Give 'Em Shell: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

I must admit the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have never really worked for me. There’s something about their characters that holds me at a distance. Maybe it’s because they’re so similar in look – big humanoid turtle things differentiated only by the color headbands their wear – and personality. They have the names of Italian Renaissance artists: Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Donatello. They all love pizza, do martial arts, shout “cowabunga,” and live with their adopted mutant rat father in the sewers below New York City. It’s a collection of silly details that never quite grabbed me in any form be it comics, animated series, video games, or feature films.

I still felt that distance in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a reboot of the live action big screen turtle movies. But somehow this transparently silly goof of an adventure movie kept me distracted, if not quite entertained. It’s not a good movie, but it’s competent as it runs through a standard superhero plot with a big bad threatening a city and the heroes who save the day. That its climax only puts about 10 city blocks in immediate danger is a nice change of pace. Is it progress that this summer spectacle is a retread of blockbuster beats from a decade or two ago instead of staking a claim in the apocalyptic stakes race we’ve been living through the last few years?

The movie follows an intrepid reporter (Megan Fox), the sort of ambitious young newsperson who is sick and tired of fluff pieces and wants to do serious journalism. One night she spots a group of mysterious vigilantes breaking up the evil Foot Clan’s nefarious deeds on the docks and comes face to face with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Some fun is had with their improbable details as Fox tries to explain to her newsroom colleagues (Will Arnett and Whoopi Goldberg) what she has discovered. She sounds crazy. Meanwhile, desperate to keep their existence secret, the turtles and their rat father set out to find and befriend her.

The human characters are stock flat types that don’t make much of an impact beyond whatever charms the actors bring. But there’s a CGI realism to the textures of the turtles’ and rat’s skin that makes them marginally more convincing as living beings. It also makes them far creepier than the phony rubbery costumes of their previous early-90’s live action appearances. Now they’re uncannily real and utterly fake in the same instance. We’re not talking the apes from Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes here. The Ninja Turtles speak with energetic voices (provided by Johnny Knoxville, Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, and Jeremy Howard) as their faces light up with giggly banter and gain flashes of gravitas. Their rat guardian Splinter (Tony Shalhoub) has damp and furry features of uncomfortably verminous countenance as his dojo voice intones ponderously.

Eventually, as a nefarious C.E.O. (William Fichtner) and Shredder (Tohoru Masamune), the head of the Foot Clan, team up to spray poison from the top of a skyscraper and make billions off the cure, the turtles and their new human ally get drawn into saving the day. It’s a small, thin plot. You’ve seen the basic beats before and here they’re replayed dutifully. Even the surprises aren’t surprising, you know?  At least it has a small, thin sense of humor about itself.

Arnett becomes Fox’s sidekick, providing sarcastic asides, while Goldberg gets the most charm out of far too little screen time. (I could’ve used at the very least one more scene with her wisecracking editor.) The screenplay by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec, and Evan Daugherty is peppered with corny wisecracks and laughs that may not be entirely intentional, but still fit the silly mood. It's not much of a plot, and I certainly couldn’t tell you which turtle was which at any given time, but at least there’s room for a villain preparing to get inside a robotic samurai suit to say, “Tonight, I shall dine on turtle soup.” That’s the kind of straight-faced laugh line that makes me smile.

Speaking of straight-faced, director Jonathan Liebesman, behind spectacles both bad (Battle: Los Angeles) and okay (Wrath of the Titans), directs with a heavier hand than the material requires. It’s kid’s movie bounciness – the turtles are goofballs – smashed up against PG-13 roughness – a bad guy is dissolved from the inside out in somewhat graphic fashion. Lulu Carvalho’s beams-of-light-soaked cinematography is presented with a glossy seriousness, cut together in a standard amped-up chaos cinema style. I suppose when you’re dealing with material this flimsy, and so half-aware of its own inanity, grounding it in a sense of thriller weight makes the utterly weightless bounding of its inhabitants slightly less likely to float away into nothingness.

The overly familiar plotting is done and over with quickly and not as painfully as the who-is-this-for? tone or the tediously expositional rat would lead you to believe. The movie is completely empty-headed, a bland and mostly undistinguished effort that spends more time acting like it’s fun than actually being fun. It mostly goes through the motions, but at least it’s not a total waste. In the movie’s action centerpiece, a semi slaloms down a snowy mountainside as bad guys give chase and characters fall in, out, and around. It has a zip and novelty that makes it one of this summer’s better spectacle sequences, provided you can forget that there’s no towering mountain a mere 19 minutes out of Manhattan. But by that point you’ve already accepted that there are man-sized mutant turtle teenagers with ninja skills. What’s a little geographic confusion on top of that?

Generic Dystopia Blahs: DIVERGENT

So many young adult novels have gotten so lugubrious and solemn about subject matter that’s inherently exciting pulp. They’ve forgotten that fast and fun are not adjectives that preclude serious themes. Stories of teenage vampires and teenage gladiatorial combat and teenage dystopias have become these long, slow, formless blobs of deadening trembling import, eliding any B-movie energy they could potentially kick up. It’s like they feel the need to reassure their teen readership that they’re important by placing protagonists their age in the center of every single thing of importance in any given YA world. The weight of these decisions crushes the fun. The Hunger Games adaptations have just barely managed to escape this fate by working an interesting and enjoyable vein of satire and having actual characters for adults to play. You get why moments matter in those movies.

But Divergent has no such luck. It’s empty and bland, a movie built from the ground up to flatter its protagonist. You see, the world it imagines, a post-apocalyptic Chicago that’s been dried up and cordoned off, is split into five discreet career-based factions: scientists called Erudite, lawyers called Candor, farmers called Amity, soldiers called Dauntless, and philanthropists called Abnegation. The divisions between the groups are intensely policed. Once a teen picks their faction in a choosing ceremony, there’s no going back. Flunking out of the track chosen means a faction-less life of abject poverty and homelessness. Our protagonist’s only problem is that she’s too smart, too talented, and too all-around great to fit in only one faction. She’d be perfect in any and all of the factions. She can do everything. And that’s why she’s a threat. She’s just too good for this world.

She’s Tris, played by Shailene Woodley, who is good enough at suggesting interiority to make something of a character out of nothing at all. Her primary attribute is her boldness, which leads her to drift away from her parents’ selfless charity-based Abnegation towards the law enforcement Dauntless. It’s there that she realizes the problems of being labeled Divergent, what the world of this story calls those who fit more than one category. I guess if they have a name for it, then Tris isn’t the first. How this society operates, I’m not quite sure. They claim to have existed in these five separate but equal factions for 100 years. Yet the overarching plot is about the villainous head of Erudite (Kate Winslet) deciding to overthrow and wipe out one of the other factions. Why hasn’t this happened sooner? The whole system seems unstable to me, partially because it seems calculated to avoid any explicit political messaging while providing a scenario in which the protagonist is the most special of all special people and can see their world’s grand design. Good for her, I guess.

The story follows Tris as she slowly becomes a great Dauntless and ends up involved with every major machination of the plot. The fate of future Chicago is in her hands. She meets a handsome Dauntless guy (Theo James) and has a crush on him. The architecture of his face probably has something to do with that, especially the way the camera lingers on his intense stares. Lucky for her, he eventually reciprocates those feelings. Along the way we get endless training montages and some uncomfortable militaristic hazing between barking about showing no fear from an ensemble of young heroes (Zoe Kravitz, Ansel Elgort), villains (Jai Courtney, Mekhi Phifer), and at least one wisenheimer who is not quite either (Miles Teller). Joining Winslet as the token adults in the cast are Ashley Judd, Tony Goldwyn, Maggie Q, and Ray Stevenson in a collection of helpful or harmful influences on Tris and her friends. They stand around in their awkward costumes and pretend this all makes sense, lending it a modicum of weight by reminding us of the better roles they’ve had.

Director Neil Burger’s approach is generic, impersonal, but sometimes serviceable. One nice scene involves a zip line off the top of a skyscraper and through the abandoned skyline of the city. I liked that. But most of the movie, adapted by Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor from the book by Veronica Roth, involves pretty faces held in close-up. For over two hours they murmur towards each other, worried about who is going to be Dauntless, what the Erudites are up to and who is spreading rumors about Abnegation. They find it far more important than I did. All the intent declarations involving their faction titles only had me wondering why this society would choose such unwieldy adjectives for their groups’ names.

The film feels so claustrophobic and small, spending most of its time in rooms and caves and warehouses. When we finally pull back for wide shots, the sense of CGI space it tries to create feels fake and tiny, utterly inconsequential and entirely arbitrary. Chicago is a husk of its former self, but the “L” is still running and apparently automated? Okay. Maybe it works on the page (somehow I doubt it). But on screen, the whole thing just looks dumb.

Fairy Tale, Fractured: SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

Only the latest iteration of the fairy-tale-into-big-budget-spectacle trend that’s sweeping Hollywood, Snow White and the Huntsman hacks out an identity all its own. Unlike Mirror Mirror, a candy-colored family-friendly confection that Tarsem whipped up for release earlier this year, Huntsman is a darker, grimmer thing, drawing less inspiration from the safe, colorful comedy of children’s fantasy and more from the kind of dour, sweeping fantasy spectacle of the likes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy or HBO’s Game of Thrones. The script by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini takes apart the old story of the evil queen and her fairest-of-them-all stepdaughter until all that’s left and recognizable is aspects of the tale’s iconography: the mirror, the poison apple, the dwarves. What the film does with them is sometimes surprising and ultimately satisfying. This is a handsome and effective spectacle.

The film starts with Ravenna (Charlize Theron), an evil witch, tricking a king into marrying her. On their honeymoon, she straddles him and plunges a dagger into his chest. She flips back on the bed, basking in her triumph as her army storms past unsuspecting guards to take over the castle. Her stepdaughter, Snow White, is promptly locked away, so as not to interfere with her rule. Years later, now grown, Snow (Kristen Stewart) gets a chance to escape and flees into the dark forest. The queen, her good looks and terrible magic ever reliant on sucking the youthful souls out of beautiful young women, has learned that the only way she can make her dark powers permanent is to eat Snow White’s heart. So she sends her right-hand man, who happens to be her creepy brother (Sam Spruell), and a strapping, alcoholic huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) to chase down the escaped girl.

When they find her, the huntsman takes sympathy on Snow White and, instead of helping the queen’s brother, decides to help her. Together they fight off the queen’s henchmen and flee through the woods, where they will meet all manner of creatures, both frightening and enchanting, on their way towards safety. But it’s not safety Snow wants. She wants her kingdom. On their journey, they meet many potential allies amongst the people living in fear of the evil queen, including a band of dwarves (great British actors Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Nick Frost, Eddie Marsan, and Toby Jones shrunk down through movie magic) and a young man (Sam Claflin) who knew Snow in the years before her father’s death and who is now a talented archer. But even as they make their way through the wilderness, Ravenna glides through the castle, plotting her ultimate victory and flexing her supernatural muscles, transforming into a flock of inky ravens and commanding a phantom army made up of black shards.

This all sounds like the Snow White tale has been turned into just another epic-quest fantasy film with swooping shots of a band of allies trudging through picturesque landscapes. In some ways that’s exactly what it is, but what saves the film from becoming just an imitation is the intensity and earnestness with which commercial director Rupert Sanders, making an impressive feature film debut, stages the action. Like one of those grungy fantasies of the 1980s (I was thinking of Matthew Robbins’s Dragonslayer, but it at times put me in mind of Ron Howard’s Willow as well), Sanders makes his fantasy world muddy and convincingly worn-down. There’s a certain kind of realism to the striking visuals here that’s hugely rewarding. Dark magic has done a number on this ruined landscape and as our characters make their way through it, there’s a feeling of real melancholy. The effects – many are clearly elaborate, but convincing, CGI – are given space to breathe and consequentially often, especially in a mid-film respite in a mossy woodland oasis crawling with cute critters and a casual dusting of magical beings that reminded me of similar moments in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, have some real awe behind them. The pace of the picture stretches out, allowing time for Greig Fraser’s beautiful cinematography (he’s also done gorgeous work for Jane Campion and Matt Reeves) to truly soak in the sights and for the subtle work of the ensemble to provide real human emotion to the stakes of it all.

Less subtle is Theron’s villainous turn as the evil queen Ravenna. She’s icy and coldly sensual, submerging herself in a tub of milk in an effort to maintain her smooth skin between injections of young souls. She’s rotten to the core, given to howling out awful demands. But she, too, is fleshed out to the point where she’s also a bit of a tragic figure. Similarly, Stewart’s Snow White is no mere placid figure of beauty. She’s rough around the edges, with a steely determination in her eyes and a real fighting spirit within her. None of this is overwrought or heavily underlined, though, even as the plot’s ending is more or less predetermined. But the complicating of the female roles and the patriarchal assumptions of the original tale happens matter-of-factly. This is just the way the story unfolds this time. (I appreciated how it all ends, too. Without giving anything away, it ends without any kind of wedding-bells romantic conclusion, instead ending on a note of weary relief.) I would never have guessed that such a serious, dark, unsmiling yet heartfelt interpretation of Snow White would have been so gripping and involving. It’s quite lovely in the way it’s underplayed.

This is a big, thunderous fantasy epic that’s filled with excitement, incident and action, embellished with expensive effects, and yet it feels so downbeat, so patiently paced and unafraid of stillness and silence. It’s genuinely creepy, tense, and moving. And yet it’s never insistent or pressing; the cast is treating this material with utter seriousness and, though that can certainly backfire, here it helps that the material is so earnest and sensitively tuned. (It could be a bit more complicated, perhaps, but let’s not press our luck.) There’s a real respect to matters of life and death here. When a character is in danger or dies, there’s a real mournfulness in the way that’s presented. That is something all too rare in this age of easy computerized carnage and quick-cut climaxes wherein digital cannon fodder and background collateral damage is just a backdrop for superheroics. Rupert Sanders handles this big movie with such a striking eye for visuals and such surprising facility with tone and emotion that I suspect he has a big career ahead of him. The idea to take a well-worn tale and retell it with modern tools from a modern sensibility seems rather uninspired, but Sanders has made a film of real, satisfying imagination.