PROMETHEUS - all that sound and fury....

...signifying nothing.  

PROMETHEUS is a visually stunning, beautifully acted film that makes absolutely  no sense. Apart from a couple of obligatory gore-fest alien-parasite-attack scenes, there's no sense of creeping menace. No fear that in space no-one hears you scream.  Instead, we get two hours of an attempt at a deep philosophical discussion of faith versus science, creators versus created. Tragically, the writers simply do not have the intellectual chops, or the focus, or the respect for the audience to see it through. The result is a movie that plays more like a drama than a thriller, and certainly doesn't play like horror.  A film that frustrates far more than it entertains.  I didn't watch LOST myself, but  I know enough frustrated fanboys to suggest that the blame for this missed opportunity sits firmly on the shoulders of Damon Lindelof, the script-writing genius who also messed up with COWBOYS & ALIENS last year.

The movie kicks off in the not too distant future, around 200 years before the events in ALIEN.  A private corporation has sponsored a scientific mission to a planet who's co-ordinates have been painted in prehistoric caves. The scientists Shaw and Holloway (Noomi Rapace and Charlie Holloway) believe they are going to discover the creators of humanity.  The crew, helmed by Vickers (Charlize Theron) just want to get in and out quickly. All but the slippery cylon, David (Michael Fassbender) who has an agenda that is never really explained  in the course of the film.  Naturally the crew land on a planet which was once apparently peopled by a race of creators, or "engineers", who have since been wiped out by the aliens we all know and fear. All of which begs several questions.  Do the engineers mean humanity well?  Does David mean humanity well? Were the aliens a messed up experiment that got out of hand? Who created the aliens? And who created the engineers?  All of these questions will apparently be answered in a sequel, but frankly, do we care?

This movie, with its superb performances (particularly from Rapace and Fassbender) and beautiful landscapes (Darius Wolszki) could've been astoundingly good, if only it had been more focussed in exploring its themes.  For instance, if David is inspired by Lawrence of Arabia, then let's take that further.  Lawrence is a fascinating character with very specific notions of the interaction between the rulers and ruled, which could've been used here.  If Shaw is a scientist exploring creation who refuses to give up her faith, let's really explore the provocative inconsistencies there.  If David is going all HAL, let's explore that,  And if Vickers is really going to have a relationship revelation near the end, let's explore that rather than just tossing it into the mix for a nanosecond. 

So, basically, worth seeing for the visuals and the acting, but utterly, utterly frustrating.

PROMETHEUS is on release in the UK, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Chile, Denmark, Israel, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Sweden and Turkey. It opens on June 7th in the USA, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Serbia, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Croatia, Hungary, Kuwait, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Slovenia, Canada, Egypt, Estonia, India, Lithuania and Romania. It opens on June 15th in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. It opens on June 22nd in Vietnam, on June 28th in Cambodia, on July 20th in Poland, on August 9th in Germany and Spain, and on October 19th in Italy.

SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS

The sequel to Guy Ritchie's 2009 Sherlock Holmes reboot has just as much style, period atmosphere, wit and bite, but suffers from a rather baggy script from husband and wife team, Michele and Kieran Mulroney.  The result is a film that is certainly entertaining enough to justify a cinema ticket, but which propels the franchise no further, and does a great disservice to Noomi Rapace and Stephen Fry, stranded in under-written roles.

The movie is set in the Europe of 1891 - a febrile, uncertain place with anarchists rising against major powers, and the major powers signing peace treaties but all the while gearing up for what will become the First World War. Holmes' arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty (Mad Men's Jared Harris) seeks not just to corner the supply of weaponry but also to create the demand for them, by staging terrorist plots and assassination attempts that will bring Europe to war. Holmes (Robert Downey Junior) has to stop him, aided as always by his side-kick John Watson (Jude Law), interrupting his honeymoon with Mary (Kelly Reilly). The movie thus takes the result of a fast-paced, action-set-piece-packed ride across Europe, from London to Paris, by way of Cambridge, and on to the fateful Reichenbach Falls.  Along for the ride are Holmes' indolent but secretly powerful elder brother Mycroft (official National Treasure, Stephen Fry) and a rather random gypsy called Simza (Noomi Rapace - the original Lisbeth Salander). 

First the positive.  All the things that made the first SHERLOCK HOLMES a roaring success are present in the second. I love the dark, richly dressed sets, and CGI that bring to life the grim dirty Victorian cities of London and Paris, filled with dodgy clubs, filthy streets, but punctuated with glorious civic architecture and handsomely dressed upper class men and women.  For the keen-eyed, there's even a glimpse of the Sacre Coeur under scaffolding in Paris harking back to the use of an unfinished Tower Bridge in the first film.  I also love the way in which Ritchie gives us a more pugnacious Holmes than those dessicated twentieth century TV adaptations.  This feels truer to the books, where Holmes definitely has a grimy past and is in fine physical form.  I also love the device Ritchie uses to show his process of deduction - the careful editing, the bullet time replay of fights, the voice-over of every move selected. It all makes for the movies vitality and takes the novels back to their pop-cultural origins.  But most of all, any Holmes adaptation lives or dies on the relationship between Holmes and Watson, and what really sets these films alight is the genuine spark between Downey Junior and Law - the beautifully essayed mutual frustration, respect and affection.  I will always hand over money to see Holmes and Watson sparring.  Finally, to all these factors, we can add one more happy decision.  Jared Harris makes a superb Moriarty, and some of the best scenes in the film are (as they should be) the confrontations between the two - the matching of wits. 

All these good things just about make for the perfect winter blockbuster.  But, as I said before, the movie is severely let down by its script by Michele and Kieran Mulroney.  To be sure, they get some things right. I like the way small details early in the movie become important gags or plot points later on, particularly the urban camouflage!  This is a film in which one has to pay attention despite the superficial appearance of a brawny action flick.  But in too many major ways their script gets it horribly wrong.  The pacing in the first half is woefully slow.  There are some fun action set pieces but we don't really feel we know what the stakes are - what precisely Holmes is trying to do, what mystery he is trying to solve.  It's more than an hour into the over-long two hour run-time before we realise what the plot really is. Poor Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is pretty much thrown to the dogs, with barely an impact on Holmes.  But worst of all, the whole gypsy plot line is also a complete waste of time. You could easily have cut it from the film and had a tighter, more evenly paced 90 minute flick.  Presumably Guy Ritchie was happy to have another opportunity to indulge his fascination with gypsies, but is all that nonsense really worth it for 60 seconds of comedy dancing from Jude Law, and a short horse joke?  

As it is, we get poor Noomi Rapace cast as Simza - a talented actress who basically looks pained for 120 minutes.  Moreover, poor Stephen Fry is utterly short-changed in his role as Mycroft - I mean - what comic joy could have been woven from an encounter between Fry and Downey Junior on screen!  But the screenwriters simply had a naked arse gag. Poor.  The storyline also leaves poor Kelly Reilly rather short-changed as Mary, although she, unlike Noomi Rapace, does manage to steal every scene she's in and leave a favourable impression far outweighing her actual screen-time. Let's hope now that Simza has been rendered irrelevant, Mary and Mycroft will get more screen-time in the next film. And yes, I suspect that given the early box office there will be another film.  And yes, this instalment was still enough fun, despite its flaws, that I look forward to it. I only hope that the producers replace the screenwriters.

SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS is on release in the US, UK, Canada, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and Turkey. It opens on December 22nd in Malta, Germany, Israel, Singapore, Slovenia, Thailand, Finland, Indonesia, Romania and Taiwan, Denmark and Norway. It opens on December 29th in Belgium, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Russia, Estonia, India, Lithuania and South Africa. It opens on January 5th in Armenia, Australia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and Poland. It opens in Brazil on January 13th; in France on January 25th; and in Japan on March 10th.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST / LUFTSLOTTET SOM SPRENGTES - workmanlike and unwatchable

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST is based on the final installment of Swedish investigative journalist Stieg Larsson's wildly popular Millenium Trilogy. The novel picks up from the previous installment. The anti-heroine Lisbeth Salander - genius hacker, emotional anorexic, victim of sexual abuse - spends half of the film in hospital recovering from an attempted murder at the hands of her father and brother - and the other half in court, defending herself for the attempted murder of her father. In both cases she is isolated, communicating with the outside world through an internet connection to her hacker friends, or by means of an autobiography she is writing. Many people risk everything to help expose her enemies and bring her justice - but she is so introverted she can barely register thanks. The first is kindly doctor Anders Jonasson who keeps the rozzers at bay; the second is Mikke Blomkvist, crusading journalist, who plans to expose all in his magazine, with the help of the entire Millenium staff.

The book is compelling for two reasons. First, as we see the conspiracy against Lisbeth exposed, we realise just how high up it goes - to the office of the Swedish Prime Minister, no less. The stakes are high, and as the court case proceeds, the tension mounts. In short, the book is a thriller that is genuinely thrilling. But more importantly, the book works because we've come to care about the characters. Lisbeth and Mikke may not be in the same room together but we feel there connection. And in the novel, Mikke's long-time colleague and sometime lover Erika Berger takes front-stage, when she leaves Millenium for the Swedish Morning Post and starts being bullied with explicit emails and texts. I thought the portrait of a successful career woman trying to balance her job with her emotions was particularly authentic.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, this Swedish adaptation, originally intended for the small screen, fails to do justice to the novel. The direction is visually uninspired, workmanlike and plodding, sapping all pace and tension from the narrative. The character of Erika Berger suffers most in the editing down of the novel to a still unwieldy two and a half hour run-time. The acting is just fine, but the actors have little to do but work through the text. Of the new characters, Aksel Morisse is sympathetic as the doctor Anders Jonasson but the rest are pretty unforgettable. The result was that I was so bored I almost walked out several times, preferring to remember the denouement as I had read it rather than in this insipid, tedious adaptation.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST / LUFTSLOTTET SOM SPRENDGTES opened in Denmark, Norway and Sweden in 2009 and in Finland, Iceland, Spain, The Netherlands, Greece, Estonia, Canada, Germany, the USA, Switzerland, Austria, Singapore, France and Japan earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Indonesia in January 2011.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE - heart-stripped

Lisbeth Salander, a young, rebellious, autistic computer hacker, returns to Stockholm to enforce her revenge on her sexually abusive state-appointed guardian, Nils Bjurman. But, soon after, Bjurman is murdered, along with two young investigators who were about to expose a sex-trafficking scandal, in which he was implicated. The police think Lisbeth is the murderer and she goes on the run. Only her old lover and friend, Mikke Blomkvist; her current lover Miriam; her old boxing buddy (real-life star) Paolo Roberto, and her kindly first guardian, Holger Palmgren, believe she innocent. But they can't track her down to help her. As it so happens, it was Blomkvist's magazine that was going to be publishing the sex-trafficking expose, and as he picks up the trail of the gangster Zala, he is led back to Lisbeth, who also believes that Zala was involved in her scandalous abuse as a child. So unfolds the true story of Lisbeth's god-awful childhood, and the reality of the complicity of the Swedish state in her abuse.

I loved Daniel Alfredson's faithful adaptation of Swedish thriller, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. It was a well-acted, competently-made crime drama with a convincing relationship at its heart - that between campaigning journalist, Mikke Blomkvist; and his sometime researcher and lover, Lisbeth Salander. Salander's character - emotionally avoidant, scrupulously fair, kick-ass - is the most sale-able thing about these books. But it also makes them hard to access at an emotional level, without the reader being able to experience her through the softer focus of her friendship with Mikke, her loyalty to her lover Miriam, and her respect for her old guardian, Holger Palmgren. The problem with the sequel, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, is that we don't get enough of the relationships - we simply don't see Lisbeth on screen together with Mikke, or Holger or Miriam, long enough to engage emotionally. And without that, the movie just becomes a crime procedural. Worst of all, because most people who watch this film will be fans of the book, a crime procedural to which we already know the answer. To be fair, partly this is unavoidable. The film-makers have to stick to the broad outline of the book, and to that end, they have no choice but to keep Mikke and Lisbeth apart. But, Stieg Larson gave us compensation in the novel. He gave us the reunion of Lisbeth and Palmgren, something which is skated over very quickly in the film - and most importantly, he gave us the intriguing character of the cop, Jan Bublanski - charged with tracking "murderer" Lisbeth down, but a man who instinctively knows something far more murky has been going down. With only a small role for Jan, and a resultingly small role for the police in the investigation, the movie seemed to have no centre, no momentum, and no interest for me. I was actually bored by it, and was really very disappointed indeed.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE was released in the Nordics, Italy and Spain last year, and was released earlier this year in Greece, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Estonia, Portugal, France, the US and Argentina. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in September in Japan and Singapore.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO - a faithful adaptation of a great thriller

Niels Arden Oplev's screen adaptation of the wildly successful Stieg Larsson thriller, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, is a sure crowd-pleaser. Though still coming in at two and a half hours, it is an admirably condensed and faithful adaptation of a complicated thriller. As fans will be well aware - and I'm assuming most people who see the film will have already read all three books - the movie is about two people who form an unlikely bond in order to investigate an old crime in one of Sweden's most prominent families. Years ago, a young girl disappeared from the wealthy island inhabited largely by her family - the Vangers. In old age, her grand-uncle hires disgraced investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist to re-examine the case and the rogue's gallery of former Nazis and selfish old bastards that make up the Vanger family. Blomkvist is a like-able decent guy - and in his relationship with his long time mistress and best friend Erika, as well as with his new found aide, Lisbeth Salander, he proves that he is a "man who loves women". He enjoys their company, enjoys making love to them, treats them as equals and with respect. But Lisbeth Salander - the true star of the books and this film - is a prickly character - highly intelligent, gifted with computers, a victim of extreme abuse, and as uncomfortable in her skin as Blomkvist is at peace.

I found the direction to be workmanlike in all but the elegant way in which the IT hacking was depicted. What set the movie apart was, source material notwithstanding, the genuine sympathy between, and charisma of, the two lead characters. Michael Nyqvist is superb as the laconic Blomkvist, and Noomi Rapace commits physically and psychologically so fully to being Lisbeth Salander that you can feel the ferocity. And this is important, because inevitably, in order to compress the film, the side relationships - and the smaller characters at Millenium and Milton Security - have been stripped away. As a result, the film lives and dies by whether you are emotionally affected by an abused woman opening a small sliver of her life to Blomkvist. This is much more pivotal than solving the "whodunnit". After all, if there's any real message to Larson's novel, it's that the establishment in its entirety did it.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was released in 2009 in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Finland, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Italy, Spain, Iceland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Greece, Austria, Poland and New Zealand. It opened earlier this year in Japan and Estonia. It is currently on release in the US and UK and opens next weekend in Australia. It opens on April 23rd in Brazil.

Additional tags: Jacob Groth, Jens Fischer, Eric Kress, Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Peter Haber, Sven-Bertil Taube, Peter Andersson, Ingvar Hirdwall, Marika Lagercrantz, Ewa Froling, Tomas Kohler, Gosta Bredefeldt, Niels Arden Oplev.