Terminator poster gallery

Terminator Salvation

Public service announcement: in the pub after work last night, a stressful week at the office and a few nights with minimal sleep caught up with me, and I experienced a motivational shut-down that extended to a complete incapacity for social interaction (my apologies to those I was out with) let alone watching and blogging about movies later in the evening. I dragged myself home and slept for 12 hours. Consequently, I’ve only just got round to watching ‘Terminator Salvation’ and, again, what follows is hastily written and the product of first impressions. Normal service (and normal standard of reviews) will be resumed next week.

Okay, I’m wracking my brains how to start this article. Do I get into the semantics of whether ‘Terminator Salvation’ is sequel or prequel, or – given that concept behind the franchise is essentially an ouroborus – just another stepping stone towards (although not quite) completing the circle?

Do I try to get my head around an anomaly …

SPOILER ALERT

… in the Skynet avatar (Helena Bonham Carter)’s conversation with Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) where she/it tells him, “Our best machines failed time and again to complete a mission. You did what Skynet has failed to do for so many years. You killed John Connor.” The events of ‘Terminator Salvation’ play out in 2018 and culminate with John Connor (Christian Bale) meeting Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) for the first time, yet Skynet doesn’t send back the first of the cyborgs, the T-101, until 2029. WTF?!?!

SPOILERS END

Or do I just get down to the bit of business I’d rather not engage with, grit my teeth, spit blood, curse like a trooper and type the five words it fucking pains me to put into a sentence and record for all time on the internet?

Fuck it, let’s get it over with:

McG does an okay job.

Bastard!

For the record: the ‘Charlie’s Angels’ films are still crimes against celluloid and calling yourself McG is as pretentious as it is stupid. But for the most part he crafts a solid and often exciting mainstream movie. Indeed, apart from one ridiculous attempt to craft an iconic moment only to fail miserably and produce the bastard child of ‘E.T.’ and ‘The Great Escape’, McG (I hate to go on about this whole name thing, but I really don’t think the announcements read, “to Mr and Mrs McG, a son, no first name”) succeeds in making this the most un-McG-like McG film yet.

So how does ‘Terminator Salvation’ shape up to the rest of the series? Well, for the first hour or so I was beginning to wonder, with bated breath, if something of a minor miracle was in the process of being pulled off: could this be the second best entry in the cycle?

Turns out not. ‘Terminator Salvation’ gets some things absolutely right, and it’s only fair if we dwell on those things for a little while, but it drops the ball in a few places (and does so with increased regularity as it draws towards its curiously anaemic ending) and the end result is a film that doesn’t quite hang together.

Here’s what it does well. First and foremost, it gives us a John Connor who isn’t a whiny little brat or a bland twenty-something with all the leadership qualities of a particularly nervous dormouse. It gives us, instead, Christian freakin’ Bale. If there’s anyone you can imagine taking the fight to the machines and tearing their fucking lights down (sorry, couldn’t resist), it’s Christian freakin’ Bale. Secondly, it backs up Bale’s screen presence with good performances from Sam Worthington (there are no real surprises in his character arc, but the actor manages to invest Marcus with a palpable sense of enigma) and Anton Yelchin, reverse engineering Michael Biehn’s performance to give us a younger and still vulnerable, but swiftly toughening up, Kyle Reese. Thirdly, the effects piss all over ‘Rise of the Machines’, the Hunter-Killers glimpsed briefly in the earlier films tearing through the fabric of this one. Fourthly, the Mc-to-the-G keeps the aesthetic desaturated, grim and gritty; ‘Salvation’ is a colourless vision of the future shot through with the shaky visceral immediacy of a war movie, most of its battles pitched at the level of street to street combat.

Where it drops the ball is (a) the backgrounding of John Connor for much of the first half (the film’s absolute best scene – a chase featuring a Hunter-Killer, some driverless motorcycles and a wrecking truck – is a showcase for Marcus Wright and Kyle Reese); (b) the wasted opportunity to follow Connor’s development from footsoldier to leader (a title crawl suggests that some resistance fighters already see him as a prophet, others as a fraud, but the script neither establishes why nor explores the dialectic); (c) a handful of anomalies, mainly regarding timeframes (obvious example: Kate, now Connor’s wife, though played by a different actress – Bryce Dallas Howard – seems no older in 2018 than she was in 2003’s contemporarily set ‘Rise of the Machines’); and (d) the lack of a clearly defined antagonist. With Marcus Wright’s agenda kept ambiguous, it is left to actual hunks machinery rather than anthropomorphosized cyborgs to provide the actual threat to the resistance fighters. There’s nothing as memorable as the T-101, the T-1000 or the T-X and ‘Salvation’ suffers as a result.

And then there’s the ending. I haven’t quite figured out how I feel about the ending yet. I have a strong suspicion that something narratively redundant and thematically pointless has been passed off as a moment of great emotional import. I might need to watch the film again. And that’s something I never thought I’d say about a McG flick.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Prestige

Watch Christopher Nolan's second film 'Memento' - an out-of-nowhere cult hit that set him up for what has proved, so far, a stratospheric directorial career - and marvel at its cleverness, intricacy and structural legerdemain. Watch 'Batman Begins', the most impressive franchise re-boot this side of 'Casino Royale', and marvel at his sleight of hand vis-a-vis the identity of not-quite-villain Raz Al Ghul. Watch 'The Dark Knight' - in my humble opinion the best film released this year - and be utterly gobsmacked at the narrative-fracturing possibilities of one individual's force of will (the Joker's) smashing into the ordered and rigidly defined perameters of Batman's. Consider the themes of duality, confusion of identity and obsession that permeate Nolan's filmography.

It seems somehow inevitable that he and his brother and co-writer Jonathan Nolan would adapt Christopher Priest's novel 'The Prestige'. Using the word "adapt" loosely. Priest's novel flits between time-frames (it's bookended and mesologued by contemporarily-set scenes while the bulk of the narrative plays out amidst the greasepaint and gaslight of the Victorian music halls) and features four* different first-person narrators, none of whom are reliable. The unreliable narrator is a stock-in-trade of Priest's novels. He's also interested in perspective, illusion and doubles. He's a science-fiction writer (such genre staples as time travel, cloning and alternative histories have all featured in his work) whose novels don't read like sci-fi.

As written, 'The Prestige' doesn't come across as ripe for filming. With much of the first half devoted to working class magician Alfred Borden's diary, all fractured entries and elliptical clues, and the second consisting of aristocractic Rupert Angier's journal, just as sketchy and missing crucial bits of information, the narrative essentially stops halfway, goes back to the beginning and starts again.

What Nolan does is to take elements from both sections of the novel and shuffle them like a deck of cards. This is a film about illusions, and as such takes the form of an illusion itself. The opening sees impresario Cutter (Michael Caine) explain the stages of a magic trick - the promise, the turn and the prestige - to a young girl (who is she? - very important, this - and where, chronologically, does this occur?); he also gives evidence at the trial of Borden (Christian Bale), who is accused of murdering Angier (Hugh Jackman). Oh, and there's some business about a lot of top hats in a forest that comes on like 'Miller's Crossing' in a time-warp. Forest, what forest? And why so many hats? It's important; keep it in mind.

Do not take all of this at face value. Take some of it at deeper than face value. There are clues even in misdirections.

It's a film about illusions and it takes the form of an illusion, but 'The Prestige' isn't a parlour trick - not like 'The Village'. It's one of those rare films - 'Memento', 'A Tale of Two Sisters' and 'Deep Red' being the only other examples I can site off the top of my head - that get infinitely better once you know the twist. But, like those other films, it's not so much a twist as a complete re-evaluation and re-assessment of everything that's gone before it. The first time I saw 'The Prestige', me and Paula talked about it all the way back to the car, all the way home and all the way through a bottle of wine. Now, having seen it a good half dozen times, we still debate it after each viewing.

Of course, I can't get into a really interesting discussion of the film here and lay out some of the questions me and Paula only think we've answered, because I'd have to give away an audacious, jaw-dropping triple-whammy ending (I've spoken to some people who think it's a double-whammy ending; it's entirely possible it's a quadruple-whammy ending - like much of the film, it's up to the viewer to figure it out). And I want everyone who watches 'The Prestige' to be as blown away as I was by it.

So, I can take the easy way out and break out the superlatives, praise Christopher Nolan's faultless direction to the heavens, applaud a cluster of great performances - Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine and David Bowie (a revelation as Nikola Tesla), take a bow - and rave about the period recreation, the hugely atmospheric cinematography and the attention to detail that coheres what could have been a sprawling epic full of overlapping timelines and interrelationships into intimate drama.

Or I can say that the story is driven, superficially, by rivalry (which Nolan kicks into gear differently than Priest does, and perhaps more effectively) but is, on a deeper level, about obsession, about secrecy, about dualism. About price of success and the sacrifice that is demanded. There's a third-act revelation (or maybe second act, or maybe fifth act - you work it out) that demands a suspension of disbelief that may leave you thinking the Nolan has gone a twist too far, but the key to the film is not to take it literally. True, Priest's novel takes it literally - and then takes it even further (there's a definite H.G. Wells homage going on in the latter stages of the novel) - but Nolan's genius is to render it as a metaphor. After all, this is a film about the dualism. About sacrifice.

Does it agitate the mind? Oh, you sweet fucking-A betcha!!

*Or more.

Summer of the superhero (2): Hellboy II and The Dark Knight

So, my two most anticipated films of the year have come and gone, both sequels, both saddled with the challenge of facing up to an awesome first instalment, both reuniting director and key players, both with the potential for greatness.

One was masterful, one disappointing. Let’s get the disappointment out of the way first.

A few weeks before it opened, I mentioned to a friend that I was eagerly anticipating ‘Hellboy II: the Golden Army’. His response was a cautious, “Might just be more of the same, though.”

Oh, that it had have been! The original ‘Hellboy’ was a delight: it came out of nowhere, unheralded, the brainchild of Guillermo del Toro, a man who had made a career out of alternating highly personal Spanish-language films (‘Cronos’ – what a debut!) with generic Hollywood productions … a ‘one for you, one for me’ arrangement that seemed to serve him well. Only with ‘Hellboy’, it was more a case of ‘one for me while I pretend it’s one for you’. Studio film-making shot through with a style all of his own. And I dug it big time.

I dug ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ a whole lot more – it’s on the personal faves list and I’m itching for it to get pulled out of the hat (a certain revisionist Boulting Brothers classic is next on the list) – and was in a state of almost pant-wetting excitement at the prospect of a ‘Hellboy’ sequel.

Ordinarily, this would be the point where I’d come out with an eminently sarcastic paragraph consisting of a single sentence where every component word is full stopped, just to ram the message home as bluntly as possible. Something like:

But. It. All. Went. Wrong.

I can’t quite bring myself to grind the axe so viciously with ‘Hellboy II’, though. Whatever its deficiencies (see next few paragraphs), it is nothing less than visually magnificent. The troll market sequence is a standout, likewise an extended sequence involving a forest elemental; although seemingly vindictive to begin with, once defeated by Hellboy, it dies the most poetic of all movie deaths, turning a grimy city sidewalk into a pastoral glade. Likewise, del Toro’s take on the angel of death: a deliciously ambivalent creation on every level.

Del Toro’s imagination gets free rein when it comes to the creatures and visuals, and he exploits it in to the full. Oh, that the same degree of imagination, of artistic flair had been lavished on the script. For the script is the albatross around the film’s neck, the millstone forcing it to shuffle when it should sprint, leap, fly …

The original succeeded because of its script, its direction and its cast. All elements lined up and clicked into place. The sequel fails because it takes the intelligent characterisations of its predecessor and dumbs them down. Remember the lovelorn Hellboy (Ron Perlman), worshipping Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) from afar, taking advance on matters of the heart from a nine-year-old kid? A wonderful, perfectly played scene. In the sequel, Hellboy and Liz are a couple and their constant bickering is on par with the last, desperately unfunny, series of ‘Men Behaving Badly’.

Or how about Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), Hellboy’s nominal departmental nemesis: originally a stuffed shirt who later proves his mettle and earns Hellboy’s grudging respect. Here, he’s reduced to a stuttering imbecile paraded in front of the audience for cheap laughs. Liz Sherman’s erstwhile edgy, unpredictable heroine is recast as a doe-eyed sap. Doug Jones as Abe Sapien – a cool, intelligent foil to Hellboy first time round, is forced into a lapdog-like romantic subplot and saddled with dimestore motivation purely to drive the plot forward in the final act.

Yeah, ‘Hellboy II’ is a glory to behold imagery-wise, but its nothing short of a betrayal of everything that made the first film so priceless.

Fortunately, Christopher Nolan doesn’t make the same mistakes in ‘The Dark Knight’. In fact, he doesn’t make any mistakes at all. ‘The Dark Knight’ is not only an improvement on the frankly fucking bloody brilliant ‘Batman Begins’, and not only the best film of the summer, but it’s one of the best films of the year, period.*

I’m aware that I’ve just spent about 600 words bemoaning ‘Hellboy II’ and I could easily knock out twice that many praising ‘The Dark Knight’ to the heavens, but before this posting gets too long, and too reliant upon strings of fanboy-grasped adjectives, I’ll just pick out just four aspects of the film at random and hopefully, if there’s anyone within a hundred miles of a cinema who hasn’t seen it yet, said individual will log off this blog and head for the multiplex in question PDQ:

1) Heath Ledger as The Joker. Christ, I feel his loss so badly watching this film. The Joker is quite simply his greatest performance. It telegraphs the career he would – should – have gone on to. Like Malcolm McDowell in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, Ledger tears down the screen, eradicates the boundary between actor and audience, and makes every fucking one of us complicit in his gouts of inspired mayhem.

2) Christian Bale as Batman. Going deeper and darker into Bruce Wayne’s psyche, his balls-to-the-wall acting style creating an even more emphatic schism between the two personalities, Bale takes a comic book (anti) hero and turns him into a mainstream Hamlet. I can’t think of any other blockbusting, studio produced summer event movie that delves with such Shakespeare fearlessness into the compromised morality of its ostensible hero.

3) The supporting cast: Michael Caine, making it a quadruple-whammy after ‘Batman Begins’, ‘Children of Men’ and ‘The Prestige’, doing some of the best work of his career; Morgan Freeman, the Mister Cool of cinema, who – as Antagony & Ecstacy has pointed out – claims the single best line of the film; Gary Oldman, building on the rugged humanity of Lieutenant Gordon in the first film, here developing the character to heights of almost tragic intensity; and Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent/Two Face, the only complaint about whom is that, with The Joker taking centre stage, he doesn’t survive to become the antagonist of a third instalment – Eckhart’s performance would easily have driven another movie.

4) The co-writer and director, Christopher Nolan, who, six films into his career has yet to deliver a film that is less than fascinating, and half of whose filmography – in my opinion – constitutes bona fide masterpieces. For what he’s done so far: slainte, Mr Nolan. For what he has the potential to go on to do: I can’t fucking wait!



*To qualify this remark, two of the US critics’ best films of ’07 – ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘There Will Be Blood’ – didn’t open in the UK till January and February of this year respectively.