WALL-E Saves The World - Oblivion

Oblivion

Back in 2008, audiences fell in love with a soulful, big-hearted, little trash-collecting robot named WALL-E who saved the world and the future of mankind while cleaning up humanity’s mess.  Fast forward a couple of years and replace the cute little robot with Hollyweird’s favourite, toothy, couch-jumping Xenu-botherer toting a rifle that’s almost as big as him and, in essence, you’ve got TRON: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion.

60 years after an apocalyptic war with an alien invasion force known as the Scavs (short for Scavengers), mankind has been forced to abandon the battle-ravaged Earth, evacuating the remaining population to a colony on Saturn’s moon Titan, leaving behind only a skeleton crew of soldiers tasked with repairing and maintaining the security drones that protect the giant harvester machines strip mining the planet’s natural resources that are essential for humanity’s survival among the stars.

Drone repairman WALL-E, sorry, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his devoted colleague and lover Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are nearing the end of their tour of duty on the Earth’s surface and in two weeks will join the rest of the survivors on the Titan lunar colony.  Jack spends his days patrolling the skies over what was once New York and repairing security drones damaged by the Scavs still hiding in Eartg’s ruins while Victoria coordinates his searches and acts as his eyes and ears.  But by night Jack is plagued by dreams, fragmentary memories, of a beautiful woman (Olga Kurylenko) he’s never met.  Or has he?

When the beautiful EVE, sorry, Julia (Olga Kurylenko) literally falls from the sky in a damaged spacecraft, Jack finds his very existence thrown into turmoil as he’s forced to confront some horrific truths and finds the future of humanity rests on his shoulders.

Slick, glossy and pleasingly straight-faced, Kosinski’s sci-fi epic (based on his own graphic novel) is actually a rather sombre, thoughtful, ambiguous piece of work masquerading as a Saturday night, crowd-pleasing, balls-to-the-wall action flick.  Concerned as much with the unreliability of memory, niggling paranoia and the persistence of love as it is with big guns, dazzling pyrotechnics and flashy CGI, Oblivion borrows liberally from some of the most iconic science fiction films of the last 50 years (Planet Of The Apes, The Matrix, Silent Running, Moon, 2001), drawing major inspiration (and stealing chunks of plot) from WALL-E, Philip K. Dick’s brilliant short story Second Variety (filmed as the little-seen gem Screamers) and Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space novels yet still somehow managing in the process to rise above its diverse influences to deliver a bold, refreshing (if not exactly fresh) vision of our post-apocalyptic future with, for once, a truly alien threat. 

As Oblivion’s everyman protagonist, Cruise is decent if a little miscast, delivering a nicely understated performance which never quite convinces as your regular working stiff.  No matter how much he plays down his Messianic craziness, the Cruiser is always playing the hero even long before his Jack realises he is one.  Why else would he ride around Kosinski’s stunning ruined vistas on a motorbike when he could zip around in his cool insect-like spaceship other than the fact the Cruiser likes to race motorbikes?  Far better casting as Jack would have been Game Of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau who’s relegated to the secondary role of grizzled resistance fighter.  Though Cruise convinces as a man who, when faced with the choice between two seemingly idyllic heterosexual relationships, would rather go to war with a malevolent alien machine intelligence.  The film also features a fantastic triumvirate of female performances with the exquisite Olga Kurylenko definitely the kind of woman who’d make anyone, not just Tom, question their beliefs if she fell out of the sky on top of them while Melissa Leo is creepily cheery as Jack and Victoria’s ruthless space-bound boss.  The finest performance in the film though comes from Andrea Riseborough who manages the feat of being twitchy, sexy, poised, vulnerable and ambiguous in every scene she steals.  

Without wishing to reveal any of the film’s major twists (c’mon, you know from the trailer Morgan Freeman is basically phoning it in as the film’s Morpheus!), Oblivion is a little obvious, offering few surprises, and it’s never quite as clever or stirring as it wants to be but it is a jaw-droppingly gorgeous, exciting piece of pure entertainment that may just end up being the first iconic sci-fi movie of the next decade.

David Watson

Directed by:

Joseph Kosinski

Written by:

Joseph Kosinski, Arvid Nelson, Michael Arndt and Karl Gajdusek

Produced by:

Peter Chernin, Dylan Clark, Joseph Kosinski, Barry Levine and Duncan Henderson

Starring:

Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough, Morgan Freeman, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Lindsay Clift

Genres:

Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Language:

English

Runtime:

2 hours 6 minutes

Certificate:

12a

UK Release Date:

Wednesday 10^th April 2013

Rating:

4/5

Simon Killer - Too much Simon, not enough killing...

Simon Killer

Mind The Gap

After a traumatic break-up with his high school sweetheart and long-term girlfriend, recently graduated American student Simon (Brady Corbet) heads to Europe for the Summer to lick his wounds, get his head together and soak up some culture. 

Adrift in Paris, Simon wanders the streets alone, alienated, disengaged, until he’s lured into a strip club-cum-brothel where he meets vulnerable prostitute Victoria (Mati Diop), first paying for sex then entering into a tentative romance with her.

As the two become closer, Simon hatches a dangerous scheme to blackmail Victoria’s customers.  But as Simon’s plan spirals out of control and Victoria becomes increasingly needy, Simon’s genial mask of sanity slips, hinting at the callous, fledgling sociopath lurking beneath.

Beautifully shot, cold and morally ambivalent, Antonio Campos’ second feature Simon Killer is an icy, ambiguous exercise in voyeurism and manipulation that aims to leave you as alienated as its vacuous, amoral protagonist.

With his bland, all-American hipster good looks, surface charm and underlying creepy neediness Simon could be any privileged, middle class kid on a Gap year; that friendly, if boring, Mid-Western jock sat on the stool at the end of the bar after hours in O’Neill’s, that overly chatty guy at the urinal next to you with no regard for personal space or splashback, that creepy stalker haunting the fringes of the dance floor. 

It’s just that instead of wandering round the Far East smoking dope, wearing tie-dyes and questioning his sexuality after a drunken fumble with a ladyboy, Simon sexually and financially exploits a Parisian hooker and then beats her half to death before heading home to Mom.

Sexually explicit but profoundly unerotic, Campos’ Simon is a portrait of disaffected, alienated, amoral youth.  Callow and serious, he’s self-absorbed and humourless, impossibly seems to be having less fun than the audience and, as wonderfully played by Corbet, he’s a glib, compulsive liar and spineless coward.  Simon is a fantasist, a voyeur with hidden shallows, and Corbet reflects the audience right back at themselves with his dead-eyed stare.  Mati Diop as Victoria is sweet and vulnerable; she’s every privileged, middle class kid’s fantasy woman, the stereotypical fabled hooker with a heart of gold.  Their doomed amour fou while predictable is undercut with a mounting sense of dread and unease.

Wintry and mesmerising without ever being engaging, Simon Killer has plenty of Simon but precious little killing and manages to make being fingered by a Parisian hooker look unexciting.

David Watson

Directed by:

Antonio Campos

Written by:

Antonio Campos, Brady Corbet and Mati Diop

Produced by:

Josh Mond and Matt Palmieri

Starring:

Brady Corbet, Mati Diop, Michaël Abiteboul, Marc Gaviard and Alexandra Neil

Genre:

Drama

Language:

English

Runtime:

1 hour 41 minutes (approx.)

Certificate:

18

UK Release Date:

Friday 12^th April 2013

Rating:

2/5

Far from entrancing...

Trance

Forgettable

So, you’ve just pulled off The Greatest Show On Earth with the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony…what do you do for an encore?  Well, on the basis of his vacuous new ‘thriller’ Trance, if you’re knighthood refusenik Danny Boyle, it appears you may just have gone home and masturbated furiously in front of Inception and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

Fine art auctioneer and degenerate gambler Simon (James McAvoy) owes a lot of money to some very dodgy geezers.  Deep in the hole, he teams up with the ruthless criminal gang led by goatish Gallic gangster Franck (Vincent Cassel) to rob his own auction house of a Goya painting worth millions of dollars.  But the heist doesn’t quite go according to plan and, one bump on the noggin later, Simon wakes up with amnesia and no clue where he hid the painting.

When threats and physical coercion don’t aid Simon’s powers of recall, Franck sends him to possibly the world’s least professional hypnotherapist Dr Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson) in an attempt to jog his memory.  However, as Elizabeth explores the darkest recesses of Simon’s fractured subconscious in an attempt to discover the truth, the lines between obsession, love, desire and reality blur, cross following double-cross, as everyone betrays everyone else to a pounding middle-aged techno beat and Simon wonders if he can even trust himself…

A flashy, empty remake of screenwriter Joe Ahearne’s 2001 TV movie, Trance is a thriller about amnesia that induces just that; 20 minutes after you finish watching it you’ll be hard pressed to remember a damn thing about it.  In the days that follow you may experience mild flashbacks.  Stay away from petting zoos as the sight of a billy goat may cause Vincent Cassel’s face to swim unbidden to the surface of your subconscious.  The buzz of an electric razor may force a Pavlovian exclamation of “Pubes!”  This is nothing to worry about.  Give it a week.  You will forget.

With its gang of criminals trying to break into their victim’s mind, Trance desperately wants to be Danny Boyle’s Inception but has none of that film’s intelligence, precision or style.  With its themes of obsession and the elusive, unreliability of memory, Trance would also quite like to be Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind but lacks that film’s quirkily goofy melancholy.  Instead, what it resembles most, is Wolfgang Petersen’s hysterically overwrought, 1991 psychosexual thriller Shattered in which befuddled amnesiac Tom Berenger wanders through the film looking constipated and trying to remember who the hell he is and what the hell he’s done while Greta Scacchi breathily rubs herself against the furniture like an unspayed cat.

While the heist itself, with its Trainspotting-lite narration by McAvoy, is thrilling and intricate, and McAvoy is charismatic and likeable as Simon, Cassel (standing in for Michael ‘Tripod’ Fassbender who had the brains or good fortune to jump ship before filming) is laughably miscast as Franck, lacking the suavity, the icy intelligence and the sex appeal the role needs while the best you can say of Rosario Dawson’s performance is she’s exactly the sort of unconventional, rule-bending hypnotherapist you’d expect would include shaving her hoo-hoo as part of her client’s therapy.  The film also has a worryingly cavalier attitude towards its minor characters with one suddenly turning a bit rapey FOR ABSOLUTELY NO LOGICAL REASON and poor Tuppence Middleton again finding herself ill-used.  The increasingly frantic plot lacks plausibility and as none of the main characters are particularly likeable, the film is devoid of tension, the well-telegraphed series of unsurprising twists that cap the film rendering Trance a loud, migraine-inducing slice of smug tedium.

Callous, amoral and tired, Trance is entirely forgettable.

David Watson

Directed by:

Danny Boyle

Written by:

John Hodge and Joe Ahearne

Produced by:

Danny Boyle and Christian Colson

Starring:

James McAvoy, Tuppence Middleton, Lee Nicholas Harris, Vincent Cassel, Rosario Dawson and Sam Creed

Genres:

Crime, Drama, Thriller

Language:

English

Runtime:

1 hour 41 minutes

Certificate:

15

UK Release Date:

Wednesday 27th March 2013

Rating:

2/5