Wrote a review awhile back
http://rickshq.blogspot.com/2009/04/review-franklyn.html
Franklyn is the story of four individuals who feel incomplete and their explosive collision in a futuristic London setting......
.......at least from what I thought.
Franklyn is easily the most miss-marketed movie of all time. In fact, 3 quarters of the film do not actually take place in the future. The quarter that was futuristic was easily the most intriguing. The aesthetic of Meanwhile City was gorgeous; it reminded me of
Dark City except industrialized. The strange psuedo-theocratic government put into place was fascinating, and would have been a fantastic new element in science fiction, a genre that has been missing originality for some time at least in the cinema. And even though there are obvious similarities to
Watchmen's Rorschach, Preest was still an entertaining and interesting protagonist.
Usually, Ryan Phillipe, who plays Preest, does nothing for me with the exception of Way of the Gun. These blunt, edgy, tough guy roles suit him better than most I think. The other 3 stories were also individually interesting, but together had little to do with each other until the end. This bouncing back and forth between the 4 did not feel organic.
Many of the fans of this film note the effectiveness of the filmmaker to portray mental illness unlike any other film has. I wish I could say something concrete about this but I have zero experience with mental illness, and to my knowledge I am not suffering from it (except the dellusions that people are in fact reading this blog).
The film does end up tying things together quite nicely in the end, except so much of it felt spoonfed to me. Before the ending revelation, we have already came to the conclusion that some things we were seeing were mostly dellusions by the characters, and the ending loses weight because of it. Of course, the line "It's not about who you leave behind, but the people you haven't met." It was a fantastic line and solidfied the ending perfectly, at least for 2 of the characters. The other two characters become more "weapons of fate" to bring the first 2 characters together, which justifies the minimal screentime of one and the seemingly irrelevent nature of the other.
I would have rather seen the entire movie take place in the future. The thematic elements of mental illness, a creator's resonsibility to their creation, and the how our own fate are intertwined with those around us are easily transferable and reinvigorate a genre that has been too "popcorn"-oriented in recent years.
Grade: 5/10
