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Touching the Void
I have to confess, I had to eventually turn off two pretty niggling thoughts in my brain while watching this movie: firstly, my usual knee-jerk reaction to any sports-based movie, basically, why the hell should I care if someone wants to climb a lethal mountain for no reason whatsoever? (alright, alright: that’s out of the way; unlike this year’s Friday Night Lights, I actually ended up liking this one, so bear with my miserable sport-hating ass :-p); and secondly, a cynicism I’ve read in other reviews on the net, a result of the use of reconstruction footage in the film. I found myself even doubting the interviews were real people in places. Like this year’s Open Water, which was supposedly based on a true story, we have no real evidence that any of this really happened, just three people that went to the hills (or, two people that went missing for a few days), and a story.
But it’s fruitless to go anywhere beyond stating my doubt there. Once I emptied my mind of these thoughts, aside from a few really slow points in the movie (how many times does the guy need to tell us he was dehydrated?), eventually, I felt a glimmer of understanding and feeling for the people involved.
I don’t really know what it is fans of the movie get out of Touching the Void, but I certainly didn’t get whatever it is. It didn’t feel to me like a tremendously courageous story or anything, I wasn’t shocked by the guy cutting the rope on his friend. These guys pretty much did the right, sensible, thing at every turn, and since they were headstrong young men, found themselves humbled by how low they could go. I’m afraid part of me really just wants to say, “Big deal: you wanted to climb the damn hill.”
March 21st, 2007 at 3:18 am
[...] Anyway, as to the rest of the movie … I really wasn’t a big fan of director Kevin McDonald’s last movie, Touching the Void, though his first One Day in September really impressed me. This, we’re told, is his first foray outside of documentary cinema (cough Touching the Void cough cough) and I sort of feared the seemingly too-fictionalised aspects of this one if, as I’d heard, and can confirm, Forest Whitaker’s performance was to be so on the nose. But somehow, if we’re to believe the degree to which the movie portrays this man’s insanity, the slightly surreal, bending-of-the-truth, approach, works. I found it somewhere between Apocalypse Now and The Beach with a Wicker Man-ish ending (well, almost – put it this way, when they, err, “punish” James McAvoy towards the end, it’s a more terrifyingly Wicker Man moment than anything in the Nicolas Cage remake, lol) that I think would sit best alongside last year’s Munich. [...]