Reviews

It's an important film, not a great one. It put World War II and its veterans back in the public eye in a big way that would be impossible to exaggerate. The story itself is childish fantasy and the plot holes are so big you can drive a Tiger tank through them. The contrived frontal assault on the radar station ruins it for me, since it comes out of nowhere and Miller acts irrationally for no other reason than the movie demands it. Steamboat Willie's return at the end, and the idea that Upham is somehow vindicated because he murders a prisoner of war is just too nonsensical. Even if we accept the silly notion that Willie happened to run into the same SS guys Miller was about to fight (who, incidentally, in reality didn't make it to Normandy until after the events of the movie) and decided he will just throw in with them as they launch a frontal assault on a defended town (instead of, I don't know, reporting to his own unit), we're supposed to, as the audience, hate on him for shooting Miller despite the fact that's his damn job? Sentimental schmalz with the over the top flag-waving book-ends. It's too bad, the combat sequences are among the most visceral, impactful, and realistic put to film. All in service of a corny B-movie plot with stock characters from central casting, most of which were too old (but especially Farina, Danson, Hanks and Sizemore).

It is a shame the writing on this film is so lacklustre as the production values are through the roof. The aerial scenes of the gliders are breathtaking (though a little crowded, as CGI artists tend to do). The uniforms and military equipment are for the most part good, and the cinematography is outstanding. The grey colour palette matches the film well and it is impossible to tell where CGI ends and the real world begins. It looks very much like someone took modern cameras back to 1944 Walcheren and photographed it. Each hospital room, living room, public building, flooded field, and the causeway itself is a flawless depiction of what the area must have looked like during the war.

As for the story...

Things occur throughout the film solely so the movie can happen. It's as if someone simply looked up some historical facts to hang the film on, but had no idea how militaries then or now actually worked. There is a scene where a resistance man tells two Dutch girls to get a map to the allies "or all will have been in vain." Amusingly, the map shown on screen is in fact an Allied map. There are surviving samples in Canadian archives, I've held one in my hands. A quick glance at the war diaries of the Canadian units involved in the actual Sloedam battle will reveal that the Allies knew all about the German defences.

The actual attacks over the causeway are compressed. The initial attack by the Black Watch is depicted in the film, the subsequent two attacks by the Calgary Highlanders, which forged the bridgehead, are not. Reinforcement by Le Regiment de Maisonneuve is similarly not depicted. In actuality the 52nd Lowland Division was ordered across the causeway after that, but refused, having found a place to cross the Sloe Channel by boat. That is sort of depicted in the film, but by the time they crossed in the actual event, the fighting at the German roadblocks on the west end of the Sloedam had long since been captured.

Other nonsense propels what little plot there is forward. A German officer comes to the house where a resistance boy lives. He doesn't search the house, but engages in some "affably evil" conversation with the boy's father. To what end? We never find out. In fact, no one seems to have any real motivations. None of the characters are fleshed out in the least.

Overall the movie is shot with lavish detail in the visuals, but the story is dull and there are no characters to care about. They just stumble from predicament to predicament and evoke similar scenes from batter movies. The evil German talking to the Dutch civilian? Tarantino did it better in I. B. The standoff (actually, about three of them) between a German and a Brit? Tarantino again. In a quirky Tarantino film it makes sense. Here, in a kitchen-sink drama, hard to say what they are supposed to prove.

Could have had something significant to say - about a lot of things - Canadian sacrifice or the plight of the Dutch, particularly those who found fascism appealing, or the British sense of duty. The film thinks it's talking about all this, but it's so poorly plotted and the dialogue is so stilted, you never lose the sense you're watching some screenwriter's sense of what the war might have been like.

Ryan Reynolds obviously steals the show as the super-likable hero. All the acting is good except for the "heavy", though perhaps his continual mangling of pop culture references is a deliberate comment on his personality. The effects are obviously very good. Not so good are the constant and unnecessary blasphemes, foul language and vulgar sexual references which will go over the heads of the younger viewers and honestly add nothing to the film. In common with any other video game movie, you'll have to check your brain at the door. Given a room full of computer servers why would it occur to anyone - dumb villain or otherwise - to attack it with a hatchet rather than just, you know, cut the power. Many other similar questions, which shouldn't interfere to the fun on the screen as long as you remind yourself it doesn't matter. No real surprises or twists and of course the obligatory happy ending which you see coming before the film is even half over.

It was rumoured years ago that Tom Hanks wanted to do a mini-series based on the Kennedy Assassination, as a counter-point to Oliver Stone's film, "JFK", using Vincent Bugliosi's research as a guide. If anything, this film is a convincing argument for such a series - and perhaps is even a test-bed for such a project. The film seems to pack a lot of material in, and as noted by many others, the pacing feels off.

However, there is a great verisimilitude created by the inclusion of actual footage - in limited amounts - as well as the integration of the ground-breaking television coverage of the events of the day. The conclusion of the film is perhaps too subtle, but if one pays attention to what Cronkite is saying and relates it to the action on-screen, there is a very clever "conclusion" to the film that it seems some reviewers have missed. I saw this film in the same (opening) weekend as "Gravity" and ironically, the latter film is receiving rave reviews for the acting of its cast, despite not really having much of a story. In fact, "Gravity" is really not much more than a thematic notion about "rebirth" with two weakly drawn characters, while "Parkland" focuses on a group of real-life men and women who had to deal with a major historical catastrophe. I found the latter far more gripping, and compelling.

Some of the choices in "Parkland" were a bit odd, and comparing to the historical record as set out by the source material - Bugliosi - one sees some liberties taken for one presumes cinematic reasons. Other reviewers have pointed out some (i.e. Zapruder had initially locked his film in his safe, not clutched it to his bosom in Dealey Plaza). One wonders if we truly won't see an expanded version of this film, in mini-series form, with the many other characters explored. The actor chosen to portray Lee Harvey Oswald bore an uncanny resemblance and the effort seemed wasted given the tiny screen time given to that major historical figure. One could easily see some merit to an 8 or even 10 part treatment of various subjects, including Oswald's life in Russia, the assassination attempt on General Walker, the work of the Warren Commission, the rise of the conspiracy industry, Jack Ruby's last weekend of freedom, the Clay Shaw trial, etc. Many more interesting stories to tell from the perspective of the Bugliosi/Posner perspective.

One of my absolute favourite cinema experiences was seeing Magnificent Desolation in IMAX 3-D. Having had a long-time interest in Project Apollo, it was amazing to sit in the audience and feel like I was actually on the moon, or in the actual spacecraft involved with the lunar landings. Knowing that I was watching history come to life left me with a lump in my throat, a feeling I still get every time I put From The Earth To The Moon in my DVD player and replay Tom Hanks' 10-part mini-series, which I do on a regular basis.

The visuals of Gravity in 3-D are no less stunning, and other reviewers, professional and amateur, have spoken well to them, in particular the opening 17-minute shot which leaves one feeling as if they, too, are right there, on a mission over the Earth.

Unfortunately, the film quickly departs from logic. The director has admitted that science has taken a back-seat to story, and this understandable - even forgivable. I can understand a certain necessity to putting all the space stations and ships on the same orbital plane in order to tell a good story.

However, there is no story here either. The director basically has opted to provide a theme - "rebirth" - and has used a space setting in order to paint this theme for the audience in sometimes subtle, sometimes broad strokes. This may appeal to the artistically minded, it will certainly clash with those, like myself, who were drawn in by the rave reviews about the technical merits of the photography.

The characterization is minimal, and perhaps most disappointing given her usual brilliant performance, Bullock is used here as a 'damsel-in-distress'. We are led to believe she has been selected for astronaut training and employment as a mission specialist, but we don't get to see her in whatever element she was chosen for. Instead, we see her fumble through routine repairs, dropping tools, complaining about space-sickness, and ultimately screaming in fright, crying, confessing to the strains of single-parenthood, admitting she can't fly the re-entry modules, but managing to do so anyway, through blind luck. And thus she is "reborn".

And in case you don't "get it", she floats in an airlock in a fetal position, wrapped in an umbilical cord for long, pointless seconds, as Clooney's character drifts off into the void, incommunicado, as she ensures the audience buys into the "rebirth" theme, before floating down the tunnel to make contact.

It's not such a bad theme, but the actual space program is about so much more than blind luck and damsels in distress. I understand movies need to have peril and conflict - which can include inner conflict. The device here of having Clooney return was handled so abruptly, I simply assumed it was a bit of science the film-makers had simply gotten wrong, and the gasps and muttering of other audience members in the cinema suggested they felt the same way. It would have been much more satisfying to see astronauts behaving like actual astronauts, and not fretting about whether or not they had "learned how to pray" correctly.

There was nothing about any (both) of these characters that made me care about them, and the fact that Bullock's survived by pushing buttons like a chimp in a food experiment actually made me a bit angry.

Such excellent photography and visuals, and two brilliant actors, are wasted here on a non-story by a director who dwelled entirely on theme.

I think it is great that movies can be used to highlight current social issues, or even past ones - the plight of the Tuskegee airmen, for example, or the Holocaust. I don't even mind "heavy-handed" emotional overtones - i.e. the American flag in Saving Private Ryan used to bookend the movie. I'm a sucker for that stuff. But Avatar is not just overblown with heavy handed writing, it actually insults any number of categories of viewers.

If one listens to the commentary track of Valkyrie, for example, the writers mention that the obvious "villain" of the piece could not have been written as a villain. Hitler's public speeches were almost always about prosperity and peace, he never killed anyone personally, never signed an execution order, never visited a death camp, never witnessed a murder. And so in Valkyrie, you had a quality of which apparently Mr. Cameron is not possessed - subtlety. The only "mustachio-twirling" moment, as the writers called it, was when one of the teletype operators is told by his boss to cut off communications to the orchestrator of the coup against Hitler, and he makes a faint smile. That's it. That's the moment of villainy for the film. The rest is cloaked in ambiguity.

Avatar, of course, has scenery chewing galore, or would have if not for the excellent actors. Stephen Lang is well known to Civil War buffs is certainly no over-actor. But the writing does him no great service, ditto Giovanni Ribisi, another familiar face to war movie buffs from his service in SPR.

What is most insulting, though, is that Hollywood almost always dumps on religion out of ignorance up until the point it can serve a story in some hokey way. The only time religion is used to service a story is if some scientific grounds can be found to 'legitimize' it (in Star Wars, it was mitichlorians, whatever they are, and in this one, it is electromagnetic impulses connecting the trees). In Avatar, the people using technology are stupid and amoral ones and naturally are depicted as faithless. Catholics, Jews, Muslims all get short shrift in films because without some "scientific proof" for their religious beliefs, apparently faith alone is not enough. According to Cameron, you have to be able to literally talk to the trees and cute animals, or else religion just doesn't cut it.

But I also don't understand the movies in which we're supposed to root for cultures who reject modernization; the message was so heavy handed it just made me angry more than anything. Connect the dots - technology is bad, since evidently it ruined the Earth, and therefore we need to root for blue people who prefer to live in trees and sleep in hammocks without any of our creature comforts. Personally, I like living in a house and having a computer, and watching TV, and a spring mattress, and a gas-fired furnace, and a car with internal combustion engine to take me interesting places, and going to the movies and watching far-fetched stuff that people like Cameron dream up.

There might have been a good story in here somewhere if Cameron hadn't decided to beat us over the head with an environmental guilt-trip, with bad guys with razor thin motivations and no ambiguity whatsoever. Far more interesting themes would have been the notion that humans were there to sincerely help, or perhaps the notion that religion and faith are real and legitimate and meaningful without being able to 'prove' the existence of God through scientific means. Sometimes sworn enemies even believe in the same gods - talk about moral ambiguity. I can't buy into a notion that people who make multi-million dollar technology are always of necessity amoral idiots while people sleeping on rocks and eating raw hand-killed food are somehow geniuses with absolutely perfect moral centres. I guess that's why they call it fantasy. By the end, I was cheering for the guys in the helicopters, not because I approved of what they were doing, but because I wanted it to be over with that much more quickly. I simply wasn't buying it; I enjoyed the visual spectacle but the characterizations and motivations of the "villains" were about as compelling as Wile E. Coyote.