HACKSAW RIDGE (US/China - 2016) Directed by Mel Gibson. Written by Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight. Cast: Andrew Garfield, Sam Worthington, Vince Vaughn, Luke Bracey, Teresa Palmer, Hugo Weaving, Rachel Griffiths, Richard Roxburgh, Nathaniel Buzolic, Matt Nable, Firass Dirani, Luke Pegler, Ben Mingay, Nico Cortez, Goran D. Kleut, Milo Gibson, Robert Morgan. (R, 139 mins) Directing his first film since 2006's APOCALYPTO, Mel Gibson shapes this biographical account of WWII hero Desmond Doss (1919-2006) into an unflinching, graphically violent look at one man taking a personal stand amidst the horrors of war. Co-written by Robert Schenkkan, who scripted several episodes of the HBO mini-series THE PACIFIC, HACKSAW RIDGE is also filled with the kind of epic suffering endured by Gibson protagonists, whether it's BRAVEHEART's William Wallace or THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST's Jesus, right down to some crucifixion and baptismal imagery in the climax, almost depicted as a resurrection of sorts. The first conscientious objector to be awarded the Medal of Honor, Desmond (Andrew Garfield) grew up in the hills of Lynchburg, VA, the son of drunken, bitter WWI vet Thomas (Hugo Weaving), who's still shell-shocked by his experiences and wracked with survivor's guilt after he was the only one of his friends to return home alive. A family of Seventh-Day Adventists, Thomas has instilled in Desmond and the rest of the family--wife Bertha (Rachel Griffiths) and their other son Hal (Nathaniel Buzolic)--a deep belief in non-violence and the idea there is no circumstance in which even touching a gun is justified. Thomas is enraged when Hal enlists, and despite his protests, Desmond enlists as well, feeling a sense of duty but vowing to stick to his anti-gun beliefs by volunteering to be a medic ("Instead of taking lives, I'll be saving them," he tells his father). Promising to marry his nurse girlfriend Dorothy (Teresa Palmer) during his first furlough, Desmond joins the Army and all goes well until he refuses to handle a weapon.
Of course, he's immediately branded as a coward by everyone from bullying fellow recruit and all-around alpha-male Smitty (Luke Bracey) to drill sergeant Howell (a miscast Vince Vaughn), and Captain Glover (Sam Worthington). It also doesn't help that his religion's Sabbath is on Saturday, a day in which Desmond refuses to train. Glover orders a psych evaluation for an easy Section 8 discharge, but when Desmond is deemed of sound mind, Howell is instructed to make his life hell. Desmond is routinely singled out for non-existent infractions, for which Howell punishes the entire group with 20-mile hikes and having their weekend passes revoked. Desmond is beaten by his fellow recruits and refuses to back down. He's eventually court-martialed, and it's decided--with some input from a high-ranking General who fought with Thomas--that Desmond can serve his country as a medic and do so without the protection of a weapon if he so desires. After marrying Dorothy, Desmond is shipped off with the others to Okinawa to take the Maeda Escarpment (recreated on location in Australia, where the entire film was shot), known as "Hacksaw Ridge." Many men are killed in seemingly endless battles with Japanese soldiers, and after Glover orders a retreat, Desmond remains atop Hacksaw Ridge, dragging surviving soldiers to the cliff and rappelling them down one by one. Working himself to the point of mental and physical exhaustion after seemingly answering a call from God, his hands raw and bleeding profusely from rope burns, Desmond single-handedly saved the lives of 75 men at Hacksaw Ridge.
It takes a little over an hour before the story gets to Hacksaw Ridge, and the carnage starts with an extremely effective jump scare more suited to horror movie. Dumping untold gallons of blood and hurling around more innards than an Italian cannibal movie, Gibson doesn't shy away from making combat look as raw and realistic as possible (naturally, some conservatively-used CGI splatter takes you out of the moment, but it's mostly practical effects). Bullets rip through flesh and skulls in ways that put this on par with the opening of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and the endless suffering of Jesus in THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. While he'll always be a pariah to a certain degree, Gibson is clearly a complex and troubled man beset by frequently public demons. His efforts as a filmmaker have a shared vision, even his 1993 directing debut THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE, thus far Gibson's only directorial effort that didn't involve graphically gory feats of human endurance. Gibson's heroes are outsiders and rebels, either by choice or by fate. They are men who stick to their beliefs in the face of any and all adversity and are willing to endure whatever physical and psychological suffering to demonstrate that belief and prove their conviction. And when you see the frayed tensions in the Doss family and the things that led Desmond to take his stand, particularly in his relationship with his father, a man who loves his family but too often treats them horribly because he can't forgive himself for being the only one of his friends to come home from The Great War alive, one can't help but wonder how much of that applies to Desmond Doss and Mel Gibson. There's an argument that Gibson's complicated relationship with his own father, an on-the-record Holocaust denier who--and this is not to excuse Gibson's tabloid transgressions--undoubtedly planted the seeds for some of the beliefs that have led to so much turmoil in Gibson's life. On and off the battlefield--the graphic gore aside--it's easy to dismiss HACKSAW RIDGE as corny Americana and Garfield's performance as overly earnest. Of course, Desmond gets not one but two "I was wrong about you" mea culpas, one from Smitty and one from Glover, and Vaughn's Howell scaling the cliff and uttering "We're not in Kansas anymore" is a line that should've been axed at the first read-through. But it was a simpler era and a time of different values and Desmond Doss, who died in 2006 and is shown in an interview snippet at the very end, was a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. To that end, HACKSAW RIDGE is a powerful film that both honors Desmond Doss and functions as another intensely personal look into the abyss for Mel Gibson.
Cpl. Desmond Doss receiving his Medal of Honor
from President Harry Truman in 1945
THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES (US/New Zealand - 2014) Directed by Peter Jackson. Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro. Cast: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lilly, Luke Evans, Lee Pace, Benedict Cumberbatch, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Ian Holm, Ken Stott, Graham McTavish, Aidan Turner, Stephen Fry, Billy Connolly, Sylvester McCoy, James Nesbitt, Jed Brophy, Stephen Hunter, Ryan Gage, Manu Bennett, John Tui, Mikael Persbrandt. (PG-13, 143 mins)
"One Last Time" seems to be the resounding theme throughout this final chapter in the HOBBIT trilogy as well as in its advertising. The films in Peter Jackson's original 2001-2003 LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy stand--especially in their extended editions--among the most monumental achievements in all of cinema. But by splitting J.R.R. Tolkien's relatively light and quick-reading Hobbit into another colossal, epic trilogy and insisting on shooting them in the absurd 48 fps "high frame rate," a format that makes everything look like a live TV broadcast, really only works for expansive exterior shots and is preferred by no one with a name other than "Peter Jackson," Jackson seems guided more by hubris and self-indulgence than anything. The Hobbit isn't meant to be as huge as The Lord of the Rings. It's a smaller, more brisk story and by importing elements of Tolkien's The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, bringing Orlando Bloom back to play Legolas, a character not even present in Tolkien's novel, and even going so far as to invent his own entirely new character--the elf Tauriel, played by Evangeline Lilly--and granting her as much, if not more plot and screen time than the key principals, Jackson is only demonstrating that he doesn't know when or where to stop. It's great that Jackson loves Tolkien so much, but where his LOTR trilogy ranks with the original 1977-1983 STAR WARS trilogy, his bloated, three-part HOBBIT, while well-acted and enjoyable on its own terms, is his STAR WARS: EPISODE I-III, and like George Lucas, he's surrounded by yes-men and basically at the point where he's too rich and powerful for anyone to tell him "no." When Jackson made the original LOTR trilogy, he had an insane ambition and something to prove. Remove that and the HOBBIT trilogy feels like little more than an extended victory lap.
At least the third part of the HOBBIT trilogy, THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES, is the shortest at a mere 143 minutes. Roughly half of the running time is devoted to the epic battle at Erebor, where Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) has reclaimed the Dwarven birthright following the dragon Smaug's (motion captured by Benedict Cumberbatch) rampage on Laketown and its subsequent death courtesy of the black arrow fired by Bard (Luke Evans). Thorin has been driven mad with power and is obsessively hunting for the Arkenstone, which has been stolen by Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), who knows that it's dangerous for Thorin to possess. Meanwhile, Bard has led a large band of Laketown refugees to Dale, where he's formed a tentative alliance with elf king Thanduil (Lee Pace), who wants elven jewels being kept in Smaug's former stronghold. Legolas and Tauriel also turn up, with Tauriel still dealing with her forbidden love for the dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner) as Orcs launch an offensive and Gandalf (Ian McKellen) dispenses sage advice.
With FIVE ARMIES, Jackson attempts to send the trilogy off with multiple extended battle sequences that play like a bunch of Helm's Deeps strung together. There's some occasionally inspired bits of action and some dazzling visuals that look fine in standard, 24 fps 3D (though the waxy sheen and gauzy Barbara Walters soft focus on some of the actors, particularly Bloom, can be distracting), but after a while, it's hard for it not to become an exhausting, eye-glazing CGI blur, quite often looking more like a video game than a movie. FIVE ARMIES works best in its few small-scale and quieter moments, be it a smiling nod from Gandalf (again, McKellen has little to do here aside from "show up and be Ian McKellen," but he owns this role so thoroughly that even watching him phone it in is a pleasure) or Thorin coming to his senses and realizing that he's been treating his friends horribly. There's so many characters and intertwining subplots that Freeman's Bilbo more or less disappears into the ensemble until it's time for him to say goodbye to the dwarves and head back to his home at Bag End. Despite some good performances by Evans and Armitage, there's too little of the sense of emotional connection that worked so brilliantly in the LOTR trilogy, where its many scenes of friendship and camaraderie never fail to get the waterworks going for fans. It's not like the magic is gone, but the freshness definitely is, even with brief, shoehorned-in appearances by other LOTR alumni like Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Christopher Lee as Saruman, and Hugo Weaving as Elrond (their bits were intended for THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG but cut from it and edited into this film instead), and in using more CGI than ever in this closing installment (the shot of Legolas running along a bridge as it collapses is dreadful), there's a very diminished sense of humanity compared to before.
In his LOTR trilogy, Jackson paid loving tribute to Tolkien and captured the writer's voice and spirit with nothing less than absolute perfection. But by stretching THE HOBBIT from a 300-page breeze of a read to three films totaling around eight hours--even longer once you factor in the DVD/Blu-ray extended editions--Jackson is only paying tribute to Peter Jackson, capturing the voice and spirit of a gifted visionary who can no longer do anything without completely overdoing it, like a three-hour-plus KING KONG. I probably sound like I hate the three HOBBIT films, but I don't. They're entertaining and demonstrate flashes of past LOTR greatness (Cumberbatch's Smaug in the second film is probably the highlight), but the overall feeling is one of shrugging ambivalence. The LOTR trilogy is one that vividly entertains and still richly rewards. The nice-enough-while-you're-watching-it but forgettable HOBBIT trilogy is just there. People still talk about LOTR in reverent tones, but do you know anyone who really loves the HOBBIT movies and speaks of them as highly as the LOTR films? Everybody's gone to see the HOBBIT movies but it seems like we've approached this new trilogy more out of a feeling of obligation than out of the feverish excitement we collectively had a decade ago. I'm actually sort-of glad that it's done.
THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (US/New Zealand - 2012)
Directed by Peter Jackson. Written by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Guillermo del Toro. Cast: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis, James Nesbitt, Ken Stott, Sylvester McCoy, Graham McTavish, Barry Humphries, Manu Bennett, Lee Pace, William Kircher, Stephen Hunter, Dean O'Gorman, Aidan Turner, John Callen, Peter Hambleton, Jed Brophy, Mark Hadlow, Adam Brown. (PG-13, 170 mins)
Other than greed, hubris, and self-indulgence, is there really any need for J.R.R. Tolkien's 300-page book to take three three-hour movies to play out? After a long pre-production delayed by lawsuits and MGM financial issues, and a change in director from Guillermo del Toro to Peter Jackson, the eagerly-awaited prequel to Jackson's landmark LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy is finally here, and not without controversy. Jackson initially planned THE HOBBIT as a two-part film, but it was expanded into a trilogy of its own. If this first installment is any indication, there's definitely a sense of bloat and overkill, especially in the way Jackson brings in elements that weren't in Tolkien's book (incorporating some material from The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, including most of the backstory for the eccentrically disheveled wizard Radagast the Brown, played by former DOCTOR WHO Sylvester McCoy) as a way of giving what was a smaller-scaled, significantly less epic-feeling tale the same heft and spectacle of the original trilogy. The 1977 animated, Rankin-Bass produced TV-movie of THE HOBBIT managed to get the story across in about 80 minutes. AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY has assorted detours, asides, and completely new elements that aren't entirely necessary (and it's in higher-priced 3D) and really only seem to be there as a way to get as much money out of moviegoers as possible.
The bigger story, at least in the select theaters that are presenting it this particular way, is Jackson's decision to shoot the film in the High Frame Rate of 48 fps (frames per second) instead of the industry-standard 24 fps. The HFR 3D version is playing on less than 500 screens in the US, but it does represent Jackson's preferred vision of the film. While you get used to it as the film progresses, it's initially very jarring and disorienting. AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY looks traditionally "cinematic" maybe 15% of the time, usually in close-ups of certain cast members (Ian McKellen as Gandalf seems to have the least CGI enhancement of the cast). The rest of the film has an overwhelmingly artificial look to its ultra-HD appearance. The high frame rate brings out every minute detail (you can clearly see the line of the prosthetic footgear worn by the actors playing Hobbits), and it gives most of the epic action and battle scenes an annoyingly video-gamey look that's nothing less than a total distraction. Elsewhere, many scenes look almost entirely CGI animated. The interiors fare the worst of all, with the film having a completely stage-bound, soap-opera look that resembles a remastered version of a shot-on-video PBS or BBC TV production from the 1980s. Walk in on a scene of people talking indoors and it could pass for a filmed version of a HOBBIT stage performance. And in these interior scenes the high frame rate gives the actors a jerky, sped-up movement that frequently resembles something being slightly fast-forwarded. When it comes to anything LORD OF THE RINGS, Jackson wields enough power that he can do anything he wants, and like George Lucas, is likely surrounded by yes-men who are happy to indulge him as long as the money keeps rolling in. I imagine the traditional 24 fps version (also in 3D and regular screenings) plays better, or at least more "cinematically," but Jackson's 48 fps experiment really only works in the shots of the stunning natural terrain of New Zealand's hills and mountains. In these all-too-brief scenes, the film takes on an almost PLANET EARTH quality that's a beautiful sight to behold.
Having said all that...I did find AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY generally enjoyable, at least from the standpoint of the story and the performances. Martin Freeman makes a likably fussy young Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm again plays the aged Bilbo in a framing sequence with Elijah Wood as Frodo), it's great to see McKellen play Gandalf once again, and a mere decade in technological advancements have made Andy Serkis' motion-capture Gollum even more expressive and lifelike. The film's strongest performance comes from Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield, leader of a band of Dwarf warriors who adopt a reluctant Bilbo to help them reclaim their home on Lonely Mountain, lost 60 years earlier when the dragon Smaug took it as his own, forcing them to live as marauding outcasts. The camaraderie of Thorin and his cohorts with Gandalf and Bilbo, and the ways Bilbo proves his worth and earns their respect are the kinds of things that are hard to bungle, and, as in the original trilogy, it's in these rousing and emotional scenes that AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY finds its true strengths.
Christopher Lee (as Saruman), Cate Blanchett (as Galadriel), and Hugo Weaving (as Elrond) briefly reappear from the original trilogy. The elderly cast members, like 90-year-old Lee and 81-year-old Holm, have some very noticeable CGI retouching done to their faces, as they're a decade older but playing younger, and they have a waxy, glossy, artificial appearance that looks a lot like extensive noise reduction on a Blu-ray. This is likely due more to the use of 48 fps, which just represents another issue with the format. AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY might visually play better on Blu-ray, but I think I've seen enough of Jackson's love of the high frame rate to go with the standard 24 fps version when THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG hits theaters in December 2013.
Written and directed by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski. Cast: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, James D'Arcy, Keith David, David Gyasi, Xun Zhou, Robert Fyfe, Martin Wuttke, Brody Nicholas Lee. (R, 172 mins)
Based on David Mitchell's 2004 novel universally considered unfilmable, CLOUD ATLAS is the kind of insanely ambitious undertaking that I suspect many people will respectfully admire from a distance rather than like. It's a film that's bound to be divisive and not everything about it works, but it's a safe bet that you've never seen anything like it. A collaborative effort between Lana & Andy Wachowski (THE MATRIX) and Tom Tykwer (RUN LOLA RUN), CLOUD ATLAS is one of those "everything is connected" films (in fact, that's the tag line on the poster art), but instead of the usual wallowing in self-absorbed ennui, it's a story that stretches across time, balancing multiple stories and timeframes. It demands patience and attention and yes, it all eventually more or less comes together, though it can be a bit chaotic and messy at times. There's a lot of comparisons one could make (I kept thinking of THE TREE OF LIFE if it was directed by Christopher Nolan), but CLOUD ATLAS is a film that stands uniquely alone.
CLOUD ATLAS simultaneously tells six stories across six time periods and places, and almost all of the main cast appear as different characters in each: in 1849, a lawyer (Jim Sturgess) travels by ship to facilitate a slave deal for his father-in-law. In 1936 Scotland, Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) is hired to assemble pieces of a symphony dictated to him by an aging composer (Jim Broadbent). In 1973 San Francisco, journalist Luisa Rey (Halle Berry) gets in over her head investigating a conspiracy involving a powerful oil company and a nuclear power plant after a chance meeting with an elderly man (James D'Arcy) in a stuck elevator. In 2012 London, a scheming literary agent (Broadbent again) is duped into committing himself to a nursing home while on the run from gangsters to whom he owes a significant amount of money. In 2144 New Seoul, a replicant waitress named Sonmi (Doona Bae) is being interviewed prior to her execution for leading a clone rebellion against the totalitarian status quo. And "100 winters after The Fall" in a post-apocalyptic world, the nomadic Zachry (Tom Hanks) agrees to guide a strange visitor (Berry again) into the mountains.
Team Wachowski handled the 1849/2144/The Fall scenes, while Team Tykwer tackled 1936/1973/2012, working at the same time with two different crews and sharing almost all of the actors, who are often unrecognizable under heavy makeup, or at least playing far against type. Most of the actors handle their multiple assignments well (even when playing different genders and races), but Hanks, largely because he's likable and instantly-recognizable Tom Hanks, does seem a bit out of place and miscast in some of his roles. Having said that, it is amusing in the 2012 segment to see him playing cauliflower-eared, scar-faced thug of the "fookin' ell!" variety, dropping plentiful F-and-C-bombs and throwing a guy off a balcony. Actors often fare better in some segments than others: Hugo Weaving is distracting as a female nurse in 2012, but absolutely terrifying as a demonic figure tormenting Zachry in the Fall. Berry is fine as the crusading 1973 journalist, but as an elderly male Korean doctor under a ton of old-age prosthetics? Not so much. But the stunt casting, for the most part, has a point, and ties into the "connected" them, regardless of any controversial "sensitivity" issues, as odd as it seems in 2012 to see British actors like Sturgess and D'Arcy playing Asians. When's the last time you saw eye makeup like this? Peter Sellers in THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU? Joel Grey in REMO WILLIAMS?
CLOUD ATLAS is the kind of film that offers something for pretty much everyone: drama, comedy, romance, art, high seas adventure, conspiracy/paranoia thriller, dystopian sci-fi, horror. It's an incredible achievement in the sheer scope of what it tries to accomplish, and it mostly succeeds. The filmmakers cut no corners with CLOUD ATLAS, and it's fascinating to watch a visual element in one time frame tie into another, or a line of dialogue in one section that has significance to something that happens in another. As expansively huge as the film is, it's mostly very tight in its construction and rarely loses momentum despite two teams of filmmakers juggling six narratives for nearly three hours.
With CLOUD ATLAS, Tykwer and the Wachowskis reassert themselves as among the most visionary of modern filmmakers, even though they've only achieved fleeting mainstream success since their big breakthroughs. The Wachowskis produced and scriped V FOR VENDETTA, but got otherwise chilly receptions for the disappointing MATRIX sequels, the underappreciated SPEED RACER and the unremarkable NINJA ASSASSIN (which they produced), and also had a hand in attempting to salvage THE INVASION (an uncredited rewrite, and their associate and V FOR VENDETTA/NINJA ASSASSIN director James McTeigue handled uncredited reshoots). Tykwer thus far has yet to enjoy a repeat of the critical and commercial success of his 1999 cult classic RUN LOLA RUN, though 2006's PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER and 2009's THE INTERNATIONAL both deserved better receptions than they got. I don't think CLOUD ATLAS is going to be a big US box office hit (it will likely do better overseas), but it's a complex and often extraordinary, one-of-a-kind film that will likely be discussed and dissected for years to come. While not a perfect film by any means, and one where the technique is perhaps more important than the story, it strikes me as a film that will reveal more layers of detail with repeat viewings.
