It seems that if Hollywood wants a movie about people facing real-life harrowing situations, they call Paul Greengrass. The director’s pseudo-documentary style puts you right in the middle of the action, whether it’s the final hours of the doomed United 93 flight on 9/11, or Tom Hanks facing down Somali pirates in Captain Phillips.
His latest is The Lost Bus, which takes place during the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California, and stars Matthew McConaughey as a school bus driver who drove 22 children and a teacher through the apocalyptic flames to safety.
The movie’s style is typical Greengrass, with shaky cameras, lots of cuts, fast pans and zooms, and tightly held shots. It all drives me nuts, frankly, but there is a serious cumulative effect to the whole thing. Once we’re really in the thick of it, it’s as intense as can be, claustrophobic and nerve-wracking, and more than once I found I was holding my breath without realizing it. And we all know this is the reason we’re watching a movie like this in the first place.
Around all of the fire and sweaty bus driving, though, we’ve got some problems. There’s a strained subtheme involving fathers and sons, which opens us up to plenty of eye-rolling dialogue. There’s often an overly artificial look to the broader views of the landscape and the fires, and bizarre shots swooping through the trees call to mind the smoke monster in the TV show Lost, which I guess isn’t entirely inappropriate considering what’s happening. And somehow even in the year 2025 no one’s figured out how to make computer-generated fire look not terrible, although Greengrass’s jittery style makes that harder to notice.
But, in truth, all of this only mildly detracts from the real thrust of the movie, which is that these people did this amazing thing, and we get to see it without really breaking our own sweat. And on those terms, at least, it’s kind of fantastic.
The Lost Bus is in theaters now and on Apple TV+ October 3rd.
