Cat. I’m a kitty cat…

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I was following Stray on and off during its development for a few years, eagerly awaiting the release of the Unreal Engine powered cat walking simulator that involved exploring smoky, neon drenched cyberpunk city scapes. I caught wind of it when I saw a very early tweet promising more details to come in future that featured at least one delightful gif. That initial impression, forged by the gif of a cat wandering aimlessly, just being in an evocative environment, is what stuck with me the most, even as the game developed and crystalised into something more the closer it got to release. Effectively, the Stray that lived in my mind’s eye was the Stray of the prototype gifs that captured a game in a time before any promise of the ambition and scope of environment and narrative of the final release.

So it came as more of a surprise to me than It should have when the game opened on a colony of cats just living life and enjoying each other’s company under clear blue skies. It is during this opening that Stray tips its hand about one of its preoccupations: simulating with uncommon care and fidelity, the act of being a tiny kitty. The game will not progress until you walk up to each member of your colony and hit Triangle, the universal Interact as a Cat button (it is important to note that there is a separate button for non-cat interactions. This makes sense in context). This triggers a series of interactions, each of which is different but all something a cat would do with a friendly cat. They are paid back in kind by your colony members. Play fighting, nuzzling, flopping on your side and being bopped in return. You all then gather together to sleep.

It was a delightful opening gambit that sold its commitment to making the player as much of a facsimile of a cat as possible within its limited gameplay frame. These little touches continue throughout the game and hint at developers who are very familiar with and love how cats behave. Shortly after your cat wakes up again and progresses to the rest of the introductory sequence, you are presented with the best button prompt in gaming since Titanfall 2’s “Press LB to time travel.” The game tells you to “press Circle to meow.” The first gameplay achievement I unlocked was “A Little Chatty”, awarded to me for meowing 100 times. I unlocked it within my first 5 minutes of play. You are able to scratch at carpets, walls and sofas. There are dedicated sleeping spots. You can stop and lap water out of bowls or puddles. If the mood takes you, you are able to rub up against some characters’ legs. Pool balls can be swatted around. You can interrupt a game of mahjong by jumping onto the table and scattering the tiles onto the floor. The players of that mahjong game react to this with dismay. These interactions, triggered by hitting the dedicated Interact like a Cat button, for the most part, confer no immediate gameplay benefit to the player. It is the canniest trick the game plays, simultaneously priming the player to “think like a cat” and to allow for plausible deniability when the game anthropomorphises the cat (by this I mean the game relies on the cat to follow logic and patterns of behaviour that are decidedly human and not feline.)

The game spends its limited time with other cats on the surface trying to get you to bond with them as expeditiously as possible. It offers you multiple opportunities to interact with them by playing with/nuzzling them directly, meowing in call and response with them, scratching on trees together, or gathering around puddles to lap up some water. It is a section of the game that is utterly brimming with charm and makes it all the more painful when you’re separated from them in a tremendous fall into the Walled City. I really did spend the rest of the game primed with a sense of pervasive misery after witnessing the precious baby limp for a few steps after landing to a chorus of distressed meows from his family before collapsing and passing out. He comes to all alone, surrounded by silence.

I might have buried the lede here, but if you are sensitive about animals in pain, this game does contain two painful falls that result in temporary limps, enemies that latch onto the cat and overwhelm him until he collapses to be eaten, sentry drones that shoot electric bullets at the cat and will down him in one shot, and (spoilers) an unavoidable cutscene where the cat is shot by said drones off screen (end spoilers). If you don’t like unhappy animals, Stray has moments of that too.

Unfamiliar Surrounds

You find yourself trapped in the depths of a city that has been sealed off from the outside world. Above you, the stars are actually lights in a far off ceiling. Your first few minutes exploring this city take you through abandoned locales, slowly teaching you through context clues. You are introduced to the game’s first threat, the zurk, gradually. At first, they appear in small numbers and scurry away from you, until you come across a partially eaten robot (called a Companion in game) covered in them. They scatter as you approach the dying Companion, but their menace is made clear. It is not long before you are confronted with a swarm of them and are given the button prompt to run. this should be enough of a clue that they are bad news and you should not stick around.

The game takes a similar approach to teaching you how to interface with its puzzles and its world. In the time you spent above ground with your family, it forced you to engage with the other cats like a cat would, gating progress behind this. It then presented organic opportunities to act like a cat, rewarding your indulgences and compliance with cuteness. Early in your exploration of the inside of Walled City 99, you are presented with a line of paint cans, and approaching them gives you a button prompt with no written context. Interacting with them causes you to knock them off the edge of the platform they are on, you know, like a cat would. This same interaction s used in a number of puzzles throughout the game, including the very next puzzle.

Your path through the world has you running from rooftop to rooftop, balancing on pipes and planks, and crawling into small holes and windows. Your perspective, so low to the ground compared to a human or a Companion as the case may be, invites you to interrogate the way you inhabit and navigate space. You can get to places a humanoid character otherwise wouldn’t be able to because you are a cat. If you didn’t grok this intuitively through the course of play, the game makes it explicit by having characters tell you as much, not once but twice. I wasn’t sure how much of the cat behaviour priming was critical to progressing through he game until I came across a person with no cat experience who said they were struggling with the game until they tried to think of what a cat would do and where a cat would go. So there you go, a singular data point.

A robot by any other name

If you are sensitive to spoilers, please stop reading now.
Your journey through the game takes you through linear platforming and puzzle sections which lead into a non-linear hub section where you are free to explore and complete objectives somewhat out of order. While the linear sections can sometimes feel like you are being rushed through them to avoid threats, the hub sections allow you to slow down and soak in the atmosphere. The hubs are Companion settlements that you come across at different levels of Walled City 99 as you slowly climb your way out. It is here where you spend your time in Stray observing and interacting with the characters that inhabit Walled City 99. The first one you meet is a consciousness trapped in the city’s network, whom you help download into a drone named B12. B12 acts as your means of communicating with the Companions you come across, and parallels their behaviours and cultures with that of the city’s long extinct human residents. You learn through your travels that the Companions of the lower levels of the city began replicating human customs uncritically through acts of random mimicry. They began eating and drinking before setting up restaurants that serve RAMen (It’s made of RAM modules. That’s the joke). B12 observes a mural before musing that the Companion’s art has slowly transitioned from mimicry to genuine expressions in their own right. It becomes evident as you travel through the game that the Companions have, as a society, moved from mimicry to developing their own culture and customs.

There are little flashes of humanity in the Companions’ behaviours. You run across Companions that take care of plants, meditate, play a guitar-like instrument, run businesses, make mix tapes and dance defiantly, play table top role playing games, forget their character sheets for their TTRPGs, attempt to have haircuts, knit ponchos and live in family units who love and miss each other. You can run into Companions that you can affectionately rub up against, and more often than not, they will respond joyfully. Some of them invite you in to take shelter. They have developed a system of spirituality and beliefs based on the materials humanity left behind, believing, for example, that the outside is a myth and that there is no world to be experienced outside of the confines of the walled city. In the lowest levels of the city, they even believe that they are unable to break through to the upper levels, that they are destined to stick in the slums, picking through scraps and garbage filtered down from those on high.

It is easier to imagine the end of the world…

As you progress you come to realise that the legacy that humanity left behind has created a shaky foundation for the Companions to build their society on. You also begin to realise that Stray isn’t a cat game, as much as it is a game that uses the alien perspective of a cat in a post-humanity Earth to chew upon and interrogate capitalism as a system of oppression in one handy, vertically stratified microcosm. Stray posits that capitalism is a destructive system that causes stratification in society. The humans of Stray created the Walled Cities as a means to protect themselves from an unspecified plague. Walled City 99 is fashioned the safest city on Earth. It is treated as exclusive. But only those on the upper layers got to live with any degree of luxury. They died out because the rich recreated the material conditions of the old world within the walled cities, saving all the resources for them and apportioning limited resources to lower levels. The farther down you go, the fewer resources apportioned. The rich never felt the need to heed science and take precautions against the plague, and so were doomed to a slow death. In the meantime, they engineered a bacteria to eat through all the garbage they were creating. In their absence, the bacteria eventually developed into the zurk and began to eat whatever they could, organic and inorganic alike. In their wake, humans and their capitalist society continue to poison the world.

The Companions, in replicating human customs have also replicated capitalism. They continue their isolation of robots in lower layers. They continue to apportion fewer resources to them, forcing them to live off cast offs and limited allocations of energy. A company, Neco Corp, survived the fall of humanity and continues to function. The hub city surrounding Neco Corp is a police state in which Companions are disappeared for agitation or suspected agitation. Sentry bots were created by humanity to act as surveillance. In what is becoming a pattern, their years of operation in a world set up by humanity but not overseen by it has hardened them into unflinching enforcers of order, operating beyond their original mandate. But this is a familiar notion. We currently live in a world where the powers at be continue to test how far they can overreach in the name of security. As you enter this hub, you see a random Companion being arrested on mere suspicion of association with a wanted individual. The wanted individual in question is the Companion you are looking for, one who is trying to break free from the Walled City to take a glimpse of the outside world. This quest is fashioned as a journey of curiosity, of a burning sense of wanting to see the sky and breathe the fresh air. Of following a dream and nothing more. Around her and her handful of companions, life continues as it always has. Before the three of you are able to make your escape, you are double crossed by an associate who was paid to turn you in to the authorities. Even in a world devoid of humans, filled by entities who fashioned themselves identities from seeming nothingness, there are still individuals who preference gaining money over the lives of others. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It is a series of sour notes in a game that tries its hardest to find the moments of joy and life in squalor.

The game ends on a bittersweet and ambiguously hopeful note. The cat is able to escape and has opened the dome over Walled City 99 in the process, filling the world with natural sunlight for the first time in centuries. And yet the structures of cruelty erected by the game’s narrative have given me no hope for a better future for the Companions. Perhaps my read is too pessimistic. Perhaps I am missing something. I have seen the cruelty of our world, and any society built on the foundations we have laid down is doomed to the same path of misery.

To me, Stray is a melancholy game punctuated by stabs of sharp sadness.

Stray observations:

  • I like very much that the depth of field around the cat in an early cutscene fails due to fur in the same way that early portrait mode on an iPhone would. Very true to life.
  • I love that when you first get your backpack, the cat flops over, and then spends a bit of time walking super low to the ground. This will be familiar to anyone who has put a harness on a cat. Truly, the devs knew what they were doing.
  • The cat does the licking his lips thing when he is upset/scared/angry. So much detail has been paid to replicating real cat behaviours.
  • You scratch on objects by alternating presses of R2 and L2. this is an element of Kinaesthetic gameplay I first remember experiencing in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 while scaling a cliff using ice picks, and then later experienced in a more benign context in Grow Home (albeit also while climbing). I just find it kind of interesting that this mechanic transcends external trappings of genre and setting to convey the same presence boosting intent.
  • Another thing that reminded me of Titanfall 2, there is a portion of the game where you are given a means to fight back against the zurk. As soon as you have completed this segment, that ability is taken from you, the device destroyed due to overuse, much like the time travel device from the Effect and Cause level. The developers try to shake things up like this from time to time and don’t let any one wrinkle overstay its welcome.

A little side note on Stray’s imagery:

With a twitter @ of @HKdevlog, it is understandable to be sceptical of the French developers, Blue Twelve Studio, for muddying the water about their origin. It is in the history of the cyberpunk genre to make use of Asian iconography due to the economic anxieties of the 80s, when the west did fear Japan as a rising technological powerhouse. Whether or not that is a dealbreaker for you, I will not judge. I would merely like to take the time to invite people to have a look at what is being discussed regarding the developers obfuscating their identities, the game’s refusal to tackle the history of Kowloon Walled City, and even the problematic framing being used by people to discuss the game’s failure to engage with the imagery it is using:

This whole thread is worth a read to be honest:

Another thread for your consideration follows:

Alita: Trans Angel

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Alita: Battle Angel took me by surprise. At a time when big cyberpunk projects focus on surfaces, like Altered Carbon, or wallow in cynicism, ugliness and hateful messaging, like Cyberpunk 2077, along comes a frothy, sincere movie with unexpectedly queer subtext. There was a scene in Alita that made me happy and hopeful in a way that I was not expecting from a James Cameron scribed, Robert Rodriguez directed multimillion dollar violent action movie. It got me thinking about the way technology and identity intersect, and left me simultaneously smiling and envious of the fictitious future tech on display. My friends weren’t as convinced, and neither was a portion of cis feminist twitter who believed the movie was sexist. It was however, in the handful of tweets from trans women that I came across that I found my feelings vindicated.

Spoilers abound below!!

A scientist specialising in cyborgs comes across an errant head in a scrap heap, takes it home, attaches it to a spare body he has lying around, and revives it. Thus begins the story of Dyson Ido, the scientist, and his charge Alita, the resurrected cyborg. The thing is though, that Ido takes a sense of paternal ownership over Alita and dictates what she should and should not do. For her own good, he instructs, she shan’t go out late, get into fights, and especially, shouldn’t question her circumstances. Alita is appreciative, of course, but feels like there is something wrong. She does not recall who she is, nor where she came from. Just about the only thing that starts to become clear to her is that she is in the wrong body. These misgivings don’t really boil over until she finds the right body for her. Alita is drawn to it, seeking it out in an ancient spaceship. She manages to navigate the ship and its security systems as if in a trance until the body is in her possession. Alita insists repeatedly that it is the right body for her and that she feels a deep connection with it; that the body that Ido provided her is stifling her ability to be her true self. Ido does not budge, refusing to let her use it until there is no other option.

Alita: Battle Angel is a strange adaptation that crams multiple volumes of a manga into one movie. The end result is something that feels episodic and lumpy, but always propulsive. A side effect of the adaptation process was the alteration made to the relationships between Alita, Ido and the correct body. In the manga, it is something Ido had lying around that he could pull out when Alita needed it after a botched bounty hunt. The movie’s alteration to this plot point, however, is what opens it up to a trans reading. In the movie this is Alita’s perfect body that she comes across herself, not one that is presented to her by an external actor. Ido on the other hand plays two roles:

  1. The role of the father
  2. The role of the medical practitioner

In the role of the father, Ido is overprotective and prescriptive. Ido has a specific idea of what his child is and should be with no deviation allowed. His paternal relationship is complicated by the nature of the initial body he provided Alita with. This is the body of his deceased biological daughter, who in life was sickly and in need of constant vigilance on the part of Ido. It is through Alita that Ido is obtaining something of value for him, being able to see a part of his daughter live on. It is what makes him overprotective of Alita, and reluctant to let her change to suit her own needs. Basically, he still has some unpacking to do.

In the role of the medical practitioner, Ido is a specialist who performs repairs for the cyborgs of the community. He is well regarded and even has a good standing in the ranks of the hunter killers, a group of bounty hunters he performs free repairs for. It is he who stands between Alita and the body she desperately needs to feel complete. It is he who refuses out of a misguided sense that he is protecting her from herself, in much the same way that medical practitioners often refuse HRT to people wishing to transition.

It is not until later in the movie when Alita’s first body is catastrophically damaged that Ido’s hand is forced, and in order to ensure she remains alive, he completes the procedure to attach her to her new body. And not only does this body suit her temperament better, but it literally changes its form to reflect her self image. As someone who is uncomfortable with their body and the way they present, this scene had me damn near in tears. There I was in the theatre, completely blindsided by this additional little detail. Sure the queer subtext of a person struggling to transition to their right body is there bubbling away under the surface, and at points threatening to become text. That the movie would go that one step further in acknowledging that Ido had imposed his idea of what she should be and how she should outwardly present was just icing on the cake. And what’s more, when Alita comes to after the procedure, Ido, the character, admits he was wrong and that he should have let her be who she was meant to be all along rather than imposing his will and restricting her bodily autonomy.

You can look at the above outline of plot beats and say that it’s a rather standard YA template, and you would be right. You could also look at the fact that this is a movie directed by a man and written by a man, and that any imagery related to Alita’s body is presented through a male gaze; that the fixation on bodies, especially ones that reform to appear shapelier is uncomfortable and approaching fetishisation, and you would have a leg to stand on. There are things that Alita: Battle Angel could have done better. But here’s the rub, there are always going to be multiple lenses that one can feed a piece of media through, and there are always going to be ways that a piece of media will interface differently with people from disparate backgrounds.

Alita: Battle Angel’s specific cocktail of young adult plotting with the conceit of a cyberpunk future where body modification is so routine that Cyborgs are commonplace just so happened to throw the doors open to this little queer to see something of value in its lumpy, earnest form. While someone may be more primed to see the questionable, possibly sexist framing of Alita, I was primed to see a struggle to wrest control of a person’s sense of self from a society that insists they know better, and this is a reading that cannot be taken away from me.

Venom

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Recommendation: Yes

Okay, something that needs to be addressed up front is just how weird Venom is while trying its hardest to be the safest, most anodyne thing it can be. Not only is it the gayest straight movie I have seen since Alien: Covenant, but it is also the second somewhat mainstream movie that appeals to the monsterfucker demographic to come out in Australia in the year of our lord 2018. All this while being a throwback to the late 90’s-early 2000’s school of super hero film making, you know, before they were good. If we are to continue the comparison between Alien: Covenant and Venom, and I am writing this, so you can be damn sure we are going to continue the comparison, Venom feels like a much more interesting queer story haphazardly stapled onto a barely functional anachronism.

 

Venom starts off and remains for the majority of its running time a surprisingly ugly looking, boring thing that heavily deals in the aesthetic possibility space of pre MCU comic book cinema. It even has a licenced hip hop soundtrack! When was the last time you saw a comic book super hero movie that doesn’t star a black main character that has a hip hop soundtrack? The plot is a standard origin story and involves corrupt corporations and the whole thing takes too long and doesn’t do anything. Our hero Eddy Brock is a contemptible man. He makes so many questionable decisions, does not learn from his mistakes, blames others for them, and slurs his way through all his dialogue. The movie can’t wrap its head around how it wants to treat him, at one point actively pointing out he is a loser, but having many more instances of people lauding him for his integrity and investigative skills. Supporting characters exist solely to move the plot along from set piece to set piece, with only Riz Ahmed’s Carlton Drake having even a hint of an inner life. Carlton, like Eddy is a confused character. The film portrays him as an outright villain from the get go with few scruples to stop him from getting what he wants, but Ahmed plays him like a cross between a messianic figure and a techbro, insistent that the betterment of mankind lies in the wake of violent discovery and invention. Try as he might, there isn’t enough meat in the screenplay for that kind of a reading, because honestly, Venom doesn’t care to provide that material for its cast and its audience. For the most part every element of Venom, the super hero movie, is content to be serviceable when it is not outright phoning it in.

 

But Venom shows hints of something weird going on under the surface. An early sequence of a symbiote body hopping from Malaysia to LA reliably exhibits a mix of body horror and humour that would be missing in its 90s counterparts (the way this sequence pays off is pretty great, but I’m not sure in a good way?). Then there is Tom Hardy’s performance as Eddy Brock, which certainly is a thing. His attempt at a hard hitting American journalist plays more like a perpetually drunk fool who lied himself into the role and is desperately trying to convince people he has the goods while the world burns around him. It is hard to untangle what has been written that way and what was Tom Hardy imposing his will on an unsuspecting movie. From my understanding, a scene involving a lobster tank needed to be reworked when Hardy came on set, saw it, and announced his intentions. I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t the only thing Hardy insisted on, because he is strangely committed to whatever it is he is doing with the character.

 

And when the Venom Symbiote bonds with Eddy Brock, a good 30 minutes or so into its slender 112 minute running time, something magical happens. Venom’s form begins to resemble the weird friction between two characters, both played by Hardy, coming to terms with the fact that they both reside in the same physical space and need each other in order to reach their full potential. For you see, this is when a queer romantic comedy forcibly binds itself to a humdrum comic book movie, threatens to overpower it, and eventually settles for periodic shows of extreme existence, much like the Venom Symbiote throughout the remainder of the movie’s hurried and cluttered plot. It’s this friction that makes Venom any fun to watch and transforms an irredeemably dull movie into a fascinating mess of conflicting motivations. Would that the rom-com did win out in the end, that would have been something truly special. Heck, there is a Chinese print ad campaign specifically touting Venom as good boyfriend material. The Shape of Water even showed the world that it is okay to be incredibly horny on main about your monsterfucking fetish. Avi Arad, I’m not sure how but this is your fault and you let us down again.

 

Okay but seriously, the romantic subtext between the two has become text in a particular run of comics, that if I were being 100% fair, no studio in their right mind would think of adapting. The idea of a complex relationship between Eddy and the Venom Symbiote leading up to the birth of their child would make good blockbuster fodder is preposterous. But that doesn’t change the fact that the growing relationship between the two in the film’s B plot is as charming as it is gonzo, and boy does it get gonzo in the third act. But as it is relegated to a B plot, and the film is committed to being simultaneously as zippy and overstuffed as possible, that third act comes along much too soon for any natural feeling emotional climax to be reached. I’m not saying that Venom should have been longer. I am saying they should have cut down on as much of everything that wasn’t Venom slowly having its Tsundere heart melted by Eddy’s compassion and moral fortitude as possible. Because as it stands now, with how Eddy Brock is being portrayed as a mostly selfish asshole with a saviour complex, it is incredibly hard to buy that he of all people, and not his ex-fiancée’s angelic new Doctor boyfriend is the one who would make Venom want to turn good guy.

 

If there is to be a sequel, as a stinger very hopefully hints at there being, please please please lean harder into the Eddy-Venom relationship. Please, it’s all this movie had going for it.

Black Panther

hivekitty2 Comments

Recommendation: YES

Spoilers spoilers here be spoilers

Full disclosure: 1) I am not white, 2) I am an immigrant, 3) there are people (myself included) who think I am a damn fool, 4) in general, the MCU has by and large left me bored to tears.

With all that out of the way, Black Panther is the god damned best thing to come out of the milquetoast factory that is Disney/Marvel’s MCU. To be fair, that isn’t a high bar to clear, but things in the MCU had taken a turn for the interesting recently with the similarly refreshing and politically switched on Thor: Ragnarok. I suppose we should feel blessed that within a short few months, the MCU has given us a delightful romp through a nation disintegrating while confronting its horrific colonial past… starring SPACE VIKINGS, and an incendiary critique of the way powerful nations, both white and non-white are complicit in the systemic dehumanisation of entire races of people. There’s more going on under the surface of Black Panther to be sure, and for the most part it muscles past the Marvel house style to remain engaged in its musings for almost the whole runtime.

But yeah, I am happy, giddily so, that the MCU has produced a movie that is a prime example of the value of mainstream “safe” cinema. In the right circumstances, pop entertainment can be a validating and/or confronting conversation with popular culture at large. It can discuss topics that are important to the culture and the people living under it in an intelligent way. And in the best of circumstances it can still be excellent entertainment. And gosh, Black Panther is a damn good entertainment with actual thoughts in its head about race and history and a culture of theft and degradation, whatever its flaws may be (they are choppy, sometimes illegible action and rather poor CGI).

It is important to note that Black Panther is not the first movie to feature a black superhero (Blade 1-3, Catwoman, Steel, FAN4STIC, Iron Man 2 and 3, Captain America 2 and 3, etc). At least one person has also told me that Black Panther is not a film about real life exceptional Black people. To be fair, this conversation arose as a means to question why Black Audiences cared about Black Panther and not biopics of significant Black figures… which is… wrong?? It also arose out of a desire to dismiss the importance of Black Panther. After all it is just another dumb super hero movie, right? But that presupposes that the only legitimate works of art and media are ones that distance themselves from “lower” forms. It’s already a fairly common argument that genre films and animation aren’t worthy of considering as important cultural artefacts (unless they are from specific sources). This ignores the potential of genre films to be ABOUT SOMETHING (e.g. Gojira, the Romero zombie movies, Get Out, Under the Shadow, Snowpiercer etc.). It also unnecessarily limits the avenues for minorities and the issues they face to be depicted in the wider cultural context. It would be a sad state of affairs if, for example, Wonder Woman did not exist because the only legitimate place to tell stories of exceptional women and the power of compassion was a biopic. There is something legitimising about having a group of peoples be represented in the mainstream rather than specific niche genres. Their stories are important enough to be shared and consumed widely. It allows for cultural exchange on a level beyond what a high art or prestige movie would. And there are all sorts of classist implications in insisting the truly important cultural artefacts are those produced for consumption by an elite white tertiary educated audience. Fight me.

Black Panther picks up soon after the events of Captain America: Civil War. T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) returns home to the secretly wealthy and technologically advanced African nation of Wakanda after the death of his father, the late king T’Chaka. All things considered, the succession seems to be going well for both T’Challa and Wakanda, until it comes to pass that Wakanda’s public enemy number 1, Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) has resurfaced. Seeing an opportunity to bring a murderous plunderer to justice, it is decided that T’Challa, his ex Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), and the leader of the Dora Milaje, Wakanda’s all female special forces, Okoye (Danai Gurira) set off. In the process, they unearth skeletons from the late king’s closet and things start to get complicated. As it turns out, Wakanda deployed spies to multiple nations to develop a vast intelligence network. One of said spies was none other than T’Chaka’s brother, N’Jobu, who was deployed to the United States, only to be radicalised after witnessing the plight of the Black peoples of America. He is then killed by T’Chaka when he is confronted for assisting Klaue to infiltrate Wakanda and make off with valuable vibranium. It is the consequences of this killing and T’Chaka’s subsequent choice that fuels most of the conflict in Black Panther.

With Black Panther, Ryan Coogler has taken the musty old origin story formula and bent it to his will. The narrative familiarity afforded by the origin story template allows Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole to focus more screen time on developing the world, characters and politics of Black Panther. The movie is an absolute triumph of aesthetic. It presents the audience with an excellent and predominantly Black cast inhabiting a world that extrapolates how an East African nation with abundant natural resources would fashion itself with nil contact from violent European colonial powers. Wakanda is a gorgeous fusion of African elements and design queues with near future technologies. The movie presents a rich palette of cultures, all richly research and lovingly displayed. This rich cultural influence permeates the score, which is genuinely the best and most thoughtful and thematically resonant film score in all the MCU, melding percussive and vocal elements with a more traditional western film score to represent Wakanda, while sneaking hip hop beats in edgeways for any musical cue to do with the half American half Wakandan Erik “Killmonger” Stevens/N’Jadaka (Michael B Jordan).

Black Panther starts off interrogating what it takes to be an effective leader of a country that has as much to gain as it does to lose if it opens its boarders and engages with foreign powers. It then goes a step further to ask how such an advanced African nation could sit idly by while it is privy to the horrors of violent colonialism. It is heavy stuff, and it only gets heavier as the film goes on, baking this thought experiment into the very fabric of the film’s drama.

As much as I was enjoying the movie, it wasn’t until a specific point that I truly fell madly, head over heals in love with it. Early in the film, T’Challa ritualistically drinks of the heart shaped herb, a plant infused with vibranium that grants him the powers of the Black Panther. He is transported to a spiritual realm, rich in colour and wonder and populated by the spirits of his ancestors, where he communes with his father about his duty to his country and upholding its ideals. Later in the film, Killmonger partakes in the same ritual, only to be transported to the mundanity of his Oakland, California apartment, peaks of the rich purple sky of the ancestral plane only evident out the windows. It is here that he is greeted solely by his mournful father. There is so much going on in this scene that it would take a while to unpack it all. Killmonger’s appearance shifts to that of a stern faced child, putting on a brave face, symbolic of the still festering trauma and anger driving him, only finally catching up to him when he reverts back to his adult self and openly weeps. This scene is a perfect visual representation of what it is like to be a child of an immigrant, having a vague connection to and yearning for your motherland and culture that is intermingled with the present of your new home in a foreign land. This scene is what gives a beating heart to Killmonger’s previously intellectually driven call to revolutionary violence.

Each character in Black Panther has something to say or contribute to the film’s themes of racism, identity, cultural theft, and revolution. And each character says or contributes these things in big and small ways. The opening narration about the history of Wakanda, for example, is told by N’Jobu to a young Erik, deepening his sense of disconnect from his culture being a second generation immigrant. Ulysses Klaue’s character, delightfully hammy as he is, is constructed around the various forms of theft he, a white South African, perpetrates on successful Black cultures, stealing vibranium and hip hop in equal measure. Shuri (A delightful Letitia Wright) embodies a forward thinking attitude of constant striving for improvement, something that rubs off on T’Challa as he confronts the secret history of his nation. Likewise, Nakia insists on actively aiding foreign populations wherever possible, not wanting to be holed up in a secretive and isolationist nation when there is suffering abroad. Killmonger, himself is an embodiment of righteous fury, challenging the Eurocentric view of western/White cultural, intellectual, and technological superiority. An early scene in a museum has him quizzing a curator as to the origin of various African artefacts before challenging her knowledge and the museum’s right to ownership of ostensibly stolen cultural goods, for display to a predominantly white audience. Coming from a disadvantaged background his emotions are raw and his motive is violent revolution. In opposition is T’Challa, a Black man from a privileged socioeconomic and cultural upbringing, free from the burdens of living under the thumb of a racist country with racist policies. He is a man who can afford the distance to offer a peaceful alternative. Killmonger cannot, and importantly, the film cannot bring itself to wholly condemn him for his drive toward violence, implicating the US military and CIA’s training for the grubbier, more all destroying edge to his actions. After all, it is the conflict that Killmonger brings to Wakanda that spurs T’Challa into positive action, confronting his ancestors and ultimately mobilising Wakanda’s wealth and technology to empower disenfranchised minorities world wide.

It would be disingenuous to disown the anger simmering under the surface. Killmonger may be a hyperbolic embodiment of this, a killing machine honed by military and CIA training to slaughter enemy combatants and destabilise foreign governments for the insertion of a US friendly regime. One need only look at #killmongerwasright to see how this movie struck a cord with audiences. I feel a lot of this has to do with how true the film is to the personal experiences of a young director Ryan Coogler and his friends in Oakland.

I too was angry once, but I grew to be merely tired and sad. Black Panther was a flash of inspiration that worked past my defences and made me feel alive again.

It may be a “stupid superhero movie” but it is the most important superhero movie to be released in recent times.

Dunkirk: An Assault on the senses

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Recommendation of YES

Summary: The film tells a triptych of stories on land, sea and air about the successful military retreat of Dunkirk.

 

A friend of mine was confused as to the relative brevity of Dunkirk (a zippy 106 minutes) having expected it to be 2h 30 min as all modern blockbusters are somehow required to be. I jokingly asked if, since Christopher Nolan billed Dunkirk as a thriller and not a war movie, he would be able to survive three hours of tightly wound tension. As it happens, he barely survived the 1 hour 46 minutes.

So the above is quite an opening, and may raise expectations for Dunkirk to be some sort of demolishing assault on the audience, one that would be irresponsible to extend in length lest it kill someone. These are expectations that no multi million dollar wide release film can live up to, but Dunkirk is, if not the most tense thing, a harrowing, tense thing nonetheless.

Right from the first, Dunkirk punctures the quiet of some obligatory historical film exposition cards with the sound of gunfire from the spectre of an advancing German army (unseen save for their aircraft that periodically molest the evacuees) and through a near persistent audio visual assault on the audience, never quite relents. Be it through the loud cracking of gunfire, the whir and creaking of ships and their engines, the howling and roaring of the areal assault, the panicked and pained screams of dying soldiers (mostly also left off screen so you can imagine the horror), or Hans Zimmer’s propulsive score that comes complete with the sound of a ticking clock, Dunkirk uses its sound design to present a suffocating intensity that is evocative and impressionistic in the sense that Nolan only sometimes achieved with Interstellar. Though the success of Dunkirk over Interstellar may also be because they have somewhat opposite approaches to delivering the film experience to the audience.

Where Interstellar was an exposition and dialogue heavy film with unintelligible dialogue, the narrative, such as it is, of Dunkirk has been kept purposefully thin and divvied up into a triptych with three different time scales. Firstly we have “The Mole” (herein describing a solid structure that is often used as a pier, and not a spy), detailing one week in the life of 400,000 British soldiers as they attempt to evacuate while German forces push through French defenses. Secondly, we have “The Sea”, detailing the day long voyage Little Ships that the British Navy requisitioned to aid the evacuation. Thirdly we have “The Air” depicting 1 hour of three spitfire pilots engaging German fighters and bombers in intense dog fights to protect the rescue ships and soldiers on the beach.

Each of these segments focuses on just a handful of individual characters, though it would be fair and accurate to say they are almost entirely thinly characterized. They are there for one purpose, to let the audience vicariously experience the horrors of the evacuation. Without this narrowed perspective, and without the characters being somewhat tabula rasa, Dunkirk could not do what Dunkirk sets out to do. For the very point of the thing is to be a purely cinematic emotional experience of war rather than any specific narrative with any particular themes or arcs to explore.

I have in the past said that Christopher Nolan does not do emotion well; that his films were puzzles and exercises in cinematic mechanics. I do for the most part stand by that, but I must admit that Dunkirk bucks the trend. That is to say in as much as pervasive anxiety is an emotion, and Dunkirk trades in pervasive anxiety, it is perhaps the most authentically emotionally affecting Christopher Nolan film I have seen.

Even the mechanical experimentation one would expect from a Nolan Joint serves as a means of maintaining tension. As noted  above, the film is a triptych that operates at differing time scales. They are constantly cross cut between rather than shown chronologically, only to eventually have them converge by the film’s climax. This converging of the narrative threads serves to bring the film to its emotional climax as well. Due to the differing time scales, the constant cross cutting never allows you to orient yourself in time and space. When we are in a sinking ship next to the mole at night, we may then end up in a late afternoon dog fight over nondescript ocean before finally settling upon a pleasure yacht plucking up a shell shocked soldier off the skeleton of a sinking warship.

Dunkirk is a constant anxiety engine. Its mission statement is to depict a constant state of anarchy spawned from war, and it does so audio-visually with minimal dialogue through blank slate characters at a level that someone smarter than I may say is approaching “Pure Cinema”, being elemental sound and motion with little reliance on exposition. Or probably not. That too may be overselling things, but it does its anxiety making well while looking great and sounding even better.

Spider-Man: Homecoming. Skipping Class

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Recommendation of Yes

Synopsis: The surrogate son of a perennial billionaire industrialist fuck up goes to to to with a blue collar family man that his surrogate father’s overreaching amends making put out of business, serving only to break things, endanger lives and destroy a mostly innocent family.

Yep, Peter Parker is kind of a screw up. He constantly flubs the landing, destroys property, is responsible not once, not twice, but at least three times for endangering the lives of innocents through recklessness, and answers back to his surrogate dad about how he doesn’t understand and won’t treat him like an adult. You know, typical 15 year old boy stuff.

Okay, I was being glib, but if I am being honest, this one movie does a far better job of depicting what happens when an irresponsible person tries to do good outside of due process than all three Iron Man films and Age of Ultron combined. Peter does tend to screw up spectacularly. You know, when you stop to think about it, the MCU can go to kind of dark places without the need to wallow in dour self-seriousness like the worst of the DCEU… But I guess on the other hand, their reliance on safe formula and quip-heavy flippancy does kind of get in the way of all of that hinted at darkness. Either that or they feel like dull homework assignments for the bigger films.

So then colour me delighted when Homecoming’s biggest strengths are that it plays with formula so drastically, while managing to be relatively self contained and tiny feeling. Right down to the absence of glowing CGI doom in the climax.

If you did didn’t remember his introduction, Spider-Man: Homecoming kicks off Peter Parker’s story with a mobile phone recording of the airport fight from Captain America: Civil War. And if I were being unfair, I would say that Homecoming wins points for reminding  me of a better movie. But if I am being honest, I’d have to say that Homecoming does some key things much better than Civil War (i.e. probably having the first genuinely well considered villain in the MCU). And that’s about as much introduction as you’re going to get to Peter Parker. There is no origin story, the spider is long since dead and is dispensed with in a single short exchange, and we don’t have to sit through yet another Uncle Ben (though at one point Tony Stark comes dangerously close to paraphrasing him).

This movie’s narrative arc for Peter is that of a super hero sequel where an already accepted hero has his wits and abilities tested, shortcomings highlighted, and has to rise to the occasion. And in fact, the film’s origin story arc is given to its villain, Michael Keaton as some kind of birdman (The Vulture to be precise). He is introduced in an inciting incident as an average blue collar worker trying to look out for his family and employees, but who is put in a horrible financial situation due to Tony Stark colluding with the US government to take over all clean up duties post Avengers. As a result of him being given the narrative arc usually reserved to a first time super hero, he’s developed into one of the most layered and sympathetic villains in all MCU; a family man at odds with big business and trying to provide for his family and his employees. The Vulture is nothing more than the avatar of a man trying desperately to provide for those who depend on him by any means necessary. Enough screen time is spent with him outside of the suit that he is fleshed out as a human being. And one of these sequences is a claustrophobic and steadily simmering sequence in a car that allows Keaton to do some capital A acting.

And then you see his house with “so many windows”. I can’t particularly fault Spider-Man: Homecoming for introducing politically charged subtext and then fluffing it with what it actually shows off as the characters’ on screen truths, given that Civil War was probably a bigger offender (and the less we talk about the muddled politics of Batman v Superman, the better). But there was more character truth behind the anti big business/big government posturing of Keaton’s Vulture and his gang of merry arms dealers than in the pro vs anti registration kerfuffle of Civil War, until a third act twist puts a damper on it in favour of pulling the rug out from under Peter Parker. Given this is Spider-Man: Homecoming, and not a treatise on capitalism driving men to do morally questionable things, it’s probably for the best. That doesn’t stop the film from being reasonably pointed, and one could argue, posturing at superficial profundity about it in the early goings given it ultimately ends up going no where.

All that said, Homecoming really sings in the small moments. Bits of acerbic comedy are mined from its teenage supporting cast, poking and prodding at Peter in various ways, be it jovial and jocular, or antagonistic. A wonderful, if small contribution by Hannibal Buress as a put upon gym coach, brief asides about a teacher previously having a student die on him on a field trip, and the aforementioned bits with Keaton and co., make up for the otherwise mostly flat action. With the exception of the Stanton Island Ferry sequence shown off in the trailers, there is nothing particularly exceptional, and even then Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2’s train sequence far exceeds it in scope and emotional impact. But it’s really the playfulness and small scale that makes Spider-Man: Homecoming feel fresh, even if in the grand scheme of things, the MCU has offered us better (see Guardians of the Galaxy, all three Captain America films, for example). The willingness to go small, even with its Captain America “cameos” and its stinger are a shot in the arm for what could otherwise have been simply adequate. Ant-Man was adequate, Spider-Man: Homecoming is in some way approaching charming. And honestly, for what is the third rendition of this franchise on the silver screen in recent memory, that is a mighty fine victory.

Kong: Skull Island

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Recommendation: YES

Summary: Japanese and American World War 2 pilots crashland on a beach and promptly resume trying to kill each other until they are rudely interrupted by a living, breathing challenge to their sense of significance. Flash forward to the end of the Vietnam War and a ragtag team of scientists, a mercenary, a photojournalist, and disgruntled soldiers take part in a “geologic survey” of an unexplored island. Things go wrong.

Would you take this moment to once again welcome King Kong, grandpappy of the American movie monsters, to the cutting edge of trends in big budget Western film making. In this case, the cutting edge is not the bloat and operatic excess of Peter Jackson’s 2005 entry, nor the mind blowing technical wizardry of the 1933 original. No, in this case it’s the trend of plucking up unproven indie film makers with one or two tiny movies under their belt and unmaking their individuality in the fires of Hollywood. Double points for Kong: Skull Island being an entry in one of the very many shared cinematic universe exercises (see Marvel, DC, the Universal Monsters, to an extent Star Wars, and now Transformers?). But I’ll be damned if this film didn’t manage to sneak a bit of persinality in with its monster meyham, much in kind with Gareth Edwards’ Franchise-mate Godzilla (2014). I can’t rightly say whether it’s capital G good or not, but its a heck of a lot more than what the tepid Jurassic World could muster.

So, personality, eh? While Godzilla ’14 was a more slow paced (though some would say glacial), Spielbergian movie with a clear affection for its monsters and a tremendous sense of scale, Kong: Skull Island is tontent to be this weird little pastiche of Vietnam War movies, adventure/monster pictures, and exploitation cinema. There aren’t many PG-13 studio tentpoles that visually evoking something else involving a pole from Cannibal Holocaust. And it’s this “deplorable excess of personality,” to quote a Spielberg film that both Kong and Godzilla quote, that keeps Kong: Skull Island interesting long after its stand out first set piece with Kong.

It is worth noting that muck like Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island is sparing win its use of its titular beast. However, they differ in that Kong: Skull Island reveals its hand early (King Kong is on screen within the first 5 or so minutes) and its forward momentum. The film is littered with little bits of action that serve to make Skull Island itself an antagonist of sorts. It may come across as episodic at times given its poor human drama, but there is always some sort of threat around the corner as our hapless human cast come face to face with some unpleasant mega fauna. Credit where credit is due, there is a consideration and care put into the creature design that suggests a working ecosystem that is often missing in films that focus on making eerything look as “cool” or deadly as possible.

This does mean that for stretches it feels like the film is more interested in the way in which the environment conspires against the humans than the humans themselves. Outside of the broadest of strokes, this is true. There is an element of political subtext about the villification of soldiers by the media and the US government’s failure to be serious about the fate of its veterans. Every now and then there are flashes of the characters presenting with PTSD. And once in a while, the film comes close to being a genre film take on teh Vietnam War in the vein of Aliens, with low tech enemies ambushing and overwhelming a high tech military detachment.

And then Kong: Skull Island decides to go off and kill off its cast in sudden, gruesome ways, with no comment other than that it is possibly amusing that this moment that would be big in any other movie was totally deflated by a subversion showing the pointlessness of it all.

Having had time to dwell on the film, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is as successful at being a “Post-Human” blockbuster as Godzilla, but through different means. While Godzilla focused its attention on the monsters and impressed with its excellent sense of scale, making the human characters feel like insignificant lookers on, Kong: Skull Island never quite masters scale in much the same way. Aside from an early bout between Kong and helicopters, it is rather hard to get a read on how large the beasties are in comparison to the humans. No, Kong: Skull Island is post-human by virtue of its constant winking insistence that at best, humans are a minor annoyance, and at worst, their actions are pitiful and utterly meaningless.

As I said, I can’t tell if all of this is a “good” thing or not, but I can say that it’s fucking weird and commits to its weirdness as much as a franchise picture directed by a relative unknown can. At least much more than, for example, the half-assed satire of Jurassic World, or the defanged Robocop remake. And I’d take fucking weird over polished blandkess any day.

If it continues apace, the MonsterVerse will be one to watch; and the news of the attachment of Michael Dougherty to 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters has me very hopeful indeed.

Wonder Woman

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Recommendation: YES

Summary: A US born British spy by the name of Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crashlands off the coast of a hidden island inhabited by Amazons. Hearing his tales of a war without end (World War 1), Diana (Gal Gadot), an idealistic princess, decides to help Steve return to London with crucial intel on a deadly chemical weapon if he in turn will point her in the direction of the front so she can hunt down Ares, whom she believes is responsible for corrupting the minds of men and prolonging the war. Lessons are learnt.

Here we are, witness to the first unqualified good film in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU). It is a shame that the most drastic about face I have witnessed in recent history had to be surrounded by the relative shittiness of the internet. Rest assured that there is no conspiracy here, no campaign against men. Women only screenings did not end the world, nor were they the responsibility of WB, so you can stop blaming them for it. That Wonder Woman was a film directed by a woman is not the most significant nor sole reason for its incredibly warm reception.

The answer to why we suddenly have a well received film in the DCEU is a bit simpler than that. Director Patty Jenkins (of Monster fame) is someone who understands that Wonder Woman as a character is an embodiment of love and compassion. Patty Jenkins isn’t David Ayer, a person whose filmography to date largely revolves around the “coolness” of self destructive or poisonous masculinity, or appeals to violence and power (that said, End of Watch is a genuinely good and character focused aesthetic experiment). Nor is she Zack Snyder, a Randian Objectivist who writes his worldview into characters diametrically opposed to it.

I would get into Suicide Squad, but its failings are so numerous and its production so troubled that I can’t rightly tell what is a result of Ayer’s philosophy and approach as a story teller, and what is resultant on, for example, Ayer being forced into completing the screenplay in 6 weeks, or the reshoots, or Trailer Park being hired to recut the film.

So let us discuss Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (BvS) for a moment and contrast its approach to that of Wonder Woman. BvS takes cues largely from The Dark Knight Returns, a graphic novel in which a Randian Batman eventually takes on a non-Randian Superman, who is rendered as a stooge for the government (because you are either smart enough to believe in ethical egoism, or you are a self sacrificing slave to an overreaching government). In BVS however, Batman is consumed with a rage and desire to prove himself a capable actor with agency and an ability to affect change from without, refusing to cooperate and uncaring of the fate of those he goes up against, as long as his ends are met. Superman is a pouty, put upon, selfish and capricious person of mass destruction. Snyder frames him in glorious, approaching iconic compositions, saving people and averting catastrophies, but forever with a scowl on his face. There’s an inherent disconnect between what the Words Say about how Superman is the best most altruistic of actors in this universe, and his actions that suggest he is doing so reluctantly out of a misplaced sense of obligation that both his mother and ghost father say he shouldn’t feel.

They are then pitted against each other in what the film insists is a battle of opposing ideologies, but in reality is Snyder taking two toys infused with his Objectivist world view, and smacking them together in a climax that is in no way climactic, and much less so when a second, tacked on climax fails to dazzle with so much CGI nonsense. Whatever good BvS brings to the table outside of Snyder’s penchant for framing beautiful compositions, is snuck in at the periphery (see Holly Hunter’s character trying to hold Superman accountable for acting unilaterally with no oversight in and outside the United States), and then too only at the level of individual scenes.

But Wonder Woman offers an uncluttered, focused, self contained narrative with a simple thesis that it explores at both the level of character, and a higher thematic level. The film makes it its business to posit that displaying love and compassion for your fellow man in the face of their shittiness is the one thing for anyone ever to strive for, no matter their origin. And it is this singular focus on its thesis that makes Wonder Woman an at times profoundly humane film watching experience. Wonder Woman, unlike the DCEU version of Batman or Superman is a character worth deifying. She is a character who will do what is right because it is what she ought to do, and this is no better exemplified than in the film’s stand out set piece, the No Man’s Land sequence. It has the most effective use of speed ramping to suggest the physicality and grandeur of comic book splash pages since Snyder’s own 300. It highlights the strength of Diana’s moral character through action rather than speechifying. It is a sequence in which the rousing score inspires awe rather than beating us over the head with a suggestion of unearned poetry. And it’s the most damned super hero-y sequence I have seen in a movie since, I don’t know, the bit with the train in Spider-Man 2. This is a movie that is operating on a level of quality in all domains that far exceeds anything the DCEU has offered to date. And Wonder Woman continues to operate at this level of quality until its obligatory CG nonsense climax.

And it’s also so adorable and affectionate about it’s characters. From the young Diana play acting at being a warrior with a look of wonder on her face, to the playful chemistry between her and Steve Trevor, there’s a genuine interest in the inner workings of its characters and the struggles they are facing. Even the rag tag group of misfits (a la, Captain America’s Howling Commandos) have moments hinting at an inner life. The actor turned spy who couldn’t make it big because of his race, the braggart sniper with what is fairly evidently PTSD, the opportunistic Native American smuggler who only does what he does because his people have been displaced by Americans and it’s his best option for making a living. All of this is handled so deftly that the complexities of these character arcs are set up, delivered, and paid off in relatively little screen time. This is a big budget event movie where the small, quiet scenes are just as powerful as the bombastic ones because they are all in service of character or theme. And when a movie can have you in rapt attention at a character playing the piano and singing out of key because of what it means for that character in particular, then it is doing something right.

It is this focus on characters that helps turn a functionally invincible one like Diana into an interesting one, even if almost every physical challenge she faces is trivial. Where Wonder Woman succeeds and BvS, or even Man of Steel failed is in establishing Diana’s core values and beliefs (that man is inherently good), and challenging it at every turn. Dramatic tension is maintained throughout the movie by playing Diana off against everything that surrounds her, including the characters that are ostensibly there to support her. What happens when push comes to shove and none of her compatriots believe in her conviction that Ares is the one pulling all the strings? What happens if she was wrong all along? Does it matter more or less if she keeps going? And how funny can we make a woman walking around early 20th Century London carrying a sword and a shield?

Okay, so turning Man of Steel into a fish out of water comedy may not have worked out as well as it did with Wonder Woman (owing in large part to the fantastic chemistry and performances of Gal Gadot and Chris Pine), but the main thing is the fish out of water-ness cuts both ways when it comes to the film’s drama, and this is something that the dramatically inert Man of Steel could have used. As she goes on her journey, she learns about the cycles if warfare and oppression of indigenous peoples, the existence of racism, the horrors of PTSD, to name a few things, and the film is refreshingly honest about its depiction. It doesn’t gloss over any of it, but simultaneously doesn’t get bogged down in the dour tone of BvS. “Yes, humans are shitty,” the film intones, “but that is not justification enough to turn your back and stop fighting for what is good and right. Not when there is still love in the world and a chance for a better future.” And this is a far less ugly message than what any of its contemporaries have managed to convey.

Alien: Covenant… Increasingly familiar

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Recommendation: NO

Summary: Colonists find their ship hit by solar winds, leaving their captain toasted and the rest of the crew unwilling to reenter their cryosleep pods lest they befall the same fate. The acting captain, a man who believes his religion makes him untrustworthy in the eyes of the crew a mere 10 years after a devoutly religious person was part of the crew of the most expensive space expedition to that point, gives into popular demand to investigate a much closer, possibly hospitable planet rather than travelling their years long journey to their actual, safe destination. Due to terrible safety protocols, things go wrong.

Let’s get a couple of things out of the way right off the bat:

  1. Alien: Covenant is not a good film
  2. Alien: Covenant is not a good Alien film
  3. I prefer Prometheus to Alien: Covenant

If Prometheus is what happens when you take a slasher film and hurriedly retrofit it into a “thinking person’s science fiction film”, Alien: Covenant is what happens when you go the other way.

Be warned, if you were at all even the slightest bit interested in finding out why the Engineers created us and why they wanted to destroy us, prepare to be disappointed. That plot thread is hurriedly swept aside in a flashback in an attempt to course correct towards being more closely connected with the Alien franchise. But people hated Prometheus! Isn’t a course correction towards the rest of the franchise a good thing? Let’s take a moment to remember what else was part of the Alien franchise:

  • Alien 3
  • Alien Resurrection
  • AVP
  • AVP: R (I don’t remember what the R stood for, but it was probably Requiem or something equally terrible)

And let’s also take this moment to remind ourselves of a slow, ponderous science fiction film that Scott directed that wasn’t looked upon kindly until a few years later:

  • Blade Runner

Ultimately, what I am trying to say is that in the grand scheme of things, people don’t know shit; neither the authors, nor the audience.

And that is evident in Alien: Covenant. The ponderous core of Prometheus has been swapped out for that of a sleazy thriller, one that operates in the vague neighbourhood of Alien (complete with a condensed recreation of that first film in what passes for Covenant’s third act) after taking a detour through 80s slasher territory. People do stupid things for the sole purpose of delivering gory kills for the audience to enjoy, there is a lurid sex scene that gets bloodily interrupted, and the alien itself, far from being an unknowable walking metaphor for violation and sexual assault, is nothing but a bad special effect. They even managed to do the alien POV shot worse than it was done in Alien 3. Think on that.

Save for some two scenes of body horror (neither of which entirely approach the heights of the cesarean scene from Prometheus, though the first one gets close), the film is almost always better when the aliens are not on screen. In an Aliens movie. Prometheus at least had the good fortune of being distanced somewhat from Alien so it could be its own weird slow burn thing.

But aside from the aforementioned body horror and some effectively atmospheric gothic production design, Alien: Covenant is a film that puts on a show of being a horror film without actually committing to it. Everything else good about it comes as part of its past life as a Prometheus sequel. And all of its grandiose and “literary” discussions of the relationship between creator and created were better suited by Prometheus’ more consistently considered pacing. Sure, I did not think Prometheus got it right, but it sure as hell was better built to get it right than Alien: Covenant.

The one (two?) saving grace(s) of Alien Covenant is Michael Fassbender. This time playing a new Synthetic named Walter and returning as the creative and unhinged David, Fassbender electrifies the screen with his winning take on the uncanny valley. Affecting an American accent in something of a Lance Henrickson impersonation, Walter is a character that impresses in his coldness and restricted affect. And he is the perfect foil to David, a creature designed with a desire to create and understand. No better is this weird undercurrent of “humanity”, for lack of a better term, seen than in the film’s opening, a prologue introducing us to David’s first few hours. So much of the contempt between creator and created is suggested through reactions and body language as David prods and pokes at Peter Wayland’s insecurities about his mortality to see how far he can push and get away with it.

And then we have the scenes where the two synthetics interact. These sequences are crackling with an uncomfortable yet captivating “Platonic homoeroticism” while the two explore each others boundaries and try to seduce each other to their way of thinking. It really, really makes me wish the movie jettisoned the Alien connection altogether and became its own psychosexual thriller. But the aliens, creatures created out of unconvincing CGI, are the main draw, and Covenant: These Two Gay Robots are Totally Amazing would not a winning investment make.

And so we have part homoerotic thriller, part mad scientist movie (that totally robs the mystery of and defangs the Xenomorph), and part movie that dresses in the discarded skin of a gothic thriller by way of 80s slasher. A movie with no idea what to do with itself for an audience with no idea what is actually good for it. It’s time to put this franchise to bed before anymore damage is done to one of Cinema’s most iconic horror creations.

Monster Fest – The Autopsy of Jane Doe

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Director: André Øvredal

Yes (Cat lovers/owners be warned though)

Summary: A father and son team conduct an autopsy on an unidentifiable, naked woman found half buried at the site of a multiple murder. Things go wrong.

 

The Autopsy of Jane Doe opens in a location it will never revisit. It is the site of a bizarre multiple murder that has the town’s Sheriff puzzled. He’s even more puzzled when his men find a half buried naked corpse in the basement, with seemingly no connection to the murders. One of his officers informs him with a mix of cheese and solemnity that there were no signs of a break in, in fact there were signs suggesting the murder victims were trying to break out!!!

The opening is ominous in a couple of ways, the most worrying of which are signs of a screenplay rich in cliche. It is just as well then that director André Øvredal has the good sense to focus on the more unique aspects of the premise, most obviously the whole autopsy thing. Speaking of, the film shifts to an underground location filled with aged rooms and tight corridors. This space is framed in a particularly claustrophobic way. While we’re being introduced to the setting of the remainder of the film, we are also being introduced to two of its three primary characters. It is reasonably standard stuff. The father is struggling to get over the death of his wife, the son wants to leave town and avoid following in his father’s footsteps, but the performances are strong enough to sell it. There is jokey verbal sparring and a sense of mentorship that underlies most interactions, making the relationship and by extension the characters feel lived in and authentic.

And then the third major character is rolled through the door. Yes, the Jane Doe corpse is a character in her own right. The way she is filmed, the way the editing gives her reaction shots to the bizarre goings on, make her feel aware and consciously manipulating her surroundings despite her entirely still and expressionless exterior.

But it’s her internals that drive the mystery of the film. The autopsy sequence fleshes out the father and son characters, while piling unlikely finding upon unnervingly unlikely finding. The autopsy is approached and filmed in such a clinical way that every new reveal stands in much stronger contrast to the natural order of things. They build upon each other and lead to a climactic finding that is deliciously creepy. And the excellent sound design, including a slowly growing storm and a malevolent and teasing radio slather the atmosphere on thick. It is almost Lovecraftian in its lack of cohesion with human rationality.

And then things hit the fan, and the film shifts tactics from building tension to delivering scares. Here’s where the problems start to raise their head. While the first half of the film was a slow burn relying on incongruence, the second half is a haunted house picture that’s a little too eager to go bump in the night. The longer the film goes on the more reliant it is on highly telegraphed jump scares. The screenplay justifies it as a malevolent force toying with its victims. It’s trying to rattle them and make them suffer rather than trying to kill them. But The Autopsy of Jane Doe gets dangerously close to becoming a one trick pony. An opening is created in a surface, a character looks through it, a few seconds of silence before BOO a face pops up into frame.

It takes a genuinely tense elevator sequence and a build up to a cliche ending that is viciously subverted for The Autopsy of Jane Doe to regain its footing. This is one of a few movies that attempts to explain what the malevolent force is without reducing its level of threat. And that’s because the characters still don’t know 1) if they can defeat what they are up against, 2) if they are even right about what it is. And it’s a fun way to end a reasonably smart single room supernatural thriller.