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LUCY IN THE SKY WITH SMARTPHONES
Nov. 21st, 2014 02:23 pmCatching up on the cinemas, because let’s all admit, yr here for the amateur reviews, aren’t you?
Interstellar
The Nolan brothers’ sci-fi epic in which the Earth is dying, and former NASA pilot turned farmer Cooper is recruited into a secret mission to find a new world for humans to inhabit. As you might expect, the visuals are great and the Nolans spared no expense in terms of scientific accuracy, although of course not to the point of getting everything 100% right, which will ruin it for hard SF fans who get really, really annoyed by such things.
Which is a shame, because the objective of Interstellar isn’t to give a science class, but to examine the human element of interstellar exploration – it really brings home the sacrifices involved and how even the most careful planning can be upended by human weakness.
Interstellar does have some flaws, and I don’t mean the occasional science lapse – the dialogue is occasionally flat, and there are several puzzling leaps in logic to drive the story along (though the Nolans are one of those filmmaker teams that tend to leave things intentionally unexplained, so that could be it). Also, it does suffer a little in comparison to the Nolans’ previous films in terms of narrative cleverness.
But for all that, it’s still a trademark Nolan film that doesn’t go for the obvious storyline, and gives the audience something meatier to chew on. Everyone will probably find something to complain about, but I give high marks just for attempting something different, especially in the SF genre. Too few people even try to make films like this, and fewer still can pull it off.
Lucy
The new Luc Besson film, which stars Scarlet Johansson as a woman who unwillingly ingests an experimental drug that enables her to use 100% of her brain, giving her increasingly god-like powers. This being a Besson film, there are also Korean gangsters, led by Choi Min-sik (from Oldboy), who own the drug and want it back.
Lots of people have complained that the film’s central idea – that humans only use about 10-15% of our cranial capacity – is an urban myth and pseudoscientific nonsense. I don’t really have a problem with that because, c’mon, it’s a Luc Besson film. He’s built a career out of making B-movies with A-level budgets. I didn’t go into the theatre expecting hard science. And bullshit or not, Besson takes the idea and runs with it fairly well, even if he does borrow from other films to do it (Akira, 2001 and The Matrix are visual reference points).
Lucy has its share of flaws – most of them in the form of action-film tropes, especially the CG-assisted car chase scene. And at a taut 90 minutes, maybe Besson could have spared an extra ten minutes to flesh out some underdeveloped ideas. But like a lot of his better films, it’s fun to watch, bad science and all. And Johansson really carries the film as the title character.
App
Techo-thriller from the Netherlands in which college student Anna wakes up after a drinking binge and finds a mysterious personal assistant app called Iris on her phone. Iris seems useful at first, but soon it is terrorizing Anna and killing people.
It’s a nice hook, and director Bobby Boermans does a good job of building up the tension and keeping you watching – which is remarkable considering the story makes less sense as it goes along. I can forgive a story that makes any given technology do things it can’t possibly do in real life (see above), but writer Robert Arthur Jansen seems to have thrown on a bunch of thriller elements with no idea of how to tie them all together in a way that makes sense.
On a side note, the original film was conceived as a “second screen” film, which means audience members could download a sound-activated app that delivers parallel story info on their smartphones during the film. So it’s possible the story makes more sense if you use the app. But from what I’ve read, it doesn’t. All up, it’s an otherwise decent film with a likable heroine but a lousy payoff.
Uninstalled,
This is dF
Interstellar
The Nolan brothers’ sci-fi epic in which the Earth is dying, and former NASA pilot turned farmer Cooper is recruited into a secret mission to find a new world for humans to inhabit. As you might expect, the visuals are great and the Nolans spared no expense in terms of scientific accuracy, although of course not to the point of getting everything 100% right, which will ruin it for hard SF fans who get really, really annoyed by such things.
Which is a shame, because the objective of Interstellar isn’t to give a science class, but to examine the human element of interstellar exploration – it really brings home the sacrifices involved and how even the most careful planning can be upended by human weakness.
Interstellar does have some flaws, and I don’t mean the occasional science lapse – the dialogue is occasionally flat, and there are several puzzling leaps in logic to drive the story along (though the Nolans are one of those filmmaker teams that tend to leave things intentionally unexplained, so that could be it). Also, it does suffer a little in comparison to the Nolans’ previous films in terms of narrative cleverness.
But for all that, it’s still a trademark Nolan film that doesn’t go for the obvious storyline, and gives the audience something meatier to chew on. Everyone will probably find something to complain about, but I give high marks just for attempting something different, especially in the SF genre. Too few people even try to make films like this, and fewer still can pull it off.
Lucy
The new Luc Besson film, which stars Scarlet Johansson as a woman who unwillingly ingests an experimental drug that enables her to use 100% of her brain, giving her increasingly god-like powers. This being a Besson film, there are also Korean gangsters, led by Choi Min-sik (from Oldboy), who own the drug and want it back.
Lots of people have complained that the film’s central idea – that humans only use about 10-15% of our cranial capacity – is an urban myth and pseudoscientific nonsense. I don’t really have a problem with that because, c’mon, it’s a Luc Besson film. He’s built a career out of making B-movies with A-level budgets. I didn’t go into the theatre expecting hard science. And bullshit or not, Besson takes the idea and runs with it fairly well, even if he does borrow from other films to do it (Akira, 2001 and The Matrix are visual reference points).
Lucy has its share of flaws – most of them in the form of action-film tropes, especially the CG-assisted car chase scene. And at a taut 90 minutes, maybe Besson could have spared an extra ten minutes to flesh out some underdeveloped ideas. But like a lot of his better films, it’s fun to watch, bad science and all. And Johansson really carries the film as the title character.
App
Techo-thriller from the Netherlands in which college student Anna wakes up after a drinking binge and finds a mysterious personal assistant app called Iris on her phone. Iris seems useful at first, but soon it is terrorizing Anna and killing people.
It’s a nice hook, and director Bobby Boermans does a good job of building up the tension and keeping you watching – which is remarkable considering the story makes less sense as it goes along. I can forgive a story that makes any given technology do things it can’t possibly do in real life (see above), but writer Robert Arthur Jansen seems to have thrown on a bunch of thriller elements with no idea of how to tie them all together in a way that makes sense.
On a side note, the original film was conceived as a “second screen” film, which means audience members could download a sound-activated app that delivers parallel story info on their smartphones during the film. So it’s possible the story makes more sense if you use the app. But from what I’ve read, it doesn’t. All up, it’s an otherwise decent film with a likable heroine but a lousy payoff.
Uninstalled,
This is dF
