Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Review

Quick Description:

Tinker Tailor solider spy is a confusing spy movie where you have to pay a lot of attention, or you will not understand what is happening. The Circus (A British intelligence agency) has discovered a mole in it’s midst, and it’s up to George Smiley (Gary Oldman) to find out who it is. The plot twists and folds as we discover each character’s part in the story. The movie features actors like Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Collin Firth, John Hurt, and those are only a few of the huge crowd of characters that you can’t keep track of. Good luck.  

Quick Review:

Rating: 65/92½ main characters.

Firstly, I didn’t actually dislike this movie, I just didn’t really understand it because I haven’t read the book. After watching the movie I don’t think I will read the book. The biggest problem with this movie is that the story is too big to fit into a two hour movie. It’s not even because the basic story is complicated, but because of all the other stuff they throw in on top of it. In addition, they didn’t choose a style of film making that’s good for conveying ideas clearly. They kind of pass by important details, and fail to focus on important things. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just not very clear. So watch the movie a couple times, and you’ll have a better chance of understanding.

Analysis:  ***Spoiler alert***

This movie does not do a good job of using flashbacks correctly. They make no distinction between flashbacks and scene changes, which gets pretty confusing. Let’s say we have two characters sitting in a car. Then a flash back happens. Usually we expect to return to the scene in the car after. Instead, we’ll often return to present day, but in a completely different scene. In a movie that’s already complicated this does not help. They obviously wanted the story to be non linear, but more care should have gone into ordering the scenes and flashbacks for clarity.

The movie also features characters who are barley developed, and little used, such as John Hurt’s character, and others. Gary Oldman’s Character, George Smiley, had pretty strong character development, and he did a good job playing the character, but all the other characters feel under used. Granted, this is a movie about emotionless cold war spies. The actors pull this off very well, but I think it would have been a good choice to develop them further. Without doing that, I find it hard to care one way or another about these people.

The Writing for the actual dialogue and production of the movie are very good. The overall feel of the movie is genuinely period appropriate, and the somewhat drab and monotone adds to a really neat feel. Tom Hardy in particular did some really good acting, and his character also livened things up a bit. By keeping most of the movie calm surprising events feel very exciting, and carry a stronger impact. So was this movie worth watching? Yes. But I’d suggest reading the book first (which I did not do.)