Interzone #265 - July-August 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  All the mainstream doxosphere can muster to explain its inability to get this astounding film on any level is that it’s full of shiny cgi (well, duh) and ticks the wrong kinds of diversity box by casting white Australians in all but a handful of roles, and no Egyptians at all – though one wonders how many of the complainants could even name a living Egyptian actor, and those who can are probably not part of the audience for this film, while as an Egyptian Greek Australian the director is perhaps more qualified than most to tweak the Sphinx’s nose. But behind the pangeneric action romp is an often stunning vision of what a post-superhero cinema might aspire to, a divine quest down Fury Road whose imagery recalls nothing so much as Jack Kirby’s concept art for the unmade Lord of Light. The first sequence on Ra’s boat is one of the most astonishing sequences of fantasy imagery ever committed to screen, infused with visual memories of the ends of Dark City and Knowing, except that here it’s Geoffrey Rush in a bathrobe lightspearing an anus dentatus which is trying to ingest the universe up its toothy wormhole. The only thing much like it is Tarsem Singh’s Immortals, which this film manages to leave looking austere and restrained. There is ripping of brains by hand out of their skull; there are, deliciously, lettuces; and there are lines like “I can recite the true names of the stars. I have seen the world created from sand and water,” to which the sceptical mortal’s query “Where were you watching it from if nothing had been created yet?” draws the response “If I were to explain, your brain would liquefy through your ears.” Already taken care of, my lord.

  A more conventional slice of superheroic Egyptology is X-MEN: APOCALYPSE, Bryan Singer’s impossible followup to his kitchen-sink franchise time-mash in Days of Future Past, here celebrating the end of his lead trio’s contracts with a baton-passing plot extending the rebuilt timeline and cast into the far beginnings of mutant history via the high Claremont era of the disco-haired eighties, as Oscar Isaac’s first mutant returns from Predynastic myth to cleanse the world of humanity. The latest film to be branded a box-office disappointment for taking its time to hitting the billion-dollar mark, it’s certainly a more straight-ahead, superensemble film than its immediate predecessors in the franchise. But Singer and writer Simon Kinberg are old hands at these films and expert at making difficult things look lazy, and right from the initial staging of 9/11/3600BC through the stunning 3D credit sequence with time literally flying out of the screen into your eyeballs, there’s a sense of the X-Men canon as an epic superhistory that no other comics franchise has even remotely yet approached, and which the narrative return to Auschwitz and genocide lays claim to as something this series alone has unique, if contestible, claim to have earned.

  Amid the commentariat complaints of superhero fatigue, it’s easy to forget what spandex cinema and the X-Men films in particular have done for the health and vitality of storytelling in 21st-century cinema: revitalising the ensemble storyline and rescuing Hollywood plotting from the sclerotic orthodoxies of protagonistic solipsism; opening out the narrative canvas into deep megatextual expanses of time and historical depth which can encompass entire and multiple histories of the world; cherrypicking the most powerful narrative moments from a gigantic megacanon of monthly mass mythopoiesis, and telling and retelling them for multiple new generations; above all, finding the stories that are optimised to inhabit and showcase the new cinematic technologies of the fantastic, and using them to conduct a vast democratically-crowdfunded experiment in narrative universals, speaking across cultures to unify humanity as never before in a truly global shared experience of story. Even without the system-shock of Deadpool’s maverick success, Days of Future Past was always going to be a tough act to follow, and a lot of the plotwork in Apocalypse has gone into the thankless but necessary business of setting the reset narratives back on the tramlines of canon, with Scott Summers and Jean Grey back in the story and the spotlight at last, Professor X finally granted his iconic eggskull do, and the Weapon X storyline rebuilt to propel the last surviving cast member from the 2000 lineup into his solo swansong without losing the actor’s history with the character across the six films now erased. But it also makes the most of the fact that Michael Fassbender has played Macbeth since he last played Magneto, even if the final act rather confines him to hanging around like Last Stand Jean in a giant bubble of acting until the inevitable sentimental turnaround that the audience saw coming two hours back. Teased for next time are interstellar backdrops, Dark Phoenix, and Mr Sinister. Don’t try to pretend it won’t be epic.

  The canvas is both smaller and bigger in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s spring celebration of the tying of the knot with Sony and the Spider-Man film rights, which loosely adapts Mark Millar’s titular storyline as the pretext for a refreshingly old-school and comicsy hero-on-hero mass smackdown beginning in the geopolitical aftershock of Ultron’s Sokovian adventure and a Nigerian takedown that goes bad, but modulating from the political to the personal for its final mano-a-mano following a well-crafted big reveal about the Winter Soldier. Each of the assembled Avengers old and new is carefully given an individual road to travel that places them on one side or another in the Flughafen Leipzig–Halle mass walloping, and the combinatorial duels exploit a classic narratogenic formula of the comics with more sense than we’ve yet seen of the simple pleasures of seeing Hawkeye fight Vision or Ant-Man battle Spider-Man (see what they did there?). New characters are rotated to the front and old ones escorted to the lobby with a firmly sympathetic hand, and you hardly notice that the film ends with nothing whatever resolved and the ending deferred to six films’ time. What you do notice is that with Thor and Hulk off shooting their Asgardian side-project the Avengers lineup is a measurably duller, more earthbound and actorly place, its edges sanded off just as Phase 3 (of which this is the opening chapter) is lining up a more adventurous slate of wilder and stranger explorations of the cosmic corners of the parent universe. But the MCU is large and contains multitudes, and the Cap team have built particularly effectively on the Whedon crossover foundations. It’s not hard to feel you could do this all day.

  It’s been a different kind of Disney story for ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, the studio’s belated and commercially underloved sequel to Linda Woolverton and Tim Burton’s 2010 overperformer about a teenage Alice’s return to the realm of her childhood dreams to rescue it from a Narnian collapse into Jabberwock-infested darkness, and herself from the corsets of Victorian social expectations. The sequel picks up Alice’s story a year on, as the Chinese trading enterprise she set up at the end of the first film finds itself threatened by traitors to the dream just as Underland faces a new crisis of its own. A far more adventurous and interesting film than it needed to be, it addresses the central challenge of turning Carroll’s scattershot inventions into a textured and historied world by sending Alice on a time-twisting tour of Underland’s backstory before her first arrival, and a past in which Alice is now the adult and Carroll’s characters the children still untouched by the lugubrious absurdities and disappointments of adulthood. The enabling conceit is Carroll’s tea-party throwaway about Time as an offstage character, realised here as a Bavarian-accented demiurge who “lives in a void of infinitude in a castle of eternity” with a Wellsian time machine as its engine; and time-travelling viewers will recognise retroflections of Twelve Monkeys and Back to the Future (“I shall never forget that snowy night when she hit her head on the town square as the clock struck six”), as Alice has to portal out of Bedlam to save the Hatter and thwart the Red Queen by revisiting the scene of her earlier revisit and, in something of a time-travel cinema coup, racing the ensuing waves of paradox back to their source.

  Director James Bobin makes an impressively assured step up from cinematic Muppet-wrangling, and copes surprisingly well with the millstone of Johnny Depp’s Hatter performance as the obligatory centre of the story despite being once again the most tiresome thing in it. This being Woolverton, the sparky feminist take on the Disney princess narrative is
offset by an overreliance on emotional readymades (dad issues for the Hatter, sibling rivalry for the Red Queen) and timeworn Hollywood platitudes about dreaming the impossible. But this is still one of her best efforts, a huge improvement on the soggy Maleficent, and shrugging off all pretence to be much bothered with Carroll, which was never really the point. In what is less a bid for the Asian audience than an intimation of where today’s new breed of Disney princesses need to look for their futures, Alice spends the bulk of the film in a Chinese dress and ends up setting up an office in the Middle Kingdom to compete with her former partners in a boat beneath a sunny sky of her own. Such a curious dream.

  For hunters of snark, it’s been a satisfying thumb in the eye of the mean-spirited sages of doom to see WARCRAFT: THE BEGINNING clean up internationally after a sustained campaign of preemptive derision and the inability of US domestic audiences to see past Paula Patton in green paint and tusks. Easily the riskiest film of the season, Warcraft knowingly mixes the multiple box-office toxins of high fantasy, game adaptation, star-free franchise launcher, and decade-long residency of development hell even before Duncan Jones tore up the script to start again with a more gamer-friendly take on orcish geopolitics. The result is certainly not a film for everyone, with its uncompromisingly old-school fantasy worldbuilding tropes and its enthusiastic embrace of performance capture and greenscreen cinema to bring its massively multiplayer digital armies to life, only to land them with dialogue like “Always remember: from light comes darkness and from darkness light.” But what it has in surfeit is a refusal to apologise to anyone for anything; and in taking the Warcraft universe back to its earliest foundations, it’s signalled a kind of long-term commitment to the property that respects the weight and depth of its world in the eyes of those who’ve spent some of the most rewarding years of their lives more in it than out.

  That said, it’s not really a film about the modern-day Warcraft player experience (where the benchmark remains John August’s The Nines, an allegorised self-portrait of WoW addiction in which this world is effectively the in-game universe and the characters staging an intervention). Rather, it’s an adaptation of the original 1994 game Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and its later associated novels as lavish experiment in post-Jacksonian epic fantasy spectacle, servicing a knowingly old-school tale of orcs and men caught up in a war of worlds and kingdoms between light magic and dark. When the world of Azeroth is invaded by an orcish horde from a dying world through a necromantically engineered portal, what seems like a genocidal war for survival reveals itself to warriors on either side as something darker still, and Toby Kebbell’s orcish clanchief strikes a fragile alliance with their human foes as the mother of all roleplaying battles goes down. It looks and feels amazing, particularly in IMAX, and is played completely straight, even by royal couple Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga; and if the climactic battle goes on, and on, and on, there’s something genuinely exhilarating about seeing a rubbish eighties-style high fantasy plot done with total commitment and a nine-figure budget. The global balance of takings remains a problem for the future of the prospective franchise, since Universal’s deal with Legendary, struck before the latter’s Chinese takeover, means that all the profits there will flow to the locally-owned partner and not to the US studio. But this has been a huge result for Chinese investment in American film, and it’s hard to imagine it as anything but a game-changer.

  A horde of green-skinned invaders from another world bring their own peculiar game plan to ANGRY BIRDS, the feature-scale reinvention of the hundred-strong series of wordless short animations spun off by Rovio as part of their attempt to turn their ubiquitous cartoon physics game into a durable transmedial franchise property. Amid layoffs and downsizing, Rovio have bet the poultry farm on the film version as the fledgling offspring which can fly the collapsing coop and activate the Mighty Eagle IAP to save its precious nest eggs from the greenbacked predators beyond, with the Finnish Film Foundation stepping up with its biggest ever investment to power-up this precious but faltering national enterprise. It may even pay off, because the Jon Vitti-scripted animation does a sterling job of building a film-shaped story of character growth and redemption around the icon-shaped characters and the game mechanics of firing birds at green pigs with crates of TNT. Red, we learn, owes his eruptive attitude to childhood teasing about his eyebrows, and finds his iconic teammates in anger management class; but when strangely-coloured immigrants abuse their refugee welcome to steal their host’s children to feast upon, it’s grumpy Red who sees through the plan and persuades his peaceloving flightless fellow citizens to discover the beast within (“We’re birds. We’re descended from dinosaurs. We’re not supposed to be nice”) and Nagasaki those scrofish invaders back to the Pleistocene. Speedy Chuck’s time-retardant technique from the cartoons is now a full-on homage to the Quicksilver sequence in Days of Future Past, and to the certificate clutch of “very mild bad language, slapstick, innuendo, toilet humour” can be added bizarre quotation from The Shining and discussion of shooting fireballs out of your butt. But kids will scarcely notice how bonkers it is, and merely pester for merchandise.

  Third and least visible game adaptation of the season has been RATCHET & CLANK, a well-made animated port of the venerable PlayStation series about a furry space ranger and his pedal-bin sidekick. In a junior hybrid of Futurama and Guardians of the Galaxy, the film version sees young spaceship mechanic Ratchet kicking heels on a backwater world and dreaming Skywalker dreams of a life among the stars as a member of the galactic justice league. But when interstellar-realtor supervillain Drek breaks up the team and threatens inhabited worlds with the full Alderaan, it’s up to our orphan hotrodder and his defective war-droid buddy to save the future. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before, and the project might have found more of an audience in the abandoned live-action version that was a money pit for Sony a decade back; but the designs and animation are surprisingly rich, and the Hong Kong-based team who seem to have done most of the heavy lifting have delivered a kids’ space cartoon that takes the trouble to texture its cosmos as well as delivering on the requisite big-screen simulation of not actual gameplay.

  INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE unleashes the art of big-screen planetary destruction in a noisy arena reunion show for Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, artists of apocalypse whose solo careers have never quite lived up to their chart-topping heights as a pop duo. For those who just want to hear the hits, there’s a familiar pulse to the narrative beats as groups of characters are introduced in an assortment of global and offworld captioned locations (“Space Defense Station, Earth’s Moon”) collating the harbinger signs of imminent apocalyptic smackdown, and the first act culminates in a sequence where Goldblum and friends have a fly-through narrow escape as Shanghai is smushed on top of London and a 3000-mile-long mothership touches down in the Atlantic (“Which part?” – “All of it!”). As always with these band reunions, there’s been a lineup change that has made for some rearranging of the old harmonies, with Jeff Goldsmith having to take over on lead after Will Smith dropped out of the tour, and Liam Hemsworth coopted as the new band member audiences aren’t too sure about. But Bill Pullman, Brett Spiner, and Vivica Fox are among the returnees, the last now inspiringly retrained from poledancer to trauma nurse; while the first film’s kids are now attractive adult leads, with Maika Monroe incarnating the franchise’s native absurdities best as the first daughter turned fighter pilot turned White House staffer (yes, in that order). The actual resurgence brings the interstellar predators back to an Earth that has appropriated their own technology to fortify the solar system, only for humanity to find itself outgunned and outplayed by a massively scaled-up force bent on stealing our planetary core and turning off the Earth’s magnetic field for an instant replay of Emmerich’s last cataclysmic hit as 2012 2: 2016. Fortunately the surviving stars from 1996 make a discovery that gives them one last crazy shot at victory (presidential broadcast to the world: “What we do in the next twelve minutes will eit
her define the human race or finish it”), and after the scattered plotlines converge from their tour of the Earth-Moon system for a last stand in Area 51, it’s time to tool up, face the alien queen (“Get ready for a close encounter, bitch!”), and take the fight to the stars in a sequel we can only pray to deserve.