Where the Wild Things Are: PETE'S DRAGON

When Disney tasked David Lowery, director of 2013’s hushed and self-consciously artsy crime movie Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, with remaking their half-remembered 1977 live-action/animation-hybrid roadshow musical Pete’s Dragon they must’ve known they’d be getting a radical reinterpretation. The original movie, a simple boy-and-his-dog story in which the dog is a friendly, occasionally invisible, hand-drawn dragon, is a broad, galumphing, protracted, insufferable, fumblingly wacky thing. Lowery’s update is a complete improvement, excavating the title and central relationship, changing and elevating the rest. I’d go out on a limb and suggest the result is far better than even the wildest studio expectations. Here’s a movie that’s sensitive and tender, about a boy who is orphaned in a car wreck and left to fend for himself in the woods of the Pacific northwest, making an unlikely friend in a big, furry, green dragon. Lovingly and patiently told, the movie is reverent with tough material artfully suggested, and an impressive respect for the mind of a child.

Firstly, Lowery and his co-writer Toby Halbrooks approach the movie with a great degree of seriousness in representing the mindset of their lead. While Pete grows to love and trust this creature, we see the confidence and tenaciousness of childhood innocence enduring in the face of trauma. After six years in the woods, he’s discovered by people from the nearby town, including a forest ranger (Bryce Dallas Howard) who takes him in while investigating his situation. He’s at a loss upon returning to the human world after several years as a wild child, his long hair and fiercely intense stare telling the story of his troubles and his survival. He yearns for a family, but separated from his dragon he can only think of running back to the home he knows. Lowery works with young actor Oakes Fegley to make a wholly convincing performance that’s unlike other kids’ roles in big CG-heavy spectacles. It’s closer in tone and effect to Jacob Tremblay in Room, or a similarly feral boy in Truffaut’s The Wild Child. Here’s a real boy in unreal circumstances.

This leads to the movie’s second welcome expression of respect for children’s minds. It’s a movie that understands a young audience’s ability to be drawn in by quiet and contemplation pitched at their level without a hint of condescension. Lowery has cinematographer Bojan Bazelli (The Lone Ranger) make still, soft poetry out of sun-dappled forests, which are ultimately as magical as its central effects’ performance. It paints a world of wonder, majesty, and scale, a young boy dwarfed by the natural world and then slowly coaxed out of it into society once more. There’s a real beauty and appeal to the world of the trees and hills, and a real boys’ adventure understanding of building a life there. It knows that fear of the unknown can hold you from living a better life, but the soft fear of the everyday can hold you complacent in a situation that’s not ideal. Tough stuff, but the filmmakers expect children to follow. Lowery is allowed the confidence to make effects secondary and bring to the fore human-scale emotions so elemental and simple that he need not surface them explicitly. For once, a family film leaves its emotional underpinnings unspoken, with faith in the intuitive interpretative power of children.

It works because the movie is so precisely cast, with Fegley’s strong child performance anchoring a sharp and clear ensemble. Dallas Howard projects maternal warmth, and it’s easy to see why the boy would be drawn to her as a protector and a sympathetic ear. She’ll be needed to protect him and his dragon from hunters (led by Karl Urban) who wish to capture the legendary beast. Other kind adults include Robert Redford, bringing decades of weathered stardom to a subtle and warm effort of grandfatherly charm, and Wes Bentley as Howard’s husband, a man who hardly believes in the magic around him. Then there’s their young daughter (Oona Laurence), who is skeptical but eager to get involved in helping this strange boy. It’s a movie about childlike sense of wonder and possibility, but with grounding in reality. Confidently moving in its portrait of the good parents can do, and the pain a friendship can alleviate, it’d be a fine drama without the dragon.

But there is a dragon, and it’s the last piece in the movie’s emotional core. The movie turns on the relationship between a kid and a special effect, and it works as well as it did in E.T., Free Willy, and The BFG (Disney’s other good soft-spoken wonderment about an orphan and a towering magical being this summer). Lowery makes the smart choice to shorthand the emotional connection by making the impressively tactile CG creature not an impish animated sidekick but a big, furry, endearing, overgrown puppy dog. An early scene finds the fantastical animal quizzically tipping his head to fit a log he’s carrying between his teeth through a narrow opening between two trees. It’s such a dog-like action, as are his soft cries when Pete goes missing, and his wet-eyed search for the boy as he softly wings his way towards town. He’s playful and protective, capable of cute energy and growling loyalty. It’s smart to make him at once oversized astonishment, and a down-to-earth pet.

The movie embraces stillness and silence, has long passages of human emotion set to wistful folk music and a melancholy mood, but it somehow doesn’t diminish the dragon or make him seem out of place. As the movie escalates to effects and a flourish of climactic action, it still places him in the frame as just another character. (One shot even holds him out of focus in the background while humans tearfully reunite, a sight so casual it takes a moment to realize how daring it is to spend part of the animation budget on a shot where it’s not the focus.) We’re to be amazed not only by what happens, but how it plays out in its characters’ feelings and relationships. This is a rare family movie of restraint. It doesn’t rush manically from setpiece to setpiece or gag to gag. It unfolds patiently, allows itself the time to let characters inhabit believable physical and emotional spaces, and trusts in its audience’s ability to care without any more handholding than a soaring score and strong performances at its heart. If this is what can happen when you give a remake’s reigns to smart filmmakers with real vision and something meaningful to communicate, than Disney should do this more often.

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.

In Treatment: WELCOME TO ME

With its central recurring tragicomic setpieces taking the form of a deeply strange local access talk show, the Kristen Wiig-starring Welcome to Me recalls SNL sketches where she’d play a televised oddball attention seeker. Unlike that series’ endless iterations of the cracked talk show concept, this film deepens the emotional terrain and provides context tying the laughs to melancholy and sadness. It’s a small character study brushing up against eccentric details, but never losing a central thread of depression and pain. It’s funny, but in the cringingly awkward way an unexpected inappropriate comment punctures empty moments. The movie is appealingly uneasy.

Never let it be said Wiig plays it safe with her choice of roles. Here she’s a woman with borderline personality disorder who goes off her meds after winning millions in the lottery. Against the advice of her therapist (Tim Robbins), best friend (Linda Cardellini), and parents (Joyce Hiller Piven and Jack Wallace), she cuts a check to a tiny nearby TV station, buying airtime on which she demands to star in her own daytime program. Oprah-obsessed, she imperfectly models her show on her idol’s. Clearly enjoying the cult-of-personality aspects above all else, she creates a show with no interviews or topics. Instead, she only discusses herself. It’s a warped reflection of any social media feed you might encounter, or any string of comments below any article, where you slowly realize the person behind the messages is deeply troubled.

The results are a program that’s a stilted mess of naked neurosis and narcissism, clearly the product of a disturbed mind, and strangely compelling because of it. She uses the airwaves as her own personal therapy session, much to the confusion of the station’s managers (Wes Bentley, James Marsden, and Joan Cusack), who continue cashing her checks, the only thing keeping them out of bankruptcy. The show, also called Welcome to Me, features a woman exorcising her past amongst rudimentary graphics, mannered reenactments by confused day players, stretches of silence, crying jags, cooking demonstrations, and rides across the stage in a swan boat. It’s a close, psychologically complex, cousin of the Tim & Eric aesthetic. Of course it would generate a cult following, from baffled channel surfers and an overeager grad student (Thomas Mann) hungry for more.

Her show, and the performance that comes with it, is the source of the movie’s appeal, crafting a painful vision of a woman for whom personal validation is inextricably tied to a desire to be on TV. (If that’s not a comment on our current media landscape, I don’t know what is.) Beyond it, director Shira Piven and screenwriter Eliot Laurence have created a small world, but a consistently compelling one. Under bright, flat cinematography, Wiig shows off a range of hilarious and heartbreaking line readings which are always firmly rooted in a good sense of character, especially as the woman increasingly disappears up her own unmedicated ego in bizarre and elaborate episodes. Relationships beyond the studio setting are perfunctory indie dramedy fare turned slightly unsettled by the context. But they take a backseat to the show-within-the-movie. It builds in complexity and heart with each repetition, drawing difficult emotional reactions from what could’ve easily tipped over into stiff camp.

Often queasily hilarious, this story of a woman struggling with mental illness is still treated just soberly enough to not feel mean-spirited. Even when she is making self-destructive decisions, or exploited by those who should know better, her plight is treated with empathy and understanding. At best, it’s a comic character study so unusually sharp it draws tears, but retains a layer of artificiality keeping the proceedings vaguely humorous. Because we see the person behind the show, it’s both funny and painful. Like her cult following, I found myself hanging on every word while she’s on the air. The film doesn’t come to any sort of satisfying resolution and many subplots fall flat, but it’s Wiig’s memorable character, and the core of cringe comedy respectfully played, that sticks with me. The show’s warbling theme song still echoes in my brain.

To Boldly Go: INTERSTELLAR

Interstellar is a film out of time about a man out of time. It’s set in a future world in which climate change isn’t solved, leading to food shortages, dust storms, and economic collapse. In other words, it’s our world if we don’t get our acts together. It’s gotten so bad, a highly skilled engineer and pilot like Cooper (an earnest Matthew McConaughey) has found those jobs gone, forcing him to take up farming. There amidst the cornfields he, widowed, lives a frustrated life with his kids (Mackenzie Foy and Timothée Chalamet) and his father-in-law (John Lithgow), working the land and watching the skies, lamenting the lack of opportunity not just for himself, but for his children as well. They’re doomed to work the land for a starving planet losing habitable soil by the day. His father-in-law tells him, “You were born forty years too late, or too early.” How strange to hear that said about a future person, wishing himself back in our day.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan is a man out of time as well. His brand of pop seriousness, with the likes of The Dark Knight and Inception, may be in vogue, but his insistence on un-franchised tentpoles and shooting on film (full IMAX and 70mm, no less) make him an outlier. Sure enough, he, along with brother Jonathan who co-wrote, makes Interstellar an old-fashioned science fiction tale. It’s built out of bits and pieces of major sci-fi landmarks past, with the slow build of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the workaday travelers of Alien, the matter-of-fact procedure of Contact, the trippy leaps of 2001. There’s also some Gravity, Apollo 13, and The Right Stuff mixed in. And the opening sequence even has talking heads literally reappropriated from Ken Burns’ Dust Bowl, an odd choice.

The film steadily takes its time, gets its thrills out of the power and excitement of the unknown, and finally leaps beyond its reach into an ending as intuitively satisfying as it is both literal and baffling. Cooper is recruited by one of his old bosses (Michael Caine) to join a secret last-ditch effort to save humanity by looking to the stars. The plan is to travel through a wormhole near Saturn to a distant galaxy perched on the edge of a black hole and scout habitable worlds. Feeling the weight of the doomed Earth dying fast and taking his kids’ futures with it, he agrees to embark on this difficult and potentially indefinite mission. The film, which up until this point is appealing without being gripping, achieves liftoff at the same time the spaceship does.

The scientists (Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley, and David Gyasi) joining the journey are embarking on exploration meant to resist the prevailing earthbound public sentiment to merely manage decline. No, they’re out to discover a way to save mankind, a standard sci-fi trope here done slowly, seriously, and well. Nolan takes the opportunity to find the absorbing detail of scientific exploration, the majesty of awe as all manner of cosmic phenomena drift by.

Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema makes gorgeous images out of the interplay between the gunmetal grey ship and the gleaming, glittering panoply of stars, nebula, wormholes, and singularities lighting up the night sky. A host of talented artists conjure gorgeously rendered effects as beautiful as anything Douglas Trumbull cooked up for 2001 and The Tree of Life. Hans Zimmer’s score makes use of a pipe organ, making the connection between swirling space and spiritual reverence, the resonances of hope and progress as a light in hopeless darkness, the cosmos a cathedral of wonder and fear. It’s a film that’s reaching, and often thrilling in that reach.

That’s all in line with Nolan’s typical interest in concept over all else. His filmmaking is interested in process and rules, in films that constantly explain their preoccupations with puzzling over magic tricks, rattled memories, and layers of dream spaces. This is narratively his most straightforward film, thrilling to the step-by-step procedures that launch our team of astronauts (plus a Bill Irwin-voiced faceless box of metal robot who gets all the best lines) towards strange new worlds. There they find moments of peril and thriller plotting, including a late-arriving big name put to great use in a twist a lesser actor wouldn’t sell nearly as well.

The screenplay’s construction is clever in its use of the theory of relativity’s stretching space travel time to tell two connected stories on vastly different tracks. First, the tense interstellar mission spanning what feels to the characters like weeks. Second, a decades-spanning story for those left on Earth, like Cooper’s kids who grow up to be Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck, wondering if their father will ever return or if he’s lost in space forever.

This is the film’s animating anxiety, not the potential end of humanity, but a broken family trying to pick up the pieces. They’re separated by time and space, in need of reconciliation and reunion that may never come. That’s the big beating heart at the core of the film, for all its spacey wonder and eventual squishy mumbo jumbo conclusion. The stars are an impressive backdrop, and the tense spaceship maneuvers and equation crunches are gripping outgrowths of, moments as simple as a father weeping while watching his children grow up fast from afar. The people in the film are representations of ideas more than round characters, but the talented cast breathes life into them and the feelings shake through. It’s a testament to the level of craft on display that the film can routinely verbalize every idea, and then feel them, too.

It’s Nolan’s most humane film, building on the metaphors for grief that drove Inception, working towards greater heights of narrative tension as expression of character needs. In the end, these twin, sometimes fumbling, impulses towards scientific and emotional exploration lead the film into a resolution that’s partially an explosion of abstract images, but more often an overly literal explanation that actually doesn’t make much sense. But the journey there is often stirring and exciting, overwhelming and marvelous with powerful images and sensations. I couldn’t help but admire the overreach of the final moments anyway, as it turns sci-fi loops that resolve the story tightly where I might’ve preferred a greater sense of poetic ambiguity. It’s a film of great ambition, a big, uneven, intensely personal vision that sneaks up and overpowers my objections.

Battle Royale: THE HUNGER GAMES

Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, the first in a trilogy of popular sci-fi novels technically labeled “young adult” fiction, offers an irresistible genre hook that can be boiled down to easily sellable sensationalistic ad copy. 24 enter. Only 1 survives. But the plot goes deeper than the hook. The titular games are an annual event thrown by the wealthy ruling class of Panem, a post-apocalyptic North America with twelve districts. Each district is required to select at random one male and one female between the ages of 12 and 18 to be sent as tribute into a gladiatorial combat reality show. Winners return to their districts wealthy for life. Losers simply don’t return. It’s ritualistic sacrifice as entertainment, subjugation through mass opiates.

This is strong stuff and Collins makes it into gripping reading. It starts with satiric bite and shifts into a page-turner and a thrill ride without defanging its sharp social criticisms. The film follows the plot of the book closely, starting slowly in the gray, impoverished District 12. A gutsy hunter, teenager Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), volunteers to take the place of her younger sister (Willow Shields) in the upcoming Hunger Games and barely has time to ask her best friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth) to take care of her family before she’s whisked off to the Capital. Along with fellow District 12 tribute, a baker’s son, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), Katniss finds herself in a strange new place, a metropolis of conspicuous consumption, rampant materialism, and grotesque amounts of leisure time. Their creepily optimistic Capital representative (Elizabeth Banks) guides them to their drunken, grizzled mentor (Woody Harrelson) and a kind stylist (Lenny Kravitz). These three are there to help these teens prepare for their upcoming fight to the death.

But first, a publicity tour. They’re paraded around the capital, which is some kind of stylistic mash-up of Metropolis, the Emerald City, and THX-1138.  The teens appear in parades for the approval of the quietly menacing President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and his gamemaster (Wes Bentley). Later, they’re interviewed on a talk show hosted by a sleazy ham (a perfectly cast Stanley Tucci). The sights and sounds of the Capital are terrifically imagined caricatures of decadence and careless oppression. It’s a city of people who look like Marie Antoinettes and Lady Gagas, colorful and baroque, while also as aloof as the filthy rich, blissfully ignorant of the true conditions in the outlying Districts of Panem. A telling moment comes during the talk show when a guest comments that the host smells “nicer.” “Well, I’ve been here longer,” the host replies with a wicked grin, underlining the easy-going condescension of the aristocracy. By the time Katniss and the other teens are sent into a technologically controlled wilderness to fight for the amusement of all Panem, it’s certainly clear that the odds are not in their favor.

The question going in to the new film adaptation of the book was if director and co-writer Gary Ross would be able to keep the same powerful mix of brisk, cliffhanger storytelling and wry, allegorical social satire. After all, his last film was 2003’s horseracing period piece Seabiscuit and, before that, 1998’s allegorical fantasy comedy Pleasantville. (Though, come to think of it, Pleasantville had it’s fair share of allegorical social satire). The answer to Ross’s suitability to the material is, thankfully, a qualified yes. This is a movie that’s a successful adaptation (Collins is one of the credited screenwriters) and a solid entertainment. As cinema, it is perhaps ultimately a bit of a disappointment, but I’ll get there.

Odds are that the audience will eat it up, though. This is without a doubt slick, button-pushing Hollywood entertainment that pumps up the emotional notes and hits the expected plot beats with a predictable regularity. Indeed, it’s a particularly faithful adaptation, in many ways a slavish abridgement that leaves the pacing sadly lumpy in spots. It can’t be easy to introduce so many characters and concepts and, consequentially, it feels at once rushed and bloated. But there’s quality control on screen here from a cast and crew that evidently shares a love of the source material. It’s a fine transcription of Collins’s imagination to the screen with some top-notch set designers, costumers, and art directors contributing to a convincing futuristic world. The cast is uniformly solid, though the leads, the usually compelling Lawrence and Hutchinson, are blanker than they should be. Katniss is a great character, a great heroine, but she fades into the spectacle more than she should. Ross doesn’t find a good way to represent the omnipresent interiority of the book that gives us more of an insight into her thoughts and actions. Still, Lawrence sells the big moments with a similar grit she gave to her breakout – and Oscar-nominated – role in Winter’s Bone.

Ross pumps up his filmmaking with shaky cinematography that drains some of the energy. When moments feel flat or preordained, jiggling the camera won’t work to spice them up. Unfortunately, the actual hand-to-hand combat in the Hunger Games themselves is filmed with an often blurry, haphazard, shaky cam as well. Perhaps this is a way to combat the limitations of the desired PG-13 rating, but it’s a lazy solution. The shaking image problem is compounded by the film’s tendency towards close-ups and tight medium shots that pervades the entire production. In many moments, I wondered if it was compensating for the relatively modest budget for this kind of spectacle by limiting what’s actual seen in the frames. The style is a detriment to those who would prefer to understand the in-the-moment action instead of simply waiting around for a still shot to clue us in to which blows landed, who got hurt, who’s alive and who’s dead. But since the 22 other fighters have been so sketchily introduced in choppy montage and rushed exposition, there’s not even much of a sense of who these other kids are. And that dilutes some of the horror. I’m not asking for more gore, only greater clarity.

Ross mostly nails the mood of Katniss’s main crisis, though. He understands that it’s a story about a young woman trapped in a terrible situation, forced into a nearly unwinnable scenario in which she’s struggling to retain autonomy and self-worth in a demoralizing society that wants her dead at worst, as a propagandistic pawn at best. Katniss is easy to root for; we want to see her succeed even if it’s not clear what success could possibly mean. With a central character, and central conflict, like this, The Hunger Games often makes for a compelling film, even if it’s ultimately a bit too cluttered and rushed – when its not languid, that is – for every little moment to land as well as they should.

It doesn’t consistently fall flat, but nor does it ever really take off. Ultimately Ross has made an adaptation that’s just slightly more than a pale imitation. It’s a solid effort all around and a promising start to a new franchise. (For my money, the third book is by far the best, still thrilling and accessible while even darker and more complex, with greater moral and allegorical force). I wish Ross could have taken more chances, made a gutsier film that made more of an impact with a streamlined pace and a visually coherent and comprehensible style. Greatness was within reach. Instead, it’s a film that drafts off whiffs of more exciting action and greater thematic depths.