The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

4/5

I have trouble reviewing movies I grew up watching, especially ones that have the cachet of Spielberg and the nostalgia of youth behind it. The Lost World is one such example. It is a remarkable but imperfect piece of filmmaking, yet all its flaws are ignored when remembering it 15 years later. Not quite the breathtaking, innovative escapism that Jurassic Park was, this sequel somehow manages to be both more mundane and more extravagant. Industrial Light & Magic's CGI here is astounding, even by today's standards. But all the special effects are front and center, with a spotlight shining down, instead of simply existing as a tool in the storyteller's arsenal. Though the plotting is as richly intricate and textured as the first one was, it puts too much emphasis on the spectacle of the dinosaurs. It makes the Tyrannosaurus Rex the protagonist, without humanizing it enough to make it feel like King Kong for a new generation. Like the 2005 King Kong remake, it centers on special effects instead of story, action instead of characters, and that is where it misses out on its full potential. The Lost World loses the awe that Jurassic Park had. The thrills excite, the jokes lighten the mood, and the movie reaches its inevitably satisfying conclusion, but not nearly as well as the first one did.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119567/

The Town (2010)

4/5

The Town is a movie about a lot of things. What it tries hardest to be about is a certain community in Charlestown, MA. It is a community of bank robbers, into which protagonists Doug (Affleck) and James (Renner) were born, and how its way of life is similar to other cultures and other communities. It is also about people escaping from their past and about uncertain, sacrificial love (both man-wife and parent-child). The movie starts with a bank robbery in which Claire (Hall) is taken hostage and blindfolded. She is eventually sent free without a mark on her. She is approached by the FBI (Hamm), but offers them very little except suspicion of criminal involvement. Doug starts following her to make sure she doesn't confess anything incriminating to the FBI, but soon develops a profound and all-encompassing love for her. He wants to quit his career to be with her, hoping that she will never find out the truth between how they met and how they know each other. But of course this wouldn't have been turned into a movie if life were that simple.

The directing is more than competent, with sharp cinematography and efficient editing, although a few times it felt trite or simplistic. Similarly, the script was well-written with a few concepts made overly obvious to the point of numbing bluntness. The acting was all around fantastic, although nothing really blew me away. All in all this is a technically competent movie with tense action scenes and a complex set of relationships. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to fans of excitement and/or crime.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0840361/

Inception (2010)

5/5

Christopher Nolan's Inception is a near-perfect film. It follows a thief named Cobb (DiCaprio) and his team of extractors (Gordon-Levitt, Hardy, Rao, Page) as they invade people's dreams and steal their secrets. They are hired to carry out a new kind of job called inception: implant an idea in someone else's head through their dreams. In order to do this and convince the dreamer that it is their own idea, they must go three levels deep--a dream within a dream within a dream. With each level removed from reality, time slows down exponentially, such that entire lives can be lived within mere seconds. Imagine the life you're living now; imagine dying 80 years after being born and then waking up to find yourself still young. And that is the idea from which this entire movie stems, from which it will no doubt be compared to the likes of The Matrix. But what Inception has over The Matrix is that we all dream, and we all know what it's like to wake up from a dream. We can imagine that what we're living in now is just a dream, and maybe--just maybe--we can wake up and get a second chance at life.

The cinematography in this film is crisp and direct. Except for the impressive and awe-inspiring gravity-defying action scenes in the hotel, it's merely adequate. It's not particularly cumbersome nor is it particularly artistic, but it gets the job done. The acting feels much the same. It is written well enough to make the characters distinct and separate, but they never feel like more than just archetypes. Even DiCaprio's character, by far the most complex and mature, feels like a rehashing of the tormented soul he played in Shutter Island. And Marion Cotillard, whose acting I fell in love with in Nine, plays a representation of an idea instead of a real human being. But these are the weakest aspects of the movie.

Inception's strengths are its storytelling, directing, and editing. The story, as I've described above, is what will win this movie its fans and its cult following. The plot, compelling as it is, exists solely to propel the idea that the world we think is real may just be a dream. And as Cobb warns us in the film, an idea is the most dangerous, insidious, persistent threat to our health and wellbeing that we can imagine. The story is combined with precise editing to create an airtight film that never lets you catch your breath or blink your eyes. It is nonstop intellectual and visceral action from beginning to end, with stunning efficiency and economy. And Nolan's directing puts this movie together into an unforgettable whole, with nary a missing piece or unseen error. This is a movie that was not thrown together in a day; it took years of planning and execution and is all the better for it. No, it's not a perfect movie and it may not be for everybody, but it's one of the most riveting, revolutionary movies I've seen come out of Hollywood in a long, long time. I suggest you watch it as soon as possible, before all the water cooler chatter about it ruins the film for you.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/