Reviews

We watched Westworld last night: first time I'd seen it in ages. It's still great fun, all paranoid futurism, macho satire and the insane staring killer-robot eyes of Yul Brynner. Perhaps more surprisingly, it's also clearly a big influence on the Terminator films.

My favourite moment is one character explaining to another how you can tell who's a robot and who's not: "The hands," he says. "They haven't managed to perfect those yet." Which begs two questions: what's different about their hands (it might have been the grainy film that denied forensic analysis) and, more importantly, why haven't they? Anyway, despite the fact that it's a classic, what's more fun is of course noting how it Gets The Future Wrong in Entertaining Ways. Thus: 1. All the computer technicians are men in white coats. Clearly the world of the early 70s was more respectful towards its geeks, and would have been shocked at the prospect of dead-white skinned conspiracy freaks getting high on Diet Coke as they shinned up the latest data drainpipe to hack into the NATO mainframe or something.

2. The computers themselves all use tapes. Come on, people, let's at least try to imagine the future.

3. Everyone travels from place to place in sleek-looking spaceships. And yet the robot repairmen go around in electric buggies that would fall apart at the mere thought of a Sinclair C5. Highly practical for getting around the rocky desert-scape.

4. The green-screen lab monitors appear to show little useful information, but do a nifty line in seemingly pointless twisting geometric shapes, a bit like pre-Windows 95 screensavers.

And finally, seemingly the first thing all the men do when they arrive in Westworld is seek out the nearest robot prostitute. Completely ridiculous.

This movie was laughable almost from the beginning. I thought T3 was fairly good - at least it captured the spirit of the first two - but this came over like someone had accidentally given $100m to someone fresh out of film school.

The direction is terrible and often illogical, there's virtually no excitement in scenes which Scott/Cameron would have torn up the screen with, and the acting is hilarious (everyone seems to speak in a gruff monotone). What the hell is Christian Bale doing in it? Did he sign the contract drunk? The female characters are largely pathetic. There are plot holes all over the place (why is John Connor so horrified by the technology that gave birth to a half-human half-Terminator, when he's already seen the T-1000 and T-X?). The whole thing is obsessed with being 'dark' and 'gritty', which it manages nowhere near as well as the 10 minutes or so of 'future' scenes in the first film 25 years ago.

Apart from the effects, and the new 30-foot tall Terminator, what is good about this film?

Clearly the key question about Godsend is how Robert De Niro ended up in such a fundamentally idiotic, appallingly scripted thriller. Once you've got over that particular shock, though, it's time to sit back and laugh at its every flaw. There are many, but surely the worst is the director's clear belief that having a child actor look moody, and planting in plenty of shots of knives and hammers, are the way of keeping your audience convinced that you're some sort of nouveau Hitchcock.

The sound in Godsend is among the worst in any modern movie I've seen. There just seems to be no mid-point between the largely whispered dialogue (volume up) and the ear-splitting musical punctuation (quick, turn it down!) of every half-arsed shock.

I won't go into the dreadful editing (which leaves enormous, and unnecessary, holes in the plot) and the preposterous back story. By far the most offensively poor part of Godsend is the fact that we are shown a child's death, rebirth and first eight years of his reincarnated life in a matter of about 25 minutes. So many opportunities for emotional depth; so many obvious directorial shortcuts, as it becomes increasingly clear that the only thing that interests him is cheap horror.

Sadly maligned as 'average' on its UK release, Cabin Fever is in fact the best horror movie to have come out of Hollywood for years. A lot of people seem to be harping about its over-the-top action and general silliness, apparently not realising that this is the point - Cabin Fever is a black comedy. Filled with great, quirky characters and an interesting streak of sadism, it's an expert subversion of the horror genre.

A little like My Little Eye (another great recent film), the script-writer delights in killing off every one of the characters and cleverly inverting the standard kids/rednecks formula: turns out the hicks are more sophisticated than your average, and one kid in particular just loses all semblance of humanity, turning psycho and killing everyone that gets in his way. There's also some truly unpleasant moments of gore and (SEMI-SPOILER AHEAD!) a neat apocalyptic twist reminiscent of Cronenberg's Rabid.

Great film-making.

If what you came to expect from 'Braveheart' was gloriously presented battles, a taste for gore and a bitter revenge subplot, then have no fear, your expectations will be met.

Sadly, 'The Patriot' doesn't quite live up to the sheer bravado and guts of its predecessor for a number of reasons. The first is that it's about 20 minutes too long, with rather too long, at times, between the action (and don't give any of your 'it's an intellectual film' arguments). Secondly, most of the characters are painfully underdeveloped. Thirdly, and most importantly for me as an Englishman, it is a risibly one-sided look at a war which, like any other, had its heroes and its villains on both sides. I counted two, just two vaguely sympathetic characters on the side of King George. One dies in the first skirmish of the film; the other seems to be going along fine until he decides to set fire a church, slaughtering tens of women and children.

Mel Gibson is, as ever, excellent, as are several of his co-stars. But if Hollywood is to be the judge and jury on the morals of world history, then woe betide any Brit who steps ashore the USA for as long as the memory of 'The Patriot' lasts.

The first hour of Sleepers is highly impressive, with the account of the protagonists' fall into the hands of their oppressors and the subsequent atrocities dealt with very well. The images of what happens to the boys are sensational but realistic, avoiding, except at one key point, the kind of triumphal uprising-against-the-system plot line that normally takes over. Here there are no heroes and no courage - just blunt brutality.

Unfortunately, the second half of the film, in which convoluted courtroom-revenge theatrics take over, is unable to deliver such a punch. The only interesting character from the prison meets his end far too early, and we are left, apparently, to cheer on the demise of characters whom we have only seen in half-glimpsed slow-motion fragments. We know nothing of them, and don't care about their plight, other than in a general 'they're bad so they must die' Hollywood kind of way.

We are also asked to support a priest who lies under oath to protect two boys who, by their own admission, have murdered a man in the middle of a bar. That several witnesses saw the murders happen in front of them is ignored by the end of the film - all logic having been cast to the four winds to support a system of values which, while intuitively just, is, on reflection, highly tenuous.

An interesting film, then, but one which needed less Hollywoodisation and a little more thoughtfulness.