I must protest...I am NOT a merry man!

Oops…I meant…


( ^ He's not a merry man either.)

Ridley Scott's Robin Hood.


Firstly, let’s get this straight…

Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood is not a terrible film as I’d heard from some quarters. In fact some elements of it are really rather good. Unfortunately it’s not a film I found myself enjoying while I was watching it. To be honest I felt rather bored and disconnected from everything that was happening on screen. I just wasn’t pulled in to its (admittedly) well-realised world or engaged by its tangled, charmless story or its bland characters. It looked good but overall it left me cold.

What did I like about it?

Well, being a Ridley Scott film, it looks very nice indeed and is certainly a handsomely mounted production with wonderful sets, great costumes and some excellent photography. And it was quite refreshing to see a movie employing some real large-scale action – hundreds of men on horseback and real castles as opposed to thousands of CGI enhanced fighters and battles and landscapes. But, even so, like I said, this movie left me cold.

So what went wrong?

I mean...Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett with a script by the writer of LA Confidential. How could it be anything less than awesome?

Personally I found the whole thing utterly unengaging and unnecessary. The story it was trying to tell I thought was convoluted and kinda dull. At its core it is the bog standard hero’s journey thing we’ve seen a million times before which leads Robin to become, finally, at films end, the hero we know from legend. But it isn’t very well constructed. It just didn’t ring true to me at all. For a start I didn’t for a moment buy Crowe, a very good actor, as a proto Robin Hood. He still has his natural rough, tough charisma, but plays it too low-key and undynamic. And you never really know what kind of a bloke he is. He’s a bit roguish, pretty mercenary, but then he is also unfailingly honest and will risk his life for seemingly no gain after he’s taken the belongings of men he’s killed. I didn’t get any real sense of his character nor of a character journey to show how and why he ends up as the man he does. He (conveniently) remembers some things about his past but doesn’t seem to change or grow as a character. His actions and motivations are rather muddled and unclear with silly things happening like his afore mentioned sudden miraculous memory of his fathers once great importance. And all it took was Max Von Sydow to say “close your eyes” for him to remember all of this vital plot stuff. Huh? Stuff just happens in this film to service the plot and for little other reason.

Another big problem for me was Robin and Marion’s relationship. It felt hollow, bland, forced, a mechanical necessity to the plot rather than one of genuine feeling. Crowe and Blanchett are excellent actors, but here they both just about managed to be solid. Part of the problem is that, when together, they have absolutely no onscreen chemistry so you don’t buy in to what is one of the central pillars of this story.

And as for the so-called merry men…

What a ragged and utterly forgettable bunch including a couple of North American actors who plainly had no idea where these guys were supposed to hail from.

Which brings me to all those accents.

The range of bizarre and awful accents in Robin Hood is one of the most entertaining (for all the wrong reasons) things about it.

And another reason why I didn’t enjoy Robin Hood was this. The whole enterprise was seriously lacking a sense of humour or any sense of fun. What little humour there was came off as mostly forced or just plain lame. Mark Addy as a bee keeping comic relief Friar Tuck was hopeless and simply not funny. None of them were. I don’t think I laughed or broke a smile once in this film.

So what's left?

Well, at least the film’s action and battles were pretty decent. The opening castle siege stuff was pretty good and suitably grubby and noisy. The French attack on Nottingham was very good and by far the best sequence in the movie. And the end beach invasion battle was pretty darn good too, playing like a medieval Saving Private Ryan…only with the heroes defending the beach. I liked how its scale was big but not overly so. This is pretty good stuff.

But wait...

Dang it all, Marion suddenly turns up with a bunch of kids!

What?

And then she has to be saved by Robin!

NO!

I suppose you could argue that it would have been good for her to arrive and then kill Mark Strong as it was he who killed old Man Locksley whom Marion was very close to. But she doesn’t kill Mark Strong. Robin does. Marion turns up and then fairly quickly has to be saved by Robin. That is her sole role in this battle. Now, just think back to the awesome Return of the King. Eowyn fights and defeats the main henchman – the Witch King. For story, character and theme this was a HUGE moment…and one of the greatest “YEAH!” moments in modern cinema. She was an integral part of that battle. What the hell was the point of Marion in the battle at the end of Robin Hood? Did the gaggle of woodland kids she brought with her really make a difference against a major French invasion force? Puh-lease!

For most of Robin Hood’s running time I was teetering on the edge of boredom. I’m all for reinventing old heroes and looking for new takes on old tales. But if you have nothing actually new or interesting to bring to the table, then why bother? The original concept of this film did sound like an original take on the legend. Robin Hood was the villain and the Sheriff the hero with both roles to be played by the same actor. A meditation on duality, about how point of view can determine who is a hero and who is a villain. The one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter thing. But the film we actually got, to me, felt immediately redundant. It was overly serious, po-faced and unengaging. It was so determined to show us 12th century politics and the grim life back then that it missed out on showing its audience (or me at any rate) a good time. This is no Gladiator. Gladiator succeeded due to its grand sweep and the real dramatic, mythic weight it carried with it, along with the sterling acting from all involved. It also provided its hero with a clear journey and clear motivations. You cared about Maximus and his plight, about what was done to him, about the obstacles he had to overcome to achieve his goals. You cared about the friendships and relationships in the film, the themes of honour and love and friendship and family. They all shone. They all had weight. Nothing in Robin Hood had any real weight.

Sorry Rid and Russ, for all its faults I’ll take Costner and Rickman in the daft pantomime of Prince of Thieves any day. But above all I’ll mostly stick with the classic Robin of Sherwood TV series as the definitive take on the Hooded Man. 2/5

A Legendary Book

I am Legend (Richard Matheson, 1954)

This month I finally got around to reading Richard Matheson’s 1954 sci-fi/horror classic I am Legend. It’s one of those books I’ve been meaning to read for years as it’s had such a major impact on modern sci-fi and horror movies and literature. I’ve seen the three films based on it - The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price, The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston and, of course, I am Legend (2007) starring The Fresh Prince and a dog. Even before reading the book I didn’t much like any of these films with the exception of The Last Man on Earth, which, though very low budget, at least seemed faithful and starred the great Vincent Price. I really do hate The Omega Man what with its trippy albino hippies while I am Legend is a decent enough blockbuster vehicle for Will Smith but I knew even before reading the book that it missed the whole point of Matheson’s story by going all CGI Hollywood on us.

For those who don’t know the story of the book, it goes like this:

A plague has swept across the world killing most of humanity and turning them in to vampires. The ones it has infected but who haven’t died have also become vampires. As such the main character Robert Neville appears to be the last human left on Earth.

Neville spends his days out of his fortress house gathering supplies and finding the living and the dead vampires and staking them for a final death. By night he holds up under siege from a horde of bloodsuckers led by one time neighbour Ben Cortman who desperately wants to get at Neville, hurling abuse and taunts at his home guarded by garlic and crosses – all of which seeming to work in the traditional way. Neville has lost his wife and young daughter to the plague and so spends a great deal of time in depression and in heavy drinking. His loneliness is always threatening to destroy him faster than any vampire could. He spends a couple of years this way until he eventually discovers a new mission and point to his life. He decides to learn about diseases and germs and sets out to discover the true source of the vampire plague. He also wants to find out how come all the traditional vampire lore seems to be true – sunlight killing them, fear of crosses, repelled by garlic, unable to cross running water, killed by a stake through the heart. And, of course, how come he alone seems immune.

I am Legend is a fascinating tale that works on several levels.

Firstly, it takes the familiar folklore of vampirism and treats it as a disease; a natural based condition rather than a supernatural one. Over time, Neville does indeed identify the cause of the plague and discover the scientific based reasons for all the familiar vampire attributes. Some of which are surprising but do make a weird kind of sense and are backed up by reasoned arguments. To my knowledge this is probably the first time this approach to vampires was ever taken. Nowadays we see it a lot with the likes of Blade, Ultraviolet, Underworld and the recent Daybreakers, that last one owing a huge debt to Matheson.

Secondly, the book works as a character study. It’s a dark and tragic tale of loneliness, isolation, guilt and regret. Neville feels constant guilt over the death of his wife, Virginia, whom he loved intensely. We see some of their life together in flashback including when she first became ill. And we also see in flashback the horrific night where she comes back to him as a vampire and what he then had to do. Neville of course feels guilty about having had to kill Virginia as a vampire, but more so about having survived the plague while she didn’t. Throughout the book he is constantly talking to her, either out loud or in his mind, saying things like “I’ll be with you soon, Virge.” Neville often falls in to deep depressions, losing track of time and of himself, resulting in sudden mortal dangers such as being caught outside for too long as the sun falls and the vampires come out to hunt. He is also constantly reminded of his old life by the nightly appearance and taunting from his old friend and neighbour Ben Cortman. One of the most interesting things in the book is the sexual nature of Neville’s guilt. Because he is all alone and still has the normal male urges, he finds himself aroused by the female vampires who come out at night and display themselves to him, trying to lure him to them. This is a familiar theme in vampire stories: the sexual undercurrent including dangerous sexual temptation. And Neville hates himself for the thoughts that go through his head and the reaction his body has to their offered flesh. More than once he almost gives in and goes to them, but manages to pull back at the last moment.

Thirdly, I am Legend works as a morality tale. A fable about ones place in the world. About seeing the wider view and not giving in to mindless fear and prejudice, about trying not to become that which you despise the most. For it eventually becomes apparent to Neville that the world has changed forever. There is no going back. Humanity as he knew it has gone, with a new species now born in its stead. A species that is trying to carve out a new society from the ruins of the old. But one thing stands in their way. The one who murders their kind by day, slaying loved ones – mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children. The object of their fear and hate, the bogeyman that comes for them while they sleep. There is only one way this story can end.

I am Legend is a great book, a justifiable classic. It is short (180 pages), simply told, lightly plotted, yet dense with ideas and character. Neville is an everyman. He is not a soldier or scientist or whatnot. He is smart and resourceful, sure, but he also has to learn about things to survive and progress. He spends years learning about diseases and germs so he can try and work out what happened to the world. Even then he gets things wrong.

Having now read the book, the Vincent Price movie is by far the closest in terms of plot and themes. The Will Smith one is pretty far removed and it irks me even more that they took a book full of such great ideas and a brilliant and challenging central one (which is the entire point of the book’s title) and discarded it in favour of standard Hollywood heroics. They entirely missed the point of Matheson’s story. Twats! Reading I am Legend I couldn’t help but think that back in his heyday John Carpenter could have made a wicked film out of it. Shame he didn’t get the chance.

But if you ever get the chance, then pick up a copy and read it. It’s a seminal work. It’s the stuff of legend.

Next up on my book pile is Handling the Undead, Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist’s follow up to his excellent Let the Right One In.