Fear the worst
INGENIOUS CINEMATOGRAPHY ENSURES THIS UNUSUAL FILM DOES NOT FALL SHORT
FALL (M)
Director: Scott Mann (Heist) Starring: Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner
Rating:
Keep your eyes on the rise
Wow. Whenever the full force of Fall drops on you, there is no other way of putting it. Just, wow.
This is a big achievement for a movie with such seemingly small potential. Especially when its ungainly premise is put down on paper.
Here is the entirety of what happens in Fall.
Two young women with rudimentary mountaineering skills climb up a decommissioned TV tower in the Mojave Desert.
This rusty, creaking transmission mast is over 600m high, making it one of the top ten highest structures in the world.
Then “something” happens. Now the women are stuck at the very top of this thing, on a tiny platform no more than a metre in diameter.
Not only is there no feasible way back down to the ground. There is also no mobile phone reception. The platform is so high that, to the naked eye, anybody on it cannot be seen. It is bloody hot up there. Oh, and just to make a bad situation even worse, the women occasionally host some uninvited company: a pecky, swoopy pack of local vultures.
To put it bluntly, there is simply no way a movie like Fall should work at all. And yet, from the moment its two thrillseeking heroines commence their dangerous climb, an intimidating and often terrifying spell is cast which cannot be broken.
Through the use of some unquestionably ingenious shooting and editing techniques, the movie immediately plugs into the natural fear of heights that is embedded within all of us.
Once the women are stranded, Fall continually manipulates that fear with nerve-shredding precision. All it takes is for the camera to suddenly point downwards, and a truly dizzying case of in-cinema vertigo takes hold.
Remember those astonishing scenes in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, where Tom Cruise was dangled off the side of the world’s tallest building in Dubai?
Well, Fall has at least an hour of such stomach-churning sky ballet to its name.
While this illusion has been conjured with tricks that have been around since the dawn of filmmaking – such as rear projection, changes in near-far perspective and selected CGI effects – it is never, ever less than totally convincing.
Sure, the acting can get very wonky at times and the script could have used multiple rewrites of its dicey dialogue.
This is just one rare case where these factors do not count. All Fall has to do is tip the camera lens towards the lip of that tower platform, and all cynicism melts away. While you can’t always see the point of Fall, you always feel the peril.
Fall is in cinemas now
BODIES BODIES BODIES (MA15+) General release
In this consistently clever horror affair, the pages of an oldfashioned murder-mystery are fed through a social-media shredder. Perhaps you can imagine a book penned by Agatha Christie, reimagined for the Instagram age? If you’d rather not, then this is definitely not the movie for you. For everyone else, this is quite the happening hack-’em-up.
A hurricane is on its way. So an entitled group of 20-somethings decide to party away the storm in a mansion on the outskirts of town. Perpetually glued to their phones and undercut by their selfobsessed neuroses, virtually every guest fails to notice this is the kind of property where the power will soon be off and mobile coverage will be getting mighty unreliable.
Nevertheless, once the house is plunged into semi-darkness, the partygoers engage in a roleplaying game where the losers must pretend they are dead. However, it gradually becomes apparent that some participants are not pretending at all. Although this movie can get very annoying very quickly, there can be no denying that the results it achieves both as a thriller and a modern satire are impressive enough to deserve the look-see.
Starring Amanda Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Pete Davidson.
AVATAR (M) General release
There is one very telling reason why one of the highest-grossing movies of all-time is copping a rerelease into cinemas with the full complement of big-time bells and whistles (most notably, a full highdefinition remastering).
Well, there is an Avatar sequel on the way, you see. And because it will have taken the best part of 13 years for Avatar 2 (aka The Way of Water) to arrive this Christmas, there is every likelihood that most people may have forgotten the finer details of what happened in the original.
So therefore consider this a refresher course in all things Na’vi, the human-ish species that live on the lush jungle moon of Pandora. The inner circle of these noble creatures will be infiltrated by Jake (Australia’s Sam Worthington), a paraplegic soldier from Earth who has been dispatched to Pandora to do the bidding of a greedy mining outfit.
Although Avatar has long been a love-it-or-loathe-it proposition for fans, those who appreciate the grandstanding storytelling vision of director James Cameron will be relieved to learn the dazzling 3-D production has held up very well indeed. But what younger newcomers to the Avatar universe will make of this strange spectacle is anyone’s guess.
Co-starring Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang.