Gateway Cinephiles

Late to the Game: 9

2009 (USA)
Director: Shane Acker
Viewed: January 10, 2010
Format: DVD – Universal (2009)

Shane Acker’s talent for nimble, evocative world-building is on full display in 9.  It’s telling that even at a lean 79 minutes, the film still feels a bit padded and sluggish on the story front, given that all the satisfying setting crunchiness is delivered swiftly and efficiently.  Acker deftly establishes the essential traits of his post-apocalyptic world and the clan of burlap-skinned homunculi that inhabit it, while leaving plenty to implication and imagination, including the precise mechanics of the setting’s steampunk-tinged alchemical magic.  Perhaps unexpectedly, the nine little doll-folk are quite distinctive, both visually and as characters, but the real draw here is not the simplistic story—a hero awakens evil and then defeats evil, etc., etc.—but the richness of the blasted landscape, the uncanny menace of the monsters that stalk it, and the thrills of numerous small-scale battles and escapes.  Even the vague, unnecessarily drawn-out ending doesn’t markedly detract from 9’s guiltless visceral appeal, which is that of a novel, densely detailed world sketched with precision and enthusiasm.  Acker gratifyingly demonstrates that not only aren’t the fantasy, science-fiction, and dystopian genres dead, they’re often found in the same film, and a gorgeously animated one at that.

Mr. Cameron Wants You to Be Comfortable While He Does His Thing

Avatar
2009 (USA)
Director: James Cameron
Viewed: December 22, 2009
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (AMC West Olive)
I was only one year old when Star Wars was released in 1977, which means that for all practical purposes, I’ve always lived in a post-Star Wars world.  While I later participated quite enthusiastically in the broader consumer phenomenon often summed up as simply “Star Wars,”—encompassing sequels, toys, comics, and card games, to name just the few products I personally devoured—I was too young to catch Star Wars: A New Hope in its original theatrical release.  Even if I had been a few years older at the time, I obviously wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it as anything other than an entertaining tale of adventure.  Accordingly, when older generations speak of the revolutionary nature of Star Wars as cinema, of how it blew their minds and opened up previously undreamed possibilities in terms of the places movies could take us, I’ve always nodded along without ever truly understanding what they were saying.  How could I?  Subsequent cinema has been irrecoverably altered—or tainted, depending on your point of view—by the existence of Star Wars and is phenomenal commercial success.

Perhaps the highest praise I can bestow on James Cameron’s mind-bogglingly expensive 3D science-fiction epic, Avatar, is that I can now understand how my forebears felt when they first settled in to let Star Wars wash over them.  There’s nothing particularly nuanced about Avatar, which is essentially a standard science-fiction adventure, straight up, no chaser.  Thematically, emotionally, and structurally, its ambitions are modest, even pedestrian.  However, like Star Wars before it, Avatar is a revolutionary film.  You’ve heard it a hundred times before, but this time is indisputably true: This Is Like Nothing I Have Ever Seen.  It is fitting that it has been birthed by James Cameron, a technophilic film-maker whose finest works tell simple stories with relentless energy and discreet intelligence.  It’s a cliché to insist that a movie must be seen in the theaters to be appreciated, but Avatar is the first film in memory than positively demands that it be experienced in its full glory, and that means 3D digital theatrical projection.  This is a film that will be a shadow of its former self on even the most elaborate home theater system.  Trust me on this: cough up the funds for that overpriced multiplex ticket, and prepare to see a new world unfold before your eyes.

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Late to the Game: Terminator Salvation

2009 (USA)
Director: McG
Viewed: December 18, 2009
Format: DIRECTV DEMAND

Just as Nick Stahl’s skittish, fatalistic John Connor fit Rise of the Machines‘ ferocious rush towards a bleak future, a zealous yet cynical Christian Bale–plagiarizing his Batman growl–suits Terminator Salvation’s gritty realization of that future.  This, and the admittedly seamless visual effects, is about the only thing that McG’s distressingly rote sequel gets right.  This outing’s central conceit–SkyNet has spawned an experimental half-human, half-machine abomination (a rugged, essentially charmless Sam Worthington)–isn’t remotely meaty enough to sustain a feature film.  The story is as limp as a noodle, but even as a mindless science-fiction actioner, Salvation fumbles.  At about the halfway point, McG trades genuinely frightening early set pieces for dull sensory incoherence.  Blessedly, it’s not the nerve-frying visual lunacy of a Michael Bay film, but just the undistinguished smash-bang nonsense that has characterized vast swaths of the past two decades’ action films.  That such mediocrity has befallen that Terminator saga is all the more frustrating given that the film-makers are clearly besotted with the previous films, loading Salvation with references and homages that range from the blatant to the clever. If only fanboy enthusiasm alone were sufficient to conjure a good film.

Late to the Game: Star Trek

2009 (USA)
Director: J. J. Abrams
Viewed: November 24, 2009
Format: Blu-ray - Paramount (2009)

With his reboot of the moribund Star Trek franchise, J. J. Abrams has chucked out the moralizing and paper-thin social allegory that characterized Gene Rodenberry’s original series and delivered something closer to a Buck Rogers-style swashbuckling space opera.  Abrams is keenly aware that for Trekkies and casual viewers alike, the iconic characters are always what lent the series its endurance. His tactic is to transplant those characters into a rollicking adventure, while retaining the physics mumbo-jumbo and desperate gambits that have always been the franchise’s bread-and-butter.  The film is also an arch variant on the “Getting the Team Together” formula, as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, et al. are slotted into place for their syndicated television destiny.  Predictably, the elaborate, time-hopping plot is only sketchily conveyed, and without William Shatner’s hammy presence, it is shockingly evident (to this non-Trekkie) that James T. Kirk was always a bit of an asshole.  Still, Star Trek is dazzling, giddy stuff, a complete re-purposing of a pop culture institution for distinctly old school cinematic thrills, complete with black holes, monstrous aliens, and doomsday weapons.  If Abrams’ only goal was to render Starfleet officers as the badass successors of pirates and cowboys, then mission accomplished.

Quick Review: District 9

2009 (USA / New Zealand)
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Viewed: August 27, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

The lusciously realized science fiction setting of District 9 almost compensates for the film’s slack qualities.  Eschewing deep space wonders, director Neill Blomkamp brings his extraterrestrials into the dusty, militarized locale of modern South Africa.  The first twenty minutes of District 9 constitute its most lively and gratifying stretch, as Blomkamp lithely blends faux footage from news programs, documentaries, security cameras, and other sources to set up his tale.  However, what starts out as a gripping, blackly comic work evolves into a wearying slog, with the film reverting to the obnoxious chase-escape-chase rhythm of countless action films.  (It’s telling that a COPS-style ride-along early in the film is its best sequence.)  The film’s visual flourishes are arresting and often witty, from the swirl of flickering symbols within an alien cockpit, to the sight of giant insects in castoff human clothing.  Such pleasures, however, aren’t worth the surrounding ballast.  The attempts to analogize the alien “prawns” with real-world refugees are clumsy and illogical.  The story depends on a protagonist who acts head-slappingly stupid with irksome consistency, and doesn’t evoke the sympathy that Blomkamp imagines he does.  Most disappointingly, District 9 eventually succumbs unfortunately typical scifi tedium.

Here I Am Sitting in a Tin Can, Far Above the World

Moon
2009 (UK)
Director: Duncan Jones
Viewed: July 25, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Feature science fiction cinema is looking a tad moribund these days.   One can count on a single hand the milestones of the past five years, and one of those would be a children’s cartoon: Children of Men, A Scanner Darkly, and WALL•E.  (The Host and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow might warrant nods if one were feeling generous.)  It would seem that quality “hard” science fiction—i.e. narrative fiction that explores political, social, or ethical conundrums within a futurist or speculative setting—is becoming a rarer and rarer beast.  Thank goodness, then, for the appearance of Duncan Jones’ Moon, a film that is so smartly constructed, so effortlessly engrossing, and so thought-provoking, that it feels like a monsoon after a long drought.  Jones and riveting lead Sam Rockwell have created a sterling example of what science fiction can achieve at its most disciplined, empathetic, and imaginative.  Moon seems destined to be a topic for countless late-night discussions—not about what happened during the film, necessarily, but about the implications of those events and about the unpleasant choices that a comparable future might someday demand of us.

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Ordinary’s Just Not Good Enough Today

Watchmen
2009 (USA)
Director: Zack Snyder
Viewed: March 11, 2009
Format: IMAX Theatrical Print

Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen is a dizzying feat of world-building, among the densest and most bewildering I’ve ever seen. It’s a sprawling, exhausting work, one that perpetually threatens to burst from the director’s control, and on occasion succeeds in effecting just such an escape. The story Snyder is attempting to tell is simply too vast, too intricate, too discomfiting, too pensive, and too nasty for its nearly-three-hour running time to accommodate. It is, in other words, a glorious mess of a film, offering novel, absorbing sights and themes but also unfortunately susceptible to off-key indulgences and the wearying effect of an undisciplined structure. That said, Watchmen is a fascinating mess, one that calls out to be scrutinized, explored, and savored, like a cinematic collage. It is the not the ur-superhero film that fans might have hoped, but no matter. It will rattle and mystify many viewers, I suspect, especially those who have never paused to contemplate the implications of a world of caped crusaders.

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Review: WALL•E

2008 (USA)
Director: Andrew Stanton
Viewed: July 27, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

WALL•E delivers to the anemic landscape of science fiction cinema a much-needed shot of vitality and depth. This is especially the case for that rare subspecies of sci-fi film that WALL•E delightfully embodies, one that is at once engaging, challenging, and appropriate for children. If the film has a flaw–and its flaws are rare indeed–it is the filmmakers’ dogged insistence on exploring a proflieration of ethical and philosophical quandries when a sublime little allegory might have sufficed. Lest I damn with faint praise, let’s be clear about one thing: WALL•E is simultaneously the best animated film, children’s film, and science fiction film of the year. The electricity that tingles within its comfortable tropes signals a turning point in Pixar’s oeuvre, not to mention Disney’s. Although it lacks the virtuosity that made the studio’s Ratatouille one of the best films of 2007, WALL•E has an ache of grand ambition in its bones, one that bodes well for the potential of “children’s entertainment” to still take people of all ages to undiscovered worlds without and within. (Minor spoilers follow…)

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Review: The Dark Knight

2008
Director: Christopher Nolan
Viewed: July 20, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Indulge me for a moment, as I’m going get effusive right off the bat (pun intended). With The Dark Knight, writer-director Christopher Nolan sets upon the “comic book film” with sledgehammer and napalm, and delivers the sort of sorely needed genre reconstruction that occurs once in a generation. Here we have, at long last, a film that winnows away the limitations of comics, distills their strengths, and emerges as a work wholly cinematic in character, leaving its ancestral medium far behind. The Dark Knight is a noir action epic of the grandest, bleakest, most exhilarating sort. It is not a flawless film, nor is it a masterpiece. However, it is a wonder to behold. It is a film so ambitious, so dizzying in its lofty heights and abyssal depths, I suspect that it was only the appealing Batman branding that permitted Nolan to create it at all. This is Hollywood film-making as bloodless revolution. As Heath Ledger’s terrifying Joker observes, “You’ve changed things. There’s no going back.”

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Quick Review: Hancock

2008
Director: Peter Berg
Viewed: July 8, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

In the abstract, Will Smith’s reluctant, negligent superman, John Hancock, is a comic hero with an admittedly cunning twist. And Smith, to his credit, uses his own boundless charisma to nicely affect the mysterious messiah’s transition from sophomoric alcoholic to godling with a conscience. In the end, however, the Idea and the Star alone cannot elevate Hancock when the filmmakers have relatively pedestrian ambitions. The film’s best moments are also its nastiest–such as when Smith flings a little bully a few thousand feet into the sky to put the fear of Krypton into him. Too often, however, Hancock lunges for cheap sentiment or weak laughs. Berg’s camera captures the distinctive glaze of modern Los Angeles, but also insists on a style that consists primarily of constant, distracting jiggling. I wasn’t bothered by the out-of-left-field revelation in Hancock’s third act, but its poorly conveyed implications and the confused, tension-free climax ensured that the “surprise” was wasted. The early glee at watching Hancock’s disastrous attempts at heroism (and Smith’s “Fuck Y’all” attitude) just barely make up for the generally limp storytelling, or the discomfiting subtext in a black man–even a black superman–who needs to go to prison to learn a lesson.