22 Things I Learned from Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

1. It’s easy to find a working Humvee lying around in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. The keys will even be in the ignition.

2. Ditto dot matrix printers, which will be fully equipped with paper and working electricity.

3. Previous franchise entry cliffhangers can be gesturally honoured but logistically and emotionally ignored.

4. Alice is a fickle friend, and cares nothing for K-Mart, Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, and Ada Wong. But then, neither do you.

5. Tanks are way bigger on the inside.

6. Milla Jovovich never met a vehicle she couldn’t wreck.

7. Pharmaceutical company Umbrella manufacture and ostentatiously brand their own cufflinks, motorcycles (with BMW), and chainsaws.

8. Arbitrary deadlines do not make for compelling deadlines.

9. Ali Larter is the only one of the gang returning the producer’s phone calls.

10. Shawn Roberts isn’t worth the gym membership card his face is printed on.

11. You can never have too much Iain Glen.

12. But you can have too many clones.

13. That laser corridor deserves its own variety show.

14. Editor Doobie White (yes) apparently gets paid by the cut.

15. There are zombie hordes everywhere! Except when there aren’t.

16. Zombies are flammable! Except when they aren’t.

17. A devastated Washington DC, a businessman plotting an “orchestrated apocalypse”, relentless nepotism… this film may be prescient political satire.

18. Writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson has been watching Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies.

19. And RoboCop. And the latest Bourne fiasco. And, er, Daylight, I think?

20. Switching from native 3D to a cheap conversion is never a good idea.

21. If you like endless one-on-one combat filmed with swooping cameras and cut to ribbons so you cannot for the life of track what is going on, then boy is this the movie for you.

22. Alice doesn’t live here anymore. And neither do I.

Systemic Malignancy: A Review of 'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps'

Early in 2010, Paul Greengrass decided (or, perhaps, was compelled) to make a film about the war in Iraq. Green Zone showed the hunt for WMD, the strategic folly of disbanding the Iraqi army, and the impotence of those who were manipulated by warmongers. However, to do this, names were changed, Matt Damon was cast, and John Powell’s score was cranked up during exciting chase scenes. The effect was a damning dilution of whatever was being said in the first place, which was mostly accepted public knowledge beforehand, and the lingering unease that follows the brandishing of the weapons of the enemy by the liberal left (a moral hazard best left alone).

Following an identical model, Oliver Stone in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps depicts recent factual, cataclysmic, and widely reported historical events – the 2008 near-collapse of the global financial system, ground zero being, appropriately enough, Ground Zero. Like Greengrass, Stone upends much of the value of his project by re-aligning the facts to follow a Hollywood template, here a family drama. Shia LaBeouf’s Wall Street trader is our guide through the turmoil – but even he gives his mother $30,000 he “doesn’t have” to bail-out her failing real estate business, thus proving himself to be part of the problem in more ways than one. Indeed, Stone’s awareness of the circularity and repeatability of frailty and disaster is a rare strength in this sequel.

The other assets are put brilliantly on display in the first hour, as the naturally metaphor-oriented writer-director demonstrates more visual flair than he has in fifteen years. The titular neighbourhood glistens and gleams as invisible information shoots from one anonymous trading floor to another and an audience has a struggle keeping up. Only after the first act does it become clear that we weren’t really meant to – the meat of the story is a marriage crisis. He is a trader, she runs a lefty website; but her dad is Gordon Gekko, who has turned over a new leaf but still orders his life as a serious of predatory trades.

Gekko, played with jewelled menace by Michael Douglas, is again the star of the show, as he was in the 1987 Wall Street. He has been in jail for the entire 1990s, released in the wake of 9/11 (he then bides his time for seven years, presumably writing his book, before his stage-managed, Edmond Dantès-like return). This chronology, eliding as it does Bill Clinton’s presidency, as well as the period between the cold and on terror wars, is intriguing, as though Gekko’s such as these have no choice but to hibernate during Democratic administrations. But for all his correct predications (there’s no bigger aid to a screenwriter than hindsight), Gekko curiously lurks at the edge of events, a bystander to the systemic problems, rather than the marble-solid manifestation of them that he was in the 1980s. There is mileage in this interpretation, but not validity, certainly not with the ending Stone has in store.

The touting of the funding of fusion reactor research seems a knee-jerk move towards clean technologies, but the explanation of this reveals a paradox: intense energy is concentrated on a miniscule point, which then detonates, the immense outpouring offering more energy than was put in. Of a piece with the frequent talk throughout the film of unsustainable bubbles and systemic problems, this suggests that all optimism is deluded. A hint of this cynicism can be detected in the otherwise cloying final moments, but this vibe seems bolted on to a Hollywood template rather than ingrained in the logic of the tale being told. The tale is classical, mythical, and the entire point of myth is to reassert the continuing nature of things, the stability and order of the world. What Wall Street and Wall Street could do without is any more myth.

Like Green Zone, too much faith is placed in a radical alternative within the media. The stinging irony of this is the thudding conservatism with which both that film and Money Never Sleeps proffer their depiction of historical occurrences, changing details enough to not be libellous, and facts enough to not be accused of dullness. These are not allegations that can be levelled at The Social Network, but then that story had something of a (systemic) happy ending, and is a far more deserving companion piece to Oliver Stone’s 1980s icon in its laser-sharp revelation of the absurd institutional dynamics of the moment.

Gordon Gekko was a bracing creation in 1987, but he was ahead of the curve, the Wall Street meltdown which occurred shortly following the release being credited with much of the box office success and legendary status of Wall Street. This re-tread is hopelessly behind the times, like a two-year old Sunday supplement. However, with strong brand recognition and a vigorous marketing campaign, the film did manage to make back its $70 million budget. It’s not only banks that are too big to fail.

Death Toll: A Review of 'Knowing'

A note on spoilers: if you have not seen Knowing (or 2012) and were looking forward to curling up with them on a cold Winter’s evening then a) I pity you, and b) you should probably avoid reading the below. Spoilers are not overt, but are lurking between the lines

Placing the events of 9/11 into a framework of cosmological inevitability, and frequently referencing the attacks in both dialogue and visual aesthetics, Knowing works very hard to separate historical happenings from epistemological experience. The former is elided entirely from meaningful discourse, while the latter is elevated to an organising principle whose primacy is overtaken only by religious determinism.

As an MIT professor, we can assume our protagonist John Koestler is a man with a rigorous focus upon rational explanations of the physical world. When his son receives a fifty-year-old document consisting of a sprawled mass of seemingly random numbers, it is the sequence 091101 (that is, 9/11/01) which catches his eye. One drunken night on google later and he has identified a pattern in the numbers (which is more than can be said for most people after they spend a drunken night on google) – they 'predict' all major disasters of the last fifty years, with death toll usefully appended.

Thus determinism sets in early. For all Koestler's assurances that he believes “shit happens” (his wife died in a hotel fire, of which more later), the delineation of historical flow into specifically defined disasters sites – with attendant numbering of those killed and even a GPS locator of the event – smacks of straight-jacketed human perception far more than the film-makers seem to realise. Take 9/11, the only disaster dealt with in detail: what precise GPS coordinates would be given here? The address of the World Trade Centre? A field in Pennsylvania? The Pentagon? We never discover (nor whether the death toll includes those who died later from their injuries, or from the asbestos-laced ash in the streets that day); but given the film's (and American culture's) insistence in localising the events of that day at “ground zero”, educated assumptions can be made.

There is of course the possibility I have approached the film from the wrong direction: rather than questioning the inclusion criteria of the disasters (one has only thirty-three deaths, which hardly strikes one as worthy of listing, unless of course one happens to be in the direct vicinity of it, or related to one of those unlucky thirty-three), perhaps these events were only chosen by the Cassandra whose hand sprawled those numbers on that paper because they would be the first things thrown up by a google search. In the Old Testament, Moses had to make do with plagues which affected the entire populace; in the postmodern world, foretellings of doom can be tailored to suit Western-centric search engine algorithms.

As with Roland Emmerich's by turns unintentionally hilarious and intentionally hilarious 2012, Knowing gives up on the oh-so-twentieth century notion of an identifiable apocalyptic source. The characters within these films are at the mercy of mutating neutrino particles or the like, rather than marauding alien invaders or even global warming. Both films also exhibit something of an awed attitude to scheduling: one of the heroes of 2012 (nearly all of Emmerich's films are titled after dates, a tacit acknowledgement that their substance is their events, not their characters) is drafted to write “the most important timetable in the history of mankind”: a grandiose rhetorical description for a document that must by nature lack rhetoric altogether. The sheet of numbers in Knowing is puzzled over until the content of it is transposed into the more exciting – or at least visual – mode of familial protection, at which point it is no longer of any value (Waterworld pulled something of the same trick). Likewise, once it has been made abundantly clear that shit is happening right now and there's not a damn thing we can do about it, the populace of 2012 just get on with panicking rather than troubling themselves with any further explanation.

Which is to say, once science has done its bit in conceiving of a terrible thing, it is jettisoned entirely. Koestler may be an MIT professor, but that doesn't do him a bit of good. The desperation on Nicolas Cage's face as he witnesses another terrible (but blood-free) disaster can be read as the horrible realisation that for all his scientific knowledge he is helpless. Lisa Simpson felt the same way when the skeleton of an angel was uncovered in Springfield but, as we all remember, the doubt in her non-faith-belief system was misplaced. Knowing's lunge towards religiosity in the face of (a particularly 9/11 inflected) end-of-days is much like the denouement to that episode of The Simpson's: a ploy on the part of consumer interests to guarantee high grosses (it worked: the film made back its budget four times over). “The End is Near … The End of High Prices” - in deploying apocalypticism in the marketing of a mall The Simpson's echoed George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, while also asserting the accurate yet unappealing prospect that total consumer freedom walks hand-in-hand with the holocaustal imaginary.

Yet consumerism, like science, is a false dawn for Knowing, which peddles the safely reductionist line that we'd all be better off staying at home. Koestler's wife died in a hotel fire during a business trip, while the predicted major disasters occur on planes or subway trains (and goodness, the New York subway has never appeared such a mecca for abstractly besuited businesspeople as it does in this film). Salvation comes hand-in-ghostly-hand with a return to an ur-domesticity, even if that is a dishevelled cabin in the woods, or a cloying family hug with your estranged father.

There's no wink at the sublimity of mass death here as there was in Independence Day (remember the stripper-friend, on the roof of a skyscraper in LA, eyes as wide as her smile as she's blown to smithereens by the transubstantial glare of an alien laser-beam?), the reason for which can be explicitly traced back to 9/11. As can the obsession with choice that pervades this and Emmerich's film, but it is 'choice' in quotation marks, a choice rooted in safe populism. In the face of the President's daughter's disgust that only the rich will be saved in 2012, the pigheaded Secretary of State suggests she offer her ticket to a Chinese worker if she feels so bad about things. The passive smirk she gives by way of reply says it all: moral outrage is as much a privilege as is a room on an ark. People get chosen, they do not themselves choose, and once chosen you get with the program because to do otherwise would be to conceive of a universe that admitted the possibility of transgression, disorder, and personal agency.

Which all generates a cinema of eschatological comfort. Teleological (that is, regressive) in the same way as Will Smith's I Am Legend, Knowing peddles the line that even chaos is not chaotic. 9/11, your wife's death, your kid's partial deafness: all are cartographic points of reference on a map of divine will. Human political potential is reduced to nought, and all we're asked to do is follow the signs on our way to an inevitable and enriching (well, briefly) family reunion. Powerlessness never felt so absurd.

22 Things I Learned From 'The Book of Eli'

1. It’s okay to kill a hairless cat.

2. Thirty years after the end of the world it’s still worth checking the taps for running water.

3. Jeopardising a mission to save mankind by sidetracking to charge your iPod is not the action we expect of a stoic protagonist.

4. KFC, Motorola and General Motors will survive the apocalypse, their marketing departments remarkably intact.

5. Once you go black, you go Christian.

6. The hero always enters the town in slow motion.

7. The hero always enters the bar in slow motion.

8. Gary Oldman is at his most entertaining when he is channelling the ghost of Jack Lemmon.

9. You don’t need a seatbelt if you’re pretty.

10. There’s always a quirky, fidgety guy who’s good with electrical appliances (preferably to be played by Tom Waits).

11. End-of-the-world settlements will be ruled over by a faux-intellectual despot and populated by a bunch of illiterate thugs (see also The Postman, 28 Days Later).

12. There may not be any water or food in this world but there is plenty of petrol.

13. Having a character whistle Ennio Morricone does not a clever Western pastiche make.

14. Two fight scenes and two exploding cars does not an action film make.

15. Ponderously dull and literal scripting does not an art film make.

16. Casting the woman who voices Meg Griffin in Family Guy as the love interest somewhat undermines whatever credibility your listless production may have initially had.

17. Shooting Denzel Washington in the chest only makes him stronger (see also Man On Fire).

18. It is possible to make an entire film about the bible without understanding one word of it.

19. Malcolm McDowell is making a career out of being the last straw.

20. Endings which sacrifice logic, characterisation and the moral lessons of all that has gone before at the altar of “looking cool” are somewhat frustrating.

21. If you couldn’t get enough of the trash-punk vehicles, windswept desert vistas and imperative-free plotting on offer in Terminator Salvation, this should certainly be for you.

22. For everyone else, you’re better off reading a book.

Speaking Of The Apocalypse: A Review of 'Pontypool'

It is true of films as it is of people that they can be too smart for their own good. They utilise their cleverness to outsmart you, leaving you befuddled and – maybe – impressed, but certainly not rewarded. As a result of successes such as ‘The Usual Suspects’ and ‘The Sixth Sense’ the last fifteen years have seen the prevalence of the “twist ending” grow, such reversals inevitably becoming either rote and expected or unfathomable and bewildering. It is a rare film (and, indeed, person) that employs cleverness not to outwit you but to reward you, and that has enough faith to methodically reveal its treasures without feeling the need to hurriedly pull the rug from under you lest you become fidgety.

‘Pontypool’ is such a prize experience, and even if it did not feature a mesmerising central performance, subtly rich atmospherics and confident use of a small budget, it would deserve acclaim simply for thinking its ideas through properly and trusting the strength of an interesting concept.

It would be discourteous to speak too much about what these ideas are, as coming to the film cold is a distinct advantage, even though it lacks overt narrative surprises. Suffice to say that it is set in the radio booth of a local station for a small Canadian town, into which strange reports come concerning the behaviour of the locals. Rather than venture beyond the borders of the converted church of Radio 660 the film instead becomes tighter, more claustrophobic, genuinely engrossing and quietly horrific.

“Mrs French’s cat is missing…” intones Stephen McHattie’s Grant Mazzy in the film’s opening, and his gravel-hued voice subsequently offers the viewer what seems a solid anchor, even as more and more clues suggest that it is language that is what should be feared in this world.

We return to the missing cat several times in the film in ways which are easy to overlook: this is just one subtle repeated idea which is used to provide a structure which, the more it is developed, questions the very nature of structure itself. Does the repetition of an idea create meaning or destroy it? Familiarity is vital to successful discourse, and rhetoric thrives on repetition, so what would be the consequences of a requirement to de-familiarise oneself from the things that, arbitrarily, are concrete?

These might be strange questions, and I am being purposefully vague, but it is clear ‘Pontypool’ is playing games with the idea of apocalypticism, and the film would be best read with recourse to James Berger’s rewarding book-length study of end-time thinking ‘After The End.’ In it, Berger speaks of the trauma of the apocalypse rendering the event itself unreadable, and texts from the Bible onwards cop out by conceiving of the post-apocalyptic in pre-apocalyptic ways: in the Book of Revelation, when an angel “measures the new Jerusalem, it uses preapocalyptic, human measures.” It should be left to another reviewer less cautious of spoilers to investigate the film as it relates to Jacques Derrida’s concept of language and the “absent referent”, but ‘Pontypool’ should certainly be seen as grappling with serious issues regarding apocalypticism, a way of thinking which can so easily lead to lazy satire (‘Zombieland’) or unenlightening teleological religiosity (‘I Am Legend’).

If such sociological enquiry fails to get your blood pumping, then never fear – there are plenty of well-handled shock moments, including a nasty ‘cold-turkey’ sequence which, apart from its overwrought punch line, is quietly but pervasively upsetting. These and other moments of tension are insidiously effective, and make ‘Pontypool’ one of the best films I have seen in recent years. Seek it out. Just make sure when in company who have yet to see it you force yourself to be as tight-lipped as the tagline demands: “Shut Up Or Die!”

22 Things I Learned From '2012'

1. Doctors wear scrubs all the time, even when at home.

2. Ex-wives may trade up financially, but never emotionally.

3. Mega-earthquakes and clouds of super-heated ash always move just slightly slower than John Cusack, altering their speed as necessary. Tsunamis are a somewhat different matter.

4. Leaving your children alone when camping while you have a chat with a mentally unstable man inside his trailer is perfectly acceptable parenting.

5. In three years time Paris Hilton will be married to a Russian Oligarch.

6. Shifting tectonics and the reversal of the earth’s poles in no way impairs the navigation systems of Russian cargo aircraft.

7. Eastern monks drink milky tea.

8. Two lessons training as a pilot is more than enough.

9. Car horns are louder than supervolcanoes.

10. When briefing the President about cataclysmic temperature changes it’s considered bad form not to check out the first daughter.

11. The Chinese put a bewildering array of cameras on their vessels. These cameras have microphones and function underwater.

12. The apocalypse unfolds without a drop of blood spilt.

13. Limousines have fantastic suspension, steering, and acceleration.

14. Several days into the end of the world, with all governmental infrastructure destroyed and most cities wiped from the face of the earth, it will still be possible to get a cell phone signal.

15. The dog always makes it.

16. Seeing a tidal wave crash nearer and nearer is not dramatic enough – a prominently placed clock ticking down the seconds until impact is also required.

17. With seconds to live it’s more important to let your friend know he has failed you than embrace your family.

18.The balance of power truly is moving towards China.

19. Novels that end with the line “…and we all realised we had relatives in Wisconsin” are destined to only sell five hundred copies. They will also take exactly twenty-seven days to read, and be considered alongside ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’ as a great work of literature.

20. Dangling a giraffe from a helicopter and careering it through a frozen tundra will not in any way impair its health.

21. Watching various American cities tumble into the earth's core like God sweeping the remains of last night’s dinner into the bin is rather entertaining.

22. The fact that it goes on for 160 minutes is not.