How entertaining? ★★★☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 3 October 2011
This a movie review of PERFECT SENSE. |
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“I think it’s okay to panic now,” Samuel (Stephen Dillane).
Director David Mackenzie’s second film of 2011 after the pretty awful YOU INSTEAD. Here he sort of redeems himself, but it’s not up there with his best – YOUNG ADAM. Reuniting with Ewan McGregor from that peak, he fashions a love story set during a global apocalypse. Starting with inconsolable grief, tears and the loss of the ability to smell, this is only the beginning of the world’s human populace losing its senses. It is emotional (depending on your empathy) and tragic, but we are in the territory of Jose Saramago’s BLINDNESS and Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD, and PERFECT SENSE pales in comparison as a work of anthropological enlightenment. There isn’t even imaginative visual verve to convey sensory eroding and depravation, nor an allegorical subtext – more like, when the planet’s dominant species is degrading, love is enough. We’re in Richard Curtis land – "Apocalypse, Actually". Though this is a cut above the tripe that he has been churning out lately.
The romance between McGregor’s chef, Michael, and scientist Susan (Eva Green) is moving and sexy, thanks mostly down to the charming and winning leads. The climax does reach a surprisingly charged crescendo. The end of the world as date movie.