Twilight: Breaking Dawn part 2

I don’t think I really need to complain about the various glaring plot problems in this latest – and hopefully last – Twilight film. About the fact that the film is basically about the Volturi walking across half the world rather than getting a plane, and then just walking back. About what a lazy plot device Alice is. About how Alice could have just shared her plan from the start and prevented several deaths, plus the slaughter of a number of innocents in the vicinity of Forks as a group of vampires gather to protect super-special Bella. About how very annoying Bella is with her perfection and her super powers and yet how she just completely ignores her baby to have some sex for a few days. About how the series ends with the Volturi still in power, still doing whatever they like in Italy including slaughtering what ought to be a notably huge number of people. How Jacob is going to have sex with Renesmee when she’s seven and ‘fully grown’. But again, Dan Bergstein over at Sparknotes has already done all of that in his brilliantly funny readings of the books, and done the suffering for me.

I have to say, having read his summary of the books chapter by chapter, I’m very very glad that he did it so I didn’t have to, and presented it in such an enjoyable way. Plus once again I can find out about the stupider parts of the books – the absurd last-minute change where it turns out werewolves aren’t really werewolves. Marcus’ hilarious power of seeing relationships. The way she tries to write a bit of action at the end, and has some mist buffet against a love bubble and some snow, with the result that everyone is then convinced Bella was the one who won the ‘war’ for them.

So since I don’t feel the need to talk about that, I only feel the need to talk about the big climax, the one scene that makes the film enjoyable, the one scene that isn’t even in the goddamn books – a huge, gristly battle sequence. To be fair, not to have it there would make this an incredibly dull film, almost as dull as Breaking Dawn part 1. Again because the film was padded out to make enough material for two, this one is drawn out to great length, with only a scene with Bella’s father feeling like it brought any depth to any of the characters. But the fact is that the filmmakers put in a long, bloody battle between superpowered vampires, with some huge werewolves thrown in there. And it’s quite satisfying – annoying Cullens are dispatched, wolves rip off the heads of smug vampires and of course, there at the centre of it is Martin Sheen, always the best thing about these films, having a brilliant time with one of the campest roles it’s possible to have and looking both absurd and awesome doing it. It’s basically a comic book film at this point, not the turgid romance it was before, and it’s fantastic. And yes, like most of the parts of Twilight that are actually good, it’s not in the books.

I’ve now seen every one of these films, and I’m pretty saddened by the fact that such awful, awful books were actually enjoyed by a target demographic that – and I don’t care what an intellectual snob I am to say this – have to be morons to actually think is good plotting or romantic in any way. I don’t mind things I think are crap but have the bare minimum of decent writing make it big – like Harry Potter – but for this to sell so very much is quite distressing. That said, the expensive films were with a couple of exceptions at least amusing, fun and I quite genuinely liked the first one, in an ‘it’s not good but it’s nowhere near terrible’ sort of way – I even preferred it to the Harry Potter films. But that was imagining something better had to happen after the first film…and it didn’t. It got worse and worse and oh so much worse. 

Conclusion: Meyer is teeeerrrrrrible but Hollywood can indeed polish turds - to some extent. 

Skyfall

With every new Daniel Craig film, we get told that it’s a brand new Bond in a gritty post-Bourne world, where modern sensibilities abound and the cartooniness is gone. Well, it’s not. Daniel Craig isn’t a wise-cracking Brosnan with perfect teeth, that’s for sure, but it’s still the same cartoony silliness – and that’s what I liked about Skyfall.

We have Bond surviving things that will kill anyone without even an explanation. We have lots of ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ moments, with computers doing things like launching trains at people and hiding maps in daft 3D rendered mushes of strings. Bad guys come flying in helicopters blaring out ‘Boom Boom’ by John Lee Hooker, but neglect to buy, y’know, missiles for it, which would have wound up his problems right away (though I suppose it can be justified by his desire to look his victim in the eye…though his tactics anyway could have made that impossible quite easily). Of course, we also get the baddie dithering and speechifying when he could have outright completed all his goals if he just got on with it.

But these things are part of Bond, and part of what makes watching Bond fun.

There are attempts to maintain the veneer of having the franchise grow up. Characters talk about pain and tortured pasts, and the whole thing revolves around MI6 being flawed and accountable rather than able to get away with anything. Bond himself is still portrayed as a bit past-it and out of touch. We get a few examples of having cake and eating it – the new Q dismisses silly old gadgets, but we get the retro fun of the old car with machine guns under its headlights; a little aside about Bond not knowing what the rush hour commute is like hints at a desire for him to be more socially conscious, but he really shines swanning about absurdly plush casinos in Macau; the new Moneypenny gives as good as she gets and teases Bond, but she’s still far from a progressive figure.

But expecting a Bond film to suddenly become a lefty fantasy of equality and progress is to wish for a different film altogether. And a good Bond film is a uniquely tasty occasional treat. The last couple had their moments but really missed their marks, especially the extremely forgettable Quantum of Solace. So for all its rebirth theme, this film subtly asserts that sometimes doing it the old way is best, and comes off much better for it.

Oh, and the intro sequence was fantastic, even if I don’t like Adelle undercutting her big notes in that way she does…

Silent Hill 2

The first film wasn’t exactly brilliant, but this one has been even more cruelly panned. Which is fair – this version had its moments, but its main flaw was that it was very, very boring. It dragged and dragged, and when it finally got interesting, it got disappointing.

The way the Silent Hill worlds work means just about anything can happen. Any monstrosity can appear and creep after you. You can find the world shifting to something truly horrific. The first film had some pretty harrowing scenes, like the one in the bathroom, but this one unfortunately gets past the silly jump-scare phase and straight into stupidity. Whose decision it was to make the first significant monster a dumb waxwork dummy-making spider thing that screamed at the screen in daft attempts to use 3D effects was sorely misled on what was going to be scary.

And the trouble is that there just aren’t enough monstrous creatures here. There’s the silly wobbly thing with no arms, that spider, the nurses – whose bit makes them look good but is very ill-conceived – the main baddie and Pyramid Head, who they really awkwardly try to make some kind of antihero. Bunnies with blood on their mouths aren’t terrifying. Silly heads under the grills of the floor aren’t terrifying. Nothing here is terrifying, though Malcolm McDowell gets close a couple of times before he’s turned into a daft monster whose mortal weakness is that someone can daintily remove a magic artefact from a gaping hole in his body. Eventually the main girl gets to the chamber where the final showdown will happen and various Game of Thrones actors are strewn around helplessly, and then basically it turns out that nothing mattered after Malcolm McDowell’s scene, because the same ending would have happened if the girl went there directly.

Short on scares, short on humanity and crucially short on any sort of action or tension that could have kept things interesting, this was a definite dud.