The Watcher 9
Movie reviews for Napoleon / The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes / Foe
Napoleon (US 2023, Ridley Scott) ★★★★☆
Napoleons rise and fall through the lense of Ridley Scott starts with Marie Antoinettes severed head which will be emblematic for the film itself. The film shines whenever Vanessa Kirby is on screen, playing her Joséphine with a great mix of vulnerability and a weird but sexy and ruthless bitchiness. Joaquin Phoenix Bonaparte compared to her looks like a crude baffoon, but he also makes his ambitions and will to power subtly believable, albeit with a hint of farce. These dynamics work great and give you a kind of intimacy with the characters, while we watch Napoleon longing for a heir to his empire which Joséphine can't bear to him.
However, these moments are also cut short by a hasty script which ofcourse has to checkmark all the battles and historic events playing out in Napoleons life. The battle scenes are great and sometimes fantastic, whole armies sinking into icy lakes bombarded by canons in Austerlitz or the giant defeat of Napoleons army in Waterloo. But these scenes, as great as they are, feel disconnected from the drama playing out in Napoleons private life, and the film feels very disjointed because of that. Scott never manages to bring these two storylines together, the rise and fall of Napoleons power, and the rise and fall of his marriage, into one consistent film.
At the end, the movie is dedicated to Lulu, which would be Ridley Scotts dog, and this too, is emblematic for a movie which's interesting and intimate storyline of Napoleon and Joséphine is cut short like the decapitated head of Marie Antoinette it started with, just to be dedicated to a dog.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed watching these two films, one with a great character driven story about a troubled marriage and one being the bombast cinematic experience of a history epic featuring awe inspiring battle scenes. But it also felt ultimately unsatisfying, and when finally Napoleon just drops dead on isle St. Helena it feels strangely apt.
Maybe all of this is on purpose and Scott wants to make explicit the disconnect of Napoleon the great emperor on the battlefield, and Napoleon the somewhat crude sometimes cruel lover. I wish Scott would've had a clearer vision of what he tried to say here and we’ll see how this film compares to Spielbergs planned series adapted from the original script by Stanley Kubrick.
In any case: It's a great spectacle with fantastic production design and it's fun to watch, but it's also just a goodish movie which could've been great.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (US 2023, Francis Lawrence) ★★★★☆
As a young man, Coriolanus Snow who later will become the tyrant ruler of Panem, is assigned to mentor Lucy Gray, tribute in the tenth Hunger Games from district 12.
I haven't watched the movies in a long time and didn't read the books at all, i just remember them for inspiring a flood of annoying young adult stuff that's basically all the same. I also remember not liking the original movies very much finding them okay, but i never got the fuzz about them. I mean i get it: An authoritarian society sacrificing their youth is basically a metaphor for our society sacrificing the next generations on the altair of capitalism and climate change, which... sure. But i don't like movies that follow blueprint narratives and The Hunger Games always stroke me as decidedly uncreative: Dystopian gladiator show, rince repeat.
This is why this movie came quite as a surprise to me and i liked it much more than the original entries, despite obvious weaknesses stemming from shallow Hollywood scripting with not very believable turns, some overacting by Rachel Zegler who might have been cast more for her singing than her acting skills, which in some moments runs danger to turn this movie into a Disney musical. But it doesn't stay that way and thankfully, the titular Hunger Games are just one part of a movie that many might consider too long and with 160 minutes, they have a point.
Along the way, we witness a much more complex story of betrayal and metamorphosis unfold. I also did like the somewhat anticlimatic third act following the explosive, action-rich gladiator games. On top of that, we get excellent villains with gamemaker Dr. Volumnia Gaul played by Viola Davis with a great lust for insanity, and Peter Dinklage as the intellectual mastermind behind the games, basically a Tyrion Lannister in a dystopian future.
And speaking of dystopian future: I also dug the mashup of dieselpunk aesthetics, the retrofuturistic renderings of 50s technology like in the Fallout game-series, with synthetic plastic and some biopunk stuff paired with the usual Hunger Games Nazi-like dystopia, all of which leads to a pretty weird look and feel of this movie.
Sure this film is flawed and it sure has it's weaknesses, but from all the entries in the Hunger Games franchise, i think i liked this one best.
Foe (US 2023, Garth Davis) ★★★☆☆
Henrietta and Junior live on a Fam in a future striken by climate change, when a mysterious stranger knocks on their door. Junior has been chosen in a government program to be sent to space, an offer that he can't turn down. Henrietta will live with a synthetic replacement until he returns.
Foe tries a bit too hard to be a very serious psychodrama, while themes of artificiality and duplication remain underexplored. Character dynamics feel off up to the point where some relations and choices become incomprehensible, and though Henrietta is the main character and narrator of the story, we mostly watch her unstable and whiny husband doing weird stuff. The ending, which you can see coming from a mile, somewhat explains this stuff, but it feels weird sometimes while it’s playing out on screen.
However, the movie is saved by a strong performance from Saoirse Ronan who plays her Henrietta with a cool mix of fragility, stubbornness and strength. Good visuals with some great subtle scifi FX paired with a hopeless depiction of climate change reminding of Nolans Interstellar and an interesting story reminiscent of both Black Mirror and Ex-Machina (without being a ripoff) make a flawed script into an okay to good movie.