The film doesn't so much leave questions hanging in the air as whole conversations. All the characters speak in heavily stylised, opaque non-sequiturs, which means that nobody really makes much progress (God knows how they'd have got on if they'd decided to stop off for a group order of sandwiches). The script — and indeed the novel, which this adaptation cleaves closely to — is made up of streams and streams of verbal bunting, random and flapping around in the wind. This straining for gravitas gets very tedious after a while. But if your answer to the question, "What does it actually mean?" is, "Hey, what is meaning anyway?" then this is the film for you. It also means that you are, at most, probably in your first term at college and sitting cross-legged on the floor with a group of really, really interesting new friends.
With his skin-deep persona, Pattinson might seem a good choice as Packer. Certainly, when in close-up, his expressionless features become compelling, and the occasional twitch, nuance or glance can give the impression that there's some subtle "inner" acting going on here. But I suspect that it is just a matter of happy chance. When forced to move around in scenes set outside the limo, he appears awkward and self-conscious. You find, after a while, that you simply can't believe that this is a man who controls the financial fate of millions, let alone his own. In fact, from banker to barber, security guard to sexpot, barely a line spoken has the remotest ring of truth about it.
It's a summer of portentous titles: before Cosmopolis there came Prometheus, Ridley Scott's "prequel" to the Alien films, and the big cinema event of the summer. Set some decades before that squirty little alien burst out of John Hurt's chest, it follows an expedition which sets out to find the origin of life. Of course, this is something which they can never truly discover without the whole narrative being upended, and so we are left with lots of loose ends and, despite the sometimes glacial pace, an oddly muddled plot. But it's still worth seeing — just for some quite exquisite sequences.
Still in my mind is the scene in which the obligatory humanoid robot David, played superbly by Michael Fassbender, manages to conjure up and then immerse himself in a silvery, three-dimensional representation of the universe, and for one brief moment holds planet earth in his hands. I can't quite remember how or why he got to that point, or what its significance was, as the story has largely disappeared into the ether. But that was a moment of pure beauty.
