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’.

Commemorating D-Day with a scientologist: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Edge of Tomorrow - this year's Tom Cruise sci-fi blockbuster - is, as most other reviews have made plain, a melange of many other films. But then, which blockbuster these days isn't? I seem to remember realising this when I saw Alex Garland's Sunshine. But remarkably it turns cliches to gold and never approaches dullness. For the literal-minded amongst you (and in similar fashion to Sight & Sound) I spotted the various component parts of Groundhog Day and Source Code (Tom, as Major Cage has to repeat the same day ad nauseum); The Matrix, Battleships, The Darkest Hour etc. etc. (squirmy CGI aliens); Aliens (post-'Nam troop fun with large exoskeletal battledress etc.); Mimic (well, the aliens are called mimics); Starship Troopers; Independence Day; Looper; Battle Los Angeles etc., as well as Saving Private Ryan. 

Yes, you read the last one right - its release timed to perfection, with its central set piece battle, this is possibly the oddest commemoration of D-Day that you're likely to see all week. In this respect it functions well as a science fiction film, using scenario as metaphor, just as all genre work should. 

Europe has fallen under the jackboot tentacle of an alien race borne to Earth via asteroid. Humanity looks out for the count, but a surprise victory (at Verdun of all places) led by tough resistance poster girl, Emily Blunt, has given the world hope again. Allied troops are massing in London (now officially the cool location city of choice for CGI blockbusters cf: Thor: The Dark World) ready for a invasion landing on, naturally, Normandy Beach where everything goes to hell. Our first experience in this battle is with the spearheading forces which include Tom. In this way the film functions as a re-telling of how the Yanks helped us kick Adolf's boys back in 1944. On paper that doesn't look too promising, but somehow no memories get sullied here and the aforementioned Frankenstein's Monster approach to putting together Edge of Tomorrow is saved by Doug Liman, a man who, with the Bourne series, showed us that the spy thriller could be retold for the post-modern age (and thus, subsequently laying the ground for the renaissance of James Bond). And if you think the script crackles, amuses and entertains more than usual it'll possibly be because two of the film's writers are none other than Jerusalem playwright, Jez Butterworth and his brother John-Henry.  This is no mere production-line pulp, even if it isn't (as the publicity claims) a really 'intelligent' sci-fi movie. But it sure ain't dumb…

As mentioned recently, we're now in a post-gaming environment where the game influences the film, rather than the other way around. Unlike Dredd and The Siege's simple level-by-level methodology, the concept of re-living the same battle over and over again is given life via the gaming cliche of being able to die repeatedly and being automatically put back at a fixed opening point until Tom and Emily can figure out how to kill, yes you guessed it… the big (blue) BOSS at the game's end (here referred to as the Omega). Emily Blunt's character is even nicknamed the 'Full Metal B*tch', in case we don't fully get the joke. And like Bill Murray's hapless weatherman in Groundhog Day, each rebirth offers scope for exploring the variations in formula as Tom meets Emily again and once more attempts to thwart the 'mimics'.  As if to demonstrate how well thought-through this concept is, at one point, I began to wonder why (a by-now pretty battle-hardened) Cruise had to work with Blunt, only to have Liman explore that very option for me. Talk about neat timing.

Virtuoso editing by James Herbert rushes you through Tom's many incarnations, often to comic effect as he wakes again and again to the (always wonderful) Bill Paxton as his Squadron Sergeant. The 12 certificate also in this case adds a certain dignity to the whole affair by never revealing too much gore, and leaving you to guess at how Cruise meets his grisly end at times. Paxton's just one of the joyful little touches that turn what could have been a boneheaded and deadly dull rehash of recent tropes into a genuinely entertaining film. There's also Brendan Gleeson (recently stunning in John Michael McDonough's Calvary) as the grumpy allies' general and Noah Taylor as Carter, the particle physicist who's the only one who understands exactly what is going on. Much has been made of the shaky opening premise that (for some reason) Cruise is sent to the front in some kind of revenge for his role as the US Army's PR man, depicting him for once as (initially) a craven coward - in other words, playing against type. Yet what he's really doing is putting us slap bang in the centre of the nightmare battle scenes, allowing us the imagine the sheer terror that any invading troops must feel. Beyond the A to B narrative arc, it's this aspect of the film that adds any real depth while never letting it get bogged down or over serious. For every war-weary failure there's a moment of genuine playfulness. Hell, there's even a caravan joke (which may have been insisted on by Cruise who has, himself, guested on the awful Top Gear). Goodness knows why certain reviewers found it dull…

What's more, despite the film's central premise of reliving time again and again, the writers never attempt the kind of tricksy time travel plot twists that bedevilled crap like Looper, instead opting for a simple premise that allows us to enjoy the thrill ride as TC becomes gradually more and more like the pint-sized action hero that we all know and love. If there's a downside it's that the action sequences suffer from that 3D conversion process that leaves the whirling dervish machine aliens looking like hyperactive blurry octopi and battle scenes too chaotic a la Michael Bay. Yet the plot makes sure that these sequences are actually mercifully brief throughout, never sacrificing character or plot for sterile explosive scenarios. Be warned, there's nothing original about this film, and yet somehow this is one of the most charming (and it IS oddly charming) aspects. There are, after all, only seven stories in the world. Edge of Tomorrow remembers that it's how you tell these stories that draws in an audience.

But, in the end (without giving TOO much away) I'd say that the central premise of this film isn't really about re-imagining D-Day for a 21st century audience, or even about how one man can be transformed (in the 'crucible of battle' as his Sergeant jokes) into a true hero. No, Edge of Tomorrow  could be summed up as 'boy has goofy smile, boy loses goofy smile'. Yes, it's simply about one a-list screen actor's quest to rediscover his patent disarming, lopsided grin. Does he find it, folks? 

Like you have to ask…

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...

Under The Skin (2014)

This is the second film I've seen in a week that's had audiences cheering and booing in equal measure at recent festivals (why do I never get to go to these divisive screenings? The ones I attend are always boringly sedate affairs. Oh, to live in '60s France…). Having already garnered glowing reviews from the big British newspapers, Jonathan Glazer's third film in 13 years is a gruesomely effective modern science fiction horror about a dispassionate and sexually available alien - played by Scarlett Johansson - who lures single men to their doom in modern Scotland and based on the book of the same name by Michael Faber. Most of the cast were passers-by, filmed unwittingly by hidden cameras. I doubt you'll see anything quite like it over the next year. It's never loud, and never relies on standard horror tropes, instead delivering the nail-biting tension of of a mysterious hunt, matched by a gripping, itchy score by Mica Levi. It's stunning.

Having said all of that, it must be noted that Under The Skin isn't quite as revolutionary or original as you may have been led to believe. The 'stranger in a strange land' storyline owes a considerable amount to Nic Roeg's (now considered classic) Man Who fell to Earth, where David Bowie's spiralling coke habit and clipped English accent were the perfect method acting techniques for him to portray an alien all at sea in American consumerism. It's worth noting that all Johansson has to portray her 'otherness' is a black wig, a fur coat and, again, an English accent; which jars against the broad Glaswegian of most of the participants in the movie. It's surely no coincidence…

Another touch point would be the music video nastiness of Chris Cunningham. There's one remarkable scene where Johansson's automatic piloted fembot fatale (ha! I may copyright that one) picks up a severely disfigured man. Dim greys of night vision camera techniques give that scene - along with the truly shocking section where you actually see what happens to her victims - the same dark, urban tone that made Cunningham's Aphex Twin videos such haunting pieces. The more abstract glimpses of the aliens' culture and backroom machinery has the cold, clean touch of Kubrick about them.

Unlike Faber's book, the audience is left to guess at what is actually taking place most of the time. Johansson prowls the dark estates and drunken city streets of Glasgow in a white van, using a set of interchangeable pick up lines to determine whether the victims are suitable meat for the alien abattoir, entered via tenement doorways or within rotting, abandoned houses. She's accompanied on her quest by a grim motorbike riding 'fixer' who disposes of details which may lead to their discovery. The dialogue is confined to the foreboding foreplay of her pick up lines, or the uncomprehending questions of those she encounters.

Even though we know that there's a weird otherworldly vampiric purpose to Johansson's stalking, it's a deeply disturbing reversal of our notions of sociopathic sexual predation. Only at the denouement do we see Johansson's character (is she merely an automaton in  human skin?) falling prey to the usual pattern of human abuse. And at the same time Glazer seems to be drawing a grim portrait of the post-Cameron north/south divide, where human flesh is mere fodder for an uncaring alien purpose.

Most reviews have drawn attention to the director's skill in putting you behind Johansson's eyes, seeing the grimy, desperate activities of dispossessed urban Scotland as a totally incomprehensible melee of noise and  primal urges. A section where she gets whisked into a thronging club really leaves you as disoriented as she herself looks. Her own body, often portrayed naked, is not Hollywood thin, but pleasingly real in its curves, adding to the sense that she's somehow been designed for the greatest appeal to her victims.

It's an astoundingly brave performance by Scarlett Johansson who obviously longed for something meatier than the recent Marvel comic roles she's been servicing. With Under The Skin she's surely found it. You'll never look at her the same way again.

Under the Skin is released in the UK on March 14th 2014