by Andy Cox
So, there is nothing new under this big movie’s sci-firmament of crypto-variant nihilism, and yet its romantic heart beats on long after the life-support machinery has been unplugged.
In Dreamscape (1984), finding real-world solutions to an American president’s WW3 nightmares were at stake. But in Spanish director Jorge Dorado’s debut feature (and first English movie) Anna, re-titled MINDSCAPE for its DVD release (25 August), there is little more than a disturbed teenager at risk.
In this understated futuristic drama about techno-shrinks, John (Mark Strong, ‘Sinestro’ in Green Lantern) is a therapist tasked with convincing an apparently crazy heiress, Anna (Taissa Farmiga, American Horror Story), to give up her hunger strike. With competing claims to her inheritance fortune hanging in the balance, John delves into Anna’s childhood. But, just as unfussy psi-gadgetry enables John’s monitoring of her memory replays, so Anna manages to dredge up his haunted past, too. Suspicions of parental abuse and hints of systematic paedophilia attempt to award this psycho-thriller with a much harder edge than first anticipated – although it boasts more style than dramatic substance.
Farmiga is good value as the overly intense heroine and there’s one clever twist in this tale of headspace as routinely accessible media. However, like anything that is connected to our remembrances, the lack of a trustworthy narrator spoils the modest revelations and, unfortunately, results in a vapid and flimsy effort overall.
KIPPLEZONE: ALSO RECEIVED
Humour is not universal. Genre comedy is a particularly difficult sector to do well in, at least with any widespread appeal. For every popular sci-fi parody there’s a dustbin full of unsuccessful spoofs. Claiming that such dull efforts are ‘cult’ movies when they often fail to be actually funny is one typically defensive position. But, admittedly, so is that assertion. Jokes are wholly subjective (stop me if you’ve heard this one!) because the essence of a good joke is not just about timing. From the muddle of its 007-styled title-sequence, to a painfully dim ending, ASHENS AND THE QUEST FOR THE GAMECHILD (DVD/Blu-ray, 14 July) is a witless compendium of irrelevant ‘gags’ that only remind viewers how geeky irreverence is no guarantee of amusement value.
Directed by Riyad Barmania (co-writer of the dreary Elfie Hopkins), this parcel of undercooked tripe results in a spew of postmodern quirks, deadweight ironies, and insipid performances of several boring characters. Even a novelty of animated dream-sequences can’t save it. I found lead play-actor Stuart Ashen (who apparently runs a web channel that ‘reviews’ tat) is only as hilarious as having a wasp crawl up my nose. The final sting is that this idiotic homegrown twaddle lacks even the alleged charm of Larry Blamire’s gormless American flicks!
What would you do to regain your youth? Rutger Hauer recycles a Tron/Total Recall combo as the framing story for another tournament-of-death scenario in RPG – Real Playing Game (DVD, 8 September). Wealthy old folks wake up in young bodies and this lost-amnesiacs’ slasher-mystery unfolds with much bitter cynicism, and paranoia that mushrooms in twisted hearts/vacant minds in search of identity. “Now, we have another hour to kill.” There’s less intrigue than Cluedo murders. It eschews the flashy anti-heroics of Gamer. This makes Hunger Games seem like a Shakespearean drama.
Comicbook parody and freak show, HK: FORBIDDEN SUPERHERO (DVD/Blu-ray, 15 September) mixes smutty comedy sketches/absurd aggro like Kick-Ass meets Spider-Man, Japanese style. With used knickers for his mask, teenage hero Kyosuke gains homo-erotic powers and so hardly needs any clothes. “He’s a pervert, but…he’s so cool!” Gay panic is enough to disable gangs of school bullies, and prancing fu takes care of the rest. Even when the foes are sleazier than Pervert Mask, this remains a po-faced, eccentric farce that’s just ridiculously kitsch and tacky instead of very amusing.
MUTANT POPCORN
NICK LOWE
LUCY
TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION
THE PURGE: ANARCHY
DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
HERCULES
SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR
THE ANOMALY
EARTH TO ECHO
VAMPIRE ACADEMY
THE ROVER
THE CONGRESS
MOOD INDIGO
The average sf film only uses 10% of its imagination, and the average lead only 10% of her stellar mass. So third cheer in a row for Scarlett Johansson, unlikely first lady of posthuman cinema, who has cashed in her Marvel profile to lend bankability to three wildly out-there sf films that would have struggled in various ways to happen without her, while at the same time giving her things to do that small pouty blondes with leather-friendly booties rarely get the opportunity to explore in today’s Hollywood, and to thumb her perfect nose at her Marvel paymasters’ timidity over lady leads. Luc Besson has been making films about female superheroes since before anyone even noticed, from Nikita and Joan of Arc to Adèle Blanc-Sec and The Lady; and as in the best Besson, there’s a cheery rubbing of audience noses in the differences between Hollywood narrative and the things you can get away with if you feel sufficient contempt for American rules, as Lucy finds herself an American plunged terrifyingly into the middle of a Besson film, where brilliantly-cast gangs of heavies in immaculate black suits speak unsubtitled Korean in unsubtitled Shanghai for no reason we ever need to know, and anyone can get blown away on a whim. But as the progress bar of her intelligence rises, she comes to master her Besson narrative environment, throwing cars round Paris like a native and blowing strangers away as her humanity falls, quite poignantly, away.
Before rushing to judgment on LUCY’s daft endorsement of the 10% brain myth, it’s important to remind ourselves that Besson is not an idiot, and indeed only came to filmmaking after the teenage diving accident that derailed his original destiny as a marine biologist. (The laugh-out-loud line in Lucy about dolphins is partly a wistful wink to that lost road.) The fictional drug CPH4 is based on some surprisingly well-informed bluffing from genuine research in embryonic development and the links between hormones such as estradiol and early-weeks neural development. Lucy’s intentions can be read from the fact that it was written in Comic Sans, with a prefatory note explaining that the first half-hour is Léon, the second Inception, and the last 2001. And sure enough, the film changes up through the genres from a bunch of Korean thugs to spinning-room stunts to a whited-out state of transcendence where Lucy gets her star child on and graduates from girlfriend to God. Now that’s a character arc.
2001 famously started out as a narrated film, from which Kubrick only removed the earnest Clarkean voiceover in a three-week editing frenzy before the press show. Besson’s less radical, but still audacious, solution is to retain the great slabs of portentous exporrhea intact, and simply cast twinkly voice-of-God Morgan Freeman to try and carry them off. (You may think he goes on a bit, but there was a lot more in the script.) In the end, though, the film has had to dial back a bit on the transcendence and compromise more than it intended with the 10% audience. Early drafts got rid of the drug-lord plot early on, as Lucy (quite reasonably) loses interest in banal plot goals like revenge, and it was a comparatively late decision to keep the shootout action going as background noise to the final sequence, which for some will be the point where the film gives up, and for others where it really takes off. As the lady says, “Life was given to us a billion years ago. What have we done with it?” That’s not an opening line you hear a lot in American film.
If Besson is an easy target for scorn, it’s easier still to take a pop at Michael Bay, so let’s briefly recap why he’s a filmmaker nobody should underestimate or dismiss. First if least importantly, you don’t get to be the apex predator in global blockbuster cinema on 10% of your movie brain. Bay is a very skilful and experienced filmmaker who (let’s remember) sat in the same classes at Wesleyan as Joss Whedon, and has built up a body of work, an audience, and a profit stream in blockbuster cinema to which The Avengers, for one, is i
neradicably indebted. The Transformers films have established the despised and sneered-at genre of Japanese toy franchises as a four-quadrant package which has united the world and set the bar for photorealistic effects in mecha cinema, as well as demonstrating how to reach out beyond the domestic audience to make films for the world in a post-American age. The line in TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION about the Chinese central government’s staunchness in the face of the Decepticon threat to Hong Kong may knock western audiences back in their seats a bit, but there’s a reason you heard it first in a Transformers film, and why local martial-arts stars are so prominently featured in supporting roles.
And these are not stupid films. It’s true that Age of Extinction is a film about giant robots riding giant robot dinosaurs, which frankly should be sufficient warrant to exist in itself. But it also happens to be the one Hollywood film to predict the rise of ISIS, in an inverted but completely obvious allegory under which America is postwar Iraq and the Autobot pullout has left a weak and compromised government exposed to a new and genocidal Decepticon insurgency. Into the middle of this stumbles Mark Wahlberg’s backwoods shed mechanic, scavenging an old truck which turns out to be injured warrior Optimus Prime, and thereby makes his family a target for absolutely everyone, when all he wanted to do was protect his family. It’s a powerful evocation of the conditions of civilians left to pick up the pieces in a former war zone between great powers, on to which are projected the most primal of American emotions about the right to bear arms against anyone who looks interested at your daughter. Watch out especially for the CIA unit called Cemetery Wind. That’s a bowel condition you really do not want.
Bay’s often-forgotten sideline in low-budget horror production has unleashed another dubious profit monkey in James DiMonaco’s THE PURGE: ANARCHY, a swift followup to last year’s manipulative home-invasion nasty about a 2020 US where all crime is permitted one night a year. Where the first film was a single-location siege movie centred on one house and family, this second instalment opens the action out to follow three initially separate stories through the streets of an entire city under lockdown while painty-faced Purge people roam the streets letting the American id run free with semi-automatics. As the stories converge and the vigilante lead finds his priorities challenged as he becomes responsible for a tag-along party of innocents, the film moves from a moderately interesting exploration of the franchise’s thought-experiment world to an increasingly silly plot about posh folks playing most dangerous game with the poor and big government using people power to crush the people. Like the first Purge, it recognises in its heart that the premise is beyond dumb, and its solemn message that tooling up and locking down are a dance of death is undercut by the exploitation of precisely the licensed discharge of fear and violence that the film deplores as a mechanism of utopianisation. But they can always say that that’s the point: that the reason these films make you sick to your stomach is because they invite you to identify with the same class terror and gun-happy vigilantism that they’re insisting are a disease of the American soul. Be glad it’s just one night a year.
DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES takes a more thoughtful, but perhaps not less exploitative, address to some of the same issues of gun control and original sin, in a ten-years-on sequel where Rise’s simian flu has wiped out most of humanity while Caesar’s apetopia in Muir Woods thrives, only for contact with a surviving human community in San Francisco to precipitate a string of distrust and betrayals that bring violence to the apes’ forest dream and hawk/dove factional splits on both sides pull the bispecies world to the precipice of war. As has become well known, Matt Reeves’ film is itself the survivor of an apocalyptic extinction event, after Rise director Rupert Wyatt’s abrupt departure took the original storyline with him, and new screenwriter Mark Bomback found himself promoted from a couple of weeks’ polishing to creating a completely new film from nothing for the same release date. So instead of a tale from further down the timeline, we rewind to the moment of Battle for the Planet of the Apes, when the famous slogan “Ape shall never kill ape” is put to the test with the moral right to inherit the earth as the prize, and a terrestrial fantasy of first contact plays out some simplistic but resonant issues of human and animal nature against our ominous franchise foreknowledge of where all this will end up.
Technically, it’s an impressive achievement, breaking ground with the use of performance capture on location, and with the ape leads acting the B-list humans off the screen. The price that’s been paid for all this is a crudely mechanical plot about tree-huggers versus warlords, fathers and sons, and a climactic mano-a-mano atop a skyscraper with a bomb at the bottom, all played out by characters whose personality and motivation rarely rises beyond paper-cut puppets. Viewers of Dawn from countries where firearm ownership is not a given will also be disappointed by its subordination of thoughtful questions about original sin and the origins of aggression to parochial issues of gun control – even if the film rather aptly kicks off with the TSG Entertainment ident of Odysseus shooting through the axes, having earlier removed all arms from the hall on the reasoning that “iron by itself leads a man on”. But it’s certainly a more adventurous film than the one Fox would have made if they hadn’t been in release-date panic mode; and despite the spectacle and the set pieces, it’s surprisingly slow-paced for a summer blockbuster, which makes it all the more encouraging that audiences don’t seem particularly to have minded.
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 is pretty much the same film, with heavily-armed militarists threatening a utopia of sanctuary wildlife and overthrowing a tentatively-established interspecies cooperation, until dragons together strong. Following on from the bridging Legends trilogy of shorts, we catch up with Hiccup and his fellow dragonriders five years on, the island of Berk now an eco-paradise of dragons and humans in soaring aerial 3D harmony, till Djimon Hounsou’s psycho warlord (who is, as ever, “building an army”) introduces a kaiju-sized alpha dragon to the mix, and singing to Gerry Butler’s chiefly portfolio: “I’ll swim and sail on savage seas with ne’er a fear of drowning / And gladly ride the waves of life if you will marry me.” (Amazingly, Shane McGowan wrote that.) But it’s all part of Hiccup’s education in manhood and sense of identity: “I was so afraid of becoming my dad, mostly because I never could.” He certainly can’t do the accent, though at least he’s better than Cate Blanchett, who makes the very unfortunate mistake of trying.
Even now that GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY has beaten Apes, Transformers, and Dragon to the top of the summer charts, it’s still not at all clear why this film exists. A purely genetic narrative would point to its origins in Marvel Studios’ previously little-noticed in-house writing programme, which farms a bullpen of early-career screenwriters on two-year contracts to develop a secret library of scripts from Marvel’s vast back catalogue of intellectual property, with occasional furloughs to do cheap and uncredited polish work on Thor scripts. As is now well known, Nicole Perlman was a lone female among these indentured labourers, who got the gig from her Richard Feynman biodrama The Challenger (which might easily be confused with the subsequent BBC biodrama Challenger about Richard Feynman, but for the fact that Perlman’s name appears nowhere on it), and politely refused the female-led properties dangled to her in favour of the recently rebooted Guardians. The film was greenlit, and the script promptly whisked out of her hands for a series of other writers to work on, ending up with James Gunn rewriting the whole thing anyway. But none of this explains why Guardians was allowed to go forward in the first place, which may be something to do with Marvel’s need to reassure Disney in 2009 that their four billion was buying something more than a yellowing portfolio of fifty-year-old characters and storylines on which they’d failed to improve or build in the half-century since, and that the present-day comics business was still an engine for heavily franchisable properties that could generate entire suites of collectible character toys at the snap of an opposable thumb. It won’t have hurt that Disney were able to take the oppor
tunity to test the waters for their much bigger investment in the risky revival of a space-opera brand at a time when the genre was all but extinct. Of course it’s spun as Marvel showing new confidence in their less familiar properties, in the expansive supercluster starfield that stands as the comics universe’s backdrop, and in the power of the naked brand to pull audiences into something they’ve never heard of, just because, you know, Marvel. But don’t think there isn’t a bottom line in there.
At any rate Guardians is a pleasantly disarming, if surprisingly timid and old-school, space opera that occasionally would be quite exciting if it wasn’t apologising for itself and winking so much of the time. The 2008 Abnett/Lanning Guardians comics reboot came as the accidental detritus of the Annihilation event, leaving a randomised superteam of minor figures (plus the very non-minor Adam Warlock, who has sensibly fled the coop here) to repopulate what had thitherto been a far-future team brand. Their wild storylines, heavy with timeline-twisting Marvel metaphysics, have been pretty much ignored here for a much more conventional story, insistently retro and ironic, rooted in a model of space opera that remains stuck in 1983, when Peter Quill was abducted from Earth and his cultural lexicon never since updated. It’s a shame that the favourite thing in the first new space opera in years is a talking tree, but Marvel knew what they were signing. Gunn has been making versions of this film for a while, right back to the millennial dawn of modern superhero cinema; the year of Bryan Singer’s X-Men also inconspicuously threw up Gunn’s The Specials, an eyewateringly cheap film about the off-duty lives of a Guardians-like low-ranking superteam with dumb powers, lashings of body paint, and hit-and-miss character banter. The old Troma hand has sharpened his tools since those days, but he was never going to be the man to charge with a sense of wonder; the plot is surely the last we will ever tolerate of those Marvel boilerplate numbers about chasing an Infinity Stone around for an hour and a bit till something woah-sized falls out of the sky in the third act.