Game News Video Games Reviews & News
Related Articles
11 The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Director: Peter Jackson
Cast: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Sylvester McCoy, James Nesbitt, Richard Armitage
“Have you got any chips?” Oddly, we don’t remember that line from JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit . Nor about 75% of the rest of the film…
Not that it mattered. Many critics became hung up on the fact that Peter Jackson was making a trilogy out of a 300-page book, but that was missing the point. Jackson wasn’t really making an adaptation of The Hobbit ; he was making a prequel trilogy to The Lord Of The Rings . Sure, he could have just stuck to The Hobbit , and made one lean, to-the-point movie in the light, children’s fantasy adventure tone of the book, but he knew that’s not what fans actually wanted; they wanted more Lord Of The Rings .
And he gave them that by expanding the book using appendices from The Lord Of The Rings and parts of the Silmarillion to expand The Hobbit and set it in the wider world and mythology of Middle-earth. The result: a prequel that felt like a prequel.
Admittedly, the straightforward, linear plot structure of the book gives the film a little of the feeling of getting the hors d’oeuvres after the main course. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey isn’t quite as good as any of the Rings films. But the Rings films were stunningly brilliant. Being slightly less than stunningly brilliant is okay in our book.
While the film has some stand-out action sequences, it’s at its best in its less frantic moments, when its stellar cast are required to act. Martin Freeman is superb as Bilbo and Ian McKellen is possibly even more fun to watch than he was in the Rings trilogy. The “Riddle In The Dark” scene is absolutely perfect, and the Dwarves (including some of the sexiest Dwarves ever seen on screen) are a loveable bunch.
Sometimes the action goes a little too video-gamey, and the 48fps version may not have been to everybody’s taste (we’re not sure that’s just a case of “the shock of the new” so much as a filmmaker being a little overambitious with new technology before working out how to take the best advantage of it) but the quibbles are minor. This is a worthy continuation of the movie Middle-earth tales, and one that was well worth the wait.
Jonathan Norton
10 The Cabin In The Woods
Director: Drew Goddard
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Kristen Connolly, Anna Hutchinson, Fran Kranz, Richard Jenkins, Amy Acker
The Avengers may have taken all the cash, but for many Joss Whedon fans, this was the better flick. The irony? Whedon didn’t direct it. That role fell to Cloverfield writer Drew Goddard. The result of this collaboration was one of the year’s most original and exciting movies.
To say too much about the plot would spoil it for newcomers, so we’ll leave it at this: five teens go on holiday to a remote cabin. They are not alone. Bad things happen. The film’s genius lies in the way that it both subverts and celebrates this clichéd setup and the genre that spawned it. We experience all the traditional horror thrills (Death! Boobs! Gore!) while the film probes deeper and asks questions about cinema, and about society itself. It’s meaningful stuff.
Whedon called the movie a “very loving hate letter” to the torture porn flicks that ruled at the start of the decade ( Cabin was originally due for release in 2010). Some have taken that as a stab against horror in general, but nothing could be further from the truth. Watch the sequence in the basement, or the reveal of what exactly is in the cubes, and it’s clear that this is the work of two fanboys having the time of their lives. It’s riotous fun. At times it feels like the great horror film Quentin Tarantino is yet to make. It’s funny, tragic, heartwarming and frightening all at the same time. And it features a unicorn.
Will Salmon
9 Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Director: Benh Zeitlin
Cast: Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry, Gina Montana
With a title that whiffs of being a nature documentary, a cast of unknowns – including a small child in her first film, the horror! – and a budget that would be just enough to whip up three minutes of something like The Hobbit , Beasts Of The Southern Wild really shouldn’t be this good.
But it’s good. Very good. And it’s absolutely unforgettable to boot.
It’s a beautiful, yet often visceral, fairy tale and social drama combined, set in the swamps of the American Deep South just before the ice caps melt away and the entire land floods to nothing. Six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and her volatile father Wink (Dwight Henry) live an existence on the edge, struggling to survive both everyday life and each other’s presence. But when the waters finally rise, the burden falls on Hushpuppy to seek out her dreams…
Young Wallis was a mere five years old when she made the film, yet her acting style is so natural and fluid she makes Meryl Streep look like a panto dame. She had great material, though; this is the kind of messed-up, disturbing story the Brothers Grimm would be writing today, but with a socio-political edge that grounds it in reality. Dark, blistering, supernatural Southern magic.
Jayne Nelson
8 Skyfall
Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Naomie Harris
So how did Skyfall do it? How did the 23rd Bond movie become a bona fide phenomenon, trousering the kind of silly money usually only obtained by threatening the UN with an orbital laser platform?
Let’s not rule out the simple power of patriotism – this summer saw Her Majesty’s secret servant recruited for security detail at the London Olympics (with Her Majesty herself on comic relief duty) and a little of that red, white and blue bulldog buzz undoubtedly attached itself to the film’s release.
But Skyfall has taken a staggering $952,207,818 worldwide (at time of writing). This is a global smash, edging Ian Fleming’s superspy into the dizzying, high-altitude realm of Avatar and The Lord Of The Rings . The Bond brand has a half-century advantage at the box office, of course, and the franchise’s golden anniversary undoubtedly triggered a groundswell of appreciation and affection for the old boy – but that doesn’t quite explain it either. And Skyfall does an awful lot of things that, on the surface, screw with the time-honoured sacraments of a Bond film: the new Q brings a snotty hipster attitude to the cherished gizmology of yesterday, there’s no grand world-threatening scheme, Dame Judi Dench becomes the de facto Bond babe and, in a sense, our hero fails.
But, in the broader creative sense, Bond triumphs. Skyfall is a juggernaut because it’s built on some mighty talents: Sam Mendes, transitioning from arthouse to blockbuster mode but keeping his core emotional values intact; Javier Bardem, making the Bond villain be an outsized, crowdpleasing turn again; cinematographer Roger Deakins, painting the East as some shimmering fever dream; Daniel Craig, finally allowing glimmers of wit and irony to puncture his hard man shell. Plus, it has komodo dragons. And komodo dragons rock.
By the end of Skyfall it feels as though the house of Bond has been rebuilt from the foundations up, completing the mission begun by Casino Royale in 2006. We’re back in business, and reporting for duty.
Nick Setchfield
