It was with some reticence that I went along to see this latest incarnation of Shirow Masamune's Ghost In The Shell. Mamoru Oshii's anime feature of 1995 is an all time favourite of mine so this new version by Rupert Sanders, director of the unremarkable Snow White and the Huntsman, had some mighty shoes to fill. But Sanders' film is surprisingly good.
More a prequel to Oshii's film than a remake, the story relates the origins of Major Motoko Kusanagi…
Set in the future where mutants have all but been eradicated, an aging and ailing Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is shacked up with a mentally debilitated, nonagenarian Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and mutant tracker, Caliban (Stephen Merchant) in remote, desolate Mexico - the last of their kind, apparently. That is until 10yo Laura (Dafne Keen) enters the picture with abilities which are remarkably like the Wolverine's. Cue another nefarious government plot to genetically engineer and control mutantkind.
The great thing about…
A reworking of the classic 1959 Disney animated feature, Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent portrays the same story from the villain's point of view - more a parallelequel than a sequel or prequel, if you like. Naturally in this story we find that Maleficent is not such the bad witch after all but rather misunderstood.
Given that Maleficent was actually killed by the valiant prince in Sleeping Beauty, some narrative gymnastics are required to make the story a palatable family movie. As…
Could this be the first of a long string of projects to be influenced by Duncan Jones' Moon? Oblivion apes many of the narrative ideas present in Jones' impressive feature debut but largely shirks it's philosophical queries in what is a Hollywoodised (i.e. simplified) projection of Jones' story. This is perhaps a good thing, however, given director Joseph Kosinski's less than successful attempts to inject a philosophical edge into his previous film, TRON: Legacy. Oblivion, by contrast, keeps the metaphysical…
