Over the last couple of years, the story of slavery made a comeback as feature film and tv material, with Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” probably still the gold standard. It became that standards, I believe, because if exceptionally skilled directorial skills and outstanding actors. While the fact that it was based on a true story may have contributed to the hype, I’d rather believe that it succeeded despite the shackles that reality usually puts on stories. “The Birth of a Nation” has a similar starting point, using events that are now referred to as the Slave Uprising of 1831, when slaves led by Nat Turner from Virginia tried to break free. A little Spartacus, a little Braveheart, a little Twelve Years a Slave, of course.
The way this is narrated, with the focus on a character who sets out as a slave preacher, and ends up a freedom fighter, is less inspiring than the “12 Years” example, though. After watching this, I had to struggle remembering remarkable moments, emotional turning points or moments of being wowed by one of the actors. It plays out rather straightforwardly, the way you expect it to do after learning about the setting. There are some grueling moments of violence (the teeth… oh my, that’s one to haunt me), and there are ambiguous and weak characters (such as farm owner Sam) but I never felt that I am all too familiar with the characters and their motivations, never felt I was embraced by the story and the drama. I could even imagine that this is intentional, indicating that what happened did not happen in a cinematic way, but the way life works, as a succession of individually less than glamorous or dramatic events that somehow lead to a tipping point. It still means that the film never really dragged me in. I felt like reading an illustrated history text book, rather than a dramatization, missing the cinematic qualities of Steve McQueen’s effort. It’s not a bad film, it just is not all too remarkable in retrospect.
If you tell the real life story of Saroo as it happened, you realise there is not much story to it: boy from rural India gets lost, orphanage, adoption by Australians, later seeks to find his family years later to get some form of closure. The script of “Lion” seeks to add a bit of extra drama to it, but focuses mainly on the fact that this boy basically has forgotten about his past life, and the way he is suffering from the loss only when by chance he stumbles across something that triggers his memory. In consequence the film is not very dramatic in its best moments, but very introvert and calm. There are some beautiful scenes at the beginning, before young Saroo gets separated from his family because of an unfortunate event he only learns about much later. In these moments, it is quite a heart-warming depiction of siblings relationship and the pleasures and pains of being a kid. The second part is not as strong as a film, with its setting in less exotic Australian suburbs and the addition of characters such as Saroo’s “brother” that do not add a great lot to his story. Of course, the way the story pans out is still moving, and the use of technology to trace his past life even provides for some thrills. Taken as a whole, I found “Lion” to be a bit too unbalanced to really enjoy it. I could appreciate Dev Patel’s acting skills, and I could easily fall in love with Sunny Pawar, who plays Saroo as a child. No doubt this is solid awards season material, but could have been bit more edgy for my taste.
As I read somewhere: if you are stuck in a collapsed tunnel somewhere in Korea, Jung-Soo is the guy you want to be stuck with. Despite his poor fate of sitting in his Kia under millions of tons of rubble after the tunnel through which he was driving towards his daughters birthday party falls down on his roof, with little hope of rescue and a limited amount of water and birthday cake, his spirits remain high. After he finds another survivor with a dog, he happily (well, briefly hesitatingly) shares his water, and he surprisingly does not kill the dog for diving into the food supply. I would have.
Of course Zombie movies are not everybody’s piece of cake. They are not even everybody’s piece of cake among those who like zombie movies, given the amount of nonsense that has been around for the last decades. Whenever I see a trailer or a plot synopsis for such a film, my defenses go up immediately and I wonder where a new film may find something original to tell in a setting where the undead start roaming, or most recently running, the earth. Hence, after some of Romero’s films, and after Danny Boyle’s 
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