Have Not: THE UPRISING

There was a good decade where Paul Greengrass was among the most exciting mainstream directors working. He followed up an early career spent in documentaries and British television with some electrifying feature films. He brought a jumpy handheld aesthetic and docudrama realism to overlapping dialogue, matter-of-fact procedure, and intense emotional specificity. He made fact-based re-enactments with propulsive thriller mechanics that shook with a sense of political outrage, showing us an English massacre of Irish protestors in Bloody Sunday, or a hijacked plane on 9/11 in United 93. He added to the realism of his look and tone by casting a mixture of professional actors and amateurs whose day jobs were the roles they portrayed. These are overwhelming effective movies. In another excellent effort he dramatized the takeover of a freighter by pirates, and the daring rescue of the crew, in Captain Phillips, building to star Tom Hanks’ finest few minutes of acting as he decompresses from the trauma. Greengrass also built Matt Damon’s great Bourne franchise, helming three of his four outings as the amnesiac spy trying to piece back together the conspiracy in which he’s a central victim. As writer-director, Greengrass could always be counted on to make films with verisimilitude and direct political engagement. His next group of movies—dreary mass shooting drama 22 July, fine western News of the World, and solid real-life disaster movie The Last Bus—recaptured that magic incompletely. They weren’t without their lesser strengths, but they were movies somehow outside the zeitgeist. 

It’s nice to find that his latest, The Uprising, finds him returning to the appeal of his earlier films, transplanting his aesthetic and thematic concerns to the late Middle Ages for a recounting of the 1381 peasants’ revolt. It’s transparently a movie with modern resonance, with snarling upper class entitlement, encroaching authoritarianism, and fractured political expectation. Is it any wonder he’d be drawn to a movie about a post-plague world stumbling toward economic collapse exacerbated by widening inequality? He films the muddy protestors with bobbing over-the-shoulder following shots and rushing-to-keep-up traveling takes, whip-pans, and snap-zooms. Andrew Garfield plays a humble ploughman who semi-accidentally kicks off the uprising after resisting the onerous new taxes imposed by young tyrant King Richard II (Woody Norman). There are terrific scenes of the downtrodden treading toward London in long lines of protest. They rhyme interestingly with Bloody Sunday’s doomed march, and echo across time when this uprising also reaches a violent conclusion. The movie’s full of character actors young and old (Tom Hollander, Jamie Bell, Cosmo Jarvis, Jonny Lee Miller, Katherine Waterson, and so on) playing period dress-up, and spouting off dialogue that’s largely expositional. The movie remains frustratingly surface-level in this way. It’s all posing picture book history with all the surface grit and none of the characterization that would really make it grow beyond the obvious. Though it nonetheless has effective sequences throughout, it puts them between tedium and obviousness. It also undercuts a fine dreary ending with an epilogue that feels like wishful thinking (and overtly modern thinking) tacked on after the fact. The result is a movie with everything in place for success and then it just slowly deflates instead. I’m still looking forward to the next great Paul Greengrass movie. 

All Those Lonely, Lonely Times: ALL OF US STRANGERS

Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is a palpable portrait of loneliness and the long tail of childhood grief. It’s a film that feels haunted with the intense emptiness that comes from a solitary life. It stars Andrew Scott as a writer just south of middle age who lives alone in a small apartment in a mostly uninhabited new building in London. Though the movie will technically leave this cramped home, in all the really important ways it stays trapped there with him, and within his head. He meets another inhabitant of the building, a troubled younger man (Paul Mescal) with whom he strikes a hesitant romantic interest. They’re drawn together as two loners, clearing their throats to speak like they're unaccustomed to doing so. There’s a sense even as they open up emotionally, sharing stories of their pasts, their coming outs, and their romantic interests, that they’re holding something back. They’ve been hurt before.

The writer is currently working through some of his hurt with an autobiographical project about his parents. He imagines them as they were when he was 12 years old. They were dead before he was 13, killed in a car crash at Christmastime. How awful. Now this writer will sometimes return to his childhood home and see them. Hardly ghosts, they are flesh and blood memories he inhabits, having conversations he wishes he could’ve had, and still could have but for that fateful black ice—reminiscences explanations, apologies, a coming out. The parental presences are projections of the son, but Claire Foy and Jamie Bell play them with full personalities. These aren’t dream parents; they’re not always parroting ideas their now-grown child would hope they’d share with him. They’re real, and unreal. (There's a productively weird cognitive dissonance of seeing actors of roughly the same age playing parent and child, too.) He’s happy to see them, but there’s that spectral distance, too. They’re part of him, and yet not. Here’s a man so used to being alone he holds everything at arm’s length, from that potential new boyfriend to the grief he’s never quite addressed.

Haigh is a filmmaker always so closely attuned to the subtleties of human interactions—the way a shift in information or understanding ripples imperceptibly across a face, and then out across an entire relationship or community. It's in the intimate close-ups and spaces for quiet contemplation. He makes movies in which people sit and talk to each other, revealing as much in their silences and implications as with their conversations. There’s the hookup coupling that tentatively teases the idea of something more in Weekend or the anniversary that teeters on the precipice of a breakup in 45 Years. His works are always careful to conceal and reveal his characters interiority in conjunction with softly naturalistic performances that capture their humanity. He also expert at getting deft, delicate drama out of symbols lesser directors would fumble as obvious underlining. Here’s a movie about a man literally haunted by his grief, and has trouble bringing someone new into his lonely life. That core specificity gives its abstractions their power.

It’s about the disconnection he feels from the world around them, and from some essential part of himself and his past. So of course there’s that huge empty building, and a cozy memory place of childhood memory. The two blur. There’s a mid-80s photo from right before the incident. It becomes a vision of the past with a child actor; it’s also a recreation with the adult. Past and present are joined by the Pet Shop Boys’ swirling synths. That’s a peak of hazy sadness in a movie that’s a most tender, melancholic ghost story. Later, a simple move of the camera swaps one ghostly presence for another, although we might not quite know it until we reflect on it later. The movie builds to a climax of emotional revelation, and nods to the power of love to last. Because the performances are so natural, and the filmmaking so attentive, it gathers considerable metaphoric force. It feels heavy with depressed yearning in every gesture.

Flight of Clancy: WITHOUT REMORSE

The only real shock of Without Remorse, a sleepy thriller with sporadic spurts of dutiful violence, is to realize we used to have this sort of movie at this scale all the time. Now to consistently see a new movie about some military guy off on a mission of revenge you have to go down to the direct-to-video space. I’d say it’s nice to see even a mediocre one of these done with a good fresh movie star, sleek production value, on a big screen, but Paramount sold it off to Amazon Video and now here we are. It’s a slick paperback thriller with undigestible exposition and brooding emotional simplicity, loosely adapted from a Tom Clancy novel, which means it’ll have a stew of geopolitical confusion, Deep State skulduggery, and paranoid might-makes-right special-forces plotting. It stars Michael B. Jordan as an ex-military guy who gets entangled in international conspiracy when veterans from his unit are suddenly murdered stateside. He’s attacked, too, but it leaves him merely wounded while his pregnant wife dies. That’s the kind of brute force inciting incident of which these sorts of stories are made. Of course he has to work with his old military contacts (Jamie Bell and Jodie Turner-Smith) and the Defense Secretary (Guy Pearce) to ferret out the connections between his wife’s murderers and various international ne’er-do-wells. 

The result is long stretches of darkly lit unhappiness interrupted only by, say, a fiery interrogation or routine firefights blankly staged with digital squibs. There are some twists and turns along the way, but the film is so digitally scrubbed and smoothly burnished and dully doled out that it was slowly lulling me asleep instead. It’s cold to the touch, never quite involving enough as emotion or action or intrigue. Director Stefano Sollima, whose Sicario: Day of the Soldado was at least stylishly unpleasant, and writer Taylor Sheridan, who specializes in the terse masculine genre mechanics that of course leads him to war and westerns and crime pictures, never quite unlock what makes this story, or character, tick. As a result they strand the hard-working Jordan without a chance to uncork his substantial charisma. There’s also that nagging sense one gets in a would-be franchise starter that the whole production is holding something back for the next one. Would that it would just kick all the way into high gear the first time around. By the time it gets to the end credits scene — in which Jordan somehow finds a Joseph Gordon-Levitt impression as he intones words that’ll mean something to readers of the source material — teasing a future Clancy-verse, I was out. It makes me yearn for the relatively convincing simplicity and gripping precision of the classic Hunt for Red October instead.

Not So FANTASTIC FOUR

The third time attempting to make Marvel’s long-running comic Fantastic Four a movie franchise is not the charm. It almost works, starting as a straightforward attempt to situate fantastical developments within something like a real world. But by the end, it becomes merely a halfhearted and mediocre version of every CGI comic book slugfest we’ve ever seen. For most of its runtime, it’s a relatively low-key sci-fi drama about ambitious scientists whose work leads them straight into a body horror scenario. Its broad strokes are every superhero origin story. We meet some characters, watch them fall into a tragic moment that births their strange powers, and then let the effects of those powers lead them to do good. At least it starts from a place of awe about scientific discovery and nods towards serious contemplation about what it’d be like to suddenly wake up a freak. The follow through is what’s missing.

Opening moments play like slick speculative thriller, like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby rewritten by Michael Crichton. We meet a science prodigy, Reed Richards (played all grown up by Miles Teller). He’s out to make a teleportation device, recruiting a classmate, Ben Grimm (eventually Jamie Bell), to be an assistant, since the boy has access to a junkyard. Years pass. A government scientist (Reg E. Cathey) recruits Richards to assist on a top-secret teleportation project. The budding genius joins new peers Susan Storm (Kate Mara), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), and Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell) in making his hypothesis a reality. This is what leads to the multidimensional gobbledygook and eventual mutation, turning Richards into a stretchy-limbed man, the Storms into an Invisible Woman and Human Torch, and Grimm ends up a lumbering, naked (although neutered) rock pile Thing. Doom disappears into green goo, but with a name like that, you’d know what he becomes even if there weren’t fifty years of comics pointing the way.

Setup is handled briskly with cinematographer Matthew Jensen’s nice industrial blue-and-gray palate and a pace set to ominous dread. The percolating score by Marco Beltrami and Philip Glass helps keep things on the edge of unsettling. Director and co-writer Josh Trank’s debut feature was Chronicle, the found-footage horror riff on superpower development. There he tapped into a feeling of teen angst and bullied vengeance, bending a metaphor around familiar tropes in some surprising ways. You can see in Fantastic Four a movement in that direction simply by how dourly and seriously he treats the concept despite how dutifully it hits origin story beats. He finds naturalism amongst the cast as the actors play real emotions instead of comic book posturing. Cathey has a gravely paternal countenance. Teller gives Richards a shy overconfidence, while Mara and Jordan share a relaxed sibling dynamic. Kebbell and Bell have intriguing inferiority and jealousies that dovetail. There’s enough there to wish there was more.

A better movie would flesh out these relationships, and turn their powers into more successful monster-movie metaphors. The central contraption sends off The Fly vibes. Yet by the time their powers are bestowed, the film’s decline has irreparably begun. There are initial creepy moments, as Teller sits with his limbs stretched unnaturally across a wide room, Jordan burns, Mara shimmers in and out of sight, and a boulder blinks with Bell’s eyes. But the movie is already poised to become something ordinary, turning characters’ sci-fi trauma into grist for the blockbuster mill. It’s obvious every moment of the narrative is dragging towards beats that must be hit. It’s not a matter of character or design, but rather corporate planning. The suits simply must have a recognizable superhero team before the end of the second act, no time to stop and linger in the material’s potential for character or ambiguity.

This Fantastic Four succumbs to achingly dull cliché so suddenly and incongruously, turning off the path of slow-burn characterization into stereotype in the blink of an eye. Character dynamics are no longer explored. Relationships are never satisfyingly resolved. Conflicts introduced between them are never teased out, instead foreshortened or forgotten. Themes of determination in the face of opposition and sacrifice in the name of science are thinned out and ultimately taken to dead ends. Everything initially intriguing about the movie is thrown out for the sake of yet another expensive movie ending with a bright blue beam of light zapping into the sky threatening to end the world. It goes from an admirable – and refreshingly different! – small-scale human-level superpower story to a big bland apocalypse. It’s almost as if it almost wasn’t a usual superhero movie and someone slapped together a new ending on the fly. Maybe that’s what actually happened.

I’m sure the inevitable behind-the-scenes tell-alls will be worth reading. Even if rumors of creative differences and a troubled production hadn’t leaked out over the course of its making, it’d be easy to tell the final product feels worked over, compromised. It starts as a slightly atypical look at overfamiliar material and ends abruptly as an underwhelming repetition of typical tropes. Without inside knowledge it’s hard to stand back and point out what to pin on Trank, and what to spot as contributions of co-writers Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater, not to mention any number of producers and creative consultants. No matter how it got there, what’s on the screen – obvious reshoots and all – lost my interest steadily as it became clear every avenue for drama, tension, and creativity was closed off to better streamline potential complexity into one quick, limp marketable action sequence. I don’t know if some hypothetical version of this movie would be better, but if it was doomed to fail, at least it could’ve failed interestingly.

Crazy Train: SNOWPIERCER

Snowpiercer is a smorgasbord of sci-fi ideas and images. The plot is simple, but its world of pulpy imagery and thoughts are not. The thrilling film imagines a future in which the Earth has frozen over. International efforts to combat global warming were too much, too late. They backfired, covering the world in a thick, uninhabitable winter. Seventeen years later, several hundred survivors, all that remains of humanity, live in a futuristic, heavily armored, self-sustaining, climate-controlled train a billionaire built, the lengthy locomotive endlessly circling its tracks. Brutal guards carefully maintain order inside. The billionaire industrialist who ordered the train and the tracks built sits at the controls. The rich get to live in luxury in the front cars, mindlessly worshiping his capitalist impulse. They paid for their spots. The poor are huddled in squalid conditions in the caboose. They were lucky to get on board in the first place. Perpetual poverty is the price they pay. It is a blunt force allegory primed to explode.

Equal parts pleasantly preposterous and wickedly intriguing, the film is the rare sci-fi film that starts fascinating and maintains that level of interest throughout, getting better, richer, and more surprising as it goes along. It hurtles forward with imagination and momentum. We meet a reluctant hero (Chris Evans), a tortured back-of-the-train citizen who is fomenting a revolt. Gathering allies (a fine international cast including John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, Jamie Bell, Song Kang-Ho, and Ko Ah-Sung), the revolution smashes forward, aiming for the engine room at the very front of the train. The movie fights its way forward with them, car after car, each serving a different function in the train’s ecosystem. The set design and action choreography changing with each car – a food factory, a garden, a classroom, a prison – bounces nicely off the consistent claustrophobic dimensions that remain the same. Dumped into the moving vehicle with scant background, we learn more about how this society operates, who lives there, and why they’re in this mess as we storm through.

Along the way, we meet some fabulous villains, pawns of the train’s corporate dictator and founder. The unseen force that is the head of the train radiates backwards through his soldiers and his minions. (Eventually, we see him, and he does not disappoint, but to spoil who plays him and what he’s like would rob you of a pleasant surprise.) Most memorable is the sniveling, condescending, ice-cold officer (an nearly unrecognizable Tilda Swinton) who coos over the aristocratic excess and luxurious hoarding of the rich and snarls with glee at the conditions of the poor. As heroes and villains are slowly fleshed in and the full splendor and horror of the train is bit by bit revealed, the movie takes on darker, more powerful emotional underpinnings to its more intellectual allegorical force.

Shot with dark humor and rattling with gushes of artfully applied blood, this is an exciting, impactful sci-fi actioner that sleekly tracks forward, finding twists and complications every step of the way. The actors give tough, memorable genre performances, types done right. The camera finds cutting away as valuable as lingering on chaos. Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo's mix of shooting styles finds deliberate lateral moves as tense as jangly hand-held work. Ondrej Nekvasil and Stefan Kovacik's production design creates an immersive world, enveloping and all-consuming in its detail. Each new car is a revelation. From the prisoners kept in massive metal drawers, to the creepy-crawly secret of the underclass’ protein rations, to the Gilliam-esque warped environments of the rich and comfortable, this is a film of wonderfully thought-through spaces on which the stage is set for resonant, expressive, satisfying conflict.

Snowpiercer represents the modern economics of global film production at its finest. It’s a multinational ensemble working with Bong Joon-ho, a great South Korean director, filming in Prague and creating visual effects in London and Vancouver, an English-language adaptation of a 1980’s French comic. The final product is fantastic international multicultural synthesis, bigger and more idiosyncratic than most of what makes it to movie screens. It’s immensely satisfying to sink into a film so intricately designed and find images and ideas at once familiar and foreign. Bong Joon-ho, with his previous off-kilter genre efforts like 2006’s creature feature The Host and 2009’s murder mystery Mother, showcased his great eye for striking pulp visions. Here, with moments from a man punished by having his arm stuck out an exterior hatch and frozen off to a fight in total darkness between resourceful rioters and thugs with hatchets and night-vision goggles, he's made a film with a new jolt of surprise and imagination behind every doorway.

As we smash forward with righteous fury on the heels of the uprising, the screenplay by Bong and co-writer Kelly Masterson raises interesting questions amidst hugely entertaining excitement. Is it best to stay quiet and know your place in what is clearly a corrupt system, hoping for marginal improvement? Or is it better to blow it all up and start again? Snowpiercer is actually interested in interrogating these questions rather than using them as tantalizing flavoring for its premise and then discarding them once the action starts. It’s part of the fun. This is a rich experience, tremendously entertaining, funny, sad, and thrilling, with plenty of personality that doesn't sacrifice thoughts for thrills or vice versa. It’s one of the most involving and compelling science fiction films in recent memory, a great ride that moves and moves.

Good Old-Fashioned Derring-do: THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN

With The Adventures of Tintin, Steven Spielberg, one of our greatest and most popular filmmakers working today, is experimenting with the most modern of filmmaking tools. Consequentially the film has the creak of an accomplished professional trying to adapt his style to a new format. Luckily for us the results are a film that is not an uninteresting exercise but a playful and fluid adventure film that’s as charming and low-key as it is fun and visually stimulating. Working with performance-capture techniques for computer animation, Spielberg can send his camera any which way he wants it to go and send his characters into any dangerous situation he wants. Luckily, he has some solid material to guide his way.

Intrepid boy reporter Tintin first appeared in the comics of Hergé in 1929 and has endured in some areas of the world, mostly Europe and parts of Asia, as a recognizable and beloved figure. Spielberg’s film has a script from three of the best and cleverest screenwriters working today, Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish, that sticks close to the original conception of the character as a blank goody-two-shoes who happens to be clever and resourceful in getting out of the scrapes that his curiosity gets him into. The film starts with Tintin (Jamie Bell) and his faithful dog Snowy buying a model ship from a street vendor, a simple act that soon grows in consequence. He doesn’t know it at first. He’s simply perplexed as to why his little impulse buy is met with such urgency from such mysterious sources.

It turns out that the ship is not a model of just any ship. No, it’s the Unicorn, a ship that legendarily sunk with hundreds of pounds of treasure in the cargo hold. It turns out that a wealthy man, the evil Sakharine (Daniel Craig), will spare no expense to get his hands on the model for hidden within it lies a clue that will lead to the real thing. There, at the bottom of the ocean, lie vast piles of treasure. So, it’s a deadly intercontinental race, then. But first, Tintin is kidnapped and placed aboard a ship mid-mutiny where he’s forced to help Sakharine find the treasure. He’d rather not, so he flees with the ship’s embattled drunkard captain, Haddock (Andy Serkis), to beat them to it.

The set up here is terrific. There’s a nice mystery to solve and a fun MacGuffin for these characters to fight over. The plot, though I’ve made it sound so simple, also involves a murdered American, a centuries-old conflict between warring pirates and their descendants, a pickpocket, two bumbling bobbies (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg), an opera diva touring a Middle Eastern country, and circuitous action sequences involving boats, planes, and automobiles that comes to a head in one great rip-roaring chase of death-defying destruction through a crumbling and flooding sea-side town. (There’s more movie after that chase, but it is unquestionable the high point of the spectacle). It’s the stuff B-movie matinees are made of.

The movie’s essentially a case of this happens and then this happens and then this happens, a galloping plot that sweeps across several serialized episodes of adventure and thrills with characters stumbling into cliffhangers and then solving them with ease. Spielberg digs back into the same place within himself where he stores the kind of uncomplicated B-movie energy of something like Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that film’s warm, propulsive and tactile (not to mention quite possibly the best action film ever made) while Tintin is cool, level, and smooth (and not the best action film ever made). It’s a film with visual play and skillful slapstick choreography animating its computerized soul but it never feels like real human stakes are in play. The cliffhanger method of storytelling works like gangbusters but leaves things up in the air. It doesn’t come to a satisfying conclusion any more than these new renderings of 2D comics characters ever really feel like fully fleshed movie characters. Still, though, the film’s comfortable wit, bright colors, and energetic staging make it more than acceptable entertainment.

Spielberg has made his first animated movie with the verve of an old master doodling around just for the fun of it. He concocts sequences, especially that aforementioned chase, that would be logistical nightmares to direct in live action. His imagery has a range of movement that is at once freeing and problematic. In some ways, it leaves him rudderless, too tied to the technology to fully exercise his control over the technique. At times it feels less a Spielberg film than a Spielberg product. It lacks the power and humanity of his best efforts.

But then again, I’m really only trying to put my finger on what it was that kept me ever so slightly from fully embracing a film that’s so lovely, well-crafted, and entertaining. The fact of the matter is that this is a fun movie. It’s pleasant and funny and every so often takes giddy leaps into exciting action. Just as its plot engine of constant forward movement, always pushing into the next complication and smashing into the next cliffhanger, creates a series of fun sequences that lack a satisfying resolution, the film's very distinctiveness – so old fashioned, so relaxed, so European, and yet so cutting-edge Hollywood with its CGI and 3D – is both its greatest flaw and greatest asset.

Quick Look: JANE EYRE

Cary Fukunaga’s new adaptation of Jane Eyre starts with the titular character fleeing across dark, windswept moors in a Gothic storm, signifying this version’s stylistic interests to be that of smoldering, roiling darkness. Aside from setting the striking mood of the opening scene, it’s a decision that marks the narrative disjunction of this film. This is not the opening of Charlotte Brontë’s great 1847 novel. The script by Moira Buffini starts quite a ways into the story to give us this unexpected shot of gloom before circling back to the beginning. There’s a tension between the film’s mannered choices, its dull dustiness, and its rawness, tenderness of mood. The adaptation’s time shifting is occasionally inelegant, confounding even, but what drags the production along is the emphasis on the pained emotions moldering underneath. Mia Wasikowska stars as Jane Eyre, beaten as a child, sent away by a cruel aunt, ground down as a schoolgirl by strict schoolmasters, and eventually finding employment, arriving at the imposing, dark Gothic property of Mr. Rochester. As played by Michael Fassbender, Rochester is a mysterious man, charming, clearly drawn to his young employee, but also clearly possessing some half-hidden capacity for ugly surprise. The two actors do a fine job with the material and Fukunaga surrounds them with a capable cast filled with respectable performances from the likes of Jamie Bell and Judi Dench. There’s a tense emotionality hidden down each and every dark corridor, in the dim, candle-lit nighttime rooms where cozy creepiness lurks about every conversation. A stiff, reverential take on this classic literary material may have been too predictable, but covering the approach over with rearranged chronology and atmospherics does little to hide how standard this is, a great novel turned into an adequate film.