22 Things I Learned from Ant-Man

1. Tanks can go from zero to sixty in two-point-five seconds.

2. Criminals enjoy waffles.

3. There are ants everywhere.

4. Helicopters can crash in major urban centres without consequence.

5. The button for the laser grid is always switched off at the last possible millisecond.

6. Paul Rudd’s head is just slightly too big for his body.

7. Michael Pena never met a relief he couldn’t comic.

8. It makes so much sense for a man who has built a shrinking suit to also be able to speak to ants that this correlation is not even worth discussing. (Also, why not bees? Or bears? Or other people?)

9. Seeing a villain outright murder someone is not enough to prove their villainous credentials. They must also kill a lamb.

10. Ex-cons have no rights whatsoever.

11. I fancy a Baskin Robins Mango Fruit Blast. I wonder why?

12. Bobby Cannavale and Judy Greer make an absurd couple. They are also both making careers out of being wasted by Hollywood.

13. You can get up to pretty much anything in your back garden without arousing suspicion.

14. Marvel are still casting Janet van Dyne.

15. There is only one police precinct in San Francisco.

16. For heist films to work the location of the heist has to be clearly laid out, and should ideally have at least a couple of interesting architectural details.

17. The subatomic realm looks like a late-90s music video.

18. Romantic relationships happen offscreen.

19. The idea of a cultured Mexican is inherently absurd.

20. You don’t need cities crashing to the ground for an exciting action finale.

21. Bathos is all well and good, but it can get pretty tiresome.

22. Somewhere, Edgar Wright is shrugging.

22 Unanswered questions from Season One of Daredevil

1. Does Matt Murdock dye his hair? And if so, why?

2. Did the chemicals make him a superhero, or the fact that he was taught by an old King Fu master?

3. Why does Elden Henson play Foggy as though he’s at an initial table read?

4. Is Vincent D’Onofrio a better actor when he’s nowhere near the screen?

5. How did Stick find Murdock, and why?

6. Why is all the banter so cringe-worthy?

7. When Murdock knocks a guy out and he falls into the Hudson, does that count as murder?

8. Why did that Russian mobster, previously so cautious and respectful, burst in on Fisk’s private dinner like an idiot?

9. Is the graphic violence making a point about the brutality of vigilantism and criminality, or is it just there because the show is on Netflix?

10. What is Black Sky, and why should I care?

11. How do any of the heroes pay their rent?

12. Why does Rosario Dawson only have half a haircut?

13. Has there ever been a protagonist journalist who hasn’t been chewed out for pursuing a story by their business-minded editor? And didn’t I see this exact same plot in the first season of Boss?

14. Surely there are easier ways to solve your problem than poisoning a whole swathe of New York aristocrats?

15. Why do Fisk and Vanessa have no chemistry whatsoever?

16. Why was that gun loaded, and what was it doing on that table in the first place?

17. Just how many abandoned factories, buildings and alleys are there in Hell’s Kitchen?

18. Are all superhero properties contractually obliged to feature a scene (or several) in which a henchman is quietly incapacitated after he walks into the shadows?

19. No really, why hasn’t Foggy been killed off yet?

20. Why does all that Catholic hand-wringing over the problem of righteous murder go in the last episode?

21. Is it really possible to tail a car along rooftops for several dozen blocks?

22. Will I bother with Season Two?

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.

Curses! A Review of 'Kick-Ass'

Like hastily eaten junk food, comic book films continue to repeat in stale belches across cinema screens. It is only logical: no matter how minor the comic it will still have some devoted followers, who will – being likely in their teens and very active in techno-blogo-twittersphere – generate more hype than warranted, increasing the slim possibility of a decent opening weekend before inevitable and hasty evaporation of ticket sales and audience interest. In addition to this financial concern, the comic turn is natural considering the movement of mainstream American filmmaking towards hollowness, callousness and self-justified viciousness.

It seemed that Kick-Ass would be something of a relief from all this. Promising a knowing inclusion of the dramatic and aesthetic expectations of the “young adult” comic book genre (a deadly eleven-year old girl!), but with a critical eye towards the link between this film world and the real world: how are the goals and ambitions of the average American teenager formed and manipulated by widespread generic banality? The real and the fantasy feed off each other, currently only able to offer a trajectory that spirals ever downward. There is certainly room for a film attacking these issues and which, even if not excoriating the peddlers of morally lazy trash, at least opens up alternative avenues of thought to those of unreal empowerment through dress-up and revenge.

Kick-Ass seems to engage with these issues, but very quickly backs away. Or, more accurately, becomes drawn in by the lure of easy answers through violence. The protagonist, Dave Lizewski, is tired of being a non-presence at school and getting casually mugged on his way home. Donning a mask and batons to fight crime, he is promptly beaten up and stabbed. A bracing concept. Yet there is something unsettling about the stabbing. Digital blood, followed by a comedic overwrought car crash. This is not bathos, it is glorification.

(These digital spurts of blood are becoming increasingly prevalent in Blockbuster cinema, again a result of the comic influence. But while the panels of Frank Miller feature a splatter of red across them, the brutality inherent in this captured moment is lost when translated to the screen. These gushes of obvious post-production tinkering plainly separate violence and spectacle, focussing exclusively on the latter. It may be a direct translation of the visual style of the comic onto the film, as it was in Sin City and 300, but the different medium alters the meaning of the aesthetic. Grittiness is expressed differently on a printed page than it is on the silver screen at twenty-four frames a second.)

The violence in Kick-Ass functions narratively (initially at least) as the unpleasant intrusion of the real into the fantasy; however, it is filmed in such a way that it merely fuels the fantasy, driving it further into masturbatory indulgence.

Fine, then. This is not to be the To The Lighthouse of comic book films (as last years Watchmen could and should have been, in the same way that the sharp source material by Alan Moore was so comprehensive it made all further graphic novels about masked avengers redundant). As it develops further, and Lizewski (superhero name: Kick-Ass) becomes a media star through youtube footage and canny social networking, there is plenty of room made available for satire to creep in. Unfortunately, nothing except sensationalism manages to survive the ensuing din. The film aims for cynical but ends up utterly charmless.

A more successful duo of crime fighters is introduced, who are at war with a villainous yet wholly undefined syndicate responsible (indirectly, it must be highlighted) for the death of an inevitably unnamed and voiceless female figure of maternal comfort (worryingly, Lizewski’s mother is also depicted as dying silently and indolently). These various characters all become embroiled in possibly the most lazily plotted of such scripts to date, and less and less gets in the way of violent action sequences (each one with a soundtrack stolen from elsewhere: John Murphy’s signature cues for 28 Weeks Later and Sunshine, and Ennio Morricone’s overexposed For a Few Dollars More theme).

Director Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake, made in the ebb of hype following Guy Ritchie’s own London gangster films (which Vaughn himself co-produced), was one of the most stylish and inventive British films of the last ten years, easily earning the title of The Long Good Friday for the twenty-first century. Since this, however, Vaughn has increasingly looked like a director-for-hire, even though he co-produced and co-wrote Kick-Ass. The most memorable parts of the film are the zaniest, and feel distinctly like they have been conceived of solely to keep Vaughn interested in his production (and it takes something pretty zany for interest to be retained in a film which cues up the song ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us’ when two superheroes meet).

We end up on the same damn rooftop that Iron Man 2 ended on: man and woman sharing an intimate moment, a poor digital recreation of New York behind them, the unwelcome promise of a sequel, and not a single thought given to the disproportionate collateral damage wrought during the preceding “adventures”. Kick-Ass in the end tells us nothing more than that the temptation for violent catharsis through a cartoon lens is too much even for what seems a highly talented crew. The generic template is adhered to so closely that attempts to interpret any critical discourse on the unpleasantness unfolding become increasingly difficult, and finally impossible. This is not to say it is not entertaining: it’s a film with great comic timing and some fresh ideas up its sleeve. That it feels so hollow in the end should be a lesson for future filmmakers to avoid indulging in the temptations that are here so fully given in to.

Further reading:

The Dangers of Exceptionalism: Some Thoughts on 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine'

Land of the Parodic, Home of the Absurd: A Review of 'Watchmen'

Bunker Buster: A Review of 'Iron Man 2'

There are certain moments in ‘Iron Man 2’, Jon Favreau’s sequel to his own 2008 Blockbuster comic book adaptation, in which the thundering roar of machine gun fire is so loud and so insistent it begins to edge the spectator into a sublime state of disinterest. One wonders why they felt the need to crank the engine of apathy up to such excesses at these times when it seems to hum along just fine without the aid of special effects and boringly disinterested plotting.

Mercifully, these onslaughts come towards the end of the film, although we have previously been asked not merely to suffer through but to judge both sassy and dramatic a fight between two robots set to a remix of Queen’s ‘Another One Bites The Dust’. Up until this descent, there is much to be entertained by. Robert Downey Jr. reprises his narcissistic playboy arms manufacturer, playing Tony Stark like a cross between the young Howard Hughes and a less insufferable Tom Cruise. Favreau directs with commendable looseness, allowing Downey and Sam Rockwell in particular to improvise as though they did not have a $170 million production riding on them (the only drawback: editing together such ad-libbing leads to distractingly dire continuity).

The problems begin to set in around the halfway mark, or perhaps the novelty just wears off. Poisoning himself to an early grave with his own thrill seeking, Stark recklessly commandeers his company’s entry in a Monaco grand prix, but is cut down mid-race by Mickey Rourke’s vengeful Russian physicist. Between Stark’s lithe panic at being challenged and almost bested, Rourke’s monolithic determination, and the unexpectedness of the harbour racetrack setting, the scene comes close to presenting something akin to storytelling.

After this, it all begins to spiral away, Rourke is neutered, the Wider Marvel Universe (TM) rears its unenlightening and one-eyed head, and dramatic tension bleeds away to nought. Don Cheadle’s Lt. Col. Rhodes is an exemplar: moving through scenes like driftwood, he is given little motivation and no character whatsoever, but merely does and says what is required of him by an increasingly desperate script.

During a scene in which the intriguing life-sucking corollary of Stark’s heroism is solved in the laziest fashion possible, it is hard not to be struck by the realisation that this film, and those like it, actively discourage thought. Like Downey’s other franchise grab ‘Sherlock Holmes’, any mystery displayed here is so convolutedly both dispersed and minute that the process of attempting to grasp it is highlighted as futile, even stupid (yes, we all guessed it involved The Map, but the obfuscated digital imprint of an entirely new element?).

While the first ‘Iron Man’ offered an interesting schemata of contemporary terrorism and the dream of a one-man American war machine finishing the job started by the Bush administration, ‘Iron Man 2’ is happy for the job to remain firmly done. Having, in his words, “privatised world peace”, Stark now functions as a human nuclear deterrent, although the implication that his sartorial weaponry keeps any other countries from attacking the United States sounds less like world peace and more like a globalised national dictatorship. Either way, the games that are played and the battles that are fought are between American companies and different factions of the military industrial complex. Vacuously, the finale takes place in the same exhibition space as the film’s opening demonstration of technical superiority by Stark, and both are just displays of meaningless flash and bang, of exorbitant financial expenditure without appreciation for human collateral.

It might be too much to ask for such Summer Entertainment to contain the trace of drama, but given the scale of the production one is certainly entitled to question the lack of precision. Perhaps when those who are today teenagers grow up, and realise their cultural memories are made of cheap, plastic-covered nothing, they will have a creative recession similar – but worse – than that generated by subprime mortgages and asset inflation. Only the quality of the inevitable ‘Iron Man 3’ will give us any clue as to whether it will be a double dip.

The Dangers of Exceptionalism: Some Thoughts on ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’

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Abstract: The title of the film, a plateau of signifiers with seemingly arbitrary grammar and word ordering, is entirely appropriate, indicating a narrative without a strong purchase on character, morality, logic, or much of anything.



Some way through the wearyingly vague plot of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the titular character forms an unlikely alliance (or rather, re-alliance) with a high-ranking US military official who has offered him the tools with which to avenge the death of a loved one. ‘I come with you,’ conditions Wolverine, ‘I’m coming for blood. No law, no code of conduct – you point me in the right direction and you get the hell out of my way.’

Hardly a new sentiment – the Hollywood summer blockbuster seems built on twin narrative foundations: on the one hand a craving for bloody revenge, on the other a desire for acceptance as both a member of a group and respect as an individual. Ethan Hunt is an effective member of an elite government spy agency; framed, he proves himself as capable on his own terms; at the close of the film he both destroys the people who harmed him and is re-accepted into the Impossible Mission institution that formerly rejected him.

Yet the words ring hollow in Wolverine’s mouth. Why? (Readers who do not wish the excitements and surprises of this Marvel origin story enunciated before they watch the film for themselves best look away now.) Born in the middle of the nineteenth century, this man has lived his life in warzones, fighting on the morally correct side in the American civil war and both world wars. Vietnam, however, offers the breaking point, when he and his similarly immortal brother Victor come to blows over how much violence precisely is too much. A later sojourn the two undertake as part of a secret government program ends similarly; once again, Logan (Wolverine’s erstwhile moniker) criticises, saves a life imminently jeopardised, then walks away, ignoring entirely the situation and its consequences until they come knocking on his door six years later. Victor returns and apparently murders Logan’s wife, drawing the mutant into a violent feud. Many ineffectual ‘oh, this is actually what’s going on’ denouements later, Victor and Logan are fighting side-by-side, Logan’s wife is up and swinging, and the villain to be overcome is the previously mentioned military officer.

This is all very convoluted, as though the writers considered revelations and reversals to be synonymous with drama and involvement. What should be most concerning for an attentive viewer are the moral implications of such shifting alliances. The military official, Stryker, is played by Danny Huston. He is a bad man. He plays bad men. He is hissable. Wolverine is played by Hugh Jackman. He’s muscular, charming, funny, blue-collar. He hosted the Oscars. His mission to avenge the death of his beloved is justified – Victor is a violent, animalistic killer.

Yet the death of the wife was staged. Discovering this, and in tandem with the appearance of another threat, Logan and Victor forgive each other their trespasses. Neither’s character has changed; rather, a specific event was misinterpreted. Stryker, manipulator-in-chief, has meanwhile quietly been given motives for his dastardly deeds: Stryker's own son is a mutant, and killed Stryker’s wife. Thus, Stryker wants to win a vaguely defined war that will soon break out between humans and mutants. Never mind that the film at no point makes any efforts to establish the relationship between these two groups, or even establish that there are groups at all (the word mutant is not used until well into the film, many of the mutants we do see have undetermined powers of moving really fast and jumping really high, and Logan himself is perhaps the least aesthetically mutable and most human-like of all mutants). Stryker murders the General who comments on his matricidal household – he reacts emotionally and violently to a defined historical event.

This is exactly what Wolverine does, promising ‘no code of conduct’ in his mission for revenge. Hollywood exceptionalism allows the protagonist to be special, to break laws, interrogate suspects, operate outside a codified system of correct action. Everyone else must follow this code, but the chosen alpha-masculine figure is allowed – nay, must – operate beyond the moral standards of everyone else. As the saying goes, this time it’s personal.

Stryker too operates outside the code of conduct. He is acting pre-emptively ‘to save countless lives.’ He is acting illegally and immorally because the legal and moral gains will more than reset the balance. His logic, given the information the audience are about his history, seems sound. He did not even order the murder of the lovely Mrs. Logan like we thought he did.

Wolverine pursues Victor and plans to cut his head off. His quest is personal: it is important enough to operate beyond the law. Yet his wife is alive, and when Logan discovers this he realigns his priorities almost instantly, and saves Victor’s life during their nuclear-cooling-tower-topping kung-fu shenanigans. Wolverine’s thirst-for-blood is not only sanctioned, it is easily adaptable. Rather than suffer an existential crisis when he discovers his motives are groundless, he just carries on fighting.

The film may be unremitting dross (and indeed, it is), but that does not excuse it from being so ethically muddy. Stryker’s special ops team of mutants, who operate outside the law and are criticised by Logan because of this, merely offer a standardised version of the later Wolverine’s own self-justified mission. In a cosmopolitan and democratic environment if one person is exceptional, then we all are. If his emotional crisis justifies lawless bloodshed, so does mine. The tone of the film, jumping as it does from one dramatic arrangement to another, should work to undermine this exceptionalism, but fails. Despite revealing the malleability of character and events, both of which can be lied about or misinterpreted, the arbitrariness of moral particularism is never grasped by the characters. Perhaps this is because they do not live in our world, but some strange digital creation of blue screens, wobbly effects, and blurred edges, as though the comic book world tried to break into the real one, but got stuck in some interstitial space of digital communication in which economic, rather than creative, imperatives predominate. Or maybe that is the real world, and it is this fuzziness that allows for such irresponsible laziness in moral definition to be pedalled as summer entertainment.

Land of the Parodic, Home of the Absurd: A Review of ‘Watchmen’

...and I feel fine: Faithfulness to the quintessentially novelistic source material turns out to be the weakest link of Watchmen.

A joke: a man in the midst of a deep depression visits the doctor in an attempt to alleviate his malaise: he can find no solace in a harsh world and its vague future. The doctor prescribes a visit to world famous clown Pagliacci, which is sure to cheer him up. The man bursts into tears – I am Pagliacci, he explains. What hope do we have when the distractions we have assembled to take our minds off the nastiness of the human condition become themselves afflicted?

This anecdote appears in Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel ‘Watchmen’, released in the mid-eighties, and evoking a M.A.D world on the brink of nuclear armageddon, peopled by a citizenry who are fanatical about anything but love or truth, burying their heads in gang-culture, nostalgia, and even comic books so as to avoid sensible engagement with an increasingly eschatological world. Masked avengers in this work are not emblems of justice in a gothic metropolis, but are rather symptom of personal gratification and the power of consumer branding.

In adapting the novel to the screen, director Zack Snyder and his team have retained this grim yarn, as well as most of the words and images, translating them sometimes slavishly onto the screen in a similar, if with a more varied palette, manner of the Snyder’s popular version of Frank Miller’s 300. But this is not a story about Spartans and Persians and constant mythologizing and bloodshed. Moore’s novel, and by extension the script of the film, is an attempt to strip away myth and grandiosity, replacing it with troublingly deep psychology and an acute examination of why people dressing up in masks and fighting crime appealed and appeals so much to the American psyche, and how this appeal is tied up with the outcome of the Second World War and the unseen forces at work in the subsequent Cold War. That’s a lot to squeeze in, even with Watchmen’s two hours forty minutes running time. In making the attempt, the film reveals the massive potential of its own medium – unfortunately, by failing to fulfil it.

As with the novel, there are a wide variety of characters, themes, alternative histories, flashbacks, locations, plots and sub-plots. Without the structuring of chapters, and even the careful positioning of cells on a double-page layout, many elements lose their force. A cannier director may have made more of an attempt to translate the visual and thematic language which Moore and artist Dave Gibbons worked with so carefully into the filmic dimension. Instead, he transliterates. Snyder reproduces, rather than reinvigorates. The narrative feels like a constant plateau of meaning and emotion, only rising and falling by tiny increments, rather than tightening the nearer the metaphorical doomsday clock gets to midnight. Never mind that the surprise reveal of the villain is undermined by fresh framing and sequencing, the finale fails to flare the imagination more than the rest of the film because it is handled in the exact same manner as the rest of the film. Shot, reverse-shot, slo-mo punch, smashing of a glass table, repeat. The title sequence, in which ideas and referents from the novel are presented as Wes Anderson-like tableau’s to the unmediated tune of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, manages to avoid this flattening-out, as does the depiction of a trip to Mars (don’t laugh) and the metaphysical anguish one character feels by his very existence and responsibilities, all set to some of Philip Glass’ music from Koyaanisqatsi (a 1984 film concerning the disharmony and unsustainability of modern life).

These interesting and unexpected musical cues are not alone: also used are Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and Simon & Garfunkel, some more successfully than others, but all adding some cultural heft otherwise absent: no use listening to Rorschach, a single-minded vigilante, bitch about the state of New York (“this city is like an open sewer with sidewalks of blood”) when the film makes no effort to ground itself in the streets he walks. Like the back-lot of a Spiderman film, or the digital sets so beloved of late, even constant views of the Twin Towers on the skyline fail to position the audience as anything other than outsiders looking in on a fish-tank, our perception warped, the objects we study unreal. This quality might suit the plotline involving two retired Watchmen who re-don their costumes for the thinly-veiled sake of some soft-core action and empowering beat-downs (focussing as this strand does on the infantilism and egoism inherent in the genre), but the sheen does not sit well with either the intensely violent and uncompromising Rorschach or the corporeally challenged Doc Manhattan, a scientist turned to pure energy in an experiment who can eviscerate opponents and used this skill to win America the Vietnam War. These two characters, as well as the fallen comrade who opens the film and the truly Machiavellian adversary who was behind the whole scheme (nothing less than saving the world from itself), are all embodiments of moralistic outlooks, each embedded strongly with American (and human) history. Watching such lofty personifications duke it out at one-quarter speed is disappointing, at best.

What then of that poor, existentially troubled clown? Perceived wisdom is that the superhero comic book is an escape, a fantasy of masculine power and ethical simplicities in which good triumphs and no thanks ma’am, no need to thank me, just doing my job. Comics may not be the opiate of the masses, but they help the opium go down. In examining this phenomenon in such detail, and stressing the danger it poses not just to American foreign policy but also to the basic human ability to relate to one another, Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ bit off more than it could chew, but asked questions about the nature of escapism, and the danger of fabulist story-telling and mis-used imagination. Snyder’s Watchmen, through the configuring of an invisible Russian threat and a caricature Nixon, fails to exhibit the same apprehension about its own medium, instead settling on being a spectacular, morally swampy distraction.

Anarchy Loves Company: A Review of 'The Dark Knight'

The Hollywood Blockbuster equivalent of James Joyce in narrative style, The Dark Knight is a mad, free-association assemblage of moral quandaries and spectacular destruction.

In superhero fashion, dark is the new black. Mood and introspection are the accessories of the now. The backlash has already begun, and films like Hancock and Iron Man actually appear ‘niche’ because of their insistence of lightweight fun. It’s tempting to blame Tim Burton for all of this, his Batman and Batman Returns revelling in the demented grotesquery of the circus freaks who populated a wildly over-conceived and dangerously top-heavy Gotham City, itself an ornate architrave beneath which combatants duelled theatrically. Burton’s films fed upon the yuppie consumer malaise of Reaganomics, depicting a fear subverted by fetishism and all but eliminated by societal apathy; in Christopher Nolan’s fresh take on the franchise the fear, like the hallucinogen in Batman Begins, has infiltrated the bloodstream of the social body and is ready to explode at the flick of a switch.

That 2005 reboot told the story of a simple billion-heir punishing himself in various ways in order to understand why bad things happen to good benefactors: Bruce Wayne, his parents killed, learns lessons both martial and moral, then unleashes both on a cabal of assassins attempting to destroy the city. Batman Began, but seemed unsure how he was going to get to wherever it was that he was going: the plotting could only be considered anything other than a complete mess if one read the film as an externalised Jungian nightmare, which was a stretch at the best of times. The same confusion affects the sequel, only this time reveals itself to be an intention rather than a vice – in The Dark Knight, the word to spread is most certainly panic, but it spreads beyond the schemes of the villains and the reactions of the citizens, infecting the performances of the actors, the composition of shots, the musical score; the very texture of the film.

Gotham City, evolved from a composition of urban environs into a Chicago-inspired (and shot) dystopia of political aspiration and mob rule, is attempting to haul itself out of the mire of corruption and depression. Hot-shot D.A. Harvey Dent is giving the ordinary people hope against an empowered criminal underclass. Newly-minted Batman is thwarting drug deals and gaining co-operation from the police, particularly Major Crime Unit commander Jim Gordon. Bruce Wayne remains a pompous, over-sexed jerk. Before any of these elements are established, however, Christopher Nolan and his co-writer (and sibling) Jonathon Nolan have introduced the match-head which threatens to burn down this particular urban forest: standing half-hunchbacked on an intersection in the sunlight, clown mask in his hand, the Joker begins his reign of terror.

Cut loose from the time-shifting opening acts of Batman Begins and The Prestige Nolan initially seems to be floundering, his drifting narrative lacking the excuse of warped chronology. Events in this first act notably fail to cohere to one another, creating less a plot and more an incredibly high-sheen superhero soap opera. This fractured, shard-like style never lets up; where its predecessor eventually jettisoned the fragments for a linear roller-coaster (the frenziedly elliptical editing notwithstanding), The Dark Knight has no choice but to revel in its own chaos, sub-plot proliferation and jaunts to Hong Kong abound. The Joker arrives as an almost extra-textual element to the film, a demented punter setting fire to the auditorium, causing the performers on screen to desperately utilise celluloid means to extinguish a corporeal flame.

And what a flame it turns out to be. Not since Robert Duvall turned the volume up on Ride of Valkyries has so much destruction been wrought over such a wide area with such panache. Like the characters of Michael Crichton’s Sphere, the Joker seems to need only to conceive of some malevolence than the barrels of gasoline appear and the clock starts ticking. The gleeful nature with which Nolan instantaneously manifests such chaos puts shame to Batman’s silent appearances and vanishings. These moments begin to transcend their earlier incarnation as plot-holes, following as they do the logic of a nightmare. The Dark Knight is in awe of such power: even composers James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer seem cowed by the Joker’s mere presence onscreen, their normally bombastically ominous score becoming nothing but a shrill whine as some fresh horror of his making unfolds.

The destruction mounts, and Nolan stages particular sequences with a verve and tension that at times beggar belief. A three-way cross-cut sequence leading to an assassination (but whose?) is edge of the seat stuff, despite two of the imperilled characters being mere bit-parts. The most cohesive fifteen-minute stretch – a street-chase involving an armoured convoy, a bazooka-wielding Joker, some monumental stunt-work, and very little music – makes the film worth the price of admission no matter what the cost, playing out with vintage Michael Mann precision rather than comic book bedlam.

This sequence aside, the film suffers the similar (albeit enviable) fate as its forbearer and remains a collection of grand and fantastic ideas under-executed and swiftly departed from. Floated relatively early is the plot-point that the Joker’s reign of terror will cease only when Batman reveals his true identity; a few scenes later this is effectively dropped, so that later still when the two come face-to-face the Joker fails to even suggest that the bat has an alter ego. While this is an intriguing way of suggesting the growing synergy between the two characters (i.e. as the Joker has no past or alter ego, neither does the man in black), it flits past so quickly, and is surrounded by so much flying debris, that it is in danger of being lost to the cacophony. So too is the concept of an ontological sonar-based CCTV system which Batman uses to hunt down his nemesis, the thrill and danger of one man being able to map in real-time the movements of an entire populace becoming just another piece of visual bombast in a sequence already full of it. The most resonant idea being heard above the din is that there is just no point to it all, and that if – as the final act suggests – the expected moral norm that an individual is more ethically sound than an endangered mob can be inverted, then anything is fair game and the very concept of heroism is meaningless.

The Joker’s schemes affect not only other characters within the film, but the very texture of the film itself.

With the vision of a city in chaos, hospitals exploding and bound hostages being used to deliver messages via the nightly news, The Dark Knight is at pains to be fiercely contemporary. It becomes impossible to speak of the plot in a vernacular that does not reflect Western political anxiety; even the characters within the drama give up halfway through and identify the Joker as the terrorist that he is. Beyond these aesthetic lifts the most original expression of the new normal within the film is the uncertainty which grows with every minute. Every character can be killed, every building can be destroyed, and every good man can become a ruthless murderer. Beyond this, the Joker’s insanity infects even the plotting: whatever framework of control the characters or the audience attempt to impose (It’s the story of a superhero in crisis! It’s a love triangle! It’s about an imperilled political operator! It’s the story of an alliance between the mob and a madman!) is literally blown to smithereens almost in the very moment at which it is conceived.

The cast, for the most part, are as unhinged by this randomness as the viewer. While the aforementioned lighter summer films of Hancock et al were designed around central star personalities, Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne neglects to command such control, ceding it instantaneously to Heath Ledger’s fluttering psychotic. Much praise will be given to Ledger’s performance (much of it entirely deserved) and all I would attempt to add here is that – for all his violent audacity – the character is beautifully anchored in some miniscule way by a bittersweet sense of something lost (sanity? history?) which could never be regained. Bale himself deserves praise for making his Bruce Wayne as casually dislikeable as possible, and his dark Knight as monotonous as possible – just as Wayne himself would play the Bat. Other actors seem pleasingly frazzled by the chaos around them, Gary Oldman being a particular stand-out, elevating his Jim Gordon from the one-note idealism of the first film into a living, breathing, middle-aged criminal investigator seemingly way out his depth in this particular sea of madness. The casting of the bit-parts, meanwhile, goes beyond the mere stunt and into an inexplicably euphemistic realm – witness Eric Roberts playing, effectively, Eric Roberts, and the in-joke casting of former ‘Batmanuel’ Nestor Carbonell as the new Mayor of Gotham.

At two-and-a-half hours the film is certainly long, and with its extended third act and constant state of frenzy, it is easy to feel wearied. However, the brilliance of the craftsmanship (the brooding score, Lee Smith’s flash-point editing, Wally Pfister’s granite-like cinematography) makes the elongated running time welcome. While others have termed it the greatest superhero film of all time, I hesitate to apply that label, for the principal reason that I do not feel it is a superhero or comic book film: the pleasures on display are for the most part divorced from the sorts of thrills that are contained within that generic label. The Dark Knight is far more notable for its social theory, emotional tone, and (most of all) the originality of the narrative-style than for its duels or its scenes of caped crusaders flying through the air. As such, it represents a director pushing the boundaries of his craft in the most literal way possible, and demands viewing on the biggest screen you can find.

Arms and the Entrepreneur: A Review of 'Iron Man'

'I was in an Elton John video? When did this happen?'

It’s a curious comic book adaptation that opens with the abduction of a wealthy American in Afghanistan, centres on a character who is essentially an asshole, and co-stars Gwyneth Paltrow. Iron Man performs all these feats, while ticking every box on the origin-story template that’s been banging around for forty years, and giving Robert Downey Jr. the role, if not of a lifetime, then certainly of the season.

He plays Tony Stark, head of a massive weapons manufacturing company currently hocking its latest product to the US army. He has the ingenuity to build a bunker-busting missile, the spiky energy to set off any party, and the rakish charm to disarm even the most good-looking investigative reporter. In short, he is a man due for a comeuppance – which duly comes when he is forced at gunpoint to assemble a WMD for Arab terrorists. He capitulates, but constructs his own method of escape: a one-man war-machine of wrought iron and flamethrowers, powered by a quasi-hydrogen battery. In doing so, and slaughtering countless gibbering captors, he learns that helping people is better than building things that kill them. Helping white people, that is.

The plot thickens on his return to America, but I shan’t go into that here, as one needs to take all the surprises one can (unless you’re a fan, in which case you already have a fair idea of how the third sequel is going to pan out). There are romantic entanglements with secretaries, predictable double-crosses, and shit-gets-built montages aplenty, the whole thing occurring in a universe which has never experienced The Incredibles, let alone Frank Miller or Alan Moore. It could all be quite wearisome, were it not for the first-rate cast and the manner in which they have been directed.

Jon Favreau, perhaps best known for his starring role in Doug Liman’s indie-comedy Swingers (and here providing a cameo as, very appropriately, Stark’s bodyguard and bag-handler) shows a surprisingly strong hand, and a welcome willingness to allow his cast to improvise and generally piss around. It isn’t Altman, but it does grab your attention. While there might be some to claims that Downey Jr. wheels out the same mannered, drug-spun bundle of ticks in all his recent performances, his Stark is an entertaining mixture of charm, idiocy, and muscle somewhere between Jack Sparrow and Batman. It is a credit to the actor that he makes no effort to alter the essential attitude of the man post-abduction, a move which forces the sceptical among us to question the ethical veracity of those who have been part of his inner circle all along, including the perpetually placid Terrence Howard and the alarmingly not-terrible Paltrow. Then there’s Jeff Bridges, playing the ridiculously titled Obadiah Stane, who – though he is the obligatory grizzled old guy – invests his character with some pathos and psychology, even if his plotline is underdeveloped. (I guess there’s a reason he’s named after the shortest book in the Old Testament.)

In these $100 a barrel times the cyber-dream of flawless man-machine integration cannot be that simple: Stark’s suit is a sleek exhaust-free number which literally runs on the power of his own heart, whereas his nemesis’ bulky Hummer-parody belches exhaust fumes. The latter is a personification of the outdated mechanised armoury of the pre-Cold War period; Iron Man on the other hand is an example of contemporary military tactics, even at one point being mistaken for an UAV. This American playboy – whose father literally invented the Atomic bomb – at one point launches at whim into a middle-eastern war zone, overcomes the villains with his absurdly advanced artillery, then exits as soon as he has brought about peace, leaving the natives to happily sort out the mess. All this happens bloodlessly of course, Favreau showing a marked aversion to killing, always cutting away at the moment the trigger is pulled. Still, considering the fetid morality of films such as Jumper, these sidesteps cannot be entirely condemned.

It is by no means a masterpiece, but in the modern blockbuster environment, when the best James Cameron we can come up with is Michael Bay, it certainly entertains for a couple of cheerful hours, and we can only hope it makes absurdly sculpted goatees 2008’s must have facial accessory.