The Year of Living Dangerously (1983)

Just so...so bad

How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

There are few modern directors I admire as much as Peter Weir. His movies have a lean, elegant quality; he knows restraint and the power of understatement. His use of music is masterful. He is a fantastic actors' director, getting from people like Harrison Ford and Jim Carrey the best performances of their careers - here it's Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. Even potential miscalculations - like giving the part of an Indonesian man to an American actress, as it happens with Linda Hunt in this film - strike gold: Hunt won a deserved Academy Award for the role.Even a minor Weir, like The Year of Living Dangerously, captures the sense of alienation - and exhilaration - of outsiders lost in mysterious places, a recurrent theme in the director's opus (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Witness, The Mosquito Coast, Master and Commander). Here it's Indonesia during the Sixties, as Gibson's foreign correspondent follows the attempted coup to overthrow President Sukarno.Worth watching, like every movie in Weir's filmography.7/10

Writing a two star review for a film that has an IMDb rating of 7.1 must look like spite, but let me make my case. Firstly, the plot line is confusing, quickly ticking off events from the book, without the viewer getting to understand their full significance. So we do not get to understand Billy's love of the Sigourney Weaver character, his bitterness as someone who has not had love reciprocated and thus his spiral out of control. We do not really get to understand Mel Gibson's motivation as a journalist either, only his romance with Sigourney Weaver. So, we do not really understand why he deliberately loses the swimming race with the British military attaché - (this was done to befriend him and get more scoops). This messes with the dramatic impact, meaning that we not only do not get to know the characters, nor the complexity of the political backdrop of Indonesia under a dictatorship with communist revolutionaries and Muslim generals. My second problem is with the casting. Mel Gibson and Siguourney Weaver are the fabulous looking Hollywood stars brought into attract an audience, but Gibson is wooden and wholly unbelievable as a foreign journalist. He overuses a cigarette as a prop as if that is the main characteristic of a journalist. He only comes alive when offended and given a chance for violence, (which explains his future casting in Braveheart/Lethal Weapon). Weaver gives a reasonable English accent, but the role calls for someone with a cut glass voice to emphasise how foreign her posting in Jakarta is. Similarly Linda Hunt does well as Billy Kwan, but why bother? With a billion Chinese on this earth why opt for a white female to play a male half-Chinese man?

Sadly, the author of the book only wrote two novels and this one thankfully was made into this great film. The dialog of Linda Hunty's character is so intelligent you might want to keep a Thesaurus handy. Alos Michael Murphy, so underrated is perfect. Of course looking at the very young Sigourney and Mel is very pleasant. The plot is exciting and really proves something. That these Dictators, in this case Sukarno come and go and come and go. The photography and scenes are stunning. I don't care to see two people actually 'doing it' on the screen. If you like that sort of thing watch a porno! The scene between Gibson and Weaver when they run to the car to get out of the rain and just look at each other........wow, you can really feel the Heat big time. You can really learn things about the World from this film.I hate remakes but this one if done right could be great.

I'very disappointed with this boring, irrelevant movie. Basically nothing relevant happens: A guy are working in a tropical hellhole and meet some unlikely, unbelievable character, like a midget philosopher-photographer, a tough British soldier who don't like ice and the only one attractive woman in the whole Jakarta who, of course fall in love with him. Almost anyone in the movie behaves very irrationally, crashing armed checkpoints for bring a girl at home, wandering crime riddled streets just for fun, getting out of the car to face a machete-armed hostile crowd, and continuously,blithely ignoring a whole army of mean-looking armed guards. This movie is just an excuse for presenting the real heroes: the commies, who tries to "liberate" Indonesia, as they "liberate" China, Korea and Vietnam.