DUNKIRK (US - 2017) Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, James D'Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Joachim ten Haaf, Matthew Marsh, Damien Bonnard, Will Attenborough, Bill Milner, voice of Michael Caine. (PG-13, 106 mins) Christopher Nolan's painstakingly-constructed DUNKIRK brings a harrowing you-are-there immediacy to the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk with an intensity that plays like a feature-length version of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN's opening sequence at Normandy. At 106 minutes, it's Nolan's shortest film since his 1998 pre-MEMENTO debut FOLLOWING, but it never feels less than epic in its presentation and its ambition. One of the few true purists left among A-list filmmakers, Nolan uses the barest minimum of CGI in DUNKIRK, instead going the classic route, shooting on film--mostly with IMAX cameras--with real extras, real locations, real ships, and real planes. For those who don't spend a lot of time watching old movies where such things were more commonplace, the difference is immediately, staggeringly obvious. There's a tangible sense of reality to the aerial shots and the long/wide shots up and down the beach, filled with thousands of extras as British soldiers waiting to be rescued that would've been compromised if done digitally. Nolan's approach to the film stands as proof that no matter how far CGI has progressed (WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES is the current standard-bearer as far as fantasy cinema goes), when it comes to recreations of historical events such as this WWII story, the old ways remain the most effective.
There's a scene very late in the 1980 gangster classic THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY where British mob boss Bob Hoskins, trying to sever his ties with gangland past, chews out his New York Mafia partners for backing out of a business deal over fears that his criminal empire will interfere with their legit interests. "Us British," he explains, "We're used to a bit more vitality, imagination, touch of the Dunkirk spirit, know what I mean?" The Dunkirk spirit is present throughout, as Nolan presents three intercut narratives over the course of DUNKIRK: "The Mole," takes place one week before the evacuation; "The Sea" takes place one day before; and "The Air" one hour before. Of course, all three eventually come together, and while it may seem gimmicky, it's in line with Nolan's recurrent motif of playing with time elements (so important to MEMENTO, INCEPTION, and INTERSTELLAR). It works beautifully, with imagery in one tying into and complementing something going on in another, and with occasional characters popping up in other sections as the threads begin to overlap. It's not confusing at all, and it's becoming one of the things that make Christopher Nolan films so unique. "The Mole" focuses on young soldiers Tommy (newcomer Fionn Whitehead) and Gibson (Aneurin Barnard), and later, Alex (One Direction's Harry Styles, who's surprisingly solid in his dramatic acting debut) at Dunkirk, where 400,000 mostly British soldiers are waiting to be evacuated after German forces have pushed them to the edge of the town, making them sitting ducks for German air raids. "The Sea" follows mild-mannered Dawson (BRIDGE OF SPIES Oscar-winner Mark Rylance), his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Peter's shy, introverted friend George (Barry Keoghan) as they take Dawson's boat out to sea, joining other civilians and Navy-commandeered private vessels on a dangerous mission to Dunkirk to rescue their officers. "The Air" centers on two Spitfire pilots--Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden)--left on their own after the squad leader is shot down, heading to Dunkirk to take out German planes, with Collins forced to land on the water and Farrier playing guessing games with his fuel after his gauge is damaged in a skirmish.
Nolan presents the stories in a clinical, matter-of-fact fashion. There's very little in the way of personal backstories of the characters (one emotional bit involving Dawson's reasons for partaking int he rescue are mentioned almost as an afterthought), with everything taking place in the moment. While it's debatable whether this leaves a cold chilliness to the human element, it works in the context of DUNKIRK because nothing matters but the evacuation. That doesn't mean there aren't powerful moments for some of the characters, whether it's outcast George going along in order to feel good about contributing to the war effort; or a shell-shocked sole survivor of a U-Boat attack (Cillian Murphy) picked up by Dawson; or the sympathetic Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) demonstrating true leadership in making sure every last soldier is evacuated from the beach. Nolan doesn't engage in jingoism or over-the-top chest-thumping here. The word "Nazi" is never said and German officers are never seen, and if this were made back in the '60s, it would be one of the very few WWII movies with no role for Karl-Otto Alberty. This is a nuts-and-bolts chronicle of the triumph of the human spirit, of a nation pulling together to do what it needs to do, even if it means civilians putting their lives at risk. With very little in the way of dialogue--Nolan's script was only 76 pages long--the film relies on visuals and sound design to tell its story, whether it's the constant, repetitive Hans Zimmer cues with a subtle clock ticking audible in the mix almost constantly, Hoyte van Hotema's cinematography showcasing the vast forever of the sea and the beach, and the terrifying, deafening shriek of German planes as they fly overhead, DUNKIRK transports the audience to another time and place. It also exists in a less divisive time when everyone did their part, and it's only fitting that it's made in such an old-school fashion. A defiant and very welcome "they don't make 'em like they used to anymore" exercise, DUNKIRK establishes Nolan as arguably the best commercial filmmaker working today, at this point boasting an almost Kubrick-ian track record of consistent high quality (the exception being the Nolan-produced sci-fi dud TRANSCENDENCE, which he had the sense to turn over to cinematographer-turned-debuting director Wally Pfister) and one of the few auteurs of his caliber doing everything humanly possible to preserve the classical notion of cinema as it's always been known.
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (US - 2016) Directed by Zack Snyder. Written by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer. Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Gal Gadot, Scoot McNairy, Tao Okamoto, Callan Mulvey, Harry Lennix, Christina Wren, Kevin Costner, Michael Shannon, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lauren Cohan, Ralph Lister, Jason Momoa, Ezra Miller, Ray Fisher, Michael Cassidy, voice of Patrick Wilson. (PG-13, 151 mins) There's no getting around the fact that the awkwardly-titled BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE is a disjointed, bloated mess that still feels incomplete even at two and a half hours (a three-hour, R-rated version will be released on Blu-ray in July, though I can't imagine that being much help). The reviews have been devastating and the toxic response from critics would lead some to believe that the film is some kind of cinematic Ebola. I'm not especially keen to engage in a round of "reviewing the reviewers," and some of the vicious reviews make their points in a professional, even-handed manner but it's obvious that a lot of the critics had their reviews pretty much written before they even saw the film. As if workshopping jokes for a Comedy Central roast of director Zack Snyder, many no doubt jotted down their snarky comments and nit-picky complaints and pithy zingers and constructed their reviews around them to fit the narrative that was constructed the moment the project was announced.
This is a recurring issue with the films of the much-maligned Snyder, a guy nobody had a problem with when his surprisingly solid 2004 remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD got good reviews and 2007's influential--for better or worse--300 became a surprise blockbuster. Then around the time he directed 2009's WATCHMEN, critics and internet fanboys decided it was time for him to pay because that was a treasured property that frankly, nobody could've done in a way that would've satisfied its most obsessive fans. 2011's SUCKER PUNCH, one of the strangest and most original major-studio, big-budget movies of the last decade, got eviscerated and Superman fans took it as a personal attack that he was chosen to helm 2013's MAN OF STEEL. The response to BVS is indicative of a recurring problem in today's film criticism: the pile-on. A Hitfix article listing 20 "baffling questions" that BVS "refused to answer" gets several of the details completely wrong. Did the author of that article watch the movie or were they watching how the Rotten Tomatoes percentage was dropping? Does the author know that an unanswered question isn't necessarily a "plot hole"? Is BVS a good movie? Eh, it has its moments, but it's OK at best. There's plenty of legitimate beefs with a lot of what's here. But is it as offensively godawful as you've been led to believe? Not even close. Nevertheless, the pile-on is the most intense since Ridley Scott's THE COUNSELOR, a film so unjustifiably lambasted ("Meet the worst movie ever made," crowed one particularly smug review) that its reputation improved and a cult following had formed before it even left theaters. So here's BVS, and like the villagers storming Castle Frankenstein, here's critics, fanboys, and message board mouth-breathers victoriously celebrating an imagined defeat--this had a $166 million opening, so it's not as if a movie like this depends on good reviews--with the tone being set by the "Sad Ben Affleck" viral sensation over the weekend.
Essentially a feature-length prologue to Warner Bros' DC Extended Universe franchise, BVS also functions as a reboot of the Christopher Nolan DARK KNIGHT trilogy and as a sequel to MAN OF STEEL (Nolan gets an exec producer credit here). It bites off more than it can chew taking on too many responsibilities, and it shows in the choppiness (Jena Malone was completely cut from this version of the film) and the frequently confusing developments. Opening with yet another replay of young Bruce Wayne witnessing the murder of his parents (Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan), the action cuts to MAN OF STEEL's climactic battle between Superman (Henry Cavill) and Zod (Michael Shannon) and the destruction of Metropolis (played by Detroit, MI) witnessed on the street by Bruce Wayne (Affleck), who sees a Wayne Enterprise building collapse in yet more of the standard-issue 9/11 imagery. Blaming Superman for the mayhem, Wayne vows to bring down the Man of Steel with help from his faithful butler Alfred (Jeremy Irons). There's a lot of plot, usually involving a globe-trotting Lois Lane (Amy Adams) constantly getting into trouble and Superman bailing her out, and the evil plot of Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg, more on that shortly) to, well, get some Kryptonite from the bottom of the Indian Ocean and do something to revive Zod and take on Superman. It's never really clear why Luthor hates Superman, but he actually gets the edge on the Man of Steel when he kidnaps and threatens to kill Martha Kent (Diane Lane) if he doesn't kill Batman, which leads to the brief title showdown, followed by about 17 endings.
There's also Gal Gadot as Diana Prince, and it's hardly a spoiler at this point to mention she's Wonder Woman. First seen looking sleek and mysterious and crossing paths with Wayne at a Luthor fundraiser, Diana doesn't figure much into the story until Bruce figures out her long-buried secret and she ends up helping Batman and Superman take on a late-arriving, Luthor-generated villain in the climax. Gadot's first appearance as Wonder Woman doesn't take place until after the two-hour mark, but it's a highlight of the movie and she gets what's by far the biggest response from the audience, but the way she's shoehorned in is clunky. Speaking of clunky, Gadot is also integral to one of the film's clumsiest scenes, where she opens an e-mail with video files of future JUSTICE LEAGUE franchise players Aquaman (Jason Momoa), The Flash (Ezra Miller), and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) in a five-minute sequence that stops the movie cold and cumbersomely plays like Gal Gadot watching movie trailers on her laptop. Cavill looks the part and doesn't really do anything wrong as Superman, Adams is too smart an actress to play someone so perpetually helpless, and Affleck is an ineffectual Bruce Wayne/Batman, speaking in a dour monotone and mumbling a good chunk of the time. He's trying to go for that Christian Bale intensity but he honestly just looks bored. Others appear throughout: Irons as the most cynical and tech-savvy incarnation of Alfred yet to be seen (he functions more like Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox from the Nolan trilogy), Laurence Fishburne as a blustering Perry White, and Holly Hunter as the head of a Senate panel investigating Superman (another underdeveloped subplot that doesn't make much sense) as well as standing in the way of Luthor's master plan, but they don't really get to make an impression. Oh, and for some reason, Jimmy Olsen (Michael Cassidy) is now a covert CIA agent posing as a Daily Planet photographer. He's killed off early when he's made by terrorists, the first tip-off probably being that he was still using a camera with film in the year 2016.
For all its flaws--the messy structure, the inconsistent performances, the frequently ugly and smudgy look of the whole thing (closeups look really bad)--BVS is never dull and there are some spectacular action sequences and somewhat better CGI than the destruction porn that dominated the botched second half of MAN OF STEEL. The film's biggest obstacle, and one thing about which critics have been completely right, is the truly mind-bogglingly awful performance by Eisenberg, who plays Lex Luthor as an obnoxious, insufferable trust-fund brat. Eisenberg's whole approach to Luthor seems to have been to study Heath Ledger's Joker and filter it through his Mark Zuckerberg repertoire. He flails his arms, twitches, smirks, preens, poses, and breaks up and punctuates his sentences with "hmm"s like Deltoid in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. It's a grating, appalling, Razzie-ready spaz attack of a performance, one of the most off-putting and abrasively unpleasant in recent memory. Eisenberg is never convincing and never threatening, never coming off like a feared megalomaniacal villain but rather, an attention-seeking, spoiled little shit in dire need of a time-out.
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE, has been universally panned but everybody's still going to see it. The sizable crowd with whom I saw it didn't seem to hate it. They loved Wonder Woman. They laughed at the very few intentionally funny lines. There's the oft-mentioned disconnect between critics and audiences, and while it's got a surplus of flaws and dubious decision-making, it never succeeded in pissing me off at any point, and I can't say the same about MAN OF STEEL and its second-half implosion. Let's face it, whether it was the casting of Affleck or the decision to bring back Snyder or the various ways it deviates from the comic books (I've never been into comic books, so these filmmakers can do whatever they want with the material, I don't care), the trolls and the haters were never going to give this a chance. Going back to Tim Burton's BATMAN in 1989, has there ever been an initially positive response to any announcement of who's playing Batman? Do comic book fans ever not have a hissy fit and react to these kinds of things in a way that makes THE SIMPSONS' Comic Book Guy the most accurate. Representation. Ever? Critics don't need to sink to that level. The trolls and the haters will always be there because what else do they have? But they shouldn't be the ones making a living as objective reviewers resorting to clickbait tactics in a dying field whose continued relevance is constantly being questioned. Maybe it's lowered expectations, but this movie isn't that fucking bad, and if film criticism is going to continue to be a thing, everyone--from career reviewers to hobbyist bloggers--needs to step up their game. Leave the irrational pile-on to the IMDb message board denizens.
INTERSTELLAR (US - 2014) Directed by Christopher Nolan. Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan. Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Wes Bentley, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, David Gyasi, William Devane, Timothee Chalamet, Leah Cairns, David Oyelowo, Collette Wolfe, voices of Bill Irwin, Josh Stewart. (PG-13, 169 mins)
Like the work of his contemporary David Fincher, the films of Christopher Nolan are among the very few that qualify as legitimate "event" films. A master filmmaker who, like Fincher, consistently draws comparisons to Stanley Kubrick, Nolan has one of the finest track records of any filmmaker in the modern era, even with the inevitable backlash that comes with such a high level of acclaim. Through MEMENTO, the DARK KNIGHT trilogy, and INCEPTION, Nolan's scope and vision grow with each new project. His latest film, INTERSTELLAR, is his most ambitious yet, a stunning sci-fi saga filled with state-of-the-art visual effects, a memorable, organ-driven Hans Zimmer score, breathtaking cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema (TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY), and excellent performances all around, and one packed with such grandiose vision that it can't be contained in one reality or even in one galaxy. With obvious influences including the likes of Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS (1972), along with Douglas Trumbull's SILENT RUNNING (1972), Robert Zemeckis' CONTACT (1997), and Danny Boyle's SUNSHINE (2007), INTERSTELLAR often feels like it's juggling too many hard sci-fi concepts. On one hand, it's almost impossible to not marvel at such a staggering achievement, but on the other, it magnifies Nolan's few weaknesses. In the span of just a few moments, your mouth is agape at what you're seeing, then you're groaning as the characters overexplain something for the third or fourth time. Again utilizing his trademark intercutting (think of that SUV's endless plummet into the water in INCEPTION), Nolan can present a brilliantly-edited set piece of nail-biting intensity with three or more distinct and equally suspenseful things simultaneously unfolding, then follow it with a hoary cliche like someone taking their last dying, gasping breath as they're about to reveal a deep, dark secret.
INTERSTELLAR takes place in a near future where Earth is dangerously close to being unable to sustain itself. Crops are scarce--they've just lost okra and corn is on its way out. Cities resemble a new Dust Bowl, the New York Yankees play to a crowd that consists of a few people on a small set of bleachers and the roster is filled with people who have no idea how to play baseball. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a NASA-trained ex-pilot and widower struggling to make it as a farmer while supporting his teenage son Tom (Timothee Chalamet), ten-year-old daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), and his wry, wise father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow). Times have changed--all government money goes toward farming and organizations like NASA have been disbanded and discredited, as evidenced by Murph getting suspended from school for bringing an old textbook that doesn't reflect the new accepted version of history: that NASA wasn't a legit outfit and the moon landings were faked to help bankrupt the Soviet Union. Books keep falling off of Murph's bookshelf and Cooper dismisses her talk that it's a "ghost." Dust blowing in the windows falls in a specific pattern on her bedroom floor. Scientist and curious mind that he still is at heart, and Murph being his daughter, they eventually figure out that the pattern is a code for coordinates on a map. They follow it and stumble on a seemingly abandoned NORAD outpost in the desert that houses what's left of the space program: Cooper's old mentor Prof. Brand (Michael Caine), his protegee/daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), scientists Doyle (Wes Bentley) and Romilly (David Gyasi), and the de facto head of NASA (William Devane). Brand tells Cooper that 50 years earlier, a wormhole was discovered behind Saturn and probes sent through it found another galaxy with a dozen potentially habitable planets. Earth has, at most, a generation left before it dies, and they need to find another planet to sustain human life and carry on the species, either by colonizing it with the humans left on Earth or, if that fails, by incubating fertilized eggs on the new planet. Twelve astronauts were sent on a mission a decade earlier to survey each of the planets. Nine have been eliminated from contention and Amelia, Doyle, and Romilly need a pilot to get them through the wormhole to investigate the three planets where colonization has been deemed possible and attempt to locate the surviving astronauts.
Of course, Cooper leaves his family behind and has no idea how long he'll be gone, which doesn't go over well with Murph. A miscalculation by Amelia results in three members of the team--Amelia, Cooper, and Doyle--spending over three hours on a planet where one hour equals seven Earth years. When they return to the main spacecraft, Romilly is 23 years older and there's communication messages from the now-grown Tom (Casey Affleck) and the still-resentful Murph (Jessica Chastain), who's now working with the elderly and wheelchair-bound Prof. Brand to finish the equation that will being the quartet back to Earth. It's here that INTERSTELLAR goes in directions that are best approached knowing as little as possible.
In many ways, it's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY if Kubrick films had the ability to be warm and sentimental. And that streak of sentimentality is where INTERSTELLAR sometimes stumbles. Nolan is clinical and doesn't wear sentimental well. His protagonists--think Guy Pearce's Leonard Shelby in MEMENTO, Christian Bale's Alfred Borden in THE PRESTIGE and Bruce Wayne in the DARK KNIGHT trilogy, Leonardo DiCaprio's Dom Cobb in INCEPTION--are driven by emotion that's been distorted into obsession and, in most cases, revenge. That cold focus is something that draws the Kubrick analogies. Practically every major character in INTERSTELLAR gets a scene where Zimmer's score--quite majestic and often dark but still a bit much at times--swells up John Williams-style as tears roll down their faces. This look doesn't suit Nolan, and sometimes, the film seems less inspired by 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY or SOLARIS or SUNSHINE (there's even talk of doing a shortcut to "sling-shot" around a black hole to land on one of the planets, much like the Boyle film's last-ditch, desperate "sling-shot" effort to drop the payload and restart the sun), and more like a secret, elaborate, hard sci-fi adaptation of the 1977 Todd Rundgren/Utopia song "Love is the Answer." The song's not in the movie, but someone at a more maudlin point in the proceedings alludes to love being the answer, which made me think of the song, and well, here, read the lyrics:
Name your price
A ticket to paradise
I can't stay here any more
And I've looked high and low
I've been from shore to shore to shore
If there's a short cut I'd have found it
But there's no easy way around it
Light of the world, shine on me
Love is the answer
Shine on us all, set us free
Love is the answer
Who knows why
Someday we all must die
Were all homeless boys and girls
And we are never heard
It's such a lonely world
People turn their heads and walk on by
Tell me, is it worth just another try?
Tell me, are we alive, or just a dying planet?
What are the chances?
Ask the man in your heart for the answers
Nolan's films have a grim darkness to them and that extends to INTERSTELLAR, particularly in some the mid-film plot turns. All the tears and the crying makes for an uneven work as Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan try to have it both ways, and it's the same thing that made something like A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001) so frustrating, as Steven Spielberg brought a never-realized Kubrick project to life and you can see in the film the precise moment where Kubrick's cold, clinical script ended and Spielberg's heart-tugging contributions took flight. Some of it works with INTERSTELLAR, particularly Cooper seeing the 23 years older Murph on a video message and realizing how bitter she remains over him leaving. It's heartbreakingly played by both McConaughey and Chastain, who's very good throughout. Other times, such as the climax (well, one of the climaxes, I should say), which follows this film's version of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY's "Jupiter and beyond the infinite..." set piece, and Prof. Brand's repeated invocation of Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," the Nolan brothers are just belaboring the point for maximum mawkishness.
Please note that these are immediate reactions. Like Kubrick, Nolan is a filmmaker whose work is difficult to judge on one viewing. That's never been the case more than it is with INTERSTELLAR, a flawed film with some issues of tone that nonetheless has too many brilliant sequences and powerful performances to dismiss. There's a lot to process here, and for everything that doesn't work, there's ten things that do. Performances are terrific across the board, with Hathaway, Lithgow, and young Foy also standing out, in addition to a sardonic and droll work by Bill Irwin as the voice of TARS, the ship's robot, ballbusting the crew with his humor setting at 95% ("Why don't we take that down to 75?" Cooper instructs TARS after the robot jokes about using them as slaves for his planned robot colony). It's a gargantuan, visually dazzling, and often thematically bold piece of work, but in the end, it's really just a bigger, longer SUNSHINE, one of the most underrated sci-fi films of the last decade. INTERSTELLAR is demonstrative of Nolan wanting to make his Kubrick groundbreaker and Tarkovsky art film but needing to make sure it's Spielberg-accessible and audience-friendly. Most of the time, the reconciling of those two goals balances out, but the film struggles in the moments when that balance is lost.
TRANSCENDENCE (US/China - 2014) Directed by Wally Pfister. Written by Jack Paglen. Cast: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Paul Bettany, Cillian Murphy, Kate Mara, Cole Hauser, Clifton Collins Jr., Josh Stewart, Lukas Haas, Cory Hardrict, Falk Hentschel, Steven Liu, Xander Berkeley, Wallace Langham. (PG-13, 119 mins)
Since his 2000 breakthrough MEMENTO, Christopher Nolan's go-to cinematographer has been Wally Pfister, who got his start working second unit camera crews on Roger Corman productions like BODY CHEMISTRY and SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE III before photographing early 1990s straight-to-video erotic thriller "classics" like SECRET GAMES and ANIMAL INSTINCTS. Pfister got an Oscar for his work on Nolan's INCEPTION, and makes his directing debut with TRANSCENDENCE, which lists Nolan as an executive producer, features several Nolan vets in the cast (Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Josh Stewart, Lukas Haas), and has a very Nolan-like concept courtesy of first-time screenwriter Jack Paglen. Paglen's script is muddled, and though it's probably meant to be a gray area, there's no consistency in the characterizations or who the villain is really supposed to be. There's an argument for ambiguity but given how hopelessly convoluted and downright silly the whole film is, the answer could very well be that the filmmakers simply don't know. Considering its pedigree, TRANSCENDENCE is a misfire of catastrophic proportions, a supposedly cutting-edge vision filled with hard sci-fi techno-jargon, but it continually proclaims the most rudimentary messages that sound like Paglen's cribbing from a college freshman's Intro to Philosophy essay exam. It makes thuddingly obvious observations about the internet and our reliance on technology, with paranoid lip service paid to government surveillance and the lack of privacy in social media, tossing out buzzwords like "upload" and "off the grid" and even throws a bone to those who might still be losing sleep over Y2K. How old is this script? And how many times did it get shuffled to the bottom of Nolan's slush pile before he got sick of coming across it and punked his buddy Pfister into making it?
In a performance so somnambulant that Pfister should've just used a picture of him with a Conan O'Brien superimposed, talking mouth, Johnny Depp is Dr. Will Caster, an artificial intelligence pioneer who, with his work partner and wife Evelyn (Hall) and their associate Max (Paul Bettany), has designed PINN, a fully sentient computer system. Will is targeted by a "neo-Luddite" anti-technology terrorist group called R.I.F.T. (Revolutionary Independence from Technology) with members who have infiltrated his own research team and plotted a series of computer lab bombings across the country. After giving a speech at a university, Will is shot by one such activist (Haas), though the bullet only grazes him. The damage is done however, as he soon grows deathly ill and it's revealed the bullet was poisoned with radiation that's now in his bloodstream. Given five weeks to live, Will abandons his research until Evelyn comes up with the idea of wiring into his brain and loading his consciousness into PINN. Will dies, and soon begins communicating with Evelyn and Max through the computer system, instructing her to download "him" to the internet. Max is alarmed by the suddenly megalomaniacal Will and when he voices his objections, Evelyn sends him on his way to be abducted by R.I.F.T., and he eventually join forces with them. Meanwhile, Will, alive online and seen MAX HEADROOM-style on computer monitors, hacks into various global computer systems, clearing out Wall Street and depositing the money into an account for Evelyn to buy Brightwood, a nearly-deserted desert ghost town, converting it into their high-tech base of operations for a complete technological takeover. The virtual Will evolves at such an accelerated rate that he's able to heal the sick and disabled, who are then linked to his source code, synched with him to function as living, tangible extensions of himself. He's creating an army of Will Casters, with the government, led by FBI agent Buchanan (Murphy) and Will's old colleague Tagger (Freeman), aligned with Max and R.I.F.T. in hot pursuit.
This film is an absolute mess. What is Christopher Nolan doing shepherding what amounts to little more than a $100 million remake of THE LAWNMOWER MAN? Paglen's script is an incoherent, nonsensical jumble. The film opens in a dystopian CHILDREN OF MEN-type setting, with keyboards being used as doorstops and Max mentioning that "there might be phone service in Denver." Will's death and subsequent online reanimation happened five years earlier, and the Brightwood plotline two years after that. Brightwood was funded with money stolen by "Will" and Evelyn. When Buchanan drags Tagger to Brightwood two years later, how is it possible that he hasn't brought along the entire bureau to arrest her? Instead, she introduces them to the virtual Will and then they leave to plot a military attack, with help from R.I.F.T. What the hell is the government doing working with a domestic terror organization? Especially the one that caused all the trouble by killing Will in the first place? We learn so little about Buchanan and R.I.F.T. leader Bree (Kate Mara) that it's probable that neither Pfister nor Paglen know, either. Does anyone pay for their crimes in TRANSCENDENCE's world?
It's been said that no one sets out to make a bad movie, that sometimes they just happen. Watching TRANSCENDENCE, you can actualy see the actors wearing defeat throughout. You can see on Freeman's face and hear in his line deliveries that he knows this is a dud. While it's nice to see Depp sans the Tim Burton security blanket of white pancake makeup and silly costumes and not crutching on eccentricities and assorted Hunter S. Thompson affectations, this is probably his worst performance. It's one that reflects his utter lack of engagement with the material--and you could hardly blame him--and is not that of an actor, but rather a bored celebrity who already has more money than he'll ever spend in a lifetime. Sure, the material is stale and dated, but at least a Nolan regular like Christian Bale would've brought something to the role, like a pulse, perhaps. Hall is OK but suffers playing a sketchily-designed character, but she at least fares better than Bettany, Murphy, and Mara, who are saddled with even less. Considering that he's a cinematographer first, you'd think Pfister would at least give the film a great look, but it's not even very interesting on that level. There's a lot of long, ominous corridors and expansive labs of the antiseptic, dehumanized Kubrick variety, but they're shot very plainly by HOT FUZZ cinematographer Jess Hall. TRANSCENDENCE stumbles out of the gate and never finds its footing, and it only gets more pretentious, ponderous, and hokey as it proceeds.
Going back to the silent era, there's no shortage of great cinematographers who became accomplished filmmakers--Karl Freund, Freddie Francis (who quit directing and went back to cinematography late in his career, winning an Oscar for GLORY), Jack Cardiff, Mario Bava, Nicolas Roeg, and Jan de Bont to name just a few. Gordon Willis photographed some of the most iconic films of the 1970s (KLUTE, THE GODFATHER, THE GODFATHER PART II, THE PARALLAX VIEW, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, ANNIE HALL, MANHATTAN) before making his directorial debut with the 1980 suspense thriller WINDOWS. It was the first major release of its year, opening to universally toxic reviews and was all but buried by its studio for over 30 years before getting an MOD DVD release. Willis was arguably the top D.P. in American cinema for a decade, got his shot at running the show and blew it. He promptly licked his wounds and returned to his old gig, keeping busy and eventually retiring in 1997. He never directed a second film. WINDOWS is a bad movie but it looks terrific. TRANSCENDENCE doesn't even have that going for it. I guess what I'm saying is this: TRANSCENDENCE is Wally Pfister's WINDOWS.
Directed by Zack Snyder. Written by David S. Goyer. Cast: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Antje Traue, Ayelet Zurer, Christopher Meloni, Harry Lennix, Richard Schiff, Michael Kelly, Dylan Sprayberry, Cooper Timberline, Julian Richings. (PG-13, 143 mins)
It's only through sheer luck that Zack Snyder, the director that fanboys love to hate, hasn't become a Hollywood pariah of M. Night Shyamalan proportions. Love him or hate him--and if internet message boards are to be taken seriously, most movie fans fall under the latter--there's no denying that Snyder's got balls. This is a guy who not only had the chutzpah to remake a classic like George A. Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD, but shocked even the most doubtful naysayers (myself included) when that 2004 remake turned out to be surprisingly good. After his 2006 blockbuster 300, Snyder helmed 2009's WATCHMEN, an ambitious fool's mission that had no possibility of pleasing fans of the legendary graphic novel, but works very well taken on its own terms, especially in the 186-minute director's cut. Following the 2010 animated film LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE, Snyder unveiled his most divisive film yet with 2011's SUCKER PUNCH, which opened to devastating reviews in what looked a lot more like a critical pile-on rather than an objective analysis of the film. It's amazing that Snyder got a major studio to bankroll his bizarre pet project, especially considering that WATCHMEN didn't live up to box-office expectations. SUCKER PUNCH is one of the most misunderstood and unjustly maligned major-studio films in recent years, and if you got caught up in the rabid bloodlust that took it down, it might be worth another look. In just two years, it's already acquired a fervent cult following, and if there's such a thing as "Zack Snyder's masterpiece," I'm almost certain it will be SUCKER PUNCH.
A lot of directors with more clout than Snyder would've been bounced off the A-list after a commercial failure like SUCKER PUNCH, but he's obviously got believers in his corner at Warner Bros., who tapped him to helm the SUPERMAN reboot MAN OF STEEL. Teaming with producer Christopher Nolan and screenwriter David S. Goyer, Snyder's revisionist take on the Superman saga tries to go for a dark and ultra-serious DARK KNIGHT approach and for about half of the film, it looks like they might pull it off. We don't really need another Superman origin story, but we get one anyway, and it doesn't really look or feel like any previous SUPERMAN outing. On the dying planet Krypton, scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) refuses to go along with a coup by irate military leader General Zod (Michael Shannon). Jor-El and his wife Lara Lor-Van (Ayelet Zurer) have just accomplished the unthinkable and had a child via natural birth, which hasn't happened on Krypton in 3000 years. That child, Kal-El, is sent to Earth with a device known as the "codex," which will be able to preserve the Kryptonian people.
30 years later, the infant Kal-El has grown into drifter Clark Kent (Henry Cavill), who works a series of odd jobs, never staying anywhere too long since hints of his true nature always start to manifest, as they have since childhood when his spacecraft was found in Smallville, KS by the childless Kents. Jonathan (Kevin Costner) and Martha (Diane Lane) raised Clark, living in constant fear that the government would come and take him away, but as Jonathan explains, "nobody ever came." Teenaged Clark's superhuman powers--demonstrated when he pulls a bus filled with students out of the river--make him a misunderstood outcast, and following Jonathan's death, he leaves Smallville on a quest to find himself. The secret to his nature lies in a frozen spacecraft where he learns about his true self from the holographic image of Jor-El. Meanwhile, Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is chasing a story that brings her together with Clark, right around the same time that the banished Zod figures out that the codex is on Earth, and that Jor-El's son might be in possession of it.
So far, so good. Maybe not for the purists, but as a radically different take on a familiar subject, MAN OF STEEL gets off to a promising start. But once Zod arrives on Earth, Snyder seems to check out and the film becomes just another loud, blurry, ugly alien invasion epic with wall-to-wall video-game CGI and endless 9/11-inspired destruction porn straight out of a TRANSFORMERS movie. Throughout the film, but especially in the second half, Snyder uses--and overuses--an incredibly annoying shaky-zoom move in nearly every scene. I don't even mind the changes they made to the origin story. I don't read comic books and I'm not slavishly devoted to any of these characters or stories and filmmakers are free to show me any interpretation of them that they so desire. But the constant sense of destructive spectacle--and it's really not spectacular--just goes on forever and gets dizzyingly dull around the time the 43rd Metropolis skyscraper slowly collapses. The actors take a good chunk of the climax off, replaced by CGI doppelgangers who pinball all over the screen. I thought the CGI backlash and eventual moviegoer rejection of it would've happened by this point, but I guess I just need to put up or shut up. This is obviously just how movies look now.
Cavill is physically an impressive, imposing Superman, but we don't see much in the way of emotion beyond moody and sullen. Christopher Reeve is a tough act to follow in this role, and it's not Cavill's fault--he's just not working with much of a script. From a story and screenplay standpoint, Nolan and Goyer seem to be having a rare off-day here, or maybe the dark and grim post-9/11 motif just works better for Batman. Then again, Nolan's BATMAN films had some thematic depth to them and didn't turn into Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich joints in their second halves, so it's hard to say whether it was Nolan's or Snyder's call to dumb it down to lowest common denominator destruction. MAN OF STEEL starts strong but ultimately, there's just no story here. It makes the hero dull and uninteresting, and the villain one-dimensionally cartoonish, with Shannon's overacting a weak substitute for Terence Stamp's Zod from SUPERMAN (1978) and SUPERMAN II (1981), and he's not helped by a ludicrously distracting hipster goatee. Reliable pros like Laurence Fishburne (as Perry White), Christopher Meloni and Harry Lennix (as military officials), and Richard Schiff (as a scientist or something) are onscreen a lot but have little to do. Crowe makes an interesting, man-of-action Jor-El and has much more to do than in Marlon Brando's check-cashing interpretation of the character, which seemed scripted around how little work Brando really wanted to do while still getting top billing.
The film's most human, sympathetic moments come from Lane and Costner. Costner only has a few scenes, all flashbacks, but he projects the same loving, fatherly warmth that Glenn Ford did so masterfully in only two brief scenes in the 1978 film, which handled Pa Kent's death in a way that seemed more authentic. [SPOILER] In MAN OF STEEL, it's an excuse for another big special effects scene, and no matter how heartbreaking that shot is of Costner holding his hand up and silently telling Clark to not save him, the circumstances are just too hard to buy [END SPOILER]. But therein lies the central problem with MAN OF STEEL: it has no heart and ultimately, no purpose after the midway point. After setting up what would seem to be a unique take on the Superman story in Snyder's typical expectations-be-damned way, it all gets chucked to make another faceless, soulless, instantly disposable Hollywood summer product, completely interchangeable with countless others that have come before it. Snyder has proven himself a fearless filmmaker, but in giving MAN OF STEEL the DARK KNIGHT treatment, he's made an intermittently interesting misfire that, when it's finally over, feels less like an auteur's vision and more like something that's been focus-grouped into immediate irrelevance.
Directed by Christopher Nolan. Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan. Cast: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Matthew Modine, Tom Conti, Aiden Gillen, Nestor Carbonell, Daniel Sunjata, Cillian Murphy, William Devane, Juno Temple, Ben Mendelsohn, Tomas Arana, Reggie Lee, Brent Briscoe, Brett Cullen, Ronnie Gene Blevins. (PG-13, 165 mins)
Personal note: my thoughts go out to the victims of the Aurora, CO tragedy and their families and friends.
Christopher Nolan continues to cement his place as the most visionary commercial filmmaker of his generation with THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, the conclusion of the trilogy that began with BATMAN BEGINS (2005) and THE DARK KNIGHT (2008). Both of those films functioned fine as stand-alone works, but the allusions and callbacks that RISES makes to its predecessors show fully-realized arcs and themes that only become apparent after seeing the third film. What Nolan ends up with is an epic trilogy of staggering scope and ambitious vision, and one that rivals STAR WARS in terms of cultural and cinematic significance. Is THE DARK KNIGHT RISES better than THE DARK KNIGHT? I don't know. It lacks a villain as colorful as Heath Ledger's Joker, but that's an impossible act to top, so RISES wisely doesn't even try. But THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is a more ambitious film, and a much deeper one, with more topical themes of politics and class warfare in addition to eternal ones like good and evil. It's also a film about redemption, and not just for the tarnished image of Batman throughout Gotham City. It enriches the earlier films (especially BATMAN BEGINS), while existing on its own as both profound and incredibly entertaining, though dark, bleak, and deadly serious, with not much in the way of even the incidental bits of humor in the first two films. Comparisons with THE AVENGERS are inevitable. THE AVENGERS doesn't have the level of drama that RISES has and that wasn't its purpose. But both films stand as sterling examples of how to do a smart summer crowd-pleaser without pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne
Tom Hardy as Bane
Picking up eight years after the events of THE DARK KNIGHT, the Dent Act has eliminated crime in Gotham City and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is now a hobbling recluse holed up in Wayne Manor. Batman took the blame for the death of, and the crimes committed by White Knight prosecutor Harvey Dent (played by Aaron Eckhart in THE DARK KNIGHT) and disappeared a fugitive. Gotham is prosperous and living large but the evil is always bubbling just under the surface. It's in the form of the hulking Bane (Tom Hardy), previously kicked out of the League of Shadows by Ra's Al Ghul (played by Liam Neeson in BATMAN BEGINS), and now a gas-mask wearing symbol of underclass rage who has commandeered the sewer system with his legion of followers and wants to take the city back from the politicians and the affluent who, as sultry cat burglar (never referred to as "Catwoman") Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway, who's terrific) tells Wayne, "have so much and give nothing in return."
Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle
That's only the set-up of the large-scale story. Bane has a devious plan to take over Gotham; Wayne deals with the mental and physical pain of being his alter ego (he's suffered some muscle, bone, and even a bit of brain damage from his exploits); and Wayne Enterprises ends up in the hands of Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who has a clean-energy agenda for the company and is a love interest for Wayne. Wayne Enterprises chief and genius inventor Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and earnest young detective John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) also figure in significant ways, but really, the surprising emotional heart of the film is Alfred (Michael Caine). Always there to help and provide sage advice and wisdom to Master Wayne, the fatherly Alfred has always kept the hero grounded, but they have terse words here that neither can take back, and Caine in particular is just heartbreaking, especially when he's tearfully recalling "someone I've cared for since the first moments I heard his cries echoing through the halls of this house." Throughout his 50-year career, Caine has made great films better and some terrible films bearable, and he's an absolute joy to watch here. It's a great character for a great actor, and Caine does a beautiful job even if he's absent for a good chunk of the film.
Michael Caine as Alfred
Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox and Marian Cotillard as Miranda Tate
Hardy makes a physically imposing villain, even if most of his face is obscured for about 98% of his screen time and his voice post-synched and obviously tweaked (his dialogue has clearly been re-recorded since the first trailer some months back, when it was impossible to understand anything he was saying--now he sounds like a strange hybrid of Robert Shaw and Dr. Evil). Bane and his followers want to take the city back from the fatcats, and as played in the film, they're very much the manifestation of how right-wing talk radio imagined the Occupy Wall Street movement. Those aren't the only political jabs the film takes--notice how Gotham's mayor (a returning Nestor Carbonell, who seems to have eased up on the guyliner just a bit) tells ambitious Deputy Commissioner Foley (Matthew Modine) that Gordon's on his way out. "The man's a hero," Foley says. The Mayor: "Yeah, but that was wartime. This is peacetime." No matter how effectively he does his job, Gordon is a reminder of past problems, and just like Bane's people underground, there's no place for him in the perfect-on-the-surface Gotham.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as John Blake and Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES methodically builds towards its epic climax, with numerous twists and revelations, some expected, some not. I'm sure people can nitpick (yeah, I know...cops trapped underground for three months and none of them have beards), but Nolan has capped off this mammoth saga in grand fashion. Is it dark, bleak, and unpleasant? Yeah, but popular culture reflects its time and environment, and these are dark and unsure times. I'm sure these will age just fine over the years, but no other franchise has succeeded in mirroring its era as effectively as Nolan has done with this trilogy. Individually, they're great films. Collectively, the story is a masterpiece.
