So it's time for another round of quick reviews. This time round I review Wreck it Ralph, Zero Dark Thirty and The Impossible. Read and enjoy!
Wreck it Ralph
(This review was written under a brief from my film course, so it may read slightly different to my usual style. Please let me know what you think of this so that I know whether you guys prefer this style or not.)
Wreck it Ralph
(This review was written under a brief from my film course, so it may read slightly different to my usual style. Please let me know what you think of this so that I know whether you guys prefer this style or not.)
After taking it’s time to be imported from the states Wreck it Ralph is finally here in the UK
and ready to do business. Does it quite live up to the hype that many critics
overseas have been calling ‘the new Toy
Story’? Well unfortunately not, but that is not to say that it isn’t a
decent animation film.
Wreck it Ralph follows
arcade game villain Ralph, voiced by John C Reilly, sick of always being the
bad guy, Ralph attempts to become a hero, jumping from game to game around the
arcade, Ralph finds that becoming a hero might not be for the best. This is
Disney’s best attempt yet to keep up with the big dogs like Pixar and
DreamWorks in the animated film race. But unlike its competition it fails to
attract the parents in the audience. Pixar does it perfectly; somebody of any
age can sit down and really enjoy one of their films (forgetting Cars 2).
Wreck it Ralph on the other
hand is not as much a family film but more of a kids film.
Not that they don’t
try, in the first act we get a load of cameos from other game characters such
as Bowser and Sonic the Hedgehog, that will be enough to wet most gamers
appetites, however this stops in the second act where we are left in a game
called Sugar Rush which is way too sweet for most to handle.
This is where we
meet Penelope an annoying glitch in the games framework irritatingly voiced by
Sarah Silverman. This is when the film starts to fall apart because it just
becomes very cliche' and boring, nothing new or original is being done to make
this film stand out amongst the crowd. If the film had kept up its solid first
half then we might have had the next Toy
Story on our hands but instead we get bored by staying too long in a world
we don’t like and followed around by a really irritating character that again
we don’t particularly like and then we finish with an ending which is too
predictable.
The animation may be solid but it still has nothing on the
advancements that Pixar make in every film they do. Wreck it Ralph starts off so well but disappoints in the last half,
making this film nothing special in the animation genre. Therefore I am giving it a rating of 3/5.
Zero Dark Thirty
There has been a lot of mixed feelings about this film and when I finally came to watch it I didn't have the highest of expectations, however once I had finsihed it I was happily surprised. Zero Dark Thirty is based on first hand accounts of the events that led up to the eventual assassination of terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden. The film starts off with the very difficult to watch torture scenes that have been picked apart by the press since it's release. I can understand some of the criticism but these torture scenes are essential to the film and I believe were most likely essential to the information they gathered in real life. This is not the kind of film you are going to sit down one Saturday evening with your family and have fun watching. No, you have to watch this thoroughly from start to finish so that you can understand what is going on and how difficult it must have been for the team that were trying to track down Bin Laden. If you are expecting this film to be anything like Kathryn Bigelow's last film The Hurt Locker then you will be disappointed, apart from the last 30 minutes the film is mainly made up of a bunch of people having meetings in offices with occasional real life acts of terrorism thrown in. This film wasn't as 'god bless america' as I thought it was going to be, with a lot of the film putting America in a kind of controversial light. Especially the CIA, the people there don't always seem to be that good at their job. As much as this film tries to give a realistic portrayal there are some points that feel quite fake, mainly with Jessica Chastain's character Maya who starts to shout and scream at her boss at one point and then when questioned by a senior personal she calls her self 'the motherf**cker who found this place', something I doubt would have happened within such a disciplined organisation. At two and half hours long this film still manages to keep you interested even though you already know the ending, the cinematography is incredible and the film really does look amazing. The acting is top notch with Jason Clarke's performance particularly standing out. The last 30 minutes are exhilarating and feel very real as we have since learnt that the director was allowed to see some of the real footage that took place during the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this film and was really interested from start to finish. I am giving Zero Dark Thirty a rating of 4/5.
The Impossible
Based on the real survival of a Spanish family The Impossible does the hard job of putting the tragic events of the 2004 tsunami onto film. A hard topic that the film sometimes pulls off and other times does not. For one, the main family's nationality was changed from Spanish to English, one can only assume this is for the film to attract a more mainstream 'western' audience. The problem with this is that the family are a very stereotypical posh English family that within the first 10 minutes of the film cannot stop referring to each other as 'darling'. This straight away provided a barrier for me as I found the family to be quite irritating so therefore when disaster eventually strikes I did not have an emotional connection with them. Thankfully their irritating nature decreases throughout the film enough for me to feel for the family and want for them to survive the disaster. However it is only this family that you care about, almost like any other survival type film you care for the characters you follow and not for the ones around them, which would be fine if this event was fictitious but it is not, it is real and a lot of people lost their lives and were affected by the tsunami and feeling for so few throughout this movie does not seem right. Maybe it is because director Juan Antonio Bayona has his previous roots in the horror genre that this film sometimes feels like a genre piece rather then a documentation of real life events. That's not to say that some of the horror elements in this film don't work as sometimes they really add to the scariness of the event but then again other times it makes it feel like a disaster movie. The title of this film is quite right, the story that happens does feel impossible and might be the reason that certain moments felt dramatised or too good to be true. As a film it has been shot beautifully with some scenes being absolutely terrifying, just like they should be. By the end of the film you do feel like you have been through an emotional journey, one that you may not want to take again. The 2004 disaster is one that is hard to portray on the big screen and The Impossible doesn't always pull it off however the film still isn't half bad, therefore I am giving it a rating of 3/5.
Zero Dark Thirty
There has been a lot of mixed feelings about this film and when I finally came to watch it I didn't have the highest of expectations, however once I had finsihed it I was happily surprised. Zero Dark Thirty is based on first hand accounts of the events that led up to the eventual assassination of terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden. The film starts off with the very difficult to watch torture scenes that have been picked apart by the press since it's release. I can understand some of the criticism but these torture scenes are essential to the film and I believe were most likely essential to the information they gathered in real life. This is not the kind of film you are going to sit down one Saturday evening with your family and have fun watching. No, you have to watch this thoroughly from start to finish so that you can understand what is going on and how difficult it must have been for the team that were trying to track down Bin Laden. If you are expecting this film to be anything like Kathryn Bigelow's last film The Hurt Locker then you will be disappointed, apart from the last 30 minutes the film is mainly made up of a bunch of people having meetings in offices with occasional real life acts of terrorism thrown in. This film wasn't as 'god bless america' as I thought it was going to be, with a lot of the film putting America in a kind of controversial light. Especially the CIA, the people there don't always seem to be that good at their job. As much as this film tries to give a realistic portrayal there are some points that feel quite fake, mainly with Jessica Chastain's character Maya who starts to shout and scream at her boss at one point and then when questioned by a senior personal she calls her self 'the motherf**cker who found this place', something I doubt would have happened within such a disciplined organisation. At two and half hours long this film still manages to keep you interested even though you already know the ending, the cinematography is incredible and the film really does look amazing. The acting is top notch with Jason Clarke's performance particularly standing out. The last 30 minutes are exhilarating and feel very real as we have since learnt that the director was allowed to see some of the real footage that took place during the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this film and was really interested from start to finish. I am giving Zero Dark Thirty a rating of 4/5.
The Impossible
Based on the real survival of a Spanish family The Impossible does the hard job of putting the tragic events of the 2004 tsunami onto film. A hard topic that the film sometimes pulls off and other times does not. For one, the main family's nationality was changed from Spanish to English, one can only assume this is for the film to attract a more mainstream 'western' audience. The problem with this is that the family are a very stereotypical posh English family that within the first 10 minutes of the film cannot stop referring to each other as 'darling'. This straight away provided a barrier for me as I found the family to be quite irritating so therefore when disaster eventually strikes I did not have an emotional connection with them. Thankfully their irritating nature decreases throughout the film enough for me to feel for the family and want for them to survive the disaster. However it is only this family that you care about, almost like any other survival type film you care for the characters you follow and not for the ones around them, which would be fine if this event was fictitious but it is not, it is real and a lot of people lost their lives and were affected by the tsunami and feeling for so few throughout this movie does not seem right. Maybe it is because director Juan Antonio Bayona has his previous roots in the horror genre that this film sometimes feels like a genre piece rather then a documentation of real life events. That's not to say that some of the horror elements in this film don't work as sometimes they really add to the scariness of the event but then again other times it makes it feel like a disaster movie. The title of this film is quite right, the story that happens does feel impossible and might be the reason that certain moments felt dramatised or too good to be true. As a film it has been shot beautifully with some scenes being absolutely terrifying, just like they should be. By the end of the film you do feel like you have been through an emotional journey, one that you may not want to take again. The 2004 disaster is one that is hard to portray on the big screen and The Impossible doesn't always pull it off however the film still isn't half bad, therefore I am giving it a rating of 3/5.
