The Fall Movie Review

Introduction

'The Fall' is an adventure-fantasy film released in 2006. The film had Tarsem as its director and co-writer. The cast included Lee Pace, Justine Waddell, and Catinca Untaru. 'The Fall' is based on a screenplay of a 1981 Bulgarian film 'Yo Ho Ho' made by Valeri Petrov.

At the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, The Fall had its world debut. David Fincher and Spike Jonze presented the film for its 2008 theatrical release. It was released in the UK in 2008 and successfully earned $3.7 million worldwide.

Story

Roy Walker, an injured Hollywood stuntman, and Alexandria, a young patient with a broken arm, meet at the hospital. He tells her a tale about six heroes who set out to kill the evil king Odious.

Plot

After jumping from a bridge for a stunt in his debut movie, Roy Walker, a stuntman, was hospitalized, bedridden, and potentially permanently paralyzed in 1915 Los Angeles. He runs across Alexandria, a young patient in the hospital born in Romania and suffering from a broken arm. He tells her a narrative about Alexander the Great, who shares her name. Alexandria is informed that she must depart, but Roy promises to tell her a fantastic tale if she returns the next day.

When Roy tells his unbelievable story the following morning, Alexandria's creativity gives his character life. A quiet Indian warrior, an influential formerly enslaved person named Otta Benga, an Italian expert in explosives named Luigi, Charles Darwin and his pet monkey, Wallace, and a masked swashbuckling robber are the five protagonists of Roy's story. Each of the five has suffered an injury at the hands of the villainous Governor Odious, and they are all seeking retribution. A sixth hero, a mystic, subsequently joins the group of heroes.

Alexandria has vivid visions of her friends and the individuals in her immediate vicinity taking on the roles of those in Roy's narrative. Roy grows fond of Alexandria, but he also has another goal: getting her to steal morphine from the hospital pharmacy. Because the lady he loves has moved on to the actor Roy provided the stunt footage for, Roy plans to use morphine to kill himself. Alexandria reappears, but only with three tablets. When Roy inquires about the remaining pills in the container, Alexandria replies that she flushed all but three of them because she mistook the "E" on the slip of paper Roy handed her for a "3". The tales are combined into one work, in which Alexandria also participates. With Roy playing the role of the masked Bandit, Alexandria takes on a character of her own.

Roy persuades Alexandria to take a bottle of morphine tablets stored in another patient's medicine cabinet, and she subsequently consumes the entire contents. He instructs her to go when he takes them, but he is aware that she could disobey and see the man she has grown to regard as her father die. This does not occur since Roy realizes the tablets are placebos and not natural morphine when he awakens the following day from his slumber. Alexandria gets out of bed to go to the drugstore because she wants to aid Roy. She attempts to climb the cabinet but slips tumbles, and suffers a severe head injury. Roy pays her a visit following her operation, at which point he admits to lying. Alexandria refuses to hear Roy's conclusion despite his pleas to ask someone else to do so. Roy unwillingly starts the remainder of the narrative.

One by one, the heroes perish, and it appears that Governor Odious will prevail. Alexandria grows increasingly angry, but Roy maintains that his tale must be told. She claims ownership and asks Roy to spare the Bandit's life. Governor Odious lies about dying, and Bandit and his daughter are alive and united as the epic story ends once Roy finally accepts. In a shocking turn of events, Roy encounters the person he believes to be his ex-girlfriend. She claims the story's suffering served as a "test" of the Bandit's devotion to her. Finally, The Bandit turns his back on her and her deceit.

When the plot is concluded, Roy and Alexandria watch a screening of the finished movie that Roy appeared in with the patients and personnel of the hospital. Everyone is laughing, and when Roy notices that his leap has been removed from the movie, his smile is only affected.

Alexandria returns to her family's job at the orange farm once her arm recovers. According to her voice-over, Roy has healed and is now back at work. She imagines all the stunt performers as Roy while a montage of clips from some of the best and most dangerous stunts in silent films plays while she speaks.

Review

Tarsem's 'The Fall' is an opulent visual orgie, a madcap folly, and a freefall from reality into undiscovered territories. It's undoubtedly one of the most extravagant indulgences a director has ever given himself. Tarsem has been a top director of music videos and T.V. commercials for twenty years. He spent millions of his funds to finance 'The Fall', which he shot over four years in 28 countries. Nothing like it has ever existed before.

When Variety refers to 'The Fall' as a "vanity project," you can only appreciate the man who was so arrogant as to produce such an outrageous film. It offers a straightforward tale with expansive, beautiful romantic pictures that I had to double-check to make sure they were real before believing the movie's assertion that no computer-generated imagery was used. The person who appears from the on-fire tree? Possibly the most crucial phrase is "computer-generated." Some of the photos were produced using more conventional special effects.

The artwork has a simple narrative structure. In Los Angeles in 1915, a careless stuntman for a silent film had his legs paralyzed. He recovers at a generally abandoned hospital with halls of cream and lime that span from ward to ward with mostly empty beds. These beds' pillows and linens are waiting for the fruits of World War I. The stuntman is Roy (Lee Pace), who has a kind demeanor and a confident speaking style. Roy is delighted to make Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a little girl, a new friend.

Alexandria listens to Roy tell her a tale about intrepid travelers who transform into other people as soon as a young child's mind can function. The method is evident. He describes an "Indian" with a wigwam and a squaw to her. She imagines an Indian from a country of palaces, turbans, and swamis, even though she is unaware of these phrases. Roy provides the spoken tale, while Alexandria provides the visual picture.

A bomb-throwing Italian anarchist, an escaped enslaved African, an Indian, Charles Darwin, and his pet monkey, Wallace, are among the characters in the plot, along with Roy (playing the Black Bandit). They are stranded on a desert island by their sworn adversary, Governor Odious, but they ride swimming elephants onshore and declare war on him.

To further his agenda, Roy has Alexandria take morphine pills from the pharmacy after she delivers him communion wafers from the hospital chapel. He intends to commit suicide since he is paralyzed and has lost his great love (she is the princess in his narrative). A beautiful moment shows the little girl attempting to bring him back to life.

Either you are sucked into this movie's universe, or you are not. Of course, it is absurd, but Werner Herzog is not wrong when he asserts that we shall perish if we do not discover new pictures. A queue of paddlers here launch hundreds of arrows into the air. The escaping slave is struck by so many of them that they support the weight of his body as if he were lying on a bed of nails with dozens of foot-long arrows, causing him to collapse backward. Wallace, the monkey, chases a butterfly across impossibly tall buildings in one scene.

'The Fall' is lovely in and of itself. And then there's the endearing appeal of the little Romanian actress Catinca Untaru, who may have been dubbed but manages to talk with childlike innocence while navigating complex wordplay. She is as amazed by the world she inhabits as by the fiction she portrays. The visuals of Roy's narrative are conjured up in her mind, and they possess a purity and strength that defy logic. Roy is the ideal storyteller for her, and she is the ideal listener for him. Together, they create a world.

Critical Reception

The movie now has a 62% approval rating out of 113 reviews on review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes, with an overall rating of 6.3/10. 'The Fall' walks the line between the labor of love and filmmaker self-indulgence," according to the website's reviews, because it is "more visually elaborate than the fragmented story can sometimes support." The film received a score of 64 out of 100 on the weighted average review site Metacritic, which was evaluated as "generally favorable reviews" by 23 reviewers.

The film was ranked among the best 10 movies of 2008 by a number of critics. Tasha Robinson of The A.V. Club picked it as the best film of 2008, and Sean Axmaker of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer placed it as the sixth-best film of the year.

Production

Most of the movie's funding was provided by Tarsem Singh, who paid the actors and crew equally as opposed to the customary Hollywood way. The movie took four years to make and included video captured in 24 different nations, including India, Indonesia (Bali), Italy, France, Spain, Namibia, and China (PRC). Singh emphasized the value of on-location filming and the absence of special effects since he believed that contemporary methods would not hold up in comparison. He only accepted advertising projects in locations where he had already done location scouting, and he used the same crew to fly cast members to shoot movie sequences.

When filming in Jodhpur for the blue city, Singh gave people blue paint to touch up the paint on their homes. The brilliant blue of the metropolis in the movie is the consequence of this substitute for post-production effects. The modern South African mental hospital that serves as the movie's significant backdrop for an early 20th-century Los Angeles hospital was also used for filming and was still open (in a different wing).

At the director's recommendation, Lee Pace spent most of the early filming in a bed, persuading the majority of the crew that he was indeed unable to walk. Tarsem and Pace pointed out that the goal was to make Roy's physical limitations appear as realistically as possible to Catinca Untaru, whose words and emotions as the character Alexandria mainly were unscripted. The 6-year-old actress's unintentional misreading during production, which the director transformed into a plot twist, led Alexandria to misunderstand the letter E as the number 3 in a message by Roy. To capture Catinca and Pace's natural interactions even though Tarsem was there, he had several of the hospital sequences between them shot through tiny holes in the hospital bed drapes of the film crew surrounding them. Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein produced animation from a dream scene for the movie.

The ways in which the film was shot are truly amazing and completely opposite to what we generally hear and that makes this movie stand out completely from other fantasy movies made so far.

Conclusion

The Fall is a 2006 film directed by Roy Walker, starring David Fincher and Spike Jonze. After being injured in a stunt, Walker meets Alexandria, a young patient with a broken arm, and tells her a tale about six heroes who set out to kill Governor Odious. The story follows the heroes, including an Indian warrior, Otta Benga, Luigi, Charles Darwin, Wallace, and a masked swashbuckling robber. Alexandria's creativity gives her characters life, meanwhile, Roy plans to use morphine to kill himself due to the loss of his beloved. The imaginary narrative ends when Odious dies, and the story ends with Roy encountering his ex-girlfriend, who claims the suffering served as a test of his devotion.

All in all, the film might seem confusing to some people in the beginning but the visual effects, soundtracks, and adventurous narrative, all combine to make this film a grand success which should be appreciated for the immense creativity with which it is made. To sum it up, this movie should be on the watch list of everyone who enjoys cinema.