Classical Hollywood: From Here to Eternity (1953)

From Here to Eternity (1953), Dir. Fred Zinnemann
Starring: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra

This Oscar-winning military drama is set at a Hawaiian military base just before the outbreak of the second World War - and accordingly, the attack on Pearl Harbor. Michael Bay should have taken note and canned his scrap-heap of a big budget movie about Pearl Harbor, because Zinnemann's 1953 film does it with more heart, humanity, and panache then he could ever manage. There are a lot of misleading ideas surrounding the movie - mainly due to the iconic image of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kissing in the surf. The film isn't really terribly focused on the romance, and the famous moment only lasts a few seconds. The film also isn't really about Pearl Harbor, as such, and by the time the world-shaking events occur, the audience is so wrapped up in the very human dramas of regular life at the military outpost that the attack seems oddly surprising. Montgomery Clift, supposed precursor to Brando and Dean, is much less mannered than the latter two, and much more subtle - perhaps more watchable by today's standards. He had a wonderful presence and an injured, repressed quality that got attention but never begged for it. Sinatra is a mischievous but good-hearted friend, strangely skinny-shouldered and ratty standing next to athletic Lancaster and fine-featured Clift. As a modern viewer, one can't help but to pick up on the underlying patriotism and occasional narrative schmaltz that make up a prestige picture like this one, but nonetheless, it is one of uncommonly good scripting, actors, and director. It criticises the poor treatment of lower-ranked men by the officers' ranks, and speaks to the violence, drunkenness, and general corruption of domestic military life, but never takes far-reaching steps to extend this critique toward the government, or to allow its characters anything but unwavering loyalty to their military, in spite of their poor treatment.  The film ends with a wistful scene on a steamboat between Deborah Kerr and Montgomery Clift's lover, Donna Reed, talking about their wayward men. As the camera pans down to the sea beneath them, we get the sense that in 1941, on the precipice of war, a great many more young women would soon be talking just as wistfully about the military men in their lives.

Brief Thoughts: Prometheus (2012)

Prometheus is a behemoth of a film with equally as large hype and expectations surrounding it. As a supposed loose prequel to Alien, it certainly had big shoes to fill. The claustrophobic horror of the chest-bursting, phallus-obsessed, feminist original is sadly much lacking in its predecessor. In spite of rather optimistic reviews, it has a baffling, overblown plot and a frequently cringe-worthy screenplay; the kind where the characters say, 'You'll die if you take off your helmet!' and other 'look here, gasp now!' dialogue in place of a discernible story. I think it pained all of my friends to admit it - we were so looking forward to it, and were almost speechless when we left the dark of the cinema. The blatantly creationist Christian undertones (if you could even call them that, such was the emphasis put upon them) were bizarrely placed in a supposed Alien prequel - an original film predicated on rationality and Godlessness. As far as interestingly portrayed characters, Michael Fassbender as android David may be the only one - but even then, he isn't given very much to do. He stands around, stiffly handsome and sinister, and that's about the most I can say. His position by the end of the film is clearly ridiculous, but the film is utterly po-faced about it. Scott clearly wants us to take Prometheus as seriously as we take Alien, but apparently fails to realise its inherent silliness, and even worse, fails to realise why it is we take Alien seriously in the first place. It's a crying shame, and an absolute mess of a film, one that seems five minutes in the making rather than 30 years. The impressive CGI set pieces were undermined by other details: rubbery humanoid aliens, poor characterisation, and banal 'surprise' sub-plots. Science-fiction, at its best, satirises and holds a mirror to our modern world - is socially and politically relevant. Alien certainly met this criteria, and Prometheus does anything but. It doesn't tell us anything new or relevant; it arguably struggles even to tell a good, coherent story. What a let down.