Jupiter Ascending

Now, I was forewarned. Everyone who had seen this film said it was bad. Really bad. But possible so bad it was enjoyable. I’d say it was indeed terrible enough to be enjoyable in parts, but mostly it sat in the middle of atrocious and mediocre, and thus was not even very fun. And oddly enough, it was when buildings were exploding and spaceships were bursting through planetstorms that the film was dullest.

To get the full disclosure and the name-dropping out of the way, I’ve actually been acquainted with two of the people in this film. I was in Oliver! with Eddie Redmayne – I may have mentioned that once or twice lately – but the film also had a very short cameo/featured extra part for my good schoolfriend Bryony.

And I’m sorry to them both, but I can’t say that there was much to admire here. Actually, Redmayne was clearly having a lot of fun in a very campy, hammy role quite unlike the ones that have been winning him acclaim lately. He’s obviously relishing putting on a silly voice and occasionally bursting into quite absurd fury every so often, but it’s not really a performance that can carry an otherwise drab film.

I’ll always have a certain amount of loyalty to the Wachowskis thanks to The Matrix and how superb it was when it came out. The Matrix was silly, I grant you, borrowed heavily from anime and of course only concluded with sequels not many people admire – but it had two things this film doesn’t. Firstly, cool. This film horribly lacks the cool factor. And secondly, the impression of a genuine menace: the machines of the Matrix and their agents are unoriginal but iconic.

The mistakes of this film are manifold. Its central character – Jupiter Jones – is both absurd and hard to like. Her empowerment story is just a step too far – toilet cleaner to princess of the universe. She also spends almost the entire film as a damsel in distress for Channing Tatum’s character Caine – genetically engineered so he can be semi-literally a lone wolf – to rescue. Their romance is horribly underdeveloped and rings false. And that Caine rushes to the rescue on horribly lame sci-fi flying rollerblades causes quite a bit of inner pain.

The plot is overwrought and overlong. In the sci-fi world of Jupiter Ascending, the Earth exists only as a breeding ground for humans. When it reaches a population the planet cannot sustain, a harvest will be ordered and everyone will be processed into an elixir of life that lets the aristocrats of the universe – who all have English accents, of course – live forever. However, if the exact genes of any aristocrat repeat themselves in any human born anywhere in the universe, they are considered a reincarnation and honoured – these are even factored into the wills of the extremely long-lived elites. And of course, Jupiter is one of these: the ‘recurrence’ of the head of the most powerful family of all. This makes her the true heir to a fortune that includes the planet Earth. Redmayne’s character, the eldest son of this matriarch, wants Jupiter dead, but his siblings have other plans for her, and thus she is passed between the three of them until violence can solve all her problems. And when she is put in a position of incredible power, does she try to shut down the system that so horrified her and dedicate her life to stopping the ridiculous amount of death she now has the influence to affect, where planet after planet is harvested? Nope, only Earth matters, apparently, and she doesn’t even think about the other similar planets that will still be harvested, even if one plant on Jupiter has been destroyed.

There were things I liked in the film. There’s a tribute to Terry Gilliam that is so blatant that they had to get Gilliam himself in for a brilliant cameo to ensure that everyone knew this was an homage rather than a rip-off. But it’s a wonderful little take on bureaucracy that sadly is far above the rest of the film. The absurdity of Caine busting in to stop a fake marriage at the last moment took the high-camp to enjoyable levels. The dynamic of the Russian immigrant family worked well as something peripheral. The costumes were of course wonderful, and the three bounty hunters who kind of represent ideas of ‘ethnic minority badass traits’ in the States admittedly bring some of the coolness that’s deeply lacking elsewhere. I also liked Sean Bean’s grizzled, fallen soldier character, even if he was very much underused. Plus of course the makeup, prosthetics, sets, effects and designs were superb. It was a good-looking film, even if some of the spaceships looked a little clunky.

But the whole thing feels half-baked despite being over-long. What happens to the other siblings in the end? How can Jupiter live knowing the industry is still going on, even if Earth is safe? Surely she’s still a huge target for assassination/ coercion into marriage/business deals? Is Caine able to hang around her as a bodyguard? What about Sean Bean’s daughter? Aren’t there people out for revenge after the head of the most powerful family in the universe is killed?

Limited fun, eye candy and some snatches of (other people’s) brilliance can’t stop this film being anything other than an absurd waste of money – and a very poor echo of the brilliance of The Matrix. 

Ex Machina

While I really liked Alex Garland’s books in school, when The Beach was all the rage, I always felt like he fancied himself a good bit cleverer than anything demonstrated in his writing. That wasn’t a problem in the straightforward, uninventive screenplay for 28 Days Later, with this foray into being writer and director, it was at the centre of why I didn’t like this film very much. It’s had excellent reviews so far – 94% ‘fresh’ on Rotten Tomatoes – but it really says nothing new about A.I. paranoia and sadly remains predictable and ponderous to the end.

It’s a kind of open secret that one of Google’s aims are to create very advanced A.I. That seems to have inspired this story, in which a genius coder behind the world’s premier search engine has created an incredibly advanced robot named Ava. This coder is an enigmatic alcoholic named Nathan, played by Oscar Isaac – soon to appear as Apocalypse in the X-Men films – who for some reason very much reminded me of Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy. He owns a vast research facility and runs a competition to find someone within his company to take part in a kind of modified Turing test – the test being whether the person chosen can over the course of a week decide that Ava is conscious even though she is demonstrably a machine. The one chosen is the bland everyman Caleb, played by Domhnall Gleeson, son of Brendon and Bill Weasley in the Harry Potter films.

The plot thickens as Ava is able to turn the cameras off and talk to Caleb directly. She is clearly an incredibly advanced intelligence, and able to detect lies as well as warn Caleb not to trust Nathan. Nathan, it turns out, has used information harvested from all the world’s internet searches and facial scans from all the world’s webcam calls – and of course selected Caleb based on the information gleaned by that sort of invasion of privacy rather than based on his abilities or at random. Caleb inevitably gets a bit nutty when he starts developing feelings for Ava, discovers that there are a number of previous discarded prototypes and rather unconvincingly gets so paranoid he slices his own arm open to check he’s not another of Nathan’s machines.

Nathan has the most advanced technology in the world available but still uses keycards carried in the pocket to access restricted areas for some reason, which ends up crucial to the plot. While Nathan is drunk, Caleb sets Ava free in a classic cheesy scene of one person thinking they have the other in the palm of their hand but it being the opposite – and I won’t give away the ending, but this is after all Alex Garland.

There were some lovely acting moments, and the CG gives the impression that this is a glorious high-budget film instead of quite a small-scale production with a bare minimum of cast members. But overall this was a pretty soulless and self-important film that gets all its heavy moments from the overdone cliches of the genre. How do we know what intelligence is in another? When can a machine be called sapient? How do we truly know we ourselves are what we think we are? Can a man love a robot? Do androids dream of electric sheep? It’s really nothing very new or inventive, and nor is the plot able to elevate it.

Towards the end, the music is so heavy-handed and the full-frontal female nudity so gratuitous that the whole thing comes over as extremely juvenile. It feels like what a sixth-former would produce given $20 million, thinking himself so very profound. But I seem to be in the minority thinking this. This film lives or dies on whether it impresses. And for me, it fell well short of that. 

Into the Woods

In some ways, the time was ripe for Into the Woods to have a film adaptation. In others, it was perhaps a little early. But as only a passing fan of the musical, I was glad this was made: rather as with superhero films, I consider it an alternate universe that doesn’t infringe on the original. And the darker, more complex, longer Sondheim musical is still around, still very popular and still often revived or performed in the amateur musical world – which is where I was first introduced to it.

So why was it both a good time and the wrong time? Well, this is a good time for Sondheim in general. The Sweeney Todd adaptation was a hit, and the man himself is still around to write new music and drum up publicity. There’s a craze for fantasy and most of the component fairy tales that make up Into the Woods have had recent adaptations or reimaginings, from Jack the Giant Slayer to Tangled. And though I’m sure a few decades from now this will seem a bit of a joke, but there are good enough special effects to make the fantasy scenario impressive and epic-looking.

And why was it a bad time? Well, because cinema isn’t yet ready for the adult connotations that Sondheim highlighted. Disney didn’t want Rapunzel to have children and die, so she rides off with her prince and exits the story feeling like an afterthought – never learning her true parentage or who her brother is, never having to question if her love for her prince is actually based on anything substantial, and subject to a very weird moment where most of her hair is cut off and taken by the Baker’s Wife, yet is just about full-length the next morning. Disney didn’t want the Baker’s Wife to explicitly have an affair, so she is (probably) just kissed a lot before blaming it on the influence of the woods and quickly and almost randomly dying – apparently at the expense of one of the best songs. And the initial casting of Red Riding Hood had to be changed because the child’s parents were uncomfortable with the (well-known) sexual connotations of her story – the way the wolf eyes up her flesh and the lines afterwards about having become experienced in new ways. We would have a better film if the musical made it to the screen intact – a musical that after all skewered the idea of love at first sight and happily-ever-after long before every Disney film tried to do the same.

That said, this remains highly enjoyable and has an excellent cast. Meryl Streep is wonderfully capable of the mixture of understated sarcasm and grand gesture the Witch requires, as well as being able to be more glamorous now post-transformation than she could ever manage in Death Becomes Her. Her exit is a little abrupt and odd, though. Johnny Depp’s short cameo is just right for him, hammy and creepy and smug yet very likeable, and Chris Pine occupies a very similar place – utterly contemptible, pathetic and extremely fun to watch all at once. For the first time ever, I did not hate James Corden, and this straightforward role that doesn’t suggest with every line that he thinks he’s utterly hilarious suits him much better than his usual persona. He does the normal, likeable, friendly, ordinary middle-aged man role very well and should stick with it. Emily Blunt is a great mix of forcefulness and sensible understatement, though it’s sad that there isn’t more exploration of what her infidelity means for her marriage. Frances De La Tour appears once again as a giant woman, and Simon Russell Beale appears for a pleasingly serious and heartfelt cameo – though of course his character lacks the impact or considerable twist of the narrator in the musical.

The kids are great, too. Lilla Crawford is a delightfully precocious and somewhat annoying Red Riding Hood, oddly complimented by her American accent, and while he essentially does the exact same performance he did as Gavroche in Les Misérables, Daniel Huttlestone is very cute as Jack and is basically getting to be everything I wish I could’ve been!

In terms of effects, performance, cinematography, costumes, makeups, editing and effects – as well as music, of course – this is an exemplary film. Like many adaptations from the stage it suffers from sagging in the middle where the interval ought to be, but there’s enough action that the pace is soon brisk again. This is a generally rather beautiful film and a fantasy world that’s extremely enjoyable to look into, grim(m) parts and all. I just would rather none of the grimness had to be stripped away, and for the film to remain what the musical was meant to be – a funny but slightly bitter deconstruction, for a real world of adultery, philandering and even pederasty.

The Theory of Everything

This film wasn’t quite what I hoped it was going to be, but it was still an incredibly impressive tour-de-force of acting, delicate filmmaking and romanticised Britishness.

Aiming for biopic as well as Oscar-friendly study of a degenerative disease, the film is a little light on the science and heavy on possibly the strangest love story I’ve ever seen on screen. And while I’m all for something a little different from the average romantic fare, this particularly messy real-life tangle of broken relationships, infidelity and under-developed second partners left me rather uncomfortable – largely because the film attempted to frame it all as rather admirable, romantic and even beautiful with a final platonic reconciliation. When in fact it was a deeply sad study in love not lasting, falling apart and being unable to withstand challenges. I don’t mind a biopic that shows love going deeply wrong, but I found myself rather resenting the attempts to portray a deeply broken relationship as something natural and ultimately healthy – because greater things than the relationship were part of these lovers’ lives – rather unsettling.

But this is after all a biopic about two people who are still alive and will be watching the film, which is bizarre enough. Popular recently, certainly, with the likes of The Queen and The Special Relationship, but those were focused on professional lives, not a deeply personal relationship. And some reviews, presumably based on familiarity with the source material, claim this film warped the real story for the sake of more palatable drama, which for such an odd love story seems the wrong approach. It’s quite well-known that there was a lot of anger and confrontation when the marriage broke down, which wasn’t conveyed here – and it’s not even made clear that Hawking remarries his sultry nurse.

Which is why the film I would have rather seen would have been much more focused on Hawking as a professional, and how his motor neurone disease affected his work as a physicist. The man is after all most famous for his books for a popular audience. The film has a fair crack at explaining the concept of time beginning at the Big Bang, and Hawking radiation, but I’d much rather it at least mentioned the information paradox and Hawking’s eventual rather unconvincing announcement that it can all be explained by parallel universes. On the other hand, I was grateful that Dennis Sciama – played by David Thewlis – was insistent on underpinning the theorizing with mathematics.

I felt quite privileged at some personal connections with this film – and not just because I have an inkling I was in Oliver! with Eddie Redmayne. I saw Stephen Hawking once or twice in Cambridge outside Emmanuel – or was it Gonville and Caius? And it was fun to see Cambridge looking so pretty, even if it did all have to be that accursed St. John’s.

What really has to be admired here, though, is Redmayne’s towering performance. He was excellent in My Week with Marilyn and likeable in Les Misérables, but this is certainly the role that will define him, and guarantees stardom for many, many years. His performance as Hawking had to be perfect, as if the physical impersonation was anything short of precise it could have looked like mockery. His face suits Hawking’s remarkably well, but nonetheless the close study of his facial tics and ailments was both incredibly hard to pull off and also what was admirable. Redmayne embodies the progression of the disease extremely well, including in loss of speech, and never does the impersonation come across as anything but respectful and sympathetic. There is a certain taboo to an able-bodied actor portraying a man disfigured by a disease with such a physical manifestation, but the sympathetic direction and Redmayne’s superb performance make it work.

It of course overshadows everything else, but Redmayne’s bravura performance doesn’t prevent Felicity Jones’ being very impressive. Her stern yet loving performance and the increasing complexity of Jane Hawking’s feelings are portrayed delicately and without melodrama. Funny thinking back to when she played Ethel in the television adaptation of The Worst Witch. I also actually rather liked her bringing God into not only Hawking’s theories, but his everyday life – even if the pay-off felt excessively like the writer felt he was walking on eggshells and Hawking’s views were rather vague.

Awareness of Motor Neurone is higher than it has ever been, thanks to last year’s Ice Bucket Challenge, but I fancy that this film will show more of the severity of the condition and how difficult it makes lives than a thousand celebrities getting soaked. Even if, as we all know, Hawking has triumphantly defied the disease into old age. 

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

And so the rather absurdly stretched-out film versions of The Hobbit come to an end. It’s probably a little sad that what will be remembered, rather than the huge amount of work that went into making this film spectacular and beautiful, will be the superficial things: the padding and the original characters – including the elf-dwarf love story. The protracted battles with orc leaders. The armoured war-pigs. Actually, I’m not sad about that part. Armoured war-pigs are awesome.

It’s been a very long time since I read The Hobbit, and I must say that the events of this film are what I remember least about the original. I remember very well the trolls turning to stone and the dwarves in barrels and Gollum and Smaug...but really very little about the Battle of the Five Armies. Talking with friends and family and checking summaries, though, it seems that largely, what happens is brief: the ‘nice guy’ armies make their demands, the nasty orcs and goblins show up, Bilbo gets knocked out, and when he wakes up he finds that Thorin is in a bad way and, basically, that Beorn the Bear has sorted everything out.

I can understand the desire to take that and spin it into a much larger battle. Especially in the Peter Jackson universe of huge clashes between armies. I mean, there are five of them! Hard to resist, really. And things are done with clarity: the set-up to dispatch Smaug has all been done and Bard does it with little fuss – yet the town is destroyed. Thorin is changed by reclaiming the mountain, becoming like a dragon: proud and selfish, unwilling to pay his debts. Desolate, now, the people of Lake Town march to the mountain to seek refuge and provisions as promised to them by Thorin, but are met and given provisions by the beautiful elves of the Lake. The elves are there because some of their most valuable treasures were taken by the dragon and they wish to reclaim them. Thorin holes himself and his company up in the mountain, preparing for a siege and offering absolutely nothing, and thus the stage is set for battle.

When it looks like the combined forces of men and elves are just going to storm the handful of dwarves, Thorin’s cousin Dain Ironfoot shows up with a heavily-armed company. The third army! Dain is hot-headed, played with aplomb by Billy Connollly, which was a joy. Before they can clash, though, the orcs under Azog appear through tunnels that come courtesy of some sandworms borrowed from Dune, so huge you would think they would have been better off coming up under the armies and causing some damage rather than just making transportation easier.

Anyway, because the orcs decided to appear just then rather than waiting for the other armies to destroy one another as would have been sensible, everyone turns on them. The orcs decide that rather than concentrating all their forces on the armed threat, they’ll draw the men and elves thin by going after the women and children sheltering in the abandoned city of Dale. Thorin finally comes to himself and joins the battle, rallying the ailing dwarves, and then goes after Azog.

Of course, this is all a trap and another orc army is on the way to mop up the remnants. Also, taking out Azog is apparently not that effective anyway, because the armies carry on perfectly normally without him giving commands as he gets distracted by one-on-one fights. As for Beorn? Well, he may not play quite such a role and only gets about 4 seconds of screen time, but effectively he and the eagles are still instrumental. Does this last part seem a bit contrived? Well, yes, but it also makes sense of Azog and co not exactly employing the best strategies.

Ultimately, though, this film is about the joy of all-out action and spectacle. If shouldn’t be treated as intelligent, even by the scale of the main LOTR trilogy. It is straightforward, joyful fun. And I got something of a thrill from watching Christopher Lee kicking some butt and Galadriel getting some pretty excessive powers – but which came with the kind of spectacle I was hoping we’d get with Gandalf vs Saruman in the first film, instead of old man dance-off.

The Hobbit was never enough material for three substantial films, but I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed the ponderous, rather insubstantial ones we got. And Bilbo remains rather more likeable than Frodo ever was...

Rembrandt: The Late Works at the National Gallery

I enjoyed the Rembrandt exhibition quite a lot more than I expected to. I like Rembrandt quite a lot as a technician, and admire his phenomenal technique and subtlety, and the only reason I don’t count him as amongst my favourite painters is that I don’t tend to connect emotionally with his subject matter. He had a very painful life, losing his wife and son before his own death and struggling badly towards the end with money and falling out of fashion, and his major themes are the aging of the patriarch, the contemplation of death and inner turmoil. Very seldom does he engage with youth, though one of the highlights of this exhibition was the juxtaposition of a sweet daydreaming picture of his son with a rather stunning painting of an older woman in a hood with a book.  

And in fact, this exhibition really tied his work together better than I’d seen it before. In conjunction with the newly-reopened Rijksmuseum, which lent some major pictures, as well as pieces from the States, from Sweden, from the Louvre and numerous etchings and sketches from the Ashmolean and the Fitzwilliam. Thus it was possible to arrange the gallery into strong themes: the famous self-portraits first and foremost, but then interesting thematic groups like experimenting with light, pushing softly against boundaries and dealing with his personal demons. The arrangement did very well at framing the narrative of his life, using less significant pieces to inform the more impressive ones nearby, and there were some stunning pieces beyond those self-portraits, including the National’s prized portrait of a husband and wife where the wife is clearly the empowered one, a fascinating depiction of Alexander the Great and a large equestrian portrait – though while the figure in it was excellent, it must be said that Rembrandt probably avoided equestrian portraits for a reason, and his horse was not very convincing. Similarly, for such a consummate master of faces and poses, I do think he has an odd problem with making forearms look very short – for which foreshortening does not adequately compensate. And his depiction of Joseph accused by Potiphar’s wife was bizarrely dreadful in terms of conveying emotion and drama compared with his other far more subtle and believable paintings. In fact, it seems there’s another version by ‘an assistant’ in Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art with Joseph looking penitent rather than like a drama queen.

But that aside, the gallery was well-designed, informative, clever in terms of its flow and really highlighted Rembrandt’s genius. I like artists who work within the boundaries of the prevailing fashions yet push things in small, subtle but innovative ways, which Rembrandt certainly did. And very few artists can match his ability to evoke textures and the play of light in clever, sparing brushstrokes. It is a real joy when his brushstrokes seem so disassociated and oddly-chosen up close when viewed from a distance perfectly represent the back of an old man’s hand or the gleam on a suit of armour. That shows the genuine genius of an old master, and I have nothing but admiration for his skills. 

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1

I didn’t care for the previous Hunger Games films – or, indeed, the novels. I didn’t like Katniss or Peeta, and disliked how the first film took all the easiest options and never explored the genuinely interesting dilemmas it hinted at. The second film very much annoyed me for almost completely repeating the first film, only with less emotionally interesting things in it. The contents of the first film could essentially have been a prologue, and this film was where it could have quickly gone.

And I have to say, this was a much better film than its predecessors. It had big problems, mostly down to following the trend of splitting final films in big female-fandom franchises into two and thus having pacing and narrative issues, but it was much more interesting in general. No more stupid game. No more pretence that this ridiculously evil dictatorship could actually suppress the proletariat. 

This is classic good vs evil as the rebels in the militarised District 13 – thought to have been destroyed - have Katniss. But the Capitol have Peeta. First the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character has to convince Katniss to take part in his propaganda – and it takes indirectly causing the deaths of dozens to spur her into action – but she is soon firing up the masses. This leads to impressive scenes of terrorist attacks on the government – but it’s all good because we know the government is evil so this time terrorism is what we support. The action is kept nice and fast, there are some genuinely funny moments and the angle that Peeta is being used against Katniss – while she is convinced he’s being tortured – provides some interesting depth. The love triangle with Gale is also interesting, though it’s very, very obvious he’s going to have to be killed off because Collins always solves her dilemmas the easy way.

The problem is that the last act is very slow. There’s a protracted attack on the underground bunker, which is meant to be tense but is just boring. Then all power in the Capitol goes down because one dam is destroyed by a random force of rebels, and instead of using the chance to invade, break down the borders or neutralising as many enemy military targets as possible, the rebels use this time to extract Peeta. It leads to the big cliffhanger, and does make sense in narrative terms even if also attacking other targets seems like common sense, but it’s done too slowly, and attempts to seem grown-up by hinting that Snow pimps out his Hunger Games winners (ooh the decadence) ring hollow.

But there are none of the huge glaring problems I had with the previous films, and it’s settled into a much more interesting classic battle against an evil dictatorship. Katniss will never be likeable...but the next film may still be interesting.