Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen the classic movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and if you don’t want to know what happens in the end, go watch it before you read this. I expect that since it’s been out there for so long, most of you should have seen it by now. If you haven’t, shame on you. It’s an excellent movie. It has all of the elements – a great story with action, conflict, moral and ethical choices, man’s brutality to man, heroics. Plus incredible performances from the likes of pre-Obi Wan Alec Guinness.
And how about this Oscar haul: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score. And it probably would’ve been a clean sweep with Best Supporting Actor, except the nominee’s last name was Hayakawa, if you know what I mean.
Do I bring this movie up because I just watched it and needed something about which to write? Actually, no. I’m writing this because I saw Jurassic World: Dominion this weekend (along with a couple of other movies that got me thinking along these lines), and my thoughts within the first few minutes of the movie were not good. Something along the lines of, “Hey, we’d love to watch another Jurassic World movie…said no one, ever.”
Seriously. The absolute only thing the movie had going for it was that a couple of the action sequences, though ridiculous, were well executed.
But this is a problem I’m having with a lot of movies lately. We’re expected to suspend disbelief for them, but they miss the point of internal consistency. Yes, suspend disbelief. But the filmmakers still have to create a movie that is consistent with the universe in which it takes place. It seems they’re so caught up in making magical effects that they forget that. A classic example (another spoiler alert) is the Star Wars The Last Jedi debacle of Admiral Holdo sacrificing herself by firing a ship through another using a hyperspace jump – the problem being that if that’s all it takes, then why wasn’t the Rebellion rigging dummy ships piloted by drones to slice through any other threats all along?
The point is, you can’t come back with, “There are no such things as space ships and star wars, so you shouldn’t get all bent out of shape just because a ‘fictional’ character did a ‘fictional’ thing.” Not when the “fictional” universe has its own set of laws of governance. But this is what happens when the directors go for cheap, special-effect-laden thrills.
And so it was with Jurassic World. Yeah, we could almost believe some of the dinosaur stuff. If you remember the original Jurassic Park (still an incredible movie – too bad we can’t go back to relive the wonder of it), there was actual science somewhat involved. Even more so if you read Crichton’s book (and some of his others too). Part of the magic was that it happened against the backdrop of our very own world. But in our own world, elephants don’t live in the Arctic – they require far too much vegetation to survive in a place covered with ice. So when you see a couple of huge Brontosaurus-like dinosaurs (that obviously need far more vegetation than elephants) wandering around in the snow…well. Cheap thrills.
It’s not that that ruined the movie for me though. I think what bothered me the most was the utter lack of necessity to have filmed it in the first place. Believe me, when it comes to dinosaurs, we’ve pretty much seen it all, and they’re no longer the story anymore. Kind of like the zombies in The Walking Dead. I think the word “gratuitous” pretty much sums up most moviemaking these days. We’re just dead to quality (thanks in part to streaming services and the need to crank out material for binge-watchers), and that’s a shame.
Now, about The Bridge on the River Kwai, here’s the spoiler – it ends with the bridge blowing up. One. Stinking. Explosion. That’s it. No special effects extravaganzas to make up for a weak story riddled with abysmal and cliched dialogue. No suspense of disbelief either. It did such a good job with believability that most people actually believed there was a bridge that was blown up by a British hero during the war (the actual bridge that inspired the story didn’t even cross the Kwai and was blown up by allied bombing). The irony of it now though is that to see any of those good movies, including this one, you’ve actually got to pay. Those streaming services don’t carry a lot of the classics.
But they do carry the likes of The Hitman’s Bodyguard, which is nearly as senseless as its sequel, Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. Which is saying a lot, because the latter is one of the worst movies I’ve ever had to ignore while doing something else while it was on.
In the end, I can only give this recommendation: spend more time in the library. Even if reading isn’t your thing, there’s got to come a tipping point in civilized society where movies just aren’t cutting it anymore. I think we’re pretty much there.
Before CGI it took so much effort and imagination (and money) to create an effect that they were used more judiciously. I like TCM for this very reason. Doug says The Criterion Collection is similarly satisfying.
You’ve become such an accomplished, what’s the word I’m looking for…”PHILISOPHER.” What? You thought I would demean you by saying “Film Critic?”
Great movies come from great books written by people who understand the drama of relationships and the human organism’s response to challenging circumstances. The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. Amazing that a Pulitzer or an Oscar can come from writing about something that at it’s core is nothing but chemicals reacting to one another to achieve homeostasis.