Kevin Macdonald
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Recall that in " Gladiator ," after a rip-roaring battlefield prelude, Russell Crowe 's Maximus had slowly to recover from near-death before he could take up his relentless quest for vengeance.
But while he ain’t exactly Russell Crowe in Gladiator , Tatum acquits himself admirably here, in a film that clearly intends to ensure Hollywood cheese is the last thing that comes to mind... and it succeeds admirably, too.
The Eagle sticks close to its source material, which should stand it in good stead overseas but will do little for the U.S. market, given that the American conception of those first few centuries A.D.—to the degree that there is one—is equal parts Gladiator and Camelot.
Built around puffed up, misplaced notions of honor and bravado, it plays out like a cross between "Gladiator" and "Braveheart" -- and "Where's Waldo?"
The movie owes clear debts to "Gladiator," though the producers also cite the Stanley Kramer drama "The Defiant Ones" as an inspiration.
Sword-and-sandal howlers like these often overpower the best elements of The Eagle, a bloodless version of 300 and Gladiator, both of which clearly inspired the filmmakers, with the emphasis on honour and the brotherhood of the sword.
The Hunt for Red October (1990)
Directed by John McTiernan
influenced Black Sea (2014)
Plot Themes Music
The film will not appear on favorite submarine film lists in the company of greats including “The Hunt for Red October,” “Crimson Tide,” “U-571,” “K-19: The Widow Maker,” “The Abyss” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”.
What plays out is a fast-moving deep-sea caper that blends the intricacy of "Ocean's 11" with the intensity of "The Hunt for Red October" and the cautionary notes of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."
With a film legacy that includes Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 German epic Das Boot, John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October (1990) and Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide (1995), the submarine has been the perfect setting for films that emphasize themes of mutiny, claustrophobia or conflict against nature.
From "The Enemy Below" and "Run Silent, Run Deep" to "The Hunt For Red October" and "Crimson Tide" by way of "Das Boot," the submarine thriller sub-genre has been a popular one for decades.
Perhaps Macdonald and Kelly sought to honor The Hunt for Red October by evoking aural memories of Sean Connery — dangerous to evoke memories of such illustrious precedents.
Thrills abound as a one-in-a-million plan of survival gets underway, borrowing from other undersea adventures like “The Abyss,” “Black Sea,” and “Sanctum,” all while the mystery of a final transmission from the drilling team poses concerns of a supernatural kind (not unlike “Event Horizon”).
The movie even steals some major plot twists from another recent submerged suspense thriller, 2014's "Black Sea."
Macdonald goes deeper into the history books for "The Eagle," a sturdily wrought adventure about the Roman occupation of Britain that is like "The First King of Scotland" meets "The Last of the Mohicans."
Much of the scenery and action in “The Eagle” recall not classic ancient Roman-set films, but “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Drums Along with Mohawk.”
We accepted Russell Crowe in Gladiator and Malcolm McDowell in Caligula; we did not accept John Wayne as the Centurion overseeing Christ’s crucifixion in The Greatest Story Ever Told (you haven’t lived until you hear The Duke drawl, “Truly, this man was the son of God”).
The cultural trappings (costumes, music, Celtic languages, pagan rituals) are nicely authentic (though the painted Picts look like refugees from Burning Man), and a terrific climactic battle scene conjures John Boorman's Excalibur.
With roots in everything from Jack London’s 1908 short story “To Build a Fire” to the 2003 nonfiction film “Touching the Void” and the recent ordeal of the Chilean miners, “127 Hours” is a real-life cautionary tale for anyone not respectful of all the dirty tricks Mother Nature can play.
Brief, punchy and powerful, 127 Hours has more than a passing similarity with the excellent 2003 documentary Touching the Void - about two men whose trip to the Andes goes bad - and will make you feel the tension, anxiety and anger Ralston went through.
A lot of movies about climbing ‒ I’m thinking “Touching the Void” and “North Face” ‒ are about men who get into trouble by pushing their luck.
Is it a uniquely powerful experience or a "Johnny-come-lately" after the metaphysical survivalist films Touching the Void and Into the Wild?
Aron wanted to be interviewed a bit like in “Touching the Void”.
It’s how I felt about “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012), which, unlike “The Mauritanian,” didn’t even take much of a moral position on the torture we were witnessing.
Both films exist as something of a rejoinder to Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty , a film that wasn’t nearly as skeptical about American anti-terrorism policies.
“The Mauritanian,” in other words, joins 2019’s “The Report” in reviving a dormant subgenre of war-on-terror thrillers that, with one brilliant exception (“Zero Dark Thirty”), has produced little more than a series of bland, hopelessly dated exercises in high-minded hand wringing.
“The Mauritanian” is a tough movie, and not an easy one to enjoy, marking the polar opposite of the gung-ho fight-terrorism-at-any-cost attitude of post-9/11 productions such as “24” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” in which the ends justify the means.
We’ve seen these stories before in Zero Dark Thirty , documentaries such as Ghosts of Abu Ghraib , or the aforementioned The Report .
Besides, this is Mr. Crowe at his most endearing, playing a disheveled old-timer reminiscent of Jeff Bridges’s The Dude in “The Big Lebowski.”
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009) If ever a film demands a second viewing, it's this one: It's savage and horrifying and wicked and funny in the same vein of humor that could also find Dead Baby Jokes funny (i.e. the subject matter isn't funny, but the mere nature of it, being so sensational and offensive, is), and on top of it all, it completely denies us of context, outside the elasticity for good and bad held by the human spirit.
The thought of climbing perilous icy peaks might not sound like most people’s idea of a good time, but watching brave men and women take on such challenges has led to some truly great films like Kevin Macdonald’s Touching the Void and the recent doc Meru.
The best ones are typically documentaries, such as Touching the Void (2003) and the recent Meru, in which the climbers explain their motivations in their own words.
Instead, it's a close cousin to sci-fi stories like Moon , Gravity , and Interstellar and deals with some of the same themes and ideas as Cast Away and Touching the Void .
The story itself seems to be borrowed from an amalgamation of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "The Italian Job" or any other treasure hunting film if it were set aboard a submarine.
With Wonder, he has help from Jack Thorne (How I Live Now) and Steve Conrad (creator of the relentlessly darkly comedic Amazon original series, Patriot) in adapting R.J. Palacio’s novel.
To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018)
Directed by Susan Johnson
influenced The Mauritanian (2021)
In "To All the Boys: Always and Forever," the conclusion of the trilogy of hit YA adaptations that began with "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" (2018) and continued with "P.S.I Still Love You" (2020), heroine Lara Jean (Lana Condor) seems to have everything going her way during her senior year of high school--her dad (John Corbett) is getting remarried, her relationship with boyfriend Peter (Noah Centineo) is going strong and the two lovebirds are planning to go to school together at Stanford in the fall.
We go for years without a great survival movie a la “Cast Away” or “Touching the Void,” and suddenly we have two at the same time (“Gravity” is the other).
It isn’t even really about the triumph of the human spirit in quite the same way that “Touching the Void” or, again, “127 Hours” are.
Bell (Jumper) plays the local slave and friend with laudable intensity, and ends up stealing quite a few scenes.
But he lost his charisma -- he appeared shrimpy in Jumper (2008).
The war is under way and Robbie - McAvoy ("The Last King of Scotland") brilliantly portrays him as a very changed man - has been released from prison to serve in the Army in France.
McAvoy, who made his mark in "The Last King of Scotland," here becomes a bona fide leading man, his virility in early scenes later giving way to an even more affecting sensitivity.
McAvoy ("The Last King of Scotland") comes into his own as a lead; and Knightley, costumed to the nines, gives her most mature performance to date.
Atonement will certainly make McAvoy, who was inevitably overshadowed by Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland, a star in his own right.
And as Robbie, McAvoy (The Last King of Scotland, Becoming Jane), radioactive with lust, personifies Atonement's broken heart.
To put a story like this across, the actors must be in complete sync with the project and each other, and McAvoy, recently seen opposite Forest Whitaker in "The Last King of Scotland," and Knightley, whom the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies turned into an international star, are able to do just that.
It’s a soulless drama that’s passionately directed by James Mangold (“Logan”/”The Last King of Scotland”).
That said, Frozen isn't exactly Touching the Void, and there are more than a few plausibility issues, especially when you try to get your head around three young people going out on the slopes without one of them having a cell phone or PDA. Green barely addresses this, and there's nothing to make us assume this story takes place in the '70s or '80s or anything.