Movie Review: The Assessment (2024)

Genre: Dystopian Drama  

Director: Fleur Fortuné  

Starring: Elizabeth Olsen, Alicia Vikander, Himesh Patel  

Running Time: 114 minutes  

Synopsis: In a dystopian future, parenthood is strictly controlled due to environmental limitations and mastery of life-prolongation. Couple Mia and Aaryan (Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel) apply to become parents and qualify for an "assessment" to be conducted by stern government worker Virginia (Alicia Vikander). She arrives to live with them for seven days and observe all their behaviours and interactions, but also to test their limits.

What Works Well: The imaginative premise is intriguing, and the plot reveals it's environmental details with practiced patience. Yielding control of the human yearning to procreate is an ultimate manifestation of the destruction unleashed on nature, and the couple's professions reflect the dystopia: Aaryan creates virtual pets for a world no longer able to sustain the real critters; and Mia grows food in living compost. Virginia exposes their readiness (or not) to care for a child, posing universal questions about selflessness and sacrifice, and challenging the tensions hiding behind every couple's facade.

What Does Not Work As Well: The suffocating aesthetic is almost impenetrably muddy, bathing the drama in orange/brown near-darkness. The final few scenes contain a sudden torrent of context-setting revelations. Rather than adding value, all the new information is unquestionably late, including Aaryan graduating from simulating pets, the attempts to round Virginia into a person worth caring about, and Mia's commitment to a journey into the known unknown.

Key Quote:

Mia: What if we're not good enough?

Aaryan: If we're not who is?

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Movie Review: Beckett (2021)

A chase thriller, Beckett features plenty of narrow escapes but meager plotting. 

Beckett (John David Washington) and his girlfriend April (Alicia Vikander) are vacationing in Greece. With a large left-wing political demonstration planned in Athens, they depart on a road trip to the peace and quiet of the countryside. At the end of a long day Beckett dozes off behind the wheel, and a bad crash ends with their car smashing into a secluded house. 

Beckett is hurt and hospitalized, but when he admits to spotting a young red-headed kid at the house, he finds himself a target of corrupt police officers and is forced to go on the run. Political activists Lena (Vicky Krieps) and Eleni (Maria Votti) help transport him to Athens, where he meets US embassy official Tynan (Boyd Holbrook). But with political tensions running high in the streets, Beckett's troubles are far from over.

While the Greek countryside provides rustic locations and Italian director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino knows his way around breathless action scenes, Beckett suffers from too much running around and not enough explanations. By the time Beckett survives the umpteenth attempt on his life and his broken bones count creeps towards the double digits, the impact is lost. 

Ironically, the quiet first 20 minutes are strong, writer Kevin A. Rice investing in the relationship between Beckett and April. They become a couple worth knowing, and their rapport heightens the jarring outcome of the car crash. But from the moment a couple of Greek police officers start taking ill-aimed pot shots at Beckett, character definitions are parked, and an intense guilt-ridden John David Washington performance is wasted.

The conspiracy is expressed in sketch terms at best, and involves the kidnapped son of a faceless left-wing politician, the bad guys described as either political opponents or mobsters, depending on who is providing the explanation. The nefarious Americans are, of course, up to their elbows in meddling and misdeeds. Beckett dodges all-comers on his way to the middle of the mayhem, but all meaningful motives remain mysterious.



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Movie Review: Tomb Raider (2018)

An adventure thriller based on the video game series, Tomb Raider reboots the franchise with an athletic and grounded heroine, but cannot escape the drudgery of silly CGI overload.

In London, Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) works as a bike courier and dabbles in mixed martial arts. She refuses to accept that her father Richard (Dominic West) is dead, although the wealthy businessman and adventurer disappeared seven years ago. Richard was on a quest to find the grave of Queen Himiko, an ancient ruler with enormous evil powers, supposedly buried on a remote island in dangerous waters off the coast of eastern Asia.

Lara finds her father's hidden research chamber and travels to Hong Kong, where she teams up with boat owner Lu Ren (Daniel Wu) and they set sail to the island of Yamatai in the Devil's Sea. They wreck on the rocky shores of the island, and stumble upon a well-financed expedition led by the evil Vogel (Walton Goggins). He is intent on finding Himiko's grave to benefit the shadowy Trinity organization.

With the video game series rebooted in 2013, the movie franchise follows with this effort, directed by Road Uthaug. Tomb Raider is an origins story with a focus on the relationship between Lara and her father, and the first 30 minutes work well. Alicia Vikander brings a vulnerable sincerity to the role, and Lara is introduced as a compelling central character struggling to define her place in the world and resisting the idea that her father is gone forever.

Once Lara arrives in Hong Kong both Uthaug and the film start to lose their way. An endless and needless chase scene with some nondescript goons along the ramshackle waterfront is quickly followed by the arrival of messy CGI as Lara and Lu Re wreck their boat in the middle of a nighttime storm. By the time Vogel is introduced as a traditional heartless and psychotic villain, Tomb Raider is relegated to the ranks of countless mindless action films, the characters confined to the back row well behind the special effects, ridiculous stunts and mind-numbing escapes from death, which arrive at the rate of one per 3.5 minutes.

Vikander's good work is wasted, her athleticism often diverted towards surviving punching bag duties. The two hours feel like three as Himiko's grave site is finally penetrated, triggering a tired rehash of sequential trap dodging ideas dating back to early Indiana Jones and Mummy days.

Tomb Raider opens the creaky crypt door with some optimism, but is quickly sucked into the same old rot.

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Movie Review: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

A lighthearted yet effective spy thriller, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is zippy, action-packed, and playfully funny.

It's the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War. The CIA's suave agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) extracts mechanic Gabriella "Gaby" Teller (Alicia Vikander) from East Berlin under the nose of the KGB's Ilya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer). But Solo and Kuryakin are then forced by their bosses to work together on a dangerous mission to track down Gaby's father, nuclear scientist Dr. Udo Teller (Christian Berkel), who has disappeared.

The superpowers suspect that wealthy industrialists and Nazi sympathizers Alexander and Victoria Vinciguerra (Luca Calvani and Elizabeth Debecki) have abducted Teller and are forcing him to develop a technique to mass manufacture nuclear bombs. Solo, Kuryakin and Gaby travel to Rome where Gaby's uncle Rudi (Sylvester Groth) works for the Vinciguerras. The spies have to infiltrate the network of evildoers, find Teller and guard against each other, while Gaby has her own agenda.

An attempted rebirth for the 1960s television series starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, the big screen return of U.N.C.L.E. combines action, humour and a good dose of personal rivalry. Directed and co-written by Guy Ritchie, the film stays true to the spirit of the original series. The story does not take itself too seriously, Solo and Kuyakin are both really good at what they do but also never quite friends, and the overall vibe of the sixties among the jet set is irresistible.

Ritchie conjures up several brilliantly kinetic set-pieces, always laced with a mean streak of humour. The frantic yet elegant opening escape from Berlin sets the stage and introduces Solo's ingenuity and coolness under pressure as well as Kuryakin's uncompromising persistence. Later a motorboat chase is elevated to sublime character-driven artistry, Kuryakin increasingly desperate on the water, Solo in a truck listening to romantic music while munching a sandwich, the two men apart but about to become professionally inseparable. An electric chair "glitch" is also a masterful display of background humour.

If one thing limits U.N.C.L.E., it's a lack of overall originality. The television series was always riffing on the James Bond tune, and the film, while undoubtedly polished to a modern shine, is obviously playing with a very old deck. From the foreign settings to the seduction of exotic women to the McGuffin of a disk at the heart of the chase, all the elements are overly familiar. Ritchie does his best to infuse style, including busy editing to play with micro level scene sequencing, but little that is new can be wrung out of the sophisticated spy sub-genre.

The performances are both slick and predictable, Cavill perhaps pitching for future consideration as Bond, while Vikander has the most fun with Gaby, the one character holding more cards that she initially lets on. Hugh Grant gets a small role as a master spy handler.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. may lack substantive innovation, but the film anyway has fun revisiting past glories.

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Movie Review: The Fifth Estate (2013)

A biographical technology drama, The Fifth Estate delves into the chaotic formative years of WikiLeaks and the profound questions caused by the sudden public availability of state secrets.

The film briefly starts in 2010, with The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel about to co-publish The Afghan War Logs, derived from thousands of United States secret government cables leaked to WikiLeaks by Bradley Manning. The story then shifts back to 2008, when German tech whiz Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) meets and agrees to help WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch). Assange is passionate about providing an unfiltered anonymous platform for whistleblowers to reveal hidden corporate and government information.

The popularity of WikiLeaks grows with revelations about tax evasion on a grand scale at a Swiss Bank. Daniel is captivated by Julian, who is enigmatic but also obsessed with his own version of the truth and not beyond twisting facts for his benefit. The worldwide scoops multiply, and WikiLeaks becomes a thorn in the US government's side. Daniel's relationship with girlfriend Anke (Alicia Vikander) suffers, and more tension lies ahead as Assange seems oblivious to the individual harm that could be caused by the release of unredacted data.

Directed by Bill Condon, The Fifth Estate is only a few years removed from the events depicted. Both a biography of Assange and a commentary on the rapidly shifting world of no secrets, the film is always dynamic, sometimes frantic, and often resembles the chaotic no-one-is-in-control reality of information in the citizen journalist world.

The Fifth Estate is based on two 2011 books: Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website by Domscheit-Berg, and WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy by David Leigh and Luke Harding. And this is not a hero-worship story: the film presents Assange as a deeply flawed man living in his own world, charismatic enough to dominate a room and attract ardent followers but also blinkered in pursuing a self-defined mission. It's an attractive proposition for a biography to pursue, and allows screenwriter Josh Singer to chase the various shades of grey morality in the WikiLeaks story.

Aware that the film is treating history too close to the source, Condon expands the breadth and triangulates numerous issues, rather than diving too deeply into any one aspect. The Fifth Estate takes pains to cover the people, the technology, the profession of journalism, the actual historical events, and the implications both intended and not, and never dwells for too long in one place. There is something here from every angle, and while none of it is perfect or fully satisfying, it is all rich fodder for thoughtful discussion.

Through the sub-story of a trio of State Department and White House officials (played by Laura Linney, Stanley Tucci and Anthony Mackie) struggling to cope with the sensitive state secrets suddenly detonating on WikiLeaks, Condon takes a stab at reflecting the information age's unexpected consequences. He also throws in a sub-sub-story of an American informant in the Libyan government, whose identity is potentially exposed in the leaks.

Elsewhere traditional journalists at The Guardian, already struggling with the digital revolution, now have to contend with defending their professional standards as a tsunami of astounding information is about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world in unfiltered format. Are the rules being rewritten, or is this the reason the tried and tested rules exist in the first place?

Benedict Cumberbatch delivers a chilling performance as Assange, self-assured, emotionally domineering and steely-eyed, his shock of white hair working to his advantage. Daniel Brühl gets plenty of screen time, and the film is as much the Domscheit-Berg story as it is about Assange, and this is not necessarily always a good thing. Alicia Vikander cannot do much with the role of the token girlfriend.

The Fifth Estate doesn't contain any great revelations, yet it's a stylish point-in-time marker, a chronicle of an inflection point in privacy's death march. Governments are also losing the right to keep any secrets, and all it took was one determined man and one website to make it happen.

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The Movies Of Alicia Vikander

All movies starring Alicia Vikander and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Fifth Estate (2013)

Ex Machina (2014)

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

The Danish Girl (2015)

Burnt (2015)

Jason Bourne (2016)

The Light Between Oceans (2016)

Tomb Raider (2018)

Beckett (2021)

The Assessment (2024)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Ex Machina (2014)

A near-future psychological science thriller, Ex Machina peeks into the potential ramifications of evolving artificial intelligence and offers a stark vision.

Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is a programmer working for Blue Book, the world's dominant on-line search engine. Caleb wins an employee contest to spend a week at the home of Blue Book's reclusive founder Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). After a helicopter trip Caleb arrives at the luxurious but secluded house, where Nathan gives him his assignment for the week: Caleb is to interact with Ava (Alicia Vikander), Nathan's latest artificially intelligent robot, to determine her level of self-consciousness through a version of the Turing test

Caleb starts spending time with Ava in sessions recorded and monitored by Nathan, and Ava quickly demonstrates that she is indeed supremely capable of displaying human cognition and emotions. Between the sessions Caleb gets to know Nathan, who emerges as a hard drinking, lonely but manipulative genius. When mysterious power outages start to repeatedly disrupt the interactions with Ava, Caleb suspects there is more going on than he initially believed.

Written and directed by Alex Garland, Ex Machina is sparse, sometimes slow moving but always thought provoking. With the sleek look of detached modernity, Garland extends the Frankenstein narrative into the age of advanced robotics, and proposes a viable scenario where unintended consequences, both human and artificial, are the norm. When artificial intelligence includes heightened self awareness and inherent sexuality, the line between intelligent human and intelligent machine begins to blur, loyalties merge, and outcomes are predictably unpredictable.

The film is a three-person (or two-person, one robot) character study set almost entirely at Nathan's house, and the locations are limited to a handful of rooms. Garland effectively designs a theatrical dynamic where the three characters are forced to interact together by choice or design, and the implications of Ava's near-human levels of intellect and emotion are revealed through Caleb's eyes. Ava wastes no time in gaining the emotional upper hand and starts to dominate her visitor's psyche, maybe to get back at her creator or maybe just because she is bored and looking for an escape. Whether Nathan is implicated in her behaviour or simply her inventor is the puzzle that Caleb has to grapple with as the dark side of artificial intelligence evolution starts to emerge.

The film encounters a few substantive weaknesses. In stretching to 108 minutes of running time Garland notably runs out of original ideas about halfway through, and some of the scenes between Caleb and Nathan descend into tiresome drunken stupors. The ending picks up energy but in the wrong direction: Ex Machina abandons its more cerebral pursuits to chase more familiar but less satisfying conclusions. The robots are getting more clever, but the humans sometimes still get stuck in stock territory.

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Movie Review: The Light Between Oceans (2016)

A weighty and visually beautiful drama, The Light Between Oceans features a commanding story of human anguish but the film is drawn out beyond the capacity of the story.

Rural Western Australia, just after the end of the Great War. Tom (Michael Fassbender) has experienced hell in the trenches and is looking for a quiet place to emotionally recuperate. He accepts a job as a remote lighthouse keeper on a rocky outcrop accessible only by boat. While briefly visiting the nearby town, Tom meets and falls in love with the lively Isabel (Alicia Vikander). She joins him on the island and they try to start a family, but tragedy strikes in the form of two successive miscarriages.

With Isabel still grieving, a drifting lifeboat washes up on the island. Inside is a living newborn baby and a dead adult man. Isabel immediately takes to the child and insists that they keep it as their own. Tom is torn between making his wife happy and doing the right thing in reporting the incident and helping to find the baby's real parents. He yields to Isabel's desires, and they name the baby Lucy. Months later and back in town to baptize Lucy, Tom spots grieving widow Hannah (Rachel Weisz), and realizes that she is Lucy's birth mother.

An adaptation of the M. L. Stedman book directed by Derek Cianfrance, The Light Between Oceans is a melancholy story enlivened by excellent lead performances and stunning landscapes. The plodding place and excessive length erode enjoyment, but the story carries enough strength to maintain interest.

A prevailing theme in the film is post-war emotional doldrums. Tom is suffering from what today would be called post traumatic stress disorder, seeking immense solitude to chase away war demons. Through no fault of her own Isabel is dragged into the emotional abyss caused by successive miscarriages. And later Hannah contributes to the gloom by carrying the burden of a family shattered under bigoted circumstances.

With the three main characters suffering under the pressure of severe emotional anguish, The Light Between Oceans is not a happy place. The film almost revels in endless misery, the brief moments of happiness, such as the early days of Tom and Isabel's marriage, only serving as preludes to deeper valleys of despair ahead.

Adam Arkapaw's cinematography cuts through some of the psychological darkness to capture some uplifting if harsh scenery. The small island housing the lighthouse, the cute town representing the closest civilization and the body of water in between all provide opportunities for marvellous feasts for the eyes. And with Cianfrance insisting on the slowest possible speed for the story to unfold, all the pretty pictures help pass the time.

The performances from Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander are both earnest. Fassbender remains committed to a quiet representation of a man seeking emotional rescue initially on his own before accepting a life companion. Vikander gets more variety to play with, first as Isabel chips Tom out of his shell, then traveling through some sharp cycles of giddy happiness inevitably followed by disappointment. Rachel Weisz appears relatively late in the proceedings and is generally underused.

The Light Between Oceans evolves into a war survivor's search for purpose, and a deep commitment to love that drives a willingness to sacrifice. Although not nearly as profound as perhaps intended, the film is nevertheless a reasonably rewarding story of the tenacity that resides within genuine human attachments.

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Movie Review: Jason Bourne (2016)

Star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass return to the series, and offer more of the same. Jason Bourne teases out a promising story that adds depth to the central character, but is otherwise obsessed with ridiculously over-the-top action set pieces that defy all laws of physics and human endurance while occupying copious amounts of screen time.

Former CIA agent Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) hacks into the agency's network and uncovers evidence that Jason Bourne's father Richard Webb (Gregg Henry) was instrumental in instigating the ill-fated Treadstone covert program. Nicky alerts Bourne (Matt Damon), who is in self-imposed off-the-grid hiding, reduced to bare knuckle fighting to make a living. Nicky's hack is detected, and CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) tasks Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), the ambitious new head of the Cyber Ops Division, to clean up. Heather activates a hit man known only as the Asset (Vincent Cassel) to track and kill both Nicky and Bourne, and he almost succeeds in a chaotic Athens.

The Asset bears a personal grudge against Bourne, but after delving in Jason's files, Heather starts to believe Bourne can be brought back into the fold rather than killed. This puts her on a collision course with Dewey who just wants Bourne terminated for self preservation reasons. Meanwhile, Dewey's newest illicit program has him partnering with technical wizard Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), the CEO of social media giant Deep Dream, to harvest massive amounts of global personal information. Bourne starts to investigate the role his father played in his troubled career, all while evading the Asset and wondering whether he can trust Heather.

The fifth film in the Bourne series, the fourth to feature Damon and the third directed by Greengrass, Jason Bourne is glossy, professional and undoubtedly exciting. But the film also barely brings anything new to the table. The action moves from Athens to Berlin to London and then onto Las Vegas, but all the hyper-kinetic, micro-edited scenes of carnage now fall into familiar territory.

The motorbike chase, the chaotic crowd scene, the narrow escapes, the hand to hand combat to the death and the ridiculous car chase: they are all here, they all go on for too long, and they've all been seen before in this very series. Bourne has a narrow escape or cheats death at the rate of once per five minutes, and has the resilience to routinely survive collisions with fixed and moving objects that would reduce mere mortals to a vegetative state. And most tiresome of all are more retreads of scenes at CIA HQ, with multiple monitors flickering and grim faced operations commanders like Lee and Dewey barking orders and moving assets into position like pawns on a digital chess board.

On the more positive side, the film tries to include some new wrinkles to keep the series relevant and aware of current events. There are nods to the refugee crisis in Europe, and a toe-dipping into the grey world of mass surveillance using back doors within social media apps. The backstory related to the role of Bourne's dad in the agency and a deadly explosion in Beirut add good context to the convoluted Bourne family history.

Damon remains smooth in the role, projecting just enough emotion at the right times to serve as a reminder that there is a person in the middle of all the projectiles. Vikander is a welcome addition to the series. Tommy Lee Jones finds the weathered look of an old man ready to cut to the chase of kill or be killed, Dewey no longer possessing the patience for drawn-out strategic encounters. Vincent Cassel infuses the hitman role with more texture than usual, but further details on his story and background would have been appreciated.

Greengrass stubbornly sticks to his jerky, hand-held, up-close-and-personal style, the action amplified into a million edits none lasting for more than a split second. The eye catches glimpses of what may be going on and leaves it to the brain to try and make some sense of the fractured mosaic. It is undoubtedly artistry in editing, but nevertheless remains an annoying celebration of choppiness gone mad.

Although undoubtedly slick and efficient, Jason Bourne's biggest battle is against familiar motions and seen-before visual tactics.

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Movie Review: The Danish Girl (2015)

A drama loosely inspired by real events, The Danish Girl is the story of artist Einar Wegener who underwent a pioneering sexual transformation to become Lili Elbe. The film features remarkable performances from Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander, but suffers from slow pacing and a narrow focus.

It's the mid-1920s in Copenhagen, and landscape artist Einar Wegener (Redmayne) is celebrated in cultural circles. His wife Gerda (Alicia) is also an artist but still struggling to establish herself. Einar starts to display a strong emotional attraction towards women's clothing, and Gerda encourages him to model for her in a dress. She then helps Einar attend a social party as a woman, and the persona of Lili emerges. A physical encounter with a man called Henrik (Ben Whishaw) causes confusion and resentment, with Einar and Gerda unsure whether Henrik is attracted to Lili as a woman or Einar as a cross-dresser.

Einar starts to feel more comfortable as a woman, and gradually Lili becomes the more dominant presence. Gerda's career takes an upturn when her contemplative paintings of Lili find a market, but with her marriage in turmoil, she turns to Einar's childhood friend Hans (Matthias Schoenaerts) for help. Lili consults with a succession of doctors to find a pathway to happiness, and finally starts to work with doctor Kurt Warnekros (Sebastian Koch) on a potential groundbreaking sex reassignment surgery.

Directed by Tom Hooper, The Danish Girl takes quite a few liberties with the story, but remains an affecting and well-intentioned film. Einar's transformation to Lili is portrayed as difficult, courageous and slow, a journey of self discovery made more challenging by the artists' public profile and happy home life. The film is a quiet and considered human drama, and unfolds with plenty of tenderness. It is also visually appealing, the artistic social circles of Copenhagen and later Paris of the 1920s recreated with understated elegance.

However, the film is also quite slow and singular. The pacing is anemic, scenes often stretched thin and well past their usefulness as Hooper struggles to find enough material to fill two hours. The Lucinda Coxon script is also unable to branch into any real breadth. The secondary characters hover around Einar and Gerda in a state of undefined animation. Lili's clumsy interactions with Henrik and later Hans' blatant pursuit of the vulnerable Gerda are fragments of sub-plots that fail to properly progress.

The two central performances are excellent. Eddie Redmayne seamlessly evolves with his character from Einar to Lili. And as Lili, Redmayne is perfect in continuing the transition from a stiff man learning to emerge as a woman, and then gradually as a confident woman who can no longer imagine functioning as a man. Alicia Vikander is excellent in strong support, The Danish Girl also the story of an astute wife grappling with a seismic shift in her life's expectations. Vikander keeps Gerda balanced between tentatively supportive and understandably bewildered, always keeping an eye on her own happiness and never dropping into sappy self-sacrifice territory.

An essential story of individual and societal progression, The Danish Girl is sometimes poignant but also ponderous.

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