A Film Canon

Around The World In Eighty Days stretches the screen to an unprecedented extent, imbuing every frame with the curvature of the earth's surface, and creating a proto-IMAX aesthetic that justifies producer Michael Todd's opening summary - and invocation - of cinema as a canon of technological innovations, extending from Melies' experiments with the fade, to the most recent examples of aerial photography. This enables a surprisingly sophisticated engagement with the past, as Anderson resists both straightforward identification and exotic detachment in favour of a technological genealogy, thereby ensuring that Phileas Fogg's (David Niven) eighty-day journey already contains the imminent satellite orbit of the earth, collapsing - and defamiliarising - retrospection and projection. Unfortunately, the overwhelming breadth of Todd's vision outweighs this directorial flourish - particularly clear in the astonishing travel segments, which seem keen to revive both the 'phantom rides' of silent cinema, and the painted panoramas of Verne's time - resulting in overwhelmingly one-dimensional characterisation, both of the handful of leads and completely token cameos, and of the various countries encountered, all reduced to so many sacrificial rites.