The Brave and The Bold
I have a collection of favourite directors and no matter what these director’s films are about I’ll go and see them because I like their work. One of these directors if Joseph Kosinski. If you don’t know who he is that because he is a little bit of a rising star of sorts. The two films he directed before Only the Brave were Tron: Legacy and Oblivion. I love those two films and think they are marvellous pieces of science fiction art. Kosinski’s Only the Brave is another work of art that strips away Kosinski’s usual sci-fi elements to create a film about life and elements of our planet that aren’t normally shown in a film, the only issue is that it’s a little long.
Only the Brave follows the true story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots who are an elite group of firefighters who end up risking everything to save their beloved town from a wildfire. The Granite Mountain Hotshots became famous around the US for the events that happened as shown in the film and it is a story that I didn’t know existed until I watched the film. If you’re going to see it and don’t know the story then I recommend going in blindly because you’ll most likely enjoy it more for the subtle twists and turns.
Getting the bad part out of the way it is simply just a long film and even though it is only two hours and fourteen minutes long it ends up feeling more than that. It’s the exhausting middle portion of the film that takes it out of you and makes you realise you’re in a cinema watching a movie. This feeling isn’t in Kosinski’s other films as they are immersive and so visually stunning that you can’t help but watch them play in front of you. The middle is long for a reason but maybe cutting ten minutes out would’ve made it so that the audience didn’t feel so strained to keep sitting there watching it.
The story is quite good however and the characters all great a quality amount of screen time which is usually a little uncommon with films like this. There are a lot of members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots and its good that each member is fully realised and seen in the film for enough time. Their progress from being lower level firefighters to certified hotshots is an inspiring journey which creates an emotional tug at your heartstrings when the film gets going towards the end. It’s their lives that you truly care about as you see both their life with their loved ones and their life with the fire, in the end, get to care about each member’s life as he battles through the flames destroying their towns.
Where the film succeeds the most is in its visuals and Kosinski’s usual sci-fi landscape is stripped away to a desert and forest landscape which he managed to take a hold of as well. The desert looks perfectly rough and gorgeous while the fires look frightening and astounding to the viewer’s eye. I would love to see the behind the scenes to see what parts of each fire are real and what parts are CGI. It’s Kosinski’s understanding of how to set up the look of the scene and surround the cast in a beautiful environment that makes the actual firefighting parts of the film have such a large impact, even if the environment is a dangerous and deadly one. These scenes are the ones that you become immersed in and you look on with a mixture of astonishment and fear at the same time.
Only the Brave is an inspiring and shocking true story that will pull at your heartstrings as you watch the members of the team go from nothing to heroes. I love Kosinski’s other films because you feel immersed all the time but with Only the Brave that immersion is only felt some of the time and it’s long runtime makes it a little tougher to sit through than it probably should’ve been. It’s certainly worth watching and it is another really good film by the director but I can’t see myself sitting through it many times like I do with Tron: Legacy and Oblivion.