The White King (2016) Reviews

• Very well made but very unsatisfying

  thekarmicnomad2017-04-27

  This follows a family living in a totalitarian dystopia. This is a hard film for me to review. First off, its production is very good. The camera work and direction is great. The characters are very well constructed and the acting is absolutely top notch. The world is quickly and deftly painted using iconography and suggestion. The world is oppressive but not overly brutal making it feel more real and dangerous. I enjoyed every minute of the first hour greatly and was gripped to see what was going to happen. Here is the problem. Not much does happen. This film has plenty of story, but hardly any plot. Characters are introduced, and adversities befall our leads, but very little is resolved or explored. Any small victories the characters win aren't exploited. The only analogy I can think of is if you made a film about a waitress who works in a bar in Star Wars. Sure dancing girls are fed to monsters and Jedi come in - but at the end of the day you are still watching someone serve drinks. Maybe it is my personal taste, I thought I was more open minded than this, but it seems I do need a certain degree of resolution. I kept the mark high because of the quality of the film making - not sure if I would recommend it though.

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• Too many loose ends

  cliffmiddleton-549572017-06-05

  The film had me hooked, waiting for all the loose ends to be tied up. 1) The twins - what happened to them? 2) Where is this country? 3) What is the meaning of all the technology in the General's house? 4) Is it a world cut off from the outside, like in M Shyamalan's 'The Village'? 5) How did the people get out of the building at the funeral? 6) What did the father say to be labelled a traitor? So many more, and there was no sense of justice. The bad guys weren't punished. There was no resolution. And then it just abruptly ended. Would have been good as a first episode in a series but is too unfinished to be a film. An hour and a half of my life that I can't get back.

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• I'm not sure it knew what it wanted to be

  boydapeters2018-01-20

  Potential. But I think it failed to convert from the book into a film. The backdrop with violent kids just rampaging, and no one paying attention to that, to the ending that offered nothing. I have no idea what the film was wanting to achieve. I think they wanted to make this a triple series but maybe realised it was just weak material and gave up. either that or the editor is owed his or her $500 fee and withheld the last 20 minutes of the film. Watch it or not it is one of those that won't make a difference. Sad really, had a lot of potential in there. I think you could have gone to 20 random people in the street and they could have made that 50% better

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• Standing up for yourself without the gimmicks

  wsarah-991592016-06-19

  I saw this at the opening at EIFF For once a movie that shows us an adolescent understanding how propaganda can blind you, and standing up for himself in a believable real life scenario. No sci-fi gimmicks or ninjas here- which is a reason why it may not appeal to some people. But this is real life, and if you are 12, these are the means you have at your disposal. How propaganda and politician's lies can deceive us is very topical at the moment - in national and international politics. The narrative is at times disjointed and I was not sure if it reflected the episodic nature of the original novel or the disorientation of the child (an excellent Lorenzo Allchurch) facing the realisation his world is different from what he believes A particularly believable performance by Jonathan Pryce as the grandfather torn between duty and love.

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• An absolutely terrible film on numerous levels

  Tin Tin-32016-06-18

  I saw this film at a press screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. The only positive was that I didn't have pay to get in. This film was so bad, on so many levels, it was insulting. I'll confess not to having read the source material so it's impossible for me to know how well or otherwise the screenplay had been derived from the (apparently well-received) novel of the same name, but what can be said with certainty is that while the author has read 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' (as everyone should, of course), he's also plagiarised it. More of that later. The cartoon opening sequence which 'explained' the pass we find ourselves at at the start of the film itself screams 'NO BUDGET!' and while that's not a crime, it was so lazily done that immediately I thought of a simpler, equally inexpensive method of explaining the back story: a voice-over with titles, as was neatly demonstrated in 'Escape From New York'. Variants of 'lazy' kept coming back to me throughout. Case in point, the technical aspects of the film. While the cinematography was adequate, the audio jumped between ear-splitting and barely audible; the lighting was also erratic. The direction was incoherent at best and took us down numerous paths of irrelevance, while ignoring opportunities to take the viewer where they actually needed to go. There was no structure that I could discern. The worst offender was the screenplay. Completely lacking in any kind of narrative flow, it struck me as a very lazy piece of work – or incompetent, or a bit of both; take your pick. The ridiculous ending had the imprisoned father being driven from the scene of his father's funeral in an armoured car, with his son and wife running and cycling after it respectively. To what end? What were they going to do had they caught up with the armoured vehicle? The sight of the wife of the imprisoned pedalling furiously on the bike had a certain comedic value, I grant you, but I'm not sure this was the intention of the co-directors. All that was missing from this scene was the music 'Yakety Sax' (a.k.a. the music from The Benny Hill Show). Some of the performances were suspect. Agyness Deyn as the wife was actually quite good, but horribly miscast as the mother of the protagonist, the son – I initially assumed she was the son's big sister. The son, played by Lorenzo Allchurch, did not convince. His grandfather was played by Jonathan Pryce and his part as a 'loyal party man' was phoned in – and who can blame him when presented with dialogue of such poverty? When you compare his performance here with his epic turn in 'Brazil' it's impossible to believe this is the same actor. As to the plagiarism allegation, in one scene we see the son being urged by his grandfather to shoot a cat with a handgun. He's reluctant to do so despite his grandfather's cajoling, but eventually pulls the trigger and succeeds in killing the cat. The point of this scene, as I interpreted it, was to show that under a totalitarian state, results can be achieved if sufficient pressure is applied. This is an unashamed lift from the 'morning exercise' passage in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' where, when directly addressed by the exercise instructor though his telescreen, Winston Smith is able to touch his toes 'for the first time in years'. How we're not expected to notice this obvious parallel is a mystery. Overall, the film was boring, nonsensical, technically inept and also hamstrung by that appalling screenplay, which came across as if the writer had better things to do. Well, if you're bringing your début feature to an internationally-renowned film festival for public scrutiny then, no, you don't have better things to do. The film's Facebook page trumpets that Ian Rankin tweeted that this film was a 'harrowing and timely story about ideology, indoctrination and the fragility of freedom'. Obviously I disagree with every word, but it's telling that Mr Rankin didn't say if he thought it was any good. Damning with faint praise, I suspect. This film deserves to sink without trace for its laziness, technical ineptitude and audience-insulting 'Oh, I reckon that'll do' leitmotif. EDIT: I was astonished to subsequently learn that TWK had a budget of $2m. In these straitened times, profligacy of this level should be a criminal offence.

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