March 06, 2006
ultraviolet
For much of this film, one can't tell what kind of image one is looking at, stuck with a brain habituated to distinguishing between "live action" and animation. Here there's no distinction to be made, and the brain shivers. Milla Jovovich's face in closeup looks spectral and rendered, polygons and pancake makeup, each surface torquing onto the next with a kind of blurred elision; the buildings of the future city look about the same. From the first sequence onward, the image sometimes oscillates (and a narrow oscillation it is) between the two kinds of images, and sometimes plays out at an indecipherable limit, on the two-sided surface of extremely computer-aided graphics, a disorienting and frantically appealing blend that falls somewhere within the delta formed by Sin City, hi-end video games, and a-ha's "Take On Me" video.
It's at once hard to look at, and fantastic. And for a few minutes it seems that the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom dreamed of but couldn't quite achieve (the problem of liberalism, as ever) might finally be reallized, the Hollywood film composed of nothing but action sequences. And then, after that dream has died, there is a lengthy moment when it seems there might be only enough narrative to get you from one ass-kicking, escape, or detonation scene to the next; eventually that dream too is doused, and once again a film decides it requires enough plot that one could say it had a plot. That, we fear, isn't helping anyone.
Posted by jane at March 6, 2006 07:11 PM | TrackBack