Prometheus

Though there was always a tiny glimmer of doubt, nobody I knew really went into Prometheus thinking it was anything other than an Alien prequel. We’d seen that the story of the so-called ‘Space Jockey’ would finally get filled in – as a long-time fan of the franchise, I’ve long been aware of the weirdness of that one scene in Alien where a huge fossilised humanoid sits in a navigation chair, long dead, but is never mentioned again. Essentially its presence was one of the larger HR Giger fingerprints on the property – he drew the Space Jockey as one of the pieces of concept art he supplied for the first film, and it was duly realised. But the continuation of the Alien story didn’t need any more information about the dead extra-terrestrial; he was left a mystery and his people occasionally showed up in the extended non-canon universe as elephant-headed things. And that was where Prometheus came in. Set only a couple of decades before Alien and only at the end of this century, it tells the story of the space explorers who follow the signs left in ancient artworks to find a buried alien ship. Where, of course, they set loose something they soon wish they hadn’t.

There’s a purposeful simplicity here, as the story very much follows the Alien template, a template that isn’t exactly exclusive to Ridley Scott films. A crew full of broad, recognisable characters goes to investigate the mysterious artefacts, awaken unpleasant things and end up getting killed first in scenes full of suspense and then later in heart-racing action sequences. It’s simple, predictable and expedient. But it works just fine. The film is a good, satisfying sci-fi horror story and has an interesting enough cast (headed by the young Magneto from the newest X-Men film as an awesome artificial human who only falls a little short of being as cool as Bishop and the girl from Sherlock Holmes as the newest Ripley): it’s fun to watch and ticks the right ‘scary’ boxes too.

It has two glaring faults, though. Firstly, there is absolutely no way that Guy Pearce should have played the old man, because he doesn’t look like an old man. He looks like a young man in heavy makeup. Even if you choose to believe Ridley Scott was subverting expectations by making his audience believe Pearce would have his youth restored, that doesn’t stop it being a terrible decision – it always jerks the viewer out of the suspension of disbelief and will make the film look dated much sooner than it ought to. Secondly, there are just too many different types of aliens, and ways aliens could affect people: in the original, you have the perfectly reasonable life-cycle of egg, face-hugger, chest-bursting parasite, full-grown alien. It’s all believably one creature. Arguably you can add the Space Jockey to that. This film has the alien of the final reveal, the Space Jockey race, a black liquid that is apparently alive and when drunk turns into an eye-worm and then makes a person into a space zombie, a squiggly worm with acid blood that spontaneously appears from the black liquid in larger quantities/is made from it - and a monster octopus-foetus precursor of the face-hugger. Apart from the Space Jockey guys, they all appear as a result of the weaponised liquid cargo – but the qualities are just too disparate and unrelated for this to work well. The Space Jockeys are also rather hard to understand here, with a bewildering opening sequence in which one of them drinks a black liquid that is presumably different from that of the weaponised cargo, which breaks him down to a molecular level – and it’s not clear whether this is (a) on Earth, kick-starting the human race as is hinted – which leads to us asking why the jockey sacrificed himself for that end and why they stayed in close contact with humanity for millennia in order to appear in cave paintings but then disappeared and turned hostile, or (b) on another planet, possibly setting loose the weapon and causing an exodus/bringing the Xenomorphs into being. Prometheus makes it clear it needs direct sequels.

There is also quite a bit of awkwardness in the last act when most of the cast needs to be culled. One pilot would be quite enough; two of them going ‘You’ll need all the help you can get’ seemed pretty unlikely. And as for the girl who spent a good minute running around only to get squished, failing to just roll sideways, that was truly lame and she could easily have been dispatched in the next few minutes if it was really considered necessary.

For all these flaws, though, the film overall was very entertaining, had great 3D (especially on the huge Sky Screen) and good performances. Well worth a watch – if not up there with the first two films in the franchise. 

The Dictator

I was of the opinion that Sasha Baron Cohen’s glory days were over and that he was going to settle into a long, happy career doing eccentric bit-parts like those in Sweeney Todd and Hugo. But no, he still has the oomph to carry a film on his own, and it’s considerably better than Ali G in da House. He may have got progressively less original since the days of The Eleven O’Clock Show, but he’s still a very funny man. I had my doubts when I saw the posters of this film and read the plot summary, but the trailers made me think it would actually be worth seeing.

And it was. It was very, very funny. It may not have been very fresh, and the whiff of South Park and Team America was all over it – from the throwaway gags pushing the boundaries of taste to the moment where the whole film is glibly made to look like a sweeping political statement on America – but I still watch South Park and huge originality isn’t exactly necessary for something to be incredibly funny.

Baron-Cohen skewers everyone here, not just absurd dictatorships. Much of the comedy is fish-out-of-water humour about the dictator going unrecognised in New York, which allows not only extremist states to be a target of comedy, but silly idealist lefties. There are some brilliant comedy moments, not all of which were given away by the trailers, and the script sensibly allows for a human element, pathos and love – even if only to subvert it.

The bottom line is that Baron-Cohen remains funny. He may become less so soon – but for now he remains well worth the price of admission. 

Dark Shadows

I was not particularly looking forward to seeing this film. The concept seemed trite and the humour in the trailer was painfully unfunny. I have never seen the cult soap opera, which apparently didn’t introduce any supernatural elements for the first six months of its run, so came without any nostalgic feelings there, and had even forgotten about its existence until friends suggested we went to see it.

So I had low expectations – and it’s likely for that reason I didn’t find the film too abhorrent. I would not say it was good, but it was nowhere near as terrible as many have made out – it was mediocre to adequate, worth a single watch, but never made it to the territory of ‘good’. It was very much like late-80s Burton, but without the idiosyncratic spark. In short, it felt like an inadequate attempt to emulate rather than what it could have been – quintessential Burton.

The basic plot is that a rich young man named Barnabus Collins is cursed by a jealous witch to be a vampire. When she still cannot win his love after murdering his lover (funny that), she locks him in a coffin for almost 200 years, until he is finally dug up in the 70s. Emerging as the classic blood-sucking, pale, undying, burning-in-sunlight, pointy-toothed vampire, he joins his descendants without fitting in. He doesn’t have the winsome, awkward charm of an Edward Scissorhands, though, rather taking charge of the family business and trying to improve the lives of the children. Of course, the rival company who has forced the Collins into near-ruin is run by the witch, and things soon come to a head. Throw in every woman in the piece falling for Barnabus, additional complications from vampires and ghosts and a gig by Alice Cooper and you have a very, very campy vampire story. If the set-up of a very strange supernatural personality forcing his way in amongst a family sounds very Beetlejuice, though, it’s unfortunately never as crazy nor as funny – though the humour is certainly a lot better than it looked to be in the trailer: with context, the jokes are much more amusing and less obvious.

The two main strengths of the film are its aesthetic – genuinely beautiful most of the time, and hilariously schlocky most of the rest – and its cast. Of course Depp and Bonham-Carter are present and correct, doing their usual job of overacting in the right place, but there are more interesting choices: Michelle Pfeiffer’s transition from beauty to matriarch is to be taken more seriously after this, and Eva Green from The Golden Compass was compelling in the over-the-top role. Misfires, though, were Christopher Lee in a vampire film cameo that felt very lazy indeed (especially as he didn’t even use an American accent) and the girl from Kick-Ass and Hugo as a two-dimensional grumpy teen. That said, her presence led to some of the film’s bigger laughs. Her final reveal would have been better left out of the script, though, especially as it was part of a particularly soulless CG-fest that made me long for the more inventive effects of Beetlejuice.

The humour can only go so far, though, and the end all gets wrapped up a bit too glibly – so after admitting to his numerous murders, what can Barnubus do now with his new partner for all time? But this film is a superficial and silly one, and works best considered that way. The trouble is that a Tim Burton film used to mean campy, silly, supernatural – but also fantastic. Sadly, that hasn’t quite been the case for a long while. I haven’t wholeheartedly enjoyed a Tim Burton film since Big Fish, and even that was no critical darling. I think it’s time for him to do another Ed Wood. Another clever and intimate film to make him respected again. That or get Neil Gaiman to write him a script.

The Avengers / Marvel’s Avengers Assemble

Happily, this is the only thing Joss Whedon has done that I've really enjoyed. Well, except for that one episode of Firefly where Jayne is seen as done sort of God. Despite an unnecessarily slow first two acts, the payoff was well with it, and though it was really the bare minimum I'd expect from an Avengers feature,

The key is probably that Whedon only directed rather than writing the full script – he tweaked, but he didn’t come up with the concept or the larger part of the dialogue. So we don’t have to put up with his trademark smugness, largely consisting of him using genre tropes and then sneering at them or nudge-nudge-wink-wink laughing at them as if beneath him – and calling it irony. Instead we get his genuinely funny glib one-liners deflating action scenes in just the right way, and a respectful treatment of a property he clearly loves. 

The story is basic, which is necessary for the complex task of bringing so many characters who already have full-movie backstories together. The Avengers featured in the film are showcased – Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye and Black Widow. We also see the antagonist, and his simplistic comic book plan – Thor’s brother Loki means to use the Tesseract to bring a huge army of aliens to Earth and conquer all, the idea being that they will then crown him. So Nick Fury has to get all the prickly superheroes together in one place – gathering them and having them all learn to cooperate forms the bulk of the fairly dull first two thirds of the film. Then Loki fools the lot of them, puts them in disarray and takes the tesseract. From then on, things get fun – the Avengers work together to stop a full-blown alien invasion, including fun flying dragon-eel-turtle things on a massive scale. Iron Man has a moment to prove his mettle – do ho ho! – and then we get a typical teaser for the next film.

Much to my surprise, given that he’s my least favourite member of the team most of the time, and despite the fact it’s inadequately explained why he decides the rest are his allies, the real star emerges as The Hulk. I had never seen the guy they cast as Banner before but he was perfect, much more so than I imagine Ed Norton would have been, and ultimately, having him onscreen with Thor allows for Whedon’s humour to shine through, as an Asgardian god is one of the few characters you can believably have engaged in slapstick scenes with The Hulk without being reduced to a red smear on the ground. And his scene very close to the end was one of the best in cinema history, no doubt about it.

Thin on plot and slow to start with, it was nonetheless what an Avengers film should have been. The personalities were well-balanced, with straight-laced Cap and swaggering Stark sparking off one another brilliantly without getting to dominate, the Black Widow far from a peripheral extra, each character being admirably human – and SHIELD giving the kiddies the lesson that they ought to question authority figures at all times, it may not have blown away my expectations, but it certain exceeded them. 

Cabin in the Woods

I didn’t know anything about this film before I went to see it, apart from that it was horror. My companion told me as we went in that it was also meant to be funny, which I thought to be no bad thing. If I’d known beforehand, though, that it a new work from Joss Whedon and one of his Buffy writing partners, I would have hesitated. That said, Drew Goddard’s writing on Cloverfield hadn’t overly annoyed me, and there were episodes of Firefly that…I didn’t mind.

And this film had all the fingerprints of Buffy on it. That same smugness, the attitude of ‘look, here’s a lame cliché, ugh, we’re so above it – we’re postmodern now, and we show you the conventions of this genre in an ironic way, you know… though ultimately we just end up totally relying on them anyway’. I really can’t stand it – it made me dislike Buffy, dislike Angel, dislike Runaways and worry about The Avengers. And it made me dislike the bulk of this film – until the last 20 minutes, where all hell breaks loose and the rest is gratuitous silliness and fun with lots of references to other horror films – my favourite being Hellraiser.

The rest of the film, though, was very reminiscent of Buffy, only with more ‘ironic’ blood and boobs and tired stoner jokes. Watch for the last twenty minutes of fun, by all means, but if you have the same attitude to Whedon and co as I do, steer clear. 

The Hunger Games

When I saw Battle Royale some ten years ago, I remember thinking it was a bit brainless and unoriginal, but still compelling. Perhaps a part of it was seeing The Running Man when I was still small enough to have a babysitter – I remember that because he was the one who brought the tape, with Fatal Attraction right after it, and for whatever reason the cartoony ultraviolence of The Running Man was deemed appropriate to show six-year-old me, while bunnies getting boiled was not. And then The Hunger Games came out, and one of the most common comments soon became that it was a rip-off of one or the other of these properties. A popular image going around the net right now is a riff on a line from Pulp Fiction: ‘What do they call The Hunger Games in Europe?’ ‘Battle Royale with Cheese’.

And the premise is the same: a bunch of kids are against their will sent to a wilderness, given weapons and told they must all kill one another until only one person remains. The backstory is different: in The Hunger Games it’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi, in which an oppressive state demands the fighting happens so that smaller societies who once rose in rebellion remember their place, while Battle Royale has a more satirical note, being based on the question of how to discipline children who are losing their respect for authority. This is the slight difference in the dynamic – the kids of The Hunger Games are blameless and innocent, but perhaps less identifiable as they’re from an imagined society. Those of Battle Royale are supposed to be responsible for their own fates because of delinquent behaviour – although of course innocents are involved there as well, so much of the same impact through indignation can be found.

That the story has been told before is not a big issue for me, though. I don’t mind seeing the same story in a different way. A lot of the media I consume is very derivative, and that’s fine – more important are characters, settings, relationships and the philosophical questions raised. And the fact is that the reason I disliked The Hunger Games boiled down to these.

Firstly, the film was very protracted and dull. The games themselves don’t start until what must have been well over an hour into the film. Up until that point, there’s a little tension as participants are chosen, as they get to make their first impressions and as they check out the opposition, but all of it could have been just as effective at half the length. Then the games start and while there’s quite a bit of action, what follows is disappointment after disappointment. Every single time, without fail, that there is a chance for an interesting scenario, the writing takes the easy way out. Catniss is developing maternal feelings for a young girl who saved her life? Great – what will happen when they’re the last ones left? Nope, no dilemma needs to happen because some random kills the girl. How will she survive now that she’s badly wounded? Oh, here comes a magic potion that heals her – something pretty much none of the other characters are seen getting. She’s been saved by one guy – what will happen when she meets him again? Oh, he’s been savaged by CG beasts. The rules have changed so that two winners can be declared? Oh, they’re bound to rescind that – oh, but now they have, there’s an absurd way to force an ending. At no point does it feel like characters are genuinely in fear for their lives and there’s always a cartoon solution to Catniss’ problems, and the way she pretty much never kills anyone but they manage to get killed by something peripheral so that her hands are kept clean gets really, really far-fetched.

The details are clumsy, too. There’s a tense moment where she thinks her partner has been killed, but it’s someone else, so why hasn’t her face appeared up in the sky like everyone else’s did when they died? If the trained killer boy has the element of surprise, why on earth doesn’t he carefully kill his rivals at the end? Oh, because he’s gone a bit nutty, of course. It all feels lazy and I didn’t care about a single one of the characters, except for basic ‘awww’ protective urges about the small kid for the few minutes she was onscreen. In general, Battle Royale presents far more interesting psychological dilemmas and gives a more believable version of what would happen when young people think it’s kill or be killed.

And the filmmaking was horrible, too. The one chapter of the book I read (and I no longer feel any need to read any more) had the prose style annoy me – it seemed to be drawing attention to itself by trying to be clever and elegant but failing, by trying to make its character perceptive and formidable but only making her seem arrogant and detached. While I didn’t dislike the Catniss of the film nearly so much as the book’s narrator, it seemed to me the horribly annoying filmmaking techniques were a brilliant way of mirroring the bad writing: every time there was action, the camera shook in the most absurd way, and even worse, anything vaguely creepy, unsettling or requiring a bit of anxiety had to be reflected by extreme close-ups, very tight framing and fast cuts. It all had a very Brechtian distancing effect, making it impossible to forget this was just a film and generally making the whole thing seem even more shallow than it was.

It seems a successful franchise and I don’t doubt there will be more. It makes me very, very sad that this film will likely be a successful series where His Dark Materials floundered and failed after its first film, though…

The Iron Lady

The consensus, from the reviews I’ve read, seems to be that The Iron Lady is a mediocre film with a stunning performance at its centre from Meryl Streep. I’d say that was fair – though to be honest, I don’t think the plot could ever please everyone. If it condemned Thatcher, it would be called a leftist fantasy and a distortion. If it painted her as saintly, it would get torn apart by all those who recall just how divisive Thatcher was. And sitting in the middle as it does, focusing on her Alzheimer’s and trying to project a balanced view, it gets decried for fence-sitting and having nothing to say.

I’m just about old enough to remember Thatcherite Britain, though more of my childhood memories come from the period when John Major was in power. My parents were comfortably middle-class and reaped some of the benefits of Thatcherism, so my early childhood was comfortable, brightly-coloured and joyful, one I will consider a kind of ideal just before the age of the Internet forever changed what it was like to be a kid, and which I hope I’ll live long enough to see painted as a kind of Utopia in films. But while we were comfortable in the 80s boom, my Dad was always left-leaning, had purposely chosen to work in an area with little wealth so that he was in low-income houses every day and was originally from a working-class background. While we had a strict – and pretty early – bedtime, one thing we were allowed to watch as a family despite all the vulgarity and swearing was Spitting Image, the satirical puppet show. So I grew up knowing at least through the lens of satire who the people in this film were – Thatcher herself, and Hurd and Heseltine and Howe. Thatcher was to me what she was on Spitting Image – a schoolmarm tightly controlling a cabinet of unintelligent man-children, who relieved herself in a urinal, heard the advice of Hitler in hiding and thought his ideas quite brilliant and of course, in that famous sketch that according to Ian Hislop now gets repeated by ex-cabinet members as though it really happened, answered the waiter’s ‘What about the vegetables?’ with ‘Oh, they’ll have the same as me.’

Here, though, is something of a humanised Thatcher. The most interesting part, sadly all but skipped through, is how she went from being laughed at as a woman in a man’s world with no hope of election to being elected as an MP, rising up to become education secretary and finally Prime Minister. This is a fascinating success story that sadly, while represented, is a disjointed series of flashbacks, which seems to me a wasted opportunity. Four major elements of Thatcher’s tenure follow: the contrast between increased wealth for the UK while unemployment also skyrocketed; the breaking of the unions; the conflict in the Falklands with Thatcher’s excellent counter to why we should go to war over land most in the country don’t even care about and which is thousands of miles away – that on those grounds it is just like Hawaii for the US; and the poll tax, perhaps Thatcher’s biggest mistake and here shows as almost a direct cause for her party turning against her.

The very idea of a film about Thatcher struck me as absurd, but the more I thought about it, the more curious I became, and when Streep won the Golden Globe and is now hotly tipped for an Oscar, I knew that it would be a film worth seeing. Personally, I neither loathe Thatcher nor worship her. She was a strong leader at a time the country needed one. The Unions may not have needed breaking, but big changes had to happen and it’s uncertain whether or not they could be implemented any other way. The Falklands were justifiable but certainly more could have been done diplomatically – though it’s very likely without military response Argentina would not have budged. And the poll tax was always utterly absurd.

But Thatcherism is where Britain totally changed, including in the backlash against Britain. As the first scene with Thatcher buying some milk covertly makes plain, Britain today is almost nothing like the Britain Thatcher grew up in, and it’s only the coming decades that can show us whether or not that is for good or ill. Had Thatcher been in power longer, would we have almost no industry today outside pharmaceuticals? Without her, would we have far better exports today and not rely so much on banking? Would immigration and the EU be different? We don’t ask these questions of John Major.

Because I wanted neither an evisceration nor a deification, I don’t mind the presentation of Thatcher’s life. But what I did not like was the bulk of the film being given over to Alzheimer’s – the part that will likely win Streep the Oscar. It’s pure pandering to the Academy and the shadow of Iris is everywhere – after all, Dench really ought to have won the Oscar Halle Berry got in what I still feel was uncomfortably tokenism, and Jim Broadbent, playing a similar role to the one he plays here, won Best Supporting Actor for it. It seems cruel to portray a woman still alive as hallucinating her dead husband all the time, and seemed to me a very simple-minded portrayal of Alzheimer’s. It allowed for strong performances, yes, but for me the balance was all off and I couldn’t help thinking of all those satirical ‘how to win the Oscar’ comics and cartoons.

So yes, I agree with the verdict that this is a mediocre film centred on a strong performance – but perhaps my reasons for finding it mediocre are different from others’. Oh, and I don’t know why Anthony Head seemed to be impersonating not Geoffrey Howe but my Uncle Ray, but it really tickled me.