The Walking (Almost) Dead: MAGGIE

Disease has long been one of the many metaphors at the zombie movie’s disposal. They come freighted with plague imagery, and with concepts of sickness, infection, and contagion as core elements of plot progression. There’s often a scene in a zombie movie in which a healthy character is bitten, giving the other characters and the audience some queasy suspense as we wonder whether someone will kill their infected friend before full zombification takes effect. That’s the core sick pit of dread in Maggie, a new zombie feature that’s the directorial debut of graphic designer Henry Hobson. Working from a screenplay by John Scott 3, Hobson makes a disease-of-the-week picture out of horror materials, treating a zombie plague as a Black Death sweeping the country. The healthy hole up in their houses, praying the curse doesn’t visit their doors, forcing them to watch their loved ones turn zombie before their eyes.

The focus is on a farmer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his wife (Joely Richardson) whose teenaged daughter (Abigail Breslin) is in the hospital. She’s been diagnosed as infected with the zombie bug and given two weeks before her skin starts to decay and her cannibalistic appetite kicks in. What follows is not what one would expect from hearing Schwarzenegger is starring in a film about zombies. There’s no muscle-bound fight for a cure here. Instead, the girl is released home, where her family must watch her slowly succumb to her fate, and take her to be put down once she’s a monster. They know there will soon come a day when their daughter would mindlessly eat them. But until that day, they will enjoy the time they have left with her.

There’s an inevitability to this film’s progression, a slow, somber affair. It’s a gloomy movie, glum with distended dread as it stretches one familiar zombie moment to just under 90 minutes. The film is shot in dreary light, Lukas Ettlin’s cinematography always catching the sun in the process of rising or falling, with little direct illumination, especially in dusty farmhouse interiors. A deathly pall hangs over the proceedings, the atmosphere heavy with unspoken sadness, as if the family were starting to mourn even while trying to cling to their daughter’s presence. It’s a deathbed vigil with the added suspense of knowing the disease won’t just take their loved one. It’ll make her dangerous for everyone around.

Throughout are other zombie encounters haunting and startling, like one involving a little girl with hollow eyes and a filthy white dress slowly emerging from the forest, deeply unsettling and unspeakably sad. But the center of attention remains the family unit. Schwarzenegger, pushing 70, has aged into less of an action hero, but more of an actor. Always a formidable screen presence, he’s now able to rest his weathered face in a frown of pathos, here playing a character beaten down by an apocalyptic scenario that’s left crops burning and cars crumpled, and now threatens to take his daughter, too. Breslin plays her with a flat teenage affect made fragile by a death sentence, trying desperately to stay human, but also not getting her hopes up. Receiving a zombie diagnosis can’t be easy, but it’s a lot harder in Maggie’s world, where the transformation is in agonizing slow motion.

I wish this movie had more complications. It’s all so drearily straightforward, a clear line from point A to point B without any interesting detours along the way. Its commitment to one stifling mood, presented without variation in increasingly agonizingly long minutes, is a bit overdone. But Hobson’s command of tone and confidence in allowing his actors to carry potentially laughable material with total sincerity is admirable. He takes one of the key thrills of both zombie movies and Schwarzenegger actioners – the kills – and turns it into the most dreadfully sorrowful outcome.

Boom Boom Pow: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES

To all those who complain about director Paul Greengrass’s shaky-cam style in his excellent Bourne thrillers, I offer up Battle: Los Angeles as an example of that style taken to an illogical extreme. This new sci-fi blow-‘em-up is nearly two hours of unmotivated shaky-cam that rattles around in a painfully futile attempt to cover up just how bereft of originality the movie is. It’s an empty spectacle that gives empty spectacle a bad name. Unlike the Bourne films in which Greengrass, with cinematographer Oliver Wood, used precise, intelligently planned staging to better integrate their strategically implemented low-level blur (essentially intensifying intensified continuity), Battle: Los Angeles is muddied and unclear in its imagery. But there’d be hardly anything worth seeing even if it settled down.

It’s more than just the shaky-cam. This is a movie that’s not merely bad; its every decision seems to betray a basic lack of intelligence behind the camera. Director Jonathan Liebesman, with cinematographer Lukas Ettlin, use a small range of focus and a quick-cutting style that obscures not only plot and character but even the special effects work, the only ostensible reason for such a film as this. And when that’s gone, what could possibly be left to enjoy?

But back before I knew just how bad things would get, the movie starts, after a brief prologue of chaos, with all kinds of swirling bombast and ominous portents. So far, so good. Then mysterious, half-glimpsed, alien spacecrafts land all around the globe and we’re deployed with a group of soldiers, almost entirely indistinguishable from one another, led by a statuesque Aaron Eckhart who, wouldn’t you know it, was just days away from retirement.

We follow them through the streets of L.A., or at least that’s what we’re told. The movie doesn’t utilize the juicy possibilities (satirical, political, or the like) that arise naturally out of staging an all-out intergalactic salvo on California. There’s just bland gray city streets covered with ugly gunmetal debris. It’s supposed to look frightening, but the movie never really gives us a good glimpse of a pre-combat L.A. There’s no real sense of danger when the enemy is mostly invisible and the stakes never feel less than fictional.

The fictional status is just as well, for this is a movie that is so unapologetically, glowingly pro-weaponry and hawkishly drooling over the military that even Jerry Bruckheimer might suggest taking it down a notch. It’s a thoroughly shining portrait that has no time for detail or nuance in portraying the men and women of the military. These aren’t people. They’re not even caricatures. They seem more boringly G.I. Joe than the soldiers in G.I. Joe. Even Eckhart, a fine actor who does the best with what he’s given, comes across as little more than a prototype for a bargain bin action figure. There’s a moment where he has to give a pep talk to a little civilian who has just lost his father that’s handled with such mawkish pro-war hogwash that I’m not at all surprised that it makes little emotional sense in the moment. If such an uncomplicated look at war were placed in anything but a fully fictional context such as this, it would be laughed off of the screen.

I could forgive this movie, somewhat, I think, if Christopher Bertolini's script was merely content to grind past character so quickly that it barely fleshes them out with cliché, as long as it were on its way to giving me some passably enjoyable spectacle. I still wouldn’t have liked it all that much, but at least it wouldn’t have been so aggressively bad that it got on my nerves. Honestly, all I expected was some decently staged action. But this is about as far down to the bottom of the barrel as big budget explosive sci-fi filmmaking gets without going straight to DVD. Frantic and mind-numbing (literally, I think I nodded off once or twice) this is a non-stop visual and aural assault merely pretending to be exciting.