When was the last time you saw a really big movie?

The words spoken by Harrison Ford in his promo for Sky movies. The answer for pretty much everyone who goes to the movies or watches them on TV is that it's pretty hard to avoid them, if by big you mean a lot of money was spent on them. Examples in the Sky commercial included The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, After Earth and Oblivion. Put together they probably cost over a $billion to make, but do any of them constitute a truly big movie?




I fear not. A lot of these films, including the ones I have cited above actually lose out as a result of their big productions, saturating the viewer with sights, sounds, colours and a profusion of computer graphics, so that we become almost numbed to any artistic merit they may possess. Perhaps the best contemporary movie I saw last year was Blue Jasmine, and that didn't have to rely on elaborate special effects, rather its strength lay in the traditional fields of tight direction, brilliant screenplay and superlative acting performances. To offer another example, I recently watched the re-screening of the BBC's I Claudius on BBC 4, a series with the budget seemingly cut to the bone, but which, even after more than thirty years since its first outing on television, has retained its magnetic power through a tremendously good script and the utterly compelling acting of a very high quality cast.




So, Harrison Ford and Sky movies: I don't want big movies, I want good ones. Please to oblige?