When Five Tribes Go To War....

"Fuck Off Legolas!"

So I finally, finally got around to seeing 'The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies' last night. I know, I know - slovenly on my part - but here's the thing....I read the book as a child but never finished it. As far as I'm concerned, the story of 'The Hobbit' ends once Smaug is out of the way. To be honest 'The Hobbit' ends for me once Gollum is out of the way....but that's just me. What I'm trying to say is that I never felt any pressing need to see the conclusion.  But here it is and....well, I enjoyed it...but I'm also glad it's all over.

I applaud Peter Jackson for what he has done. He filmed the unfilmable, remained true to his singular vision over 15 years and pushed technical boundaries. For the most part he didn't fuck it up, which is truly remarkable.

Now I may not particularly like the third LOTR film and I never want to sit through 'The Two Towers' again, but that's my problem with Tolkien not Jackson. Tolkien doesn't really lend itself well the way scripts are structured. For me LOTR and The Hobbit both have great openings, languid middles and "are we there yet?" endings. But plotting kind of misses the point of Tolkien anyway. Tolkien is about immersing yourself in the detail, the descriptions, the glacial shift of events, the sense of a truly never ending narrative - something properly mythical. It's amazing that Jackson managed to capture the essence of that and make it entertaining for a mass audience over the run of six films.

There's no point me reviewing the film properly, you'll have seen it by now and have your own judgement. For the record I liked it the least of the three 'Hobbit' films and have plenty of gripes but at least it didn't quite turn into the CGI battle bore I expected, but I did think it lacked a little of the awe and wonder of the other films. At times it did feel strangely dated already - something that wasn't helped by the use of some shoddy back projection work. Of all the films in the series this one noticeably has the most inconsistent standards for SFX. It runs the whole gamut from wonderful to laughable with some bits clearly loving laboured over and others rushed through for completion date.

The battle of the five armies becomes the battle of some superhero dwarves on a hilltop  - but strangely this seems to work.

Bilbo gets lost a little - even though it is his story and he has little to do other than hold the ring, hold the Arkenstone and roll his eyes. He doesn't actually do very much of anything. But that's not to take anything away from Martin Freeman who is reliably brilliant and the smartest bit of casting that Jackson did for the whole saga.

Those dwarves though. All looking like they went to the same hairdresser and got a blow dry. You expect one of them to have a purple rinse.

And Smaug went down too easy for my liking.

And Legolas is still in it. I'll miss inwardly telling him to fuck off every time he's on screen.

And "Love hurts so much!". Thank you Tauriel, you may go now.

And what was with the comedy coward routine?

And how come the eagles  save the day again (as they do in LOTR) but we spend no time with them, or learn anything about them?

And what was with the worms? What did they do?

And...and....well, you see...the more you think about it, the more I don't like it... so I'm going to stop there. I think the 'The Hobbit' on the whole was great fun, an exuberant blast of family entertainment. It was never going to please everybody, it was a terrible idea to spread it out over three films instead of two and it has plenty of flaws but I'm glad it's there and I'm glad it's not an abomination.

But I'm also glad that I won't have to sit through another one.

Imitation Games. 'Ex Machina"

...and she took a face from the ancient gallery...

The renaissance for intelligent big budget sci-fi movies continues apace with Alex Garland's 'Ex Machina' which is probably better than any of last year's crop and is an assured and timely British film. 

Young software engineer Caleb gets to meet his genius employer Nathan at an isolated, subterranean location. After signing disclosure documents Caleb is asked to run a series of "Turing test" styled sessions with Ava, a human simulacra, to determine if she truly is an artificial intelligence. During a power outage Ava implores Caleb not to trust Nathan....and so the games begin, certainties collapse and paranoia and mistrust intensify.

It's a great set-up and immediately engaging.  We don't have a tedious build up to meeting Ava, we don't have tons of tedious pseudo-scientific exposition and we don't have our intelligence insulted.  The film is tight, tense and perfectly paced. The three leads are uniformly great and it helps that there isn't a big star name onboard to distract us. Well....I guess Oscar Isaac is a well-known actor....but here's the thing...I didn't even realise it was him until I saw the end credits. That's how good he is; that's how stupid I am. Likewise I didn't realise that Alex Garland had directed this as well as written it. It's an assured debut that simultaneously coaxes brilliant performances out of the whole cast, presents its special effects with a matter of fact nonchalance, maximises atmosphere from the minimal sets and approaches the material with intellectual rigour. We've definitely got his unadulterated vision on the screen.

It's clear to see what his influences are - 'Blade Runner', Kubrick, 'Metropolis', 'The Stepford Wives', 2000 A.D. comics, computer games. This is the stuff he will have grown up with. It's what I grew up with; probably you too. What's remarkable is that he's thrown his hat in to the ring with such iconic fare and doesn't come off looking stupid. He manages to distill the fascination and fear of artificial intelligence and fashion it into a gripping drama - something even the much vaunted 'A.I.' Kubrick/Spielberg collaboration failed to do. 

A younger Alex Garland might have been tempted to turn the last act into a slasher film - with a   psychotic killer robot on the rampage in an isolated location. There is still an element of that on show but Garland shows the restraint learnt from  scripting 'Never Let Me Go' and steers us towards a convincing and satisfying conclusion. 

I loved every moment of it and thought it was pitch perfect from the opening shots of office workers plugged in to their media devices right through to the use of Savages' 'Husbands' as the closing credits music. My palms were sweating, my mind was working overtime and I was reeling from the visceral thrill of it all. Geoff Barrow from Portishead (the band, not the place!) contributes to the excellent soundtrack and there is just an overall sheen of class and confidence to the whole project.

Objectively, it's not perfect by any means. For all the exploration of A.I. themes this is still a fable about male fear - with Ava as a monstrous female - beautiful, manipulative, unknowable. It's undeniably a film made by a man....about a genius male creator.... making a fuckable robot.... and then being afraid of it because it might just have an interior life of its own. It also has a strong element of porno chic. Maybe I was just too sensitive to that because the film was preceded by the awful trailer for 'Fifty Shades Of Grey' with which it seems to share a similar interior design aesthetic. It may not be a feminist sci-fi film then, but I don't think it's a misogynistic one either. Concerns about the eroticising of Ava are addressed in the plot and to give Garland the benefit of the doubt I do think he is making valid points about objectivisation and the eroticising of technology. He's not a leering, horny idiot - that'll be Zack Snyder.

If you know your sci-fi and/or have an interest in emerging technology then you won't find anything here that is particularly groundbreaking. The conversations between Caleb and Ava could have benefitted from a bit more depth for me. I'd have liked to have seen them challenging and testing each other on a higher philosophical level. The conversations between Caleb and Nathan hold more interest. Even so I enjoyed my first viewing immensely. Only time will tell if the film has got that repeat viewing factor. Personally I'm not sure there is enough intellectual substance here for University courses to be referencing it is a main text in ten years time. Even so, I am sure that it will provoke plenty of post cinema pub discussion about the ethics and limitations of artificial intelligence and I'm sure that was Alex Garland's intention.

Go see it!

W.I.B. 2. The Woman In Black: Angel Of Death

The woman in black is dancing with me

cheek to cheek

W.I.B. 2 is rubbish. It has no aliens, no ray guns, no Will Smith and no Tommy Lee Jones. Just some guff about kids in the war and a house on the marshes.

Do you know why 'The Woman In Black' is on the national curriculum? It's because it is an expertly crafted ghost story in the classical tradition that lends itself to a gripping, spooky and enthralling theatrical experience. The 2012 film adaptation was a slow burn of tension and drama wrapped up with some perfect gothic moodiness. It was smart and spooky and caught the public's imagination. It was haunting (every pun intended) and not exactly reassuring in its denouement.

All subtlety is brushed aside for  the sequel which is built around four unrelated jump scares and little else. The plot about a vengeful ghost terrorising evacuated children holed up in the sinister house on the marshes during World War Two plays like the obligatory "spooky" episode you will find in every season of Doctor Who . To be honest I kept drifting off. I didn't really know what was going on at certain points and didn't much care. There is plenty of atmosphere but it is all thrown away on silly "boo!" moments. Such moments always make you jump but there's not much skill involved. A loud noise and a kid wearing a gas mask suddenly appearing in frame is not the same delicious thrill that comes from the anticipation and dread of slowly crafted suspense. The film-makers can't even really figure out a good way to make the scares happen naturally out of the story and so there is an over-reliance on dream sequences and nightmares. The biggest scare in the film is the face of a passing nurse suddenly turning into that of a screeching ghost woman. This is the cinematic equivalent of those YouTube videos  where someone is made to stare at an innocuous maze on a computer screen for a while until a shock insert of Linda Blair in the 'The Exorcist' kicks in and makes them fall out of their chair. It's getting a reaction. It's not a story. The film ends on exactly this sort of lazy device at the expense of sensible resolution and structure. You leave feeling that you have been tricked.

The cinematography is wonderful (especially during the night-time sequences), I liked the wartime setting and for a moment there I thought we were going to get a fascinating black mirror version of Narnia. Unfortunately what we actually get is "'Annabelle' in a gothic house" with no creativity beyond thinking "this will look good in the trailer".

'The Woman In Black: Angel Of Death' - setting the bar low for horror in 2015

Plot 1. Action 2. 'Taken 3'.

What do you mean "more family-orientated"?

So 2015 kicks off with 'Taken 3' - a much more family-orientated take on the franchise in every sense of that phrase. We spend an interminable amount of time reacquainting ourselves with the Mills family. Poor Bryan, he has so much to contend with - his little girl is now all grown up and pregnant and his estranged wife wants him back in her life. All of this soap opera is of course just a pretext to ratcheting up his pissed off meter for when the inevitable something bad happens.

Alarm bells started ringing even before the film started. What people responded to in the first film was the brutal violence, a ruthless hero and an edgy plot involving sex trafficking. 'Taken 3' has a 12A rating and like 'Expendables 3' the desire to get bums on seats has resulted in a compromised, toned down addition to the franchise. People get shot in the head but there's no blood flying around the screen, no real sense of threat and no impact. It all feels very 'safe' this time out.

Remember that the unique selling point of 'Taken' is Liam Neeson being bigger, smarter and more merciless than the bad guys. He has a "particular set of skills" and part of the fun is seeing him employ them in a determined manner against the clock. Mix in some European locations and realistic car stunts and you've pretty much got your movie right there. All of that is jettisoned this time out. It's less of a 'Taken' sequel and more of a 'The Fugitive' variant as Bryan becomes a murder suspect on the run, out to prove his innocence. Yawn.

Part of the problem is the Los Angeles setting. Instead of the disorientating and threatening European milieu we have a reliance on over familiar locations - storm drains, diners, garages, car parks, Californian mountain roads. By the time a car rolls down a hillside and explodes you'll be thinking you could be watching any cop movie or television show made at any time in the last 40 years. It's all a bit ordinary.

But here's the thing....despite all that it still somehow manages to work. Neeson is as stoic as ever, the plot is as preposterous as it is predictable but it's undeniably entertaining in an undemanding way. I suspect the script started out as its own thing but then got opted with a view to shaping it into a 'Taken' movie. The most interesting element has Forest Whitaker as the lawman assigned to bring Neeson in. It's refreshing to see a genuinely smart detective on the case and he makes a good foil for our hero. Whitaker is fine but he plays his character in much the same way as his role in 'The Shield'. It all adds to the general tv feel of the thing.

Dougray Scott turns up in it too. It's strange to think that this man was once touted as a potential Bond and is now a sort of Poundland version of Gerard Butler. It's a cruel business.

So 'Taken 3' then. A lot of fisticuffs, a fair bit of bang bang shooty bang bang, one confusing and dull car chase and a lot of stupidity. It's okay. A bit better than 'Taken 2'; nowhere near the heights of 'Taken'.

2015 is underway and the bar has been set low.