Category: Review

I loved it. I knew going in it was short, I knew coming out it was short, but not once during the 74 minutes of the film did I feel like it was a short movie. Considering it’s so short, I wondered why so many people, adults and children alike, didn’t seem to like it. Then it occurred to me that they had all probably read the book, and right before seeing the movie.

This is not Harry Potter.

You will not find a careful, line-by-line conversion from book to screen here, and if you look for one, you will be disappointed.

What you will find is a movie where “you can have as much fun as you want to, and not get in trouble.” SO, if you want to have fun watching this movie, you won’t get in any trouble for it. It’s in the contract. So go, see the movie (on DVD, if that’s your preference) and enjoy it. Try to remember that despite the title and characters and general theme of a cat wreaking mayhem with two children, it is onlyinspired by that book. Not actually based on it.

First, I’d like to start by saying that I have not read the books, so for you … enthusiasts of the books the movie is based on, my review probably won’t speak to you. Really, you should all go speak amongst yourselves; you are probably of common mind.

Next, I’d like to say that I walked in with practically no expectations for this movie. Normally before I see a movie, whether I want to or not, I’ll know who all the actors are, the writer(s), director, producers, budget, on-set problems, financial expectations, oh, and the entire storyline, often with complex understandings of the characters and sometimes even with the ‘twists’ which are supposed to shock and surprise me. This time, it was just the first seven, which for those of you too lazy to count, means I had no idea what the movie’s story was, or whether it really even deigned to have a story. The only descriptions I’d had of the movie were about how very much like actually being on a ship it was. No mention of story or character (aside from some people looking too far and seeing homosexuality where even my keen eye so no real evidence), just technical details.

So, as I said, I didn’t know what to expect from the movie. Actually, this was my primary motivation against seeing the movie; I had no way to judge whether I would like it or not. Technical accuracy aside, without a carefully crafted story and believable characters (likeable or not), an epic period piece like this is doomed. For instance, I know I’ll enjoy Hidalgo, and having learned the actual story of The Last Samurai (not from the in-theatre-trailers, mind you, but from people who have seen the film or read the book), I believe I may enjoy that as well. So, I tried to go with an open mind, looking for entertainment.

And boy did I find it, now and again. Almost immediately, we are drawn into an excellently executed and edited battle sequence, and I just loved it. It was fast paced and violent and accurate to naval tactics at the time (based on some other reading I have done) and really did well to introduce the feeling of such a battle at sea. It really drew me into the film. They say that a viewer decides in the first ten minutes whether they will like a film or not, and despite the next two hours and ten minutes being somewhat patchy at times, the first ten minutes may have set my mind onto enjoying the film overall.

It has a little story: an older model of ship of the English Royal Navy is chasing (or is it being chased by) a brand new make of ship fighting for Napoleon’s Navy. The old tactics are fairly ineffective against the new type of ship, and the english captain is fairly crazy in his pursuit of it, well beyond his orders. The cat and mouse game they play is the line across which the characters dance in this peice, and it is played out excellently for the most part.

There are several battle sequences in the film, and after the first one, there are … well, the way I tend to judge complicated action sequences is by whether or not I am able to follow what is going on. In the second big battle, only 1/3 of the way in or so, I found myself lost. It wasn’t jargon I didn’t know, because I have somehow picked up most of it already. It may have been characters I didn’t recognize; the ship’s crew at the start of the film is nearly 200, and I swear I’m meant to be able to recognize a full quarter of them to tell what’s going on. Perhaps easy in a book, but more difficult on screen in such a short time. Then again, it could have simply been poor writing or editing that lost me somewhere amidships without a clue to who was winning or losing, who was alive or dead, and what I might be able to do to help.

And as soon as they were out of that battle, I regained my sea legs and was able to follow the characters around the ship again, but … it kept happening, usually in particularly intense sequences. Now, multiple viewings (which may occur, I feel I prefer this film and performance by Russel Crowe to that in Gladiator, which I already own on DVD, so if Master and Commander joins it, I shall not be surprised) may make these sequences more clear, as hind-sight always does, but I feel it is a director’s job, and the editor behind him, to ensure that the story is told in a way that the average viewer does not feel out of place in their seat.

Luckily, the last two reels of the film were practically without this problem (the only confusion I had at all was with a character or two I didn’t recognize, but in watching them die, realized I was meant to), including the final exchange between the ships, which was exciting and powerful, and quite fun to experience. All the characters I did manage to get to know during the course of the film were played out in exciting and interesting ways, growing and changing as characters, through the course of the film gradually, but also very quickly in the crux of battle, in ways that made sense for the characters. Excellent.

The biggest problem I had with the whole thing was a little bit about a stick-bug. A little too obvious, a little too telling… I mean, you really don’t need to hit me so hard in the face with foreshadowing.

But they did draw me in. Bellamy’s performance was the best I’ve seen from him, and I considered him the highlight of all the other films I’ve seen him in. The young players were particularly impressive in their acting, and Billy Boyd stood out as he had little chance to in the LotR trilogy. Truly, the technical details were astounding and accurate, and they really did well to give the feeling of being on a ship as best one can in two dimensions and two hours. Overall, I highly recommend it. And if you can follow the battle sequences better than I, there will be very little wrong with it in your experience.

Enjoy.

So, in case the title wasn’t enough to warn you, this “Review” of The Matrix Revolutions contains information from the film that may “spoil” it for you. That is, I’m going to say things that may give it all away. In the next paragraph. If you haven’t seen it yet and care about whether you find out about it before you watch it, read no further. Continue reading The Matrix Revolutions – SPOILERS included, take 1

The Oracle is a human, working for the EVIL AI. Agent Smith likes kittens. Zion is destroyed in record time, with every ‘free’ human killed in less time than it takes to get a refill on your popcorn, and then Neo loses the big climactic battle and the Matrix crashes, killing every last human connected to it. The Merovingian is secretly controlling Agent Smith, and when Bane finally wakes up, he speaks in french. That runner from the Animatrix who woke up from running too fast is actually behind the current war, peace having been met between humans and AI years ago, but broken by that runner over a little matter of a sexy nurse and a key. Trinity is actually Neo’s mother, and Neo is actually Smith’s father. And that little girl in the trailer?

YOUR mother.

**********

Okay, so expect a “No Spoiler” review and a “FULL OF SPOILERS” review from me later.

This one is just silly.

I’ve seen the movie, but … I’m not ready to say anything about it yet, I haven’t processed it all, yet. But, I’m about to go see it again, apparently. So. For now, know that the Twins are more powerful and important than anyone ever imagined. Watch for their spin-off, next fall.

I saw M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs early Friday afternoon, but I spent all weekend debating whether or not to write about it. As we saw in both of Shyamalan’s last two pictures, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, there is a big piece of information revealed in the last few minutes of the movie that makes everything you’ve seen so far change perspective in your mind. It certainly makes it worth seeing again. The question was whether or not I should write about the movie at all, since no matter what I say now will be through the new persepctive brought on by the last-minute information.

I decided that it would be best to save you the 2nd trip to the theatre; I’ll reveal the twist now and the movie will be that much more interesting because you already know the secret. I definitely think this unexpected twist enhances the entire moviegoing experience more than it gives anything away.

First though, I’ll say that generally Signs is a sort of suspenseful thriller. There are a lot of jump-in-your-seat moments, and a couple of places where the entire audience screamed in unison. There is also a lot of great acting, and the true nature of the movie really lent to that element in a way that you might miss if you thought it was just about an alien invasion.

As you should know from movie trailers and movie posters and TV commercials, Signs is about crop circles. Mel Gibson plays a reverend Graham Hess who left the church and lost his faith about six months before the movie opens, and who has what appears to be just a couple acres of corn growing out behind his big farmhouse. He is a single father of two young children, an boy of about 12 (Morgan, played by Rory Caulkin) and a girl about 6 or 8 (Bo, played by Abigail Breslin), and lives with his brother (Merril, played by Joaquin Phoenix). The reason Graham lost his faith in God and left the church, and why Merril is living with them, is that his wife died in after being struck by a driver who fell asleep at the wheel. This event sets the emotional background for all the characters, and really seems to be the basis for the involvement of Graham’s crops in the crop circle-related events.

Now I’ll reveal the entire movie:

It’s about the rapture. The crop circles are divine symbols foretelling the rapture. As the movie progresses we see more and more of the creatures that we believe are aliens invading earth, and they definitely do not look human, and they do not speak, and they can run faster and jump higher than any man ever could, and they are the agents of God. On the first night they make the signs in crops around the world, more being discovered as daylight races around the circle of the Earth. On the second night they begin to be spotted, running around in the dark corners, but joined by strange hovering lights in the skies above major cities. Those who see them in person can never remember what they looked like. (There is a funny sequence where Graham and Merril are trying to describe the figure they saw the previous night, and about all they can say is “it was very dark”; eventually it seems that perhaps a swedish female olympian was on their property, since all they know was that a tall figure was able to leap all the way onto their roof and run faster than anyone they had ever seen.)

Graham and Merril have some intense conversations during the days about faith, and we have seen that Merril and the children still have deep faith in God, whil Graham still denies God. There are also some flashbacks to the death of Graham’s wife. It is during these moments that the emotional depth of these characters is revealed and we really get a feel for them as genuine people.

It’s really well done how the events unfolding in their small community, literally in their own back yard, are unfolding all over the world, on every channel. Of course, everyone in the movie believes it is aliens until the third night, when they start taking people. That night, Graham and Merril have boarded up all the windows they can, and for some rooms with too many windows, the doors leading in from those rooms. The radio and the TV are no longer receiving signals. At the last moment, as they hear the “creatures” moving outside their home, unable to get through windows or doors and moving up onto the roof, they realize they didn’t board up the hatch to the attic. The four of them retreat to the basement.

The urgency of the “creatures” to get at this small family seems intense, considering there is an entire town they could go after instead. The “creatures” bang away at the basement door, and look for other ways to get at them. They are very persistant. With the last twist in mind, I know why; they are here to take at least the children and Merril, whose faith is not failing in these intense and frightful times. Little does the family know that they have allowed Graham to board them up and hide them from salvation. This is a beautiful metaphor played out in an intense way, and a gentle subtext to the history we learn as the movie progresses. Graham’s loss of faith has affected his whole family, and has subverted the life of his brother, who would rather enlist in the Army than stay with Graham. This movie works on so many levels, it’s a beautiful thing.

And then more suddenly than they appeared, the “creatures” disappear, taking millions with them. The family hears about it on the radio they found in the basement. Reports of people who saw these “creatures” face to face and were spared, while they saw others carried off, apparently dead. No one knows why the “creatures” were leaving, but they say “the tide turned somewhere in the middle east”; I believe they simply had fewer people to take in the middle east because of religious differences. Graham and his family carefully go up into the house and see that it has been somewhat ransacked, but with the reports on the radio and the dancing masses of people on TV glad to still be alive and on Earth, they feel safe.

Of course, this being a suspenseful thriller, they are not alone in the house. I won’t say exactly what happens, but it is in that final face-to-face confrontation with an agent of God that we learn what’s really been going on, and Graham is confronted with the truth about faith in God. The specific details will be fairly obvious from things said earlier in the movie, but its still great to see what you thought was going to happen unfold in light of the new perspective of the rapture.

Then the movie ends abruptly and we are not faced with what happens after the rapture, whether it is the coming of the antichrist or the 2nd coming of christ or what; that’s not the point of this movie. What this movie is really about is one family’s relationship with faith and God, life and death, and watching one man’s inner struggle affect his family (and indeed his entire community, who can’t stop calling him “father” instead of Graham, and who still want to confess to him), and nearly keep them from experiencing something truly amazing.

Oh yeah, and ONE MORE SPOILER that you should not look at unless you’ve seen the movie:

This whole “review” was actually a “lie”. My imagined “twist” for the movie is not actually in the movie. I made all of this up. Well, the character names are the same, and the actors, and their general relationships, but … come on. The rapture? It’s really just a big well-organized hoax made possible by the internet. Or bunnies. Or wait; Mel Gibson was dead the whole time, and he was the one who made the crop circle in the first place. Or maybe the butler did it. Of course, if you’ve seen the movie, then you know what happened. Go back and watch it again with my twist ending in mind; it’s actually a much better movie that way.