A fun, concise, and earnest genre flick. There is no lamp-shading or tricks. It simply tries to be a spy thriller with fantastic actors, and succeeds at it very well.
I'm loving these recent Soderbergh/Koepp team-ups. They're not interested in doing anything but telling simple stories with clean, traditional narratives, and then they end. Both in direction and writing, they exude confidence but not arrogance.
A lot of undeniably great moments, severely shackled by the 3rd act. The first 2 acts don't suffer at all from Nolan's usual shortcomings: they're not needlessly complicated, they're not obnoxiously edited, and you get the sense that the movie is building something. Something very human that's also anchored in hard science.
I had seen this movie twice before, but at this point I nonetheless thought, "maybe this move is great and I've just been too harsh." Then the 3rd…
I found this thing ultimately really frustrating. For a movie that tries so hard to be epic, it nonetheless came off to me as small. And though small, it lacked intimacy. As a result, I felt abandoned as an audience member. I was stuck in limbo, waiting for this movie to finish its thought. But it never did.
Weirdly enough, the length wasn't bothersome, and the intermission worked really well. My problems, I think, stemmed from my feeling that the…
It's all I want from a 90s thriller. A bit simple, a bit dumb, and there's a train.
