“The Fall”

I recently saw this trailer, for a movie called The Fall.

Kind of looks like Pan’s Labyrinth but in the desert. This film is directed by Tarsem (props to anybody who can go by one name), who also directed The Cell. The Cell was a beautiful movie, but almost nonsensical. I’m hoping that The Fall lives up to its incredible trailer and delivers on the narrative level as well as the visual.

I’m a big fan of a movie that presents such a spectacular visual world, but if the story is gibberish it kind of falls apart. Casshern, with its trippy blend of 2D and 3D graphics and it’s weird art direction (big Lenin-esque statues with gears for arms, robot armies that look like they marched out of the old Max Fleischer Superman cartoons) looked spectacular, but after for the first forty minutes the story disintegrated into Japanese people screaming threats at each other and giant CG machines exploding. This may not be the film’s fault, though. Wikipedia informs me that the US version of Casshern is 24 minutes shorter than the original and features horrifically bungled subtitles. Oh well, it wasn’t the first time a stateside production company screwed up a foreign franchise, and it won’t be the last.

For some movies with good stories and interesting (fantastic) worlds, check out Pan’s Labyrinth, anything by Hayao Miyazaki (especially Princess Mononoke, one of my favorite animes), and Mirrormask (or so I hear).

~ by Ian D. on April 17, 2008.