Country: US
Technical: col 128m
Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons
Synopsis:
An oil magnate ignores warnings about the environmental effects of drilling in Greenland, but persuades an increasingly desperate world to accept the price anyway. Twenty-five years later, he is the subject of a play revival in which he is vilified by the next generation.
Review:
The director always lent towards 'conceptual' cinema, but here bit off more than the audience could chew. Aside from its chillingly real central premise (a giant rogue iceberg), the film sustains a barrage of visual and verbal flatulence for two hours, bits of Yorgos Lanthimos grotesquerie, Terry Gilliam grandiosity, Wes Anderson colours, Denis Villeneuve music, an ending and sequence shots from Children of Men, all put through the blender and served up like Popeye Doyle mixing cocktails at a cinephile shakedown. The ballooning budget was surely to do with the extraordinary interlocking set, which bears no scrutiny whatever if one tries to fit it within the theatrical conceit for which the film is, as it were, a rehearsal. Cruise has to carry it all virtually single-handed, with Ahmed a close second, and delivers a bravura performance were it not for the strident, barely intelligible tirade that passes for dialogue. Tanking at the box office soon after Damien Chazelle's similar folie de grandeur, Babylon, it will no doubt have served as a reminder to the studios of the need to look over the scripts of their talented, artistically inclined directors before giving the green light, and - who knows? - may even have made its money back on streams within a decade, though one doubts it. As one mogul once said: 'If I want a message, I'll use Western Union'.
Country: US
Technical: col 128m
Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons
Synopsis:
An oil magnate ignores warnings about the environmental effects of drilling in Greenland, but persuades an increasingly desperate world to accept the price anyway. Twenty-five years later, he is the subject of a play revival in which he is vilified by the next generation.
Review:
The director always lent towards 'conceptual' cinema, but here bit off more than the audience could chew. Aside from its chillingly real central premise (a giant rogue iceberg), the film sustains a barrage of visual and verbal flatulence for two hours, bits of Yorgos Lanthimos grotesquerie, Terry Gilliam grandiosity, Wes Anderson colours, Denis Villeneuve music, an ending and sequence shots from Children of Men, all put through the blender and served up like Popeye Doyle mixing cocktails at a cinephile shakedown. The ballooning budget was surely to do with the extraordinary interlocking set, which bears no scrutiny whatever if one tries to fit it within the theatrical conceit for which the film is, as it were, a rehearsal. Cruise has to carry it all virtually single-handed, with Ahmed a close second, and delivers a bravura performance were it not for the strident, barely intelligible tirade that passes for dialogue. Tanking at the box office soon after Damien Chazelle's similar folie de grandeur, Babylon, it will no doubt have served as a reminder to the studios of the need to look over the scripts of their talented, artistically inclined directors before giving the green light, and - who knows? - may even have made its money back on streams within a decade, though one doubts it. As one mogul once said: 'If I want a message, I'll use Western Union'.
