Dusty Song

Rating: Null/10 (14 August 2007)

Don't see this.
I don't know the children's' book from which the scenes were stolen. I assume it is successful in the sense of giving the reader channels to be transported to a world that matters.
But I do know what works with movies, and not just for myself. The business is all about creating worlds, weaving realities. The big challenge is getting us into a world that makes enough sense for us to rattle around in it, and perhaps be manipulated using its laws. If we are lucky, those manipulations will matter and the film will be worth watching. But that first hurdle is helping us to enter the world.
This fails at that front door. Like many other big budget productions with a weak creative coordinator, different bits have been parceled out to creative teams all over the world, and each has created their own miniworlds whose only commonality is that they are "inspired" by the book.
But they are also inspired by other movies too. The problem is that each team used a different set of movies and thence different worlds, with different symmetries and hinges and refractions. Its incoherent.
One single thing could have helped. Nothing ties bits of a movie together like the score, especially when it is heavy like this one. The problem is that the composer used a Wagnerian approach. Now, you don't have to be very knowledgeable about music to have strong opinions about whether Wagner is a burden on or wings for our souls. But either way, it implies a world of its own, a world of Olympian lusts, of simple honor and vast battles. Love isn't a basic force in Wagner's world, its a prize. In the simple story we have here, it is the unified force of everything that happens, a sort of light that affects everything. (The metaphor here is the stars as gods.)
So every time something happens in this movie, they turn on this music machine that snaps the world away from any of the worlds we see. Its schizophrenic, like a TeeVee laugh track over Hamlet.
It would have helped if they had gotten real actors, too.
There are two scenes that are okay. One is the incidental bargaining over a chest full of lightning. Another is the "landing" of the ship in water that DeNiro's character pilots. All else is failure.
Oh. If you saw "300" or "Perfume," you will have seen two recent versions of the incidental redhead as a sort of token of purity. We get a few seconds of the previous star that fell and whose heart was ingested by unloving witches. Its Sting's daughter, artificially and brilliantly reddened.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.