Coming from director Roland Emmerich, you might expect “Anonymous” to be a large scale action movie about the end of the world, a prehistoric beast or giant Japanese monster. Instead the German director has left the disaster motifs of his previous work behind and created a large scale period piece about the importance of literature set against a backdrop of intrigue and sexual peccadilloes in seventeenth century England.
With a plot that mixes and matches themes from history and Shakespeare’s plays, “Anonymous” uses the backdrop of the struggle for succession between the Tudors and the Cecils as the Essex rebellion moves against Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave) to set the scene for the debut of Shakespeare’s plays. But were they actually written by Shakespeare? The movie supposes it was Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans)—the Anonymous of the title—who penned plays attributed to William Shakespeare. He kept to the shadows to save his family the embarassment of havimg a common writer in their midst and because thee plays were openly critical of the Queen’s advisors Cecil and Raleigh.
In a story ripe with mystery the only real question is how this got made at all. Big budget Shakespearean movies don’t get made much anymore, so I guess the next best thing is to make a big budget movie about Shakespeare, and Emmerich, despite his tendency to try and juggle too many story threads at one time does a good job at bringing the elegantly filthy world of Elizabethan Britain. Powdered faces, filthy fingernails and velvet jackets abound and the atmosphere adds much to the story.
This is a sprawling story with many twists and turns. The downside is the film’s sketchy casting. In flashbacks the queen and Edward appear to be the same age, but later after a major twist, are revealed to be sixteen years apart. This kind of lack of attention to detail muddies the waters in the flashbacks, making it difficult to follow the story in the first hour. Soon enough, however, all the players are straightened away and the pleasures of the story take hold.
A liberal mix of fact and fiction–there is no real life evidence that the Earl of Oxford penned the plays–“Anonymous” is a twisted tale about how politics and art intersect, and the written word’s ability to instigate change.
Director Roland Emmerich, whose films usually portray the end of times—Independence Day saw aliens try and conquer the Earth while The Day After Tomorrow had Mother Nature taking a swipe at life as we know it—has, this time, chosen to take us back to the beginning of time.
10,000 BC is what used to be known as a “caveman” movie, but in these more politically correct times is now called Neanderthal Drama.
A bombastic cross between Quest for Fire and Encino Man it tells the story of D’Leh (model and actor Steven Strait), a caveperson of considerable physical charms, whose mate Evolet (Camilla Belle) is kidnapped by marauders on horseback who D’Laeh mistakes for “four legged demons.”
Lovesick, he vows to get her back. In his quest to find his love he must battle giant computer generated Saber Tooth Tigers, Wooly Mammoths and something that looks like a steroid-crazed giant chicken.
Keeping the tradition of other Cro-Magnon epics like Teenage Caveman and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, 10,000 BC doesn’t skimp on the kitsch—dialogue like “You see that star out there, the one that doesn’t move? It’s like my love for you, in my heart” would be hard for any actor to pass off, let alone one wearing a loincloth—and don’t look for a history lesson either. In Emmerich’s version of history cavemen don’t live in caves but thatch-roofed villages. They travel on wooden sailboats and worship at pyramids and temples thousands of years before either of those things actually existed. Call it historical fantasy.
Apart from a wild Wooly Mammoth battle near the end I’m afraid even fellow caveman Fred Flintstone might give this one a pass. So to paraphrase the world’s best known caveman is 10,000 BC a Yabba-Dabba-Do or a Yabba-Dabba-Don’t? I think Fred would choose the latter and rent ancient epic Apocalypto instead.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel bored.” Nothing like a quick paraphrase of a classic R.E.M. song to sum up my feelings toward the latest end of the world CGI spectacular from Roland Emmerich. Unlike the 1970’s disaster genre, which tended to focus on one particular mishap, like a boat sinking or an office tower bursting into flames, “2012” is an all-purpose disaster movie. Emmerich lays it on thick, utilizing earthquakes, tsunamis and every other natural catastrophe in the Master of Disaster Handbook, to bring life as we know it to a screeching halt.
The film centers around a global doomsday event coinciding with the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar’s current cycle on December 21, 2012. In other words, four days before Christmas, 2012, the world goes boom. California falls into the sea, the South Pole ends up somewhere in Wisconsin and the Himalayas are submerged underwater. Staying one step ahead of the devastation is divorcée Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), who pulls out all the stops to get his ex-wife, kids and a handful of stragglers to a lifesaving Noah’s Arc in China called Genesis.
The fifteen year old boy in me enjoyed watching the world blow up real good; the adult in me, however, wanted characters I could believe in. Or at least care about a little bit. It’s not exactly the actor’s fault that I didn’t warm to / care about anyone on screen, they were simply doing their best with a script that had been run through the Cliché-O-Matic before filming began.
Occasionally the cheesy dialogue raises a smile. During a lover’s spat one character says to another, “I feel like something is pulling us apart,” as an earthquake splits the floor between them but more often than not each and every character is saddled with dialogue that would make Ed Wood Jr beam with pride. As all hell is breaking loose the president says to his daughter, “you look just like your mother when you get mad,” and everything is the “most important (insert event here) in the history of mankind!” A thousand monkeys banging away on a thousand typewriters for a week could probably write this script.
But clever wordplay is not why we go see movies like this. We go to revel in a make believe orgy of destruction. Nothing much happens in the first forty minutes however—we meet the large cast, but by the time George Segal shows up the cameo quotient begins to resemble an episode of “The Love Boat”—but when the earth’s crust begins to destabilize at the forty minute mark many spectacular scenes of world demolition follow. Hope you have a huge appetite for destruction because for the next two hours that’s pretty much all there is. “2012” becomes an end of the world spectacle to end all end of the world spectacles, which, works if a doom boom is all you’re interested in, but after a while the elaborate special effects becomes visual white noise.
Emmerich could have kept up interest by adding some real drama beyond timers counting down to zero or placing the hero in life or death situations that he is most certainly going to survive, or by shortening the running time—at a butt numbing 2 hours and 40 minutes “2012” feels like the end of the world is playing out in real time—but instead was content to fill the screen with flashy CGI and little else.
Coming from director Roland Emmerich, you might expect “Anonymous” to be a large scale action movie about the end of the world, a prehistoric beast or giant Japanese monster. Instead the German director has left the disaster motifs of his previous work behind and created a large scale period piece about the importance of literature set against a backdrop of intrigue and sexual peccadilloes in seventeenth century England.
