One last 2014 movie roundup

I haven’t seen any of 2015’s movies (yet), but I did leave some unfinished business while double-checking Naughty and Nice lists last month.

Interstellar

After The Dark Knight was a financial success of near-Cameron proportions, studios trusted Christopher Nolan to make original movies. After I saw Inception, I started trusting him too.

Interstellar abused that trust a little, but did not permanently damage it. The movie spends twice as long as it needs to setting up the plot with a lot of padding scenes on world building the broken-down Earth of the near future.

While the planet is in the middle of a progressive ecological collapse (which is the important part), very strange things are going on in society in general. Professional sports stadiums look like well-heeled little league fields. History is being revised to prevent students from even thinking about better times in Earth’s past. The very scientific studies that would save the planet are carried out in secret, as the people apparently would never stand of their tax dollars used to save their butts in the middle of a very real and visible emergency. This is ham-fisted luddism beyond Ted Cruz’s wildest dreams.

Eventually, though, the movie finally gets past itself and actually puts the main character into space, looking for a new home. While the pacing remains deliberate, it’s less wasteful as most of what’s going on actually advances the plot.

The mission is a long-shot, and the astronauts must endure high-risk maneuvers and tragedies before their work reaches its end in a way reminiscent of 2001, but without Stanley Kubrick trying to ratchet up the crazy.

The movie includes breathtaking visuals, creative settings and a reasonable mix of junk and real science. It can even be philosophical at times. It also does the less-modern trope of ending before telling the whole ending, but it gives you enough to go by. Having too little ending might be better than having too much ending, if the malignment Return of the King still gets is anything to judge by.

This movie was designed to be a masterpiece, but good gods is it not for everybody. Even the people it IS for will need a heaping helping of patience to get through it and have to deal with the wasteful, quasi-political subplot. However, the parts that ARE well-made are VERY well-made. It’s up to you to determine if that outweighs the missteps.

Verdict: Rental (3/5). Try before you buy. Sadly, you won’t get the full benefit of it being one of the last movies ever shot on 75mm film by watching it on your TV.

The Hobbit: There and Back Again Battle of Five Armies

I’m really of two minds about this movie. Sometimes, it seems short. Sometimes, it seems long. Sometimes, it’s bursting at the seams with content. Sometimes, it seems like there’s nothing left to include.

We get some good action, and some deserving characters get more screen time. But everything takes so long and yet so little happens during those long takings. We spend far too many scenes on what’s happening inside the Lonely Mountain, only to just repeat the same plot points over and over. Bilbo still has to be the main character, but nearly nothing happens to him at this point of the story.

The titular (and confusingly counted) Battle of Five Armies gets plenty of attention, becoming the longest on-screen battle of the franchise. But even then, perhaps half of the entire fight is spent on dueling (and the anticipation of such) away from the battlefield. When the time comes for more interesting characters to fight (namely, Beorn), the battle is considered won and thus, their contributions are almost entirely omitted.

I liked the first two Hobbit movies well enough, but this was a bit of a mess. Even with the added coverage of Gandalf’s side plot with the Necromancer, this definitely should have been two movies.

Verdict: Flat (2/5). But I’ll probably own the extended editions of the whole trilogy anyway.

Into the Woods

A dark, yet whimsical musical mashup of old Brothers Grimm tales adapted from a Broadway musical. The vast majority of the action takes place in the titular woods, which run wild between nearly every point of interest in the kingdom and all characters of note need to traverse regularly, setting up any number of fated encounters.

The new narrative that connects the stories of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Cinderella,” “Rapunzel” and “Little Red Riding Hood” involves our main characters, a baker and his wife, who become desperate to relieve themselves of a curse placed on the baker’s family after discovering it is preventing them from having children. Wacky hijinks and singing ensue as the items a witch tasks them to retrieve are held by better-known fairy-tale figures who are all in the middle of their own stories.

There’s a bit of a massively failed Aseop near the end when the story brings up the notion that killing a giant should be as unethical as killing a human, but then immediately brushes aside that notion without turning the brushing aside of it into a joke. Which would have worked, given the tone of the story.

There story is cleverly written. Instead of lampooning fairy tales with snark as seen in Shrek and the like, it simply hangs a lampshade on them by digging up details from the grimmer, darker original stories. It also has an astonishingly down-to-Earth ending for the survivors. Yes, survivors. Original Grimm stuff never lets everybody live.

All in all, there’s not much to hate, but it’s also not the most amazing thing ever. It’s worth a watch if you’re into the genre, as its charm relies heavily on your previous knowledge of the tales.

Verdict: Go for it (4/5), if you’re into the genre.