Review: War Machine (2017)

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Director: David Michod
Starring: Brad Pitt

I'll give War Machine this much: it doesn't give in to the temptation to play "Fortunate Son" at any point during its running time, even at the end when you can practically hear the opening guitar riff start in your head. In just about every other respect David Michod's film aligns with pretty much every other movie ever made about the War on Terror (the exception being the great The Hurt Locker), pointing out the follies and the hubris that have already been examined and dissected ad nauseam, offering nothing new in terms of insight, and resorting to glibness whenever it can think of nothing else to do. War Machine aims for satire but, like the conduct of the wars themselves, confuses having a mandate with having the means to fully and successfully achieve the goal. And, yes, Brad Pitt is going to make that face through the whole movie and, yes, sometimes that is pretty distracting.

Review: The Rover (2014)

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Director: David Michod
Starring: Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson

The Rover, writer/director David Michod's follow up to his brilliant 2010 debut Animal Kingdom, is a brutal and bleak vision of the future. Set in Australia a decade after a global economic collapse has turned the landscape into a desolate wasteland where life is cheap and violence comes easy, the film isn't science fiction so much as a good old fashioned western about a loner riding the plains in search of the men who wronged him, pushing further and further into the frontier. On a performance level, and often on a technical level, The Rover is a very good movie and I have no doubt that it will find many champions, yet as I finished watching it I was left cold. Individual pieces of the film are brilliant but, taken as a whole, the narrative starts to seem relentlessly prosaic the longer it carries on, which left me feeling split on the result. In the end, I think that The Rover is a decent movie, but one which doesn't really have anything new or different to say.