The post Us (2019) appeared first on Alternate Ending.
]]>So it is with Peele’s second feature as director, Us, which evolves even further still. It’s not nearly as laser-focused in putting forth an argument as Get Out was (which is not to say that it doesn’t have an argument), and if this means fewer Oscar nominations and year-end Top 10 lists (and I suspect this will prove to be exactly what it means), that somewhat pales compared to how much better Us is at the nuts-and-bolts of making a really big, nutty horror picture, how much more you can palpably feel Peele-the-cinephile going all-in on making the kind of film that he really wants to watch. You don’t get to something this loopy and big without a huge mountain of joyful passion, and that passion is totally infectious. It’s been a good long while since there was a horror movie that included this much stuff on the way to being this much fun.
The structure is pure slasher movie: prologue set 30-ish years ago detailing the protagonist’s traumatic childhood, a first act that establishes a bland middle-class normality, a second act where the demonic stalkers show up, and a third act full of blood. The difference is all in the fourth act, where things go all the way weird; I will not spoil a solitary frame of the last 30 minutes of Us, but to say that it turns out the film that pretended to be a psychological thriller for most of its running time turns out to be something closer to cosmic body horror. And this is an astonishing twist, all the more so since given that, when it finally appears, Peele has done such a good job of nudging us in the right direction that it’s less of a “wait, what?” than an “ah, I see” moment.
Anyway, the protagonist with a dark past is Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o as an adult, Madison Curry as a child), who experienced something most unnerving in 1986, on a family trip to the beachside amusement park in Santa Cruz, California: there, in a tacky hall of mirrors, she spotted a girl who looked precisely like her, but steadily refused to act like a reflection. These man years later, Adelaide is married, to Gabe (Winston Duke), with a teenage daughter, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and a geeky younger son, Jason (Evan Alex), and a handsome vacation home in Santa Cruz, California. We get the impression that annual vacations back to the site of her one great trauma have never not-bothered Adelaide, but for some reason it’s worse this year. And “some reason” turns out to be a premonition about the four figures in red jump suits who appear in the driveway on the Wilsons’ first night of vacation. But these are no ordinary home invaders: they’re doppelgängers for the Wilsons, only animalistic: mute, violent, deformed. Only Red, the alternate Adelaide, is able to communicate through any means other than brute force, and she does so in a groaning, clicking, croaking voice, like somebody taught a cricket how to speak English after it had been eaten by a bullfrog.
Take it at face value – it is perfectly satisfying to do so – and Us is basically just a stock “the killer got knocked down, haha no they didn’t, now here’s a jump scare” thriller, marked out primarily only by the strength of its execution. As he demonstrated in Get Out, Peele has watched all the right movies, and he assembles his influences in some really wonderful moments; Us boasts, for example, one of the better variations on the Halloween-derived “the killer seems to materialise in a dark doorway” scares I have seen in a while. But where the film really shines isn’t in its overt scares, no matter how beautifully cinematographer Mike Gioulakis frames them with velvety darkness, or how superbly Michael Abels’s battering ram of a score wrenches us through moodiness and into terror and then wary escape. It’s in the profound uncanniness of the scenario and the performances, which are uniformly excellent; if Nyong’o is obviously the best (and, I would say with barely any hesitation, the best she’s ever been in a movie), that’s really only because she’s got the most to do by a long shot. The thing that’s amazing about all four lead roles, as well as Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker’s performances as the Wilsons’ bland white friends, is how easy it is to forget we’re watching one performer take on two characters. Whatever Peele did to his actors to get them to the point that Us requires, I’m impressed by him and sorry for them: there is a palpable sense of soul-death in Duke’s Abraham, of starving carnivorous rage in Joseph’s Umbrae, and unfathomable inhuman curiosity in Alex’s Pluto (I can’t quite bring myself to believe it’s any sort of accident that the creepy little boy, maybe the most actively upsetting thing in the movie, shares a name with Michael Berryman’s horrifying cannibal manchild from Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes). And as for Red, the alt-Adelaide played by Nyong’o, she’s simply mesmerising, with something eerily wrong and ill-formed in everything from the way she puts her hands on her face to the way she uses her eyes to the scraping, rocks-on-concrete quality to her voice.
It is deeply unnerving to spend time with these characters, and while the home invasion situation is, admittedly, boilerplate in its setpieces, and resolved without much actual effort from anybody but Gabe, it’s plain enough that this is more of a mood piece than a crisp, clear bit of storytelling. And such mood: heavy and dark (even the sunny beach scenes are slightly dim and washed out), but veined with a more acerbic and focused version of the actually-kind-of-sour comic relief that Peele employed in his last film that keeps it from simply being morose. All that being said, the home invasion thriller material is in a sense just a red herring for what the film is actually doing, which is to create a dreamy underworld that’s, on the one hand, an obvious allegory. Obvious for what I can’t quite say; most of the running time, it feels like Us is about the abandonment of impoverished African-Americans by the black bourgeoisie, in small details as well as broad strokes (the film’s already-celebrated use of “I Got 5 on It” is, among other things, an opportunity for the priggish Gabe to ignore the song’s class implications), but as it goes along the horror is steady de-racialised. Whatever it is, it’s clearly pointing out that there are a whole lot of us in the U.S. that get left behind by the rest of us, treated as sub-citizens who don’t even possess their own wants and needs. If the target is more diffuse than in Get Out, it’s because Us has a grander scale in mind, with a more free-floating sense of who wields power over whom.
So that’s on the one hand. On the other, frankly much better hand, Us is a wonderful collapse into a nightmarish underground, where lonely institutional spaces and the light implication of gruesome violence, baroque imagery involving rabbits, some phenomenal compositions of Nyong’o giving vent to Red’s rage, and a beautifully edited, savage parody of ballet all combine to create a kind of collage of half-formed horror movie spaces roughly assembled into something of a dream journal of genre fare. It is so extremely easy to see why someone might consider the sprawling, messy final quarter of Us to be a huge liability; but I’m certain I’m not the only person who instead thinks it’s the film’s crowning achievement, with the overall breakdown of identities mirrored in the sense of the film splitting itself apart, revising its plot, its allegiances, its setting, and its tone. It’s like falling off a cliff in a dream, terrifying but also weightless, and that otherwordly quality that begins to infect the movie as we start to learn just what’s going on is pretty intoxicating stuff to this lover of unstable horror films.
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]]>The post Wonder Park (2019) appeared first on Alternate Ending.
]]>Just about the only thing about the movie that actually does go some minimal way towards that word “wonder” (or even “park”): it turns out that CG animation software packages have evolved enough that $80 million can turn out a pretty lovely motion picture these days, especially when you go cheap on the voice cast. It actually does look pretty great; the backgrounds, lighting and effects, anyway, and the character animation is good enough to get the job done in a world where Illumination Entertainment still exists. Better than any of it, the film is just lousy with really elaborate flyover shots, letting the camera swoop around and catch the titular-ish amusement park from several angles at once, capturing something that of the wind-in-your-hair feeling of a roller coaster. Admittedly, three months after Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the bar for weightless flying animated cameras sailing in every direction has become incredibly high, and Wonder Park wasn’t going to clear even its pre-Spidey level. But it is important to be grateful for tiny fragments of joy when they come by, like if you’re hip deep in dead sewer rats, but one of them is wearing a cute bow tie.
This particular swimming pool full of bloated rodents centers on June Bailey (Sofia Mali when we first meet her as a wee one, Brianna Denski after she ages up to ten or so), who has an all-consuming interested in developing a magnificent theme park called Wonderland – “Wonder Park” is never said out loud, and why would you ever expect such a stupid thing as a title that matches the content of the film, anyway – drawing out maps and building models and eventually neighborhood-sized roller coaster tracks using household objects. That June is an otherworldly engineering savant is quite overlooked by the film, which would undoubtedly reject the concept of “engineering” as being too much of an adult concern. And that’s exactly the point of all this: June is about to be taken in by adulthood, now that her beloved co-creator and mother (Jennifer Garner) has been shipped off to some distant hospital with an unspecified but obviously extremely deadly disease. The girl is so bitter that she rejects Wonderland and imagination itself, and this triggers a huge crisis, for there is of course nothing more heinous than a child on the brink of adolescence becoming aware that there is a time for taking on responsibilities and living in the world. Which is why reality bends in some unexplained way when June is sullenly on her way to math camp (it is extremely unclear whether the film regards math camp as the ultimate in anti-wonder, or an obvious source of inspiration for a design-nerd like June, or even if it was chosen for any reason other than the fact that “math camp” is a mildly amusing phrase to say out loud). Escaping from the bus and running through the woods to return home, where she expects to find her dad (Matthew Broderick) dead from eating too much junk food, she instead stumbles into Wonderland itself, which has been torn about by living chimpanzee dolls birthed from a huge dark cloud symbolising June’s depression.
I don’t really get whether Wonderland actually exists, or if it’s one of those “fell asleep and dreamed it all” deals; but like everything else involved with Josh Applebaum & André Nemec’s screenplay, it doesn’t end up mattering. Whatever gets her there, June is in Wonderland, and as its creator god, needs to repair it, with the help of the profoundly awful cast of wacky animal sidekicks she and her mom created: Greta the warthog (Mila Kunis) the personality-free source of authority and stability as Wonderland collapses; Gus (Kenan Thompson) and Cooper (Ken Jeong), a pair of beaver brothers who are the comic relief figures in what’s already a comedy, which means of course that they’re basically just stupid and incompetent; Boomer (Ken Hudson Campbell), a huge bear who is basically the park’s Mickey Mouse, and is narcoleptic; and Steve (John Oliver), a porcupine who lusts after Greta, gets all the big jokes that the filmmakers clearly intended for five-year-olds to shrilly scream back to their parents over and over again for a week after seeing the film, and is generally just the most ungodly dismal thing. Oliver commits, bless ‘im; it’s more than any of the actual professional actors involved in the movie can say. Anyway, the plot of the film involves using setpieces to repair some of the big, fanciful rides out of June’s wild imagination (which all consist of “quotidian thing X, plus flight”), while also trying to find Peanut (Norbert Leo Butz), the chimpanzee who heard all of June and Mom’s ideas and translated them into practical reality, which I suppose makes him Wonderland’s Pope.
Even by the standards of grueling animal sidekicks in trite animated pictures, the talking animals of Wonder Park are a wretched, hateful lot; only Steve has actual character traits, all of which are inexcusably annoying, while Boomer is vaguely useless, Gus and Cooper are extremely useless, and the entire screenwriting process around Greta seems to have consisted of saying, “we made the boss a girl, so we get girl power points, right?” Though Wonder Park only runs a wispy 85 minutes long, the time we spend with these characters is agonisingly slow and grating. The film’s sense of scale works: Wonderland is a huge sprawl full of misty dreamscapes off in the distance, colorful even in its decay. But the characters bring it down to trashy direct-to-video kids’ movie territory so readily that even the way-too-good production values don’t make it pleasurable. June’s neighborhood experiments are the only place where Wonder Park actually feels, y’know, wondrous; this has everything to do, I am sure, with the relatively stronger characters and more interesting family dynamic, and the lack of shticky jokes. That’s what’s aggravating about this, more than anything else: these people clearly could have made a real marvel of a family adventure in a wildly creative setting, and they only wanted to make this sludgy crapheap of an overpriced TV pilot. So much for childish innocence.
*You can also see the exact point where the intern got bored and gave up: “Jeffrey Tambor was originally meant to star in the film as Boomer the Bear, but he was later removed from the project… for unknown reasons”. Ah, yes, a mystery for the ages.
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]]>The post Climax (2019) appeared first on Alternate Ending.
]]>What is this softer, gentler, more mainstream Noé picture, anyway? It’s simple enough to sketch out: in 1996, on a snowy night, an modern dance group rehearses its newest number in a small auditorium, as part of the lead-up to a spate of practice that will end with an international tour. With the dance behind them, everybody celebrates with a couple bowls of sangria, but one of them has mischief in mind: the sangria was spiked with LSD, and so a whole room full of people wracked with all of the internal tensions any group of self-styled radical artists will be stuck with ends up having an exceedingly bad trip, with everybody rolling around and dancing formlessly and screaming in horror, pain, and rage, before the morning light finds them all exhausted, mortified, and wiser. Haha, no, this is a Gaspar Noé film, so everybody suffers terribly for no reason, and at least a few people end up dead or dying.
But this it not a film about agony. Fully a third of it or more, in fact, is about as deeply, sincerely blissful as I can fathom a motion picture being. The 97-minute film exists in basically three parts of extremely uneven length. The first of these is one shot of some ten minutes, pointed at a television playing a VHS tape. This is Climax‘s list of works cited: on the left side of the television are various film theory monographs and works of continental monographs; on the right is a stack of movies, including Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, and Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, and by the time the movie is over, Noé will have nodded towards or quoted or outright stolen from pretty much everything in these two piles. While we’re given a nice long time to peruse the collection, the entire cast is introduced in the form of their audition tape, identifying themselves and why they want to dance.
The film’s second part is that first dance, shown as one glorious uninterrupted take that barely moves except to push in or pull back to accommodate a changing number of dancers (it’s basically a club music version of the exact same principle Fred Astaire used to insist on in his films), and then a second, much more free-form dance, pointing down from above, as each cast member, one per shot, gets a half minute or so to perform some moves in a circle of their colleagues. Then, 40 minutes or so into the movie, we finally get the credits, and only then does the spike sangria come out, and the majority of the rest of the film plays out in the course of one extravagant long take moving in and out of the auditorium and the hallways around it, taking notice of different people seemingly at random, as they decay and degrade into pure animal instinct.
The unifying theme here is the body as a means of expression: the opening dances are absolute unstinting fleshy joy, asking us to soak in the capacity of the human body to move in an endless variety of exaggerated, fluid ways, growing more or less baldly sexual depending on who’s doing the dancing and where we are in the choreography. The remainder of the film is much more interested in the loss of conscious control of the body, but it’s still all about how emotions and inner thoughts manifest themselves in movement: Noé designed the film so that the first half would be tightly choreographed and planned out, while the second half would involve him and Benoît Debie capturing the cast – almost exclusively made up of professional dancers, with the one trained actor, Sofia Boutella, playing the company owner (which she does superbly, for all that the role doesn’t immediately reveal itself as particularly complicated) – as they improvise dance and dance-like moves to express whatever pleasure or hell is coursing through their character’s rattled head in that moment.
Basically, it’s some kind of weird, fucked-up, nihilistic ballet: the plot proceeds more as a list of main points to be covered than events to be depicted, and only twice does the film favor standing still to hear dialogue rather than allow its characters and camera to all move like electrons darting around in a crowded space (and that dialogue is, for the record, pretty disposable and insipid, primarily serving to demonstrate that the characters are all various kinds of horny, and mostly pretty gratuitously unpleasant about it). The film’s soundtrack is made up of an eclectic mix of old and new songs, but the main unifying principle is a pulsing beat and synthesized orchestration; it is music to dance to, not to listen to or absorb, and by Christ, they dance.
To press the effect of all this on the audience, Climax relies on one of the loudest, most angry sound mixes that I think I have ever heard. This is a film that begs to be seen in a theater with the best audio quality you can lay your hands on: it is a movie whose impact – and a more literal impact you’ll rarely get in a motion picture – depends on sound waves pounding steadily into the viewer at an increasingly hypnotic rate. If Noé can’t have us get up in our seats and dance in front of the screen, at least he can cause our bodies to vibrate at a sympathetic frequency to the movie, and it’s a hell of a thing to experience it. The orgasmic pleasures of the film that curdle and turn into something like body horror done in the most realistic possible register are tangible things.
All of this is exhilarating until it’s not (the film has really only the one or two ideas, and not that many iterations of them), and there’s really no denying that the film peaks early: that exquisite long-take dance number, so mesmerising, endless, and overstuffed with joy, really just blows away the rather trite miserabilism of the last 15 minutes. It’s also hard to pretend that the film is especially fresh, when Noé so openly tells us his inspirations, and he’s not even including how much of this feels like he’s re-working ideas from his own Enter the Void. Still, as a single, sustained experiment in communicating bliss and horror through music and movement, and finding a bravura but curiously plain cinematic style to capture that movement, Climax is an absolutely magnificent object. It is a celebration and indictment of the human body made with wholly unmitigated passion and conviction, and even if it’s obviously imperfect in certain ways, I cannot think of the last movie that felt so much like a living thing, exploding with an almost terrifying vitality.
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]]>The post Captive State (2019) appeared first on Alternate Ending.
]]>Captive State doesn’t do it right. Truth be told, I think I’d have to stop and think about ways for Captive State to have done it any worse, barring the obviously absurd. It is a dismal and scabby thing, squandering a concept, a setting, and a cast on some of the most inexplicably incoherent storytelling I have encountered in quite some time, kissed by flagrantly ugly, illegible cinematography. The very nicest thing I can say about it is that eventually it starts to make some sense, and if the twist ending had been moved up by about two-thirds, it might have gotten something pretty interesting out of its characters. In its present state, though, it’s pure sludge.
The setting is the not-too-distant future, nine years after the immediate future,* at which point a race of extraterrestrials rather effortlessly will take over the planet. We see a fragment of this in the film’s opening scene, by leaps and bounds the best few minutes of the 109 that the movie has to offer: a Chicago police officer with his wife and two kids in tow races across the city, trying to get away from a pointedly unstated something, and takes a wrong turn that puts him face to face with a few tank-sized alien vessels. With one blast, these blow out the window of the car, taking the parents with it, as the two boys in the back stare out with shell-shocked amazement at what appears to be a humanoid form made out of gunmetal grey porcupine quills. Cut to the credits, which jump ahead those aforementioned nine years, while using that old reliable bit of exposition, the Fake TV News Montage, to explain how these aliens, the “Legislators” have taken over the city centers of every major population center on Earth, while instituting a one-world government. The younger of those two boys has grown up to become one Gabriel Drummond (Ashton Sanders), who scratches out a living doing the various quasi-legal things one will under a totalitarian regime; the elder boy, Rafe (Jonathan Majors), is officially dead, remaining alive only in the memory of those who were inspired by his resistance efforts in his home neighborhood of Pilsen (which is name-dropped quite a hell of a lot, considering how obviously co-writers Erica Beeney & Rupert Wyatt know nothing about it – they make almost comically little out of the neighborhood’s ethnic make-up, despite having a racially diverse lead cast). “Officially” dead, because of course he’s not at all, and nobody suspects this more than William Mulligan (John Goodman), their dad’s old partner, now a human apparatchik in the Legislator’s occupation force.
If this leads you to expect a “resistance versus quisling cops, with the unformed, neutral Gabriel torn between both sides” narrative… actually, that’s what you’ll get. But you have to do a shitload of work to dig it out. The one thing I can say in favor of Captive State‘s approach to world-building is that it doesn’t tell us anything that the characters would already know, either making us figure it out, catch a fragment of a passing news report, or simply wait for someone more ignorant than ourselves to wander in. The downside is that the information we are thus deprived includes basically everything about characters’ lives and personalities – most of the latter is never even filled in, unless “beatific resistance martyr” is enough to do it for you as far as Rafe’s ostensible personality. Hell, even the genre isn’t clearly explained for something like 40 minutes of the film’s running time, and when it finally shows its face, it involves introducing something like a half-dozen new people completely without a scrap of context, while Gabriel, the only person we’ve been primed to accept as protagonist up to this point, is unceremoniously ignored for the film’s entire middle. To say nothing of how much the film has to shortchange most of its characters to preserve its extremely-not-tricky twist.
As much of a muddle as the film is narratively, it’s so much worse visually. Captive State is directed by Wyatt and shot by Alex Disenhof to have a rough and tumble “you are there” feeling towards the occupied city, and this is achieved primarily through a whole lot of hand-held close-ups. Which is a combination uniquely designed to piss me off, but even without personal bias getting in the way, this is an aggravatingly busy, hectic, literally incomprehensible movie. When the only thing a movie really has to sell is the redressed city of Chicago (it doesn’t have the budget to sell anything else; the aliens put in little more than an extended cameo, and they look silly as they do so. One repeated shot – we’re not meant to notice it was repeated – of an alien ship speeding off over Lake Michigan is just about the shlockiest, cheapest-looking effect I can imagine somebody trying to get away with in a theatrical release), it would help to be able to see the city, or at least see the specific spaces around the characters, and Captive State is not interested in offering this to us. All it has is visual chaos, which it offers in the hopes that we will be suitably thrown and distressed by the arbitrary madness and violence of it all. But by failing to tether that chaos to stable, well-developed characters, or a clear set of narrative stakes, or even just a plainly-stated scenario, all that we get is visually loud, incoherent confusion.
The film should be better than this. Rupert Wyatt can certainly do more; he proved that with Rise of the Planet of the Apes back in 2011 (Captive State nakedly steals one particular visual concept from that film, and it comes right at the end, to make me all the more good & pissed off at him as I left the theater). The actors deserve more (including Vera Farmiga, in an especially thankless and empty role even by the standards of the thankless and empty roles she gets stuck with all the goddamn time). The concept deserves more. And, by quite a lot, the audience deserves more than this drab, dumb, irritating collection of quarter-baked ideas and confusingly-applied sci-fi tropes.
*Technically, if I followed the dates correctly, the occupation began in 2016. I believe that the film considers this to be the same thing as satire.
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]]>The post Apollo 11 (2019) appeared first on Alternate Ending.
]]>Till now, anyway. One of the things Apollo 11 turns out to be sublimely good at is making the entire eight days of the titular mission seem like a constant drip of near-crises, with seemingly every single press of a button the result of untold hours of mathematical calculations, and if any one variable was wrong, or the timing off by even a few seconds, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Michael Collins would die the most novel deaths in the history of the human race. In a lifetime of being fascinated by the 1960s space race, I don’t know that I had ever before this film truly felt how horribly difficult it must have been to get people to the moon and back: how many different specific things had to all go right all of the time. Apollo 11 nails that feeling, evoking in its headlong rush of footage just how much the moon launch was one damn thing after another, for more than a week. It’s genuinely a bit miraculous, and it somehow manages to be the freshest, most vital cinematic treatment of the Apollo program, a half-century after that program’s greatest triumph. Not that I want to say anything bad against the other two major Apollo documentaries, 1989’s For All Mankind, and 2007’s In the Shadow of the Moon. What’s impressive about these three films is how each of them manages to carve out its own particular niche, feeling in no way redundant with the others: For All Mankind is reflective and spiritual, In the Shadow of the Moon is a deliberate act of anti-romance, grounding the Apollo program in basic human experience.
Apollo 11 is, then, all about the nuts and bolts of stuff happening. It is the most tightly constrained of the three, beginning a few hours before the 16 July launch of the mission, and ending with the astronauts free from their two weeks in quarantine back on Earth. Its approach is entirely free of editorialising or even any context: it is the direct cinema version of an Apollo documentary, adopting the non-fiction form that had become so important over the 1960s. We watch people do things and hear them talk, always as though there wasn’t even a camera present, and the insights of the film are mostly those that we can pick up from our privileged position as flies on the wall (the single exception: the three astronauts are introduced with a montage of personal photographs). It is a you-are-there approach that makes the events of July 1969 spill out with no sense of History’s Weight; this is a film about a very complicated, very stressful process, allowing us to watch a people work themselves into a sweaty mess making sure that process comes off without a hitch.
The film exists due to the labors of director-editor Todd Douglas Miller, who received access to one of the most extraordinary treasure troves of archival footage any filmmaker could ever daydream about getting: a forgotten cache of 70mm footage of the launch and recovery, along with 11,000 hours of unsorted audio recordings from the mission. Miller and his team set about restoring that footage, as well as 35mm and 16mm sources from inside Mission Control and the spacecraft itself, to a bright, shiny luster, as well as combing through all of that audio and, wherever possible, marrying it to the appropriate footage. This labor ended in a 93-minute feature that is among the most admirable jobs of film editing I have ever seen, invisibly combining all of this material into a perfectly straightforward narrative spiked, at appropriate moments, by animated graphics covering important maneuvers that couldn’t be filmed, on account of Apollo 11 being tens of thousands of miles away from the nearest camera crew.
It’s a really wonderful bit of direct cinema, Especially during the opening quarter or so, before the launch, a remarkable tour of Mission Control and the civilian crowds gathered miles away from the launch site to watch. Nothing in the film better captures living history, the look of people in 1969 polished and brightened to appear like you could walk right outside of the theater and meet them. In fact, this opening somehow manages to be more interesting than what happens after the launch (when the number of available cameras and thus the range of footage was severely curtailed), creating a vivid, immediate sense that makes the anticipation of the launch more palpable than I’ve ever seen it. Miller’s use of a tastefully small countdown clock helps bind this together and also make it more tense (nothing more suspenseful than a literal ticking clock, after all), while providing us all the context we really need.
Not to say that the events after the launch become boring: the constant bustle of human activity, perfectly showcased as the ant-like behavior of many individuals who all know exactly what they need to do every second, is an equally great example of the camera standing as an observer, and the editor allowing the footage to speak entirely for itself, without needing to tart it up in any way. It’s just less new: undoubtedly, the tension Miller wrings out of the footage is on a previously unimaginable level, but the fact is, once we get Armstrong on the moon to take his one small step, the film has to cope with the fact that its triumphant climax is also made up of its only stale footage. But whatever. This is exquisite filmmaking, one of the most amazing achievements in documentary editing I’ve ever seen, and blessed by a wonderful score by Matt Morton using synthesizers from the 1960s to create a soundscape of dreamy drones and suspenseful digital heartbeats, all in service to bringing back the majesty and terror of a historical achievement that had already been safely neutered and domesticated ten years before I was born. For restoring that literally awesome power back to the Apollo 11 mission, Apollo 11 would have all of my admiration even it it wasn’t such a superb bit of documentary craftsmanship.
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]]>The post Arctic (2018) appeared first on Alternate Ending.
]]>And as for the movie that takes place within that landscape? Sure, it’s fine. It is a survival thriller, and it has most of the narrative beats typical of the form; the single film it most recalls is probably All Is Lost, if only because it too includes very little dialogue and ends abruptly after a plot that can be summarised as “one horrible thing happens after another and a man capably solves each problem as it arises, though he gets more worn out each time”. The man in this case has a name (revealed on the pocket of his jacket, from some uncertain branch of an unnamed miltary), Overgård, but not an identity; he is played by Mads Mikkelsen as a series of actions rather than as a personality. The actions in question consist of trudging out from a makeshift shelter in a ruined airplane fuselage to run a distress beacon from a hand-cranked dynamo, mapping his immediately visible surroundings, fishing, and constantly watching for any sign of human beings. The latter of these comes to fruition in the form of a helicopter that promptly crashes, leaving the pilot dead and the sole survivor a semi-conscious woman (Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) with identification in what appears to be Thai script. This means double the work of finding sustenance, but at least it gives him someone to talk at, no matter how comatose. Also, it gives him a clear direction in which to head for the nearest form of human habitation, dragging his new friend along on a sled.
As a “how would you survive?” procedural, Arctic is an impressive work of docu-realism. Director Joe Penna, a YouTube-based short film director helming his first feature, remains firmly interested in surfaces, and what happens on them: the surface of the Arctic tundra, the surface of Mikkelsen’s increasingly bedraggled body, and all the things in between. It’s an extremely unromantic film, devoid of the philosophy of The Grey, the clumsy genre trappings of The Mountain Between Us, or the sheer wretchedness of The Revenant; it is purely mechanical watching what a human being in a position of enormous stress does – and does, and does, and does – to remain alive for the next moderate stretch of time. Mikkelsen’s performance, which has been flawlessly worked out technically, contributes to this by appearing to be constantly hunting, hearing, sniffing, looking: not desperation, since that’s an indulgence, but constant wiry alertness. All Is Lost was similarly invested in omnipresent survival instinct, but with more of a poetic soul; it is to Arctic much as Robert Redford (that film’s star) is to Mikkelsen. This the the more sinewy, harsh, unkind film, direct and savage at every turn.
It’s hard not to admire the diligence of the filmmaking team in capturing this feeling, this reduction of the human to the automatic and instinctive, and also foreground the enormous hostility of the Arctic setting. Where I get a bit tripped up is on the rather important question, “yes, but why did you watch it?” And to that, I can only say, well, um… By the standards of the survival genre, it’s certain not at all bad, and the confidence of execution arguably makes it much better than average. Mikkelsen’s fearless physicality alone makes it at least worth watching. But there’s a distinct lack of purpose to it. And a lack of purposefulness, which is different. There’s not much actual content or momentum across the film’s 98 minutes, which mostly consist of Overgård doing variations on the same few things over and over again, sometimes encumbered by the woman and sometimes not. Around midway through the film, there’s an encounter with a very cross polar bear, and while it feels a bit ginned up and melodramatic (not least because this is one of the few places with a prominently loud music cue), it speaks to the more exciting, nerve-wracking, active version of this story that might have been tawdrier, but definitely would have been more fun. A little bit later, Overgård has to make a difficult moral choice, and the process by which he decides what to do is buried underneath an awfully convenient setpiece and the fact that the character has no discernible internal life.
So that’s the lack of purposefulness – it simply doesn’t go. And maybe that’s meant to connect to the endless helplessness of the location. But it’s still a bit hard to engage with it. As for the lack of purpose, that’s simply down to the fact that this is so great at surface level suffering that it never things to be about anything else but suffering. Except in a largely superficial way, I don’t know that the film has anything new to say about what desperate people can do; it has none of the more ethereal qualities of the best survival films, the almost spiritual element of an All Is Lost, or the psychological growth of an Adrift. It just has misery, and a stunned, mildly repulsed awe at how far the human body and will can go in surviving that misery. That’s not nothing, but it’s pretty damn little, and exemplary cleareheaded, realistic craftsmanship only goes so far in redeeming something so determined to make us feel unpleasant without an outlet.
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]]>The post Captain Marvel (2019) appeared first on Alternate Ending.
]]>I don’t know what the hell Captain Marvel thinks is its excuse. At this point, making Marvel films has become a process with faultless, machinic timing – none of the occasional hiccups of fellow Disney insignia Pixar, or the regular crises of Lucasfilm. Getting these movies turned out is neither an art nor a science, but it’s at least a very smoothly-honed craft. It does not allow for mistakes. So what I don’t get is how that factory could have allowed this screenplay, by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck & Geneva Robertson-Dworet, to come out into the world: it is, God bless it, a fucking trainwreck. That’s true at the level of dialogue, which is easily the worst to have smeared any film in this franchise since Joss Whedon set the template with his manic, quippy The Avengers, low these six years ago: since then, the Marvel films not involving James Gunn or Taika Waititi have basically consisted of various screenwriters putting on their best Whedon impersonation, generally to fine, if banal effect. Same with Captain Marvel, but the quips in this case are miserably bad, stiff non-jokes that make up for their clunky diction with a profound lack of wit.
Even more than that, it’s true at the level of the story, which is an almost impenetrable slog of pulp sci-fi notions of intergalactic wars and an amnesiac supersoldier, expressed without a modicum of camp or passion. Instead, and in keeping with Boden & Fleck’s career-long tendency towards mild, plotless character sketches, Captain Marvel tries to get by on little characters beats. Which is fine and all, but the world-building still needs to happen, come hell or high water, and it definitely, absolutely doesn’t. The first of the film’s (at least) four acts is inordinately terrible, dumping exposition out by the barrelful, but doing it without any focus or aim, so you just kind of have to pick up bits along the way. The main bit is that Vers (Brie Larson) is a warrior-in-training for the great intergalactic Kree army, serving under Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) in the battle against the shape-shifting alien race of Skrulls. She has amnesia. Skip ahead a bit, and she crash-lands on Earth in 1995 (the source of many uninspired jokes and one supremely annoying song cue), where she crosses paths with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), agent of the U.S. government agency S.H.I.E.L.D., and together they team up to find a particular Skrull leader named Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), who has come to our planet looking for a technology being developed by Dr. Wendy Lawson (Annette Bening), who looms large in Vers’s forgotten history as a human pilot for the U.S. Air Force named Carol Danvers.
Once we get to that point, the film can at least be parsed, though it is damnably full of gaps and half-measures. The biggest of these center around Vers/Danvers herself; it is very obvious that Captain Marvel yearns to be a character study, watching as a woman re-learns who she is, but the filmmakers have forgotten the crucial step of actually letting us follow along on that journey. Even by the end of the film, I’m not sure if I understand how much Danvers actually remembers about her human life, versus how much she’s basically just taking on faith; she just kind of figures stuff out when the script needs for her to do so, and that includes all sorts of Earth technology and Earth customs and Earth slang, on top of the far more pressing matter of her own opaque past. Larson fights the good fight in trying to make a character out of this; she’s a damn sight better than she was in her last big-budget effects movie, 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, but there’s only so much that even the most gifted actor can do with a role made almost entirely out of taped-together ellipses. And so Danvers emerges, not as a personality, but as a narrative mechanism, and that in a narrative whose solitary function (outside of doling out some scrawny in-jokes for the fandom, including a cameo from a character from Guardians of the Galaxy who definitely never needed to come back) is to introduce us to the character who’ll be serving as deus ex machina in Avengers: Endgame in a few weeks.
The story that the film tells in the interim is a fairly generic tale of secrets and lies, hidden truths revealed, and populations of aliens who’ve come, visually and thematically, straight out of Star Trek. Moreover, it’s the boring Star Trek, the kind where Michael Piller used bad metaphors to talk about Native Americans. What keeps it going is the interplay between Larson and Jackson (who has been subjected to de-aging CGI, mostly to good effect; but the shots that look bad are really, really appalling), who have a kind of ramshackle buddy cop relationship that can mostly survive the fact that Danvers has no personality and Fury has a fairly shallow one, only becoming interesting when he gets to fawn over a mysterious ginger tabby cat named Goose. It’s never funny – the writing’s not good enough for that – but it’s at least mirthful. And that’s all the more true when they’re forced by circumstances to spend time with Talos, graced with the film’s only actively good performance, courtesy of an unusually weightless, bubbly Mendelsohn (speaking with his native Australian accent, which probably helps explain the weightlessness). It’s pleasant as a hang-out comedy, probably because that’s what directors Boden & Fleck are capable of; when it tries to be anything else, it collapses on the spot.
As an action-adventure, a sci-fi epic, or just about anything else, Captain Marvel is simply dreary. Besides its confounding script, it suffers from inexplicably bad cinematography, by Ben Davis, which routinely drapes everything in an impenetrable shroud of gloom; it also suffers from the directors’ addiction to medium close-ups, apparently the only shot scale they can imagine using for conversations, emotional breakthroughs, fist-fights, or memories. When a group shot appears, it is an almost spiritual event; when a wide shot appears, it’s like the whole movie suddenly turns on for one brief moment, as we are permitted to watch the spectacle of seeing a superhero interact with her environment. At any rate, the film has no interesting in making its action legible, nor does it seem to be choreographed with enough cunning to be worth the effort of making it out. Just about the only real pleasure the film has to offer as popcorn cinema is that its CGI is generally quite excellent. This is something that we can by no means assume with Marvel (in their 20 previous films, I would say that only 2016’s Doctor Strange has persistently great visual effects), so seeing the sprawling Kree homeworld, the sleek flight of spaceships, or Danvers’s special powers (which look goofy, but, like realistically goofy) at least offers a hint of the florid Jack Kirbysms that Guardians and Guardians 2 trafficked in. The world it presents is confusing and not worth visiting, but at least it’s realised with a great deal of flair. The story is a boring mess, the characters barely-cohesive strings of clichés, the setting a gross bit of nostalgic pandering, and the overall tone that of obligatory place-setting for the next entry in the series; but it knows how to popcorn movie, at least.
Reviews in this series
Iron Man (Favreau, 2008) | The Incredible Hulk (Leterrier, 2008) | Iron Man 2 (Favreau, 2010) | Thor (Branagh, 2011) | Captain America: The First Avenger (Johnston, 2011) | The Avengers (Whedon, 2012) | Iron Man 3 (Black, 2013) | Thor: The Dark World (Taylor, 2013) | Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Russo Brothers, 2014) | Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn, 2014) | Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon, 2015) | Ant-Man (Reed, 2015) | Captain America: Civil War (Russo Brothers, 2016) | Doctor Strange (Derrickson, 2016) | Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (Gunn, 2017) | Spider-Man: Homecoming (Watts, 2017) | Thor: Ragnarok (Waititi, 2017) | Black Panther (Coogler, 2018) | Avengers: Infinity War (Russo Brothers, 2018) | Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018) | Captain Marvel (Boden & Fleck, 2019)
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]]>The post A Madea Family Funeral (2019) appeared first on Alternate Ending.
]]>So here’s what we’ve got: somewhere in suburban Georgia, Vianne (Jen Harper) and Anthony (Derek Morgan) are about to celebrate their anniversary. All of their grown children have returned home for the event: Sylvia (Ciera Payton) and her husband Will (David Otunga), A.J. (Courtney Burrell) and his wife Carol (KJ Smith), and Jessie (Rome Flynn) and his brand-new fiancée Gia (Aeriél Miranda). Add in ancient patriarch Heathrow (Perry himself, adding a new role to his collection), a legless cancer survivor and sex fiend – the elderly are always sex fiends, in these movies – and we have enough people that there’s hardly any chance to avoid interpersonal conflict, particularly with the early reveal that A.J. and Gia have been having an affair for a while now. It’s a perfect formula for soapy melodrama, even before the mid-film twist that reveals another affair has been happening for a while.
Meanwhile, Heathrow’s hated siblings, Madea and Joe (Perry #3) have been invited, bringing with them Joe’s son Brian (Perry #4), and Madea’s wacky cartoon gargoyle sidekicks, Bam (Cassi Davis) and Hattie (Patrice Lovely). And that is the formula for lots of scenes of sluggish sketch comedy, in which Brian patiently voices the respectability politics of Perry’s target audience, while the others make fun of him and say dirty things. They arrive at a hotel just in time to find one of the people from the other subplot dead in a hugely compromised situation, and must thereafter resist their deep-set urges to gossip shamelessly. Meanwhile, Madea is tasked with arranging the funeral, which of course, when it shows up, is a monstrous, gaudy affair.
A Madea Family Funeral is a throwback to an older phase of Perry’s career. The first set of Madea films – the ones adapted from the writer-director-star’s stage plays – are all very much on this model: there is a serious half revolving (like as not) around some form of sexual indiscretion, there is is a wacky comic half revolving around Madea, the aunt of someone in the serious half, and these converge with a scene of tough love and some good hard wacking of thick heads. The second set of Madea films, starting with 2012’s Madea’s Witness Protection, have been strictly comic, expanding Madea and Joe’s roles, mostly doing away with moral lessons, and indulging in far broader slapstick. Family Funeral is an attempt to split the difference between these two formulas, and it’s really not successful at all. In the older movies, which all suffered from fairly severe tonal whiplash, Perry at least had the sense to keep the different genres from touching each other directly. A wacky scene, a sad scene, a wacky scene… the shift back and forth was disorienting, but manageable. In Family Funeral, the shifting happens right in the same scene; sometimes in the same shot. One thing that has emerged over the 13 years of Perry’s directorial career – it is possibly the his only actual stylistic quirk – is that the “serious” scenes in his films employ a much darker lighting scheme than the “comedy” scenes (the only obvious exception I can think of is 2017’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween). In Family Funeral, this scheme doesn’t hold, and so Madea and friends frequently walk into a scene visually flagged as serious, before getting down to their hijinks. It is a subtle, but profoundly distressing note.
Much more commonly, the film just welds the two things together. So, for example, Carol or Sylvia or somebody will look mordant and thoughtful, nodding in anguished agreement, while Madea and Hattie and Bam blather on in an endless chain of non-sequiturs, malapropisms, and mangled faux-scripture. It’s one thing for the film to use this contrast to generate comic tension, as it occasionally does when Hattie or Joe are about to reveal the secrets they know, and the rest of the characters simply don’t react to them at all, like they’re literally in a different movie. For people to treat Madea as a source of hard-won wisdom, now that she’s a cartoon character played by an obviously hostile actor who just wants out of the goddamn latex, simply can’t work like it sort of did back when she was merely a colorful, garish eccentric.
This leads directly to a hapless, ineffective form of filmmaking marked primarily by its disinterest in whether anything about is actually working. The comedy is simply awful, even by Madea movie standards (of course, that’s all subjective; the (exclusively white) audience I saw it with was laughing up a storm), and the filmmaking is sloppy and thoughtless. Plus ça change, and all: sloppy, thoughtless filmmaking is the foundation of Perry’s filmography. But this isn’t like the weird outsider art of his early work; this is just careless, with characters getting blocked by other characters in some deliriously ugly staging, flubbed and repeated lines left in, chintzier make-up work than this series has ever suffered from (Joe, in particular, looks like a badly-painted plastic toy). It feels like tossed-off junk, and that’s exactly what it is: this was basically shot by Perry and crew in a hurry after 2017’s Boo 2! and before 2018’s Acrimony, for the more or less openly stated reason that he wanted to knock out a final Madea picture while he was still in that headspace, but he didn’t want to release it until the market was hungry for another one. And that flavor of bored self-loathing is entirely on display in the film: it’s not nearly bonkers enough to be like the ineffective Perry projects of old, too obviously made out of mercenary motives to have anything resembling even a ghost of inspiration. It’s not, by any objective measure, the “worst” Madea film, but I am very confident in calling it the least-watchable.
Reviews in this series
Diary of a Mad Black Woman (Grant, 2005)
Madea’s Family Reunion (Perry, 2006)
Madea Goes to Jail (Perry, 2009)
I Can Do Bad All By Myself (Perry, 2009)
Madea’s Big Happy Family (Perry, 2011)
Madea’s Witness Protection (Perry, 2012)
Boo! A Madea Halloween (Perry, 2016)
Boo 2! A Madea Halloween (Perry, 2017)
A Madea Family Funeral (Perry, 2019)
Other films in this series, yet to be reviewed
A Madea Christmas (Perry, 2013)
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]]>The post Greta (2018) appeared first on Alternate Ending.
]]>We have upon us now an especially polished and artful version of the form: Greta, directed by bona fide arthouse director Neil Jordan, and starring living legend Isabelle Huppert, beloved of all Europe’s most thoughtful, psychologically severe auteurs. Huppert’s been tending more and more lately to lender her status as one of the most intellectually powerful working actors to give extreme weight to pleasant fluff or florid trash; think, if you will, of 2016’s rape thriller comedy Elle, for which she received her wildly overdue first Oscar nomination. And Greta is obviously part of that trend, and there’s no doubting it during any of the many moments where Huppert gloms onto Jordan and Ray Wright’s screenplay and gives it the full hambone treatment. Or when she starts twirling around and around in her stockings as laughs maniacally. She’s absolutely having a blast with a part that blatantly worships her as a screen presence, an actress, and a symbol.
You know who’s not having a blast? Me, for one. Greta has a lot of directions it can go: seedy, kitschy, campy, sordid, vulgar, grotesque. The hell of it is, I think Jordan actually supposes he’s making a movie that’s at least some of those adjectives. But he is not: Greta is, first and above all, just not much fun at all, and that would appear to be the most important thing for it to have been. It’s not that it supposes itself better than its genre; i’s just not a good genre film.
The protagonist is not Greta Hideg herself, played with relish (but not, alas, very communicable relish) by Huppert, but Frances McCullen, a recent transplant to Manhattan played by Chloë Grace Moretz. And that, frankly, is the start of the film’s problems. Moretz is an actor of extremely specific skills: her most effective performances, dating back to her child actor days, are the ones that trade on her essential toughness, a kind of blunt hard edge that makes her seem alert and suspicious and wiry. For some reason, she keeps getting roles that require to be a retiring, fragile, shy thiing, and this is a keen example. Frances is a hapless innocent incapable of navigating the tough streets of New York or standing up to a force of will like Greta. And yeah, I mean, who among us could stand up to Huppert’s force of will. But the point is, Frances needs to seem constantly imperiled and out of her depth, and Moretz simply cannot provide that.
So anyway, Frances is new in town, living with her idly rich playgirl college friend Erica (Maika Monroe) in a bought-and-paid-for condo, and one day she finds a handbag abandoned on the subway. Taking her naïve innocence and sense of righteousness (honed in Boston, which this film seems to regard as something like a Minnesota farming town), she goes to find the handbag’s owner, discovering that same Greta, a sweet old widow with a semi-estranged daughter in Paris, and a profound loneliness. With Frances still reeling from the death of her mother, it’s a perfect fit: one surrogate daughter for one surrogate mother. Except that Greta is also a violent psychopath who turns to stalking once Frances discovers a whole cupboard full of green handbags, each with the name of the helpless young girl who brought it back to its owner.
Perfectly sturdy stuff, but made with little flair or skill. Greta is a largely ordinary thriller that turns by inches into a very lousy horror movie after its midway point, and suffers at all points from a hugely perfunctory screenplay. The problems show up almost immediately: the film’s urgency in getting us to PsychoGreta is quite unseemly, racing Frances through the most dead-eyed, functional scenes of exposition, barely hanging together chronologically at all, until it deposits her at Greta’s door. It only gets a little bit better after that, blatantly using Erica as an object to receive or provide whatever exposition is pragmatically necessary to advance the story to Greta’s first of many insane rages, and using dialogue to spackle the plot together with an almost comical lack of artistry or flow.
Once it actually gets to those first stalking scenes, the film does at least slow down, though it does not get better; for it is shortly after this point that the script’s addiction to fake-outs and twists starts to manifest. The very worst of this is a nested pair of “it was all a dream” sequences that adds nothing besides five minutes of running time (out of a total of 98; a short running time, but impressively badly-paced), is never referenced again, and tells us nothing about the characters or conflict. But damn near every plot point in the last half-hour is a lazily telegraphed chain of clichés that think that, because they bother to put 90 seconds into trying to fool us, means that they are clever.
Every now and then, something magnetic happens: Huppert standing across a street, staring through window, with an utterly unreadable look in her eyes; Huppert having a screaming freak out in a restaurant. The first of these works as suspense, the second as camp, and either of those modes would have been a fine fit for this material. But instead, it’s mostly just stiff and sullen and hideously bland. What should be the film’s signature moment, Greta’s mad little dance, is rendered almost illegible by the smudgy underlighting that characterises all of Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography in the interior shots (I am confident the filmmakers though this connoted “atmosphere” rather than simply “wait, I can’t see”), and then compounded by the blocking that puts Huppert in the background, out of focus, in multiple shots that go for detached artistry rather than any sort of emotional impact.
Basically, it’s a square, dull movie that can be almost anything in the world other than square. Huppert goes for it, and it’s at least sort of okay to watch; but she goes for it in exactly the ways you’d expect of her, if you know any of her recent work at all. So there’s not even the pleasure of shock. It’s just a drab little thriller that thinks it’s much fancier than is the case, with psychological acuity that it doesn’t possess, and tension that its paint-by-numbers storytelling does not generate. It’s a failure as trash and a failure of art cinema, and in wasting its star turn on such thin material, it’s an early contender for one of 2019’s biggest cinematic disappointments.
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]]>The post The Wandering Earth (2019) appeared first on Alternate Ending.
]]>“Interesting”, I should hasten to point out, is not inherently the same thing as “good”. The Wandering Earth is a magnificently fascinating object, and it’s also a movie that, to be blunt about it, I didn’t much enjoy watching. It’s 125 minutes and feels close to half-again that long; this is largely because it has four different climaxes in its second half. It starts out by minutely explaining all the details of how its fantastical science works, but ends in an explosion of technobabble as we watch giant machines with no obvious function are manipulated by screaming people as the clock ticks down. It keeps switching back and forth between a hugely conventional, American-style tale of an estranged father and son, and an ensemble-based thriller in which collective action rather than individual heroism carries the day, and this contrast is just really damn tiresome to keep track of. It’s a mess, basically, exactly what you should expect when a team of seven screenwriters, including director Gwo Frant transform a hard sci-fi novella (by Liu Cixin) into a melodrama with a substantially different plot.
But, in its way, a pretty compelling, exciting mess. The hook is pure high-concept heaven, so fearlessly ridiculous that you can’t not love it. Sometime in the not enormously far future, Earth scientists have discovered that our sun is starting to go wrong, and will shortly send out enormous flares that will destroy the planet. The solution is as straightforward as it is demented: consolidate all the resources of human civilization into one massive project to strap a whole fuckload of city-sized rockets to one-half of Earth, and fly it to the nearest star system. This trip will take some 2500 years, so all of humanity is obliged to reorganise itself: after some half of all people are wiped out in the massive flooding that is triggered by the launch out of orbit, the remaining few billion souls now live in underground bunkers, shielded against the extreme low temperatures that have frozen the entire outer surface of the globe. A few doughty specimens work as drivers and technicians on the surface, and an even smaller number live on the spaceship orbiting Earth that serves as control room and navigation center for the trip.
This is all the backstory. The story is that, 17 years into the flight, Earth has gotten a smidgen too close to Jupiter, and is about to plummet into the gas giant, there to be crushed into rocky pulp. “High concept” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Against this backdrop is a tidy family drama: Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing) was one of the first men to travel to the space station, and his 18-year mission is just about up, meaning that he can at last return to his now-grown son Qi (Qu Chuxiao). Except that Qi has grown immensely resentful of his father. These days, he’s being an ill-tempered young hothead, causing much misery for his truck-driver grandfather Han Ziang (Ng Man-tat), and roping his adopted sister Duoduo (Zhao Jinmai) into various dangerous schemes. The latest of these puts both of them, along with Ziang, in a prison near the surface, where they meet Australian-Chinese comic relief Tim (Mike Sui). And he’ll be the first of many individuals, some seasoned pros and some helpless neophytes, who cross paths with our heroes as they form a team to make a last-ditch attempt to keep the Earth from becoming a blip in the Great Red Spot. And then a last-ditch attempt after that. And still a third one after that.
It feels very much like an American disaster movie of the ’90s, with some culturally specific tweaks (most obviously the lack of anything even hinting at a romantic subplot, though the focus on teamwork is pretty obvious as well), and of course a whole mess of ’10s CGI to make all of the impossibilities (the Earth flying like a jet, massive frozen landscapes that used to be great cities, rocket engines towering like Elder Gods in the wastes) come to life. The effects work, at least, is quite extravagant: it’s the sort of thing where so much of it is so obviously fantastic that it seems unconvincing, until you step back to realise just how much of the film actually exists inside a computer, and all those unfathomably large expanses of ice and ruin assert themselves as some unusually effective world-building. Probably the best thing The Wandering Earth has over its U.S. counterparts is its sense of vastness: the land stretching out endless for what feels like hundreds of miles, and also the looming presence of Jupiter, almost totally filling the night sky like some sprawling, swirling oil painting from hell. And not just visual vastness: the film’s awareness of time frames, the nonchalant way that 17 years pass on a trip to Jupiter with 2483 more years to go, knocks the usual sci-fi “get there and back in what feels like an afternoon” right off its perch. The film does a superb job of communicating the exhaustion of space travel, and the pent-up claustrophobia that would naturally attend to living in underground metropolises that, no matter how much stuff is in them, still have close walls and low ceilings. It is a very looming film, very weighty, but never so much so that it loses its sense of swashbuckling fun and racing against time.
The setting is so damn good that part of me wonders if I actually didn’t enjoy this after all; but God, is it a meandering, sludgy bit of storytelling. It’s a bit tricky keeping all of the characters in order, given that we’re introduced to them in large batches and almost all of them are wearing indistinguishable sci-fi cold weather gear; then again, the dissolution of individuals into a huge team is somewhat the film’s point. It’s all about collective actions: of several people to solve problems, of several nations to save humanity. It supposes, quite without making a big deal about it, that the little petty things that divide us into smaller and smaller tribes would be ignored more or less on the spot in the face of world-ending crisis, and celebrates the ability of mass effort to do literally unbelievable things. So perhaps the fact that the cast eventually turns into “Qi, Duoduo, the Australian goofball, and the other dozen people” isn’t a flaw.
But flaw or not, it also isn’t much fun to watch, and it only gets less fun as the movie keeps throwing up obstacles more or less at random. It basically turns into an endless chain of problem-solving exercises, most of them looking awfully similar: Gwo can’t do very much with all the unchanging ice and doesn’t do much more with the raging inferno of the engine area that’s the film’s only particularly distinct location. If the film is, in the abstract, deeply interesting (watching as the film repurposes and transmogrifies stock narrative situations for themes very different than the ones they were designed to espouse), in the details, it is barely interesting at all. So that’s kind of a neat tension in and of itself, but one that doesn’t make for a hugely rewarding night out. The film’s dazzling, and big, and genuinely epic in its concerns and portent; but frankly, it’s also kind of a chore to get through.
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