This is Us

So US is a big hit, elevating Jordan Peele from promising novice filmmaker to budding cultural phenomenon; he’s going to be inescapable in 2019, with the newest Twilight Zone relaunch smartly dropping last month and a bunch of other TV projects with his name attached headed our way shortly. The dude’s even going to be in Toy Story 4. Whenever an exciting new talent like this flares up as fast as Peele has—yeah, he’s been around, but his directorial rise has been meteoric—there’s always that little shiver of trepidation that they’ll get a little too high on their own success and burn out before truly following up on the thing that put them on the map. With Peele that’s somewhat combined with the concern that he might spread himself too thin; just roll by his IMDB page and you’ll see he seems to be planning a career’s worth of creative work in the next two years. I guess that at least somewhat undercuts the first thing?

But US, at least, turned out to be a good movie, sparing Peele the fate of an overhyped one-hit wonder. The comparisons to Spielberg that have been tossed around lately are pretty baffling, but at least he’s avoided becoming the next M. Night Shyamalan.

(Speaking of other genre filmmakers, as a director, at least, the one I’m most tempted to compare Peele to is John Carpenter. Am I crazy for detecting echoes of Prince of Darkness in US? But anyway.)

As a movie, US is not particularly subtle with its central metaphor, but that’s not really a criticism; horror movies are allowed to blunt-force their way into whatever discussion they’re meant to be sparking, and US is still more subtle than Get Out, which may as well have come with a Greek chorus to explain its themes to the audience. (And that’s STILL not a criticism. Get Out would frankly have been a lesser film if it hadn’t yelled its ideas through a bullhorn. On top of everything else, it’s a movie for the Trump era.)

But US is a quirkier creature—even if its haves-vs-have-nots theme doesn’t take much sussing out, there’s more going on there that I haven’t seen anyone really engage with yet. (At this point, be advised that I’m basically about to spoil the whole movie, so turn back now and get to the theater if you haven’t gone yet.)

The idea of an evil twin, a changeling, a personified shadow, is obviously common enough, and fertile grounds for discussion; the class warfare aspect is, as I say, pretty obvious; even the idea of a vast evil mind-controlling conspiracy being developed in a secret underground complex that apparently spans the country, which Peele the writer amusingly breezes past at 60 mph without looking back, is basically a narrative device from we can extrapolate whatever details make sense to us. (I think one of the things I like best about Peele’s short career as a filmmaker so far is how unapologetically batshit and ornate his horror mythologies are, while still being quickly and efficiently outlined when they appear. It’s the essence of horror storytelling, really—casually suggesting something that sounds insane but which part of you has always suspected, deep down, to be true.)

But there’s another aspect to the film that’s been weirdly glossed over, possibly because it’s so much easier to talk about that other stuff, and also possibly because by the time it starts to really emerge in the third act the movie has got us surfing along with its own demented logic so we just nod along, going, ‘yeah, sure, ok’. And that is—

YOU GUYS THE VILLAIN’S BIG PLAN IN THIS MOVIE IS TO RE-ENACT “HANDS ACROSS AMERICA”

That’s pretty weird, right? I mean, it’s a weird movie but that’s *really* weird. And it’s not like there’s an obvious tie to the whole “evil twin” concept. The fact that the movie’s “about America” is there from the start (the title is a double meaning, folks) and there’s the neat use of paper-cut-out imagery, but otherwise—what is up with that, guys? Why is that the movie’s endgame?

Hilariously, there might be a key to this in an article about Peele that came out a few weeks ago and was circulated on social media, in which Peele talked about being offered a chance to go from writing for Fox’s attempt at a late night sketch comedy franchise, MADTV, to the big leagues of Saturday Night Live. His bosses at MAD wouldn’t let him out of his contract, and Peele supposedly retreated to his basement to “smoke pot and plan revenge”. His whole career since then, obviously, has been said revenge, and—

Look, I’m not going to say that US is literally about Jordan Peele’s psychic battle to escape from one sketch comedy show to another, more profitable sketch comedy show, but it’s there, encapsulated in a submerged theme that runs throughout the film. Lupita Nyong’o’s Adelaide is, for reasons that eventually become clear, a quiet, inexpressive woman. For most of the movie—assuming you haven’t guessed the twist—the assumption is that she’s still suffering from PTSD from her childhood encounter with her doppelganger “Red”. But of course Red *is* Adelaide, traumatized from her brutal, subhuman childhood and finding herself raised to what must seem like Elysian heights. She’s got everything she could ever want—why would she make waves? Why wouldn’t she try to blend in, go with the flow?

Her parents encourage her to express herself after her trauma by drawing, being creative. Ultimately she does find her creative impulse in dance—something that, it’s implied, Adelaide never would have done if they hadn’t swapped. But it seems to be something that she ultimately put aside to live the life of a well-off housewife. Elizabeth Moss’s character Kitty spells it all out when she sighs about how she could have been an actress, but, well. When you’re living a life of beachhouses and boats I guess you don’t have that drive, that hunger, to perform. To speak out. To make a statement.

Shoving that creative impulse down is probably unhealthy, right? I mean, you can’t just kill that part of you.

Ultimately the fact that Red’s plan is to make a statement—not to sneak in and switch places again, something that she probably could have done pretty easily, or even to foment a true revolution—is key here. Red’s not sane, and she seems to have given up on re-integrating with the upstairs world. She just wanted to do that one thing. To get people to notice her, however doomed—and the final shot suggests pretty strongly that the Tethered are doomed, in the way disruptions to the American status quo always seem to be. But before she goes out, she has everyone’s attention, and an army of loyal followers, something every artist dreams of, right?

So yeah: Us is a movie by a guy who’s found himself, miraculously, with a megaphone, and he is going for it.


(If you like this blog, check out my podcasts: Destroy All Clickbait and What Mad Universe?!?, or my comics on Comixology. You could also subscribe to my Patreon. Thanks!)

REVIEW: BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW

                When we call something “Cronenbergian” we’re usually referring to body horror. But there’s another aesthetic I associate with Cronenberg, at least his early flicks: a fascination with the place where science, (or at least pseudo-science) and the fringey counterculture mindset intersect. We might call it “hippie science”, this image of New Age ideologies and crackpot fringe theories being taken seriously enough to merit study in well-funded, superficially respectable institutes. It had its heyday right when Cronenberg was first making a name for himself as a filmmaker, and it pops up repeatedly in most of his early work. I don’t know if there were ever actually private institutions devoted to studying “Psycho-plasmics” or Cathode Ray Missions for allowing homeless people access to media signals, but this kind of thing was everywhere in pop culture for a while; it’s actually become part of our collective memory of the era, typified most memorably in Lost’s Dharma initiative with its synth music-backed videos and straight-faced statements about the betterment of humanity. Despite the memorably era-specific coat of paint, though, it’s really just a front for our old pal Meddling In God’s Domain.

                The Arboria Institute of Beyond the Black Rainbow may as well be the Dharma Institute under another name. The movie even begins with a similarly trippy propaganda video filled with bold proclamations on the part of its founder, “Mercurio Arboria” (I’m guessing that’s not the name he was born with). Dr. Arboria (Scott Hylands) is, predictably enough, a pop science guru whose specialty is pharmaceuticals, and whose institute is devoted to the usual blather about how tripping balls will usher in the next phase of human consciousness. Back in the 60s he performed some radical experiments in chemistry on himself and his inner circle, including his wife and his protégé Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers). The result of this, or one of the results, was the birth of a child, Helena, who seems to have superhuman powers. I think Helena is Mercurio’s daughter, but to be honest it’s a little hard to tell what the hell is going on in the flashback to 1966 due to heavily blown-out, high-contrast cinematography.

                The rest of the movie, set in 1983, is less impenetrable visually but still somewhat opaque narratively; we eventually learn that Dr. Arboria is clinging to a grotesque parody of life somewhere in an inner chamber while Nyle runs the institute, a job that largely consists of studying and psycholanalyzing the imprisoned Helena (the strikingly elfin Eva Allen). Unfortunately, in the proud tradition of movie psychiatrists everywhere, Nyle’s kind of a dick…well, no, actually, “kind of a dick” is  putting it mildly, though we don’t understand how mildly until the movie’s most of the way to act three.

                Beyond The Black Rainbow is not for everyone. It’s way too languid and artsy for people who prefer mainstream thrills and chills, and while ultimately a horror film it’s not in a hurry to announce itself as such. Of course, the movie also makes no bones about being a head film, starting with the title, so hopefully anyone who stumbles across it on Netflix will enter into it with the proper expectation that it’s a sensory experience first and a narrative second. The lush colours and warbly ambient soundscape are carefully constructed to draw you in in a way few movies bother with these days; Kubrick is obviously a touchstone, as is Mario Bava. In terms of mise en scene, though, it leans more to pre-Star Wars 70s SF, hence my evoking Cronenberg earlier.

                What’s most intriguing about the movie to me, though, is how it uses the genre trappings of the era it’s examining to comment on it seemingly without even trying. The movie presents a SF re-enactment of the death of the hippie dream, Hunter S. Thompson’s high water mark embodied in the shift of pop culture tropes over two decades. Begun with earnest ambition to make a better world, the Arboria Institute has become a house of horrors, its gurus detached from humanity, the chemicals meant to enhance lives become a withering addiction. Even the movie’s structural veer from portentious thoughtfulness to slasher flick echoes this decline.

                Setting out deliberately to make a “cult film” is usually a bad idea in the same way that a movie intended as “Oscar bait” spells trouble; you can’t force people to feel a certain way about your film just by using certain signifiers. But while I won’t claim that you can’t sometimes see Black Rainbow trying to deliberately weird you out, director Panos Cosmatos clearly has something to say behind his posturing. It’s definitely notable that I found this movie worthwhile, even though it’s the kind of thing I usually find to be a slog. 

Here's One For TV Tropes

So here's an annoying pop culture cliche I've recently become aware of: the Older Woman as Vampire.

Obviously this is something that goes back to Snow White and similar myths, but it's something which I notice modern Hollywood has had no problem embracing recently. Including in the two recent Snow White adaptations. The place where I first noticed it, though, was (God help me) the Halle Berry Catwoman movie. In my defense, I haven't watched this all the way through, because it was pretty much unwatchable. But I saw enough to register that Sharon Stone's villain was apparently drawing some kind of superpower (stone skin? WTF?) from the cosmetic products she was trying to sell, which were also apparently going to mutate everyone who used them, or some such nonsense. It was clearly meant as an oh-so-satirical takedown of the beauty industry and how desperate some women are to hold onto their looks and blah blah blah.

It popped up again in Stardust, with Michelle Pfeiffer as the evil aged witch who wanted to cut out Claire Danes' heart to restore her youth (and her sisters'), and then, of course, in Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman. There are other, similar examples, and echoes of it that don't follow the trope exactly, but the gist of it is: older woman who resorts to horrific, unnatural means to keep her looks, which puts her at odds with a younger, naturally pretty girl. The former is the villain, the latter is the hero.

Like, for instance, the "Magical Negro", this is a trope that might not actually be so bad if it didn't keep popping up over and over again, to the point of cliche. I mean, vanity is a bad thing, and people have indeed resorted to unpleasant means throughout history to stave off their own mortality. Obviously heart-eating is to be frowned on. But the problem here is where the dart of empathy is aimed: always at the young. The cumulative effect is to value young and "naturally" pretty girls over older women, whose looks are fading and who, thus, have less value in their own eyes...and the people telling the stories don't do much to suggest that they disagree, frankly.

I don't think I'm breaking any radical new ground here; I'm sure any feminists reading this are thinking "Wow, such dazzling insight, Adam! Now do you have any thoughts in re: the wetness of water?" But I do think it's worth commenting on how much Hollywood seems to exaggerate this effect. There's a pretty clear hierarchy at work here: if you're a young, hot starlet, you get to play the heroine; if you've been able to drink for a decade, it's time to start relegating yourself to villainous roles. Yes, yes, I know, twas ever thus, but it seems like there's a renewed meanness to it of late, particularly the Sharon Stone bit. All of these women are still gorgeous, particularly Theron, who isn't even fucking 40 yet, but here they are playing decaying hags, and worse, evil decaying hags who only exist to make life hard for some vapid pretty girl.

"Yes, Adam, and FIRE HOT," chant the feminists.

I know, I know. And I am used to women being valued only for their looks in the movies. But even in this superficial context, can't we at least get some movie producers capable of recognizing female beauty in someone over 30? I mean, it's not rocket science. You don't have to use some kind of formula. Yet it kind of seems like that's what's being used to determine what makes a woman "hot", as opposed to, y'know, looking.

And the end result is that not only are women being treated as if only the young ones matter, but women are written as if they themselves believe it. At the end of the day, I think this is one of the more inherently pernicious concepts in storytelling, far more than simple sexualization. There's no inherent reason a sexualized woman in a movie can't be an interesting, well-fleshed out character (I mean, they usually aren't, but there's no reason they can't be). But relying on the "evil queen" who's jealous of a younger woman--no matter how subtly it's played--automatically reduces women to the status of objects. It'd be nice if more people in the media paid attention to what they're saying with their stories.

Justified

2012 was a somewhat odd year for movies for a number of reasons, but one of the oddest was the fact that it featured a great number of enjoyable summer blockbusters...almost none of which actually opened in the summer.

I'm not so jaded that I can't enjoy a big fireworks display of a movie, as long as it's done with a certain level of inventiveness and panache, and Chronicle, The Hunger Games, The Cabin In the Woods, Looper, 21 Jump Street, Rise of the Guardians, John Carter, and The Pirates! all scratched that itch rather better than a lot of Hollywood's recent offerings in this arena. A couple of them are downright great, and even the ones that were merely passable diversions were loads more fun than the movies that opened during the actual summer season*, the soggy likes of Battleship and Prometheus and that Snow White movie (no, not that one, the other one). Even Pixar and Christopher Nolan let me down this year. Oh yeah, there was The Avengers, which was almost the platonic ideal of a popcorn movie, but that opened on May 1st, which, sorry, ain't summer where I come from. (I come from Canada.)

And then there was Dredd. (Spoilers follow.)

Dredd didn't do very well in theatres, though I'm told that it's the best-selling DVD of the admittedly young year. This fact has awakened some hope of a sequel amongst the film's nascent cult, and it's this fact that made me consider some issues about this film...which I'm not entirely comfortable with.

To get the obvious out of the way, Judge Dredd was created in 1977 by John Wagner (writer) and Carlos Esquerra (artist), first appearing in only the second-ever issue of the evergreen British comics anthology 2000 AD. The character is part of the wave of punk-rock comics of the time, created as a satire of the American fetish for rogue law enforcement officers who act as "judge, jury and executioner", and inhabiting a berzerk cyberpunk world that played a major role in defining "cyberpunk" in the first place. As with rock 'n' roll, Americans may have invented comics, but the British were the ones who really saw the art forms' potential, and a level of tongue-in-cheek irony of a kind foreign to contemporary American superhero stories pervaded the strip. Dredd became, and remains, a wildly popular character in the UK, but Americans mostly know him from the awful 1996 Sylvester Stallone movie. The fact that Dredd removed his helmet was the least of the movie's problems; more than anything else, it seemed like adapting Dredd into an actual big-budget American action movie had robbed the movie of its ironic, subversive charge. (Robocop was heavily inspired by Judge Dredd, and I'd argue it captures the strip better than ether of the nominal adaptations. Perhaps not coincidentally, director Paul Verhoeven is European.)

Dredd is a fun, quite well-made movie, and I enjoyed it tremendously. But it falls prey to a tendency that's become overwhelming in geeky adaptations: they labour under a weird, creeping sense of obligation that sometimes overwhelms the need to make the best movie possible, or even the best adaptation possible.

With this movie, director Pete Travis set out to make a movie that would be much truer to the character--which actually seems to boil down to the fact that they wanted a Dredd movie where he never took his helmet off.

Look, I get that this is a big deal in the comic, but this is a movie, people. In much the same way that geeks moan endlessly when an actress of the wrong hair colour is cast for a comic-book role, this seems like a weird fixation on a superficial detail. I'm not saying that it's not nice that Karl Urban's Dredd keeps his helmet on; I'm just saying that making that the lynchpin of the movie resulted in a rather underwhelming story.

Because if you switch out the character of Dredd, you'd be left with a relatively generic, though well-made, action story (as everyone keeps saying, the similarities to The Raid: Redemption are inescapable), and that seems like a missed opportunity. Travis and company were quite open about the fact that they were going to make a small-scale story due to budget issues, and while that's fine as far as it goes, the problem is that the script thinks too small. The vast, sprawling, nightmare world of Mega-City One is basically ignored (and what little we see of it just looks like a generic, modern metropolis) and the bulk of the action reduced to a single, admittedly huge, apartment building. Fair enough, but there's no sense of the personality of the city surrounding it either. Indeed, there's little trace of the tonal subversiveness or snotty nose-thumbing that makes the comic so memorable either. Even Dredd himself is given very little to play off of; sure, he's the authoritarian hard-ass we expect, but this isn't really explored by the story in any serious way. Dredd never, for instance, has to make a choice between following the rules and basic humanity, and the ramifications of this borderline-fascist legal system don't play a role in the plot at all, other than the shock of a cadre of corrupt Judges who pop up at the halfway point.

And therein lies the rub: this movie seems to have been made solely to validate the character after the Stallone debacle, to give fans of the character something to point to to show that he's actually good. In that way, it plays directly into the modern idea that movies are somehow "better" than other media, and that no matter how much you love that comic or novel or TV show, it hasn't arrived until it's been turned into a big-budget CGI-fest. Even this wouldn't be so bad if the resulting movies didn't end up feeling like they were made using a checklist, afraid to take too many chances, providing as direct a transcription as possible for the sake of the fans. We're a long way from the era when Jaws and the Godfather ended up being a vast improvement on the original pulp novels.

Which brings us to the possibility of a sequel. Again, the filmmakers are on record as saying that, should the first film do well, we'd be getting a sequel featuring some of the more unique elements of the comic. Again, I get the necessity inherent here, but this seems to be the standard approach for far too many comic-book and other "geek" properties--a small-scale, unambitious movie that sets up a potentially better sequel. This doesn't have to be bad, of course, but too often it seems like the filmmakers are shirking their responsibility by doling out the property in bite-sized chunks rather than straining themselves to deliver the best movie they possibly can. It's like if the first Star Wars movie had only hinted at the big Death Star battle, with Lucas promising we'd get to see it if the first movie made enough money.

What I really object to about this is that it puts a burden on the movie-consuming public--give lots of money to the corporation, and maybe you'll get a treat! Obviously this attitude popped up organically among film nerds over the years, but Hollywood has been quick to exploit it. Essentially they're trying to be rewarded for stretching the property as thin as they possibly can, and it smacks of a con job.

Don't get me wrong: if a Dredd sequel gets made, I'll be first in line. But it would be nice to get the sense that the filmmakers had given it their all the first time, that they weren't selling a promise as much as a movie.



*And then, just to compound the weirdness, the two best movies of the summer were Moonrise Kingdom and Beasts of the Southern Wild, both ultra-precious indie movies of the kind that usually haunts arthouses in the early fall. And they did well!

End Of The Year, End of the World

Hi! Miss me?

It's been a crazy few months here at Phortress Phantasmic, mostly due to an overload of illustration work (which is a very good thing, of course, for my ability to not starve to death and those who enjoy watching me not starve to death). Things are calming down a little now, so it's time to take inventory of...stuff.

Firstly! Lemuria is back, obviously, and if you haven't been following it, it's recently featured the return of Hordo of Atlantis from the second-ever story. Plus lots of pirates. I do have every intention of colouring these strips as soon as I can find a moment to do so...

I also want to finally return to Freak U. and yes, even Night Shift; I'm going to say Freak U. will return sometime in February. Night Shift, I'm not sure about. Even Amazon Space Rangers, which is effectively dead as a comic, is sort of back in the form of a series of prints I'm working on...here's the first.

More on that later. Um, what else? I guess I'll bang out some reviews for the end of 2011 and early 2012:

Sherlock Holmes 2: A Game of Shadows and Sherlock, Season 2: It's kind of weird how pop culture is suddenly Sherlock-happy, isn't it? And now apparently there's an "American Sherlock" TV show in development, which will probably just be "House meets CSI" crap. Anyway, it must hurt Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Jr. right down in their spleen to know that their big-budget theatrical steampunk version of Sherlock Holmes is being so consistently upstaged by a BBC production starring a previously-unknown and the guy from The Office. I mean, the Downey Sherlock Holmes movies seem to make decent bank, and I actually liked the first one somewhat--putting aside the stupid action movie setpieces, the script actually captured the tone and characterizations of the stories, and avoided some of the pitfalls modern Holmes adaptations sometimes fall into (Watson isn't an idiot, the supernatural is revealed to be fraudulent). But Game of Shadows was just awful--loud, bloated, bombastic, without a trace of wit or refinement. Yes, refinement. Sherlock Holmes should be REFINED, dammit. He should also spend at least a little of his time, y'know, solving mysteries, something Ritchie apparently has no interest in whatsoever. Even worse, the movie's version of Moriarty is staggeringly bland, which seems like it's the last thing Ritchie would get wrong.

This, more than anything, is something that looks completely embarrassing when stacked up against the Stephen Moffat show, because this was the season they got to play with Moriarty, and they absolutely nailed it. The accepted wisdom on Moriarty is that there's something "everymannish" about him, as if he had no personality of his own and could blend in perfectly with the background, the better to manipulate his criminal network. The movie interprets this, as I said, as "let's make Moriarty really, really boring". The show has a very clever take, as we saw last season: first by having Moriarty "speak" using other people's voices, and then revealing him as an unsettling creature whose speech patterns seem to vibrate at random across the entire spectrum of human speech, while never once sounding natural--an obvious advantage when your archnemesis is a guy who can tell everything about you from a glance and a few words. Some people seem to have found this a little annoying, and actor Andrew Scott has toned it down a lot this season, but it's still present. Scott is creepy every second he's on screen--he knows exactly when to go over the top and when to tamp it down a little (but only a little). His over-the-topness is employed in a highly restrained manner, if that makes any sense. But then, it may be necessary to go a little over-the-top when you're sharing the screen with Benedict Cumberbatch. On the flip side, Lara Pulver plays it perfectly cool as Irene Adler, in "A Scandal in Belgravia", somehow managing to be impassive and expressive at the same time, and she too strikes sparks with Cumberbatch--if this season has an overriding flaw, it's that Martin Freeman as Watson gets pushed a little too far to the side by all the larger-than-life personalities.

In general, though, this season is better than the mostly-great first, which was weighed down by the inferior (and racist) "The Blind Banker" and a somewhat chaotic plot in "The Great Game". This seasons' weakest entry is "The Hounds of Baskerville", which is a little padded, but which still manages to get some real mileage out of pitting Sherlock against the supernatural, and develops the theme of Sherlock's increasing humanity in a smart way, by having him deal with crippling terror, something he never thought he'd have to do. "Belgravia" is probably the best single episode of the show so far (for the record--SPOILERS--my opinion is that Adler faked the whole scenario at the end for the sake of faking her death, but also to see if she could draw Sherlock out; so did in fact "win" their game in a sense, by revealing him to have feelings. That's just my interpretation, though, and if Moffat meant for it to be a straightforward "Sherlock saves the day" moment, I do think that's a misstep). And Moriarty's plan in "The Reichenbach Fall" is extremely clever, a brilliant way of upping the stakes and showing why he's a real threat to Holmes, as opposed to just a guy with a really epic scheme to take over the world.

I *am* a little skeptical that Moffat can pull off the reveal of how Holmes pulled off his triumph at the end there--Moffat's shown he's not immune to illogical deus ex machinas in Doctor Who, as the last season showed--but I'll definitely be watching. Oh hell yes.

Hmmm, that ended up taking a lot more space than I expected. OK, I guess I now have the material for a whole series of posts!

Ceci N'est Pas Une Filme

The last time I reviewed a movie here on my blog, I was dealing with a sweet and well-realized love story with a very human, charismatic core, but wrapped around it was a half-baked SF/fantasy premise that the filmmakers hadn’t thought through properly. In Time is practically the exact opposite of that: the premise is clever, hooky, and well-developed, resulting in a well-constructed and clever world that comments effectively on ours. But the movie built around this premise barely exists, and certainly isn’t engaging.

Justin Timberlake (who I generally like as an actor but who is badly miscast here) plays Will Salas, an industrial worker in an indeterminate future where everyone’s effectively immortal due to genetic engineering. The only thing is that you’ve got a clock branded into your arm that’s perpetually counting down to zero, and you need to keep replenishing it by working. Yes, the whole movie is built around the double entendre of “time is money”. Essentially, you can choose between the security of knowing you have a substantial amount on the clock, or paying your bills. Down at the lower end of the spectrum, in the de facto ghetto (people are segregated in “time zones” based on their wealth—I did mention that this movie likes groan-worthy double-meanings, right?) people are often forced to live “day to day”, barely keeping ahead of the clock, working non stop just to make sure they have enough not to die in their sleep. A mistake in their calculations, a poorly-thought-out indulgence, or even just a failure to get where they need to go fast enough can be fatal.

One night, Will comes across a man (Matt Bomer) in a bar behaving erratically, almost suicidally. Will saves his life from a local gang of thugs, or “Minutemen”, at which point the man reveals that he’s fantastically rich—over a hundred years old, with another century on his clock—gives him an inkling of just how corrupt and rigged the system in which they live is. The next morning, Will wakes to find that he’s been gifted with the man’s time, right as he lets himself die (rather stupidly, if he was trying to help Will, as the immediate appearance is that he’s murdered him and stolen his time). Will goes on the lam to the logical place, buying himself into the highest-income time zone, to get a look at how the other half lives. Soon he’s hobnobbing with the ultra-powerful Philip Weiss (the ever-reptilian Vincent Kartheiser, playing an old man in a young man’s body) and falling in love with his daughter Michelle (Amanda Seyfried, another miscast actor who I normally like). But of course, the heat, in the form of “Timekeepers”, led by Cillian Murphy, catch up to him, and soon Will is in even more desperate straits than he started, on the run with Michelle and trying desperately to find enough time to stay alive.

Reading a synopsis of In Time, it sounds like a really smart, exciting action/SF film. The trouble is that writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) seems to have been so satisfied with the synopsis that he didn’t really take the next step and make it into a movie. I’m barely exaggerating—whole scenes are built around characters telling each other what the scene is about instead of, y’know, showing us. Likewise, whenever an “action” scene starts up, it’s so perfunctory you can almost see text popping up on the screen reading “insert exciting car chase here”. The most emblematic moment of this, as the Onion A. V. Club pointed out, is a moment where Will has to “arm wrestle” a Minuteman (time is exchanged by pressing forearms together, so this is literally a competition to drain the other guy’s life force). It would be exciting…if we had any idea what the rules were, or how it is you can drain time from your opponent without letting him drain you. The perfunctory explanation we’ve received from Will earlier about his secret method of winning arm wrestling competitions makes no real sense, so we’re left with a scene that’s just “Will gets in an arm wrestling competition. Will wins. Next scene.” We in the audience are forced to use our imaginations to fill in what would normally be the crucially entertaining moments of the film.

There’s one exception, a moment early in the film where Will’s mother (Olivia Wilde, who IS well-cast as an older woman in a young woman’s body) has to race through the streets to replenish her clock after overspending, which is legitimately exciting, but otherwise, this is practically a stage play.

I feel kinda bad ragging on the movie for this stuff; lord knows we get far too many supposed science fiction movies where the action and dazzling visuals are literally the whole game, and there’s nothing resembling an idea in sight. But Niccol’s seemingly overcompensated by making a movie that’s literally nothing BUT ideas, with no execution. While he has overcome some of the issues that dogged his earlier work (the sledgehammer-subtle symbolism, for instance, or the look-how-clever-I-am narration of something like Lord of War, his last movie) he seems less grounded than ever in the needs of cinematic storytelling. Niccol’s a good writer who could even be great if the right director would keep him in line (as almost happened with The Truman Show) but as a filmmaker he’s shooting first drafts.

Some Adjustment Required

MILD SPOILERS.

The Adjustment Bureau is a pretty darn good film that could have been a great one. It is, unapologetically, a romance, which is interesting in and of itself; a lot of genre movies have love stories, but they’re usually of the “Here’s where Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese fall in love to move the plot forward” style, a subplot used to provide motivation. Actually, even in The Terminator, the love story is both crucial and affecting, but it’s not what the story is about. The Adjustment Bureau is a love story first and foremost, and the supernatural trappings are secondary to that. It’s still an intelligent movie that addresses existential and religious issues, but it doesn’t do this in the context of an action-thriller, which is how we’ve been conditioned to expect all of our more thoughtful genre movies these days (and a lot of less thoughtful ones, as well).

Which seems to be bothering some critics, who complain about “lowered stakes” (despite the fact that the protagonist faces complete mental erasure) and the lack of a slam-bang action climax. But the movie chooses the structure and story beats of a romantic drama, and I don’t see any particular reason why this is a less valid way of addressing these ideas. In fact, I think that being able to frame Big Ideas in the context of a romance is one of the very best ways of grappling with them, cinematically, and even if the movie pulled this off intellectually it would be laudable. But it also manages to be a genuinely charming romance, thanks due to the terrific performances of Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. Again, this is the kind of story where more idea-focused screenwriters and directors might touch on “romance” as an abstract idea only inasmuch as it serves the story (the Wachowski brothers spring to mind) so kudos to writer-director George Nolfi for giving us a screen couple who are a joy to watch, thereby letting us believe that a real love affair is at stake.

So why does it fall short? Simply put, Nolfi bobbles the themes a bit, and he does it in a way that’s endemic to a lot of Hollywood movies right now. When Damon’s character finally gets the full purpose and M.O. of the Bureau spelled out for him, by Terrence Stamp as the very creepy Senior Adjuster “Thompson”, it turns out to revolve around changing not just random events but people’s minds as well. The Adjusters “can’t alter people’s personality or their emotions”, but they can “change the way you make decisions.” This is their primary tool in keeping human history in order and making sure events unfold in a way that will be broadly beneficial to the human race.

This is problematic for a couple of reasons, the most obvious being: aren’t people’s emotions exactly the kind of thing that would be easiest to meddle with? Understand that the Adjusters don’t *just* tweak fate and probability, they actually get right inside people’s heads when they need to (in a creepy scene that, in retrospect, doesn’t really make sense). You’re telling me that these folks can physically alter people’s decision-making neurons, but can’t make them a little grouchier or more euphoric? There are humans who can do that with relative ease, for Pete’s sake, just by using the right phrasing or exposing people to certain imagery or smells. Also, pharmaceuticals.

Furthermore, we’re told that the Adjusters have been messing with Damon’s personality his whole life, by exposing him to traumas like the death of his family. And then there’s the central event that kicks off the story, Damon’s meeting with Blunt, which inspires him to give an off-the-cuff speech which in turn reignites his political career. We’re later told that Damon’s impulsiveness has been a continuing problem for the Adjuster’s Plan, but here we them using that impulsiveness to get him exactly where they want him.

The real issue, of course, is that Damon’s only meant to encounter Blunt once, then never see her again, but his love for her—combined with a screw-up on the part of the Adjuster assigned specifically to him (Anthony Mackie)—throws the Plan into disarray and puts Damon into conflict with the Bureau. So this is a Love Triumphs Over All story, and given the framework here, Nolfi clearly thought it was most logical to have the Adjusters represent the triumph of cold rationality and intellect, and for Damon’s struggle to represent the counteracting force of emotion.

But that doesn’t really work, thematically. Because Damon’s love for Blunt is just as clearly shown to be the product of chance, and to have been manipulated by the Adjusters. They even say, later on, that the reason the two of them feel so strongly about each other is that an earlier version of the Plan DID mean for the two of them to be together. So their love is just as inspired by the machinations of the Adjustors as anything else.

More than that, though, I don’t think Nolfi has defined “love” properly. I’m of the firm belief—in case it wasn’t obvious—that intellect runs deeper than emotion, and that, forced to choose, it would be better to make a decision based on rational judgment than on emotion. But I also think that’s kind of a false dichotomy, because emotion is a complex thing. Your moods and whims are ephemeral, transient, but there are other emotions, emotions that form the core of your being, and which arise out of your rational judgment (as well as other thought processes that are mysterious to most of us…which is probably a good thing). I may be in a bad mood today because it’s gloomy out or because I have a headache, but listening to some music or taking Aspirin will probably help with that. But when I think about, for instance, the Tea Party, I’m always going to get depressed and angry. When I think about the moon landing, I feel a sense of pride and inspiration. When I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I feel a sense of comfort and familiarity. These “emotions” are consistent, and go to the core of my being. As such, I don’t think you can describe them separately from my rational thought processes. And I like to think that the love I feel for the woman I saw this movie with is fundamental in exactly the same way.

I’m a little leery here, in that I come close to agreeing with a number of borderline sociopaths on this point (most notable the horrible, horrible Objectivists). My larger point is that you need this kind of “emotion” in your life, and it’s foolish to deny that they make up a core part of your being. If the Adjusters can meddle with your rational thought processes, they have the potential to violate your ability to love someone—it’s not about reason vs. emotion, it’s about how the external vagaries of chance affect your fundamental being—your soul, if you like. What would remain of you if everything in your life was different? If the people you’d learned from, the environment you’d grown up in, the events that had happened to you, were different? It’s a fascinating question, and one the movie doesn’t really address satisfactorily, opting ultimately to go for the comforting bromides we’re used to from Hollywood.

But it is sweet, and romantic, and it does raise these issues in the first place. So that’s something.

The Worst Of All Possible Worlds

In the early sound era, there was a mania for sequelizing and remaking movies; the Wizard of Oz that we know best is something like the fifth or sixth film version, and there was a sequel to King Kong made the same year the first one came out.

In the 50s, movies were often talky and stagey, stuffed with needless filler to pad out the runtime on business that wasn't at all important to the story, and with exposition often delivered in spectacularly clumsy fashion.

In the 60s, movies got incredibly bloated, with studios lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars (adjusted) to fill up the screen with empty spectacle to distract from how boring or stupid the story was.

In the late 60s and 70s, smaller and more independent movies went through a renaissance, but a lot of these were slapdash and amateurish, sacrificing narrative coherency for the director's "vision" (or just a plain ol' inability to tell a story).

In the 90s, movies were aimed increasingly at kids or rather stupid teenagers, sticking rigidly to formulas and keeping everything as stupid and unimaginative as possible.

...

Is it just me, or does a lot of what Hollywood makes these days combine all of these aspects?

I guess the silver lining is that all of these trends eventually reversed themselves.

Five SF Misconceptions Set Straight

5. Star Wars is set in the future, not the past. This has been confusing people for years. The fact that the movie starts with "A long time ago..." plus the fact that it came out in the 70s, when people took Erich Von Daniken seriously, had everyone assuming that this was intended as an "Ancient Astronauts" kind of thing, and that we were seeing events that somehow took place before recorded history. In another galaxy. In fact, one of Star Wars' biggest imitators, Battlestar Galactica (the original), made the "humans came from the stars" an explicit part of their storyline, which helped cement this whole idea further in people's minds, to the point where no one questions it now.

Certainly, the fact that Lucas was going for a mythical, fairy-tale feel with Star Wars makes this idea seem a little more plausible. And Star Wars throws a lot of confusing stuff at you right at the start, so "this is all happening in the past somehow" seems like just one more gnat to swallow. But what a lot of people don't realize is that "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" was a last-minute addition to the movie. Even the original novelization, by Lucas himself, began with the more ambiguous "another galaxy, another time". It's pretty clear he was trying to evoke old-fashioned campfire mythology without explicitly contradicting the idea that this was taking place amongst a typical star-spanning future civilization, one clearly evoked by Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Frank Herbert's Dune, from which Lucas borrows liberally in his world-building. (And it's worth noting that both of those stories take place in a future so distant that Earth has been either forgotten or relegated to the status of insignificant backwater, one which no one bothers to mention.)

But wait, you say, back up--regardless of Lucas's original intentions, the movie DOES open with that line establishing the story as existing in the past, so all this is moot, right? I mean, I'm pretty sure "Sith" wasn't intended as meaning "evil jedi" originally (Darth Vader simply had "Sith lord" as a title, and he happened to be a jedi who had gone evil--but that's two different things) but the Prequels have established it otherwise. But no: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" isn't intended from OUR perspective. It's from the perspective of some other chroniclers in the far, far distant future (and possibly another galaxy). Lucas even mentions these guys repeatedly in the early drafts and concept notes: they're called The Whills, as in The Journal of the Whills. Which is what the entire Star Wars series is--a record of future history. Given how badly Lucas has jumped the shark, I doubt we're ever going to return to this concept, but it's out there, and nothing we've seen has ever contradicted it.

And speaking of Lucas jumping the shark--

4. Midichlorians are not the same thing as The Force. I'm not trying to defend the Star Wars prequels in any way, shape or form, but one of the biggest complaints about The Phantom Menace--that it reduces the force to a biological condition--simply isn't accurate. The midichlorians are LINKED to the force, yes, but people seem to have leapt to the conclusion that these little guys are what gives you the ability to use The Force. And the higher your midichlorian count, the stronger your force powers.

Even though this is explicitly contradicted by the dialogue.

The discussion is pretty straightforward. Anakin's midichlorian count is revealed to be absurdly high, "higher even than Master Yoda's". "What does that mean?" asks Obi-Wan. "I don't know," says Qui-Gon.

So if Midichlorians gave you super-force powers, why would they be acting so confused? It would mean something pretty straightforward: that Anakin is the super-Force messiah and they should all be bowing down to him. But in fact the Jedi seem to treat Anakin's midichlorian count as a weird, vaguely interesting anomaly, nothing more. It doesn't even justify training him as a Jedi, apparently. And--somewhat more crucial--does Anakin ever display a mastery of the Force higher than Yoda's? No he does not. Hell, Obi-Wan kicks his ass. Anakin's high midichlorian count is a weird fluke, not the end-all and be-all of Jedidom, and the Force remains a mystical anomaly.

Man, I feel nerdy. Let's move on to something more straightforward.

3. The new Star Trek did not "erase" all the other ones from continuity. Ah, that's...better?

For some reason this was a huge complaint around the interwebs back when we were all convinced the new Star Trek was going to suck, and even after we all saw and enjoyed it there were still people moaning a little about how everything Star Trek has been wiped from continuity "except Enterprise" (usually accompanied by moans of despair).

This appears to be a hangover from Crisis on Infinite Earths. Lord knows Trek fans and superhero fans can give each other a run for their money in the OCD trivia sweepstakes. And the desire to have a single "continuity" seems to be inescapable, even when so much time and effort could be spared by simply acknowledging the presence of a new timeline and chilling the fuck out. But if you won't accept that, how about the fact that it's fucking Star Trek and alternate timelines have been part of the show's mythology since 1966?!? I mean, did Eric Bana wipe the "Mirror universe" from continuity as well? No? Then shut up.

Fortunately people seem to be accepting this one--I'm told the new Star Trek online game is set in the old, nerdy continuity. So the idea seems to be that the new movies will be an effecitve in-continuity reboot for mainstream audiences, but the hardcore will still have their Star Trek Classic(tm) with all the old baggage. Makes sense to me.

2. Deckard is not a replicant. Yes, I know this is contradicted by Ridley Scott himself. He was taking the piss, guys. Deckard being a replicant makes no sense, plot-wise or thematically, and the idea is based entirely on that one weird line in which the number of escaped replicants is miscounted (which, incidentally, was corrected in the director's cut) and a few strange arguments about the unicorn dream sequence. Anyway, this one's been thoroughly dismantled by Scott "El Santo" Ashlin at 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting, so just click on the link and save us all some time. But not before I talk about:

1. Pretty much everything about the second Matrix movie. Now this is a movie I do think gets unfairly maligned--the third movie has a lot more problems, but even so, it's got a lot of value in it as well. The main reason I like the second movie is that it actually expands, thematically, on the first in a way that most sequels don't bother with...and I absolutely love that they're willing to twist the premise of the first around the way they do. That said, there are some awkward bits from a story perspective, but a lot of the issues people have can be corrected (though sometimes a bit of fanwank is needed.)

Why doesn't Neo just fly away during the Burly Brawl? Because, if you notice, Neo can't just leap into the air; he needs to bend down and build up power first. The pile of Smiths assaulting him makes that impossible until he's cleared a space.

Why is Smith alive again at all? Because his experience with Neo--his "merging" with him at the end--made him capable of thinking outside the box in a way that the other programs can't, and part of that newfound realization--Neo "setting him free" as he puts it--is that you can't really "kill" a computer program. He became spiritually self-aware, and reconstituted himself. Essentially, it's what Neo did at the end of the first movie. This is why he quickly starts taking over the Matrix--without needing to abide by the rules, he's become essentially unstoppable.

Why does Neo defy the Architect, dooming the human race? It's not so much that he dooms anybody as that he rejects the choice he's offered. The whole series up until that point has been leading to this, thematically: Neo's made a big deal of his own freedom of choice up until now, but at this point, choice is being used as a method of control. Neo's basically exercising the only freedom left to him--the freedom to opt out, even if it means disaster. But he also believes that he can make his own rules, and doesn't have to accept the Architect's pronouncement of how things will play out. Very buddhist.

Oh, and why can Neo control the machines in the real world now? Because he's been to The Source. I'm amazed at how many people miss this bit. He's developed a link with the machines, one that they all seem to share--he's infected their code the way Smith has infected the Matrix. This is a big part of why the machines let Neo solve their problems in the final movie--they realize they're at a bit of a stalemate. They've got Neo wrecking their shit from without, and Smith taking over the Matrix from within. Chaos has corrupted the system.

If it helps, though, I still agree the rave scene was silly.