Movie review: Half of a Yellow Sun is missing substance

THERE’S plenty to look at here, but not much to think about in 12 Years a Slave star Chiwetel Ejiofor’s new film Half of a Yellow Sun.

THERE’S plenty to look at here, but not much to think about.

While this is certainly no serious crime for any movie, it does amount to a squandered opportunity for Half of a Yellow Sun.

Taking a scenic, soap-opera route through the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s turns out to be a navigational error from which this lavishly appointed production can never fully recover.

A complex and often brutal conflict is put on the backburner so we can track the comparatively trite trials and tribulations of two pretty sisters from a privileged Lagos family.

A movie that had more potential ... Chiwetel Ejiofor in Half of a Yellow Sun. Picture: Supplied

Olanna (Thandie Newton) has just earned her papers as a sociology professor, and is attempting to convert the closet militant Odenigbo (12 Years a Slave star Chiwetel Ejiofor) from boyfriend to husband.

Meanwhile, Olanna’s twin sibling Kainene (Anika Noni Rose) has set tongues wagging by taking up with a wimpy white novelist named Richard (Joseph Mawle).

Writer-director Biyi Bandele seems far more concerned with these women and their many men problems, rather than by the political and cultural tumult that will soon lay their homeland to waste.

Anyone who fell under the spell of the acclaimed novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from which this film has been adapted will be saddened by the sappy simplification it gets here.

Running for their lives ... Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a scene from the film, Half of a Yellow Sun. Picture: Supplied

Half of a Yellow Sun (M)

Director: Biyi Bandele (feature debut)

Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Joseph Mawle, Anika Noni Rose, John Boyega.

Rating : **

Half of a movie missing