Blogorium Review: Jurassic World

 Jurassic World is a pretty good movie and a great example of corporate filmmaking at its best. That is to say that it reflects the kind of movie that fulfills all quadrants, offends nobody, and coasts along on enough charm that it does not bore or annoy audiences. Just don't think to hard about it, and you'll be just fine. It's weird, because I feel strange saying that I thought it was enjoyable. I've watched the Screen Junkies debate and I watched Red Letter Media's Half in the Bag review, and to be perfectly honest, I can't mount a defense of any of the problems raised about Jurassic World. The characters are barely one note, the contrivances and narrative conveniences are at time embarrassing, and yeah, there are plot holes you could drive a truck through. I'm not even going to try to defend the movie from the type of criticisms I'd normally hold it accountable for. I can't. By the same token, I've tried to talk myself out of the fact that I did enjoy it, and it's not sticking.

 Let's get the elephant out of the room right away: I don't view Jurassic Park with rose colored glasses. I feel like that's important to point out, because I didn't watch Jurassic World through the lens of nostalgia. I think Jurassic Park has some fun moments, mostly the suspenseful ones, but have always felt like most of the characters are broadly drawn cartoons who dress in such a way that you can easily tell their toys apart. I'm the weird person who still kinda likes the mostly terrible The Lost World, even though I just watched it again, and yeah, it's still pretty bad. The "Spielberg does Godzilla" part still makes me laugh, because it's such a stupid, audacious way to close out that movie. But I didn't really care about seeing Jurassic World. I wasn't interested at all, and when I did see it, my thought process was "what the hell, I just watched The Lost World yesterday, and it can't be worse than Jurassic Park III." And it's not. Unlike just about every review, I'm not going to say that Jurassic World is better than the sequels but not as good as Jurassic Park, because I don't hold the first one in the same standard as most people. Bear that in mind as we move forward, because your mileage may vary.

 For starters, I guess I do like the premise: Ingen finally got its shit together and John Hammond found somebody to reopen the park. His name is Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), and he's immediately not like the usual sleazy businessmen you've seen in the other Jurassic movies. He's one of those carefree billionaires who is managing the money and taking care of Hammond's vision, but mostly just wants to show off that he's almost finished his helicopter lessons. He leaves the actual running of the redubbed "Jurassic World" to Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is a numbers, spreadsheet type that thinks of the dinosaurs as "assets" and is concerned about the bottom line and appeasing investors. In other words, the character we're probably not going to like but since she's a main character, she'll eventually see the error of her ways, right? Eh... maybe not so much. Back to that later. Claire is supposed to be hanging out with her sister (Judy Greer)'s kids, but she doesn't have time and foists precocious Gray (Ty Simpkins) and moody teen Zach (Nick Robinson) on her assistant Zara (Katie McGrath). They have VIP passes, so they can go anywhere which is a good way for us to see the park. It beats seeing the control room, which is where comic relief audience nostalgia surrogate Lowery (Jake Johnson) works. (He bought a Jurassic Park t-shirt on Ebay and has dinosaur toys on his work station).

 Anyway, nobody cares about the characters, because there's a new dinosaur. Like, a new, genetically modified dinosaur that never existed, and as dumb as Indominus Rex ends up being a lot of the time, but reason for her existence is actually a pretty sound one. In the universe of Jurassic World, the park reopened two years after Jurassic Park (well, actually they completely rebuilt it, as we find out) and it's been a tourist attraction with a cruise ship that takes people to Isla Nublar every day since then. Claire is explaining to investors from Verizon (no, really) that after twenty years, the allure of dinosaurs has started fading, and they want something new. Audiences want something they've never seen, something scary, so Dr. Wu (JP alum BD Wong) cooked up the I-Rex, a mystery hybrid that has super powers. We'll also come back to the convenient super powers later. The reasoning behind creating the new dinosaur plays like a commentary on moviegoers today. I mean, the novelty of seeing dinosaurs in a movie has pretty much worn off, so lets make them bigger stronger faster scarier. More CGI. More mayhem. Jurassic World the movie is the proof that Claire the character isn't wrong: people went in droves to see it.

 Indominus has been raised in her paddock, alone ever since she ate her sibling, and Masrani wants Claire to have ex-military consultant Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to check it for security before the consider opening it to the public. Claire doesn't like that because of course they went on a date when he started working there and of course it didn't work out because she's into designing itineraries and he's into the Matt Foley school of living life. But he's Chris Pratt so we mostly like him and he's capable and manly and cracks jokes, etc. He cares about the dinosaurs and has raised a pack of Velociraptors from birth and is their alpha. Just in case we don't get that, their names are Echo, Delta, Charlie, and, uh, Blue. I guess maybe they thought audiences might not understand why a raptor was named "Bravo" or maybe the network said they couldn't use it, so it has blue markings instead.

 The raptor subplot is actually a lot less stupid than the trailer made it look, because Owen just barely keeps them in check for most of the movie. It's established early on that they accept him as the alpha, but only to a degree. They listen to him, but he still has to roll under the closing gate to get out of their pen when he saves some idiot who falls in. They know he's not like them, but he's their alpha, so it's a tenuous balance. You've seen the part in the trailer with the motorcycle, but that happens because he's following them as they follow the scent of the I-Rex, and that happens as a matter of last resort. Mostly thanks to subplot we didn't need in this movie character Hoskins (Adventures in Babysitting's Vincent D'Onofrio). His "lets militarize dinosaurs" contractor guy feels like a leftover plot thread from the abandoned John Sayles draft of Jurassic Park 4 with the human / dinosaur hybrid Dirty Dozen*.

 But anyway all of these characters have to converge so of course the kids are out in a gyrosphere rolling around when the I-Rex gets loose and Claire has to evacuate most of the park while the Asset Containment Unit gets slaughtered. See, the I-Rex can mask her thermal signature if she wants to, so she tricks them into thinking she's not in her cage and Owen can see how dangerous she is when she eats a fat slob red shirt (seriously, this dude has a tie that's not on straight, a barely tucked in shirt, and a safety hat that's tiled at an angle: he's clearly getting eaten from the moment we see him). I-Rex goes on a murder spree, killing everything, in a once again reasonably explained way. Owen correctly points out that having been raised in captivity with no contact at all, Indominus Rex has never encountered other dinosaurs (or anything) before, and doesn't know its place in the food chain. And they really don't want her to find out.

 Anyway, dumb kids somehow go "off road" and Claire and Owen have to find them. Hoskins takes over the control room, and everything goes straight to hell. This leads to the disaster part of the movie, where people die horrible, horrible deaths. Like, I was surprised how horrible in some instances. There's one character whose death is wildly disproportionate to their behavior in the movie, unless being inattentive means you should be pecked apart by Pterodactyls and then swallowed alive by the Mosasaurus, the Sea World-like attraction. I mean, the dude who grabs his margaritas while running doesn't even get it that bad. He might not die at all, and there's no way he ordered both of those drinks for himself, if he ordered them in the first place. There are people who totally deserve to have their arms bitten off or to be dino-stomped or Pterodactyl impaled**, but there's dome disproportionate brutality going on. Maybe director Colin Trevorrow had a bad vendetta with somebody or just hates Mary Poppins or something.

 Well, now's as good a time as any to transition into the "why people think this movie sucks and I can't even argue with them" part of the review. I'm going to start with two pieces of dialogue from the dumb kids who are only in Jurassic World because the movies are ostensibly aimed at kids (and not their 30-something parents who saw Jurassic Park twenty years ago). I'm going to slightly modify what they say to point out what incredible plot conveniences they introduce, but if you're SPOILER averse, you might as well skip ahead to the last paragraph.

 "Hey, do you still have those matches neither of us ever mentioned at any point before now even though we just got away from the I-Rex by jumping into water?"

 "Do you remember that time we fixed up Grampa's car which would totally mean we can repair this Jeep we found in the old Visitor's Center from Jurassic Park and then drive back?"

 Putting aside the fact that any theme park that offered a "gyrosphere" attraction without a guide should have a way to bring said gyrosphere back when the park is unexpectedly closed, those two lines are indicative us just how lazy the writing in Jurassic World is. They both happen within five minutes of each other, and I think they were hoping we'd be too caught up in fact that "hey, it's the old Visitors Center! I remember Jurassic Park! Omg!" to really think carefully about how contrived those plot points are. Almost as contrived as Indominus Rex, who is white (except when she's not), can mask her thermal signature (once), pulls out her own tracking device, and is part Raptor. How do we find out she's part Raptor? Someone in the movie has to say it. In fact, here's what Owen says:

 "No wonder they didn't tell us what's she's made of: she's part Raptor..."

 This happens at the end of the motorcycle scene, when the Raptors find I-Rex and, even though she's never seen a Velociraptor before, she begins communicating with them. Guess there's a new Alpha. Oh wait, that's also something Owen says. The Raptors of course turn on Owen and Hoskins men and kill them, and then go all the way back to their paddock to chase Claire and the stupid kids who are sitting in a truck that the boys for no apparent reason won't close the back doors of. It's one of the many, "wait, what?" moments that Jurassic World hopes you won't ask questions about, like "where did the other helicopter pilot go if Masrani and the helicopter are still on the island?" or "wait, wasn't the Mosasaurus attraction further away from the main park area?" or "would you really stop to comfort a dying dinosaur when there's nothing you can do to help at all and you're searching for two children that may or may not be in mortal danger?" Yes, the last question is the closest scene Claire has to a humanizing moment, and it may be the only dinosaur in the entire movie that isn't CGI, but if you give it a moment's scrutiny, why does it need to happen?

 And yet, I didn't really mind while watching it. Yes, in retrospect, the film compounds so many lazy, convenient, or "we hope you're not paying attention to this" moments that you probably won't even remember the loose plot thread they leave for the next Jurassic sequel (hint: BD Wong). Does it really matter what happened to Lowery? Eh, I didn't even think about him in the last scene. In truth, most people are only going to remember the final battle, and to Jurassic World's credit, it takes the humans out of the equation and goes for full on dino fight. And it's a pretty good fight with a great (if implausible) conclusion. You'll be excited, you won't care about product placement - I mean, have you been to a theme park? Is the Jimmy Fallon scene really that out of place? - and if you loved Jurassic Park, you might even cheer when T-Rex makes her grand return by crashing through a Spinosaur skeleton. Take that, Jurassic Park III. You never forget that everybody hates you. I'm sure there's tons of press material where producers and the director and four writers talk about making the fans happy, and that lip service is expected, but this movie was created by committee. And to be honest, for what it is, it's better than it has any right to be. I cannot pretend that it's a well constructed, well thought out film, but Jurassic World gives you what you came for. If you're the nostalgic type, there's a chance you might like it even more than I did. It's not really the best or the worst, which I know the internet hates, but that's how it is sometimes. Every now and then you get a mostly happy middle, and for reasons I can't quite fathom, Jurassic World was entertaining, in spite of itself.



 * I am not making that up.
 ** Although, if we're picking nits, one was done in The Lost World and the other was the original ending of the film before Spielberg took T-Rex to San Diego.

Some Other Movies I Saw in 2014 (Part Three: It's Getting Better All the Time)

 Let's kick off this chapter of the "Great Recap of Twenty Fourteen" with the movie that went from being in every headline in December to being the punching bag of January: The Interview.

 I really do find it quite amusing that the negative reaction to the film seems to be based - at least, critically - on the fact that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's comedy about assassinating Kim Jong Un starring Rogen and Franco isn't a biting enough satire of the media or of politics. This, coupled with the somewhat ridiculous overreaction of everybody feeling like they need to see The Interview (because, y'know, 'Murica) emboldened the normally lazy Golden Raspberry Awards to stop just penciling in "Adam Sandler Movie" as their "Worst Picture" and to put The Interview right out front as their leading Razzie nominee. Why? Because people are still paying attention to The Interview, for reasons that are extremely fortuitous to Sony.

 Perhaps you buy into the conspiracy theory that Sony was worried nobody would see The Interview so they put together an outlandish and complicated "hacking" scheme to ensure everyone would want to see the newest Seth Rogen / Evan Goldberg movie. As conspiracy theories go, it's got some legs, because people I know for a fact would never go see Pineapple Express have said to me that they feel they have to see The Interview ('Murica!). The disappointment, I'm guessing, is all in the expectation, because The Interview is exactly what I expected when I saw the trailer and thought "eh, I'll probably rent it." At the time I was laboring under the illusion that Inherent Vice would make good on its promise to be in theatres "just in time for Christmas," so I didn't really give credence to making The Interview our annual Christmas outing.

 To be fair, we still didn't go see The Interview - we saw a movie you'll see much higher on this list - I watched it on demand on Christmas Eve. And, yup, it's a dumb comedy where Franco plays a borderline incompetent guy and Rogen is the straight man. It's a little too long, the beginning meanders way too much, but when it gets funny (shortly after Lizzy Caplan enters the film), things maintain a consistent clip of laughs until the rather violent ending. Trade out Lizzy Caplan's name with Danny McBride, and I think I just distilled Pineapple Express into a review. Or This is the End, which landed in a comparable position in last year's recap. I like them both, but they're not my favorite comedies, and like many entries in the post-Apatow Era, they all share certain pros and cons. There's an over-reliance on improvisation (find one of them that doesn't have a "Line-o-Rama" in the supplements), a ham fisted "we're friends but now we aren't but we will be again by the end" character arc, and a reliance on pop culture references over jokes. In Rogen and Goldberg's case, at least post-2009, this also includes the "wow, that escalated fast" move to extreme violence in the third act.

 This is not to say that The Interview doesn't work, because when it's firing on all cylinders, it's very funny. Don't think that I didn't laugh; I did, but I chuckled a lot, too. It was nice to see  seemingly pointless yet continued allusions to The Lord of the Rings pay off in a way I didn't even think about until Dave Skylark (Franco) points it out to Aaron Rapaport (Rogen) near the end. It almost offset the overdone "honeydick" jokes or Skylark's obsession about whether Kim Jong Un (Randall Park) has a butthole or not. Make no mistake about it, if there is bodily humor to be mined, Rogen and Goldberg found a way to write it into the script, including an appropriately timed shart during the titular event.  But this is not some scathing takedown of media obsession or a penetrating look into the myth of North Korea's leader. This is a dumb comedy that uses easy jokes with relatively good results, and says as much about the media as Rogen and Goldberg had to say about underage drinking, marijuana laws, or the Book of Revelations. And that's it. Not the worst movie of the year, and not anywhere near the best. If you liked Superbad, Pineapple Express, or This is the End, odds are you'll enjoy The Interview. If you didn't, I don't care how patriotic you're feeling, this is not going to be two hours well spent. In this case, track record says everything.

 While we're on the subject of "track record," you'll notice that Magic in the Moonlight follows Blue Jasmine in the "what's Woody Allen releasing this year?" filmography. If you've been keeping up with Allen, at least with respect to the movies he's making, you'll know that since his "return" to making movies people want to watch (let's start with Match Point), there's been a pattern of "really good to great one" followed by "pretty good one that you'll forget he made until someone brings it up." Like Scoop. Remember Scoop? It came out after Match Point, and is an amusing movie about Scarlett Johannson talking to a ghost and solving a murder mystery. It's okay if you only remembered Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the much better movie he made with Johannson and Penelope Cruz two year's later (I'm not sure anyone other than the Cap'n remembers Cassandra's Dream). After Vicky Cristina Barcelona came Whatever Works followed, the not very well regarded "Larry David as Woody Allen surrogate," which I liked a lot more than You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger. Midnight in Paris was followed by To Rome With Love, and so on. Ergo, Magic in the Moonlight is a perfectly pleasant, but at best is a trifle. That's not to say that a trifle can't be enjoyable on its own merits, particularly one whose stars are Colin Firth and Emma Stone.

 Magic in the Moonlight is another of Allen's "European" films, this one centered squarely in his favorite period: the roaring twenties. Wei Ling Soo (Firth), is probably not as well known by his given name, Stanley, but his "mystical magic of the Orient" still packs theaters. Stanley also fancies himself a renowned debunker of fraudulent "spiritualists," and when his old friend and fellow magician Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney) pays a visit, it quickly turns to Sophie Baker (Stone). Sophie and her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) have been making the rounds in France, providing advice from beyond the grave via the younger Baker's "gifts," and a family Howard is close to appear to be her next "mark"s, so to speak. Stanley can't resist the opportunity to expose her, but the unassuming Sophie may be more than he bargained for. In fact, she might even be the real deal...

 If there's something holding Magic in the Moonlight back from being more than just charming, it's that Stanley is, even to the end, an irredeemable egomaniac. When he's right, he lords it over other characters, but when he's wrong, he still finds a way to make it about magnanimous he is to admit he was mistaken (see the press conference he holds when he finally accepts Sophie as legitimate). It's a romantic comedy where you'd much rather Sophie end up with the "Baxter": the ukulele serenading wet blanket Brice Catlidge (Hamish Linklater), only because Stanley is so full of himself that he firmly believes he's doing Sophie a favor by suggesting they marry. It isn't, I suppose, that he's wrong, but he's so insufferable throughout the film that I scarcely felt like he deserved Sophie, a free spirit who loosens him up, only to make him less appealing. That said, much of the film looks marvelous, as Allen soaks in the French countryside and revels in the hot jazz, clothes, and cars of the era. Magic in the Moonlight is a fun movie to watch, but not one you'll be thinking about for long after. Then again, there's something to be said for well made fluff, even if the taste doesn't linger.

 On the more biting end of that spectrum, I would suppose, is Frank. I've already reviewed it, and depending on your taste for deliberately avant garde music or comedies with a serious dark side (and not always in a way that's funny), it may or may not be to your tastes. Michael Fassbender is something to see, however, acting for most of the movie from behind an oversized paper mache mask. Here's a snippet of the original review:

 "Were I you, I wouldn't go into Frank expecting a comedy, because while it is often funny (or at the very least, amusing), there's a dark undercurrent to the film. The original keyboardist isn't the only person involved in the band that gives up on living, and the contentious atmosphere never softens. While it's frequently an interesting movie to watch, Frank keeps you at a distance until the very end. The last scene brings about some sense of setting things right, but on its own terms, and in the meantime it's hard to find a character to sympathize with. Jon (Domhall Gleeson) transitions from affable to duplicitous not long after they arrive at the cabin, and the other chief option, Frank, is a mystery until late into the film."

 If you don't mind, I'd like to take a moment to address some films which would generally fall under the "kids' movies" umbrella. As you may or may not know, I am still a fan of much of it, but don't watch nearly as many as I used to. In fact, if we don't include the two-and-a-half I'm about to mention, you could argue that the only other children's movie I saw in 2014 was A Talking Cat?!?!?, and it's better that we not discuss that. Still, I did manage to catch Disney's first animated Marvel movie, one of their live action musicals, and a non-Disney movie that should, for all intents and purposes, just be a giant commercial. Surprisingly, then, it's The Lego Movie that I was the most pleased with.

I give much of the credit for this to directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (22 Jump Street), who managed to take a film that should have just been shameless advertising (look at the title, for crying out loud) and make it a fun and often very funny movie that sneaks in some pathos at the end. It even tugged at the heartstrings of this crusty old Cap'n. A first rate voice cast doesn't hurt, and The Lego Movie boast Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Charlie Day, Will Ferrell, Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, Will Arnett, Alison Brie, and tons of cameos from the likes of Will Forte, Nick Offerman, Jake Johnson, Cobie Smulders, Keegan-Michael Key, Jorma Taccone, Billy Dee Williams, and Jump Street alums Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum and Dave Franco. The writing is snappy, the plot is breathlessly paced, and the CGI convincingly replicates Lego. And I didn't even really want to buy Lego sets afterwards, which is good because I know how expensive they are.

 Oh, and of course there's the song. You know the one. About how conformity is awesome and everything is cool when you do what you're told. What? Am I changing the words or something? That seems like the gist of it. Anyway, you have it in your heads again, unless you haven't seen The Lego Movie, in which case you didn't know that song your friends' kids were singing was from The Lego Movie. So here, watch this.

 Like another Marvel film that came out this year, I hadn't really heard of the source material for Big Hero 6, but I feel I can't be blamed for that, as it comes from the same collective who brought the Disney Channel Ben 10 Alien something or other. No actual offense intended, but other than briefly encountering Ben 10 merchandise at a toy store, I have no connection whatsoever to it. This has little bearing on Big Hero 6, which is still a pretty entertaining movie despite following the "superhero / team origin story" to the letter.

 To wit: Hiro (Ryan Potter) is a young slacker with a gift for making robots, but his lack of direction worries his brother, Tadashi (Daniel Henney). Tadashi takes his brother to the institute he studies at, one for young inventors like Go Go (Jamie Chung), Wasabi (Damon Wayans, Jr.), Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez), and Fred (T.J. Miller), under the tutelage of Professor Robert Callaghan (James Cromwell). Tadashi is working on Baymax (Scott Adsit), an inflatable robot designed to provide medical care, and Hiro decides to apply himself. Then, after an encounter with businessman Allister Krei (Alan Tudyk) at a convention ends in tragedy, Hiro loses his brother and finds solace in Baymax. They work together as a team to solve a murder mystery, there's betrayal, hurt feelings, and the surprise identity of the villain.

 And yet, despite the fact that you can guess exactly where Big Hero 6 is going every single step of the way, the film manages to be frequently amusing and engaging. Perhaps it's the jumbled near-future world of San Fransokyo, or the design of the characters as hero. Or maybe it's just Baymax, who is easily worth watching the film for. I can't attest to its originality or any novelty in storytelling, but sometimes when you do something familiar well enough, it can carry you through. Considering that one of my favorite movies of this year falls directly into that category, I can't therefore hold it against Big Hero 6, but it's middle-tier Disney / Pixar, and certainly not something I would choose over the likes of Wreck-It Ralph in the future.

 Serviceable is perhaps an unfair way to characterize Disney's Into the Woods, because it damns a perfectly fun Steven Sondheim adaptation with faint praise. I'm trying very hard to separate the film from the stage production, because while I understand the need for many of the changes, it doesn't make me miss the narrator's presence in the second "act" any less. What Rob Marshall (Chicago) chose to do instead makes sense in its own way, and creates a nice cyclical tone to the fairy tale presentation, but the film is decidedly less "meta" than its source. Still, everyone in the cast gives it their all (with the exception, perhaps, of a totally superfluous Johnny Depp cameo as the Big Bad Wolf, which amounts to "Johnny Depp with prosthetic whiskers") and it's always visually engaging. Meryl Streep might not be by Witch (that's staying with Bernadette Peters), but I can't act as though she doesn't do a fine job. James Corden and Emily Blunt make a fine pair as the Baker and his Wife, and Anna Kendrick is fitfully fretful as Cinderella being chased by her Prince Charming (Chris Pine, who I didn't realize could sing). MacKenzie Mauzy and Billy Magnussen make less of an impression as Rapunzel and her Prince, but it's more than compensated for by Daniel Huttlestone and Lilla Crawford as Jack and Little Red Riding Hood. It may not be my Into the Woods, but it's certainly a good starting point for younger audiences, even if Disney tried very hard to pretend it wasn't a musical in the advertising.

 Rather than repost my earlier Godzilla review (with bonus Godzilla on Monster Island coverage), I'll link to the original and include the following excerpt, in case you're fatigued from Into the Woods paragraph-ness:

 "But in all seriousness Godzilla 2014 is pretty good stuff. I give it some grief but generally speaking the monster fights at the end are worth the price of admission. I liked that Edwards decided to show most of the MUTO mayhem from the perspective of the people on the ground, where they lose sight of monsters in the dust or are falling from a carrier plane and can see part of Godzilla as the descend through the clouds. It's a good visual hook for the film and does convey the sense of carnage better than the obvious miniatures in Godzilla on Monster Island. Although those miniatures are pretty funny looking and are actually being smashed (or being burned with a flamethrower, in the case of tanks) I did chuckle every time Strathairn said "Godzilla," which wasn't nearly as often as I'd hoped.. In most ways, the newer film has the better budget and conveys the power and size of Godzilla better, but it also doesn't have Space Cockroaches."

Likewise, I'll provide you with the original review of Cheap Thrills, and tantalize you with this portion, wherein the Cap'n makes an unusual comparison to, uh, A Serbian Film:


"I'm intentionally not telling you how crazy things get because not knowing what's going to happen or how far down the rabbit hole [the characters] are willing to go is part of the fun of watching Cheap Thrills. Like Ti West's The House of the Devil, there is a sense early on that something bad is always about to happen, but [...] (r)ather than simply shoving our faces in the ugly side of humanity for 87 minutes, E.L. Katz makes sure there's also comedy peppered throughout [...] (there's a sequence of events late in the film involving a meat cleaver and an iron that shouldn't be as funny as it is, but a well disguised reveal makes the laughter more hearty).

 Black comedies are notoriously tricky to get right, but Katz threads the needle very well with Cheap Thrills, and does it without ever making what happens seem outside of the realm of possibility. Other than one challenge I can't imagine anyone have time to make up on the fly, everything in the film matches the verisimilitude with which it's presented, which is all the more impressive. Cheap Thrills is a great movie to watch with friends who don't mind a little twisted in their cinema, and you won't have to clean vomit up off of the floor (maybe). I don't think you can say the same about A Serbian Film, so I think I know which one I'd pick."

 And on that note, we'll make an uncomfortable left turn to discuss the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, an actor I've long admired who left sooner than I'd like. If there's any upside (and really, there isn't), there were at least a few finished films in the can we could enjoy, and I saw two of the three this year: A Most Wanted Man and God's Pocket. (I'm going to have to watch the first two Hunger Games movies if I want to see his final films*).

 I knew about the former but not the latter, in large part because A Most Wanted Man comes from Anton Corbijn (Control, The American) and is based on a John le Carré (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Constant Gardener) novel, which would imply a stripped down narrative presented in a low key fashion. Which, in fact, it is, sometimes to its detriment. The film follows Günther Bachmann (Hoffman), a spy operating a small operation in Post 9/11 Hamburg, as he picks up on and tries to intercept Chechen refugee Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) who sneaks into Germany. The US and German authorities are interested in this undocumented Muslim, but Gunther's interest is piqued when it becomes clear he's not radicalized, but is looking to claim the fortune of his father, a Russian general.

Gunther allows Issa to contact immigration lawyer Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams), and through her, the bank where his inheritance is being kept. The manager, Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe), is resistant, but Günther convinces both of them that they can use Issa's money to definitively prove that Islamic philanthropist Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi) is funneling cash into terrorist cells. It's an uncomfortable bargain, but Tommy agrees, Annabel has no choice, and Issa is none the wiser. The only person who concerns Günther more than the German authorities is Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright), a representative from the CIA who is more than aware of his previous failure, the one that landed him in Hamburg, constantly begging for more time from the locals.

 After it becomes clear in A Most Wanted Man what Issa is really after, much of the tension tied up with the "post 9/11" setting drains away, and Corbijn's film becomes strictly a character study of a man who has been down on his luck too many times. It barely sustains itself, narratively, and like many Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the ending is decidedly anti-climactic. This is not to say it isn't satisfying or appropriate, or that it shouldn't be inevitable for Günther, but it does rob the film of a certain quality. I enjoyed watching A Most Wanted Man, but not quite as much as I'd hoped. Hoffman is fantastic: sullen, slouched over like a man who knows failure all too well, for whom even sitting up is laborious. Once you work out his accent, it's a real wonder to watch Hoffman work. Wright, Dafoe, and McAdams are also very good in not particularly showy roles. I wouldn't hesitate recommending A Most Wanted Man, but don't be surprised if you feel a bit like Günther when it's all over.

 God's Pocket doesn't stray much further from the concept of "loser noir," if we're talking strictly from a protagonist's point of view. The passion project of John Slattery (Mad Men), who adapted Peter Dexter's novel (with Alex Metcalf) and directed, it's tonally akin to a film like The Drop - which I'll be reviewing in a future part of this series. Hoffman again plays a man accustomed to being browbeaten, not merely for his lot in life, but because of where he's from. Or, to be more specific, where he's not from.

 Mickey Scarpato (Hoffman) lives in the small community of God's Pocket, Pennsylvania, but he's not from there. That's a problem, because the working class of God's Pocket only give any credence to people who grew up there, so while Mickey is married to local gal Jeanie (Christina Hendricks) and delivers meat (that might be stolen) to restaurants around town, he's not of them. He's just there, and if you really ask anybody, Mickey has his father-in-law to thank for the business in the first place. His stepson, Leon (Caleb Landy Jones), is a real piece of work, and when he mouths off one time too many at work, he ends up on the wrong side of the pipe. The workers tell the cops it was an accident, and Jeanie goes catatonic, convinced of foul play and delusional about her son.

 Money for the funeral is going to be tricky, and Mickey knows that Smilin' Jack Moran (Eddie Marsan) either gets his full payment, or else. (The "or else," by the way, turns out to be a cruel and darkly humorous turn late in the film.) His only real friend in town is Arthur Capezio (John Turturro), a small link in the mob chain that Mickey sometimes finds himself involved in. But things do not go so well for Mickey and Arthur, and the death of Leon draws the attention of local newspaper columnist and "man of the people" Richard Shellburn (Richard Jenkins). A barely functioning alcoholic, Shellburn can't resist Jeanie, and the shell-shocked housewife is easy prey for a guy two steps removed from greatness.

 The story comes colliding together over the course of a few days, between Leon's death and his funeral, and carries over just a bit to include Shellburn saying just a little too much about the people of God's Pocket. And then, for good measure, there's an amusing epilogue which may or may not be a happy ending. I had heard that people felt "cheated" that God's Pocket wasn't a dark comedy, which perhaps it was billed as, but instead a character study that grows increasingly desperate. Yes, there are some (mostly) morbidly funny parts, but Coen-esque is not how I'd characterize Slattery's film. That said, if you come in with expectations properly in check, you're really going to enjoy God's Pocket, even if you're just an outsider, like Mickey.

 Finally, I'd like to mention that while I get why so many people are raving about The Skeleton Twins, it seems to the Cap'n like the film gets along largely on the charisma of its leads: Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader. Like St. Vincent, it's a story that's been told so many times that you can see the beats coming a mile away. Take two estranged siblings with a hinted at difficult childhood, reconnect after one or both attempt suicide, and drop the outsider sibling back hometown. There's a rekindling of a torrid love affair from long ago, a marriage that isn't as solid as it would appear, and maybe some other infidelity to boot. Hell, there's even a scene where the titular siblings are mad at each other, but overcome it and rekindle their bond by lip synching to Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now," and you know how I feel about Starship.

 And yet, it's hard to deny that despite some rote, dare I say eye-rolling moments that seem to come along with every film like this from, I don't know, Garden State onward, The Skeleton Twins is worth seeing for Hader and Wiig. It isn't just that they're playing against type - this film just barely qualifies as "comedy" - but that their real life friendship from years together on SNL bleeds onto the screen, making it very believable to buy them as brother and sister. There's a moment in the dentist's office where Maggie (Wiig) works that feels like improvisation. Maggie and Milo (Hader) collapse into uncontrollable laughter, and it's a genuine moment that helps The Skeleton Twins overcome its more predictable tendencies.

 There are a few other good characters in the film: Luke Wilson plays Lance, Maggie's "how did they end up together husband," who despite his role in the story manages to come out as a decent, honest guy who tries to include Milo into their dynamic. Ty Burrell has the second most substantive role as Rich, Milo's former English teacher who has issues of his own, and whose relationship with his former student is a serious sticking point for Maggie. Of course, she has her own issues with monogamy, and the current object of her obsessive infidelity is Billy (Boyd Holbrook), her scuba instructor. Joanna Gleeson has a cameo as Maggie and Milo's mother, and it gives some hint into their dysfunctional family history. But by and large, this is Wiig and Hader's show, and they're certainly worth the price of admission. Bear in mind that The Skeleton Twins is often a very dark movie, one that addresses suicide frequently throughout the film, so don't expect to chuckle your way through the film. We're not talking Heathers, here. Actually, IMDB lists Frank as a "similar" film, and now that I think about it, that's appropriate.

 Next time we'll take a look at some of the bigger releases of 2014 that I was really looking forward to seeing, and maybe didn't end up being so thrilled with. They're ones I get asked about a lot, so we'll take a look and figure out the whys and hows soon...



 * This is not to say I won't or wouldn't have otherwise, just that I haven't seen them yet. People I know and whose opinions I generally trust have vouched for them. I just haven't gotten around to it, yet.

May the... oh, you get it already.

 There was a long piece here about why I wasn't obsessing about Star Wars anymore, but when I went back to look at it, the whole thing seemed silly. I was taking a lot of time to tell you that I wasn't going to worry about Episode VII and would just let it happen, but four or five times as long as the first half of this sentence. But now you know, and accordingly that answers potential questions about Star Wars on the Blogorium between now and December of next year, when I'll presumably review a new Star Wars movie.

 Wow, I just said the words "Star" and "Wars" three times in one paragraph. Maybe it is better I do some "conscious uncoupling" from all of the casting rumors and script details. In truth, I haven't been reading anything about it. I did watch The Shining last night. Not sure if you'll get a write up for that one, though. Or Band of Outsiders - there's plenty I'd like to say about both, but it could take a little while to get them in a coherent place.

 Anyway, stay tuned for tomorrow, when I'll be taking a look back to twenty years ago - it's a Retro Review of Reality Bites.

Two Perfectly Reasonable Answers to Plot Holes in Prometheus (That don't make the film any better)

 Despite my better judgement, I did pick up Prometheus when the fancy Blu-Ray set arrived, knowing full and well that the "questions will be answered" promise was a false one at best. To my surprise, it did answer some questions, like:

  - Is Ridley Scott going to explicitly tie the Alien and Blade Runner universes together (Answer: Yes)
  - Were the effects mostly digital or did they use more practical trickery than you'd expect? (Answer: The latter)
  - Is John Spaihts more than a little peeved that Damon Lindelof took his screenplay and turned it into Lost on LV-223 (Answer: Yes)
  - Does Damon Lindelof know you're going to be angry that the ending is nothing more than a "to be continued"? (Answer: Yes)
  - Does Damon Lindelof care that you're angry? (Answer: No)

 You can learn all of this and more watching the three hour and forty minute making of documentary (The Furious Gods: The Making of Prometheus), plus the deleted scenes and Weyland's "notes" that accompany the viral videos. What you won't learn, in any form or fashion, are answers to perfectly logical questions. Questions that drive fans of science fiction and the Alien series into a frothy rage because of how mind-bogglingly stupid they seem to be.

 Luckily for you, while I was thinking about Prometheus, it occurred to me that there are some reasonable answers to some of the most often raised "plot holes." I will share them with you. So that's the good news.

 The bad news is that they don't actually make Prometheus a better movie; they just provide an explanation for the stupid things that happen in the story. The answers don't really help explain why they happened in the first place from a screenwriting standpoint. But I can only do so much, dear readers...

 Problem Number One: "Why are the scientists so stupid?"

 You'll find this in just about every critique of Prometheus, because it's a plot crippling error that causes the film to collapse almost immediately after the scientific crew of the ship enter the Engineers' pyramid. They don't behave like scientists, or like human beings for the most part. For some reason, either Lindelof or Spaihts took a horror movie script, drew a line through "horny teenagers" and wrote "scientists" above it in pen.

 The complaint I hear most often (and while it would take a while to link all of the reviews I've seen it in, let's start here and also use the reviews it links to) is that there is no conceivable explanation why Weyland would hire such incompetent scientists to fly as far out as any human being has ever gone on the research mission of a lifetime. And they are, to be generous, really not sterling examples of their respective fields. That is, when we know what their fields are (more on that in a bit).

 The Answer: Weyland didn't hire them. Meredith Vickers did.

 It's worth noting that while the ship Prometheus is Weyland's, and his money is paying for the expedition, the only people aboard the ship that he was directly involved with were Holloway, Shaw, and David. Everybody else was hired by Weyland's daughter, Meredith Vickers, who had no interest in the mission being successful.

 The first thing she says to them during the briefing is "For those of you I hired in person, it's nice to see you again. For the rest of you, my name is Meredith Vickers, and it's my job to make sure that you do yours."

 She's being facetious, or perhaps saying it for David's benefit, as Vickers knows her father is aboard the ship in hypersleep (Weyland, on the other hand, seems surprised that his daughter joined the Prometheus crew when she comes to warn him that he's going to die). It's evident throughout the film that the only person onboard the Prometheus with no interest in Holloway and Shaw finding alien life is Vickers, so I find it to be totally fair that she's not going to hire the best scientists available for the mission.

 Vickers doesn't even really care if they survived the trip. The first thing she asks David about the crew after waking up from hypersleep is if there were any casualties. When he explains that no one died, she dismissively tells him to "wake them up."

 That explains why Fifield, the geologist, is only in it for the money. It explains why Milburn, the biologist, freaks out when he sees a calcified corpse but then, not six hours later, reaches out to touch something that looks like a facehugger mated with a manta ray. If you don't expect your team to succeed, why bother getting the best and brightest, especially if you know your father isn't going to wake up and meet any of them until after the mission has failed?

 So when Shaw and Holloway do find something, and Vickers tries to put the kibosh on it, we end up with the scene where David and Meredith have a tense conversation about Weyland's instructions. She already hates her step-"brother," but the fact that Weyland trusts David more than Vickers only enrages her when she learns that the message is "try harder."

 Why it doesn't make Prometheus any better:

 From a story standpoint, we understand why the characters are less scientists and more "horror movie stereotypes," but that doesn't make Prometheus any more satisfying. It makes Prometheus a dumb horror movie with characters that spend inordinate amounts of time "doing science" in the laziest ways possible. It also doesn't address the two people that Weyland DID put on the ship: Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway.

 Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that we can guess what their fields are. Holloway is probably an archeologist - it is his expedition in Scotland that sets the narrative off. Shaw is a little trickier - is she also an archeologist? Is she a biologist? Is she just somebody who hangs out with Charlie and provides moral support? The film doesn't ever really address this, just like it never explains why the climate specialist who gives us exposition about the atmosphere of LV-223 is also qualified to assist Shaw and David in an autopsy of the severed Engineer's head.

 While I can shrug and accept that Vickers doesn't give a shit about the secondary scientific crew, alarms bells should go off the moment that Holloway takes his helmet off in the pyramid, and he should be quarantined immediately by the security crew that was presumably driving them from the ship to the site and back. But that doesn't happen, and then everyone else takes off their helmets because the pyramid is creating a "breathable" environment that clearly wouldn't have any unknown diseases or particles that are also in the air. There's not excuse for that, nor is there one for Holloway's sudden desire to give up on the whole mission because he can't talk to the dead Engineers they find in one part of one pyramid a few hours after they land.

 So the question shouldn't be "why are the scientists so stupid," because there's a good answer for that, but "why are our protagonists so stupid?"


 Problem Number Two: "The Movie Takes Away the Significance of the Title 'Alien'"

 So bear with me here: this is a larger argument about where Prometheus stands in the Alien series, but the gist is that what's so scary about the xenomorph in Alien is right there in the title: it's foreign. It's completely unknown to us, and that's terrifying. It is not of human design, we cannot understand it, we cannot reason with it - we can only hope to kill or be killed by it.

 That's a basic, fundamental fear that we share: the monster that cannot be appealed to, that we recognize nothing in. Its life cycle is foreign to us, its biology is foreign to us (let us ignore for the moment the fact that having acid for blood serves no biological purpose) - the xenomorphs are at best insect-like, as Ridley Scott suggested and James Cameron made explicit in Aliens. But they've always been fundamentally, well, "alien." Even when they burst from the chests of humans, the only thing they take on as a physical characteristic is our stature.

 So the issue at hand is that the "monster" in Prometheus, if we ignore the Engineers for a moment (and I'll get to them shortly) is one that comes from Shaw and Holloway having sex after David slips Charlie some of the black oil. (Total Side Note: Did anybody else think of the black oil from The X-Files, by the way?) The proto-facehugger she "gives birth" to during the medi-pod Cesarian is therefore part-human / part-alien, the same way that Fifield is when he returns after a face full of acid and black oil.

 The proto-facehugger then does what facehuggers do to the Engineer, and then a chestburster does what it does, ending the film with something that looks a LOT like the xenomorph we recognize.

 One could reasonably make the argument that the aliens are not "alien" at all, especially if we also remember that the Engineers are the progenitors of the human race. There's nothing about their biological weapon that can't be linked back to humanity in the first place.

 The Answer: That's Not the Same Xenomorph the Crew of the Nostromo Encounters.

 It isn't, and that's one aspect of Prometheus that isn't exactly addressed in the film, but one that is answered as a throwaway line in Weyland's "notes." If you were worried that the ship that Shaw and David fly away in is the same one that Ripley, Dallas, Ash, and company find on LV-426, worry not. That's not where the eventual (and inevitable) Prometheus sequels are heading. How do I know that?

 Well, in addition to Spaihts, Lindelof, and Scott insisting that the film is no longer a prequel to Alien, there's a mention in Weyland's "notes" that while they were probing LV-223 that the Weyland Corporation picked up the distress signal from the ship on LV-426. David, in fact, is aware of this, and LV-426 is actually more of a priority than LV-223, but since Weyland wants to meet the Engineers, they're following Shaw and Holloway's theory first.

 More to the point, this argument doesn't necessarily hold up for another reason, one that has nothing to do with Prometheus. I'm actually going to totally ignore Alien: Resurrection, which already went out of its way to blend together the concept of "human" and "alien" as the central theme of the film, and instead look at a seemingly insignificant line from Aliens.

 Aliens takes place 57 years after Alien, which takes place roughly 30 years after Prometheus. So we're looking at something close to 90 years later, at a point when the Weyland-Yutani Corporation has been terraform-ing and mining planets for quite a while. They were doing it before Prometheus, as is evidenced by the bet between co-pilots, and the Nostromo isn't the first time they've had to deal with a hostile species. How do I know this?

 Ignoring the Prometheus, we can surmise this from one line in Aliens. The Colonial Marines, who protect colonies under the Company, have seen their share of action, and Hudson asks* Sgt. Apone:

"Is this gonna be a standup fight, sir, or another bug hunt?"

When the answer involves a xenomorph, Vasquez mutters "it's another bug hunt."

 So let's say, for the sake of argument, that this nickname for a mission the Marines don't want to be involved in is the result of having to hunt other alien lifeforms, successfully or otherwise. So yes, they're "alien," but we're no longer terrified of them to the point that soldiers are openly bored by the prospect of fighting another "bug" when they could have some real action.

 As Aliens is widely accepted as the favorite entry in the Alien series (not by me, but by a lot of people), we can hardly blame Prometheus for "ruining" the rest of the films by making xenomorphs less "alien." We've been cool with the malaise about the "alien"-ness of the monster for more than twenty-five years.

 Why it doesn't make Prometheus any better:

 That being said, why have the xenomorphs in Prometheus at all? Why have creatures that are so similar in design to the creatures from Alien and Aliens only to tell us that "well, it's not the same monsters, so it's not a prequel!" Why bother making that connection in the first place?

 Since it's really unclear what the black oil can and can't do (it seems to break down DNA and reconstitute it, creating life) or whether it's a part of a ritual sacrifice that begins life on planets or if it's a biological weapon. In Prometheus, it serves both purposes, to no apparent end. It's a MacGuffin that does whatever Spaihts and Lindelof need it to do whenever they need it to do that. More importantly, it's not even fundamentally important to what Prometheus is "about."

 If you pick up nothing else from the film or the nearly four hours of "making of" material, it's that the film is really about "where we came from" and "what it means to meet our makers" and "what happens if we're disappointed by what we find." And oh yeah, that's why David is there, because David is constantly disappointed by his makers, which allows him to do whatever he wants and lie about not feeling emotions.

  No, really, and here's the kicker. It's another one of those seemingly insignificant lines that most people probably missed. After David quotes Lawrence of Arabia, Charlie asks him what that means and he says "It's just something from a film I like." A film he likes, in a movie where David is constantly being told he has no emotions. You could say it's lazy screenwriting, but since the creative team beats you over the head suggesting David is more evolved than he lets on, let's assume he has disdain for his creators.

 So if this is all an issue of finding our place in the universe, and the "alien" threat that we are now complicit in introducing to LV-223 is our contribution to this search, why did it need to be something that looks like it could evolve into the xenomorph we hadn't had any contact with or had even heard about in Alien? If there are enough other species out there to constitute the term "bug hunt" less than a hundred years later, why not introduce that as the lasting contribution of the crew of the Prometheus.

 Oh, right. Because things that look like xenomorphs put asses in seats. Just like Engineers who turn out to be Space Jockeys get people who pored over Alien to go frame by frame through the trailers and to buy midnight tickets. Prometheus didn't ruin the "alien" from Alien, it just exploited the iconography for a story that didn't need it. Now we just need some Replicants in the next film to understand why they're so angry about being lost like "tears in the rain."

 Well, it's like I said: those are the answers, and in the context of the film, they make sense. They don't make Prometheus a better movie, but I hope they help address some of your concerns.



* It's about 35 seconds into the clip.

Things We Learned from Prometheus (and Some Other Reactions)

  I never thought I'd write the sentence "I'd rather be writing a review for Men in Black 3 right now" but you can't throw a virtual rock anywhere in the internet right now without it hitting something about Prometheus. And, at least in my experience, 90% of it has been negative. The hostility that the Ridley Scott / John Spaihts / Damon Lindelof prequel to Alien but not exactly movie has been deafening since Friday night, and while I don't argue with the reasons why commenters and reviewers and discussion board posters have been tearing Prometheus apart, I'm astonished at their ferocity.

 There are a few different points of attack, but many of them fall along the following lines: a) Ridley Scott hasn't made a good movie in years and this falls far from a "return to form" that we (the internet) were promised, b) The script is laughably bad, with one or two developed characters and a bunch of people that only do what the narrative needs them to do regardless of their "role" in the story, c) It isn't scary, d) It embarrasses the Alien series more than Resurrection (okay, I laughed out loud at that one*), or e) The movie lacks an ending and instead resembles Lindelof's strategy on the show Lost of "we'll save this for the next one" raising answers and plotlines they have no intention of addressing in Prometheus.

 With that in mind, I'm going to look a a few things to take away from Prometheus, some of which are tied to the criticisms listed above, and some tied to last week's post about Alien and Prometheus. Until the echo chamber of negativity dies down, I don't think I'm actually going to review Prometheus, even though I enjoyed it more than seemingly most of the chatterverse online. It's funny, because I liked it and my friends liked it and everybody I've spoken to that I know has seen it liked it, but if I start looking around online, Prometheus is the "WORST MOVIE EVAR ALL CAPS!!1!!!11!!"

 So let's get into it, starting with the indefensible:

 1. The Writing in Prometheus is a Mess - One of the most cited problems with Prometheus, even in positive reviews, is that the writing is anywhere from half baked to terrible. And you know what? It's true. I can't even begin to argue this, and no amount of thematic "Big Ideas" can overcome basic story problems (speaking of "Big Ideas," if you're looking for an interesting breakdown of the religious / philosophical / mythical references in the film, I suggest reading this post). They fall into two categories, one of which I'm not sure who is responsible and the other seems to follow the M.O. of Lindelof, but let's deal with the first part, the one where characters do things that don't make any sense.

 The primary offender here is Charlie Holloway, who along with Elizabeth Shaw is responsible for the Prometheus being there in the first place. It's unclear in the film itself whether both of them are scientists or if Holloway is the scientist and Shaw is the believer that pushes him forward (I've seen this idea floated out there in a few reviews). I'm inclined to believe that both of them have some interest in ancient civilizations, but Shaw is also apparently capable of overseeing a dissection / genetic analysis of one of the Engineers (Space Jockey) without question by the other scientists aboard the Prometheus. This is kind of a side note, but other than Janek (Captain), Chance (Pilot), Ravel (Pilot), Milburn (Biologist), and Fifield (Geologist), it's not clear what the other "scientists" / non-Weyland personnel do. Does anybody have an idea what Ford does? She's in the pyramid, is involved in the genetic analysis, and delivers exposition about how toxic the air is on LV-223. That's all we know.

 Anyway, I got off track. So the premise is that Holloway and Shaw convinced Peter Weyland to pay a trillion dollars to design a state-of-the-art research ship (hence the holographic displays and fancy equipment that, let's be honest, you aren't going to see on the mining ship Nostromo or the war ship Sulaco) and send 17 people two years into space to follow a space map. They arrive, find a pyramid with a skull on the top, David activates a holographic projection of Space Jockeys / Engineers running from something that ends with one of them being decapitated. They open a room with a giant head, murals, a sculpture that looks like a xenomorph, and jars filled with a black liquid that reacts to the change in temperature. They're forced to leave the room because of the reaction, but the body of the decapitated Engineer is roughly 2000 years old. They leave the pyramid structure because a storm is coming in, but Holloway and David are both lingering. David wants one of the jars, and Holloway dismissively declares "this is just another tomb."

 From this point forward, after being in the pyramid once (after he insisted they go in immediately after landing), Holloway becomes a drunken cynic, convinced everybody is dead and that he'll never be able to "talk" to the Engineers. After being in the pyramid once. Having explored one room, a few hallways, and being forced to leave because of external circumstance, Holloway gives up and starts drinking. His inexplicably newfound fragile mental state allows David to slip him some black liquid and let it do... whatever it does. Decode DNA? Recode it to create new life? Guarantee miraculous births? Look, I don't have any quarrel with the ambiguity of the opening of the film, whether it takes place on Earth or not (Scott says it doesn't matter where it is), and I'm even okay with the obvious horror movie setup of leaving Milburn and Fifield behind (in fact, it plays into two of the most known horror tropes paying off: smoking pot and having sex, the former in the pyramid and the latter preventing Janek from knowing they were in trouble).

 That said, Holloway's turn is arbitrary and only really seems to exist so that he can drunkenly insult Shaw and then get them together in bed so we can get to the "medical pod" scene in the film. It's a perfunctory character shift that doesn't make sense in the story, either as a scientist or as a "believer" - Holloway simply doesn't have enough evidence to leap to the conclusion he does, and since Weyland clearly pushes David to "try harder," it's not hard to see that Charlie giving up gets him out of the way midway through the film. It's logistical, not organic, and I can't get past that.

 The other problem, the "Lost" issue, is part of this notion that everything should be "sequel-ized" for continued franchise use. I fully admit this is nothing new and that complaining about it is like Clint Eastwood chasing hoodlums off his lawn in Gran Torino, but Damon Lindelof seems to be approaching Prometheus like it's a guaranteed ongoing series (and hell, it probably is, it's tied to the Alien franchise that 20th Century Fox has been desperate to reboot), and like he did with Lost, Prometheus raises lots of questions with no intention of answering them. In this film. That's the distinction between Alien and Prometheus. Yes, Alien never explains who the Space Jockey is or how the alien life cycle works in specificity (Aliens does, kinda) or how the derelict got there or a number of other questions, but Alien wasn't made with Aliens in mind.

 Prometheus doesn't even really have a beginning, middle, or end: it has an ambiguous opening shot, an earthbound introductory sequence, and jumps forward to the ship at the end of its voyage. Again, I don't have much of a problem there because the logistics aren't that important. I'm cool with the ambiguity about David's motives (actually, I love that and the tiny ways Scott ties how Shaw and Holloway treat David to the way Replicants are regarded in Blade Runner), the quick way the scientists are introduced and the plan Shaw and Holloway have, but once they land on LV-223, the narrative collapses. We're continually introduced to mysteries, one after the other, as characters are shuttled back and forth from the Prometheus to the pyramid, and instead of addressing these problems we get perfunctory explanations from the strangest sources. Yes, Janek is right that the Engineers are developing weapons in a pyramid with a skull on top in the middle of nowhere (how do I know this, read the previous piece where Scott repeatedly asserts in the Alien commentary what his reading on the derelict is), but is he the only person who realized this? Vickers is content to stick around under Weyland dies, even though she figures out pretty quickly how badly things are going to end.

 Okay, let's take a step back. What do we know about the Space Jockey / Engineers at the end of Prometheus that we didn't know in Alien? Okay, they engineered us for reasons we don't know (but are constantly reminded by characters in the film is VERY IMPORTANT), they were planning on wiping us out with biologically engineered weapons of mass destruction (including creatures that will evolve into the facehuggers and Xenomorphs we recognize from Alien) for reasons we don't know (but again, Shaw finds this VERY IMPORTANT) and that they're incompetent. How are they incompetent? Well, taking what we know from Alien and what we learn in Prometheus, they have no idea how to contain the weapons they create and as a result their WMDs end up killing them.

 That's it. We're given the carrot that Shaw and David aren't going back to Earth, but will instead fly one of the "bombers" to the Engineers' home planet (which isn't LV-223) to get answers that Lindelof, Spaihts, and Scott have NO intention of addressing in the film. We get lots of puzzle pieces, a promise that the story will pick up in the next movie, and a final shot introducing us to a proto-Xenomorph to give the audience something to be excited about when they leave realizing that Prometheus didn't actually end so much as throw up a "to be concluded..." ala Back to the Future Part 2.

 Side Note: I only call it a bomber because there's a distinction between the ship at the beginning of the film and the U-shaped, Giger designed spacecrafts, so let's assume that if several ships that look like that are stationed at a weapons facility that they're designed to haul volatile cargo to targets.

 Okay, so I watched six seasons of Lost that continually pushed the "we'll address this next year" only to get to an ending that failed miserably. But that's not my quarrel with the "sequel-izing" of movies. It's more fundamental than that. A movie with sequels can still have a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if it's designed to be part of a larger story. For example, while I don't know why you would do it, you could watch The Empire Strikes Back without seeing A New Hope or Return of the Jedi and feel like you've seen a narrative arc for every character in the film. It still raises questions, it leaves one character frozen in Carbonite, but it's still satisfying as it's own film.

 Movies that intentionally set themselves up with sequels in mind can fail. Case in Point: The Golden Compass. The writers decided they'd leave a bunch of open ended plot threads for the future installments of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and in the process forgot to make a satisfying film for audiences. As a result, the other two films were never made. They probably never will be. The same goes for Push, Jumper, and I Am Number Four. Prometheus will almost certainly get its sequel, but if Lindelof, Spaihts, Scott, and anyone else involved in future entries into this franchise don't tighten up the films so that people can enjoy them on their own (again, that's WHY people argue about whether Alien or Aliens is better, because they work in tandem but also as their own distinct experiences), I don't know that I want to be dragged along for two more hours.

 2. Other Things from the Last Post - Well, I think I've covered that LV-223 is not LV-426 and any speculation about where they are in relationship to each other is still up in the air (depending on which wiki site you visit, it seems to vary, but Google LV-426 and LV-223 and go to any link other than this to keep looking). Speaking of which, a friend asked me what the LV stood for, and even after digging around, I'm still not certain. If you know, please leave a comment for other readers and I'll also try to incorporate it into this section. I would gather it's the classification for planets discovered in the Alien universe, but the the "L" and "V" mean, I'm not sure.

 Since the mission of the Prometheus ends with Peter Weyland, his daughter Meredith Vickers, and the rest of the crew dead (at least as far as Earth is concerned), one can see how Yutani moved in to merge with Weyland Corporation in the absence of the family who ran the "Company." We can probably guess that Weyland-Yutani took the information David gathered about the "weapon" and that leads us into their obsession with bringing a Xenomorph back for research.

 It may sound silly to say this, but Prometheus is a prequel to Alien, just not in the way people expected. This is possibly why expectations are met with such vicious reactions, because other than the mid-section, Prometheus isn't really strictly trying to be a horror film. It's a film more fascinated with the origin of humanity, even if it has very little to offer other than more questions. Where it becomes an explicit prequel is a little white lie that Ridley Scott told about there being "No Xenomorphs" in Prometheus.

 Let's say it's safe to say that if you're still reading this after I broke down most of the major plot points (the Prometheus crashing into the Space Jockey's ship is in the trailer, but since I haven't mentioned it yet, there you go), so it's not going to bother you to mention the last scene in the film. After an obvious homage to Alien - Shaw recording voice-over explaining what happened to the crew playing over a ship leaving - we cut back to the last surviving Space Jockey, last seen on the losing end of a fight with an oversized facehugger. Its body begins shaking, and instead of a chestburster, a scrawny version of what we recognize to be a Xenomorph emerges, stands up, and screams (with second mouth). It's not "technically" a Xenomorph, just like the big tentacled thing wasn't "technically" a facehugger (although if it's anything like the tiny one in the pyramid, it has acid for blood). Therefore, Scott was only kind-of lying.

 What I'm a little curious about is that if the Alien wiki sites say about the chronology of the films (Prometheus taking place thereabouts 30 years before Alien). What we see at the end of Prometheus is are creatures that will evolve into facehuggers and Xenomorphs, but with only thirty years for the species to evolve to that point? Well, they're aliens, so I guess we should just ignore that. Also, I hope that this particular facehugger / Xenomorph combination don't have anything to do with what the Nostromo eventually encounters. Seriously.

 Just think about that: the "alien" in Alien is descended from Charlie Holloway and Elizabeth Shaw, with some tinkering from David, a Weyland Corporation android. It makes it a little less "Alien," doesn't it?


 I don't want to end things on a sour note, because despite the story problems I have with Prometheus, I completely disagree that it's not a good movie. I think Ridley Scott did a fantastic job with the 3D, bringing LV-223 to life, and in generating the tension when Prometheus moves into horrific territory. The medical pod scene is pretty disturbing, as is what happens to Milburn and Fifield in the pyramid (less so the Sunshine-esque reappearance of Fifield later in the film. And it's Fifield, not Holloway - I've seen that mistake made in a few reviews). I really enjoyed watching Prometheus, and would like to see it again. It's true that there's a lot going on in the film that would benefit from another viewing, but I'm not enough to cover story elements that don't make sense. So it's a very good film, but not a perfect one. It's certainly not the travesty or failure that I keep seeing online, but that's just my take. I'm happy to hear your thoughts.



* So I liked Alien Resurrection as a strange, heightened take on the Alien films by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but I'm in the minority. You have to REALLY be able to get past how wildly uneven the film is, how the combination of Jeunet's direction and Joss Whedon's screenplay - and I could probably write another entry just about the script - drains any sense of tension and replaces it with overacting and incongruous jokes. That, and the hybrid. I can't defend the hybrid. Anyway, it is not better than Prometheus**. What's next? Are the AvP defenders going to see their opening and go after Prometheus?


** Why yes, I put a post-script in a post-script, but where else should this go? I do think it's funny that various comments and forum posts insisted that only Alien and Aliens were now "canon" for the series and that Prometheus would assure that. Why is it funny? Because one of the things we see David doing while he's waiting for the crew of the Prometheus to wake up is wandering around with a basketball and eventually doing trick shots on a bicycle. Rather than this being an arbitrary decision, I choose to believe Scott made a conscious decision to pay homage to the silliest moment in Alien Resurrection, thus validating its existence in series "canon."

Blogorium Review: Captain America - The First Avenger

 Pre-Review Nerd Stuff:

 I know that it's considered bad form to start a review with a tangent, but why is that subtitle on Captain America? Were Paramount and Marvel afraid that people wouldn't go see a Captain America movie if they didn't directly tie it to The Avengers movie that was still a year away? Were they concerned that people might think that, despite no evidence to support the theory, that it was somehow a live action sequel to Team America: World Police?

 Let's take a moment to just pontificate on this, because I'm guessing most of you didn't even think twice about it. Captain America was the last of the Marvel feature-length-prequels/trailers to Marvel's The Avengers Directed by Joss Whedon in IMAX and RealD 3-D Coming to Theaters May 4th*. We already know that every Marvel movie that doesn't involve spider-men, punishers, mutants and Nicolas Cage** are moving towards The Avengers. How do we know? Well, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, The Incredible Hulk, and Thor have included either Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury or Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson (sometimes both!) and they keep hinting at an "Avengers Initiative" that Tony Stark isn't allowed to be in.

 Sometimes they throw in characters that have nothing substantive to add to the movie but who also happen to be members of The Avengers not named Ant Man (Hawkeye and Ant Man / The Wasp stand-in Black Widow) that are also part of S.H.I.E.L.D. However, to this point, Universal and Paramount have trusted nerds to understand that they're planning an Avengers movie without subtitles like Iron Man: The Avengers Wouldn't Have Him or Thor: The God of Thunder and Also Member of The Avengers.

 I could understand the need to bridge this with Captain America if say, Nick Fury wasn't in the film (SPOILER: He is. So are his "Howling Commandos," but sans their learder). If the film was actually just about Captain America's origin and role in World War II and didn't involve the prologue and epilogue in the present day, then yeah, I guess some rubes might say "hey, where's things I recognize? Why does that guy who isn't Robert Downey Jr. have the same last name? Why doesn't this movie explain things to me because I'm a drooling moron?" Okay, that last part was maybe a little mean, but we haven't needed our hands held to this point. The other films have done a reasonably good job of integrating elements for a later film without disrupting the experience of watching the film. Well, until Iron Man 2.

 Wait, what? Oh, the movie itself? Fine...


 Substantive Film Review Portion:

 Is there a missing "director's cut" of Captain America somewhere? Specifically a cut of Joe (The Rocketeer) Johnston's film that fills in the second half of the film, when things just happen without any connective tissue? Things were off to such a promising start...

 Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is a 90 pound weakling with a heart of gold who just wants to enlist and fight Nazis in World War II. His miniscule body (accomplished with some impressive digital trickery) and sickly medical record keep him from being mowed down by machine gun fire, which is what the Army officials who keep turning him down remind him. Defeated, he goes to the World's Fair in New York with his buddy "Bucky" Barnes (Sebastian Stan) and a few girls, and on a whim he decides to forge his papers and enlist (again). This time, Rogers catches the eye of Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), a scientist who defected from Germany to help the Allied war effort. He's working with Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) to develop the "Super Soldier" serum, and after boot camp, Rogers is determined to be the ideal candidate. Despite the misgivings of Colonel Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones) and Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), Rogers receives the serum and becomes muscular, hunky Chris Evans, er "Captain America," and is promptly sent to do USO shows to help the war effort.

 Meanwhile, Erskine's first "Super Soldier" experiment, Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), is plotting to take over the world, first for Hitler and then just for Hydra, his own private army. He has the Cosmic Cube, left on Earth by Odin (Anthony Hopkins, not appearing in this film), and with the help of Dr. Arnim Zola (Toby Jones), is creating new weapons, ones that will help him rule the world. Oh, and he doesn't have a face any more - he has a Hugo Weaving mask that he wears for a while but is actually a Red Skull. Or, THE Red Skull.

 And this whole portion of the film, dedicated to Captain America's origin story, is a whole lot of fun. It's a throwback to throwbacks of old fashioned adventure films like Joe Johnston's The Rocketeer or Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (visual effects art direction by Joe Johnston). There's a nice sense of momentum and wonder as this puny kid named Steve Rogers proves himself to have the heart to be a hero and then gets the "Super Soldier" serum and instead of getting to fight Nazis has to pitch war bonds to families and punch a fake Hitler over and over.

He never even gets to punch the real Hitler, because Captain America: The First Avenger doesn't actually feature Nazis to speak of - The Red Skull kills a few of Hitler's liaisons and then declares Hydra to be its own entity. That's okay, I guess, although it defeats the purpose of needing to have the film set in the 1940s, but I was still on board. Rogers ends up in Europe doing his goofy show to soldiers that really aren't interested - they lost a lot of good men to Hydra, including "Bucky" Barnes. Rogers decides that this "rah rah" patriotic song and dance isn't helping, so he asks Stark and Peggy to sneak him across enemy lines so he can save the captured allied soldiers.

 The first action scene, when Captain America improbably sneaks into the Hydra plant past a bunch of heavily armored soldiers and rescues Barnes, along with what will eventually be the aforementioned "Howling Commandos": "Dum Dum" Duggan (Neal McDonough), Gabe Jones (Derek Luke), Jim Morita (Kenneth Choi), James Montgomery Fallsworth (J.J. Feild), and Jacques Dernier (Bruno Ricci). The men band together to escape from Hydra, and Captain America ends up meeting Zola and The Red Skull as the plant begins exploding.

 And then Captain America: The First Avenger falls apart. There's still plenty of action and patriotism and fighting of Nazis Hydra, but none of it matters any more. All of the well designed narrative and breathless pacing designed to service Captain America's origin collapses and Johnston's film becomes a meaningless cacophony of scenes that seem to happen independently of what comes before and after them. The sense of wonder and adventure dissipates and instead we're subjected to a mish-mash of things that need to happen to service the epilogue of the film, when (SPOILER) Captain America wakes up in present day New York.

 I'm going to give you two examples of things that just happen without any explanation other than "well, it needs to happen for the movie to end the way we wrote it":

 1. Captain America goes from being a propaganda tool who went AWOL and saved some soldiers who returned fully expecting to be court-martialed to being AN ACTUAL soldier. How does this happen? Well, there's a scene where he's supposed to get a medal for bravery but he isn't there so that Stan Lee can make a joke in his standard issue cameo. He's not there because Captain America is now in London is certainly appears to be an actual Captain. Before someone goes into the comments to correct me on this, please instead consider explaining how, in the film (not the comic), receiving a medal of valour is in any way a logical substitute in the narrative for going from being s morale booster into being an actual soldier.

 2. Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter have a "will they or won't they" romance during the first half of the film, one that is loosely continued into the second half of the film, only in a lazier fashion. They sort of flirt, have conversations that indicate that they could fall in love, and then Rogers is seduced by another lady. Carter walks in on them kissing, makes a snide comment, and Rogers is embarrassed. He tries to apologize, but instead she shoots his new shield and Howard Stark makes a joke. Steve thought that Stark and Peggy were canoodling because he doesn't know what "fondue" is, so he doesn't understand why she's so mad! Oh, romantic comedy misunderstandings! Then the script drops all of the parts where he wins her back and instead pretends that because Captain America puts a picture of Peggy in his watch and that she sees it in a newsreel that they're in love. We know this because they see each other during the last Hydra showdown and kiss in a car, then have a sappy conversation as Rogers (SPOILER) crashes the Red Skull's plane into the Arctic, where he will be frozen for seventy years.

 That's important because the nonexistent third act romance is supposed to be the real tragedy of the film, because when Rogers wakes up in the future and Nick Fury stops him in the middle of Times Square, the only thing he can say is "Yeah. Yeah, I just... I had a date."

 I wish I shared the tragedy of Steve Rogers losing everything and everyone he knew, but I just didn't buy it. Just like I didn't really feel anything when (SPOILER) "Bucky" is killed during a seemingly arbitrary train sequence designed to capture Dr. Zola. We're off to the next scene so quickly that it doesn't really matter what just happened, which robs the second half of the film from having any meaning.

 Along those lines, the Red Skull and Captain America have no stakes in their rivalry: other than being the only "Super Soldier"'s and being on opposite sides of the war, there's nothing driving their specific animosity towards each other. They're enemies because the movie needs an antagonist who can fly to America so that Captain America can crash the plane, be frozen, and be rescued in present day. The Red Skull works because he's Captain America's enemy, so he's in the film. He has the Cosmic Cube because it figures into The Avengers, although for some reason they aren't calling it the Cosmic Cube in the film.

 Nothing happens organically after Rogers storms into the Hydra plant. It's somehow appropriate, because at that point the World War II setting becomes irrelevant anyway. The Red Skull has developed futuristic laser guns and laser tanks that evaporate Allied soldiers (gotta have a PG13 rating for this war movie, after all), so it ceases to be a throwback to adventure films anyway. Now it's a dumb CGI science fiction / comic / war hybrid where things like plot development don't matter. The film doesn't need a reason to get from A to B to C; it just skips forward and assumes you're too swept up in the special effects to notice.

 For a director who started in visual effects, Joe Johnston has been having a lot of trouble with effects heavy films lately. Jurassic Park III and  The Wolfman looked comically cheap when it came to digital effects, and despite the presence of actual physical stunts, Captain America starts to look like a long string of green screen sequences with people running, fighting, or driving. I'm almost positive that most of the plane interior where Captain America fights the Red Skull is an actual set, but it looks fake, and so does most of the movie after the first hour. To put it in perspective, I knew that most of Asgard was designed in a computer, but it seemed more palpable than 80% of Captain America's climax.

 Now, it is possible to watch Captain America and not think about any of this. You could just turn your brain off after an hour, try not to follow the story and just say "well, they need those 'splosions, after all" and be swept away to the end of the film. You're still going to feel underwhelmed by how quickly it ends, how little any of it registers, or the way that you don't feel anything that the writers, director, and actors wanted you to. But you might not mind. You'll think about Chris Evans and how he was a really good Captain America / Steve Rogers. You'll like Hayley Atwell and Tommy Lee Jones and be surprised that Neal McDonough wasn't playing a jerk for the first time you can remember. Toby Jones is a little bit like Ronald Lacey in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Hugo Weaving is chewing up scenery as the Red Skull. Dominic Cooper is fun as Howard Stark and you know, it was a fun adventure movie. It was a comic book, and really what did you expect?

 And if that's how you measure a movie, then the fact that half of an actual movie has been stitched together with a bunch of other scenes won't be an issue. Maybe there are a ton of deleted scenes that I need to watch or something, but they aren't in the movie I did see. The movie I did see started out with a lot of promise, and then used that good will to skip to the ending without earning it. Of course, the ending only exists to be the beginning of another movie, and not much else. At least Thor had something to do on Asgard, and Dr. Banner went back into hiding while he tried to cure himself. Tony Stark had to decide what good being Iron Man was really doing.

 Steve Rogers hangs out in S.H.I.E.L.D. until Nick Fury asks him to be an Avenger. The First Avenger, I guess.

 Subsequent Nerd Closing Component:

 So, where were we? Oh right, "The First Avenger" part. So if we're talking chronologically, wouldn't Thor be the "first" Avenger, predating Captain America by a few thousand years?

 I fully admit that I'm not an expert on Captain America or The Avengers. I was always more of a DC Comics fan, so I'm coming into these films with what little I do know about the characters. Some of them I know more about than others - I read more Spider-Man and X-Men and The Punisher than The Avengers, but I also read Secret Wars and am familiar with most of the major Marvel characters. The movies have their upsides and downsides, but Captain America has, to this point, been the one I was the most disappointed with.

 Sure, Iron Man 2's plot was too busy and Thor's story was more concerned with Asgard than the dutch-angle laden New Mexico portions, but there was a semblance of narrative in them that wasn't JUST in service of The Avengers film. Captain America doesn't feel like a movie so much as an obligatory set-up of one last character in the crossover film. It's like stretching the Hawkeye scene in Thor into a two hour movie that needs to hit certain beats in order for people to come into The Avengers knowing who everybody is. Worse still is that it tricks you into thinking there's an actual movie in the beginning and then just peters out halfway through.




 * Take that, George Lucas. May the 4th be with them!
 ** Or are those last two the same thing???