doughelo Reviews

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Stupefylngly Dull

[2/10 · 10 October 2017]

Truly I thought I was watching the "Heaven's Gate" of sci-fi. Every beautiful shot goes on and on and on until you scream "move along, already!" The reward for this butt-numbing length is a plot minimal to the point of nonexistence, and a resolution so trivial it could barely anchor a soap opera. If I hadn't known better I would judge from his performance that Ryan Gosling couldn't act his way through a Cheerios commercial. He wears a completely blank expression bleaching any emotional impact out of a scene, even as his virtual girlfriend finds a way to make love to him for the first time. Wait for it on video, as it's only endurable on 4X fast forward. In installments.

The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

Revenge fantasy in the Congo

[3/10 · 30 August 2016]

I can't comment on the movie as a whole, since I walked out halfway through. But I had 3 major objections to what I did see:

• Margot Robbie's Jane is annoyingly modern and out of context of the time. Held hostage by the villain, she is unrelentingly sassy and shows no sign of even slight concern for herself or her friends threatened with death. And she's so pure and good the butterflies flock to her.

• Making a swashbuckling revenge fantasy out of an historical atrocity borders on the offensive, the prime example being Inglorious Basterds. If they had showed the true story of how 10 million people died in the Congo for Leopold's profit, it would have been a very depressing movie. The real Leon Rom did not pay for his crimes, while here he is a caricature who meets a deservedly gruesome end. Good is saintly and Evil punished.

• Sorry, no way a 200 pound human slams at top speed into an 800 pound gorilla and comes out without rib splinters poking out of his lungs.

Sicario (2015)

A nihilistic nothingburger

[4/10 · 8 January 2016]

If you can take your lead character out of a movie without affecting any of the events, you've got a problem. Emily Blunt is there to observe events, but does not affect them in any significant way. Plus I couldn't get over the absurdity of the plot:

• Worried about an ambush at the backed-up border? Have you heard of airplanes or helicopters?

• No back history or real home life shown for any of the characters, and there's nobody to root for, really. Del Toro's character is a monster of a hit-man who kills children just to make a point. And after what this country has done in real life, are we really still showing the "heroes" successfully getting information out of a prisoner via water torture?

• Speaking of which, why stage the tunnel raid just to get him into Mexico, when he could plainly just drive in? What if the corrupt policeman's car hadn't been at the tunnel entrance? Would he have hailed a cab? Why did the cop keep unloading drugs after they heard gunfire in the tunnel?

The movie revels in gore without a point, such as the headless bodies hanging from a Juarez overpass which we are shown no less than four times. Although visually well made, the movie exists in a moral vacuum with no hope and no virtue.

Interstellar (2014)

They forgot to take the robot out of the box

[3/10 · 17 November 2014]

Somewhere in Interstellar is a decent 90 minute movie padded to 3 hours. I thought it might feel long; what I didn't expect was the cheap, weepy emoting and Hallmark philosophizing.

As for the padding, at least 40 minutes goes by before anyone mentions space, yet nothing of the ecological disaster is explained in any depth. No point is so trivial it can't be made ten times, no scene so long it can't be stretched beyond the breaking point. And oh, the sap – love is described as a kind of quantum effect that transcends time and space (as long as it's between parent and child).

The supposed scientific accuracy was limited largely to the depiction of stellar lensing around the black hole and the silence of space. Howevvver…

• Why do pickup trucks look exactly the same in the future? Why is the dust all over the trucks and house but not the crops?

• That was the most ridiculous robot I've ever seen (I love the comment that it was made of "spinning HVAC ducts"). How does this lurching refrigerator even get itself through a hatch? Its interface is a crude text screen worthy of a PCjr, yet it has a complete human personality (so much so that I had a hard time distinguishing its voice from the crew).

• Do you always launch your rockets from the middle of your office buildings? Remarkable how those glass partitions in view stood up to the blast.

• Apparently having no idea of what a wormhole is BEFORE being sent through one, Matthew is shown the rudimentary folded paper analogy. Wouldn't that have come up on the first day of class?

• How does a mile-high wave form out of foot-deep water?

• The planet orbits a black hole? Where's your light and heat coming from? Any problem with the intense X-rays usually found around these things? Guess not.

• On Matt Damon's planet, exactly why aren't the "frozen clouds" falling? At least Avatar posited superconducting rocks and intense magnetic fields to explain their floating mountains.

• When Matt takes Matthew out to show him the "surface", just how far do they walk? The rescue pilot flies at hundreds of miles an hour for at least a few minutes.

• When Cooper returns to our solar system, at least 60 years has elapsed since he received his daughter's video messages (since she is now in her 90s or more), so has Anne Hathaway been alone all that time on her planet? I don't recall any mention that she was going to be in a slow time region. By the way, time only slows down significantly in a very high gravitational field, which they showed no signs of being in.

Besides all that and much more, the plot was disjointed, with inarticulate dialog and confusing placement of people. For example, during the entire scene of the boosted entry towards the black hole, I didn't know Cooper was in the shuttle, separated from Anne Hathaway in the station, until he looked across at her.

It's not a completely terrible movie, there are some great visuals that are impressive in IMAX. But they're dragged down with the padding and cheap sentiment.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

No doubt this film endorses torture

[5/10 · 13 September 2013]

I'm deeply emotionally invested in the torture argument, chiefly because I can't believe there even is an argument. I would have placed it on a plane with say, lynching or slavery, as one of those things that is just known to be wrong. Yet some of my own family followed my government down the rabbit hole where "enhanced interrogation" might be OK, as long as it's only against terrorists. So it was with interest I followed the controversy over where Zero Dark Thirty stood on the issue.

Having (finally) seen the film, there is no doubt in my mind the film endorses torture; in fact, the first third revels in interrogation scenes, going beyond even what the CIA actually did (like the dog collar). The chief interrogator is sympathetically presented and is a good friend of Maya's. Maya helps him waterboard a suspect by handing him a bucket and repeatedly questions detainees undergoing torment. Nobody in the film questions the techniques, only expressing concern about the political climate changing and "you don't want to be the last one holding the dog collar". Most importantly, the vital clue of Bin Laden's courier is given up by a victim just after he's explicitly threatened with being returned to interrogation. The courier's photo and name is then confirmed by a montage of detainees undergoing or just after torture. A few years later, an official states he can't confirm a piece of information because now the detainees will just get "lawyered up".

However, the CIA has stated that the film is inaccurate as the courier's name was not found out through torture. So why the obsessive focus on this during the first third of the film, plainly stating that the techniques worked? It's a shame, because the rest of the film, especially the raid, is riveting.

Elysium (I) (2013)

Don't get your expectations too high

[5/10 · 9 September 2013]

Coming off of the incomparable District 9, this is a simplistic good vs evil story that doesn't make a lot of sense on many levels. I won't rehash too many of the points others have made, but here's some jarring questions that stood out:

• Elysium's defense system consists of a guy on the ground with a 2-foot missile? Also, the roof of the torus is open to the vacuum of space. Guess how long those little walls are going to hold the atmosphere in.

• There is no attempt to explain why there aren't medpods on Earth, which would seem to be a growth industry. Do they use too many resources, create even more overpopulation, or what?

• I'm not clear whether Elysium actually runs Earth or just ignores what government there is. There doesn't seem to be any other source of authority they have to deal with.

• Enough said about Jodie Foster. If only she could have grown a Snidely Whiplash mustache.

• Alice Braga is again the platonic friend with cute child that saves our hero, who repays her and saves the world with a supreme sacrifice. We've seen her in I Am Legend, you know.

Cloud Atlas (2012)

Nice try, but too long and too disjointed

[6/10 · 12 October 2012]

Not going to recap the plot, everyone else has done that. The first 2/3 was pretty absorbing, but finally it became apparent that the threads really weren't going to come together. I still don't know what the movie was trying to say beyond greeting-card platitudes such as "I believe when one door closes, another opens" and a vague sense of continuity between the eras reinforced by common actors and objects lasting through time.

I'll say this is the Wachowski's best movie since the first Matrix (not saying much) but more concrete ties between the stories would have improved coherence. For example, perhaps a Fabricant-Union rebellion triggered the cataclysm implied by the far future storyline. Other elements near the end seemed to come out of nowhere (like the signed contract for something and the box of gold) but maybe I lost track of something mentioned 2 1/2 hours before. And is Hugo Weaving getting tired of being typecast as the bad guy?

So overall, interesting most of the time and ambitious, but at the end like trying to pick up jello.

The Red Baron (2008)

Flying scenes almost make up for a terrible script

[4/10 · 30 July 2010]

Clearly director/writers who worship their subjects unreservedly should not be trusted to make movies about them. Something of an improvement from another WW1 labor of love, the godawful "Flyboys", Red Baron has problems from the start, jumping pretty much right into the cockpit with no depiction of how he came to be a pilot or why we should care about him. The lead resembles a grown-up Macauley Culkin with little presence. Some of the dialog is hilariously awful - "What's with this crazy paint scheme?!"

For some reason, the director thought he should create out of thin air an ongoing relationship between Richthofen and the Canadian Roy Brown, the pilot long thought to have shot him down (although it was probably ground fire). Richthofen is shown to disable Brown's plane and capture him, only to have Brown somehow escape prison to again encounter the Baron, whereupon they both land in a pristine-appearing no-man's land to have a friendly chat. Yet all this fictionalization is wasted, as Brown's final fight with the Baron is never shown.

The flight scenes, however, are the best I've seen in a WW1 depiction - excellent CGI and battle choreography on the sky textures, planes and battlefields. Even here, though, random cuts in and out of the action just increase the confusion as to the plot in general. There are a number of bothersome inaccuracies, such as a modern concrete-floored hangar with 25-foot high doors (for what?) on a muddy WW1 field. Instead of isolated observation balloons, vast arrays of barrage balloons cover the battlefield, which were actually not used until WW2.

Looks like The Blue Max still hangs on as the best WW1 aviation movie.

The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)

Scrupulously accurate AND entertaining, who would've thought?

[9/10 · 15 April 2010]

Such a refreshing change to see a film about historical events where the producers worked overtime to get it as accurate as possible, even using many of the same locations (the prison and the courtroom) or exactly replicating others from photos (the cell block). That for me vastly increases my enjoyment of the film. So many historical events don't need embellishment, but the last American film done in this way was probably Tora Tora Tora. Even the well-done Nordwand changed a lot of events, some for dramatic purposes but at times stretching credulity. Terrific performances all round. The crowd scenes had enough people to feel realistic, although I think the Shah protest scene went on a bit too long. My only real quibble would be the lack of an epilogue summarizing what happened to the group and its members in the following decades. Be sure to watch the included German-language documentary on the making on the film.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

I don't know WHAT this film was supposed to be

[1/10 · 1 April 2010]

This was by far the worst and sickest Tarantino film I've seen, and I've seen all but one. It's an ungainly mix of cartoony revenge fantasy and sub-Eli Roth torture porn.

The Basterds roam around France without any apparent source of supplies, ammunition, or command of any language other than English. Their actions are hideous, scalping bodies (with vivid sound effects and exposed brains), carving swastikas in foreheads..slowly.., sticking fingers in bullet holes, yet these are the good guys and the torture is played for laughs. Tarantino doesn't know any difference between ordinary (e.g. drafted) German soldiers and Nazis, and thus any amount of carving up is OK as long as it's done by Jews or their redneck leader. I guess he thinks it'd be equally OK if the Germans scalped American bodies and carved stars in their foreheads?

Tarantino is good at dialog and set pieces, but fails to weave them together into a coherent narrative. There are basically two revenge fantasies coming together in the Paris movie premiere, but neither one affects the other. There is zero character establishment or development. We're not told how a penniless Jewish girl came to own a fabulous movie theater a few years later in occupied Paris, or even how she established a false identity. None of the Basterds have separable personalities or life histories (we don't even find out why Aldo has a rope burn on his neck). Compare and contrast with "The Dirty Dozen."

The climactic premiere sequence is so absurd it's not even laughable. Sometime after the Allied invasion (which is never referred to, although we've been told it's June 1944), the entire German high command takes off for a gala film event in Paris, about 300 miles from the front lines (it's not like they had any pressing business). At the theater, Hitler is protected by a grand total of TWO guards. When you can't even be as realistic as a Mel Brooks movie ("To Be or Not To Be"), you're just insulting the audience. I've seen better security at the library.

Hmm, what else?

• Why aren't the Basterds surprised when the theater catches on fire? That wasn't part of their plan.

• Why did Landa completely lose control and strangle the actress? It's wildly out of character from every other scene. If he's angry she's a traitor, he already has it in mind to become an even bigger traitor himself.

• Why does every German they meet speak English?

• What was the point of scalping the driver at the end? The war was about to be over, who were they trying to freak out?

• Does Tarantino even know what Goebbels looked like?

I could go on, but it's like picking apart the physics of Bugs Bunny. It's a spectacle of Tarantino acting out his man-child, which unfortunately gets taken as a daring alternate history.

Black Dynamite (2009)

Like a futon - tries to do two things and neither of them well

[2/10 · 1 March 2010]

It's not a decent enough plot to be interesting as a straight movie, and it's not skewed or funny enough to be a good spoof. If you want to see a blaxploitation takeoff, "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka" is vastly better. The jokes here were quite sparse. It was also too gruesome/explicit in parts (such as a zoom on a "shrunken" penis and pulling out some eyeballs). There was a serious jump in the middle (perhaps they were trying to simulate a missing reel) but also an action montage out of nowhere, suddenly dispensing of who we thought was the major villain (and who never find out who he was or what his relationship to the other villains were). It was constructed seemingly at random and not written well enough to make you care about anybody in it, which even a spoof should do.

The Hurt Locker (2008)

Too many inaccuracies and shakycam, too little character

[3/10 · 28 August 2009]

I really wanted to like this movie, but ended up bored and incredulous. The first shot is a camera feed from a robot traveling towards a bomb and is, naturally, shaky. But then the rest of the movie stays in shakycam mode, even during quiet conversational moments, to the point of ridiculousness. Have the rental houses run out of tripods and Steadicams? The fact that it was shot on 16mm doesn't help, as the entire movie is grainy as well as shaky.

For all the effort Bigelow put into accurate vehicles and equipment, there are enough glaring errors and inconsistencies that they undermine the movie's credibility.

• A car would not erupt in flames after a single shot, and once engulfed would not be extinguished by a small hand-held extinguisher.

• A single Humvee would not be driving around Baghdad in 2004, but would be backed up by other vehicles in case of breakdown or attack. - It would be exceptionally unlikely to be able to hit a running insurgent at long range, where the bullet is clearly taking over a second to reach the target.

• I believe bombs were brought to designated disposal areas on or near a base, not some random spot in the middle of the desert.

• The oil tanker attack is stated to have occurred in the Green Zone, a highly secure area that experienced very few attacks from within. The zone is mostly offices and palaces with few residences, yet it is portrayed as a dangerous warren of dark alleys and lurking insurgents. Oddly, James never gets in trouble for the ridiculous tactic of ordering his two companions to each take an alley by themselves, thus setting up the attempted kidnapping.

• Speaking of which, the 3-man team is always depicted clearing buildings, chasing insurgents etc. on their own, even when there are clearly dozens of soldiers right there.

• How many hours does the team have to stare at a dead insurgent hanging out a window to figure out he's not faking it?

There were no establishing shots to show the viewer what the size and layout of the base was or where Baghdad was in relation. I had no idea who the EOD team reported to, nor were any other characters fleshed out. These are things the characters would know, so we should too.

Many of the "surprises" and scenes are perfectly predictable. Yes, it's obvious that the psychiatrist colonel will get into trouble with the Iraqis he's trying to move along, that the choice of cereals back home will be overwhelming, and that a driver you kidnapped will not wait for you when you leave the vehicle.

Finally, there was an almost complete lack of character development. Renner's character from the beginning has a troubled relationship at home, is reckless and addicted to adrenalin. He's exactly the same at the end of the movie. What's the point?

If this is indeed the best so far of the Iraqi war movies, it's a sorry bunch. Just based on the half hour I saw of it, I'd recommend Generation Kill on HBO instead.

The Lost Skeleton Returns Again (2008)

A decent but underdeveloped sequel

[6/10 · 10 November 2008]

We saw this at the LA premiere last night, complete with cast and crew (and their families and friends, which made for an enthusiastic and fun audience).

Even with 10X the budget, it still had the no-expense look. All the old characters were back, including the bickering aliens Kro-bar and his wife, dead characters resurrected as their not-so-evil twins, and yes, Animala. Of course the Skeleton is back, although only as a skull (which gives him certain dependency issues). He gets the best lines (while waiting for his minions to carry out some task - "It's the waiting that's difficult").

All the performances were excellent, particularly Larry Blamire as the bitter scientist (another scientist took credit for his rock) and wife Fay Masterston.

The plot, such as it is, involves a race to South America to obtain the valuable Geranium-90, worshiped by the Cantalope people. It's basically 60 minutes of plot stuffed into a 90-minute movie. Although the individual jokes are often very funny, the framework is too bare-bones and linear. Even cheeseball 50s SF movies often had, you know, subplots. There's a lengthy middle section where everyone passes the same banana plant about 10 times (which was probably part of the joke). Failing a bit of a rewrite and reshoot, editing down to 70 or 75 minutes would help.

To his credit, Larry Blamire said he would not do another sequel, as he fears the jokes would start repeating themselves. True enough.

Sunshine (2007)

Not very well thought out

[4/10 · 20 July 2007]

I had high expectations for this film, as the scenario is an interesting one. Unfortunately, the film is clumsily structured and incoherent in parts, and many elements are contrived to keep the crew in danger. Here's a not quite comprehensive list:

• The movie opens with a voice-over explaining the situation and you jump right into the ship. Since there's no shots showing what is actually happening on Earth until the very end, I didn't feel invested in the mission.

• Any science that was once in the script has been gutted here - there's no mention of WHY the sun is dying or exactly how the bomb will restart it, although an interesting theory about a "Q-particle" infesting the sun is on the production blog.

• You'll be confused by some of the most incoherent fight scenes ever filmed. With his extreme closeups and quick cuts, Boyle can't even pull off a 20 second fight in a corridor without losing the audience. It gets worse with the Pinbacker character, who's filmed so blurry and artsy that my wife seriously thought he was some kind of trans-dimensional alien.

• For such a critical mission, the Icarus ships are not very robust. They contain only one airlock (even the shuttle has two ways to get out!), one mainframe that depends on a constant supply of coolant with no backup computer, and no emergency lighting. Instead of the habitat spinning to provide gravity (which would make more sense than the never-mentioned but apparent artificial gravity), the only part of the ship that spins are the communication antennas - the one part you want stationary and pointing to Earth. The heat shield is composed of thousands of mechanical louvers with no imaginable function, instead of a simple solid piece. I rarely had a clear idea as to where anything was in this ship; for example, the viewing room was cut into the bomb's heat shield, but there was no impression that anyone had to walk through the bomb area to get there.

• Oxygen levels play a big part in the suspense, with Michelle Yeoh calculating that there's only enough air for four crew. Yet this was a vast ship with literally cubic acres of air in the bomb area alone (which begs the question, why have air around the bomb at all?). And all this oxygen was generated by the small plant area? I don't think so.

• Why exactly did the first probe fail? Did everyone just decide to burn themselves up? Didn't quite catch that explanation.

• If the mainframe fails, there's only one person who can operate the bomb. Why weren't the rest of the crew trained to operate it? What else did they have to practice on for 16 months?

• The bomb will be traveling so fast space & time will break down? Please. This thing is the mass of Manhattan, you're not going to accelerate it very fast.

• Why was communication lost as they neared Mercury? We've had probes go to Mercury and even closer to the sun, and we've talked to them just fine.

• All remaining plausibility flees at the end, when Capa detonates the bomb and has a leisurely gaze at..what? The wall of nuclear flame? The fires of creation? You tell me. The famously cryptic 2001 made a lot more sense than this.

In general, much of the film impressed me as contrived situations to keep the crew in danger. This movie had a lot of potential, but Danny Boyle chose to get lost in his own head.

Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

Much less than meets the eye

[5/10 · 2 January 2007]

Although this film has been represented as an amazing view at the battle from the Japanese point of view, it had very little new to say and was clumsily plotted and directed.

For example, the island comes under aerial bombardment. The next shot shows the troops huddling in the caves under what has obviously been continuous shelling, which must come from offshore ships. We never hear of the arrival of these ships, and soon afterwards the message comes that the American fleet is on its way from Saipan. So who's offshore firing at the island? There's little connection between the scenes in the caves, which seem too much like sets, and the larger tactical situation outside. If you don't already know much about the battle, you'll be a little confused at the end of this movie. No mention of made of how long the Japanese held out (30 days), how many troops died on either side, or as to why the island was a desirable target. Not much mention was made of the lessons the commander must have taken from previous island invasions and how he used them to his advantage. More wide view shots of the approaching Americans or the Japanese positions would have helped. Even if the point of view of the common soldier was limited, he would have been aware of his location on the island and where the enemy was.

As for Mount Suribachi, I had heard that napalm was dropped from aircraft, covering the mountain and asphyxiating most of the Japanese in the caves. As a result, there was very little fighting on the mountain itself. This seems at great odds with the film's depiction.

Other oddities - what happened to the blood on Saigo's face from his exploding comrades? It disappears very quickly. And where was the massive effort digging the miles of tunnels must have taken? We get 10 seconds of someone picking at the face of a cliff, and in the next shot the tunnels are all done. Swell, that was easy! However, we do learn that that both Americans and Japanese have loving families and caring mothers. Huh.

Poseidon (2006)

It was the errors that really bothered me

[3/10 · 15 May 2006]

The worst error concerned the bow thruster at the end.

• Why was it still running? Almost all other electrical power was out, and a bow thruster would not be on an emergency circuit.

• When Richard Dreyfuss opens the hatch into the bow thruster shaft, a hurricane force of wind blows into the room. Ship propellers are slow-turning compared to aircraft propellers (so as to avoid cavitation) and are not going to move large quantities of air - hardly any, in fact, as they're not shaped to move low density air.

• There seemed to be a propeller on either side of the shaft. For air to blow inward, both props would have to be pulling air towards each other. The idea in a bow thruster is to pull water in one end and out the other.

• Nobody would build an inward-opening hatch below the waterline.

Also, it seemed that from the ballast tank (by definition and appearance at the bottom of the ship) they seemed to travel UP a few levels, thus in reality placing them above the bottom of the ship.

I found it a bit hard to believe the Captain could have convinced anyone to stay in an underwater room with giant windows showing the ocean behind the glass.

Red Riding Hood (2006)

Suitable only for 4 year olds and other feeble-minded people

[2/10 · 21 March 2006]

Relying on the positive reviews above, we saw a free screening of this last night. Now I KNOW that filmmakers plant positive reviews, because there is no way an objective individual could have written these. "Destined to become a 'cult classic'"?? The theater was packed, apparently with friends and families of the production crew, because only a few of us walked out by the first hour.

The songs were the most literal I've ever heard in a musical – "don't take the short cut, honey, there's a wolf in the woods..". Debi Mazar's eyes blinked furiously as she struggled to sing. Fortunately, most of the tunes lasted for only a few lines.

Now, whoever plays the wolf in this tale should be charming and seductive. Instead, we get Joey Fatone, ex N'Syncer, living up to his last name as he's not aged well. He's not exactly lithe with his extra 50 pounds and junior high school-quality makeup and out-of-tune singing. Seriously, this guy was in vocal group? The rest of the actors are semi-adequate, but can't do much about the unimaginative script. You know, it is possible to write for adults and children at the same time – see under "Pixar".

On the positive side, the virtual sets looked nice and were well-integrated with the actors. And it wasn't as offensive as "Crash".

The Village (2004)

Half-hour plot crammed into two hours

[4/10 · 26 April 2005]

This was well-filmed and decently acted, but there's not enough there there. M Night is a good cinematographer and knows how to set up suspense, but he should have put more complexity into the story. The plot twist is not terribly surprising and less clever than his previous films, even "Unwatchable" (sorry, "Unbreakable"). It's really only enough for a Twilight Zone plot, probably because it pretty much WAS one - the episode with Cliff Robertson in a wagon train where he sets off to get medicine for his sick boy. He inadvertently crosses into the modern world and returns to his time with the magic medicine (penicillin). Except for the time travel aspect, that's pretty much what happens in the Village.

A few other problems - a settlement completely isolated from the outside, yet with absolutely immaculate, finely finished clothing, housing and furniture (they've been there at least 18 years, remember); almost no sign of crops; a seeming abundance of leisure time and no shots of anyone working in the fields or at looms, even though constant, grinding labor would be needed to support that many people. I fail to see why the Federal government would accept a bribe to keep flight paths away from the area (no one's ever strayed over it?). None of the young men in town have ever tried to fight one of the creatures, and no one's ever seen the elders heading into the woods with an outfit tucked into their arms? No one's ever stumbled across one of the outfits? William Hurt mentions the elders made the creepy sounds from the woods, but never says how - a solar-powered recording?

Not to mention the morality of forcibly holding your children ignorant and superstitious. There are far easier ways of maintaining a sanctuary while still being aware of the outside world. And obviously the experiment failed, as they were not able to shut out passions and crime.

Pearl Harbor (2001)

The death of storytelling

[19 June 2001]

What bothers me even more than the historical inaccuracies is the inability to tell a coherent story. The abundance of quick cuts, constant overwhelming music, overemoting actors, and blatant symbolism is becoming fairly common these days. Unfortunately, all this gets in the way of following what's going on. There's a lot of money on effects (such as the Arizona blowing up), but no time given to appreciate them.

All this layering on seems to be an attempt to inject "excitement" as an alternative to the more difficult but more effective method of a coherent, suspenseful plot. You might contrast the Pearl Harbor attack with the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg effectively recreates the chaos of battle, yet you're able to understand the movement of the characters and the obstacles they must face. By NOT USING MUSIC to artificially heighten emotions, he created a much more powerful experience.

I don't consider this movie to be about Pearl Harbor in any historical sense; it's a video game with P40s as X-wings, jammed in with force-fed emotionalism.