Eternal Sunshine Of The Hopeless Knight
Posted on | July 20, 2008 at 5:23 pm | 2 Comments
It’s the return of Movie Review Sunday! Yippee!
Watched two Blu-Ray discs last night: one a purchase and one a rental.
The purchased one was Batman: Gotham Knight, an animated movie released to cash in on the theatrical release of The Dark Knight. It features six vignettes that tie into that movie somewhat (as a sort of prequel), as well as tying in with each other. The six stories are directed by six Japanese directors in anime style. They were all written by one guy, although the screenplays were from different people, including some DC Comics writers. The stories range from mildly interesting to deeply weird, but there’s always something entertaining to see. The action scenes are very well done. A few Batman foes show up: Killer Croc, The Scarecrow, Deadshot, but there’s no real costumed rogues gallery villainy like we’re used to seeing in animated Batman flicks. So in that sense it plays more like Batman Begins. The voice of Batman is Kevin Conroy, who voiced the Caped Crusader in the 90s Batman animated series (still the best of the lot) as well as in the various Justice League cartoons. He’s the best. Although sometimes his Bruce Wayne voice doesn’t really fit the Bruce Wayne portrayed in these stories (who looks more like a high school kid than Christian Bale).
I have to say I was a bit disappointed. The animation style didn’t vary much from story to story, even though they had different directors. I guess they wanted a consistent look. The stories were not very well developed, and I don’t think it was just because of the short length of them. What development there was tended to be confusing at times. But it was definitely pretty to look at, and I’m sure I’ll be watching it again. Not a bad way to waste 75 minutes.
The rental was Sunshine, a science fiction opus directed by Danny Boyle of 28 Days Later and Trainspotting fame. It takes place in the near future and features a crew of astronauts on a mission to reignite our dying sun with a really big bomb. (It’s never really explained why the sun is dying. I guess we just have to go with it.) In the course of their mission, they run across the first spaceship that was sent out for the same job 8 years earlier, but which never completed its mission and which hadn’t been heard from since, and hilarity chaos ensues.
First, I have to say that this movie looked really, really good. The special effects were amazing, the set design was good, and the cinematography made you really think you were headed to the sun. The HiDef Blu-Ray picture really made the film shine, so to speak. The acting was pretty good too, although Cillian Murphy creeps me out even when he’s playing a good guy. He’s got those weird piercing eyes. Chris Evans redeems himself somewhat from the Fantastic Four movies, and Rose Bryne and Michelle Yeoh are as enchanting and believable as always. The first two thirds or so of the movie are really good. It’s one of those “bad day” movies, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and you wonder how the crew is going to cope or survive. But they keep using their human ingenuity to get them out of sticky situations and closer to achieving their goal. It raises the usual moral questions about how far “normal” people will go when faced with an untenable situation, and follows the consequences of those actions. So far, so good.
But then an element is introduced into the movie that is just plain goofy, and not very well explained. This causes the film to lurch slightly into another direction that just feels wrong and like it belongs in another movie. You really have to wonder what the filmmakers were thinking. I think something was lost in the translation from script to screen. I really, really wanted to like Sunshine, and was really getting into it, and then… blah. Off the rails.
Though I haven’t seen anything to confirm this, I have a sneaking suspicion that Sunshine is an homage of sorts to the John Carpenter movie Dark Star, a favorite of mine. In Sunshine, the captain of the first mission is named Captain Pinbacker, and in Dark Star, the main character is Sgt Pinback. Both movies feature missions to bomb planetary bodies, take place on claustrophobic spaceships with a small crew far from Earth, and both are about the crews having a Really Bad Day. They even end in a very similar fashion. And in their own way, they both bring up issues of existentialism and what it means to be human. So I wonder…
Although since Dark Star was a precursor to Alien (even though it was essentially a comedy), and was even written by the same guy, it could just be that Sunshine is drawing from the same well a couple of levels removed.
Latre.
Comments
2 Responses to “Eternal Sunshine Of The Hopeless Knight”
July 21st, 2008 @ 4:43 am
Dark Star rocks.
July 21st, 2008 @ 8:51 pm
Dark Star was awesome. The beach ball alien is one of the greatest inventions ever. It’s also the movie that made me realize that a John Carpenter movie’s quality is inversely proportional to the budget.