Movie Review: Official Secrets

Official Secrets ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Gavin Hood.

Written by: Gregory Bernstein and Sara Bernstein and Gavin Hood based on the book by Marcia Mitchell and Thomas Mitchell.

Starring: Keira Knightley (Katharine Gun), Matt Smith (Martin Bright), Matthew Goode (Peter Beaumont), Rhys Ifans (Ed Vulliamy), Adam Bakri (Yasar Gun), Indira Varma (Shami Chakrabarti), Ralph Fiennes (Ben Emmerson), Conleth Hill (Roger Alton), Tamsin Greig (Elizabeth Wilmshurst), Hattie Morahan (Yvonne Ridley), Ray Panthaki (Kamal Ahmed), Angus Wright (Mark Ellison), Chris Larkin (Nigel Jones), Jeremy Northam (Ken MacDonald).

 

Official Secrets is the story of Katherine Gun, who in the lead up to the Iraq war, worked for British intelligence as a translator. She knew that the intelligence didn’t really support the war, and that both the American and Iraqi governments were lying about it – and eventually her conscience gets the best of her – and she leaks an internal memo from the Americans, to the British, requesting information on members of the UN Security council, that could be used to essentially blackmail them to voting for the war. She didn’t do this for personal gain – in fact, it was a tremendous personal risk to her, as she could be fired and charged, and her Muslim refugee husband could end up being deported. It is a great story – and not one all that well-known outside of England. And yet, the movie that tells the story is more than a little dull – and never quite hits the way it should.

 

I think the reason the film doesn’t really work is because co-writer/director Gavin Hood never really settles on the story he wants to tell. He has essentially made three movies here – and none of them work as well as they should. One of the movies is about Gun herself – played in a fine performance by Keira Knightley, as a woman who gets increasingly exasperated with what she knows are lies, leading her country to war, and eventually breaks and leaks the document – and then has second thoughts. When the leak is discovered, and she is discovered the leaker, the pressure mounts on her – and her husband.

 

The second movie is about the reporters who eventually get the memo. They work for a paper that is pro-war – but cannot resist a good story. They have trouble verifying the story – and they have to go to print still not 100% sure that they are correct – even though they have vetted it as much as they can. This part is probably the weakest – because it’s the most well-known and clichéd part – and as talented as some of the actors (Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, Matt Smith) are, they cannot quite breathe life into it.

 

The third movie starts late – and centers of a lawyer played by Ralph Fiennes, who decides to take on the case for Katherine, when the government seems to be coming for her guns blazing. His challenge is to mount a defense for a woman who has confessed her crime, and is charged under a law that pretty much says the government can do whatever they want. His only defense is that the war was illegal – so therefore, what Katherine did to try and stop it wasn’t.

 

I will say that the movie builds to a satisfying courtroom climax – the rare courtroom climax that literally did surprise me, and would be the type of thing you wouldn’t believe unless it were true. It hits just the right notes in that climax.

 

But the rest of the movie feels a little too bland, a little too predictable, a little too stolid and solid, without really digging very deep. It’s all very British in a reserved way – but without the subtlety that can sometimes come along with it. The film holds your interest, without ever being very involving. It’s just kind of there.

Movie Review: Eye in the Sky

Eye in the Sky

Directed by: Gavin Hood.

Written by: Guy Hibbert.

Starring: Helen Mirren (Colonel Katherine Powell), Aaron Paul (Steve Watts), Alan Rickman (Lieutenant General Frank Benson), Barkhad Abdi (Jama Farah), Jeremy Northam (Brian Woodale), Iain Glen (British Foreign Secretary James Willett), Phoebe Fox (Carrie Gershon), Monica Dolan (Angela Northman), Faisa Hassan (Fatima Mo'Allim), Aisha Takow (Alia Mo'Allim), Armaan Haggio (Musa Mo'Allim), Carl Beukes (Sergeant Mike Gleeson), Richard McCabe (George Matherson), Michael O'Keefe (Ken Stanitzke), Kim Engelbrecht (Lucy).

 

Eye in the Sky is a thriller, and a fine one, about drone warfare that deliberately – perhaps over deliberately – doesn’t give the audience an easy out – a way to feel superior to the film, or to make easy moral judgments. The film has no answers, but simply sits back and asks questions and then leaves it to the audience to decide what is right and wrong. In general, I appreciate this approach, although in this case, I felt the whole thing was too perfectly designed – it presents too perfect an unanswerable moral quandary – to truly have the impact it wants to have. This is a film that seems like it wants to inspire debate, but doesn’t really end up giving the audience much room for debate. No matter what side you’re on, you’re both right and wrong – and the film makes it too easy to simply throw your hands up and not take any side at all.

 

The film is about a drone mission in Africa, that is supposed to be little else than an observation one. Helen Mirren is Colonel Katherine Powell, who has been tracking a British Citizen, who has converted to Islam and become radicalized by her husband, for years. She finally thinks she knows where she and her husband will be, and has ground troops ready to arrest her. She has the help of the Americans – who have assigned drone pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul), stationed in Las Vegas, to simply watch the house the couple is supposed to be at. But then things take an unexpected turn – this isn’t just a regular meeting, but is actually meant to prepare for a suicide bombing. They have eyes inside the house, and see men suiting up with bomb vests, to carry out an attack who knows where. Capture then has just become too dangerous – but letting the men leave to carry out their attack is also not an option. They could make Watts fire a hellfire missile at the house, blowing it up, but there will be collateral damage – seen here as a young girl selling bread outside the house, who will almost certainly be killed if they strike. But if they don’t strike, then how many other little girls – and their families – will be destroyed.

 

Eye in the Sky wraps everything up in a nice, neat little package then that becomes unanswerable. The bulk of the movie is the internal debates about whether or not to fire the missile. Legally, it appears, that they can fire the missile, but at the same time this mission wasn’t authorized to be deadly. The British bureaucracy dithers and twiddles their thumbs – passing the buck from one person to the next, none of whom want to make the decision. The higher ups in America are unsympathetic, and just want to fire the damn missile already. Watts, who actually has to pull the trigger, and thus, end the little girl’s life is much less sure.

 

The movie is well directed by Gavin Hood, who bounces between smaller films, and big blockbusters, and here has crafted a fairly tense thriller. The performances are almost uniformly excellent – Mirren, single minded and driven, not caring who dies if she can accomplish her mission, Paul, as morally conflicted (because that is after all why you cast Paul in anything), Alan Rickman as a General in the room with the British bureaucrats, who is frustrated by their lack of response (who also doesn’t think twice about the fact that he’s buying a present for granddaughter around the same age as the girl he may have a role in killing). There are fine British actors, dithering very British-like throughout the film. Barkhad Abdi, Oscar nominee from Captain Phillips, is pretty much wasted as an alley to the British and Americans, who is still the only one in actual harm’s way.

 

The major problem I had with Eye in the Sky, is that the whole thing seems overly calculated. It lacks true moral complexity, but instead has a manufactured one. In the end, I think, the movie takes the easy way out – it takes no stand on drone warfare at all, and instead, simply tells the audience there is no solution. Perhaps that is true – but the problem is that it’s fairly clear that is what the movie is saying from its opening scenes right down to the end. There is nothing that truly makes us re-evaluate our stance on the issues. The film dithers almost as much as its characters do, while criticizing those characters for doing just that. The film works, mainly, as a thriller. I just don’t think it’s nearly as complex as it thinks it is.

Movie Review: Ender's Game

Ender’s Game
Directed by: Gavin Hood.
Written by: Gavin Hood based on the book by Orson Scott Card.
Starring: Asa Butterfield (Ender Wiggin), Harrison Ford (Colonel Graff), Hailee Steinfeld (Petra Arkanian), Abigail Breslin (Valentine Wiggin), Ben Kingsley (Mazer Rackham), Viola Davis (Major Gwen Anderson), Aramis Knight (Bean), Suraj Partha (Alai), Moises Arias (Bonzo Madrid), Khylin Rhambo (Dink Meeker), Jimmy 'Jax' Pinchak (Peter Wiggin), Nonso Anozie (Sergeant Dap), Conor Carroll (Bernard ).
 

For the most part, I believe that you have to except the basic principle of a movie. Some like to dig in and map out all the logic flaws in a time travel movie for instance – showing how what happens in the movie will make the universe implode – but to me I try to just except the basic premise of any movie and go with it. You can make a good movie – or at least an entertaining one – out of the most ridiculous premise imaginable – if you at least stick to your own rules. In relation to Ender’s Game however, I never could quite believe the founding premise of the film – that children and not adults are best suited for war, because they are more empathetic, so they can better intuit the moves of the enemy. I don’t think this is entirely my fault – the movie does a very poor job of establishing the why and how this premise was established in this world, and the movie, which seems to be about the main character trying to find balance between two extremes – empathy and violence – is also poorly handled. The movie, which has a lot of weighty ideas in it, especially for a Young Adult one, is more interested in special effects than anything else – and that ends up hurting the film immeasurably.

We first meet Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) while he’s at school, training to see if he has what it takes to be a soldier in the fight against the Formics – an alien race who tried to invade Earth 50 years before, but were eventually defeated – but only after millions of people lost their lives. Humans were unprepared last time, but won’t be next time. Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) is convinced Ender is “the one” – but needs to put him through one final test before he can go off to Battle School – which Ender passes by putting a much larger child in the hospital. He didn’t pass because he was quick to violence – he passed because of the reason he put the kid in the hospital – he kicked him when he was down to prevent future fights.

In voiceover, Ender tells us that he must balance out the traits of his two older siblings – Peter, who is sadistic and quick to violence, and Valentine (Abigail Breslin) who is too empathetic. He has to strike the middle ground – being willing to dole out violence when need be, but still empathetic enough to understand his enemy. Graff immediately singles Ender out in Battle school – which, of course, makes all the other kids hate him, which is precisely what Graff wants. Graff wants Ender to become hard, and believe that no one will ever be there to help him. He is, in theory, balanced out by Anderson (Viola Davis), who takes Ender’s mental well-being seriously, but since Graff outranks her, he just steamrolls over all of her concerns. Graff’s plan doesn’t work too well anyway – as Ender still does manage to make friends – in particular Petra (Hailee Steinfeld), who helps him train in the Zero-G room for battle simulations.

Ender’s Game didn’t really work for me. From the beginning, we know Ender is the “chosen one” – the Luke Skywalker of the movie – and the film treats that as pretty much a given. As Ender gets promoted – time and again – through the ranks rather quickly, I was always left wondering why. What did he do that was so much greater than everyone else? Why is Graff so convinced of his abilities? Why does Sergeant Dap (Nonso Alonzie), who in one scene says he’ll never salute Ender, end up changing his mind just a few scenes later? I never quite understood why they thought Ender struck the balance between empathy and violence they want so bad so perfectly – when he does react violently, it’s always in self-defense – which is not what they want him to do to the Formics. They want a pre-emptive strike, which is the exact opposite of self-defense. The film also foreshadows it’s ending way too heavily (I won’t say how, because if I did, the ending would become immediately apparent to anyone who may see the film). And I do not think the end of the movie really works. The film wants to have a moral complexity in its final moments that the rest of the film pretty much refuses to have.

All this probably makes it sound like I hated Ender’s Game. I didn’t – although I find the movie ultimately unsatisfying, there are still some good things in the movie. Asa Butterfield confirms the talent he showed as the title character in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo – and, to a lesser extent, Hailee Steinfeld confirms the talent she showed in the Coen’s True Grit. Harrison Ford is not just sleepwalking through his role as Graff, as he has done far too often lately. Viola Davis is a much needed sympathetic presence, and Ben Kingsley is in fine form as another mentor. In short – the acting is almost universally very good – although the actors are undercut by a screenplay too full of exposition – and not the kind of exposition I would have found fascinating (about the morality of what they are doing), but the kind where characters spend entire scenes explaining the rules of everything to each other for no reason other than without it, the audience would be lost. The special effects are generally quite good as well.

I have not read the novel by Orson Scott Card, so I cannot say how the movie stacks up against it (I wanted to read it, but my pretty pathetic public library has had the book “on order” for six months now, and I’m too cheap to buy many books). I am willing to bet however that book is more complex than the movie – and spends more time on the morality of what is going on. There is a reason this movie has languished in one sort of development hell or another for over 20 years now, and why there were dozens of drafts of the screenplay at various points. In the end though, it’s what is on screen that counts – and what’s there is a promising idea, that is never fully executed.

Movie Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

X-Men Origins: Wolverine ***
Directed By: Gavin Hood.
Written By: David Benioff & Skip Woods.
Starring: Hugh Jackman (Logan/Wolverine), Liev Schreiber (Victor Creed/Sabretooth), Danny Huston (William Stryker), Will i Am (John Wraith), Lynn Collins (Kayla Silverfox), Kevin Durand (Frederick J. Dukes/The Blob), Dominic Monaghan (Chris Bradley/Bolt), Taylor Kitsch (Remy LeBeau/Gambit), Daniel Henney (David North/Agent Zero), Ryan Reynolds (Wade Wilson/Deadpool), Scott Adkins (Weapon XI), Tim Pocock (Scott Summers).

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a solid movie. What it does, it does fairly well and it remains consistently entertaining throughout. If it doesn’t rise to the level of recent superhero movies like The Dark Knight, Watchmen, Iron Man, or for that matter X2: X-Men Unite, we can be grateful that it doesn’t devolve into something as terrible as Catwoman or Fantastic Four. It may not be a masterwork, but it is an entertaining action film – and sometimes that’s enough.

By this point, even if you’ve never picked up a comic book, you probably know who Wolverine is. He is the X-Man who really cannot be killed, because he heals pretty much instantaneously. In the previous three X-Men movies, Logan cannot remember what happened to him – how he became what he is, which is a powerful mutant with a metal compound fused to his skeleton, and three giant claws he can extract from his hands at will. In X2, we met William Stryker (there played by Brian Cox, here by Danny Huston), who knows what happened to Wolverine, and offers us a few glimpses. In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, we get the complete story.

Logan (Hugh Jackman) was born in the mid-1840s, and was a sickly child. His lone friend is Victor (Liev Schreiber), who as a child he finds out his really his brother. After a murder, the two flee their Canadian home and end up in America, fighting in the Civil War, WWI, WWII and Vietnam. It’s sometime after Vietnam (but supposedly before the Gulf War, which we do not see), where most of the action in the movie takes place. Logan has grown tired of all the wars and all the killing, but Victor has started to feed on it, and love it too much. The two get in trouble with a court martial, but Stryker offers them a way out – if they join his team of mutants, they can go free, and will essentially be above the law. Victor loves it, Logan not so much.

The main thrust of the plot deals with Logan leaving the team, and going back to Canada where he meets and falls in love with Kayla (Lynn Collins), a modest schoolteacher. Stryker shows back up in Logan’s life when old members of the team start to die. We know, well before Logan does, that it is Victor behind the killings. And he’s coming for Logan next.

The director of the movie is Gavin Hood, who is an odd choice for this material. His film Tsotsi won the foreign language film Oscar a few years ago, and he followed that up with Rendition, a political thriller about the war in Iraq. But Hood proves himself adept at directing action (or, perhaps, has a good second unit director who knows how), as the action sequence in Wolverine are fast paced, and well cut together. This is not quite the Michael Bay school of action filmmaking where we the edits are so fast, we often have no clue what’s going on. Rather, the action seems to make sense, no matter how implausible it all is. What Hood doesn’t do nearly as well is special effects. Wolverine’s claws never quite look right when they are seen in close-up. But it’s a minor gripe.

It’s really the performances that make Wolverine work as well as it does. At this point, Jackman has now played Wolverine four times, and although this time the major difference is that he DOES remember what happened to him, it doesn’t really change his personality. He slips into the role like an old glove, and while he is no longer a revelation in the role, he is solid and dependable. Schreiber has a lot of fun playing Victor/Sabretooth, and because he does, we have fun watching him. Huston plays the slimy, amoral Stryker just about perfectly. Solid in support of these three are Collins as the girl Logan loves and all too briefly Ryan Reynolds as another member of the team. Not so good is will.i.am who is an embarrassment as another member and Taylor Kitsch as Remy LeBeau/Gambit. Perhaps it’s not really Kitsch’s fault that I didn’t really like him as Gambit – I have after all been anxiously awaiting his arrival on screen since the first X-Men movie almost a decade ago, and perhaps my expectations were too high. Why they felt the need to make him into an Ashton Kutcher look-a-like, I’ll never know though.

Overall though, X-Men Origins: Wolverine does what it sets out to do. It is an entertaining summer action movie anchored by strong performances. Perhaps by the end of the summer, this wouldn’t be enough for me to recommend it – I am on the fence about it right now – but at this point, when it’s been so long since we had a movie like this, it is. Make of that what you will.