Given that I usually enjoy the "titanic ancient battle" genre in general, I should technically love this film.
Why do I not, then?
The best I can describe it is that someone offers you a delicious steak sandwich. You bite into it and the bread is soft and fluffy, but the meat feels and tastes alarmingly like wet cardboard liberated from a tramp's living quarters.
300 is the wet cardboard of ancient battle movies. It's just bland, dull, predictable, brainless and above all fake. To sum this up, let me break it down into sections.
Presentation
The presentation is my least favourite part of the film - I don't think a single shot in the film was captured without the aid of CGI, if not completely constructed by CGI. It just sucks.
Even the scenes in which Leonidas (Gerard Butler) strides around Sparta all look like they were created completely by a computer. The simplest sets look like they've been airbrushed and edited and CGI'd to within an inch of their lives as opposed to being built of something real.
We see valleys, seas, hills, trees, all with lense effects and filters and virtual graphics. Even the Spartans themselves are created apparently out of a plastic mould, all walking around with the same chiselled granite torsos.
I wonder how much CGI was performed on the main cast too. One unintentionally hilarious moment, I paused because something didn't seem quite right about the lighting on the few characters stood in the foreground.
When I looked closer, their heads seemed to be shaded in differently to their perfect physiques. It was like a competently performed photoshop, but one that looks stupid nonetheless.
This is to ignore the dreadful battle scenes and the Persian hordes. If the Spartans come out of plastic moulds, the Persians must come off of a freaking mass production line.
There are about 3 types of Persian soldier in this film: Masked Man With Turban, Masked Man Without Turban and Immortals (Masked Men In Dark Clothing).
These faceless antagonists run at the Spartans like sausages leaping into a meat grinder. They exist merely to be eviscerated in slow-mo, fast-mo, in-between-mo and collapse in ridiculous sprays of unconvincing blood.
Now I'm aware that the film is hardly meant to go for realism (seeing as it depicts oracles as monsters and delights in other similar silliness), but the fight scenes are really a highlight of the CGI bullcrap.
Remember how I said Gladiator looked real, because the effects are real? Here is the opposite.
Typical combat scene: Identikit Persian #45409 charges in, gets hit by sword, does a 360 degrees backflip with CGI blood going everywhere (the "blood" is all perfectly spherical and never hits the ground, even when about 40 guys are beings stabbed) and then makes a landing that would be shunned at the Olympics.
Making every combat scene in a whole movie boring is actually quite an impressive feat, so I salute the effects team there. Perhaps if the film wasn't structured entirely around fighting it would be forgivable, but since that's the selling point AND the narrative of the film, having crap action sequences is quite embarrassing.
If you love films where not a single shot actually looks plausible in any way, you'll love this picture.
Story
So this movie is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel "300". If you've watched Sin City, you might be lured into thinking that 300 would have similar levels of weirdness and complexity. Sadly not.
No, this film is all about MANLY BELLOWING and MANLY SHOUTING and MANLINESS and MANLINESS THAT'S A BIT HOMOSEXUAL and not a lot else.
"Spartan" is used as a replacement for the word "badass", and is overused so much ("He kept his Spartan reserve", "We are Spartans!") that it's quite comical.
The Persian army is not elaborated on in any detail besides how evil they are. Which increases with every scene. Apparently the Persians don't just execute men, they execute them with obese disfigured guys with huge blades for arms. And they have pseudo-zombies as troops. Riiiiiight.
Sometimes the film tries to pretend that it's a little clever and knows about tactics. Leonidas repeatedly mentions the importance of a good Phalanx formation. This is then followed by the battle scene showing Spartans just wading in with no order at all, somehow striking down 4000 Persians each with a flick of the wrist because the script demands it.
Unlike in Gladiator, where the death of major characters feels sad and poignant, I found myself not giving a hoot about Leonidas' fate, or the fate of his men, because they're all such airheaded macho stereotypes that you could just replace them all with Arnold Schwarznegger. About the most deep exploration of emotions in this film is a closeup of someone's eyes...that's it.
The rest of the movie boils down to a silly, predictable tale of senate conspiracy, like a low-rent rip off of Roman politics. Oh, and boobs. We get to see boobs several times, but somehow even these have suspicious hints of CGI about them and fail to be interesting.
Overall rating: 2/5
When your film is about fighting and passion but fails at both, you know that you've done something wrong somewhere along the line.
[*][*][ ][ ][ ]
Thursday, 31 March 2011
Sunday, 27 March 2011
Movie Review: 12 Monkeys
12 Monkeys is one of those rare films that manages to mix a huge load of ideas, themes and different genres into one production and actually have it all work brilliantly.
It also manages to have an even more unusual quality - and that is that the film gets better every time you see it and absorb more of the plot.
The story primarily concerns a disasterous global event, and the run up to it. In the near future, all but 1% of Earth's population has been wiped out by a terrible virus. The remnants of humanity live in underground settlements that are a bizarre mix of high tech gear and dirty metal walls.
The main character, James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a convict in the future. He is "volunteered" for tasks to aid humanity in order to apparently reduce the prison sentence he serves, though when we get to see him we gain the impression from his personality that whatever crimes he committed are quite far in the past.
The entire film is pretty ambiguous from start to finish, which is what makes it so fun to watch. One of the huge musings through the whole film is on the nature of sanity.
Cole's primary mission (other than a fabulously creepy data-collecting trip to the surface in a vacuum suit early on) is to use an apparently new technology - time travel - to go back to the time of the outbreak, 1996, and find out what caused it.
Instead, he ends up in 1990 by mistake, and is quickly put in a mental institution for his gibberings about the future. Here he meets Goines (Brad Pitt), another mental patient who hates consumerism and apparently is obsessed with animals "taking back the world". Goines naturally goes on Cole's list as a candidate for "plague causer", whether founded or not is hard to tell.
Pitt is often, like DiCaprio, exemplified as a "pretty face" actor. Here, however, he pretty much gives the top performance of the film.
Goines is poetic, twistedly logical and yet utterly insane. He'll typically start talking about his ideas to Cole and then get "agitated", spilling out a torrent of anti-establishment jargon while Cole watches with weary confusion. He contributes considerably to the film's disorienting tone with his incongruous witterings yet solid sentiment.
One of the best speeches of the film comes from a man (Frederick Strother) who inexplicably realises he is not sane. Dressed in a smart dinner jacket, he approaches Cole and leans towards him.
"I find myself on the planet Ogo, part of an intellectual elite, preparing to subjugate the barbarian hordes on Pluto. But even though this is a totally convincing reality for me in every way, nevertheless Ogo is actually a construct of my psyche. I am mentally divergent, in that I am escaping certain unnamed realities that plague my life here. When I stop going there, I will be well. Are you also divergent, friend?"
And is he?
Most interesting about this speech is the use of "plague" and "unnamed realities", two things that strike an enormous resemblance with Cole's 'reality'.
This question of sanity bothers us all through the film. Cole hears voices that apparently come from his head (though the voice mockingly identifies itself as another convict sent back in time). The moods of the scientists in the future change every time he sees them - at one point they are interrogating him almost cruelly and berate his lack of success, at another they encourage him as though admiring his courage and resourcefulness.
The system of time travel itself seems almost arbitrary - at one point he ends up in WWI. Does this suggest that he's imagining it, and his chaotic mind flits from one "time" to another?
Is the "virus" scenario just Cole's personal "Planet Ogo"? Is he "mentally divergent"?
These questions are answered to some extent, but left to our own minds predominantly.
The story itself features a neat twist and I just love the ending. It's very sad but also hopeful. It leaves so much open for us to think about, that even though you don't know the exact conclusion to the story, you'll be thinking about each possible outcome for days after the credits have rolled.
5/5.
[*][*][*][*][*]
It also manages to have an even more unusual quality - and that is that the film gets better every time you see it and absorb more of the plot.
The story primarily concerns a disasterous global event, and the run up to it. In the near future, all but 1% of Earth's population has been wiped out by a terrible virus. The remnants of humanity live in underground settlements that are a bizarre mix of high tech gear and dirty metal walls.
The main character, James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a convict in the future. He is "volunteered" for tasks to aid humanity in order to apparently reduce the prison sentence he serves, though when we get to see him we gain the impression from his personality that whatever crimes he committed are quite far in the past.
The entire film is pretty ambiguous from start to finish, which is what makes it so fun to watch. One of the huge musings through the whole film is on the nature of sanity.
Cole's primary mission (other than a fabulously creepy data-collecting trip to the surface in a vacuum suit early on) is to use an apparently new technology - time travel - to go back to the time of the outbreak, 1996, and find out what caused it.
Instead, he ends up in 1990 by mistake, and is quickly put in a mental institution for his gibberings about the future. Here he meets Goines (Brad Pitt), another mental patient who hates consumerism and apparently is obsessed with animals "taking back the world". Goines naturally goes on Cole's list as a candidate for "plague causer", whether founded or not is hard to tell.
Pitt is often, like DiCaprio, exemplified as a "pretty face" actor. Here, however, he pretty much gives the top performance of the film.
Goines is poetic, twistedly logical and yet utterly insane. He'll typically start talking about his ideas to Cole and then get "agitated", spilling out a torrent of anti-establishment jargon while Cole watches with weary confusion. He contributes considerably to the film's disorienting tone with his incongruous witterings yet solid sentiment.
One of the best speeches of the film comes from a man (Frederick Strother) who inexplicably realises he is not sane. Dressed in a smart dinner jacket, he approaches Cole and leans towards him.
"I find myself on the planet Ogo, part of an intellectual elite, preparing to subjugate the barbarian hordes on Pluto. But even though this is a totally convincing reality for me in every way, nevertheless Ogo is actually a construct of my psyche. I am mentally divergent, in that I am escaping certain unnamed realities that plague my life here. When I stop going there, I will be well. Are you also divergent, friend?"
And is he?
Most interesting about this speech is the use of "plague" and "unnamed realities", two things that strike an enormous resemblance with Cole's 'reality'.
This question of sanity bothers us all through the film. Cole hears voices that apparently come from his head (though the voice mockingly identifies itself as another convict sent back in time). The moods of the scientists in the future change every time he sees them - at one point they are interrogating him almost cruelly and berate his lack of success, at another they encourage him as though admiring his courage and resourcefulness.
The system of time travel itself seems almost arbitrary - at one point he ends up in WWI. Does this suggest that he's imagining it, and his chaotic mind flits from one "time" to another?
Is the "virus" scenario just Cole's personal "Planet Ogo"? Is he "mentally divergent"?
These questions are answered to some extent, but left to our own minds predominantly.
The story itself features a neat twist and I just love the ending. It's very sad but also hopeful. It leaves so much open for us to think about, that even though you don't know the exact conclusion to the story, you'll be thinking about each possible outcome for days after the credits have rolled.
5/5.
[*][*][*][*][*]
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Movie Review: Taken
*This review contains "spoilers" for a rather predictable plot!*
So I caught this movie for the second time on TV last night and the second watching really saw the film pulling itself to pieces for me.
Now, I hate to rant on a film starring Liam Neeson, who portrayed the lovable "Dad" in Fallout 3, but I think the problem with this movie is really the script.
He gives a pretty decent performance with what he's given, but the whole film is like power trip father-revenge pornography. The film is pretty much just "I AM A DAD, DAMMIT, AND SO I AM JUSTIFIED TO SHOOT PEOPLE!11oneone!"
The plot concerns a CIA agent named Bryan (Neeson) whose daughter is kidnapped by an Albanian Mafia group. The group specialises in prostitution and Neeson's character is promptly told in dramatic fashion that he'll probably never see her again within a few days.
Anyway, this setup is all pretty irrelevant, the entire story of the film basically boils down to "Dad murders lots of bad men, happy ending." There's essentially no character development aside from "I'm pissed off, where is my daughter?" and the typical whiny ex-wife character that gets 2 minutes of screen time.
The bad guys are all completely 1 dimensional amoral arseholes and exist only to spout dickish lines before they get executed in a suitably violent fashion by the enraged Neeson.
While it has trappings of a Thriller, it has the despoiled brains of an Action film.
Take the ending, which is absolutely ludicrous and kind of reminded me of Mirror's Edge. Neeson spends 90% of the film killing people, whether by snapping necks, beating them senseless, stabbing them or just substantially altering their blood-lead molar ratio.
He has no government backing for these vigilante murder sprees and makes next to no effort to cover his tracks, he just storms in and starts piling up the corpses. We even see the police after him at one point.
So when he kills the final bad guy, does he go down for life? Or maybe he gets a death sentence for the amount of carnage he wrought?
Err, no. Actually he just takes a leisurely stroll to the airport with his daughter and goes back home to live happily ever after. Let's ignore the 50 or so people he killed, they were bad after all and so there are no repurcussions...
There is also a kind of half-arsed attempt to make Neeson's character anti-heroish. Neeson plays the part with skill, and so this actually kind of works (such as in a rather unpleasant torture scene, easily the agent's most morally dubious act).
The problem is, there is no heart to it. The film poses no moral questions, without which the whole idea of an anti-hero is kind of pointless. One minute we are encouraged to think "Wow, Bryan is actually quite a merciless dickhead", but the rest of the time the film is back to "Bad people have to die 'cos they're bad."
The action itself is quite engaging, some of the scenes, such as a shootout and the conversation beforehand in a run-down block of apartments are pretty well done. In general the film is well choreographed.
That's the only thing really that lets me save the rating a bit to 2.5/5 (rounded to 3).
If you watch it as a brainless action flick it's kind of entertaining, just don't be lured in by the false pretense that it's anything deeper, because you'll be disappointed.
It's also quite amusing how xenophobic Taken is. Literally all but one foreign character is portrayed as some kind of corrupt tosspot. Uncle Sam's people are almost all intelligent and helpful, but every French, Albanian or Arabic person is of course a complete dick, if not an outright bad guy (which they normally morph into as the film progresses).
Still, Hollywood has long been like that, so it's no real surprise.
2.5/5 --> 3/5.
[*][*][*][ ][ ]
So I caught this movie for the second time on TV last night and the second watching really saw the film pulling itself to pieces for me.
Now, I hate to rant on a film starring Liam Neeson, who portrayed the lovable "Dad" in Fallout 3, but I think the problem with this movie is really the script.
He gives a pretty decent performance with what he's given, but the whole film is like power trip father-revenge pornography. The film is pretty much just "I AM A DAD, DAMMIT, AND SO I AM JUSTIFIED TO SHOOT PEOPLE!11oneone!"
The plot concerns a CIA agent named Bryan (Neeson) whose daughter is kidnapped by an Albanian Mafia group. The group specialises in prostitution and Neeson's character is promptly told in dramatic fashion that he'll probably never see her again within a few days.
Anyway, this setup is all pretty irrelevant, the entire story of the film basically boils down to "Dad murders lots of bad men, happy ending." There's essentially no character development aside from "I'm pissed off, where is my daughter?" and the typical whiny ex-wife character that gets 2 minutes of screen time.
The bad guys are all completely 1 dimensional amoral arseholes and exist only to spout dickish lines before they get executed in a suitably violent fashion by the enraged Neeson.
While it has trappings of a Thriller, it has the despoiled brains of an Action film.
Take the ending, which is absolutely ludicrous and kind of reminded me of Mirror's Edge. Neeson spends 90% of the film killing people, whether by snapping necks, beating them senseless, stabbing them or just substantially altering their blood-lead molar ratio.
He has no government backing for these vigilante murder sprees and makes next to no effort to cover his tracks, he just storms in and starts piling up the corpses. We even see the police after him at one point.
So when he kills the final bad guy, does he go down for life? Or maybe he gets a death sentence for the amount of carnage he wrought?
Err, no. Actually he just takes a leisurely stroll to the airport with his daughter and goes back home to live happily ever after. Let's ignore the 50 or so people he killed, they were bad after all and so there are no repurcussions...
There is also a kind of half-arsed attempt to make Neeson's character anti-heroish. Neeson plays the part with skill, and so this actually kind of works (such as in a rather unpleasant torture scene, easily the agent's most morally dubious act).
The problem is, there is no heart to it. The film poses no moral questions, without which the whole idea of an anti-hero is kind of pointless. One minute we are encouraged to think "Wow, Bryan is actually quite a merciless dickhead", but the rest of the time the film is back to "Bad people have to die 'cos they're bad."
The action itself is quite engaging, some of the scenes, such as a shootout and the conversation beforehand in a run-down block of apartments are pretty well done. In general the film is well choreographed.
That's the only thing really that lets me save the rating a bit to 2.5/5 (rounded to 3).
If you watch it as a brainless action flick it's kind of entertaining, just don't be lured in by the false pretense that it's anything deeper, because you'll be disappointed.
It's also quite amusing how xenophobic Taken is. Literally all but one foreign character is portrayed as some kind of corrupt tosspot. Uncle Sam's people are almost all intelligent and helpful, but every French, Albanian or Arabic person is of course a complete dick, if not an outright bad guy (which they normally morph into as the film progresses).
Still, Hollywood has long been like that, so it's no real surprise.
2.5/5 --> 3/5.
[*][*][*][ ][ ]
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