Murder on the Orient Express: Classics, Stars and leaving the audience out of the mystery.

As I had a number of hours to kill before my night-bus from Tokyo to Kyoto I decided to give Murder on the Orient Express a shot—primarily as I couldn’t find any Japanese films screening with subtitles!

The film’s first sequence contrasts the rest of the film is many ways, it contains a huge cast, spans a few locations and lays out the pieces of the puzzle in a mystery for the audience to start attempting to crack the code. It successfully introduces Branagh’s Poirot as a genius, far ahead of everyone that surrounds him. These are all elements, bar the last, that are largely jettisoned when we board the Orient Express—the most tragic being the lack of puzzle pieces for our mystery.

As the title explains, we witness a murder and one of the train’s passengers is, of course, the murderer. We get a few nuggets of information during the murder, in sparing visuals and sounds experienced by Poirot. Naturally we take each to mind, beginning to form a web of the characters and motivations that delves us into the realm of a classic mystery—enticing us to think one way, then another. However, without spoiling too much, most of these pieces are jettisoned later in the film in place of an explanation that has laid outside the on-screen space, and thus has had no impression in the audience’s mind. The murder, and murderer, is tied to this outside cause and the film wraps itself in a neat bow. However I was very unsatisfied with this conclusion, and upon reflection it is exactly due to the fact we lacked any knowledge of this connection. It wasn’t that the narrative outsmarted us, either by plot, visual, auditory prowess by leaving the answers in the background, it ‘outsmarted’ the audience by simply withholding the explanation until the end of the film—which turned out to be unrelated to the information we were provided before-hand. Thus the mystery lost its mystery, and produced a mass of indifference as the grandiose conclusion turns into a flaccid reversal and reveal.

Of course, this criticism can’t be directed only at the 2017 film (although I have neither viewed the 1974 version or the Christie novel) however one cannot simply excuse it because it follows suit. All too often do we see works, or elements of works, go unchallenged because they are considered within the sacred category of a classic—yet, in all truth, these are the works we should approach with the most critical eye to find whether in our opinion (which can be of a different location, generation, class or belief) the work still stands up today. However, I doubt the 2017 Murder on the Orient Express will reach the status of the book, or even the previous filmic adaptation.

On a side note, upon reading a number of reviews after viewing the film many referred to the concept of a stellar and phenomenal cast which had me slightly puzzled. Each character receives very limited screen time which leaves 10+ characters in the realm of extremely underdeveloped stereotypes, resulting in flat and uninspired performances. This is interesting as it makes us consider what makes a ‘good’ cast in the public eye. Is it a cast filled with actors who provide phenomenal performances, or simply a cast filled with ‘stars’ who have provided notable performances in the past? Should we then judge the quality of the cast from the names on the poster, or the performances themselves? I, and I believe anyone, would argue the latter.

0/0/0

0/13

~Leo

(This 0/13 score is interesting as I would likely give the film 2/5. However as our scale rewards innovation, creativity and nuance (alongside personal engagement) this film has scored extremely low. Don't get me wrong it's not as awful as this makes it sound, it simply lacks what we classify as importaint; using the full potential of cinema, and pushing those boundaries outwards).