According to Dictionary.com, fun is defined as “something that provides mirth or amusement”. It must be said that not all movies need to provide mirth and amusement to give the audience an effective cinematic experience. I am thinking of advocacy documentaries, war films, and anything directed by Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, or Michael Haneke. Here are some cinematic franchises I do expect to be fun: James Bond, Star Trek, Star Wars, and certainty Superman.

Superman has always been my favourite superhero. Ever since I was a child, I loved the character. I love how he does right simply because it’s right, and not to nurse psychological demons, like Batman. I loved how he can fly, because, well, that’s just cool. The facts that his girlfriend can’t recognize him with glasses on, and that nobody ever notices that Mr. Kent and Superman are never around at the same time are stupid and implausible, but that’s okay. It’s fun.

I must report to you that there was very little fun, nor mirth or amusement, in Man of Steel, the new Superman film from Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan. The movie has a gloomy, dark look to it (something that the 3-D does not help) and Superman’s costume, famously bright colored, is muted, which ends up being a metaphor for the entire film.

A positive trend in cinema has developed over the last ten years or so in which fantastic characters are given a darker, more realistic psychology. The recent Bond movies and Nolan’s Batman films are examples. I don’t think giving Superman a realistic psychology would be a problem but making it darker is – who wants to see a dark Superman movie? It’s an oxymoron. You see, Superman must be fun to be Superman.

Take the villain, for example. The bad guy in this film is General Zod, played by Michael Shannon. Zod was played by Terrence Stamp in Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980) and the differences between the performances are emblematic of the divergence between those films and this one. Stamp was hamming it up and having fun, but how else could an actor effectively say the dialogue he had been given? Shannon goes for a more naturalistic approach. He doesn’t seem fake or melodramatic, but that just makes everything worse, and makes the banal dialogue more silly. It’s not Shannon’s fault – it’s Snyder’s and Nolan’s, for trying to force a tone on the film that is inappropriate for the material.

The best thing about Man of Steel is the new Superman, Jersey actor Henry Cavill. He’s not as good as Christopher Reeve (who could be?) but he’s effective in the role, with a dead-on American accent. He manages to express the essential goodness and decency of the character while not looking awkward in the costume.

Unfortunately, the rest up the film is not up to Cavill’s standards. When the picture is not giving us gloomy cinematography and badly written dialogue we are treated to endless action sequences in which Superman and Zod throw each other through buildings. Because they can’t really be hurt, it gets boring and tedious very fast. The special effects in Reeve’s films may look a bit antiquated by today’s standards, but they were kind of graceful and made me believe that a man could fly. Man of Steel made me believe a red CGI blur can leap – inside a computer.

I had been looking forward to this movie for a long time, and, with the exception of Cavill’s performance, found it to be a major disappointment. The sad thing is that didn’t even really need to be good for me to enjoy it. It just needed to be fun.

2.0 out 4

Marcelo Machado’s film of the same name brings together Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and some of the movement’s other key players in an exploration of a dynamic part of Brazil’s history, blending interviews, voiceover and previously-unseen footage to illustrate just what an impact it had. And, naturally, this is done in a quintessentially Brazilian way. Vibrant explosions of music and colour maintain a vivacious pace, complimenting the slick, graphically-driven editing of the various archive media in a way that reinforces the idea that this was very much a whirlwind of free expression.

However, it’s a whirlwind that at points veers dangerously close to spinning out of control. Although polished, the editing brings together characters, voices and events in such chaotic succession that the previously-uninitiated might become quickly overwhelmed. Whilst this gives an indication of the energetic nature of the movement itself, it ultimately fails to underline the true cultural significance of some of the events before sprinting off to cover different ground.

It’s frequently said that Tropicália was like a single, perfect wave of liberationist optimism that swept over Brazil and soaked into everything. What Tropicália translates really well is the emotion that came with this tide – of freedom and giddy excitement at the prospect of unsilenced self-expression. But unfortunately it hits rather an awkward tone, rendering it difficult for others to share in this celebration. Rather than a single wave, Tropicália is more like a set of choppy ripples; it happily splashes about and covers a lot, but its lack of depth only makes what it crosses just a bit damp.

2.0/4

Tropicália is released in cinemas on 5 July, and on DVD on 7 July 2013

@olliedabson

This is one of those movies that I probably would not have seen if I did not write for this website, but I ended up being very glad I did make the trip to the cinema. It’s one of the better animated films made in a long while.

On paper, the movie’s premise does not fill one with hope. Teenage Mary Katherine (voice of Amanda Seyfried) is visiting her divorced father (Jason Sudeikis), a crackpot scientist who lives isolated in the forest. He’s trying to prove that there are little, fairy-like people living there. We are told that this obsession destroyed his marriage (which is really not that surprising), and that father and daughter are not particularly close.

Of course, this being a movie, there actually are little people living in the forest. They are hard for humans to see because they live on a slightly faster plane of existence. The forest is personified in the form Queen Tara (Beyoncé) who is protected by soldiers known as Leafmen. The Leafmen attempt to protect the forest from evil creatures who dress in rats’ and bats’ skins, known as Boggans, but they don’t do a very good job of it, considering the fact that the Queen is killed and the forest is threatened with destruction very early in the film.

Looking at the preceding paragraph, I can see that I am not really doing a good job selling this movie. The plot involves generic fantasy tropes, and I probably do not have to tell you what happens to the relationship between Mary Katherine and her father, but none of that matters, because it is done so well.

This movie is absolutely beautiful. The animation is breathtaking, and the visual details are remarkable. The Leafmen fly on birds that they mount like horses, and they seem to move like real birds. If you have ever wondered what men riding birds like horses would look like, this is your film.

Pretty much everything in the forest is either beautiful or cool. I liked the flower people, whose heads look like hats, and the way that they move, with a kind of graceful, fairy-like manner. The action sequences (something I usually get bored by in other films) are well conceived and actually suspenseful. The relationship between Mary Katherine and her father, as well as a youthful attraction with a junior Leafman (Josh Hutcherson) both manage to be kind of sweet despite their unoriginality.

The idea behind Epic is not new, but the execution is masterful. The director, Chris Wedge, first came to prominence with Bunny (1998) a memorable Academy Award winning short, but had yet not been able to follow up artistically following that metaphysical picture. Epic is a big leap forward. It is a family film in the sense that it’s appropriate for someone of any age, but it’s so good that I would recommend adults to see it on their own, without kids. Really.

4.0 out of 4

Baz Luhrmann’s interpretation of the novel has everything you can expect from a big-name, big-budget adaptation; expansive sets, extravagant costumes, and an exciting soundtrack full of names like Beyoncé, Florence and the Machine, and Lana del Ray. And it all works brilliantly. Filmed in Australia, Luhrmann captures the heat of a summer in 1920s New York, even if there is a little over-reliance on blue screens, which is just a personal pet peeve of mine. The costumes, designed by Miuccia Prada, are outstanding, and I think both women and men across the world will forever be Google-imaging the picture of Leonardo DiCaprio in that impeccable pink suit. The fact that the film has sparked a revival of all things twenties in fashion and jewellery – a fine example being the diamond-encrusted headband by Tiffany’s – and the overt Moët product placement in the film all speak to the materialism that, whilst being a key part of the novel, may have overshadowed some of the story’s finer subtleties.

In fact, where I was left a little disappointed was the attention paid to the little details of the novel. A friend of mine who went to a 5 o’clock screening said it was full of sixth-formers, who sat silently trying to take in as much as possible for their English Literature exam in a few weeks; if there are any of said sixth-formers reading this, please note, the things the examiners are looking for were not in the film. The effort was made to include the shaving foam on Mr McKee’s face, yet Nick’s preoccupation with perfection that it represents is entirely lost in the debauched liquor-and-sex-fuelled party that take place in Myrtle and Tom’s apartment. In an attempt to appeal to the mass market, the nuances of the story were replaced with product placements and a soundtrack that can serve as a pre-drinks playlist for any 18-24 year old.

As a die-hard fan of the novel, I thought I would be more upset about the lack of attention paid to the smaller, but in many ways defining details of Fitzgerald’s book. However, the acting was, across the board, exceptional. Leonardo DiCaprio is the perfect Gatsby; he will be, for most people, the Gatsby you pictured in your head, and his love for Daisy, or what she means for him, is in every action and every word. Carey Mulligan as Daisy is similarly impressive. Like DiCaprio, she fits Fitzgerald’s own description almost to the word, and like Gatsby, you fall in love with her almost against your will.

Luhrmann’s great attempt at creating The Great Gatsby was an honourable one, but rather than becoming the definitive film, it has become yet another view of Gatsby alongside the previous films, the ballet, and so many other productions and products that have tried to capture Fitzgerald’s novel and its namesake hero. So, if you are as big a fan of the novel as I am, prepare for some nit-picking; there will be bits that you will wish were better. However, if you are a lover of the twenties, again like myself, and are looking for some lavish, 1920s-inspired Hollywood decadence, Gatsby will not fail to disappoint.

3.5 out of 4

I spoke to James about the project, and the film that told its story.

Ollie Dabson: I wanted to start by asking you about your previous thoughts on climate change. You mentioned at the start of the film that you used to be a bit of a sceptic. Why was this, and what caused you to change your mind?

James Balog: There were lots of layers to it. One was simply that I was involved with a lot of other conservation and environment-related issues twenty years ago, and my first reflex was “Oh Christ, aren’t there enough things to think about?” Another part was that I really didn’t have it in my basic mental programming that it was possible for humans to change the fundamental operating system of the planet. Of course I knew that we could make animals go extinct, and we can deforest landscapes here and there, but the idea that we could actually change the elemental foundations of physics, chemistry and biology on the Earth really hadn’t occurred to me, and it still hasn’t occurred to most people even today. Finally, I thought that the science was primarily about computer modelling, and I’m a bit of a sceptic about computer modelling. The fact of the matter is that today’s climate models are quite good, but the climate models of twenty years ago – not so much. So for all of those reasons I was kind of rolling my eyes and thinking “Oh God, I don’t know if this is real”. It was when I took the time to keep an open mind and learn more about the science that I realised that this was not all driven by computer models, this was about real-world empirical evidence that was visible on the ground.

OD: And this realisation led to the creation of the subject of the film, the Extreme Ice Survey. You’ve now built up a catalogue of hundreds of thousands of images [of glaciers] – what was it like to see that first completed time-lapse sequence?

JB: It was staggering. It was astounding when we saw the first pictures come through in June 2007 – that was from the first cameras that had been deployed on the project which started March 2007 in Iceland. We were all gathered around the computer room watching this stuff, and we really didn’t know how dramatic the pictorial evidence would turn out to be. It was a shock –  a revelation –  and it continues to be a revelation when we download the pictures from the cameras today. We’ve just had a team up in Alaska which has just come home over the weekend; I haven’t seen the pictures yet but they’re telling me that it continues to be shocking.

OD: For me, one of the most exciting things about the film is how you bring these really distant, spectacular landscapes to people who might not normally experience them, and then you bring them to life in a very dynamic way. Did you ever have concerns that these places are just too far removed from civilisation, and that people might find it difficult to relate to the message as a result?

JB: Sure, you always have all kinds of anxieties and doubts. At the beginning, I was concerned about how people would respond to a story about glaciers, but as an artist, my number one concern is to express what’s going on in my world as I experience it. I realised long ago that if you worry about pandering to the audience, you’re creatively sabotaging yourself before you even get out the door. My concern is to do what I think is aesthetically, conceptually, experientially correct and let the audience follow me.

OD: Now you take these sequences of photographs all over the world; have you found that there’s a difference in the attitudes and responses you get to the project? Are some people slightly more hostile towards the message?

JB: Not particularly, no – I think people have been shockingly responsive. I don’t recognise any sort of national variation. The director [Jeff Orlowski] is in China as we speak, screening the film to China and Taiwan as part of a Sundance White House sponsored film tour, and it’ll be interesting to see what he hears over there, but I suspect the audiences will be quite enthusiastic. What I worry about a little bit when I’m out there on the road is that sometimes you go into audience environments where you know you’ve mostly got people who are hostile to the climate change message. I’ve screened it in front of rooms full of retired guys seventy or ninety years old who spent their lives in big corporations and so forth, and as a general rule they are not likely to be converts. And yet I find that even in those audiences, I get a lot of people saying “thank you for opening my eyes”.

OD: It’s clearly an incredible result, but it’s also been a very personal journey and you’ve overcome physical challenges, technical difficulties, even injury. Looking back on it all, has it been worth it?

JB: Yeah, it’s been absolutely worth it. As we speak right now, I’ve just had my fourth knee surgery – problems with my knee were a core part of the challenges and indeed those challenges have continued. And it’s still worth it, as I recognised a while ago, because doing this project has been my destiny. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, that’s all. It’s an accumulation of everything I have known about as an adult person – it’s about love, it’s about photography, it’s about science and it’s about physical adventure. Those have all been the main currents of my adult life and they all come together in this project. I actually feel incredibly fortunate that, in spite of all of the travails and the suffering, I’ve had the privilege of doing what it was mine to do.

OD: And finally, has there been a single moment through your journey that has especially stood out to you?

JB: Oh boy. There’s been so, so many – one really exciting point in the journey was just a few weeks ago when we screened the film at the White House for all the senior staff of the executive branch, and everybody who had any involvement in climate change, energy, technology and science, all of them leading officials, were there. That was a big moment. Out in the field there were so many incredible times – there still are, in fact. I think some of the most special moments were the really quiet moments – one o’clock in the morning on the Greenland ice sheet, when the Sun is way down low near the North Pole somewhere. The whole ice sheet freezes up and it gets really quiet and there’s no wind, and the light is this gorgeous golden pink pastel colour that washes across the landscape and it feels like the whole world is holding its breath. The midnight Sun, it’s a very special aspect of the Arctic. It’s really blissful, and I cherish that.

Chasing Ice is released on DVD and Blu-Ray on 10 June 2013.

@olliedabson

Maybe you shouldn’t read this review. Maybe my opinion as a fan-geek will not be helpful to you. Then again, I will be the first to admit that some of aspects of the franchise (Voyager, I’m thinking of you) are sometimes embarrassing and intolerable. At other times, Star Trek can be just totally awesome. Into Darkness is one of those times.

I was not that big of a fan of the previous picture, which rebooted The Original Series with new actors set in a parallel reality, thus preserving the continuity of the other Trek media while allowing J.J. Abrams to make altercations where desired. The idea of introducing the material to a new generation was a good one, but the execution was poor, losing some of the philosophical underpinnings and replacing them with standard action movie fare. A friend of mine correctly stated that it felt more like Buck Rogers than anything else.

Not here. Perhaps the greatest compliment that I can give the film is that it just plain feels like a Star Trek movie, striking just the right balance between old and new. To me, the appeal of Trek has been always a combination of endearing characters, liberal social commentary and a call to adventure in a space setting, and this movie pulls off the trifecta. It doesn’t try to do what it can’t (such as replicate the golden three way chemistry between William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley) but finds new and interesting ways for the revamped versions of the characters to interact with each other.

The previous film really only developed Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto), but this one has more time for the entire ensemble. I particularly liked the friendship between Kirk and Scotty (Simon Pegg) and the attraction between Spock and Uhura (Zoe Saldana), both of which were hinted at but not really exploited in the TV show. There’s also some material in the bromance between Kirk and Spock that is, uh, kind of moving, to the point that I heard crying in the theatre.

In terms of social comment, I have a feeling Gene Roddenberry would be proud. Essentially the film is a critique of Bush-era American foreign policy, albeit a few years too late. The message is well-taken and not too preachy, which is sometimes a problem in Trek.

Finally, the adventure aspects and actions sequences really worked this time. The villain (Benedict Cumberbatch) is actually threatening, for example. Abrams has had problems with action elements in his other films, which seemed to stop an interesting story for a dull exercise in special effects chaos. Here, all of the sequences are well integrated into the storyline and some are rather thrilling. Like the very best of Star Trek, we really get the feeling that we are in space in the future, discovering cool new things and meeting exciting new aliens.

There is one annoying quirk of the movie I feel like I must mention, and it is Abrams’ use (or abuse) of lens flares. They are not necessary and are just distracting at best, and occasionally ruin some otherwise beautiful shots. The flares are at least better here than in the last movie, in which it seemed that someone was aiming a flashlight at the camera throughout the entire film.

Setting aside the flares, this is one of the best pictures in the series, in the company of The Wrath of Khan (1982) and First Contact (1996). Abrams has grown as a film artist. Making a film like this, that could have failed in a hundred ways but succeeds in ninety nine of them, is a sign of the arrival of a great talent. It also assures that Star Trek will be around for a long time, but well, we knew that already.

4.0 out of 4

Although I think we can all agree it was never in danger of rivaling Au Hasard Balthazar as a great work of cinematic art, the first Iron Man film did have its charms. It managed to avoid some of the portentousness found in other superhero movies with its hedonistic protagonist, and adopted a lightly comic tone without bordering on kitsch, which was refreshing. The eternal twelve year old boy inside me enjoyed the final showdown, where a man dressed in a robot suit fought a man dressed in a giant robot suit.

Having seen through two sequels and the character’s appearance in Marvel Avengers Assemble, I discovered that my Iron Man tolerance was maxed out with one movie. After that, Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey, Jr.) antics and snappy “witticisms” became annoying and the plotting predictable. Seeing Iron Man fly once was kind of cool, seeing him fly over and over again is just boring.

The plot of this installment involves America being terrorized by The Mandarin (Sir Ben Kingsley) a terrorist who sets off untraceable bombs in public areas and sends cruel videos to manipulate the President (William Sadler). The Mandarin is somehow related to a geeky scientist (Guy Pearce) and a pretty lady (Rebecca Hall) that Stark screwed on New Year’s Eve 1999, one metaphorically, one literally.

The release of the this film was unfortunately ill-timed due to the terrible tragedy in Boston and I found the early scenes of The Mandarin’s videos, the most effective part of the film, a bit too serious and disturbing for a superhero movie. The rest of the film is fairly by the numbers and has little originality. Even the surprises are not that surprising, if you get my drift.

This is not really a bad movie, just an unnecessary and dull one. It can be compared to the later Rocky films, which take a character that was appealing in one installment and repeat the same formula, over and over again. One thing I can’t really accuse the film of is false advertising (except perhaps in the title, as the poster uses the Arabic numeral but the title screen spells out the word “three”). The movie is pretty much what you would expect. If that’s what you want, that’s what you get.

Speaking of advertising, when I saw the trailer, before a screening of Oz the Great and Powerful, I thought about a hypothetical film where Iron Man teams up with the Tin Man. That would be an unexpected cinematic experience.

2.0 out of 4

Sometimes, being 6ft1 and female is slightly awkward. You look silly in heels. Trousers and men are often too short. However, my extra inches were a distinct advantage on the morning of April the 17th, when standing outside St Paul’s cathedral watching the choreographed pageantry of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. I was something of a neutral observer. Though not a fan of her policies, I object slightly to the personal vilification of her from some quarters in recent days. She ended as a fragile octogenarian, gripped by dementia and living a life of luxurious loneliness, stuck at the top of the Ritz since January, waiting to die. Glenda Jackson’s excellent Commons speech seems to be the most admirable response to her demise so far. Though hyperbolic in places, Jackson successfully expresses a hatred for the policies, for Thatcherism, without turning the woman into a mythical witch. Even if she was on occasion personally vile, even if you disagree with everything she stood for and did, burning her in effigy or turning your back on the coffin won’t change what she did, and it won’t hurt her. She’s dead and cannot watch. Her family, though, are not dead and do have to watch.

There were some loudly expressed opinions both pro and anti-Thatcher yesterday, with banners carrying messages ranging from ‘We are here to remember the victims of Thatcherism’ to ‘Margaret Thatcher put the Great into Great Britain’. The journalists around us focused on these people; they were filmed and questioned and egged on by reporters clearly hoping for some ‘angry debate’ footage to put on the news. Most of the crowd, though, weren’t carrying banners, and didn’t seem that interested in discussing policies. They were there for spectacle, not debate. I struck up conversation with the people around me after taking pictures for them with my up-stretched gangly arms. When I asked why they were there, none said ‘because Maggie Thatcher was my political idol and I agreed with all of her policies’. The three most common answers were ‘respect’, ‘patriotism’ and ‘just wanted to be here’.

She had been a personal inspiration to the woman next to me, who remembered feeling, as a school-girl, that if Maggie Thatcher could make it, so could she. From shop-keeper’s daughter to Prime Minister. That really isn’t bad. A man nearby had a transistor radio, so we heard the service as it unfolded. When the Dean of St Paul’s spoke about the funeral being not about politics but about the universal truths of death, family and (for him and Thatcher, at least) faith, the crowd around me murmured in agreement. There seemed to be some widely shared values among them; a respect for tradition, patriotism and achievement, a thirst for ceremony. They wanted this woman’s death to have meaning, dignity and purpose. What with all the marching and music and silly hats, it was easy to forget the cause of the event – a death. We watched the stomping soldiers, listened to the brass bands, and tried to spot famous politicians. Even when the coffin itself appeared, it was natural to focus of the pained faces of the blokes maneuvering it rather than to consider what it was they were carrying. All the energy, ambition, daring and heartlessness of Margaret Thatcher, all that has made her a heroine and a hate-figure, a mother and a wife and leader, all that ended, leaving some snappably frail bones in a box.

This truth was not the focus, really. It was the event people had come to see, not the person or the remains of her. Despite my height, the view was constantly impeded by a terrifying lady dressed all in navy blue, who proudly declared that she had arrived at 8am with her (small) son and a step ladder. She also proudly declared that she had used said step ladder at both the Royal Jubilee and Olympic parades. I internally christened her ScaryToryWoman. She had printed Margaret Thatcher’s Wikipedia page for her son, and was asking him questions about it. There was a similarly Dursleyish presence nearby in the form of a moustache-wriggling man who kept barking things like ‘keep your back straight lad’ when soldiers marched past. Despite being not my usual cup of tea, the marchy ceremonial stuff was quite impressive, and she had chosen some good hymns.

It gave me something of the euphoria you feel at a huge and amazing gig, when Elbow or Mumford or whoever reaches your favourite song and you think ‘YES! I’d follow you anywhere!’ But I didn’t properly get this feeling. Maybe it was the mizzling rain, or ScaryToryMum’s distracting back. Mostly, though, I never launched fully into such a delirious Numembergian state because there was too much to disagree with; when the Queen arrived, I started clapping before I remembered that I’m a republican and stopped. When the Bishop spoke about how personally kind she’d been to people in distress I remembered her policy of ‘care in the community’, which condemned so many thousands to homelessness. In any event, I think it was the chance of that collective feeling which subconsciously drew so many people there, including me. We humans like to feel united, we like to share things. We like to be able to tell people afterwards, ‘I was there’. I was at the party, the riot, the funeral. I saw. But what exactly did I see? I’ve tried to tell you in this article, but I’m not entirely sure myself. I saw lots of things, many conflicting. All of the emotions on display, though, stemmed from the same desire – the desire to matter, for ‘it’ to matter, whatever ‘it’ even is. Rationally, I can’t believe that all the ceremony and old words said that day will speed Lady Thatcher’s passage to the afterlife; I can’t believe that there is an afterlife. Rational conclusions, though, won’t stop those same crowds gathering again, when the Queen dies. And they won’t stop me surrendering myself to music sometimes, when I’m caught unawares.

Any musical ensemble, no matter what the style, is faced with huge conflicts due to the fact that there are so many personalities and egos involved. It’s like a three-, four-, or five-way marriage. This odd, multiplicative psychology was on my mind as I watched A Late Quartet, a drama about a string quartet that has played together to acclaim for twenty-five years, apparently with no serious problems, and suddenly seem on the verge of disintegrating.

A Late Quartet is really a quintet, a drama between five characters. The nominal leader of the group is the cellist, Peter (Christopher Walken), a good-natured and kind man who is near the end of his career as a musician due to a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. Daniel (Mark Ivanir), is the first violinist, an arrogant and cold man who approaches music in a methodical, almost scientific manner. Not much warmer is the violist, Juliette (Catherine Keener), who is an introvert and guards her emotions. Her husband, Robert (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the second violinist, is her polar opposite, warm and somewhat impulsive. The fifth character is Robert and Juliette’s daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots) who has begun a relationship with Daniel.

Although it may not seem like it on the surface, this kind of film is among the hardest to make as it requires total knowledge of the five character’s interactions with each other. What is Peter’s relationship with Juliette? What is Robert’s relationship with Daniel, before and after he starts “dating” his daughter? How is Peter’s reaction to this tempered by the fact he knows that Robert also wants to play first violin, and wants to group to continue after he retires as his legacy?

The complicated natures of the relationships make this a film for multiple viewings. The director and co-writer, Yaron Zilberman, avoids taking anyone’s side on almost any issue. Does Daniel’s methodical style hamper creativity, or does it perfect it? Is Juliette a lousy wife, or is Robert a lousy husband, or were they a bad match from the start?

The movie watches with interest as the characters interact with each other, only to end in an extraordinary and moving final scene that could be a manipulative trick in a lesser film. A Late Quartet is a drama that works because it trusts that its audiences will care about the lives of its characters, a correct assumption.

3.5 out 4

War is hell. People around the globe are widely in agreement on this simple statement, which is pretty impressive, seeing as we can barely agree on the day of the week most of the time. And yet, for some reason, we’ve only managed about three years without war since WWII. We’ve seen the Greek civil war, The Jewish insurgency in Palestine, the South East Asia conflicts, the Malayan emergency, the Korean war, the Anglo-Egyptian war, the Mau Mau insurgency, the Cyprus emergency, the Suez/Sinai war, the Muscat and Oman intervention, the Jordan intervention, the Indonesia conflicts, the Ugandan army mutiny, the Aden conflict, the Northern Ireland conflict, the Falklands war, both Gulf wars, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the Former Yugoslavia peacekeeping operations and the Libyan war, and those are just the wars that Britain has been involved in. And it looks like things are about to get pretty intense in North Korea soon, but that’s another kettle of fish entirely.

These wars have always been about the deaths of individuals. The number of young men your country is able or willing to put forward to defend an ideal, attack an ideal, protect your territory, or invade someone else’s has ultimately always been the deciding factor in who gets to claim to be the winner. The science of warfare has grown around two simple premises. You can improve your chances by making it less likely that the bad guys can kill your guys, or you can make it more likely that your guys can kill the bad guys.

Today, I came across a video of a laser cannon mounted on a US ship destroying a US drone. It wasn’t as spectacular as I was hoping – I wanted an explosion, the drone to evaporate into thin air. That said, it was still pretty impressive. The drone burst into flame, and lost control, crashing into the sea. The video’s below, and regardless of what you think about this article, it’s worth watching.

But you see, it got me thinking. There’s been a move to using UAVs in a number of theatres recently to minimise casualties among soldiers, to allow dangerous areas to be reconnoitred before troops move in, or, in some cases, to actually launch strikes against the enemy without our troops ever moving within rifle range. It is, no doubt, an incredible feat of engineering. The drones themselves are sophisticated, and the amount of work that has gone into trying to ensure our troops’ safety is phenomenal.

Think about how far we’ve come since the first battles were fought. One man against another for a hunk of meat developed into a group of men against another group of men for land and resources. At some point, it is believed that the Sumerians were the first to train and equip what we would call an army. This was significant, because it was no longer citizen against citizen, it was trained and armed professionals fighting against each other to demonstrate their superiority. In a sense, this created the first “civilians” in the sense that we use the word today. There were now people who didn’t fight, because others did the fighting for them. Society has benefited immensely from this. People could get on with making the world around them a better place, and could specialise in skills like science, mathematics, agriculture. And it has led us to the point we find ourselves at today.

Warfare has always been relatively symmetrical. Introducing this level of machine-versus-machine technology into warfare makes for some interesting philosophical questions (if a drone falls in the woods, and no-one notices it’s gone, does it matter if it was shot down or if it was ‘operator error’?), but most significantly, it forces the opponent to make a choice. They have three options:

1. Continue to send young men to their deaths, despite knowing that they will never get close enough to a real live enemy to have an effect on the outcome of the war.
2. Adapt, and develop machine weapons of their own, which abstracts the conflict into a question of “who has more resources”, that could in fact be answered without any material losses for either side.
3. Adopt an asymmetrical strategy. Begin a campaign of terror. Start to target the public. The number of civilian casualties would drastically increase, but the number of soldiers who die in combat would plummet.

In the past, war has been an effective (if rather uncivilised) way of resolving disputes because the stakes are so high. We roll the dice against each other, and the losses are painful. By introducing technology like this, we are effectively changing the stakes, and what’s worse, it’s only those who can afford the big losses who have access to the technology and resources to allow them to avoid them.

This doesn’t mean that wars will cease to occur. It means that the nature of war will change. The Goliathan countries that can afford the technology will soon be faced with Davids who can’t compete in terms of might, and so will attack where the armour is weak. There are a lot of parallels I can draw with the story of David and Goliath, but the most important is to remember that David wins … and he was the good guy (well … despite going on to have more than ten wives and another ten concubines, sleeping with Bathsheba, the wife of one of his top men, then trying to get him killed so he could add her to his hareem).

Terrorism will become the only way for a vastly outnumbered and outgunned opponent to resolve issues outside diplomatic channels. We will blame it on the opponents being cruel and inhuman, as we have done for thousands of years, but the truth is that we will have brought it on ourselves, by taking away the possibility for armed combat to inflict serious losses.

“It’s the army’s job to die for their country”, is often countered with the rejoinder that “it’s the army’s job to fight for their country”. But this simply doesn’t make sense. As long as people are prepared to kill for what they believe in, we need people who are prepared to die for what they believe in too. Because if we swap our battlefields and armies for drones and cruise missiles, then the people that die will be ordinary civilians.