You have to think carefully about your return to cultural life. You probably want to remember it later, the first film, the first exhibition after what felt like the longest winter of your own life. So cinema. No multiplex tristesse in the pedestrian zone, but a film festival. Glamor, hustle and bustle, people, everything that was missing for so long. Munich, not Cannes, but after a year and a quarter the differences in the rabbit burrows of streaming services are really only gradual. Especially when the first film is “Tides”, the science fiction thriller by Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum.
What he does very well with images and sound is what is called terrace dynamics in music. Anton Bruckner demonstrated this in his symphonies: every fortissimo a summit, every pianissimo an abyss. In between the action plays. At first, silent black text panels are mounted between drama pictures full of noise in the marrow-and-bone quality of Dolby Atmos. This sets the rhythm for the alternation of images of claustrophobic narrowness and lost space in the rust, ocher and gray tones of a hostile planet. And because this film turns its genre a bit upside down, it is the earth on which the three space travelers who come from the planet Kepler land. This is an interstellar refuge to which the elites fled after the pandemics, climate catastrophes and wars. Only one survived the landing on its return in the endless mudflats with its brutal tides, which gave the film its title. Blake (Nora Arnezeder) is now exploring this planet, which has become so inhospitable in this future that the west coast desert from “Blade Runner 2049” looks like a Garden of Eden.
The leaps in time in streaming productions that are often the same? Should only keep you awake.
The review will follow in August when the film hits theaters. It’s about the evening. So much should only be revealed to make it clear that a narrative style apart from the new script templates of the Netflix and Amazon productions also contributes to the fact that you are clearly back in the cinema. Who actually came up with these templates, which make it imperative that the end must come at the beginning and the rest is mixed up like a packet of sheep’s head cards? Probably a sleep researcher with Tarantino’s oeuvre behind his neck, who found out that sofas develop gravity and only cinema seats develop G-Force.
The one in the Arri can catapult you into a linear story without wanting to keep you awake. Because there are images that even such a Corona 4K screen would not be able to cope with and the subwoofer would go miserably to its knees in the thunder of sound. And yes, popcorn from the box office always tastes better than that from the pan at home.
Too much pandemic-weary glorification of a movie night? Mainly because history really does not give courage for the future. Tim Fehlbaum and his producers Thomas Wöbke and Philipp Trauer could not have known when they developed the script that the world would be in the middle of a pandemic, deadly heat waves and on the brink of a cyber world war when their film premiered in Munich. Or maybe because that’s the art of the blockbuster. Roland Emmerich once told the story, who incidentally worked on “Tides” as an executive producer and even in the editing room. In any case, he said that he regularly goes to the Book Soup bookstore on Sunset Boulevard and then in front of the table with the new non-fiction books ponders what will move the world in four, five, six years. That is how long it usually takes from the idea to the premiere. It worked. Hit nerve.