Zach Z
Very good. Enjoyable. I miss Robin Williams a lot.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
04/18/24
Full Review
Aender S
Good story just a little tarnished by Al Pacino's over-acting.
I surely need to watch this film's Norwegian original.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
04/11/24
Full Review
David M
We all know that it's our real or perceived weaknesses, mistakes and transgressions that keep us awake at night; left to themselves they can run riot. Unable to rest, we lose perspective, our memory plays tricks on us and guilt - justified or not - can become overwhelming. Soon we're caught in a circular trap, from which we can only be freed by sleep or the morning.
It's precisely this insomnia that haunt's Nolan's third film; Dormer (Pacino) is haunted throughout by an assortment of vulnerabilities. Some of these are a simple fact of the passage of time and humanity - the threat of a turned ankle after a jump, slipping under the logs giving chase, an inability to sleep in bright light. Others are real guilt, an increasing doubt of his own motives, or the temptations of being away from home and whatever his more 'normal' family life might be. This is all given force by the parallelisms between Dormer and Robin Williams's character, and the Internal Affairs investigation with the central murder.
These are all strengths of a script that, unusually for a Nolan film, isn't written by the director. I haven't seen the film it's a remake of, but certainly it's a film that unlike many of Nolan's other films (which he at least co-writes), its main female characters are complex, interesting creations with genuine agency. Photographed by long-term collaborator Wally Pfister, the film is soaked in cold, almost metallic shades (amongst others) of blue, lending a sense of the eerie to a film which, driven by a Pacino performance that for the most part avoids his latter-day tendency to self-parody, brilliantly evokes the way an inability to sleep feels all the day round. Unlike many Nolan films, the story is entirely linear; but it retains his obsessions with how our past informs our present, and the film plays with that as the flashes of visons that haunt that Dormer suggests a suppression of his past that threatens to overwhelm in - and by the end, does.
This is often seen as a minor Nolan film, on the way to the more successful and lauded films that lay in his future. But it deserves attention for all these reasons, not to mention the much missed Robin Williams's haunting and controlled performance. If Inception would take the cinema of dreams to somewhere new, this asks uncomfortable questions about what makes us unable to sleep ... and therefore to also dream. Showcasing as it does a deft thriller plot, his customary technical excellence and female characters who are better drawn than his usual, this is a corner of the Nolan filmography ripe for a revisiting.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
03/30/24
Full Review
KB B
This was such an awesome movie with great acting, cast and storyline. It's definitely worth the watch.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
03/25/24
Full Review
Trerg F
From Norway to Alaska
I respect Al Pacino. I support Robin Williams, especially in his dramatic endeavors. I don't like Hilary Swank, but that's a small matter. I have a lukewarm attitude toward director Christopher Nolan. But for some time I really liked the film 'Insomnia'. Until I got acquainted with the original - a Norwegian film under the same name, it seems, released in 1999.
Yes, the American film is professionally tailored. Well played. Its disadvantages are visible only if you know how it could have been (and it was!). And it was: brilliant.
Al Pacino overacts. He goes out of his way to try to prove to the viewer how much he wants to sleep. During the entire film, the Swedish actor not only didn't yawn once, but he himself seemed to have no idea that he wasn't getting enough sleep. And at the same time, his fatigue poured off the screen. How? A miracle, probably. In the Norwegian original, the main character is not a hero at all. Pacino again released a caricatured brave comic, a man of honor and conscience. And the scriptwriters conceived of him as an ordinary person, quite unpleasant by the way, with human emotions and shortcomings.
Robin Williams is the most organic. Although again, one cannot help but notice some of the grotesqueness of his character. He plays the villain. He is obsessively unpleasant. Purely Hollywood approach - 'good character' versus 'bad character'. And God forbid the viewer confuses them.
The ending absolutely killed me. In "Insomnia" 2002, she aroused distrust in me for a long time. But now I know for certain that nothing like this was expected.
In 2002's Insomnia, there is a sense of a great idea that falls apart as the film progresses, and by the end there is no trace of it left at all. Why do unknown Scandinavian actors play incomparably better than Hollywood stars of the first magnitude who receive $20 million per film? Well, who said that everything in life is fair?
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/14/24
Full Review
JonNookI
Insomnia is yet another triumph from my favorite current director, Christopher Nolan, based on the 1997 film by Erik Skjoldbjærg. The plot is compelling, and the characters and acting are just fantastic, particularly Al Pacino's character, but Robin Williams does a great job as well, and his character is so striking to watch, because you can see all his layers, and he really seems like he should be a good guy, which is why he is so good as the villain. Nolan's style we see in his other films is majorly missing here, as if I didn't know this was a Nolan film beforehand, I probably wouldn't have thought it was while or after watching. I thought that the ending was near-perfect, though I would've expanded the story a bit more after, to really make the film feel complete. Though not his best work, I think this a fantastic representation of Nolan trying something different, and while it won't work for everyone, I truly enjoyed it.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/10/24
Full Review
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