Because Everybody Else Has One

Okay, I have to be honest, for some reason actual production info was hard to be found for this film so I'm a bit worried about some of the facts I present - I heard from the PR person handling the film that the original cut was 3-hours but I'll be damned if I can find anything to back that up online. Also, I got the location wrong in the original review (which you can read over on  Channel 24 ), so I fixed that at least for this review. None of this actually changes my thoughts on the film at all but, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I'm not 1000% sure I got all the background details right. Anyhoo...  What it’s about The year is, roughly, 20,000 BCE and when the teenage son of the chief of a tribe of pre-historic humans is presumed dead after a hunt goes horribly wrong, he sets off for home with the help of an injured dog that he tends for after injuring. The only catch? This is well before dogs were domesticated and had more in common with feral wolves...

I can't remember the last Ridley Scott film to feel this assured. Well, okay, yes, I can, but that was American Gangster in 2007 and who the hell can remember that far back. Welcome back, Sir Ridley, it's been way too bloody long! The Martian tells the story of the first manned mission to mars (to be clear, the fictional story - but, um, you do know that, right?) and of the astronaut who is accidentally left for dead by his crewmembers and is forced to fend for himself on the inhospitable Red Planet until NASA send their next mission some four years hence. However, rather than going the more obvious route of a gritty, or at least more lonesome and meditative, survivalist story, it plays out like Apollo 13 on steroids - and it really is all the better for it. This means that though it does lack the depth of something like Duncan Jones' beautiful indie sci-fi flick, Moon, it more than makes up for it in terms of sheer, unfiltered enjoyment. And, frankly, after the un...

So this is a very big week for films with a number of major and/ or worthwhile releases coming out. Lets starts then, with the biggest and best of them... Like most seemingly unfilmable novels, Yann Martel's excellent, if occasionally slightly tedious, Life of Pi is heavy on theme and character and heavier still on subtext. Yes, the basic plot of a young boy surviving for weeks on a small lifeboat with only a vicious tiger for company is hardly uncinematic, but as anyone who has read the novel can tell you, Life of Pi isn't really about the plot at all. It is above all else a story steeped in symbolism and largely plays out as a fairly brilliant metaphor for humanity's need for storytelling and for religious/ spiritual belief, as well as the way the two are interdependent on one another. It's also a novel steeped in ambiguity and while you can argue for days whether it's ultimately pro- or anti-religion or -  no, that would be telling (insert final revelati...