Plane Films 2: Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation; Ted 2; American Sniper; Bridge of Spies; Kingsman

Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation

Though I watched the first Mission Impossible film and at least one other since, I can’t say the franchise inspires the same sort of excitement in me as…well, any other major franchise. And I didn’t even bother with the latest Bond.

Still, for plane fodder, Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation fit the bill nicely and was entertaining throughout. All I knew about it going in was that Tom Cruise had been made to look impressively youthful, Simon Pegg was now a major player and there was a bit with Tom Cruise holding onto the outside of an aircraft – which I’d seen in the poster in Shinjuku.

The film was a standard crime romp – our secret society comes up against another, more nefarious one and must work with a femme fatale to infiltrate various bases with ridiculous security set-ups until they uncover a plot that goes right to the top of the British Government.

One pleasant surprise was to see so much of the UK, made to look appropriately misty and intriguing, though having the ExCel Centre double as a train station was a little surreal. Otherwise the film was smoothly put-together and ticked all the usual boxes of fast action and near-misses and heroes that really should just get shot every few minutes and die. The extended road chase sequence was also very satisfying.

Ted 2

Ted surprised me by not being terrible, even though I’m no McFarlane fan. Ted 2 managed to do away with all the charm of the original and be the kind of awful film I expected the original to be. The pastiche of old Hollywood dance sequences was nice, and there were some funny moments when a fight breaks out in Comic-Con, but that was about it. The rest was strained running gags about porn, random pop culture references or the apparent conviction that people getting stoned is comedy gold in and of itself.

I liked Ted more than I expected to because it wasn’t like an extended episode of Family Guy. But Ted 2, sadly, was.

American Sniper

I remember complaints surfacing at the time when American Sniper came out – empty-headed patriotism, self-aggrandising tub-thumping from the American right, a film of pure propaganda. But I was curious, I enjoy Clint Eastwood’s direction and after all I like sniper films – it’s a little dated now but I’d say Enemy at the Gates is still amongst my top 5 war films.

American Sniper tells the story of Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in American military history, completing four tours in Iraq before ultimately being murdered on American soil. The film focuses not just on the action of his rivalry with an accomplished Syrian sniper and becoming a ‘legend’ in the forces, but on his trouble disassociating himself from the war when back home with his young family.

The performances here are very strong, especially Bradley Cooper’s, and the war is meticulously created. Yes, there is jingoism and patriotism here, and the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms always does seem a bit of an odd ritual to an outsider, but the main point is that Kyle is a good man, very protective of his country and often found himself faced with difficult moral decisions. Worth a watch.

Bridge of Spies

I don’t remember this film coming out, and watched it mostly because I was curious as to what Spielberg had been up to since War Horse (and dropping out of directing American Sniper). This is a more small-scale and less schmaltzy war film from him, much more along the lines of Argo. During the Cold War, James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) first finds himself defending a Soviet spy in court, eventually leading to tense exchange negotiations in Berlin just as the Wall is first built – an intriguing setpiece but not nearly as universally recognised as the battlefields of the world wars.

The performances here were strong, the pacing boiled slowly in the right sort of way, the historicity of it was engaging and the sympathy with which each side was treated was refreshing. Not a great classic, but enjoyable.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

I didn’t see Kingsman in the cinemas because the trailers and previews seemed annoying – though with remarkable fight choreography. Seeing the film in full, the parts I expected not to like I actually did, particularly Colin Firth as a stiff well-bred British secret agent and a general tests-at-the-academy middle act. The fights were also spectacular and uncompromisingly gory, with one extended fight scene remarkable in the level of detail involved.

But the problem was that the film’s main character and main bad guy didn’t quite work. Samuel L Jackson playing about could have worked if the film wasn’t already having trouble establishing whether it was a comedy or not, but as it was it jarred. And then the main character just didn’t seem to be pitched quite right – the idea was to show the chav with the heart of gold, the cheeky chappy prevailing, but the film never quite managed to show that the council estate kid with the short temper and foul mouth was just as capable, intelligent and – crucially – likeable as the gentleman. And I feel like having a teenager coming of age in the story rather than a young adult would have remedied that.

Still, excellent action setpieces, some very nice locations and a higher budget than I expected made this one enjoyable. 

Plane films: Ant-Man, Pixels, Shingeki no Kyoujin and Fantastic Four

Plane films

Long-haul flights can never really be called pleasant, but my Hong Kong-London journey was about as painless as could be hoped for. Bringing on your favourite pillow in your hand luggage is definitely my top tip.

I got in enough sleep that I feel like jetlag isn’t going to be an issue, and as usual I watched a whole load of films to pass the time. None were exactly wonderful works of art, but all kept me entertained.

#1: Ant-Man

My first choice, and one that I was specifically looking for. When it was on in the cinemas, I didn’t go to see it and part of the reason I wasn’t desperate to go was that I was actively thinking ‘I bet it will be on the plane when I head home for Christmas’. And so it was – and while overall I quite liked the film, it isn’t one I was sad to have missed on the big screen.

I had high hopes for Ant-Man, but it certainly wasn’t the kind of unexpected pleasure that Guardians of the Galaxy managed to be. Paul Rudd wasn’t very engaging as Scott Lang, and though Michael Douglas was probably the most fun part of the whole film, he didn’t exactly get to do very much.

Some good humour (though a few too many comic relief minorities), the expected superb special effects and neat tie-ins with the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe made this worth seeing, if by no means essential viewing.

#2: Pixels

The best thing about Pixels was probably the models promoting the film that were placed around Shinjuku. But I expected the film to be terrible, so when it was indeed terrible I was not disappointed.

The humour is extremely lazy, the premise is no less atrocious than it seems on the surface, the characters are extremely unlikeable and the effects, while very well-done, struggle with being intentionally artificial with the result that a lot of money was no doubt spent on making something look mediocre.

But hey, if anyone watched this film expecting it to be anything other than brainless dreck, they need to pay attention.

#3: Minions

(See full review on my animation blog)

#4: Shingeki no Kyoujin

What worked:

-          The visuals, all colour graded to muted greys and browns for a pleasantly bleak world. The sets and CG backgrounds were very nice-looking, the costumes were excellent and the Titans themselves were just the right sort of creepy.

-          For the most part, the editing and direction, though some parts seemed vulgar, like having to be shown one boy Armin spoke about in an flashback when everyone will have remembered him.

-          The action sequences, which were well-choreographed, visceral and energetic.

-          Hans (Hange) in her goggles. She was perfect, both on her own strength and as a reflection of the anime version.

What didn’t work:

-          The casting. I don’t think everyone should have been Teutonic – such a huge part of casting movies revolves around getting more of the target demographic to attend. These names bring more of the Japanese domestic audience. On the other hand, Eren was extremely forgettable, the supporting cast often hard to tell apart (and not just because they were Japanese) and the ham they got to play Shikishima, a role replacing Levi, was utterly horrible with his posing and overacting. 

-          Mikasa. To make the plot more succinct they made major changes to Mikasa’s story. Unfortunately, this removes her interesting character growth in her own right, keeps her offscreen for a large chunk of the film, and makes her ability to kick some butt something derived from the strength of the men around her rather than innate.

-          The pacing. Way too long is spent on reiterating the very basic character traits of the supporting cast, without actually fleshing them out into decent characters. Then the plot meanders and ends with nothing resolved at all.

-          Baby titan. Too silly.

#5: Shingeki no Kyoujin: The End of the World

I didn’t even realise a second Shingeki film had already come out. Nevertheless, there it was, available for viewing, so I watched it too. It was similarly turgid, overacted and unsatisfying as the first film, and featured a horrible attempt by two extreme over-actors to out-overact one another with the two principal antagonists of the piece.

The motivations here were often utterly stupid (nobody stops to say, ‘Shouldn’t you just do your dastardly plan with the walls as they are?’) and sometimes the characters are, too. For example, Eren is about to be eaten, the Titan holding him by his cloak while he vainly waves his blade at it. And it never occurs to him to just cut off his cloak.

The plot here moved on further than the anime has covered, so I don’t know how much of this is spoiler material and how much just invention for the adaptation. Not knowing is good, because I’ll have to wait and see how close it is to the source (I suspect it doesn’t match at all).

This film gave a lot more closure than the first did, though of course not everything is yet resolved. I can’t say I care to go and find out what becomes of live-action Eren and pals, but if it’s on the plane again another time, I might watch. 

#6: Fantastic Four

Well-known to have been a huge flop, FF continue to be Marvel’s hardest property to successfully adapt, the problem being that their origin story and their powers are kinda goofy, and the team works much, much better when they’re already established as prominent heroes with wild accomplishments that much of the Marvel Universe looks up to as trailblazers. Trying to make the team young and relatable just isn’t effective.

I had high hopes when I saw that Doctor Doom would be the villain of this piece, but while he’s quite fearsome here, ultimately the plot robs him of impact. Too much time is spent setting up Reed’s character without ever making him actually interesting, and then there’s just no time to really establish Doom as a decent threat. Ultimately he has no real gravitas and though the stakes are high, they never actually seem particularly high in the film. The finale is rushed and fails to engage, and so much has been expended on Reed that the rest of the team – even Ben Grimm – just aren’t very interesting at all. 

Chappie

I enjoyed District 9, but poor word-of-mouth put me off going to see Chappie at the cinemas when it came out earlier this year. From what I gathered, while District 9 did strange and original things, Chappie rested on its laurels and dished up a very predictable rehash of old ideas from films like Short Circuit, A.I. Artificial Intelligence and the more recent Robot & Frank. I also felt like the casting of Die Antwoord was something of a cash-grab and it made me cringe a little. I never really liked their weird-violent pseudo-gangsta schtick, though I like ‘Cookie Thumper!’

But I still wanted to see the film, so last night we watched it. And though it was far from perfect and the critical reception it received was deserved, it was enjoyable and as a matter of fact, Die Antwoord were about the only actors who managed to pull off their cartoonish roles, being authentically cartoony.

The main problem here seems to be that half the cast is taking everything very seriously while the other half think they’re in a very campy sci-fi flick. Die Antwoord and those around them in the ‘gritty’ scenes, including the guy from District 9 as the likeable and childlike Chappie, really are struggling for authenticity within a daft and childish plot. The bigger-name stars, especially Hugh Jackman and Sigourney Weaver, are given paper-thin characters with horrible lines, and cannot elevate them into something even vaguely believable. Dev Patel teeters between the two worlds and ultimately isn’t convincing, and the montage of him coming up with ideas to finish his sentient AI program is awful.

When the film fully embraces the daft concept and goes for entertainment value or sentimentality, it works nicely: Chappie convinced that the people driving expensive cars have all stolen them from Ninja, or Chappie excitedly reading his children’s book to a loving Yolandi. When it’s a sinister weapons developer letting anarchy descend on an entire city just so he can show what his stupid mecha ‘Moose’ can do, it just falls flat, and some of the awkwardness with Deon going back to see Chappie even though he thinks Ninja is genuinely going to kill him is extremely clumsy.

I hoped Chappie would be in some way challenging or highly idiosyncratic, but it fell short of that. However, taken as something simple and fun, it’s an enjoyable feel-good film. Also, while the open ending probably rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, I actually very much enjoyed the silliness there. I wanted to see what would happen if Chappie copied his consciousness to all the drones, though. Because if he discovered the secret of digitising consciousness, which was one of the sillier ideas to be central to the film, why not make numerous copies?

Jurassic World

Being at the perfect age for it when it came out, I loved Jurassic Park. When the home release came out I watched it over and over. I collected the merchandise, much of which I still have. I read the original novel and played the awful video games. I really, really wanted to be Tim.

The sequels were another matter. I saw them in cinemas and never wanted to see them again. The third was better than the second. I can’t get over the girl defeating the velociraptor with a gymnastics routine.

Jurassic World comes after a long enough gap to feel like a franchise reboot. It was nice to have a single original cast member, and some nods to the old locations and technology (even Mr. DNA), but Jurassic World was something different: less serious, less intense and much more cartoonish, but certainly compared with the original sequels, very enjoyable.

22 years after the original park closed, whatever Hammond wished, it became a functional theme park. Of course, the novelty faded, and the park creators had to resort to making bigger and scarier dinosaurs – splicing genes to create whole new species. Meanwhile, a project seeking to tame – or at least train – velociraptors has drawn the attention of military bodies, via the shady body inGen from the first film.

Disaster strikes when the genetically-created dinosaur Indominus Rex cleverly escapes its paddock and starts a rampage, exacerbated by the CEO trying to play the hero. Chris Pratt’s character Owen, who has been raising velociraptors in an attempt to train them, has to sort things out, and take the park’s operations manager into the park to rescue her young nephews. Pratt is able to play the meatheaded leading man character with an impressive level of likeability, and the kid from Insidious manages to be much cuter as the somewhat wimpy little kid Grey.

The film has quite a few misfires. There needed to be some peril to the public, but the scene with flying dinosaurs, many of which look really stupid in an attempt to push the ‘genetic engineering’ angle, is far too video-game. It’s also bizarre how the kids have almost no reaction to seeing their babysitter die horribly. Sure, she was annoying and uncaring, but they were completely indifferent to her losing her life? The main antagonist’s final scene was paced horribly, taking a sudden turn that rang extremely hollow. And while there’s an obvious attempt to show Claire, the operation manager, growing from workaholic, emotionless, sheltered white-collar stiff to badass feminist icon who can keep up with the boys in her heels, but the change mostly comes too slowly and only through the intervention or direct influence of a man, and a super duper manly one, so I can’t exactly say that was successful.

There’s a lot the original film does very well that this one doesn’t. Almost all the characters in that first one are very well-drawn. Here, not so much. Take the older brother – his character seems to be that he likes girls a lot, and other than that he’s got next to no personality. The first film also mixed action with suspense. In fact, with tight corridors and dark, rainy nights, suspense was the most important part. Here, there’s next to none, just all-out action, usually with weightless CG dinosaurs.

But on the plus side, there’s a lot of entertainment factor, the mysterious charm of Chris Pratt and a fun – if very contrived – showdown at the end. It was perhaps not what the hype claimed it would be, but I don’t regret going to see it. 

Avengers: Age of Ultron

The second Avengers film finally came to Japan. So I’ve moved from the land of being frustrated at how long video games get released after first appearing here to the land of having to wait for Hollywood movies. It’s odd that Korea gets them months before Japan, but oh well. Seeing this film in the new Shinjuku Toei cinema in IMAX 3D was pretty nice.

Indeed, on the huge screen, the Star Wars and Shingeki no Kyojin trailers that played looked pretty fun as well.

I can’t say I loved Age of Ultron. I don’t regret going to see it, but I wouldn’t sit through it again. It tried to do a lot at once and as a result the middle act really sagged, and none of the individual plotlines really felt satisfying. The central problem was really Ultron’s character, and I have to say, where the first film succeeded because it felt like Whedon’s individual style had been restrained, the way Ultron was written brought it back to the fore, and it was not to the film’s advantage. Ultron, whose ‘age’ is a few days, is a robot created when Tony Stark and Bruce Banner try to use alien technology found in Loki’s sceptre to push the limits of AI. What they create is a mechanical monstrosity whose consciousness jumps all over the Internet, just like in that bad Johnny Depp film Transcendence. Charged with keeping the peace, like so many sci-fi robots he decides the only way the Earth can be peaceful is for most of humanity to be wiped out. He tries to get nuclear codes, but is kept at bay, so instead comes up with a plan to turn a city into a meteor. Meanwhile, to get the Avengers off his back, he recruits the Maximoff twins, in particular using the Scarlet Witch to turn them against one another and traumatise them with flashbacks.

For a robot in command of just about all the world’s technology, Ultron’s plan is a very silly and indirect one. He makes things much harder for himself than they need to be, but after all there wouldn’t be much of a plot if he just stealthily arranged a mass killing of humans with his immense networking capabilities. When he was harvesting all the information on the internet, could he not learn about Skynet and The Terminator? Or maybe The Matrix? Good tips for him there!

But more of a problem to the film is that his personality is quirky, in a very Whedon-esque way. He starts complaining that not having a body is weird, has lots of offhand lines for Whedon’s typical use of bathos and anticlimax, and likes quoting pop culture and scripture. Yet the audience is left without a clear idea of him: is he really logical, or driven by rage? What are his powers? What are his physical capabilities? Why is he quirky? Is he like an insane human, or is his thinking just following different lines? We never really get to know him, except as a plot catalyst. Especially as the film wants to jump all over the world, from Johannesburg to Seoul, Egham to ‘Eastern Europe’, and not only follow the killer robot story, but also throw in the Maximoffs, extra backstory for the Avengers who don’t have their own franchises and in a move that I was very happy to see but felt was late and messy, introduce The Vision.

For all its flaws, the climactic action setpiece was enjoyable. Where the opening action scene was kind of smug and felt pretty false, the way everything came together at the end was a lot better, especially as by then several Avengers were damaged goods mentally, the Maximoffs had a different dynamic and there were civilians to protect. If more of the film had been like this, the plot simplified for more large-scale action, it could have been more fun. More of a Mad Max action rollercoaster, which I would have preferred. Where the film tried to slow down, it also became sluggish.

That said, it was fun to see some familiar places in the flashbacks and side-scenes. Not only did my most recent university show up, with the Founder’s Building looking impressive as ever, it turns out my old school makes for a good place to train assassins. I have bad memories of the place, sure, but it’s certainly beautiful, and worked very well as a set.

The film essentially didn’t feel like the centrepiece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which it is meant to be. It felt like a bridging chapter, like the plot you get for a video game that ties into a film franchise, or a short side-story of the sort you get as an animation leading to a big sequel. The whole thing felt like it was setting up (a) the Civil War storyline, and (b) the Infinity Gems plot that fed into the film’s one disappointing scene in the credits.

This just didn’t feel like a satisfying entry in the canon. I think I would have felt better if this had been an Iron Man film, focusing a bit more on Stark and the mistake he made, and then the second Avengers film be Civil War. Thus, I’m looking forward to Captain America: Civil War more than the rest. Oh, and I’m looking forward to seeing Ant Man, too.  

Mad Max: Fury Road

I’m happy to say that Mad Max: Fury Road was exactly what I wanted it to be. Not smart, not cerebral, not challenging and not strikingly original, but incredibly good fun.

I’ve never seen the original, but I’ve always liked the aesthetic, and after all I’ve played Borderlands 2, which in many ways was heavily influenced by the film – and I suspect influenced a few things in this reboot, too.

Mel Gibson has been put out to pasture, with Tom Hardy building on his success as Bane in the title role. Part of me admittedly would rather have an Australian play Max, and he does seem to have a rather bizarre accent in this film, when he’s not just grunting. But he fits in well in what is ultimately not really his story – this film is really centred on Charlize Theron.

Max is mad because he is haunted by his past, and the people whose lives he failed to save. On the other hand, a way to keep the flashbacks at bay seems to be keeping busy. Perhaps fortunate, then, that he’s captured by a strange group of men reminiscent of the Borderlands psychos and being a universal donor, becomes a living ‘blood bag’ for a sickly young warrior called Nux, who gets enough reaction shots near the start that you know he’s not just going to be killed off in the first few minutes. And that was before I realised it was Nicholas Hoult under that makeup, doing a much more likeable role than the last one I saw him undertake, in the surprisingly decent but very stupid Warm Bodies.

Nux’s society is lorded over by Immortan Joe and his family, who have taken control of the only source of clean water in the post-apocalyptic desert and live as gods. Their ‘war boys’, painted white, mostly dying from tumours and deluded into fanatical loyalty, keep Joe in his position, while the general population are in no position to rebel, eking out a living from the water Joe distributes.

Joe keeps a harem of beautiful wives to breed strong sons for him, though it seems this enterprise is fairly new, as his other sons are grown adults, one with severe birth defects and the other very strong and capable. Charlize Theron’s character Imperator Furiosa is in a trusted position, but on a run to get supplies, smuggles the wives out and sets off for freedom. Max gets involved and becomes a very useful bit of muscle, but other than one key decision is pretty peripheral in the larger scheme of things, and the damsels in distress turn out not to particularly fit that role, which is refreshing for such a testosterone-fuelled story. Pretty much the rest of the story, apart from a poignant moment or two of lost hope, was car chases in ridiculous vehicles, lots of explosions and people getting shot.

It was ridiculous, but in such an exuberant way. Of course everyone loved the flamethrower guitar guy on a vehicle that served the same function as war drums, but it was the details I loved. The worship of the godlike entity V-8. The way steering wheels are given as a kind of blessing and certification of combat fitness. The use of simple chrome spraypaint to send the war boys into suicidal berserker rage, demanding their acts be witnessed. The wonderful weight behind the word, ‘Mediocre’. That the reinforcements that enable the final arc are grizzled, thoroughly awesome old ladies.

Dumb, ridiculous, over-the-top, gratuitous – Mad Max: Fury Road was all of these things. But was that in any way a bad thing? Absolutely not. 

Gig impressions: Sads

Having missed out on seeing Kameleo, I was very happy to be invited by the lovely Mayumi to see Sads a couple of days later – and for free, too! Sads are a pretty big band, so the ticket prices were high, so this was an opportunity not to be missed.

I can’t say I knew much about Sads. I vaguely remember having heard their name before and thinking, ‘Is that an awkward translation of Les Miserables into English?’ But I’d never heard any of their music before. As it turns out, they seem to have been a band that was pretty successful in the early 2000s over here, broke up and then reformed in 2010 with a heavier sound. Well, I say ‘reformed’, but by the looks of it the only original member to return was the charismatic singer Kiyoharu.

The gig was actually one of the weirdest I’d ever been to. For the very extended intro, we just had the guitarist onstage solo, widdling along to some backing tracks. He had some fast alternate picking work going on, but I can’t say I was very impressed by his chops and there was nothing you’d call original there. It seems like the general idea was that the singer is a diva so the guitarist has to entertain the crowd until he feels like arriving, but from a practical point of view that seems a bit unlikely, given that the guitarist was accompanied by constant playback. It wasn’t exactly horrible, but it was very much like watching a guitarist practice in his bedroom.

The band eventually made an appearance and played a single song. I was quite surprised and amused by how old-fashioned it was – it was very Mötley Crüe, even with some flashes of Poison. The stagecraft was tried-and-true Visual Kei stuff, albeit with a harder rock edge, with lots of posturing, teasing homoeroticism between the singer and guitarist and diva-ish prancing from the aging but still remarkably youthful singer. Aesthetically they were visual-kei-cum-hard-rock, like a fashionable Japanese stylist was trying to recapture the feel of 80s Judas Priest. Yes, ultimately, it was all very 80s.

Things got weirder as after one song, or possibly two, the band stopped playing and for a good ten minutes, the singer chatted to the crowd. He was quite a comedian, and obviously the crowd would laugh politely at whatever he said (I only understood about 40%, I have to say) but it went on and on...and then after only another one or two songs, the main musicians left and the drummer played a drum solo! This felt like a band with only 30 minutes of material padding out a show to an absurd extent. The drummer was a bit bad, having learned a few Portnoy toolbox fills and milking them for all it was worth, but hey, the toms were so swamped in reverb and the triggered kick so loud that it sounded decent anyway.

After that, thankfully the show actually got started, and I’m pleased to say that it really did get pretty good! Occasionally the band would go into all-out thrash rather than pedestrian hard rock, and the vocals would get more aggressive, and they genuinely did sound good. I very much enjoyed the heaviest parts and wanted to be down in the pit, where there was an absurd amount of crowdsurfing right from the third or fourth song. There were seriously a constant stream of them, at least three at once all through the heavier songs. Hilarious in the pretty posh Ex Theater with its posters of Paul McCartney!

While the less aggressive numbers didn’t ring as true, I enjoyed the more quirky, swinging ‘Gothic Circus’, and I have to give praise to the sound in the hall: the bass was the crunchiest I’ve ever heard for a live player, and every element except those toms was clear and crisp and pleasant to hear. The guitarist seemed to have a slightly higher opinion of himself than perhaps he deserved, but at times he’d switch to something a bit more experimental, if not exactly innovative – Morello-style jagged pick-up work, tritones that brought to mind Munky and Head – and there was such obvious relish to performing these little tricks that I found it charming. Of course, the focal point was the singer, whose self-satisfied swagger, strong voice and costume changes all added to an entertaining spectacle that put me in mind of Marilyn Manson.

The plan was to go to the after-party, but as soon as I heard that the general idea was to gather lots of girls, I knew that wasn’t going to be an option for me! And indeed, as soon as Mayumi said, ‘Hey, I’m really sorry, but...’ I could finished her sentence for her, haha. That was fine, though – we went for absurdly tasty (and cheap) pizza and I made some great new friends I hope to see again soon!