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Reviews
Film reviews by
Mark Harris
A tale
from another planet
HG Wells’s epic
tale gets the Hollywood treatment. Get the towels out...
The War of the Worlds
UK 2004, Cert 15
Director: Steven Spielberg
Star Rating: *****
A new Steven Spielberg movie used to be a real event:
The Last Crusade, Schindler’s List and even Saving
Private Ryan all made the fizzy pop and popcorn vendors
(or cinemas, as they used to be known) very happy indeed.
But ever since he became obsessed with airports and sci-fi,
Hollywood’s safest pair of hands has been in Terminal
decline. It’s not that his ability to tell a story
has really suffered – Catch Me If You Can was a
perfect little tale that would have made a great movie
any time in the last 50 years. But his saccharine mawkishness,
first evident in Hook and Always, is gradually seeping
into everything he makes.
On the face of it, a remake of HG Wells’s classic
tale of alien invasion should be the perfect vehicle to
get Spielberg back on track. After all, this story is
so scary that even a radio adaptation of it by Orson Welles
in 1938 had gullible Yanks panicking in the streets and
wrapping their heads with wet towels to protect themselves
against Martian gas attacks. Naturally, Paramount’s
new film will be a effects-heavy blockbuster, ‘updated’
from Victorian England to 21st century fortress America.
It’s a shame they didn’t land in the Home
Counties like last time, as I think most of us would happily
accept alien overlords in exchange for our present Government.
Don’t get your hopes up yet, though. Leading man
Tom Cruise is co-billed with a couple of irritating kids
(Jurassic Park anyone?) and early reports suggest the
aliens are a subtle presence rather than crash-landing
in the opening scene with tentacles, bug eyes and death
rays. Rumours that Cruise demanded that the CGI Martian
war machines had their legs shortened to make him look
taller are almost certainly true, as are the suggestions
that it’s all a vehicle for LA nut-job Scientologists
desperate for another crack at converting multiplex audiences,
following John Travolta’s amazingly uncool space
rasta in Battlefield Earth.
Even more disappointingly, there’s no sign of Jeff
Wayne’s 1978 electronic/prog rock soundtrack finally
finding its way to the big screen, with a typically bombastic
orchestral score from John Williams muscling in instead.
Considering the source material, The War Of The Worlds
is bound to be worth a watch, but if you need a wet towel
this time, I’ll wrap it round your head myself.
Currently on release, showing Odeon, UGC, Worthing
Connaught
 Batman
Begins
USA 2005, Cert 12A
Director: Christopher Nolan
Star Rating: *****
They all sell out in the end. Sam Raimi’s SpiderMan
was always inevitable; Ang Lee’s Hulk was another
nail in the coffin; and we were only spared Merchant Ivory’s
Snoopy by the recent demise of Ismail Merchant earlier
this year. Probably. And so crumbles Christopher Nolan,
director of the mind-wrenching Memento and atmospheric
Insomnia, now reduced to licking the hand of Warner Brothers
as they scrape the bottom of their bat-shaped money barrel
one more time.
The movie starts with Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) visiting
a superhero boot camp in Tibet, where he learns all manner
of ninja moves and Oriental philosophy from the mysterious
Ducard (Liam Neeson). He’s soon back in Gotham,
brooding over his parents’ murder and battling the
nefarious Scarecrow, a maverick shrink with a neat line
in hallucinogenic aerosols. The casting director must
have had a quick sniff of these: Michael Caine’s
Alfred veers dangerously close to a Dick Van Dyke-style
Cockerney; Gary Oldman looks quite uncomfortable playing
a goody; and Tom Wilkinson as a Mafia don is simply bizarre.
Bale, at least, manages to keep his head above water,
keeping an admirably straight face at the battiness around
him. And Nolan doesn’t entirely disappoint, summoning
some of the apocalyptic atmosphere of The Dark Knight
Returns and rattling everything along at a decent lick.
Production design is good, with the retro-futuristic monorail
system, in particular, being so lovingly detailed that
you just know it’ll reappear later on.
I think the moral of the film is that while a little bit
of fear is good for you, a lot is bad, that people generally
fear what they don’t understand, and that it really
helps your ambition to become a superhero if you happen
to inherit a billion dollars, a cutting-edge weapons laboratory
and a butler who’s prepared to blow the doors off.
I hope Nolan thinks those lessons are worth sacrificing
his credibility, reputation and talent for.
Currently on release, showing at the UGC, Odeon,
Worthing Connaught
copyright The Insight 2005 |
