SUBMERGENCE (France/Germany/Spain - 2018) Directed by Wim Wenders. Written by Erin Dignam. Cast: James McAvoy, Alicia Vikander, Alexander Siddig, Celyn Jones, Reda Kateb, Jannick Schumann, Jean-Pierre Lorit, Julian Bouanich, Loic Corbery, Hakeemshady Mohamed, Hans Torgard, Jess Liaudin, Abdikjam Abdulllahi Aden. (Unrated, 112 mins) All careers have ups and downs, but for those with an intense passion for movies, there's few things more depressing than watching a great filmmaker lose their way and fall into a pattern of sustained collapse. Along with trailblazers like Werner Herzog, Volker Schlondorff, Margarethe von Trotta, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders was one of the key figures in the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s. Important Wenders works from that era, like 1974's ALICE IN THE CITIES, 1976's KINGS OF THE ROAD and 1977's THE AMERICAN FRIEND, remain revered by cineastes and studied in film courses to this day. After his 1982 American debut HAMMETT flopped, Wenders returned to Europe and came back strong with 1984's PARIS, TEXAS, which gave Harry Dean Stanton the role of his career, and 1987's WINGS OF DESIRE, his masterpiece and an often breathtaking work of art that found Wenders at the peak of his powers. But over the last 25 years, something's gone wrong. Like Herzog, Wenders found himself more interested in documentaries, and he enjoyed the biggest commercial success of his career with 1999's BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB, where he followed guitarist Ry Cooder to Havana to track down and pay tribute to an obscure collective of elderly Cuban musicians. In addition, he also directed several U2 music videos, and he helmed an episode of the PBS documentary series THE BLUES, among other short films and smaller, personal projects.
Throughout this period, following 1991's UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD, Wenders continued exploring non-fiction while his narrative features were proving to be one forgettable disappointment after another: 1993's FARAWAY, SO CLOSE! was a decidedly inferior sequel to WINGS OF DESIRE that nobody liked; 1997's THE END OF VIOLENCE had some interesting moments amidst a generally muddled story involving Hollywood movie producers, government surveillance, and illegal immigrants; 2001's THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL is aggressively unwatchable, co-written by U2's Bono and headlined by Jeremy Davies in possibly the most annoyingly mannered performance in the history of motion pictures. It remains Wenders' worst film by a country mile, one whose cause wasn't helped by co-star Mel Gibson, going for some arthouse cred as a bellowing detective in a back and neck brace, telling an interviewer that it was--and he wasn't wrong--"as boring as a dog's ass;" and 2005's middling DON'T COME KNOCKING reunited Wenders with PARIS, TEXAS writer Sam Shepard but with significantly lesser results. 2005's post-9/11 drama LAND OF PLENTY is really his only consistently good scripted film after 1991. It more fully develops his half-baked surveillance themes from THE END OF VIOLENCE, and it got a big boost from Michelle Williams and a career-best performance by John Diehl, a veteran TV actor (he was Zito on MIAMI VICE) who took the opportunity and ran with it, but it's one of Wenders' least-known and least-seen films. Wenders stays busy and still earns significant accolades when it comes to his documentaries, most notably 2011's PINA, 2014's Oscar-nominated THE SALT OF THE EARTH, and the upcoming POPE FRANCIS: A MAN OF HIS WORD. But of his four scripted features over the last decade, two--2008's PALERMO SHOOTING (one of Dennis Hopper's final films) and 2016's THE BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF ARANJUEZ--remain unreleased in the US, while 2015's EVERY THING WILL BE FINE was a stilted, somnambulant Atom Egoyan knockoff with James Franco that was pointlessly shot in 3D, which hardly mattered since it went straight to VOD anyway.
That brings us to Wenders' latest, SUBMERGENCE, which again spotlights the esteemed filmmaker's ongoing inability to function outside of the documentary genre. It's based on a 2011 novel by J.M. Ledgard, but not helping matters is that the screenplay adaptation was entrusted to Erin Dignam, the same writer behind Sean Penn's 2017 embarrassment THE LAST FACE. As in that film, we have a blossoming romance between two driven but lost souls being intruded upon by career dedication, Third World strife, geopolitical concerns, godawful writing, and a director with a message that gets mired in lugubrious self-indulgence. To his credit, Wenders doesn't come close to approaching the smugness of Sean Penn, but make no mistake, this could very easily be titled THE LAST FACE II: SUBMERGENCE. The film chronicles the whirlwind romance between James More (James McAvoy) and Danny Flinders (Alicia Vikander) after they meet at a Normandy bed-and-breakfast resort. He's a Scottish-born MI-6 counterterrorism agent undercover as a water engineer and awaiting instructions for his next assignment in Somalia. She's a biomathematician prepping for a deep sea dive in a high-tech submersible off the coast of Greenland to study the origins of life. They court in vague riddles, usually with clunky nautical references. Lunch dates don't get much hotter than a monotone Danny droning "The ocean has five layers...the first one is epipelagic..." or James making his move when responding to her question "What's your favorite water body?" with a come hither "The human body."
He's eventually sent on his mission and is promptly abducted and held prisoner by Somali jihadists, who attempt to brainwash him into believing in their cause as he all the while insists he's just a water engineer. This leads to a real attention-grabbing conversation with a Somali doctor (Alexander Siddig) about well construction and water filtration systems. Danny, meanwhile, gets ready for her dive but is troubled by James' sudden disappearance and his unanswered texts. She tries to focus on her work, as evidenced by one breathlessly thrilling scene that's almost as riveting as Donald Sutherland's clandestine, 15-minute conspiratorial park bench exposition dump on Kevin Costner in JFK, where Danny's examining some large rock formations near the shore and tells a fellow researcher "If you come closer, they're like tiny trees...this one here is a marriage between a fungus and a cyanobacteria," adding "It dissolves from life into non-life." At this point, Vikander could very well be referring to the pages of Dignam's script.
If SUBMERGENCE has one thing working in its favor, it's that it certainly looks good, thanks to the contributions of regular Gaspar Noe cinematographer Benoit Debie, who's also worked on films as varied as Dario Argento's THE CARD PLAYER, Harmony Korine's SPRING BREAKERS, and Ryan Gosling's LOST RIVER. But for as utterly inert and lethargically lifeless as the dramatic elements are, Wenders would've been better served by making a documentary about either a biomathematician deep-sea diving off the coast of Greenland or a water engineer working with locals to construct a water filtration system in Somalia. Much like what's happened with Terrence Malick's recent string of duds, SUBMERGENCE comes across like Wim Wenders directing a parody of a Wim Wenders film. And like Malick, he's still attracting A-list stars who want to work with him, even though they must realize they aren't quite getting the same guy who made WINGS OF DESIRE. There's still enough cache in his legend that you can't blame McAvoy and Vikander for wanting to say "I was in a Wim Wenders film." At this point, the 72-year-old filmmaker has nothing to prove to anyone. His classic films are eternal and no amount of MILLION DOLLAR HOTELs, EVERY THING WILL BE FINEs, and SUBMERGENCEs will diminish their impact. Sure, it's not a so-bad-it-makes-you-question-your-will-to-live fiasco like THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL, a film that moved at the pace of plate tectonics and was so inconceivably awful that it took four sittings over a two-day period to get through because I could only endure it in 30-minute increments and I refused to let it defeat me. No, SUBMERGENCE is not on that level of bad, but it's a chore to sit through. It's not completely fair to say Wenders has lost his mojo, but this and almost all of his "commercial" features of the last quarter century don't play to his current strengths. Concerns and priorities evolve over a long career, and it's obvious that his passion lies with documentary filmmaking and not with ponderous drivel like SUBMERGENCE.
JASON BOURNE (US - 2016) Directed by Paul Greengrass. Written by Paul Greengrass and Christopher Rouse. Cast: Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed, Bill Camp, Ato Essandoh, Gregg Henry, Scott Shepherd, Vincenz Kiefer, Stephen Kunken. (PG-13, 123 mins) After sitting out 2012's disappointing THE BOURNE LEGACY--the TOKYO DRIFT of the BOURNE franchise--star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass return for the fifth entry, JASON BOURNE (they really should've called it BOURNE AGAIN). It's been nine years since THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, and the Damon-Greengrass duo basically stick to the formula, opting to not fix what isn't broken and, naturally, including a new closing credits remix of Moby's "Extreme Ways." Not participating is screenwriter Tony Gilroy, a key component to the success of the first three films who failed to find a spark when he was promoted to director in Greengrass' stead for LEGACY. Greengrass' hyper-kinetic, shaky-cam style is, for better or worse, so inextricably linked with the BOURNE franchise that it's easy to forget he wasn't involved with 2002's THE BOURNE IDENTITY and only came onboard when Doug Liman (SWINGERS, GO) wasn't invited back for 2004's THE BOURNE SUPREMACY after clashing with Universal on the first film. Gilroy's focus on exposition and dialogue turned LEGACY into a bit of a bore, and without his presence here, Greengrass has taken over scripting duties for the first time on a BOURNE film. It's telling that he shares credit with his usual editor and first-time screenwriter Christopher Rouse, who won an Oscar for his editing work on ULTIMATUM. With that in mind, the focus is on action, with many of the more intricate details of plot, characterization and motivation left fuzzy, probably because that just isn't their chief concern. Trotting all over the globe at a breakneck pace, JASON BOURNE keeps your attention and is a definite improvement over THE BOURNE LEGACY, whose existence it completely ignores, but there's no denying that the freshness is waning and that neither Damon nor Greengrass seem as inspired this time out.
CIA operative Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) hacks into the agency's database from Iceland, stealing damning files on the Treadstone and Blackbriar programs that turned all-American David Webb into superagent Jason Bourne (Damon). Bourne is living off the grid in Greece, picking up pocket money in brutal street fights and still coming to terms with his past. Parsons' hack is traced by ambitious cybersecurity official Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), who talks new CIA director Robert Dewey (a craggier-than-ever Tommy Lee Jones) into making her point in the trackdown of Parsons, who they're sure will lead them to Bourne. Of course she does, though Parsons is killed by Dewey's covert agent "The Asset" (Vincent Cassel), which sends Bourne all through Europe trying to get to the bottom of Parsons' claim that the death of his State Dept honcho father Richard Webb (Gregg Henry in newly-shot flashbacks) in a Libya car bombing in 1999 was actually a CIA hit disguised as a terrorist attack. He forms an unholy alliance with Lee, who works closely with Dewey but seems to have her own agenda. Dewey, meanwhile, wants to keep a lid on anything related to Bourne and is preoccupied with his own secret dealings with billionaire social media tech mogul Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), who's been paid a huge amount of money for his work in a new agency project called Ironhand, an advanced surveillance program that will track the whereabouts and actions of all users of Kalloor's Facebook-like app Deep Dream.
There's some fleeting attempts at topicality with Kalloor's parallels to Mark Zuckerberg, and one of Dewey's flunkies (Ato Essandoh) gravely intoning that Parsons' hack is "worse than Snowden," but Greengrass isn't really concerned with the confusing plot, instead keeping a relentless forward momentum as Bourne goes from one action set piece to the next. This culminates in a ridiculous but nonetheless entertaining car vs. SWAT truck chase in Las Vegas that's more CANNONBALL RUN than BOURNE. Mainly, the bulk of the action is a more propulsive-than-most travelogue of Damon briskly walking through scenic European cities and train stations while looking over his shoulder, intercut with the obligatory scenes in a CIA crisis suite filled with rows of surveillance monitors on the walls, with a steely-eyed Lee demonstrating an almost Spidey Sense of where to spot Bourne in a crowd ("Stop...back up two seconds...pause...enhance the image...it's HIM!"). In the most apparent sign of the shift in writing focus, Damon has very little dialogue here, and Vikander doesn't have much to other than look really grim and serious, her Heather Lee coming across like the least fun person on the planet (she's essentially a young version of Joan Allen's Pamela Landy). Jones relies on a lot of his stoical Sam Gerard routine, periodically barking "Find him!" and stopping just short of ordering Cassel's "The Asset" on a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and doghouse in the area. Damon's three previous BOURNE films were smartly-plotted thrillers with intense action sequences, while JASON BOURNE just dispenses with the notion of a story making much sense, but works as an over-the-top action movie, albeit one you've seen several times before. It's not so much a dumbing down as it is giving people what they want. To that extent, it's a good time, but certainly a step below the first three films, particularly the two Damon-Greengrass collaborations.
THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (US - 2015) Directed by Guy Ritchie. Written by Guy Ritchie and Lionel Wigram. Cast: Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, Hugh Grant, Alicia Vikander, Jared Harris, Elizabeth Debicki, Luca Calvani, Sylvester Groth, Christian Berkel, Misha Kuznetsov. (PG-13, 116 mins)
With rare exception, the list of 1960s TV shows turned into big-budget event movies in the mid '90s to the early '00s is a pretty dire roll call of failure. For every MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE or THE FUGITIVE, there's a slew of duds like WILD WILD WEST, THE SAINT, I SPY, BEWITCHED, THE MOD SQUAD, GET SMART, LOST IN SPACE, MCHALE'S NAVY, and THE AVENGERS, among others. In an age when every superhero is getting their own movie, 2015 seems a tad late to hop on the TV reboot bandwagon and bring THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. to the big screen as a $75 million summer movie. It's even more surprising that it retains the period 1960s setting during the Cold War. The film was a long-in-gestation project, languishing in development hell for at least a decade, with Steven Soderbergh, George Clooney, and Tom Cruise all attached at various times. On the heels of his career reinvention as a Hollywood franchise guy with Robert Downey Jr's SHERLOCK HOLMES films, the former LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS wunderkind Guy Ritchie fashions his U.N.C.L.E. as an extremely enjoyable retro '60s spy movie that's funny while successfully avoiding the camp and kitsch of a straight-up AUSTIN POWERS spoof. Other than some CGI work and some minor quick-cutting in some of the action sequences, Ritchie's U.N.C.L.E. looks and feels like it could've been made in 1965, with the same level of outstanding production design, atmosphere, and attention to detail he brought to his semi-steampunk interpretation of SHERLOCK HOLMES. The fact is, nobody needed a MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. reboot and the idea sounded less than promising, almost like the film was setting itself up to bomb and clean up at the Razzies next spring. There's no reason this thing should be as giddily entertaining as it is, but it turned out to be one of the most pleasant surprises of the summer.
The question is, will it matter? The target audience has to be older by default--how many in today's prime multiplex demographic even know what THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. was? The spy series, which starred Robert Vaughn and David McCallum as, respectively, U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) agents Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, and Leo G. Carroll as their boss Waverly, aired on NBC from 1964-1968. It was a response to the 007 phenomenon (then hitting its stride with the much-anticipated release of GOLDFINGER, followed by the Bondmania zenith THUNDERBALL in 1965) and even had Ian Fleming onboard as a creative consultant until his death a month before the series premiere. It was so popular that NBC even edited episodes together, padded them with new or unused footage, and released them as feature films that became hits. That's right--U.N.C.L.E. fans went to the theater and paid to see re-edited versions of things they already saw on TV. Ritchie's U.N.C.L.E. serves as an origin story for Solo (MAN OF STEEL's Henry Cavill) and Kuryakin (THE LONE RANGER's Armie Hammer), who begin the film as nemeses. It's 1963, and Solo is in East Berlin to smuggle mechanic Gaby Teller (EX MACHINA's Alicia Vikander) to the west. Gaby is the estranged daughter of Dr. Udo Teller (Christian Berkel), a scientist forced into being a Nazi collaborator during WWII. He's been in the secret employ of the US government but has gone missing and is now held prisoner by megalomaniacal shipping heiress Victoria Vinciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki), who's using him to develop a nuclear weapon. Solo and Kuryakin must become reluctant and constantly bickering allies to both protect Gaby and get her in contact with her uncle Rudi (Sylvester Groth), who may know of Udo's whereabouts. As they form a begrudging respect and friendship with one another as colleagues, Solo and Kuryakin are also operating under strict orders to obtain Vinciguerra's computer files--and take the other out if the need arises.
THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. is a lighthearted, globetrotting spy outing, filled with witty and occasionally smutty double entendres, great zingers ("For a special agent, you're not having a very special day, are you?") and some quirky action scenes, including one that plays out in the background while Solo relaxes with a quick bite and some wine while sitting in his getaway truck. Hammer does a great job with his thick Russian accent and actually demonstrates some character depth even though Kuryakin is primarily a ball of barely-contained rage. Cavill is having a blast as the cocky, womanizing Solo, not doing a direct impression of Vaughn but beautifully nailing the great character actor's distinct vocal inflections and cadences, uttering his dialogue with a perpetually-arched eyebrow but never taking it over the line into self-aware snark (Hugh Grant plays their eventual boss Waverly, though his role is relatively brief here).Ritchie's U.N.C.L.E. is a breezy, uncomplicated affair that's big on laughs but takes itself seriously when the situation warrants for a nice balance of serious action and intentional laughs. And that may ultimately be its commercial downfall: it's hard for 2015 audiences to accept a period piece like this at face value, without the kitsch and the parody element that an AUSTIN POWERS would bring to the table. It's one thing to wonder if the kids today know what THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. was, but do they even know what the Cold War was? Ritchie's film is terrific entertainment and the kind of movie you'll stop and watch until it's over every time you come across it while channel-surfing as it plays on HBO in perpetuity...but will anybody under 40 even care about this movie right now?
EX MACHINA (UK - 2015) Written and directed by Alex Garland. Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya Mizuno, Corey Johnson. (R, 107 mins)
It's easy to make surface comparisons to Caradog James' 2014 sci-fi film THE MACHINE, but Alex Garland's EX MACHINA, while sharing some similar ideas and, unfortunately, a focus on female android protagonists named Ava, goes in an otherwise completely different direction. A twisty, often philosophical mindbender, EX MACHINA marks the directing debut of novelist Garland, who's been a frequent Danny Boyle collaborator (he scripted 28 DAYS LATER and SUNSHINE, and his novel The Beach was adapted into a 2000 Boyle film by TRAINSPOTTING screenwriter John Hodge), and also wrote Pete Travis' instant cult classic DREDD (2012). Garland lays on the Kubrick worship a little thick, especially in the back end of the film, but he does it right, and the film's cold, clinical look, its long hallways, its recurring use of mirrors, and its limited number of protagonists in an isolated, claustrophobic location make it particularly indebted to THE SHINING. In conjunction with a throbbing electronic score co-written by Portishead's Geoff Barrow and the cinematography of Rob Hardy, EX MACHINA is one of those hypnotic films whose visual intoxication works on you quickly, but unlike many such instances, it's got the story to back up the style.
Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a code writer for Bluebook, a Google-meets-Facebook-like behemoth and the internet's most utilized search engine. He wins a company-wide contest to spend a week with reclusive CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a billionaire several times over who lives in a distant, subterranean fortress that doubles as his secret research facility. Nervous Caleb wonders why he's there and why he has to sign a confidentiality agreement, but Nathan soon reveals that he wants Nathan to administer the Turing Test--whether an artificial intelligence can engage in human behavior and make human decisions on its own--on an android named Ava (Alicia Vikander). After several interview and observational sessions with Ava, an odd mutual attraction forms, and during periodic power blackouts that Nathan claims were caused by faulty installation but now has too much top-secret research to allow the electricians back in--during which time Nathan loses security camera access to what Ava and Caleb are talking about--Ava secretly warns Caleb "Do not trust Nathan. You can't believe anything he tells you."
Roles eventually shift in unpredictable ways, but as heavy-drinking Nathan becomes more erratic, Caleb grows more paranoid about his host's intentions, and Ava begins to exhibit more signs of intelligence and independent thought, the film definitely starts to resemble THE SHINING, with evil Nathan subbing in for Jack Torrance and Caleb and Ava functioning as Wendy and Danny. There's a fourth major character in Nathan's mute Japanese servant and sexual outlet Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), who doesn't understand English but clearly has secrets of her own and knows much more than she lets on. But little is at it seems in EX MACHINA, which doles out its plot twists in a restrained, organic fashion rather than ridiculous reveals that negate what's happened prior. Garland engages in some clever misdirection designed to make you think you've got things figured out in a "maybe Caleb isn't the one conducting the Turing Test" sort-of way, but ultimately, he isn't interested in going down that road. It's a near-flawless fusion of intelligent, hard sci-fi and rich, vivid atmosphere that just gets better and more intense as it goes along, though if it ended one scene before it did, it would've been flirting with perfection. All four stars are superb, with Isaac turning in another dynamic performance right on the heels of A MOST VIOLENT YEAR. Shot at the Juvet Landscape Hotel in Valldalen, Norway, with the long hallway shots done at Pinewood Studios in London, EX MACHINA is a remarkable film, intelligently written, visually stunning, and with top-notch android CGI on Vikander, proving that CGI can look good, and doing so on just a $16 million budget. It belongs on that short list of almost trance-inducing modern sci-fi cult classics like BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW, UNDER THE SKIN, and the little-seen THE MACHINE, which also deals with AI and a female android named Ava but in an entirely different, post-apocalyptic setting and, it should be noted, lacking an amazing Isaac-Mizuno dance scene.
