By the pricking of my thumbs...
Feb. 3rd, 2008 10:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wonderwelshMy name is Dewi Evans. Erm... about three hours ago I went to see a film in which some... thing attacked a city. If you've watched this, then you probably know about as much about it as I do. It disappointed my friend, Amy Jones. It disappointed the guy sitting behind me. Oh, and Mark Kermode. If you want a more detailed review look under the spoiler tag.
Basically, it's a clever film with a very moving central message - namely, live for the moment because when the shit hits the fan it might just have made it all worth while. I loved the conceit of having Rob's camera tape over his day at Coney Island, leading to the extremely affecting final scene, emphasising the last line - 'I had a great day'. The ordinary sentiment of the last scene suddenly seems, in the midst of the carnage, like the most wonderful, beautiful thing in the world - the tragedy is, Rob probably didn't appreciate it enough at the time. It's a cliched message, but original in the way it's conveyed.
Perhaps the best thing about it though is the way it takes standard imagery associated with terrorist attacks (the most immediate fear facing us when it comes to a catastrophe on this scale) and uses the monster to displace the specificity of the terrorist threat through the fantastic, so that the creature becomes a generic vehicle for every kind of disruptive catastrophe - i.e. what a terrorist attack represents for those who experience it, rather than the specific political and social consequences attendent on terrorism per se. What we fear about the attack, what such an event would mean for our lives and those we love (the emotion, the fear etc), rather than the specific physical reality of an actual attack by actual terrorists. The monster is a fantastic, unreal device, but no more unreal than any other event that brought about such carnage would seem - no more unreal than watching the twin towers disintegrate before one's eyes or (one imagines) watching the effects of the atomic bomb atacks on Japan. (I hope that's not too garbled!)
In the first forty-five minutes or so, this nightmarish setup is expertly executed and enhanced by not letting you get a comprehensive view of what the monster looks like. It becomes, as one character notes, not a specific threat, but an emblem of a generic 'something terrible', a nightmare. But then it all just turns into a standard runaround (though it does have a brilliant ending) that can never decide whether it wants to be a creature feature or something a bit more interesting. I want to like this film, because the ideas at its heart are extremely engaging - but as soon as it abandons the monster as a kind of magical realist vehicle for more deep-seated fears, it just becomes another standard run-around. It's a good film, but I can't help feeling it should have been an awful lot better. 6/10
Basically, it's a clever film with a very moving central message - namely, live for the moment because when the shit hits the fan it might just have made it all worth while. I loved the conceit of having Rob's camera tape over his day at Coney Island, leading to the extremely affecting final scene, emphasising the last line - 'I had a great day'. The ordinary sentiment of the last scene suddenly seems, in the midst of the carnage, like the most wonderful, beautiful thing in the world - the tragedy is, Rob probably didn't appreciate it enough at the time. It's a cliched message, but original in the way it's conveyed.
Perhaps the best thing about it though is the way it takes standard imagery associated with terrorist attacks (the most immediate fear facing us when it comes to a catastrophe on this scale) and uses the monster to displace the specificity of the terrorist threat through the fantastic, so that the creature becomes a generic vehicle for every kind of disruptive catastrophe - i.e. what a terrorist attack represents for those who experience it, rather than the specific political and social consequences attendent on terrorism per se. What we fear about the attack, what such an event would mean for our lives and those we love (the emotion, the fear etc), rather than the specific physical reality of an actual attack by actual terrorists. The monster is a fantastic, unreal device, but no more unreal than any other event that brought about such carnage would seem - no more unreal than watching the twin towers disintegrate before one's eyes or (one imagines) watching the effects of the atomic bomb atacks on Japan. (I hope that's not too garbled!)
In the first forty-five minutes or so, this nightmarish setup is expertly executed and enhanced by not letting you get a comprehensive view of what the monster looks like. It becomes, as one character notes, not a specific threat, but an emblem of a generic 'something terrible', a nightmare. But then it all just turns into a standard runaround (though it does have a brilliant ending) that can never decide whether it wants to be a creature feature or something a bit more interesting. I want to like this film, because the ideas at its heart are extremely engaging - but as soon as it abandons the monster as a kind of magical realist vehicle for more deep-seated fears, it just becomes another standard run-around. It's a good film, but I can't help feeling it should have been an awful lot better. 6/10
