Send in the Clones
Movies from seen in mid 2002
Originally written: June 2002
Star Wars 2: The Attack of the Clones
The Majestic
Rabbit-Proof Fence
The Time Machine (2002)
A.I.
The new Star Wars movie, The Attack of the Clones, has come. First the faint praise: it's better than The Phantom Menace. But that's not saying much. It's still a bit of a mess. And it is largely a mess because Lucas and his fellow script writer cannot actually write dialog. The early SW movies moved along at such rapid pace that there was barely room to notice the stilted dialog or Mark Hamill's lack of personality, but tAotC is a movie that wants to be primarily character and narrative driven and the big action scenes don't really come until the end of the movie. And it relies particularly on a successful translation onto film of the alleged love affair between Amidala and Annakin. Loved her; hated him. Hayden Christensen (the Mark Hamill of the twenty-first century) just cannot act. His dialog is bad to begin with and his delivery is worse. As a result, Natalie Portman's Amidala, who comes across as a strong-minded and intelligent character, is supposed to become all moony over this callow, scowling youth with no poetry in his soul and no emotion in his voice. It just doesn't work. Nor really do the major narrative threads: the bounty hunter, the renegade Jedi, the clone-makers, Obi-Wan as a latter-day Sam Spade and Jar Jar Binks as a senator (not even the US Senate, where Strom Thurmond at 99 still has a seat, would buy that one). There's too much story for the proper balance of the film. This is not a sin Lucas could have been accused of in the earlier episodes.
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There are one or two great moments: I liked this episode's car chase (through the airspace of the Galactic capital); Obi-Wan's anti-smoking bit in the bar; and the sonic weapon used by the bounty hunter in the planetary ring belt. But these, combined with reasonably performances from Ewan McGregor, Christopher Lee (didn't he play the same part in tLotR:tFotR?) and Yoda, as well as two good New Zealander support roles, Jay Laga'aia and Temuera Morrison, and a couple of effective Australian cameos, especially Jack Thompson, were not enough to overcome the sagging centre of the movie. Annakin Skywalker's great and tragic love, which gave rise to the threat to the Galaxy as we know it, but also contains the seeds of its resurrection, should be the centrepiece of the pivotal story arc of the Star Wars saga but poor scripting and the wrong actor have lessened that impact. And even the all-in brawl at the end, and some flash light-sabring, cannot save the movie as a result.
Capra-esque
Jim Carrey occasionally shows signs of becoming a genuine actor. In The Majestic, he combines with director Frank Darabont to present a tale of fall and redemption. Darabont did not write the script on this one, as he had for his two previous films, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. And this one is not set in a prison. It's set in Hollywood and a coastal Californian town at the time of the anti-communist witch-hunts and Carrey's character is accused of being a fellow-traveller. Through barely believable circumstances he ends up amnesiac in the small town, where he is mistaken for Martin Landau's son. There he helps the town in its recovery from the loss of much of its young male population in WW2, falls in love and rebuilds the eponymous cinema. Naturally his past catches up with him and he has a chance to redeem himself before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee before the predictable denoument.
The fact that the movie comes across as much better than it sounds and ends up being something more than the sum of its disparate parts is a tribute to the lead actor and to the director, both of whom do a good job. Carrey is assisted by a cast of good character actors, particularly those populating the small town, which comes across as a modern version of the sort of small town America which Frank Capra built up in his pre-war movies. That patina of nostalgic remembrance could have killed a less well-put-together movie but here, for me, it works. This won't be everyone's cup of tea but, with its knowing satirical winks at Hollywood, the studio system and the fifties, and its informed memorial to an era in which Hollywood did not cover itself in glory, The Majestic has more than enough going for it to make it worthwhile.
Walkabout
There has been quite some debate in the papers about the accuracy or otherwise of the main narrative elements of Philip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence. This is the story of the forced removal from the local indigenous community of three young 'half-caste' girls under the then extant policy of trying to breed aboriginality out of Australia by separating such children from the blacks and raising them in government-run orphanages where they'd be trained as domestics or farm workers. In case this all sounds very old-fashioned, this movie is set in the 1930s and the 'assimilation' policy was still government policy in some areas of Australia until the 1970s. The main thrust of the movie is the story of the girls escape from the white-run camp and their epic journey over thousands of miles back to their people, a task achieved by finding and following the rabbit-proof fence, a structure built by the whites to keep rabbits, a plague animal imported from Europe, out of the agricultural lands.
The debate has largely centred on the scenes early in the movie which show the forced removal of the girls and their transport to the camp in the south of Western Australia. Some conservative critics with a vested interest in denying the 'stolen' generations have asserted that the scenes are both fictional and not derived at all from the source material, which are the memoirs of one of the girls, as told to her daughter. The writer and director of the movie have answered these critics in chapter and verse but the 'no-thank-yous' remain unconvinced. Quite frankly, whether the scenes are dramatised from reality or from some slightly hyperbolic version of reality is irrelevant to me. The story, and the film, really gets going when the girls escape and in their epic journey. The three young kids who play the girls are great. They do not have an over abundance of dialog but their faces and their bodies convey the story. They are matched every inch of the way, in equally taciturn fashion, by David Gulpilil as 'the tracker', the local Aboriginal who assists the white man in his recovery of runaways. His face is fascinating and he uses it to great advantage here. Not so successful is Kenneth Branagh, as the administrator. He never really gets a handle on the role.
This is a great Australian movie and one I thoroughly recommend.
As time goes by
I cannot make anything like that call on The Time Machine, the recent remake of George Pal's classic version of HG Wells epochal novel. Guy Pearce is given an impossible task with a thankless role in a mess of a movie. The only two good pieces of invention here are: the use of the moon as the catalyst for the destruction of society and the ultra-modern library support service that somehow survives and learns. Apart from that, not much worth it.
We saw Spielberg's version of Pinocchio, AI Artificial Intelligence, on video recently. This has some really dumb ideas and a couple of good ones, and again demonstrates that Spielberg is incapable of properly ending an sf/fantasy movie. This one has just about the longest anti-climaxes in movie history and this bathos derogates from whatever interesting and stimulating material has preceded it. Haley Joel Osment is a rare talent and is very good in the central role. He is well supported by Jude Law and Frances O'Connor and even Robin Williams in a voice bit. But, for all its genesis as an idea being played with by Kubrick, Aldiss and others, AI remains just Pinocchio in modern dress - the puppet who wants to be a boy. And if William Hurt is supposed to be his Geppetto, he has none of the poignancy that the carver has in the original story. There is a great deal of artifice here but damned little intelligence.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]