On Tomorrowland

It would seem that Disney are taking steps to move away from the traditional, patriarchal representations that made them one of the most prosperous studios in global cinema. Tomorrowland is a rare thing: a liberal blockbuster. At one stage in the film, Athena (wisdom and war) the violent robot who takes the guise of a twelve year old girl, tells the female protagonist that in Tomorrowland they need the thinkers; the dreamers; those willing to meddle in government property (anarchists) and those who wish to be free of bureaucratic red tape. 

In the film, Tomorrowland is envisaged as a place where the brightest and most creative from all disciplines can work free from political constraints. Yet, when opening up this utopia to the many, a tyrannical Hugh Laurie dressed like an SS commander shuts it down, turning it into a police state. It takes the anarchist and the jaded to come together and rebuild.

As a piece of cinema, Tomorrowland is a thrilling story, full of imagination, humour and creativity. The pace never lets up and the knowing references to other futuristic, time travelling films are fun. This could easily become the favourite film of a child raised on 80s/90s cinema. However many of those exist.

To entertain and be a spectacle is its first port of call, but Tomorrowland seems also to want to say something about blockbuster cinema. It wants to tell up to question and cause trouble rather than just accept the work of those that govern, simply because they do so. Rarely are children told to go and think differently, break the mould and be subversive (the education system is designed to knock this out of them), but here is a mainstream piece of cinema telling them just that. And it is all the better for it. 

On Mad Max: Fury Road

George Miller is often referred to as a visionary director. It could be argued that many directors are by the true definition of the word, but what this means is that Miller is creating cinema unlike what mainstream audiences are used to seeing. Happy Feet (2006) is certainly an unusual animated film. Babe: Pig in the City (1998), less so. Yet, what are referred to when this adjective is used are his Mad Max films. This now quartet of dystopian, Australian road movies, beginning in 1979 and with a thirty year gap between the last and this latest instalment.

Miller’s vision of the future certainly is imaginative. Larger than life figures populate his dirt red world where water is the most valuable commodity. Savage road crews fight for dominance of oil to keep their savage vehicles running. Amongst all of this is the truculent, terse anti-hero, Max Rockatansky, played here with intensity (the kind that hopefully doesn’t lead to racist enthusiasm) by Tom Hardy.

Visually, Mad Max: Fury Road is stunning. The detail in the action is The Hurt Locker (2008) like, although more fantastical as the world is far more detached from reality than The Hurt Locker. The heat and dirt is ubiquitous and the world all the more tangible for it. You almost feel you need to wash after the film.

The first film’s story about a policeman seeking revenge for the death of his family is briefly mentioned to tie the three-decade gap together, but this is more a redemption story for Max. Through saving the women he is saving the future.

As summer blockbusters go, Fury Road ticks the boxes you’d expect and then adds a load more and ticks them too. And this is why it’s far more fun to follow Max than anyone with a cape. 

On Monsters: Dark Continent

In 2010 Gareth Edwards wrote and directed Monsters. A road movie with an alien invasion twist. It is a beautiful and haunting film that has a quiet intelligence running through it. Edwards proposes that the monsters that had found a new home on Earth were benign, yet ends with a terrifying unseen American military intervention.

Four years later, Tom Green has written and directed Monsters: Dark Continent. Continent organically evolves from where Edwards left off. The monsters have made Earth their home and have become a part of life. A part that military organisations cannot let exist. Green takes us into the Middle East where American intervention in Middle Eastern conflicts is complicated by the monsters, offering them two fronts to fight on.  

The film presents us with four young Detroit men, unskilled and untrained, volunteering to go to the Middle East, presumably suggesting that the army is so stretched it will take the uninitiated. In these early stages the dialogue lacks subtlety and the characters are hard to like, but the photography has an air of authenticity to it that makes for some impressive desert scenarios.

Where Green’s skill lies in moving Edwards’s narrative forward is his ability to very quickly undercut audience expectation. What we think is a buddy war movie (with the alien addition) turns in one of the film’s best sequences into a psychological survival story. It is in this second half where the film is at its best, becoming a welcome addition to the American war genre.

Continent is not the quiet beauty of Monsters, but it has its own aggressive charm that when it kicks it becomes a solid piece of storytelling and a smart development on Edwards’s film. 

On Losing Ourselves with Citizenfour and Blackhat

At one point in Citizenfour, Edward Snowden, while sat, dressed casually in a hotel room he is uncomfortable leaving, sums up global issues in one sweeping term: That the US and UK government paradigm is one where the balance of power between the citizenry and the government is becoming that of the ruling and the ruled as opposed to the elected and the electorate.​The statement, coming from the unassuming, but potentially martyr like figure is a  swiftly damning account of an issue many of us feel at our core, but may be unable to articulate or really comprehend. 

Citizenfour is an exploration of a collection of brave people (their bravery will be assumed until evidence pointing to the contrary is revealed) and their rare, selfless act of humanity. Snowden, as the whistleblower, identifies a feature of global national security agencies he feels is so disproportionally incorrect that he risks isolation, entrapment and his life to bring it to public knowledge. Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill risk censure, slander, libel and their careers to bring this story to the attention of the public while director Laura Poitras completes a triptych of American domestic and foreign policy documentary films by recording, in true documentary style, the events that unfold. All three journalists have reported being followed and experiencing trouble when crossing borders. Snowden remains in Russia, not knowing when his front door 'might be kicked in', to use a phrase he repeats in Citizenfour. 

Citizenfour is unlike other documentaries in that the event is happening as the film is being made, not retrospectively. This allows for unique reportage. People are not remembering, they are responding and often to life changing events. These are made all the more powerful by their reactions, which are not as Hollywood may have us believe, loud and emotional, but quiet and introspective. Snowden stands as a nice point of contrast to Julian Assange, who has performed similar public duties, but done so very much with himself as the star. As Snowden repeatedly makes clear, he is not the story. 

The idea of tech thrillers is nothing new. Filmmakers have been using the material since the dangers of the web became clear (The Net, 1995, Disconnect, 2012, Untraceable, 2008), yet Citizenfour is rooted far more in authenticity by the spread it experienced across other media platforms and by Snowden's self-effacing manner; he doesn't want to be the hero. This may be an act of true generosity that he has not greatly benefited from, other than maintaining his integrity. Adding to the tech thriller canon and perhaps as authentic as fiction has been on the subject is Michael Mann's Blackhat. 

It's been almost six years since Mann's last film, Public Enemies (2009) and Blackhat returns to many of the themes and motifs that litter his work: professionalism, prison, high style in image and dialogue, violence, masculinity. Citizenfour was thrilling due to its authenticity. Blackhat is  thrilling as it feels rooted in authenticity and shows us what damage can be caused in the form of online terrorism. Mann achieves this as he always has, by creating characters that somehow manage to walk the fine line of being cooler than anyone you know, yet belonging in a the very realistic environments that he creates. 

Blackhat is an impressive thriller that was always going to be a hard sell to audiences. Citizenfour may be looked back on as one of the most important documentaries of the Internet generation, yet unfortunately, the impact it is having on actual policy is sadly underwhelming. The documentary caused massive uproar, both journalistic and in the form of protests. Yet, yesterday American senators voted in favour of the NSA keeping their illegally obtained data, presumably setting a precedent for them to continue to do so. This is sad, but not surprising, both US and UK governments are corrupt. What is perhaps more depressing is that when people are told their privacy is being sold, they simply shrug their shoulders. Social media has made it seem so acceptable to give away our privacy that being told it is being stolen from us has little impact. 

Citizenfour is hugely important and Snowden's sacrifice should be rewarded, but the odds are not on his side.  

On Just Calling it Avenging with Avengers Assemble

The verb avenge is to inflict harm in return for an injury to oneself or another. America, as self appointed world police, would see themselves as avenging the wrongs done to others by invading middle eastern countries and imposing more favourable governments. This is of course all done with what would be considered strong neo conservatives ideologies such as that to control the flow of oil. This is not avenging. This is politically motivated aggression.

Mainstream American cinema has found a way to reinforce neo conservatism in a manner that disguises this harmful message in subtle and damaging ways (American Sniper was damaging without the subtlety). Slavoj Zizek discuss similar ideas in length regarding the Nolan Dark Knight trilogy, specifically the middle and latter instalments. Marvel is equally guilty.

Avengers Assemble follows self appointed world police officers, using their superior technology and strength to muscle the rest of the world into giving them what they want. They are incredibly damaging, causing mayhem and casualties on a mass scale both at home and abroad. When a foreign ‘bad guy’ gets hold of a powerful material that can be used to destroy the world (let’s call it nuclear, just for the sake of it), the Avengers swoop in to reclaim it, despite having no claim on it to begin with.

When other individuals show up with similar powers, they are given two options: join us or die. An offer the everyday, ‘normal’ residents that are innocently caught up and killed, were never given. Being a part of a world police is for a select few only. A wealthy, white few.

Cinema, being an art form, is typically left, yet there is a right wing cinematic movement that wears a cape and reinforces an ideology that is ruinous to a socialist, inclusive society. But, it makes lot of noise and has fancy CGI, so who cares...   

On Fast & Furious 7

Seven films, more planned and no signs of improvement on the first in 2001. This, the seventh Fast & Furious film tries to combine action and comedy, perhaps as a cathartic release for the tragic events surrounding one of their key cast members, as it is clear at times that the surviving cast are genuinely sad in their performances.

This makes it all the sadder that the dialogue is so poor. It gives a talented group of actors who have authentic despair to communicate little to work with. The comedy falls flat, as do the threats. Yet, this may not matter as popular discourse tells us that the reason audiences flock (and they do flock) to see the Fast & Furious films is for the ever mind blowing stunts. They are becoming ever more ambitious, but well choreographed action does not a good action film make.

There is heart in these films, especially in the seventh and it’s in the right place. That heart needs to come off the screen and affect the audience otherwise all they’ll ever do is gasp at the action and forget the rest. 

On The Gunman

Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008) took an actor older than your average action star and gave the world an action trilogy. Not great, but occasionally fun and some moments of brilliance in the first one.

The same is unlikely to be the case for Morels’ The Gunman. Unlike Taken, The Gunman attempts a lot, threading many big ideas into a film that primarily wants to be action and therefore losing many of the ideas along the way. The film is well acted, which is to be expected, but the script doesn’t give them the depth in material they’re capable of.

There are a couple of interesting action set pieces and the physical nature of them is to be admired, but there are better examples out there. The Gunman trots around the globe a la Bourne and Bond and is better than the latter, but lacks the intensity of the former.  

On Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice published in 2009 is a dense, evocative, complicated narrative that covers cults, drugs, sex, prostitution, housing, Nazis, the medical profession and probably a whole host of themes and characters that have been forgotten all seen through the eyes of Doc Sportello.

Paul Thomas Anderson, who makes dense, evocative, complicated films obviously saw in Inherent Vice (a book that most would see as unfilmable) a perfect match. Anderson, with great success, transfers all of Pynchon’s literary idiosyncrasies on to the screen. The sense of time, the sheer confusion of the narrative, yet our complete willingness to be taken along for the ride are all features of both book and film.

Joaquin Phoenix once again proves himself an actor of incredible versatility as the paradox Doc Sportello, managing to naïve and knowledgeable at the same time. Phoenix becomes as much a part of West coast American counter culture as Venice Beach. Read the book and see the film. It doesn’t matter in what order. Either way just, let Anderson and Pynchon take you for a trip. 

On Selma

Biographies can be tiresome. They chart the life of well-known people who have predictably had difficult lives (otherwise why make a film about them) where such difficulties seem to always be drink, drug or sex related. Or a mix of all three. Selma has a little of this, nudging at the theme of infidelity, but mostly remaining focused on Martin Luther King’s fight in Selma and march to Montgomery.

The last biography of a ‘great American’ was Steven Spielberg’s 2012 Lincoln. A historical film, beautifully shot, about an important issue and with an incredibly strong central performance. Lincoln was, unsurprisingly major award bait. Selma has all the same characteristics yet instead of Spielberg the director is Ava DuVernay. Instead of Daniel Day Lewis, the central performance is David Oyelowo. Do the unknown names mean a lack of award recognition? Who knows, but Selma should feel a little hard done by, as this is a powerful piece of cinema. Oyelowo is fantastic, as good in the scenes where he says nothing as he is when giving speeches.

Whether the historical or biographical statements are accurate is not relevant here as the message is important and pertinent to life in America today for black people. It is sad that when watching Selma we can relate the events to those happening today, yet it ensures the film is even more relevant. 

On Ex Machina

Arriving not long after the uninspiring film about the man comes the seductive film about his ideas. Ex Machina explores the Turing test, where AI is established through a series of tests. Isolating its few characters in a billionaire’s mountain home/research centre places the film in the realm of horror as well as science fiction.

Written and directed by Alex Garland, what is obvious from the trailer alone is that Ex Machina is a beautiful film. Less clear is that it is also an intelligent film, linking Gleeson’s Caleb (smart, but out of his depth) with the audience (assumed to be smart and also out of our depth) and throwing us into an isolated setting with an unpredictable scientist playing god. Sounds like a horror film and it does employ many of the genre’s conventions including the suspense, but without the jumps.

Ex Machina asks a lot of intelligent questions and although the ending asks some of the wrong type of questions (plot holes), it’s a rare form of mainstream, contemporary science fiction: character rather than action driven.