Does the digital revolution mean the death of film?

Side by Side: The Science, Art and Impact of Digital Cinema

A Documentary

Every movement in every artform across the ages is inevitably accompanied by resistance to change, tentative excitement about innovation and progress, and a wistful gaze through rose-tinted glasses at the past. Our cinematic versions of these glasses are very fetching 3D ones, which perhaps perform the dual function of making us nostalgic for a simpler, more innocent age of cinema and enlightening us to the potential of the digital revolution.

Side by Side is an intelligent documentary looking at how the landscape of filmmaking is being transformed by such proliferation of digital technology. It ranges from the specific scientific developments involved in capturing moving pictures to the age-old philosophical question of whether our rapidly changing world should welcome technological developments or remain wary of the razzle dazzle of modern pretenders.

Although not a flawless documentary, it’s worth watching just to be enlightened about the myriad techniques available to filmmakers in the digital age. But it really shines as a platform for the debate between those who champion new methods and those who believe that traditional photochemical techniques will always have more artistic integrity. Director Chris Kenneally and producer Keanu Reeves have consulted a wide variety of directors, cinematographers, colourists, actors and industry experts to tease out the nuances of these two sides. The result leaves you with a sense that digital has opened up brave new worlds but that the teachings of the old film masters and the unique effects of celluloid must not be abandoned.

Much of what the documentary records is fairly obvious: art is led by technology and vice versa, the marriage of technology and art can help to ‘outpace the audience’s imagination’. And frustratingly it doesn’t always tell you immediately who the talking heads are. But the expertise of those heads, from staunch digital advocates George Lucas and James Cameron to the more equivocal Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, gives both an interesting overview and quirky little insights into the history and current practice of Hollywood fimmaking. The extent to which digital is democratising the industry, and conversely is jeopardising its more traditional counterpart, is still very much unresolved.

So if, as cinematographer Michael Chapman avows, ‘cinema was the church of the 20^th century’, where does that leave us now? We may have our 3D glasses on but are we seeing, experiencing and creating more through them? Or will we end up with the inevitable headache from watching a film in more dimensions than it should aspire to achieve, or from whizzing our eyes about at 48 frames per second, or from seeing colours so searingly clear that we crave the distinctive grainy aesthetic of celluloid? It seems somewhere between the two. And I think if you watch Avatar or Sin City, you can't deny the exhilarating possibilities that digital affords. But it is clear from the way that these eminent filmmakers talk about celluloid that there is a unique magic to film and a visceral engagement with it that cannot, and should not, be lost in the furore. But do watch Side by Side, and make up your own mind.

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See a trailer for Side by Side here

Cloud Atlas: puzzling, dazzling, discombobulating

Cloud Atlas

Released 22^nd February 2013

Who would have thought one film could contain such a confusing cumulonimbus of character concoctions? Directors Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer have tried to translate David Mitchell’s epic novel into a digestible film, and their success is mixed. Cloud Atlas can feel like a daunting thousand-piece jigsaw, with seemingly unconnected fragments that must be painstakingly fitted together without the conviction you’ll ever quite get the full picture. But it can also be a beautifully rich tapestry, woven from a giddying array of genres and across many epochs, its threads interweaving to tell thrilling tales through a smorgasbord of ideas and intricate details.

Those character concoctions are the directors’ audacious filmic solution to the six-part structure of Mitchell’s novel. Each actor is reincarnated in different roles, sporting impressive prosthetics through which their acting calibre can (mostly) still shine through. So we witness Halle Berry as a gritty 1970's journalist, a silver-wreathed oracle from the future and even (only just believably) the white Jewish wife of a composer in 1930's Edinburgh. The most startling reincarnation is Hugh Grant, who plays a series of rather preposterous villains including an unexpectedly convincing, bloodcurdling cannibal.

The brilliance of the film, for someone who has read the book, is that the directors have taken a seemingly impossible combination of plots and made them exhilarating and surprisingly resonant. Themes of retribution, subjugation and accountability are nicely teased out – occasionally the script is too obvious, which I think is why some critics have accused the film of vapidity. But Cloud Atlas does have something to say about how your actions affect those around you, what your legacy will be when you’re gone, and questioning what freedom really means and whether any of us truly achieve it. And it does this with such style and technological daring that you cannot but be impressed.

Prolific links between the narratives, from theme to plot to subtle camera angle cuts, are revealed with breathtaking dexterity. One such tense moment intercuts between two scenes: a black runaway slave tightrope-walks the ship’s rigging to prove his worth to hostile, murderous sailors below; and a futuristic battle is fought on a precipitous sky-high walkway by rebels rescuing a genetically-engineered clone from perpetual servitude. The inevitability of enslaver and enslaved is made palpable as every camera angle is mirrored, reminding us of the ominously repetitive nature of humanity's flaws.

But watching the film with someone who hadn’t read the book did raise the question: without an anchoring knowledge of Mitchell’s more clearly divided narratives, would you understand what on earth is going on? The hasty cuts between scenes can be bewildering and take serious concentration to follow. There is also the temptation to play the ‘who’s who’ game – the prosthetics may be remarkable (and admirably racially non-discriminatory) but they are sometimes artificial to the point of farce – Hugh Grant as a geriatric cockney geezer and Hugo Weaving as an ostensibly Korean bad guy spring to mind. More time can be spent deliberating about, marvelling or laughing at the metamorphoses of these famous actors than paying attention to the earnest film the directors have tried to make.

Mitchell’s novel has a wonderful capacity to absorb you in six discrete worlds, each with their own inimitable voice in which you completely invest before moving on to the next. Each is disorientatingly different but immediately hypnotic. By intercutting the characters' tales, the directors have achieved a distinct kind of dramatic intensity but lost some of the novel’s immersive quality and some of its coherence. It takes time to appreciate fully a tapestry of this ambition and intricacy, weaved of such multifarious threads. And perhaps the medium of film, by its very nature, can never allow enough time to devote to such complexity. But the threads are beautiful nonetheless, and I think it is worth the 172 minutes to entwine yourself in the exquisite stories they spin. 

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Zero Dark Thirty versus Homeland - film review

Zero Dark Thirty, dir. Kathryn Bigelow

There are clear parallels between Kathryn Bigelow’s new behemoth Zero Dark Thirty and the CIA TV series Homeland. Both pivot around a striking, passionate, slightly crazed female heroine. Both ratchet up the tension with brooding sequences of cog-whirring contemplation followed by explosive action scenes. And both portray CIA life as a melee of exhilarating discoveries, calcifying frustrations, impossible suspicions and excruciating disappointments.

This all makes for compelling viewing, with the caveat that you accept you’re watching a fictionalised account, emphatically not a precise, blow-by-blow representation of undercover operations and the war on terror. It is easy to accept this with Homeland, the audacious, hyperbolic sister of Zero Dark Thirty, but the film must equally be remembered as a fictional entity (albeit based on true events). Zero Dark Thirty is the older sister showing off her superior maturity, with an austere atmosphere that brilliantly blends political gravity, brooding scenes and scintillating storytelling.

Many critics of Zero Dark Thirty seem to have lost sight of its filmic quality in the furore around its perceived endorsement of torture. It should be seen through the prism of its Hollywood incarnation, with the inevitable attendant sensationalism and an agenda that is dramatic as much as political. And once you have seen the film, you’d have to be inhuman to feel entirely unpeturbed by its sickening exposition of a man being waterboarded, abused and forced into a tiny wooden box. The filmmakers may have had unprecedented access to the CIA, which has exacerbated the vitriolic criticism Zero Dark Thirty has attracted, but if information gained through torture did indeed contribute to the assassination of Osama bin Laden, then Bigelow’s depiction of the CIA’s methods is so brutal(ly honest) it cannot but be an implicit condemnation.

The film and the series have different strengths in their revelation of the relentless pursuit of the world’s most wanted men. Homeland has an emotional hook and an explosive momentum that accumulates by virtue of the episodic nature of its medium. It forces us to feel the unyielding pressure on its heroine, Carrie, to destabilise constant terrorist hostility. Zero Dark Thirty does not have the same level of human investment – we never find out about Maya, its heroine, beyond that she’ll go to any extremes to catch her nemesis. The film’s power comes instead from its gripping intensity. It does not shy away from the horrors of American torture, it shows the inexorable, myriad twists that undermine morale at every turn, and finally it depicts the almost uncanny infiltration of bin Laden’s hideout with blistering skill and tension. Bigelow uses edgy camera angles, masterful editing and atmospheric lighting to lead you screaming to a conclusion which you know is coming but which is no less tense and anticipatory for that.

What resonates most in both Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty are the protagonists’ compelling performances and the impact on their personal stability of the terrors they witness. Homeland’s Carrie (a versatile Claire Danes) displays a much more histrionic kind of instability; her manic depression takes her from chin-wobbling lows to boggled-eyed highs and back again in the space of a scene. But as with the programme as a whole, her character feels faintly ridiculous; she gets into inappropriate scrapes, falls in love with the terrorist-come-homeland-hero Brody and veers wildly off course only to be enfolded back into the CIA with barely any questions asked.

We may know less about Maya (the brilliant Jessica Chastain) but this mystery merely serves to augment the impact of our realisation that we are emotionally invested in her plight. Her trauma is subtler, slowly wearing her down in the face of a seemingly impossible task. The film ends with a shot of her climbing into a plane to be liberated from Pakistan after the deed is done; a close-up of her face shows her composure finally cracking, and tears streaming down her face. Zero Dark Thirty may be equivocal in places, but that subtlety makes it ultimately more haunting than its TV equivalent. Both Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty interrogate the Everest-scale uphill struggle against terrorism, but the film leaves the viewer feeling fundamentally more shaken. It asks the plaguing question, what is left when America’s most wanted man has been destroyed? Its implicit answer seems to be bleak: uncertainty, suffering and the demoralising prospect of more hunting, doubting and death.

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Thrilling 3d in Life of Pi

In the trailer for Life of Pi, you can see a panicked zebra swimming towards you in the claustrophobic confines of a ship’s cabin, a phosphorescent whale soaring out of a luminous green ocean, a tiger striking out at the screen with explosive carnal energy. These moments alone are reason enough to go and see this film in 3D. In Life of Pi, Ang Lee legitimises the use of a cinematic technique that has been maligned as expensive, distracting and artificial – 3D runs the risk of being so hyperrealised that it ironically prevents you from immersing yourself in a film's fictional world. Instead, it systematically jolts you into remembering, by its very almost-realness, that that world is not real. But at its best, 3D has the power to make you want to plunge into the realm behind the screen, and this is what Lee achieves with such splendour.

Occasionally the 3D in Life of Pi does jar – once or twice Lee falls prey to the temptation to make the audience believe something is poking straight out of the screen at them, which immediately feels gimmicky and false. When you are looking down the length of a pole Pi uses as a weapon against the tiger, the sensation is more like being anachronistically plonked in a Disney World 3D simulator, flailing your arms impotently and failing to convince yourself that the object you see on screen is actually tangible in your hand.

But for the most part, 3D beautifully enhances an already beautiful film. The opening credit sequence alone is enough to convince – every animal, from powder-pink flamingos on a rippling lake to cantankerous orangutans reposing in the trees, feels enticingly within touching distance. You can almost smell the intoxicating odours of the Pondicherry zoo that Pi's family call home. And the stunning scenescapes – raging oceanic storms, flat expanses of sea reflecting smoky ochre clouds, an inconsequential lifeboat bobbing below a silvery hoard of flying fish – all feel so exquisite precisely because they are realised in 3D.

The feeling of being immersed in this film is not simply due to the 3D effects, however. It must also be attributed to Suraj Sharma, the debut Indian actor who plays Pi with such warmth and authenticity, and who makes you believe every hardship of his 227 days stranded at sea with just a hostile tiger for company. And the tiger itself must also be acknowledged as an astounding CGI creation that absolutely looks real, from each menacing growl to every quivering strand of fur. What feels truly miraculous is that the relationship between Pi and this tiger (with whom Sharma could not, of course, physically act) is utterly believable – the evolution from the tiger’s primal instinct to eat Pi to boy and beast forming a convincing, peaceful relationship driven by mutual desperation, without artificial anthropomorphism of the tiger or a saccharine contrivance of the plot, gives this film its heart.

Yet although I appreciated Life of Pi for its visual sumptuousness, its captivating narrative and its human warmth, I have not been left with a resounding sense of being challenged or provoked. Lee has clear messages to convey: stay true to yourself in the face of adversity; do not give up hope; never fail to say a proper goodbye to those you love. But this very clarity ironically undermines the film’s power; I don’t want these messages spelt out for me by a contrived expositional frame story, in which a writer is soliciting (and painstakingly, patronisingly explaining back to us) the adult Pi’s story. This is not the novel, it is the film, and I wish Lee had had enough faith in his medium and in his audience to let his own incredible visual and storytelling prowess do the work in a much more subtle and emotionally true way.

But absolutely go and see this film. It will make you believe in the true power of storytelling and allow you to indulge in a visual and technological feast. It may even leave you with the strange sensation that you would like to befriend a wild, resplendent, elusive and strangely comforting adult Bengal tiger.

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Arriving precisely when he means to: Peter Jackson's triumphant return to Middle Earth

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

‘I think I’m quite ready for another adventure.’ This is how Bilbo Baggins ends his journey in Lord of the Rings, having yielded to the ravages of age and thus being accorded a place on the last ship to the Undying Lands. But the question abounding in critics’ reviews is: are we ready for another adventure? And do we really need one?

The film Jackson has made is a rollicking, hilarious and tender frolic through Middle Earth. Admittedly, by its very nature, it is not as epic as its predecessor. Its evil characters (comically cockney trolls, a hostile but amusingly jowl-wobbling Goblin King, even the scarred albino menace Azog the Defiler) fail to inspire the terror of Sauron and his Nazgul. And there are some odd moments that could perhaps have been culled, such as the episode with the mushroom-eating, bird-poo covered wizard Radagast, which feels disconcertingly like a bizarre flight into a hallucinogenic video game.

But Ian McKellen’s wizard Gandalf, by turns twinkle-eyed and splendidly wrathful, gives the film a powerful sense of both warmth and gravitas. And the story is carried expertly by Martin Freeman’s ingenuous, endearing embodiment of Bilbo Baggins. As an actor he elevates himself from Elijah Wood’s somewhat cloying, wooden Frodo – you cannot help but relate to Bilbo as someone uprooted from his home and muddling through the unknown. He disarmingly tackles challenges big and small, from protecting his mother’s antique glory box against the boot-scrapings of impolite dwarves to protecting the exiled dwarf-king from a beheading by a vengeful, merciless Azog.  

It is the film-stealing riddle scene between Bilbo and Gollum that makes another trip to Middle Earth feel truly worth it – brilliantly-timed, wretched, ominous and hilarious all at once. Andy Serkis’s superlative facial expressions are transmuted to create a CGI character that perfectly sustains the schizophrenic Smeagol-Gollum dialectic conceived with such inspiration in Lord of the Rings. Serkis fully makes you feel the spectrum of Gollum’s emotions: his gambolling joy at playing games with Bilbo; his primative urge to kill this intruder into his world; his innocent, excruciating pain at losing the ring. And the teetering repartee between Bilbo and Gollum, which veers from playful to menacing in an instant, gives you a real sense of their terrors, prejudices and weaknesses, to the point where you wish you could go down to the goblin cave in which they spar and save them both.

So for me at least, the answer to whether we need The Hobbit is a resounding yes. Not simply because I am an ardent fan (who, I admit, is to Lord of the Rings what the devoted Samwise Gamgee is to his Mister Frodo.) But also because I think Peter Jackson has given us a film which not only pays homage to the meticulously realised world Tolkein created but which emphatically enhances our appreciation of that world. He has indeed vastly augmented a small book in order to realise it on the same colossal scale of his first film trilogy, for which he has faced not insignificant derision. But it doesn’t feel that this is arbitrary or excessive, because Jackson has faithfully incorporated elements of The Silmarilion and Tolkein’s own appendices, and made with them a film that still speaks to our own times of the uncertainty of life, the unlikely friendships that can be forged and the courage that can be found in every day actions.

If you have given up 30 hours of your life watching the ‘Making of Lord of the Rings’ DVD appendices (yes, I have. Twice.) you will know how much love and painstaking devotion went into every detail, down to the last curlicue of elvish written on the thousandth extra’s sword and sheath. And I believe the same, justifiable commitment has been made to The Hobbit – so do not take Peter Jackson for a conjurer of cheap tricks. Oh no. He is a maestro of his craft, and I would wholly recommend you go on his unexpected journey. For when you step onto the road, there's no telling where you might be swept off to…

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Skyfall – when did James Bond become the ‘damaged superhero’ du jour?

Bond, the wounded superhero, the zeitgeist protagonist of our times. This is what critics have been going wild for, claiming that the new film combines emotional depth, resonant topicality and scintillating wit.

Bond is indeed ‘damaged’. We see him as a shaking, stubbled, alcoholic wreck. Later we are supposed to be shaken, perhaps even stirred, by his silent, brooding contemplation of his parents’ deaths, reflected in the bleak mists of the Scottish moors that host the climax of the action. But this seems instead to damage the film and the very essence of who Bond should be. Yes, the franchise is an amorphous series that metamorphoses through the decades, but that is no excuse for the over-emotive scenes with M in which we are supposed to perceive the ‘real Bond’, but instead find ourselves faced with a cliché of the flawed hero type much harder to swallow than the clichés of Bond’s classic one-liners.

The film does have undeniable strengths. The cinematography is stunning; the plot (until the last half hour when all degenerates into an unimaginative shoot-out) is compelling and does indeed attend to our very real concerns about cyber terrorism; and the bad guy, Silva, is chillingly played by Javier Bardem as a floppy-haired, pout-lipped dandy with a malicious policy of vengeance, unnervingly veiled by the fineries of his deliciously camp demeanour.

But with the exception of Bardem, the acting is dubious, particularly from Bond-girl-come-secret-agent Eve (Naomie Harris). She is also proof of the film’s enduring sexism; by the end of the opening chase scene through the bazaars of Istanbul, we have already witnessed the banal mocking of her driving skills and ability to aim a gun. Critics such as Jane Martinson in The Guardian acknowledge this but believe it to be counterbalanced by the figure of M. The head of MI6 is heralded as ‘a proper female hero’, but it seems to me that, although her spirit and resilience are strong, she is actually undermined by the fact that she is losing her grip on the agency, by her reliance on men (Bond, Ralph Fiennes’ brilliant Mallory) to protect her bodily when she fails to do so, and by her callous disregard for the lives of her agents. For this Martinson praises her, but despite the surprising humour it brings to the film, it often seems unnecessarily spiteful rather than a necessary sacrifice for the greater good (Bond arrives back from the dead: ‘We sold your apartment. You’re not staying here.’ and so on).

It seems to me that critics have been blinded by the contemporaneity of the plot and so have overlooked the fact that, beneath the virtual whizzbangs of the hacking world in which Bond now dodges computer trackers as much as bullets, the film is a hackneyed yoking of modern and classic. It thus fails both to have the pure entertainment factor of the old Bond films or the compelling emotional resonance of a modern drama. Bond has indeed (sky)fallen from grace, and fallen hard.