Movie Review: The Water Diviner (2014)

A post-war drama, The Water Diviner explores themes of recovery from tragedy and broader cross-cultural understanding. An appropriately somber mood is compromised by too much plot.

In 1919, Australian farmer Joshua Connor (Russell Crowe) is still grieving the death of his three sons in the Gallipoli campaign three years prior. Their bodies were never recovered. When his wife Eliza succumbs to her anguish, Joshua makes the long journey to look for his sons' remains in Turkey. He finds the victorious Allies in control of the country, with Australian Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Hughes (Jai Courtney) leading an excavation of Gallipoli battle sites to recover and identify fallen soldiers. Major Hasan (Yılmaz Erdoğan) of the defeated Turkish army provides reluctant help.

As Joshua searches for the remains of his sons, he tangles with Hasan, who was on the battlefield when the Connor boys died. Joshua also gets involved in the life of widowed innkeeper Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko) and her young son Orhan. Joshua and Hasan move from adversaries to allies, and have to survive skirmishes with the invading Greek army.

The directorial debut of Russell Crowe, The Water Diviner is loosely inspired by real events. The title references Joshua's ability to find water wells in otherwise barren land, a talent that may also translate to locating his fallen sons on a scarred battlefield filled with ghosts. The film's scope is ambitious, almost epic, and combines a father's intimate search with cultural detente. Whether in rural Australia, on the desolate Gallipoli terrain, or within a bustling Istanbul, Andrew Lesnie's cinematography is suitably grand, and portrays Turkey after the Great War as a stunned nation seeking a path to recovery. Efficient flashbacks to grinding trench-to-trench battles are effectively gory but avoid excess.

When the narrative remains focused on healing the wounds of war, The Water Diviner maintains promise. But the script by Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios crosses from expansive to cluttered. Joshua's journey is bogged down in the affairs of the widow Ayshe, who is being pressured into marrying her brother-in-law. Whatever the film wants to say about local culture is lost when the evolving friendship between Joshua and Hasan takes centre stage, followed by the re-emergence of a ragtag Turkish militia to counter unexplained Greek aggression. A surrogate father-son bond between Joshua and Orhan also starts and stops more than once, but not before branching off into a dead-on-arrival subquest for Orhan's father.

Crowe eventually remembers the core plot and gathers up the search-for-the-missing-sons story, achieving some moments of true poignancy. But by then the initial dramatic thrust is dissipated and replaced by unnamed Greek enemies, silly narrow escapes involving cricket bats, and an obligatory overture towards romance.

Crowe directs himself in a soulful and restrained performance, and finds a good foil in Yılmaz Erdoğan's patient portrayal of Major Hasan. Olga Kurylenko is competent but predictable as Ayshe, while the underutilized Jai Courtney brightens proceedings. The Water Diviner finds some wells of inspiration, but also digs then abandons too many holes.



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Movie Review: Oblivion (2013)

A post-apocalyptic science fiction drama, Oblivion is visually gorgeous but compromised by substantive logic gaps.

In 2077, the moon has been destroyed and Earth is uninhabitable after a war with invading alien scavengers ("scavs"). The humans won the war but relocated to Saturn's Titan moon, leaving the gigantic Tet spaceship to orbit Earth. 

Maintenance technician Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his communications partner Vika (Andrea Riseborough) are among the few humans on Earth. Taking instructions from their commander Sally (Melissa Leo) on Tet, they are completing a five year stint maintaining military drones that hunt remaining scavs and protect massive generators converting the ocean's waters to energy.

Jack and Vika are supposed to have had their memories wiped before their maintenance mission, but Jack suffers from persistent flashbacks featuring a mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko). He has also discovered a pasture where nature is recovering, and he yearns to stay on Earth. After he locates a signal broadcasting into space, a human spaceship crash lands. The behaviour of the drones at the crash site and the story of the sole survivor force Jack to question everything he knows.

A combination of dystopian nightmare and hopeful resiliency-of-humanity epic, Oblivion offers plenty to admire. Written and directed by Joseph Kosinski, the cinematography is a feast for the eyes. With seamless CGI effects, the destroyed and abandoned Earth is a desolate, engrossing place, haunted by the remnants of an exploded moon. The command centre in the sky is sleek, and the spacecrafts and drones are clever, agile machines. 

Starting with a well-constructed premise but always hinting at the potential for curves, the plot basics are intriguing. Kosinski reveals the hidden layers of his story in increments, maintaining a good level of curiosity with a succession of twists. Unfortunately, many of the highlights are also familiar from other movies, and under any cursory level of examination the plot details disintegrate.

Also less successful are a couple of unnecessary action scenes thrown in as a check-box exercise. These are notably out of place and poorly executed. The drones invade a hideout, and then pursue a craft in canyon-like terrain, and both sequences are derivative, choppy, and edited with a hatchet.

The cast is small and led by a typically magnetic Tom Cruise performance. Jack Harper benefits from a complex backstory, and Cruise savours it with inquisitive conviction. Andrea Riseborough teases out the tension within a conflicted character, but Melissa Leo has less to. Morgan Freeman and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau enter the narrative about halfway through in smallish but pivotal roles.

Oblivion works best as a tableau of artistry, a vision to be admired from a distance, the details best left unexamined.



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The Movies Of Olga Kurylenko

All movies starring Olga Kurylenko and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Quantum Of Solace (2008)

Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Oblivion (2013)

The November Man (2014)

The Water Diviner (2014)

The Death Of Stalin (2017)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: The November Man (2014)

An espionage action thriller, The November Man skips over logic gaps to extract satisfying thrills from a suitably complex story.

In 2008, CIA agent Peter Devereaux (Pierce Brosnan) and his protege David Mason (Luke Bracey) have a falling out after a botched job in Montenegro. Five years later, Peter is recruited by his former boss John Hanley (Bill Smitrovich) to extract would-be defector and Peter's ex-lover Natalia (Mediha Musliović) from Moscow. She has information compromising Russia's next leader Federov (Lazar Ristovski), related to his history during the Chechen wars.

The Moscow mission goes badly, with Peter and David landing on opposite sides. Natalia's information leads to Belgrade and the hunt for missing ex-refugee Mira Filipova. To find her Peter connects with refugee case worker Alice Fournier (Olga Kurylenko). Meanwhile New York Times reporter Simpson (Patrick Kennedy) is interested in Federov's history, while lethal assassin Alexa (Amila Terzimehić) is terminating everyone connected to the future President's sordid past.

An adaptation of the book There Are No Spies by Bill Granger, The November Man finds star Pierce Brosnan returning to James Bond-style spy action. The title refers to the bleak annihilation Peter Devereaux leaves behind, and this is a gadget-free, more gritty story of dirty global plotting for geopolitical gain. Director Roger Donaldson deserves credit for adopting straight-ahead, maintain-the-momentum pacing while keeping the multi-dimensional and fairly convoluted plot well within coherence limits.

Combining personal vendettas with mission-driven objectives, the action scenes are frequent but short, offering fairly standard thrills at a human scale with the added blessing of rational editing. Belgrade is the main setting and Donaldson makes good use of the city with brisk and bright location work.

The plot features no shortage of twists and turns, some pleasing if predictable and others outright absurd. Admirably avoiding a bland MacGuffin, The November Man is propelled by the grim history of the Chechen wars, the refugee and human trafficking crisis, the atrocities of civilian massacres and the rape and abuse of young women in the shadow of conflict. And the script, co-written by Michael Finch and Karl Gajdusek, expounds on the dark dilemmas inherent in the sometimes contradictory pursuits of justice and long-term global influence.

Pierce Brosnan cuts through the action exuding definitive confidence and little else. Luke Bracey follows suit, a younger version of the same. Olga Kurylenko bursts into prominence late on with a lethal disguise, while Bill Smitrovich adds good texture to the role of Hanley, the CIA man deeply embroiled in international, across-the-decades machinations. 

The November Man is rarely original, but fulfils the mission objectives with credible efficiency.

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Movie Review: Quantum of Solace (2008)

So here is the obvious little fact that seems lost to some movie-makers: when every scene is trying to be a highlight, none of them are.

The latest Bond movie is a mish-mash of attempted highlights, and they all fall into the been-there, done-that category: the car chase; the foot chase; the fight to the death in a hotel room; the boat chase; the airplane chase; the jump from an airplane without a parachute; the out-of-the-way high-tech building that explodes at the ho-hum climax of the movie. The scenes come one after the other at a dizzying pace with no attempt to take the time to build up any kind of thoughtful plot or character. We are left with a hodge-podge of ridiculous scenes that melt into one big mess of boring action.

Director Marc Forster does not help things at all in the editing room. His idea of introducing fake kinetic energy by micro-editing every scene, ensures that we never actually know what is going on. It is a lot easier to chop a scene into a million tiny incomprehensible edits than to actually plan an action scene into a truly visually stunning sequence. The lack of thought in the movie is therefore confounded by a lack of any truly stunning action moments, since no moment can actually be memorable if it lasts for all of 1/1,000th of a second.

So here are the broken pieces of the attempted story in Quantum of Solace: Bond (Daniel Craig) is still pursuing the shadowy evil organization Quantum that he was after in Casino Royale. He is a bit off-mission, since his attention seems to be just as focused on getting revenge on the killers of Vesper, his love interest from that Casino mission. Quantum has infiltrated the British Secret Service, so Bond and M (Judi Dench) do not know who to trust, as Bond runs around Europe and South America in search of the next chase scene.

This all leads to a Mr. Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a member of Quantum masquerading as a high flying environmental entrepreneur, whose latest scheme is to help overthrow the government of Bolivia, (with help from the CIA, naturally), in favour of ruthless military dictators in return for Quantum controlling a piece of desert -- below which runs the water supply for the whole country. Or something. The holes and unexplained developments are much larger than the plot itself, since the movie never actually pauses to give the unfolding story or any of the characters a chance to breathe.

The Bond girl, although remarkably there is neither sex nor even romance between her and Bond, is Bolivian secret agent Camille out to stop Greene from handing her country to the junta, but also pursuing her own revenge theme. As played by Olga Kurylenko, Camille is actually the most interesting thing about this movie. The airhead role goes to actress Gemma Arterton, playing an MI6 agent named, wait for it, Strawberry Fields. She does get into bed with Bond.

After the intense and emotionally involving Casino Royale, where the characters mattered and the plot was allowed to develop, this latest Bond outing is an unfortunate disappointment.






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