Review: Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Posted on October 14, 2017 by Sam S-P
2049

Madame Tussauds has nothing on this: 6:14 Entertainment/Alcon Entertainment

Good things come to those who wait. Sometimes they’re really good. BLADE RUNNER 2049 not only builds on the world created by Philip K Dick and visualised by Ridley Scott, but it takes the ideas behind both much further and also manages to leave a mark all its own.

A lot has happened since Deckard (Harrison Ford) hunted down four rogue replicants and fled for a better life. Three decades on, replicant production has been perfected, the artificial humans made to follow orders and live their lives as second-class citizens. When a routine job for Blade Runner K (Ryan Gosling) uncovers some evidence with earth-shattering implications, K goes looking for Deckard, and for answers.

If Ridley Scott’s film was chiefly about androids searching for a soul, 2049 is about artificial beings owning their memories. If you’ve lived a life and your memories guide your actions, are they not your own, even if they were once artificially implanted? There’s some real soul-searching and strokey-beardy philosophising behind this question.

2049 goes one step further along from asking, “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” Holograms may have feelings in this world as well, and here they’re not even arrogant prigs like RED DWARF’s Arnold J Rimmer. The future world depicted seems to operate on a caste system, with the surviving humans at the top, the new more obedient replicants below the middle and holograms right at the bottom of the pile.

Replicants are now public, they have ghettoised communities and are allowed to hold down jobs as long as they can handle prejudicial behaviour targeted at them. 2049 explores the original’s issues from alternative angles only possible now a good chunk of time has passed. The group we focussed on in BLADE RUNNER were just criminals on the run, we’ve never before seen replicants just living, making ends meet as prostitutes, farmers, and even in a limited capacity sanctioned by the people in power.

There is a scene in 2049 that is so low-key, even unremarkable, you might not even realise how crucial it is. There’s really only been one debate about Blade Runner, and here they strive to keep you guessing, or at the very least suggest that in the grand scheme of things the answer isn’t that important. That conversation does happen in a roundabout way, but it is what happens around it and the themes that feed the wider story that settles, re-starts and then fuels the debate to rage on anew.

It’s not all about you. I loved the middle finger they flip to the classic “chosen one” storyline here, and the big moments of pathos are sold by Gosling like a champ. Elsewhere, Ford continues his run of (Indy aside) successfully returning to, refining and maturing his best-known star turns and Ana de Armas’ hologram Joi grows far beyond the stay-at-home girl she is satirising. I don’t really want to say any more about the performances lest it leads to spoilers, but I will say that Sylvia Hoeks’ new replicant heavy-hitter Luv is a hell of a lot scarier than Rutger Hauer in his underpants.

It’s sadly a novelty to have a 2 1/2 hour film that doesn’t just become a punishing, endless action set piece. Villeneuve and his talented team know the power of good pacing, of giving audiences time absorb every facet of this world. Even with all the retro-futuristic design elements, this is a terrifyingly plausible future. The remnants of humanity clinging to the dying husk of Earth subsist on vast protein farms, whole swathes of cities are nuclear wastelands or landfill and a wall that wouldn’t look out of place on GAME OF THRONES is fighting a losing battle against the rising seas.

Roger Deakins is such a good match for this bleak-beautiful world. From the opening plunge from the heavens to an endless expanse of sterile white to the Dante’s Inferno lighting of the irradiated old LA skyline and a should-be-trademarked Deakins fight in silhouette, this is the most striking cinematographer in Hollywood’s most awe-inspiring work since the last time he worked with Villeneuve. See this in IMAX if at all possible, just be prepared for the fact that your eyes will sting and your ears will ring from the shear quantity of audio-visual information to be processed.

Blade Runner 2049 is one of the most thought-provoking science-fiction films of the decade, a thoroughly entertaining mystery-thriller, but in the end at it’s core it’s still a simple and emotionally tactile tale being told. Not only does this do Ridley Scott’s iconic original film justice, but it would make Philip K Dick proud. SSP

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Review in Brief: Life (2017)

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Sam S-P

For what it is (which is essentially THE THING if it was on a space station), LIFE is very watchable. The characters are of the stock variety and you can plainly see what order they are going to die horribly in, but on a technical level the film quite often impresses. The viewer, like the unfortunate crew, is suspended in uneasy zero-G, helplessly hanging directly in front of the shifting, translucent threat that’s about to do something horrible to you . The design of deadly alien life form “Calvin” is pleasingly unconventional, looking and acting more like a jellyfish-Venus fly trap hybrid than a recognisable animal, and you’ve got to give credit to the filmmakers for acknowledging that if we ever do encounter intelligent alien life then we’re pretty screwed. Unique beastie aside, don’t sit down to this expecting anything revolutionary, but as a diverting space-thriller Life is far from lifeless. SSP

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This is not going to go the way you think…

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Sam S-P

Something happened last night (or this morning in the UK). There was a disturbance in the force and millions of voices cried out in jubilation, not to be silenced until December. The first full trailer for STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI dropped and it was good.

The quote I’ve used as a headline comes from Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) himself, and I think he is speaking on behalf of his director Rian Johnson directly to their audience. Johnson is not known for playing it safe and he and his team will be taking risks. Revelations, shocks and surprises aplenty are on their way.

We see Rey (Daisy Ridley) in training, a haunted Luke seemingly in terrified awe of her skill, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) brooding and apparently gunning for his mother Leia (Carrie Fisher), Finn (John Boyega) settling a score with Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie), Chewbacca sharing his cockpit with an excited porg/space penguin. There’s almost surely some editing trickery in the succession of images and soundbites from longer conversations presented without context. Everything is still guess work at this point, and that’s how I like it.

Here’s how I think things could go down, my best guesses in no particular order:

By the end of the film Rey and Ren will have either switched places, or Luke will have fallen fully to the Dark Side. The light/dark balance will be maintained but the shape of it will have changed. Luke will be in hiding not out of shame at his failure, but because he has committed some truly horrific act. Maybe when he saw Ren luring the other apprentices down a dark path, he took it on himself to put them down (“the raw strength” he now fears could have been his own). Luke will be a changed man, he will be morally compromised, he will be on the precipice of a final, decisive fall. I still think Snoke (Andy Serkis) is far less than he seems, something in the realm of THE WIZARD OF OZ, though he does seem to be using a force power to torture Rey at the close of the trailer (again, this could be clever editing). As for Rey, they’re keeping the issue of her parentage firmly under wraps for now, but it seems like her journey ahead will be far more important than where she came from.

I might be completely wrong about all that, and there are plenty of interesting directions they could go, but I’m very much looking forward to finding out. I might try and avoid any future trailers for the film lest something is spoiled. I’m just going to breathe and trust in Rian Johnson. SSP

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Review in Brief: Hidden Figures (2016)

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Sam S-P

HIDDEN FIGURES is a gentle take on a crucial story. Why do more people not know the names Katherine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson? All three were key figures in the Space Race and remarkable, nigh-on-miraculous in their achievements for the time they were working in as black women. The last part of that sentence answered that question, but it’s well past the time for that to change. Though the depicted prejudice the trio face isn’t aggressive, in a lot of ways the passive-agressive segregated work environment and condescending treatment of brilliant women comes off as more offensive, more malicious. Comparisons with THE RIGHT STUFF are generally avoided despite covering many of the same events simply by exploring them from a different, even more compelling angle, and this faultless cast (especially Taraji P Henson as Johnson) makes you forgive certain dramatic license when the story being told is this inspiring. SSP

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Review: Mother! (2017)

Posted on October 8, 2017 by Sam S-P
mother

Oh you mother…: Protozoa Pictures

I like Darren Aronofsky’s new film MOTHER! I think. Or do I? It’s one that I’m going backwards and forwards on the more I think about it. It’s certainly unique, unequivocally its own thing. That could describe the greater part of Aronofsky’s career, really.

A idyllic lives of a woman and her poet husband (Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem) take increasingly bizarre and destructive turns as strangers arrive unannounced at their house. A doctor and his wife (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer) are just the first in an unstoppable tide, and before long their dream home environment becomes a living nightmare.

To derive meaning from this, you’ve got to decide what the space these characters inhabit represents for you. I settled on a meaning quite early on, but I found it harder to make it stick as the plot (probably the wrong word for the passage of time and events here) progresses. There are so many different takes you could have on the bewildering series of sights and sounds that envelop us. Personally I find my own my take on what is going on and what it all means made more of a connection with me than when Aronofky’s intended meaning is made explicit in the closing moments of the film, but everyone’s experience will likely be very different.

There really isn’t much point describing what does or doesn’t happen outside the bare-bones synopsis, but suffice to say something invades this film’s universe. Whether disease, addiction, madness, sin, faith, a dangerous idea, this something slowly but steadily corrupts and eventually it completely takes over the world that Lawrence and Bardem’s characters inhabit.

Aronofsky returns to most of his favourite themes somewhere along the way. Our perception of time is elusive and cyclical, love is also elusive and cyclical, faith influences everything and nothing in our lives, physical forms are broken and reshaped…

Lawrence is at the epicentre of the singularity, always the focus, and always sublime. She’s put through a lot here and is given nowhere to hide, with Matthew Libatique’s camera more often than not inches from her face. Just as a hoarde of strangers invade her space, we the viewer feel guilty for doing the same with the actor. The other film Mother! reminded me most of was Lars von Trier’s MELANCHOLIA, in that the female lead is broken down to her very essence by the weird goings on around her, and in both the viewer is made uncomfortably complicit in watching what she is put through. Everyone else in the cast plays it so (intentionally) odd that it’s difficult to comment on their acting.

You’ve heard of comedies of absurdity, but Mother! is a horror-thriller of absurdity. Just when you think things have gone as far as they possibly can, something is pushed further, you are subject to a new, sickening experience. If you’re prone to any kind of social anxiety, then this film is your worst nightmare. I thought REQUIEM FOR A DREAM was full-on, but it’s nothing compared to this. If Requiem knocks you off your feet to crash painfully to the ground the Mother! hits you with a freight train while you’re down there.

The Oscar sound categories this year surely have to be between DUNKIRK and Mother! They both play with sound, amplifying and distorting, jarring and enrichening their world.  Both films prove how important an element of filmmaking sound design is. Mother! is a hyper-sensory experience; as well as aesthetically and sonically bludgeoning the audience, something in the makeup of this queasily fascinating concoction makes you smell the paint, polish and blood, feel the woodgrain. It’s textural. Added to this the ingenious use of space, the impossible, ridiculous house that seems to morph, expand and contract as the lead character’s body and mind is out through the wringer, and you’re utterly enveloped in oddity.

Mother! is going to drive some people mad. It’ll make them absolutely livid. For some directors (Aronofsky, Nicolas Winding-Refn, von Trier), that’s what they set out to do, to provoke a reaction. It’s so ambiguous, so odd and so unlike any other 2017 release that this could be the year’s most argued about film. I’ve got my take(s) on it, have you got yours? SSP

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Review in Brief: The Villainess (2017)

Posted on October 5, 2017 by Sam S-P

Creative fight choreography and full-on violence is one thing, but what really blew me away about THE VILLAINESS was the cinematography. I can’t even begin to imagine how they achieved some of these impossible shots. For once a POV action scene isn’t jarring, in fact the gang hideout slaughter that opens the film is smooth and seamless. It doesn’t just look like someone’s just holding a camera at head height either, with the view shifting naturally as a person’s head would move to, for instance, avoid a machete flying towards your face. The spectacle is no less jaw-dropping elsewhere, particularly a death-defying (for the camera operator as well as the stunt performers if it was done for real) and ridiculous three-way bike chase/sword fight. Deliberately elusive storytelling is made even tricksier by non-linear plotting and a lead character (Kim Ok-bin) that changes her face halfway through, but if you make the effort and concentrate this is a satisfying, deliciously dark, and far from straightforward affair. SSP

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Review in Brief: Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

Posted on October 3, 2017 by Sam S-P

HACKSAW RIDGE is firmly in Mel Gibson’s wheelhouse. It’s a brutal depiction of an inspiring true story with copious religious symbolism with a lot of Australians in it. From a very earnest beginning, the film becomes pretty horrific in its imagery, a full-on body horror with explosions. I’m all for war being presented as brutally as it is, but I still find the tone and construction of the battle scenes weird: they look too carefully choreographed and feel calculated. I know plenty of filmmakers have religious hangups, but it’s a case of Scorsese’s guilty, inward-looking Catholicism vs Gibson’s somewhat worrying bordering-on-zealotry (though Andrew Garfield is better in the this than in SILENCE). Gibson brings it back with a rousing finale which takes much dramatic license and some moving archive footage before the credits. You still feel like you’ve been put through an unnecessary ordeal, an almost perverse revelry in battlefield gore, but the emotional connection thankfully remains. SSP

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Review: Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

Posted on October 1, 2017 by Sam S-P
kingsman2

Here’s to going through the motions: Fox/Marv Films

The more I think about KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE, the less I like it. When I first came out of the cinema, I thought it was OK, but I’m getting increasingly frustrated at mulling over a film with next to nothing to it. For all the dynamic action and bigger, shinier spy toys, Kingsman has lost the charm, the wit and the clear vision for what it wants to be that made the previous instalment such a joy.

When the entire support network for the Kingsman agents is destroyed, it is up to Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and Merlin (Mark Strong) to bring down the culprit, a drug-producing terrorist called Poppy (Julianne Moore). They must enlist the help of their better-funded American counterparts, the Statesman and also an old friend presumed dead…

The Kingsman story seem to have lost a beating heart somewhere along the way. The potential poignancy in the state in which Colin Firth’s Harry Hart returns (not a spoiler – it was in the first trailer) is completely squandered, digging further into his backstory made into a recurring joke. About the only moments which make any kind of emotional connection come from Mark Strong as a more fleshed-out and human spy drill sergeant Merlin, and he’s the only real acting highlight in the whole rotten affair.

A lot of people complained about a particular tasteless joke that ended the last film. Fear not, everyone, it’s now a recurring gag! The distasteful, puerile stuff is still prevalent throughout, particularly in an appalling sequence set at Glastonbury that makes AMERICAN PIE look the height of sophisticated comedy. Everyone involved is above skits about unwelcome advances while glamping and intimately-placed tracking devices. I never thought I’d think this this about a comedy movie, but thank goodness for Elton John: his willingness to act as a silly plot device is about the only really funny thing in this.

Once again I’m annoyed about Roxy (Sophie Cookson), who should have had an action scene last time (she was always better than Eggsy) but spent the whole third act tied to a balloon while the boys did the legwork. That would have been almost forgivable if they’d have used the sequel to correct these mistakes,  but again Roxy is given absolutely nothing to do.

The film isn’t about much of anything. The War on Drugs is a plot driver, but what are they saying about it, that narcotics peddlers want to profit without impediment and politicians want to be seen as taking a hard line on criminal activity? What a revelation. It’s just a series of vaguely linked events driven by thin motives and reactions to such. When director Matthew Vaughn and writer Jane Goldman run completely dry on ideas, they just repeat, retread and reestablish the status quo. Harry returning far from fighting fit is glossed over as soon as it’s convenient for him to be useful in the action scenes again (said action is dominated by not one but two re-hashes of the bar fight in the first film) Eggsy learns exactlythe same lessons as he did last time but with an added awkward scene with the in-laws. What little character development there is for the Statesman (Channing Tatum, Pedro Pascal and Halle Berry) all seems to happen between the scenes we actually get to see.

The new gadgets are at least entertainingly ridiculous – robot-armed henchmen, robot hench-dogs, an amphibious taxi and a machine gun-cum-shield in a suitcase – all very spy movie-tropey, but fun when they’re wheeled out for a scene all the same.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle is a big letdown. Other than the odd glimmer of inspiration and jolt of fun within the pumped-up action sequences, this is a bigger, emptier version of the same story. I’m hoping against hope that this is just a blip and Vaughn hits his stride again next time. SSP

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Review: It (2017)

Posted on September 21, 2017 by Sam S-P
IT 2

Who wants to see my jump scare slide show?: New Line/KatzSmith Productions

Nobody does a slow build like Stephen King. In both THE STAND and IT, he’s still introducing new characters and concepts with 250 pages to go and he can spend chapter after chapter establishing history, geography, mood and layer -upon-layer of hangups and neuroses driving his heroes and villains. I think that’s why a lot of his material works better on TV: it’s all a matter of time. In the new film adaptation, King’s doorstopper book has been split right down the middle. Part One tells the kids’ story, the adults’ encounter with the shapeshifting It will follow…

Something rotten lives below Derry, Maine. It takes many shapes and I’s been there for a long time, every 27 years waking for a spree of child-killing. After his brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) is taken by It, Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher) and his gang of Losers face their fears and battle It’s multiple guises, most notably Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgård).

What they do get right with It is is casting. What a talented young ensemble this is. Straight from the page steps a determined, passionate Bill, a wisecracking Richie (Finn Wolfhard) and a nervy, hypochondriac Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer – the highlight). Reinterpreted we have Tomboy outsider Beverly (Sophia Lillis), tragic orphan Mike (Chosen Jacobs), local history nut Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor) and a world-on-his-shoulders Stan (Wyatt Oleff). It’s interesting the character traits they swap around in this version, the changes in the kids’ backstories they make, but they all make sense, especially in this setting, updated from the 1950s to the 1980s (tying neatly into the story’s 27 year cycle – this will make Part Two contemporary). What makes an outsider and the dynamics within friendship groups have changed a lot over three decades.  I would have liked to have seen psychotic bully Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton) get less of a short shrift, but there are admittedly a lot of characters to divide screentime between, and the chemistry between these kids is just right everywhere else.

What makes even more sense in this adaptation, and the thing that gives it its most hard-hitting punch is what they do with the concept of fear. Rather than the grab-bag of horror tropes and stories around the camp fire King presents in the book, here every form Pennywise takes is tied to, and is essential to who each of the Losers are. They each get their own horror set-piece that delve into their respective psychologies and the traumatic events that made them.

The kids are all great, but Skarsgård is something else. I know I’m going to tread on a lot of toes here, but the 1990 TV movie was fine, and that’s about it. Nothing against Tim Curry, but this was TV limited by budget and the time it was made. In the film, Pennywise is primal and animalistic but also chillingly calculating and malicious; creepily almost human. He plays with his prey, mocks them for their weaknesses and wears them down, changing into manifestations of each child’s phobia but always settles back into the shape he has grown accustomed to over the centuries (at least three judging by the ruff and stockings), the dancing clown. You get glimpses below the surface, hints at what It really is, but they’re saving most of these reveals for the (presumably more sci-fi- tinged) sequel.

But here’s the rub: for me, It wasn’t all that scary. I’m not saying this will be the case for everyone – on the contrary I can see many well-placed and executed moments that will scare the bejesus out of some – it just didn’t particularly chill me. I’m more into creeping dread, much like director Andy Muscietti’s previous exercise in horror, MAMA (which is cannily referenced in one of It’s forms). Perhaps they’ll be able to do something more stylistically daring and different with the horror element beyond jump scares and unnatural, jerky J-Horror movement in the sequel, when they have to nail on what scares grown adults.

It might not be an original horror in its presentation, but it connects where it counts and brings King’s Losers and their struggles with fear and growing up to real life. What Muscietti and his writers understand from Stephen King’s words and living life itself is that what really scares kids the most, beyond blood and ghosts and clowns, is growing up and having adult responsibilities. Because adults themselves are the scariest thing in the world. SSP

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Review in Brief: The Discovery (2017)

Posted on September 21, 2017 by Sam S-P

THE DISCOVERY is quietly thought-provoking sci-fi, and more worth your time than a lot on Netflix. The premise: what would the world’s reaction be if scientists proved the existence of an afterlife? The debate over faith, the meaning of life and human nature is covered from several angles, and often not the most obvious ones. The film’s final stretch packs a punch and manages to keep a few final, stubbornly ambiguous revelations under wraps right to the end, and it’s not a film which offers answers, only more questions. I don’t know whether Jason Segal is the most compelling dramatic lead in the world (at least not at this stage in his career), but he has good chemistry with Rooney Mara and does seething family resentments well. Having Robert Redford on board – even when he doesn’t have to try very hard – can’t hurt your film’s chance to get noticed, whatever the outlet. SSP

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