Eragon

Oh dear. The success The Lord of the Rings created a boom in fantasy filmmaking, with some very good stuff resulting, but with every boom must come a bust, and thus here we have Eragon. A failure on almost every possible level, I can't even recommend it as an unintentional comedy; and when a bad fantasy film cannot even be that, it's a sure sign of how utterly wretched it is. The source novel, written by a fifteen year old, isn't actually as bad as you'd think. It's not that good either, but it's reasonably entertaining, and there's certainly worse high fantasy out there. The film, however, is one of the worst the genre has ever produced.

A young farm boy called Eragon (Edward Speleers) finds a dragon egg in a forest, which soon hatches into one of the last dragons left in the world. Unfortunately, agents of the evil empire from which it was stolen come to get it back, and murder Eragon's uncle while he's away. Eragon therefore teams up with a wise old wizard (Jeremy Irons) and a loveable rogue (Garrett Hedlund) in order to rescue a princess (Sienna Guillory) from a dark wizard (Robert Carlyle) and get the dragon to the hidden base of the rebels so they can fight against the empire.

The plot is, beat for beat, character for character, stolen from Star Wars, and it takes place in a boring clone of Middle-earth. I'll be the first to admit that Star Wars wasn't the most original film, borrowing liberally as it did from Kurosawa films and the old Flash Gordon serials, but at least it did new and interesting things with the tropes it borrowed; Eragon is just a rote rehashing of tired fantasy cliches which weren't even that interesting when they were new.

Even ignoring the borderline plagiarism, the script is appalling. The characters are utterly lacking in personality, and the film is in such a rush to get to the end that nothing that happens has any impact. At 99 minutes long, it's far too short for an epic fantasy, and has no time for character development or explanation of the plot, jumping disjointedly from one uninteresting set piece to another. The dragon goes from hatchling to fully grown in about 30 seconds, and despite being apparently too young to breathe fire at the beginning, so little time has passed between beginning and end that it goes from “too young” to “napalm-vomiting death machine” in the space of about two days.

Furthermore, a film which cost $100 million has no excuse for looking this bad. Since they apparently spent most of the money on the dragon, most of it takes place in dull forests and hills, and director Stefen Fangmeier has none of the eye for spectacular scenery which made Peter Jackson's opus so remarkable. Instead of orcs we have tribesmen with body paint (because they're cheaper), and the grand final battle is disappointingly, if not surprisingly, small and boring. It looks like a direct-to-DVD film.

The cast don't help matters. Ed Speleers shows all the acting ability of an Attack of the Clones-era Hayden Christensen; John Malkovich is barely in it; and Robert Carlyle is given nothing interesting to do as a colourless knock-off of Darth Vader. Jeremy Irons is the film's one saving grace, trying admirably to lend some gravitas to the proceedings, but even he can't do anything with this script. His performance makes you long for his Profion from Dungeons & Dragons, because at least he was having fun there.

There is nothing to recommend this film. From script, to cast, to effects, it's a complete and unambiguous failure, and will go down in history as one of the immortal low points of the fantasy genre. At least there's no chance of a sequel.

Solomon Kane

Because of the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger film, the Robert E. Howard character most familiar to audiences by far is Conan the Barbarian, and the aforementioned film has gone on to be considered one of the classics of the sword-and-sorcery genre. However, the character of Solomon Kane was created by Howard four years earlier than Conan, but it wasn't until 2009 that he got his own film. It did very poorly at the box office, only making back about half its budget, which is a real shame, because while it will never be as iconic, it's every bit as good as Arnold's Conan.

James Purefoy is Kane, an English mercenary leading an attack against the Ottomans in North Africa. After capturing a fortress, he encounters the Devil's Reaper, who informs him that his soul is damned because of all the terrible things he's done. Fleeing in terror, Kane makes a new life for himself at a monastery in England, hoping that by showing devotion to God and renouncing violence his sins can be absolved. Unfortunately, a new evil soon arises, requiring Kane to take up arms again, and thus risk damnation for himself in order to defeat it.

The story is, in all honesty, nothing remarkable, and the final villain Malachi (Jason Flemyng) only appears for the last ten minutes and is not very memorable. All the same, Purefoy's performance is excellent, perfectly embodying the tormented Kane, and appearances by Pete Postlethwaite and Max von Sydow are very welcome. The atmosphere more than makes up for the relatively weak story, with the muted colours, bleak landscape and chunky violence creating a strong sense of a land on the brink of destruction. The action sequences are a particular highlight, a good combination of blood and brutality with genuinely skilful choreography; the fact that the characters wield guns as well as swords, rare in this genre, allows for a lot more variety than other films.

It's wonderful how all-inclusive Solomon Kane is for the fantasy genre. Along with the expected knights and mercenaries, there are witches, undead, ghosts, and an enormous fire demon straight out of Hell. It takes somewhat of a kitchen sink approach, throwing everything it can think of into the melting pot and seeing what works. In a lesser film the abundance of magical elements could be a weakness, but it's executed so well and played so straight here that it's hard not to be drawn in; another film might be ashamed of its pulp fiction origins, but Solomon Kane wears them proudly on its sleeve and elevates them to genuine quality, despite the fact that the plot has very little resemblance to Howard's original stories.

If you enjoy sword-and-sorcery films, I can't recommend Solomon Kane highly enough. It leaves itself open for a sequel, which is unlikely to be made because of the very poor box office returns, but it's still an excellent standalone film. It will never be as famous as Conan the Barbarian, not least because, while a much better actor, James Purefoy is not Arnold Schwarzenegger, but in a lot of ways it's a better film, and is certainly the best epic fantasy film this side of The Lord of the Rings.

Watchmen

Generally considered one of the best and most influential comic books ever written, Watchmen was one of those things that no one ever really expected to see turned into a film, not least because it was in development hell for twenty years before finally getting made. The general opinion was that, even if it did get made, it would probably be a failure both as an adaptation and as a standalone film. Fortunately, the general opinion was wrong. Zack Snyder's film is far from perfect, but it's a brave, fiercely ambitious work, and about as good as an adaptation of the comic as we could reasonably have hoped for.

In an alternate 1986, superheroes are, or were, a fact of life. Most have either retired or been forced into retirement, with the exception of the state-sponsored Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and the unbalanced psychotic Rorschach. When the Comedian is discovered murdered, having been thrown out of the window of his penthouse apartment, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) takes it on himself to solve the mystery, and ends up uncovering a conspiracy which could bring America and Russia to nuclear war, forcing the old heroes to come back out of retirement.

It is, unfortunately, a very difficult film to summarise, and the above description doesn't nearly do it justice. This was one of the biggest fears for the film version: the comic is astonishingly deep and multi-layered, and it was believed that there was no way all that depth could be successfully put on screen. Sadly, people were correct about this; there is quite a lot of material missing, mostly consisting of backstory and tertiary characters. All the same, the opening credits montage does a fantastic job of filling you in on what you need to know about the background, set to “The Times, they are a-Changin'”, and is actually one of the film's best sequences. While the lack of extra material is a shame, David Hayter's script is very pragmatic, and the sections of the comic which have been cut are ones which probably ought to have been cut for a film version: it never feels like anything crucial is missing. People complained about the absence of “Tales of the Black Freighter”, a comic within the comic, but frankly, while hugely important in the comic, it's pretty much the first thing which should have been cut when writing the screenplay.

While Sucker Punch did reveal that Zack Snyder can't write a coherent screenplay to save his life, what it does share with Watchmen is spectacular visuals. He may not be able to write, but he can certainly direct, which hopefully bodes well for the upcoming Man of Steel. It's safe to say that, by this point, close-up shakycam has more or less run its course, and Snyder takes great care to make sure the camera is stable and pulled back far enough that the audience can appreciate the care which went into composing the scenes. The other nice bonus is that it results in some fantastic fight sequences; he's greatly increased the complexity of the fights from the comic, changing the characters' fighting styles from relatively simple street fighting to full-blown martial arts, and the scene where Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) break into a prison is a particular highlight.

It was one of those films which people thought couldn't be done, and in many cases, shouldn't be done. Alan Moore remains staunchly opposed to any adaptation of his work, and I can understand why, as Watchmen is, by necessity, very simplified compared to its source material. All the same, taken as a film on its own merits, and acknowledging the difficulty in adapting such complicated source material, it's a fantastic accomplishment, and while it didn't do brilliantly at the box office, it's sure to become a cult classic in the years to come.

Highlander

The crop of fantasy films made in the 1980s are a mixed bunch. On one end, there are the legitimate epics like Conan the Barbarian which still hold up well today, and on the other there are crimes against art and reason like Hawk the Slayer, which nonetheless end up being priceless entertainment because of how astonishingly bad they are. Highlander falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum: there are plenty of good aspects to it, and even if the whole is less than the sum of its parts, it's still worth a watch. It operates on much the same level as Flash Gordon, despite the fact that it isn't intentionally cheesy.

In a lot of ways, it's exactly what you'd want from a sword-and-sorcery flick. It has entertaining ideas and a big scope, even if the budget is never quite up to the task. The premise is that there are Immortals among us, who can only die from being beheaded, and they are destined to fight until only one is left, whereupon he will claim the Prize. The hero is Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert), a 16^th Century highlander, who believes himself to be an ordinary man until he is fatally wounded by the villainous Kurgan (Clancy Brown), but refuses to die. He meets another Immortal called Ramirez (Sean Connery), and is taught the ways of their kind and the rules of their Game. 400 years later, in New York, the few remaining Immortals convene for the Gathering, to fight to the last: there can be only one.

A lot of what makes the premise work is that the film never wastes time explaining it. How do the Immortals know what their task is? Why do the rules of the Game prevent them from fighting on holy ground? How do they know that the last one will claim the Prize? In avoiding explanations, the film never gets bogged down by minutiae, and the mystery over who the Immortals are lends a greater sense of the fantastic and the epic to the film. All the same, it's a very daft film, and probably ought not to work as well as it does. The cinematography is very nice, with the Scottish highlands lending themselves well to the task, but the special effects are a very mixed bag, with wires being clearly visible in many of the fight sequences. This is a particular shame because the fights are actually very impressive, with the duel between the Kurgan and Ramirez featuring possibly the best decapitation ever committed to film. And it would be remiss of me to not mention the thundering soundtrack by Queen, which is just as good as their soundtrack for Flash Gordon and without which the film would not be nearly as enjoyable.

Ropey effects aside, the film's biggest problem is its lead. Christopher Lambert looks the part, but it was on the basis of his looks that he was hired: when he arrived on set, having not met any of the crew before, director Russell Mulcahy discovered that he couldn't speak English, and so he had to learn during filming. This is the source of the bizarre train wreck of what I can only assume is supposed to be a Scottish accent, made even more jarring by having the very Scottish Sean Connery as his mentor. He is also partially blind, which means that his swordfighting is sadly never as good as it could have been. It's a real shame, because Connery and Clancy Brown, despite the latter's voracious devouring of scenery, are very good in their roles, and Lambert seems very subdued and uninteresting compared to them.

All these flaws aside, I do recommend Highlander. It's still one of the better fantasy films that don't star Frodo or Westley, and would probably be remembered as fondly as Conan if the effects had been better and it hadn't been blighted by a string of terrible sequels. Lambert is still a better actor than Arnold, though.

The Big Lebowski

Reviewing a comedy is always difficult, since if you explain what makes it funny you're giving away the jokes and effectively spoiling the film. Reviewing something like The Big Lebowski is especially difficult, since it can be very hard to tell what it's actually about; the plot is wildly incoherent, and there are enough weird digressions and threads that go nowhere that summarising it is near impossible. This is, of course, the point, since it's a parody of detective stories in general and The Big Sleep in particular, and only serves to make the film even funnier.

Replacing the Philip Marlowe detective character with Jeff Bridges' lazy, slovenly Dude, constantly drinking White Russians, was a stroke of comic genius. This loveable stoner only wants to get back the rug that was stolen from him, but somehow ends up involved in a conspiracy that involves kidnapping, severed toes, being threatened with a ferret, and lots of bowling. The plot is nigh incomprehensible, but, this being a Coen brothers film, it's more about the characters than the plot at any rate. Remarkably, the Dude manages to be the only sane character in the film, having to deal with psychotic Vietnam veteran Walter (his best friend), omniscient Texan narrator the Stranger, and John Turturro in a bizarre cameo as blisteringly insane fellow bowler The Jesus. The characters are all well-drawn, even the ones who only show up for a scene or two, and are guaranteed to have you in stitches, The Jesus in particular, who is practically the definition of a one scene wonder.

The Dude is perhaps not Jeff Bridges' best role, although that is up for debate, but he is probably the definitive Jeff Bridges character all the same, and certainly his most iconic, having gone on to inform the characterisation of, among others, Crazy Heart's Bad Blake and True Grit's Rooster Cogburn. It's hard to shake the feeling that Bridges is essentially playing an exaggerated version of himself, not least because the Dude's actual name is Jeffrey; this sense of the actor's familiarity with the character's outlook on life is what makes how the Dude deals with his ridiculous situation plausible. Strangely, the fact that the Dude is almost completely divorced from how the real world works is what makes him the only one able to deal with the insane conspiracy reasonably, in contrast to Walter, who is constantly flying off the handle, threatening people and destroying their property. Part of what makes the situation they get caught in so entertaining is that it's almost entirely Walter's fault: if the Dude weren't friends with him, he likely would not have ended up so deep in the conspiracy.

Quite simply, this is one of those films that you simply have to see, especially if you're a fan of stoner comedy. The insane characters, nonsensical plot and incredibly surreal dream sequences add up to what is probably probably the Coen brothers' funniest film, and one of the funniest films you're likely to see.

Speed Racer

Every once in a while, a film comes along that is so terrible that it makes you wonder, if people are able to make something this bad, was anything ever good to begin with? Speed Racer is one such film. An unmitigated catastrophe on pretty much every level, it has the dubious honour of being one of the only films to make me feel physically unwell.

As the above screenshot will hopefully illustrate, the film is a horrible, overdesigned mess whose constant stream of blinding colours will give you a migraine and make you thank whatever God you believe in for the tedious greyish brown of everyday life. There is nothing wrong with bright colours, but when they are in such abundance and the artistic design is so hideous that it genuinely hurts to look at it, there has definitely been a problem. It wouldn't be so bad if the effects weren't awful on a technical level as well, but the omnipresent CGI never fails to unimpress; it is abundantly clear that the set ends about 10 feet behind the actors and everything beyond that point is greenscreen, with potentially impressive cityscapes looking like the flat walls they were projected onto. It's a hideous film. Not in the Gears of War way where everything is drab and boring and indistinguishable from everything else, but in the way that it MAKES YOUR EYES BLEED.

Even if I hadn't been trying to watch the film through a blinding headache, I doubt it would have been any easier to follow. I have no idea what the plot was, since the script is as incoherent and nonsensical as the visuals. I knew I was in trouble when I found out that the main character's name actually was Speed Racer. That aside, there is a monkey (for some reason), who boxes with Speed's younger brother (for some reason). The sequence in question is so bizarre and hallucinatory that I thought I was either asleep, or someone had spiked my drink. I have no idea how it fitted into anything or what its purpose was. Other than that, there is Racer X, who Speed thinks is his brother, but then it's revealed that he isn't, but then it's revealed that he actually is and just had extensive plastic surgery so he is unrecognisable. WHYYYYY?!

There are those who think this film is fun. They are wrong. It's a mess, an impossible to follow catastrophe that makes you want to hit your head against a wall because it would be less painful than trying to watch this drivel. It's one of the worst films I've ever seen. And it's longer than Citizen Kane! It might have been tolerable at 70 minutes, but it instead blunders on for 130.

If you must watch Speed Racer, do so only with friends and a large bottle of industrial strength cider.

The Woman in Black - What Went Wrong

Let me preface this by saying that The Woman in Black, despite whatever justified reservations you may have about Daniel Radcliffe, is a very good film and you should definitely see it if you get the chance. Special mention has to go out to the set design: Eel Marsh House looks like Satis House after the apocalypse, and the whole film deserves some kind of special award for services to ludicrously creepy children's toys. It makes me happier than I can adequately say to see a horror film which knows that true horror has its roots in tension, suspense and mind games, not blood, gore and titties.

But.

I can't help but think there are, all the same, a lot of areas where it went wrong, and it's been a while since I wrote a negative review, so here goes. I'm going to try and keep spoilers to a minimum, but if it's on your To See list, I'd advise coming back and reading this afterwards.

First and foremost, while you will doubtless be on the edge of, and quite possibly hunched into, your seat for pretty much the entirety of the film, I can't shake the feeling that it just isn't scary enough. Part of this is probably due to knowing more or less what was going to happen, having read the book and seen the play; but that doesn't change the fact that the play is genuinely piss-your-pants terrifying while the film is merely quite scary.

The main part of the problem is a simple one: they show you the titular Woman far too much. She is at her scariest when you only just glimpse her, maybe for only a fraction of a second: the momentary flash of her face seen in a zoetrope, or when she's off to the side of the shot and out of focus. But the filmmakers insist on frequently putting her right in the middle of the frame, often for several seconds at a time, which does nothing but dilute the impact she has. There are a couple of moments towards the end when she runs straight at the camera screaming like a banshee, and yes, it's quite unnerving, but the fright is over as soon as she's off the screen again. In the play, you barely see her, but you feel her presence the whole time and are constantly frightened that she might appear. It's the first rule of horror filmmaking: the less you see of something, the more frightening it is. Our minds will always frighten us more effectively than a film can. This is doubly frustrating because I'm informed that they filmed it in extra-widescreen so they could experiment with putting things right on the edge of your field of view, but they don't take advantage of it nearly enough.

A corollary to this is probably more of a personal problem, I admit, but I wish they hadn't kept showing you the ghosts of the dead children. It's possibly because I love the play's ridiculously minimalist setup (a stage, two men, a box, and the Woman), but I felt like they detracted from the threat of the Woman herself. Every J-horror film made in the last decade has shown us that, yes, dead children are scary, and the trope feels overplayed and unnecessary. Like the Woman, we see far too much of them, and I can't help but feel like it was an just an opportunity to get what are essentially zombies into the film, as if we hadn't already seen enough of them in every book, film, game and comic produced in the last five years. They also cause serious problems with the ending, but I'll get to that in a minute.

*ENDING SPOILERS - DO NOT READ ON IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE FILM*

The ending, it has to be said, is crap. Utter trash. The ending of the play is incredibly depressing and results in you leaving the theatre absolutely terrified, where the ending here is an attempt to give some kind of redemption to Arthur Kipps. Quite apart from the syrupyness of it all, it doesn't make sense in the context of the story. In brief: the Woman makes his son walk in front of a train, Kipps runs to him, they both die. In itself, not bad. Would've been better if Kipps had survived a broken, hollow shell of a man, but still. But then, we see a sequence of Kipps and his son being reunited with his wife in what is presumably Heaven.

It doesn't work. Every indication so far has been that Heaven doesn't exist. The presence of the ghosts of the children killed by the Woman all but outright states that her victims are cursed to be restless for eternity and never find peace. Ciaran Hinds' character tells us the reason he doesn't believe in the Woman is because he wants to believe his son is in Heaven; she does exist, hence her victims cannot go to Heaven. Shortly before Kipps and his son are run over by the train, we hear the woman whisper "never forgive".

Apparently, her final revenge is to grant a tortured soul eternal peace with his beloved wife.

*END OF SPOILERS*

Let me conclude by reiterating my first point: The Woman in Black is a very good film. I'm still not entirely convinced about Daniel Radcliffe, but this was a step in the right direction for him; and Ciaran Hinds is as good in this as he ever is, even if I want to shout "Hail Caesar!" every time he appears on screen. All the same, it could so easily have been so much better. Here's hoping Hammer's next effort doesn't make the mistakes this one made.

The Artist

I have to admire the guts it took to make The Artist. It would be difficult enough to get away with making merely a black-and-white film these days, but The Artist is not only black-and-white: it's French, and it's silent. Getting international distribution for a silent film must have been a nightmare; it can't have been easy to convince the studio heads that foreign audiences would be interested in this film. But thank goodness it did get released over here, because it's a masterpiece.

The film is set during the late 1920s and early '30s, and is about George Valentin (played by Jean Dujardin), a silent film star, and Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), and up-and-coming actress. It covers the time period during which silent films fell out of fashion and talkies became successful; while Peppy rises to super-stardom in the talkies, Valentin falls out of favour because of his refusal to change. The plot is simple, yes, but that's no bad thing, and since The Artist is, in a sense, a throwback, a complicated plot would reduce the effect of the film. And just because it's simple doesn't mean it's predictable: the audience where I saw it applauded during the credits, and the happy ending will make you want to get up and cheer.

Much of the film's success is down to the two leads. Dujardin looks every inch the silent film star, all slicked-back hair and Errol Flynn pencil moustache, and is unfailingly charming and charismatic as Valentin, while Bejo radiates warmth and movie-star beauty, complete with a Marilyn Monroe-esque beauty spot. John Goodman, the film's biggest American star (although Malcolm McDowell does have a brief appearance) is very entertaining as the cigar-chomping boss of the studio where Valentin and Peppy work. It's actually really refreshing to watch a silent film: since the actors can't speak, they have to rely entirely on facial expression and body language to get their emotions across. This could result in mugging (which, in fact, is one of Peppy's criticisms of silent actors within the film), but here allows the actors to really show off their ability; Dujardin has already won Best Actor at Cannes, and he ought to at least be nominated for an Oscar. At no point in the film does the lack of dialogue make it difficult to follow what's happening: the actors' expressions tell the whole story without need of words. That said, where Dujardin and Bejo act out the story, it's Ludovic Bource's near omnipresent score which acts as the narrator. By turns whimsical, bombastic, and heartbreakingly sad, it perfectly conveys the mood of each scene and elevates great scenes to magnificent ones.

The film seems to be aware that, as a silent film in 2012, it's something of an oddity, and there's a pleasant amount of metacinematic humour at its own expense. There is one scene in particular which has a lot of fun with the fact that the film is silent, but the joke is too good to spoil here. The appealing thing about it is that the film reveres silent cinema without idolising it, and accepts that the time of the silent film had to end in favour of the talkies; during an argument between Dujardin and his wife, he remains sullen and refuses to talk, prompting her to ask, “Why do you refuse to talk?” Her criticism of his refusal to act in talkies is also an acceptance that cinema had to move on. The time period covered by the film continues into the early '30s, when talkies thoroughly dominated cinema, and instead of mourning the passing of the silent film, The Artist instead celebrates the newfound opportunities which sound offered to filmmakers. The sheer love of cinema itself on display here is absolutely wonderful, and is a strong contributor to what makes The Artist such a great film: when this much joy has gone into making something, it's hard to leave the cinema feeling anything else.

Akira Kurosawa, one of the greatest directors who ever lived, once said that silent films “are often so much more beautiful than sound pictures are. Perhaps they had to be”. As far as The Artist is concerned, he was absolutely right. This is one of the year's best films.

And it has the year's best dog in it, too.