Directed by : Sam Mendes

No one's gonna give you the life you want. You have to go out and get it. 

Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward in a still from 'Empire of Light'

Spoilers ahead...


Set in an English coastal town in the early 1980's, Empire is a seaside theatre where Hilary (Olivia Colman) works as a Duty Manager. She's regularly seeing a doctor because of some mental illness she is going through and there's a very good improvement in her health when a new hire at the theatre Stephen (Micheal Ward) arrives with whom she forms a great friendship blossoming into romance.

When the opening credits began, showing the various places of a theatre, from the food counter to stairs leading to various screens, projection room and finally the movie hall, I felt this would be a movie that will show the workings inside a theatre, about the staff and their daily routines and lastly some sort of ode to the cinema. Unfortunately, that's just one of the many themes this film tries to show off and failing at each one of them. 

There's mental illness, sexual exploitation - Hilary's boss Donald Ellis (Colin Firth) asking for favours in his cabin all the time, racist violence, vandalism of public property, power of cinema and also short little romance of Hilary-Stephen that the narrative tries to cover. As expected, it turns out to be a total mish-mash, unable to balance these plots together. 

In one scene, Hilary who has till date not dared to use her credentials to sneak in and watch a movie with the audience, decides to finally watch a movie asking the projectionist Norman (Toby Jones) to play any of his favourite movie. Norman decides to play 'Being There', and as the movie proceeds we see Hilary getting so involved that by the end she is in tears. Now, I haven't seen that movie but from this scene I can gather the motive was to show how powerful the medium of movies can be, only that I couldn't feel same way as Hilary does here because the path taken to reach this moment has been not engaging. Similarly, when Norman is describing to Stephen about 24 frames per second and escapist cinema that he feels people in majority come here for, you just get a feeling he is preaching and its not naturally coming out for us to feel. Something that Fabelmans did right. 

I love the metaphor done related to pigeons scene, where Stephen tries to help one of the pigeon who has lost wing and days later help it fly away. He tried to help Hilary out too, and at start it seems to work before totally falling apart. 

Cinematography and score of the movie is good. Also, one particular scene that I loved when a customer is told by Stephen to either eat the food he has or throw it as outside food ain't allowed inside, there's a hint of racism but this situation holds true otherwise too as many people do tend to dislike being told about such rules. .

Even though this is another of Olivia Colman's fine performances, I would rate it below 'The Father' and 'The Favourite'. I rather liked Michael Ward much more, playing a guy who wants to do college and become an architect but gets stuck at ticket counter of a theatre while also going through the humiliation of racist attacks time and again. The theatre attack scene could had been well written, I didn't get why the other staff won't ask him to hide rather than letting him help close the doors which lead to the attack. Silly writing!

Overall, Empire of Light could had been lot more had it chosen one of the sub-plots preferrably the daily life routine of people working at a theatre and let the rest story revolve around it. Rather tries for a lot and fails at it badly

My Rating : 4.5/10