KWIF = Kent's Week in Film.
This Week:
Juror #2 (2024, d. Clint Eastwood - Crave)
The Wild Robot (2024, d. Chris Sanders - AmazonPrime)
Conclave (2024, d. Edward Berger - AmazonPrime)
The Gorge (2025, d. Scott Derrickson - AppleTV+)
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I have only seen a half-dozen of Eastwood's many directorial efforts, all being unfussy tales told in a pretty direct manner, with something to say through characters and story. This matter-of-factness about Eastwood's movies has never much appealed to me. I find his works mildly compelling in the viewing but with little stickiness afterwards, and very little to linger on.
Juror #2 continues that streak. It's Eastwood and first-time writer Jonathan A. Abrams' examination of the American justice system, which can be summed up as "it's a flawed system, but it's all we've got."
Eastwood's focus here seems to be dead set on not generating any suspense or thrills. He wants to be clearn, this is not a John Grisham story, nor is it a courtroom drama, it is an exploration of subjectivity in the legal system and it never deigns to offer any answers. It will neither condemn nor praise the justice system, as I think Eastwood's more conservative tendencies makes it hard for him to fully criticize any American institutions.
The plot finds Justin (Nicholas Hoult, Dark Phoenix) -- a journalist, recovering alcoholic and expectant father -- reticently being selected for jury duty. The trial is of a second-degree murder case about an ex-gang banger who is charged with the death of his girlfriend. After an argument in a bar, she was found dead on the rocks down the side of a bridge. Thing is, as the details are examined in court Justin realizes that he was there that night, at the bar, he saw the fight though he was lost in his own misery, and on his ride home in the rain, he hit what he thought was a deer, seeing nothing when he went out to check.
Justin wants to do the right thing, he wants to come forward, but his AA sponsor and lawyer (Kiefer Sutherland) tells him that coming forward, even though it was an accident, given his drunk driving history, it will result in a very hefty prison sentence and that he has a family to think about.
The thrust of the movie is not in the courtroom, but in the sequestered jury room, where, at first, Justin is the only hold-out on finding the defendant guilty. Without tipping his hat to his own complicitness, he tries to convince the others that there's reasonable doubt. But the point of the movie is that despite being told to be unbiased and objective in their decision making, within a room of 12 individuals some are still going to have bias and base decisions on feelings.
Hoult does carry the film, with Toni Collette being the prosecuting attorney who is up for election as the District Attorney, and this case will make or break her. Her counterpart in the courtroom, the public defender played by Chris Messina is an altruistic true believer in justice and an old friend of Collette's who rides her hard about justice vs. politics, appealing to her sense of morals. It's a film lacking a villain and Collette could have easily been it, but she instead takes on the idea that she could be wrong and starts reexamining her own case.
There were avenues for this film to go down, ways of generating some incredible tension and emotional weight, but Eastwood really sidesteps these avenues for an almost clinical examination of this, I want to say, ridiculous scenario that's been concocted solely to examine these threads of the American justice system. It's not a full movie, but it's not an exciting one either. It's the type of film where you say "yeah, I get it" halfway through and then have to stick it out for the rest of the movie as it plays out hammering the same chord.
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Within the opening few minutes of The Wild Robot I was immediately taken aback by some of the creature designs (and by creatures I mean actual woodland animals), and not in a good way... there's a blockiness to them that I think was intended to juxtapose against the roundedness of the robot protagonist. The fur and feathers and other textures of the creatures stood out to me, glaringly, a distraction that I never did fully get used to.
The titular Wild Robot awakens in the waters off the shore of an forested island. It is a task-oriented helper robot looking to every woodland creature to give it something to do. The creatures fear this automaton (except the raccoons who start pillaging it, the dirty thieves they are) and the robot prepares to send a distress beacon to be recalled home (except the raccoons steal the beacon). So the robot goes into learning mode, observing the creatures and watching the food chain play out, and along the way picks up the language so that it can speak with the animals. An accident causes the robot to knock over a tree, killing some geese and the robot finding an egg. After a chase sequence with a fox (Pedro Pascal, bringing a real Ben Schwartz energy), the robot is given the task of being a mother to a newly hatched, stunted-wing gosling. She must feed it, teach it swim and fly so that it can migrate for the winter.
In a bold choice, the film spends only about 10 minutes with the robot, her new fox friend, and the baby gosling as she develops her maternal instincts. It then smash cuts to months later, the gosling is grown and it needs to become part of the flock, failing miserably on first attempt. Migration is coming soon and to fulfill her task, the robot must get her baby in the air, ready for its long journey.
The film's first act leads to robot (named Roz, played by Lupita Nyong'o) picking up her assignment, and then jumping to putting a lot of the focus on Brightbill and his need to migrate. It's clear that in the process Roz has developed past her task-oriented programming and enabled maternal instincts and developed an approximation of emotions, and the film makes it frustratingly obvious to everyone but Roz and Brightbill (who suddenly becomes a rebellious teenager).
It feels like cheating, the time jump, and it frustrated me that this story that's partly about technology's increasing invasion upon nature doesn't do more with that thread. The third act finds Roz's, having succeeded at her task, recalling her corporate overlords, and nearly destroying the island in the process, which is the expected answer. It feels like the obvious stakes for the film, and as such wasn't fully satisfying.
Throughout the film the story toys with cohabitation within nature. It very clearly starts the film showing how the creatures of the island forest survive upon eating each other, but it starts trying to present this peaceful existence, of the creatures rallying as a community for their own self-preservation (or even to save Roz). While it makes for cozy kiddie-fare (which more and more the movie reveals itself to be) I found it hard to buy into.
It's an intentionally heartwarming film with a gentle disposition that 's hard to not be soothed by, but at the same time, it's not an honest production, and I had to keep shutting down my b.s. detector and relax into its vibe. Even still, the vibe isn't steady. The Wild Robot doesn't tell its story cleanly. I wanted to like it more.
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Conclave is a pseudo-political thriller that takes place inside the sterile marble walls of Vatican City in the wake of the reigning(?) Pope's death and the assemblage of cardinals from around the globe to vie for and select the new Pope, under the guise of enacting the will of God.
But God rarely enters into it, and the election of Pope in Conclave is a fraught contest, severed down the line between regressionist conservatives and liberal progressives. Of course, among it all is a hefty level of in-fighting, bargaining, and secrets to be kept or exposed. At the center of it is Ralph Feinnes playing the dean of the College of Cardinals. He not only has no interest himself in assuming the papacy, but was preparing to resign from position as dean prior to the Pope's death. He is a good man, and thorough, and when he finds out dirt on any of the Cardinals in the running, he never directly outs them or exposes their dirt, but instead leaves it to them to do what is just and right as a member of The Church. Of course, the pettiness of others means the dirt gets tossed into the open anyway.
Most of my knowledge of the Catholic church comes from watching Father Ted, which at once lampoons and reveres the religion. Conclave is much, much more stern than Father Ted but I couldn't help but get the same sensibility out of it, that it was simultaneously reverential and also taking the piss. As a political thriller, it's sublimely pulpy with it's "shocks" and "twists", none of which are very surprising (at least until the finale) but still are quite delightful in their execution.
It's all accentuated by incredible cinematography from Stéphane Fontaine, along with the direction and art department, practically every shot is an incredible composition in its own right. I found myself smiling at the framing of figures, or how the cardinal reds and whites contrasted against their surroundings. The laughably eccentric styling of robes and hats, especially when assembled en masse, look ludicrous, but in these compositions look like art. Seeing cardinals huddling in the courtyard in groups of three-to-five, smoking, gossiping, it's just incredible the overhead shot. I liked the story of the film, but I loved looking at it. There may not really be any true action in the movie, but visually it's so engaging and a tense, plinking, screeching score from Volker Bertelmann makes one's pulse spike up.
It's a film that's not really saying anything pointedly (except that perhaps the Catholic church is as prone to political in-fighting as any other nation), it's just deliciously consumable entertainment.
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For days I thought about that stupid-looking trailer because I couldn't get over that Teller and Taylor-Joy were in it. Then I learned that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross were handling soundtrack duties, and that legit horror/Doctor Strange filmmaker Scott Derrickson was director. There had to be something more than what I was seeing.
Toasty recaps the film nicely in his review so I won't get into it the details much except to say that I found Teller's portrayal of being a shell-shocked veteran sniper to be fairly effective early on, but Taylor-Joy's Lithuanian sniper to be another in the relatively recent trope of quippy eastern bloc women killers (see also: Helena in Orphan Black, Yelena in the MCU and Max/Nichka in The Recruit) who seems completely unaffected by the work she does.
As Toasty points out, the premise of what's in the titular gorge is not inherently bad, but there are so many questions raised about the whys and hows of containing what's in the gorge that it threatens to undermine the logic of the whole movie (okay, maybe not threaten so much as cut the film off at its knees). And yet, if The Gorge succeeds at all, it's because it doesn't start as a movie about the gorge at all, but instead about these two characters falling in love (yes, really) and a critique of private military contractors who will stop at nothing to profit even more from war.
I really and truly bought into the accross-the-gorge romance between Teller and Taylor-Joy, and frankly, I would have loved a movie starring these two that was solely a wartime drama about them being on opposing sides of a conflict staring at each other through sniper lenses across some barrier between them, and connecting anyway. There's some meat to that idea.
The second act of this film gets lost in the mysteries of the Gorge and, at first I was surprised by how...bigger budgeted the world inside the gorge was. There's lots of bio-organic creepy-crawlies and vine-and-moss-ensconced skeletons to fend off and frankly, it all looks so much better than anything I was expecting. There are terrains and building within the gorge to discover, again, not at all what I was expecting, only to unveil the true nature of what our protagonists were up on those towers trying to stop from getting out.
As much as the unveiled world within the gorge impressed me, it was still far less interesting to me than the romance between our leads and I couldn't help but feel that the story loses sight of the characters once it starts playing into "unraveling the conspiracy". Having just dashed through all 6 seasons of Lost in the two months, I'm all for secret buildings and old videos and mysteries, but it's not really what you were selling me on throughout your first act.
As Toasty notes, the more the film reveals about the gorge, the more ridiculous the setup becomes. I wasn't really thinking there was a mystery to explore going into the film. I was anticipating instead that within the gorge was some ruptured gateway to the afterlife and the undead soldier of past gorge-watchers were spilling out. I don't know if the film would have been better had the gorge been left more of a mystery, but the third act winds up feeling pretty perfunctory. It's a film that really needed a John Carpenter-esque approach, explaining less, and more of an unresolved ending.
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