Civil War (2024)

We are now closer than we have ever been to victory. The near future. A civil war has broken out between an authoritarian US Government and various regional factions. The dictatorial President (Nick Offerman) who is serving a third term, claims that victory is close at hand. Renowned war photojournalist, Colorado-born Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) saves aspiring photojournalist Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny) from a suicide bombing in Brooklyn. Lee and her colleague, Florida-born Reuters journalist Joel (Wagner Moura) intend travelling to Washington DC to interview and photograph the president before the city falls. Lee’s mentor New York Times veteran journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson)asks to accompany them as far as Charlottesville where the Western Forces (‘WF’) of Texas and California are presently assembling. Despite Lee’s hesitance she and Joel agree. Unbeknownst to Lee, Jessie persuades Joel to take her with them as well. After leaving NYC, the group stops at a rural gas station protected by armed men where Lee negotiates the purchase of fuel in Canadian dollars. Jessie wanders off to a nearby car wash, which she saw from the road. There, she finds two men being tortured by the owners, who claim that the men are looters. One owner follows Jessie but Lee defuses the situation by taking a photo of the man posing with his victims. After leaving, Jessie berates herself for being too scared to take photos. Following an overnight stop close to ongoing fighting, the group documents the combat the next day as militiamen assault a building held by loyalists. Lee sees Jessie’s potential as a war photographer, while Jessie photographs the militia executing captured loyalist soldiers. Continuing on, the group spends the night at a refugee camp  before passing through a small town where, under watchful guard, residents attempt to live in blissful ignorance. Look at the tops of the buildings. Be subtle. Lee and Jessie grow closer, trying on clothes at a local shop. Later, they are pinned down in a sniper battle amid the remains of a Winter Wonderland theme park. No one’s giving us orders, man. Someone’s trying to kill us and we’re trying to kill them. The snipers they are with mock Joel’s attempts to ascertain which party they are fighting for or against, telling Joel that they and the sniper in a nearby house are simply engaged in a struggle for survival. Jessie’s nerve builds and her photography skills improve as she witnesses several deaths and she develops a mentorship under Lee … They shoot journalists on sight in the capital. Writer/director Alex Garland’s latest film plugs into the inflammatory State of the Union as it currently pertains, figuring a fissure that is as much physical as ideological with the Western secessionist states of California and Texas pitched against the federal forces that protect a President hiding out in the White House. Garland’s work from The Beach onwards has focused on trouble in paradise and lately on dystopia. Lee and Joel are both camouflaging psychological disturbance from previous war zones – she has PTSD, he has modern-day shellshock and Lee especially exhibits something world weary cynicism to control symptoms that threaten to erupt into something worse. It’s gonna make a good image. How that dissonance within Lee translates into a kind of mentoring relationship with Jessie reflecting Sammy’s relationship with her provides much of the tension as the action and violence spiral the further into the US they travel. I remember you at her age. The juxtaposing of beautiful landscapes with jarring imagery of shock and awe combat provides much of the troubling visual texture. The sense of reality, the minutiae of a road trip under fire and the urgency of the storytelling has the quality of reportage from the front line. The fact that Lee wants to photograph the President to prove he is still alive speaks volumes. What happens ultimately is straight out of the Romanian playbook. The ones who get taken are always lesser men than you think. With no enemies identified, the viewer is asked to come to their own conclusions, a motley crew of varying protagonist-journalists providing a kind of collegiate and immersive focus group of the population, a prism for coming to terms with radical change and war as Americans fight Americans. Every instinct in me tells me this is death. Whether the presence and role of good old-fashioned photojournalists recording events makes a difference is not really questioned here – it’s presumed necessary for history: proof that things are happening because seeing is believing. Hence the acknowledged reference to Lee Miller in Dunst’s character’s name. What kind of American are you? A powerful state of the nation portrait that feels immediate and true. What happened back there is nothing in comparison with what we’re heading into

Hotel Artemis (2018)

No killing the other patients – rule number one.  How many times do I gotta say it?  Rioting rocks a dystopic drought-ridden Los Angeles in 2028 and disgruntled thieves Waikiki/Sherman (Sterling K. Moss) and Lev (Brian Tyree Henry) make their way  following a heist to Hotel Artemis – a 13-storey, members-only hospital for criminals run by ageing Nurse/Jean Davis (Jodie Foster) a no-nonsense, hard-drinking, high-tech healer who already has her hands full with a French assassin Nice (Sofia Boutella) who’s injured herself to gain entry to carry out a job for Detroit; Acapulco (Charlie Day) an obnoxious arms dealer; when an injured cop Morgan (Jenny Slate) who knew Jean’s late son begs for help. As the violence continues outside, the Nurse must decide whether to break her own rules as she gets the call that Malibu Mob boss the Wolf King (Jeff Goldblum) is on his way in for treatment in the care of his son and heir Crosby (Zachary Quinto) … Twenty years we’ve never let anyone in who wasn’t a member. Now you wanna let in a cop? Decisions decisions! Harder than ever to make in the dark as the power keeps cutting out and the production keeps the lighting budget low to try and highlight Foster’s performance as a crew of uglies decide how to best kill each other while she discovers the truth behind her son’s OD death. A kind of pointless vision of future shock since it’s already here and John Carpenter and Ridley Scott did it all thirty-five years ago. All that’s new is Dave Bautista minus his usual superhero makeup as Nurse’s sidekick. If you want to see Father John Misty (who wrote the song Gilded Cage for the movie) you had better bring a torch. Written and directed by Drew Pearce and produced by the sons of John le Carré, if you can believe it. Cops kill poor people, poor people kill cops. Circle of life

The Lobster (2015)

Lobsters live for over one hundred years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives. I also like the sea very much.  In a dystopian society,  single people, according to the laws of The City, are taken to The Hotel, where they are obliged to find a romantic partner in forty-five days or are transformed into an animal of their choice. David (Colin Farrell) is escorted there after his wife has left him for another man. The dog accompanying David is his brother. David chooses to become a lobster, due to their life cycle and his love of the sea. David makes acquaintances with a lisping man Robert (John C. Reilly) and a limping man John (Ben Whishaw) who become his quasi-friends. John explains that he was injured in an attempt to reconnect with his mother, who had been transformed into a wolf. The hotel’s rules and rituals include mandatory sexual stimulation by the maid and viewing propaganda films. David commences a forbidden romance with a Shortsighted Woman (Rachel Weisz) and they try to escape … Greek writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos’ work is an acquired taste – and on Valentine’s Day this satire about our obsession with coupledom is timely but also challenging. Shot in Dublin and County Kerry which provide suitable backdrops for an absurdist and blackly comic exercise, this doesn’t completely fulfill the promise of its premise and works well for probably the first hour after which the plot about the Loners in the woods (led by Léa Seydoux) starts to feel tired. Farrell and the lead cast play very gamely indeed and there are some very amusing moments which are practically out of the midcentury absurdist rulebook – Ionesco, Beckett et al. Written by Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou. You’ll recognise the song in the end credits from Boy on a Dolphin.

The Island (2005)

I have discovered the Holy Grail of science – I give life! Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) lives in a sterile colony, one of thousands of survivors of The Contamination who dream of going to The Island. One of his friends is Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) and she doesn’t believe him when he dreams things he knows he hasn’t experienced and then discovers they are clones waiting to have their organs harvested for humans outside somewhere:  he sees a moth in a ventilation shaft when visiting his engineer friend McCord (Steve Buscemi). They are really living in an elaborate organ lab run by Merrick (Sean Bean) who hires mercentary Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou) when Lincoln and Jordan escape to the real world … McGregor and Johansson are superb as the clones who realise their humanity and make you stick with a drama that takes a little while to get going in that sterile facility that we have seen a hundred times. But when it takes off it never stops and it’s pretty heart-pounding. This takes potshots at eugenics, organ harvesting, the modern day obsession with breeding that leads to murderous mass surrogacy programmes, and ultimately the kind of control by tech billionaires that we all rightly fear:  the penultimate scene using a gas chamber tells you all you need to know about where we are all heading in this Nazified world of ours which seems even more relevant 12 years after this was released. The ultimate irony about this clone drama is that it is itself a clone – of a novel called Spares and 1979 movie The Clonus Horror to the extent that a massive seven-figure settlement was made by DreamWorks to the plaintiffs for their legal claim. Nonetheless it’s a gripping portrait of futureshock and all that it implies for contemporary life. Be very afraid. 2019 is just a breath away! Screenplay by Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci from a story by Caspian Tredwell-Owen. Directed by Michael Bay.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

In the face of the fabulous new your thought is to kill it?  Los Angeles 2049. K (Ryan Gosling) is a blade runner for Wallace, the new incarnation of the Tyrell Corporation led by blind Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) whose right hand woman Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) is enchanted by K’s story that a replicant may have had a child. He is ordered by LAPD (in the guise of Robin Wright) to get rid of any evidence that a replicant could have given birth in order to see off a war between replicants and humans. He returns to the site of a dead tree and finds something that makes him think he can remember something from his own childhood and it leads him into a spiral of discovery that involves tracking down his predecessor before Prohibition and the Blackout, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) who appears to have something to do with the rebel replicants underground …. Where to start? This hybridised metafictive spawn of one of the greatest achievements in cinema is no easy ride. The way it looks for one. It’s horrible. Mostly greys with occasional harking back to the navy and neon and a sour yellow, a nod to the burnished autumnal shadings of the original. The Orientalised appearances are now more subtly rendered but are even more prevalent as though mixed into a Caucasian blender. Then there are the women. Luv is clearly meant to remind us of Rachael (Sean Young) while the reference to Nabokov’s Pale Fire is intended to tell us that there are two fictional characters sparring with one another here – but the question is, which two, and of them, who’s real and who’s a replicant? The quasi-Oedipal story steers right into a quagmire of identities and dreams and purported flashbacks. Other quotes – Kafka, Treasure Island, and even the songs that play as holograms in a burned-out Vegas – also serve to get us to look one way, instead of another. The idea of relationships as a figment of your imagination – literally, a hologram – is conceptually brilliant and well executed (in every sense) but takes too long as a narrative device to be told and then unravel. The ending is enormously clever and draws on facets of Philip K. Dick’s own backstory: it’s literally a tidal wash of action and memories. But are they real? Are they implants? Hampton Fancher is back but with co-writer Michael Green this time instead of David Webb Peoples. You can see the spliced DNA with Harlan Ellison (an insistence on procreation) as well as PKD  (what is humanity? what is reality?) and the literary turns which have some good jokes. There are some nice lines too and even if they’re on the nose they actually future proof it somewhat:  You’ve never seen a miracle.  Or, I know it’s real. Or, Dying for the right cause is the most human thing you can do. They actually conceal what is paid off by misdirecting us.  It gets away with its visual tributes to the original cast with the prostitute who looks like Darryl Hannah and Hoeks who clearly resembles Sean Young even in ill-fitting costume.  Directed by Denis Villeneuve who is one of the most audacious mainstream directors at the present time with Ridley Scott producing,  I appreciate what they’re doing here but it’s a pale twenty-first century facsimile, more replicant than human.  Ford enters the fray so late and Gosling is not my favourite actor albeit he acquits himself well as someone who starts to feel things he shouldn’t given his somewhat obscure origins as a police functionary. But I have feelings too. Nothing can compare with the sensory overload that is Blade Runner, the daddy of the species. Notwithstanding the foregoing, as all the best legal minds argue, the ending is brilliant. Oh! The humanity.