Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The Hateful Eight": Basic, Brutal, Brilliant

Directed and Written
by Quentin Tarantino

(R - The Weinstein Company - 3 hrs, 2 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Despite his "I'm a guy that makes crazy movies out of other crazy movies" public persona, Tarantino doesn't just make what he thinks will look good onscreen. He puts a lot of thought into the images he creates; combining art cinema's taste for meticulous shot composition and labyrinthine dialogue with pop cinema's taste for mad-cap energy and cathartic indulgence, creating a unique blend of the two that has earned him the status as one of the great contemporary film makers.

The Hateful Eight leans more towards the art cinema side, eschewing the violent power fantasies of Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds or the epic sprawl of Kill Bill for something almost Hitchcockian in it's simplicity. To wit, in the first decade after the Civil War, Samuel L. Jackson is Major Marquis Warren, a former Union cavalry officer that now works as a bounty hunter. While bringing a few bodies in to collect a warrant in a frontier town in Wyoming, he comes across John "The Hangman" Ruth and his prize Daisy Domergue heading the same way. He joins them, along with former Confederate sympathizer Chris Mannex, and they stop at a little frontier outpost called Minnie's Haberdashery when a blizzard hits, trapping all of them inside, along with a cowboy, a hangman, a former Confederate general, and a Mexican left in charge of the inn while the owner is out.

It's a bunch of disreputable people, all lying on one level or another about their backgrounds, many of whom have had a price on their head from someone, most of whom are armed, all stuck with each-other in a run down shack for several days while a blizzard rages on outside. It's as consistently engaging as anything else Tarantino has put out, but in a very different way. The Hateful Eight is not an action movie, it's not even really a Western; above all else, it's a suspense thriller. It's Tarantino stripped down to the basics. It's still just as quotable, but Tarantino takes his sweet time introducing all of the characters, giving us more time to get acquainted with them. His cinematography is just as beautiful as ever, which is more impressive since most of the film is confined to a single space. It's little more than a bunch of character actors in period dress slowly coming down with cabin fever, but with the director of Pulp Fiction at the helm, you may as well be on a tilt-a-whirl the whole time.

Not that the cast is bad, it's terrific, everyone involved is instantly memorable in their part, even when that part isn't really developed all that well. Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russel, and Jennifer Jason Leigh get the most screen time, as they're introduced before anyone else, and they're all amazing. You will be shocked by how much you enjoy such talented actors acting like complete sociopaths, and clearly enjoying themselves while doing so.

That's the thing that sets The Hateful Eight apart from Tarantino's other works, this time there are no heroes. There is no avenging gunslinging fallen angel like in Django, no clear villains like in Inglorious Basterds, everyone here is either a violent murder or a war criminal or both, we are left to try and find the least evil person present. It is a mean, nihilistic piece of work that encapsulates a hopelessly cynical worldview while expressing it in a way that still gets you to smirk along with it, only to brutally punish you for doing so with periodic bursts of horrific violence.

Yet the most striking image in The Hateful Eight is not Tarantino's signature bloodshed. It's the film opening on a long shot of a crucifix buried in snow as two of our main characters ride into the frame. That one image sums up the entire film without a single word; that everyone you are about to meet is beyond redemption, and their sins shall not be paid for but in blood.

Have a nice day, and I'll see you at the movies in 2016.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4/5

The Archivis' Second Annual Not-Buster Awards (Worst of 2015)

Artwork by Olivia Steva

Alo Party Peoples.

Last week, I told you my best films of 2015, now it's time for the other list. Just a word before we get started, there's no solid metric for what ends up here. Just being a bad movie isn't enough to get on this list As an example, Adam Sandler's The Ridiculous 6 launched on Netflix a couple weeks ago, and it's absolutely terrible, but by Sandler's standards it's merely below average. Nobody was heartbroken by it sucking, everyone expected it to suck, therefore it's sucking doesn't matter. No, to be on here, you have to be a disappointment, or otherwise good resources have to be wasted, or it has to offend me on some level.

Dishonorable Mentions

• Aloha: This was just a bizarre failure. Such a skilled director, so many good actors, such a potentially fascinating screenplay, all either seemingly half-asleep, horribly miscast, and damaged and half-formed as though someone spilled coffee on the master while the ink was still drying.
• Avengers: Age of Ultron: It's not that it's bad, it isn't, but the first Avengers was just so good, a complete redefinition of its genre, that anything less than a masterpiece of a follow-up was going to be a disappointment, and Age of Ultron is far from a masterpiece. That, and it looks like Marvel Studios' infamously grueling production schedules have broken Joss Whedon to the point that he's all but retired. That's a crying shame.
• Chappie: Congratulations, Neill Blomkamp, you made something that isn't completely terrible. Now I just wish you'd make something that's actually good, I want to like you. Maybe if you became a music video director, you already cast a couple of big-shot rappers from your home country  as main characters in this, you'd be really good at it.
• Hot Pursuit: Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara have excellent chemistry, and given the chance they could make a very good comic duo, but first they need to be paired with a good director and a good screenplay.
• Jurassic World: Once again, it's not that this is that bad, it's what this represents. What is little more than a 200 million dollar B-movie became the highest grossing film of the year, (but probably not for much longer) combined with an Independence Day sequel and a theatrical Power Rangers movie both arriving in the next couple of years, the 90s Nostalgia Wave has come crashing onto the shore of the culture. God help us all.
• Straight Outta Compton: I told you it would be here too. I really wanted to like it, if it ended after the about the first hour you'd have a great short film. Hell, edit it down the the money shots and set it to a medley of the album its named after and you'd have an all-time great music video, but as a movie it slowly devolves into boiler plate Oscar bait. What a letdown.

The Archivis' Top Ten Worst Movies of 2015

#10) Jupiter Ascending Directed and Written by Andy and Lana Wachowski

In a parallel universe, the Wachowskis lived up to The Matrix and became some of the best action directors of all time. In this universe, they lost the magic long ago and now I'm ready to throw them in the same boat as Neill Blomkamp and Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu. They remain top-tier technicians, but it has quickly become apparent that there is little to no substance behind the spectacle, and they're one more bad film away from me calling them straight-up hacks. Jupiter Ascending still looks beautiful, but all the spectacle in the world can't distract from hokey acting and a screenplay that occasionally feels like The Matrix with all the proper nouns switched out.

#9) Tomorrowland Directed by Brad Bird, Written by Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof

I really didn't want to put this on here. I like Brad Bird for the most part. I like the refreshingly positive message of hope and optimism and the endless possibilities of science that Tomorrowland wants to be about. I like visualizing that more optimistic future through the lense of old-school raygun Gothic sci-fi, the last period where we truly thought that science could save the world, and if Brad Bird had expressed all this in an editorial or a TED Talk, I'd totally back him up. But in movie form Tomorrowland is so ham-fisted and poorly executed that I can't excuse it for good intentions. It comes across less as "Back in my day the future was amazing, what happened to us?" and more like "If you don't share my aesthetic obsession with vintage pulp sci-fi, you are directly contributing to the end of the world!"

#8) The Man From UNCLE Directed by Guy Ritchie, Written by Guy Rtichie and Lionel Wigram

For whatever reason, we got a surprising number of spy movies this year. We had a way too self-serious spy movie, two funny spy movies, and then we had this. This was just dull, shallow, vacant-eyed. It's no better than that Jack Ryan movie from last year. It plays out like a bad James Bond knock-off from the 60s, only it's 2015 so it's even more boring because we've seen all this a million times since. Being a period piece almost forces it to be at least somewhat visually interesting, but otherwise it is a complete snooze.

#7) Minions Directed by Kyle Balda and Pierre Coffin, Written by Brian Lynch

This summer, Minionmania reached what is hopefully its apex in the only way it could; the little yellow monsters got a big, heavily marketed movie of their very own. The posters were everywhere, as were the trailers. Facebook was flooded with memes. We simply could not find a way to escape these things. Which wouldn't matter if the movie was alright, but Minions misses the main thing that made them appealing enough to build a media empire on. They're only funny as a distraction from the main characters, when you make them the focus of a feature, there isn't enough substance to carry a movie. Da-ba-dee, da-ba-dae. Da-ba-dee, dab-a-dae, please o' please let this craze die.

#6) The Visit Directed and Written by M. Night Shyamalan

Once upon a time, M. Night Shyamalan was positioned to become the next great American auteur. That, didn't happen, but for a while he had an entirely different kind of notoriety as the filmmaker that everyone agreed was cool to hate, The Happening is still some of the best accidental comedy ever put to film. But with The Visit, Shyamalan has finally managed to wear out his welcome. It's too obvious and on-the-nose to work as a straight horror film, it's too self-serious and meditative to work as self-parody, at one point one of the main characters literally flips off the audience. M. Night, whatever you needed to get out of your system with the last seven or eight films, I hope you got it all out, because I half-expected you to walk onscreen during the credits and shout "Screw all y'all haters! Imma do it how I want!"

#5) Spectre Directed by Sam Mendes, Written by John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Jez Butterworth

I want to like the Craig era James Bond movies, Daniel Craig is great in the part, but Spectre isn't only easily the worst Bond movie since Die Another Day, it's confirmed something that I've been suspecting for a while; that James Bond itself has become obsolete in the Marvel Age of blockbuster film making. The point of the James Bond movies has always been to follow the exploits of a guy who's only job is to say cool things while doing cool things in the most over-the-top manner possible. That's virtually every action movie now. We don't need James Bond for that anymore, and by now it's just going through the motions and hoping that we still respond to it.

#4) The Divergent Series: Insurgent Directed by Robert Schwentke, Written by Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman, and Mark Bomback

This was the year that YA dystopia films finally reached critical mass. With the saga of The Hunger Games flickering out like a candle starved of oxygen, the forest fire of imitators will soon start running out of fuel. But until that happens we'll still have to deal with the lingering scent of burning wood. As long as there are insecure teenagers, there will be power fantasies that shamelessly pander to them, but the Divergent movies are the most insultingly, cynically calculated of the bunch. If Logan's Run is a genuine Parisian cafe and The Hunger Games is a Starbucks, then the Divergent series is cheap airline coffee that barely gets the job done, smells of spent gunpowder, and tastes of pencil shavings and ash.

#3) Fant4stic Directed by Josh Trank, Written by Josh Trank, Simon Kinberg, and Jeremy Slater

We've been spoiled by the ascendancy of Marvel Studios, so much so that we've all but forgotten just how bad superhero movies can get. Fortunately, 20th Century Fox and Josh Trank are more than happy to remind us with another shoestring budgeted quick cash-in made to hold onto the IP so nobody else can touch it in the spirit of the Roger Corman movie. Actually, even that might be too nice, the Roger Corman movie is terrible, but it at least captures some of the energy and enthusiasm of the comics, Fant4stic on the other hand is dull, dreary, and grim. Of all the high-profile superhero films to rip off, why would you pick something as reviled as Man of Steel?

#2) Pixels Directed by Chris Columbus, Written by Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling

As Nineties Nostalgia begins to rear its ugly head, Eighties Nostalgia had its last breath this year, and there is no end to that trend that would fit better than this movie. Pixels is the nadir of lazy, nostalgia driven cash-ins from the disaster artists at Happy Madison that tries to appeal to everyone and in doing so appeals to no one. Kids today aren't going to care about the Atari era miasma it marinates itself in, and nostalgic adults that do care about it will be insulted by just how little Pixels cares about its subject matter. There's a critic for the Dallas Morning News who, when reviewing Pixels, said that the studio had tired to ban him from seeing Adam Sandler movies for review because he wasn't very nice to them. He said that it was "the nicest gift anyone has ever given me."

Before we get to number one, I need to make something clear, everything else on this list has at least some redeeming value. Jupiter Ascending's baroque pulp sci-fi looks gorgeous, The Visit is occasionally unintentionally hilarious, The Man From UNCLE is a fascinating case study in just how generic a movie can be, even the Divergent movies are a great example of what not to do when ripping off a successful franchise, but...

#1) Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 Directed by Andy Fickman, Written by Kevin James and Nick Bakay

...on the other hand, has no redeeming values. The director is barely there, the acting is atrocious, the script is an unfunny joke that feels like it would have been great as an SNL bit but simply cannot sustain a feature film. It is shot badly, edited blandly, and so bone-headedly dull and slow that I almost thought it was a practical joke on the part of the film makers. There's a reason that there aren't any so-bad-it's-good comedies; bad drama, action, horror, virtually every other genre can be amazing when they go wrong, you can't peel your eyes away from the insanity that unfolds. But the whole point of comedy is to do all that on purpose, so when it fails, it's just awkward and sad.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Star Wars: The Force Awakens": A 200 Millon Dollar Fan Film, And I Like It

Directed by J.J. Abrams
Written by J.J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan,
and Michael Arndt

(PG-13 - Disney - 2 hrs, 16 mins)

VERY MINOR SPOILER WARNING
Alo Party Peoples.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens will likely go down in pop cultural history as the single most anticipated film ever. Disney spent upwards of four billion dollars just to get the rights to the property and Fandango crashed when the first trailer was released during the Super Bowl. Speculation on every single detail ran rampant for months prior to release.

Disney has been so confident that they have a guaranteed mega-hit on their hands that the advertising has eschewed any discussion of plot or themes in favor of building as much hype as possible among. "Look! We're using practical effects and models and matte paintings and shooting on film again! Look! Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill are back for one last red carpet before they retire! Love us! Please, love us!" They even chose World's Best Style Mimic of 80s Genre Movies J.J. Abrams to direct, say what you will about his actual skill as a storyteller, there is nobody working today that is better at building up anticipation among audiences. Everything about the build up to The Force Awakens has been deliberately calculated to get original trilogy fans to weep with joy while providing Disney with terabyte after terabyte of free marketing.

And it's paid off for them, The Force Awakens is exactly the sequel to Return of the Jedi that die-hard fans have been wanting for decades but didn't dare dream of happening ever since The Phantom Menace went down in pop-cultural history as the one of the industry's biggest disappointments. It's no masterpiece, but it's better than any of the prequels, and considering that it had no earthly reason to be anything other than passable (I'll be surprised if this doesn't make over 2 billion worldwide) that's remarkable in and of itself.

Make no mistake, what The Force Awakens wants to be is a two hundred million dollar original trilogy fan film. It plays out as an extended remix of A New Hope with liberal sampling of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, as we find ourselves following another droid sent to a desert planet with top-secret information to be taken to a rebel base in aims of defeating another planet-destroying super-weapon. It's like Abrams came across a case of the original trilogy's vintage toys, and not only is he re-enacting his favorite scenes, he's adding his own tweaks and revisions. The ingenious thing is that this level of reverence for the events of the original trilogy is when into the plot of the film itself, as our new bad guys, the First Order appear to be a cult of dedicated to recreating the Empire, and all of our heroes are seeking on one level or another to emulate the deeds of Luke, Leia, Han and company, who are regarded by them as near literal legends.

This would come off as a little insufferable, if it weren't for one thing. Abrams has taken the most important lesson of the original trilogy to heart, that a lot can be forgiven in terms of wonky screenwriting if you have compelling enough characters, and The Force Awakens absolutely delivers. One-time Stormtrooper Finn, scavenger and would-be Jedi Rey, and ace Resistance pilot Poe Dameran are all fun, engaging characters with great chemistry, and there's consistently more to them than just being the Luke, or the Han, or the Leia from scene to scene, but it's Adam Driver's Kylo Ren, our would-be Darth Vader, that is by far the most interesting new character. It's impossible to get into detail as to why without a huge amount of spoilers, but of all the new cast, his is the story I'm most excited to see continue.

If The Force Awakens is a fan film, it's a fan film in the best possible way. It's a fan film made by people that totally get and respect the source material, and want to express that enjoyment in the best possible way. If the goal was to emulate A New Hope, then mission accomplished. They're both wildly imaginative space adventures from directors that are probably better as technicians than they are as auteurs, that constantly hint at a big, wonderful world just outside the frame. Now let's hope that this emulation continues with the next one being a meatier, more ambitious, more emotionally satisfying film handled by a better director.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4/5

The Archivis' Second Annual Thinking Man Awards (Best of 2015)

Artwork by Olivia Steva

Alo Party Peoples. 

Great films are the kind of films that make great film making look easy. The kind of film that can awaken a love of the medium within someone. The kind of film that someone can watch and think "That was amazing! I want to do that." and sets them down a path that might lead them to do the same for someone else. They can entertain, they can inform, they can inspire, they have been a dominant pop-cultural force for nearly a century, and I'm here to tell you what I thought the best examples of the form were this year.

First up, the runners up, in no particular order...

Honorable Mentions

• Ant-Man: Marvel Studios, the current kings of the Hollywood blockbuster had the guts to go smaller, more intimate, and more enjoyable with a really good little movie that was one of the highlights of a pretty underwhelming summer movie season.
• Batkid Begins: Where most documentaries focus on the systemic unsolvable problems of the world, Batkid Begins is a clarion call for optimism. It's sweet, it's effective, it's a neat little movie.
• Cinderella: After deconstructing the Disney fairy tale with Frozen and nearly ripping it to shreds with Maleficent, Disney decides to reconstruct their signature story with a near-flawless rendition of the archetypal Disney fairy tale.
• Jessica Jones: To say that Jessica Jones is the best individual work under the Marvel banner is to undersell just how good it is. Even if you don't care about Marvel, even if you've never cared about Marvel, you should still watch Jessica Jones.
• In The Heart of the Sea: Ron Howard continues to be a great technical powerhouse, but In The Heart of the Sea is too self-serious to work as a morality play, and too simplistic and shallow to be a huge, sweeping epic. 
• The Water Diviner: Russel Crowe turns out to be really good at directing war scenes, but he's less good at artsy, show-offy would-be top-tier director stuff.  With practice I can see him being a very good technical guy, but for now he should probably stick to acting
• Straight Outta Compton: For about the first hour or so, Straight Outta Compton is a fierce, powerful force of film making that almost becomes this year's Selma, then, as soon as NWA breaks up, it devolves into this year's Imitation Game and becomes a paint-by-numbers Oscar bait biopic. Just for the record this is probably in the honorable mentions for the worst list too.
• Steve Jobs: It is by no means a definitive account of the real Steve Jobs' career, it's not even that accurate of one. Depending on who you ask it's either defacing the trees to draw attention to the forest of Jobs' ego, or it amounts to spitting on Jobs' immaculately designed grave, but it is still a great character study about the drive to success, and an amazing actor's show case for the assembled cast.

And now...

The Archivis' Top Ten Best Films of 2015

#10) Me and Earl and the Dying Girl Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, Written by Jesse Andrews

Pretentious? Maybe. Aimed almost exclusively at wannabe auteur hipsters? Definitely. Still a sweet little movie despite that? Absolutely. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a moving portrait of adolescent angst filtered through the lense of an ongoing Millennial yearning for the late 20th Century, but it's also a sweet little romance story with enough genuine heart to make up for being yet another feature-length tribute to Wes Anderson.

#9) Max Directed by Boaz Yakin, Written by Boaz Yakin and Sheldon Lettich

Wait, come back! I'm being serious. A family movie about a dog coming down with PTSD after serving in Afghanistan is one of the best films of the year. Not only is Max a masterful work of emotional heart-string pulling pulled off with such success that it's enough to make you think director Boaz Yakin might have sacrificed a goat to the gods of film making, it's also a better film about veterans adjusting to civilian life than American Sniper could ever hope to be. It proudly wears its gushing heart on its sleeve, and I would have respected it for that level of earnestness anyways, but it also being an incredibly well executed version of exactly what it wants to be gets it a spot on this list.

#8) Crimson Peak Directed by Guillermo del Toro, Written by Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins

This comes with the same caveat as Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro's last film, if you can't get behind a film that actively embraces convention, then you won't be able to enjoy it, but if you can get behind it, you'll absolutely love it. Crimson Peak takes the same loving approach that Pacific Rim took to kaiju movies and applies it to Gothic romance, creating a film that swoons with every shot. It's the cinematic equivalent of a haunted house, but in the same way that The Avengers is a fireworks display and the same way that Gravity is a roller coaster. It's a haunted house designed by a mad genius architect with an insanely talented interior decorator hell bent on making the best haunted house possible.

#7) The Big Short  Directed by Adam McKay, Written by Adam McKay and Charles Randolph

The Big Short is a tour de force of film making, an amazing acting showcase for Christian Bale and Steve Carrell (he will be up for Best Actor again, and this time he'll deserve it), and a powerful polemic on the vices of unrestrained capitalism and greed for the sake of greed. Part docudrama and part economic history lesson, you're unlikely to see anything quite like it in theaters this year. Seriously, go see it, Star Wars is going to be hopelessly crowded for the first two weeks anyways.

#6) Vacation Directed and Written by John Francis Daley and Johnathan M. Goldstien

I know I'm in the minority on this one, but I don't care. It's my list, and if I think that a decades later nostalgia cash-in sequel deserves to be on it, I'm going to back it up. I say that Vacation is a lot funnier and a lot smarter than most critics gave it credit for. It's a consistently hard hitting and occasionally brilliant satire of Hollywood over-reliance on established brands, that also works as an elevation of the same. It's such a good time, you'll be whistling zip-a-dee-do-dah out your ass.

#5) Kingsman: The Secret Service Directed by Matthew Vaughn, Written by Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman

Nobody saw this coming, did they? Matthew Vaughn continues to be a pop-cinema genius, and Kingsman was easily 2015's surprise jem. It's bursting with manic half-mad energy, it has some of the best fight choreography and cinematography I've seen in a long time, Vaughn and frequent co-writer Jane Goldman's script is a consistently hilarious spoof of golden age James Bond while still being a better James Bond movie than the actual Bond movie we got this year. It kicked a lot of ass, in every sense of the term.

#4) Inside Out Directed by Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen, Written by Pete Docter, Ronnie Del Carmen, and Josh Cooley

It feels so good to see Pixar hit one out of the park again. Not only is Inside Out their best movie since Up, not only is it one of the best family films of the young century so far, it's a shockingly in depth exploration of how people deal with emotional turmoil, one that's better at it than most grown-up movies on the subject. It feels like the last few movies were Pixar working through it's own awkward adolescence, seeing everyone else in theatrical animation catch up to them and sulking over not being the biggest fish in the pond anymore, and Inside Out is them coming to terms with the change.

#3) The Martian Directed by Ridley Scott, Written by Drew Goddard

It's been so long since one of the great American film makers actually made a great film that I was wondering whether he had forgotten how, but living legend Ridley Scott has redeemed himself with a top-notch thriller, a cracking good adventure story, and a love letter to NASA that puts Interstellar and Tomorrowland's heavy handed message mongering to shame. It's nice to see Ridley Scott get back in the game, and since he's following this with a Prometheus sequel, it probably won't happen again for a while.

#2) Mad Max: Fury Road Directed by George Miller, Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nico Lathouris

This is probably the only time that a decades later relaunch of an 80s genre franchise is not only the best in the series, it's a genuinely great film in its own right. Fury Road is a lean, tight, gloriously over the top hard-R action film of the type that we rarely see in the blockbuster scene, and it's also bitingly intelligent work of dystopic sci-fi that leaves The Hunger Games and it's legion of imitators behind in the dust as it rides away in a tricked out ATV while shredding a flame throwing electric guitar and shouting "Witness me!". It was a real toss up between this and my number one pick, but...

#1) Ex Machina Directed and Written by Alex Garland

...this was still my favorite. I thought long and hard about this list, but as soon as I saw this movie, I knew it would be number one. Ex_Machina is brainy, big idea sci-fi of the best possible kind; deliberately paced and structured, beautifully shot and arranged, forcefully well acted, and comes with a powerful and intelligent script that will have audiences thinking about it for years to come. Christopher whom? Terry what's-his-face? Forget them. This guy, Alex Garland, he will become the new Stanley Kubrick, and his directorial debut is easily the best film of 2015.

As usual, you can go here to see a list of all the movies I saw this year, and here for my picks for this year's Academy Awards. Next week, it's the other list.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "In The Heart of the Sea": Overreaches For The Stars

Directed by Ron Howard
Written by Charles Leavitt, Rick Jaffa,
and Amanda Silver

(PG-13 - Warner Bros. - 2 hrs, 2 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Ron Howard is the kind of film maker that makes great film making look easy, nobody worth taking seriously is going to dispute that. He is the kind of film maker that makes such masterful use of the cinematic form while also making garunteed crowdpleasers that by the end of the movie you're left wondering why everyone else has such a hard time getting it right.

In The Heart of the Sea is a great example of that kind of film making, trading in broad sweeps befitting of the kind of archetypes that make up much of its cast and its breathtaking presentation. Think an Apollo 13 style story of a voyage to distant lands gone wrong by way of Titanic's captial-R Romaticism, and you've got a pretty good idea of what to expect from In The Heart of the Sea. 

Chris Hemsworth is Owen Chase, a farmer's son that followed his late father's dreams of becoming a whaler, and has done so for a number of years, becoming quite good at it. One day in 1819, he leaves his pregnant wife behind for one final voyage aboard the Essex on the condition that he be allowed to captain the ship. Only to find that he's instead first mate to Benjamin Walker as George Pollard, son of one of the great whaling families of Nantucket, on the condition that if they come back with 2000 barrels of whale oil he will be a captain. Their voyage is fraught with danger, encountering a storm that nearly cripples them, and arriving at their usual hunting grounds only to find that it is nearly devoid of whales. So they dock in Ecuador in hopes of selling their meager findings and maybe get something out of the expedition, where they hear legends of a spot way out in the Pacific, where there are "flukes as far as the eye can see" and they can fill their holds with oil in a few days, if it weren't for a massive white whale that sinks any ship that ventures near. Chase thinks it's insane, this kind of risktaking is what got them into the storm, but Pollard is desperate to keep up the family's reputation, so they head out there anyways, and the whale sinks their ship.

That's about as close as In The Heart of the Sea gets to having a point, every bad thing that happens to the Essex is brought about by the captain ignoring the warnings of the experienced whaler and going with his gut in the pursuit of profit. They don't sail around the edge of the storm because it would take too long. They don't head in for repairs because it would wreck the Pollard family name, they head into uncharted waters and run into a monster because the captain sees no other way to fill their holds. And in a final bit of symbolism, the Essex doesn't survive the whale attack because the whale oil in their holds catches fire, any chance of salvation the crew had being destroyed by their own hubris.

It wants to be a cautionary tale about foolhardy risk taking and going where man was not meant to be, and the general presentation matches up with it, but it fails to convey the kind of emotional gut punches such a story needs in order for those themes to connect. The cast works their ass off to make it work; natural-born movie star Chris Hemsworth can't help but look good in period dress aboard a great wooden ship like he just jumped off the cover of a trashy paperback romance novel, Benjamin Walker perfectly embodies an arrogant nepotistic old family name that cares about nothing other than keeping up the family name, the cinematography is absolutely stunning, but it just doesn't connect in the way that it should. More often than not, In The Heart of the Sea feels like a well done but soulless cover version of a much better film.

Maybe if it ended with the sinking of the Essex, In The Heart of the Sea would have worked better, the shock and horror of seeing everything you've ever worked for destroyed in an instant by your own human imperfections would sink in, but it goes on, detailing how they survived being lost at sea for months afterwards, barely hanging on at the mercy of the planet they'd considered themselves masters of. At one point, after they've washed up on a desolate rock thousands of miles away from civilization, one of the crew tells Chase that men were divinely ordained masters of the world, he grimly responds "Do you feel like an earthly king right now?" That should mean something, it should have real impact, but instead it comes across as shallow message mongering.

In The Heart of the Sea is not as good as it should be, but it's still a gorgeous looking film baked up by two great actors turning in great performances. It's worth seeing for that, but only if you can ignore how much better it could have been.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4/5