The Light Between Oceans is the rare case where I can’t recommend a movie, despite the brilliant acting. Usually I can at least say, “see it for this actor,” but in this case, even the two fantastic leads, Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, can’t cover a plot full of disappointment. It actually starts really great. Tom is a lonely man after World War II who takes a quiet, desolate appointment at a lighthouse. He intends to live there alone, but ends up falling in love with Isabel, a girl living in the town across the bay. When a baby washes up on shore in a boat, after Isabel has recently suffered two miscarriages, she convinces Tom to tell everyone the baby is theirs. Tom is racked by the guilt though, especially when he comes across the mother. Here’s where the film takes a turn. Too many plot twists and a rush job hurtles the movie towards an unsatisfying conclusion. I’d go so far as to say nearly any other ending would have been better. Fassbender and Vikander are absolutely incredible, running the gamut of emotions in total brilliance, but they can’t save this one.
The Case for Christ is based on the real life of Lee Strobel (who wrote the book of the same name). A strong atheist, he set out to discount the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection, while working as a journalist at the Chicago Tribune in the 1980’s. He believed so strongly that religion is false, that he thought it wouldn’t be a problem to find mountains of evidence disproving the accounts in the New Testament of the Bible. He finds the opposite though, that there is more scientific evidence proving it than disproving, and he looks everywhere, from eyewitness accounts to medical research. In the end, he realizes the only thing preventing him from accepting all of the evidence as fact is his own desires wishing it to be so. Obviously a Christian-themed movie, but again, that doesn’t mean the facts presented aren’t real. I enjoyed it.
For a super spy movie, Allied is sort of boring. It has its moments, but is overall rather dull. Brad Pitt plays Max, a Canadian air force pilot undercover in Morocco to assassinate a German figure during World War II. Upon arriving in Morocco, he meets Marianne (Marion Cotillard), a French spy who has been there for a couple months laying the groundwork for their spy game, as she is to play his wife. When they accomplish their mission, they head back to London, where they fall in love, get married, and have a baby. After a year or so, Max is approached by his superiors with news that his wife may not be who she says she is, and he spends the rest of the film trying to prove her innocence. The best part of this film is the first half, when the duo’s mission in Morocco is under constant threat of discovery and their inevitable execution, but that tension fades in the second half.
Silence is just dreary. The latest film directed by Martin Scorsese, it tells a fictional tale about the persecution of Christians in 17th century Japan. A very real and very terrible time in Japan’s history, it doesn’t translate well in this movie, despite great actors (Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, and Liam Neeson are the well-known names). When news reaches priests Rodrigues and Garupe in Portugal that their former mentor has renounced his faith in Japan, they head there to see what is going on, knowing that their lives are forfeit if they are caught. They spend their time in Japan hiding from the authorities and giving comfort to the Japanese Christians who are also forced to hide their faith. They see horrors every day and eventually are each caught, leading to the question of how to balance their faith with the fear of a brutal death. The movie’s “highlights” are the torturing of the Japanese who will not turn from their faith, and the story itself is just dull and predictable, and as it approaches 3 hours long, it is just too long to sit through.
Finally had a good one in Land of Mine, a Danish film that shines a light on a forgotten moment in time after World War II. With the beaches across Denmark loaded with land mines placed by Germany in anticipation of a sea landing there, the Danish military enlists German POW’s, many of them just teenagers, the dangerous task of finding and diffusing the mines. This film follows a group of 14 such men, really just boys, under the supervision of a Danish sergeant. The Dane is at first very strict with them, almost brutal, but as their bravery is shown in doing their task, and as a few ultimately die along the way, he starts to open up to them, and they in turn to him as well. A beautifully written movie about the often forgotten moments that follow most wars, but also about true forgiveness, at a time when everyone involved must find a way to move on.
Jons Movie Takes 