The Dark Knight Rises

1.5/5

The Dark Knight Rises has ambitions to rise, to soar, to climb above and meet the lofty expectations that are unfairly shackled to it.  Ultimately, though, it barely gets off the ground, permanently restrained by the cement shoes of pretension, clumsy storytelling, excessive length, and lack of focus, all the trademarks of its creator, Christopher Nolan, the Internet appointed Awesomest Director Ever!  Read the blogs, people: This guy makes nothing short of a masterpiece every time he turns on a camera. 

            

Oh, brother.  As someone that found Batman Begins plodding and underwhelming and The Dark Knight overstuffed and overrated, this final chapter in Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy doesn’t strike me as the potential crowning jewel in the franchise that has everyone else and their mothers drooling feverishly with fanboy rabidity.  Instead, I inquisitively approach Nolan’s work as a curious skeptic, on guard to one-day endorse him the title of Master he so desperately craves.  When he’s worthy of it, I swear I’ll declare it, but until that day, Nolan remains, to these eyes, a high-minded action-movie director with too much zeal and not enough grace. 

             

For starters, Nolan could have at least made this Batman movie actually, you know, about Batman—something its predecessor, The Dark Knight, failed to do.   But such obvious dramatic foundation seems to slip the director’s mind.  The Dark Knight Rises is about juicier stuff than superheroes.  When your movie tackles terrorism and economic dichotomies and moral conundrums and numerous other topical and brainy subjects, what use are Bat-caves and Bat-mobiles?  At a ruthless 2 hours and 45 minutes, the movie finds time for a dozen zeitgeist allusions—from the financial crisis to Occupy Wall Street to the threat of new technologies.  It fills its quota of flipping cars and exploding bridges.  It manages to logjam in a whole slew of new extraneous characters.  There’s plenty of room for plot turns and double crosses.  All the while, The Dark Knight Rises fails to properly introduce, develop and resolve its protagonist, the guy with the pointy ears—the one in the goddamn title. 

            

Perhaps I’m being unfair.  Maybe the movie does wrap up the tale of The Caped Crusader is the most facile sense, but I was too distracted by Nolan’s Film-Noir-On-Speed stylistic disorder and his debilitating need to overload his script with people, places, and flying things to fully absorb—or care for—any pregnant insights on Bruce Wayne and his dark alter ego.  If they did exist, they were, like so many of Nolan’s thematic “messages”, buried under three feet of murky cinematic soot. 

            

To avoid ranting, let’s talk plot.  It’s been eight years since The Joker held Gotham City in a vice grip of fear, and turned its golden boy, DA Harvey Dent, to the dark side.  Remember, Batman took the rap for Dent’s deranged killing spree and has gone underground to avoid the resulting lynch mob.  His daytime other-half, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), is now a gimpy Howard Hughes with a beard and Kleenex boxes on his feet (so to speak).  He no longer makes public appearances.  The Dent Act—ratified after the eponymous man’s demise—has cleaned up the streets, but left Gotham with a massive wage discrepancy.  The middle class is shrinking. 

            

In marches a new villain, Bane.  He takes to the sewers with his army of Chechen Rebels, expatiating on revolution to incite the masses against the wealthy, beginning with a strategic stock market crash.  A bald bodybuilder with a black voice-box/muzzle that makes him sound like Darth Vader mixed with an old English elocutionist, Bane is played by Tom Hardy, who gives an impressive physical performance, but considering the disability of having to act behind that awkward shroud, he comes off as little more than a meathead with a funny voice.  (They probably could’ve cast Kane Hodder, the guy in the hockey mask from the Friday The 13^th movies, and few would know the difference.)

For mostly incomprehensible reasons, at least until the finale’s (whoa!) giant twist, Bane takes control of Gotham, sets up a people’s court presided over by the increasingly zany Scarecrow, and keeps the outside world at bay with a massive nuclear reactor/bomb.  With the city in dire peril yet again, Batman dusts off his suit and prepares to go head-to-head with Gotham’s latest nihilistic overlord.

I wish the story were that simple, I really do.  But Nolan lives by this maxim: If it’s horribly convoluted, people will mistake it for cooly complex.  Back are Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), penitent over allowing Batman to take Dent’s heat; superhero apparel handyman Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman); and trusty butler Alfred (Michael Caine), whose only role in this smorgasbord is to cry every time he’s on screen. (Nolan has apparently taken note that critics find his films emotionally vacuous, so as to indolently solve that dilemma, he lets his English thespian turn on the waterworks malapropos.)  There’s newcomer John Blake (Joseph Gordon Levit), an idealistic rookie cop that does his own private sleuthing, and leads around a ragtag troop of orphans like their scoutmaster; and billionaire philanthropist Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), Wayne’s newest business partner and love interest.

All these characters figure prominently into the monstrous narrative juggernaut that is the plot of The Dark Knight Rises, and throughout this loud and capricious grind you’ll feel as if you’re watching three or four films at once, all crudely parallel edited into a single bloated and busy picture without a semblance of intelligence or heart.  But it’s about big, current, real-world issues, you say?  When asked which way his film leaned on the political spectrum, Nolan replied with something along the lines of, “I don’t know.  We just throw in as many things as we can to see what sticks.”  In other words, his film has no voice or point of view; it just name-drops hot button topics to fraudulently generate relevance and respectability.

Bain’s clearly the story’s resident “terrorist”, but his vendetta to avenge his old master—Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson from Batman Begins)—hews closer to the motives of Die Hard 3’s German bank robbers than any actual terrorist.

But Nolan, employing his agonizingly urgent verbosity, makes the insinuation like a broken record.  Purported sophistication isn’t the same as actual sophistication.  I’m reading too much into this, is that it?  I’d happily proclaim the movie a mindless summer blockbuster with some badass action scenes and special effects, if it weren’t so heavily marinated in portent, pretension and big concepts.  If it wants to be considered art, I’ll treat it as such.  In that light, it’s worthless.  As spectacle, sure Nolan knows how to blow up a football field or demolish massive steal suspension bridges with the help of his friends over in the Computer Generated Images department.  If only he knew how to tell a clean, coherent story and express fully formed ideas.

I will concede that the one beacon of light in this overwhelming darkness has got to be Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle.  A duplicitous cat burglar torn asunder by her allegiance to the 99% and her obvious attraction to one mysterious billionaire, Kyle is even more slippery than Batman, leaving him searching on rooftops as she evaporates stealthily into the night.  “So, that’s what that feels like,” he growls.  She travels around with a cute little blonde teenager (maybe her ward, maybe her lover?), and walks the ever-so-plausible tightrope between good and evil, between solipsism and communal welfare.  In a less discursive film, Kyle could’ve really shined, but Hathaway leaves her mark nonetheless, in a performance as witty and beguiling as it is liberated and brilliantly unknowable.

That’s where the compliments end.  The Dark Knight Rises, when it’s all said and done, really is a suitable capper to Christopher Nolan’s over-exalted trilogy.  It manages to be as ponderous as Batman Begins and as overblown as The Dark Knight, while still being as empty as both, combined.  So this is what “serious” superhero movies look like, huh?  Hopefully now that Nolan’s take on the genre has at long last reached its conclusion, they can finally go back to being fun.

Savages

3/5

Oliver Stone was once a political provocateur, an accusatory and wildly ambitious finger-pointer who attacked the American political, cultural, and societal landscape with fearless bravado.  Some of his better pictures—Platoon and Born On The Fourth Of July—were gripping exposés charged by the fury and passion of post-Vietnam disillusionment and post-Watergate governmental malcontent.  While even his follies—JFK and Natural Born Killers—reached for the stratosphere before collapsing under the weight of their own pretentions and self-righteousness.  In either case, Stone was—with Spike Lee—the most formidable American cinematic loudmouth of the late 80’s and 90’s, someone with a point of view and something to say—an Important director. 

            

These days, his soapbox cinema has lost much of its relevance.  His recent films W. (the George W. Bush biopic) and World Trade Center were, respectively, an inert stab at controversy and a run-of-the-mill disaster flick that happened to be about a world-altering calamity—it was Backdraft: The 9/11 Version.  With Savages, it is now clear that Stone’s famous flag burning has all but been extinguished, at least for now.  Even considering its references to the war in Afghanistan, the war on drugs, corrupt cops, and Internet streaming, this movie’s about as politically driven as something directed by Robert Rodriguez.  Yet from Stone, who’s usually such a restless muckraker, Savages arrives as something of a bloody treat, never void of mindless entertainment value.  There are disposable joys to be had in this ultimately muddled but always alluring saga of cross-boarder drug violence.

In its auspicious first minutes, the movie introduces us to its central figures: a high-functioning love triangle made up of narrator Ophelia (Black Lively), philanthropist Ben (Aaron Johnson), and war veteran Chon (Tayor Kitsch).  A partnership of Laguna Beach marijuana cultivators and distributors, who guarantee the most potent stuff in the world, Ben and Chon share Ophelia—or “O”—like Butch and Sundance shared Katharine Ross, except that this movie is from the girl’s perspective.  She describes Chon as the love of her life and then Ben, mere moments later, as the other love of her life.  In her eyes, Ben’s the sensitive lover who uses his drug money to finance clean water programs in Africa.  And Chon’s the tormented man’s man with a perpetual beef, a stressed out soldier that has not orgasms but “wargasms”.   According to O, combined they’re the perfect man.  The film’s libertine polygamous trio could anchor a great film all on their own, but Stone has a whole annoyingly busy plot to churn through, and the thematic promise they arouse is quickly tossed before a hail of bullets.

The boys are strong-armed into selling their business to a Tijuana cartel run by Salma Hayek’s sexy Latina jefe, Elena Sanchez.  Stone deliberately reveals a forlorn mommy-dearest burrowed underneath Elena’s dictatorial crime boss persona, granting his wicked witch some dimensionality, to good effect.  The only person that gets the better of her is the reticent Magda (Sandra Echeverria), her ashamed offspring hiding out in California.  To coerce Ben and Chon, Elena calls on her sleaziest underling, Lado, played by a scene-stealing Benicio Del Toro as the most disturbingly charismatic and darkly funny criminal enforcer you’re likely to encounter onscreen.  He’s a proudly repugnant psychopath in a Cheech Marin stash who loves to small talk his hits before pulling the trigger.  He gags his torture victims because he “doesn’t like the screaming.”  In a sick way, he’s as personable as he is depraved.  Then there’s John Travolta’s crooked DEA agent Dennis, a nervous snake-in-the-grass who knows that the drug war is a game that can be won by playing for every team.  He’s got a wife in hospice he can’t stop nattering about—another instance of humanity graced upon the monstrous. 

Quickly, the bad guy’s in Savages become far more interesting than the heroes who, as individuals, grow tiredly one-note.  Kitsch’s Chon is a glowering tough guy with nary a beat change.  Johnson’s Ben comes to life only momentarily when forced to participate for the first time in his profession’s inherent violence.  He shows some genuine squeamishness, but little personality beyond that.  And once the merger sours and O is captured by the cartel and held as leverage, the film becomes too chockablock to even begin fleshing out its protagonists.  Although Lively turns in a better performance as a captive stealthily struggling to win her captors’ favor, the three are best when they’re together, which is seldom.  Despite this, the picture remains highly watchable as a stylish and blood-soaked exploitation crime thriller and action movie that blends Blow, Alpha Dog, and Once Upon A Time In Mexico into a cool and sexy new gangster opus that can sit among them as posters on a freshman’s dorm room wall.  Stone may have gone from moving the masses to pleasing bloodthirsty college kids, but he’s definitely got a knack for it.  I never thought an Oliver Stone movie could be so much fun for having so little on its mind.      

Magic Mike

2.5/5

Steven Soderberg’s Magic Mike is at once fleshy and skeletal.  I say fleshy because its subject is a male strip club in Tampa, Florida, where sculpted beefcakes dance and thrust and expose themselves to crowds of hollering cougars and bridal parties.  I say skeletal because, despite Soderberg’s rapt stylistic groove and his actors’ unerring commitment, the director never gives his story or characters enough meat, never raises the dramatic tension, and never shows us what these dancers are sacrificing for a g-string full of one-dollar-bills: i.e. their souls. 

            

In fact, for a vast majority of the film’s runtime, Magic Mike’s central studs couldn’t have it any sweeter.  Off the bat, Mike (Channing Tatum) recruits 19-year-old Adam (Alex Pettyfer) to work at Xquisite, a male burlesque house in sunny Florida.  The place is owned and operated by Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), an aging performer with aspirations to start a new, bigger, better club in Miami.  Mike, Adam and the rest of the humping, gyrating crew—who could use a bit more personality if you ask me—are rolling in cash.  They spend their nights partying it up with randy females and their days lounging on the warm, sandy Floridian beaches.  

            

Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it?  For too much of Magic Mike, that’s all we witness, and by the time some much-needed drama is finally introduced, it’s nearly too late.  Adam gets mixed up in drugs and Mike starts to let two relationships slip away.  One with Joanna (Olivia Munn), a gorgeous late night booty call with a more respectable façade, and one with Adam’s cute sister Brooke (Cody Horn), who disapproves of Mike’s decadent lifestyle and vocational preference.  Inspired loosely by Channing Tatum’s actual pre-fame career as a male stripper, Magic Mike does have style.  Soderberg’s films always glisten with an aesthete’s fastidious cinematographic polish.  And on stage, Tatum’s got moves, like a hip-hop sex machine on overdrive. 

            

In the end, though, Magic Mike has too much of a good time.  By the eighth full-fledged strip routine, it’s no longer entertaining, just kind of numbing and banal.  Boogie Nights is an obvious inspiration, but for a film about pornography, that movie spent less time on money shots and more time exploring how its pornographers were actually human beings, with dreams and regrets and personal hardships.  Magic Mike is more concerned with putting on a show than it is with uncovering the real people behind the cop uniforms and codpieces. 

            
In its brightest, most focused and indelible scenes, the film flirts with the idea that perhaps Mike’s identity was lost behind the tacky getups—that by playing Magic Mike all the time, he can never just be Mike.  An aspiring custom furniture designer, he walks into the bank for a loan in a costume of respectability, a nicely pressed suit, a leather briefcase and gold-rimmed glasses.  He’s so obviously a caricature of a prosperous business-type high roller that the scene serves as one of the film’s best, a moment of absolute identity disillusionment.  Sadly, such revelations are few.  Magic Mike is just too busy thrusting and hip shaking to give its protagonist the movie he deserves.

The Amazing Spider-Man

3/5

Toby McGuire was certainly nerdy enough to play Peter Parker, but was he angsty enough?  In The Amazing Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield (The Social Network) re-imagines the famous daytime high school student and nighttime web slinger with so much perfect snarky Gen-Y attitude that he just about makes the case for this entire superfluous remake’s existence.  Only ten years ago, director Sam Raimi delivered a perfectly adequate Spider-Man origin story.  Peter Parker, an orphaned New York teenager living with his aunt and uncle, is bitten by a radioactive spider in a science lab, develops superpowers as a result, and is then driven to crime fighting by his uncle’s tragic death at the hands of a mugger.  In the new film, the beats are exactly the same, and only after about 45 minutes of going through the motions does the new Spider-Man movie really begin. 

            

Director Marc Webb (500 Days Of Summer) and his team of screenwriters attempt to hold our attention during that perfunctory period with new tidbits about the Parker parents.  But what really keeps us enthralled is Andrew Garfield.  With his case of perpetual bed-head, his skinny jeans and skateboard, and his constant air of guarded insecurity, Garfield’s embodiment is a new kind of geek, an offbeat urban hipster with a lost puppy allure and a too-cool swagger.  The English actor’s profound performance educes everything we’d expect from a modern Peter Parker: He’s reckless and lonesome, bedraggled and bruised, but still good looking in an Indie Rock kind of way.  When he stumbles home at midnight after receiving his radioactive infection, the psychoactive effects make him giggle and binge eat like a first-time weed smoker.  He may not have done anything illicit, but his warped case of the munchies may evoke a few memories for the seasoned parents in the audience. 

            

Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field) look on helplessly.  What are they going to do with this kid?  Compared to Garfield’s isolated adolescent good-for-nothing, Toby McGuire was a Boy Scout.  Nothing in The Amazing Spider-Man is as welcome as this Peter Parker makeover.  Except maybe for the addition of Emma Stone as Parker’s first teenage crush, Gwen Stacy, an A-student in a series of mini-skirts, knee socks, and ponytails.  With notebooks constantly pressed against her chest, Gwen is the daddy’s girl to Parker’s rotten apple, the Natalie Wood to his James Dean.  And their chemistry scintillates.  Her father, police Captain George Stacy (Denis Leary), doesn’t particularly approve.  But what father would?

            

If superhero puppy love isn’t your thing, rest assured.  The Amazing Spider-Man’s got action, too.  Just like in its predecessors, this movie has our wall-crawling vigilante taking down another mad-scientist whose experiment went awry.  This time it’s Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), a genius geneticist and amputee testing reptilian limb regeneration on humans.  To make a long story short, he crossbreeds with a lizard, becomes a walking abomination, and takes refuge in the Manhattan sewer system (alligators in the sewers, anybody?).  When he decides to infect the whole population with his gnarly deformity, Spidey swings in to save the day.  The Lizard, as he’s called in the comic books, comes to life with CGI as a pint-sized Godzilla, and he’s a passable nemesis at best, not especially imaginative or complex. 

Is it too soon to bring back Doctor Octopus?  It was probably too soon for an entire new Spider-Man origin story in the first place.  This movie certainly doesn’t convince otherwise, and it offers a number of narrative threads that lead nowhere.  One might call it a remorseless commercial reboot, and it leaves so many things unresolved that it has the feel of a TV pilot.  While not exemplary as a structured and satisfying drama, The Amazing Spider-Man does have its rewards: namely, its two star lovebirds.  Even if the superhero’s latest adventure feels a bit premature, the unveiling of Garfield and Stone, whose stars burn brighter with every fresh frame, couldn’t possibly have come sooner.

Ted

3/5

Seth McFarlane’s live-action feature film debut, Ted, has at least one good thing going for it: It’s better than Family Guy.  I’ve never understood the wild popularity of that stale and exhausted Simpsons knock-off.  Although, its ubiquitous animator and creator, who at one point had three programs running back-to-back on Fox’s Sunday Night Animation Domination (Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show), is pretty well-suited for a single, solitary time slot.  He’s really a one-idea kind of artist.  Family Guy was never consistently clever enough to maintain its required airtime.  That’s not to say that Stewey, the brilliant Bond Villain baby, and Brian, the dog who’s ten times smarter than his owner, weren’t good ideas in the first place.  They were great ideas. 

            

Ted, the raunchy and hilarious, R-rated fairy tale about a boy whose Teddy Bear comes to life one magical day and proceeds to grow up alongside him, is another inspired concept.  As the boy, John, becomes an adult (at least physically), Teddy becomes Ted, a vulgar and immature slacker who spends his days smoking weed and his nights partying with hookers.  Ted is, in essence, a reflection of John’s arrested development, his refusal to put away childhood and become a grown up.  The central premise is so obviously good it’s hard to believe someone hadn’t already thought of it.  What would have made for an absolutely tremendous animated or live-action short film is here stretched out to over 90 minutes and, miraculously, the movie doesn’t rip its stitching—although it comes awfully close. 

            

Now 35-years-old, John (Mark Wahlberg) is a well-meaning goof and rental car employee with a gorgeous girlfriend (Mila Kunis) who’s sick of sharing her man with his boorish stuffed (party) animal.  Ted is voiced by McFarlane himself—a gifted vocalist who, admittedly, finesses a comedic line so superbly that nearly everything Ted has to say comes out barbed and penetrates right to the funny bone.  The plot involves John trying to mediate the two poles tugging on him: the girl dragging him kicking and screaming into a responsible relationship and Ted, who’s still the security blanket for this frightened man-child.  At some point, Giovanni Ribisi enters the picture as a creepy Teddy Bear stalker straight from Silence of The Lambs.  That superfluous plot point provides the action necessary to propel the movie to its feature length goal, but adds little else. 

            

Made in the same pop-culture savvy style that Matt Groening invented and McFarlane later adopted for his animated sitcoms, Ted gushes over Star Wars and Flash Gordon while jabbing at such easy pickings as Jack And Jill and Taylor Lautner.  One of McFarlane’s trademarks is his unearned flippancy: he loves to rip on zeitgeist fads without having the intelligence to send them up in any insightful way.  Like South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone, McFarlane sits on an ivory tower chanting “Everyone’s Stupid But Me”.  Unlike the South Park duo, McFarlane puts nothing up, never pushing boundaries or provoking people to rethink their own ideologies or obsessions.  That same hypocrisy exists ever so slightly in Ted, but, for the most part, McFarlane is working more from Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith’s handbook for jejune but teary-eyed modern comedies. 

            
As the classic story of a boy, his best friend, and the girl that comes between them, Ted mostly works, because the script (written by McFarlane) mixes puerility and scatological humor—its so dense in dick, feces and sex jokes that all you can do is give in to the immaturity and laugh—with shards of wisdom and heart.  Ted’s annoyingly cutesy “I Love You” audio function has remained inside his stuffing over the years.  If it gets touched, an adorably childlike voice giggles that most unmanly phrase, and when inconveniently toggled during a poignant moment of male bonding between Ted and John, it perfectly sums up everything the two boys feel but can no longer say to one another.  It’s those sorts of heavenly messages that exist organically throughout Ted.  If only McFarlane had done more with them.  Too often it seems he’s just trying to please his Family Guy faithful, but in all honestly, it’s probably time he outgrow them. 

Prometheus

3/5

With Prometheus, legendary director Ridley Scott makes his long-awaited return to the science fiction genre, his bread and butter.  I know many of his dearest fans have been anticipating this release like the Second Coming, but I held my enthusiasm.  To these eyes, the director hasn’t made a great film since Blade Runner 30 years ago.  For a one-time genius of the form, he’s quite rusty.  Prometheus, about an interstellar space expedition aboard the titular vessel, where the crew of deep space explorers stumbles on the scary inhabitants of some distant planet, is not Scott’s expected return to the annals of sci-fi mastery, but little more than an effectively executed and exhilarating piece of 70’s style science-fiction-horror filmmaking.  Any stabs Scott makes at intellectualism or deeper meaning hardly resonate.  Prometheus is a well-made, big-budget creature-feature—no more, no less.      

            

The year is 2089 and Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) are archeologists and lovers digging through caves in Scotland when they discover a pictogram with a map directing them toward a constellation of stars thousands of light years away.  The two opine that these galactic coordinates will hold the secrets to humanity’s origins.  Two years later, cut to the Prometheus spacecraft, where android David (a brilliant Michael Fassbender) maintains the ship, peeps in on the dreams of the slumbering crew, and plays Lawrence of Arabia on repeat.  Fitting David with the flamboyant elegance of a starchy English butler, the underhandedness of surreptitious villain, and the muted emotion of his namesake robot from A.I., Fassbender makes David the most interesting character in the film.  When someone harshly points out his inherent soullessness, the magnificent Irish actor reacts with the perfect amount of concealed heartbreak.  Even if it’s true, intellectually, David understands exactly what it means. 

            

A terminally ill billionaire named Weyland (Guy Pearce in old man makeup) has funded the mission and assembled a crew including the scientists Shaw and Holloway, the no-nonsense ship overseer Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), the captain (Idris Elba), and a number of skeptics and clashing personalities.  As the team enters a mysterious planet’s toxic atmosphere and then sets down on its rocky and desolate surface, we already know where this ship’s headed.  The pre-humans—or “Engineers”—that Shaw and Holloway hope to find aren’t necessarily friendly, and Prometheus, at times, becomes the kind of don’t-leave-the-group slasher flick we’ve seen a thousand times already.  When some slithery alien life form, that looks like an eel mixed with a giant parasitic inchworm, makes contact with one of our unwitting crewmembers, he decides to approach the thing as one might approach a stray puppy.  The audience bellows in unison, “What the hell are you doing?” right before it leaps through his mask and down his throat.  We’d never be so stupid.  We’ve seen this movie before. 

Although Ridley Scott did not invent the science fiction horror film—just watch anything from the 1950’s that involved Vincent Price or Roger Corman—he certainly modernized it, gave it grit, and raised the fright-factor to levels no one had ever experienced in a movie theater.  When that gnarling little monstrosity burst out of John Hurt’s chest halfway through 1979’s Alien, audiences knew they were watching a different kind of horror film; it was an amalgam of classic haunted house clichés and atmospherics and new school sci-fi blood and gore effects.  The combination was incendiary.  It launched dozens of copycats and helped inspire the remakes of The Thing and The Fly by Scott’s contemporaneous sick-puppies John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.  As expertly designed and imagined as Prometheus might be, one never gets the feeling that they’re watching something special or unique.  The film’s centerpiece scene—involving Shaw, an alien fetus, and a surgery machine that looks like a futuristic tanning bed—is truly terrifying, disgustingly squirm-inducing, and all too palpable.  But the scene is also, in so many ways, just a more explicit reimagining of the alien-violating-human chest-buster scene from the original Alien.

Many have deemed Prometheus a prequel to that aforementioned game-changer, and, having now seen the film, I can say it lends itself to that analysis, but Scott isn’t entirely up-front about it.  It exists in the same universe as Alien, but the two films aren’t necessarily connected.  Whatever the case—prequel or not—Prometheus certainly doesn’t improve upon Alien.  Anyone hoping that this picture would take the genre to the next level will be disappointed.  

Written by John Spaihts and David Lindelof, the movie has a number of plot twists and curious character developments—Vickers’ pervasive iciness isn’t just her personality and David’s insidious trickery has more dimensionality than some simple robotic directive.  Shaw’s clashing belief system (How can one be a Catholic and a scientist?) gives the film its existential gravitas.  But mostly, the story doesn’t add up to anything particularly inventive or revelatory.  Prometheus does offer beautifully rendered imagery, with graceful and subtle use of CGI; an assured performance from Rapace, who’s tough enough to recall Ellen Ripley and sweet enough to recall Audrey Tautou; and the right amount of pulse-pounding excitement to reward the price of admission.  This half-successful sci-fi horror flick is best viewed as a masterfully conceived throwback that, in its finest moments, makes you nostalgic for the kinds of movies Scott used to make.

Snow White And The Huntsman

2/5

Taking familiar stories and repackaging them is the name of the game in Hollywood today.  Snow White And The Huntsman has got dwarves, magic mirrors and poison apples, as is necessary to nominally be considered a Snow White tale.   But this misbegotten reinterpretation feels less like the magic of Walt Disney than the entire long agonizing slog of The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy jammed into one two hour endeavor.  The movie, which was directed by Rupert Sanders and stars Charlize Theron as the evil queen, Kristen Stewart as Snow White, and Chris Hemsworth as the hunky huntsman, has the same feudal-filth stylistics as the popular historical fantasy Game Of Thrones, but in its mish-mashed approach it only sullies the enchantment of the classic story with Dark Age gloominess.  Muddy, loveless and as over-produced as the worst Hollywood assembly-line epics, this revisionist fairy tale is far more grim than Grimm.  

Besides a handful of technically impressive visuals—Theron’s Queen Ravenna ages forward and backward like a perpetual motion machine, her skin withering into pockmarks and wrinkles before magically resurfacing into splendid Neutrogena cover girl smoothness—this is a rather joyless affair.  It begins with Ravenna usurping a king’s throne with a black widow’s ruse—marrying him then sticking a knife in his heart—and locking the prepubescent princess in a tower until she grows up into the inescapable and insufferable Kristen Stewart.  (The Twilight actress tries her hardest for an English accent and fails, miserably, but that’s hardly the biggest problem with her performance: Stewart acts as if constantly suppressing a migraine.) 

Regardless of any self-serious, swords-and-shields reimagining, the essence of the Snow White character has and always will be absolute kindness and generosity, almost to the point of masochism.  The ultimate message of the Snow White fable was that, despite the queen’s best efforts, she could never be as beautiful as Snow White because Snow White had an untouchable beauty of spirit; the queen was overflowing with festering hatred.  Stewart, with her Got-Milk gawkiness and two or three expressions, is so sullen an actress that she comes off as enormously self-centered, a most antithetic character trait.  When Snow White is invited to dance by a love-struck dwarf, she obliges, but Stewart is so phony she has to force a smile, like a preteen brat reluctantly dancing with the class dweeb at her Bat Mitzvah.

Admittedly, Stewart, green eyed and raven-haired, does have a natural on-screen beauty, most clearly in evidence early on.  But compared to her breathtaking costar, Charlize Theron, Stewart is a feather battling it out with an anvil on a triple beam balance.  When it comes to screen radiance and explosive histrionics, Theron’s incendiary turn as Ravenna sporadically set the theater aflame.  Other times, all the shrieking and overacting prompted a good amount of unintentional giggling (from this viewer particularly).  For better or worse, though, the Oscar winner is at least wholly committed to role, affording the archetypal evil queen far more sympathetic depth than any previous incarnation.  Of course, I use the term sympathetic rather lightly; she’s still the “evil” queen, after all.  When her old consigliore, the magic mirror, warns her of Snow White’s potential beauty, Ravenna decides to devour the girl’s beating heart, absorb her purity, and achieve omnipotence (or some other magical jargon I can’t remember). 

Snow, instead, escapes to the Dark Forest, where she allies with a widowed huntsman named Eric (Hemsworth, in his third feature this year already) and seven dwarves played by famous British actors with their faces graphically placed on little bodies Benjamin Button style.  They trudge through a sludgy fantasia filled with gravelly trolls and effulgent sprites for what feels like eons, get chased by the Queen’s inept guards, and then arrive at the base of the Rebel Alliance, where the messianic Snow White gives the most laughably unconvincing of rally-the-troops pep talks before leading an army to defeat Ravenna and take back the kingdom.  The script, which is credited to Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini but was probably passed down an entire batting order of Hollywood hacks, is symptomatic of the Twilight-cancer, adding a superfluous second love interest named William, an ace archer with curls and dimples. 

He’s kind of like Prince Charming, but in all honesty, he and Eric should probably just be one character.  The writers think they’re being subversive, or at least clever, by hinting toward an inevitable romance between Snow White and her burly anti-prince, Eric.  But the two have zero chemistry.  (Probably because acting opposite Kristen Stewart is like acting opposite a frozen freezer door.)  Teutonic with an oceanic ocular glimmer, Hemsworth also has a cheeky self-knowingness to go along with his movie star looks.  Putting on a Scottish brogue and donning ragged, greasy threads of hair, the Australian doesn’t quite shine in this picture like he does as the Norse demigod Thor, but he has an earthy, aggressive charisma that seems as inherent as it is irrepressible.    

At times, he reminds me of a young Brad Pitt, perhaps if Pitt had moonlighted as a rugby enforcer.  But the movie is a thankless death-march for the entire cast.  It’s the cinematic equivalent to long unrefrigerated String Cheese: processed and produced, spoiled into a putrid miscellany of fashionable plot devices and visual tendencies, and repackaged and resoled.  Snow White And The Huntsman doesn’t care a lick about genuine adventure, romance or heart—only box-office returns.  If you choose to indulge, I don’t think any magic kiss will raise you from this movie’s sickening spell.