The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

(May contain mild spoilers)

Finally it is there, the movie everyone has been looking forward to after The Dark Knight, considered by many as The Godfather of the superhero movies. And it deserves this status. It had great action, suspense and one of the best villains ever in the Joker. Quite a challenge for Christopher Nolan to live up to the standard he created. I was curious and full of expectations, especially since I could really appreciate his Inception, but this film fails to impress on many levels and I am afraid this is the first weak film of the British director. I’ll try to explain.

Of course Nolan is smart enough to know that he could never replace the Joker, and after the tragic death of Heath Ledger he had to create a different villain. He succeeded by creating Bane (Tom Hardy), a force of nature, pure muscle, evil and just like his predecessor not someone to bargain with. Unfortunately the director puts himself in trouble by creating someone who seems undefeatable. Halfway the film (in a great scene) we see how Bane kicks Batman’s ass and almost literally breaks him. Bruce Wayne goes to a prison-well from which only one person ever managed to escape and our hero has to overcome his own demons to deliver a happy end. With this knowledge I expected an intelligent non-physical solution to defeat the brute villain, who gave the ‘power to the people’ in Gotham city, but as it turns out a lame plot twist and ‘discovery’ about Bane give Nolan the easy way out. I expected much more from a filmmaker who usually comes up with inventive and intelligent scripts.

Hereby I haven’t mentioned the voice of Bane that made me laugh on a number of occasions and I am sure I was not supposed to laugh (his sound approaches the alien-villain from the first Men In Black picture, if you recall)

Apparently Nolan chose to find a role for most members of the Inception cast because there are a lot of new characters in The Dark Knight Rises. Some of them are completely redundant (think of the two businessmen trying to take over Wayne enterprises) and with characters like Catwoman (Anne Hathaway), Miranda Tate (the beautiful Marion Cotillard) and some new policemen (one of them the talented Joseph Gordon Levitt) the movie is full, too full. Its length (164 minutes) feels too short for good character building and emotional involvement and feels too long regarding some of the plot developments.

At first it feels like Nolan is trying to give us a message (like Bane is) with a revolution and an ‘approaching storm’ (financial crisis).Wayne enterprises invested in Green Energy, but soon the tool for nuclear fusion becomes a weapon and there are too many subplots and situations to give these themes the attention the director may have intended. The whole movie feels like Nolan had to cut a lot of material. This becomes clear in the last half hour, with some chaotically edited action and again some unoriginal and simple solutions, instead of balanced and clever developments as we are used from the director.

So am I just negative about this film? No. Most of the time The Dark Knight Rises was enjoyable but this is mainly because of the same reason the third Godfather film is for instance. As a viewer you are still on a high from the previous films. There are some memorable scenes between Batman and Alfred (the great Michael Caine), one almost perfect action sequence (I refer to the first appearance of Batman after the Wall Street heist, with the police force chasing him as they see him as the killer of Harvey Dent) and some powerful scenes where Batman/Bruce is struggling in prison.

But overall the movie is disappointing. It doesn’t have the unpredictability of the Joker, emotional involvement (like the death of Rachel in The Dark Knight or the ending with Jim Gordon and his son) and stunning action sequences. The ending of the saga contains cheaper action (not literally I am afraid), a weaker script with various plot holes and unoriginal solutions. Let’s hope this is an incidental ‘flaw’ from a director who usually delivers and deserves credit for both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

5.5/10

Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)

Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev made a big impression on the arthouse movie world (and myself) with his debutfilm The Return, a very intense family drama portraying the relationship between a father and his two sons. Elena is the directors third film (I still have to watch his The Banishment) and shares the family thematic with The Return. Just like many other arthouse films it became a slow and dense picture, which is good in most aspects but unfortunately cannot top the director’s debut.

The title character Elena is an older woman who has a relationship with the wealthy and somewhat distant Vladimir. They have met in a later stage of their life and have been married for two years. Elena has a grandson who has to go to the army since the family cannot afford to send him to university, which apparently is his only way out. His parents, Elena’s son Sergey and his wife, are unemployed and don’t really intend to do their best to find at least one job. To make matters worse they just had a baby. Not a very bright future prospect.

Elena asks her husband Vladimir for financial funds to support her lowlife son and grandchildren. Vladimir, who has a troubled relationship with his only spoiled daughter, refuses to pay for them, since he believes the family could try harder. Elena’s offspring is portrayed as the typical drinking and antisocial lowlife, positioning Vladimir in a righteous position from an audience point of view.

When Vladimir ends up in the hospital after a heart attack he gets reunited with his daughter Katya. This results in one of the best scenes of the film. It contains great dialogue, acting and some interesting insights. Katya has a very hedonistic lifestyle and doesn’t deserve a potential heritage according to Elena, who gets more and more desperate about her family situation since Vladimir keeps refusing to support the ‘lazy bums’.

Just like he did in The Return, Zvyagintsev uses some beautiful imagery and long takes to portray the different family situations. Vladimir (and Elena) lives in a very cold and well organized house. He has daily structures and routines and just like his apartment his life seems to be in perfect order. This can’t be said about the household of Elena’s son Sergey. His messy, small, disorganized house is both a metaphor for his life as it is a realistic setting. The social differences are very well displayed and may be recognizable.

I will not spoil anything, but as to be expected (for those familiar with the director’s work, and as an arthouse cliché almost) this movie has no Hollywood ending, to say the least. The ending gave me an uncomfortable feeling and I am afraid Zvyagintsev gives a realistic insight in the social differences and cause and effect for in this case the Russian society (but it seems pretty universal).

Despite some good scenes, beautiful shots and metaphors Elena is not perfect. It doesn’t always manages to keep your full attention due to certain story developments (you might call it partly predictable in a way). Somehow I expected more from especially the last half hour, but the director chooses to let us observe events that only give us an idea of social patterns and doesn’t deliver the expected climax. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t distinguish itself from a handful of other films within its genre (think of some English kitchen sink pictures). Nevertheless Zvyagintsev manages to make a very decent and compelling observation of the differences and choices the different social classes tend to make. He is definitively a talented and promising filmmaker. Elena will not be remembered as his best film I believe.

7.5/10

Mission: Impossible III (J.J. Abrams, 2006)

Oddly enough I never watched the full MI movie series before. The first Mission: Impossible from 1996 was the first ‘proper’ film I saw in the cinema. Therefore it carries a lot of sentimental value and I still believe it is actually a good movie. After I ‘incidentally’ saw the 4^th film last year I was pretty disappointed and decided it was about time to watch numbers 2 and 3. The 2^nd one was pretty bad as well but the 3^rd oddly enough was a very entertaining and intelligently constructed film. I will try to explain the difference.

Let’s start with the first one, why was it good? Of course the complexity of the plot (let’s say it is more complex than the other 3 or for instance Inception) made it challenging, but I think in this case the director (Brian de Palma) managed to create a lot of suspense mainly by introducing every mission properly and explain its urgency to the viewer. Of course the movie has its flaws, but I believe it did pretty well what it was supposed to do: create an entertaining suspenseful action film.

About the second one. I will not spend too many words since I will compare most elements in my review of the third movie but director John Woo for me failed in most elements where the movie should and could score points. The story is usually more or less the same for these films (or a James Bond film if you wish) so this is not where the film can distinguish itself. This can be done in chemistry between male and female leads, the villain, the choreography of the action scenes and the suspense created.

Most of the elements mentioned above are much better portrayed and executed in Mission: Impossible III. Let’s start with the male and female lead. In this film Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) got married and wants to settle down. Of course the mission calls when he has the rescue a girl he trained and sent out in the field. When he can’t manage to save her the situation becomes personal for him and he wants to go after the villain Owen Davians (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who after being held hostage and threatened by Hunt promises to go after Hunt’s wife. This creates a sense of urgency we as viewers can understand. Compare this to the 2^nd film, where the relationship between Hunt and the female lead was forced and therefore felt unnatural, the sense of urgency was missing for me there.

Then the earlier mentioned villain, with personal favourite Philip Seymour Hoffman the choice could not have been better for any film that needs an intelligent evil villain. Period.

Finally, the suspense. In every respect this film beats its predecessor. First of all, the choreography of the action sequences is much better. The style of John Woo couldn’t interest me much but the most important reason for this lies in the preparation. Let’s for instance take the masks Ethan Hunt and other characters tend to use in these films. Of course this is a gadget we take for granted, let’s not point out the differences in eye colour, length and manners of characters that could make this feature an unlikely one. The usage of this feature should somehow be introduced to us to make it credible I would say, this is exactly what Abrams does in the third film when Owen Davians is about to be kidnapped and Ethan will be impersonating him. We see how the mask is created and that it takes time to do this job well, this creates great suspense. In the second film the masks came out of nowhere, which annoyed me.

Last but not least: the missions. In the second one we have some kind of deadly ‘Chimera’ virus, which somehow can be spread by someone who is infected. There are some plotholes in this story. Abrams makes a very intelligent choice in the third film by not giving the viewer any details about a dangerous compound called ‘the Rabbit’s foot’. Not knowing what it is makes it scarier, this always seems to work. More or less the same holds for the presence of the villain, in the third film Hoffman doesn’t have that much screen time making him more mysterious than his predecessor in the second film. The missions concerning the deadly compounds are set out differently, just like in the first film Abrams prepares his viewers very well in how to get what they are after (in the third one this is the villain in person). Woo failed to introduce the scene of the heist in the second film and as a viewer you kind of fall straight into the action.

All in all, the 3^rd film can measure itself with the first Mission Impossible film and I believe that director J.J. Abrams took a good look at what went wrong before. Of course, not every role is acted well, and there are some flaws but overall he created a very credible and suspenseful action film which I can strongly recommend.

7.5/10