Tag: film review

  • Fall 2: Deadpoint — A Movie Review

    Fall 2: Deadpoint — A Movie Review

    Better Than Its Predecessor, but Still Falling Short

    Rating: ★★½☆☆

    Fall 2: Deadpoint is better than its predecessor, but it still has problems with characterization.

    When I sat down to watch the movie, one of the first things I saw was the BuzzFeed Studios logo. If you know anything about BuzzFeed, you know they’re all about lists: “The Top 10 Most Dangerous Things to Do in Your Bathroom,” or something like that. Knowing that this was one of the studios behind the film braced me not to expect very much.

    It cleared that very low bar, and I enjoyed myself. I’m not going to give it a particularly high rating, though, because the characters are only barely three-dimensional.

    The movie opens in the middle of a rainstorm, apparently on the side of a mountain. One man, held at gunpoint by another, is prodded forward along a very rickety-looking series of planks. Then an earthquake strikes, and both men fall to their deaths.

    From there, the movie cuts to a young woman named Jax. She turns out to be the younger sister of Shiloh Hunter, the woman who died in the first movie and used the social-media handle “Danger D.” Jax has received her sister’s Ford Bronco from the police and is trying to figure out what to do with it. With her is Luce, who was apparently one of Shiloh’s friends from college.

    From this exchange, we learn that Jax is considerably more timid than her sister—and that there is evidently a story behind their strained relationship.

    Luce finds a journal that is essentially Shiloh’s bucket list. Looking through it, they discover that Shiloh completed only about half of the entries. Luce asks whether she can photograph the unfinished pages, but after giving her permission, Jax tells her to keep the entire book. She doesn’t want it.

    Once they go inside the house, Luce gives it back and suggests that Jax complete the challenges Shiloh never got around to. She argues that doing so might help Jax feel closer to her sister. Jax’s response is basically, “Why would I want that? She was a better friend to Becky than she was a sister to me.”

    We then see a flashback in which a young Jax is hanging from what I think is some sort of monkey-bar apparatus, repeatedly trying to get her older sister’s attention. Shiloh, however, is too busy talking with Becky to pay any attention to her. From that brief little scene, we’re apparently supposed to go, “Oh, I get it now.”

    I will tell you that this moment is telegraphed so heavily that you just know it will become important later—and you would be right.

    After some hemming and hawing, Luce manages to prod the timid Jax into attempting the next item on Shiloh’s list: the infamous plank walk of Mount Kwan in Thailand

    Evidently, if you reach the end and “meet the dragon,” it will devour all your fear. I don’t know whether the mountain or the trail exists in real life, but the movie presents them as real, and that’s good enough for me.

    Jax and Luce travel to Thailand, where a secret phrase written in Shiloh’s journal helps them identify the right man to smuggle them onto the mountain. The trail is closed, and climbing it is illegal.

    They also arrive during the rainy season, so climbing the mountain isn’t merely illegal—it is contraindicated by basic common sense. Lots of rain means lots of slippery surfaces. You go onto a mountain with lots of slippery surfaces, you fall down.

    Luce, however, is far too invested in boosting Jax’s spirits to let a little thing like mortal danger stop them. The guide warns them that smuggling them onto the mountain will cost a great deal of money, but apparently Luce is loaded, so off they go.

    Evidently, Shiloh compiled her list only after doing a considerable amount of research. Jax and Luce, meanwhile, simply take advantage of that research without bothering to investigate the climb for themselves.

    They make their way up the mountain and out along its increasingly precarious planks. Then, of course, disaster strikes. Jax and Luce become stranded on a couple of isolated sections of plank with no apparent way down. That is the central premise of the movie.

    It is handled better than the predicament in the first film, simply because everything feels more real. This seems like something people might actually attempt. The danger feels genuine, and the views are terrific.

    The movie also relies heavily on flashbacks, not just the monkey-bar scene. Each one is triggered by something Jax notices in her surroundings, although I wouldn’t call the transitions natural. The clunkiest example has a ceiling fan prompting her to remember a skydiving experience with Shiloh. Yes, a ceiling fan reminds her of skydiving.

    The flashbacks are clearly intended to give the sisters’ relationship more depth, but they never quite manage it.

    There are also some identity-related shenanigans. Luce may not be who you think she is, the guide may be up to something nefarious, and eventually we get the obligatory final fight for survival.

    Shiloh—or, rather, Virginia Gardner, the actress who plays her—makes several appearances in flashbacks throughout the movie. Becky also appears, first in a photograph and then in person as she checks her old-fashioned, rounded-top mailbox. Inside, she finds an invitation to celebrate Shiloh’s life.

    That makes it fairly obvious that we’re getting a third movie. There is nothing after the credits, however.

    I’m giving Fall 2: Deadpoint a straight-down-the-middle 2½ stars. You will probably be entertained, but the movie is also easily forgotten.

    Cast

    • Harriet Slater as Jax Hunter
    • Arsema Thomas as Luce
    • Tom Brittney as the mountain guide
    • Virginia Gardner as Shiloh Hunter
    • Grace Caroline Currey as Becky Connor
    • Juju Journey Brener as Teen Jax
    • Evie Mann as Young Jax
    • London Nuovo as Young Becky
    • Einar Haraldsson as Joe
    • Andrey Kasushkin as the smuggler
  • Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Review

    Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Review

    Rating: 4½ out of 5 stars (9/10)

    Walking into this movie, I had heard a lot of people talking about how heavily Nolan used the gods. After watching it, I do not really agree with that assessment. Athena appears throughout much of the movie as a beautiful woman whom Odysseus speaks to and calls by name, but she never tells him anything he could not already know. She points him toward decisions that, somewhere inside himself, he has already made. For the first two thirds of the movie, I was willing to accept that she might simply be Athena, although I was already beginning to suspect that something else was happening.

    That interpretation finally came together for me while Odysseus was with Calypso. She is portrayed as a lone Lotus Eater, caring for Odysseus after his shipwreck. The lotus flower serves as an analogue for opiates. It soothes pain while keeping memory cloaked from conscious awareness. She had fallen in love with him, but she also understood that loving him meant eventually helping him remember who he was and allowing him to leave. As she encouraged him to tell her about his life, he experienced the sack of Troy again as a flashback. He remembered watching Greek soldiers behead a young Trojan girl while other soldiers toppled the head from Athena’s statue. He did not kill the girl or desecrate the statue himself. He simply witnessed both acts and carried them with him. The young girl had the same face as the Athena who had been appearing to him throughout the movie.

    That was the point where my interpretation of Athena as a manifestation of PTSD became much more than a vague possibility. Odysseus had taken the face of an atrocity he witnessed and given it to the goddess he prayed to for wisdom and guidance. Athena became the person through whom he explained his own choices to himself. She could still be the literal goddess, appearing in the form that would affect him most deeply, but the psychological reading no longer felt accidental.

    The word that kept coming back to me while watching was verisimilitude. Nolan changes quite a bit from Homer, but once he establishes the rules of his version of the story, he never cheats them. Everything fits together. The gods, the monsters, the symbolism, and the emotional beats all belong to the same world. Whether you agree with every change is almost beside the point because the movie remains true to itself.

    One of the biggest surprises was the expanded role of Sinon. Rather than simply being the man left behind with the Trojan Horse, he becomes a tragic figure whose fate weighs heavily on Odysseus throughout the film. It gives the story an emotional thread that carries all the way to the end and reinforces the idea that Odysseus is haunted as much by the people he could not save as by the enemies he defeated.

    The Trojan Horse sequence was probably my favorite part of the movie. It felt far more believable than the version most people have in their heads. The Greeks spend what feels like days trapped inside the horse. There are moments where discovery seems inevitable. A soldier probing between the planks even wounds one of the hidden Greeks, who has to be physically restrained to keep from crying out. The tension never lets up. It turns a famous legend into something that feels like an actual military operation.

    The last scene between Odysseus and Athena also worked well for me. After Odysseus finally spoke openly about his trauma with Penelope, who listened from behind a screen, he sat separated from Athena on the stoop and reached out his hand. Athena took it. Then he blinked, and she was gone, while his hand remained suspended in the air. I read that as the moment he realized he no longer needed her to exist outside himself. Not that every wound had suddenly vanished, but that he had finally begun to understand and accept what his mind had been doing to keep him alive.

    The climax in Ithaca is just as satisfying. Penelope’s bow challenge feels earned, and when the disguised beggar finally strings the bow and sends an arrow cleanly through the line of axe heads, everyone in the hall realizes exactly who is standing before them. From that point forward, the fight is brutal without ever feeling like empty spectacle. I also appreciated Telemachus’s arc. He spends much of the film learning how to become a man, and when the fighting finally begins, he has to put those lessons into practice. His duel in the armory and the moment where he throws his father a sword are some of the most satisfying moments in the film because they complete his journey.

    The ending also worked for me. Rather than pretending everything is magically fixed once Odysseus gets home, the film acknowledges that twenty years of war and loss leave scars. He survives, he reconciles with Penelope, and Telemachus is ready to inherit the kingdom, but Odysseus still has one final obligation to fulfill in honor of the men who never made it home. It felt like an honest ending instead of a fairy tale.

    My biggest criticism is the design of the Cyclops. I understand what Nolan was trying to do by giving Polyphemus a twisted face with a single eye instead of the classic giant with one eye in the middle of his forehead, but it never quite worked for me. Rather than making Polyphemus more believable, it made the face visually confusing. That is one of the few moments where I felt the movie overthought something that did not need to be reinvented.

    Overall, I think Christopher Nolan accomplished something difficult. He did not make a literal adaptation of Homer, and he never seemed interested in doing so. Instead, he made a film about trauma, duty, promises, survival, and finally coming home after becoming someone you barely recognize. Whether you choose to see the gods as real or as reflections of Odysseus’s inner life, the movie supports both readings without contradicting itself.

    That is why I walked out of the theater giving it a 4½ out of 5 stars. It is not perfect, but it is one of the most thoughtful and emotionally satisfying adaptations of a classic myth that I have seen in a long time.

    The Odyssey (2026)

    Written and directed by Christopher Nolan
    Based on The Odyssey by Homer

    Odysseus: Matt Damon
    Athena: Zendaya
    Calypso: Charlize Theron
    Sinon: Elliot Page
    Penelope: Anne Hathaway
    Telemachus: Tom Holland
    Polyphemus: Bill Irwin