Spun Out: VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is not so much a sequel as a faint echo. The first of these Spider-Man spinoffs—largely theoretically connected to the current live-action Marvel Cinematic Universe canon so far, but one never knows—was a surprise hit back in 2018. It was also surprisingly good at what it was. That is to say, it would’ve been the best superhero movie of 2005. It was short and simple, uncomplicated and unburdened, hooked on a squiggly, committed performance by Tom Hardy as a muckraking journalist who gets fused with Venom, a gloopy alien parasite. The alien becomes a growling id in his head, when it’s not a rippling tentacled slime oozing out of him and coaxing him toward superpowered vigilantism. The thing is weirdly small-scale and legible, refreshingly so. Its very rock-dumb simplicity and willingness to build up to satisfying-enough character dilemmas made it play like quite a zag in the year of peak MCU interconnected pomposity. But it’s aged well that way, so slim and spirited and unconcerned with any larger world-building. It was a refreshing throwback then and a nice anomaly now. And the central villain being a heartless tech CEO hoping to launch himself into space off the backs of exploited workers has gained a certain charge. So to find the sequel takes all that goodwill, such as it is, and just doodles around for a bit is too bad.

At least it’s not one of those big blow-out self-important superhero sequels. This one is still trim, with the credits rolling just past the 80-minute mark. But it makes you appreciate what setup there was to the character dynamics last time. This one is mostly about the love-hate relationship between man and monster as they inhabit the same body. There are some funny moments in which Hardy flails about attacking himself as the movie teases out a workable metaphor for self-loathing, and still more enjoyment out of Venom lurking around for other hosts when they get in a fight. (There’s also the movie’s best moment: Venom wandering into a nightclub and holding court.) We get a few good moments with other returning characters, like Michelle Williams and Reid Scott who seem to be having a good time as relatively normal bystanders who reluctantly get involved in some key moments. “I thought you said no aliens,” he says at one point. “No more aliens,” she only somewhat helpfully clarifies. The movie is shot by Robert Richardson, no stranger to good-looking movies, what with the Scorseses and Tarantinos he’s lensed, and helmed by Andy Serkis, no stranger to effects, being the king of motion capture performance for Apes and Gollum alike. They’re at their best staging action with a bit of cartoony slapstick. There’s sometimes fun here. Watching it clunk along, you might almost think you’re watching a real movie.

Ah, but now I’m almost writing myself into thinking I enjoyed it more than I did. If only the thing were the sum of its best moments. Instead it's wedded to one of the most underdeveloped and under-thought villain plots in recent memory. He’s Woody Harrelson as a serial killer on death row who, through some far more convoluted reasons than an 80-minute movie needs, gets a drop of Venom in his system which turns him into an evil red gloop of tendrils and tentacles. His goal is to, well, wreak carnage and get married. He does a little of both. He breaks out of prison in an explosion of effects. Then he bides his time till he strikes again to find his fiance (Naomie Harris). Then he fights Venom. Never once does it sell a broader feeling of danger, or build to anything cumulative. It’s simply contained and separate from the main action. Harrelson isn’t given the chance to build much of a character, and the ultimate final confrontation is so flailingly amorphous it’s hard to tell whose digital glop is slicing whose. (I liked the stained glass backdrop, though. That was a nice touch.) I almost wish the movie hadn’t a villain at all. It clearly put most of the effort into Hardy’s inner struggle anyway. Everything else falls flimsy. By the end, it basically feels like treading water. Even now, I’m almost asking myself if I actually saw it, such a non-event it is.

Superb Hero: BLACK PANTHER

Black Panther is easily one of the best entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, at this point a sprawling, occasionally mind-numbing constant in modern multiplexes. This one succeeds for the same reasons the other good ones do. It’s loaded with a ridiculously charismatic and overqualified cast delivering good-enough quips, and built out of splashy comic book action that barely overstays its welcome. But the movie leaves a slightly bigger than average impression because it is allowed a bit more personality. Offering control over to Ryan Coogler, the promising young writer-director of Fruitvale Station and Creed, the story of the princely superhero ruler of fictional pan-African paradise Wakanda is given a genuine charge of retro-Afro-futurism. Here is a gleaming modern city hidden away behind a force-field in the heart of Africa, the capitol of Wakanda, a country both a towering symbol of sci-fi technical might – the most advanced in the world – and rich in tribal tradition. Untouched by colonialism and slavery, Wakanda is strong and isolated. This becomes both its greatest asset and a potential weakness, as characters debate the long-held seclusion of their people. What do they owe the greater world? Heavy is the head that wears the Black Panther crown. There’s slightly more charge – in politics, character dynamics, and world-building – than is the norm in this type of thing.

Played with paradoxically shy bravado, a soft-spoken Chadwick Boseman is T’Challa, ruler and protector of Wakanda, and the hero of the title. We last saw him introduced in the worst MCU film, the interminably boring Captain America: Civil War, where his father was killed in a terrorist bombing. Now, his people look to him to lead. His mother (Angela Bassett), tech-genius sister (Letitia Wright), advisors (Forest Whitaker, Daniel Kaluuya), spy (Lupita Nyong’o), rival (Winston Duke), and military leader (Danai Gurira) have competing and overlapping interests. Some wish them to be more proactive, sharing their technology – flying cars, miracle medicine, hover trains – with the world’s underprivileged. Others wish to protect their secrecy at all costs. Enter the villains – a scene-chewing thief (Andy Serkis’ Ulysses Klaue, last seen getting his arm chopped by Ultron in Avengers 2) and a rabble-rousing zealot (Michael B. Jordan) – who are hellbent on breaking into Wakanda and zooming out with high-powered weapons to send hither and yon to the oppressed everywhere. A new world order is what they’re after, and though deep down they ideologically align with the Wakandan ideals of freedom, their process is suspect. Yes, Wakanda may be prepared to fight off baddies with violence – they have an army and battle-rhinos, after all – but at least they aren’t indiscriminately murdering their way through a plot for world domination. There is real political heat to this conflict, and it is rooted inextricably in character. Jordan, especially, brings great simmering rage and expressive, pointed attack that’s more vivid and personal than the typical superhero villain.

So Coogler does more than the usual MCU picture gets up to, while managing to draw several immediately lovable new characters and relationships. It’s an entire cast of scene-stealers, fun on the surface. But, beyond the pleasure of charming performances, that it’s an all-black cast makes it powerful representation – a swaggering thrill of diversity in an otherwise very white franchise. It’s not even explicitly addressed in the film itself; best is how it takes this state as natural and right and moves on to business as usual. Here the cast goes zipping through light banter and fun action. There’s a car chase through Korea that’d be the best action sequence in any other MCU film, and its almost a letdown following a fantastic brawl in an underground casino – sets up a space that looks like a Bond lair and sings with a Kendrick Lamar song before sliding through a digitally-composited long take that slides up and down a multi-level set. It has exquisite design, clothing its characters in colorful patterns and an assortment of accessories drawing equally from African fashion through the ages and vintage Marvel looks from the groovy to the modern. That it has all this vibrancy of personality and ideas makes it all the more depressing that it must culminate in one of those endless CGI slugfests that – though still slightly more fun than the deadening conclusions to, say, the otherwise semi-charming Guardians of the Galaxy – will clearly call out for a fast-forward button in any at-home rewatch. Still, it effortlessly and entertainingly opens up a fascinating new corner in a franchise that risked falling into dull repetition. It may fall into the same routine eventually, but at least it gives us something relatively fresh to admire on the way there.

A New Hope: STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI

I didn’t know they had it in them, but I’m grateful to be proven wrong. Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi is the first great Star Wars movie since creator George Lucas sold his company to Disney. Though run by Lucas collaborators and acolytes – from an ILM and Skywalker Sound stocked with Wars veterans to a story group built out of the prequel days, to a longtime producing partner in Kathleen Kennedy overseeing it all – the results thus far have been mostly successful recreations of franchise sensations past. They were nostalgic, fleet, and fun enough. JJ Abrams managed to introduce a handful of bright and promising new characters along the way in Episode 7 – the searching Rey (Daisy Ridley), stewing dark-sider Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), turncoat stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega), and hotshot pilot Poe (Oscar Isaac). Gareth Edwards and company cobbled together a decent margin note in the franchise’s canon with the heisting of the Death Star plans in Rogue One. But for all that potential, it took writer-director Rian Johnson (whose Brick and Looper marked him as an original voice to watch) to return the sense of surprise to the galaxy. He makes a movie following Abrams’ new characters and some of Lucas’ classic ones into a roller coaster of creative developments.

Where Johnson succeeds is in his molecularly precise evocation of the Star Wars style, not by simply copying faithfully what’s come before, but by returning to the source. He realizes the series is a suis generis blending of Westerns and World War II movies, gangster pictures and samurai films, high fantasy and low serialized sci-fi. He returns to these inspirations for whip-smart visual language, spirited tone, and adventurous spirit, shot through with zen portent and seriousness of mythological import. So once more unto the Star War we go, the sinister First Order seeking to crush the rebellious Resistance once and for all. General Leia (the late, great Carrie Fisher), hoping for the return of her brother Luke (Mark Hamill, soulful and unpredictable), leads the surviving rebels across space, pursued by the evil Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis). The usual sturm und drang of space battles and aliens worlds follows, with a healthy dose of Jedi mysticism on a far-flung planet where a Master hides from his mistakes and an earnest would-be Padawan desperately seeks his help. He’s their only hope. The Rebels assemble for dogfights and showdowns; the Dark Side and the Light ready their laser swords with patient, spiritual connections in The Force; nefarious characters plot backstabbings and pure-hearted beings become the sparks that will light up the darkness. In the middle is Rey, an ever more exciting new hero movingly unmoored from a sense of destiny, hoping to find her place in all this while Kylo Ren, similarly lost, circles with roiling bad vibes. 

This is rich emotional territory mined with crisp, clear storytelling in painterly precision and elegantly lensed filmic cinematography. It’s big, broad, immediately satisfying storytelling in the tradition of the series’ best moments. Every step of the way, Johnson finds visual invention for his gripping sequences and compelling settings – a bombing run is so crisply, efficiently unfolded, the fate of a character we’ve never before met and who hardly speaks is intensely felt; a dazzling casino world drips in military-industrial power and is larded with slimy monsters of all sorts (and a jazzy alien band to boot); a colony of frog-like nuns caretake a crumbling village surrounded by a sea of squawking bird-beings; a salt-covered planet is streaked in billowing red dust as a battle rages; a red-walled throne room is draped in ominous Dark Side intent; a hyperspace jump shatters plans – and minds. In these thrilling images and places are a host of creatures and more new characters, from a mysterious pink-haired admiral (Laura Dern) to a big-hearted rebel recruit (Kelly Marie Tran) and a slippery thief (Benicio Del Toro). Johnson imagines fun adventures, tense escapes teetering on massive stakes, and pleasing grace notes – First Order office politics, a melding of prequel lore in sequel minds, loving glamour shots of vehicles and tech – while never stepping wrong. 

What a deeply felt outpouring of the finest Star Wars anyone not named George Lucas has managed to get on the big screen! This isn’t a film entirely coasting on old nostalgia (though the familiar sounds of lightsabers, TIE fighters, and the like are powerful generators of it). Nor is it content to simply doodle in the margins of the expected. Johnson uses the old as a runway for new adventure to take off. In the end, I found it poignant to consider how he’s skillfully built in an old franchise a space for new imagination, while connecting to the childlike wonder at the sense of grandiose unfolding mythology that makes it evergreen. Johnson has pulled off a perfect balancing act – a reverent brand deposit that pushes all the right nostalgic buttons while fearlessly unfurling satisfying surprises. It’s a sensation as pure and as real as a kid, head swimming in the galaxy far, far away, picking up a broom and, for a fleeting moment, imagining it a lightsaber.

Monkey Business: WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES

War for the Planet of the Apes, the finale for the trilogy that is Fox’s most recent attempt to restart the venerable sci-fi franchise, is the heaviest picture yet concocted for this series. And that’s saying something, when back in the 70s it gave us a film that ended with the planet Earth exploding, then improbably followed that up with a sequel that kindly supposed three beings escaped the destruction only to see them to their violent deaths a couple hours later. But that was decades ago, and done with a sense of sharp pulp fun. Now, though, War’s director Matt Reeves, returning from the previous entry, treats the ongoing conflict gravely. After Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – a dour, but thrillingly charged allegory for intractable armed conflict – the band of mind-bogglingly convincing CG primates lead by Caesar (Andy Serkis), the smartest of their kind, have continued to retreat into the woods. They fend off attacks from humans, but only in defense. They want to be peaceful, but continue to be dragged into war by men – and they’re all men here – who fear them. Mankind knows its time is up – ravaged by disease and facing apes of undeniable intellectual equality – and would rather go down fighting than slowly die out. 

Reeves takes this idea as seriously as possible. He shoots the film like a Holocaust drama, suffusing a gunmetal grey and mottled mud palate with a somber heaviness as it captures atrocities inflicted upon bodies ape and human alike. Our primate heroes are slaughtered, captured, carted away, and forced into slave narratives and POW trauma. The people – heavily armed, and adorned with graffiti like “Bedtime for Bonzo” and “Ape-pocalypse Now” – get sick, and act sicker. The raw materials of blockbuster dazzlement – effects, explosions, CGI monkeys, and loud armories – have a pall cast over them. Sure, you might think it’d be fun to watch apes ride horses and root for them against dastardly military madmen. But Reeves wants to make sure it hurts, too. This has always been a series of films interested in the damage mankind does to itself and others, the venal and violent tendencies burbling underneath that lead us inevitably to our doom. Sometimes the apes who take over are stand-ins for minorities and the oppressed. Sometimes they also represent, in true Animal Farm fashion, the worst human qualities, as the more like men they become – walking upright, speaking, organizing – the worse they behave. It’s rich sociopolitical text, but War’s grinding depression and repetitive thematic inquiry mutes its impact. As a fitting conclusion to this Caesar’s story – here hoping to take his clan to the promised land, one step ahead of the Kurtz-y colonel on their tail (Woody Harrelson) – it ties up loose ends. As a continuation or furthering of the ideas – visual and otherwise – that were so thrillingly novel in Rupert Wyatt’s 2011 kickoff Rise of the Planet of the Apes and expertly complicated in Dawn, it’s nothing much, flatter and, worse, routine.

The film carries itself with the gravity of a historical epic, moved with grim contemplation and constructed as if preordained. Of course, because this is nominally prequel narrative to the planet of apes Charlton Heston (or Mark Wahlberg) would discover centuries later, it is preordained. We know where this is heading. In his concept of the fall of man and rise of ape, Reeves (co-writing with screenwriter Mark Bomback), makes this film at once sweeping and small, massive in implication and intimate in execution. It follows Caesar and his compatriots across mountains and beaches and forests, and yet boils down to small confrontations, a tiny cast of speaking roles, and tight closeups – chimp and man growling philosophy in terse conversations and patient shot/reverse shot. The planet is irrevocably changed, and it happens largely offscreen, indifferent to the dramas of the players on the film’s center stage. It’s an environmentalist lament about species struggling to survive, a pacifist’s sorrow about the inevitability of violence begetting violence, an idealist’s compromises to gain a better future for his followers. This contributes to the heaviness of the film, but it also gums up the spectacle, growing humorless (a delightful comic relief Steve Zahn ape notwithstanding) and cold. We watch apes slowly put plans into action as men with guns and tanks move into position to take them out once and for all, but not before working them nearly to death to build last-ditch human battlements. It’s involving and interesting without ever tipping over into compelling or emotionally satisfying. Still, the all-consuming mood is effective, enveloping, and hard to shake, a bleak drumbeat of pessimism and glum resignation. Even the rattling action comes booming with a sense of doom, sorrowfully leaving bodies piled high.