Oppenheimer: A Movie Review by Stewart Stafford

(Spoiler Alert: This review contains spoilers. If you haven’t seen Oppenheimer yet, you might want to do so and then come back and read this review.)

“I must be cruel, only to be kind:

Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.”

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV

J. Robert Oppenheimer and America faced a dilemma in the early 1940s. The Japanese had brought the United States into the Second World War with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour in Hawaii on December 7th, 1941. They had jealousy witnessed the Nazis’ astonishing gains in their invasion of Soviet Russia, and their eyes turned across the Pacific to the American behemoth, the biggest kid in the playground that bullies always want to challenge and dominate.

They were fanatics who viewed surrender as shameful and would rather give their lives in kamikaze suicide flights for their country and Emperor. This refusal to surrender meant America had to engage in fierce hand-to-hand combat to capture each island as they got closer and closer to Japan. Resistance would be even stiffer in the Japanese homeland and they estimated that America would sustain a million casualties in any attempt to take it. The atomic bomb could avoid all that, a shortcut to bring the Japanese to their knees and unconditional surrender.

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is easily the best version of this story of the development of the atomic bomb yet made, and I’ve seen them all. Done wrong, the story of the Manhattan Project can be slow, talky, full of jargon and boring. Nolan’s film has a ton of information to impart, some of it highly technical, but it’s probably the fastest three-hour movie you’ll ever watch. The crisp writing and editing break each scene down into digestible bite-sized nuggets of foreshadowing and exposition before moving briskly on. Nothing and no one overstays their welcome.

Nolan has already made a World War II movie, Dunkirk. I thought his script there was undercooked and not as good as it could have been or got made out to be. His Oppenheimer script is a vast improvement and will almost certainly win him an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. 

At the end of shooting Tenet, Robert Pattinson gifted Christopher Nolan a book of Oppenheimer’s speeches, which undoubtedly came in handy as background direct from the horse’s mouth.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Martin J. Sherwin did deep, gold dust research in 1980 by interviewing as many people who knew Oppenheimer and/or worked at Los Alamos as he could find, most of whom were still alive. Strangely, he procrastinated, sat on the research and never wrote the book! It became a running joke in his family. Fast-forward to 1995, when Sherwin resurrected his book deal with the same publisher and a new co-writer, Kai Bird and that incredible wealth of research finally was put to great use.

Published in 2005, the book won the Pulitzer. Nolan consulted with Bird and Sherwin, with Bird advising Nolan to frame the story around Oppenheimer’s later security clearance problems. He took the advice, and it works beautifully as a kind of Godfather II flash-forward and flashback mechanism to interrupt, rejoin, reexamine and reinterpret. Like The Godfather films, Oppenheimer is a tremendous lesson on the uses of power – nuclear, man-made and human-wielded on the battlefield, in relationships and in private backstabbing plotting.

The film starts with Oppenheimer as a young student being humiliated by a professor in front of his peers. In a controversial scene, Oppenheimer’s grandson has cast doubt on, he attempts to take revenge by injecting an apple with Potassium Cyanide, leaving it on his tutor’s desk before changing his mind. He makes a frantic dash to dispose of the apple. We see Oppenheimer doesn’t yet possess the killer instinct.

The apple is interesting, as it symbolises the forbidden fruit of nuclear fusion that Oppenheimer will become a deadly practitioner of later in the film and in his life. Scaled up, the spherical, “killer” apple becomes the Uranium Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. It’s also a visual reminder of another World War II genius who helped end the conflict sooner by cracking the German Enigma code – Alan Turing. Like Oppenheimer, his key war efforts later turned to suspicion and banishment by the powers that be. (Unlike Oppenheimer, Turing never became a public darling because his war activities were classified under Britain’s Official Secrets Act and remained unknown by the public until after his death.) Convicted of then-illegal “homosexual activities,” Alan Turing was given a choice – jail or be experimented upon like a lab rat. He chose the latter, was pumped full of female hormones, grew breasts, and they suspect he took his own life with a poisoned apple. The world lost the genius credited with being the father of modern computers and the internet aged 41. (Benedict Cumberbatch played Turing in The Imitation Game.)

Alan Turing

Cillian Murphy

There are career-best performances from Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt, in a subtle supporting role as his long-suffering alcoholic wife until she shows her true steeliness under cross-examination in an outstanding scene near the end. Oppenheimer was an odd man who stepped on toes, made a host of enemies and seemed to cheat relentlessly with any woman (usually married) who would have him. Statues were pulled down in recent years of people once thought heroic, and this film shows our hero has feet of clay. He is a deeply flawed and complex human being. The general consensus is that Oppenheimer was also the only person capable of fusing the disparate elements of The Manhattan Project and delivering the bomb to the US in time. It also examines that old chestnut: “Be careful what you wish for: you may get it.” Whenever people are involved in acts of heroism and are branded heroes by the media, they always shy away from the accolade as they wisely know it’s an impossible ideal to live up to that will haunt them later. There’s haunted, and then there’s Oppenheimer.

Robert Downey Jr (left) portraying the real Lewis Strauss (right)

Robert Downey Jr. is also noteworthy as Oppenheimer’s slimy nemesis Lewis Strauss, probably turning in his best performance since he played Charlie Chaplin back in 1992, although he did a good turn in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) too. He will almost certainly get a Best Supporting Oscar nomination and will probably win due to his four-decade-long movie career.

I wondered what Rami Malek was doing in it as a silent extra in two early scenes until he gets a showy speech revealing Downey’s Strauss villainy in full.

Josh Hartnett goes under the radar in probably his best work since his early years.

Nolan wrote the Oppenheimer script in the first-person and from his point of view. Matt Damon said he’d never read a script like that before, even the stage directions were “I” instead of “We see…” That carries over into the finale. Every other telling of the Oppenheimer story shows the dramatic-as-hell dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and its people. Nolan’s Oppenheimer doesn’t show it, as, from the protagonist’s point of view, it was a distant, unseen anticlimax. Screenwriting guru Robert McKee would no doubt praise the almost “Oriental discipline” of Nolan in not showing the victorious, phallic mushroom cloud as he had with Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. (A heist movie that doesn’t show the heist, just the aftermath of the botched getaway and the hideout from it. Brave cinematic moves that are faithful to the viewpoints of their characters and that trust the audience to keep up with them and understand them).

Oppenheimer is the best movie I’ve seen in years. It isn’t a sequel, an unnecessary remake, or a dayglo kiddie videogame, toy or comic book experience. It’s the kind of movie Hollywood excelled at in the 1970s – dark, complex, fiercely intelligent and downbeat movies for adults. A movie ABOUT something. Remember those? Welcome back.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

The Horror: Apocalypse Now

(Spoiler Alert: If you have never seen Apocalypse Now, this review contains spoilers and you may want to come back after you have seen it and read it then.)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is a very loose reinterpretation of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. It lifts the book’s basic premise of a boat trip up a river to confront a character named Kurtz whom the natives are in awe of. The novella’s African setting becomes a commentary on colonialism, and Kurtz is an ivory trader. The film transposes the scenario to the Vietnam War and is a scathing commentary on American involvement. Kurtz is now a renegade Special Forces Colonel who must be executed “with extreme prejudice.”

So you have the Conrad material at the root of the film. Over that comes screenwriter John Milius’s take on the material as an updated version of The Odyssey from Greek mythology, with the Playboy bunnies in the jungle as the sirens and Kilgore as the outwitted Cyclops (the stealing of his surfboard in a different cut of the film), etc.

There are also references to the American mindset remaining stuck in Frontier Wars with Native Americans; Robert Duvall wears a Stetson, and his unit is the Air Cavalry with helicopters instead of horses. One of the Playboy dancers is dressed as a cowgirl, with Stetson, white cowboy boots and a pair of six-shooters. (That analogy has become ever more overt in recent years with America’s use of Apache helicopters, Tomahawk missiles and even using the codename “Geronimo” for Osama bin Laden.)

On top of that, you get Milius’s take on the Vietnam conflict, with Coppola adding his viewpoint on the power structure and how it had changed from his Oscar-winning script of America’s World War II triumph in Patton (1970). The icing on the cake is Michael Herr’s brilliant written narration. (Herr, a Vietnam War correspondent for Esquire, published a book in 1977 called Dispatches which was called the best book written about the Vietnam War by The New York Times Book Review. Herr was brought in by Stanley Kubrick to co-write the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket in 1987.)

Martin Sheen’s character Willard says very little in the movie. His voiceover is a valuable insight into his internal monologue and his character’s confusion, frustration and cynicism with himself, the war, and his complicit participation in it with America. I would go so far as to say that it is the best voiceover narration I have ever heard in a movie. Like The Godfather, so many lines from Apocalypse have entered popular consciousness, especially the narration with its one-liners with their deep, biting aftertaste. The first-person voiceover is a narrative technique punted over from novels. It was also a staple of film noir where it could assist the writer in imparting dense exposition from the labyrinthine plot the detective was investigating. Here, Sheen’s Willard is as morally beaten up and jaded as any Bogart or Jack Nicholson gumshoe back in the States.

The character of Williard is a burnt-out assassin who has lost his raison d’être.

Oddly, with its synthesised score, narration, stunning visuals and the many different cuts of the film released over the years, Apocalypse Now reminds me of another movie with one of the worst voiceovers ever – Blade Runner.

A young George Lucas planned to direct Apocalypse Now at one stage in a black-and-white, handheld, 16mm, Cinéma vérité -style in Vietnam with the war still raging. When Star Wars skyrocketed, and Lucas found himself owning and running companies he had founded, like Industrial Light and Magic and THX Sound, on top of preparing to make the Star Wars sequels, he no longer had time to do Apocalypse. Coppola stepped in to save the film.

He went in a completely opposite direction from Lucas’s vision and made a David Lean-style Bridge on the River Kwai/ Lawrence of Arabia epic out of it.

Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro was an inspired choice by Coppola. His lush, vast photography is mesmerizing in the epic, earlier scenes and grows steadily more surreal as the characters near the deranged Kurtz’s hiding place. Storaro deservedly won an Oscar for his outstanding efforts.

Robert Duvall reunites with Francis Ford Coppola from The Godfather Parts I and II. Here though, he is not like Tom, the soft-spoken family lawyer. Duvall has a field day playing against type as Lieutenant Colonel William “Bill” Kilgore – a loud, macho, gung-ho, Kubrickian-type who would seem at home in Dr Strangelove. Kilgore, like Coppola’s Patton, loves war, and his greatest fear is “someday this war’s gonna end.” He can callously flick playing cards over dead and dying “gooks” and then stop giving water to a man holding his guts in with a pot lid when he hears Lance, a famous surfer from Willard’s boat, is there.

You could argue that Apocalypse is like a tripped-out, riverboat version of The Wizard of Oz, with the protagonists encountering a series of increasingly-bizarre characters and situations until a confrontation with the befuddled and underwhelming “man behind the curtain” – the Wizard/Kurtz.

When I first saw Apocalypse Now, I thought it was a great film, but with a disappointing ending. As I have gotten older, I find it more and more appropriate. The whole movie has been a slow build-up of the myth of both Kurtz and Marlon Brando. In a way, nothing could live up to it. He is just a man, in the end, and a very odd and lost one. He is not so much assassinated by Sheen’s character as butchered with a cudgel (the comparison is made with cuts to the real slaughter of a water buffalo that Coppola filmed.) Which enables Brando to indulge in yet another one of his prolonged, masochistic death scenes that he was famous for.

The movie Apocalypse Now shares similarities with the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Both works explore the themes of power, corruption, war’s moral ambiguity, and the descent into the darkness of the main characters. They also utilize the imagery of blood, darkness, and fire to establish a sense of horror and tragedy. (The boat the characters travel upriver on is called The Erebrus. According to Encyclopedia Britannica: “Erebus, also spelt Erebos, in Greek religion, the god of a dark region of the underworld and the personification of darkness. Erebus is one of the primordial beings in the Greek creation myth. He is the son of Chaos, who is also the mother of Erebus’s wife, Nyx, the personification of night.”) Both works also quote or reference other works. For example, Apocalypse Now quotes Macbeth’s famous line “The horror! The horror!” at the end of the film, while Macbeth references “the dismal and fatal end” of Julius Caesar’s assassination, which is also the title of another Shakespeare play (and a film adaptation that Brando had starred in, only it was the assassination of his character this time).

Dennis Hopper’s manic character has no name in the film, and is just called “Photojournalist.” He seems to be modelled on The Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear with some truth emerging in his ramblings. Lear abdicated his kingdom and you could argue that, in abandoning his command and his loyalty to his country to set up his own “kingdom” in Cambodia, Colonel Kurtz abdicated his responsibilities and descended into madness like Lear did with tragic consequences. Coppola had already said that he saw Vito Corleone in The Godfather as this great king who had to choose one of his three sons to succeed him, which is a very Lear-like description as he had three daughters to divide his kingdom among. Coppola would make the King Lear references more overt in The Godfather Part III with Sonny Corleone’s bastard son showing up like Edmund in King Lear and Michael ranting and raving during a thunderstorm like Lear on the heath.

Coppola also had a complicated relationship with Marlon Brando, who plays Colonel Kurtz in the film. Coppola had fought the studio tooth and nail to have Brando cast as Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Brando was perfect in it, it was a huge hit, and Brando won and refused an Oscar for his performance. However, in Apocalypse Now, Brando was overweight, unprepared, and uncooperative. He refused to learn his lines or follow Coppola’s directions. He demanded a huge payment for his role and threatened to leave before finishing his scenes. Coppola could not think of an ending and had to improvise and edit around Brando’s performance to make it work. Coppola felt a sense of betrayal and he never worked with Marlon Brando again.

It was very sad, as Coppola was the closest Brando had come to finding another Elia Kazan to work with again. Kazan had really put Brando on the map in the 1950s, directing him in classic movies like A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952) and On The Waterfront (1954). (Kazan fell out of favour after naming names at a HUAC anti-communist hearing. Some even refused to clap when he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Oscar decades later.)

Brando would make one more movie, 1980’s The Formula (which starred another actor who’d refused an Oscar, George C. Scott), and then disappear off the screen for nine years, living off his massive paydays from The Missouri Breaks, Superman and Apocalypse Now in Tahiti:

• The Missouri Breaks (1976): Brando received $1.25 million plus 11% of the gross for playing a bounty hunter in this western film directed by Arthur Penn. The film grossed $14 million at the box office, which means Brando earned about $2.79 million in total. Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $16.4 million in 2023.
• Superman (1978): Brando received $3.7 million against a percentage of the gross for playing Jor-El, the father of Superman, in this superhero film directed by Richard Donner. The film grossed $300 million at the box office, which means Brando earned about $14 million in total. Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $67 million in 2023.
• Apocalypse Now (1979): Brando received $2.5 million plus 8% of the gross over $30 million for playing Colonel Kurtz. The film grossed $150 million at the box office, which means Brando earned about $11.6 million in total. Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $46 million in 2023.

Adding up these amounts, Brando earned about $129.4 million in 2023 dollars for making these three films.

Shooting for the film took place in the Philippines. While there, Coppola threatened suicide, broke his Oscars in frustration, remortgaged his estate to pay for the film’s completion, endured Typhoon Olga wrecking the film’s sets and the heart attack of lead actor Martin Sheen (that nearly led to the abandonment of the film after Sheen had replaced original star, Harvey Keitel).

Luckily for him, Sheen recovered, the film was a big hit and is now regarded as one of the best war films ever made. The film won two Academy Awards for cinematography and sound but lost the Best Picture award to Kramer vs. Kramer.

Words: © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

Pictures: © American Zoetrope.

The Shape of Water: Beneath the Waves

Guillermo Del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” is a continuation of the monstrous themes Del Toro has pursued in his previous films like Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, Cronos, Blade II and both Hellboy movies. The story concerns a mute cleaning woman (Sally Hawkins) who works at a secret US government facility where she meets and develops feelings for an aquatic creature that has been captured in South America and brought there for research.

It’s another Beauty and the Beast tale in the style of The Phantom of the Opera, King Kong and The Hunchback of Notre Dame that Hollywood is so fond of.

If there is one central, recurring theme in American movies, I believe it is this: individual righteousness is more important than the group ethic. “The Shape of Water” is set before America has put a man on the moon. It is mentioned that the structure of the creature’s lungs could be used as a model for a prototype breathing system for an astronaut in space. They try to x-ray the creature, but its density prevents anything being seen. So, it’s proposed to end its life and perform an autopsy to study it properly. Now if she was following the group ethic, she would say that the creature must die for the common good, but she chooses not to do that. Her individual righteousness supersedes the group ethic and she decides to rescue him from certain death. You see this theme in everything from “Serpico” to the Jason Bourne movies and “Dances with Wolves” to “Avatar.” Is it any wonder that whistleblowing is so widespread when the whisteblowers themselves are consciously or subconsciously absorbing this theme from the time they watch their first American movie?

“The Shape of Water” is only the second fantasy film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, the other being “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” If you’re doing fantasy correctly, you can have all the fantastical surface elements but get in some subtle social commentary underneath and this movie does it beautifully.

The heroes are all minority underdogs; the creature is being tortured and experimented on because of the way he was born, the heroine is has a disability and can’t speak, she’s friends with a black woman and there’s a scene showing the civil rights struggle on an old black and white TV, the heroine is also friends with a gay man and he is going through his own struggles. It even plays into the whole #MeToo thing with a scene of sexual harassment. The film is set in the 1960s, but it is made for an audience of today and cleverly comments on issues of equality and diversity that we’re still struggling with now.

Guillermo del Toro won the Best Director Oscar at the 2018 Academy Awards, but his victory was clouded in controversy after claims that “The Shape of Water” was plagiarised from another work.

The backlash first began on social media with some people tweeting about glaring similarities between “The Shape of Water” and a 1969 one-act play titled “Let Me Hear You Whisper” by the late Paul Zindel. Then the comparisons really began and it was alleged that there were 61 similarities between the play and the film. Paul Zindel’s family became aware of the allegations and filed a lawsuit. “We are shocked that a major studio could make a film so obviously derived from my late father’s work without anyone recognizing it and coming to us for the rights,” David Zindel, the author’s son said.

Del Toro has denied all claims of plagiarism directed towards his film, but the film did lose out at the Writer’s Guild Awards and didn’t get the Oscar for Best Screenplay, probably due to the negative publicity.

“I have been at this 25 years and have an unimpeachable reputation,” the director said in his defence.

Universal Studios own the rights to “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and they’ve recently tried to reboot their horror characters (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Invisible Man) in something called The Dark Universe. Their stated goal was to make their remakes as big as Marvel is, unfortunately there’s no great demand for these old characters at the box office. The first film in the Dark Universe, “The Mummy” with Tom Cruise, flopped badly and it looks like the other planned films have been shelved for now. Del Toro actually pitched “The Shape of Water” to Universal as a remake of “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” They were initially interested until Del Toro said that the girl was mute and Universal thought it was a crazy idea and passed. So Del Toro took his idea to Fox Searchlight, had a huge, Oscar-winning and the rest is history. Universal must have been kicking themselves that they passed on it. The rest is history while the while lawsuits rumble on.

© Stewart Stafford, 2018. All rights reserved.

Dark Valentine: My Relationship with “Silence of the Lambs” On Its 25th Anniversary

On Valentine’s Day 1991, The Silence of the Lambs had its premiere in New York. It took several months to reach the other side of the Atlantic and didn’t open in Dublin until May 1991 – a particularly dull, chilly month. It was one of those event movies that everyone said you had to see. As with The Exorcist and Fatal Attraction, it dominated the media for weeks. There were TV panel discussions on the hysteria for this new phenomenon – the serial killer (they were common or garden psychopaths before that.) It was the last film that I missed out on seeing because the cinema was full. With so many multiplexes everywhere, you get in to see whatever film you want now. Having to make a second attempt to join the lengthy queue and get in made it more enjoyable, I found.

The other Hannibal movie from five years earlier, Manhunter, got a boost from the huge success of Silence. It had slipped under the radar pretty much as there were no big names starring in it. People caught up with it in 1991 and a new fanbase for that film emerged. It’s also superb.

I found my seat in the auditorium and the lights went down. I had no idea what I’d let myself in for. I saw Silence in the Savoy, at the time the biggest screen in Dublin. Silence features extreme close-ups of the faces of Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) as they stare directly into camera at each other but also at the audience. Audiences are used to being voyeurs and watching the actors, not having them stare back. As Lecter unpicks Starling’s psyche, he does the same to the audience. I felt like a baby in a pram with these massive faces looming down at me. I was pressing back into my chair to get away from them. That’s never happened to me with any other movie before or since. On television, with the faces shrunk, it has none of that power (if you ever get the chance to see Silence of the Lambs on the big screen, take it.)

That wintry May in Dublin was significant, as I can’t think of another movie that depicts the ravages of winter so well. The first sound you hear is the clarinet of Howard Shore’s brilliant score. It sounds like birdsong and then you hear it again. It perfectly sets the scene as we see FBI trainee Clarice Starling jogging alone on a deserted assault course with brown Autumn leaves still in evidence. The film later shows what winter does to the soft flesh of a dumped female victim in the mortuary scene.

Unusually, for a film written, produced and directed by men, it has a pro-feminist bent. The males, like Doctor Chilton and Miggs, are all sleazy pervs to a man who only want get into Clarice’s pants (even Hannibal has a go at innuendo until he’s put in his place by Clarice). This is not just a serial killer thriller (although you get your fix of that too). It touched on many important themes that movies in the early 90s just didn’t; gender, sexuality, the relationship between fathers and daughters, even how we judge people based on their height. You got your criminal profiling layer too. Despite Clarice saying that “transsexuals are very passive,” the movie (along with Basic Instinct in 1992) was picketed by LGBT groups. It was a tradition dating back to Psycho to have a “deviant” villain.  It’s one reason Silence of the Lambs could never be made today in the form it’s in right now, which makes it such an honest film. Director Jonathan Demme agreed with the protestors and made the apologetic Philadelphia starring Tom Hanks as a lawyer dying of AIDS. Demme won the Academy Award for Silence as best director but his career since has been patchy to say the least.

You could see the film as a battle for the soul of Clarice Starling between the “good” father figure, her boss Jack Crawford, and the “bad” father figure, Hannibal Lecter. Clarice has to break free of them and her childhood trauma (her policeman father was murdered and the killer never found) and grow up and become a woman in her own right.

The sound design is brilliant; just listen to how the sound grows more menacing as Clarice Starling essentially enters into the bowels of Hell to confront Hannibal Lecter in his plexiglass cell. There are atonal, womb-like noises. It’s got probably the most effective sound design since Alien in 1979 which does a similar job of setting the scene and unnerving the audience.

The rich photography by Demme regular Tak Fujimoto is exemplary, particularly the ending in the basement with no light during Clarice’s fight-to-the-death with the serial killer Buffalo Bill. (Every woman in the audience screamed when Bill reached out to touch Clarice’s hair when she couldn’t see him in the pitch darkness.)

Ted Levine played Buffalo Bill in the movie and he is probably the unsung hero of the whole thing, not even being Oscar-nominated for his terrifying performance while everyone else won Academy Awards.

There are so many great lines of dialogue. Anthony Hopkins had given up on a Hollywood career and moved back to the UK to appear in theatre. Hopkins got a call in his dressing room from his agent saying there was a script called Silence of the Lambs and would he take a look at it. Hopkins thought it was a children’s film based on the title alone. Director Jonathan Demme came to see him and offered him the part because he’d seen him play an intelligent doctor with a heart in The Elephant Man. Even though Anthony Hopkins is only in Silence of the Lambs for around 14 minutes, he dominates the whole thing, even when he’s offscreen. It won him the Oscar and changed his life and career.

Indeed, the film became only the third film after It Happened One Night and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest to win all five big Oscars – Best Film, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Screenplay (Adapted). To date, it is the only horror film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. That was an incredible achievement at the time and it only grows even more impressive as the years go on.

There have been other Hannibal books and movies (the sequel Hannibal opened on Valentine’s Day 2001, exactly 10 years later. 2001 was appropriate as Hopkins had based the voice of Hannibal on Hal, the computer from Kubrick’s 2001). None of the new material ever really recaptured the greatness of Silence of the Lambs. It is one of the best thrillers ever made with career-bests from all those involved on every level. There are great twists that you don’t see coming. Even that ending, which refuses to tie things up in a neat bow is daring (it so freaked out one couple in America, that they apparently refused to leave the cinema afterwards). It’s got everything you could ask for really. So, this Valentine’s Day, when you get sick of all the predictable rom-coms, put on that magnificent dark Valentine, The Silence of the Lambs, and luxuriate in a masterclass of acting, filmmaking, screenwriting, photography and production, sound and costume design. You will never see its like again.

© Stewart Stafford, 2016. All rights reserved.

Film Review: Star Wars – The Force Awakens

“It is a time of sacrifice…good and bad.”

This is the first sequel in the Star Wars franchise in 32 years. A long time ago in an era far, far away.

The First Order, the new Empire, is set up awfully fast in The Force Awakens. The last time we saw the Empire at the end of Return of the Jedi, it was defeated and destroyed. Here, somehow, it is at full strength again and even has Star Destroyers and a battle station that dwarfs the Death Star. I think the writers have missed an opportunity to show The First Order as underdog fanatics plotting to overthrow the New Republic in a patient build-up. But nope, we get one line that they have risen from the ashes of the Empire and, that’s it, they’re back, just like that.

The writing is shorn of George Lucas’s interest in diplomacy. For all his flaws, Lucas always grounded the Star Wars movies in a political context. He was very interested in how the states he had created operated. Granted, in the prequels there was far too much talky politics that bogged the movies down in clunky exposition (taxation anyone?). The new script sacrifices depth for pace, humour and a lightness of touch that is reminiscent of A New Hope. The pulling back from full-on CGI aids the realism too.

Lawrence Kasdan who co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back returns as co- writer here, but The Force Awakens is nowhere near as good as that masterpiece. There were so many great lines in the original trilogy “The force will be with you…always,” “I am your Father” and “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Some of them are repeated in The Force Awakens but there is nothing new to challenge the old lines. That is a pity. (In the age of the instantaneous internet, could the “I am your father” moment be kept secret now? I doubt it. I accidentally saw a major spoiler for The Force Awakens while typing in a hashtag on Twitter.)

Michael Arndt gives lectures on the original trilogy and wrote the first draft of The Force Awakens script. Perhaps he’s great at analysing why Star Wars works but not so great at creating something new. The script is okay, nothing more (there is a nice riff on the father/son theme that runs through every Star Wars movie and Han Solo finally accepting The Force as being true is a nice payoff to his “hokey religion” dismissal in 1977).

Harrison Ford brings weary charisma and some much-needed gravitas to the film in reprising his old scoundrel Han Solo. He’s given some better lines and more to do than in Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but, just as in that film, the older stars are shoved aside in favour of the newcomers who aren’t that interesting.

Carrie Fisher looks like she’s been at the Botox. The only parts of her face she can move are her lips and even that’s a struggle. It doesn’t look like her and it is a shock seeing her as a shrunken old woman.

We know Daisy Ridley is miscast in the lead role. We know because J.J. Abrams told her on set that her acting was “wooden.” If you’ve cast someone that can’t act in the lead role of the biggest franchise in film history, you’ve hired the wrong person. Ms Ridley compensates by overacting horribly, shouting every line with her eyes as wide as possible. She runs (a lot) and cries (a lot). Apart from that, the jury is still out on her. Then again, Star Wars has a history of not-great acting, so she’s probably keeping up a great tradition.

Muhammad Ali-lookalike, John Boyega, took some criticism in early reviews, but I actually thought he had good comic timing, the audience liked him and he even struck up a buddy rapport with old grumpy pants himself, Harrison Ford. Let’s hope we see more of him in the sequels and spin-offs, he’s the best of the new breed.

John Williams returns to score the picture and it’s okay, nothing as unforgettable as Vader’s Theme from Empire. Darth Vader himself is, for me, the greatest villain in movie history and he is sorely missed. Vader choked people to death by breaking their necks if they defied him. Whereas new baddie Kylo Ren takes his frustration out by incinerating inanimate objects with his lightsaber to keep the rating kiddie-friendly. There’s also some predictable PC casting. Everything that was white and male before now has to be rebooted as female, ethnic and/or LGBT (we’re getting an all-female Ghostbusters reboot and possibly a black James Bond in the future.)

The Force Awakens isn’t as good as I thought it was going to be and I doubt it will stand up to repeat reviewing as the original trilogy did but it is perhaps the best that can be expected now George Lucas has bailed out on his film company. It will no doubt break box office records. No film could probably live up to the hype anyway. It is good to have Star Wars back in whatever form it’s in (I think I know the big plot twist in the next movie too but I won’t spoil it for you, dear reader.)

© Stewart Stafford, 2015. All rights reserved. (Star Wars ©Lucasfilm Ltd)