This film has a great cast but a massive problem - it can't decide if it believes in this stuff or not.
The premise is that Ewen McGregor, an emotionally unstable journalist, has caught on to the idea that there's a New Age psychic division of the army that operate as "Non-Lethal Weapons" and try to resolve conflict by developing their hippie sides.
So...we have Clooney (check), Bridges (check), McGregor (check), Spacey (check)...and yet some kind of a mess. The film spends half the time sending up psychic phenomena, pretending the main protagonists are burned out PTSD hippies, and the other half trying to subtlety suggest that maybe they do have all the answers.
Bets are hedged the whole way through the film, and that leaves you with a sense of detachment...have they got powers? Are they deluded hippie soldiers? Do I care?
Watchable (I don't think these actors could avoid being watchable) . But not as funny as it thinks it is, or as clever as it thinks it is, or as satirical as it thinks it is. Or much of anything.
Meh.
Tyrannosaur
I watched this because I'd heard it was harrowing but a great film, and also because I really like Olivia Colman, who has recently started getting the attention she deserves as an actress who brings a warmth and likeability to all her roles. Once it arrived I then avoided watching it for a week or two. Mainly because of the harrowing part.
Peter Mullan plays Joseph. Joseph is a seriously angry man spiralling out of control after the death of his wife. In the aftermath of one of his outbursts he ends up in a charity shop run by Hannah (Colman), who handles the situation by praying for him. Joseph returns the favour by an abusive outburst which upsets Hannah given the severely abusive nature of her marriage. Joseph is remorseful, Hannah needs to matter to someone, and so develops a strange friendship between the two, plausible only because of their mutual isolation and vulnerability.
1) Olivia Colman is great in it.
2) It is harrowing.
3) Not recommended as a pleasant evening's viewing if you are bothered by animal abuse, random unprovoked violence, casual racism on its way to escalating to full-time committed racism, spousal abuse, emotional abuse, child neglect, rape.
Some people have said it's uplifting in the sense that there's a glimmer of hope in Joseph by the end. I think there's a tiny bit of truth in that...this film makes you dig deep to empathise, but empathise you can, though it does test you to the very limits. Joseph is under no illusions about who he is, which just about saved him for me as a lead character. Hannah's lot seems grotesquely unfair, yet it's hard to swallow the idea that the only person she can possibly turn to (or would possibly turn to) is Joseph. The story seems to be told from the point of view of the role she has in bringing some kind of redemption to Joseph - personally speaking, I wondered where the redemption was coming from for her.
Ultimately there are no great lessons to be drawn from this movie, other than life's shit for a lot of people because men are taking out their anger on whoever they can. I'm not sorry I've seen it, but I can't see myself ever sitting down to watch it again.
