Ad Astra (2019)

Most of us spend our entire lives in hiding. Sometime in the future. Following a mysterious global power surge, astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), a cool guy with a blissfully low pulse rate, travels to the outer edges of the solar system to find his father, heroic scientist Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones) who’s been missing for 29 years following the disappearance of the Lima Project.  Now apparently there are signs that he’s alive, out on Neptune. The purpose of the trip is to unravel a mystery that threatens the survival of humans on Earth and to uncover whether Clifford is somehow responsible for the weird imbalances that are killing tens of thousands back on Earth. Roy travels to the Moon in the company of Colonel Pruitt (Donald Sutherland) and they are set upon by violent assailants in a buggy chase across craters that endangers them both and kills a crew member. He suspects from his psychiatric evaluations that he’s being used as a stooge and hears from a woman called Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga) whose parents travelled with Clifford all those years ago that his father probably murdered them and others in the team. He determines to carry on with the trip to Neptune to locate his father and has to deceive Space Comm in order to do so … I don’t know whether to find him or to finally be free of him. What are the chances of Brad Pitt giving his finest two performances in back to back films? If the first, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, ponders the very contemporary question of whether movie stars serve a function in the new cinematic universe, this film, the second, is the proof that they do. And how. To the stars is a wonderfully ironic title in these circumstances. And what about the usually moribund director James Gray finally breaking out of the chains of realism (with his excursion to the jungle in The Lost City of Z he came close to greatness) and unsympathetic characters by shooting out of the earth’s atmosphere to infinity and beyond? It has set him free as a filmmaker. This has a lyricism and a beauty arising from the script by Gray and Ethan Gross, yet the resolutely familiar shooting style (by Hoyte van Hoytema and Caleb Deschanel (credited with ‘additional photography’) maintains a sober palette that permits the performances and the intrinsic ideas to shine, rather like when Godard did sci fi in Alphaville. We know this world.  We even believe that the Moon (‘the Earth’s Moon’, as one character puts it) could look like a shopping mall once humans colonise it. The brief sequence between Pitt and Lee Jones has more humanity in it than the entirety of the auteur’s preceding body of work: Roy’s lack of emotionality turns into something else when the reality of his father’s existence hits him. We’re all we’ve got. In between we have a fabulously Freudian take on fathers and sons and space with some mileage gained from the diadic homonym son/sun and the movie’s existential philosophising pondering the father’s quest for alien intelligence; while the son’s ruminations take a decidedly more paternalistic twist despite his own lack of family, visions of an ignored wife Eve (Liv Tyler) chiefly accessible through old videophone messages notwithstanding. There are cute and clever references to other films but so intelligently do they unfold you won’t remotely care. It’s tremendous. It’s just what the cinema needs: a thrilling exploration of metaphor that oozes humanity, awe, wonder and acceptance as space becomes the past and the future, all at once. In the end the son suffers the sins of the father

 

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Venom (2018)

You know for a smart guy you really are a dumbass. TV investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is trying to take down Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), the notorious and brilliant founder of the Life Foundation who is constantly announcing new supposedly life-enhancing initiatives.  Eddie opens up confidential files belonging to his district attorney fiancée Anne Weying (Michelle Williams) which causes her to lose her job and leave him. He is fired by his TV station for his impropriety. While investigating one of Drake’s experiments in symbiotes (aliens merging with humans), Eddie’s body merges with the alien Venom – leaving him with superhuman strength and power. Twisted, dark and fuelled by rage, Venom tries to control the new and dangerous abilities that Eddie finds so puzzling and yet so intoxicating but Drake sends out his team to ensnare him… Do you ever feel like your life is one monumental screwup? How bad is this? Perhaps it should have been called Contempt if that misnomer wasn’t already the title of a classic of French cinema. Dreadful acting (Hardy is no movie star, just a terrific actor prone to insane levels of idiot savant mugging way too early here, tipping us off about the high comedy to come), terrible writing, stupid plotting and lazy presumptions. It takes about forty minutes or so for this film to finally find its feet as a satirical fantasy by which time I had found myself wondering how many more superhero movies can deal with silly sloppy seconds, bizarre virtue signalling in diversity casting (this year’s Elon Musk avatar is played by a Pakistani) and dumb allusive socio-cultural commentary including a leading lady dressing like Britney circa Baby One More Time. However once Eddie is hilariously taken over by The Host I was moved to think about the magnificently bad Saoirse Ronan movie of that name; the fourth level of jihad (‘feast upon the infidel as would a parasite upon a host’) which of course is all about the Islamic takeover of the white world; and the edicts of mindfulness (proto-neo-liberal zealotry extolled by Google’s Jolly Good Fellow along with all other Big Tech surveillance monsters); and it was then that I realised that this is in fact an expertly crafted warning about all sorts of contemporary ills:  mass immigration, uncontrolled technology, globalisation, narcissism, unsupervised pharmaceutical experiments and endless superhero movies. Obviously it’s set in Northern California, the boomer and millennial nightmare running the world. It’s dark and Blade Runner-y, as if we needed reminding that Philip K. Dick was telling us all about fifty shades of surveillance for at least forty years in the last millennium. This, then, is what happens to the universe when you’re busy buying Starbucks coffee and checking your iPhone and doping yourself with anti-depressants that persuade you that totalitarianism is okay while disinhibiting your urge to protest, and scarfing medical marijuana which is the real cure for your paranoia about the internet, and, you know, there’s nothing wrong with anything, it’s your attitude to it that needs to be corrected because you’re pathological and everything Mark Zuckerberg does may not be ethical but by crikey it’s legal! Be afraid, suckers. Make the new the primary focus of your life. Jeff Pinker & Scott Rosenberg and Kelly Marcel adapted the Marvel characters created by Todd McFarlane and David Michelinie and it was directed by Ruben Fleischer, responsible for an outing called Gangster Squad, a production that was so hypnotically awful I forgot what it was about while I was watching it (mission accomplished) to the point that I lost the plot and practically lost the will to live. Is it me? Even Jesus Christ himself would say, Enough. Get it over with. Crucify me, guys. Instead we have expertly crafted lines like, God has abandoned us… I won’t. And the voice inside Eddie’s head that tells him, Your world is not so ugly after all.  And Anne finds that power is indeed a bit of a sneaky thrill: Oh  no! I just bit that guy’s head off!  Sheesh. Maybe this works after all, Spider-Man in reverse. Like civilisation, this is poisoned.

Flash Gordon (1980)

Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would’ve hidden from it in terror. NASA scientists are claiming the unexpected eclipse and strange ‘hot hail’ are nothing to worry about, Dr. Hans Zarkov (Topol) knows better, and takes NY Jets quarterback star Flash Gordon (Sam Jones) and travel agent Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) on a flight into space with to rectify things. They land on planet Mongo, where the despotic Emperor Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow) is attacking Earth out of pure boredom. With the help of a race of Hawkmen, Flash and the gang struggle to save their home planet while Ming fancies Dale as his betrothed and Princess Aura (Ornella Muti)  thinks a footballer is just what she needs despite the attentions of Prince Barin (Timothy Dalton). How can they outwit this psycho’s powers? ... Don’t empty my mind! Please, I beg you! My mind is all I have! I’ve spent my whole life trying to fill it! You might only know this from the Ted movies wherein Sam Jones (largely dubbed here) is something of an obsession for Mark Wahlberg and the eponymous bear but for those of us who grew up in the late 70s/early 80s and watched Buster Crabbe on summer mornings on BBC this was catnip at the cinema. Michael Allin adapted the characters from the original comic strip by Alex Raymond and Lorenzo Semple Jr. (responsible for developing the classic TV Batman) wrote his customarily caustic and amusing screenplay, reuniting with producer Dino De Laurentiis after King Kong. The pulchritude – male and female – is just jaw-dropping and I’m not referring to Prince Vultan’s (Brian Blessed) thighs. Was there ever a more beautiful woman than Muti as the sexpot daughter of Ming? What a saucy minx she is! Watch those orgasmic gyrations when Ming puts Arden under his spell!! Or a handsomer man than Dalton?! Good grief! The production design and costumes by Danilo Donati are simply staggering. And what a witty score provided by Queen, with supplemental orchestrations by Howard Blake. And just to prove it’s not all fun and games, when Zarkov has his mind read it’s a montage that includes Hitler, which draws the comment, Now he showed promise! Whoever cast Von Sydow as Ming the Merciless was truly inspired. Fast-moving, funny and as camp as a caravan site, this is how superhero movies should always be. Believe it or not this was originally meant to be made by Fellini. And George Lucas. And Nic Roeg! In the end it was directed by Mike Hodges who also made Get Carter, Pulp and Croupier. Give that man a BAFTA! With supporting roles played by Peter Wyngarde, John Osborne, Richard O’Brien, Suzanne Danielle and Robbie Coltrane, this veritable rock opera has cult written all over it these days. Shot by the great Gilbert Taylor.  I knew you were up to something, though I’ll confess I hadn’t thought of necrophilia?

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

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

Do these animals deserve the same protection given to other species? Or should they just be left to die?  Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) rescue the remaining dinosaurs on Isla Nublar off Costa Rica following the volcanic eruption that is about to destroy the Jurassic World theme park.  They and their vet pals smuggle themselves into the transport led by mercenary Ken Wheatley  (Ted Levine) bringing everything to the Lockwood mansion where Hammond’s successor Lockwood (James Cromwell) is dying and unaware of the unfolding plot (lucky him). His granddaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon) overhears company exec Eli Mills (Rafe Spall) with mad scientist Henry Wu ( BD Wong) and their plan to auction the dinosaurs. While Owen tracks down Blue, his lead raptor, they encounter terrifying new breeds of gigantic dinosaurs and uncover a conspiracy that threatens to disrupt the ecology of the entire planet… Do you remember the first time you saw a dinosaur? First time you see them, it’s like… a miracle. You read about them in books, you see the bones in museums but you don’t really… believe it. They’re like myths. And then you see… the first one alive. Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow return as the screenwriters working from Michael Crichton’s original characters and this is the fifth Jurassic film and the second in the proposed Jurassic World trilogy which seems to be about a kind of co-species Future Shock. Howard has lost the high heels. There’s an underwritten thread about the need for a mother and the dangers of cloning. Most of it takes place in the expanding Lockwood mansion which renders it Night of the Museum-ish. The bad guys get … eaten, quite frankly. And there’s an ending out of E.T. Thankfully Jeff Goldblum returns in a cameo as the chaos theorist, appearing before a Senate Committee. There are thrills and spills in the beginning but it’s a tale of sound and fury signifying a whole lot of nothing, bar a few nice images that Spielberg spawned 25 years ago, if you ask me. Yawn. Directed by J.A. Bayona.  How many times do you have to see the evidence? How many times must the point be made? We’re causing our own extinction.  One can but hope.

The Day Time Ended (1979)

You know what this is, don’t you? A time-space warp! The Williams family headed by Richard (Chris Mitchum) and Beth (Marcy Lafferty) with son Steve (Scott Kolden) and daughter Jenny (Natasha Ryan) relocates to the Sonoran Desert to be close to grandfather Grant (Jim Davis) and grandmother Ana (Dorothy Malone) in their solar-powered home.  Three supernovae explode simultaneously, aliens build something behind the barn, a UFO lands in the hills and a miniature extra-terrestrial befriends Jenny telepathically. Because this desert home is in the middle of a time vortex that lures aliens to warn them of earth’s imminent destruction. When said aliens then touch down and fight among themselves outside the house, the family escapes but becomes separated while Beth and Jenny disappear and the next day everyone finds they are actually thousands of years in the future… For a while the whole galaxy was turned upside down. Home movie level acting even with Malone’s starriness, shonky effects and a mercifully short running time (79 minutes) make for an amusing diversion and a pleasing reminder of life when Atari games seemed positively other-worldly. A trip, of sorts. Sigh.  There is an elegant score by Richard Band. Written by J. Larry Carroll, Steve Neill, Wayne Schmidt and David Schmoeller.  Directed by John Cardos. Maybe this was all meant to be

The Medusa Touch (1978)

Talk about beating somebody’s brains out. French detective Brunel (Lino Ventura) working temporarily on assignment to Scotland Yard in London reconstructs the life of author John Morlar (Richard Burton) who is lying in hospital with severe head injuries following a brutal assault that has nearly killed him.  With the help of the man’s journals and psychiatrist Dr Zonfeld (Lee Remick) he realises that Morlar had powerful telekinetic abilities. His books make the link between evil and power and a pattern starts to emerge:  Brunel starts making uncanny connections with a series of disasters occurring in the outside world triggered initially perhaps by Morlar’s childhood brush with a terrible fire-breathing nanny (Frances Tomelty) whom he believes he willed to death …  If he believed himself involved in disasters he may have convinced someone else too. And they may have sought revenge. This oddly satisfying genre-splicing of psychological thriller/supernatural horror/disaster film/policier is aided immensely by Burton’s brilliant performance and Ventura’s charismatic presence, a real fish out of water navigating both a bizarre case and the politics of London policing. There are a number of significant alterations from the novel but the texture is enhanced by plugging into contemporary fears and layering them with cod-Freudianism to effectively channel several horror tropes and a heady dose of misanthropy. John Briley adapted Peter Van Greenaway’s source book and it was produced by the brilliant editor Anne V. Coates and shot by reliable veteran Arthur Ibbetson. Directed by Jack Gold.  I am the man with the power to create catastrophe

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

If you two are finished comparing sizes… we need to figure a way to track down the lab.  Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is grappling with the consequences of his choices as both a superhero and a father to Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) following his X-Men activities in X-Men:  Civil War, monitored constantly by the police. Approached by Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), he dons the Ant-Man suit again to fight alongside the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) with assistance from Luis (Michael Peña) a former cellmate and member of the X-Con Security crew. The urgent mission leads to secret revelations from the past in the search for Pym’s wife and Hope’s mother Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) who is lost in the quantum realm since 1987, shrinking to sub-atomic levels.  The dynamic duo finds itself in an epic battle against a powerful new enemy Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) while low-level crim Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins) wants Pym’s technology for the black market….I still think about the night your mother and I had to leave you. A whip smart, lean and fun outing that is anchored by the charming performance of Rudd, a consistently underrated actor, who contributes to the screenplay by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari. He is matched by Lilly as the other half of his double act and also by Douglas, whose flashback scene with Pfeiffer shows what special effects can achieve (an improvement on the real old thing!). Laurence Fishburne turns up as Pym’s estranged former colleague Bill Foster despite having played Perry White elsewhere in the (now 20-strong) Marvel series. The dual father-daughter stories root the narrative in something close to human emotion, while the Fantastic Voyage element works nicely and the overall tone is light and optimistic – proving that size always matters.  And how nice is it to see a female villain?! Stan Lee shows up when his car is shrunk. Directed by Peyton Reed. I’m gonna call you ANT-onio Banderas!

A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

This is no longer a search it’s a rescue.  Meg Murry (Storm Reid) and her little brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), have been without their scientist father, Alex (Chris Pine) for five years, ever since he discovered a new planet and used the concept known as a tesseract to travel there. He’s left his scientist wife (Gugu Mbatha Raw) behind and a flashback clarifies why she thinks his theories went too far – and why he might have disappeared. Joined by Meg’s classmate Calvin O’Keefe (Levi Miller) and guided by the three mysterious astral travelers known as Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling) and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) the children brave a dangerous journey to a planet that possesses all of the evil in the universe … Trust nothing. Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell have adapted Madeleine L’Engle’s fifty-four year old Young Adult classic and extracted all its mystery to make a bafflingly bland politically correct dumbfest which won’t fool the kids.  They certainly won’t relate to this brother and sister act. Even Zach Galifianakis’s usual gadfly act (as the Happy Medium!) is too old for this fairly charmless outing. Daft, mindless, life-affirming piffle which only requires a shedload of mind-altering substances to make you feel like you too are lost in the universe. Pass the opium. Please.  Directed by Ava DuVernay.  Do you realize how many events and choices that had to occur since the birth of the universe, leading to the making of you just exactly the way you are?

Rampage (2018)

What are you, some kind of international man of mystery? Primatologist Davis Okoye (Dwayne Johnson) a man who keeps people at a distance but shares an unshakable bond with George, the extraordinarily intelligent, incredibly rare albino silverback gorilla who has been in his care since he rescued the young orphan from poachers in Africa. They joke in sign language. A rogue genetic experiment gone awry in outer space with the deadly pathogen falling into wildlife parks in California and Florida and mutate this gentle ape into a raging creature of enormous size. There are other similarly altered animals – starting with a grey wolf who takes out the soldiers sent to kill him. As these newly created alpha predators tear across North America, communicating via sonar and destroying everything in their path, Okoye teams with discredited geneticist Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris) to secure an antidote, fighting his way through an ever-changing battlefield to halt imminent catastrophe commencing among the skyscrapers of Chicago.  Luckily his training in Special Forces gives him the ability to confront the dangers they face but he must also save the now fearsome creature that was once his friend….. Of course – a wolf that can fly!  Or, gorilla goes ape, in this interspecies mutant/hybrid cross between King Kong and Godzilla only it’s neither as serious nor as silly as those classics. The third collaboration between Johnson and director Brad Peyton (which presumably qualifies as a kind of auteurist effort) this starts in a space station with a giant rat, an explosive scene sequence which used up a lot of the FX budget and shards of an exploded rocket with this dangerous pathogen wind up all over the shop, as you do. Hence the shonky CGI mayhem. Jeffrey Dean Morgan turns up as a good ol’ boy Other Government Agent (I always knew they existed) and after their plane is wrecked by a growing George, he and the big friendly giant (The Rock) and Harris go after the brother and sister gene manipulator team (Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy) responsible for this lunatic experiment. Adapted from an Eighties video game, by Ryan Engle and Carlton Cuse & Ryan J. Condal and Adam Sztykiel, this is never quite as fun as it should be but you might just shed a tear from that rheumy worldweary eye at the fight to the death. If animals hate you they eat you. You always know where you stand