Ex Machina (2014)

It’s taken me over a week to write about Ex-Machina, not because I’ve been too busy (although I have) but unfortunately because I saw it on the same day as the previous two films reviewed on this blog. Comparisons may be odious but sometimes they make even a reasonably good film seem a bit lame. And Ex Machina IS reasonably good, but misses the mark on quite a few levels.

Alex Garland’s had a long run-up to this, his directorial debut. It’s a solid gold fact that the man knows his sci-fi. Sunshine, his second joint project with Danny Boyle was entertaining even if it contained more sly references and obvious rip-offs than was, perhaps, decent. Meanwhile his reworking of Judge Dredd’s basic building blocks into a second attempt at bringing Mega City’s law-enforcer to the screen was just magnificent. And yet what hampers Ex Machina is both its failure to ultimately surmount cliche as well as the disappointing development of what could have been some interesting variations on the hackneyed idea of man-made life and the consequences that lie therein.

Ex Machina basically takes all of the previous templates for the dangers of man playing God, from Metropolis to Spielberg’s A.I. and tries to give it a spin based on (presumably) Stephen Hawking’s recent warnings of the dire consequences of such actions (in short: as soon as machines gain sentience we’re fucked). The idea has become common cinematic fodder recently, in our post-Syri world so it’s little surprise that this aspect of the plot feels rather worn. It even formed the basis of an episode of Elementary. And last year we not only got the truly woeful Johnny Depp vehicle about merging man and machine, Transcendence, but also Scarlett Johanssen in not one, but TWO films exploring the concept (Her and Lucy): both equally terrible albeit for different reasons. Her was glib and pointless while Lucy was just hackneyed shoot-‘em-up schlock. 

This is not to say that Ex Machina is anywhere near as bad as these films. It shares the underground research facility meme with Transcendence, but there any similarities cease. Garland’s scripts are never dumb and the setting of Ex-Machina is a far more believable ultra-chic modernist lair set not in a desert but in the northern wildernesses and filled with glass and cool concrete. The performances here are also much finer. Both male leads are actors who deserve close attention. Oscar Isaac (who was superb as Llewyn Davis), portraying Nathan, the billionaire tech as an odious, manipulative creep is great, while Domhnall Gleeson is also excellently dazed and confused as Caleb, the office nerd who seemingly gets granted the golden ticket to visit Nathan’s Willy Wonka-style research facility. Meanwhile Alicia Vikander transcends her role as sexy robot, Ava to make her possibly the most sympathetic character in the whole film.

Well, so it seems at first, when Caleb has been helicoptered to the wilderness to seemingly test the true self-awareness of Ava, but, of course, there are far more sinister things at stake here. In tone the initial third of the film felt closest to John Fowles’ masterpiece, The Magus. And of course a single, lonely, awkward coder is the perfect dupe to fall for the sexual mind-fucks which subsequently arise.

But it’s in the portrayal of Nathan that the film has its most interesting thread. Here Garland dissects the kind of Wire-reading uber-jock who both parties and practices physical self-improvement hard. He calls Caleb ‘bro’ and bud’, has a truly annoying beard and talks in horrid 21st century cliches. Unfortunately the film’s transparency doesn’t allow for you to feel anything but repulsion for the man, and his manipulation of Caleb is patently obvious from the start, defusing any plot twists in the final third. Yet Garland’s obvious critique the Schmidts, Zuckerbergs and Jobs of this world who assume the cloak of liberal progress while perhaps harbouring far more sinister motives for mankind could so easily have reaped really interesting results. 

Ava’s final (inevitable) revolt also contains the seeds of some interesting notions. Based on the predication that once  men, are given godly powers (or the internet) it will only be a short matter of time before ether use it for some kind of pornographic ends, the film dares to position itself as a post-feminist fable. Yet here sisters (and robots) are still doing it for themselves in high heels and designer dresses, even if ( a little like another Johanssen performance in Under the Skin) they use these feminine whiles to gain their bloody revenge. There’s a glimmer of intrigue in the notion that  - just maybe - AIs could already be amongst us, we just don’t know it. But Ex Machina takes too long trying to look cool to really thoroughly explore any of these innovations.  

Again like Sunshine, Garland lifts plot lines and references wholesale: the notion of browsing history as a method of measuring man’s behavioural patterns is (if anyone’s interested) is lifted from the abortive BSG prequel, Caprica, for starters. And just about anyone who’s seen a movie about creating artificial intelligence knows, it’s hardly ever going to work out well.

Ex Machina does have a few things to recommend it. The portrayal by Vikander of Ava is initially tender and nuanced enough to recreate the same sadness that pervades Spielberg’s AI. This seeming bewilderment at her own creation is oddly touching. And there is a point in the movie where you genuinely start to wonder exactly who is real (just as Caleb questions it himself once he’s figured to the extent of his role as unwitting pawn). But ultimately Ex Machina is merely a very diverting one hour and 40 minutes, instead of the truly original, intelligent science fiction film that we deserve. Still, one hopes that Garland will keep trying.

Finally, if there’s one thing on which I seem to disagree with most other critics about: it’s the soundtrack. At what point did it become de rigeur to fill every other film with cookie cutter post-rock, prefacing every plot highlight/revelation with a twinkling guitar glissando that crescendos into four-four Tortoise-isms? Maybe it was the success of Mogwai with their soundtrack to Zidane, but the stuff has become obvious, unsubtle and just plain intrusive for me. Geoff Barrow’s approximation of the trope here is just terrible.

Interstellar (2014)

The inevitability of me writing about Interstellar is as great as the fact that no matter what Christopher Nolan did, it would be bound to be a disappointment.  This doesn’t mean that Interstellar (Nolan’s fourth film to date beginning with the letter ‘I’) is a complete failure, far from it: it’s a never less than thrilling hunk of eye candy supported by a suitably cosmic plotline filled with enough twists and turns to keep any audience engaged. And while ubiquitous Matthew McConaughey may just be on the cusp of wearing out his welcome on our screens with his stock in trade breathless fatalism, as with his recent searing performance as Rust Kohl in True Detective, he projects stoic capability and glowering, world-weary passion unlike any other screen actor I can think of at the moment.

But this is Christopher Nolan (along with, as usual, his brother Jonathan) doing serious science fiction. And on a week when Kubrick’s 2001 is re-released for the umpteenth time in cinemas, Interstellar has to be (deservedly) judged by a higher set of values than just another blockbuster. Nolan obviously expects it, so logic dictates that it should be criticised on the same terms. And for that reason alone, Interstellar fails.

I’ve been all worked up over this film for well over a year now (when they started showing trailers in cinemas). The anticipation I felt for Nolan’s epic was born of the fact that this was, reportedly, a comfortably old-fashioned look at space travel and was flagged as a true return to the glories of Kubrick and Clarke’s science-based vision of the human race’s inevitable journey to other galaxies. I was thrilled about the possibility of a film that could once more get to grips with the realistic conception of interstellar travel, how it could work and the mysteries any adventurer would encounter: a return to the glorious scientific optimism of my generation’s childhood.

So what does Interstellar bode for our notions of science fiction? Ostensibly it’s a ‘hard’ sci-fi film but is weighed down by its inability to stop pointing out how clever it is while dragging along a parallel plot regarding wispy notions about of the power of love (which, if I take Nolan’s point correctly is comparable to gravity in its ability to transcend space and time... or something). And indeed, Nolan is here cheerleading for culture’s latest hot date: sexy old science. In a future where mankind has found itself facing imminent destruction from crop failure, corn is the only remaining plentiful food source. I imagine that this would be a world where if someone offered you cornflakes for breakfast you’d probably punch them in the throat (and I also admit to wondering what such a reduced diet would do to the human digestive system). But Nolan has no time for lily-livered eco warriors intent on being a ’caretaker generation’ (even to the somewhat unbelievable point of being moon landing-deniers, for fear of inflaming a human race for whom such money wasting on space travel may seem idiotic when all energy needs to be focussed on providing food). It’s a strangely Boys' Own notion where Matthew McConaughey, as Cooper (or ‘Coop’), is an ex-NASA test pilot who rails against his lost chances for glory and lives vicariously through his troubled prodigy of a daughter, Murph. In a nicely feminist touch her older brother is a pleasant knucklehead who actually likes farming. What a rube…

No, only the truly brave and reckless will win this grim day for mankind, so despite his attachment to his family (that significantly lacks a mother figure) Coop’s heading for outer space to seek out new worlds etc. after some suitably cosmic coincidences that bring him together with Michael Caine (doing his Nolanesque weepy old man thing again) and his scientist daughter, Anne Hathaway.

The film’s second half is filled with the typical post-Gravity nuts and bolts derring-do-in-a-vacuum stuff that no epic sci-fi movie can be without (as usual involving air locks, docking and terror in stomach-churning spinning spaceship fashion) but it’s also here that Nolan veers a little too close to Kubrick’s hallowed ground. A final encounter with the ‘hard’ maths of an event horizon/singularity makes deliberate nods to 2001’s finale – cue Coop’s helmet glinting with the retro-styling of the spaceship’s computer consoles etc.  as he hurtles towards his encounter with higher powers - and maybe this is why Interstellar resists any genuine sense of awe, because Nolan’s initial vision of  Humanity having lost its ability to crave adventure and take chances (‘Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt,’ Coop says early on, while sipping a manly beer on his porch with grumpy father-in-law, John Lithgow) also relies on the kind of Dawkinsian triumph of science and rationalism which will somehow explain away the ‘ghost’ from daughter Murph’s childhood. Planets in Interstellar are inert balls of rock for us to plunder, or play out our very human dramas; the abandonment of our world is just an inevitable fact as we follow the unfashionable notion of progress into the future. Just get over it, hippies…

The trouble is that Interstellar wants its huge galactic cake and it also wants to eat it at the box office. Nolan’s for all his high-mindedness is in thrall to money-making machinery that will always preclude making a truly hard sci-fi movie in the modern age. Time and again the film’s insistence on drawing attention to its science credibility rubs uncomfortably against a need to inject emotion and drama thrilling enough to keep less attentive viewers watching. These devices, when cast against just about the biggest background you can have, can come across as hackneyed (for instance: the race against time device in the film’s last third is both contrived and unnecessary as it’s obvious how it will play out) and at times even cynical. The concentration of the camera on the defrosting of one of the advance team of scientists who preceded Coop’s mission is only there to make you supposedly gasp at the revelation of another major star late in proceedings. Meanwhile one ten-minute section uses the incomprehensibility of the spoken lines to put the audience on tenterhooks before the whole thing is again explained to them. Meanwhile Coop’s inexplicably rapid promotion to mission pilot (from farmer) seems only there so he can ask all the dumb questions that the audience may have.  I would have far preferred the steely pragmatism of 2001’s crew as they attempt to repair their craft, instead of a ship where everyone’s worried about their own personal agendas. Surely there would be some kind of psychological evaluation before you’d send people on such mind-bending voyages?

Compare this to Kubrick’s approach: he never really bothers to explain matters until the point at which the mission has very nearly failed and HAL’s dying act releases the briefing video that finally tells Dave what he’s about to encounter. And, even then, the viewer is left to themselves to contemplate the real meaning of the final psychedelic showdown. For Stanley the alien’s purpose should always remain shrouded in mystery, only hinting at wonders beyond our comprehension, but in Nolan’s universe the face of God is not only knowable, it’s revealed to be ourselves. Interstellar, much like a vast amount of Nolan’s other work, contains a monstrous hubris at its heart.

And like the fifth dimension where Coop finally sees the workings of his own familial drama laid bare Interstellar ultimately has feeling of being a film reverse engineered for cleverness. And in the same way that Inception started with an intriguing notion and then proceeded to explain the life out of it, Interstellar asks you to accept its deus ex machina fudging until it’s all neatly explained (as with all time travel paradox malarkey in movies) by a final reel replete with happy endings and cute end-tying. We’re expected to sit back and marvel, not just at the cosmos, but at the director’s big brain.

I know comparisons can be belittling, but let’s be honest, Nolan’s not really hiding his influences that well. Beyond the inevitable parallels with Kubrick, Hans Zimmer’s organ-heavy soundtrack injects enough of the planetary-scale gravitas of Philip Glass and Koyaanisqatsi, but other reviews have also pointed to the less flattering ghost of M Night Shamalyan that hangs over the film. It’s not helped by the setting of the first third on the dust-drenched cornfields of Cooper’s farm. What is it with science fiction and cornfields? From the laughably contrived Looper to Shamalyan’s not-that-bad-actually Signs and even in this year’s so-bad-it-was-nearly-genius Transformers Age of Extinction: the vast stretches of nascent popcorn seem to some kind of touch point which may be necessary to capture those vast mid-Western audiences. Or maybe it’s just because Ray Bradbury stories often took place on such archetypal farmsteads.  But in the end Interstellar - beyond its incredible imagery of other worlds and (with the consultancy of physicist Kip Thorne) in conveying what a real black hole may look like – contains nothing really original to the genre. And yet, this doesn’t make it a bad movie in any way: Nolan’s too seasoned a director (and rightly deserves to inhabit the same lofty realm as people such as Spielberg).

Mind you, it was also probably a bad idea to send a mission equipped with another sci-fi space yarn cliché - two sardonic robots. Never really given enough space (they get just about all of what counts for the film’s ‘humorous’ lines) – they nonetheless only draw attention to the fact that Anne Hathaway has zero screen personality. Far better is David Gyasi as the poor ‘pure’ scientist, Romilly, whose twitchy reaction to the tenuous nature of space travel leads to one of the film’s most effective (albeit brief) moments where the Lazarus spacecraft drifts around Saturn’s rings accompanied by the sounds of Earth’s wildlife. In another of the film’s finest moments Cooper and Brand (Hathaway) return from a short, disastrous trip to a planet’s surface to find that 23 years have elapsed due to the relativistic effects of the nearby black hole. Not only is McConaughey’s reaction to seeing his children become middle-aged adults via archived video diary messages deeply affecting, but Gyasi’s quiet edge of insanity brought about by the extreme loneliness he’s suffered is beautifully observed. Luckily Coop’s daughter has grown up to be Jessica Chastain (already a proven natural at playing steely–faced women with a serious job to do in the awful Zero Dark Thirty) who manages superbly to convey the contradictions in someone for whom the pain of abandonment is trumped by her own scientific curiosity (luckily for mankind).

Popcorn for dinner... again

Set against a truly cosmic background the petty squabbles and cheap Hollywood gewgaws designed to ramp up the excitement seem too cheap and extraneous. Even Steven Soderbergh’s re-tooling of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (a book which never reaches any conclusions about the mysteries we may ultimately encounter out there and was, thus, suitably spiritual ground for Tarvoksky to use as well), while focusing on love managed to remain in awe of the ineluctable grandeur of the universe and the unknowable face of God. Yet Interstellar is a pretty great film.  As with Edge Of Tomorrow, earlier this year, it’s no shame to make a film that contains not one ounce of originality and still blows you away. Interstellar’s fault is that it aims, both literally and figuratively, for the stars but forgets to leave in any sense of the mysterious. By explaining every detail of its intricate mechanism, it’s a film that’s ultimately earthbound. File under ‘brave attempt’.

Cinema in a post-gaming world gone to shit (The Raid 2 & Snowpiercer)

It's not all Danish auteurs, knotty jazz-rock and impenetrable nonsense here at Jonesisdying towers. We like a little bit of straightforward rock 'em, sock 'em mainstream Hollywood action movie erm... action once in a while (ok, quite often, truth be told). And science fiction as well. 

The trouble with this is, of course, that most Hollywood actioners are a lot like crack or Chinese food. Five minutes after consuming it you just forget the two and half hours of eye candy and crave some more. What's worse, I suspect this trend is deliberate as the habit can often lead to watching a movie about five times before you can begin to distinguish it from all the others in the genre/series/franchise etc. etc. Yes, the subject matter or treatment is usually predictably generic (it's a species of film grammar, after all), yet frequently these days it's also the sheer length that can lead to big screen alzheimers.

For example: I know I saw Captain America The Winter Soldier a couple of weeks ago (and really enjoyed it) but beyond a vague sense that the film seemed to be addressing some genuinely interesting points about freedom of information vs national security and it had more Scarlett Johansson than the last one*, I couldn't really tell you what happened: the Marvel franchise has now grown so huge and labyrinthine (actually in quite a good, coherent sense to be honest) that it seemed to be more exposition and soul-searching interspersed with superb set-pieces than anything; like an expensive soap opera with guns rather than a punchy thrill-fest, which is what we really want.

Insert gratuitous Scarlett Johannson picture here

The reason I say all of this is because I recently saw another couple of movies that reminded me that simplicity is always the wisest course when building your thrill-ride for the eyes. Both films represent what I now think of as the sub-genre of 'post-gaming' cinema. That is: the movie has one very basic point - to get the main protagonist from A to B via a series of levels, each of which contain a different (escalating) level of 'peril' (I love the use of this word in film adverts - if any poster warns me of 'mild peril' I immediately think silent movie villains, twirling moustaches and tying heroines to railway tracks). The final level, naturally, contains the big 'Boss'.

Simples. And you'd imagine that such a brutally minimalist slant to plotting would lead to mindless films for morons who spend most of their day in their underwear and using their thumbs to shoot, stab, fold and mutilate stuff on the TV. Yet you'd be wrong. When it comes to (often literally) visceral thrills coupled with devilish ingenuity there were two films that defined this sub-genre in the last two years: The Raid: Redemption and Dredd.

Urban Dredd

For some reason I never got around to writing about these films in depth, but while both superficially seem to have about the same plot (fighting your way up a squalid dystopian high-rise block to defeat the criminal overlord/lady) they both erm... blew me away. Dredd single-handedly rescued a maligned comic-book adaptation (from Danny Cannon's awful attempt with Sylvester Stallone who ruined it all by taking the helmet off) by understanding that the central character was always a brutally minimalist character with barely any emotional touch points and with an elegantly binary notion of 'morality' or 'justice'. Karl Urban channelled the unsmiling near-fascism of the Judge to perfection. Like Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, this left us with a gory, blood-spattered irony-fest where the real imagination can be poured into both a wonderfully grimy, drug-fuelled aesthetic and increasingly kinetic set-pieces. I really hope they make another.

Gareth Evan's The Raid had a similar (digital post-HDR) grimy aesthetic, but along with the gore came some astounding martial arts scenes (utilising pencak silat - a special form of close combat) added to the typical plot-twists and oddly gooey sentimentality that no far Eastern film can do without. This isn't to say that it was complex in any meaningful sense, but added a little spice to the Cuprinol-like directness of what was the film's aim.

This kitchen is about to get VERY messy

This week saw its sequel: The Raid 2 (well, durr...), released in major cinemas and, sure enough, it seems that the first film wasn't a fluke. Starting off almost exactly where  the finale of the first instalment left off, it follows doe-eyed one man killing machine, Rama, as he's dragged back into grimy underworld corruption-riddled Jakarta again. Now he's working undercover to bring down some warring crime lords as well as the high-ranking police officials who collude with them, and it's no small matter. It involves punching walls while serving a two-year prison sentence (separated from his wife and new child, just so he can get near to one of the crime lord's sons), fighting whole crowds in toilet cubicles or mudbaths and then navigating a maze of double dealing and deception as well as negotiating (i.e: slaughtering) his way to a rendezvous with the hardcore violence awaiting him at the top of yet another building. This time it's a restaurant - giving a great opportunity for an incredible fight sequence in an all-white kitchen (see above image) that leaves it considerably redder in hue.

The violence is often so brutal that you enter that strange mind-state where you alternate between gasping and giggling (a scene with a metal baseball bat embedded in an opponent's face made the entire cinema guffaw). Evans knows exactly how to balance the kineticism with nerve-shredding pauses that presage all the carnage. And in the end, despite all the head-swimming double-crosses, it's a simple film with a simple aim that really gets the job done. It's only real flaw is perhaps the needlessly distended length, but in this case more doesn't necessarily equate to less. It allows diverse variations on the theme, such as a wonderful fight sequence in a car, during a bullet-riddled high speed chase or scene involving a female, deaf assassin, two hammers and a metro carriage. Ouch...

And now there is another film to extend this linear, level-defeating approach. Snowpiercer is, I have to say, one of the best things I've seen in a long time. Not yet released in the UK or US (I believe it has a summer US release date now) - it's directed by Joon-ho Bong the man behind the superb South Korean monster movie Gwoemul (The Host). 

The film is based on a series of graphic novels by Frenchmen Jacques Lob  and Jean-Marc Rochette and uses the simple premise of a post-apocalyptic world where the last of humanity live in a huge train which endlessly circles a terminally frozen globe. In a hilariously pared-down metaphor for society, the poor are lumped into the rear trucks where they live in cramped, bullied squalor and munch on cubes of disgusting looking protein jelly (and yes, you do find out what it's made of). The rich passengers who paid to join this dystopian Orient Express live in luxury at the front of the train, as does the mysterious Wilford whose emissary is played by a fantastically unrecognisable Tilda Swinton.

Yup, that's Tilda

(In a side note: this is the third film I've seen in the last month that features Swinton playing characters which don't look like Swinton! her turns in both Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel - as the aged Madame D - and in Terry Gilliam's excellent Zero Theorem (as a Scottish, schoolmarmish virtual shrink) are amazing.)

At the heart of the increasingly unhappy proles travelling third-class is a bearded Chris Evans (Captain America himself, here playing Hugh Jackman-like Curtis) along with a young protege, Edgar (Jamie Bell who, thanks to this and Nymph()maniac now seems to have shaken of the awful stench of Billy Elliott) and an ageing leader, Gilliam (see what they did there? This character is played by John Hurt - who, as with Outlander or Hellboy, always seem to signal that a film's better than usual. He's a kind of anti-Liam Neeson!). Revolution is on the cards, and the only way that the means of production will pass into their hands is, yes, you guessed it, by fighting their way carriage-by-carriage along the train to get to the engine. A sort of occupy movement with cleavers.

See? A childishly simple premise, yet its limitations allow Joon-ho Bong to utilise cunning and imagination to forge genuinely new slants on this post-gaming genre. The sequence where Curtis' band of future Bolsheiviks meet a black wall of 'state' troops (above) is an object lesson in protracted tension and release. And the action is so fast-paced that you completely forgive the obvious plot-holes or, in actual fact, the sheer silliness of the film's premise. By keeping the body count high and with some wonderfully written parts for characters such as The Host's Kang-ho Song as a junkie lock picker this film maintains its momentum like, well, a speeding train.

In many ways this premise reminded me of another great science fiction predecessor: Christopher Priest's Inverted World. In that 1974 novel the characters believe they live on a strange world in which the laws of physics are  turned on their heads and the city that they inhabit endlessly circles the globe on tracks which need to be laid as it travels. 

Just as in Priest's classic book, the train of Snowpiercer is not necessarily what it may seem and despite its almost Alice in Wonderland removal from reality you become utterly immersed in the film's internal logic. On top of this Evans gives a believably harrowing performance as a man driven not only by a sense of justice but a truly dark secret past, putting paid to the altogether blander white bread performance he gives as the Captain.

For his first movie in English it seems that Joon-ho Bong is already well on the way to achieving far more than John Woo did with ten years in Hollywood.

I predict a big cult hit, and no mistake...

*Oh, and at one point there was a really obvious reference to Kubrick's Shining, oddly enough...

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

Being well aware that this is going to be just one of kazillions of reviews and commentaries this reaction to just seeing Star Trek Into Darkness (note Abram's lack of punctuation in that title: there's a declaration of intent for you) is going to be below average in the details. I'm a fanboy, but couldn't hope to compare with Den of Geek and their ilk. And I'm equally aware that lots of you will see this film so I've kept the spoilers to a bare minimum, limiting them to facts that already out there on sites such as IMDb.

JJ Abrams' latest addition to the franchise is almost cynically successful at building on his first (ingenious) reinvention of Captain James Tiberius Kirk and his trusty cohorts on board old NCC-1701 (see? I can be a nerd too). The action is, from the first second, ramped up, CGI vertiginous and shot through with that post-Transformers NOISE. But at least you don't get to see Shia LaBeouf, and the film's pace - while never really letting up - becomes decidedly more coherent after the first ten breathless minutes.

This time Abrams managed to include a worthy bad guy. For such a factory-line genre so few action movies seem to realise that the bad guy has to be at least as charismatic as the good guys for the film feel balanced and well-rounded. The last movie used its convoluted temporal paradox story mainly in the service of setting up the originals all over again. But the downside of such cleverness was that it lacked a really compelling adversary. Eric Bana did little but brood and blow up Spock's homeworld, apparently because he was sad about his wife and child.

But look out here comes SHERLOCK HOLMES! Well, actually Benedict Cumberbatch plays a kind of anti-Holmes here, mentally AND physically superior, but as mean as you can get. He's a Starfleet guy with an agenda that involves blowing up, shooting and generally being nasty to everyone. He's Cumberbastard. And he uses his best basso profundo to serve up all of his most chilling pronouncements. You know, the ones that link up all the bits where stuff blows up. Of course he's not what he seems at first (cf that spoilers remark). I think he nailed it.

The aforementioned first ten minutes set up a plot whereby Captain Jim can be stripped of the Enterprise, then get it back in about two minutes along with a strong thirst for vengeance. We're reunited with all the usual faces with the addition of a rather useless Alice Eve as new crew member/gratuitous alternative eye candy to Zoe Saldana, Dr Carol Marcus (there's a big clue in that name BTW). Cue a romp across the neutral zone into trouble.

It's worth mentioning here that, as before, the production team have to strive to achieve a balance between retro and futuristic because they're effectively re-imagining a modern version of an old vision of the future to make a third meta-futurism. It's a cool trick but also means that women seem to occupy a woefully retrogressive place in the future. Just like the old future. Yes, we expect old serial space shagger Kirk to leer, but it also means that the female uniforms remain woefully aimed at teenage boys. Thighs in space! And Uhura's role as Spock's sensitive touchstone undermines her more hard-headed skills as multi-linguist and comms person just as Marcus, as second science officer (specialising in weapons, natch), is undermined by her getting down to her space undies pretty smartly.

This is unapologetically a boy's movie, filled with daddy issues, bromance and mobile phone spats. But there's enough here for all of the family, really. There's a lot of love on this ship - cross-gender, cross-ethnicity, even cross-species - and who knows what they could get up to on a five year mission? It's just as Gene Rodenberry saw his original vision for ST:

“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms."

But the upgraded Enterprise 2.0 also takes into account modern politics. Just as the '60s series represented the face of liberal American imperialism, ST 2013 seems to want to make atonement for rushing into conflicts or forcing them upon us, replacing revenge with justice and saying something about the use of drones, terrorism, George Bush and WMD. Maybe. It's never that clear and it blurs the real reason that people will go and see this film. Contained in Rodenberry's vision was the idea of a disparate bunch of characters who you could genuinely love. Why else did we watch the cardboard rocks and latex silliness? And Abrams makes sure that we care just enough for these gloriously 2D characters for two hours.

Of the usual crew, Karl Urban (above) gets singled out by me, if only because his DeForest Kelly as Dr 'Bones' McCoy impersonation gets better every time. And he was Dredd (did I mention that I loved Dredd?). However Zachary Quinto also seems to have become more like Leonard Nimoy than Leonard Nimoy ever did. Even Simon Pegg manages to be aceptable as Scotty this time around.

The script's snappy, witty and (thankfully) always manages to shove the technobabble bits into segments where characters walk or run fast, thus making comprehension no longer a requisite. Machine-gunned sentences about warp cores being mis-aligned etc. only need to convey the very simple premises of fixing something within an allotted time before something very bad happens. That's how knowing this script is. Even when it throws a 'disarming a ticking bomb' cliche into the mix only to make you smile to yourself for recognising that it's a blatant use of a cliche. Make no mistake STID is put together like a well-oiled adventure ride. It also manages to slip in nods to other sci fi greats: a USS Bradbury is mentioned, while Cumberbastard's character is called John Harrison. A coincidence? Also Peter Weller's in it. You get the picture...

So STID is stuffed with enough meta references to keep the faithful happy (a TRIBBLE!) even down to at least one of the denouements. I say 'one of' because if STID really has a noticeable fault it's that it's too willing to give fans what they want. I think I counted at least five big climactic moments before I started to wonder how much more edge of seat stuff my brain could process. Abrams doesn't yet seem to have learned that you should always leave us wanting more. But in this case STID was more than enough. I loved every second.

Star Trek Into Darkness is released in cinemas on May 9th

Oblivion (2013): It's not the end of the world

It's a funny old thing, but for a pretty cookie-cutter-type sci fi romp, Oblivion, the latest blockbuster from Joseph Kosinski seems to be getting an undue amount of attention. Well, that's if you go by the reviews.

Just announced on its opening wekend in the States as grossing nearly $38 million at the box office, in this country the Tom Cruise vehicle has been at the number one slot for the last week, although against such intellectual fare as The Croods and Scary Movie Pt 368 that's not really saying much at all.

In fact, just about everything I've seen so far this year, post-Oscars, has been mildly disappointing. Hence the paucity of reviews on this blog for a while I guess. There have been a slew of strange childhood fairy tale CGI monstrosities, of course. Jack The Giant Slayer - the very dictionary definition of 'two hours I will never get back'  - proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bryan Singer has now reached the absolute antithesis of his debut, The Usual Suspects. Oz The Great and Powerful, while not a disaster by any means (James Franco can ACT?!?) with its reasonably entertaining re-tooling of L. Frank  Baum's universe for the 21st century, was still a far cry from something which Raimi used to concoct such as The Evil Dead (although let's not forget those Xena credits).

But it's not just the schlock which has been schlockier than normal: Francois Ozon's In The House was nicely creepy in parts, but seemed too pat and satisfied with itself. Soderbergh's s (alleged) swansong Side Effects was a disappointingly inconsequential thriller with a twist, and a cast that all repelled in some way. Pedro Almodovar's I'm So Excited is just weirdly slight and seems to be saying something very sinister about his attitude to post-recession Spain. Even Paddy Considine's latest major performance vehicle, Honour, seemed clumsy, poorly acted in places, and even politically suspect, despite its brave subject matter (honour killings in urban Britain). Only Neil Jordan's forthcoming vampire-with-a-twist movie, Byzantium, has really got under my skin, and I seem to be in the minority on that one. I may still write about it in more detail soon, though. (Also it may be a good point to mention in passing a preview I saw for The Returned, a forthcoming French zombies-with-a-twist series that's coming to Channel 4 soon. It's really very good indeed and far better than the tripe that BBC Three are foisting on us with In The Flesh: but then, In The Flesh is aimed at teenagers, The Returned is very much an adult drama. For more details go here.)

So, to continue, why am I bothering to write about Oblivion, a film I've already described as 'cookie-cutter'? Let's run down the negatives first. Yes, as most reviewers have pointed out, the film's derivative. This is hardly a cardinal sin, especially in sci fi movies. I can't think of ONE sci fi movie or TV show I've seen in the last ten years that really made me sit up and think 'wow, now that's an original plot line' apart from, maybe, Battestar Galactica. As discussed many times on this blog, the very FUNCTION of sci fi, as commentary on modern society via allegory seems to be becoming increasingly irrelevant as we telescope into a real life situation where most technological or ecological shifts almost match our 'fantasies.' In other words, the future isn't what it used to be...

So Oblivion has LOTS of other movie plots wrapped up in its dystopian sweep, not least Wall-E (the film's ecological message is hammered home in Tom's 'secret garden' where he lives an alternative life in what looks like The Grateful Dead's holiday home, playing, of all things, Led Zeppelin II).

Big deal.

Also most critics seem hellbent on pointing out the somewhat dour nature of the script. Well, err... yes. The plot is about a decimated post-apocalyptic Earth where (supposedly) all humans have pissed off to Titan leaving behind Tom Cruise (as Jack Harper or Tech 47 - incidentally I was amazed that Tom's only played a character called Jack THREE times, I really thought it seemed like just about every character could have been called Jack) and Andrea Riseborough (as his comms officer and lover, Victoria) to maintain the 'drones' that police the surface, following an alien invasion, and maintain the gigantic plants that convert sea water into energy. Filmed in Iceland, the overwhelming greyness of Oblivion leaves you in no doubt that there won't be a huge amount of laughs.

And why should there be? No one criticises Haneke for a lack of mirth: the implication being that lowly sci fi has fallen so far from grace since 2001 that unless it provides enough spills, thrills and chuckles for the whole bloody family, then it's worthless.

Oblivion does provide spills and thrills. But it also dares to provide a reasonably intriguing plot that throws enough curveballs to keep you engaged to the last frame. We already KNOW from trailers that the 'aliens' are not what they seem to be, so that's no surprise, but the studio are canny enough to hold the big twists under wraps for long enough. This has the odd effect of making the first third seem a little workmanlike, but making the denouement reasonably thrilling.

Performances, especially from Riseborough, are uniformly good. Cruise may be a fully paid up Scientology nutcase, but one thing you can never say about him is that he can't do big films. And a big bonus (for me) is that Morgan Freeman is hardly in it.

Where the film really fails massively is in the post production, notably the edit that makes Tom give a portentous and (I realised halfway through) totally unnecessary expositionary voice-over at the start. This is quite obviously a device inserted at the behest of studio execs, scared that it may prove too confusing to let the plot just play out until the reveal. Remember that first cut of Blade Runner? Same thing... Maybe Kosinski will get to re-cut it in a decade or so. But it leaves us having to effectively listen to Tom explain the back story TWICE in one movie. Durr...

But what won me over (well, at least enough to want to write this post) is the LOOK of the thing. Most reviews have rightfully pointed out that Oblivion looks amazing, but it's often written off as mere eye candy.

Well, one of the things that makes so much modern sci fi a let-down is the fact that while all the studios no whave the toys to make a film look amazing (cf: Prometheus) they rarely seem to exercise any imagination or STYLE beyond the set norms. Kosinski, 38, has grown up using these tools and somehow seems to be offering something a little more special. His only previous directorial credits, apart from ads, belong to Tron: Legacy: a universally derided sequel to the Disney original which used  production design by none other than Jean Giraud: Moebius.

The film was rightly criticised for the fact that Kosinski seemed to have forgotten to include either acting or decent plot, but man, it looked good. In fact, to me, it looked so good as to make Kosinski worth watching. Here's a man who obviously knows not only his sci fi, but his graphic novels. Oblivion itself is based on his own unpublished comic.

Now, imagine if he could be commissioned to bring a work by someone like Moebius to the big screen? The mind boggles. Yes, basing sci fi on pure aesthetics seems shallow, but maybe in a post-Iraq world where technology outpaces our own imaginations we need a new approach to sci fi that at least transports us. Such formalism may be (ho ho) alien to the average (usually male, and young) viewer of such things. But think about what was wrong with Avatar or Prometheus, or the last three Star Wars films. Actually, don't, because you'll be thinking for weeks, but primarily what I'm getting at is the PLOT and the poor actors, expected to deliver dialogue that no sane human would ever utter.

Audiences need a human element, i hear you cry. Well yes. But to marvel at our own imaginations is as human as you can get. No one criticises JMW Turner for leaving out the humans in his almost-abstract later works.

And if we want decent plots and believable characters we need scripts that go far beyond the average and challenge preconceptions: emotions that express more than shock, rage, fear or the most trite representations of 'love.' It seems an odd thing to say, but ennui and depression are just as much part of the human experience. Try reading some J G Ballard or Philip K Dick to see what I mean.

Above all we need adult cinema that uses these tools to forge a new aesthetic matched by rigorous intellect. Science fiction isn't dead, but we need to rescue it from increasingly infantile producers whose cowardly thinking stifles creativity.

Oblivion, it's necessary to say, isn't  such a film at all. It's deeply flawed, crippled by its compromises and never destined to be even a 'cult' classic. But, as an attempt to create things that make us think about ourselves for more than two seconds, it's really not the end of the world...

The Romantic Imagination in 21st century English culture

In the ever-wonderful Feuilleton blog, while doing some research on 70s album sleeve design, I came across this rather marvellous passage on the English disease of marginalising genre fiction/culture in this appraisal of the work of Roger Dean: a man who I once interviewed and liked immensely. I thought it was worth reposting. It says, extremely eloquently, what I've long felt to be true about the way that something that helped me shape my view of the real world constantly becomes marked as 'kitsch', and also underlines the importance right NOW for a more rigorous approach to what is still perceived to be the playground of adolescents and halfwits:

'Dean’s art has been out of critical favour for so long that it’s difficult to discuss it positively without sounding overly defensive. While many other shunned aspects of the pre-punk era have been rehabilitated—folk music, psychedelic drugs, flares—I’ve yet to see anyone mount a serious reappraisal of Dean’s artwork despite his furniture and architecture designs having been exhibited at the V&A. There’s a certain kind of critic, usually male and British, who finds the exercise of a Romantic imagination to be a suspect and unwholesome activity. That suspicion often sees a single “story” being told in art history which skips from Impressionism to Cubism and ignores the Symbolists and Decadents; it dismisses Dalí’s work after the 1930s and won’t even look at the paintings of HR Giger, Ernst Fuchs or Mati Klarwein; it’s a suspicion which marginalised Mervyn Peake almost to the year of his death in 1968, which scowls at genre fiction and ignored JG Ballard (always a proud science fiction writer) until his Booker Prize nomination in 1984. Minimalism and restraint is favoured over exuberant invention, and a blokey cynicism is favoured over any kind of visionary impulse which is seen as tasteless or kitsch, with “kitsch” in this context almost always meaning “whatever I dislike”. For every Marina Warner, Michael Moorcock, Clive Barker or China Miéville who assert and promote the value of the imagination, you’ll find a vocal crowd who find the whole thing to be unpalatable and juvenile. It’s an older argument than punk versus hippy, going back at least to the nineteenth century debate between Realism and Romanticism. It’s also a peculiarly joyless English attitude; the French have shared the debate as far back as Zola but are generally a lot happier for serious intellectual dialogue to sit side-by-side with comics, movies, science fiction and fantasy.'

Me And My Big Mouth (another PLOT SPOILER!)

Typical. In my last post I sang the praises of Katee Sackhoff - Kara Thrace AKA Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica, the most irksome, infuriating, contrary, warm, lovable, sexy and downright HUMAN character on the whole shebang and what happens? Yup, THEY KILLED HER OFF!!!
Now I'm paranoid. Is someone at the Sci Fi channel reading this?
Of course not.
But after everything I said about the whole family schtick that BG has goin' on, this hit hard. Too hard actually. It can't be healthy to grieve for a fictional character can it? But it just goes to prove that I was on the money too. This series is awesome and (by all accounts ) will continue to be so right up to the last episode of this season.
Meanwhile, bye lovely Starbuck. You were frakked-up, but still wonderful...sniff. See you on the other side...

(ps I KNOW she'll be back, so don't write to tell me)