Robin Hood Review

Two years ago, after the 2016 presidential election, there was a lot of optimistic debate about how the films might react, the way the films were perhaps forced to respond to the nuances of autocracy and bigotry that had just organized a gigantic party in the United States and the White House. I remember seeing Arrival three times in theaters falling, clinging to the idea that stories like this were what we needed more in the dark years ahead. Many more people have seen their struggle in the dark heroics of Rogue One: A story of Star Wars. Even without a victorious end, we could find ourselves and romance ourselves in the mythology of cinema.

It is perhaps predictable, after sleepwalking, through innumerable gestures of "shades of Trumpism", ranging from Star wars at Nutcracker and the Four Kingdoms, that we would arrive at Robin Hood. The last story of the favorite wealth redistributor of Western mythology is a totally incoherent movie salad that covers the iconography of Black Lives Matter, Antifa and the war in Afghanistan in a proudly anachronistic transcription of the hero's story, as well as overlays. this on 90 percent of the plot of The black Knight. Many recent films that opposed a rebel faction to an evil autocrat had a Rorschach quality about them; do enough mental gymnastics and you can find the besieged tribe of your choice in the band of protagonists. Good luck finding a significant thread for hitching your car to Robin Hood.

This is not the way we should watch movies, especially films as immaterial as Robin Hood. But the film, written by Ben Chandler and David James Kelly (two mysterious of the IMDb who already had little merit), is doing everything in its power to include as many modern political signifiers as the fragile structure of the plot can contain. , while avoiding to say anything about it. In this version of the story and in accordance with later versions of the legend, Robin de Loxley (Taron Egerton) is a young man of noble birth who is sent to fight in the crusades and gets his land stolen by the sheriff. of Nottingham (Ben Mendelsohn) in his absence. In addition, his beloved Marian (Eve Hewson), believing himself dead, is paired with a handsome politician in the making. Upon his return, he teams up with John (Jamie Foxx), the Moorish prisoner he liberated during the war, and they seek a means of revenge, mainly by clearing the crusades and returning the war chest to overworked peasants.

I'll admit that "Defund the Crusades" is an incredibly ahistorical premise for a movie, and I was willing to face all the fifteenth century leather hoodies and haute couture to see where that was going, but even technically, Robin Hood is impossible to follow anywhere. Director Otto Bathurst (who debuts in a feature film after a handful of outstanding British television titles) is fortunate to have a trio as seductive as Egerton, Foxx and Mendelsohn, as the many sequences of Action of the film are mounted in a chaotic and illogical manner. becomes exhausted. At the moment when Robin's rebel faction throws Molotov cocktails at Nottingham's riot police force, it has been suggested that the church's crusade is related to "the Arabs", I was lost and I had to join us. Hopefully everything will be explained in the sequel that the film installs openly, and in the meantime, we can give up what is less and less useful. falsepolitical iconography of traditional post-Trump cinema.