BIG NEWS!
I'm the new weekly film critic at Geek.com! So bookmark that (written reviews will be posted to Geek, video reviews will appear on their YouTube Channel) and share with as many people as you can - MovieBob is back, and it's because YOU demanded it!
Here's the inaugural review of GHOSTBUSTERS (2016):
Here's the inaugural review of GHOSTBUSTERS (2016):
Empathy
Hello friends.
The following was to be the script to this week's IN BOB WE TRUST, which would've been posted a few hours from now once it had been edited together. The subject was to be adding some context to some social media flaming I've been enduring for suggesting that, in the wake of Sunday's ghastly events in Orlando re: the worst mass-shooting in U.S. history; it might be prudent for people presenting at the also-unfolding E3 conference to look at any of their trailers/showcases involving gunplay and ask "Is there anything in here that will make me look like an asshole today, in light of this?"
Since it was hard to think about anything else, I decided to turn elaborating on my feelings about the blowback my Tweet received and what it says about geek/gamer culture's issue with empathy into an episode... only to discover when it came time to actually record the audio and put it together that there was just no way to make the seriousness of the subject-matter "gel" with my standard video presentation (i.e. jokey graphics, fast-delivery, etc) - and that in actually following through, I'd be (potentially, at least) engaging in the kind of good-intentions/poor-taste business I was questioning in the first place. So I decided not to.
There will be an episode of IN BOB WE TRUST this week, but it will arrive on Wednesday or late Tuesday night. My call, no one else's, felt it was what was best. But for posterity's sake (and because I feel it reads better in text format anyway, I'm presenting my thoughts as originally-scripted here. I hope you find something worthwhile in them, and apologize for the delay in episode production.
Thank you.
ORIGINAL "IN BOB WE TRUST" SCRIPT (w/ minor alterations for blog post form)
The following was to be the script to this week's IN BOB WE TRUST, which would've been posted a few hours from now once it had been edited together. The subject was to be adding some context to some social media flaming I've been enduring for suggesting that, in the wake of Sunday's ghastly events in Orlando re: the worst mass-shooting in U.S. history; it might be prudent for people presenting at the also-unfolding E3 conference to look at any of their trailers/showcases involving gunplay and ask "Is there anything in here that will make me look like an asshole today, in light of this?"
Since it was hard to think about anything else, I decided to turn elaborating on my feelings about the blowback my Tweet received and what it says about geek/gamer culture's issue with empathy into an episode... only to discover when it came time to actually record the audio and put it together that there was just no way to make the seriousness of the subject-matter "gel" with my standard video presentation (i.e. jokey graphics, fast-delivery, etc) - and that in actually following through, I'd be (potentially, at least) engaging in the kind of good-intentions/poor-taste business I was questioning in the first place. So I decided not to.
There will be an episode of IN BOB WE TRUST this week, but it will arrive on Wednesday or late Tuesday night. My call, no one else's, felt it was what was best. But for posterity's sake (and because I feel it reads better in text format anyway, I'm presenting my thoughts as originally-scripted here. I hope you find something worthwhile in them, and apologize for the delay in episode production.
Thank you.
ORIGINAL "IN BOB WE TRUST" SCRIPT (w/ minor alterations for blog post form)
Okay! So, this episode is going to be about two things I generally DON’T want to regularly fixate on for this series: Current events and video games. I don’t wanna do too much game coverage because there’s another show for that – oh snap I guess I spoiled that’s coming back at some point, too, huh? – and current events because this really isn’t the forum but, hey, y’know, sometimes you gotta get something off your chest.
So, the United States just had itself another godawful mass-shooting, this time targeting a gay nightclub in Florida. It’s completely horrible, there is no upside, it’s a shitty thing made even more shitty by the fact that these things could be mitigated if not prevented outright by fairly simple measures that most other civilized countries have already put in place but we refuse to because enough of our population still somehow believes that the word “Ammendment” means “Sacred Unchanging Writ Seared Into The Immortal Rock By Fucking ZEUS.”
But that’s a different show. Bottom line: Horrible tragedy, an outrage, maybe keep these things in mind when you VOTE in a few months and while thoughts and prayers are lovely what they REALLY need down there is donations in the form of blood or money.
ANYWAY! All of this happened to be occurring right at the same moment that the video gaming press was hunkering down to start watching this year’s info-dump of pre-rendered overpromising cutscene trailers from the E3 show. And since MY MIND always goes to the worst-case scenario, a thought occurred to me: Since a plurality of games likely to be shown off at this show involve looking down the barrel of an automatic weapon to some extent because video games have gone from being a fertile and endlessly creative space to… NOT that… wouldn’t it be just one more layer of horribleness if one of these presentations was to come off inadvertently in “poor taste?”
Nothing “intentional” of course – mainstream triple-A gaming may be STUPID (proudly so, in fact) but it’s generally not suicidal or intentionally cruel. The first thing I honestly thought of was “Boy, I sure hope Rockstar wasn’t planning to pop in and say ‘Hey guys! Big news! GTA6 is going back to VICE CITY!” Which, y’know, could still happen – the show’s not over yet. I mean, obviously wouldn’t be INTENTIONAL, the announcement and accompanying footage would’ve been prepped weeks if not months ago, but still… we can all agree that shit would’ve been awkward as hell, right? Big presentation about how fun it is to pretend to the shoot-up Florida within hours or days of some asshole ACTUALLY shooting-up Florida?
Or if the next CALL OF DUTY trailer revealed one of those "No Russian" type civilian mass-shooting sequences to showcase how bad the bad guys were? That'd would've gone over like a lead balloon, and along with just being a tone-deaf way to conduct business it would've turned "LOOK HOW GROSS AND INSENSITIVE THE VIDEO GAME WORLD IS!" into a headline news story in the mainstream media - and it'd be really hard to argue with the optics without coming off like the worst possible stereotype of a gamer - as demonstrated when I said THIS...
...and was immediately set upon by people eager to prove themselves as embodying the worst possible stereotype of a gamer: Death threats, accusations of attempting to "censor" the medium, fat jokes, racial slurs, all the tactics you'd expect.
Now look, I'm no stranger to being harassed by idiots - check out the comments under this episode if you don't believe me. But it really struck me that SO MANY people got SO OUTRAGED about such a minor sentiment. I hadn't asked for any games to be "banned," I hadn't scolded any developer for which games they'd showed (I couldn't have if I'd wanted to, since it hadn't happened yet) I hadn't Saif any games should be "banned" or "censores" because that would be wrong and stupid. I didn't even say "don't show any gun games!" because A.) I don't think that'd be a good idea and B.) even if I did, this is gaming in 2016 - what the fuck else are they gonna show, Ubisofts skiing thing?
The SUM TOTAL of what I said was "Hey, people about to make a public presentation about stuff involving guns? Maybe take one more pass on your preparations and see if anything in there that was fine YESTERDAY might make you look like an asshole. You know, what P.R. people are *supposed to do.* Or what no less than GEORGE CARLIN did when he revised his standup set for a special recorded in the immediate aftermath of 911 out if sensitivity to the victims because he was a fellow New Yorker and also just a DECENT GODDAMN HUMAN BEING.
Not that I'm confused about WHY there was blowback. What we call "gaming culture" NOW evolved from gamers first coming together in the 90s and early-2000s to oppose the very REAL censorship threats from the likes of right-wing political agitators like Jack Thompson, and the idea of never giving an inch or admitting that ANYTHING involving games might be in bad taste for fear of awakening The Demon is deeply ingrained in gaming's psychological DNA - even though the last "game censorship" controversy anyone who matters gave a shit about was a Japanese dev pretending to be afraid of censors as an excuse not to hire a localization team.
So yeah, not a surprise. Like I said, until spaces like Twitter, Facebook etc get some proper regulations in place; dealing with idiots is the price of doing business online. But the disproportionate response this time really shocked me. And I come to realize that what's so depressing isn't the anger... it's the lack of EMPATHY. All I or anyone else suggested was that people about to have a HUGE platform think about the feelings of others, and THAT somehow triggered an ignorance-fueled backlash about "censorship."
The thing is, we don't talk about this enough, but geek culture in general has a real problem with the concept of empathy. You can see it in the micro where forum cultures like reddit and 4chan or social-media harassment movements like You-Know-Who attack the very idea of earnest feeling or sincere emotional investment in ANYTHING other than snark-for-snarks sake "lulz" as a sign of intellectual weakness; but you can also see it as an almost pathological inability to even consider that anything beyond our own fandoms, our own fixations our own immediate enjoyments can "matter."
After all, why else is the go-too bogeyman always "censorship?" It's certainly not out of concern for artists rights - internet culture stopped pretending to care about artists rights the minute NAPSTER was invented. No, it's because "censorship" is the most obvious thing that could impact OUR enjoyment. A valid concern, absolutely - but should it really be the beginning and the end? I'm not exempting myself here, either: Best of intentions or not, it maybe speaks to MY subconscious priorities that "Hoo-boy, I wouldn't want to have to show off a shooter at E3 right now" is (one of) the first places my mind went, right?
Nerd-cultures problem with empathy also extends to how unwilling we often are to even hear out concerns about representation from those outside the "traditional" audience base for the things we enjoy, or why so maNY of us tense up and start blubbering out memorized nonsense about "narrative" and "agenda" at the mere menation of comics, games, movies etc engaging with social or political issues - all in the name of preserving supposed "escapism."
And escapism IS a great thing, and the idea of geek culture BEING a place to escape to is a key component of it. But it can go too far, and too often an attitide of "don't ask me to think about things in THIS game conic or whatever" turns into "don't make me think about things in ANY games comics etc" and then into "don't make me think about things during this whole fandom convention" and then into "don't make me think period ever." Where's the line?
Folks... its one thing to "escape" into a place, it's another to STAY there, build a fort around it and try to shut the world out permanently - that's not escaping anymore, that's HIDING. And it's also denying that same escape to people who might need it as much or more than you did. Playing a game, watching a movie… whatever, yes, that can an “escape” from the often trying experience of sharing the world with other people. But a culture around them really can’t be – not in the same way. Because a culture (even the so-called “geek culture”) is MADE of people – so it’s part of the grand human experience.
And if we can’t at least THINK about having empathy for our fellow human beings… what’s even the point? I’d like to believe we’re better than that.
This piece made possible through donations to The MovieBob Patreon
Review: WARCRAFT (2016) - Updated with Video
This review made possible in part through contributors to The MovieBob Patreon.
Good news! After nearly 3 decades of video game movis being terrible because they didn't respect the actual games at all, we finally have one that's just as if not substantially more terrible because it reveres the games entirely too much! And now that Goldielocks has had her nibble at the Mama Bear and Papa Bear side of the equation, we should be just about ready for some enterprising go-getter to swoop in all Baby Bear and get things just fucking right – hopefully? After all, the next couple of these on deck are based on Ubisoft franchises; and they've never been known to vanish eagerly up the industrial-strength vaccum-like asshole of their own self-important mythological pretense!
Sigh. Yes, WARCRAFT is a colossal, monumental, staggering disaster. 15 or so years from when Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson and JK Rowling jointly planted their flags and kicked it all off, the Geek Age of Cinema finally has its answer to HEAVEN'S GATE (or, if we're being generous, ONE FROM THE HEART): A film willed into being by a genuine visionary of a filmmaker whose unwavering confidence and utter, unapologetic, deeply-drawn love of the material has resulted in something that avoids being called a simple failure by being so visibly cherished by its makers. Too compelling in its misbegotten grandeur to be dismissed, too grim and determined of its own importance to be called a farce; the only fair description of WARCRAFT is a tragedy.
It can be exhilirating to watch a bad film fail - watching the apotheosis of every shitty, pandering, grim-n-gritty creative decision made in comics over the last 3 goddamn decades crash and burn in BATMAN V SUPERMAN has been, overall, a fucking perverse delight - but there's no joy or even vindication to be found in WARCRAFT. It's not just that so many people tried so hard and believed so much in this project that makes its collapse so sad, it's that all that effort and belief is the main reason why it collapsed.
The fact of the matter is, WARCRAFT is the kind of bad movie that can only be made by fans – because you have to love something – really fucking love it - to the point of all-encompassing blindness to unwittingly yet so effectively smother it to death like this. This is video-game adaptation by way of the dad from THE LEGO MOVIE – a whole game’s worth of stuff that’s supposed to be fun all cragled into place so rigidly that it’s impossible to have fun with it: The characters are so arch the actors can’t move around inside them, the world has been so lovingly recreated you can practically see the museum display-ropes keeping everything from being handled and the dialogue practically chisels itself into the stonework for fear of a single line landing out of place. It’s clear that director Duncan Jones really wanted this to work – to make his mark, do something really different and set a new standard for blockbuster fantasy filmmaking… and geez, do you have to feel bad for this fucking guy, because what he’s managed to do instead is set a new standard for having missed the forest for the trees.
The flaws are baked in right from the get-go: WARCRAFT is, technically, a video-game adaptation… except somebody decided that instead of adapting a story from the games or even setting a new story in the world of the games, the place to start was retelling in pedantic BEAUTIFUL MIND-level detail - the setup of the original game – yes, this essentially an entire fucking movie’s worth of the kind of shit LORD OF THE RINGS blew through in bullet-points in the first two minutes of the first movie, or that STAR WARS wisely consigns to the opening title crawl. Previous video game movies may have failed because they were like watching someone else play the game, but WARCRAFT is like watching someone read the game’s instruction manual.
And that’s some heartbreaking shit, because it’s the kind of bad decision that only a truly lovestuck fan can make, assuming that the mechanics and mythology details are SO damn important that we need to learn every single piece of it rather than skipping ahead to the fucking interesting stuff. Make no mistake: This kind of attention to detail and narrowly-focused worship of the material is the reason that the armor and the weapons and the spells and the Orcs – holy shit are the Orcs amazing looking in this – all look so damn good… but it’s the exact wronginstinct for telling an interesting story.
Especially when the story already needs all the help it can get to be worth telling in the first place. Setting aside that for all its novelty the “World of Warcraft” is basically the same high-fantasy hodgepodge that every other kitchen-sink fantasy realm has aspired to post-Gygax; it’s still pretty astonishing to realize that once the movie is done introducing every location, race, faction, region, sect etc that someone seriously thought we needed two full hours to understand a plot that boils down to: “The Green Stuff Is Bad.”
Fine, it’s mythology… but mythology needs characters we can invest in, and apart from one early scene of an Orc couple just chilling and talking about life (which is probably the first and last moment where the film approaches “good”) there isn’t a single exchange between characters or line of spoken dialogue that doesn’t involve a character introducing themselves, explaining what’s going on, telling us what something is, how it works or where they have to go next. The screenplay is nothing but exposition, and the only thing that’s never explained is why the fuck we’re supposed to care beyond the supposedly edifying novelty of both the humans and the invading Orc army both being basically decent people trying to do right by their families and communities as opposed to the usual black and white morality associated with the genre.
Sadly, since none of these people ever register as actual fucking characters, all of that supposed moral gray area mainly boils down to the Orcs and the humans both being equally stupid; with the entirety of the would-be story tension resting on nobody noticing that the creepy Orc wizard building a giant magic-machine that runs on dead people and the creepy human wizard who fucked-off for a bunch of years and showed up again acting like a goddamn weirdo right when all the bad shit started might be the bad guys!
The closest we get to an actual character is Toby Kebbel as Durotan the Orc, in as much as he has the closest thing to a relatable storyline and because all the actually good stuff in the movie revolves around the Orcs – period. But for the most part we’re stuck with Travis Fimmel as a boring knight, Dominic Cooper as a boring king, Ben Schentzer as a mage and poor, poor Paula Patton struggling not to look stupid with inverted vampire fangs as a half-human/half-Orc lady Garona… who kind of feels like she should be the main character but then… isn’t.
None of these people manage to be interesting because they never get to talk about anything that isn’t tedious worldbuilding or exposition. At one point two characters suddenly seem to be involved romantically, and you could feel the audience come to life for the first time all night as everyone collectively looked at the person next to them and asked “Wait, when the fuck did that happen!?” Worse still, it all builds up to a chaotic climax full of death, betrayal, emotion, tragedy, huge stakes and grand self-sacrificing decisions that feel like they’d be the stuff of legends… if it was even remotely possible to give a shit who the fuck any of these assholes are or what the hell is going to happen to them. Even simply reacting to the ending feels like homework: “Okay, class – is this a sad ending? A happy ending? A cliffhanger? Or did they just run out of time?”
And despite all that, I still find myself wishing I could root for this fucking disaster just because Duncan Jones is so clearly talented and deserving of serious blockbuster clout, but… the most tragic thing about the film is how massively beyond his grasp it turns out to be. Sure, it’s possible taking this specific tone and route may have defeated any filmmaker, but whereas at the least the mostly-CGI scenes involving the Orcs or the (far too few) big scale battles at least look interesting… everything involving the humans or filmed on a practical set is staged and blocked in the most uninteresting ways possible. Everything plays flat, basic and dull, and it’s legitimately depressing seeing such dreary work come from the same filmmaker who brought such masterful command of cinematic language and scene geography to MOON and SOURCE CODE.
WARCRAFT wants to be big. It wants to be different. It wants to the be smarter, deeper, more meaningful breed of Summer blockbuster that explores ideas and asks questions. Unfortunately, the only questions that anyone will be leaving with “What the HELL did I just watch… and how the FUCK did it happen!?”
Good news! After nearly 3 decades of video game movis being terrible because they didn't respect the actual games at all, we finally have one that's just as if not substantially more terrible because it reveres the games entirely too much! And now that Goldielocks has had her nibble at the Mama Bear and Papa Bear side of the equation, we should be just about ready for some enterprising go-getter to swoop in all Baby Bear and get things just fucking right – hopefully? After all, the next couple of these on deck are based on Ubisoft franchises; and they've never been known to vanish eagerly up the industrial-strength vaccum-like asshole of their own self-important mythological pretense!
Sigh. Yes, WARCRAFT is a colossal, monumental, staggering disaster. 15 or so years from when Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson and JK Rowling jointly planted their flags and kicked it all off, the Geek Age of Cinema finally has its answer to HEAVEN'S GATE (or, if we're being generous, ONE FROM THE HEART): A film willed into being by a genuine visionary of a filmmaker whose unwavering confidence and utter, unapologetic, deeply-drawn love of the material has resulted in something that avoids being called a simple failure by being so visibly cherished by its makers. Too compelling in its misbegotten grandeur to be dismissed, too grim and determined of its own importance to be called a farce; the only fair description of WARCRAFT is a tragedy.
It can be exhilirating to watch a bad film fail - watching the apotheosis of every shitty, pandering, grim-n-gritty creative decision made in comics over the last 3 goddamn decades crash and burn in BATMAN V SUPERMAN has been, overall, a fucking perverse delight - but there's no joy or even vindication to be found in WARCRAFT. It's not just that so many people tried so hard and believed so much in this project that makes its collapse so sad, it's that all that effort and belief is the main reason why it collapsed.
The fact of the matter is, WARCRAFT is the kind of bad movie that can only be made by fans – because you have to love something – really fucking love it - to the point of all-encompassing blindness to unwittingly yet so effectively smother it to death like this. This is video-game adaptation by way of the dad from THE LEGO MOVIE – a whole game’s worth of stuff that’s supposed to be fun all cragled into place so rigidly that it’s impossible to have fun with it: The characters are so arch the actors can’t move around inside them, the world has been so lovingly recreated you can practically see the museum display-ropes keeping everything from being handled and the dialogue practically chisels itself into the stonework for fear of a single line landing out of place. It’s clear that director Duncan Jones really wanted this to work – to make his mark, do something really different and set a new standard for blockbuster fantasy filmmaking… and geez, do you have to feel bad for this fucking guy, because what he’s managed to do instead is set a new standard for having missed the forest for the trees.
The flaws are baked in right from the get-go: WARCRAFT is, technically, a video-game adaptation… except somebody decided that instead of adapting a story from the games or even setting a new story in the world of the games, the place to start was retelling in pedantic BEAUTIFUL MIND-level detail - the setup of the original game – yes, this essentially an entire fucking movie’s worth of the kind of shit LORD OF THE RINGS blew through in bullet-points in the first two minutes of the first movie, or that STAR WARS wisely consigns to the opening title crawl. Previous video game movies may have failed because they were like watching someone else play the game, but WARCRAFT is like watching someone read the game’s instruction manual.
And that’s some heartbreaking shit, because it’s the kind of bad decision that only a truly lovestuck fan can make, assuming that the mechanics and mythology details are SO damn important that we need to learn every single piece of it rather than skipping ahead to the fucking interesting stuff. Make no mistake: This kind of attention to detail and narrowly-focused worship of the material is the reason that the armor and the weapons and the spells and the Orcs – holy shit are the Orcs amazing looking in this – all look so damn good… but it’s the exact wronginstinct for telling an interesting story.
Especially when the story already needs all the help it can get to be worth telling in the first place. Setting aside that for all its novelty the “World of Warcraft” is basically the same high-fantasy hodgepodge that every other kitchen-sink fantasy realm has aspired to post-Gygax; it’s still pretty astonishing to realize that once the movie is done introducing every location, race, faction, region, sect etc that someone seriously thought we needed two full hours to understand a plot that boils down to: “The Green Stuff Is Bad.”
Fine, it’s mythology… but mythology needs characters we can invest in, and apart from one early scene of an Orc couple just chilling and talking about life (which is probably the first and last moment where the film approaches “good”) there isn’t a single exchange between characters or line of spoken dialogue that doesn’t involve a character introducing themselves, explaining what’s going on, telling us what something is, how it works or where they have to go next. The screenplay is nothing but exposition, and the only thing that’s never explained is why the fuck we’re supposed to care beyond the supposedly edifying novelty of both the humans and the invading Orc army both being basically decent people trying to do right by their families and communities as opposed to the usual black and white morality associated with the genre.
Sadly, since none of these people ever register as actual fucking characters, all of that supposed moral gray area mainly boils down to the Orcs and the humans both being equally stupid; with the entirety of the would-be story tension resting on nobody noticing that the creepy Orc wizard building a giant magic-machine that runs on dead people and the creepy human wizard who fucked-off for a bunch of years and showed up again acting like a goddamn weirdo right when all the bad shit started might be the bad guys!
The closest we get to an actual character is Toby Kebbel as Durotan the Orc, in as much as he has the closest thing to a relatable storyline and because all the actually good stuff in the movie revolves around the Orcs – period. But for the most part we’re stuck with Travis Fimmel as a boring knight, Dominic Cooper as a boring king, Ben Schentzer as a mage and poor, poor Paula Patton struggling not to look stupid with inverted vampire fangs as a half-human/half-Orc lady Garona… who kind of feels like she should be the main character but then… isn’t.
None of these people manage to be interesting because they never get to talk about anything that isn’t tedious worldbuilding or exposition. At one point two characters suddenly seem to be involved romantically, and you could feel the audience come to life for the first time all night as everyone collectively looked at the person next to them and asked “Wait, when the fuck did that happen!?” Worse still, it all builds up to a chaotic climax full of death, betrayal, emotion, tragedy, huge stakes and grand self-sacrificing decisions that feel like they’d be the stuff of legends… if it was even remotely possible to give a shit who the fuck any of these assholes are or what the hell is going to happen to them. Even simply reacting to the ending feels like homework: “Okay, class – is this a sad ending? A happy ending? A cliffhanger? Or did they just run out of time?”
And despite all that, I still find myself wishing I could root for this fucking disaster just because Duncan Jones is so clearly talented and deserving of serious blockbuster clout, but… the most tragic thing about the film is how massively beyond his grasp it turns out to be. Sure, it’s possible taking this specific tone and route may have defeated any filmmaker, but whereas at the least the mostly-CGI scenes involving the Orcs or the (far too few) big scale battles at least look interesting… everything involving the humans or filmed on a practical set is staged and blocked in the most uninteresting ways possible. Everything plays flat, basic and dull, and it’s legitimately depressing seeing such dreary work come from the same filmmaker who brought such masterful command of cinematic language and scene geography to MOON and SOURCE CODE.
WARCRAFT wants to be big. It wants to be different. It wants to the be smarter, deeper, more meaningful breed of Summer blockbuster that explores ideas and asks questions. Unfortunately, the only questions that anyone will be leaving with “What the HELL did I just watch… and how the FUCK did it happen!?”
In Bob We Trust: AGENTS OF S.H.I.P.
Because you demanded it!
Review: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS (2016)
It won't surprise me if the overall consensus on TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS (just TMNT 2 from here out, okay?) is that it's an improvement on the first film. It is - but only in the sense that the bar is already set so painfully low. The first film was a full-blown piece of shit - badly directed, badly scripted, poorly acted, edited into a clusterfuck to fix story problems that never should've made it that far to begin with and ugly to look at from top to bottom - this is seriously one of the worst production-designed series ever.
The sequel carries over all the pre-existing problems, but this time things are marginally better directed (however much of it was actually directed, since so much of it is so obviously comprised of bog-standard pre-viz) and they've imported a bunch of fanservice aimed squarely at the first-wave Millennial entertainment bloggers most likely to get assigned to review it by their Russian and/or Chinese owned traffic farm - er.. I mean, Perfectly Legitimate News Outlet so... yeah, the reviews will be better.
It's still pretty fucking bad.
Yes, they clearly had more time to work on this one so it's not quite as clunky and thrown-together as the original felt throughout, but an overriding sense of laziness and half-effort is still the name of the game. The plot (such as it is - see below) is an afterthought, the characterizations are basic to the point of parody (almost everyone introduces themselves with a description of their own personality and expected "arc") and none of it ever manages to have any weight or feel like it's supposed to matter - which I understand is a weird complaint to have about what's ostensibly a kids movie, but like I said last time: Kids deserve better than this.
I mean, he first time they made this shit into a movie I was the kid and it was every bit as much of a cynical grab for my or rather my mother's money for more licensed plastic Turtle crap; but at least they had enough respect for my hypothetical intelligence to slow the fuck down in Act 2 and have that quiet stretch at the farmhouse to develop the characters into something resembling depth. OR they figured that establishing emotional connection to the characters would generate even more devotion to the product line, but... look, the point is, "it's just for kids" is not an excuse not to do your goddamn jobs - that kind of thinking is how you end up with tainted baby food.
Case in point: You might've been under the impression that there's a new Shredder is this one... but it's just a new actor supposedly playing the same part. Wasn't Shredder a really old guy in the last one? Who fucking cares, right? And the Foot Clan are Ninjas again even though they were clearly black-ops mercenary guys in the last one because... okay, even I don't care about that one at this point.
Anyway, the plot this time is that the Foot Clan wants to break Shredder out of prison by using an alien teleporter rebuilt by Tyler Perry's mad scientist Baxter Stockman. But instead of sending Shredder where it's supposed to, it drops him into another dimension where the cyborg dictator Krang tells him that the teleporter is actually part of a bigger teleporter whose pieces are scattered on Earth and if reunited will let him beam in and conquer the place, which Shredder agrees to do in exchange for help with his Turtle problem. Believe it or not, I'm pretty sure that ENTIRE goddamn setup plays out in less time onscreen than it just took me to describe it - and yet somehow the rest of the movie is still almost 2 hours long.
What passes for a "theme" intrudes on the proceedings when Shredder uses a serum from Krang to turn henchmen Bebop and Rocksteady into their cartoon selves, which apparently occurs by "regressing human DNA to its animal ancestry" which is not how that works but... whatever. The point is that for some reason this means the same serum could turn the Turtles into full-blown humans, the prospect of which divides the team ideologically because hey, if you're going to steal a storyline from the fucking X-MEN movies, you might as well steal from the worst one... I guess?
It all feels phoned in and lifeless, save for the bizarre obsession the film has with reminding us that Bebop & Rocksteady really are BFF's for life - in a movie that's already much too long, it's just bizarre that so much screentime is given over to two lumpy, farting CGI monstrousities engaging in endless Judd Apatow "bromance" improv. The rest of it is just mechanical as shit, a Mother Goose simple plot interrupted for scheduled interludes that feel dreamed up by a seven year-old who knows that a narrative needs character conflict to give it structure but doesn't understand what any of that entails beyond cliches he's seen in other movies.
The action scenes, once again, are a big fat letdown considering how much money got spent on the FX. I can't for the life of me figure out why they decided to use motion-capture to create the Turtles or any of the shitty new villains since every big setpiece is the same bullshit mishmash of the characters flinging themselves through the air in weightless theme-park choreography designed to show off the 3D and not much else. The keep hammering the point home that these characters are ninja-master, but there's almost zero martial-arts in either of these films so far - the fucking KUNG-FU PANDA movies have better hand-to-hand combat sequences, and their both basically cartoons.
Speaking of which, the garish aesthetic mismatch between the design and the narrative isn't doing it any goddamn favors either: The story and characters are all pitched at the level of an audience that's still shitting it's Huggies, but the cinematography and editing make everything look so much like a faux-gritty cop show you expect the Dick Wolf logo to come up at any minute and the Turtles are all still overdesigned hulking brutes I can't imagine NOT terrifying a small child in person, forget being embraced as a children's merchandising icon - the resulting dissonance feeling like somebody dubbed a vocal track from BANANAS IN PAJAMAS over a particularly Ramsay-heavy episode of GAME OF THRONES.
Giving the dialogue some snap might've mitigated some of this, but the writing is uniformly bland and explanatory in a way that suggests everyone involved knows that the main function of this tossed-off kleenex full of turtle jizz (and every other third-tier tentpole franchise like it) is to suck up dollars from undiscerning overseas 4D "ride theater" audiences and figured they might as well make life easy for the poor souls who have to dub it all into Mandarin.
Oh yeah, Meagan Fox is also in this. I... once upon a time had some fucking douchey, not at all nice things to say about Meagan Fox early on in my criticism career that I'd pretty much take all the way back if I could. She's not GOOD in this, don't get me wrong, but it sometimes feels like she's trying just a little bit harder than everyone else is. She almost certainly deserves a lot better than this... but, then, so don't we all.
This review made possible in part by generous contributions to The MovieBob Patreon.
The sequel carries over all the pre-existing problems, but this time things are marginally better directed (however much of it was actually directed, since so much of it is so obviously comprised of bog-standard pre-viz) and they've imported a bunch of fanservice aimed squarely at the first-wave Millennial entertainment bloggers most likely to get assigned to review it by their Russian and/or Chinese owned traffic farm - er.. I mean, Perfectly Legitimate News Outlet so... yeah, the reviews will be better.
It's still pretty fucking bad.
Yes, they clearly had more time to work on this one so it's not quite as clunky and thrown-together as the original felt throughout, but an overriding sense of laziness and half-effort is still the name of the game. The plot (such as it is - see below) is an afterthought, the characterizations are basic to the point of parody (almost everyone introduces themselves with a description of their own personality and expected "arc") and none of it ever manages to have any weight or feel like it's supposed to matter - which I understand is a weird complaint to have about what's ostensibly a kids movie, but like I said last time: Kids deserve better than this.
I mean, he first time they made this shit into a movie I was the kid and it was every bit as much of a cynical grab for my or rather my mother's money for more licensed plastic Turtle crap; but at least they had enough respect for my hypothetical intelligence to slow the fuck down in Act 2 and have that quiet stretch at the farmhouse to develop the characters into something resembling depth. OR they figured that establishing emotional connection to the characters would generate even more devotion to the product line, but... look, the point is, "it's just for kids" is not an excuse not to do your goddamn jobs - that kind of thinking is how you end up with tainted baby food.
Case in point: You might've been under the impression that there's a new Shredder is this one... but it's just a new actor supposedly playing the same part. Wasn't Shredder a really old guy in the last one? Who fucking cares, right? And the Foot Clan are Ninjas again even though they were clearly black-ops mercenary guys in the last one because... okay, even I don't care about that one at this point.
Anyway, the plot this time is that the Foot Clan wants to break Shredder out of prison by using an alien teleporter rebuilt by Tyler Perry's mad scientist Baxter Stockman. But instead of sending Shredder where it's supposed to, it drops him into another dimension where the cyborg dictator Krang tells him that the teleporter is actually part of a bigger teleporter whose pieces are scattered on Earth and if reunited will let him beam in and conquer the place, which Shredder agrees to do in exchange for help with his Turtle problem. Believe it or not, I'm pretty sure that ENTIRE goddamn setup plays out in less time onscreen than it just took me to describe it - and yet somehow the rest of the movie is still almost 2 hours long.
What passes for a "theme" intrudes on the proceedings when Shredder uses a serum from Krang to turn henchmen Bebop and Rocksteady into their cartoon selves, which apparently occurs by "regressing human DNA to its animal ancestry" which is not how that works but... whatever. The point is that for some reason this means the same serum could turn the Turtles into full-blown humans, the prospect of which divides the team ideologically because hey, if you're going to steal a storyline from the fucking X-MEN movies, you might as well steal from the worst one... I guess?
It all feels phoned in and lifeless, save for the bizarre obsession the film has with reminding us that Bebop & Rocksteady really are BFF's for life - in a movie that's already much too long, it's just bizarre that so much screentime is given over to two lumpy, farting CGI monstrousities engaging in endless Judd Apatow "bromance" improv. The rest of it is just mechanical as shit, a Mother Goose simple plot interrupted for scheduled interludes that feel dreamed up by a seven year-old who knows that a narrative needs character conflict to give it structure but doesn't understand what any of that entails beyond cliches he's seen in other movies.
The action scenes, once again, are a big fat letdown considering how much money got spent on the FX. I can't for the life of me figure out why they decided to use motion-capture to create the Turtles or any of the shitty new villains since every big setpiece is the same bullshit mishmash of the characters flinging themselves through the air in weightless theme-park choreography designed to show off the 3D and not much else. The keep hammering the point home that these characters are ninja-master, but there's almost zero martial-arts in either of these films so far - the fucking KUNG-FU PANDA movies have better hand-to-hand combat sequences, and their both basically cartoons.
Speaking of which, the garish aesthetic mismatch between the design and the narrative isn't doing it any goddamn favors either: The story and characters are all pitched at the level of an audience that's still shitting it's Huggies, but the cinematography and editing make everything look so much like a faux-gritty cop show you expect the Dick Wolf logo to come up at any minute and the Turtles are all still overdesigned hulking brutes I can't imagine NOT terrifying a small child in person, forget being embraced as a children's merchandising icon - the resulting dissonance feeling like somebody dubbed a vocal track from BANANAS IN PAJAMAS over a particularly Ramsay-heavy episode of GAME OF THRONES.
Giving the dialogue some snap might've mitigated some of this, but the writing is uniformly bland and explanatory in a way that suggests everyone involved knows that the main function of this tossed-off kleenex full of turtle jizz (and every other third-tier tentpole franchise like it) is to suck up dollars from undiscerning overseas 4D "ride theater" audiences and figured they might as well make life easy for the poor souls who have to dub it all into Mandarin.
Oh yeah, Meagan Fox is also in this. I... once upon a time had some fucking douchey, not at all nice things to say about Meagan Fox early on in my criticism career that I'd pretty much take all the way back if I could. She's not GOOD in this, don't get me wrong, but it sometimes feels like she's trying just a little bit harder than everyone else is. She almost certainly deserves a lot better than this... but, then, so don't we all.
This review made possible in part by generous contributions to The MovieBob Patreon.
In Bob We Trust: GHOSTBUSTERS - WHY GET SO MAD?
FYI: There have been questions re: AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. recaps. Short answer: Yeah, Season 3 ultimately got so tiresome I couldn't bring myself to do write-ups of it anymore. However, with the season now concluded, I will be addressing that on the next installment of this series, tentatively arriving one week from today. Stay tuned :)
Really That Good: SUPERMAN (1978)
Watch it now, in case Warner Bros' bogus copyright claim goes through (if so, there is a Vimeo version.)
As ever, those who want to see more like this (at a more frequent rate) are encouraged to support The MovieBob Patreon.
As ever, those who want to see more like this (at a more frequent rate) are encouraged to support The MovieBob Patreon.
Cinemassacre vs Ghostbusters vs Internet
NOTE: This was originally written as the script for a video, but I decided it read better than it sounded performed. As ever, if you like what I do here, there's a MovieBob Patreon for that.
Alright. The Internet is all up in arms because of the below video wherein a guy who reviews movies says he's not going to review the GHOSTBUSTERS remake mainly for nostalgia/"respect-the-original" reasons (and will instead do a "non-review" seemingly mostly about the failed attempts to make a proper GHOSTBUSTERS III over the years); and I find the fallout interesting because half the web is celebrating: "Hooray! Famous Internet Man has joined our anti-feminist witch-hunt!;" while the other half is scolding him over:"Boo! Famous Internet Man joined their anti-feminist witch-hunt."
Meanwhile, the gender-flip business of the remake doesn't really come up other than a factual acknowledgment thereof in the actual video, making it nicely illustrative of the tiresome way discussion of this movie has become proxy-vs-proxy and not about the movie at all... but also of who's to blame for that tiresomeness in the first place (HINT: It ain't the so-called "SJWs.") Anyway, there's the video, my take after the jump.
So. Background: James Rolfe, probably still best known as the Angry Video Game Nerd and pretty-much the INVENTOR of the whole “pop-culture rant” internet video genre, put out a video where he announced he was going to do some kind of vaguely-defined “non-review” tie-in video to the remake of GHOSTBUSTERS because it looks really bad and he resents the idea of remaking it in the first place and would thus rather not watch it.
Which… I totally understand and think is pretty valid. I mean, look – I’m a film critic by trade and I’m generally of the opinion that everyone critic or not should experience as many things as possible and that goes double for things you assume you yourself won’t like I assume we’ve all read GREEN EGGS & HAM and I don’t have to explain the logic behind that further. BUT! It’s also true that not everyone CAN see everything and if you really do think something looks so beyond your capacity for enjoyment or rational engagement then maybe it’s best left to others every once in awhile.
To be frank – short of “not gonna watch it” I have a hard time disagreeing with most of his basic premise (though I'd like to think I wouldn't have said it was "good" that Harold Ramis didn't get to see the movie - that's a bit much.) GHOSTBUSTERS is one of those all-time classics that shouldn’t be remade even if remaking it well was possible which it isn’t because the making of GHOSTBUSTERS was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle scenarios that can’t happen twice and GHOSTBUSTERS II is the proof of that. The remake they HAVE made thus far looks and sounds terrible both conceptually and based on the trailers, everything about it makes me embarrassed for the very talented cast that’s been assembled to put it together. It’s a movie that probably never should have happened, stands almost no chance of being worthwhile and thus far doesn’t even look like it’ll be good enough to be a “whatever, next movie.” The last time a movie project looked THIS bad top-to-bottom before its release was BATMAN V SUPERMAN and just look how that monstrosity turned out.
And yeah, I COMPLETELY “get” resenting remakes of classics because – yes – while a remake doesn’t make the original “disappear” it does often inject a sour note into the cultural history of something (fairly or not) at least for a little while. See: Today, when you talk about ROBOCOP, you kinda have to specify that you mean the good one from the mid-80s and not that godawful piece of garbage from last year. Or when you talk about HALLOWEEN and have to point out that you mean the John Carpenter movie and not the Rob Zombie one. It’s not a huge problem or a major tragedy but it DOES kind of suck that unless this remake is itself an outright classic which – no, it won’t be – any discussion of GHOSTBUSTERS will now have to specify whether you mean the remake or the good one.
Now look, I’m not here to “defend” The Angry Nerd OR start some kind of debate over all this or even really to talk about his thing at all. And before somebody brings it up YES, I understand that he’s doing a “bit” and the whole “principled stand against a remake of a classic” thing feels like basically a clever promo for a what sounds like a video more about the history of the failure to make GHOSTBUSTERS 3 while it was still possible that he probably wanted to do anyway. I get it – self-promotion is the business, the business is what it is and he’s been doing it longer than almost any of us.
What I do think is worth noting is that the “discussion” that spilled out of this continues to be all about sexist assholes in fan-culture clearly being upset at this movie because they recast it with women… and the fact of that BARELY came up at all in Rolfe’s video. Now, look – full disclosure: I know this guy, not super well but we’ve worked with a lot of the same people, have done a few of the same events, I always admired his work, he’s always been a good guy to me, I have ZERO reason to believe he has some kind of issue with women and the fact that he doesn’t bring it up at all bares that out: I take him at what looks to be his word that this is about remaking classics and not about gender politics or whatever.
But what’s interesting and also depressing is… it doesn’t really MATTER, does it? The remake of GHOSTBUSTERS became a proxy battlefield for political posturing pretty-much the minute it was announced because that’s the world we live in now, and that’s always a frustrating phenomenon because it involves weighing two equally true facts against eachother – Fact #1 being that issues like feminism, progress, social-justice etc are, objectively, more important than whether or not a movie is good; but Fact #2 being that the only fair way to judge a work of art is based on its intrinsic merits and not which “side” of some bigger, more important argument its quality or lack thereof backs up.
This is partially why you haven’t heard ME really have anything substantively to say about the movie up to this point: Honestly, I was rooting for it to be good (and still hope it is even though all possible signs point to “no”) because inverting the character-genders raised a lot of genuinely interesting possibilities and almost seemed like a good enough reason to remake a classic in the first place. And as soon as the awful trailers and the awful everything else started to roll in, y’know… I felt physically sick over it because I realized what we were now in for:
The same pissed-off woman-hating assholes that ran roughshod over video-game fandom last year and this year have managed to (improbably) turn the otherwise well-intentioned Presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders (of all people!) into a fucking punchline are going to climb all over this movie sucking as ammunition for their bullshit cause, which means the GOOD people on the other side will either feel compelled to jump in and “defend” this or get sucked in otherwise because it becomes the new talking point of the moment.
And while that’s annoying on all fronts, I’m not trying to make a false equivalency here: I HATE the fact that we can’t have an honest back and forth about this or any other movie without having to think about whether or not what we say is going to get repurposed a weapon in a bullshit “culture war,” but I know who’s to blame for it – and it aint’ the so-called “SJWs.”: It’s the regressives and the trolls and fedora squad and the MRA/”meninist” right-wing internet collective that’s been banging on about this shit ever since they realized that the inexorable tide of cultural evolution is poised and ready to sweep them and their bullshit played-out reactionary worldview into the dumpster of societal-obsolesence.
Because guess what: The remakes of ROBOCOP and TOTAL RECALL *both* looked just as bad as the new GHOSTBUSTERS looks (and spoiler: they WERE exactly as awful as they looked) – but I don’t remember a year-long preemptive, pre-TRAILER hate campaign against those movies; so logically there’s obviously something else at play here – and while it’s true that Chris Hemsworth being in a movie where he’s NOT playing Thor is usually a bad sign… I kinda don’t think it’s that.
So… yeah. You think the remake of GHOSTBUSTERS looks terrible? I agree – it looks terrible. I just hope it doesn’t stop people from putting Leslie Jones Kate McKinnon in good movies because those are two funny fuckin’ people. You think it looks super-disrespectful to the legacy of one of the most important genre-comedies ever made? Yeah, I think that looks to the most-likely case. Don’t wanna watch it because of that? Fine – totally valid, you do you. But please, don’t you DARE insult either of our intelligences by trying to tell me that *most* of the super over-the-top mega-hatred that’s being trained on this project and RUINING any chance to have an honest discourse isn’t mainly coming from paranoid sexist assholes who think something is being “stolen” from them.
Egh… can we just get this over with? And by this, I mean can we just fast-forward to five years from now when we’ll be able to find out what everyone REALLY thought of this movie?
P.S. Since it's relevant, my original "Really That Good" episode on the original GHOSTBUSTERS. For those wondering: RTG: "Superman: The Movie" is in-production and should be done soon, Yes, I am aware it took longer than I wanted it to. As ever, if you enjoy the work and want to encourage more, please consider The MovieBob Patreon.
Alright. The Internet is all up in arms because of the below video wherein a guy who reviews movies says he's not going to review the GHOSTBUSTERS remake mainly for nostalgia/"respect-the-original" reasons (and will instead do a "non-review" seemingly mostly about the failed attempts to make a proper GHOSTBUSTERS III over the years); and I find the fallout interesting because half the web is celebrating: "Hooray! Famous Internet Man has joined our anti-feminist witch-hunt!;" while the other half is scolding him over:"Boo! Famous Internet Man joined their anti-feminist witch-hunt."
Meanwhile, the gender-flip business of the remake doesn't really come up other than a factual acknowledgment thereof in the actual video, making it nicely illustrative of the tiresome way discussion of this movie has become proxy-vs-proxy and not about the movie at all... but also of who's to blame for that tiresomeness in the first place (HINT: It ain't the so-called "SJWs.") Anyway, there's the video, my take after the jump.
So. Background: James Rolfe, probably still best known as the Angry Video Game Nerd and pretty-much the INVENTOR of the whole “pop-culture rant” internet video genre, put out a video where he announced he was going to do some kind of vaguely-defined “non-review” tie-in video to the remake of GHOSTBUSTERS because it looks really bad and he resents the idea of remaking it in the first place and would thus rather not watch it.
Which… I totally understand and think is pretty valid. I mean, look – I’m a film critic by trade and I’m generally of the opinion that everyone critic or not should experience as many things as possible and that goes double for things you assume you yourself won’t like I assume we’ve all read GREEN EGGS & HAM and I don’t have to explain the logic behind that further. BUT! It’s also true that not everyone CAN see everything and if you really do think something looks so beyond your capacity for enjoyment or rational engagement then maybe it’s best left to others every once in awhile.
To be frank – short of “not gonna watch it” I have a hard time disagreeing with most of his basic premise (though I'd like to think I wouldn't have said it was "good" that Harold Ramis didn't get to see the movie - that's a bit much.) GHOSTBUSTERS is one of those all-time classics that shouldn’t be remade even if remaking it well was possible which it isn’t because the making of GHOSTBUSTERS was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle scenarios that can’t happen twice and GHOSTBUSTERS II is the proof of that. The remake they HAVE made thus far looks and sounds terrible both conceptually and based on the trailers, everything about it makes me embarrassed for the very talented cast that’s been assembled to put it together. It’s a movie that probably never should have happened, stands almost no chance of being worthwhile and thus far doesn’t even look like it’ll be good enough to be a “whatever, next movie.” The last time a movie project looked THIS bad top-to-bottom before its release was BATMAN V SUPERMAN and just look how that monstrosity turned out.
And yeah, I COMPLETELY “get” resenting remakes of classics because – yes – while a remake doesn’t make the original “disappear” it does often inject a sour note into the cultural history of something (fairly or not) at least for a little while. See: Today, when you talk about ROBOCOP, you kinda have to specify that you mean the good one from the mid-80s and not that godawful piece of garbage from last year. Or when you talk about HALLOWEEN and have to point out that you mean the John Carpenter movie and not the Rob Zombie one. It’s not a huge problem or a major tragedy but it DOES kind of suck that unless this remake is itself an outright classic which – no, it won’t be – any discussion of GHOSTBUSTERS will now have to specify whether you mean the remake or the good one.
Now look, I’m not here to “defend” The Angry Nerd OR start some kind of debate over all this or even really to talk about his thing at all. And before somebody brings it up YES, I understand that he’s doing a “bit” and the whole “principled stand against a remake of a classic” thing feels like basically a clever promo for a what sounds like a video more about the history of the failure to make GHOSTBUSTERS 3 while it was still possible that he probably wanted to do anyway. I get it – self-promotion is the business, the business is what it is and he’s been doing it longer than almost any of us.
What I do think is worth noting is that the “discussion” that spilled out of this continues to be all about sexist assholes in fan-culture clearly being upset at this movie because they recast it with women… and the fact of that BARELY came up at all in Rolfe’s video. Now, look – full disclosure: I know this guy, not super well but we’ve worked with a lot of the same people, have done a few of the same events, I always admired his work, he’s always been a good guy to me, I have ZERO reason to believe he has some kind of issue with women and the fact that he doesn’t bring it up at all bares that out: I take him at what looks to be his word that this is about remaking classics and not about gender politics or whatever.
But what’s interesting and also depressing is… it doesn’t really MATTER, does it? The remake of GHOSTBUSTERS became a proxy battlefield for political posturing pretty-much the minute it was announced because that’s the world we live in now, and that’s always a frustrating phenomenon because it involves weighing two equally true facts against eachother – Fact #1 being that issues like feminism, progress, social-justice etc are, objectively, more important than whether or not a movie is good; but Fact #2 being that the only fair way to judge a work of art is based on its intrinsic merits and not which “side” of some bigger, more important argument its quality or lack thereof backs up.
This is partially why you haven’t heard ME really have anything substantively to say about the movie up to this point: Honestly, I was rooting for it to be good (and still hope it is even though all possible signs point to “no”) because inverting the character-genders raised a lot of genuinely interesting possibilities and almost seemed like a good enough reason to remake a classic in the first place. And as soon as the awful trailers and the awful everything else started to roll in, y’know… I felt physically sick over it because I realized what we were now in for:
The same pissed-off woman-hating assholes that ran roughshod over video-game fandom last year and this year have managed to (improbably) turn the otherwise well-intentioned Presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders (of all people!) into a fucking punchline are going to climb all over this movie sucking as ammunition for their bullshit cause, which means the GOOD people on the other side will either feel compelled to jump in and “defend” this or get sucked in otherwise because it becomes the new talking point of the moment.
And while that’s annoying on all fronts, I’m not trying to make a false equivalency here: I HATE the fact that we can’t have an honest back and forth about this or any other movie without having to think about whether or not what we say is going to get repurposed a weapon in a bullshit “culture war,” but I know who’s to blame for it – and it aint’ the so-called “SJWs.”: It’s the regressives and the trolls and fedora squad and the MRA/”meninist” right-wing internet collective that’s been banging on about this shit ever since they realized that the inexorable tide of cultural evolution is poised and ready to sweep them and their bullshit played-out reactionary worldview into the dumpster of societal-obsolesence.
Because guess what: The remakes of ROBOCOP and TOTAL RECALL *both* looked just as bad as the new GHOSTBUSTERS looks (and spoiler: they WERE exactly as awful as they looked) – but I don’t remember a year-long preemptive, pre-TRAILER hate campaign against those movies; so logically there’s obviously something else at play here – and while it’s true that Chris Hemsworth being in a movie where he’s NOT playing Thor is usually a bad sign… I kinda don’t think it’s that.
So… yeah. You think the remake of GHOSTBUSTERS looks terrible? I agree – it looks terrible. I just hope it doesn’t stop people from putting Leslie Jones Kate McKinnon in good movies because those are two funny fuckin’ people. You think it looks super-disrespectful to the legacy of one of the most important genre-comedies ever made? Yeah, I think that looks to the most-likely case. Don’t wanna watch it because of that? Fine – totally valid, you do you. But please, don’t you DARE insult either of our intelligences by trying to tell me that *most* of the super over-the-top mega-hatred that’s being trained on this project and RUINING any chance to have an honest discourse isn’t mainly coming from paranoid sexist assholes who think something is being “stolen” from them.
Egh… can we just get this over with? And by this, I mean can we just fast-forward to five years from now when we’ll be able to find out what everyone REALLY thought of this movie?
P.S. Since it's relevant, my original "Really That Good" episode on the original GHOSTBUSTERS. For those wondering: RTG: "Superman: The Movie" is in-production and should be done soon, Yes, I am aware it took longer than I wanted it to. As ever, if you enjoy the work and want to encourage more, please consider The MovieBob Patreon.
Review: X-MEN: APOCALYPSE (2016)
Video Review Coming Soon. Enjoy this review? Please consider a contribution to The MovieBob Patreon.
Broken record time: There are plenty of pre-modern (read: prior to BATMAN BEGINS/IRON MAN) superhero movies that absolutely hold up. Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN is one. The 1978 SUPERMAN is one. BATMAN RETURNS... sort of. The first two BLADE movies, definitely - I know we're only "supposed" to like BLADE II because of Guillermo del Toro, but the first one is totally serviceable.
But the X-MEN movies? No. They don't hold up. Portions of them do: McKellan's Magneto is a hell of a performance, Jackman as Wolverine was a great discovery, Patrick Stewart is... basically doing exactly what you expected, so it's fine. Zeroing in on the gay-youth metaphor was a good idea. Sort-of-nude Mystique is iconic. X2 has a decent-ish screenplay, which helps alot. But taken as a whole? Only FIRST CLASS is a straight-up good movie, and THE WOLVERINE is 2/3rds of a good B-movie. The rest of them are varying degrees of straight-up bad (ORIGINS: WOLVERINE and X3 being the worst) - aesthetically ugly, blandly directed, filler-packed half-efforts of which X2 gets a pass because it's screenplay is good enough and restricting 90% of the action to the X-Mansion, underlit hallways and... more underlit hallways helps disguise Bryan Singer's inability to properly direct action sequences or really any sequence with more than one plane of action and more than three active characters.
(SPOILERS after the jump)
And look, I get it: For a moment there, this looked like the best we could've possibly hoped for, isolated scenes like Wolverine defending the Mansion and Iceman "coming out" to his parents are damn close to transcendent and seeing the Phoenix shape under the water was Nick Fury before Nick Fury. I was there, too, I understand. But I've also lived through the decade-plus hence with clear eyes, and apart from FIRST CLASS (again, the only good one) the only thing more disappointing in hindsight than the totality of the X-MEN movies is the whole idea of Bryan Singer being a major talent as opposed to an unspectacular point-and-shoot dramatist of what we used to call TV-level visual chops.
What I'm saying is: It's okay to let this series go. I understand why we cling to it, but enough is enough. Propping up this franchise in 2016 is like unironically propping up HAWK THE SLAYER after LORD OF THE RINGS.
But whatever. Thanks to DEADPOOL we're going to keep getting these now in one form or another, even as it begins to feel more and more like Fox intends to jog in place accomplishing nothing special (the next movie will apparently be set in the 90s to maintain whatever the nonsensical continuity is now) for the main series while they wait for Disney/Marvel to make them a Spidey-style shared custody offer; so it's time to watch the surviving FIRST CLASS actors team up with the new baby-faced versions of the Parts 1-3 characters whose actors have aged out of the franchise for what amounts (in terms of actual plot) to a 2 1/2 hour explanation for why Professor Xavier went bald early. Riveting.
Any pleasures to be had amid this tedium are strictly of the ironic variety. Specifically: It's enormous fun to watch poor Oscar Isaac (usually one of the most expressive and versatile actors working today) stomp around looking like a 1970s SUPER SENTAI villain in absurdly fake-looking prosthetic makeup and plastic armor (there isn't a single prop, set, costume or makeup effect in the film that doesn't look Schumacher-BATMAN-level phony) as Apocalypse, supposedly "The First Mutant" and our basis for various myths about gods and demons etc. Buried alive in Ancient Egypt, he wakes up in the alt-reality 1980s created by DAYS OF FUTURE PAST's time-travel meddling and decides that humanity has fucked up the planet so bad that he needs to blow everything up and start over as Mutant God again; so he assembles a team consisting of Storm, Angel, Magento and newbie mutant Psylocke and supercharges their powers to help him kidnap Professor X so that he can hijack his mind-powers to find and manipulate every mutant on Earth at once because that's exactly what the bad guys did in X2 and that was the last time anyone not named Matthew Vaughn made a good X-MEN movie.
Meanwhile, plot contrivances (and contractual obligations) bring Mystique (J-Law again, somehow affecting her most vacant, disinterested thousand-yard-stare yet) back to the Xavier School at the same relative time as the new Barely Legal versions of Cyclops, Jean Grey and Nightcrawler are all turning up along with still-mindwiped Moira MacTaggart, who wants help running down Apocalypse and Magneto - who's evil again because he moved to Poland and tried to start a family and just guess how that ended up. It's all just a lot of marking time until Apocalypse can show up and blow the school to smithereens, compelling Mystique to get over her resistance to heroism (young mutants now hero-worship "The Blue Woman" as a Che-style revolutionary icon that she wants no part of) and re-assemble The X-Men in order to rescue Charles and beat Apocalypse...
...but only after an insultingly-pointless, utterly unnecessary plot detour during which the main good guys are abducted by Baby General Stryker and whisked off to an underground facility exclusively so that they can bump into Hugh Jackman for about two minutes of bloodless Wolverine cameo-carnage and then promptly hurry back on their way to back to the main storyline. It's as nakedly awkward as I'm making it sound, reeks of post-production interference and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out it was all created in reshoots - and yet, somehow, Wolverine still has more actual bearing on the plot than (Arch?)Angel, Storm and Psylocke; none of whom serve even a contrived purpose since Apocalypse's big scheme is essentially: Super-Magneto destroys the world with Earthquakes.
On balance it's not quite as disastrously bad as X3 and just about even with ORIGINS: WOLVERINE in terms of enthusiastically-boneheaded stupidity, to the point where it might even be "fun" after a fashion if Singer was a better director of spectacle or had the capacity to have genuine fun within the genre. Unfortunately, APOCALYPSE has clearly been designed with the aim of aping the structure/tone of the most-recent Marvel features - read: witty banter, elaborate fight sequences, Lucky Charms color-palette, a giant climactic fight scene in the middle of basically the whole damn world exploding into pixel showers in the background - which would make for a headache-inducing clash with Singer's prevailing "sullen-Ambercrombie-models-looking-pouty" aesthetic that it likely wouldn't have looked good if he could direct it properly - which he can't.
It's honestly shocking just how bad the "big" moments of the film look, particularly a third act mega-brawl set in a blown-to-bits Cairo. Outrageously poor green-screen compositing and lighting/lensing choices seemingly designed to highlight how fake everyone looks (poor Olivia Munn looks like she's posing for an expensive-for-2002 cosplay shoot) would be forgivable with even a minimum of visual flourish, but the composite/soundstage/CGI mix is so stagey and basic that your average Sid & Marty Kroft show was overall more inventive about disguising their plate-shots. Fassbender's Magneto, hovering unconvincingly amid swirling digital chaos, looks less like a Horseman of The Apocalypse than he does a badly-dressed many giving a TED Talk about advances in particle-FX animation.
In a moment that crystallizes the "soulless xerox of an MCU entry" sensibility intrinsic to the whole enterprise, the film opts to insert it's requisite Stan Lee cameo not into the margins or a tension-relieving "funny" scene; but into one of the most (theoretically) dramatic moments possible - garaunteeing gufaws from the audience at one of the least opportune times. By the same token, since everybody (but me) made an obnoxiously big deal out of the Quicksilver slo-mo scene in DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, we get two more of them here: One of which turns what should be a big deal plot point into a jokey "Ha! I remember that 80s song!" spotfest, the other of which serves to render him so overpowered it feels pointless to have any other X-Men around - even if everyone didn't keep forgetting which powers they have until they need it for a specific beat.
The only question I end up having as all of this dull drivel winds down is whether or not having to follow one of the best recent superhero movies (CIVIL WAR) and one of the all-time worst (BATMAN V SUPERMAN) to theaters works out against the film or in its favor. I'm on record not believing in "superhero fatigue," but X-MEN: APOCALYPSE is exactly the kind of movie that under the right circumstances could get me way down in the dumps about the genre - it's not even bad enough to make for interesting "how did this abomination happen!?" discussion like BVS or FANT4STIC. There's no mystery to how pointless, uninspired fare like this get's made - or to why there'll almost certainly be more of it before we're through.
Enjoy this review? Please consider contributing to The MovieBob Patreon.
Broken record time: There are plenty of pre-modern (read: prior to BATMAN BEGINS/IRON MAN) superhero movies that absolutely hold up. Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN is one. The 1978 SUPERMAN is one. BATMAN RETURNS... sort of. The first two BLADE movies, definitely - I know we're only "supposed" to like BLADE II because of Guillermo del Toro, but the first one is totally serviceable.
But the X-MEN movies? No. They don't hold up. Portions of them do: McKellan's Magneto is a hell of a performance, Jackman as Wolverine was a great discovery, Patrick Stewart is... basically doing exactly what you expected, so it's fine. Zeroing in on the gay-youth metaphor was a good idea. Sort-of-nude Mystique is iconic. X2 has a decent-ish screenplay, which helps alot. But taken as a whole? Only FIRST CLASS is a straight-up good movie, and THE WOLVERINE is 2/3rds of a good B-movie. The rest of them are varying degrees of straight-up bad (ORIGINS: WOLVERINE and X3 being the worst) - aesthetically ugly, blandly directed, filler-packed half-efforts of which X2 gets a pass because it's screenplay is good enough and restricting 90% of the action to the X-Mansion, underlit hallways and... more underlit hallways helps disguise Bryan Singer's inability to properly direct action sequences or really any sequence with more than one plane of action and more than three active characters.
(SPOILERS after the jump)
And look, I get it: For a moment there, this looked like the best we could've possibly hoped for, isolated scenes like Wolverine defending the Mansion and Iceman "coming out" to his parents are damn close to transcendent and seeing the Phoenix shape under the water was Nick Fury before Nick Fury. I was there, too, I understand. But I've also lived through the decade-plus hence with clear eyes, and apart from FIRST CLASS (again, the only good one) the only thing more disappointing in hindsight than the totality of the X-MEN movies is the whole idea of Bryan Singer being a major talent as opposed to an unspectacular point-and-shoot dramatist of what we used to call TV-level visual chops.
What I'm saying is: It's okay to let this series go. I understand why we cling to it, but enough is enough. Propping up this franchise in 2016 is like unironically propping up HAWK THE SLAYER after LORD OF THE RINGS.
But whatever. Thanks to DEADPOOL we're going to keep getting these now in one form or another, even as it begins to feel more and more like Fox intends to jog in place accomplishing nothing special (the next movie will apparently be set in the 90s to maintain whatever the nonsensical continuity is now) for the main series while they wait for Disney/Marvel to make them a Spidey-style shared custody offer; so it's time to watch the surviving FIRST CLASS actors team up with the new baby-faced versions of the Parts 1-3 characters whose actors have aged out of the franchise for what amounts (in terms of actual plot) to a 2 1/2 hour explanation for why Professor Xavier went bald early. Riveting.
Any pleasures to be had amid this tedium are strictly of the ironic variety. Specifically: It's enormous fun to watch poor Oscar Isaac (usually one of the most expressive and versatile actors working today) stomp around looking like a 1970s SUPER SENTAI villain in absurdly fake-looking prosthetic makeup and plastic armor (there isn't a single prop, set, costume or makeup effect in the film that doesn't look Schumacher-BATMAN-level phony) as Apocalypse, supposedly "The First Mutant" and our basis for various myths about gods and demons etc. Buried alive in Ancient Egypt, he wakes up in the alt-reality 1980s created by DAYS OF FUTURE PAST's time-travel meddling and decides that humanity has fucked up the planet so bad that he needs to blow everything up and start over as Mutant God again; so he assembles a team consisting of Storm, Angel, Magento and newbie mutant Psylocke and supercharges their powers to help him kidnap Professor X so that he can hijack his mind-powers to find and manipulate every mutant on Earth at once because that's exactly what the bad guys did in X2 and that was the last time anyone not named Matthew Vaughn made a good X-MEN movie.
Meanwhile, plot contrivances (and contractual obligations) bring Mystique (J-Law again, somehow affecting her most vacant, disinterested thousand-yard-stare yet) back to the Xavier School at the same relative time as the new Barely Legal versions of Cyclops, Jean Grey and Nightcrawler are all turning up along with still-mindwiped Moira MacTaggart, who wants help running down Apocalypse and Magneto - who's evil again because he moved to Poland and tried to start a family and just guess how that ended up. It's all just a lot of marking time until Apocalypse can show up and blow the school to smithereens, compelling Mystique to get over her resistance to heroism (young mutants now hero-worship "The Blue Woman" as a Che-style revolutionary icon that she wants no part of) and re-assemble The X-Men in order to rescue Charles and beat Apocalypse...
...but only after an insultingly-pointless, utterly unnecessary plot detour during which the main good guys are abducted by Baby General Stryker and whisked off to an underground facility exclusively so that they can bump into Hugh Jackman for about two minutes of bloodless Wolverine cameo-carnage and then promptly hurry back on their way to back to the main storyline. It's as nakedly awkward as I'm making it sound, reeks of post-production interference and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out it was all created in reshoots - and yet, somehow, Wolverine still has more actual bearing on the plot than (Arch?)Angel, Storm and Psylocke; none of whom serve even a contrived purpose since Apocalypse's big scheme is essentially: Super-Magneto destroys the world with Earthquakes.
On balance it's not quite as disastrously bad as X3 and just about even with ORIGINS: WOLVERINE in terms of enthusiastically-boneheaded stupidity, to the point where it might even be "fun" after a fashion if Singer was a better director of spectacle or had the capacity to have genuine fun within the genre. Unfortunately, APOCALYPSE has clearly been designed with the aim of aping the structure/tone of the most-recent Marvel features - read: witty banter, elaborate fight sequences, Lucky Charms color-palette, a giant climactic fight scene in the middle of basically the whole damn world exploding into pixel showers in the background - which would make for a headache-inducing clash with Singer's prevailing "sullen-Ambercrombie-models-looking-pouty" aesthetic that it likely wouldn't have looked good if he could direct it properly - which he can't.
It's honestly shocking just how bad the "big" moments of the film look, particularly a third act mega-brawl set in a blown-to-bits Cairo. Outrageously poor green-screen compositing and lighting/lensing choices seemingly designed to highlight how fake everyone looks (poor Olivia Munn looks like she's posing for an expensive-for-2002 cosplay shoot) would be forgivable with even a minimum of visual flourish, but the composite/soundstage/CGI mix is so stagey and basic that your average Sid & Marty Kroft show was overall more inventive about disguising their plate-shots. Fassbender's Magneto, hovering unconvincingly amid swirling digital chaos, looks less like a Horseman of The Apocalypse than he does a badly-dressed many giving a TED Talk about advances in particle-FX animation.
In a moment that crystallizes the "soulless xerox of an MCU entry" sensibility intrinsic to the whole enterprise, the film opts to insert it's requisite Stan Lee cameo not into the margins or a tension-relieving "funny" scene; but into one of the most (theoretically) dramatic moments possible - garaunteeing gufaws from the audience at one of the least opportune times. By the same token, since everybody (but me) made an obnoxiously big deal out of the Quicksilver slo-mo scene in DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, we get two more of them here: One of which turns what should be a big deal plot point into a jokey "Ha! I remember that 80s song!" spotfest, the other of which serves to render him so overpowered it feels pointless to have any other X-Men around - even if everyone didn't keep forgetting which powers they have until they need it for a specific beat.
The only question I end up having as all of this dull drivel winds down is whether or not having to follow one of the best recent superhero movies (CIVIL WAR) and one of the all-time worst (BATMAN V SUPERMAN) to theaters works out against the film or in its favor. I'm on record not believing in "superhero fatigue," but X-MEN: APOCALYPSE is exactly the kind of movie that under the right circumstances could get me way down in the dumps about the genre - it's not even bad enough to make for interesting "how did this abomination happen!?" discussion like BVS or FANT4STIC. There's no mystery to how pointless, uninspired fare like this get's made - or to why there'll almost certainly be more of it before we're through.
Enjoy this review? Please consider contributing to The MovieBob Patreon.
Review: CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR
This review is made possible in part through donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you see, please consider becoming a Patron.
(Full Text after the jump)
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when Marvel makes a bad movie. I don’t mean as in “Hey, this isn’t as good as the first one!” or “This feels tonally at odds with the others and/or of lower stakes;” I mean an entry that actually outright kind of sucks – and I’m not counting the third season of AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. even though, yeah, Season 3 does kind of suck overall. I mean at some point, just by the law of averages, one of these things is going to outright bad… and at this point I’m curious to know what that means, because my suspicion is that the answer is “not much.”
By now the Marvel machinery works so well that comparisons to Swiss watches are no longer adequate: The studio’s output is more like the water-cycle at this point, turning hype into engagement into narrative and back into hype so efficiently that it feels fully capable of processing a failure and moving on: If DOCTOR STRANGE turns out to not be good in November whatever new slivers of worldbuilding detail it contributes to the bigger picture will still be poured over in forgiveness-generating detail until GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 2 wins everyone back in May with SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING batting cleanup in July. Whenever the subject of “superhero fatigue” comes up, I continue to maintain that the I’m-tired-of-this/lets-take-a-break/oh-hey-a-new-one-I’m-reminded-why-I-like-this cycle that used to be a years-long process for genre movies now takes mere months and happened for Marvel in the brief interlude between AGE OF ULTRON and ANT-MAN.
I bring this up because among the surprises to be found in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR is just how leisurely and self-assured it feels about its own existence. Despite the sensationalism of its basic setup (Friends becomes enemies! Superhero civics debate! The End of The Avengers!?) and the frenetic pace of its narrative, in terms of tone and self-regard it’s the most “lived-in” feeling blockbuster in recent memory – capable of thrilling and confidently carrying a two or three of the most satisfying setpieces the genre has ever managed to deliver up its sleeve like an emergency mood-booster, but secure to an almost zen-like state that A.) it has the goods and B.) even if it doesn’t have quite the goods it thinks it does, we’re not going to “turn” on the MCU now.
The result is that, while it could well be (on balance) the best Marvel movie since THE AVENGERS (and a more fitting thematic follow-up to that feature than its own sequel by a substantial measure) it’s also among the most deliberately-plotted and “comfy” installments in whole Marvel mega-franchise – the action movie equivalent of a hit TV show wheeling out the big guns for sweeps week secure (along with the audience) in the awareness that there’s still plenty of episodes to go before the finale.
That should be bizarre, given that the entire plot of the film is about (literally) blowing the status quo of the MCU’s central narrative hub to smithereens, but it makes sense given the degree of investment expected of the audience for all that “blowing up” to matter: We care because we love these characters and their world, we love these characters and their world because we’ve gotten to know them over more than a dozen prior films, because we love them and their world we know there will be many dozens of films to come – so, for a change, even though the action is big as ever the actual stakes are comparatively small and intimate: The world doesn’t need to be ending and it’s pointless to pretend that the MCU storyline could “finish” here, so instead lets enjoy watching our favorite characters work out some issues, develop some new dimensions and occasionally set off some new fireworks. In fact, without giving too much away, this is the first film in awhile where the mystery of what’s “really” driving an escalating series of small, personal grievances turns out to be… A smaller, even more personal grievance.
The plot you already know from the ubiquitous trailers: Something goes wrong during a routine Avengers mission that leads to collateral damage and takes the already faded bloom off the rose of having superheroes running around unchecked with enough of the global public that the U.N. steps in to force Captain America and company to become a regulated outfit. Some say yes, others say no, Cap’s “no” becomes more emphatic when a terrorist strike during the signing of the new deal is blamed on The Winter Soldier – aka Cap’s brainwashed ex-HYDRA cyborg assassin bestie Bucky Barnes – and he (after being convinced of his friend is innocent and something more sinister is afoot) goes rogue to hunt for the real culprit. Complicating matters further, one of the U.N. signatories killed in the attack was the King of the secretive African nation of Wakanda; whose son has now donned the ceremonial battle-armor of The Black Panther in order to hunt down and kill The Winter Soldier himself.
The big question mark hovering over the film from the beginning has been whether or not this was the point where the overriding commitment to a shared universe would overwhelm the individual storyline: Sure, it’s nice to see the cast hanging around and not having to wonder where all the other heroes went during a solo movie; but are we getting the “lite” version of an AVENGERS sequel at the expense of a CAPTAIN AMERICA movie?
Luckily, the answer turns out to be… it can be both: This is definitely CAPTAIN AMERICA 3 – and, more importantly, the direct continuation of the WINTER SOLDIER storyline – but since Captain America LIVES in Avengers Headquarters and the other Avengers comprise about 99% of his known social circle it really can’t help but also be an AVENGERS movie. And with that aforementioned leisurely confidence in place, CIVIL WAR wisely opts to take some of that well-earned audience goodwill and spend it on fleshing-out the character stuff that’s been driving these movies from the beginning: So Vision and Scarlet Witch get some character development, Falcon and War Machine get to voice their opinions about the way their more prominent allies conduct business, Black Widow gets to be morally-complicated on a more than superficial level… hell, Black Panther get’s an entire introductory character arc two years in advance of his own movie!
(Seriously – I’m really curious what the BLACK PANTHER movie is going to be about now that a version of the story you’d kind of expect them to tell in the first BLACK PANTHER movie has now already been told in background of this one.)
And yes – especially in the second act – it does start to feel like the proper AVENGERS sequel that AGE OF ULTRON never quite managed to be, if for no other reason than it’s as strongly a movie about a team falling apart as that first film was about a team coming together. But once the plot heads into its conclusion and the full scope and purpose of the narrative is laid bare, it becomes extremely clear that CIVIL WAR is fundamentally Captain America’s movie above all else – in as much as the thematic core is all about the push-pull of doing what you want emotionally versus doing what’s right and he’s the Avenger that embodies that inner conflict moreso than anyone else in the franchise.
The narrative arc they wring out of that, where it’s completely understandable that the other characters are more than a little skeptical that Cap’s thinking clearly when he decides to basically fight the entire rest of the world in order to clear his friend’s name, is legitimately fascinating to watch play out in such surprisingly complex terms; and instead of hogging the spotlight as many had feared Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man turns out to be a perfectly-chosen mirror-opposite to the same arc: Sure, he seems to be doing what he thinks is right; but it’s also clear that retirement not really working out and no longer having any Avenging to fall back on is letting his personal demons consume him all over again. And the dynamics at play that allow the pair to maintain their ideological “sides” while gradually trading places in terms of the attitude is a such a strange but interesting way to construct an emotional narrative I can’t help but admire it.
The strength of all that heart-on-sleeve operatic emotionality is why I’m having a hard time settling on whether or not this or WINTER SOLDIER is actually the better movie. It’d be hard to argue that SOLDIER was the more rigidly coherent and polished work in terms of structure, but CIVIL WAR is substantially more satisfying from a “pure cinema” perspective: There are some pretty hard to ignore logical leaps a play – mainly in that the entire scenario hinges on someone being able to both manipulate and predict the exact actions of dozens of individuals and entire national governments without really explaining how said someone was able to do – so but the payoff is SO strong and hits SO hard it’s genuinely hard to care… and also, yeah, because it’s a Marvel movie and by now we’ve all been trained to give that sort of thing the benefit of the doubt since three movies from now it’ll probably turn he had a magic rock or something.
But yeah – it’s a superhero movie, but it’s practically structured like the macho-melodrama version of a MARX BROS comedy: The storyline is “there” but it’s largely incidental to the true purpose of creating scenarios for the characters to literally figuratively “bounce off” of one another: So if it’ll help remind everyone just how natural it is for people in this universe trip over themselves for the chance to fight alongside Captain America and having Ant-Man show up will do that? Then you do that. And if it’ll add some necessary complexity to Tony Stark’s storyline to have him help out an underprivileged teenager and that gives you an opportunity to introduce Spider-Man to everybody? Then you do that, too. And that means you’ve got two more dynamic characters for a big show-stopping end of Act 2 blowout where everyone vents their long-simmering frustrations with one another and since they’re all varying degrees of super-powered godlings it escalates into one of the most ridiculous yet amazing action sequences ever put to film – and yes, it’s as awesome and worth the price all on its own as you’ve heard.
But however cool it all is, what sticks around and satisfies about CIVIL WAR is the emotion-driven character work that the action scenes ultimately exist to facilitate and underline – which is why it’s hard to find fault with the actual plot being kind of a superfluous shell game: By the time the big all-cards-on-the-table finale has rolled around we find – even as the mysteries have all been solved, the cause of the superhero Civil War has been identified and the narrative reasons behind the fighting have ceased – the fighting isn’t over because the dark secrets, deep-seated character flaws and furious emotional pain involved have transcended the plot-mechanics that brought them to the surface in the first place; and sometimes things like that don’t just “go away” because the inciting disaster has averted. When was the last time that was the moral of a “serious” or “grownup” movie – let alone a movie where freakin’ Ant-Man is a featured player?
And what’s most impressive of all, from a broader cultural standpoint, is that while it’s a given that the smug set will be all too happy to hand CIVIL WAR the backhanded compliment of having accomplished all this “in spite of being just another Marvel movie;” the fact is the weird, risky, offbeat, atypical stuff that makes the film work is largely only possible because Marvel has created a cultural zeitgeist for CIVIL WAR to inhabit. You simply couldn’t have a character-driven movie in this genre with this dense of an emotional narrative if so much work hadn’t already been done establishing these characters and their world in the first place: What starts as a geopolitical conflict of high-minded hypotheticals narrows down into an extended-family schism among a dozen or so ideological standard bearers and then compresses all the way down to an intensely personal brawl where it’s genuinely, viscerally difficult to root completely for (or against) either side.
That’s an impressive feat of storytelling in any genre; and while I’m not 100% convinced that CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR is itself the best film the Marvel Cinematic Universe has produced, it’s far and away the best example of why it was worth constructing in the first place – and why it’s not going anywhere any time soon.
P.S. In case you were wondering: Tom Holland is fantastic… but I feel like Tobey Maguire is still going to be the best Spider-Man. That being said, I’m increasingly of the mind that the Sam Raimi SPIDER-MAN probably needs to go on the shelf with the Richard Donner SUPERMAN i.e. “Yes, these will never be equaled and you can’t keep marking down every subsequent attempt for not living up to unattainable miracles.” The new SPIDER-MAN works and I think HOMECOMING is in good hands.
This review is made possible in part through donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you see, please consider becoming a Patron.
Catching Up 5/4/2016
Hey! Did you notice I've been a little quiet on this website the last few weeks? Well, it's because big things* have been in the works. Two of which can now be read up on ScreenRant:
A CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE:
Sure, you've probably read through the "which order to watch the Marvel Movies in" lists, and you've probably done your refresher-course work to get ready for CIVIL WAR (review forthcoming, incidentally) - but have you ever wanted to be able to look at a chronological breakdown of every event depicted in the MCU movies starting with the beginning of the Universe (as in The Big Bang) right up to this very week, including the events of the Netflix series and AGENTS OF S.H.I.EL.D.? Well, now you can. The (tentative) plan is to update it as new information becomes available, so bookmark it now if you want to - either way, enjoy!
15 CHARACTERS WE WANT TO SEE IN SUPERGIRL - SEASON 2:
Exactly what it says on the label. Sometimes work is hard, sometimes work is hard but you're getting paid to explain how Comet The Superhorse works.
*Yes, the long-awaited REALLY THAT GOOD: SUPERMAN is in fact one of those big things. It's on the way, and I thank you for your patience. As ever, both speeding me up and keeping me afloat period are functions of The MovieBob Patreon :)
A CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE:
Sure, you've probably read through the "which order to watch the Marvel Movies in" lists, and you've probably done your refresher-course work to get ready for CIVIL WAR (review forthcoming, incidentally) - but have you ever wanted to be able to look at a chronological breakdown of every event depicted in the MCU movies starting with the beginning of the Universe (as in The Big Bang) right up to this very week, including the events of the Netflix series and AGENTS OF S.H.I.EL.D.? Well, now you can. The (tentative) plan is to update it as new information becomes available, so bookmark it now if you want to - either way, enjoy!
15 CHARACTERS WE WANT TO SEE IN SUPERGIRL - SEASON 2:
Exactly what it says on the label. Sometimes work is hard, sometimes work is hard but you're getting paid to explain how Comet The Superhorse works.
*Yes, the long-awaited REALLY THAT GOOD: SUPERMAN is in fact one of those big things. It's on the way, and I thank you for your patience. As ever, both speeding me up and keeping me afloat period are functions of The MovieBob Patreon :)
Here We Go Again...
The screencap, in case this was an early trigger-pull and they take it down:
TV RECAP: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 3 - Episode 17: "The Team"
"The Team" has been teased as "the one you've been waiting for," since it's plot supposedly involves finally giving the Secret Warriors (i.e. Daisy and the handful of good-guy Inhumans we've met so far this season) a full-fledged mission; in this case to rescue the rest of the cast from being held captive by Hive and Giyera. The sequence where this actually happens is pretty impressive, with the standout business being the chemistry between Yoyo and Joey, even if it does serve to highlight that giving AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D its own mini-Avengers to play with only highlights how much of an also-ran the series feels like in its lesser moments.
But whatever, it's actually a tiny part of the episode, is over quickly and the entire Secret Warriors storyline more or less goes "That's it, next thing!" by midpoint. Gotcha!
No, really. Once the rescue is done and the team is back at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ with a willingly-captured Mallick (he wants to team up and fight Hive now to get revenge for his daughter), "The Team" more or less tips its hand and reveals the Secret Warriors' big debut was basically misdirection for the episode's true intent: A low-tech redux of THE THING.
Short version: Mallick tells Coulson about Hive's ability to mind-control Inhumans, so all the non-Inhuman Agents get paranoid and decide they have to covertly lock down the base and try to figure out if any of their allies are infected without telling them. Naturally, this doesn't work and soon enough The Inhumans are in quarantine (Daisy betrays them to her teammates) and now nobody trusts eachother - especially since, in all the confusion, someone killed Mallick. For a moment, it even feels like they've found the infectee... but it turns out they figured wrong, and the episode concludes on the now evil former good guy poised to potentially destroy HQ with everyone inside.
So who's the baddie? Daisy, duh - who else was it going to be?
In truth, this is a pretty damn good episode up to that point. The quandry makes sense, the two Spanish-speaking Secret Warriors are great characters whose actors have a killer rapport, everyone's actions make complete sense and there's a palpable sense of loss to the idea of these people ceasing to trust one another even though there wasn't any other choice to be had. Hell, on paper Daisy being Hive's unwitting sleeper even makes total dramatic sense in as much as it leaves the team in the worst possible situation: The Agents and The Inhumans will have to put their mutual distrust aside to stop this, and the only teammate who truly lives in both worlds has been removed from the equation.
And yet, frustratingly, that also means AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D once again going back to the two wells that have become the most tiresome: The tendency of every damn storyline to lead back to Daisy and "Skye/Ward," a pairing that wasn't interesting when they where both human and is unlikely to be interesting now.
I don't know. I'm trying to work out how this wraps up interestingly short of "death of a main character" or "unlikely actual reprecussions from CIVIL WAR" and the options feel pretty limited at this point. Daisy being "evil" for awhile, the turning out Hive because Coulson/May/Lincoln/whoever somehow gets through to her just feels like a retread of places we already went at the climax of Season 2 but not as good. Supposedly the "Fallen Agent" storyline is going to be stretched out over a 4 episode arc ("The Singularity," "Failed Experiments," "Emancipation" and "Forgiven") with CIVIL WAR happening in the middle, with the season finale "Ascension" hitting one episode later.
I guess we'll see, especially considering Season 4 is already greenlit.
But whatever, it's actually a tiny part of the episode, is over quickly and the entire Secret Warriors storyline more or less goes "That's it, next thing!" by midpoint. Gotcha!
No, really. Once the rescue is done and the team is back at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ with a willingly-captured Mallick (he wants to team up and fight Hive now to get revenge for his daughter), "The Team" more or less tips its hand and reveals the Secret Warriors' big debut was basically misdirection for the episode's true intent: A low-tech redux of THE THING.
Short version: Mallick tells Coulson about Hive's ability to mind-control Inhumans, so all the non-Inhuman Agents get paranoid and decide they have to covertly lock down the base and try to figure out if any of their allies are infected without telling them. Naturally, this doesn't work and soon enough The Inhumans are in quarantine (Daisy betrays them to her teammates) and now nobody trusts eachother - especially since, in all the confusion, someone killed Mallick. For a moment, it even feels like they've found the infectee... but it turns out they figured wrong, and the episode concludes on the now evil former good guy poised to potentially destroy HQ with everyone inside.
So who's the baddie? Daisy, duh - who else was it going to be?
In truth, this is a pretty damn good episode up to that point. The quandry makes sense, the two Spanish-speaking Secret Warriors are great characters whose actors have a killer rapport, everyone's actions make complete sense and there's a palpable sense of loss to the idea of these people ceasing to trust one another even though there wasn't any other choice to be had. Hell, on paper Daisy being Hive's unwitting sleeper even makes total dramatic sense in as much as it leaves the team in the worst possible situation: The Agents and The Inhumans will have to put their mutual distrust aside to stop this, and the only teammate who truly lives in both worlds has been removed from the equation.
And yet, frustratingly, that also means AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D once again going back to the two wells that have become the most tiresome: The tendency of every damn storyline to lead back to Daisy and "Skye/Ward," a pairing that wasn't interesting when they where both human and is unlikely to be interesting now.
I don't know. I'm trying to work out how this wraps up interestingly short of "death of a main character" or "unlikely actual reprecussions from CIVIL WAR" and the options feel pretty limited at this point. Daisy being "evil" for awhile, the turning out Hive because Coulson/May/Lincoln/whoever somehow gets through to her just feels like a retread of places we already went at the climax of Season 2 but not as good. Supposedly the "Fallen Agent" storyline is going to be stretched out over a 4 episode arc ("The Singularity," "Failed Experiments," "Emancipation" and "Forgiven") with CIVIL WAR happening in the middle, with the season finale "Ascension" hitting one episode later.
I guess we'll see, especially considering Season 4 is already greenlit.
TV RECAP: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 3 - Episode 16: "Paradise Lost"
This recap made possible through donations to The MovieBob Patreon.
In the wake of some much needed diversion from formula in last week's offbeat future-seeing episode, "Paradise Lost" gets us back to AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. Classic Recipe: a lot of low-tech-playing-high-tech diversions with the promise of later payoffs, capped off by a last-minute swerve and (for good measure) someone slamming their fist on the big red button marked Major Plot Point with enough flourish to almost make it feel like an earned moment as opposed to "Hey! The writers have just been informed of how CIVIL WAR shakes out."
Spoilers after the jump...
To recap: Everyone is finally on the same page re: Hive, the ancient Inhuman HYDRA apparently worships as a god is on Earth wearing a Grant Ward skinsuit and building an ill-defined evil scheme involving his fellow Inhumans, but now things are complicated further by good guy Daisy and bad guy Gideon Malick both having experienced flash-forwards involving death last episode.
For a change, the main story this time is mainly about developing the villains; as we learn Hive's back story (short version: he was the Mark I Inhumans' General Zod, a genetically-engineered military mastermind who led the Inhuman rebellion against the Kree but then went mad with power and got himself exiled offworld) and get some background on Malick and HYDRA - though fans hoping that it might make AGENTS' conception of the secret supervillain society make more sense are out of luck. But, then again, if "make more sense" is really high on your list of priorities for AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D., chances are you checked out of Season 3 awhile ago.
We here learn (courtesy flashbacks to a college age Gideon and his brother uneasily taking the reigns of the family business after the death of their father) that while all of HYDRA is aware of their Hive-worshipper origins, not everyone is still fully onboard. The Mallicks belong to the old school "draw lots to see who gets sacrificed to Hive" sect, while Red Skull and Daniel Whitehall's Nazi-aligned faction were less devout about it and who knows what the S.H.I.E.L.D-infiltrating cats were on about. With a little extra push, this would all be a brilliant satire of how monumentally stupid the entire Illuminati/Bilderberger/Rothschild/Trilateral/"Bankster" globalist-conspiracy theory bullshit is when you lay it all out; but sadly AGENTS' usually admirable resistance to self-parody won't quite let it.
In any case: We glean this as Mallick, while waiting for HYDRA bigwigs to arrive for a fancy dinner in Hive's honor at his estate (while also scheming to avoid a prophecized death he believes will occur at his god's hands) recalls how Whitehall tempted he and his brother being tempted to the dark(er?) side by Whitehall, who reveals that Papa Mallick rose to power by gaming his participation in the lot-drawing ceremonies with a marked stone. The brothers resolved to reclaim the family honor by holding a fair-and-square drawing, and if you're noticing that this is the first time we've ever heard that Mallick had a brother you know where that's going.
Fortunately, most of that predictability pays off decently in terms of what however much of the other Mallick remains in Hive thinks of as karmic payback, and the whole thing has an appropriately lurid "70s pulp-Satanism" vibe; but there's no avoiding that AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. has fallen too much in love with its own penchant for misdirection: We can see it coming by now.
Elsewhere, the B-story is all about Coulson and the non-Inhuman Agents breaking into a factory acquired by Mallick in order to set up either the cause or solution to whatever Hive's big plan is. Finally getting to see Coulson start to lose it at the revelation that not only was murdering Ward against his own code but the direct cause of Hive being able to reach Earth is nice; but otherwise it's a bit of a snooze. Even the promised one-on-one fight between May and Giyera (Mark Dacascos) feels obligatory - c'mom guys! Dacascos and Ming-Na Wen are both legit icons of B-movie action, this is (literally!) Chun-Li vs Billy Lee... have some fun with it!
But whatever. The whole thing is really only happening so Giyera can be captured, taken back to S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ and escape, leaving the conveniently off-site Daisy and Lincoln to decide that *NOW* is the time to call in the Secret Warriors reserve-troops... as opposed to the several other times where the stakes have been at exactly the same height. The problem is, while Dacascos has screen-presence to burn, the show has been too indecisive about Giyera's role for him to suddenly be an all-stops threat now; so it all feels too obvious that the only real reason for the Warriors to go into action now is because AGENTS' needs a team of powered-pepole to show up and have their actions be misunderstood so that the plot can sort-of sync up with CIVIL WAR.
Amusingly, the C-story that serves to keep Daisy and Pikachu safe enough to push the Plot Button is actually more interesting: They go to seek out an Inhuman survivalist in Australia who once burgled information about Hive's back story from Afterlife, but the hook is that he's one of the Inhumans from whom Jaiying ultimately denied Terrigenisis because... he's a douchebag, I think? It sets up a novel bit of conflict where Lincoln baits him with Terrigen in order to grab a mysterious orb-like relic he'd stolen from Jaiying, but ultimately refuses him powers because he agrees with whatever their ex-leader's reasoning was. It's here that we get more information about Lincoln: He caused his girlfriend's death in a drunk driving accident shortly before The Inhumans found him.
This all feels like so much further setup for Daisy and Lincoln to be on opposite sides when AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D's version of the CIVIL WAR schism hits; but it plays out a lot more naturally than he Giyera story and I hope Australian Guy is a recurring character - especially if he turns out to be C-list SPIDER-MAN nemesis "The Kangaroo," whose power set includes jumping very high and being from Australia.
As for the orb? No idea. It looks like something halfway relates to the Infinity Stone vessel from GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY but covered with designs that look more than a little DOCTOR STRANGE-y; but at this point the safest bet is that they hadn't fully committed to what it is or does when they (the show) designed it, so it looks like a lot of things to cover all bases.
NEXT WEEK: In "The Team," The Secret Warriors get their buildup over with, at last, and someone turns out to be bad maybe. Personally, I'm hoping for Sexy Evil Simmons Who's Been Part Hive All Along; if only to spare us the predictable arc of Fitz and Simmons being on opposite sides of CIVIL WAR LITE:
ALSO: The show loves the hell out of Hive reducing his victims to skeletons, and Mallick's vision only shows him being partially zapped, so I'm renewing my old guess that he somehow winds up as Red Skull 2.0
This recap made possible through donations to The MovieBob Patreon.
In the wake of some much needed diversion from formula in last week's offbeat future-seeing episode, "Paradise Lost" gets us back to AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. Classic Recipe: a lot of low-tech-playing-high-tech diversions with the promise of later payoffs, capped off by a last-minute swerve and (for good measure) someone slamming their fist on the big red button marked Major Plot Point with enough flourish to almost make it feel like an earned moment as opposed to "Hey! The writers have just been informed of how CIVIL WAR shakes out."
Spoilers after the jump...
To recap: Everyone is finally on the same page re: Hive, the ancient Inhuman HYDRA apparently worships as a god is on Earth wearing a Grant Ward skinsuit and building an ill-defined evil scheme involving his fellow Inhumans, but now things are complicated further by good guy Daisy and bad guy Gideon Malick both having experienced flash-forwards involving death last episode.
For a change, the main story this time is mainly about developing the villains; as we learn Hive's back story (short version: he was the Mark I Inhumans' General Zod, a genetically-engineered military mastermind who led the Inhuman rebellion against the Kree but then went mad with power and got himself exiled offworld) and get some background on Malick and HYDRA - though fans hoping that it might make AGENTS' conception of the secret supervillain society make more sense are out of luck. But, then again, if "make more sense" is really high on your list of priorities for AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D., chances are you checked out of Season 3 awhile ago.
We here learn (courtesy flashbacks to a college age Gideon and his brother uneasily taking the reigns of the family business after the death of their father) that while all of HYDRA is aware of their Hive-worshipper origins, not everyone is still fully onboard. The Mallicks belong to the old school "draw lots to see who gets sacrificed to Hive" sect, while Red Skull and Daniel Whitehall's Nazi-aligned faction were less devout about it and who knows what the S.H.I.E.L.D-infiltrating cats were on about. With a little extra push, this would all be a brilliant satire of how monumentally stupid the entire Illuminati/Bilderberger/Rothschild/Trilateral/"Bankster" globalist-conspiracy theory bullshit is when you lay it all out; but sadly AGENTS' usually admirable resistance to self-parody won't quite let it.
In any case: We glean this as Mallick, while waiting for HYDRA bigwigs to arrive for a fancy dinner in Hive's honor at his estate (while also scheming to avoid a prophecized death he believes will occur at his god's hands) recalls how Whitehall tempted he and his brother being tempted to the dark(er?) side by Whitehall, who reveals that Papa Mallick rose to power by gaming his participation in the lot-drawing ceremonies with a marked stone. The brothers resolved to reclaim the family honor by holding a fair-and-square drawing, and if you're noticing that this is the first time we've ever heard that Mallick had a brother you know where that's going.
Fortunately, most of that predictability pays off decently in terms of what however much of the other Mallick remains in Hive thinks of as karmic payback, and the whole thing has an appropriately lurid "70s pulp-Satanism" vibe; but there's no avoiding that AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. has fallen too much in love with its own penchant for misdirection: We can see it coming by now.
Elsewhere, the B-story is all about Coulson and the non-Inhuman Agents breaking into a factory acquired by Mallick in order to set up either the cause or solution to whatever Hive's big plan is. Finally getting to see Coulson start to lose it at the revelation that not only was murdering Ward against his own code but the direct cause of Hive being able to reach Earth is nice; but otherwise it's a bit of a snooze. Even the promised one-on-one fight between May and Giyera (Mark Dacascos) feels obligatory - c'mom guys! Dacascos and Ming-Na Wen are both legit icons of B-movie action, this is (literally!) Chun-Li vs Billy Lee... have some fun with it!
But whatever. The whole thing is really only happening so Giyera can be captured, taken back to S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ and escape, leaving the conveniently off-site Daisy and Lincoln to decide that *NOW* is the time to call in the Secret Warriors reserve-troops... as opposed to the several other times where the stakes have been at exactly the same height. The problem is, while Dacascos has screen-presence to burn, the show has been too indecisive about Giyera's role for him to suddenly be an all-stops threat now; so it all feels too obvious that the only real reason for the Warriors to go into action now is because AGENTS' needs a team of powered-pepole to show up and have their actions be misunderstood so that the plot can sort-of sync up with CIVIL WAR.
Amusingly, the C-story that serves to keep Daisy and Pikachu safe enough to push the Plot Button is actually more interesting: They go to seek out an Inhuman survivalist in Australia who once burgled information about Hive's back story from Afterlife, but the hook is that he's one of the Inhumans from whom Jaiying ultimately denied Terrigenisis because... he's a douchebag, I think? It sets up a novel bit of conflict where Lincoln baits him with Terrigen in order to grab a mysterious orb-like relic he'd stolen from Jaiying, but ultimately refuses him powers because he agrees with whatever their ex-leader's reasoning was. It's here that we get more information about Lincoln: He caused his girlfriend's death in a drunk driving accident shortly before The Inhumans found him.
This all feels like so much further setup for Daisy and Lincoln to be on opposite sides when AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D's version of the CIVIL WAR schism hits; but it plays out a lot more naturally than he Giyera story and I hope Australian Guy is a recurring character - especially if he turns out to be C-list SPIDER-MAN nemesis "The Kangaroo," whose power set includes jumping very high and being from Australia.
As for the orb? No idea. It looks like something halfway relates to the Infinity Stone vessel from GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY but covered with designs that look more than a little DOCTOR STRANGE-y; but at this point the safest bet is that they hadn't fully committed to what it is or does when they (the show) designed it, so it looks like a lot of things to cover all bases.
NEXT WEEK: In "The Team," The Secret Warriors get their buildup over with, at last, and someone turns out to be bad maybe. Personally, I'm hoping for Sexy Evil Simmons Who's Been Part Hive All Along; if only to spare us the predictable arc of Fitz and Simmons being on opposite sides of CIVIL WAR LITE:
ALSO: The show loves the hell out of Hive reducing his victims to skeletons, and Mallick's vision only shows him being partially zapped, so I'm renewing my old guess that he somehow winds up as Red Skull 2.0
This recap made possible through donations to The MovieBob Patreon.
Review: HARDCORE HENRY (2016)
This review is made possible by donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you see and would like to see more, please consider becoming a Patron.
HARDCORE HENRY is the sort of gleefully violent sensory-assault moviemaking that critics sometimes like to say feels "made by a madman," but in overall execution it's just a hair too deliberately-structured and well made for that to be a fair assessment. All told, the film is much closer to a (slightly) more polished version of a student film handed in by the class troublemaker; a show-off reel of every wicked, dangerous, inventive, perverse creative impulse they've got all in one go-for-broke splatter of imagination - as though they can't believe someone finally let them play with the camera and they know it has to count because they'll never be allowed to play with it again.
The results of such work are often tiresome, but at their best they offer a window into a unique, unrestrained vision. Like a lot of present-day art-school anarchists, director Ilya Naishuller's vision is one thoroughly cluttered with the influence of YouTube parkour and the video-game aesthetic; but also one with an awareness (however nascent) of those influences beyond mere imitation.
MILD SPOILERS from here onward:
Set (I think?) in the near-future, its protagonist is a recently injured (dead?) man named Henry who’s just been Frankensteined back to life by his lovely super-scientist wife Estelle using technology that’s effectively made him a cyborg – complete with a titanium skeleton, onboard battery and a superhuman endurance for pain. It’s also, supposedly temporarily, left him without any memories and unable to speak, allowing the film the cheeky trick of letting its protagonist not only take the audience along for his adventure in video-game inspired First Person view but also to embody modern gaming’s favorite brand of protagonist: The mute, backstory-free, superhuman bullet-sponge cipher.
When Estelle winds up kidnapped (because video games, you see) by Akan, a telekinetic supervillain (because video games, you see) who wants her to make him a whole army of undead cyborgs (because v… you get the idea), Henry sets off to save her – aided in his quest by Sharlto Copley’s mysterious Jimmy, a living parody of NPCs who wanders in and out of the story to hand Henry his mission objectives… even as he’s repeatedly killed off, only to return with a costume change and a new personality.
There's eventually a suitably high-concept explanation as to what's going on with Jimmy that adds a welcome note of poignancy to all the gorehound fireworks that make up the rest of the film (in terms of creative bloodshed, HARDCORE HENRY makes DEADPOOL look like the kiddie-pool), but like most of the film's reaches into science-fiction it feels less driven by narrative than by reverse engineering: "What sci-fi concept do we need to invent to have this bit of common video-game nonsense happen in the real world?" At one point, Henry even "powers up" by ripping a piece of combat-enhancing hardware out of a foes chest and graphically self-installing it into his own body like Mega Man as reimagined by David Cronenberg.
And make no mistake: While fans of extreme action-comedy in general will likely find plenty to enjoy in the film (the sheer number of new ways it finds for Henry to shoot, stab, slice, crush, bludgeon, bisect or even tri-sect the human body is something to behold) the places where Hardcore Henry becomes something like transcendent will land strongest with gamers. They're the ones who'll cue in on the specifics when Henry's mission objective takes him on a wholly gratuitous tour of a strip club a'la Duke Nukem, or when a gaggle of oddly-unperturbed sex-workers reason out a somewhat counter-intuitive method for recharging the weary hero's energy reserves (well, if it works for Kratos...) and will note the precise moment when the lengthy final confrontation with Akan (who already appears to have leaped, fully-formed, from a METAL GEAR SOLID sequel) switches from being the climax of a movie to a Boss Fight. If you're looking for the gamers in your screening, they'll be the ones already cheering when Henry kicks open a luckily-discovered first aid kit (yup!) filled with syringes conveniently-labeled "ADRENALINE" before Freddie Mercury's vocals come sneaking in on the soundtrack.
It might be a step too far to call it “satire” of modern gaming, but it's definitely a send-up; bursting at its (admittedly roughly-stitched) seams with the same love/hate exuberance about video games that REN & STIMPY had for classic TV cartoons - or that METALOCALYPSE had for heavy metal. It's not necessarily a condemnation of the fantasy of inhabiting a video game (or of being a game hero in real life), but it recognizes that either option would be more comic than dramatic - even as it chooses to revel in the "fun parts" anyway: It knows enough to pause for a laugh when a pair of Jimmy's allies showing up as leggy katana-wielding blondes in black vinyl catsuits, but you're still getting leggy katana-wielding blondes in black vinyl catsuits.
Fortunately, it's also got a few things on its mind about the medium beyond just hanging a lampshade on its own inherent silliness as an excuse to just keep doing it (though, yes, that's most of it - this is a science fair volcano, not a geology thesis.) The aforementioned reveal of what, exactly, the deal is with Jimmy is the start of a string of Act 3 story turns that aren't exactly unpredictable but arrive welcome all the same; retroactively infusing the preceding story (such as it is) with a vein of self-examination that should be familiar to gaming fans who've already taken their swings at the medium's emerging canon of self-critical works like THE STANLEY PARABLE, PORTAL, BRAID and SPEC OPS: THE LINE. It's the latter (a seemingly-conventional military shooter than gradually morphs into an apocalyptic denunciation of CALL OF DUTY-era narrative structure) with which Henry's final denoument has the most in common - though the film is aiming less for condemnation than it is for "a swift kick in the ass” when it comes to the games medium itself.
At the beginning I referred to Henry himself as a kind of Frankenstein monsters, and so it’s appropriate that to the degree that HARDCORE HENRY wants to be "about" anything it's about what a creation owes its creator and the very idea of identity and one's choice in their own story. As the film races into its own climax (like any great video game there's a castle to climb, a last wave of enemies to cut down and a Big Boss whose defeat requires every skill you've acquired) its central narrative question ceases to be whether or not Henry will save the princess and instead becomes who (or what) is really in charge of the hero's destiny: Estelle, who "made" him and now requires the very services she installed? Akan, who started the story and drove the narrative? Jimmy, who set the goals and walked him through the missions? Or is Henry the one with his hand on the (figurative) joystick - and if not, shouldn't he be?
Granted, it feels dubious to suggest that anything as enthusiastically frivolous as HARDCORE HENRY is really attempting some sort of existential statement. But a self-consciously blunt highlight reel of live-action video game homage turns out to be an amusingly insightful way to tweak narrative convention, even if a wicked final twist that lays all the self-examination bare could just as easily exist solely for Naishuller's mischievous little boy instincts to indulge in vandalizing gaming's most sanctified narrative device. But it can’t be avoided that video games - the type being referenced here, at least - live and die by their ability to give the player a cathartic fantasy of omnipotent power and absolute control precisely by limiting their options ("you can interact with anything so long as 'interact' means shoot-with-your-gun'") and locking in their goals: Go to X, kill Y, obtain Z, do it again, the box says you're the hero and the cutscene says this end goal is very important to you. Nor can it be avoided that applying that kind of setup to live-action humans can’t help but push all of the ever-familiar choice/fate quandaries right back up to the surface of a movie that’s already very proud of almost everything being on the surface.
And so as HARDCORE HENRY’S eponymous protagonist struggles bloodily to his feet at the midpoint of a particularly gruesome climactic battle, suddenly awash in questions about exactly what he's done (and has been prepared to do) because this or that person handed him a task and told him what an awesome badass he was whenever executed the correct sequence of actions; it's hard not to reflect (if just for a moment) on how much that same quietly-insidious method of incentive exists outside of video games or their action-movie tributes - whether the "goal" in question is fighting a war, going through the motions of schoolwork (or an office job) or just getting through the day in one piece. As thematic underpinnings go, "who's pulling your strings?" may not be the most original question for a movie to ask, but it's certainly something to think about...
...for however long until it's time to strangle a bad guy to death with the sinews of one's own detached eyeball, course.
This review is made possible by donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you see and would like to see more, please consider becoming a Patron.
HARDCORE HENRY is the sort of gleefully violent sensory-assault moviemaking that critics sometimes like to say feels "made by a madman," but in overall execution it's just a hair too deliberately-structured and well made for that to be a fair assessment. All told, the film is much closer to a (slightly) more polished version of a student film handed in by the class troublemaker; a show-off reel of every wicked, dangerous, inventive, perverse creative impulse they've got all in one go-for-broke splatter of imagination - as though they can't believe someone finally let them play with the camera and they know it has to count because they'll never be allowed to play with it again.
The results of such work are often tiresome, but at their best they offer a window into a unique, unrestrained vision. Like a lot of present-day art-school anarchists, director Ilya Naishuller's vision is one thoroughly cluttered with the influence of YouTube parkour and the video-game aesthetic; but also one with an awareness (however nascent) of those influences beyond mere imitation.
MILD SPOILERS from here onward:
Set (I think?) in the near-future, its protagonist is a recently injured (dead?) man named Henry who’s just been Frankensteined back to life by his lovely super-scientist wife Estelle using technology that’s effectively made him a cyborg – complete with a titanium skeleton, onboard battery and a superhuman endurance for pain. It’s also, supposedly temporarily, left him without any memories and unable to speak, allowing the film the cheeky trick of letting its protagonist not only take the audience along for his adventure in video-game inspired First Person view but also to embody modern gaming’s favorite brand of protagonist: The mute, backstory-free, superhuman bullet-sponge cipher.
When Estelle winds up kidnapped (because video games, you see) by Akan, a telekinetic supervillain (because video games, you see) who wants her to make him a whole army of undead cyborgs (because v… you get the idea), Henry sets off to save her – aided in his quest by Sharlto Copley’s mysterious Jimmy, a living parody of NPCs who wanders in and out of the story to hand Henry his mission objectives… even as he’s repeatedly killed off, only to return with a costume change and a new personality.
There's eventually a suitably high-concept explanation as to what's going on with Jimmy that adds a welcome note of poignancy to all the gorehound fireworks that make up the rest of the film (in terms of creative bloodshed, HARDCORE HENRY makes DEADPOOL look like the kiddie-pool), but like most of the film's reaches into science-fiction it feels less driven by narrative than by reverse engineering: "What sci-fi concept do we need to invent to have this bit of common video-game nonsense happen in the real world?" At one point, Henry even "powers up" by ripping a piece of combat-enhancing hardware out of a foes chest and graphically self-installing it into his own body like Mega Man as reimagined by David Cronenberg.
And make no mistake: While fans of extreme action-comedy in general will likely find plenty to enjoy in the film (the sheer number of new ways it finds for Henry to shoot, stab, slice, crush, bludgeon, bisect or even tri-sect the human body is something to behold) the places where Hardcore Henry becomes something like transcendent will land strongest with gamers. They're the ones who'll cue in on the specifics when Henry's mission objective takes him on a wholly gratuitous tour of a strip club a'la Duke Nukem, or when a gaggle of oddly-unperturbed sex-workers reason out a somewhat counter-intuitive method for recharging the weary hero's energy reserves (well, if it works for Kratos...) and will note the precise moment when the lengthy final confrontation with Akan (who already appears to have leaped, fully-formed, from a METAL GEAR SOLID sequel) switches from being the climax of a movie to a Boss Fight. If you're looking for the gamers in your screening, they'll be the ones already cheering when Henry kicks open a luckily-discovered first aid kit (yup!) filled with syringes conveniently-labeled "ADRENALINE" before Freddie Mercury's vocals come sneaking in on the soundtrack.
It might be a step too far to call it “satire” of modern gaming, but it's definitely a send-up; bursting at its (admittedly roughly-stitched) seams with the same love/hate exuberance about video games that REN & STIMPY had for classic TV cartoons - or that METALOCALYPSE had for heavy metal. It's not necessarily a condemnation of the fantasy of inhabiting a video game (or of being a game hero in real life), but it recognizes that either option would be more comic than dramatic - even as it chooses to revel in the "fun parts" anyway: It knows enough to pause for a laugh when a pair of Jimmy's allies showing up as leggy katana-wielding blondes in black vinyl catsuits, but you're still getting leggy katana-wielding blondes in black vinyl catsuits.
Fortunately, it's also got a few things on its mind about the medium beyond just hanging a lampshade on its own inherent silliness as an excuse to just keep doing it (though, yes, that's most of it - this is a science fair volcano, not a geology thesis.) The aforementioned reveal of what, exactly, the deal is with Jimmy is the start of a string of Act 3 story turns that aren't exactly unpredictable but arrive welcome all the same; retroactively infusing the preceding story (such as it is) with a vein of self-examination that should be familiar to gaming fans who've already taken their swings at the medium's emerging canon of self-critical works like THE STANLEY PARABLE, PORTAL, BRAID and SPEC OPS: THE LINE. It's the latter (a seemingly-conventional military shooter than gradually morphs into an apocalyptic denunciation of CALL OF DUTY-era narrative structure) with which Henry's final denoument has the most in common - though the film is aiming less for condemnation than it is for "a swift kick in the ass” when it comes to the games medium itself.
At the beginning I referred to Henry himself as a kind of Frankenstein monsters, and so it’s appropriate that to the degree that HARDCORE HENRY wants to be "about" anything it's about what a creation owes its creator and the very idea of identity and one's choice in their own story. As the film races into its own climax (like any great video game there's a castle to climb, a last wave of enemies to cut down and a Big Boss whose defeat requires every skill you've acquired) its central narrative question ceases to be whether or not Henry will save the princess and instead becomes who (or what) is really in charge of the hero's destiny: Estelle, who "made" him and now requires the very services she installed? Akan, who started the story and drove the narrative? Jimmy, who set the goals and walked him through the missions? Or is Henry the one with his hand on the (figurative) joystick - and if not, shouldn't he be?
Granted, it feels dubious to suggest that anything as enthusiastically frivolous as HARDCORE HENRY is really attempting some sort of existential statement. But a self-consciously blunt highlight reel of live-action video game homage turns out to be an amusingly insightful way to tweak narrative convention, even if a wicked final twist that lays all the self-examination bare could just as easily exist solely for Naishuller's mischievous little boy instincts to indulge in vandalizing gaming's most sanctified narrative device. But it can’t be avoided that video games - the type being referenced here, at least - live and die by their ability to give the player a cathartic fantasy of omnipotent power and absolute control precisely by limiting their options ("you can interact with anything so long as 'interact' means shoot-with-your-gun'") and locking in their goals: Go to X, kill Y, obtain Z, do it again, the box says you're the hero and the cutscene says this end goal is very important to you. Nor can it be avoided that applying that kind of setup to live-action humans can’t help but push all of the ever-familiar choice/fate quandaries right back up to the surface of a movie that’s already very proud of almost everything being on the surface.
And so as HARDCORE HENRY’S eponymous protagonist struggles bloodily to his feet at the midpoint of a particularly gruesome climactic battle, suddenly awash in questions about exactly what he's done (and has been prepared to do) because this or that person handed him a task and told him what an awesome badass he was whenever executed the correct sequence of actions; it's hard not to reflect (if just for a moment) on how much that same quietly-insidious method of incentive exists outside of video games or their action-movie tributes - whether the "goal" in question is fighting a war, going through the motions of schoolwork (or an office job) or just getting through the day in one piece. As thematic underpinnings go, "who's pulling your strings?" may not be the most original question for a movie to ask, but it's certainly something to think about...
...for however long until it's time to strangle a bad guy to death with the sinews of one's own detached eyeball, course.
This review is made possible by donations to The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you see and would like to see more, please consider becoming a Patron.
TV Recap: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 3 - Episode 15: Spacetime
This recap and others like it are possible through support from The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you see, please consider becoming a Patron.
Another week, another "just fine" Season 3 episode that makes for a good watch but continues to feel like we're running out of time to arrive somewhere more interesting by the finale, with the broader Inhumans storyline once again being waylaid for a chance at using the surprise-superpower gimmick as a way to get back into the monster of the week business that made so much of Season 1 so tiresome. Still, the idea this time is a novel one and the episode itself has some above-average direction, so call it a win.
Anyway...
The "Inhuman of The Week" this time around is a homeless guy with a variation on the DEAD ZONE power: He touches you, and you both get a premonition of witnessing someone's death. That feels a little bit specific, sure, but trying reasoning out how Peter Parker got only those specific vague abilities of a spider sometime - spider's don't even have a "sense," they know what's coming because they've got lots of eyes and crazy-sensitive body hair.
But whatever. Circumstances contrive that Daisy and company show up to try and stop HYDRA from collecting the guy, only to not simply lose him to the bad guys but for Daisy to get hit with a premonition that appears to depict (among other things) Lincoln getting a beat-down, Fitz/Simmons standing inexplicably in a snowfall, Coulson shooting her - possibly to death - and May somehow not being involved in any of this.
This sets up the interesting part of the episode, wherein the Agents try to change the future by using Daisy's vision to pre-plan their strategy (up to an including leaving the should-be participants off the mission entirely) while Fitz argues that it's impossible by way of fourth-dimensional thinking. It's a time-killer, as the first half of "change the future" stories often are (no prizes for guessing that May ends up not going after all because Lash business comes up) but the execution is charming in that low-tech AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. kind of way and it does set up a nifty-looking one-take fight scene for Chloe Bennett.
Also, a "of the week" stories go, the situation for the homeless Inhuman is pretty affecting: A suburban dad whose life has been completely ruined by his ability and is running away from accidentally giving his loved ones (or anyone) unwanted death-visions. For a change, it even makes sense for HYDRA to be spending resources to acquire him, since Hive/Ward finds an immediate practical use for his powers - and the fact that a final touch from Daisy gives her a slightly longer vision of the "bloody spaceship" dream from the beginning of this half of the season certainly makes things (theoretically) interesting.
The B-story, though (C-story is May and Andrew finally having it out as he prepares to transform into Lash for what he's pretty sure will be the last time) is sort of a snooze: Hive/Ward makes Mallick buy a company that makes powered-armor, mostly so we can get fun scenes of Powers Boothe throwing people and things around wearing what sort-of looks like a 90s X-Files prop; but it very clearly all about setting things up for Mallick (who got a death-vision of his own) to have a "What have I done?" moment between now and the finale. Also, everyone is now on the same page re: "Hive is running HYDRA and looks like Ward now," so that should speed things along.
One thing to note: The TERMINATOR exchange between Lincoln and Coulson ("I've actually never seen the original." "...You're fired.") was cute, and it's interesting to see two episodes in a row based on establishing rapport between these two characters. Yes, the writers seem to be in "try out new pairings" mode lately (see also: May and Simmons, sure to be exacerbated now that Lash is on ice and the "cure" might be a thing.)
NEXT WEEK: Somehow, Daniel Whitehall is back for "Paradise Lost," which is also supposedly going to give us some backstory on Mallick presumably related to whatever he saw in his vision. It also looks like we'll get a look at what Hive "really" looks like, so put me down for hoping for another big rubbery monster to wrestle with Lash at some point.
This recap and others like it are possible through support from The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you see, please consider becoming a Patron.
Another week, another "just fine" Season 3 episode that makes for a good watch but continues to feel like we're running out of time to arrive somewhere more interesting by the finale, with the broader Inhumans storyline once again being waylaid for a chance at using the surprise-superpower gimmick as a way to get back into the monster of the week business that made so much of Season 1 so tiresome. Still, the idea this time is a novel one and the episode itself has some above-average direction, so call it a win.
Anyway...
The "Inhuman of The Week" this time around is a homeless guy with a variation on the DEAD ZONE power: He touches you, and you both get a premonition of witnessing someone's death. That feels a little bit specific, sure, but trying reasoning out how Peter Parker got only those specific vague abilities of a spider sometime - spider's don't even have a "sense," they know what's coming because they've got lots of eyes and crazy-sensitive body hair.
But whatever. Circumstances contrive that Daisy and company show up to try and stop HYDRA from collecting the guy, only to not simply lose him to the bad guys but for Daisy to get hit with a premonition that appears to depict (among other things) Lincoln getting a beat-down, Fitz/Simmons standing inexplicably in a snowfall, Coulson shooting her - possibly to death - and May somehow not being involved in any of this.
This sets up the interesting part of the episode, wherein the Agents try to change the future by using Daisy's vision to pre-plan their strategy (up to an including leaving the should-be participants off the mission entirely) while Fitz argues that it's impossible by way of fourth-dimensional thinking. It's a time-killer, as the first half of "change the future" stories often are (no prizes for guessing that May ends up not going after all because Lash business comes up) but the execution is charming in that low-tech AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. kind of way and it does set up a nifty-looking one-take fight scene for Chloe Bennett.
Also, a "of the week" stories go, the situation for the homeless Inhuman is pretty affecting: A suburban dad whose life has been completely ruined by his ability and is running away from accidentally giving his loved ones (or anyone) unwanted death-visions. For a change, it even makes sense for HYDRA to be spending resources to acquire him, since Hive/Ward finds an immediate practical use for his powers - and the fact that a final touch from Daisy gives her a slightly longer vision of the "bloody spaceship" dream from the beginning of this half of the season certainly makes things (theoretically) interesting.
The B-story, though (C-story is May and Andrew finally having it out as he prepares to transform into Lash for what he's pretty sure will be the last time) is sort of a snooze: Hive/Ward makes Mallick buy a company that makes powered-armor, mostly so we can get fun scenes of Powers Boothe throwing people and things around wearing what sort-of looks like a 90s X-Files prop; but it very clearly all about setting things up for Mallick (who got a death-vision of his own) to have a "What have I done?" moment between now and the finale. Also, everyone is now on the same page re: "Hive is running HYDRA and looks like Ward now," so that should speed things along.
One thing to note: The TERMINATOR exchange between Lincoln and Coulson ("I've actually never seen the original." "...You're fired.") was cute, and it's interesting to see two episodes in a row based on establishing rapport between these two characters. Yes, the writers seem to be in "try out new pairings" mode lately (see also: May and Simmons, sure to be exacerbated now that Lash is on ice and the "cure" might be a thing.)
NEXT WEEK: Somehow, Daniel Whitehall is back for "Paradise Lost," which is also supposedly going to give us some backstory on Mallick presumably related to whatever he saw in his vision. It also looks like we'll get a look at what Hive "really" looks like, so put me down for hoping for another big rubbery monster to wrestle with Lash at some point.
This recap and others like it are possible through support from The MovieBob Patreon. If you like what you see, please consider becoming a Patron.
Langganan:
Postingan (Atom)