Yeah, I don’t think people knew what they were getting themselves into with this one.

First of all, Spring Breakers is genius. This is the first but hopefully not last holy fucking shit movie of 2013. It is going to hugely divide people because many will expect something sillier, more trite, and way less weird. There have been comparisons to Malick’s films, and these are somewhat apt. Harmony Korine is known for being something of a cinematic anarchist, but I’ve never seen his other films (I will now, though). With Spring Breakers, it is basically like he wants to say “fuck you” to Michael Bay and Terence Malick while also caressing them lovingly.

With it’s haunting, repetitive refrains, the Skrillex score, and constantly rotating shots of naked chicks, blunt smoke, and all the candied, metallic surfaces of a dystopia happening just around the corner, it seems like Spring Breakers may be trying to say something to and about contemporary youth culture. This is supposed to be Korine’s schtick, the well-known Kids being one of the more commonly seen of his films. I’m not sure that Korine specifically wants to say anything, though. This feels like the work of an observer, first and foremost, someone who revels in the chaos and insanity more than needing to hold it up to say “hey look, America… this is you!”.

That said, there is something uniquely American about this film. I think a lot of viewers will be turned off by that, unable to comprehend the hedonism and recklessness of the culture on display. It is a film to make our elders shift in their seats and look around uncomfortably, as if everyone under the age of thirty might snort coke off a pair of tits, flash a submachine gun, or crack a metal grin at any moment. This is a movie I barely understand in a generational sense, and I’m only twenty-six. Fuck man, it makes me nervous about young people.

And I think that’s exactly what Korine wants.

The movie constantly returns to rap video style shots of spring break revelers… maybe it is trying to say something.

This movie principally concerns itself with the adventures of four very insane girls. They are almost interchangeable for a lot of the running time, but two among them are particularly important. They are played by young actresses like Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens and it’s a bit of a coup to get people like that for a movie like this. I doubt people who see this as part of Gomez’s fanbase, for example, are really going to know what to do with this movie.

Gomez plays Faith, who is incidentally one of those born-again types. I don’t know if it’s a put on (the movie gives us reason to believe either way) but it does distinguish her from the other girls. Like a chrysalis, the film sheds the more reasonable characters as it goes. The first is Faith who, like her friends, wants to shake up the drudgery of her life and turn it into something magical and lasting. Hence, their big spring break exodus which only comes after the other three rob a restaurant in the first burst of what becomes a trademark nihilism for Spring Breakers and its characters.

There’s a purity and a stupidity to their goal. It’s like a quest to them and they’re ruthlessly determined to do whatever it takes to get to St. Petersberg, Florida to conduct the ritual of absolute hedonism that is the MTV reality of American spring break. If we forget that even for a second, Korine reminds us with all the flesh, booze, and aimless “celebration” our eyes can handle.

Faith is the one least comfortable with the robbery, with her friends’ growing sense of disconnect with anything resembling consequence or the law of the land, and is therefore the first to fold.

They enjoy their partying for  while but are eventually arrested for drug use or something. Seeing them in the courtroom, cuz he’s there to bail out two of his own guys (the creepy Twins), Alien (James Franco) decides to bail the girls out on a whim. At first it seems like he just wants to party with them. His sleazy charm and unlikely-seeming edge quickly inure most of the girls to him. It seems he is exactly the adventure they are looking for. The ultimate escape. All but Faith anyway, who leaves almost as soon as they meet Alien.

Alien is an incredible character. Franco is the kind of actor no one ever expects this shit from. He’s like a T-Pain evolution of Gary Oldman’s Drexel (from True Romance which… see it!). Buried under idiotic tattoos, a comical gangster patois, and the ubiquitous grill-mouth, Franco has an absolute blast with the role. However, that unlikely edge is never far from the surface. We never really know who Alien is, he just is (until he isn’t) and the film is not interested in judging him, or anyone else really. Imagine Spring Breakers, the filmic entity, as a sandbox in which Alien is simply a self-styled king of the most piss-covered corner. He knows this and he loves this.

Part Cribs parody and part callback to the idiotic regard for the satirically intended Scarface, Alien’s whole deal is just stunning to behold. He has an extended monologue where he regales the remaining three girls (Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, and Vanessa Hudgens) with his gangsta steez. He has shorts in every color, numchuks, machine guns, and a bed that is basically a piece of modern art. It’s like he’s listing off the evolution of the shallow materialism that sophisticates assign to the “dolla dolla bill” essentialism of gangster rap culture. We laugh at the petty ambitions of a man like Alien, who makes more money than the average white college grad will ever see slinging drugs with a couple of hillbilly friends.

He laughs right back.

Unpacking this character is like taking drugs from him.

What Alien didn’t bargain for is the vicious misanthropy (or so it seems) of his new proteges. He takes the girls under his wing, shows them a good time, but eventually gets shown up. For all his guns and knives and posturing, Alien is not especially dangerous to anyone but himself. He has a rival, Archie (rapper Gucci Mane) who has a ridiculous obsession with ice cream cones. As things come to a head with Archie, we get all the gangland chest-thumping we’d be likely to see in a low-rent 50 Cent biography. Archie, ultimately, is probably much the same as Alien but he definitely draws first blood.

Cotty (Rachel Korine) gets winged in a warning driveby (yeah, that’s a thing I guess) and bails. Cotty was the getaway driver during the heist that got them to the resort town they think has saved their souls. But now, the game is over and she’s on the bus same as Faith. In fact, there’s a point being made by showing a reflection of those same “Faith goes home” scenes with Cotty this time. It’s like Korine is allowing for the fact that only a certain type of insane is capable of thriving in Alien’s world. In a film that is about the kind of random, absurd escapism that seems to underline all the manufactured types we young people take for granted, it’s more than clever that these kids get scared and balk at different levels of intensity. For Faith it was Alien’s rapey interest in them, and the dirty reality of his trashy gangland lifestyle. For Cotty, it literally takes being bitten by the violence that she, along with Brit and Candy, only played at before.

It’s like if Mike Judge made art movies.

In one the film’s trademark absurdist-genius sequences, the three girls who have become Alien’s enforcers, sit out on his patio with him singing a Britney Spears song, dancing around, in the attire pictured above. This is just like “what the fuck am I watching?” territory and in the best possible way. Coupled with the Kimbo Slice clips and snatches of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic which the girls indulge at various points in the film, it adds to the already mad reflection of idiosyncratic slices of pop culture. I don’t know what this shit is supposed to all have in common, but there seems to be a vague sense of emptiness and absurdity running through these touchstones as well as the passive way they are engaged with by the characters. All except the Britney number, somehow, where the moment flirts with being touching or sweet in some ephemeral way.

Alien eventually comes to understand what he’s found in these last two girls, after Cotty takes off. Brit and Candy are not like their friends. They are sociopaths, true blue, and utterly disconnected from anything resembling a normative mode. They tell the other two “pretend it’s a fucking video game” and “don’t be afraid, get hard” and it’s like they don’t need this themselves, because they are already there. Interestingly, they never hurt other women. In some ways, I can see them playing as twisted angels of anarchistic female-first militancy. They shed the men in the film much the same way that the film itself sheds any vestiges of normalcy or plot. By the time Alien leads them into battle against Archie, a revenge gesture for Cotty’s wound, the movie has entirely moved past any semblance of realism and gone totally, unrepentantly for the surreal.

Together, Brit and Candy gun down every single one of a small army of Archie’s thugs. Finally, they kill him. They do all this in bikinis and pink balaclavas. It’s an intense, awe-inspiring sequence and you keep expecting them to get shot down because how can they not. They never do. They are forces of nature, things apart, and are as removed from judgment as anything else in the movie. It’s like a microcosm of a cultural tearing, or even snapping, that comes at the end of absurdity, self-indulgence, and disconnect. I watched that sequence and I thought about school shootings.

All the dead bodies are intercut later with those familiar scenes of spring break partying. Of course they are.

Whatever else people remember of this, I would bet on a big one being James Franco giving blowjobs to handguns.

I don’t really know how to define a movie like this. Part of it seems like a fairy tale as told by a psychopath, and I’m sure Korine wouldn’t mind that description at all. At other times, it seems like a work of extreme satire and parody, a mockery and doom-soothe for our times. I definitely think this is the kind of artifact that makes older people shake their heads in fear and wonder at the way things have degraded since “their day”. And maybe they have. I definitely walked out of Spring Breakers convinced that my generation is a write-off. Hearing the comments of people around my age or a little younger as they walked out, people who didn’t even bother to check and see what they were walking into, only confirmed this further.

Spring Breakers is the kind of bizarre, once obscure film that I sought out in my high school days when I was first discovering the films that got made outside or alongside the Hollywood system. That this went into wide release is probably owed largely to the cast and it is an amazing thing in itself. I can’t tell you what a bizarre feeling it is going from Oz the Great and Powerful‘s more familiar James Franco to this version, a version I appreciate far more while remaining a little unsettled by.

And that’s a good word for how this movie will probably leave you: unsettled. But it isn’t that simple. There’s a beauty here, an aesthetic consistency that plays on the more intuitive parts of the brain. Harmony Korine recently did a reddit AMA (ask me anything) wherein he said “there is beauty in all shit”. It was a characteristic-seeming non-sequitor of an answer but I could not get it out of my head when I was watching Spring Breakers. I still can’t, thinking on the movie now.

In spite of everything else, the friendship between these girls feels very genuine. Even as some leave, there’s no recrimination or drama just serene and loving acceptance. And goodbyes.

I have to hesitate to actually recommend this movie. It’s definitely one where I would want people to do their homework first, starting with checking out a few reviews and that insane, attractive trailer. For some, this movie will just bounce off as vulgar and bizarre, but for many it will have a far more pronounced effect. I expect to get into some hairy arguments about this one once some of my friends have seen it. If they see it. Honestly, there’s a few who I almost hope won’t bother.

That all said, if you read this and it all sounds interesting or awesome, do yourself a favor and see Spring Breakers. I can at least guarantee with a fair amount of confidence that you’ve never seen anything else quite like it.

The natural evolution of Jesse Ventura.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation is a weird sort of sequel. It liberally ignores the “canon” of its predecessor in many superficial ways, drops characters and icons we saw in the previous film without explanation, and often feels more grounded and as if it takes place in an entirely different world than the first one (which was much more science fictional). The result is something that I can only compare to two different versions of the same comic book character(s). John M. Chu proves he can do more than direct dance movies or follow Justin Beiber around, showing a flair for action and humor that lends itself well to this movie, but he also feels like a guy coming into an X-Men run two years after the last notable one.

This movie also has an interesting production history. There were several rumors going around when it was delayed (it was supposed to come out last year). The most popular rumor was that it had been delayed to bump up the presence of Channing Tatum and his character Duke. 2012 was the make year for Tatum and it makes a lot of sense that the studio would look at this fact and say “our movie needs more of this year’s it-guy”. I don’t know how much they added, but the official report was that the delay was really about a post-conversion to 3D. And here I thought these fuckers had realized what a bad idea that usually is. Fortunately in G.I. Joe 2, the 3D is actually pretty good and often cleverly used to punctuate the action choreography.

Anyway, as to whether or not this movie is any good… you’ll have to ask yourself whether you liked the first one or not. It’s definitely different, as this sequel is more grounded and less ridiculous (for the most part) than Rise of the Cobra. That being said, it’s still a cartoon action movie coasting on a somewhat thin coating of charm and violence. The first movie was more violent and more crazy than this one, and if that’s why you liked it (if you did) then you will maybe be disappointed by Retaliation. Of course, if you didn’t like the first one because of those elements, Retaliation will certainly seem like the better of the two.

Tatum and Johnson have great chemistry, actually.

Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson) is the sergeant and buddy of Duke (Tatum) who now leads the Joes. The only other Joe from Rise of the Cobra is Snake Eyes. The others are not mentioned, not seen, and the entire organization seems smaller, powered down, and so on. It seems that Joe 2 only takes place a few months after the first (sourced from some dialogue Zartan has about impersonating the president only for a few months). Yet, with all these disconnects from the first one, it feels like it should be years later. Anyway, some more connective tissue would have helped cement the reintroduction we get to the Joes, but the movie knows it isn’t going to go there and tries to get stuff swinging quick enough for the audience to roll with it. Roadblock is essentially our main character and the other primary team members are from Duke’s core squad, who we are introduced to fairly early on.

In the first movie, Cobra Commander (Luke Bracey this time around) managed to get Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) implanted as the President of the United States (Johnathan Pryce). Then ol’ hissy face got captured along with Destro (who isn’t really in this movie) leaving Zartan to prepare for some kind of master plan. How this all goes down in a logistical or tactical sense is incredibly unclear, but Zartan eventually springs Cobra Commander with the help of Firefly (Ray Stevenson, who else?) and the whole shebang gets under way. Their first step? Kill all the Joes and frame them for a bunch of bad shit so they can’t stop the Cobra from being all nefarious.

Their plan basically works. 90% of the Joes get killed. The only survivors are Roadblock, Flint (D.J. Cotrona), and Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki). Because they are in Japan when the ambush goes down, Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and newly ninja’d Jinx (Elodie Yung) are also spared.

Stevenson is becoming a full-time scenery chewer. Here he has a bizarre Southern accent.

Most of the movie is spent on Roadblock and his two buddies trying to figure out what happened. Once they do, with the help of the original Joe Colton (Bruce Willis), they go into full attack mode with the help of Snake Eyes, Jinx, and a temporarily allied Storm Shadow (Byung-Hun Lee). Obviously they more or less win the day and this is not even close to the most interesting thing about the movie or what I did like about it.

Most of the appeal comes down to actors having fun, actually. Every single one of them except for a few notable exceptions. Foremost of which is D.J. Cotrona as the useless and wasted Flint. Flint’s big specialty is that he’s Cameron from Alphas. He does redundant (there are fucking ninjas galore in this movie) freerunning and so on. He also has a triaged (I imagined it was sacrificed in the editing chamber) love connection with Lady Jaye, who gets way more screen time and is yet the more problematic character. Flint is just Duke 2.0, basically. He’s a pleasingly handsome dude but he is not given any time to show if he can be as charismatic as Tatum and therefore, he is just there like a prop.

Of course it comes down to tits.

Palicki is given the thankless role of playing to the insecurities and base desires of this movie’s ideal demographic: young men. She starts off being the “smart one” on the team but inevitably has to leverage her sex appeal as her real asset. This would be fine except it is, by this point, so fucking boring. And as safe, boring, and lazy as it is used here (it’s pretty much lifted directly from Mission Impossible 4 but that movie tried harder to make the token female a character), it just forces you to confront that this is even a thing in movies. They could have just left it alone or let Palicki play a character who is smart and sexy on a legitimate basis. It’s like if she was allowed to just be intelligent, it would somehow break 18 year old men’s minds. I mean, on top of the sex appeal thing, her one intelligence-based contribution is her uncovering of the President’s true identity. It’s a two step process: the first is her using observation, analysis, and technology to reveal that he is an imposter and the second is using T ‘n’ A to get DNA confirmation. Before Part 2, she is told that her evidence “isn’t good enough” by a sleep-acting Bruce Willis who continuously calls her Brenda and makes a couple of chauvinistic jokes before standing in as the channeling tool of her daddy issues (which are mired in male chauvinism). I can tell they were trying to do something with this character but there’s no nuance or subtly so it just feels like one giant ugly concession to insecure little boys.

Speaking of which, it’s interesting that they even bother with Jaye but leave Flint totally by the way side. I want to give the movie a little bit of credit for this but it’s hard given how poorly the whole thing is executed. Thankfully, this movie is really light on character. In fact, Jaye and Storm Shadow are the only characters who get any real development.

The ninja sequence has been widely seen already thanks to marketing, but its really great.

The best thing in the movie is the extended sequence of Snake Eyes and Jinx assaulting the mountain temple where Storm Shadow is recovering from injuries sustained whilst busting out Cobra Commander. Phew, mouthful. This part features all the best action choreography in the movie (though there is lots of good stuff here and there) and makes you want to watch an entire movie of these ridiculously ninjas running around in a world that can’t really be the same one that the rest of Retaliation takes place in. But whatever, they wanted to have their cake (grounded G.I. Joe movie) and eat it too (fucking ninjas) and I guess they did.

The Rza shows up as Blind Master and delivers such a ridiculously brief sandwich of ridiculous exposition that I was pretty much gaping. In about thirty five seconds, he explains that Storm Shadow needs to be taken alive, Jinx is his cousin but on their side, and Snake Eyes needs to use some special sword. Later, we find out that this whole time it was Zartan who killed Hard Master (seriously) when they were kids, framing Storm Shadow and bringing on Snake’s vow of silence. Oddly, when this is all revealed, Snake Eyes does not start talking.

Johnson has pretty good chemistry with fucking everyone.

The Rza’s showing up in this movie actually brings up a wonderful thing about it, and a way for me to be specific about what a good time most of these guys are having. First and most obviously, the banter between Tatum and Johnson is pretty good. Especially when you stop to think about how weird it is that it revolves around Roadblock’s two daughters, whom he seems to have produced asexually or from his biceps (no wife or mother or vessel is shown). Then there’s the solo acts hamming things up, chewing all the scenery in sight, and just elevating sequences of this movie into highly entertaining SNL skits.

This is mostly Walton Goggins who plays a slimey prison warden at the world’s scariest prison. This is the kind of cameo Goggins is best for and it’s weird for a second when he shows up but he just stares at you from the other side of the reel and says “watch me, baby” and then you do. Rza is weird and entertaining on some sort of meta level, but Goggins is just a weird random cameo.

Better than this is Johnathan Pryce as Zartan as the President. He gets all the best lines in the movie and is consistently watchable and hilarious. He makes all those typical villainous plotting/interrogating/moustache-twirling bits a total fucking blast. I never knew Pryce has this sort of shit in him. For the best stuff, please pay attention to the summit scenes where he plays a game of nuclear weapon chicken with all the other nuclear-armed leaders. When he pushes the button that has them all frantically launching their nukes, it’s like something out of Kubrick. “Yeah, I pushed it.” he deadpans. It’s fucking beautiful and my single favorite scene in the movie.

On the more downplayed front, there’s Joseph Mazzello playing Mouse, a Joe who is briefly the rookie marksman of the team. They even fit in a “Tiny Tim” joke as if to remind us all that this kid has been in very little since Jurassic Park for which he is still best known. He was recently in The Pacific and Justified so maybe we’ll see more of him.

Mostly this is kind of an ensemble movie, but they should have given Roadblock an arc.

Retaliation has a bit of the ra-ra American jingo that everybody knows and loves, but it is dropped before long into a more generalized militaristic story. Besides, it has a riff on Equilibrium‘s gun-based martial arts towards the end (Roadblock is actually a Grammaton Cleric) so I mean how patriotic can it really be? Do these things have anything to do with each other? Who knows.

It’s too bad about Duke and all the other characters from the first one. Of course, if they make a threequel, they can easily bring them all back. I mean, Cobra Commander (who isn’t half the villain in this as Zartan, similar to how he functions in Rise of the Cobra really) escapes and everything. It sucks that Zartan is dead, but at least Cobra has destroyed another prominent European city.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation is a limited, patchy movie. It is definitely entertaining, probably on par with the first one but derived from different sources, and features a few scenes and sequences that totally elevate it. It could have been really great if it was able to harness any of the things that work for it on a consistent basis, but I’m not sure that the people behind this movie really knew what worked and what didn’t. Or maybe they figured it out too late and decided to release it anyway, boosting ticket sales by making it 3D. Is Duke even really dead? There are some things we may never know.

It can’t be overstated how gorgeous this movie is.

Walking into a Dreamworks animated movie, you’re never really sure if you’re going to get a Shrek or a Kung Fu Panda. In the last few years, Dreamworks Animation have risen to the challenge of Pixar’s lock on high quality, thematically and narratively satisfying animated films that are the definition of “fun for the whole family”. There have been a couple of times where they’ve handily beat Pixar’s usually incredible output with a much better, more original film. This is a studio that has matured and become willing to take chances, but they owe a lot to Pixar for blazing the trail and revolutionizing computer animated films as a (sort of) genre. It’s nice to have two major studios releasing movies like The Croods and Brave on an annual basis, isn’t it?

With The Croods, the focus is primarily on creativity itself. The prehistoric setting is just window-dressing to get a plethora of beautifully realized and ridiculous ideas. But it’s not just that, it’s also got loads of heart and wit and a pervasive sense of wonder. All of these elements are so fully in tune with the narrative that the impression is one of effortless mastery. The creativity in The Croods is enough to evoke awe in the audience, but what they’ve achieved in terms of sheer harmony is truly magnificent.

The Croods is kind of post-apocalyptic actually!

The Croods are a family of cavemen who live in a ravine. They used to be surrounded by neighboring families, but one thing or another has killed them all off. This movie is often hilariously comfortable with the idea of death and jokes about death are made often. To keep the family alive and in line, patriarch Grug (Nicolas Cage) preaches a policy of fear and tradition and caves. Eep (Emma Stone) is his eldest daughter and she is at the age where freedom and thinking for herself matter a lot. This puts the two at odds and their relationship is the central one in the film.

Like a companion piece to last year’s underrated Brave, this is ultimately a movie about fathers and daughters. I can appreciate that on a personal level, having a daughter of my own, so I may be biased. I submit that it’s very well done here, especially given that fathers and daughters are a much more common thread than mothers and daughters in kids’ movies (probably because the industry is saturated by men writing/creating from personal experience). It helps that Eep is such a great character.

Perhaps not as great as Belt. Just LOOK at him.

Eep is the kind of “strong female protagonist” I love to see and love to write about. Like Brave‘s Merida, Eep is brave, willful, and flawed. She’s not hugely flawed, just self-absorbed enough that she takes her family (especially her dad) for granted and has to learn to overcome that. Because so much of the focus is on Eep and Grug, the rest of the family aren’t as rounded out. They mostly provide comic relief and some sound-boarding for the conflicts in the film. They are all likable and charming which is all the movie really needs. Eep centers them and acts as the principle vehicle for the audience’s experience with the world of the movie. Her awe and excitement and curiosity are of a piece with ours. Grug gets the more developed character arc, which is a nice bit of sleight of hand from writer-directors Chris Sanders and Kirk De Micco.

Also, trivia: John Cleese has a story credit on this movie. Is there anything that man can’t do?

This is sort of a cat people kind of movie.

Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is the character who counters Grug in the movie’s conflict between old and new, tradition and creativity, courage and fear. He’s a skinny plainsdweller who was brought up thinking that cavemen were all barbaric and backwards. He’s also a representative of the modern human, being more anatomically familiar than the ape-like Croods. He gets mixed up with them as the world begins to break apart around them. His influence on Eep (cuz they are mad crushing, yo) extends to the rest of the family and sets up the importance of taking chances and trying new things, which they take to much more naturally than Grug.

The end of the world is a metaphor for the uncertainty of the future. This theme is very strongly pushed by the movie and concludes that it takes the youthful to pull the elders into a newer world. I love that this movie says that both sides of the generation gap have to learn from each other. Grug inspires because of his dedication to his family and his selflessness, while Guy inspires even Grug with his creativity and lack of fear. Every chance it gets, the movie indulges some ridiculous outlandish solution to a problem. Like the hybrid animals (owlcat, turtlebird, etc!) and fantastical landscapes (like a coral reef in a desert), these inventions are all about blasting creativity in high concentration and reveling in that. I approve.

The Croods creates several entire ecosystems of animals, plants, and terrain. It’s often familiar, think zoological mash-ups, and always stunning.

On a technical level, The Croods feels like a natural extension of How to Train Your Dragon. The virtual camerawork in The Croods is spectacular, especially in an early actions sequence that uses a classic physical comedy bit (the running chase/keepaway). There are shots in there that are staggering and are the first sign that whatever else, The Croods is part of the tradition of newer animated films that have learned to use the virtual camera in dynamic, heavily cinematic ways. Going hand in hand with what the movie does with lighting, texture detail, and other technical elements, the net result is noticeably streets ahead.

I think animation geeks will get a lot of out of The Croods. It’s a great example to show people if you want to demonstrate the technical and artistic grandeur that animation can attain. Not only that but it’s another in an elongating list of spectacular animated films that transcend the “that’s kiddie stuff” label occasionally used as a way for otherwise entertainment-hungry adults to dismiss the whole “genre”. There’s too much meat here to just wave it away.

Another bit of trivia: Belt is voiced by Chris Sanders, who also voiced Stitch. Stitch is one of my favorite animated characters ever.

Some reviews of The Croods have focused on its message. Most of the time, you can spot a cynical kids movie review from a mile off just by that alone. You don’t often get the same kind of paternalistic attitude in criticism of adult movies. For live action movies, you hear about themes not “the message”. It’s as if movies like The Croods don’t have themes, they simply have a flimsy storyline painted onto a kid-oriented, simplistic moral/social lesson. Of course kids’ movies do tend to have simpler themes and tend to reinforce them more tangibly and obviously than do adult-oriented films. This is just practical. However, it’s possible to find complex themes that may be extracted into a more simple lesson. If you reduce The Croods to some kind of pedantic lesson for kids, it seems like the lesson is “don’t listen to your parents, take crazy risks, and cool shit will happen”. The Croods live in a dangerous world, and part of the movie is about Grug and Ugga (Catherine Keener) needing to give them space to explore it. Mostly, Grug needs to believe in his and his family’s ability to handle the danger and uncertainty of the world they no longer know. This is not “fuck wearing a helmet when you ride on a bike, go explore the world!”. The Croods is obviously using physical danger as a metaphor for other kinds of challenges that kids face and probably need to face by their own lights, hopefully with the love and support of a family. That’s the theme, when you really show this movie the respect it deserves.

This means that The Croods is refusing to be paternalistic. This is nice, but it sort of risks bugging the parents who, if conservative, will not like that this movie throws them under the bus. Family is of paramount importance to The Croods and I hope this isn’t missed by adults in the audience who may otherwise be put off by its focus on youth.

I’m such a sucker for wonder as an emotional setup/payoff.

At the end of the day, though, it’s not like this is a new story. Coming of age movies typically feature some element of youth vs. age and often take the side of young people needing to forge their own identities and parents needing to learn to back off. The Croods does not reinvent the wheel, let alone invent it in the first place. But there’s nothing wrong with a familiar story well told and The Croods features interesting call-outs to modern anthropological science (homo sapiens on neanderthal lovin’? YOU TELL ME) and that ridiculous creative splurging I keep mentioning. Like I said earlier, this is a movie that works so well because it beautifully harmonizes all these different things.

Even if you don’t care about all the narratives and themes and sophisticated relationships and well-drawn character arcs that this movie has, go see it because it is fucking beautiful.

On the outside and on the inside.

Tomb Raider single-handedly justifies franchise reimagination.

To get it out of the way, Tomb Raider is a technical masterpiece. Crystal Dynamics has completely outdone themselves on pretty nearly every level with this game. It is not flawless, but most masterpieces aren’t. Still, I give it this label because if it is a perfect iteration of its genre. We might call this genre the “action platformer” in which combat mechanics are as important as spectacle, scale, and yes the mechanics of movement across digital environments. It is hard to make a creative platformer. It is even harder to make a shooter or action game that feels new and interesting. Tomb Raider is not a product of an attempt to reinvent anything other than the franchise itself, representing a symbolic rebirth for a new generation of gamers.

Borrowing liberally from the Uncharted series and repackaging many now-mainstay game design concepts (upgrades and “skill” progression, otherwise known as “RPG elements” being a good example), there aren’t a lot of people out there who are going to say that Tomb Raider suffers for being derivative. However, I would argue that trying to bring an established set of conventions up to the maximum level of quality is as worthy a goal as trying to invert, subvert, or otherwise alter standard formulas in the pursuit of novelty. Ergo, Tomb Raider is not a novel game on the level of its actual gameplay. What is fresh and exciting about it is that it takes all these familiar things and executes them with mastery. Sometimes “good” is the only goal that matters, and Tomb Raider is all about “good”.

Get used to seeing Lara get her butt kicked. She gives back as good as she gets, though.

Being a franchise reboot, Tomb Raider goes back to retell Lara’s origin story. Given that she’s a bit of a super hero, in the Batman-has-no-powers sort of mode, this makes sense and is definitely informed by the recent glut of origin-based superhero films. Lara’s origin is that she’s an assistant to an archaeological personality who has done for his field what Steve Irwin did for zoology. The guy is a douche, but Lara’s tightly-knit group of fellow crew members all seem to basically know it.

During a storm, their ship runs aground on a mysterious island in the middle of the mysterious “Dragon Triangle”. This is a Far-East version of the Bermuda Triangle. They are looking for a lost pseudo-Japanese civilization called Yamatai. One of the crewmembers, Lara’s college buddy Sam, is a supposed descendant of the legenderay Sun Queen Himiko, ruler of Yamatai and said to have supernatural powers like (dramatic cue) control over weather.

The island, it turns out, is definitely Yamatai. Built over the ruins of the pseudo-Japanese society is a patchwork of additional ruins, artifacts, and makeshift towns built up over hundreds of years by visitors running the gamut from World War 2 researchers to frequent castaways. The island’s current inhabitants are a cult of all-male survivors called the Solari. They are led by Mathias, who wants to restore the Sun Queen and finally escape the island. It’s truly impressive what these guys have gotten up to but they are a merciless threat and Lara must constantly survive their traps, fighters, and the rickety nature of their structures in order to save her crew and get home.

Pictures do not do the beauty of this game justice.

The first and most striking feature of the game is its visuals. It’s become sort of old hat and distasteful to talk about the quality of graphics in a game. This always happens toward the end of a console generation, as most developers settle for what seems like the upper echelon of what the hardware (and their artists) can achieve. Late stage console games always get interesting, though, when the developers try to push that hardware in unexpected ways to achieve unexpected quality. Tomb Raider‘s textures are impressive. They are definitely the best the X-Box 360 is likely to achieve, or at least they look that way to me. The PC version probably looks even better.

This is not why this game’s graphics are so impressive.

I keep telling people that Tomb Raider is all about the lighting. The reason why its environments, lush in all we can expect in terms of detail and hand-made authenticity, are so great is directly due to what CD has accomplished with lighting. It is literally everything in this game’s visual presentation. Just telling you this will not be emphatic enough of a statement for me. You have to see it for yourself. If it doesn’t impress, I don’t know what to say.

And this is the first claim for where Tomb Raider demonstrates mastery.

I wish hunting was a bigger part of the game.

Level design in Tomb Raider is yet another good example of mastery at work. This game has intricate levels smartly paced between constricting, claustrophobic buildings, caves and tunnels, and wide open spaces where Lara’s various athletic skills and helpful tools become vitally necessary. This is a game that knows players are used to a formula of gameplay that will begin to repeat itself and get stale. We play games and say “oh this is the climbing part, been there and done that”. Eventually, we become numb to these sequences and they just feel like obligatory check boxes on the path to completion or enjoying a story.

Tomb Raider harnesses all the other elements of its production: mechanics, art, design, and its progression system to keep that fatigue from ever occurring. Or at least, from occurring too soon or too often. In other words, Tomb Raider‘s mechanics develop in such a way that there’s just about always something new or interesting going on, big picture or small, with “platform sequence #58″. You get swept up in the flow of it. Game flow is a nebulous concept, but it’s the game equivalent of reading a book you can’t put down and realize 6 hours have passed, or of a movie so engrossing that you forget you’re watching a movie at all.

Tomb Raider is a game made up of spurts of sublime game flow, broken into chunks so as to keep the player digesting even as they dive into the next one. A lot of this is owed to the intelligent level design, the deft balance between exploration and plot-requisite linearity.

This game is an exemplar of the empowerment fantasy.

The other way this flow is achieved is in where the game chooses to be abstract and “gamey” and where it adheres to realism.

Lara’s appearance changes throughout the game to reflect the beating she’s taking and her constant brushes with fire, barbed wire, and the very ground itself. This is the game’s concession to the fact that Lara actually suffers injuries (including a minor impalement, if there is such a thing) that are more or less shrugged off for the sake of gameplay. I was impressed that, occasionally, Lara would suffer a fall or other pain that would limit her physical abilities temporarily. These are scripted events but I definitely appreciate it, as well as the way the necessity of rest is represented in camps, the game’s inherent way of breaking up the flow. So there’s a balance here where they don’t want the injuries to be too realistic, but they don’t want to ignore that all the shit Lara goes through takes a toll. By the end of the game, she is physically and emotionally scarred and you feel every step of that.

Another dimension of the flow comes in one of the game’s major themes: empowerment. The early action in the game is light on combat until the horrific sequence that prompted all the bombast and backlash that Tomb Raider “is a rape game” just because it includes an allusion to sexual assault. This caused CD to act stupid and say stuff like “players will want to protect Lara” which definitely undermines the actual content of this game, which is generally empowering for either sex and specifically empowering for women and not in a “I am Lara’s big brother helping her out” sort of way. The player embodies Lara as much as he or she would do with any strong-voiced video game character (as opposed to Mary Sue characters). Refreshingly, there are no love interests and Lara saves men more than she is saved by them. Also refreshing is the lightness with which the game touches on the loaded, subtly controversial idea of the female heroine. This idea, and the battles being fought over it, are quickly becoming more heated and visible. I think that it’s fitting that Lara’s origin story game is about empowerment when she is probably one of the first video game heroines that skewed to an older crowd.

It also helps that this game rejects Lara’s status as a sex symbol first and replaces it by making her a strong protagonist that happens to be female. This should be lauded on all sides of the gender equality debate since it not only normalizes female empowerment, it doesn’t do so with soap-boxing. Tomb Raider is not an obstructively political game. It is not didactic or preachy. It’s subtle but still political. Case in point: all of the human enemies Lara fights are men. She is betrayed by men, attacked by men, etc. But so too are all the male video game characters in action games. There’s no sense wherein Tomb Raider is militant feminism. It’s the light, normative type that assumes men want a good empowerment story just as much as women, and that they care far less about the main character’s sex than do the armchair psychologists that fill suits in studios and say things like “games with female protagonists don’t sell”.

An example of the open, multi-layered levels.

As a snapshot of how Tomb Raider‘s empowerment narrative works, let me submit my favorite moment in the game. Throughout the early parts, as I mentioned, the game is light on combat but death and violence are treated as far more significant than in the usual game. Lara is horrified by her killing of the man who has tried to rape her, and even sheds tears over it. As she progresses to having to fight off others, eventually arming herself with a bow and various guns, she goes through a very human, very rousing progression of fear, uncertainty, and even reluctance before she’s finally had enough. Lara has procedural dialogue where she will react to things in the environment as you play, including enemies. At first she says things like “wait, stop” or “I don’t want to fight” or “leave me alone” but she becomes progressively hardened against the Solari thugs who have attacked her and her friends and subjugated them to violence, torture and death merely for being there. Eventually, Lara becomes aggressive and defiant. This clicked for me when you first get the grenade launcher and the enemies run form you, reacting to the new and destructive weapon Lara is wielding. “That’s right you bastards, I am coming for you!” she cries. I am paraphrasing, but you get the idea. By this point, Lara is not only competent (as she is throughout the game), she is empowered not only by the tools to protect herself but her willingness to use them. This may seem grim or glorifying violence, but it works metaphorically as a narrative of overcoming one’s fears and the obstacles of a hostile, external world. Simply put, Lara becomes a badass and you feel this more organically than pretty much any game I could name. The harmony between the mechanical progression of skills and weapon upgrades and Lara’s characterization are my favorite of the astonishingly good things about this game.

Speaking of the action sequences…

One thing I don’t hear mentioned much is that Tomb Raider has some of the strongest and most interesting AI I’ve ever seen. The enemies always feel like a challenge and behave intelligently, reacting not only to Lara’s weapons but whether she is fighting defensively or aggressively. In other words, the enemy AI reacts to the player in a fluid, lucid way. There’s no “hostile switch” where they just charge at you and there’s very little of the meat-grinder elements of many shooters, both third and first person. It helps that the set pieces and environmental obstacles/aids are so varied, making most of the fights feel fresh and interesting even when you’re pretty sure you’re going to win.

While some have criticized the stealth aspects (mostly that there should have been more of it), I appreciated that the line between avoiding detection and getting caught is subtle and escalation to full-out firefight always felt natural to me. In most games with stealth elements, there’s a powerful urge to “reload” if you fuck up a stealth sequence. In Tomb Raider, I never felt this need. It could be due to how fun combat was, how invested I was in the story, or just that ephemeral flow working its magic. Or all of the above. Either way, an unusual thing for me in any game with stealth elements. I suspect this goes for most people.

Sometimes there are far grosser looking things waiting for you in the sludge.

If I can point to any particular weak element, it’s probably the somewhat flimsy characterization everybody else has. The game is so focused on Lara that most of the other characters are fairly one-note. Most of them are likable and this counts for something, but I think the story could have been much better with a little more focus on the villains and the friends Lara is bent on saving. They all get nice moments, but they lean on tag-lines or somewhat embarrassing stereotyping (Jonas, the ambiguously ethnic guy, is “spiritual” of course). That said, I appreciate the modern feel of a relatively minor character, Alex the obligatory “nerd”. He has a tattoo and a clever graphic T. This may be a bit one dimensional in its own way, but at least it’s not the sniveling poindexter of yesteryear. Plus, Alex gets a pretty nice heroic moment.

Where Tomb Raider is weak on secondary characters, it is propulsively strong on its primary one. This means that the story is not some black sheep weak point like it so often is in otherwise strong games. Instead, it’s just not as good as it could have been which is not a particularly damning criticism when the game simply emphasizes another element of its storytelling more than the other. Could they have spent more time on other things? Yeah. Would I preferred it if they had? Definitely. Does it really hurt the game? Mileage, it gonna vary.

You do get more out of the characters if you find their journals and read between the lines. Roth and Reyes are a good example.

All in all, I was pretty surprised that Tomb Raider is as good as it is. It seems like video games are a far more friendly environment for reboots and restarts than movies, but there’s tons of love in this game and you can tell every second you play it. Crystal Dynamics would have sold copies even if they decided to target this game exclusively at 15 year old boys and nostalgic grown-ups who liked it when Lara was just tits with guns and a posh accent. Instead, they showed a remarkable sense of inclusiveness and sensitivity in bringing Tomb Raider to the futuristic world of 2013.

Some are not going to be as taken with it as I was. They will feel like it is just Lady Nathan Drake or something, but I have played the Uncharted games and the many smaller titles that were inspired by the way it revolutionized both platforming and third-person shooting by fusing them into a single hybrid. Tomb Raider is the culmination of this fused genre, a masterwork entry that will define it from now until the next benchmark comes along.

Expect a flood of games to try and capitalize on the formula Tomb Raider has largely perfected. Expect more Tomb Raider games. I just hope they make them with as much love and harmony and sense as they made this one.

Fair Warning: You should not read this review unless you have played Bioshock Infinite or could care less about spoilers. This is one of those times where spoilers might alter your experience of the game.

Bioshock Infinite is one of the most anticipated games in recent memory. It belongs to a loose trilogy begun what seems like a long time ago with what is often considered one of the greatest games of all time, Bioshock. As a substantially literary game, Bioshock showed what could be done when story, writing, theme, and narrative immersion were fundamental foci for the game design. Infinite maintains the same priorities and you definitely know while playing it that it is the narrative, characterization, themes, and plot were more important to 2K and Irrational Games than anything else.

Like Bioshock, the setting is the hook. The world-building here is nothing short of spectacular. A triumph of the imagination bolstered by almost obsessive attention to detail. As many have reported, the weak link in Infinite‘s altogether masterful formula is the over-reliance on shooting and scavenging. If you look at this comparatively, to other shooters, it really isn’t what you’d call a weakness in the game. It is simply only part of the game that feels obligatory and occasionally tedious.

There’s a sense that Infinite could have and should have been more and quite a lot of backlash about perceived “broken promises” made during the release of marketing materials showing off mechanics or scenes that never made it to the final cut of the game. In no way does Bioshock Infinite feel rushed or slighted. It feels like a complete game. Maybe not quite the breath of fresh air that Bioshock was but it’s not like expectations don’t account for that. You don’t catch lightning in a bottle twice when you use the same bottle. Your best bet is to channel the lightning you’ve already caught in a different, equally viable direction. Infinite definitely accomplishes that. It also skews more toward action than horror than its predecessors.

The action is often overly chaotic, but just as often spectacular and satisfying.

In Bioshock Infinite you play Booker DeWitt, a former Pinkerton agent who is tasked with retrieving a young girl from the city of Columbia. “Bring us the girl, wipe away the debt” is a mantra repeated frequently in the game. It not only represents Booker’s primary motivation and the mystery that drives the player’s interest in it, it also ends up having layers of narrative significance. Columbia is an early 20th Century city, looking a bit like the Atlantic City of Boardwalk Empire really, but it floats in the goddamn sky.

The young girl is Elizabeth, a seventeen year old girl imprisoned in a giant statue of an angel. As Booker first enters Columbia, the player is treated to a pile of world-building meant to introduce you to not only Columbia itself, but the underlying themes of both the setting and the game’s story. Columbia is a monument to a certain aspect of American culture. It was founded by a Prophet named Comstock who saw a vision from an angel named Columbia (the statue is of her) about a holy city in the sky. You see early on that three “Founders” are worshipped as Saints and even prayed to. They are each represented by a motif that is layered through the game. The first is George Washington, the Sword, representing the militant stance of the city and who also takes on the form of “Patriot” automatons who fire machine guns at you and spout Columbian propaganda. The second is Ben Franklin, the Key, who represents the spirit of scientific advancement and invention in Columbia (necessary for the city itself to even exist). Last is Thomas Jefferson, the Scroll, whom represents the law and the spirit of independence.

Dem Founders.

Columbia is as obvious a satire of Tea-Party style constitutional/religio-political fundamentalists in American society (and history) as Rapture was of libertarians and Objectivists. This is the introductory statement of Bioshock Infinite. It is not the primary raison d’etre for the story, though. Like Bioshock, the themes of social and political thought that run through the game are mixed up and used in various ways, often subtly, and show up as part of the superstructure as a participle in the game’s overall hook. You chuckle a bit and move on, looking to see where the game is going to take you on this journey of critical, satirical exploration of a part of the American psyche that is both glorious and hideous.

That Colombia is led by a religious Prophet was something I actually didn’t know before playing the game. I never expected Irrational to want to go at religion and Christianity the way they do. Some are calling Infinite an “anti-Christian” or “anti-religious game”. I don’t know if it really goes that far. Instead, it questions and criticizes the way religion and Christianity have often been used in American culture. Like it or not, the peculiar and American brands of Christianity have been highly influential throughout the country’s history. From Mormonism (which the game leans on heavily through Comstock and his angel) to the contemporary right-wing fundies who have taken over the Republican party, Infinite has something to say about the whole ugly spectrum. The game literalizes the lyrics of its symbolic theme song, Will the Circle be Unbroken (By and By) and refers back to them often. This threads nicely through its exploration of quantum uncertainty and multiverse theory, really, and suggests a degree of awe, respect, and uncertainty about the metaphysical nature of the universe (God or no God).

That the game doesn’t respect religious expedience, the mix of religion and politics, and the hubris of so-called prophets who claim to speak for cosmic unknowable entities is pretty plain. In general, Irrational likes to instill its games with a lot of old school “what if?” science fiction and its pretty unmistakable that there’s a pro-science agenda onto which dystopian technologies are liberally sprinkled. That is as true in Infinite, with its Handymen and Vigors, as it was in Bioshock (which committed to this idea more).

They could have explored the technology of Columbia more, but it likely felt like repetition.

Because the nature of technology in Columbia isn’t all that different from that of Rapture (The ubiquitous vending machines again stand as a witty reference to America’s love affair with rampant consumerism, drugs, and guns), there’s a point that can be made about the cross-section of repeating game mechanics and thus repeating world-building. Infinite actually goes out of its way to justify this in its elaborate, metaphysical epilogue, but it seems like the game features “plasmids by another name” anyway. I understand that there can’t be as much focus on the science and technological policies of Columbia given that this was such a big part of Bioshock (and truly, Infinite is after higher-hanging fruit anyway) but it does leave the game open to criticism that its world-building and mechanics, intertwined as they are, amount to too much repetition. Whether or not Infinite improves on it over previous games is probably the real question, and reactions to this have been mixed. Some think the gameplay is more shallow and others think it is tweaked and far better. Exploration works basically the same, with the player rewarded for looking around and paying attention to the lavish world they’re inhabiting. Unlike most games, the reward is not simple completionism nor is it material rewards of better loot, powers, etc. These are part of it, but Irrational more or less set the bar on using exploration rewards as a way to flesh out settings, characters, themes, concepts, and the larger story itself. Like in Bioshock, there are relatively few “cut scenes” and most of this additional story is delivered through audio recordings. Miss these and the game will seem even more ambiguous than it actually is, let alone much shorter.

Though you’re likely to spend just as much time doing exploring as fighting enemies, it’s the combat that has to really work for the player to not get bored and plow through the story. Combat in Infinite is smoother and more immediate than in previous games. Booker relies more on guns, a wide variety of them, and so do the enemies. Fights often take place in elaborate, expansive shooting galleries with multiple different approaches. The game lacks puzzles (something I miss) and uses very simple mechanics for passing obstacles (Elizabeth’s lockpicking) but the fights themselves are sort of like puzzles. This reminds me of Dishonored in some ways, as there are so many ways to use Booker’s weapons and powers, let alone the environment and Elizabeth’s tears, to get through the chaotic fights. This in itself makes combat fun and varied and overcomes some of the repetitiveness of enemies, locations (there are roughly 3 types of locations where fights occur: indoors, outdoors, and outdoors with rails/ships/hooks) which is a thing even though the game does a splendid job of progressing through introducing new concepts, powers, enemies, and so on and allowing you the room to experiment and interact with the game on this level before moving on to something new.

Whenever the combat sequences threaten to have shown you everything they were going to, the game introduces something new.

The combat is extremely frequent, however, and almost always large scale. This means it is incredibly hectic, a meatgrinder as many have called it, and this necessitates some concessions to shallower game design additions like respawning shields. Thankfully, the inclusion of Elizabeth to most fights means that you are able to get last-minute, cinematic-feeling boosts to ammo, health, and Salts (the energy source for Vigors) right in the middle of fights. Though it might get a bit old by the end of the game, there are enough fights without Elizabeth that you miss the presentation of those moments. The sound effects (particularly when she tosses you coins), her defiant or supportive yelling, and the quick animations of getting a gun tossed over to you just feel great even hours into the game. This mechanical function of the Elizabeth character is a masterstroke, actually, since it completely reinforces the player (and Booker’s) attachment to her.

Speaking of Elizabeth. The game settles on a very Beauty and the Beast sort of motif for her, initially. She even looks like Belle and like her, she is imprisoned by a monster for whom she has some sympathy. When you first meet her, she is in a great big library that calls back to the one The Beast gifts to Belle. It’s sort of a minor connection, really, but I think it says something about how expressive Elizabeth turns out to be as a result of the heavy Disney influence in her art design and animation.

The resemblance to Belle is striking.

More importantly than this, Elizabeth represents The Girl in the series of Constants that connect the multiverse within which Bioshock takes place as a series. Yes, Infinite is where the game brings in the freaky physics. The Lighthouse, Man, and Girl are those Constants and they represent the things that are the same, no matter what world you’re in. Infinite is the first game in the series that acknowledges the underpinning structure of its fiction. Simultaneously, it is a game that deals with world-hopping, alternate versions of people, and the ability to control or change entire universes as plot points. Elizabeth is fundamental to all of this, but she is also very like the Little Sisters and Eleanor from the previous games.

Bioshock‘s main strength has always been the simple emotional core that rests within all the science fiction, horror, and social commentary. Just as Pixar films are known for, these games are often reducible to that simple emotional core and it is really the heart of everything else. In the Bioshock games, that core has always been the relationship between fathers and children. In Bioshock 2, which is far more superficially similar (direct father-daughter relationship with twists, experimentation, rescue, etc), this element is part of the reason I’m probably one of the only people who doesn’t consider that game a let down. It is also why the extent to which all three games are fundamentally similar in mechanical and narrative ways just doesn’t bother me that much. Hell, I bet most people who like this series don’t really realize just how similar each game is. Not any more so than other popular franchises, surely, but for whatever reason I think Bioshock games are expected to be a lot more different by iteration than they are. Bioshock 2 was often called an expansion to the first one. If that’s true, then Infinite must suffer the same criticism in spite of its different setting (admittedly a key point of distinction).

But I digress.

It is actually painful to watch Elizabeth’s naivete erode under the pressure of what she learns and goes through alongside Booker.

Bioshock featured a paternal narrative between Jack (the protagonist) and the Little Sisters, especially if you choose to save them. Jack and Andrew Ryan’s father-son thing is a bit more overt, but I think the subtlety with which Bioshock does the father-daughter is just the mark of a theme beginning to emerge. In Bioshock 2 it is in full swing. In Infinite, the relationship seems to be a symbolic one again but the savvy player should always suspect that there’s a heckuva lot more to Booker and Elizabeth’s relationship than his just being her rescuer. This pays off well, if unsurprisingly, in the game. It is by far their strongest emotional statement in the series, also, as the late scenes of Booker giving up his Anna only to try and get her back (to say nothing of the sickeningly sad and hopeful after credits sequence) will bust you up. Especially if you’re a father who has a daughter. Like me.

This time around, the themes are more focused on the extent to which a father can control the destiny of his child. Comstock, an aged version of Booker from another world, tries to do this actively by making her into the realization of a prophecy he constructed from glimpses into other worlds. Throughout the game, there’s a sort of metaphysical comedy being played out in the fringes, usually indicated by scenes of the Lutece “siblings” spouting cryptic hints about what’s really going on. The culmination of this comedy is that the game is their latest attempt (of over 100) to undo the world-meddling they are responsible for. This meddling produced Elizabeth/Anna, a being who’s body is in two universes at once (her finger left behind in the world she came from). Whether or not this is the source of her universe-hopping powers is unclear, but this is not a game afraid to be ambiguous and get the player trying to work it out for themselves. Little hints abound, however, and though I didn’t find them all I think I found enough (helped greatly by going over it all with my brother) to be confident of my interpretation.

The game sexualizes Elizabeth, which I think is a mistake.

There are some minor problems that Infinite does have. One of them is that Elizabeth is sexualized by about halfway through the game. It’s not that she suddenly starts nailing dudes or that there is any sexual tension with Booker. Far from it. It’s the wardrobe and haircut. People will say that it’s symbolic of her growing up, getting darker, etc bit it’s not a good way to symbolize that. Grown up and edgy doesn’t equal tits and corsets nor should it. Ultimately, it’s not like it ruins the character or anything. It’s just a weak move for Irrational and a bit of a head scratcher given that Elizabeth is a seventeen year old girl with home the player (and Booker) form and realize a paternal bond. She’s not your love interest, though that justification would have made the male gaze thing even more obvious, so why strip her and sex her up?

Another issue is more of an honest nitpick. I found that dialogue overlapped way too often, as if Irrational expected players to just compensate themselves. Missing dialogue or having to replay your voxophones because Elizabeth randomly starts talking over them is annoying and happens too much. But really, that’s not a very big deal. More worth mentioning because it’s a weird oversight and also something I’m sure most players notice.

Speaking of the audio. This game has lavish sound design and music. There’s a sublime part, my favorite really, where Booker plays guitar and Elizabeth sings Will the Circle Be Unbroken (By and By). It’s a completely missable moment but the kind of small, intimate thing that games do not do often and that are so fundamentally lacking.

The Songbird is an interesting, too rarely scene force of nature.

In one way, Infinite‘s skewing away from the “weird science” elements in favor of the larger (still weird science) plot stumbles. The Songbird is a very interesting character, heavily featured in the game’s marketing, that just isn’t in the game enough. I don’t necessarily mean that he doesn’t show up enough, more that he lacks the supporting attention such an iconic (this game’s version of the Big Daddy) figure deserves. This does maintain an air of mystery and tragedy around the Songbird and perhaps not giving the audience enough to understand him and his origins was a deliberate choice. Or maybe I missed a voxophone. I do feel like, had Bioshock Infinite retread the “oh look at this invention/experiment/monsters” a tiny bit more, I would have been more satisfied with the Songbird. The Handymen get a better introduction, though the Songbird is key in several great scenes in the game (particularly during the final battle). His death is incredibly sad, as it should be.

There’s definitely a sense in which Bioshock delivers the hint-then-payoff mini-narratives of Rapture’s denizens far better than Infinite does. The horror direction of the previous games means that enemies have to be mysterious, teased, and then shockingly right there trying to kill you. The tension is different, in other words, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what Infinite has to replace the lack of it. It’s worth noting that Infinite, not being a horror game, doesn’t need or want this same formula (except for a couple of bits where it is used but not particularly well, the Sirens are a good example). The effortless way with which Bioshock told a story about its environment and the denizens seems to be eroded just a bit in this latest game.

From the very first Columbian Booker kills, it’s sort of a nonstop parade of corpses.

The two biggest bits of dissonance for this come from that you are always killing people, most of whom are police officers or Irish and black revolutionaries (seriously), and the fact that you never have to stop and think about vigors because they are just a carry over from Bioshock. In many weighs, all these things were given more weight in the first game. More nuance. Rapture was a society built on magical science and we get to see what it did to them. I suppose Infinite with even the words “Vigor” and “Salts” are implying a more idealistic version of the same transformative artifact. That Columbia is not a fallen city, not yet, means that this is perhaps appropriate. Comparing Infinite to Bioshock is being done by everyone, usually unfavorably to Infinite, but I do think the game has enough internal logic to counter that. I mean, for every example like the plasmids/splicers vs. the vigors/Columbians, there’s a logically consistent explanation. Did it feel more meaningful in Bioshock? Yes it did. Is that lack intentional and itself meaningful in Infinite? I think so. I’m not sure.

So moving on past the places where my reaction to Infinite is murkier, let’s get at that murky ending. The last half hour of Infinite is pretty much one extended ending with little “gameplay” and much narrative loops getting closed. By this point, the player will have figured out the essential mysteries of the game. By this point it should be understood that there’s a balance between all these universes, and the aforementioned Constants. Elizabeth completely upsets that balance, the direct result of the Faustian bargain made by the Rosalind Lutece (yay Jennifer Hale!) and the version of Booker who became Comstock. Lutece finds a male version of herself, and together they help Comstock satisfy his ambitions in exchange for his patronage. In doing so, they inadvertently create Elizabeth and throw all that balance into disarray. Elizabeth can see everything, go anywhere, and tear it all down. That, it turns out, is not what the Lutece’s want and so they set Booker to the task of undoing their dark work. For this to happen, Comstock can never exist.

This part hit me hard.

The ambiguity of the ending is: what is left after Elizabeth drowns Booker? Is there some universe where they stay father and daughter, where Elizabeth stays Anna and Comstock never exists? That is the implication, as one version of Elizabeth/Anna remains in the water when the screen fades to black. This is a gutsy and ambiguous ending. Sad and maybe even nihilistic. What is the point of it all, you might wonder, if it has to end with an Undo button. The dominant message there, I think, is that you have to understand your mistakes and their consequences to understand why you have to make up for them. The whole dance you go through in Infinite is symbolic. Booker has been put through this redemptive arc (redemptive for everyone, really) a pile of times and you just happen to be playing the only time it’s actually worked. The version where Elizabeth and Booker reach an understanding and begin to undo their mistakes and prevent the possibility of their repetition.

The responsibility to not be an omnipotent being, or a great destroyer, or a victim is what ultimately completes Elizabeth/Anna as a heroine. Booker facing his memories and his responsibility for abandoning his daughter, a very primal and simple emotional punch, registers just as highly.

Even though it has these satisfying takeaways, it can require a bit of time to let them sink in. Immediately after Infinite I was still unsure about a bunch of stuff. Talking about the game, something Irrational no doubt intended and wanted from the players, helped a lot. So did writing this review.

The cast is mostly blah.

There is an ironic amount of over-praising being bestowed upon Evil Dead, a remake that I think is actually the appropriate sort. The praise is being generated over the movie’s apparently terrifying effect on audiences. I am here to tell you that Evil Dead is not scary. It’s gory, yes, and some scenes are a bit unsettling, but it’s not worth the youtube reaction videos. The irony comes from two places. First, there’s that The Cabin in the Woods came out less than two years ago. That movie is the last time you saw the familiar “bunch of kids go to a cabin, hilarity ensues” formula. That movie used the formula as a vehicle to eviscerate the over-reliance on the formula in the horror genre. That movie suggested, with supreme wit, that horror needs to get more creative and/or more convicted with its tropes and subtext. Evil Dead is like if someone shrugged and said “so what?” and went right ahead not only making a remake of an influential horror classic (that has been riffed on and copied continuously, right up til The Cabin the Woods did it to make its point) as if no call to better horror had ever taken place or taken off. The second piece of irony is that there are definitely praiseworthy elements in Evil Dead, just not the stuff it is generally being praised for.

Look at this shot. Look at it.

Evil Dead is a gorgeous-looking movie. Fede Alvarez and his team worked some significant magic and wrought the prettiest horror film since Antichrist. Some of the shots in this are simply gorgeous and almost feel out of place. Alvarez also shows a clever sense of how to refer back to Sam Raimi’s original film with zippy camera moves and close-ups that feel like a hip version of the cheesy gimmicks that populated Raimi’s earlier films (and show up again in Drag Me to Hell). None of Alvarez’s “Raimi Shots” feel cheesy at all and, like the rest of the production, they tend to help this remake feel more comfortable and respectful than most do.

That said, the acting and dialogue are incredibly tedious. This may be intentional given that bad performances are a horror staple, all the better to have the audience looking forward to the gruesome demise of its heroes. Evil Dead pretends that The Cabin in the Woods never happened, though, so it depends entirely on the ritualistic cliches of the horror sacrifices, the scary basement, and the idiot heroes who can’t admit that something supernatural and bad is happening til almost the end, etc. The usual character archetypes are also present: hunky jock, nerdy guy, virginal sweet girl, and wild thang. The wild thang in this case is actually also a junkie, her intervention being the reason everyone is there. The nerd archetype is actually split into two characters making a total of five. The junkie/intervention angle is interesting but nothing really comes of it. It only exists as a device to justify some of the credulity (still stretching it a lot for audiences, I think) of her friends as she gets possessed and starts puking Alphaghetti and so on.

Yes, I too look at this image and think “bad withdrawals”.

The movie’s commitment to convention isn’t so bad in itself. I definitely think the specter of Cabin haunts this thing but there’s still something to be said for taking classic bricks and putting together a nice house with them. To the extent that it does this, Evil Dead is mostly a success. It certainly isn’t a bad horror movie, nor even an unworthy remake. It is no The Nightmare on Elm Street. However, it’s not quite The Hills Have Eyes either. There’s just no meat to chew on, which seems like a pun given all the splatter that is there. I mean, Evil Dead may be the definition of shallow. It looks great, moves fast, but signifies nothing.

Take for example the reversal that happens very late in the film. For most of the running time, we watch as David (Shiloh Fernandez) is trying to help Mia (Jane Levy). We learn a bit about them through bewilderingly dull exposition. Mia is a bad seed and in case we don’t know from what the other people say, we see her not only smoking but writing poetry or something on the hood of wrecked car (see the beautiful shot I used for a caption shot above). David wasn’t around for Mia and their sick, dying mother. He’s a “big city boy” now. His other friends also stayed behind, looking after each other and Mia while David went off for the job and the meek girlfriend. He even introduces her as “my girl”. She seriously doesn’t utter a word for half the movie.

Admittedly, David’s “girl” (Elizabeth Blackmore) does get one of the most unsettling scenes in the movie.

David is so committed to Mia’s well-being now that he refuses to believe she’s not just having a bad trip or something. Even as her ailment spreads to every woman in the movie (probably something to this), David still hangs in there. Even when he’s the only one left that she hasn’t changed or killed, he still hangs in there. It’s only after he successfully revives her and breaks the possession that we see he isn’t the new Ash but just a fake-out for the one limp attempt this movie makes at a social-context update. The curing and reviving of Mia is such a ludicrous thing that you sit there sure she’s just faking and is going to try and kill him any moment, dragging out the fateful choice of having to kill one’s own sister for self-preservation. You simply can’t believe that there’s going to be a happy ending. To its credit, the movie doesn’t want to give you one. That said, it doesn’t at all try to convince you Mia is still possessed either. Still, David dies and Mia turns out to be the last chump standing, left alone to face off against the “Abomination” that all these deaths were supposed to free as part of some nutty ritual. Mia being the heroine, all of a sudden, is not any more earned than any of the false tragedy that most horror movies try to derive from their victims. Thankfully, the only unbelievable emotional arc the movie tries to get us to accept is the stuff between David and Mia. Even David’s friend, Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) doesn’t get to have much of an emotional arc with him even though he is definitely in love with him.

Eric actually brings all this demon shit on and the movie thoroughly, sickeningly punishes him for it. Pucci becomes a walking talking canvas for all the frightful ways the movie’s four (!!!) writers could conjure to inflict pain and misery. If watching the human body get tortured beyond recognition is your thing, Evil Dead wants to take you aside and show you its stamp collection.

Shouldn’t have opened the book, hippy.

The Necronomicon features heavily in the movie and is actually pretty cool and scary. Scrawled onto its presumably Aramaic pages are jaggy warnings and clues in stark red ink. Of course, Eric idiotically ignores them and says a random collection of syllables which bring on some specific demon that is never really identified. It likes possessing women though, that’s for sure. Eventually, we learn that if five people get killed then an ancient repressed evil will awaken. See what I was saying about The Cabin in the Woods? Well, Evil Dead isn’t copying from it or anything. Remember, what it’s really doing is just flat out ignoring it.

This is evident especially by that the Abomination is ridiculously not scary. It just looks like Mia and crawls around hissing and such. Mia gets hurt and clobbered more by her own panic and ineptitude than by the creature being any more dangerous than any of her possessed friends had been. For that the movie is ostensibly about avoiding waking this thing up, it’s a bit of a disappointment. Again, Cabin sort of stole the thunder here as I’m not sure what exactly is supposed to top a giant hand smacking the world upside its head.

For all my contextual griping, this sequence actually plays well. The blood rain is cool.

Mia being the real heroine, complete with lopped off hand, is supposed to be some kind of twist and appeal to the anti-formula. “This time, Ash is a woman!” the movie brags, wanting us to congratulate it for being so clever and progressive and changing things up. It just doesn’t work because the whole movie, Mia is either a junkie moaning around like a cat in the worst heat, or she’s a low rent version of Regan MacNeil. Even the laughable “obscene” shrieks recall The Exorcist and not in a self-flattering way. This is the one place where “hip” reallocation of Raimi’s trademarks fails the movie. Stuff like “I will eat your soul!” has to be delivered with less camp unless you’re going for camp. Likewise, the half-hearted attempts at shocking today’s audience with references to demonic oral sex fall as flat as Drag Me to Hell‘s box office take.

Mia just doesn’t register as a horror heroine. Most of them go through a ringer of terror, violence, and sometimes grievous physical harm. Mia does this but she’s the antagonist the whole time. We’re supposed to sympathize with her because she’s a repentant junkie who misses her brother. As good as she is at playing a demon-twat, Jane Levy just doesn’t have the time, tools, or charm to make us care even a little about Mia. That makes the last 20 minutes of the movie an exercise not only in how over the top bro they can take this, but also in audience patience.

There was a time for unlikable horror stooges getting killed wholesale by some ludicrous avatar of innate human bloodlust (and, Cabin taught us, murderous contempt for the young) actually worked in movies. 2013 is not it. That ship has sailed and with it went the assumptions and conventions of a genre built on little else. Evil Dead is certainly a well made redundancy and it is definitely watchable, but this does not keep it from being a redundancy after all. And redundancies are helplessly boring.

I want that guy in the sequel.

Easily one of the more gorgeous science fiction films in recent memory.

Oblivion is best understood as an entry level movie. It’s being criticized heavily for its “thoughtless” borrowing from just about every classic science fiction film of the last fifty years, but I would submit that this borrowing is meant both as a love letter to the genre and as a way for imagery, ideas, and references to be introduced to a fresh audience of younger people without any sure experience of many of those classics. Some of the references are to movies that were chasing after the Big Speculative Ideas. Oblivion is happy to pin them up in its road-map of the science fiction genre, but is more blue collar in its thematic approach. It is far more self contained and clever in itself than interested in cosmic or grandiose questions or ideas.

I mean, it’s a movie with an ending sequence that blends imagery and concepts from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Independance Day… at the same time. This is far more awesome than it sounds.

Oblivion may seem shallow at first glance, but I think there’s a methodology behind it that I can support. Because of its lavish presentation and clever structuring of reveals and payoffs, it is not boring even if you have seen the movies that it so expansively tributes.

I am going to have to spoil this movie in order to talk about it. It’s one of those where knowing too much may be detrimental overall, so you shouldn’t read this review if you haven’t seen it. That said, you may find it predictable or derivative as you watch it if you’ve seen some of the movies it riffs on. Use your spoilers judgment, kids!

Cruise is fucking 50 now. Let that sink in.

In slightly too expository voice over, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) explains that an invasion force called the Scavs invaded Earth. Their entire civilization showed up, destroyed the moon, watched the catastrophes that followed, and then invaded. Humans fought back, using nukes, and won. The cost was a livable planet, forcing the survivors to relocate to Titan. Jack and his operator Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are the last two people on Earth, tasked with looking after the giant hydrogen rigs that are converting the last useable water into energy for a final migration to Titan. The Tet is a diamond-shaped space station that orbits like a new moon and contains the colonials waiting on the rigs to rejoin the rest of the human race in their new home. Mission control, onboard the Tet and personified by Sally (Melissa Leo), controls the drones which protect the rigs and which Jack, Technician 49, keeps running.

Jack is a repairman but also a fighter. The remnants of the Scav invaders periodically attack the rigs, the drones, and him. He is always armed, always alert, even as he walks the ruins of New York City in awe and nostalgia. He and Victoria (often called Vicka) had their memories wiped five years prior for the “security” of the mission. This is the first clue that things aren’t what they seem. In spite of the wipe, Jack has vivid dreams of a New York before the war. These dreams also feature a woman and feel like memories to him.
So here we have a blend of Wall-E and Total Recall and you start to get a sense of the quilted texture of the movie.

The design in this movie is one of its main selling points.

Unlike Jack, Vicka doesn’t ask questions or give much thought to Earth. They are set to leave in two weeks and that’s all Vicka is concerned about. The two are lovers by default, it seems, and have a strangely idyllic life aside from the Scav attacks that force Jack out into the open (where, in truth, he would probably want to be anyway). Their base of operations is an ultra-moden house on a platform high in the sky. It even has a fucking outdoor pool. A spectacular outdoor pool.

By the end of Jack’s introduction to the movie, you’ll have some lingering questions about the whole set up. One of the satisfying things about Oblivion is that it sets out these questions deliberately and sets about answering them just as deliberately. The movie takes its time teasing out or paying off its mysteries. Some are saying that this is a thoughtless movie, but this is where the thought is. The structure is itself carefully thought out. The implications and baggage of the references it contains are also included thoughtfully, not haphazardly.

Kind of pretty for the apocalypse.

The status quo Jack lives with gets exploded when he and Vicka trace an offworld signal to the ruins of the Empire State Building. They know that there are no Scavs to send a message to, so why would they do it? Then a ship crashes and instead of more Scavs it contains stasis pods with human survivors. As Jack investigates, he watches as the drones destroy the pods. The only one he manages to save has a woman inside, literally the woman of his dreams. He saves her and we see that someone or something is watching him do it. Strange, black-garbed figures that we aren’t quite told are the remnant Scavs.

Not only does the survivor, Julia (Olga Kurylenko), complicate the narrative that Jack and Vicka have taken for fact, she also complicates their romance. Julia remembers Jack. They were married, before the war, and this means Jack is living a lie. Instead of trying to explain all this verbally, Julia gets Jack to help her investigate the crash again, this time to get the flight recorder.

They do try.

This leads directly to their capture by the Scavs who turn out to be humans led by Malcolm Beech (Morgan Freeman). They explode the fabricated reality Jack occupies even further. In a nice bit of the clever, self-contained world-building the movie does, Beech explains that they dress and move the way they do to confuse the drones. They also use voice disguisers and other methods to survive. This has the side effect of making them seem alien from a distance, which is the only way Jack has ever seen them. The drones don’t leave much by way of remains.

Now this is where the movie falls into a bit of a problem with its own structure. Jack is the anchoring force of the movie and there are few scenes without him. When Beech reveals some of the truth to him and asks for his help destroying the Tet, he isn’t ready to accept it all yet. Beech lets him go, telling him that the truth is out beyond the so-called Radiation Zones. We then get a confrontation with Vicka, who has seen Jack and Julia embracing as Jack realizes that they were married and his dreams are memories, and then a protracted chase scene. This stuff is satisfying but it comes at the cost of secondary character development which the movie could really have used for the Scavs.

Yeah so Jaime Lanniser didn’t spend that whole year in chains after all.

There’s no time given to them, so they don’t have much of an impact as characters. Freeman is entertaining enough as Beech, but Nikolaj Coster-Waldeau and Zoe Bell play his lieutenants and they are barely in the movie. Zoe Bell doesn’t even get a speaking line, if I remember correctly. This trickles down to the anonymous citizens of their refuge who we never get much reason to care about, making the threat to them register far less than the movie needs it to.

While this is my biggest criticism, I should also mention that the love story between Julia and Jack is overplayed and also costs the movie precious time that could have been better used. Cruise is in fine form and Olga Kurylenko is also good, but they can’t quite get past the generic nature of the relationship on the page. The most interesting thing about it is a wrinkle thrown in at the end.

The drones are excellent. Their sound design especially.

In order to talk about the ending, I need to get to where Oblivion borrows from a more recent science fiction classic. Like Moon, Oblivion features the exploitation of clones. The first humans the Tet, which is really an alien machine intelligence and the real invader and destroyer, encountered were Victoria and Jack. Its invasion force was an army of clone Jacks, making Jack himself a semi-mythological figure to the survivors. They have killed tons of Jacks, hidden from others, and have learned to see him as a compromised human machine under the control of the Tet. The second phase of the Tet’s invasion is the energy gathering it pretends is for a nonexistent colony on Titan. For this phase, there are clones of Victoria and Jack working out of home bases separated by the radiation zone borders, which are also a fabrication. This requires a little more intelligence and autonomy from its clones, so the Tet has unwittingly engineered its own downfall.

The Jack Harper we get to know is the first “unique” one in some time. Because he is more curious due to his freer reign, and because he is observed directly by Beech and the Scavs in this capacity (he collects books and other memorabilia and even has a cabin dedicated to his artifacts). When he saves Julia, who is really the X-factor that sets everything else in motion, Beech and the others start to believe he may be different and able to defy the Tet.

The action in the film isn’t show-stopping but it’s always interesting and/or beautiful.

The enormity of some of these ideas is left for the audience to ponder. We don’t really need to see a drop ship full of soldier Jacks. We watch Cruise’s face as the realization sets in. Likewise, the movie mostly hints at the consequences for all the other clones once the Tet is destroyed, but it’s enough.

The end has Jack tricking Julia to save her life and taking Beech to the Tet as a decoy. They go there, like Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum by way of Patton Oswalt, and destroy the Tet. The thing is this enormous monolith containing endless clone pods (The Matrix) and a giant red-eyed central brain (2001: A Space Odyssey and a little Tron too). Just before they detonate their Trojan horse, there’s a great sequence which answers one of the last mysteries in the film. Instead of letting us wonder about the details behind Jack and Victoria being the only clones or how it was that Julia and the other Odyssey crew survived in stasis for sixty years, we see the events recorded in the Black Box of the Odyssey play out in parallel to Jack’s final approach to the Tet. This gives the movie a nice sense of symmetry, of a cycle being repeated just before it is finally broken.

Though Jack sacrifices himself to save what remains of the human race, he lives in not only in the form of offspring but also in the other clones who are still on Earth. Oblivion doesn’t tell us how many of them there are or what happens to them next. Except of course for Jack 52, the clone that Jack 49 (our Jack) encounters late in the second act of the film. This Jack, like all the other Jacks, is more human than the clone army the Tet unleashed sixty years prior. Since we know there are also other Victorias out there as well, we have to wonder about them and what happens next. I appreciated that the movie didn’t hand this to us or use it as an excuse to bait a sequel. Like other films, for example Source Code, this one is happy to leave us with some unanswered questions about “what next?” after bringing its story to a satisfying conclusion.

This picture doesn’t do it justice. I love these kinds of big science fictional moments.

To provide connective tissue for all this stuff, the movie is full of small cues and clever bits. One example is the iconic graffity stamped into the armor of one of the drones. It looks like Jack. There’s also the prevalence of the inverted diamond that symbolizes the Tet itself. There’s that the Tet can mean “tete” like head or tetragrammaton, the name of God. At one point, the Tet actually calls itself God in Sally’s voice. There’s definitely a place to which Oblivion is willing to go in engaging these kinds of symbols and hints in the service of its plot more than for any deeper themes. My favorite one, though, was the way that Jack’s pristine white jumpsuit progressively got dirtier and darker until it’s almost black by the end. The gleaming white of the machine is the Tet’s color, while black is definitely the color of the Scavs. It’s a nuanced bit of visual storytelling typical of the movie.

A master visualist only two movies in, Joseph Kosinski is getting a reputation not only for impressive design and craftsmanship but also his bold approach to music in his films. For Tron: Legacy he got Daft Punk, which was a coup and signature for that movie. In Oblivion he uses M83 and gets a fuckton out of them. There are some sequences that are beautiful to look at but register much more due to the beauty and grandeur of the score. Two good examples are the pool scene and the first time we see Jack riding his motorcycle across the wasteland.

On the other hand, Kosinski is also getting a rep for being a shallow storyteller. Tron: Legacy, which I loved, was characterized by the same emphasis on presentation over plot and theme. Narratively, Tron: Legacy and Oblivion have many of the same weaknesses. Neither, however, is insulting to the intelligence of the audience.  They both rely little on audience familiarity with the genre and they both go for smaller cleverness and simpler allegory over big ideas. So if your question is “better than Prometheus?” the answer is yes, if only because it doesn’t reach so high and can’t fall so far.

The technology is so well realized it’s almost a character in the movie.

Oblivion is by and large an effective movie, especially if viewed as an entry level and accessible ode to science fiction. A lot of filmmakers act like they love the movies they butcher and ressurrect as soulless remakes. Kosinski, in crafting his “original”, non-franchise, non-remake, non-sequel hodgepodge of pieces from greater films, actually does show that love. Oblivion deserves credit for that and so does Kosinski, even if the movie doesn’t work as well for you as it did for me.

Now there’s something else I want to talk about. Lately, drones have been a major topic of debate and discourse as they increasingly become a cornerstone of the drama that is the United States military adventure. Let alone that CCTV cameras and domestic drones seem like distinct possibilities for the near future not only in the USA but in other countries as well. This gives Oblivion a certain topical flavor that takes some unpacking.

The enemy in the film is a machine intelligence, an all-seeing eye in effect, that has wrecked the planet and continues to drain its resources using duped slaves. Does that sound like a way of describing late capitalism to you?

Technology, UI, and AR that are only now emergent are fully integrated in the movie.

Some people would probably say that Oblivion‘s allegory is obvious and even trite, but I think it calls back to the 70′s era with movies like Silent Running or Logan’s Run. There’s a certain persistence in the allegorical elements of Oblivion that informs my opinion that it’s not a shallow “pin the trope on the donkey” exercise. I think that Oblivion is deliberately saying something, even something obvious, about the world today. That makes it consistent with the allegorical tradition of “cerebral” science fiction films. I think contemporary audiences are simply spoiled on this sort of thing. That, or they are too busy counting the references that don’t pay off as expected to notice that the movie is actually building toward a statement.

Oblivion, for all that its a product of the corporate machine, is still a rebellion narrative that sides with the black-clad anarchists and de facto terrorists (from the perspective of the Tet, certainly) that is at the heart of the dissonant American relationship between authoritarianism and anti-athoritianism.

Not bad for a movie a lot of people are calling a shallow rip-off, right?

Ryan Gosling doesn’t star in this movie, he haunts it.

I actually saw The Place Beyond the Pines before the last two movies I reviewed (Evil Dead and Oblivion) but it’s taken me a lot longer to conjure a review. This is partly because I wanted to like this one more than I did. It’s also because, whether it works for you or not, The Place Beyond the Pines is one you have to sit with for a while. It’s thematically dense and takes itself very seriously. It mostly succeeds in expressing its themes effectively and leaving the audience with the semi-melancholy feeling that pervades it. That said, the structure undermines the movie and it seems like they should have presented it for what it is rather than hiding its generational scope behind the promise of its leads doing impressive dramatic work, which they do

Overall, The Place Beyond the Pines is hampered by the conceits that don’t work. On a deeper level, though, it’s a movie that should connect strongly on the strength of its essential theme: what sons inherit from their fathers, good and bad. I think that The Place Beyond the Pines is probably a more enjoyable experience if you know about the plot and a pretty major character death before actually seeing it. Without this knowledge, the feeling is that Pines is trying to be surprising and it ends up feeling frustrating instead. Because of this, I won’t caution you to avoid spoilers on this movie unless you are just fundamentally against them on principle. With this opening scrawl, I’ve respected that as usual but I will be including spoilers in the main text of the review.

Luke Ganton walks a fine line with audience sympathy.

Luke is a traveling motorcycle stuntman covered in the kinds of random, awful looking tattoos that instantly make a person off-putting. He looks like a hesher, dresses in the same dirty moth-eaten clothes all the time, and chain-smokes cigarettes like the modern caricature of the Lone Rebel that he is. Ganton is not self-aware enough to know what model of masculinity he’s adopted, but the movie wants us to be very much aware of it. Part of the point of Pines is us these models and deconstructing them. The intellectual value of the film is in how well it pulls this off. What undermines Luke’s fringe exterior is the existence of a son.

On a roll through Schenectady, NY some time ago, he had a fling with Romina (Eva Mendez) and she became pregnant. When he finds out, Luke quits the life he’s seemingly satisfied with and begins to exist in the gray and fuzzy place between a familiar archetype and something more human and unpredictable. Gosling imbues the character with a reserved edginess, the same feel he gave his character in Driver. This is only appropriate given that both movies are dealing with the same archetype and approaching deconstruction from different places. Unlike the Driver, Luke quickly loses control of his cultivated aura of cool and “don’t give no fucks”. He becomes almost creepily desperate to build some kind of domestic life with Romina and their son. Meanwhile, Romina has a fella but this doesn’t seem to stop either of them. The romance of the idea is what snares her, while Luke quietly self-destructs trying to live up to some kind of fever-dream he has about their future.

This is a beautifully shot movie, by the way.

Luke hooks up with Robin (Ben Mendelsohn), a man who is like him but maybe fifteen years older. Robin tells Luke how easy it is to rob banks and away they go. Robbing banks to make enough money for his new family is exactly the kind of romantic masculine fantasy that appeals to Luke. His entire manner revolves around that model he’s trying so hard to follow. His possessiveness, his desperation, and his delusion all make him a bit threatening to the viewer. At the same time, his vulnerability and commitment endear him to us, making us see the man beneath the image. There’s no doubt he actually loves his son and wants to be a good father, and it’s the journey between the want of the connection and the responsibility of the relationship that is thematically important. For the whole film, too, not just for Luke. It’s a sentiment that echoes in every fiber of it.

Luke’s trajectory is quickly overpowered by his inability to control the variables. Robin’s caution, Romina’s unwillingness to let go of Kofi (Mahershala Ali), the more stable man in her life. As we watch Luke do the robberies, we see how he wants to be powerful and commanding (he ignores Robin’s advice to be subtle) even as his voice breaks and he yells shrilly like a punk kid. This intensifies as he goes until finally, a domino cascade of small mistakes lead to his demise.

The fact that Luke dies about 45 minutes into the movie isn’t clear from the marketing. This in itself might not be an issue inherently (perhaps we shouldn’t even consider marketing, though it’s hard not to). It is one of the reasons I said knowing some “spoilers” beforehand might increase appreciation for the movie, though. I mean, up until this point it feels like Pines is about Luke Ganton trying to make do. Instead, the first third of the movie is like a mini-movie about that. Its familiar in some ways, but it’s really there to service the overarching theme. As Luke dies, we switch to the man who killed him.

Bradley Cooper gets the more difficult arc.

Cooper plays Avery, a rookie cop who happens to encounter Luke after his botched heist. Luke knows he’s going down and his last request is that Romina not tell Jason, their son, about him. This follows from an earlier scene where he sheds tears in a church. It’s the culmination of Luke realizing that the fantasy is a fantasy and that he actually is zero good for his son and Romina. He lets Avery kill him, it seems like, but they really shoot each other in an almost comically authentic moment of confusion and instinctive violence.

Afterward, Avery is a reluctant hero to his department. The problem is that his friends want him to help them be dirty cops easier. Avery feels like a good man who wants to do right, but his father encourages him to be political. Avery is obviously a smart guy and at first we like him because he seems straightforward, ethical, and brave. Like Luke, however, this is a man who is living up to a model. When the facade slips away, he’s every bit as corrupt and tactical as Ray Liotta (playing cop #816) or his crew. More dangerous, too, because Avery is smart enough to negotiate himself into positions of power. You’re meant to notice the influence of his father and contrast this with the lack thereof in Luke’s case. Both men want to be men and have different ways of doing that.

Where the film flirts with quiet brilliance is in its strokes of connection between Avery and Luke. Avery feels it pretty heavily until the turning point where he abandons his upright model for a less sterling true self. At the same time, he “gives up the ghost” of Luke Ganton. In one scene, he tries to give her back the money that Luke had given her earlier. His words are echoes of Luke’s and Romina’s rebuff basically functions as a symbolic end to Avery’s fantasy of masculine responsibility.

Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen are very good.

The last third of the movie takes place fifteen fucking years later. I don’t think most people watching it understood that it was going to spend significant time on the “next generation”. This is also where the film’s tripartite structure works against it. If Luke’s portion was a mini-movie using the familiar tropes of the tragic criminal, then Avery’s was a mini-movie of the cop tempted by corruption. The third unexpected movie is the legacy of these fathers on their teenage sons. As unlikely as it seems, and the contrivances will bother some people, Jason (Dane DeHaan) and AJ (Emory Cohen) become friends. In spite of Avery’s efforts to keep them apart, they circle each other as the audience sits back and waits for Jason to realize who AJ’s father is.

AJ’s model of masculinity is inspired by Jersey Shore. He has a fake accent, a gross tattoo that says “Arrogance” and basically acts like somebody’s idea of a joke. But, thanks to his father, he’s a rich kid and he’s also big and handsome so he gets away with his schtick. Jason, meanwhile, is a smaller more broody kid. He’s one foot into a bad path and has connections to drug dealers which AJ can exploit. They don’t ever quite become friends, but there’s a weird sense that AJ sort of wants them to be. Jason hasn’t really developed an identity for himself yet and you can feel the tension of the absent father he knows almost nothing about. For AJ, not being the white collar prick his dad is seems pretty important. For Jason, it’s about figuring out who Luke Ganton was. As he does so, the film becomes about yet another romantic model and makes a clear statement about how these things get passed on generation to generation.

He should be in everything, this kid is that good.

Jason wants to be like his dad. He’s a romantic, and thinks his criminal dad was a badass. When he finds out that it’s AJ’s dad who killed him, he doesn’t bother to think about how it happened or why. He’s too angry, confused, and lost to even care that Luke may not have ever given Avery a choice or that Avery was, by and large, just doing his job. Of course, there are shades of gray in all that, but in no way is Jason justified in seeking revenge against Avery. Instead, he’s trying to live up to the badass fantasy of the vengeful son.

Like all the other false paradigms of masculinity explored in this film, Jason’s model is undermined by real emotion. Avery, prick though he has become, is only worried about AJ. As Jason kneels him down in the pines presumably to kill him, Avery doesn’t beg for his life. Instead, he asks after his son’s and he tells Jason that he’s sorry. This crystallizes the difference in the lives of sons who have fathers, and sons who don’t, sons with bad fathers who have good intentions, and sons who don’t have fathers at all. It also is the point at which Avery finally shifts to a truer mode. If it can be said that his corrupt, political guise is just another model of manhood he’s following (his father’s example) then this is when he finally breaks down to what’s important.

Jason, meanwhile, breaks the cycle that could almost start here while committing to its repetition. He spares Avery but strikes out on his own, buying a motorcycle and riding it off into the distance chasing his father’s ghost.

This scene busted me up. Super tense and emotional.

As much as you’re thrown by the contrivances and by the movie’s structure (it takes a few minutes to realize that the Jason/AJ stuff isn’t an epilogue but a whole third chapter), there’s no denying that there’s something in the emotional substance of the movie that really works. I didn’t find it profound, though perhaps it wanted to be, but it certainly flirts with profundity. I do think this will be more accessible to men, but paradoxically men are brought up with a lot of difficulty lowering the barriers that prevent them from being genuinely emotionally affected by something as penetrating as The Place Beyond the Pines.

There’s a lot of bias toward the subject matter and the narrative/thematic threads in this review. I usually am fairly biased toward narrative matters when doing the critic thing. I think it would be easy to dismiss this movie for messily securing its own point, but I just can’t quite bring myself to be overly distressed by the structural conceit or the contrived plot devices. This is an ambitious film, trying really hard to reach for and grapple with a difficult, layered subject that almost seems doomed on the grounds of who it’s intended for. Men aren’t stereotypically good at the kind of reflection that Pines is asking us to do. However, there’s no veneer of badassery or cultivated cool to latch onto. Unlike Fight Club or The Grey,  there’s no chance of men confusing the deconstruction and critique of masculinity in Pines for an ode to macho individualism and physical violence.

I think this is precisely why this movie will not make much of an impact. I’d like to say it’s because of its structural weaknesses and the misdirection of its marketing, but I can’t. I really think it’s just going to confuse and/or bore most men who watch it. Especially the younger men for whom it is most important.

This is a ridiculous, misanthropic film. 

Michael Bay is a well-known fan of the Coen brothers. He frequently casts Coen regulars (John Turturro and Frances McDormand for example) and sometimes seems to flirt with some of their human-hating dark humor from time to time. Even in kids’ movies like Transformers. In Pain & Gain, Bay returns to the world of R rated high saturation ridiculousness that he left behind for ten years to do progressively worse giant robot movies. This is the world where Bay belongs, however. This means that Pain & Gain is here to remind us what the guy can do with obnoxious, somehow nuanced, vulgarity when he feels like it.

One of the things I like about Bay is how unafraid he is to mock his own trademarks. 

Pain & Gain isn’t some kind of masterpiece, but it is definitely the most 90′s movie of 2013. That has to count for something, right?

It’s a very funny, very entertaining film with a bevy of great performances. It’s basically a cinematic list of great lines, scenes, and small beats that keeps piling on itself and rarely lets up. To get a bit more sophisticated for a moment, it is also a great companion piece to Spring Breakers. This movie is also showing us a great big mirror held up to a dimension of the American psyche with much wit but little judgment. Like Spring Breakers, I think Pain & Gain has a very high potential to be misunderstood and championed by a crop of idiots for whom this movie has a condescending affection. They will want to be just like Daniel Lugo and fail to realize that not only is Lugo a sociopathic monster, this movie isn’t shy about it.

It is also worth mentioning that I read the articles this film was based on and it is fairly faithful from what I can remember. I read the pieces back when this movie was first announced. Pain & Gain might be the most entertainingly bizarre “true story” movie ever made.

This movie is sort of a present for people who like Mark Wahlberg.

Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) is a half-smart gym trainer who aspires to be a lot more. He’s the classic scumbag who is just smart enough to bamboozle dumber people but not quite smart enough to realize that he is being bamboozled just as often. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t realize that self-help gurus often make money on the saps who listen to them, not on some secret they discovered beforehand. Ken Jeong has an extended cameo as Johnny Wu, exactly the sort of guy Lugo listens to and wishes he could be. That the audience is (or should be) clued into what Wu is all about divorces them from Lugo’s obliviousness and shows him for the fool he is. I just hope that’s what most people get from this because there is no sense that Lugo, in real life or as depicted, is at all heroic. Entertaining? Yes. You want to see his adventures and antics precisely because he’s entertaining and his interactions with Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) are so consistently hilarious.

This is something Wahlberg brings to the table alongside the film’s approach to the story. Pain & Gain is a crazy story and a lot is made of how unbelievable it all is. Pete Collins’ articles could have been approached in a way more straightforward way. It’s to Bay and his writers’ (Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) credit that they decided instead to focus on just that unbelievability and commit to it utterly. This makes scenes that probably didn’t happen (Lugo and the kids) play out in a way that feels consistent to the characterization and tone while also being as bewildering and entertaining as pretty much anything else that happens.

Kershaw is a great Bayhem character.

As Lugo uses his low-grade cunning to help Sun Gym up its profile, to the delight of owner John Mese (Rob Corddry), he starts training Vic Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub). Kershaw is a self-made man in exactly the kind of way that Johnny Wu probably isn’t. Rather than “generously” sharing his secrets, Kershaw has a chip on his shoulder as deep as the Marianas and wastes no opportunity to be a staggering prick about everything. Lugo is just another loser to him and the film suggests that its Lugo’s deep-rooted envy combined with Kershaw’s arrogance that sets his whole whacky scheme off. Lugo decides to stage a kidnapping, have Kershaw sign over his assets, and then get away with it all by preserving his anonymity. To get this done, he recruits his best friend Adrian (a moronic juicer with erectile dysfunction) and the recently freed Paul Doyle (a big, lovable born-again with impulse control issues). Lugo is a gifted liar and uses every inch of that gift to string his friends, and everyone else, along. They hold Kershaw for weeks. He refuses to break and even forms a twisted friendship with Paul. When he finally does break, they ineffectually attempt to kill him and make it look like an accident. He survives, though, which is actually deepens the menace in the movie instead of alleviating it.

The cops don’t take Kershaw seriously so he reaches out to a private investigator, Ed Dubois (Ed Harris) who is retired and feels like a bit of a cliche. He’s the most cinematic character in the movie, kind of, the quintessential retired cop/retired detective who takes on one last case on instinct, though at first he has the same incredulous reaction to Kershaw’s story as the police did. One of the points the movie returns to is that the cops really dropped the ball and take a lot of responsibility for the further misdeeds of Lugo and his “gang”.

As much as Lugo sucks at being a criminal (and boy does he), he was really good at working for Sun Gym. In another life, Lugo could have become a fitness guru not dissimilar from Johnny Wu (who is more a “boats and bitches” guru apparently) and really had the empire he so desperately wants. The fun of the movie, though, is in just how badly Lugo and friends fuck things up. The film is structured as a series of progressively more bizarre and intensely stupid misadventures. Every time it threatens to turn into something more pedestrian, Paul does some coke or robs an armored car and the movie is back off anything resembling rails. This is a good thing.

Everybody in the movie is good but The Rock fucking owns.

Pain & Gain is a pretty stylish movie but is light on gimmicks or Bay’s characteristic touches. One of the gimmicks that works surprisingly well is the voiceover. In conventional wisdom, voiceover is a crutch used by lesser screenwriters who can’t get the message across with staging. In this movie, Bay and the writers show how little they care about that conventional wisdom and give every major character their own voiceover. Sometimes this is broken up and you don’t hear any for a few scenes, other times the voiceover swings from character to character in the same scene. It’s one of the ways we get introduction to these people, and it’s actually an excellent delivery system for comedy. I usually don’t mind well-done voiceover in a movie and here it’s so much a part of the joke that it feels irreplaceable. It’s actually kind of stunning how well it’s woven between the characters, it’s almost like the movie is doing third-person omniscient. I think the last movie I remember that did something similar (besides Detention but, well, y’know) was Election.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Michael Bay and I’m glad he’s got movies like Pain & Gain still in him. This is a movie that is preoccupied with an exaggerated definition of not only the “American Dream” (which is often referred to) but in a warped definition of masculinity. In Lugo’s world, a real man has the sculpted body of a God first and everything else should follow from that. It’s a sort of entitlement that might seem a bit foreign to younger people, but it does make you understand Lugo’s mentality and just how twisted he really is (if you’re paying enough attention anyway). Though this movie enjoys its idiotic, violent criminals it doesn’t try to glorify them. They glorify themselves and the movie is happy to stand back and watch it happen. This is very familiar after seeing Spring Breakers but I imagine it’s hard for audiences to get a good handle on. I mean, we are far more used to anti-hero stories (or at least misinterpreting satire as heroism, see Scarface) that would have made Lugo and friends a tragic story of things simply getting out of hand. They definitely do get out of hand, but it isn’t because of cosmic unfairness or oppression but because of stupidity, shortcuts, and the entitlement of the American Dream.

Broad irony is something Bay occasionally does very well, if never subtly.

Like I keep saying, a lot of people are going to miss the irony of Pain & Gain even if they grasp that this is not a movie where we’re supposed to root for Lugo and his buddies (at least too much). It’s sort of hard not to root for Paul and as he is somehow the funniest and also least culpable of the three, the movie is okay with this and it gives you permission to be as well. His ending is downright pleasing, in some ways, because while movie Paul Doyle might be different from real-life Paul Doyle, you get a sense that this is basically a man who means well but is too gullible, stupid, and caught up in his addictions to have the fortitude to withstand a man like Daniel Lugo. Lugo and Adrian are simply numbskulls who overreach and deserve exactly what happens to them. Lugo started out as a wannabe white collar hustler, which we can more or less get behind as long as he learns a lesson, but this film makes sure you understand that this guy is like a serial killer: fantasy and small potatoes are not going to be enough forever.

Wahlberg has our attention if not our sympathy, then, and while Pain & Gain is way past hard lines of good guys and bad guys (far more like a Coens film this way), there is a sense to which Lugo’s path is carefully structured so that things go really bad around the third act and the dawning realization that there’s no redemption for him is a late one. It’s a delicate balancing act and I appreciate this approach to the story on pure entertainment grounds. You have to get people to like Lugo (at least) enough to follow him through a movie where he essentially does bad things to people because of envy, greed, and self-entitled delusion. You have to kind of hope he’ll make a turn-around or someone more morally reprehensible than he is will turn up. That character never appears because Lugo is the only real monster in the movie. Adrian is his dupe, Paul is a stooge, and Kershaw is an Ari Gold-level asshole.

Rebel Wilson fits perfectly well in a Bay movie somehow.

Pain & Gain is the kind of movie where you and your friends quote or refer to scenes for days after seeing it. Dwayne Johnson’s cokehead scenes are flat-out worth the movie on their own. He steals the movie but also shows more of his acting muscle (sorry I had to) than the other kind. He always seems just on the verge of breaking out of the “omg he large” mold of action/comedy that he’s done so far. Roles like this and his small one in Be Cool (which started a lot of the buzz he had for a while as a REAL LIVE ACTOR) should open more doors for him if he chooses to go through them. I for one would love to see that. This is a movie where, if it had more Coen DNA, you’d feel the same sort of detached bemusement for Paul Doyle as you did for Brad Pitt’s character in Burn After Reading (they are similar in some ways after all). Instead, Johnson completely wins you over and it’s a special sort of magic that this doesn’t undermine the movie’s ironic affection for the characters.

Bay will never be a classy sort of director, and he shouldn’t be. He’s a step above your standard schlock director and is willing to go places and show you things that you’d never thought you’d see let alone enjoy on some twisted level. He’s a reveler in the vulgar, saturated dimensions of the culture that produced him. He’s an interesting motherfucker, in other words, and he makes very interesting movies, too, even when they suck.

Luckily Pain & Gain doesn’t suck.

Which is really the hero?

I think Iron Man 3 is only slightly less ballsy than The Avengers. It’s another of Marvel’s growing crop of “they really fucking made this? they really fucking made this!” movies. This is not to say that it doesn’t have problems or that it’s going to be a crowd-pleaser the way The Avengers was. You really can’t fault Marvel for a lack of boldness, though. If nothing else Iron Man 3 is really trying (and I think succeeding) in shaking things up and turning expectations upside down. It also wants to be a serious psychological exploration of character and on this front, credit goes to the allowances given to Shane Black to really make this movie his.

A lot of peoples’ enjoyment of this movie is going to rest on whether or not they get its broader context. Even broader than that it’s a Marvel movie. Or a superhero movie, for that matter. It doesn’t always feel like one, after all.

Because this is a Shane Black movie through and through (Christmas setting, introspective voice-over, snappy dialogue, funny and realized henchmen, monologuing Bond villain, etc), it will definitely help calibrate the reception of its sprawling tone and loose arrangement of Jungian psychological metaphor if you know your Shane Black. Even people who only ever saw the seminal Kiss Kiss Bang Bang will feel something familiar about Iron Man 3 that goes beyond the inclusion of Robert Downey Jr.

Marvel knows we’re living in what I called the post-Avengers world. Both in the film, where things are somewhat darker and more personal (seems this is being extended to other Phase 2 films given Thor 2‘s trailer), and outside of it. They are not trying to emulate the gangbusters approach they (and Joss Whedon) took to The Avengers. Rather, this is about scaling things back and dealing with the aftermath of a world-shattering event. This just feels right. I don’t know how else you could describe it.

But lets get back to the movie.

SPOILERS ACTIVATE!

Things get a little spooky after New York.

In all three Iron Man films, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) deals with some kind of suffering that threatens to hamper his unflappable confidence. This suffering provides a context for his growth as a character. Basically, he’s always been on a trajectory leading away from being such a selfish asshole. Physical conditions like the shrapnel in his chest or the iridium poisoning from IM2 seem a lot easier than tackling Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but Iron Man 3 goes there. He’s got the physical stuff, the heart condition and so on, pretty well squared away by now. But after almost dying in Loki’s invasion, Tony is left unable to sleep and driven to deep distraction trying to be prepared for any contingency. Even though he’s had plenty of experience managing the downsides of being a superhero, he’s driven far further into this part of his identity. No wonder, after encountering not only alien monsters but actual gods. He’s continued to build more and more Iron Man suits, though we don’t see most of them until the film’s somewhat disappointing action finale (40 unique suits zipping around in the dark…. really?).

As you’d expect, Tony’s issues have taken on a life of their own. He’s become reclusive and paranoid, his relationships with his few friends strained, and a new threat is rising in the meantime. In the Jack Bauer world of Colonel “Rhodey” Rhodes (Don Cheadle) who is now the Iron Patriot, a super-terrorist called the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) has declared war on the President of the United States (William Sadler as President Ellis… nice shutout to Warren Ellis, one of the best comic book writers alive and who originated the Extremis storyline heavily sourced in this movie). The Mandarin is a mysterious figure who has appropriated iconography, speech patterns, and techniques from a host of sources. He is like an aggregate meme of 10 years worth of War on Terror topography. This makes him an interesting specter of a villain but, given the way he is used in this movie, a fairly decisive political statement as well.

The Mandarin hovers over the movie like a hen. Ben Kingsley knocks every aspect of the character all the way to Thanos.

If Iron Man 3 is the end of a trilogy, which it definitively is, a unifying arc for it is Tony’s crusade against war profiteering. He’s often been called a symbol of American Power and combined with Iron Man as a figure of independent heroism and warlike technology, it’s hard to argue with this. But interestingly, Iron Man has morphed through the movies to be a symbol of the rehabilitation of that power. Or an aspiration to that, at least. See, Tony gives up being an arms dealer and then winds up fighting people who want to conjure or otherwise manufacture conflicts that will justify their technologically-derived accumulation of wealth. Pure commerce motivates people like Justin Hammer and Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) and this seems at least as American as who has the biggest gun. Be that as it may, Tony Stark and Iron Man stand against that notion of America and Iron Man 3 dramatizes this in singular and effective fashion. He leads by positive example, by dropping the trappings of power in favor of sharing it (his clean energy program in The Avengers being an example) and represents the now-elusive specters of American innovation, philanthropy, and charm.

But then there’s Killian, who wants to trade truth for dollars and global security for personal advancement. Killian shows up with his Extremis tech, which seems to be potentially beneficial to people for the recovery of wounds but which also makes people super-powered. They heal fast, get strong, and can explode if triggered. In Killian’s case, they even breathe fire. In practice, it’s all a bit ridiculous and hand-wavey in science-fiction terms but it totally fits the loosey-goosey approach to science that all the Iron Man movies have (let alone The Avengers and the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe). The plausibility of Extremis isn’t really an issue, but it’s execution is. Later in the film, Tony’s army of suits battles a group of leap-frogging, fire-punching Extremis anonymities. This comes off as a step down from Hammer and Whiplash’s army of drones from the second movie, if you can believe that. There just isn’t much too these guys and their design feels lazy and dumb. Oh, they glow from the inside out. It’s boring.

Thankfully, they aren’t that important. Iron Man 3 is too busy being a a beautiful chimera of symbolism, wit, and style to derive personality from whatever bullshit makes its thugs dangerous. Black is far more interested in having fun, humanizing the thugs occasionally, and otherwise playing in as many cinematic sandboxes as possible all in the same superhero threequel.

James Badge Dale is pretty fun as one of the few Extremis soldiers who rises above anonymous henchman status.

As you’re no doubt aware by now, Iron Man 3 has a fucking lot going on. It’s a miracle that it holds it together, really. If it’s any kind of great, it’s great because of an effortless handling of its own ambitious mass. While watching it, it’s sort of perplexing how much this movie makes time for without ever feeling fat. It’s got none of the second-act drag that Iron Man 2 suffered from. For some, it will feel tonally slipshod and maybe a bit scatter-brained but the script is actually airtight. Maybe too tight for the ending to fully work, actually. This being a Shane Black movie, it’s got time to mix in all kinds of stylistic references from the hard-boiled detective genre to classic James Bond films.

While the marketing made it look like Iron Man 3 was going to go very dark, and I acknowledged its darker overall tone earlier, don’t worry about it. Iron Man 3 is easily the funniest of all three films, scoring hit after hit with great one-liners, Black’s specialty set-ups and payoffs, and the kind of grand banter you’ve come to expect from Tony Stark. Robert Downey Jr has always been this franchise’s one and only weapon of mass destruction. To some extent, this is actually a flaw all three Iron Man films have in varying degrees. Without RDJ, there may not be much else to get excited about.

The movie wisely tries to get around the implicit “we’ve seen it already” side of the suit coin.

The darkness is really not external, as the trailers suggested. They had to lead with the Mandarin to throw people off Killian’s scent. The reveal that the Mandarin is just a stooge, a false-flag Killian has used to obscure his true intentions and plans, is perfectly handled in a uniquely comedic way. It also feels adult, and not because The Mandarin’s actor is actually a deranged hedonist, but because it asks you to roll with this twist not as an “aha!” moment, but as a genuine opportunity for absurdity and commentary.

It’s no secret that many believe the American government has done its own false-flag work to spur economic and military churn. The Iraq War feels like a distant memory in some ways, even while it still rages, but Iron Man 3 remembers it and remembers how easily people are fooled by even a messy stage show. Black gets away with this by wrapping it up in the absurdity of the reveal. It really works on many levels and it is (rightly) pissing off the purist, foolish “fans” who are the same people that wanted The Mandarin to be the Yellow Peril caricature he started out as. With how Iron Man 3 handles this alone, Marvel (and Kevin Fiege) prove themselves to be astonishingly savvy, bold, and intelligent.

They are not fucking around and The Avengers wasn’t a fluke nor the last word on super hero movies. They still have shit to show us.

Guy Pearce is in the “having so much fun” phase of his career.

One of the core themes of this series is that “no man is an island”. Not even Iron Man.

Tony always fights shadowy versions of himself. In this way, Iron Man is always playing with psychology as a dimension of storytelling. In the third film, Tony’s shadow is Aldrich Killian. Like Obediah Stane or  Justin Hammer, Tony has history with Killian. In their case, it’s as simple as Tony being an asshole and Killian being an awkward interloper. Fast forward 13 years and Extremis has rehabilitated Killian into a 90′s era villain. Right down to his suits. The movie flirts with the idea of forming love triangles between Tony-Pepper-Killian or Tony-Pepper-Botanist, but never actually goes there. This may be due to script changes (and certainly some stitches are visible here and there), but it feels more right than if the triangles actually happened. The focus remains on Tony learning to keep calm and carry on, and the secondary characters are there to facilitate, motivate, and complicate this process.

Iron Man 3 gives a lot of ground to secondary characters. This is because it’s important for Tony to learn how to graciously rely on others. Not only series mainstays like Pepper and Happy, but newcomers like the “inner child” figure represented by Harley Keener (Ty Simpkins) or even the projection of Tony’s own subconscious: Jarvis (Paul Bettany). And, subsequently, the Iron Man suits themselves. Tony may be Iron Man, but he’s also a man who tries to split himself into different selves, each responsible for different things. For example: Jarvis is not a true A.I. but rather a reflection of Tony, first representing the part of him that is organized and productive, and later taking over the spectrum of power represented by Tony’s 40+ Iron Man suits. Learning how to let this stuff go and internalize rather than externalize is part of Tony’s journey.

Iron Man 3 goes back to basics!

The core Tony is the “mechanic” and his greatest strength is improvisation. The Superhero is an abstraction (or distraction), and the movie doesn’t waste much time beginning to deconstruct the very idea of Iron Man. Early on, Tony one-ups himself in terms of activation technology and interface with the suits by making them remote-controllable. While being inside the suits helps with his anxiety, he no longer needs to literally be Iron Man. By the time he’s got Jarvis piloting his army of suits, the big question looms: where do you even go from here? Is Jarvis now Iron Man in some way?

I say no, by the way, given that Jarvis is just a, albeit sophisticated, program.

The fact that Tony Stark no longer has to be the man in the suit raises big questions for the super status quo familiar to comics readers. It’s a very interesting move, but not one I’m sure really works (as I get to later). When it does work, it’s in showing just how capable Tony is without the signature armor. In two sequences that don’t seem to have much in common but totally do, the shift in centrality for the “Iron Man” identity surfaces.

This works much better as superhero stuff than the big finale.

The first is Tony’s solo assault on The Mandarin’s mansion where he uses gadgets and weapons he cobbles together from whatever he has on hand. Like Harley tells him, his real strength is that he can always just “build something”. The second is the lauded sequence where Tony helps rescue a bunch of passengers from an exploded Air Force One. I say “helps rescue” because this scene, nick-named The Barrel of Monkeys, is a perfect symbol (in a movie full of symbols) of Tony’s need to cooperate with others to achieve best results. He doesn’t simply catch all the passengers as, perhaps, Superman would. Instead, he helps them help each other by providing the encouragement and anchoring force they need. One by one, he has them scoop each other up until they have essentially saved themselves.

The optimism and “reach exceeds grasp” attitude is central to Tony Stark and makes for truly thrilling superheroics.

Pepper is only the damsel for a little while before getting the most ass-kicking moment in the film.

So I mentioned above how I think there’s a sense in which the ambition of the movie undermines it. My one narrative complaint about Iron Man 3 is that it feels just a bit too final. With that, it also feels easy when it waves away both Tony’s iconic chestplate and Pepper’s Extremis in order to come to its too-neat conclusion. It is seriously Dexter sort of neat.

At the end, Tony says “I am Iron Man” but it is unclear what this now means. He has destroyed all his suits, tossed the Arc Reactor into the ocean, and seems to be starting a new chapter in his life. As this movie handily demonstrates, Tony’s real super power is his brain. That said, the way Iron Man 3 ends makes it feel like he’s going into retirement. That the credits include bits from all three movies seems to cement that this is a send-off, a real end for the RDJ era of the character.

Tony no longer needs to be Iron Man for psychological armor. He no longer has any physical tether to the suit. He no longer needs to redeem himself for his war-profiteering days. By the end of Iron Man 3, all the things that made Tony Stark a superhero are essentially gone. He’s become a completed character. Many are going to argue that they’ll find a way around this but I think whoever writes Iron Man 4 has their work cut out for them then. And they likely won’t have the charisma powerhouse that is Robert Downey Jr, the man most probably owed primary credit for the very existence of the MCU.

Making this a night scene was a mistake.

This may go a bit wide of being a criticism of the movie, but it definitely leaves the audience wondering “what the fuck?” even as a presumably reassuring card comes up reading “Tony Stark Will Return”. It isn’t reassuring, by the way. In fact, it feels like Marvel capitulating to the rumors swirling around that this is RDJ’s last solo outing with the character. Though cute, the after-credits bit where we find out that the narration that bookends the movie is meant as the intro and outro of Tony confiding in Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) doesn’t lessen the confusion.

In a broader sense, Iron Man 3 is a stirring call to arms for the “what comes next?” aura around Phase 2. It shows that stripping these characters down to a more intimate level works as a way to keep them relevant. Mix in a bold writer-director like Shane Black and you’ve really got something that ups the ante without actually having to outdo The Avengers in terms of pure comic book spectacle. My misgivings about the finality of this particular chapter of the grand storyverse Marvel is building for us aside, the future is very bright and very intriguing for fans of these movies and characters.

Like a cat and a laser pointer.

The Great Gatsby is classic Baz Luhrman. Like most of his other films, it’s a big messy thing that sweeps you up in its ambition and only occasionally lets you drop. Mirroring the story of its enigmatic central character, the movie is big on imagination but small on coping with things not working out as planned. It’s impossible that this was intentional, but I feel like it’s an insightful observation to make about a resonant coincidence.

More than the book, Luhrmann’s Gatsby is a melodrama through and through. Occasionally this induces cringes as some scenes are just too maudlin (in some ways, the book is also an ode to maudlin) or too cheesy to withstand the instinctive rejection of melodrama in and of itself. The movie frequently overplays its hand, resulting in gimmickry that feels cheap rather than the ornate that it’s going for.

Instead of trying to derive some topical, modern-friendly message from what is essentially Rich White People Have Problems: The Movie, Gatsby commits utterly to the somewhat off-history context Luhrmann has crafted for it. This makes it essentially a fairy tale, and it follows through with the conventions until it all begins to fall apart and twist into a tragedy that is almost certainly Shakespeare-inspired. That goes for the book as well, but where the book is tidy and concise, the movie is bombastic and draped over the audience like a cigarette model with too-long legs.

Sometimes you just want her to move.

Gatsby’s ridiculous castle.

Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire, seemingly ageless) is a wannabe writer who moves to New York City to join all the excitement of the stock trade. He’s related to Old Money but is not essentially “of” it, so he lives in a little cottage right next door to the Jamie Foxx of 1920′s mansions. Across the bay, his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) lives with her boorish husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton, chewing the movie like Doublemint). Always the outsider and observer, Nick gets caught up in the petty intrigues and social abandon of New Yorkers in the 1920′s. He meets professional lady golfer Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki) and together they are pulled into the grand plan of Nick’s reclusive owner.

Five years ago, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) met and fell in love with Daisy Fay only to disappear after the war (WWI) which left her to marry Tom. Now he’s come back to win her heart again. All the pomp and circumstance he can muster with what seem to be inexhaustible fortunes go toward this project. As he takes up an affair with Daisy, Nick continues to play the chronicler and watch the drama unfold. It’s a tricky proposition for a modern story, actually. I wouldn’t have been surprised if an adaptation of the book dropped Nick’s perspective and made Gatsby more protagonist and less subject. The Great Gatsby is a very faithful adaptation to the book, underneath all the visual stuff, and therefore keeps Nick in the watcher role, providing plenty of opportunities for unnecessary voice over (I think it’s definitely a crutch too often in this movie) and the book-end device where he’s in a Sanitarium writing this all out as a book. Plenty of magical typing across the screen ensues and it is all bad.

Leo is a good reason to see any movie.

Anyway, back to Gatsby’s plan.

There’s something romantic about it and if you can forget about the contemporary cynicism at the excesses of rich white folks, it’s enjoyable in much the same way as the The Count of Monte Cristo. In fact, I always loved the grandness at the heart of Gatsby’s plans and his efforts to realize them. In the movie, this is given huge emphasis and is brought to life by Luhrmann’s particular flair for pageantry, anachronistic music, and beautiful images that are almost slaps.

Leonardo DiCaprio is a treasure and his performance in this is filled with the kind of nuanced, quieter moments that he’s so good at. It’s interesting to note that he and Luhrmann go back to Romeo+Juliet. Gatbsy is the first time DiCaprio has leveraged his boyish looks rather than tried to make us forget them. His Gatsby is full of childlike wonder and imagination and the same stubborn insistence on his own reality as you’d expect from a headstrong boy. While Nick tells us that Gatsby is the greatest because he’s so hopeful, we see a desperate and naive boy who doesn’t get his way and has a hard time dealing with it. I think DiCaprio’s performance tells us that this is intentional, that it’s actually thematically relevant that what we get from Gatsby and what Nick gets are somewhat different things.

Because Nick, too, is boyish and naive.

Like in the book, Gatsby is the most interesting thing about the movie. The mystery surrounding his life story, his wealth, and his motives all swirl around throughout the movie and provide the stronger substructure on which is laid those draping legs, that persistent and pretentious melodrama. Less interesting are Nick or Jordan, the latter being my favorite character in the book and here underused in spite of a great performance from Debicki.  However, Carey Mulligan can basically make any character sympathetic and her line readings for Daisy keep her compelling even as the plot assassinates the character, making her more foolish and more frivolous over time. In the book, Daisy feels like the “beautiful fool” she describes early on and never much more. In the film, you get major depth and pathos from Mulligan, enough to garner real sympathy for Daisy and understanding (if not approval) of the choices she makes. Her delivery of the “beautiful fool” line is haunting and it gives the line significance in the movie that I don’t remember it having in the book (where it felt like a witticism in a book full of them). Even Edgerton can’t rescue Tom from being a total cad, but he walks away with just about every scene he’s in and manages to infuse the most repulsive character in the movie with something like human emotions during the movie’s double-climax.

Speaking of that climax, The Great Gatsby is too long. I understand the necessity of the two climaxes (the hotel scene and the accident), but there are two long breaths taken before the end where not only is the whole movie explained back to us by crappy VO, but the whole thing just grinds to a frustrating halt. The first happens before Gatsby dies, the other afterward as Nick goes ballistic and we get to learn all about how he ended up in the Sanitarium writing his book. Even though the book provides an ending, it seems like Luhrmann had trouble wrapping up the movie. Everything after Gatsby’s death especially feels like a movie that can’t quite figure out how to end. With a more concise, abrupt climax, The Great Gatsby would have went out with at least a whimper. As is, it goes out with a self-referential and tedious sigh.

New York is practically a character in the movie.

In spite of its structural clumsiness and narrative shortcomings, The Great Gatsby is a movie that deserves just about every aesthetic accolade you could give it. It’s impeccably designed, self-consciously mythologizing New York in a way that somehow feels fresh and exciting. I mean, it’s the most mythologized and romanticized city in the United States and Luhrmann makes that feel special anyway. That’s really something.

There’s also that The Great Gatsby is probably the best use of 3D in a live-action film since Avatar.

Though The Great Gatsby is a fairly shallow film overall, and it could be easily said that its visual flair is just more superficiality to disguise its lack of depth, I think it’s more fair to attribute credit to the sensory effect of a movie that is honestly and obviously trying to achieve such an effect. There are parts of Gatsby where wonder is invoked in the audience, where real beauty stands out in a world that is primarily about artifice, and where you can’t help but admire the vision that semi-obnoxiously coats everything else in it.

The Valley of Ashes is sort of a non-starter.

The one half-hearted attempt Gatsby makes at saying something about the poor is in its depiction of the coal-mined wasteland between Long Island (where the characters live and conduct most of the affairs that make up the movie) and the citadel of New York. This is where the poor, broken down people live. Some hand-waving is given to that the Valley exists to support the partying New Rich that populate the movie, but it doesn’t stick.

Jason Clarke and Isla Fisher play a married couple, the Wilsons, operating a gas station. Myrtle Wilson is Tom’s mistress and a secret thrust upon Nick even though Daisy is a relative. It seems like helping Gatbsy with Daisy is a way for him to balance the scales in terms of secrets and betrayals, but Nick is never able to fully realize his own motivations and the movie too quickly flits back to pageantry or melodrama to bother much with introspection. Nick’s ennui after Gatsby’s death doesn’t really feel like the end-road of his role in all this. He’s too much on Gatsby’s side and not enough on the side of getting away from all these lies, schemes, and secrets. The last secret he keeps is that it was Daisy who killed Myrtle. Maybe Gatsby’s last wish, that no one know it was Daisy, is the element that’s supposed to solidify him as a grand romantic hero. It doesn’t stick, in spite of Nick’s assessment of his character, because it’s still about Gatsby’s master plan and eliminating all obstacles to it.

It’s actually hard to consistently talk about the themes and characterization because while they are present and noticeable, they remain shadows of a story more interested in what these characters do than why. This is also why I called it a bit of a fairy tale. In fairy tales, things happen according to fairy tale logic and people can extract whatever metaphors and meanings they desire. Or they can take the whole thing literally and accept what the narrator or other “authority” in the story tells them about what they just saw. The Great Gatsby plays with the idea that Nick is an unreliable narrator, but there’s no commitment to actually exploring this. The fairy tale is not interested in interpretations, it only wants to set up and pay off.

Rare scene where The Great Gatsby breaks from its self-serious, maudlin tone and lets itself be awkward and funny.

All in all, The Great Gatsby has too much going for it to be a failure. Though even Luhrmann’s failures are interesting, to be honest. This is one of those movies where the flaws are easily overlooked if you can conceptualize it as a fairy tale and enjoy the sensory ride. Because of the great performances and visual beauty, The Great Gatsby can be enjoyed even if you note the flaws. It’s not expressly a dumb movie, even though it is shallow, and pretentious is often better than careless. I can imagine a version of The Great Gatsby that I would prefer more (as an adaptation of the book) but that doesn’t take away from Luhrmann’s silk and neon romp through his fantasized approach.

I have a strong instinct to criticize this movie on the grounds that it doesn’t acknowledge its social context whatsoever, and embraces the problematic aspects with abandon. I’ve restrained that instinct and reserved what little discussion I can offer about this.

I think a lot of people are going to dismiss or rail against this movie in light of contemporary attitudes toward wealth, excess, and even romance. In some sense, for example, Gatsby’s romanticism borders on creepy. He’s possessive and obsessive and all that fun stuff. Unsurprisingly, the Twilight crowd already seems to be eating this up. Likewise, the MTV Cribs dimension of culture will look at the opulence of Jay Gatsby in much the same way as Tony Montana is remembered. And Tony Montana was satirical, even. That Gatsby is a bootlegger and criminal? Even better. The pop culture impact of Gatsby, if it has much of one, will be depressing.

Can’t really imagine anyone else playing the guy.

All that said, it seems unfair to go at this movie on that level. Why should the adaptation of a book that’s almost 100 years old be reformulated to acknowledge the way some of its cultural contexts have changed over time? It’s a difficult question to answer. I can imagine good arguments going either way. I could even imagine criticizing a movie for not being more responsible with itself under different circumstances. The Great Gatsby is a trivial movie in many ways and perhaps that’s why I don’t care that it isn’t going for irony when Tom talks about the “Colored Empires” (though Daisy does make jokes about this) or when Gatsby is throwing his ridiculous parties on the bones of a working underclass. If it was less trivial, its story more affecting and profound, then we might rightfully expect some reflection of current social responsibility. But the book doesn’t exactly dwell on or explore those issues and it didn’t need to. It’s an interesting question to ask, whether these Rich White People Have Problems narratives are valid in spite of the cynicism they deserve.

It’s something I’ll probably wrestle with as the discussion of the movie rolls out among my friends and other writers. Let me know what you think in the comments!

An appropriate image for taking things a bit darker.

It won’t win me any favors to say so, but The Wrath of Khan is an outrageously overrated movie. To dig the hole further, I put it in the same category of adorable geek over-praise as the animated Transformers movie and the Indiana Jones trilogy. I say all this not to provoke nerdrage (inevitable anyway) but to set up a point.

Star Trek Into Darkness is a ballsy half-remake of Khan and it works for me precisely because I don’t give a shit about Star Trek in any special sense. Being that I think Khan can only be considered a good movie if you only compare it to other Star Trek movies. Star Trek Into Darkness is a legitimately good movie. But you wouldn’t know it from the majority of nerdy critics. To them, Darkness commits two major sins: 1) it dares to play with the sacred Khan and 2) it is occasionally pretty stupid.

I really didn’t expect to like Into Darkness as much as I did. It’s got its problems, mostly the same writing problems as usual with this team of creatives, but it overcomes them without asking the audience for a bail-out. The only reason to get worked up over this movie is because you are the butthurt Trekkie that Abrams is baiting. I applaud the gumption it took to do what they did here, even if they do try to pad out the impact with fan-service references and acknowledgment of nostalgia. More than that, I applaud a fun, visually stunning science fiction movie that just happens to be Star Trek.

Probably needless to say but SPOILERS, guys. Though… the review title is itself a spoiler? Whatever.

This movie features the most homoerotic genre bromance since The Lord of the Rings.

The first “sin” kind of takes care of itself. It’s a stupid, uninsightful complaint. It ignores the fact that Abrams has a mandate (which everyone helped create by making Star Trek 2009 a smash success) to remake the original continuity as he sees fit. It also ignores that the original Khan still exists for its odious fans to brow-beat neophytes with whenever they question the supremacy of whatever.

The second is overstated. If you liked Star Trek 2009, which is a pretty stupid movie full of irresponsible writing, then you had to ignore its almost brazen stupidity. Sometimes stupid is okay. I tend to be tough on stupid, but usually when it’s the kind of stupid that is all about cheating the audience or insulting them. Movies like Prometheus or Cowboys and Aliens fit that bill. Star Trek Into Darkness is not that kind of stupid. It doesn’t take itself seriously enough for that. It’s more akin to Indiana Jones or The Fast and the Furious. Those are movies that define enjoyable dumb.

And to be honest, Into Darkness is the first time I’ve felt like Abrams’ favorite hack writers actually bothered to dot their I’s and cross their T’s. Kurztman, Orci, and Lindelof are responsible for some of the worst written successful movies in a generation. Seriously, I am getting tired of having to explain to people why these guys are the worst and have pretty much always been the worst (Lindelof graduated to “worst” status after Prometheus and he isn’t doing himself any favors since). IMDB the fuckers. They make Akiva Goldsman look good.

But I’m not kidding when I say they at least tried to keep their script free of plot-holes. Almost all of the popular complaints (and I’ll get to many of them) have an in-movie justification, even if it’s one line of dialogue. I often praise good movies for asking the audience to pay attention to keep up with themes, characterization, etc. Though in Darkness it’s mostly plot stuff that gets explained this way, I have to respect that because the movie gets extremely expository one or two times but avoids making a problem out of it.

People have had enough of Kirk, man.

Probably the most important theme in the movie is this: what are leaders willing to give up for the sake of the people they lead? So far, Kirk (Chris Pine) has been coming up short as an effective leader mostly because of his massive ego and disregard for Starfleet protocol. At the beginning of the film, he and an away team are trying to stop a volcano from destroying a primitive tribe on the planet Nibiru. This is pretty cool stuff and a nice nod to the essentially benevolent nature of Starfleet. It also sets up the point that Kirk, for all his faults, really is the type of leader who is willing to sacrifice everything for his people. He breaks the Prime Directive to save Spock (Zachary Quinto) from the volcano, something that the literalist Spock disapproves of, but that makes complete emotional and moral sense to Kirk and everybody else. Except Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who gives Kirk one of the best dressings down I’ve heard in a while.

Essentially, Kirk still has a lot to learn. This movie is sort of about that. His ego needs to be tempered, and Into Darkness is the crucible in which it happens. The movie therefore focuses more heavily on him and its closest secondary characters than it does on the sort-of-ensemble of the 2009 movie. Characters like Sulu (John Cho), Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and even Bones (Karl Urban) don’t get as much to do. Still, this movie very wisely makes sure that everybody gets a few lines or moments (like Sulu being a badass, somehow a staple now) to remind the audience why these guys are hugely beloved as characters and that Abrams et al are genuinely interested in continuing that legacy.

Also, Spock keeps walking that fine line between irritating and awesome. This time with fire.

After Nibiru, Kirk gets bumped down to First Officer and Spock gets transferred to a different ship. However, terrorism is happening in London and all the captains and their first officers are called together in a disastrous meeting. The terrorist is a man named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) who is really Khan Noonien Singh. He has a big ol’ bone to pick with Starfleet and the magic regenerative blood needed to manipulate people to do his dirty work. In spite of the later issues revolving around that blood, the movie establishes very early that it’s important.

For all that Abrams seems to subsist on cynically manufactured “mystery” to bamboozle people into being interested in his shit, there isn’t really that much subterfuge going on within the movie itself. Everybody knows that someone is going to die in this movie. The big twist is that it isn’t Spock. The early notice about the Khanblood is as good as saying “don’t worry, it won’t stick”. Now this is sort of annoying, in a way, because it drives down the stakes. If we know Spock won’t really die, why worry about it? Unfortunately, this is a reboot of an existent story so we already know two things: 1) Spock dies and 2) Spock is resurrected in the sequel. Where Abrams gambles (and wins, I think) is in turning this around and killing Kirk but also reviving him in the same movie. This may not have been the only way to divert the stakes to something surprising (if you can’t have stakes, have twists is the logic, I guess?) but it is the way they took and it works.

For all his many faults, Kirk doesn’t really hesitate.

Anyway. Pike dies in Khan’s brazen attack on the meeting and this puts Kirk into revenge mode. Although this movie is about Kirk getting his house in order, we need this sort of catalyst to put him at odds with his crew. At his weakest, Kirk starts out by letting his fatal flaws lead him around by the nose. Earlier, he lectured Spock about friendship after Spock’s truthful report on Nibiru cost him his job. Spock in turn lectures Kirk and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) about how mortality and loss seriously freak him out. This becomes very important when contextualizing the big death scene.

Kirk’s rampage puts him in Admiral Marcus’s (Peter Weller) big weathered palms. He allows Kirk and Spock to lead a mission to the Klingon homeworld where Harrison/Khan has fled. Once there, they are supposed to bomb him from orbit using 72 special missiles. This is calculated move all around. The Klingons are scooping up territory and acting generally hostile toward Starfleet. Khan knows that Starfleet can’t follow him, or at least that they’ll be slowed down while he plans his next move. Marcus, on the other hand, is revealed to have used Nero’s attacks on Earth in the 2009 movie as an excuse to begin converting branches of Starfleet to a paramilitary organization. He wants to fight a preemptive war against the Klingons, believing them to be a direct threat to Starfleet and humanity. This is very interesting both in terms of navigating the darker timeline Nero created vs. the generally benevolent nature and purpose of Starfleet as well as in terms of the extent to which Into Darkness is commenting on how lies, power, and ego can coalesce into aggression as it does with Marcus and Khan (dark reflections of Kirk’s brief flirtation with the same).

The secondary theme, then, is how easily threats can change a person, or organization, into a darker version of what they were. The Into Darkness title refers directly to this. Not only does Kirk go darker (for a while) but so has this timeline (world) and all the people in it. Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) is now a weapons specialist, where in the original series she was a more benign scientist.

The Klingons are barely in this. I expect more in the threequel.

Being that there’s some set up for Movie 3 in this one, the Klingons are barely featured. A hint of things to come, it seems like, though I have some doubts about that given where Into Darkness leaves off. More on that later. For now, the significance is in keeping the settings exotic and interesting and creating great setpieces for explosive action sequences. The strongest part of the 2009 movie was never its action scenes. It was cool watching Spock and Kirk play gunfighter on Nero’s ship. Here, there’s a lot more chasing, butt-kicking, phaser-shooting, etc and it’s all great. This, even more than the impressive design and geography, makes me think Abrams will do right by Star Wars. At least more right than I would have thought prior to seeing this movie.

Some people are going to be annoyed by the fact that Into Darkness is an action movie. These people rightly expect Star Trek to present the exploratory, scientific dimension of the science fiction genre. I don’t know if this confusion of genres is really a problem for the movie, though. Into Darkness is what it is and it makes more sense to me to go after it, critically, for problems it has with what it is than for not being something else.

Cumberbatch overacts the whole movie.

Into Darkness is not a subtle movie. This is not the same as being obnoxious, which it isn’t, but it does create some close calls. Benedict Cumberbatch is a great actor who is usually amazingly subtle. In this movie, he goes very broad and while his voice gives all necessary gravity to Khan’s huge ego and crazy schemes, his ridiculous facial expressions challenge that gravity and dare comedy. I think mileage will vary on that one but it is undeniably a performance almost too big for the movie. I guess he’s trying to fill Ricardo Montalban’s shoes or make people forget he’s white or something, but it’s a performance that pulls double duty both undermining the self-seriousness edging into the movie and reinforcing the inherent lightness of the adventure flavor of the movie. It’s like Iron Man 3 in that it flirts with the darker, grittier tone and sensibility but ultimately veers back into adventure/fun mode. I like this. It shows a sense of commitment to the foundational aspects of these respective franchises. In other words, Star Trek can get dark but it’s not dark at heart.

Ultimately, Khan’s grievances with Starfleet fall at Marcus’s feet. It was Marcus who used him to design weapons and who gave him access to restricted technology like Scotty’s super-transporter formula from the 2009 movie (which explains one of the “plot-holes” people are talking about). Then Khan went rogue to save his 72 comrades. Evil as he turns out to be, Khan’s concern for his brethren make him somewhat relatable to the extent that he’s a representative of the lesson Kirk has to learn. On the back of that small dose of empathy, Kirk partners up with Khan to attack Marcus’s warship and save the Enterprise. It’s a fun team-up but really breathless in that it’s the tail end of the second act and there isn’t much time for the characters to play cat and mouse. Kirk pretty much knows that Khan will turn on him, just as Khan plays fast and loose with his presentation of his motives (he isn’t really a victim, his small army of supermen are guilty of horrific warcrimes). In a bizarre scene that probably caused a lot of groaning among franchise fans, Spock calls up Old Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to ask about Khan. In 2009′s movie, Old Spock had sworn not to reveal anything to Young Spock so that the timeline wouldn’t be continually fucked over. However, this is sort of the exception (we’re told) because Khan is so dangerous.

Dangerous but awesomely smug… Khan is a much better character after Kirk frees him. Especially when he gives Marcus the ol’ Roy Batty.

As a result, Spock is able to formulate a plan that sorts Khan out but also puts the Enterprise in jeapordy. There’s a bit where the ship free-falls into the atmosphere of Earth only to rise up in the clouds. As preposterous as it (and the whole movie) is in terms of realistic physics or even world-building (where is Earth’s response to a huge ship falling on it?), it’s a grandiose and iconic image that works as a stunning proof for the extent to which sacrificing sense for drama can work in a movie’s favor. If the movie doesn’t take external logic too seriously, anyway.

Less successful at this is Kirk’s “Russian Spacestation” engineering. He essentially kicks the fucking warp core back into place to get the Enterprise going again. Doing so means sacrificing himself due to the lethal amount of radiation in the core’s housing. This is the big twist of the movie. Khan has indirectly killed Kirk instead of Spock and after a moving, bromantic death scene, Spock’s earlier remarks about how loss and death mess him up come to the fore and he turns into an even bigger vengeance-machine than Kirk. This is a nod to the idea that Vulcans suppress their emotions because they feel so intensely that letting them go messes them up. Spock being the only one who can go toe-to-toe with Khan is cool. Also, in spite of the complaints that kicking the core is nuking the fridge, I think it’s completely consistent to the character. The scene isn’t just an inversion of the death, but an inversion of how the day gets saved at the price of that death. In Wrath of Khan, Spock does handyman engineering shit to save the day. That’s in-character for him. Spock is calculated, reserved, and competent. Kirk is impetuous and blunt. He doesn’t know what to do, technically, but he can see that one of the core’s pylons is out of sync and he knows he needs to fix that so he kicks it until it works as a gut instinct. Gut instinct is what Kirk is all about and this is returned to again and again in the movie, starting with saving Spock on Nibiru at the eventual cost of his captaincy, and repeatedly until it culminates in this moment.

Goddamn emotions.

Much of the character work in these movies is about showing Kirk and Spock complete each other. In this one, they are established friends but still with a lot to learn both from and about each other. While some fans are complaining that Kirk’s death is thematically meaningless because Kirk and Spock haven’t been friends for 15 years. This would make the use of this in Darkness a cynical rehash of familiar material just for the sake of shocking fans or something. I look at it a different way. Given that I’m not a swinging dick Trekkie, this may mean I don’t know anything, but let’s try this thought out and see where it goes.

The movie isn’t trying to capitalize on 15 years of friendship. Conversely, it is capitalizing only on Kirk learning the importance of self-sacrifice and Spock learning the importance of friendship. There’s enough work done for either character to justify their big moment together. This is more about realizing how important they are to each other in potential terms, than it is about the heavy loss of an old friend. Spock and Kirk are still “finding each other” and yes, it’s as gay as it sounds. Which is awesome. Kirk doesn’t even get a romantic subplot this movie, and Spock’s thing with Uhura is even more perfunctory. That’s because everybody knows which romance is actually important to these movies.

The only way this scene and the whole setup/payoff of the reversal doesn’t work is if you bring a bunch of Wrath of Khan baggage to the mix. Taken on its own and with the material that’s actually in the movie, it works. This is enough for me. If they’d simply skimmed through and done this scene without any supporting work, it would be the type of move that I hate most and criticize most fiercely when I encounter it in stories. Here, it’s being unfairly maligned by fanboys.

This does not mean that the movie isn’t stubbornly insistent of its own stupidity fairly often.

Now while I’m both defending and praising the pleasant surprise I got out of Into Darkness, I have to spend time on its myriad flaws. One of the minor ones, pictured above, is gratuity. This isn’t Bay’s Transformers series, so the gratuity is fairly minimal. This, however, makes it even more noticeable. Alice Eve undresses for no reason and then we get this carefully composed shot of her sexeh bodeh just to tickle the nascent pickles of pre or omnipubescent fanboys that creatives still think compose the majority of genre fans. Somehow, Hollywood hasn’t really figured out that nerds are the new normal and things like Star Trek aren’t the primary property of sweaty, virginal troglodytes. But it’s like they’re convinced they still have to drop the brow a few notches to appeal to these people, if they even exist anymore.

Again, it’s a minor quibble because it’s only one scene and it’s not that bad. Kirk is in his underwear in the movie too, and Chris Pine is way more sexy than Alice Eve anyhow. Plus, this movie is gayer than Hobbits (like I keep applauding) and that sort of repeals those moments where it pretends it likes girls.

If someone really wants to have a go at Star Trek Into Darkness for being dumb, it’s going to be in all the same ways that most plot-centric adventure movies are dumb. It contains many contrivances like the fact that nobody on Earth responds to the Enterprise’s plight in orbit. It contains many compromises between sense and drama. You can actually have both sense and drama, as much better science fiction movies continually prove. However, the Star Trek of the aughts isn’t really about being science fiction. It’s just window dressing, but very nice and pleasing window dressing. In effect, these are the kinds of rollicking, fun-first-questions-later movies that feel a bit antiquated in the contemporary world of armchair scientists refusing to suspend disbelief because they read io9′s article about warp drives.

Besides: spectacle.

Now the one exception, it seemed to me, was the magic Khanblood. It doesn’t bother me that it’s a thing. It’s dumb the way the Matrix of Leadership was dumb in Transformers 2 (thanks again, Orci and Kurtzman!) but at least it’s a tangible resurrection tool. It’s hocus pocus, sure, but it’s not necessarily the bad kind. What irks about it is that the crew of the Enterprise waits in suspense and Spock goes after Khan and Uhura follows to make sure Khan’s blood is retrieved (thus Khan needs to be alive). Why does it need to be Khan’s blood when there are 72 other supermen onboard the Enterprise in their cryotubes? Some line about how their security is “sequenced” suggests that they are actually unable to open the tubes. This is one of those times where it’s too thin, too throwaway to count as an actual explanation. It’s also such a crucial moment (much more so than Spock and Kirk being at the big Starfleet meeting) and therefore requires more justification to have full impact. Unfortunately, the movie drops the ball here. It’s not as spectacularly sloppy as when they disappeared Nero and his ship for 25 years to wait for the plot to happen in the 2009 movie, but it’s still fairly sloppy.

So while Into Darkness surprised me and did a little to rehabilitate my assessment of J.J. Abrams overall filmmaking skill, it has not really undone the damage that Orci, Kurtzman, and Lindelof have done to scripts and their images over the last 6 or 7 years. It seems like they all do better work when they are separated. Put them together and you get Cowboys and Aliens.

Love this image. Couldn’t think of a better place to put it.

Thankfully, Star Trek Into Darkness doesn’t hate its audience. It may not give much of a fig about the embedded Star Trek purists and Abrams may have stupidly tried to hide the identity of Khan by lying directly to everybody, but this is a movie made for people like me who love science fiction, think Star Trek can be a cool universe to play in, but who ultimately don’t give a fig about those purists either. Not even a little. To me, complaining about Into Darkness‘s many deviations and glib references to its overrated source material is the same as bitching that The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 is not the Yellow Peril caricature he was in the comics. If there’s any connective tissue at all to those two movies and how they relate to their audience, it’s in that. Iron Man 3 did it better, but Abrams can always learn new tricks.

The major takeaway as a fan culture is this: old stories are not sacred texts. If you want that kind of fandom, please see the Bible.

The major takeaway about this movie is this: sometimes dumb can be good, and it doesn’t do anybody any good to get outraged about dumb that loves you and wants you to have a good time. Save the raging for dumb that insults you, hates you, and thinks you’ll pay to be shat on like it’s amateur hour in Amsterdam.

The word is family.

Something to get out of the way: this series has no naming convention, with each entry reinventing the titling to such a point that I’ll just refer to them with the word “Fast” and numerically by order of release. This will hopefully be a lot less confusing for everybody!

Every Fast and Furious movie echoes a specific movie. With the sixth entry of what has become one of the best original cinematic franchises out there, that movie is The Avengers. It turns out that it’s not only superhero movies that now exist in a post-Avengers world. One of the things I’ve always liked about the Fast series is that it’s been made by filmmakers who dearly love movies. Cohen, Singleton, and then the long (but now complete) run Justin Lin had all have that in common. Though not as much a love letter to The Avengers as the first one was to Point Break, the signs of Lin’s, and writer Chris Morgan’s, appreciation for the most recent blockbuster game-changer is a prevalent and noticeable ingredient in their superhero team-up movie.

We’ve watched all these characters, and the actors who play them, grow up with the franchise. Each Fast movie is, if not better, more self-assured than the last. The commitment to continuity and the themes of its ridiculous universe has always been a major strong suit for the series. It’s surprising every time, especially rewatching the whole shebang, at just how well this thing supports itself.

In Fast 6, everything that makes the series what it is has been dialed up to eleven. Lin is going out with a bang and here proven himself to be one of the highest potential action directors out there. For all that Fast 6 contains the familiar humor, themes of family and redemption, and ridiculous sense of its world, the place where this movie really outdoes itself is in the action. While this has always been an action series, Fast 6 is the first one that features not just one or two great or iconic moments but a dozen of them. Just as the heroics echo The Avengers, the action feels like Lin picking up elements he loves from other movies and floating them through the world of Fast. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but somehow the Bourne-style fisticuffs and Michael Mann gunfights (this is one of the rare movies with loud, realistic gun SFX) are less welded on and more breathed in. The confidence with which Lin includes these touches is breathtaking and makes you completely believe in the action, which in turn ripples through everything else in the movie no matter how ridiculous.

Fast 6 plays the oldies beautifully.

The credits stinger at the end of Fast 5. sets up the mission of Fast 6 and a larger arc for at least a trilogy’s worth of movies (if you include Fast 5). It turns out that Letty (Michelle Rodriguez doing maybe her best work) is not dead, as everybody believed her to be since Fast 4. Instead, she’s working for an ex-military hijacker who is one step ahead of everyone after him. Hobbes (Dwayne Johnson) tracks down Dom (Vin Diesel) hoping to use Letty as a way to get the help of the Fast 5 crew in taking down the hijacker. Dom is enjoying the retired life with Elena (Elsa Pataky) in Spain while Brian (Paul Walker) and Mia (Jordana Brewster) raise their son Jack not far away. Letty is enough to bring Dom back into the fray. Like before, his first instinct is to go it alone but family is about not being alone and Brian has his own reasons for wanting to get to the bottom of Letty’s resurrection.

We get to see what everybody’s been up to since making off with millions of dollars at the end of Fast 5. Before long, Dom and Hobbes have assembled them all in London to deal with Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) and his own crew of expert criminals. As Roman (Tyrese Gibson) remarks halfway through the movie, Shaw’s crew is like a mirror image of Dom’s right down to having a hulking slab of muscles, a handsome black dude, and an Asian. This pays off major dividends both later and in the moment. The fact that the movie stops and has its primary comic relief character acknowledge this device is awesome in a way that I don’t know if I can articulate. I guess the best way would be to say that it shows how self-aware this movie (and series) is and how much fun its having with its own ridiculousness. It’s inviting us, the audience, to enjoy these elements with full awareness that they are ridiculous and fun.

We’d be suckers not to.

This movie is bromances.

Though it has a fairly complex logistical plot, Fast 6 puts this and the MacGuffins on mute and focuses instead on character pairings, the emotional thrust of the story, and the conflict between Dom’s code of family and Shaw’s code of precision. It doesn’t really matter what Shaw is trying to steal and sell (some sort of EMP bomb) or exactly how anyone in the movie does what they do. While this isn’t glossed over (the movie even makes time for Brian to take a sidetrip to L.A.), it’s simply unimportant. I appreciate this and so should you. The Fast series is one of complex heists/operations/etc and thus risks the same thing all such stories risk: to become bogged down in the details. Inception this ain’t. It’s very tricky to pull off an expository heist movie with both style and satisfaction. Fast 5 flirted with its given the Ocean’s 11 riffing, but one of the things that differentiates 6 from 5 is that 6 is by far the more mythological of the two movies. By this I mean that everything is bigger, crazier, even less believable (in a good way), and therefore iconic.

Letty is the character with the biggest arc this time around. The attempt on her life before the events of Fast 4 have left her an amnesiac. Shaw, it turns out, was responsible not only for Braga (John Ortiz, who returns for a great cameo) and his whole empire but also for getting Letty “killed”. As Shaw creepily explains to her, she’s the only one his crew that he feels any attachment to. The rest are disposable if they make mistakes and violate his edict of precision. Shaw is therefore the polar opposite of Dom. Dom relies on others and takes care of them in return, it’s messy but his self-sacrifice and protective instincts often get his ass out of the fire and even when the laws of probability should snuff him out, the metaphorical level of the story rewards Dom’s code because at heart, Fast is all about doing for others.

Letty gets not one but TWO brutal, awesome fights with Gina Carano.

Shaw likes Letty because her amnesia makes her blank. She has no history, no family, nothing hitching her up or inviting mistakes. Unlike Shaw, Letty’s divorce from conscience is not self-imposed. After he recruited her and gave her a purpose, Letty would have had no reason to question either him or her place in his operations. It’s only when Dom and his crew interrupt those operations that Letty is forced to confront who she’s in bed with and what this signifies for her. She’s drawn to Dom and his people and she doesn’t know why. In this way, she’s a great stand-in for the newcomer viewer who maybe hasn’t watched all the previous movies or who still hasn’t quite gotten the appeal. Yes, Letty (and newcomer), Dom’s crew is a lovable but inexplicable bunch. Embrace them and they will embrace you.

Watching her find herself is actually one of the stronger parts of the characterization (which is quite good) in this movie. Michelle Rodriguez is not known for being a master actress, but here she leverages the tough physicality and attitude she is best known and most often cast for against a furtive vulnerability that I didn’t know she had in her. Like Paul Walker’s deepened pathos in Fast 4, one of the tools in the box for these movies is giving one or two characters enough room to breathe and arc and all that fun stuff while also providing for smaller arcs or character moments for secondary and tertiary characters. Here it’s Letty who gets to surprise the most, but Han (Sung Kang) and Gisele (Gal Gadot) wring plenty of drama out of their doomed love affair as well. Walker continues to bring a quiet maturity to Brian. Gone is the jittery, nervous energy of the character’s youth. Now he’s an ass-kicker, his cool blue eyes telling the story of a gunslinger as opposed to a street racer. He’s also a father haunted by his role in Letty’s fate and the film gives him (and us) a chance to find out the truth, visit with a couple of guys from Fast 4 (aforementioned John Ortiz as well as Shea Whigham), and bust some heads before the big climax.

Rome and Han make for a great surprise team.

Most of the second act is spent on fun character pairings. Because the Fast series now has a fairly sprawling cast, the only way to give everybody some time to do their thing is to split them up. This was nice in Fast 5 where it’d been some time since we’d last seen some characters (Roman, Tej (Ludacris)) and also presented an opportunity to give the secondary characters their own relationships with each other. In Fast 6, the opportunity to pair characters who didn’t hang out in 5 is taken full advantage of.

Hobbes is eventually paired with Tej which is surprisingly fun in itself, but also frees him from the charisma suck that is Gina Carano.

Carano is at her best whenever it’s action time, so I guess that undermines some of my ire for how noticeably bad she is everywhere else.

She is just bad in this movie, no two ways about it, and really stands out as such even in a cast of actors whom most people wouldn’t normally rate as especially great (with a few possible exceptions). Carano seems to exist primarily as a punching bag for Letty which is awesome and almost makes up for her shitty line delivery and bored expression. That she turns out to be the mole who has helped Shaw keep tabs on Hobbes, Dom, and the rest is only surprising because she is so consistently forgettable. Did Lin do this on purpose? It seems way too convenient to think so but I do have to acknowledge that Carano’s character being a bad guy did surprise me. It also feels just a tad tacked on but then again, it provides another excuse for she and Letty to square off.

Evans is consistently solid especially in roles like this.

When I spoke earlier of how great the action is in this movie, I not only meant the actual fighting but also the ridiculously huge (even for this series) set-pieces. Though there is plenty of big action throughout, the first two acts are mostly made up of smaller fights. I could talk about Michelle Rodriguez and her fights with Gina Carano all day long, but I wanted to also give a shout out to the other prominent fistfights in this movie. First, though, I should say that fistfights and fight choreography in general were never a big part of this movie. There were always fists thrown here and there, but never at this level. It’s one of those things that fit the series much better than you might have thought. After all, Brian points out that this isn’t cops and drug dealers like before (implying that those were people this crew could handle). Ex-military or whatever, Shaw’s crew seems at least as dangerous as Dom’s and you have to wonder how a bunch of upjumped street criminals can hope to match it. But this is the Fast series and there’s plausibility even where there’s fantasy.

For example, Brian knows how to fight (and always did) and he gets a spectacular brawl during his sojourn to L.A. Interestingly, Lin opted not to have Sung Kang’s Han be a stereotypical Asian martial arts master. Han is actually clumsy with his fists and during he and Rome’s awesome fight with The Raid‘s Johannes Taslim, it’s actually Rome who seems to have a better idea of what he’s doing. When it comes to gunplay, the skills are a bit more evenly spread with Gisele still being the “expert” and getting a couple of beautifully John Woo-ish moments to show it.

Eminent badass, even hanging off the side of a car.

When the third act comes along, Fast 6 goes into overdrive the same way that The Avengers did during the Chitauri invasion. With only a brief pause for breath to separate the two big sequences, it’s pretty much forty minutes of nonstop fuck yes. First is the bridge sequence wherein Shaw has commandeered a tank and Letty gets her clearest image for how batshit he really is. He gleefully drives the thing into traffic, murdering civilians in their cars on a truly astounding rampage. I mean, this movie has quite the fucking body count and rather than ignoring it, attention is paid to the fact that Shaw is murdering a lot of people. Letty freaks out and Dom insists that they do what they can to distract Shaw and give people a chance to get out of the way.

I can’t really overstate how great the bridge sequence is. Like many of the big action sequences in the series, this one hinges on a lot of high-speed driving, vehicular mayhem, and preposterous (super)heroic manipulations of physics through the totemic power of car. If there was any doubt that Lin is deliberately loving on The Avengers with this movie (after the ‘Samoan Thor’ gag, there shouldn’t be), it’s with this movie’s version of the joygasm-inducing catch save.

First you’re all like “where is this going?”

Then you’re all like “holy fucking shit”.

I only wish I had a better picture of this fantastic, ridiculous moment.

I laughed and hooted throughout the majority of Fast 6 but it is only as Dom suicidally car-frogs his way over a chasm separating the two lanes of the bridge that I wanted to stand up in my fucking seat. “No way!” I said as Letty, thrown from the tank, soared majestically in the air with Dom rising up toward her like a bald, beefy phoenix. Then there was only “yes! God yes!” as he catches her and they plummet onto, of course, the hood of a sportscar. “How did you know there’d be a car to break our fall?” she asks him moments later, swooning only an iota compared to me. How indeed.

Justin Lin said “fuck it, let’s make Fast 6 a superhero movie” and so it is.

Not to be outdone, Rome also imitates a mythical bird.

After that fucking stunt, you’d be forgiven in thinking that Fast 6 is done with you. But it isn’t. Oh no. Shaw is a pretty good villain, probably the best that the Fast series has had. Once he’s bagged, he isn’t really “bagged”. He has an ace in the hole named Mia and even though her life isn’t worth the thousands or millions that Shaw’s plans might cost in the moral calculus of a mind bent on precision, even Hobbes has by this point given in to the all-consuming power of family. He points a gun right at some soldier motherfucker and though Shaw gets to saunter out, nobody is letting him walk.

The second climax is the night-time assault on a Hercules plane. This entire sequence, like the bridge, is in motion. Somehow, Lin has figured out the magical formula of unique action (fistfights and gunfights are pedestrian, he’s almost saying, I can do that in my sleep fuckers) is to keep everybody moving and moving and driving and jumping car to car until the audience is bombared by clear, legible action that is as undeniable as the girth of Dwayne Johnson’s right bicep.

The once-Rock is having quite the year.

If you aren’t getting the picture, this shit is like a tantric on switch for action lovers. That Lin pulls it off predominantly with practical effects and makes it look easy is why Fast 6 is fourteen steps above even Fast 5 (let alone the rest of the series), which was itself a classic action movie. If the bridge isn’t enough for ya, this movie makes it a point to square each member of either crew against their spiritual opposite.

I mean. How do you even make a Fast 7? Stay tuned for the end credits to see fucking how. Fast 7 is being made for imminent release and I wait with baited breath and jubilant expectation.

“Paul, we don’t even have a big fuck-you shot for the climax. What are we gonna do?”

“Wait a second, Jordana. Is that what I think it is?!”

Why yes, it’s Vin Diesel driving a car through the front of an exploding plane.

But in the end, Fast 6 isn’t about the flashy cars, the big explosions, or the oily muscles. Fast 6 is about building a family and standing up for them. Instead of dismissing Elena, who was there for Dom after Letty, the movie hammers home its maturity (perhaps the most surprising of all the qualities the franchise has accumulated over time) and deals with it face-first. Just as hard emotional realities have to be dealt with alongside the bullets and blood, there’s always got to be time for family. How appropriate, then, that Fast 6 ends where the series began: sharing a moment around barbeque in the heart of L.A.

Fuck I love movies.

Some stunning shots in this movie.

I expected a Shyamalanatastrophe with After Earth. Although the first, stunning trailer was very good, the more information that came out about this movie the more convinced I was that it would be fucking awful. I read all about how Will Smith came up with the idea and decided to make a multimedia empire around this detailed, ludicrous backstory. A 300 page “Bible” was written, comic book guys were brought on to make supplementary stuff, and the whole project ignored all the other attempts to do this that feel dismally flat (The Matrix, Southland Tales, etc). Honestly, I expect the same for After Earth. It won’t become some new Star Wars even with the considerable influence of Smith.

That said, the movie is not bad. In fact, it’s pretty good. Maybe a bit slight, given that it tells a small scale story in a large scale world. Like YA books, it uses its big concepts more for backdrop and setting than for actual storytelling. The story is intimate, with only a few characters and some straightforward thematic work (which is resonant almost in spite of itself). People who are expecting bigger payoffs to the lore are going to come away disappointed. This is a movie that does world-building by implication more than exposition. As such, we aren’t told much that we don’t expressly need to know to follow the core story. The one exception is a long bit of lumpy exposition delivered in the drawling “space human” accent of Jaden Smith. Still, there’s a distinct likelihood that this is going to frustrate a lot of viewers. In many ways After Earth feels incomplete with many opportunities to show off concepts and details left to fall by the wayside. I assume the idea was to get away from conventional tropes and payoffs, but there’s a balance that this movie doesn’t quite get to.

What makes the movie good is that it’s fully in command of that smaller, core story. With the resonant themes, sense of scale, and a well designed world to play around in, Shyamalan and writing partner Gary Whitta take Smith’s story idea and do fine, unambitious work with it. There’s room in the world for humble, one-off stories that leverage an epic backstory for intimate storytelling. That said, don’t expect a legitimate science fiction movie out of After Earth. It’s a fantasy movie that happens to have neat technology, space ships, and aliens. It is not speculative or scientific in the least.

Smith is playing the ultimate badass but we barely see it.

The backstory of the movie is quite involved and little of it is fully explained or shown by the movie. A bit too much telling over showing is what I was getting at when I talked about a feeling of incompleteness. A great example is Cypher Raige (Will Smith) and his status as the Prime Commander of the Rangers, humans first line of defense. Not only is the alien race that attacks humanity’s colonies, even the new homeworld Nova Prime, but the details of how this war proceeds aren’t present. There’s only the briefest glimpse of Cypher’s combat prowess, used to explain the concept of “Ghosting” and no explanation given for why humans don’t use projectile weapons a thousand years from now.

After ruining Earth, humans venture out into the stars where they make a new home on a desolate, arid world that looks like Arizona (with accents to match). Once they’ve established themselves, they are attacked by hostile aliens who use biologically engineered hunter-killers called ursas. The ursas are dropped from pods and track humans by smelling our fear (we give off pheromones). Ghosting is a technique employed by the best Rangers in which they switch their fear off and become effectively invisible.

All this information is delivered to us by voiceover from Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith). Both the Raiges, and seemingly no one else in the movie, use vague and drawling accents that suggest the Southwest United States. When I first heard it I thought “cool, a movie that acknowledges how speech patterns would change after a thousand years” though even this would be nominal. Of course, every other character has a different accent so it just comes off like some weird affectation rendered unnecessary by inconsistency. This is one of many smaller hiccups in the presentation of the movie and I mention it specifically because it bothered me a bit that there was no payoff or point.

Families that breathe together stay together.

The core story of the movie is much simpler. Kitai is a cadet Ranger and his impulsiveness and petulance have kept him from advancing. Wanting desperately to please his distant father, the great warrior and general Cypher Raige, he has thrown everything into this and is left despondent and insecure. Though Cypher knows what his career has cost his family and himself (as a father and husband), he still has a hard time relating to his son. Poised to retire, he follows the advice of his wife Faia (Sophie Onokedo) to take Kitai along with him on one last journey.

The source of a lot of the angst among the hilariously named Raiges is the death of the even more hilariously named Senshi Raige (Zoe Kravitz), Kitai’s older sister. Senshi followed in their father’s footsteps first, becoming a Ranger. Through flashbacks that serve less as a reveal or plot device and more as a thematic reminder, we see that Senshi died badly fighting an ursa and trying to protect Kitai. Both male Raiges blame themselves but think they blame the other, so there’s a lot of tension and undealt with trauma in their relationship. Faia sees all this and delivers an actually beautiful, soft lecture to Cypher about what their son needs from him. It’s an early sign about where this movie’s heart is.

En route to a planet where Rangers are trained fighting captive ursas, their ship the Hesper, comes across a freak asteroid storm. The ship suffers severe damage and has to jump away using a wormhole-based FTL. The computer autoselects their destination and they wind up in Earth orbit. Earth is now a “Class 1 Quarantined Planet” which means it’s totally unsafe for humans. Without another choice, Cypher orders his pilots to attempt landing. Unfortunately for all involved, the ship breaks into two in its descent, with the tail section holding a captive ursa. Everybody except Kitai seems to be dead until he finds his gravely injured father in the rubble of the ship.

Zoe Kravitz manages to do quite a bit with limited screen time. We really feel her death, especially as more of its grisly barbarity is revealed.

With two broken legs, a broken emergency beacon, and only his untested (unworthy?) son to get them saved, Cypher’s situation is pretty desperate. He’s a tough SOB, however, and he quickly establishes a plan of action. The bulk of the movie follows Kitai’s perilous quest across the desolate, deadly landscape of the changed Earth. On the surface, this is a survival story. Slightly beneath that surface, there’s the conflict between these two characters and the realization of their bond. Kitai needs to overcome his fear, which means overcoming his past, and his father needs to learn who he is so he can accept him. They both struggle with false impressions of each other, all tied up with inner turmoil over Senshi’s death. Kitai believes he should have done more and projects this guilt onto his dad, expecting and seeing disapproval in every facial expression and word. Cypher also thinks he should have done more, should have been there period, and his guilt manifests as coldness and a vague disapproval of Kitai’s path (even he probably doesn’t realize he wants Kitai to be safe, thus not a Ranger). The pathos and motives of these characters comes across wonderfully. The challenge is that Kitai’s petulance and fear make him a tad annoying at first. He makes a lot of mistakes and whines quite a bit but the point is that he needs to settle his inner conflict and guilt in order to rise above these limitations.

As a statement about overcoming fear, After Earth may reach significant levels of poignancy for people who struggle with anxiety. A lot of the reactions Kitai has in his hostile surroundings feel natural. This movie’s version of the Litany Against Fear (from Dune) functions both as Cypher’s badass explanation of the mental state of Ghosting and as an expression of the Zen Buddhist fatalism that informs the frequently Japanese motifs in the movie (names like Senshi, for example). It’s also a great, focused iteration of a theory of fear (and overcoming it) that probably works well for people who can pull it off. Cypher telling the story of his first Ghosting and how he accomplished it while Kitai shivers in rain, cold, and danger is just a great moment that solidifies who Cypher is, good and bad. Here’s a man who’s hard as nails, both remote and inspiring to his son (and us). This kind of nuanced characterization is definitely After Earth‘s strong suit.

Also nice is the appreciation and awe of the altered, wild Earth.

Some have joked that After Earth is a sequel to The Happening. In that abominable film, Shyamalan showed us a world that was trying to kill us in ludicrous ways. The gist was that we were fucking the environment and it was determined to fuck us right back. After Earth takes place a thousand years after we’ve left a planet we ruined, but it’s probably not supposed to be a continuation of The Happening (funny as that is). It seems to have got on just fine without us. As ridiculous as the notion that “everything here evolved to kill humans” is (how, when humans are gone?), there’s a sense of wild splendor that imitates that of Avatar‘s Pandora. The flora and fauna are changed, but not unrecognizable. And as hostile as the place is, there’s still beauty and possibly even companionship amidst the death and danger. In an example of a nice touch that I wish was less undercooked (sort of a theme for me and this movie), Kitai is half-befriended by a giant goddamn bird that winds up sacrificing itself for him. This movie takes death pretty seriously, to its credit, and Kitai is almost constantly in very real danger. But not just him. Earlier, we have to watch a bunch of jackal-cougars kill the baby birds, for example. Not pretty.

Kitai’s quest to retrieve a working beacon from the tail end of the ship is also on a timer, if the environment wasn’t bad enough. This is a movie with stakes, even though they aren’t epic stakes. If Kitai can’t get to the beacon fast, he’ll die as he runs out of rebreathers. Likewise, Cypher will bleed out due to a ruptured artery in his broken leg. He tries to do an arterial shunt, which brutal, but it doesn’t work and he’s basically dying slowly the whole movie. But he won’t leave Kitai alone, if he can help it. He even refused to take painkillers because they will muddle him up.

The movie is full of cool tech and gadgets that are internally consistent and heavily reference materials science.

On top of the dangerous world, the ticking clock, and his daddy issues, Kitai is also being stalked by the fucking ursa. Oh yes, that thing. It’s still alive, and uses “fear triggers” which is basically impaling people on spikes to scare survivors so it can stalk them. The ursa is a poorly and busily designed insectoid. It looks exactly like the aliens in Cowboys and Aliens and Super 8. That said, what it does and how it functions are scary enough that the poor design is of smaller consequence.

Speaking of design. After Earth features a pretty unique spin on futuristic tech. Yes it has the silly jumpsuits and gleaming spaceships, but it also emphasizes metamaterials more than most “scifi” does. The Lifesuit that Kitai wears is practically a character in the movie. It changes color in response to toxins, temperature, threats, etc (and even gets bumpy and armored in texture) and has inbuilt backpack, communicator, and holster for a cutlass, the Rangers’ signature weapon. The cutlass is very cool. It’s basically a rod with smart metals in the shaft which can be expanded and configured into a variety of different blades and tools. It can even be split and wielded ambidextrously. It’s an iconic weapon and I bet kids will love it. Similarly, After Earth bases a lot of its other technology on “smart” materials like fabrics. Even the ship looks like it’s made of cloth on the inside at least. Three dimensional maps, thick-fabric utility closets, and an organic-looking air filter are all other examples of cool tech in the movie.

Kitai splits the cutlass into two katana-like weapons in preparation for his final battle.

As Kitai progresses through his adventure, he flashes back to Senshi’s death over and over. It’s only when he lets himself remember all of it that something clicks into place. No longer feeling guilt for being too afraid to come out of the capsule and die alongside his sister, he accepts his fear and gets past it. Ghosting, he fights and kills the ursa in what is actually a pretty great sequence. That this echoes the story of Cypher is relevant, especially when the cheesy earlier scene with the soldier who Cypher saved forcing himself to get up (on one remaining leg) to salute his hero. When Kitai again faces his father, Cypher imitates the behavior of that soldier and Kitai not only gets his love and acceptance reaffirmed, he also accomplishes his earlier goal of becoming a good Ranger.

And really, the fucking kid deserves it. I expected more of a kid superhero vibe from this movie. Instead, Kitai is a flawed and scared little boy. This works way better, really, and is something Jaden Smith does well (Kitai isn’t so different from his character in The Karate Kid). While Will plays restrained and stoic, Jaden plays volatile and emotional. In a relatively humorless movie, there’s some subtle humor here and there that works well and breaks up the seriousness almost as well as the movie’s big beating heart.

I wonder how much of the movie’s story echoes what life is like for the Smith kids with their busy father.

Though they don’t save the universe from the anonymous aliens, the catharsis works nicely. I would liked a bit better execution and payoff for some of the silly lore in this movie, but what you get instead is far from bad. A lesser movie would have just done the paint by numbers race from setpiece to setpiece with no stakes and only the barest adherence to some kind of emotional core. After Earth actually bothers to try and get you to care about Kitai and Cypher’s estrangement and survival.

It isn’t a great big sweeping deal like maybe they wanted it to be. Instead, it’s a small victory. A minor win for Shyamalan who needs all the wins he can get. For the Smiths, it’s a safe and probably fun team-up that is a challenge if only because neither of them is coasting on charm here.

For us, it’s a minor league fantasy movie that will probably score bigger for the kids who are going to end up seeing Epic instead. Meanwhile, bloodthirsty millenial geeks like me will sparsely attend After Earth hoping it’s a trainwreck and finding that it’s actually all right. It’s always confusing when you expect to hate a movie and don’t love it, but kinda like it instead.

Featuring all the 25-35 year old actor/comedians you love.

I have a weird relationship with comedies. The SNL-alumni stuff is usually hit or miss for me. I also don’t think Apatow really knows what he’s doing anymore. But Apatow’s heirs apparent are probably Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. I have loved every movie they’ve written with the exception of The Green Hornet and their brand of comedy is one that really works for me. Part of this is the self-aware, tonally agile style of their movies. Part of it is Seth Rogen himself, as a lead actor in movies that frequently blend traditional broad comedy with occasional forays into other genres. The biggest part, though, is probably the themes that unite all their films. Every one of them is about friendship between men, running the gamut from the endearing and sweet (and homoerotic) to the kinds of drama men have (but is frequently unrepresented in TV and movies) and always, always hilarious. Every one of their movies has a warm, friendly core and an affable reality that grounds all the laughs in something that feels authentic, if not realistic.

This is what lets them get away with something like This is the End, which is a movie that probably shouldn’t work. Self-reference/parody is tricky to pull off with grace. It’s also one of the common measures taken by public figures who start to get stale or over-exposed. Rogen has experimented with roles that have been “against type” and probably will keep doing that. He probably doesn’t think of it in those terms and good for him if so. Here, however, he shows that he is totally aware of the potential tiredness of his “schtick” and the fickle nature of audiences who complain about a performer always seeming to come off as “the same guy” and yet line up to see it over and over. Rogen is not quite at the point where he hates us all (as Adam Sandler undoubtedly does), and This is the End suggests that he may never get there. Good, I say. I like the guy, I like his brand, and I never get tired of it.

In spite of its bottle-episode structure, This is the End functions well as a survival/apocalypse story even as it spends most of its energy on the character-derived comedy all these guys are so fucking gifted at. By the last twenty minutes, This is the End has morphed into an epic which is both surprising and unsurprising at the same time. You trust these guys to pull something like that off, but you’re still amazed when they do it.

Shit, the Jesus freaks were right!

As everybody knows, this is one of those movies where the actors all play themselves. Of course they aren’t really playing themselves. Instead, each one is heightened or skewed in ways that are funny, self-referential, and above all self-aware. The point starts off being “how would these guys react to the apocalypse?” and ends up being just as much about how they react to their own images. This is more relevant for some, like James Franco, than others because they don’t all have equal public exposure. Skewering those personae is a project of the movie, though, showing that all these guys have a huge sense of humor about everything up to and including the end of the world but especially about themselves.

Seth Rogen is enjoying the lifestyle and relationships his success has brought to him. He has a bunch of friends in L.A., many of whom made in the Apatow days and others from his more recent work. Jay Baruchel is his oldest friend, though, and they’ve been growing apart recently due to pretentiousness and obliviousness on both their parts. It takes a long time for the movie to really equalize the relationship so for most of it, Jay just seems like a whiny anti-social dick.

Though part of the point the movie makes is that, when the chips are down, friendship is all that really matters.

He thinks the affable, positive Seth has sold out and changed too much. He hates the L.A. entitled lifestyle, he hates L.A., and he may even be starting to hate Seth. However, they are all set up to have a weekend together to hang out and rekindled the friendship after almost a year apart doing their own things. While we do see Rogen doing dickish things to Jay for the sake of his new friendships, we spend way too much time watching Jay Baruchel act like a brat to really fault him. The bad relationship is a bit one-sided and I think they probably intended it to be more equal in terms of blame for its problems. But I wouldn’t say the way it all comes together is unearned. I was actually a bit surprised that they were willing to go so far into douchey territory with Jay, risking any audience sympathy for the guy. That may be partly based on sensitivity to his reluctance to hang out with Seth Rogen’s L.A. friends, who we know (and Seth explains) are a collection of actors and comedians that the audience already adores.

Of course, Seth drags Jay to a party at James Franco’s house and the apocalypse happens. This has a way of complicating their plans but also forcing them to confront the ways they’ve been dicks to each other and why they should bro down and hug up.

The elite survivors.

Though the first act features a bunch of cameos, some small and others larger, they pretty much all die before the movie switches from awkward party scenario to “how do these idiots survive the end of the world?” scenario. It would be silly to list off all the cameos but most of them are funny. The highlights are Michael Cera and (much later) Channing Tatum. Cera probably plays the most ridiculously extreme version of himself and this because he dies first when the apocalypse actually hits. Before that, we see him snorting coke and macking ladies and getting slapped hard by Rihanna. Cera nicely summarizes the way this movie is willing to send up aspects of these guys for weirdness and laughs. There’s no way Michael Cera is as creepy and incorrigible as he appears here, but there’s this box people put him, as a performer and personality, into. That box no longer exists.

Now for Channing Tatum. Though he’s only in it for a second, the interplay with Danny McBride and the way the movie sets up and pays off both Tatum’s inclusion and McBride’s character arc is just staggeringly brilliant. It’s the funniest thing in an incredibly funny movie.

Glorious.

This is the End could easily have been these actors playing roles. Instead, there’s another layer to the approach of having them play exaggerated or parody versions of themselves. It’s playing off the sense people have from seeing these guys so much and often in similar roles that they know who they are. There’s an idea of who James Franco is based on an amalgamation of interviews, public appearances, roles, and factoids about him that makes people think they know who the guy is. And a lot of people don’t like that guy. Franco gets called out a lot, and is an especially favored target in this movie. His capacity for self-mockery goes way beyond everyone else. Interestingly, Evan Goldberg told the press that he was the only person besides Seth who never said “that’s going too far” in terms of skewering their public image. I can’t imagine what else they could have asked Michael Cera or Danny McBride to do that goes much further than what we see here.

As the fellowship of buffoons go into lockdown in Franco’s kitschy house, Jay tries to point out that this is the actual rapture and maybe they can still be saved if they redeem themselves in the eyes of god. Meanwhile, they deal with the challenges of food and water shortage, getting tired of each others’ shit, and dealing with the anarchic Danny McBride. McBride plays a version of his Kenny Powers character (from Eastbound and Down) that is unleashed by the apocalypse, rather than humbled by it. He reacts to the desperate nature of their situation with no fucks to give. Once he walks out on them, the movie has a void to fill where McBride’s confrontational comedy used to be. He’s an asset in every fucking thing he’s in and if he didn’t pop back up later to deliver the best, most hilarious scene in the movie, I’d have been a bit disappointed. However, that self-awareness Rogen and Goldberg seem to have in bulk saves the day as they replace the funny and hostile drama with an episodic, hilarious bit that brings the movie back to its “Christian Apocalypse” concept full-bore.

The exorcism scene is where Jonah Hill finally gets to let his hair down.

One of the longest cons in the movie is Jonah Hill’s nice, sensitive guy thing. Very little of the quipping or funny reactions/exchanges come from Hill. He’d be the straight man if this movie had one. The persona he’s lampooning is one quite divorced from his usual selfish-jerk thing. In fact, it’s the opposite kind of personality and that’s key. If you’re clued in, you might be amused at how he keeps the benevolent, sensitive front up. If not, it’s still funny both on a meta level and in the movie when he gets possessed by demon rape and brings on the full Jonah Hill style against his friends as they make a lame attempt to exorcise him. I’m a big fan of Hill, so this scene was delicious for me as was the realization that over an hour of screen time had been devoted to setting up this one big joke about Hill’s typically abrasive, sarcastic characters.

By the time Hill goes rogue on them, we’ve already seen a couple of demons kicking around and they are surprisingly convincing. I was expecting demonic characters, or maybe possessed people cameos, but the movie eschews all that mythic level stuff and sticks to the humans. This does not preclude an epic and stunning finale where Seth and Jay face off against a giant demon with seven snake heads and a swinging, fiery cock. This is not only convincingly done on an effects level (as much as it can be, anyway) but is just where they take the craziest and biggest ideas and imagery they can come up with and run with it. And why not?

Light on females as it is, both Rihanna and Emma Watson get to have some fun.

If you’ve seen Pineapple Express or Superbad or even 21 Jump Street, you have some idea of the style of comedy and the general thematic content/tone that this movie is going for. This is the kind of extra depth and nuance that pushes otherwise unremarkable comedy into the stratosphere. And given my love affair with Parks and Recreation I think it’s confirmed that I have a strong love for comedies with big hearts (but I also love the Coens so what does that say?) and This is the End has a huge one.

It’s also one of the funniest movies of the year. Not that 2013 has been packed with great comedies. In fact, This is the End makes it clear how conspicuously absent the comedy landscape has been so far this year. With another “bunch of friends deal with the end of the world” movie coming out later on, hopefully This is the End gets some competition not just as a comedy but also as an apocalyptic comedy. Which… is that a thing now?

If not, it should be.

The power of flight means a lot to me.

Man of Steel is the movie that will do for Superman what Batman Begins did for Batman. This does not mean it’s perfect. Like with Batman Begins and due to their having the same writer, there are stretch-marks here and there that feel like the pangs of a mighty child whom suffered a difficult birth. Man of Steel is probably a much better film than Begins, however, if only because as a directorial effort it far surpasses the often clumsy Begins. The only reason I compare these movies is because it is the Dark Knight trilogy of Christopher Nolan’s that most directly informs the project. This ends up coming up more as a writing comparison, because of David Goyer, than anything else.

Zack Snyder is making movies at his peak right now and Man of Steel is the finest distillation of his tremendous, possibly unique strengths and sensibilities. He knows what kinds of things people want to see in a Superman movie and he was absolutely the right guy for this job. He understands instinctively how to shoot and score and direct in a way that keeps this movie both epic and grounded which seems to me like a very difficult balancing act. The purest joys of Man of Steel are derived from its cinema, not it’s story. For one thing, Man of Steel is a sensory slam dunk with constantly beautiful imagery accompanied by rousing, grandiose music. I said the same sort of things about Sucker Punch and probably about Watchmen but here is a creativity backed by serious resources and unhampered by the demands of adaptation or of authorial vision. Free from the responsibilities of writing the movie or slavish translating a beloved, singular story, Snyder is allowed to play in the sandbox like the visionary architect that he is.

All credit where it’s due, Goyer is consistently a writer whose work I struggle with liking. His pretentious, on the nose themes and speeches and indulgence in cheesy, pandering one-liners that induce cringes instead of the limp grins they’re going for. That said, Goyer frequently takes ideas and concepts from comics and makes them work on a very different kind of paper. He’s the guy who made Blade work (though he deep-sixed that franchise when he tried to direct it) and he’s likely who we have to thank for fucking ninjas in Begins and the best-written (let alone performed) Joker we’re ever likely to get. Man of Steel is not free from his irritating indulgences: they have been pared down making cringey shit few and far between but also resulting in that shit being even more noticeable and jarring than usual. I’ll get to specific examples later.

FROM THE DEPTHS OF SPACE COME SPOILERS. GO EASY, STAR-SAILOR.

There’s quite a bit of Krypton in this movie.

One of the best and most surprising things in the movie is the expansive prologue on Krypton. Not only do we witness the birth of Kal-El, the first “natural birth” on Krypton for centuries, but we also see the entire fall of not only the stagnating Kryptonian society but the planet itself. Jor-El (Russel Crowe) is the planet’s foremost scientist and tries to warn the government that the planet is about to be destroyed. Their massive energy needs have caused them to push the place past its expiry date, a grave error made in spite of the warnings of Jor-El and his colleague Zod (Michael Shannon), the planet’s foremost military leader. General Zod means to hold the government (and their silly fucking hats) responsible for their misdeeds and wants to save the Kryptonian future. Kryptonians are born under a Matrix-like machine apparatus complete with a eugenics program that selects individuals for certain roles in society. Kryptonians are bred to be warriors like Zod or scientists like Jor. Understanding that this is one of the reasons their civilization fell, Jor opted to let his son be born naturally as a symbol of freedom of choice for his people. Imbuing him with the genetic history of Krypton, he sends him off into the stars in defiance of Zod’s eugenics-centric plans for a new Krypton. Zod thinks some “bloodlines” are less worthy than others, pointing to the government’s endless debates and inaction as a condemnation of softer, intellectual selection as unworthy. Jor, given his ideals, rejects this and they have them a big ol’ fight as civil war rages across Krypton.

This sequence is staggering, simply staggering. Not only is Krypton a wildly fantastic place, the kind of thing that seems like it jumps right off the cover of a 1940′s dimestore scifi novel, but everything about it is informed by incremental world-building. The technology, based seemingly on metamaterials and particle manipulation, feels consistent and unique. Alien, also, which is very important. Even the ornate clothing and armor feel consistent to the alien culture and environment of Krypton. Even the flora and fauna get a bit of attention, with Jor riding a dragon (as you do) in a thrilling chase that is one of the better of the many great action sequences in the film.

Russel Crowe is all over this movie.

One of the writing problems consistent in David Goyer’s work is his occasionally half-assed approach to character motivation. A question that sort of makes you pause during the prologue is “why do Jor and Lara stay behind?”. One could surmise a number of reasons, had the movie not gone there, or they could simply have supplied one. Why does Jor stay behind? Because their fate is “tied to Krypton’s”. They simply refuse to leave and it doesn’t really make much sense when the means (as we see later) are present. Why do they have to stay and die? I can accept that they do, of course, but not the reasoning as given. Ultimately a minor issue but one that belongs to a category of writing problem that threads through this movie and pretty much all the movies Goyer has written.

With baby Kal safely dispatched to Earth, Zod is arrested by the council and sent to the “Phantom Zone” along with his handful of lieutenants. Before going, we get a brief but intense measure of the insanity and zealotry that boils beneath the surface of a man who claims to be serving “the greater good”. Zod is the kind of villain that gets almost as much development and attention as the hero. It’s always nice when a villain has a better motivation than “being evil” and it’s through Zod that we begin to understand what Jor meant when he said that Kryptonians had “lost something” when they started their eugenics program. The burden of being trapped in a predetermined role is at the center of Zod’s aggression, ruthlessness, and eventually his insanity. It’s all up to Shannon, who is more than game for it, to get across that complex vortex of emotion running underneath the veneer. In a less than subtle movie, Zod is a character whose motives are subtly handled even as he speechifies about them.

Getting Shannon was a coup.

People may be surprised, given Man of Steel‘s very effective trailers, that the movie does not segue from the fall of Krypton to Kal’s childhood. Instead, we meet Kal-El/Clarke Kent (Henry Cavill) as an adult. Lost in the world and trying to stay that way, Clarke has grown to his 30′s still not knowing the full scope of his origin. However, he’s compelled to help people and Snyder presents the audience with a statement about how he’s approaching this as a superhero movie. Clarke doesn’t hesitate to save a burning oil rig full of people, revealing himself to them (inexplicably shirtless) as he does so. He crumples doors, withstands flames swirling around his body, and holds up a control tower in the space of a few minutes, a dizzying display of realistic application of his powers that shows how coy Snyder is not going to be about them.

Not just Clarke’s powers, but also his limits. He is not limitless. The feat of strength required to hold up that tower is probably the greatest he’s ever attempted by this point (the reason to think so is given by the movie a bit later) and it causes him to pass out after the whole fucking thing falls on him. Alone, he drifts under the waves and flashes back to his childhood. The formative years of Clarke’s life are delivered to the audience intermittently, in sequences much like this one. Sometimes the triggers are a bit thin (the school bus for instance) but it is an interesting, if not entirely effective, way to both do and not do the conventional origin story. Superman’s origin is ultimately familiar to us and this movie only delivers what it has to, saving time and energy for the stuff that is remixed or given a fresh coat of paint (like the Krypton stuff).

Henry Cavill looks remarkably like Hugh Jackman here.

An element that rings out as Clarke awakens underwater, with playful whales swimming above him, is the sense of awe and wonder evoked by Snyder’s camera. It is not an accident that people compared some of the shots of sunlight over Kansas corn-fields to Malickian capture of natural beauty as a means to evoke almost cosmic wonder. Man of Steel plays with this as well, and it’s a subtle intelligent hint about what differentiates Earth from Krypton (it’s a barren, harsh world) and why Clarke may feel enough of a connection to his adopted world to choose it over Zod’s plan for a terraformed, Neo-Krypton version.

After the oil rig episode, Clarke goes back to business as usual. He moves around, place to place (even Canada), taking odd jobs and occasionally finding opportunities to help people. Urban legends spring up wherever he goes but he’s always trying to cover his tracks in respect to his human father, Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner). Clarke is a man who has a pathological need to use his powers to help people. This need springs naturally and evocatively from the movie’s handling of flashbacks detailing all the times he’s had to hide who he is, even at the cost of his father’s life, and how using his powers to help people began as an impulse toward rebellion. Now, as an adult, that impulse is beginning to blossom into something else. Clarke isn’t quite Superman yet and even though it may have been partially intentional, he doesn’t feel like a character that Goyer and Snyder quite pinned down on the page.

I do really like the anonymous, David Banner style of Clarke’s transience.

While Clarke’s penchant for doing good comes across well as a core characteristic, and I like the tension the movie sketches between he and dad, there’s not much else about Clarke that gives the impression of a strong character. I think this may have been partially intentional because this is a guy who is still figuring out who he is. But in true Goyer style, he’s also spouting off about himself whenever the script needs him to. One minute he’s referring to Krypton as “my world” and the next he’s telling General Swanwick (Harry Lennix) that he’s as “American as it gets”. It’s like the script can’t decide if Clarke is an alien or not, whether he’s entranced by his true origin so much that he immediately identifies with it, etc. There are some really obvious emotional journeys Clarke could have as a result of everything he is and learns but they are roads not taken. I would have preferred something generic over nothing at all. As it is, Clarke has surprisingly little to say throughout the movie and even less that helps us identify what he is thinking and feeling. Superman was always a mild-mannered boyscout and Henry Cavill gets that across well, with a wide-eyed benevolence exuding from his shiny blue eyes and ridiculously chiseled jawline. Beyond that, it’s hard for me to say much about him as a character with an emotional arc. He is already predisposed to helping people so I suppose his arc is deciding between Earth and Krypton. The movie does keep this at the forefront of the plot, but Clarke’s feelings about it never really come out through interaction. His interactions with other characters are sterile, even with supposed love-interest Lois Lane (Amy Adams).

The age of 33 is not a coincidence. Though he’s probably more correctly understood as a Moses figure, Superman has also long been infused with Christ-like characteristics, imagery, and allegory. That Clarke Kent is 33 years old when he discovers who he is, receives his moral imperative from his father, and gets thrust into a larger destiny, is totally intentional as a reference to this connection. And fine, I guess. Superman Returns did it a lot more ham-handedly than does Man of Steel. Aside from one glib reference and the circumstantial connection, there’s not much made out of Superman as Christ. This is wise, I think, as I don’t know much patience contemporary audiences have for a geek idol being turned into Jesus.

That said, Superman is a figure with enormous responsibility but with the moral character to wear it lightly. This does eventually come through in the movie, but it also renders the character more inert than he should be. He’s remote, detached, and omnipotent. Is this supposed to be somebody’s characterization of a God?

Clarke has struggled with his powers and the urge to use them his whole life.

Part of the reason Superman never really feels like a three-dimensional character is that once he actually becomes Superman, the movie takes off running and never stops. He barely has any time to interact with the human cast, people like Lois Lane and the slew of unconvincing generic military types. Well, except for Harry Lennix. That man would exude militaristic authority if he were playing a transvestite retailing golf clubs. Lois Lane’s attraction for Clarke is completely underdeveloped, though I suppose it’s because he catches her falling like forty times in the movie. Too many times, really, for a character that is way more self-motivated and “strong female protagonist” than usual. This is all good stuff and Lois is well served by a script that constantly keeps her in the mix. It’s just that Goyer uses her falling off shit as an easy infusion of stakes and he uses it too many times.

Clarke’s attraction for her makes more sense, really, since she’s his first friend who actually knows him and his need for human connection (while understated probably too much) is also one of those pieces of characterization he does get. When they finally kiss, a Goyerism is produced to ruin the moment as Lois says “you know it’s all downhill after the first kiss right?” and Clarke quips about being an alien. I cringed so hard I have three eyes.

Plus, the actors have simply no chemistry. I hate mentioning that because it feels so trivial in some way, but it’s really not. You buy movie romances that hinge on very little precisely because the actors are able to convince you via inflection, body language, etc. In this case, none of that is there. What sparse accounting for the relationship is present on the page is all there is. This subplot reminded me of how the relationship is handled in Thor but Chris Hemsworth is allowed to have more charm in his beard than Henry Cavill is allowed to have in his entire meaty body. Fortunately, nobody behind Man of Steel was trying to make Lois and Clarke’s romantic interest in each other a centerpiece for the movie. It’s obligatory, yes, but a good way to dodge obligatory romance is to reduce its importance to the plot.

Seriously, he’s practically her Google Car.

Up until Zod lands on Earth and fucks up everyone’s year, Clarke has mostly stuck to accidents and natural disasters. He has not learned how to fight, that we see, or match his powers against others like him. Earlier, when Clarke gets an infodump from the computer-bound ghost of Jor-El, he hears about how the only way to know his limits (and to stretch them) is to keep testing them. This beautifully recalls the oil rig where we see him somewhat vulnerable, just as it beautifully sets up his attempts to break gravity’s hold over him. We understand that so far as we see, Superman is not at the full height of his powers. As the movie progresses, his unwillingness to give up is what keeps him in the game. It’s not skill or training, he doesn’t have those, and the movie doesn’t always do a great job of conveying this. When we see Superman fighting Zod and his underlings, we’re supposed to probably understand that he keeps getting his ass kicked because he’s out of his league, but it’s that willpower that makes the difference. Unfortunately, it’s not until Zod actually points out this shortcoming that we can contextualize the beatdowns we’ve been watching.

Plus, Clarke’s inability to take out one or two Kryptonians on his own necessitates a perfunctory and disappointing exit for all of them except Zod. They get sent into a singularity after an incredibly techn0-babbly and silly plan that feels a bit too much like the way the bomb in The Dark Knight Rises was handled (thanks again, Goyer) for comfort. Only this time, instead of flying it away from the city they are using the MacGuffin Device (Clarke’s ship) as a bomb against the Kryptonian world engine that is violently terraforming the planet.

Almost like something out of He-Man. Almost.

The body count in this movie is a huge troublesome thing. In The Avengers, the first thing the heroes do during the climactic fight is try to contain it and come up with a plan to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. Man of Steel pays little attention to considerations like this until it’s convenient. This is a movie where Supes tells people in Smallville to go indoors while his battle (and the military’s ill-informed intervention) basically level the whole fucking place. Planes crash into the streets, Supes gets knocked into and out of buildings, and he eight foot tall Kryptonian soldier throws a fucking train. It’s madness.

It’s also nothing compared to what is visited upon the people of Metropolis. The world engine uses gravity to somehow alter Earth to be more like Krypton. The effect is huge in scale and levels several blocks of the city center. We see plenty of people presumably die during this chaos. Buildings shatter and fall over, people get caught in fireballs or rubble, and that’s before Superman and Zod start their version of the super burly brawl.

And yes, talking about this begs a comparison to The Matrix Revolutions. While that movie is dated, effects wise, it has a better version of the same fight. Zod and Supes don’t fight for very long, anyway, and it’s punctuated by melodramatic speeches, making it a disappointment for being something you’ve waited the whole movie to see. You keep waiting for Superman to have a really iconic godlike moment and it never really comes. You find yourself preferring the smaller (it’s almost funny thinking of it that way) acts of superheroism he does earlier in the movie. To wit, I found his actions on the oil rig much more heroic and moving than when he destroys the world engine in the Indian Ocean or any single moment he spends fighting Zod. It’s not as if it isn’t a glorious action sequence. It is. It just gets tiring watching super-strong, indestructible guys punch each other.

Though it does make for moments like this one.

In spite of the size and spectacle, the last reel or so of the movie just doesn’t connect. The most major sign that additional course-correcting was needed comes when Superman kills Zod. By this point, the two of them have probably killed hundreds in collateral damage. Their fight is a natural disaster of monumental proportions. We do see that there’s a lot of Metropolis that doesn’t get destroyed, but it’s hard to shake the bombed out buildings and familiar white ash that the human characters are left with on the ground. Given all this, it seems trite and unbelievable that Superman finally ends the battle as Zod is about to heatray a family in a train station. After the unimaginable death toll no one seems to care about, it’s actually having to be up close and personal with the cost that freaks him out enough to kill a guy. He’s like a talking predator drone.

Okay, though. Superman shouldn’t just execute motherfuckers, that’s not who he is. But they really couldn’t spare a throwaway line during or after the fight to explain or justify all that death? They couldn’t leave Superman partially haunted by it?

Instead, the ending barely works because they expect the audience to believe that Superman’s face isn’t the most well known face on the planet by this point. Because the movie works like only five people are ever involved with this huge, global scale alien invasion event (come to think of it, Man of Steel is as much an alien invasion movie as a superhero movie), I guess they thought that having Clarke go work at the Daily Planet would be an acceptable thing. My criticism here is less that this happens (it’s part of the Superman mythos after all) but that they so lazily support it as a thing that could actually ever happen after the events of the movie.

A lot of people had to have seen his face, right?

Even though it seems that Zod has knocked out all the electronic equipment (not actually so, but people will argue it), there’s enough people who see Supes up close that it would be impossible to keep his likeness a secret. No credence is paid to this in the movie. Audiences are not really tough on unlikely things so long as they are attended. Had they done an Avengers style bit of the world coming to grips with the events and character(s), the movie could have avoided this criticism. It’s jarring while you’re watching it. Too much of the last act boils down to “wait, what?” for the spectacle to be enjoyed without pause.

There’s a sense to which spectacle and raw cinema at this scale and of this quality sort of undermines issues posed by narrative or writing problems, uncrossed t’s and undotted i’s, but there’s also no denying that Man of Steel would be a better movie if they’d paid more attention to that shit. In fact, I think Man of Steel is going to register as an uncomfortable but minor disappointment on a couple of levels. For some people, spectacle matters more than anything else (it’s why they go to the movies). At the end of the day, Man of Steel is not the sacrifice of good sense/taste to spectacle that, say, the Transformers movies are. I only mention this because I’m afraid I may be giving the impression that it’s some empty-headed CG-fest when it isn’t. Snyder is too good at creating images and moments that rouse, move, or amaze for that to be the case.

For all its problems, it is not a stupid film. It’s just so well realized so much of the time that stupid shit (Zod can somehow enter Superman’s dreams?, “I just think he’s kinda hot”, etc) is jarring and it feels like precisely the kind of stupid shit that isn’t well-intentioned but lazy or pandering or cloying. The unfortunate reality of things is that if your quilt is immaculate, that one fucked up patch brings the overall quality far more into question than does a rough patch on a rough quilt. Blights mar astonishingly beautiful things more than they do the mundane things, which is why a movie like Fast 6 gets an overwhelmingly positive review while Man of Steel gets the “good but not great” treatment.

“Evan, stop it. It’s just a mooooovie!”

Overall, I think there’s a ton of merit in Man of Steel in spite of how much time I’ve spent discussing its flaws. A lot of people are reviewing the movie less charitably. There’s a lot of talk about how boring it is and I just don’t agree. It’s structure (not quite an origin, but trying to have that cake and eat it too) and pacing (long foreplay, too quick to climax) create or cement its narrative flaws, but there’s a lot of thought behind this movie. It has fucking themes, even if the movie kind of rolls over them. Henry Cavill is a plenty good Superman and I hope to see more of him and his cape. Some people are going to wonder if they alter the explanation for Superman’s powers, or change them around, or do Kryptonite. This is a good place to describe why I say there’s a lot of thoughtfulness here. Like I said earlier, Superman is still just figuring out his powers. By the time he’s Superman, he’s only tested them fully this once and they seem to grow a bit even over the course of that. He’s had longer to adapt to Earth’s atmosphere and solar radiation than his fellow Kryptonians, and it makes a noted difference in his ability to handle all that extra power. Only Zod figures out how to fly, in one of the better moments during their fight, and the others avoid the disadvantages of superhearing and Xray vision by staying protected in their cool, transparent breathing masks. There’s a nod to the concept of Kryptonite, even. Superman is weakened by Krypton’s atmospheric conditions because he has never had to adapt to them. It provides the same function and is somehow less hokey than Kryptonite.

I also hope to hear more of Hans Zimmer at this caliber. The score is brilliant, iconic, and informs every scene. Like his score for Inception, Zimmer works with a basic theme and reinserts it, bolsters it, thins it out, or lets it sing whenever the movie calls for it. What it amounts to is probably one of the most memorable scores for a superhero movie, if not the most.

There’s a lot of unnecessary shaky-cam in the movie, but fuck it if Snyder doesn’t shoot the big stuff like a boss.

With Zimmer’s help, Snyder has crafted a memorable movie that features some truly awe-inspiring ideas and moments. That’s where its merit is. It’s one of the great superhero movies, though seldom are they as ambitious as Man of Steel is. I tend to think that Snyder made this movie almost because it afforded him the opportunity to do that Krypton sequence. I hope so. Everything from the weird robots to the insectoid design of their ships and armor feels like it could just as easily be from some as yet unmade Miyazakian epic. Man of Steel will be a success and with that success will come a legacy for new Superman movies and possibly DC finally catching up to Marvel. But more than that (I’m a Marvel guy anyway), I hope that this movie proves the viability of cosmic-scale, ridiculous worlds and characters. I want to see more Kirby-inspired spectacle, dammit.

I think I’m going to see Man of Steel again for that Krypton bit. Honestly, I grinned like a happy infant for a lot of the first half of this movie. The beauty and wonder Snyder is able to evoke kinda washes pleasantly over you until the plot sets in. In its hurry to get the big action shit going, though, it sacrifices too much of the more thoughtful and unexpected stuff that made the early parts work so well. I wonder if I’ll feel the same way after watching it again. Sometimes you appreciate a movie more when expectations are left to the side and you’re cognizant of where the flaws are. I am at least sure that Superman may come off as a fuller character on a rewatch.

Eager to find out.

The Paris of Remember Me often feels like a living place.

Remember Me will be one of those games that people kind of miss out on. Every year or so, one or two low-profile games with interesting ideas get ignored by the mainstream only to be rediscovered as “cult” hits later on. Remember Me will probably be one of those. The game design is solid, reliable, and even has a few new and interesting ideas thrown in to what is generally formulaic. This is actually in keeping with other games like it (Enslaved, The Saboteur, Singularity… to name a few overlooked gems) where AAA game design concepts get remixed into new IPs, usually original ones, where designers add their own ideas. It enriches the experience of gaming, really, to see mechanics and ideas you like being reinterpreted a few times before the next big thing comes along. This is how we got Assassin’s Creed and others off the back of Grand Theft Auto III‘s core design philosophy. This is how we got entire subgenres of books, music, and films.

Remember Me doesn’t ape any particular game that closely, but it’s definitely got a familiar feel. Most of the gameplay is straightforward platforming broken up by acrobatic fights with a variety of challenging enemies. Some are calling it a sort of beat-em-up/platformer hybrid and this is basically true. However, the mechanics service the story and world of the game and always take a back seat to that. This is a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you like your games. There are enough games out there that push the envelope of all of the above (Tomb Raider) that I’m satisfied with the type of game that emphasizes narrative and world-building over rote gameplay mechanics like combat and jumping on a roof. Not that these parts of Remember Me are unsatisfying. It’s more that they aren’t the reason to appreciate this game.

Speaking of the narrative, inarguably its core priority, Remember Me weaves a deeply personal story through a larger scale (intimately delivered) rebellion story. Some of the writing is fairly overwrought but the ideas and themes come across very well and elevate the game into a worthwhile experience. If it sounds like all the most interesting stuff is in the story, rest assured that there are a few neat gameplay mechanics that emerge as well.

Nilin is our heroine.

One of the contextually important things about Remember Me is that it features a female lead character. The player always controls Nilin, the protagonist of the game. After Tomb Raider, this may not seem like such a big deal but it remains a fact that the games industry heavily favors male leads. Conventional wisdom is that games with female leads do not sell as well to the male-dominated market. Remember Me probably won’t shake up that truism by much, being one of those overlooked but solid games I mentioned. That said, it still feels bold to say “fuck that” and use a female lead anyhow. Especially when Remember Me could easily have featured a male lead without much consequence. That makes Nilin’s gender a choice, not a function. An important distinction. And not only that, but she’s a milatto baby!

Nilin is a “Memory Hunter” in a futuristic, cyberpunk Paris that is one of the last refuges of a world ravaged by global warming and warfare. These issues inform the environment, the little infusions of backstory and embellishment of the setting, but are not core to the story. This means that a lot of care was taken in creating a believable, self-contained world for this game. It always seems like games do this as a matter of course, but they really don’t. Most games do this to the same extent that early films used cardboard cacti. As a result of the care taken, Remember Me always feels like an actual setting, fresh if familiar. The setting feels like L.A. in Blade Runner or any of the hyper-urbanized settings of a cyberpunk novel. At the bottom of the city there’s flooding, garbage, death and decay. As you rise above the slums and ramshackle structures, there’s a gleaming metropolis of high-tech robots, augmented reality, and pronounced decadence.

The technology that informs all of this is Sensen, a sort of implanted augmented reality engine that everybody has. Sensen lets you manage your memories, which have become a sort of currency, but also work as a jack-of-all-trades much like contemporary cell phones which allow us to do a helluva lot more than call people. The Sensen appears as a floating hologram just behind our heads, hovering over our cerebellums. A Memory Hunter is a person who uses Sensen-derived tech to hack peoples’ memories.

Nice shot to show off the contrast of technological haves and have-nots in Remember Me.

When we first meet her, Nilin is in a prison called La Bastille. This is where political prisoners and enemies of the Sensen-controlled state are put to be experimented on, subjugated, and ultimately wiped of memory. Nilin stumbles through the halls with no idea who she is. Like Neo in The Matrix, all she has to guide her is a voice in her head. The role of guide is played by Edge, a verbose young man who refers to Nilin as “sister” and helps her escape La Bastille. The game is fairly exposition-heavy, which is understandable given the assortment of setting-specific terms and concepts players must learn, and it’s through exposition that we find out Nilin is also an Errorist. More than just a play on words (terrorist, har), the term “Errorist” implies the belief that its membership have that memories ought not to be edited, remixed, sampled, etc and especially not by a totalitarian corporation like Memorize, their sworn enemies and creators of Sensen.

Memorize has a huge grasp on Parisian society and probably the rest of the world. People in this Paris have a variety of accents, styles, and ethnicity which works with the background fiction: war and climate change have forced people to migrate. Edge has an American accent, for example, while Nilin is British.

Anyway, more than just wanting to stop Memorize from controlling everybody’s memories and therefore lives, Edge and the Errorists want to break Sensen’s hold on society and put a stop to various glitches associated with the technology. Foremost among these is the “Leaper” phenomenon. Named for their gangly bodies and jumping tendencies, the Leapers are like the Splicers in the Bioshock series. They are madmen and women changed forever by dependence on a specific kind of technology. Meant to empower, Sensen also has the capacity to corrupt. Nilin is an example of how Sensen can make a person very powerful indeed, but the Leapers are a constant reminder that Sensen technology has a severe downside and perhaps some mysterious, darker elements to be discovered later.

The “remix” sequences are unique and awesome, if not particularly challenging.

Nilin’s unique skillset means that she’s a major asset to Edge’s overall goals. He puts her to work doing what she does best: infiltrating important places and the people who control them. With her Sensen glove, Nilin can change small details of a person’s memory in order to create a desired change in behavior. People who liked Inception will gel to this immediately. It’s basically the same idea, just delivered through memories rather than dreams. That idea is that even a small alteration will have a ripple effect. We see dramatic examples of this in Remember Me both from people who are unaware they’ve been changed and who are aware and this awareness is actually part of the overall effect.

An early example is Olga, a mercenary hunting Nilin for money to save her husband who is becoming a Leaper due to Sensen corruption and the experimentation of Dr. Quaid (a Total Recall reference? I think so). Nilin makes her remember that Quaid killed her husband, which puts her on Nilin and the Errorists’ side. It’s a cool bit of work and an early indicator for a couple of the neater parts of the game, as well as some sticky flaws.

While the remixing mechanic is very cool and used just enough to always feel that way, never overstaying its welcome, it also raises some troubling questions. The fact that Nilin is profoundly altering people (a form of mind control really) is never really dealt with. I don’t need it to be morally justified (it kind of is) but I do want some acknowledgment of the long-term consequences of Nilin mucking around in peoples’ heads. Especially when the changes she makes usually have something to do with death and dismemberment. That she’s essentially a terrorist (from the point of view of Memorize) means that collateral damage is a fact of her life and an occupational hazard. The game does deal with this, and Nilin’s guilt over the consequences, but more with Olga and some of the other secondary characters would have helped flesh this out. Olga gets turned and then you barely see her. It’s very weird.

Since Olga is one of a handful of secondary characters, it would have been good to see her (and the others) more.

The other more surprisingly enjoyable feature of the game is the combat. Yes its straightforward, but it’s also a fairly robust and customizable (on the fly, too) combo system. The combos draw strikes from four categories: damage, regeneration, cooldown mitigation, and effect enhancing. Nilin eventually has four combos of increasing size and complexity with the option of flowing intricate strings of beneficial effects together. There’s an aesthetic element too. Nilin is beautifully animated and it’s always fun to execute her acrobatic, stylized martial arts moves. There’s also that you can choose your combos according to how the actual strikes flow together, creating your own choreography.

Fights are challenging on a fairly solid curve. As Nilin gets more powerful, eventually able to use her buffed up Sensen to make AR attacks (hacker stuff like logic bombs or temporarily rerouting robot AI), the enemies follow suit. She eventually fights giant mechs called Zorns, various other powerful robots, and Sabre Force (Memorize’s private police) goons outfitted with shields that damage Nilin if she attacks them. The Leapers also evolve, and eventually you fight combat-trained Leapers part of a Memorize project to enslaved the poor mutants and use them as labor and cannon fodder. There are even Leapers who can mask their Sensen signal, making them effectively invisible. Nilin also eventually masters this trick.

In some ways, Remember Me is incredibly old school. That it was published by Capcom makes an odd sort of sense (though it’s a French game) given that it follows the same basic gameplay pattern as Megaman. Nilin runs, jumps, and fights across levels only to face “boss” battles which subsequently reward you with new powers. When she’s fighting, Nilin’s glove takes on holographic spikes that make it look like a gauntlet. This eventually allows her to reroute power, fire interrupt signals at electronics, etc. It’s very much like how Megaman acquires new, useful powers by conquering other cyborgs. Nilin fights everything from Memorize higher-ups to Kid X-Mas, a reality-show bounty hunter.

Nilin uses her gauntlet to fire on Leapers, messing up their Sensens and keeping them off her back so she can maneuver.

Though the game does an admirable job in trying to keep the mechanics and settings feeling fresh, Remember Me eventually starts to feel sort of samey. One of the unfair criticisms being leveraged at the game is that it’s “too linear”. I think this actually should tell you about one of the game’s strengths. You want this game to be more open world since it seems like such an interesting place and the core mechanics of movement and combat are solid enough to probably support a more open design. However, the real flaw presented by the linearity of the game is that samey feeling it begins to take on near the end. Some boss fights are recycled, with more challenge, and the game retreads the same ground too often (you go to La Bastille twice at least).

The game is split up over eight chapters, each one taking around 60 minutes to complete. Some will run you longer as the game can be difficult in spite of itself. The camera and movement are occasionally awkward, which is very noticeable when so much of it flows well. Deaths end up meaning long load times before respawning (even with the game installed) and the falling deaths and instant-deaths via drone are annoying too often. This is just some rough spots in a solidly designed game, really. It’s not inherent to the game’s challenge level, which is really only a function of its combat system. The platforming is too simple and straightforward to really be difficult. The puzzles, while well designed, follow the same pattern. One thing that is difficult is finding all the upgrades and items that are hidden throughout the world. You can find these on the go, so it avoids the problem of forcing you to stay in the same location relentlessly hunting for goo-gaws. Instead, you’re meant to explore fluidly and the impeccably detailed design of the world often means its hard to see obvious places where stuff is hidden, even with occasional guidance from other Errorists who leave pictures behind as a hint system.

Sometimes Nilin’s battles take place within the mind.

Earlier I mentioned that Remember Me‘s storyline is actually very personal and I’ll talk more about that. For now, let’s get into some of the core themes of the game. The rebel/hacker hook is there to get you into the world and the cause Edge promotes constantly. You get a real sense of the reasons why Errorists want to fix Paris and get rid of Sensen. While I was inclined to dismiss the anti-technological flavor of Remember Me‘s themes, I noticed eventually that the game walks a very fine line between anti-technological sentiment and celebration of the empowerment created by it. Nilin never ditches her glove or Memory Hunter role even as she is instrumental in ending the Sensen corruption that plagues her society and has caused her so much personal trouble. So in one sense, the game is happy to leave Nilin a character capable of using technology to subvert others while taking that power away from an impersonal entity (Memorize). The destruction of the central server hub feels topical in the world of NSA data collection (I wonder how intentional this is, or if it’s just a big coincidence). You can get behind Edge’s desire to get rid of Memorize even when you find out that Edge is really H30, an AI spawned by the CPU and memories spawned accidentally by the system and Nilin’s childhood influence.

This is where we get personal. Nilin had an unhappy childhood caught between the Cartier-Wells power couple. Her father is the technical mastermind behind “memoriel therapy”, the idea that controlling bad memories could heal people of their mental anguish. Her mother is more business oriented, and eventually becomes the public face of Memorize. As Nilin regains her memories, she finds out that these people are, in fact, her parents (kept from her by Edge, presumably, so he could control how the information is used). Nilin remixes her own mother to change her self-destructive blaming of a horrific accident on her little daughter. This paves the way for reconciliation and is repeated later when Nilin remixes her father. Both realize what has been done to them, eventually, and come together in recognition of their fucked up shit and love for their grown daughter, who has surpassed both of them.

We return to that car accident several times in the game. It hits you right in the feels, watching little Nilin at the mercy of her self-absorbed and negligent parents. The whole saga of Memorize comes down to a father trying to fix the suffering of his daughter, unable to see how he himself exacerbates it. Nilin’s dad is totally oblivious to the outer effects of Memorize. He stays locked up in his memories, trying to find a way to fix it all. Her mother simply doesn’t care anymore. She’s wounded, pissed off, and hateful and turns that negativity outward with major responsibility for all the draconian and exploitative elements of Parisian society.

So it all boils down to a lonely little girl and her fucked up relationship to her parents. I can forgive a  lot of overwrought speeches and dumb dialogue for a narrative twist this elegant. Though it is no less personal and potentially moving, the Edge reveal works less well. He thinks of Nilin as a sister because she helped create him. His founding of the Errorist cause is about being a suicidal AI, trapped with all the shitty memories nobody wants and slowly being corrupted by them. Though it results in probably the most perfunctory (if cinematic) boss fight in the game, the fact that Nilin is killing her only real friend is a point well taken.

The drones are super annoying. But they are also often a part of the lively background of the game.

All in all, Remember Me‘s strongest selling points are its strong narrative (rare in games) and world-building. It’s a fairly short game so I’d recommend people wait for it to inevitably drop down in price before buying it. It’s one of those games that, unfortunately for the developer, don’t sell until they’re at bargain bin prices and game-hunting writers have proselytized for them. The early marketing sold me on the game completely, mostly based on the setting and consistent mechanic justifications (how the memory tech weaves its way into everything in the game).

It’d be too much to say that I loved Remember Me. I was definitely satisfied and will likely play it again someday to relive its story and world. Sometimes, that’s what games should be. A lot of people complain about the $60 price tag for a game that takes less than x hours to complete. I think, as a person who pays $15+ for 90-120 minutes of entertainment in the theater, $60 for 6-10 hours is a decent deal. It’s got nothing on something like Skyrim but this is not necessarily a weakness. Long games tend not to be very narrative, and that’s some peoples’ bag. I like all of the bags, though, I’m a fan of bags. Remember Me is in a different, no less valuable bag. Playing the $ vs. Length game is still an argument I can win, though, even for a game like Remember Me which most people will not pay full price for.

I hope they play it, in any case. The company who made it deserves some success for the impressive work they put in. We have to stop complaining about the stagnation of the games industry (content-wise) if we’re going to ignore games like this one.

Sometimes the apocalypse is a pretty place.

There are two silly, redundant debates circling around The Last of Us and it seems like I have to comment on them before I can really begin to write about this game and why it’s special. Prodigious, reckless spoilers are going to be in this review. So let me wrap a love-glove over it for you before you continue. If you want to skip right to where I get into the game and thereby avoid the background discussion I attempt to have about its context, ignore the next section here.

Sometimes the apocalypse is full of plague-ridden cannibals.

The first is this business about whether or not games are art. This seems ridiculous. If narratives are art, video games can be art. Not all games are narrative. Not all films or books are either. But video games which are narrative are attempting to achieve the same goals as fictive novels or films. Ultimately, narrative art is like any other art in that it attempts to have an interactive relationship with an audience. The pathways of that interaction are different in each of the three major narrative mediums consumed in our culture, but all three are certainly trying to achieve their respective version. Often, all three have potentially uncomfortable intersection between commercial enterprise and artistic endeavor. The exploration of a coherent theme often takes second place behind design-as-marketing decisions which are meant to avoid muddying the waters between product and profit. A good example unique to video games is the recycling of “tried and true” mechanics (even The Last of Us feels like an example, but I’ll discuss that in more detail later). But if you think about it, it isn’t so unique. Films and novels also recycle techniques that seem more profitable, they also pander to audiences that are in lucrative demographics, and so on.

But that’s just one of the arguments used to “prove” that games aren’t or can’t be art. It’s easily overturned and contains enough to overturn a second argument: that the interactivity courted by the very nature of video games means they can’t be art. An obvious element of any workable definition of art is that it must be interactive in some way. Narrative art is a subclassification I’m using to describe the specifics that separate video games, novels, and films from, say, a sculpture or painting. These static bodies are also interactive, but they are generally not narrative. That is, they don’t explore a theme or subject (or web thereof) via narrative. They do it in a different, more esoteric way. This is why it’s also obvious, when you think about it, that the three narrative media I’m discussing are the most widely consumed and considered most accessible.

Since I can go on and on about this, I’m going to stop here and move on to the second silly debate. This would be whether or not The Last of Us is “finally” the “Citizen Kane moment” in video games. On its face, we can sort of see what this is supposed to mean and we can react to the question accordingly. I would argue, though, that it’s a silly question. Games aren’t universally narrative and they don’t actually need a Citizen Kane. In fact, a lot of game designers would argue that chasing after the same narrative and artistic goals as films do is folly. I disagree with that as an encompassing position because I think it’s awesome that games can actually accommodate a huge variety of creative philosophies. Pundits and “game journalists” tend to simplify to an extent that is actually pretty embarrassing for and to gamers, and this is just part of that. Whether or not we apply the Citizen Kane standard just to narrative games, it still reduces what is possible in terms of transcendent artistic and historic success to an old movie I doubt most people considering this question have even seen. It’s a shallow standard, in other words, and I don’t say this to somehow sidestep a quality issue with The Last of Us. I say it because it needs to be said. Because gamers owe themselves a bit better, and the people who don’t play games anyway should really just shut the fuck up.

So is The Last of Us the Citizen Kane of video games? Sure, you could say that. But it doesn’t matter and it isn’t a very interesting label. It’s also misleading. Fuck that, let’s do better.

Phew. Over 500 words written and now I can finally talk about the actual goddamn game.

More than being the best in class for the type of game it is, The Last of Us is also the best argument for the relevance of narrative games that piggyback on cinematic storytelling conventions and techniques (a dedicated script, reliance on cut-scenes and procedural dialogue, performances by digital “actors”, etc). Its type is “survival horror” which has evolved on several distinct lines since the genre term was first coined during the early Resident Evil days. Plugged into the Naughty Dog school of third-person movement and action (Uncharted series) which has been hugely influential in third-person games these past few years (see: Tomb Raider and the spiritually similar I Am Alive) are the expected gameplay mechanics of scavenging for supplies, inventory maintenance, and crafting. These are all enjoyable elements in and of themselves, but not because they are tweaked to perfection or yards ahead of other games that do similar things. The effectiveness of these familiar mechanics comes from a very different place and, I’d argue, it’s this relationship that underlines the specialness of the game.

See, every single one of these mechanics serves the story and setting. Many games have begun to pad out their play times by adding collectibles players can search for, or side content they can access in specific conditions. Most games do an inoffensive job of implementing these elements with in-game justifications. Some games do a very poor job (Far Cry 3, for example) of it. The Last of Us completely commits to its post-apocalyptic scenario such that familiar and potentially tedious activities, like collecting rags to make bandages, are infused with a sense of authenticity and desperate need that is unmatched even by other games that do it well (Tomb Raider with its nods to archaeology).

There’s a balancing act that is probably very hard to maintain between distracting the player with goo-gaws to hunt down vs. keeping them invested in and engaged with the story. The Last of Us makes this stuff work not only by doing a bang-up job of respecting this balance but by making sure that the quality of writing in even the little notes you find scribbled out by long-gone fellow survivors is high enough to keep you invested and make you feel like they are artifacts Joel and Ellie would actually care about. Perhaps unique to this game is that a lot of the character-based side content stems directly from the discovery of these items. If you don’t pick up that paper in that house, you might miss out on some insight into a character. But this isn’t about trying to get all the content possible from the product. Rather, the quality of writing is so high on this project that it’s as simple as actually wanting to know more about these people. It seems that the characterization philosophy Naughty Dog went with here is “always leave them wanting more”.

And oh but you do.

Neil Druckmann, who wrote this game, is a fucking hero.

This is a zombie apocalypse game, essentially. The zombies, this time around, are really a breed of infected mutants that are hyper aggressive and cannibalistic. They are infected with “cordyceps”, a fungal virus that is based on a real-world neuro-parasitic fungus that reprograms insect behavior. Joel (Troy Baker), our protagonist, is a Texan single father who tries to escape his quarantined town alongside his daughter, Sarah, and kid brother Tommy. Sarah is shot and killed in a horrific and emotional climax to their escape. Because I’m a father with a little girl, this hit me especially hard and immediately cemented identification with Joel.

The present of the game is 20 years later, after the world has largely moved on from the chaos and destruction that immediately followed the cordyceps outbreak. People live in walled zones, protected by military juntas, and struggling to survive on limited resources. Banditry is common outside of the military quarantines, and even Joel later admits to having done his share of preying on others in the name of survival. When we meet him, Joel is a smuggler who works with Tess (Annie Wersching), a hard-as-nails woman who may be his lover (the game is ambiguous about this). He and Tess are about to go settle a score with a lowlife who fucked them over.

In Boston and other similar cities all over the States, the loosely organized military regime is resisted by the “Fireflies”, an idealistic insurgency trying to restore a semblance of normalcy and civilization to what’s left of society. Their vendetta puts them in the path of Marlene (Merle Dandridge), a Firefly leader who’s hand is being forced by an untimely defeat. Wounded, Marlene hires Joel and Tess to smuggle a young girl out of Boston and into Firefly hands. Ellie (Ashley Johnson) is a tough-talking fourteen year old girl with a strong resemblance to Ellen Page or a character she would play. She’s also immune to cordyceps, which the Fireflies want to translate into a cure.

Ellie and Joel are as realized as video game characters come. They have dimension, pathos, and vulnerability that are grounded by performances that would be just as incredible in a film or television show.

Joel and Tess are reluctant to help, especially Joel, but they do anyway and this begins a 10-month (or thereabout) odyssey into the west which makes up the “road story” tone of the game. Joel’s arc is familiar to fans of Children of Men or players of The Walking Dead. Both stories also feature an older male protagonist who is matched with a younger female character who needs their help and protection. Joel is reluctant but the cards are laid out on the table. It’s because caring about people hurts, and he’s spent 20 years trying to forget his daughter. He won’t even bear her name mentioned in his presence. But he wouldn’t be a good character if he didn’t soften over time, coming to love and support Ellie almost in spite of himself (and she earns it). Ellie is similarly damaged, more by being born into this world, but represents the hope for something better. Not only for Joel, but for the world. Her potential savior’s role weighs on her but also drives her, supported by natural pluck and grit. She’s the quintessential young tough girl. Shades of True Grit with the crusty, emotionally withdrawn mentor/protector.

Games writing is something of a backwater even in an era where games make more money than films. Good writing is sort of rare in commercial films also, but even that stuff makes most commercial games writing look like Faulkner. Here, Neil Drucknerr and the others who no doubt helped write this script do something I’ve almost never seen in a video game. They almost never compromise character for plot, subtlety for accessibility. This makes the storytelling in The Last of Us remarkably mature. Games are still a medium where “mature” tends to translate to gore, swearing, fucking, and strong violence. Mature really means not watering down complexity to talk down to the audience. Mature really means to respect them and that they’ll be able to handle a story with gray where there’s usually black and white, with silence where there’s usually exposition, etc. Piecing together who these people are and what motivates them is part of the point of the game, making its narrative more than just an excuse to string action scenes together.

This isn’t to say that The Last of Us is light on gore, violence, and swearing. Since it’s an American game, there’s no fucking, but the game isn’t shy about referring to sex or sexuality (Bill is gay!). The thing is, these elements aren’t gratuitous but again are consistent with the story. Uncharted is not a game series that needs a fourteen year old with a potty mouth stabbing mushroom-zombies with a switchblade or going toe-to-toe with a pedophile cannibal. That Ellie is so capable on her own, and the bulk of the first half of the game deals with her proving that, also offsets any sort of paternalist agenda (incidental or otherwise) evoked by making her the protectee. In The Last of Us this feels appropriate and uncompromising. This is a dark, fucked up world, made even worse by the collapse of civilization. The Last of Us almost always beats its audience to the punch in accounting for authenticity as we would understand it for such a world.

But there are moments of beauty.

Some critics have talked about how The Last of Us “feels” as a game. Like the filmgoers who only want abject “entertainment” and dismiss or are confused by films that challenge them to think past knee-jerk gratification, these guys are overly concerned with how “fun” this game is. Some of this is due to the setting and story. I say nuts to that. More sticky is the design of the mechanics and controls and how they reflect both the desperate and serious tone of the game and defy some of the precision and accessibility usually sought by game designers.

The debate is really whether the mechanics of the game go too far in terms of authenticity with a net cost of fun. Having to move a ladder around three times to get over an obstacle may not be “fun” in the conventional sense, but it is part of the realism and atmosphere of the game. It also doesn’t come up often and always feels like the kind of thing survivors would really have to do, and probably wouldn’t love having to do. And though Ellie and Joel kill a lot of people and infected throughout the game, the actual mechanics are such that you rarely feel anything short of desperate. Ammo is usually scarce. Enemy AI is smart and will almost always use flanking and charging to get the drop on you. Joel also has limited ability to keep track of unseen enemies. In what is a great example of this game’s feature elegance, the familiar mechanic of pausing to go into a secondary vision mode to check out your environment is conceptualized here as simply “listening”. Where games like Tomb Raider or Assassin’s Creed have the same basic mechanic but it’s either just there or explained away by some setting function, The Last of Us simplifies it to the point of elegance. It’s a huge “well duh” moment because you think, why do other games not just explain it the same way? Does a great job of mitigating one of The Last of Us‘s more gamey elements and maintaining the delicate balance between game logic and authenticity that it does so very well.

This game is also psychologically stressful.

So I think I’ve established the character and relevance of this game’s challenges both in narrative and mechanics, but you may be wondering what the point is. The point is to drive a high degree of stress in the player. The characterization is so strong that you genuinely feel worried about Joel and Ellie (especially as the game isn’t afraid to kill the various secondary characters you meet along the way). The scarce resources and overwhelming combat enhance that concern because you’re not consistently sure that you are up to keeping them alive. Some of the stealth/combat scenarios in the game go a bit wide of the mark in terms of balancing challenge with the tedium of instant-death-respawn rinse/repeat but I think this was mitigated (for me at least) by the fact that the game is incredibly free-form about letting the player decide how they’re going to deal with the scenario. Sometimes you’re forced to sneak or gunfight or whatever, but this is rarely the case. More often you can clear areas by being a ninja, avoiding violence altogether, or blasting your way through either with a frontal (suicidal) assault or clever use of traps and distractions. The only penalty for tactical errors is the same as in real life: wasting resources and increasing risk of death.

The pacing of the game is such that the first half is spent predominantly running from danger to danger, whether it’s hostile humans or the infected, or environmental dangers like spores or decaying infrastructure. The respites don’t come often, but they are there. Later in the game, as Joel and Ellie cross into Colorado and beyond, the moments of quiet beauty come along more frequently. I realized while playing that this was a reflection of Joel and Ellie’s changing relationship. Eventually, Ellie becomes the daughter he’s lost and Joel’s cold heart gets to beating again. The crux of which comes when Joel finally has a chance to pass responsibility for her on to someone else but doesn’t. Their kinship is full of quiet, reserved emotionality that comes across beautifully due to the stellar performances and writing. I’ve been telling people that they’d watch this game if it were a show or movie, a double-edged comment about how seriously drama is taken in games. Is The Last of Us the most realized drama in the history of games? Probably.

The emotional narrative carves through the particularities of plot and the demands of commercial accessibility and makes such concerns feel gaudy and cheap.

Not only does The Last of Us easily surpass the great games already released in 2013 (Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider in particular) but it will probably go down as one of the finest games ever made. It’s such a powerhouse of interactive narrative that it may single-handedly rejuvenate an industry that is starting to show some signs of exhaustion with all the demands that have evolved in the making of AAA games. Seriously, when I look at the lists of animators, performance capture techs, and performance artists required to make games these days I have to wonder why these people aren’t making animated films free and clear. In the case of The Last of Us, the performances are so well captured and animated that it might as well be an animated film in terms of attention to detail and quality. Little things like body language and facial tics come across fully in every performance. After L.A. Noire, this type of thing is getting more common but it is perhaps worth noting that The Last of Us uses the more classic approach of creating a character and using a performer that looks nothing like them rather than simply recording a performance and digitally rotoscoping it (for lack of a better term) into a game. The effect is more impressive than I can really put into words, and you may not even notice it right away. You forget you’re playing a video game.

Now, if I may, I want to talk about the end of The Last of Us which is already its most controversial element. Endings are very hard, as any writer knows. In games, endings often feel perfunctory because they are sequel-baiting. So ends another naked grab at a franchise to endlessly milk money out of. The Last of Us is remarkable not only because its ending is abrupt, ambiguous, and thematically resonant, but because Naughty Dog quickly went on record saying that the story of Joel and Ellie is definitively over. This cleverly leaves them room to expand the world The Last of Us takes place in, if they choose, but also gives players closure. Closure is something that games rarely do well. This is partially what keeps video game narratives from achieving the levels of appreciation usually afforded to novels and films. Like the sagas of comic book superheroes, most games and franchises in gaming can only ever aspire to closure of a particular episode. This leaves players outside the rank and file “fans” a bit disenfranchised, if I can use that word. People want stories to end so that we can decide what they have meant.

An ending like that of The Last of Us is confusing for crops of players raised on games that end ambiguously because there’s going to be a sequel. Parsing the note that this game closes on against the idea that the story is really over may be more difficult and problematic for that type of player. That’s too bad, really, and sort of a sad commentary on the general quality and closure offered by most video game endings outside of RPGs which usually feature a higher-than-average focus on narrative consistency.

The Last of Us ends with a lie. But the lie says everything, as does the choice that the lie represents. By this point, Joel is ready to say “fuck you” to the human race (for which, in a general sense, we see that he is given ample reason) to keep Ellie alive. Ellie might choose herself to die for humanity, but there are no guarantees that the Firefly doctors will be able to do anything with her immunity and there’s a sense to which the choice Joel makes for her sake is reprehensible and understandable at the same time. You get it but you wish there was a third option. That’s a pretty good description of how complex behavior works in drama, and The Last of Us is full of examples if none so resonant and amazing as its ending.

Some will say that for all this talk of closure, there’s precious little of it in an ending like this. They are mistaken about what closure is. Anybody can put a plotline to rest. That isn’t why endings are hard. Endings are hard because they require a payoff to the thematic and emotional work of the story. The characters have to have changed in a way that isn’t non sequitor to all the shit they’ve been through along the way. Since the game is largely about Joel and Ellie bonding and becoming family to each other, the ending is great closure to this part of the story. The plot, that Ellie needs to get to the Fireflies because she’s immune, is also essentially over but I can’t blame people for thinking more could yet happen with that. It doesn’t matter though, because what matters is Joel’s choice and Ellie’s trust. Her words and her look in the final shot of the game speak volumes of closure.

It’s incredibly clever to have a journey fraught with these two saving each others’ lives go to a place so pointless and bleak, forcing a choice that utterly reflects the weight of all their adventures.

It’s interesting for me to ponder the effect of this ending on the moral absolutists that make up a large enough percentage of the people who are going to play The Last of Us. These will mostly be poorly adjusted adult gamers or youngsters who haven’t yet had enough run-ins with reality to ditch their certitudes. I expect a lot of them will be troubled by Joel’s choice, because it is not the arithmetic of morality they have been conditioned to approve of. Joel makes a selfish choice, in some ways, choosing one person’s life (and his own happiness/redemption incidentally) over the potential to save many. It’s the opposite of the moral calculus that we’re supposed to consider in larger than life scenarios, wherein one life is certainly worth many. The complexity of emotional and moral maturity means a disconcerting lack of certitudes, which is the kind of experience and state of mind a person would be better served having in order to appreciate The Last of Us the way it deserves. I think that getting there requires engagement with fiction that asks it of us, almost as much as it requires real life experience of hardship, loss, compromise, and moral decisions. That means that The Last of Us is as likely to usher in a higher order of critical thinking as it is to put off people who think Stannis Baratheon is the true hero of Westeros.

Honestly, I was very close to just gushing my way through this review. I tried my best to do justice to the complexity and achievement that The Last of Us aimed for and hit (with flying colors). Everybody is going to have favorite moments in a game like this, and I bet a lot of them will be quieter moments or those parts where the game (rarely and so effectively) really lets its hair down and allows for some visceral justice/revenge-meting. I also think that The Last of Us is a game liable to stay with people. It may be one of the very few games that people replay simply because they’re not sure how they feel the first time through.

By the time the game was over, Joel and Ellie felt to me like dear friends and people you genuinely want to see whole, together, and safe. Leaving them behind is hard, but I think they’ll make a life in Jackson, at least for a while, with Tommy and Maria and the only beacon of a “good” society that we see in The Last of Us.

Note the knife taped to the gun barrel and the magazine taped to the forearm.

I follow websites and news about the production side of movie making. I usually know a little bit about the “behind the scenes” stuff on a given film I’m interested in. Occasionally, a project comes along that is so fucked around and fraught with disputes, setbacks, script issues, etc that everybody hears about it. For World War Z you didn’t really have to be checking the trades or following the production to get put on notice about how troubled of a production it was. This kind of buzz, not to mention the delays in releasing it, usually means people are going to have to manage their expectations. I think that World War Z gets by on two things: people genuinely like the book it pretends to be based on and people always (fucking always) have time for zombies.

Fortunately for them, World War Z is actually a pretty decent movie. Yes I went into it with diminished expectations, probably like most people, but I think I can actually make a case. I mean, it’s not seamless. You can’t radically change entire acts of a movie without popping a few stitches, and they do show, but by borrowing liberally from Contagion, World War Z manages to not only stay coherent and reasonably smart, but keep zombies fresh enough to justify itself. That’s the real challenge.

The first bit hews closest to stuff you’ve seen in other zombies movies.

During what appears to be a regular day in his retired life, Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) and his wife Karin (Mireille Enos) are taking their daughters to school when all hell breaks loose. Though it’s full of dodgy CG and quick, disorienting cuts (a problem throughout the movie), the scenes of Philadelphia essentially collapsing are an effective intro to the larger-than-average scope of the movie. It’s called World War Z after all. Because Pitt and Enos have a nice, gentle chemistry with their kids, you do care about this family enough to want to see them make it to safety. A boon to them is that Gerry was once a UN investigator and they desperately want him back. His principle contact Thierry (Fana Mokoena) will help them get out of the city (they eventually wind up in Newark).

Pitt feels a bit out of place with his surfer hair and gentle eyes, but there’s an intelligence in his performance that comes through both in his constant measured calm and the tactics he employs to deal with the zombies. Early on, he prepares to take his family through an infested apartment complex in order to reach a helicopter waiting for them on the roof. He quickly tapes a knife to the barrel of his rifle and a magazine to his forearm (to ward off biting zombies safely). This is more contextual smarts than entire zombie movies/shows ever get around to having (The Walking Dead anyone?) and pretty quickly puts you in Lane’s corner. He is believable as an adaptive, professional investigator. He’s also got a sort of quiet kindness and compassion toward others that we see evinced throughout the movie. Adding to the surprising quality of the characterization is the way the movie shows how his calm helps him observe small details amidst the chaos. These powers of observation, probably his most useful skill, end up saving the day as much as his bravery and wits. He’s an easy hero to get behind, in other words, and Pitt carries the character (and thus the movie) on his shoulders like they weigh nothing.

The responsiveness to the pandemic always feels global and competent.

After his family is safe, Lane reluctantly agrees to go into the field to try and find a patient zero. If they can do that, they can make a vaccine and try to slow down the rate of infection which is overwhelming pretty much the whole planet. This follows pretty closely along with the usual schema of an “outbreak” movie (see Outbreak even!) and it’s a slightly bigger perspective on the usual zombie thing. This is the only way in which the PG13 violence and the sort of detached, “force of nature” depiction of most zombies in the film can even work. They operate like the surging limbs of one giant infection-spreading organism. This is actually pretty smart and the movie is very consistent with its version of zombies. Purists will dislike it, I expect, whether they are book fans or simply (ridiculous) zombie purists. The fact is, zombies need to be reinterpreted to stay fresh. The survivalist fantasy doesn’t cut it anymore. So remembering that zombies are a plague and basically constructing a plague movie around this seems like a smart play.

As Lane trots around the globe trying to piece together how this all got started, you realize that this structure works a lot better than it should. Each of the major locations and set-pieces have their own feel and casts of secondary characters. Though the cast is full of lesser or unknown actors, they all do good work in making this really feel like a global problem. They pull their weight, in other words, rather than dragging World War Z down into the sea of episodic random faces it could easily have been.

The Israeli sidekick being one of the bigger character surprises.

Foremost amongst the secondary cast is Segen (Daniella Kertesz), an Israeli soldier that escorts Lane out of Jerusalem after Muslims (of course) fuck up the nice defensive barrier that’s so far kept the city safe. After she is bitten, Lane cuts off her hand and saves her from infection. As he nurses her, we get a big dose of the compassion and competence that make Lane an effortless hero. Segen must feel that way too because she becomes instantly loyal to him, determined to help him and protect him even with one hand. She’s the kind of character you expect to float out of the movie, or die in some sacrificial moment or something, but she’s there throughout.

As Lane gets around, he hears stories and rumors that feed cool information about how the world is coping with the outbreak. This is the stuff that the book was centered on: a bunch of anecdotes and short histories to tell a global story. World War Z only really ever pays lip service to that idea, morphing it into a more straightforward story that nontheless tries to remember that there’s a world out there where this shit is happening. This allows for cool ideas like Jerusalem’s wall or the quiet Welsh village where Lane finally figures out how to save the world.

With a little help from his friends.

The conclusion of the story is probably one of its weakest points. But the climax is great. Lane figures out that the infected only spread the zombie to healthy hosts. Therefore, tricking them into thinking that hosts are sick by introducing benign or curable strains of deadly diseases is a way to vaccinate the surviving humans. Stuck alone with eighty zombies between him and safety, he elects to pump himself full of bad shit in order to test the theory. Lane walking alone through a crowd of zombies, calm and collected, is a very nice climax that circles back to why we like this character in the first place.

It’s not quite the “epic” feel that the book probably has (I haven’t read it) nor is it the scrappy Russian battle sequence that was ultimately dropped from the movie. Footage from that sequence did make it into the coda of World War Z (which is hampered by some cheesy voice over from Pitt, who sounds bored doing it). Images from it, particularly of Pitt wearing a heavy coat with what looks like armored plates in the same places he tapes magazines all the time, were leaked also which probably means some were disappointed that some of the “war” stuff was ultimately dropped from the movie. But it’s a great climax all the same, helped along quite a bit by the movie’s consistently good score.

Even the bombastic “zombie hordes” are executed much better than you might expect.

I would agree that World War Z is kind of an inappropriate title for this movie if you want to nit-pick the implications of “war”. There’s also that Pitt’s character is some kind of badass, which we see glimmers of in the movie, and could have been a zombie-killing machine had the movie gone another way. But they decided it didn’t work and they dropped that shit out of the movie. I don’t know what it would have been like had they kept it but I do know that the movie they wound up with is far from the trainwreck it, by all rights, should have been.

It’s sort of pointless to disparage the movie it could have been had they adapted the book more faithfully or kept the stuff they ultimately cut. I say it a lot but I’ll say it again: it’s important to evaluate and appreciate a movie on its own terms, for what it is, rather than what you wish it was or what it could have been. It’s a miracle big expensive movies even get made, really. Certainly huge movies that go way over budget, have writers hired to rework each other’s work, and where the director is happy being sidelined by over-eager producers and a “visionary” star (just some of the problems suffered during the production of World War Z), are even more of a miracle when they turn out halfway decent. So I mean, part of my reaction to World War Z is certainly derived from how much of an underdog it really is. I wonder how that stacks against those who had no expectations or high ones, going into this movie completely blind to context. Perhaps they’re the ones who are best suited to appreciate it or not based completely on its own merits. Perhaps not.

I usually hate this type of shit.

All that said, I think it’s more than just exceeded expectations (mine were seriously dismal) that have led to my positive position on World War Z. There’s plenty to like here, as long as you’re willing to let it be the zombie movie it is rather than the one you maybe wish it was. More than just stuff to like, what surprised me most was how thought out and intelligent it is. That the heroes are less the military and more the doctors and specialists of global organizations like the UN and WHO also feels thoughtful and over the boring, conventional military slant that they could easily have taken here. I mean, a lot of people probably just want to see motherfuckers tear zombies apart. I get that. We’ve seen it before, but I get it. The thing is, World War Z understands that conventional warfare is useless against this enemy. Not only that, but it’d be cinematically boring to see even fast-moving, hyper-agile zombies get torn up by conventional weapons. The few bits where World War Z indulges machine guns and bombs are within the confines of general chaos anyway and it works very nicely. Where there is more intimate violence, the movie understands that shooting zombies is less scary and ultimately less satisfying than having to fight them off with improvised weapons.

Plus, there’s a solid emotional core here. Lane’s concern for his family, and the scenes he shares with them, never feels hokey or cheesy. It’s genuine. Though the little kid they adopt after his stubborn family get eaten feels a bit weird. One of the big seams in the movie is that kid, I think Tommy is his name, who never even seems all that upset that his parents are food. So even though the end of the movie feels a bit perfunctory, and is another place where you can see the (appropriately) taping that holds this movie together, there’s an emotional dimension to it that feels all right even amidst the “this war is not over” sequel-baiting.

It’s a cartoon but a good one.

Making trailers for the R-rated ones must be a tough racket. The trailers for The Heat felt more like Rush Hour than Lethal Weapon… if you know what I mean. Turns out, this is a ribald and hilarious comedy that definitely follows the tradition of odd couple buddy cop movies to a tee. Only this time, the buddies are women and the director is Paul Feig, the guy who gave us the similarly female oriented but universally appealing Bridesmaids.

Though this one sometimes slacks off to its detriment, the pairing of aging (not that you’d know it to look at her) Sandra Bullock with Melissa “Force of Nature” McCarthy is pure genius. The movie putters a bit whenever they’re not together, and Bullock performs the more difficult of the two roles completely admirably and very generously to McCarthy, who gets to be the movie’s true selling feature.

Going into this expecting one of Sandra Bullock’s safe, low-laying-fruit movies might be in for a (pleasant I hope) surprise. Personally, I stopped finding her interesting in terms of her work years ago and was very surprised at how game she is here. It made me recall the Sandra Bullock of Demolition Man and Speed rather than the Sandra Bullock of fucking The Blind Side or The Proposal. McCarthy is the kind of comedienne that makes you wary because she seems almost supernaturally good. This owes a lot to her versatility. Not a single fat joke or body-gross joke in The Heat which is impressive if only because those jokes would have been all too easy in this movie.

All in all, this movie works but doesn’t quite soar. There’s enough here to add The Heat to the annals of great buddy movies, and it deserves a lot of credit for managing to find a balance between paying homage to the genre and making the most of being “the chick cop” movie.

Can’t help but feel like Bullock is sending up some of her prior roles with this one.

Bullock plays Special Agent Ashburn, an FBI hotshot who doesn’t seem to realize what a pain in the ass she is. Neurotic, competitive, and a braggart, Ashburn is the kind of character who would normally act as a foil to our plucky heroines. Instead, The Heat casts her as a heroine whose primary journey is one of self-awareness. She’s a pain in everybody’s ass, yes, but we also see her vulnerability and loneliness and this helps us sympathize with her even as we watch to see just how bad she’s going to stick her foot in her mouth next.

McCarthy, on the other hand, plays a bear of a detective who has bullied pretty much everyone in her precinct into not fucking with her. Cops and criminals are afraid of her and she takes “loose cannon” to a level that is as staggeringly unbelievable as it is entertaining to watch. Most of the laughs in the movie are delivered by Det. Mullins and her acute vulgarity. McCarthy is perfect for this role and perfect as a counterpoint to Ashburn.

While Bullock is obviously the more conventionally attractive of the two, the movie reverses the power dynamic assumed by physical attractiveness. I found this subtly subversive in a movie that mostly avoids wearing feminism on its sleeve. The Heat is matter-of-fact about rejecting chauvinism and promoting female empowerment. Still, it’s interesting that Mullins is the confident and self-possessed one of the two. She’s the heartbreaker, not the lonely workaholic Ashburn who is awkward, uptight, and functionally asexual.

I mean, she borrows her neighbor’s cat.

It doesn’t take long before McCarthy becomes too entertaining to bother worrying about her preposterous behavior.

The movie is always better when Bullock and McCarthy are playing off of each other. Over time, they learn shit from each other and develop grudging respect that evolves into true friendship. Seriously, you’ve seen this sort of thing before and it’s very clean, straightforward, and familiar. Doesn’t bear much analysis but it’s always nice to see. There’s attention to character in this film, even if it doesn’t do a lot that’s surprising.

Where it sort of falls flat or stumbles a few times is in some haphazard plotting and poorly executed jokes. Though not afraid to be a little risque in today’s ultra-PC climate (the watermelon joke, holy fuck), The Heat also indulges a few too many lazy “policing” sequences that threaten all suspension of disbelief. It seems weird to pick on the movie for having scenes where Asburn and (especially) Mullins break down doors to threaten leads with guns out and ready, no warrants, etc. Or the half-assed “gearing up for the big shootout” sequence which they wind up ditching anyway within ten minutes of getting the two of them to a promising location for a big ol’ gunfight. Because The Heat never veers into surreal or absurd territory like, say, The Other Guys it feels more like a misstep to get so loosey-goosey with this stuff. There are parts of the movie that, as a result, feel tacked on rather than engineered.

Also, The Heat could lose 10-15 minutes and survive just fine. The Larkin reveal is also a miscalculated joke. I get what they were going for. By the time Ashburn and Mullins are about to be tortured by Larkin’s right hand man, everybody expects Larkin to be the albino and for Mullins to be vindicated in her hilarious and justified (because he’s a misogynist) contempt for him. Then it turns out that it’s the albino’s partner, a complete random nobody who is the definition of bland vacancy, and that’s supposed to be the joke. Too bad it doesn’t work precisely due to the anonymity of the “true” Larkin. One of the weaknesses of The Heat is that it fails to generate a fun villain or any real foil for Ashburn and Mullins. They are foils for each other, true, but the formula assumes a real villain and this movie doesn’t have that.

In fact, the plot itself is pretty weak. Ashburn wants a promotion, Mullins wants to keep her brother out of trouble, but since they have 90% of the screentime and dialogue in the movie, there’s not much room to develop anything else beyond the skeleton it needs to be to connect scenes together.

Oh shit faces all around.

The friendship is heartwarming, the dialogue is hilarious, the secondary characters are also often very funny. There ya go. That’s all you need for a solid, if somewhat lazy comedy that works a lot better while you’re watching it than it does when you think about it. It’s not quite back-handed to say that it’s Bullock and McCarthy that elevate this movie enough that the shortcuts and thin plot don’t impact as much as they could have. Maybe it’s actually high praise.

But I think it’s also a movie full of missed opportunities and occasionally very weird decisions:

Hale, the inexplicably Hispanic (like deeply) FBI boss gets a confusing amount of screen time for a guy who is just there to be mean to Ashburn for little apparent reason, whilst constantly dangling a promotion over her head like a ball of yarn. It’s a good example of the places where the adherence to the buddy cop formula is half-assed and rings false. On the other hand, the send-up of the angry captain over at Mullins’ precinct is the perfect example of how the movie is canny about the conventions of the genre and toys with them effortlessly.

Why does Mullins have a fridge full of awesome guns when they are never used in the movie? Sure Mullins and Ashburn gear up for their (illegal?) assault on Larkin’s supposed lair, but the same hipster turd gets the drop on them again and they get disarmed. Wham, bam, no budget for action ma’am. So don’t have the fridge full of guns, assholes.

Why is Marlon Wayans even in this movie? It’s nice that he’s playing a character where being black has nothing to do with anything, and where he’s not doing annoying things with his face for “laughs” but he’s utterly wasted.

So I guess I have mixed feelings about both the movie and Sandra Bullock’s cougar thing.