Mortal Engines review – Peter Jackson’s brilliant, bombastic escapism breaks exciting new ground [National Student archive]

~~~THIS ARTICLE was originally written for THE NATIONAL STUDENT it has been archived on my personal blog anticipating the TERMINATION of that VENERABLE ESTABLISHMENT~~~



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Verdict: Peter Jackson's adaptation of Philip Reeve's award-winning sci-fi YA uses recognisable and much loved motifs to introduce a new generation of cinemagoers to the power of Star Wars-like escapism.

Without watching a trailer, Mortal Engines is a bit hard to sell because the concept is ridiculous when you say it out loud. In the far future, after an apocalyptic nuclear war, resources are so scarce that the majority of the survivors put their cities on wheels and hunt smaller towns (also on wheels) for sustenance. Then again, Peter Jackson probably doesn’t have much difficulty in pitching batshit bonkers ideas to studios, given his CV.

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What suspends the audience’s disbelief with the force of a SpaceX rocket is the sumptuous world-building, both visually and in Philip Reeve’s electric in-world vernacular: reverential talk of the “Great Predator-Cities”, “Traction-Towns”, “Air-Haven” (yes, a city in the sky), the “anti-tractionists of Shan Guo”, as well as unvisited, enticing-sounding locations like the “Ice-City of Archangel”, sucks you right into the ridiculous world of Mortal Engines. Every place, organisation, or person wistfully spoken of feels like it deserves Capital Letters, part of the fantasy mystique of the world-building.

The Oxford Union shouldn’t have invited Bannon, and the talk shouldn’t go ahead [National Student archive]

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Steve Bannon’s talk was announced by the Oxford Union yesterday morning. By midday Unite Against Fascism, Stand Up To Racism and the Anti-Fascist Network had organised protests. By the evening I read in Cherwell that the OU was calling an emergency meeting with a view to rescinding the invitation and cancelling the event.

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Good riddance - he should never have been invited.

You can’t debate a white-nationalist, identitarian, conspiracy theorist. He’s not here to listen to logic, or to dispute it – he’s there to make the case for white nationalism. If the talk goes ahead it’ll be a rerun of what we saw on Channel 4 News in May, when Channel 4 allowed Bannon to weasel-word live in an 'interview' with Matt Frei for over 40 minutes.

The point is that most of our liberal paragons are horrendously ill-equipped to debate people who don’t respond to debate. On the one hand, liberals find it hard to debate “identitarians” (there are other words for those overly concerned with their racial identity, but I’ll indulge the Bannons for now) precisely because these identitarians are so apt at turning identity politics on their head. If a person’s stated identity is irrefutable, they say, then how can you attack me for just being a white nationalist? I am a white nationalist, what’s your problem with my identity? (C.f. the bizarre ‘It’s okay to be white’ campaign of 2017).

Stand up to Racism and Unite Against Fascism plan protests over Steve Bannon’s Oxford Union talk [National Student archive]

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The Oxford Union announced today at 10am that they plan to host Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to President Donald Trump and former executive chairman of Brietbart News, for an event this Friday (16th November).

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The event, as advertised, will consist of Bannon’s opening remarks, ‘followed by questions from the [OU] President before opening the floor to the audience’.

The decision to announce last-minute, and with the strict attendance limit of members only, may have been influenced by the widespread condemnation of the Oxford Union caused by the announcement of Alice Weidel (leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD)) as a guest earlier this month.

Liberation groups had planned protests if the event went ahead. Her OU billing for the 7th of November was eventually cancelled, after Weidel cancelled her trip to the UK citing ‘concerns with the security arrangements for aspects of her travels and engagements’.

Theatre Review: The Lovely Bones @ Birmingham Rep [National Student archive]

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The Lovely Bones is a new show produced by the Birmingham REP, the Royal & Derngate, Northampton, and Northern Stage, in association with Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, and is directed by Melly Still.

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Tonally, this play was all over the place, as if the it can’t decide whether it wants to indulge the horror of the crime at the core of the play or the whimsical detachment of the protagonist-narrator. Once irony eats the horror-cake, you can’t then have the cake. Jumpscares involving a paedophile (who’s proven to be just a human) marauding our ghostly protagonist (who’s proven to be invulnerable to and separate from the physical world) were pointless in their lack of threat, besides being simplistic and obvious as jumpscares are.

Director Mike Leigh talks Peterloo's increasing relevance, the artist, and democracy [National Student archive]

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I chatted with Mike Leigh in Leeds, where he was attending the Leeds International Film Festival, hot on the tail of Peterloo’s premiere at the HOME cinema in Manchester. “Yeah it was great. It was part of the London Film Festival – but in Manchester. It was a very inspired move on somebody’s part to do that. It was great.” Leigh’s assistant had been eager to inform me before the interview that the premiere was specially held in Manchester despite being part of the BFI London Film Festival, and that this was no mean feat.

I got the impression that Mike (can I refer to an OBE, promethean figure in British drama by first name only? Hopefully.) was incredibly incisive, with an active mind. Talking to him, perhaps because I had this article in mind at the time, one could hear the punctuation in his speech – dashes, locking onto exciting new thoughts. I’d got a sense from reading other interviews of Mike’s directness, so I asked him quite directly what his film had for young people. He was also pleasingly direct in his response: “What’s it got for young people? Well, what the film is about is the future, how we live and how we’re going to live. … I consider it a film for everybody – plainly it’s about democracy, it’s about people hearing our voice.”

Peterloo review - a beautifully furious film [National Student archive]

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Verdict: A beautiful, furious film, but if Mike Leigh was hoping to convert viewers to the cause of opposing iniquities in the present day, then the accessibility of this slow, long film may be an issue in converting those other than the choir.

The first thing that strikes you about Peterloo is that aesthetically, this film is lavishly historical, minutely detailed, and so utterly immersed in its setting that you wouldn’t believe for a second that this isn’t an actual slice of history. 

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Beyond the visual, there is also a fascination with rhetoric, and the powerful sway which ideas held over the conflicted time following the French revolution. Huge swathes of the film are given over to eloquent oration from all sides of the debate, delivered from a series of absolutely fantastic performances, such that we the cinema audience are somehow included in the pub- or meeting hall-audience of nineteenth-century workers.

Theatre Review: The Wider Earth @ the Natural History Museum [National Student archive]

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The play opens to ethereal music and a low rumbling, with a starscape of slowly scintillating lasers through dry ice – lasers suspended in the air, glints of white light occasionally catching your eye.

There’s an indescribable anticipation for being in one of the Museum’s hallowed halls, and all of the preshow impresses on the audience the immanence of an Event. An indescribable dark shape skulks in the centre of the room, a mysterious part of our discovery.

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Images courtesy of Chloe Nelkin Consulting

This shape turns out to be the set, a hulking structure of wood which at certain angles is part ship, part building. One side is predominantly hills/cliffs/icebergs/coastlines, and the other, hollow, predominantly classroom/ship-deck/living room, giving a nice variety of sets with a minimum of clunky changeovers. The revolution and rotation is used quite cleverly in scenes and montages to create a sense of lateral movement, for example a prehistoric fish swimming as the puppeteer stands still and the background moves. Revolves seem to be very much “in” right now for high-concept theatre (Les Mis, War Horse, Hamilton) but it’s used very well here, particularly when used to create that sense of travel, like those rolling backgrounds in old fashioned film, and it felt quite a fresh innovation in this smaller-scale production.

Johnny English Strikes Again review - finally restores the saga to almost its original heights [National Student archive]

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Verdict: Rowan Atkinson is hilarious in Johnny Engilsh Strikes Again, if you can look past the film itself.

Johnny English has retired into obscurity as a teacher, when a cyber attack reveals the identity of every secret agent serving the UK, forcing the government to (reluctantly) call on English again. It’s a pretty basic premise which requires one while watching the film to imagine the first idea on a writer’s whiteboard under the question “how do we justify a sequel in canon?”

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But it does the job, and then we’re away.

The first thing that deserves mentioning is the excellent slapstick. Rowan Atkinson’s comedic instincts continue to amaze, and his performance in this film is wonderfully, gloriously silly. It’s not quite as thoroughly funny as the original film, and yet it’s still enjoyable in itself, and there are moments which are more laugh-out-loud funny than the original, so it evens out. I won’t spoil my favourite gag, because it’s brilliant, but watch out for the green and red pills. The joke you’ll see coming from a mile away – Johnny English is always great at planting hints of future hilarity – but the pay-off is even better than you could imagine.

2036 Origin Unknown review - poor, lazy scifi, clearly lacking the polish of its great ancestors [National Student archive]

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Verdict: a solid effort, but just watch the good sci-fi it's emulating instead.

2036 Origin Unknown is a fairly experimental sci-fi film which loosely can be said to tell the story of a Mars mission with an AI controller and human assistant (hello, 2001: A Space Odyssey), which finds a monolith of unknown origin where one has no right to be, on the surface of an alien planet (ditto).

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This review must be prefaced with an acknowledgement that this film is a diamond in the rough.  For one thing, it comes from a fairly new director (this is Hasraf Dullul’s second feature) and was shot in 11 days on a fairly modest budget. However, these things do not excuse that this is a poor film with clear issues in its pacing, plotting, internal logic, and acting.

Theatre Tourism: we thespians and theatre-watchers need to get out more [National Student archive]

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We thespians and theatre-watchers need to get out more.

I don’t mean to say that theatre is an inadequate pastime, quite the opposite; I just mean that we’re too narrow in our selection of local theatre closer to us, or in obsessing over London theatre, often heinously so. Instead, I argue we need to view regional theatre as the nerd version of the football away-day. It’s a way to see great theatre and to see the country at the same time.

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There isn’t one hegemonic theatre in the UK, despite what ATG tickets might make you think, and travelling around means you can see the wonderfully varied things people are doing on stage. Not only that, but local theatre can combine seeing unique theatre with learning more about a new area when it tries to tell local stories.

Foreign Film Friday: Sicilian Ghost Story review - a beautiful Italian crime-story-with-a-twist you need to see [National Student archive]

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Verdict: an absolute must see.

Sicilian Ghost Story is in Italian with subtitles, but don’t let that put you off - this is a truly marvellous, heart-wrenching watch. It’s based on a true story which I recommend not looking up before you see it for the full impact of the ending.

In short, it tells the story of Giuseppe, a Sicilian boy who was abducted in 1996 by the mafia as leverage over his father, who was co-operating with the police. It’s also about Giuseppe’s girlfriend, Luna, and her quest to get to the bottom of his unexplained disappearance.

Why a student debt TV game show is a sad sign of our anti-intellectual times [National Student archive]

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This week we found out that Michael Torpey, most famously CO Thomas Humphreys from Orange is the New Black, has started a new cash-prize game show.

However, rather than winning tonnes of money for the speedboat you’ve always wanted, being successful simply clears your cripplingly large student debt.

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Just for a moment, let’s put this phenomenon in the context of other game shows like Pointless, Deal or No Deal, or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire where all the prizes are a tidy sum of at least thousands of pounds, sometimes even a million.

In comparison, on Paid Off you don’t win a million pounds, you win freedom from a gigantic debt.

Put on a number line stretching from minus $40,000 (CNBC’s figure for the average debt of an American when they graduating) to positive $1,000,000 on the other end, the difference is striking; Instead of going from zero to positive you go from negative to zero.

How It Ends review - a post-apocalyptic, ultra-macho road-trip that's more worthwhile than you think [National Student archive]

~~~THIS ARTICLE was originally written for THE NATIONAL STUDENT it has been archived on my personal blog anticipating the TERMINATION of that VENERABLE ESTABLISHMENT~~~

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Verdict: This post-apocalyptic Netflix film is a surprising departure from genre expectations and an enjoyable watch, despite a disappointing ending. 

How It Ends (2018) is a post-apocalyptic road-trip movie released straight to Netflix. The first thing a British audience will notice is that it’s as American as apple pie – or rather, as American as absurdly long car journeys and Call of Duty. It certainly has the same gritty, muted colour palette as the latter, with the browns and grey-blues, and orange washes to show unnatural heat. It’s orange and blue, orange and blue, like Michael Bay with less explosions. You might not think it from the look of it, but the film has more going on than its aesthetic and its premise would suggest.

A trailer for a film on the notorious Peterloo massacre just dropped [National Student archive]

~~~THIS ARTICLE was originally written for THE NATIONAL STUDENT it has been archived on my personal blog anticipating the TERMINATION of that VENERABLE ESTABLISHMENT~~~


Peterloo is a new historical drama from Mike Leigh, director of Mr. Turner (2014), and the attention to detail in presenting the 19th century seems to have carried over, in a film with a clearly linked “look” with 2012’s Les Miserables.

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The film comes from the production studios of Film4 and the BFI, both renowned for great British cinema, as well Mike Leigh’s own company, Thin Man Films.

The November falls within the 199th year since the Manchester Yeomanry charged a crowd listening to a parliamentary-reformist speaker in St. Peter’s Field, outside Manchester.

Manchester Uni officers have painted over 'racist' Rudyard Kipling poem [National Student archive]

~~~THIS ARTICLE was originally written for THE NATIONAL STUDENT it has been archived on my personal blog anticipating the TERMINATION of that VENERABLE ESTABLISHMENT~~~



On Thursday, elected officers at Manchester uni painted over a Rudyard Kipling poem displayed in the student union building with Maya Angelou's 'Still I Rise.'  

Sara Khan, the SU’s Liberation and Access Officer explained in a post that the original mural arose from 'a failure to consult students during the process of adding art to the newly renovated SU building,' and that the Executive team 'believe that Kipling stands for the opposite of liberation, empowerment, and human rights.'

The SU has since apologised for the mural saying that it was 'inappropriate.'

In response to social media backlash, the SU issued a further statement defending the students’ action from accusations of 'vandalism,' saying they were 'breathing life into a project to make it truly student-led.'

'We're all struggling' says campaigner who started a petition to pay student nurses a minimum wage [National Student archive]

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Nursing students currently have to do seven placements totalling 2,300 hours of unpaid work.

This is equivalent to 60 unpaid weeks, over the 3-year course. The petition claims that since scrapping of NHS bursaries, nursing students have been forced to take up part-time work on top of a 37.5-hour-a-week placement just to make ends meet.

The petition is addressed to the Prime Minister, the Minister of State for Universities, and Matt Hancock MP, the new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.

It turns out that employers don't actually care about your uni grades that much [National Student archive]

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New research suggests that employees value experience over education.

Indeed.co.uk, the job site used by more than 200 million people, has released new research about the decision-making of small businesses during the employment process.

Unfortunately, some of the findings may come as a shock to those who have invested 3 years and over £27,000 of debt into their degrees.

A survey of 1,000 small business employers found that 81% place a higher premium on a candidate's experience rather than on their education.

Philip Reeve releases new 'Mortal Engines' short stories and we're so excited [National Student archive]

~~~THIS ARTICLE was originally written for THE NATIONAL STUDENT it has been archived on my personal blog anticipating the TERMINATION of that VENERABLE ESTABLISHMENT~~~


Philip Reeve has brought out a collection of three short stories in the universe of the Mortal Engines quartet, to tie in with the film adaption of Mortal Engines coming out later this year. As if fans of the original series didn’t have enough to lose their minds over already.

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The collection, entitled ‘Night Flights’, is centred around Anna Fang, the Anti-Tractionist aviatrix supporting-character from the original quartet. It’s essentially a prequel to the main saga which, as Reeve says in his 2018 Book News update, ‘adds a bit of detail to the stories of Anna Fang’s early life which are hinted at in Mortal Engines’. The middle story in the collection is based on ‘Traction City’, Reeve’s World Book Day novella release from 2011, refocussing the events on Anna who in that book was more of a deuteragonist, while, excitingly, the first and last stories are wholly new creations.