I had a lot of thoughts, feelings and questions during my time watching the sequel to Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon. What follows, in no particular order, are those musings.
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Everything in these movies seems to be for Snyder alone. It’s as if the only point of four and half hours of movie runtime is for him to prove that he can spend all this money to capture his meticulous little scenes on his camera, refracted through his gauzy vintage lenses. Never before has the act of filmmaking felt more like someone painting Warhammer figures in their basement.
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A finely engineered watch figures prominently in the plot of Atomic Blonde. It’s loaded with some secret information that everyone in the movie wants to get their hands on. It’s tracked by operatives of MI6, the CIA, the KGB and the French DGSE. Whoever has the watch controls the fates of dozens, if not hundreds of spies in Cold War Europe. As the people of East and West Berlin take the final crucial steps towards reunification, a shadowy battle plays out over a single deadly timepiece.
Like the watch, the film is a collection of beautiful components. The craftsmanship behind every part is on full display: bold, fluorescent cinematography, calibrated performances, and a vicious one-take action scene for the ages. There’s an important flaw, though: Atomic Blonde puts all of this powerful material on display, but can’t seem to put it together correctly. It’s as though the pieces are grinding against each other, resetting the clock when the film should be ticking forward and building tension.
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