LEGENDS OF THE FALL

(Ed Zwick, 1994)

It's not easy to adapt author Jim Harrison to the screen. A filmmaker as vital and distinctive as Tony Scott found that out with Revenge. And if he couldn't quite translate the timeless macho poetry of Harrison to film, what chance did a director as plodding and insipid as Ed Zwick have?
Based on Legends of the Fall: absolutely no chance. Harrison's novella is both spare and epic, but Zwick's movie is instead turgid and ridiculous, an episodic and at times cringeworthy soap opera with beautiful landscapes and bad performances.
Brad Pitt plays Tristan, beloved middle son of Col Ludlow (Anthony Hopkins). They live on a Montana ranch along with Ludlow's American Indian employees, who bring Tristan up as a half-brave with a respect for nature and a certain intolerance for the ways of white society. His older brother Alfred (Aidan Quinn, giving the best performance in the film, full of pain and anger) is more conventional, while the plot is kicked off when the youngest, Samuel (Henry Thomas) brings home a beautiful girl who bewitches all three brothers. She is Susannah (Julia Ormond), and she falls for Tristan, of course, beginning a long series of scenes in which Ormond and Pitt appear to be competing to see who has the shiniest hair.
Samuel wants to go off to fight in WW1, so Tristan goes along to protect him, fails, and takes his revenge by crossing no mans land after dark and scalping Germans. When he returns to Montana, he and Susannah comfort each other after their loss in the most predictable, soft focus way possible, then he goes off travelling the world to quiet "the bear inside him", leaving her to wait at home at the mercy of a smitten Alfred.
In 1994, Pitt had not yet realised that acting meant more than just posing, flexing his cheek muscles and biting his lips. He is awful here; a vacant, beautiful model. Ormond is little better, causing you to wonder why any of the three brothers would be interested in her.
Both are outdone by Hopkins, who gets to play a post-stroke Ludlow as a shambling invalid, and slices the ham thickly here.
Zwick's direction never dodges a visual cliche, from the slow motion during key scenes to the honeyed cinematography, and the score and script all combine to make this feel somehow neutered.

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

(Ridley Scott, 2005)

Balian: You go to certain death.
Templar: All death is certain.

If Kingdom of Heaven - the Directors Cut, not the manifestly inferior theatrical version, which is 45 minutes shorter - starred anybody other than Orlando Bloom in the lead role, it would be one of Ridley Scott's very best films. Bloom has never been better than in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where he is required mainly to seem unearthly and beautiful - Legolas doesn't really have any personality in the realistic sense. He is a heroic ideal, and Bloom, blessed with his good looks, manages that without difficulty. In much of his other work he is similarly required to look pretty, but he is hopelessly out of his depth when asked to express any actual emotion. In Kingdom of Heaven, where he is asked to handle huge emotions - grief, despair, love - he is blank-faced. His single expression is a sort of empty smoulder - he seems to have walked off the set of an aftershave commercial. His character, Balian, is driven through the film by a search for his faith, yet Bloom looks like he's searching for his iPod and isn't all that bothered if he finds it or not.
It's a pity, because he is surrounded by a truly classy cast of mainly European supporting actors, most of whom seem totally at home in the Medieval World Scott painstakingly, beautifully creates. Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Jeremy Irons, Kevin McKidd, Martin Csokas and Brendan Gleeson all have big masculine presences, and Bloom seems dwarfed by all of them in his shared scenes. Eva Green is a fascinatingly complicated leading lady here, and Edward Norton offers a somehow Brando-esque but very effective voice performance as the masked Leper-King, Baldwin.
This is a complex, thematically ambitious epic, spending much of its running time detailing the political and religious divisions which beset the factions within the Holy Land during the Crusades. It is also an exploration of ideology and of the difference between faith and religion. That could be dull, but screenwriter William Monaghan, who wrote the dazzling dialogue for The Departed, shows that he can do the same for a vastly different world here, though there are a few clunky exchanges. Its contemporary resonances, dealing as it does with a battle in the Middle East between Christian and Muslim forces, are unavoidable and well-handled. It is fair-handed, with Saladin, the Commander of the Saracens, played by the charismatic Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud, emerging as one of the best and most likeable characters, while many of the Christians are plainly rabid animals using their religion as justification for slaughter.
The real glory of this film, though, is Ridley Scott's direction. It seems a synthesis of much of what he has done before - the reconstruction of Old Worlds in Gladiator and 1492 and The Duellists is here attempted on an even bigger canvas, and it is achieved more vividly and more beautifully than in any of those films. The ferocity of the battle scenes in Gladiator and Black Hawk Down is replicated here, again on a bigger, more beautiful scale. The contrast between the wintery mud and misery of Continental Europe in that era with the exotic melting pot of the Holy Land is brilliantly evoked. Indeed, the whole thing is textural masterpiece, always sensuous and visceral, with moments of pure poetry scattered throughout the story.
Its commercial failure is still no surprise. Aside from the gaping hole at its heart where a leading man should be, it's flaws are obvious and even its strengths are partially uncommercial - it is more complex and adult than any of the other modern epics, its conclusions about religion and war too ambiguous for popular acceptance. If Gladiator used a simple revenge story to great effect, Kingdom of Heaven has no such basic structure, its tale of a man searching for faith and redemption far too interior to drive such a big narrative emotionally. The film it most reminds me of is Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire, another Epic with a miscast leading man and a downbeat, complex tone.

TROY

(Wolfgang Petersen, 2004)

Has ever a major actor been quite so uncomfortable in period or non-American roles as Brad Pitt? Here he just about gets by on an extremely Californian type of sun-kissed buff beauty, but every single time he opens his mouth to speak, this film runs into a big problem; its protagonist - the legendary Achilles - is faintly ridiculous. That is only made more obvious by the fact that his direct opponent and mirror image, Eric Bana as Hector, is a serious, intense, magnetic presence.
Written by David Benioff in what now seems like a shaky dry-run for the sort of believable heroic historical drama he perfected on Game of Thrones, Troy now seems like a commendably old-fashioned sword and sandal epic, filled with lots of talk of honour, politics and the Gods. Only it's never really all that good.
The casting is one problem. Not only is Pitt horrendously miscast, but Diane Kruger , while obviously beautiful, makes a curiously dull Helen, and Orlando Bloom is his wooden, pretty worst as Paris, which robs the relationship meant to drive the entire plot of any interest or emotion. The old British thespians in smaller roles do better; Peter O'Toole and Brian Cox chew scenery (and there's a lot of it to chew on) to good effect as duelling Kings Agamemnon and Priam, Brendan Gleeson is flat-out terrifying as Menelaus, and Sean Bean is so good as a wily, political old Odysseus you find yourself wishing the film was about him instead.
Benioff's script is filled with good ideas. Achilles here is a warrior as rock star, lounging in a tent surrounded by groupies, followed by a cadre of warriors who worship him, but lazy, contemptuous of normal people, with a seeming death wish. That is all undone by Pitt's empty, superficial work, as is his relationship with Brisseus (Rose Byrne), a Priestess who is taken captive.
In contrast, Hector's love for his wife, family and country is simple and believable, which unbalances this narrative precariously (as does the fact that Agamemnon is such an unscrupulous villian, while Priam is just a bit of an earnest fool).
The material that does work is the spectacle, when it has not been spoiled by some shabby cgi. Huge battle scenes are efficiently directed by Petersen, without ever containing anything that is truly special or even memorable. The fighting has obviously been carefully considered, and Achilles moves like a dancer in stark contrast to the heavy armour and forceful strikes favoured by everybody else.
The climax - the arrival of the Wooden horse (nicely designed here) into Troy and all that follows - feels quite rushed, and in any event, the emotional climax has come and gone almost an hour before.
The duel between Achilles and Hector is easily the best thing in the film. So clearly shot and edited it feels like somebody other than Petersen must have been involved, it is visceral and gripping throughout, and the outcome is at least stirring in a way nothing else in this film is.

NOAH

(Darren Aronofsky, 2014)

This is the Old Testament by way of a 1970s Prog Rock double album. More post-apocalyptic than Before Christ, Aronofsky's vision is dark and emotional, visceral and soulful, his film occasionally engrossing, often silly, always interesting.
It tells the story of Noah from his childhood to the time when his sons are set upon repopulating the world, after the flood. The most compelling and resonant passages all come in the lead up to that cataclysm. Aronofsky paints a picture of a barren, ruined world, where Noah (Russell Crowe, one of the few leading men with the right presence for a biblical epic) and his small family struggle to survive in the wilderness, never eating meat, only taking what they need, avoiding the violent men from the industrial cities who are descendants of Cain. Then Noah has a vision from "the Creator" (the word God is never uttered in this film) of the world destroyed by water. He travels to see his ancient Grandfather Metuselah (Anthony Hopkins) for advice, and realises he must build an ark to protect all of the animals once the waters come.
In this he and his family (Jennifer Connolly as his wife, Logan Lerman as the sulky Ham, Emma Watson as the incest-avoiding Ila) will be aided by the Watchers, rock giants who were once Angels, now imprisoned inside their rocky forms. They need help and protection, for Warlord Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) and his forces are bent on entering and claiming the ark when the rains come.
All of this is involving, with some impressively epic imagery by Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique, working well alongside Clint Mansell's magisterial, mighty score.
The flood, when it comes, is awesome, preceded by a big battle scene involving men and Watchers and...
Its just all such nonsense, more sword and sorcery than Bible in tone and visual design, and though there are many good things (Crowe remains a magnetic presence throughout, Iceland looks magnificent, there are some vivid and visceral textures) it rarely, for all its modern psychology, feels all that much more interesting than the Biblical epics of the 1950s. Oh, there is a "relevant"ecological theme, and Aronofsky pulls off one stunning scene (Noah recounts creation as Aronofsky somehow melds the theory of evolution with Christian orthodoxy) but once the film settles down in its third act to everybody on the Ark as Noah goes off his rocker because of what he's had to do and still may need to do, it loses most of what made it different and even slightly distinctive. Is there any profundity here, presumably Aronofsky's chief aim? It is too bombastic, too ambitious in conception - here are angels returning to heaven, here is the serpent in the garden, etc - to really allow for any consideration of profundity in the real world. The closest it comes are the moments when you can feel the influence of Terrence Malick most vividly, when Aronofsky doesn't seem bent beneath the weight of all that Bible he's bearing. It is still somewhat impressive, but then so were those 1970s Prog Rock albums...in their way.

ROBIN HOOD

(Ridley Scott, 2010)

While there is an unmistakeable whiff of something very much like contractual obligation about Robin Hood, that does not mean it is without its pleasures. It is that rare beast, a Summer Blockbuster aimed mostly at grown-ups. As such its extremely wordy - the machinations detailed in the opening act in order to set up the plot are nothing if not torturous, as Dukes plot with Kings who betray Barons and double-cross cousins against the backdrop of Anglo-French tension, political infighting and taxation disputes. All this happens while we are still getting to know the principals, Robin Longstride, a Northern Archer campaigning in France with King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston, tearing lumps of ham off with his bare hands) , and Marion Locksley (Cate Blanchett), an independent war widow who runs the lands owned by her infirm father-in-law (Max Von Sydow). They eventually meet after much complication, and finally Robin learns who he is and what his destiny must be. Strangely, considering its title, this is not really a "Robin Hood" film.
It ends just as Robin and his Merry (more bawdy, in this case) Men become outlaws, pursued by the Sheriff of Nottingham (an underused Matthew MacFadyen) and enemy to King John (Oscar Isaac, terrifically loathsome throughout) and living at one with nature in Sherwood Forest.
Before that it feels almost as if Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland had in mind a different story altogether, and decided to link it with the Robin Hood legend just because they could.
The Robin Hood film it most resembles is Robin and Marian, Richard Lester's superb 1976 elegy for youth, love and heroism lost. That comparison does this film no favours, but it does borrow some of the gritty textures and much of the material with Richard Lionheart in France. Bizarrely it yokes all that to a plot centred around the Magna carta, recasting Robin as a more outright freedom fighter than most narratives do, and throwing in a massive battle on a beach for its climax.
Despite being about 45 minutes too long, it just about works. Scott understands this sort of Epic filmmaking, and nobody visualises it quite like him - this is a film full of casually beautiful shots and sequences, and cinematographer John Mathieson does some staggering work. There are battles and banquets, hissable villains aplenty and dashing heroism, and an incredibly classy cast in even the smallest roles, from Mark Strong as the main villain to William Hurt as a sympathetic court advisor.
But this sort of thing really rests upon the leads; and Crowe and Blanchett make an extremely convincing and likeable couple. Crowe can do this sort of macho hero role in his sleep, and though his accent is all over the British Isles, he is one of the only movie stars we have who has true star quality and actual acting ability, and he combines them here. He and Blanchett - that rarity, a leading lady around his age - have significant chemistry, and she is just as powerful and commanding as he is.
Even when all the mayhem around them is clattering awkwardly along,  an obviously impersonal corporate product and something of a mess from a director capable of so much more, the leads keep the focus intimate and real, and the film benefits massively from that.

THE 13TH WARRIOR

(John McTiernan, 1999)

Even at his commercial peak, John McTiernan was bafflingly underrated as a director. A master of mise en scene, he has few equals in his use of space and movement. His action scenes were, in his pomp, elegant, beautiful and muscular, but crucially always coherent and well-organised. Die Hard  is perhaps the greatest action film of the 80s, transcending its own cliches even as it set them in stone for a hundred imitators, while Predator  is a thrilling, simultaneously bloated and pared down study of hunter vs hunted which manages to skirt Arnold Schwarzenegger's limitations as it faces him off against a creature even more alien and bizarre than he is.  The Hunt for Red October  is perhaps the only truly successful Tom Clancy adaptation and a great study in cinematic space, as McTiernan's camera prowls the confined setting of a nuclear submarine, but never forgets to keep its focus on the movie stars playing out the tense drama at the centre of the narrative. Even the mostly deservedly maligned Last Action Hero has it witty moments, and is a bravely self-reflexive move on the part of this particular filmmaker.

 By 1999, when he came to adapt Michael Crichton's early novel "Eaters of the Dead", itself a retelling of "Beowulf", McTiernan had lost most of his clout, and the filming and editing processes were bedevilled with problems and studio interference. It is to his credit, then, that the result is such a bracing adventure film, telling this Viking legend in the style of Kurosawa with style and wit and an epic feel.
Antonio Banderas is a Ahmed idn Fadaan, a Muslim poet and courtier who accompanies a band of Vikings back to their homeland in the barbaric , darkly alien North in order to combat a terrifying, all-devouring beast. Along the way, of course, he comes to appreciate their values, courage, friendship and loyalty, while they learn to appreciate him as a Warrior and man.
The action scenes are terrific - not least the commando-style Viking raid upon the lair of the "creature" and the final attack upon the Viking fortress, shot mainly in slo-mo as the rain pelts down, in apparent homage to Seven Samurai . But it is the smaller moments that best convince - Banderas gradually learning the Viking tongue just by listening and watching, his prayer before the final showdown, the Viking politics of challenge and combat put to cynical, hilarious use, their contempt for his tiny arabian stallion trumped by its athleticism...There is also a Hawksian sense of action as character here. By the end of the film, this merry band of Viking Warriors, so indistinguishable from one another at the outset, have become familiar and nicely shaded to us, without any real scenes of characterisation. The performances - mainly by a cast of semi-unknown European  and British actors - are crucial to this. Vladimir Kulich isn't especially expressive, but his bearing and dignity - and his sheer, extraordinary size - tell us enough about his Buliwyf. Banderas is a capable, likeable lead, and he seems somehow more human beside these outsized Scandinavians. Meanwhile Norwegian stage actor Dennis Storhoi more or less steals the entire film as Herger, the most approachable of the Vikings.
Considering its enormous budget, you would expect The 13th Warrior to look and sound good, and it doesnt disappoint; Jerry Goldsmith's score is one of the best pieces of work in the final years of his career, while Peter Menzies' cinematography is atmospheric and beautiful throughout.
A year later Gladiator would come out and sweep all before it, but McTiernan's film is just as good, if less overblown and more of a pure genre exercise. Now, what about a Directors Cut on DVD...?

JOHN CARTER

(Andrew Stanton, 2012)

Pulp - old pulp, real pulp, the kind of thing written by Robert E Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, tales of high adventure and fantastic creatures, full of exotic lands, beautiful women, brave warriors, romance and action - that sort of pulp has been largely absent from cinema for a few decades. Modern cinema is sleeker, slicker, more cynical.
Though pulp still seeps through the cracks occasionally. It's there in the Star Wars films, in Indiana Jones, in Pirates of the Caribbean, even though it is often obscured by contemporary style, suffering from death by a thousand cuts due to modern editing rhythms and buffeted by cgi until its most essential, old-fashioned nature is hard to make out.
Andrew Stanton's John Carter is an admirable, earnest attempt to revive that old-fashioned pulp. As such, it adapts one of the core texts of the genre, Rice Burroughs' "Princess of Mars", the novel which introduced John Carter, Confederate Veteran of the Civil War, and transported him to Mars, where he becomes involved in the disputes between various Martian species, discovers the Martian atmosphere gives him great strength and agility, and falls in love with a Martian Princess.
Stanton adapts much of that surprisingly faithfully, and it is a strange testament to the massive influence Burroughs' books have had upon pop culture that a lot of the material here seems very familiar. That is partly down to the many works that have stolen from Burroughs and partly down to Stanton's classical, old-fashioned storytelling. No hyperactive editing here; he fills the screen with big landscapes and bold imagery, and he takes his time. If John Carter seems to share some DNA with Lucas' Star Wars series, then that is mainly down to their cinematic influences; both are heavily reliant on Lean, Kurosawa and Ford for their epic stateliness, and both take much of their visual grandeur from the costume Epics of the 50s and 60s.
And this film is epic; a sweeping tale which begins in turn of the Century New York, moves to an Arizona populated by Apache, Cavalrymen and ornery miners before it alights on Mars (or "Barsoom" as this film has it). Stanton manages the delicate dance between such a grand narrative and a more intimate, character-based piece throughout.
If that makes John Carter sound a tad overstuffed, well, that may be it's big flaw. It takes on a lot; masses of plot, numerous major characters, and far too many themes for this kind of action spectacle to handle. But it works. The plot means there is an overlong scene or two of dry exposition in the first act, the characters make strong impressions with little screen time (a quality Stanton learned well at Pixar) and the themes are generally nicely-integrated with the story. Only Carter's status as a soldier who fought for the South in the Civil War is glossed over, which in a film full of characters making speeches about freedom and oppression, seems most odd.
It is all, undeniably, a bit of a mess. But what a glorious mess! Stanton understands the appeal of the material, so that there is a genuine sense of wonder to many of the sequences, from Carter discovering the extent of his abilities on Barsoom to the reveal of the Thark's temple. That wonder is crossed with a distinct strangeness; something antiquarian and colonial, perhaps taken from Burroughs, is discernible here in the encounters between Carter and these "primitive" aliens, and even in much of the production design. The action scenes are thrilling and muscular, even beautiful at times - Carter fighting an entire army of Tharks, most notably - and the strong characters give it a compulsively watchable momentum even when the plot is at its most knotty and discursive.
The cast is mainly composed of British class, with James Purefoy, Ciaran Hinds, Samantha Morton, Dominic West and Mark Strong all vivid presences. Taylor Kitsch is perhaps slightly too contemporary for the lead, but he is a star; charismatic and physically beautiful, he delivers especially in the action scenes, and his passion for his leading lady is convincing. That may be because Collins is fantastic here; lovely, fierce, intelligent, she carries much of the emotional weight of the film.
The other standout is Willem Defoe as Tars Tarkas, leader of the Tharks, the tall, green-skinned, four-armed, tusked Apache-Mongol-like alien race who capture and adopt Carter. Defoe - and the animators who brought his character to life - make the alien a proud, complex creature who is the source of much of the film's easy humour. The other source is another cgi alien; Woola, the dog-like animal who bonds with Carter and protects him with almost touching enthusiasm.
Both aliens are good examples of the film's great design; they reference the heritage of John Carter in popular culture - from Frazetta book covers to Marvel Comics - but they integrate that within a coherent, thought-out alien civilisation with a touch of steampunk to its technology and a lot of ancient Rome in its pageantry and costumes. Stanton and cinematographer Daniel Mindel keep the film visually lush and timeless, to match its confident pacing, and Michaell Giacchino provides a beautifully stirring Epic score which binds it all together.
The film's probable commercial failure may mean that the franchise it establishes is never continued, which would be a great shame, for John Carter is an interesting, exciting, fun, soaringly romantic and at times batty old-fashioned Sci-Fi Epic worth a dozen modern summer blockbusters.

IMMORTALS

(Tarsem Singh, 2011)

This is where modern mainstream cinema has brought us: this bizarre twisting of Greek mythology filtered through a collision between video game narrative (journey, fight, boss fight) and slick advertising imagery, all of it pumped up on steroids and as homoerotic as Tom from Finland. Thankfully that slick advertising imagery is the work of Tarsem Singh, a director with an actual, distinct and individual visual sensibility. His narrative chops are more open to debate, since each of his films so far (confused serial killer thriller The Cell and quite unclassifiable fantasy The Fall) have been problematic as Exercises in storytelling. But he makes each and every frame of Immortals look truly magnificent. The film is a triumph of design; sets, costumes, weaponry; they all look superb and Singh lights and frames all beautifully.
As if to celebrate this, he often resorts to slo-mo, emphasising the aesthetic pleasures to be had in his tableaux. But instead, he just exaggerates the film's airless, constricted beauty, the obviousness that this is a movie fantasy with no relation whatsoever with the real world. This doesn't look, sound or feel like the real world, which makes it's efforts at grittiness - in the violence, in some of the emotional content - almost laughable.
The story is familiar and familiarly ludicrous; evil king Hyperion is conquering all, his scarred, masked troops raping, murdering, pillaging. He's the kind of villain who's so evil, he casually kills his own men at regular intervals. He wants a magic bow in order to free ("unleash" is the term preferred by the script here) the Titans, only Zeus and his family of Gods looking on from Olympus aren't happy about that and so they prod Theseus (Henry Cavill), a blandly efficient Warrior with a grudge, into his path to lead the fight. Along the way Theseus meets and deflowers Phaedra (Freida Pinto), a virgin oracle, and bonds with Stephen Dorffs buff, wisecracking thief.
The script is clunky and often comically earnest as its characters discuss free will and fate while deciding whether or not to involve themselves in the big battle, and the uneven cast doesn't help. Rourke plays it like it's Sophocles, though he cops Brad Pitt's "eat something in every scene" trick, Cavill and Pinto are seemingly involved in a secret contest to see who can be the most beautifully wooden (which doesn't help their scenes together) and much of the rest of the cast seem content to flex their muscles and pout.
Singh puts together a few good action scenes, and it is always quite entertaining in its delirious way, but it's an odd film, memorable more for what it does wrong than what it gets right.

AUSTRALIA

(Baz Luhrmann, 2008)

It must have seemed a good idea; a big, rousing, handsome old-fashioned Epic about Australia when it was still an emerging Nation in the first half of the Twentith Century. It is a good idea, if it was done right. If this had been directed by an Australian director - Peter Weir, say - with the right sensibility for that kind of romanticism and that sort of Epic sweep, then Australia might have worked very well indeed.
But it's not. It's directed by Baz Luhrmann, a post-modern artist who presents everything in quotation marks, whose undeniable eye is perhaps best suited to advertising, and whose use of digital imagery in his previous day-glo films means that he was always likely to attempt to use it again here. Everything feels off. There are some impressive sequences and Luhrmann does manage some arresting imagery; from the Western-style shots of the massive cattle drive across the outback to the carnage of the Japanese attack on Darwin. But there are some awful cgi-assisted scenes, too, and the candy-coloured palette is a step too far towards sentimentality (as is the hideous misjudgement represented by the use of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow") in Luhrmann's apparent attempt to give every scene a magical glow.
The story has enough sentiment already in its focus on a vulnerable half-Aboriginal child, and the simplicity of the adult relationships depicted don't help. Nor do the principals. Australian Jackman sounds like he's putting on a bad Aussie accent, while a Kidman beamed in from movie-star central where people have little contact with real life or the world as we know it, her face frozen rigid with botox atop a sickeningly spindly frame gives an utterly one-note performance.
They are not entirely to blame, however. The script gives them little to work with, and David Wenham and Bryan Brown fare little better with pantomime villains. Luhrmann has painted well in broad strokes before, where he can fill in around the edges with irony, humour, a little razzmatazz and smoke and mirrors, but this is a genre and a tale requiring a good dose of earnest emotion, of solid storytelling and characterisation, and he is simply not equipped to make that interesting.
Which makes Australia, for all its excessive length and spectacle, a long and slightly embarrassing bore.

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.