Snowden

At the beginning of last year, I reviewed the documentary Citizenfour, which was a blow-by-blow story of Edward Snowden that was made by filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was one of the people Snowden contacted to tell his story right. That film was a masterpiece and when I heard that there was a biopic being made about Snowden, I dismissed it straight away, believing that it would not be able to convey the weight of what he did. But after watching it, I realised that the point wasn't to show people what he had done, but rather to humanise him in the eyes of a public who still vilify him as a traitor.

Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a bright eyed young special forces recruit who is hopeful for a career in the military, but after he breaks both legs, he is discharged and looks for a new way to serve his country. He soon comes upon an opportunity in working for the CIA as an intelligence analyst after going through rigorous training under Corbin O'Brien (Rhys Ifans). His various jobs soon take him around the world and he learns that the NSA has a program that allows them to gather information from everyone in the world. Knowing this makes Snowden increasingly paranoid to the point where he clashes with his girlfriend Lindsay (Shailene Woodley) because he wants to protect her. Soon his conscience gets the better of him and he decides to expose the truth to a handful of journalists including Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto).

Oliver Stone is definitely someone who knows how to make a movie that will appeal to a lot of people, which is something that Citizenfour may have been lacking. While it doesn't go into a great amount of detail about what Snowden leaked, it gives a general overview of what the US government was doing (and still is). This works to the films benefit because any in depth analysis would leave audiences confused. Stone's style of over the top filmmaking draws you into the film and makes you feel a lot of empathy for the characters. This is good because the point of the film is to humanise Snowden. A lot of the media around him portrays him as a cold traitor who has no acknowledgement of the danger he caused with his leak. That couldn't be further from the truth and Stone attempts to show that he is really a patriot who was looking out for his fellow citizens. While the majority of performances are good and exactly what you'd expect from a movie this size, the surprising parts come from the cameos that a director like Oliver Stone can get. Timothy Olyphant, Logan Marshall-Green and Nicolas Cage all pop in small roles. The Nicolas Cage cameo is quite surprising because he's the last person you'd expect to see in this film.

Some of the problems I have with this film have to do with the fact that some of the events of the film have been documented in Citizenfour, yet they are shown differently in this film. Snowden's communication with Poitras is rushed and limited to a single email, whereas in reality the communication took place over many months and only after he failed to contact Glenn Greenwald through a secure means. That's a small thing that was jarring for me and I'm sure would effect others who have seen both. Stone also drags the film out by added smaller details (that go into humanising Snowden) which seem irrelevant. Snowden's diagnosis of epilepsy and his relationship problems really slow the film down in some key parts of the film. Also there is too little time devoted to the time he spent in Hong Kong (probably the most important part of the story). The inclusion of the real Snowden at the end of the film also throws some doubt onto JGL's portrayal of him. In his last couple of films JGL has been making some strange vocal choices and after being able to compare his voice to that of Snowden, you can hear the definite difference.

I had thought that Snowden would present the story in an ambiguous way, leaving you to make up your own mind on whether or not he had done the right thing. But now after seeing the film it's clear that Stone has made it in line with his own left-wing leanings. I'm not saying that his own politics had any input on whether the film is good or not. He has made a film that may not stand the test of time, but for time we live in it's a very good movie.

London Has Fallen

Remember how great it was when everyone made fun of Hollywood for bring out the same movie twice in 2013 (although it's far from the first time they've done it). The White House fell down twice in one summer and everyone had a chuckle. Now think about this, the one that gets a sequel was the one where the president isn't black. That's something we should all think about. But don't worry people, the Vice President is Morgan Freeman in this one, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief.

The set up for this movie is either one big joke or whoever wrote this movie must be highly uneducated. The Prime Minister of England dies of a heart attack and all the major leaders of the western world attend the state funeral. Ok let's start, yes, if the sitting Prime Minister of England died, there would be state funeral. Would all the world leaders attend? Probably not, they have countries to run. If leaders did come, they wouldn't be from Italy, Germany and Japan, but New Zealand, Australia and Canada (don't worry Canada, you get repped in this movie). President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) does attend, but can't help but feel like something will go wrong (because when all the world leaders get together something is bound to go wrong, just like in real life). The head of his Secret Service detail Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) feels the same. And just like the end of Ghostbusters or people who still believe in The Secret, they will the bad stuff to happen. Terrorists, led by weapons dealer Amir Barkawi (Alon Moni Aboutboul), end up hijacking London and killing all the leaders apart from the faithful President, who survives thanks to his one man army.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I found myself siding with the terrorists on this one. I mean the Americans did approve a drone strike on a wedding where they knew more civilians were than terrorists were present. We live in a world where there's a movie about the decision to commit to a drone strike because there's a single child in the neighbourhood (see Eye in the Sky), so a mass murder like this seems very extreme. I'm surprised they waited two years to retaliate. An even more bizarre thing about this movie is that director Babak Najafi is Iranian and although the bad guys in this movie are Pakastani, it is still a very anti-Muslim, pro-Western democracy movie. The bad guys are treated like characters in a video game and the movie does have the sensibilities of one. The action sequences toward the end even feel like you're playing a level of Call of Duty, complete with a hard to beat villain at the end.

The casting seems very off for this movie. I understand bringing back the three main leads, Butler, Eckhart and Freeman, and tossing in a new villain, but did they really have to use Melissa Leo and Robert Forster again. They play bigwigs in the US Defence Force and you barely see them at all. Both are veteran actors whose talents could be put to better use elsewhere. Same could be said of Jackie Earle Haley who is introduced only to say a couple of lines in the background. Gerard Butler really needs to stick to roles where he can use his natural Scottish accent because he has a horrible American one. British actress Charlotte Riley could have used more screen time because she was fantastic as MI6 agent Jax. The same could be said of Patrick Kennedy who was a minor villain. Both Waleed Zuaiter and Alon Moni Aboutboul were fantastically underused.

Despite the video game aesthetics there really isn't anything remotely enjoyable about London Has Fallen except maybe the caricatures of current world leaders.

The Equaliser

This review was written by our new recruit Saul, who is going to start writing for us every so often. - Jack

In recent years, Denzel Washington has established and slowly disintegrated his status as a badass action star in films like Man on Fire. And with director Antoine Fuqua, the pair have attempted to recapture the magic of the Academy Award-winning Training Day. Spoiler alert, they haven't. What they have done is create a solid, slow-paced action-thriller that gets progressively more random and inevitably settles down in mediocrity.

The Equaliser follows Robert McCall, a quiet, private and apparently ex-military middle-aged man working in a hardware warehouse store. Much of the first half of the film is spent following him through his daily routines, his work and his friendships there (specifically Ralphie, who Robert is helping to become a security guard), and a local coffee shop where he visits nightly to read and talk to under-age prostitute Teri (Moretz). McCall loves to help people out, and this eventually evolves from helping train Ralphie and encouraging Teri, to murdering her pimp and taking on an international criminal organisation.

The way in which The Equaliser implodes is indicative of a lack of concrete and original ideas, as though several pages of the script went missing and the director attempted to improvise in the missing parts. There is obvious vision for how the beginning will work, and how he becomes a hero for hire, but as the Second Act looms and the plot thickens, ridiculousness seeps in to worrying degrees, slowly consuming the film from the inside out, leading into an ending nearly fully detached from the first half. The positives of this film are, without a doubt, the establishment of McCall and his primary nemesis, Teddy/Nikolai, played by Marton Csoskas. Most of this is accomplished solidly without being too overt, there's little-to-no explicit mention of McCall's military service in the first half, but it's also glaringly obvious, mostly through Washington's commendable characterisation. And Russian enforcer Teddy is introduced as an enigmatic, intelligent, cold and dominant figure in the wake of the first action sequence, and during the second act explodes into violent acts that are not unlike Ryan Gosling's Driver character from Drive, cutting a fearsome path through his early scenes.

However, the film falls apart in so many ways that it beggars belief. Characters appear and disappear with little-to-no explanation or introduction, Chloe Grace Moretz's Teri literally vanishes after the first action scene, rendering any and all setup for her to be the Jodie Foster to McCall's Travis Bickle instantly null and void. Whatever good that began with McCall and Teddy's characters soon evolves into a pissing contest for emotionlessness, which even the movie explicitly mentions at one point. Character motivations and relations feel random and convenient, McCall is both invincible and omnipotent, and aside from brief moments in the climax, there is literally zero threat to McCall throughout the film. He nonchalantly dispatches henchmen with such amusing ease that rarely is it even shown onscreen for fear of boring the audience. And it's almost painfully nostalgic how the primary goons are tattoo-covered, muscly Russians with skull fetishes, perhaps indicative of a re-emerging trend in action films.. And on the technical side, the score and direction are so painfully "middle-of-the-road 2000's action" that, save for one GORGEOUS dissolve emphasising Teddy's dominance over the city of Boston, they hardly deserve a mention.

All in all, this is the cinematic equivalent of slowly watching a ball of yarn roll around the floor and untangle itself, eventually revealing itself as an assemblage of mediocrity, with brief, seemingly accidental moments of brilliance and beauty. Unfortunately, ridiculousness, and lack of emotion and motivation ruin a movie that had the potential to be much more than a good film gone bad. Wait for the DVD release.

Oblivion

I think someone is going to have to face some copyright infringement charges soon and if they don't it's a damn shame. Instead of reviewing this movie, I could review about five others, but I'll keep it simple.

Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) is a technician working on Earth sixty years after a race called Scavengers (Scavs, for short) destroyed the Moon and sent the world into disarray. Tsunamis and earthquakes wiped out most of the population, with the rest escaping to a space station (almost like the Death Star), called the Tet. He lives in a tower with his communications officer, and implied lover, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough).

Harper's main job is to maintain drones that patrol the area around massive harvesters, which turn sea water into fusion energy. Whilst out on these missions, he routinely has run ins with Scavs. One day whilst chilling out in his hideaway, he sees a crashing spaceship, where he finds human survivors. One of them is a woman from the dreams he has been having. Turns out this is his wife, Julia (Olga Kurylenko). They are then attacked by Scavs and taken back to their stronghold.

When they get there, the Scavs reveal themselves to be regular humans and that the drones are actually there to wipe out humans. We meet their leader, Malcolm Beech (Morgan Freeman), and his lieutenant, Sykes (Nickolaj Coster-Waldau). Beech initially tries to get Jack to reprogram a drone with a bomb to destroy the Tet. After Jack refuses, Beech tells him to go into the radiation zone for an explanation. Jack and Julia go there only to find a clone of Jack. We find out that there a thousands of Jack Harper and that they really destroyed the Earth.

Jack decides to go back and help the humans destroy the Tet, but not before a big battle that claims the life of Beech. Both Beech and Jack go and destroy the Tet.

Now unless you have seen a lot of sci-fi movies you may not see the copyright problems. Lucky for you, I'm here. This is all just a big budget remake of the 2009 independent film Moon. In that, an engineer on the Moon is weeks away from coming home. His main task is the maintenance of harvesters that extract Helium 3, a clean energy power, from the surface of the Moon and send it back to an overpopulated Earth. Oblivion just reversed that to take it to a Death Star. As the film progresses, we find out that the main character is just one of many clones that gets recycled every three years. Oblivion just does this on a larger scale.

Last week, I read a funny article on HuffPost that showed the similarities between the Oblivion poster and the poster for Top Gun. I thought it was funny and it soon left my mind. The parallels didn't stop there. Jack Harper also is an ace fighter pilot, only this movie lacked Val Kilmer and a volleyball. Keen eyes will spot references to Planet of the Apes and Alien as well.

Now, the acting. Tom Cruise seemed very hollow and distracted in this movie. It's as if the Tripods took it out of him in his last sci-fi film. I am normally a big fan of Olga Kurylenko, but I wasn't too keen on her performance this time around.

Morgan Freeman did his job as an exposition teller and ended the movie in a big bad way. Nickolaj Coster-Waldau (the Kingslayer himself, Jamie Lannister), seemed to be playing future Jamie Lannister with a high power rifle and Academy Award Winner Melissa Leo wasted her talents for a couple of minutes.

This movie did look good though. Lots of great landscapes and worn down monuments we all know. I had a good debate with my friend about whether it was all green screen, but we ended in a stalemate.

Verdict: A blatant rip off of others that came before. I would only really watch for the good CGI. Not too much action.