A film which I nearly didn’t go to see because the poster and the trailers have all been so rubbish but then I did go and see it last night and was totally blown away. Attention Wachowski brothers, this is how you make a convincing and terrifying film about a near future British fascist state.

So it’s pretty bleak and occasionally seems depressingly close to where we are now, you can see how we get from here to there with just a couple of nudges eg. there are some pretty explicit refrences to Abu Ghraib in background of the refugee prison camp that the characters visit. On the down side, there’s the occasional clunky monologue but whilst these stand out they don’t detract from the film. To me it felt like a return to the inteligent British sci-fi tradition of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, sensibilities which were kind of lost post Star Wars but seem to be reasserting themselves with things like this and the new Doctor Who (esp that gas mask episode) and writers like Tricia Sullivan (who’s actually American but seems to me to fit in better with the John Wyndam, Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard continuum than the US pulp tradition) Also it’s a better action film than “V…” was.

Also, in trailer news, the new James Bond film looks pretty good (the guy they have as James Bond = pretty much how I imagined James Bond should be from the books) and the Scorsese remake of Infernal Affairs doesn’t look too bad either