Movie Reviews

Ender’s Game

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  • Title: Ender’s Game
  • IMDB: link

Ender's GameOriginally written as a short story published in the August 1977 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, author’s Orson Scott Card‘s story of a complicated boy who is humanity’s best chance at survival took another eight years before it was released as the full novel Ender’s Game. I first read the novel more than two decades ago. It’s held-up remarkably well, although given its subject matter I doubted would ever be made into a movie.

Adapted and directed by Gavin Hood the story of Andrew “Ender” Wiggin isn’t an easy one to pull off, especially in under two hours. Although the timeline is heavily condensed, and the subplots involving Ender’s siblings is largely ignored, the movie gets far more right than I expected.

A lonely child with a good heart but a special talent for measured brutality, Ender Wiggin isn’t the easiest of protagonists to put on screen. The best choice Hood makes is to cast Asa Butterfield in the complex role that requires us to feel for the situation the young man finds himself in but also be a little taken aback by the methods he uses.

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Escape Plan

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  • Title: Escape Plan
  • IMDB: link

Escape PlanSylvester Stallone thrown into prison at the whims of a madman is hardly a new story (the plots of both Tango & Cash and Lock-Up include these themes). In Escape Plan, Stallone stars as expert prison escape artist Joe Bresslin who has been working for the last several years to find holes in various prison systems, 14 of which he’s successfully escaped.

After a brief introduction involving Breslin’s escape from his latest job, he and his associates (Amy Ryan, 50 Cent, Vincent D’Onofrio) are approached by a CIA agent (Caitriona Balfe) offering $5,000,000 to Breslin to test out the government’s top secret, and privately run, new rendition facility for those criminals too dangerous to house on U.S. soil once Guantanamo Bay is closed down for good.

Breslin accepts the job, despite the fact that his location will be kept completely secret from his team, meaning he will be going in blind without back-up (breaking all of his usual rules). Of course, it doesn’t take long before things go wrong.

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Gravity

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  • Title: Gravity
  • IMDB: link

GravitySpace and underwater films offer the unique juxtaposition to explore both vastness and claustrophobia simultaneously. With Gravity writer/director Alfonso Cuarón offers a tense thriller, a moving character study centered around a single performance, and a roller-coaster that provides some of the best action scenes of this year. The result is a thrilling 91-minute thematic experience which easily ranks as one of the year’s best films.

Seeing the film in 3D IMAX, Cuarón’s vision is breathtaking. Although George Clooney has a supporting role as a throwback larger-than-life astronaut who would have been right at home during NASA’s heyday when astronauts were the country’s greatest heroes, Sandra Bullock carries nearly the entire film. And she does it well. As Dr. Ryan Stone,  a scientist sent to work on the Hubble Space Telescope, Bullock becomes untethered and lost in the vastness of space miles above Earth when debris from a Russian satellite rips through the shuttle and leaves her without anyone to rely on other than herself.

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Oh What a Rush

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  • Title: Rush
  • IMDB: link

RushEven more than winners and losers, championship runs and crushing defeats, sports are defined by rivalries. In Rush, director Ron Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, Hereafter, The Queen) turn their attention to Formula One and the mid-1970s rivalry between two upstarts whose competition eventually would make them both world champions.

The stark contrast in the two characters and the drama of the season screams Hollywood sports film, and I’m a little surprised it has taken this long for their story to find its way to the big screen. Without the backing of his family Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) bought his way into Formula One with a prickly personality and an unparalleled knowledge of getting the best out of his car. Lauda’s main competition came from the charming but flighty James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) who despite lacking Lauda’s single-mindedness made up for it in his own self-absorbed recklessness and resolve to prove he could beat anyone on a race track.

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Austenland may be a fun place to visit, but…

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  • Title: Austenland
  • IMDb: link

Austenland

Based on the novel of the same name by Shannon Hale, writer and first-time director Jerusha Hess (co-writer of both Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre) delivers a quirky, over-the-top, odd film that is more charming than it has any right to be. Showcasing how one may take fandom too far, Keri Russell stars as Jane Hayes, a middle-aged single woman with a lifelong obsession for the works of Jane Austen and a romantic life that has never lived up to her fantasies. Spending her entire savings, Jane books a vacation at an Austen-themed destination getaway where she might finally live out those fantasies as a woman from Austen’s era.

In the spirit of a Christopher Guest film that simultaneously celebrates and pokes fun at a particular niche, Austenland‘s premise could turned around any number of overzealous fans and the properties they embrace so religiously. However, anyone who has ever known a woman obsessed with Austen’s books may take a somewhat perverse glee in Jane’s realization that her time-period-appropriate assigned role isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

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Austenland may be a fun place to visit, but… Read More »