The Bigger Picture

Under discussion:

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor  (2008)

The latest flick in the Mummy franchise sees the return of Brendan Fraser as Rick O'Connell but takes us away from pre-war Egypt and relocates the action to China in 1947. If the idea was to refresh a franchise that would be best located on the scrapheap it didn't work and this could well be the picture that kills the series.

The story, such as it is, concerns Emperor Han (Jet Li) who is having a whale of a time conquering and pillaging and so forth. Concerned that he will never be able to complete his "great work" he decides to seek out the secret to eternal life. He enlists the help of witch Zi Yuan (Michelle Yeoh) who tricks the Emperor, cursing him and his army by turning them into stone.

Cut forward to the present day where the curse could be (and inevitably, is) undone, unleashing an almost-immortal warlord and his army upon the world. It is, predictably, a race against time to prevent the Emperor from completing the process that will give him immortality and to destroy his army.

Now, I have no problem at all with B-movie schlock and enjoy a popcorn-muncher with the best of them but this is highly uninspiring fare.

Its first major problem is a preoccupation with CGI effects. Apparently the filmmakers used over 1,000 visual effects shots in this film but aside from the Emperor's army coming to life these lack thrills or imagination.

It also gets in the way of what had the potential to be a thrilling fight between Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li, two legends of martial arts cinema. What could have been an exciting encounter is cut so short it is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it affair.

Which leads neatly into the film's second major problem: each of the characters is sold short by the action and the film's clunking script. At no point do any of the actors get a scene to really flex their acting muscles, nor are there any jaw-dropping stunts.

What makes this all more frustrating is that in the latter half of the film there are two moments that potentially have huge emotional impacts on the characters, yet neither is developed or dwelled on. Perhaps moments of grief in action movies are no longer in fashion? Instead within moments we are up and running again (or rather we are cutting between shots of actors gurning and CGI combat).

Without emotional hooks or any standout performances all that's left is a mess of dull visual effects shots and a hokey story. At no point does the film achieve any real suspense and its attempts at humour leave much to be desired. It even pulls out that comedy classic, the yak vomit sequence, in its desperation.

If this is the best the franchise has to offer after seven years in which to develop a sequel, perhaps it would be best buried for good.

Under discussion:

Schindler's List  (1993)

Wuthering Heights  (1992)

I was seventeen when I first read Wuthering Heights in an English Literature class. Like most of the boys in the class (of which there were about 4) I was sceptical about the novel, believing it to be a soppy romance. I could not have been more wrong and four hundred pages later I was labelling it the greatest novel I have ever read. I still do.

This 1992 adaptation of Emily Bronte's novel is not the first attempt to put the book on the big screen but it was the first attempt to adapt the entire novel on film. Usually the emphasis is solidly on the first half of the novel which contains the "love story" as opposed to the second half which is much more focused on Heathcliff's revenge.

Ralph Fiennes is wonderful as Heathcliff, balancing energy and passion without ever venturing into gothic excess. The character could easily descend into charicature but here he manages to elicit sympathy and disgust simultaneously. He invests Heathcliff with such a dark coldness and emotional reserve that it is easy to see why he was cast as Amon Goeth in Schindler's List a year later.

It is hard not to appreciate the ambition of this adaptation, unfortunately it is equally hard to brand it a success. Aside from Fiennes as Heathcliff, the casting is so low key and the characters so weakly established that a good knowledge of the novel is required simply to follow who each of the characters are and how they are related to one another.

There are also superfluous elements that could easily have been chopped to make more time for the central threads of the story. Lockwood, although the narrator of the novel, adds little because his appearance is so brief, whilst Sinead O'Connor's role as Emily Bronte is an addition that is utterly unnecessary.

Worse yet, Juliette Binoche is badly miscast here as Catherine (and later Cathy) Earnshaw. Certainly she is striking but her accent perplexes and she is completely overwhelmed by her more charismatic and impressive male co-star.

The production design is underwhelming and the camerawork fails to make the most of Yorkshire's impressive geography. For instance there is a scene with Heathcliff and Cathy on this impressive field of rocks, yet the camerawork is so drab that what could have been a memorable and awe-inspiring scene just blends into the body of the picture.

With edits to the script and more time devoted to the minor characters being established this film could have been substantially better, although Binoche's lack of screen presence here would have remained.

I commend the production for demonstrating some ambition but the results here suggest that Bronte's novel is better suited to the slow unfolding of character possible in a mini-series than the faster pace that films require.