I'm not going to lie, when the BBFC card appeared and the screen-sides didn't expand out to 2.35:1, I was surprised. To say the least. Imagine visualising a film this aesthetically gorgeous, having the means and technology to realise it, then at some point saying out loud "Oh, I think 16:9 will do for the aspect ratio. Don't want to go mad, do we?". But hey ratio's not everything, it's what you do with the screen-space you've got, right? And damn, this film looks good, even down to the usually-problematic 3D rendering.
In an alternate near-future and after a near-fatal accident, the operative known as Major is rescued by the enigmatic Section 9, transplanting her still-functioning brain into a resilient synthetic body. But a series of escalating incidents uncovers fragments of a larger conspiracy, and Major begins having flashbacks to a past she can't remember…
It's Robocop. There, I said it. Ghost In The Shell is never a bad film, I feel I should also point that out at this early juncture. Not least because my notes contain nothing but tuts and grumbles. If it's not my perceived cross-referencing with other genre movies, it's the niggle-points which make little or no sense*1.
Scarlett Johansson's on good form (although she's rarely anything other), but you can't help feel that her acting here is just a combination of Black Widow and the alien from Under The Skin. Fascinating, just nothing new. Elsewhere, Juliet Binoche stars as Captain Exposition, Pilou Asbæk plays his role as Batou like it was written for Keifer Sutherland, and Michael Pitt's Kuze delivers dialogue like he's channelling Stephen Hawking and Max Headroom at the same time. It's all an odd mix, but it works for the movie.
My main problem, as I intimated above, is that nothing really feels new here. Even though it's based on a 1995 animation from a 1989 comic, the story itself doesn't feel like it ever invented any of what's happening*2. Now there are reasons that that shouldn't matter, and indeed reasons that it doesn't. But those reasons weren't sitting with me in screen 5 tonight, unfortunately. When [redacted] is working in her office browsing incriminating files, you just know from the very first frame of that scene that this is where she dies. And the moment Major picks up that cat? The entire audience instantly knows where that's headed, even before the characters sit down for a cuppa. But damn, this film looks good.
Without wanting to damn with faint praise, this is perfectly acceptable popcorn-fodder. Wanted to love it, but came away liking-with-reservations.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, the absolutely stunning cinematography, effects and production design here feel slightly wasted on a standard procedural conspiracy thriller.
Ghost In The Shell looks superficially amazing, but feels mechanical and spiritually empty. That's either entirely fitting or deeply ironic…
Well, Robocop, The Matrix, Blade Runner, and the Alice-thread of Resident Evil.
Although if you enjoyed all of those, you don't really need to see Ghost In The Shell…
For the visuals, absolutely.
I imagine so.
It's the scale of the ambition itself I'm unsure about.
Good, sure. Best, no.
Nope.
Not that I heard.
Level 1: The visual effects supervisor is none other than Star Wars legend, John Dykstra.
And sure, I normally keep this section reserved for people in front of the camera, but his name's in the opening titles. Plus, he's a bloody legend.
*1 SPOILERS, highlight-to-read: Okay, when Cutter leans forward on Aramaki's desk, his hands are in a different position between the intercut front and rear shots. And when Batou gets the news about Dahlin in his car, he goes into a skidding 270° from standing when he could have saved time by just turning left and accelerating as normal. And the animation where Major is jumping away from the spider-tank looks atrocious. And if Motoko's brain is in Major's synthetic body, why does she have a flawless American accent? Sure, she'd have "Johansson's" vocal cords, but an accent comes from the social-conditioning in the brain. I mean, it's not inconceivable that Motoko spoke another language un-accented, but after meeting her mum, it's not very likely, is it? I probably shouldn't notice all these the first time I'm watching a film…[ BACK ]
*2 The worst part could be that I haven't seen the 1995 version and deliberately didn't watch it in advance, preferring to see the live-action version with no (or at least minimal) preconceptions. It still held no surprises, like listening to a cover version of a song that you've never heard but realise you know anyway. [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Ben-Hur (2016 / 2D)
Cert: 12A / 123 mins / Dir. Timur Bekmambetov / Trailer
Full disclosure, I haven't seen the 1959 movie Ben-Hur. And as much as I quite enjoyed this new remake, I don't think I'm going to bother, not least because it's an hour and a half longer than its descendent, and I basically know the story now. Anyhow, everything I'm about to say is based on the premise of me not comparing the film to the original version. I may well have sat comparing it to everything else I've seen, but not the original…
Plot: Roman urchin Messala is Jewish prince Judah's adopted brother. They get on really well. Then the Romans come in and start being dicks to everyone, especially the Jews. This will end well…
So yeah, this was better than I expected it to be. Certainly better than the trailer suggested. Not being versed in this sort of thing (Noah and Exodus don't count), I was pleasantly surprised that the film has a more contemporary angle than most other swords-and-sandals epics (largely because they usually involve dragons or somesuch), and although it's set squarely in Biblical-times, the film doesn't centre on that either*2. Instead, what we get is a fairly ageless story of sibling love, rivalry and the struggle between family loyalty and broader morality.
Although y'know, it's sadly ironic that Morgan Freeman was once employed to give a middling film a boost of credibility and gravitas, yet now the same actor in the same roles serves the exact opposite purpose. His opening narration here sets the tone for things to come, and he's wheeled out by the screenplay later like a Biblical Yoda*1. Luckily, the film doesn't depend on him as the rest of the cast are taking things seriously; Jack Huston, Toby Kebbell and Nanzanin Boniadi particularly.
Sure, the film is a solid 9 on the cheese-scale, but it's earnestly acted by a cast who've got the chops to make a decent job of the script. That said, it's a shame that much of the incidental dialogue sounds like it was improvised on the same day that the director decided he was just going to go with the first-take of everything. The accents are all over the place, pretty much all of the time, but since none of the characters would have been speaking English anyway, it doesn't matter somehow (although the ADR during Boniadi's conversational scenes is atrocious).
I was also amazed at the number of Monty Python callbacks in this movie, most of which I'd guess were unintentional. Classic feed-lines from The Life of Brian and Holy Grail pop up left, right and centre. And I could have sworn blind that after escaping the galley-shipwreck to a deserted beach, the bearded and bedraggled Judah was going to re-enact this classic. Probably just as well he didn't, I suppose.
Oh and I can't be certain, but it looks like Ben-Hur is wearing jeans at one point. Or jeggings at best. And he's definitely wearing leather trousers later on. I'm not sure how historically accurate the wardrobe is in this movie. It's also worth mentioning that the final lap of the chariot-race seems to be the olden-days equivalent of the Fast & Furious runway, too. It takes bloody ages and there's not a slow-motion shot to be seen.
Al in all, Ben-Hur is surprisingly not awful.
I mean, it's pretty far from being 'great', but I'll take what I can, when I can get it…
Credit where it's due, the sea-battle and chariot-race look pretty damned good on a big screen.
I think it does
Although I don't think the film's intentions as a remake were entirely altruistic to begin with.
With the best will in the world, absolutely not.
Nope.
I'm pretty sure I heard one in the sea-battle sequence.
There's a lot of screaming in there.
Level 1: This film's got Toby Kebbell in it, and he performed additional-voice work for Star Wars: The Old Republic, and as much as you think that doesn't really count, I assure you it does.
*1 Or more properly Qui-Gon Jinn, given his role in the third-act. I know the Podrace in The Phantom Menace was inspired by the original Ben-Hur, but the favour seems to have been repaid tenfold in this movie. I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm mistaken about that.
*2 I have to admit it tickled me no end that Jesus (yeah, that one) is reduced to cameo-scenes in this movie, basically turning up every time there's a scuffle and getting everyone to chill out a bit. If I didn't know better, I'd swear that director Timur subscribes to the theory raised by Richard Herring that "yeah, Jesus was just a guy who lived around those times, you know? Like, going around and doing good things". Don't bother frowning or lecturing about this, I'm going to hell anyway. Might as well be qualified when I get there ;)
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
High-concept, action sci-fi isn't a genre you'd normally associate with the pen of Luc 'Taken' Besson, and after the Freeman/Johansson vehicle Lucy, that isn't about to change. His tale of a young woman who develops accelerated intelligence and telekinetic powers after an experimental narcotic leaks into her bloodstream, suggests that Besson wanted to make a superhero film, but thinks that comic books are somehow beneath him.
My main problem with the film is that I just couldn't buy into any of it. At all. I know that the super-powers exhibited in the Avengers series are absolutely fictional, for example, but they're set in a world which is real, and are governed by real-world physics. Lucy on the other hand, is based sincerely around the misconception that we only use 10% of our brains. It's not a wild and dangerous speculation to point out that this is bollocks, in the same way as Mars won't really appear to be the same size as the moon this year. Nonetheless, Besson takes a provenly incorrect starting point, and builds a story around it which defies all common sense, suggesting that humans all possess the brainpower not only to move physical objects with out minds, but also to overwrite the basic structure of science. And it all happens from the accidental ingestion of a drug which is designed in the film to be ingested, without a single person in the organisation which created it having examined the effects of its use. At all.
The real scientific experiment here may be 'what happens when I don't employ a proof-reader for my script?'.
In and of itself, it's perhaps not as bad a starting block for a movie as I'm making out, but the film fails to convince at every turn. Resident brain-expert Morgan Freeman basically spends an hour and a half shrugging and asking "how does that work?", while Scarlett Johansson's powers increase exponentially and she replies "look, it just does, alright? Science, and that". I wouldn't go so far as to say the film is stupid, just wilfully ignorant. For example, if Lucy can change the colour, length and style of her hair to avoid airport security, why can't she change the structure of her facial features? If Lucy can make a room full of police officers pass out at will, why does she spend the next half hour avoiding the Korean crime syndicate who are attempting to hunt her down? Why is a woman who can bend matter, still constricted by gravity and inertia?
By the time that Freeman asserts that our universe "isn't governed by mathematical laws", the whole thing has devolved into a nonsensical chase caper, with less cause-and-effect than the average Tom & Jerry cartoon. Lucy isn't a movie where you can leave your brain in the car park (you want Besson's 3 Days To Kill for that), simply because it keeps hurling fabricated suppositions at its audience for them to think about. There's just nothing I could believe in, even within the context of the film. And if you can't explain your premise using logic and reason, you may as well have your heroine gain her powers after being exposed to a solar-storm, or somesuch.
On a more technical level, Lucy is a curious mix of high-end CGI effects work, and regularly intercut cheap-looking library footage of safari animals, volcanos, cityscapes etc, which suggests that the budget had been well and truly spanked long before the film's final edit. Scarlett Johansson's performance is surprisingly agile, although hers is the only one, giving the impression that this could have been a much stronger film had it been in different hands from the start.
What's more worrying is that distributors Universal also seem to lack confidence in their product's appeal. The trailers beforehand (The Riot Club, Medea, Let's Be Cops, Sin City 2, Before I Go To Sleep, Sex Tape - in that order) suggest that the studio has no idea who will be watching this film, and so aren't sure what to pitch at them for future attractions. Although I'm sure if any of those feature Morgan Freeman as a beleaguered academic, it'll be right up the audience's street.
For a film about increased intelligence, Luc Besson takes a perverse delight in insulting the intellect of his audience, and it's perhaps ironic that I felt slightly more stupid for having sat through it.
Science-fiction for people who hate science, Lucy takes the incredible and makes it truly unbelievable…
Oh, it pretty much is, yeah.
Not nearly enough.
No. It doesn't.
Whatever.
A little bit, yeah.
I shouldn't think so.
Didn't hear one.
Has Johansson got an unfeasibly large overdraft she's trying to pay off, or something?
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
