A pseud's film

Rating: 1/10 (20 March 2017)

This film is a complete failure. It leaps from one ludicrous affectation to another, straining for 'meaning' but having none. The director Denis Villeneuve can deal with reality, as witness his film SICARIO (2015, see my review). But when it comes to spacemen, forget it. He has not got a sci fi bone in his body, or should I say his brain, as the film has been made by somebody who is clearly bone-headed. He thinks he can achieve profundity by having lots of loud music which drowns out the actors' voices, by having them mumble and whisper, by most of the scenes being so dark you have to peer through the gloom (all the better to see nothing, my dear), by having one of those identikit Hollywood children who lisps like an infant and cannot speak clearly, by not really showing his aliens except through a haze, by pretending to be something of a philosopher, with all the assiduity of a drunk ranting in the street. Amy Adams plays the female lead, and she at least articulates her speech, even though she has been encouraged to say everything in a near-whisper, so that we struggle to make out what she is saying, especially against the 'mood music'. As for Forrest Whittaker, who spoke perfectly clearly in THE BUTLER (2013), he has been reduced to an incomprehensibly mumbling hulk. I think I more or less understood about half of his lines, or am I just being kind? The idea that he should play a tough Army colonel was a serious instance of miscasting. He looks too nice to bark out orders such as 'move out!' But we can't understand his dialogue anyway, so in the end it does not matter. The stock scenes of tanks and soldiers with assault rifles attempting to deal with incomprehensible aliens from another world shows that Hollywood has not moved on since the 1950s. Everyone in the film seems to wear battle fatigues. But what about the fatigue of us, the viewers? There seems to be no end to this meaningless rambling film as it wanders around seeking for answers and finding none. The camera lingers so obsessively on the face of Amy Adams that the film is essentially an Ode to Amy. She seems to be the subject of about half of the shots in the whole film. Was the director in love with her? What is that all about anyway? Amy's leading man is played by Jeremy Renner, who get almost no close shots, much less closeups, and seems to have been cast in order to play the thankless role of a nonentity who would not steal too much attention from Amy. OK, OK, so the film was made in Canada, and Villeneuve is Canadian, and maybe it is not technically a Hollywood product. In which case, it is simply worse than Hollywood. All Canadian aliens should hang their tentacles in shame. A single scientific buzzword has been thrown into the dialogue, 'nonlinear'. That is all the science we get. (Nonlinear equations are increasingly important in modern physics. Don't even ask what they are, this is a film review.) There are mumbling remarks about the puzzling nature of time, but even on the rare occasions when we can hear them, they don't make any sense. Somehow Amy Adams is meant to know the future, or is it the past? It is not clear at all what she knows, although we are told she speaks Farsi, Mandarin, and many other languages. But no matter how many languages you can speak, if you have nothing to say, you might as well keep your mouth shut. Having the aliens look like octopuses is sensible, since serious writers on extraterrestrial life have been suggesting such creatures since the 1960s at least. Octopuses have big brains, and so hyper-intelligent super-octopoid aliens probably do exist on many worlds. That at least was not nonsense. But just about everything else was. And once again China is misconceived as being run by a general called 'Chairman of the People's Army'. Come on, folks, can't you get anything right? But the most ludicrous single thing in the entire film is the suggestion that a spaceship lands in the Sudan, of all places, and we are expected to imagine that the Sudan has a proper government. Hahahahaha.