Category: Epic

HMS Defiant (1962)

HMS Defiant (1962)

Interpersonal conflict on the high seas, in this serviceable romp upon the high seas

Director: Lewis Gilbert

Cast: Alec Guinness (Captain Henry Crawford), Dirk Bogarde (Lt Scott-Padgett), Anthony Quayle (Vizard), Tom Bell (Evans), Murray Melvin (Wagstaffe), Maurice Denham (Dr Goss), Nigel Stock (Mdspman Kilpatrick), David Robinson (Mdspman Crawford), Bryan Pringle (Sgt Kneebone), Richard Carpenter (Lt Ponsonby), Peter Gill (Lt D’Arbly)

HMS Defiant, despite what its poster suggests, isn’t really non-stop rollicking adventures on the high seas. Instead, it’s about internal conflict: between officers and crew, between captain and first officer, between sailors and admiralty. In 1797, Britain is sailing into war with Napoleon and the press gang is seizing sailors off the streets. But no-one is getting paid fairly, something a proto-trade union of sailors led by Vizard (Anthony Quayle) is determined to sort out even if that involves mutiny. Mutinous thoughts abound on his ship Defiant, as stoic Captain Crawford (Alec Guinness) is engaged in a battle of wills with his ambitious and vicious first officer Lt Scott-Padgett (Dirk Bogarde), with Crawford’s son (a young midshipman on board) caught in the middle and paying a heavy price.

Interestingly, both of its two leads would probably have preferred it if the film had sunk to the bottom with trace. Guinness considered it one of the worst films he was involved in, while Bogarde saw it as little more than a pay cheque with sails, the sort of box-office he needed to do to pay for films like Victim. That’s harsh on a perfectly serviceable slice of Forrester-inspired nonsense, the sort of film that has become a staple of Bank Holiday TV. There is nothing wrong with HMS Defiant (God knows you’ll see a lot worse) and if it’s not inspired, it’s also not a disgrace.

It’s competently assembled by Lewis Gilbert, who ticks off the various nautical boxes with aplomb. Over the course of the film we get multiple floggings, a man falling from the yardarm (an all-too-obvious dummy), sails puffed with wind, cannon-firing action against the French, an amputation, cutlass-shivering feuds, grumbling below decks and a parade of fists slammed into hands behind backs. Everything you have grown to expect from Hornblower is here, all put together with an assured professionalism that means you are never anything less than entertained.

The action, when it comes, as ship goes against ship, is actually less interesting than the complex inter-personal dynamics on board. It’s perhaps one of the most interesting films in presenting a Naval ship as an insular little world, a sort of boarding school on the seas, with head boys and scroungers. At its heart is the clash between two potential headmasters: Alec Guinness’ decent Crawford, who leads through a sort of unimpeachable example of British reserve, and Bogarde’s Scott-Padgett a charismatic bully who is basically a sort of Flashman of the Seas.

They both have very different ideas of what the boat should be. Crawford sees it as a tool to deliver the Admiralties orders, with everyone fitting perfectly into their assigned role and never for a moment thinking outside it. Scott-Padgett sees it as an opportunity for social climbing, who feels since he’s uniquely special the rules shouldn’t apply to him and will go to all manner of petty ends to get what he wants, not giving a damn who gets hurt. Crawford would govern with a firm but fair hand, letting a cross word communicate his displeasure. Scott-Padgett walks around deck with a coiled rope in his hand to literally whip the sailors on, handing out thrashings like their going out of business.

He’ll also pick on the vulnerable, roping bullies like Nigel Stock’s ageing senior midshipman (a man who reeks of failure) to hand out beatings to those who can’t protect themselves. And, like the sort of unpleasant reader of men he is, Scott-Padgett works out the Captain’s pressure point is to line up Crawford’s son for as many beating as possible and subtly threaten more unless he basically gets his way on the ship. It’s a sort of under-hand dealing that the decent Crawford is totally unprepared for, a complete disregard for form and rules of conduct that’s outside of his experience.

It’s telling that Crawford has more in common with Vizard. Anthony Quayle, in the film’s finest performance, is cut from the same cloth: a reasonable man with a sense of fair play who feels a petition and a careful argument placed to the Admiralty will get everything he wants with no chance of violence rearing his head. It’s not that much of a stretch for the audience to guess he might be wrong, not least because his number two is the increasingly bitter, class-conscious Evans, played with a surly mean streak by Tom Bell. Not least since the quick to anger Evans is also happy for other men to take the rap for his actions and never considers anyone’s needs but himself. Vizard’s number two shares more than a few characteristics with his bête noire Scott-Padgett (one of many ways Vizard and Crawford are alike).

It leads to an inexorable show-down, with Bogarde’s patrician contempt and self-satisfied assurance like a red rag to everyone he encounters. (You could say HMS Defiant is an interesting warm-up for Bogarde before he tackled the satanic butler in The Servant). Guinness fares less well, probably because he has a much less delicious part, all to clearly struggling to raise any interest in the character he’s playing (HMS Defiant is one of the best examples of Guinness on terminally-bored autopilot, rarely stirring himself to do anything other than go through the motions).

But it’s still an entertaining film, in a Sunday afternoon sort of way (the exact time I watched it). There is something endearing about the sailors’ naïve plans to win their rights, just as there is something wonderfully pantomimically hissable in Bogarde’s odious lieutenant, a lovely embodiment of upper-class entitlement that literally makes every situation worse. Sure, nothing is re-invented, but as a vessel for some interesting character beats and some serviceable naval action, it more than holds water.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Kubrick’s enigmatic masterpiece will open your mind in the same way as its mysterious monoliths

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Keir Dullea (Dr. Dave Bowman), Gary Lockwood (Dr. Frank Poole), William Sylvester (Dr. Floyd Heywod), Douglas Rain (HAL 900), Daniel Richter (Moon-Watcher), Leonard Rossiter (Dr. Andrei Smyslov), Margaret Tyzack (Elena), Robert Beatty (Dr. Ralph Halvorsen), Sean Sullivan (Dr. Bill Michaels)

When I first sat down to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey I was a teenager. It quickly became clear I had no idea what I was getting into. Somewhere in my mind I pictured an experience a bit like Star Wars. What I wasn’t ready for was the enigma wrapped in a mystery Kubrick actually made. Watching it was rather like a teenager chugging back a fine red wine as their first drink: I spat it out and reached for a can of Fosters. Appreciation for that sort of stuff has to grow with age. Today, for all Kubrick can be self-important, this is visionary, individualistic, ground-breaking film-making. A truly unique piece of film artistry and a masterclass in sound and vision, presenting something unanswerably different. No wonder its impact has stretched through film, like the monolith’s on mankind.

2001 could arguably be about everything and nothing. It was developed by Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke, working in tandem to produce both script and Clarke’s novel. But Kubrick flew in a radically different direction. While he and Clarke populated the novel treatment with greater context, Kubrick felt (as the film reached its conclusion) that explanations weakened the film. Its power lay in maintain the mystery. Kubrick cut a voiceover, trimmed out characters, sliced out dialogue and removed all references to aliens behind events: he left the film itself as a mysterious artifact, the viewer could touch it and experience their own unique odyssey into the unknown.

Split into four chapters, we are taken from the dawn of our civilisation to (perhaps) the dawn of our next civilisation. A prologue shows the arrival of a mysterious monolith on prehistoric Earth, where a group of ape-like humanoids encounter it and learn to use tools (namely to hunt and kill). Millions of years later, mankind’s early colonisation of space discovers another mysterious monolith, buried millions of years earlier. A mission is sent to Jupiter years to find out more about its origins. On that mission, all the crew bar Dr Dave Bowman (Kier Dullea) are killed when on-board computer HAL seems to malfunction. Bowman is left alone to encounter a monolith circling Jupiter which takes him into the infinite, a whole lifetime lived in minutes in a dream-like French drawing room, before his rebirth into a giant space baby.

What’s extraordinary about all this, is that Kubrick does nothing to place any of this into an understandable context. 2001 is a sort of Last Year at Marienbad in Space, a journey into a series of questions with no answers – but yet somehow never feels unsatisfying. It’s also fascinating as a work that feels profoundly philosophical, but with very little actual philosophy or insight in it. Instead, what the film supplies is a sort of raw, elemental power that makes you tremble to your very bones. You can feel it worming inside you, its unfathomable imagery, haunting audioscape and sometimes impenetrable logic making it even more engrossing.

It’s often been said the only character in 2001 Kubrick related to was HAL, the emotionless but sinister computer. In fact, I’d say the character Kubrick most relates to is the Monolith. For, essentially, what is it but a film director: a master manipulator holding all the cards, knowing all the answers and choosing what to share with us? We understand nothing in a film without the director’s guiding hand. Like the Monolith, 2001 has such overwhelming awe and majesty that people are drawn to it while barely understanding it. That’s a Godlike power I feel Kubrick relates to.

2001 is a master-class of the director’s art. The visionary beauty of its imagery is breath-taking. From its sweepingly empty vistas of the barren rocks of pre-historic Earth to the serene majesty of space, this is a film filled with indelible images. There is a true power in the geometrical perfect, bottomlessly black Monoliths that make them something you instantly can’t look away from. And don’t forget that 2001 has one of the two greatest jump cuts in history (the other, of course, being in Lawrence of Arabia), as an ape celebrates victory by flinging a bone into the air that cuts suddenly into a similarly shaped space craft as it falls.

Kubrick’s imagery of planets in mysterious line-ups, or the sun emerging over the top of the Moon have helped define how we think of space. His vision of mankind’s future, full of pristine surfaces, corridors that curve and rotate to create gravity has a power behind the simplicity of its design. So mind-bending is Kubrick’s vision of entering the Monolith – a kaleidoscope of colours hurtling towards the camera – that only the knowledge of his control freak self would let you believe that he (unlike many of the film’s viewers) never once dropped acid.

But the real genius Kubrick used was to match the stately, patient beauty of his images – and you can’t deny that 2001 is a film that frequently takes its time – with striking, perfectly selected classical music. You can argue what Kubrick does here is piggy-back emotional and spiritual effect from the work of others. But his choice of musical score is unfailingly, undeniably perfect: there is no chance Alex North’s rejected score could have had the same power. The deep rumblings of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra so perfectly captures the endlessly, unknowable power of space, time and the Monolith itself that it’s now become a landmark piece. The scenes of the ships in space are given a balletic beauty by being perfectly cut to Johan Strauss’ The Blue Danube. Could the Monolith have had both the power and unsettling sense of the unknowable without the sound of Ligeti’s Reqiuem? There is not a single decision to combine sound and visuals in 2001 that isn’t perfect.

And it only adds to the mysterious power of a film that can be deeply unsettling. If there is a transparent philosophical idea in 2001, it’s that mankind uses tools for conquest; the Monolith at first inspires a progression from the empty posturing of rival ape-tribes, into head-smashing violence. And, millions of years later, mankind is still two tribes (East and West), with weapons that could blow each other out of existence. But, whether that was the aim of the Monolith we never know. Just as we never really know what’s going on with Bowman’s fast track life through his neoclassical hotel (though I find something terrifying at Bowman encountering increasingly older versions of himself in silent trepidation).

Is 2001 optimistic or pessimistic about the future? I think Kubrick is aiming for letting us make up our in mind – after all this is our own private communion with his monolith. It matches his own natural inclination for distance. The humans in 2001 are almost impossibly stoic: space travel is no more exciting to them than a plane trip to a frequent flyer (the curved space station is basically an airport, which the character’s treat with the same time-killing blaseness as we do at a terminal). Messages from family members are twice watched by different figures with impassiveness. HAL’s control of the ship is so total, you wonder what the crew is for. Has the Monolith-inspired technology stunted mankind – now we are so dependent on machine that we just cogs in their workings, has progress stalled? 2001 could really be about mankind’s rebirth for a new life.

The HAL sequence – a precursor in many ways to The Shining in its unsettlingly invasive atmosphere – sticks in the mind as it has easily the most dialogue, plot and overt drama. HAL is a brilliant creation – Douglas Rain’s emotionless voice subtly shifting from strangely sweet to terrifyingly relentless to surprisingly sympathetic when he meets his end – and the sheer terror of these technological marvels turning against us (a space probe that shifts into a sort of monster, followed by a jump cut to HAL’s glowing red eye is just breathtakingly brilliant).

But if 2001 is short of narrative drive, surely that was Kubrick’s point? To keep 2001 as a mysterious encounter with no real answers. It opens and closes with two thirty-minute sequences devoid of any dialogue (the last word we here is “mystery”) and gives us such a blast of the senses that it feels more like being flung into a void of unanswerable questions. I was certainly not ready for that when I first watched it. But now, I just have to bow before Kubrick’s mastery. This inspired so many, its power is felt in thousands of works of art since. And it does this because it balances awe, wonder and mystery in a masterful way few other films can. You learn nothing in 2001. It has no real message, argument, or philosophical points, But yet it leaves you utterly satisfied, bursting at the seams with the power of your own imagination. That’s masterful film-making.

Alexander the Great (1956)

Alexander the Great (1956)

An odd epic, which both loathes its subject and also presents him as a golden-boy

Director: Robert Rossen

Cast: Richard Burton (Alexander the Great), Fredric March (Philip II), Claire Bloom (Barsine), Danielle Darrieux (Olympias), Barry Jones (Aristotle), Harry Andrews (Darius), Stanley Baker (Attalus), Niall MacGinnis (Parmenion), Peter Cushing (Memnon), Michael Hordern (Demosthenes), Marisa de Leza (Eurydice), Gustavo Rojo (Cleitus the Black), Peter Wyngarde (Pausanias), William Squire (Aeschenes)

No one in history achieved so much, so young as Alexander the Great. He conquered most of the known world before he was thirty and left a legend that generations of would-be emperors found almost impossible to live up to. He did all this, while remaining a fascinatingly enigmatic figure: either a visionary nation-builder or a drunken man of violence, depending on who you talk to. Alexander the Great, in its truncated two hours and twenty minutes (sliced down from Robert Rossen’s original three-hour plus) can only scratch the surface of his story and that’s all it does.

As the great man, Richard Burton flexes his mighty voice in a film that splits its focus roughly equally between the early days of Alexander and his troubled relationship with both his father Philip II (Fredric March) and his mother Olympias (Danielle Darrieux) and his own kingship and conquest of the known world until his early death. Surprisingly, perhaps because the world is so vast, it’s the first half of the film that’s the most interesting – perhaps because showing up the internecine dynastic squabbles between petulant royals are more up director and writer Rossen’s alley than global dominance.

Perhaps as well because it feels pretty clear Rossen doesn’t particularly seem to like Alexander. Over the course of the film, the pouting monarch will prove to have a monstrous ego (even as a teenager fighting Philip’s wars, he cockily re-names a sacked city after himself), ruthlessly slaughters opponents after battles, is prone to fits of rage, informs his followers with wild-eyes that he’s God himself, leads his army into the dried out hell of the deserts of the Middle East and turns (at best) a blind eye to his mother’s plans to assassinate his father and then murder his father’s second wife and baby son.

The film culminates in a shamed Alexander kicking the bucket more concerned with maintaining his legend for future generations than assuring any kind of future for his kingdom. But the sense of hubris destroying the great man is never quite captured. This is partly because the grand figure we are watching lacks any personal feelings or fear. He can’t seem to experience loss or grief and only understands negative events in terms of their impact on his reputation. And he never seems to truly learn from this – even when he harms friends, his regrets are based around the impact such action will have on how those around him see him. At the same time, Rossen can’t quite follow his heart and make a real iconoclastic epic meaning he instead leaves titbits here and there for the cinema-goer to hopefully pick up among the spectacle.

As such, Alexander is still pretty persistently framed as we expect a hero to be, with a rousing score backdropping Burton’s speeches and poses, even while the film seems deeply divided about whether this guy who conquered most of the known world and lay waste to Babylon was a good or bad thing. While acting half the time like a egomaniac tyrant, the film still carefully partially shifts blame for his character flaws onto his mother’s Lady Macbethesque influence (Darrieux does a good line in whispering insinuation) or Philip’s bombastic egotism (March, growling with impressive vigour).

Rossen has far more admiration for people like the fiercely principled Memnon (a fine Peter Cushing) who refuses to compromise only to be rewarded by a post-battle one-sided butchering from Alexander after his offer to surrender and spare the lives of his men is turned down. Even Michael Hordern’s Demosthenes comes across as a man of principle, certainly when compared to Alexander’s Athenian-of-choice Aristotle, interpretated here as a pompous windbag cheer-leader for dictators. Oddly even Harry Andrews (possibly, along with Niall MacGinnis’ wily Parmenion, the films finest performance) as Darius comes across as a man of surprising human doubt under his regal exterior. But, perhaps because of choppy-editing cutting down a complex story into just over two hours, Alexander the Great can’t resist framing its hero as a sun-kissed golden-boy, towering above everyone else in the film.

Watching Alexander the Great you get the feeling the film has effectively entombed him as a marble statue, so devoid is he of fundamental humanity. Perhaps this was Rossen’s solution to shooting a film about someone he seemed so devoid of human interest and sympathy for. There is a reason why Charlton Heston – the first choice for the role (can you imagine!) – called Alexander the Great “the easiest kind of picture to make badly”. Frequently Alexander the Great tips into a sort of sword-and-sandles camp made worse by how highly serious it takes itself. Not helped by Burton’s all-too-clear boredom with the part and contempt for the material, Alexander strikes poses and delivers speeches as if he’s been ripped straight out of Plutarch or a bust display in a museum.

Apart from rare moments – usually in the first half as he processes his complex feelings of love and loathing for his overbearing father – he is almost never allowed to be human. His friends – most notably his famed best-friend (and lover) Hephaestion – are reduced to a gang of largely wordless extras and only Claire Bloom’s Barsine is given any scope to talk to him as if he’s a man rather than just a myth. It gets a bit wearing after a while as you long for something human about the man you can cling onto.

It’s also a shame that Rossen seems uncomfortable with shooting the battle sequences. The battles of Granicus and a combined Issus-Gaugamela look rather like damp scuffles over shallow streams than some of the mightiest clashes of the Ancient world. Rossen communicates no visual sense of either strategy or scale (despite the bumper budget). Similarly, the grand sets look too theatrical and never quite as impressive as they should do, despite some fine painterly compositions. Rossen can never quite find a way to make his hundreds of extra seem like thousands and he falls back in the second half to communicating Alexander’s success through a tired combination of map montages, voiceover and repeated shots of men marching left to right and burning cities.

Alexander the Great is a deeply flawed epic. It’s neither swashbuckling fun that bowls you along, or a breath-taking piece of historical spectacle. Nor is it psychologically adept or insightful enough to show you something truly different about its hero. Instead, it tries to straddle both ways of thinking and ends up collapsing in the middle. If only Rossen had found his own Alexanderian solution to cutting this Gordian knot. Instead, the film just ends up a cut-about mess that fades from memory all too soon.

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

Scott’s crusader epic is a much better, more thoughtful film than you’ve been led to believe

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Orlando Bloom (Balian of Ibelin), Eva Green (Sibylla of Jerusalem), Jeremy Irons (Lord Tiberias), David Thewlis (Hospitaller), Liam Neeson (Godfrey of Ibelin), Brendan Gleeson (Raynald of Chatillon), Marton Csokas (Guy de Lusignan), Edward Norton (King Baldwin IV), Ghassan Massoud (Saladin), Michael Sheen (Priest), Velibor Topić (Almaric), Alexander Siddig (Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani), Kevin McKidd (Sergeant), Jon Finch (Patriarch Heraclius), Ulrich Thomsen (Gerard de Ridefort), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Godfrey’s nephew), Iain Glen (Richard I)

Version control: This review cover the Director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven, a three-hour film that is much better than the original theatrical version.

For hundreds of years the Middle East has been the site of wars over land and religion: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven is a grand, melancholic epic about the crusades, a period of history that seems to become even more divisive and controversial if every passing year. During the First Crusade (1096-99), a European Christian army had bloodily seized control of Jerusalem (massacring its Muslim population). The Crusaders built a state that lived through fragile truces, in a constant state of cold war with the Muslim states that opposed their conquest. Scott’s film picks up the final years of that ‘kingdom of Heaven’.

He does so through fictionalised version of the events. Balian (Orlando Bloom), a former military engineer, is now a widowed blacksmith in Northern France – until Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), a crusader lord, returns to claim him as his illegitimate son. Fleeing his home after murdering his bullying priest brother (Michael Sheen), Balian arrives in the Holy Land as the new Lord of Ibelin. But he not a paradise, but a kingdom full of ambitious lords and zealots, surrounded by the armies of Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) with the whole thing only just held together by the wise leper king Baldwin IV (Edward Norton). There is already a power struggle for who will control Baldwin’s heir, the child of his sister Sibylla (Eva Green). Will it be the moderates led by Tiberias (Jeremy Irons) or the zealot Templars led by Sibylla’s husband Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csorkas)?

I’ve always been interested in this period of history, and I’m a sucker for a grand historical epics. So I’m pretty much the target for this ambitious, luscious, flawed but engaging film. It helps when it’s assembled by a director as full of visual flair as Ridley Scott. Kingdom of Heaven is an extraordinarily beautiful film – one of those where you really could snip out every frame and hang it up on your wall. Gorgeously lensed by John Mathieson, it moves from a chilly, blue-filtered North France (a land of artistic snow fall and permafreeze) to a David Leanesque desert land, of rolling sand dunes and skies tinged with deepest blue. It’s a film of breathtaking scale, as medieval armies converge, legions of siege weapons roll up to never-ending city walls and the desert stretches as far as the eye can see.

It makes a fantastic backdrop for a film that’s tries really, really hard to take a measured, reasonable view on human nature and religion. It’s fair to say that this makes Kingdom of Heaven a very serious film (there is barely a few minutes of humour in its entire three hour runtime – a joke about Neeson once fighting three days with an arrow in his testicle is about all you’re gonna get), but it’s also nice to have a film celebrating compromise and moderation. Really, Kingdom of Heaven isn’t a true representation of the Crusader period at all – the real Balian and Baldwin would scarcely recognise the humanist liberals they become here – but as a sort of fantasia on balancing conflicting demands in a place that seems to make men mad, it’s hard not to be respect that it’s trying as hard as it is.

To achieve it’s aims, Kingdom of Heaven divides both sides of the argument into goodies and baddies. For the goodies, Baldwin and Saladin are reasonable, just men willing to strive for a world where all can worship freely. Edward Norton – unbilled under a silver mask and English accent – brings a great deal of strength and wisdom to Baldwin, matched by Ghassan Massoud’s superbly patient Saladin. On the other side, we have the “God wills it!” brigade. Admittedly on the Muslim side, they are embodied by one of Saladin’s advisors, whereas the crusaders are awash in angry, Holy War bloodlust types who believe any killing is justified if it’s in God’s name.

Kingdom of Heaven has a respect for faith, particularly when filtered through the words of characters who don’t believe painting a cross on their chest allows them to kill anyone who disagrees with them. Several times, Balian argues doing sensible, reasonable things technically against the word of the Biblewill be understood by God (if he’s worthy of the name). It playfully suggests David Thewlis’ (in an excellent performance) reasonable Hospitaler might actually be an angel, with his power to appear undetected and prodding of Balian towards doing the right thing (Thewlis even disappears into a burning bush at one point).

But, if I’m honest, much of the rest makes its points rather forcefully, showing a world where fine words are corrupted by ambition and anger. Many of those preaching faith are really motivated by a constant hunger for more –power, land, you name it. The closer a character is to the Church, the more likely they are to be either a pantomime, mustachio-twirling villain (like Marton Csorkas imperious Guy or Brendan Gleeson’s playfully-psychotic Raynald) or snivelling hypocrites like Jon Finch’s Patriach (who counsels converting to Islam and repenting later when the shit hits the fan).

Kingdom of Heaven lays out this earnest, well-meaning political viewpoint of how moderation should trump fanaticism, while filling its wonderful visuals with gorgeous costumes, stupendous sets, a brilliant score and some stunning battle sequences. But there is always a fascinating lack of hope in Kingdom of Heaven. When Balian troops up Gethsemane on his arrival in Jerusalem, he only hears the wind not the word of God. When offered the chance to save the kingdom from itself, it comes with such a morally compromised price-tag a straight-shooter like Balian is always going to say no. While his father (one of Neeson’s patented performances of weary, maverick nobility) clings to ideals, the film is perhaps best summed up by Jeremy Irons’ wonderfully world-weary performance as the cynical Tiberias: mournful, depressed and wondering what the hell it’s all been for.

It’s no wonder it’s such a savage world. Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t shirk on the medieval violence. Bodies are hacked to pieces with fountains of blood. It opens by introducing us to a regular Dirty Dozen of toughened Crusader veterans – only to slaughter nearly all of them in the first act. Death is only seconds away in this dangerous world: even sailing to the Holy Land is to risk near certain shipwreck. It’s fascinating that the film’s amazing reconstruction of the Siege of Jerusalem sees Balian fighting to make the siege so difficult that Saladin will be forced to offer terms rather than slaughter the city’s population as the First Crusaders did hundreds of years ago.

Sadly, the film’s main weakness is Orlando Bloom. Surfing the peak of his post LOTR popularity, Bloom’s limitations are ruthlessly exposed by carrying this historical epic. His delivery lacks shade and depth, he doesn’t have the charisma for the big speeches and he never convinces as either a man consumed with grief or a battle-hardened veteran (he doesn’t even remotely look like Michael Sheen’s older brother). It’s a part that needs a role of commanding presence, but Bloom doesn’t have it. It’s unlucky he also has to play off Eva Green giving a complex, well-judged performance as a Queen who learns humility the hard way (the director’s cut restores an entire plot-line for her, which adds hugely to the film’s quiet air of inevitable tragedy).

Kingdom of Heaven has a lot going for it: it looks amazing, it’s crammed with stunning scenes on a truly epic scale and gives excellent opportunities to a host of great actors. It’s an interesting, surprisingly glum exploration of the struggle to find peace. Sure, it’s view of the Crusades has very little link to do with the actual crusades and it’s a little one-sided in its views. But it’s also a thoughtful film that’s really trying to say something that’s worth hearing about moderation, all with some truly breath-taking epic film-making. It’s not a lost masterpiece, but it’s a much more impressive film than its reputation suggests.

Gladiator II (2024)

Gladiator II (2024)

Gonzo sequel sits firmly in the shadow of the illustrious predecessor it tries to imitate time and time again

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Paul Mescal (Lucius Verus/Hanno), Pedro Pascal (Marcus Acacius), Connie Nielsen (Lucilla), Denzel Washington (Macrinus), Joseph Quinn (Emperor Geta), Fred Hechinger (Emperor Caracalla), Derek Jacobi (Gracchus), Tim McInnerny (Thraex), Alexander Karim (Ravi), Peter Mensah (Jubartha), Lior Raz (Viggo), Matt Lucas (Master of Ceremonies), Rory McGann (Tegula)

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Gladiator II. In many ways, it’s a big, silly, perfectly inoffensive swords-and-sandals flick, with the violence dialled up. But as a sequel to Gladiator – a film that married scale with a hugely relatable emotional story about one man’s quest to avenge his family and unite with them in the afterlife – it’s not even in the same league. Gladiator II’s biggest problem is that when it tries to do something different from Gladiator it usually fails and when it hues close to the original, it only reminds you what a good film that was and how you’d honestly much rather watch that again.

Gladiator II picks up 16 years after the first film. The nephew of the late Commodus, Lucius (Paul Mescal) lives with his wife in the last free city of Numidia. That ends when the city is taken by a Roman army, under the command of General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) and Lucius’ wife is killed. Lucius, taken as a slave, of course arrives in Rome and becomes a gladiator in the service of the ambitious, unscrupulous wheeler-dealer Macrinus (Denzel Washington). Macrinus has schemes to exploit the fragile Empire, ruled by brothers Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). General Acacius and his wife, Lucius’ mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), also plan to overthrow the Emperors. And Lucius also plans revenge against Acacius and all of Rome in that order.

Gladiator II is awash in echoes from the first film. It gives Lucius mostly the same motivation as Maximus. It opens with a big Roman battle. It rushes to get Lucius back into the Colosseum, via a few reluctant bouts in the provinces. He is accepted as a leader by the other gladiators, marshalling them like troops. Connie Nielsen gets the same plot and versions of the same “visiting the hero in prison” scenes. There is a lot of talk about the power of the mob. Hands are frequently rubbed in the dirt. The famous quotes (“Strength and honour!”) are paraded out. Lucius cos-plays as Maximus for the film’s big ending. The final scene shows a survivor searching in the dirt of the Colosseum. Just when you think the film has at least not shown us a shot of a hand stroking some wheat… Gladiator II even chucks that in. It’s a big bit of nostalgia IP dressed up as homage.

But Gladiator II only seems to understand the surface elements of what made the first film successful – not the heart. Gladiator was a very simple story: it was a film about a man who deeply loved his late wife and son, determined to carry on living until he avenged them. Sure there were plot mechanics about the future of the Empire and “The Dream of Rome” – but this was window dressing to a plot focused on very real emotions, about caring for your loved ones. Maximus was carefully crafted as an honourable, decent man, a reluctant warrior who fought because he must. This narrative simplicity is completely lost in Gladiator II, a film so awash with subplots, schemes and shady deals that it becomes hard to follow – and eventually to care – who is on whose side and why.

There are at least four competing schemes at play in Gladiator II, each fighting for screen time like rats in a trap. It’s at best a bloody stalemate. The character who emerges best from all this is Macrinus. Based on the first Moorish Emperor of Rome (a fascinating, if short-lived, figure) he’s played with a meme-courting bombast by a clearly having-fun Denzel Washington (his rolling pronunciation of the word “Pol-leetic-sah!” designed to launch a thousand GIFs). A flamboyant figure, he effectively mixes elements of both Proximo and Commodus from the first film with the larger-than-life amorality of Washington’s Alonzo Harris (if Harris was a slightly camp Roman aristocrat). Most of the film’s enjoyable moments revolve around his increasingly brazen manipulations, first of a corrupt senator (an enjoyably sleazy Tim McInnerny) then the two deranged and incompetent Emperors. Every other plotline eventually falls into the shadow of Washington’s scenery-chewing excess (by the time Macrinus is using a character’s severed head as a prop to intimidate the Senate, you realise you just have to go with it).

Gladiator II though needs to split its focus between these multitudinal plot lines, to the detriment of all of them. The emperors fiddle and feud while Rome burns. Various soldiers and senators line-up familiar plots to restore the republic. Lucius, the character we are supposed to relate to the most, is the one who starts to lose our interest. Paul Mescal does an effective job as this growling, surly figure, even if he doesn’t quite have the force to pull off his final late-act speeches. But the film rushes his elevation to leader among the gladiators so quickly it feels unearned – as well as stuffing the film with a multitude of sidekicks so anonymous they blur into one, so much so you won’t even notice (or care) when they start to bite the big one.

On top of which, Lucius zigs-zags through motivations with all the logic of a charging rhino. He goes from wishing he was dead, to fighting desperately for life, to vowing revenge on one man to suddenly changing his mind, to leading a proto-Spartacus inspired revolt to ditching the idea, to denouncing his mother and birth-right until suddenly he doesn’t, to half-heartedly resenting Macrinus to announcing he only lives to see him die, from rejecting Maximus to cos-playing him – how are we supposed to keep up with this? The fact he’s a man of very little words doesn’t help.

When he does speak it’s never particularly punchy. Scarpia’s workman-like dialogue gives him a clumsy rallying cry – “Where we are not where death is. Where death is, we are not” – which manages to be both leaden word-soup and spectacularly unrallying. The film recognises this by having Lucius ditch it late on for a rousing cry of – what else? – “Strength and honour”. Scarpia’s script, along with its muddy plotting, is full of deathly, forgettable pap; as well as riffing so determinedly on Gladiator that you’d think not a day went by in the bowels of the Colosseum without a wistful discussion about Maximus. Gladiator II also manages to pee across several ideas at the heart of Gladiator, from the potential implication that Maximus may have cheated on his wife to father Lucius (even Russell Crowe questioned that one) to the idea that at the end of the film they buried him in the Colosseum, which seems like the last thing they’d do.

In fact, I started to think that Ridley Scott’s main motivation for doing Gladiator II was to chuck in all the gonzo ideas he couldn’t make work (or find the budget for) in the first film. A fight with a mad rhino. A flooded arena full of ships (with added sharks – how these were caught and conveyed in-land to the arena just doesn’t even bear thinking about). Lucius and his fellow prisoners take on man-eating poorly-CGI’d baboons (Lucius’ position as leader largely stems from him biting one of these beasts before strangling it to death). Outside the arena, heads, hands and arms are hacked off and Scott effectively opens the film with a re-stage of the battle of Jerusalem from Kingdom of Heaven – only the siege towers this time are on ships charging the sea walls.

All of this is pretty well done, don’t get me wrong. Scott can do historical epic on screen like few others. But Gladiator II actually suggests that where he lucked out on Gladiator was keeping it simple with a strong story. Gladiator II feels something where attention has been lavished on the scale and the bombast, but that plot and character have been rushed. The film is about 15 minutes shorter than Gladiator while telling a story twice as complex, a mixture that doesn’t work well. In fact, the main feeling I had coming out from it was that I didn’t need to see it again and if I could re-watch Gladiator and pretend this didn’t exist at all, I might be a happier man. Gladiator II lives so absolutely in the shadow of its predecessor, that its flaws become more apparent through the constant invitation the viewer is made to compare and contrast them. This one won’t echo to 2030 let alone eternity.

War and Peace (1967)

War and Peace (1967)

Legendary Soviet Tolstoy adaptation, awe-inspiring in its scale and creative amibition

Director: Sergei Bondarchuk

Cast: Sergei Bondarchuk (Pierre Bezukhov), Ludmila Savelyeva (Natasha Rostova), Vyacheslav Tikhonov (Andrei Bolkonsky), Boris Zakhava (Mikhail Kutuzov), Anatoly Ktorov (Nikolai Bolkonsky), Antonina Shuranova (Maria Bolkonskaya), Oleg Tabakov (Nikolai Rostov), Viktor Stanitsyn (Ilya Rostov), Kira Golovko (Natalya Rostova), Irina Skobtseva (Hélène Kuragina), Vasily Lanovoy (Anatole Kuragin), Irina Gubanova (Sonya Rostova), Oleg Yefremov (Fyodor Dolokhov), Eduard Martsevich (Boris Drubetskoy), Aleksandr Borisov (Uncle Rostov), Nikolai Rybnikov (Vasily Denisov)

During the Cold War, the superpowers had to fight with things other than nukes. They raced to space. They were gripped by chess matches. And they made rival film productions of Tolstoy’s epic novel. War and Peace, a gargantuan production (it’s really four films and took literally years to make) was the Soviet answer to King Vidor’s War and Peace. If Hollywood thought it could own the greatest Russian novel ever written by making it an Audrey Hepburn vehicle, Mosfilm would take it back. The Soviet War and Peace would treat Tolstoy with the respect it deserved, honouring its literary richness, and putting it on a scale no film had ever seen before.

War and Peace was made with the state’s full backing. Its director would have anything he needed. Rebuild Moscow on the backlot (then burn it down)? Sure. Have historical artifacts from dozens of museums shipped to the film set? Boxed up and ready. Use tens of thousands of troops – and three war-hero Generals as assistant directors – to restage the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino? Thousands of horses were shipped to the set, while seamstresses worked on over ten thousand costumes. Moscow even created an arsenal of functioning cannons which shot 23 tons of gunpowder for the recreated battles. It’s no exaggeration that no film before or since could match this for scale. Avengers: Endgame eat your heart out.

To direct this gargantuan operation, Mosfilm and the Ministry of Cuture selected Sergei Bondarchuk, relatively young in his early 40s, over the seasoned veterans who expected the gig. Bondarchuk was by all accounts a hard taskmaster, who fought, bickered and bullied practically everyone on set (burning through three cinematographers), but also had a gift for marshalling effectively a small nation for years (though not without at least two heart attacks, one of which left him clinically dead for five minutes). He also had the chutzpah to audition nearly every actor in Russia before deciding the best man for the leading role of Pierre Bezukhov was none other than… Bondarchuk himself (for good measure, Bezukhov’s seductive screen wife would be played by his own wife Irena Skobtseva).

War and Peace could have gone two ways: its scale could have flattened a lesser director or led to the sort of middle-brow, stale traditionalist fare Hollywood hacks churned out for years. Instead, Bondarchuk was fascinated by the possibility of the medium and swept up in playing with the cinematic tricks explored by his heroes and contemporaries. War and Peace is a strikingly unique, often discordant, meditative film, full of visual invention that pushes the boundaries in the most inventive ways to present its colossal scale.

You can see traces of Abel Gance’s Napoleon in its evocative use of double exposure images (showing ghost like echoes of people appear in frame, most notably the near-death experience of Andrei Bolkonsky) and its extreme close-ups, not to mention the more obvious triptych homages for key moments (such as Napoleon and Alexander III’s meeting at Tilsit). Bondarchuk’s influences went wider than that: there is a social realist immediacy in several scenes, with their jittery camera-work, throwing us into confusing battles, that wouldn’t look out-of-the-ordinary among the Italian Neorealists. There are patches of Welles and Lang in the sweeping camerawork that stress the scale and geography of the sets. Panoramic aerial shots dial up the most ambitious work of Murnau and Gone with the Wind. Bondarchuk’s decision at key emotional moments to fade out all sound except for ambient noises, such as drips, breathing or birdsong feels like he’s been studying Tarkovksy – as does the beautiful, lingering shots of nature. Bondarchuk wasn’t just going to make a stately coffee-table book: he fused distinctive flourishes from the great film-makers, to wonderful effect.

In addition, Bondarchuk (also the co-screenwriter – did his chutzpah influence that similar wunderkind Kenneth Branagh, both obsessed with tricksy, inventive camerawork) wanted to pay tribute to Tolstoy. What’s remarkable about War and Peace is how much of Tolstoy’s meditation on the meaning of life is in the film. Sure, there are cuts – Nikolai Rostov, Sonya and Maria Bolkonskaya are reduced to the bare bones – but this film finds a great deal of time for its characters to muse (either in sometimes portentous voiceover, or a deep-voiced omniscient narrator) over the meaning of life, the quest of happiness and the nature of decency and nobility.

In fact, this is a particular surprise since this version War and Peace had its roots as a patriotic demonstration of Soviet film-making might. It’s particularly striking then that it ends with a sequence that stresses how ordinary soldiers (French and Russian) have more in common than not and how much links mankind together than drives them about. This is not pro-Soviet propaganda.

Not that War and Peace doesn’t take a few potshots at the effete, selfish rich, sitting in comfort while soldiers fight at the front. But it also finds time for the Rostov’s decency and self-sacrifice for and it doesn’t stint on the grandiosity of Tsarist Russia. A ballroom scene, site of Natasha’s meeting with Andrei Bolkonsky, is stunningly staged. In a huge mirror-laden ballroom, Bolkonsky’s camera bobs and weaves between dancers. Cinematographer Anatoly Petritsky suggested he filmed it while roller-skating, a genius innovation which creates a visual dancing effect as well as allowing us to be right among the literally hundreds of grandly costumed dancers (Bolkonsky skated alongside Petritsky, at times holding a fan slightly before the camera, to add to the effect).

The magnificence of this often gets forgotten in the awe-inspiring spectacle of the Russian military backed battles. Bondarchuk enlisted the Soviet Air Force for stunning, wide-angled aerial shots that revealed the stunning dimensions of the recreation. Petritsky also introduced a series of diving crane shots – like the camera has been set on a zip wire – that fly down from the heights into the battle’s chaotic maelstrom. (The battles are, as per Tolstoy, confusing messes where no one knows what’s going on but everyone pretends to be in charge). These battle images virtually redefine epic, mind-blowing in their scale – and the managerial and artistic force that must have been needed to organise and capture them all on screen as exquisitely as they are.

The same goes for the burning of Moscow, a dizzying outburst of flame, co-ordinated tracking shots (following Pierre through the burning wreckage) while crowds of extras run and panic. War and Peace also follows Tolstoy in being perhaps one of the grandest scale, anti-war films ever made. There are no real moments of heroism in the battle, soldiers march into injury and death and Bondarchuk frequently pans the camera across mounds of bodies or soldiers left mauled and dying on the ground. The retreat from Moscow sees Hellish suffering for the French, but that is balanced by the horrifying executions of civilians they carry out in Moscow, terrified men and boys led to stakes and gunned down in hard-hitting slow-motion. War and Peace doesn’t shy away from the suffering, pain and death that war brings, with very little glory or pride to show for it.

It’s also a film that’s often strikingly well-acted. Bondarchuk may be too old for Pierre, but his thick-set frame is perfect and his soulful eyes beautifully capture the character of a would-be-philosopher with no purpose. Vyacheslav Tikhonov makes Bolkonsky an imposingly distant man hiding his fragility. Perhaps most strikingly, ballet dancer Ludmila Savelyeva is a radiant Natasha, waif-like but bursting with energy and life, who tackles better than almost anyone else an impossibly difficult character. Bondarchuk frames her perfectly, back-lit to focus on her expressive eyes.

At times there is almost too much to everything in War and Peace. Bondarchuk is at times almost constitutionally incapable of shooting a simple scene, a relentless inventive energy that is perfect for the war but sometimes exhausting for the peace. The all-consuming screentime given to the scale of the battles and balls does eat into the time allowed to character and plot. But this is like complaining about being uncomfortably full after a generous rich meal. There is so much in War and Peace Bondarchuk gets right: from its respect to Tolstoy, but as an intellectual not as heritage figure to its stunning visuals, in every minute of its great length there is something to admire, thrill and strike you with awe. In this instance, the Soviets proved they could do Tolstoy better than the Yanks.

Titanic (1997)

Titanic (1997)

Cameron’s film is easy to knock, but is a triumph of romance, scale and real-life tragedy

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Jack Dawson), Kate Winslet (Rose DeWitt Bukater), Billy Zane (Cal Hockley), Frances Fisher (Ruth DeWitt Bukater), Kathy Bates (Molly Brown), Gloria Stuart (Old Rose), Bill Paxton (Brock Lovett), Suzy Amis (Lizzy Calvert), David Warner (Spicer Lovejoy), Danny Nucci (Fabrizio De Rossi), Victor Garber (Thomas Andrews), Bernard Hill (Captain Smith), Jonathan Hyde (J Bruce Ismay)

Get on any ship, and I guarantee you’ll see two people at the bow standing, one in front of the other, with their arms stretched out. If that doesn’t tell you something about the lasting impact of Titanic nothing will. Titanic was a sensation: top of the box office for months with the sort of repeat-viewing producers dream of; My Heart Will Go On went platinum and half the world was in love with Leonardo DiCaprio. It won 11 Oscars, made a billion dollars and is a film everyone knows even if (hard to believe) they ain’t seen it. James Cameron took an enormous punt on Titanic – Romeo and Juliet meets disaster movie on legendary ship – and it paid off in spades. Because, no matter your cynicism, you can’t deny he created a film millions of people invested in to an extraordinary scale, staged with the epic sweep, gorgeous detail and pounding disaster thrills that channelled David Lean, Luchino Visconti and Irwin Allen all at once.

Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) is destined for a life of dutiful, unimaginative marriage with spoilt millionaire Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) when she boards Titanic as a first-class passenger in Liverpool on 10 April 1912. Also boarding the ship (but in steerage) is drifter and would-be artist Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio). When he saves her from taking her own life by jumping from the ship, they form a bond which flourishes into a love that will change both their lives. But not as much as the iceberg the ship is ploughing relentlessly towards across the Atlantic.

It’s very easy to take a pop at Titanic. Its romance sometimes succumbs to Mills and Boon cliché and Cameron’s script has more than its fair share of clunky lines (it’s one of those rare Best Picture winners with no screenplay nomination). Plenty of people hated it in a fit of inverted snobbery as a whole generation took this modern romance to its heart. But Titanic reveals the truth of the magic of movies: it uses a traditional romance to build our emotional investment in the sinking and the lives of ordinary passengers, more successfully than any other Titanicfilm had before or since.

Cameron knew the mountain he had to overcome. After all, this was the most famous disaster since Pompeii: where was the tension? So, he opens with a modern-day setting, a treasure hunt among the real ship’s ruins, with the hilariously named Brock Lovett (a game Bill Paxton in a thankless role) searching for a priceless diamond, the Heart of the Ocean. His only link: the older Rose (a plucked-from-retirement performance of charm and hidden fire from 87-year-old Gloria Stuart), who becomes our window to the past. This allows the audience to be told the geekily excited “ain’t it cool” details of the sinking with the same sort of distance we’re used to thinking about it. The film then becomes a lesson in making us learn, like Brock, this wasn’t an anecdote but a horrific disaster that killed 1,500 real people (made worse because we know exactly what’s going to happen to this ship every step of the way). The MacGuffin is intended to look as trivial as it does by the film’s end.

His key tool for this was his Romeo and Juliet love story told, for all its airport-novel lack of originality, with a vibrant, earnest intensity. Helped by fantastic chemistry between two talented actors, you have to work hard not to care for Rose and Jack (no accident those initials). And through their eyes, the whole ship comes to life, Just as the special effects camera sweep through the ruins, turns it from a ghost shop into a living breathing place, where ordinary, real-life dramas play out in every corner. It’s a perfectly judged entry point for bringing history to compelling life, playing on emotions we’ve all felt: love and fear of death.

The film splits neatly into two acts. The first is the romance and, whatever you say, it’s a cinematic romance for the ages in its old-school sweep. As we watch them bounce round the ship, make each other laugh, dance and fall in love, the utter lack of cynicism is really winning. It’s so overwhelmingly genuine and heartfelt, you can’t help feeling it yourself. Both help each other find new depths: for Rose, the willingness to embrace her own choices, for Jack a maturity and responsibility he’s lacked. Bathed in golden cinematic light and backed by James Horner’s superb score, they become two people we really invest in being together. It’s so earnest and honest it even gets away with otherwise ridiculous scenes like “draw me like one of your French girls Jack”.

Both the leads carry-off it off superbly. No mean feat considering the challenge of making the film – not least being submerged for weeks in freezing cold water during night shoots. Kate Winslet makes Rose burst with life from the depths of fear and doubt, effortlessly carrying much of the movie. It’s often overlooked that Rose drives much of the pace of the romance, as well as clearly being the more sexually and romantically experienced partner. Leonardo DiCaprio – who found it a burden for years, as it turned him from proto-DeNiro to heartthrob pin-up – gives an infectious energy to Jack’s fortune-cookie mantras, while growing in authority as the film progresses towards disaster.

Cameron fills his golden-hued recreated Titanic with the sort of detail we’ve not seen since The Leopard. Sure, his view of the haves and have-nots is hardly subtle (from ruthlessly posh, heartless Brits to plucky, happy-go-lucky Irish working-class), but it makes it very easy to relate to the injustice, bullying and casual snobbery. In Rose’s fiancée Cal, Billy Zane unselfishly plays an utter rotter: a coward, a snob who mocks Picasso and has never heard of Freud, a bully who treats Rose like a pet dog and puts his own needs (and safety) first at every turn. Titanic might be a ship of goodies and baddies (most egregiously in its clumsy slandering of First Officer Murdoch, a clumsy mis-step Cameron later apologised to Murdoch’s family for), but it’s undeniably alive.

It’s that quality of life which makes the sinking of the ship so horrifyingly intense. Cameron’s extraordinary second-half of the film – effectively a souped-up, horrifying remake of A Night to Remember (including quoting shots from that film) – never lets us treat this like a historical curiosity. Instead, it hammers home in intense, tragic detail, the shocking loss of life and the desperate, futile attempts of so many people to survive. Told in close to real-time, superbly edited and practically dripping in freezing water, it’s terrifying in its unstoppable intensity. Suddenly the scale of this mighty ship shrinks into an ever smaller world of fear. Events advance with horrifying speed, as the ship slowly then terribly quickly, disappears, made worse by our knowing in advance every step.

Cameron breathes life into dozens of small tragedies that surround Titanic. The band that played on. The Irish mother who puts her children to bed, knowing they cannot escape. The wealthy elderly couple who lie together while the water washes up around them. The hysterical children separated from their weeping father who remains on board. The priest who spends his dying moments comforting his flock. The camera catches moments of terror in the eyes of people we have seen fleetingly in the film. Titanic drains any sense of perverse excitement at the disaster from you. By the time the survivors are pleading for rescue in the freezing Atlantic, you’ll be as shell-shocked and shaken as the witnesses in the lifeboats.

Watch Titanic with your cynicism parked, and it is an extraordinary piece of epic, romantic film-making. The cinematography, production design, costumes and editing are all perfect and James Horner’s inspiring score takes the film’s slightly mushy romance to a higher level. There are great performances from the likes of Kathy Bates and Victor Garber. And the second half grips like a horrific vice, never letting go. There’s a reason this film gripped the hearts of the whole world in 1997: it knows exactly what it is trying to do and excels at doing it. And never, in any film, has a historical disaster hit a viewer with as much punch as Titanic does.

Throne of Blood (1957)

Throne of Blood (1957)

Kurosawa’s Macbeth adaptation beautifully captures much of the spirit of Shakespeare

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshiro Mifune (Taketoki Washizu), Isuzu Yamada (Lady Asaji Washizu), Minoru Chiaki (Yoshiaki Miki), Takashi Shimura (Noriyasu Odagura), Akira Kubo (Yoshiteru Miki), Yōichi Tachikawa (Kunimaru Tsuzuki), Takamaru Sasaki (Lord Kuniharu Tsuzuki), Chieko Naniwa (Forest witch)

Shakespeare is universal. What more proof do you need, than to see Macbeth very much present in Throne of Blood, Kurosawa’s samurai epic version of the Bard’s Scottish play. Kurosawa’s film takes the plot of Shakespeare’s tragedy, with touches of Japanese Noh theatre, told with his distinctive visual eye. It makes for truly great cinema, one of Kurosawa’s undisputed masterpieces – even if it loses some of the greatness of Shakespeare along the way.

You can though see Shakespeare from the beginning in Kurosawa’s mist filled epic (bringing back memories of the Scottish Highlands). A badly-wounded soldier brings news to Lord Tsuzuki (Takamaru Sasaki) of the defeat of his traitorous former friend thanks to the brilliant generalship of Washizu (Toshiro Mifune). Meanwhile, in the forest, Washizu and his fellow general Miki (Minoru Chiaki) encounter a witch (Chieko Naniwa) who prophesies that Washizu will one day be the Lord. When other prophesies proof true, Washizu starts to think how he could make the last true as well. His ambitions are encouraged by his wife Lady Asaji (Isuzu Yamada), who persuades him murder is the best tool for succession. But can they live with the consequences of their crime?

So much, so Shakespeare right? Throne of Blood ingeniously translates Shakespeare’s plot to an entirely different setting, one of feudal Japan. It also translates some of the Bard’s most striking verbal imagery into visuals: the strange mixture of rain and sunshine (‘so foul and fair a day’) that Washizu and Miki wade through before they meet the witch; Miki’s horse thrashing wildly through the courtyard like Duncan’s; the lamps that light the way to Tsuzuki’s chamber (like Macbeth’s dagger). Kurosawa’s visual transformation of the play’s imagery is breathtakingly original.

On its release Throne of Blood was savaged by Western critics for its cheek, before critical consensus shifted to proclaim it one of the greatest of all Shakespeare adaptations. But do you still have Shakespeare without the language (and by that, I don’t mean from English into translation, but its complete removal). Kurosawa’s film makes no attempt to replicate the poetry of Shakespeare (most strikingly, its equivalent of the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech is Washizu shrieking “Fool! Fool” as he sits in frustration, a neat image but one where you’d wish Mifune had been given more to play). But Throne of Blood may not be a complete Shakespeare adaptation, but it’s possibly one of the greatest adaptations ever made of a Shakespeare story.

This is because Throne of Blood captures so many of the core thematic concepts of Macbeth, not least its destructive, nihilistic force and the terrible, crushing burden self-imposed destiny and ambition sets. Toshiro Mifune’s Washizu may more of a brute than Macbeth, but his blustering, aggressive exterior hides a weak man, insecure and dependent on others. His weakness is in fact a lack of imagination, his inability to picture a life outside of the tracks laid down before him by the witch. His lack of independent thought is recognised by his wife, Asaji who nudges and pushes Washizu in the direction she (and he, deep down) wishes at every opportunity.

Washizu is soon trapped in a cycle of murder and disgrace he can’t escape. The walls of the room where he and Asaji plot the murder of Lord Tsuzuki is still smeared with the blood from the seppuku of its former owner who also betrayed Tsuzuki. Whenever he enters the forest, Washizu seems almost wrapped inside its branches, unable to find his way. Before a dinner to host the murdered Miki, Washizu listens (like Claudius) to a noh actor recount details of a crime all too similar to his own. As Lord, Washizu cowers powerlessly in it just as its previous owner did. Even the film itself is a grim cycle of the inevitability of destruction: Kurosawa’s open mist rolls away to reveal a monument to the castle before the castle itself emerges to take its place, the film returning at its end to the same mist-covered monument. These bookends also stress how transient (and pointless) this grappling for power is – nature will eventually claim all.

But it also suggests a world where death is so inevitable, that you might as well seize what power you can when you can. Even Miki – the film’s finest performance from Minoru Chiaki, full of subtle reactions of resignation and disgust – turns a blind eye (despite his sideways glances of disgust at key moments) to Washizu’s crimes, to further his son’s promised hopes for the throne. Asaji is motivated by her belief that there is no sin in seizing what you can from our brief time in this world, firmly telling Washizu that not only is it his duty to deliver the prophecy but – in a world where Tsuzaki gained power by murdering the lord before him – he would hardly be the first and that no previous killer trusts a potential new rival in any case.

Asaji is strikingly played by Isuzu Yamada, a quiet, scheming figure who sees everything and has an inner strength her husband lacks. Like Mifune, she uses the striking poses of Noh theatre to fabulous effect – Asaji herself moves, on the night of the murder, in a noh dance craze – and to communicate the dance of power between them throughout that long night. Kurosawa also uses silence beautifully with Asaji, most strikingly of all her silent, almost supernatural, collecting of drugged saki for Tsuzaki’s guards: as she walks into, disappears into darkness, then reappears carrying the drink all that is heard is the squeak of her robes across the floor. Yamada’s controlled, Noh-chill makes her brief collapse into futile hand-washing madness all the more striking.

After the long night of the murder, Kurosawa presents a world that grows more and more uncontrolled. In a brilliant innovation, Asaji provokes the murder of Miki by lying (perhaps?) about being pregnant, making Washizu desperate to protect the chance of a royal line. Miki’s murder leads to his terrifying pale ghost silently challenging an increasingly wild Washizu, who thrashs weakly around the room seemingly without any control. Mifune’s powerfully gruff Washizu becomes increasingly petulant and desperate, lambasting his troops and clinging to the letter of the prophecies rather than their more detailed meaning. Mifune’s striking poses – inspired by noh theatre – seems to trap him even more as hyper-real passengers in a pre-determined story. If Kurosawa’s adaptation has rinsed much of their complexity out, he firmly establishes the couple at its centre as trapped souls in an inescapable cycle.

Kurosawa innovates further by introducing a sort of Greek chorus of regular soldiers, ordinary warriors under Washizu’s command whose faith in their commander (they clearly know he murdered Tsuzaki) shrinks as Washizu’s grip on the situation fails. Washizu clings to belief in his invulnerablity – even after the prophecy about the impossible circumstances needed for his defeat (as if a forest can ever move!) is told to him in a fit of mocking laughter by the androgynous witch and a string of suspicious woodland spirits.

It culminates in Washizu instigating his own destruction, bragging to his men about the obscure circumstances that will lead to his defeat – leading to his own disillusioned men fragging the panicked lord the second the situation comes to pass. Kurosawa’s ending is visually extraordinary, Washizu pierced with so many arrows he resembles a human porcupine (Mifune’s terror was real, the actor dodging real arrows). Just as Asaji collapses into madness, Washizu’s fate is ignoble – Kurosawa doesn’t even afford him Macbeth’s brave duel against Macduff, this great warrior instead going down without so much as inflicting a scratch on Throne of Blood’s Malcolm and his forces.

Throne of Blood focuses beautifully on some (not all) of the key themes in Macbeth. It presents a fatalistic world where choices are few and the deadly cycle of death never seems to stop. Kurosawa interprets this all beautifully, transferring Shakespeare’s verbal imagery into intelligent, dynamic imagery. Sure, in removing the text it removes the core thing that makes Shakespeare Shakespeare – and also leads to the simplifying of its characters, in particular its leads who lose much of their depth and shade. But as a visual presentation reinvention of one of Shakespeare’s stories, this is almost with parallel, a triumphant and gripping film that constantly rewards.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Deliriously overblown and full of demented imagination even if it never quite feels necessary

Director: George Miller

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa), Chris Hemsworth (Dementus), Tom Burke (Praetorian Jack), Lachy Hulme (Immortan Joe), Alyla Browne (Young Furiosa), George Shevtsov (History Man), John Howard (People Eater), Angus Sampson (The Organic Mechanic), Nathan Jones (Rictus Erectus), Josh Helman (Scotus), Charlee Fraser (Mary Jabassa), Elsa Pataky (Mr Norton)

Is there a more demented mainstream film series than Mad Max? Furiosa follows the balls-to-the-wall excess of Mad Max: Fury Road with more of the same and a mythic atmosphere of Godfather Part II-backstory deepening. What you end up with might feel slightly odd or self-important – over two and a half hours of direct build-up for a pay-off we saw almost ten years ago (perhaps that’s why Furiosa ends with a cut-down play-back of the major events of Fury Road spliced into the credits, so we can all be reassured the villains left alive here got their comeuppance later). Furiosa is frequently overlong, a little too full of its love of expansive world-building and never quite convinces you that we actually need it – but then it’s also so bizarre, Grand Guignal and totally nuts perhaps we should just be happy that, in a world of focus-grouped content, it even exists.

We’re back on the desert wasteland of post-apocalyptic Australia as motorbike riding goons kidnap young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) from the Green Place hoping to use her to persuade crazed war lord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) to lead his forces there. Despite the heroic efforts of her mother (Charlee Fraser), Furiosa remains a captive with only a secret tattoo on her arm (guess what’s going to happen to that…) to guide her home. Dementus provokes a resources war with cult-leader Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), with Furiosa traded, then escaping a hideous fate as one of Joe’s wives, instead growing up secretly-disguised as a boy (becoming Anya Taylor-Joy) as part of Praetorian Jack’s (Tom Burke) War Rig crew. Then the war between Immortan Joe and Dementus explodes again, foiling Furiosa and Jack’s plan to escape and giving Furiosa a change at revenge against Dementus.

That sprawling plot outline hopefully gives an idea of the ambitious bite George Miller is taking out of his world. While Fury Road took place over, at most, a few days, Furiosa stretches well over twenty, so gargantuan in scale and newly invented locations (as well as the mountainous citadel, we get the oil-rig nightmare of Gas Town and the Mordor-like Bullet Town) that it squeezes most of the entire Act Five war between Dementus and Immortan Joe into a brief, tracking-shot, montage. Furiosa is actually rather like a fever-dream Freud might have had after reading an airplane thriller, split into on-screen chapter titles – each with portentous (and sometimes pretentious) names like ‘The Pole of Inaccessibility’ – and a self-important narration dialling up mythic importance. If Fury Road was like someone stabbing an adrenalin-filled syringe straight into your heart, Furiosa is a like being told a detour-crammed story by someone a bit the worse-the-wear after a long night.

Not that Furiosa shirks on the banging madness of Fury Road’s slap-in-the-face action. It features a mid-film War Rig vs motor-bike raiders pitched-driving battle that is so extreme you wonder no one got crushed under wheel while making it, perfectly capturing the addled madness of Fury Road. A Chapter 4 pitched battle at one of Furiosa’s Dystopian-on-speed locations sees destruction, devastation and disaster on an even grander scale than anything else Miller has done before in this series, with an entire mining crater turned into a whirligig of firey destruction. That’s not forgetting three desperate desert chases – the finest of which is the film’s opening sequence, which see Furiosa’s mother track down and ruthlessly dispatch Furiosa’s kidnappers with a velociraptor-like ruthlessness and efficiency. No wonder Miller can put a whole war into a single shot – and why he feels comfortable ending Furiosa with a surprisingly personal and small-scale confrontation.

The main confrontation is between Furiosa and her self-proclaimed warlord – and would-be surrogate Dad – Dementus. Furiosa gives Chris Hemsworth the opportunity he’s been waiting for, allowing to flex his comic muscles, chew hilarious lumps out of the scenery and still show his menace. He makes Dementus an overgrown child, brilliant at stealing but with no idea about how to use them, obsessed with self-improvement (his dialogue is full of verbose, overwritten phrases, like a psychotic thesaurus) and only really happy when he’s smashing something. Introduced framing himself like a zen-like messiah, it doesn’t take long until he’s charging around on a chariot drawn by motorbikes, tasting other people’s tears and giving self-aggrandizing speeches while torturing Furiosa’s nearest-and-dearest. It’s a gift of a part, funny, scary, loathsome but strangely likeable even when he does awful things.

Opposite him, Anya Taylor-Joy actually has less to work with as Furiosa (she only takes over the part almost an hour into the film). Although this is meant to be a Furiosa film, it rarely feels like its telling us much more than we already know, especially since much the skills that ‘makes’ Furiosa what she is in Fury Road takes place in montage and her desire for freedom and to protect others are swiftly established so that any new-comers can unhesitatingly root for her. If Dementus is all talk, Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa is silent and simmering, her humanity either shrinking or quietly growing from moment-to-moment. She has a quiet romance with Tom Burke’s world-weary Praetorian Jack, but this really about converting her into a mythic figure of vengeance rather than making her a personality.

A vengeance we’ve already seen pan-out in Fury Road. I’ll be honest, for all the grand scale of Furiosa, I don’t really feel I learned anything about its central character here I hadn’t already picked up from Theron’s brilliantly expressive performance in the first film. For all the impressiveness of the scale, a lot of Furiosa boils down to physically showing us things that were implied in the first (second?) film – from locations, to the reasons why Furiosa lost her arm to giving us clear reasons for her motivations. But all this is already there – and with brilliant economy – in Fury Road. Telling us all again feels like Miller giving us the footnotes (Furiosa Silmarillon perhaps?) rather than anything truly new and the Homeric backdrop Miller is going for never really clicks into place.

So the most successful swings are not narrative but visual. Furiosa reminds you what an absolutely insane extreme world Mad Max is. Death cults of radiation-deformed albinos? Villains who bottle milk straight from the nipple (not a cow’s), while another obsessively fondles his exposed, pierced ones? A villain who straps a battered old Teddy bear to himself? Action set-pieces that throw in everything – flying bikes, lava lakes and arms stoically lopped off? Even time-jumps are done imaginatively, like a wig, caught in a branch, decaying in front of our eyes. Every single design decision in this – and the gorgeously sun-kissed photography – is dialled up to eleven for George Miller’s very personal vision of pulpy, dystopian chaos.

You can wonder at times – as I did – whether we really needed a two-and-a-half hour film that’s expands the thematic depth of a chase movie which already outlined its characters motivations and personalities with impressive economy. But then, there are moments in Furiosa that just feel like they’ve been pulled out of someone’s crazy dreams. It’s put together with such a good mix of pulp poetry and head-banging craziness by George Miller that after a while you just go with it. And it sticks with you in a way focus-grouped Marvel films never seem to.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)

Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)

Epic retelling that sticks with the same melodrama and nearly destroyed Brando’s career

Director: Lewis Milestone (Carol Reed)

Cast: Marlon Brando (Lt. Fletcher Christian), Trevor Howard (Captain William Bligh), Richard Harris (John Mills), Hugh Griffith (Alexander Smith), Richard Haydn (William Brown), Tarita Teriipaia (Princess Maimiti), Matahiarii Tama (Chief Hitihiti), Percy Herbert (Matthew Quintal), Duncan Lamont (John Williams), Gordon Jackson (Edward Birkett), Chips Rafferty (Michael Byrne), Noel Purcell (William McCoy), Tim Seely (Midshipman Ned Young), Henry Daniell (Admiral)

After the success of Ben-Hur, MGM thought it had cracked the mystery of making those cash-registers go ring-a-ding: massive historical pictures, with scale and run-time dialled up to “epic”. Mutiny on the Bounty was one of the most famous stories of all time and they’d had signed up Marlon Brando, universally seen as the greatest actor alive. It couldn’t go wrong, could it? Months of shooting and a disastrous box-office release later (despite a MGM campaign that landed this a Best Picture nomination), and Mutiny on the Bounty effectively destroyed Brando’s career for the next ten years and became a by-word for star excess.

Brando played mutineer Fletcher Christian – but in a manner completely different from Clark Gable (who, Brando disparagingly stated, only played himself minus the moustache). Brando’s Christian would be British and then-some: posh, foppish, a gentleman torn between the rules of society and those of fair play. Bligh – played with a constant sneer by Trevor Howard – would follow in the footsteps of Laughton, but Brando wanted to make something more serious, more historical. Less of a blood-and-thunder naval drama and more a character study that would give a fair crack of the whip (so to speak) to the Tahitian natives the mutineers lived among.

The film we ended up with though is no more historically accurate than the 1935 Best Picture winner. Part of the film’s disastrous reception might well be that this epic tells more-or-less exactly the same salacious story of a devilish sadist scowling as he whips men to death (far from the truth of the real Bligh, a poor leader but not a monster) until his noble number two steps up (the real Christian was a spoilt weakling) but in what feels like twice the time with half the fun. If you want to watch this version of the Bounty story, why would you want to choose this one? (We’d have to wait until the 1984 version for a more fair-handed telling.)

Not that Mutiny on the Bounty is as terrible as its reputation suggests. It touches – particularly in its thoughtful post-mutiny coda on Pitcairn island – on an interesting character study of the mixed motivations of Christian, filled with regrets and self-pitying sulking. It wants to explore where the balance lies between what is right by the letter of the law and by its spirit. Nothing Bligh does in the film is wrong as such, but his relish and zeal in doing it are. Christian isn’t a conventional hero, but a smirking, foppish character prone to snide remarks and affecting an air of disconnected duty for large chunks of the film. If the film had allowed Bligh more sympathy, rather than the two-dimensional monster he’s portrayed as here, it might have made for an interesting character clash.

Instead, it tends to be slow, self-important and pompous, not helped by Brando’s indulgent performance which sacrifices drama for portentousness. For all the film offers a cartoonish villain, it’s resolutely unfun and deathly serious. Shot with a professional, disengaged widescreen flatness by Milestone (called in from decades of retirement as a “safe-pair of hands”, after the sacking of Carol Reed), it’s uninspired and mistakes size for visual interest. The ship, in particular, is shot with a wide-angled spaciousness which feels completely wrong for a location supposed to be ripe with claustrophobic tension.

The drama attempts to make up for this with its parade of lashings, keel-haulings and bodies (or obvious dummies) tumbling to their death from the rigging. Trevor Howard delivers exactly what’s asked fork here, sneering and constantly in the wrong. It’s one of the film’s failings that it leans into psychological complexity in some places, while most of its events and its second lead are presented with cartoonish silliness. Its location shooting in Tahiti looks great (although the all-too-obvious intercutting of this with scenes on sound stages, sometimes from one cut to another, jars) but a widescreen image of glistening sea would look gorgeous in even the most workmanlike hands.

Perhaps the film is, at times, a chore because it all too clearly was for many involved. Reports of Mutiny on the Bounty have regularly focused on its disastrous making, with directors fired, location shoots awash with dysentery, shooting months over schedule. Above all, Brando rewriting the film on the fly, muscling a disinterested Milestone aside to direct certain scenes. Not a surprise that the studio decided all the blame would be dropped on him not them (they were also stung by the contract they gave him, at $5k a day overtime, Brando’s perfectionism becoming one of the main factors of the film going months over schedule), leaving him virtually unemployable for a decade.

But is that fair? Brando arguably become the awkward, unlikeable, misunderstood Bligh with the cast and crew as the mutineers, all of them intent on a voyage of mutual self-destruction. Put simply, this was a clash between Brando’s immersive, deep-dive acting style and Old Hollywood. To Brando “professional” meant something very different to the “hit-your-marks-say-your-words” attitude of Milestone and the crew: it meant searching over time for the heart of a character. The sort of psychological depth Brando was aiming for was just anathema to many of those he was working with, coming across as the unprofessional self-indulgence of a spoilt star. Combine that with Brando’s stand-offish shyness and professional selfishness and you had a recipe for disaster.

Severed from any director he respected (he made it all too clear he considered Milestone a hack studio Yes-Man) and with no-one having either the power or inclination to restrain him, Brando threw every idea he had at the screen, no matter how awful. So we got Christian with a ludicrous, giggle-inducing accent, a performance stuffed with foppish eccentric touches (and awful costume choices) that aims at thoughtful re-invention but comes across as a camp, bizarre mess. The tragic thing is Brando is clearly passionate about the project, putting more thought and commitment into this performance than he ever offered in barely-bothered turns in films like Sayonara.

Brando was also working with a group of Reed-recruited actors with no sympathy for him. This group of macho British and Irish heavy-drinkers (Hugh Griffith, in a crucial role, frequently disappears for no reason as his alcoholism eventually became such a burden he was fired mid-shoot) had no sympathy for the fey Brando or his acting style. Richard Harris’ loathing of his co-star – who responded to their open dislike with petty on-set power-plays, only making the whole problem grow – in particular is all too-clear. Brando looks most comfortable working with the Tahitian actors (he had long been a passionate anti-racist campaigner) and later married Tarita Teriipaia. It’s one of the few times where he makes Christian feel fully human rather than a mixed bag of conflicting actorly tricks.

Mutiny on the Bounty has its moments: unfortunately it’s all the wrong ones. For a film that wanted to be a more serious, historical exploration of the mutiny, its best parts revolve around Howard’s lip-smacking villainy, combined with flashes of its on-location shooting. Problem is, that’s not dissimilar from what we got in the 1935 original – and really you’d just be better off watching that.