Spaced: VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets blasts off with more invention in one sequence than many blockbusters manage in their entire runtime. So chockablock with dazzling gee-whiz whiz-bang sci-fi detail and swooping techno-swashbuckling space opera derring-do, it’s an overload of pulp eye candy. Spaceships soar through the skies, asteroids pelt planets, energy pulses from being to being, viewscreens and robots light up with commands, a multitude of creatures jostle side by side in a universe cascading every direction in and out of the colorful 3D frame, and a hero and heroine pose in rippling red-blooded choreography. Too bad the movie slowly runs out of steam, hitting its peak around the midpoint, then slowly dragging to an underwhelming climax, each sequence a little less involving than the last. But, goodness gracious, how eye-boggling the film is from top to bottom and beginning to end, worth marveling at even after the rote plot and clunky dialogue’s throwback novelty appeal wears off. What preposterously dorky-cool retro-future space serial silliness! It’s good enough to make me wish for a whole bunch more of these, a big, glowing, fully-inhabited fantasy universe worth exploring. After all, marry the look and movement to a tighter, wittier script consistently involving throughout, and you’d really have something here.

Springing from the mind of French trash-master Luc Besson, inspired by a classic French comic book, the writer-director steers into his strengths. Always a tonal eccentric with a brilliant design sense, he’s made a career out of stretching and pulling at genre conceits in unexpected ways. His films aren’t always worthwhile enterprises – he’s made more than his fair share of clunkers – but there’s an earnest appeal to his attempts. Valerian, like Besson’s best films – from the similarly colorful sci-fi Fifth Element to hallucinogenic super-lady actioner Lucy – is built around enjoyable visual tricks and hurtling energy. Familiar in the best sense of the word, here’s a gleaming CG space movie built around geometric ships, rocket suits, laser guns, and glowing screens, and with striking figures – our leads with features more delicate and movements more fluid than we usually get out of stock brutes and babes – flying and posing in elaborately constructed phoniness and quick, chaotic, episodic cliff-hangers. Here we follow interplanetary secret agents Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne), a flirtatious working partnership played with low-chemistry, flat-footed, dopey love/hate obviousness, as they get pulled into a conspiracy involving duplicitous colleagues, secret redacted information, and a bevy of nasty underworld characters on sidetracks and side quests. 

Our heroes’ journey begins in an action sequence with the movie’s coolest idea – an inter-dimensional bazaar where a stakeout turns into a chase sequence that phases in and out of different planes of reality, an inventive transporting genre idea – before returning to Alpha base, where a thousand planets have built a hodgepodge floating city in deep space. They’re meant to be working together in harmony, but amidst the bulkheads and geospheres and capsules of this galactic Zootopia, darkness grows. This leads to Valerian and Laureline’s encounters with their stern commanding officers (Clive Owen, Kris Wu, and Herbie Hancock), heartless robots, a ruthless alien gangster (John Goodman), gossiping duck-billed beings, massive aquatic beasts, memory-unlocking jellyfish, a sexy shapeshifting blob (Rihanna) and her bejeweled cowboy pimp (Ethan Hawke), a tiny rodent that poops magic pearls, and an ethereal race of doomed blue androgynous stowaways (Elizabeth Debicki and others). Through it all, Besson keeps his images spinning with elaborate expensive detail. It’s like the best sci-fi paperback cover paintings you’ve never seen. He had a huge budget and a good imagination and is intent on displaying as much as he can. The heroes crash through dazzlingly rendered visual delights, lingering mere minutes or even seconds in environments so rich with possibility that you could set up shop in just one for an entire feature. But we’re always rushing to the next episode, the next dramatic escape, the next conflict in an unfolding mystery. By the time the plot forces itself to congeal and resolve, petering out in rote villain monologues and tedious flashback explanations, it’s not only with the sad sense of a narrative running out of steam, but with the deflating knowledge that that’s how we’ll have to leave this memorable world.

Sick Daze: A CURE FOR WELLNESS

A Cure for Wellness ends up another Hollywood movie about why being a workaholic is bad. And yet director Gore Verbinski makes the whole baroque horror atmosphere and plotting so intensely odd and unsettlingly drifting that I can’t help but admire it. Even as I found myself asking, “Why am I seeing this?” during the movie’s winding, repetitive middle, I couldn’t look away. (Well, except for the part with the aesthesia-free dental drilling. I had to squirm and squint then.) It’s set largely at a massive Swiss sanitarium set up in a sprawling nightmarish castle (one which houses centuries-old secrets, no less). There you can check out, but you can never leave. So discovers ambitious finance guy Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) when sent to retrieve his company’s missing chairman. The old man (Harry Groener) has been holed up in this place receiving aqua-therapy: steamed, dipped, dripped, and dunked while drinking plenty of fluids. And yet he never seems to get any better. And the head doctor (Jason Isaacs) insinuates he won’t any time soon. And the nurses won’t seem to call Lockhart a cab. And then he somehow topsy-turvy ends up a patient there himself. Now we’re all trapped, wondering how there could possibly be a way out of this Kafka-meets-Kubrick hall of body horrors.

As it begins we see dark ominous low-angle shots of a midnight modern cityscape, towering skyscrapers like one with a single glowing office in which a harried guy checks stocks and answers emails until he dies of a heart attack. It looks like a 90’s Fincher effort – mostly The Game – or the technological/supernatural isolation and paranoia of Verbinski’s own (great) The Ring. (He’s once again working with that film’s director of photography, Bojan Bazelli, brining the beautiful film in a similarly drained sumptuousness.) But by the time the young protagonist arrives at the health spa castle in the picturesque Swiss Alps, the whole production slips easily into a modern-day Gothic horror. (It’s not only the repeated eel imagery giving the movie its slithering, inevitable forward motion.) The place has a dark history, old lockets, hidden rooms, secretive groundskeepers, eerily unbending rules, stern authority figures, and a pretty, pale young woman (Mia Goth) with a mysterious past. Lockhart is drawn deeper into the hallucinatory hallways (think a Shining hospital) and the spooky subtext as doctors don’t quite say all they mean, and teeth fall out, urine samples have icky substances floating in them, and fellow patients are increasingly confused or confusing.

Running well over two hours, the script by Verbinski and Justin Haythe (Snitch) takes its time doling out clues and suspicions, only fully unspooling its knotty, baroquely upsetting backstory in its final moments. This gives most of the film over to atmosphere, wandering down the same halls, seeing increasingly suspicious behavior and ever more unhinged gross medical procedures. Here modernity has been thoroughly colonized by the Gothic imagination. Verbinski’s strong command of tone and genre has befitted his career resuscitating old modes with a twist. He’s made a ghost story (The Ring), westerns (Rango, The Lone Ranger), pirate movies (the first three Pirates of the Caribbean), madcap slapstick (Mouse Hunt) and screwball heists (The Mexican), all old-fashioned forms told with newfangled vernacular. With Wellness he drags Gothic trappings into now, tapping into a potent feeling of gaslit befuddlement. He conjures an atmosphere of unspeakable wrongness, allowing an in-over-his-head protagonist to wandering the clammy corridors and sweaty stones with increasing unease. He’s slowly losing his mind, unable to put the pieces together, pacified only by flirtations with the mystery girl and the stunning mountain views. He could very nearly forget why he’s there, but for the sudden dips into disturbing escalation: locked in a sensory deprivation chamber, hallucinating a deer in the steam room, hearing odd whistling rattles from around corners and down dark vents.

The people running the spa are quite transparently up to no good, and their constant lies and obfuscations when asked direct questions don’t seem to matter. So what if Lockhart knows they are lying when their cult of wealthy health nuts is happy in a cocoon of misinformation? There’s a perceptive strain of anti-intellectualism hiding under mindless quantification happening here, wrapped up in a nasty, pulpy mystery. (Timely, no?) It answers the question of why we’re watching this queasy blend of inevitable and adrift plotting in the same way as the question of why our protagonist doesn’t just leave. We’re all too curious to see how this thing turns out. For a finale, Verbinski has the movie devolve into a faintly more standard grotesque scramble, with vulnerable nubile flesh juxtaposed with a monster’s drooping, drooling face while the hero takes decisive action. But the filmmaker maintains such a vice grip of stunning imagery and sustained, teeth-gritted gross-out tension, straight through to the final shot, that it’s hard to shake the film’s sinister insistent spell. It’s as slithery as a bathtub full of eels wriggling around a bathing woman who peers over the edge with an inscrutable stare. The movie is full of such mesmerizing, disturbing allure. It is masterfully directed mush.

Caught in a Web: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2

What makes Spider-Man fundamentally engaging and enjoyable is his relatable humanity. Peter Parker is just a normal young guy with real problems with family, school, girls, and employment. That provides a ground-level rooting interest that’s a more direct emotional appeal in all his action sequences than in all the boring climactic near-apocalyptic scenarios that pervade the superhero genre. That’s what I found most charming about The Amazing Spider-Man. With Andrew Garfield the reboot’s filmmakers found, like Sam Raimi found in Tobey Maguire for their superior films, a likable guy. Even if Peter didn’t always do the right thing, you knew the decisions pile up and weigh on him without getting in the way of the high-flying fun of being Spider-Man. What was most refreshing about that retelling of Spidey’s origin story was its relatively self-contained narrative. It didn’t seem to be spending too much of its time teasing future installments or leaving storylines conspicuously hanging at loose ends like so many superhero movies do these days. It simply found good performers in a narrative that had a beginning, middle, and end.

But when it comes to The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the charm of a complete story has been entirely thrown out. It consists of 142 minutes of scenes – some better than others – that never cohere. The whole production exists for the moment, chasing a this-happens-then-this-happens high where everything is pitched at a consistent level of spectacle and import. I thought of Ebert’s criticism of Michael Bay’s Armageddon as a feature-length trailer. The problem is, this Spider-Man isn’t just cut together like its own highlights. It’s cut together like a teaser for its own sequel. It’s all color, noise, and shapeless plot, stuffed full of subplots and character introductions foreshadowing and previewing where the studio would like to take this franchise in the future. As a result, the movie plays out busily with much happening, but little impact. There’s no clear through-line. Narrative, character, theme, and style exist in a haze, constantly threatening to take shape, but never getting there.

To even briefly summarize the plot seems a losing proposition. Instead I’ll describe some of the variables bouncing around. Peter (Garfield) is on-again-off-again with the lovable Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone, continuing her appealing performance from the first movie). He’s also trying to hide his superhero identity from sweet Aunt May (Sally Field). Meanwhile, the heir to the CEO throne of the omnipresent and obviously menacing Oscorp Industries, Harry Osborne (Dane DeHaan), skulks about looking to cure his mysterious hereditary ailment. A dweeby and unjustly ignored scientist (Jamie Foxx) gets electrocuted and then falls into a tank of genetically altered eels, an experience that leaves him blue, translucent, able to manipulate energy, and has rattled his brain in a way that leads him to decide he’s a supervillain and take the name Electro. He must know he’s in a superhero movie. The rest of the movie is filled with bit parts for the likes of Paul Giamatti, B.J. Novak, Felicity Jones, and Sarah Gadon, all clearly sitting around hoping they get to play more important roles in a future installment.

Director Marc Webb, with cinematographer Dan Mindel, shoots it all clearly and colorfully, juggling the plotlines as best he can. It’s all broad and comic-booky, with cartoony fluidity to the bright special effects and shots of action that twist gymnastically around Spidey in sometimes-exciting ways. But it is when Webb gets the chance to narrow in on the human relationships that the movie works best. The scenes are not particularly well written, but Garfield and Stone continue to have nice chemistry and manage to have a believable romantic spark as they juggle their lives individually and together. He’s a freelance photographer and Spider-Man. She’s an Oscorp intern and wants to go to Oxford in the fall. The question of what their future looks like, and whether they’re a couple beyond the present, is treated with some gravity. It works only because the performances are convincing.

Garfield is enjoying himself, creating a Peter Parker who is having so much fun being Spider-Man, swinging down New York City skyscrapers and wisecracking with bad guys, that darker shadings of grief and mystery almost don’t have room to stretch out comfortably. Stone, for her part, is even better. Not just a prop or an object to be rescued, she holds her own. Smart, she helps think Spidey’s way out of a number of predicaments, and is her own independent-minded person. It’s a shame that she has to reenact one of the source material’s most famous plot developments, a decision that turns her into yet another female character we’re only supposed to care about because of how what happens to her makes the male lead feel.

But it’s not just her. Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci’s screenplay makes the wrong moves by having every character and event become simply an overtly reverential and referential signpost on the way to the next spectacle, moving the pieces and gears into place for the next installment instead of becoming a wholly satisfying story of its own. (That Kurtzman/Orci scripts have sometimes made this a bad habit is not encouraging. I went into the film unaware of its writers and when their credit appeared I groaned and thought “makes sense.”) If I’m being charitable, the movie is an accidental post-narrative experiment. If I’m not being charitable, it’s desperately laying track just ahead of a franchise barreling down a route-in-progress. Either way, the flop sweat starts to show. It leads to a wobbly tone and confused plot.

Take Jamie Foxx for example. He’s delivering an amused big, campy performance that appears to belong in a different movie. Electro is a jumble of shifting personalities, goofy jealousies, and legitimate complaints, not to mention some serious-minded hints of metaphoric marginalization that remain largely inactive, all mixed into one convincingly weird persona. His scenes rise to match his nutty intensity and scattered evolution. I thoroughly enjoyed his scene opposite the exquisitely named Dr. Ashley Kafka (Marton Csokas), a man with a thick German accent who captures Electro in an Oscorp-funded insane asylum’s contraption that looks like a rubber body suit welded into a giant circuit board suspended over a hot tub. (Why would such a thing even exist other than to accommodate the plot of a superhero movie?) It’s a scene that feels one or two notches away from pure comedy.

But it is hard to square that tone with what we see elsewhere. We get straining emotional scenes of Dane DeHaan brooding with intensity in a heightened sickly torment that nearly breaks past the quick and dirty token characterization given to him. There is light relationship comedy, intimations of fatherly secrets for Spidey and Osborne alike, an opening phony-baloney plane crash flashback, a concluding manipulative little-kid-in-danger scene, a perilous blackout, a couple of winking references to the sadly still-unseen J. Jonah Jameson (the best of all Spider-Man supporting characters), and a funeral. It’s a sequel that does so much, it ends up feeling like nothing at all. I didn’t exactly have a bad time, but its diverting qualities are fleeting and its frustrations linger.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears: LAWLESS

John Hillcoat’s Lawless has all the right ingredients to become a great movie, but lacks the focus to truly capitalize on these assets. His earlier films, muddy, blood-soaked outback western The Proposition and bombed-out, hardscrabble, post-apocalyptic The Road, were films so downbeat, atmospheric and tangibly grim that by the time the end credits rolled I felt like I had dirt crunching under my fingernails. Lawless, a promising based-on-a-true-story drama about three small-town, deep-South, bootlegging brothers in the age of Prohibition, is well cast, well photographed and contemplatively paced. By the end, though, it’s only conjured up a level of surface grime and narrative muddiness. It’s a nice try, but all this craftsmanship has gone into a finished product that’s mostly inert.

The moonshine-cooking brothers at the center of the film are a tough, monosyllabic World War I veteran (Tom Hardy), a brutish, bearded alcoholic (Jason Clarke), and a squirrely, dopey hothead (Shia LaBeouf). They run their operation with the full cooperation of the local sheriff, but one day, in swoops a preening big-city representative of the law (Guy Pearce, sans eyebrows). It’s a setup not unlike a Western, with charismatic guys strutting around, hands on their hips, fingers brushing just above heavy holsters. There are pretty women – a recent arrival who works the bar (Jessica Chastain) and the preacher’s shy daughter (Mia Wasikowska) – a local cripple boy who helps out the criminals (Dane DeHaan), and a stately, blunt crooked official (Gary Oldman). Then, here comes the stranger who threatens the small town’s lawless, but weirdly stable, state.

The script by Nick Cave (a musician who also wrote the fiddle-and-banjo folk-music score) is full of vague, evocative mumbling and perplexing character relationships that are at once sharply simple and complex, given to halting development. The plot moves forward in long, languorous periods of stillness and sporadic rise-to-modest-riches montage interrupted only by gory splashes of violence. The film is effectively one of introductions and set-ups that sometimes wind their long, slow way to some sort of resolution. It’s sporadically effective, in short bursts of righteous anger, in which bloodied louts reappear in startling moments of retribution, and scenes in which flawed antiheroes and worse villains clash in a warped cops-and-criminals routine. At best, it’s a film that’s like a backwoods Boardwalk Empire.

But for all the picturesque dusty roads, lush forest landscapes, period detail, and vividly inarticulate performances, the film remains static and unfocused. It’s hard to watch a film introduce such formidable talents as Mia Wasikowska and Gary Oldman in separate striking scenes – the former in an impeccably sound-designed church service, and the latter in a tommy-gun assault down the middle of Main Street – and then thoroughly squander their characters. They fade into the background. Wasikowska lives out an undernourished romantic subplot while Oldman just flat out disappears after two scenes or so. But that’s just indicative of the film’s unfocused approach to storytelling that doggedly refuses to allow clarity into the characterizations. Take Chastain, for instance, who simply floats through the margins and, despite experience some horrific (off-screen) abuse, exists only so that Tom Hardy can have someone other than his brothers to grunt at.

To some extent, I was willing to follow the aimless nature of the film simply because Hillcoat is such a strong director. There is considerable craftsmanship here, striking images, impressive sequences, stunning shots. What’s lacking, ultimately, is a reason to care. By the time the film dead ends in a climactic confrontation, I found myself realizing that I still knew very little about these characters, even as I bristled at the uncomfortable, ill-fitting ugliness that warps the whole thing into a pat clash between good and evil, with the scrappy small town criminals fighting back against a slimy federal influence. It’s a strange note to end on, but no stranger than the wistful epilogue that follows. This is a film that’s well made on every technical level, but deeply confused about what it’s about. It’s a film about rough, violent entrepreneurs and slick, violent lawmen and yet remains uncommitted as to what it wants to say about that, if anything at all.

Great Powers, No Responsibility: CHRONICLE

Josh Trank’s debut feature Chronicle is a nice spin on the typical superhero origin story. It’s such a nice spin that, until late in the film when it makes blatant nods towards that direction, it could be any old found-footage horror movie with vaguely supernatural things happening to a small cast of teens. It starts with Andrew (Dane DeHaan), a loner high-school senior, getting his hands on a video camera with which to document his life, which is certainly not going well. His father (Michael Kelly) is a drunk, abusive man. His mother (Bo Peterson) is dying. When he goes to school, things aren’t much better. He’s ignored, or worse, bullied. When his popular, extroverted cousin (Alex Russell) invites him to a cool party, he reluctantly takes the chance to get out of the house.

At the party, he, his cousin, and another popular senior (Michael B. Jordan) head out into the woods to explore a mysterious hole in the ground. We follow the shakily filmed teens down into the hole where they find a massive glowing blue crystalline wall (government secret? alien artifact?) that makes their noses bleed and the camera go all screwy. The screen goes black. When it comes back to life, Andrew has a new camera. We see the three guys playing catch. But it’s not quite that simple. Soon it’s apparent that the ball they’re throwing is veering off at weird angles or even stopping mid-flight, hovering in the air. They’re controlling the ball with their minds. Then one of them notices a small trickle of blood leaking out one nostril.

The teens explore their newfound telekinetic powers in a casual, goofy way that feels more or less the way actual teenage guys would handle the situation. Do you really think they’d head right out to fight crime? That’s a superhero trope that’s nicely cast aside here as they wander around town playing pranks, roughhousing, taunting bullies and trying to get girls. It’s all so simple, but the found-footage style (albeit deployed in a way that grows increasingly strained) gives a shaky verisimilitude to the kinds of powers we’ve seen many times before. When one of the guys discovers that they can levitate themselves – flying, actually – the way they try it out made me actually concerned they’d fall. When was the last time I was afraid some superpowered character would drop out of the sky? Maybe never.

There’s a winning lack of confidence to these characters, a halting sense of bewildered and astonished improvisation with their new abilities. Especially with Andrew, a sullen kid who gets powers and a new group of friends in the very same instant, the film gets good use out of its central metaphor of superpowers being an unstable aspect of adolescent id within an overwhelming sense of change. The screenplay by Max Landis (son of John) can be (but isn’t always) especially acute in the way it deals with the shifting emotions of its three leads.

Where the film starts to fall apart, when the small sense of disappointment sets in, is when it becomes just another superhero movie. It’s still found footage, but the commitment to believable shots (such a crucial, enjoyable aspect in Cloverfield and the Paranormal Activity movies) starts to slip away. And, though the characters are still just regular teens with special abilities and nary a mask, cape, or latex suit in sight, the climax of the story hinges on yet another sequence in which guys beat up on each other with their superpowers. I was engaged and intrigued by the film for so long, enjoying ways that it tweaked teen movie moments like a party or a school talent show with an injection of supernatural powers, that when it sinks into cliché it’s all the more frustrating. That said, the climactic battle plays out with more weight and impact than you usually find. The stakes feel real and though the blows between the combatants feel CGI weightless, the collateral damage has a believable immediacy to it. But I couldn’t help but wonder who could have possibly found all of this footage (expanding from the simple camera to a host of amateur photographers, security cameras and police car dashboards) and then edited it together. It’s not exactly motivated.

But those questions barely bothered me in the moment. The film’s a skillful slide from a genre goof into truly dark territory as Trank’s direction of Landis’s script makes genuine emotional and metaphorical sense out of powers that could otherwise have been glossy B-movie accoutrements. It resists coping out of its genre tweaking by going all the way with suits, superhero names, and catch phrases. It stays likably grounded. Although I had the sense that in the near future, just past the end credits, one of these characters is going to be donning a superheroic persona, it doesn’t feel like just another would-be franchise starter. The actions the young guys take feel convincing and the outcome is always a little in doubt. In the end it’s surprisingly unsurprising, but it’s nicely done in a way that feels new and exciting even when it's not.