tabuno
06-03-2013, 12:09 AM
With mysterious but an awesomely ethereal original score by Paul Leonard-Morgan, this Kasper Barfoed directed espionage movie starring John Cusack seems more like an independent character-driven psychological thriller drama that spends more time in a brooding ambience of foreboding terror and a sense of loss of control much like what Signourney Weaver’s character as Ripley experienced in Alien (1979) and suggestive eerie and dark, sadistic ambiance of the classic thriller Wait Until Dark (1967) with Audrey Hepburn. There’s a lot of the Bourne Identity (2002) characterization without all the fancy stunts and action sequences, though there are some shooting scenes, the movie doesn’t necessarily focus on them so much as the psychological intensity of the quiet moments that only superficial hide the unknown terror from without. Cusack’s singular performance in the horror movie 1408 (2007) likely offered a number of resonating psychological themes that could be related back to this movie.
There’s a little backstory offered in this movie but the script plays out well without having to known everything about these characters as it comes done more to just survival. Cusack’s character is readily brushed stroked with a moral center by the end of the first quiet then rapid fire scene. There is none of the dry wit or implicit humor as in The Informant! (2009) nor the mainstream action, political scheming, and global threatened destruction of Tom Clancey’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) nor the necessity of the spectacular blockbuster of even the comparatively cerebral, gritty version of James Bond in Casino Royale (2006). Even unlike Deja Vu (2006) where there is this ironic love story going on, or even the sci-fi love story of Oblivion (2013),The Numbers Station doesn’t require such a typical love connection or the love triangle and instead there is something even more of basic humanity going on here and seems even deeper much like what one gathers from such relational movies as the relationship between Brendan Fraser’s amazing performance as a contact killer and Sarah Michelle Geller as a naïve pop singer in The Air I Breathe (2007).
The cerebral and layered The Good Shepherd (2006) offers a good comparison as a mainstream version of this movie that covers years or larger geo-political perspective contained in the anti-terrorism movie Body of Lies (2008) where as this movie brings its audience into the intensity of the moment by moment experience of living and dying second by second of this movie, almost like a watching a stage play instead. Perhaps this movie comes closest to Robert Redford’s The Three Days of Condor (1975) or Tom Cruises’s contract killer persona in Collateral (2004) in tone and the psychological intensity and the independent foreign flavor enhanced by the musical scores of A Man and A Woman (French, 1966) or even of the updated version of Solaris (2002).
There’s a little backstory offered in this movie but the script plays out well without having to known everything about these characters as it comes done more to just survival. Cusack’s character is readily brushed stroked with a moral center by the end of the first quiet then rapid fire scene. There is none of the dry wit or implicit humor as in The Informant! (2009) nor the mainstream action, political scheming, and global threatened destruction of Tom Clancey’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) nor the necessity of the spectacular blockbuster of even the comparatively cerebral, gritty version of James Bond in Casino Royale (2006). Even unlike Deja Vu (2006) where there is this ironic love story going on, or even the sci-fi love story of Oblivion (2013),The Numbers Station doesn’t require such a typical love connection or the love triangle and instead there is something even more of basic humanity going on here and seems even deeper much like what one gathers from such relational movies as the relationship between Brendan Fraser’s amazing performance as a contact killer and Sarah Michelle Geller as a naïve pop singer in The Air I Breathe (2007).
The cerebral and layered The Good Shepherd (2006) offers a good comparison as a mainstream version of this movie that covers years or larger geo-political perspective contained in the anti-terrorism movie Body of Lies (2008) where as this movie brings its audience into the intensity of the moment by moment experience of living and dying second by second of this movie, almost like a watching a stage play instead. Perhaps this movie comes closest to Robert Redford’s The Three Days of Condor (1975) or Tom Cruises’s contract killer persona in Collateral (2004) in tone and the psychological intensity and the independent foreign flavor enhanced by the musical scores of A Man and A Woman (French, 1966) or even of the updated version of Solaris (2002).