(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.
Showing posts with label Eric Bana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eric Bana. Show all posts
Tuesday, 26 August 2014
Thursday, 16 January 2014
LONE SURVIVOR
(Peter Berg, 2013)
America: Fuck Yeah!
Four heroic Navy SEALs on a recon mission in Afghanistan find themselves caught in open ground by multiple Taliban fighters. Without access to communications and with nowhere to run, they begin a desperate rearguard action, killing dozens of enemy soldiers. But they are whittled down gradually until only one remains...
Reminiscent of Ridley Scott's superior Black Hawk Down, this a a combat movie that sentimentalises the band of brothers at its heart while turning the faceless enemy combatants into little better than 1st person shooter video game cannon fodder. That is, when the enemy is not being identified as evil Taliban leadership, responsible directly for the deaths of US soldiers. Berg isn't interested in the politics or morals of the conflict in Afghanistan, and so he reduces it to a jingoistic claptrap of black and white, good versus evil.
In this case the good are represented by American movie stars: Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster (the standout) play the four SEALs, with Eric Bana their commanding officer. Berg knows what he's doing and the battle scenes here are ferocious, and crucially always maintain some spatial coherence - you know exactly where everybody is in relation to everybody else, despite all the gunfire and explosions.
Documentary footage over the opening credits shows how tough SEAL training is and that should serve as a warning of sorts - these men (literally) jump off two cliffs as part of their retreat, and this film is really as much of a gruelling survival ordeal as it is a War movie. The cast are fine, the script efficient but hideously bombastic - Afghans die rapidly, meaninglessly, one after another. Each American death, meanwhile, is underlined somehow; in slow motion, given a heavy musical backing, crosscut with another event: these men are HEROES, and don't you forget it, son.
It works if you like that sort of thing, I guess.
America: Fuck Yeah!
Four heroic Navy SEALs on a recon mission in Afghanistan find themselves caught in open ground by multiple Taliban fighters. Without access to communications and with nowhere to run, they begin a desperate rearguard action, killing dozens of enemy soldiers. But they are whittled down gradually until only one remains...
Reminiscent of Ridley Scott's superior Black Hawk Down, this a a combat movie that sentimentalises the band of brothers at its heart while turning the faceless enemy combatants into little better than 1st person shooter video game cannon fodder. That is, when the enemy is not being identified as evil Taliban leadership, responsible directly for the deaths of US soldiers. Berg isn't interested in the politics or morals of the conflict in Afghanistan, and so he reduces it to a jingoistic claptrap of black and white, good versus evil.
In this case the good are represented by American movie stars: Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster (the standout) play the four SEALs, with Eric Bana their commanding officer. Berg knows what he's doing and the battle scenes here are ferocious, and crucially always maintain some spatial coherence - you know exactly where everybody is in relation to everybody else, despite all the gunfire and explosions.
Documentary footage over the opening credits shows how tough SEAL training is and that should serve as a warning of sorts - these men (literally) jump off two cliffs as part of their retreat, and this film is really as much of a gruelling survival ordeal as it is a War movie. The cast are fine, the script efficient but hideously bombastic - Afghans die rapidly, meaninglessly, one after another. Each American death, meanwhile, is underlined somehow; in slow motion, given a heavy musical backing, crosscut with another event: these men are HEROES, and don't you forget it, son.
It works if you like that sort of thing, I guess.
Monday, 9 May 2011
HANNA
(Joe Wright, 2011)
Is it better for an Action film to attempt to engage with the real world? The Bourne films, which are the pre-eminent Action films of the last decade, are set in, and to some extent offer a commentary upon, our World of CCTV and the War on Terror, distrust of Government and depersonalisation, cluttered as they are with the tech-details of the modern world; mobile phones and computers and the impossibility of ever getting off the grid. They are fine films, enriched by this sense of topicality. But some of the films which have sought to replicate the success of the Bourne franchise fall down when this part of the equation is attempted. Best perhaps to allow for the influence of those hyper-kinetic, dizzyingly edited action scenes and place them in an entirely different context.
Which is what Joe Wright does with Hanna. It is a movie for the DVD era, a collection of exquisitely imagined and mounted sequences, flicking between moods and tones expertly, all narrative forward momentum and effortless cinematic storytelling. The film it most reminded me of was Tarantino's Kill Bill in its disarming status as a narrative defined almost purely by its relation to other narratives. Here it is Fairy Tales, as acknowledged by the recurrent references to the Brothers Grimm, but it is also a spy movie and there are action movies and martial arts films in this stew too. And it's quite an eclectic stew; stir in genetic engineering, skinhead heavies, British middle class satire, some lovely travelogue material, a little free-running and a few flashes of sci-fi imagery for the full, slightly dizzying effect. Wright somehow makes it work.
Where Kill Bill is a self-indulgent gatefold double album on vinyl, Hanna is a pure and almost perfect three minute dose of electropop on mp3; short, fun, infectious and disposable.
Wright directs like a filmmaker let off the leash and the film flashes with unexpected shards of visual beauty amidst the brutal, adrenalized fight and chase scenes. These are staged mainly in the forgotten, unloved public spaces of Western Europe; a German subway, a labyrinth of shipping containers in the docks at a French mediterranean port, waste ground in a housing estate.
The film portrays the varying shades and moods of this Europe very well, from warm summer nights in the orange and yellow of Spain to the exhausting urban sprawl of grey Berlin. The cast are all fine, catching the tricky mood easily - never has Ronan's otherworldly, slightly alien look been so well utilised - and the Chemical Brothers score pulses and chimes to great effect.
Its a slick, pleasurable watch throughout. Wright understands the medium and it's visceral and sensuous potential entirely; so Hanna is full of interesting, vivid textures and brilliantly captured instants. He is a thoroughly modern director, like his namesake Edgar Wright or the aforementioned Tarantino, in that for all his brilliance as a craftsman and his technical prowess, he seems to have little to say about the world or the people in it, a suspicion which arose from viewings of his previous prestige adaptations of literary novels Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, expertly made though both were. But that is perhaps why Hanna is his best film, intent as it is on being a thrilling pop artefact, with little substance but bags of style and enough quirk - in its direction and some of its supporting performances (Tom Hollander's turn as a camp peroxide blonde assassin is as memorable as anything he's done) - to attract art house audiences.
Most importantly in an action film, it gets the action right. Ronan has a few thrilling fight scenes, but the film's best sequence belongs to Eric Bana. Wright's camera follows him in one fluid shot as he gets off a coach, strolls through a bus station, realises he is being followed, descends on an escalator into a subway, then is confronted by and fights four suited men at once. It's a great moment, and one of the better action scenes of the last few years in one of the more interesting action films.
Is it better for an Action film to attempt to engage with the real world? The Bourne films, which are the pre-eminent Action films of the last decade, are set in, and to some extent offer a commentary upon, our World of CCTV and the War on Terror, distrust of Government and depersonalisation, cluttered as they are with the tech-details of the modern world; mobile phones and computers and the impossibility of ever getting off the grid. They are fine films, enriched by this sense of topicality. But some of the films which have sought to replicate the success of the Bourne franchise fall down when this part of the equation is attempted. Best perhaps to allow for the influence of those hyper-kinetic, dizzyingly edited action scenes and place them in an entirely different context.
Which is what Joe Wright does with Hanna. It is a movie for the DVD era, a collection of exquisitely imagined and mounted sequences, flicking between moods and tones expertly, all narrative forward momentum and effortless cinematic storytelling. The film it most reminded me of was Tarantino's Kill Bill in its disarming status as a narrative defined almost purely by its relation to other narratives. Here it is Fairy Tales, as acknowledged by the recurrent references to the Brothers Grimm, but it is also a spy movie and there are action movies and martial arts films in this stew too. And it's quite an eclectic stew; stir in genetic engineering, skinhead heavies, British middle class satire, some lovely travelogue material, a little free-running and a few flashes of sci-fi imagery for the full, slightly dizzying effect. Wright somehow makes it work.
Where Kill Bill is a self-indulgent gatefold double album on vinyl, Hanna is a pure and almost perfect three minute dose of electropop on mp3; short, fun, infectious and disposable.
Wright directs like a filmmaker let off the leash and the film flashes with unexpected shards of visual beauty amidst the brutal, adrenalized fight and chase scenes. These are staged mainly in the forgotten, unloved public spaces of Western Europe; a German subway, a labyrinth of shipping containers in the docks at a French mediterranean port, waste ground in a housing estate.
The film portrays the varying shades and moods of this Europe very well, from warm summer nights in the orange and yellow of Spain to the exhausting urban sprawl of grey Berlin. The cast are all fine, catching the tricky mood easily - never has Ronan's otherworldly, slightly alien look been so well utilised - and the Chemical Brothers score pulses and chimes to great effect.
Its a slick, pleasurable watch throughout. Wright understands the medium and it's visceral and sensuous potential entirely; so Hanna is full of interesting, vivid textures and brilliantly captured instants. He is a thoroughly modern director, like his namesake Edgar Wright or the aforementioned Tarantino, in that for all his brilliance as a craftsman and his technical prowess, he seems to have little to say about the world or the people in it, a suspicion which arose from viewings of his previous prestige adaptations of literary novels Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, expertly made though both were. But that is perhaps why Hanna is his best film, intent as it is on being a thrilling pop artefact, with little substance but bags of style and enough quirk - in its direction and some of its supporting performances (Tom Hollander's turn as a camp peroxide blonde assassin is as memorable as anything he's done) - to attract art house audiences.
Most importantly in an action film, it gets the action right. Ronan has a few thrilling fight scenes, but the film's best sequence belongs to Eric Bana. Wright's camera follows him in one fluid shot as he gets off a coach, strolls through a bus station, realises he is being followed, descends on an escalator into a subway, then is confronted by and fights four suited men at once. It's a great moment, and one of the better action scenes of the last few years in one of the more interesting action films.
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