News of the World - 4 nominations

 

Best Sound Oliver Tarney  Mike Prestwood Smith  William Miller  John Pritchett

Best Achievement in Production Design David Crank (production design)  Elizabeth Keenan (set decoration)

Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score) James Newton Howard

Best Achievement in Cinematography Dariusz Wolski

I really wanted to love it.  It has all the right elements - who doesn't love Tom Hanks? Who doesn't love a period piece? Who doesn't love adventure?

Here's a movie where Captain Kidd (who doesn't love a character named Captain Kidd?) agrees to take a girl back to the place where her only living relatives reside.  She has been through hell - first her parents were murdered by the Kiowa Native Americans who kidnapped her, then the people who became her Kiowa family also died.  Captain Kidd is a civil war veteran who travels around the country to read the news to the illiterate masses, making him an experienced traveler and the perfect person to bring this girl to another place to call home.  She doesn't want to go and they don't really speak the same language.  As if that scenario isn't challenging enough, there are also nefarious characters out in the old west, and Captain Kidd must protect his charge at all costs.

It wasn't a bad movie, per se, but it was slow.  Even the moments that should have been exciting felt very one-note.  The bad guys are just really bad guys, and their dialogue could well have been, "I'm a bad guy.  This is me saying bad guy things."  This movie was not my favorite but if you have nothing else to do, it's what I would call "good enough."  Nothing to prioritize.

Watch the trailer here.