Reviews

Christopher Nolan has always been willing to sacrifice coherence and clarity of action to achieve mood and atmosphere, but that willingness has never been so apparent as in this film.

The first two hours of Interstellar achieve genuine greatness, as the film moves seamlessly from dystopian society study to ghost story to 2001: A Space Odyssey tribute to space exploration saga. And then, to Nolan's shame, we finally learn the answer to the ghost mystery, and it guts the plot we've been breathlessly following all along. It's the sci-fi equivalent of "the butler did it".

I cannot think of a better film that is more let down by its last act.

What a waste of a magnificent setup.

Peter Falk and Alan Arkin, who'd previously appeared in the In-Laws, team up for some reason in a film that's two-thirds a remake of Double Indemnity, and one-third a silly safe-cracking caper film. I don't know that I've ever seen Peter Falk embarrass himself this badly in any film. Falk has no buddy-film chemistry with Arkin, who seems to want to take the next taxi off this picture. After the Double Indemnity-style insurance caper goes off the rails, around the hour mark, Falk and Arkin decide to rob the company chairman, or his safe, or something. It doesn't fit together, none of the characters' motivations seem reasonable, and the film ends by fizzling out with a deus ex machina. It's a shame that Cassavetes couldn't have had a more distinguished swan song than this mishmash. I've wasted 93 minutes more egregiously, but not lately.

This is 84 of the most excruciating minutes I've ever spent watching a movie, and I've seen Gigli.

The movie opens with a gratuitous shower scene with a naked Neve, before showing parallel scenes of Neve Campbell spewing platitudes on a kind of job interview with a character played by the director, while the boyfriend character (Ford) is spinning multiple lines of nonsense that nobody would believe. The dialogue is clumsy and very superficial in both sequences, and seems to mostly illustrate that both main characters are vapid and unlikable. And all of the scenes, both in the beginning and throughout the movie, go on forever and ever.

The introduction of the Count is even clumsier. Dialogue between the count and his flunkies - I mean, his assistants - serve the painfully obvious purpose of showing that he is a Very Important Man. Ford's one successful pitch is to pimp out sweet little Neve, who double crosses both of them, or something. The double cross, when it happens, is actually not bad, but it doesn't make up for the excruciating scenes that go before. Getting to that third act does not justify the previous two.

Even beyond the fact that there is not one decent, sympathetic character here, I was ready to scream at scenes that took forever and did nothing.

This movie hits every trite cliché in the book, both before and after the kidnapping. As a bonus, this is basically two, two, two movies in one!

This first is "drunken man finds redemption and sobriety and reason to be happy in friendship with small child" and this is probably the better part. Dakota Fanning plays the typical winsome blonde kid who somehow cracks past Denzel Washington's crusty exterior. Fanning is a little cutie, and Washington is certainly a strong enough actor to pull this off. Still, you've seen this done before, and done better.

The second half of the movie is the "one man obsessed with revenge, oh and by the way, he happens a trained killer." You'll recognize this trope as having been done before and better. Denzel Washington is a fine actor, but he's a bad Schwarzenegger (for all his limitations, Ahnold is very good at amoral obsession, which is what Denzel is going for here).

It's not that it's a bad movie; there's too much talent (or at least experience) on both sides of the camera to make this bad. Still, it's trite and cheesy. There are better ways to spend 146 minutes of your life.

The good news: Revenge of the Sith is visually sumptuous; each new world created is exquisite. The CGI techs who put together the backdrops did themselves very proud.

That's it. The one piece of good news.

The acting is as bad -- or worse -- than you've been told. The script is leaden. The "turn" of Anakin isn't so much a seduction of a pure soul by evil, but the duping of a sulky imbecile by the smart guy. And so on. If there is torment, instead of petulance, on Anakin's side, it needs a better actor (or director of acting) than Christensen (or Lucas). Hayden Christensen, in this film as in the previous episode, seems like he's imitating Sylvester Stallone imitating Marlon Brando. Natalie Portman is also dull. And the pair have so little chemistry on screen, you wonder how she could have even become pregnant.

I thought even some of the editing was poor. It was difficult to see who was firing at whom in the opening sequence. It was difficult to see who was swinging at whom in the lava. It was hard to remember where the heck they had left Natalie Portman when Obi-Wan and Anakin -- er, Darth Vader -- started their fight.

And finally, even the sumptuous backdrops ended up hurting the film. One of the real charms of the original Star Wars was the scruffy landscape of Tunisia, which gave the requisite desolation without interfering with the action (or the dialogue). By contrast, all that magma distracts you from the action; as does that weird hollow planet where Obi-Wan kills Sidious; as do the constant stream of moving vehicles across the sky-roads of Coruscant. And the final irony is that with all the exotic CGI backdrops, the film ends up feeling rather studio-bound.

The final film of the series deserved to be a character piece (in the way that the Luke half of TESB was). Instead, it's a dull bit of space opera.

It wasn't as bad as Gigli (what is?), but all in all, it was a very dull, very disappointing piece of film-making. As Yoda might have said, "A shame it is, that come to this it has.