What We Talk About When We Talk About Sexy Robots

Speculative fiction is, at its best, a tool for presenting complex concepts in easily relatable packages. From Star Trek modelling a post-racial world for 60s audiences, to Alien Nation and District 9 discussing immigration and integration and prejudice, to Battlestar Galactica's attempts to reconcile faith and science, and its explorations of artificial longevity and serial incarnation, good science fiction, meaningful speculative fiction, has always tried to do something with its premise beyond the merely spectacular.

Ex Machina is very good science fiction, indeed.

A lovely alternate poster, courtesy of Francesco Francavilla

The Fandom Re-Awakens

Really, is there anything else I could write about for my grand re-entry into the blogging world?

That's right. We're going to talk about Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

*fanfare*
(The film will now pause for ten minutes while the audience applauds wildly.)

Although I could, of course I could, I'm going to restrain myself from talking about the movie in relation to the history of Star Wars; the prequels, the old Expanded Universe, all those sorts of things. I absolutely will go into those issues at some point, because good heavens is there ample fodder for discussion there! But it feels appropriate to start with the movie, not as the obliteration of nearly twenty-five years of continuity (that's right, I count from the Thrawn Trilogy; suck it, Splinter of the Mind's Eye!) or the rectification of the poor choices and missed opportunities of the now-decade-old prequel trilogy, but as nothing more or less than a movie in its own right. Because ultimately, it has to stand and fall as that.

So, The Force Awakens. Is it any good?

Like 300, But With Way More Gunfire

I just have to say this; the opening to Dredd is awful. It's just really, really bad. It consists of a freeway chase and a mall shootout, and while the action is decently staged, it in no way, shape or form looks like the kind of world Judge Dredd should be operating in. It looks like it's taking place in a particularly rundown section of contemporary Los Angeles. It's about as underwhelming as an opening can be, really.

Which is annoying, because the rest of this movie is pretty great.

The Best $7 I've Spent in Ages!

Pacific Rim is one of the greatest, dumbest action movies I've seen in a long, long time. And I mean that in the best possible way. This movie isn't dumb like, say, Star Trek Into Darkness, whose villain's behaviour can only be reconciled by assuming he is both working for and against another villain simultaneously, or The Dark Knight Rises, which completely wastes the entire emotional arc of the trilogy by having the people of Gotham not do a damn thing to save themselves. No, Pacific Rim is dumb in the biggest, coolest, most fantastic way possible, in the kind of way that doesn't let silly little things like reality and physics get in the way of grandiose displays of pure spectacle.

For example, there's a scene in the trailers where the hero's robot, Gipsy Danger, wields a cargo ship like a sword. This scene is dumb as a box of hammers. Just picking up a ship like that from one end would probably snap it in half amidships, nevermind dragging one end along a pretty long causeway. And then it gets swung through the air and collides with a giant monster. Multiple times! You can punch a hole in the hull of a ship like this by hitting it with a particularly sharp rock; the chances that it would've remained intact long enough to serve as a make-shift weapon for not just one, but several strokes, is essentially nil.

But it looks cool as hell!

As Criticism of Criticism, This Post is Insanely Meta

A formal warning, right here at the very start; I am going to be talking, in some detail, about Man of Steel, its critics, their criticism, and several key plot points and scenes. This post absolutely will contain spoilers. Anyone who hasn't yet seen this film, but wants to, and wants to do so un-spoiled, should not read this post.

Man of Steel has now supplanted Superman III as the most contested of the Superman films. Pretty much everyone agrees that I and II are good, if a little slow and uneven and very 70s; likewise, pretty much everyone agrees that IV and Returns are awful. Before this, III was the go-to movie if you wanted to find people actually arguing about whether a Superman movie was good or not. But now we have Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, and all of a sudden the presence of Richard Pryor's comedy stylings in a Superman movie seems a downright quaint point of contention. Ah, progress.

It's Not Perfect, But What Is?

Man of Steel accomplishes in its 143 minutes what Smallville spent 10 seasons alternating trying and failing, and just plain not trying, to do; show how Clark Kent, a young man of strange parentage alternately blessed and cursed with fantastic abilities, grows into the role of Superman, as much a symbol of heroism as a hero himself. It's not unlike Batman Begins, a similarity helped along by the presence of Christopher Nolan as producer, in the way it tracks its titular hero from their definitive origin point (the alley shooting for Batman, the destruction of Krypton for Superman) through a somewhat dissolute period of travel, into a return to their point of origin, and ultimately the establishment of their superheroic identity amongst the broader public. It's a bit formulaic, but hey, not all formulas are bad.

I Demand Those 133 Minutes Back

God damnit, J. J. Abrams. God. Damnit.

The 2009 Star Trek reboot was launched for ostensibly one reason; modern Trek scribes were simply too hamstrung by decades of continuity. There was no way to tell fresh, new stories with all that established history clinging to the franchise, like barnacles on a ship's hull.  In order to tell twenty-first century stories, we needed a twenty-first century Star Trek.  I never actually accepted that argument, and would hold up the 'Typhon Pact' book series as being clear evidence that this is in fact complete nonsense, but at least it was something. And heck, even if the reboot wasn't necessary, at least there was talk of bold, new ideas. Coming off the pathetically anemic Star Trek: Enterprise and the simultaneously backwards-looking and continuity-ignoring Nemesis, that was worth something.

And then, apparently to prove all that was simply the most epic case of trolling imaginable, Abrams makes Khan the villain. No wonder he called it 'Star Trek Into Darkness'; if he'd called it anything even remotely like Star Trek 2 and had it use Khan as the villain, even his omnipresent lens flare and Apple Genius Bar-looking starship aesthetic couldn't have hoped to disguise the absolutely shameless and transparent failure of imagination that is this movie.

Also, the casting of Benedict Cumberbatch, one of the most quintessentially white actors imaginable, as Khan Noonien Singh, an Indian Sikh 'prince', is downright offensive. Like, 'The Last Airbender' levels of offensive. Or beyond, even.  It was bad enough that the racial and sexual dynamics were being recycled from a nearly fifty year old product, completely ignoring three series' worth of progress (Enterprise offered no forward motion for any group) in terms of crew breakup and reflection of present multiculturalism.  But to actually be less willing to cast non-white actors than an American network television series from the 60s?  That's so far beyond sad it starts to look suspicious.

Star Trek Into Darkness is, like 2009's Star Trek, worthless.  It's an interesting premise utterly squandered, with nothing to say about present day issues, a half-baked 'homage' to a movie that was already done as well as could be done wrapped with enough pyrotechnics and lazy action scenes to hopefully bamboozle the viewer into thinking something meaningful is going on.  This movie is bad, not in the way a Michael Bay or Friedberg/Seltzer movie is bad, but in the way it absolutely squanders all of its admittedly-considerable promise in favour of lazily 're-imagining' existing stories and characters while not only adding nothing, but actually subtracting a great deal.  Yet again, the new Star Trek team has given us a film, and a villain, that requires considerable supplemental material to actually connect with.  This is beyond lazy.

I think I'm done with Star Trek films.  I gave it two chances, and it failed me in each case.  And that's okay, because the book series is fantastic.  Maybe when the studio gets tired of wallowing in nostalgia and decides to try a new sreies I'll take a look in, but for now?  Screw it, I have better things to do with my time than watch Abrams and crew completely fumble every pass they're thrown.

And I hope you do, too.

He Doesn't Love Her For Her Brains. And That's Good.

Alright, let's get this out of the way right here at the start; Warm Bodies is Romeo and Juliet with zombies. Her name is Julie. His name is R. They come from 'families' that hate each other to death (and beyond). He's got a buddy named M. She's got a confidante who wants to be a nurse. There's even a scene where she's looking down on him from a balcony.

So yeah, it's Romeo and Juliet with zombies. But that just tells us what it is; it doesn't tell us if it's any good.

And It's Not Even Really About an Invasion!

Starship.  Troopers.  Invasion.

Just... just look at it...

Oh my god, this movie is hilariously awful!

I know, I know, way to give it all away right from the start. But honestly, I can't help it; Starship Troopers: Invasion is just a terrible movie. It's tonally confused, it has no central character, it's neither serious nor sarcastic about the universe, it is just riddled with bizarre decisions and minor plot holes, and most bafflingly, it involves the original trio from the 1997 live action film and then makes their characters look absolutely nothing like them. Rico you might get away with by pointing to his scars and eyepatch, but Carmen is now a short, slender woman with short black hair, and Carl is...  Well, some sort of ghoul, I think. Neil Patrick Harris this most certainly is not!

Alright, so what's this trainwreck all about? Well, not much. Or at least, not much that actually hangs together. Some MI are sent to a station built into an asteroid to rescue some other MI guys, since the bugs have gotten loose. Carl steals Carmen's ship, leaving her to get a lift with the MI on their ship, along with a guy nicknamed, I'm not kidding, Hero. And let me assure you, this movie is nowhere near self-aware enough to get away with naming what appears, for the first two-thirds or so, to be its protagonist Hero. Anyway, Hero is in the stockade for Reasons, and when Rico calls to tell the MI to go after Carl and Carmen's ship, which has stopped transmitting, Hero's men declare that they want him to lead them on the mission. It's impossible to really have an opinion on this, because you have no idea who Hero is or what he's in trouble for. Nevertheless, the movie seems to think you should find this heartwarming, and that you should consider Hero heroic. There's also a random sex scene and a random shower scene, and a fight between a couple of MI grunts with nothing beyond the barest of stereotypical characteristics, which is won when a female MI grunt flashes some tit at one of them, inspiring him to fight on. I guess. I actually thought she was distracting him, but then he somehow powers through because of that flash of CGI nipple, so what do I know?

Anyway, with the gratuitous nudity out of the way, the MI catch up with Carmen's ship and board it, to find the entire crew slaughtered by bugs save for Carl, who's having a psychotic episode, offering cryptic advice that would have solved all the problems to come if he'd just said what he bloody hell meant. From there it's all scenes of MI gunning down bugs with about as much success as they had in the first movie, the grunts dying in ways that are clearly meant to be tragically heroic but fall flat because the movie has spent maybe a minute developing each of their characters, tops, and a truly absurdly one-sided space battle. The stupidity finally culminates in Rico landing with a squad of expendable grunts in giant robots to try and rescue the survivors, so that they can recreate the ending scene of the three original characters from the '97 movie but with none of the emotional set-up necessary for it to come off as a meaningful moment for them. It's an homage purely for its own sake, rather than one that serves the story.

Not that there's much story to serve.

To be fair, I didn't go into this thing with much hope of a good story. Really, I was hoping for some great visual action sequences; this is, after all, from Shinji Aramaki, the man who did Appleseed: Ex Machina, and that movie had a cyborg in a robot wielding a chainsaw sword to kill swarms of sentinels from the Matrix inside a floating Borg doom-fortress! Unfortunately, Starship Troopers: Invasion is as far from that as, well, the original Starship Troopers would have been. The action is almost all MI grunts hopelessly firing off huge quantities of bullets to try and kill bugs, mostly to no avail. There's nothing interesting in the staging or the fights themselves, and even when Rico and his giant robot show up, there's no real energy to his fights. The only time the movie feels like it's got something to offer, visually, is when the engine room on Carmen's ship starts up again, though that looks more like a giant casino than something you'd recognize as a power generator. It's honestly a tragic waste of potential, and manages to really drag down the action scenes to the point where I was honestly bored by them as often as not. There's nothing even remotely interesting or new here; if you've seen the original, you've seen all this has to offer.  And considering that Starship Troopers is a sixteen year old movie that looks like it was made on a shoestring, that's really sad.

You can maybe make an argument that ST:I is 'so bad its good', but there's no debating that this is a bad movie. The characters don't even rise to the level of archetypes for the most part, the returning trio are nothing like the originals (in look, word or deed), the plot is beyond wafer-thin, and the action is bland and repetitive. Considering all it could have been, to see it sink to these pitiful depths is really kind of depressing.

The Real Alternative to Yellow Spandex

I want to talk about Chronicle, because I finally got around to watching it, and I really enjoyed it, and contrary to my last couple of reviews I do actually like talking about things I enjoy. But first, I want to talk about whether I should be talking about Chronicle, here.

For those who don't know, Chronicle is about three teenagers who find a thing in a cave that grants them telekinetic powers. My first instinct was to classify it as action sci-fi. And I'm not alone in that; the Lovely Madam Meagan did the same after we watched it, and the first seven words in its Wikipedia entry are "Chronicle is a 2012 science fiction film'. But then I stopped and tried to think about why Chronicle is a science fiction film, and I realized I couldn't come up with a single thing. The thing the boys encounter isn't obviously technological. Their abilities are as likely the result of some bizarre natural radiation producing a mutation. Or, heck, magic. The thing is never studied, at least not by the boys, and their abilities are never explained as being some previously-untapped ability all humans possess. There are no aliens, no lasers or force-fields, no super soldiers, no robots or battle armour. Nothing in this film is particularly science fiction-y. Frankly, it's more fantasy than anything else, albeit a rather dark sort. But because it doesn't involve wizards or vampires or werewolves, nobody seems to think of it that way.

Science fiction, it seems, now constitutes anything fantastical that isn't explicitly magical or supernatural. Which is weird, because it means the genre picks up things like Chronicle and Hancock, good films that don't actually have anything to do with where they wind up. Are superhero movies just science fiction by default, now?

Still, if we're going to wind up with movies arbitrarily crammed into the science fiction genre, it's nice when they're as good as Chronicle. The movie follows three high school boys, Andrew, Matt and Steve. Andrew is the son of an abusive father and a dying mother, and his purchase of a hilariously oversized portable camera starts the film. Dragged out to a party by his cousin Matt, Andrew is spotted by Steve, the school's resident cool kid who, surprisingly, is just a really nice guy. Rather than bullying or insulting Andrew, Steve actually wants a favour; can Andrew come record this amazing thing he and Matt have found with his omnipresent camera? The thing, frankly, defies description, and not just because whatever energy it's putting out is interfering with the camera. It looks star-shaped, some form of glowing crystal half-obscured by rock, and demonstrates some rather impressively strange properties. From their exposure to it the boys discover they've gained telekinesis, a power that's roughly equal for all of them but finds expression in ways particular to each of the three's temperaments. And unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, the temperament of a bullied outcast with an alcoholic and abusive father and a slowly and painfully dying mother is perhaps not the best one to entrust with powerful telekinetic abilities.

Chronicle is, first and foremost, a character piece. For all its mysterious power sources and superhero-style antics, the movie is really about Andrew and Matt. Steve is a decidedly minor character, though he gets some good moments, and the movie certainly wouldn't play out the same without him. The movie's driving conflict, in the absence of supervillains or monsters, is the struggle between Andrew and Matt, between an abused and bullied kid who suddenly finds himself with more power than anyone else, and a smug and pretentious but ultimately level-headed kid who understands that they need rules and boundaries. Matt is afraid of them doing something terrible, by accident or on purpose; Andrew is tired of having the terrible things in life happen only to him. Competing outlooks based on radically different upbringings set the cousins on a collision course that is as obvious and inevitable as it is believable and tragic.

The acting is solid, probably made easier by the fact that there are only really a handful of characters in the film. The handheld style of the movie helps with viewer perception of the actors' presentations, as well; the semi-intimate feel of the well-executed affectation draws the viewer in. It's a nice touch, and it more than the lack of costumes and wise old uncles really sets this film apart from the superhero genre. Not enough to escape being reflexively labelled science fiction, of course, but still. There are some weak elements, particularly a romance subplot for Matt that just sort of peters out, but on the whole the focus is kept tight, on the increasing friction between responsible Matt and predatory Andrew.

Whether you like superhero movies or not, Chronicle is definitely worth a look. And it's done well enough that it's got a sequel in the works, something I'm looking forward to. Perhaps this time I'll even manage to make it to the theatres before it closes up its run!

And He'll Keep Looping Until He Gets It Right!

There's this scene in Looper, about halfway through the film. Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, playing the same character, Joe the Looper, separated by thirty years of life experience, sit down in a diner. Gordon-Levitt starts to ask about Willis' memories, his understanding of their shared existence, particularly as it diverges further from the past Willis remembers when he was Gordon-Levitt. Angrily, Willis cuts off the questions, declaring he's not there to talk about that; if they try, then it's only a matter of time before they're trying to make diagrams out of straws on the tabletop.

It's an amusing line, and somewhat self-aware, but it's important because it represents the views of the creator. Rian Johnson, the writer-director and therefore basically the authority on the film, has made it quite clear that he had always intended to make a movie that involved time travel, but not a time travel movie. There would be no neat 1985/1985A drawings on chalkboards, no predestination paradoxes trying to rescue doomed loves, no men in terrifying rabbit costumes and none of whatever the heck Primer is. At the end of the day, Looper is about a guy, a functional junkie who's happy being a trigger man for the mob, whose life suddenly gets turned completely upside-down and who has to finally take a good, hard look at himself and justify his choices.

It just, y'know, happens to involve time travel, and telekinetic mutants, and a plot to kill a future criminal overlord while they're still a child.

I wonder if Willis insisted on getting the cooler gun...

Set in 2044, clearly in the midst of the collapse of western civilization, Looper is seriously bleak. Everyone seems to have weapons, and no hesitation about using them, with petty thieves getting gunned down in the street and not a single eyelash batted. Nobody, however, has much of anything else; food, clothes, housing, it all seems to be in decidedly short supply. For Joe, his best friend Seth and the other Loopers, however, things couldn't be better. Young men of limited horizons and simple appetites, the Loopers are paid well to execute prisoners sent back by the mob thirty years in the future, on the understanding that they too will eventually be sent back to keep the precise information regarding time travel a secret. When that happens, one 'closes their loop'. The payday is bigger, much bigger, the Looper is let out of their contract, and are set loose with the knowledge that they have about thirty years of guaranteed survival to enjoy before someone comes to send them back, bag on head and gold bars strapped to their backs.

Of course, if it were really that simple, there wouldn't be much movie. Instead of simply being sent back and dealt with quickly and cleanly, the older version of Joe manages to arrive unhooded and unrestrained, and with the help of just a moment of hesitation turns the tables on his younger self. This sets off the plot of the film; old Joe is looking for the identity of the Rainmaker, a brutal criminal crime lord in the future who's been closing all the loops, so he can stop them before they're too powerful. Young Joe is looking for old Joe, since if he fails to close his loop he'll have to answer to the present-day representative of the Rainmaker, Abe. And Abe and his lieutenants are looking for both of them, to kill old Joe or to use young Joe to find him, in a none-too-gentle fashion. This three-way chase sequence drives the overall plot, but it's young Joe's slowly-unfolding realizations about himself that propel the story.

Despite being slathered in makeup to try and look like a young Bruce Willis and called on to occasionally imitate the venerable action movie superstar, Gordon-Levitt turns in a truly impressive performance. Joe isn't stupid, just short-sighted; a child of the streets, at a time when the streets are as dangerous as they've ever been, he's never had any use for a long-term view. But as he confronts his older self, the choices he's made and the choices he's going to make, and interacts with a few other, key characters, including a slightly precocious child and a few of Abe's lieutenant's, he starts to develop a sense of himself and where he fits into the wider world. Gordon-Levitt plays young Joe with a fine mixture of swaggering street-tough, recovering junkie and frightened victim-to-be, trading time among these aspects but never letting any one of them overwhelm the others. It's a good, nuanced performance, in a role that could easily have just settled for someone doing a decent Bruce Willis voice and playing the cliched Gruff and Stoic Killer With a Good Heart. Joe's not a monster, but he's not a hero either, and Gordon-Levitt plays both sides of it quite nicely. He does it so well, in fact, that the ending seems comes at you straight out of left field, but after even just a second's reflection it's entirely obvious. The more I see of Gordon-Levitt, the more impressed I am.

For instance, I'm impressed by his ability to act wearing an entire second face.

Willis turns in a less nuanced performance. With thirty years of experience as a killer for the Chinese mob, a revenge plan in his head and no ties to anyone in 2044, he's mostly just a killing machine. Think Clint Eastwood, at the end of Unforgiven. But even then, he manages to put in a couple of nice, emotional beats. Old Joe had a wife in the future, the loss of whom he feels very deeply, and despite his singular focus on ending the threat of the Rainmaker before it begins, after he guns down his first lead he really sells the depth of his horror and disgust at murdering a child, in cold blood, for nothing.

Looper is a rock solid action movie, with some really good ideas and an actual heart, a rare thing these days. There are some beats that are obvious, such as young Joe picking one of the three target houses to lie in wait for his older self and, of course, forming a relationship with the child there. Some cliches, you just can't get away from. But overall the movie is sharp, willing to tread strange new ground both as an action movie with science-fiction elements and a science-fiction movie with action elements. It has a certain timelessness to it, simultaneously racing along and feeling like it could have already run for hours. The sets are well designed, futuristic but not so much that they seem fake, a space designed rather than lived in, and there some nice, subtle touches that make it clear that while this isn't our world, it could be, down the line.

I must offer a warning, though. Despite the writers' disdain for straw diagrams as expressed by Willis, it's hard not to try and make sense of the conflicting timelines. Go ahead, but realize that things are not going to line up neatly. This is the sort of time travel where effect can precede cause, even incite cause in the first place, and there are elements of the final timeline that are blatantly paradoxical. Since none of the characters in the film are scientists this isn't really addressed, becoming neither a problem nor a source of technobabble, which is ultimately the best way to handle it. It just is; the universe is, as the saying goes, not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine. But yes, the timelines of certain characters, and particularly the entanglement of Joe and the Rainmaker, do create something of a puzzle to chew over after you leave the theatre.

But, only well after you leave. Because when you first walk out of the theatre, I can pretty much guarantee you'll be focused on one of two things. Either you'll be thinking about Joe's character arc, or about what happened to poor, dumb Seth...

When Creators Lose the Plot

As much as The Dark Knight Rises has problems with its plot, and pacing, and some of its character work, and it most certainly has problems with all three, that's not the real problem with this movie. No, the real problem is so much deeper than that. It took me a while to really wrap my head around it, but after talking it over with a few associates, particularly Major Armstrong and the Lovely Madame Meagan, I think I've put my finger on it. Those issues I mentioned, at the start of this paragraph? Those are simply issues with Rises on its own, irrespective of its standing in Nolan's trilogy. No, the real issue is that of the three major themes running through the Nolan trilogy, Rises completely wrecks two, and just sort of ignores the third.

Be warned; from here on out, there be spoilers.

"As a man I'm flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol... As a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting."
- Bruce Wayne

"Everlasting, two years, y'know, whichever comes first."

In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne realizes that Gotham is so far gone, so riddled with corruption, so owned by the mob, its people so terrified or coerced or co-opted, that no man could save it. Not even billionaire philanthropist industrialist Bruce Wayne. Wayne's parents had tried to save the city, and enjoyed some minor success, but by making themselves so visible they made themselves targets. A mortal man (or woman, in the case of Martha Wayne) simply couldn't redeem the city, because the city would eat them before they could succeed. What was needed instead, then, was something more than a man. A symbol. The Batman.

And it works. At the start of The Dark Knight, the symbol of Batman has clearly had an effect on Gotham. The police are still shaky, but where before Gordon was completely alone, now he has a core of mostly trustworthy cops who actually seem set on doing their jobs. The DA's office is far stronger, and even if Dent doesn't trust Batman at first, Batman's existence has certainly motivated Dent; showing he can replace Batman is just as much a reflection of the symbol as wanting to live up to him. And the people of Gotham are starting to push back against the corruption; even if the Citizen Batmen are a disaster, untrained, out of shape and wearing hockey pads, at least they're doing something. The change from the Gotham seen in Batman Begins is astounding, and shows, yes, the power of a symbol. But by the end of the film, that symbol has been tarnished. Branded a cop killer and held responsible for the death of Harvey Dent, Batman is a fugitive, an outlaw who fights outlaws, a symbol twisted around itself and ultimately sacrificed to burnish another symbol; Harvey Dent, the 'White Knight'. So, to carry through the idea of Batman as an everlasting symbol, obviously Rises would have to provide a story in which Batman can be redeemed in the eyes of Gotham City as a whole, shaking off the mantle of killer and criminal and replacing it, once again, with the idea of Batman as an incorruptible force for justice.

But none of that happens. Instead, the movie opens with Batman apparently having hung up the cowl about five minutes after the end of Dark Knight. Far from being an everlasting symbol, he's abandoned the city for about four times as long as he ever operated in it. This makes Batman's totemic significance to certain characters completely baffling, and totally unearned. Yes, he stopped the mob and the Joker, but it's been the police who've been doing all the heavy lifting for almost the last decade, and the last thing anyone saw of Batman he was running from the cops after being accused of murder. A force of terror on the side of the angels, he isn't. But what's even worse, he never earns back his place as a symbol for the people of Gotham. As far as the people of Gotham are concerned, not only has Batman completely disappeared for eight months, he never did anything to stop Bane's initial assault on the city, and has left them languishing under his tyranny for five months, straight. The only thing he does is disable Bane's big guns so the police can do most of the fighting, go toe to toe with Bane, and then die for Gotham by getting the bomb away from the city. It's a nice gesture, and if this were Adam West's Batman, or Bruce Timm's, or heck, even George Clooney or Val Kilmer's Batmans, it would really have affected Gotham. Those Batmans actually established a strong relationship with the city. Nolan's Batman has given up on it. Most of the impressive things Batman accomplishes are done where nobody can see it, and while what little he does in public is good, it's hard to buy that these guys decided to put a statue up in his honour. It's a nice moment, but it doesn't feel earned.

And of course, it's completely ruined by the knowledge that there'll be another Batman along soon enough. Sort of robs that heroic sacrifice of its value if you turn up later...

"What chance does Gotham have when the good people do nothing?"

- Rachel Dawes

Although sometimes, nothing is exactly what good people should do.

If Batman is to serve as a symbol, though, there has to be someone to see it; Ozymandias' feet mean nothing until Keats observes them, after all. It is for the people of Gotham that Bruce Wayne creates Batman, as a symbol of justice and the power of the individual to triumph over crime. This is an important element in Nolan's Batman universe, because individually the people of Gotham have been made to feel helpless in the face of the seemingly insurmountable scale of the problem facing them. It's too easy for each of them to say that they're just one man or woman, and what can they do, and therefore atomisticly allow their society to collapse around them. It's really hard to understate the importance of Batman as a symbol for this particular Bruce Wayne; he's not Adam West, having a grand old time trading wits and fists with ultimately harmless criminals, and nor is he Frank Miller's creation, a disturbed and violent misanthrope who is acceptable because he can't not fight crime, even if he's barely a step above the Punisher. Nolan's Batman understands the seriousness of the situation far better than West's ever could have, but unlike Miller's he's not willing to devote his entire life to being Batman; as early as the end of Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is trying to visualize some kind of way out for him, a goal he can aim for and that, once reached, will justify him stepping down. And for this particular Bruce Wayne, to paraphrase American officials on Iraq, when Gothamites stand up, he'll stand down.

And he starts to have that effect in Dark Knight. I mentioned the Citizen Batmen earlier, and while they're a disaster in the film, it's not for lack of heart. They just don't understand that Batman is something to aspire to symbolically, not literally. To live up to his example doesn't require you to dress in black capes and masks and fist-fight drug dealers. So yes, Bruce Wayne shuts down the Citizen Batmen as best he can, though with not nearly the finality the Joker employs later, but that's not a serious problem because that's not what Bruce Wayne wants. We see what he wants in the form of Harvey Dent, in particular, and in the reaction of the Gothamites on the ferries, in general. Dent is a man who is willing to take up Batman's challenge in his own way, to wage the war on crime from inside the system, rather than as an outsider. He needed Batman to exist to encourage that system to work, but now that it's been primed, Bruce Wayne desperately wants to believe that Harvey Dent can keep it running. But again, it's not just about one man in Gotham City; one man can be ignored, or destroyed, as Bruce Wayne himself realizes. So, Harvey Dent is important, but arguably not as important as what happens on those ferries in the harbour.

Can there be any doubt that, before Batman began operating in Gotham, any of those people would've hesitated to blow up the other ferry to protect themselves? It was a brutal, violent, amoral city, where those like Jim Gordon were few and far between, and utterly powerless. But Batman serves as an example; he doesn't kill (mostly), he doesn't steal, he doesn't oppress the powerless and he stands up to the mob on behalf of the people. Capturing the Joker is ultimately of secondary importance in Dark Knight. What really matters is that he has offered the people of Gotham another, better way, one where even convicted criminals will refuse the Joker's offers of personal safety at the expense of others. The people of Gotham don't have to put on dollar store Batman masks, they just have to be good people, who are willing to risk their own lives for their fellow human beings.

Unfortunately, the people of Gotham are almost completely ignored in Rises. Where Ra's al Ghul corrupted them from within with money and drugs, and the Joker brutalized them with exploding hospitals and murdered public officials, Bane mostly ignores them. He has his own army, after all, and despite a throw-away comment that some of Gotham's poor might have been drifting down to the sewers to find work (apparently to escape a grinding recession we never really get any evidence of) and Bane and Catwoman mooting about how this is a revolution of the people, it never looks like anything other than the conquest of a city by an outside force. The people of Gotham aren't eating themselves alive again, like before Batman came along, they're just being killed by outsiders. But nor are they standing up against Bane, either. That may sound like a strange objection given my earlier take on the Citizen Batmen, but bear with me. The Citizen Batmen were wrong, albeit with the best of intentions, because they were trying to simply ape Batman without any of his training or abilities or equipment. It was the inappropriate response to the situation. And here, it would be again, even if having the Citizen Batmen keeping that symbol alive in occupied Gotham would have gone a long way towards demonstrating the utility of that symbol in such a drastic situation. But there are other ways to fight, to resist, if you will. Such as, oh, forming a resistance.

But we never see that. Yes, Gordon and a few of his men are doing something, though not much that really amounts to anything. And eventually the police, rescued from the sewers and shockingly hale and hearty after five months trapped underground, turn up to fight Bane's army. But Gordon and the police are not the people; they're an institution of Gotham itself. And they're not really rising to the occasion, beyond what their position requires of them. If Bane had turned up before Batman, when the city was in the grip of the mob, do you really think the bought-and-paid-for police wouldn't have fought just as hard to keep Bane's men from muscling in on their territory? The police can't represent Gotham's people, because they're too busy representing Gotham as a thing, an institutional system in its own right, and like all such systems it will of course fight to defend itself. But if Gordon, deprived of his cops, had turned to the citizens of Gotham? If groups of armed civilians had established safe zones in the chaos of a lawless Gotham, fighting off the remnants of the criminal elements and Bane's forces, doing their best to show that Gotham isn't entirely beaten? Well, now that would have actually meant something. Instead, after a brief flurry of anarchic violence, the people of Gotham apparently just go inside and shut their doors for five months, emerging only once everything is over to put up a statue.

Talk about good people doing nothing.

"We start carrying semi automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor piercing rounds. And you're wearing a mask and jumping off rooftops."

- James Gordon

Escalation - Batman wears a mask, so Joker wears a dress. You'd be a fool not to see it coming.

The issue of escalation is the only one of the three that Rises doesn't completely ruin. Which makes it a success, I guess, but hardly a rousing one.

The thing is, if it's even happening, and that's always supposed to be a chicken-and-egg sort of question where Batman and his villains are concerned, escalation is supposed to be directly tied to his accomplishments. In the beginning, there's the mob, whom normal police can't handle. Then there's Batman, whom the normal criminals of the mob can't handle. But as he cleans up Gotham from the normal criminals, standing as a symbol and putting himself very squarely in the spotlight as the hero of Gotham, his presence inspires a very different kind of criminal. Super-criminals, if you will. Or supervillains, if you're feeling less fancy.

In Begins, Batman is basically fighting against ordinary crime, plus Ra's al Ghul, whose plot predated Batman's appearance and so cannot be said to be inspired by his presence. But once he's mopped the floor with those guys, along comes the Joker in Dark Knight, a supervillain to face off against a superhero. The Joker could've run rings around the GCPD, which is probably why he never bothered to; as a man who clearly craves constant entertainment, tangling with the police would've been unbearably dull. But Batman, ah, now Batman offers a worthy test of his deranged mettle! And so, you'd think, the same could be said of Bane. And, well, it sort of can be. But at the same time, it really can't.

If the presence and success of Batman is meant to be at least theoretically the cause of this escalation, then it can't really be used to explain Bane's presence in Gotham. After all, when Bane's plot begins, Bruce Wayne is a retired shut-in with a bum knee, and it's been eight years since anyone saw Batman. Batman can't be escalating the situation if he's not around. Bane represents a larger threat to Gotham than the Joker did, so it sort of works, but only in a purely superficial kind of way. Where the Joker had henchmen, Bane had an army. Where the Joker wanted to frighten people, Bane wanted to completely change them (apparently). Where the Joker had a few rigged buildings, Bane has a nuclear bomb. Where the Joker was a purely mental threat to Batman, Bane can both out-think and outfight the dark knight. But while the threat itself has grown larger, it's done so independent of Batman, who if anything has de-escalated the situation by hanging up the cape and cowl for nearly a decade.

So, yes, escalation. The situation itself is biggger and more dangerous than in previous instalments, but not through anything Bruce Wayne or Batman have actually done. If Wayne had left Gotham entirely after he decided to give up on it years before the movie starts, if he was living in seclusion in the Himalayas or in the jungles of South America or in a little domed hamlet on the North Pole, Bane's plan wouldn't really have been affected in any way. And for any Batman story to talk about the issue of escalation that surrounds Batman, that's sort of a bizarre situation to engineer.

So, three key themes that run through the trilogy, and Dark Knight Rises kind of demolishes two of them in its own stumblebum kind of way, while the third just sort of stands in the corner, out of the way.  Hardly a triumphant close to one of the biggest original trilogies to hit the box office in the last, oh, decade at least.

Rises? It Barely Sits Up.

"The audience is expected to accept too many things we are and are not told."

- Mr. Plinkett, in his Attack of the Clones review

Well, it took me a little longer than I might have liked, but I finally saw The Dark Knight Rises. Possibly the most eagerly anticipated film since The Return of the King, like it the concluding part of a visionary director's critically and culturally acclaimed masterpiece, The Dark Knight Rises closes out Nolan's Batman trilogy, though without the absolute finality so many might have expected him to employ given his stated desire not to return to the franchise and the likelihood that those who own Batman will likely reboot the series rather than try and have someone step in and continue Nolan's universe without him. And as the credits roll and the curtain falls on the third act of Nolan's trilogy, amid all the clapping and whistling and general good-will, I found myself struck by a single, startling thought.

This movie is not very good.

Oh no, Batman.  This time, I look down on you!

Oh, I enjoyed it. I most certainly left the theatre with a sense of pleasure, the sort of amped-up feeling of giddy energy a good action-adventure film is meant to inspire in the viewer. And I liked Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anne Hathaway, and Bane was fantastically done, and Morgan Freeman pretty much always turns in a good performance. But honestly, I found the first, oh, third of this movie to be kind of brutal. And the reason for that goes back to Mr. Plinkett's complaint, at the start of this post.

I'm not really going to spoil anything here, and the film's been out for, what, three weeks now? But still, if you haven't seen it, and you want to, go see it first. It is worth seeing, despite everything I'm about to say.

So, as should have been obvious the second Bane appeared, Rises is focused on the breaking of Batman, and his eventual triumph over the gravest threat he'll ever face. Strangely, however, Nolan starts off with Batman broken, and then builds him back up, and then piles on contrivances in order to make his eventual mid-movie defeat even more comprehensive so he can be, yes, built back up again. Not only does it make the opening, say, third of the film kind of redundant in the face of the far superior post-back-breaking rebuilding, it requires some really strange contrivances. Bruce starts off half-crippled, walking with a cane, living in seclusion in the east wing of Wayne Manor and half-broke. The last of these is sort of explained, though only after far too long, and in a way that sort of only raises even more questions, but the first three? Nothing at all. The implication is that Batman retired some time ago (making his taking the fall for Dent to up his credibility among criminals at the end of Dark Knight sort of pointless), so what happened to his leg? If it's an injury from the end of Dark Knight, a theory I've seen tossed around, why hasn't he had it fixed before? It apparently took about five minutes in a robo-knee brace, and it's been eight years. You're telling me he didn't want to be able to walk comfortably for eight years? And why doesn't he need robo-braces for his other knee, and his shoulders, and his elbows, all of which a doctor tells him have no cartilage left in them at all? But that's just the appetizer to the ludicrous isolation Nolan heaps on Bruce Wayne. First he loses control of Wayne Enterprises and all of his money, in a way that would be easily and immediately refutable in court. And his car gets repossessed (because Bruce flipping Wayne leases?), and his power is immediately shut off (because the power company doesn't need you to miss a payment before they cut you off), and he has no friends he can turn to because he's become a recluse for no reason, and he's not really Batman-ing anymore so he doesn't have that, and he has no hobbies, and he frankly has no life, at all. And Alfred is removed, in a scene that ultimately falls short of the emotional punch necessary because, quite frankly, Dark Knight was a while ago now and Rises hasn't actually rebuilt any of the immediate emotional foundation necessary to really make that conflict work. And Gordon is laid up for the entire opening sequence, and never interacts with Bruce or Batman at all, or really does much of anything. And Rachel is the only woman he could ever love, and she's dead, do you hear me, dead! Nolan just piles on more and more things, but if you actually stop and look at how it all hangs together, the whole thing just collapses under its own weight. It's easily as ludicrous as the Enterprise constantly being 'the only ship in range'.

Still makes more sense than these guys, though.

Those aren't the only catastrophes in the plot, but unfortunately I can't really get into the problems later on without hugely spoiling things. Suffice it to say that, compared to Ra's al Ghul and the Joker, both of whom had specific objectives in mind and both of whom very clearly built things up, step by step, in order to arrive at their desired outcomes, the villain's plot in Rises is a mess. The setup is fantastic, but once it actually goes into action much of its internal logic and morality, such as exists, just collapses. And by the time it's meant to be resolved you're left wondering what the point of it all was, on several levels, not least because the villains apparently have absolutely no plan in evidence to escape the massive consequences of their actions. Where al Ghul only decided to sacrifice himself once Batman had removed all other options to make his plan work, and the Joker never placed himself in immediate jeopardy at all, keeping himself constantly free to slip away to plot more chaos to inflict on the citizens of Gotham, Bane and his allies just sort of stand around, being evil and, apparently, suicidal for no real purpose. It's the most simplistic funny book villainy, and utterly unworthy after Nolan's efforts to craft truly ingenious evil in the first two films. I could almost buy it for Bane, but the man has an army, and apparently that entire army is also completely and unhesitatingly suicidal for no reason.

The pacing for this movie is also, frankly, embarrassing. The opening I was just complaining about stretches on for an interminable length of time, during which the only people doing anything interesting are Bane and Selina Kyle; for a movie called 'The Dark Knight Rises', the titular dark knight takes his extremely sweet time actually putting in a meaningful appearance. Batman, Gordon and Alfred are basically bit players in the opening, while instead we get weird interludes with John Dagget and his lieutenant, and some police captain talking about how Gordon's totally going to get fired (which never amounts to anything), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Blake just completely taking over the good guy's side of the film. It finally picks up once Bruce puts the mask back up, but then goes into overdrive; if the crawling opening has covered, oh, a few days to a week or two in far too great detail, the middle portion of the film suddenly leapfrogs over nearly five months in just a brief montage. The time frame is in some ways far too short, and in others unbelievably long, considering where everything and everyone is when the action actually resumes again with Batman back from his breaking and out to show the world that Gotham City still has a protector.

And in a larger sense, this movie throws off the pacing of Nolan's trilogy. Batman Begins is set, obviously, at the beginning, during Wayne's first real outing as Batman. And The Dark Knight picks up soon afterwards, with the Joker's presence having been suggested at the end of the first film and realized early in the second. There's perhaps a year or two between them? It's a short period, anyway. But The Dark Knight Rises jumps eight years ahead after the last one, and basically ends Batman's career before it's even begun. Rather than being a vigilante driven by the murder of his parents to fight an eternal war against Crime, then, this Batman just sort of pops up long enough to break the mob's power in the city, fight exactly two super-criminals, and then hangs up the utility belt. Which could work, if he was just so broken down by the events of The Dark Knight that he couldn't do it anymore, but that's not really seen in that movie, and not really suggested as the reason for it in this film. It's like doing Batman: Year One, and then doing The Dark Knight Returns, but not bothering to put in the years of crimefighting, supervillains, heroism, tragedy and sacrifice that come between them. Those are, you know, kind of the whole point of the story.

Uh, Mr. Nolan?  You might've missed a Batman story or two...

So. The plot is contrived and full of holes, even by superhero movie standards, and the pacing is horribly out of whack, both within the movie and for the trilogy as a whole; what, then, makes this movie work? If it's not very good, why did I enjoy it? Well, honestly, while there is a lot about this movie that doesn't work, not just pacing and plotting but characters just disappearing, or not really being introduced, or not being allowed to develop, there are things that work. And the things that work, work. Wayne being retired at the start of the movie is an indefensible idea from a storytelling and pacing perspective, but once he shrugs that off and makes a triumphant return to Batman-ing, with the batpod and the batplane, it's thrilling stuff. His conflicts with Bane are fantastic, though sadly for most of the film the two are kept in completely different spheres. Bane himself is excellent; it took me a little while to get used to his new voice, but the character is both strong and smart, a pleasant change from his post-Knightfall appearances in television and film. There's a brilliantly executed reveal that really changes the opening of the film in several key ways, and while some feel it undermines Bane, it didn't bother me. Catwoman is a little shaky, her relationship with Batman based far more on 'Catwoman always loves Batman' then what you actually see of their interactions in the movie, but as a character on her own she has some nice moments. Blake is a really good character, though not so good that him basically taking over most of the first half of a Batman movie doesn't grate a little. You buy that he still believes in Batman, and that even on a non-corrupt GCPD, there's a certain sloth and inertia you get in all large institutions that he chafes against. It's not Gordon as the only clean cop, from Batman Begins, because that wouldn't have been appropriate; it's just a cop who still believes in the lessons learned from Batman's war on crime, in a police force that's ready to declare victory in the war and go back to peace time.

There's one other thing, though, that sadly does not work, and it's the result of factors outside the scope of the film; the death of Heath Ledger. Nolan clearly took Ledger's death hard, as hard as you possibly can. Parents have been less devastated by the death of their children. And in his apparently towering, insurmountable grief, Nolan declared that not only would he not recast the Joker (which was fair), but that there wouldn't even be any reference to the Joker, anywhere, at all. Which was a disaster. The Dark Knight Rises is full of Harvey Dent; it starts on Harvey Dent Day, it's concerned with the Dent Act, Gordon's guilt over what happened with Dent at the end of Dark Knight cuts through his character, the reveal apparently cripples him psychologically when it comes. But for all that, there's absolutely no mention of the Joker and his crimes. It's like watching a movie where one of the subplots is the renewal of the Patriot Act, and nobody, not one single person, ever mentions even the existence of terrorists. Bane's plan is more reminiscent of Joker's than al Ghul's, and to have nobody comment on it, and to have no residual scars from it haunting Gotham, its people and its institutions, just beggars belief. Worse, it cripples the film as a meaningful sequel to Dark Knight, which with the omnipresence of Harvey Dent and the reverberations of the end of that film all through Rises, it is quite clearly meant to be. Rises doesn't have enough to say to stand on its own, but its total unwillingness to address the Joker's legacy means it fails as a sequel.

If you've seen the first two Nolan Batman films, you should see this one. It's far from perfect, but it does enough well that it's a worthwhile investment of time and energy. But don't go in expecting another Dark Knight; this movie is so much less, in nearly every way. It's enjoyable enough while it's happening, with some good action and character beats and some nice ideas, but it's a fleeting kind of pleasure, and by the time you make it home you may have decided to cut Nolan's 'trilogy' down to a duology from there on out.

I know I have.

With a Great Budget, Comes Great Expectations

When you put the word 'amazing' in your title, or any other superlative really, you're tempting fate to a certain extent. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius really doesn't have any wiggle room based on its rather hyperbolic name, and while it's not nearly so over-the-top, The Amazing Spiderman finds itself running the same risk. After all, there have already been three Spiderman movies against which to compare this one; it's going to have to be amazing, to pull off that name.

And happily, it is.

You even get used to his basketball-based costume.  Promise.

The Amazing Spiderman is a hard reset on the Spiderman movie franchise, completely wiping out Tobey Maguire's run. Instead of Maguire, Amazing gives us Andrew Garfield as 'nerdy' Peter Parker and, eventually, the titular wall-crawler himself. This Spiderman is still a high school student, dealing with bullies, living with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben after the disappearance of his parents, and pining over the beautiful blonde Gwen Stacey. Peter's story is set into motion by the discovery of some of his father's old research notes, rescued from the basement before a malfunctioning washing machine floods it. The notes bring him to Oscorp, and eventually to Dr. Curt Connors, who after appearing in two of the original run's films to no real purpose finally gets the turn into the monstrous Lizard. In addition to a supervillain, Spiderman has to deal with Captain Stacey, chief of the NYCPD and, it just so happens, father of Gwen Stacey herself. And of course, along the line, poor Uncle Ben takes a bullet, teaching Peter a very important lesson.

This film is notable for re-imagining so many of the elements of Spiderman's origin, both those from the original comic run and those popularized by the Maguire films. Peter's parents play a larger role in the story, even appearing on screen, and there's certainly a sense that they're going to turn up somewhere down the line in this movie series. Uncle Ben also gets a hugely expanded role, though mostly at the expense of Aunt May, who has perhaps two quick scenes after his death and doesn't really accomplish anything with them. The mechanical webshooters make their first appearance on screen. Flash Thompson is present, of course, first as the swaggering bully and later as the Spiderman fanboy, in a move true to the comic. Norman and Harry Osborn are absent, though Norman is an off-screen force often acknowledged, but never seen. As for Peter's nerdiness, and his love of science, well... I have to say it's a bit of an informed attribute, frankly. Yes, he goes to some kind of 'science high school', and yes, he has a bizarre semi-remote door lock that takes almost as much energy and three times as long as doing it manually, and yes he eventually seems to actually know something about what he's doing. But honestly, the impression one leaves the theatre with is less 'nerdy Peter Parker' and more 'Xtreme skateboarding photographer Peter Parker'. It's not bad, necessarily, but I would've liked to see more done to build his 'nerdy' credentials from the start.

One thing I absolutely will not fault this movie for, though, is Gwen Stacey. After frankly suffering through a rather forgettable MJ, a character who got progressively blander (and blonder) with each outing, Gwen is a treat. Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield have believable chemistry with each other, and even manage to pull off the 'awkward teenage crush two-step', the little hands-in-pockets, head-down, fidgeting-feet shuffle people that age tend to engage in whenever they're forced to confront actual emotional intimacy. Garfield and Stone really do sell the romance, far more than Maguire and Dunst ever did, which is delightfully ironic considering Maguire's earnest voiceover assurance that the first movie was 'a story about a girl'. Gwen has far more character than MJ ever managed, and an actual role in the plot beyond 'hot girl'.

So, I've already done it; everyone has. And really, how could you talk about Amazing Spiderman without comparing it to the Maguire trilogy? I'm just going to hit a couple of points, since mostly it's been covered elsewhere, in greater depth. I think Maguire did a better job as nerdy Peter Parker, but Garfield was a far better Spiderman. Dunst was a nonentity compared to Stone. I preferred the organic webshooters, because Peter being able to make the web fluid and not selling it or patenting it for use is silly given how often he's broke, and if he's buying it (as he seems to be doing in this movie) it should be laughably easy to track down who's mail ordering crates of the stuff and use that to track down Spiderman. Dafoe's Norma Osborn was a far more interesting villain than Rhys Ifans Curt Connors, though the fights against the Lizard are infinitely more impressive than those against the Green Goblin. Stan Lee's cameo in Amazing is extremely funny, and probably a bit better than in the original. The schmaltzy 'New Yorkers come to Spiderman's rescue' scene in Amazing is executed better, a more understated and personally grounded expression that pays off far better than New Yorkers chucking junk at the Goblin off the Brooklyn Bridge. And finally, Uncle Ben and Aunt May. Rosemary Harris does a far better job as Aunt May than Sally Fields, though Fields is given almost nothing to work with. On the other hand, for all the paternal charm of Cliff Robertson, Martin Sheen absolutely knocks it out of the park as Uncle Ben in Amazing. That man is just fantastic, owning every scene he's in, and easily swinging between making the audience laugh and making them cry. The only dim spot in his performance isn't even his fault; in a bizarre desire not to use the 'with great power comes great responsibility' line, Sheen is saddled instead with the most roundabout paraphrase of that thought you could imagine. He doesn't quite manage to pull it off, but he comes closer than any other actor I can think of would've, and if the worst you can say about a performance is that he got a few clunky lines, well, that's pretty good.

There are, however, two points on which Amazing simply fails compared to the original Spiderman movie. There's no J.K. Chesterton as J. Jonah Jameson. And there's no Bruce Campbell.

The Hunger Games: Only Unthinkable Until They're Not

So, like most of the rest of this continent, I've been to see The Hunger Games. I must admit, the books passed me by, to the point where I didn't even know it was a science-fiction story; I'd just assumed it was an alternate history, probably something around the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century from the way people described it. The presence of a flying ship, then came as something of a surprise to me, but a pleasant one, since it meant I could slide a review onto this blog. Here's to 'all things futuristic'!

There's not much to say about the movie itself that hasn't already been said. The effects are impressive, the aesthetic is unique, the inevitable love triangle is pleasantly understated, the violence is affecting without being grotesque, there are dryly funny moments, tear jerking moments, Big Damn Heroes moments, and moments that make you want to punch every single person in the Capitol, one at a time. The actress who plays Katniss does a solid job carrying the film, no small task given that the books are apparently a first-person narrative, and the supporting players turn in equally solid work, from familiar faces like Donald Sutherland, Stanley Tucci and Woody Harrelson to unknowns like Josh Hutcherson, who plays Peeta, and Wes Bentley, who plays Seneca Crane. Even Lenny Kravitz, of all people, turns in a very nice performance, though I hear it's pretty different from his character in the book. The movie doesn't offer a fully fleshed-out world, but this is only the first part of a trilogy, and its focus necessarily limits its scope, though even there it apparently provides a slightly broader scope than the original novel. The movie shows you enough of the world that you understand the broad strokes, but leaves plenty of room for expansion in the two sequels. And given its monumental box office success, there's no question about those sequels.

What I did want to talk about, though, was the Hunger Games themselves. The realistic nature of the games, or their lack thereof, has been a point of some contention even amongst my own rather open-minded circle. The basic complaint of course is that nobody would tolerate something like that, a complaint that I must admit doesn't bother me much, reflecting as it does quite well on both those raising the objection and the culture they were raised in. It is entirely proper for a person in this day and age to view the Hunger Games as utterly unthinkable, even unconscionable, because at the moment they are. But by that same token, on September 10^th it was unthinkable that the US government would suspend Habeas Corpus and inflict torture, namely waterboarding on suspects indefinitely detained in a prison complex based on a supra-territorial legal fiction. Things are only impossible until they're not.

In that sense, the background of the Hunger Games, the film, lays a fairly good foundation for the Hunger Games, the competition. From the opening title cards and Effie Trinket's propaganda film it is made clear that not only was there a civil war between the Districts and the Capitol, but that it was a particularly brutal one; Trinket's film even includes a clip of what looks like a mushroom cloud. And in the aftermath of the Districts' defeat, it's clear that they're meant to remember this, in perpetuity, restricted from ever again rising to challenge the power of the Capitol. And just to hammer home the magnitude of their defeat, the Capitol imposes the Reapings and the Hunger Games on the Districts, introducing the storm of capitalized letters genre fiction loves so dearly. The message is as clear as it is brutal; rebellion will be punished, not with your death, but the death of your children. Surely that would give any parent pause.

This introduces two additional complaints, both of which I maintain are resolvable. The first is, given the threat hanging over the heads of their children, why would those in the Districts not band together and resist the Reapings and the Hunger Games, and the second, why do those in the Capitol continue this abhorrent practice. For the latter, and I admit this is pure speculation, it's entirely possible that the Hunger Games were originally little more than twenty-four children, locked in a room, and not let out again until only one of them is left. This is, after all, the seventy-fourth annual Hunger Games; there's every reason to assume that, like the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics and such, they've grown progressively bigger and more spectacular and more expensive over time. Perhaps it started with a somber profile on the twenty-four Tributes, and then a grim feting of the survivor. The point is, the system has had decades, has had over three generations in fact, to become what it is. And of course, the bigger it grows, the more people it employs and the more integral it becomes to the economy and culture of the Capitol. It's easy for people to turn a blind eye to the more outrageous aspects of their culture when the results are so integral to them. Just look at the recent controversy involving Apple and their Foxconn City suppliers. And as for why the Districts don't try to stop the Hunger Games? Well, this thing is the result of their original rebellion, don't forget, and if they couldn't fight off the Capitol before seventy-plus years of repression, why would they assume they could do any better in the present? More broadly, though, the system of the Reaping is specifically designed to isolate dissent; it affects, after all, only two families at a time, passing over all others in the District at any given moment. For those who aren't affected, then, particularly those who either have no children or children safely past the danger of being selected in the Reaping, not only is rebellion dangerous (it has already failed at least once, and catastrophically), but it offers no real, personal gain. It's a rather brilliant bit of game theory on the part of those in the Capitol who originally organized the system. There's no incentive to resist the Reapings but their general immorality, and as we've seen time and again in human history, that's a weak motivating factor.

The Hunger Games, the competition, are to any decent person utterly abhorrent to watch. Which is the point, of course; the hook of the story is, how will this awful institution be overthrown, and the more awful the institution, the stronger the hook. But it's not unrealistically abhorrent. Like all good science fiction, it's a feature of society drawn out into the future, allowed to grow beyond what we might consider its logical end to something even more outrageous and even obscene, because to a lesser degree that is how human society works. And that's part of what makes The Hunger Games, the film, so good.

That, and Woody Harrelson is darn funny.

Best Flop I've Seen Since Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

The failure of John Carter to perform at the box office serves to remind me, once more, that my definition of 'good' and that of the broader public intersect only rarely.

For those who don't know, John Carter, né A Princess of Mars, is an early twentieth century science-fantasy action-adventure romp. It's a purely old-school adventure movie, almost pulp in its lighthearted enjoyment of the sweeping vistas, fantastical technologies, half-naked heroes (male and female) and, of course, sword fights. Because no matter how advanced a civilization's technology may be, if you want a really good adventure story, you need to work a swordfight in there, somewhere. The basic story is that John Carter of Virginia is swept to Mars, called Barsoom by the indigenous inhabitants, through an accidental encounter with an enigmatic techno-wizard. Once there, Carter finds his Earth-bred muscles more than a match for both the gravity and inhabitants of Mars, to the point that he can barely walk without catapulting himself into the sky at first, and before he truly understands how much more fragile the people of Barsoom are he accidentally kills one with a single blow. Caught up by the green-skinned, four-armed Tharks, thinly disguised indigenous North Americans right down to being disdainful of the more European-like 'red' Martians, Carter intervenes in an airship battle to save the Princess Dejah Thors from the clutches of the warlord Sab Than, and gets swept up in the millennium-old war between Thors' Helium and Than's Z, putting him ultimately on a collision course with the mysterious techno-wizards who back Than for reasons all their own.

If the story sounds familiar, well, odds are you've seen it somewhere before. Carter's Mars-bound capabilities were one of the inspirations of the early Superman (when he could only leap, not fly), and no less than George Lucas has claimed the stories influenced him immensely. This can actually be a problem for John Carter, for the simple reason that while the stories introduced many of the science-fiction action-adventure, by this point they are cliches, nonetheless. To its credit, though, the movie ultimately transcends as many of the cliches as it falls prey to. The princess may need rescuing, but she's far from helpless, and while there's a bit of a 'Mighty Whitey' element to Carter's interactions with the Tharks, there's far less than in, say, Avatar or The Last Samurai or the like. And of course, while airships may be something of a worn-out signifier of being on a strange new world, it's hard to think of any nearly so pretty as the ones in John Carter.

Which isn't to say the movie doesn't have flaws. The opening is unnecessarily long and slow, with a completely pointless flashback to the first meeting of Than and the techno-mage Therns that really should have been inserted in as a story told by Thors later, if it had to be there at all. Then there's a bunch of running around for reasons you literally will not learn until the end of the movie, where they only half pay off. Really, the story could have skipped clear up to Burroughs arriving at the house to read the journal without damaging the storyline, and it would have greatly improved the flow of the early scenes. There are also a few rough character edges; Thors declares she cannot marry Than, even for the sake of peace, because of his monstrous ways, but in most of Than's scenes he appears to be no more or less bloodthirsty a monster than you'd expect the leader of a city at war for a thousand years to be. There's also an underdeveloped incident with one of the female Tharks repeatedly bullying another, the ultimate reason for which the viewer is left simply to guess. And of course, the Therns themselves are a bit weak in their ineffability; while it makes perfect sense that neither Carter nor Thors nor Than himself really know who they are or what they truly want, it makes them rather hard to take seriously as villains. They appear to have no real aim, just the maintenance of the status quo until Mars' biosphere collapses entirely, and the only explanation is an off-hand comment that they somehow feed on the process. Are they planetary vampires? Are they nourished by certain chemical by-products of the process? Are they simply being poetic? The movie never really tells us, and ultimately that's probably the biggest mark against it.

Still and all, though, it's a very solid action-adventure film. Part spectacle and part character piece, John Carter does an admirable job of keeping the viewer solidly entertained for nearly the entirety of its run; certainly there are no stretches so dull and pointless as, say, pod-racing. If you're looking for a fun way to spend an evening, you could certainly do worse than to go see John Carter. And hey, if it does well enough on dvd, it may even get the sequels it so clearly wanted to set up this time around.

A fellow can dream, at least.

Never a Matrix of Leadership When You Really Need It

So, The Darkest Hour hasn't exactly been a pop culture darling; two weeks after release it's still seven million dollars shy of earning back its budget, and it's apparently taken rather a drubbing in critical circles, as well. An action/adventure/scifi/horror movie released on Christmas Day, rather than the more usually appropriate 'somewhere in the high summer', it was always likely to suffer a bit of a beating for that rather perplexing studio decision.

And it turns out that said beating is entirely undeserved. The Darkest Hour is easily one of the most enjoyable, and most skilfully crafted, science fiction films in quite some time.

The poster, on the other hand...

One of the biggest complaints about the film surrounds the characters; they're flat, they're wooden, they lack depth or distinguishing characteristics. And honestly? It's not untrue. I went to see it with the lovely Madam Meagan and a mutual friend, Jena K, and none of us could really remember the names of more than one or two of the characters. They're strong enough archetypes, but they never really rise above being just that. That's not a flaw, however. The characters in The Darkest Hour are weak for the same reason the protagonist of a Harlequin romance is usually the equivalent of a plain and mousey housewife and the leads of so much YA fiction are ordinary, moderately-bullied kids who suddenly find themselves granted some special power or influence. The purpose of these characters is to serve as stand-ins for the audience, providing a variety of potential archetypes for the watcher to slot themselves into. And while that's a technique that's come into some disrepute lately, mostly thanks the Twilight's Bella Swan, it's still a perfectly acceptable stylistic choice, and an appropriate one here. You see, The Darkest Hour isn't trying to tell you a story about people. It's more or less uninterested in people, as distinct and particular individuals. No, what it's trying to do is make you feel, to tell a story through atmosphere, and in that way the characters are less 'independent individuals' and more a variety of emotional cues waiting to be called out for the experience of the viewer. The film, at least so far as I read it, attempts to do no more or less than evoke a series of strong emotional responses in the viewer. And I think it does so very well, actually.

The story is appropriately basic. Two pairs of Americans and a Swede are in Moscow when an alien force descends from the skies. The aliens either consume or block electricity, blacking out whole sections of the city and killing every cellphone in the area, and quickly display their hostility towards humanity. The largely-invisible and apparently-invulnerable assailants begin slaughtering everyone, contact with the aliens reducing a human being to a pile of ash, and the five characters hole up in a club's storeroom, waiting out the initial assault. Eventually they emerge to a Moscow nearly devoid of life, with aliens patrolling the empty streets seemingly at random, and decide (somewhat arbitrarily, but not unreasonably) to head for the American embassy. They're hoping to find survivors, or help, or a way home, and desperately avoiding the patrolling aliens, whom they can barely see and against whom they have no defence. It's wonderfully tense, reminiscent of the early section in 28 Days Later in which Jim wanders silently around an empty and brutalized London, and it becomes all the more macabre when one realizes that the blowing dust and grit swirling through the air are all that remain of the people of Moscow.

I'd almost describe The Darkest Hour as 'Independence Day, if it was done really well'. Like Independence Day, The Darkest Hour seems most interested in exploring things like fear, bravery, determination, cowardice and heroism. Both movies try to talk about how people act when the world, as they know it, has come to an end. Where Independence Day does this through the exhilarating spectacle of the full power and glory of the United States military, however, The Darkest Hour keeps the focus personal, on individuals doing whatever they can to survive, and even struggling to fight back against the aliens. At one point the characters come across an ad-hoc militia already feeling their way through anti-alien tactics, but where an American story would have them lionized as defenders of freedom and bold, larger-than-life heroes, here they're just people, people who refuse to either run or die, and so have no choice but to figure out some way to fight. Like everyone else in the story they stay comfortably human, bereft of the superstar charm of a Will Smith or the unbelievable competence of a Jeff Goldblum. There are no elite, hyper-capable heroes ready and waiting to save the day, here.

Just these schmucks.  Relateable, aren't they?

A word on the aliens. As an engineer, Jena K found the explanation of their motives and some of their properties dubious, to say the least. If you have that kind of background, the film may suffer somewhat, though probably no more than any other mass-market science fiction suffers. But the storytellers made what I think were two absolutely inspired choices that allow nearly any inconsistencies to be shrugged off. First, the humans never learn anything about the aliens beyond the most basic physical facts necessary to fight them. This ignorance allows any number of strange behaviours to be shrugged off, simply because we really have no idea why the aliens are doing what they're doing. They clearly have a goal they're pursuing, and they seem mostly logical about the way they go about it, but there are things they could do instead which they don't that seem obvious to us; by making the aliens entirely alien, the movie protects itself by keeping their reasoning utterly inscrutable, and thus somewhat beyond challenge. The second wise choice The Darkest Hour makes is this; at no point in the movie does anyone know what they're talking about. There are no experts, no labcoated geniuses who can provide word-of-god exposition, just people doing their best to figure out the aliens through what little they see of them. That keeps every explanation that is offered grounded in a certain uncertainty, and means you can never really take the humans' description of the larger issue of the alien invasion as gospel. Too many science fiction movies feel the need to have experts explain everything, usually with such laughably awful science that it drags the movie down. The Darkest Hour doesn't bother, because why the aliens kill dogs, or ignore the uninhabited planets of our system, or leach the power out of cell phones and light up bulbs as they pass isn't important. These things just are, and the human survivors have to adapt to it, or die.

Spoiler Alert: Most people aren't exactly the Borg when it comes to adapting.

And die they do. Obviously I won't spoil it for anyone, but I will say this; don't get too attached to anyone. There are no headlining stars in this movie, leaving it free to kill off anyone they please, and the movie takes full advantage of this freedom. You'll see some of the deaths coming because of the conventions of storytelling, but not all of them, not by a long shot. And that first shocking, 'they killed that character?!' moment does a beautiful job of passing on the feeling of fear these characters would be living under, constantly. You don't know how this story is going to end, any more than they do, because there is no star on the poster whose survival, along with a love interest and perhaps an adopted plucky child, is assured. There's nobody on the poster, nothing but an empty street full of the blowing remains of the dead, and the hostile, lethal touch of the invader.

Like I said; this movie is Russian.

 Faraday-cage Kitty agrees wholeheartedly.

Oh, and a note on the 3D. The film was shot with 3D cameras, so unlike hack-jobs like The Last Airbender or Clash of the Titans, the quality of the picture is still crisp and clear, and the film is only dark when it's supposed to be. That being said, I can really only think of one moment when the 3D was used for meaningful effect. If it's only available in 3D, don't let that stop you from seeing it, but if you have the choice, you might as well save the extra couple of bucks.