Agora (2009)
Country: SP
Technical: col/2.35:1 127/141m
Director: Alejandro Amenábar
Cast: Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella, Oscar Isaac, Michael Lonsdale
Synopsis:
Fourth century Alexandria: Hypatia, the foremost philosopher of her age, and a woman, finds that her teaching, and her own personal quest to make sense of the apparent movement of the heavens, are interrupted by religious dissent and intolerance amongst Egyptians, Jews and Christians.
Review:
Highly creditable - and largely successful - attempt to combine historical spectacle with a cosmological perspective and respect for scholarly detail. Advances in CGI, together with the construction of extensive sets in Spain, produce vistas of astonishing scale and veracity, notably during the extended zooms in and out from space that punctuate the narrative, where trouble has been taken to research exactly how the coastline appeared at the time, and in shots of the Pharos. Less happily, the film's tantalising progress towards a modern understanding of the cosmos in the mind of its protagonist shows it more at ease with the deployment of ideas than it is with the inter-relationships of characters, which range from the commonplace to the perfunctory: Hypatia was an ideas person, not a people person, and that is both the film's strength and its undoing.
Country: SP
Technical: col/2.35:1 127/141m
Director: Alejandro Amenábar
Cast: Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella, Oscar Isaac, Michael Lonsdale
Synopsis:
Fourth century Alexandria: Hypatia, the foremost philosopher of her age, and a woman, finds that her teaching, and her own personal quest to make sense of the apparent movement of the heavens, are interrupted by religious dissent and intolerance amongst Egyptians, Jews and Christians.
Review:
Highly creditable - and largely successful - attempt to combine historical spectacle with a cosmological perspective and respect for scholarly detail. Advances in CGI, together with the construction of extensive sets in Spain, produce vistas of astonishing scale and veracity, notably during the extended zooms in and out from space that punctuate the narrative, where trouble has been taken to research exactly how the coastline appeared at the time, and in shots of the Pharos. Less happily, the film's tantalising progress towards a modern understanding of the cosmos in the mind of its protagonist shows it more at ease with the deployment of ideas than it is with the inter-relationships of characters, which range from the commonplace to the perfunctory: Hypatia was an ideas person, not a people person, and that is both the film's strength and its undoing.
Country: SP
Technical: col/2.35:1 127/141m
Director: Alejandro Amenábar
Cast: Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella, Oscar Isaac, Michael Lonsdale
Synopsis:
Fourth century Alexandria: Hypatia, the foremost philosopher of her age, and a woman, finds that her teaching, and her own personal quest to make sense of the apparent movement of the heavens, are interrupted by religious dissent and intolerance amongst Egyptians, Jews and Christians.
Review:
Highly creditable - and largely successful - attempt to combine historical spectacle with a cosmological perspective and respect for scholarly detail. Advances in CGI, together with the construction of extensive sets in Spain, produce vistas of astonishing scale and veracity, notably during the extended zooms in and out from space that punctuate the narrative, where trouble has been taken to research exactly how the coastline appeared at the time, and in shots of the Pharos. Less happily, the film's tantalising progress towards a modern understanding of the cosmos in the mind of its protagonist shows it more at ease with the deployment of ideas than it is with the inter-relationships of characters, which range from the commonplace to the perfunctory: Hypatia was an ideas person, not a people person, and that is both the film's strength and its undoing.