Categorie archief: Films

Dungeon Classics #33: Excalibur

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

FilmDungeon’s Chief Editor JK sorts through the Dungeon’s DVD-collection to look for old cult favorites….

Excalibur (1981, UK, USA)

Director: John Boorman
Cast: Nigel Terry, Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, Nicholas Clay
Running Time: 140 mins.

For the ultimate film about the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, look no further than John Boorman’s Excalibur. It has everything from dark magic to romance, to sword fights. It was filmed completely in Ireland, and the sets and costumes (lots of very heavy and impractical armor) are fantastically realized. Storywise, it incorporates familiar elements, like the sword in the stone, Lancelot’s romance with Guenevere, and Perceval’s search for the Holy Grail, but also new stories such as Arthur fathering a bastard son with his half sister Morgana who wants to destroy him. The cast is very good with early performances by Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, and Helen Mirren. But it is Nicol Williamson who steals the show as Merlin the Necromancer.

The Verdict: The Creator

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

In 2016, director Gareth Edwards delivered Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the first Star Wars movie that was not part of the main series. In terms of cinematography, locations, and visual effects, it was certainly successful, but the film failed to move me. I had exactly the same experience with Edwards’ latest film The Creator, which is about a future war between humanity and artificial intelligence. The movie, which was shot on beautiful locations in Thailand and contains Oscar-nominated special effects, certainly looks amazing. However, the story about an army sergeant (John David Washington, who increasingly looks and especially sounds like his father Denzel) who is on the run with a powerful AI child made no emotional impact on me whatsoever. I didn’t care whether humanity or AI would ultimately win the war. SPOILER: The contrast between what I felt when the Death Star was blown up in the original Star Wars and the destruction of space station Nomad at the end of The Creator could not be greater. A shame really, because the potential was certainly there.

The Creator is now available on Disney Plus

The verdict: to stream or not to stream? Not to stream

Dungeon Classics #32: Starship Troopers

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

FilmDungeon’s Chief Editor JK sorts through the Dungeon’s DVD-collection to look for old cult favorites….

Starship Troopers (1997, USA)

Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Dina Meyer, Jake Busey
Running Time: 129 mins.

In the late eighties till the late nineties, Paul Verhoeven – the pride of the Netherlands – had the decade of his career in which he made three science fiction classics that are both masterful and unique: RoboCop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers. All three deliver on stunning design, ultra-violence and social commentary. Starship Troopers revolves around a future human, militaristic society which is at war with an alien bug species. The film follows several recruits who join different parts of the military organization, and go on outer space missions to defeat the bugs. The social commentary against extreme policies was apparently too well hidden, so that critics and viewers missed it completely at the time and considered Starship Troopers just as a typical Hollywood action movie. Understandable, because Verhoeven’s direction is basically flawless and as a piece of suburb popcorn entertainment, the movie works extremely well. However, it works just as well as a propaganda piece for a future, fascist government, who want to dominate the galaxy through violence and oppression. The good looking cast members (check out main actor Casper Van Dien’s perfect jawline) thereby function as ultimate poster girls and boys for citizenship, a status that is reached through military service. The fact that Verhoeven took 100 million dollars from a major Hollywood studio to make this, is fantastic. Don’t expect it to happen anytime soon again. Luckily, Starship Troopers is still just as effective and enjoyable as it was back in 1997.

A Scanner Darkly

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

Director: Richard Linklater
Written by: Philip K. Dick (novel), Richard Linklater (screenplay)
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson

Year / Country: 2006, USA
Running Time: 100 mins.

A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s semi-autobiographical novel about a futuristic undercover agent who gets addicted to the drug ‘Substance D’ during a drug epidemic in Orange County in 1994, opens with Rory Cockrane’s junkie character being tormented by bugs that keep respawning on his body and face. It sets the tone of the film right away. This movie, set in a near-future dystopia and police state, seems to be mostly about the frightening downsides of a drug habit.

Typical for Dick, it is also about losing one’s identity as heavy users of Substance D, like main character Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), typically develop a serious brain impairment. The movie was shot digitally and then animated using rotoscoping technique. This visual style, also used in Linklater’s Waking Life, fits this movie perfectly. Apart from the police characters’ use of ‘scramble suits’, which are suits that change their appearance and voice every microsecond to hide their identity, this is not really a science fiction film. The story – of which there is not much really – is kind of hard to follow, but thanks to the terrific visuals and strong performances by the main cast it is still captivating. Robert Downey Jr. is especially on a roll here.

After The Matrix, Keanu Reeves is on another mind trip here (he literally takes a red pill at one point), but while The Matrix delivers a crystal clear concept, what A Scanner Darkly tries to do, plotwise or thematically, remains pretty much… well… in the dark. What the movie does very well though is portray the depressing hopelessness of being stuck in a community of junkies, with all the panic, pain, fear and paranoia that comes with it. It is admirable that Linklater stayed faithful to Dick’s source material, and did not try to turn it into a Hollywood movie. But maybe this is the one book of the famous sci-fi author that could have used some clarification. Now it remains quite a confusing affair, albeit a mesmerizing one.

Rating:

Biography: Richard Linklater (1960, Houston) is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. He was among the first and most successful talents to emerge during the American independent film renaissance of the 1990s. Suburban culture and the passage of time are big themes in many of his movies, some of which are set during one 24-hours period, including his successful ‘Before’-trilogy with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. He is married to Christina Harrison and they have three children, including Lorelei who played a large part in Linklater’s much praised movie Boyhood.

Filmography (a selection): It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988, short), Slacker (1990), Dazed and Confused (1993), Before Sunrise (1995), The Newton Boys (1998), Waking Life (2001), Tape (2001), School of Rock (2003), Before Sunset (2004), Fast Food Nation (2006), A Scanner Darkly (2006), Me and Orson Welles (2008), Before Midnight (2013), Boyhood (2014), Everybody Wants Some (2016), Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022)