Film Review | Hunger (2008)

It's easy in many ways to tell that Hunger is the work of Steve McQueen, the director who brought us Shame: a captivating central performance from Michael Fassbender; a subject which deals with humanity at its most raw and vulnerable, but also at its most destructive and savage; and a directorial panache which makes the film at times feel less like a feature and more like an art installation. But it's also easy to tell that this was made earlier than McQueen's modern masterpiece - the hallmarks are there, but the director's approach occasionally alienates a little too much.

Central to Hunger is its crowning glory, a scene well over twenty minutes in length featuring only Bobby Sands (Fassbender) and a Catholic priest (Liam Cunningham) talking over the hunger strike Sands intends to take as an inmate of the Maze Prison during the Troubles. Featuring a single shot around seventeen minutes long, each man on either side of a table in an empty room, this is McQueen laying his cards out on the table in bold and uncompromising fashion. The entire sequence is note perfect, the two actor glancing off each other to perfection with Fassbender in particular bringing an intensity so brazen and enigmatic its impossible to resist, and the script delivering some of the most powerful moments of the whole film.

Either side of this extraordinary middle section, things are still undoubtedly impressive but feel less successful. The opening half an hour of the film presents a patchwork of events from both inmates' and prison officers' lives at Maze, offering little in the way of narrative structure or indeed exposition. If you're not already familiar with this particular period during the Troubles, McQueen offers little to educate you, opting instead to show you his artistic vision of life in Maze Prison which regularly impresses and confounds in equal measure. Fassbender's main character isn't introduced until around a third of the way in, a bold decision which ultimately works but is likely to be at least somewhat bewildering on a first viewing.

McQueen ends his film by again opting for images rather than a traditionally structured narrative, presenting us with some of the film's most harrowing moments as we witness Sands' deterioration and decay through Fassbender's astounding physical commitment to the role. Once again, the finished product feels more like an art installation than a feature film at several points, and whilst the film here is regularly striking, there are bold decisions made by the director which don't always pay off. McQueen undoubtedly has justification for showing us an extended sequence of a prison officer dousing a corridor with cleaning fluid, then sweeping the fluid from one end of the corridor to the other, but what his reasons are just don't feel clear enough to justify such a prolonged and, frankly, uninteresting moment.

Hunger is a film to admire and appreciate artistically, but not necessarily to enjoy in the same way as McQueen's later effort Shame. The director's panache with crafting powerful images is never in any doubt, but at the same time this feels a little too esoteric and metaphorical meaning Hunger often treads a fine line of accessibility. That said, as directorial debut's go, this is one of the most powerful and promising the 21st Century has seen so far.

8/10

Film Review | Shame (2012)

Michael Fassbender has emerged over the last five years or so as a serious talent to watch, bringing to life such memorable characters as Lieutenant Archie Hicox in Inglourious Basterds and more recently the unsettling android David in Prometheus. But to truly see why Fassbender is one of the most outstanding contemporary actors out there, you need look no further than his astonishing performance in Shame.

By the end of the film's opening, wordless sequence, Fassbender has expertly set out his stall, crafting the character of Brandon Sullivan sublimely through suggestion, expression and an intensity that only the very purest acting talent can muster. Brandon is seen making eye contact with an unnamed woman on the New York subway. The subtle flirting is traded back and forth, escalated little by little. And then things suddenly change, the woman sensing threat and becoming flustered before quickly escaping the train carriage at the next stop. Brandon pursues, no longer a man flirting with a woman but a predator desperately attempting to track his prey. The woman eludes him, and Brandon transforms again: a frustrated child who knows he has lost the game and momentarily bewildered, before heading back crestfallen to board the train once again. All the while this is intercut with candid snippets of Brandon's daily routine; his well-to-do but solitary existence in a modern, clean-cut apartment which belies the character's true life as a sex addict.

It's a performance which Fassbender sustains and develops masterfully throughout the film. Brandon is a complex character, simultaneously repulsive and genuinely sympathetic, repressed yet explosive. This is a character more intricate than the entire cast of other films put together, and yet Fassbender's execution of the part is so perfectly balanced between the excruciatingly subtle and overwhelmingly palpable as to appear effortless. It's a performance around which the rest of Shame is built, but the combined skill of both Fassbender as performer and McQueen as director means that it never threatens to overpower the film's many other superb elements.

Under the direction of another, Shame could at any point very easily slip into the exploitative and tasteless realm of cinema, but McQueen is so firmly in control of what he is creating this never even threatens to  happen. His depiction of the sordid elements of Brandon's life is regularly graphic, but never pornographic. A great deal of the sexual activity McQueen shows us is devoid of sexiness, instead manifesting a combination of Brandon's hedonism, dependency and self-loathing. The only time the director allows sex on screen to titillate is during Brandon's seduction of co-worker Marianne (Nicole Beharie), directly reflecting the character's desire to begin a genuine romantic relationship. Without a doubt, McQueen's command over his film is absolute and expert at every moment.

Carey Mulligan, supporting Fassbender as Brandon's capricious sister Sissy, is also deserving high praise. Her chemistry with Fassbender is electric, bringing a volatile and deep relationship to the screen with the two sharing both tender moments and some of the most uneasily tense scenes in the entire film. Her haunting yet beautiful take on a well-known film theme is also guaranteed to stay with you just as long as some of Shame's most hard-hitting sexual images.

Shame is a modern masterpiece: a piece of art where everything is perfectly crafted and exudes excellence. Steve McQueen is a director of substantial talent who will undoubtedly prove to be a name in cinema worth watching very closely in the years to come. But it is the awe-inspiring performance from Michael Fassbender that will imprint itself upon your mind long after the film's conclusion, and rightfully so. It's the most brilliant performance I've seen yet from one of the finest acting talents of the 21st Century. Shame is regularly not an easy watch, but it's a film that without question deserves to be seen.

10/10

Film Review | Inglourious Basterds (2009)

If the 1990s defined Quentin Tarantino as one of the finest directing talents of modern cinema, then the first decade of the 21st Century showed that he is also one of the most unpredictable. The director's '90s trifecta - Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown - all feel decidedly complete, whilst at the same time  exhibiting shared themes and an unmistakable style to the point that all three films arguably take place in the same universe. In contrast, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 by definition are two halves of one long and bloody epic story that inhabit their own world, whilst Death Proof is an esoteric love letter to a film-making and cinema-going style of yesteryear which shared more than just a double billing with Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror. Inglourious Basterds is arguably therefore Tarantino's first and only stand-alone film of the 2000s when measured against his 20th Century output. In many ways it signifies a new direction for Tarantino, with a quasi-historical context and a multilingual script. But this is also undeniably a Tarantino film, and moreover one which redefines the director as a breathtakingly skilled auteur.

From its opening prologue-like sequence, Inglourious Basterds is a film which commands your attention. Cinematically this is Tarantino's most mature work, with expertly crafted sequences that segue through historical drama, spaghetti western, romantic melodrama and exploitation with a refinement surpassing even the director's most acclaimed works. Every shot is a work of art, but two sequences within the film stand out as possibly the best ever seen from Tarantino. The first is the opening chapter, exuding quality and making an immediate statement through the subtitled French dialogue and beautiful yet sinister wartime countryside setting: this is at once the director not only away from his usual backdrops, but also out of his comfort zone, and yet making a masterpiece of every moment.

The opening scenes also introduce one of Tarantino's, and indeed cinema's, greatest ever character creations in Colonel Hans Landa, played to perfection by Christoph Waltz. The actor's performance is sublime to the point of being almost indescribable, creating an immensely complex and yet starkly straightforward personality it is impossible not to simultaneously despise and be awestruck by. Every moment Waltz is on screen is pure cinematic pleasure, with his introduction as "The Jew Hunter" of the SS in the film's opening one of the finest moments Tarantino, or in fact any director, has committed to celluloid.

As perfect as the film's prologue is, Tarantino's crowning achievement within Inglourious Basterds is undeniably the scene set in "La Louisiane", a basement bar at which a liaison between German double agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), undercover Brit Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and two of the Basterds takes place. The entire scene is laced with tension, and is so finely crafted as to be a microcosmic movie contained within the main film's narrative.

Whilst this may feel like one of Tarantino's more uneven works tonally - consider how far the film changes from its quietly controlled, dramatic opening to its hyperreal, ultraviolence-fuelled finale - that's not to say that the film falters in between the moments highlighted. Tarantino commands the film's multi-plotted narrative as a virtuoso conductor does a concerto through his perfectly-assembled orchestra of superb acting talents, many of whom are bold choices being unknown to English-speaking audiences plucked as they are from European cinema. So high is the quality of the casting and performances throughout that even Eli Roth's subpar turn as Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz is forgivable.

Inglourious Basterds is a tour de force from Tarantino: a rip-roaring war epic which straddles genres, delivering entertainment, emotion and extreme violence whilst showing off the director's supreme talent behind the camera in the same way as his early work that first caught popular attention. This may be harder for audiences to take to their hearts in the same way as they did, say, Pulp Fiction, but Inglourious Basterds more than deserves to go down as a true Tarantino classic.

10/10

Film Review | Prometheus (2012)

I've noted in the past that returning to a franchise a long time after the last installment is a potentially hazardous thing to do in the film business. You run the risk of upsetting a lot of die-hard fans or even tarnishing the legacy and image of well-respected pieces of cinema. The bigger and better thought of your original film is, the higher the risk you are taking. Ridley Scott obviously didn't read my advice, returning to the Alien franchise (or is he?) as director for the first time in over three decades since he helmed the original in 1979. Since Scott kicked things off, we've had three sequels of varying quality, but undoubtedly one of the best loved horror sci-fi franchises ever created. We've also had two genre crossover entries in the Alien Versus Predator spin-off franchise, which hardly did the series' credibility any favours; Prometheus is therefore Scott's chance to pull the film franchise he spawned back on track, but also has the potential to disappoint many who revere Scott as the man who first brought us Ellen Ripley and the xenomorph.

Prometheus tells the story of archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) who, after discovering several images from different ancient civilisations all including the same star map, become part of the crew of the eponymous spaceship on a mission to discover the secrets of who created humanity. Amongst the crew is android David (Michael Fassbender), whose agenda becomes more and more suspect as Shaw, Holloway and the rest of the crew begin to uncover the secrets of the moon they have landed on, LV-223.

The film's "shared DNA" with Alien, as Scott has described it, is something of a double-edged sword: it lends the film credibility, and gives ample context to the universe in which it is set; but it also sets the film up continually to comparisons with Scott's iconic franchise opener, which is essentially setting it up to disappoint. The only film in the Alien series that comes close to the quality of the original is the first sequel, Aliens, and one of the key reasons behind its success is that it didn't try to emulate the original. As far as a sequel can be, it was its own film; it continued the story of Ripley and the xenomorphs, but was also individualistic in terms of genre and style.

Ignoring for the moment that Prometheus inhabits the same universe as the Alien franchise, it's a fairly solid sci-fi thriller in its own right. Rapace takes a little while to find her feet, but becomes a compelling protagonist as the film wears on, and by the time the final act began I was rooting for her all the way. Fassbender's performance as David is also compelling and rich, with the android ironically displaying the most depth of any character. Idris Elba and Charlize Theron do well with what they're given, but never really have the chance to fully flesh out their roles. The rest of the cast are fine, but their characters feel more functional than anything else.

Scott also shows he still knows his way around chillingly horrific sequences. There are several genuinely tense and claustrophobic horror scenes, the best of which involving a hi-tech automated surgery table. The only problem is, I came away wishing there were a few more. When Prometheus is making you squirm in your seat it becomes an adrenaline-pumping, terrifying experience. But Scott leaves too long between these moments. Whilst much of the mythology and science is genuinely intriguing and intricately constructed, it's never nearly as compelling as the scary parts, and at times the film begins to get too wrapped up in its own saga instead of providing something a little more entertaining.

Even though it's arguably not part of the Alien franchise (arguments as to exactly how it fits in with the original quadrilogy will almost certainly go on indefinitely, and to give my definitive take on it would involve dropping some massive spoilers), Prometheus lends itself almost too easily to comparison with it as mentioned earlier. It's never as good as Alien or Aliens. But it is superior to Alien³, and is a deeper and better crafted film than Alien: Resurrection.

Unfortunately for Prometheus, when it is inevitably compared to the first film it will almost always fall short: Shaw is not Ripley, and Rapace is not Sigourney Weaver; Prometheus the ship, whilst impressively realised, will never have the gritty, rough-and-ready charm of the Nostromo; the majority of its crew will never feel as human as Ripley's charmingly workaday colleagues. Fassbender is the sole element that matches up to his Alien counterpart, giving just as enigmatic and unsettling performance as Ian Holm's Ash. But whilst the comparisons are there, it's not fair to judge it solely through comparison. On its own merits, Prometheus is an enjoyable and well made film. It is flawed, but there's enough here that works to make it a compelling and worthwhile watch.

7/10