Tag Archives: science fiction

Review: “Looper”

30 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

“Killing Time”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

 “IF YOU WANT a vision of the future,” George Orwell once remarked, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”  If that’s a grim forecast, it’s also a strikingly apropos one in relation to “Looper,” a dystopic sci-fi flick from writer-director Rian Johnson (“Brick,” “The “Brothers Bloom”).  It’s the second best science fiction film of 2012, after the even loopier “Prometheus.”

The face-stamping boot in “Looper” belongs to Bruce Willis (old Joe), a contract killer working for a crime syndicate in the future, who returns to the year 2044 to confront a younger version of himself (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt).  Because time travel has been outlawed, young Joe is a bad guy (and a junkie), a “looper” hired to, as he puts it, “take out the future’s garbage.”  He works a remote corner of a cane-field in Kansas where his victims suddenly appear, hands-tied, head-bagged, ready for a shotgun blast to the chest.  The executions are carried out like clockwork until, of course, there’s a glitch in the “Terminator”-like system.

Unbeknownst to him, Joe’s bosses in the future have sent the old Joe back in time to be killed by the young Joe and effectively close the loop.  We never see the evil genius known as the Rainmaker, busy sending old loopers thirty years back in time to be shot down by their former selves.  Joe’s friend Seth (Paul Dano) suffers this gory fate early on in the film.  Watch as a young Seth is cut down, limb by limb, in the present, his wounds materializing in the future.  Don’t worry; the temporal antics of “Looper” won’t be on the test.

Johnson’s plot line is intricate whereas personal matters in “Looper” are fairly old-timey.  There’s a prostitute (Piper Perabo) who keeps the young Joe drugged and confused, and, in the farm house nearby his killing floor, a single mom named Sara (a butch Emily Blunt) keeping a close watch over her precocious son Cid (Pierce Gangon).  Could Cid be one of the three kids that the old Joe is dead-set on exterminating?  The uncanny Gangon has special powers, which I won’t reveal here, but he could be the creepiest kid on film since the tricycle-riding Danny Lloyd in Kubrick’s “The Shining.”  Blunt, meanwhile, who has the Midas touch in picking scripts, never gives a bad performance and she offers the film some much-need pathos.  She shelters Joe, from old Joe and from the truth, and in the end, young Joe returns the favor in a sacrificial last act.

The only misstep in “Looper” was a needless effort to make Gordon-Levitt look like Bruce Willis.  A plaster mold of Willis was cast to help the young actor resemble the iconic action film star.  Fitted with a putty nose and prosthetic upper-lip, young Joe looks more like a glass-eyed Howdy Doody doll than the moonlighting star of yesteryear.  And because science fiction is always already not the real world, this turns our anti-hero into something even further unreal and distracts the audience.  The gun violence is gratuitous as well, and though it happens off-screen, watching children getting shot at close range threw me for a loop.  It goes without saying that if the older version of myself in 2042 got in touch with me now, I’d be asking for stock tips, Super Bowl wins, Lotto numbers, and other money-making factoids, not whom to kill and when and where.  But that’s the real world not the movies.

“Prometheus” aside, “Looper” could be the most inventive science-fiction film of 2012; what is your vote for best action/sci-fi film of the year thus far?

Review: “Total Recall”

06 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Where is my Mind?”

Grade: C (SKIP IT)

REMEMBER, BACK IN THE NINETIES, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was gladiatorial and not yet gubernatorial, and two words, “Sharon” and “Stone,” spelled the very apex of the filmic femme fatale?  They were all there in Paul Verhoeven’s “Total Recall,” based on a Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” and adapted by the writing team that gave us “Alien.”  The film grossed over a quarter-million dollars over the summer of 1990 and the sequel, in true sci-fi style, transmuted itself not into “Total Recall 2” but into Speilberg’s “Minority Report” starring Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell.

The latter actor now leads “Total Recall,” a remake not exactly worthy of the suffix “2.0” due to its repetitiveness and lack of inspiration. The premise remains a fascinating one and something of a Lockean nightmare: what if an authoritarian form of neuroscience could reduce its enemies into a tabula rasa with just the flip of a switch?  As everyman Doug Quaid, Farrell has only vague memories of being a secret agent in the ongoing war between Chancellor Cohaagen (Bryan “Breaking Bad” Cranston) and a resistance led by a wasted Bill Nighy.  Visiting a laboratory called Rekall, the scientist tells Quaid: “Tell us your fantasy and we’ll give you the memory.”  Outside the lab, a chemical attack has cleaved the earth into the Fall, a version of Great Britain, and an imperialized Australia known as the Colony.  All the Marxist animosities between workers and over-lords would appear to be in place, but are soon squandered in a film that clings to flying-car chases and endless sequences in which Farrell and sidekick Jessica Biel fall from rooftops.  Even more nightmarish is the idea that in the distant future, in a decimated London-like metropolis, “Phantom of the Opera” is still being advertised on double-decker buses.

Directed by Len Wiseman, from a script by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback, this “Total Recall” is a gumbo of other, better, films:  Cohaagen’s synthetic drones look like the Storm Troopers of “Star Wars” and the Colony resembles the LA of “Blade Runner” (only wetter).   Wiseman should have wised up to the fact that the Verhoeven’s original was full of grotesque splendors: triple-breasted prostitutes, red-hot martian sands, and a human face that came apart like a Rubik’s cube.  This was Verhoeven after “Robocop” but before “Showgirls,” and he brought a campiness to the original sadly absent in the reboot.

Then again, Kate Beckinsale (also Mrs. Wiseman) goes for the throat as Quaid’s wife, but if it’s Beckinsale karate-chopping her way through a film you’re after, the “Underworld” franchise will better whet your appetite.  Alongside Farrell and Biel (not so much a thespian yet but a very high pair of cheekbones), the cast is comprised of some of Hollywood’s blandest actors: poor Farrell is a hard worker, but he has an empty coolness that keeps him from truly vaulting himself into mega-stardom once and for all.  Here, the cast is upstaged by gadgetry, especially a glowing cell phone implanted in the palm.  Talk about keeping a phone on hand.

The best bit of dialogue transpires between him and Beckinsale with the query: “If I’m not me, then who am I?”  “How do I know?” she replies, “I just work here.”  Despite this, however, the sour irony of “Total Recall” is its total forgettability.

Review: “Prometheus”

09 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

“Space Oddity”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

MY 3-D SCREENING of Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” was preceded by a trailer for Tim Burton’s forthcoming “Frankenweenie,” due out this Halloween.  The titles of both films openly borrow from the 1818 classic that more or less invented the mode we now know as science-fiction, that is, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.  The rebellion myth involving Prometheus was nothing short of indispensible to the nineteenth-century English Romantics.  Mary Shelley’s novel notwithstanding, husband Percy Shelley penned his own lyric drama Prometheus Unbound in 1819 while Lord Byron wrote his own short poem heroizing the Titan god, the fire-stealer who, in bringing fire to humanity, found himself eternally punished by Zeus, his liver pecked out by an eagle on a daily basis.  “Like thee,” he wrote in 1816, “Man is in part divine,/A troubled stream from a pure source.” What obsessed the Romantics about the promethean narrative was is its faith in boundless human potential, in boundary-breaking, in playing with fire just as the gods do.  Prometheus, as our ally, stands in for the human.

Accordingly, questions of origins permeate Scott’s “Prometheus,” which is the most intelligent, visually satisfying science-fiction film since “Avatar,” and similarly interested in corporate exploitation and the meaningful ways in which spacemen rage against the machine.  Literally a machine, the excellent Michael Fassbender (“Shame”) plays a white-blooded robot named David who takes his cues for seeming human from Peter O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia.”  A close second to David’s robotic rigidity is Charlize Theron as Miss Vickers, a bloodless corporate drone working for Weyland Corp. and overseeing a trillion-dollar mission aboard the vessel named Prometheus.  The goal?  Investigate the alien remains on a deserted planet, which gradually draws the shipmates into its abyss.  The consequence?  Bloodshed, lots of it.  “Prometheus” looks in two directions at once: forward to the future world of 2090 when companies have colonized outer space and backward to the filmic past of “Alien” (1979), the first of Ridley’s Scott’s two sci-fi films – his equally influential “Blade Runner” followed three years later. “Prometheus” functions as a prequel to that first film.  Proof that we are back in the world of “Alien” are the airlock doors and padded hallways of the spaceship, the pod-like sleep chambers and, of course, the threat of a foreign body bursting through one’s abdomen.  It is hard to imagine a more terrifying scene on film this year than the self-administered C-section scene in “Prometheus” wherein an octopus-like fetus is gorily excised.

While Theron remains in the same deep freeze as her performance in “Snow White and the Huntsman,” she is offset by warmer, more human characters such as Elizabeth Shaw (played by Noomi Rapace) and her ill-fated husband Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green).  The screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof foregrounds Dr. Shaw as a proto-Ripley heroine who demands some ethical accountability from her cruel captains of (space) industry.  After surveying the alien planet that holds the key to humanity’s own origins, he declares: “This is just another tomb.”  This is the eeriest aspect of Ripley’s masterpiece: space is a sepulcher, and with dim, brownish camerawork by Dariusz Wolski, we are plunged into a kind of puzzle.  “Prometheus” isn’t just a top-shelf work of space-horror with the power to shock, even revolt, its viewer, but the work of a director wiser than the one who directed “Alien” thirty years ago. With its milky-way moments reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and even Malick’s magnum opus, “The Tree of Life,” Scott’s film goes deeper, to the DNA level of human life and its precarious place in a mysterious and often cruel cosmos.

Review: “The Hunger Games”

24 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Food Fight”

Grade: B- (RENT IT)

THE MUCH-ANTICIPATED screen version of “The Hunger Games” comes with baggage.  A lot of baggage, in fact: more than twenty million readers (and growing) and that perennially impossible pressure of bringing a beloved book to life on screen.  Let’s face it: you can’t appear as if you love the book if you love the movie as well.  But what’s to rave about here?  “The Hunger Games” begins and ends not with a bang but with a whimper, and that’s the surprising deficiency in Gary Ross’s screen retool of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling dystopic triology with this cheery premise: a futuristic Orwellian autocracy in which minors are marched into a televised fights-to-the-death.  Call it “Keeping up with the Kill-dash-ians.”  Ninety million dollars later, not to mention a costume department that resembles the offspring of Tim Burton and Marie Antoinette, and we have Part 1 of “The Hunger Games,” but it’s a snooze and you’re lying if you weren’t left a little hungry for just a little more gaming and a lot less exposition.

In terms of Collins’ savage plot, there’s really nothing new here.  Critics cite the Japanese film “Battle Royale,” but there are influences even more obvious: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Stephen King’s sci-fi novel, “The Running Man” (later a film starring Schwarzeneggar), in which the clairvoyant King, who saw, back in 1982, where reality-TV was headed, put game-show contestants in a death match.  As Collins’ 16-year old heroine Katniss Everdeen, Jennifer Lawrence (Oscar-nominated for “Winter’s Bone”) has already been call bland and lifeless in the role.  Not so.  The leitmotif of The Hunger Games is containment – segregation, really, as in the district-ization of this future nightmare-socity – and Lawrence gives a restrained, rather contained performance, focused and somber.  Some of the first images of Lawrence are powerful: like a Diana in pigtails, she stands inside in a verdant forest, hunting bow in hand.  Of course, the huntress becomes the hunted as she joins twenty-three other so-called “tributes” to inhabit a vast televised landscape, replete with genetically engineered hornets and man-eating dogs the size of VW bugs, compliments of reality-show producer Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley) and blue-skinned Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci) as the games’ slimy talk-show host.

Regardless, the supporting cast contains some delightful stand-outs: the always-entertaining Elizabeth Banks who cites Joel Grey in “Cabaret” as the inspiration behind her Effie Trinket and Josh Hutcherson (“The Kids Are Alright”) as the passive Peeta Mellark.  Two others are severely miscast: a wooden Lenny Kravitz as Cinna and a Woody (Harrelson) as Haymitch Abernathy.  Apparently, the party every night during shooting was in Kravitz’s trailer but he brings little of that fun to the screen.  And the fact that two of the audience members in my row were asleep two hours in – and it was a 12:15 screening! – speaks to the film’s snail’s-pace.  Simon “Slumdog Millionare” Beaufoy has adapted the second book “Catching Fire” for the screen – production begins this September – and let’s hope he can give the plot the Bollywood bop it deserves.

A sinister Donald Sutherland, whose white beard is combed into a ghostly mask, plays President Snow and in the film’s final scene, we see him assessing the winners of the Games and perhaps determining what’s to come.  “Contain it,” he tells Seneca earlier in the film.  Still, what are we to make of that last look at the games’ sole survivors?  It spells sequel, but how exactly?  What’s left uncontained?

With the next three films in the works and fans ravenous for more – that’s right, Hollywood will split the third book into two films to play the game some more – it’s safe to say the Kat Fight will continue.  Let’s hope it can overcome the low blood sugar that slows down this first installment.

Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

06 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by in Film Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Orangutangulous!”

Movie Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Grade: B+/A- (SEE IT)

THE FACT THAT star James Franco (“Howl,” “Milk”) is currently studying British Romantic literature at Yale University in pursuit of his PhD – what’s next? Anne Hathaway as college chancellor? – may help to explain his initial attraction to the script for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011), a  prequel to the “Planet of the Apes” franchise which will have you saying to yourself: Go monkey, go!   After all, it’s in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), that Romantic caveat of a classic which more or less spawned the entire science-fiction genre, that Victor Frankenstein describes his laboratory as that “workshop of filthy creation.”  What gives “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” its chill (and genuine thrill) is that the pharma-medical lab at the film’s center is anything but filthy.  Instead, the scientific headquarters known as Gen-Sys look like a state-of-the-art facility: sleek and silvery countertops, Plexiglas cages in which primates pace and occasionally scream out, Franco (as Will Rodman) in an immaculately white lab coat.

The glossy exterior of Gen-Sys belies what goes on behind (sliding and keypad-operated) doors: primates are routinely tested and tortured in pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer’s.  The drug restores memory in humans and turns primates into Super-Simians.   Rodman’s own dad, Charles (played by a befuddled looking John Lithgow) is himself an Alzheimer’s sufferer and another guinea pig for his son’s trials.  Therein lies the film’s recipe for disaster: just as Will is boasting to Gen-Sys’s investors that he and boss (smooth operator David Oyelowo) have found the cure, an ape known as Bright Eyes busts out of its cage and through the window to a board meeting only to be shot dead by security.  Bright Eyes leaves behind a baby chimp whom Will smuggles out of the lab and names Caesar.

It’s a portentous name, Caesar, and until he finally realizes the dictatorial power of his moniker, we’re left waiting for Caesar to rise and rule a maligned race of apes just dying for a leader.   With the help of Will’s panacea for Alzheimer’s, which he steals from the kitchen fridge, Caesar crosses the Rubicon into San Francisco and starts a revolution.  Who knew the City by the Bay had an incompetently run monkey house sitting on its borders like a ticking time bomb, and that silverback apes, looking for spears to throw at cop cars, could pull parking meters out of sidewalks like they’re picking daisies? In a film really about the horrors of captivity, this George is more furious than curious.

Director Rupert Wyatt (“The Escapist”) maintains a breezy pace as Caesar’s insurrection gathers speed and force.  One notable scene is set on Will’s street where drivers and pedestrians alike stop, mouths agape, to see something amazing:  scores of monkeys swinging through the trees above in a gathering storm.  The standoff on the Golden Gate Bridge is truly something to behold; one would be hard-pressed to think of another confrontation on film between ape and mounted policeman (ape: 1; S.F.P.D.: 0).  Though “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” delivers the exploding helicopters and car chases we expect from a summer blockbuster, Wyatt also maintains a thoughtful plea for animal liberation.  Sympathy was central for the Romantics, especially Mary Shelley whose Creature in Frankenstein longs for someone to sympathize with his plight, and the traces of that creed are still visible in Caesar’s all-too-human cries for freedom and non-violence.

The most affecting revelation in Frankenstein is when Shelley’s monster, with his “dull yellow eye,” confesses to his crimes, saying: “I’m malicious because I’m miserable.”  His motivation all along was the simple, childlike desire to be loved and needed, but looking the way he does, humans only reacted with fear and horror.  This is more or less the point of Wyatt’s eco-positive parable, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”: all monsters are man-made just as every futile attempt to contain the animal other via zoos and laboratories ultimately backfires.  So long as we continue to oppress all other species, the threat of their violent takeover will remain both a fear and a fantasy.

As a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster, Caesar wants to lead a bloodless revolution – he even stops his monkey underlings from killing humans indiscriminately – but it’s just not in the cards, especially in a Hollywood movie.  It’s telling that his only line in the movie is “No,” which he utters to the surprise of his inept jailers in the ape house.  If you’re listening, Patrick Doyle’s pulsing score will stay with you until you reach the parking lot, but it’s the final image of Caesar finally in his element, free (for now) in the treetops overlooking San Fran, that will enliven you long after.

For my review of Franco as poet Allen Ginsberg in “Howl,” see:

“A Movie Based On a Poem”

(Review of “Howl”) in the _G&LR_

http://www.glreview.com/article.php?articleid=316