Perry Mason (2020)

Masonic Disorder

Perry Mason (2020)
Season 1 - 8 episodes
HBO Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some mild spoilers

Okay, following my viewing of the original 1930s Perry Mason films, I bypassed the Raymond Burr series (for now) and ended up taking a look at the newest incarnation of Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous literary lawyer. Now, if you’ve read my other Perry Mason reviews, you’ll recall that I haven’t actually read the original source novels... something which stood me in good stead because the movies are, apparently, nothing like the original novels and I have an idea that, despite being touted as being based on the earlier, darker novels of Gardner’s character, quite a lot of this show deviates from its literary source quite a lot too.

What we have here is an eight episode story arc of a case which is particularly dark and we have Perry Mason, played by Matthew Rhys, as a fairly broke private investigator working for a lawyer, EB, played by John Lithgow. It’s set in 1931 and 1932 and it’s pretty much a ‘superhero origin’ story as far as the regular characters from the books go. Della Street, played by Juliet Rylance, is Lithgow’s secretary but any sexual sizzle between the characters like in the books (heck, Perry even married Della in one of the movies) is removed by her also being a lesbian. Ditto, the few appearances of young, future DA Hamilton Burger are notable in that he is also gay.

Then we have Chris Chalk playing a black version of Mason’s future detective Paul Drake. He starts off here as a cop walking the beat and he’s one of the most interesting characters in this, throwing up the whole racial tensions issue. My one slight problem with that is that, as a private detective in the 1930s, I’m not sure the colour of your skin wouldn’t be a major hindrance to gaining access to places as a private investigator but, please chime in down below in the comments section if you know different and it turns out this was a common practice after all. Shea Wiggum is also in this as private investigator Pete Strickland and he also does a really good job here.

The show is bleak from the onset, when a group of kidnappers are paid off but, when the mother and father go and collect the baby boy that was stolen from them after they leave the money, he’s dead with his eyes sewn open. From there on in, the law firm which employs Mason gets involved in what turns out to be a very convoluted case and, well, the inevitable happens in a way I won’t disclose here but, by the fifth episode, Mason fudges his way through a law exam (in much the same way that original novelist Gardner did when he passed the bar to be a lawyer) and inherits the office of the former lawyer, due to the perseverance of Della Street and the impetus of clearing the kidnap victim’s mother of conspiring to set into motion the entire set of events.

And there’s a whole lot of stuff going on involving an evangelical superstar (Tatiana Maslany aka She-Hulk) promising to resurrect the child in her religious fervour, bent cops, whorehouses, morally questionable officials and various other distractions like Perry’s ex-wife and son, his casual lover (played wonderfully by Veronica Falcón) who wants to buy his small ranch out from under him and various other twists to the plot, more than enough to warrant eight episodes of what is, frankly, a quite gripping story arc.

In terms of the literary legacy and straying far from its source, I’d say that the style of the show is much closer to the modern, 1940s and 1950s set hard boiled novels of James Ellroy than anything else. It’s full of foul language and gritty, ugly ideas and scenarios. It definitely gives the central character something to test his mettle against and, although I found the ending of one of the characters in the last episode a little unsatisfying, I found the whole thing to be well thought out, well executed and... well, doing this thing in period with this many extras... it must have been expensive to produce. My understanding is that Robert Downey Jr spent some time developing this series with HBO and was originally going to play the lead but had to drop out of acting duties due to scheduling conflicts. Instead, he’s produced the series and I’m guessing that’s why the budget it attracted was as large as it was... or at least, as large as it seems. Terence Blanchard’s score, which does a very nice thing on the end credits of the last episode, is also pretty good and fits the flavour of the show like a glove.

I liked pretty much everything about the new Perry Mason, to be honest and I’m glad that, by all accounts, another series is going to be forthcoming from the same company. My father, who is a big Perry Mason fan and who I bought this set for, was a bit unsure of the first episode or two, until he realised that this was an arc which transformed the detective into something, well just a little closer to the Perry Mason character as he’s more usually presented. Not a whole lot like him but, still, I think my dad really liked this one too so, for me, that’s a ringing endorsement that I can pass on to other lovers of the character for sure. Can’t wait to buy my dad series two when it gets a blu ray release.

2010 - Odyssey Two

 
To HAL And Back

2010 - Odyssey Two
(aka 2010 - The Year We Make Contact)
USA 1984 Directed by Peter Hyams
MGM  Blu Ray Zone B

2010 - Odyssey Two is the movie adaptation based on Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the same name... being a sequel to both the first full length novel (originally a short story) and, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s amazing masterpiece of the cinema, 2001 - A Space Odyssey (reviewed by me here). I remember seeing this when it finally came to the UK in cinemas in 1985 and, even though it’s very different in atmosphere to Kubrick’s milestone, I remember enjoying it a lot.

This one follows character Dr. Heywood Floyd who, with two other American specialists... Dr. Chandra (played here by Bob Balaban) who invented the HAL 9000 computer (voiced again by Douglas Rain) and Dr. Walter Curnow (played by John Lithgow)... accompanies a Russian expedition to the original Discovery, still stranded in orbit above Jupiter by the monolith but with that orbit decaying, which kind of forces the collaboration between the USA and USSR. So the film has a couple of objectives... find out why the HAL 9000 computer malfunctioned and killed all those people; find out what the heck happened to David Bowman (played once again here by Kier Dullea); find out what is going on with the monolith... all the while keeping up good relations with the Russians (led by a young Helen Mirren) who are particularly icy due to the downward spiral with relations between their two respective governments back on Earth.

Floyd is played here by Roy Scheider, who was played by William Sylvester in the original movie and I’m not sure why Sylvester didn’t reprise his role here. Perhaps because of the 16 year time difference between the first film and the sequel but, even so, Roy Scheider is actually 10 years younger than Sylvester in real life... playing a version of Floyd who is obviously supposed to be ten years older than the character as depicted in Kubrick’s odyssey. However, the casting was certainly a good choice because Scheider does wonders with the role, managing to deliver an electrifying performance where not a lot of physical action is required... just talk.

The director makes great use of a variety of shots to give us some great staging and although there is some camera movement, I noticed very early on that the film is primarily made from cutting around static shots but Hyams still manages to get a lot of movement out of it... from scenes which might be very boringly handled by other directors. The beautifully shot opening sequence, for example, where a Russian scientist goes to tell Floyd about the decaying orbit of the Discovery and proposing a joint venture is absolutely electrifying as presented here, when it really is just a bit of, admittedly well written, dialogue between two men talking science and politics.

Similarly, when there are more visually dynamic scenes in the movie such as a spacewalk, Hyams concentrates on the way the characters interact by showing the nervous American being helped through the spacewalk by the Russian, which is followed by a scene where the Russian panics onboard the Discovery. So the approach is reversed by having something visually more interesting pulled back to an emotional sequence of character interactions, which also helps build up a quick relationship with this particular Russian so that, later on in the story, when this Russian character is ‘lost’, it means more to the audience. Again, when the whole set is shaking as the crew of the Russian craft are attempting a possibly perilous way of getting to their destination, Hyams makes it about characters again as one of the young female Russians gets into Scheider’s bed/cabin area with him out of fear... again concentrating on emotion in what is, like the movie before it, a film about a very sterile set of events.

Added to this, the film has some very nice, almost casually introduced shot set ups which, like that opening sequence of the conversation, add the interest to the story where it isn’t necessarily in the main text. For instance, a meeting scene around a table in one shot has one guy with his back to us in silhouette making up a big, vertically blocked area in the centre of the screen with the opposite side of the table on either side of him... Floyd on the left of screen and two Russians on the right... which also serves as a way to keep the ‘them vs us’ international divide as a constant reminder in a visual fashion, to help maintain the underlying sense of tension within the narrative.

Actually, the idea of using static shots works a treat with one of the film’s less scientifically grounded scenes. There’s a wonderful moment where HAL9000 is delivering a message to Floyd and after a while, when HAL is unable to identify the other person relaying the messages, Floyd is asked by HAL to turn his head and look behind him. It’s a great moment as he sees Kier Dullea as David Bowman manifested before him. He follows him to the pod bay room and has a conversation with him but, as he talks to him, Bowman shifts through multiple appearances taken from his final scenes in 2001 - A Space Odyssey. All the transformations are revealed, however, via Scheider’s face reacting to something off screen and then we have a static cut back to Bowman where he’s changed appearance again. If this had been simply tracked with a camera and some computer effects work (which weren’t really available at that scale when this movie was made anyway), then it would have looked incredibly unconvincing. Here, because Hyams has been using a lot of cuts from one shot to another rather than move the camera around, he manages to sell the transformations of this sequence with the aid of the lead actor’s reactions. Well... mostly. There’s a corny bit where ‘the star child’ from the end of the first movie is manifested and... that moment has dated a bit, I think and just seems a little over the top now. But it worked at the time and it’s kinda charming now when you look back on it.

Also, the musical score is quite sparse... and also quite rare still, from what I remember. I have an old Japanese import CD of the score which I bought back in the 1980s that had somehow made its way into Tower Records but I don’t think it’s ever been properly commercially released in either the US or the UK. The score is basically a synth score by David Shire and, it’s used very sparsely and it’s not bad but I think this was ultimately the wrong kind of scoring to have for this film (the first score by another composer had already been rejected). So it’s kind of good that it’s not used that often.

The film opens with a recap following David Bowman’s final transmitted words... “My God... it’s full of stars.” which is a static reminder of the events of 2001 and this is scored with Ligeti music which, as far as I’m concerned, makes any visual accompaniment sound interesting. After this, there is no music until a good ten or more minutes into the film, as David Shire’s score kicks in when Floyd tells his wife that he’s going up into space for a few years. After that, as I say, it’s very sparsely spotted with occasional hits of Shire’s score plus one more (I think) very brief use of Ligeti and a quick nod to the famous Thus Spake Zarathustra in the film’s closing scenes.

I remember loving the ending of this when it was released but looking back on it now, although it’s still a great, if different, kind of film to 2001, I think the ending of this could now maybe have used a little more gravitas and less ‘wonder’ in its end game. It does feel a bit anticlimactic to me now but, then again, I’m much more older and jaded by these things than I used to be so... yeah, that might not be true for a vast majority of the audience.

Asides from the odd ‘things of note’ then, there’s not much more I have to add to this one. Those things to note, though, would be the appearance of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick as illustrations on an issue of time magazine a nurse is holding, Clarke’s cameo as ‘man on bench’ in front of the White House and, just maybe, the interesting fact that Kubrick destroyed all the models and blueprints of the spaceships from the first film to stop anyone ever being tempted to make a sequel (I think, ultimately, I’m with him in terms of not making a sequel but not in destroying models) and so the Discovery had to be rebuilt from looking at the original movie... which must have been a pain.

At the end of the day, if you liked the first movie and don’t mind the less clinical atmosphere of the sequel, 2010 - Odyssey Two is probably something you might quite like and, while in no way comparable to Kubrick’s masterpiece, it’s actually quite a good movie which holds the interest of the subject matter in a very different way to the previous one. Definitely one I will revisit again some day. If you, like me, live in the UK, you won’t be able to get a Blu Ray of this from the likes of Amazon. If you want one, go to either Fopp or HMV where the Blu Ray can be purchased as an HMV chain exclusive. Like a few other films which should be made more widely available in this country.

Miss Sloane

Entertaining Miss Sloane

Miss Sloane
France/USA 2016
Directed by John Madden
UK cinema release print.

I didn’t know about Miss Sloane until a couple of weeks ago when I started noticing the posters and saw the trailer. This is possibly because the film is already 5 months behind the US release and, it turns out, was openly boycotted by the US gun lobby on it’s release... effectively killing its box office takings. If I’d have known that pro-gun people were that afraid of this powerful and entertaining movie then I would probably have rushed quicker to the cinema to see it. As it is... the pull of this one for me is that I’d seen Jessica Chastain, who plays the title character Elisabeth Sloane, in a few genre favourites such as Mama (reviewed here) and Crimson Peak (reviewed here) and I like her a lot. I also think she’s a real powerhouse of an actress and nowhere is that more ably demonstrated than in this riveting performance as a woman who has earned a big reputation as the ‘go to’ person to hire to lobby for you on particular issues in US parliament. Forgive me, by the way, if I get some of this political talk wrong as... I really don’t understand politics and the fact that I am willing to even half talk about them here maybe shows you that this is a film I really liked.

Now, the film starts of from a framing story which renders everything leading up to that framing device... which we catch up to before flashing back again every twenty minutes or so... as Chastain’s lead character is under fire in a trumped up Senate hearing investigating the illegitimacy of her ‘methods’ to successfully lobby against a specific issue. The film then starts proper as Miss Sloane’s agency is asked by gun lobbyists to ‘sell’ the idea of making firearms easily available as a positive thing to the women of America. However, this is something that really goes against the grain and she is given an opportunity, which she immediately takes, of quitting her firm and taking herself and as many of her team who want to go with her to a rival company to lobby for the exact opposite.

Now I’m not going to pretend that the issue of owning guns or not is a simple one. The bottom line is nobody should have them but the reality is... someone always will. It’s complex and I am far too naive and idealistic to get into that... especially in a film review. I mention it here to clarify that Chastain’s character is lobbying to make guns harder for the common thug on the street to have access to... by providing more rigorous checks before firearms are allowed to be bought. Which makes good sense to me as a short term workaround, to be sure.

So anyway, her and about half of her team are now working on behalf of something called the Brady Campaign for a firm headed by Rodolfo Schmidt, played here by Mark Strong, in direct rivalry to the people in Sloane’s old company. And there’s one of the reasons right there why this film is so electric. Not to take anything away from the other cast members in this movie, all of who do a blistering job and include stalwart John Lithgow as the senator leading the framing hearing but... Chastain is always brilliant and, frankly, Mark Strong just impresses me more and more every time I see him in anything. Together with some absolutely amazing costars, they contribute to an already powerful script full of ear catching dialogue, which is so beautifully pulled together by the director, John Madden.

The pacing on the film is almost '1930s screwball' furious and the performances, as I’ve said, all superb as the iceberg cool Miss Sloane is shown as the almost emotionless machine of a lobbyist using all kinds of espionage tricks to establish the outcome that she wants. This is all set up with Chastain’s opening, framing dialogue to the majority of movie, which also plays in the trailers from what I remember. And its just an absolutely brilliant and enchantingly well made ride but there is one slight weakness to the movie which, in this particular case, makes the film even stronger...

To explain that; what I mean is that although the film seems to be quite twisty and turny... it’s really not. The writers spend the first half  of the story setting up their ‘infallible’ title character before they start to show things going wrong for her and building on her vulnerability... except, if you’re like me, then you’ll known that the vulnerability is not necessarily a crack in the personae at all. Alas, the film is extremely obvious and, I have to say, within the first five minutes I had pretty much figured out what the denouement of the movie was going to be and, as it turns out, I was dead right. Now normally that would (and all too often does, unfortunately) annoy the heck out of me and, for the first third of the movie... I was kind of stewing over the obviousness of certain ploys the writers were using to try and distract me from the end game but, as I watched and the dialogue, acting and cinematography continued to win me over, I realised that if there was any other ending to this movie than the one they were building towards, I would have been incredibly disappointed in the film. So although I usually find the obvious ending to be a let down, here it was a welcome conclusion... my initial perceived weakness of the script became its strength, for me.

So it has all of that going on for it and, frankly, it’s just a gorgeous film visually too. The director uses the nice vertical set ups of walls and glass in the interior scenes to compartmentalise certain elements of the frame (as do a lot of great directors) and he does it in an interesting way. For instance, there’s a gorgeous shot which I wished he’d have lingered on longer, just after Mark Strong has sent Sloane’s team home for the evening to have a rest. It’s near the end of the movie and shows Sloane standing in the corridor full length on the left of the screen and, through and past the glass corridor coming down the middle/right side, Mark Strong siting down with his back to the camera and by the size and division of those two people in the frame, making a visual metaphor about how Strong’s character has begun to lose faith in Miss Sloane’s ability to win and using the mise en scene to visually (and presumably subconsciously, for some people) show the distance between them. It’s a wonderful shot in a film full of many such cool moments.

Max Richter’s, sadly unreleased on CD, score to this is kind of a minimalist masterpiece laying, stylistically, somewhere between Philip Glass and Hal Hartley’s musical compositions and it works really well here. It doesn’t overstate the obvious and it matches the icy veneer of the title character beautifully when it needs to. It highlights the things it needs to and stays out of the way when scenes call for it and it’s yet another score which highlights the need for this composers work to be released on a proper physical medium like compact disc.

And I don’t have much more to say on this one but I will say that, if you’re a fan of cinema and the way it can sometimes tackle important issues like corruption at the heart of a country, then you’d be really silly to miss this one while it’s doing the rounds. It’s not the kind of film I would usually repeat watch but I suspect I’ll be picking up the Blu Ray of this one at some point. Obvious or not, it deserves to be seen by a wider audience and it certainly doesn’t deserve the stupid numbers it got at the US box office. It also firmly seals the reputations, as far as I’m concerned, of Jessica Chastain and Mark Strong as being two of the finest modern actors working in cinema at the moment. Go see this one.

Interstellar

Before The Paradox Passes By

Interstellar
2014  USA/UK
Directed by Christopher Nolan
UK cinema release print.

Hmmm... yeah, okay. I’ll say up front, for any readers who might not make it to the end of this one, that I actually quite liked this movie... but I also have issues with it too.

The thing about the director, Christopher Nolan, is that I don’t usually like his movies, even though I somehow seem to have seen most of them at the cinema. The two I really liked were his second and third Batman films, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises and, though I really hated Batman Begins when it first came out, I’ve learned to have a grudging respect for that one too... mostly only as a “set up” movie, though, because I find it tonally wrong for Batman.

The main problem I always have with Nolan is in his role as a story teller. To me it seems he either dresses up a really simplistic plot and tries to pretend it’s in some way “more” than it actually is (Inception anyone?) or, he’ll make the plot line and ending of his pieces really, very obvious and telegraph it all ahead, more or less, within the very early parts of a particular movie so you’re sitting there wondering why all the characters are left playing catch up for the rest of the, often considerably long, running times (The Prestige, for example). Quite often this annoys the pants off me and I really have a hard time dealing with the way in which everything is so decodable right from the outset and can’t seem to see why people like this, obviously very popular, director so much.

Now, it has to be said, that Interstellar is guilty, to a large degree, of both of these major problems I just identified in Nolan’s work. The difference here though, is that he somehow made me not mind about it so much because he’s also managed to make the obvious seem much more entertaining in this movie. Corny, perhaps, but definitely entertaining.

So let’s get the negative stuff out of the way first, preferably without any spoilerage.

The film does, indeed, telegraph itself way too much. Right from the start we have trouble with a poltergeist in Murph’s room. Murph is the daughter of lead protagonist Cooper, played by the always watchable Matthew McConaughey. The first thing I suspect most of the audience are going to do is draw a very specific conclusion as to Murph’s “ghost” and, by the time you get to the end of the film, the audience may find themselves a bit disappointed that they were right all along.

It doesn’t help when a specific “gravitational message” is kinda “skipped over” and discarded during the opening narrative set ups, once the thing has served its purpose and got Cooper in touch with the people he needs to be in touch with to ignite the plot. The writing and misdirection during these sequences is almost, it has to be said, like watching the film crew realising they’ve painted themselves into a corner and about to reveal the ending of the movie, so they quickly run through the wet paint and hope nobody in the audience notices. However, I’m willing to bet maybe at least half the audience notice this sloppy sleight of hand so... there’s that.

A third ingredient you’ll get which allows you to quickly solve the “riddle” element of the movie is probably something you’ll get just from the marketing for the movie, to be honest. As soon as anyone starts talking about wormholes or black holes, there's a specific phenomenon associated with those that most people will probably think about. Which is, also, kind of a shame. But there’s no escaping that... just like there’s no way of escaping a black hole, right?

One last negative, before I get onto the good stuff... the movie starts off with cross cutting talking heads that speak about a time in Earth’s past when the dust started. Anybody will be able to gauge, right away, the success, or lack of success, of the central mission of this movie from these little clips. You need to contextualise them and, as soon as you do that, you realise just what’s going on there.

Okay... sorry about all that. There’s one more big negative but I’ll get to it in time. Now for all the good stuff, okay?

Interstellar is a pretty good movie. It deals with big issues of a doomed planet Earth and a mission launched to go through a wormhole which has been suddenly “left” by us by “others” and the search for a planet which the population of Earth can either be moved to or colonised with. There’s actually a little twist to that which you’ll probably half guess but which turns out to be false anyway, so that’s quite nice and, without mentioning what it is, serves to increase the dramatic tension and turn a scene of grief into a scene of almost conflict... so there’s that. The film concentrates on Cooper’s mission with his companions and the disaster that’s hitting his home world while he goes about his business trying to save mankind. It has a whole host of really good actors on board for this film in addition to McConaughey, including John Lithgow, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon and they’re all, as you would expect from such a top notch bunch, absolutely believable and convincing in their performances.

There’s also a nice structure to the first third of the movie in that, during the end of a message transmission from Earth to Cooper’s spaceship, we finish with the Earth part of it and we are left to pick up the story back on Earth. We only get back into Cooper’s mission when a similar message is sent and we end back up on the Cooper side of the message as it closes. So that’s a really nice structural thing and, when the director later discards this technique in favour of dramatic and metaphorical cross-cutting between the Earth and the mission, I couldn’t help but think that he was using the nature of the final solution of the movie to move away from that neat style of presentaiton to match this more, seemingly chaotic presentation of the footage. Possibly not but I’d love it if they actually thought about that while they were editing this movie... hopefully that will be addressed some day in future retrospective interviews about this movie.

The film has been compared to Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey by a lot of people at the time I’m writing this but, I have to say, Nolan’s no Kubrick. I say this not to diminish all his good work on this movie but to point out that the use of camera (there’s a surprising amount of hand held work in this) and editing style (often quite jarring) seem to me to be less close to Kubrick than most people have been saying. So, yeah, not actually a good comparison to make, people. In terms of the epic feel and the subject matter, however, then I can see why people are all jumping on and making that comparison, in some way. Certainly, the absence of sound in space is something to be celebrated as making a return to the art of cinema, in my book, anyway.

Actually, the film reminded me more, in one of it’s early sequences, of the great director Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Solaris... in that it jettisons the bits which can be best used in indirect metaphor and discards them in such a way that it gets you to your narrative destinations quicker. For instance, in Solaris, you have a view of a road from a car windscreen as a car goes on a journey and it lasts for many, many minutes without doing much else than look at a moving road. The first time you see the movie, in fact, it seems like maybe a half an hour of nothing happening although, I can assure you, it’s a lot less time than that. After this, we see the main protagonist of Tarkovsky’s film already arriving at his destination at a space station and it’s as though the feel of the previous scene of a car journey was a metaphor for the journey across space. In Interstellar we have a much quicker scene of Matthew McConaughey leaving his daughter on bad terms and then, as we cut from that scene, he is already in space. This works because of the emotional weight of the previous scene and its effect on the lead protagonist as a sense of going on a journey. It’s enough and it also gets us quickly to where we want to be with no unnecessary build up of pencil pushing theories and spaceship construction, training etc. So this approach really works well for Nolan.

Another great thing about the movie is the robots used by NASA that accompany Cooper and co on their mission. When you first see them they are very much presented as a sinister, threatening creation and, I suspect, this is Nolan’s way of trying to deal with the inevitable 2001: A Space Odyssey comparisons he knows would be a pre-conception in the audience and use the plot of that movie as misdirection here. All the way through you’re wondering when one of the robots is going to get all “psychotic HAL 9000” on everybody’s collective ass and Nolan fans these flames by letting you know the robots in question are programmed for 90% honesty. All I will say about that preconception is that there’s certainly an element of  an antagonist in the movie but, it doesn’t necessarily come from where you think it will... well, until you actually come in to contact with a specific character and Nolan starts telegraphing it like crazy on first contact with that character but, hey, that’s maybe one of the least successful but strangely entertaining bits of the movie so... not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing to be honest.

In terms of these robots, though, all I will say is that I suspect they’ll be remembered for a long time in the future history of science fiction cinema... long after Nolan is dead, I’m sure. They are very simply designed and as easily iconic as Huey, Duey and Lewey in Silent Running, Brigitte Helm in Metropolis, Robby The Robot in Forbidden Planet (and many other appearances over the years) and the droids in George Lucas’ Star Wars saga. You are certainly not going to forget these robots in a hurry... that’s for sure.

Interstellar works best, for me at any rate, because it delivers a hugely optimistic message about the final fate of humanity. Admittedly, it’s one a lot of people will figure out from the first ten minutes or so of the movie but, hey, it’s still a breath of fresh air in its broad strokes and, although obvious, the twists and turns of this movie are, at least, honed to a very fine and over-the-top level which you maybe won’t be expecting in terms of the details of the film’s final destination. So there’s that too.

Frankly, despite a whole spaceship cargo full of faults, I really quite liked this movie and even though I found Hans Zimmer’s score to be a little too reminiscent of certain sections of the Philip Glass score for Koyaanisqaatsi in a lot of places, even that was quite listenable (I love Philip Glass anyway) and I look forward to hearing the score CD sometime on Christmas day (I suspect)... although I’m apparently not allowed to buy the 2 disc super duper version of the score unless I happen to live in America, which I find to be hugely discriminating and insulting of the publishers, Watertower Music, in terms of omitting people who would love to import and hear this version for themselves. That’s inexcusable in my book.

There is one more big problem with the movie, for me, and I’ve been putting off writing about it because I wanted to make this review spoiler free and... it’s hard to talk about without being specific. As a result the next paragraph is going to seem extremely and unnecessarily cryptic to people who haven’t seen the film (possibly even to those who have) and, frankly, if you’ve not seen it you might want to skip this next paragraph anyway, in case there are inadvertent spoilers in my words. I’ll do my best to sum it up though.

The identity of the “helping hand” and the placement of the wormhole and the so called twist ending of the movie creates an awful paradox. The entire narrative could never have happened without the main events of that narrative already having taken place. Since the advanced and evolved nature of a certain collective identity can justify that paradox by actually bypassing the physics that such a paradox is created by, then there was no need to actually go back and do that stuff anyway. So if you look at the problem from one end of the equation you have a massive paradox which can’t happen or, from the other end, you have a completely irrational event taking place because, frankly, this stuff doesn’t need to have happened to create the series of events that gets us to that paradox in the first place. So it’s a bit rubbish in terms of the whole film really meaning nothing and is a completely pointless exercise, if you choose to look at it in those terms.

There you go... that paragraph will hopefully make a lot more sense once you’ve seen the movie and, that being said, the level of the art and craft of this particular movie outweighs, as far as I'm concerned, this same old mistake as it is made time and again by movie folk. So, yeah, it’s guilty of the same crimes a lot of science fiction movies in the last 20 years or so have been guilty of... and I won’t name them because the titles could constitute spoilerage of this movie for a lot of people... but I would normally condemn a movie hard for making just this kind of mistake (and have done so this past year with a very popular franchise movie) but I’m gong to let Interstellar off the hook because the message is one of hope and there’s always a justification for this kind of mistake somewhere along the line when the broad strokes are this big, I suspect.

And that's that, I think, for my review of Interstallar. A more or less spoiler free look at a movie which relies relatively heavily on relativity and uses it for both dramatic tension and resolution. It’s almost three hours with no interval, so that’s a problem in itself... but ultimately it’s worth the butt numbing trial to take a look at this one on a big screen. It definitely needs to be seen large, that’s for sure. Although I suspect I’m still going to find Nolan a bit hit and miss on future films because his modus operandi seems to be the same as it always was. Here’s to hoping he proves me wrong... I like to see good movies as much as the next person.