Movie Review: Fractured (2019)

Genre: Thriller  

Director: Brad Anderson  

Starring: Sam Worthington, Lily Rabe  

Running Time: 100 minutes  

Synopsis: Bickering married couple Ray and Joanne (Sam Worthington and Lily Rabe) and their young daughter Peri are on a long drive home after Thanksgiving at her parents. They stop at a gas station, where Peri has an accident and hurts her arm. At a nearby hospital Peri is treated by Dr. Berthram (Stephen Tobolowsky) and sent for a scan, separating Ray from his wife and daughter. When he wakes up in the waiting room, his family is missing.

What Works Well: This efficient something-is-wrong-here thriller effectively juggles conspiracy vibes with a psychological unraveling. Director Brad Anderson keeps both explanations on the table by simultaneously dropping hints about Ray's decaying mental state and the hospital's shady practices. The mounting tension is augmented by a troubled backstory that allows Sam Worthington to leverage complexity in the midst of turmoil.

What Does Not Work As Well: The wife-mysteriously-vanishes genre has been well-covered, and here the traditional thriller elements yield to gun wielding and physical altercations that are misplaced within the hospital milieu, and much less interesting than the psychological edginess.

Key Quote:

Dr. Berthram: So, what's the story, young lady?

Peri Monroe: I fell.

Dr. Berthram: Yeah. Sooner or later everybody does. Right dad?

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Movie Review: Man On A Ledge (2012)

A dramatic thriller, Man On A Ledge is a wild-enough ride through a too-insane-to-matter plot.

Former police officer Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) is serving prison time for stealing and fragmenting a large precious diamond, a crime he denies committing. He escapes, and a month later books a hotel room in Manhattan, writes a suicide note, and steps out onto the ledge. Detective Jack Dougherty (Edward Burns) is first on the scene, but Nick demands to talk with negotiator Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks). 

As the expected crowd and media hordes gather at street level, Nick's ex-partner Ackerman (Anthonie Mackie) and Sergeant Marcus (Titus Welliver) follow the drama with interest. They realize Nick's stunt is a distraction to allow his brother Joey (Jamie Bell) and Joey's girlfriend Angie (Genesis Rodriguez) to infiltrate the vault of corrupt real estate tycoon David Englander (Ed Harris) and steal the diamond for real, proving Nick's innocence. But Englander has many police officers on his payroll, and is determined to hold onto the diamond.

Written by Pablo Fenjves and directed by Asger Leth, Man On A Ledge is a heist movie jazzed up with a needlessly complicated backstory, but also handsomely mounted with a sense of glib bravado. Whether with Nick on a ledge threatening an instant death or with Joey and Angie navigating Englander's alarm systems, the tension of a misstep is always near. Leth finds edgy perspectives and keeps his cameras moving despite the potentially static premise.

The visual gloss is necessary, because the actual plot is well past ludicrous. The holes are large and obvious, starting with not a single police officer in New York recognizing the supposedly notorious Nick, who is keen to buy time by refusing to disclose his identity. A large building rooftop explosion attracts no attention, then Joey and Angie are clever enough to defeat the city's most elaborate security system, but need to radio Nick - on that ledge - to recognize a heat detector. 

The performances are of the adequate variety. Elizabeth Banks benefits from the most depth as her character deals with the trauma of a previous failed negotiation and is now forced to re-test her instincts. Ed Harris phones in a bad guy performance and does not look healthy doing it. 

As typically happens with thrillers tethered to one location, Fenjves starts to clutch at flimsy reasons to keep Nick suspended in place, and it's a relief when he finally abandons the jumper pretense and swings into action during the suitably chaotic climax. Man On A Ledge offers a good view, as long as the details are left unscrutinized.

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Movie Review: Sabotage (2014)

An action thriller, Sabotage is crammed full of repetitive scenes and bloody carnage, all to little effect.

In Atlanta, John "Breacher" Wharton (Arnold Schwarzenegger) leads his elite Drug Enforcement Agency special ops team as they raid a fortified cartel headquarters. The bad guys are eliminated, and Breacher's crew also steal $10 million in cash to keep for themselves, but the stolen money quickly goes missing.

An internal investigation yields no outcome and months later Breacher reunites with his group, now wracked by guilt and suspicion. Soon the team members are getting murdered in gory ways, attracting the attention of Detective Caroline Brentwood (Olivia Williams). Breacher has to keep Caroline out of the way as he tries to identify the vicious enemies intent on eliminating his unit.

Primarily obsessed with puddles of blood and a surplus of gore, Sabotage trips up on repetitive scenes, an utter absence of charisma, and uniformly unlikable characters. Director and co-writer David Ayer scrapes the bottom of the dialogue barrel, everyone's vocabulary limited to predictable profanities and hurled insults.

Arnold Schwarzenegger at 67 years old is several decades too old for the role, and he is surrounded by the likes of Sam Worthington and Terrence Howard far from their best work. The conspiracy plot wades into ever more absurd territory with every murder, and the introduction of a personal vendetta angle for Breacher arrives too late and further strains credibility. Action scenes are supposed to somewhat rescue movies like this, but here Ayer rinses and repeats the same tactical unit building invasion shots every 10 minutes.

Neither smart nor fun, Sabotage self-destructs.



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Movie Review: Cake (2014)

A psychological drama, Cake features a strong Jennifer Aniston performance but is too slow to shift gears away from the doldrums of grief.

Claire (Aniston) is suffering from enormous physical pain and scars as well as emotional stress further to a devastating car accident. She is also dealing with the suicide of Nina (Anna Kendrick), a member of her support group, with Nina's ghost making frequent appearances to communicate.

Claire has kicked her husband Jason (Chris Messina) out of the house, and because she refuses to sit upright in any car, she leans heavily on housekeeper Silvana (Adriana Barraza) for transportation. Claire manages the chronic pain through large amounts of painkillers provided by her doctor Annette (Felicity Huffman). Through the haze of depression and discomfort she connects with Nina's angry husband Roy (Sam Worthington), and they start an awkward relationship.

Directed by Daniel Barnz, Cake zooms in on one individual character in a state of crisis. The film offers an intriguing enough premise, exploring in depth the iron grip brought forth by excruciating pain, discomfort, physical scarring, and calamitous emotional loss. The film deserves credit for portraying Claire as more than a victim deserving of sympathy. She is also now enraged, frustrated, insensitive and resorting to pressure and lies to get what she wants.

But beyond the prevalent motif, Cake stalls. Barnz and writer Patrick Tobin appear content to allow Claire to spin endlessly within the locked box she finds herself in, and for too long the film revisits the same misery-propelled themes, from the macabre appeal of Nina's exit to Claire's self-justified attitude of insolence and the ease with which she uses others to try and fill the vacuum inside.

By the time the film finally creaks forward and attempts to evolve the narrative past the thick dollops of grief, it's too late, and the metaphors related to baking cakes for others and the last minute introduction of a brief houseguest are clumsy and underdeveloped ideas.

Jennifer Aniston again proves that she can excel in drama, and offers a deglamorized role filled with a curtain of darkness behind her eyes, as Claire silently rages against a life-altering catastrophe. Adriana Barraza emerges as the most interesting secondary character, the housekeeper taking the brunt of Claire's interrupted life and search for others to lean on.

Cake is not without merits, but is no better than half-baked.

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Movie Review: Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

A war epic based on a true story, Hacksaw Ridge is the stunning story of a conscientious objector who stuck to his principles and found his purpose on a tortuous field of battle.

With World War Two rumbling to a start, Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) from rural Virginia enlists in the Army. Desmond grew up to despise violence, having been raised in a strictly religious family dominated by his father Tom (Hugo Weaving), a drunk, abusive and emotionally damaged World War One veteran. Desmond refuses to carry a weapon, and wants to serve his country as a medic. His anti-violence stance as a conscientious objector who nevertheless volunteered confounds the army. His unit Sergeant Howell (Vince Vaughn) tries to drum him out, while his squad mates, including Glover (Sam Worthington) and Riker (Luke Bracey) turn against him and label him a coward.

With help from an unlikely intervention by his father, Doss eventually gets his way, stays with the army, graduates as a medic, and marries his sweetheart, the nurse Dorothy (Teresa Palmer). His squad is dispatched to join the Battle of Okinawa, and quickly thrown into a meat grinder of a fight to dislodge the Japanese army from well-entrenched positions on top of a steep embankment labelled Hacksaw Ridge. With grim determination on both sides resulting in mass casualties on a brutal battlefield, the weaponless Doss will find his true calling.

Mel Gibson returns to the director's chair for the first time since 2006, and delivers a raw human story soaked in the blood and gore of battle. Hacksaw Ridge is an unflinching look at true heroism, and Gibson finds in Desmond Doss an assuming oddball, a deeply religious pacifist looking for his calling in the heat of battle. Doss won the Medal of Honor, and Hacksaw Ridge is a deeply satisfying salute to selfless courage.

The film is divided into three parts, with some flashbacks in the later scenes to fill in the gaps. The first third is an elegantly delivered coming of age love story, Desmond's background and formative years presented under the blazing sun of farm-bred innocence and the dark clouds of a damaged father figure. Key incidents from Doss's early life are efficiently presented, as he grows into a teenager willing to stand up to Tom, protective of his mother Bertha (Rachel Griffiths), and dogged in his pursuit of the ethereal Dorothy.

The middle of the film is a search for self: Doss knows he wants to be in the army, is insistent that he wants to go war without a weapon, and is stubborn about both obsessions to the point of taking on an incredulous army establishment. Slowly he garners a grudging respect among the fellow trainees who don't understand him, but even the grunts and sergeants begin to admire something intangible in the gangly kid with a goofy attitude but a core of steel.

The foundations solidly laid, Gibson moves confidently into the final act, shifting gears and creating nothing less than hell on earth. Taking the opening 27 minutes of Saving Private Ryan as just a starting point in the realistic representation of battle, Hacksaw Ridge goes beyond what is easily imaginable, presenting a harrowing close-up vision of war and its destructive impact on bodies and souls.

The Battle of Okinawa is recognized as one of the bloodiest of the entire conflict, with estimates of up to 130,000 soldiers killed, and is cited as one of the core reasons the decision was made to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. Gibson does not flinch from what this level of human carnage means: in a series of battles at close quarters, men are torn to pieces, guts are spilled, partial torsos are used as bullet shields, and rats feast on human remains. Death rains in from all directions, and Gibson leaves no doubt what the field of combat can do to a man who survives the horror. Suddenly both Tom's descent into an alcohol-fuelled depression and Desmond's anti-war stance make perfect sense.

The camerawork in the combat zones is superb. Gibson along with cinematographer Simon Duggan and editor John Gilbert keep the images rational, the cameras fluid, up close but only slightly jerky. The images of brutality, death, and heroism never compete with stunt directing and micro editing.

Andrew Garfield is serviceable and stays loyal to Desmond's admittedly dopey persona. Vince Vaughn finally demonstrates some acting chops outside of lame comedies, and enjoys a tremendous entry scene, Sergeant Howell invading the barracks of the new army recruits and exposing them to his brand of discipline and humiliation. Sam Worthington and Luke Bracey are the most prominent of the many fellow soldiers who endure the war with Desmond and witness or benefit from his exceptional audacity.

Hacksaw Ridge is an instant classic war film, a story of true love, religious conviction, dedicated service and remarkable bravery set amidst the worst form of perdition.

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Movie Review: Texas Killing Fields (2011)

A bleak crime drama, Texas Killing Fields offers a moody atmosphere, but is undermined and ultimately sunk by a cluttered and wayward script.

In Texas City, the body of a brutally murdered young woman is discovered. Detectives Mike Souder (Sam Worthington) and Brian Heigh (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) start to investigate. Meanwhile Detective Pam Stall (Jessica Chastain) is responsible for the surrounding rural area, notorious for the high number of murdered and missing women dating back to the 1970s. Pam also has a missing woman case on her hands and calls for help from Brian and Mike, the latter being her former husband.

Complicating life for the detectives is concern for Anne Sliger (Chloë Grace Moretz), a young teenager living with her white trash single mother Lucie (Sheryl Lee) and older brother Eugene (James Hebert). Lucie is a local whore of sorts, and the menacing Rhino (Stephen Graham) appears to move into her house to help himself to a piece of her action.

Mike wants to focus his effort on the Texas City murder, while Brian, a deeply religious man, is more inclined to widen the investigation to help Pam and include the surrounding swampy fields. Mike zeroes in on pimps Levon (Jon Eyez) and Rule (Jason Clarke) as potentially involved in murder, while Brian enlists the services of a phone company contact to try and triangulate the origins of cell phone calls linked to the murders. The detectives soon find themselves being taunted and drawn into a deadly game with the mysterious killer.

Inspired by real events and directed by Ami Canaan Mann (daughter of Michael Mann), Texas Killing Fields throws plenty of characters and events of the screen, but fails to make any of them count. Three detectives, four creepy possible villains, several victims, many crime scenes, plus a few side-plots: there is plenty going on, and unfortunately none of it captivates. The film is stylishly assembled and the lead performances are professional enough, but the final product is badly let down by a confused script and poor execution.

The film is written by Don Ferrarone and it does appear that in trying to create a dramatic fictional narrative, the enormity of the real life agonies and tragedies of the Texas Killing Fields along Interstate 45 overwhelmed the writing. The resultant tone is simply off. Somehow, the most important debate presented in the film is whether Mike and Brian should or should not help Pam, who is outside their jurisdiction. On multiple occasions Mike berates Brian for venturing into the hinterlands instead of sticking close to home. With everything going on, it's a stupefying issue to repeatedly waste screen time on.

Meanwhile, we learn precious little about Mike, Brian and Pam, except that they are grim faced, dour and fairly snappy with each other. The ashes of the relationship between Mike and Pam just scatter in the wind, serving no purpose. Similarly Brian's religious fervor is introduced and forgotten.

The murder suspects fare much worse. Levon, Rule, Rhino and Eugene must be despicable characters because they scowl at the camera, have tattoos, and generally look the way pedophiles and pimps are supposed to. They remain prototypical bad guys with no backstory. Even less is known about the murder victims and their families. And then Mann throws into the mix even more peripheral characters in the form of prostitutes and runaway kids, who drift in and out of various scenes and serve to further distract from a focus that is never found.

With Worthington, Morgan and Chastain stuck in angry detective mode, it is left to Chloë Grace Moretz and Sheryl Lee to deliver the most affecting performances in relatively small roles. Moretz is steady, her vulnerability representing potential victims who come from hopelessly broken homes. Lee is the stand-out performer as Lucie, a woman so far gone into desperation that she routinely kicks her daughter out of the house to better serve her sleazy clients.

Despite earnest intentions and no shortage of talent, Texas Killing Fields is messier than grasslands trampled by an unruly herd, and a regrettably wasted opportunity.

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The Movies Of Sam Worthington

All movies starring Sam Worthington and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Terminator: Salvation (2009)

Avatar (2009)

The Debt (2010)

Texas Killing Fields (2011)

Man On A Ledge (2012)

Sabotage (2014)

Cake (2014)

Everest (2015)

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

Fractured (2019)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: The Debt (2010)

A decades-spanning action drama set in the world of Mossad agents, The Debt is a powerful story about spies grappling with personal agonies in a world that demands heroes and easy victories.

The film unfolds in two time periods, 1965 and 1997, with the same characters portrayed by different actors. In 1965, Mossad agents Rachel (Jessica Chastain), David (Sam Worthington) and Stefan (Marton Csokas) are sent on a dangerous mission to East Berlin. They are to abduct and bring back to Israel Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel, more famously known as the Surgeon of Birkenau for his macabre wartime experiments on concentration camp prisoners.

David is a sensitive introvert, while Stefan is the more cocky extrovert. Both men fall in love with the determined and capable Rachel. The trio do find and capture Vogel, but the mission runs into trouble before they can smuggle him out of East Berlin. In captivity at the safe house, the former Nazi turns out to be a formidable foe, but nevertheless, Rachel, David and Stefan eventually return home as heroes, their mission proclaimed a great success. A pregnant Rachel marries Stefan soon afterwards.

In Tel Aviv of 1997, Rachel (Helen Mirren) is being feted on the cocktail circuit. Her daughter Sarah (Romi Aboulafia) has just published a book chronicling the famous 1965 mission. The celebrations are marred when David (Ciarán Hinds) commits suicide by stepping in front of a large truck. Stefan (Tom Wilkinson), now a senior Mossad executive but confined to a wheelchair, reconnects with his ex-wife Rachel. David's suicide is a sure sign that all is not well in the spy world, and Rachel will reluctantly be drawn back into a world of intrigue that she thought was firmly in her past.

Visiting some of the same territory as 2005's Munich, The Debt is a film that demands concentration. Director John Madden jumps around between 1965 and 1997, and adds a brief stop in 1970 for good measure. With six actors portraying the three main characters, this is a film where it is imperative to quickly understand who-is-who, when and where. Madden pulls off the not insignificant trick of keeping the narrative cohesive while simultaneously establishing three unique characters and the psychological luggage they have accumulated over 32 years.

The pay-off for investing in the film's complex structure is immense. Madden and the team of screenwriters (Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan) reveal the secrets of the plot slowly, in tantalizing increments, first introducing a sense of lingering unease, then an unresolved dynamic between Rachel, David and Stefan, and finally, a quite stunning secret hiding at the heart of their professional lives. The film works its way towards a simmering conflict that draws in personal achievement, honour, private emotions and national pride, resulting in a delicate balance constructed in 1965 but at risk of collapsing in 1997.

The Debt also pokes away at the deep scars of the holocaust. The character of Vogel emerges as an evil Nazi catalyst for the ages, chillingly adept at matching wits with the Mossad agents despite being shackled. He finds their weaknesses, pushes their buttons, and seeks any advantage, turning what was an already dangerous mission into a journey through psychological hell for Rachel and her colleagues. This added layer of dark human sparring elevates The Debt to a level of intellectual excellence rarely encountered in a spy action drama.

The film's aesthetics are as grim and layered as the subject matter. The Ben Davis cinematography brings to life an East Berlin bathed in dank browns, yellows and greys, the iron curtain firmly closed and controlled by a police state.

Jessica Chastain delivers an amazing performance, conveying the fragility of a new field agent dropped into the real world of danger, falling in love with rugged colleagues, and having to stare down a butcher of men. Her scenes as Rachel overcomes her horror and disgust and pretends to be Vogel's patient at his gynecology practice are simply devastating in their sheer brilliance. In comparison, Helen Mirren as Rachel in 1997 and the likes of Sam Worthington (intense as the younger David) and Tom Wilkinson (a shrewd political operator as the older Stefan) are merely good.

The Debt is a thought-provoking puzzle, a journey through the moral ambiguity of a world where lust for revenge competes with historical wrongs, and the outcome is both right, wrong, and disastrous, depending on perspective.

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Movie Review: Everest (2015)

Based on the tragic true story of the ill fated May 1996 campaign when eight climbers died over two days, Everest boasts some majestic cinematography, but fundamentally fails to create sufficient human drama to properly resonate.

New Zealander Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), an experienced mountain climber, has invented Everest tourism, whereby relatively inexperienced climbers are guided in large groups up to the world's highest peak. Now others are jumping on the bandwagon, including brash American expedition leader Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), creating a logjam of guides and ill-equipped tourists all wishing to reach the summit in the narrow climbing season window. Rob leaves his pregnant wife Jan (Keira Knightley) behind for his latest assault on the mountain.

His group includes Texas doctor Beck (Josh Brolin), mailman Doug (John Hawkes), Japanese mountaineer Yasuko (Naoko Mori) and Outdoor magazine journalist Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly). Rob's Base Camp support staff consists of logistics manager Helen (Emily Watson) and the group's doctor Caroline Mackenzie (Elizabeth Debicki). Rob and Scott create an uneasy alliance to better manage their way through the crowd of climbing groups, with Russian guide Anatoli Boukreev (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) adding experience to Scott's team. May 10 is the designated day to reach the summit, but a variety of mishaps result in the climb falling dangerously behind schedule, just as a monstrous storm moves in.

The events of May 10 and 11 1996 shocked the world, and placed a focus on mountain climbing tourism, sparking debates about the wisdom of treating Everest like any other item on an adventurer's bucket list. Several books were later written by survivors, including Krakauer's best-selling Into Thin Air and Boukreev's rebuttal The Climb.

With the survivors understandably differing, sometimes bitterly, on many details of exactly what happened on those two chaotic days, the film Everest is not based on any single account. Directed by Baltasar Kormákur and co-written by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy, the film tries to stick to the known facts. Hall is portrayed as a well-intentioned, experienced guide faced with difficult decisions borne out of his love for expanding the appeal of mountain climbing. All the other characters are presented in a rather emotionless manner, their actions provided with the most basic motivation and left to be.

This leaves Everest with plenty of people and not much drama. The battle whereby a mammoth mountain teams up with a massive blizzard to shake off small humans provides plenty of opportunity for astounding cinematography by Salvatore Totino, but is otherwise asymmetrical in the extreme. From the first majestic shots of the intimidating Everest peak and the explanations about the dead zone where the human body starts to die at high altitude, the contest is settled. Kormákur does his best to zoom in on the climbers struggling up and then down the hill, but when everyone is bundled in multiple layers of climbing gear and conversations are reduced to shouting over howling winds, it's difficult to distinguish the characters, or to develop empathy.

Hall and Beck are provided with sketched-in worried-women-back-home, a loving and pregnant partner in Hall's case and a relatively angry and estranged wife for Beck. The rest of the climbers are defined in the broadest terms: Yasuko is aiming to check-off all of the world's tallest peaks; Doug is getting too old and wants one last crack at reaching the peak. Plenty of other faceless climbers trudge through the snow and die with barely an introduction. The actors do what they can, but other than Jason Clarke as Hall and Josh Brolin as Beck, the likes of Gyllenhaal, Knightley, Worthington and Wright are reduced to glorified cameos with disjointed snippets of screen time.

Krakauer, meanwhile, is trying to understand the age-old question of why climbers do what they do. Of course there is no satisfying answer to that conundrum. Some humans will always seek an escape from the mundane by testing themselves against nature, no matter how many times nature tilts the elements in her favour. Everest tries for deeper meaning, but settles for the same conclusion: the people may try hard but the mountain can always choose to win.

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Movie Review: Avatar (2009)

Watching Avatar in 3-D, the word that comes to mind is: game-changer.

In terms of technical achievement, Avatar redefines the benchmarks. Here is a whole new lush planet, Pandora, that comes to life at a level of detail that is orders of magnitude beyond anything seen in the Star Wars movies. Here also is a new virtual species, the Na'vi, who start out looking strange at 10 feet tall, blue and with tails, but end the movie as more familiar and more human than the earthlings.

And most of all, here is gorgeous 3-D technology being put to use to create life without gimmicks, without gizmos, and without spears or rocks being thrown at the audience. The 3-D is simply and brilliantly used to draw the audience into the movie and create a level of involvement never experienced before. Avatar is not a movie watched; it is movie experienced.

After his achievements with Terminator, Titanic, and now Avatar, director and writer James Cameron has cemented his place among the all-time giants of the movies.

The story of Avatar is powerful enough, but will certainly not win any awards for originality. It is a modern, science-driven take on the often-told narrative of invaders with a heavy foot trampling over a pristine land and disrupting the lives of locals. Substitute Pandora for North America and the Na'vi for natives; or allow the whole movie to represent US foreign policy in the Middle East -- it's all been done before.

The details here revolve around mining for the precious mineral called Unobtanium (clever name), which is only found on Pandora. The humans have established a joint scientific / military base to extract the stuff, but unfortunately the Na'vi keep getting in the way. The Na'vi combine ferocious but basic fighting skills with stealth, speed and oneness with nature to create a formidable obstacle in the way of the heavily armed but blunt human troops.

The science team (led by Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine) develops avatars in the shape of the Na'vi, to allow humans to take on native form and appearance. The objective is to better understand what it will take to move the Na'vi out of the way of the biggest Unobtanium deposit.

Jack Sully (Sam Worthington), a paralyzed marine who gains full mobility in his avatar, quickly becomes the focal point for both the scientists and the soldiers, as he is accepted by the Na'vi -- and falls in love with the daughter (Zoe Saldana) of the Na'vi chief. The ensuing conflicts that erupt between duty and love, aliens and natives, scientists and soldiers, science and nature, the physical and the spiritual, are all familiar, but are treated on an impressively grand and deeply satisfying scale.

Avatar is an immersive, breathtaking experience, and claims an undeniable place among the most major of milestones in movie history.



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Movie Review: Terminator Salvation (2009)

The good guys are very macho, the bad guys are very macho, the women are very macho, and the machines are (of course) very macho. In the post-apocalyptic Terminator vision, those who do not drip machismo will be dropped dead and abandoned among the carnage of broken buildings, broken cars, and just plain broken civilization.

The fourth episode of this franchise that started all the way back in 1984, Salvation takes us for the first time into the future that was only hinted at in previous episodes.

The year is 2018, and human soldiers lead by John Connor (a macho Christian Bale) are fighting the war for the survival of the human race against the SkyNet machines that launched Judgement Day on the planet. A mysterious stranger called Marcus (a very macho Sam Worthington) drops into the battle, and we know from the movie's opening sequence that Marcus was a death row inmate who donated his body to science back in 2003.

You would need to be very new to the Terminator concept not to suspect that some re-incarnation of Marcus has been sent through time, this time forwards, probably with some ill intentions towards Connor.

The overall battle between humans and machines then becomes the backdrop to the evolving tension between John and Marcus, with the usual complications thrown in such as major disagreements between Connor and his submarine-dwelling commanders, and a bond that develops between Marcus and one of Connor's soldiers, female (but still macho) pilot Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood).

Bloodgood has probably the most interesting character and performance on display, but unfortunately she fades away due to neglect from the final third of the movie.

Terminator Salvation does only a few things, but it does them well. Director McG ensures that things blow up with big bangs. The war equipment looks authentically grimy, and the set-design is quite brilliant. Those familiar with the computer game Fallout 3 will instantly recognize the striking similarities in the look and feel of the movie.

Terminator Salvation does not pay too much attention to characterizations or any attempts at developing much of a emotional centre of gravity. The characters remain for the most part cardboard cut-outs with dialogue lines inspired by comic books, or previous movies. Michael Ironside as the overall leader of the resistance mails in a performance -- and dialogue -- that he has mass-produced a good dozen times in much worse productions. And there is even a mute long-haired kid here who seems to have time-warped straight in from the set of Mad Max 2 (1981).

Taken as almost a straight-ahead war story with a bit of routine human drama tossed in, Terminator Salvation certainly delivers, but do expect a bit of a hollow spot where the soul of the movie usually resides.







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