Noah Review

SPOILERS:

If recent box office trends in 2014 have proven anything, it’s that there’s a sizable audience ready to spend their money on religion or Bible-themed movies, quality and star power be damned. Just a quick glance at theatrical releases such as Heaven Is for Real and Son of God, both of which spent multiple weeks in the top 10 at the US box office, and it’s clear that an untapped demand for more “spiritual” content has finally been noticed. Within that context, the arrival of 125 million dollar Noah doesn’t initially seem as that much of a surprise, and yet, it comes as a subversive game-changer. 

In other words, those expecting a heart-warming tale of a long-bearded Noah and cute and cuddly animals entering the ark two by two should look elsewhere. Keeping in mind that this film comes from Darren Aronofsky, director of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, what you’ll find with this latest big screen retelling of the ancient Biblical tale of Noah’s Ark is a provocative and occasionally unsettling story that isn’t your typical Sunday school rendition. We quickly learn all the familiar background elements of the story, from Adam and Eve’s temptation with the Apple to the murder of Abel by Cain. The basic components are still all the same as well: Noah (Crowe) is a good man who is given the task by God (or as he’s called in the film, the “Creator”) of protecting Earth’s innocent animals from an imminent great flood designed to wash away the evil men of the world. 

So far so good, but it isn’t long before this new version departs from its source material, and this is due to one important reason: the remarkable brevity of the aforementioned source material. The story of the Flood in the Bible covers only about four chapters and is very light on details; a challenge for any screenwriter, especially one trying to find enough content to fill a feature length film. In fact, aside from the stark and unique style of the opening sequence, the first thing you’ll notice about Noah is how daring it is when it departs from the conventional narrative. And this is for the simple reason that Aronofsky isn’t really interested in just telling the basic rudimentary story of Noah’s Ark. The film labors to explain certain “unbelievable” aspects of the story, adding details such as the assistance of several fallen angels called “Watchers” in building the ark or the usage of a special herb concoction to drug and control the thousands of animals, but it doesn’t explicitly dwell on them. Aronofsky isn’t that interested in the nuts and bolts of the story, mainly because he understands what’s important in the tale of Noah and the Ark. 

What this film is more interested in capturing is the struggle of a man placed in an unenviably difficult position of having the fate of the human race in his hands and the various moral dilemmas and repercussions that arise from such a situation; it is a challenging and compelling  approach that does not pander to its audience or soften the harsh edges of the story. The film also surprisingly includes an action-filled pivotal and impactful scene that definitely was not in the original tale and clearly smacks of a desire to inject some excitement into proceedings. While arguably unnecessary, its inclusion is understandable, mainly because the film does tend to meander a bit with much of the posturing and ruminating between the various characters proving to be slightly redundant. 

The film spends considerable time on a number of subplots covering the evolving hatred of Noah’s eldest sons towards their father, but none of it feels as satisfactory or as well done as the central elements of the film. Noah is most effective when it centers on Russell Crowe’s titular character; it weakens whenever it strays anywhere else. With only the guidance of ambiguous dreams and the oblique wisdom of his grandfather Methuselah (Hopkins) to help him, Noah is a man who knows firsthand the evil that humanity is capable of and sees it everywhere, even in himself and his family. Resolute in his belief that the Creator has deemed that humanity’s sin and evil is too great to allow its continued existence on Earth, Noah’s convictions lead him to some truly dark and unsettling territory. From his determination to let countless fellow human beings die to depriving his sons from the opportunity to have children or a future, Russell Crowe’s Noah is a tortured man whose torment is made all the more acute by the battle within him between the love for his children and his sense of duty and responsibility to the Creator.

And interwoven within the film is a contemporary message of warning as Aronofsky utilizes the allegorical power of the tale to get us thinking about the legacy of the human race and our effects on our planet and on each other. The great success of this film is in finding the timeless and prescient characteristics of its source material that are the chief reasons behind why it’s been around for such a long time. The story of Noah is about the evil of man and man’s struggle with his own evil nature, and that’s exactly what is most fascinating about this movie. Imagine a man in Noah’s position, a person who has seen the ugliness in himself and others and struggles to find the goodness in the human race, especially when sin is what appears to define our lives and our existence as human beings. 

This sin is personified in the film by Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone in a great performance), the King of a tribe of evil and capricious men. Tubal-cain captures all the self-destructive flaws of man in a nutshell: here is a man who only understands and sees the world in one way: the way he believes the Creator has made it. It's a struggle for survival, it is a world where one must take what he wants and use any means necessary; it must be this way and Tubal-cain’s way must be right. Why must man be punished when he has been given dominion over this world and when he is made in the Creator’s own image? By showing us the seduction of Noah’s middle son Shem at the hands of Tubal-cain and the darkness within Noah himself, the film explores how easy it is to let our harmful tendencies prevail, whether it’s self-preservation over altruism, greed over generosity, or simply strength over weakness. Embedded within us are the seeds of our own destruction, and armed with that knowledge, do we forsake ourselves, or do we find something to make our continued existence worthwhile? In a pivotal moment in the film, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Noah gets his answer and with it, he finds man’s redemption and an unassailable hope for a better future.

Verdict: Featuring a Russell Crowe performance that is worth the price of admission on its own, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah takes one of the oldest stories ever told and successfully gives it a contemporary tone and message. That being said, Aronofsky’s most ambitious (and expensive) project to date is an uneven film that could have lost at least half an hour on the cutting room floor.

B

Trailer:

Movie info:

Runtime:138 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Cast: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ray Winstone, Emma Watson

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel

Cinematography: Matthew Libatique

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Review

When plans were announced for a reboot of the enormously successful Sam Raimi Spider-Man films only 5 years after the critically-panned trilogy closer, there were concerns that it was coming simply way too soon. Aside from the almost inevitable effects of franchise fatigue, there was also the fear that the latest Spider-Man films, now starring young and upcoming British actor Andrew Garfield in the title role and helmed by the untested Marc Webb, would just be retreads of the older films with nothing new to bring to the table besides some spiffed up special effects.

With those concerns in mind, marketing for the first Amazing Spider-Man promised fresh storylines and unexplored territory and promptly failed to deliver, and yet, it was still a resounding hit. Although it didn’t reach the dizzying heights of the Raimi movies, The Amazing Spider-Man proved that audiences were still willing to pay to see an inferior product; only minor rejigging was necessary. The lessons consequently learned were the following: bring in hip and current young A-list stars, scrounge the source material for a new villain or two, have a big explosive action set-piece to build the movie around, rehash the rest, and money will undoubtedly follow. 

And The Amazing Spider-Man 2 almost perfectly follows that blueprint to a T, if it wasn’t for the fact that villain Harry Osborn aka The Green Goblin now joins the fray as yet another recycled character. The movie kicks off a couple of years after the end of the first installment with Peter Parker (Garfield) still maintaining a fragile relationship with girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Stone), a relationship complicated by his guilt about his role in Gwen’s father’s death. With Peter still searching for answers about his parents’ disappearance, more complications unsurprisingly and arbitrarily set in when Peter’s childhood friend Harry Osborn returns to his life with an agenda of his own.  And lest we forget, in case Peter’s life wasn’t difficult enough, timid, socially awkward, and Spider-Man obsessed Oscorp employee Max Dillon suffers an accident that instantaneously turns him into a super-villain à la Sandman from Spider-Man 3. With the villains wreaking havoc left and right, this all builds to a showdown that is as uninspired and disappointing as the set up.

Why so uninspired and disappointing? For a few simple reasons, all of which become this film’s fatal flaws. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has nothing new to say, nowhere new to go, and feels like a hollow and shallow attempt at piecing together a film. Sure, the characters are there and sure, things do happen to them in proper chronological order, but something feels so joylessly labored in its construction. If placed under close examination, it is actually shocking how flimsily put together the plot of this movie is and how loosely everything is tied into place. Simply put, not much rings true about the characters or their relationships with each other. Both Harry Osborn and Electro (formerly Max Dillon) end up despising Spider-Man with a blinding hatred for various reasons, but their motivation for doing so is poorly developed to say the least. Things happen to Electro and Harry Osborn but their reactions to these events and their decisions to seek revenge on Spider-Man feel forced and mechanical. The film spends very little time in building those conflicts: those characters have to be villains because that is what they are designed to be and we have to just accept it. 

The reason for the weak characterization of the villains is pretty straightforward: they’re not that important in this movie. The core of The Amazing Spider-Man films is the relationship between Peter and Gwen: Peter fears losing her and is tormented by his broken promise to Gwen’s father to stay away and keep her safe. For her part, Gwen insists that she makes her own choices and is willing to risk her life to be with him. This brings up one annoyingly unspoken solution to their dilemma: Peter’s choice of being Spider-Man and all the dangers that come with that life is presented as an unchangeable given (perhaps because there’s still one more movie to make), but his reasons for maintaining the Spider-Man guise are never really covered or discussed. During various ingratiating emotional scenes between the couple, you begin to wonder why Peter doesn’t give up this life and just do the cliche of living happily ever after with Gwen. Much as is the case with the villains, it becomes a problem of motivation.

Peter has an obsessive desire to discover what happened to his parents but this doesn’t explain why he must be Spider-Man; it’s just taken for granted. This is not to say that there’s no reason for him to hang around, what with all the villains with amazing supernatural abilities and arbitrarily evil natures that conveniently arrive just to muddy the works with plans to destroy the world or turn everyone into lizards. Sticking around is thus very understandable, but the film spends so much time dwelling on Gwen and the fact that being Spider-Man requires losing her that Peter's choice to keep that life doesn’t ring true or feel honest to the character. It all just amounts to a time-filling plot line designed to set the stage for the third time waster of an unimaginative franchise. 

And finally, just a brief mention of an issue that also plagued the first Amazing Spider-Man: while purists might argue that Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man is a more accurate representation of the comic book character, his witty comebacks and jovial jokiness come off as wildly inappropriate in many scenes. Much like the first movie, the silliness and outlandishness of certain scenes or moments come into conflict with the relative seriousness of the film’s overall tone. We watch as Electro destroys countless buildings and undoubtedly kills numerous people, and then are supposed to laugh as Spider-Man dons fireman hats while crowds cheer and applaud nearby instead of fleeing for their lives. It’s a strange thing to watch and sums up one of the movie’s various problems. Caught between trying to be a more serious and adult film in the vein of The Dark Knight and yet still pandering to the comic book’s traditionally more overtly juvenile tendencies and characteristics, the film makes for an odd experience, an experience that this reviewer would not recommend.

Verdict: Failing to build much on the first installment, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has plenty of impressive visuals and action but fails everywhere else. Weak characters, plot contrivances, and bland one-note villains tarnish this surprisingly unengaging film and ultimately condemn it to become the latest in a long line of forgettable big summer sequels. 

C

Trailer:

Movie info:

Runtime: 122 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Dane DeHaan

Director: Marc Webb

Screenplay: Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Jeff Pinkner

Cinematography: Daniel Mindel

Oculus Review

As far as sure thing money-makers in Hollywood go, you can’t really go wrong with high-concept low-budget horror. From Sam Raimi’s amateurish yet hugely successful 1981 film Evil Dead to 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, Hollywood has long turned to the niche genre over the years in the search of a safe and easy guaranteed profit. This trend has seen a resurgence in the last couple of years with the Paranormal Activity series, and in our era of 200 million dollar blockbuster 3D visual overloads, the stroke of genius of films such as Paranormal Activity is that they thrive on what they don’t show you. And Oculus is a perfect example of the Paranormal Activity formula slightly, ever so slightly, rejigged. Oculus features a next to nothing budget, a no name cast of primarily TV actors, minimal effects and simple stripped down sets. The difference is that this time, while the Paranormal Activity movies are more often than not exercises in tedium that barely reach the minimum requirements for tangible content in a feature length film, Oculus actually has some substance to back it up.

The premise and set-up is short and sweet: Oculus is a haunted mirror movie, pure and simple. And at the heart of the story, we find a family whose lives were irrevocably destroyed by that very haunted mirror and the brother and sister who happened to survive that ordeal. The film begins with us following the lives of those children, now all grown up eleven years later. Younger brother Tim (Thwaites) has just been discharged from a psychiatric hospital after being deemed fit for living in normal society, while his sister Kaylie (Gillan) has just arrived at the end of of a lifelong search for the antique mirror that she is certain is the cause behind the deaths and misfortunes of countless people over the centuries. When the siblings reunite after a long estrangement, Kaylie reveals to a reluctant and fragile Tim her plans to destroy the mirror and salvage their family’s tattered reputation. Kaylie then reveals an elaborate set up to do just that, one that involves multiple cameras, various sensors and detectors, a pet dog, and a ceiling-mounted anchor aimed right at the mirror, ready to destroy it if she should fail to reset its timer. 

SPOILERS: 

At this point, we don’t know what exactly happened all those years ago, why Tim was in a mental facility or the reasons behind that elaborate set up, but Oculus does a solid job of slowly and steadily revealing details and information. While some of the exposition is stilted and unnatural, the film’s strength is its reliance on the dialogue and interplay between the protagonists. The relationship between the two siblings is the core of the film and is fleshed out enough to elevate the film beyond other inferior horror products that shun any meaningful form of character development. 

Once things get going, the film bounces around a lot between the present day and eleven years ago when Kaylie and Tim’s parents first acquired the mirror, and many of the scenes deftly and seamlessly weave back and forth between those two time periods. While this may seem like a risky and potentially unnecessarily confusing approach, the filmmakers use this technique very effectively to help elucidate events and create a general atmosphere of dread and foreboding terror. Not exactly a horror movie in the same way that recent high-concept films such as Sinister or Mama were, much of Oculus unfolds as an inner psychological battle as Kaylie and Tim struggle to maintain their hold on what’s real and what's just the mirror's trickery.

Speaking of Sinister, a low budget horror flick that involved an evil entity that can reside in film footage, Oculus shares the same major flaw as the Ethan Hawke-starring film. While it’s not necessarily a bad thing to not learn too much or figure out everything in a horror movie, Oculus and Sinister both fail for not clearly establishing the rules of the playing field or giving their characters much of a fighting chance. Besides it clearly having a strong survival instinct, the mirror in Oculus constantly pulls more and more out of its bottomless bag of tricks and uses them all in its battle of wits with Kaylie and Tim. From the mirror having an ability to possess people or to just manipulate what they see or hear, the filmmakers have lots of fun with this in a number of scenes that take full advantage of the fact that very little of what happens throughout can be trusted by the characters or the audience. 

The problem is when this gets to the point where the audience realizes that all the rules are out of the window and pretty much anything could or could not happen, logic be damned. Paralleling the demise of Sinister’s protagonist, the protagonists in Oculus are completely helpless in the end and pretty much do everything that the mirror wants them to do. Although the main focus of Oculus is on setting up the struggle of the characters to cling to their bonds of family to resist the mirror’s power, much of the tension and suspense vanishes when you realize midway through proceedings that the mirror has such a substantial upper hand. And while the finale of Oculus does set things up for a potential sequel, those expecting any kind of resolution should look elsewhere: the horror genre thrives on dragging out franchises beyond the point of no return and milking them for all they’re worth. Oculus will doubtlessly prove to be no exception. 

Verdict: Not as barebones content-wise as the Paranormal Activity films, Oculus does everything you want a horror movie to do: a bit of gore, a couple of scares, a twist here and there, and lots of well done good old-fashioned ominous atmosphere. More psychological thriller than pure horror, Oculus is an effective little film that will entertain those that take it at face value for what it is: a movie about a haunted mirror. 

B-

Trailer:

Movie info:

Runtime:104 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Cast: Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff, Rory Cochrane

Director: Mike Flanagan

Screenplay: Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard

Cinematography: Michael Fimognari