Inception – Decoding the Dream

I would recommend that you don’t read this blog post unless you’ve already seen the film Inception. This is not a review; it is analysis. Brief analysis, but analysis that could still spoil the film. Readers who haven’t yet seen the film probably won’t understand what I’m talking about. I will try—probably unsuccessfully—to keep things coherent.

Justin Chang, a movie reviewer for Variety, pointed out in his review that “movies are shared dreams.” In an ironically perfect metaphor, he calls Christopher Nolan one of “one of Hollywood’s most inventive dreamers.” This is perfect because it sums up the plot mechanics of Inception, wherein a dreamer uses a science-fiction device to bring a subject into a dream.

I’ll jump ahead and spoil the ending: Inception ends with the notion that the whole movie, or maybe just part of it, or maybe just the ending itself is a dream. Any part or even all of the movie could take place either in a dreamscape or in what we call “reality” or maybe something else, but the film won’t say which is the case. We, the audience, have to question these things. Because the ending questions the film’s reality, we have to go back and look thing over again. This movie begs to be analyzed and decoded. It needs to be rewatched to be understood.

We have to figure out for ourselves what parts of this movie are real. The reflexive implication is that we have to figure these things out outside of the shared dreaming experience of a movie theater as well. We have to figure out which parts of our world are unreal. We have to question the nature of our reality.

It is not a spoiler to say that Inception is about a team of corporate espionage specialists who hack into people’s minds to steal their secrets. The interesting twist is that the team is asked by a powerful figurehead named Sato to instead plant an idea in a subject’s mind. They have to do so in such a way that the subject will think they conceived the idea themselves. This process is called “inception,” and it’s nearly impossible.

As one character says, “If I tell you not to think about elephants, what do you think about?”

Elephants. You think about elephants. And you also know who made you think about elephants.

The team is led by a man named Cobb, played convincingly by Leonardo Dicaprio. Cobb has an emotional investment in the inception job. He lives in political exile because the authorities in America think he killed his wife Mal; all he consciously wants is to return home to his children. Sato says he can make this happen.

Cobb is haunted by the ghost of his wife in the form of a subconscious projection he carries with him into dreams. She makes things difficult for him in his line of work, especially when she starts killing people within the dreams. Usually this will wake them up, but in the inception mission, they are sent to a terrible place called “limbo.” Mal is played by Marion Cotillard, who is talented enough to play her character both as a whimsical figure of love and a horrific menace. She is also beautiful enough that she fits into the movie’s heist-noir elements as an enigmatic femme fatale.

If the movie has an internal conflict it is that the emotional love story between Cobb and Mal sometimes conflicts with the heist-like inception mission and the cold logic of the dream worlds. The movie is at its most interesting when Mal comes into literal conflict with Cobb and members of his team. Because, remember, Mal is just a projection of Cobb’s subconscious (probably), so that she sabotages his missions and sometimes attacks his cohorts may mean that his subconscious is self-sabotaging. Mal is partly a representation of the fact that Cobb wants to see himself fail.

Why? Well, that would be a spoiler, but I’ll tell you anyway. It is revealed that Cobb knows that Inception is possible because he first performed it on his wife. Experimenting, they went deep into a dream together. Because in Nolan’s dream mechanics, time is experienced exponentially slower in successive dream worlds than in reality, the couple literally spent decades together in a dream. Perhaps they killed themselves to get out; perhaps they lived out decades of their life in the dream world. Both explanations are given. But during their time in the dream, Cobb introduced an idea into his wife’s mind to help her cope with the length of time they spent inside: the idea that her world might not be real. As Cobb remembers it—and it is important to remember that the film’s perspective is not always reliable—she committed suicide because she thought dying would wake herself up. He is beset by guilt over his part in this tragedy. One of the implications of the film’s ending is that she might have been right.

These paragraphs I have written so far scratch only the surface of an outline of the level of analysis needed to decode this film. But Inception’s achievement is that it never becomes incoherent. Despite the fact that the movie is literally about a heist taking place in dreamscapes; despite the fact that at some points the narrative cuts between three parallel dreamscapes happening at different rates of time—and these dreamscapes include car chases, zero-gravity gun fights and explosions—the movie never becomes incoherent.

It’s also exciting to watch. There is enough chasing, punching, shooting and exploding to keep even the most witless viewer entertained. If you want, you can ignore all the intellectual mumbo jumbo and instead enjoy watching two guys fight in a rotating hallway. Christopher Nolan learned how to direct action with his two Batman movies. In Inception, he creates action scenes unlike any other movie’s.

Oddly, despite most of these action sequences taking place in dream worlds, they are not surreal. These dream worlds are governed by Newtonian physics. They take place in literalized spaces. They are more akin to the Matrix than the dreamscapes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or actual dreams. Every moment of strangeness is explained.

Inception’s lack of surrealism is surprising. This is a movie about dreams and dream worlds. Moreover, these dream worlds are accessed not through high-end technology, but through hallucinatory drugs.  In order to perform their psychic heists, both Cobb’s team and their subject are hooked up to a device that pumps drugs into their arms. These drugs place them in the dream world. In essence, the entire inception mission is a shared drug experience.

Cobb is a drug addict. He finds a chemist to balance the multi-leveled dream worlds necessary for the inception mission. He finds this man in a Moroccan drug den. Cobb, like those who frequent the drug den, cannot dream without injecting himself with the special dream drug.

But there is no psychedelia. The dream worlds are strictly logical. When Cobb injects himself, he flashes to memories he has about Mal. There are no Jungian archetypes in Inception, or Freudian ideas aside from Mal’s invasions. The best and most accurate depictions of dreams and dream logic remain those David Chase wrote for The Sopranos. But Inception adheres to its own internal logic, and this makes it a successful mind-bender.

I should mention one other thing: Christopher Nolan has some fun with meta-fiction in this movie. Cobb is named after the elusive but charming con man character from his first movie, Following. Roger Ebert pointed out that Ellen Page’s character, an architect who designs maze-like landscapes for the dreams the team ventures into who also serves as an emotional guide for Cobb, is named Ariadne after the mythological figure who guided Theseus out of the minotaur’s labrynth. And Edith Piaf’s song “Non, je ne regrette rien” is played for the dreamers to indicate to them that they should wake themselves up; Marion Cotillard won an Oscar for playing Piaf in La vie en rose.

It’s not hard to make connections between Inception and Nolan’s other movies. Other critics have done that. As a filmmaker, he’s always been concerned with criminals and the blurred edges of reality. He has also frequently worked on stories about men who do extraordinary things because they are plagued with guilt.  So far, he has not run out of stories to tell with these themes.

I’ve been having more vivid dreams since I saw this movie. They have been more lucid than the ones I had before. Maybe this is because, as an insomniac who rarely dreams, I’m actually getting a proper amount of sleep lately. Oddly, these lucid dreams have caused me to question reality in the same way I do when I don’t sleep for days on end and enter a state of waking dream. Now that I’m awake, I have to wonder if the dreams weren’t more real, or at least better than the reality I regularly find myself in. I have to question where I am, and why I am here.

Maybe Christopher Nolan successfully performed inception upon me.

Predators

For a few decades now, Robert Rodriguez has been one of the finest producers of pulp cinema. He’s made From Dusk Till Dawn, one of the best vampire movies made before vampires  became sexy; Sin City, which was a literary reinvention of the hardboiled noir genre, stylized in the mode of the comic books from which it was adapted; Grindhouse, a love letter to gorey and stupid movies from the 70s; and also a few movies about men with guns shooting things. It’s high time he made a science fiction movie.

Someone smart gave him the Predators franchise. Rodriguez opted not to make the film himself. Instead, he produced the new sequel, Predators, and hired relatively unknown director Nimrod Antal to direct an amateur screenplay. Oddly, the result is a film more tense, serious, and mature than one Rodriguez might have made himself. It still has men with large guns killing ugly aliens.

The movie opens with a character played by Adrien Brody in free fall. He’s falling toward an unknown jungle, and he doesn’t know how he got there. Somehow, he figures out that he has a parachute on. Soon after, he meets a group of really tough badasses who also parachuted into this jungle, and they discover that they’re actually on an alien planet.

Roger Ebert says, “Predators may be the first film in history to open with a deus ex machina.” Ebert is not entirely wrong in that the free fall opening is convenient to the plot, but he ignores the fact that this is a rare movie to open in media res, or in the middle of the action. This story opens with action and intrigue, and the pace never lets up.

The badasses Brody meets up with include a Russian soldier, a convict, a Mexican cartel enforcer, an African death squad officer, a ninja, and a female IDF sniper. They are all badasses. You’ve probably seen them in other movies, but you’ll only be able to figure out where if you’re a nerd. The Jewish woman is not necessarily cast as a romantic interest, but rather to emphasize that the casting was equal opportunity. Over the course of the movie, most of the badasses die. They die in various exciting ways. As with most sci-fi movies, the black guy is one of the first to go.

At the start of the movie, the predators themselves, who are aliens who for some reason like to hunt things, are an unseen menace. They attack the badasses with their dogs before appearing themselves. When they do appear, they are disappointing.

Modern special effects should have made these predators look terrifying and real. And they do, when they stand stagnant and look menacing. But when they actually have to fight the human badasses and each other, their movement is slow and stocky. The scene where the ninja sword-fought a predator – as he was inevitably going to do – relied on editing to show the action, and so it was not shot like a proper sword fight. Director Antal had to rely heavily on editing in all the fight scenes, and because of this the third act was less exciting than the two that preceded it.

But Adrien Brody takes his shirt off. He slathers himself in mud. His frame is bulky. He is not as bulky as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s once was, but he is as convincing at punching and shooting guns at aliens. And that is what people should pay to see this movie for.

That the first two acts are intelligent and smartly paced makes the ticket price a bargain.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan

The direct to DVD movie Battlestar Galactica: The Plan is awful. It’s so bad I can’t understand why it got made.

In the early seasons of the mostly excellent reimagining of the space odyssey TV show Battlestar Galactica, it was purported that the Cylons, the robotic enemies of humanity, had a plan. As it gradually became more and more apparent that the writers were making things up as they went along and that they didn’t have a plan for the show themselves, it likewise became apparent that the Cylons did not, in fact, have a plan.

This DVD movie, its synopsis claims, attempts to retrospectively show just what that Cylon plan was. But the Cylons’ attempt at a plan in this movie is almost as disjointed and stupid as the movie itself.

The movie starts with a sequence depicting the Cylons nuking the human Twelve Colonies. This is an impressive display of visual effects. It features spaceships and things blowing up. Sadly, it does not show spaceships blowing up.

But then the movie has shot its load. The movie then cuts between humanoid Cylons infiltrating the human survivors on Caprica, one of the Colonies, and Cylons infiltrating the fleet of refugee spaceships that was the focus of the TV show. Apparently the Cylons in the fleet want to blow up the fleet, but aren’t very good at it. The Cylons on Caprica just sort of follow humans around while looking mischievous.

I should explain more about the plot, but there isn’t an actual plot to explain.

Every scene in this movies exists between some other scene in the TV show. Consequently, every scene looks like it belongs as a deleted scene found on a DVD. The problem is, these scenes are shown out of context of the larger story. They require viewers to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the show itself. Worse, there are some scenes taken from the show itself and shown out of context for no good reason.

Most of the scenes in this DVD feature Dean Stockwell as Cavil, the seeming leader of the Cylons. Stockwell is a talented actor, and watching him work is engaging. But not enough to make me forget that nothing his character says makes sense.

There are also boobies. For some reason, director Edward James Olmos – who is as incapable as a director as he was thrilling to watch acting as the show’s Commander Adama – felt the need to add nudity in this DVD movie when there was none in the show itself. Sadly, the tits are the only redeeming factor in this mess of a movie.

There aren’t even spaceships shooting at each other and exploding.

The Last Airbender – a critical response

The Last Airbender is a weird movie. It is a bad movie. But it is the kind of movie you can enjoy if you’ve read other critics’ reviews and found out its flaws ahead of time. It is also the kind of movie that benefits from you being drunk.

Other critics – ones with more prestigious publications than this blog – have said that The Last Airbender is rushed, and too quickly paced. They have said that it suffers from stilted dialog with too much exposition, and that this dialog is often poorly delivered by bad child actors.

They are right on all counts. But the movie isn’t quite as bad if you know these things going in. Especially if you have had several beers and/or joints beforehand.

The movie takes place in a weird world where there are four nations representing the four elements dictated by stupid Greek people – fire, earth, water, and air. The story is about this bald white kid Asianly named Aang who is found by some white kids from the water tribe. In this story, the different nations can each for some reason manipulate their respective elements, except for one being called an Avatar who can manipulate all of them. Aang is almost definitely the latest Avatar, and I’m sick of giving exposition already.

The movie gives this exposition. The critics are right that the exposition is overlong, and that the child actors delivering it don’t know how to act. They are right in saying that the movie’s pace is too quick because it attempts to summarize a twenty-episode cartoon series in less than two hours. Certainly the movie has a cartoony feel to it.

What is weird is that the movie is less than two hours long. It didn’t need to be. For the money he was budgeted, writer/director/producer M. Night Shyamalan could have made the movie maybe half an hour longer, and then the pace wouldn’t have been so rushed.

But the other critics have said the movie’s too-fast pace and excessive exposition made it incomprehensible, which it is not. The movie is based on an Anglican anime-style cartoon by Nickelodeon. I have only seen a few episodes of that cartoon, but I still understood what was going on in the movie. It was a fantasy tale about primal elements and their balance.

And it was visually gorgeous. The other critics knew that. But they deemphasized how awesome the special effects were. They deemphasized how brilliant the composition of the cinematography was. Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan has always been a better director than a writer. He has always been better at visual composition than working with actors. In his past movies, he’s had better actors to make up for these flaws. The Last Airbender emphasizes his strengths and flaws more than his previous productions.

Shyamalan does amazing visual work with camera focus, left-to-right composition, long shots, close-ups, and whatnot. The scenes where the characters do their “bending” of the elements feature a dance like martial arts and brilliant special effects. These are beautiful. If you’re drunk enough, maybe you won’t notice that the story isn’t so great.

There have been two other major criticisms leveled at The Last Airbender.

The first is that the 3D, which was converted from 2D film, sucks. The obvious answer to this problem is to see the movie without the 3D gimmick. I saw the movie in 2D and it looked gorgeous. Maybe someday movie studios will realize that audiences don’t want to see bad 2D-to-3D conversions.

The other major criticism is that M. Night Shyamalan is racist because he cast white people in the lead roles, contrary to the races of these characters in the Nickelodeon cartoon. This is a stupid criticism because Shyamalan – as you might have guessed from his last name – is Indian himself. He cast the villains from the Fire Nation as Indians. Either this is an case of self-hatred on a race level, of Shyamalan cast race-blind. Either way, this shouldn’t be an issue to white critics.

What is more an issue is that Shyamalan cast most of the prominent Indian actors working today. There aren’t many. This means that he cast Dev Patel – who you remember from Slumdog Millionaire – as the lead villain. And he cast Cliff Curtis and Aasif Mandvi as the other two prominent villain roles. Aasif Mandvi is one of the latest correspondents on The Daily Show. For liberal white people like myself, it’s hard to take him seriously as a bad guy in a big budget, overbloated fantasy production.

Following by Christopher Nolan

Following is the first movie made by Christopher Nolan, who you probably know as the guy who made the new Batman movies. If you’re a little bit of a film nerd, you probably also know him as the guy who made Memento. He also made The Prestige and that movie where Al Pacino couldn’t fall asleep. Following is mostly only interesting to film nerds, like me.

Consider this: In the early 2000s, Warner Bros. was looking for someone to revive the Batman franchise after directer Joel Schumacher had made two cartoonish Batman movies wherein Batman’s suit was made into something horrifically homo-erotic with rubber nipples. The studio was looking for a director who could make a Batman movie that was actually good. The leading contenders were two independent directors: Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky.

Aronofsky had directed the brilliant and groundbreaking Requiem for a Dream, a visually engrossing and atmospheric film about heroin addicts in Coney Island. His first movie, π, was a neo-noir film about the mathematical discovery of everything. It explored the mystery behind the number pi, Kabbalah, life, the universe, and everything else. It was also shot with a tiny budget on grainy black and white film.

Aronofsky didn’t get the job of making Batman. Instead he made The Fountain, an ambitious and underbudgeted film that was brilliant despite its flawed, and which flopped at the box office.

Nolan got the Batman job. But before he made Memento, a structurally engrossing and atmospheric movie, he made Following, which was shot on a tiny budget on grainy black and white film. The similarities between the two filmmakers’ early careers are interesting to film nerds like myself.

Following starts with a young man explaining to someone about how he is a young, unemployed writer in London who took to following people he thought were interesting. He began following a man who befriended him in a cafe and revealed that he was a professional burglar. The two of them burgled a beautiful woman’s apartment, who the young man later encountered at a bar and fell in love with.

The film follows conventions of film noir. The woman the young man falls for is the femme fatale. Neither she nor the burglar he befriends are who they seem to be. The ending, when their intentions are fully revealed, is trite and not as interesting as the setup.

But Nolan keeps things interesting through a non-linear plot structure, which allows for dramatic revelations and two or three plot twists. He used non-linear storytelling artfully in Memento, and also to great effect in Batman Begins, The Prestige. In Following, the lack of linearity isn’t necessary, except to allow for plot twists. Here, Nolan is essentially prepping himself for his later films.

But it is interesting how he uses sets to define people. In an early scene, the burglar takes the young man on a venture breaking into someone’s apartment. He speaks about how people’s personal space can define who they are. Nolan takes advantage of this idea by having different characters enter apartments with recognizable landmarks. These apartments indeed define the characters. The young man’s apartment is small and stark, like an employed person’s would be. The femme fatale’s apartment is well-furnished and has a piano.

Interestingly, Nolan used his friends’ apartments as location. All of the actors are amateur, but some of the apartments may actually belong to them, and may actually define them.

And Nolan’s film is furnished with his characteristic plot structure. Despite the grey and the grain, it looks visually similar to his other films, especially Memento. One idea behind Following is that we cannot escape who we are. Nolan is no exception.

Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro” Music Video

There are an awful lot of writhing naked male bodies in Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro” music video. This is a departure from most music videos, which usually feature writing naked female bodies, and from Gaga’s own music videos, which have generally not featured writhing naked bodies of any type – save hers – and have generally been more tasteful and better produced than this one.

The song “Alejandro” itself is not bad. It can be interpreted to be about a woman begging Hispanics not to cat-call her, a peon for lost Freudian love, or whatever. The lyrics are clever, but, as with Gaga’s other songs, become needlessly repetitive. “Alejandro” and the other Hispanic names Gaga uses in the lyrics may have meaning, or they may have been chosen for their syllabic value. The song leaves itself open to interpretation, though very few people who listen to Lady Gaga interpret her words.

The actual music, as with Gaga’s other songs, is heavily reliant on techno artist RedOne, who is a clever composer of pop beats.  The vocals are good; Gaga’s recording studio knows how to use pitch correction technology and synthesizers. But Gaga has written and sung better songs, and she has made better videos than this one.

The video is shot by Steven Klein, a fashion photographer who is best known for his work at Calvin Klein and with celebrities like Brad Pitt and Madonna. He has photographed many nudes before, though he almost always covers up the naughty bits. In some shots posted on his website, for examples, penises have been cleverly covered by guns. This may be a commentary on sexuality, but in an interview Klein once said, “I will never consider what I do art.” I do not believe that he really thinks that.

Klein has never shot a music video before. His first attempt is not bad. His photographs are usually shot with vibrant, hypersaturated colors. Here, the colors are muted, often to full black and white.

The video starts with and prominently features male dancers in form-fitting black underwear.  They dance, as dancers in music videos do, in perfect choreography. At first it seems that they are dancing for Gaga while she looks on in one of her Gaga-esque costumes, but later she joins them.  These dancers’ bodies are athletic and beautiful. Their dance incorporates the full prowess of their muscled bodies; they flip on the floor and occasionally hold their bodies up with one hand. When they dance with Gaga, they adapt to the femininity of her motion. Both the dancers and their choreographer are talented.

But despite Klein usually working in controlled studios to great effect, this video has terrible production value. It looks like it was shot on a sound stage. Gaga and her dancers exist inside an empty warehouse, and not to any artistic effect. In several shots, the latticework of the warehouse’s roof is visible. The dancers often move in front of a projected screen, and it looks cheap.

As Gaga’s other videos, the music and lyrics have very little to do with the imagery. This video incorporates fetishized fascist imagery, which is disturbing. When the dancers aren’t mostly naked, they wear sexy versions of SS uniforms. They are all meant to be soldiers from some strange, Gaga-esqe universe. They all have bowl haircuts. Toward the middle of the video, Gaga wears a nun habit with a symbol evocative of the Spanish Inquisition. At several points, Gaga wears cloth underwear sans underwire that evokes Cabaret. This costume is not flattering, and emphasizes her imperfections. Not surprisingly, this makes her seem sexier.

But Gaga is not the focus of the sexuality in this video. The nearly naked, fascist, athletic men with bowl haircuts are. Their writhing bodies are admired by the camera more than Gaga’s. Steven Klein excels at this sort of imagery. Gaga has many gay fans and has said in interviews that she made this video for them. I, as a mostly straight man, can find little that is sexually appealing in this video. Maybe that’s the point.

Gaga makes some homages to Madonna in this video. She wears a bra with gun barrels attached that evokes Madonna’s notorious cones. Soon after, she sings on a stage with her shirt open in a pose that references Evita. These moments are heavy-handed and unnecessary.

The best part of the video comes when Gaga dresses in a costume like the ones Liza Minelli often donned. She dances by herself against a black backdrop. Klein seems to enjoy photographing her this way. She’s a phenomenal dancer, and is very sure of her body. Moments like this are pleasant to watch, but rare.

Snatch

Snatch is a movie that has balls. Or, since the movie is set in England and narrated with a cockney accent, it has bollocks. Either way, the movie so desperately wants you to know that it has bollocks that it waggles them around in your face stylistically for all of two hours.

There are no women in Snatch. Instead there are a motley crew of cartoonish men with names like Turkish, Franky Four Fingers, Mickey, Brick Top, Boris “The Blade” “The Bulletdodger” Yurinov, Vinny, Bullet Tooth Tony, Tyrone, and so on. Most of them communicate in a cockney accent, or in some indecipherable dialect. They all have about two dimensions, if that.

There is a plot, or a series of plots. They involve a stolen diamond the size of a fist, a boxing match where of course someone has to take a fall in the fourth round, a Caravan trailer, and gangsters, but not necessarily in that order. The plot is mostly indecipherable, and it doesn’t matter much. This movie is more about having bollocks.

Because the movie has bollocks, it is stylized. Director Guy Ritchie enjoys playing with hypersaturated film, slow motion, quick editing, obscure camera angles, and Jason Statham as the Turkish character narrating the movie in a cockney accent while talking in quick, choppy sentences. His narration comes off as an English imitation of Raymond Chandler.

Statham may be the main character of the movie. He plays a fellow who arranges fights for a bookie in a version of the English criminal underworld that is altogether unrealistic. But of course the plot doesn’t matter.

Snatch comes as a direct stylistic successor to Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting, but it’s a mess in terms of plot, character development and story. The characters don’t evolve and the story doesn’t go anywhere.

But Snatch is entertaining. It’s really fun to watch. It has tough characters, a far-flung plot, and enough stylization to put most modern movies to shame. If nothing else, this movie was confidently directed. Snatch has balls, and it’s not ashamed that it has little else.

Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood

Aside from the fact that it has very little to do with the Robin Hood legend, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood is a pretty good movie. It has a lot in common with Ridley Scott’s last two historical epics, Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator, in that it has beautiful scenery and quickly edited sequences of men fighting with swords. Because this one is called Robin Hood, it also has quickly edited sequences of men shooting other men with bows and arrows.

But this doesn’t have anything to do with the Robin Hood story as told in the Errol Flynn or Disney movies. There’s no archery contest, Robin Hood doesn’t use guerrilla warfare to redistribute wealth, and the Sheriff of Nottingham hardly plays a role. Instead, Russell Crowe’s Robin shows himself to be a good man by bringing a dead lord’s sword to the lord’s father after returning to England from the Cruscades. The father tells Robin to pretend to be his son so as to present a show of hope for the people of Nottingham. This involves sharing a room with Cate Blanchette’s Marion, who is not a maid but the widow of the fellow who owned the sword. This Marion is a strong proto-feminist. She is not pleased.

How much you enjoy the story will depend on how much you are attached to seeing the same Robin Hood story played out. I found the new story to be refreshing.

And Ridley Scott did a good job presenting it. Here, as with his other movies, Ridley Scott lends a sense of realism to the world he creates. He cheats a little in terms of historical accuracy, but the 12th century England and France presented in Robin Hood feel lived in and accurate. Farmers use plows appropriate to the time period, and the siege in the opening battle sequence is more of a prolonged encampment than a quick storming of the gates. Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood lives in a fully realized world.

This Robin Hood also has a slower pace than more adventurous versions of this story. Robin spends a good amount of time flirting with Marion. Meanwhile, Mark Strong, playing a villain as always, causes unrest in the country by manipulating the naive but likeable King John. Mark Strong’s Sir Godfrey is setting the scene for a Frengh invasion of England, and the whole thing inevitably ends with a big battle scene that has special effects, quick editing, and Russell Crowe killing people while screaming.

Somehow, though, the battle scene seems less exciting than those in Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, or any number of recent movies that had large armies fighting. It’s well shot, paced and choreographed. But it doesn’t have a driving sound to it. The background noise of armies fighting are muted, and the score does nothing to drive the action.

Of the movie’s two flaws, the score is the worst. The the music does nothing to affect the movie’s mood, and the few discernible themes are cliche and lack force. Ridley Scott used to work with top composers like Hans Zimmer and Harry Gregson-Williams. But for his past four movies, he’s employed the untalented Marc Streitenfeld. In Robin Hood, his music is distractingly bad.

The other flaw is the epilogue. For most of the movie, Robin is a well respected man. Then, after Robin defends England in the climactic battle scene, King John, who had until then been a relatively likable character, outlaws him for no apparent reason. The movie seems to beg for a sequel. Now that Robin is outlawed he can go about his business being an outlaw.

Overall, though, the movie is good. It’s a fully realized story. The performances are all excellent, especially from the two lead. Some may say the movie is too slow, and some may say that it doesn’t follow the traditional Robin Hood story enough. I for one enjoyed that the film took its time making me care about its characters, and didn’t rehash a story I’ve already seem. This film is not without its flaws, but those are not among them.

Ridley Scott does well making movies like Robin Hood. His movies have an old fashioned quality to them. They seem to come from a time when movies had story, characters and the good sense not to need something to explode every five minutes.