text:
The film's shallow yet rapid-fire plot has Batman (Ben Affleck) and Diana "nobody calls her Wonder Woman" Prince (Gal Gadot) assembling a team of metahumans to combat Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds), a galactic warlord whose entire character can be summed up with "Because Evil." He's hunting for some mystical MacGuffins — which are definitely not Infinity Stones — that will cause the end of the world or something. Joining Bats and Diana are super-speedster The Flash (Ezra Miller), underwater barbarian Aquaman (Jason Mamoa) and a cyborg known as…well, Cyborg (Ray Fisher).
Big damn heroes.
It's hard to take any of the plot too seriously considering how weightless and simplistic the film is, but that's not entirely a bad thing. It's not a good thing, but it isn't entirely bad, either. On the one hand, Justice League avoids the density and metaphorical posturing that dragged down Man of Steel and Batman V Superman. It's often genuinely entertaining and suitably super-heroic. On the other, it means that the armageddon-from-space that Steppenwolf represents seems like an empty threat with no real consequences.
In many ways, Justice League is a film doing battle with itself. Director Zack Snyder stepped down during post-production, turning the reins over to Joss Whedon, who gets a co-writing credit alongside Chris Terrio. Whedon was at the helm for some studio-mandated re-shoots, and while he mimics Snyder's visual style as much as possible, it's still clear which parts he's most responsible for.
Quick, to the Whedon singal!
The film ricochets back and forth between confusing, monochromatic fight sequences and tight, snappy team-building scenes with such speed and force that it threatens to break the sound barrier. Whedon's influence is apparent during the latter, most clearly mimicking the inter-hero dynamics that helped make his Avengers films successful. Snyder, however, was clearly the driving force behind the film's action sequences, rife with his usual unimaginative choreography, shoddy effects work, and quick-cut editing. The end result makes the film feel less like a comic book adaptation and more like a video game with some killer cut scenes. (Wonder Woman repeatedly does her "clash bracers get big bada boom" trick like someone's inputting quarter-circle-forward + punch.)
Like the previous DC films however, its greatest strength is its characters, and despite their mixed record on its overall output, DC has always had its casting game on point. Ben Affleck continues to impress as Batman, and Gal Gadot is as magnetic as ever as Diana. Both play off of each other well, and both are clearly committed to their roles. The new characters integrate well into the vibe Affleck and Godot have established, each one adding a new facet to the cast dynamic that serves to strengthen the overall story. Jason Mamoa is effortlessly charismatic as Aquaman, playing him as a hard-drinking, gold-hearted drifter. Ray Fisher is both strong and sympathetic as Cyborg, transcending the character's flat and underwritten modern-Frankenstein backstory.
Serving tattooed bodybuilder merman realness.
The film's breakout star, however, is Ezra Miller as The Flash. Genuinely funny and endearingly sincere, Miller's Flash is a wide-eyed fanboy, giddy at the prospect of sharing space with the world's greatest heroes. The Flash's quirky, semi-metatextual humor and love of pop culture references are classic, Buffy-era Whedon, and rarely has that style been more welcome than it is here. Miller has excellent chemistry with literally everybody in the film, especially Affleck and Fisher, and his scenes with Billy Crudup (playing The Flash's father) have more dramatic weight to them than anything else in the narrative.
The need for speed.
Less excellent, however, is the film's central story and its accompanying villain, both of which are painfully generic. Steppenwolf comes off as a refugee from a forgotten PlayStation 3 title, and while Ciarán Hinds gets the voice right, the script never comes up with anything interesting for him to say beyond standard villain-speak. He may be strong enough to take on the Justice League single-handed, but he's ultimately a weak and very dull Big Bad. That his CGI is nowhere near up to par for a film of this scope doesn't help matters in the slightest, even if he's a huge step forward from BvS's Doomsday.
The artificial look of Steppenwolf and his army of "parademons" robs the central conflict of any real-world danger. The film tries to remedy this by constantly cutting to a nameless Russian family in peril near Steppenwolf's lair, but that goes-nowhere micro-plot only highlights the lack of drama. Whereas Whedon's The Avengers showed an alien invasion in the heart of New York City, with countless lives in the very immediate balance, Justice League prefers to set its climax in the Middle of Nowhere. It's very hard to care about the possible end of the world when you can't see how much world there is to save.
Apocalypse not.
There's a glimmer of hope in Justice League that the DCEU is slowly making its way toward a more colorful, more consistent level of quality. But that's almost undone by Snyder's signature visual noise; the film is half composed of shots that look amazing in a trailer but not so much in the context of a broader work. While it makes a clear effort to please the fans and the studio at the same time, it ultimately defaults to siding with the latter, and the film is worse off for it. This isn't quite the film that does justice to its heroic cast, but it also gives the audience hope that maybe next time, they'll get it completely right. After all, you can't keep heroes like these down for long.
FBOTU Score: 5 out of 10 / C
For the first two acts, it appears that the most self-serious part of the MCU is going to buck the trend, as well. The film starts with Thor (Chris Hemsworth) seemingly addressing the audience in a highly uncharacteristic bending (but not breaking) of the fourth wall. A few scenes later, Thor's hammer/crutch is broken by Hela (Cate Blanchette), the self-proclaimed goddess of death (and Thor's previously-unmentioned older sister). While Hela sets off to conquer Asgard, Thor ends up in Sakaar, a world literally made up of discarded garbage from other planets. There, Thor is easily captured by a mysterious warrior woman (Tessa Thompson) and sold as a gladiatorial slave to the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum, essentially playing himself). His first opponent just happens to be the mean, green Incredible Hulk (Marc Ruffalo).
Thor V. Hulk: Dawn of Smash.
If all of that sounds out of place for a Thor film, don't worry. It is. And that's what makes the majority of Ragnarok feel fresh and new. And if that sounds like something you don't want in a Thor film, don't worry. The third act is pure, processed Marvel Formula from start to finish. See? Something for everybody.
New Zealand director Taika Waititi might seem like an odd choice to helm a $180 million superhero film, given that he's mostly known for quirky and quietly humorous independent films. But like how Patty Jenkins spun her indie-drama skills into superhero gold for Wonder Woman, Thor: Ragnarok is a great example of what can happen when the right director is suddenly given a (mostly) unlimited canvas. Like Jenkins, it's clear that Waititi has a sincere, personal devotion to the material. While some of the action sequences are a bit muddled, and there's an extended scene made of pure Green Screen Fail, the character moments that are the film's heart are polished to an attractive shine. Waititi even places himself within those moments via motion capture as Korg, a rock-monster alien with the personality of a laid-back Kiwi bouncer, and one of the film's most memorable supporting characters.
Sup, bro?
But those moments make the film's flaws, which go beyond the incredibly formulaic climax, all the more apparent. Most of that can be easily pinned on the drab and featureless frame of Waititi's otherwise colorful picture. Of the three credited writers, one has no previous film credits, one is known mostly for straight-to-DVD Marvel animated films, and the third was responsible for not only the ponderously heavy Thor: The Dark World but also for Max Steel, one of 2016's biggest bombs. None of this ends well.
It's claimed that the vast majority of the film's dialogue was improvised, and it isn't what's coming out of characters' mouths that hurts the film. If anything, the the snappy banter saves the film from drowning in itself. Ragnarok bounces back and forth between Sakaar and Asgard seemingly at random, and the subplots feel like they were grafted together from two completely different films. Hela's conquest of Asgard feels like a dreary outtake from The Dark World, while Thor's escape from Grandmaster's arena feels like a charmingly low-fi (but high-budget) sci-fi B-movie. The two don't mesh well together at all, both stories seem underdeveloped, and simply put, it's nearly impossible to care about Hela despoiling such a flat and boring CGI landscape such as Asgard.
Danger: High Voltage.
Hela's also a woefully underwritten part, especially for the first female villain to featured as the main antagonist in a Marvel film. However, Cate Blanchett does her level best to elevate the role, and few actors are able to amp up thin material as she can. Striking an appealing balance between Galadriel's regal bearing and her campy Boris-and-Natasha role in Indiana Jones and the Legend of the Awful Reboot, Hela is a slinking, sarcastic, seductive dame of destruction. It's clear that Blanchett is having a great time with the character, and her presence alone gives the character (most of) the weight that the script never does.
Category is Epic Evil Goth Queen Realness.
The whole cast, in fact, works their hardest to transcend the limits of the screenplay to various degrees. Chris Hemsworth himself is at his most appealing, and i'ts in stripping the character of his high-fantasy drag that allows Hemsworth to finally display the full breadth of his admittedly impressive comedic chops. Marc Ruffalo gives a committed (at times overly so) performance as Hulk/Bruce Banner, as does Tom Hiddleston, here returning as Thor's Chaotic Neutral-personified brother/friend/enemy Loki. Jeff Goldblum, as expected, does fantastic as the always-welcome Jeff Goldblum character.
The new character who strikes the biggest profile, though, is Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie. Everything about her is on point, from her rough-and-tumble accent to the way she swaggers through the Grandmaster's palace. Valkyrie is as formidable a fighter as Thor, but she takes a special kind of pleasure in battle that makes her scenes tremendous fun to watch. Although the film wisely jettisons the dead weight of the Thor/Jane Foster romance (and Natalie Portman along with it), Valkyrie is never expressly set up as a new love interest, allowing the character to be defined primarily through Thompson's performance.
Shante, you slay.
Like the rest of the film, however, it's disappointing to see Valkyrie trade in her kick-ass, black leather ensemble for a set of more typical, unimpressive battle armor in the third act. For most of the film Waititi tries his best to buck the Marvel formula, succeeding more often than not. But all his idiosyncrasies are no match for the MCU machine, and the closer the film gets to its contractually-obligated end credits stingers, the more generic it becomes. Which isn't to say the film isn't often genuinely funny, exciting, and entertaining. It just isn't the full-on upheaval and rebirth that a film called Ragnarok needs to be.
FBOTU Score: 6 out of 10 / B-
Officer K (Ryan Gosling) is the titular blade runner, a cop who's job is to hunt down and "retire" renegade bio-engineered humans known as replicants. On his latest assignment, he uncovers a buried secret that unsettles his superior, Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright), who tasks him with discovering the truth behind it and destroying anything he might find. His investigation leads him to ex-blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who vanished 30 years earlier. At the same time, K's work is noticed by replicant creator Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), who sends his enforcer Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) after him.
Something old guard, something new guard.
Very little of 2049's plot can be discussed without major spoilers, however, as the mystery behind K's investigation is crucial to the film's hypnotic allure. Director Denis Villeneuve lets the narrative unfold slowly and organically, telling the story as much with visuals as with the tight and wickedly lean script by Michael Green and Hampton Fancher (who also wrote the 1982 original). Villeneuve is adept at drawing the viewer in, teasing the audience with just enough clues to make them think they've figured everything out before upending that with new information. We never know more about the mystery than K does, allowing Villeneuve to create an undeniably intriguing narrative.
Much of the power of 2049 comes from Villeneuve's bold and vibrant visual compositions, filmed with masterful grace by Roger Deakins. Eschewing the quick-cut style of modern genre films, Villeneuve favors imperceptibly-slow pans and takes that are held to an almost uncomfortable length. It encourages immersion into the setting, turning the film into a kind of lived-in experience that mimics the all-encompassing environment of the narrative itself. Beyond the opening text crawl explaining the nature of replicants, there is very little exposition offered, but Villeneuve's approach makes everything seem familiar and real, which is highly appropriate for a film that explores the nature of identity and memory.
K and the Holograms.
Villeneuve doesn't cover the film in sci-fi trappings, at least not more than the film requires. Unlike more spectacle-based films indebted to Blade Runner like Ghost In The Shell, there is a tactile nature to the world of 2049, almost unsettlingly so. The art of the film, while eye-searingly colorful and active, is in service to the story. The world of 2049 is a harsh and unforgiving place where simply surviving day to day can be a struggle, but Villeneuve conveys that through the twists and turns of the narrative and through the interactions of the characters with the environment, encouraging the viewer to take in every inch of the expertly-framed visuals.
2049 boasts an impressively-complex sonic palette as well, thanks to a mesmerizing score by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch (whose score for last month's It was also one of that film's major highlights). Like the film itself, this is a new exploration of the themes and motifs of what has come before, using Vangelis' iconic score from the original as a stepping-off point. Heavy with sounds reminiscent of vintage analog synths and undercut with Zimmer's trademark drums and heavy bass, it tells as much of the story as much as the script does. It's a rich, layered, electronic symphony that compliments Villeneuve's stunning visuals perfectly.
Symphony for Creepy Gallery in D.
Similarly, Ryan Gosling's K isn't a copy of Harrison Ford's original performance as Deckard. Gosling's performance is informed by Ford's, which was probably unavoidable, but he makes K his own complex character, expressing a vulnerability that Ford only hinted at. Ford himself is in excellent shape, looking more at home here than he has in any film for decades (including The Force Awakens). Like Gosling, he's fully committed to the performance, infusing each line reading with humanity and depth. The scenes where Ford plays against Jared Leto (who's more downplayed and grounded than he has been lately) are thick with tension, with Deckard keeping a tight grip on his emotions and Wallace seeming to do away with emotion altogether.
There is a stronger female presence than there was in the original, which is not to discount the remarkable women in that film. Like she was in Wonder Woman, Robin Wright is an ensemble dark horse, intriguingly able to make Joshi as warm as she is cynical. She makes remarkably efficient use of her relatively small amount of screen time. Sylvia Hoeks' Luv is just as dualistic, being both a corporate deadpan snarker and an in-the-trenches bad-ass bruiser, a captivating Eve of destruction. But one of the most arresting performances belongs to Ana de Armas' quietly sensual performance as Joi, a holographic companion A. I. that serves as K's "girlfriend." She has an amazing level of chemistry with Gosling, and their relationship is more believable than those in most romantic films.
K and Joi explore their chemistry.
If the film has any flaws, its primarily that it doesn't explore any social issues beyond those related to K's investigation, which centers around the idea of what constitutes humanity and being human. The social and income equality that makes the backbone of the setting and the sexist connotations of Joi as a mass-marketed "perfect woman" are intriguing ideas that don't get much screen time. However, while the film doesn't explicitly deal with these issues, much can be extrapolated through a post-viewing analysis. The setting of the film lives and breathes and is full of subtle complexities that require a bit more work to parse out. The characters are so enmshed in the settings -- and all the social problems it entails -- to the point where they don't question what happens around them. To them, that's just the way things are, and Villeneuve lets it stay that way. It may be more of a modern audience expectation than anything to do with the film itself.
The film's other demerit is that it feels a bit too long. Villeneuve makes expert use of his time. No scene feels extraneous, but it eventually does start to drag, especially because Villeneuve is stingy with his action scenes, saving most of them for the third act. Beyond that, however, is an otherwise fascinating science-fiction film that is as worthy of the top tier of the genre's canon as its predecessor. Captivating visuals, a haunting score, and a cast that's uniformly at the top of their game make 2049 more of an experience than a film. It's nothing short of an electric dream.
FBOTU Score: 8 out of 10 / A-
OK, so here's the little bit of plot we have. Kingsman super-agent Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and Kingman's resident tech expert Merlin (Mark Strong) are the only surviving members of the spy organization after global drug kingpin Poppy (Julianne Moore) decides to blow them all up. Without a home base or allies, Eggsy and Merlin hook up with Statesman, their American equivalent, to track Poppy down and pay her back for her rude act of excessive violence. Stretch that out to 141 minutes if you can. Oh, and there's something about Poppy lacing her drugs with a virus so that she can sell her users the cure, but there's almost no reason at all to pay attention to that.
Pay attention to this instead. Take your time.
So. Damage report. Writer/director Matthew Vaughn and frequent writing partner Jane Goldman are responsible for a number of genre gems, including Stardust, X-Men: First Class, Kick-Ass, and of course, Kingsman: The Secret Service. By all accounts, The Golden Circle should have been a return to one of their most enjoyable films, a witty and sharp Bond-style spy/action film that satirized the trappings of Bond-style spy/action films.
But somewhere along the way, Vaughn and Goldman managed to drain nearly every bit of fun and personality from The Secret Service to produce what amounts to a generic, off-brand equivalent of the original. Much like how Kick-Ass 2 devolved into the empty-headed, mindlessly-violent mess detractors of the original accused it of being, The Golden Circle is a pale imitation of its predecessor, as superficial and incomprehensible as critics of The Secret Service said that film was. What makes it all the more disappointing is that Vaughn and Goldman had nothing to do with Kick-Ass 2 but are almost completely to blame for the failures on display here.
There's a metaphor here somewhere. I just know it.
The film looks unquestionably cheap, with second-rate CGI and incoherent fight choreography; the film's scope is twice as large as its forebear, but the budget was only about $20 million more. (And that's still nowhere near adequate for a film this size.) There is nothing as transcendent as the first film's now-iconic, 50-person church battle, even though Vaughn repeats every camera trick from that sequence ad nauseum in the all of film's set pieces, which are scattered throughout a flat and shambling plot as if they were placed there by a random number generator. Vaughn barely waits for the one-minute mark to pass before launching into a high-octane car chase, all penetration and no foreplay.
To be completely and totally fair, there are elements of the film that are quite enjoyable, but they never compliment the final product. The total is nowhere near as great as the sum of its parts. A prime example would be Julianne Moore's take on Poppy, a ruthless crime boss who literally turns traitorous underlings into hamburger, which she serves in a diner that's part of her hidden jungle compound, which itself is decked out as a quintessential 1950's main street. And that description is more interesting than what ends up on screen. Moore's clearly having a lot of fun, effortlessly breezing through the role, hiding Poppy's villainy behind an appealing, Leave It To Martha Stewart veneer of gentility.
Julianne Moore IS Donna Reed: American Psycho.
As enjoyable as Moore is, however, she highlights the film's Because Movie problems. Her character has no motive to preemptively wipe out Kingsman except Because Movie. Her robot-armed henchman is the first film's disgraced Kingsman recruit Charlie (Edward Holcroft) Because Movie. The Kingsman survivors never heard of their Statesman cousins before this film Because Movie. Kingsman agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth), who was last seen in The Secret Service getting shot in the head at point-blank range, is still alive Because Movie. Hart's presence itself is a retcon so sloppy and half-assed that I wouldn't be surprised if the production team behind Terminator: Genisys sued Vaughn/Goldman for residuals.
The cast, at least, is mostly adequate even if most of them can't elevate the material. Taron Egerton is still an appealing action lead, his boyish looks contrasting with his hyper-fighting action scenes. Words can't express how welcome Colin Firth is, even if his character arc is unsteady and unformed. Mark Strong is likewise a comforting type of presence as Merlin, one of the actor's most charming and most appealing roles to date, and he plays extremely well off of an understated but winsome Halle Berry as Statesman techie Ginger Ale.
Hit me with your best shot. Please.
The other Statesmen don't fare quite as well. The agent with the most screen time, Pablo Pascal's Agent Whiskey, is an underdeveloped and shallow character that Pascal himself can't inject with enough life to be appealing no matter how hard he (or an out-of-left-field, third-act plot twist) tries. He handles the action scenes beautifully, though, which almost makes up for it. Channing Tatum, despite being heavily featured in the trailers and advertising, is reduced to little more than a glorified cameo, as is Jeff Bridges. But whereas Bridges makes the most of his time as Statesman's leader Champ, easily lighting up any scene he's in, Tatum only serves to drag down the film's pace, his only significant contribution to the film being an underwear shot where he shows off a pair of absolutely gorgeous thighs and a very stately bulge.
Analyzing the film itself is both more than it deserves and exactly what it deserves. It's definitely a brains-off, bits-out spectacle, and taken on those terms is quite enjoyable. But it's nowhere near as smart, funny, or critical-hit-scoring as its predecessor. If The Secret Service was an expensive, meticulously-tailored suit, The Golden Circle is a cheap, off-the-rack costume. Tight where it should be loose, loose where it should be tight, and made of cheaper material, it's just not as impressive. Here's hoping the Kingsmen go to the tailors before the third film goes into production.
FBOTU Score: 5 out of 10 / C
The Mother of the title (Jennifer Lawrence) lives in a newly renovated home in the middle of nowhere with her husband, Him (Javier Bardem). Him is a poet, but he's been suffering through horrible writer's block that is starting to take a toll on his marriage to Mother. Things start to unravel one day when the Man (Ed Harris), a dying doctor and fan of Him's work, shows up to the house. The next day, his wife the Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) arrives, and it's not long before a steady stream of strangers enter into Mother and Him's life, threatening to destroy the quiet existence they've built for themselves.
Open doors can never close again.
As it might be made apparent from that paragraph, none of the characters in the film has a given name, and the names here are only revealed during the end credits. The characters are more symbols than they are people, and how well you go along with that idea is a good barometer of how much you may or may not enjoy Aronofsky's film, which is much more Jodorowsky than it is Polanski. It's as much Biblical allegory and sociopolitical commentary as it is psychological horror, and that becomes more and more apparent as the film's reaches its climax.
The film begins innocently enough, quiet and natural, almost to an unsettling degree. Scenes are lit almost entirely with natural light, very few colors go beyond earth tones, and the soundtrack consists of only ambient noise. The film is set completely within Mother's house, the layout and dimensions of which we never truly get a grasp on, even in establishing shots showing the house from the outside. It makes the film seem like a parody of pastoral life set in a dream-logic diorama, seemingly allowing anything to happen while maintaining a tenuous grasp on solidity. There's never a clear sense of time or place, with the film seeming to take place in a setting that's microcosm and macrocosm in equal measures.
Home is where the horror is.
Aronofsky, however, never pretends that he's making anything other than a tense drama always on the verge of spilling over into nightmare territory. From the opening scenes, where Mother walks through the house in a thin nightgown while looking for Him, there is a nearly unbearable tension in the air. Even happier moments are undercut with the darkness swimming under the surface, threatening to break free at any moment. Every character is walking on thin ice, and any single one of them might cause it to crack at any second.
Much of the tension comes from Aronofsky's choice to show the film almost entirely through Mother's perspective, often framing the view over Mother's shoulder or focusing entirely on Jennifer Lawrence's face. Lawrence does an amazing job, even though the character of Mother seems purposefully underwritten and underdeveloped. She spends a great deal of the time reacting in panic to what's happening around her, but Lawrence sells the ever-living hell out of it. Her chemistry with Javier Bardem's Him never fully gels, but given that Mother and Him's marriage is on shaky ground, that's to be expected.
Hell is other people.
Bardem himself cuts a strange path through the film, alternating between Mother's closest ally and her most powerful antagonist, sometimes in the same scene. He's effortlessly charming, but there's a constant sense that something's off about his behavior. He's clearly dedicated to his role, however, as is the supporting cast, especially Michelle Pfeiffer in a tightly-wound, stiletto-pointed turn as the Woman. Her sharper features and cynical outlook contrast beautifully with Lawrence's curvier and more innocent Mother, and their scenes together feature both actresses at their best. A special notice also goes out to Kristen Wiig, playing Him's publicist (credited as "Herald"). In her few short moments on screen, Wiig turns her established comic persona completely on its head, using her warm charm to disarm the audience before her character takes a decidedly brutal turn.
What may divide opinion on the film, however, isn't its technical aspects or cast but Aronofsky's thick metaphorical narrative. The film is clearly an allegory for the Fall of Man, with Him being the Christian god and Mother being the Earth. The Man and Woman arrive to start complicating things, as do their Cain-and-Abel sons and a seemingly endless parade of humans intent on screwing up and destroying the world they've been given. Mother is constantly abused, neglected, and disrespected by the strangers, and she comes to realize that the narcissistic and intermittently-sociopathic Him is more concerned with how much the strangers adore and respect him than the damage they're doing to his wife and his house.
And I will strike down upon thee…
In service to that metaphor, Aronofsky stages some truly unsettling set pieces during the film's dizzying, chaotic, batshit-insane third act, where his subtle symbolism turns into a sledgehammer that violently crashes through the film's universe. What happens elicits both disgust and fascination at the same time, seemingly both grotesquely gratuitous and absolutely necessary. In many ways, it mirrors the raw and divisive emotional impact of Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, which had an 8-minute, single-take, no-music rape scene at its center. It both alienates and strengthens the bond with the audience, eagerly exploding any good will the film might have developed in bold service to its core message.
And like Irreversible, mother! is a brilliant film that begs to be deconstructed, and also a film that I'll never need to see again. It's brutal, shocking, and powerful while also being unmercifully exhausting and insidiously haunting. Starting out as quietly hypnotic then invisibly morphing into something that's morbidly fascinating in the levels of outrageousness it reaches, it's a work that's as admirable as it is difficult to watch. Even thinking about it now makes my heart tighten a bit. There's a very good reason that Aronofsky put an exclamation point in the title.
FBOTU Score: 8 out of 10 / B+]]>
Adapting only the first part of the novel's 1,100-page narrative, It the film follows a group of seven kids who call themselves the Losers Club during the summer of 1989 in Derry, Maine. Aside from dealing with a pack of sadistic bullies and parents who are almost uniformly unfit, all seven also get visited by a demonic entity that disguises itself as the clown Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård). As the kids find out, Pennywise (or "It") comes to Derry every 27 years, kills a bunch of kids, then goes into hibernation. Blaming It for the death of his brother Georgie a few months earlier, Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) leads the Losers Club in a quest to stop It once and for all.
Yeah, yeah. Floating. Got it.
Even before the film properly begins, the studio logos inform the audience exactly what kind of film they'll be watching. While heavily reverbed children's voices sing indistinctly in a precisely-edited stereo field, rain falls on the logos themselves, all set in a gray, dreary background. It's the film in microcosm, with expert audio/visual design incorporating horror film tropes that have been rehashed to death. While it's supposed to evoke an immediate sense of unease, what it really does is trigger memories of horror films past.
And that's not something that always does It any favors. There is very little original in the film presented here, whether or not you're familiar with the source material or earlier adaptation. Every trick, every jump scare, every bloody special effect has been done elsewhere before. The beats of most action sequences are imminently predictable to anyone with the least bit of genre-savvy. There's a distinct lack of subtlety in any of part of the film that makes the tropes all the more obvious.
The Hardy Boys and the Case of the Missing Scares.
What's interesting about that, though, is that it doesn't totally detract from the movie itself. Director Andy Muschietti approaches the film like a DJ making a killer mix tape. He knows how to combine the horror elements on hand into an attractive package, and he's invested in every scene. Freed of the tyranny of network censors that neutered the miniseries, Muschietti indulges his R-rated heart out. To his credit, It never feels mercenary or sloppy. Muschietti clearly gives a damn about how the film is presented, and everything from the creature design to the exquisitely-rendered sound production to the meticulously-detailed 80s references in the setting reflect that. It's helped along tremendously by Benjamin Wallfish's stunningly-evocative score, which is equal parts retro and experimental.
But the strength of any It rests firmly on the shoulders of Pennywise, a character that even Stephen King himself has admitted that he's too terrified of to write about. Tim Curry's performance in the miniseries is nothing short of a tour de force, one of the actor's most memorable and iconic performances in a career overflowing with the same.
Bill Skarsgård never tries to duplicate Curry's mannerisms, wisely finding a new spin on the character while paying respectful homage to his predecessor. Skarsgård's Pennywise is much more clearly demonic right from the start, a metatextual nod to the character's cultural saturation. After all, we all know Pennywise is evil, so why waste our time or insult our intelligence by pretending otherwise? Skarsgård is by far one of the best parts of the film, an uncanny and insidious presence that gets under the skin when the rest of the film can't. His over-enunciated plea of "Take it…" when offering Georgie a balloon in the prologue has more menace and darkness in it than the rest of the film in total.
Hello, boys and girls…
When the focus isn't on Pennywise, it's on the Losers Club, and that's often to mixed results. While Muschietti excels at showing the development and relationships between the characters as well as how they battle their own personal demons, these scenes also lay bare the film's uneven pace and clunky script. Only a few of the Losers have their own subplots, and those vary wildly in quality and narrative heft. There's a lot of build-up and very little payoff except for the subplot about lone female Loser Beverly (Sophia Lillis) and her abusive father Alvin (Stephen Bogaert).
It's through this, though, that Lillis shines as one of the most confident and sure-footed actors among the Losers Club, most of whom get little chance to stand out or create a character of their own. Except for Jack Dylan Grazer's appealing performance as the hypochondriac Eddie, most of the Losers' actors define their roles with one or two characteristics to the point where it becomes difficult to remember their proper names. I was referring to Finn Wolfhard's Richie as "the mouthy one I want to slap" for most of the film. Sadly, this is also reflected in Jaeden Lierberher as ostensible main character Bill, with the young actor leaning on Bill's stutter to color his performance. Lierberher seems to have a lot of potential, but it seems he simply wasn't given the right direction, as if Muschietti was more concerned with the setting around Bill than the character himself.
Yeah, you on the right? SLAP!
In the end, while It is visually stunning, the sound beyond reproach, and Skarsgård's performance a selling point in and of itself, there's little weight and impact to the overall film. Muschietti wisely dials back the more ridiculous cosmology details of King's novel, but that also fails to give the infernal presence at its center any real depth and the horrors it brings any metaphorical heft. It seems to be a horror film for horror film's sake, and while that's sometimes enough, it isn't enough to help this one float to the top of the heap.
FBOTU Score: 6 out of 10 / B-]]>
The "plot" — as much as one exists buried under a chaotic pile of tropes and King shout-outs — involves a young boy named Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), who has dreams about another universe called Mid-World and of a sorcerer called the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey). The Man in Black, who also goes by the rather unintimidating name Walter Padick, is trying to bring down the Dark Tower, which stands at the center of all worlds and protects the universe from demonic…um…thingies. After a series of inexplicable events, Jake ends up in Mid-World and meets Roland Deschain (Idris Elba), the last of the legendary gunslingers and the only one with the ability to stop good ol' Water's evil schemes.
The Dark MacGuffin.
If a lot of that sounds painfully generic, that's because it is. In fact, there are very few words that can properly convey how painfully generic and terminally boring the film is; there's probably a word for it in Swedish or something. It's as if the film has no idea why it exists in the first place, wandering around aimlessly for its entire runtime unsure of what or how it wants to be. Where the original book series confidently (if not always smoothly) combines elements of spaghetti Westerns, fantasy, Arthurian legend, and more, the film turns these elements into identities it randomly switches between in a desperate quest to find its own tone.
But even though the film has no idea where it wants to go, it has no issue running there as fast as it can. It rarely stops to take a breath, and it stubbornly refuses to ever explain itself. In a cinematic landscape where even the Power Rangers re-boot comes in at two hours long — five full minutes of which was devoted entirely to discussing how important it is to defend the local Krispy Kreme from alien invaders — The Dark Tower seems needlessly, purposefully edited into incoherence. Even the quiet moments are full of confusing conversations that reference a world and a mythology that is never fully developed or explained, something that becomes especially obvious during the constant references to Jake's "shine", a fustratingly-undefined psychic ability. It might make sense to people who've eagerly devoured the entirety of the book series, but people unfamiliar will just be left lost to the point that it's impossible to give a damn about anyone or anything on screen. (And full disclosure: this critic has only read the first three books in the series.)
Pictured: The film's editing process.
A good deal of the blame for the film's miasma of failure rests on the shoulders of Danish director/co-writer Nikolaj Arcel. The best adaptations of Stephen King's fantasy and horror works are a result of being helmed by directors with distinct styles, such as Brian DePalma (Carrie), David Cronenberg (The Dead Zone), and Stanley Kubrick (The Shining). Arcel is in no way in league with any of those people. His style can generously be described with back-handed compliments like "competent" or "journeyman." To say that he's out of depth here is a massive understatement, and he fails to put any personal stamp on an otherwise muddled film.
The production troubles behind the scenes were a story more exciting than what's on screen. Sony Picutres at one point wanted to replace Arcel and finish the film with a different director, and it's easy to see why. Action sequences are bewildering and poorly-choreographed. The pace is shaky and uneven. Virtually every visual cue — including the inexcusably cheap and poorly-executed CGI — appears to have been culled from other films, everything from Serenity to Resident Evil to Underworld to the Mad Max series. The dull-gray script in no way helps the film, which shares two writers with the lifeless YA dystopia adaptation The 5th Wave, one of which (Akiva Goldsman) is also responsible for the legendary bomb Batman & Robin.
Please welcome to the stage…Troubled Production.
Just about the only good thing in the film, besides the typically-dynamic score by Junkie XL, is Idris Elba as Roland. Projecting an effortless, intriguing man-with-no-name charisma, he's nearly perfect as the conflicted, cynical Roland. During the second half of the film, which takes place on "Keystone Earth", his fish-out-of-water interactions come dangerously close to making the film interesting, and he serves as a welcome anchor to the unfocused and anarchic fight scenes.
Unfortunately, Elba's Roland is not the main character. That would be Jake, and Tom Taylor's performance is like an iconic "child actor" collection of exaggerated emotion and unsteady line readings. To his credit, it's not a terrible performance given that it's his first film, but he's far from a natural. That caveat can't be applied to Matthew McConaughey's portrayal of the Man in Black, who seems like he filmed his role in-between Lincoln car commercials without bothering to change his costume or demeanor. He comes off less as ultimate adversary and more as a bored Disc 1 Boss, possessing none of the depth or gravitas that the role requires.
Watch out, world. It's big, bad…(sigh)…Walter.
In the end, there seems to be very little reason for this film to exist other than the studio's insistence on getting it out of development hell by any means necessary. As an adaptation, it's a complete failure. As a sequel or continuation, it has absolutely none of the dizzying, kitchen-sink fantasy King's books are known for. As a standalone film, it makes absolutely no sense and barely qualifies as having a plot. Edited to death and lacking anything resembling a personality, this is a film that even Idris Elba's magnetic gunslinger has no hope of saving.
FBOTU Score: 3 out of 10 / D]]>
Theron plays Lorraine Broughton, one of MI6's top agents, who is sent into Berlin just a few days before the Wall comes down in 1989. When one of her fellow agents winds up dead, Lorraine is sent to investigate the murder and recover "The List", a microfilm that includes the true identities of any number of undercover operatives. Her partner is Berlin bureau chief David Percival (James McAvoy), who's gone native and makes extra money by smuggling Jordache jeans and Jack Daniels to rebellious youths in East Berlin. Told to trust no one, Lorraine begins an uneasy partnership with Percival in order to get back The List before it's sold off, jeopardizing the entirety of the West's intelligence operations.
Don't turn around (uh-oh)…Charlize Theron's in town (uh-oh!)
The paragraphs you just read may make it seem like Atomic Blonde is a relatively straight-forward film with a simple plot used to hang any number of wickedly-choreographed, hypnotic fight scenes. You'd only be half-right, though. AB's needlessly labyrinthine story does indeed seem to exist only to stage the intense set pieces, but it's anything but straight-forward. In fact, very little of it makes any sense at all until close to the end, when Lorraine lays out the bare bones of the narrative during a debriefing session.
That's likely entirely on purpose. AB is a self-conscious homage to any number of 80s and 90s spy thrillers that similarly had nonsensical scripts and left-field plot twists seemingly as a requirement of the genre. The supporting characters start to blur together, and eventually you reach a point where you stop trying to figure everything out and give in to the film's icy-cool charm. Unlike a film like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, who's narrative failings were unintentional, Atomic Blonde's messy story is at least partially (if not entirely) on purpose. The narrative continuously moves forward, rarely becoming recursive, and it becomes easy to get lost in the momentum.
One of 99 lit cigarettes.
But let's face it; none of us is here for the story. We're here for some good, old-fashioned violence, and Atomic Blonde delivers that in spades (and also in knives, pistols, rifles, and the ever-reliable sucker punch). Every single hit is meticulously timed and choreographed but possessed of an anarchic energy that makes the battles seem improvised and furious. Many of the scenes are cut together to appear as one long take, making them even more immediate. Theron did almost all of her own fighting, charging through every scene like a whirlwind of destruction, using every bit of her environment to her advantage. In a scene where she fights with East Berlin police in an abandoned apartment, her weapons include a frying pan, a freezer door, and a coiled-up length of hose. Lorraine isn't just a great fighter; she's the living embodiment of the fight itself.
The epic, holy-crap-did-you-just-see-that nature of the brawls shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, given that director David Leitch was one of the people responsible for the similarly go-for-broke fight scenes in 2014's John Wick. Leitch is just as adept at quiet moments that don't leave the characters with broken bodies, and he saves most of his camera tricks for the fights themselves. The in-betweens tend to be calmer, cooler, and quieter but keeping the intensity of Lorraine's fights as a subtext.
How does it feel…to beat me like you do…
Leitch is great at using visual cues to inform the characters, allowing the images to color them in. (As the film is based on a graphic novel, that might be a given.) The first time we see Lorraine, she's in a bath tub filled with ice, trying to heal the numerous cuts and bruises from her latest fight. Without looking, she takes a few cubes and fills up a tumbler sitting next to the tub, then also without looking, fills it with just the right amount of Stoli. That sequence says more about Lorraine than anything in Kurt Johnstad's screenplay does, and Theron is so perfect in her understanding of Lorraine that she speaks volumes with a single look. Leitch could have made AB a near-silent film without losing much depth or dimension.
Leitch has a similar flare for musical cues, having impeccable taste in classic New Wave and synth-pop. After her ice-and-Stoli bath, Lorraine heads to her debriefing while David Bowie belts "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)". A frantic car chase, which includes an intense melee within one of the cars itself, is staged to Peter Schilling's "Major Tom" (here appropriately in the original German). 'Til Tuesday's "Voices Carry" is used more than once to underscore scenes where a character's double-dealing and deception are discovered. It you'll forgive another comparison to Valerian, AB is another Euro-centric film whose soundtrack is more a powerful narrative device than its actual screenplay.
Never thought I'd meet a boy like you…meet a boy like you…
That screenplay includes an unnecessarily large amount of supporting characters for a film that's primarily about showing off how magnetic, ferocious, and badass Charlize Theron is, and the confused script leaves several of them with little to do. McAvoy obviously gets the most time, and he handles his part as well as expected. With his muscles jacked and his eyes constantly flashing sarcasm, he's an undeniably attractive and dangerous bad-boy who's loyalties are immediately suspect in his very first scene. Despite his success at playing a young, noble Charles Xavier in the new X-Men films, McAvoy seems most conformable playing people of questionable morals and ethics, and there's no denying that he completely enjoys his role here.
A third special agent ends up in the mix, a novice French operative played with open charisma and appealing naturalism by Sofia Boutella. She shares an unflinching, scorching-hot sex scene with Theron that's sensational in how unsensational it is. Neither woman is definitely positioned as L or B, and the scene explicitly lacks the expected titillation factor of the films it's emulating, simply turning it into another character examination. Boutella is the closest thing Theron has to a romantic lead, and both actresses sell their chemistry effortlessly.
The politics of…(ahem)…dancing.
No matter the faults in Atomic Blonde's messy narrative or uneven cast of supporting characters, the film is consistently entertaining and captivating. Letich has a knack for unique and heart-stopping fight sequences; this is only film to ever feature a knife fight staged against a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky's high-art sci-fi film Stalker. It's stylized to death, but when the style is this appealing, that's barely considered a sin. And it helps when your film's center is Charlize Theron, a woman so kick-ass that she could give Wonder Woman a run for her money. AB might not be the cleanest cut, but it's certainly one of the most memorable.
Best enjoyed with your favorite liquor. On the rocks, of course.
FBOTU Score: 7 out of 10 / B]]>
Set in the 28th century, our title character (Dane DeHaan) is a special agent charged with keeping order in an galactic federation made up of hundreds of species. Along with his long-time partner Laureline (Cara Delevingne), Valerian's adventure begins when a mysterious alien race kidnap his superior Commander Filitt (Clive Owen). In their mission to rescue him, Valerian and Laureline discover long-buried secrets that endanger the order established in Alpha, a massive space station metropolis where every race in the galaxy meets to share knowledge and experience.
Even androgynous supermodel aliens in marine couture.
Summarizing the plot in Valerian, however, belies the nature of the film itself. That paragraph might seem relatively straightforward, but it also represents nearly the entirety of the narrative of a film that's over two hours long. It doesn't take long for the story to get buried under countless layers of visual splendor, laser-blasting action, and intriguing world-building details. When the big reveal comes in act three, the reminder that there was a reason for all of these striking images honestly comes as a bit of a shock.
And that's perfectly okay. Most of the time.
What do you mean MOST of the time?
Besson's film is based on the long-running French comic book series Valérian and Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, specifically on the sixth book in the series, Ambassador of the Shadows. If a lot of what we see and experience in the film feels familiar, that's probably because the series was an enormous influence on any number of sci-fi blockbusters, most notably a little film called Star Wars and Besson's own The Fifth Element (which Mézières himself worked on). Besson has been anxious to make a film based on the comics for decades, and his love of the material shows through in literally every frame. Valerian the film has been meticulously crafted and designed, each piece of it fitting neatly (if not smoothly) into the framework of the film's story.
Fans of the comics will probably get much more out of that story than those who are unfamiliar, as Besson completely skips any kind of origin story for the characters aside from an opening sequence set to David Bowie's "Space Oddity" that shows the development of Alpha itself from a humble space station in 1975 to the massive construct it is several hundred years later. This approach works far more often than it doesn't, placing things in an implied context that only occasionally becomes explicit. There is no audience surrogate, and the characters all treat their surroundings as normal and natural. That approach helped sell the setting of The Fifth Element, and it's just as easy to get into Besson's groove here, too.
In space, no one can hear you squee.
Valerian is many times denser and more complex than Element, though, and virtually every scene is full of details that show Besson's dedication to building a film as loyal to the source material as possible. It's easy to lose count of the number of alien species we're introduced or all the fascinating locations Valerian and Laureline travel to in the course of their mission. Besson's visual flair is impeccable, and his eye for spectacle is unparalleled. He allows the film to gently flow and unfold instead of racing from one set piece to the next, giving each scene the proper space and time needed to thrive on its own merits. It's given a great assist by Alexandre Desplat's sympathetic score; strong without ever being bombastic and perfectly mirroring the distinct emotional hooks of frequent Besson collaborator Eric Serra.
If only Besson had paid as much attention to the story he was telling. The plot is, to be generous, a chaotic and jumbled mess that quickly gets crushed under the searing visuals. The focus is centered nearly completely on the "who" or the "where", and that isn't always a problem until the third act, when Besson suddenly remembers where he put the "why." A relatively light-hearted and giddy story suddenly takes a dark and serious shift that's as jarring to the audience as it is to the momentum of the film. It doesn't help that said climax is made of mostly of a set of long, expository speeches followed by an action sequence that pales in comparison to the ones that came before it.
Valerian and Laureline bravely try to make sense of the plot.
The incoherent nature of the story isn't always helped by the main cast, many of whom seem miscast or at the very least unhappy to be there. Dane DeHaan is fine as Valerian, even if he seems a bit too slight and sleepy-eyed for an action hero. "Dashing rogue" is not a role that comes easily to him, but even if he never seems like quite the right fit for the role, he never truly embarrasses himself. Cara Delevingne is actually quite appealing as Laureline, displaying an easy, organic charm that was never apparent in her monochromatic turn as Enchantress in Suicide Squad. While both actors do well in their roles, their chemistry together is far from perfect, and they work better apart than they do together. At any rate, they never come off as two people who've spent the better part of a decade working as a tightly-knit duo.
The supporting cast is surprisingly small for a film of this scope since most of the action is focused squarely on Valerian and Laureline. Clive Owen's part amounts to a glorified cameo, and the Commander is much more of a plot device than he ever is a character. Owen himself doesn't do much to ameliorate this, often angrily sleepwalking through his scenes. In fact, the supporting roles that provide the most color and amusement are both aliens with little direct bearing on the story. One is a Jabba-like smuggler voiced by John Goodman and the other a shapeshifter played by Rihanna. Goodman has more personality in a voice-only performance than Owen ever manages, and Rihanna is surprisingly, perhaps even shockingly good in her role. Her scenes are without a doubt one of the film's biggest highlights, and she has more believable chemistry with both DeHaan and Delevingne than the two have on their own.
While some of that may seem like some high-caliber shade, it really isn't in many ways. The plot and script might be among Besson's weakest, but the images he puts on screen more than make up for it with their unique, inventive beauty. Valerian is a non-stop feast for the eyes, a dizzying head-rush of color, light, and every kind of alien you could possibly imagine. Had the film also been just as stimulating for the brain, however, Besson would have made something that's worth several thousand words and several thousand pictures at the same time.
FBOTU Score: 6 out of 10 (B-)]]>
Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is the web-slinger in question, who's made a minor celebrity of himself in New York City thanks to viral videos of his everyday adventures. Well, that and there was that time he fought half the Avengers and stole Captain America's shield. Things start to take a serious turn, however, when Peter comes upon the work of Adrian Toomes/Vulture (Michael Keaton), an arms dealer equipped with advanced alien technology scavenged from the Battle Of New York. Desperate to prove himself and prove he has what it takes to join the Avengers, Peter sets out to stop Toomes' plans.
Pictured: a serious turn.
That's the plot summary if you've come for a superhero film, and it works just fine in the context of the narrative. But the real A-plot revolves around the precarious balance Peter maintains between his life as a high school sophomore and his life as a wall-crawling superhero. Arguably, it's this conflict that's the infinitely more interesting of the two, and the film's biggest issues tend to arise from director Jon Watts not being able to mesh both plotlines in the proper ways. Which isn't to say that Watts does a bad job, especially given that this is his first film of this stature, just not a stellar one.
To be fair, Watts is working off of a script that has six writers attached to it, even if said script seems remarkably coherent for something seemingly written by committee. There are many legitimately and honestly funny moments, the characters tend to have very natural but distinct voices, and there aren't a whole lot of weighty speeches to weigh it down. Best of all, it wisely skips the creation of Spider-Man himself and gets right to the action; there's all of one line of dialogue referring to the famous spider-bite that gave Peter his abilities. It might not reach the levels of some of Marvel's best — because let's face, Joss Whedon is a very high bar to clear — but it's remarkably solid.
An Incredible (40) feat of Strength.
And speaking of Whedon, there's a great deal of early Buffy The Vampire Slayer in S-M: H, which is oddly appropriate as classic teenage superhero stories were surely an inspiration for Buffy in the first place. It's not just the high school setting or the deadpan snark of characters like Zendaya's scene-stealing student Michelle. Like Buffy, the film is strongest when it focuses on the dual-aspect of Peter's life and his struggle to reconcile the two, recognizing that Peter can't shirk his responsibilities to either side of his life. He doesn't angst or brood about this too much; like a teenage Buffy Summers, he just does his best to keep things balanced.
Part of what sells this is Tom Holland's remarkable, star-making turn as Peter Parker. He's the youngest actor to wear the red tights so far and the closest to Peter's actual age in real life. That's part of what helps his performance, as Peter's youthful and borderline-naive exuberance seems less like an act and more like nature. But Holland connects with the fundamental core of the original character in ways his predecessors never could. His Spider-Man is a nerd with superpowers instead of a super-powered nerd. He might be able to lift a car over his head without effort, but he still lacks the confidence in himself to ask his high school crush to the Homecoming dance. He's imminently relatable without being idealized.
He doesn't lack for abs, though.
Holland is helped by a uniformly talented and well-chosen supporting cast, and even the weaker parts of the script come alive thanks to the undeniable chemistry between literally everybody on screen. Even outsized personalities like Robert Downey Jr., who's refreshingly down-played Tony Stark serves as Peter's quasi-mentor, fit well into the fabric of the film. Despite the large cast, nearly every character gets a moment to shine, from Jacob Balaton as Peter's best friend Ned to Marisa Tomei as Peter's guardian Aunt May (unquestionably one of this reboot's biggest and most welcome upgrades). Oddly enough, some of the best moments in the film are conversations Peter has with the artificial intelligence in his Stark-built Spidey-suit, voiced by a pleasantly warm Jennifer Connelly.
The only cast member who doesn't fare well, unfortunately, is the villain. This has absolutely nothing to do with Michael Keaton's intense, confident, and sympathetic performance. Keaton keeps a tight lid on Toomes, expressing the most about the character when not outwardly expressing much at all. Unfortunately, he's hampered by the script, which doesn't seem to know what to do with Toomes, sometimes feeling like he's only there because there has to be an antagonist. He's still handled better than most of Spidey's cinematic rogues gallery, which isn't terribly hard to do, but there's the overwhelming feeling that the character is underdeveloped.
Death — or at least mild discomfort — from above.
That being said, there are far more positives about the films than negatives, and the negatives that are there are more disappointments than failures. The action sequences aren't terribly inventive, but they also don't lose themselves in the need to show off just how well a CGI Spider-Man can swing between buildings. The story might be fairly light, but we're also spared another origin story and yet another speech about "great responsibility." It might be the third reboot of the character in 15 years, but it also gives us the most appealing, fully-dimensional, and naturalistic Peter Parker yet. Homecoming might not be perfect, but it's a great start. There's nowhere to swing but up.
FBOTU Score: 7 out of 10 / B (but an A for effort)]]>
Baby (Ansel Elgort) is the driver in question, who operates under criminal mastermind Doc (Kevin Spacey). Baby serves as the getaway driver for Doc's schemes, using the music constantly playing out of his headphones to both choreograph his movements and drown out permanent tinnitus. Just as Baby thinks he's done with his life of accessory to a crime, Doc pulls him into a dangerous job with the trigger-happy Bats (Jamie Foxx) and the Bonnie-and-Clyde duo of Buddy (Jon Hamm) and Darling (Eiza González), threatening his future with his waitress girlfriend Debora (Lily James).
Crime in an elevator.
Edgar Wright conceived of the idea for Baby Driver over 20 years ago, first officially exploring the ideas behind it in the music video for Mint Royale's "Blue Song" in 2003. The opening scenes of Driver mimic that video's expert efficiency of scene and movement as Baby idles in the getaway car, getting down to "Bellbottoms" by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Excepting the occasional glance at the robbery in progress, Wright keeps the camera completely on Baby and the car, drumming up tension and excitement solely through Baby's immersion in the soundtrack.
It's this kind of precise audio-visual choreography that informs nearly the entirety of the film, including the scene immediately after the opening, where Baby walks through the streets of Atlanta in perfect sync with Bob & Earl's "Harlem Shuffle." It's a giddy, hypnotic kind of energy that the film maintains for most of its runtime, with the visuals punctuating the music in Baby's iPod instead of the other way around. Gun battles, wild chase sequences, and even tender romantic moments exist primarily to illustrate the power of the music that Baby (and the rest of us) use to get through life.
Nowhere to hide…
The film itself is like a ballet of action cinema's greatest hits, and part of how Wright manages to pull it off with such seeming simplicity is by keeping the focus entirely on Baby himself. Nothing happens outside of his perspective, and everything is filtered through Baby's music. In the rare times when the music drops, the soundtrack is filled with a high-pitched drone and an extremely light ambient score to mimic Baby's damaged eardrums. While this approach has a downside in that it never gets past the surface of any of the other characters, it also brings a freshness in its approach to characterization. When Baby meets Debora, they swap songs featuring her name in the title. The fact that he chooses T-Rex and she chooses Beck says more about the characters than any amount of actual dialogue.
Elgort himself wisely plays Baby as slightly opaque and detached, becoming the most expressive when he's deep into his tunes. Elgort's underplaying initially seems off-putting, but as the film unfolds and we hear more of Baby's music, so too does the character expand and become more colorful. Baby is a good-hearted boy in a dark and dangerous situation, and his music serves as both a coping mechanism and a form of escape. In that way, he's imminently relatable even while Elgort plays Baby's beats close to the chest. Baby is like the physical incarnation of the rush we feel when we speed down the road to our own killer mixtape, a kind of secret thrill we keep hidden under a mask of social stoicism.
Baby Dreamy.
Elgort's supporting cast doesn't get as much development, but that doesn't stop most of them from turning in a playlist-worthy performance. Kevin Spacey is probably the most magnetic as Doc, a quasi-father figure to Baby, who lost his parents in the car accident that also caused his "hum in the drum." Doc is the kind of person who's every question is rhetorical and backed up with an unsaid threat, but at the same time he possess an easy, undeniable charisma. Spacey plays Doc with a restrained intensity that's magnetic and captivating, making his few moments of strong emotion seem genuine because it.
The rest of the cast does well, even if their performances tend to be a little more uneven. Lily James is imminently likable and warm, but Debora is defined almost entirely by her relationship with Baby, one of the few times when Wright's tight focus on Baby serves as a detriment. Similarly, Eiza González has little to do as Darling that isn't directly tied to Jon Hamm's Buddy, but she still manages to do well within the limited narrative she's given. Hamm himself turns in a stellar performance as the barely-contained Buddy, a sharp contrast to Jamie Foxx's deceptively insightful yet openly sociopathic Bats. Foxx's hard-gangster schtick wears a bit thin after a while, however, and he's the only person in the cast that doesn't seem to take the film seriously at all.
This meet-cute may be recorded for quality assurance.
The film's intensity and energy can sometimes work against it, and if the film has any dings in its chassis, it's that it falls victim to it's own kineticism. Wright hits the gas right out the gate, and he almost never lets up. Even the romantic interludes between Baby and Debora or the nakedly empathic exchanges between Baby and his deaf foster father (a charming CJ Jones) are filmed in the same hopping, spinning language as the car chases and crime sprees. Wright never stops the music, and he gets major points for how consistently and efficiently he utilizes it, but the effect can become a bit wearying by the film's midpoint.
Even the best iPod playlist in the world has its weaker cuts, but the true judge of quality is how well the playlist itself flows and evolves. In that respect, Baby Driver is a clear winner, a heady mix of insane car chases, genuine comedy/drama, and characters who are both delightfully archetypal and fully human at the same time. It's a mash-up of Scott Pilgrim and Death Proof, filtered through the most sublime iteration possible of Grand Theft Auto, and served up with one of the best soundtracks in recent memory. If this doesn't make you want to get behind the wheel and crank up the stereo, nothing will.
FBOTU Score: 8 out of 10 / B+
The time is presumably the very near future. The setting is…somewhere. A mysterious bubonic plague-like disease has swept across civilization, leading Paul (Joel Edgerton) to take his wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and teenage son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) to a remote home in the wilderness for safety. When fellow survivor Will (Christoper Abbot) breaks into the cabin, looking for food for his starving wife Kim (Riley Keough) and their young son, Paul reluctantly agrees to shelter the family in order to pool resources and defense. It doesn't take long, however, for the whole arrangement to go awry as both families start to be consumed with paranoia and distrust.
Meet-cutes sure aren't what they used to be.
The second feature film from writer/director Trey Edward Shults, after the family drama Krisha, starts out promisingly enough. The opening scenes, where Paul and his family must mercy-kill Sarah's plague-stricken father, are stark and foreboding. The first encounter between Paul and Will is fraught with organic tension and a heightened, fight-or-flight energy. We're never told what happened to cause the situation Paul's family is in, or what may or may not have happened in the outside world, and that ambiguity helps to ramp up the fear and dread that great horror films are built on.
But most of that early potential quickly evaporates once Will's family moves in. We're treated to a series of shallow, banal conversations that don't give us any insight into any of the characters' motivations, forcing us to discover such things by reading the negative space around them. Unfortunately, there's almost nothing to be found there. There are several questions that arise over the course of the film but almost no answers. There is absolutely zero political or cultural metaphor in the families' interactions. When people finally start to turn on each other, the development seems to come out of nowhere, since Shults hasn't done an adequate job of establishing anybody in his milieu. He goes straight from the act one foundation to the act three climax, the only foreshadowing being a completely random, completely macabre Pieter Bruegel painting on one of the cabin's wall.
This painting is called The Triumph Of Death a.k.a. Foreshadowing 101.
The lone exception is Kelvin Harrison Jr's Travis, and that's completely due to Harrison's effortless naturalism. He's the closest thing we get to an audience surrogate, and while we never get the expository answers such a surrogate usually delivers, that's completely the fault of Shults' maddeningly opaque script. Harrison conveys a depth of emotion greater than the rest of the cast combined, often with only his eyes or the quiver of a jaw. He's quietly magnetic, even if the material he's given isn't up to his level.
He comes off better than the rest of the cast, most of which are stuck playing one emotion based upon one or two defining character traits. While the hook of the film is watching people descend into paranoia, Joel Edgerton's Paul is pretty much already there when the film begins and never moves. He approaches his role with a hypnotic and admirable dedication, but Paul is a character who's volume is cranked all the way to 11 and never gets any quieter. Christopher Abbot does what he can with Will, but as most of his scenes are opposite Edgerton, his downplayed approach gets steamrolled by Edgerton's intensity. Carmen Ejogo and Riley Keough are both mostly wasted, sadly, with flat roles as a terrified mama bear and a vulnerable waif respectively.
Searching for an honest scare.
To be honest, the film is more effective when the characters don't speak or aren't even on screen at all. Shults sets the entire film either inside Paul's large-but-confined home or the forest directly outside. We never get a feeling for how the cabin itself is arranged, but that actually works in the film's favor, giving the place a kind of alien mystique. The cabin never truly feels like a home, even to Paul's family. The most frightening aspect about the visuals, in fact, is the idea that there is no safe space or ability to get a sense of place.
Shults overplays his hand here, though, and he relies too heavily on a handful of quickly-exhausted tricks to keep the tension mounting. He repeatedly features a slow tracking shot down the cabin hallway that leads to an ominous red door, the only way into or out of the house. While at first creepily effective, it quickly becomes tiresome the more he does it. Likewise, he too often cuts to Travis' disturbed dreams, which makes for an unsettling aside until the third or fourth time it happens. Most of the horror scenes — and really, every single horror image from the trailers — is found in these dreams, making Travis' waking world seem pedestrian in comparison.
Red room! RED ROOM!
The best part of the film by far is the score by Brian McOmber, which fluidly shifts between melody and discord with a terrifying grace. The first tracking shot leading to the red door is scored by melancholic, minor-chord strings that slowly mutate into atonal clusters until finally giving way to a frighteningly monochromatic drone. Like the film itself, McOmber's score is tight and sparsely-populated, but unlike the film itself, it's possessed of an intangible sense of pure, unaffected dread. Had the film been half as long and a silent picture, with only McOber's score as dialogue, perhaps it would have lived up to all its festival-circuit hype.
In the end, despite a handful of compelling performances, It Comes At Night is a film with almost nothing to say and almost nowhere to go. Shults' camera work and sense of frame are both impeccable, but his genre skills leave something to be desired. When the most terrifying aspect of your horror film is the soundtrack and the most fully sympathetic character is the family dog, perhaps its time to re-examine your work. Might I suggest adding a second act? I hear most films have one of those.
FBOTU Score: 5 out of 10 / C]]>
WARNING: The Lasso of Truth compels me to tell you that there may be mild spoilers.
Diana (Gal Gadot) is the princess of the Amazons, a tribe of fierce warrior women who live on the idyllic island of Themyscira, hidden from the rest of the world. When World War I pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crashes his plane off the coast, he's rescued by Diana but brings with him foreboding news from the world outside about the brutality of the war. Unwilling to sit by while innocent lives are lost, Diana leaves the safety of her island to help Trevor stop German General Ludendorff (Danny Huston) and his mad scientist associate Dr. Maru (Elena Anaya) from unleashing a new chemical weapon that would extend the war indefinitely.
Who needs satin tights when you have a sword?
Wonder Woman has fought many enemies in her time, but none may be as daunting as the Legion of Doom that is cultural expectations. This is the first solo female superhero film in over 10 years, after the unqualified failures of Catwoman and Elektra. It's also the first time a woman has directed a female superhero film, and only the second time a woman has directed such a film at all (the first being 2008's mostly-forgotten Punisher: War Zone). There's also the unenviable task of turning around the momentum of the DC Cinematic Universe, which risks being throttled to death by its own cynicism.
And not only does the film succeed with literal flying colors, it raises the bar for superhero films in general.
Pictured above: flying colors.
Director Patty Jenkins might not seem like the most obvious choice to handle a film of this caliber. Her only major film prior to this was the gritty, purposefully-unglamorous drama Monster. However, that seemed to be enough for Marvel to offer her the job of helming Thor: The Dark World, a job which eventually went to Alan Taylor when Jenkins left citing the old standard "creative differences." But Jenkins handles this film like a veteran, easily able to balance the myriad elements necessary to make a film that's equal parts adventure, romance, action, and drama.
Jenkins has a discerning eye for color and composition, easily shifting from epic to intimate and back. The opening scenes in Themyscira are a vista of sapphire oceans and white cliffs that end up getting broken up when Trevor's more monochromatic plane crashes. Likewise, the movie's first big action piece has Diana, in all her reds and blues and golds, bravely striding out onto a drab and gray battlefield like a beacon. That battle scene itself is a dizzying grand melee that never feels confusing, with Jenkins largely avoiding quick-cuts and focusing instead on fluid, graceful movements. Diana's fighting style is a beautiful thing to behold, a whirling dance of blades and kicks, and Jenkins even makes a scene where Diana literally throws an armored tank over her head seem refined.
Whip it good.
For sure, this is definitely the brightest and most vivid film yet in the DC Extended Universe, and not just because of its color palette. A great deal of that comes down to Gal Gadot in the title role, who is nothing short of radiant and magnetic. Like she showed in her brief scenes in BvS, Gadot is possessed of a distinct and unique form of charisma, a mix of strength and vulnerability that is essential to understanding Diana herself. In the course of the film, Gadot is called upon to express everything from innocent wonder to raging fury, and she fully inhabits every moment with dedication and grace. Not since Lynda Carter has an actress so fully embodied the humanity at Diana's core.
Gadot's chemistry with Pine is also a wonder to behold, effortless and organic in every way. It's remarkable to think that the most believable romances in recent cinematic memory exist in films about immortal warriors and mouthy mercenaries. Pine is his usual charming self, but that charm is shaded by the grim nature of the war surrounding the narrative. Trevor's world-weariness and Diana's optimism play off of each other in beautiful ways, feeding and coloring the energies between the characters with each interaction.
Not since Ryan Reynolds and Morena Baccarin...
Wonder Woman also presents us with one of the most diverse cast of heroes in recent memory, which might not be surprising for a film directed by a woman and scripted by an openly gay writer (Allan Heinberg). Trevor's squad includes a Moroccan spy (Saïd Taghmaoui), a Scottish sniper (Ewen Bremner), and a Native American guide (Eugene Brave Rock). Trevor and Diana are assisted by Trevor's unassuming secretary Etta Candy, played by a delightfully plucky Lucy Davis, who "isn't afraid of a bit of fisticuffs should the occasion arise." The script does its best to steer away from the overwhelming, agressive, monolithic masculinity of the traditional superhero film, focusing instead on emotional resonance and self-discovery. The dialogue does occasionally feel a tad clunky and platitudinal, but the entire casts handles it with aplomb.
En garde.
While the film does well in its depictions of its heroes, and it especially succeeds in making Diana herself a complex figure, it's rather shallow when it comes to its villains. Danny Huston tends to nibble on the scenery every time he's on screen, and it often seems like he's desperately trying to find an extra dimension to Ludendorff that isn't there. Conversely, Elena Anaya underplays Dr. Maru to the point of making her feel extraneous, although that often has more to do with the script than Anaya's otherwise completely satisfactory performance. Maru seems to be little more than a plot device, but Anaya does the best she can with what she's given.
The film has several thirlling battle scenes, but it takes quite a long time to get to the first one, and the road there is often bumpy. The opening scenes, while beautiful, move rather slowly compared to the rest of the film, and the Amazons themselves vary wildly in acting ability and pronunciation (Robin Wright's Antiope seems to change accents with every sentence). Once the film's first major setpiece arrives, that's largely forgiven, and the path leading up to it is recognized for the slow, gradual climb it was. The climactic battle, on the other hand, seems to go on for much, much longer than it should, threatening to negate its own grandeur and spectacle and get swallowed up by the superhero film tropes it spent the previous two hours avoiding.
Don't make me take off my tiara.
Those last criticisms, however, seem relatively unimportant in the bigger picture. The job of both Wonder Woman and her film is to provide hope and inspiration in a dark world, the kinds of things that heroes were expected to do at one point. While Wonder Woman never shies away from the dark parts of Diana's story or the world around her, it also never succumbs to them. Diana does what she does because it's the right thing to do, full stop. She's an old-fashioned hero in a film that never itself feels old-fashioned, and she combats a cynical world while refusing to give in to that same cynicism.
Wonder Woman is not just the best film in the DC Cinematic Universe to date. It isn't just one of the best origin stories to date. It's simply one of the best superhero films made, period. Bright, witty, and epic while also feeling grounded and intimate, it succeeds where so many other films before it have faltered. Never send a man to do a woman's job.
FBOTU Score: 8 out of 10 / B+]]>
Set approximately 10 years after the events of Prometheus, A:C focuses on a ship called the Covenant, which carries a couple thousand space colonists in cryosleep, as well as a crew of 15 and a single android named Walter (Michael Fassbender). En route to their destination, the crew intercepts a distress signal coming from a nearby planet and takes a detour to investigate. There, they find a downed ship containing David (also Fassbender), the android from the Prometheus and the sole survivor of that ship's voyage. They also discover, of course, a nasty, acid-blooded monster whose hobbies include running, hissing, and tearing humans into little bitty pieces.
You rang?
While ostensibly a sequel to Prometheus and a prequel to the original Alien film, A:C is effectively neither. The events from the previous film exist merely as a plot device. That film's central motivation, the quest to discover the origin of human life, is completely forgotten. And as it's the first part of a prequel trilogy leading up to the events of Alien, there are huge narrative gaps in-between the end of this film and the beginning of that one that will presumably be filled in by two more entries. It seems more like a soft reboot, erasing a disliked or weak link in the franchise, much like how Days of Future Past ended up removing The Last Stand from the X-Men film canon.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Director Ridley Scott and screenwriters John Logan and Dante Harper have created a film that's more horror and less science-fiction, and it's clear that they're making a concerted effort to fit A:C into the same palette and structure as the previous films. For certain, this film feels much more like Alien than Prometheus ever did. The opening act begins promisingly enough, with composer Jed Kurzel borrowing heavily from Jerry Goldsmith's brilliant, evocative score from the first film. Likewise, the narrative begins with the calm and serenity of space being replaced by an ominous uncertainty when a wrench is thrown into the best laid plans of the ship's human crew.
In space, no one can…well, you know.
Soon after that, however, the film ends up rehashing literally everything that's come before it in the most mercenary of ways. The climax of the film shamelessly borrows from the end of all four of the original Quadrilogy. It plays more like a greatest hits collection that was created by an artist's label and not the artist themselves, with a previously unreleased track or two slapped on for good measure. A:C does almost nothing new and nothing truly innovative unless you count the multiple ways that the new alien "neomorphs" burst out of their human hosts. By this point, though, the body horror that made the first film so effective has become a pop culture trope, and it fails to have the impact it should. In a similar vein, A:C seems to be intent on over-explaining the origin of the aliens themselves, and in doing so, threatens to remove the menace and mystery that makes them so terrifying.
The neomorphs themselves are something of a disappointment and a symptom of the film's lack of ingenuity. This is the first film in the Alien franchise not to benefit from the creative input of the late H. R. Giger, and it's painfully apparent. The neomorphs look like less like the xenomorphs we've all come to know and love and more like a mutated Slender Man with a big forehead. There is also a distinct lack of visual flair in the film, with almost none of Giger's trademark macabre/erotic bio-mechanic design to serve as nightmare fuel. Most of the film takes place not in space or on the Covenant but in a cave system on the planet's surface that feels painfully generic, almost like a placeholder that became the final product.
It takes quite a long time for the xenomorph itself to appear, which is unfortunate because once it arrives, the film finally begins to feel at least a little exciting. This is the first time in decades we've seen a proper, classic xenomorph on screen, and there's a distinct, primal thrill in seeing it stalk, chase, and ravage everything in its path. Ridley Scott masterfully knows how to deploy the creature to its proper effectiveness. If the film was a symphony, the xenomorph is the featured soloist.
Hello, my baby. Hello, my darling.
As for the xenomorph's buffet of victims, all that can be said is that you shouldn't bother learning most of their names. Half the cast is gone by the middle of the film, and of those that remain, only a few seem to have much of a personality of their own. Terraforming expert Daniels (Katherine Waterston) is positioned as A:C's equivalent to Sigourney Weaver's iconic bad-ass Ellen Ripley, if only because of how she's the most active female character and the one with the least glamorous haircut. It's an unfair comparison, since Waterston does a fine job on her own and is easily one of the most expressive people in the cast, but she's no Ripley mainly because nobody is. The only other human character to match her is Billy Crudup's Captain Oram, who wrestles with both his religious faith and his duty to his crew. Its one of Crudup's best performances in a long time, and he nails the righteousness that Oram uses to cover up his self-doubt and vulnerability.
Spoiler alert: don't get too attached to any of these people.
But this film belongs completely and totally to Michael Fassbender, who is brilliant as both Walter and David in equal but very different measures. Even without knowing about the events in Prometheus, David gives off a sinister and uncanny vibe right from the first scenes, where Peter Weyland (an uncredited Guy Pearce) asks the newly-operative David to play a piece of his choice on the piano. That David chooses to play an entry from Wagner's Das Rheingold is a heavy bit of metatextual foreshadowing, but it works like a charm. By the time we encounter him in A:C, David has evolved to believe himself above his creators, possessed of a cold intellect that's colored by desires and schemes that seem all too human.
Walter, on the other hand, has a desire to serve humanity literally built into his source code. If David seems more human than human, Walter swings the pendulum the other way. David has the Received Pronunciation voice of a sinister, Hammer Studios villain, but Walter has a flat, American accent that leads him to over-pronounce his R's almost as a defense mechanism. David's movements are quick and almost bestial, while Walter has a more utilitarian and brute-strength way about him. The best scenes in the film are when Fassbender plays against himself as both characters as David tries to mentor Walter in the personal expression and creativity Walter lacks in his programming. It brings to mind the tense, hypnotic, smoldering and unapologetically homoerotic intensity of Fassbender's rapport with James McAvoy in X-Men: First Class if Magneto and Xavier's roles were reversed.
Barefoot came the android.
If the first Alien film was a slasher film set in space, and Aliens a zombie survival film set in space, Alien: Covenant is a mad scientist/haunted house film. Set in space. The characters act just as illogically, the plot twists just as predictable, and the dramatic moments often just as ridiculous. It eventually does make with the xenomorph mayhem that is the franchise's hallmark, but it takes forever to get there, and the journey is often as muted and desaturated as the skies of the setting's unnamed planet. While buoyed by the strong performances of the lead actors and brilliantly framed by Scott's impeccable eye for composition, there's nothing here we haven't seen before. Instead of exploring strange, horrifying new worlds, Scott seems intent on revisiting the past.
FBOTU Score: 5 out of 10 / C]]>
It isn't that the film has prominent queer characters. The main players all present as primarily heterosexual, although only Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) appears to be definitely so. It isn't that the film touches on themes of oppression. Stripped of its flourishes, the primary conflict appears to be a fairly simple, yet wickedly efficient save-the-world story. Instead, there's something intangible about the film itself, as if there's queerness coded into its DNA. It's part of a larger experience; it isn't the film's primary reason for being, but it's most certaintly present.
Say it with me: MUL-TI-PASS.
To understand The Fifth Element's queer aspect, it helps to first look at its pedigree. The film was heavily based on the works of French comic book artists Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Mœbius) and Jean-Claude Mézières. It wouldn't be the first time that their work inspired a sci-fi blockbuster; Mézières' work especially was highly influential to the aesthetic of the early Star Wars films. It also wouldn't be the last time Besson was influenced by their work, either, since 20 years after The Fifth Element's release, Besson would direct a straight-up adaptation of Mézières' long-running Valérian series. Mézières' work tended to turn its focus not to space battles or defeating an enemy but instead centered on themes of an optimistic kind of humanism that embraced diversity and, more importantly, sexuality and sexual equality.
Whereas Star Wars drew off of 1930s serials and a liberal application of Joseph Campbell's studies on mythology and Star Trek was like a western crossed with Isaac Asimov, The Fifth Element appears to be more in line with Métal hurlant, the comic anthology co-founded by Giraud. (Americans know it as Heavy Metal.) The series wasn't afraid to present decidedly "mature" storylines that included sex and nudity mixed in with the usual sci-fi action and speculative fiction. In that respect, you could say that The Fifth Element owes more to Barbarella than it does to Flash Gordon.
Leeloo bella, psychidella…
It's this level of maturity that sets The Fifth Element apart from the two franchises it explicitly set itself up as a counter to. Aside from Princess Leia's metal bikini in Return Of The Jedi, sex and sexuality was all but completely absent from the early Star Wars films. Likewise, in the anodyne future of Star Trek, human sexual diversity seems to have been eliminated along with poverty, war, and whatever other moral failings the Enterprise crew discovered on the strange, less-civilized worlds they encountered. Both franchises also tend to devote their plots to a central good-vs-evil conflict that ends up defining the series as a whole, arguably holding more importance than the players involved.
The Fifth Element, on the other hand, turns its focus squarely on its main characters. The ostensible over-plot — that is, defeating the evil planet hurtling toward Earth — seems more like an excuse to show the personal stories of Korben Dallas and Leeloo (Milla Jovovich). In fact, the Big Bad can only be defeated if and when Leeloo grows to understand the full depth of the human experience, including (and most importantly) love. It's this connection to the humanity of its cast that helps to give The Fifth Element its queer elements.
Leeloo tries to understand skydiving.
This is perfectly encapsulated in the film's true climax, which is not the final defeat of the evil heading toward earth. Instead, it's what is inarguably the film's most famous sequence, the performance of the alien diva Plavalaguna (Maïwenn Le Besco with vocals by Inva Mula). For several minutes, the film becomes quiet and contemplative as the audience watches enraptured by the diva's performance of the famous "Mad Scene aria" from Lucia Di Lammermoor. This may be the only time a sci-fi epic stops everything for a bit of opera that's just as dramatic as any spaceship skirmish.
Instead of featuring on hard, aggressive, typically masculine events, the diva's performance is soft, vulnerable, and nakedly emotional. It's these qualities that become the most important to the film's central conflict. As he watches, Korben's face lights up with a kind of new emotional intelligence as he begins to understand the power of vulnerability. From that point forward, it becomes clear that Korben must resolve both masculine and feminine parts of himself to truly succeed in his mission. For lack of a better phrase, he becomes archetype-fluid.
Sing, sweet alien of music.
Leading up and immediately after the event, we're treated to a number of bits that further reinforce the film's queer credentials. Shortly before the diva's performance, we are introduced to the flamboyant galaxy-class VIP Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker). Prancing around like a cross between Prince and Dennis Rodman in Jean-Paul Gautier's gender-fluid bodysuits, Ruby is unapologetically gender non-conforming. While clearly cisgendered, his fashions are decidedly effeminate by 20th-century standards to say nothing about his mannerisms.
To top it off, Ruby's surrounded by a pack of gay male admirers/lackeys. But at the same, he's also seen as sexually desirable by nearly every woman he encounters, and the only person who seems to find Ruby's behavior difficult is Korben, which comes off as more a basic personality conflict than anything else. While Ruby is not clearly and canonically bisexual or pansexual, he admits to having had relations with non-human aliens, so it is entirely within the realm of possibility that he's hooked up with at least a couple of men in his time.
He's here, he's queer, he's super-green.
Ruby isn't the only queer attendee in the audience, though. A background character, Baby Ray (Ian Beckett), is accompanied by a male significant other in an outfit even more gender-non-conforming than Ruby's leopard-print and rose-festooned unitards. Ray himself is dressed in gauzy white lace, and like Ruby has many female admirers. While relatively unimportant to the main story, Ray gets more screen time than any of the other extras in the audience, and Besson isn't afraid to show the emotional connection between Ray and his partner.
Beyond all of that, The Fifth Element is possessed of a production fueled by bright colors and outrageous situations. From Leeloo's neon orange hair to Plavalaguna's sky-blue skin, Besson isn't afraid to surround his characters with vibrance and light. In fact, he's said in interviews he did this deliberately to avoid the "dark corridor" effect he saw in so many sci-fi films. Besson literally employs every color in the rainbow for his film.
Fly the friendly space-ways.
And of course, The Fifth Element cannot be discussed, especially in a queer context, without spending time on Gautier's unique costume designs. The "bandage dress" Leeloo wears in her first scenes has since become iconic and instantly recognizable, perfectly summarizing the out-of-the-box aesthetic of the film. Gautier shows a lot of skin and a lot of sex in his outfits with both genders, from the cleavage-baring uniforms of the Euro-models working the 23rd century McDonald's to the ultra-tight spandex worn by the deliciously steroidal musclemen working for the villain, Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg (Gary Oldman). While it's kept all within a PG-13 framework, it's remarkably mature and sophisticated when compared to other sci-fi epics of the time.
But as the production design goes, so does the heart of the film itself. While on the surface, The Fifth Element is often defined by its visuals, but it's true nature is revealed in the humanity of its story. The future envisioned by Besson, Giraud, and Mézières isn't dystopian or homogenous. In fact, it appears that they've taken the diversity and emotional potential of humanity and amplified it exponentially, in effect erasing many of the boundaries around gender and sexuality that its audience has come to know and accept. The human heart of the film defines its unabashedly wild palette and not the other way around.
Leeloo spins us right round.
By focusing itself around the experience of its characters and not the conflict that's the ostensible primary narrative, The Fifth Element opens itself up to the explore full breadth of humanity. It envisions a future where everybody has a place and everybody is free to express themselves as they see fit, no matter what. It's the same kind of freedom that fuels the queer experience, where identity is very much self-defined by each individual in different ways. In fact, it's this freedom that ends up being the key to saving the world and, by extension, the universe. It's perhaps the most hopeful and optimistic kind of science-fiction, one where true strength and power comes from vulnerability and openness. It's one where the players define the story instead of the story defining them, and that definition can be anything you want it to be.
That's one hell of a multipass.
The header image is by Nick Runge. Check out more of his artwork here.
The Fifth Element is returning to theatres on May 14th and 17th, 2017, in a new, restored 4K transfer. Check Fathom Events to see if it's playing in your area.]]>


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The Base Condo For Rent in Pattaya City ฿15,000
1 Bedroom Swimming Pool View for RENT at The Base Pattaya Condominium. This unit is set on the 3rd floor and has a balcony facing to the swimming pool. It has fully furnished and comes with kitchen, living space with LED TV and sofa. Queen sized bedroom with fitted wardrobes, bathroom & hot water shower. Ceramic flooring and air-conditioning throughout. Balcony. Washing machine.
This project is located in the best location. Positioned along Pattaya Second Road in between South & Central Pattaya this downtown residence means that everything is easily accessible.
The Base Pattaya Condominium provides excellent facilities such as 24hrs security, key card access, 2 communal swimming pools, sea view fitness center & sauna, games room, playground and even a library, covered parking space.
Please contact us to arrange a viewing, and for more information Tel 038-723615 or e-mail via [email protected]
- Fully Furnished
- European Kitchen
- Communal Swimming Pool
- 24-Hour Security
- Long Term Only
- On Taxi Route
- Easy Access To The Beach
- Fully Air Conditioned
- Pool View
- Washing Machine
- Gymnasium
- Covered Parking
Rented Until 28 February 2018
( 3 Months 9 Days )
Reference number :: RC9442
- ฿15,000 /m
- Living area : 30 sqm.
- Floor : 3
- Bedrooms : 1
- Bathrooms : 1
- Location : Pattaya City
Property and land sizes are for guidance only and should not be relied upon. Verification of registered sizes will be available upon serious enquiries.
Interested in this Property?
Call EAST COAST REAL ESTATE on:
Jomtien tel: + (66) 38 267 030-1
Pattaya tel: + (66) 38 723 615-6
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