The recent wave of autumn film festivals has ushered in numerous tasteful prestige dramas angling for Oscar glory, but there’s a snag: ask most critics if any of these noble hopefuls is better than Mad Max: Fury Road (Warner, 15) and you’ll see an awful lot of head-shaking. For George Miller’s thrillingly deranged resuscitation of a 30-years-dormant action franchise has a breadth of vision and depth of conviction unmatched by any mainstream film so far this year. It’s a brazenly oversize spectacle, but rooted in surging, primal feeling.
I was nervous that revisiting the film on DVD might dim its effect, but no: if the image is less overwhelming on a smaller scale, the pure, purposeful drive of its storytelling only comes further to the fore. Beneath the film’s glitter storm of visual and sonic activity lies a chase narrative of disarming simplicity. The joint there-and-back quest of Tom Hardy’s eponymous road warrior and Charlize Theron’s newly unleashed soldier Imperator Furiosa, motivated by elemental needs for water and earth, is rousingly romantic without resorting to human romance. There’s been much talk of the film’s feminist undertow, but its absolute gender parity is what stands out most: rare is the action film in which male and female characters are so interdependent. All this, and it has electric guitarists riffing aboard charging attack cars. Few films will give us more exhilarating muchness this year.
Which is not to say that Aloha (Columbia, 12A) doesn’t try. There’s so much unsorted business in Cameron Crowe’s unruly, often incomprehensible romantic-comedy-turned-mystic-travelogue-turned-military-conspiracy-thriller, it’s hardly surprising when it climaxes (don’t ask why) with an attempt to beam all recorded sound in human history into space. The latest, arguably most interesting misstep in the career of the man who made Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire, Aloha surfaces on iTunes months after tanking in the US. It might be the most A-list Hollywood film ever to take the straight-to-VOD route.
It’s hard to believe that a film starring Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams could skip cinemas entirely, but equally hard to believe that a Crowe script could mismanage their talents so badly, locking them into a zero-stakes love triangle: Cooper is the army contractor in Hawaii on an inscrutable satellite-launch mission, Stone is the feisty fighter pilot inexplicably assigned to assist him, McAdams the old flame with a suddenly flickering marriage. Nothing adds up, and that’s before you toss in Bill Murray as a space-race billionaire with designs on the sky; Crowe is reaching for grand statements here about national, spiritual and personal security, but his film seems expressly edited to dodge any kind of thematic continuity. The title is a Hawaiian greeting that serves as both hello and goodbye; it’s all too apt for a fascinating folly that seems to be coming and going at once.
In a busy week for big thinking on screen, alas, Tomorrowland: A World Beyond (Disney, 12) draws the shortest straw. Brad Bird’s family fantasy is an even more ambitious, idealistic failure than Aloha, but a much stiffer one, ladling its whiz-bang World’s Fair delights with a deadening dollop of philosophy 101: even as you’re watching the film, it’s awfully hard to determine what it’s about. George Clooney is a once-prodigious inventor with access to a futuristic parallel dimension shared by a bright spark teen (Britt Robertson); together, they embark on a mission to... well, exactly what defies the space constraints of this column. Suffice to say a film with a chiding knowledge-is-power message gets considerably murkier as it goes along, while the wide-eyed retrofuturism that Bird brought to The Iron Giant and The Incredibles gradually palls in live action.
Unusually, this week’s blockbuster offerings might be more robustly eccentric than the small-scale fare, though Rufus Norris’s London Road (Spirit, 15) at least scores novelty points. An earnest but decidedly uncertain adaptation of Alecky Blythe’s National Theatre docu-musical on the 2006 Ipswich serial murders, it’s well performed – with a singing Tom Hardy cameo miles removed from Mad Max – but can’t quite mask a certain sneering complacency to Blythe’s much-vaunted verbatim technique. If you want cheerier musical entertainment, there’s an underplaying Dustin Hoffman as a stern children’s choirmaster in The Choir (Curzon, PG), and an overripe Al Pacino as a grizzled rock star seeking offstage purpose in Danny Collins (Entertainment One, 15). It’s hard to make great claims for either film, but their leading men put them across.
Finally, Good People (Lionsgate, 15) is a proficient but half-hearted pulp thriller, set none too convincingly in a south London underworld that envelops cash-strapped American property developers James Franco and Kate Hudson. Their suitably tetchy performances, particularly Hudson’s, give it some B-movie juice, though landing in the same week as Aloha, it’s a glum reminder that Almost Famous was 15 years ago.
