MOVIE REVIEW: The Patriot (2000)

2000 was a good year for movies, or at least what I remember of it. Among them, we had Gladiator, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Almost Famous, and Traffic at our disposal. And then there was The Patriot, an underrated historical-drama/war picture directed by disaster-film cheesemeister Roland Emmerich and starring Mel Gibson; in the days before he went "Four Loko" on us. Like most films of it's kind, to call The Patriot 100% historically accurate is questionable, but does it manage to entertain in some way, shape, or form? Certainly.

The story concerns a widowed farmer, who takes a pacifist stance on the eve of the American Revolution when tensions have risen at their highest. After one of his sons is killed trying to save another from persecution by the gallows, the farmer has a change of heart and joins the militia with his eldest son as they fight to protect Charleston, South Carolina. The Patriot grapples with many themes of honor in war, and revenge versus compassion, this is where I felt the film's strongest points were. It also helps when you have a strong, symphonic score by John Williams and some incredible set design. There were times because of the meticulous attention to these details, the melancholy score, and the plot that I felt things were very reminiscent to Braveheart. Obviously, Mel's presence doesn't help things much, but I don't think it would have mattered either way. It was a welcome sense of familiarity that kept my interest throughout the film's two-and-a-half hour length.

Emmerich's presence as a director made me nervous at first, but now I consider this to be one of, if not, his best film. He brings the right level of tension and alacrity to the action scenes, yet he does do a few things that bothered me. One of them was giving Mel Gibson near-superhuman strength in a sequence where he takes down a caravan of 20 redcoats along with his miraculously crackshot juvenile sons. Another was Mel's final showdown, where he makes the beaten hero pull a last-minute-hat-trick-in-order-to-kill-the-bad-guy cliche. It's done well, but it's still a cliche (and amusingly bears uncanny resemblance to the Maximus/Commodus fight in Gladiator). What bothers me the most, probably is the artistic liberties taken with history - there were a few glaring ones that I don't really feel like going into detail, but that's something unavoidable with these films.

I still enjoyed The Patriot because of how it portrayed the ire of many Americans of the time through a select few fictional characters as a representative sample. Most obviously is the one of Gibson, who resolves to fight in order to justify his son's sacrifice. It hits a little closer to home when my country is still in the midst of a war right now, but all historical innacuracies aside, thank goodness historical fiction at least allows us to think.

8/10

Peace,
- Jon

MOVIE REVIEW: 2012 (2009)

2012 isn't the worst disaster movie I've ever seen, but it's definitely one of the dumbest. All scientific innacuracies aside, I'm generally a lot more willing to suspend my disbelief in the name of science fiction than the average American film critic usually is. With 2012 though, I'm highly distracted at the film's grating jabs at melodrama, which is worse than say, Titanic. Although the special effects are impressive, it's obvious where all the money went. If only they could have afforded a better screenwriter for characters, let alone, actors.

This latest entry, starring John Cusack and directed by Roland Emmerich, follows in the same vein as his previous films: Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow, which is to say: big, dumb, and filled with cookie-cutter characters of the disaster genre that are somehow intricately linked to one-another. Capitalizing on the upcoming 2012 phenomena, a group of geologists discover the apocalypse is immenent when cosmic conditions cause the sun to melt the Earth's core and cause "Earth Crustal Displacement" - which translates to massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions - basically bringing out the End of Days. Blissfully ignoring the fact that we'd probably all fry from extreme heat before "ECD", a downtrodden writer decides to take his kids camping in Yellowstone, I don't need to elaborate much more on the plot from there, except there's a little government conspiracy and human rights issues that eventually arise. These plot devices are probably the most thought-provoking thing in the whole film, it's a shame I gave up caring for the characters at this point.

In case you're THAT curious, scientific research has shown that the 2012 phenomena is no more valid than was Y2K, nearly ten years ago. I even have a whole FAQ page from NASA to back me up on this. Neverheless, it hasn't stopped a load of books from being written by religious figures, philosophers, and whackos alike. There are loads of sources dismissing the accuracy and interpretation of the Mayan calendar, which some belive was the first tip-off to the apocalypse, such as this one from The Guardian. But hey, in a fatalistic sense, if the world were to end on December 21, 2012, I sure as hell had a great time on it while it lasted...shame I wouldn't get to finish law school, though.

2012 does nothing more than fuel the fire for the belief that something like this could happen in the most scientifically innacurate way possible. It's a pretty package, but it's nothing extraordinary.

5/10

Peace,
- Jon