Allied (2016)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
In 1942, an intelligence officer in North Africa encounters a female French Resistance fighter on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. When they reunite in London, their relationship is tested by the pressures of war.
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What critics say influenced Allied
Two people fall in love in Nazi-occupied Casablanca - stop me if you've heard this one before.
At the very least, it's a nice mix of 'Casablanca' and 'Mr and Mrs Smith'.
Allied is more intimate than epic, so the grandiose moments tend to stand out like a sore thumb, clashing with the Casablanca-esque tone the film works so hard to replicate.
Salvo que mi imaginación haya buscado lo inexistente, me parece que en una toma Brad Pitt adquiere un parecido notable a Humphrey Bogart en Casablanca (1942), de Michael Curtiz.
Su primera parte recuerda al cine clásico fabricado por Hollywood, sobre todo a Casablanca (1942), y, la segunda, propone un viraje que se aleja de dichos elementos para acercar el convoy a los thrillers hitchcockianos (Notorious, Suspicion).
Shot in velvety-rich classic Hollywood style from an original – and yet so very unoriginal – script by Steven Knight (Pawn Sacrifice), Allied comes off like a highlight reel that mimics the look and feel of a whole school of great films, from Casablanca to Hitchcock's Suspicion and Notorious.
The more Zemeckis strains to re-create the romanticism of the wartime films of the 1940s, the more I wished this one was being made by Alfred Hitchcock, who effectively made a variation on this theme with "Suspicion" (1941).
The story, written by Steven Knight and apparently based on some real wartime derring-do, has overtones of Hitchcock’s Notorious and Suspicion, as well as Casablanca, and even Charade.
Instead, we get a play-it-safe thriller with a plot that recalls that of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and Suspicion yet fails to muster a fraction of either's suspense.
It’s a movie that bows deeply to such classic spy thrillers as Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and a dozen other Second World War-time films, including Casablanca.
Think Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock’s Notorious.
Or the stars of Notorious, shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1946 in such enveloping close-up that all else—the Nazis, the uranium ore MacGuffin—was forgotten.
Shot in velvety-rich classic Hollywood style from an original – and yet so very unoriginal – script by Steven Knight (Pawn Sacrifice), Allied comes off like a highlight reel that mimics the look and feel of a whole school of great films, from Casablanca to Hitchcock's Suspicion and Notorious.
The story, written by Steven Knight and apparently based on some real wartime derring-do, has overtones of Hitchcock’s Notorious and Suspicion, as well as Casablanca, and even Charade.
Instead, we get a play-it-safe thriller with a plot that recalls that of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and Suspicion yet fails to muster a fraction of either's suspense.
It reminds us of the way Sylvia Sidney regards Oskar Homolka in Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage.
Unfortunately, they are played out in such a flatfooted fashion that you’re likely to be reminded not of “Foreign Correspondent,” “Saboteur” or “Notorious” but of the missteps of his later years like “Torn Curtain” and “Topaz.”
Unfortunately, they are played out in such a flatfooted fashion that you’re likely to be reminded not of “Foreign Correspondent,” “Saboteur” or “Notorious” but of the missteps of his later years like “Torn Curtain” and “Topaz.”
Unfortunately, they are played out in such a flatfooted fashion that you’re likely to be reminded not of “Foreign Correspondent,” “Saboteur” or “Notorious” but of the missteps of his later years like “Torn Curtain” and “Topaz.”
Maybe only Hitchcock, particularly the Hitchcock who made The Man Who Knew Too Much, which succeeded in making Islington feel like the casbah.
He’d rather pull off big, showy set pieces like the spectacular opening shot of Max parachuting into the Moroccan desert or the scene in which Max and Marianne consummate their relationship in a car buffeted by a sand storm (a shot shamelessly ripped off from The English Patient).
That old number, you might think—a leftover from The English Patient.
The physical consummation is clear-cut, occurring in the midst of a desert storm in a scene that recalls another 1996 release, Anthony Minghella's The English Patient.
But, for all its echoes of Casablanca and The English Patient, this World War II drama doesn't earn the "iconic" label.
In the film’s best scene, M & M make love inside a car during a sandstorm: It’s like Lawrence of Arabia as a date movie, or maybe The English Patient, only vehicular instead of aerial.
The film is schooled in the ways of Curtiz and Hitchcock, of Lean and Powell/Pressburger (the finale even pays homage, as so many movies from the Spielberg generation do, to John Ford’s The Searchers).
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Moving elegantly from its golden-hued first hour in French Morocco to a bombed out—but no less postcard pretty—wartime England, Allied evokes imagery like an expensive mausoleum of the silver screen, from the obvious callbacks to Casablanca to David Lean, the Archers and Carol Reed’s The Third Man , gliding through high-tech recreations of classic wartime movie tropes filtered through Zemeckis’ gifted eye for composition.
But this isn’t some fetishistic museum exhibit, à la Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German ; the technique is thoroughly modern.
Still, this romantic aspect of Allied is uninteresting, mostly because it lacks the sensual, existential suspense that made Josef von Sternberg’s Dishonored and Morocco transcend politics.
Still, this romantic aspect of Allied is uninteresting, mostly because it lacks the sensual, existential suspense that made Josef von Sternberg’s Dishonored and Morocco transcend politics.
But the stuffy, stilted, lumbering “Allied” earns a place beside David Selzer’s similarly overblown “Shining Through” (1992) among misguided big-budget attempts to go back to the front.
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Mr. Zemeckis has made more ambitious, more dazzling films — as a dogmatic anti-Gumpian, my list of favorites would include “Back to the Future,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and “Cast Away” — but this one may be the purest and most relaxed demonstration of his mastery.
But there’s true value in escapism in its purest form, which has been Zemeckis’ forte since “Back to the Future,” especially when it’s presented with such skill and conviction.
Shot with vintage movie luster by Zemeckis’ go-to cinematographer Don Burgess (Forrest Gump, Cast Away, etc.) and costumed by Joanna Johnston (her third Zemeckis movie since Back to the Future), the clipped, manicured, decked-out Cotillard and Pitt don’t just look great; they glow as if they’ve been radiated.
Director Robert Zemeckis (“Forrest Gump,” “Back to the Future”) goes old-Hollywood in this World War II yarn, making the beauty of his two leads as much the focus of the film as the espionage storyline.
Best known for directing the Back to the Future trilogy and Forrest Gump, his recent career has been steeped in artifice.
In 2012, “Back To The Future” mastermind Robert Zemeckis returned from motion capture purgatory (“The Polar Express,” “Beowulf,” and “A Christmas Carol”) to the land of the living with “ Flight ,” and then, three years later, “ The Walk .”
Working from a screenplay by Steven Knight (“Eastern Promises”), director Robert Zemeckis (“Flight”) delivers a romantic thriller that’s reminiscent of those that were made during the period in which it’s set.
After the disappointing The Walk, the lopsided Flight, and his creepy dead-eyed motion capture trilogy (Beowulf, The Polar Express, and A Christmas Carol), it seems the talented director is getting further and further from his halcyon days.
After a decade-long detour into performance-capture animation projects, Zemeckis is back in his sweet zone making movie movies such as the terrific Denzel Washington vehicle Flight, the greatly underappreciated and under-seen The Walk and now the supremely entertaining Allied.
In 2012, “Back To The Future” mastermind Robert Zemeckis returned from motion capture purgatory (“The Polar Express,” “Beowulf,” and “A Christmas Carol”) to the land of the living with “ Flight ,” and then, three years later, “ The Walk .”
His movies are typically filled with it, sometimes in obvious ways (recreating the World Trade Center for The Walk ), other times more subtly (the airbound scenes in Flight ).
While technology has consistently played an important role in the director's career from the start, it's arguably been brought more to the forefront in the last 15 years, and has been incredibly influential in every movie he's made since Castaway: from his motion capture trilogy, to the plane-flipping drama of Flight, to the vertigo-inducing 3D of The Walk.
Allied marks Zemeckis’ second incursion into Hitchcock territory since his Harrison Ford-Michelle Pfeiffer ghost tale What Lies Beneath in 2000, but here he’s on stronger ground with the sturdier script.
(It also recalls, at certain points, Zemeckis’s own domestic thriller What Lies Beneath.)
As an overenthusiastic fan of What Lies Beneath , Robert Zemeckis’ earlier evocation of a classic movie format (in that case Hitchcock), I was probably more open than most to Allied, his attempt to recreate a wartime romantic suspense picture along the lines of Casablanca and Notorious (Hitchcock again).
However, the film eventually starts to resemble Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath , his 2000 horror-thriller that, like Allied , concerned the growing distrust that festers between a married couple.
Like his own “What Lies Beneath” without the laughable ending, here’s another Zemeckis genre programmer that digs deep into ideas of partner betrayal … with superior results.
After the disappointing The Walk, the lopsided Flight, and his creepy dead-eyed motion capture trilogy (Beowulf, The Polar Express, and A Christmas Carol), it seems the talented director is getting further and further from his halcyon days.
Zemeckis often uses cutting edge technology in his films; he blended cartoons and real life in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and “The Polar Express” was the first film to entirely utilize motion-capture animation.
In motion-capture animated films like The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, he merrily sleighed into the heart of the uncanny valley ; meanwhile, last year’s The Walk showcased both the World Trade Centre (fake) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s French accent (faker).
In 2012, “Back To The Future” mastermind Robert Zemeckis returned from motion capture purgatory (“The Polar Express,” “Beowulf,” and “A Christmas Carol”) to the land of the living with “ Flight ,” and then, three years later, “ The Walk .”
Robert Zemeckis directs and the man that brought us the Back to the Future trilogy, Forrest Gump, The Polar Express and, more recently, Flight and The Walk, tones down the TAH-DAH special effects.
Respected director Robert Zemeckis earned an Oscar for “Forrest Gump,” and he has helmed a wide range of other films, including “Back to the Future,” “The Polar Express,” and more recently “Flight.”
He also got the romance simmering in an uber-believable way between Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in "Romancing the Stone," so it's a mystery why his latest offering doesn't work as well it could and likely should have.
Over the years, he has elicited great work from the likes of Kurt Russell (“ Used Cars ”), Kathleen Turner (“ Romancing the Stone ”), Bob Hoskins (who should have received an Oscar for his work in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”), Tom Hanks (“ Forrest Gump ” and “ Cast Away ”) and Denzel Washington (“ Flight "), to name a few—and this is once again the case with "Allied."
Second Glance: The Pre-‘Allied’ Freedom of ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’…
Starting off with writing 1978’s teen pic “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” he became a Spielberg protege, directing a number of big blockbusters, including one of the most beloved of all time, “Back To The Future.”
It’s a reaction I’ve often had to Zemeckis’ more grandiose films, including Forrest Gump, Beowulf, and Contact.
Then he switched into more prestige-y fare in the 1990s with the Oscar-winning “Forrest Gump” and the less adored, but less stodgy “Contact.”
He is Max Vatan (Pitt), a Canadian spy working for the British, so handsomely outfitted that he could have fallen not from the sky but out of another firmament: "Lawrence of Arabia."
Zemeckis’ yesteryear calculation is apparent in that very first shot, with the earthbound Pitt seen striding across a Lawrence of Arabia panorama standing in for the Moroccan desert, wrapped in fatigues that wouldn’t look out of place in an expensive, middle-aged menswear catalogue.
In the film’s best scene, M & M make love inside a car during a sandstorm: It’s like Lawrence of Arabia as a date movie, or maybe The English Patient, only vehicular instead of aerial.