Linbeymusol
Wonderful character development!
filippaberry84
I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
Freeman
This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.
Phillipa
Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.
Brian Berta
This is a fantastic character study which expertly details someone's transformation after they survive a horrific plane crash.After a man survives a plane crash, he is hailed as a hero because he lead several other survivors to safety. This has a negative effect on his personality though and he then meets another survivor who lost her baby in the disaster.The movie has great character development as we get to know more about Max and Carla. The movie makes us care for them and we get to experience their change throughout the film. This movie has the tendency to catch you off guard and it can surprise you're least expecting it.Probably the most memorable scene is the plane crash scene. It is frighteningly realistic. It shows the force of the wind and Earth ripping apart the aircraft. It is a horrifying scene and a horrifying memory which changed the characters life forever. It is a scene that will stick with you long after viewing it.This movie isn't perfect though. There are a few moments where the movie can be slow and a bit too long but other that, it's an underrated gem which will stick with you for a long time.
Naught Moses
Director Peter Weir and actors Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez deserve their share of credit here. But this film was built on a SCRIPT. And that script was built on a novel. And the builder of both was Rafael Iglesias. I've no actual idea how Iglesias had come to have such a =deep= understanding of the symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, but... a great deal of what I saw in this wonderful film points directly to the remarkable body of work done by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk at Harvard in the 1970s and '80s. The author of Traumatic Stress, The Body Keeps the Score, and other books provided scores of superior articulations of what happens to people when they are become so overloaded with stimulation that their nervous systems cannot handle it. What he saw then, and what many of us have witnessed since then is that such people have to force bits and pieces of the experience out of consciousness into vaults with pass codes and combinations they may never be able to remember. The upshots of that fragmentation often include "crazy" behavior designed to make sure those vaults are sealed forever."Fearless" was therapeutic for me. And I expect it may be so for those of us whose minds came apart -- just as that airplane did when it hit the ground -- and left us hunting for the fractured memories.
FlashCallahan
After a terrible air disaster, survivor Max Klein emerges a changed person.Unable to connect to his former life or to wife, he feels godlike and immortal.When psychologist Bill Perlman is unable to help, he has Max meet another survivor, Carla Rodrigo, who is racked with grief and guilt since her baby died in the crash....This is one of those movies that had massive plaudits when first released, but vanished without a trace, (you can't even get it on DVD here in the UK).And I ask myself why? It's one of the best films no ones heard of in the nineties, and it may even have a career best performance from Bridges and the rest of the cast.It's a difficult subject matter to deal with, people trying to come to terms with loss, whereas one man, is doing everything in his power to prove everyone that something enigmatic, even sublime, happened to him on the plane.The film would be perfect if it had the same power in the third act, like it did in the first two, but sadly, it runs a little out of steam.The scenes on the plane are very intense and genuinely terrifying, but somewhat peaceful thanks to Bridges calming influence.The film is asking lots of questions throughout, but if you go that little much deeper, rather than look at it at face value, it gets a little lost also (there are some scenes, that are indicating that Bridges is really dead, and in purgatory, which can be confusing at times).But all in all, if you ever come across this movie, you must take some time out to see i, it's an amazing movie with an amazing message, it just loses it's way a little in the last 30 mins.
secondtake
Fearless (1993)Peter Weir has directed some great, unique movies--Galipoli and Picnic at Hanging Rock are two of my favorites. So I watched this with curiosity at first. And then boredom. And then a kind of draining disappointment. I can see how the drama, and the various characters involved in it, might really draw someone in and move them. So this is just my own take on it, a fair balance to the others, I hope.The shock of being in a plane crash is played out by Jeff Bridges as a young professional who survives. This is gripping enough in the first scenes. This survival is played out through Bridges over the next fews days as he visits other survivors and sees the range of their inabilities to cope. Throughout, Bridges is asked to play with a calm that at first seems to be a blank slate for our growing into his complexity. His own complete acceptance and almost joy at having survived seems to have no down side, except having to run from television cameras or stand on rooftops screaming. Normal things, I suppose. This is how we are made to see his mind working through the horror he has repressed. But the blankness is a cover for an unresolved shock, and this doesn't unfold easily. Von Trier or Bergman or even Hitchcock might have made art out of this, but Weir can't pull it off. His earlier movies are gems of situation, of how groups of people behave within circumstances. Fearless is different in that it goes inward, trying to be about a person's mind. And yet, Weir still plays Bridges as if he were foremost a character among other characters. When we do go inward, it is mostly through his memories of the event, which are given predictable elements of fear and horror. (It's a plane crash, after all.) As for how Bridges copes, you will see either beatific gazes or screaming to himself.The basic idea is great movie material, but I didn't find the psychology convincing. The writing is stilted and worn out before it starts. The narrative is broken up with cheap flashbacks and with irrelevant and unconvincing scenes of tacky lawyers looking for money. Clichés. Even the extended and manipulative ending, which by that point is so unnecessary and indulgent for all its fire and visions of heaven, just leaves you feeling battered.