Movie Review: The Aftermath (2019)

A drama and romance set in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, The Aftermath explores the fresh scars of war at a personal level against the backdrop of wide scale destruction.

A few months after the Allied victory, Rachael Morgan (Keira Knightley) joins her husband Colonel Lewis Morgan (Jason Clarke) of the British Army in Hamburg, where he is stationed to help in the rebuilding process of an essentially destroyed city. They take over the intact suburban mansion of local architect and arts lover Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård) and his daughter Freda. Lewis invites the Luberts to stay and live in the attic rather than sending them to a camp.

Rachael and Lewis' relationship has been strained since the death of their young son Michael during the Blitz. Equally, Stefan and Freda are grieving the loss of his wife, who died in the 1943 firebombing of Hamburg. With Lewis frequently away chasing down Hitler's last loyalists, Rachael and Stefan develop a mutual attraction and start a torrid affair. Meanwhile Freda falls in with a group of youth intent on continuing the war with hit-and-run strikes on Allied targets.

The Aftermath is old-fashioned in a generally admirable way, and looks gorgeous in creating a sense of time and place. A bombed-out Hamburg populated by hollow-eyed and near-starving war survivors put to work clearing up the rubble is juxtaposed with the eloquent Lubert mansion, decorated with the latest architectural delights available to the upper echelons of 1940s German society.

But the film's weakness is also strongly associated with its sense of nostalgia. Absent a couple steamy sex scenes, The Aftermath could have been produced by the Hollywood of the late 1940s or early 1950s. The pacing is slow, the dialogue repressed, and the emotions, once they emerge, are theatrically overclocked. Director James Kent is unable to tease out much narrative sophistication from the Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse adaptation of Rhidian Brook's novel.

The story is just about strong enough to stand on its own, the sense of personal loss within both families echoing the greater calamity of a world war that left entire cities in rubble. Flashes of victor's triumphalism and the resoluteness of the vanquished are evident, but quickly confined to the shadows of a greater common tragedy.

Kent does find a few scenes with palpable resonance, one highlight featuring the piano as a unifying instrument of soulful loss bringing Rachael and Freda closer together.

The romance elements combine classic misery-loves-company and neglected wife themes, with Keira Knightley better than Alexander Skarsgård at finding and selling the internal emptiness, in her case stemming from a husband who took refuge in emotional neglect rather than face the loss of his son.

As elegant as it is predictable, The Aftermath laments the intimate and immense carnage of a devastating conflict.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Hummingbird Project (2018)

A business drama, The Hummingbird Project tackles a potentially dry subject with some verve, despite never quite engaging at the human level.

In New York City, stock trader Vince Zaleski (Jesse Eisenberg) works at the firm run by Eva Torres (Salma Hayek). His socially awkward but technically brilliant cousin Anton (Alexander Skarsgård) is Eva's technology guru, part of the team continuously trying to improve transaction speed to gain millisecond advantages. Vince finds a backer to finance his dream of building the fastest fibre optic line from Kansas to New Jersey. Access to the line can then be sold to traders, generating millions in profits.

Vince and Anton quit their jobs, enraging Eva, and team up with construction expert Mark Vega (Michael Mando). Building in a straight line will require negotiating with numerous property owners, crossing rivers and swamps, and the small matter of drilling through the Appalachian Mountains. Vince will also have to deal with unwelcome health news and Eva's determined efforts to torpedo the project, while Anton struggles to make his software as efficient as possible.

The Michael Lewis non-fiction book Flash Boys (2014) highlighted the dangers and eccentricities of the high speed stock trading world, and how the race to gain milliseconds in transaction speeds drives the madcap construction of dedicated fibre optic lines across the country. It's an arcane subject at best, so credit to Canadian writer and director Kim Nguyen for conceiving a fictional movie (not based on the book) tackling the same subject matter.

The Hummingbird Project tries to create human subjects worth caring about, and Nguyen colours in just enough personality to help move the action along. Vince and Anton Zaleski are sons of Eastern European immigrants living the dream and chasing more, Vince the always persuasive dealmaker while Anton is the prototypical dour coder. Less successful is Eva as the one-dimensional antagonist, sketched in as a cartoonish villain.

The script's real investment is out in the field, where the idea of building a communications conduit in an absolute straight line takes shape. The sheer audacity of such a project is at the heart of the film, and Nguyen provides a taste of the challenges to be overcome, from negotiating with individual landowners to flying in drilling equipment by gigantic helicopter to the base of the Appalachians, where there are no roads.

Of course almost everything that can go wrong does, Vince's dream threatened by serious personal challenges and obstacles as mundane as an obstinate Amish community, while on the sidelines Eva tries every trick to halt the line in its tracks.

Although the acting performances are secondary, Alexander Skarsgård is a pleasant surprise, entirely losing his Tarzan features and transforming into a bald, haunched and entirely pessimistic anti-social tech geek.

The Hummingbird Project is a version of the American Dream where millions are sunk in pursuit of an imperceptible advantage for dubious purposes, and making a quick buck is defined literally.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Legend Of Tarzan (2016)

An adventure film, The Legend Of Tarzan tries to breathe life into the fabled character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs but gets trampled by a dull script riding an overabundance of computer-created beasts.

In the late 1880s, envoy Léon Rom (Christoph Waltz) is dispatched by the near-bankrupt Belgian King Leopold to secure the diamond treasures of the Congo. Rom strikes a deal with local Chief Mbonga (Djimon Hounsou): in exchange for the diamonds Rom will capture Tarzan and hand him to Mbonga.

Tarzan is John Clayton III (Alexander Skarsgård), the Baron of Greystoke, currently living in England with his wife Jane (Margot Robbie). He was an infant in Africa when his father was killed and John was raised by apes before meeting Jane and being rescued as a young man. He has phenomenal abilities to communicate with wild animals and travel at lightning speed through the jungle.

Falling for Rom's arranged ruse, John travels back to the Congo with Jane and American veteran George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson), who is investigating slavery. Rom and his soldiers catch up with them but capture Jane instead of John. With the help of George and local tribesmen, John becomes Tarzan again and has to rescue his wife and stop Rom before he gets his evil hands on untold riches.

Directed by David Yates, The Legend Of Tarzan is a limp attempt to jump-start a franchise in an era already drowning in superheros. Despite adopting a welcome grim and irony-free tone, the film's plot is one long and boring chase, as Tarzan, George and their buddies trudge through the jungle chasing Rom's slow boat to nowhere. The pacing is laborious, and the editing often truncates scenes at odd moments, not that any of it matters.

The film relies heavily on CGI creatures, and for fans of animals created from pixels, they are all here, with a wondrous but artificially created African species appearing at the rate of one every eight minutes or so: lions, hippos, crocodiles, ostriches, elephants, wildebeests and of course lots and lots of apes all make their compulsory appearances, often for no narrative reason whatsoever.

Elsewhere Alexander Skarsgård takes off his shirt frequently to expose a chiseled physique, but is an otherwise humourless central character. Margot Robbie is primarily wasted into an old fashioned damsel in distress role, chained to a railing for most of the film. Samuel L. Jackson is dreadfully miscast as essentially a sidekick, while Christoph Waltz phones in yet another performance as the smarmy villain.

With thin characterizations and a threadbare plot The Legend Of Tarzan is old fashioned in a bad way, and over reliant on unconvincing new technology in an equally bad way.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.