Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Independence Day: Resurgence": A Pale Imitation

Directed by Roland Emmerich
Written by Roland Emmerich,
 Nicholas Wright, James. A Woods,
Dean Devlin, and James Vanderbilt

(PG-13 - 20th Century Fox - 2 hrs, 0 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

"Sparky sparky boom, man."

That is the experience of watching Independence Day: Resurgence. It's not exciting, it's not even interesting in its failure, it just happens, and then it's over. The story that exists is little more than a retread of the already intentionally arch original, all the easier for whoever has to dub it into Mandarin. It's all the glossy explosions for glossy explosions' sake that director Roland Emmerich's detractors go after him for. Granted, they're really good looking, well shot glossy explosions, Roland Emmerich is a flat out better technical filmmaker than most other blockbuster specialists. But it's glossy explosions all the same, and without the sense of earnest effort or heart that make his good films work and his bad films uniquely memorable.

And it's not like I was expecting high art from Resurgence either; despite what some of y'all might think, I've got nothing against glossy explosions. Fury Road got onto my best list last year, and pretty damn high, too. The Marvel films are one of the few things that I'll go out of my way to see regardless of whether they've been screened for critics. Hell, I even kind of liked Hardcore Henry, and it's about as glossy as glossy gets. But in those cases, the glossy explosions are complimented by something more; Fury Road is packed to the gills with crazy car stunts, but it's also a serious epic with actual observations about social dynamics and personal autonomy and an introduction to feminist theory, while still being packed to the gills with crazy car stunts. The Marvel movies get cited for "superhero fatigue" all the time by "serious" critics, but they do their antics in service of dynamic characters. Even Hardcore Henry occasionally struck a thematic line of feeling that someone else is pulling your strings.

And Independence Day is sort of like that too. The glossy explosions are definitely a focus, but even though we can be assured that billions of people are dying, human carnage isn't what Emmerich chooses to turn the camera too. Instead, it focuses on the destruction of buildings, landmarks and iconography. Those iconic shots of the Empire State Building and the White House being blown up aren't just eye candy for the trailers; by showing the destruction of all the symbols and borders we put up between eachother, and then showing mankind rising from the ashes to defeat the invaders, it establishes a theme. That at the core of the film, Independence Day believes that our differences hold us back, and the aliens almost did us a favor by blowing apart the divides we'd put between us, because it allows us to harness the strength that comes from unifying. It's that kind of optimism in the face of the literal end of the world that's turned Independence Day into a generational touchstone for Millennials. An accidental time capsule of how optimistic and forward looking the Nineties look in retrospect, especially compared to today's blockbuster landscape where even Superman has to be grim and morose all the time.

Roland Emmerich is not a subtle filmmaker, anyone that saw The Day After Tomorrow or White House Down can tell you that, so with the context of Independence Day's place in the popular culture in mind, making a sequel in a post-9/11 zeitgeist should allow it to burst with meaning, intentional or not. That first trailer, with its super serious title card intoning "We always knew they would come back." seemed to hint at something. Maybe the feeling here would be "paranoia after a devastating attack leading to constant military buildup in preparation for a second assault that may never come", that'd fit as a thematic followup to the original. If there's one reason that a sequel to Independence Day could be even remotely interesting, it's seeing what the post-invasion world eventually became. But Resurgence can't be bothered to wait more than ten minutes before the aliens show up again. Rather than letting us get to know about the setting it's created, and I'll give them credit for not trying to recreate the present, our minds are left to wander amid the fireworks. And I couldn't help but wonder how, despite twenty years passing and civilization being remade with their technology, we never bothered to give the aliens a proper name.

And if the fireworks were good, I might give them some slack for it, but Independence Day: Resurgence is one of the most underwhelming blockbusters in recent memory. The cinematography and effects are all fine, but the editing is horrible, never letting us hold on a shot long enough for it to stick, it's clear that they needed to trim it down for time, because nobody gets an arc or a personality that would let us care about who's doing the shooting. Fireworks are always better when they're actually celebrating something.

If Independence Day is the urtext of the modern blockbuster, then Resurgence is a pale imitation of the same. Where the former can thrill and entertain and inspire, the latter can only waste time. Part of the reason this review took so long is because of how surprisingly hollow this film is. Roland Emmerich at least usually leaves an impression, and it's sad to see him apparently stop trying.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 2/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Finding Dory": A Great Family Film, But Not A Great Pixar Film

Directed by Andrew Stanton
and Angus Maclane
Written by Andrew Stanton, Victoria Strouse,
and Bob Peterson

(PG - Disney, 1 hr, 54 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Finding Dory is unique in Pixar's catalog in that it has the chance to get really, incredibly bleak towards the end... and then it just doesn't. The studio is already well known for baking heavy emotional gut-punches into material that looks light and gentle on the surface; like a fantasy about toys coming to life that's also about coming to terms with mortality, or a superhero adventure that's also about midlife crises, or a rehash of Herman's Head that's explicitly about how bottling up difficult emotions will only cause them to boil over in the end.

Finding Nemo followed that template in that it's a movie about talking fish, but it's also at least partially about living with a disability, i.e. Nemo's little fin and Marlin's overprotective nature in regards to it being the thing that kicks off the plot and what lends the story most of it's emotional weight. Finding Dory makes it more explicit by revealing that the title character's forgetfulness is actually the result of chronic short-term memory loss, a childhood disability of her very own. The film opens with her parents teaching her coping mechanisms so she can lead a fuller life when she gets separated from them, and wanders the ocean for years, sometimes even forgetting what she's searching for, until the runs into Marlin and Finding Nemo happens. A year later, Dory has an encounter with a stingray triggers a dormant memory, which leads her to drag Marlin and Nemo along on another journey across the ocean to find her parents, which leads them to the Marine Life Institute of California where they get separated again.

"Hey kids/older teenagers that were in grade school when Finding Nemo came out! Remember the funny comic relief sidekick from last time? Well, the forgetfulness you spent the last film laughing at is actually a crippling disability she's been dealing with her entire life!" should come across as self-parody - just writing it out makes it sound like someone's screwed-up fanfiction. But I'll be damned if it doesn't work, because Pixar is that good at this material and because of Ellen DeGeneres' performance as Dory. Making her the main character means she doesn't get to be as funny, but she gets to go deeper and more poignant than Finding Nemo could ever let her be. By the end, it gets damn close to one of the most effecting endings Pixar has ever achieved...

...but then it sort of doesn't. I understand why, if the film ever slowed down enough for the weight of the scenario to really sink in, it'd come across as existentially horrifying instead of just exciting. The characters find themselves literally flung from one life-or-death situation to the next in a mostly dry, human-built space that's far more difficult to navigate than the open ocean. It's the kind of tossing around that usually gets reserved for Woody and company in the Toy Story movies, except that a fish is far less durable than an action figure. Aside from one scene in an interactive tidal pool, it never quite gets to the kind of intensity that Pixar is known for. At the end of the day, it's a kids movie, and you're not supposed to leave deep psychological scars in a kids movie; regardless of how well it would have fit thematically, Woody and company were never going to die at the end of Toy Story 3. Instead it keeps things going along at a good clip, introducing lots of new characters, Ed O'Niell as a curmudgeonly octopus is a real stand-out, and keeping from getting in too deep.

Finding Dory is a great family film, and one I imagine that parents of disabled children will have been waiting for for a long time, but it's not a great Pixar film. All the pieces are there, and if better assembled they could have achieved greatness, but for as long as it took to get a sequel off the ground, Finding Dory simply doesn't clear the bar that Pixar has set for itself.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Warcraft": Skip It Like A Cutscene

Directed by Duncan Jones
Written by Duncan Jones, Charles Leavitt,
and Chris Metzen

(PG-13 - Universal - 2 hrs, 3 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

It can be an enjoyable thing to watch a bad movie fail. To use the most recent example, seeing every short-sighted overly serious grim-n'-gritty decision made with comic book superheroes since the Nineties come home to roost in Batman v Superman was nothing short of cathartic. And there are entire communities built around cult failures like The Room or Birdemic - hell, even Howard the Duck has it's defenders. And there are people that built entire careers around mocking these sorts of failures like Mystery Science Theater 3000 or the folks at Channel Awesome and its ilk.

But no such joys are to be found in Warcraft; too ambitious to be written off as fluff and too serious to be called a farce, it is a tragedy. It's like driving past a car crash caused by drunk newlyweds, it's sad because you can tell that the reason it went wrong was because the people involved were giving it their all in hopes of a brighter future. The devotion from director Duncan Jones that lets all the sets and the armor and the weapons and the magic and the creatures feel cinematically real and aesthetically interesting is the same devotion that smothers the rest of the production and renders it an unwatchable slog. He's clearly a big fan of the Warcraft games, big enough that he thinks that the audience needs to know all of the lore and backstory and proper nouns before they can get to any actual plot. He's made an entire movie out of the stuff that the Lord of the Rings movies wisely confined to the first two minutes so they could get to an actual story - even Tolkien kept most of the more trivial worldbuilding details in the appendix.

The result is a masturbatory deluge of the same pop-fantasy milange that film and television and literature and, yes, games drew from Dungeons and Dragons until the "Hey, this could all almost exist" naturalism of Lord of the Rings took over, played so relentlessly serious that it sucks any and all joy out of the gloriously goofy art design. Sure, that's all World of Warcraft ever was on a story level, but without the ability to interact with it there isn't enough of a story or characters there to engage the audience. Great stories tend to have defined characters at their core, a Gilgamesh or a Hercules or a Sun Wu Kong or a Jesus of Nazareth or a King Arthur or a Hamlet or a Sherlock Holmes or a Huck Finn or a Jay Gatsby or a Holden Caulfield or a Clark Kent or a Frodo Baggins or a Luke Skywalker or a Forrest Gump... you get the idea. They all have defined personalities and motivations and arcs, and that's what let them get ingrained in the popular consciousness. A blank homunculus waiting for the character creation engine to decide their entire being is the exact opposite of that. No school will ever assign even the best Choose Your Own Adventure book to be read by its students. I was bored after two minutes, getting antsy after ten, and by the hour and a half mark I wanted nothing more than to be able to push the Y-button in order to make someone do something interesting.

That kind of dissonance is what's really sad about Warcraft, a movie that walks and talks and acts like it sprung fully formed from the collective dreams of a generation of fantasy fandom shouldn't be able to be this dull. There's surprsingly little warcraft in Warcraft, and even when it does happen it looks like a really expensive Scandinavian heavy metal music video, it's flatly directed and the editing is stale and it rarely gets to happen because the filmmakers were more concerned that we might not get that the magic green vapor that comes from stealing souls from prisoners of war and turns anyone that uses it into a horrific wraith is bad.

The experience of watching Warcraft is like listening to that one friend of yours drone on about the Dungeons and Dragons campaign they hosted last week, you can tell that they're really enthusiastic about it, and you feel compelled to keep listening to be polite, but you have no idea what they're talking about and you wish you could just walk away and join the more interesting conversation about that new song on the radio going on across the room. After decades of video game movies sucking because studios chose stuff that was the interactive version of a movie, or because they stripped away all the offbeat, uniquely video-gamey stuff that made it worth translating to film to begin with, or because they just didn't care, now we have one that sucks because the people involved tried way, way too hard to translate everything to the screen, regardless of whether it made an interesting film. It's a cutscene, and the reason you're able to skip cutscenes in games is so that if you just beat the big boss and you're in the zone and you can't wait to keep going, you can get past the boring short film quickly and get back to the action. Warcraft is that, and I suggest you skip it as such.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 2/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "X-Men: Apocalypse": It's Time To Let Go

Directed by Bryan Singer
Written by Bryan Singer, Simon Kinberg,
Michael Dougherty, and Dan Harris

(PG-`13 - 20th Century Fox - 2 hrs, 24 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Once upon a time, there were no superhero movies. That's not entirely true; once in a while you got movies based on larger-than-comics pop icons like Superman or Batman, but for the most part it was rare that any character created after the 1940s would get consideration from Hollywood, and even when they did, it was still up in the air whether you'd get a pretty good The Crow, or an abject failure like Howard The Duck or Steel. So when the first X-Men movie came out, and it wasn't terrible, it felt like a revelation, and alongside Peter Jackson pulling off Lord of the Rings and Sam Rami pulling off Spider-Man it was part of the rise of the modern "geek culture" dominated blockbuster landscape.

Then the second one came out and it was quite a bit better, so it got to be called great, but with hindsight they just aren't that good. Parts of them hold up; it was awesome to get two really classy respected British actors to play Professor X and Magneto, Hugh Jackman was such a perfect fit for Wolverine that people still don't want to see him in any other kind of movie, focusing on the gay youth metaphor was a timely update of the material - the first two X-Men films have a deserved place in pop history, is what I'm saying. But nearly everything else to come out of this series* has been either mediocre or flat-out terrible. The Last Stand managed to be interchangeable even by the standards of a Brett Rattner film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine was so terrible that they pretend it didn't happen, Days of Future Past  is a slog that takes a hatchet job to the already fragile semblance of continuity. I get that nostalgia is a powerful thing, I know I've felt an irrational desire to rewind the world and freeze it around 2005 more than once, but I'm not forcing my bubble onto everyone else. I understand why we hold onto this series, but it's time to let go.

But thanks to Deadpool, which not incidentally builds much of its comedy around mocking the anachronistic nature of this franchise, we're going to keep getting more of these and Fox is going to keep jogging in place until Disney offers them a shared custody deal like Sony got with Spider-Man. So it's fitting that Apocalypse is trying to emulate the superficial trappings of a Marvel movie (loads and loads of characters and banter, fanservice-y cameos, jokey references to the comics and other movies, a technicolor palleted CGI apocalyptic finale), but without any of the character work or genuine heart that makes it work. The best example of that is when, in the middle of the inciting incident for Act Two, when all the world's nuclear weapons are being launched, and it looks like the world is ending, they cut to Stan Lee looking up at the rockets. If there's one thing that it should be easy to not screw up, it's putting the funny celebrity cameo in the middle of the end of the world.

Not that the story they came up is that great to begin with. An ancient Mutant named Apocalypse that used to rule Ancient Egypt gets brought back from the dead in 1983 by the time-travel shenanigans in Days of Future Past and decides that he doesn't like what humans have done with the world in his absence. So he decides that he needs to take over the world and the X-Men unite to stop him. That's it. Nobody has an arc, nobody learns anything, the only meaningful change to the status quo of the series is that it provides an explanation of why Professor X went bald early. None of the cast appears to care about anything happening onscreen, Jennifer Lawrence is somehow more disinterested than she was in Days of Future Past, when she started to regret having signed onto this series before she had The Hunger Games clout to bargain with, and she's sadly resigned to being here now that that ship has sailed. Oscar Issac as Apocalypse - good Lord Oscar Issac as Apocalypse; this man is one of the best actors of his generation, and they've put him in six layers of heavy latex makeup and having him stomp around like he got lost on the way to the set of the Power Rangers reboot.

I might have excused that if it could at least be an enjoyable action film, but it's really not. Bryan Singer was never great at large-scale action to begin with, and it's really kind of amazing just how bad all the "big" moments in Apocalypse look. Limp lifeless effects and flat cinematography make the entire production look like a bunch of Abercrombie models in decade-old cosplay screwing around in front of a green-screen. The makeup is atrocious, and the costume design is worse, dressing everyone up like an emo rock album cover might have flown in 2000, but it doesn't fly sixteen years later. You'd think that being a period piece might force it to be somewhat visually interesting, or maybe they'd make narrative use of it being the Eighties, maybe tying the story into the Cold War like First Class did, but they don't do anything with the time period at all besides a needle-drop for retread of the Quicksilver super speed gag from Days of Future Past. One that makes him look so overpowered that I can't help but wonder why they need anyone else to defeat Apocalypse.

X-Men: Apocalypse isn't quite an apocalyptic failure, but that's only because you need to try to come up with a disaster, and it's clear that nobody involved in the production gave a shit about what they were doing beyond "We need to make one of these every few years or Marvel gets the rights back." When I told one of my teachers just how bad this movie was, he told me that it doesn't matter because it's a superhero movie and nobody expects high art from them. Setting aside that the Richard Donner Superman, The Dark Knight, and Spider-Man 2 would beg to differ, I don't buy that argument. Coming from source material of dubious merit is not an excuse to suck, I've seen terrible movies made out of the life of Christ, and I've seen excellent films made out of cheap airport novels and cheap Sixties sci-fi TV and print cartoons about a man that puts on a bat costume every night because he misses his mother. If The Lego Movie can become a postmodern masterpiece, then X-Men has no excuse for not trying.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 1/5

*First Class is the only one of these that's genuinely awesome, and it's the one that Bryan Singer had nothing to do with. That's not a coincidence.