MOVIE REVIEW

ROAR

Director: Kamal Sadanah
Writer:  Aanand Goradiya
Stars: Aadil Chahal, Aaran Chaudhary, Pranay Dixit
Strength: Beautiful cinematography
Weakness: Incoherent plot, poor screenplay, lack of character development
Runtime: 123 minutes
Rating: 2.5/5

Plot: After his photojournalist brother gets killed by a white tigress in the jungles of the Sundarbans, Pandit and his team of commandos enter the prohibited core area of the forest to avenge his death.
Review: If you're looking for a rewarding cinematic experience with a coherent plot and well-rounded characters, then 'Roar' may not be the film for you. It's shot entirely in the dense Sundarban forest. Debutant director Kamal Sadanah must have been ripped apart between a documentary about the tigers of Sundarbans or a fictional story set in the tiger sanctuary, and he went for the latter. The film doesn't intend to present a realistic portrayal of life in the Sundarbans. It tries to be an entertainer. The cinematography is awe-inspiring. But, stunning shots of the natural beauty of the Sundarbans cannot compensate for the lack of consistency and logic in the plot about a bunch of adventurers's revenge on a white tiger. The characters are all written for the sake of creating a shock effect as one by one, the plot's populace pops off the face of majestic map. Time after time, the editing exposes the lack of coherence in the plot. Characters jump into the danger zone and then wait for the script to decide their future. The killings in the sinister marshland are well-staged. The acting is uniformly amateurish, with no real talent in the film to be amazed with. Attempts to add glamour to the grisly affairs are downright clumsy. You can almost smell the director's unease and awkwardness in trying to infuse acceptable commercial trappings into the sun-kissed rugged picturesque locales. Images from the National Geographic meet "Fear Factor" in this brilliantly photographed adventure saga. You may not think much of the characters's shallow shindings during the time of exceptional stress. But one thing is for sure. You've never seen anything like this in Hindi cinema.

Reviewed by Broti Rahman

***

THESE FINAL HOURS

Directors: Zak Hilditch
Writer:  Zak Hilditch
Stars: Jessica De Gouw, Sarah Snook, Nathan Phillips
Strength: Touching scenes, fresh new take on apocalypse movies
Weakness: Lack of character development, weak dialogues
Runtime: 87 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5

PLOT: A self-obsessed young man makes his way to a party on the last day on Earth, but ends up saving the life of a little girl. Their relationship ultimately leads him to the path to redemption.
REVIEW: Extending the Apocalypse genre pioneered by the Mad Max movies and recently treated as groundwork for a dour parable in David Michôd's The Rover, the doomsday clock is ticking in These Final Hours – the twist being that hope for humanity has long passed its use-by date. Director Zak Hilditch establishes early on that there's no avoiding the catastrophic impact of a meteorite. The end of days is arriving down under, and quick – 12 hours is roughly how much time Australia has left. After a tiff with his girlfriend about whether to wind down the clock together or spend it enjoying at an apocalyptically good house party, James (Nathan Phillips) opts for the latter and leaves her for dead. On his way to the bash, James' conscience pricks him into deviating from the plan. Armed with a hammer, he saves a kidnapped young girl named Rose (Angourie Rice) from a hideous fate. James takes her under his wing and shepherds her around a violent anarchic landscape like a guardian angel. Cinematographer Bonnie Elliott creates a sweaty sun-kissed look and editor Nick Meyers a sense of itch-inducing immediacy. And if These Final Hours slips a little in a plot sense, it's because Hilditch's focus ultimately lies elsewhere – in creating an experiential, brooding, disgustingly plausible hypothetical universe. By these criteria, These Final Hours is an awesome success. There are more life-affirming interpretations to be uncovered from Hilditch's hell-on-earth setting. James is stuck in a compelling dilemma, wanting to protect his innocent young friend but understanding he is powerless to change their doomed fate. The relationship he has with Rose is a reminder that good things can, and often are, accomplished when there is no material reward and no logical purpose for doing so. These Final Hours is also about how beauty can be salvaged from the bleakest of scenarios. It's one of the most touching images Australian cinema has offered in some time.

Reviewed by S.M. Intisab Shahriyar

***

CLASSIC REVIEW

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1930)

Director: Lewis Milestone
Writers:   Erich Maria Remarque, Maxwell Anderson
Stars: Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray
Runtime: 136 minutes

PLOT: A young soldier faces profound disillusionment in the soul-destroying horror of World War I.
REVIEW:  Few films, to this day, have struck as powerful an anti-war message as Lewis Milestone's extraordinary evocation of the tragic folly of war. Arguably, still the greatest WWI movie, his tender portrayal of innocent German youth is compared with the harrowing immediacy of trench warfare, shot with a powerful authenticity many modern filmmakers, with all their tools, have failed to match. Even more than the visceral evocation of trench life, with all its wanton squalor, the philosophical underpinnings of the film reach deep into the heart and head. During the opening sequences, in the dreamy almost fairy-tale safety of their school life, they are resolved, thanks to the stirrings of their teacher, to sign up and fight the good fight. What becomes hastily clear amongst the mud and blood of fellow comrades and shadowy enemies alike is that there is no good fight to be fought, only a terrible one, where victory is as pointless as defeat. Such a determined, for the time radical message, the soul of Remarque's novel, finds its most focused point in the scene where Paul, whose eyes we follow to the battlefront, is trapped in a bomb crater in no-man's land with French solider; dying from the wound he gave him. Struck by remorse, he vainly tries to save him, prying through his clothes to find a name, a person beneath the victim. The dialogue may feel stagy by today's standards, the verbose speeches over fallen comrades are hardly realistic, but they are telling, and no concessions are ever made to moral notions of good versus evil. All is madness, chaos and inescapable loss, captured with poetic and perfect simplicity in the motif of a butterfly watched by Paul from his trench, a reminder of the butterflies he would trap and pin in a glass case as a boy.

Reviewed by S.M. Intisab Shahriyar