The scale of this movie is in its own category.

I followed the production of Pacific Rim since I first heard about it. There’s probably no one who was more hyped for this movie than me. Pacific Rim wound up not being quite the slam dunk I wish it was, but it is a great ridiculous distillation of 80′s action movies, Saturday Morning cartoons, and corny ghetto anime. It’s the closest thing to a live action anime since Speed Racer. There’s no other movie quite like this, though, and that includes Speed Racer. But that doesn’t mean Pacific Rim always feels brand new. The story actually feels pretty familiar, maybe too familiar, and the plot is so basic and characterization so lean that there’s not much of the story that really differentiates itself from those familiar things. This may put off some people, but it should be noted that Pacific Rim is a movie aimed squarely at ten year olds, not jaded thirty year olds with enough pop culture awareness to chart every beat, reference, and quirk of of the movie. If you’re the type of person who enjoys that stuff, you’ll have a ball here. Guillermo Del Toro is the type of guy who enjoys that stuff, and so his movie is awash with it. It’s almost as prominent a feature as the film’s robust world-building (one of its strongest features). I’m sure Del Toro is the most responsible for the sheer level Pacific Rim reaches in that (blowing even District 9 out of the water), but writer Travis Beacham also deserves tons of credit.

Without splitting hairs too much, Pacific Rim is all about seeing some shit you haven’t seen in a movie before. Namely, watching gigantic mechs with human pilots do battle against sea monsters. That is exactly what you’re going to get. The story and characters exist to serve the initial hook or get the fuck out of the way. That introduces some problems, particularly a lack of story meat to chew on. The thinness of the story does not make it stupid, however. Everything functions perfectly well in spite of some rough edits and a few too many places where you really feel the absence of the three-hour cut that’s supposed to exist.

At its worst, Pacific Rim is a big corny cartoon that is another example of something I’ve talked about before: the cinematic equivalent of a big dopey dog that fucking loves you. This is a robotic dog painted up like an airshow plane, yes, but a dog all the same.

But at its best, it’s a spectacle unlike any other. This is big all over. Big subjects, big moments, and big clear images of staggering beauty.

And big fucking monsters wrecking shit.

Pacific Rim opens with two definitions: Kaiju (Japanese for “giant beast”) and Jaeger (German for “hunter”) and these are the two most important words in the movie. Kaiju movies are a genre in and of themselves in Japan and popularized elsewhere by the Godzilla brand. Paying homage to that genre, and the subgenre where humans in giant robots battle monsters (it’s a thing), Pacific Rim is all about the fantastical premise that humans would set aside our differences to build giant humanoid robots to fight the Kaiju. Rather than just waving it away as a necessary contrivance, it is quickly established that battling Kaiju with conventional weapons takes days, creates immense collateral damage, and gets their toxic body fluids on everything. This is all shown to us with some connective voice over from Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam), one of the heroes (it’s a bit of an ensemble) of the movie.

This is a heavy dose of rapid, rich world-building. By the time it moved into the movie proper, I was like “wait no, give me more” because they really did the work and mixed in the love and detail that makes for great world-building. Even the eccentric looks and attitudes of the Jaeger pilots is accounted for. During the first years of the Jaeger Program, it was so successful that humans weren’t afraid of the Kaiju and treated it like a spectator sport, making the Jaeger pilots into celebrities and action heroes (rockstars, as Raleigh calls them). Little details like this come at you fast and account for a lot of later stuff that might seem random otherwise. For instance, some people will see the Russian pilots and just roll their eyes but it makes sense, even while still being silly, given the “rockstar” chic the Jaeger program once enjoyed.

It’s like a sequel to Rocky IV.

Guillermo Del Toro, who directs this with his usual gumption, is a supreme world-builder. Pacific Rim is full of his artistic sensibilities, from the design of the monsters to the detail I keep praising. It also has his quirky sense of humor and corny sentimentality. Del Toro likes big, broad heroism and broad strokes storytelling. But he’s also a guy who loves small character moments and there aren’t very many of them in Pacific Rim. Some critics are speculating that they cut all that stuff so that they could mesh a more marketable, familiar sort of story with the spectacle to make it all more palatable. Pacific Rim uses some specific terminology and concepts to great effect, but I could see how there’d be a concern about it. An early warning sign that Pacific Rim was going to be light on story, drama, and character development was in that the trailers all focused exclusively on the action (thereby familiarizing audiences with several of the biggest moments in the film before they ever got to see it) and danced around the who and why. I thought that they were just trying to sell the novelty of the premise and the spectacle front-end, with the story stuff taking a back seat in the marketing. I didn’t realize until about halfway through the movie that the story stuff takes a back seat altogether.

A big part of that is the anime influence. This is a story of broad strokes and cliches, writ large in fresh circumstances. For some people, the movie is just going to seem silly for no reason and they will inevitably say it was just poorly written or stupid. In fact, a smart script is an economical script where everything is present for a reason, even if it’s subtle, and all elements work together to reinforce one or more central themes and one or more key character arcs. Pacific Rim has all that. You’re given ample character motivation, though it’s executed in broad and spartan terms, and the theme of cooperation is reaffirmed throughout the movie and informed by the characters and their various personalities, desires, and conflicts. It’s just that it’s straightforward and uses cliches to court mass appeal. I stop short of saying shallow, because it isn’t (it’s too well constructed), but thin seems to fit well.

There’s a distinction between the structural nature of a script and the actual texture of dialogue, though. Pacific Rim‘s script isn’t the most structurally smart ever written, but it works well in its commitment to functionalism and servicing of the spectacle. That’s actually rare in big Hollywood movies these days. Take Man of Steel. That movie’s script is a mess, structurally speaking. The dialogue, though, is what people actually hear and it’s easy to get the impression that Pacific Rim is a dumb movie since the dialogue is often impressively silly. It’s intentional, though. Completely intentional. I’m not sure it always works, in fact I know there are many lines that just don’t, but on the whole it’s better for a movie to have flaws for a reason, instead of out of laziness or stupidity. It’s better to try for something and not quite get there than to hedge your bets (which you could argue they did with the other elements of the script). The anime feel of the dialogue (let alone the visual aspect) is obvious to people like me who grew up watching 80′s anime on 90′s TV. If you didn’t watch anime, Power Rangers might be close enough and not just for the obvious reasons.

The Beckett brothers are strong in the Drift.

Hunnam’s voiceover intro serves to set up the moment when all the winning starts to go the other way. You could easily have a movie set in this universe that tells the story of the first Kaiju attacks, the first Jaegers, etc and it would be awesome. Pacific Rim is the story of what happens when a winning war turns out to be a war of attrition that humanity’s resources can only handle for so long.

Raleigh and his brother Yancy (Diego Klattenhoff, who you might know from Homeland) are copilots of an American Jaeger called Gipsy Danger (not sure why they decided to spell “gypsy” that way). Yancy is the older and wiser one and Raleigh is the young and enthusiastic one. You get that out of them in twenty seconds of body language and banter, so I guess the characterization in the movie isn’t as stilted as I might have made it sound. Yancy dies in a Jaeger attack and Raleigh is traumatized due to their neural connection, a necessary element of piloting the Jaegers. One of the examples of the many concepts and terms this movie throws at the audience, “The Drift” is the shared headspace of Jaeger pilots as they work in tandem to pilot the machines. The idea is that they are too big and powerful to control alone, so a two-pilot system is created to make it all work. In one of its more obvious tributes to anime, Pacific Rim borrows the idea of “synchronization” from Neon Genesis Evangelion with the difference being that the synchronization happens between the pilots, not between a single pilot and a biomechanical giant robot. The mechs in Pacific Rim are just machines, after all, triumphs of human ingenuity and teamwork.

Teamwork is actually the core theme of Pacific Rim. Getting over our issues and differences to be brave and work together. It’s really as simple as that. The idea of two pilots forced to work together across the Drift reinforces that idea beautifully. In terms of its execution, you can certainly imagine a plethora of alternate set ups and possibilities. What if the copilots don’t like each other? Pacific Rim inspires twice the ideas that it shows us, and that’s the sort of thing that made Star Wars what it is.

Though not all big movie stars, the cast has major geek cred.

After Yancy’s death and the trauma he endured feeling it through the Drift and being forced to pilot the Gipsy Danger alone (which is something that few can survive doing), Raleigh quits the program and goes roughneck, working for rations on a giant Coastal Wall. In the ensuing five years, the attacks escalate and the Kaiju get bigger, meaner, and more adapted to our tactics. What was once an army of 30+ colorful rockstar Jaegers and their eccentric, celebrity pilots has dwindled down to four machines and a handful of pilots. The UN funding for the program is being pulled and its commander told to stand down while Coastal Walls are erected as a last ditch effort to fend off the attacks. Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) knows this won’t work with the same kind of gruff self-assuredness that commanders on the ground always seem to know better than the suits thousands of miles away. In one last ditch effort to do his job and prove the Jaeger program is still vital to human survival, he concocts a plan to close the portal once and for all.

To get it done, he recruits Raleigh. There’s not much hesitation, no “Resisting the Call” episode where Raleigh struggles with self-doubt vs. the man he was Destined to Be. Raleigh is a good guy and a born fighter pilot, and an unpredictable scrapper. The conflict doesn’t come from him resisting heroism, but from whether or not Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) can or should be a pilot. She’s got the more classic heroic arc, really, and a personal history with Stacker that makes him extremely reluctant to let her fulfill her dream and avenge her dead family. This is the type of thing I mean when I call this movie a Saturday morning cartoon. These motivations and conflicts are given just enough time and attention to keep you invested in the characters and the movie, but it can occasionally be a close call.

Mako, as a little girl, was caught in a devastating Kaiju attack on Tokyo. A younger Stacker killed the Kaiju with his Jaeger moments before it could gobble up little Mako (the little girl who plays her is expressive and awesome, by the way). In a great example of the simple, sentimental heroism of the movie, there’s a shot of Stacker emerging from his Jaeger with a bursting halo of yellow sunlight behind his smiling head. It’s a brilliantly cheesy moment, but inspiring the way classic heroic pin-ups and poses are supposed to be inspiring. It looks like the living version of a “Join the Jaeger Program and Fight for Humanity” recruitment posters that I’m sure are wearing away somewhere between the scenes of the movie. This is the kind of thing that makes or breaks the movie. It’s a movie that asks you to leave the cynicism at the door and enjoy yourself. By the time it happened, I had stopped expecting Pacific Rim to take itself seriously and begun to groove with its tone. This moment is a perfect example of that tone and it’s the kind of thing that will make little kids go apeshit but it also risks cringes from the jaded adults.

Mako Mori is part of the ensemble, but gets the most character development.

Raleigh and Mako have great chemistry and have a lot of potential as a team. However, they also both have deep personal trauma that gets in the way. Mako’s especially causes her to fuck up their trial run and obliterate what little faith Stacker and the army of support personnel have in them. To say nothing of the other pilots, for whom Raleigh is already a pariah who represents the moment the Jaeger program went into decline. The drama that ensues isn’t especially deep or introspective, it’s more breezy and light-hearted and perfectly in keeping with the overall fluffiness of the movie’s tone. Their chemistry never fully coalesces into romance, because the movie maintains a nice ambiguity about whether theirs is a brother-sister bond or a potential romantic one. People watching the movie are going to come to their own conclusions about the earnest glances, the shy awkward body language, etc. But the movie doesn’t end with a kiss, but a relieved triumphant hug. The fact that Pacific Rim doesn’t shoehorn a romance is a nice touch. That you could get behind it if they had gone that route makes it even better.

The theme of teamwork and helping each other comes through most effectively in Raleigh’s mentor/partner relationship with Mako. She’s the one who’s unused to Drifting and needs the helping hand to achieve her full potential. It’s the kind of relationship, simple but elegant, that Pixar might write a story around. It’s only when they work together fully that their full potential gets unleashed, and they are able to do astonishing things.

Del Toro said there’s a lot of Mexican wrestling in the fight choreography. I can see that.

The big action setpiece occurs a little ways into the second half of the movie, just after Mako blows the trial run. Stacker has to rely on them, reluctant as he is, once again and they get another (spectacular) shot at proving their the ones for the job. The theme of teamwork circles in again, with the Gipsy Danger the last Jaeger standing against a “double event”, the first time two Kaiju have attacked simultaneously.

People will talk about the “Hong Kong Sequence” for years to come, even if only to say it was the only good thing in the movie (they’ll be wrong, but whatever). It is seminal, astounding action spectacle. It’s an epic fight, and I don’t use those words lightly, beginning in the water and ending fifty-thousand feet in the air. The work done to bring these machines and monsters to life, and give them a realistic (as best as can be done, it’s not like this is a plausible movie) feel is leagues ahead of anything else and may be a benchmark for a long time yet. Ramin Djawadi’s work with Tom Morello on the theme also comes through full force during this sequence, underlying the muscular and spartan sensibility of the movie with complimentary music.

It is, after all, about giant robots punching fucking monsters.

I’ve mentioned that Pacific Rim is more of an ensemble than your typical heroic narrative. While it’s true that this movie’s logline could be “former pilot comes back for one last job with a rookie copilot and his old commander”, the focus is spread too evenly among the various characters for Hunnam’s Raleigh Beckett to be much more than the anchor around which everything else flows. Everybody’s doing solid work, but there isn’t much in here that’s going to make you have some revelation about Charlie Hunnam’s talent. In fact, he’ll probably come out of this looking like a random leading man guy. Hunnam’s a major talent, but I guess we’ll have to stick with Sons of Anarchy to see it. For now.

Beyond the core trio of Hunnam, Elba, and Kikuchi, there are several actors playing secondary roles of varying importance. Most important are Newt (Charlie Day) and Gottlieb (Burn Gorman). They are supposed to be this semi-comic duo of odd couple scientists. It works sometimes, mostly when Day gets to mock Gottlieb’s intense and cringey self-importance. Gottlieb really feels like a Del Toro character, but I don’t think his stuff works as well as it should have. Day fares better, getting to channel a lot of the enthusiasm and excitement that Del Toro obviously feels toward the Kaiju. He’s a Kaiju enthusiast, Newt is. He has tattoos of them on his arms and knows more about their anatomy than anyone. He’s also the first to Drift with a Kaiju brain, a desperate attempt to find out more about them and why the Breach only goes one way. According to Del Toro, the sequel idea he and Beacham have revolves around the consequences of Newt’s interaction with the Kaiju brain. This is also hinted at in the movie, where it’s a possibility that the Kaiju attack Hong Kong specifically to get at Newt.

The other Jaegers are super iconic.

Newt’s investigating takes him to Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman), the most eccentric character in the movie by far. A flamboyantly dressed Kaiju “parts” dealer, Hannibal is there to enhance the stylized world of the movie while also reinforcing the reactive context society has developed toward its giant monster status quo. Hannibal is a character that perfectly encapsulates the sense of fun first, seriousness later sensibility that Pacific Rim is infused with. He is a very silly character but silly in all the right ways, a claim you can accurately make about the entire movie.

Turns out, this is super important to the overall plot of the movie and the key to Stacker’s plan to get a nuke through to strike back at whatever’s out there. Annoyingly, Pacific Rim does a bunch of expository telling (where it usually shows everything) about the “master” aliens that clone and grow the Kaiju as a way to wipe out civilizations they want to harvest. Sound familiar? It should. It’s the exact same premise as Independence Day and one of the very few places where Pacific Rim errs on the side of laziness. Oddly, having Charlie Day deliver all this exposition in a rushing, hysterical ramble seems like a sly acknowledgement that it isn’t all that important, it isn’t why we’re here, and who cares because JAEGERS AND KAIJUS.

But even Stacker’s plan echoes Independence Day perfectly. To be fair, other recent movies have done the same Trojan Horse thing. Oblivion and The Avengers both have basically the same endgame. Of course, quibbling about these movies sharing elements is small potatoes as long as they do it well. Pacific Rim does do it well and the climax of the film is great, if less amazing than the Hong Kong sequence where the spectacle truly peaks.

Day’s shrieking, tweaker style mostly works for the movie.

It’s hard not to get caught up in the love and enthusiasm that went into the design of the movie. I would have liked a deeper story and maybe a second pass on some of that cornball dialogue, but ultimately that’s asking for a different movie than the one that got made. More than anything else, Pacific Rim is a movie that makes you want more. Whether it’s more amazing fights with giant monsters, more crazy pilots and their iconic mechs, it’s just about more of this world and setting. Pacific Rim is the perfect boilerplate for an entire universe of stories, ideas, and merchandising. I’m not sure if it will catch on the way it deserves to, but it’s got the potential to be sure.

It also serves as a nice light-hearted fantasy about coming together to fend off environmental disasters. There’s a stapled-on quasi-environmentalist message in the movie. During a particularly bad infodump, we hear that humans have basically terraformed the planet for the Kaijus’ overlords by wrecking the environment. This is just goofy, yes, but what really comes across well in Pacific Rim is how humans have to work together with ingenuity and a spirit of cooperation (instead of competition) to combat the big stuff like earthquakes, hurricanes, famine, etc. The Kaiju are a nice metaphor for the recent environmental disasters, and the movie acknowledges this when Raleigh tells the audience that being in a Jaeger feels like you can fight a hurricane and win.

A hurricane is easy mode. Free-falling from 50,000 feet though? That’s what separates the pilots from the chassis scrubbers.

As a closing note, I want to return again to the tone of Pacific Rim. This is a cheerful, light-hearted movie in a sea of ironic detachment from the classic earnest sentimentality of Big Damn Heroics. This summer has been good to us, with even the mixed bags turning in some really great ideas and spectacle (Man of Steel and Star Trek Into Darkness) but hampered by self-seriousness, short cuts, and overly convoluted plot lines. If I can connect Pacific Rim and the enthusiastic joy it inspires to any other movie so far (that isn’t an animated film), it would be Fast 6 which shares the same enthusiasm, simplicity, and love for you, the audience.

This is not a movie for cynical people. It completely ignores its own vulnerability to cynicism and just rolls out the corn because corn on the cob is goddamn delicious. There’s particular breed of self-avowed geek that will sit back in their chair and scoff at the “physics” of a science fiction fantasy movie with 100-foot tall robots fighting monsters from another dimension, but go home and play a board game where dragons and elves live in a cyberpunk dystopia or like Dr. Who which makes fun of its own tendency to throw up a middle finger at suspension of disbelief (hand-wavey timey-wimey). There’s a disconnect between being able to just enjoy a fantasy for what it is and trying to hold it up to some imagined standard of cherry-picked realism that only exists as a construct we call up when we don’t want to like something. I suspect that people like this are nursing wounded hearts from the large number of big spectacle movies that remind us of everything we love about the possibilities of science fiction and fantasy, but fail to deliver. It’s Star Wars Prequel Syndrome.

Pacific Rim is like Speed Racer in all the best ways. I never got to review Speed Racer but the power of that movie was near to mind when, about 20 minutes in, I realized what Pacific Rim is. If you let it, this movie will take you to a very special place of awe and jubilation.

And if anybody argues with me I’m just going to show them this:

It’s practically Jubilation: The Movie.

Believe it or not, this bit works a lot better in context than it did in the trailers.

The Wolverine isn’t just the best X-Men movie (First Class has not aged well), it is also nuanced and focused in a way that most comic book superhero movies just aren’t. This makes it feel more like a “real movie” than Origins or even First Class ever did. This is because pandering is kept lower key, characters don’t get thrown in for no reason or just to be cute, and most everything is foreshadowed, setup, justified, and paid off. There is way less “and then” storytelling going on in The Wolverine than has become typical for superhero movies, let alone Hollywood’s foundering big budget output.

Though the third act is clunky and full of bad contrivances that threaten to derail the movie, it’s also the only part where The Wolverine fully indulges its comic book origin. This is going to work for some and be a dealbreaker for others. For me it was a mild mess. I’ll go into more detail later, but for now be satisfied that it’s the third act problems that keep The Wolverine from being legitimately great. It seems like we have to wait a bit longer for a superhero solo outing to be truly awe-inspiring (Man of Steel comes so close), but in the broader context of these types of movies it is hard to be cynical about the satisfaction level that The Wolverine reaches rather handily.

Full-bearded caveman Hugh looks a lot like Robert Carlyle.

When we see our friend Logan (Hugh Jackman), he’s living in a cave somewhere in the Yukon territory. After having to kill Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) in X-Men 3, he’s haunted by his history of violence and the high price he’s paid for doing the right thing. While I don’t know that this movie can really earn the idea that Logan is immortal and haunted by “the deaths of all he loves”, it certainly sells the idea that he’s given up on living in the world. The thing about the former is that Logan is always outside, always isolated. Who are these people he’s lost, aside from the few dead members of the X-Men, who died violent deaths? And is his healing factor really going to let him live forever? The Wolverine basically lands on that being the case, but it hasn’t been more than a vague bit of angst for the character up to this point. Always, his being at odds with himself is about more pressing things. This time, it’s not having anything to live for. Like I said, this movie makes that idea work.

In his grief, Logan has hit rock bottom and frequently has dreams about Jean where she beckons him to “come to her” via death. Conveniently, there’s an old figure from Logan’s past who’s around to offer him just that.

That bed is super cool.

Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi) was saved by Logan during the bombing of Nagasaki. Interestingly, The Wolverine only flinches away from indicting that act a little bit. In the younger Yashida’s eyes, looking out at the devastation wrought by the use of an atomic bomb, is all the indictment we need. But Logan, too, looks horrified.

Yashida has come a long way from frightened prison guard. By now, he’s created the richest and most technologically advanced corporation in Japan. He sends Yukio (Rila Fukushima), one of the handful of mutants in the movie and his adopted daughter, to fetch Logan to Japan for an offer that grizzled old Wolverine probably won’t be able to turn down. Yashida doesn’t want to die of the cancer that’s eating him up. He wants Logan’s healing ability and he assures him that he can take it if Logan truly does want to free himself from the existential horror of an immortal existence. I thought it was refreshing that Yashida was honest about his self-interest and I also thought it was refreshing that Logan doesn’t even consider the idea, not just because he thinks it’s not possible, but because he’s stubborn about who he is.

Jackman frequently looks 10 years younger than he actually is, but that’s dialed up in this movie.

One of the most important lines in the film is the one I used for the title. He seems to be explaining his disbelief to Yashida about the adamantium and the mutation, but it goes much further than that. The subtext is actually his nature as a killer and the grief that haunts him which he believes can’t be undone. The movie is all about him discovering this isn’t the case, and that’s a fine bit of setup for the substantial (surprisingly) journey of self-acceptance that Logan undergoes. The dialogue doesn’t always service this as well as it could have (the “you’re a/I’m a soldier” bits are cheesy) but the idea comes through very nicely. And it’s an actual idea, an actual arc that goes beyond figuring out how to be a hero. Logan already knows how to be a hero, he begins the movie with natural heroism (no hesitation, just saves the Japanese prison guard and goes after the guys who used poison on a grizzly for a sport) and ends by figuring out that it’s what he’s for. Not just for killing, which is part of it, but to save people and serve his moral code.

The primary way Logan finds reasons to live again, and begins to let go of Jean, is through forming personal attachments. It makes sense that he’s sort of abandoned his X-Men allies after what went down with Jean, but finding friends has ever (right back to X-Men with Rogue) been Logan’s way of connecting to the world and demonstrating that natural heroism and protective instinct. Here he as Yukio, a spunky sidekick and the movie’s true female lead, as well as Mariko (Tao Okamoto), a damsel with a strong will who winds up a love interest.

Mariko, like much of this movie, is a throwback to the 80′s.

Something I liked about The Wolverine was that its DNA has just as much classic 80′s era action movie as it does superhero stuff. Probably more, actually. Even down to the gruff hero ending up on the lam with a pretty damsel feels like it’s right out of the classics. On a basic level, before you get mutants and claws and the details of The Wolverine‘s occasionally silly plot, this could easily have been a Stallone movie. It even has the cheesy fetishization of Japanese culture, history, and customs. Characters opine about samurai and Japanese honor, there are actual black-clad ninjas, and even a fun bit with a “love hotel”. Because of its affection and light touch with this, director James Mangold never quite pushes it too far and manages to maintain an agreeable balance between respect and cribbing the cool bits.

That all said, the Mariko character is a gambit that I’m not sure everyone will agree pays off. Rather than being an empty dress like so many of her cinematic sisters, Mariko does get to have a personality and strength of character that somewhat elevates her from the plot device she is often used as. Mariko is about to inherit Yashida’s legacy and this makes her a political target as well as a criminal one. Even her own father, Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada), seems to dislike her. She’s surrounded by threats and obligations and when Yashida finally dies, she’s totally vulnerable. It’s Logan, who sees something of himself in her (his suicidal malaise?) and immediately steps in as her protector, whether she likes it or not. This, too, feels like a classic trope.

Yukio is the more realized character, and the movie wisely keeps her around and makes use of her.

Their attraction also makes sense, and the movie takes time to justify it. That wouldn’t normally have to be said at all, if most movies of this kind bothered to flesh out “trivial” matters like major relationships. Unfortunately, the trend is to gloss this stuff and rely on the audience just going along with characters falling for each other and hinging their entire motivation on each other. Mariko’s vulnerability and ability to understand and empathize with Logan is what makes this shit work. For his part, Logan is the wounded animal who can’t run nor fight when held in up in Tao Okamoto’s huge luminous eyes.

That Mariko winds up mostly a damsel in the third act is something that Mangold and/or his writers must have realized. The movie is often very self-aware and it knows that balancing out the classic “hero rescues the princess in a tower” imagery they are working with is a tricky job in a genre fraught with disappointing female characters. I think the shit works, really, and was quite taken with the somewhat mythic structure of this part of the movie. Unfortunately, there are some logistical things leading up to Wolverine’s final rescue that hamper it and wind up leaving the audience with at least one scene that makes no sense, as well as a female character so wasted and tone-deaf that it seriously undermines all the nice stuff that can be said about Yukio and Mariko.

Lady Viper ( Svetlana Khodchenkova) is an awful, semi-pointless rip off of Poison Ivy right down.

There’s a part where the ninja Harada (Will Yun Lee) who loves (and was loved by) Mariko brings her to the Yashida tower where they are going to use her as bait to draw out Logan. When Mariko confronts Viper, she knocks her out only to, a scene later, monologue at her after she’s come to. The editing separates these scenes with a brief bit of Logan driving up to the mountain village on a motorcycle. But why does Mariko need to be knocked out? I get why Logan gets knocked out so often in the movie (weakened powers plus necessary for Jean Grey haunting) but this seems like a bit that exists just to kill some time for Logan to get there. It feels like a sloppy patch job on a logistical issue in the script that most people probably never would have noticed. Or were we supposed to think Viper had killed Mariko for all of 30 seconds? This shit is dumb.

Not quite as dumb but still pretty dumb is the way Mariko is taken. In the village where she and Logan are hiding out, Logan awakens after the consummation of his feelings for Mariko to find her being dragged away by a couple of Yakuzas. Now, we’ve already seen that Mariko can fight well so where is this here? Why go to the trouble of using her to get Logan to come to the Yashida complex when they could have probably captured him while he was sleeping, along with Mariko? Presumably she was outside the house or something. Presumably Logan killed so many Yakuzas that they just don’t wanna fuck with him at this point. Presumably there are ways to sort of patch this together in your head as you watch, but it’s too sloppy not to notice and therefore it’s a problem for the third act as it feels so haphazardly plotted.

Also, how does Shingen survive Viper’s acid or whatever? Who knows.

There are a few little WTF moments like this throughout the movie but they only ever get close to throwing the whole thing over when we get to that final act. In spite of the obviousness of these flaws, it seems that more people are interested in complaining about the Silver Samurai reveal and the SFX-laden climactic fight which I admit, is a bit disappointing.

Most of the action in The Wolverine is very well done and often interestingly shot. There’s a fondness for close-ups, dynamic movement, and smartly done editing that makes you sit up and pay attention even when some of the details of the fighting are lost in the blur of movement. There’s a grittiness to the way its done that suggests the rumored R-rated cut of the movie is actually no rumor at all. However much SFX work was done in these parts, and the awesome train sequence definitely had a fair share, it pales in comparison to the comic book-y Silver Samurai fight.

Though a bit ridiculous, the Silver Samurai armor nicely ties into the Sentinels that will be featured in Days of Future Past.

Like I said earlier, the third act is where The Wolverine embraces being a comic book superhero movie fully. Inside the Silver Samurai, an adamantium exoskeleton with flaming swords, is old man Yashida who is not dead after all. Logan figures out how to use the heated blades (only thing that can cut adamantium) to decapitate the armor, but he still has both sets of his own claws cut off and some of his bone marrow (or something) drained out of him. Meanwhile, Yashida monologues. There’s a fight with Viper and Yukio, Mariko’s horrified reaction to Yashida’s true evil, and even Harada having a change of heart. Since the cast is tight throughout the movie, this stuff is really well balanced and thought through in an attempt to give every character clear motive, resolution/comeuppance, etc. That doesn’t stop the sequence from feeling a bit misaligned with the rest of the movie. It doesn’t stop the marrow-draining facilities of the Silver Samurai armor from being ultra-contrived (if suggested earlier by Yashida himself “we made this to take from you what you would not give” etc), and it doesn’t stop Lady Viper from being Britta.

I do think that this is not where the problems with the third act of the movie really lie. It’s a fine action sequence, feels like a good personal climax what with Yashida being a big villain all along (the movie never really pretends this isn’t obvious and predictable either), and it lets Mariko pay off her earlier bragging about winning a martial arts competition with her knife skills. Yukio also gets to give Viper the most gruesome (and deserved) death in the movie. Kudos all around, The Wolverine.

Yukio also gets to have a cool extended fight with Shingen, who is sort of a proto-Silver Samurai and nice red herring.

Now that I think about it, it’s actually all those payoffs that really make The Wolverine work. That type of thing always demonstrates the kind of mindfulness and attentiveness that make mistakes or shaky bits easier to accept and fold into a generally favorable evaluation of a film. There’s simply a distinction, possibly subjective, between flaws that arise because a filmmaker didn’t give a fuck and those that arise in spite of a filmmaker trying their best. The Wolverine is a movie that seriously goes for it and even though it indulges some silliness and undercooks its climax a bit, it mostly gets there.

The thing with Mariko and her knives is just one example. There’s also small stuff that sets up the Silver Samurai suit, like that Yashida almost bankrupted the company by stockpiling adamantium (along with paying for expensive doctors and treatments). There’s also visual bits like showing Wolverine in WW2 with the bone claws prior to the Weapon X program, then giving them back when he loses his metal ones later. This is just to remind audiences that the adamantium is a sheath over what he already has. It’s also nicely symbolic for what Logan has underneath all the surface of his powers and enhancements.

The ninja sequence is a bit unnecessary but makes for fun imagery.

All in all, The Wolverine gets way more right than it gets wrong. It’s a textured, nuanced superhero film that owes a lot to classic action movies. If not for Iron Man 3, it would be the surprise superhero win of the summer. It will be for some people, and it does earn this. 

Because Fox is doing the unlikely and bringing everybody back in to twist up the cinematic X-Men continuity even more, this movie ties directly into Days of Future Past and is actually a pretty great set up for a reasons why Logan might want to travel backward or forward in time. His renewed connection to the world being one reason, the prospect of undoing Jean Grey’s death (given the appearance of Xavier and all) being another. While I’d like it better if they stayed away from Jean Grey’s death (plenty of it in this movie), I appreciate the idea that Logan might want to, above all, undo the one murder he most regrets.

In any case, The Wolverine finally justifies the prospect of keeping Wolverine a central character in the franchise, as well as having his own personal sandbox to play in.

This movie gets at something deep and pure.

The Kings of Summer is the first major work from Jordan Vogt-Roberts (director) and Chris Galleta (writer) but you should try to remember those names because they have submitted a masterpiece first outing, which means they deserve attention for whatever they do next. I use that word sort of freely, I guess. I don’t think there are many instances where I’ve misapplied it. There’s a special quality to films I would call a “masterpiece”. That quality tends to be some degree of grace unfettered by glaring flaws or the one or two missteps that otherwise great films tend to have. Interestingly, I’m not one of those critics who necessarily picks out the masterpieces as my favorite movies of the year. There’s a difference, for me, in the value of something as particular to me versus its objective inherent quality. It’s useless to compare a movie I love (but is great rather than masterful) to a movie that I think is flawless, but there’s got to be a sense to which a flawless movie is comparatively “better” than a great (but flawed) film that specifically reached me or that I loved for some emotional, subjective reason. A good example of a great movie that falls short of being a masterpiece might be Warrior from 2011, but I did pick that for my top movie of the year. The Kings of the Summer is probably unlikely to be my favorite for the year but it will rank fairly high.

Not sure if that bit of explanation of my thoughts on this subject helps at all. I usually spend a bit of time on a general overview and contextualization for a movie to open a review. Sometimes I wade into way, way general territory. I guess this is just some of that shit.

Back to this film. It would probably be appropriate to call it a coming of age story, but that sort of feels reductive for some reason. I mean, it is a coming of age story and that’s probably a great way to simply tell you what kind of movie it is. It’s very light hearted, staying in the realms of idealism, friendship, and surprisingly natural comedy far more than it does the darker parts of growing up: disappointment, heartbreak, etc. You sort of expect something bad to happen, and the film is economical and contains plenty of foreshadowing, but it’s still a surprise when it does and ultimately not that bad. This film distils the magic of young male bonding in way few films do, and it does this without being nostalgic or wistful. Whimsical, yes, but utterly comfortable in its own skin.

It’s sort of the perfect teen boy friendship movie for hopeful, positive people.

Not pictured here: William Wallace sword.

Though the friendship in The Kings of Summer is shared by all three of its principal characters, it is primarily about Joe (Nick Robinson) and Patrick (Gabriel Basso) who have been buddies since they were little kids. Joe’s whacky schemes seem to have constantly gotten the practical, utterly loyal Patrick into various hijinx. Joe’s latest one is to build a house in the forest, in a splendid little patch of ground that he discovers one night after a party. Inexplicably partnering up with the impish, bizarre Biaggio (Moises Arias, who steals the movie), Joe decides that in order to be real, independent men, all three of them need to live in this house away from their overbearing, irritating parents (and Biaggio’s mysterious, honorable dad). Joe wants to be independent, Patrick is Joe’s Partner In Crime (and is annoyed by his cloying, cheesy parents), and Biaggio is inexplicably along for the ride. Probably because he’s a somewhat marginalized, if fascinating, little individual.

Building a house in the woods is a universal boyhood dream. It manifests itself in tree forts, overnight tenting (even on your parents’ lawn), and tiny tribal forays into whatever wild is both easily reachable and outside of the supervision of adults. The building of the house is sort of easy and the film presents it as such, without bothering with the complications of logistics or skill that might derail the movie (and will probably bother nitpickers anyhow). This is because the dream, the idealism, is the point. It’s also because these kids are surprisingly competent, intelligent, and resilient. Plus, it’s not like they move a thousand miles away from civilization or anything.

The parents aren’t monsters, just sort of everyday terrible and yet endearing.

While there’s a bit of pathos involved with Joe’s relationship to his father, Frank (Nick Offerman), it’s got the same sense of lightness that infuses the entire movie. Joe’s mom is dead and Frank is the kind of dad who never really figured out his kids. Joe had a stronger relationship with his mother and now, with his sister gone to college, he’s mostly alone with a man who simply doesn’t get him and would rather be his rival and jailer than his friend or mentor. Without drawing too much attention to it, a lot of this movie is about the audience discovering that Joe is actually quite a bit like Frank, in both good ways and bad. He’s competent and manly but also a bit of a selfish bully. Though a lot of the laughs in the movie come from Offerman’s belligerent portrayal of Frank (it’s a special treat seeing him outside of the TV environment), the film never gets too far away from the idea that Frank is kind of a jerk and could probably use a bit of self-awareness. This is also true of Joe, which is the point of the focus on their arc over that of other characters.

Patrick’s parents (played by Marc Evan Jackson and Megan Mullally) are zanier and much more up his ass. So bad he’s got hives. They police his clothes, mild changes in his tone, and pretty well every aspect of his life. Joe’s yearning for freedom and his earnest bid to get some of it for them is basically what wins Patrick over. The complication for them is that there’s a girl, Kelly (Erin Moriarty) who comes between them. Though she runs the risk of falling into the male-centric comedy archetype of devil-woman, the film makes room for Kelly to be more than a complication. It’s not especially smart of her to ignore/miss how Joe feels about her when she cleaves to Patrick, but it also rings true as the sort of thing a young girl (or boy) would simply hope would turn out okay. As she says, she never meant to come between friends and the film makes us believe that this is true, a not so subtle dodge from the problematic territory of making the character unsympathetic on her face. Besides, the movie is just as critical of Joe’s slightly chauvinistic attitude toward Kelly as it is romantic about the powerful and positive (traditionally) masculine virtues of bravery, camaraderie, loyalty, and independent self-reliance.

The pain of this sort of thing is dealt with perfectly. It’s not melodramatic, it’s not histrionic, it’s just something that happens and while it can provide a test of character, good people ultimately use this stuff as a growing experience. That’s firmly where The Kings of Summer lands on teenage romantic angst.

Instead, the important thing is how Joe selfishly and childishly handles it, which leaves him in isolation. He’s a big baby and we see Frank’s shitty attitude all over Joe when he’s lashing out at his friends. Patrick, for his part, surprises by immediately choosing Joe over the girl. But this isn’t good enough. Something about that makes Joe’s behavior even sadder, but once he’s committed to it he can’t back down until he has time to decompress. It’s exactly like when Frodo tells Sam to fuck off just as he’s about to climb up into Mordor. Patrick telling Joe that he wants to stay with him is more heart-breaking than four thousand Kellys choosing four thousand Patrick’s over four thousand Joes. This friendship feels so simple and true that you actually have to pause and think about how strange it is that the situation presented, a cliche in itself, is often shown in fiction using more cliches. In general, The Kings of Summer feels refreshingly cliche-free.

Joe is a complicated guy. This nicely compliments the simple, puppy-like Patrick and the inexplicable Biaggio. While Biaggio’s quirkiness is informed by his ambiguous sexuality and impressive array of random proverbs and thoughts, Joe’s has an edge to it. He’s a kid who unabashedly calls the cops on his dad for fucking him over in Monopoly, and it’s not the kind of thing he’s only done once. He’s lashing out, in his somewhat gentle way, and it informs every bit of the movie. The movie knows when Joe’s antics should be funny and when they should be pathetic and sad, both for him and for others. That sense of tonal awareness is one of the reasons The Kings of Summer avoids false notes and self-indulgence.

Alison Brie shows up as Joe’s sister, and she provides a bit of shading on Frank which is a great way to earn the reconciliatory ending.

Many people seeing this movie will be reminded of Stand By Me (though that one is a bit darker) and up until I saw The Kings of the Summer, that film had a special unique place in my memory and psyche. Now I guess it’ll have to share. I’d also point to The Wackness as a “boy coming of age” movie that gets to a similar level of sincerity, humor, and self-awareness.

Oddly, it’s in the cinematography that The Kings of Summer gets away from its brethren. There’s a patience to the way nature is shot that recalls Terence Malick (sunlight through trees, slow marches through grain fields, etc). It’s actually a really beautiful film and takes place in Ohio, which I had no sense of prior to seeing this. The reverence and romanticism of the nature scenes is one of the ways this film surprises with its graceful approach. Other ways include the easy competence the boys have with living in the woods. Though Biaggio and Joe prove to be poor hunters, there’s no break with their idealism until much later when Joe is forced to hunt alone (and ends up conquering this task, too, proving himself again to be competent and somewhat courageous).

Speaking of Biaggio, he’s a character that could quickly have grown tiresome or crutchy but there’s a perfect amount of him in the movie, somehow. It’s the kind of thing that you have to stop and notice because it comes off so effortlessly that you might forget all the times you’ve seen a movie where the weirdo railroads his or her own function. A great example would be how the foreshadowing of the copperhead snake pays off. The specter of the snake overshadows the movie just enough that there’s a sense of danger for Joe as he remains alone in the cabin while Biaggio and Patrick have returned to their lives (they don’t tell anyone where Joe is, showing the loyalty that is celebrated by the movie). For part of the movie, you’re trying to guess who is going to be bit by that snake and it turns out to be Biaggio in exactly the kind of way that fits his character, quirks and his deeper personality and motives, perfectly.

One of the feelings that emerges most is the desire to go out somewhere and build your own sweet ass house. It’s sort of the same impulse that keeps you coming back to games like Minecraft but the origin of that has more to do with childhood romps through the woods than an appreciation for sandbox video games.

In trying to prefigure what the negative reactions to this could be, I imagine it would something along the lines of “indie quirk bullshit” but I think such a reaction would be dishonest. There’s definitely quirk galore in The Kings of Summer, but none of it self-referential, pandering to “hip”, or coasting on a patently made-up world (which only Wes Anderson should even try). The Kings of Summer feels like it’s about real people, in a real setting, doing and experiencing real shit. There’s only a few parts where the film risks venturing into “too quirky for its own good” territory. One of them, so totally fun its hard to criticize it, is when Joe imagines a Street Fighter 2-style battle with his dad. It’s not a brilliant moment, and it does go for the whimsy a bit hard, but it also recalls earlier moments in the film (playing Street Fighter with Patrick) and the baseline antagonistic relationship Joe really does have with Frank. So even something like this is too informed by the story, and the confidence with which its told, to be all that much of a risk after all.

There’s a naturalism to the emotion and conflict of The Kings of Summer that is effortlessly authentic and this may be its best, most masterful quality. The narrative is constantly focused on sweet, funny, and above all genuine characterization, interaction, and conflict. It’s like the perfect summer story for 15 year old boys (and people who well remember being 15 year old boys), and this isn’t to say it has narrow appeal. It’s sense of humor and emotional intelligence make it universally appealing, and because it doesn’t compromise subtlety or quality to get there, it’s a masterpiece.

And did I mention that it’s funny? It is seriously the funniest movie I think I’ve seen in 2013. This is the End comes terribly close, but maybe I just like this kind of humor more or something.

Terrence Malick and Stephen King had a baby that is a teenager with a crush on Ellen Page and listens to The Arcade Fire and Flobots whilst reading Thoreau.

Carruth has crafted one of the weirdest love stories ever told.

Some of you may remember seeing, or hearing about, a small science fiction film called Primer. It is generally regarded as the most authentic time travel movie ever made as well as one of those mind-bender audiovisual puzzles you have to see a couple of times to solve. Upstream Color is only Shane Carruth’s (writer, director, producer, actor, composer, wunderkind) second film, but he’s by now established a style of tight control, impressionism, and disregard for accessible, traditional plot development. His narratives are loose, ambiguous, and preoccupied by small disparate moments that are evocative over informative but nonetheless work together to form a clear, cohesive narrative should one be paying the requisite amount of attention.

Carruth’s work is utterly worth paying attention to. The guy is a genius, nothing short of it, and this second film has twice (or beyond) the stature, confidence, and profundity of his first offering. Unlike the more clinical, subdued Primer, Carruth’s second film focuses less on the science of science fiction and more on the intimate effects of a bizarre speculative scenario. Rather than the colder, more mechanical sciences of engineering, physics, or computers, the science of Upstream Color’s fiction is earthy and biological.

Upstream Color shows a range that is way beyond “weird, small science fiction”. It’s an elegant, beautiful film with an uplifting, moving conclusion that is constructed carefully, slowly, and precisely by its textured, impressionist narrative progression. Its poignancy doesn’t come from the sudden realization and appreciation for its structural genius (though it has this quality), but from the way it generates clear emotional theme from seemingly ambiguous events. By the time the film ends, you may not be sure about the chain of events that lead from x to y, but you’ll be sure about the weight of what happens to its characters and moved by their resolve to liberate themselves from a fate that was inflicted upon them by exploitative forces beyond their own understanding.

I had to see this movie twice before I felt like I could review it and I’m glad I did. Like Primer, it’s one of those films that’s rewarding the more you pay attention and the more times you watch it. So far this year, it’s the frontrunner #1 candidate for my eventual Top 15 list. One thing I should note, though, is that the Blu Ray disc has audio sync issues with certain player/TV settings. I managed to figure out how to fix the issue, but people should know about it before they go buying the disc.

WARNING: DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE. IT’S ON NETFLIX, SO NO EXCUSES.

This is the kind of movie you use as an example of why showing over telling can often work so damn well.

Part of Carruth’s strategy in Upstream Color is to show you a lot of stuff without necessarily telling you what it all means. That is, there’s pretty much no exposition but that doesn’t mean  there isn’t information or contextualization. The flow of images and scenes provide both. There’s a certain type of viewer for whom this is ultimately the most rewarding viewing experience and others for whom it’s exceedingly frustrating. The frustrated viewer will dismiss Upstream Color as pretentious, vague, and meaningless (or puffed up on its own self-indulgent sense of meaning). The frustrated viewer can be counter-dismissed as outside the target audience of a film like this one, but that doesn’t quite go far enough for me. The frustrated viewer is simply in the wrong. In our relativism with regard to the having and holding of opinions, my saying so may seem arrogant and possibly narrow-minded. The thing is, I don’t think someone who lacks the willingness or attention span to extract meaning from what Upstream Color is telling by showing is much worth my polite consideration. A populist attitude about art foists the blame on the artist for when their work fails to connect to the audience. That is just nonsense on its face, and yet a common attitude for intellectually defensive consumers. Upstream Color is, in no uncertain terms, one of those movies where sometimes “you just didn’t get it” is a reasonable defense.

Presumably, one could summarize Upstream Color by saying that it’s a movie about a strange grub-like creature with which it is possible to create telepathic connections between people, animals, and possibly other lifeforms (like plants). We see many people exploiting the worm, and the closed ecological cycle to which it belongs, in radically different ways. The film opens with the character credited as the Thief (Thiago Martins) throwing away a colorful paper chain. Some kids are hovering around him on bicycles. Soon, we see that the Thief cultivates a small flesh-toned caterpillar from pots of blue flowers. These creatures are sorted and placed inside pills or mixed into drinks by being set on a filter. The effects of ingesting the drink seem to be some sort of synchronicity (tandem movement), which we see the kids use as a sort of trippy drug. Meanwhile, the Thief’s pills are ingested orally which carries the worm inside of bodies.

The blue flower, a color not normally found in nature, is an early hint that there’s something special about it.

The Thief goes to bars and tries to pick up women, offering them the mysterious drug. It’s creepy and he’s not very convincing so the strategy fails. Not overly discouraged, the Thief resorts to desperate measures and uses a stungun on a young woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) who we have seen is some kind of film editor. The Thief forces her to ingest the worm which puts her into a disoriented, pliable state.

What follows is a series of short, bizarre scenes where Kris seems completely vulnerable to the Thief’s verbal suggestion, as if she is hypnotized. In short order, he convinces her of several unreal ideas (the ground can’t support her wait, his face is made of the same stuff as the sun so she can’t look at it, an ordinary jar of ice water is the best thing she’s ever tasted, etc) which weaken her will and distract her from the perverse exploitation he is inflicting on her. The Thief soon strips her of all her assets, leaving her alone with the worm that has now entered a new life-stage and is big and long enough to tunnel its way throughout her entire body.

Part of the reason this sequence is so weird is that we’re not sure how the suggestion effects work. I’d argue that the mechanics are unimportant and that the neurological effects of the worm, and whatever enzymes it secretes from its body, are already set up by the previous way we’ve seen it used. Besides, the film is far more focused on the exploitative nature of what the Thief is doing. Not just exploiting Kris (and his other victims) but whatever accident of ecology/biology that generated the worms in the first place. Exploitation of human beings is more immediate, but the film is also exploring the exploitation of nature and ecology. That the worms seem to be naturally occurring may mean that Upstream Color isn’t a proper science fiction film but that hardly matters either. I would likely argue for the “bio/ecological science fiction” I indicated at the beginning of the review.

The violation leaves Kris shattered as a person.

After the Thief leaves her, Kris’s hypnosis ends and she realizes there’s a worm inside her. She tries to cut it out, unsuccessfully, and then becomes drawn to a sound she hears rumbling in the earth. In a field somewhere, a solitary man points big speakers at the dirt and plays the sound. This man is called, in the credits, Sampler (Andrew Sensenig). Eventually, Kris appears. He gives her a drink, possibly loaded with sedatives, and gets to work removing her worm and transplanting it into a pig. He keeps detailed records of what he’s doing and of her. He tags the pig’s ear with her name.

By this point, the average viewer is going to be going “ques qua fuck?” and rightfully so. But it’s important to point out that Upstream Color is obviously building to something with all this, and it is providing incremental bits of information that function as clues more than plot points.

Sometime later, Kris has gotten a shitty printing job at a signage store and she meets Jeff (Shane Carruth). They start a bizarre little courtship where Jeff addresses her and his attraction for her assertively, almost aggressively. She remains guarded and closed off. It turns out that they’ve both been victims of the Thief (though neither is aware of it), and both been subject to the worm removal process. They’ve also both come up with a rational explanation for the missing time and erratic behavior that accompanied their victimization. Kris has decided that she’s had some kind of mental breakdown and now takes medications for OCD and possibly other issues. Jeff takes a lot longer to fully explain himself to her and it’s not until he does that she warms up to him. His explanation is that he was a drug addict, which led to divorce and a sort of employment limbo.

This courtship feels tense and awkward at first and it’s an interesting counterpoint to the brief moment we catch of Kris’s pig being greeted by a bigger, browner pig. This is Jeff’s pig. Realizing this provides insight into the weirdly instinctual mannerisms involved, especially from Jeff. He’s behaving how we imagine an animal to behave. Not brutish, but certainly more informal and earnest than is generally recognizable in a modern relationship.

The Sampler keeps all the pigs. He, too, exploits the connections the worm creates.

While Jeff and Kris get to know each other and begin to fall in love, the Sampler is seen to derive some sort of voyeuristic telepathic connection from the worm-infested pigs. Throughout the film, we see bits where Jeff and Kris’s behavior is inter-cut with stuff that is happening to the pigs. In addition, the Sampler seems to be able to watch the lives of the people attached to these pigs, simply by touching them. Does he have a worm inside him? We never find out how, but we do get plenty of insight into why.

All these pig-people seem lonely, haunted, and detached in much the same way as Kris and Jeff do. Some are plagued with psychological issues that feel like depression and anxiety. Eventually, their relationship eases the psychological burden of what was done to them but there’s always something odd about it, which they are both dimly aware of. Eventually, they begin to tell stories that are presumably from one of their memories and then have arguments about whose memory it really is. This is one of the ways we understand the almost nonverbal connection they share as a result of the worm and the pigs, as if they are branches of the same tree. Interconnectivity is a major theme of the film in general.

Once Kris opens up to Jeff, there’s a warmth and realism to their romance that, in spite of its bizarre tone and origins, registers as a thousand times more effective than the romances featured in just about all movies. Something in the body language, perhaps, but whatever the case it’s utterly believable and wholly idiosyncratic at the same time. Maybe it’s the idiosyncrasy that creates the authenticity. I think most relationships are idiosyncratic, after all.

The insistence and urgency of their romance also feels authentic, though we know it’s the result of a weird cross-species psychic connection.

Though at first we might think that Jeff is a bit deaf to Kris’s mental state, we also see him become more and more agitated as the Sampler interferes with their pigs. He notices that two of his pigs are buddied up and this seems to disturb him. Kris tells Jeff that she thinks she is pregnant but the doctors find only the damage done to her insides by the tunneling worm (a whole new level of violation). As they muck about in her body, we see Jeff in pain and holding his abdomen which reaffirms that the connection runs deeper than an animalistic one derived from the pigs. On some level, Jeff and Kris are baseline simpatico and this informs not only that semi-nonverbal communication we see them sharing, but also the way he reacts to her shakier and shakier state of mind. It’s when we see that Kris’s pig is pregnant that we begin to understand more of the connection they share with the animals.

The Sampler interferes again, separating the pigs and throwing their litter of piglets into a stream near his property. All of this effects Kris and Jeff in a vague, horrifying barrage of emotions including rage, aggression, fear, and profound sorrow. Though he’s less engaged with his own feelings (he’s the one asking “what” and “why” while Kris seems more in tune with whatever is going on), Jeff joins Kris in her reactivity because he also feels it. Just differently. It’s in the unquestioned support and the way Jeff joins Kris so utterly that the heart fucking melts even while you’re afraid for them because their confusion and agitation is so affecting and well executed in the context of the film.

Their love is almost totally without ego.

After a while, their pain eases. We return to the pigs, though, which have died and decomposed in the stream. Some chemical reaction happens and bluish fluid oozes up out of their bodies and into the soil and plants growing from the stream. Among them are orchids that we’ve previously seen collected by the same gardeners who sell the plants that the Thief searches for grubs. It’s possible that all these moving parts of the cycle are in collusion, but the film doesn’t say either way. Is the Sampler aware of the Thief? Probably. Is he directly involved with what the Thief does? I doubt it, and we’re never told for sure. There are some clues that he isn’t. Same with the mother and daughter who harvest the orchids and the blue flowers that we see are generated by some osmosis from what was excreted by the piglets. It seems like one of them would have told the Thief about the end of the cycle, when the flowers are no longer blue (at the every end of the film) and the worms disappear. But the thief is surprised and dismayed by their absence.

The last third of the film is comprised of Kris and Jeff figuring everything out. As the full picture of the cycle becomes clear, including why Jeff and Kris can feel the deaths of the piglets without fully understanding what they’re feeling. It all comes back to the connection created by the worm. Most of their work is accomplished without dialogue. There’s only the weird music Carruth created to inform his weird movie. Three pieces play over the last scenes of the film, all of which complimenting what we see much more than dialogue ever could. The music in this film is like a signature, another piece of the range Carruth has as a filmmaker as well as the thorough authorial stamp he places on his work. By the time it’s all over, you’re left with the impression that there’s definitely a lot that can be done through emphasizing showing over telling. Perhaps spoon-feeding information to the audience to justify the movement of the plot is a strategy that is over-relied on. Even complex movies like Upstream Color can come together into a compelling, cohesive picture just by showing it intelligently.

My favorite moment in the film.

The impressionism of the film is in full swing during the climax. The completion of the cycle back into the plants of the gardeners is what finally allows Kris to trace it to the Sampler and the pigs, which is also what breaks it. Though she’s who we begin the movie with, by this point Kris becomes a hero as well as a protagonist. But she’s not necessarily an uncontroversial hero. She’s the one who leads them to the Sampler, by retracing all the steps and pulls and engaging with her mysterious feelings, and she’s the one who finishes what he began as the unwitting architect of his own demise. By killing those piglets, he recreates some version of whatever cycle initially put that blue (the film codes anything to do with the worm and its psychic effects with the color blue) magic back into the biosphere. When she and Jeff lure the Sampler into their head-space (depicted as one of the empty rooms in the office building where Jeff works), she looks up directly at him and is aware of him. She’s trapped him, waited for him to appear and then used her heightened awareness to find him out.

And then she kills him.

Whether or not what the Sampler actually does in the film is deserving of this vengeance, it may be worthwhile to ponder whether or not his death is even about that. He’s the most interesting character in the film, after all, so let’s talk about him for a while.

There’s nothing especially triumphant about this.

Certainly his murder of the piglets is probably the clearest reason Kris would have to kill him, but it’s also about liberating her (and the other pig-people) from the cycle he was a participant in and perpetrator of. It’s also a rejection of the cycle of exploitation, both of human beings and the (not really separate) natural world. His voyeurism and exploitation are bad enough, but he also keeps Kris, Jeff, and all the others that the Thief victimized in the dark completely for his own reasons. He samples their lives, their experiences, like he samples the sounds of rocks, electrical equipment, and so on. Yet there’s a small amount of sorrow that should be reserved for him. Like with the sounds, which he tries to form into music and seems to not be wholly successful at (though he has a bunch of albums out, which gives some clue to who he is), it is possible that he’s trying to create some sort of harmony out of the lives he touches, some sort of greater meaning for himself. This obviously doesn’t exonerate him, but it makes him more than just a kind of rapist (which he is). We should pity him because his search for meaning is about control and exploitation, rather than about connection and intimacy. The film rejects the Sampler and embraces Kris and Jeff and the community they form with the other pig-people (and also the pigs, let’s not forget them).

The search for meaning, especially in nature, is a big part of the subtext of Upstream Color. It goes hand in hand with the persistent idea that interconnectivity is meaning in itself. But maybe the ego or some other flaw in our nature makes us miss this, favoring more exotic or esoteric types of meaning than that which is obvious.

Whilst robbing people blind, the Thief forces them to memorize Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. The book also winds up being one of the keys with which Kris and Jeff unlock the mystery of what happened to them. There are several reviews out there that examine the presence of Thoreau in this film, including the exciting idea that Carruth presents a Thoreauvian thesis that counterpoints the Emersonian ideals that commonly show up in the films of Terence Malick. The fact that Upstream Color looks a little like Malick is actually kind of hard to miss, and the idea that it’s Carruth’s answer to the worshipful awe that Malick infuses his films with is an interesting and appealing one. Carruth seems more interested in the repulsive elements in nature, the low down processes and disgusting orchestra of the chemical. Sunlight filtering through trees is less germane to Carruth’s purposes than is the decomposing body of a baby pig or vascular intimacy of a worm tunneling through a woman’s body.

I don’t really know my Thoreau (or Emerson, really) so it’s hard for me to comment on what exactly it has to do with Upstream Color. I’m sort of certain, though, that reading Walden would probably yield significant insight on the themes of the film. But this isn’t to say that the film is inaccessible without that prior knowledge. If it were, I’d be less willing to defend its approach to storytelling the way I did earlier. I mean, I will go as far as conceding that one shouldn’t have to read a book in order to functionally understand a movie. That said, I appreciate the notion that reading a book might help me form a more nuanced understanding or provide a more detailed context for a work. Upstream Color is very much worth that type of effort.

If I remember correctly, Thoreau did spend some time thinking about pigs in particular.

I’ve focused heavily on Upstream Color as a love story that heavily rejects exploitation and violation while embracing empathy, interconnection, and human intimacy. There’s plenty of analysis out there that focuses on Thoreau or on anti-religious elements in the film. Upstream Color seems open to all these threads of thought. Certainly there’s a sense in which the existential relationship between the unseen watcher and the watched appears like certain conceptions of an ambivalent, impersonal god. There’s also the symbolism of the worm (because it creates conformity and exploitation), the rejection of a certain type of meaning-seeking, etc. I’m sure others will watch this movie and have very different ideas about it than I did, which is partly why so much of this review mixes summary with analysis. It’s certainly the kind of movie you want to talk about for hours.

Upstream Color is a towering film and this nicely juxtaposes its intimacy and humility. Rewarding on repeat viewings, moving and resonant in every frame, this is a film that people discover on their own and cherish afterward. It’s got that something special. I mean, even if nothing else you might come away from this movie with an increased level of affection for pigs. They’re treated in a sort of banally terrible way by the Sampler. Simply as animals. But they’re more than that, and perhaps not just these pigs. Perhaps pigs, in general, are exploited. Perhaps all of nature is. And perhaps nature is dangerous and poorly understood and without inherent meaning besides that it’s nature, it’s connection, and we’re part of it.

Deriving meaning through forming connections is what humans do, though. In the sense that it embraces that concept fully, Upstream Color is an existential masterpiece.

It would be understandable if you never eat pork again after seeing this film.

It’s not exactly a subtle film.

Some are calling Elysium, Neill Blomkamp’s long-awaited follow up to District 9, the disappointment of the summer. I guess these people never saw Man of Steel. What connects Man of Steel and Elysium can be summed up in one word: hype. It can also be dispelled almost as easily: by letting go of unfair expectations. Man of Steel felt lesser for the epic, nuanced marketing that perfectly sold a movie it was for only the first half. Elyisum is hyped for what Blomkamp accomplished with District 9 and while Elysium is actually a lesser film, it’s not some crushing failure or massive letdown. It’s a cyberpunk fairy tale with a lot of great moves, but a few that don’t quite work. Both of these are good films overly hampered for disappointing people by not living up to some standard. Acknowledging that is an important first step in providing an honest evaluation of any movie that finds itself in this trap, and there are a lot of them these days.

If I can indulge some comparison with District 9 (it does invite this, and I think people will be thinking in these terms anyway as they watch), I’d say that the one thing Blomkamp certifiably surpasses himself with is the world-building and design. There is some repetition of theme with the guns and vehicles, but on the whole he’s managed to make Elysium feel like a real future, if an undesirable one. I will get more into this later, but it’s sort of important to mention it off the bat because if you’re coming into this looking for the same level of inventive action and quirky characterization, and astute allegory… you’re not going to get it. The action isn’t as good, nor is there very much of it, and the characterizations are blander on the whole, more akin to an 80′s movie than the more nuanced trend of contemporary “smart” action flicks. The allegory is clever and functional, but caught between Blomkamp’s commitment to gritty realism and a sort of fairy tale logic that sometimes undermines itself by being too clever (again, more on this later).

Having said all that, Elysium does work. If not always as well as I’d like. Especially if you let go of the urge to receive it under the shadow of District 9, which is admittedly difficult since it shares so much DNA. It’s a very different movie, though. Even if it doesn’t seem so on a superficial level, underneath the artifice that Blomkamp is so god damn good at, there’s the beating heart of a far more conventional action movie with slightly broader, and perhaps more ambitious, sociopolitical commentary mixed in. It compares far closer to Andrew Niccol’s In Time than it does to District 9, which all the good and bad that entails.

Elysium may feel like a bit of a letdown after the lightning-in-bottle magic of District 9, but it would be right at home alongside movies like Robocop or Total Recall. When you stop and think about it, so would District 9. Socially conscious science fiction has puttered along since its heyday and every now and then there’s one that knocks the roof off which makes you think there’s about to be a bunch more. That the subgenre will enjoy a resurgence. Elysium, unlike District 9, is not the movie that reinvigorates a genre, but it is the kind of movie that happens when a genre is well into that process. With the likes of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, In Time, and even The Hunger Games in recent memory, science fiction stories that want to make direct commentary on social issues that face us now are beginning to come along more often and with a higher overall level of quality. Not all of them are Verhoevian, true, but they don’t all have to be.

L.A. stands for all of Shithole Earth and, like Elysium itself, is practically a character in the movie.

The premise of the film is juicily topical. 150 years in the future, the disparity between the very poor and very rich has only intensified as pollution, overpopulation, and wealth gaps complicate the neo-liberal narrative. To protect their comfortable way of life, the rich basically create Spaceship Suburbia where they enjoy the benefits of a technological civilization that feels quite believably a century and a half in our future (it’s actually more conservative than I would bet on, even). Meanwhile, Earth is a dusty and toxic place where people have access to technology that mostly feels like it’s junk and refurbs from only about twenty years in our future.

Appropriately, this comments directly on the technological gap that many argue is an unavoidable consequence of rapidly developing, beneficial technology. Rather than being all tech-negative about it, the film simply acknowledges that technology is technology and some people are assholes about it. Bravo, says I. I think there are plenty of people, closet Luddites and the like, who’d prefer a movie where all the biotech implants and advanced medical tech (a major plot point) was simply smashed by the end, to equalize everything for everybody so we can start out again as primitives. Fuck that, says I.

Another interesting bit of world-building will hopefully exemplify why Blomkamp is so worth praising. Not only are half the characters in this film (more than that, I think) people of color or mixed race, there’s a sense of doubling down on the topical urgency of Hispanic influence on Western American population, culture, and language whilst also providing a believable future where that influence has become functionally dominant. Most people understand that immigration from Mexico has already vastly changed California and other states, but Blomkamp imagines what the extent of this could be in 150 years especially if everything else keeps going to shit. The result is that even the white lead, Max Da Costa (Matt Damon) is descended from and a product of Hispanic immigration and culture. The immigration Americans currently experience is replanted into the science fiction scenario Blomkamp has conjured for Elysium and it’s no accident at all that Mexican-Americans are the heroes of the film.

Blomkamp doesn’t flinch away from the seedier parts of poverty: the crime, substance abuse, and desperation are a huge part of the picture.

After the text and establishing shots that introduce us to Elysium, we are immediately faced with one of the things that really just doesn’t work in the movie. We see Max as a kid, looking up at Elysium and wanting to go there, and then becoming a bit of a troublemaker whilst fostering a child’s romance with Frey (who grows up to be Alice Braga, surprising me again by not being awful). This is almost fine and well. It nicely informs the way Max acts later in the movie, going against his own self-interest and survivor’s mentality, but it’s also couched with an annoyingly stupid bit with a nun. The nun explains that he’s special and meant to do a great thing. What? Do we really need this shit? No, we don’t. It also slaps you in the face with Elysium‘s simplistic use of the Hero’s Journey (District 9 does it far better). Instead of letting us see that Max is destined to be a hero, the movie out and tells us.

I think this is because Max is a reformed criminal by the time we meet him again in adulthood. Maybe it was thought that audiences would be more sympathetic to him if there were a scene saying “don’t worry, this guy is the chosen one”. It’s not like he really is some kind of chosen one, but the movie comes as close to saying it as it can without introducing mystical elements that usually accompany that sort of shit. Now, I could have stomached this one lapse in judgment if it weren’t repeated again later. Recalling these scenes in the ending weakens it terribly, making it feel saccharine and self-important rather than triumphant, and it is perhaps the weakness of the ending that most mars this otherwise excellent film.

Anyway. As an adult, Max has tried to go straight and even has a job at a company called Armadyne. They not only build robots (human labor is cheaper than robot labor, a clever idea) but also designed the software package that runs Elysium. Their CEO is Carlyle (William Fichtner), the embodiment of the inhuman, sociopathic “job creator”. He couldn’t give less of a shit about people like Max, whose air he doesn’t even like breathing, and is utterly reptilian when poor Max is forced by his boss (who threatens his job, and he’s an ex-con trying to go legit) to enter a very dangerous chamber where they irradiate droids. In doing this, Max gets a lethal dose of radiation and will be dead in five days unless he can find a way to get to Elysium and access one of their medical pods. This also throws a wrench in his attempts to reconnect with Frey, who has returned to the neighborhood as a beleaguered nurse with a dying daughter. Once, Max had promised to take her to Elysium but now he’s just worried about saving his own ass. Of course, fate (or whatever) has other ideas.

And then Hillary Clinton showed up!

Max isn’t the only one who longs for Elysium. A hacker and old associate of his, Spider (Wagner Moura) runs some kind of coyote operation. Earlier, we see one of his attempts to get would-be immigrants to Elysium go horribly wrong thanks to Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster) and her harsh intolerance for immigration. Delacourt is a weird character that the movie eventually kind of dumps, and Foster’s performance is full of one-note menace and a bizarre, distracting inconsistent accent choice (French? Posh American? British? you tell me). It’s sort of set up that Delacourt protects all of Elysium with the ferocity of a mother lion because she herself has kids. That’s as much character development as she gets. The government of Elysium are the kind of inhumanly humane people who don’t just kill unwanted Earthlings, but do round them up with their robot security force and put them in cages until they can be mass-deported back to Earth without the miraculous medical technology the Elysians enjoy freely. Their president, Patel (Faran Tahir) doesn’t like Delacourt’s methods at all (she blows coyote ships out of the sky) nor does he like her reliance on a deactivated Earthside agent named Kruger (Sharlto Copley, who steals the movie). With Kruger on the ground, Elysium’s apparent lack of a missile defense system doesn’t matter: he can simply fire ground-to-space missiles at motherfuckers and does so with relish.

Because Delacourt holds Patel and his associates in contempt, she wants to stage a coup. Her coup is the background plot of the film, really, and intermixes with Max’s adventures in a mostly tight fashion. Armadyne is struggling so she exchanges guaranteed business contracts with Carlyle in exchange for his help rebooting Torus, the aforementioned software that runs Elysium. She also enlists Kruger’s help which he’s into simply because it means he’ll be allowed to keep going around and fucking shit up.

Kruger is the kind of villain that people remember, that elevates the proceedings. Though he plays a similar role (overzealous shooter with a vendetta against the hero) as the bald guy from District 9, he injects the character with an anarchic whimsy that feels reminiscent (in good ways) of Heath Ledger’s version of the Joker. Sometimes it feels like Copley is in a slightly different movie than everyone else, a movie more in line with what people probably expected from Blomkamp’s sophomore effort. Between barbequing with his futuristic katana to “come meet the boys!” and a little Afrikaaner lullaby thrown in for kicks, Kruger is a villain that sticks to the movie far better than does its hero.

Though Matt Damon does his best, Max kind of gets lost in his own movie. The character, as written, is reliant on cheesy flashbacks to generate motivation. We understand that Max is obsessed with survival, that simply not dying is motivation enough (until he fittingly dies for others). I do like the scrappy survivor thing. I like what characterization is generated by Max’s constantly being the underdog. I like the charm and humor he gets to show in one or two scenes. Somehow, though, it doesn’t stick enough. I think it feeds back into a structural problem with Elysium. This is a very momentum-heavy movie. Once it really gets going, there are almost no respites. The respite is an important functional element of an action movie. When used correctly, a bit of breath between chases, fights, and danger provides a chance to build character, evolve motive, and give the audience reasons to care about the people and the plot. Though Elysium is far from being shallow in this regard, it does feel imbalanced and this is detrimental not only to Max, but to supporting characters like Frey and Spider who feel like they should have had one or two more moments to really connect to the audience.

The exosuit never really gets to have the punch it should, no pun intended.

Spider offers Max a deal to get him to Elysium. Max will have to brainjack a rich fuck and get access to all his bank info and accounts so that Spider can rob him blind. Max, who was semi-conscious whilst Carlyle was talking about him like he was a louse, selects the obvious target. This unwittingly puts him in possession of Carlyle’s codes to reboot Torus and complete Delacourt’s coup. It also puts him in Kruger’s gunsights and further complicates an already desperate life.

Although I give the movie some shit for undercooking Max as a character, I have to hand it to Blomkamp for settling on one of the very best ways to engender audience engagement in an action hero. Max is always physically fucked up, not only starting off with a broken arm but suffering continuous abuse from the radiation all the way to getting stabbed and beat up. Blomkamp did the same thing with District 9 in a less direct (and more clever) manner, but it fits in with this movie perfectly. Having Max notbe turned into an invulnerable juggernaut by the exosuit is a nice touch, retaining the physical vulnerability that increases the stakes (and thus viewers’ tension) for the character. Being pissed on by the world is part of what makes Max tick, and it is perhaps in his determination and resilience to it that we find the character the movie sometimes forgets to service. Max is the quintessential tough guy with a good heart, really.

It’s sort of odd that Matt Damon, poster boy of the cerebral action subgenre most clearly found in the Bourne films, is playing a role that could easily be something Schwarzenegger did in the late 80′s. In fact, another solid touchstone for Elysium is Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. In fact, Elysium makes me think that Blomkamp is less this generation’s James Cameron and more this generation’s Verhoeven.

Max also has the older, more busted version of everything.

Since I can’t seem to get off the topic, there is a thing about Max that somewhat balances whatever weakness there is in his characterization. That is, he functions a lot better as an element of the broad allegory. As an ex-con trying to do a job and live a life, he is very representative of both the American prison system and its perpetuating effect on poverty, crime, and desperation. His experiences are meant to evoke how difficult it is to reintegrate, even when one is well-intended. As a result, he’s kind of the perfect figure to messianically rebalance the world. Being disenfranchised and rebelling against the controls placed upon him seem to be his only options. As a youth, he was a criminal because it was the only way to acquire upward economic mobility. As an adult, he’s given up his dreams until circumstances force him to confront them as a matter of literal life or death. He’s the ultimate outsider, with Kruger functioning as a sort of deranged mirror. That’s a clever bit of structural work, really, and Blomkamp is so good at that sort of thing that it disappears behind the more noticeable problems.

I think I’m convincing myself that he’s a far stronger character than I initially thought when I started to write this. Hey, that’s awesome. This is why I write reviews. Actually, it’s worth mentioning also that the allegorical makeup of Elysium is a lot stronger than I expected. Without the peculiarity (for us North Americans) of the South African setting, Blomkamp doesn’t miss a step in capturing and hyperbolizing the bevy of topical sociocultural issues that float in and out of the wealth gap narrative. He’s got rich vs. poor, healthcare access imbalances, poverty culture in general, post-penal reintegration, and even the tendency for big business and big government to get in bed and make ugly exploitative babies. Much like In Time, Elysium is the kind of movie that is utterly reflective of the Occupy era.

All the same, there’s a sense to which things come a bit too easily, a bit too conveniently in the movie. It feels small, with it’s short timeline and even shorter list of characters and you too often see the mechanics of the plot betray themselves as just that. This intermingles with the sweeping scope of its world-building and gives the impression of a really nice physical set backgrounded with a matte painting. In pure plot terms, the whole sequence between Max deciding to trade his data for a trip to Elysium and being betrayed by Kruger like five seconds before landing feels like the hand of the writer (Blomkamp wrote as well as directed this) materializing before our eyes to get his ducks in a row. More objectionable is the way Delacourt is simply dismissed (she even dismisses herself as she’s dying, it’s very weird) when Kruger completely loses his mind (after Max blows his face off) and decides he’s going to be King of Elysium.

Being younger and sexier kind of drives him insane, I guess.

From the time we first see Kruger, the film is slowly ramping itself up toward a mano-y-mano showdown that should have been a lot better than it is. Blomkamp is a step behind himself with the action in this movie at least half the time. His gunfights are over-treated with gimmicks like extreme slow-motion (we only need one shot of those explosive rounds going off, thanks) and his fistfights are even worse, with the kind of shoddy hyperediting that is often used to disguise cheap or nonexistent fight choreography. There’s also some distracting camera shit going on there too, shaky cam helping to obscure the quick edits. If you’re going for brief, brutal, and realistic fights then the Greengrass Method is appropriate, but when you’ve got burly men made burlier with robotic armatures, people want to see that shit clearly. These actions scenes aren’t bad by any real meaure, but they are disappointing. Blomkamp infused District 9 with inventive tricks and gimmicks (FPS-style camera direction, etc) and it worked very well. Precious little of that in Elysium.

The action is made enjoyable, sometimes in spite of itself, due to the gleeful plethora of gadgets and weapons. From modded shotguns and AK-47s to UAVs and chest-mounted laptops, there’s almost no place where they miss an opportunity to throw in something neat. This also spreads out into other elements of the film, including the costume and aesthetics of the characters. People from Elysium have neat scarification tattoos embossed on their skin, either words or various shapes, and tattoos and prosthetic implants are common on Earth. The disparity is beautifully realized with everything on Elysium coming off as septic and iPod-chic whilst Earth is Miami Ink and screwing metal plates directly into bones.

There are some pretty satisfying moments in the generally disappointing fights.

Some people will likely be tempted to dismiss Blomkamp as yet another foreign director who is compromised by working in North America. I really don’t think that’s fair. It probably would take a few movies before Neill Blomkamp is John Woo and we should be as charitable as possible given the strengths the guy so obviously has in abundance. It’s a bit of a shame that he turned some of that down for Elysium, but enough of the visionary we thought he was shows up here that we shouldn’t go thinking District 9 was a fluke. Elysium cannot be the instant classic that first film was, and I suspect this is partly due to the tricky interplay of success and expectation. In other words, there’s no way the environment in which this film was released could ever support it being an instant classic, even if it earned that status by merit. Not that I think it does, exactly, but it’s worth mediating one’s criticism by considering these things.

Earlier, I called Elysium a cyberpunk fairy tale and I think that’s the best, quickest way to sum it up. Cyberpunk because it is big on cybernetics, robotics, computer technology, and dystopia and fairy tale because it simplifies its narrative with rationalizations that serve an allegorical point (or moral). It’s no accident that Frey’s daughter tells a parable halfway through the movie, annoying as that moment is (in spite of Damon’s best efforts, really). It’s funny because people are going to misjudge two elements of the ending that seem lazy or unbelievable (and have, judging by other reviews) which, while adhering totally to the easy convenient logic of the plot, also ring true as both world-building and allegory. Which, you know, is what a fairy tale does.

The protector role Max ends up in is a bit too perfunctory and incidental.

The first of these is the almost laughably simplistic programming of Torus. In a moment that will be both fun and recognizable for anybody who has learned a bit about coding, the moment when Spider grants all of Earth citizenship in Elysium will register as both simple and correct. It’s just one false/true statement in probably a disgustingly complex body of code. It’s not all that different from altering the .ini file for a video game. That one line of code could have power over your character’s mortality, or it can equalize healthcare for 10 billion people.

The second is the consequences of citizenship. Almost immediately, Torus identifies that billions of people require medical attention under the terms of Elysian medical care. This means that they have congenital defects, injuries, cancers, etc that can all be quickly treated by the medical pods. Ships are dispatched to Earth to deliver this service to people. The question some will be left with is: why the fuck didn’t Elysium just do this anyway? The question is rational, but the answer isn’t. Nor is its real world equivalent very rational. There’s a barrier to entry with the lifestyle and services of Elysium, just as there is a barrier to entry with healthcare in countries like the United States. Without insurance or financial status of a certain level, the very best treatment (or any treatment at all) is simply not possible. I think middle class (if there is such a thing) theater attendees are going to miss this clever bit of allegory completely. It simply won’t register to them in the same way that it will to all the poor kids downloading CAM rips of Elysium.

And that’s fucking perfect.

Oh Kruger; katanas and cherry blossoms.

The new hotness.

Never been a fan of Mark Millar’s comic books, especially the ones that get made into movies, but I do seem to like the movie versions. Wanted, Kick-Ass, and now Kick-Ass 2 are all much better films than they ever were comic books. This owes mostly to intelligent, often massive changes done to the source material. The books these movies are based on are fun in some ways, but also steeped in a repulsive nihilistic meanness that is watered down in each respective film. It seems odd to praise adaptations that not only massively alter the source, but also cut out significant amounts of darkness and shock value. That said, it fits here simply because tone is what matters and the filmmakers who’ve worked on Millar’s stuff all seem to have a better understanding of audience tolerance than Millar does. Or perhaps the comic book audience, particularly his, are just that different from the rest of us.

I’ll get into specific examples later but because it’s not my policy to use adaptive comparisons as criticisms (if it can be avoided), it’s not really pertinent to the broader question of whether or not Kick-Ass 2 is a good movie. It is a good movie, by the way, but not because it’s better than its book. Hopefully that makes sense!

Like the first tone, Kick-Ass 2 is an irreverent and crude little gem that takes the idea of real-world superheroes and runs with it, ending up far away from realism but still well within its own parameters. It’s more like “real-world superheroes in the world of Kick-Ass“. Along the way, it stops to joke about or comment on various comic book tropes. While some would call Kick-Ass deconstructive, it’s actually reconstructive. It only starts out taking a shot at the silly tropes and uncomfortable realities of real-world superheroes. Eventually, it circles around to embracing those tropes and thrusting forward its bonafides as an actual, legit superhero movie. So does Kick-Ass 2, and it is by far the more straight-forward of the two movies. That said, it lacks some of the balance and tidy structure of the first, as well as the ridiculous, awesome action of the first movie. Which is what most people remember about it.

The age difference between the leads is smaller in the films.

A few years after their battle against D’Amico, the mob boss from the first one, Dave (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Mindy (Chloe Grace Moretz) are suffering through high school with their superhero days more or less behind them. Not fitting in at all, Mindy cuts class to go train while her adopted father Det. Marcus Williams (Morris Chestnut) keeps an eye on her. Meanwhile, Dave is getting bored in his retirement and eventually decides he wants to get back in the game. Dave’s boredom is a valid character motive within the realm of this story, even if it isn’t very dramatic. Mindy is more interested in staying true to the life her father made for her and she gets all the cheesy little speeches about being a superhero and protecting folks this time around. If anything, Dave is even more juvenile and enthusiastic about the whole thing than he was the first time around. For him, Kick-Ass 2 winds up being about learning that there are consequences for the game he’s playing. For Mindy, it’s about figuring out who she really is… someone born to play that game.

Mindy has the more interesting arc in the film and as a result, it’s a lot more focused on her this time around.

That said, I may be doing Dave’s storyline a disservice. It’s more than boredom. He sees that his actions in the first movie have inspired a whole pack of new superheroes and he basically just wants to join them. He had to keep it all a secret before, and only had Big Daddy and Hit Girl for company. And they way, way outclassed him. The one lesson he definitely learned in Kick-Ass was the upsides and downsides of teamwork. That teamwork is what saved the day seems like something that he’s kept in mind. He puts the mask back on to belong, this time around, and it nicely parallels Mindy’s own search for the same feeling. What makes them different is that Dave basically knows who he is and Mindy is full of adolescent doubt.

Her biggest fear is that she’s just another girl, and her kryptonite is boy bands.

But for a while, they get the team back together.

In high school, Mindy doesn’t fit in and doesn’t much care. She ditches class to train and takes Dave along with her once he decides he wants back in. Her doubts are compounded both by how other girls treat her and how Marcus is always trying to make her “normal”. This is a one-two punch of outsider story, really, and because Mindy is a huge geek (dropping fanboy-slapping jokes about Stan Lee even), this registers as fairly astute for a 2013 movie, let alone a 2013 comic book superhero movie. I mean, it’s close to the same stuff that usually gets stuffed into Peter Parker’s high school stories. So it’s true to comic zeitgeist and repurposed to comment on a specific type of person in a universally challenging phase of life. Nicely done, Kick-Ass 2. Did not see that shit coming.

Mindy’s story is really progressive, even more so than in Kick-Ass. With her dad gone, she’s the only real superhero left and the movie (mostly through Dave) keeps reminding us of that. Her superior training, reflexes, and unflappability just make her a step above even Col. Stars and Stripes (a born again mob enforcer played with aplomb by Jim Carrey). Even though he finds a home with the Colonel and his superteam Justice Forever, all Dave really wants is to bask in Hit Girl’s shadow. His hero-worship of her is always notable, never more silly than it should be, and totally informs the interesting and possibly unique gender politics of Kick-Ass 2. And the admiration works both ways. Dave is the first boy Mindy ever crushes on, has sexual attraction, to, or kisses. He’s brave, she says, which is really the only requirement to being a superhero. They inform each other, as characters, and this in turn informs the movie, elevating it beyond the schlocky sequel it easily could have been.

It’s around the time when all this comes together that the movie finds its footing and mostly takes off. Jeff Wadlow takes the reigns from Matthew Vaughn this time (writing and directing the movie) and seems to stumble a bit in the set-up phase. Once Mindy takes off her mask and Dave goes looking for more people like him, the movie gets not only much better than anybody probably expected, but also genuinely interesting. It’s a bit messier than Kick-Ass was and has much less awesome action, hip musical cues, and uncouth Mindy jokes but these flaws don’t really get too much beyond being slightly disappointing due to the very different ambition of Kick-Ass 2 and its consequent tone.

When Mindy accesses her inner self, she’s more confident and capable than 200 mean bitches.

The beautiful parallel to Mindy’s girl-power storyline is the character Mother Russia. Like Mindy, she’s the only “real deal” on her side of the fence. Menacing and iconic, Mother Russia is the heavy hitter on the evil team formed by The Motherfucker (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). In an intentional echo of Hit Girl’s ridiculous hallway shootout in the first movie, Mother Russia gets the most memorable action sequence in Kick-Ass 2. She takes out a squad of cops single-handedly in a series of moves that escalate their barbarity, cleverness, and gleeful violence. This is not a heroic sequence, but it’s beautifully done and gets the audience raring for the inevitable showdown between Hit Girl and Mother Russia. The point, though, is that these are the most badass characters in the Kick-Ass universe and they are both women.

Speaking of The Motherfucker. After his dad’s death at the hands of Kick-Ass, he’s been trying to figure out some way to get revenge. When he accidentally kills his mom, he inherits the family money and sets about using Javier (John Leguizamo) to hire his own private gang of thugs: The Toxic Mega-Cunts. He reimagines himself as The Motherfucker, the world’s first supervillain and walking advert for bondage gear. If Mintz-Plasse failed to make this all work, the movie would have fallen apart. Aside from the story and themes that work so well for Kick-Ass 2, he’s one of the best things in it. Rumor has it that he took some additional acting coaching to be able to play the character. Thankfully, there’s nothing pretentious about the performance and it’s note-perfect whilst juggling infantile egotism, anarchic cruelty, and self-deprecating humor.

Also the most ridiculous part, which must not be easy in a movie this ridiculous.

As the Mindy vs. The Mean Girls storyline resolves itself with Mindy getting awesome revenge and realizing who she really is, The Motherfucker has begun a rampage that puts Kick-Ass in the crosshairs whilst creating tons of collateral damage, including his dad. Night Bitch (Lily Bloom) stands in for the old girlfriend (who, in the book, isn’t ejected from the story in amazingly perfunctory fashion as she is here) that becomes another target for The Motherfucker’s vendetta. The borderline offensive, shock-baiting rape scene from the book is adapted with sensitivity and even humor (The Motherfucker can’t get it up), without wading into the casual misogyny and mean-spiritedness that typifies Millar’s work. Though their relationship is just a fling, we still applaud when Dave shows up at the hospital with flowers (Dave is just a nice guy) and then again twice as hard when Night Bitch goes back on her (understandable) doubts and joins in for the final brawl between the superheroes of New York and The Motherfucker’s evil army.

It would have been nice to see more little snapshots of that big fight, but the movie makes time for all the secondary characters throughout its running time. The core group of Justice Forever gets to do plenty, and have plenty of fun with jokes, heroic violence, and even some pathos when the Colonel is brutally executed by Mother Russia. That said, the big fight doesn’t make as much room. Most of it is taken up by Hit Girl vs. Mother Russia and Kick-Ass vs. The Motherfucker. These are glorious fights, full of fun and meaty subtext, and they are intercut with other moments like Dr. Gravity (Donald Faison) unleashing the new beating stick, or Hit Girl making good on her claim that she can kill a guy with his own finger. But still, there’s nothing in Kick-Ass 2 that measures up to the hallway shootout (or the hotel assault in general) even though Mother Russia’s cop killing spree comes close and maybe only falls behind because it’s bad guy stuff and because we don’t actually especially like seeing cops get killed. Hopefully.

Once Jim Carrey is out, Mother Russia is in as the character second most fun to watch in the movie (after The Motherfucker, obv). I mean, just fucking look at her.

As good as Mindy’s story is in general, it really lets its hair down with the vs. the mean girls stuff. I mean, there’s enough potential in the performances and material to carve out its own movie. Here, it could easily have been a weird left turn and a bad distraction from the reason we’re all really here: superhero shit. Instead, Wadlow makes it work completely and that in itself is worth pausing again to praise. It’s the instinct we all have to buckle down and get along that drives Marcus and his gross misinterpretation of his adopted daughter, and he stands in to represent the overarching and mostly benevolent source of this kind of adversity. The mean girls stand in for a lot of the rest.

Mindy doesn’t look at what her dad did to and with her as a theft or an abuse. She looks at it as a gift, but can’t articulate it until she gets over her self-doubt and realizes that you don’t make the world a better place by sitting around and living how other people tell you to. While it’s massively ridiculous on the surface, Kick-Ass 2 is driven by core themes (like that one) which are generally paid lip service to (everybody needs to chase their dreams, outsiders are the people who make a difference, hell is high schoolers, etc) but rarely as broken in as they are in this movie.

All that and it is still a straight-up superhero team-up movie. I mean shit, that’s something ain’t it? If I can carry on with this for another moment or two, it’s also important to note that Kick-Ass 2 is not subtle about these things. Everybody who sees this movie should have a good grasp of the themes I’m talking about. It’s not some secret, obscure bit of subtext that winds its way through the movie, only to be picked up by the astute and attentive viewer. I like that kind of thing, too, don’t get me wrong… but it doesn’t belong here.  This means that nobody has an excuse to miss this stuff or dismiss it because they didn’t like something else about the movie.

If there’s any weakness to Kick-Ass 2 aside from the perfunctory way it occasionally handles its narrative (which feels true to character and universe, but still a bit jarring), it’s that the movie will occasionally come right out and tell you what the big picture is. It doesn’t do this any more than your average, PG-rated, ostensibly for kids superhero movie so I guess it only feels odd because Kick-Ass 2 is very much a grown-ups’ movie about growing up. But it’s also a perfect movie to watch when you’re fifteen and just starting to be able to deal with the adult stuff.

I honestly wish Carrey had more roles like this one in him.

Though everybody has ample reason to quit by the end, and most do, Dave takes the whole thing as a sign that stepping up to the next level is what’s needed. Up to this point, he’s been a “punk in a wetsuit”, just playing superhero even with some flirtation with the real thing, but the example set by Big Daddy and Hit Girl finally gets him to acknowledge the seriousness of what he’s doing. For Dave, Kick-Ass 1 and 2 feels like one complete superhero origin story. This is why the ending, where you see him training even harder than before and a brief shot of a metallic helmet designed after the wetsuit pattern, works. In many ways, another theme of the Kick-Ass movies is that going against the grain, even when it makes no sense, is just the right thing to do. The grain is practically a character in these movies, too. Like I said, everybody involved on the superhero side gets ample reason to go “wait what the fuck am I doing!?” and cut it out. None more than Dave. That he perseveres anyway is ridiculous in a realistic sense, but thematically correct.

In fact, it’s rousing. The same way that Kick-Ass was rousing in spite of the fun it had at the expense of the ideals that characterize superhero fiction. Ideals that seem laughable in the dangerous, complex, and morally uncertain world we really do live in. These movies are about stepping up and being the change you want to see in the world. It’s nice that they are so funny, that the characters are so diverse and fun to watch, and that the whole endeavor is couched in an excellently progressive narrative. What’s really important, though, is that there’s no real philosophical difference between putting on a costume to literally fight crime and speaking up when you see someone harming another. Most superhero movies take these ideas for granted, which is usually understandable, but every now and then it’s nice to be reminded why there are superhero movies in the first place.

People seem to mistake Kick-Ass as attempting and failing at being a satire. Kick-Ass has satirical elements, and so does Kick-Ass 2 (though lessened), but they are not satirical deconstructions meant to leave you with the comforting reaffirmation that real people becoming superheroes is a dumb idea. Instead, these movies totally embrace the superhero metaphor for daily involvement and the heroism that comes with not being indifferent. Stepping up, in other words.

Whatever else they are, the Kick-Ass movies are thoroughly goofy and crude and lovable.

Fran Kranz is one of the biggest surprises in the movie. You’re probably surprised this is him, even. That’s just the beginning.

Much Ado About Nothing is an eminently easy movie to love. No one should be surprised that Joss Whedon decided to tackle Shakespeare in his spare-time. I would have been shocked and disbelieving if anyone tried to tell me that Whedon isn’t one of Shakespeare’s biggest fans in the whole wide world. Whedon, as I’m fond of saying, writes like Shakespeare. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that Whedon is as good as the Bard (though Tarantino, who also writes like Shakespeare, may be). I’m just saying there are correlations. Stuff like turn of phrase, clever and snappy dialogue, five-act structures, pop culture slyness, and ribald humor are all hallmarks of Whedon’s work. So who better to do a nuanced, clever, and often ironic production of one of Shakespeare’s funniest plays?

Nobody. There’s nobody better. So it’s okay if you expect a lot here. Shakespeare fans should definitely love this movie, but it’s a real treat for Whedon fans as it features many of his regulars doing the kind of work for which you will find yourself half-angrily wondering why these people never broke through into the bigger world of acting fame and fortune. It also has little in-jokes for people who watched his TV shows. Nothing too obtrusive or self-indulgent, but truly sly (can’t think of a better word for it) stuff that is so tiny that I may be imagining it.

So it’s great, a slam dunk, for the Shakespeare crowd and the Whedon crowd. But what about everybody else? Everybody else may not like the movie for being black and white, or for using Shakespeare’s lines in a contemporary setting, and so on. Everybody else is missing out if they can’t wrap their heads around that, though. It’s just window dressing. This is one of the most accessible “off the page” Shakespeare films ever made. The script is so witty, so full of wonderful and funny stage direction, that it would be pretty difficult to miss that wit or fail to see what’s happening through the sometimes (in some plays) barrier to entry that is Shakespearean language. I respect that some people have a hard time with that stuff, but I hope they give Much Ado About Nothing a chance because it seriously transcends that potential hurdle and rises to be unequivocally one of the funniest movies of the year, and so good-natured and fun that you smile even when you don’t laugh out loud.

Two of Whedon’s biggest “what ever happened to…” actors who really fucking show up in this movie.

If you know the play, excuse my summarizing the plot a bit.

Leonato (Clark Gregg) is about to receive some guests, recently returned from “the wars”. They include Don Pedro (Reed Diamond), Claudio (Fran Kranz) and the witty, argumentative Benedick (Alexis Denisof). They also bring Don John (Sean Maher), who is Pedro’s brother and a bit of a traitor/pain in the ass. John’s also got two retainers. No one wants him or them around, but they’re along anyway.

Leonato has a daughter, Hero (Jillian Morgese) and a niece, Beatrice (Amy Acker) who has a similar disposition to Benedick. Unlike in the play (as far as I remember, anyway), the film shows us that Beatrice and Benedick’s long standing war of wills and wits is based on a dalliance that ended presumably with Benedick running off to do his soldiering. Since then, neither has married and both are cynical about the entire enterprise of love and marriage.

As Hero and Claudio fall in instantaneous, Shakespearean love, everybody except John decides now would be a good time to trick Benedick and Beatrice into falling in love. Their dispositions make them perfect for each other, and both actors play it up as the kind of bickering, stubborn chemistry that lights up the screen. They are both so fucking good.

All of these guys take to the patter and turn of this dialogue like they were born to do it.

Not to miss an opportunity to fuck with his brother’s fun, Don John dispatches his own friends Borachio (Spencer Treat Clark) and Conrade (Riki Lindhome) to mess it all up. Meanwhile, pretty much everybody else in the household is busy making sure that Beatrice and Benedick overhear gossip about their secret love for each other. As if it’s what they’ve been wanting to hear all along, this news really gets them both going and the results are touching and hilarious.

It’s tough to convince an audience to take this sort of thing seriously, and the movie doesn’t really ask you to. It’s all treated as sudden, ridiculous, and fun (which feels right). Yet, all of the mains in the movie are able to make it more than that. Kranz is especially electrifying, if I can use that word with a straight face, when things start to go wrong for Claudio. But Denisof and Acker do every little thing they can to make this stuff feel as real as it can. There’s vulnerability underneath the caustic wit, there’s yearning underneath the cynicism. That’s good stuff, and the kind of good stuff you could never get reading this in an English course.

Everybody knows how fun Gregg is, but he gets the chance to be both soothing and menacing in this one.

Borachio and John scheme together to convince Claudio that Hero is unfaithful and not a virgin. Though I bet it’s not in the play either, Whedon and Clark create a Borachio who also has the hots for Hero and therefore feels something both when she’s promised to Claudio and when she fakes her death in the aftermath of her humiliation. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The scheme is Borachio’s but John is happy to send it home. He bangs one of Leonato’s servants in Hero’s window, while she wears Hero’s dress, and John makes sure that Claudio and Pedro see it.

I’ve already mentioned Kranz’s surprising weight in the movie. He’s the same funny, pensive guy you’d expect (though the nervous energy he had in Dollhouse and The Cabin in the Woods is absent here) until he gets his heart broken. Then, an explosive Kranz emerges and the movie never quite recovers its jovial tone after his scathing rejection of Hero. That’s what you call a powerful performance, by the way. It’s one that punches a hole in the movie, really, and the movie is more than happy to stay wounded and let the damage be damage.

Firefly fans will delight.

I have this feeling that Sean Maher is probably one of the least popular of all the awesome characters Whedon has created over the years. I don’t think there are many big Simon fans out there and I don’t think the character was ever intended to have many. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but it feels true. In Much Ado About Nothing, Maher gets to play the slick, composed, and sociopathic villain that I think most people could see lurking in him somewhere in the Simon character. Maher fits Don John like a glove and if the movie is lacking in anything, it’s in his presence in the last third of the film. Like with Fran Kranz, it’s the kind of performance that makes you really aware of the potential these guys have and excited to see what they’ll do in the future as they’re both still really young. Acker and Denisof are also nothing short of amazing, but they’re both over 40 and while I also hope they get more attention if for no other reason than how good they are here, it also seems like they’re more of a known quantity.

That makes me sound a bit cynical. Shoot. Moving on.

Following the play, Whedon has to negotiate a sort of anti-dramatic turn around where Borachio and Conrade get caught, John runs away, and the duel that Beatrice has convinced Benedick to fight against Claudio is waved away. This is Shakespeare for you, though. And it’s a comedy so everything  has to work out in the end, even the buffoonish police (Nathan Fillion and Tom Lenk, who are a riot together) get to chalk up a win. Apparently, Whedon was committed to staying very true to the play as a whole. His changes are mostly out of irony (Claudio’s Ethiope line is a great quick joke) or pure anarchic fun (changing Conrade’s sex and having everybody refer to her as a he or a man), or to add nuance and depth to the characters. I don’t think he can help himself and thanks to the lack of stage direction in Shakespeare’s plays as written, there’s plenty of room to have fun with the material.

Dogberry is just the kind of name you want to have.

It’s worth mentioning that Much Ado About Nothing was a really low budget, DIY kind of movie. It was shot at Whedon’s house, during the production of The Avengers and in total secret. I hope he gets to do more of these. Now that he’s risen to the forefront of filmmaking success, it’s a good sign of the guy we know and love that he has work like Much Ado About Nothing in him. And really, seeing a movie he made with his friends is sort of like seeing a movie a friend made, starring your own friends. All of these people have a special connection to the breed of literary nerd that Whedon so captivates. My foot is only ever half in that door, but it’s enough to feel like this is a special sort of movie.

Don’t overlook it.

There are some surface similarities to Sound of My Voice.

One of the things that comes across very clearly in The East is how willing it is to push buttons. It’s practically Pushes Buttons: The Movie. Complimentary to this is just how damn confident it is, on pretty well every level of the production. Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling wowed everybody a couple of years ago (or last year, depending on your access to cinemas) with Sound of My Voice in pretty similar fashion. The East is an order of magnitude beyond that, or several, not only in terms of tension and turning screws, but also subverting expectations and challenging viewers and doing it all with surprising ambition and always that unflappable confidence.

I’m not sure whether it’s intentional (of course it is) or not, but even the premise of this movie is precisely set up to be inviting to incredibly diverse people only to turn it around on them. The premise is: private sector intelligence agent infiltrates secretive ecoterror cabal. That immediately implies a judgment against the environmental activism (trickling down from the extremist level, I guess) or an endorsement of it via the somewhat natural notion that this is a story about someone fighting for one side, finding out its wrong, and fighting for the other. What people read into the premise is going to decide the movie before them before they ever sit down and watch it. There’s a type of person for whom it’s a given that environmental activism is a modern evil, that groups like The East are basically terrorists, etc. Then there’s the type for whom The East is going to have direct appeal, either convincing them of something they suspected was true or reaffirming ideas they already had.

But the film is more complicated and richer than either of those relatively straightforward (preconceived) notions. I can say that it comes down a lot more on the side of environmentalism, even extreme activism, but that it doesn’t get there through a simplistic moralist story about evil corporations and good hippies. The East actually chances undermining the authenticity of its eventual position by including certain characteristics in its core group of activists. This is a calculated risk, though, and one of the best signs that The East is everything you’re thinking it is while you’re watching it. It’s a subtle character study built on a straightforward plot. All the challenges come in the spaces in between the characters, in the pauses between their activities.

Just in case I obfuscated it by avoiding direct spoilers, I loved this film. It’s brilliant and challenging and ambiguous in all the right ways. It’s the best spy movie in years.

Part of Jane’s problem is not knowing which connections to lean on.

Jane Owen (Brit Marling) is a young and ambitious intelligence operative working for a company that caters to big corporations by protecting their reputation and damaging their enemies from the inside. She used to be FBI but the private sector seems to afford her more opportunities to do serious field work. Hand-picked by Sharon (Patricia Clarkson), Jane dyes her hair and becomes “Sarah”, a traveling hipster smart and canny enough to put herself in contact with an elusive group called The East.

In some fairly important ways, The East is about the dichotomy of identity and how splitting oneself up into discrete persons can lead to essential conflicts at the core of who we are. The East is not heavy-handed about this and is quite happy to let the audience pick this theme up at any point, whilst being more directly engaged by the tension and intrigue of Sarah’s infiltration and The East’s plans.

Because it is one of the key themes, and my primary source of evidence for the claim that this is a subtle character study as much as a thriller, let me say a bit more. For me, the first big sign that this was going to be a movie more about Jane/Sarah than anything else was the inclusion of a boyfriend character. Tim (Jason Ritter) is her nice guy live-in boyfriend, a guy who seems about to ask her to take the next step in their relationship before she shushes him, using this new job as an excuse. Jane never seems comfortable with Tim, it’s as simple as that, and it only intensifies as her odyssey into The East continues. There’s nothing explicit about this progression from not wanting to talk about whatever Tim is about to ask and then feeling like a foreigner at home. When Tim finds her sleeping on the floor instead of with him, he’s smart enough to know what the movie doesn’t explicitly tell us, always striving instead to find ways (both great and small) to show us. Jane is gone. Replaced by Sarah.

But there’s more than this. Jane’s cover name, whether assigned to her or chosen, is Sarah. Sarah sounds like Sharon. Sarah’s hair is blond, like Sharon’s. Sarah is a staunch “company woman” or wants to appear to be (as Jane). This is subtle stuff, meant to feed the central irony that even whilst emulating Sharon, Sarah becomes the enemy of everything she stands for. This is a relationship that gets a relatively tiny amount of screen time, but I think I’d argue that it’s the most important relationship in the film.

Some are saying that Jane is like a female Jason Bourne.

The East gets on everybody’s radar by taking aggressive, punitive action against CEOs and high-ranking corporate figures who they claim are responsible for various atrocities. All the corporate crimes tackled by this movie are based on real things that have happened. You may find yourself being reminded of stuff you’ve read over the last few years. Gas in water, drugs that cause horrific side-effects, etc. This is about when the conservative types hoping this is a movie for them will begin to feel a bit uneasy. It’s all just too real. Marling and Batmanglij understand our collective discomfort about this, and they pin it to us like the proverbial tail on the donkey. They invite us to feel a visceral thrill at someone finally standing up and doing something. Then it gets complicated.

Sarah eventually finds her way into The East by helping the trusting Luca (Shiloh Fernandez) with some train cops. She meets the core group of Doc (Toby Kebbel), Izzy (Ellen Page) and Benji (Alexander Skarsgard) and watches them while they induct her into their hippy-dippy, seemingly cultish social customs. This is the one place where Sound of My Voice is instantly recalled and The East may surpass even that film for creating a disconcertingly mixed mystique around a group of people. As with their previous film, Batmanglij and Marling make the shady group here appealing and repulsive at once. The scene where they wear straitjackets and feed each other soup is brilliant both in its underlying tension and its communal message. We understand Sarah’s frustration at being tricked, but we also understand the ideological appeal. They feed each other, sacrificing one person’s greed and immediacy in favor of the collective.

Marling plays Sarah close to the vest. Showing us much without telling us anything.

Of course, the film begins with something like this only so it can deconstruct it later. The East is not an idyllic or fully cohesive group. They have disagreements and a rotating membership of hangers on and people with personal vendettas. We discover that Izzy’s father is the CEO of a company that pours arsenic into water, something that costs at least one life by the time The East selects him for one of their “jams” (what they call their attacks on corporations). This goes back to something I said earlier about the film risking undermining itself. See, it would be a lot cleaner to have all of the members of The East be ultra-canny regular folks who are simply and morally outraged, with no icky personal history or ego to get in the way of ideological purity. But that’s idealistic and The East is not that kind of idealistic. Instead, we’re supposed to wonder if Izzy’s personal involvement with the arsenic jam undermines her, undermines what The East is, even. She’s a rich kid, and so is Benji, and maybe this reaffirms the popular notion that “eco-warriors” are a bunch of spoiled kids who are really just mad at mommy and daddy. While this is true of Izzy, and shades her character, it’s a disservice to Benji who is far more of an iconoclast. He’s an ambiguous character and Skarsgard plays him with big-eyed sincerity in a facade that eventually drops away to reveal the shrewd, dangerous creature within. He’s the real deal, in other words. Rather than embracing this, the film rejects Benji.

Previously, Sarah’s first jam with the group was one where they gave a drug called Dioxin to a party full of the parent company’s high ranking corporate officers as well as their guests and families. Sarah tries to stop as many as she can from dosing Dioxin, setting up the moral politics of the film. More and more, we have reason to support the fundamental aim of The East as we become convinced that it’s right to fight back against exploitative and harmful corporate practices that virtually no other social institution has any effect on. Just so, we have more and more reason to feel a certain disconnect from the Hammurabi morality of Benji and his crew. “Poison us, we’ll poison you” they say. From Sarah’s perspective, it’s the harming of people that crosses the ideological line. Even when she turns, this stays a constant. It’s actually part of what turns her. Sharon, as it happens, is every bit as willing to sacrifice people for her ambition as Benji or Izzy are.

Sarah’s always trying to save people, all through the movie. This keeps us on her side.

Sarah, however, isn’t. She’s only really willing to sacrifice herself. She becomes emblematic of a kind of intelligent, precise approach to activism that belies the lazy pothead stereotype as well as the Unibomber stereotype. She’s an activist for the Occupy generation. Smart, capable, technologically proficient, and brave enough to not take the easy path. This doesn’t mean she reflects the Occupy type so much as she is aspirational. This is who we, those of us who believe in activism and want to see changes in the world even if it means getting serious, should aspire to be like. There aren’t really any characters that embody the “tree-hugger” stereotype so well as Benji embodies his, but I chalk this up to the film not really taking that stereotype seriously in the first place and instead broadening the idea into the general social practices (group baths, feeding, bonfires, and kissing games) that The East carries on with when they’re not playing the part of high-tech, super competent environmental activists. Carving through all of that is the version of Sarah that Jane eventually becomes.

Choosing who to be is fundamental to the film. Jane’s journey toward Sarah is meant as (at least) a rough analog of the kind of choices our consciences demand of us. Do I think you have to go this far in order to fight the good fight? Will I hurt people for my cause? Will I risk being hurt for it? But most of all: how far is too far?

It’s a movie of layers, even when it strips them.

In case I’ve given the impression that Jane/Sarah is some kind of untouchable paragon, let me rectify that. One of the more interesting and risky propositions the film makes is the attraction Sarah feels for Benji. An affair subplot, especially in these circumstances, could easily railroad the movie or turn either character more simpering and moronic than they are up to this point. To hedge its best, The East steadily builds up to the final breakdown in whatever walls these two have kept up. For Sarah, it’s a release and another step toward replacing Jane with a new, better person. For Benji, as we find out later, it’s the last step in a long and intricate plan to manipulate Jane into helping The East willingly or in spite of herself. While its a scene caught up in the after-effects of Izzy’s sad, horrifically authentic death, the full realization that Benji knows who Jane is, has known all along, is supposed to make us think back to this and realize just how scary Benji’s focus really is. For Skarsgard, an impeccable actor, it’s as easy as narrowing his eyes and changing his body language to reflect that focus over the ambling, affable, and boylike mannerisms of his social persona. They’ve both been hiding behind assumed identities, probably people they both really like better, but when the gloves come off its Sarah who remains and Benji who rejects his better self.

That’s some nice fucking duality. Part of the pleasure of The East is in realizations like that. All of them come from performance and nuance, never from exposition or histrionics. That is extremely key here. The only time they fumble this, it’s mostly down to an unfortunate music choice. There’s a sequence after Tim and Jane break up where The National’s About Today plays. The song is meant to reflect, now that I think about it, Sarah’s abandonment of Jane. All the sorrow of separation in that song, all the bereavement, is meant for this. Unfortunately, that song is owned by The Warrior, and the beginning of the sequence it’s used for in The East just doesn’t work. When Sarah jogging in her home city transitions to going back to The East’s headquarters the last time, it clicks but just a half-step too late to not feel a little manipulated. It’s a misstep only because it suggests that we’re supposed to feel bad about Tim leaving her (at first, anyway) when its true purpose in the sequence has nothing to do with Tim and is actually, on its own, a nice use of the song. Sometimes subtle is too subtle, I guess.

Not every movie needs such a deft touch, but The East is the kind of movie that keeps the audience at arm’s length, never telling you how to feel or what to think but inviting you to come to your own conclusions even if they disagree with those of its characters. Not everybody is going to feel the vicarious triumph of Sarah’s choice, nor the small token we get in the credits that it’s been at least a little successful.

This movie is okay with that because it respects your intelligence. It doesn’t want to tell you how it is, it wants to show you something and see what you make of it. It’s utterly respectful of your intelligence.

A movie by and for beer.

This has got to be one of the most highly anticipated movies of 2013 if you go off how people felt (and still feel) about Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Yet, I’ve had to explain to people what movie I’m talking about when I say I saw The World’s End. Maybe the title just isn’t memorable. Fuck knows. It should be, though, because it’s perfect. The partnership of Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost is the sort of stuff from which perfection is made, if you ask most people. Personally, I’ve never been quite as captivated by the thematically-linked Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy as many others. I’m not the guy who quotes Shaun or Hot Fuzz like I invented it (I’ve never said “Yarp”) but I do love all three films. Perhaps I connected with The World’s End the most, though, and it is almost certainly going to remain my favorite of the three even when the afterglow of the first viewing fades some.

Anyone who has seen the others will already be aware that these aren’t just regular comedies with genre wrappers. Each has its things to say about masculinity, friendship, personal responsibility, and growing up in general. The World’s End further explores some of the same thematic ground as the other two, but they are a spiritual trilogy rather than some kind of narrative one, and as such the familiarity is potent without being overwhelming or repetitive. The beating heart of these movies has always been, well, heart and The World’s End has massive, beautiful heart. Enough heart for days.

It’s also more of an action film than Shaun of the Dead. It’s sort of like Hot Fuzz with bar fights instead of gun and a gleeful commitment to the kind of whiz-bang editing and chop socky that Wright picked up doing Scott Pilgrim. The World’s End sometimes feels like three movies in one, any of which more than capable of being expanded into fullness on its own. Yet all three inner movies remain tangled up with everything else the whole shebang is doing in some kind of weird alchemy that shouldn’t work and somehow does. It’s the kind of movie I must spoil, but should be engaged by those who haven’t yet seen it with as little foreknowledge as possible. I saw it only knowing its basic premise (which is enough) and not really having an idea of where it was all going until it got there. Coupled with its surprising climax and one of the all-time great (audacious, even) epilogues, it’s probably best if you see The World’s End without having read this review first.

FAIR WARNING, KIDDIES. DO NOT READ ON IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM.

Aww, cute!

The first movie within the movie is the one where Gary King (Simon Pegg) reunites his four best mates in order to complete a pub crawl that Gary still thinks was the best night of his life. In their hometown there is a spread called the Golden Mile: twelve ridiculously British pubs making for an epic crawl that the Gary and Pals of 20 years ago never managed to complete. Pegg gives us pretty much everything we need to know about Gary to justify the abrupt way he decides to “get the band back together” in an opening voice-over that would have felt a bit unnecessary if not for the way it subtly tells the audience that this movie within the movie is actually kind of a character study.

Gary King is such an insolent, unrepentant prick that it’s only Pegg’s caffeinated (coked up?) performance that keeps the character just this side of audience sympathy until a breaking point later, when some walls need to come down to truly humanize Gary fucking King. Up to that point, he lies and cheats and manipulates in the sort of selectively aware, oblivious way that the canny audience will remember was also true of, if in a slightly less abrasive manner, Michael Cera’s Scott Pilgrim. I don’t think there’s too much influence from that movie on this one, but there’s definitely a bit (particularly in how the fights are shot) and I think Gary sort of resembling a grown up Scott in terms of his careless and selfish disposition is a clear example. In other words, Gary is like Scott if Scott didn’t get his shit together and confront Ramona, Gideon, and himself. Gary is just this side of charming-in-spite-of-himself assholery. I think Pegg is within his skillset to keep Gary a “funny asshole” instead of an “asshole asshole” but it’s a close call that is totally intentional. We’re supposed to see that fine line.

Transitions!

He gets his friends Steve (Paddy Considine), Ollie (Martin Freeman), Peter (Eddie Marsan) and Andy (Nick Frost) all together again by promising each of them that everyone else is coming. Some falling out in Gary and Andy’s past has them all pretty skeptical that Andy will show, which I think is the reason why they all actually do. I mean, besides curiosity in general there’s a strong hint that everybody is a bit invested in the mechanics of Gary and Andy reconciling their differences. Later, when we find out that Gary left Andy to be hospitalized and holding the bill for an autowreck, we get why it seems far-fetched to the others that Andy would be coming. There’s this beautiful unspoken sense of “well if Andy is down, we have to be down because Gary never did anything that bad to us”. I’m sure this will ring true for many groups of old friends who sometimes need a good excuse to be in the same room with each other.

Now this contributes hugely to why I connected with The World’s End so much. It’s not that I didn’t sympathize with Sean or Nick from their respective movies, but I have a lot more Gary King in me than I do either of those guys. More than I care to admit, really. I would never say I was as brazenly self-deluded as Gary seems to be (he plays it up because he knows its what others think and expect, the facade only dropping occasionally) but others might say that about me so I guess I would have to concede the point. Where I’m going with this is that I want to explain why Gary King hit me like a brick in a sock. Don’t get me wrong, his dickishness is exaggerated and comical as such, but there’s enough truth in there to make guys who have been the Gary King once or twice pause and reflect. Most movies don’t have that power. The World’s End does. And it’s a fucking comedy. Kinda puts movies like Grown Ups 2 in perspective, I think.

Gary is sort of like a British Kenny Powers.

As often as there’s the selfish, charismatic friend there is also the abused and supportive friend, or the overshadowed rival friend. I’ve been both of those, too. While I personally connected most to Gary, others will also find a similar level of connection to characters like Steve or Andy. This is not crucial to the experience of watching the film, of course, it just helps that these characters always feel like real people even when they are indulging some rather unreal heroics.

Nick Frost, for example, gets to play an action hero in The World’s End. He is about as against type for that, in terms of conventional action films, as it gets. Yeah he got to do a lot of action stuff in Hot Fuzz as well, but The World’s End puts him front and center as the most badass of all Gary’s crew. Watching Nick Frost beat an army of robots with a couple of bar stools is practically a spiritual moment as it holds a stiff middle finger to decades of unspoken acceptance that big fat guys like Frost can’t do shit like this. Part of the reason this movie works so well is that it doesn’t pause on a thing like this and wink at the audience to make sure we all understand how zany and against expectations this is. It’s played totally straight, as if it’s not against expectations. This makes it work without the kind of self-congratulation that makes this sort of thing feel cheap or just for laughs.

Similarly, there’s a playful sense of the classic love interest element in The World’s End that also plays against audience expectations. Gary sees himself as the kind of lovable rogue that makes inappropriate passes at Sam (Rosamund Pike) and gets closer to her with every slap. He thinks he’s Han Solo. In many movies, Adam Sandler movies say, this is the kind of shit that will eventually work out for the hero. He will erode her walls, drop her guard, and finally get in her pants after all as she can’t help but love him. Better than that routine, The World’s End has Sam say to Gary that he’s not a bad person, just bad boyfriend material. She’s too old for his shit, in other words. It’s Steve, a man having a subtle and undealt with mid-life crisis who really deserves the shot with Sam after a life of never having the guts to tell her how he feels. Usually, the kind of drunken confession he makes to her would simply be embarrassing, but here it is heartfelt and a bit sad in the context of this group’s history and Gary’s treatment of Sam when they were all younger. That it’s Steve who “gets the girl” and that “the girl” is completely an agent in her “getting” is one of the many, many quiet ways that The World’s End demonstrates an above average degree of emotional intelligence and nuanced characterization.

In another nice reversal, it’s Frost playing the guy who mostly has his shit together this time. Not a bumbling oaf at all.

The robots in the film were featured in the marketing so it should be clear going in that The World’s End is (secondary to the friends on a pub crawl angle) a science fiction movie. Most of the exposition about it is saved until the end, so that it will have maximum impact in terms of how the characters react and what they ultimately decide to do. It also makes all of the ridiculous fisticuffs take on an extra layer of hilarity that is almost certainly a joke at the expense of the people who are going to roll their eyes watching guys like Ollie and Peter essentially kung fu fighting with robots (it’s a bit more grounded than that, but you get the idea). Basically, the “Blanks” (what the robots are eventually named) aren’t actually trying to hurt these guys and are therefore much easier to dispatch than they would be otherwise. They are kind of fragile, which makes for many more great sight gags and jokes (especially Peter’s head in the epilogue) sprinkled throughout the running and fighting.

The intelligence that governs the Blanks is just trying to peacefully change human society with as minimal collateral damage as possible. Its reasons are altruistic: uplift humans to get them ready to join an enlightened galactic civilization. To do this, it has created The Network which is a series of small towns almost completely overtaken with machine duplicates of humans (which are killed and “mulched”). Little did it know that it would be a fivesome of drunken Brits that stumbled across its United Kingdom theater.

The Blanks are actually kind of scary when they aren’t funny.

The World’s End is an extraordinarily confident and gutsy movie. I’ve given some reasons why I think so, but let me give you the best one. The emotional climax of the film is when Andy and Gary have their final confrontation over that last beer Gary desperately wants in order to fulfill the quest he has set himself on. Gary’s quest is to recapture the last night in his life that he was happy about anything. We find out in this scene that Gary is or was suicidal and the meeting we saw him attend at the opening of the film wasn’t a Narcotics Anonymous meeting (which we’re led to believe, I think). Nor was his tiny apartment really an apartment at all. Gary was at a care facility after a suicide attempt.

After we find out what Gary did to Andy, the last bit of sympathy for him as a character should mostly have flown out the window. Some people might have enough insight to recognize what’s really going on under Gary’s selfish, oblivious exterior but for narrative purposes it is a major reveal and one that engenders plenty of conflict in the audience. Potentially, we’re feeling like it’s a bit convenient that Gary actually has this sad backstory to explain all his lying and bullshit. Potentially, we’re going to be dismissive of the astonishing performances put in by Pegg and Frost as they confront these realities together. I hope that the gamble Wright, Pegg, and Frost have made here will pay off for them and that audiences admire the courage it took to not make Gary a complete irredeemable D-bag. Yeah, it’s true that not every asshole has a tragic backstory or some deeper psychological and emotional reality that informs their surface bullshit but in the warm, funny, and positive narrative of The World’s End (and the other Cornetto movies), it makes total sense. There’s a lot of risk in turning things around when we’ve spent 90% of the movie being subjected to Gary’s bullshit. Pegg is able to walk the line between keeping Gary funny enough for the audiences to stay with him, but it’s not until this moment that we fully understand the guy. Understanding is what it takes to actually have catharsis, and The World’s End gives us that catharsis. More than we bargained for, actually.

Pegg’s tightrope performance also leaves plenty of room to like and empathize with Gary’s buddies.

With perfect timing, Gary and Andy are brought down to the bowels of the town where the Network waits to try one last time to convince them to cooperate peacefully and stop smashing robot heads. Of course the elevator down is located at the very bar that has come to symbolize journey’s end (both for the crawl story and Gary’s emotional story). Of course that bar comes to also take on a symbolic association with the actual end of the world.

This is the plot climax of the movie, where Gary and Andy face the Network in their drunken belligerence and tell it to go fuck itself. Along with Steve (who heroically shows up, another small brazen move away from expectations), they commit themselves to the fallibility of all humankind. This is the kind of stuff that at once feels right and wrong. The Network is essentially right about humans, and we’ve watched an entire movie of Gary justifying its ambition to “civilize” us. So when it finally says “fuck it” and abandons Earth and its uplift project, it’s hard to know whether Gary’s defiance is just typical Gary ruining it for everybody else, or if it’s the one time in the film that he is really and truly right. That the Network tempts him with what seems like his heart’s desire only for him to renounce it is Gary’s heroic, redemptive moment. People are going to disagree about their feelings about his choice. It’s a big moment, like when Kenzie chooses to give Amanda back to her mom in Gone Baby Gone or when the survivors of The Cabin in the Woods decide not to die to save the world. A moment people will talk about walking out of the movie.

Rosamund Pike also gets to the ass-kicking and expectation countering.

If it was just Gary saying “no” to a cosmic intervention on all our behalf, that’d be one thing. But The Network abandoning Earth has the unexpected consequence of basically hitting the reset button on human civilization. Earth is reduced to a shambles, in classic apocalyptic faction. This leads to the audacious, ridiculous epilogue of The World’s End and the realization that a post-apocalyptic saga is the third “movie within the movie”.

The epilogue is the kind of shit no one expects from this movie or sees coming until it happens. Instead of a bit of voice-over or something explaining that yeah, the world kind of came to an end (thanks Gary!), Andy sits among some children, warming themselves by the fire, as he tells the tale. Presumably, he’s been telling the entire story to these kids including the epic pub crawl. Now, he’s at the part where they all split up and do their own thing. Except he doesn’t know what happened to Gary.

When we find out, it’s the kind of “fuck yeah!” moment that the movie completely earns. In fact, it goes three or four extra miles in terms of making us understand not only who Gary is, but why he’d have done what he did and also what he would do next. That’s almost philanthropic, let alone “earning”. I expect that some viewers of The World’s End will feel like this is less awesome and more hokey, hung up over the fact that Gary inadvertently destroyed the Earth and now gets to be Mad Max. But it’s perfect, really. Totally in line with the arc toward fulfillment, competence, and manhood that all three of the Blood and Ice Cream films contain.

One of the many ways this franchise mimics Conan the Barbarian.

After almost ten years, here comes the third Riddick movie. I think it would be a bit of an overstatement to say this was a highly anticipated threequel but Riddick has always had a fanbase and the recent resurgence of Vin Diesel has made this movie possible for them. I count myself tentatively among the fans of Riddick, and enthusiastically among the fans of Diesel (check out that video of him singing Rihanna, it’s astonishing). I’ve also always been easier going on the much-hated Chronicles of Riddick than most people. I liked it for what it tried to be more than for what it is, I guess. The idea of a misanthropic Space Conan is one that has legs. Pitch Black didn’t have that idea coded into its DNA, but Chronicles certainly did. Riddick, the self-titled third album, remembers that idea even as it does its best to recall the more successful and more focused Pitch Black.

Part of me wishes they would have gotten the budget to do the movies they originally wanted to do. David Twohy and Vin Diesel have created a slapdash mythology around this character and they have big eyes for where it’s all going. Unfortunately, the failure of Chronicles and the non-blockbuster status of the character means the money isn’t exactly flowing for the grandiose fantasy epics they wanted to make. So we get this, a much more stripped down and raw side-story that feels like a one-shot bridge movie that self-consciously acknowledges the need to get things back on track. There are bits of monologuing in this movie that feel like they’re breaking the fourth wall, commenting indirectly about the franchise, character, and even Diesel himself. This goes together with the strange sexual psychology of the movie and its characters to elevate the subtext of Riddick to an interesting, probably unintended place.

It helps that the film is rather good. Especially the first half. It’s also much grander and more beautiful than the early trailers suggested. It’s far from the B-movie lowfi of Pitch Black and even farther from the saturated, Star Wars-lite of Chronicles. It exists somewhere between the grit and the glamor, and it feels like (visually at least), Twohy has really gotten his stride. The world-building is as slippery as ever, the character is still the sly dangerous antihero (with some soft spots) that we remember, and so on. All this is packaged in a lean, robust action movie masquerading as a creature feature. Even when it gives up on its best parts to focus on the secondary characters, Riddick keeps you engaged. When it turns into a buddy movie about honor and relying on others, you can’t help but feel like they’ve really made good with this one.

Riddick’s dog was an unexpected and awesome surprise.

Most of the stuff in the trailers is from the last third of the movie. I get why they’d sell it on the back of that. The last third is when all hell breaks loose and a lot of the best action happens. But it’s not the best part of the film. The first half of Riddick echoes the first half of I Am Legend and is great for some of the same reasons. Alone in the wild of a very dangerous planet, we watch as Riddick (Vin Diesel) picks himself up and goes from barely surviving to thriving. Along the way, he picks up one of the planet’s Great Dane-like dog creatures as an animal companion and friend. Riddick has always had soft spot for kids, women, and animals. It’s other men he doesn’t like so much. The mechanics of his survival are very well done, and there’s almost no dialogue with the exception of the bridging flashback that explains how Riddick got from becoming Lord Marshal of the Necromonger horde (a great ending that really elevates Chronicles) to being dumped on this unnamed planet.

Some people are going to be disappointed that Riddick had to cannibalize the Necromonger story that Twohy and Diesel had originally intended. In a somewhat perfunctory manner, the film tells a short story about Riddick’s years (approx. five of ‘em) as the Lord Marshal. Softened by civilization but not the conqueror his predecessor was, Riddick languishes like a tiger in captivity. His compromises lead to betrayal as Vaako (Karl Urban) finally makes his move, dangling the prospect of helping Riddick find Furya, his home planet, as the bait. This is good stuff and the interplay between the two works well, with Urban doing a lot with very, very little. I’d like to see that movie of Riddick trying to turn the Necromongers to his own purposes, having Vaako working against him at every turn. There’s also one of the rare, nice shreds of world-building here as Vaako explains that records of Furya’s location were expunged, and he may know where it is because he’s been there.

These guys have good, antagonist chemistry.

The exact nature of the Riddickverse has always been a bit foggy. Pitch Black seemed a lot less far into the future than Chronicles and Riddick feel. Characters still refer to Earth as if they’d just come from there, and they mention specific countries and things like they’d still be familiar. In the sequels this is less prevalent and it seems like the universe is a big place full of inhabited worlds, with humans having evolved at least partially into different forms (Elementals, Furyans, etc).

But I don’t think people really worry too much about the world-building stuff. I get hung up on it a bit but partially it’s because I think Riddick’s universe is an interesting one with a lot of potential that simply makes me want to no more. In terms of this review, that should be counted as praise. There’s always world-building in science fiction/fantasy that doesn’t make sense or has holes and is frustrating for that reason. It’s far less often that it’s elusive but still good enough to pull you in.

Some of the shots in this film are gorgeous. Even though it’s pretty, the planet feels a lot more like it could be a real place than the setpieces-as-worlds in Chronicles.

When Riddick matches wits with the planet’s particular apex predator, he realizes that with rain comes an event not that different from the blackout in Pitch Black. This time, it’s water more than darkness that brings on the beasts. He realizes he’s going to have to get off the planet and so he sends an invitation to the mercenaries who he knows will still be out there waiting on the big payday he represents.

At this point, the movie partially forgets that Riddick was the Lord Marshal of a feared interstellar army. It also moves on from the awesome, alien “man vs. wild” movie it starts out as. This latter change is okay because most of the secondary characters are engaging and it does give the movie some emotional weight (more on this later) that it probably would have had a harder (if more interesting) time generating with just Riddick alone on a planet contemplating civilization and his divorce from it (I would definitely watch that movie though). The former is not so good. It seems like people would remember what became of Riddick, and his reputation would have changed from being what it was before the end of Chronicles. I think they missed an opportunity to grow his legend even more, but it’s not really a flaw in the film since it doesn’t derail the logic or act as a “plot hole”. If the film had leaned against Riddick’s background more than on the specific events of Pitch Black, it would have probably become one.

Mercenaries are a fun element of this universe.

Riddick has always had a special relationship with mercenaries. Even in Pitch Black, it’s apparent that he doesn’t respect them and we can glean even in that film (before he flat out tells us in Chronicles) that it’s because they have no honor or code. That said, part of the point of throwing Riddick up against other people is that he isn’t actually 100% right about them. There’s always a few good people, even in a universe as rough as his. There’s people he can count on, but we’re given to understand that at the point of his latest adventure, there haven’t been any for too long.

Two very different groups of mercs show up. One is more rough and tumble, the kind of crew we’ve seen before, and is led by a particularly vicious asshole named Santana (Jordi Molla snarls and quips almost unintelligibly through his accent until he is awesomely killed). The other is more paramilitary, organized, and led by a much more appealing and competent fella that we find out is Boss Johns (Matt Nable), none other than the father of the Johns that had captured Riddick just prior to the events of Pitch Black. I have a minor quibble that Nable looks barely out of his forties (if that) and this makes it a stretch that this guy was Cole Hauser’s dad even 14 years ago. For this to be a reasonable thing, Boss Johns would have to be about 60 years old. Matt Nable is probably not 60 years old and he definitely doesn’t look it. That said, we don’t really know how old Johns was in Pitch Black nor do we know how longevity or vanity technology works in Riddick’s universe. So… a minor quibble it must remain.

Johns’s right hand woman.

While Santana and his cutthroats just want the money for Riddick’s head, Johns wants to know what happened to his son and only Riddick truly knows. This feels like it’s leading to some kind of vengeance thing, and the movie goes there to play a bit, but it ends up being about a father’s closure. Johns doesn’t want to believe what Riddick tells him about his boy and for all that Nable looks like he must have been ten years old when he fathered the guy, he puts in a great bit of performance and carries all of the emotional weight of the film. He and Riddick working together and figuring out they can kind of trust each other is one of the high points of the film. I didn’t expect it and it was very welcome.

That said, with Johns comes Dahl (Katee Sackhoff) his “strong female protagonist” lieutenant. Sackhoff plays a stalwart variation of Starbuck and she’s perfectly serviceable in the film. The character says “I don’t fuck guys” and Santana tries to make her. She beats him up several times in the film and it’s a great running joke. In other words, Dahl all right as a character and she feels like she belongs.

The creature design is great. The effects are really well done too.

Where things get weird is in the ways she becomes a sexual symbol. Not only does Sackhoff do a demi-nude scene that seems sort of gratuitous and meant to appeal directly to the nerds who watched BSG and for whom Sackhoff may be a bit of a sex symbol in her own right, but she is also subject to Riddick’s swinging dick bravado.

At one point this essentially sexless character says “I’m going to go balls deep in Dahl, but only when she asks me to sweet-like”. Given that Dahl tells the film’s biggest douchebag about her sexuality, it’s possible that she’s fronting a bit and trying to get by in a world of tough, insecure men. Riddick is the real deal, unlike the posturing “tin badges” surrounding him. Johns is too, which is probably why Dahl is loyal to him. As far as Riddick (franchise and this movie alike) comment on masculinity, it’s mostly to make this type of distinction. Even though it’s not in the movie, and therefore it unwisely does a “Riddick can cure lesbians” facepalm, the original script had Dahl only fronting gay for the same reasons why Jack pretended to be a boy in Pitch Black.

Dahl could have and should have been a much bigger and better character.

Still, the movie goes there without adequately covering its ass and it looks like adolescent schoolboy wanking. Which feels especially awkward given the general cultural awareness of Vin Diesel’s sexuality controversies. He’s one of the many action stars in Hollywood history who has routinely been rumored as gay. Gay or not (none of our business anyway), Diesel rules the dark, the light, and everything fucking in between. But this film invites the controversy by its (possibly incidental) sexual politicking. That the movie turns into a bromance between Riddick and Johns feels only appropriate in this respect. At the same time, there’s no reason why Dahl isn’t just the perfunctory bop on the road of Riddick’s sexual conquests. If he is really Space Conan, Dahl may just be his Red Sonja. She’s definitely not his Valeria.

Okay, I’ll stop there. Too much Conan waxing. Point is, a lot of this subtext and how it comes off is dependent on what you bring into the movie. If you have no awareness of Diesel’s struggles with the rumors, this will just seem like a badass getting laid by another badass because of mutual badass appreciation. If you have no concern whatever for the struggles lesbians actually have in being taken seriously by men with alpha male complexes, that’s how you’ll read this. I think it’s a flaw that could easily have been avoided by keeping that bit of script about Dahl’s reasons for obfuscating her sexuality. If it had been left in, it would turn the point from being the awkward and potentially offensive thing it is into an acknowledgment of the difficulty women have in a landscape ruled by the male gaze (an idea very present in Riddick actually, but unfortunately perpetuated by Riddick in a way that reads as clumsy but unintented) and some of the unfortunate measures that must be taken to get around it. Then instead of curing her devilish gay, Riddick “getting the girl” in this case could have actually been about what the movie seems to want it to be about: mutual badass appreciation.

The film is always walking a line between beings its own thing and being a call back to Pitch Black.

Still, at the end of the day Riddick is a way fucking better movie than anybody would have expected. It’s not the weird surprise Pitch Black was but it’s a better film. It’s also leaps and bounds better than Chronicles of Riddick. You respect what they tried to do, but I think the balance between larger mythos and tight, personal story that they found in Riddick serves the character better. If they can find a way to keep that going, I’d love to see a Riddick movie every couple of years. Why not? If he’s Space Conan, then he’s a man who has tons of interesting self-contained adventures all in service to a larger goal or meaning. For Riddick, it’s to get home. His longing for Furya is the one concession the film makes to the deeper emotional life of the character. Everything else comes out of interactions, especially with the dog. With the dog, they found the best way to get at where Riddick is when it comes to forming relationships. Jack worked well in Pitch Black but neither the dog or Kyra in Chronicles did half for showing that Riddick does have a soft spot what the dog in this movie does.

Which, by the way, if you’re a dog person… well, you will both love and hate this movie.

I like to think that the dog is named Paul Walker.

This could be a sort of emblem for a generation of single men.

Don Jon is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut. People love the guy, for all the right reasons, and this film will probably only make them love him more. Maybe not for all the right reasons. Some people are going to like this movie only by ignoring what it is saying to them.

With Don Jon, he has an agenda that not everybody is going to like. No one really wants to have their perceptions and attitudes held up in a mirror and then stripped away, even subtly as this film does it. That said, Don Jon is subtle enough with its criticisms of contemporary gender assumptions that I think a lot of people will miss the criticism altogether and feel they are watching a comedy about overcoming porn addiction. Of course, Don Jon could be described that way, but it’s got a lot more going on.

The film is really about indicting both sides of the issue. It’s a bit more interested in objectification, especially from the male perspective, but it makes plenty of room to share out the criticism with the ways women are also taught to categorize, ritualize, and finally objectify their male counterparts. Don Jon is not a preachy film. This is the reason why it is as good as it is. It’s got an easygoing attitude toward the subject, where the protagonist’s journey of self-discovery is subtle and incremental, but no less revelatory.

Gordon-Levitt brings us along for the ride with subtlety, humor, and a deft hand with the social criticism, never crossing over into hostility or judgmental tones. This is key to keeping the film appealing, especially to people who exhibit many of the same behaviors as the characters in the film. Behaviors which hopefully the film will show are worth rethinking.

Spending time with the family gives us a lot of insight into the characters.

Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a bartender in his late 20′s. As he informs us, he only cares about a few things in life but he cares about them a lot. He’s something of an aesthete, really, and perfectly administers those few things. His body, his pad, his ride, his boys, his family, his church, and his women. All of these elements of his personality are exterior things with tangibility that balances out their superficiality, at least for him. Family isn’t about support so much as about ritual. Everything is ritualized, ordered, and thus an object. At least to Jon, who we see has probably internalized this worldview from his parents. This makes him into a Class A douchebag, by any kind of measure. Except Gordon-Levitt makes him not a douchebag. Owing to the guy’s natural charm, maybe, or just the weight charm really has even as we get a look at the shallow guy underneath.

When Jon meets Barbara (Scarlett Johansson) he decides to try a “meaningful relationship”. This is an early and subtle hint that under Jon’s seeming satisfaction with the repetition and ritual of his life, he is seeking something more. He knows that preferring porn to sex is at least atypical. He also seems to suspect that a real connection is what’s lacking. As Gordon-Levitt shows us repetitive scenes of the rituals Jon follows, the pattern goes from humorous to understandable as a coping mechanism to vaguely sad.

Somehow, the repetition works very well for the film and makes sure that humor carries the audience through the character arc.

Unfortunately for Jon, Barbara is subject to her own set of expectations and rituals. She’s the product of the Nicholas Sparks brand of romantic drivel, which Jon perceives as simply a woman’s version of the same preoccupations he has. His porn is tits, ass, and money shots. Barbara’s porn is love at first sight, contrived drama, and happy endings. Emotional porn, in other words. Neither of them is the least bit capable of recognizing each others’ real needs. Whenever things threaten to get real, they both retreat (aggressively) into their assumptions and prescriptions for what sex is like, what men and women are like, what love is like.

Though he exaggerates this stuff for effect, Gordon-Levitt also keeps it completely recognizable and relatable. I would challenge anyone to look at the way these characters think, talk, and act and not recognize something of themselves in it. My fiancee and I had a funny and nuanced discussion about where we fall in it after the movie. I think the ability to recognize yourself in Don Jon and handle it with a sense of humor and introspection is key to the movie’s power. If the audience lacks this ability, if the criticism makes them defensive, then it will fail for them in spite of its truly laudable intelligence and care.

The looks on their faces? Those are their porn-receiving faces.

Not only is Don Jon full of great performances, nuanced characterization and subtext, and an overriding sense of humor, it also has some technical chops that serve its agenda. There’s the repetition I already talked about, as well as the use of cross-cutting and parallel shots to underscore the depth of similarity between Barbara and Jon. There’s a lot of Jon’s dead-eyed and vacant stare as he watches porn, and we also see Barbara’s wide-eyed rapture when the plot of the romantic comedy contrives its leads to finally live happily ever after.

When they finally break up, it’s over Jon’s addiction to porn. More than that, it’s over an underlying inability to accept the person you’re with for who they are. Beyond the specifics of gender politics that this film engages, there’s always that more fundamental issue of recognition failure. The true test of a relationship always comes down to whether or not you expect your partner to change to suit you. I think most people could come up with numerous examples of relationships they have or had, or have seen others have, where this is the root issue that makes sure things won’t work out. Objectification is Don Jon‘s real target, but it also points to selfishness and self-absorption as the seeds of objectification. This feels spot on.

Julianne Moore is aces in this film.

Though it flirts with it, Don Jon avoids wrapping the self-discovery in a character. It’s convenient to do this, and there’s an extent to which Jon’s journey relies on another person (it’s all about connecting to someone after all), but the film keeps Jon in focus as the captain of his own ship. His curiosity and search for meaning are what brings out the truer self, the kind of person that Esther (Julianne Moore) can be heard by. Jon’s walls are already collapsing when he meets her, but not in some tear-streaked moment of cosmic realization. Jon’s whole head space is communicated in subtle ticks, breaks in his routine, questions he starts to ask (the confession scene is particularly exemplary of what I’m getting at), and the small ways he changes.

Esther is also a unique sort of love interest for a character like Jon. A less intelligent film would have introduced a manic pixie dream girl or dryly intellectual feminist with a soft spot for Jersey Shore. Instead, Esther is a weird but open-minded widow who handles Jon with wisdom and openness as opposed to caustic wit (though there’s a bit of that) and criticism. Her criticism is knowing and affectionate. She’s a mature woman, and completely outside of Jon’s normal scope for a romantic partner.

A new and improved Jon explains why what a woman says matters as much as the numerical rating for her body.

There are going to be some who think Don Jon doesn’t go far enough. This was my first thought when the film ended. As a feminist and a man, I am pretty much the secondary target audience for the film. I think Gordon-Levitt wants to reach the people who are captured by the perceptions his movie criticizes, but it’s also a film for a mature audience and I’m not sure to what extent that audience exists without typically feminist attitudes about the roles of men and women in relationships, the problem of objectification, and the dichotomy between ritual and respect.

All that said, I think that where Jon is at the beginning vs. the end of the film is fine as is. It feels authentic. A lesser movie would dramatize the character’s evolution far more than Don Jon does. Instead, it’s about as dramatic as it is in real life. More confusion than revelation, more small changes than big ones.

Jon never turns into a crusader for equality between the sexes. This is a smart move for Gordon-Levitt as it will keep the film from alienating the more easily threatened members of its audience. Those people will likely find some way to take umbrage with this movie anyway, which is why they’re the ones who should be paying the most attention.

What greater expression of the masculine condition?

I first saw Only God Forgives back in July. I have written three or four drafts of this review before scrapping them all, watching the film again, and finally sitting down to do it right. That may hype this review up or something so let me say outright that this isn’t my intention. I’m not even really sure if this review will be worth reading. Writing about Only God Forgives is one of the biggest challenges I’ve had since I first started doing film criticism.

The housekeeping for this film goes like this: it’s embarrassingly good. So if you know something about how controversial Only God Forgives is in critical circles, this will already help you classify me somewhere in that aegis. It’s not that this is a case where the controversy is bullshit. It’s obvious to me why Only God Forgives should inspire as much disgust as it does awe. Though he’s made similar films before, Nicolas Winding Refn has never been more in control of his considerable powers than he is here. From a purely cinematic standpoint, being the collusion of technical elements and raw craft, the mastery at work for this film is undeniable. To reject this is to indulge bullshit.

What’s left after is where people are in fierce disagreement. The content of the film. It’s meaning, if it has any, and the choices that were made in the telling of this story from the how to the why to the occasional what. So ephemeral as to seem obtuse, Only God Forgives is also as subversive a genre film as can be imagined. To the extent where I’m sure some find it unclear whether this is actually a genre film at all.

Like with Spring Breakers, I find myself in the position of apology for what I think is a questionable masterpiece. Give me the time and attention and I may be able to convince you with whatever persuasion and argumentation I can muster. At the same time, these are difficult and demanding films. They are also films that aren’t trying to win you over. They don’t care if you like them, in fact they are sort of counting on you not liking them. To shake you up, make you think, give you some emotional payoff especially if it isn’t the one you went in expecting.

Though the plot is straightforward and simple, its significance and meaning for the characters go the other way.

Julian (Ryan Gosling) and his brother Billy (Tom Burke) are drug smugglers living in Thailand. They run a boxing club as a front though Julian exhibits an affinity for the mystique of the Muay Thai kickboxer that Billy does not. Billy is a monster, we quickly learn, who rapes and kills women indiscriminately and probably suicidally. When he goes just a touch too far, he is caught out by the enigmatic Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), a high-ranking police official who seems possessed of and empowered with his own sense of justice. Even early on, Julian has silent premonitions of a collision with this man, but probably more likely what he represents.

When we meet Julian and Billy’s mother, Crystal (Kristen Scott Thomas), the mystery of their behavior and Julian’s quiet psychological dysfunction starts to clear up. Crystal is a voracious, evil Jocasta to Julian’s Oedipus. Her vulgar sexualization of her sons is only matched by their devotion to her. Julian is utterly helpless to do more than slightly derail Crystal’s desire for revenge. This would be a proper revenge film if not for Julian being on the wrong side. He knows what Billy did and he knows that Chang is probably out of their league. Emasculating him and taunting him, Crystal accepts no excuses while campaigning to have Chang killed.

But Chang isn’t so easy to kill.

Even Julian’s sexual proclivities are best understood in the context of his mother. Is it Crystal’s direct influence that leads to Billy raping and killing teenage girls? Is it Crystal’s direct influence that makes Julian prefer to be bound up and spectating sexual acts, rather than engaging in them himself? The clues in the film, and there are many, point to yes. Crystal almost certainly had a sexual relationship with one or both of her sons. Julian was almost certainly forced to watch. The fucked up damage of the Oedipal condition takes on a whole new dimension of perverse darkness in this film. This, probably more than anything else, is what puts people off it.

Julian is a difficult protagonist. He is remote, vacant, and stoic. He rarely speaks, and communicates mostly through violence and aggression. His self-control and latent morality are fascinating when juxtaposed with the triggers that set off the animal underneath. As he examines his hands, those great tools of creation or destruction, we’re given early insight into his sense of himself. He wants to be a hero, a warrior, but that path is completely blocked off for him. On some level, he even wants to be Chang.

She rewrites the book.

Most of these themes and story bits are communicated silently, through seemingly untethered moments of almost purely visual storytelling. The pace of Only God Forgives is deliberate but some are calling it glacial. I think that one’s less an issue for the film and more an issue of audience patience. Some of this might be owed to the way this film was marketed as a spiritual successor to the sociopathic heroic journey of Drive. If anything Only God Forgives is the anti-Drive. Julian is the scared little boy in all men, especially those driven to be thugs and killers. His only connection to Driver besides Gosling’s performances (deliberately similar) is that both of them see themselves as avengers or heroes, before having to accept that their worlds are better off without them.

For me, the silence gave the performances room to breathe. Maybe people are getting tired of Gosling’s stoic pretty boy thing, though I can’t imagine how this is remotely an actual “thing”. Here, it utterly serves the film and he gets across just as much with the differences in the inclination of his head as he gazes at whatever as a lesser actor would with an impassioned speech. The room to breathe is what makes this possible. Getting to know Julian isn’t about seeing what’s happening in his head by the plasticity of his face. It’s about what he does and doesn’t do.

The dinner scene deserves its own special mention for being about as uncomfortable a dinner as has ever been in a movie.

This is echoed by Chang, who has maybe three facial expressions: cold stare, colder stare, and cold bemusement. Chang is even more enigmatic and obscure than Julian. He sings karaoke beautifully, has a daughter he seems to love, and will cut a motherfucker’s arm off while his cop buddies look on.

There are several readings of the film that rely on a quasi-mystical or metaphorical sense of these characters and their interactions. The most interesting ones position Chang as a sort of God in and of himself. The ultimate source of justice in his world, at the very least. I’m not sure whether there’s anything to this, but it’s the kind of interesting material the film’s elegant silence makes room for. It’s obvious that there’s no Only God Forgives without Sigmund Freud, but your mileage on the metaphysics may vary.

Most people seeing this film are seeing it for this scene.

The fight between Chang and Julian is seminal for many reasons, almost none of them what most people probably expect going into the film. By the time it happens, it should be apparent that this is not a straightforward revenge tale. Julian is not much of a hero, and may even be the villain. Yet, he challenges Chang to a fistfight as a way to reconcile his own sense of self, including a sense of honor his mother doesn’t have, with the pursuit of vengeance for his brother. Chang, having a sense of honor and a sense of humor, indulges the boy.

What follows is one of the all-time great fistfights that I’ve seen in a film. Not only because it’s shot well, or the choreography is well executed, but because of the story its telling both within the film and in a greater sense of its context. Only God Forgives is incredibly, sometimes uncomfortably, self-aware. Many are mistaking that self-awareness for self-indulgence, but I think that perspective has to reach to reject what a scene like this is all about.

Julian gets his manhood test.

Seeing a somewhat anonymous character played by an unknown actor kicking the shit out of Ryan Gosling has got to rank as a surreal, unexpected moment. Julian getting his ass kicked is as total a rejection of his self-worth and moral confusion as could be possible. This is the little boy trying desperately to be taken seriously as a man by the only man he’s ever met. Chang’s beating is about teaching a lesson, not about punishment or revenge. At this point, the matter could have been settled.

But for spite, but for a little boy’s wounded malice. This is where the futility of revenge and the discipline of justice again collide. Julian finally indulges his mother’s thirst for blood and goes to Chang’s house to kill him, as ignominious but natural an end as could be imagined in the way we normally see crime dramas and reprisal killings play out. But Julian is still Julian and justice is more important than revenge.

In some ways, Only God Forgives mythologizes the sacrifice it takes to emancipate oneself from the legacy of one’s origins. Julian examines his hands, with which he murdered his father at his mother’s request. With which he thought of himself as a hero and a warrior. With which he pays Chang for the unjust revenge Crystal pressed on him for the just death of her son.

Forgiveness is actually pretty far from everybody’s mind.

I think there are numerous things you could take out of Only God Forgives that would likely be equally valid. It’s as much a deconstruction of the revenge film as it is a surreal expression of the impotence of a certain model of masculinity. To me, the latter comes across the most strongly. The fight is especially an expression of that.

The fistfight, the duel, is a profound ritual of masculinity. Most men want to think of themselves as at least able to handle a fight. Rejection of the fight may be considered the reasonable path of peace for a generation of men free of the constricting, destructive model of masculinity that bound our fathers or their fathers, but its power as a symbol of manliness has lost none of its power. Nor has its primacy as an honorable way to settle a conflict. We feel distaste for the gang-beating while relishing the duel. The kind of conflict where even the loser has kept his honor, able to retain his status if not his cause with a black eye and a handshake. This is an ideal that most men cannot hope to live up to, and that truth is why Julian has to get his ass kicked. There’s a sense to which this may be because, like I said, Chang is the only real man he’s ever met. Therefore, Only God Forgives may reinforce an archaic and mythic model of masculinity which may be unattainable anyway. Depends on the extent to which Chang feels more like a person and less like a metaphor.

I think you could argue that Chang is supposed to function as a successful model of masculinity, with his confidence and competence and sense of justice. He’s outside the law, above it somehow, and capable of astonishing feats of violence. Yet he sings karaoke and loves his kid. Maybe that’s enough to make him more the real guy and less the metaphor. I’m not sure.

The use of color and light sort the mood and evoke the metaphorical, fantastical space the film occupies.

I think that my admiration for Only God Forgives may speak to my comfort with ambiguity. I don’t usually make the mistake of conflating ambiguity with intelligence, as some do, and I don’t believe I’m making it here. Though it may not always be clear which scenes in this film are literal or metaphorical (maybe all are one or the other, rather than a mix!) I think there’s a clear and followable story in here. It’s not a pleasant story, of course, but it’s not much more dark or perverse than the average Korean revenge film, to which Only God Forgives may be in a sort of high level discourse.

Nicolas Winding Refn has made difficult movies more than accessible ones. For every Drive there’s a Valhalla Rising. You’re always in good hands with him, though. His films are always artistically appealing, well made and acted, and aggressively about something. That something is where lies the rub. The something isn’t always all that clear, and requires engagement and thought that the films may not be able to sustain for all people. This is okay, though. Only God Forgives is not a film for all people.

Hey, girl.

Yeah, I know. I should really be writing my Gravity review. Thing is, people are going to see that movie. They’ve heard of it. It’s on their televisions and their radars. Something like A Field in England tends to have a much lower exposure level. I’ll eventually write about Gravity but today my task is to review a film that most of my readers are unlikely to have heard of.

The only other Ben Wheatley film I’ve seen is Kill List and A Field in England could not be more different. If Wheatley has a signature by this point, four or five films into his career, it’s probably experimentalism. Seeing only two of his films, the reputation seems well-earned. There aren’t any movies exactly like this one, but there are a few with enough similarities to offer a comparative sense of what kind of film this is.

It’s certainly difficult to recommend. Some are going to hate it. It’s about as inaccessible a film as most people ever encounter. There’s very little plot, too much insular humor, and the pacing is what the attentionless would call glacial. That said, it’s a thoroughly engaging experience if you can stick with it. The real pleasure of the film is the anarchic, psychedelic glee with which it confuses. It’s not necessarily important what the “whole thing is about” when you’re watching strobing images of dirty men’s faces melting into each other and into a character’s cape like the demented decor of a butterfly wing.

One of the central themes is servitude.

The plot that is goes like this: a handful of men break away from a battle during the English civil war of the 1640′s. They tromp through the titular field, looking for an Alehouse within which to take a break from the fighting, the marching, and the orders of their masters. Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) is a cowardly scholar who has failed to find a colleague who has stolen from their alchemist master. The others, Friend (Richard Glover), Trower (Julian Baratt) and Cutler (Ryan Pope) appear to be soldiers tired of the war. Of course, it’d be a lot more simple if these guys were just one hedgerow away from ale and companionship.

Along the way, Cutler doses Friend and Trower with “magic mushrooms” to soften them up for the arrival of an Irishman called O’Neill (Michael Smiley). O’Neill is the very thief that Whitehead was charged to find. His failure may mean his death if the army ever catches up with him. He alone refuses the mushrooms, but it’s him that O’Neill needs most. O’Neill, the menacing and regal occultist, believes there is treasure somewhere in the field. He needs Whitehead’s talent for divination to find it.

And this is where things start to get strange. Whitehead is pathetically unable to assert any kind of dominance on anyone. He is “unused to making decisions” and has spent most of his life with books. Cutler calls him a coward and he does little to suggest he’s anything more. The yoke that O’Neill places on him seems at first to cost him his sanity. When O’Neill makes the situation they’re all in clear to Whitehead, he takes him into his tent presumably to brief him. Instead, the audience gets to watch the other three men react to five or six straight minutes of Whitehead’s increasingly anguished screams.

Whatever happened to him in there, Whitehead becomes a sort of walking dowsing rod.

Whitehead leads the men to a place in the field where they can set up and begin to try and dig up the treasure. More madness, dark hilarity, and violence ensues. Men die and reappear alive only to die again. Whitehead seems to recover his sanity while Cutler loses his. A mad and dreamy persistence of imagery collects into a sense of foreboding for the audience. Something is going to happen, but what?

When things kick off, there’s a powerful and memorable sequence I alluded to earlier. In his madness, Whitehead appears to suffer a vision of sorts. It’s what most people are going to remember this film for. That and Reece Shearsmith’s brilliant, transformative performance from cowardly and servile weakling to something… more.

On a visual level, the film frequently impresses.

The black and white imagery is often stunning. Supporting it, the film also features great sound design and music. The punctuation of the heavy, ear-splitting pistols is particularly memorable. Beyond that, Wheatley and cinematographer Laurie Rose use interesting techniques such as brief semi-still shots as sort of chapter breaks, occasional slow motion, and commitment to the very basic, almost singular setting of the film. The field is a character, and even has a voice (Sara Dee).

A Field in England is not an especially quiet film. There’s plenty of dialogue in Amy Jump’s script, much of it instilling a sense of humor and camaraderie which undercut the mounting horror of the film.  That said, it’s still a very contemplative experience. I don’t think you need to ponder it to get something from it, but it seems like the type of film that only reveals itself fully to those attentive and fascinated enough to give it more than one go.

Whitehead’s transformation is an easy takeaway.

One of the problems with reviewing this film is that I’m not especially sure what it was about. I don’t know why we see Friend die and then come back only to die again. I’m not sure what the significance of Whitehead’s somewhat more courageous and decisive behavior toward the end of the film is. I know that the words “I am my own master” may be a signifier unto themselves. Up to the point where he utters them, Whitehead has been a slave to his circumstances and to the wiles of stronger willed men. He eventually manages to rise up and overthrow O’Neill and this may be symbolic of that simple idea which runs its course all through the film: servitude sucks.

I say this, but it seems like that sequence at the hour mark of the film is the most communicative about what the film is attempting. During this bit, Whitehead imbibes a huge handful of mushrooms and gives a little speech about “chewing up the selfish scheming that men like you inflict on men like me” and “burying it in the stomach of this place”. Then he gets up and there’s wind, gunfire, crazy eyes, and a bunch of flickering transposed images that seem meant to impart a sense of shared identity, of sameness for Whitehead and O’Neill.

My theory is that it’s symbolic of Whitehead’s transition from slave to master. It’s only later that he actually overthrows O’Neill and says “I am my own master”. After that, it’s a very different Whitehead we see. He dons O’Neill’s hat and cloak and seems to stand straighter, move more confidently, and even seems more handsome than before.

Whitehead’s praying probably isn’t going to help.

There’s a muddled and intentionally vague aspect of magic running through the film. What is delusion and what is actual power seems to be part of the point of introducing hallucinogenic mushrooms into the mix. There are many things, small things, that happen or we see and we’re not quite sure what to make of them. Why does Whitehead wear O’Neill’s clothes? What is the significance of returning to the battle, through the hedges as if the field was just a fantasy in its totality? What is the small black jewel O’Neill swallows just before Whitehead appears to be calling up a gale against him? What is the black glass disc? The documents that O’Neill stole?

A comfort with mysteries that don’t seem to resolve is probably required for this film. But like I said, you don’t need to care about that to take something away. A Field in England is an existential horror film that can be read as a story about a cowardly, servile man who overthrows a villainous, deranged oppressor. It could be a metaphor for a chapter of English history, or an allegorical tale of an inner struggle all men and women might suffer.

Still images will not do this film justice.

Gravity is thus far this year’s purest answer to the question “what do movies have left up their sleeves?”. Not only is Alfonso Cuaron’s (Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien) film the closest thing movies get to simulating the actual experience of a roller coaster ride, for all that hack reviewers like to use that image to describe them, it is also a sophisticated and satisfying emotional journey. It is very rare in the current climate to see the resources and technical artistry manifest in Gravity used for something other than a superhero movie or something with franchise potential behind it. Something that appeals to the nerdy types Hollywood is so constantly chasing after nowadays.

Gravity is something else. It does appeal to the nerds with its authentic (not realistic) portrayal of humans in space and the precariousness of even minor space missions. It uses a few science fiction doodads, a prototype jet thruster and helmet-based augmented reality, and one big hard science fiction scenario: the Kessler Syndrome. Which is to say, a storm of human-made space debris cascading around our orbit and destroying everything in its path as it the domino effect grows and grows. This is the name for a scenario described by Donald J. Kessler, a NASA scientist, in 1978. It never happened, but it still could happen. This is science fiction not because it requires some futuristic or otherworldly event, but because the scenario’s predictive power is based completely on science but it still hasn’t happened which puts Gravity in the realm of speculation. Exactly where science and fiction, when used together, lives.

Though it’s apparent in trailers and marketing that Gravity is a thriller or a sort of intimate disaster film, it’s got major horror chops. Like many great horror or stressful films, it also pulls itself up by the spaceboots to become triumphant and life-affirming in a way many movies try, but few movies ever earn. Gravity is a film whose first apparent quality will be in the realm of technical proficiency. Everyone will be able to appreciate how beautiful, believable, and unique the film is on that level. What surprised me was that the cathartic emotional story as well as the narrative and structural tightness of the film were equal to the technical stuff so the message I want to send about this movie is not to overlook those elements while marveling at shots of the Earth or at Cuaron’s ridiculously masterful opening shot, an extended sequence with no cuts that totally brings you into the environment and mood of the film.

The film is very economic with its storytelling and structure.

Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) invented a new kind of imaging hardware for use in hospitals. NASA recruited her to install the hardware in Hubble because it has space research applications. In six months she is trained and prepared and then sent on mission. We join her and Captain Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) at the tail end of the mission. We can immediately see how nervous Stone is, how disoriented and out of her comfort zone. That’s all we need to know about her for the first act of the film.

That act is mostly an unbroken continuous moving shot that gives us a sense of the Explorer shuttle, the attached Hubble telescope, and various small parameters of the crew’s equipment. About twenty minutes in, disaster strikes as the Kessler Syndrome gets kicked off by Russians destroying one of their own satellites. This sends a cascade of orbital debris around the Earth every 90 minutes, with the first burst proving catastrophic for Stone, Kowalski, and the other crew of the Explorer. They are the sole survivors.

The 90-minute clock is something I hope people catch. This film is almost exactly 90 minutes long. This is important not because it happens in real-time. It doesn’t. It’s important because it establishes a time scale between the audience’s time and Stone’s. The Kessler storm becomes a revolving event that signals the end of each act of the film. Structurally, it works as a way of splitting the film up into sections in an organic and clean way which always keeps tension in the back of our minds even as Stone gets a few minutes here and there to catch her breath. It’s as effective a cinematic “clock” as the van falling into the river in Inception. It is such a clever and intelligent skeleton on which to build the film that the realization of it enriches an understanding of other choices, especially narrative ones, made for the film.

Clooney is a genuine pleasure in this film. As good as he ever was.

Some are pointing out that the movie takes almost thirty minutes before really developing Stone as a character. Up until that point, the characterization is much stronger for Kowalski. This is because Stone is stoic, afraid, and completely out of her element until Kowalski rescues her and forces her to talk. This should be apparent to people as a deliberate narrative choice. Kowalski chatters as a coping mechanism. While space is his element, he’s not a robot. Chattering is how he deals with his fear and distracts it so he can get the job done. It’s a beautiful bit of character work from both Cuaron (and his son, Jonas, who co-wrote the film) and Clooney. Clooney is so charming and so up for this that it might appear to people that he’s just planning to charm his way to survival. Watch for how he ignores Stone’s outbursts of hopelessness (“I’m not gonna make it, I’m slowing you down”) and focuses on keeping her talking.

Later in the film, when Kowalski is lost, Stone eventually adopts his behavior. This is partly why some of Bullock’s dialogue is a bit broad and sounds silly. The kind of things people say, and how they say it, when they have no idea what they’re saying but they need to say something. Bullock totally sells this. She also sells the emotional, overwrought self-talk with aplomb. You put this stuff in a lesser actor’s hands and the audience will turn on it, call it cheesy, and it’ll mar a movie that is otherwise on all cylinders.

It is eerie how young she looks again. Not a day over 30, I swear.

Sandra Bullock is not an actor I have a lot of respect for, usually, not because of her skills (she has em) but because of her safe choices and transparent greed for demographic approval. This year, it’s like she decided to have fun and be a good actress again. Between The Heat and Gravity, I’m turning back into the guy who would have said more than ten years ago that Sandra Bullock was his favorite actress.

It’s such a great performance and it has to be. The real meat of Gravity isn’t zero-G fire, or watching shit explode with disconcerting silence, but experiencing an existential moment. Stone has very little will to live. As she tells Matt, she lost her young daughter in an absurd accident. As she is telling us basically from the moment she first appears on screen, she’s alone and rudderless. Her only constant is her work. It makes sense that she would be willing to go to space. Not out of excitement for it, or the adventure, but because of her work. The mitigating nature of the risks, that which retards the natural adventurous nature of space travel as we tend to imagine it, is the danger. Why would that stop Stone in an abstract sense? When she’s up there, different story. As she confesses, mostly to herself but also to a Chinese man who’s tapped into the radio feed she’s using, she knows she’s going to die but she’s still afraid. That realization coupled with  a very daring and cheeky sequence where Matt seems to return out of all realm of plausibility, forces Stone to confront her existential situation where the choice is as simple as: live or die. The use of birth imagery throughout the film reinforces this.

When she finally makes the choice, Stone becomes a heroine.

I would like to see, some years down the road, Dr. Ryan Stone becoming a cinematic giant on par with Ellen Ripley. She’s one of the greatest heroines in the history of film. She may be one of the greatest in the history of fiction. Some people will roll their eyes, distracted from this very basic idea by hang-ups about Bullock, about the movie, or about something. What’s important to recognize is that roles like this one are very rarely afforded to women. It probably says something about all the dues Bullock has paid with her career that she’s a no-brainer for the role. Her casting did not surprise me at all. She’s a huge box office draw and she’s a good actress, maybe a great one, when she wants to be. This is the performance of a career but it also is the character of a lifetime. Not that Stone or her story are expressly feminist. That’s what’s so great about it. Stone is the hero not because she’s a woman or because it’s Sandra Bullock playing her, but because Stone is the rookie through which we can experience the events with more or less fresh eyes and the tension felt by someone who doesn’t always know what they’re doing. The only nod Cuaron gives to the unlikelihood of Stone being a woman is a joke about her name being a “weird name for a girl”. In what is almost a quip, and something I felt was talking directly to the audience, Stone replies that her father “wanted a boy”. I absolutely believe that someone, somewhere, complained about Stone being a woman. Maybe it was Alfonso Cuaron, and the line made it in as a joke between father and son. Maybe it was the suits. Either way, it’s tacit acknowledgment of a risk that isn’t a risk at all and shouldn’t be thought of that way by anyone.

But let’s back up a touch. Why do I think Stone is so great? There’s obviously the emotional journey she goes on, with its cathartic ending, and just the incidentalism of being along with her for that. That’s the easy stuff, though. The stuff you have to pay attention to is the intelligence with which she meets the challenge of survival. At its heart, Gravity is a “human against nature” story. Nature, in this case, just happens to transcend the usual Earthbound conceptual constraints we place on it. In this struggle, Stone is challenged in every way possible. Emotionally, psychologically, physically, mentally, etc. Even her luck, something as intangible as that, becomes a tangible thing as we watch her defy the odds. Having Stone overcome not only her fear, but her impossible environment, is as easy as just having it happen. At least in theory. In actuality, it’s a tough sell. You have to continuously reinforce the challenge while making us believe in her.

Again and again, we watch Stone defy impossible odds.

The Stone we meet and hang out with in the first Act of the film is not a Stone that makes this easy. This is one of the very real gambles this movie makes, gambles which belie what some are describing as an overall “safe” or “accessible” film set up that way to compromise with the technical ambitions so that it can make its money back. Well, that’s all nonsense. Cuaron has made a film that challenges more than our stomachs or nerves. It’s eminently rewarding viewing just as a story.

There are many techniques used to achieve this, not all of them “safe” ones. The music is perfectly matched to the film, subtle and moody when shit is bad, and soaring and triumphant in the final moments when the audience is totally invested in the Stone that is emerging from the crucible of the horror we’ve gone through with her. That’s the easy stuff again. Some other techniques, including the use of first-person footage, are more risky. People don’t know what to do with first-person footage. They think it’s a video game thing. In this film, it is used to reinforce the sensations, such as they are, of what Ryan Stone is experiencing. They are meant as a bridging mechanism, a way for us to access the confines of a space station or the chaotic jungle gym of the outside of a space station.

Another gamble is having the only other visible character, Shariff (Phaldut Sharma) never show his face to the audience except as a blasted ruin after coming into contact with shrapnel. Beside that horror show ruin of a human face, we see a picture of Shariff floating around, attached to his suit. We see a happy guy with his family. Before that, Shariff’s few lines and one or two moments in the film set up that reveal. This was a happy guy, with a loving family, who enjoyed being in space. It’s a tragedy told to the audience with Hemingway style economy. This is a gamble because some people in the audience won’t care. It’ll just be a dead body in space, like the dead bodies still trapped inside the Explorer (used for one of the film’s rare gotchya horror moments). But this would be missing out on what Cuaron is trying to do.

Some are complaining that he’s a throwaway character. That making him Indian and having him sing is just a pat on the head for minority audiences. I can sort of see that. I mean, the two leads are white folks. But things get more complicated when you consider how carefully Shariff’s death is treated, and the real impact (both sad and horrifying) that it has in the film. It also gets more complicated when you consider that Alfonso and Jonas Cuaron are not white folks. But people who complain about this sort of thing very rarely want their narrative complicated and I must acknowledge that the one “minority” actor in the film dies five minutes in without us ever seeing his face. But in a movie with only a few characters, most of them offscreen (Ed Harris does the mission control voice), should we really read Shariff’s ethnicity as patronizing? Consider that Gravity is a very expensive and ambitious film without franchise potential and probably without a demographic-busting, asses-in-seats hook. Getting bankable stars to lead up the film is one way to secure its financial prospects. Getting people like Clooney and Bullock may read, to the neophyte, as cynical… but there are reasons why they are bankable in the first place. Again, it’s much more complicated than the “Hollywood loves India, but not Indians” message some are using to criticize the film. I’m not really sure that there aren’t grounds for criticism, by the way. All I know is that it’s more complicated in this case than it first appears.

This is one of those luck moments.

Gravity has pulled ahead of a few other 2013 masterpieces (Spring Breakers, Upstream Color, etc) to fill the top spot of the year for me. At least so far. The year isn’t over and there are more pedigreed films to come. I’m not sure what kind of traction it even really has to mention what my top film of the year is when the year is still in progress. It may give you some idea about the esteem with which I hold Gravity. I’ve seen it twice, by the way. That’s why I didn’t write my review last week when it premiered. I even saw it early, the first time, and could have had a review out opening day. Until someone pays me to do this, I don’t really worry about getting ahead of stuff like that, so I mention all this now to reinforce the fact that I have given this one some thought.

One of the nice things about a movie like this is that it appears to be selectively targeted. “Space movies” are supposed to be for a select demographic, if you ask certain people. Especially the people who bankrolled this movie. As if outing that whole ideology as the silliness it is, Gravity has something for just about everyone. Even kids could watch this film, I know I would have loved it around the same time I was discovering Jurassic Park or Event Horizon. Albeit, I got to watch “adult” films much younger than most. There’s some coarse language and a few horrific images, but I think kids could handle the extended tension of Gravity.

In fact, it may be worthwhile for younger people, tweens maybe, to see this. Space is coming back into focus as one of the great adventures of human history. People are noting the gutting of NASA and the loss of peaceful, generational projects that actually seek to leap humans ahead of our current context. Guys like Neil Degrasse Tyson have got famous from espousing the popular opinion that this science shit needs to come back in a big way. Though it’s a horror movie and a disaster movie that gives you some reasons why space isn’t the best place for humans, there’s an undercurrent of awe at both the project of space travel and the temerity of human space travelers running through the film. It’s arguable whether it is intentionally trying to inspire people to remember that space is out there and it’s scary but also amazing. It may actually be saying “sorry Bill Nye but let’s stay on Earth”. Either way, its authenticity and imagery have the potential to inspire a generation of people with the idealism of the endeavor, and the surpassing beauty and awe-inspiring weight of our tiny place in the universe.

Roger Deakins, eat your heart out.

Prisoners feels like the closest thing to a genuine Alan Moore movie that I’ve ever seen. It may seem cheapening to the work screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski did (stellar work, by the way) to say that, but I mean it as an utmost compliment. While Prisoners will make its way into the world on its strengths as a thriller featuring great performances, unpredictability, and moral ambiguity, there are layers within layers of symbolism, allegory, and inquiry being performed within what appears to be an eccentric, but straightforward kidnapping film. Alan Moore is a touchstone for me because of his penchant for layering symbolism in his narratives, attaching occult elements or bits of weird history into his stories. From Hell, the graphic novel, is what immediately comes to mind as I think back on this film.

I can’t think of a recent mystery thriller more surprising than Prisoners. This will probably be one of the things that leaves the biggest impression on audiences. Because the film takes its time (it’s 153 minutes long) and is very selective about what it shows and tells, it’s very difficult to predict the twists and turns. There’s a flirtation and subsequent abandoning of the conventions of the genre. It starts out feeling more formulaic, only to steadily layer uncertainty even on the level of its structure, which rolls out into the narrative and characterizations.

Prisoners is a very intelligent film. A lot of its merit will be lost on people who go into it only willing to engage with the surface. That said, it’s laudable that the movie works entirely on that surface level. It’s not perfect. There is a bit of bloat here, and there are scenes and moments that are not easily clarified in the context of the story nor its thematic significance. This can be confusing and unsatisfying as some of the lingering questions after the film aren’t the good kind.

This is a film you DON’T want spoiled. Do not read this review if you care about that and/or you’re planning to see the film.

It starts off just like any other Thanksgiving.

The film gets off to a grim and foreboding start. We hear Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) delivering the Lord’s Prayer as he and his son shoot a deer. On the way home, Dover explains his life philosophy: pray for the best, prepare for the worst. This philosophy, and the subsidiary elements of Dover’s character, are put to the test when his daughter, along with the daughter of the neighboring Birch family, is kidnapped. It’s a powerhouse, surprising performance. Jackman has rarely gotten to play characters with moral ambiguity, but Keller Dover is at least that. He’d be challenge for any actor, but Jackman carries us through the range of his emotions and decisions with expert sense of tonal balance. One minute, he’s vile and maybe crazy, another he’s a tragic hero, and still another he’s the sympathetic desparate parent the audience hopes to never be.

During Thanksgiving dinner, the girls wander off to play. Earlier, they’d briefly climbed around on a parked, rundown RV. This RV is the immediate, if sketchy, clue for the families as they realize that their kids are gone. Dover is the classic conservative ideal of the American man. He’s devout, prepared, decisive, and above all else morally certain. He believes in good and evil as stark moral realms, without much nuance or ambiguity to speak of. This puts him at odds with Detective Wade Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), an allegedly precise caseworker who has solved everything he’s been up against. In small town Pennsylvania, Loki feels like a weird character. It’s not just his ridiculous name, but the occult and religious tattoos and jewelry he wears. Gyllenhaal carries these cartoonish affectations with ease, balancing the character’s eccentric appearance with a restrained performance that gives him an air of mystery and barely-contained menace. Instead of being a cartoon, Loki is a grim figure perfectly suited for a grim adventure. Gyllenhaal’s work complements the unrestrained nature of Jackman’s. The movie puts these two together often, giving us both a clash of personalities as well as a clash of representational ideas and symbols.

There’s a beautiful parallel arc to their emotional states throughout the film, with each one taking turns being calm, calculating, and ultimately consumed with rage.

We spend almost equal amounts of time with both men. Canadian director Denis Villeneuve maintains the theme of clashing opposition by giving the more intimate portrayal to Dover. Loki is always at arm’s reach, from us and probably from himself. As a nice example of the selective approach to the characterization and storytelling, it’s the first scene with both characters that tells us who they are. Dover’s is the aforementioned hunt and conversation with his son. Loki’s is a lonely Thanksgiving dinner in a shitty diner before picking up the call about the kidnapping.

Loki’s facial tic (he blinks, usually when he’s angry or trying to stay calm) tells us how difficult it is for him to maintain his control and professionalism. He’s not a cold robot, though. He has a weirdly affable and antagonistic relationship with his Captain and we do learn a few more details about his back-story (he went to a Christian boys’ home for six years and subsequently has a healthy suspicion and dislike for priests).

The characters mirror each other, as do various actions they take throughout the film. In the end, they are two crusaders using utterly different philosophical approaches to an impossible problem. This is just one of the thematic conflicts in the film. Just one of its layers of meaning.

Death is a disease, Dano!

Alex Jones (Paul Dano) is the mentally stunted driver of the RV. He’s creepy, sure, and the RV was on the scene when the girls were taken. Dover’s son reports this to both families and it’s sketchy intel at best. But everybody acts on it. Dover, his wife (Maria Bello), and the Birches (Terence Howard and Viola Davis) are convinced that Jones knows something. Dover, at least, immediately dumps his rage and despair into a fixation that is teetering over the edge of obsession until it plummets all the way down to something much darker. Loki, meanwhile, goes along with the suspicion (Jones is suspicious) but he does it by the book, which in spite of his appearance and candor at the office, is pretty much how he do.

This is the crux of the moral collision in the film. Dover uses any means necessary, letting the severity of the situation dictate his approach. Loki is more thoughtful, systematic, and ordered. He chases the leads, he does the legwork, and ultimately it is his approach that the film rewards. He’s the statement that Prisoners makes about the very nature of morality. Morality is not the black and white that Dover’s religious and masculine preconceptions generate. Morality is about imposing order on chaos, using the emotion as an impetus and an inspiration. We see this happen even as Loki begins to lose his tight grip on himself. Amidst the outbursts, the tactical mind is still at work in the functional, methodical quest for justice. His instincts are correct, too, and they serve him again and again and lead him, because he tempers them, to the truth without morally compromising himself.

Watching these two act opposite each other is one of the highlights of the film.

While Loki checks Jones out thoroughly, he ends up chasing other leads while Dover’s fixation with Jones continues. Finally, Dover resolves to get at Jones’s secrets using any means necessary, dragging the Birches into it with him. He first kidnaps, then tortures a man who is mentally ten years old. He’s got reason to suspect Jones, which is one of the ways the film keeps us tentatively with him. Franklin Birch is our surrogate in this situation, being unable and unwilling to believe Jones is innocent enough to save him, and even helping Dover at first as his own rage, grief, and fear do his thinking for him.

This thing with Jones is, in the context of the mystery, the setup for several twists and red herrings that ultimately coalesce into something strange, grand, and retroactively coherent. It’s a mystery with twists and reveals that work, ultimately. The way it progresses is not just a matter of being satisfying, though. This film is serving many masters, all of them faithfully, and the way the mystery works is as much about navigating several symbolic and allegorical streams alongside functioning as a competent (it’s more than competent, really) thriller.

Look at Howard’s face. It’s a very subtle, but awesome performance.

The first of these is an exploration of morality. Directly, it’s easy to point to the situation in the film as an allegory of post 9/11 American social mores. The sketchy intel, the fixation on a target, the use of torture to extract information, the complicit and morally compromised overseers and bystanders (the Birches), and the collateral damage. Even the true villains of the film, Holly Jones and her dead husband, are religious fanatics (of a breed).

However, Prisoners is not happy to be yet another veiled criticism of contemporary American culture or morality. For one thing, the film stays with Dover and never abandons him to the audience’s judgment. We’re allowed to turn on him, at least temporarily, but the movie refuses to take a stance. We see Dover ruthless, we see him do real evil, but we also see his hesitation, his grief, his remorse, and we also see something not completely unlike vindication. This is a movie complex enough to show us that Dover’s instincts were correct: Jones is involved, though not responsible. This does not endorse his actions, however. His actions lead him into the real villain’s clutches, both literally and figuratively. He ends up being a tool for the evil he’s trying to expose and fight, but that doesn’t mean the evil isn’t there. Does that sound like a simplistic way to deal with the moral compromises of contemporary American society? It would be a lot easier to vilify Dover wholesale by having Jones be completely uninvolved or to have turned out to be insane (the film does flirt with this possibility, but it’s a red herring). They could also have left us with just Jones and Dover, but Franklin Birch is also in the mix. He’s the audience, and he’s society. He’s the people who let the morally certain men do the unspeakable in a misguided quest for vengeance masquerading as the search for truth or justice.

Loki’s function in this level of the narrative is to provide a representation of due process. Yes, Loki is suspicious and he’s upset and he’s emotionally involved and all of that. Yet, he does the right things. He doesn’t give in to vengeance or extremes, but stays measured and calculated until he finally has the opportunity and moral/legal grounds to mete out his justice. But it’s not so simple as saying Loki’s way is the right way, we can all go home now. The film deals with the downsides of due process with the same attention to complexity with which it deals with Dover’s slide into amorality. The system lets Jones slip through the cracks without extracting the information he has, the system comes across Aunt Holly Jones by accident rather than by consequence of its merits.

But ultimately, I don’t think there’s any problem with the fact that the film does take a stance in favor of one philosophy. It’s not the philosophy it chooses which matters so much as with the respect, complexity, and maturity that it explores the alternatives.

The creepiest house I’ve seen in a while.

Audiences will understandably get the sense that something deeper is going on with the plot of the film. Loki’s name and occult/symbolic tattoos aren’t the only clues. Prisoners works on the level of thriller, morality play, and even as an allegory of post-9/11 moral corruption. The other level it’s operating on is one of religious and occult symbolism.

Does this mean something supernatural is going on? I’d say no. I’d say that the symbolism is serving the more direct, uncompromising social criticism the film is making. This is a film that is heavily anti-Christian, I think, and I believe I can make a case for it.

First off, Loki is the moral hero of the film. He’s named for a Satanic figure in Norse mythology. He’s covered in polytheistic occult symbols, including runes and Greek zodiac symbols. He was raised in a Christian boys home, is presumably not a Christian. He does have a cross tattooed on his hand, but it’s on the left hand. It also fades as the film draws to a close.

The film plays it close to the edge with Holly. There are early hints that she’s got some secrets, but she eventually confesses just enough to keep her out of suspicion.

Second, the villains are religious fanatics “waging war against God”. To do this, they take children and indoctrinate them, with snakes, an adversarial character in Christian myth, as a central tenet. The end result is to destroy the parents, to turn them into “demons” with no faith and capable of horrors. Holly Jones almost certainly meant for Alex to be taken, for Dover to eventually kill him, and so on. They are the snake-charming, venom-drinking charlatans of a disabused and nameless religion. Their grievance with God is said to be that He let their son die of cancer. Perhaps this is another red herring, but it seems simple enough and personal enough to inspire their crusade. It also nicely parallels Dover’s own motivations and moral position.

Dover is a carpenter and a Godly man. His morality and assumptions about life are informed by his religious convictions. As are his certainties. It’s interesting to see all this compromised by those very convictions, but it’s also the brutal deeds of the most Godly man in the film that reveal the vulnerability of religious morality. Loki’s adherence to a moral standard based on the imposition of order via the rationality of humans (how else would you describe “the law”?) is superior as a mechanism with which to deal with the horrific chaos life sometimes puts in our path.

Though it’s possible that there are other pagan traditions in the mix, the one that comes forth most clearly is Norse. Past Loki himself there is the “maiden in the maze” (Brunhilda) motif, the Nordic style of the mazes we see drawn in the film, and the symbolic sacrifice of the eye for wisdom. First, Alex’s eye is so damaged that it’s swollen shut and we often see shots that highlight his good eye. He alone has the knowledge, if not the understanding, that could lead Dover to the truth. Likewise, Loki is shot just above the eye and temporarily loses his vision in it (swelling and blood) as he stumbles across Holly Jones and ultimately saves Anna Dover.

The mazes are actually a haunting motif in the film. Can’t you tell? Also note the faded cross, barely visible, on his left hand.

Prisoners is an ambitious film and it’s not always subtle about it. One of its major weaknesses may be its commitment to all of these symbolic and thematic streams. It somehow pulls it off, though, only leaving a few truly confusing moments (Dover being blamed by Joy Birch is one of them) which may actually make sense in a rewatch. Though its length is barely felt due to the excellent pacing of the film, there is still some room to condense what’s here into something tighter, clearer, and slightly more urgent. This film is just shy of being a masterpiece and I believe its value will appreciate over time. It’s already received critical and audience acclaim for various reasons, which I suppose is one benefit of being so chimeric with its themes.

I may have written 2500 words extolling its other virtues, but I still think the one that stands out is just how surprising it manages to be. The richness and depth that accompany that surprise will be what gives this film staying power and rewatchability, two things that are very hard for mystery thrillers to incorporate without rapidly diminishing returns.

With stunning performances, the rare intelligent handling of complex moral ideas, and a bunch of fun and creepy mythic symbolism just to ice the cake, I think Prisoners is easily one of the most interesting films of the year. And for me, at least, it pretty much came out of nowhere. Not only when I found out it existed, but while sitting there watching it.

Thor is still ultimately about these two fellas.

A little over two years ago, I wrote a positive review for Thor fueled mostly by very pleasant surprise that they dared so much, let alone accomplished anything by it. Thor is probably one of the weaker stand-alone Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films, but it was elevated by one of the better casts and a functional emotional story of a type for which I have a confirmed soft spot. What held it back was its smallness, its breeziness, and a certain lack of conviction that kept it from fully owning its cosmic scale.

Thor: The Dark World succeeds its predecessor in every way it faltered. Not only a bigger and better film in terms of spectacle, it maintains the emotional narrative and strong sense of familial drama that drove the first film and has helped make Loki (Tom Hiddleston) the best Marvel villain and one of the greatest film baddies of this era. Rather than breaking from its lesser roots, The Dark World returns to them and builds on them, crafting a science-fiction fantasy film that is the envy of all other science fiction fantasy films (though there aren’t many of them) since probably the last good Star Wars. It is so audaciously, apologetically a movie of ridiculously huge ideas and creatures and characters, that anyone who grew up on Final Fantasy and Masters of the Universe, let alone the comics, will feel like it was made for them.

There’s also that it’s one of the funniest, funnest movies of 2013. Thor: The Dark World in no way felt like a movie that should be as out-and-out entertaining as it is, going in, but I laughed my ass off. It may even be funnier than The Avengers. One might have fairly expected a greater degree of verisimilitude with Alan Taylor directing (he did a lot with limited resources on Game of Thrones) but I don’t know that anyone expected him to have such a sharp ear for the comedic inside the dramatic, or the cosmic. I would not have envied the job of trying to make some of the stuff in The Dark World work on the straight, let alone trying to make it amusing without undermining it. Here, that is the accomplishment. It also paves the way for the crazier, bigger world of the MCU’s next phase of development, a world wherein we’ll be connecting the grounded (ish) realities of the Phase 1 films and The Avengers with things like talking trees, Space Jim Jarmusch, and fucking Rocket Raccoon. Because yes, sportsfans, part of Thor: The Dark World‘s purpose is to prepare audiences for that big step upward and outward, to a place where we can receive Guardians of the Galaxy with only the good kind of head-scratching.

The Marvel films make it an exciting time for moviegoers and superhero fans. Thor: The Dark World makes it an exciting time for fantasy fans, and even the ones who don’t care about Thor or Marvel should really give this a look.

The Dark Elf design is just great.

In eons past, the Dark Elves ruled over a universe that was different. They wanted it to go back to the way it was. Led by Malekith (Chris Eccleston), they created a living energy weapon called the Aether and prepared to use the Covergence (a time when the Nine Realms intersect) to unleash it everywhere at once. Odin (Anthony Hopkins) wasn’t around back then, the way he was with the Jotun, so it was his own father who gated his armies to Svartalfheim (realm of the Dark Elves) for a battle royale. The Aether was successfully sealed away, but it’s been 5000 years and Convergence approaches again. Malekith, who survived the destruction of his world and people, is ready to come out of hiding and get on with his diabolical plans.

On Earth, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) accidentally discovers the Aether whilst investigating anomalies in London. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) hasn’t seen her in two years, and with the Bifrost only recently repaired, he’s been spending all his time getting the Nine Realms back in order after the absence of Asgard left it all to go to Hel. We rejoin Thor in Vanaheim, as he and his friends fight a final battle to liberate it. With the Nine Realms again at peace and Loki locked away, Odin is prepared to actually, for real, step down this time and let Thor rule the Realms. Only problem is that Thor has changed and has begun to solidify an identity for himself, as a warden and protector on the ground rather than as the judge and king of everything. Partially this comes down to Thor’s reluctance to make genocidal decisions, a qualm that Odin and his own father did/do not really seem to have.

The little battle on Vanaheim is fun, but the place kinda feels like a Stargate: SG1 set.

Thor basically wants the freedom to make his own way in life. While the first film was a fish out of water story, The Dark World shows us Thor in his own element, treating his friends and people and place in the world with more care and respect than he was capable of before. But he still wants to be out there, with people, and free to pick up his romance with Jane Foster where he left it, if she’ll have him. Loki mocks this, because their lifespans are so long, and Odin disapproves. Only Frigga (Rene Russo), who is really the glue holding the family together (and that comes across very well in this film with Frigga having a small but key role this time), understands any of them enough to understand why they’re really quarreling. She even makes time for Loki, and she’s the only one who does. We learn that Loki’s penchant for illusion and misdirection are tricks that she taught him, and that he still loves her in spite of himself.

Only Frigga’s death at the hands of Malekith, who chases Jane to Asgard when Thor brings her there (the excuse he needed finally arriving) for protection, can make Loki and Thor risk joining forces again. Odin, meanwhile, sort of loses it and tries to barricade everything and everyone in Asgard while Malekith hides in plain sight.

Frigga’s scenes really elevate the film.

Back on Earth, Dr. Selvig (Stellan Skaarsgard) has more or less lost his mind since Loki took it over. It’s all Darcy (Kat Dennings) can do to corral him and her intern (who gets a great moment toward the end of the film) to back Jane’s play when everything comes to a head.

The plotting of the film is pretty tight, as you can see by how long I’ve spent summarizing it. There’s a lot to cover, and many characters to serve. The film accomplishes this very well, and not even by slowing down to make the time. The Dark World is a movie with more shit going on than many others can manage in three hours, let alone the two it has. It’s a minor miracle that the film even works, that its tonal shifts feel earned, and that nothing ever feels undercooked or excised. For a recent comparison of a movie that should have been longer to better dole out its story, see Ender’s Game (review soon).

The wonderful Viking funeral scene was one of the points where The Dark World really transcended itself and created something that felt special.

The Dark World is a fast mover, hurtling its way through the plot and punctuating every beat with strong, character-derived humor. By now we’re all familiar with these personalities, and we’re here to watch them bounce off each other once again. I can’t overstate how amazingly well the tonal balance of this movie works. There is some real weight to counterbalance the amusement, and The Dark World may do this even better than The Avengers did (granted, that film did not try to be as weighty). Scenes like Thor knowing that his brother is only pretending calm after their mother is killed, or the funeral scene, go beyond the affection for the characters or the excitement of this universe brought to such vivid life.

The one sacrifice to the pace and packedness of the film are the villains. Malekith may be better developed in the comics, but here he’s just a scary looking guy who wants to destroy the universe. He’s more elemental than someone like Loki, who is driven by understandable psychological and emotional motives. Kurse (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) is little more than a very cool henchman. The fact that Loki is in the film and provides some degree of menace and duplicity throughout is pretty much the only thing that saves the villains from being cool looking shells. Loki’s fake death should have been a cheesy bit that Marvel had to know wasn’t going to go over, but Hiddleston and Hemsworth make this shit work by sheer acting. Loki’s fake death isn’t just left alone, either, it informs the stuttering apology he gives Thor and the interaction Odin (really Loki) has with Thor at the very end.

I mean look at this guy.

The love story is better this time around, but still underserved. Hemsworth and Portman make it work, this paperthin thing, on the idea of “spark” alone. In the first film, it felt more like a spark, the potential of something, than the life-affirming and course-correcting event that had so much influence on Thor. This time, it’s played like the ultimate long distance could-be, with Jane dating (awesome cameo, Chris O’Dowd!) sort of, and Thor being forced to put work first and coaxed to look around at local prospects (Sifffff).

When they finally meet again, the question is whether or not the spark is still there. Of course it is, but only after Jane slaps some fools around. In The Dark World, we have grown to know these characters a bit better (especially Thor) and it is far easier to understand their attraction to each other. They’re simply good for each other. Thor is confident, which Jane admires. Jane has strong convictions, which Thor admires. They are both curious and have a strong sense of wonder. This stuff comes across better in The Dark World but it’s still kind of a bummer that they never get to consummate their relationship.

And don’t give me that “no sex, kids movie” stuff. Have you seen any of the Iron Man films?

In spite of her alleged distancing from her role in the MCU, Portman gives a great performance that front-ends the room that The Dark World makes for its female characters. Her work keeps Jane from being a damsel, and provides small but rewarding moments with the other women in the film.

This only bears mentioning because it is so rare, not necessarily in Marvel’s films (though they have miles to go yet), but in genre films as a whole. Not only are there some great performances and rich roles for women in these movies, but The Dark World even passes the Bechdel Test (where two women talk to each other in a film about something other than men). Frigga, Darcy, Sif, and especially Jane are all heroic and awesome by their own lights, and not defined by the men they have around. Jane tries to protect Thor, even though she is not superhuman. Frigga is the glue that held her family together, especially Odin (who comes a bit undone when she’s gone). Maybe it’s Portman’s influence that made this happen, and if so then good for Marvel for at least attempting to back up what is a sorely lacking element in their brand.

More lightning all the time.

The best things about Thor: The Dark World aren’t just the stunning visuals and awesome design work. That stuff is there, of course, but this film also features a final battle heavily reminiscent of the video game Portal, making it even more of a love letter to the geek audience than high-tech vikings fighting high-tech dark elves with laser swords and flying longboats.

But really, what makes this shit work is the narrative depth that Marvel has managed to infuse into these films. They don’t need much to skate by on and still make crazy money. By casting these films with good, likable actors who manage to fully inhabit the roles, Marvel has created a unique franchise that generates narrative from character, creating icons that will have just as much influence and staying power as their comicbook counterparts.

Part of the pleasure of the film is just watching these guys create characters and bounce off each other.

I think The Counselor is already going down as some kind of odd failure. I haven’t ready many reviews, but the tone of the ones I’ve checked out has been apologetic. Not in the “we’re sorry” remorse sense, but in the old school intellectual defense sense. So going into this, I was aware that might be a movie needing a defense. However, I don’t think that’s going to be my approach here.

The Counselor has significant merit on its own. It’s major sin is banal: it is not what audiences expected. Instead of being a pleasant surprise, the largely bloodless and talky film we get probably bored and confused most of its audience. It’s too bad, as The Counselor is an eminently sophisticated and interesting film, combining the (occasionally overwritten here) philosophical words of Cormac McCarthy and the (restrained) filmmaking of Ridley Scott into a film that is more for the actors in it than for anyone else.

It is also a fairly unsubtle criticism of the culture surrounding the war on drugs, particularly the opportunists who probably rationalize the moral and human cost of what they involve themselves in. Because its plot is sparse, or at least sparsely told, it comes across as somewhat disinterested in the machinations of that culture, in any sense. It doesn’t glorify, it doesn’t fully condemn, it just lets you in for a peek behind the curtain and asks you to indulge a reflective perspective on what you see and hear.

Every actor is doing great work, but Bardem drapes himself over this film like it’s an old sofa.

The Counselor (Michael Fassbender) is a defense lawyer, presumably for criminals, who is on the cusp of doing a deal with an associated called Reiner (Javier Bardem). Together, they are entering into a bunch of different business ventures including the trafficking of narcotics controlled by an unidentified Mexican cartel. Something goes wrong and the consequences come down like the wrath of a spiteful God. This is just business, the movie tells us, while showing us things that we’d normally assume were very, very personal.

The boogeyman of the Cartels has been haunting American cinema for a few years now. It’s hard not to think of it as a sort of new Red Peril, a scapegoat against which Americans can periodically mirror their insecurities, fears, and other assorted issues. But one need only look at the statistics and articles coming out of Mexico, all of which this film is fully aware of, to face a sobering reality. This is a real war, a new kind of war, one with a serious fucking death toll and a seemingly endless supply of soldiers and opportunists.

The characters with whom we spend the most time are all such opportunists. The Counselor, Reiner, and another associated named Westray (Brad Pitt), all get together in a series of scenes where they tell each other stories, advise each other, and explore the psychological and philosophical ramifications of their choices. Each one gives us a different elemental focus for the ur-Drug Opportunist. Counselor is naive, slick, and in over his head. Reiner is crazy, lavish, and delusional. Westray is practical, overconfident, and possibly remorseful. Their conversations are, on the surface, about their lives (especially love lives), the deal, or the consequences about to be visited upon them by pissed off Cartel guys. Beneath that, but sometimes coming out with all the force of a sledgehammer thanks to what feels like a script in need of a bit more polish, there are deeper concerns and issues being explored.

The film’s occasional violence is cold, detached, and unsettling.

Not unlike No Country for Old Men (the novel was written by Cormac McCarthy), this triumvirate are meant to present us with varying facets of a central situation. In No Country, we also had Sheriff Tom Bell from which to receive the story. He was the through-line that maintained the narrative direction, as he pieced it all together. Here, there’s no Tom Bell. However, all three of the main characters are drawn together by the same situation (the deal) in much the same way as their counterparts in No Country. It’s possible that having a Tom Bell character would have enhanced the accessibility of The Counselor but I feel like that was not the aim. 

The Counselor is a very bleak film. There are no happy endings for anyone, except maybe for Malkina (Cameron Diaz). She is this film’s Anton Chigurh. She’s a mystery who makes outlandish claims and does outlandish things. She styles herself a huntress, and ruminates about the philosophical nature of that. She skillfully and coldly sets up and executes the plan that we see play out in the film, but we’re always at a step or two remove from that plan and a galaxy from her.

This film has a strange and potentially off-putting attitude toward women.

The film poses several moral and ethical questions, and even has a brief dance with existentialism. The secondary and tertiary characters who are encountered by The Counselor and Malkina, presumably meant as opposite ends of some sort of continuum, always seem to have some sort of wordy wisdom to share. Most of this is good, particularly the very existential conversation that the Counselor has with a Mexican contact, a man who tells him that he creates his own world through the choices he makes. It’s a fatalistic commentary on the nature of characters like the Counselor, who are almost always the heroes of films like this. Instead of being a basically good guy, or morally ambiguous antihero even, who we root for in spite of that “one bad choice”, this is a film about the culture of that bad choice. It rejects the illusion of narratives we might typically enjoy, and perhaps mistake this film as being in the tradition of, and possibly indicts our enjoyment.

This is sort of maybe why people aren’t liking this film much. The most important bit of dialogue in terms of understanding what it’s saying to us, and to its own themes, is when Westray talks about snuff films. It’s one of the great dialectical moments in a very dialectical film, wherein Westray raises the notion that to watch a snuff film is to be an accessory in murder precisely because it is the potential for consumption that drives the creation of the consumed. There are reductive problems with this point of view, but the elegance of the message resonates. It’s that guys like Westray, Counselor, and Reiner are all those (unwitting or otherwise) watchers of snuff film. But so is the audience of The Counselor. So are the regular people who profit from, opportunize, or even ignore the drug war happening around them, and all the nasty consequences thereof. The difference between Westray and his counterparts is that he’s aware of this. Awareness, however, does not save you.

The Counselor’s failure is to see this, a protest about the lives lost in the tribal conflict of the Cartels in Mexico, as a necessary part of the world he’s entering.

The consequences for everyone are dire and tragic. There is no happy ending, except for Malkina. She’s an utter sociopath, the most vital and monstrous depiction of the Whore that I’ve seen in a while. Her sexuality and exoticism are her weapons, but she’s also fiercely intelligent and predatory. She and Crystal from Only God Forgives are like mother and daughter or something. On the other end is the mostly decorative Laura (Penelope Cruz) who presents us, and more importantly the Counselor, with a Madonna to aspire to. She’s pretty and kind and trusting. She’s the innocent lamb, a victim served up unwittingly by choices she didn’t make at all. Collateral damage, of the kind we roll our eyes at (rightfully) because her blindness was such that she couldn’t see anything at all. She’s a nice compliment to the Counselor, and with him she provides us with a counterexample to the unrepresented real innocents brutalized by the culture this movie depicts.

On some level, the Counselor believes everything he does is for Laura, to have the money to support lavish gifts that acknowledge her beauty (as a diamond dealer tells him is the philosophical nature of adornment). Diaz is not always up to the task of someone like Malkina, and I’m not even sure the carefully constructed fiction of this film fully supports the existence of a total X-Factor like her. She’s memorable, though, that’s for sure. She steals every scene she’s in, except for the very last one which falls very flat partly because Diaz’s performance and line-delivery fizzle. The words are unwieldy, perhaps even pretentious, but unfortunately they’re her responsibility at that point.

Speaking of the Madonna/Whore binary… The Counselor is probably a very problematic film, in terms of its gender politics. The perspective is mostly male, and many of the conversations revolve around sex and sexuality in a frank, mystified, and fatalistic way. The Counselor’s main preoccupation with Laura seems to be sex wrapped in unconvincing sentiment (“Life is being in bed with you, everything else is just waiting). Westray is a cavalier chauvinist, knowing himself for being a helpless rake. More interesting, there’s Reiner who is not possessive nor cavalier, but actually stupefied and entranced by the sexual power of Malkina, who is his lover. He tells a story that, whatever people think of this film, will go down in history as “The Catfish Story”. In it, Bardem takes something so alien and outlandish as to be ridiculous on its face, and completely sells the cognitive dissonance of attraction and repulsion. He probably knows Malkina is playing them all (one conversation he has with her seems to go a ways into acknowledging this), but he can’t help himself with her. Yet, in his bafflement of her is also the thriving garden of not-quite-misogyny where he explains to the Counselor that you can “do anything you want to them, just never bore them”.

This may also be the movie that people remember as “that time Cameron Diaz fucked a car”.

I feel like this is a movie that will slide around the heads of audiences, more than going over them. There’s too much here that’s sticky, resonant, and nasty to just be completely numb to it. But there’s an almost hostile lack of concern for what the audience may be thinking and feeling watching it that I think a lot of people will understand, on some level, that they are being accused by it and that it doesn’t much care whether this bothers them.

The Counselor makes a nice compliment to this year’s Spring Breakers though it is perhaps even less accessible. They are both dealing in criticism of complex social and ethical issues of our day. They are both widely hated by audiences ill-equipped to understand them, let alone grapple with the complexities of our collective complicity in the culture surrounding drugs in North America (and beyond). The world that The Counselor relies on is a very real one, the staggering body counts and barbaric tactics are things that really happen (and are typically normalized out of their shock value by mass media, books, TV, and movies). If you come out of it thinking about how unkindly history is likely to judge The War on Drugs, and how quickly the entire wasteful and destructive house of cards might collapse if steps were taken to decriminalize the narcotics that fuel these atrocities, I believe you’ll have got the message that McCarthy and Scott are trying to send.

Getting over estrangement isn’t easy!

Frozen is both surprising and a film that makes perfect sense. Disney is on a tear lately, and Frozen belongs to a new and proud generation of “Princess” movies that are not afraid to indulge a little self-awareness, trope-busting, and progressive themes. Its companions are Brave and Tangled, with both of those films functioning nicely alongside this one as the new breed of animated films featuring female characters that are not dominated nor defined by childishness, vapidness, the institution of marriage, or their relationships to men.

Co-directors Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck may not have known what they had on their hands, but Frozen is a smash success and the type of movie I’m very happy exists. I pride myself on being as manly as the next man, by any sane and emotionally healthy definition, but Frozen made me choke up and just the chorus of stand-out song ”Let It Go” gives me the big feels. Lee had no previous animation experience, by the way, and was brought on to make sure the story and characters had depth and complexity. This is a big deal. This is maybe a sea-change in how the business of making these frankly very commercial movies is done. Disney has long done above-average work in the kids’ and animated genres, especially since linking up with Pixar. I hope the quality of Frozen, and the returns it is deservedly enjoying are a lesson to other creatives and executives in the industry.

Seeing movies like this one and Catching Fire in the same weekend, and knowing they are hugely successful in every way that matters, makes me very happy for the state of my favorite entertainment industry and hopeful for the future.

The thing about little baby ice sorceresses is that they grow up.

Adapted from The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen (for whom at least three characters are named), Frozen is all about the relationship between the two princesses of a vaguely Scandinavian kingdom called Arendelle. One of them, Elsa (Idina Menzel) was afflicted by some kind of magic that has given her the ability to express her feelings through generating snow and ice. Her sister, Anna (Kristen Bell), wakes her up one night to play with a power that isn’t hers, but is shared with her anyway. Unfortunately, Elsa can’t control her powers and Anna is hurt. Their parents take them to see the trolls, their patriarch (Ciaran Hinds) can fix minor damage but warns that if Elsa uses her powers to freeze a person’s heart, they will be cursed beyond saving. This prompts the King and Queen to keep Elsa’s gifts secret, to force her into isolation and estrangement with Anna, all for the good of the realm.

But the King and Queen die in a shipwreck, leaving Elsa and Anna with nothing but silence and loneliness. For her part, Anna never fully gives up and her sister’s coronation affords her the only opportunity she’s had in a decade or so to reconnect with Elsa.

Anna sidesteps being a bit of a manic pixie dreamgirl thanks to Kristen Bell’s command of the performance.

Anna wants to hang out with people, but she also yearns to meet “the one”. In what becomes a running joke in the film, she seizes on the first nice guy she meets, a Prince Hans (Santino Fontana) with whom she has a sort of awkward rapport. This is the kind of thing she expects to happen to her. A romantic fantasy that immediately connects her with the Disney fans in the room, both the ones who’ve out grown the Disney model of love, and the younger ones who are still ripe to be taken in by what has long been rightfully labeled a somewhat pernicious con. Expanding on Brave‘s stubborn, assertive approach to that problem, Frozen deals with it via humor and an acknowledgement that the love Anna wants is definitely a fantasy.

Ambushed by Anna’s characteristic enthusiasm and snap decision-making, Elsa has a bit of a freak-out predicated on just how hard she’s concentrating on not letting anyone notice her powers. She doesn’t think Anna should marry a guy she’s just met. This comes across as obvious, but unstated, since Elsa is dealing with her own shit. Just think about that for a minute. There are emotions and motives in this film, an animated Disney film, that come out of subtlety and small cues of body language and facial tics. Only the big cathartic stuff is every outright said, or sung, in this movie. That makes it intriguing. That makes it sophisticated.

From Ice Queen to Ice Queen.

Elsa’s fit outs her as a sorceress and she flees the village, scared that her magic will hurt people due to her lack of control over it. Once she’s far away from anyone she could harm inadvertently, she has a moment of reflection and realizes that she’s finally free to let her hair down and be who she is. What follows has got to be one of the singular and seminal Disney musical numbers in their storied history. How to describe Elsa’s transformation via this song? How to elucidate the complexity of character, image, and the interplay between the aware audience (mostly adults) and what they’re seeing on screen?

Of all the great moments, characters, and scenes in this film (and there are plenty), this is the one that hits the hardest and is probably what people will remember. If only for the great song. Elsa, without having to worry about hurting anyone, truly controls her powers and creates beauty. She erects an ice palace on a mountainside, in a nod to Watchmen‘s Dr. Manhattan, who does something similar when he finally gets away from the fear and judgment of other people. This shows unequivocally that Elsa’s magic is something to be refined and respected, a true gift rather than a curse.

Wonderful homage to Watchmen.

But this moment also suggests something far more interesting and subversive. Other critics have mentioned that Elsa’s characterization may be a wafer-thin metaphor for the experience of LGBTQ people and I have to agree with them. Even if it wasn’t intentional, and I seriously doubt it wasn’t, the metaphor is perfectly functional and ridiculously valid. If her snow powers are a metaphor for her sexual orientation, follow through the way the movie handles it as a metaphor for the way parents, society, and possibly our loved ones can possibly shut us into ourselves when there’s something about us they fear and don’t understand. Carrying that out, you can apply it to any outsider narrative you might want but I think that the most powerful is the LGBTQ message, if only because it’s never represented in this type of film. And besides, Elsa never seems all that interested in men.

Elsa takes complete ownership of herself, and the animation and dress of the character once she’s unleashed is probably one of the most adult, sensual, and attractive that Disney has produced. This is a powerful woman. Woman is the key word there, the italics be damned. And she’s there for the grown-ups. Anna, great as she is too, is the princess meant for the kids in this one.

This movie has a lot of warm hugs to give.

There’s more than one love story in Frozen. There’s Olaf (Josh Gad), the snowman Elsa accidentally animates, who loves everything and everyone (the idea of summer most of all). He’s in the JarJar spot, in this movie, and he’s a character that could easily annoy but is endowed with so much heart (and not a little wisdom) that he wins you over. Similarly, Sven the Reindeer feels like a Disney character we’ve seen 600 times before, but the movie knows this and uses it expertly. Just enough to keep us happy, not too much to edge into obnoxious. This is helped a lot by Christoff (Johnathan Groff) who insists on carrying on entire conversations as himself and play-acting as Sven. This is a nicely executed joke on Disney’s history with the “talking animal” trope and it endears both characters to the audience.

Christoff is the love interest for Anna, and agrees to help her to save his ice-selling business. Raised by the trolls after being separated from his own people, Christoff is the evolution of Tangled‘s Flynn Rider. He fills the role that women usually fill in typical action-adventure or fantasy films. Tangled wasn’t quite confident enough in the idea of a purely female lead (which is odd for Disney, really) that Flynn narrated the thing, putting the film at least nominally in his perspective. This time, Anna and Elsa get the full honors and this is only fitting.

Elsa and Anna have the most important love story in the film. It’s also a lot more focused than the similarly filial “romance” of Brave. The bad guys aren’t important, and though Disney has a history of great villains and a lot of time spent on their characterizations and evil plots (think Scar, Jafar, etc from the golden period of the 90′s), Frozen is more perfunctory about it. That said, Hans is the closest thing to a villain that there is and even his motive (he’s the youngest sibling in a big family, left out of inheritance or special status) feeds back into the central issue.

There’s room for everybody to be heroic.

Though Elsa is potentially destructive, highly emotional about it, and estranged from her, Anna’s defining characteristic is hope. Not only for herself, even in pretty dire circumstances, but for Elsa. When it comes to Elsa, Anna never gives into fear or reproach but is an unwavering line of support, love, and selflessness. This is a beautiful message, and a mark of restraint for a film where it was probably very tempting to reduce the conflict to sibling rivalry, angst, or open fighting. Frozen sidesteps those simpler ways of dealing with the conflict, and keeps it all operating at a higher, more realistic level. That it’s a fantasy film makes this approach a bit unnecessary, but certainly functional. And I get why they did it. In spite of Elsa’s snow powers and what their function in the story could represent (I say could but I think I mean definitely does), their shit is way relatable to anyone who has siblings.

The miscommunication. The storming off. The tantrums. The paternalism. The natural and irrefutable willingness to drop all that at moments it really matters. That’s all stuff even the most manly men can understand, especially if they have brothers or sisters.

Or small, affable snow golems.

Yeah, Bilbo, sit there and think about what you did.

I was wrong last year when I wrote that An Unexpected Journey would improve with subsequent viewings. It doesn’t. Instead, it’s sort of like some leftovers that happen to biodegrade very slowly, if at all. They are there if you need them, and they are kinda nice, but mostly you can’t even taste them anymore. Watching An Unexpected Journey is exhausting. Sometimes a good, long movie should be exhausting. I’d put The Return of the King in that category. Unfortunately, this doesn’t extend to Jackson’s personal prequel trilogy. Both An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug are exhausting in the bad way.

I didn’t originate the comparison but I pretty much agree that the Hobbit films are Peter Jackson’s personal failure to meet the same tests once undergone by George Lucas to the detriment of all save Sam Jackson. Cuz, to be fair, that guy has survived worse than Mace Windu.

I went easy on An Unexpected Journey when I wrote about it. I’d be less charitable now. Doubling down on all the mistakes he made there, Jackson has created a slapstick cartoon full of so much “why in fuck?” that it erodes the sense of fun and whimsy that I was pretty much okay with going in. I mean, I understand that these are not as grimdark as The Lord of the Rings tended to be. That said, these Hobbit movies now feel almost like they take place in a different universe. There was a tangibility to the locations, costumes, and creatures in The Lord of the Rings that feels railroaded here. An over-reliance on unnecessary CG hampers the verisimilitude that made The Lord of the Rings so fucking influential and successful that it single handedly made high fantasy mainstream-viable. The Hobbit movies now feel like the lesser work of some other asshole who’s trying really hard to be Peter Jackson.

But it’s not all bad or anything. Obviously, this is an extension of the same flaws that have plagued all of these films. You’re probably going to enjoy Smaug. I enjoyed the majority of it. It’s just hard not to be super critical when there’s all that “why in fuck?”

In The Desolation of Smaug, the dial on fucking everything gets turned so much over the limit that it’s broken off. Nearly every reel of the film recalls the chaffy enormity and excess of the Pelennor Fields sequence from King and not one of them has built up the anticipation or emotional investment to earn that excess or at least mitigate it with catharsis. There will never be a “Last March of the Ents” or a “Rohirrim Charge” moment in the Hobbit films. So why all the impossible camera angles, badly composited establishing shots, and grandiose rehashing of lines from The Lord of the Rings? It’s a mystery.

You didn’t forget about this asshole, did you?

Without skipping a beat, it seems Azog (Manu Bennet) has tracked the Eagles hundreds of miles or whatever and caught up with Thorin’s (Richard Armitage) gang. They are mad on the run, yo, and wind up hanging out with Werebear Beorn for a few minutes (they do nothing with this shit, so they should have cut it… Jackson 2001 would have). After that, it’s off to Mirkwood where they meet Bizzarro Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and his lady friend, Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly). And then Laketown and Smuggler Bard (Luke Evans). And then Erebor. And then nonsensical Pirates of the Caribbean style shit. And then cliffhanger.

Lots and lots of “and then”. This movie is relentlessly paced. There are few moments of respite, littler characterization, and the best character-based storyline is just an echo of the Aragon-Arwen romance. Jackson and friends really did use up every opportunity to call back to The Lord of the Rings that they could. Instead of coming off as pleasant, the fact that it’s only been ten years makes it feel like the cheap self-reference that it is. It puts Jackson in a bad light, making him come off much the same way George Lucas did when he set about over-exposing every bit of backstory, coincidence, and loose thread he could. It’s the same inclination. It’s so bad that the once-warm “we love Hobbits, everybody” moments (cue gentle Hobbit theme) could now be a fucking drinking game. Even characters like Balin (Ken Stott), for whom Bilbo (Martin Freeman) is the only experience, rehashes Gandalf’s (Ian McKellan) line about Hobbits always surprising him. There is tons of shit like that in this movie. When we go to Bree in an unnecessary flashback, there’s an obligatory shot of Peter Jackson eating a carrot again.

Why does this stuff matter? Because it’s distracting. Why is it distracting? Because it’s not in service to the story we’re watching, or the spirit of telling it. It’s in service to the people who brought the story to your screen, and a constant reminder that they are very proud of what they did. It’s obnoxious and insecure and just amateurish.

But still has its moments.

Speaking of Pirates of the Caribbean, that’s really what these films resemble once you get past the uncomfortable Star Wars prequels thing. The whimsy, slapstick, and successive levels of absurdity and flippant ignorance of physical laws served that series well. That’s what the Pirates films were: summaries of swashbuckling pirate mythology dressed up in absurdist humor, with every fucking dial broke off. The Lord of the Rings may have been a more serious, epic story with higher stakes, but Desolation still tries to have its “this is serious, guys” moments (the dead Dwarves in Erebor, including dead Dwarf babies) which it fails to earn by having action sequences predicated on impossible plans where all the characters must be telepathic and have perfect senses of timing. Not to mention the Radagast bits, cuz yes… he’s back.

This isn’t to say that the whimsy never works. The barrel escape is a great example of a great part from the book being elongated, mutated, and set to spin by Jackson. Except that it works, for a change. There’s a fine balance to shit like this. The Goblin Town sequence from Journey would have achieved it were it not for that bit with the broken scaffolding. The barrel escape achieves it not because it chooses a good moment to stop (it doesn’t, it goes on past the point of charm) but by ending with something so ridiculous that it punches the audience back into sheer, childlike glee. Bombur’s (Stephen Hunter) one badass scene is really that good. It alone saves the sequence from being a total misfire. As it is, it’s still like something out of Pirates.

About time Evangeline Lilly gets some big exposure.

Though her storyline with Fili (Aidan Turner) echoes Aragorn and Arwen, Tauriel is really the best character in the film. Stupidity and excess are not the only things that Jackson and his writing partners, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, doubled down on. They wanted to do what they were smart not to do in The Lord of the Rings and have a badass she-elf (shelf?) character that sticks around. Tauriel is always kicking ass and always saving motherfuckers. That she does it with a bow is a nice continuation of how the bow has become a symbol for nonstandard female characters in genre fiction. Lilly also infuses the character with longings and convictions that keep Tauriel from getting lost in all the noise and confusion of the film.

And that’s really something you could say about nearly every character and actor in it, with some exceptions. Freeman, Armitage, and Benedict Cumberbatch (as Smaug) all keep their scenes grounded and buoyant even when the writing isn’t exactly serving them. With them along, Thorin’s PTSD, history of mental illness stuff is not forgotten and the character still has audience sympathy even as he acts like a dickbag to everybody. Freeman makes Bilbo into an everyman hero, a very different kind of character than Frodo was. And Cumberbatch impresses as always as Smaug, infusing a CG character with grandeur, flamboyance, and even some sinister charm. Smaug’s scenes with Bilbo are probably some of the best in the film, really.

Faring less well are McKellan’s Gandalf, who spends most of the film following up on the apparent return of Sauron. Those scenes are a bit meh. Mostly they give him something to do, pad out the length, destroy any mystery from the source novel, and set up the third Hobbit movie which will undoubtedly make the Battle of Five Armies less a regional conflict predicated on power imbalances and old unsettled business (though this element is very much still there) and more a precursor to Sauron’s bigger plans. The way the Sauron shit is being handled here is troublesome because it calls into question what everybody’s been doing between the end of The Hobbit and Frodo’s inheritance of the Ring, some 60 years later. Here’s hoping they address that in Hobbit 3.

They choose entirely the wrong way to use Legolas.

Legolas has his share of fans. People like Elves. No one likes them, or him, more than Peter Jackson though. The characters in The Lord of the Rings who were in the Fellowship were like the the Avengers of Middle Earth. With the exception of the hobbits, every one of them was a world-class warrior. When Gandalf reassures someone, on the march to the Black Gate, that there are “names among them worth a thousand”, these are the types of dudes he means. In The Hobbit every fucking buddy is a superhero. Combat is perfunctory. Like in Goblin Town, the dwarves and the elves and everybody else just bats enemies away like they’re nothing. All the choreography and battles are coated with obvious CG stunts, ridiculous feats of strength and dexterity, and an altogether “fuck physics” attitude. It wouldn’t rankle so much if it didn’t make every battle feel weightless and threat-free. No one is gonna die, no amount of orcs is enough to take down Legolas, and so on.

Speaking of Legolas, cuz I forgot about him for a second there, he’s got characterization issues. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Legolas was a mouthy and hotblooded young Elf-prince who loved him some Aragorn and hated him some dwarves. In Desolation, he’s a cold and calculating veteran warrior who rides orcs like surfboards and goes toe-to-toe with the seven foot son of Azog with all the strength and endurance the script needs him to have to make the fight work. How did this guy become the guy we remember from movies that take place 60 years later?

I think they missed an opportunity. Legolas’s characterization, if he fucking had to have one in these movies (he didn’t, but Jackson always rolls Elf Ranger so there ya go), should have been about his father. By keeping their relationship clipped, they both float in their respective motivations and subplots barely attached, even when they’re supposed to be. Legolas, we’re told, likes Tauriel (but never acts like it or does anything about it), but Thranduil (Lee Pace) is like “ah hell naw” or something. Who knows. Because Thranduil is actually kind of cool in a male-Galadriel way, this bugs me. Also, the big conflict with the dwarves is about some goddamn jewels. See An Unexpected Journey: Extended Cut for very little more about this.

The best dragon in movies. Except for Toothless.

What this film does best is somewhat undermined by Jackson’s poorer instincts. The world-building, tangibility, and authority with which Middle Earth was depicted in The Lord of the Rings has been bludgeoned aside by the easy way. Make everything a cartoon, and soon enough you’ve got a cartoon. The thing about a cartoon is, it’s consistently what it is. A good cartoon has all the same merits as any film. A film that dabbles in the cartoonish soon mitigates its consistency and this is always to its detriment. A combination of elements, not just the stubborn insistence on animating everything, is what makes this so. Tonally, Desolation is a fucking mess.

Nowhere are these competing poor instincts more contained than in the dwarves’ astonishingly stupid, incoherent plan to chase Smaug out of Erebor. Thorin decides to light the ancient forges of the dwarves and use Smaug’s dragonfire against him. Fair enough, but we have no idea either before, during, or afterward why this is a thing. I guess Thorin may have remembered that there was an unused mould for a gold statue of Thror in one of the halls. Either way, this is the linchpin of his big plan to give Smaug a gold bath (shades of Game of Thrones, too… it’s actually a nice reference). The trouble with this sequence is in its logistics. For this to work, everything has to work out like magic and since there’s no “planning phase” scene (cut so we can watch a CG bee wake up Bilbo at Beorn’s), the audience is kept out in the cold as to what the fuck is happening in this sequence.

There’s entirely too much of that in this movie, guys.

Still… dwarves!

There’s also that Bilbo is constantly the smartest guy in the room. He figures out everything. Every body else is too dumb or too ready to quit. It’s the misguided worship of hobbits that has ruined the “courage of hobbits” bits and turned them into self-parody instead of self-congratulation (ugh). Here, it’s in full swing. This is both good in the sense that it lets Bilbo be distinct from Frodo (he’s way more of a doer and an action-hero) but bad in the sense that it makes him the movies’ trump card to move a scene along or get to the next one. An obstacle, you say? Give Bilbo a second and he’ll fucking sort that out. Opportunities to give one of the umpteen under-developed dwarves a chance to do somthing are shunted aside so Bilbo can justify the religious fervor with which hobbits are treated by New Zealanders. Allegedly.

I am being so hard on this movie. Hilariously, I actually do predict that Desolation will seem less messy on subsequent viewings. Yes, Evan, but you said that about Journey. So I did. So I did. I even put Journey on the Honorable Mentions list for favorite films of 2012. I don’t think it actually deserves that but I can’t change it now! Desolation is nowhere near one of the best films of 2013, though. It’s been too good a year, where 2012 was a bit more sparse. That said, I don’t think I have the heart to put it on this year’s Naughty List. It satisfies all my usual criteria for that, though, so let that tell you what it tells you.

Is The Desolation of Smaug actually one of the worst movies of the year? Of course not.

Is The Desolation of Smaug one of the worst squanderings of potential in movies this year? Affirmative.

Did I write this entire review without even talking about Laketown or Bard? Yeah I did.

Fuck it.

In this picture: why these movies even get made.

It’s a fairly colorful film.

2013 has been a pretty great year for movies. So great that I think the haters are really trying hard to hate when they can while the pickings are slim. Most of the really badmouthed movies are movies like Man of Steel, which is simply not as good as it should have been due to a few grievous errors in an otherwise good film. To me, this is a pretty grave sin when it’s traceable to bad decisions, or any decisions at all. Bad writing also kills an otherwise good movie. I almost always prefer to waste my time writing about those kinds of movies than I do about the movies that just don’t care. There are movies that are little more than cynical consumer fluff occupying each year’s slot for Dance Movie, Talking Animal Movie, or Adam Sandler Hates You Movie (occasionally we get multiples of these in a year, oh joy!).

Then there’s stuff that doesn’t quite fit in. 47 Ronin is one of those awkward movies that you don’t cringe at half as much as you do at the people writing about it. Like World War Z, this is a movie that was either butchered or saved in the editing room (my opinion is that it was the former). Unfairly maligned almost as much as that movie, 47 Ronin is simply “not as bad as people are saying”. It’s pretty solid, really. It could have and should have been much, much better. There are little glimmers of that better movie, and there are also a great many moments of nuance, technical flare, and so on. These are the things that make a movie like this fascinating to me, rather than disappointing. If 47 Ronin had bigger names behind the camera, rather than first-timers like Carl Rinsch, it would not be able to sidestep more damning criticism. As it is, it’s a movie that was taken away from its director after the shoot, with a gun-for-hire editor brought on to “fix it”. It’s hard, when you know shit like this going in, to not let it mitigate your expectations and critical responses to a film. The same thing happened with World War Z.

Most of this review is going to focus on 47 Ronin‘s problems. This is because it has many. That said, it is watchable and entertaining and occasionally cool. The barriers to entry are all stupid, and the problems it actually has require watching it and engaging with it as a narrative and as a film, subject to the rules and techniques that govern those things.

In many ways, 47 Ronin is a remake of Krull.

47 Ronin‘s first problem makes itself known right at the get-go. I don’t know who’s decision it was to add the pretentious, British-accented voiceover to the movie but it feels like a toxic combination of lifting from The Last Samurai, trying to explain the concept of the movie to people, and trying to underline how serious and epic it is. It’s a mistake. I do not need to hear words like “To know this story is to know the story of all Japan”. Sentiments like that are why we can’t have movies like 47 Ronin just be what they are. They always have to be justified in some larger cultural or historical sense. 47 Ronin is a fantasy-lite retelling of a classic Japanese myth. Some people are stupid enough to think this is an attempt at being an historical film. It is about as historical as The Pirates of the Caribbean. In fact, if not for its self-seriousness, 47 Ronin compares most closely with the Pirates movies.

One of the nice, unexpected things about this movie is that it cares about its story. It may have been difficult to work around certain problems or demands (more Keanu Reeves was a demand by the studio, and he was actually digitally reinserted into some scenes), but a coherent story does come through. The trouble is, the film was recut and marketed to be all about Kai (Keanu Reeves) and his outsider story. Savvy audiences were already sharpening their forks to eat this movie alive for that shit. No one in their right mind wants to hear a story about a vaguely “white” guy like Reeves (he’s very mixed race, but white enough for political correctness) forced into the sort of role traditionally reserved, in white-dominated societies like ours, for non-white people. That said, some attempt was made to consign his outsider status to being raised by the Tengu demons as much as for being the product of an English sailor and a Japanese peasant woman.

Much as I like him, this movie isn’t going to do him any favors.

Ageless, impeccably physical Mr. Reeves does about as much as anyone could with a grim, stoic role. But he’s basically a sidekick, which makes matters pretty confusing. His story of trying to come to terms with his past is often secondary to the story of Oishi (Hiroyuki Saneda), the chief retainer to Lord Asano (Min Tanako) of Ako. Oishi gets more screen time but not more screen time. Like Pacific Rim, this movie distracts from its true protagonist, a Japanese character, by having a familiar and attractive white guy around so that the suits can rest assured that the 15-35 white male American demographic is satisfied that they are being represented. I know that’s snarky, but where Pacific Rim is sneaky and progressive about it, 47 Ronin is not. The film absolutely reeks of tension between keeping the story on Oishi and making time for Kai’s sidestory. That tension does not exist in Pacific Rim, where the split of hero and protagonist is organic to the story and comments on its themes (teamwork). In 47 Ronin it doesn’t mean anything. Thankfully, the “chosen one” dialogue of the trailers (and pretty much all the dialogue from the trailers) is excised in this film. The movie you’re watching seems to sort of know that Kai is more of a second in command or reluctant ally than the main character of the film.

That said, Reeves gets to do a lot of fighting in the film and most of it is really good. His swordfights at Dutch Island are especially cool and have you sort of wondering about what a cleaner version of Kai’s story could have been like. I’m not one to say that stories about outcast half-breeds in societies other than European/white ones are impossible or undesirable to tell. A story about Kai, freed from the ball and chain of the 47 Ronin but with all the demons and monsters kept in could have been splendid. Instead, it’s merely adequate and occasionally slipshod.

The monster stuff is very cool.

It shouldn’t bother people that this is a fantasy movie. It also shouldn’t really bother people that Keanu Reeves is in it, just because he’s a white guy. The way it’s done is the problem, because Kai’s shit detracts from and sidelines the actual story of the film: the 47 Ronin getting revenge on the man who used trickery to kill their master and take his lands.

This makes the movie, ostensibly, a revenge epic. Unfortunately, the opening act drags on quite a bit as it establishes the characters. None of this is really all that complex or layered, so it has the feeling of being doable in way less time. Better economy would also have left more time later on to let some of the action sequences and set pieces breathe more. Like the Dutch Island escape, which almost certainly was cut down from a much longer sequence. Waste of a cool location and an iconic looking character. The tattooed guy all over the marketing is in the film for all of five seconds. What’s funny about this is that I expected 47 Ronin to have the “too fast for its own good” problem a lot more than it does. It makes somewhat good use of its 2 hour running time, really, with more crossed t’s and dotted i’s than most of these types of movies bother with.

Which is maybe the real problem with 47 Ronin and its reception: there are just too many movies like this, and most of them are bad. For what it’s worth, 47 Ronin is far better and far less insulting to the audience than stuff like Jack the Giant Slayer.

We do get this guy and his severed head, though.

One of the bigger problems this movie has is its writing.The moment to moment dialogue is obnoxiously adequate. There’s no flare, no style, and nothing memorable about anything anyone says in this movie. There isn’t a lot of dialogue, thankfully, but it’s one of the few not exaggerated problems 47 Ronin has. To make the audience care, a filmmaker has to try to get a lot done with dialogue and without this, 47 Ronin is more a collection of cool moments and beautiful imagery than an adventure where you actually give a shit about the adventurers.

In terms of plot, exposition, and moving itself along, it does okay. There’s also that it doesn’t try to water down Japanese feudal culture more than it has to. That they actually end the film with all the heroes killing themselves seems jarring in a McEpic, but it’s appropriate to the myth and to the culture that’s been fantasized. Sorta like having pirates actually doing piracy could have felt jarring but appropriate at the same time in the Pirates movies. Still not sure if avoiding that altogether was the right move for those movies, but it’s the move they made.

This sorta lethal, bedraggled look is way better than the look Kai normally has. The character is better when unhinged.

Saneda is always engaging due to his effortless presence. The character isn’t much as written, with most of the development going toward a fairly undramatic relationship with his son. Few of the other Ronin get any development, though there’s a handful who get some lines and a moments to shine.

This is more or less echoed by the villains of the film. Lord Kira (Tadanobu Asano) is a vaguely effeminate, power-hungry villain who seems like the thinnest attempt at a Macbeth pantomime as I ever did see. His Lady Macbeth is the nameless witch played by Rinko Kikuchi. Alone in the cast, Kikuchi unfolds herself across the role like a fucking blanket. Appropriate given her character’s power over cloth. Her performance rises above the silly dialogue and thin characterization, providing plenty of scenery-chewing and even a little pathos. She’s probably the best thing about the movie, and its only truly memorable character.

Very cool design, kind of a wasted character.

One of the things that makes me want to defend this movie at all is the final assault on Lord Kira’s snowbound castle. For about fifteen minutes, it is like watching a completely different movie. There are flashes of the confidence, planning, and cinematic flair of this sequence sprinkled throughout the movie, but it really comes together into something special. Something that’ll make you sit up in your chair if you’re starting to turn on the movie a bit. It’s that good.

You’d be hard-pressed to find the Japanese flavor of swords and arrows better done than here, including the somewhat similar (and equally amazing) ninja attack in The Last Samurai.

I just wish she was in it more.

I’ve painted a picture of a movie which has an assortment of problems. What makes 47 Ronin interesting is that it’s very solid in spite of its troubled production and host of issues.  Maybe I’m a bit forgiving of this movie because it was a troubled production. Maybe it’s because I had hugely diminished expectations. This is probably one of those cases where diminished expectations work in a movie’s favor.

I still maintain that 47 Ronin is not as bad as people are saying. I may have proved its badness in this review, but I think the allure of its setting goes some ways in mitigating the vague assertions that its boring or lifeless. It is not those things. It is merely roughly stitched together. I mean, not everybody is going to respond to a fantasy movie set in Feudal Japan the same way I did (and we will all wish for a better version of that someday anyhow), but it can’t be argued that this much at least is fresher than yet another grimdark retelling of a classic fairy tale, or a Peter Jackson dwarf cabaret. Maybe not better, but certainly fresher.

“This should have been a buddy movie, right?”

“Keanu… I thought it was a buddy movie.”

“Oh Hiroyuki. Poor, naive Hiroyuki.”