March issue - Magazine - Page 29
Glenside
News
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ENTERTAINMENT
CINEMA & TV REVIEWS
By David Taylor
Project Hail Mary (Cert 12A)
is out in cinemas
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are best known from
working in the world of animation, variously shepherding
the likes of The LEGO Movie, Cloudy With A Chance of
Meatballs, Spider-man Into the Spider-verse and The
Mitchells Vs The Machines onto the screen, but they bring
the same level of inventiveness to this live-action
adaptation of Andy Weir's bestselling novel.
hijacks the prototype – hopping into an android beaver –
in order to scupper the plans to build a superhighway
through a local forest.
The level of comic invention here is off the scale –
let's just say that the 'hopper' discovers that the hierarchy
of the animal kingdom isn't quite what she was expecting
– and the non-stop barrage of visual and verbal gags
demands multiple viewings.
All of which bodes well for Pixar's upcoming Toy
Story 5, which is coming out in a few months.
As in Weir's earlier book The Martian, it's a nailbiter
about science triumphing over extreme adversity, with
Ryan Gosling as the lone survivor of a one-way trip to the
far reaches of the galaxy to find a way to stop a voracious
organism from draining the energy of our sun. Helping
him in this struggle is an alien creature in a similar
predicament – it looks a bit like a crab made out of
boulders – whose spaceship he has found parked around
the only sun seemingly immune to whatever it is that's
gobbling up stars across the universe.
Like the 2016 movie Arrival, this is the harder edge of
science fiction and it's a credit to Lord and Miller that
they don't allow the story to get overwhelmed by the
complex astrophysics and microbiology being thrashed
out, but keep the action fast-paced and humorous.
Kudos also to Gosling who, aside from a few
flashbacks showing his life pre-blast off, spends 90 per
cent of the movie essentially on his own, talking to a pile
of rocks.
The Bride! (Cert 15)
is out in cinemas
It's obvious that Maggie Gyllenhaal had a lot on her mind
with this revisionist take on The Bride of Frankenstein,
for which she is credited as writer, director and coproducer, but too much of it feels like a fistful of random
papers being waggled in the audience's face than a
coherent screenplay.
Hoppers (Cert U)
is out in cinemas
The previously unbroken stream of animated
masterpieces from Pixar Studios has had it's share of
lacklustre movies in the past few years (I'm looking at
you Elio and Seeing Red), but Hoppers finds them back
and firing on all cylinders.
After a self-styled environmental crusader discovers
that her college professor has been secretly developing a
system called 'hopping' that allows you to covertly
observe the natural world by implanting your
consciousness into a robot animal, the feisty student
So we start with the ghost of author Mary Shelley
(Jessie Buckley) bemoaning her lot in life, then
apparently possessing the body of a gangster's moll in
1930s America, who mouths off some more and gets
pushed downstairs and brought back to life by a not-somad scientist (Annette Bening) as a mate for
Frankenstein's monster (Christian Bale), about which she
has a lot more to say, mostly screeching at the top of her
lungs, before they embark on a life of crime a la Bonnie
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