Film Reviews by DM

I'm a sucker for generation starship stories but/because they always go wrong. In this case it's because the mission designers didn't read Lord of the Flies. The analogy breaks down a little because the crew are young adults, not children, so it's a bit hard to believe that almost the whole crew turn into a bunch of psycho apes the minute they stop taking their medication; when I was in my 20s I could easily have found thirty friends who could get on in a confined space without killing each other.

But of course it's a metaphor for how fascism gets started (invent a lie to make people afraid, then demonize anyone who insists on facts and reason) and also a nod to Alien, since which movie every spaceship is crewed by a bunch of malcontents who are only stopped from tearing each other's throats out by the presence of one responsible adult.

Not great, then, but not dreadful. I just hope that if and when humans do leave the solar system they can figure out how to put together more reliable teams.

The book is ambiguous (we don't know if Bella is really a Frankensteinian creature) and set in the real world. The movie is unambiguous, linear, and set in a steampunk world, or a kind of cosplayers' 19th century, that makes you wonder what is supposed to be fantastic and what people accept as normal. It's quite similar to 1960s "hip" picaresque movies, the only difference being that it's a young woman going through sexual experimentation rather than a young man. You get the point of each sequence long before the director thinks you have. The one point I thought there was a plot twist coming (this is a world in which brains can be transplanted, after all) it fails to happen, probably because the scriptwriter didn't think of it. So: read the novel instead.

Brendan Fraser plays an English teacher who is fatter than Baron Harkonnen. His performance is good but I couldn’t make any sense of the story or characters. There seemed to be some ongoing reference to Moby-Dick but I don’t think the writer had much idea of what he was trying to say; he just threw in every theme he could think of and hoped something would stick. It was originally a stage play, which accounts for the relentless emoting of all the characters. After watching some very fine dramas like The Staircase and The Act, this sort of over-the-top intensity and exposition comes across as very artificial.

The storybook narration tells you you're not supposed to believe in any of this. (You are too cool and clever to be taken in by fiction's tricks, see.) Also, you do need to find extreme violence funny, or at least worthy of a smirk. So it's Tarantino for Brits -- or Tarantino with a dash of the Coens, only the Coens don't deploy violence gratuitously. And transplanting Tarantino's hyper-violence to Britain doesn't really work because you'd immediately have a nationwide manhunt and we are a small country with a lot of CCTV, so I doubt if the same rules apply. Guy Ritchie for smarter viewers, perhaps? (That's not hard, admittedly.) Overall it's clever-clever but dispiriting in its view of people.

50 years on from Chinatown, this is a backwards step, a movie loaded with so many noir cliché that it is more of a parody than a worthwhile story. The only modern element here is that the violence is turned up to the levels you expect in the final reel of a Tarantino movie, which really doesn't fit the material. Neeson is always a good performer, but he's too old for the part and the dialogue is too writerly, with almost every character quoting Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Joyce, etc. Hard to see why Neil Jordan bothered.

Suppose you got an AI to write a TV Western in the style of David Milch and direct it in the style of Sergio Leone. You might end up with something that superficially resembled the work of those masters, but only in the way that a shambling zombie resembles a living person. This entire thing is excruciatingly mannered and ludicrously fake, obviously the work of somebody who has learned all they know from watching movies. All surface style, no depth or heart.

An artistic puzzle that takes a bunch of disparate elements (the Green Man, guilt, sexual politics, isolation) and stirs them in a bucket hoping that a story will emerge. Is everything in the lead character's head? Can't be, as we see scenes where she's not present. So is it real? Clearly not -- almost all the locals look the same. So it's a fantasy where we know they're the same person in some way but she doesn't: a recipe for detaching the viewer from the character. At the end I was thinking mostly about the special effects. The writer/director said he wanted it to provoke thoughts and for viewers to find their own interpretation, but that's been achieved far better in many less tricksy films than this.

You know how an AI can synthesise a painting using patterns it has learned to recognise but doesn't actually understand? That's what the script of Tenet is like. You can imagine a writing AI thinking, "The humans would put a surprise plot twist at this point. Generate a random surprise and insert."

Dialogue is on cruise control: "Don't try to understand. Just feel," says the Q-fused-with-Basil Exposition character. The protagonist nods: "Instinct." Given that humans' instinct for even forward-pointing physics models is barely on Looney Tunes level, I don't see how that would cut it, but we are swept on past on a white water of bewilderment.

Later, the screenwriting AI identifies a need for a portentous exchange between protagonist and antagonist: "You don't believe in God. That means you're not even human." Socrates would scratch his head, but luckily the antagonist is about to be shot anyway so he doesn't have a chance to drill into the logic there. Talking of logic, the AI correctly identifies that humans love stories that defy logic, so has vengeful victim-wife shoot him at a point that might very well doom the world, but turns out by luck not to. (That twist borrowed from "use the Force, Luke." This AI has studied a lot of story patterns.)

I'm giving the film 2 stars rather than 1 because it was simply too confusing to have any strong feelings about. And as a first effort by a deep learning scriptwriter I guess it deserves encouragement. But I hope the self-drive cars of the future are powered by better AI than this.

A gruelling waste of time. Irving's story rehashes ideas from his other novels and by the ending (which seems to come tantalizingly close several times, only for the thing to stutter on) you're just praying for it to finish. Unengaging and uninspired.