Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)

Jake Pentecost (John Boyega whose performance only isn’t the most lifeless and dull one in a movie full of lifeless performances because Scott Eastwood is even more of a zombie), rogue yet boring – and retconned in so the lazy script can include Hollywood’s daddy issues fixation - son of Pacific Rim’s Stacker Pentecost is roped in to help train a bunch of teen cadets as the next generation of Jaeger pilots. They may or may not be obsolete soon, for a Chinese company has invented piloted drone Jaegers. Returning to die – and if you think that’s a spoiler you haven’t seen any movies at all, have you? – Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) isn’t quite convinced of the concept. Soon a mysterious evil – it is painted black, after all - Jaeger attacks, and other supposedly exciting things are bound to happen later on.

As someone who liked Guillermo del Toro’s original Pacific Rim quite a bit (well, actually loved it to bits), I was going into Steven S. DeKnight’s sequel with a degree of optimism despite the bad write-ups for the film at the time it came out. Alas, this one’s really just barely better than a Transformers film of the Michael Bay era, dropping basically every bit of interesting world building (drift compatibility between pilots as a form of intimacy for example is written out completely except for one scene that repeats a plot beat from the first film but much worse), and misusing the returning characters badly. As a matter of fact, quite a bit of the film feels as if the filmmakers feel more than just a little loathing for the first one and go out of their way to tell you. It’s not just the identity of the villain – whose plans and actions being undetected by the way makes no logical sense whatsoever even if you’re applying tolerant blockbuster logic – or the undignified way Kikuchi’s character is written out, the film’s whole approach to mecha, kaiju and human beings is unpleasant and cynical where del Toro’s film goes out of its way to be anything but.

One might think the high diversity of the kids playing the cadets would at least be a nice step in the right direction, but the script just doesn’t bother to provide anyone with any characterisation going beyond their skin colour at all. This thing’s so badly done, you often don’t even know who is supposed to be in which mecha. The writing as a whole is atrocious: there’s no concept of how a film can make shorthand characterisation work, the plotting is vague, inconsistent and anti-dramatic, and there’s nothing here that doesn’t come directly out of the big book of Hollywood blockbuster clichés. Now, the first film did use said book quite a bit too, but it also knew how to give a cliché a little twist and how to put some heart and excitement into it when done straight. Where the first film understood clichés and knew how to use them creatively, Uprising just reproduces them, badly.

The mecha and kaiju action are a huge step backwards, too. It’s supposedly bigger, better and more fun, but in actuality, there’s no heft, no excitement and no verve to any of the action set pieces. They are joyless, pointless and lack any sense of wonder. Which actually make them perfect fit for the rest of Uprising.

Three Films Make A Post: When the dead start to walk you'd better start running…

The Dead Pit (1989): Half hokey supernatural slasher, half pocket zombie apocalypse movie, Brett “The Lawnmower Man” Leonard’s feature debut never adds up too much. Between attempts at the nightmare logic of a Fulci and the cheesy one-liners of A Nightmare on Elm Street style slashers at their worst, the film never finds any personality of its own.

The acting is dire, the effects undistinguished, and for every single effective shot, there are three whole scenes that look and feel amateurish. It is a film easy to point and laugh at, if you’re of a mind to, but I never found myself interested enough in The Dead Pit to find much actual joy in doing this.

The Cloned Tyrone (2023): If you can make it through the much too broad first twenty minutes or so, you might find that Juel Taylor’s conspiracy thriller weird pulp comedy has rather more to offer than a handful of obvious jokes – hell, there’s even a good reason why these jokes start off as obvious as they do. The movie manages to apply methods and a comedically heightened version of the style of 70s conspiracy thrillers to the feeling of being black and poor in America, and that role’s truly horrifying and individuality-eating aspects. While it’s at it, it then turns this into the kind of existentialist horror that can make one’s laughter get stuck in one’s throat.

Taylor’s direction is intelligent as well as just clever as a meta-game, increasingly putting emotional weight on characters and situations you wouldn’t have expected to be meant to carry them. That John Boyega, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris make one hell of a core cast doesn’t need mentioning; nor Kiefer Sutherland’s effectiveness as a villain.

The Three Musketeers – Part I: D’Artagnan aka Les trois mousquetaires: D’Artagnan (2023): When in doubt, go back to the classics, as does this umpteenth adaptation of Dumas. This is an update clearly meant for the blockbuster franchise era, so the second half of the film follows in December, there’s a scene in the end credits, and the score is as generically 2023 as you can imagine.

Director Martin Bourboulon is fortunately very good at what he does, mixing modern and original sensibilities effortlessly, keeping close to the same points film adaptations of the Musketeers prefer, while modernising and sexing up the margins. It’s a fun, energetic kind of blockbuster, with a great cast – Eva Green as the Milady, Vicky Krieps as Queen Anne, Vincent Cassel as Athos, and so on – a sense of play as well as one of drama.

Will this be the start of the Musketeeromatic Universe? Will someone eventually adapt “Twenty Years Later/After”? We can only hope/fear.

Some Scattered Thoughts About Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015)

It is somewhat ironic that you have to drag the Star Wars universe out of the hands of its original creator to actually get a watchable film taking place in it again, but then, creating something doesn’t necessarily mean understanding what’s best about it.

Sure, you could argue that a lot of the impact of J.J. Abrams’s film lies in the way it harnesses its audience’s nostalgia and general love for Star Wars and I couldn’t exactly call you wrong. However, you could just as well argue that doing this is actually what this particular film should do, respecting what the audience loved about the original trilogy and using it as the stepping off point for its variation of the original tale, instead of pretending to make everything new. And, while the film does perhaps repeat one plot beat of the originals too many, it gives most of its repeats little twists that to me feel very important. I don’t really need to explain why there’s more than just one difference between the scene between Kylo Ren and Han Solo and the parallel scene in the original trilogy nor why that’s important, do I? And while we’re talking about changes, to my eyes, it’s rather important and special too (in a good way) that Abrams also gives us a new entry in a beloved nerd mega-franchise whose heroes are a young woman and a young guy of colour, building on what came before and reaching towards inclusivity not as something to be prescribed in a dogmatic manner but as something that’s just normal (in all the good meanings of that word).

I also found myself decidedly happy with the film’s look which brings the Star Wars aesthetic back to its 70s SF paperback cover roots (that’s a compliment), its expectedly exciting action sequences (seriously, if you’re operating in the blockbuster world, good action sequences really should be a given by now, though it doesn’t seem to hurt Michael Bay his films only have crap ones), and the general air of the film very much caring about the tradition it stands in.

In short: Attack The Block (2011)

Distracted from their mugging of nurse Sam (Jodie Whittaker) by an alien falling from the sky, the group of friends around Moses (John Boyega) decide to slaughter the ugly little thing, and drag it into the council estate they - and, as will later turn out, Sam - live in, in hope for that elusive internet fame.

The thing the kids killed was only the first part of something of an invasion. Soon, there's a whole bunch of additional creatures falling from the skies, all black fur, glow-in-the-dark-teeth and gorilla-dog demeanour. The creatures seem to concentrate a bit on the kids' block.

During their attempts to fight and flee the aliens, the kids will also have to survive the tender mercies of the police, the ire of the block's drug kingpin Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter), who does not understand the concept known as "a misunderstanding", and team up with the woman they mugged at the beginning of the evening. There might be time for blood, unexpected heroism, and changes of heart before the night's through and the minor alien incursion can be fought off.

Watching Joe Cornish's Attack The Block did once again drive home what's for my taste missing from a lot - though certainly not all - of contemporary low budget movies - a willingness to not only go through the motions of genre cinema but to mix the generic and therefore expected parts with a contemporary reality, possibly even that reality lying outside the experience of white rich Americans.

Consequently, Attack The Block wins major points with me by having a group of poor, mostly black teenage soon-to-be-real-full-time-criminals as its protagonists, and, while never pretending that mugging people and working up to worse stuff is harmless or loveable, still treating them like actual human beings with pasts and futures and hopes and reasons for doing what they do, but without going into the poverty porn direction of looking down at them mumbling "oh, the humanity!". That's called not looking away from complexities where I come from.

Of course, using actual social complexities as the background and thematic underpinning of your SF horror comedy (the latter part often oh so very dry, by the way) does not necessary make it good as a SF horror comedy.

Fortunately, Cornish's got his audience's back there, too, and does not walk into the traps I would have expected him to walk in. There's nothing of that "aliens as a metaphor" crap here - a black gorilla-like alien with green glow-in-the-dark teeth out to kill you in this movie isn't a metaphor for the police state or the characters' mothers but is primarily a black gorilla-like alien with green glow-in-the-dark teeth, and therefore something that makes an excellent basis for a surprisingly ruthless (I absolutely can't see this one being made in Hollywood without getting a major re-write in the direction of the dishonest and and the mawkish), well-paced and unassumingly clever film in the best low budget traditions like this.

To make a pretty great film even better, the film's handling of its "change of hearts/characters learn a valuable lesson" parts is highly effective and far away from the sentimentality these scenes could have devolved into. Especially in these (dangerous) scenes, the young actors do some very effective and economical work that fits Cornish's unsentimental yet sympathetic treatment of their characters perfectly.

Attack the Block could have been a gimmick film on the level of garbage like Leprechaun In Da Hood, but it turns out to be my favourite kind of film: a B-movie that's as clever as it is entertaining.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,british movies,sf,horror,comedy,joe cornish,john boyega,jodie whittaker,nick frost