George Stevens' Giant was on a seatback screen, as discussed here, while Kevin Costner's first chapter of his Horizon saga -- which looks as though it's going to be at least four movies (!!!) -- was on my phone.
You see, Scoot airlines does not have seatback screens. I'm not sure I fully understand this as a choice by a budget airline. Yes you are saving on a one-time cost in the building of the airplane, but then you are also limiting its scope to a small range of very budget uses. What if you one day decide that Scoot is going to be the industry leader in refinement and luxury? You can't. (Plus, it's one of those airlines where once you pay for any extras that you would get for free on a slightly less budget airline, like seat selection, you are paying just as much if not more than the less budget airline. We won't be flying it again.)
But we did know about the lack of seatback screens beforehand, so I had prepped two downloaded movies from Stan, both of which I ended up watching during the 6:30 flight, and both of which are encapsulated in the subject of this post.
Unlike Giant, Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is not a classic, so it's clear that watching it on the plane was the only way I probably would have felt satisfied taking it in. In fact, now that I know that there are at least four installments planned -- which I learned just now adding it to Letterboxd -- I feel a bit resentful that I watched it at all. When you are talking about 12 hours worth of movies, assuming the same three-hour length for the others, you are talking about more like a TV show than a series of movies, especially if they come out in relatively short succession rather than over a period of ten years. (The second chapter is currently available, though not yet on Stan, while the remaining two do not yet have release years.) Costner has already been making an actual TV show with what I assume is very similar material in Yellowstone. It's unclear why he felt he wanted to treat this material at least superficially differently.
The even funnier thing, especially in retrospect, about there being so much future Horizon planned is that Chapter 1 ends with a time lapse montage that might encompass another five years in these characters' lives that we aren't seeing play out in real time. Some of the events portrayed in this dialogue-free montage are the standard "you don't need to see this dramatized" stuff, like the building of towns, but then there's also stuff that seems like it could have fit into a Chapter 2 and benefitted from some exposition, characters being separated and in some cases maybe even dying. Although Costner certainly commits the sin of indulgence here, one sin he does not commit is excess exposition, as it takes quite a while to get our bearings within the many stories and characters, in part because Costner trusts us to pick things up and determine for ourselves what's important. It's probably the only example of commendable restraint in the project.
Other than the all-star cast that kept popping up throughout -- including the likes of Sam Worthington, Sienna Miller, Luke Wilson, Will Patton and Giovanni Ribisi, the latter of whom is fourth billed in the end credits even though he does not appear until just about the final moments of the film -- there was one noteworthy element, but only as it relates to what my wife was watching next to me.
She'd tried to watch Don't Breathe -- it was a film that she didn't get to on the first leg of the trip, when we had seatback screens on Jetstar -- and found it was available to download from Netflix. She also found that she'd already seen it, soon after she started watching. See, this is why I keep lists.
So instead she watched multiple episodes of Florida Man, in which actress Abbey Lee gets second billing to Edgar Ramirez. I saw her pop up there first, so was then quite surprised when she showed up in 19th century western garb on my own screen. (Based on screen time only, she deserved to be among the top four billed, but lost out to Giovanni Ribisi for his 15 seconds of screen time.)
Ever since she made an impression on me with her intense appearance in The Neon Demon, I've been quick to pick out Lee. I always think of her as a model first and an actress second, which is the correct chronology for her career, but she's not one of those where the modeling is obviously a better fit for her than the acting. (We'll get to one of those when we talk about Tyra Banks in Halloween: Resurrection, the third movie I watched on Monday after I got home, which we will not otherwise discuss in this post.)
And though I suppose this is only "range" on Lee's part in terms of the time periods of the two pieces of content -- she seems to play a woman of loose morals in both movies, an actual prostitute in Horizon and maybe just a woman who dresses provocatively in Florida Man -- I did consider her appearance in both of the things we were watching to be some sort of confirmation of her arrival as an actress, and not just a model that people were giving work because she has such arresting peepers.
The final third of my subject relates to Robot Dreams, the Pablo Berger film that worked its way into a surprising Oscar nomination for best animated feature in 2023. And like Horizon with Giant, this spoke directly to something I had watched earlier in the trip.
You may recall that I saw The Wild Robot while on the ground in Singapore, and in a very short appraisal of its quality at the end of a piece that was mostly about differences in attending movies, I said that I wished the animals had not talked.
Well, Robot Dreams is also about animals and robots, and neither of them talk.
In fact, I wasn't sure if 103 minutes was too long for a movie in which no one talks. Because film is first and foremost a visual medium, it is of course possible to understand everything going on in Robot Dreams without any dialogue, and certainly preferable. Not only can you show it in any country without alteration, but it removes the temptation to rely on famous voices and silly shtick as in The Wild Robot. Much more profound this way, though likely far less accessible to children.
Still, it's possible -- though I'm not going to say certain -- that Robot Dreams would be better as a 25-minute short, or 80 minutes if it was Berger's dream to make it feature length. You get up to 103 and there's definitely filler, which I felt while watching it.
But this is indeed a very pleasing movie, one which charmed me regularly. Its similarities to The Wild Robot, at least on the surface, do not end with the blending of animals and robots (the primary relationship being between a dog and his robot). Both movies in fact contain a newborn bird -- or three in the case of Robot Dreams -- hatching from eggs and imprinting on the first robot that they see.
It's just one of those coincidences, but I'm glad the more creative Robot Dreams got there first.
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