Film reviews – by Adam Vaughan
Film’s this week:
Rating key – ◊ Total turkey | ♥ Drooping hotdog | ♥♥ Pick n Mix | ♥♥♥ Bit of fizz | ♥♥♥♥ Popcorn-tastic | ♥♥♥♥♥ Not to be missed
Titanic 3D (12A) ♥♥
Quite early on in James Cameron’s hugely successful film documenting the eponymous ship’s ill-fated maiden voyage, Bill Paxton’s oceanographer asks Rose (Gloria Stuart) if she is ready to revisit Titanic; a question that could quite as easily be posed to audiences.
No doubt, at the time, Titanic was a massive hit at the box office. It long held the record for most money taken worldwide (in excess of $1.8 billion), before Cameron’s next block-busting venture, Avatar, outdid that boosted by 3D revenues. Tying in with the centenary of the ship’s sinking and jumping on the fad that brought home the bucks with his 2009 space adventure, Cameron and Twentieth Century Fox have re-released Titanicin 3D fifteen years after its first cruise.
Titanic 3D
The film hasn’t been altered much. Charting the star-crossed love story between Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) onboard the supposedly unsinkable ship, Cameron seems more preoccupied with the size and structure of the boat – he went on many dives to the actual wreckage and even made a documentary. The love story and its clunky transition between each participant emphasising the gulf in social standing (Rose the fiancé to Billy Zane’s possessive millionaire and Jack a homeless, penniless artist), the awkward dialogue and rather hoky acting seems a vehicle for Cameron to marvel at the naval behemoth and its dramatic, tragic downfall.
It is surprising how well the special effects, which at the time were revolutionary, have stood the test. The real problem, however, is Titanic‘s repackaging. The retro-fitted 3D is quite awful.
Cameron, in an interview last year, bemoaned the process of converting a movie into stereoscopy in post-production, taking particular aim at Clash of the Titans. It’s odd then why Cameron should have decided that this was a good idea, especially because it’s been done in such a shoddy way.
Large chunks of the film haven’t even been converted, mainly sections reliant on grandstand CGI; perhaps the special effects technology then isn’t able to be manipulated now. Furthermore, whenever there is a particularly mobile camera shot, the focus blurs and is a strain to watch – which is a big problem when most of the action is on a forward-moving steam liner.
Titanic 3D is a big, brash commercial exercise that has lost all of its emotional poignancy thanks to distracting and disorientating 3D. Please, Jim, don’t become the next George Lucas.
Battleship (12A) ♥
From toy manufacturer Hasbro comes Battleship; a thumping, thudding, booming, blasting headache that is basically Transformers at sea. It’s enough to make you seasick.
Based on the famous game (but not really as watching two players sat randomly guessing coordinates to the opponent’s fleet would be boring, but maybe not as tedious as what’s on offer here), brothers Taylor Kitsch and Alexander Skarsgard get caught up in a sea battle for supremacy as alien invaders plunge to earth seeking to exterminate the human race.
Battleship
A pre-credits sequence, before the arrival of the inter-stellar baddies, shows an inebriated Alex (Kitsch) going all-out to woo a girl by breaking in to a convenience store and stealing a microwaveable chicken burrito for her. He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed and he desperately needs to get his life in order. But, as his brother Stone (Skarsgard) points out, he will make a fine navy officer.
Moments later Alex is a fully fledged weapons man who nonetheless still disrespects authority (in the shape of Liam Neeson who is, as chance would have it, also his girlfriends’ father). Will Alex, throughout the course of this alien invasion, somehow prove himself as a decisive leader thus earning the respect of his future father-in-law? I think we know the answer.
Just like the Transformers series before it, this Hasbro endorsement isn’t really interested in plot, character or any recognisable human emotion. It’s about toy sales and including enough bang for the budget bucks. And at an estimated cost of $200 million, there’s plenty of fireworks on show, but little else.
Worryingly, the CGI space aliens have more acting range than any of their human counterparts. Granted, Erich and Jon Hoeber’s script gives the navy seals little to do except shout “Missile to B2” and for Kitsch to flap around looking conflicted. Oh, and Rihanna – making her acting debut – does a lot of running and getting shot at whilst pouting and looking fabulous.
Battleship’s list of flaws is too long to catalogue here (the decision to use real-life US soldiers and trying to be ‘political’ by teaming the American navy with the Japanese rank among its most misjudged), but what I will say is that last time I checked, Battleship, the game, didn’t involve a bunch of colonising aliens. On this form we can expect the adaptation of Monopoly to include flesh-eating zombies. Now that I’d pay to see.