Terra Indifferentia

As I think I’ve mentioned several times before, sometimes I just want to go to see a movie – not a particular movie, not a specific film, I just want to have the experience of watching a film. At this point my usual critical standards necessarily take a bit of a hit, and indeed in some cases I go along to see a film I know virtually nothing about, in the hope of getting a pleasant surprise. This week I was going to go and see the new version of Cyrano de Bergerac, but the light of my life expressed the desire to see it as well and we couldn’t get our schedules in sync. And so I ended up going along to Ruben Fleischer’s Uncharted instead.

I’m going to make the reasonable assumption that you’re an intelligent and rational person (despite the fact you’re reading this blog) and you don’t necessarily wander along to see any old movie that’s on just because you can get a bit obsessive about your film-going. Is that fair? If so, it’s probably quite unlikely you’ll have considered watching Uncharted, because it’s just not that kind of film.

Normally when I write about a film, at the back of my mind is the faint hope that I will be able to help someone make their mind up about whether or not to watch it, and thus in some small way make a contribution to the sum total of their happiness. But you don’t need me to tell you whether or not to watch Uncharted – I suspect you’ve already concluded not to, a decision I would probably applaud. So what are we all doing here? Well, you may be wondering just what it’s like to watch this movie. What is that fabled and ephemeral thing we call experience in this case?

Well: the movie starts by doing that slightly annoying thing where it opens in media res with an action sequence from the third act. This finds young Tom Holland mixed up in an extravagant action-and-stunt sequence that rather puts one in mind of the Bond movies, back in the days when they were fun rather than glum. It’s all quite ambitious and visually interesting, although it was clearly done almost entirely inside a computer rather than with actors and physical objects.

Very soon the film jumps back a decade and a half to when young Holland was… well, even younger. As one of Tom Holland’s most prominent talents is the ability to look about two-thirds of his actual age, the producers have a bit of a challenge when it comes to finding someone to play a younger version of him who looks appreciably less mature but is not in fact a mewling infant. I never really bought into the idea of this being a younger young Holland, but this bit is mainly just laying in exposition and back-story.

It turns out young Holland is playing Nate Drake, a cocktail barman, petty thief, expert on mediaeval history, gymnast, and morally-flexible treasure hunter. (Now that’s what I call a diversified CV.) He also has a bit of a tragic family history just to obscure the fact he’s essentially a collection of plot functions. Into his life trundles roguish chancer Victor Sullivan (Mark Wahlberg – it will tell you how long this film has been stuck in Development Hell if I reveal that Marky Mark was initially supposed to be playing young Holland’s part, rather than the more character-based role of his mentor/tormentor). Sullivan is on the trail of the fabled gold of Magellan (everyone in the film pronounces Magellan with a soft G, which I must confess really annoyed me), which young Holland just happens to be an expert on. ‘I’m not teaming up with you to find the gold,’ says young Holland, but of course by the very next scene he has had a complete change of heart and the two of them are planning to knock over an international auction house in search of a Maguffin, or possibly Majuffin, that will help them get the treasure.

It turns out that the family who financed this Majellan guy’s original trip are still around and wanting payback for their support – this is very long-term thinking – and have hired various bad guys to make the lives of young Holland and Marky Mark more stressful than they could have been. Antonio Banderas pops up as a wealthy scumbag – off in the distance, you can just faintly hear a cry of ‘I told you so!’ from Almodovar as he recalls telling Banderas he would just end up wasting his talent in America – but only briefly, as the film is partly Spanish-financed and they wanted a local star in it for a bit. Most of the villaining is done by Tati Gabrielle, while in a more ambiguous and rather transactional role as another dodgy treasure-hunter we find Sophia Ali, whose accent goes on a bit of a voyage of discovery of its own.

Well, there’s a bit in New York and then they all fly off to Barcelona – there’s a scene on the plane where Holland and Wahlberg discuss at length the fact they’re going to Barcelona, followed by a smash cut to a panoramic view of Barcelona with a huge caption reading ‘BARCELONA’ over it, because this is that kind of film. The film has sort of hit its groove as a Bond-Indiana Jones-Robert Langdon knock-off by this point so you can imagine the sort of things that go on, but the product placement is probably sillier than you’re thinking. Then it’s off to the Philippines for the final act.

As you may be able to tell, Uncharted hadn’t really done a lot for me up to this point, feeling almost entirely procedural – characters run around in search of plot coupons, doing exactly the things you’d expect them to, without any real sense of peril or significance. It’s literally so bloodless that one character has his throat slit on camera without there being any mess or spillage at all. In the final section, the film goes beyond inane into the realms of the actually silly – all the way through the story is stuffed with contrivances that don’t make sense if you think about them; by the climax, the film is not making sense even if you don’t think about it too hard.

Occasionally I wonder if I do have some kind of unjustified bias against computer game movies – it’s true that I can’t remember ever seeing a good one, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that a good one doesn’t exist somewhere out in the wilderness. Or perhaps the form itself is inherently compromised – plot and characterisation are always secondary concerns in a computer game, with the main focus being on gameplay and graphics (which reach the screen as action and imagery). Uncharted is agreeable to look at and there’s always something going on, but you never really care what it is.

Perhaps this is why the producers have taken the reasonable step of engaging young Holland (who is himself an engaging presence, after all) to lead the movie. The lad does have a definite charm, but he’s got virtually nothing to work with in terms of a coherent character. Initially his performance as a wise-cracking cocktail waiter turned globe-trotting treasure hunter is virtually identical to his turn as a wise-cracking adhesive teenage superhero; eventually he finds the odd grace note of swagger, but not much. The Sullivan role is likewise crying out for someone with real charisma and a strong persona of their own, just to paper over the cracks between the different plot functions he’s required to carry out – but Wahlberg just isn’t up to the task.

There’s nothing wrong with mainstream popcorn movie entertainment, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with making the most of a popular franchise property. Uncharted hits all the minimum criteria as a functional movie, and has clearly had quite a bit of money spent on it. But at no point did I ever care about what was happening; I was engaged, in a minimal sort of way, but never actually entertained. Nevertheless, calling it a bad movie would be unfair, because that would suggest it is much more interesting than is actually the case.

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Ditko-Verse A-Go-Go

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s starting to look like one of the key mainstream films of the last few years was 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Perhaps simply because it was a cartoon, and thus to some extent operating under the critical radar, it felt like it had more freedom to embrace some of the more bizarre and imaginative elements of traditional superhero comic books – the result was a critical response verging on the adulatory and a very healthy box office take.

Normally I would suggest that everyone involved was taking notes and that Jon Watts’ Spider-Man: No Way Home is an attempt to replicate the success of Into the Spider-Verse in a live-action context, but the startling degree to which Marvel Studios plan their operations in advance – up to ten years, if one believes their publicity – does give me pause. Unless Into the Spider-Verse was intended as a kind of test-bed for the new movie all along, of course.

Superhero movies in general seem to have got a bit brighter and bolder since Into the Spider-Verse, anyway, and this does not appear to have affected their dominance even in the post-viral world. That said, I don’t think that any of this year’s first three Marvel Studios releases showcased the enterprise at its best, while Venom: Let There Be Carnage was possibly even more of an enjoyable mess than its predecessor. (Which would mean that The Suicide Squad was the best comic-book movie of the summer: a surprising thought.) Rather gratifyingly, No Way Home sees the Marvel machine finally slip back into high gear and produce a supremely entertaining, wildly imaginative, and surprisingly touching film.

Great Scott! Even the poster should carry a spoiler alert!

The film follows on more or less seamlessly from the end of 2019’s Far From Home (watch the quibbling between maintainers of MCU chronologies begin!), with Spider-Man (Tom Holland) alarmed to find himself in the frame for the death of Mysterio and his identity exposed, courtesy of a tabloid news service run by J Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons, reprising his role from the three Sam Raimi Spider-Man films).

This is obviously bad trouble for our lad, not least because it imperils not just him but also the lives of those nearest and dearest to him. Even after his immediate legal issues are resolved (the initiated should not be terribly surprised by the identity of Peter Parker’s attorney), it is clear that the scandal is impacting on the prospects and happiness of his best friend Ned (Jacob Balaton) and his girlfriend Michelle (Zendaya Coleman). It would, of course, be greatly preferable if the revelation of his identity had never been made, but of course that’s impossible. Or is it?

Cue a maximal Steve Ditko quotient as Peter trots off to beg a favour from Dr Strange (originally created by the same artist as Spider-Man, of course). Can Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch, as usual) use his sorcery to fix the situation somehow? Unfortunately, Peter’s tendency to run off at the mouth manifests at exactly the worst moment, as usual, and the plan to ensure everyone forgets Spider-Man’s identity does not go entirely as planned…

And how am I supposed to write about the rest of the movie, I ask myself? I suspect there’s a kind of spectrum when it comes to people’s engagement with No Way Home – at one end there are presumably those who’ve only barely heard of Spider-Man and only go along to see the movie because they’re dragged there by friends or family. Then there are people who’ve seen all the trailers and thus have a pretty good idea of what the big conceit of this film is, even if some of the details may come as a surprise. And then there are people like me: I’ve been following the buzz around this film for months, and have been quietly amused by some of the ways it has impacted on other films (certain performers pre-emptively apologising for not being able to answer questions about No Way Home while they’re supposedly being interviewed about something completely different).

It’s almost impossible to write meaningfully about everything that makes No Way Home such a great piece of entertainment without spoiling things that really should come as a surprise, if at all possible. At least, it seems like a great piece of entertainment to me, as someone who has been watching Spider-Man movies on the big screen since the movies themselves were simply repurposed American TV episodes. The standard this last twenty years has been inestimably higher – it seems a little unfair to me that the reputation of the Sam Raimi films has taken a hit simply because Spider-Man 3 wasn’t quite up to the standard of the first two, while I don’t think that either of the films directed by Marc Webb were quite as disappointing as they are now held to be. One of the loveliest things about No Way Home is the way that it unreservedly celebrates the whole lineage of Spider-Man films leading up to this point: I think it will cause a lot of people to revisit those films and hopefully remember just how good some superhero movies were, even in pre-Marvel Studios days.

After a few films in which the links to the larger Marvel universe (or perhaps we should call it the multiverse now?) felt a bit laboured or tenuous, No Way Home feels like it’s back at the heart of the action without any real sense of contrivance. Chief guest star from the other Marvel Studio films this time is Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr Strange: more than just a cameo, this is a proper chunky supporting role (presumably setting up next year’s Multiverse of Madness). Cumberbatch finds his groove within the more comedic style of the current Spider-Man films very quickly, and manages to make an impression despite a lot of formidable opposition.

I’m aware that the movie-going world tends to fall into two camps: people who are on board with the Marvel project, recognising these films as the excellent entertainment they are, and people who aren’t (whether their response is indifference or outright animosity). The best review in the world isn’t going to persuade members of the latter camp – and it is true that No Way Home is convoluted and stuffed with in-jokes and references mostly aimed at the faithful. But it also has energy, humour, soul, and a real sense of joy and delight. Films like this are the reason why Marvel Studios have become the dominant force in mainstream global cinema.

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Greased Lightning

Regular visitors will know that one of the few constant features to be found hereabouts is the succession of bad puns introducing and punctuating whatever bits of writing I see fit to unload onto t’internet. Often, especially during a particularly boring film, I will find myself thinking nearly as much about what bad pun I am going to put in the title as I am about whatever Keira Knightley (or whoever) is up to on screen. So to turn up to a film and discover that the makers have already been diligently milking their own work for its bad-pun potential is wrong-footing, to say the least. I feel as though someone has shot my fox, or stolen my clothes, or whatever the most appropriate idiom is. If the film makers are going to start doing the bad puns, where does that leave me? Do I have to start actually making the films?

Nevertheless, here we are with Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s The Current War, a film about the race between rival companies attempting to bring electrical power to the USA and thus, you can see, a film with a play on words as its title. It goes further: ‘Power changes everything!’ declares the poster. Demarcation, that’s the only answer, I tell you. Quite apart from this suspect promotional strategy, there does seem to be something slightly ‘off’ about this film – as a fact-based period drama with a first-rate cast, one would naturally expect to encounter it in a cinema around Christmas or early in the New Year, for it has clearly been made with one eye on the awards season. And yet here we are in the middle of summer and it is essentially serving as counter-programming to Disney’s regal cat and the latest Fast and Furious movie. What, as they say, gives?

Well, my understanding is that this one was actually finished a couple of years ago, and was in the process of having a few re-edits made to it when scandal engulfed one of its producers, Harvey Weinstein. Putting out a film with Weinstein’s name on it these days is such a bad business move that no-one even considers it, and so The Current War has been flogged on to another company and only now is seeing the light of day (if that’s an appropriate metaphor for something which is mainly going to be viewed in very dark rooms). I’m not sure at what point Kazakh producer-director Timur Bekmambetov got involved (Bekmambetov is the visionary responsible for the precognitive loom of Wanted and the general barking lunacy of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), but you can kind of sense his influence too, not least in the film’s tendency towards lavish CGI. (Much of this goes to cover up the fact that, for a film about American history, a significant chunk of it was filmed elsewhere.) As if that wasn’t a mixed enough bag, Martin Scorsese’s name is on it as well (although that has popped up in many unexpected places recently).

The film is mostly set in the 1880s and early 1890s. The script does a very good job of establishing that we are only really on the cusp of a recognisably modern world as the film opens: the night is lit mostly by firelight and candles, vehicles and machinery are operated by steam or sheer muscle-power. No wonder the early pioneers of electricity were regarded and referred to as wizards and magicians. Unfortunately, the film does a rather less impressive job of establishing one of the key tensions in the story. On the one hand, we have the famous inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison (Cumbersome Bandersnatch), who is determined to bring light to the masses through a combination of his own incandescent light bulbs and the judicious application of direct current (DC). Set against him is the engineer and businessman George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon), who has a similar plan involving high-voltage alternating current (AC).

Now, you could argue, and I expect the film makers probably will, that the heart of the film is about the rivalry between the two men and the differences it reveals in their personalities – the fact it boils down to a difference in currents only really matters if you are trying to come up with a snappy, pun-some title for a movie on this topic. I don’t know. I would have liked to have understood the science a bit more, simply because it is so central to the story, and also because the film is partially about how scientific and engineering progress is made.

The film progresses anyway. Westinghouse is initially interested in a possible alliance with Edison, but the great inventor snubs him and the scene is set for a mighty clash of wills – Edison has developed a complete and safe system he can provide, at some expense; Westinghouse has a product which is cobbled-together from various sources, considerably cheaper but also potentially lethal due to the high voltages involved. Much of the film revolves around Edison’s attempts to smear Westinghouse by suggesting he is selling a dangerous product to the unsuspecting public. Edison also makes a big fuss about never using his considerable talents to invent something harmful to human life, which is of course setting up the irony of the fact he is largely responsible for the creation of the electric chair.

Lots of good material there for a story in and of itself, you might think: maybe even more than enough, given the film could probably use a little bit more scientific exposition about the technology involved. But the film goes even further: there is a subplot about Edison’s personal life, and the illness of his wife (Tuppence Middleton). There is another one about the contribution made to all this by the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult).

For all that he makes a significant contribution to the story (an employee of Edison and later a partner of Westinghouse), and despite Hoult’s excellent performance, the inclusion of Tesla is probably the most glaring example of the film trying to do too much. We are probably overdue a proper Tesla bio-pic, given that he was a mythologised figure even in his own lifetime (he has been suggested as the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft’s short story ‘Nyarlathotep’, written back in 1920), and frequently depicted as an almost stereotypical mad scientist (see also David Bowie’s cameo as Tesla in The Prestige). There’s enough Tesla in The Current War for it to feel obtrusive, but not enough to really satisfy.

The same can be said for many elements of the film, if we’re honest. The story tries to cover so much that nothing is really treated with the depth and detail that it deserves, and the pace is seldom less than breathless – the film rattles along, rarely pausing for a reflective moment. This does mean it is never dull, but it also means it is a little exhausting to watch. After a while you just sit back and let the story whizz past in front of you.

This is quite disappointing, as in all other respects than the script and pacing, the film shows signs of excellence: it looks great, the direction is creative, and the performances are uniformly very strong. As noted, Hoult is on impressive, scene-stealing form, and there is a nice turn from Tom Holland (with a quite remarkably baroque hairstyle) as Edison’s secretary. Shannon also makes an impression in what’s not a particularly showy part. The film feels very much skewed in favour of Edison, though, which may or may not be connected to the fact that Bittythatch Chunderhound is one of the executive producers. He is, I should say, as good as usual, but on the other hand he is also playing pretty much the same character that he does in almost every film he makes:  acerbic, snarky, very very clever, not exactly gifted when it comes to showing affection to others… there’s no doubting his charisma, but he does seem in danger of becoming a movie star rather than the great actor he’s always been up to this point.

It is not a major issue, certainly when compared to the problems with The Current War‘s script and story. Even so, this is an interesting and engaging movie which we both enjoyed (Olinka needed some persuasion, but was glad she agreed to come along in the end). It’s by no means completely satisfying, but – quite appropriately – it does shed some light on an interesting period of history, and it’s nice to find a film with such aspirations to ambition and intelligence doing the rounds at this time of year.

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A Tangled Web

I will not inflict upon you the heavily-vowelled utterance a friend of mine could not contain when he learned that the fourth Marvel superhero movie in five months was about to come amongst us; use your imaginations. Normally he and I are in different camps when it comes to this sort of thing – he would quite happily see the whole genre consigned to the waste-basket of history, whereas I, on the other hand, cheerfully organised the schedule of a recent trip to New York City so we could see Captain Marvel there on opening night. Nevertheless, I was more sympathetic than usual on this occasion – Avengers: Endgame was such a monumental piece of work, carrying such a significant emotional charge, that a lengthy pause in Marvel Studios’ operations in its aftermath would have felt logical and entirely appropriate. Knocking out another Spider-Man sequel to meet a contractual obligation… well, it almost feels like it’s too soon, doesn’t it?

Certainly the opening sequences of Jon Watts’ Spider-Man: Far From Home give the impression this movie has been slipped an almighty hospital pass, for it is almost obliged to try and make sense of the rather confused state of the Marvel movie universe in the wake of Endgame. Half the world was dead for five years, before returning to existence not having aged a day – the film is obliged to acknowledge this, but also has sound dramatic reasons for wanting to handwave it away as quickly as possible and get on with telling a story set in a recognisable version of a world resembling our own. It’s a tricky conundrum the film never really manages to get to grips with, and the way it still seems to feel the need to stress its continuity with the non-Sony Marvel movies doesn’t help much – there are endless references to the other films, much more than you find in any of the ‘real’ Marvel Studios productions.

Still, once the plot gets properly going the film makes an impressive recovery from this dodgy opening section. Peter Parker (Tom Holland) and his peers are all off on a tour of photogenic European capitals; Peter is hoping for a break from being Spider-Man and a chance to get a bit closer to the girl he likes, MJ (Zendaya Coleman). However, the various antics of Peter and his peers take a bit of a back-seat when the Grand Canal in Venice unexpectedly takes on semi-human form and becomes rather aggressive to everyone around it. A mighty tussle ensues, with the belligerent landmark on one side, and Spider-Man and an enigmatic new superhero on the other. Everyone is impressed with the new guy – ‘He’s kicking that water’s ass!’ cries one onlooker – who is soon christened Mysterio and turns out to be played by Jake Gyllenhaal.

Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) turns up to make the formal introductions. It turns out Mysterio hails from another dimension where Earth has been devastated by hostile elemental beings. Now these creatures are coming to Earth, and Fury wants Spider-Man – anointed, it would seem, as the chosen successor to Iron Man as the world’s foremost protector – to partner up with Mysterio and stop the elementals from trashing this planet too. It’s a big responsibility for a young man feeling the loss of his mentor, to say nothing of the disruption this could cause to Peter’s school trip…

As mentioned, it seems like the Sony-funded MCU movies really do go out of their way to tie themselves into the wider continuity of the series, and on this occasion that proves to be a bit of a mixed blessing. Like I said, it does force the film to address the odd state of affairs pertaining after Endgame, which was always going to be tricky, and I imagine the film’s repeated use of Robert Downey Jr’s image will ultimately prove a bit exasperating for viewers who get the message quite early on, thank you. On the other hand, this is hardly happening frivolously: the events of Endgame are crucial to the plot, and the film builds intelligently on them to provide motivation for the various characters.

Nevertheless, this is still obviously a Spider-Man film rather than an addendum to the Avengers series, for all that the European setting is a bit unusual for this particular character. Now, you may well be thinking that Spider-Man teaming up with a new superhero to fight monsters from another dimension is a bit of a departure plot-wise too – well, all I can reasonably say on this topic is that you certainly have a point. That said, the plot of Spider-Man: Far From Home is quite a clever one, making some amusingly jaded observations on the ubiquity of superheroes these days and how silly the plots of some of these films have become. It also reinterprets material from the original comics in a convincing and imaginative way. The only problem is that it is very easy to guess which way the story is going, even if you’re only passingly familiar with the characters involved.

Still, there is a lot to enjoy here: this is as much of a quirky comedy film as Homecoming was, and Samuel L Jackson throws himself into the funny lines and comic situations whole-heartedly. The film’s star turn performance-wise, however, is Jake Gyllenhaal, who makes the most of a part which really allows him to show his range as an actor. About fifteen years ago, Gyllenhaal was in the frame to replace Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man himself when Maguire’s bad back threatened to force him to withdraw from Spider-Man 2 – he was also apparently on the list of people considered for the part of Venom in Spider-Man 3. It’s gratifying to see that his arrival in the series (finally) is such an impressive one.

(And if we’re talking about the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, how’s about this for a genuine visitor from another plane of the multiverse – Far From Home includes a cameo from JK Simmons, reprising his role as J Jonah Jameson from those films. Very nice to see him back, of course, and one wonders about the extent to which this opens the door for other stars of non-MCU Marvel movies to cross over into this series. Let’s have Alfred Molina back as Doctor Octopus, for a start, and Nicolas Cage as Ghost Rider, and how about Wesley Snipes as Blade? Apparently Snipes and Marvel have had meetings…)

Once the film gets going, it is pacey and consistently amusing, even if it is also knowingly absurd in a number of places. The special effects are as good as you’d expect, and the film concludes with the best set-piece sequence around Tower Bridge from any fantasy film since Gorgo. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the greatest Spider-Man film ever, and it would be foolish to try and deconstruct it in the hope of deciphering what Marvel will be up to next (for the first time in years, they’ve released a movie without revealing what the next one is going to be), but this is still a fun, clever, and solidly entertaining blockbuster.

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The Third Time Around

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that to cast one actor as Spider-Man is a sound commercial decision, to cast a second might be seen as a little questionable, but to give three people the part in the space of only about fifteen years is arguably labouring the issue. And yet here we are, with another ingenue web-slinger in the form of Tom Holland, starring in Jon Watts’ Spider-Man: Homecoming. Yup, it’s yet another comic-book movie, but try to keep your fatigue at bay, for this one has a number of points of interest.

The Spider-Man rights are considered to be such a sure-fire guarantee to make money that the $709 million made by The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014 was somehow decided to be a bit of a disappointment. Holder of said rights, Sony, decreed that better must be done, and – in a move that brought wild excitement to many people who should arguably be old enough to know better – re-opened negotiations with Marvel, publisher of the Spider-Man comics and producer of their own series of wildly popular movies. Basically, the deal they cooked up is as follows – Marvel Studios are now making Spider-Man films for Sony, which Sony is financing and distributing. In return for this, and of course various hefty fees, Marvel now get to insert Spider-Man into their own movies, which is indeed what happened with his extended cameo in Civil War last year.

The new movie recaps Spider-Man’s trip to Berlin and shenanigans with the quarrelling Avengers, before moving on to pastures new. Spidey’s alter-ego Peter Parker (Holland) is still very young and keen to impress his mentor in all things superheroic, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) – he chafes against Stark’s insistence that he take things easy and go slow and careful for a while. In short, he is in a big hurry to grow up.

However, staying low to the ground, as it were, brings Spider-Man into contact with someone else very keen to stay off the radar of Iron Man and the other Avengers – Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), a former salvage engineer put out of business by Stark and the government, who has taken to scavenging alien materials and other miracle technology and using it to build high-technology super-weapons which he sells on to anyone who has the cash. Toomes has also built himself a set of jet-powered antigravity wings, because, hey, you’ve got to have a gimmick, I guess.

So, if going to your typical American high school, complete with stressful social rituals and ceremonies, wasn’t demanding enough, and trying to meet the exacting standards of billionaire genius playboy philanthropist didn’t make life totally unbearable, Spider-Man now finds himself forced to contend with the winged menace of this high-tech vulture. What’s a boy to do?

I have to confess I was less than overwhelmed with joy when the news of the Sony-Marvel deal came through – all right, it’s nice to have a version of Spider-Man in the MCU (the shared continuity of the other Marvel Studios films since 2008), but we have had some very good Spider-Man films already in the not too distant past, while there’s still no sign of a decent take on the Fantastic Four or Doctor Doom. Or what about another solo Hulk movie? Or Devil Dinosaur: the Movie? That said, however, Spider-Man: Homecoming is a top piece of entertainment, certainly outclassing the Marc Webb movies, and perhaps rivalling the standards of the best of the Sam Raimi-Tobey Maguire films from a decade and more ago.

The at-a-slight-remove conditions under which the Marvel Studios people are working seem to have paid off, for while this film has a distinctly different look and feel to it, compared to the likes of Doctor Strange and the Avengers movies, this is by no means a bad thing – it has a lightness of touch and sweetness that is totally disarming. Much of it is written and played as pure comedy, and it is consistently very funny indeed, in a disarmingly oddball way.

I was a bit dubious about the fact the film is called Homecoming, mainly because it seemed like it was only there as a crashingly unsubtle way of emphasising the fact that Spider-Man is now back in the MCU along with all the other characters, which at times seemed like the movie’s sole raison d’etre. This shared continuity is rammed down your throat at very regular intervals in the course of proceedings: the very first shot is a picture of the Avengers. The first scene takes place in the shadow of Avengers Tower, and is set shortly after the climactic battle from the first Avengers movie. Scenes from Civil War are restaged, Downey Jr appears in both his Stark and Iron Man guises, Jon Favreau reprises his role as Happy Hogan from the Iron Man films, Chris Evans cameos as Captain America, and another star gets an outrageous fourth billing considering they’re only in the movie for about two minutes. Marvel’s own movies take much less of a broad-brush approach to this sort of thing, but in the end it does kind of work, because a lot of the in-jokes and mickey-taking of the other films is spot on (this extends to some witty choices of voice casting and a brutally funny joke at the expense of the Cult of the Post-Credits Sequence).

One slightly ironic thing about this film that no-one has much commented on is the fact that Michael Keaton’s status as a ‘hot’ actor is largely down to his role in Birdman. Birdman was a film which gave its own sardonic commentary on the phenomenon of serious actors spending all their time in superhero movies, and yet Keaton has used it to get himself to this position, as a serious actor in a superhero movie – and, what’s more, playing the Vulture: someone who is, of course, essentially a… oh, work it out for yourselves.

All that to one side, Keaton is the film’s star turn when it comes to acting performances (although this is a notably well-played film throughout). We are quite a long way down from the pick of Spider-Man’s rogues gallery, and the Vulture suit in this movie is a rather unwieldy piece of design, but Keaton manages to create that rarest of things – not just a great villain in an MCU movie, but a blue-collar supervillain is who both a plausible character and genuinely menacing. You really wish Keaton was in the movie much more – also that the MCU people start to create characters with this sort of presence and depth for their own movies.

I would say that the climax of the movie is arguably a little weak, but in every other respect Homecoming gets the mixture of comedy, pathos, and exhilarating action you’d expect from a Spider-Man film pretty much spot on, with the film’s insertion into the wider Marvel universe a real bonus too. How many movies in a row now, without a serious misstep from Marvel Studios? You would have to be a very brave person to bet on their hot streak ending any time soon.

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Raging Blubber

One of the big casualties of the unstoppable Disney stellar conflict juggernaut appears to have been Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea, a lavish epic aspiring to have all the traditional narrative virtues, yet a film which has clearly struggled to find an audience (and, more importantly, make its money back). One can speculate as to whether this is down solely to all the cinemas as far as the eye can see desperately putting on as many lucrative showings of The Force Wakes Up as they possibly can, thus depriving other films of opportunities to connect with an audience, or whether Howard’s latest is a genuinely weak movie.

Everyone seems to have given up on it already, it would appear: less than two weeks after its UK debut, it has already vanished from the cinemas of central Oxford. One wonders whether the big studios will take note of this and simply not bother releasing any big films in the fortnight after Disney’s future stellar conflict brand extensions come out (I note that Columbia are still planning to release Passengers, another SF movie, late next December – it’ll be interesting to see whether they stick to their guns or just change the date).

With the film already having said farewell to the interior of most moviehouses, I suppose it seems a bit pointless to write about it now (greetings, visitors from the future), but I think the film deserves better than to be simply forgotten about out-of-hand. Plus, I can’t bring myself to pass up the opportunity to trot out some tired witticisms on the topic of angry sperm. So here we go.

In the Heart of the Sea is, as I said, a fairly old-fashioned movie, with the meat of the narrative occurring within a frame story set many years later: young writer Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) turns up at the house of old sea dog Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), last living survivor of the sunken whaling ship Essex. Eventually Melville persuades Nickerson to tell the tale of the ship’s final, doomed voyage.

The young Nickerson (played by Marvel’s new Spider-Man, Tom Holland) is but a lad on off on his first ocean trip, so most of the story revolves around two men. One of them is Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), an experienced whaler from a humble background – tough, charismatic, a leader of men. (He also has a pregnant wife, which is of course movie code indicating he’s about to have many horrible experiences.) Much to his chagrin, Chase is passed over for the captaincy of the Essex, in favour of George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), a man who owes his position solely to his family connections, with little real aptitude for command. Sparks inevitably fly.

Both men are thus determined to load up on whale oil and get back to Nantucket, where they are based, as quickly as possible – but the great beasts prove elusive, forcing the Essex deeper and deeper into the Pacific Ocean. Reports from the crippled ex-captain of a Spanish whaler lead them to offshore grounds where the whales have taken sanctuary from the hunters – but they ignore his warnings of a huge, ferocious white whale, given to attacking whaling ships, something they will live to regret…

So, as you can see, this is a big, stirring, briney tale, of men pitting themselves against nature at its most savage, very much in the tradition of macho nautical shenanigans like The Bounty and Master and Commander – but with Mel Gibson and Russell Crowe both being a shade long in the tooth for this sort of thing, the services of another Antipodean alpha-male have been retained, in the form of Chris Hemsworth.

Hemsworth is one of those actors who has an extremely impressive career box office take, but who’s yet to prove his ability to open a movie under his own name – does he have a career beyond just playing Thor, in other words? Well, he gives a very solid performance here – you can’t dispute Hemsworth’s presence or charisma, but I just wonder if he quite has the ability to suggest emotional depth to really make it as a star in his own right.

Then again, this movie is strong on the rollicking adventure front, but the characters are a little bit thin – you quickly get a handle on the fact that Pollard is a martinet, and Chase isn’t going to take any nonsense, and then not very much else happens. Cillian Murphy is also on board as the second mate, and while he is customarily good, he doesn’t get a huge amount to do.

Still, the movie remains solidly entertaining throughout the opening voyage and the set-piece whale attack which is, if you’ll permit me, at the heart of the film. The producers made the slightly odd decision to show this key sequence in isolation as an extended trailer for the film (I saw it before Bridge of Spies), which seems to have become a common tactic to advertise films about which a studio is getting nervous. Impressive though the scene is, I’m not sure seeing it out of context really does the film justice, and having already seen it, it inevitably loses some of its impact here.

However, once all the whaling and gnashing of teeth is over and done with, the film still has the best part of an hour left to run, and so it settles into a sort of stoical-metaphysical-existential mode which is slightly heavy going. The survivors of the Essex drift about in some open boats, occasionally stopping off at a desert island or engaging in a little light cannibalism to survive, and it’s all curiously unengaging. The slightly surprising decision to have the white whale occasionally show up to harass them really strains credulity as well: this happens very occasionally over a period of nearly three months (or so we are assured), and if nothing else the avenging sperm summons up the spectre of Jaws: The Revenge.

The film does its best to provide a strong climax, and Gleeson and Whishaw are strong in the frame story, but it’s hard to escape the impression that this is a film which starts strongly but then falls off a bit. It is a bit similar to other films in the all-at-sea genre, too, which can’t have helped it, and the fact it is so unreconstructedly blokey may have been a bit of an issue as well. (Charlotte Riley and Michelle Fairley have very subordinate roles as wives.) It’s not so old-fashioned that it doesn’t find time for a few moments of implied criticism of the whole enterprise of whaling, which almost feel all the more jarring for being the only concessions to a modern perspective.

This is by no means a bad film, but I doubt it was ever going to be a critical or popular smash, and releasing it when they did was almost certainly a gamble by Warner Brothers. Whatever else, it’s still a worthy, good-looking film with some impressive individual moments and sequences – it’s just not quite as epic or stirring or exciting as it really needs to be to completely succeed as a movie.

 

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