As the reviews for the $200m Transformers sequels have proved, movies are not what they cost. And yet, for many directors, freedom from financial constraint remains the ultimate goal. In 1970s "New Hollywood", critically revered film-makers such as Francis Ford Coppola had carte blanche to push the budgets of their masterworks ever skyward. That is, until Michael Cimino's 1980 uberflop Heaven's Gate, which earned just over $3m from a budget of $44m, forced studio execs to reconsider the filmmaker's divine right. A-list directors have been fighting to see a return to those heady days ever since, while passion project after passion project has gone unmade. But with Darren Aronofsky's $125m biblical epic Noah now in cinemas, the climate may finally be changing.
More accustomed to budgets a tenth the size of Noah's, Aronofsky elected to let his control-freak flag fly during production. Keen to limit the need for CGI, he had a full-scale replica of the ark made, while the script he co-authored with longtime collaborator Ari Handel blends biblical verse, Darwinian theory and contemporary political allusion to mind-numbing effect. A long, languorous opening act, in which Noah patrols the decaying Earth spouting expositional dialogue, feels antediluvian in more ways than one.
Continue reading...Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/12/noah-titanic-big-budget-epics
No comments:
Post a Comment