World War Zzzzzz...

What does $200 million of Paramount’s money get you these days?  Certainly not a fantastic Star Trek movie – that was proven last month.  World War Z proves that it can buy you a gaggle of screenwriters, if you define a “gaggle” as five or more.  The completed movie, however, proves that said gaggle of screenwriters can’t guarantee you an interesting, much less coherent, screenplay.

It’s been said that when a popular genre reaches a point where filmmakers are producing comedies or parodies of it, that’s a sure sign the genre has all but “played out.”  While World War Z may not be a parody (Warm Bodies, from earlier this year, would better fit that bill), it’s at least a sign that the zombie genre is almost dried up from a dramatic viewpoint.  If the old saying about too many cooks spoiling the broth is relatable to filmmaking, then a slew of names under the “written by” credit should be taken as a cause for concern.  Brad Pitt’s production company won a bidding war five or six years ago for the rights to Max Brooks’ (son of Mel) novel about the oral history of a worldwide zombie pandemic.  Of course, this film bears no resemblance whatsoever to that novel, outside of its title and the fact that there are zombies in it, but Hollywood knows best, so out goes all the introspective, human stories and in goes swarms and swarms of computer-generated zombie termites, crashing helicopters, artillery fire and nuclear explosions.  Heaven forbid should somebody make a movie about people describing their experiences in such a fantastically terrifying time as a zombie apocalypse – nobody would want that, right? 

Pitt cast himself in the lead role, that of one Gerry Lane (a name which, for some reason, planted a Beatles’ song in my head and never let it go), who before his recent retirement, was some sort of go-to investigator-type guy for the United Nations at one point, although the movie doesn’t bother explaining any more than that to us.  He, his wife and two daughters manage to escape Philadelphia, by way of Newark, as the pandemic breaks out, narrowly and miraculously avoiding swarming death several times before being rescued and taken out to a helicopter carrier which serves as… Oh, screw it.  None of it matters, because you’ve seen all this before!  Did you see 28 Days Later?  Then you’ve seen this.  Did you see the pilot episode of “The Walking Dead?”  Then you’ve seen this.  The filmmakers have spurned a totally original take on the zombie-movie provided to them by the source novel for which they paid an astronomical sum of money, and instead chosen to make a zombie flick as they imagine Roland Emmerich might have.

Okay, sure, the zombies here evoke “hive” or “swarm” behavior, similar to flocks of birds or colonies of insects, presaged by images of those creatures in the opening credits.  This could be construed as slightly different from some other zombie flicks, but why do they behave this way?  Well, not only is that never explained, we’re also never even given a hint about what actually started all of this.  Oh, sure, there are couple lines of dialogue about somebody biting a doctor in Korea, and the Indian Army “fighting the undead,” but those plot points are never explored.

Gerry’s wife and kids? What about them?  They’re nothing more than a plot device, giving Gerry a reason to call back to the command ship and serendipitously get information that leads him to the movie’s next CGI-created set-piece.  Heck, for all we learn about those characters, “wife and kids” is really all the identification they require.  When a senior military official refers to them as “non-essential personnel” at one point, I wondered for a second if it was meant as a joke.

Why Brad Pitt would be so devoted to such a project that he would throw a good chunk of his own money at it sort of baffles me, too.  Don’t kid yourself, folks – Pitt considers himself a “serious” actor, and maybe with exception of Troy, has never done the “summer blockbuster” movie before.  What’s even more baffling is how the movie we finally get to see is a lot LESS a spectacle picture than was originally intended.  The final forty minutes of the movie are a complete rewrite/reshoot, eliminating a third act that would have centered around a massive zombie battle all throughout Moscow (a good portion of which was actually even filmed, but now won’t see the light of day) into the more intimate, thriller-type ending we get now.  I’ve read of how the original ending played poorly with test audiences, as well as Paramount executives, and how screenwriter Damon Lindelof, the man who made such an absolute mess of the Prometheus script last year, was brought aboard to formulate a new ending.  While that ending is the most zombie movie-like story arc of the entire film, it’s too little/too late by that point.  We’ve learned so little about Gerry, much less the characters who inhabit the medical research facility in which he finds himself, that it’s hard to feel much dread over what possible horrible fate may await him.

I’ve said in some previous review that once you’ve seen one zombie movie, then for the most part, you’ve pretty much seen ‘em all, and that remains so.  Given that semi-debatable fact, the only thing that can differentiate one zombie flick from another is the stable of characters inhabiting the story.  Since I really don’t know any more about Gerry Lane, his wife and/or his kids at the end of this movie than I did at the beginning, much less any cause for the pandemic, was their any point in my seeing it, other than to see that Paramount was willing to spend $200 million to convince me zombies can clickity-clack their teeth and swarm like ants…?

"Man of Steel" lives up to the hype

As one raised a Southern Baptist, and who has lived in the heart of the Bible Belt his entire life, I’ve always thought I have a fairly good notion of how I believe people in general would react to evidence of, or contact with, an extra-terrestrial intelligence.  The short answer is that I don’t think folks would handle it very well at all (the Robert Zemeckis film Contact depicted that possibility more believably than any other film of which I can readily think).  So many of us are unable to conceive of anything greater than ourselves or our image of God, or even worse yet are conditioned by religion and societal norms to consider such thinking as heresy, that having evidence to the contrary dropped in our laps would most likely result in some pretty ugly reactions.  This is the premise from which director Zack Snyder (Watchmen, 300) and screenwriter David S. Goyer (Christopher Nolan’s three Batman movies) approach their telling of that story with which we all are so familiar, how an alien baby came to Earth, adopted it as his home and became its champion and protector.

Man of Steel (an interesting title, not even mentioning the name he’ll have assigned to him by humanity) begins with a prologue depicting the few days leading up to Krypton’s demise, with Russell Crowe as Jor-El, an eminent Kryptonian scientist, and his wife Lara, both of whom have bucked their society’s notions of reproductive morality and produced a child the old-fashioned way when Jor-El deduces that Krypton is doomed to destruction due to environmentally-disastrous practices.  We see General Zod (Michael Shannon), commander-in-chief of Krypton’s military, attempt to assume control of the government and save their people in his own way.  This vision of Krypton is one we have not been shown in previous iterations of the Superman story, as the twenty minutes or so of the prologue gives us so much more of Krypton’s technology, government, wildlife and landscape than Superman: The Movie gave us thirty-five years ago that we can feel more sense of loss when this civilization comes to an end. 

The film, however, doesn’t go sequentially from there to baby Kal-El crawling from his spacecraft into a Kansas cornfield.  No, it quickly jumps to young-adult Clark Kent (Henry Cavill, an excellent casting choice), already grown and off into the world, attempting to find some sense of self.  Since we all know the Superman story, we really don’t need to have it all spelled out note for note again, and to their credit, Snyder and Goyer don’t even try.  We revisit important moments in the Superman/Krypton/Kent family mythos via flashback when those moments apply to current happenings in the film, a brilliant move on the filmmakers’ part.  As Clark comes to critical points in the plot, he’ll recall life-lessons instilled in him by his adoptive father Jonathan (Kevin Costner, whose understated acting style is the perfect tone for conveying fatherly wisdom), and his Earthly mother, Martha (Diane Lane, in some fairly-impressive aging makeup in later scenes).

The second and third acts are of how Clark’s existence, but not his identity, is revealed to the world by the arrival of Zod and his henchmen, having escaped from banishment to another dimension before Krypton’s destruction.  Zod’s vision of “saving” Krypton’s civilization require Clark/Kal-El’s death, and subsequently, Earth’s destruction, leading first to mankind’s question of accepting Kal-El as trustworthy, then to an all-out battle for Earth’s survival.  I liked how the movie takes a little time, even during all the carnage, to show how we might would go from hostile distrust of a being such as Superman to even accepting him, using a few Army officers’ coming to grips with him as a metaphor for society in general.

Oh, and Michael Shannon as Zod is fantastic, folks.  Shannon always has a borderline-psychopath look in his eyes, and he must be aware of it, as he always seems to find some way to utilize that physical characteristic to some advantage in whatever character he’s playing. Mania does not always necessarily equate to evil, and Zod honestly believes he’s pursuing a noble cause, and that his zeal in pursuit of that cause makes his actions just.  I think Kal-El/Superman even realizes this on some level and knows he must destroy Zod, anyway.

I suppose my only complaint (and I’m a little reluctant to use that word) is Amy Adams being cast as Lois Lane.  I’ve not been very happy with any of the actresses cast in that part in any of the previously-produced Superman films, with Kate Bosworth being the biggest joke of them all, and I was hoping Adams would break that streak for me, as I’m such a fan of hers.  Alas, the streak continues, but I’m not totally sure if my hesitation in accepting her is any fault of her own, or am I just unsatisfied with how David Goyer wrote the character.  The character isn’t anywhere near as annoying as Margot Kidder’s Lois, and is even written as having some empathy and restraint, but she still whines and cries a bit too much.  But, I guess if this is the biggest quabble I have with the movie, there must not be very much to quabble about.

Man of Steel is most certainly a product of the time in which it was made.  It seems that superhero films of this day and age must portray their primary characters full of angst and self-doubt, and loved ones will die, and there must be orgies of carnage and property destruction, and sure, those qualities are all present here.  That said, I found all of them appropriate here, and without any sense of stereotype.  First Contact, when that time comes, WILL result in mass hysteria and destruction in some form or another, so seeing New York City (and let’s face it, gang – that’s what “Metropolis” is) almost razed to the ground when aliens do battle there sorta makes sense.

While the term “reboot” has been applied to this film, that term often is self-defeating.  Sure, by definition, it means that it’s a new starting point for a potential series of stories, yet it seems that most folks never, ever allow themselves to forget the history of the source material, or keep that history from skewing their opinions of the new product, generally to the negative.  I admit I’ve been guilty of this myself on occasion (Casino Royale in particular), but I’d like to believe myself objective enough to overcome such gut-reactions.  Seeing this film with fondness or nostalgia for the Christopher Reeve films of the 70s and 80s, and expecting something similar would be a great mistake on a viewer’s part.  This movie is a science-fiction film at heart, and I suggest you see it with that mindset.

"Star Trek Into Darkness" is just light enough for fun.

It’s not so great a feeling to walk into a theater to see a flick and find yourself becoming mentally prepared to be disappointed, but I must admit to just such a situation this past weekend when going to see Star Trek Into Darkness.  The Star Trek reboot four years ago was a little fun, but with some of the heresy director J.J. Abrams committed upon Star Trek canon, and all that God-awful lens-flaring to which he subjected us, I wasn’t really yearning for the sequel at first.  Well, maybe “heresy” is perhaps a strong word, but it’s the first one to come to mind.  Anyway, as I began to see the promotional materials and teaser trailers over the last several months, and being blown away by some of the visuals, I found myself looking more and more forward to seeing his next attempt at the Star Trek universe.

The pre-title sequence, with Kirk and McCoy fleeing some pursuing primitives while Spock becomes trapped in an erupting volcano, didn’t do much to allay my fears that I’d be disappointed in the movie, though.  Sure, the very Raiders of the Lost Ark-esque chase scene is quite well-crafted, but it almost immediately conveyed to me that Abrams still didn’t “get it” (damn it, Federation Battle Cruisers CAN NOT make landfall!!!).  It had enough hectic and funny banter and interplay amongst the characters, however, that I found myself getting past the details and getting caught up in the movie pretty quickly. 

The movie has the reckless feel of some of original series episodes where Kirk showed his rashness and selective disregard for authority, as the first film did, but the rebelliousness seems to be less for its own sake in this film, and in that sense is an improvement on the previous film.  The Prime-Directive-be-Damned attitude for which Original-Series Kirk was so beloved is in full-force here, and while we do get to see a little bit more consequence of his actions, it’s still not as much as there SHOULD be.  This character trait is the one that Chris Pine seems to enjoy portraying the most, with his smirk-and-narrow-eyes being dished out in Shatner-like proportions.  It’s also the facet of Kirk’s personality that sets the movie’s events in motion.

I won’t delve into plot details too much for fear of inadvertently dropping spoilers, and there are so many to avoid revealing that I hope I can still convey to you that I did enjoy the movie and recommend that you see it.  Into Darkness shamelessly steals plot elements from a few different points of Star Trek’s past, namely some shady forces attempting to instigate a war with the Klingons and a certain villain who turns out to be more than meets the eye.  All of our favorite characters are back, and all have enough to do that their presence doesn’t feel like glorified cameos. 

Seeing these characters interact is the best thing about it, even more so than the previous film.  The casting of all these actors is spot-on, and their preparation and attention to detail is evident.  There were several instances of some combination of each or all three of the lead actors being onscreen when I found myself thinking of Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley, as the body language of Messrs. Pine, Quinto and Urban is all so very perfect. 

On the other hand, not every character harkens back to the original - Simon Pegg’s portrayal of Scotty is done to such a hyperactive level that James Doohan himself might not even recognize the character anymore (if he were still with us, that is…).  The rebooted version of Dr. Carol Marcus didn’t even really seem to serve much purpose here, either, other than to provide an opportunity for Kirk to see her in her undies and possibly plant the seed for him to… er, plant the seed… in the next movie.

After praising the casting, though, I must wonder about the logic of John Harrison’s ethnicity and accent without putting so much detail to this question as to reveal a vital plot point.  Watching any movie requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief by the audience, but the level of that suspension should not be too great, and if a film attempts at least a token explanation of some illogical point, most folks would probably buy it and move along.  Sadly, Abrams’ screenwriters didn’t even attempt to explain why we’re supposed to accept Benedict Cumberbatch as “Harrison,” and that one point of logic nagged me enough that it took me out of the movie for a few moments.  

The movie is a visual treat, too.  The actions sequences, and there are plenty of ‘em, are technical marvels to be sure, and while Abrams’ penchant for filling the screen with debris and an almost pornographic level of mass destruction continues from the first film, thank God he throttled back on the lens-flare somewhat!

Star Trek Into Darkness is a funny, involving and entertaining popcorn-flick that is very enjoyable in the moment, but I don’t think it as good as the first three or four movie adventures of the original cast.  Abrams expends a lot of effort in giving us “Easter eggs” that remind us of moments from the series’ previous iteration, so much so that his version almost doesn’t seem to be moving in an original direction.  Given his public admission that he was never as enamored of Star Trek as he is with Star Wars, one might hope that his taking over the Star Wars franchise will mean the next Star Trek film might be made by someone who has some interest in creating an entirely original story for these characters to inhabit.

Oh, and as a side note - it’s certainly a relief that San Francisco won’t be destroyed for another 250 years, since I’d very much like to see it before all of Telegraph Hill is overtaken by the Starfleet Campus…

"Iron Man 3" seems to be an experiment in the effects of rapid-fire wise-cracks.

Robert Downey, Jr. is a funny guy.  We all know that, right?  I don’t mean just as the characters he plays – you’ve seen him do press or talk shows when he’s promoting something, and he’s obviously as sharp as a tack.  We’ve also all seen the other two Iron Man pictures, as well as The Avengers, and it’s fairly apparent that the wise-ass genius Tony Stark was the role he was born to play.  The snarky, rapid-fire dialogue which comes so easily to Downey was the highlight of his three previous portrayals of the character (well, four, if you include his post-credits scene in The Incredible Hulk).  The question I have after seeing Iron Man 3, however, is at what point does a highlight start to blind us?

Shane Black, the screenwriter who created Riggs & Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon, and wrote and directed the criminally-underappreciated Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang (also starring Downey), assumes the director’s chair for this entry of the series from Jon Favreau (who thankfully still found time to return and play Stark’s bodyguard Happy Hogan).  He and his co-writer Drew Pearce give us a story of how Stark is adjusting to his world after being so emotionally scarred by his experiences in The Avengers, suffering from anxiety and insomnia, and driving him to focus obsessively on his various suits of armor, which puts strain on his relationship with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow).  Along comes the terrorist threat known as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), as well as some professional acquaintances from Stark’s past conveniently reentering his life, namely one Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), and the resulting death and destruction drive him to learn just what his priorities really should be.  

Iron Man 3 is a lot of fun and fits in the series very well.  It feels like we’re seeing the same characters in the same world we’ve observed before, and it’s definitely the most frenetic of the three movies.  The action pieces of the film, of which there are several, are spectacular.  We’ve all seen the destruction of Stark’s mansion in the trailers and TV spots, so it’s not a spoiler to say that if you thought that was impressive, there are others just as good before movie’s end.  Stark spends a great deal of the time outside his armor, even during battle, and this new story-wrinkle leads to a whole lot more techno-cacophony.  If anything, Black gets a little carried away with the mayhem at the movie’s conclusion, but Hell, if you buy a ticket to a superhero movie (or a Shane Black movie, for that matter) without expecting lots and lots of Stuff-Blown-Up-Good, then you’d best do a better job of researching how to spend your entertainment dollar.  

Black tries to take us a little deeper into everybody’s psyche than the previous movies did.  Stark has so much of his world upended during this movie that he has to seriously reexamine just what being Iron Man means to him, and how it impacts the people around him.  He spends a large portion of the movie out of his armor, being forced to come to grips with his emotional distress and to rely on his wits, and not his inventions.  Black excels at writing the sort of dialogue that Downey excels at delivering, and he has provided a different tone for the series, but while the concept of Stark’s introspection is very interesting, I think Black misfires in the execution in a few ways. 

Sure, it would be foolish to attempt making this film without taking advantage of Downey’s wit, but there are some instances in Iron Man 3 where the old adage of Less-being-More is ignored.  Stark’s mouth is pretty much running constantly throughout the movie, yapping off at each and every character he encounters, regardless of the logic.  The addition of an almost-stereotypical “kid sidekick” was a bitter disappointment, and seemed to primarily be A) a means to provide Stark a target for some rapid-fire smart-ass-ness, and B) a marketing ploy to involve kids who are probably too young to be seeing this PG-13/borderline-R movie in the first place.  

As good a job as Black does at delving deeper into Stark, he does it at the expense of the other characters around him.  The Killian and Maya Hansen characters are woefully underdeveloped, and the Hansen character in particular is almost dumped from the film about two-thirds of the way through.  As much fun as Don Cheadle’s Rhodey/Iron Patriot may be in the movie's final act, even his inclusion felt wedged in there, in a story-logic sort of way. 

Iron Man 3 is a worthy entry in the series, and I enjoyed it enough that I look forward to the character’s return in The Avengers 2 in a couple of years, but as good a movie as it is, I can see how it could have been even better.  I liked how we delved deeper into Stark’s relationship with Pepper and his overall mindset after his experiences in The Avengers, but while Stark so famously said “I am Iron Man” at the conclusion of the first film, and he does come to learn more about what that phrase means to him by the end of this movie, I’m left wanting to learn a few more things.  But, hey - we sure got a lot of great one-liners…

Yet another sci-fi flick takes us to "Oblivion," but THIS ride...

Oh, great… another Tom Cruise flick…  Have you ever noticed how some people say that with such derision?  I’ll even admit that I’ve even said it a time or two myself.  I’m not even one to hold the off-camera couch-jumping and psychology-bashing against him to the point I’d refuse to buy a ticket to a movie in which he stars, but you’ve got to admit that Tom Cruise is a bit of an over-actor.  Now, wait a second - that’s not completely meant as a knock, as there are roles where that’s appropriate, and some actors make a fine living doing it (you ever hear of Nicolas Cage…?). 

Something about all the promotional clips I’ve seen for Oblivion over the last few months have drawn me to it, though, despite seeing Jack Reacher not three months ago and having Cruise’s… zeal, for lack of a better word… still fresh in my mind.  Well, I shouldn’t say “something,” because I know what drew me to it – director Joseph Kosinski.  His first feature, the underappreciated Tron: Legacy was a visual feast, and after seeing the trailers for his follow-up, I was fairly certain this would be just as impressive.  Lemme tell ya - it’s nice to be right, folks.

The story he tells here is that some sixty years after an alien attack upon Earth, humanity has defeated the invaders, but has devastated the planet in the process.  While the survivors are supposedly being resettled on one of Saturn’s moons, Cruise’s Jack Harper and his teammate/partner/lover Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are stationed in one of numerous work towers high above Earth’s surface as a maintenance crew, servicing the automated drones that patrol the landscape searching for and eradicating the remaining aliens.  Without going into too much detail of their memory of life before their assignment being wiped and Jack’s troubling dreams of some pre-war life he couldn’t possibly have lived, including a mysterious woman in those dreams (Olga Kurylenko) who happens to (literally) fall out of the sky during the course of the story, I’ll let you know that Jack comes to learn a lot of the things he held as truths are definitely not so.

There are a lot of familiar sci-fi elements here – a post-apocalyptic, dystopian setting; alien invasion; a central character familiar with or longing for the world as it was before – so a lot of the plot points can be seen coming a ways down the road, but that’s okay.  After all, any Western worth a toot is going to have a gunfight in it, right?  Without saying that it’s exactly like such films as Logan’s Run or Silent Running, it certainly had that same sort of feel to it.  Call me crazy, but I even felt a little Planet of the Apes vibe, too, with some of the things Jack comes to learn about the universe around him and how he reacts to his discoveries.  To his credit, Cruise keeps his sometimes-manic energy level mostly in check here, and it makes his character’s actions, predictable they may be, a lot more interesting and believable.

It’s Kosinski’s visual style that drives the film, though.  Some of the plot points that I may have been certain were about to crop up (and I was right more often than not) were still made fairly effective by how little he showed the audience leading up to them.  Sure, I knew who those dudes in the black leather really were.  Of course, that’s who that other Tech-dude checking out that downed drone was while Jack watches from behind the sand dune.  Certainly, Victoria would be at that place when Jack arrives, almost half-expecting to see her.  But, dang!  How cool to have it dropped on us like THAT!  Even something as simple as having the majority of the film take place in daylight is an effective choice, avoiding the somewhat-cliché mood of the dark, rainy, depressing post-apocalyptic pictures we’ve all seen before.

Those of us who dig sci-fi know it better than most other movie-goers – if the movie is well-made, you can very quickly forgive it being a little predictable (and even forgive it starring Tom Cruise), so with that in mind, you ought to catch Oblivion in the theater.  You may not end up loving it to the point you’d pre-order your Blu-ray as soon as you could, but you’ll be glad you saw it on the big screen instead of waiting for HBO to run it next year.