Transformers: The Last Knight

There really wasn't any need for another Transformers live-action movie. It's definitely one I would only watch on the plane. And if I'd checked and seen it was 2 1/2 hours long at the beginning, I wouldn't have bothered. 

But I have to admit this film was actually a lot of fun. It was very stupid indeed, Michael Bay presumably wanting to throw a bit of Game of Thrones and The Da Vinci Code into his franchise by tying his giant gun-toting robots into the mythos of King Arthur, with some World War 2 action thrown in for good measure. Transformers have been part of human history all along, you see, kept secret by a hidden society. A macguffin even more macguffin-y than the All-Spark appears, key to activating Merlin's staff but also tying into self-proclaimed Tranformers creator Quintessa's plans to bring Cybertron bizarrely quickly across the universe to Earth. Which is secretly Unicron. 

There's a lot more silliness here. Anthony Hopkins having much more fun and putting in much more effort than in Thor as a guardian of an ancient society. A posh English butler robot with a psychotic streak. A human weilding excalibur to be able to fight on even terms with a giant robot and screw physics right up. A descendant of Merlin who happens to be a smokin' hot British Professor of English at Oxford (college unspecified).Hot Rod made French purely for the comedy of how his name sounds in that accent.

Though the big climax is a typical big ole robot scrap, what makes this work as well as it does is that there isn't that much focus on the Transformers, and they're less annoying than they were in the first Bay films anyway. The human characters are much more central, and though they're very broadly-drawn, they're still likeable and compelling. 

This is totally brainless eye candy, with a stupid plot driven by prophecies and magical items, which is the laziest kind of writing, and they could really have just had Quintessa come and attack and gone straight to the big fight and you would have just about the same level of substance. But dammit, it's fun, sometimes it made me laugh, and it was visually stunning. And it's nice to see glamorised England, from Tower Bridge to Stonehenge. Perhaps it's just that my expectations were very low this time, but this was probably the most fun I had watching a live-action Transformers film, because it was just so unashamedly silly. 

Viceroy's House

Though I've been researching the end of the British Empire to a degree, and in primary school I did a little project on Pakistan, I must say that I had little real understanding of the complexities of why partition had to happen and what kind of pressure Mountbatten was under to make a decision that could never please everyone. 

This movie does a very nice job of framing the key debates of post-war India, not only having the key leaders of the communities debating with Mountbatten himself, but several microcosms to help humanise the consequences of such a momentous event as splitting a country with a very long history into two. Three later on, of course. 

These human stories are the most interesting. Central is a love story between a young Hindu boy and Muslim girl. Not only is she betrothed to another, but partition will mean she has to move far away and cannot break off her engagement. These characters are sympathetic and their stories touched by conflict as well as romance. Then there's Lady Mountbatten (Gillian Anderson in a posh version of her British accent), who tries her best to understand the Indians on a personal level that the likes of Churchill never understood, but sometimes being hopelessly out of touch in trying to change everything on a whim. There's the satisfying twist of Mountbatten being an appeasing puppet and just filling in a predetermined path devised with much more cynical rationale than Mountbatten’s. 

The performances here are superb, especially the actor portraying young Hindu boy Jeet, Manish Dayal, who deserves to go on to greater and greater things. I see he’s current in Agents of SHIELD, which is a nice start. It's great to have a light shone on the things that still determine geopolitical relationships even after the passing of Empire. The salient point that the terrible violence was indirectly the result of British divide and rule policies is stated, which is good for cinemagoers to hear and discuss - was it all calculated by cruel imperialists who thrived on the deaths of others or can there be nobody to blame for the leap from division to hatred and lawless slaughter but the perpetrators themselves? All well worth considering especially as nationalism and xenophobia and the demonization of the old white patriarchy rises, and division with it. 

I shall have to look up the historical accuracy of this film. But it was certainly a great starting point for further research, a beautifully acted piece from an Indian director about India, and a chance to learn from the past no matter your background. 

The Greatest Showman

With a story that’s been told before, mixed-to-negative reviews and a no-name director, I decided to just watch The Greatest Showman sometime in the future, perhaps on a plane. But we had free time as a family so went to see this. And I was very pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed The Greatest Showman, not just for being a fun, enjoyable film but for so upending my expectations about it in the context of 2017 identity politics.

Barnum on the face of it would be a terrible place to try and make a politically correct story. Look at this old white man from a generation ago who gathered ‘freaks’ and basically made his fortune from mocking the disabled. This fraudster who sewed animal parts together for a mermaid and who’s often thought of as saying there’s a sucker born every minute (whether it was genuinely him who said it or not). What an awful choice for a modern-day movie protagonist. This disgusting man first gained fame parading around a paralysed former slave he had ‘leased’, claiming her to be the oldest woman in the world, then charged admission to her autopsy when she passed away.

And the movie landscape has been irrevocably altered by recent preoccupation with minority representation, for good and for bad. Greater diversity makes for some really nice dynamics in ensemble movies like Rogue One, but then on the flip side you have it becoming so central to a movie’s marketing that it ends up alienating a lot of the audience and Ghostbusters gets written off as disastrous. Right now there’s a lot of politics being applied to The Last Jedi, where critics seemingly love it far more than audiences do, and some on the left are very keen to shoe-horn it into their ideology and say that it gives a strong message of tearing down the old, patriarchal system and replacing it with a new, vibrant, diverse one – when honestly, the movie not only had a subplot that basically concluded ‘trust in the old guard who know what they’re doing and don’t try to make it all about you as you attempt to wrest power away from them’, but also didn’t honestly end up telling a very good story anyway.

Which brings us to The Greatest Showman. Of course, this is a fictionalised version, and needs to be to give the message it does. No Joice Heth the paralyzed old lady. Very little lying and cheating, and carefully only where it does no harm to others. A sympathetic Barnum who comes from nothing, loves his wife and two beautiful daughters (the tragedy of another daughter dying at age 2 and his second wife never entering the picture), buys an unsuccessful museum of curios on a whim and gleefully subverts criticism, is a far cry from the truth but works here. Hugh Jackman is superb as a performer and as a family man here, and his story arc is satisfying – he is drawn away from his progressive and diverse troupe by the lure of appealing to the established patriarchal establishment through the highbrow opera singing of Jenny Lind, but it ends up almost ruining him and losing him everything he built (with a fire from the civil war era transposed for effect). In reality, of course, the tour was a huge success that taught him nothing of his own flaws.

But crucial here is the treatment of Barnum’s acts. What makes this a triumph for identity politics is that they are not the sideshow, they are not abused or exploited. They are empowered, they are probably the best thing about the movie in terms of uplifting and moving performances, and they are not only the reason Barnum reaches success, but what bring him back to earth and support him in his moments of need, too. One character points out that he was putting forward those who nobody else would, ‘as equals’, and Barnum’s fall from grace here happens because he turns his back on his diverse and unusual entertainers and chases after the conventional.

I’m not saying this element is done perfectly for the approval of the far left. In reality, General Tom Thumb had a lot more to do with Barnum becoming as successful as he was, and if anything his role in this movie was massively understated. With a couple of exceptions, the troupe was more of a collective than a group of well-characterised individuals, which isn’t really in the spirit of celebrating their uniqueness. For all its diversity and Zac Efron and Zendaya’s sweet love story meant to highlight the foolishness of disapproving of race mixing, at its heart there’s still a lot of the white saviour to this story. And yeah, animal rights don’t get a look in.

But reframing the Barnum story as a celebration of diversity rather than railing at exploitation, giving agency and focus to the so-called freaks, was a small stroke of genius in my book. Add to that strong performances, superb visuals, great dancing and vocal performances – from Zendaya in particular – and the best songs I’ve heard in a live-action musical for a very long time (way better than La La Land’s, most of the numbers having a great modern feel, like if Sia decided to write music in the Disney mould) made this far better than I expected it to be. 

Thor: Ragnarok

I didn’t see the latest Thor in the cinema and was under the impression it was a disappointment. Some friends told me it tried too hard to be funny all the way through. Some reviewers said it was too much spacefaring nonsense, not enough Norse epic. I even read a few times that it was a mess because it tried too hard to please prevailing tastes of the leftist media – though I think that was just from people scared that having black and Asian people playing fantastical alien beings who were meant to have inspired Norse mythology somehow gets in the way of America being Great Again.

Whatever the potential criticisms, once I actually went to see Thor: Ragnarok and I can happily say that it was not a disappointment. It was a pleasure. Yes, it was silly and there was humour throughout, but it worked. It was goofy and self-deprecating, but in the same way as Guardians of the Galaxy – lots of bathos, lots of undercutting of the pompous, lots of people being awkward and uncomfortable. Though similar to Whedonesque humour, it’s not quite the same. It’s not about tearing down genre conventions or being smug about how much cleverer you are than the similar movies that have come before you – it’s just about taking familiar plots and situations but having silly people comment on them. It rings much truer and for me is very enjoyable. I loved Thor and Loki’s reminiscences of their childhoods (the story with the snake it told in brilliantly underwhelming fashion), director Taika Waititi’s character Korg is hilariously matter-of-fact about everything, and Loki’s self-congratulatory play (with remarkable cameo actors) unfolds at just the right pace timed against Thor’s reaction.

As an actual story it’s pretty simple stuff. Odin (played by Anthony Hopkins in notable phoning-it-in 

mode) can no longer hold back the power of his first-born child Hela (played with hammy joy by Cate Blanchett, and with a different backstory from the comics or mythology) so she comes back to take over Asgard and indirectly trigger Ragnarok. While trying to combat her, Thor and Loki are thrown off the Bifrost and end up in sci-fi tournament-land Sakaar. Thor has to fight his way out of a tournament in a tower decorated by the faces of the likes of Ares and what looks like Beta Ray Bill, reuniting with old faces and, just maybe, another Asgardian in hiding. It’s all a bit anime but that doesn’t stop it being fun and a refreshing change of pace from the other Thor movies.

There are many highlights here – the question of who is the strongest avenger; Jeff Goldblum undercutting everything at a vast scale; amazing use of Led Zeppelin; Skurge actually getting a time to shine; good use of the Hulk, always a difficult character to write; and Idris Elba being far cooler as Heimdall in guerrilla vigilante mode than weird polished doorkeeper guy.

After a few indifferent movies, this one – as well as Guardians of the Galaxy 2 – got me fired up for the continuing MCU, and I’m really looking forward to Avengers: Infinity War and what may come after that. The news that X-men might get incorporated is welcome, too, and there have even been rumours that a Power Pack movie is in the works. Now that would make me happy, especially if it brought the kids to a wider audience and they were taken seriously.

Long may this golden age of comic book movies continue!

Alien: Covenant

I don’t think this movie was necessary as an addition to the Aliens franchise. It linked Prometheus to the main series explicitly, but everyone already knew they were connected. It allowed Michael Fassbender to ham it up again, this time in two different roles, which was probably fun for him but got tedious for me.

Otherwise, there’s a lot of repetition. Another couple of xenomorphs running rampage. Another mechanoid getting carried away with what it believes it must do. Another showdown in a cargo bay where the vacuum of space is only the press of a button away. Another interesting female protagonist who suffers loss and responds with strength.

But everything’s done less well than before. The first films did a superb job of economically sketching strong, identifiable characters. This one give a crew with almost no distinguishing features beyond a cowboy hat. It also shows a world where humans can become hosts to violent aliens not through a face-hugger but just breathing in the wrong place – and not only tries to present facehuggers as an evolution from this, which they clearly aren’t, but suffers from a huge reduction in tension too. Facehuggers you can potentially fend off. Breathing in spores you can’t. It becomes a much less interesting dramatic situation when death comes from being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This movie and potential sequels seem to exist purely to show how the xenomorph went from white blobby killing machine to black pointy killing machine. Honestly, that’s not that interesting and could have been accepted to have happened naturally through the species encountering a few other hosts before the time of Alien. Yet we have to have a long ponderous explanation of the dangers of trying to create life and the unpleasantness of genetic experimentation.

I suppose adding a very natural gay relationship is a plus, as I can’t think of any reason this future society shouldn’t be permissive. The main characters put in strong performances, if wooden sometimes. And the series’ staple grisly deaths are of course in place. But this feels like a poor echo of the previous films, which offered thrills, striking ensemble casts and more importantly, fun. I’m not sure I’ll care enough to watch the future sequels…perhaps on a plane.  

Churchill

Aeroflot advertised 'Dunkirk' but didn't actually have it. Instead I watched Churchill. I kind of hoped we'd get a full biopic showing unfamiliar sides to Churchill - how he went from a journalist to a dashing young war hero, his uncomfortable white supremacist views, his early political career. 

This follows just a few days during World War II in the run-up to D-Day. Churchill is vehemently opposed to beach landings at Bordeaux, remembering the disaster at Gallipoli. Everyone around him thinks he's had his day, and he's presented as past his prime, childish and impulsive. But also compassionate and a great leader. All of which is, of course, an entirely fictional scenario but works well for an underdog drama. Seeing Churchill as an underdog at the end of his life is pretty bizarre, especially when trying to pass it off as a biopic, but it makes for decent dramatic impetus.

This stuck to tried-and-tested elements, and didn't really give any insight into Churchill the man, actually making him seem very short-sighted and concerned with men he is immediately concerned with while being indifferent to those giving their lives that he's not thinking of, but certainly it allowed for bravura performances, particularly from Cox and Richardson. Richard Durden is also extremely likeable as Field Marshall Smuts, though what he’s doing acting as Churchill’s valet I cannot fathom.

Can't say it was the most compelling or moving piece of cinema ever, and though the period isn’t my area of expertise, I know enough about Churchill to know it was entirely made up and in personality terms a complete dramatic invention, but as an onscreen story it just about worked.

Wonder Woman

This was a movie full of nitpicks. Fast-travel boats, origin stories framed as flashbacks but full of lines of dialogue the character having the flashback did not hear, a fight with arrows flying but for some reason nobody aiming at one main character despite having no reason not to kill him…

Though those details add up, I could forgive it if the rest of the movie was good, but it suffers from unlikeable characters, an uninteresting main story and despite the backdrop of WWI, stakes that just don't seem that compelling. It would probably have been better to have a modern-day story that actually got us to like Diana and then this origin story as a sequel.

Diana herself is half robot, half child, and it's bizarre how the narrative makes her too pure to be able to pass by those in need but at the same time never stop to ask the Germans' stories before slaughtering them. Never pausing to question destroying the heritage of local people.

As WWI scholar enough to be bewildered as to why Siegfried Sassoon was on what appeared to be a wall to memorialise dead soldiers (Owen makes more sense), I totally expect to see the period made cartoonish for action movies, but it would be nice to have a bit more nuance than directly stating it was good guys against bad guys. Or at least having Diana question that when it was presented to her.

The humour was stilted, Gal Godot wasn’t very interesting or powerful, the main antagonist acted in ways that make no sense to further his goal, and Chris Pine didn’t manage to bring the likeability to Steve Trevor that he did to James T. Kirk.

There’s a lot of controversy about how adequate this incarnation of Wonder Woman is as a feminist icon, whether she exists only for the titillation of the male gaze or whether she’s an empowered icon of strength. Well, I’m not in a position to tell women what to think about this powerful woman, and it’s not for me to conclude whether she’s an image of strength or a tool of patriarchy. But the jokes about her getting undressed inappropriately or the main characters going straight to talking about sex definitely seemed both artificial way to get the character to own her sexuality and at the same time excite teenaged boys, but the worst part is that neither ring true as character moments.

I’m surprised this plodding film got the positive reception it did. DC are definitely lagging far behind Marvel with their cinematic universe these days. It’s interesting that internationally, Thor: Ragnarok has slightly outdone Wonder Woman (with Guardians of the Galaxy and Spider-Man: Homecoming both more successful still). But in America alone, Wonder Woman has outdone them all, second only to Beauty and the Beast in box office takings. This seems to me wholly fuelled by the American obsession with identity politics right now, which the rest of the world is wrapped up in. And certainly, I find nothing wrong with progressiveness. But when there’s such a disconnect from the rest of the world, the danger becomes writing more for political goals than for the need to tell a good story. Perhaps that’s a factor in why I just couldn’t get into this one. 

IT (2017)

I remember watching the miniseries of IT as a child and being fascinated by Tim Curry’s Pennywise. Goofy and sometimes hilarious but also terrifying. I was so fascinated that I read the book when I was about 9, which turned out to be quite a confusing experience, thanks to the sewer sex scene that’s being brought up pretty often online, but also due to the totally bizarre lore about universe-puking turtles and evil beings made out of lights crashing to Earth on asteroids. Honestly, it made me think King was a bit of a hack, even at such a tender age.

But undeniably the man created incredibly iconic imagery, and that’s as true now as it ever was. So I was pretty eager to watch IT, with the new, creepier Pennywise and the story updated to the 80s still being set long enough ago to inspire nostalgia.

Honestly, this version of IT is a little disappointing. It relies too much on sudden shocks and dodgy CG, especially when it comes to a creepy woman from a painting coming to life, and the kids never seem all that scared. Instead of having to face their fears in the knowledge that they cannot possibly hurt It, they seem empowered to just beating up whatever they see, and It for some reason doesn’t instantly tear them limb from limb despite being shown to be capable of it. There’s not enough build-up of suspense, and when it does get built well – like in the projector scene – the payoff is too abrupt. For a movie that’s wholly about fear, there’s not enough of it.

The script also changes the book’s few kids with huge problems stemming from their parents/guardians to that being the case for every single one of them (bar the underdeveloped loudmouth), to the extent it seems like ticking off angst boxes. The film also cuts the book into two parts, with none of the adult storyline present here at all. Though the timeline with the kids is way better, that decision makes this part seem very shallow overall, and makes me fear for the sequel part because the return to Derry and final showdown really isn’t very exciting.

Taking parts in isolation, IT still has some amazing images, clever ideas and strong performances from a cast of cute adolescents. But it doesn’t really stand alone as a story, as a horror or as a coming-of-age allegory. 

Plane Films - Ghost in the Shell, Hidden Figures, Colossal, The Jungle Book, Get Out, Split.

1. Ghost in the Shell

Rather like the Beauty and the Beast movie, this live-action adaptation makes me think, ‘It does the job it’s meant to do, but what’s the point?’ I’m sure it will make money and draw fans and newcomers alike, but the original has a lot of appeal that this doesn’t. Firstly, no drama about white-washing, though I really don’t mind it in this case because Major Kusanagi is after all a robot. Secondly, the sheer artistry of the animated mechanisms. And then of course a much cooler spider-tank – I don’t know why they didn’t just stick with the original design.

There were some nice original ideas here, and the strangeness of the major meeting a relative was impressive, but honestly, the story of the original was never its strongest point, and without its artistry it’s honestly very much on the boring side. This movie, with visuals only in line with everything around it, was boring too – and definitely not worth whipping up racial controversy for.

2: Hidden Figures

A biopic of three women who made a significant contribution to NASA in the 1960s, this is a fantastic film in its own right as well as an excellent piece for the current political climate. Identity politics and racial tensions recently have led to a combative climate, and I feel that a feel-good movie that highlights the contributions of an oppressed minority in a time when institutional oppression was much starker than today is a very positive thing. These are superb role models and the more people like the lead characters of this film there are in the world, the better.

I don’t know how accurate this depiction is. I suspect no more than the Eddie the Eagle biopic I watched last time I went on a long-haul flight. I doubt one woman really single-handedly came up with the idea for calculating a change in orbits, or was a peerless genius amongst other mediocre mathematicians rather than simply an equal cog in a very sophisticated machine, but she certainly was a brilliant woman in a society that would constantly denigrate her. I don’t suppose the other two key innovators were her close friends and carpool buddies either – one business-savvy woman who knew to learn computer programming as soon as she heard of it, the other fighting in the courts to be allowed to qualify to become an engineer. But all that just makes for a better movie narrative. Having rocket launches in your storyline certainly helps keep things exciting, as well!

This is a great reminder of when America was great – yet had a dark underbelly that needed to change. It’s a superb underdog story and encourages not only cooperation but the drive to succeed and innovate, equality through self-betterment rather than the desire to tear others down. It was also superbly acted, warm and funny in its family scenes, and even squeezed in a cute romance. Overall, an excellent film I hope was widely watched and well-received.

Ah yes, checking on Wikipedia now, it’s highly dramatized and in fact the segregation issue is hugely exaggerated. Like I said, it makes for good drama.

3. Colossal

What a weird movie! I watched I because I saw the posters in London and thought it looked strange. The premise is crazy, and I can’t imagine someone pitching it or it getting through studio gatekeepers. Yet I like quirky, and this was probably the most quirky premise I’ve seen in an American movie in years.

This is the story of a typical young American woman who in pursuit of her dreams to become a writer has ended up an unemployed alcoholic in New York sponging off her boyfriend. When they decide to have a break and she goes back to her hometown, she figures out that a giant monster attacking Seoul is actually her. It’s a genre-clash of the typical relationship drama, with funny moments, moments where you think the protagonist is pretty rotten, and serious moments tackling emotional manipulation and abuse – and kaijuu movies. The ending is cathartic wish fulfilment and the kaijuu scenes are well done enough that you end up thinking this would have been better as the whole movie rather than a semi-figurative take on fighting emotional abuse – and honestly the main part was pretty boring with unlikeable characters. But the weird mish-mash was oddly compelling, and even if I wouldn’t watch it again, I’m glad I saw it.

4. The Jungle Book

Yet another adaptation of a famous animated movie, this is Disney adapting one of their older favourites. And unlike Beauty and the Beast or Ghost in the Shell, it doesn’t come across as redundant or unnecessary because it’s actually a reimagining. It’s still more Disney than Kipling, but it’s been completely re-written and given a very different tone to the original – more on the side of Maleficent without being a complete change of perspective.

As a result, I liked it more than the other recent live-action versions. It actually brought new things to the interpretation and had its own very satisfying climax.

It also had an amazing cast – Bill Murray, Lupita Nyong’o, Idris Elba, Ben Kingsley, all providing fantastic voice performances. Scarlett Johansson shows up too, this time APPROPRIATING that famous INDIAN character Kaa. There’s also the very interesting choice to make King Louie more sinister than goofy, with the inspired casting of Christopher Walken. I have to say, part of me hoped Ringo Starr or Paul McCartney would cameo as a vulture, but that wasn’t to be. We had Jon Favreau as a little pig, though!

Fun, often cute, and far more epic than I expected towards the end, I feel a tinge of regret that I thought it looked dreadful from the trailer. Too bad I think the CG is going to look very dated very quickly… 

5. Get Out

Here’s another interesting addition to the current landscape of racial tension. What starts out as a typical drama about the awkward microaggressions and false politeness of mixed race couples becomes a crazy yet predictable thriller. Any film that has a scene where the plot is laid out by a character and people laugh at its ridiculousness probably isn’t going to be all that strong, but Get Out does a good job of building the tension and developing its slight paranoia in a convincing way.

The fundamental premise relies on a divided world with each side suspicious of the other, and there’s an element of Blaxploitation here even if in many ways it plays off the idea that white people are creepy.

It’s not really clever or original, and its twists are very obvious, but it does what it sets out to do well.

6. Split

A thriller I feel like everyone has seen before. Three teenagers are abducted by a man with a split personality. Here, the guy has over 20 distinct personalities, notable ones including a fastidious fetishist, a flamboyant fashion enthusiast, a stiff middle-aged lady and a little kid. A mysterious final personality, which may or may not have superpowers, is in danger of being unleashed.

Some of James MacAvoy’s accents are a bit iffy, and for such a great actor his characterisations are a bit secondary school drama class, but he’s still the strongest thing in the film. His scenes with the older psychiatrist give the film some much-needed meat. Scenes with the teen girls and highly clichéd flashbacks of a life for a little girl in the countryside definitely don’t fare as well.

Not really offering anything new, falling back on lazy writing and keen to be much scarier than it was, this was one to miss. 

Spider-Man: Homecoming

I’m pretty happy that Spider-Man has been rebooted as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was nice to see him appear in Civil War and it’s nice to have him much younger than before, with the dynamic of him being an experienced, reckless kid mentored by Iron Man. Of course, this is done in the slightly awkward American Saved By The Bell land where 20-year-olds play 15-year-olds but look at best like 18-year-olds and you have to just pretend they’re kids, but Tom Holland putting on a high-pitched American accent just about pulls it off and makes for the most naïve and likeable of the recent Spider-Man actors.

After the events of Civil War, Spider-Man hopes he’s going to be included in more Avengers shenanigans. However, the call never comes. Spider-Man tries to make a contribution fighting minor crimes, and eventually gets caught up in a bigger plot. He does his best, messes up several times, disappoints his school friends, but keeps on trying and eventually pulls through.

What makes the film a success is that it doesn’t focus too much on plot and instead allows its characters to develop. The background characters are likeable, especially the kids Peter hangs out with. There are some great moments, mostly when various people discover one another’s secrets, and there’s a great surrogate-father and surrogate-son relationship between Iron Man and Spider-Man that’s new to these characters. There’s goofy humour throughout, and the threat is relatively low-key, making this a fun, light, easy-to-watch entry into the MCU. 

Plane film extra - Assassin's Creed

Video game adaptations are rarely classic pieces of cinema, but with the historical settings and nice simple set-up of Templars vs. Assassins, I thought this had a chance to be successful.

It looks nice. It’s nicely acted. It’s good to see Jeremy Irons in a movie again. And it’s nice to have important scenes in the Al-Hambra. But ultimately there’s no reason to care about Cal, far too much time is spent in the uninteresting present day story rather than the past, and the fact that the whole story is a big macguffin plot and the final way to beat the forces of evil is just to catch the baddie by surprise and beat everyone up feels like nothing was gained, learned or developed during the course of the movie. All the heroes needed was a chance to beat up the enemies.

Normally in these kinds of movies, the disaster that the good guys want to avert is at least partially unleashed. It’s generic, but it at least gives a sense of the stakes. That’s sorely lacking here, making for a deeply unsatisfying ending. 

Plane films - Life, Gifted, La La Land and Beauty and the Beast

#1: Life

This was a mistake. I thought there were no movies worth watching but I was only looking at the magazine – there were actually a few I wanted to see much more than this. In fact, there were plenty of better choices in the magazine, but I wanted some light cheesy sci-fi to start the journey.

I guess it was indeed light, cheesy sci-fi, but it was also really not enjoyable. Essentially, it aimed for realism with a disaster on the international space station, but the conceit was the old cliché of hostile life from Mars.

With a soil sample comes a microorganism. The scientists revive it, and of course it soon gets out of their control. A poor imitation of Alien ensues, with a dreadful bait-and-switch ending.

Some big-name actors do their best with extremely basic material, though Ryan Reynolds phones it in, but the CG blob isn’t interesting enough and ultimately the film offers absolutely nothing new.

#2: In This Corner of the World

See animation blog review

#3: Gifted

Still not one of the must-see movies on offer from today, Gifted was nonetheless well worth a watch. Chris Pratt’s speciality is being an everyman who is nonetheless very attractive to those around him and really seems to care about his loved ones, and that makes him the perfect star for this movie.

It’s not wholly original material, but it’s done well. Pratt’s character Frank is raising his niece, who happens to be a maths prodigy. However, it’s a gift she inherited from her mother, whose life was extremely unstable as a result of her mathematics achievements. Frank is trying to give her a normal life, mostly keeping her in a trailer park with an incredibly cute one-eyed cat, but when he enrols her in school for the first time, things quickly slip out of his control.

Delicately acted with a very believable performance from young Mckenna Grace, balancing intelligence, brattiness and normal childish hopes and fears, it did the family drama, courtroom scenes and even romance well.

#4: Kubo and the Two Strings

See animation blog review

#5: La La Land

I guess I just didn’t get La La Land. Beloved of many on my social media and a critical darling highly lauded at the Oscars, I expected good things. I get that it’s been a while since there has been a high-impact original musical, but there’s been plenty of big-screen adaptations of musicals lately. This pushes some nostalgia buttons and has some good tunes, but much like Greece I just didn’t like the characters and didn’t think the moral messages were good here.

So the centre of La La Land is the celebration of failing artists doing their best and following their dreams. That’s fine, but in the end the main characters aren’t really struggling artists. He is a jazz pianist who happens to have an old contract who just hands him a major-label contract and $52k+ a year salary, and she lives in a la-la land where someone can put on a one-man play for a single night, attract an audience of about 5, yet still get a call that one of those audience members loves her and wants to put her into a major feature film in a starring role. Meanwhile, it has no consequence that he can’t pay the rent and bills, or that she apparently gets supported by her rich boyfriend only to cheat on him and move on. I’d rather hear a story about some actual struggling artists.

Then there’s the fact that those two main characters are just obnoxious and hard to like. Both are extremely self-centred and ultimately their relationship could easily have worked with or without professional success, but they just don’t bother. Unlike Whiplash, which was loads of fun, I found this follow-up pretty poor.

#6: Beauty and the Beast

Maybe the most successful of the recent Disney live-action remakes, I enjoyed watching Beauty and the Beast for the artistry, the effects and Emma Watson looking very pretty as usual, but I did end up wondering why this needed to be made. Sure, it will bring in money, again targeting nostalgia and piggybacking on the animated classic to make for easy feel-good watching, but it was pretty redundant creatively, and other than some more realistic designs and some modern quips from Josh Gad’s Lefou, whose homosexual feelings (which may or may not make him ‘gay’) are far less of an issue than it was suggested by headlines around this film’s release.

The adaptation really does nothing wrong and it is fun to enjoy it when familiar with the original, which I suppose is everything it needed to do in order to make money, but the redundancy of it all ultimately feels…pretty hollow. 

Logan

One more comic book movie to round things off – and it’s a pretty different kind of feature. Logan may be remembered as the most artistic and sophisticated of Marvel’s adaptations, if not the most enjoyable. This isn’t just gritty, it’s going for arty – and tragic.

I didn’t think this would be the tone of the movie, but I’m rather glad it was. I respect trying something different, and the thing about comic book movies with multiverses is that you can try this sort of thing without it being a definitive ending for these characters – just one possibility of many. From the snippets I saw, I thought it would be another action-backed movie with the adventures of Wolvie and X-23. It certainly wasn’t that.

Things are grim as we open. Logan’s healing factor is failing him – clearly not omega-level in this universe – and he’s scraping together a living working as a limo driver. Professor X is 90 and degenerating fast. Motor Neurone and Alzheimer’s have him not only seizing but causing hugely painful surges of psychic energy for all those around him. No other X-Men are about, though a version of Caliban very different from the one we saw in the Apocalypse movie – or the one from the comics - is also helping out.  They plan to get a boat and go out onto the ocean where Charles can’t harm anyone.

Into this tragic setting comes more tragedy. Laura, designated X-23, was made with Logan’s DNA, so he’s sought out by the nurse who helped her escape. Thus begins a road trip movie with a lot of remarkably brutal violence – far more realistic than in most other such adaptations, presumably because Deadpool cleared the way for the R-rated Marvel movies – some heavy-handed moments to show Logan what he should really have is the warmth of a family, and ultimately a big cartoonish showdown that’s much more like the previous Wolverine movies.

But as the title suggests, this is a much more humanised version, and seeing Logan suffer and fail to fight off X-24, the mindless clone of his younger self, helps make him more relatable. Laura is likeable too, and the frail, somewhat embittered but warm and paternal Professor Xavier is brilliantly realised by Patrick Stewart.

This gritty tone is backed up by a departure from the usual fun things found in Marvel movies. No post-credits scenes, no Stan Lee cameos, no hints at how things can tie in to sequels or other franchises in the Fox-Marvel universe. Just pain and regret and dirt and very, very bad people – especially the Reavers, led by Richard E. Grant doing the detestable character he seems to be typecast as just now.

Well worth seeing, and certainly moving, I’m not sure it’s one you’d want to see again and again. 

Doctor Strange

After watching Guardians of the Galaxy 2, I thought I’d better catch up with some other comics movies that I’ve missed, and since he’ll be in a few upcoming movies I decided I should get to Doctor Strange.

The movie isn’t the very best Marvel has to offer and I doubt it will get the comic many new fans, but it was a very solid entry for the MCU, boasted superb visual effects and had a little more emotional depth than most of the other origin stories.

The first act, as many have remarked, is basically Cumberbatch doing Doctor House. A brilliant but prickly doctor saves lives and infuriates colleagues with his arrogance. A life-changing accident leaves him searching for healing, and he eventually finds The Ancient One. There’s been criticism of the whitewashing of this role by casting Tilda Swinton as what was originally an old Tibetan man, but I can also see the director’s point that there was no way of escaping the far-left’s criticism here – cast an old Tibetan man and you get criticised for propagating a wise-old-venerable-master stereotype. Cast a young Tibetan and you get accused of simply using another culture like a tool. A woman? Fetishing. I guess he could have gone with a black star and probably gotten less flack, but that, too, is patronising and using a culture as a tool.

In the end, Tilda Swinton brought her usual ethereal spacyness to the character and I thought it worked rather well. Certainly she put in an engaging performance and showed all the different, conflicted sides of her rather simple character. Plus she facilitated the development of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s rather more interesting Baron Mordo character, who I look forward to seeing return in future.

Perhaps the main problem here is that Cumberbatch lacks a certain something. He’s not very likeable, by intention at first but really throughout the whole movie. Somehow he lacks the gravitas he’s had in other movies or his breakout TV show, and too often his character seems to be just Tony Stark lite – which is all wrong for Doctor Strange.

Still, him aside, there’s an excellent supporting cast, a bad guy made far more interesting than his comic counterpart (who I’d never heard of), a fairly clever conceit to defeat an extremely powerful being, incredible special effects that look like something Cyriak might make with a ridiculous budget – something people apparently keep asking him about.

I am interested to see how he and his infinity stone will tie into the larger universe, and I get the feeling I’ll enjoy the character more as a minor voice in an ensemble film than I did with him at the very centre, but this was by no means a bad movie. But certainly it wasn’t as fun as Guardians 2. 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2

*Spoilers ahead*

Even if I don’t particularly love the comics, I have to say Guardians of the Galaxy so far has been the gem of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Guardians may be peripheral compared to the big-hitters like Iron Man and Cap, but their movies don’t disappoint and are actually more fun to watch.

Guardians 2 matched up to the legacy of the first movie – and now that we have a gang fully assembled, it’s time to develop them, and this movie focuses on family. Do blood ties make a family? Could gruff father figures actually have acted with kindness all along? Should a gang of misfits start to consider one another a family?

The film does a lot, but ties the threads in well. There are three major storylines – the pursuit of the Guardians by the slighted Sovereign, Quill discovering his origins and Rocket’s escape from the rogue Ravagers who have mutinied against Yondu. All of them provide exciting scenes and all of them in some way build up the film’s conception of family bonds.  

The climax is a pretty standard battle of good vs evil and Ego’s plan for the universe seems a bit daft, as it seemed a bit strange he had to cover the worlds he’d visited in killer goop, but everything is wrapped up in satisfying style, with a touching self-sacrifice and final fireworks display that are classic tearjerker elements.

But what has become the signature of Guardians films is bathos, and here there are two superb examples centred on the idea of not focusing on what would seem to be the most important element. One is during the final battle, Quinn goes on a search for some tape. The other is the opening sequence, when the endlessly adorable mini-Groot dances his way past an epic battle, which is not only fun and entertaining but also a tour de force of CG. ELO provide the upbeat soundtrack to this scene in one of several masterful soundtrack choices, with other fantastic moments coming courtesy of Cat Stevens, George Harrison and especially Fleetwood Mac. Suddenly, songs friends might consider ‘dad rock’ are in vogue again!

Visually, there are few movies as impressive as this one. The makeup is amazing again, not only on returning characters like Nebula and Gamora, but on new characters like Mantis and Ayesha and briefly-glimpsed Ravagers like Charlie-27 and Aleta. The worlds visited are superb, and there are a number of amusing cameos, my favourite of which being the Watchers alongside a familiar face. References abound to the first movie, from a cybernetic eye to a certain duck, and the name ‘Adam’ is uttered for a possible future antagonist – scrapping the concept of an Easter egg I didn’t get in the first movie, the cocoon of Adam Warlock.

 This was a great sci-fi movie in its own regard, as well as a highly satisfying sequel and, most excitingly, piece of the large MCU puzzle. I can’t wait to see the clash of worlds in the next Avengers movie. I’m certain that it will be much enhanced by the presence of the Guardians. 

X-Men: Apocalypse

Another of the superhero movies I didn’t manage to see on the big screen and never got to see on a plane, I’ve now managed to catch up on X-Men: Apocalypse. 

Days of Future Past was a very tough movie to follow up. I really enjoyed that movie, which I thought clever, affecting, well-paced and of course very fan-friendly. So I had high hopes for Apocalypse, with one of my favourite villains.

Ultimately, I’d say this is a decent addition to the franchise, but certainly not the high point of it. I had my doubts about Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse, mostly because instead of a huge menacing half-cyborg, he looked like a frail older man – though in the film he actually looks more formidable than he did in early stills.

He brings with him a credible threat, in the classic vein of washing the whole world clean – though probably spends a little too much time gathering his acolytes so that the film sags somewhat in the middle. Unfortunately he doesn’t really get enough of his own character on top of this, and his powers are very ill-defined within the context of the film.

On the other hand, the film’s re-introduction of many of the key players of the franchise is very satisfying. While it takes a while, the gathering of the Horsemen allows for some nice scenes of Ororo and Betsy to get them into this new continuity, plus a slightly shoehorned-in Warren, while on the good side we get the new, more vulnerable and likeable Scott, cute emo-kid Nightcrawler, Sophie Turner’s hard-to-define gravitas for Jean and even a small appearance for Jubilee. The professor gets his iconic appearance by the end, Magneto rather takes a few steps back in development but gets some great emotional scenes, Raven is the true protagonist and there’s even a nice moment with Weapon X and a tiny cameo for The Blob.

One thing I disliked here was the casual attitude to death, especially amongst the younger crew – who seem amused at the wholesale slaughter of the bad guy henchmen and make wisecracks. I’d think they’d be horrified. The death toll for the damage Apocalypse manages to wreak on the whole world must have been extremely high, too, but there’s no mention of that. The final showdown is a bit of a random series of powers but the final force that’s able to reign supreme makes sense.

Overall, this film was not what I hoped. There were some amazing scenes, and once again Quicksilver’s part in it all steals the show, but I was left unsatisfied by the whole piece and especially with En Sabah Nur himself. But this leaves me optimistic for the future. I’m keen to see how Mister Sinister is treated, always a much cooler bad guy than his name suggests, and while I’m not that interested in Dark Phoenix Adaptation #10,000,000, at least there’s a more likeable and compelling cast in place now.

What I really want to see, though, is rights issues resolved, special contracts written and X-Men being incorporated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. May be a bit late now, though. 

Captain America: Civil War

I still maintain that this would have been a far better choice for Avengers 2. The Civil War storyline was a very good one in the comics, with the two factions really feeling like they belonged in their respective camps, plus the whole thing was built up on top of the House of M and then Decimation. 

The movie adaptation wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but once it got rolling it was a strong addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While the pacing was a bit off, taking far too much time to get rolling, the eventual pay-off was enjoyable. If anything, we could have had less set-up of the Winter Soldier storyline and more focus on the divide caused by the 'accords' and a lot more discussion of what they actually were and how much they would control the team members. 

Another major problem was the lack of a serious antagonist. Bucky of course has two sides and is being controlled, so what's left is a rather uninteresting puppetmaster and a wild goose chase about other Winter Soldiers that ends up the film's biggest anticlimax and disappointment. 

Still, the film brings in some new Avengers members, chiefly Ant-Man (who gets a bit more of the decent powers of the Pym Particles this time) and Spider-Man, whose introduction is brief but workable, and whose motormouth is perhaps better-rendered here than in other recent representations. 

There are a few laughs and a few neat references, and probably the best Stan Lee cameo yet, but overall the film felt less impressive than I expected. It was great to see a split between heroes and the expected climactic duel, but overall, after so many adventures that seem likely to destroy cities, worlds or universes, catching Bucky or not doesn't fuel the story all that well. Indeed, in the middle, the film commits the cardinal offence of a comic book story and gets boring. 

But it doesn't stop me being engaged with these characters or wanting more. I'm very keen to continue with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, and also want to watch the Apocalypse movie, so my enthusiasm hasn't waned overall! 

The Conjuring 2

We’ve been laughing at archive footage of the event for a while, so it was nice to see it dramatized, and they actually did a very good job of making it compelling, and an Enfield council house a formidable setting. The film would have been better-off without the CG and less than terrifying monsters and sticking with the creepy goings-on and ordinary human beings, dead or otherwise, but it was better than expected and flowed well.