| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Some are old, some are new, but there's one thing you can take as an ironclad guarantee... If I bothered to both write one of these over on Facebook and then transcribe it here while editing out the Bad Words... I was at least a little disappointed in the movie in question.
ONWAAAAAAAAAARD!
The Revenant- or, “Pardon me, but you seem to have stepped in some Hollywood.”
So I caught the very first showing of the much-ballyhooed new DeCaprio vehicle our town has on offer.
Namely, The Revenant, a film which, as so many do, claims to be based on true events, and takes gross liberties with the source material.
Much has been said about the hardships endured by the leading man in the course of filming. I wish I liked the resultant movie better.
The film, as anyone who has seen the trailer can tell you, is a revenge story- DiCaprio’s character is mauled by a bear, and he’s left for dead after his half-Pawnee son is killed by one of his fellow travelers.
And the whole damn thing is one long Hollywood checklist.
Here there be spoilers, for what little that matters in a film like this.
We open with the fur-trapping expedition everybody whose name we ever learn is on nearly done for the season. Then the Arikara show up and basically slaughter them. About a quarter of the trappers get away in their boat while everyone else is chopped into fragments.
Very important to open with some proper action, you see, to start things off with a bang. As our protagonists escape, we are given a bit with the Arikara who are apparently trying to find one of their women stolen by white men.
Because in New Hollywood, simply killing invaders who are slaughtering game in the lands they inhabit and encroaching upon their lands might not be sympathetic enough, you see. No, they need to be trying to rescue someone- by killing, not questioning, every white guy they see-with an exception we’ll get to later.
On the boat, DiCaprio states that “the ‘Ree own this river, we need to ditch the boat and go overland.” This is contested, especially by Tom Hardy’s character, who points out that the pelts they’ve spent the season gathering are the whole reason they’re out there in the first place. Hardy’s character is also given a lot of racist lines that other characters are not, to reassure us that he’s a bad guy. He refers to the Arikara via affixing "tree" to an otherwise unrelated ethnic slur normally reserved for persons of African descent. more than once, a descriptor no other character ever uses- despite there being a good ten men or so in the boat, some of whom could presumably also be casually racist. But whatever, they’re not the villains.
The captain of the expedition goes with DiCaprio’s idea, and they set the boat adrift after burying most of their furs. Two men who are on the boat to get it midstream opt to stay aboard-so they can be killed by the Arikara not long after to prove that DiCaprio’s character is 100% right and Hardy’s character has no idea what he’s talking about.
Immediately before they snag the boat and kill its inhabitants, the Arikara go to some French trappers and buy some horses from them with pelts they took when they attacked the camp. The French make concerted efforts to dick them over before the lead Arikara, in pretty passable French, reminds them that they take EVERYTHING from the Arikara, and that if they don’t want to sell the horses, they are welcome to try and stop the Arikara from just taking them. The French agree.
DiCaprio is off hunting/scouting the route for the others when he spots some bear cubs. And then the cubs’ mother comes plowing out of the woods, and, to put it mildly, utterly ruins his day. He manages to wound, not kill her with a shot from his flintlock, and then she pounds on him some more. Eventually, as she mauls him, he manages to stab her in the throat, and they collapse together (well, she lands on top of him. But my way’s more poetic, dammit).
The captain says they’ll carry him back, his half-Pawnee boy (invented out of whole cloth for the movie, I hasten to add) stays by his side, and Thomas Hardy (who hasn’t stopped complaining the entire time) starts dropping hints that the humane thing to do would be to snuff him quickly and just leave. This is presented as typical evil jerkishness, except that it’s worth pointing out that the Arikara are still after them, and that dragging a guy who’s just been mauled by a sow Grizzly is likely to decrease the odds of the entire party’s survival. But whatever, leave no man behind and all that.
From here on in, Nature, one of the major characters in this film if the camera language is anything to go by, basically stops being anything more than set-dressing. While we will see bitter cold, a wolf pack, and the odd tumble over rapids, Nature basically ceases to be a primary threat in the narrative. Human adversaries will handle the bulk of inflicting danger, while Nature just makes everything scenic. Despite being savagely wounded, and struggling to find food, DiCaprio’s character will survive.
Having grown up in Alaska, I can assure one and all that this is not a good thing. The struggle to find sustenance even when able-bodied is actually the biggest achievement in the historical tale- a mangled man with no rifle managed to make his way through wild country without starving to death. But no, that’s okay, just make it look pretty.
So, back to the narrative- blah blah blah, they drag DiCaprio a ways, when they come to a steep grade and decide they’ll leave at least two men. His son and a baby-faced Jim Bridger volunteer, and Thomas Hardy, upon hearing that neither one wants any share of the reward the captain offers to those who stay, also volunteers. The captain, displaying all of the leadership acumen of a steamed prune, agrees to let the guy who has been nothing but hostile to both DiCaprio and his son stay behind to tend him until he dies and then bury him decently. Oh, it’s okay, a kid not old enough to shave will also be with them.
Predictably, this doesn’t go well. Hardy gets fed up, and tries to smother DiCaprio while the others are away getting water. The son rushes in unexpectedly and tries to stop Hardy, and gets killed for his trouble.
Hardy hides the body, and then lies to Bridger, saying he has no idea where the son’s gotten to. About a day later, he wakes Bridger up, goes, “The ’Ree are here, twenty of ‘em, we gotta run!” This is, of course, preparatory to abandoning DiCaprio to his fate.
A fate he spits on, as, shortly after they leave him, he claws his way out of his shallow grave and over to his son’s corpse. Meanwhile, Hardy and Bridger take off,and Bridger catches his companion changing his story. He gets browbeaten (and literally beaten) into just going with Hardy.
A great deal of Nothing Much happens for the next hour or so. DiCaprio crawls along, we get the odd view of the captain’s party and Hardy & Bridger making headway.
DiCaprio sets up a rough camp with the fish trap that made its way into the trailers between hallucinations of his dead Pawnee wife. After a bit, the Arikara come upon his camp. For guys we have been told are ruthlessly tracking these white dudes, they sure took their sweet time catching up to the bear-mauled guy who can’t even walk properly. He escapes downstream, dodging the odd arrow and musket ball, despite this same band flawlessly hitting dudes in the eye socket during the opening attack. The John Wayne Bullet Shield is alive and well.
He crawls out of the river with his legs apparently working better (could be he’s just numb from the cold, I guess) and sets about starting another fire and trying not to die.
Meanwhile, Hardy & Bridger find a raided Pawnee settlement, presumably the work of the U.S. Army, with lots of dead folks lying around. Hardy is cavalier about it, being Designated Racist Bad Guy, while Bridger spots a terrified survivor and leaves some food where she can get it.
DiCaprio finds that a herd of bison have come near him, and he watches a wolf pack take one of them down. Then he stumbles back to bed.
Later that night, he sees fire, and a burning wolf runs past. He sees a solitary man with a bow digging into the bison carcass and crawls closer, begging for food. Since his ship is in, the guy is a Pawnee who takes pity on him, sharing the meat.
Turns out his family’s dead-killed by the “Sioux”- and he’s heading south, looking for more Pawnee. He takes this mangled guy with him and takes care of him, even treating his infected wounds from the bear mauling with... well, something. A blizzard comes in, and he builds a lean-to and stashes DiCaprio in it.
DiCaprio has a vision of his son in a ruined church. A vision of a vision, really. Anyhow, he wakes up, and finds his benefactor gone. A bit of stumbling about, and he finds his Pawnee friend hanging from a tree with a sign around his neck- in French.
Sure enough, the exact same band of French trappers the Arikara dealt with before are there, laughing, having a grand ol’ time, and, wonder of wonders... they have the missing Arikara woman. So despite the Arikara knowing these guys, speaking their language, and moving near them freely, they somehow didn’t notice the exact woman they were looking for in their camp. Guess they didn’t know Hollywood Frenchmen are randy unscrupulous cretins who exist to make our guys look better.
Anyway, DiCaprio releases her and steals a horse, killing a couple of the French trappers in the process. All this time, Hardy & Bridger have been back in “civilization” at the fur trading fort. DiCaprio wakes up to vengeful Arikara riding in on him and flees on his stolen French horse, going over a cliff (hey, look, a trailer shot!) after shooting a couple of them.
He crawls inside of his dead horse for warmth, while a lone Frenchman staggers into the fur outpost begging for help. He hands over a canteen that Bridger had left at the grave, and immediately, Bridger & Hardy know something is up. The captain leads out a posse to look for...well, it’s not clear. The lone maniac who attacked the French? The surviving Frenchmen? In any event, what they find is DiCaprio, who Hardy & Bridger have been saying died the year before.
Things go downhill rapidly. Hardy has already taken it on the lam, robbing the fort’s safe and heading toward Texas (whose Comanche inhabitants he stupidly fears less than the Arikara, for the record).
After a bit of catching up, the Captain and DiCaprio- just the two of them-go after Hardy. You can see where this is headed. Yes, sure enough, at one point they split up and Hardy kills the captain, leaving us with just the pursuit in the gorgeous wilderness. Of course, considering how badass DiCaprio has proven to be, shock of all shocks, he finds his man. But heaven forbid this Hollywood tale of vengeance end with a shot from a flintlock rifle. No sir, despite trading shots, these guys end up in a brutal hand to hand fight involving a tomahawk (and severed fingers!), a knife (and an impaled hand!) and a lot of brutality. As they’re having this little tete-a-tete, Hardy tells his enemy that he hopes he’s enjoying his revenge, since it won’t bring his son back. DiCaprio looks up, sees the Arikara downstream from them, and gently floats his hated adversary to their tender mercies. Then the Arikara ride past, with the woman he rescued looking down regally from her horse as they depart.
And then he stumbles uphill, possibly dying, sees his dead wife, and the movie ends.
I really wanted to like this movie-and there are things it does really well.
It is visually stunning.
The relevant Native languages are heard about as much as English, especially if the first half of the movie is taken into account. This matters to me. The lone Pawnee nor any of the Arikara speak any English, period.
The fight choreography is sloppy (in a good way!) and brutal and pulls no punches.
The performances are generally solid. I actually think Hardy has more to work with than DiCaprio (who basically just gets to play hunger, pain, grief, and rage for the bulk of the film), but no one does a noticeably bad job.
The “bad Indians” are shown to be human beings with comprehensible motives and legitimate grievances while not being wimpy failures in terms of presenting a threat.
But the hangups are real and pronounced.
After the bear mauling, most of the real danger comes from human agency, despite winter in the wilderness being no laughing matter. I get that freezing and starvation aren’t camera sexy, but they’re also the biggest hurdles the real Hugh Glass overcame in his own survival epic.
The French are cardboard cutout villains.
The Arikara are remarkably desultory in their ruthless, murderous search for their stolen daughter.
The “good Indians” almost uniformly exist to help the protagonist (often with fortune-cookie words of wisdom) and then be horribly victimized by other white guys.
Thomas Hardy’s villain isn’t allowed to be right about anything, and certainly not better at anything than our leading man- he’s a worse tracker, worse hunter, worse shot, and comes up a decided second in their hand to hand fight. While that makes his scenes of bullying his junior companions ring true, it also makes him a pretty laughable final antagonist.
In the Heart of the Sea, or, “Pick Your Theme Already!”
So, in traditional Sad Lonely Loser fashion, I trooped off to the movies on my birthday.
Having already seen Creed (yeah!), Krampus (*sigh*), and Victor Frankenstein (huh!), I was pretty low on my list of priorities...so I went to go see In the Heart of the Sea, based upon Nathaniel Philbrick’s book about the Whaleship Essex.
It was... an uneven ride.
Firstly: Knowing the historical tale as I do, I was prepared for gross liberties to be taken in the name of making movie. It’s just what happens. I will not dwell upon them, therefore, except insofar as they REALLY hamstring one part of the film. Now. On with it...
The film, much like Moby-Dick, which is part of the framing narrative, suffers greatly by being three or four different stories awkwardly crammed into the same package and expected to coexist. However, where Moby-Dick had the stories wax and wane (Queequeg and Ishamel’s friendship basically fades into the background from the middle half of the book), In the Heart of the Sea juggles them rather awkwardly, trying to keep a few too many balls in the air.
To wit, the stories I noticed:
Human hubris in the face of nature’s might
A coming of age tangent.
The futile stupidity of classism and the harm it does to human endeavor, and how all humans are equal in adversity.
Human survival in the face of incredible odds, and the lengths humans will go to in order to achieve it.
The value of talking about old traumas to face them.
There may have been more, but I couldn’t be arsed to find them.
Now, this is already a major structural problem, but the film compounds it by having most of the narrative be a flashback- apparently nothing was learned from Titanic’s misstep- the character telling the story years later cannot ever be worried about. We know damn well he makes it, so any peril he faces is essentially ho-hum. We know he comes out alive with all of his limbs. And it pulls us out of what could be building tension time and time again, because we need to fast-forward through the decades to be reminded that he’s telling this story to Herman Melville. Furthermore, Future Guy has little to do but be haunted by what he saw and was forced to do to survive- something a stronger film would have shown, not told us.
Up next: Whose Side Are We On? The film must perforce treat the human characters as its protagonists- outside of cartoons, whales don’t get much dialogue, so it behooves us to get to know and become invested in these humans who we’ll be taking this unpleasant journey with.
But the film can’t seem to make up its mind- are they doughty sailors, united in common hardship, or are they murderous baboons who deserve a bit of divine/natural wrath in the form of a vengeful whale? The movie cannot seem to decide, and not in a “moral ambiguity” sort of way. Characters we’re meant to root for will heave a harpoon- and then we will see that it’s hit a mother whale, whose calf is beside her, and whose eventual escape is a subject of some relief. If we are simply meant to embrace the ugly, bloody side of whaling (as several shots seem to indicate), then we need to stop heroically backlighting our matinee-idol stars as they go about doing it, because it doesn’t force cognitive dissonance so much as a resigned shrug.
Furthermore, while many of the human characters get to do little beyond act like they’re slowly dying on the open sea, those who are given definite roles haven’t got much meat to chew on. We have-
-Hero-Man First Mate. Perhaps a little prideful, but essentially never allowed by the script to do the wrong thing. Whenever he butts heads with his captain, his superior experience causes us to side with him. Whenever he makes a harsh choice, it’s plain that the situation necessitates it. This leads to him being incredibly boring.
-Captain From a Good Family. Not exactly a villain, but made to look like an utter bastard for the first hour or so we know him, then he abruptly shifts tack to “fellow imperiled mariner” for the balance of the movie. His relative lack of experience causes friction with Hero Mate, but does not actually get anyone killed, nor, apart from a single incident, is his seamanship shown to be all that bad- which would be fine, if Hero Mate were ever allowed to screw up. But he isn’t.
-Alcoholic Second Mate. A fine bit of performance from Cillian Murphy, he’s an old friend of Hero Mate, a resolute teetotaler thanks to some un-expanded upon past alcohol abuse. The problem with him, in a nutshell, is that he’s there to die and contribute little else to the proceedings. Up until he takes a brutal blow to the head, most of his appearance in the film can be summed up with “and he was there too.”
-Greenhorn Boy Who Grows Up To Tell The Story- We gets dribs and drabs of his coming of age, but we know little else. While we know he grows up to be a boozy, haunted man whose wife runs a boarding house, we see very little to make him unique. Hero Mate sort of adopts him, he’s presented as an orphan so there’s no one worrying about him (in OR out of the story), and we know he lives. He’s practically a paint by numbers Sea Waif, and the peculiar conditions of the Essex’s story mean we don’t really get to see him grow or develop much, beyond his refusal to die. Furthermore, while his adult self is haunted by his experiences (which include some privation-induced cannibalism), the last we see of his younger self, he’s telling Hero Mate it was an honor to sail with him... months after they’ve been rescued.
So much for the humans. Which brings us to the whale who occupies so much space in the promotional material, and who is described as so central to the narrative. Full disclosure: I was rooting for the whale, a task made easy by so many of the humans being relative ciphers coupled with my own awe of the massive things. How sad, then, that he’s really not in the movie all that much- but still too much.
The whale’s initial assault on the Essex is great. This big, battle-scarred leviathan comes churning in to defend and avenge his more pacific kin, ramming the ship and stoving it in, causing the Essex to sink. A champion and defender of his own kind, the White Whale is a true force of nature, more or less uncaring for the efforts of the humans to harm him. So far, so good. The humans take to their whaleboats and start trying to head east and back to dry land. We are given a couple of hints that the whale is shadowing them. After a bit of “Man, life in an open boat in the middle of the ocean is lame,” land is sighted and the humans start rowing for shore.
And then the whale attacks, overturning their boats and spilling everybody into the sea. I’m pretty sure someone or another dies in this attack, but since we haven’t bothered to keep up with most of the crew, we don’t lose anyone we care about even a little here. This is a point of historical divergence which hurts the film- the real whale did not pursue its aggressive course after sinking the Essex- but apparently an action scene was called for, so here we get one. Note that despite sinking the Essex in a very brief and violent action, and despite taking one of the whaleboats in its jaws during this second attack, the whale does not manage to put any of the whaleboats out of action for good. After the survivors make landfall, they hammer all three boats into working order again once they figure out that the island cannot support them, and that to stay is to die.
The whale resumes its stalking, but does not actually attack them again-as it passes close, Hero-Mate refrains from throwing his jury-rigged harpoon at it and it swims off, never to be seen again. From there on, it is absent from the movie- meanwhile the three boats drift along, one of them (with literally no one we care about in it) vanishing while the other two start losing people, who are then eaten by their surviving shipmates. Which would be a good place to work up some tension and horror, but we keep cutting away to Future Guy unburdening himself about it, and not letting us spend time with these suffering men.
All told, the film left me tepid- the visuals are great, and if you root for the whale, his attack on the Essex is viscerally satisfying, but since In The Heart of the Sea cannot decide what sort of movie to be, it tries to be several, and does none of them justice.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, or, "There's a Hobbit in this story, I swear."
So, with all of the inevitability of peristalsis, I trooped out to watch the final installment of the Hobbit film trilogy.
Much has been said about how turning the shortest of Tolkien's novels into three movies, each as long as those devoted to a single (much longer) novel in his Lord of the Rings trilogy was probably a mistake.
This third film, without exaggerating, seems to be the best argument against the three-film model that could be made.
Allow me to elucidate:
Both Stephen Fry and Benedict Cumberbatch have credits in this film. In both cases, the characters they portray are dead by the end of the pre-title action scene.
A scene which could just as easily have been stuck to the end of the last film.
That scene, of course, is Smaug's rampage, wherein Lake Town is destroyed and Bard the Hunter bags himself a dragon.
There is a bigger problem here- while the titular battle certainly includes plenty of stunning visuals, at no point does it come close to the "oh crap" factor of a dragon attacking with fire in the middle of the night, rampaging through the burning city.
And really, that makes sense- in the novel, Smaug's rampage is the true climax, and the battle is really part of the falling action.
The problem is, we have an entire movie built around the battle, so Smaug's rampage (in which Bilbo does not play his literary role of sending a bird to tell Bard where to shoot) is over before the movie even really begins... leaving us with the following:
1. Thorin falls prey to the dragon's curse on the hoard of Erebor. He does this largely offscreen- he spends most of the movie in full-on greedy jerk mode, leading to the particular conditions of the battle. As in the novel, Bilbo tries to circumvent this greed by giving the Arkenstone to the elves and humans to swap for the parts of the treasure they want. It goes nowhere, and Thorin and company spend the opening of the battle holed up in Erebor, before Dwalin shames him into some self-reflection, and he shakes off the curse and leads his small force out of the gates and into battle. He, Fili, and Kili, all die in a small-unit raid in an effort to kill Azog the Defiler. Dwalin goes along too, but conveniently vanishes so Thorin can fight Azog one on one. Bilbo turns up too, fights a bit (including killing several rather big orcs with thrown rocks), gets knocked out just in time for the eagles to show up and air-drop Beorn onto the unluckiest orcs around.
2. Galadriel, Elrond, Saruman, and Radagast spring Gandalf from Dol Guldur. Wizard staff kung fu abounds as they take on all nine disembodied Nazgul, then Galadriel uncorks some power and blasts Sauron/the Necromancer. An exciting, gripping sequence... that goes on too long, and which didn't have to be here.
3. Bard becomes the leader of the survivors of Lake Town. We spend a LOT of time with him and his kids... existing. During the battle, we spend considerable time watching Bard and his ragtag militia armed with spare farming implements and leftover weapons from Dale performing and surviving about as well as the Dwarves of the Iron Hills and the Elves of Mirkwood... despite having no armor to speak of. Oh well.
4. Legolas and Tauriel go scout out a special bunch of orcs coming down from Angmar to join the fun, and get mixed up in the battle. Both survive.
Note that none of this gives Bilbo much to do in a movie entitled "The Hobbit," and indeed, in the novel, he spends most of the Battle of Five Armies unconscious...
And that's a problem.
Our nominal protagonist is a guest-star in his own movie... we spend far more time with Bard and Thorin than we do with Bilbo.
There are other problems, of course... the orcs trooping down from Angmar have giant bats trained for war who can apparently function in daylight... as can the orc armies, making one wonder what supposedly makes the Uruk-Hai so damn special.
There are giant (like, bigger than Smaug) tunneling worms that the orcs can use to conceal their march underground, but which they cannot apparently just have tunnel into Erebor to claim for their own.
A massed battle is apparently the safest place in the universe to be- no one we care about gets killed in mass fighting- they all get solo deaths on their small-unit mission. Nor do any villains of note die in the general scrum of the open battle.
I went and saw this movie. And it certainly entertained me... but it had all the emotional resonance of a cinderblock.
If you must, go see it. But if you have misgivings? They're correct.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Dracula Untold- A (Scathing) Review
So, convinced that it might be fun, I went with a friend (Jerk!) to see Dracula Untold.
Mistakes were made.
I'm going to try not to dwell upon the TIDAL WAVE of historical inaccuracies in this movie about a magic vampire and his magic powers. Suffice it to say that if you have any knowledge of the relevant real-world history, these guys clearly didn't even really try.
Now. On to business: A synopsis. We open with a jumbled and rather stylized (and annoying, clearly shot with 3-D in mind) still sequence where the camera moves across a variety of scenes ranging from child-soldiers being whipped all the way through a big "impressive" reveal of a guy in dragon-styled armor impaling some poor chain-mail clad dude as his comrades run in fear. A child's voice-over talks about an (inaccurate) portrayal of the Janissary Corps and how Vlad the Impaler was a real beast in their ranks before finally discharging his obligations and being allowed to go home. The child goes, "people called him blah blah blah. I called him Father."
All right, mortal Prince Dracula has a kid, he's gone home, he has reason to resent the Turks.
We cut to a bunch of Transylvanians standing by a stream looking at something- a Turkish helmet which our Leading Man can recognize as belonging not just to a scout, but to a specific commander's forces. He can tell this, and that the helmet has washed downstream from Broken-Tooth Mountain, but somehow fails to notice the gigantic claw marks on the left side which another guy notices after they leave, although he says absolutely nothing (presumably because,as a later appearance shows, he's just into evil, or something.
Vlad takes to guys with him to go scout out the scouts, sending others back to Castle Dracula to put them on guard, then goes up the big scary mountain with his two buddies. A bunch of bats fly out of a cave, Vlad goes, "they must be in there, bats don't fly in the daytime," and Something Nasty kills both of his comrades (who we do not care about and never will) and tries to kill him before getting hacked with his sword and repelled by sunlight reflecting off of the blade.
Vlad watches the blood on his blade burn away in the sunlight and runs like hell.
Cut to him talking with some monk, who tells him all of the brothers in the monastery have dreamed of this creature of darkness- supposedly a man who bargained with a demon and got tricked- one of the Undead, trapped within the mountain until he can find someone to take his place. The monks have dreamed that this creature of darkness will besiege them and bring despair to the land. Vlad tells the monks to keep a lid on it, because with the specter of the Turks looming over their heads, people have enough to worry about. Then he goes and sees his wife and kid.
We're treated to some well-acted, if cliched, scenes of domestic felicity, including a bit where the son asks if he can go riding with his dad the next day, and Vlad assures him they will. The wife (whose name I do not remember, which should tell you a thing or two about her) chides Vlad that nothing of the sort will happen, because the next day is Easter, or she puts it, the Festival of Their Risen Lord. This will become relevant in a later screwup in the script...
So they're having some kind of Easter feast, everybody's happy, drinking toasts and the like, when some Turks show up, looking like Persians from 300 who found some shirts somewhere. They strut in, sneering and acting menacing like a bunch of high school jocks in an '80s flick, and Homzur Bey, their leader, exchanges some pleasantries with Vlad, who assures him that while they arrived earlier than expected, he has the Sultan's tribute- big chests of silver coins with Vlad's face on them. Homzur goes, "fine, fine, but we need something else- I need one thousand boys for the Janissary Corps." Everybody in the room flips out, Vlad goes, "but we don't do that anymore!" Homzur goes, "we need them, we've got a lot of campaigning ahead- those over age 15 will go fight at Vienna, the 10-15 year olds will go to Hungary." Pointing out that Transylvania has no army, Homzur goes, "cough 'em up or we'll beat you up," and leaves.
So, Vlad agonizes a bit, his son goes, "Your father had to send you to the Turks... would you do that to me?" Vlad doesn't say no, but he does go, "that was a long time ago." Wife goes, "you and the Sultan were like brothers once" (really? First I've heard of it!) and suggests he go ask Mehmet not to do this.
So he does, and Mehmet (who gets absolutely no chance to display any real friendship with a guy he was supposedly "like a brother" to) tells him he needs his thousand child conscripts AND he'll be taking Vlad's son. The alternative is war, and war is something Transylvania cannot survive.
Cut to Vlad, waiting for a carriage with his wife and kid to arrive to hand the boy off to Homzur Bey. There's some quibbling, Wife does not want to let Son (I don't recall his name either) go, there's some crying... the kid goes, "Screw it, I'm going. If it saves our people, I'm going." Vlad, holding his son's hands, walks toward Homzur, who comments that they were kinda hoping for more resistance. Vlad- who is unarmed- tells his son to run back to his mother. He then kills Homzur with his own sword after snagging it, and cuts down the rest of the Turks with him in similar fashion, because he's just that damned good. Or something.
So, having just unleashed war, not for the sake of a thousand subjects, but because his own son's bravery and self-sacrifice shamed him and because one guy insulted him less than he'd already been insulted, Our Hero tells Wife to take Son back to Castle Dracula and get as ready as they can.... he needs to go to Broken-Tooth Mountain, since whatever lives there "kills Turks." It also kills Transylvanians and can't withstand the light of day, but, you know, whatever.
So Vlad climbs back up to talk to the thing that ate two of his men (never mentioned again) and tried to eat him. It's intrigued because it smells hope, not fear on him, and the old vampire basically, after some posturing, and a comment that Vlad's silver ring offends him, dumps some blood into a skull it has lying around and tells Vlad, "if you drink this, you get a taste of my power for three days. Catch is, you will have an ever-growing thirst for human blood, and if you give in, you're lost- you will become a vampire for all time." So, positive that he can resist (and with the audience knowing damned well he'll give in on Hour 23, Minute 59 of Day 3), Vlad knocks it back, passes out, and wakes up in the stream where they found the Turkish helmet. His silver ring is burning him, but he's super-strong, he can hear a spider stitching up a bug in its web, all that good stuff. As he runs toward his castle (being shelled by the Turks on account of him killing their dudes...) he discovers he can turn into a swarm of bats. Handy!
The castle's being shelled, people are dying, Vlad runs in to check on his wife and kid, then tell the people he's going to handle it... "It" being the war he has chosen to fight. The shelling continues while he does this, making it somewhat questionable why he bothers to drivel at them before, you know, doing something.
Vlad walks out, alone, as what we are later told is a force of 1000 Turks charges. Does he call down swarms of bats to attack them? Maybe a few wolves? No, don't be silly, he's going to punch them to death.
What follows is one of the least exciting action sequences I have ever seen, wherein Vlad just kills Turk after Turk after Turk in slow motion, with some godawful shot-for-3-D attempts at being artistic. After he's finished punching the army to death (okay, he also did a lot of his "kill them with their own weapon" thing, but, you know, whatever), some of his men run out, swords drawn. Vlad, without a scratch on him, walks back and goes, "please, do not ask me about what happened here." NOTHING SUSPICIOUS ABOUT THAT!
Vlad has his people pack up and head for the monastery since it's "too remote for cannon" (despite a gigantic wide valley a massive Turksih army will march down later), while the Turks go, "huh, he killed a thousand men, huh? Then the Sultan will lead a hundred thousand against him!" (Wasn't this all about 1000 untrained, unwilling child-conscripts to bolster the army's numbers? If the loss of a thousand men against an enemy without an army can be written off, then what the hell did you need these useless little brats for?).
ANYway. Vlad starts craving blood, especially when he's getting frisky with Wife, so he takes off... and some crazy guy follows him (same guy who kept mum about the clawed helmet)- or, more accurately, the bats that follow Vlad around, recognizing one of their own. He offers a cup of his blood to Vlad, who tells him to get lost. He does so. "Yes... Master."
Next morning, Wife notices Vlad is on the floor, lying away from her. She goes over to him, and notices that the scars on his back are gone, and that his silver ring, now worn on a string around his neck, is burning his bare chest.... as is the sunlight she starts letting into their tent. He fesses up to Wife, who, despite being a devout enough Christian that horseback riding on Easter is apparently a no-go, takes it in stride that her husband has consumed the blood of an unholy monster and will be using the powers of darkness for two further days as his thirst for human blood grows. Nice to know.
She gets some guy we're supposed to care about... I think his name's "Dmitriu" or something, so he must be important to the plot... to lead them to the monastery , saying Vlad will join them later.
Turks find the refugees and attack around nightfall, killing some people we don't care about and chasing Wife and Son. Dmitriu gets killed defending them from some Janissary we've seen before, but then Vlad shows up and tosses said Janissary off of a cliff, kills a bunch of other Turks, and basically stops the attack.
The Transylvanians get to the monastery, Vlad urges them to fortify the place ("Get off of your damn knees, prayer alone ain't gonna stop the Turks!") and hands out weapons from the monastery's... armory? Huh. Wasn't aware that medieval lords kept all of their best hardware in the hands of an ecclesiastic estate a full day and a half's march from their seat of power.
The Turks, knowing Vlad is using Evil Magic, are worried... the Sultan's solution is the incredibly stupid method of blindfolding his entire army so that won't see anything creepy, then marching them off toward the monastery.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, one particular monk, not being an idiot, notices that Vlad avoids sunlight, corners him a smithy, and, brandishing a silver sword, proclaims he knows what Vlad is, and urges him to let the monk kill him, since, by not flinching from the show of a crucifix, the monk knows he hasn't sealed his fate by drinking human blood yet. When Vlad demurs, the monks cuts open a flap of leather by the side of the smithy, letting in daylight, which starts burning ol' Vlad. Everybody present panics, and a mob, quickly realizing that burning in sunlight is not the trait of a normal guy, set the place on fire. Wife tries to stop them, but is basically ignored. The smoke from the fire obscures the sun, and Vlad walks out, pissed off, claims he is all that has been keeping them alive, and looks ready to... take a swing with a burned timber or something, but anyway, Wife talks him down and everybody settles into place.
The giant blindfolded army of Turks shows up, walking along a valley you could lose a small CITY in, and apparently so level and open that none of them trip... but remember, it's too remote for cannons.
Dawn is near, and with it, the loss of Vlad's vampire powers.
Vlad FINALLY notices that he can control bats... and thus we get the bit CGI set-piece, the infamous "bat fist" from the trailer, where he uses these tiny, fragile creatures in an assault on the Turks. Good thing they're blindfolded, oh, wait, it makes NO DIFFERENCE. Vlad sees a guy in the Sultan's armor and goes after him, flying down from the Orthanc-like spire these monks have on their monastery for... some reason.
The Turks are screaming and losing and all of that, but the guy in the Sultan's armor is AN IMPOSTOR! OH NO!
Meanwhile, some Janissaries are in the monastery (how'd they get there? Was NOBODY on guard? Did NOBODY notice these guys climbing the walls or what?) and go after Wife and Son. Some chump who I guess we're meant to care about gets killed in their defense, they grab Son and kick Wife off of the top of Orthanc.
Vlad sees her falling and flies to catch her, the Turks break in and start killing folks, while Vlad ultimately fails, Wife is fatally injured... and then, urges him to drink her blood to keep his power and save their son.
Now hang on.
This woman cares about religious observance. She believes in Heaven. She believes in divine justice. And her solution is to have her husband damn himself in order to defeat worldly enemies? Riiiiiight. And as her last act in this life? Whatever. Vlad chows down.
The old vampire steps out of his cave prison as the cloud cover rolls in. So much for dawn, eh?
Vlad goes among the wounded and wretched survivors in the ruined monastery and asks them if they want revenge. If they say yes, he has them drink his blood. Notably, he doesn't mention any three-day time limit or a "make sure you don't drink human blood and you can go back to being normal" to any of these people. Obviously, their lives don't matter. Or something.
The Turks are feeling pretty good about things, until they notice the sun should be up. Instead, out of the east, a massive thunder storm rolls in, with Vlad and his army of vampires beneath it. They kill the Turks in pretty blandly one-sided fashion, apart from the Sultan, who, standing in the treasury tent, surrounded by silver coinage, fights Vlad one on one. To what end, we're not really sure, since his entire army is getting eaten alive outside.
Anyway, Vlad beats him despite silver apparently being Vampire Kryptonite, takes his son, and walks outside, so Junior can see all of the undead monsters slaughtering the helpless Turks. One vampire (some councilor whose name I don't recall, but who always cautioend Vlad about his actions) says after they eat Son, everything will be fine.
Vlad, despite being damned, soulless, undead, and having turned a bunch of his people into monsters, objects to this, and kills Councilor vampire with a spear through the heart... so none of those thousand guys he fought the first time got so much as a lucky jab in? Whatever.
There's the small matter of the other vampires, but then Nameless Monk shows up with a crucifix, repelling them all, and urging Vlad to give him the boy. Vlad does, Monk and Son leave... and then Vlad dispels the cloud cover, nuking the other vampires and himself.
One wonders why he needed Monk to show up to do that...
So Son re-voice overs, saying that his father was a hero, but there are no statues of him, no pictures, yadda yadda yadda (all false, Vlad Tepes is fairly well-memorialized), we get a shot of creepy "Yes, Master" guy pouring some blood into Vlad's charred corpse's mouth, reviving him, then cut to the modern day, where Vlad, speaking archaically, talks to a young woman named Mina, played by the same actress as Wife. As they stroll off together, Old Vampire, looking a lot more human, follows them. Roll credits.
So. A turgid, confused mess, with a notable absence of characters (really, this seems to be Legendary Pictures' most recurring flaw... they're not that good at focusing on interesting people in their movies) leaving reasonably talented actors adrift between tension-free action scenes.
We KNOW Son lives, because he's the narrator of the opening, speaking in the past tense. We KNOW Wife dies, because the narrative gives her NOTHING ELSE to do. And we all knew which way Vlad was headed going in.
The Turks, for all of their numbers and sneering mustache-twirling, are never really all that scary- we don't care about the people they kill, and they're powerless to do much to the protagonist- after all, even as an unarmed human, he kills a small party of them single-handedly.
Vlad's supposedly insatiable thirst for blood is not addressed between his meeting with Creepy Guy and his wife asking him if he wouldn't mind damning himself for all of eternity. He doesn't even seem peckish when surrounded by Transylvanians in close quarters.
Old Vampire, the most interesting guy in the story, refers to some greater game where Vlad will be one of his pawns, but we never get any hint of who the opposition is or what forces they might employ... unless it's meant to be good guys, in which case, the bad guys are boned, since sunlight, silver, and the crucifix all work pretty damn well at hosing vampires. Good thing the Turks were Muslims...
And so on.
This is the worst movie I've seen in quite some time, because it lacks even the self-aware stupidity that makes things like Sharknado a good drunken viewing- it takes itself incredibly seriously (comic relief is VERY light on the ground in this film) while being, in essence, a stupid two-dimensional action film.
Avoid at all costs.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
The Witch, or, "Only the Good Die Young."
This will be something of a departure for me.
Ordinarily, if I like a movie, I settle for saying so and moving on.
But now, with a sorrow in my heart and a sinking sensation at the core of my being, I must beg you, Gentle Reader... go see this movie soon, or I will find you, strap you down, and Clockwork Orange it into your retinas.
The Witch is an intensely atmospheric, superbly-acted, well-shot, claustrophobic family tragedy. I cannot stress the level of performance and craftsmanship enough- apart from two of the youngest members of the cast, who are not bad, but are also not really given to nuance, I absolutely believed every actor’s performance. They feel like real people, despite using what is largely period-appropriate dialogue.
If you are looking for jump scares, sex scenes, explosions, physically imposing human adversaries, or neat, pat answers, you will be sorely disappointed. Which is why I truly fear for this excellent film’s theatrical longevity. People who go in expecting popcorn will not be happy when the movie instead turns out to be more of a meal. There is a lot to take in here, not so much in terms of plot or content- both are delightfully straightforward- but in terms of texture.
You feel this movie, from its slow-burning beginning to its seemingly-inevitable finale.
The Witch knows what it wants to be- no juggling multiple harebrained plots in a pathetic attempt at depth. We focus with monomaniacal intensity upon a single family, exiled into the wilderness, and we watch them disintegrate. It is a painful process, because like most *good* horror movies, the appalling things that occur happen to people we rather like. They’re not perfect by any means, but they’re good people stuck in a situation they cannot overcome.
It also follows what my sister and I regard as the Golden Rule of horror: The situation should be screwed up even if the supernatural elements are removed. And make no mistake- this is not some “surprise twist” flick where they turn out to be hallucinating or merely insane. The supernatural is very real in The Witch. It just doesn’t prance about wearing a mask and swinging a machete.
Much of the film’s horror comes from the family’s own faultlines- while the supernatural threat absolutely exacerbates those, many of the problems confronting them arise from their own human shortcomings.
This movie is not long for the cinemas, if the inane blather I heard from my fellow audience members as the credits rolled is any indication, but you owe it to yourself to see it in a dark room with no easy way out.
If you have any love of real horror movies, as opposed to simply tallying body counts from the latest boogum of the week, see this movie. If you enjoy a lavishly crafted immersive experience which manages to feel strangely comfortable, even as you watch good people torn apart, see this movie.
Seriously.
See this movie while you still can.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
10 Cloverfield Lane, or, “A Sequel That Isn’t, And That’s All Right.”
Tonight, as is my wont, I trooped off to see the latest genre offering- billed as a sequel to Cloverfield, it has just about nothing to do with the prior film.
It is also a wonderful, wonderful movie.
Without getting into too many details (this is a movie where figuring out what’s really going on is part of the fun), this film has a lot to recommend it.
The pacing builds genuine, at times almost unbearable tension, and every single performance is really damned good. Of particular note is John Goodman, who turns in a performance that can go for humorous to terrifying within the span of a single take. Were this NOT a genre film, I’d be penciling him in for some sort of acting nod from the Academy... but since those imbeciles confuse genre films with a urinal more often than not, I suppose he’ll have to get by with the pride of a job superbly well done.
Not that he has to carry anyone- the other two characters whose stories we really delve into are fascinating people, confronted with some pretty insane choices.
Go see this flick. You’ll be glad you did.
Star Trek: Beyond, or, "Eh, could have been worse."
All right, went and saw the new Trek flick.
It was... fine.
I wouldn't call it a mindless action movie, but its efforts to reach for "meaningful Star Trek stuff" are... uneven at best.
Let's get this ball rolling...
The Good:
The cast has clearly felt their way into their characters.Not everyone is given equal face time by any means, but everybody whose name we know gets to do something cool and meaningful at least once. They are also an actual ensemble now... or they were. Rest in peace, Anton Yelchin.
The action sequences delivered for me... well, mostly. Kirk's final (and inevitable) fistfight with the villain felt forced.
Even under ungodly layers of makeup, Idris Elba still has charisma.
The tips of the hat to Enterprise were nice, and there's a brief dash of Voyager love for those who look.
Naming the lost exploratory NX starship "Franklin" was nicely appropriate- especially since I don't see Starfleet naming its ships Erebus or Terror.
The stakes for the heroes are suitably personal. While the bad guy's basic goal is cheesily generic in a way Guardians of the Galaxy's Ronan the Accuser would appreciate, that's not really the primary struggle in this movie- he destroyed their ship, imprisoned the crew, and otherwise went after the very few things our leads can be arsed to care about.
The tip of the hat to Leonard Nimoy's death had impact without feeling forced.
Sulu's husband and daughter were presented in a pleasantly understated way. No big gong banging and screaming "SULU IS GAY, LOOK LOOK LOOK!", just some simple scenes presented as perfectly ordinary and unremarked-upon aspects of life in the 23rd century.
Jaylah. I loved her. A character who manages to convey humanity while also coming off as genuinely alien in a few ways. She was by far the most interesting character for me to watch.
Public Enemy gets only slightly less airplay than the Beastie Boys.
The Bad:
The villain. You have Idris <redacted> Elba,and you have him spend most of the movie layered in swathes of makeup delivering fairly bland and generic threats. And when his big secret is revealed (and it's honestly kind of a big deal) it makes his generic motivations into fairly nonsensical ones. I can accept that the things he went through warped him, but the purpose, the point of it all,is not really adequately expressed. We are given a reason, but we'renot given a particularly compelling hook into the reason.
The destruction of the Enterprise. We have gotten to see this ship do nothing but get kicked around like a shuttlecock for two movies and about twenty minutes of a third. Its destruction therefore has about zero impact- especially since some ignorant twit went and put the ship's destruction into the damn trailer. We don't care about this ship because we have been given zero reason to do so.
The Franklin. Jaylah is not that old- the Franklin has been on the planet for a long, long time, and so she... hides the ship with holographic camouflage? Edison already knew where the damn thing was, since he crash-landed in it. And nobody checked?
Edison/Krall's henchmen. So he has his two fellow former Starfleet folks warped by the same technology...okay, but who are these other jokers working for him? Special note for the three clowns who Jaylah saves Scotty from... who are they and what are they doing there?
Krall's "feeding." Imperfectly explored, but a major problem because if he can siphon vitality by touch... why does he never do so in any of his hand to hand fights with Kirk? Why does he never even try it? I also found the one time he "shows off" using it to Uhura to be... either gratuitous or partof the next one...
Uhura, Atrocity Witness. Uhura's primary job for the middle third of the movie is essentially serving as Krall's sounding board, as well as the pretty face he goes "booga booga" at while he does something horrible. While care is taken to make sure she isn't portrayed as any more helpless than any of her counterparts, it just seemed odd.
Krall/Edison's ideology. A guy who recalls the Xindi war/crisis and the Earth/Romulan war actually doesn't believe in strength through unity?I get that we're supposed to fist pump when the noble Federation heroes prove him wrong, but neither his methods nor his goals really seem to back up his sneering about the Federation's diversity. If he were ex-Terra Prime, maybe, but he's ex-MACO. What gives?
The Specific and Easily Ignored By People Who Care Less About This Stuff Than I Do:
Why the heck are the Franklin's phase cannons shooting the same red stuff as the Enterprise's phasers?
NX-01 was Earth's first warp 5 starship. Why is NX-326 presented as the first Warp 4 starship? Especially with the Xindi crisis being canon as revealed in the baddie's dialogue.
A scene on a monitor in an old ship that nobody glances at the first time hey walk past it. Suuuuuuuure, in no way is that going to be pivotal. *sigh*
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Life, or, ”It’s about half as clever as it thinks it is.”
It’s that time again, kids!
As always, here there be spoilers.
So.
Life.
A little sci-fi horror offering dealing with the arrival of a dangerous life-form aboard the International Space Station sometime Next Sunday A.D.
Much of the film was fine- better than fine in some instances- the cast were solid, the production looked great, the design of the alien life form (named, in-movie, “Calvin”) is interesting and suitably menacing, and the stakes are appropriately high.
But in its quest to be a love letter to Alien and The Thing, this flick falls well short of its potential.
Let’s start with the ending. The final two characters concoct a plan to lure Calvin into one of the escape pods, and one of them will sacrifice his life by overriding the escape pod’s program and piloting it into deep space,taking the organism with him, while the other will take her escape pod back to Earth because... we gotta try and save the pretty lady or something. The priority placed on her survival seriously makes zero sense in the context of the “if this thing reaches Earth, we’re screwed” stakes the film is operating under. Anyway, of course, as anyone genre-savvy quickly figures out, they get screwed up (somehow) and the pod with the alien makes reentry while the lady whose life we just HAD to try and save goes screaming out into the void to her eventual miserable death- but hey, at least her corpse won’t be an alien-ravaged mess like everybody else on Earth is going to be.
KIND of a shaggy dog ending, but it’s not much of a surprise based upon how the sequence is shot, and its desperation to be shocking robs it of any and all impact.
This failure to surprise is pretty consistent throughout the film-if you’ve ever seen a horror movie, you can pretty much call the beats, as one character after another dies in their efforts to either kill or contain the alien.
Now, let’s talk about the wee beastie. It begins as a large single cell, but quickly grows into a multicellular form once they raise its temperature, feed it, and give it a suitable atmosphere.
All right. Much of the movie hinges on this thing’s need for oxygen (at one point they lure it using oxygen candles in an O2-poor environment)... despite O2 NOT being a major part of the atmosphere that revives it. In addition, despite being dormant in a modern Martian atmosphere and below a freezing temperature, this creature later spends several minutes outside of the space station in hard vacuum with no apparent ill effects.
If you’re going to tell us what this thing supposedly needs, you’d better show us that it actually needs it.
In addition, as it grows, it quickly develops distinct appendages, including a head... why it does this is totally unclear, since we’re told quite early that every cell serves as muscle, neuron, and sensory apparatus. Why it would confine itself to the sort of squid/ray hybrid form it later adopts is never addressed.
The creature proves nearly impervious not just to the hard vacuum it spends several minutes in during the film, it also laughs off several attempts to burn it to death- but it reacts to electricity, and it tries to avoid flame-making a later line about how it might survive the I.S.S. crashing into the atmosphere a little hard to swallow.
There’s further logic-botchery- A Soyuz capsule is sent up as an emergency failsafe to push the entire station out into deep space.Only one of the three astronauts remaining alive on the station at this point seems aware that this is a natural outcome of trying to maintain a breached quarantine, but that’s not the worst of it- the Soyuz capsule, based upon some thrashing and screaming when Calvin inevitably gets in, is manned... but we already know they send unmanned capsules up as a matter of course, and if they’re going to throw away the insanely expensive I.S.S., you can’t tell me that needing their Soyuz capsule back was a factor.
The entire movie is like a Rube Goldberg device, desperately trying to get the creature planetside, and pulling a hell of a lot of strings to make it happen. While a horror film is certainly not a place to quibble about downer endings, it does feel better when they’re earned.
As it stands, Life says nothing profound-or indeed, much of anything- this movie seems to be trying to make the idea that life is inherently vicious scary in some way, but it falls flat.
It tries to surprise, but it falls flat... well. Okay. After putting him allover the marketing, killing Ryan Reynolds off first was kinda gutsy, but... otherwise, nary a surprise, nary a moment whose outcome would make a genre-savvy viewer even blink, and despite trying to underpin the story with logic, its inconsistent application is jarring.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Wonder Woman. No snappy tag need apply.
First and foremost, believe the hype- this is a damn fine movie. While not perfect (for reasons I’m going to get out of the way good and early), it is one of the best superhero movies I’ve ever seen, and hands-down the best superhero origin movie I’ve churned through in living memory (only Deadpool comes close, and, well... Deadpool.). I’ve heard it called the best of the DC Cinematric efforts, but that’s a trifle unfair to Wonder Woman- to compare it to even the best of the DC shared universe films to date is somewhat akin to comparing a pearl to a kernel of undigested corn in a pile of manure- there’s some basis for comparison, but really, why bother?
Now, let’s get the pitfalls out of the way first- from here on in, spoilers abound, so, you know, don’t cry to me about giving things away.
1. The German Imperial Navy knows where Themiscyra is. While the ship’s boats full of guys with rifles that made landfall are handily dispatched, they didn’t row all the way out there- and indeed, we get a brief glimpse at at least one and possibly two German light cruisers. One of them appears to have run aground, judging by the odd angle it’s at in the one shot we see of it inside Themiscyra’s mystical barrier, but... those ships had radios. Moreover, given the importance of their mission, it’s safe to say they had a sound geographical fix on their location. Sure, Steve’s compass doesn’t work on the island, but the ships can still give their last known position pretty damn easily.
2. Steve Trevor flies a single-engine monoplane of 1918 vintage from somewhere in the Ottoman Empire to eventually crash on Themiscyra- which, given their Greco-Roman motifs, we can assume is in the Mediterranean, and not the Black, White, or Caspian Seas. Later, he and Diana board a sailboat and in apparently one night, get a tow from a helpful steamer that takes them all the way to London. Those distances do not make any sense whatsoever. At best speed, you’re not getting from the Mediterranean to the Thames in one day in 1918.
3. The Germans are portrayed as villainous in a way the Allies really aren’t- there’s talk of their enslaving the population of some village in Belgium, a sniper shoots some unarmed Belgian civilian in a village, that sort of thing. Now, the Kaiser’s army did some horrible stuff (just ask the people of Louvain), but it was more on the order of shooting hostages and, you know, invading, than things like slave labor- especially in Europe. I grasp that they’re meant to be antagonists Diana is willing to stomp the everloving crap out of, but it makes the final scene where the survivors of Diana’s mission and the surviving Germans all have a good comradely exhalation of relief at the end rather incongruous.
4. Even a passing familiarity with Greek myth makes Zeus’ benevolent role a bit hard to stomach- particularly in regard to the Amazons, who do not exactly cater to Zeus’ better nature.
5. The third act is a bit weak and rushed, a failing most superhero films seem to have.
6. If you’re even remotely genre-savvy, the few surprises the film tries to preserve can be seen a mile off.
So, with THAT out of the way- this movie rocks. It speaks volumes that despite setting most of its action in the grimy hell of World War I, this is the first DC Universe film to not try to be more grimdark than the source material really mandates. It manages to find humor, but in a way distinct from Marvel’s films with their reliance upon witty quip-masters lurking behind every shrub- the humor derives from Diana as a stranger in a strange land, and the reactions she elicits, which makes it feel less forced and more like something that’s just happening. The action sequences are thoroughly impressive, and the climactic showdown with Ares gives us a window on what Diana is really meant to mean- particularly the fact that she spares Doctor Poison- which is not something I would have done with a clear head, let alone one racked by grief and fury like Diana’s was at that moment. While her decision to show mercy to Doctor Poison is illogical, it’s also what gives her heroism its particular shine, and part of what makes Wonder Woman the first superhero movie in quite some time- and absolutely the first of the new DC films- to feel genuinely inspirational.
I will also say that her assault across No-Man’s Land is the stuff badass propaganda reels are made of- and I also like how her martial heroism is brutally cut off at the knees less than a day later by the hideous weapons of the 20th Century. Diana does not regret fighting, and does not regret the violence- some of it incredibly brutal- that she perpetrates in defense of the defenseless, but she does come to feel a shred of the helplessness all persons of conscience feel in a war.
By the end, you want to share her newfound faith in humanity, even if you’re a first-order cynic like myself. And that’s a hell of a feat.
As far as the cast goes, there’s not a truly weak performance in the bunch- even when the script gives Danny Huston little to work with, he manages to make Ludendorff at least memorable. And Gal Gadot is absolutely perfect as Diana of Themiscyra.
I don’t know where they’ll go from here, and I don’t know that Wonder Woman being this good is any indication that the Justice League flick isn’t going to suck horribly, but I do know one thing- this is a movie worthy of your time and your ticket price.
It Comes at Night- Atmospheric, Bleak, and Ultimately Frustrating
I just got back from seeing the indie horror flick It Comes at Night. I can say that the movie is intensely well-crafted, well-cast, well-acted, well-shot, and generally solid on technical grounds.
It is also never going to please an audience.
Spoilers from here on in, for those who give a toss.
The basic framework is simple- some insanely nasty disease is making the rounds, and our protagonists (a family of three- 17-year-old Travis, his mother Sarah, and his father Paul) are living in isolation in a house in a “rural” (there’s a road, I’m Alaskan, I refuse to remove those scare marks!) forested setting. When the movie opens, Sarah’s father, Bud, is also present- but suffering from the disease. He is taken out and euthanized, making it plain that these people aren’t screwing around.
Events move apace, and a second family is introduced into their dynamics- another trio, although their son is much younger.
We spend a great deal of the film getting a feel for their day to day existence, which has pleasant elements (we also see that Travis, being a 17 year old with no woman around except his mother until the arrival of the others, has a bit of an interest in Kim, played by Riley-”I-was-awesome-in-Fury Road”-Keogh, although this ultimately goes nowhere.).
Between questions of trust in this enforced seclusion, we also spend a lot of time in Travis’ dreams, which are deeply troubled and revolve around his dead grandfather, the sickness, and similar meanderings.
Everything eventually builds to a suitably bleak falling-out between the two families (given how their relationship began, it’s questionable if any other result was truly possible in the long run), with Paul and Sarah ultimately suspecting the others of being infected and taking them out of the house to what was almost assuredly going to be an execution. Things go a bit pear-shaped, but in the end, the other family’s members are all shot dead.
And then we discover that Travis, not any of the others, is, in fact, infected. The last shot of the film is of his two infected parents facing one another across the dining room table.
As a bleak post-apocalyptic examination of social dynamics, it’s interesting- but the movie also refuses to give anything away. While that can make piecing things together rewarding, if the end result is that every single character we meet is doomed either through human folly or inevitable illness, we need to be given a bit more to make us care.
A comparison to my much-beloved The Witch might be in order- because it, too, was a fairly grim story. The difference, though, is that Thomasin’s journey as a character still gives us a through-line to take out of the film... while It Comes at Night rigorously keeps us with Travis, only for him to end up dying of the disease he spent the whole movie having nightmares about.
There are many unanswered questions in the script- what did the dog chase after? Why was little Andrew in Bud’s room after apparently sleepwalking? How much of what Travis saw was a hallucination? Why in the name of god does Paul ask Will if he knows anything about the wider world when he has a truck with what we can assume to be a functioning radio in it? Why do Sarah and Kim have to board up a window in the feel-good montage if all of the windows were boarded up to begin with?
None of these really impaired my ability to enjoy the film, and none of these led to the annoyed reactions of the audience as the credits rolled.
No, the big question the movie fails to deliver on in terms of audience expectation is fairly simple- “What the hell was the point of sitting through all of that?” In that, it is much like a Chekov play- and like a Chekov play, it has a lot of merit.
But it’s also deliberately obtuse in places.
I rather liked it, because I enjoy wrapping myself in atmospheric films and getting into the groove of things... but I cannot recommend it for anyone who wants a meaningful resolution in the tales they take in.
A Quiet Place- Some Assembly Required.
So, went out to take in the latest horror creature feature on theatrical offer- A Quiet Place, that one you might have seen the trailers for where everyone lives in mortal dread of making a sound.
Spoilers ahead, you know the drill.
It basically did what I asked of it- the tension is often excruciating, you generally care what happens to the characters, the creatures are extremely nasty pieces of work, the stakes are high... all rock-solid.
And it’s a damn good thing, because the more you learn about the scenario, the more improbable it becomes.
The basic ground rules (we open on “Day 89”) are that the Big Nasty Things will hunt down and kill anything they can hear- the creatures are blind, but extremely fast, strong, and tough. We gather that they’ve wiped out most of humanity, leaving us in a sparsely-populated post-apocalyptic setting. Okay. We see old newspapers indicating that the world’s governments figured out that the creatures hunt by sound, but were powerless to stop them.
Imagine my annoyance then, when later in the movie, after a character has figured out that she’s been carrying Chekov’s Gun the entire time and found a weakness which disrupts their ability to hunt, one of the creatures is dispatched by a 12-gauge shotgun blast to the face.
Hold the phone.
You mean to tell me that against terrestrial foes that seem to be compulsively drawn to sound, that no military on Earth was able to deal with these things? They seem to me like fodder for a low-flying helicopter with some armor-piercing rounds in its weapons.
The creatures’ general limitations underpin more and more of the flaws in the basic premise. In essence, this is not a movie that stands up to much picking- it’s best enjoyed at face value, then moved on from.
Oh... and that bit with the nail? The nail nobody did anything about after the first mishap? Gragh.
Hereditary- Almost Brilliant
As a departure from my standard practice with these things... I’m going to open with a spoiler-free section:
Hereditary, the latest horror offering to hit the big screen in this little burg of ours, is very good. It’s a slow burn, for the most part, and anyone looking for jump scares is going to walk away disappointed, but it manages to build a sense of dread out of essentially nothing but the flawed and wounded interpersonal dynamics of the family the film centers around.
Also note that the trailers, if you’ve seen them, are grotesquely misleading.
But if you’re so inclined, give it a go- there are definite flaws (which I’ll get into in more detail in the next section), and I think it fumbles its chance at true brilliance, but it’s well worth the price of admission.
All right.
From here on in? Here there be spoilers.
My god, the trailers sold a bill of goods. The narrative sold in the trailers (the idea that maybe the dead grandmother is trying to possess the family’s daughter) is not even hinted at in the film. Rather, the film is sort of a meditation on grief for large chunks of its running time- we do indeed open with the grandmother’s funeral, but it’s a second death that actually serves to drive most of the dramatic action of the film.
That death being, of course, the daughter- Charlie, played by Milly Shapiro with a sort of terrifying thousand-yard stare for most of her time onscreen.
The central character of most of the film is Annie, whose portrayal by Toni Collette is absolutely incandescent. Annie is profoundly wounded at the core of her being well before the movie begins, and the movie’s most effective scenes are the ones in which we simply fixate on her and her pain- pain which, in one memorable scene, causes her to lash out at her surviving child in a way that is brutal to watch- and satisfying because of it. I seriously cannot praise her performance too highly.
But therein lies the problem, because Annie is not really with us in the climax of the film. Instead, the final (short) act is focused upon her son Peter, played excellently by Alex Wolff. Peter’s not a bad character, and Wolff does a good job (especially in the scene in which his sister dies while he’s at the wheel of the car they’re in and its immediate aftermath), but the fact of the matter is, he’s simply less compelling than Annie in almost every way. And moreover... his segments involve the overtly supernatural more than any other character.
This is a horror film in which the supernatural elements actually get in the way of simply experiencing the actual horror of the situation. There’s a fairly familiar occult subplot if you’re genre-savvy (or have simply seen Rosemary’s Baby, The Sentinel, The Wicker Man, or other films of the sort), and a climax involving the demonic possession of the last character standing, and it’s all... less terrifying than watching Annie disintegrate under her grief and a sense of guilt. Let me stress this point- A headless body floating up into a treehouse is just not that scary after you’ve watched a woman you kind of like just sort of crash and burn in her own mistakes. The knowledge that a King of Hell walks the earth in a host body with the service of an obedient cult is just not as good at twisting the knife in your gut as watching a family fall apart due to a single horrifying accident.
It’s not often I say this, but I honestly think Hereditary would have been a stronger film if played either as a straight drama, or at the very least, as a horror film whose spectral boogums are the hallucinations of a fractured mind.
I’ve heard it compared favorably to The Witch, a film I kinda sorta love with a fiery passion... and there is some truth to the comparison. Unfortunately, the biggest commonality is that the final scene of each film feels tacked-on compared to the wonderful build we have leading up to it. Both films are about families coping with loss- and doing a bad job of it- but if The Witch lacks any single performance as searing as Toni Collette’s, it makes better use of its characters- the script doesn’t suffer from quite the same misplaced focus.
Hereditary is really, really good- but the pieces were there for something truly mind-bending.