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The Impact (2022)
Great collective effort.
Guerrilla Filmmaking has been a concept that has grown in popularity and Chris Jones, one of his most serious divulgers and proponents in the UK, has given many budding filmmakers the inspiration to wet their toes in the filmmaking water by means of books, seminars and many other efforts.
This collective film is such an effort, people presenting scripts, others criticising them and selecting some for production, and eventually making a film with all the work of the participants, a series of short films that circumscribe themselves to a single theme, in this case to present the situation in which an asteroid is hitting planet Earth and people have literally minutes to decide what to do.
The idea is compelling and the beginning of the film (spoilers start here) is great: the US president sits in front of the camera and lets people know that the eponymous asteroid will make impact in around 90 minutes and there is nothing to be done about it and that is the end of it all, So far, so depressing.
From here all the short films (I believe 50 of them, thus the title) grapple with the theme, all of them with great skill, some of them repeating the core theme from the same angle (there are lots of family goodbyes and children left in the dark about the impeding doom) and a few really thinking out of the box (only a couple of films manage to save some of the characters, one for a few months to come, another one has a more singular escape for one of the characters, even though the actual action isn't there).
The films have everything: animals, a French couple looking fab on their wedding day, a Russian astronaut, some special effects, stunts, and children, children, children, which really says where the hearts of most good people making these films are, which was really moving albeit a tad boring I have to say, and surprisingly few military men, a normal trope in end of times films in which the military often takes over. Yay to pacifism I say (although there is an ominous background noise with people screaming in the distance and choppers flying by).
I was expecting superheroes but the only heroes were regular people, some of them taking terribly difficult decisions in moments that will touch the heart of even the most cynical person.
The quality of the acting is overall very good, no goofy overacting or bad acting, which is quite impressive considering the amount of actors involved (a number that should be in the hundreds), the films are polished technically and the editing, which I am sure must have been a nightmare, comes with great credit by mixing all this discordant action together in a product that can be shown and which is a pleasure to watch.
Well done to all the people involved, and if you are a new viewer pondering if you should watch the film, fear not, it is a great piece of solid entertainment.
Gwoemul (2006)
Clever and enjoyable beastie nonsensical action
The reputation of the director is now firmly established, so it is interesting to go back to one earlier work and see how things progressed.
This film handles a premise not unlike Godzilla's films, from which surely this takes inspiration: we see how the criminal actions of a few endanger the many with deadly consequences, in Godzilla's case it is nuclear waste, in this film it is chemical pollution.
Our heroes are a family of normal people with more misfits than accomplished characters with a hapless patriarch trying to mediate between them, prior to.our creature appearing all the 5 members of the family are sufficiently portrayed to hope for a rich set of conflicts but these never fully materialise.
The female characters hold the moral compass and sense of purpose, they are the ones brave, clever, calm but like in romantic opera such qualities never augur anything good for heroines upstaging male characters, the blokes are mostly useless but good hearted and brave.
Once the context is set then a suitably scary monster, which nature and moves are eerily realistic, is let loose to test the resolve of our heroes to breaking point.
Here the film looses its feet a bit, having established the situation pretty well the film doesn't know anymore what it wants to be: family drama, action film, conspiracy Sci-Fi, political intrigue, or perhaps even all of the above?
The weak point of the film is that it tries to be all these things but the script is not clever enough to do so in parallel, so when it becomes one or the other one gets a sense of stop and go and this creates uncertainty which seems to reach the director himself that loosed his hand in some inconsequential scenes that could have been better invested in providing a more solid body to one of the strands in the film, for example the conspiracy theory (there is no virus) is not fully explored ands is left hang there as an uneasy possibility, but so are the different family interactions that are not investigated fully, and as a monster action film exclusively eventually the creature is just to small for that.
At the end the film is very entertaining because it is done professionally and with great commitment, and certainly the comedic part is its best asset, but this certainly wouldn't predict a director that would conquer the world with a much more solid and accomplished film in which the monsters become the characters themselves, characters that will emerge also out of polluted water,
Under the Skin (2013)
You're in Candid Camera: we got good music.
I saw this film during the London Film Festival, so my recollections are still fresh and, bare with me, I remember the Q&A session which was very telling.
The alleged SciFi bits and pieces are presented in a completely disjointed manner, frankly I am not entirely sure they would be understood as such if one wasn't helpfully informed about that angle by the press releases. You know it is a SciFi movie and that is why you can manage to connect the dots.
So what are we left with? A pervy girl with a bad hairdo (obviously a cheap wig) driving a van and picking up men way down in the social ladder in not very attractive places in Glasgow.
This was incredibly dull. Then when these hapless individuals are brought to the hiding place of the girl they are dealt with in such a stupid and yet again dull way that is frankly adding insult to injury (and no, Ms Johannson doesn't bare it all, this is after all intended for a market where female nipples are taboo, so yeah, sexy underwear, so what?, and even if she was fully naked, so what again?)
Question here: if you lose your footing in any way wouldn't you say at least "what the heck?", and if you don't then you would be brain washed somehow, right? Well, our hapless victims don't emit even a whisper: my son, you are being had: the logical thing is to put a bit of resistance.
What made this worst was the exploitative nature of the filming process, which apparently filmed Ms Johansson with a hidden camera in authentic settings. This, we are led to believe, lends authenticity to the film. These bit parts are so inconsequential to the thin plot that they could have dispensed of them (unless you find highly exciting to see Ms Johansson walking in a crowded shopping centre).
The troubling part is that they did the same when the main character was picking up men. The thing is this: we know this is Ms Hollywood star to die for Johansson, and in the other side there are these working class lads from Glasgow whose good, and dare I say, shy and polite manners are used for the benefit of the film. They don't try to chat her up, flirt, joke, they somehow know this woman is somewhere in outer space, and that has nothing to do with her supposedly being an alien. I really felt dirty when watching these (repetitive) scenes.
Now to the Q&A: the producer accepted that they had to scale down the film because they couldn't find enough financing: well rightly so, I can just imagine people being pitched this silly idea saying no firmly. For bunnies sakes, it took them 12 years to get it done, a clue stick should have hit there.
Finally 2 out of 3 comments (and several tweets and other comments I have read) were about the fantastic sound and music. Yes, I agree, that was the best part of the film, but since film should be mostly about images, such compliments tell you a lot about the quality of the whole piece.
Never Let Me Go (2010)
How unkind of some reviewers, how exaggerated praise from others.
The people that are deriding as boring this movie are wrong, of course, but have got a point: the plot is slow to develop, the tranquillity of the film will grate the wrong way with some people and it is understandable that some may become exasperated by it.
But many people would say that a sunny summer afternoon, sitting in a place with a nice view, doing nothing but contemplating the landscape is boring. Nothing wrong with that, but that is what these people mean about the movie being boring, as everything, boredom is in the eye of the beholder, and in this case some beholders are too impatient.
But do beware of the people saying this is a marvel of a movie. it isn't, and the problem are the gaping holes in the plot.
What would give this movie an edge in regards to a full blown melodrama is the reference to Sci-Fi elements, but unfortunately these are touched so casually that in undermines the whole thing.
Spoilers!
We are led to believe that people (are they people? that would be the first question left unanswered) that by all appearances are thinking and functional, that clearly despair about their mandated fate (By whom? How?) do nothing but meekly ask for a short reprieve from a bureaucrat that surely they know is a minor peg in the overall machinery that mandates their fate? People have started revolutions for far less. By not telling us more about this inhumane condition the film is found wanting and undermines itself. You can suspend disbelief, sometimes to great lengths, but this constant distopyan teasing without throwing us one or two bones is infuriating, and inevitably rests weight from the matters the film is really trying to address.
I thought that at the end Carey Mulligan's character would have the last laugh against the system and use that tree, where she reminisces about her short life, to keep to herself those precious organs she has been raised to "donate".
But she doesn't and here is a shining example of a subtle but fundamental contradiction in the plot: that in spite of the attempts of their teachers to probe that the donors actually have "souls" (Really? Souls? Was all what they were concerned about? Is that a theocracy? Again most questions unanswered...) the donors have no recognisable aspirations.
So what is it? The boy screaming in despair or the carer signing a form? By not making its mind, the film fails to deliver its message, in spite of good acting and impeccable cinematography.
Lose the plot and you lose the movie.
Nevertheless this is a gallant failure, it is an adult movie for adult audiences, a rarity nowadays for which we should be grateful (remember who gets bored during complicated movies and who the film industry is trying to please when movies are not "boring"...).