Film Reviews

112 posts

What Was the Matrix?

Film Film Reviews

The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski), 1999

The Matrix was the third in a cycle of movies to arrive in the late nineties with a strikingly similar theme. Like its predecessors from the previous year, Dark City and The Truman Show, it tells the story of a seemingly ordinary man who suddenly finds that his whole life is faked: he is trapped in an artificially created environment designed to keep him in submission. Like the heroes of those earlier movies, Keanu Reeves’ Neo starts to realise that he is somehow special, and tries to escape the confines of his prison. Yet while I liked both Dark City and The Truman Show (particularly the latter), I think The Matrix found the most perfect framework in which to play out such a story. The artificial city of Dark City was essentially a fantasy construct, kept running by creatures with mysterious magical powers; while The Truman Show was a more reality-based media satire that showed its fake world constructed painstakingly out of bricks and mortar. The inspiration of The Matrix is to graft this plot into a cyberpunk premise in which the world is a computer simulation, created to keep humans enslaved so that machines can live off the energy produced by their bodies.

Continue reading →

Repuzzled

Film Film Reviews

The Matrix Reloaded (Lana and Lilly Wachowski), 2003

The Matrix Reloaded labours under mighty expectations. It isn’t that this is the most expensive and hyped movie of the mid-year round of blockbusters: we don’t have high expectations of heavily hyped movies any more. It’s that its predecessor, 1999’s The Matrix, is so well regarded. With that film, Larry and Andy Wachowski blended elements such as cyberpunk, comic books, Jet Li-style kung fu, and John Woo-style gunplay into a satisfying and exciting narrative. The elements that were mixed weren’t unfamiliar: indeed, many were already well on the way to hackneyed. But the film fused its checklist of geek favourites into such perfect harmony that it was a deserved critical and financial hit. Only four years later it has already staked a convincing claim as a modern sci-fi classic.

Continue reading →

Lordy

Film Film Reviews

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003)

Peter Jackson brings his epic Tolkien adaptation to a triumphant close with Return of the King. It doesn’t quite pick up directly where The Two Towers left off, instead starting with a brief but effective prologue showing the fateful moment in which the ring first fell into the hands of Smeagol / Gollum. Structurally, this prologue is all wrong (it was apparently intended for The Two Towers, and that is where it would have sat more logically), but it’s an added treat: it feels like you’ve received a bonus before the movie itself has truly started. Then we’re back into the action where The Two Towers left off, once again cutting between two main threads to the story. Frodo and Sam are still trying to reach Mordor to destroy the ring, while Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Merry and Pippin play various roles in the defence of Gondor from Sauron’s armies.

Continue reading →

Send in the Clones

Film Film Reviews

Attack of the Clones (George Lucas, 2002)

Part I: All Things Star Wars (The Story So Far)

I’m an unabashed fan of Star Wars… but lately when I say that, it always sounds defensive. I grew up with the original trilogy: while I was too young to enjoy the first two films’ release, they were a video fixture throughout my youth and I remember the excitement of seeing Return of the Jedi in cinemas in 1983. When Lucas re-released the trilogy in hacked-about versions in 1997, my disturbance at his poor creative decisions could not entirely stifle my excitement. As an adult cinema buff, this was my chance to experience the thrill of enjoying Star Wars properly, as a cinema experience. I knew the new trilogy was coming, and that every few years until 2005 I would get a new chance to relive the magic. In 1999, however, The Phantom Menace let me know I was in for a bumpy ride. A film so wretched in so many areas it almost defies any attempt to catalogue its faults (click here for my own attempt written at the time), it was particularly had to take because of the way it seemed to undermine the foundations of the earlier films. Entering the cinema hoping to be reunited with familiar characters, instead I had C-3PO with his skin ripped off. Wanting more quasi-mystical dialogue about Jedi knights sensing the “Force,” I instead was shown Obi-Wan Kenobi doing blood tests for “midi-chlorians” like an intern at the pathology lab.

Continue reading →

Shot by Shot

Film Film Reviews

Psycho (Gus van Sant), 1998

The chief question running through reviews of Gus van Sant’s remake of Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho has been a simple one: Why? The suggested answer has often been a cynical one: the film was financed as an easy way to cash in on the continuing popularity of horror movies and utilise the Psycho trademark now that the sequels have run their course. The response from most critics ranged from bewilderment to contempt.

Continue reading →

It Made Me Want to Sleep in Mummy’s Bed

Film Film Reviews

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock), 1960

I’m told that a small boy who stayed up to be scared by this masterpiece said afterwards “I liked it, but it made me want to sleep in Mummy’s bed.” – Kenneth Tynan(1)

If you were to pick the most famous single scene from movie history, you’d probably have to choose the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Film buffs might shout “Odessa Steps” at you, but while Eisenstein’s bravura sequence is more important (if only for being earlier, and arguably a model for Hitchcock), I doubt any other moment in 100 years of cinema has been the subject of as many imitations, homages, and parodies. The whole film, in fact, has been so endlessly reworked, remade, and revisited, that today’s viewers will usually come to Psycho with much of the film already in their head.

Continue reading →

Hell’s Bells

Film Film Reviews

Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino), 1980

This wasn’t “an unqualified disaster” or “a phenomenon.” This was just – a flop. – Steven Bach

Possibly the finest book written about the making of a film is Steven Bach’s Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, which chronicles the disastrous production of Michael Cimino’s epic western. It’s written from a rarely revealed insider perspective (Bach was a key executive at United Artist’s during the film’s preparation), but that isn’t its only appeal. It captures an important moment in film history: the last semblance of old-style moguls had been swept away (Arthur Krim departed UA in 1978 after 27 years) and the era of decentralised corporate ownership had begun.

Continue reading →

The Worst Day of My Life…

Film Film Reviews

The Phantom Menace (George Lucas), 1999

I guess you have to start any review of the new Star Wars movie with a little prologue explaining how excited you were to see it, how you had opening night tickets, how you queued for hours, how much Star Wars has meant to you, and so on… Well, yeah, I had opening night tickets, and yeah, I was excited, and yeah, I grew up with Star Wars and am amongst those who think that George Lucas wrought a great and marvellous thing back in 1977. I also, for the record, think The Empire Strikes Back is an even better film: one of the truly great works of fantasy cinema. But I don’t want to give the impression I went into the cinema sucked in by the hype and expecting a masterpiece. I don’t want my negative comments about the film written off as the sour grapes of someone who had waited sixteen years and could never have been pleased by Episode 1.

Continue reading →

Titanic: The Wash-Up

Film Film Reviews

Titanic (James Cameron), 1997

Eight months after it opened, it’s a little disorientating to remind myself that I actually did very much enjoy James Cameron’s epic Titanic. That’s because, somewhere in that time period, the unrelenting crudfest that has surrounded this film has made me hate the film and everything about it. I hate Leonardo DiCaprio. I hate James Horner. And surely I can’t be alone in wishing that Celine Dion’s heart would just stop?

Continue reading →