Sunday 17 March 2019

Review: A Private War

After seeing the documentary Under The Wire, I felt perfectly prepped to see the feature film about infamous war correspondent Marie Colvin.

Despite being a regular reporter for The Times, I knew nothing of Colvin let alone her reports in some of the most dangerous places in the world.

The documentary gave me so much that I can totally understand why this story is worthy of being made into a feature film.

It honestly took me a while to see this as an exceptional piece of work. Most of what I was seeing was good. It was moving along nicely, the story enhanced well and I think the structure of the plot worked well. But as the stakes got higher, the more tense I got and the final act was what got me emotionally and made me realise that I cared for everything that was happening. I felt the dangers, the stakes and the risks are characters were taking and the pay-off was very impactful.

A lot of it is thanks to Rosamund Pike who did an excellent playing Colvin. You can see she did her homework and transformed into the lady herself. I was really happy to see Jamie Dornan gives us a memorable performance playing Colvin's main photographer after being involved in the pretty bad Fifty Shades trilogy. Also, Tom Hollander did a solid contribution as he always does in the type of role we always seem to see him in.

Other aspects that made this a really good watch was the strong production design and the frenetic camerawork and editing when required.

The strength of Rosamund Pike's performance and the level of authenticity of portraying the dangers are characters were involved made this a very dramatic and intense piece of work that I think everyone should check out.
It certainly portrays Colvin's achievements well on screen and the way the camera moved around certainly made me feel like I was by her side dodging all the bombs and shootings.
The character study aspect certainly gave us plenty of content to understand why Colvin did what she did and even her softer side in the middle of all the darkness around her for most of the film.

Rating: 8/10

No comments:

Post a Comment