It's difficult making films which rely on a two-hander at their heart... especially when that film is pared back so much that the two actors have no interaction with anyone else anywhere in the film. In Figures in a Landscape, the intensity of the relationship between Robert Shaw and Malcolm Macdowell aspires to Waiting for Godot, but comes across as occasionally contrived and hokey. It seems that Robert Shaw himself adapted the screenplay... there is constant banter between the two main characters, but the verbal set pieces come across as being too theatrical. Malcolm Macdowell has a monologue about their being animals, but what is really lacking is the animus in these characters, the id... if they had the instinctive cool of the spaghetti western - a genre invoked by the film sharing the mountainous Andalucian landscapes of spaghetti classics such as Cut-Throats Nine (1972) - this would be a superior film. The classic Italo-Spanish spaghetti westerns also always intercut the terrains of the human face in close up and the badland landscape, and, curiously, close ups of the actors are almost absent in this film.
That said, a film in which two fugitives run through a landscape hunted by a black helicopter and a faceless army has to be pretty cool in its own right.
That said, a film in which two fugitives run through a landscape hunted by a black helicopter and a faceless army has to be pretty cool in its own right.