Wally Pfister is an amazing cinematographer, and prettied up the Dark Knight trilogy a treat. Outside of Batman, he's also partly responsible for the mind-bending aesthetics on display in Inception (for which he nabbed the Academy Award), and deftly captured the faded glamour of baseball's Oakland A's in Moneyball. That's all well and good, but he's not the cinematographer here he's the director, and there's more to a film than just visuals. Plot, for example. But unfortunately for Pfister old habits die hard, and he 'treats' us to multiple lovingly-framed vignettes including (but not limited to) continual shots of the Casters' garden. There's no doubting they're obviously pretty again, Pfister's an Academy Award winner and some of them are appropriately symbolic, but others are a little too on-the-nose and superfluous. It only serves to further bloat an already bloated film, and provides an already slow-moving plot with even more dead weight. After all, once you've seen those synthetic particles rise from the Earth once, you've them all, regardless of how pretty they are.
Durham University graduate and qualified sports journalist. Very good at sitting down and watching things. Can multi-task this with playing computer games. Football Manager addict who has taken Shrewsbury Town to the summit of the Premier League.
You can follow me at @Ed_OwenUK, if you like ramblings about Newcastle United and A Place in the Sun. If you don't, I don't know what I can do for you.
