Reviews

The film is not as bad as some reviewers claim, although it has flaws which have been exhaustively cataloged by other reviewers. The flaws mostly concern the manner in which scientific research is portrayed: bungling and amateurish. However, there is a deeper message and it is very much to do with the consequences of bungling and incautious science. Not all of the flaws can be excused in this manner, and I mention just one: when the protagonist, Shaw, discovers she is incubating a monster, she runs to an automated surgical cabinet to have the fetus removed by cesarean section; the cabinet answers (yes, it talks) that it is not programmed for female physiology. This is a director's trick to introduce time-pressure tension. However, the device is the private possession of the woman ostensibly in charge of the spaceship, Meredith, who could certainly have outfitted a private spaceship with a surgical unit programmed for females. Perhaps a trivial detail, but, as other reviewers have mentioned, there is a long litany of similar errors of detail which, taken together, seriously detract from the film. The complete lack of elementary safety precautions is especially glaring: don't take off your helmet on a strange planet; don't pick up an unknown snake with your hands, use forceps; don't open the door of a spaceship without first verifying who knocked; the list goes on and on. These are indicative of a weak screenplay

On the positive side, the film tackles some big issues and delivers some powerful punches. The purpose of the journey into space is, ostensibly, to "meet our makers", the presumption being that our makers could answer some big questions, such as why we are here. In a flashback, the protagonist, as a girl, confronts her father with "why did mommy have to die" and "where do people go after they die", and her father gives her a fanciful answer that dead people go to a better place. When challenged by his daughter to justify his belief, he cannot but can only say that he chooses so to believe. This is picked up again later in the movie when adult-Shaw realizes the journey has not brought the traditional (fanciful) answers she had hoped for. The film challenges our presumption that if we were to meet our makers, we would get answers. Message number one: be careful what truth you seek, because you might not be able to bear it if you get it.

As the film progresses, it becomes apparent that several characters have alternative agendas to Shaw's scientific curiosity. Meredith (Theron) is out to inherit the Corporate Empire. David (Michael Fassbender, excellent performance), is the crowning achievement of the Corporation -- an android -- whose purpose in life is to serve his maker. David's dying creator (spoiler: also Meredith's father) -- played by Guy Pearce--, bankrolled the journey in hopes of evading death. Plot tension is generated by the interaction of these characters with their conflicting and sometimes secretive purposes; you could call it underplayed, or weak direction, as they are subordinate to the almost overwhelming visual attention commanded by the alien encounters.

The David-Meredith dynamic works well: David is the son the tycoon wished he had had, and is physically a male version of the tycoon's beautiful daughter, Meredith; but David is without emotion, and therefore without love or reverence for his maker. Whereas, the daughter emulates David's emotional coldness so far that the ship's captain (perhaps jokingly) suspects that she too is an android. She has tried to find grace with her father through a kind of gender role reversal, and failed--only loneliness and bitterness remain between them. Guy Pearce is under- utilized, but Theron gives a good performance. A more human aspect of her character (with her hair down) appears on the Blu-Ray disc; too bad it was cut from the cinema version.

There is some excellent dialog between David and the humans in which the humans lament not knowing what their makers' intentions were, whereas David is certain of his maker's intention yet finds no comfort in it. This irony is echoed in the scene in which the tycoon realizes his maker despises him, just as the tycoon ultimately despises his robot-ersatz-son. The tycoon's last-gasp "it's nothing", David flatly comments with "I know". He knew all along there is no "big answer" to the "big question", but no human would have believed him because he's a robot--humans have to learn the hard way.

Our makers, it turns out, were not gods, but genetic engineers-- flawed mortals like ourselves--who played with fire and got burned. In another deleted scene, the second major message of the film is set up: the dangers of unfettered science. The ship's captain tells how a research facility had to be blown up with all personnel because "somebody spilled something" and it got loose. Well--spoiler!--, our makers spilled something and it got loose. As in Greek tragedy, where man triggers his own doom by trying to avoid it, so here, the black goo has been contaminated/activated/mutated by the scientists' own breath (don't remove your helmet on a strange planet!). David, in obedience to his maker's instructions, continues the experiment, incubating the alien genetic material in human guinea pigs, to see whether human immortality can be 'engineered'--with horrific results. Prequel alert: a monster familiar from other films appears: metamorphosed during the course of this film, beginning as genetically engineered molasses, having been incubated through human contact, then hatched out of the body of one of the pale muscle-bound aliens who were ultimately our creators--and now it's loose.

The film grasps some thorny thistles, gives them a good shake, and provides, if not pleasing answers, then considerable food for thought -- in this respect the film succeeds. Visually, absolutely stunning. However, as many reviewers remarked, it is marred by inaccuracies of detail inexcusable from such an experienced director.

6/10

Mogambo, 1953, is bound to be compared with Red Dust, 1932. The two films are based on the same stage play by Wilson Collison; the same man, John Lee Mahin, wrote both screenplays, some of the lines are even the same; the three main characters and the love triangle (or quadrangle) they form is the same; the leading man is played by the same actor, Clark Gable; and if you saw the first film, then you already know the "bang-up" ending.

Many people will find the later film the weaker of the two, but I believe that if it is viewed for what it is, instead of for what it is not, it is not bad value for money. What made Red Dust a winner was Jean Harlow, her snappy witty lines, and the sweaty sensuality of the screen chemistry between her and Gable. That is what Mogambo is not; but it has a number of other things to offer instead. While most of the secondary characters in Red Dust, including the character of the adulterous wife (originally played by Mary Astor), are cast into the shadows by the sizzling repartee between Harlow and Gable, Mogambo allows the corresponding characters to develop and show some depth. In Mogambo, the motivations and inner conflicts of the adulterous wife (now played by Grace Kelly) are explored. The sappy jilted husband is given a great deal more depth in the later film than in the earlier one. And Gable's right-hand man, Brownie, is given a more substantial part as well. This makes the later film more rounded and the characters more believable, whereas the earlier film was basically a stage duel between the barbarian and the hooker. Red Dust has a sort of Who's-Afraid-of-Virginia-Woolf claustrophobia about it; it could have been entirely played out on a single indoor stage set. Mogambo features John Ford's typical outdoorsy-ness, some pretty spectacular wildlife photography (for 1950), and a rather tense confrontation with a tribe of angry, bare-breasted, spear-wielding natives (real Africans!). Not Ford's or Gable's best by any means, but a good solid show, worth 7 out of 10.

Gable plays the same boorish, over-confident, God's-gift-to-women type in both films, but mellowed a bit (like wine, I mean). Whether you like that kind of man or not, you have to admit that he played it with grace and poise, and he showed that he could still do it 20 years on. The Gable character has been criticized by other reviewers for being incoherent or sappy. I disagree: he shows himself to be a man of raw courage, facing down wild animals, a savage tribe, a storm, etc., but finds he has lost his nerve when it comes to confronting the wimpy clueless husband. It takes Gardner to show him it wasn't cowardice, but that he did the decent thing after all.

Grace Kelly takes over the role of the adulterous wife, a mere 27 years old (so we are told) and very naive; it takes Gable's experience, wisdom, and bluntness to make her see that she does not love her husband, whom she has known since she was five. Her performance has been criticized as confused and incoherent, and Gable too old to be attractive to her; but I can well believe that a sheltered girl who married her childhood-love would be pretty confused and dotty after the first 'real man' she had ever met had heroically saved her life twice in one week. Her distress and confusion are well played, and she screams well when confronted by a panther.

Ava Gardner--well, what can one say that hasn't been already? The scene in which Gardner darts into the tribal missionary church and genuflects while the rest of the safari party go on about their business, gives her character an unexpected dimension the Harlow character lacked. I think it shows grand professionalism on Gable's part that he apparently quite happily let Gardner steal scene after scene. I guess Gable didn't have to prove anything to anyone anymore.

Forget Schindler's List, which was over-produced, over-acted, over-directed, over- everything. The horror of Nazism cannot be grasped in its enormity; it can only be filmed from the perspective of a very small group of ordinary people, and that is what this film does, very effectively.

The country which decorated a young man, Siegmund Spiegel ( Armin Rohde), in WWI is now determined to exterminate him, his wife and child, and everyone of his 'kind' it can lay hands on. A former comrade-in-arms, named Aschoff, offers to shelter him and his family on his farm in a rural community, at considerable personal risk. Spiegel's wife (Veronica Ferres) and child, who can 'pass' as Aryan, assume new identities (the name Spiegel would have been a deadly give-away of Jewishness) and may move about relatively freely on the farm, but the husband/father, who looks Jewish, must stay hidden away in a barn--for years. He can catch fleeting glimpses of his family in the farmyard as they go to work in the fields with the farmer's family and the field hands. Times are hard, food is scarce, the winters bitterly cold. Some members of the community come to know of the hideaways and help in small ways-- providing an extra scrap of food or a convenient lie when Nazi sleuths pass through hunting for Jews hiding out. Both the Jewish family and their hosts are far from safe, as some members of the community, including some of the local farm hands, are Nazi sympathizers. The penalty, of course, is death if they are discovered.

Another father and son find themselves on opposite sides of the ideological divide, and neither one will survive to the credits. It is forbidden to listen to foreign radio broadcasts (the BBC World Service, for example, reporting the inexorable advance of the Allies and the true state of the German Wehrmacht). The moment of dawning realization as the farmer's daughter learns the true identities of their guests, and the danger when a young Nazi brown-shirt begins to court her; the Star of David patch (which she had long ago tucked away and forgotten about) falling out of Frau Spiegel's pocket at the most inopportune moment in the pub ... these and a thousand other minutely drawn details fill out the picture of creeping desperation for the family and their protectors. The slightest slip would prove fatal. It is an utterly convincing tale of how paranoia and terror grip a community, how fear and intimidation paralyze people. It is also largely true; based on the memoir of the woman who was sheltered by that farmer's family (yes, they survived the war; you'll meet the real Marga Spiegel and the farmer's wife, Frau Aschoff, in the DVD's special features section).

The ultimate insult is when the Americans march in and the poor half-deranged father is finally allowed out of the barn, his head shaved (to keep down the lice)--and the American soldiers accuse him of being a Nazi. The iron cross, awarded him in WWI and which he had hoarded to show to Nazi sleuths as proof of his loyalty to the Fatherland, is suddenly damning evidence. The farmers, who had successfully hidden him from the Nazis for years, are powerless to prevent the 'liberators' from dragging him out to shoot him. If that doesn't make rage rise in your throat, you're catatonic.

The film has a gritty, Steinbeckian realism about it. The pacing is deliberate and methodical, unlike Schindler's List which was a deliberately manipulative (and exhausting) emotional roller-coaster. Don't expect cinematic fireworks from Unter Bauern; but you may not be able to sleep afterwords. The cinematography is subduedly realistic and shows what it must have been like in rural war-time Germany: mucky, cold, poor, and hungry. The cast is superb, delivering utterly convincing performances.

My only criticism is not of the film as such but merely of the title, "Saviors in the Night", for English-speaking audiences, obviously to make it 'marketable'. "Among Farmers" would be literally correct and renders the tone of the film perfectly adequately.

The film's message, conveyed in straightforward narrative without having to browbeat it into you, is this: civic courage does not require superhuman dimensions (which is how Liam Neeson's character was directed to be in S.L.). All it requires is for decent folk to do what is right. What this film shows, brilliantly, is how hard that is sometimes.