The novel by Victor Hugo is brobably
the most adapted book ever written, with hundreds of theatre, radio,
TV and cinema versions from all over the world dating from the 1800's
to today. Now I of course haven't seen all of those adaptations, but
from the movies the 1934 one was quite
ok and I kind of liked the 1998 version, but really I just wonder what the
hell can anyone add to that story anymore. Well it turns out not
much, except for a great cast. But the cast really is almost worth
the whole movie. Hugh Jackman is great, Russell Crowe is good as well
even though he can't sing that much, Samantha Barks was surprisingly
good and pretty much everyone in the movie brings out a great
performance. But there's one above everyone else and that's Anne
Hathaway, her performance is just about as perfect as one can be. Too
bad she's gone after the first 30 or 40 minutes and even though the
rest aren't bad either, but you just feel the level going down from
there on. Then the music, just about every line in this movie is
delivered by singing. Now I'm not a big fan of musicals as they tend
to take me out of the movie as it's not realistic in any way, but
that being said, I don't hate them. But as the music here isn't
exactly diverce, it gets rather boring towards the end when there's
only an occasional word or two which aren't sung. After about 2 hours
I was basically begging for some normal dialog between the
characters, but no chance of that.
I didn't like the camerawork, the shaky
cam tried to get some sense of realism to it, but really most of the
time it was just annoying as it kept reminding you that you are
watching a movie, the complete opposite of what it usually tends to
do. Also the framing was simply boring, every single scene was framed
with either closeups or some weird angle which left you just
wondering why the hell was that angle chosen and does the cameraman
have some sort of a balance disorder. And when I say closeups, I mean
about 95 percent of the shots in this whole movie. Sure that brings
out the emotions from the actor, but I guess they don't know what
establishing shots mean or that you really need some diversity for it
to keep it interesting. This is painfully obvious at some of the most
powerful parts of the story where the movie takes out the scope of
things by just giving you a face. Now that's a real problem as this
story is really epic and demands some bigger scale to things, you'd
expect that a big Hollywood movie would bring that, yet the movie
manages to look small, kind of like a small theater play. Another
problem is that every scene is built to maximize intensity and
thriving for the biggest possible emotional impact, unfortunately
that makes the movie annoyingly monotonious. It seems that the
director doesn't even know what subtle or nuanced mean. So when you
finally get to the end where you'd supposed to feel deeply for the
characters, I found myself not giving a damn and just hoping this
stupidity would be over. In the light of all that the fact that Tom
Hooper gets so much acclaim for the direction of this is just
criminally wrong.
In the end this movie was only worth
the watch to see Anne Hathaway's performance, but unfortunately even
as brilliant as it was the rest of the movie isn't worth it. And it's
really a shame that those great performances by Hathaway, Jackman and
Barks get wasted in a movie like this.
30%
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