Tag: Sigourney Weaver

The Cold Light Of Day / Battleship

Starting to get back on form with a two-film evening, making three this week so far. Kicking off with…

The Cold Light Of Day

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Young man’s family go missing, but who’s to blame and who’s on his side trying to get them back?

See it if you like: Moderately low-budget Euro-thrillers

It’s always good to see Sigourney Weaver putting in an appearance and in this Spanish-set thriller she’s as much of a bitch as you’ve ever seen her. Alongside Bruce Willis, who’s in a hell of a number of films this summer, and new-ish star Henry Cavill (soon to don the blue, red and yellow of Superman)  the group tear up Madrid in this conspiracy thriller.

Dragged to Spain on holiday with his parents while his company goes under, Will Shaw (Cavill) gets in a bit of a strop and wanders off. Upon his return, he finds his family missing and a mysterious man rather interested in taking him in, too.

It turns out papa (Willis) isn’t a harmless government office bod after all, but a CIA agent in charge of a briefcase that quite a few people are very much desperate to get hold of. Desperate enough to kidnap his family, in fact.

Things take a turn for the worse by the end of the first reel and we’re left wondering as much as Shaw who can be trusted and who can’t.

The action scenes are gritty and the acting good from all the leads, although there are a few “twists” which are about a surprising as finding a cornflake in a packet marked “Cornflakes”. It’s got that very typical European feel to it, with the car chase scenes being very twisty turny rather than full of enormous explosions.

If I had a problem with it, it was the sound. This could have been due to the print or the cinema, but it sounded as if I was listening through earmuffs and made some of the dialogue very hard to make out. It suspends reality a little too much in quite a few areas, too – the falls and gunshots are lovely and brutal but the characters simply shouldn’t be getting up and walking after some of them!

Overall, it’s not too bad. Short and snappy like a short story, a decent plot and some good acting. No classic, but well filmed and worth seeing if you’re between other films.

Battleship

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Aliens attack and this time it’s the navy’s turn to save the world.

See if it you like: Switching your brain to neutral and enjoying yourself. A lot.

I will say this now – Avengers Assemble has something to live up to. Battleship was so good that it’s already tainting my view of films I’ve not seen yet.

Remember that feeling you had when you first watched Armageddon or The Rock? Yeah, it’s like that. All the way through. Big, silly, overblown, funny, over the top, cheesy, exciting… it’s all of these and more.

Alex (Taylor Kitsch) and Stone Hopper (Alexander Skarsgard) are brothers, the former a waster and the latter an up-and-comer in the US Navy. After an amusing opening twenty minutes or so, Stone forces his brother to sign up in the navy and we skip forward an undetermined length of time to the present day.

Serving under Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson), the daughter of whom (played by Brooklyn Decker) Alex is dating, the pair are involved in an international naval manoeuvre when aliens respond to a signal we sent… by dropping some smegging huge missile-toting machines into the Pacific. Erecting a force field around the area, they cut a handful of ships and an island off from the rest of the world and start their plot to take over Earth. As aliens are wont to do.

Oh, they also blow **** up and sink ships and invade and stuff, too. All good fun.

The key story is split into two parts – the actions of Hopper Jr as he makes good on his wasted early life, and a small group on the island who take on the marauding aliens hand-to-hand. This group consists of Shane’s daughter, a mad scientist and a retired double amputee soldier played by Mick Canales – an actual retired double-amputee soldier. In fact, he’s not the only real veteran to play a part in the film. A sizeable group of retired sailors feature as well.

The board game of Battleships seems a weird film license, but they actually manage to shoehorn in the gameplay, believe it or not. They don’t, however, manage to get someone to utter the immortal phrase “You sank my battleship!” which is a shame. The thing is, it doesn’t matter.

Battleship is over two hours of hugely enjoyable explosions, one-liners, cheesy sequences, explosions, special effects, monsters, explosions… And some stuff blowing up.

It is completely silly and over the top, but it never makes any attempt to take itself seriously so all the nonsense is completely forgiveable. Even the complete disregard for the laws of physics. It falls very much into the Fast Five camp on that score.

I loved this film. I don’t know if it would bear a repeat viewing, but it’s definitely worth seeing on the big screen.

 

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Avatar

avatar-movie-poster
Avatar

Well, it’s the film of the moment that everyone’s going on about. But does Avatar deserve the hype?

Directed and written by James Cameron, this is the film he’s been trying to make for 17 years. Finally, technology’s caught up with his vision and he’s popped it onto celluloid (by way of a billion computers) where you can view it on the big screen, on IMAX and in 3D.

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Earthlings (all American ones, obviously) invade a planet to mine it dry, only the locals aren’t too pleased. So the invaders drop in a couple of “avatars” – remote-controlled bodies made to look like the locals so that they can try to convince them to, you know, sod off so we can destroy their planet.

Avatar follows a very simple formula right down at the basics. Boy meets girl while pretending to be something he’s not. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy is revealed for what he is. Girl freaks. Boy redeems himself. I saw The Wedding Crashers this week and it’s the same story. With fewer dragons and 6-legged horses. And blue people. And spaceships.

Visually it varies from incredibly impressive to cartoonish. Much as CGI has improved over recent years, character movement is still that little bit jerky or a bit too smooth. It is very difficult, however, to tell where real-life animatronics end and computer-generated stuff begins. The best effects in the film, in my opinion, are the background details. Check out the portable “medical charts” and the data-filled viewscreens. Lovely. And not hugely unrealistic given current “real-world” progress.

It’s also nice to see Sigourney Weaver doing something other than those bloody Orange adverts – which thankfully seem to have finally run their course. I’m impressed that she really doesn’t look any older than she did back in the days of Aliens. Now we have Danny Glover sucking at the big Orange teat and I’m sure I’ll be sick to the teeth of him within three films.

The film is a little too long, but even with the overuse of bioluminescence and cartoony colours does look fantastic. The final battle sequence, covering air and land, runs for around 45 minutes and is nothing short of amazing. Visually, though, I’d still give the edge to Peter Jackson‘s Lord of the Rings trilogy. I guess I prefer dirt and grit to shiny lights.

I will say though, Avatar is very much sci-fi in its purest form. A good, simple story; plenty of action; and a plot that could be used elsewhere without the science. Not the mindblowing genre-defining classic that Cameron was perhaps hoping for, but a very entertaining bit of cinema nonetheless. And also worth seeing in 3D. A shame there’s no convenient IMAX for me – I have a feeling that would be an incredible experience.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]