Cinematic Concerns

Or, two science fiction thrillers that play with experiential perception (putting the audience in the shoes, nay, minds of the protagonists and making them feel what they feel) and starring two of the hottest young male stars in Hollywood today. They're also both really awesome sci-fi thrillers, which is rare these days. Let's start.



Readers who've encountered previous posts on this blog would know it, but for the record I'm coming into this film having read the screenplay. Which means I know how the story goes and how it ends (well, it was a few years ago so thankfully I don't remember everything), so my input is more in terms of how every cast and crew member after the writer interpreted the film onto the screen.

The short of it was that director Duncan Jones kept most of the script intact, and did the story justice. There were certain things that clearly came from him rather than from the script, certain scenes that enhanced that moment of the story.

Upon hearing the premise, some people I know instinctively referred to Vantage Point as a comparison. Which immediately sounded false to me. I felt Vantage Point was a good idea but it was also severely repetitive, despite the fact that we learn new information at every new chapter that shows the events from a different character's POV. Source Code, however, marries that replaying with the central character's dilemma and frustrations. Capt. Colter Stevens has to solve a massacre mystery by being inserted into the source code multiple times, and each time he has a limited 8 minutes to discover new information, but unlike Groundhog Day (which probably a lot of Malaysians didn't see so that reference didn't pop up so much around me here) he doesn't have a thousand years to find the answer. He has just hours, if that.

Also, Vantage Point didn't give us anyone to focus our attention or goodwill, which is an unfortunate but inevitable nature of that story, whereas Source Code offers us such classy actors as Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan (as soon as I heard those casting choices and that the director of Moon is on it, I knew that Ben Ripley's script was in good hands) and Jeffrey Wright and Vera Farmiga (who's been getting the bulk of the praise for this film from film critics). Does Gyllenhaal and Monaghan have chemistry? Yes they do, and it's important for this story that they do. Equally important is the emotional connection between Gyllenhaal and Farmiga.

This is the kind of story I myself love to write, not just the almost-realistic sci-fi stuff and placing characters in such situations and seeing how that plays out, but also the way in which the story delivers information to the audience: slowly, bit by bit, not all at once. Throw the audience headlong into an unfamiliar situation without any explanation, thus confusing them, but slowly let them catch on to facts and info, and they learn as the protagonist(s) learn.

You may wonder about the science behind it, whether it's plausible. After all, it was pretty flippant about explaining the workings of the source code, with just a couple of throwaway sciencey sounding terms like 'parabolic calculus' and quantum mechanics. Well, probably not, but compared to most such movies it's rather more sophisticated with its scientific base: it makes use of the idea of multiverses (so that an audience thinking in terms of time travel is as outdated as a student espousing creationism in a class about the theory of evolution).

At 93 minutes, Source Code's pacing is just nice: tautly edited but with breathing space in between, and not annoying when it cuts back to the beginning of Colter's entry into the source code which necessarily begins in the same place every time (because it knows when to dispense with showing the whole thing again and just cuts to quick montages).

The denouement is a nice touch and, if I remember correctly, wasn't in the draft of the screenplay I read. It is also, again, a gentle reminder of the effectiveness of setups and payoffs.




The movie begins with a newly-designed film technique that we'll call infinite zoom. Okay, the camera can do one of two things: it can zoom, or it can dolly in ... or it can do both at the same time, but each of those camera movements have different effects. Now, you can have your camera on a track and keep pushing in, and that'll be a kind of long-tracking shot ... possibly a boring one. What they did here is to have the camera zoom in, and keep zooming, and keep zooming, for hundreds of yards ...

Which is impossible. Read here on how they use visual effects to make this technique work. It's a pretty nifty trick, and it's an effect that does something to your visual perception, feeling like it's too much to take in, which ties in to the title. (It'd be nicer if the opening credits weren't so huge ... in fact, it'd be nicer if they weren't there at all.)

The movie posits a drug that can increase human brain power orders of magnitude higher than most people. Such a premise is what we would call a high concept, and it's one that can very easily be wasted if it lands on the hands of an apathetic Hollywood screenwriter. I mean, you write in a smart character, and that character must do or say things that are mindblowing, right? Well, yes and no. A smart person isn't all wise, and sometimes misses things; but quite often what Hollywood offers is a so-called smart protagonist who is suddenly all stupid and making bad choices during most of Act II that his smart brain would have sounded warning bells to if he really is that smart (just so that he can learn a lesson about humility, or how he needs to pay more attention to loved ones, etc).

Not so here. I'm genuinely impressed with the writing, with what the plot puts the characters through, and how the plot plays out, and the fact that the central character, Eddie, is consistently believable when he is in the zone as a guy whose brain is firing on all cylinders. Nothing here seems implausible, and the most farfetched idea you have to accept is that a pill can do that to a person – not much of a suspension of disbelief.

But of course, the major theme in this movie is the side effects brought about by the drug – and not just physiological effects. As with most drugs, at first the side effects are not apparent. And then they hit, and then you see what that does to the character. And that is simply an illustration of the equilibrium-tending nature of reality. (On the other hand, there's entropy ...) As King Philip says in the movie Alexander, "No man or woman can be too powerful or too beautiful without disaster befalling." And the consequences on Eddie's life and the lives of those around him are so well-written that in some cases they're essentially plot twists; in other words, the film wasn't predictable and kept my attention throughout the film.

I'll say it: the Academy continues to stubbornly neglect science fiction films, but if it didn't, this one deserves a spot among the Oscar nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay.

I would also praise the performances. Bradley Cooper has come a long way since he played the scumbag in Wedding Crashers (arguably, his star status is currently shining brighter than Vaughn or Wilson at this moment), and puts in a spot-on performance of a down on his luck writer given a new lease of life that takes him into the fast lane, and zooming through it. The support players Abbie Cornish, Robert De Niro, and Anna Friel (lovely Anna Friel) sunk into their roles so well that I didn't notice them. A couple of times some of these characters face a life and death situation, which in most movies would be par-for-the-course since we're so used to them in the world of movies now, but thanks to the actors' performances in particular it felt pretty suspenseful to a moviegoer who rarely experiences suspense in the theatres. In particular, Friel's role, though small, left an impression on me.

There are lots of stylish camera and editing techniques lavished on the film, which seems to be trying very hard to get the audience to experience what Eddie is experiencing, but without being too gimmicky to the point of jolting them off the trajectory of the story. (Applied to another film they probably are gimmicky.) Come to think of it, the film deserves an Oscar nomination for Editing as well.

A well-paced, well-made film. It'll be interesting to see whether I like it as much at the end of the year.

The last time I drove to e@Curve to watch a movie at Cineleisure, it was for an utterly forgettable Channing Tatum movie titled Fighting that I only went because I was tasked to review it, and I badly dented the car I was driving.

I'm happy to report that this time, first time driving there since then, the car was fine, the movie was fine. And would you believe it, Channing Tatum is one fine actor in this one. I even liked Jamie Bell in this one.

In both cases, I consider it their best acting performances in their young careers so far; well, for Mr Bell, since his debut.

Credit should of course go to director Kevin Macdonald as well, who was already a director within my radar sights since I saw Touching The Void, my favourite documentary feature film to date. (I had the great fortune of meeting Mr Macdonald very briefly once at the 2007 Telluride Film Festival; if he's reading this – as if – he might remember me as the Chinese fellow who unhelpfully detained him with questions about his movies while his kids were demanding to go off somewhere.)

Delving into the movie itself: prior to watching it I did fear that it would be another pedestrian entry to the swords and sandals genre (and I use that term with a grimace). Though earlier I was excited that Macdonald was to do this Roman Britain story, and that it was to star Tatum (surprising choice) and Bell (who in past roles irritated me more than anything), nothing in the trailer seemed to indicate that the movie would be anything groundbreaking.

It would be a disappointment if that turned out to be the case; there's scarcely any movie made about Roman Britain (though Centurion was released not too long ago and covers similar ground with a cast that includes Michael Fassbender and Olga Kurylenko), and how many of them are good? Other than King Arthur stories, it's not easy to entertain a mass audience with this niche genre.

You might question why I'm interested in this era, in this location. Simple, it's different from what you might normally associate with the Roman Empire. The outposts of empires, places at or beyond the borders, those kinds of places interest me; it speaks of isolation, of loneliness, of the strange and unknown, of survival and relying on oneself, away from help, of the solitude, the dark nights, the vast landscape with nary a soul in it. (Correct me if I'm wrong but some or all of these are themes of Romanticism.) This is the Roman Empire with living populations measured in dozens and hundreds, and the same with its scale of battles. Here, the glory of Rome as you saw it in movies like Gladiator are only heard, through the recollections of other people, never seen – the Celtic tribes might have thought the Romans to be boasting hyperbolae when the Romans describe the grandeur of their homeland. Yet, there is a surprising parity between the invading Romans and the indigenous tribes; despite the assumed technological and cultural superiority of the Romans, the incident alluded to in the backstory of this film (5,000 Roman soldiers disappeared without a trace in the lands of Alba) so frightened the Romans that they built what would later be called Hadrian's Wall as a way of keeping the tribes out. (It's not as imposing as the Great Wall of China, but that's not the point.)

The movie itself focuses on Marcus Flavius Aquila, a Roman centurion leading a legion in Britannia whose actions are constantly driven by his father's uncertain involvement in the disappearance of the Eagle of the Ninth, a symbol of Roman military might, and Esca, a Briton slave whose courage impresses Marcus. Between them they embody a very Roman flavour of the virtues Bravery and Loyalty, and this is depicted in a way that does not seem lame or inconsequential, perhaps largely because Tatum and Bell are actors with earnest-looking faces, playing earnest characters. Theirs is a master-slave relationship that became something more platonic, which I really felt and very much enjoyed. There's a scene when a surgery has to be performed on Marcus and Esca is to hold him down, which should invite more comment but which I won't get into. :p

The cinematography by the Academy Award-winning DP of Slumdog Millionaire alternates between shakycam and more classical shots (especially when depicting the expansive, desolate landscapes of the Scottish Highlands) and is expertly edited such that we don't notice them. The action scenes were a little blurry, hard-to-see, but I'm fine with it.

I've never taken much notice of Atli Örvarsson's music in previous films, but I was rather captivated by some of the motifs he used here; among them the exoticism in the Celtic bits and the quiet heroism in the Roman parts of it. By the way, this marks the first time Macdonald isn't working with his usual choice of composer, Alex Heffes.

Another thing worth commenting about: watch this film for a lesson in sound design. It is a very atmospheric film, which makes sense when you consider, for example, that there's fog in a lot of the scenes, and the ritualistic nature of the tribes, and the psychological terror that the tribes often successfully put the Roman soldiers through. The film should (though it won't) be considered for the Sound Mixing Oscar when that comes along. In particular I was impressed with the simple but highly effective choice during the climactic fight between Marcus and the Seal Warrior prince (played by Tahar Rahim of Un Prophète fame) to mute all sounds and leave only the harsh and intense clanging of the swords – one feels as if the stakes of each sword-strike and dodge are raised at that point.

I didn't mind the accents. What seemed to be the choice here is to have the Americans play the Romans and the British play the Britons, which is no better and no worse than the stereotypical choice of having British accents for the Romans. Film critics made too much out of this non-issue. Also, for those who are expecting Gladiator: again, population and army sizes in this part of the world of that time are too small for grand battles, and to expect that would be as realistic as to expect a child to score 120 in his exams when the maximum score is 100.

Some slow moments in the second half of the second act, but I shan't complain; after all, the movie depicts many aspects of Roman Britain society (and does so reasonably accurately for a film adaptation, though I don't know for sure), and how often does one get to see that?