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Danny Boyle, Sunshine (2007)
Danny Boyle does science fiction that begins in the realm of 2001, Silent Running and Dark Star but ends up in Alien rip-off territory. The Sun has gone out, or is going out, and needs to be restarted with a bomb the size of Manhatten. The first mission has failed, and so a second one is sent. Somewhere in the vicinity of Mercury the first mission is located, and the fateful decision is taken to divert. Shit happens.
At first it plays all very realistic - like Stephen Baxter's alt-sf novels - with the mission itself and the dynamics of their indistinguishable crew enough. Better be careful about your oxygen garden, I thought, as they rotate the ship but apparently not the shields. Doh. Let's forgive the oversight, we need drama, and the unravelling has to start somewhere. Was it cancer in Titan from lousy shielding? You'd think the universe is hostile enough, without having to personalise it into slasher movie territory. There are cold equations to resolve. No, hostility has to have a human face.
I did wonder how close such a bomb could get to the Sun before it melted. I did wonder how the character was going to get out of the coolant pool if the computer sank in on top of him. I did wonder if they would really only train one person to know how to drop the bomb. I did wonder if they'd have the balls to do the seventies ending. (After all, Baxter bottled the end of Titan.) Meanwhile, I couldn't see the point of the not quite subliminal flashframes and the climactic fight seemed to come from nowhere.
So: a hour of the best British sf movie in years - perhaps the best sf movie since GATTACA. And then, well, a shame.
Neil Burger, The Illusionist (2006)
In the supporting documentary, Edward Norton says that one of the reasons he wanted to do this movie was he couldn't remember the last magician movie - which presumably means he didn't know about The Prestige, a much better film, and is ignoring the Harry Potter stuff. Or are they wizards? Anyway, Norton is Eisenheim, a stage magician arrested in imperial Vienna for treason and generally annoying the Crown Prince (Rufus Sewell). When Eisenheim was a child he had a Forbidden Love for Sophie who grows up to be central to the CP's plans to become emperor, and so ran away to become a magician. The two are reunited when she (now Jennifer Biels) becomes the mark in a stage trick, and they start an illicit affair. This is hardly smart, and Sophie is killed, by the CP according to Eisenheim, by Eisenheim according to CP. It is up to the chief inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) to bring the culprit to justice.
Uhl is a nice foil for Eisenheim, being interested in magic, and a couple of tricks are performed with explanations, to reassure us that it's all possible and not supernatural. All it needs, really, is a whole set of mirrors, and possibly sound-synchronised technicolor thirty years or more before it was feasible. The CP, meanwhile, is all rationality and twirling moustache, and is set up in more ways than one. I'm not sure why what happens to him does, although it's only fair to cheer a little.
The trick of the movie - as it was with The Prestige to a lesser extent - is to see Eisenheim only from the outside, so we don't know what he's planning, we don't see the set up, how far the magician will go for his trick. Equally, we don't see Uhl's life outside the job, why he is interested in magic, what his personal life is. He makes a sudden mental leap at the climax - for an explanation: rationality is bad, certainty is bad too.
We don't want the trick explained, but we'd feel it's a cop out if there weren't just the appearance of an explanation.
The film's based on a novel - Steve Millhauser's Eisenheim the Illusionist, which I haven't read. Either I don't read nothing, or I don't see films of books I've read.
Totals: 16 [Cinema: 4; DVD: 11; TV: 1]
Danny Boyle does science fiction that begins in the realm of 2001, Silent Running and Dark Star but ends up in Alien rip-off territory. The Sun has gone out, or is going out, and needs to be restarted with a bomb the size of Manhatten. The first mission has failed, and so a second one is sent. Somewhere in the vicinity of Mercury the first mission is located, and the fateful decision is taken to divert. Shit happens.
At first it plays all very realistic - like Stephen Baxter's alt-sf novels - with the mission itself and the dynamics of their indistinguishable crew enough. Better be careful about your oxygen garden, I thought, as they rotate the ship but apparently not the shields. Doh. Let's forgive the oversight, we need drama, and the unravelling has to start somewhere. Was it cancer in Titan from lousy shielding? You'd think the universe is hostile enough, without having to personalise it into slasher movie territory. There are cold equations to resolve. No, hostility has to have a human face.
I did wonder how close such a bomb could get to the Sun before it melted. I did wonder how the character was going to get out of the coolant pool if the computer sank in on top of him. I did wonder if they would really only train one person to know how to drop the bomb. I did wonder if they'd have the balls to do the seventies ending. (After all, Baxter bottled the end of Titan.) Meanwhile, I couldn't see the point of the not quite subliminal flashframes and the climactic fight seemed to come from nowhere.
So: a hour of the best British sf movie in years - perhaps the best sf movie since GATTACA. And then, well, a shame.
Neil Burger, The Illusionist (2006)
In the supporting documentary, Edward Norton says that one of the reasons he wanted to do this movie was he couldn't remember the last magician movie - which presumably means he didn't know about The Prestige, a much better film, and is ignoring the Harry Potter stuff. Or are they wizards? Anyway, Norton is Eisenheim, a stage magician arrested in imperial Vienna for treason and generally annoying the Crown Prince (Rufus Sewell). When Eisenheim was a child he had a Forbidden Love for Sophie who grows up to be central to the CP's plans to become emperor, and so ran away to become a magician. The two are reunited when she (now Jennifer Biels) becomes the mark in a stage trick, and they start an illicit affair. This is hardly smart, and Sophie is killed, by the CP according to Eisenheim, by Eisenheim according to CP. It is up to the chief inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) to bring the culprit to justice.
Uhl is a nice foil for Eisenheim, being interested in magic, and a couple of tricks are performed with explanations, to reassure us that it's all possible and not supernatural. All it needs, really, is a whole set of mirrors, and possibly sound-synchronised technicolor thirty years or more before it was feasible. The CP, meanwhile, is all rationality and twirling moustache, and is set up in more ways than one. I'm not sure why what happens to him does, although it's only fair to cheer a little.
The trick of the movie - as it was with The Prestige to a lesser extent - is to see Eisenheim only from the outside, so we don't know what he's planning, we don't see the set up, how far the magician will go for his trick. Equally, we don't see Uhl's life outside the job, why he is interested in magic, what his personal life is. He makes a sudden mental leap at the climax - for an explanation: rationality is bad, certainty is bad too.
We don't want the trick explained, but we'd feel it's a cop out if there weren't just the appearance of an explanation.
The film's based on a novel - Steve Millhauser's Eisenheim the Illusionist, which I haven't read. Either I don't read nothing, or I don't see films of books I've read.
Totals: 16 [Cinema: 4; DVD: 11; TV: 1]
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From:
no subject
I would love to see a good film of a Millhauser story. This wasn't it.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
The Illusionist was enjoyable enough and very nice to look at (especially the bits with Jessica Biel in... sorry, where were we?) but my disbelief was stretched by having Eisenheim being shown as apparently capable of real magic which is then revealed as a mechanical illusion that, as you note, couldn't possibly have been that good. To be charitable, it might be that we're being shown the more credulous audience's perception of the tricks, but it leave the film with a tiny whiff of the Scooby-Do ending for me.
From:
no subject
The Scooby Doo-ness is avoiding by the director insisting that the flashback (I'm being coy to avoid spoilers) is very much what Uhls thinks he has worked out (presumably including the shot that looks like it fell out of The Sound of Music) rather than any kind of Capital T Truth. Or cop out.
I shall reach for my Todorov. Or not.
From:
no subject
I found it slightly dull; and think it would have worked better if there hadn't been the flashbacks towards the end to explain what had happened to those hard of understanding.
I also found it visually bland - old Europe was very brown and clean.
From:
no subject
Presumably Norton didn't know about The Prestige (or Woody Allen's Scoop) but I don't think I would have left the line in a documentary.
It's like buses.
(There was also Magicians (2000), but who knew? - which is not to be confused with Magicians (2007))
I quite liked the sepia look at first - but it then made flashbacks very mirky (if clean - so many horses, so little...)