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.