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Reviews
Under the Mountain (2009)
Underwhelmed
I remember reading the book and watching the TV series as a child, so when I saw this was out in the DVD stores I was excited to revisit a part of my childhood.
Unfortunately, this film compares poorly to the 80s TV series. The 80s TV series had a darkness and chill surrounding the Wilberforces that had shades of Doctor Who about it. A lot of the darkness and suspense is lost in this film. It spends a good 40-50 minutes before Rachel and Theo (and the audience) is even let in on the plot. Now this might be excused in some films, if the buildup is engaging enough, but it simply comes across as disparate events that seem to have no real bearing on the story. I felt that they felt obliged to include certain scenes because they were iconic from the TV series, yet they were divorced of all context in this film. Given the length of the film, the twins needed to meet Mr Jones earlier to bring everyone into the plot earlier and allow the suspense to build.
Overall, I would advise anyone to give this a miss and try to find the original TV series - some of the episodes are on google video.
Shi yue wei cheng (2009)
Doesn't know what sort of movie it wants to be.
I had been looking forward to seeing this movie as the advertising had billed it as something of a period epic, something along the lines of a Hong Kong "Gangs of New York".
I have to say that the sets and reconstruction of 1906 Hong Kong were very good, but there were some occasions where the matte backgrounds didn't quite gel with the foreground.
The story on the whole was very good, with the key characters either learning or demonstrating the link between sacrifice and revolution. However I think this movie loses effectiveness by trying to do too much.
For a film such as this which tries to be a historical epic, the wire-fu stunts look incredibly out of place. It would have been far more effective to keep the stunts grounded in reality. The wire-fu stunts work well in films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero where there is an element of fantasy to the whole story. For a story that is purportedly a historical account all it serves to do is remind the viewer that he is watching a movie, not real events.
I also found the inclusion of Mengke Bateer off-putting. A seven-foot Chinese in 1906 Hong Kong doesn't seem very believable to me. I suspect that he was put there to get a few cheap jokes, as the character would have been just as believable as a six-foot well-built person.
These may seem like minor issues, but for me they detracted from what could have been a truly excellent film.