Justice Under the Sun

I have a confession to make: I sometimes struggle to tell my McDonaghs apart. I like both of the brothers, John and Martin, which is another way of saying I like the great majority of their films, which include Calvary, The Guard, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Seven Psychopaths, War on Everyone, and In Bruges. However – and please imagine blushing sheepishness appearing on the countenance of your correspondent – if you put a gun to my head and asked me to tell you which were made by John and which were made by Martin, I would almost certainly struggle. They’re both fond of casting Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, their films have a tendency to turn into darkly witty black comedies… do you begin to see the problem?

Having said all that, John has a new film out which doesn’t quite fit that description (while Martin’s imminent one, The Banshees of Inisherin, is apparently a black comedy-drama starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, so it’s entirely congruent with the McDonagh intersection zone). John McDonagh’s new film is The Forgiven, based on a novel by Lawrence Osborne, which in turn was apparently based on true events (this seems to be a bit tricky to pin down).

It certainly has a very literary sort of feel about it, although to be honest I was expecting to discover it was an adaptation of a book from the 1930s – many things about this tale of dissolute Europeans taking their leisure in Morocco have a vintage touch to them, from the names and attitudes of many of the characters to the string-backed driving gloves which prominently feature in a few key moments. But no: it is set in the present day, complete with jokes about Twitter and odd pop-cultural references (one of which seems likely to earn the Terry Nation estate a few quid: everything is indeed connected, but it’s sometimes odd to be reminded of the fact).

Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain play David and Jo Henninger, an affluent English couple – he is a doctor, she is a moderately successful children’s author – travelling to Morocco to attend a party being held by their wealthy acquaintance Dickie Galloway (Matt Smith) at his palatial desert home. The fellow guests are artists, writers, nobility, sleekly prosperous Americans, together with a swarm of interchangeably glamorous young women, all waited on by an army of Moroccan servants. It does sound rather like the premise of an Agatha Christie novel – the only element of doubt being, who is going to end up murdered?

The twist proves to be that the Henningers arrive having brought their own dead body with them – on a desert road, just outside the estate, they struck and killed a young Arab man apparently only seeking to sell them a fossilised trilobite. (We see the moments before the accident, but for a long time only hear the Henningers’ account of what actually happened.) Henninger pays a sort of lip-service to remorse, but denies any real culpability, despite having had a few drinks before setting out; Jo seems more genuinely concerned about the loss of a young life.

The couple get on with trying to enjoy their weekend, even though word has got around and David is pelted with stones by the local kids while out riding. Dickie does his best to smooth things along with the local police: the subtext to all of this is that one poor local boy is of very little consequence compared to the convenience of Dickie and his assembled guests. Then the boy’s father (Ismael Kanater) materialises out the desert, stone-faced, implacable, demanding that Henninger do the right thing – if nothing else, accompany the father and the body back to their home village for the funeral. It will mean a trip deep into the desert, in the company of strangers who have every reason to wish him ill…

There is something faintly stylised and self-consciously emblematic about The Forgiven from the start – it’s always clear that this is meant to be more than just a story about a clash between cultures and social strata. This never quite topples over into outright clumsiness, but one might still wish for McDonagh to have exercised a slightly lighter touch in both his writing and direction. For a while it’s not clear what the film is going to be about, beyond a forensic portrait of the filthy rich at play in all their awfulness – David Henninger is a self-justifying racist alcoholic, and many of the others are very nearly as bad. (This is a rare example of a film which has earned an 18 certificate in the UK despite not including graphic violence or sexual content – the reason given is the inclusion of drug abuse, but I suspect some extremely strong language and bigoted attitudes will also have played a part in this.)

But the film proves to be something a bit more thoughtful and humane: Henninger sets off into the desert half-expecting the worst, certainly to have cash extorted out of him. But the experience he has exposes new sides to his character, while at the same time the fun and games at Dickie’s mansion are perhaps showing Jo in a new light. The guests continue to thrash about in a swamp of their own moral turpitude, while deeper issues of moral responsibility, retribution and justice are explored far away.

In the end it’s a relatively simple story, though it doesn’t always feel that way at the time: McDonagh has turned it into a thoughtful, very good-looking film, and something of a rarity these days – a serious drama obviously intended for a grown-up audience. The cast respond to this by contributing a strong set of performances, all showing just how good they can be given the right material. Said Taghmaoui is particularly impressive in a relatively small role as an Arab driver who gradually comes to befriend Fiennes’ character; not being having to play someone who is required to symbolise something probably helps his cause a bit.

Some of the film’s oddities eventually prove somewhat explicable – McDonagh opt to open the film by running virtually the entire set of credits over footage of the Henningers arriving in Morocco, but this is mainly to facilitate the ending of the film through a powerful coup de theatre. Others prove a little harder to decode. But the end result is an impressive drama, more measured and less cheerfully provocative than many of his other films. I’m not sure I’ll be putting The Forgiven on as a piece of entertainment in quite the same way that I do The Guard, but this is still a fine piece of film-making.

Read Full Post »

The What Man?

When a film opens with a bunch of characters arriving at a place called the Hill of Death, you can be quite sure that one of two things is on the cards: a film with a potentially smug sense of its own ridiculousness, or something which is going to be painfully on the nose from start to finish. When the main character, a sickly-looking Jared Leto, is told ‘Maybe you should see a doctor!’ and responds ‘I am one,’ any hope that we may be in for Option One quickly fades.

For yes, this is Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius, here to tide over anyone who objects to having to wait four-and-a-half months between proper Marvel comic-book movies. Leto is playing Morbius, whom we quickly learn is a polymathic genius afflicted with a genetic disorder causing agglutination of the blood cells (or something like that, anyway). We even see him getting a Nobel prize for his work on artificial blood. It is also established, without a great deal of subtlety, that he is largely motivated in his studies by his desire to save his best friend (Matt Smith), and that the pair of them have been mentored by the doctor who’s been looking after them since childhood (Jared Harris – this is a good movie if you drew ‘Jared’ in the name sweepstakes).

Well, this being a Marvel movie (even an ‘in association with’ Marvel movie), Morbius’s plan is to pop off to the Hill of Death and capture a load of vampire bats, which in the world of this movie are apparently savage, pack-hunting apex predators, not the mostly-harmless and actually quite altruistic little creatures you and I share a biosphere with. He then decides to inject his own body with vampire bat DNA in the hope it will cure him. What could possibly go wrong?

I mean, it’s not the dumbest superhero origin story in history, but still. Even the fact that the human tests have to take place in secret, on a freighter in international waters, does not lead the brilliant brain of Morbius to clock that this is a bad idea. On the other hand, this does enable a bit of early mayhem as we are invited to assume the freighter crew are all despicable bad guys whom Morbius, now afflicted with the curse of blood-lust (not to mention the curse of being followed around by intrusive CGI swirls), can off with a clear conscience.

Yes, Morbius now has superhuman speed and strength and some of the powers of a bat, though IP law means the film tiptoes very carefully around what the obvious code-name for him would be. He has bigger issues than plagiarism to worry about, however, as the synthetic blood he is using to keep his hunger at bay is losing its efficacy, while his best friend has got his hands on the serum too, and quite fancies all the superpowers and CGI too…

So, just to recap, Morbius has speed and strength and can (somehow) fly, and he has sonar, which soon develops into full-blown super-hearing. I imagine that for most of the film the main thing his super-hearing is picking up is the sound of Sony frantically grabbing at every Marvel character they still have the rights to and shoe-horning them into this film.

For the uninitiated: Marvel Studios (the makers of the ‘official’, and generally pretty good Marvel films) have managed to reclaim the rights to most of their characters, in some cases by simply buying the companies that had previously held them. However, Sony have managed to hang onto the Spider-Man characters, and Spider-Man’s appearances in MCU films have been the result of finicky horse-trading between the two companies. Hence the two Venom films with Tom Hardy, and now this vehicle for Morbius, a character declared by one website to be no less than the nineteenth-best Spider-Man villain.

Needless to say, they crowbar a reference to Venom into this movie, from which I suppose we are invited to assume that this is set in the same world as they are. There is also some multiversal madness with a late showing by Michael Keaton, well-known for playing another kind of bat man, but here reprising his role as the Vulture from an MCU movie a few years back. It all feels rather contrived and put me much in mind of Amazing Spider-Man 2, which seemed so obsessed with setting up spin-offs and cross-overs it almost forgot about the movie in hand. It is clear that linking to the massively popular MCU films is very important to Sony’s plans, but also that they’re quite prepared to abandon sense and logic in order to do so.

It’s not like Morbius doesn’t have its own problems, not least that he isn’t an especially interesting character to begin with. He laments his fate and broods on rooftops a lot, and frankly it’s been done before, a lot. He gets the line ‘Don’t make me hungry, you won’t like me when I’m hungry,’ which made me laugh if only for its sheer impudence, but apart from that this is a fairly earnest film populated by dull characters who never do or say anything unexpected, saddled with borderline-inept storytelling: great chunks of exposition are handled by more on-the-nose voice-overs.

The biggest problem is that the film’s script serves its structure, rather than vice versa. Stuff happens for no real reason other than to progress the very thin plot – the disposable mercenaries on the freighter is one example of this, Matt Smith’s character deciding to go all in on being evil is another. Police check the surveillance cameras in a car park, but apparently not the ones in a hospital. Even the structure itself is not that great – it vaguely reminded me of Josh Trank’s reviled Fantastic Four movie, in that watching it I had the odd sense of having missed a big chunk of the story – it seems to have part of the second act missing. Suddenly we were in the final battle of the film and I was genuinely wrong-footed, but not entirely ungrateful.

It probably sounds masochistic of me to say this, but sometimes it’s nice when a really bad superhero movie comes along, because it surely makes one appreciate how solidly entertaining the Marvel films usually are just that little bit more. This has a silly story, thin characters that even a good cast can’t do much with, too much intrusively garish CGI, and a general refusal to acknowledge its own daftness. Morbius is definitely not of the first rank, and is comfortably quite as bad as the last couple of X-Men movies. The degree to which it succeeds or fails should tell us something interesting about quite how far the magic touch of the Marvel marque extends.

Read Full Post »

Faces of the City

Any film featuring the final performance of a talent as singular as that of someone like Diana Rigg instantly acquires a significance – and, perhaps, a set of expectations – it wouldn’t otherwise have. Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho doesn’t really do itself any favours by reminding everyone of this fact at the very beginning, featuring the dedication to the legendary actress and icon as virtually the first element of the film. It’s a brave step, but also a laudable one, and the film does not feel swamped by this unexpected (and unwanted) new element.

Wright is one of those directors who can be rather tricky to read: he bounces around across all kinds of genres, usually managing to make each his own in a rather quirky way – so far his CV includes a zombie rom com, a buddy action movie set in rural England, an offbeat comic book adaptation, an alien invasion movie, a diegetic musical car chase thriller, and a documentary about one of the world’s weirdest bands. (For a long time he was also attached to direct Ant-Man, but the whole ‘making it his own in a rather quirky way’ thing fell foul of the Marvel Studios method.)

The new movie is certainly creative, but largely tones down the overt oddness and games with genre. Thomasin McKenzie, who for a while has looked like one of those actresses one really good film away from significant stardom, plays Ellie, a young girl who has grown up in Cornwall with a head full of the sights and sounds of the swinging sixties. She is determined to go to London and make it as a fashion designer – what also rapidly becomes clear is that a suitcase full of old LPs is by no means the only baggage she is carrying with her: her mother took her own life, which has not stopped Ellie from seeing her about the place sometimes.

Despite some misgivings from her gran (Rita Tushingham), Ellie heads off to fashion designer university in the smoke anyway, and almost at once begins to find the reality does not match up to her dreams. Problem number one is the self-absorbed and callous room-mate she’s been assigned (Synnove Karlsen), which she manages to solve by renting a bedsit from a local resident (Rigg).

The fact that, after moving into the flat, Ellie starts to have some rather strange dreams does not initially appear to be a problem. She finds herself transported back to the half-mythical London of the swinging sixties (Thunderball is showing at the cinema, along with The Plague of the Zombies and Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, from which we can conclude that it is supposed to be early 1966 – even though the Amicus film came out six months earlier), experiencing the life of another hopeful young woman named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) – though in Sandie’s case, her disillusionment comes faster and harder and altogether darker. Ellie sees Sandie fall under the sway of Jack (Matt Smith), a shady and controlling character, and begins to fear for what eventually happened to her. But isn’t she just making it all up? As the boundary between her increasingly nightmarish visions and the waking world begins to splinter, it becomes difficult to tell…

Last Night in Soho might not be quite the genre-bender that some of Edgar Wright’s films have been, but it’s still a slightly tough film to pin down. Is it a psychological thriller, or a full-on horror movie? (I was amused to hear two very earnest patrons at the showing I attended intently persuading each other, as the final credits rolled, that – despite its legions of genuine alarming spectres and some rather gory revelations in the third act – this couldn’t possibly be a horror film as it dealt with some serious issues. Hey, money from genre snobs is as welcome as anyone else’s, I suppose.

I’m pretty sure this is a horror movie – it’s genuinely unsettling for long periods, deals with proper horror material, and Wright deploys a few classic horror gags along the way – but it is also a very modern piece dealing with the topics of mental health and misogynistic violence. The sense being alone in a new place, feeling isolated, and never quite fitting in no matter how hard you want to, is superbly created, as is the sickly reality of being a vulnerable single woman constantly having to deal with the calculating male gaze.

And that’s just some of the present day sequences: the stuff set in the late sixties is arguably much worse. It initially looks like this is going to be a love letter to the glamour of that period, the London of Carnaby Street and the Beatles and their peers – a young Cilla Black appears as a character – something only emphasised by the appearance in the cast of such iconic sixties faces as Diana Rigg, Terence Stamp, and Rita Tushingham. But the film is also a ruthless deconstruction of the notion of that kind of glamour and the reality it was built on, which was one of ruthless exploitation and abuse.

It’s a powerful thesis and one the film puts across highly persuasively – I was even slightly surprised that Wright was making a film which was quite so on-the-nose with its moral premise, although I should say the film also works exceptionally well as a piece of dark, hard-edged entertainment, with the director showing off his usual casual mastery of the craft.

However, what definitely came as a real surprise was the conclusion of the film, in which Wright and his co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns opt for something rather more unexpected and nuanced. To be honest, it does feel like the film is reaching a bit, mainly because some kind of twist ending is what the form calls for, and while the ending is still strong and effective it is a little bit contrived.

Nevertheless, this is up there with the very best of Wright’s other films, taking you on a journey into another world (more than one, in this case). It does a good job of suggesting how foundational the pop culture of the sixties remain in the modern world, making full use of the music of that period (along with a few interlopers: the most recent song I recognised was Happy House, released in 1980 by Siouxsie and the Banshees), but is more than just a casual piece of nostalgia. That said, Stamp, Tushingham and Rigg all get meaty roles that allow them to show their quality, and there is something rather marvellous and touching about seeing Diana Rigg command the screen so effortlessly one final time, far removed though she is from her iconic persona of so many decades ago. But nearly everyone involved in this production emerges with credit. Last Night in Soho is a terrific film, one of the best of the year so far, and a worthy valediction for a great star and a great actress.

Read Full Post »

Cons and Confidentiality

The world being in the state that it is, the temptation to sink into a state of stupefied despair is pretty much ever-present at the moment. One of the reasons I love the cinema is that it does provide the chance to escape into a different kind of headspace, a different way of thinking, and forget about the dismal facts of reality. Oddly enough, this still seems to apply even when the film in question brings one face-to-face with some dolorous truths from the recent past – at least, it does when the film is well-written, directed and played.

(Yes, yet another movie poster with Keira Knightley staring out against a black background while her co-stars peer over her shoulders. Knightley takes some stick for always doing the same kind of thing but the publicity people are at least as bad.)

Gavin Hood’s Official Secrets is set in the early 2000s, in a Britain where huge demonstrations fill the streets, only to be entirely disregarded by the government in power, where a smirking excrescence with no regard for the truth is Prime Minister, and where a comparatively lowly whistleblower has the ability to inflict severe embarrassment on the US administration. How very different things were only a few years ago. The whistleblower in question is Katherine Gun (Keira Knightley), a translator at GCHQ, the government’s intelligence and communications hub. A keen follower of current affairs, Gun is appalled and outraged by what she sees as the lies peddled by Tony Blair in his attempts to win support for an invasion of Iraq.

Then she receives an email, sent to all GCHQ personnel from somewhere within the American NSA – in an attempt to swing a United Nations Security Council vote, an effort is being made to acquire sensitive intelligence on council members in an attempt to acquire leverage – or, to put it more plainly, they are digging dirt on allies in order to blackmail them into supporting the invasion. (Should I stress that this is a true story?) After struggling with her conscience, Gun eventually decides to leak the top-secret email.

It ends up on the desk of Observer journalist Martin Bright (Matt Smith), who quickly realises just exactly what he’s come into possession of. The situation is complex, however – he doesn’t know the source of the document, and has no way of being certain it is genuine. There is also the fact that, prior to this moment, his paper has been in favour of the war. Can the leak be verified? Can the editors be persuaded of the value of the story? And what will the consequences be for Gun if they do decide to publish?

I’ve seen all of Gavin Hood’s last few films – from Wolverine: Origins onwards – and it does seem like his dalliance with superheroes was rather uncharacteristic: he generally seems to make serious films about significant real-world issues. All right, he did make the (possibly under-rated) YA sci-fi film Ender’s Game, which got tangled up in political issues of a different kind, but even there the film quietly explored the issue of using child soldiers (through an SF metaphor, of course). His last film, Eye in the Sky, was a very powerful thriller about the ethics of drone strikes as an instrument of foreign policy.

And, needless to say, Official Secrets is also concerned with international relations, the difference here being that the film is based on actual events. You might think the film already has two strikes against it as a result – firstly, does the world really want to see another film complaining about a war which is now a matter of historical record? And, secondly, the film doesn’t shy away from the fact that Gun and the Observer journalists ultimately failed in their objective, which was to stop an arguably illegal war. Wouldn’t it just be better to accept things and move on?

Well, maybe, but the film has a couple of powerful things in its favour. Firstly, it deals with what are still arguably very live issues: the opaque nature of dealings within and between governments, the issue of trust, the extent to which a government is constrained by the rule of law, and so on. For a long time I was always slightly dubious about many high-profile whistleblowing cases – there is a case to be made that governments have a responsibility to keep certain information from becoming general knowledge, which means there has to be a mechanism to ensure secrecy. But the film questions just what the limits of this can and should be – the British Official Secrets Act apparently operates on the principle that there are no circumstances in which the release of sensitive information can be justified, regardless of the legality of what is disclosed. From here it is just a short step to the assumption that the government is necessarily right in whatever it does, simply because it’s the government (one of the notions toyed with in Vice, earlier this year). It is surely worth exploring the consequences of this, even if only through a film.

And this is a very well-made and entertaining film: it may tackle some legal and political chewy bits, but it does so with the pace and excitement of a proper thriller, particular in the sequences where Bright and his colleagues try to verify the truth of the leak. Nor is it entirely sombre: there’s a great moment of black comedy when overzealous use of spellchecker threatens to discredit the Observer’s big scoop. There is a great ensemble performance from the actors playing the journalists – Matt Smith’s performance does a good job of reminding you what a charismatic actor he can be, but he is well-supported by Matthew Goode and (in what’s basically a cameo) Rhys Ifans. The film’s other major supporting performance comes from Ralph Fiennes as Gun’s lawyer, Ben Emmerson, and he likewise makes the most of a strong script. (Most of the characters in this film are real people, but – perhaps fortunately – none of them are especially familiar faces. The only possible exception is Shami Chakrabarti, who appears in the film played by Indira Varma, but as a relatively minor figure.)

This is, of course, a Keira Knightley film – it’s her face which is most prominent on that poster, after all. I think it is fair to say she is one of those performers I have never entirely warmed to, possibly because she seems to specialise in a certain type of tastefully inert costume drama, possibly to the extent where she seems vaguely out of place appearing in anything else (I can’t recall Knightley’s Kiwi accent from Everest without having an involuntary tremor). Here she is, well, good enough to carry most of the movie, although I think it is very possible she is slightly overcooking her performance. There are a lot of tics I seem to recall from other performances, anyway. But, as I say, good enough.

This is a film which may be hampered by a slightly boring title, the sense it is raking over yesterday’s issues, and the fact that it has a poster which is largely interchangeable with that of most other Keira Knightley movies. However, this doesn’t stop it being an intelligent, involving, and very well-made film that manages to deal with serious issues without becoming heavy or slow. Certainly one of the better films of recent months; it gets my recommendation.

Read Full Post »

Corpses and Confusion

There were, of course, many things about the pre-financial crisis world that any sensible person might look back on with a sense of regret and nostalgia. For myself, one of these is Borders, a chain of bookshops which operated on an epic scale – just a bit too epic, as it turned out. These days the Borders which I most often frequented have turned into branches of Tescos or pet supply shops; I suppose I should just be grateful that Waterstones survived the cull.

Adding just a little piquancy to all this fond remembrance (don’t worry, we will get to something of substance fairly soon) is the fact that, during the last months of Borders’ existence, I found myself somewhat financially embarrassed and was entirely unable to take full advantage of the bounty on offer. The only thing I remember buying was a book which, on later reflection, I found myself almost wishing I hadn’t: Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (based, obviously, on the famous novel by Jane Austen, who is rather cheekily credited as co-writer).

I will spare you yet further ramblings about my somewhat turbulent relationship with different incarnations of Pride and Prejudice, and merely note that Grahame-Smith’s parody is another manifestation of the Great Zombie Boom of recent years. The book itelf was successful enough to spawn various follow-ups, with titles like Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina, while Grahame-Smith put his obvious talent for a snappy title to work and went on to write Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, filmed by Timur Bekmambetov a few years ago.

The thing about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is that it’s a funny title which tells you exactly what to expect, but is it actually something you can drag out for the length of a whole novel? It’s a funny concept, but you need a bit more if you’re making anything longer than a comedy sketch.

All very relevant, one would suspect, to the film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, written and directed by Burr Steers, and produced by Natalie Portman, who was clearly at one point really desperate to play Elizabeth Bennet, no matter what the context. This is another of those films that never made it to the local cinemas in Oxford, and I was quite glad to catch up with it, even if my expectations were, shall we say, moderate at best.

Steers has a conscientious go at setting the scene in a manner which is vaguely coherent: the expansion of the British Empire in the 18th century brings all kinds of foreign exotica to England’s green and pleasant lands, most notably the zombie virus, which proceeds to sweep the nation. London is fortified (a touch of steampunk here), and sensible folk of the upper classes invest in combat training so they may defend themselves against the undead hordes.

It is against this backdrop that much of the same plot as in the traditional Pride and Prejudice unfolds: the Bennets are a well-bred but slightly impecunious family, and Mrs Bennet (Sally Phillips) is determined to find good and wealthy husbands for her five daughters. Top of the list are Jane (Bella Heathcote) and Elizabeth (Lily James). The arrival at the neighbouring estate of the dashing and wealthy Mr Bingley (Douglas Booth) is surely a good sign, but his stern friend Mr Darcy (Sam Riley) seems to disapprove entirely of the Bennets. Meanwhile, Elizabeth finds her head turned somewhat by Wickham (Jack Huston), a young soldier who appears to have been badly wronged by Darcy. Can the Bennet girls find romance and happiness? Could it be that Elizabeth has badly misjudged Darcy?

And, of course, there are also zombies rampaging about the countryside, although as this film is only a 15 certificate in the UK, the actual blood-soaked horror is inevitably a bit low-key. One of the big differences between the Grahame-Smith novel and the movie is that the latter moves much further away from the original Austen story, inserting much more of an action-adventure climax involving the Four Horsemen of the Zombie Apocalypse, not to mention the Zombie Antichrist.

I can kind of see why they’ve done this, as its identity as an action-horror zombie movie is clearly very important to this film – note the poster, on which the word ‘Zombies’ is considerably larger than the others. But it does inevitably take the movie further away from Jane Austen, which – given the whole point of the thing is that it’s an Austen-based mash-up – is surely a mistake. Perhaps it’s just an indication that this film has a fundamental problem, trying to bring together things which just don’t fit in the same story.

Well, maybe, maybe not. My problem with the book was that Grahame-Smith seemed to have chickened out of just putting zombies into Pride and Prejudice – which is, as noted, a funny idea – and had started trying to be actively funny, with creaky jokes like ‘Mr Bingley was famous for the size of his balls’, and the inclusion of the whole martial arts element, which isn’t rooted in the works of either Jane Austen or George A Romero.

Perhaps the problem is that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is quite funny as an idea, but once you start actually writing the story and genuinely attempt to stay true to both elements, it turns into something else. You could make it work, probably, but it wouldn’t be the comedy that the title suggests.

Certainly, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sort of hangs together as a zombopocalypse movie with a period setting – and in its own way it’s not much tonally weirder than Maggie, for instance – and in some ways it’s the Austen-specific bits of the plot that feel intrusive. It’s as any kind of comedy that it falls down, being fatally short on wit and self-awareness. Mostly, it takes itself painfully seriously, and the actually funny bits are the ones that feel like they’ve wandered in from a different film – Matt Smith (one of many actors who’ve managed to swing the ‘and’ position in the credits on this film) goes into comedy overdrive as Mr Collins and blasts everyone else off the screen, while a crucial scene between Elizabeth and Darcy juxtaposes authentically Austenesque dialogue with the pair of them engaging in hand-to-hand combat: suddenly the film comes to life, even though it feels like much more of a spoof as it does so. (The moment where a hot-under-the-collar Darcy dives into a lake, an emendation of the story first added by the BBC in 1995, makes an appearance, apparently because it’s expected to nowadays. It’s handled completely straight even though it’s surely ripe for spoofing.)

But these are only a handful of moments in what is quite a long film which never quite figures out its own identity – does it want to be a proper costume drama, a rom-com, an action horror movie, or what? Is it actually supposed to be funny? And if so, on what level? Is it trying to be clever, or knowingly dumb? It’s genuinely difficult to tell, not least because the answers seem to change throughout the course of the film.

As I have often noted in the past, you can do a lot with zombies (as recent films have shown). But you can’t do everything with them, or at least not all in the same movie. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes a talented and attractive cast and doesn’t give them the material they deserve, apparently never quite knowing what to do with them. It may be the film-makers never settled on the type of film they wanted to make. It may be that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is only funny as a title, not an actual story. I’m not actually sure. But I’m sure that this is a movie which doesn’t really work.

 

Read Full Post »

The End of the (Time)line

Before we go any further, a brief recap of this blog’s position when it comes to the Terminator franchise: The Terminator is a stone-cold all-time classic, and a practically perfect movie (possibly because it’s the only one in the series not conceived of as a blockbuster), Terminator 2 is very decent in a deafening-overblown-James-Cameron-big-budget-remake sort of way, Rise of the Machines passes the time in a not actively painful manner, and Terminator: Salvation is a pointless and puny waste of money and talent.

Given this general trajectory, the omens are not great for Alan Taylor’s Terminator Genisys even before we consider the silly title. This is a film the rights to which essentially went to the winners of an auction, so perhaps one’s expectation management should be even more severe than that.

Anyway, the film initially appears to be playing it safe and heading down the route of being a more polished remake of the original film, as, in the year 2029, Kyle Reese (this time: Jai Courtney) prepares to go back in time and save Sarah Connor (this time: Emilia Clarke) from cybernetic assassins. She is a target due to her being destined to give birth to John Connor (this time: Jason Clarke), the man who will lead the human race to victory following a nuclear war sparked by a rogue AI, Skynet. (Does anyone not know the Terminator backstory…? I feel obliged to recap it anyway.)

But when Kyle arrives in 1984, pursuing the Terminator already dispatched back there, he finds that time is out of joint: the Terminator has already been dealt with by another, somewhat wizened machine of the same model (I need not tell you who plays this role, I suspect), who is working with an entirely clued-up Sarah, while Kyle finds himself hunted by a T-1000 Terminator, which likewise shouldn’t be here at all.

What on Earth is going on? Kyle never actually asks this, so far as I recall, but he should clearly be thinking it, as should the audience. Well, to cut a long story short, this film takes the nuclear option when it comes to time travel as a plot device, and sticks anti-matter in its microwave (if that’s not too tortuous a metaphor). Basically, all the major characters end up in an entirely pre-apocalyptic near future, where they find out that Skynet is now an app or a mobile phone or the new version of Windows or something, and the reason this is happening is because…

I have two good reasons for not going any further. One is that it would involve heavy spoilers for the second half of the film, and the other is that I really haven’t got a clue what’s going on. To be fair, Terminator Genisys probably isn’t much more full of blinky-blonky techno-cobblers and suspect determinism than any of the other sequels, but it’s a lot more up-front about it, predicating its plot around some startling narrative developments it never properly bothers to explain: what exactly is going on with the grumpy old T-800 that was apparently sent back to the early 1970s? Not only does the film not bother to explain, it essentially says ‘we’ll get to this in the next sequel’, which I feel is relying rather too much on audience goodwill. (It may be significant that playing a small but important role in this film is one – it says here – “Matthew” Smith, an actor more experienced than most in dealing with byzantine time-travel plots that may not, in the final analysis, properly hang together.)

The first act of the film has fun re-staging and screwing around with sequences from the original Terminator (Bill Paxton doesn’t come back, by the way), and this stuff has a sort of demented energy that serves the film rather well. Once everyone decamps to the future, though, the film becomes rather more predictable and even pedestrian: you’ll never guess what, but they’ve got to stop Skynet being created! Just like in number 2. Oh, and number 3. And, I’ll hazard a guess, number 6, when it’s finally made. Hey ho.

What is perhaps surprising is what a peripheral presence Arnie is in the movie, given I doubt they’d have made it without him. When his CGI double isn’t being chucked through walls in the action scenes, he spends quite a lot of his time just standing around, occasionally waking up to deliver comic relief or bafflegab exposition. He’s still clearly up for it, however, and this is surely his best work since that odd political interlude in his career.

Much of the film is left to Courtney and the Clarkes to carry, and they do a decent enough job, supported by a script which actually manages to find decent moments of emotion and thoughtfulness between all the crash-bang-wallop and tortuous temporal wrangling. J.K. Simmons pops up as – I think – a new character who was supposedly mixed up in the events of 1984, but he’s mainly just there to do exposition and comic relief as well.

Like all the other sequels, this knows the audience it’s pitching to and sticks in all the appropriate explosions and jokes and lingering shots of heavy weaponry, as well as enough references to the original film to gratify the fanbase (though Brad Fiedel’s theme is saved for the closing credits), although I would be really very hesitant about taking anyone to see this who wasn’t already familiar with the first film (at least).

If it doesn’t have the raw energy, inventiveness, and dramatic charge of The Terminator – well, hardly anything does, and at least it’s more fun to watch than Terminators 3 or 4 (in places, certainly). But the prospect of yet more, even more convoluted sequels, kind of makes my heart sink a bit. Blowing up the existing timeline and letting the bits fall where they may is what powers this movie, but it’s not exactly a long term strategy, and I can’t imagine them managing to drag the story back to a place where it actually makes sense any more. On its own terms, this is a rather unsatisfying film, narratively at least – but I still think that any further sequels will find the law of diminishing returns biting them very hard and very fast. Enough, Arnie, enough.

 

Read Full Post »

The Really, Really Long Time of the Doctor

Even before it aired, it always seemed to me that the Christmas special doubling as Matt Smith’s final episode was going to be an odd sort of beast, falling into the gap between the 50th anniversary episode and the alluring prospect of Peter Capaldi’s initial season – the anniversary was always going to be a joyous occasion, which the conclusion of the story amply reflected, while the advent of a new Doctor inevitably brings with it a new sense of energy and excitement. So giving Smith a send-off with an appropriate sense of occasion about it, that didn’t feel tonally adrift somehow, was a very particular sort of challenge.

It’s very difficult to resist the temptation to compare The Time of the Doctor with The End of Time (and equally tempting to muse on the truism from the 20th century series that any story with the word ‘Time’ in the title has a better than even chance of being duff – exhibits include Time and the Rani, The Time Monster, and The Invasion of Time) – both seasonal departures of much-loved lead actors. My sense is that The End of Time is not a well-regarded story, due to excessive sentimentality and a slightly implausible plot revolving around the possible return of Gallifrey. I suspect that its reputation will be undergoing a significant upward reappraisal in the wake of The Time of the Doctor.

But I really don’t want to just sit here and criticise the story – it’s not really the case that I have a problem with individual episodes these days, more that I’m not a fan of the whole Moffat approach to the series. This seems to me to be to treat the programme as a series of comedy sketches, moments of great sentiment (sometimes sentimentality), and big set pieces, all linked together by plot elements of varying degrees of spuriousness. (The image of a naked Jenna Coleman, planted in my subconscious early on, was one I found difficult to dislodge, but that’s by the by.) One would almost think Moffat had an actual aversion to including a straightforward, solid, coherent plot in any of his programmes.

Anyway, that’s how The Time of the Doctor seemed to me – the actual story seemed very much secondary to providing all the usual clever bits. The big ideas this time around were (apparently) firstly to try and gather together some of the many dangling loose ends from previous Moffat episodes, and secondly to give Matt Smith a chance to really show his chops by playing a Doctor gradually aging into the ancient being the actor has always managed to suggest through his performance. Smith was, of course, very good, as he always has been, but I was rather less impressed by the rest of it – I still don’t think we’ve received a proper explanation of why the TARDIS exploded in The Pandorica Opens (how, precisely, did the Kovarian Chapter contrive this remarkable feat?), for one thing.

I’m not sure whether the recurrence of plot elements from The End of Time and The Parting of the Ways constitutes a reverent homage or just a shortage of imagination, but I was genuinely surprised that the potential-return-of-Gallifrey plot coupon was cashed in so soon – once upon a time I would have groused about the way the plot here completely ignored the assertion in the very previous episode that the Time Lords would be effectively frozen in time, unable to act at all, but we’re operating in a universe where the TARDIS has developed a teleporter function and a side-effect of regenerating is the ability to shoot down battle cruisers, so why bother?

Hey ho. I think I have said enough about the episode itself. Matt Smith never quite lived up to his promise, if you ask me, but I am still sorry to see him go. My problems are not with him but the scripts he was required to perform. Steven Moffat has spoken about the lunacy of changing the entire creative team of a programme at the same time, as happened when Rusty Davies and David Tennant departed together. That may be the case, but I would still rather have seen Moffat move on than Matt Smith. For me the programme seems in definite need of a sharp change of approach, and I’m not sure that Capaldi’s arrival alone will be enough to bring that about.

**********

Geeky Bit: The Clockspeed of the Doctor

Well, Moffat doesn’t seem to care that much about the wider fictional universe of the show, which just makes life a bit more interesting for those of us who do. So – age and aging where the Doctor’s concerned.

There are already, of course, several inconsistencies concerning the Doctor’s actual age already written into the series. Jon Pertwee’s Doctor at one point appears to allude to being several thousand years old, which obviously jibes with the age of around 750 which was the standard in the middle Tom Baker years. The next time we get even a general age it’s during the Colin Baker era, by which time the Doctor is claiming to be around 900 – specifically, 953 during Time and the Rani. This is of course flatly contradicted again by various stories from the Eccleston and Tennant series, wherein the Doctor is back down to about 900 (and seems to be aging in real time).

Any way you look at it, the Doctor had never been more than about 950 at any point prior to the arrival of Matt Smith: but here there is a bit of a shift. If we take the Doctor at his word, 200 years pass between The God Complex and Closing Time, then at least 300 more during The Time of the Doctor itself. Quite how long passes between the Dalek attack on the Papal Mainframe and the Doctor’s actual regeneration seems unclear, as we don’t really understand how he ages (he doesn’t age at all in the two hundred year gap mentioned up the page, but becomes noticeably more aged during the three hundred year Siege of Trenzalore), but at least another three or four centuries seems like a reasonable estimate.

The upshot of all this is that the final incarnation of the Doctor’s original regeneration cycle survived for at least 800 years, and potentially as long as the first twelve put together: most of which happened off-screen, of course, but even so it’s a somewhat peculiar development.

This would be an appropriate place to comment on the issue of the renewal of the Doctor’s regeneration cycle, and quite how this squares with the ‘All thirteen of him!’ moment from the anniversary special – or, indeed, the eleventh Doctor’s aborted regeneration from The Impossible Astronaut, or threat to regenerate in Nightmare in Silver. But that will wait for another time, I think…

Read Full Post »

The Two… hang on, they’ve already done that one

Before launching into some comments on The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People which are not really unreservedly positive, I think it is important to remember a few things: this is a piece of relatively hard SF, dealing with some very thoughtful philosophical themes, with quite a high horror content, all made to an extremely high standard. And the BBC broadcast it on Saturday night in the middle of prime time. Only someone with the blackest heart imaginable could really lay into it.

Nor would I really want to, for all that I have a few issues with it. The story did one of the great Doctor Who things very well, namely establishing an atmospheric and surprisingly textured world with only a few broad strokes, all of the guest performances were good and a couple of them were very special indeed (thinking here of Sarah Smart and Raquel Cassidy).

However, in some ways the story seemed to hearken back to the days of Rusty, with some slightly overdone emotional bits and some elements which just seemed… I don’t know, but does anyone else find the concept of an acid mine slightly implausible? Particularly on 22nd century Earth.

And in other ways it seemed to look back still further (and I’m not just referring to the Dalek Invasion of Earth, Sea Devils and Robots of Death references) – in many ways this story was a corridor-jogger in the classic style, admittedly a very clever one, but mainly just characters dashing from one place to another in a bit of a panic. Lots of things were going on, but most of the important ones were internal – concerned with relationships and ideas and the overall series plot.

Having said that, one of my complaints about last year’s two-parters was that to some degree they concluded by finishing a different story from the one they started. The way in which the central concept of this story flows into the overall arc of the series was very satisfyingly done and the startling scenes at the very end of the second episode didn’t overpower the conclusion of the main story at all.

I feel I should take a moment to praise Matt Smith here. He is, obviously, terrific week-in, week-out, but in this story he was particularly good. His dual role performance was delightful but I was even more impressed with his approach to the final scenes, finding a coldness and an implacable strength in his Doctor that’s… well, it’s been there on occasion in the past, but we appear to be seeing it more and more these days. It looks like there are dark days ahead for everyone in the series, but at least we can look forward to a few answers (finally).

Read Full Post »