Notre Dame on Fire

It was good. Notre Dame on Fire delights with a pleasantly sober cinematic grip, where none of the characters is "the main one" and everyone just fills their role in a procedural web of actions and reactions within a real event. And it's very impressively shot. The special effects are at such a level that their inclusion blends perfectly with the real shots used and you hardly notice the transition between them. That’s something you rarely see. (09/10/2022)

A reenactment of the 2019 national disaster where Notre-Dame, a symbol of Paris, burned down. Jean Jacques Annaud is an experienced director, though it must be admitted that his best years were two decades ago, but this he chose a rather attractive subject matter that begged for a film treatment, even if he took his own way of doing it, and that didn't sit well with me. There's no main character, so there's nobody to root for, and the film lacks any emotion because of it, which is a pretty major problem. It's shot in a modest way, it looks quite made-for-TV at times, but that didn't detract significantly. The beginning of the disaster itself is handled decently and there is definitely a high level of negligence on the part of the workers. Something like this could definitely have been avoided with the right attitude. The running time could have been shorter, watching firefighters put out a fire for an hour gets a little tiresome, especially when there's no one there to yell. It should probably be seen, but I can't say that I enjoyed watching it. 5/10 (09/04/2022)

What did I take away from the film? Yeah, it took a lot of work to put the fire out. That's all the movie gave me. The result is very inconsistent, because on the one hand I appreciate the footage of the real event, and I equally liked the insight into the internal practices of the firefighters, the demonstration of their real equipment, machines and robots, as well as the ashes flying all around and the lead flowing from the gargoyles. But on the other hand, qualitatively it's a bit of a TV movie. After a while the plot loses a pace, your interest linearly declines and in the end the film actually left me quite cold and didn't evoke any significant emotions. If the film was 30 minutes shorter and and more like a documentary, the result would have been noticeably better. This way feels unnecessarily long, but in the end I definitely can't say that it changed my life or perspective on the event. For fans of similar events and firefighters I guess it's a must, but otherwise I don't see why I would recommend Notre-Dame on Fire to anyone... (01/11/2023)

The Notre-Dame fire is undoubtedly one of the most significant events in French history in recent years. Three years ago, it was not only a cathedral that burned down, but also one of the symbols of Paris, France and perhaps even of Europe. On the verge of his 80th birthday, Jean-Jacques Annaud takes on this (literally) searing story and made a film with both fiction and archival footage that presents this infamous event quite faithfully, but without getting into any unnecessary narrative around it. Everything centers on the cathedral, the devastating fire, the determination of the firefighters and their race against time. I was initially a little distracted by the embedded archive footage and there were a few 'weird' scenes that didn't need to be in the film, but it's still a solid drama with a strong documentary feel and more than one suspenseful scene. (04/24/2022)

Well, in essence, there was nothing to be done with it since the Notre Dame fire is a completely unrewarding situation cinematically. Everyone was evacuated in time, everyone was more or less unhurt, it was caused by a boring technical error, we all saw it from every angle in a first row seat, and it took place sometime in the early evening, so there was no time to forget that there wasn't actually any real drama. Not to mention, of course, the iconicity of the scene itself. But is that iconicity capable of wrapping an entire movie around itself? Uhhh, It's hard to say, Berg might have given it a go, but dude really, really, not a completely, but completely worn out Annaud. He probably simply realized that there's nothing to take from this, so he overwhelmed the film with absolutely awful mini-anecdotes about a frightened young fireman, a faithful young girl lighting a candle, a dramatic security guard hypnotizing a yellow button, a priest falling to his knees, and a spontaneously singing crowd under the cathedral, convincingly gazed upon with emotion and conviction by a fireman exhausted from the fire in the tower. The degree of cringe here is comparable to that famous subway scene in Wright's Darkest Hour, only stretched out to the length of the entire film. The filmmaker's cluelessness (culminating in a final shot of the firefighter putting out the fire, which is just a dramatic un-zooming and re-zooming of the camera on his face until the music ends) is then cemented by a soundtrack so epic that it feels like it's from a music bank, which is also revealed quite often by the fact that it's mostly pretty poorly used and tries to create epic scenes out of practically nothing. I normally reserve my boo! rating for films that somehow offend me personally, because I didn't think there was anything that was simply so poorly made that it wasn't also entertaining, thus forming an intersection between the poles of quality/non-quality. But Notre-Dame on Fire is truly just the worst kind of schlock movie where even death doesn't take (literally). Annaud's descendants should make sure that no one ever gets to see the films of his late period again. (07/19/2022)