Fly the cinematic skies

Some quick media reviews (which have been banging around in my Palm and online for a few days) of my British Airways movie entertainment:

The Bourne Supremacy

• More conspiratorial spy action with super-death-on-two-feet Jason Bourne, courtesy of still-baby-faced Matt Damon.
• Bourne plays less of a center-stage role, as we spend more time with the CIA team trying to pin him down for a crime they think he committed, along with others plotting Bourne’s demise or seeking their own ends. That’s unfortunate, as it makes Bourne more of a comic book super-man type of character than in the first flick. He’s more in control of the situation, and therefore less sympathetic (if more “cool”); there’s never any real sense (to me) that Bourne is in significant danger.
• Plenty of plot twists and turns this time out, though, especially for folks who like conspiracy theories. Too many twists, perhaps, as plot is layered on plot in a way that just feels messy, not clever. By the end, though, the movie seems to have run out of steam a bit, just like the eponymous hero.
• The criticized super-jiggly-cam school of cinematography is not as noticeable on a little LCD screen on an in-flight aircraft.
• A much better to film to simply let flow, rather than think about it. On that level, it’s a lot of fun — and gives me some good ideas for my IDC game …
• Rating: 4 bullet holes out of 5.

I, Robot

• This would have been a fine film if they’d simply drawn on Asimov’s concepts (even given him a “dedicated to” line) and bypassed the title. Ironically, I think more SF fans were turned off by turning Asimov’s tales into a Will Smith action flick than were drawn to see it on that basis.
• There’s a very literate film, questioning what it means to be human and what the value of human effort is and what the very nature of human morality might be, lurking in I, Robot. Unfortunately, half it had to be chopped up to show some great shots of Will Smith blowing some robots apart with his gun.
• I take it back — more SF fans were turned off by turning Susan Calvin into a clueless Bond girl than were turned off by use of the title.
• Alan Tudyk does a nice job channeling Roddy McDowell in a rather dull role. Will Smith tries his best to rise above being a wise-cracking action hero, but the director and screenwriter succeed in dragging him back down into it. The plot is clunky, and the surprise twists are clumsily executed (and not all that brilliant to begin with).
• Guys, we get it when the robots are being good vs when they’re being bad. You don’t have to color code the good robots as blue and the bad robots as red. For that matter, the robots are just not convincing — they look too CG, they don’t move realistically (ballistically), and the cool glowy plastic they are partially sheathed in shows up nowhere else in the 2035 technology base, thus making them look even more out of place.
• Interestingly, the exploration of some long-term ramifications of the Three Laws was paralleled by some of Asimov’s later books (back when he started — mistakenly, IMO — merging the Foundation series with the Robot series). There are, though, hints of it back in the early Robot shorts — indeed, the very nature of most of the Robot short stories was how the Three Laws could get folks into a lot more trouble than would seem obvious.
• Rating: 3 platinum-iridium sponges out of 5 (4 for effort, 2 for execution, 3 if you’re just looking for a cool CGI shoot-em-up)

Troy

• To be fair, I watched about 15 minutes near the beginning, and flipped it off in bored disdain; I then flipped past it later on and decided to watch about the last 15 minutes. It might have been brilliant the whole rest of the time, but I seriously doubt it.
• Acting and writing more wooden than the horse. Not only did I not care about a single character I saw (except for maybe Peter O’Toole’s Priam), but I wanted the city to burn down with the invaders still inside. Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Eric Bana — plenty of talent here, all wrapped in bronze and dropped to the bottom of the wine-dark sea.
• The writers couldn’t decide whether to be faithful to the Illiad or faithful to writing a Hollywood Sword-n-Sandals epic, and thus managed to grab the worst elements of both. It’s convoluted and littered with too many characters, who alternate between being aloofly classical and soap-operatic. Greek pottery is more lively and engaging.
• The battle CG is a lot less realistic than the LotR flicks, which is kind of ironic, given that it’s all humans up there. The city of Troy suffers from “Look, here’s a major city with no surrounding roads or outbuildings or huts or anything,” just as did too many locales in LotR, but here it’s even more obvious on the arid Turkish (Maltese) coast.
• This film has probably done more to damage popular interest in the classics than any education reform of the last fifty years.
• Rating: 2 improbably-fashioned swords out of 5. And that’s being generous out of a respect for both the source material and the genre.