.The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE begins as Katniss Everdeen has returned home safe after winning the 74th Annual Hunger Games along with fellow tribute Peeta Mellark. Winning means that they must turn around and leave their family and close friends, embarking on a "Victor's Tour" of the districts. Along the way Katniss senses that a rebellion is simmering, but the Capitol is still very much in control as President Snow prepares the 75th Annual Hunger Games (The Quarter Quell) - a competition that could change Panem forever. (c) Lionsgate
.Captain Phillips
Two things about this riveting dramatisation of a real-life hijacking from 2009 tell you that you're watching a Paul Greengrass film. First, there is the urgent handheld camerawork, a directorial trademark refined and perfected by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, which lends an air of pseudo-documentary authenticity to carefully staged reconstructions, putting us right there in the huddle of the action.
Tom Hanks gives the performance of a lifetime as the eponymous Phillips, the former Boston cabbie turned hard-working sea captain who earns an increasingly hard-won dollar piloting vast ships through treacherous waters without clear backup or onboard protection. As two tiny skiffs skeeter across the ocean toward the Maersk Alabama, we see Phillips sending out a distress signal ("They're not here to fish!"), only to be told to observe standard protocol and hang tight. "Is that it?" he asks, turning on the hoses, swinging the rudders, grabbing a flare, suddenly aware of how isolated he and his ship have become.
As the working man out of his depths in murky waters, having to make life-and-death decisions in explosively confrontational circumstances, Hanks combines the everyman charm of a latterday Jimmy Stewart with the growing sense of heroism that underwrote his cool-headed Jim Lovell in Apollo 13. From the early scenes of buttoned-down, pressed-shirt reserve to the later gruelling episodes of Castaway-style physical degradation, he rarely misses a beat.
Once the pirates are on board this becomes a tale of a ship with two captains, and it's critical that Hanks is matched by an equal and opposite force to prevent the drama from becoming unbalanced. This Greengrass has found in the shape of newcomer Barkhad Abdi, an electrifying screen presence who brilliantly captures both the raging determination and embattled desperation of the pirates' emergent leader, Muse. At their first on-screen confrontation, the seasoned Hollywood pro and fiery first-timer produce tangible sparks as Muse orders Phillips to "Look me in the eye – I'm the captain now!" Inevitably, the power struggle between these two men becomes emblematic of the film's wider culture-clash themes, with both depicted as pawns in a much larger game over which neither has any control.
There are clear echoes of Greengrass's previous docudrama United 93, which similarly spent time with its hijackers prior to their attack. Significantly, both movies also feature hostilities breaking out in the middle of a training drill, causing key characters to explain in almost identical language that this is a "real world" situation, a blurring of the lines between reconstruction and reality, something that underpins Greengrass's distinctive directorial style.
Interesting, too, to compare this Hollywood-backed rollercoaster ride with Tobias Lindholm's more modest but equally alarming Danish offering A Hijacking (Kapringen), another film "inspired by real events", which depicts a commercial vessel being held hostage by Somali pirates. Although the films have a similar theme, their execution could not be more different. While Greengrass's movie, with its swirling helicopters and thunderous naval firepower, may broadly be termed an action movie, Lindholm's is perhaps best described as an inaction thriller, in which almost unbearable tension is conjured from lengthy periods of radio silence when nothing happens at all. What an exhausting double bill these mirror image films would make: one a symphony of ever-escalating combat; the other a study in the awful sound of silence, both ratcheting up the anxiety with aplomb.
By the time Captain Phillips moves into its third act, replete with claustrophobic lifeboat chases, night vision Navy Seal deployments and cross-hair tension on an epic scale (this is a film in which very big boats become giant, eye-catching characters in their own right), Greengrass has achieved his ultimate goal – the total suspension of disbelief. Moreover, he has shown us once again that mainstream cinema can be both visceral and intelligent, grabbing the audience by the throat without ever cutting off the oxygen supply to their brain.
One wonders what Ron Howard would have made of it; he was originally slated to direct Captain Phillips while Greengrass was developing Rush, the two film-makers ultimately swapping projects with rewarding results for both. I can't imagine anyone other than Greengrass handling this material, the story seemingly tailormade for his trademark blend of political clout, dramatic punch, thespian wallop and broad audience appeal. Make sure you allow time for a stiff drink afterwards – you're going to need it.
.The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Peter Jackson has picked up the pace. He began his Hobbit trilogy at an amiable, meanderingly
wayward canter, and tried the patience of believers and non-believers alike with that initial supper scene, almost an epic in itself. But this second episode commences with a narrative whipcrack – a quick flashback to Gandalf and Thorin tensely discussing their great plan in the snug bar of the Prancing Pony – and then we're off, at a tremendous gallop.
The end of the second movie out of three gives us a chance to revisit that critical question: does The Hobbit story work at this great length? Does epic-i-sation risk making The Hobbit too dour? In the book itself, Tolkien wrote: "Things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway." So perhaps Tolkien anticipated the way in which fantasy can grow exponentially, spinning substance out of itself, and become more and more serious and even solemn. Yet this second Hobbit film has real energy and charm.
Smaug is of course the terrible dragon, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch , who has usurped the Lonely Mountain and the dwarf kingdom of Erebor with all its gold, and whom the dwarves and Bilbo Baggins are on a mission to unseat. The "desolation" is the wasteland he has imposed on the country thereabouts, rather than any depression the dragon himself may be feeling. Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) is the alpha dwarf, grimly intent on his destiny: to reclaim his people's heritage and homeland. Martin Freeman is Bilbo, and Freeman's laidback, more naturalistic line-readings make a pleasing and interesting contrast to the more contoured saga-speak that comes out of everyone else's mouth, whether they are speaking English or Elvish or the guttural Orc tongue.
Bilbo is reluctant to confide the truth about the ring in his possession to Ian McKellen's Gandalf, who absents himself from the party reasonably early on, leaving that visually striking group looking and feeling vulnerable. Poor little Bilbo playing a non-Snow-White to the even littler dwarves as they trail across the magnificent landscape – but who are in fact tougher, more aggressive and more resilient than him.
A series of bizarre fantasy episodes, in a kind of Jackson-Tolkien-rococo style, brings us closer and closer to the mountain. The dwarves encounter Beorn the skin-changer who agrees, albeit churlishly, to help. The company finds itself lost and somehow spiritually oppressed in the forest of Mirkwood in which they get up close and personal with some colossal and very nasty spiders, which loom out of the screen in three dimensions, encasing their prisoners with skin-crawling webs. But the most uproarious setpiece comes when Bilbo, Thorin and the dwarves escape from the wood-elves' prison by hiding in barrels that are washed away down the river – which will bring them in contact with Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) and then the vain, shifty and time-serving Lord of Laketown, enjoyably played by Stephen Fry.
The barrel-chase down the river is a great sequence: a full-tilt headspinning action spectacular with orc against elf against dwarf-and-hobbit. Somehow, the whole movie has this same huge propulsive energy, whooshing the heroes onwards towards their great goal. Despite the dwarves' tough reputations, and Bilbo's expertise in the ignoble art of burglary, their diminutive size always gives them a weirdly childlike air: an air of outraged and unquenchable innocence. Bilbo's showdown with the terrible Smaug himself is of course the great finale, a narrative rhyme to his faceoff with Gollum that concluded the last film, and a satisfyingly exotic event.
And all the time, Jackson's New Zealand landscape has a storybook beauty, a fitting habitat for this story which unfolds in all seasons and times of day: fallen snowflakes gather in beards, the last rays of sunset glints in fur. Jackson depicts this fantasy world with style and gusto, and I'm looking forward to the third film already.
