The Strange Fruits of Squabbling and Bemusement

Having an orderly brain, I noted a few years ago that the gap between the first Men in Black film and the second one was five years, and further that the gap between the second and the third was ten years. It seemed a fairly reasonable assumption that there would be a twenty year gap between the third and the fourth, presumably with Will Smith moving into the role of the grizzled old veteran and someone as-yet-unheard-of providing the youthful glamour. Friends, I am shocked to have to relate this, but I was wrong. The new Men in Black film has come out thirteen years early, and I have to say that some might suggest it shows.

The title of the thing is Men In Black International, concerning the global doings of the secret agency which, for the purposes of this franchise, polices alien activity on the planet Earth. (‘But… but…’ anyone who was paying attention back in 1997 might be spluttering, ‘wasn’t it kind of established then that aliens were really just limited to the New York area?’ Good point. But shush.) The story gets going, chronologically speaking, with a young girl named Molly witnessing the Men in Black in action and wiping her parents’ memories afterwards. She grows up to be a massive over-achiever (Tessa Thompson) and through diligence and ingenuity manages to track the agency to its secret base, where she persuades the director (Emma Thompson, mostly phoning it in) to recruit her.

She is then packed off to the London branch, where there are suggestions of something not being quite right in the ranks of the persons with a wardrobe of a limited chromatic range. It seems that a few years ago there was a showdown atop the Eiffel Tower, which contains some sort of hyperspace gateway built by M. Eiffel, who was also a Man in Black. (‘But.. but… wasn’t it kind of established that the Men in Black came into existence as an exclusively American agency, in 1961?’ Another good point. But shush again.) The two agents involved (Liam Neeson and Chris Hemsworth) saved the world from an invasion by shape-shifting alien horrors, but Hemsworth’s character has been acting rather erratically ever since.

And there is some more plot following this, but I will not trouble you with the details as they are unlikely to linger much in your head, even if you see the movie. The general recipe for the film is kind of the same as before: there’s a gentle send-up of some of the tropes of B-movie sci-fi, mixed with some spy and cop movie clichés, and also a few potentially slightly scary bits with an almost Lovecraftian sense of gribbly tentacled unpleasantness pressing in on the margins of the mundane world.

The thing is that this time around… well, here’s what I have been led to understand about this film. Apparently director Gray was keen to make a film with a bit of a satirical edge to it and some social commentary on the topic of immigration (you can imagine how that would work, along with some of the more obvious gags – one wonders what kind of dismal alien hell-world could have spawned the current US administration). Producer Walter Parkes (who I feel obliged to mention has some pretty decent movies on his CV) wanted something a bit more middle-of-the-road and proceeded to start rewriting the script while the film was actually in production. Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, who reputedly signed on on the strength of the Gray script, were understandably bemused and independently recruited writers of their own to polish their dialogue.

(Yes, I know, it is utterly baffling that films are made this way, and we have to assume that it is not standard practice in the industry. Even so, this is a production with a budget of somewhere in the region of $100 million, yet the creative process involved seems to have primarily been based around squabbling and bemusement.)

When you consider all this, not to mention the producer and the director both assembling their own edits of the finished film (the producer’s version won out), one does have to say that Men in Black International is a staggering achievement in the way it still manages to be a more or less coherent story without a large number of holes in the plot. This is not to say that there aren’t any – there are still a few, and to be honest they are biggies, but it is unlikely to bother most members of the audience as the clash of different visions has resulted in a film with very little sense of what it’s supposed to be beyond a brand extension and franchise instalment. No one is likely to care or be engaged enough to worry too much about whether it makes any sense.

I mean, look, there is virtually wall-to-wall CGI for most of the film, and it is all very professionally done; fights and chases turn up on a regular basis; there are plot reversals and so on too. But none of it feels as if it means anything – it is all very mechanical and uninspired. It feels like a Men in Black film produced by some sort of artificial intelligence, or a joke written by a computer – all the structural elements are present and correct, it’s just completely flat and lifeless.

Now, of course, with this kind of film, winning chemistry from charismatic leads can go a long way towards taking up any bagginess in the other departments, but the film is also afflicted with, if this isn’t too harsh a way of putting it, the Chris Hemsworth problem. I have certainly enjoyed many Chris Hemsworth films and Chris Hemsworth performances in the past (mostly the ones where he has been playing Thor, to be honest). I have no beef with him as a person, not least because I have no personal relationship with him. However, he is in the awkward spot of being someone whose films make hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, but only when he plays that one character he’s famous for. So just how big a star is he really? Opinion seems to be divided on the topic, especially if you consider the stories that one of the reasons the fourth Bad Robot Star Trek movie folded was Hemsworth’s involvement being judged not to be worth his very hefty asking price (he was due to reprise his before-he-was-famous role as Captain Kirk’s dad). Hemsworth’s attempts to establish himself as a leading man in his own right are not helped by the fact he is essentially giving a lightweight version of the same performance he delivered in his last couple of MCU movies (here the ratio is about 70% swagger to 30% smug), or the fact he’s paired with Tessa Thompson, one of his regular foils from those same movies, or the fact that the film brazenly includes cheesy in-jokes alluding to Hemsworth having played Thor for the last eight years. As for Thompson herself, I have to say I’m not entirely sure she has the chops to be co-lead in a big aspiring blockbuster like this one. She’s not actually bad. But you’re still perhaps a little surprised to see her there, vaguely feeling that you were expecting someone else.

This is cinematic entertainment as disposable, mechanical product. It is rarely actually dull, for at least it has been edited together to provide a good deal of pace. But it is just a succession of sounds and pictures that makes sense in a transactional sort of way. It has no resonance, no subtlety, no depth, nothing new to say or do. It almost feels like it is aspiring to be mediocre. Anything which made the first couple of films in this series memorable and entertaining has been scraped out of the carcass and what remains lurches across the screen in an almost wholly affectless way. It doesn’t engage the emotions, the brain, or the sense of humour. Nobody was demanding this film, I suspect, but it could still have potentially revitalised and updated the series. Instead, I think that in a sane world it would constitute the final swift blow to its throat. So we can probably expect a reboot at some point in the next ten years.

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Reserved Occupation

1. British-occupied Germany, late 1945. Possibly a Thursday.

A train arrives in the ruins of Hamburg. Slim and beautiful RACHAEL MORGAN (Keira Knightley) disembarks. Waiting for her is stocky, troubled British army officer LEWIS MORGAN (Jason Clarke).

RACHAEL: Hello darling! It is I, your slim and beautiful wife Rachael Morgan, come to join you in post-war Germany. I am outwardly very happy to see you again.

LEWIS: Hello darling! Yes, I am your stolid, decent husband Lewis, a well-meaning but perhaps somewhat naïve English soldier (although I am played by an American), determined not to be beastly to the defeated German people, and somewhat disgusted by the crude prejudices of some of my colleagues. I am outwardly very happy to see you too.

There is a long, meaningful silence.

RACHAEL: Of course, although we are both outwardly delighted to be back together, we cannot help but reveal the coldness at the heart of our marriage and betray the existence of an issue which is slowly driving us apart.

LEWIS: Mmm, yes. Although we will only let hints and clues as to what this might be trickle out at dramatically appropriate moments.

There is a long, meaningful silence.

How was your trip?

RACHAEL: No sandwiches on the train.

She cannot meet his gaze.

LEWIS: Stiff upper lip, darling.

2. The grounds of a palatial house near Hamburg.

A car pulls up and LEWIS and RACHAEL get out. Waiting to meet them is tall, handsome, sensitive, decent German man STEFAN LUBERT (Alexander Skarsgard).

LEWIS: Herr Lubert! Please meet my wife Rachael.

STEFAN: Hello, Mrs Morgan. Please tell your husband to stop calling me a halibut.

RACHAEL: Hello, Herr Lubert. I am Rachael, the troubled Englishwoman with whom you immediately feel a deep, passionate connection despite yourself. And who might you be?

STEFAN: I am the sensitive, decent German widower (even though I am played by a Swedish actor) whose home has been commandeered by the British occupying forces for you and your husband to live in, while my daughter and I camp out in the attic.

LEWIS: Thus enabling a clumsy and not very subtle metaphor about the British occupation of Germany itself.

RACHAEL: Is this metaphor particularly resonant with the story we will enact?

LEWIS: Not really, no.

There is a long, meaningful silence.

STEFAN: Anyway, I am also the sensitive, decent German man with whom you immediately feel a deep, passionate connection despite yourself, thus allowing you to move beyond your initial prejudices about Germans.

LEWIS: I, of course, am completely oblivious to this. Shall we go inside?

RACHAEL: Yes, all right.

STEFAN: Please excuse me. I must go up to the attic, there is a subplot waiting for me about my difficult relationship with my teenage daughter, who has a crush on a Nazi loyalist.

3. The kitchen of the palatial house shared by the characters.

RACHAEL and STEFAN enter.

RACHAEL: Time has passed and we have both accepted the powerful sexual chemistry which exists between us.

STEFAN: Yes, I have accepted the powerful sexual chemistry between us, and also feel that by stealing the wife of an American –

RACHAEL: British.

STEFAN: – British colonel, I am striking a blow against the unjustness of the occupation of my country.

RACHAEL: Meanwhile, by yielding to the desire I feel for you, I feel I am punishing my husband for his neglect of me and his behaviour with regard to the dark secret which has killed our marriage. I have also come to value your sensitive decency and feel you are treated badly by the other Brits here, so this is a question of sympathy, not just me being over-sexed.

There is a long, meaningful silence.

STEFAN: Shall we tastefully consummate our illicit desire while your husband is out?

RACHAEL: Yes, why not? We’d better not go to the attic, there’s a subplot up there.

STEFAN: My kitchen table is of solid German construction.

RACHAEL: That should do.

The structural integrity of the kitchen table is put to the test, tastefully.

4. A military prison in Russian-occupied Germany.

LEWIS appears, ready to talk to an IMPRISONED NAZI.

LEWIS: You ought to know I have been sent here to hunt down Nazi hold-outs responsible for attacking the occupying American –

NAZI: British.

LEWIS: – British (thanks) forces, while my absence will conveniently also give my wife the opportunity to deepen her adulterous relationship with the man who lives in the attic. I, of course, am still oblivious to all of this.

NAZI: I am a Nazi, and therefore irredeemably evil. I am here to reinforce the distinction between the majority of decent, sensitive Germans, and the tiny minority who caused such suffering.

There is a long, meaningful silence.

LEWIS: You Nazis are so evil!

NAZI: Yes, we are!

LEWIS: I’m glad we were able to make that so clear.

5. A ball at regimental HQ.

LEWIS and RACHAEL appear in their glad rags.

LEWIS: I am a chastened man, for I am no longer oblivious to what is going on between you and that Swede.

RACHAEL: German.

LEWIS: Oh yes.

RACHAEL: However did you figure it out? Was it the kitchen table?

LEWIS: No. I may generally be characterised as being unaware of the interplay of emotions going on around me, and usually slow off the mark, but when the plot demands it I can be incredibly intuitive.

RACHAEL: Oh dear.

There is a long, meaningful silence.

LEWIS: We should probably have a heated argument in which our emotional reserve finally shatters and we get to the core of the dark secret which has been driving us apart since before the start of the film.

RACHAEL: That’s a good idea. Do you want to do that now?

LEWIS: Hang on a minute, there’s the culmination of that subplot about youthful Nazi resistance to the American –

RACHAEL: British.

LEWIS: – British (thanks) occupation and the tragedy of doomed youth due any moment, and we should probably wait for that.

The subplot passes them. LEWIS runs off after it waving his gun.

6. The palatial house.

RACHAEL, LEWIS and STEFAN stand around looking glum.

LEWIS: Well, we have managed to resolve our various problems in a tasteful and spoiler-free manner.

RACHAEL: Yes, everything has always been so blandly easy on the eye and unlikely to offend anyone, even my nude scene in the second act.

STEFAN: And yet it has all been so terribly inert and predictable and almost totally unengaging.

RACHAEL: I had no idea post-war occupied Germany was so dull.

STEFAN: Do we feel we have learned anything of value from all of this?

LEWIS: I am a good man and the war and its consequences have left me miserable.

STEFAN: I am a good man too, and the war and its consequences have also left me miserable.

RACHAEL: I’m not a man, but I’m also quite miserable because of the consequences of the war.

STEFAN: War is bad.

RACHAEL: War is bad.

LEWIS: War is bad. I’m glad we got that sorted out.

There is a long, meaningless silence.

The Aftermath (dir. James Kent) is in cinemas now, but hopefully not for much longer.

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Planet of the Apiarists

Even in our confuzzling world of social media and streaming-on-demand, some things, it seems, will never change. A few months ago I looked at the early 80s space western Outland, a film which was known for most of its production as Io. The name-change was made mainly because people kept looking at paperwork relating to it and mis-reading the title as ‘Ten’. Someone should have mentioned this to the makers of the shiny new rhymes-with-Get Clicks SF film IO: I googled this movie and the first comment I found on it was along the lines of ‘Shoulda changed the name I thought it was called 10 like the number LOL’. So it goes, I suppose – I have more of an issue with the all-caps styling of the title (just a bit shouty, if you ask me), but to each their own.

At least Outland had a good reason to be called Io, as it is set on the volcanic moon of Jupiter which has that name. IO‘s reason for being called IO is more tenuous. I suppose the plot just about justifies it, but I still think it’s mainly because the producers thought it was a cool-sounding name. Certainly no-one ever goes to Io, although they certainly talk about it a lot; the significance of the moon is largely emblematic in a script which is clearly trying hard to be about Profound Things.

The film is directed by Jonathan Helpert, and is set in a post-apocalyptic not-too-distant future. Something has caused a profound change in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, rendering it toxic for most forms of animal life; we are told of people dropping dead in the street at the time this happened. Now the planet is mostly wrapped in a poisonous veil, with only a few areas of high ground left habitable. Most of the surviving population has decamped to a space colony orbiting (wait for it!) Io.

However, our main person of interest, Sam (Margaret Qualley), has not. She is one of the few people left on the now empty and silent planet – the daughter of a scientist (Danny Huston), she is attempting to complete his work by creating a genetically-modified species of bee capable of surviving in the new atmosphere of Earth. She divides her time between working on this and making trips into the nearest city, which is of course deserted, and in her spare time exchanges email messages with her off-in-space boyfriend Elon (presumably named after the well-known litigant).

This early, world-establishing section of the film is mildly intriguing and certainly interesting to look at – this is one of those SF films with minimal ‘overt’ special effects and a tiny cast, so they can really put the budget to work in realising the empty city, which is rapidly becoming overgrown by mutant vegetation. The look of the thing is always impeccable, although you are always aware that this is a film trading in ideas and images already established by other, more prominent movies. I’m not sure whether it’s entirely fair to say that IO is very visually derivative – perhaps it is better to suggest that it mostly operates in terms of imagery which has acquired a sort of archetypal quality in recent years.

Anyway, everything changes for Sam (i.e., the plot kicks into gear) when word comes in over the radio that another Earth-like planet has been discovered only ten years away and a mission to it is being launched. One consequence of this is that shuttle traffic between Earth and Io is going to cease, and if Sam is going to escape she needs to get to a launch site in a matter of days. Matters are further complicated by the arrival by balloon of a stranger named Micah (Anthony Mackie), who says he’s come to see her father. Can they make it to the shuttle in time? Are they sure they even want to?

Hmmm – perhaps I was trying too hard to be generous when I suggested that IO isn’t actually as derivative as it seems, because on reflection it does feel very much like something stitched together from ideas and imagery from a bunch of other recent science fiction films, some of them quite distinguished, others definitely not. There’s an odd smorgasbord of Interstellar, The Martian, Oblivion and After Earth going on here, although I should make it quite clear that IO wants to be a serious and thoughtful movie – basically, there are no monsters in it.

I suppose we should be grateful for this. I myself am wont to grumble that all mainstream science fiction films tend to be action adventure movies (another reason why the Star Trek movie franchise is much less interesting than it should be), and occasionally trot out the related statistic that – a few years ago at least – around 50% of all SF movies were also, by any reasonable metric, horror films. So the fact that IO has such noble ambitions is obviously laudable.

It’s therefore simply a shame that the actual movie isn’t more palatable, because unfortunately the words that leap to mind when describing it are ones like ‘stodgy’, ‘dull’, and ‘predictable’. There is not a single plot development that isn’t easily guessable, which really just turns watching the film into an exercise in checking your answers. The tone of the thing is just barren – it has none of the leavening humour of The Martian or the vaulting metaphysical ambition of Interstellar. Now, to be fair to IO, it never quite topples over into outright silliness, which is no small achievement for an SF film that takes itself quite as seriously as this one does, but after a while you start to lose patience with the endless scenes of abstract dialogue and the film’s obsession with using Greek mythology as a metaphor for something-or-other obscure.

Oh well, there is a long and honourable tradition of SF films which aspire to be thoughtful, even profound, and basically just end up being impenetrably obscure and rather hard work to sit through, and IO is a decent enough 21st century addition to their number. But I have to say that, other than the general look of the thing, there is not a single element of the film I can single out as being particular distinctive or praiseworthy – not the plot, not the dialogue, not the performances, not the direction. It is like a study in hitting the targets of minimal competence – this is a movie which is not actually bad in any respect, but it really has nothing to commend it beyond that.

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We Built This City On Second-hand Mechagodzilla Parts

All good things must come to an end, but, for the time being at least, Toho’s series of animated Godzilla movies rumbles onward. These suckers are getting theatrical releases in Japan before turning up on a market-leading streaming site, which I suppose is something; it’s just a shame the movies themselves aren’t slightly, erm, less awful. Moderately hot on the heels of Planet of the Monsters, which appeared around the start of the year, here comes the follow-up, which was at one point going to be called Living Robot City Final Battle (gotta love these literal Japanese translations) but has actually appeared under the title Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (which I presume is a tip of the hat to either Star Trek or, less likely, Blake’s 7).

As before, proceedings have been overseen by Kobun Shizuno and Hiroyuki Seshita, and events pick up pretty much directly after the conclusion of the previous film. It says something about the thorough-going incoherence of Planet of the Monsters that I couldn’t actually remember exactly how it ended, beyond a big battle and a really, really (300m-tall) big version of Godzilla turning up, but picking up the threads is not that challenging.

The story so far: refugees from the planet Earth have arrived at, um, the planet Earth, twenty thousand years in the future (it’s time dilation, or something). They have been dismayed to discover that the whole ecosystem of the planet has evolved to mimic the unique biology of the giant nuclear monster Godzilla (whose appearance was the whole reason they left in the first place). Nevertheless, a landing party under the command of stroppy Captain Sakaki engages and manages to kill one Godzilla, before a second, bigger one turns up and stomps them all.

The sequel gets underway with the survivors regrouping, uncomfortably aware that the mother ship may well just fly off and abandon them all there with the monsters. But there is hope on the horizon as they make contact with natives, who, if not exactly friendly, are not exactly hostile either. There is some heavy and not exactly subtle foreshadowing going on here, for those in the know: it seems the natives also have monster DNA, but rather than that of Godzilla it’s that of some kind of insect. They say their god was killed by Godzilla, leaving behind only a giant egg. Translating on behalf of the egg are a couple of twin girls with psychic powers. All this left me feeling rather conflicted: I do love me a decent appearance by Mothra, which is what all this is clearly setting up, but the prospect of seeing my favourite giant lepidoptera mucked about in a film like this one is hardly appealing. As it turns out, the Mothra appearance, should it come to pass, will be in the next film in the series (which looks like it will also have Ghidorah in it).

This film has other classic kaiju characters to muck up. Our heroes discover that the locals are using arrowheads made of highly advanced ‘nanometal’, which it turns out they have been harvesting from the ancient ruins of the launch site of Mechagodzilla (who was not ready in time to fight Godzilla back in the 20th century). Investigation of the site reveals that… actually, I should say fasten your figurative seat-belt at this point… the wreckage of Mechagodzilla has, over the intervening twenty thousand years, grown into a living, artificially-intelligent city composed of nanometal.

A plan is hatched to lure Godzilla (the 300m version who’s just been standing around up to this point) into attacking Mechagodzilla City (as this rather unlikely piece of urban sprawl has been christened), which should have the ability to kill him, thus reclaiming the Earth for the refugees. Or something. But, given the tendency of the nanometal to go about assimilating and absorbing people, could this not just be a case of trading in one menace for another?

Now, the idea for this movie is a bit out there, but there’s a sense in which that’s what you expect from a Godzilla movie. And the idea of a Godzilla movie where the city itself actually resists being stomped and fights back against the monster (rather than useless toy tanks trundling into sight to do the job) is one that has a certain degree of promise. It almost goes without saying that City on the Edge of Battle does not realise this promise in any meaningful sense.

I think the problem may just be with the nature of the animation in these films. As before, there is a mixture of traditional cel animation, 3D CGI, and what looks very like some form of rotoscoping. The human-scale action is fine, as these things go, and there are some scenes with mecha attack craft in this movie which are also well realised. The problem is that Godzilla himself is almost wholly static; all he does is occasionally blast out a heat ray. The set pieces in this movie mostly consist of Godzilla just standing there being shot at. This is not good. There is no sense of scale or grandeur, and no scenes of Godzilla tearing down the towers of the living city bare-handed.

To be honest, Mechagodzilla City turns out to be a major disappointment: it doesn’t even look anything like Mechagodzilla (you would expect the odd piece of visual reference in the architecture). I was expecting the climax to be Godzilla razing the surface structures of the city, only for the ruins to reconstitute themselves as Mechagodzilla in a more traditional form and a proper monster clash to take place; this does not happen.

(I am aware that this rather negative review of City on the Edge of Battle is perhaps inordinately focusing on things which don’t happen, rather than things that do, but it is the case that this one of those films where not much happens, especially in the first hour. This is taken up with laboured exposition and the script taking vague swings at whatever SF ideas happen across its path.)

I suppose this is still something of an improvement over Planet of the Monsters, in that it is not quite such a nihilistic bore of a movie; it also has the beginnings of a fairly interesting subtext about the place of humanity in the world – on the one hand, the Mothra-worshipping inhabitants of the future Earth are clearly at one with nature, while the refugees’ alien allies are absolutely on-board with the notion of bonding with the advanced technology of Mechagodzilla City and beginning a cyborg phase of existence – this is the kind of theme which pops up in all sorts of Japanese SF and fantasy, and it’s a shame it’s not better realised here.

Still, in the end this isn’t just a bad movie, it’s also a dull one, with any improvements over the first film marginal at best. Normally I would say that the prospect of seeing Mothra and Ghidorah in the next one would be enough to give cause for optimism, but these films have been so flawed in both concept and realisation that it’s difficult to imagine how the next instalment can offer much in the way of redemption.

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A Tale of Two Wallies

‘I directed [my first film] to teach myself about filmmaking… And now, with this self-punishing process of being a producer and a writer and a director, I’m taking the next step.’ – Madonna

And if only the punishment had stopped there. But I am getting ahead of myself. Yes, every once in a while a film sneaks past me on its cinema release, usually due to quirks of scheduling or there simply not being enough hours in the day. Even though I have a probably-unhealthy interest in Bad Movies, I do try to exercise common sense in choosing what to see, which is why I skipped seeing Her Madgesty’s movie W.E. on its opening weekend in favour of – I suspect – either Coriolanus or The Descendants. Had it had a second weekend, I would probably have gone to see it then. But it didn’t: this movie only lasted a week in UK cinemas. Lawks!

Directed, co-written, and co-produced by Madonna, W.E. reveals that the singer and arch-provocateur is capable of stunning work with the instruments of cinema. I should put that in context by adding that this is in the same sense that being cracked round the head by Madonna with a frying pan would reveal she is capable of stunning work with the instruments of short-order cooking, i.e. this film is stunning in the sense of being ‘liable to cause confusion, bewilderment, or loss of consciousness’.

The very easy-on-the-eye Abbie Cornish plays Wally Winthrop, an unhappily married young woman living in New York in 1998. She comes from a long line of women fascinated with the life of Wallis Simpson, the divorced American woman who was instrumental in causing both the Abdication Crisis of 1936 and The Great King’s Speech Awards Hoovering of 2011. Wally’s interest in Wallis starts to become obsessive and the film cuts back and forth between Wallis’s relationship with Prince Edward (played by James D’Arcy) and a somewhat less momentous coming together of Wally with a Russian security guard (Oscar Isaac).

Madonna is clearly not a woman much troubled with self-doubt and perhaps it makes a certain kind of sense for her to be responsible for a film about a woman who was simultaneously widely reviled and yet somewhat iconic – an iconoclast, a threat to the establishment, passionate and yet – the film proposes – deeply vulnerable. But I also got a strange sense that what Madonna perhaps really wanted to do was make a movie about Princess Di, an arguably-similar figure – for instance, Mohammed al-Fayed  appears in this film as a character – but nobody would give her the backing.

At least a Princess Di movie wouldn’t have a central character with such a public image problem. The movie does accept that Wallis Simpson is one of the most disdained figures in recent history, but it seems to quite seriously argue that both she and the Duke of Windsor were actually dashing, romantic figures, politically engaged, and that they were rejected by a fearful and reactionary British Establishment. Not content with having Wallis as a sympathetic protagonist, the movie really goes for broke by presenting the Queen Mum – the dear old, lovely old, gawd-bless-yer-ma’am Queen Mum – as a vicious, passive-aggressive, imperialist harpy and George VI as an ineffectual weakling (Helena Bonham-Carter and Colin Firth, you may not be surprised to learn, do not reprise these roles).

Now I suppose it may be the case that Wallis and Edward have been on the wrong end of decades of systematic, institutionalised libel on the part of the British Establishment, and that there may indeed be a good film to be made, telling the story from their point of view (though beating the ‘Nazi sympathiser’ rap will always be a big ask). However, this is not that film. This film is a mess.

This movie does not look cheap and contains a number of impressive performances, particularly Riseborough’s. And it is by no means technically inept in terms of the actual sound, visuals, or editing (that said, to describe the script as somewhat artless is perhaps being rather charitable).

I’ve been racking my brains trying to find a way to describe Madonna’s directorial style. Here goes: it’s like having a conversation with someone whose English is not particularly advanced, but who has mastered at least the basics. However, this person has spent ages reading books on advanced idioms and slang and committed many of them to memory, and insists on wheeling them out regardless of whether or not they’re appropriate to the tone or real meaning of what they’re trying to say. In other words, Madonna is always doing something complicated and eyecatching with the camera or editing, without apparently giving any thought to how well it serves her story. She’s very fond of sweeping montages driven along by the soundtrack, almost like – and who’d have guessed it – a pop video. Sometimes she steals quirky touches from elsewhere – one of the more startling sequences, in which the Duke and Duchess get their party guests high on benzedrine before dancing the Charleston to the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’, struck me as suspiciously similar to a scene in the equally-dubious biopic Marie Antoinette.

She is perhaps a bit more restrained in the 1990s section of the film, but the combination of the plot, the bland affluence of the main characters’ lifestyle, and many scenes of Cornish making use of her extensive and varied collection of expensive lingerie just put me in mind of highbrow soft-core pornography with all the actual rumpy-pumpy edited out. But then again, soft-core porno doesn’t usually have W.E.‘s solemn fascination with the depiction of domestic violence in rather a lot of detail. It’s never really clear what purpose this whole strand of the film serves – as it stands, it just makes the whole enterprise rather more absurd.

And, more than anything else, this is a film which is actively dull to watch. Neither of the romances ever ignites, none of the characters is engaging, and the script’s revisionist view of Simpson as a tragic, misunderstood proto-feminist icon is never remotely convincing. Everything just staggers along, with moments and scenes only memorable for all the wrong reasons. Seldom does a film set such an overt agenda for itself and then so comprehensively fail to meet any of its targets. I never thought I would say this, but I would encourage Madonna to stick to acting in future.

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