Thursday 30 June 2011

A View of Destruction, From a Chicago Penthouse: A Review of 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon'


“I think World War Two just started!” screams a character in Pearl Harbor, Michael Bay's Mission Accomplished take on world history. As historical revisionism it's a tad US-centric, if not wholly inaccurate. Never one to let a bad idea rest, and after re-tasking the Hoover Dam and the Pyramids of Giza in previous Transformers films, Bay now draws the Apollo programme, Sputnik and even Chernobyl into the swirling black hole whose event horizon is his own visualisation of World War Three. Only, you know, with giant robots.
Transformers:Dark of the Moon, as this third film will be called, worryingly comes out the same summer as Cars 2 and Hugh Jackman's Rock 'em Sock 'em Robot Bullshit, suggesting that any further Terminator films would be extraneous in our present era: the multinational conglomerate of Cyberdine Systems and GM Motors have already won this war. But before we can get to messing up the sheets/streets, we have the tedious business of peacetime to wade through (or, the Continuance of Boredom by Other Means) with screenwriter Ehren Kruger stickily holding our hands.
The economy is biting, and poor Sam Witwicky can't find work. His muscular frame may be busting out of his shirt, but he never gets to show it, and he's stuck in the worst kind of job-interview-montage that not even Shia LaBeouf's desperate, slightly confused mugging can save. Even his old comrade-in-arms Tyrese Gibson has quit the Air Force so he can supervise tow-tractors, a job the film considers so fitting for this sole black dramatic presence that he is forced to continue wearing his blue-collar overalls even during combat. Luckily, though, he proves useful later when it turns out he knows a bunch of guys living in motels with guns the size of Ikea floating shelves just waiting for a pick-up truck to take them to where the action is. Breathe in deep. Smell that? It's America.
Round up the old crew (except Megan Fox, she spoke out of turn, and women are just as replaceable as engine parts): the next stage of the war between Autobots and Decepticons is about to commence.
The unappealingly surly website Pajiba based their entire review of Transformers:Revenge of the Fallen around the size of Michael Bay's penis. It seems unfair to lay so much blame at Mr. Bay's door ("you can't direct!") while also thereby acknowledging the almost unparalleled dominance of his auteur signature. No-one – literally, not a soul – would cut from an extended prologue set during the space race featuring reconstructions of the moon landing, stock footage and digital recreations of Presidential addresses by Kennedy and Nixon, and the most glittering and pleasurable special effects work for some time to an unmotivated shot of (or rather, up) the bikini-clad ass of a lingerie model. In 3D.
So, while I give Michael Bay all due credit for being the most Michael Bayingest person in the universe, I still wish he'd tone it down a bit. With the Transformers franchise he has realised he is utterly bullet-proof, and he'll offer to take the audience out for dinner, but then keeps talking about how awesome it'll be later when he fucks us, but only later, after he's finished his hot wings, and maybe swung by Krispy Kreme, and closed a Mercedes product placement deal on his hands-free while fumbling down our pants. And finally, when we get fucked, we'll begrudgingly agree it was awesome. But until then we'll have to put up with tacky comic relief, urgently nonsensical plotting, and wild over-acting so pungent it made me gag. Indeed, of the two hours and thirty-four minutes to suffer through, there are only sixty or so of this film that bear thinking about.
Without any acknowledgement of dramatic timing, but rather just because the movie is over half-done and the majority of the budget has just been released to him, Bay slips Dark of the Moon into his unique and delirious third-act mode, injudicious narrative ellipses making you feel like you're playing a computer game with someone who keeps skipping those boring bits that explain plot and motivation: why are those soldiers there? What are those base-jumpers doing? How did those robots get taken hostage? Never mind – open fire! There's even a Doom-style RPG moment.
The motivation for Battle: Chicago is non-existent. Gotta lay waste to something, and with all the collapsing skyscrapers it would be little inappropriate to choose New York. In LA, back in 1988, John McClane jumped off the roof of a skyscraper as it blew up behind him, which was exciting. But for this franchise, Witwicky and the gang have to nearly fall out of a collapsing skyscraper, jump out the top, slide down the angled glass walls, shoot their way back in, evade a deadly robot, then fall out the building again as it's torn apart from the inside-out by a mechanical version of one of those worms from Dune. And that's but a small section of the fun that's had on the shore of Lake Michigan.
It's all there in the poster: a giant robot war machine, a Victoria's Secret model, city-wide devastation, and you, right in the middle of it. This beautiful emplacement is even augmented in the film with slow-motion that is genuinely sublime, in an Immanuel-Kant-bludgeoned-by-Jerry-Bruckheimer kind of way. The verisimilitude of some of these effects, finely detailed even when near-frozen in contorted and impossible scenarios – all bathed in a bright crunchy sunshine that seems to envelop you as well (this is perhaps the first 3D film to get the light balance right) – should short-circuit the logic centre of any brain over the age of twelve. The fact that it's all totally meaningless only adds to the rational spectator's exhilarated malaise.
The bad guys, after all, are called Decepticons, which doesn't really give them the opportunity to be bastions of goodwill. That said, for all their dignity and largesse, anything the Autobots said or did mostly blew past me like the lush instrumentals of Steve Jablonsky's absurd score. Those dastardly Decepticons, meanwhile, proved they were both more culturally sensitive and civic minded than their opponents by not only decamping to Chicago in the first place but setting fire to that city's awful Navy Pier. That they treat Patrick Dempsey with contempt takes them up yet another notch. (Did Jon Hamm say no to the role?). Meanwhile, Optimus Prime is still blabbing on about faith, not to mention frequently demonstrating that his top speed when in truck form is slower than his walking speed as a robot, which surely defeats the point of him ever being in truck form.
Quite accurately viewed by the press as the nadir of the contemporary summer blockbuster (from the positions of both resigned appreciation and resigned condemnation), Dark of the Moon is something to behold. For long stretches it jumps around yapping annoyingly like a chihuahua. The smashing and crashing is fun, but not a patch on the extended Rio bust-up of this year's earlier Fast Five. Hell, even Hasbro's other property G.I. Joe managed to outdo Bay at times with its frenetic imagination-on-the-run CGI deployment. But then there are times here when Bay hits his stride, and the slow-motion tumbles and crumbles are like $220m advertisements for themselves. It's like the guiltiest pleasures of Inception, but bigger and without all that talking. And since this film will make an extraordinary amount of money, you'd do well to get used to it. We're all Bay's bitches now.

Wednesday 15 June 2011

Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me: A Review of 'Luther', Episode 1 of Season 2


Mel Gibson's LA Detective Martin Riggs has done it. Arnold Schwarzenegger did it just before fighting off the apocalypse in End of Days. And now Idris Elba does it, putting a single bullet (kept, bizarrely, in the microwave) in a pistol, spinning the chamber, and putting it next to his temple over breakfast. Unsurprisingly, this being the opening sequence of the first episode of four in a new run of BBC One's crime drama Luther, the gun clicks empty. At which point DCI John Luther puts it down, finishes up his half drunk cup of coffee, and sets off to work.
I've no doubt this is something many public servants do on a Monday morning, but in the hands of this singularly improbable cop show it comes off precisely as an affect learned from The Big Book of Genre Conventions, rather than anything in the territory of a compelling character trait. In this way it is indicative, as Luther shows nothing in the way of originality, wit or style. For some reason, though, its creators care about the characters involved, even as they abuse them, undermine them, and pour them awkwardly into different moulds on a weekly basis to fit another generic template. This equivocal commitment is one of the things makes Luther so strangely addictive (you can read my piece on the pilot here, and the ridiculous final episode of the first season here).
The more things change the more they stay the same: DCI Teller is gone (hopefully back to drama school, for her sake) to be replaced by someone I could have sworn played a psychiatrist in season one, but who now heads up one of those “special crime units”, a phrase synonymous with “weekly cop show serial”. So, new sets and a slightly new dynamic, but of course writer Neil Cross must have people intone “I was once your adversary, but now we must work together”, as though these alliances were the stuff of Wagnerian myth, filtered through Hollywood taglines.
The most intriguing relationship remains that between Luther and Ruth Wilson's Alice Morgan, a calculating sociopath, currently incarcerated, and who Luther appears to be helping escape. Alice still has something of Millennium's Lucy Butler about her, and has the potential to be much more threatening than the villains-of-the-week who are trotted out, but the show continues to misuse her. It's as though two first-class actors had arrived prepared for a production of David Mamet's play Oleanna, but their director had re-heated some old CSI scripts instead. “Breathtakingly unerotic” she says of her surroundings, and she's right: beyond her and Luther's relationship (or rather, the potential of the relationship) the show has no sex and no passion. It wants to evoke a nightmarish city of gothic threat, but can't do better than some shadowy basements and hand-held pseudo-porn.
At least Luther avoids cod-rationality, and one can sense forces within pulling it to a darker place, a more scatological and anarchic territory of pain, suffering, but also delight. Bolted down and sealed up by rigorously dull plotting, these impulses simmer away, almost invisible. Yet there's something perverse in the colours of the outfit worn by the young woman Luther saves from consensual rape, and the hint at even more tenebrous delights in the shackling of her to a chair in straight-laced even-voiced Paul McGann's gloomy loft conversion. No doubt this potential will be squandered, but an eager viewer has to take what they can get. Alice Morgan is still scheming away, and one of the most thrilling cliff-hangers for me is whether she'll escape prison before her brown roots start to show even more disastrously beneath that arterial blood-red dye job.
For all these faults (and many, many more) it's more engaging than the BBC's other big budget cop serial, the jaunt-y and Italian-y Rufus Sewell-fueled Zen. Luther's London may be no less unrealistic and painful to watch than that show's English-language Rome, but where Zen's de facto tone was “fun”, Luther at least has a mite of Satanic energy lurking somewhere within it - something only fair considering the inevitable cop-show ingredients of murder, insanity and lust. That may be enough to get me through another three hours of this second season, otherwise it might be time to throw the book at this show. Criminal offence? Pedalling in genre porn.

Saturday 4 June 2011

Must Try Harder: A Review of 'X-Men: First Class'


Let us start with a rhetorical question: If one is endowed with a genetic mutation (possibly nuclear-catalysed) which allows one to teleport, taking with oneself as many as three or four other people, would one stand idly by as several hundred missiles hurtled towards one and one's allies? If one is Azazel, a demonically red but otherwise characterless mutant as played by Jason Flemyng (really? yes, really) in the new X-Men film, then stand rigid waiting for molecular decimation is exactly what one does.
Well, the word “new” should here be heavily qualified. Inaugurated by Usual Suspects savant Bryan Singer in 2000, this film franchise is based on a wealth of Marvel comics material, has included a central “trilogy”, one dire spin-off, and now comes at 2011 with some kind of period prequel, all those tantalising character grievances and historical encrustations given their own place in the sun. Thus we witness the early lives of Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, an Oxford professor with telepathic ability and a Holocaust survivor who can bend metal with his mind respectively. Lehnsherr, soon to become Magneto and Ian McKellan, is here played by Michael Fassbender, and is by far the most interesting of the group. Group? Yes, group. Extended recruitment and training montages introduce us to many more mutants, whose powers become steadily less interesting, and the film becomes bogged down in a peculiar kind of X-cess.
Rather than crafting anything that might resemble a story, director Matthew Vaughn and a host of credited (and no doubt several uncredited) writers play Dramatic Conflict Roulette for two hours. In the middle of a scene or sequence up will pop a mutant and their particular dilemma and/or burden, without any regard for tension or plotting. Call me unsympathetic if you must, but when the US and USSR are minutes away from nuclear armageddon, I couldn't care less about a big furry blue guy wrestling with his inner demons. It's not that Beast (his finally awarded moniker) is uninteresting, far from it – here is a guy who wants to look normal, undergoes a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when he tries a little genetic beautification, and as a consequence clearly harbours shockingly violent tendencies beneath his gosh-I'm-such-a-nerd-me Nicholas Hoult exterior. Interesting then, but when treated with such throwaway clumsiness not in any way engaging.
But there's plenty more random, unstructured characters and arcs floating around. A film following the friendship of Lehnsherr and Xavier, including an awkward simmering rivalry regarding both their class differences and the sought-for affection of the latter's sister Raven, which finally erupts into conflict (and which we were promised) would be an effective thriller, especially if shot with the cool style and grown-up irony of Singer's earlier films and Matthew Vaughn's own Layer Cake. Instead this storyline jostles for position amongst the crowd, the early promise of subtitled foreign-language scenes and Nazi influence of US government policy in the post-war years soon hastily forgotten.
Nor do any of these elements build to any sort of crescendo. There's brief pleasure to be had from the establishing of the Cuban Missile Crisis scenario in which the X-Men make their  (not-quite-public) first appearance, but any sense of synthesis is eradicated once several unremarkable mutant fights start taking place, none impacting upon the other, all rendered palpably mute by ropey digital matte-work. The film loses track of its own rules, and so we end up with Flemyng's red teleporter, standing on a beach, waiting patiently to be eviscerated. Why? Because it's not his turn to have a character moment. It's like watching a pop group politely defer to each other's solos.
Aspects of the subject matter suggest that the intention was perhaps to do a proper version of Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen – the film version of which Zack Snyder made a cocked hat of several years ago – yet First Class's excerpts of JFK on period televisions and some nicely 60s touches (the cushions, the curtains, Xavier's willingness to use the word “groovy” in his chat-up lines) are undermined by a total disregard of the politics of the time, or any politics at all. Perhaps it will be argued that the film operates metonymically, the mutant powers a stand-in for various Othernesses, thus letting the film off the hook of actually being aware of, say, the civil rights movement, but the treatment of the sole black mutant is appalling. Rose Byrne's CIA agent along for the ride perhaps fares worse: the speed at which the film forces her to strip down to black stockings and suspenders gave me whiplash, but doesn't quite match the invidious misogyny of her final scene; in between these bookends entire hours go by in which she gets a line or two, despite being present in most scenes. (Maybe this is an homage to the lost-looking Famke Janssen in X-Men: The Last Stand, who – despite being the chief villain – hung around the edges of scenes like a waitress waiting to ask if the food is okay.)
To be a mutant is to be endowed with a gift that makes one different from everyone else, and so ostracised, but which can lead to radical self-empowerment. The extent to which the film does not understand its own concept is revealed when the idea is floated that a serum could be found which makes mutants “look normal”, but doesn't “affect their abilities”. Such an uncoupling of style and substance suggest the coldly fragmentary, unsynthesised format of X-Men: First Class, and most other superhero films bobbing and whizzing around the multiplexes lately. It's not that they lack the courage of their convictions, its that they don't have any convictions at all.