What I'm watching

#371/#88 Prometheus

When scientists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discover a number of what appear to be star maps across various continents and cultures, they obtain funding from the Weyland Corporation to set out on the expedition ship Prometheus to try and track down humanity’s possible makers. Once there however, it turns out maybe these makers didn’t really want us to find them after all.

While there are elements of Prometheus I liked, I ultimately found the film deeply disappointing. I didn’t hate it but I don’t think it’s a good film or one worth dwelling on.

The good firstly, for there are things worth praising this film for, are the visuals and a couple of the performances. The vast scale of the film made the universe seem extensive and interesting. Everything looked very sleek and futuristic, while still seeming livable and human. It made the mission feel like it was part of a larger whole, rather than the be all and end all of this film. The 3D effect were also rather good.

Performance-wise, Michael Fassbender once again brought his A-game playing the android David. Much like Aliens’ Bishop before him, it’s difficult to lock down his allegiance throughout the movie, making any scene more enjoyable by his presence. An interesting character and a well delivered performance. Additionally, Idris Elba makes fine work of a fairly minor role and Noomi Rapace performed well enough in her leading one.

The main failings of the film however are with in the plot and the majority of the characters. I don’t care that it’s not really an alien prequel but set in the alien universe. You can still do interesting things in-universe if you’ve got someone interested in it or a worthwhile tale to tell but this film has neither.

Nothing in this film connects to anything else in it. Something major will happen and then no one will ever reference the fact that that happened ever again. It’s poor story telling and makes it feel like nothing has any weight or relevance. It’s also very evident that one of the writers of Lost has a hand in this because the levels of ambiguity and sequel baiting are off the charts. You don’t need to explain everything, in fact a little ambiguity can even make for a better film, but this is just lazy writing with some pseudo-scientific/faith based nonsense tacked on.

Additionally, the people who are supposed to be top of their field scientists, are some of the dumbest people I’ve ever seen. The whole film can be summed up in one sentence: ‘Don’t touch that, you idiot!’ An unmitigated lack of self preservation, common sense and spacial awareness is displayed in this movie. They’re also not consistent from scene to scene. Sometimes they will show some levels of rationalisation or depth but the very next scene they’ll become complete morons once again.

To top it all off they’re also either boring, unlikable or designed to be canon fodder. In Alien ever death meant something because we got to know the people on the ship over the first hour of the film. We saw they were real people and grew to like them and their individual quirks. There was a genuine feel of dread when one of them had to go off on their own to deal with the alien. In Prometheus, David and maybe the captain are the only people who feel like they actually get a personality and I’d say that was more due to the actor’s personality and talent rather than any sort of writer input.

Usually I hold off judgement of a film until I’ve finished watching the whole thing through but by about the 3/4 mark of this film it was as if a switch in my brain just toggled and all the little annoyances, all the stupid characters and all the abandoned plot elements just merged together and I saw this film for the mess it is. 1/5

P.S. (and spoiler) All of their collective imaginations and the best they could come up with the Space Jockeys being is giant albino humans? The most boring thing you can make an alien is us. Poor show.

#283 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Danial Craig) is contracted by aging industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to look into the disappearance/murder of his beloved niece almost 40 years ago. Initially coming up empty handed, Blomkvist turns to Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), an anti-social hacker with her own share of personal demons, to help him uncover a truth others would rather see left buried.

A lot of the points I made about the Swedish version of this film a couple of months ago still hold true in this one. I still think that the internalisation of most of the main characters dialogue is almost impossible to totally convey to an audience and that the ultimate version of this story was the one told in the novel. In saying all that however, this is still a truly great interpretation of it.

Other than Craig’s Blomkvist, I think every character in this version of the film matched if not exceeded those of the Swedish film. Craig was just a little too generic, too pretty and overall a little bland. His chemistry with Mara was great, actually working better than Michael Nyqvist’s with Noomi Rapace, however Nyqvist has him beat in every other aspect. Still a fine performace just not the best Blomkvist.

Mara and Rapace’s performances were both phenomenal but I think Mara’s was a little more like the Salander I had pictured when reading the book. I love Rapace’s slightly more violent Salander but Mara’s mannerisms when doing the little things and her overall actions just felt more real to me when watching. I’d be hard pushed to ever pick a favourite though.

David Fincher truly manages to capture what was the best of the book with the amazing cinematography and score of this movie. Both are just beautiful to behold/hear and I can’t wait to see his further work on the next two movies. If they’re anything like this one we are in for a treat. 4.5/5

#276 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) and Dr Watson (Jude Law) must once again team up in order to stop the ruthless genius of Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris) before he starts a world war.

This is a difficult one to review because I enjoyed parts of it but the overall product was not all that good and falls short of the first film which I enjoyed so much.

The good, firstly, still comes from the back and forth between the two leads. Downey and Law are both still giving it their all and they slip back into their roles with ease, recapturing their chemistry flawlessly. Similarly, Harris and Downey’s chemistry works really well in their hero/villain dynamic. They can have the quiet moments where they just talk to each other and genuinely seem like they respect each other despite their differing viewpoints. If Moriarty hadn’t seemed like he was a worthy match for Holmes this film would have completely fallen flat but luckily this did not happen.

Additionally the newcomers in the form of Noomi Rapace as the gypsy Simza and Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes are welcome. Rapace is more of a plot point than a character but she’s still proficient enough in what she’s doing and interesting to see speaking English. Fry steals every scene he’s in and again seems like a worthy intellect to challenge Holmes.

On top of this the explanation fight scenes are good again, the scene in the woods (while a little long) is pretty epic and the last 30 minutes of the the movie are really great stuff. The problems lie with everything else.

Clearly someone has gone ‘people liked X about the Sherlock movie, lets ramp that up to 11 because surely more of something could never be a bad thing!’ So the fights are ramped up, the silliness is ramped up, the slow-mo is ramped up, the bromance is ramped up, etc. Personally, I think everything was at there perfect levels in the previous film and by ramping it up they’ve just made it less engaging and overall less fun.

My main gripe with the film though was that there wasn’t a clear mystery/plot which we were supposed to be following. In the first film they were trying to figure out what Blackwood was up to for the majority of the movie, in this one we just have the possibility of war and Moriarty’s various attempts to kill the pair. It’s less mystery and more action comedy. That’s not what I go to Sherlock Holmes for. It just fails to find that balance the original film trod so well.

What it all boils down to is that I did enjoy the movie because of the actors/characters in it, despite the lack of any real structure, and the last 1/2 hour or so being pretty cool/more like a Sherlock movie. Is it worth seeing? Yes. Should you see it in cinemas? I would say no but you could spend your time on worse. 3/5

#230 The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest

While Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) clings to life in a hospital bed after being shot three times, it is up to Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) to build a case for her innocence in a triple murder charge, all the while trying to avoid detection by a shady government group Hell bent on seeing Lisbeth disappearing into a mental hospital forever.

Finishing off the Millennium trilogy, this is the weakest of the three films. Once again the story is well acted, a lot of the effort is spend on characterisation and the sets/costumes/locations are all beautiful but the emotional impact and pacing the series seemed to discover with TGWPWF, is just completely lost in this final chapter.

Hornet’s Nest, the book, was the most convoluted of the novels having to deal with multiple perspectives, tie up all the loose ends and attempt to deal with both the characters pasts and the introduction of the government agency. A lot of people lost patience with the book just because of how much, and how densely, it has to deal with some issues. Like the previous film this makes it damn near impossible to get all of this on the screen (especially when your main actor can’t vocalise a lot of it). I think this makes it even harder for someone not already familiar with the story to get a good grasp on what is happening.

Hornet’s Nest was also rather bad for having a couple of really pointless plot threads which adds nothing to the overall story and end in plot cul-de-sacs (i.e. Erika Berger’s job/emails). This meant that the film has to include all of these but ended up merging a lot of them together, resulting in an even bigger pointless plot thread which just kills forward motion and really could have been dropped from the film all together. On top of this, the film also changes a couple of characters dynamics and introduced a whole new set of characters which never get any real development or screen time. 

I briefly mentioned the lack of emotion in this film and I think it’s most obvious in the courtroom scene and the final scene between the two leads. Both of those scenes were done so well in the book and really gave you a better feel for Lisbeth and Blomkvist but here they ring false and just plod along with the story line. It left for a very disappointing ending.

I will commend them for the final fight scene however. It played out really well and felt exactly how those two characters did, and would, interact in that situation.

Still worth watching if you’ve read the books but not a particularly good finishing point for this series of films 2.5/5

#229 The Girl Who Played With Fire

Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is accused of three murders and being hunted by the police. Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), believing her innocent, sets out to find the real story while Lisbeth uses her own skills to track down the real culprit who seems to have links to her past.

I think this is the best of the three movies in the trilogy despite TGWTDT being my favourite of the books. This films has all the same things going for it as the previous did (good actors, good cinematography, etc) but it also manages to tap into the emotional elements of the story and the excitement of the plot unfolding a lot better than its predecessor did. The villains, while not better, have more hype surrounding them and are more central to the story this time around.

The one main problem I think this film, and the others in the series, suffer from is that a lot of how we find out about the information in the books is take from within Salander’s head. Now, while this is always an issue for a movie being made from source material dealing with a first person perspective, usually they just make a lot of what the character was thinking into dialogue between two people (i.e. main character vocalising things to a sounding board/secondary character) and that doesn’t/can’t work here. One of the biggest characteristics of Lisbeth Salander is that she internalises damn near everything and she doesn’t talk for the sake of talking. This makes it really hard to get everything from the books across in the films. I know what’s going on because I’ve read the books but I imagine for someone who hasn’t it would be very easy to get lost really quickly. I also think this only gets worse in the next film.

Despite this though, TGWPWF is still a solid follow-up film, fleshing out Salander a bit better and adding a good helping of the emotional drama missing from the first film. 3.5/5

#228 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Recently disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is contracted by aging industrialist Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) to look into the disappearance/murder of his beloved niece almost 40 years ago. Initially coming up empty handed, Blomkvist eventually turns to Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), an anti-social hacker with her own share of personal demons, to help him uncover a truth others would rather see left buried.

I read and enjoyed this book series over the Summer and wanted to make sure I had seen the Swedish film versions of the story before David Fincher’s version comes out this Winter.

Most importantly, what I think this version gets absolutely correct, is Nyqvist as Blomkvist and Rapace as Salander. They are almost exactly what I was imagining when I was reading through these books and play their parts to a tee. The jury is still out on whether Rooney Mara will be able to pull off as good a Salander as Rapace but I really can’t see Daniel Craig out doing Nyqvist (he’s just a little too handsome and a little too smirky for me as Blomkvist). The quality of the films dips a little throughout this trilogy but these two actors remain a constant source of good regardless of whatever else happens.

Other than these two however, I felt the rest of the cast was a bit of a let down. Henrik Vanger was really thin and spindly in my mind (for some reason) as well as a lot more quick-witted and cunning. Additionally, Erika Berger (Lena Endre) was played more as angry than supportive. The actors gave good performances but the just didn’t link up with the pictures I had of the characters in my head. The guy playing Bjurman was spot on though. You loathe that weaselly little bastard the minute you lay eyes on him. 

While this film works as a film, I’m of the opinion this story might not work as well as a film in the same way it works as a book. They do all the same stuff in the movie but none of it has the same emotional impact as it did when reading it for the first time. I can appreciate what they’re doing on screen but in my mind I’m always going ‘oh yeh that bit had really great tension in the book’. I had the same sort of reaction to the Harry Potter or Robert Langdon films.

As an example of what I mean: When I read THAT scene for the first time I read what happened and then had to take a 3 hour lecture before I read the next 10 pages in which closure and revenge was achieved. I didn’t take in a damn thing during those 3 hours because all I was thinking of was what had just happened in the book. I essentially prolonged that tension/dread/horror way longer than it was ever intended to be held for and, as such, no film can ever rival that experience now.

I also felt that music was severely underutilized over the whole trilogy and could have been better used to help with some of the more dramatic moments of the storyline.

I liked this version and I really liked this version’s main characters but I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again. It just didn’t capture the feel of the books for me enough to merit a re-watch when I can just remember a better version in my head. 3/5