Thou Shalt Not Kill: HACKSAW RIDGE

Hacksaw Ridge is a war film about a man who refused to take up a weapon. It’s a true story of a World War II soldier who saw the world tearing itself apart and felt called to help put it back together. He volunteered as a medic, determined to save life while everyone around him was taking it. Alas, this doesn’t sit well with his commanding officers, who eventually force him into a court martial during his time at basic training. He refuses to even touch a weapon. They say he’s disobeying orders. He says he’s following his conscience. This is a fine setup for moral dramaturgy, and an intriguing challenge to Truffaut’s insistence that any anti-war film would, by presenting its subject matter, be inescapably exciting. That the director here is Mel Gibson adds another wrinkle. Here is a filmmaker who creates displays of hyperbolic violence, transforming stories of rebellion into gory sacrifice (Braveheart), stories of religious uplift into contemplations of flayed flesh (The Passion of the Christ), and whose clear masterpiece is an all-out, non-stop action splatter (Apocalypto) with violence and brutality as its subject rather than its conduit. His latest is his most self-conscious about cutting against the grain of his usual preoccupations while upholding his every interest.

It’s an old-fashioned movie, a widescreen, serious, straight-faced, unironic, conventional, period piece about strong, silent, and noble suffering. We see the young man (Andrew Garfield, playing humble aw-shucks simple sturdiness) in his small-town youth, smitten with a pretty nurse (Teresa Palmer). He shows up to donate blood just to get the opportunity to talk to her. Here we are right off the bat with an eye on plasma and its loss, willing or otherwise. There’s also the man’s tearful drunk brute father (Hugo Weaving), a struggling World War I vet with clear psychological scars from his deployment. He weeps near the graves of his fallen comrades, at one point dramatically smashing his booze bottle on a headstone, his blood artfully dripping across the top of the smooth white stone. Gibson’s not shy about drawing these connections with obvious and emphatic splashes. When an early childhood tableau of brothers fighting escalates to one tween swinging at the other with a brick, he draws the camera close to the impact, hears the sick thunk, but then follows the boy into the house where he stares at religious iconography on the wall. The birth of a pacifist is there, as well as an intermingling of guilt and duty, spirituality and conviction.  

By the time we get to boot camp, the movie becomes broad cliché, introducing a bullying commander (Vince Vaughn) slinging out nicknames to a stock group of platoon movie types: the southerner, the pretty boy, the Italian-American, and so forth. They don’t emerge as characters so much as people we can vaguely recognize once the soldiers end up on the battlefield. They don’t look kindly on their medic, who insists he won’t be using a gun, even in self-defense or in protection of his fellow soldiers. They beat him, but he won’t break. He’s jailed, but he won’t back down. He’s court martialed, and still insists he be allowed to help on his terms. He wants to heal, not hurt. Eventually he gets his wish, and Gibson doesn’t do much to milk the suspense of the court proceedings. Instead, he’s eager to follow the men to war, staging a lengthy and overwhelming battle sequence with buckets of gore chased with awe for its man of anti-violence behaving so heroically while still maintaining his ideological purity. The movie’s quaint sturdiness is unmistakably Gibson’s, with a religious fervor and belief in the power of bloody movies sitting side by side.

The movie’s grand finale, an extended and overwhelming work of blood-and-guts filmmaking, is a battle to take a ridge on an island in the Pacific. It earns the name Hacksaw through its waves of soldiers mowed down on both sides of the fight. And through it all, armed only with a spirit of decency and a desire to help, the medic sets about helping. Gibson surrounds him with meat-grinder battle scenes: dripping wounds, cacophonous ammunition, fog of war dirt and grime, loose limbs, arterial spray, demolished faces, gutted corpses, rot and rats, mud and muck, clouds of organs and tissue. And yet Gibson doesn’t simply focus on the horror, but pulls attention to the man refusing to participate. He ducks for cover, darts out with gauze and morphine, eager to get foxhole to foxhole to better save lives. There’s clear admiration here, and through the film’s earnest broad passion for the story, there’s something quietly moving within the surrounding bombast. Garfield wears a bewildered expression of simple duty, head down, hard at work.

In one pivotal moment, when danger is closest, he picks up a rifle. I tensed, wondering if Gibson would give in to his goriest blood lust. Instead, the man simply needed it to help drag a wounded soldier to safety. He sticks to his principles and the movie respects that. Although the movie is too often lumpy in construction or heavy-handed in its message, it represents a refreshing and ennobling concern for dissent in the face of wrongheaded assumptions, and the radical idea of peace in a time of war. The soldier who wishes only to heal and not to hurt is treated as aberrant, allowing him on the battlefield seen as punishment. And yet as he helps the people cut down by senseless bloodshed, he becomes their hero. He lived in dark times, and was called to be a light. We live in dark times. A movie like this, however imperfect, is a welcome reminder to be the light where you can, in all the ways you can, for all the people you can.

Part of Darkness: LIGHTS OUT

Lights Out has a pretty scary image and takes it about as far as it can go. Then it keeps going, stretching itself thin before collapsing into end credits. The idea is this: a mean, grabby, violent ghost is lurking in the dark, and disappears in the light. The opening sequence is effective, as two characters at the end of a long workday are locking up a mannequin warehouse (red flag number one, for all the shadowy figures lurking in the frame). When the lights go out, a haunting silhouette appears in the doorway, backlit by other rooms’ ambient glow. They flip the switch. Nothing’s there. Flip it again. There’s the ghost again, getting closer. Spooky stuff. Unfortunately, that’s really the only trick up the movie’s sleeve, although screenwriter Eric Heisserer (Final Destination 5) tries, but only sometimes succeeds, to keep the deployment of the image fresh throughout. The problem is inherent in making a 3-minute short into a feature-length affair, running out of novelty far sooner than an 80-minute horror movie should.

But at least director David F. Sandberg, adapting his own short, is trying, investing the thin story with something like psychological interest. One should never attend a horror movie expecting a sensitive treatment of mental illness. But here it makes for an interesting thread right up until the genre dictates send it straight into troubling conclusions. That makes it more disappointing in the end, but, hey, it was worth a try. It turns out the ghost who appears when the lights go out – one with a prerequisite tortured-youngster-in-a-tragic-asylum backstory – is psychically linked to a mother (Maria Bello) gone off her meds. The supernatural creature is a manifestation of her breakdown. We learn it happened before, after her first husband disappeared when her now-grown daughter (Teresa Palmer) was 10 years old. She managed to get it under control then. But now, after the death of her second husband (Billy Burke), it’s back, conjoined with her depression and other nameless psychological issues going untreated welcoming this specter into the home she shares with her young son (Gabriel Bateman).

What’s fascinating underneath the pro forma ghost story elements is the understanding of the ways one person’s psychosis can become a shared state of madness for the whole family. They’re bound together inside the delusion, if not in sharing the particulars then at least in understanding the language of its parameters. When the boy turns up at his step-sister’s apartment, exhausted from sleepless nights hiding as the thing goes bump in the dark, she knows all too well what’s wrong. It doesn’t take long until she and her boyfriend (Alexander DiPersia) argue with the mother about what’s best for the boy, and ultimately decide to help rid their family of this terrible curse with or without her help. The mother’s pills have gone untaken, and the ghost is getting territorial, trying its best to scare off or, failing that, kill anyone who would stop this woman’s mental illness, and thus stop allowing the spirit’s malevolence to exist.

That’s a neat-enough way to pad out the runtime. As it goes along the ghost appears and disappears under the dim glow of all of the lights (all of the lights): cop lights, flash lights, spotlights, strobe lights, street lights, candlelight, black light, neon light. All of the lights. You get the picture. There’s scraping and growling and lunging, often circling in the surround speakers to give an immersive sense of creepiness until the being appears with a jolt, its outline darkening the edges of a pale beam, then shrinking in a strong blast of bright. It’s clever, especially when the ghost starts picking objects or people up and then, upon disappearing, drops them instantaneously. But the filmmakers don’t play with the concept enough, eventually devolving into the sort of dumb horror movie behavior (don’t open that! don’t split up! don’t turn your back on that! don’t leave him alone! don’t go in the basement!) that contributes to diminishing the scares’ potency.

Still, it’s enjoyably surfacy and small enough to nearly work, carried along by well-lit (naturally) frames and a cast committing to the emotional intensity of children watching their mother’s vulnerable state deteriorate. Both are enhanced in spookiness by all those opportunities for characters to look scared while holding light sources under their faces like they’re telling ghost stories around the campfire. But by the end, the movie itself doesn’t seem to know how to conclude, arriving at a truly dispiriting answer to its characters’ problems. It gives up. The method by which the threat is resolved implies that mental illness of a certain severity is essentially incurable, and that the sane members of the family would be better off without her. That’s reductive and insulting, probably not on purpose, but through an inability to figure out any other way to write themselves to a satisfying stopping point. In just about every possible aspect, Lights Out starts intriguing and then runs out of bright ideas well before its end.

In the Cards: KNIGHT OF CUPS

I always leave a Terrence Malick film with my mind still cloudy with its cadence, and my eyes seeing the world more closely. He’s always been a poetic filmmaker, prone to gliding away from obvious plot progression through visual metaphor and a roaming curiosity for finding the beauty, the sublime, in any given moment. Lately, though, he’s been drifting further away from narrative. Where once his artful and spiritual approach was tied to the likes of a World War II film (The Thin Red Line) or a tale of colonial America (The New World), he now digs into his character’s minds with increasingly elliptical and empathetic discursiveness. He builds repeating patterns of images and rhyming, rhythmic, trance-like editing. Through The Tree of Life and To the Wonder and now his latest, Knight of Cups, he’s been drawn to similar images: beatific but sad women, stern fathers, people running barefoot on wet sand, hands gliding along surfaces smooth (stone, sheets, running water, skin) and textured (hair, grass, leaves). Does he repeat himself? Very well, then he repeats himself.

In Knight of Cups story and character are gathered only in flashes, flowing forth not in scenes but in impressions, moods, juxtapositions. Malick’s recurring images are the only entry point, and as a result it continues his trend toward gradually more obscurant and opaque films, increasingly alienating for anyone who can’t quite get on his wavelength or forgo skepticism about the sincerity of his intentions. But there’s real meditative, contemplative power for those of us who can. This new film stars Christian Bale as a disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter wandering through a womanizing, glamorous life in Los Angeles. But this is no hectic star-struck satire. Malick takes his style and approach to urban environs for the first time, but finds the intimate and the natural growing through. Every woman the man interacts with gets taken to the beach and cavorts in the puddles and waves. Gardens and boulevards express themselves through concrete and surround glassy mansions. One cameo-stuffed sequence finds a party in a palatial mansion, but Malick’s eye is often drawn to the mountains beyond.

This is an ethereal and spiritual story of a man who feels hollow, who tries to fill the void with women (a terrific lineup: Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Freida Pinto, Imogen Poots, Teresa Palmer), with family (a deadbeat brother, Wes Bentley; an imposing father, Brian Dennehy; a warm mother, Cherry Jones), with nature, with religion (a priest played by Armin Mueller-Stahl). But he can’t quite make the pieces fit. He’s a pilgrim without progress (the first voice we hear is Ben Kingsley reading from John Bunyan’s 1678 text), going through the motions. Not even an earthquake or a robbery can shake him from his haze of disaffected yearning. He wants to be made whole, and yet can’t figure out how to fill the missing parts of his soul. There’s a solemn sadness to the film’s hovering beauty, Emmanuel Lubezki’s luminous camera breathing and moving on a plane of enlightenment the character can’t. It floats, slowly tracking or pushing, distracted by beauty all around. It follows a stream of consciousness, of memory, poetic associations, intuitive connections, casual and tactile expressions of faith and philosophy.

Bale walks along empty beaches and vacant backlots, stands stranded in the desert, sees homeless and hurting people on sidewalks and in clinics, hobnobs with Hollywood elites, rolls about with lithe naked women, sinks into pools. He’s drifting through experiences, part of them without being a part. Tarot cards, agents, parents, lovers, all have advice to impart about what gives life meaning. Each person - a talented cast posing and maneuvering, each bringing a different flavor and tone into the mix - has an effect on him. And yet there are no direct dialogue exchanges of any import as scenes slide and collide, linger on silences and flow with wall-to-wall impassioned murmuring voice over and classical music cut with bits of score and rock. The film is a fog, rootless, directionless, adding up to great meaning that the character can’t access. Strangely, this walls off the audience at times. I felt its yearning for completion, was often moved by it, and still had moments when I stared at the screen in befuddlement as images collected while only occasionally connecting.

Perhaps the key to unlocking this entrancing, beguiling, beautiful mystery of a film comes when Bale imagines (or is it actually happening?) a rooftop confrontation with his stubborn but frail father. The old man laments that he thought as he aged everything about life would begin to make sense, but instead he’s sad to find nothing but a confusing tangle of messy memories. The film finds moments of intense emotional drama and thoroughly somnambulant despair, holding them both at the same remove, behind artful glass and sacred aloofness. Moments of pain and moments of grace are swallowed up by the character’s depression and the film’s interest in turning his distress into beautiful suffering. It all adds up to a heavy spell I’ve found hard to shake, even as my mind struggled in the moment and afterwards to puzzle through its throughlines. This isn’t one of Malick’s best efforts, lacking his usual intuitiveness in its progression, but that’s mostly due to how closed off it feels. I get the sense this is intensely personal, a movie dragged kicking and screaming out of his innermost being and now sits there vulnerable and foreboding, full of raw spiritual power.

Undying Love: WARM BODIES

When R (Nicholas Hoult) meets Julie (Teresa Palmer), he doesn’t know what to say. He’s understandably tongue-tied, and not just because she’s a smart, capable, pretty blonde in tight jeans. He’s dead. Well, he’s not dead, exactly. He’s undead. Warm Bodies, written and directed by Jonathan Levine from the novel by Isaac Marion, takes place some years after the dawn of a zombie apocalypse and R is just one of many reanimated corpses shambling about the ruins of civilization. He’s an unusual zombie since his brain seems to be rattling about with a fair amount of activity. There’s enough going on in there, at least, to provide us with a chatty narration that his rigor mortis won’t allow him to vocalize properly. We’re in his head and can tell he’s instantly in love with Julie even though she and her friends are being attacked by his kind, judging by the way the scene drops into slow motion and an 80’s pop ballad fills the soundtrack as she fires her rifle, hair blowing, cheeks rosy.

Warm Bodies would be more of a satire of the kind of paranormal romances that have flourished in these post-Twilight days if it didn’t work pretty well as a rather surprisingly charming romance itself. R protects Julie from having her brain turned into a snack, sheltering her in a crashed airplane where he keeps his record collection. (The movie has a nice soundtrack to go with those stacks of vinyl.)  She’s understandably scared at first. Her dad (John Malkovich) is the leader of their walled-off, heavily armed city of survivors. She’s been trained to shoot to kill the undead without hesitation. She’s weaponless behind zombie territory when R saves her. And he’s kind, clearly making an effort, straining to be understood through his hunched body language and groaning monosyllabic vocabulary. She decides he’s not so bad for a dead guy.

Though the resolutely PG-13 film has a fair amount of guts and gore kept just out of frame, this is a zombie movie for people who don’t like zombie movies. It’s a sweet and hopeful post apocalypse with appealing lead performances. Hoult makes for a likable monster in that he never comes across like one. Sure, he munches on brains, but our access to his inner monologue makes him seem appropriately conflicted about it. And as his relationship with Palmer grows hesitantly warmer, so too does his yearning to be free of the curse of being a zombie. This sets into motion a strangely off-handed search-for-a-cure plot that helps to move the film towards its conclusion. Along the way we meet other zombies who are starting to spark back to life, including a funny Rob Corddry, playing a likable zombie in what amounts to his most restrained performance ever, grunting out barely half a word at a time, but nonetheless getting some of the film’s biggest laughs.

Since we’re expected to like these zombies, there are also roaming packs of plague-ridden antagonists in the form of rotted out skeletons, undead too far gone, who are irredeemable and therefore suitable cannon fodder. It works to tie up the plot and force a conclusion through fairly standard action beats that are the least inspired aspect of this altogether pleasant amusement. What works best is the genuinely heartfelt chemistry at the core. Despite bordering on sappy with its insistence that true love can break through even cold, dead zombie hearts, Hoult and Palmer give appealing performances that are heartwarming enough to buy it. Levine, whose last feature was 50/50, a largely, and improbably, enjoyable comedy about a young man with cancer, knows how to find comedy out of tough scenarios and directs here with a light touch that never pushes too hard against material so pleasingly slight and likably diverting.

Quick Look: TAKE ME HOME TONIGHT

It’s Labor Day 1988 in Michael Dowse’s Take Me Home Tonight. There’s a big suburban house party being thrown by and for recent college grads as a sort of impromptu early high school reunion arranged by those who were in the popular crowd. Topher Grace goes hoping to impress his high school crush (Teresa Palmer) even though his MIT diploma has so far only landed him a minimum-wage job at Suncoast Video. (Remember those?) His sister (a curiously muted Anna Faris) is there as well because her long-time boyfriend (a strangely low-key Chris Pratt) is the host. This is all affable enough, at times, though Dan Fogler as Grace’s sloppy best friend seems to be in an entirely different movie, falling all over situations of poorly executed slapstick and incongruous sex-and-drugs gags. It’s a frustrating, distracting underbelly to an otherwise pleasant movie that takes place all on one night, mostly in and around this one party overflowing with 80’s music in the speakers and 80’s fashion on the extras. I appreciated the movie’s good-natured romanticism, which is presented in ways that are totally cliché, but at least it’s not a self-conscious and rancid 80’s nostalgia comedy like last year’s Hot Tub Time Machine, a movie that I find curdling in my memory. It’s not making fun of the 80’s or using its period-piece trappings to poke easy fun with anachronistic winks. If it weren’t for the modern cast it could almost pass as a minor 80’s rom-com. But “minor” is the key word here. Though there’s much to like and a little to tolerate, the movie is never more than a minor diversion. It’s sweet, but never charming. It’s likable without ever really getting around to being more than forgettable. It belongs to a certain category of movies that exist in the mind of the viewer just until the credits roll and not too long after.

Teenagers from Outer Space: I AM NUMBER FOUR

D.J. Caruso is a capable director who has helmed several middle-of-the-road efforts, none better than his 2007 Disturbia, an enjoyable suburban Hitchcock riff. He returns to suburbia for I Am Number Four, easily one of the worst of his films. It’s a dull, rote sci-fi thriller for the Twilight crowd. (Indeed, it’s based off of a teen novel by James Frey and Jobie Hughes). Here’s a cheap film that feels cobbled together entirely out of generic parts that have been shipped unaltered from the cliché factory.

It features a charisma-free performance from bland blond Alex Pettyfer as a teenage alien who was one of nine children sent from his planet to escape genocide at the hands of some things called the Mogadorians. He and the others were to be raised separately on Earth to become warrior defenders of all that is good (or something like that). His older alien protector (the usually reliably entertaining Timothy Olyphant) keeps him moving around so that humans don’t get suspicious. There’s not much on the surface to suggest that suspicion could be a big concern. Are they worried about the fact that they look exactly like normal humans?

When the movie starts, Pettyfer is flipping around on a jet ski and having a great time with the human teens until a weird symbol starts to glow underneath the skin of his leg. That’s the sign that another of his alien brethren has been killed. You see, these Mogadorians have come to earth and have apparently spent around sixteen years or so hunting down these other aliens, the last of the kind. For some never explained reason, these refugees can only be killed in a certain order. How is this order decided? Who knows? They’ve just killed Number Three. Any guess as to the identity of Number Four? Hint: check the title.

Anyways, these Mogadorians, who look like Voldemort with gills and are almost exclusively shown under the cover of darkness, are on the hunt for our protagonists, as is a mysterious blonde (Teresa Palmer) who is on her own separate search. On the run, Pettyfer and Olyphant (what a couple of surnames!) end up crashing in Paradise, Ohio where, of course, the best way to blend in is to send the alien teen to high school. There he meets cartoonish archetypes that have marched straight out of the nearest teen comedy including the inevitable romantic alluring artistic girl (Dianna Agron), the nerdy sidekick kid (Callan McAuliffe), and the antagonistic bullying jock (Jake Abel). For some reason or another, they’ll all inevitably be drawn into the looming intergalactic conflict that will play out on a depressingly small scale.

This is a movie that is never more successful than in its moments of empty-headed spectacle, but that’s mostly because it means the characters have a chance to remain silent while the plot slips even further into autopilot. It is yet another superpower metaphor in the coming-of-age story. It’s yet another low-key genre effort that’s so sleepily dull that it only makes all the more obvious its status as mere pretty product. It’s yet another achingly predictable plot that descends into a conclusion that consists of a shootout, a few explosions and the threat of a sequel.

I was so incredibly bored watching this all play out in front of me that little could be done to rouse my interest. I could not have cared less about the Mogadorians and the special numbers, the magic rocks, the stupid symbols and the plodding teen romance, though I suppose coherent exposition would have made it all go down a bit smoother. Actually, that’s probably not true. This is a movie so impersonally assembled out of prefabricated parts that little could be done to spark it to life without a complete and total overhaul featuring a bit more imagination and energy.

Charm Offensive: THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

It’s not every day that you can see a big summer action-adventure based on a Goethe poem that was previously adapted into a short segment in the beloved Fantasia, but that’s exactly what you get with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It’s loud and expensive, much like other Jerry Bruckheimer productions including the dumb National Treasures which share, in Jon Turteltaub, the same director as this new feature. They also share the same star, Nicolas Cage, but Sorcerer’s Apprentice has the good sense to embrace the actor’s loopier side.

Looking through a mess of long hair and a floppy fedora, with a long trenchcoat flapping behind him, Nicolas Cage certainly looks the part of a more than one-thousand-year-old sorcerer now living in Manhattan, who trained under Merlin and has spent centuries searching for his master’s replacement. Cage hams it up, bugging out his crazy eyes and strutting through each scene with a magical confidence. He’s also hilarious. Early in the film, following a statement made by Cage, a character asks “how do you know that?” Cage spins and fixes a wild gaze on the character while shouting “because I can read minds!” Total commitment to a ridiculous role is the name of the game here, and the film is better for Cage’s participation.

It helps that Cage is facing off with a rival ancient sorcerer played by Alfred Molina, who brings an equal commitment to his suavely villainous cheeseball. He makes a grand entrance, forming out of a squirming mass of cockroaches. Out of all the actors in the world, perhaps only Molina could look so effortlessly nonchalant about a cockroach crawling up his nostril in his first big close-up. He’s having a ball, chewing on all his lines with clear satisfaction and infectious fun.

The two sorcerers are after a nesting doll that contains the trapped essences of various evil magicians from centuries past. Cage wishes to keep it out of the hands of Molina, who wants to free the evil in order to raise an army of the dead. To further complicate matters, this hunk of magical wood was inadvertently lost a decade earlier by college student Jay Baruchel, who may just be the one true heir to Merlin’s powers. Cage suspects as much, so he takes the lad under his wing to teach him the ways of using sorcery for good, not evil. And, of course, he’ll need his help to battle all the encroaching forces of darkness. What would a summer blockbuster be without encroaching forces of darkness?

This all sounds complicated, but the film wears its mythology lightly, preferring instead to go right for the big, splashy, effective set-pieces involving all kinds of kinetic magical danger and derring-do. Mixed in is a healthy dose of humor. This is a movie that is faintly aware of just how ridiculous it own story is. Cage and Molina aren’t the only ones having a ball. Baruchel is charming and funny as a geeky asocial guy who only cares about this girl (Teresa Palmer) that he’s loved since he was ten and with whom he just might be making a connection. She might even want to, you know, date him. And then all this crazy stuff about legends and curses and magic and good and evil? It’s almost more than he can take.

I went into the theater with very low expectations and, while I wasn’t blown away, I was pleasantly surprised. This is a mostly fast moving and enjoyable experience. The effects are convincing and are put to good use. It’s genuinely exciting and amusing. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not great, but it’s much better than the majority of this summer’s offerings from this genre, and it’s certainly just right for an uncomplicated couple of hours at the multiplex.