Jeremy_Urquhart

I'd seen every major Peter Weir film before this one (except The Plumber, which sounds cool but is a TV movie, so might not count), and fittingly, The Way Back is also his final feature film. It is technically well-made and has a good cast, with all the members of said cast giving good performances. It looks nice, and it continues Weir's clear passion for stories that involve travel, survival, or some kind of "adventure"... but The Way Back is also pretty dull.

It's a good movie that's dull, which is better than a badly made movie that's dull, but I still find it hard to get excited about something that's written and edited in such a by-the-numbers way. It might add to a sense of things being more realistic, or grounded, which could've been desirable with this being based on real events, but it just should've soared a little more. It's no Master and Commander or Gallipoli, and it's probably even inferior to the flawed (but slightly more interesting) The Mosquito Coast.

On a technical front, Altered States is really impressive. Most of it visually feels ahead of its time, and I think the style of horror it's going for has really risen in popularity on the internet decades after this came out. I'm thinking of analog horror, with some of the tech stuff and grainy visuals here scratching that itch, even though I'm not sure people making horror on the internet today are directly inspired by this. I think it was more this just being ahead of its time, tapping into something uneasy on a primal level potentially before we had a name for that sort of horror.

As for the story they try to build around all the trippy stuff, it's wonky. There's a bit of a narrative here beyond William Hurt just going too far with a bunch of experiments that warp his mind, but it's all a bit thin, and I don't think the ending really brought it home emotionally. It's a great premise with inventive visuals and sounds, but it's all very by-the-numbers narratively, and I think the screenplay (and the pacing, in parts) stands out as extra lackluster compared to the cool stuff that does work.

But it's worth it for the aesthetics. It's a neat horror film, and I think the only part I could've done without specifically is the whole caveman episode, which was even a bit much for this movie. Minus some points for that scene, and a bit of an underwhelming story, but there's imagery here that I can see sticking with me, and I don't regret watching the film at last at all.

As a documentary, this is pretty average, but as a concert film, it's pretty good. It could've been longer, since the half-hearted non-concert scenes take up at least 10 minutes, and that only leaves 40-ish minutes for the concert, but there aren't a ton of ABBA concert films. That makes it valuable, considering they're such a massive band, and it's always good to have footage of any artist at the height of their fame. And here, if there's just not much footage, I guess you have to take what you can get, and ABBA: In Concert is definitely takeable.

It's weird to think both couples would be separated within two years of this coming out. Those marriages did not last too long either (researched it today while writing about ABBA for Collider). It's hard to know whether some moments on-stage are tense because of that, or just because the members of ABBA were all a bit awkward normally. If there were more concert footage of them out there, maybe you could make some kind of assessment, but it feels like guesswork, based on only this.