The Imitation Game - Oscar for Cumberbatch?

Went last week to see The Imitation Game.  The combination of maths and Second World War history is a sure winner for me, so there was no way I was going to miss out on this one.  The film is a biopic of Alan Turing, one of Britain's all-time great mathematicians, a man who was instrumental in the Allied war effort and who remains largely unknown to the general public.  He was the leader of a team who worked on breaking the Nazi Enigma code.  His team developed what was effectively the worlds first modern computer, a machine that could quickly hunt for solutions to the code and allow the Allies to read otherwise unintelligible messages.

I'm going to heap a lot of praise on to this film in a minute, so let's start with one slight negative.  Though the film mostly avoids cliché when describing the enigmatic (see what I did there) Turing, a bit of it creeps in towards the start when Turing goes for his interview at Bletchley Park.  He puts on a reclusive genius act, answering his interview questions in a deliberately oblique way before throwing in a killer line just as he is about to get thrown out of the building.  He then spends the entire film as an autistic prodigy, unable to understand social situations or work with others.  Now I have no idea if the real Alan Turing was like this, but it's hardly innovative to portray a mathematical prodigy as a semi-autistic recluse.

Aside from that though, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing and absolutely nails his performance.  If there's any sense left in the Academy then he should be in consideration for an Oscar next year.  He is supported by a host of British talent including Matthew Goode, Keira Knightly, Mark Strong, Charles Dance and many others.  Cumberbatch's Turing is insular, brilliant and occasionally funny, but he is ultimately a man consumed by his own hopes and desires in a world that wants to persecute him for it.  All he wants to do is to solve puzzles, and the Enigma code is the greatest puzzle of them all.  We follow the action at Bletchley Park as Turing's team of code-breakers struggle against a bureaucracy that doesn't understand their work.  When they finally break the code their world turns upside turn forever as they're covered in an even greater veil of secrecy, forced to make code-blooded decisions about what intelligence to make use of, for fear that the Nazis will realise they've cracked Enigma.

I read one review recently that castigated the film for its lack of historical accuracy, and furthermore claimed that the film was actually slandering Alan Turing by accusing him of covering up for Soviet spies.  I think what this reviewer failed to understand was that this is a film that is meant to be a mainstream biopic of Turing, not a history lesson in cryptography.  I think it is reasonable to accept simplifications to the story of how Enigma was broken in order to do this.  Turing endured state-sanctioned prejudice and criminal prosecution because of his sexuality; given how far society has come since the 1950s, that's something a mainstream audience might struggle to connect with.  The film uses the spying subplot as a way to convey just how secretic gay men had to be about their personal lives back in those days, showing that a Soviet spy could blackmail a good man into silence just by knowing he is gay.  Once you accept this, then what you're left with is brilliantly-paced film that tells an amazing story about a man who's achievements should make him a national hero.

Ultimately the film is a rallying cry to the people of Great Britain.  It's a call for us to remember this man, a man who's name was airbrushed out of official history for too long, a man who came up with the theories that underpin modern computing, a man who's insular and eccentric ideas were a decisive factor in the second world war, a man who was used and then chemically castrated by an establishment for whom he won a war.  Alan Turing's name and achievements should be as widely known to the people of this country as Winston Churchill's, and if this film goes any way towards making that happen then it will have achieved its goal.  Tears were welling up in my eyes as the final scenes played out and Cumberbatch brought to life the horrors that the British state wrought upon a man who changed the course of history and got no thanks for it.   I thought it was absolutely brilliant.

The Shining - Delbert Grady

A quick post to get the morning moving faster, a scene from near the end of The Shining when Jack Torrance's mind is starting to fall apart / the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel start to get under his skin.  Here the previous butler / caretaker Delbert Grady starts off trying to clean Jack's shirt, but when the conversation turns he quickly starts screwing with his head, trying to get him to murder his son.



This is screen acting and directing at its finest.  Look at the subtle differences in body language between actors Jack Nicholson and Philip Stone at the start and the end of the scene.  Kubrick uses extremely simple techniques to frame the scene, but it maintains our focus on the characters and emphasises the power that Grady is exerting over Jack Torrance.

The Shining proves you don't have to be all about shocks and jumps and blood-curdling violence to be terrifying.  You just need to be Delbert Grady.

Interstellar - Great ideas, fumbled execution

170 minutes of brand-new release can mean only one thing at the moment - Interstellar.  Went for an opening week screening this week, 7:30 start at Showcase meant we were in the cinema until nearly 11pm - but was it worth it?  Interstellar is the latest 'intelligent blockbuster' from the fanboys' favourite Christopher Nolan, in which Matthew McConaughey plays a pilot-turned-farmer named Cooper, who is part of a mission to travel through a worm hole and seek out new worlds for humanity to move to.  The reason?  Earth is slowly dying, and humanity will die under a suffocating dust unless we work out a way to start again elsewhere.  Apocalyptic stuff.

The film starts with a 30 minute long section that introduces the pilot-turned-farmer Cooper, the future world and his relationships with his family.  It's an opening act that takes a long time and is clunkily-paced, but accurately sets the tone for the rest of the film.  We basically find out that Cooper loves his daughter but doesn't really give two shits about his son.  Then within the space of 10 minutes we go from farms and dust bowls to rockets, relativity and artificial gravity.  All of a sudden there's Michael Caine, he knows Cooper from 'the past' and immediately he's hired as a the pilot of their new rocket (which conveniently is located next to a boardroom with a movable wall so that they can have a dramatic reveal).  As an opening act, it's too long but manages to reveal too little, not a great start.

Note that there are many spoilers ahead...

We then get into the meat of the story, which is Cooper and the 3 other astronauts traversing a worm hole to another galaxy where humanity might find a suitable planet for colonisation.  Cooper and the others have to wrestle with the concept that their mission is one that might save the entire human race, but also one of great sacrifice in which the technicalities of relativistic space travel mean they may never see their loved ones again.  Does their mission outweigh their individual desire to experience love for another human?  Is love something that can transcend the boundaries of space and time?  Why are the mysterious higher-dimensional beings bothering to help humanity escape the boundaries of Earth?

No matter how exciting and bold the ideas behind the film are (and I think they are), the director doesn't seem to be able to keep the story on track.  Whenever the story starts to get going the director seems intent on slowing it down.  Anne Hathaway stands up and gives a speech about love that just about falls on the right side of being cheesy.  Matt Damon turns up as a scientist on a planet for a pointless 30 minutes to prove that humans are at fault for their own downfall.  We have multiple cuts to a docking mechanism between two spaceships - they're not docking properly and something bad might happen - WE GOT IT THE FIRST TIME!  Then when the film moves into its existential finale, the director keeps bringing it back to the mundane when he should be allowing the audience to share in Cooper's bewilderment at his journey through higher-dimensional space.  Cooper has to 'give them the message' in morse code in a wrist watch?  This is pretty cheesy in anyone's definition.  Can't we stick on the emotion of the moment?  Of Cooper's reaction to seeing his daughter again?  Of Cooper's realisation that though he would give anything to go back and be with his daughter, it was his choice to leave that saved her?  Please?

Having said all this though, I need to stress that I don't think it's a bad film.  It's just a film wants to have its cake and eat it.  It wants Cooper to go on an existential journey of discovery through multiple dimensions and realise humanity's place in the stars, but also it wants him to retain his humanity, shed a tear with his elderly daughter and get the girl at the end.  In 2001: A Space Odyssey, in order to transcend humanity's mundane existence, Bowman has to give up his humanity and be reborn as the star child - that's his sacrifice.  In Interstellar Cooper sacrifices seeing his daughter grow up, but in the end gets it all back because, well, for some reason he ends up back in the solar system just in time to have a weepy final scene with his daughter.

Comparisons with 2001: A Space Odyssey are easy to make and justified.  Interstellar is a visually stunning film and it should be commended for aiming extremely high.  In particular the sequences where they traverse the worm hole and then the black hole look amazing.  All the shots on the various planets they visit are beautifully rendered, the Tars robot works as an effective comic relief and the scientific rigour - though pretty far from actual science - is pretty darn good.  In particular I enjoyed the Einstein Field Equations for and the conformal spacetime diagram on Michael Caine's blackboard.

I guess my problem really comes from how if a film tries to set the bar higher, then I'm going to judge it with a different hat on.  I enjoyed Unstoppable, because that was a film about a train that can't slow down - so I judged it as such.  I didn't really enjoy Interstellar, because it's a film that asks questions about the nature of love, individual versus the collective and questions if we are alone in the universe - so I'm going to such it as such.  It's a film that wants to ask the same philosophical questions as 2001: A Space Odyssey, but at the same time wants to be about family, love and relationships.  That's a huge ask for any story-teller to pull off; and I just don't think the director gets it right.

Having said all that, you have to go and see this on the big screen.  3 hours be dammed, it looks bloody amazing.

Fury - a single-scene movie?

This is a film that was being very heavily advertised before it came out, and so with a couple of days off work and given my insatiable interest in all things WW2, I had to go and see it the week before last.  First time going to the Ilford Cineworld for quite a few years.  Don't really use Cineworld ever as there are several other chains much closer to Reading.  There's not really much to say about it though, it's pretty much the same as all the other multiplex cinemas out there, except you still buy your tickets from an actual ticket desk rather than the bit where you get your popcorn.  Nice.

So - Fury eh?  The basic premise is that Brad Pitt is an ace tank commander at the back end of the Second World War.  Him and his unit are operating in the chaos that is Western Germany in April 1945, as the Nazi regime is falling apart and only fanatical groups of isolated SS troops are operating causing chaos as the Americans advance.  They crew a Sherman tank, a vehicle that was mass-produced in the US and though somewhat inferior to the modern German Tiger tanks, won many battles through sheer weight of numbers.  It is a battle like this that forms one of the centre-pieces of film, when Brad Pitt's tank (named Fury) and 3 other battle a Tiger.  Only by presenting the Tiger with more targets than it can shoot before they get into point blank range, do they have any chance of victory.

It is this scene that forms the central part of the movie.  With the rest of the film lacking much in the way of a plot or character development or anything really, it feels like the whole point is to bring the modern age of Saving Private Ryan-style visuals inside the cabin of a tank. Such gritty realism has become standard for any film depicting infantry combat since around 2000, and it's about time someone shifted that brutality into the world of tank combat.  All fair enough, but it's not really enough to get 90 minutes of film out of.  One scene in particular that feels like out-of-place filler involves Brad Pitt and his green co-driver hanging out in a flat in a recent-conquered German town.  They sort of play house with the women in there for a bit, pretending to be normal in a scene that goes on for what feels like 20 minutes and doesn't really do anything apart from slow the pace of the film down.

I guess this scene is meant to contrast the horrors of war against the ordinariness of everyday life, or perhaps it's some other well-worn war film trope like the grizzled gritty soldiers freshly-off the front being bamboozled by the appearance of cleanly-dressed women.  There are a lot of war clichés on display in Fury.  Shia Lebouf plays a preacher always quoting the bible and describing himself as "god's instrument of death".  Michael Pena is the Mexican one one in the tank, cue jokey tension about where his loyalties really lie.  The film also feels the need to end on a last-stand scene which - though containing amazing visuals - is totally mental and makes the German army look like a bunch of morons lining up to be dispatched by American bullets.

So I'm going to recommend Fury, but with a big caveat - which is that it's almost entirely about the visuals and the visceral realism of tank combat in WW2.  It's a film that wouldn't have been out of place as a documentary on the History channel.  Don't go into it expecting a film that re-writes the rules of the war film genre, or even has much in the way of characters; just go into it hoping to learn something about what it was like to be in a tank in WW2.