Crap-o-Nine Tale: The Nine Most Disappointing Things About ‘9’

In an undefined mid-twentieth century post-war milieu nine puppets invested with a curious life force must defend themselves from a rampaging mechanical force. A late-teen oriented CGI film produced by Tim Burton which apparently allows its metaphorical imperative to override all other customary fallbacks, what could possibly go wrong? Plenty, it turns out. Of the many frustrations, here’s my top 9:

1. Given the almost limitless possibilities of an entirely digital environment, the film offers an almost dazzlingly dull array of shot reverse-shots.

2. There’s a fat henchman used for comedic effect.

3. The highly impressive mise-en-apocalypse (a mixture of World War Two landscape, H.G. Wells threat and J.R.R. Tolkein geography) is left increasingly unexplored.

4. Martin Landau got about three lines. Unless he played one of the dead bodies, which he might have done for all I know.

5. Ten years since ‘The Matrix’, twenty-five since ‘The Terminator’, a whole eighty since ‘Metropolis’, and still the level of discourse in this sort of thing is “them machines be evil”.

6. And, given the above, there is no sense of irony in the fact that the whole film is structured around mechanical characters, has as its deux ex machina an electronic MacGuffin, and was created entirely on a computer.

7. The dialogue consists entirely of context-free heroicisms: ‘I have to do this’, ‘I can’t do it alone’, ‘There’s still a chance’, ‘We have to go back’, ‘Run!’. It’s like watching a Michael Bay film with all intervening dialogue concerning something other than a basic physical task removed.

8. Director Shane Acker doesn’t seem to know what an allegory is, let alone how to put one on film.

9. As a concept, it’s incredibly interesting. As a film, it’s unremitting dross.

Notes Towards an Exploration of Space in Contemporary Action Cinema

Space has become fragmented. Blame Jason Bourne. Or possibly Jean Baudrillard. Jittery shots, quick editing, the desired response of dazzled confusion. Renowned (but occasionally doddery) film theorist David Bordwell calls it “intensified continuity” – the phenomenon whereby contemporary films feature a considerably shorter average shot length than ever before. More shots, more cuts, more action. As a result, the environment through which characters move becomes increasingly difficult for the spectator to map.

Some films respond by collapsing their existence towards a singularity. Paul Greengrass, a British director formerly involved in painstaking you-are-there recreations of such tragedies as Ireland’s Bloody Sunday, uses intensified continuity as a precision-tool of great dramatic and artistic effect. The set-piece in Waterloo station in Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum is the nadir of this form, the splintered world created through meticulous but frantic shooting and cutting a demonstration of the protagonist Jason Bourne’s lack of history (thanks to amnesia), but total grasp of his immediate situation even in the face of extreme pressure (thanks to relentless government indoctrination). The train station becomes his entire world, and the film depicts an attempt to grasp this vast space with something close to simultaneity. Attention is fleeting, jumping from this face to that, from the security camera to the exits. Waterloo station is depicted as fragments of vital concentration, not a coherent or meaningful entirety.




This is the postmodern environment as sensory barrage. There is a similar tendency in the television series 24, with its incessant and unenlightening split-screens gesturing towards an awareness of the wealth of incident, character, and information that accompanies the most cursory event. However, the constant pandering to the lowest attention span undoes such efforts – entire episodes seem to consist of a chain of people phoning each other and re-iterating the same conversation, without the creators or writers suggesting an awareness of the ‘Chinese-whispers’ potential of such a scenario. Space for Jack Bauer may not be highly structured, but it is entirely manageable.

Detailed mapping and navigation in this sort of drama seems impossible. Plots packed with incident keep moving, flitting from place to place, offering neither characters nor audience purchase on the surrounding environment. Nowhere better is this trend examined, and indeed parodied, than the most recent outing for James Bond, Quantum of Solace. Concluding in a bizarre hotel in the middle of the desert (indeed, there are few scenes in the film that do not take place in hotel rooms, lobbies, anonymous corridors or sleek performance spaces), the setting is a meaningless, depopulated postmodern space. As the hotel itself is unconnected from a metropolitan, or even rural surrounding, so too the sections of the hotel itself fail to cohere. The central space of the hotel, across which walkways are suspended in mid-air, is like something from a science-fiction film.

Even the destruction of this site by multiple explosions, previously such an easy fallback pleasure of action films in the 80s and 90s, is undercut by the nonsensibility of the devastation. In the finest shot of the film, if not the entire series, the villain flees from an explosion as it bursts through a wall and shatters a room-spanning sheet of glass; the space may be hollow, but the only way to understand it is through action. What was previously inert and functionless (the room, the glass, the hotel itself) becomes dazzling in its beauty and its dynamism. Spectacle and excitement become tools with which to explore the meaning of architecture, and our interaction with it.




This re-examination of a space once inert made ferocious is used to great effect in the thriller The International. Extended sequences in Milan, New York and Istanbul successfully ingrain themselves with the cities they visit without excessive sequences of “local colour”. The centrepiece in Frank Lloyd Wright’s coiled Guggenheim museum (shot for the most part inside a 98% to scale replica built in Germany) offers initially the use of architecture-as-backdrop, as detectives follow an assassin up the rotunda where he is to meet his handler. The installation on display is a plethora of cinema screens showing occasionally stagey, occasionally vibrant scenes. The backdrop of the set itself is littered with further backdrops.

When the bullets start to fly the space is radically transformed. Balconies become shooting galleries, walls become shields, punters become collateral damage, and museum pieces become deadly weapons. The audience is rushed away from the ramp, into a staircase, then back to the rotunda. Our awareness of the environment, previously one of quiet (museum-like?) contemplation becomes one of life-or-death sensory necessity. The last shot of the space is a slow track forward and pan up, asking us to see how our awareness of the building has changed, progressed, clarified. Unlike the shifting mass of people and camera movement of Waterloo, this architecture is built from the ground-up within the structure of the scene and the shots that compose it.



Creating his own environments to explore, James Cameron frequently offers a meticulous recomposing of these spaces as his films cross their halfway point. In The Abyss, set almost entirely aboard an oil platform based on the ocean floor, a tour of the intricacies and layout of the rig is interwoven with the narrative during the first hour and a half. When an accident cripples the vessel, and a visiting Navy SEAL team turn against the blue-collar crew, this knowledge is redeployed as a potential for salvation. Reviewers often term this sort of action “hard-earned” – those who paid attention earlier are rewarded by a comforting feeling of awareness and security. Inversely, it is the cardinal sin of any narrative for a solution to be offered that has no preceding conditions for its existence (the plotting equivalent of the fight scene in which the hero triumphs at the moment their plight seems most dire by kicking their attacker in the genitals). Titanic actually shows the sinking of the ship twice, first in one of the early scenes aboard a salvaging vessel in the modern day, as an aged survivor is lectured using a rudimentary computer program as to what damage the iceberg did, and how the subsequent flooding of the compartmentalised sections of the hull led to the front of the ship sinking, the rising of the rear section, the tearing of the ship in two, then subsequent vertical dragging down of beneath the waves. Later, when a far more advanced computer program depicts the same events, there is no need for an over-calm character explaining what is occurring, or expositional shots of the hull under water. “What’s going on!” asks Rose to her lover: “I don’t know” he replies. But we do. The spectacle of action is only offered after forensic enquiry and two hours of dramatic action exploring every deck, engine room and cabin.

Space, then, does not have to be fragmented to be explored. The Waterloo Station of The Bourne Ultimatum exists in shards, while the hotels on Quantum of Solace seem not to exist at all. The Guggenheim of The International is scrutinised and given a new life, while the self-created spaces of James Cameron films exist as lined-up dominoes for thrilling set pieces. The action film offers a method of dynamically exploring architecture, turning what could be merely a backdrop into a tangible environment which can be mapped in a variety of unexpected ways.

Rules of Engagement: A Review of 'Lions For Lambs'

Of the swathe of ‘war on terror’ films that were released in 2006 and 2007, ‘Lions for Lambs’ is perhaps the most pressingly of-the-moment, and is unapologetic about this immediacy. ‘The Kingdom’ happily subsumed any political ideas beneath a whitewash of villainous wahabi militants and massive gun battles. ‘Rendition’ conceived of terrorism as force that was at once powerful enough to fracture the space-time continuum, and pliable enough to be overcome by Reese Witherspoon’s marital earnestness. Robert Redford’s film by contrast can proudly be likened to a particularly good weekday issue of a newspaper made celluloid, and a broadsheet more incisive, potent and naïve than any currently in circulation.

When I first saw the film two years ago I did not think much, at the time derisively calling it the kind of script that would be written by the characters on display in Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived television show ‘Studio 60’: an over-eager primer in political awareness which fatally allowed itself to be petrified by what it saw as awe-inspiring ambition. As ‘Studio 60’ improved with reconsideration, so has ‘Lions For Lambs’, and between them they offer something of a sub-genre of American entertainment which attempts not so much a deconstruction of life in that country but a studious awareness that deconstruction may just be impossible in the current climate of necessary patriotism, 24-hour news tickers, and accepted societal segregation.

‘Lions For Lambs’ may be two years old, but with its assessment of failure in Iraq, media bias, fallen soldiers in Afghanistan, and the very real possibility of a nuclear Iran, it remains as contemporary as today’s instalment of the six o’clock news. It strives for these issues to be more than just references upon which to hang some other, conventional drama, but rather constructs them as the drama. In an early scene in a base in Afghanistan, a commander begins his briefing to the troops by telling them to ask questions and take notes: the film, too, is intended as a prompt, not a lecture.

Which begs the question, what exactly is it prompting? This seems obvious: “they bank on your apathy” says a college professor, condemning both the self-involved governmental bureaucracy and the electorate which fails to open its eyes. The film preaches that politics is not another planet, but rather that our actions can be part of the political process. Whether this is followed through in the conclusion of the drama is another thing. The journalist being given an exclusive scoop from a slick senator about a new military offensive in Afghanistan suffers a crisis of conscience, realising she is little but a corporate cog in a machine for propaganda delivery. However, the images of her staring wistfully out the back of a limo at the White House, the Vietnam memorial, and Arlington cemetery, fail to say much. One story strand sees two college kids enlist due to their desire to connect with the world around them, and make an appreciable difference; despite this, the film bends over backwards not to explicitly valorise military service, even while persistently praising the boots on the ground. It’s the same old story: war is young men dying and old men talking (and women reporting).

The film has an energy which is born of September 12th 2001. The wounded aftermath is evoked several times, and it is clear that Redford feels he too was swept up in an undignified lashing out which led, step by step, to what the film understands as the debacle of Iraq. To answer the earlier question, the film is prompting engagement. No bad thing to promote, but no effort is expended to parse the echelons of involvement: America lashed out at the middle east after the towers came down, and in ‘Lions For Lambs’ the youth of America is ordered to lash out at the establishment that banks on their complacency. (For a piece of entertainment so avowedly political, the drama remains at home. We may watch two soldiers stranded in the mountains fend off dozens of Taliban with dwindling ammo, but these scenes are merely the emphasis placed on the dialogue about this initiative, and the response of the American public to it.)

Conceived of, directed, and written with simplicity in mind, ‘Lions For Lambs’ has a singularity of purpose which is bracing. It may not be a call to arms, but it is a call to attention, and whether you consider it to be a success or not, a large-scale Hollywood production with three A-list stars (Redford, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep) produced with this level of gloss that desires little more than to reach just one person, just prick up the ears of one individual who might both try to improve their conduct and be in the position where this might have a positive impact on if not the global stage then American life, is truly a thing to marvel at.

Magic Beans: A Review of 'The Brothers Grimm'

It is saying very little to claim that the work of Terry Gilliam is anarchic. ‘Brazil’, his best film, is a meanderingly scattershot exercise in existential paranoia. Oddly, the time-travelling paradoxes of ’12 Monkeys’ afforded him his most fully formed work, as the myriad of quirks on screen were simultaneously explained as psychological derangement and temporal reverb. ‘The Brothers Grimm’, under the over-watchful producing hands of the Weinstein brothers at Miramax, is an attempt to ground these flights of fancy on an even more rigid blockbuster format: ironically, given a subject matter that plays so directly to the gallery of strangeness, Gilliam is stricken by an insidious imperative to conform.

Set in what is tellingly described as ‘French occupied Germany’ in the early years of the nineteenth century, the film offers a fictionalised supposition about the lives of those famous purveyors of fairy tales without which Lacan and Propp (not to mention kindly, plagiaristic Uncle Walt) would be left somewhat stranded, as tricksters inventing monsters to slay, for which they receive the gratitude and pay of the townsfolk. These early scenes – the entire first thirty minutes, in fact – are something of a struggle, like a Monty Python sketch performed by an amateur company who have no idea how to end it, so just keep going.

For those who nail themselves to their seats, things improve considerably when the brothers arrive in Marbaden, recruited to discover the mystery of several missing young girls, presumed to have been abducted by con-artists in their own vein. A general vibe of thrown-togetherness lingers, but the energy level rises, and the film starts to complicate its conceit by engaging in an intriguing dynamic concerning imperialism, partisanship and myth, alongside the expected nods towards the narrative and storytelling process. Considering the spectral events occurring in the marginal village to be a threat to the French empire, General Delatombe (who would surely have been Napoleon, but Gilliam was not so brave as Quentin Tarantino to re-write historical continuity) configures those who believe in fairy tales as a threat to imperial unity and infallibility. Superstitious townsfolk become wood-bound freedom fighters. An interesting comparison is there to be made between ‘The Brothers Grimm’ and the latter two installments of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, which adapted a singularly manufactured exercise in theme park entertainment into a vicious attack on the fascistic enterprise of the East India Company.

Of course, this dynamic happens on the margins. But then, everything in this movie seems to happen on the margins. It’s nothing but margins. Which is why it is unfortunate that the last twenty-minutes are so rigorously bolted to a template of heroic empowerment, unmasked evil, and triumphant gallantry. I may not have read the Grimm fairy tales particularly closely, but I don’t remember many fistfights. Gilliam’s unsteadiness reveals itself in the fleetingness with which he deploys his most striking images: a white horse falling through a dark forest, a child with the features of her face removed, the fragmentation of a character whose skin is a mirrored façade.

One has to take pleasures where one can then, especially considering the horrible cinematography which confuses plasticised rot and awkward camera movements for atmosphere and suspense. A pleasure indeed is the performance of Matt Damon, whose Will Grimm is a womanising, self-aggrandising jerk. Damon always makes his quiet superiority a hindrance to his characters, but here displays a comic timing and energy which is much appreciated. Heath Ledger’s Jacob is, perhaps, less successful, although I concede that it may be the case his bumbling, bookish brother is potentially a more impressive piece of stagecraft. No argument can be broached in the case of Peter Stormare, as an Italian torturer, and Jonathan Pryce as General Delamorte: both are unremittingly terrible, clowning around like drunk uncles at a party they don’t fully understand or care to try.

What does ‘The Brothers Grimm’ teach us? Nothing at all about the siblings themselves, and very little indeed about their work. It taught Gilliam to stay away from similarly top-heavy projects for some time (he has been quoted as saying his great work only happens when he has to fight something during a project: it seems the Weinstein brothers were too great an opponent, and their marketing-over-creativity fingerprints can consistently be glimpsed draining the life from the picture). Perhaps the best thing to learn is that any kind of adult Harry Potter-esque japery is doomed to failure, and this sort of thing should be left to the children (and grown children) for whom subtext is one text too many.

Alien Zone: A Review of 'District 9'

In hindsight, perhaps the oddest thing about ‘District 9’ – and there are so many very, very odd things to choose from – comes not from the film itself but the manner of its marketing. London residents will no doubt have seen the phone boxes emblazoned with faux-warnings to “non-humans”, a campaign which is effective, but also clearly something of a triage manoeuvre, a response to the lack of any name actors and the strange stylistic affectations that begin the film. What is odd about this street advertising, as well as the trailer and poster, is that the film itself is stuffed (over-stuffed, really) with digital creatures, massive explosions, running firefights and gory deaths: exactly the kinds of things that sell movies, but here come as something of a surprise.

In the manner of Brian DePalma’s ‘Redacted’, the first act uses documentary footage and interviews to sketch out a world in which a massive alien spaceship has come to rest above Johannesburg, the immigrants on board interned into an unpleasant slum near the city, mistreated by officials, and economically abused by Nigerian warlords. So far, so bracing. The staging and cutting of this first act, while not wholly convincing, certainly grabs the attention. Considering the allegorical tone the low IQ levels of the aliens (insensitively called ‘prawns’) is potentially offensive, but the bureaucratic, ad hoc, and callous response of the South African government is invigoratingly realistic.

Slyly, and almost imperceptibly, the film shifts out of this documentary mode, but is still filmed in a hand-held, naturalistic manner, even while the plot becomes increasingly formulaic and hole-ridden.

Touching heavily, but not probingly, on issues of immigration, racism, and (non-existent) corporate humanity, ‘District 9’ suffers from indulging in its own baser instincts. Several dozen people are violently eviscerated in the course of the staggeringly action-packed second half, and the influence of producer Peter Jackson begins to be felt in the ‘Braindead’-esque zaniness of the combat, as well as the continued punishment metered out to the protagonist (indeed, for all the prosthetics on show, Sharlto Copley’s transformation from hapless office lackey to hapless action hero is the most spectacular).

The acting and effects are grounded in a way that gives the running-jumping-shooting an excitement not found in, say, the ‘Transformers’ films, but director Neill Blomkamp seems overly enamoured of this advantage. Watch the film expecting a rich tale of racial antagonism and you will, ultimately, be disappointed. Better to expect a piece of blockbuster entertainment which fudges together ‘The Office’, ‘Alien Nation’, and ‘Battletech,’ which – bizarre as it sounds – just about works.

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

.

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.

22 Things I Learned From 'Star Trek'

1. Starfleet spacesuits come in a range of primary colours.

2. The senator for Iowa has enough pull to ensure spacecraft construction occurs there. Rather than in space.

3. After five television shows and eleven films, I still have no idea what Starfleet is actually for.

4. Mining ships are equipped with bunker-busting missiles and near-impregnable shields.

5. No one ever thinks to bring a phaser to a sword-fight.

6. Bruce Greenwood is far too old for this ship.

7. There’s no corner that can’t be written out of with recourse to warp drive or the ability to beam anywhere in the universe in seconds.

8. It’s no fun when the unstoppable bad guys are so bad and so unstoppable.

9. Chris Pine’s William Shatner impression is at times uncanny.

10. Karl Urban’s DeForest Kelly impression is just the right side of weird.

11. Simon Pegg’s Simon Pegg impression is just the wrong side of tacky.

12. Apple (or possible Brawn GP) do Starfleet’s interior decorating.

13. Starfleet’s ‘peacekeeping armada’ is neither an oxymoron, nor in any way effective. In the twenty-third century equivalent of an oilrig taking on an aircraft carrier, the former consistently wipes the floor with the latter.

14. Engine Rooms on warp-drive equipped space ships look like a warehouse in Swindon with overlarge see-through plumming.

15. It still isn’t advisable to be the third man on an away team.

16. It takes three years of training, a famous father, and being an insufferable git to gain control of the flagship of the Federation.

17. There’s more cataclysm in ten minutes of this film than all seven seasons of Jean-Luc Picard’s tenure.

18. It’s not blockbuster entertainment without a spot of genocide. (See also Star Wars.)

19. Director J.J. Abrams never met a lens flare he didn’t like.

20. Writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci never met a character they wouldn’t undermine.

21. The Enterprise’s mission to explore new worlds and civilizations will have to wait until next time.

22. With its bright lights, uncomplicated morality, and lack of responsible adults, this is a children’s film at heart.