Welcome to Marwen

What makes the movie interesting — and disturbing on a few different levels — is how its sentimental, inspirational elements do battle with darker impulses.

2313d ago

The disastrous Welcome To Marwen strands a fascinating true story in the uncanny valley

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Despite a sympathetic lead performance from Steve Carell, the fictionalized version bogs down in extensive animated doll sequences, so similar they grow increasingly tiresome.

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Ultimately, this is the best version of this story that the CG-obsessed Zemeckis could have possibly produced. But just because he could make it, that doesn't mean he should.

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Steve Carell plays a man working through trauma with action figures in a film that seems to shy away from uncomfortable truths

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Steve Carell plays a trauma victim who builds and enters an imaginary landscape of World War II action figures in Robert Zemeckis' elaborate dramatization of a 2010 documentary. But the documentary was better.

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It’s a perfect example of his longstanding difficulty in integrating technological wonders with a well-told story

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Robert Zemeckis tries too hard to sentimentalise Mark Hogancamp’s story, meaning what might have been a complicated drama plays like a dud Forrest Gump

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A crackpot tangle of digital effects and Freudian fantasy

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Director Robert Zemeckis recounts a true story of an ex-soldier who uses action figures as art therapy — and loses something in the Hollywood transition

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Welcome to Marwen is a misjudgment only a first-rate filmmaker could make.

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As for those special effects, they are vivid, colorful, convincing. They aren’t quite so good that you don’t notice the WWII fantasy scenarios enacted therein are clichéd constructions reenacted in high heels.

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That isn’t exactly feel-good material, which makes the perpetual niceness of this film, its fear of upsetting anyone, feel so stomach-churning. Zemeckis has always tried to search for the human splendor in spectacle, but in Welcome to Marwen he struggles to find either anything human or spectacular.

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Not even the talents of Steve Carell and Leslie Mann can save the disaster that is Welcome to Marwen.

2313d ago

Based on the true story of brain-damaged man who’s created a miniature village with a running storyline, Robert Zemeckis’s film is a sex- and violence-tinged spectacle.

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