Review: Black Sea (UK Cert: 15)

Having spent over ten years captaining submarines, Robinson (Jude Law) is given the boot by his company. When he learns that there is a derelict submarine hidden in the Black Sea, filled with Russian gold, Robinson gathers a team together to retrieve the $40 million loot. It’s not spoiling anything to say that things go horribly wrong.

While I try not to go to the cinema expecting greatness, or get caught up in all the hype, with Black Sea (directed by Touching the Void’s Kevin MacDonald), I was ready for two hours of chair-grabbing tension. While MacDonald’s latest is entertaining enough, with some impressively shot set pieces and a cast who all do good work, it is virtually one predictable scene after another.

Dennis Kelly, one of the chief writers on Channel 4’s Utopia, gives you plenty of signposts or flashing lights during a scene, so that you know what’s coming. When Robinson gives us a roundup of his crew, one of them is introduced as a “psychopath” (Ben Mendelsohn who, in fairness, gives us a credible maniac instead of clichéd beady eyes and an evil grin). You don’t win anything for guessing that all the trouble starts because of this unhinged member of the team.

Slowly, the crew members are killed off, either through accidents or greed-fuelled murder. Unless you don’t watch films all that often, you can’t fail to notice a trend with the casualties: the least useful – or thinly written – characters are bumped off first. A scene which is supposed to be shuffle-around-in-your-seat tense is ruined because you know that a character is about to die.

What saves Black Sea is that, rather than being a nerve-wracking ride, it is heart-breaking to watch the cast succumb to greed, their desperate situation getting even worse. It’s all appallingly believable. Robinson and his crew have given their lives to their jobs. The submarine is their life, outside of it they have nothing, and yet the multi-million pound companies they used to work for don’t value them, just see them as another wage, leaving them with no money, taking demeaning jobs just to feed themselves. When Robinson tells everyone that they will get an equal share of $40 million, you can understand when you see them conjuring up all sorts of plans.

Jude Law gives a complex, career highlight performance as Robinson. To begin with, Robinson plans the voyage in the hope that becoming a millionaire will bring him his family back; screwing over the bureaucrats and money makers firmly in second place. Yet as things go from bad, to worse, to dire for the survivors, his priorities change, obsessed with getting the reward he has earned, giving his ex-employers the finger, and risking his crew’s lives to do it.

Scoot McNairy (Argo, Gone Girl) plays a slimy Personal Assistant and, as the film goes on, manages to make you sympathise with him. As Daniels, he is on the submarine to ensure his boss, the investor, is getting his money’s worth and that things run smoothly. Daniels mocks the crew members for ending up working as paper boys or serving fast food; his only worry is the numbers. In the third act, Daniels stops caring about money and just wants to live. While he plots and backstabs to ensure he’s one of the last men standing, Daniels is absolutely right when he points out that Robinson is only thinking about the gold, not the lives of those around him; exactly what Daniels was doing early on.

Once everyone is underwater, cinematographer Christopher Ross (Eden Lake, BBC’s United and Blackout) turns the visuals up a notch. There’s something bleak and beautiful about Black Sea’s submarine. Placing the camera in numerous cramped spaces and using dim lighting, Ross makes the tarnished interiors, filled with pipes, gauges and creaking machinery, another member of this double-crossing crew; everyone’s home for the next several days is working against them, ending up as their tomb.

MacDonald’s new film could have been just as agonisingly tense as Yann Demange’s ’71, but is held back by a seen-it-all-before script (there’s even one scene that dares to use the old “drowned body suddenly springs out” trick). Everyone does their best here, but with no surprises, nothing to make you question what’s about to happen, Black Sea is a harmless way to get rid of a couple of hours instead of being a full-on assault on your nerves.

3 out of 5

Matt

Review: How I Live Now (UK Cert 15)

When I sat down in the cinema to watch The Hunger Games, I was expecting great things. I hadn’t read the books, but plenty of my friends had, and were all telling me how I absolutely had to see this film. Also, to quote the guy at the cinema who gave me my ticket; “You’re really gonna like this film!”

While I didn’t walk out of the cinema in a violent rage (the guy who sold me my ticket would have been first on my hit list!), I did feel like I had watched a film that had been sifted, pulped and filleted, its source material replaced with the latest cutesy ride at Disney World.

Kevin MacDonald’s How I Live Now is the polar opposite of The Hunger Games. If The Hunger Games is the sweet, Photo Shopped, caked under a JCB-load of make-up, little girl, then How I Live Now is its chain smoking, tongue pierced, ripped tights-wearing twin sister. MacDonald is the man who gave us The Last King of Scotland; he doesn’t do dumbed down.

MacDonald’s latest is set in remote England. The world is in turmoil, governments across the globe fighting with rebels (occasionally referred to as terrorists) for reasons unknown. Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) is sent to England to live with her cousins until things calm down. At first, Daisy is your typical moody teenager who hates everyone and has a smart answer for everything (“I’m a Yank, but I’m not gonna kiss your ass, just ‘cause you’re British!”). Soon she starts to love her family – Edmond, her eldest cousin (George MacKay), especially – and their optimistic, naïve view of the world. When a dirty bomb goes off in London, Daisy and Edmond are separated, taken to military camps that are far from safe and secure. Forced to look after her youngest cousin Piper (Peppa Pig’s Harley Bird) and grow up fast, Daisy decides to trek across Britain, back to her family’s cottage, in the hope that Edmond will be there waiting.

While How I Live Now is for a teenage audience, it has not been made for fans of Twilight. The film does not shy away from its grim, harrowing depiction of a war-torn Britain. It is violent, with a well-judged mix of what is shown (Daisy searching through body bags that have been ravaged by foxes, wanting to know if her cousins are dead, is truly hard to watch) and what is implied (one character, a teenager, is shot whilst trying to escape a gun battle). This is an anti-war film, and MacDonald does not tone down the abominations that Daisy witnesses on her journey home (made even more upsetting, being set in the English countryside).

MacDonald manages to pull off the same trick he used in The Last King of Scotland. In this film, James McAvoy lives the good life working as Forest Whitaker’s doctor. We know it will never last, and MacDonald knows we know, skilfully playing with our anticipation so that, when the inevitable happens, it is every bit as brutal as we expect. At the beginning of How I Live Now, Franz Lustig’s cinematography shows us a striking English landscape and litters it with shots of low flying planes, army trucks and barricades. We see Daisy and her family playing in the fields and forests, happy and not hurting anyone, and know this will never last. When the dirty bomb goes off, Lustig manages to make it both beautiful and frightening, Piper believing that it has suddenly started to snow. As Daisy and Piper journey across Britain, MacDonald barely gives us time to breathe, and when he does, it is usually followed by something bad; Piper finds chocolates and expensive shoes in the woods, only to realise they are debris from a plane crash, the bodies hanging above them in the trees. How I Live Now isn’t a full ninety minutes of grim depression. It is hopeful without being happy, smiley and syrupy-sweet and, certainly for teenagers, if not all of us, it has an important and optimistic message.

One of the many reasons the film works is down to Saoirse Ronan’s performance. Her transformation from self-centred teenager to a smart, pro-active and fiercely protective woman is convincing and flawless. You would have to be a cold human being not to be cheering her on.

The soundtrack deserves a special mention, with songs from Daughter, Natasha Khan, and Amanda Palmer. Jon Hopkins’s score is a mixture of soaring, dewy-eyed symphonies as well as music that sounds like it came from your most sinister and disturbing nightmares. 

I’m going to be picky here and stop myself from giving How I Live Now a perfect fiver stars, and this is because of the ending. It’s brilliant in the sense that it’s not the happy ever after ending that some teenage girls might be hoping for, but it is optimistic, suggesting that if you find someone who genuinely loves you, you can overcome any scars you have suffered in your life. THAT I don’t have a problem with! What had me scratching my head is how the British government seems to quickly regain control of the country, life pretty much returning to normal. I started to wonder if the rebels had suddenly swapped their guns for water pistols. Maybe that’s the point, that despite what the creepy government broadcasts might say, things will never be “back to normal” for Britain’s survivors. If this is what MacDonald was after, then the ending’s impact felt watered down, like the script was trying to conveniently wrap things up.

This is the only problem I had with the film, and it’s a very minor one. How I Live Now is a love story that does not patronise its audience. It is gripping, at times frightening, and has scene-after-scene of faultless cinematography. It’s just a shame that, despite starring The Host and Byzantium’s Saoirse Ronan, it will largely go unnoticed at the box office, while the latest Hunger Games will make enough money to wipe out the world’s debt problems.

4 out of 5

Matt