Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

Towards the end of this Wes Craven thriller I realised I had seen it before, which speaks to how forgettable it is. The setup is similar to that of the disappointing 'Drop': a woman is suddenly thrown into a nightmarish situation in which she has to carry out orders to avoid a loved one being killed. In 'Drop' there is a mystery as to who is sending the orders and why.  Here everything is very clear. Rachel McAdams is the manager of a luxury hotel in Miami, and Cillian Murphy wants her to move some guests to a different suite, or otherwise her dad (Brian Cox) will be done away with. The guests are a prominent politician (and his family), and it's evident that the reason to move them is so that he can be assassinated.  McAdams and Murphy are on a plane back to Miami, which makes things all the more dramatic. There's some good cut-and-thrust between them as she tries to find ways not to carry out his instruction whilst trying to save her dad. Once the plane lands ...

I guess it's a measure of how much I enjoyed this epic that I was barely conscious of its length, and I even managed to watch it without a 'comfort break', which must mean something. Mind you, my heart did sink a tad during the rather clunky opening scenes which feature the usual tropes to signal we are in the presence of Genius.  But once the Manhattan Project starts to take off I was fully on board for the ride.  One of the reasons I was swept along was the combination of the time-hopping structure and the relentless pace.  Yet despite the pace, and the absence of quiet scenes, I didn't feel exhausted by the end.  Credit for this must go to Nolan, and to the score. I went into the film knowing very little about Oppenheimer the person, so I enjoyed finding out about his left-wing connections in his youth on the one hand, and his fall from grace in the 1950s on the other.  One thing I certainly didn't expect were the couple of erotic scenes, or moments, a first ...