On a global scale, war is always either further away or closer. In the film we see the tragic day from many perspectives. The narrator talks, looks through photographs and documents, and talks about other wars, about other children: Japanese, Cambodian, Balkan, Rwandan, Syrian. Documentary footage mixes with animation to create a kind of inner world landscape.
Love, Simon (2018) based on the book “Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda” (by Becky Albertalli) is a teen LGBTQ+ rom-com with themes of longing to find others with similar struggles, and ultimately is a story of acceptance of identity from those around you, and most importantly, from yourself.
Shadow & Bone excels in natural story representation with powerful centering of culture. Jessie Mei Li stars as Alina Starkov, the feisty cartographer with kindness, innocence, and integrity, who comes to be revealed as the legendary summoner of light.
The film does not add anything to its own conversation or genre, and falls flat once it’s about to end and must declare some sort of conclusion.
Its predictability shouldn’t distract from the enjoyment that the pure cinematic imagination behind the camera elicits. It is a movie of crises both moral and mortal, oozing with CGI, and thoroughly enjoyable.
Yeah, sure, the movie’s about Carnage. But it’s really about love. A love that defies all odds: the love between a man and his man-eating alien symbiote.
