Protecting The Private Life

Exodus is the perfect example of a 5/10 movie. Nothing was particularly wrong with it, and nothing was particularly amazing about it. The main roadblock Ridley Scott and his writers had to overcome was the basic narrative – it’s literally a movie about a tonne of “God cards” being played. Similar to the plot device of deus ex machina (where a situation is magically saved by an unexpected/unlikely intervention of some kind), Exodus suffers from the main characters being powerless to affect almost anything at all throughout the movie. All the audience and the characters can do is watch as God brings down horrific events onto innocent people, one after the other. There’s no real struggle for the characters to undergo, or for the audience to invest in. This isn’t an unsolvable roadblock though, as Darren Aronofsky showed us with Noah * . The story of Noah is very similar in that it’s mostly about an unstoppable, horrific act of God (though admittedly not as bad as the story of Exod

Interstellar is an interesting beast. It’s a movie of grand ideas squeezed as efficiently as possible into 3 hours. It’s a movie about space travel, but it’s also a movie about the human condition. Too big for its shoes? While watching the movie, I kept getting the niggling feeling that every scene had the edges shaved off, and was just slightly shorter than it really needed to be. Ideas were ever so slightly cut away from before finishing, perhaps missing a little bit of extra dialogue, or just some breathing room for the audience. It was never enough to cause problems, but the feeling never really went away that Nolan’s vision was slightly too big to fit into 3 hours. One specific situation that kept arising was the lack of establishing shots - it always seemed like we simply cut to the spaceship arriving at the next destination, without giving us a chance to see what the destination looked like from afar. When the destination is a black hole, that’s kind of a bummer. But again,

Source: Google As my plane descended into Swedish territory, I couldn't have asked for better timing. Dawn had barely arrived, fog surrounding the thousands of islands littering the "coastline". It was difficult to tell where the sea stopped and rivers began, but one thing was for certain – the Swedes don’t lack trees. Dense forest stretched as far as I could see – which is quite a substantial distance when you're several kilometers off the ground. As the plane headed inland, quaint green fields started to break up the mass of trees. Classic bright red barns with pointed roofs suddenly called into question my assumption that they only existed in fairy tales. Clearly, my plane had been diverted to Narnia sometime in the night. Source: Google Source: Google As a bullet train (boasting 100% renewable energy, like there was any doubt) shot me from the airport towards Stockholm, Narnia slowly gave way to a modern cityscape. But not entirely modern – my p

Rush is the most beautiful and terrifying display of raw power I have witnessed in recent memory. It simply wasn't possible to see and hear such speed and not be overwhelmed. There's really not much I can say about it – I can't think of a single fault. The cinematography was breath-taking; the acting was excellent; the soundtrack was classic Hans Zimmer; the pacing was perfect. This isn't a movie about cars or racing – it's a movie about a rivalry more powerful than even the constant risk of death. It is a movie of such pure intensity and everyone should try and see it. 10/10 I feel like I should make it clear that this is not blind praise – it's objective praise. Criticism is all well and good, but unfounded cynicism is merely tiresome. I genuinely cannot find fault in this movie.

Definitely a mixed bag. So mixed, in fact, that it didn't really feel cohesive, and the high highs and low lows are easily examined separately. I'll start with the lows: From start to finish, there was a vibe of an amateur editing job. The first 20 minutes were muddled, boring, and frustratingly lacking in anything for the audience to invest in. The plot soon recovered, but putting me in a bad mood straight out of the gate isn't what I was hoping for. And as painfully long as the beginning was, the end was shockingly abrupt. Even on a shot-by-shot level some of the editing choices seemed odd, and the whole affair left me disappointed far too often. As if to hammer the point home, somehow someone thought it was a good idea to assault the audience with fucking GoPro footage. It was hideous. It was jarring. It was just plain embarrassing. How such grainy and unnecessary footage made it into the final cut is beyond me. Not only was it far, far below the quality of the