Rocket Power: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: VOLUME 3

Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 pays off a near-decade of investment I didn’t know I had in these misfit sci-fi heroes and this particularly eccentric and isolated corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It does so by offering what no other subset of the MCU has managed: an ending, full and complete, exciting and moving, and honest both to its characters and its tone. This is a rollicking adventure with wacky side characters and rambunctious action sequences. But it also really cares about these cartoony weirdos and has, in the end, found a reason to communicate that love through a vision of self-sacrifice in the name of an open-minded community. There’s a real idea here—about the futility of forced homogeneity, the futility of perfection, and the rousing power of ragtag diverse cooperation. And there’s vision of splashy colors and apocalyptic rumblings that set the characters on edge with a palpable sense of danger and finality.

The likes of earnest goof Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) and killer green Gamora (Zoe Saldana) with her blue robot sister (Karen Gillan), talking tree Groot (Vin Diesel), hyper-literal muscle man Drax (Dave Bautista), and simpatico alien empath Mantis (Pom Klementieff) are still a loose, funny ensemble. And here their problems are treated with a genuine frayed edge. The writing gives them a strong squabbling affection and heartfelt duty. They really care about saving their world and their friends and everyone they can. Funny how often comic book movies let that slip away these days. This one populates its widescreen invention with a menagerie of characters we’ve actually come to care about, and who actually care about each other and what they’re doing instead of merely posing in the chaos. How nice that this entry is somehow freed from the treadmill of franchise promises—which so often strand each Marvel movie as just an extended promise that the next one will have the really good stuff. That makes it the only MCU property to emerge from the Avengers cross-overs and Disney+ spinoffs not looking worse for wear. It helps that the Guardians are easily the best parts of the enjoyable Infinity War and hollow Endgame. And that makes one of the biggest laughs in this new one when Star-Lord deadpans a one-sentence summary of the latter.

In this Volume 3, writer-director James Gunn gets to really dig into who these characters are, what they’d need to be happy, and how to send them off with the most satisfying resolutions possible. He’s finishing his neat trilogy of brightly poppy space operas set to a classic rock mixtape backbeat knowing he has the audience goodwill to place the entire film’s emotional and narrative thrust on the tragic backstory of the talking, gun-toting CGI Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper). In the present tense he’s been wounded and his friends need to steal a couple MacGuffins to revive him. We also get flashbacks to the mad scientist who created him, which serves a double duty of exposition seeing as the experimenter in question is also our Big Bad. (Chukwudi Iwuji plays him as a howling, calculating evil, with an eerie calm face literally stapled on.) The two timelines work well to provide a fine undertow of tension and care. So there’s refreshingly a lot jostling and juggling for attention, pleasingly overstuffed and productively messy when so many of its franchise brethren are under-stuffed and tidily hollow. By the time we get to the Guardians hoping to save the villains’ experiments as they revive Rocket, it’s like the Island of Misfit Toys looting Sid’s toy box. I couldn’t resist that hook’s emotional appeal.

It’s a movie overflowing with side-characters and incident, animated by a contagious delight in invention and a specificity in its characters. The main cast are deployed well, and the choice supporting parts are efficiently and effectively drawn, too, like an antagonistic golden super-guy played by Will Poulter as a cross between a terminator on the hunt of our heroes and a sweetheart hoping to do his statuesque mother (Elizabeth Debicki) proud. We also get a few memorable moments with a scruffy space pirate gone good (Sean Gunn) and a telekinetic canine cosmonaut (speaking through a translation collar with the voice of Maria Bakalova) that build neat payoffs of their own. Even the henchmen and thugs and bystanders are given vivid shorthand characterization, fun punchlines, and fleeting touching moments of humanity. Here’s a movie powered on the belief that we should see the characters as characters, and not just action figures or Easter eggs.

This is a bustling picture, a large-scale, all-engines-go sci-fi jaunt powered with enjoyable emotional manipulation. It all comes to a head in a successive series of slam-bang set-pieces in which spaceships careen and laser-guns go kaplow as mutants and aliens and freakazoids of every shape and size ooze and splatter and smash. There are clever, concussive action sequences booming with sound and invention in a living space station, on an exploding planet, and as a space fortress collides with a giant skull. That’s all neat Jack Kirby-style fireworks and design peppered with punchlines. But because it’s driven by this surprising well of affection for the characters, and a commitment to bring them to some kind of conclusion, it works as a crowd-pleasing entertainment, an outsized comic book spectacle with the heart and soul others of its ilk so often miss. In retrospect, it’s a trilogy that put in the work to make us love its characters as much as its creators do, and it’s great to see them fly off on one more grand adventure together.

The Other Side: KNOCK AT THE CABIN

There’s an intensity borne from earnestness in the films of M. Night Shyamalan. In his latest, Knock at the Cabin, the world is ending. Multiple cataclysmic events are piling up. One family, on vacation, unaware of the lurking global catastrophes, are about to offered an awful choice with the claim that it’s the only way to stop what’s already starting. No devotee of M. Night Shyamalan will be surprised that Cabin juxtaposes apocalyptic stakes with the sentimentality of familial love. He’s as open-hearted a genre filmmaker as ever there was one, using his total control of the camera for total emotional sincerity in his high-concept stories. This can cause discomfort in some audiences—shrinking back from such nakedly earnest emotional appeals, in which characters plainly pour out their souls. But it makes for such fascinating movies! He believes in his fictions, and in characters succumbing to theirs. At his best, it makes for tightly-controlled, high-concept thrillers wound around moving motivations and implications.

His films care deeply about the strength of family bonds, the sincerity of belief, and takes seriously the spiritual dimensions of genre dilemmas. Consider the doubting spirituality in Signs, in which a broken man of faith must find within himself the power to protect his family against unknowable otherworldly threat. Or the children held back by the rituals of their protective parents as the community bands together against the evils lurking in the woods beyond in The Village. Or the grounded superhero fictions trembling with violent real-world implications for parents and children in Unbreakable and Glass. Or the way time inevitably pulls parents and children apart even as it binds them together in Old. In Cabin, the family unit—two husbands and an eight-year-old daughter—is besieged by apparent fanatics whose ominous behaviors are said to result from prophetic visions. These harbingers of doom plead with the family to sacrifice for the greater good. Wouldn’t we all like to think we would? But, when told they must choose among their family for a human sacrifice, that choice is immediately difficult to even begin to contemplate.

The upsetting concept is inherently claustrophobic—captives and captors alike stuck in one small cabin while considering one tragic end or another. Shyamalan shoots dialogue in intense close-ups, tightly held on faces in long, lingering looks that fully take in the humanity of all involved. It’s uneasy, a tremulous tension held in the uncertainty of outcome balanced on the certainty of the telling. There’s a quasi-religious fervor to the invaders. Led by Dave Bautista in a rumblingly sensitive performance—is there a better actor working today at looking a muscular threat while speaking in a gentle softness?—these mismatched dangers confess to sharing visions—or are they delusions? They talk with soft-spoken fervor of their mission, and plead for their victims to heed the warning and make the choice. The family is tied up for most of the movie, wrestling with that question. One husband (Ben Aldridge) is resolutely convinced these antagonists are full of it. The other (Jonathan Groff) is afraid they’re starting to sound believable. Their daughter (Kristen Cui) is adorable and instantly sympathetic—sizing up the situation without being precocious. She’s aware of the dangers, sheltered from the worst of it, and willing to trust in her fathers’ resolve. The film rests on the question of who to believe, and, once believed, what must be done. It’s about the strength of a family’s love in the face of the potential apocalypse, and the necessarily painful nature of sacrifice. It’s all written in their eyes.

This is one of Shyamalan’s saddest movies, suffused with an eerie melancholy. Almost immediately, the conflict kicks in and the film knows life can never go back to how it was—for any of them. The suspense is pushed along by escalating violence, but it’s carefully composed bloodshed, more suggested and more unsettling for it. The ritualistic nature of its killings are given a nasty pull of inevitability and gathering force. And yet the fanatics are so matter-of-fact and sorrowful about it—they cry and lament and choke back vomit—that it makes their fantastical story of impending doom all the more believable. It’s hooked into a vivid spirituality that’s a sincere belief in the potential redemptive powers within all of us—for connection, for reconciliation, for transformative love, and for self-sacrifice. That leaves a movie that’s tremendously unresolved, and ends on a note that may or may not allow space for triumph or release, since it’s committed to leaving its characters in traumatized grief no matter the ultimate outcome.

Guess Who: GLASS ONION

Glass Onion isn’t exactly a sequel to Knives Out. It’s simply another complicated case for its sole returning character to puzzle through. Good thing detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is such great company, oozing Southern charm and confidence, while behaving an enlightened, affable gentleman who can slip right into any social context. He somehow stands out and blends in, the better to be underestimated as he gathers clues. And good thing, too, that writer-director Rian Johnson knows a thing or two about constructing a sequel that zigs when you’d expect it to zag, and ends up satisfying even more for giving you what you didn’t know you’d like to see. This one is a larger film, trading the first’s bickering family clad in cute sweaters, holed up in a cozy New England house while all their grievances tumble out, for a palatial mansion, with enormous sunny sets on a private Greek island filled with rich friends hanging around in sunglasses and beachwear. If Knives Out had an autumnal Thanksgiving vibe, Glass Onion is pure summer vacation.

It finds Blanc invited to a murder mystery party. He’s the ringer, and stranger, in a group of obscenely wealthy friends—a satirical send-up of every contemporary societal ill. There’s the host: an out-of-touch, and out-of-his-mind, tech bazillionaire (Edward Norton). And there are the guests: a hypocritical politician (Kathryn Hahn), a private-sector scientist-for-hire (Leslie Odom, Jr.), an alt-right YouTuber (Dave Bautista) and his girlfriend (Madelyn Cline), a ditzy model-turned-mogul (Kate Hudson) and her assistant (Jessica Henwick), and a former business partner who may be out for revenge (Janelle Monáe). It’s pretty easy to believe one of them will actually be murdered, and that they’ll all be so greedy and stupid that it might give Blanc quite a challenge. Johnson gives us a long, glittery, rambling opening hour that provides introductions to all of the characters and their dynamics. Invitations are delivered. The group assembles in Greece for the boat ride to the island. (Set during the first COVID summer, the way they wear their masks upon arrival is a big clue about their personalities.) They settle in for their first night in the mansion—a massive high-tech structure with dozens of rooms and topped with a gargantuan glass onion. The camera often pulls back to sweep around in bright establishing shots and drink it in, the sets and the setting providing a gleaming backdrop for the scheming. And throughout, Johnson, by taking his time, makes these political cartoons into bantering people we can size up and keep in mind as believable variables at play as the plot unfolds.

By the time the screenplay springs its surprises, doubling back on itself and deliberately filling in gaps I hadn’t paused to realize were left open, the film reveals it is awfully clever in a way that never stops paying out. There’s plenty of enjoyment on the surface of the movie, but when the setup reveals its full intentionality, there’s an added layer of rewards for the attentive viewer. This is a charmer of a mystery that you could practically chart on graph paper as its various setups converge with supremely satisfying reveals and conclusions. There’s an airtight clockwork construction at play, with each gear of plotting and character and humor turning at just the right time to click into place for crowd-pleasing punchlines and payoffs. Johnson’s a filmmaker with a great sense of genre play. See his straight-faced high-school noir Brick, or pretzel-logic time-travel thriller Looper, or his vivid, moving Star Wars episode. Here he’s totally at home, and clearly having fun, constructing these crafty mystery plots. They twist and turn, dangle detours and dole out tricks of perspective, but they always play fair with the audience. You can keep up with the logic, and by the end see the details close in with a pleasing snap. (It’s the dialogue and editing that does all the crackling and popping.) There’s evident delight in the construction, and that extends to the ensemble’s winning commitment to throwing themselves into the proceedings with wit and verve, too.

This has been a busy year for the whodunit movie. We got Greg Mottola’s shaggy, appealing Confess, Fletch. There was Kenneth Branagh’s opulent, excessive, and over-acted adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile; that has its velvety 70mm melodrama pleasures. We got a quaint and cozy little jewel box of a Christie homage, See How They Run; that’s a cute, winking meta-movie about a fictionalized murder mystery around the stage production of Christie’s The Mousetrap. (That movie actually brings Christie onstage, as if to say it was Agatha All Along.) But Glass Onion is head-and-shoulders above the rest. Rather than falling into homage or dutiful resuscitation of old tales, it’s the real deal itself. It’s built for maximum audience pleasure, and is quite pleased with itself, too. It’s formula without being formulaic. We return to these stories, not to be shocked and appalled or grossed out, but to take the mental exercise. Maybe it’s the cozy comfort of knowing, though the film may start with a dead body, it’ll end with a murderer revealed, and something like justice doled out.

Escape from Vegas: ARMY OF THE DEAD

If you’re going to stage a zombie outbreak and are looking for some sociopolitical resonance, you could do worse than Las Vegas. Seeing hordes of zombies milling about the slot machines or mindlessly shuffling down the strip isn’t exactly a stretch. It’s a pretty clear escalation of Romero’s use of the mall in Dawn of the Dead. Why are they there? Well, it’s what they’re used to. But really, what Zack Snyder proposes in his newest film, Army of the Dead, which, name aside, is not an extension of his remake of the Romero picture from nearly twenty years ago, is that it’d be a really neat thing to stage a heist movie inside a zombie movie. He's right. (So was Yeon Sang-ho, whose okay sequel to his great zombie actioner Train to Busan coincidentally used the same premise last year.) So why does it have to have a metaphor at all? He creates a rough future — shooting it with a smudged bleary digital paleness; ironically there are even some fleeting dead pixels in some dark scenes that had me thinking my TV was on the fritz — in which Vegas is the source of a zombie outbreak. An early scene with a speeding car accidentally smashing head-on into a military convoy transporting Patient Zero from Area 51 is a splashy start. (Car crashes are just so cinematic, no?) The city has been walled off, Escape from New York style, and is, in fact, about to be leveled with a nuclear bomb in order to stop the spread. That leaves just a few days for a casino owner (Hiroyuki Sanada) to get a team of mercenaries into his abandoned vault and rescue his money. It’s up to a mournful tough guy (Dave Bautista) to gather his forces and execute the plan.

Snyder knows what he’s doing, making a movie retrofitted from borrowed genre parts, an ambulatory homage that doesn't push too hard on anything but gore. He brings some slow-mo and needle drops and complicated world-building. But here even the lore of his take on this sort of world gathers lightly and in the margins. He’s making what might be his simplest movie. The movie gathers up some unfussy men-on-a-mission exposition in its open act, introducing a big cast of potential zombie chow to arm up and go in. Bautista is a soulful center to this thin pulp, and the fun mix of personalities around him puts Omari Hardwick next to Ella Purnell next to Garret Dillahunt next to Tig Notaro and lets their various energies crackle well enough. Then the movie spends its time plunging headlong into an extended Aliens homage the rest of the way through as the machine guns and strategy play out against hordes of dangerous undead. As bullets splatter the decomposing dead walkers, and the blood in general gathers to such ludicrous geysers that one grenade down a corridor appears to result in a gush of chili against the wall, it’s clear Snyder is enjoying the brutal goofiness inherent in his approach. 

That aside, the action is mostly hectic instead of visually striking, with Snyder, one of our last big budget visual stylists, making some of his blandest functional shots. A Romero or Verheoeven or Carpenter would’ve pushed harder on the style and satire, too, the bright lights city going to set its soul on fire. But Snyder, for all his excess and action, has some hint of a softie in him, making a movie ultimately about broken families mirrored in both humans and monsters, and with Bautista approaching the mission mostly as an excuse to repair a relationship with an estranged daughter. (Those inclined to read autobiography here will find that relationship extra poignant.) So it may be so much reanimated thrills from its inspirations, but it has just enough motivation and good structure to its hook to work at a sturdy popcorn level nonetheless.

Silly Season: MY SPY, SCOOB!, & EUROVISION SONG CONTEST: THE STORY OF FIRE SAGA

And so our strangest summer movie season in quite some time marches on. This weekend spent trawling the streaming services for new movies has turned up a motley assortment. My Spy, a formulaic tough-guy-teams-up-with-a-kid comedy, has finally been released, having been bounced from a few prime release dates over the past year by struggling distributor STX, then running into the misfortune of its last known theatrical debut penciled in right before COVID shut that all down. It’s now on Amazon Prime, which is just as well, because it seems destined to be the sort of movie that plays best in the background. (I wouldn’t rush out and get a Prime subscription for it, or for anything, really.) It stars Dave Bautista, an unusually contemplative wrestler-turned-thespian, who modulates his sensitive gravel pit of a voice down to layers of real melancholy and up to stoic fish-out-of-water deadpan. I always like that. Here he’s a tough CIA operative who messes up and gets demoted to surveillance duty with an energetic tech helper (Kristen Schaal). Quite accidentally, he gets roped into the life of the woman they’re supposed to protect after her precocious daughter (Chloe Coleman) breaks his cover and blackmails him into helping her with typical kid problems and events — bullies, career day, ice skating parties, and so on. I suppose if you’ve never seen this sort of movie before, it might play better to you. The kid is cute. Bautista plays reluctant warmth well. And Schaal gets off a few good one-liners. But director Peter Segal (Grudge Match) has no facility for the requisite action scenes in the third act, and the villain is a real drip, just a standard slightly-accented guy with stringy hair, a neat coat, and a remote detonator. It’s the sort of movie where you can figure out not just the ending, but every major plot beat, and there’s not an ounce of surprise or invention between.

At least Scoob! is out here trying something sort of new for what it is before it fails. It was going to be Warner Brothers’ big theatrical summer family movie until last month it got shuffled to VOD at $20 bucks a rental. Now it’s on HBO Max, a far better price for something that really only has curiosity and nostalgia going for it, and even then only for the first ten minutes or so. This CG animated Scooby reboot tries to turn the something-like-beloved cartoon series of teens solving mysteries with their pet talking dog into a whole Hanna-Barbera Cinematic Universe. So although it starts with a sugary-sweet how-they-met prequel prologue, followed by the original theme song lovingly recreated, it quickly pivots into noisy action-adventure fetch quest nonsense cobbling together bits of lore involving Dastardly and Muttley, Dynomutt, and Captain Caveman in a not-as-wacky-as-it-sounds 70’s Saturday Morning stew peppered with stale japes and instantly-dated pop culture references. The good vibes stop cold about 15 minutes in, when Simon Cowell steps in voicing his own waxy CG facsimile. This whole project plays like a bunch of wires got crossed back at the Intellectual Property mine, getting just enough other cartoons mixed up into Scooby’s to take it away from what makes that show fun, and not enough to make it into its own new thing. It’s just a standard whiplash candy rush of a nothing, shaping up along the same fault lines forgettable kids fare often does. I wish they’d gone all the way and also involved Josie and the Pussycats and Huckleberry Hound and Top Cat and Inch High Private Eye and what have you. No sense dipping a toe into the shallow end. Go full Roger Rabbit with it! Have some real fun! This is just a bland half-measure.

Over on Netflix is another familiar story: the underdog competition comedy. Here it’s set in the world of Eurovision, that extraordinary international campy pop music battle that has never really caught on in America as more than a niche interest. Like mimes, certain cheeses, and good pandemic response, some things are just more European than could catch on here, I suppose. Eurovision, although cancelled this year, is generally an annual delight, with winners over the years ranging from ABBA’s “Waterloo” to Celine Dion’s “Ne parter pas sans moi.” My personal favorite, and more typical of the event’s unique charms, is Finnish heavy metal band Lordi’s “Hard Rock Hallelujah,” a song performed with an electric organ pounding along with howling guitars while the band yelps out the melody while dressed like escapees from Mordor. So you can see why Will Ferrell might think he could fit right in. Thus Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is born. Here he co-stars with Rachel McAdams as an unlikely Icelandic band who’ve never gone farther than their small town’s pub, where the locals barely tolerate them unless they’re revving up the old drinking standard, “Jaja Ding Dong.” (The original songs in the movie are quite good, from this rinky-dink local tune, to the more elaborate contest songs, especially for how specifically chintzy and authentically over-produced they are.) One crazy thing leads to another, however, and the duo is improbably representing their home country on the Eurovision stage. There’s some little-fish-in-the-big-pond comedy here, and a mix of wackadoodle sentimentality as, gosh-darn-it, these over-the-hill wannabes just might pull it off and prove their doubters wrong.

Along the way to the expected results — a long, long way, running just over two hours — we get many elaborate production numbers cut with all the grace of a live awards show, silly costumes and props, wobbly accents, patter from rivals (like a slinky Russian pop star played with swivel-hipped sleaze by Dan Stevens), and loopy asides (like repeated references to a belief in elves that escalates to a Will-Ferrell-ian payoff). It’s all shot and paced rather indifferently by director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers) in an over-lit, flat style. Strangely, the cinematography looks better as a TikTok ad than on my 4K TV, for whatever that’s worth. It has the cheap Netflix look of their lesser programmers. And the plot itself is bone-deep derivative, certainly not worth the emotional investment it keeps trying to jolt to life with its estranged parents and scoffing suits and preening overdogs. It just doesn’t jell with the loose silliness of boat explosions and elaborate stage flops and endless cul-de-sac plot turns. Still, like the contest itself, the movie is never less than affectionate toward these misfits, and the songs are where it’s at. There’s a killer soundtrack of these goofy things — “Lion of Love,” “Volcano Man,” “Coolin with the Homies,” “Hit My Itch” — including a high-point faux-impromptu cameo-stuffed mashup singalong party. A leaner, tighter musical comedy would keep the good times rolling without the downtime for lumpy asides. But, hey, we’ll always have “Jaja Ding Dong.” And, if you squint a little, it’s almost like we got a Eurovision this year after all.

All Superheroes Go To Heaven: AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

Of all the Marvel Cinematic Universe films so far, the latest, Avengers: Infinity War, is certainly the very loudest. I suppose it has a right to be. Billed as the Series Finale when anyone with a working brain knows it’s merely the biggest Season Finale yet, it’s the culmination of ten years of these things. Ever since Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury stepped out in the post-credits scene of 2008’s relatively compact, swift, and charming Iron Man, promising to introduce that hero to a few others, it’s been an endless string of formulaic origins and meetups. At least the formula – 90 minutes of exposition, banter, and fun with character actors, followed by a 30-minute CGI shooting gallery – remains sturdy enough, and the performances roped in charismatic enough – that it rarely feels too much. They vary in quality. I prefer the looser hangouts where the action has a zing of screwball B-movie appeal (Iron Man 2, Avengers 2, Thor 2, Spider-Man Homecoming) or earnestness (Captain America 1, Black Panther) to the ponderous self-important ones (Captain Americas 2 and 3) with the ones in between tolerable, too. But generally they are completely disposable diversions. I enjoy them, and then they evaporate, leaving only vague impressions and the sense they should bring back Sam Rockwell someday. Infinity War is what all 18 films have built towards, the culmination of many Infinity Gem MacGuffins and Thanos references, as the purple titan himself (voiced with a growl by Josh Brolin, whose likeness stares back at us from soulful computerized eyes) comes crashing down to Earth looking for ultimate power, and two dozen heroes assemble to beat him back. 

This results in apocalyptic sequences as the characters are genuinely frightened for once in the franchise. Their quips pale in comparison to a man wielding an enormous gold gauntlet slowly studded with the glowing powers needed to wipe out half of existence in the snap of his fingers. When a ginormous whirring oval spaceship hovers over New York City, there are ominous stakes as Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) mix worry into their determination. They all want to defeat Thanos – once they’re caught up on his plan, that is – but aren’t sure how to go about doing it. He’s already one of the galaxy’s most powerful beings, with an evil plot nigh incomprehensible in its universe-wide genocidal scope. What are a bunch of plucky knockabout do-gooders going to do in the face of that? Still, this is a Marvel movie, and the jokes fly fast and frequent, and, as directed by the Russo brothers and scripted by series’ regular writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, ably balances the tones. It also shuffles a massive cast in interesting ways, letting characters hitherto separated by time and space collide in fun exchanges and tenuous team-ups in bright, clear, IMAX cinematography.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it leans on its best features – letting Spider-Man (Tom Holland) earnestly tag along behind Stark and Strange, and ceding all of the film’s galactic plotting to the winning combination of the Guardians of the Galaxy (Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, et al) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth). (They are the funniest and, funnily enough, the most emotionally engaged, too.) It’s something of a screenwriting and editing marvel (oh, pun not intended, believe me, but now I’m sticking with it anyway) to keep something like 30 major speaking roles – all major players in their respective realms – and a couple different tonal modes balanced to such a successful extent. Part of it is the streamlined plot, subplots carried over mostly shunted to the side due to the enormity of the main dilemma, allowing the characters to focus on one goal. Part of it is giving different pieces of the goal to different smaller team-ups: a cosmic crew, an Earthbound squad (led by Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and a stay with T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) in Wakanda), and one travelling between. It’s perfectly engineered to bounce between these groupings of heroes, giving each and every one a crowd-pleasing entrance and perfectly timed laugh line or action pose throughout.

These performers have a certain iconoclasm to their positioning in the roles by now, and it’s great fun watching them spar and quip and fight side by side. The action is largely satisfying, too. Not quite as deadening as usual, it has heft and design, some cleverness, and some big, booming consequences (that will inevitably be almost or entirely reversed next summer, but are still satisfying shock in the moment). Best of all are the applause-break splash panel moments – my favorite goes to a thrilling late-breaking electric return in the battle royale finale. It may be a big, dumb, violent cartoon, but improbably Marvel Cinematic Universe productions have accumulated affection and accrued pleasures that outweigh any individual film’s successes and flaws. It’s a high-budget, high-spirit corporate product. It’s blockbuster serialized filmmaking, a massive sporadic television production on the big screen. The only gamble is that we’ll want to see our favorite charming superhero buddies pummeled and bloodied and beaten down to their lowest point yet, and still clamor to see them bounce back again, and again, and again. As long as the movies are this passably satisfying, agreeably diverting, and leave the audience just curious enough to see what happens next, they will. Infinity War, indeed.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Love? BLADE RUNNER 2049

Ridley Scott’s proto-cyberpunk sci-fi noir Blade Runner is revived as a ponderous Villeneuve somber spectacle in Blade Runner 2049. Over thirty years after the original, which imagined a dystopian future L.A. with contours – smoggy rain; polyglot class stratifications; enormous looming digital neon advertising – setting the stage for many imitators, the new film digs into the implications of its world. Before, Harrison Ford played a cop tasked with hunting down rogue cybernetic beings called Replicants. Decades later, a new model Replicant played by Ryan Gosling is hunting down the last of the old models who are still hiding out under the radar, living lives of quiet desperation, their illegal problem programming allowing them just enough free will to shake off the yolk of their makers’ expectations. In the opening sequence Gosling flies his hovercar over a vast dried up terrain to a far-flung farm where a gentle giant of a Replicant (Dave Bautista) sighs in resignation, fighting back in futile self-preservation before the younger bot breaks him down and checks him off the wanted list. Sounds like pulp fun, but look and listen to the film’s atmosphere, director Denis Villeneuve using the suspense techniques honed on the likes of his Prisoners and Sicario to turn out slow, carefully considered images with grey-air-and-glowing-screen palates and a soft quiet unsettling as a pot boils in the background. These filmmakers mean to take a movie about robots, holograms, flying cars, and corrupted files very seriously indeed. 

After last year’s Arrival found Villeneuve working with a deep, powerful strain of emotional content – wrapping an egg-headed first-contact story around an effective contemplation of parenthood, memory, and grief – he takes a step back into ice cold dread. This late Blade Runner sequel is merely a speaker-rattling drone, a slow drip accumulation of dread and despair gorgeously lensed by the great Roger Deakins. He paints in greyscale gunmetal tones and harsh neon lights gracefully arcing across beautiful faces and austere jumbles of concrete-and-polymer industrial parks and towering brutalist architecture. This is a future world at once sparse and ornate, underpopulated and overstuffed. The place, brilliantly built out from the iconic look of Scott’s original, is tactile and disturbing in its all-absorbing qualities. The entrancing score – so often sounding like a window-rattling motorcycle engine roaring by outside, or like a pitch-distorted, extremely slowed down dial-up modem – and the beautifully photographed production design does the heavy lifting. Characters here are poses; worldbuilding is ominous terse monologue; emotion is as crisp and empty as watching an android kiss a hologram. We’re to be contemplating the chilly romanticism of digital beings, but it’s hard not to shake the feeling we’re watching ones and zeroes execute their complicated programs. That’s partly the point, but there’s a frustrating surface-level satisfaction to the movie’s long, languorous, cavernous contemplation of its eerie images. I loved a scene where a hologram slides over a human woman and syncs to her movements, an imperfect process of digital possession that creates ever-so-slightly overlapping images. But it looks cool more than it is actually intellectually stimulating.

The film runs nearly three hours, and its pleasures are absorbing but fleeting. Its appeal sits entirely in stoic characters wearing fabulous wardrobe – stiff high collars, starkly starched trench coats – and inhabiting handsomely striking sets – echoing rooms, windswept irradiated landscapes, a theater of holographic entertainers on the fritz, thunderous man-made waterfalls, junkyards exploding in sudden District-9-style bodily harm as sudden death rains from above. It’s the sort of movie interested in exploring the differences between mankind and artificial intelligence, probing the deep mysteries of what makes a soul and what it means to create life, but in which man and robot alike are equally placid and monotone in demeanor. The ace supporting cast – Robin Wright, Sylvia Hoeks, Ana de Armas, Mackenzie Davis, and even Jared Leto (who is fine in his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turn) – are directed to be effective elements of the art direction, moving and emoting so precisely and mechanistically it makes a mockery of any sense you could figure out who’s real and who’s created. They’re all ghosts in the machine. Villeneuve’s style of handsome foreboding is admirably sustained, putting the script’s grinding inevitability and tangled, deliberately-paced core who-am-I? mystery plotting through a lens of impeccable craftsmanship. I was never bored, but never involved, always stimulated but never fully invested. It’s a remarkable technical achievement, but a hollow emotional and intellectual exercise. It’s incredibly cool and totally cold.