IN THE HEART OF THE SEA

(Ron Howard, 2015)

Ron Howard's Meh-factor cannot be denied. Doesn't matter what the raw material is. The story which allegedly inspired Moby Dick? About a whaling vessel sunk 2000 miles out in the Pacific by a vengeful white whale , so that its crew had to drift for months in small boats, enduring starvation and eventual cannibalism in order to survive? That kind of yarn should make a cracking movie. Howard turns in an ok one.
A cast of exciting British and Irish thespians, from old hands like Brendan Gleeson and Cillian Murphy to youngsters like Tom Holland? Should be creating a savage, human drama. Here their characters seem like the plainest of archetypes, and the actors work overtime to make more of them than that. A genuine movie star with charisma and acting ability, in Chris Hemsworth?  He never really seems less than that, dominating the film with his athleticism and presence, even if his character too is defined by a single trait - a terrible temper. That temper leads him to make a decision in the heat of his first confrontation with the great whale; one which he might regret.
He plays Owen Chase (a hero must have a heroic name), first mate on the Essex, a whaling ship out of Nantucket in the 1820s. He has only been denied the captaincy because of politics, and his relationship with the captain, Pollard (Benjamin Walker), never recovers, and indeed poisons the atmosphere during their first year at sea. An eventual desperate gamble in order to ensure a good harvest of whale oil is what leads them into the path of the white whale and the ensuing tragedy.
Anthony Dod Mantle's work as cinematographer here is absolutely stunning; he depicts the oceans as a terrible living thing, the skies reeling above in a phantasmagoria of hues and colours, from the sunlight battering the men in their boats to the fires illuminating the wreck of the Essex by night.
The story takes a great deal of time establishing its world and (limited) characters, and reaches a peak around halfway, with the whale attack sequence.
It is certainly too long, and feels as if its unbalanced structure is partly to blame for that. The second half patiently traces the mens voyage home and the most awful moments of their ordeal.
So what is it that makes Howard such a pedestrian filmmaker? I think he is so resolutely Hollywood that his films coast by, content with being entertaining, never taking risks or surprising us.
He is a solid storyteller, but there is not one moment of transcendent visual style here. Not that a film should have such a moment, but this film seems made for it, especially with a DP like Mantle on-board. Contrast that with Peter Weir's nautical masterpiece, Master & Commander: the Far Side of the World. That film has tons of narrative yet still contains a few tangential moments of purest visual poetry. Howard seems to lack such poetry. The way he portrays Nantucket is also entirely Hollywood; it seems too cluttered, too busy, too respectful of the production designers and costumers, and never feels like a real place. Even his work with actors is just good enough: this role should have drawn on previously unplumbed depths in Hemsworth. But instead he grows a beard and loses some weight, but always remains a beautiful, charismatic movie star. Then there is that awkward, entirely cliched and unnecessary framing device, wherein Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) interviews an aged survivor of the Essex (Brendan Gleeson). Two great actors reduced to a bunch of pointless scenes that add nothing at all, really, to the film or any of its themes.
While it may be entertaining - as are most of Howard's films - it seems a strange way to short sell such strong material. It also has the unique misfortune to be a historical survival adventure movie released in the same month as Inarittu's The Revenant, to which it compares extremely badly.

DREDD

(Pete Travis, 2012) Judge Dredd, the classic British sci-fi comic character, is tricky to adapt to other formats. Dredd himself is a fabulously simple creation; a bad-ass fascist lawman who never ever compromises, never removes his helmet, rarely displays or admits to any human emotion, and imposes the law, often against impossible odds, through sheer force of will and incredible violence. It is the contrast between that character and the vivid world he inhabits that makes the comics so compelling and such fun. Dredd lives in Mega City One, an immense megapolis covering most of the Eastern American Seaboard, walled off from the nuclear waste of the "Cursed Earth" and populated by an endless series of freaks, psychotics and eccentrics. Many of these citizens reside in colossal blocks hundreds of stories tall, housing hundreds of thousands. Crime is rife, life cheap, the whole thing appearing to teeter on the brink of collapse at all times. It's very much the product of Britain in the 1970s, both grim and satirical, angry and hilarious. The previous film adaptation - Danny Cannon's 1995 blockbuster Judge Dredd, starring Sylvester Stallone - managed to mangle both character and setting, allowing Dredd to turn into just another, slightly angrier-than-usual Stallone hero, while Mega City One became an anonymously glossy future city familiar from a dozen other films. Travis' new version, written by Alex Garland, has a much smaller budget and seemingly much greater determination to capture what it is that makes the character special. Shooting in Urban South Africa with only a few cgi alterations works; Mega City One here feels like a real, gritty, troubled city, teeming and crumbling, its judges dwarfed by the crime they are tasked with preventing and punishing. Anthony Dod Mantle's terrific cinematography certainly doesn't hurt; there is a lived-in, organic feel to the spaces he captures, always sensitive to the play of shadow, absent from too much science fiction. But the achievement is more obviously Garlands; his decision to locate Dredd in a nasty, simple genre story is one that works beautifully. That story finds Dredd (Karl Urban) and the psychic rookie Judge he is evaluating, Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) investigating a homicide in the immense Peach Trees Block, ruled violently by Druglord Ma Ma (a scowling Lena Heady). When Ma Ma feels threatened, she shuts down the entire block, trapping the Judges, and sets her army on them, forcing Dredd and Anderson to fight their way to survival. That's a basic action set-up that has been done before (most recently in The Raid) but Garland and Travis do it so well; with wit, style and consistently great pacing. They get the characters right, too; Urban portrays Dredd as constantly biting down on his own rage, but possessed of a dark sense of humour; the role requires a lot of his mouth, chin and voice, and Urban responds. He and Garland also ensure that, crucially, Dredd is a complete super-warrior thoughout; never scared, always aggressive, virtually impossible to defeat. Thirlby's Anderson is softer, more human, but her journey to Dredd's respect and a harder countenance is nicely shaded by script and actress, and Garland makes nice use of her psychic abilities. This sort of b-movie material needs to handle its action well, and Travis puts together some outstanding sequences. Making good use of 3D, a couple of the action scenes here capture the effects of the drug "slo-mo", as Dredd's bullets mutilate flesh in agonising, beautiful slow motion. But for the most part, Travis keeps the violence nasty, brutal and utterly thunderous, while Garland ensures it generally advances the plot. But then most scenes here do; this is a satisfyingly tight film, its characterisation and satirical impulses contained beautifully within the detail of what we see as part of the story. It plays almost like a superior episode in a long-running film franchise, and impressively does that while building a convincing, fascinating sci-fi world onscreen and introducing a distinctive, memorable main character. None of these feats are easy, and to combine all three is particularly praiseworthy.

THE EAGLE

(Kevin MacDonald, 2011)

This is Boys Own material done right; sober, intelligent and full of action, but with enough emotional weight to give its last act showdowns and reversals real sting. A handsome, rousingly old-fashioned sword & sandal Epic, MacDonald's film follows a Roman Centurion and his Briton slave over Hadrians Wall and out of the known world into Scotland in search of the Standard of the infamous "lost" Ninth Legion.
It plays much like a Cavalry Western, with the Painted Warriors of the "Seal People" standing in for American Indians, and indulges in much relatively subtle point-making on Colonial Imperialism and Occupation.
Based on Rosemary Sutcliffe's classic Childrens Novel, The Eagle manages to be both epic - in the sense that Anthony Mann would have understood - and intimate. MacDonald avoids the b-movie carnage of recent similar material (Centurion or Ironclad, for instance) and focuses instead on immersion, meaning that his film, which also eschews any modishly ostentatious production design, is full of interesting and vivid textures which suggest what life in Roman times might actually have felt like. In that sensuality the Epic it most reminded me of is Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans.
There are also buddy movie moments here in the somewhat homo-erotic relationship between the principles played by Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell, both of whom acquit themselves reasonably well. The real star however is Anthony Dod Mantle, whose cinematography is stunning; evocative, lovely and raggedly gritty when it needs to be. Director MacDonald is becoming something of a high-quality craftsman; after the early documentary triumphs he experienced with One Day In September and the transcendent Touching the Void, nowadays you can expect an entertaining and beautifully-made film from him on each occasion, whatever the genre.