Battery's Out, Finger's Dead

Rating: Null/10 (25 November 2000)

This movie has not aged well. Kubrick uses a very old-fashioned camera stance and the dialog is often stagey back-and-forth medium head shots.
Scatman is apt, but Kubrick asks Jack to be more external, and that's dangerous with his unchecked exuberance. Duvall needs pumping up.
The problem is an old one, and one Kubrick knows. Successful storytelling is bound by its media, so a successful print story can be only a starting point for cinematic narrative. He clearly believes it best when a character or device is external, like Hal, the spirit here, or Hitchcock's mcguffin. His handling of the unseen contrasted with and contained in huge interiors is his strategy and it may have worked better when the film was new. But its just too tame now.
What's very nice is the selfreference. It is another piece of an obsessed storytelling about an obsessed writer, engaged in creating a story.
I gave this film extra points because it tried to use architecture well. But it did a poor job. Part of this is the unimaginative camera eye. But even a better eye couldn't have exploited the set well. If you want the set to be a character, you need to give it soul, and incorporate the viewer's eye into the form. Welles knew how. Why didn't Kubrick?