Firestorm

The dramaturgy of Firestorm is built on kitsch elevated to the level of spectacle and bombastic pathos. This is a grandiose farce that in its climactic moments audaciously rivals the brilliant operatic irrationality of Michael Bay. After all, just as Bay boldly walks on the edge of auteurism and brazen ignorance of conventions passed off as inventiveness, the makers of Firestorm came up with a “boldly” confused narrative that eliminates any exposition and, in the interest of creating fake depth, disrupts temporal continuity and classic methods of doling out information with fast-forwards. Only the question remains as to why why the narrative takes such great pains with the characters’ moral dilemmas when those dilemmas are always resolved through radical screenwriting intervention from above. But perhaps I just didn’t understand it and the film was supposed to be a paranoid anti-theist drama that shows the viewers the cruel helplessness of characters trapped in the world of a deity who doesn’t care about their motivations and simply plays with them on a whim. And then there’s the silly CGI... Rather than the Hong Kong style, Firestorm is actually more evocative of Bollywood, where everything is also conceived with absolute literalness and expressiveness. (22/09/2014)