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.