In short: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

So, if you go into this origin story for beloved smuggler Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) with the proper mind-set, adjusting your expectations towards a film that’ll not rock your world but may possibly entertain you very well; if you only keep its tortured production history in mind half of the time; if you can survive Donald Glover’s embarrassing performance as Lando coming over like a little kid playing dress up; if you set aside Ron Howard – you might probably find a perfectly enjoyable bit of SF heist blockbuster cinema.

Sure, the film has a sometimes troubling difficulty with hitting the proper emotional beats, despite a game cast that’ll hit whatever note you ask them to it, and about a fifth of the action sequences look surprisingly naff. However, the other four fifths are pretty great – the train job and the big space chase being the obvious stand-outs – showing off some lovingly designed Star Wars places and ideas while using them for some damn fun set pieces.

Quite a few of the space opera heist elements work rather well, too. The film only falters there when its tone makes one of its peculiar shifts into too broad comedy instead of keeping with the slightly silly irony and the space adventures. Or when elements appear and disappear that thematically clearly come down from a much different version of the script than the one the film ended up with.

Being a modern Hollywood film, this does of course also feel the need to explain the origin of as much as it can of what we know about Han Solo, but most of that is fun enough and well enough integrated into the pleasantly episodic flow of the affair. It’s a bit of a mess, sure, but it’s an often very fun and usually never less than entertaining mess.

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In short: Voice from the Stone (2017)

Eric D. Howell’s gothic romance about nurse Verena (Emilia Clarke) -  apparently specialised in nursing children with mental problems back to health only to leave them behind crying afterwards - and her misadventures with little Jakob (Edward Dring), his hot, dark and brooding sculptor father (Marton Csokas) and what may or may not be the ghost of Jakob’s dead mother communicating through the stone walls made from the material that made her family rich is if nothing else a very attractive looking film.

It is shot in appropriately moody colours and style and makes visually often arresting use of the setting in the Tuscany of 1950. The acting is on the good side, too, if rather melodramatic, even for a genre that by nature needs to go a bit bigger than life. Alas, the film really feels more “interesting” (in the negative connotation of that term) than artistically successful.


I think the largest part of Voice from the Stone’s problem is pacing. For a long time, it is very slow – even for me as a viewer who usually enjoys slow movies even if only as an opportunity to really take in the sights – but I don’t believe it actually needs to be quite this slow; as it stands, it seems a bit too much in love with showing us all the pretty sights it has than in using these sights for anything much. On the other hand, once the film decides it’s time for Verena to get to her operatic mad scene, it suddenly pulls her from being a bit frightened yet also drawn by the strangeness of her new surroundings and experiences into becoming raving mad in the classic gothic style without much of a transition between these states, which is the sort of thing it might have set up during the slow bits it didn’t do much at all in. I think the ending is pleasantly ambiguous – either it is quietly horrific or a real happy end – but I don’t think either of the two choices is as well prepared by the film as it should have been, again mostly because it has spent half of its running time dragging its feet looking pretty instead of using its prettiness in a meaningful way for its narrative.

In short: Terminator Genisys (2015)

Given that I’m not an admirer of contemporary Hollywood’s REBOOT EVERYTHING motto (we all know how Uncle Ben died by now, right?), I didn’t go into Alan Taylor’s reboot of the Terminator franchise with too much hope; of course, seeing as this would be a stupid intro if I wasn’t positively surprised by the film, nobody’ll be surprised to hear I was indeed positively surprised by it. Surprise.

Thinking about it, the Terminator movies were actually one case where a reboot made sense, it being a franchise whose entries beyond the first two movies and some of the comics were not very good anyway. Furthermore the last two films have pretty much stuffed the meta-plot with so much nonsense burning down what came before was probably the best option.

The film doesn’t just reboot though, but actually remixes and remodels parts of the first two films in clever and surprising ways that can also keep the good parts of what came before canonical thanks to the vagaries of time travel. The film’s first half in particular is blockbuster action cinema at its most playful, breaking up the big dumb (and rather fun) action scenes with often delightful twists on scenes we knew know from earlier films without letting the film become a mere series of ironic quotations. Taylor keeps the pace up nicely, and while some of the CGI looks a bit shoddy to my eyes, he manages to keep the increasingly silly action (the helicopter chase really is too dumb to believe) fun despite its rampant stupidity. The film’s second half isn’t quite as successful with the self-referentiality and awesome time-travel nonsense but it stays a seriously effective spectacle that knows how to keep small bits of humanity in play in between the explosions. There’s nothing deep here, yet Genisys never has that Michael Bay air of utter loathing for the intelligence of its audience; and it actually knows how to time silly one-liners.

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