Comment by Magic Marmalade:
Levinson's folly.
This is a weird, and deeply strange movie, and only half in a good way.
I had only vague recollection of it from it's time of release, except my friends and I's (<Is that grammatically correct?), nonplussed, frowny expressions of bemusement, which I think was shared by the whole of the western world...
For on the face of it, the cover, the idea, and the presence of Robin Williams in this kind of movie makes you think it's going to be a Willy Wonka style, magical, cautionary tale for kids, regarding the corruption of innocence by the big meanie serious minded military types looking to convert the childlike toy factory inherited by Williams and "sister" into a a more "war toy" oriented concern... (The father looks younger than Williams - his brother, the militarista General, and brother of said father, is Improbably played by Michael Gambon)
...And this topic has, I would assert, hit the mark with it's target audience with the excellent: Small Soldiers, but here, everything seems off, to some degree, to produce a surreal, unsettling hallucinatory "bad cheese" experience of a movie, that isn't for kids at all, and is too perplexing for anyone else.
So what's up with this movie?
Firstly, the prime asset here is, of course, or
should have been Williams himself, in this kind of premise, you would have expected him to chew this thing up for dinner, and yet, he is strangely muted, lacking energy and his usual pizazz, leaving the way clear for Gambon to consume the scenery in it's entirety, in a role way too odd, and dark for the setting. The thing you can't escape is the wild contradiction, of, on the one hand, the extraordinarily imaginative, and brilliantly conceived set designs, costumes, and general setups, but rendered in a really cheap, almost 90's tv standard of photography, which feels, when it comes through the screen, like it's in a studio, and artlessly shot, and captured.
(Everyone involved in this must have been pulsing with excitement at the premise, script, and the involvement of Williams, and only heightened when they walked on the sets, and saw the eye popping scenery, only to be crushed at what came out the other end.)
Then we have a typical weird, spooky, eccentric soundtrack from Tori Amos (the natural choice a film like this?) which is a good thing in her own back yard, but when in the context of this movie seems bizarre in the extreme, and an early-ish Hans Zimmer score that sounds like a hangover from eighties pop synth-ery, and already dated... only occassionaly blossoming into something good.
The first half of the movie is slow and, again, I use the word: hallucinatory, in the style of a fever dream or acid trip, and then the finale just degenerates into an attempt at a standard action flick, which only serves to undermine that first half, and it's aims.
There are more than a couple of things that would certainly give kids nightmares, especially the toy tanks with robot heads with helmets, and giant, green glowing eyes that move terrifyingly through the darkness (Felt quite perturbed myself! :(
And so, having watched it again after all these years, I see now what this movie was, or attempting to be: Not a kids film, in any traditional sense, but aiming more for the rarefied sensibility of a Tim Burton movie, with his off kilter movie making sense, or maybe even a Terry Gilliam movie. In todays currency, you might say that directors like Wes Anderson are what it would be aspiring to achieve...
...The problem is, Barry Levinson, great director and film-maker though he is, just isn't born with that kind of ability, or sensibility, and so, that narrowest of targets, of what you'd be aiming for in a movie like this, which a fraction out either way would make such an odd, and off movie, is only to be ventured on by those rare directors, such as those aforementioned maestros with their specific way of looking at things who know what that target is, as well as how to hit the mark. Barry has bitten off more than he can chew, and wandered onto territory he doesn't understand, and it shows.
Better, I think, having conceived of such a promising idea, to have handed it off to one of those other directors, who's name I previously mentioned. Burton or Gilliam would have made this something to behold! (Oddly, the name: Stanley Kubrick comes to mind here too, for me, and had he been asked to make this, it might even have left 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the dust!)
But, for all that, I am, in some sense, pleased this exists, as it stands as a testament of a once adventurous, risk taking movie industry, that could, in order to open the door to the possibility of something new and exciting, who's influence may be felt for decades, be experimental, and accept the possibility of what this movie may come to represent:
An indulgence, a folly, and a glorious monument to the idea of the spectacular failure.
