SOCIETY OF THE SNOW*****

Spanish writer-director JA Bayona's retelling of the iconic 1972 Andes air crash is his career best work, which is a big call given how masterful his 2016 film a A MONSTER CALLS is.  There is evident care taken to listen to the testimony of the survivors and honour both their experience and that of the victims.  What lifts this film beyond earlier movies covering the same topic is its technological prowess in showing the crash, and then by contrast, the quiet moments of philosophical and moral contemplation as the survivors decide how to live.

The film opens with a brief but powerful essay on life before the crash. We see these young college students full of life and exuberance as they plan for a flight to Chile for a rugby match.  Within five minutes we are on board and the fun continues until the first dramatic moment of air turbulence shifts the mood. Bayona moves as fast as events would have in real time, showing the plane hit a storm, wildly gyrate before having its wings sheered off, the fuselage ripped, before crashing into a mountain. We feel the impact viscerally - it's the most frightening depiction of a crash yet seen on film - and matched in impact by an avalanche shown later in the film.  We feel the peril and the suffocation and claustrophobia of endless hostile snow.

And then we move into the main bulk of the film which has a far quieter, more contemplative tone.  The team captain with his quiet gentle manner becomes the leader of the 29 survivors, raising their morale, rationing food and organising their tasks. When their hope of rescue is quashed by a news report heard on the radio. And so they realise that they are on their own, with no food, but a misperception that Chile is just on the other side of the mountain. And so they take the fateful, profound decision to use the "protein" of their dead comrades, build strength, survive and achieve their own rescue. Two of them hike an incredible ten days, without any mountaineering equipment or experience or even a compass or a map, and achieve rescue.

The most moving scene is how JA Bayona chooses to end the film - showing the Society Of The Snow reassembled, now seemingly safe and clean in a hospital ward, but still emaciated. They look confused and concerned, maybe now facing up to the decisions they took and the improbability of their rescue and the injustice of who did and did not survive. Bayona chooses to give us the essential truth beyond the sensational headlines - that these boys survived because they were truly a society - they were friends, they trusted each other, they cared for each other, they helped each other do the unthinkable, and willed each other to survive. And that this community care is going to have to continue as the men process what they have been through.

SOCIETY OF THE SNOW is rated R and has a running time of 144 minutes. It played Venice 2023 and was released today on Netflix.

JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM

This film is utterly without merit, joy, wonder or intelligence  It is a shameless cash-in on a tired franchise, without any of the majesty of the original.  Even worse, it teases us with memories of that film with an early cameo from Jeff Goldblum and a late cameo from BD Wong. Worst of all, it wastes the talents of arthouse director J A Bayona, who made the exceptional A MONSTER CALLS. 

In this new instalment, a few years after the dinos go bonkers on Isla Nubar, a volcano threatens to make them all extinct again. Goldblum's rational scientist argues for this but reformed park exec Bryce Dallas Howard now wants to rescue them as living creatures deserving of our help. In doing so she enlists the help of ex-lover and dino handler Chris Pratt, and is funded by James Cromwell's dying billionaire and ex partner of the park's original founder.  Of course, the moral of this series was always that the real monsters weren't the killer dinos but the evil capitalist bastards who sought to exploit them. And so it goes with this non-surprising plot-twist.

The whole thing is over-loud, over-long, emotionally involving and lacking in intelligence. Avoid.

JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM is rated 12A and has a running time of 128 minutes.

A MONSTER CALLS - BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Day 3

A MONSTER CALLS is the best film I have watched this year - a visually stunning, genuinely moving, imaginative and yet profoundly real film about a young boy who retreats into a world of fantasy to cope with his mother's terminal cancer.  The film is directed by JA Bayona (THE ORPHANAGE) using a screenplay by Patrick Ness, based on his own book, all credit is due to the imagination of both.

The create a world in which a boy called Conor O'Malley (Lewis McDougall) lives with his young mother (Felicity Jones - ROGUE ONE) in a house overlooking a spooky looking old church with a giant yew tree in the graveyard.  The boy is plagued by nightmares in which he loses his mother to a chasm that opens up in the graveyard.  One night, at 12:07 he is visited by a monster - the yew tree turned into a kindly/scary old man - and he promises that he will tell Conor three stories,  after which Conor must tell him his story - his truth.  Conor is sceptical about the relevance or power of fairtytales - especially ones as tricksy and dark and conflicted as those told by the monster.  But we soon realise that that monster is there to help Conor understand that in real life there aren't good guys and bad guys and happily ever after.  That belief and love are important but sometimes they aren't enough.  And that sometimes just honestly expressing how you feel is the hardest battle of all.