I Want You Back Guardians

For the first time in as long as I can remember I have walked into a cinema screen and had fun; pure, unadulterated, uninterrupted fun. From the moment Chris Pratt’s Star Lord bursts into dance at the opening credits until the moment…well the moment he bursts into dance at the finale pretty much. Guardians of the Galaxy might not be the smartest film you’ll see this year or the most powerful but by God it is the one you’ll remember when December rolls round.

Part of the success is that Guardians is the first Marvel movie you can go into without needing any real understanding of the established universe. It’s not a superhero film, it doesn’t feature cameo’s from Mark Ruffulo or make reference to something important down the line. It’s a space opera taking place in a galaxy far, far away and while the influences of Star Wars, Firefly, Farscape and Cowboy Bebop are all too apparent the film has an energy and wit all of its own.

Much of that wit comes in the form of Chris Pratt’s performance as Peter Quill, a human abducted from Earth as a child who, twenty-six years later, is now trying to establish himself as the outlaw Star Lord. His cocksure, space cowboy persona is a fun opening gimmick but watching it get undercut by how little it means is what seals the deal. Quill’s dedication to the pop culture tropes and references of Earth reinforce his tragic characterisation as a kid trapped in a man’s body trying to imitate Han Solo. Make no mistake people Quill is no John Crichton and if his companions fail to get his remarks about The Maltese Falcon or Footloose it’s all part of the gag. 

Of course it’s mostly Star Lord’s that kick of the plot when he retrieves a mysterious orb from a dead planet. The orb is sought by Ronan the Accuser a genocidal manic who wants to use it to destroy his enemy the Xandarians(just get used to the weird names here) and so sends his living weapon Gamora to steal it from Quill. Meanwhile Quill has a bounty on his head that draws the attention of Rocket Raccoon and Groot, a tree-person whose vocab is limited to ‘I am Groot’. In the end they all clash on Xandar and end up in prison where they meet Drax the Destroyer,a bruiser with a score to settle with Ronan. There the five agree to team up, sell the orb and split the cash.

Then things take a turn of formula. Turns out the orb is a planet-destroying weapon and the gang need to put their interests aside for greater good and yadda yadda yadda. Yeah part of Guardians fault is that it spends a lot of time trying to ignore the whole big picture altruism that heroes are supposed to have. So much so that it can’t quite sell everyone’s turn for good when it’s time for the big space battle.

This is largely down to the portrayal of Gamora. Not Zoe Saldana mind, who does a good job of balancing her effortless badassery with the exasperated straight woman role. No the problem is that Gamora has the most significant role in the plot outside of Quill, with her betrayal of Ronan forcing the Guardians together and her horror at the orb’s power the instigator for their last hurrah. This is all fine stuff but it’s never backed up by anything. There’s no destruction of Alderran that drives home the monstrosity of Ronan, no moment for her to reflect that what he could do with this kind of force. Compare this with Karen Gillan’s Nebula who breathes resentment for Gamora and their shared father Thanos the Mad Titan. At the end when Nebula betrays her father for Ronan it’s all too clear why she does this. With Gamora there is no such scene.

Gamora isn’t the only plot contrivance pushing the characters along though. An extended scene with the orbs would-be buyer Taneleer Tivan (last seen after the credits of Thor: The Dark World). Benicio Del Toro gives a delightfully camp performance but can’t escape the fact that he is simply explaining the purpose of the orb for the sake of plot. Thankfully though his scenes provide a new environment for the Guardian’s antics and another colourful action beat.

That’s the thing, significant though they may be the problems with Guardians never overshadows the level of fun, humour and action that the film has. The entire supporting cast is a riot, Dave Batista in particular kills as the entirely literal Drax. While Groot isn’t exactly Hodor the ‘I am Groot’ never gets old and his emotional intelligence paves the way for an incredibly affecting payoff. And look at that I finally managed to get through a Bradley Cooper film without my bum going to sleep. 

Other than that Guardians of the Galaxy is a ride, an energetic exciting ride that begs to be repeated. Yes it’s formulaic but formula can be a great jumping point for inventive action scenes, consistently funny characters and a universe of tricks and toys to be played with. Well worth a watch again and again.

Edge of Tomorrow repeats itself, never repetitive

Edge of Tomorrow is one of those nice little surprises. Not a big surprise like Disney casting aside heteronormative values in Frozen or Cabin in the Woods being a thorough analysis of the horror genre. More of a Lords & Miller 'this actually turned out good?' surprise. On the surface it all sounds terribly derivative; 'Action Sci-Fi version of Groundhog Day? Haven't seen that since Source Code.' The star is the original cocksure, hyper-competent everyman now with a heavy dose of personal baggage which coupled with the rise of brand dominance is just not the box office draw he used to be (just look at Knight & Day, Oblivion). In fact Edge of Tomorrow itself may have fallen victim to Cruise's diminishing star power losing out heavily to The Fault in Our Stars. And yet in spite of all that the film still works as a satisfying blockbuster.

Part of Edge of Tomorrow's success does seem to be down to just how aware it is of Cruise's less than favourable reception among audiences. Beginning the film as military PR-man Major William Cage, promoted over his head for the sole purpose of marketing a futile war against alien invaders in the near future. Cage is slick, disinterested in war, dismissive of the loss of human life and, when told he's being deployed to the frontlines, resorts to blackmail and desertion. So half of the inital appeal is largely due to schadenfraude, watching him get thrown down with rookie recruits, then into a horribly violent warzone to get killed by the aliens and then find out we get to see it all happen again.

See the reason the aliens have been so ably kicking our arses is because certain members of their species have the power to reverse time. When Cage accidentally kills one he absorbs the power and gets sent back 24 hours, which is where the film pretty much runs on video game logic. Soon the battle becomes a question of memorising enemy spawn points to proceed further before dying a resetting. It's not long though before he acquired the assistance of Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), a hot-shot soldier whose exploits against the aliens are legendary thanks to previously being stuck in the same loop as Cage.

Watching the evolution of Cage from spineless coward to battle-hardened soldier, thanks to Vrataski is probably the films strongest section. Essentially attempting to write the walkthrough guide to the battle while making Cage capable enough to actually walk through it. There's little in the way of surprises as the solution boils down to eliminating the hive mind that will take out all the aliens Phantom Meanace-style. But the action is exciting and they almost always find something funny or compelling to do with the various deaths. That's perhaps Edge of Tomorrow's biggest achievement, that while it often runs through several of the same scenes and lines over and over again it never feels repetitive. There's always some fresh twist to the each resurrection and it manages to play Cage's learning about the people around him without completely ripping off Groundhog Day.

Props too go to Emily Blunt as Vrataski who in a lesser film would be relegated to exposition-monkey. Here though she managed to give the stone-cold warrior woman enough visceral entertainment value to be fun and enough good timing to even get a few laughs in. I did roll my eyes at the revelation of a dead boyfriend but given she had to experience the trauma repeatedly as Cage now has to do with her it actually provides a nice amount of depth.

Edge of Tomorrow isn't going to change your life but if you're not in the mood for overly-acerbic teenagers dying horribly of cancer it's probably your best bet before the new Transformers comes out. High octane science fiction that'll be best remembered as a fun watch a few years from now.

Transcendence, entirely descendent.

So yeah, Transcendence is every bit as stupid as you've heard and stupid in the worst kind of way. A badly written film that thinks if it just puts enough large words in the script while talking about distinctly smart subject matter it can pass for intelligent, thoughtful science fiction (e.g. Gattaca or Moon). But it can't, nothing about Transcendence holds up to any kind of basic scrutiny. It's got bad writing, bad characters, bad structure, bad editing, nice visuals though. This is after all the directional debut of beloved cinematographer Wally Pfister, the very reason film buffs were looking forward to this. Now they're probably wishing they hadn't gotten their hopes up. If Transcendence proves anything it's that film is a collaborative medium and one really talented guy at the helm isn't enough to make it hold together.

For what it's worth our protagonist is Will Caster (Johnny Depp) a brilliant and respected AI researcher but you'll have to take my word for since the film never bothers to establish his work or show how far it's developed. Instead he gives a speech on the concept and it is at this point that we see just how dumb the script is. The characters all talk about incredibly smart things like the singularity and transhumanism but in the broadest, vaguest terms possible. There's no detail provided, no indication of how far this research has come, no evidence that these people actually know what they're talking about. Hey screenwriter Jack Paglan! We've come to see a film about transhumanism, you don't need to dumb things down!

Anyway because of the informed dangers of his research Will is shot by a member of RIFT, a militant anti-technology group. That nuanced breed of neo-Luddite that's strangely comfortable using cars, cellphones and guns embedded with radioactive isotopes but what the hey right. The bullet leaves Will with weeks to live during which time his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and best friend, um.... *checks IMDB* Max (Paul Bettany) work to hook his brain up to the same sever used for his now scrapped sentient computer.

They succeed but are immediately discovered by RIFT, presumably by means of clairvoyance because even if they were able to hack the Caster's computer, which is established as being offline, how the hell do you process the uploading of brainwaves from a remote laptop? So they kidnap Paul Bettany and go to destroy the system but but not before Will is connected to the internet. Evelyn then flees...which is also strange as there's no way she could have known that RIFT were coming. Will never detected the hack and Paul Bettany never sent her a warning text.

In addition to being rife with plot holes and logical flaws this sequence forces the film to move at a breakneck pace when really it should be slowing down to allow Will and Evelyn to reconnect. While watching the film I found my mind going back to the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back, in which a widow used her husband's online footprint to recreate his voice and personality on the phone. In that story scenes were dedicated to the wife talking to the voice, allowing herself (and us) to become lost in conversation, only to sharply remind us that the husband was only a simulation. This is what Transcendence badly needed because all of Will and Evelyn's actions are motivated by their relationship. A relationship whose value we are never allowed to see and as a result cannot invest in.

The film then takes an epic leap forward in time as Evelyn moves out to the middle of nowhere to turn a blighted desert town into Wills personal solar-powered server farm. With infinite power and the collective knowledge of the internet Will is able to make huge scientific leaps in medicine and nano-technology. Eventually able to heal all ailments, clone a new body and built a personal Extremis-style army. Frightening stuff, so frightening you'd think it would attract huge attention from the military, media and general public. But no, even though the proof is posted online a miracle cure for the sick and disabled doesn't even get a hint of local news. And the military seems to be limited to exactly one guy whose only job is to arm RIFT to the teeth with more filthy, evil technological weapons. 

Oh and in the two years RIFT has managed to convert Paul Bettany to their side despite presenting no logical argument and the fact that there are way, way better equipped people to stop Will than a gang of hipsters. But hey, Bettany (yes I've given up trying to remember the characters name) needs to be there because he knows Will's source code and can use it to create a virus to destroy him. And it's not like the most intelligent being on earth with two years of planning would think of safeguarding his one weak spot is it?

Eventually they get Evelyn onside too, apparently she was cool with giving up their old life, staying confined to the desert and experimenting with innocent people but the moment Will started monitoring her bio signatures that was a step too far. Which is handy because the film needs a virginal sacrificial lamb to make the idiotic ending seem weighty and emotional. The plan being to give Evelyn a dose of Will's nanobots with the virus as Will now wants her to upload her brainwaves so that his transformation into the ship from Futurama can become complete.

Needless to say this tearjerker of an ending can't play out without the stupidity of the script coming to the fore. It's revealed that Will has cloned himself a body...which means I guess they can't do the upload? A firefight breaks out and RIFT uses Bettany as a hostage so Will has to choose between uploading the virus or healing Evelyn. I mean sure he doesn't need to do the upload, he can just heal Evelyn and be with her in the physical world but DAMMIT this is Paul Bettany's life that's at stake!

The film then tries to reconcile the stidity of its ending with an epilogue, showing the ripple effect of destroying Will has also killed the internet and most forms of technology. In stopping Will and Evelyn being together we have in fact driven ourselves apart. Which would be meaningful if we cared about Will or Evelyn or their relationship and if the things which drove them apart had any semblance of believability to it. Transcendence is a mess, a terrible debut for Pfister and likely to rank among the worst of 2014.

The Zero Theorem: Zero = 100%

Okay cards on the table first. Yes, Terry Gilliam's latest world of wonderful weirdness The Zero Theorem came out back in March, several weeks ago. You may also remember that it came out and screened in cinemas for about ten minutes before being shoved aside for the latest half-hearted Hunger Games/Twilight clone. But thanks to the good people at Bristol's Cube Cinema I was able to catch a screening last week, one well worth the trip to Stokes Croft.

I'm somewhat glad I was able to see this in the hindsight of Richard Ayoade's The Double because, while I mostly liked The Double, The Zero Theorem feels like the film it wants to be. A far more nuanced take on individuality built organically into the world of the film. And with a conclusion that offers a satisfying level of complexity for such a weighty subject.

The near-future of The Zero Theorem is one with an abundance of colour. Stark, neon colours carelessly plastered onto grey streets and glum people. Vibrant adverts register each member of the public, screaming offers of meaning at them yet acknowledge no one as an individual. The ostentatious aesthetics of Gilliam's world are embraced by people desperately seeking uniqueness, even if it is only an empty illusion.

The only one sharp to this is our protagonist Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz) who despite his eccentricity and intellect knows he is not unique. He refers to himself with plural pronouns, dresses in the dreariest grey and is as bald as an unformed foetus. However despite his logical nature Qohen is a man of faith. Not religious faith, although living in a Christian Church, a monument to the original deification of the individual, suggests otherwise. Qohen has faith that a phone call is coming, not yet another cold call but one intended for him and him alone, one that will reveal his life's meaning.

Naturally then Qohen would prefer to work from home, which the shady spectre of 'Management' (Matt Damon) permits provided he can solve The Zero Theorem, a complex mathematical formula  that will determine if the universe is really for nothing. With Qohen at work it is a combination of Gilliam's absorbing direction of Waltz's frustrated performance that keep you watching. You'll be surprised how much sympathy can be wrought from watching a man fiddle with computer graphics on a screen but the aggressive anxiety of Qohen is both funny and sad. It helps of course that even the smallest prop is an oddity, adding an air of absurdity to an otherwise mundane narrative.

To break the flow of Qohen's misery comes the lascivious Bainsley (Melanie Thierry), a woman hired by Management to ease his mind via the virtual world. The chemistry between Waltz an Thierry is charming enough but it remains transparent throughout that this is an entirely artificial relationship. While Qohen is eventually willing to believe in it unfortunately we aren't. The relationship does crash in the end and it crashes hard, but had this been better built as something potentially genuine it might have resonated better with the audience.

The second interloper into Qohen's misery is Bob (Lucas Hedges), Management's teenage computer prodigy. Bob is the personification of individual potential, enormous talent with no clearly defined path even if the Orwellian Overloads are trying to pave one for him. Instead he indulges in base pleasures, lust and gluttony which eventually rubs of on Qohen. In many ways he is Qohen's opposite, seeing himself as individual while the rest of humanity is a nameless mass unworthy of the brain cells it would take to identify.

While Bainsley's influence on Qohen is intended to reinforce Qohen's worldview Bob eventually serves to break it. Forcing him to realise that his phone call is nothing but a delusion, that his life may truly be as meaningless as the universe itself. Bob's solution to the existential truth of reality is to placate himself with life's pleasures, to him his life has meaning. Managment's is entirely corporate, a business believes that nothing is for nothing as long as there is profit to be made. And for one brief moment Bainsley had found meaning in Qohen.

As Qohen's worldview and reality collapse around him it becomes clear that if existence does not matter then neither does agonising over it. The only meaning of any value to Qohen is that which he creates for himself. The film strands him in a virtual reality, or a dream it really no longer matters. But there he has control, he can create meaning, he can be one.

While there are some weaknesses to Qohen's story Gilliam's direction makes it feel like a seamless character journey. Flowing from scene to scene organically in a world which is both a visual joy and perfect reflection of the film's theme. Engaging, funny and poignant The Zero Theorem may not meet the success of it's spiritual predecessor Brazil but I feel it'll stand as one of the directors better works.

What goes on Under the Skin?

In case you were wondering Under the Skin is a film about how individuals are integrated into the collective mass of a species or social structure. Confused? Okay here's how it works; Scarlett Johansson and Paul Brannigan play what are implicitly aliens whose creation process is represented by a pinprick of light against a black background. Eventually the light disappears and the black mass is revealed to be a viscous sludge that is slowly surrounded by white, forming what resembles the human eye.

Throughout the first half the image of people entering and emerging from the all-encompassing blackness recurs. A dimly lit shot of a motorcyclist dressed all in black. The dark field from which Branigan retrieves the body that serves as Johansson's template. Most notably of course is the environment which Johansson's alien seductress takes a series of victims back to. Always male, always young.They all sink into the darkened pool from which she first emerged and now glides across like Christ on the Sea of Galilee.

In fact while she does not sink she is still amalgamated into the darkness of the shadows until her victims disappear and she can walk back into the light seemingly never breaking stride...until she can't.   Like everything else in the film it's never made explicitly clear what happens but one encounter with a pitiable deformed man detaches her from the whole. Forced to look at herself as an individual for the first time she lets him go.

In deviating from the programme she detaches from the mass. The image then becomes an all encompassing white, in the form of either fog or snow. And yet she can never fully integrate with it as she did with the black. Eventually she is taken in by a good Samaritan (A cliched sequence that forms the films weakest act) who offers some respite. But when the time comes to consummate their relationship, they can't. Presumably it is a function her artificial body lacks.

Unable to connect to the only person she has left she wanders into the woods, alone. And there she dreams of a connection to this world. In the films most beautiful shot she is superimposed onto the landscape of the forest, intimately bound to nature. Then she is brutally pulled out of it by a sexual predator. A reminder that while sex can connect us to humanity it can also tear us away. They fight and in the struggle her true form is revealed. A black skelatal arrangement of stiff, coarse limbs. 

In horror her attacker pours kerosene over her lights it. She stumbles forward and collapses into the snow. Finally given the one universal link to all creatures, death.

So is the film good? Well that depends on your tolerance for extraneous artistic indulgence as the film is loaded with abstract, sometimes non sequitar imagery. 

The premise at least brings intrigue delivered in a meaner both hypnotic and suspenseful as you see a predator becoming more and more adept at luring its prey. All of which has a suitably grisly payoff. However the story suffers from falling into the regressive archetype of the femme fatale using sexuality as a weapon. Plus the white knight coming to her aid feels overly romanticised, especially given the way in which it falls apart. all of which suggest that director Jonathan Glazer doesn't know how to explore the concept to its fulfillment.

In a way unique to the role Johansson is perfectly cast. Her doll-like beauty and imperfect accent all work to suggest a rough approximation of a human being. Which goes along way to remaining onside with the character as the film get progressively slower. Johansson imbues the character with enough inhuman mannerisms the suggest her actions are our of programming as opposed to malice. Ironically her inhumanity is what makes her second act development empathetic.

At the end of the day Under the Skin is food for the mind but not the soul. Yes it's all very interesting to think about how we integrate as an entire species but there's usually some emotion to anchor that integration. Emotion that the film consistently lacks when really it should be about discovering it. .