Ooh, fantastic movie. I loved the book, and I loved the film. One of the few that I’d go to see again. It’s increadibly rich in detail and nuance.

It’s also a superhero movie—and a relatively stylised one—which is far more grounded and relevant than the supposed crop of gritty, rebooted things like The Dark Knight. Which is nice.

It ‘works’ in the way that the best fantasies work: it takes an outrageous premise (an alternate 1985 in which Nixon is president, superheros are real, including a man who has been turned into a superman by a nuclear accident), and tells an interesting story.

They have changed one thing from the book: the giant squid at the end is, er, something else in the movie. But it works. (It actually makes a little more sense than the monster in the book, I think.) And thematically, historically and in terms of character, it’s all very faithful to the novel, which is astonishing in itself.

The soundtrack is very 1980s, and rather enjoyable. (Ride of The Valkyries in the Vietnam War sequence is kinda odd—at least to me who hadn’t seen Apocalypse Now.) Richard Nixon was a little less than convincing-looking too. But there’s not much I can criticise it for.

3 thumbs up

Ah yes. It is a truism that no man is an island. Unless his name is Madagascar.

This is a funny little film. Very funny. Rather strange. Ultimately entertaining (and a little bit exasperating).

I didn’t like the original Madagascar much. I just didn’t get whether the characters were supposed to be animals-as-metaphors-for-humans (in which case they spent too much time trying to eat each other for my liking), or ‘real’ animals with human voices (in which case why the hell did the lion not eat the zebra a lot earlier?).

This just abandons all notion of realism or actual animal behaviour. It’s all just completely bizarre. All of the characters basically exist to set up the gags. Fortunately it’s really, really funny, in a completely stupid way. Continue reading →