Change Your Image
neil-640-618588
Reviews
Around the World in 80 Days (2021)
Loosely based on...
Perhaps "inspired by" is more accurate, but certainly not "adapted from the Jules Verne novel", as claimed in the credits. All that seem to remain of the eviscerated original are the character Fogg, The Reform Club, the 80 days; and the plot device for the final denouement. That's it! It's like taking the headlamp, wing mirror and bumper trim from a Porsche, attaching them to a bicycle and advertising the result a custom-911.
I couldn't go as far as giving it 1 or 2 stars, as some have, because it has got a number of good scenes, decent camerawork and an excellent central actor. So it deserve a five, just.
The main "plus" is David Tennant, who makes an excellent job of the naïve, arrogant, foppish Nineteenth Century English Gentleman. It's just that everything around it is a sham, a not-quite-Jules-Verne illusion, created by the same artificial intelligence that wrote the rejected version of the very first draft of the Matrix. It fails to live in its own parameters. And, yes, I am looking at you Mr Tennant, since you are named as Executive Producer of two episodes.
While we weren't yet talking of Doctor Who, we have to refer to the Chibnallisation of an artistic endeavour that was once brilliant, even if a little flawed by modern standards. How so?
Firstly, there has to be an ensemble cast. Since the main character is difficult to recast as other than an English gentleman, Passepartout becomes a black hanger-on with a troubled past from the turbulent politics of the Third French Republic. Now we have the racial mix, clearly we are missing a woman with central role. (Excellent in principle, but not necessary in every reboot.) So now Detective Fix becomes Journalist Ms Abigail Fix.
Secondly, the presumptive guilt of today's English race has to be apologetically projected back onto a story from another era. So disgust around slavery, Empire, chauvinism, misogyny and the like are levered into the plot with an XL-sized large crowbar. Yes, most of these historical realities were entirely despicable, but there is no need to address them at every conceivable (if barely credible) turn; thought-provoking subtlety can achieve much more than in-your-face, "see how woke I am" heavy handedness.
I am going off to watch the rest of Episode 4; I may be sometime.
Pink Floyd: Behind the Wall (2011)
Totally misnamed
Mostly about Syd Barrett and somewhat of the dynamics of Waters and Gilmour. Taking the "The Wall" into it's title is effectively clickbait and nothing to do with the main content of the film (apart from about 5 minutes talking about how Waters wanted to perform behind a wall literal/metaphorical. Don't hold out like I did waiting for it to get to the meat - the sharks have already taken it before swimming off with the gravy train.