1984 john hurt full movie
John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Christopher LLoyd, Clancy Brown, and Jeff Goldblum (a fellow brain surgeon who unaccountably dresses as a cowboy) all co-star. The plot of this sci-fi adventure almost defies description: it’s about Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller), the rock star, brain surgeon, martial arts expert, and all-round polymath who has to save the world from inter-dimensional beings. It’s a fun, eventful adventure that concludes with an incendiary action sequence that wouldn’t look out of place in a Die Hard sequel. or Flight Of The Navigator, Cloak & Dagger stars Henry Thomas (you know, Elliott out of E.T.) as a videogame-obsessed kid who becomes an 11-year-old spy. An adventure film in the same family-friendly vein as D.A.R.Y.L.
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Indeed, the only thing that truly hooks the film to the ‘80s, and hence dates it, is the steely synth score from the Eurhythmics, whose lumbering theme song (“Sex Crime”) blurts out over the closing credits, cheapening those glowering visuals to the naff template of a pop video.Our original thought was to put The Last Starfighter on this list, but Cloak & Dagger, which was initially released on the same double bill, is arguably more obscure. While Smith’s task of “rewriting” history and channelling propaganda bears all the hallmarks of endless political spin-doctoring. He, and Radford, expose a society drugged on junk television and porn into submission. The prophetic writer was demanding humanity be watchful of totalitarianism, be it fascism or communism, and in his dread post-Apocalyptic police state, watched over by the omnipresent Big Brother, sex has been banned, emotion ruled out, leaving the populous “unpersoned” drones in a dark system.Īs we trace Winston (Hurt, as ever, a master of the victimised) and Julia (Suzanna Hamilton)’s rebellion, their sex crimes, and his inexorable road to the dreaded door marked 101, Orwell’s premonitions have gained a greater prescience still. Orwell’s dire sci-fi language - his indelible “newspeak”, “thoughtcrime” and “Big Brother” - sounds its warning bells as strikingly as when the novel was first published.
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You’re confronted with a film occluded in misery, which makes it an endurance test but a rewarding journey all the same. There is a junkyard decrepitude that infects the entire film, a forerunner of Gilliam’s more esoteric Brazil (itself heavily influenced by the novel). This dichotomy is most apparent in Roger Deakins’ murky, desaturated photography and the intricate, decayed production design.
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Thus, the year of its release is merely incidental, this is a movie set in a dystopian future-world yet chained to a bleak past somewhere on the vestiges of the Cold War. This is not least down to the fact that Radford fully grasps Orwell’s modus operandi - that this is not a tale of a dreaded future at all, but a caustic parable of the writer’s present (the late ‘40s).
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Yet, what could have sunk into gimmick filmmaking, driven by marketing rather than genuine creativity, turns out a solidly made, sternly acted, and faithful realisation. Given the year of its release, there was a trite sense of inevitability about Michael Radford’s attempt to glean a movie from Orwell’s dense and moody classic.