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Went to see Insomnia today. I'm surprised there's not been a thread on this, so I thought I'd kick one off.
I thought it was crap. It looks lovely, has some great editing and sound work, and some breathtaking bits of cinematography - the waterfall is nature at its most marvellous. But Pacino veered from good to pantomime rather than just "tired", Swank was in a horrendously underwritten role that sucked a lot (and Tierney could have played better). Williams, who was remarkably restrained even for him, was excellent though.
The plot was OK. But the thing that gets me is the sea-change from the Erik Skjoldbjærg's Norwegian version. Suddenly, we've been bombarded with cheesy horrendous backstory that gets in the way, the entirely useless Swank character, an extra twenty minutes that somehow still make the first film seem longer, because the pacing's better, the chance to see Pacino shoot a DEAD dog as opposed to Skarsgard's LIVE one... and, worst of all, Pacino's death at the end.
The point is that the cop suffers. It's a nightmare, and it doesn't get better at the end. All he can do is fly back to Sweden/LA and draw a line under it. For those of you who have seen the remake but not the original, the ending of the first is just marvellous, and only so fractionally different to Nolan's: after the shoot-out/chase, the cop (Skarsgard) returns to his car and drives away, not blinking, looking haggard as ever. He drives down a tunnel, and the screen fades to black - except for his eyes, which stay full brightness. Before it goes to a blackout, you're left with a black screen and a pair of white eyes staring out of it, forever awake.
Radio 4's Back Row made an interesting point. What it suggested is that Insomnia shows what Hollywood wants: European movies. But it can't HELP but Hollywoodise them. It loves the existential drama, but stops it being existential. It loves the ambiguity, but can't be entirely unambiguous just in case the audience don't get it. So you get Insomnia By Christopher Nolan, with high-powered actors, a dead dog, and a dead cop. It gets so close to being a European movie, and then backs out at the last hurdle. It comes across as weak. I mean, alternative American cinema is more alternative than this. It really disappointed me, that all the wit of the first one - fast pace that avoided flashbacks, and Internal Affairs, and crap reasoning, and just looked at the killings and Insomnia - had to be submerged in hackneyed backstory and the nauseatingly bollocks Swank character.
So yeah. The script sucked, despite making a joke about Swank's blow-job lips, it's nowhere near as good as Memento (which wasn't nearly so mainstream as this), and Pacino was a bit shit - supercop one minute, Emperor Palpatine the next. Ick. Nolan's still obviously a talented director, but the script he had to work with was appalling.
The credits were cool, though. |
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