After Fernando Meirelles 2002 City of God put Brazilian cinema on the periphery of audiences worldwide, Brazilian cinema has become saturated with films (and TV) fixated on retelling variations of the same story. These stories are set in Rio's notorious favelas -- a violent world governed by drug dealers, policed by corrupt cops and home to the impoverished. The favelas are a visually stunning real-world setting: overcrowded, decrepid shanty-towns, chiseled into the jagged outcroppings of Rio's coastal mountain range and in stark opposition to the natural beauty of the surrounding forest. It's not that these stories set in the favelas aren't well done --most of them are-- the problem is, every one of these stories looks as if they'd all been shot and edited by the same personnel. And when Rio's favelas showed up in one of Hollywood's biggest summer blockbusters, there was little doubt this trend had reached critical mass.
Tropa De Elite (translated: The Elite Squad) picks up on this trend, but does nothing to improve upon it. TDE tells the parallel stories of three cops and how their lives converge and ultimately affect one other's fate. TDE never measures up to its predecessors as a result of a distracted story line, one unsure of where it wants to go and how it wants to be told. While the three central stories seamlessly mingle with one another, approximately halfway through the film, TDE veers off on an awkward tangent, attempting to incorporate the Elite Squad's boot camp training into the story. The storytelling never recovers from this detour and as the first and final acts are stitched back together in the final minutes, TDE simply runs out of steam, exhausting its audience with overkill.
Tropa De Elite (translated: The Elite Squad) picks up on this trend, but does nothing to improve upon it. TDE tells the parallel stories of three cops and how their lives converge and ultimately affect one other's fate. TDE never measures up to its predecessors as a result of a distracted story line, one unsure of where it wants to go and how it wants to be told. While the three central stories seamlessly mingle with one another, approximately halfway through the film, TDE veers off on an awkward tangent, attempting to incorporate the Elite Squad's boot camp training into the story. The storytelling never recovers from this detour and as the first and final acts are stitched back together in the final minutes, TDE simply runs out of steam, exhausting its audience with overkill.
0 Yorumlar