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#646 – Dark Tower (2017)
Dark Tower (2017)
Film review #646
Director: Nikolaj Arcel
SYNOPSIS: Jake Chambers is having dreams about another world in which a Gunslinger tries to stop the Man in Black form destroying a tower and thus the world. When some workers from a psychiatric ward come to take him, he recognises them wearing human skins like in his dreams, and manages to flee through a portal to the world in his dreams. There, he meets the Gunslinger, and the two of them attempt to bring down the man in Black before he can finish off both of their worlds…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Dark Tower is a 2017 film and an adaptation of Steven King’s series of novels of the same name. The story revolves around Jake Chambers, an ordinary schoolboy who has strange dreams about a ruined world and a gun-wielding man facing off against a Man in Black. When he discovers that the world is all too real, he teams up with the Gunslinger to save both his world and theirs. Emerging from a troubled production which saw the rights for the film passed between a number of studios and directors, the film takes the eight book series and condenses it into a just over ninety minute film. It should be evident that this comes fraught with problems. I have never read the books, but I am aware that the whole series is full of lore and worldbuilding, and the main issue with this film is that it has very little, and clumsily establishes what it has to before it rushes off onto the next plot point. I’m sure that there is an interesting world and mechanics in this story, but there’s no time taken to build or present it. The film throws the story into a typical three-act structure that again just skims over any worldbuilding and relies on the typical movie structure to carry the story through. First, we get Jake thrown into the Gunslinger’s world, then we get the Gunslinger thrown into Jake’s world with a typical fish-out-of-water experience in a very typical New York City setting, and then we get the finale. There’s no room for anything special or unique. Even if you want to make the argument that it isn’t trying to faithfully adapt the novels and just do its own thing with the material, it doesn’t do that either: it just slots it into this very formulaic structure.
The only thing real highlights of the film are Idris Elba’s performance as the Gunslinger, and some of the action scenes are quite nice. The rest of the characters don’t really offer anything interesting. Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black with his ability to do just about anything is very flavourless. I a sense, I understand how this film became such a mess with it’s constant handing off to different people, meaning that any vision of it has been rewritten and dissected so nothing coherent remains. Even so, condensing such an obviously lore-heavy series into a film that barely stretches ninety minutes is evidently going to be fraught with problems without serious reworking: the solution the film finds to this is to shove it into a very typical structure that barely keeps it afloat in place of any worldbuilding. And it is the serious lack of worldbuilding that hampers this film: there’s no sense of place, setting, or consequence that makes anything matter. Dark Tower has some good moments, but barely coherent storytelling and worldbuilding leaves it a mess of a film.
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#645 – About Time (2013)
About Time (2013)
Film review #645
Director: Richard Curtis
SYNOPSIS: Tim learns from his Father that the men in his family have the ability to travel back in time. He uses this power to help improve his life, as his Father suggests, and upon meeting Mary, he does everything he can to make their relationship work…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: About Time is a 2013 sci-fi romantic comedy film. After a lacklustre New Year’s Eve party, Tim Lake learns from his Father that the men in his family (himself included) have the ability to travel back in time. He decides to use this power to improve his life by finding love. When he encounters Mary by chance, he has to use his powers to make sure their relationship is perfect. The film focuses on using these powers within the range of the romance genre, and sidesteps a lot of the other issues that this power could address: Tim is clearly established from a well-off family that get along well, so has no real need to use his powers for money or the other typical things people would try to get if they had these powers. It pigeon-holes the film in only dealing with certain things, but it’s a romance film, so it should have a specific focus I suppose. When he meets Mary, he has to use his powers to make sure their relationship goes right, but when he inadvertently changes the past so they never meet, he has to go back in time to try and meet her by “chance,” which means he learns where she is going to be at certain times. now, I suppose you could argue that this is “okay” since they already did meet naturally and hit it off before Tim changed the past, so arranging himself to meet her by chance is just him repeating what he had done, but there’s still this feeling of him being manipulative about the whole situation that just irks me, and remained with me throughout the film. The film never once raises this dilemma that he changed the past so he should maybe just deal with it, and just carries on as if it’s not really an issue. The fact also that Mary never finds out about his powers really makes the relationship very one-sided.
The film is, despite the film’s title, about love, and hinges on the developing relationship between the two main characters. Both Tim and Mary have some compatibility, and there’s certainly some charm in their interactions. The film offers us a fairly well-rounded picture of the couple, from their first meeting, to marriage and children. The film doesn’t really offer a climax of any sort, it just levels out as Tim learns to make the most of life one day at a time. All of the issues and problems faced throughout the film don’t really feed into this climax, and are often easily fixed by the whole time travel business so they never happened, and no one really develops via their mistakes. As mentioned, Tim and Mary have a certain amount of chemistry, and they deviate enough from the typical romance leads, but their quirky personalities that ramble on in that quirky fashion is not going to endear them to everyone, and even if you appreciate the charm their base awkwardness brings, it does get old after two hours. We don’t really get a sense of any of the other characters either; we get a narration introducing them at the beginning, and that serves to sum up their whole character throughout the film, so again there’s very little development or anything new than what is immediately established.
The film takes a bit of a shift towards the end as Tim’s Dad passes away, and Tim begins to go back to the past to speak with him before he no longer can. It offers a touching finale to the film, but also it just doesn’t really fit in with the romance between Tim and Mary, as the latter is pretty much side-lined. I get that Tim’s dad first introduced him to the power, and is a secret between them, so it kind of closes the circle of the films story, but it would have been nice for it to at least play more of a part throughout the film so everything is weaved together a bit better. It is at this point as well that the film just throws its own rules about time travel out of the window, having Tim go back visiting his father before he died and such. The film hand-waives the issue of a butterfly effect of altering the past away in the beginning, and as mentioned Tim never really has to deal with the consequences of his actions. The romance film is director Richard Curtis’s bread and butter, but adding in the time travel element creates a lot of issues, as I always say: if you’re going top have time travel in your film, you need to know how it works, or it will quickly unravel the whole film with plot-holes and the like.
About Time has enough charm and chemistry to carry out its duties as a romance film, but suffers from side-stepping the problems that time travel inevitably creates, and ignores addressing consequences in fear of disrupting its attempt at creating the perfect romance through the redoing of very specific moments. There’s a bit too much of holding the film together on vibes alone rather than exploring its premise with any amount of depth. It’s Richard Curtis doing what he does best, but lack of any real plot or development of the characters leaves little substance underneath. It hits the right notes when it needs to, but it’s quite muddled when it needs to how it got there. maybe it’s charm can carry you through the film, or, like me, maybe it just flounders a few times too many.
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#644 – My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006)
My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006)
Film review #644
Director: Ivan Reitman
SYNOPSIS: Matthew Saunders starts dating Jenny Johnson, and learns that she is the superhero G-Girl. When he decides to break up with her, he must contend with the wrath of a superhero, while a supervillain schemes to take her powers…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: My Super Ex-Girlfriend is a 2006 sci-fi comedy film. Matthew Saunders starts dated jenny Johnson, a woman he meets on the subway, and finds out that she is the superhero G-Girl. When he decides to break up with her, she decides to get revenge on him and make his life a living hell. The premise of the film is simple enough to grasp and offers the potential for some comedic moments. The trouble is that the film manages one or two of them and doesn’t take full advantage of it to take it anywhere interesting. It relies on crude humour that hasn’t really aged well, and also doesn’t really push any boundaries. One of the reasons for this is probably the PG-13 rating the film obviously wanted, and so anything that might have pushed said boundaries is obviously sidelined in the interest of playing it safe. Even so, there’s still plenty you could have done within the rating to make it more interesting, but due to a shoddy script devoid of imagination, and poor pacing, in which the ‘break up’ only happens half way through the film and leaves no time for anything substantial to happen before it has to set the stage for a resolution finale.
The one thing of note about the characters is that none of them are very likable: they’re all fairly flawed and annoying in some way. Uma Thurman is the stand out role and plays her part as the super-hero and nerdy neurotic alter-ego well, although a a lot of very cliché and unhinged traits are just dumped onto her character. Matthew as the male lead barely registers any interest, and Eddie Izzard as the villain is very half-baked. There’s also the distinct feeling that by the end of the film and everything is “resolved,” that no one has really learned anything. Overall, there’s certainly potential in the concept, but an obsession with a PG-13 rating and playing it safe leaves you thinking you could imagine much more interesting possibilities than what My Super Ex-Girlfriend actually gives you. Unlikeable characters, a fairly empty screenplay, and lack of many stand-out comedic moments leaves very little impression, despite Uma Thurman’s solid portrayal of the role she is given.
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#643 – Eva (2011)
Eva (2011)
Film review #643
Director: Kike Maíllo
SYNOPSIS: Alex returns to his hometown after ten years when he is commissioned to finish building a robotic child with emotions that he abandoned ten years earlier. He chooses to base this child on Eva, a young girl who is the daughter of his Brother and former girlfriend.
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Eva is a 2011 sci-fi film. Set in 2043, Alex returns to his hometown as he is commissioned to finish a child-like robot with emotional intelligence, which he abandoned some ten years ago. Looking for a child to base the robot’s emotions on, he comes across Eva, who later turns out be the child of his Brother and former lover. The core of the story is a recognisable sci-fi one, a commentary on humanity, robots and the like. There’s nothing too special here that hasn’t been said by other films. It’s simple enough to follow, but that’s mostly because there’s not a lot going on. We’re introduced to a world where robots are commonplace, but we don’t really get a sense of how this has really effected or transformed society. The film is more focused on the individual characters though, so that’s excusable to a point.
Given that the film does centre around the characters, the biggest flaw in the film is that there’s little to no character establishment or development. Alex is essentially a mystery: we know he left for ten years after developing robots, but nothing else. We don’t know his stance on anything, what has been happening in his life, or anything of the sort. As such, it’s difficult to connect the events of the film to how it affects his character because there’s very little to affect. Lana, Eva’s Mother, is essentially that: she only exists as a Mother and love interest, and suffers severely from her personality being that she is a woman, which shouldn’t really be a thing in 2011. The performances are decent, but it often feels like they’re given very little to work with. The effects and CG models are fine for the time, but the main robot lacks the intricate lifelike movement and expression that would make them more significant. There just seems very little at stake throughout the whole film: it doesn’t really matter whether Alex creates this robot or not; nothing really depends on it, he’s just doing it because…? also, it turns out that [SPOILER] Eva is actually an android that can basically do everything he is trying to do anyway, being built by his Brother and Wife beforehand. The decision he takes to shut Eva down because she can apparently be dangerous just doesn’t seem justified either: she loses her temper, but it just doesn’t seem like it’s much different than a typical child, so essentially killing her for doing it is a very strange thing to end on. It’s nicely shot and produced, but there’s a void at the heart of the film that fails to generate anything substantive, or make an emotional point due to some very poor character development. Reviews for Eva generally aren’t too bad, but honestly I can’t agree: the good elements fall away due to a lack of cohesion in the screenplay and characters, and there’s many films that broach the same subject that do it better.
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#642 – Jiu Jitsu (2020)
Jiu Jitsu (2020)
Film review #642
Director: Dimitri Logothetis
SYNOPSIS: Jake Barnes awakens at a military outpost in Burma with no memory. He is broken out of the base by a group of jiu jitsu fighters who tell him that he is one of them, and they are tasked with defeating an alien invader that visits Earth every six years, and who will destroy it if they fail to defeat him…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Jiu Jitsu is a 2020 sci-fi film. A secret order of jiu jitsu fights must off an alien invader that visits every six years through a portal in a Burmese temple, and if they fail, the alien will destroy the world. That’s basically the whole plot, and is essentially Predator with some martial arts. However, it’s complicated by all sorts of nonsense that doesn’t provide any world-building or interesting lore, but just a heap of stuff that distracts and bloats out the runtime. Having Jake lose his memory makes no sense and clearly serves no reason other than to have the plot explained to him for the viewer’s purpose. The martial arts itself is fine, but it often feels so forced, in the sense that the situations people are in don’t seem to call for specific actions, and it just doesn’t flow right. Copious amounts of dialogue try to say things or put the pieces of the world together, but serve to ultimately just make things more bloated. So much in this film is unnecessary fluff that doesn’t go anywhere or develop into anything.
The characters are all one dimensional and uninteresting. Even the ones that are obviously trying to fill certain roles (comic relief etc.) fall flat. Nicholas Cage doing his typical crazy act doesn’t really work here either. For a martial arts movie, there’s a lot of stuff that actually gets in the way of the martial arts (none of it is actually jiu jitsu, by the way). The film sometimes opts for a comic book style transition between scene, which somewhat makes sense, but doesn’t commit to it for more than a third of the film. For some reason as well, there’s portions of fight scene near the beginning of the film that are shot from a first-person perspective, which makes no cinematic sense, and is completely at odds with the rest of the film: again, if you’re going to use one of these techniques, then at least commit to it. I honestly can’t fathom what the vision or direction is in this movie: it’s just stuff thrown in front of the camera, and any attempt to justify it somehow makes everything worse. It’s not even something you can just mindlessly enjoy either, it’s just too baffling and inconsistent to not pay attention to. It’s not that the cast is bad either; they’re just given nothing to do or to work with. I honestly can’t work out what this movie’s vision is or what it is trying to accomplish, and obviously no one else could either: the film was an absolute bomb at the box office. Jiu Jitsu is a poor attempt at martial arts and sci-fi where nothing hits home.
