Category Archives: The Terminator

Today’s A Good Day To Die, Die Hard

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It’s tempting to say that Die Hard changed my life, but that would be exaggerating even too much for my hyperbolic tastes. The original film didn’t trigger a lifelong love of films; that would be Star Wars, which I saw at the Gaumont in Birmingham in what might have been December, 1977, if IMDb is to be believed (the UK got Star Wars eight months after the US? Such bullshit). Die Hard also didn’t make me see the possibilities of the action genre, and the effect that a cleanly-shot and designed action sequence could have on my adrenal glands; Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Terminator and Aliens had already done a number on me, changing my conception of what excitement was, and what were the possibilities of the genre.

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What it did do was legitimise large-scale action cinema, at least in my mind, and stop me from feeling guilty for deriving more pleasure from this genre than all the canonical films in the pantheon of cinema history. No longer did I feel like claiming my favourite film was something high-falutin’ out of guilt or concern that I would appear intellectually empty for finding perfection in a commercial, mainstream movie, and this realisation is something that has been a guiding principle for this blog ever since I started it; celebrating the artistry involved in creating populist art. You can stuff your Dogme films in a recycling bin for all I care; the moment the lens flare bursts next to Hans Gruber’s head as the vault opens, Ode to Joy blaring out, I was done for life. That was beauty, transcendent and perfect, located in a Joel Silver-produced action film starring that guy off Moonlighting. If it could be found there, it could be found anywhere.

But as much as Die Hard is good enough — no, magnificent enough — to suspend concerns about falling in love with a “dumb” action film (and please, the last thing Die Hard is is dumb), there is no way to ignore that this rough-cut diamond is a commodity, a summer schedule filler that just happened to attract a number of highly-gifted artists and technicians all at the top of their game who rose to their material, back in a time when people still thought that the best way to attract an audience was to give them something attractive, instead of just bludgeoning them into accepting the inevitability that they would have to swallow a product out of some weird sense of obligation. It was talent that made Die Hard incredible, but it was money that eventually made the franchise mundane.

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And yet for a time, Die Hard still managed to surprise. Die Hard 2 is no one’s idea of a great movie, but if it hadn’t followed the greatest pure action spectacular of the late 20th century it would have been one of Silver Productions’ best films. As sequels go, it’s still pretty entertaining, thanks to some canny casting — Fred Dalton Thompson, Jon Amos and Dennis Franz are great value — and some fun action, not to mention a fealty to Die Hard‘s audience-sating blend of drama and comedy. If it has a real flaw it’s that it hews too closely to the first film’s structure, to the point of distractingly trying to find things for Holly, Thornburg and Al to do, but it was made back in the 1990s, when the idea of creating a longform story throughout a franchise, with the same characters in new forms of adventure, was only just beginning to become popular. Carbon-copies of successful films were a dime-a-dozen.

Which is one of the reasons why the third Die Hard film is such a success. This is a movie that starts with two explosions, one visual and one narrative. The John McClane that we grew to love in the first two movies has become a bitter wreck, estranged from his wife and hated by his colleagues. This time, instead of accidentally falling into trouble, he is dragged into it as a consequence of his actions in the first movie. Placing McClane in a new type of danger, and exploring the consequences of his actions years before, is one of the most satisfying plot choices in any franchise of recent years, creating a sense of progression from what has gone before, the feeling that we are following a real person in an unreal world. For a short time, the Die Hard series felt like it lived and breathed.

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Honouring the character of John McClane is the key to this. Though this sequel sees a return to McClane’s arc in the first film, it’s shown as being one aspect of his increasingly irascible nature, and pairing him up with a similarly aggravated companion — Samuel L. Jackson’s brilliantly realised Zeus; possibly the only likeable racist in cinema history — is a great way of exploring the idea that the Die Hard franchise is based not around a noble white knight but actually a complete asshole, or perhaps just a once-decent, idealistic man who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (his wisecracks could actually be a coping mechanism); a borked Übermensch who appeals to the audience as an ordinary person who just happens to have flashes of incredible courage. While this dire psychological break means we’re only ever going to get temporary fixes to the man, for the purposes of the series this works fine.

There’s a strong argument that the final reshot ending of Die Hard 3 is a failure; certainly, it seems disappointing that we end up with a form of mano-a-mano showdown between protagonist and antagonist even when we’re taken out of New York and the ticking clocks of Simon’s games –  the geographic claustrophobia of the first (and, to a lesser extent, the second) replaced with a temporal form that constrains our hero even as he is given an entire city to explore — but all of that is forgiven by the elegance of the final shot; McClane redeemed by the new friend’s prompting, his broken soul fixed with little more than a quarter and a payphone. The outcome of his call is not important; he has swallowed his pride, made friends with someone as spiky as him, and taken a step towards rehabilitation.

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This might be the last grace note in a franchise that has to amp up its threats in order to justify its existence. Die Hard 4.0 (or Live Free Or Die Hard) is the first in the series that isn’t good enough to make you forget the fact that the franchise is just being kept afloat to squeeze a few more drops out of the original, but even though it’s oft-derided, it’s better than it has any right to be, and it signalled an evolution in Len Wiseman’s directorial style for the better. It’s doubtful he’ll ever become as thoughtful and unpredictable as peak-career John McTiernan, or as able to harness the power of the image and the cut as current action-blockbuster champion Justin Lin (a Justin Lin Die Hard movie would be cinematic nirvana), but Die Hard 4 has enough charge, pace, and humour to please at least this cynic.

Part of the charm of Die Hard 4 is the replication of some of the beats necessary for this to register as a Die Hard film, especially as by this point the series has transformed into something that could easily go completely awry, as I will get to in a moment. Yes, there is an escalation in spectacle in this one that dwarfs the first, which featured huge action moments but from a human point-of-view that acknowledged the scale of those events. Wiseman doesn’t really worry about that, as he blows up a power plant and sets a F-35B Lightning II on our hero, destroying a freeway in the process, but through Willis and Justin Long’s self-effacing recognition that some cray shit’s going down, it stays just on the right side of absurdity.

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It also wisely keeps the other films’ focus on secondary characters; one of the great joys of the Die Hard series is that each film contains a sub-cast of well-sketched protagonists and antagonists who just happen to have this other guy, this unstoppable wreck, show up to act as “the monkey in the wrench”, whatever that means. Die Hard had the best cast of characters: noble but heartbroken Al, magnificently stupid Dwayne T. Robinson, tragic Takagi, alpha-douchebag Ellis, archetypal headstrong wife Holly, comic relief Argyle, Agents Johnson and Johnson, shitbag Thornburg. And that’s before we get into the villains; cocky Theo, vengeful Karl and his hapless brother Tony with his tiny feet, greedy Uli (Al Leong’s theft of a candy bar prior to a firefight shows more character than most films can muster during their entire running time), galumphing James (aka VIGO from Ghostbusters 2), “Huey Lewis” aka Eddie down in reception, and of course Hans Gruber, the king of action movie bad guys, a Teutonic Basil Rathbone, regal and venal in equal measure. My God, this movie is near-miraculous.

But the other films do a good job of filling out their casts too. Die Hard 2 has three bad guys, none of whom are as memorable as Hans Gruber, but traitorous Major Grant is particularly vile. It also features a group of meddling bureaucratic cowards who are slowly won over by McClane; tetchy Barnes, officious Trudeau, delta-male Carmine, and eccentric Marvin. We also get a slightly more respectable journalist in Sam Coleman, not to mention a roster of villains played by character actors like John Leguizamo, Robert Patrick, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Don Harvey and, of course, Robert Sadler. Die Hard 3 has Sam Jackson taking up most of the screentime, but we still get a set of initially sceptical side-players in McClane’s court; colleagues Cobb, Walsh, Kowalski and Lambert, courageous bomb disposal expert Weiss, FBI jerk Andy Cross and Jarvis From Another Organisation, plus four great villains in sneaky Simon Gruber, man-mountain Targo, vile oaf Otto, and the frankly terrifying Katya.

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Die Hard 4 is smart enough to keep this tradition going. Justin Long’s Matt takes on the Zeus role here, working as a surrogate son for McClane’s reluctant father. The cops are represented by Bowman and Molina (Cliff Curtis and Željko Ivanek), the bad guys include Thomas Gabriel (a sadly underpowered Timothy Olyphant), nigh-superhuman Mai Linh, parkour badass Rand, and hapless hacker Trey, while Kevin Smith appears as the fanbase-splitting hacker Warlock (for what it’s worth, I thought he was kinda funny). Yes, this is not on the same level as previous Die Hard films, and Wiseman isn’t about to give them all delightful character moments like the ones that litter the first three films, but the conventions of the series are at least being honoured. He has recognised that they exist, and has included them. This is more than we could have hoped.

The best thing I can say about the fourth Die Hard sequel, John Moore’s awkwardly-titled A Good Day To Die Hard, is that it too seems to have noticed this thread, even if it doesn’t really make the most of it. The villains are multitudinous; a consequence of its unnecessarily complex plot involving incriminating files and double-treble-quadruple crosses that makes one wonder if the movie should be about the dealings of the deeply boring Komarov and Chagarin, with no need for John McClane and his estranged son Jack. The post-Vengeance convention of a female antagonist is honoured by the inclusion of Irina, the heavy is a tap-dancing clown whose japes completely undercut his menace, the comic relief is provided by the un-named cab driver (The New Girl‘s Pacha Lychnikoff), and Jack’s partner is Collins, played by Cole Hauser in what amounts to a cameo during which we get absolutely no sense of who he is.

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But A Good Day To Die Hard is not interested in creating rounded characters, or to even acknowledge that the Die Hard films are about actual recognisable humans put into absurd situations which are played as much for laughs as they are for thrills. Even at its worst Die Hard 4 recognised that, and thus honoured the previous films despite being the least memorable film in the series by that point. The latest film, on the other hand, is everything the fourth could have been; an empty, soulless cash-in on the franchise, made by people who couldn’t give a damn about the fanbase, the legacy of this series, or even fundamentally necessary elements of a successful film such as coherence, aesthetic pleasure, or even lizard-brain level spectacle. In short, it is a farrago and a disgrace.

Why did I just go to such obnoxious lengths to list the things that make the Die Hard films so distinct? Because A Good Day To Die Hard is such an insult to the other four films that while watching it I could only hold onto those fond memories in order to make it through. As someone who loves or likes all four films to one degree or another, it was like a mantra in my head, listing all of the great things in order to keep the insidious, sanity-sapping badness away; the SWAT guy pricking his hand on a rose in DH1, McClane trying desperately to signal a 747 landing in the middle of a snowstorm in DH2 and then sobbing when his efforts prove futile (and then saying “Motherfucker!” with such menace and hatred it boils the blood), the two bad guys disguised as cops in DH3 who get into an argument about leaving a block of C4 in the street for kids to find, the parkour villain in DH4 leaping out of a helicopter moments before a cop car crashes through it. There are dozens upon dozens of these moments in the series; DH5 has nothing. Just nothing.

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There are so many things wrong with this film that it’s hard to know where to start, but perhaps it’s best to begin with what has happened to John McClane, who we see here as a barely conscious force of sheer unpleasant negativity, finally reconciled with his daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead returning in a franchise-solidifying cameo as Lucy), suddenly deciding to chase down his errant, possibly criminal son Jack (played by a non-curly-haired Jai “Varro from Spartacus” Courtney). This takes him to Moscow, where John manages to stumble across Jack in the process of breaking Russian whistleblower Komarov out of jail. Komarov’s plot is pointlessly labyrinthine, while John’s is simple; reconcile with his son, who detests him. Which makes sense, because this incarnation of the previously-witty John McClane is a glum mannequin, animated by the promise of millions and millions of easy dollars. He can’t support anything more than that.

This is perfectly in keeping with the other McClane arcs, which were all about redemption, but by now the well is dry, and Skip Woods’ script — which feels like an unpolished first draft — doesn’t even bother to dramatise the reconciliation in any imaginative ways. Relying on hoary old plot elements — like sceptical Jack having second thoughts when he overhears his father talking about how he has failed his family, or the fact that he calls his dad “John” until a key moment, much like Lucy does in DH4 — is one thing, but to try to echo this familial strife within Komarov’s sub-plot only really works if Komarov’s plot doesn’t take any right turns. You get the sense that Woods was trying to do something smarter than expected here, but certain third act twists render this character work moot, even as they notably continue the trend of including unexpected secret motivations of the Die Hard villains from previous installments.

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At least that thematic reflection shows some kind of life in the process of creating the film. Other than that we get very little sense that any effort was expended. Perhaps part of that lies in the genesis of this film. Greenlit prior to the release of DH4, this is the first sequel in the series that started out as a Die Hard project; Die Hard 2 was based on the non-McClane novel 58 Minutes by Walter Wager, Die Hard 3 was originally a non-McClane spec script by Jonathan Hensleigh called Simon Says which was meant for Brandon Lee before almost becoming Lethal Weapon 4, and Die Hard 4 was originally a script called WW3.com based on a Wired article about cyber-terrorism. Die Hard 5 is merely Die Hard 5, and as a result feels like an undistinguished straight-to-DVD actioner that just happens to have John McClane in it. Instead of finding exceptional source material for our hero, they crafted something for him; the cart before the horse.

It’s bad enough that John’s arc is almost identical to the one in DH4, with him estranged from his angry son the way he was with his angry daughter. It’s worse that this time he gets to partner up with the person he’s trying to win back, meaning his growth is too directly connected with the character he bounces off. In DH3 and DH4 McClane learns to accept the ones he loves by being taught how to bend by characters he’s not related to (Zeus and Matt), but here he is already healthy enough to merely want to save his son, who ends up having to bend instead. In previous films the choice to almost accidentally resolve McClane’s character issues by having him chase one thing and in the process give him the thing he really wants is deftly done. Here the resolutions are clunkily sign-posted, and means John McClane is just there as a guy who shoots things. He’s not a character, and his son Jack isn’t drawn well enough to fill this gap.

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The worst thing that could happen to this franchise has finally happened; McClane doesn’t really feel like McClane, and not just because this is easily Bruce Willis’ worst work as the put-upon hero. Not only can he barely muster any enthusiasm for the part, he’s sorely underwritten, with almost no wit apparent in his reaction to his predicament. Instead he keeps banging on about how he’s on vacation, which isn’t even accurate, as he starts the movie by looking for his son and then travels to Moscow with only one intention; to find out why Jack is in jail (it’s for shooting someone for some poorly explained reason, which has something to do with him being in the CIA though it’s not clear how shooting someone and being arrested helps him in his goal of saving Komarov).

It also doesn’t help that this McClane actively seeks trouble, goading his son on in the middle of the movie whereas in all previous installments he is obviously only getting involved in these troublesome events because he is forced to by a desire to save his loved ones or by the machinations of a villain. Other than the final act of Die Hard 3, where he chooses to chase Simon into Canada (which completes his redemption plot for that film), or Die Hard 4, where he finds himself chaperoning the most important hacker in the US, in all of the other movies he is obviously really annoyed that he has to do anything. He’s the ultimate reluctant hero of Campbellian theory, resisting the Call To Adventure over and over again, only ever becoming a pro-active character when his family is threatened or he’s just really really pissed off.

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Die Hard 4 started this pro-activity by having him teach Matt how to be brave, but then the threat they face is all around them, and he is being tested by Gabriel throughout. In contrast, in the middle of DH5 he could easily walk away and take his son with him, but he doesn’t. To this McClane fan, even though this was a heroic choice on McClane’s part, the moment clanged. Even worse, there’s no growing tension here. In all of the other films there is some form of ticking clock urging McClane on. There’s nothing like that here. Some lines are added about a threat of weapons-grade uranium falling into the wrong hands but it smacks of convenience; no one in the film seems to even buy it. McClane is the one thing standing in the way of disaster in 1-4. Here he’s a guy who courts danger, possibly because he likes the idea of teaching his son some things (there’s a nice reference to “Bill Clay”‘s attempt to get a gun from the roof of the Nakatomi Plaza but even this doesn’t work as McClane doesn’t even know Clay is Gruber at that point, so it’s yet another empty reference solely for the audience).

This is all bad enough, betraying the conventions of the series or mimicking them bluntly without weaving them into the sub-plots of each previous film. It’s enough to make the heart sink, and look back on DH4 as a greater success than we had realised at the time; a rewatch last night showed that it’s much funnier and pacier than I had remembered. But while I cast aspersions on the script, and Willis’ performance (Jai Courtney is fine with the little he’s given, I guess), the real problem with Die Hard 5 is John Moore’s direction. I’ve never been a fan, I’ll admit, though I liked one sequence in Behind Enemy Lines (the insanely detailed plane-ejection setpiece) and thought Flight of the Phoenix wasn’t terrible. Nevertheless, The Omen remake and Max Payne were quite dreadful and unlovable, with the videogame adaptation being particularly painful.

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A Good Day To Die Hard, on the other hand, should not have been released into cinemas in this form. Early scenes display Moore’s obnoxiously tricksy compositions, but it’s not the kind of thing that could ruin a movie, being merely irksome. A couple of crash zooms during a scene in which McClane’s cab gets stuck in traffic are jarring, but again, no biggie. A couple of impressively large explosions follow, and a clumsily shot scene with Bruce Willis staggering about in a cloud of budget-shortfall-obscuring smoke is not great, I’ll admit, but it’s still not the end of the world. He then stumbles upon his son, and the camera’s either too far away from the action or too close, or not looking at the right thing. Pretty shoddy, not helped by the relentlessly blue palette, but again I let it slide. I was trying to be nice.

And then the car chase happened, and all bets were off. How do I explain this sequence using words and not clips? How do I conjure up all of the feelings I had without merely resorting to obscenity? Even though Moore has not bothered to take my feelings into account with this infinitely awful sequence, maybe I should respect his feelings, so as to prevent the miserable possibility of being transformed into a mere troll by the grueling experience of watching that scene. And yet the car chase sequence in A Good Day To Die Hard is so far and away the worst and most ineptly shot and edited sequence in action cinema — nay, ALL cinema — that I think it’s incumbent on me to go hell for leather here, to state exactly how astonished and upset I was as it unfurled, in the hope that it will deter people from wasting their time and money on this film.

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The aesthetics of action cinema have become a bone of contention with action fans over recent years, with numerous filmmakers receiving censure for their lack of visual clarity (Paul Greengrass, Christopher Nolan) or haphazard editing (Michael Bay specifically, though a number of other filmmakers have emulated him). Both crimes are terrible, I will agree, though I don’t think Greengrass or Nolan are anywhere near as bad as critics make out, and will even go so far as to say that Greengrass’ photography is actually very clear, almost startlingly so, with the camera choreographed along with the stuntmen, anticipating every move or stunt in order to capture them in entirety before being clipped down as much as possible in the editing bay, while still giving you the sense of what is going on in each shot.

I’d even defend Bay (and have done before), while stressing MOST VIGOROUSLY that I do not enjoy his action scenes as pure action scenes, with characters exploring geographically-clear spaces and achieving in-sequence sub-goals that include surviving attacks through evasion or suppressing enemies through force, like real action directors do. As I’ve said before, a really good action scene is like a really punchy pop song or a classical symphony, with all the parts working together to create a melodious whole, a break within the film that has a beginning, middle and end, as well as a kind of intrinsic harmony, if I can use that word to describe the camera’s recording of these action events. Bay’s action scenes are often syncopated drum solos without melody and harmony or even a structure, but I quite like drums so I don’t mind that so much. I’m not pretending they are something they’re not; I’m enjoying them for what they are; noisy, ostentatious exercises in self-indulgence. (I’ve seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen a dozen times and even I don’t know what the hell is going on in this shot.)

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Nevertheless, even if I were to hate Bay, Greengrass or Nolan for all the reasons that many others hate them (not counting Bay’s sexism and racism, which I DO hate), what John Moore has accomplished in the car chase in A Good Day To Die Hard is to create an action scene of such cancerous awfulness, such baffling incoherence, such cornea-scraping criminality, as to render all arguments about other action filmmakers moot. This is without a doubt the nadir of action cinema; not just a drip of poison into the old king’s ear but a full fireman’s hose of ichor right in the face at such force it blasts the eyes from their sockets. It’s an insult to my soul so egregious that I very nearly leapt from my chair to vocally denounce it the way a devout old crone in a religious horror movie would react to the presence of a possessed child. It is an abomination.

All of the things you have ever hated about modern action cinema are here; lazy witticisms, cackling villains, no awareness of geography, the shakiest of shakycams, staccato editing that nullifies every beat and shuffles all of the events into a baffling montage, camera placement that misses every stunt and hides the key elements from the viewer, zero sense of pace or escalation, crash zoom after crash zoom after crash zoom, and cacophonous music that batters the viewer into thinking he or she is witnessing something vital and exciting when what you’re seeing is a total lack of effort smeared across the screen like snot wiped on a handrail. The stunt work is great, though. If I were a stuntman on this film I’d be livid at seeing my hard work ruined, at the risks taken wasted in this vomitous sequence. (This clip shows the most clearly edited sub-section, though the footage is taken from random moments throughout.)

In all the years I’ve been watching films I’ve never once walked out of a cinema in disgust but yesterday I very nearly did. Moore’s utter disregard for how films work was like a fuck you to anyone who has ever expended any effort on a film only to see their careers falter. How is this man still working? Max Payne crawled into the shadow of profitability, and apparently that’s all that matters even though that film satisfied no one. Say what you like about Brett Ratner, but even if you hate X-Men: The Last Stand, if Moore — who was once in contention for the job — had made it we would have been even unhappier with what we got. Ratner isn’t particularly competent or imaginative but he at least knows that putting about ten crash zooms into a car chase is just not on.

The rest of the film isn’t as bad as that one scene, but it’s all so tossed off that it never redeems it either. The stink of laziness pervades the film, enough to make Len Wiseman look like a tyro McTiernan in comparison (seriously, there’s some good stuff in DH4; the shot where the camera follows the parkour guy from rooftop to fire escape and then down is astonishing). Those anamorphic shots from Die Hard that thrilled me so when I was young are replaced here by irritatingly garbled compositions and clumsy camera-placements (one shot sees McClane temporarily shoved into the corner of an otherwise black frame, and it doesn’t seem like it was intentional), not to mention the most binary teal-and-orange colour scheme ever; it makes Transformers: Dark of the Moon look like a rainbow-riot of multicoloured joy in comparison.

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Anyone not particularly interested in this kind of thing will naturally accuse me of being too precious, but I guarantee that this film will offend your eyes, be it by the endless shakiness of the camera operation, the pointless cutting from medium shot to retina-shattering close-up and back again, or by the inability to actually get the subjects of each shot into focus. The only movie I’ve seen recently that got basic stuff as wrong as this was in Rob Cohen’s dire Alex Cross, but that was at least funny. This is just depressing. I’ve railed against Tom Hooper’s awful visual direction a number of times but his worst crimes are arguably borne of out-of-control enthusiasm and puppy-dog eagerness to impress his master/peers. Moore just doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing. During that car chase it’s as if he took a photo of a car’s bumper and just flapped it in front of the camera for four minutes.

If the action scenes were even choreographed or designed in an interesting way then perhaps there would be a way to salvage this. As Moore showed in Behind Enemy Lines, he obviously likes the idea of the discrete and intricate setpiece made up of heavily-detailed elements (the plane crash sequence I mentioned earlier is a great example of that, breaking down the ejection of a pilot into tiny slices of time). But by now it’s easier to just rely on his favourite action trope; men running through a hail of bullets, either fired by bad guys or by flying machines. He used that shot a number of times in Behind Enemy Lines, again in Max Payne, and here has both McClanes running through a hellstorm of bullets fired by a helicopter not once but twice. And no one said to him that maybe he should change it up. If he could have engineered a way to shove this shot into The Omen he would have.

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Perhaps I’ve been spoiled recently. The three big action scenes in this film are not well-thought-through or shot cleanly, and while these are possibly the worst examples I’ve seen of this, it’s not like Moore’s the only filmmaker farting out disappointing action scenes. However all is not lost, and I have a feeling action cinema is about to undergo a transformation. Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher might be a gamechanger in the same way The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy were — friend-of-the-blog @T_Lee recently referred to the subsequent deluge of Bourne-aping brawls as “pat-a-cake fights”, but at the time those minutely choreographed fights were a new thing in action cinema, as were those intensely edited car and foot chases. It didn’t take long for everyone to wear those tricks out, so it’s time for a change, and McQuarrie’s adaptation of Lee Childs’ novels might usher a new era of action cinema.

In Jack Reacher McQuarrie takes the “realism” of the Bourne fights and chases to their logical extreme, doing his best to remove cinematic artifice (though not entirely, of course). His fist fights are strategic and swift, with every contact creating new challenges for our diminutive hero; whoever thought we’d see a film in which the characters get smacked in the face and then take a few seconds to recover, instead of absorbing every blow like an impact-sponge? His car chases are full of errors, stalls, oversteers and reverses, all while sustaining the flow and tension. His shoot-outs are precise and focused mainly on cover, not firing; a logical continuation of the staging of the gunfights in his brilliant anti-heroic crime movie Way of the Gun. All of these action scenes are like nothing you’ve ever seen before, and are utterly thrilling and, most importantly, comprehensible without sacrificing energy.

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McQuarrie has rewritten the rules of action staging, merely by looking at them dispassionately and intelligently, stripping away as much bullshit as possible and writing characters who think before they fight. The results are astonishing, and helped eradicate any difficulties I had swallowing the unfortunate thriller-novel bullshit tropes that McQuarrie was required to add, such as Little Jackie Reacher’s hilarious philosophy of lonerdom vs societal contraints, or his White Knight mansplaining and patronising of women, and his inhuman and reader-flattering sexual magnetism. All of that was pure chuff, but Jack Reacher remains a milestone in the evolution of the genre, a fact that will become apparent when fans embrace it on its DVD release. Though to be honest, that should have happened after Way of the Gun. (Check out this scene from WotG: the only gunshots occur off-screen, but it’s still 100 times more exciting than any of Die Hard 5‘s garbled and hysterical pyrotechnics.)

After that, it’s hard not to look at previous “geological eras” of action cinema with anything but a kind of annoyed pity. Most of the classics, the ones that defined the visual rules for each stage of the genre like Aliens, Die Hard, The Killer, Bourne 1 and 2; they’re all fine. It’s the knock-offs, the indifferently-made and identikit ones, that will suffer the most, and pure tripe like this suffers most of all. It’s kinda funny that Jai Courtney was in both Die Hard 5 and Jack Reacher, as The Zec’s right-hand man, and also amusing to note that McQuarrie gives him more personality as a henchman than Skip Woods does as co-lead. It’s as if he’s the bridge that action cinema had to cross to reach The New World. This is not to say that Jack Reacher will lead us into a land full of hard-edged and brilliantly conceived action classics, but it does give us an alternative to the mechanical and uninvolving rote staging of Moore’s farrago.

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And it really is the laziness that kills this film, and not just in the way that it’s shot. Missed opportunities abound. Michael Kamen’s scores for the first three films are a pure delight, playfully mixing well-known musical classics into his chiming and rambunctious soundtracks; the “Ode to Joy” fourth movement from Beethoven’s 9th in the first, Sibelius’ Finlandia in the second, and Louis Lambert’s When Johnny Comes Marching Home in the third. Marco Beltrami took over for the next two after Kamen’s tragic, too-early death, and while he does enough in terms of replicating some of Kamen’s signature stings amid all the musical tumult, this trend of including classical music vanished. It’s not a big deal in the fourth film, but in the fifth film? Set in Moscow? Imagine what Kamen could have done with Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights, or Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers.

But then there would have had to have been moments of grace within Die Hard 5 to accommodate such a musical flourish, and Moore has no interest in doing that when he can shoehorn in another crash zoom or fussy composition or grinding conversation devoid of subtext (the moment when the McClanes declare their love for each other is just them saying they love each other; whatever happened to “show, don’t tell”?). Would Moore have taken a cue from McTiernan with his casting, choosing Broadway veterans for supporting roles in DH3 (including playwright Michael Christofer) so that every minor character feels like they have a backstory and inner life? No. Moore’s actors are all straight out of central casting, and attempts to make them stand out, like the bad guy who dances for no particular reason, or the needlessly objectified Irina (Yuliya Snigir, who strips to her underwear in an early scene for no reason other than empty titillation) just look lazy.

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All of these complaints are, I realise, finicky and probably not the kinds of things that would bother most viewers. I get that. When I wrote about the awfulness of Alex Cross I went on about how thrillingly inept it was, how every moment in it was slightly off, so much so that the finished product is a classic example of exactly how not to make a film. Most other people who have endured it seemed to think it was just a generic thriller, making me wonder if I’m taking all of this far too seriously. This could well happen with A Good Day To Die Hard. While I rail against it as a chancre on the tongue of cinema, I’ll wager most people will just think that this is an underwhelming sequel, the inevitable lowpoint of a franchise flogged to death by a studio who saw the opportunity of making a quick buck.

Nevertheless, I defy anyone to remain agnostic about this film’s quality when they see the mid-car-chase insert in which Jack calls his bosses at Langley as the camera wobbles from side to side and zooms and shakes as if the room is on the epicentre of an earthquake, before pulling out for a moment to show every monitor in the room has a little red light on it to add dramatic strobes to their faces. Or the close-up of a target on a shooting range on which you can see part of the squib that blew it up, an error no one could be bothered to fix in post (a piddling error but indicative of a lack of care overall). Or the stupendously moronic twist at the end which [SPOILER] means that the villanous Komarov has been chased for most of the movie by a miniature army of people in his employ pretending to be his enemies, led by one guy who didn’t know any of this who is then killed. [END SPOILER]

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Or the fact that it ends in Chernobyl, in a building that is made non-radioactive using enormous Radiation-Negating Wands Of Magic, so that no one needs protective gear; lucky for the McClanes — who drive from Moscow to Pripyat in just slightly more time than it took a helicopter (it actually takes 12 and a half hours to drive but whatevs). Our heroes don’t have any protective gear, but that doesn’t matter; when they fall into a pool of water Jack says, “It’s okay, it’s rainwater!” so that’s okay then even though the pool is indoors so this is actually impossible. And what does happen to all the uranium that gets stolen? Was it in the helicopter that crashes at the end? If not, was it taken by the bad guy’s mini-army? And as the McClanes don’t kill them I guess they just leave? That’s not cool. Oh, and can we PLEASE retire the “Girl From Ipanema Elevator Music” joke please? That shit got tired decades ago.

Even taking into account those awful moments, many people will think I’m just being overdramatic about this, that my Twitter rating for this film of 1/10 was melodramatic, and that’s okay. This is inevitably personal to me because these films are so important to me, and I don’t expect everyone to see it the same way that I do. Die Hard fired my imagination and made me treat cinema as a reliable source of joy that would continue to excite me for decades to come. And, barring some hiccups, this is still the case. Even better, the original Die Hard — my favourite film of all time — is still a wondrous thing, still breathlessly exciting, still a pitch-perfect example of how to make a crowd-pleasing, emotionally-resonant slice of populist cinema that looks breathtaking.

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Die Hard 5, on the other hand, is so poor that it makes me want to take up a baton that seems to have been dropped, to actually make a movie myself that rights these wrongs. Anyone who knows how unconfident I am in real life will be surprised to hear me make a bold statement like that but just by avoiding every visual error and plot cliche here, anyone could make something that honours the genre’s greats in exactly the way this latest film doesn’t. That’s not going to happen, obviously, so instead I find myself, horribly, hoping that this tanks. Because right now, if this film’s final image — a freeze-frame of three McClanes, rictus-smiling in front of an orange sunset — is the last we see of John McClane, I’m absolutely fine with that. Unless the franchise gets a massive reboot, something that brings it back to basics the way Casino Royale saved the Bond series, it’s better off abandoned, choked to death on this gargantuan, unflushable turd.

Listmania ’11! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Two

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No preamble, nothing worth saying when there’s already almost 5000 words here, but I should stress that I felt bad writing this post due to all the negativity involved. Bear in mind two of the movies I criticise here are films I like and have seen more than once. I just wish they were perfect. Thanks to the folks on Twitter who threw ideas at me while I was writing this; I’ve tried to credit you all, but if I’ve missed anyone off I apologise.

Most Pleasant Surprise of the Year: Real Steel

Though SoC tried to keep an open mind, sometimes it’s so so hard. A boxing movie about robots starring an actor whose recent choices had seemed so wobbly and which was directed by the dictionary definition of the journeyman and featuring a performance by Lost‘s least popular actress some time after she had promised us she was done with all that acting malarkey because she had had such a terrible experience living in Hawaii for six years oh dear. I’ll watch any old SF crap but even this didn’t appeal. It looked like a classic Disney merchandise trawl (well, Dreamworks, but Touchstone distributed it, so you know what I mean), and after enduring the cynical cash-in of Cars 2, I didn’t feel like going through that again.

But reviews were good, Levy had won a spot in our hearts for making the much-rewatched-and-enjoyed Date Night, and friends of the blog seemed to enjoy it, so we put it back on our watchlist, even though the sight of Hugh Jackman teaching a sparring robot how to box in the trailers never failed to reduce Daisyhellcakes to a mess of derisory laughter. Turns out those friends were right, as we were rewarded with an emotionally honest surprise, a family movie unafraid to paint its characters as douchebags who earn their redemption. What had seemed from the trailers to be the kind of toothless thing Disney would once release back when Kurt Russell was a fresh-faced kid was surprisingly hard-nosed.

That’s not to say it’s some gritty drama; it’s about a guy who tries to make a living by pitting his robots against other robots in boxing matches, so we’re already in a weird and unbelievable future world. Nevertheless, protagonist Charlie Kenton is surprisingly unpleasant. He doesn’t give a damn about his son and only agrees to take him on because his step-uncle is going on holiday and doesn’t want him around. He’s also an idiot who takes forever to actually earn any cash, and even then it’s only because his son has a better understanding of the robot boxing world. I doubt Shawn Levy would have pushed Charlie’s sourness so far if he hadn’t got Jackman on board. It’s amazing what he gets away with in the film while still maintaining audience goodwill.

There are some problems with Real Steel, and not just because it’s so implausible and riddled with plot holes (this podcast makes that case very well). It’s certainly too long, lasting over two hours. Large chunks of plot come from two movies by Sylvester Stallone — Rocky and arm-wrestling nonsense Over The Top — with barely any alteration visible. Also Evangeline Lilly’s in it. I mean, how can it be expected to survive all of these problems? And yet it does, because it does two things well; it takes itself seriously, and it treats the fights lightly. As a result, it becomes a genuine crowdpleaser with real emotional charge.

By this I mean it doesn’t make light of the stakes involved. Charlie is on the verge of real trouble throughout, and Jackman’s performance is dark enough that we get a sense that he really will become a broken and lonely old man if something drastic doesn’t happen to change it. The way his fate, the relationship with his son, and the slow climb out of the pit of his self-loathing, is beautifully intertwined with the world of robot boxing in a way that would utterly fail if Charlie’s plight — and what looks like depression — isn’t addressed. Levy does a fine job of bringing Charlie and son Max together in such an organic way that it was only when Real Steel hits the end-of-second-act crisis that I realised how close they had become, how likeable the pairing is, and how much I wanted them to prevail.

It also helps that Levy and writer John Gatins don’t anthropomorphise the robots too much. Though Max bonds with their sparring-bot Atom there is no hint that he has sentience. He really is just an avatar for Charlie, and a symbol of Max and Charlie’s relationship — he’s rescued from a pit by Max and is fixed by Charlie before being taught how to fight, like a father would teach a son. It’s not a subtle metaphor but it’s a powerful one. I won’t lie; there comes a point during the final fight when the link between Charlie and Atom becomes more personal, and Max watches his father overcome his self-doubt, that made me blub the happiest tears I had blubbed in quite a while.

And yet the film doesn’t unbalance itself by making Atom a character with agency, which would turn this into Short Circuit 3. The fights are fun but they’re not treated as if the stakes are about the robots. We’re not meant to fret about what happens to Atom — early in the film we’re disabused of the notion that the robots are anything to sympathise with as Charlie loses two bots in quick and humiliating succession. We’re meant to be concerned about the people involved, and as a result what had looked like a silly robot movie in the publicity becomes one of the best popular movies about familial bonds to be released in a long time.

Other smart choices, such as the decision not to make Hope Davis and James Rebhorn’s aunt and uncle characters into out-and-out villains enhance this air of seriousness. There is more dramatic weight here than expected, at least considering how it was marketed as something inconsequential and cynical for kids who just like robots. Ditch your preconceptions about Real Steel before you watch it — and I do urge you to watch it. If you’re anything like me you’ll find yourself craning forward in your seat during the superbly orchestrated finale, and realise you just lost yourself in a robot boxing movie for a moment and you really just don’t care.

Most Frustrating Movie of the Year: Captain America: The First Avenger

As I said in my review of Thor, Marvel are on a hell of a roll right now. If Avengers is even half as good as everyone hopes, it might be too much for this old nerd to handle. At the beginning of last summer Thor appeared to be the wildcard in Marvel’s deck, with Captain America guaranteed big US box office; at least to pundits who foolishly thought the movie would be gung-ho patriotic nonsense. But Marvel are smarter than that, and its international box office doesn’t reflect the care they put into making it universally appealing. Thor won out, and in the process overshadowed Cap. Maybe other countries were sick of superheroes by that point in the summer season, in which case we can happily add one more thing to the list of Green Lantern‘s crimes.

However, just on the level of its quality as a film, Cap was problematic. Not because it was bad, but because it was almost Marvel’s finest hour. I was horribly conflicted over it, even more so than when watching X-Men: First Class, which squandered its best opportunities before it even got to the screen; a consequence of diluting the potentially amazing Magneto: Nazi Hunter thread with way too much plot. Cap made it to the screen with some brilliance intact but dropped the ball halfway through. Not so much as to ruin the experience completely, but enough to leave me deflated as I walked out of the cinema.

The first half of the movie was fine. Better than fine. Miraculous, even. Until Cap breaks Bucky and the rest of his platoon out of the Red Skull’s factory, I’d argue that Captain America: The First Avenger represents the best thing Marvel has done. Regular readers may recall my common vexation with superhero movies that don’t feature super heroes, merely superpowered people who get into fights with each other. Villainous threats to the public are either ill-defined or non-existent, and often supervillains are only interested in punishing the friends and families of our protagonists; fine on a basic dramatic level, but kinda missing the point of why people like superheroes in the first place.

Captain America, at least in its magnificent first half, might be the primary example of a superhero movie that’s actually about someone who wants to do good. Steve Rogers wants to be a hero more than anything else, and goes through hell to fulfil his dreams. I won’t lie; the sight of Steve Rogers leaping on a grenade and yelling at everyone to run away, or begging Howard Stark’s scientists to finish their experiment on him despite his agony, made me sob happy tears out of my face. There’s very little that stirs me more than pure heroism in movies; in recent times only Kick Ass has revolved around someone who wants to do the right thing no matter the cost.

It gets me right there, and Cap’s sincerity and heroism was exactly what I’ve been waiting for in a superhero movie. It’s also one of the reasons why criticism of Chris Evans’ pitch-perfect work as the titular hero has upset me so much. Critics have complained that he’s boring or muted, apparently not realising that Evans’  portrayal of the quietly heroic Rogers is absolutely spot-on. Longtime fans of the character picked that up immediately, and have quietly noted the silliness of the criticisms; yet more proof, if proof be needed, that mainstream critics are just not qualified to judge this corner of culture.

Evans personifies the stoic righteousness of Captain America, whose sense of duty is as overdeveloped as his muscles, and who takes no pleasure in being a super-soldier. Even though SoC has long been a fan of Evans we fretted that he had too flighty a personality to play someone who is meant to be an inspiration to everyone around him, as Cap is in the comic, and as the country he represents is meant to be to all of the nations in the world. We shouldn’t have doubted. Evans excels as the beacon of hope, virtue and courage. It’s thrilling, terribly underrated work.

That’s not the only success of the first half of the movie. We’re also treated to yet another showstealing turn from Stanley Tucci as Abraham Erskine, whose recognition of Steve’s inherent decency and courage led to even more tears. Tommy Lee Jones and Hayley “Rather Pretty” Atwell were perfectly cast too; great picks by Joe Johnston, who was a perfect choice as director considering his time on fantastical WWII movies Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Rocketeer. The now-traditional Marvel stamp of quality meant every element was an integral part of a greater whole, and an example of gratifying attention to detail, not to mention nods to the comics, like the first shot of Arnim Zola, or the references to Cap’s fight against Hitler. It’s popular moviemaking done right; 100% effort from very smart people.

And then the wheels came off. As soon as Cap is united with Bucky and the Howling Commandos, it all starts to feel a bit hollow. Part of that is the underwhelming villainy of the Red Skull, who spends the first half of the movie growling in labs and the second half getting angry in front of a green screen. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely do their best to create a link between Cap and Red Skull by pushing the idea that the Super-Serum enhances a person’s inner self, turning Steve Rogers into the angelic antithesis of Johann Schmidt’s demon. Nevertheless, coming after Thor‘s resonant hero/villain dynamic between Thor and Loki, Cap suffers in comparison.

It doesn’t help that the final act of the movie has little impact and makes so little sense. The threat that the Red Skull poses to the US is barely described, but apparently at the end he’s flying over to the US with some things that do some stuff that won’t be nice. That’s not enough. We needed a demonstration of some kind of Doomsday device, even though we know he has harnessed the power of the Cosmic Cube and even though demonstrations of Doomsday devices in movies are overdone. Even just a quick shot of Red Skull destroying a city would’ve been enough to enhance the tension at the end. Instead we’re not sure what Cap is sacrificing himself for. As for the logistics of that sacrifice, I’ll let this superb video speak for me:

That’s bad enough, but as the movie zips through the war in a lengthy montage, we only get a sense of what Cap meant to the world; a problem as we head toward The Avengers. Apparently that will mostly focus around Cap, so there’s a chance his legacy will make more sense, but as of this moment, we don’t get enough Cap vs Nazis, and certainly not enough of the Howling Commandos. That’s the price we pay for that superb first hour. Minimal Peggy Carter, minimal Dum Dum Dugan and co. If we knew they’d be back in a sequel it wouldn’t feel like we just got shortchanged but how can they return? To have spent so little time with these great characters is like a kind of punishment.

It’s not all bad. That first hour is amazing, and the second hour has numerous pleasures too: quick but heartening glimpses of proactive badass Peggy Carter, Bucky’s “death” (surely a Winter Soldier set-up), a couple of nifty action scenes. Even more pleasing is how this movie acts as the connective tissue for the Marvel universe so far, with Yggdrasil, the Stark Expo and the Super Serum bringing the other movies together; a revisit to Louis Leterrier’s Hulk was far more pleasurable after having seen Captain America.

But it could have been Marvel’s Superman – The Movie. Part of me hopes for a 6-hour directors cut with loads of extra action scenes, and maybe a cameo from Namor, and a scene where the Red Skull’s version of the Afrika Corps is repelled by an African nation with access to incredible technology. But that’s not to be, and until Avengers or Cap 2 comes along to show me what comes next, I’m going to feel a bit deflated when I think of this, and what could — and should — have been.

“Greatest Gulf Between Critical Opinion and the Feelings of SoC” Movies of the Year: Tyrannosaur / Snowtown

After swimming through the grimy water of Innaritu’s Biutiful SoC took the opportunity to have a good old moan about miserabilist movies, that sub-section of cinema that mistakes the skin of the kitchen-sink genre for the meat. The consequence of this error of judgement, other than to present us with an unpleasant flagellatory experience, is to delude the makers into thinking that they are providing some kind of education. This glimpse into horror, they seem to say, will make you a better person. You’ll understand humanity more for seeing how the other half lives. And I shall bask in this glow as a brave chronicler of the lowest circles of our man-made hell.

SoC thinks that this is absolute horseshit. Life can be cruel, no doubt. There are people out there suffering terribly, in lives of quiet desperation, but making movies about this kind of experience is a problematic exercise that can’t honestly capture what a bad life is like. It’s a noble intention, but inescapably patronising, even if the story told is directly analogous to something genuinely experienced. Too often it’s a contrived distillation of the worst of life presented as a real document of what it is to exist in the modern world, and as such is fundamentally dishonest.

Of course all narrative is a mixture of translated truth and opportunistic lies, but this is a different kind of falsehood, one that insults the people who do suffer terribly through lives of squalor and unhappiness. They also represent a negation of the human spirit. Though many of these stories feature some kind of redemption (as Tyrannosaur does to a certain extent, and Precious before it), there’s often a sense that until that moment there is absolutely nothing that makes life worth living. The woes that are heaped on such characters can often reach comical levels of misfortune; the number of vile events that stack up by the end of Tyrannosaur are almost unintentionally funny, if you haven’t bought into it by that point.

I say almost; any possibility of laughing had been smacked out of me by the time writer-director Paddy Considine was done slathering his movie in depressing circumstance, but the crucial thing is that I didn’t buy into his film for even a second. Though I have no idea what this film meant to him, or whether it represents something of his life, it’s curious that he chose to make this as his first project, in much the same way that Gary Oldman and Tim Roth chose to make Nil By Mouth and The War Zone respectively. That’s an odd trilogy of gritty grey misery right there.

Is this penance for living a reasonably lucky life, or guilt over escaping lives of desperation (I know that Oldman wanted to dramatise the effects that alcoholism had on families, after experiencing something similar in his own life)? I’m not about to judge their motives, or the reasoning behind Justin Kurzel and Shaun Grant’s decision to make Snowtown – the dramatisation of Australia’s most notorious serial killing spree – but I will happily say that these movies are oppressively unpleasant for reasons that don’t justify this approach.

I don’t trust Tyrannosaur as a depiction of real life, and I don’t think anything can be learned by picking at the sordid details of John Bunting’s crimes in Snowtown other than to say people who are disenfranchised may say or do unspeakable things. That’s a message that can arguably be justified in terms of fiction – I’d defend Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or Man Bites Dog, especially as their larger point was to question the complicity of the audience in the violence shown or not shown onscreen – but when it’s something real, a line is crossed.

So can stories about the struggles of the unfortunate, unemployed, unloved working classes be handled at all, if I were to have my way? I’ve got more time for tales of sadness that either tell a story other than “look at how totally shit I’ve imagined life can be”: Andrea Arnold’s three wonderful full-length films trade in some of the tropes of miserabilist cinema but she’s also telling stories about vivid, interesting, mysterious characters, who experience more than just a hundred gallons of bad-luck-bukkake. There is also the matter of her superior artistry, but that’s a viewpoint I don’t really have the vocabulary to explain, and I’m sure someone will have a coherent and convincing argument for Kursel’s washed-out visuals and Considine’s choice of an oxtail-soup palette.

The bitter pill of modern realism can also be sweetened with genre touches: Attack the Block‘s message about the effect of disenfranchisement on modern youth was rendered more powerful by being handled as the metaphorical subtext of a sci-fi horror movie, and the replicants of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are more memorable for being tragic slaves treated with an exaggerated disdain that the working classes suffer now (“Skinjob” as the next decade’s “Chav”?). John Carpenter’s They Live shone a light on the plight of the homeless in LA in a way that very other few movies have, and its allegorical treatment of the victimisation of the poor by our heartless corporate overlords has struck a chord that very few miserabilist movies ever could.

This diet of glum social commentary, served up like worthy gruel, is no good for you, I’m telling you. It’s sad that these two movies hit me in this way, almost one after the other. Except for good work from Daniel Henshall as the charismatic leader of the murderous gang in Snowtown, and the exceptional, award-worthy performance by Olivia Colman in Tyrannosaur, there was nothing else in either movie to keep me watching once the semi-parodic roll-call of social-realist images began to pour past my eyes like gloopy misery-treacle.

I’m not asking for every movie to be some kind of Chris Tookey-placating floofy feel-good marshmallow, but I’d ask that a work of art at least address that life is a tapestry of feelings, that it’s not all misery (and no, the one happy scene in Tyrannosaur doesn’t count as it’s set during a wake, a choice that made me wonder if Considine was actually taking the piss). As much as I regret that the lives of the poor and weak in the world are under-represented in the media, the thought of them being treated as little more than Dickensian victims to be stared at and pitied is even worse. Arnold gives her characters agency and stories to live within, and Kurzel and (for the most part) Considine don’t.

A lot of folks I know and respect liked one or both of these movies, and I don’t doubt they derived some genuine… well, not pleasure, but inner appreciation for these movies. Let my criticisms here not stand as criticisms of their viewpoint, or dismissal of their criteria for success in a story. But know this; if there was ever a kind of movie that would be SoC’s Kryptonite, these represent the most shocking examples, that sucked the heart out of me and left nothing in its place but a suspicion that I had been duped. I hope I never see even a frame from either of them again.

Movie That Would’ve Found A Place In My Top Ten If It Wasn’t For That Goddamn Third Act: The Adjustment Bureau

Nothing else released this year annoyed me as much as this, George Nolfi’s directorial debut and adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story. Nothing else bothered me and niggled at my brain as much as this during 2011. Total abject failures are one thing, and I added those to my worst movies list. Good movies that fall slightly short still have a chance of getting onto my best films list, as seen with the lower-numbered inclusions like Tintin and Kung Fu Panda 2. But this film, which mostly succeeded, just couldn’t find a home. And so it shall be placed here, for me to fawn over and rail against simultaneously.

Romance in sci-fi is often badly handled. Good examples that come to mind include Han and Leia in the Star Wars movies and Deckard and Rachel in Blade Runner. A quick Twitter survey came up with Neo and Trinity (thanks, @ericthehamster), Tom and Izzi in The Fountain and Wall-E / Eve (gracias @cockbongo), Kyle MacLachlan and his own fringe from Dune (cheers @nathanditum), Sean Connery’s red nappy and The Eternals from Zardoz (merci Masticateur), and Bud and Lindsey Brigman in The Abyss (Xie xie, @Cowfields).

Then I was reminded of Eddie and Emily Jessup from Altered States (how could I forget that? Sorry @catvincent), Chris/Kris Kelvin and Rheya/Hari in the two versions of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (spasiba, @FilmLandEmpire), Tom Cruise and himself (not sure if the lovely @KitCaless meant Tom in Minority Report or War of the Worlds), Logan and Jessica in Logan’s Run (nicely done, @douglasmillan), and Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor in The Terminator (well picked, @SparklyPaws). All fine choices, and gratefully received.

Mostly, though, if you look at the sheer number of movies made, the memorable choices are pretty limited. And not just in SF. Romcoms of recent years have made a hash of representing actual romantic feelings with any kind of verity. Just shoving a wild-eyed and panicky Katherine Heigl into a movie with some rictus-grinned B-lister does not a relationship make, and so whenever a film comes along that features any kind of chemistry between the leads, it’s worth beating a path to see it.

In recent years I can only think of Mila Kunis paired with Justin Timberlake in Friends With Benefits and Jason Segal in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Drew Barrymore paired with Justin Long in Going The Distance and Hugh Grant in Music and Lyrics, as truly convincing partnerships between people who seem to enjoy each other’s company. The stakes in these movies mean something because we want these guys to stay together. I’ve haven’t cared if J-Lo gets together with the male lead in a movie since Out of Sight, and I doubt I ever will again.

Which is why The Adjustment Bureau has stayed in my head all year. The relationship between David Norris (Matt Damon) and Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) is arguably the most convincing and endearing love match in a movie for years. Blunt’s natural energy and Damon’s easy charm combine to create a pairing that seems perfect. George Nolfi has to be congratulated for bringing these two together, and for letting Blunt go wild with her off-kilter charm. It’s been a miserable experience watching almost every director squander her charisma. Adjustment Bureau deserved a place on SoC’s best movies list just for giving us that burst of unfiltered Blunt. (For the record, I’ll happily admit that I’m a chronic Bluntman. So keep that in mind.)

By placing that easy, funny and flirtatious relationship at the heart of his SF paranoia tale, Nolfi is already streets ahead of most other filmmakers, as the stakes instantly become raised. After years of waiting for a really likeable pair to show up onscreen, the thought of them not getting together is genuinely troubling. We root for them as Nolfi cleverly casts his Dickian tale as a parable for all thwarted relationships. A lot of people watching will have had a “What if…” romance in their past, and by casting those past failures as a matter of cosmic significance, Nolfi flatters the audience and reinterprets our past dalliances as mistakes erased by God.

It’s such a versatile idea that it should have become a universally accepted trope, like the Deja Vu explanation in The Matrix. Nolfi even goes so far as to draw parallels between political spin and the micromanagement of the Bureau; a nice little touch. However, even though Nolfi creates two thirds of a brilliant, affecting movie from Dick’s original idea, there’s nowhere to go by the end, no way for our heroes to resolve the situation, which sees them kept apart through divine intervention. Nolfi tries to fix this problem by giving David and Elise a real corporeal threat in the form of Thompson (menacing Terence Stamp), but there’s no way for them to combat that without the help of Mitchell (Anthony Mackie, fantastic as ever), who gives David a chance to do something.

Unfortunately, that “something” would see their lives ruined; his intervention, though inspired by his frustration with the Adjustment system, doesn’t really have an endgame. David’s final gamble should have seen him lobotomised. No one can predict that it would turn out okay but it does, with a very literal deus ex machina. It’s such a monumental cheat that it undoes all of the good work previously done by Nolfi. It also doesn’t help that there is a long scene of Mitchell prepping David for his plan, but in the end David just ignores it; obviously this was to give him more agency in the final minutes, but it also wastes our time.

And what else does the ending give us? A lot of running. There’s no other way to finish the story so Nolfi just makes our heroes run around a lot, but he hasn’t figured out a way to visualise the supernatural threat, or where they are spatially. The door-jumping technology is cleverly used earlier in the movie; John Slattery’s frustration with the tangle of subspace jumps through downtown is a lovely light touch that helps the audience look past the reality-bending confusion of Nolfi’s conceit, but in the third act there’s no sense of menace or danger. It’s just running and running and running. Maybe if Nolfi added some kind of abstract visualisation of the labyrinth of doors and subspace jumps, it might have worked. Instead all of the tension created by that point evaporates.

As for that menace, it has to come at the expense of the good-natured air in the first half. Richardson, so well-played by as the perpetually annoyed John Slattery, is such a fun antagonist that it’s a huge loss when he gets sidelined. I understand that the threat needed to be amped up after David and Elise hook up for the third time, but to lose such a richly developed character is a crime. Once he’s sidelined and the chirpy, good-natured air of the first two-thirds is replaced by a necessary but unavoidably grumpy earnestness, my enthusiasm for the film began to wilt, and by the end, when a magic wand is waved and everything turns out okay, I was done.

Does this movie deserve to be pilloried the way it was by some mainstream critics? Absolutely not. Does it deserve to be complained about by a shlub like me with a very narrowly-defined sense of what constitutes a success? Of course! Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t think the movie counts as a failure at all. It’s a not-success, and that’s arguably worse. If it had stuck the landing this could have been a huge commercial and critical hit, and could live on beyond 2011 as an ingenious allegory for romantic strife. That it didn’t is a crying shame. Nevertheless, it remains essential viewing. Anyone considering making a romantic drama or comedy in the future should be forced to watch this first. It may fall short of greatness, but its representation of love between David and Elise should become the benchmark for movie romance. For that, I’m eternally grateful to all involved.

“Is it over?” begs the reader. But no, I’m still not done. :-(

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: Miscellaneous TV Gubbins of the Year

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It’s not over! I feel like a horror movie antagonist popping out of hiding ten minutes after the credits have finished rolling, but yes, the Caruso TV Awards have one last gasp before I retire them until the end of the year, when I will be almost as fanatical about the best and worst movies of 2011. This post should have been done at the start of the week but the 2011 London Film Festival kept me very busy, with one movie shutting down my brain for a couple of days (thanks for the mental shutdown, Take Shelter). This post is the first large blip on an EKG after my brain comes back to life. Enjoy.

Best New Show: Game of Thrones

Longtime readers will know that I have a habit of getting inordinately excited about big summer movies, to the extent that I can be bouncing up and down with anticipation years in advance (I’m looking at you, The Avengers. No, seriously, I’ve rewatched your trailer 288 times). TV is a different thing. The uncritical part of me will look forward to, say, a new Terminator movie or a second try at Daredevil just because of my affection for the franchise or character no matter how boneheaded it might turn out to be (though I hope David Slade can resurrect the DD franchise), but it’s rare that TV shows will be based around them.

Yes, a new version of Hawaii Five-O or Charlie’s Angels will pop up from time to time, but I’m not going to be excited about them in the same way, because when network TV pilfers from itself it betrays the dearth of imagination that critics feel is most rife during the summer film season. These shows are often contemptuous of the audience and cranked out like story-sausage, as brilliantly argued here by Linda Holmes. Who on earth set their TiVo with a quickened pulse when they realised there was gonna be yet another attempt to defibrillate the long-dead corpse of Knight Rider?

This is one of the things that has contributed to the renaissance of TV drama. Original dramas are being created all the time, and while many will be inspired by books or films or historical events, or be created to glom onto the success of some other show, much of the time these shows are distinct and arrive with no expectations. I have a pretty good idea of what The Avengers will be like — condensed awesomanium, of course — but I don’t really know what Boss or Homeland or Revenge will be like, to name three critically acclaimed new shows from the new TV season. I look forward to watching them, but I’m not chewing my knuckles.

This wasn’t the case with Game of Thrones. Though I’d only had a year’s worth of exposure to George R.R. Martin’s magnificent fantasy cycle A Song of Ice and Fire, the wait for HBO’s adaptation was nigh-unbearable, partly because they kept so much of it under wraps for so long. At least it felt that way. I recall being so excited about it on the day before it aired on UK’s Sky Atlantic that it disrupted my sleep. Ridiculous, yes, but this passion wasn’t unique. It’s doubtful that anyone who loves the books was agnostic about the show. All it had to do to be instantly amazing was not fuck up, and the pre-aired clips shown on the HBO site proved that the look and feel and language of the books was intact.

Just getting it right would have been enough, but Game of Thrones was so much more than just a competent adaptation. It was vivid and pacy and funny and dark and exciting, building such a head of steam that the last three episodes eclipsed almost everything else shown on TV this year. It was spot on from the very first beautiful shot of the snowy North, but it kept giving us little treats throughout: the brilliantly staged fight in the Eyrie; the superb casting (bringing in Charles Dance as Tywin Lannister made me finally like Charles Dance); the chance to finally see the grasslands of the Dothraki Sea, and King’s Landing, and the dragon heads of the Red Keep, and the Twins standing on either side of the Trident.

To those who loved the books, attempting to convert the doubters was surprisingly easy. The fatuous but compelling comparison made by the showrunners (“The Sopranos in Middle-Earth”) was enough to tempt some to give it a try. As expected, the end of the first episode, with Bran in the tower, was exactly the right kind of hook to keep viewers coming back, and draw new viewers in as those who gave the show a try dropped their bacon sandwiches en masse. Just by using GRRM’s superb storytelling tricks, the audience grew and became more fervent as each new bombshell dropped, as the ruthless became purely evil, the virtuous died, and the rest of the characters became more complex and unpredictable.

One of the great joys of experiencing this glorious success was seeing the enthusiasm for this show grow almost exponentially as the series progressed. My Twitter feed, which already included several very happy ASOIAF fans, became filled with sceptics turned rabid believers as this narrative behemoth powered toward its stunning finale. “Fucking Joffrey!” became a rallying cry, memes like Tyrion slapping the young prince and Stupid Ned Stark proliferated, and longtime fans chewed their lips in wait for the end of episode nine, with THAT ending, knowing that a few million more people would experience the same extreme denial that we did. One good friend of the blog had an epic mental meltdown on Facebook. That’s the beauty of ASOIAF.

So basically, all HBO did was take a beloved and brilliantly written book, get two big fans (D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, who is now forgiven for his involvement in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) to write and oversee it, throw a shitload of money and talent at it, promote the shit out of it with a perfectly judged drip of information, and wait for every passionate creative individual involved in the show to pay tribute to that story’s ferocious narrative drive. They built it, and we did indeed come, in droves. It’s that simple. Just make something awesome. Commit to something of enormous scope. Don’t hesitate or cavil or second guess. Just be bold, and the audience will love you for it. Thank you to everyone who made this first, incredible series. It was a blast.

Worst New Show: Camelot

Recently a TV critic asked me why I watch so much TV; it’s troubling, in a way, if someone who watches TV for a living thinks I’m watching too much. The easiest answer is that I enjoy it, especially when it’s good but even when it’s bad, because as I pointed out at really really really insane length a couple of weeks ago, there are lessons to be learned by watching anything closely enough. That means committing to some shows that are truly dire in order to see whether it can be turned around. Parks and Recreation started out with a really poor first season but has since become essential viewing. The same thing happened with The Vampire Diaries; what looked like Twilight-lite (yes, that bad) is now one of the highlights of the TV week. Even if something bad doesn’t improve much, surely it’s only fair to complete a journey to fully understand the directions you’ve been given.

But SoC has to confess, this award for Worst New Show is being given to Starz’ Camelot without reaching the final destination. I’m sorry. I tried. I tried so hard to finish it, and put this post off all week so I could try to get through the last four episodes of the short ten-episode-season, but it’s impossible. Something this boring and aimless is like an affront to the viewer, and all I can do is bitch about it from a position of 20% ignorance. Feel free to dismiss my complaints, but enduring this glacially-paced monstrosity felt like a battle for my soul. This morning it took three hours to watch a single episode as everything in the house distracted me from the endless, dreary conversations conducted in underlit rooms. I’ve got better things to do.

Nevertheless, Camelot was already number one on my bad shows list after just a couple of episodes, so finishing the series was nothing more than some kind of bizarre flagellation. Longtime readers will know that I hold Joseph Fiennes in the highest low regard; his LOADED performance in FlashForward is justifiably legendary. They will also know of my war against Torchwood, whose first two years were overseen by Chris Chibnall. Camelot united these two creatives, which drove SoC into paroxysms of joy. Within a few minutes our expectations were met; the first episode of Camelot was as shambolic and absurd as we had hoped, and the next few weeks did little to dispell that. However, while Torchwood was a hysterical abomination, this was merely dull.

And that’s the problem. I’ll admit, it’s incredibly mean-spirited of me to hope that a new show will be bad in a certain way so that I can enjoy mocking it (see also: The CW’s Ringer, which started out ridiculous but now seems to be settling down, unfortunately). However that’s preferable to the miasmatic tedium that surrounds this ill-conceived take on the Arthurian myth. Even after a seemingly infinite number of adaptations of the Arthurian myth, there is still magic in this tale. It’s one of the greatest stories of all time, one that contains so many elements compatible with Joseph Campbell’s concept of the eternal narrative it’s possible that the story will never die. And yet Camelot does its best to smother it with a pillow made of gloom and worthy realism.

Now, that’s fine. A deconstruction of the Arthurian myth is a perfectly valid approach, and though many objected to Jerry Bruckheimer, Antoine Fuqua and David Franzoni’s “historically accurate” version, I thought it was an interesting idea undone by some pretty weak execution. It helps that the Clive Owen version is so different from previous interpretations that it almost stands alone; part of the novelty of it is seeing how the myth and the (questionable) realism crossover. Camelot sometimes feels like this is its goal, but it muddies the water by introducing anti-realist elements like Merlin and Morgan Le Fay’s use of magic. It’s down-to-earth and fantastical at the same time, and that’s a big part of the problem.

It’s a fantasy that’s not allowed to be fantastical because that would clash with the realism. It’s not totally realistic because that would stop them being fantastical. The result is an awkward mix of the two, with Merlin’s constant complaining about how much his magical powers make him sad unfortunately setting the tone for the show. Chris Chibnall has stated that Camelot is meant to be a political take on the myth, a contemporary retelling that uses modern-day idealism as its basis (possibly taking JFK’s “Camelot” as its starting point in an amusing reversal). However this faux-seriousness means every opportunity the show has to spread its wings is curtailed in case it undercuts the message. In short, Camelot hates fun, and won’t let you have dessert until  you’ve finished all the vegetables.

This isn’t the only time Chibnall has done this. The very worst episodes of Torchwood are the ones that profess to be making a serious point about morality or modern life. Who can forget Countrycide, which dared to take on the very serious subject of rampant cannibalism in the north of England? Or Meat, which opened a window on the depraved and cruel world of the carnivore by dramatising the fate of poor Spacey the Space Whale, a creature that is kept alive in order to be carved up over and over again for meat, just like in a real abattoir with real cows. See also his ponderous Silurian episodes in Doctor Who that belaboured a point about the failure of diplomacy between two intractable opponents over two self-important hours.

These berserk attempts at dramatising serious issues with untenable fantasy comparisons betray the showrunner’s belief that a point MUST BE MADE at all times. Bollocks to fun; drama is here to teach us stuff, and must not allow for any levity or liveliness. At its worst, Sorkin’s West Wing was the preachiest and most condescending show on TV that wasn’t Studio 60, but dammit, in those early seasons that show was hugely entertaining. That bitter medicine went down easily because West Wing teemed with event, its purpose greased by sassy dialogue and vibrant performances. Camelot‘s seemingly endless walk-and-talks are conducted in the gloom of portentousness; it’s an interminable lecture about good and evil conducted by a depressed professor.

This is before we get into the ill-defined characters, the lack of event (a sub-plot about Morgan taking the place of Igraine to foment discord between Arthur’s boring knights takes most of the season to kick in), the poor production values, the omnipresent exposition, the weak performances from much of the cast, the sense that the season arc is being made up on the fly, with new characters constantly introduced while old ones are sidelined far too quickly. Worst of all, the central narrative line of the series seems to be about the illicit love between Arthur and Guinevere. Perhaps with some chemistry between the actors this would have seemed compelling, but… actually no. There was nothing that could save it. The show is held up by string instead of cables of steel, and as a result whenever Camelot needs to rely on this wet romance for narrative strength, it collapses.

While it’s unfair to criticise Camelot for what it’s not, it unfortunately exists in a world that has given us Game of Thrones and Spartacus. The narrative complexity and ambition of GoT shows Camelot up as the weak gruel it is, trouncing it in every way. I was willing to concede that this might be attributable to differing budgets, but GoT — which was shot in Ireland and Malta — cost about $50-60m for ten episodes while the budget for Camelot was $7m an episode, and that was only shot in Ireland. Of course those figures could well be unreliable, but the fact is that while GoT has a sweeping, epic scope, Camelot feels like it’s set in one dingy room. It’s not lack of money that holds it back; it’s failure of ambition.

The comparisons to Spartacus are even more damning. Chibnall and the rest of the Camelot team are under no obligation to emulate that show, of course, but it might have been prudent to see how vibrant and endlessly entertaining Steven DeKnight’s unrestrained TV classic can be. I’m not just talking about the infamous Fighting and Fucking formula either. There isn’t a single boring moment in Spartacus‘ run to date; every scene and line and performance adds up to a greater whole. There are few shows as pleasurable to watch as Spartacus; it’s endlessly entertaining, surprising, and beautifully presented. And it’s cheaper than Camelot too; the budget is about $5m per episode thanks to New Zealand tax breaks and creative use of effects.

Camelot wasn’t doomed by money or competition or audience antipathy or even the scheduling difficulties that made its stars unavailable for another series. It was doomed because it was the opposite of fun. You can put that down to hesitation or lack of ambition or muddled intent. What matters is that sitting through each episode felt like swimming through quick-set concrete. Still, even that’s not what makes SoC angriest. Has anyone heard anything about the King Arthur movie that was to be based on a treatment by Warren Ellis? This is the last I heard of it. There are a million possible reasons why the project has disappeared, but if this dull-as-ditchwater reimagining of the myth contributed to that movie’s descent into Development Hell, everyone involved has earned my eternal wrath.

Best Pilot: The Walking Dead

When I say Game of Thrones was the only show of the year to get me pre-excited, I’m omitting the AMC adaptation of The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Tony Moore which, for a while there, was the biggest game in town for horror and comic nerds. I was infected too; even though the comic leaves me cold, the thought of a zombie TV show helmed by a horror movie old-timer as Frank Darabont was good enough to raise expectations through the roof. And before anyone calls into question the use of the term “old-timer”, I remember seeing Chuck Russell’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Blob back at the old ABC in Walsall in ’87 and ’88 respectively, and both were co-written by Darabont. I was a teenager then, so I’m sorry, but that makes him a goddamn horror movie old-timer and that’s that.

Both of those movies thrilled me when I was a TEENAGER OH GOD I’M SO OLD, and The Mist blew my mind a few years back, so I figured The Walking Dead was in good hands. Now, most of the current opinion of the show revolves around the latter half of the first season, which disappointed most people, and the start of the second season hasn’t exactly thrilled many people either. The consensus seems to be that this was a wasted opportunity, and one that might become even more frustrating with AMC cutting the show’s budget and driving Darabont to quit. Glen Mazzara runs things now, which has caused concern. I haven’t seen his Starz show Crash, which was widely mocked and hated by some critics, but I wouldn’t want to blame Mazzara — a long-running producer and writer on The Shield — as he ran a TV show based on the world’s worst ever movie. Only an evil tree can grow from a bad seed.

As for Darabont, he may have his detractors, but as someone who risked life and limb to see The Blob not once but twice at the local fleapit, I’m definitely in the love camp. I mean, did you experience the despair that gushes out of that photo I linked to earlier? That was some 1950s kitchen sink bullshit, I tell you. You don’t know what it was like going to the Walsall ABC on a Saturday night during the 80s. You can buy Kevlar at your local Asda nowadays but back then it was impossible to find it anywhere. It’s one thing to shoot angry looks over your shoulder whenever some clown at the recent London Film Festival arrives 25 minutes into a movie and hits you in the back of the head with his Moleskine-filled satchel, but try doing that to 300 hormone-fuelled Tasmanian Devils screeching with derisive laughter and pelting you with Smarties. You have to be devout to go through something like that once, let alone twice.

Anyway, forget about the torrent of bullshit and bad blood that has poured over the audience since the pilot first aired, and try to remember it untouched by controversy. Watching it again for this post, I was struck once more by just how bold and beautiful it is. How many other TV shows are willing to depict the end of the world in such stark and uncompromising terms? How many other TV directors would leave so many long, dialogue-free scenes in their show? Has any other show started with the hero shooting a child in the head? This is Darabont’s favourite trick, it seems, as kids die memorably in The Mist and The Blob. Perhaps that’s what every show needs. Maybe more people would watch The Good Wife or Community if more zombie kids got shot during the cold open.

What kind of people are we that we would watch The Walking Dead in droves just to see if any little girls will be blasted to death this week? Obviously, we’re people who like the fact that for a while there seemed to be a new show that would actually put its characters through weekly horror movie hell just for our ghoulish entertainment, and the thrill of that possibility was enough to make this AMC’s biggest hit. Darabont’s assured handling of the first episode was good enough that I’d put this hour of TV above most of the tiresome zombie movies of the past few years. Setpieces like Grimes’ walk through the hospital, or his ride into a seemingly deserted Atlanta were riveting and terrifying, but mostly they were made with care, attention to detail, and the courage to take things slow. Darabont treated the subject with deadly seriousness, and we responded with instant admiration.

After that the series became less interesting, sillier, and confused in tone, leading to a desperately underwhelming finale at the CDC. A real shame, because the first couple of episodes were so good it looked like we were in for a real treat; the second episode was very strong too, with its Excellence Quotient bolstered by 1000 Michael-Rooker-As-A-Loathsome-Redneck points. Hopefully at some point this show will get back on track with or without the input of Darabont, but even if it doesn’t we still have this remarkable exercise in sustained tension and atmospherics, impeccably performed by all, with special SoC love for Andrew Lincoln and Lennie James representing for the UK.

Worst Pilot: Blue Bloods

Earlier this year BSkyB launched Sky Atlantic, its secret weapon in the battle to win over the middle-class liberals who had resisted giving money to the monolithic Murdoch machine. After scoffling up every prestige show from the US that it could, it promised a roster of TV shows that not only included all HBO shows, but also Mad Men. How could the bottle-of-Merlot-a-night crowd cope without their beloved Mad Men? It was also a great way for Murdoch, Tempter, Son of Perdition, to strike yet another mean-spirited blow against his PSB enemy. “Screw you BBC”, it screamed with all of those adverts featuring Don Draper and his glass of booze, “all you get now is European dramas, and no one wants to watch those. Erm…”

Sky Atlantic’s first night promised the first episode of Boardwalk Empire, and numerous documentaries bragging about the sets and Martin Scorsese and, er, the sets, and the costumes, and that Steve Buscemi. This generated insanely high expectations that no show could have matched (well, Game of Thrones could have, but that’s just my partisanship talking). Nevertheless, this was a statement of intent. This channel was SERIOUS. It was the home of QUALITY DRAMA. It was worth the Sky subscription all on its own, even though daytime was filled with repeats of X-Files, thirtysomething and Star Trek: Voyager. This was where the best of the best could be found. They could have called it Sky Emmywinners, it was so loaded with quality.

And so, all of those people who tuned in to watch Boardwalk Empire hung around to watch the next show on the roster; Blue Bloods. To a UK audience who might not be as aware of its network, non-cable pedigree, this might have seemed like another prestige drama, just one that stars Wahlberg the Lesser and Tom Selleck and his Amazing Utility Mustache, instead of Buscemi, Shannon, Whigham, Pitts and DABNEY COLEMAN FTW. Sky Atlantic was not in the business of explaining that while Boardwalk Empire was funded by subscription and could make an effort to be distinctive without alienating its targeted audience, Blue Bloods was a commercial show dependent on advertising revenue and would therefore not offer a similar experience for the audience. To those who hadn’t read up about it, it was as if these wildly different shows were being treated as equal.

Let’s put it this way; Sky1 shows lots of commercial stuff, but Blue Bloods isn’t even good enough to be shown there, let alone this new prestige channel. I’m not saying it’s bad because it’s not as good as Boardwalk Empire; I’m saying it’s bad because it’s awful, and awful because it’s bad. It’s so awful. It’s so bad. It’s AWFUL! AWFULAWFULBADAWFUL. It was almost amusing to see UK newspaper reviews the next day. Some critics seemed to express great befuddlement at the gulf in quality between the two shows, having fallen for Sky Atlantic’s trick. SoC has gone on the record as saying that Boardwalk Empire was a disappointment, but compared to the pilot of Blue Bloods, the first episode of Boardwalk Empire was the entire first season of Deadwood and fifth season of The Shield combined.

How bad is the exposition in this show? So bad that The Soup, which is usually content to focus its derision on terrible reality shows, featured a long clip from the beginning of the pilot in which the assorted members of the Reagan family (!!!!) just name each other and explain their relationships with each other. Never – NEVER – have I seen anything as clunky as this. There is no attempt to wait for this information to be parceled out through the rest of the episode. In fear of losing the audience before the second ad break, we’re bombarded with clumsily-acted meteors of information. Yes, there are a lot of central characters to introduce, but exposition this ugly just screams of desperation.

Mind you, they have a lot to get through in this first week. Not long after the clumsy download of names and relationships we see a young girl abducted, and not only that, she’s diabetic and needs an insulin shot. Even the addition of a ticking clock at the bottom of the screen would seem less manipulative than this. An abducted child is a staple cop show plotline (CSI: Miami has had several), but it’s usually reserved for sweeps week, and an audience that has seen way too many of these shows can usually sleep through them as they rarely offer anything new. This is no exception.

We get emotive pleas by hysterical parents, growled lines by impatient macho cops as they race around the city, and intolerant comments about characters who don’t represent the most basic church-going football-watching red-blooded mainstream “norm” (here it’s a doll collector, who is the recipient of several sneering comments from Wahlberg 2.0). Blue Bloods isn’t about to delay its dive into the pool of mediocrity; it’s gleefully skinny-dipping by the time most lowest-common-denominator ratings-chasing shows would be bending down to undo their shoelaces.

Once the kid is found midway through the episode, things get worse. Wahlberg is such a maverick cop he had to torture the vile, gloating kidnapper to find out the kid’s location, and this means evidence is inadmissable blah blah you know the drill by now. This automatically leads into a debate about the use of coercive interrogation techniques (AKA toiletboarding); it’s the kind of thing added for some topicality, but this show has a new twist. Fascist cop Wahlberg’s sister is wet liberal lawyer Bridget Moynahan, meaning this debate can be conducted between siblings who don’t get on.

It’s like a power-up bonus for this overused scenario. It comes at the expense of logic, sadly. Having Moynahan represent her dick brother to the DA is so improbable that the scene comes to a close with her pointing out that she would have to recuse herself from the case if it went any further. And who comes out best in the argument? Do you really think a show about a family of cops that already features a scene where both journalists and bloggers are treated like obstructive shit-sculptures by morals-fetishist Tom Selleck is going to approach this subject with any restraint? Wahlberg dismisses Moynahan’s complaints with ease and contempt.

The scene is even framed with her sitting down and Wahlberg looming over her (no mean feat; he’s about three feet shorter than her, by my calculations); he’s the boss and she’s the subordinate, wasting her time with woolly ideas about human rights while he’s out banging the heads of cartoonishly evil paedophiles against the side of a stinky toilet because might makes right. You can practically hear the capital-punishment supporting patriarchs nodding sagely in their comforters while wifey washes the dishes like a woman should.

This debate continues later over a family dinner (where the main course is yet more exposition) during which Wahlberg asks Moynahan if she would feel the same way about protecting the rights of paedophiles if her daughter was abducted. She, of course, has no response to this, other than to spell out that she hates paedophiles just as much as he does, just in case the audience thinks that defending the rights of all citizens to a fair trial is the same as joining NAMBLA. This isn’t a reasoned debate; it’s a loaded argument for the abolition of human rights and the rule of law designed to give the right-wing audience something to fap over, with the fact that seriously I’m not kidding the family really is actually called THE REAGAN FAMILY being the NRA-supporting cherry on top.

The show oozes with disdain for moral equivalence or reasoned thought. A Judge Dredd TV show would be less aggressive in its promotion of strict force, though of course the intention there would be satirical. Blue Bloods is Judge Dredd without the jokes. Or the helmet. Or the futuristic setting. Or anything, really. But you get my point. The success of resolutely unliberal shows like CSI: Miami, and reports like this one showing that the most successful shows on US TV are watched by Republicans, could well have influenced the ideological positioning by the network, who happily loaded the pilot with brusque manly men, submissive women (please don’t tell me Moynahan’s lawyer is anything other than a Strong-Female-Character-In-Name-Only), and black and white villainy.

As the show progressed it introduced a season arc about the corrupt Blue Templar organisation within the NYPD, so the water did get muddied as it went along, but an hour of this fascist-pandering horseshit was enough for SoC. Which is a shame, as dialogue as bad as, “We need to find this kid. Alive,” or, “You know, there’s no shame in talking about what happened in Iraq,” would have kept us happily chuckling until Torchwood: Miracle Day came along.

And that’s that for another year. Thanks to everyone who has commented on, liked, or retweeted these long long articles. I’m now going to go soak my fingertips in water for a few hours.

Summer Movie Poll Madness

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England just got substantially less green and pleasant. Temperatures have plummeted, and I’m having to wander around the house in a pair of warm slackerpants (and yes, in case you were wondering, I am a nerd). There’s no use denying it. Even though the local cinemas are clogged with top-of-the-line blockbusting audience-pleasers — such as The Soloist, Surrogates, and the Fame remake which made critics pine for the Alan Parker original in defiance of all that is holy — it’s fair to say the Summer Movie Season (aka My Christmas) is now over. And what an exciting time it was! Four million romantic comedies came out and actually did well, everything seemed to be 3D all of a sudden, and Michael Bay became the most hated film director on Earth, an event which apparently annoyed previous title holder Roman Polanski so much he gave himself up to the rozzers just to remind everyone what an asshole he is.

summer

Compared to last summer, it was a pretty underwhelming few months, with the odd high spot and pleasant surprise tucked away. Nevertheless, there was at least one stone-cold masterpiece, and even flat and kinda pointless movies often had something to recommend them (I’m looking at you, Meryl). There was also the occasional spectacular failure, the sort of disastrous and ill-thought-out fuck-up that gives the Summer Movie Season its bad reputation. So, in the interest of collating an overview of what people loved and hated this summer, I have begun two polls, asking for your favourite and least favourite movies of the 2009 summer season. The list is the same in both:

  • Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy
  • Zooey Hall
  • Pixar’s The Bucket List
  • Quentin Tarantino Presents: Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece
  • Final Destination: We’re Trying To Get Inside Your Eyeballs
  • Eric Bana Is: An Endearing Aussie Cuckold
  • Christopher Johnson and Wikus Van Der Merwe’s Excellent Adventure
  • Harry Potter And The Toenail of Effervescence
  • Terminator 4: When Third Acts Collapse
  • Cover Me With Drool, Drop An Anvil On Me, Then Drag Me To Hell
  • The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming
  • Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience)
  • Eric Bana Is: An Absentee Time-Travelling Husband
  • X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine
  • G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES!
  • Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision)
  • That’s No Moon; It’s Hott Sam Rockwell’s Talent!
  • When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican
  • Eric Bana Is: An Especially Tetchy Romulan
  • STREEP, TUCCI & LYNCH vs. a Blogger and her Annoying Husband
  • Night at the Museum: Sound, Fury, & Nothing
  • Futile and Fatuous
  • Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan!
  • The Shaking [Cameras] of Pelham 123
  • Oh Will Ferrell. A TV Show Remake? We Want Anchorman 2 KTHXBAI

As I’ve never used PollDaddy before, I don’t really know what I’m doing. There’s a good chance I’ve got this wrong and it will all implode, taking all the votes with it, but then Blogger once started to randomly excise votes from polls I had going over there, so I’m sort of prepared for crappy functionality. Anyway, please vote in this poll. I’ll close it and collate the data later this year. Apologies if I’ve missed out a movie you feel passionately about. Feel free to leave a comment if I have.

ETA: I just checked out PollDaddy. Once you’ve voted on the poll you can leave comments. Click on the comment link and it takes you to a dedicated page for each poll. Oh, the future. Next you’ll be telling me you can embed videos in blogposts.

End Of Season Review: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

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The first season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was reduced to a measly nine episodes by the 2008 writers’ strike, but it was none the worse for it. Those nine episodes crammed in almost a full season’s worth of time-travelly, robot-fighty thrills, not to mention a murderous, shocking climax that heightened expectation for the second season. Unfortunately, the 22-part season two delivered, oh, about nine episodes’ worth of similar excitement.

T:TSCC’s second run can be divided into three parts: the slow burn of the first third, up till the Connors dealt with the evil T-888 Cromartie (Garret Dillahunt) in episode 8; the headlong rush of the final half-dozen episodes, which hurled story and backstory at the audience at a dizzying rate; and the plodding middle section in which Nothing At All Happened.

Season two picked up where season one left off, reasonably enough, with John (Thomas Dekker) and Sarah Connor (Lena Headey), Derek Reese (Brian Austin Green) and their Terminator guardian Cameron (Summer Glau) pursued by Cromartie. This mini-arc concluded satisfyingly with a nicely-shot takedown set in Mexico and had a couple of meaty self-contained episodes – such as “Allison From Palmdale”, which provided some welcome information about Cameron’s future-past – but it had one large and irritating failing. Being the prey of a relentless, almost indestructible killing machine was deemed not enough to drive the plot, and instead the show relied for storylines on an unnamed resistance soldier travelling from the future to somehow find the Connors’ house and scrawling a few cryptic messages on their wall (in his own blood, natch) before inconveniently expiring.

Who was he? Why did he come back? How did he find the house? Why did he not make his bloody points more clearly? This event is an extraordinarily tenuous premise on which to base a TV drama, and yet T:TSCC did so brazenly. Need a way to set an episode in a nuclear power station? Put it on the Wall O’ Clues! Need to get Sarah fixated on an idea that will eventually lead her to a key Skynet facility? I think there might be a mysterious reference to it on the Wall O’ Clues! Need to introduce a psychologist to the show for a bit of scientific gravitas? I don’t suppose the Wall O’ Clues has the name of a good one, does it?

After the Cromartie situation was apparently resolved the show drifted, focusing mainly on John’s tentative romance with Riley (Leven Rambin) and Derek’s liaison with another future resistance fighter, Jesse (Stephanie Jacobsen), and the tension these relationships created. Which was, er, not very much tension. The better episodes in this period, such as “Self Made Man”, in which Cameron’s nocturnal library visits uncovered some early 20th-century cyborg activity and foiled a planned assassination (with an agreeably brutal Terminator punch-up), felt as if they’d parachuted in from a different show.

It was obvious at this point that the producers were severely restricted by budgetary constraints. Showrunner Josh Friedman may have claimed that he is just as interested in exploring Sarah Connor’s psyche as in watching killer robots having a scrap, but it is surely more than a happy accident that the likes of “Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep” – set in a sleep clinic where Sarah tries to overcome her insomnia, and just as interesting as it sounds for a good two-thirds of the running time – are much cheaper than explosive, stunt-heavy showdowns. Given the lack of funds it’s forgivable, but it still doesn’t make for great entertainment.

Frustratingly, most episodes touched only briefly on one of the most intriguing aspects of the season: the supposed Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson), another Terminator posing as the head of technology company ZeiraCorp, who had rescued Cromartie’s body with the help of former FBI agent James Ellison (Richard T Jones) and implanted it with a brand new AI, renaming it John Henry and instructing Ellison to rebuild its mind from the ground up. Ellison’s struggles to educate John Henry in the basics of ethics, forcing him to confront his own flaws, were compelling – as were Weaver’s attempts to appear human, not to mention the mystery of her motives.

The pay-off of the Riley storyline set in motion the events that brought the Connor and ZeiraCorp families together, and few could deny that the final six episodes of the season – which saw the deaths of three of the good guys, neatly explained Jesse’s mission and betrayal with a tense two-part flashback/forward, and, in the finale, turned the show on its head by separating Sarah and John in time – marked a new high for the show. Whether they made up for the preceding tedium is another matter.

One problem T:TSCC has is that almost every character’s emotional level is set to either “stoical” or “enigmatic”. Sarah, Derek and Jesse are forced to overcome hardship and swallow their feelings daily with the greater good – saving humanity – in mind; and John, increasingly, is of the same mindset. He seems prepared to jeopardise the Connors’ mission for the sake of Riley but when he loses her, he falls back in step with barely a murmur. It’s inevitably difficult to know what Cameron and Catherine are thinking, because they don’t actually think as such. The Terminatrices’ inscrutability is well played by both Glau and Manson, but they naturally struggle to make the characters truly compelling – and are given little to work with by the writers. Glau in particular was criminally sidelined for much of the season, her potent physicality and deft comic touch surfacing only sporadically.

Riley divided fan opinion but at least she displayed recognisable emotions and, in the crunch, she acted decisively and admirably. Rambin’s performance was sympathetic and, at times, verging on adorable – as was Jones’s as the conflicted Ellison, both actors lending a human face to a dramatis personae consisting of actual robots and people acting robotically. Curiously, though, it was the childlike John Henry who proved the most affecting character, with his wide-eyed efforts to understand the world and desire to protect Weaver’s daughter Savannah (Mackenzie Smith). This was by far the sweetest relationship on the show, sensitively written and skilfully handled by Dillahunt.


When I started writing this blogpost the future of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was in the balance, but Fox has just announced that the show will not be renewed. The middling-at-best ratings of its second season made it unlikely that there would be a third – and yet there was enough quality in the season, and in Friedman’s attempted gamechanging in the finale, to suggest it was merited. But surely the only way a third season could bring in new fans – and please the existing ones, many of whom grumbled online about its lack of action – would be to up the budget to allow, at the very least, a few more balls-to-the-wall fight scenes. Hands up who ever thought Fox might start throwing money at an underperforming sci-fi show?

Well, stranger things have happened.

‘Twas Here My Summer Exploded

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Summertime! Or, as Prince of Freshland Willard Smith once put it, summersummersummertime! All of its joys (such as the sunshine, the wasps, the ever-present sheen of sticky sweat) pale into insignificance next to my favourite thing in the world ever; the summer movie season. As usual, the anticipation is bound to be much more nourishing than the actual movies themselves, though last year saw an unprecedented bumper crop of excellent popcorn entertainment which should, technically, raise my excitement to even greater levels, what with the summer movie season finally offering brainfood as well as robot wars. Sadly, that 2009 highwater mark and the recent writer’s strike means I’m less excited about this year’s line-up. Sure, I’ll see a fair few, but there’s only one or two I’m goggle-eyed with obnoxious enthusiasm over. My face is sad.

Those who know me have a pretty good idea which movies have me froth-mouthed, but I’ll save that for now, because I’m more interested in what you, the readers of this blog, are most excited about. Just like last year, I want to see what is getting this small cross-section of people most pumped. Sadly, due to RL complications, I forgot to do this earlier, and have therefore included a film that has already been released (The Further Adventures of Logan T. Loganstein And His Whirring Claws Of Kill), but perhaps, if you’ve already seen it, you enjoyed it so much you can’t wait to see it again! I gather it’s depressingly bad hella-exciting. Anyway, here’s the list.

  • Terminator Franchise: Salvage Operation

  • I’d Rather Be Dragged To Hell Than Watch Spider-Man 3 Again

  • JJ Abrams Risks Death by Unwashed Nerd Rage-On

  • Transmogrifiers 2: Return of the Awesome

  • The Curious Case of Wolverine Wutton

  • Angels, Demons, and Probably Ewan McGregor’s Schlong

  • Another Worthless Woody Allen Movie

  • The Unnecessary Remaking of Pelham 123

  • (500) Days of Self-Conscious Indie Movie Quirk

  • The Time-Travelling Bana

  • Harry Potter and the Thing in the Place with the Whatsit

  • Demetri Martin + Ang Lee + Hippies = WTF?

  • District 9 (AKA Neill Blomkamp Rocks Your Face Off)

  • Hott Sam Rockwell’s Lunar Oscar Bid

  • Pixar’s Whassup, Bitches?

  • Depp and Bale in: Untouchablesque

  • Sacha Baron Cohen and the Inevitable Lawsuits

  • G.I. Joe: The Struggle to Give a Shit

  • Quentin Tarantino and the Broken Spellcheck

  • Final Destination: Rube Goldberg’s Revenge

  • Judd Apatow’s Self-Loathing People (feat. The RZA!)

Seriously! The RZA is in the next Judd Apatow movie! I can’t wait, though I’d much rather see a full-length Bobby Digital film than some navel-gazing James L. Brooks homage, no matter how good it is. Anyway, the poll will be up in a sec, and will be around for approximately numerous weeks.

Lazy Post Courtesy Of Barry Levinson

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I’m the worst procrastinator I know. I just spent an hour pootling around on the internet instead of washing up dishes and sheets. Fair enough, but I also did that because I’m too lazy to reach over and pick up a 360 controller and play Half-Life 2, possibly because I know starting that up will mean I definitely do nothing else for the rest of the day. Nevertheless, that’s some outrageous laziness, so I’ll make myself feel better by writing about it. I guess this is what it is to be a blogger.

Anyway, while looking for Watchmen Comic-Con footage after being inspired by these incredible posters, I stumbled across this trailer, for Barry Levinson’s new movie What Just Happened:

I’m in two minds about Levinson, who hasn’t made anything I’ve wanted to see since Wag The Dog. He’s made some stuff I hope to never see again (especially Sleepers), but Diner remains a favourite of mine, and Bugsy and Tin Men are fantastic. He does seem to have a strange selection of projects on the way, though, including yet another TV series based on Leslie Charteris’ Saint novels, this time starring Thomas-Jane-clone James Purefoy, and an adaptation of Bill Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods, with, get this, Robert Redford playing Bryson. I know!

It’s written by producer Art Linson, adapting his own book. I have a copy of that somewhere, stuck under a pile of cheap second-hand sci fi and popular science books. I got it back in the days when I would read pretty much any book about the film industry, and yet that remains untouched. Even I had no stomach for something that appeared to be as self-pitying as that, and we’re talking about not bothering to read a teeny-tiny 192 page book. Seriously, Art, if you don’t want a job as a successful Hollywood producer, I’ll trade you right now. I bet the best day on my crappy job is far less gratifying than even your worst day trying to prise the latest hot actor off the wall of his trailer.

Anyway, the movie looks like little more than the usual Hollywood navelgazing silliness, which is galling as Levinson has already plundered this well a couple of times previously. That said, there are interesting things about it, such as the cast, featuring Stanley Tucci, Catherine Keener and Robin Wright Penn who, from the trailer, looks like she gets to play yet another miserable wife, just like in Unbreakable and Beowulf. Levinson has also managed to get the terrifying Michael Wincott to cry like a baby. For that precious image, I thank him. But hey, check it out! Is Bruce Willis channeling genius singer/songwriter Will Oldham?


Excellent. And ZOMG! It’s internet search term sensation Moon Bloodgood!


Sadly, from what I can tell from the trailer, she has been cast as Miscellaneous Superhottie Doing Sexxy Things With Chopsticks, doing little more than making Art Linson feel better about himself by flirting with his onscreen representative (aka Robert De Niro). Still, at least appearing in the excellent-but-doomed Journeyman and the not-at-all-excellent-yet-equally-doomed Pathfinder is not stopping her getting work. She’s also going to appear in McG’s Terminator Salvation in a frighteningly good cast that includes Christian Bale, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Helena Bonham Carter, which is great news.

In less great news, she’s also in Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li, which is an early contender for worst film of 2009. In the middle of a frighteningly uninspiring cast, Moon plays second fiddle to Kristin Kreuk as Chun-Li, Michael Clarke Duncan as Balrog (I can see that, but Grand L. Bush will probably remain the definitive Balrog), Neal McDonough as Bison (??!?!?!?), and Chris Klein as Nash. Plus, it’s directed by hapless Doom helmer Andrzej Bartkowiak; Paul W.S. Anderson was obviously too busy doing post on Death Race to take the job. It’s rare that a nerd-film is announced that I have no interest in, but they managed it. If it’s good, I’ll eat my words, lightly braised in a vowel sauce, but I don’t hold out much hope.

::sigh:: I guess I should do that washing now. In the meantime, knock yourselves out with the first animated installment of Get Your War On (beware, NSFW).

Yet Another Sad Day, This Time For Nerds And Film Buffs

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The first bit of news I heard today was that Stan Winston, animatronics pioneer and monster/alien design genius, has sadly passed away. While yesterday’s sad news about Esbjörn Svensson upset me as I had only just discovered his music, this hits me differently. There is no way I could accurately quantify the effect Winston’s incomparable work has affected my psyche, as his golden period covered my adolescence, during which time my mind was boggled by Aliens, Predator, Terminator, and many others. My God, I even went to see George P. Cosmatos’ risible Leviathan just because I knew he had worked on it.


Like many people, my bedroom wall was covered with posters and movie stills when I was younger, and my favourites were the ones showing his designs. The Predator, possibly his most imaginative creation, burned a hole into my head, though credit should be given to John McTiernan for leaving the final reveal of the alien’s hideous visage until the end of the movie. Those tiny glimpses of the creature’s real face, followed by a slow unveiling of the actual face, are hilariously retained in later Predator movies, even though we now all know what it looks like. Still, familiarity has not made that design any less impressive, a real classic fit to stand alongside H.R. Giger’s nightmarish Alien design. Speaking of which, further kudos are due Winston, for managing to adapt that biomorphic image and create the Queen from James Cameron’s Aliens. Not only is it a beautiful adaptation of the original design, but the animatronic realisation of it is even more impressive. The final fight with Ripley in the powerloader is utterly convincing. When I was a teenager, that scene fried my mind to a charred crisp. Look at the damn thing! BTW, the image on the right is of the evil Sarris from Galaxy Quest, a hugely complicated combination of costume and animatronics. Can you believe that underneath all of that is Robin Sachs, aka Ethan Rayne from Buffy?


In much the same way that the Universal monster movies inspired a generation of filmmakers, Winston’s creations seemed to appear in almost every significant movie of my childhood, existing as an alternate universe supergroup of monsters, aliens, robots, undead serial killers, and demons. His monsters either enhanced good movies (Terminator, Predator), or were the best thing about bad movies (his bizarre brain creature and backwards walking Martians from Tobe Hooper’s Invaders From Mars remake were way better than everything else in it). I always thought of those creatures (or should I say characters) existing in parallel in much the same way Dracula, Wolfman and Frankenstein‘s monster did years before. Considering the proliferation of material written since then, with those characters facing off against each other, I know I’m not the only one. Of course, Winston also got a crack at paying homage to those Universal monsters with Fred Dekker and Shane Black’s hugely entertaining Monster Squad, which was nicely circular. Check out the amazing Gillman design (on the left, with the Martian Intelligence from Invaders From Mars on the right). Just gorgeous.


While some of his work was dramatic and vivid, he could also be more subtle. He did animatronic animals that were utterly convincing (the lions in The Ghost and The Darkness, as well as the apes in Congo and Instinct) or playful (the mischievous mouse in Mousehunt). That of course led to his studio making the incredible dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies, which are often sadly overlooked when people discuss the admittedly impressive CGI FX in that trilogy. How cool would it have been to see his work on the long-rumoured Jurassic Park Meets The Dirty Dozen, with humans interacting with commando-saurs? He was also responsible for one of the most affecting non-monster images of recent times; poor Edward Scissorhands, the Emo King, with his bladey hands and scarred face. So basically, Stan Winston has made me laugh, cringe, hide behind my hands, put me on the edge of my seat, and also made me cry. That’s good going. (Eddie Scissormitts is seen here with the nasty Pumpkinhead, who appeared in Winston’s directorial debut.)


With CGI now almost ubiquitous and demand for animatronic creatures seemingly dropping, Winston Studios has had to branch out into producing, though he was still working on set even while suffering from myeloma. His recent Iron Man suit (designed, if I recall correctly, with Adi Granov) was so lovely I have lost probably hours of my life just staring at it. He has also done some work on James Cameron’s Avatar, so we still have that to look forward to. I can imagine his team of FX experts (some of whom have been working with him for twenty five years now) will be able to carry on his legacy, as long as there is a call for real world effects or character designs, but that doesn’t remove the sadness. Ain’t It Cool News is receiving tributes from some of Winston’s colleagues, including one from James Cameron that deeply upset me this morning. Forgive me for seemingly losing my sense of perspective, but as a film buff, and a nerd, and as someone who once was lifted out of himself by the incredible vision of the man, Winston’s death is a hugely significant and upsetting event. He will truly be missed.

Sci-Fi Season Premiere Face/Off! (Terminator: TSCC)

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Until the hopefully triumphant return of my favourite sci-fi TV show ever (and no, it’s not Sci-Fi Channel’s Flash Gordon), I’ve had to forgo experiencing that genre in a TV format. Well, I could have watched Stargate: Atlantis, but I have no love of either that show or its progenitor. I also could have watched Bionical Woman, and did for a while, but I just couldn’t face its relentless idiocy after the first few weeks. It really was a disaster from conception onwards, and I can’t imagine how even an infusion of talent could have made it work. As for Battlestar Galactica, all we’ve had since the silly season finale is the Razor TV movie, and we tried to watch it a couple of weeks ago but got so distracted by our cats jumping around trying to catch toy mice that we didn’t finish it. We will, though. I did get to see ace FX unit Zoic go mental with much wobbly-camera space destruction, and no one started singing Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, so I’m going back there soon, with bells on.

This week, though, saw the season premieres of two sci-fi shows, spinning off from other established concepts. Torchwood, the “adult” spin-off of BBC’s newly enwonderfulised Doctor Who, is now on its second season, attempting to prove that it has learned from the mistakes of the first season (which were legion). On Fox in the US, War of the Worlds screenwriter Josh Friedman has developed a non-James-Cameron-sanctioned spin-off from the first two Terminator movies, with the cumbersome title Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (or as Masticator and Masticatrix have abbreviated it, The Sarah Conicles). Chances are I will watch both until the end of the season, but which one am I excited about, and which one is a mistake? FACE/OFF TIME!


When I heard that the Terminator movies were being picked apart for scraps yet again, my heart sank. The first two movies are kind of perfect, and while I prefer the original (and remember my childhood adoration of it as clearly as if it were yesterday), I love that the second is more than just an action film. It’s a pacifist, pro-disarmament action movie containing lots of destruction and mayhem, and yet there is no contradiction between the two halves of its whole. Plus, it features Arnie’s one great performance. His scenes with Edward Furlong are superbly done, quiet and naturalistic and devoid of his usual distracting gurning. I often distrust director’s cuts, but the longer version of T2 meant we got to see more of those scenes, and they were all superb. James Cameron doesn’t get enough credit for getting that performance out of him.


T2 is a brilliant sequel, and the final shot is so wonderfully uplifting and moving and final, that when Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines came out, I was incensed. The story was so completely over that any resurrection of the franchise smacked of pure cynicism. Also, it came out at the wrong time; not close enough to keep up the momentum of the other films, and not far enough away that people would have a nostalgic wish to see more of that story (see also Ghostbusters 2, which came out five years after the original and did poorly at the box office). It did okay, but I was more concerned with its effect on the other two movies. Would it invalidate that wonderful finale, where Sarah and John go through hell in order to change the future?

Turns out it didn’t seem to care about that. Whereas in T2 the chronology and genesis of Cyberdyne, SkyNet, Miles Dyson and Judgement Day are all worked out rigorously, in T3 SkyNet comes back just because that shit is inevitable and that’s that. Perhaps I’m remembering it wrong, and if so someone correct me, but that’s the sum of it. It’s a horrible cheat after all of the work Cameron did on the first two. I get riled by badly thought-out time travel stories. I’ll grant that they’re incredibly hard to do, but they can be done right. Back to The Future 2, Primer, Gregory Benford’s Timescape; they do exist.


Other than that, T3 is visually flat (thanks for that, Jonathan Mostow), undercut with cringeworthy comedy moments, horribly designed, pointless, and cast in a distracting way (having Nick Stahl and Claire Danes running around firing guns was perhaps a bold choice, but a disastrous one for suspension of disbelief). That said, what an ending. It wasn’t quite worth all of the nasty scenes featuring plastic toy Hunter-Killers and T-1s to get to that, but still, kudos where necessary. It was very clever and quite affecting.


But why go back again? Surely the moment has more than passed, right? And wouldn’t continuing the story after T3 (apocalypse on a grand scale) cost billions of dollars? Ah, but there is always a way, and Josh Friedman came up with one. Set in a timeline separate from that of T3, and following on a couple of years after T2, Sarah Connor is still on the run from the FBI, having been accused of the murder of poor Miles Dyson. She’s also predictably plagued by dreams, which means we get an action blowout in the first scene, filled with apocalyptic imagery of Terminators and mushroom clouds, which is all borrowed from the films.


So it has got some strikes against it from the get-go; starting with a frigging dream sequence presented as reality, following the visual template of the films too slavishly, and recasting Sarah Connor with Lena Headey, an actress I’ve never been too keen on, and who committed one of the many crimes against acting perpetrated in 300, a film that, as I have said elsewhere in the past, is the worst acted mainstream movie I think I’ve ever seen. I really didn’t like the idea of casting her in such an iconic role, and was prepared to be very annoyed.

I was wrong, at least to a certain extent. In the middle of the scene (which, credit to director David Nutter, is exciting and well-edited), John gets shot in the back by the not-Arnie Terminator, and Sarah reacts by begging it to kill her too as she has no reason to live now her son is dead. Her reaction is believably overwrought, and I warmed to her quickly. During the episode she perhaps goes too far now and again, but over the course of the season perhaps she will get the tone right. I could also do with less of the voiceovers at the beginning and end, but that’s as much Friedman’s fault as hers.

It matters little. The opening worked brilliantly for one very important reason. Right there Friedman sets out her character elegantly, and from here I can imagine there are places to go with her. It’s not called The Sarah Connor Chronicles for no reason. The first movie was all about her, and the second took the focus off her a bit (by making her borderline insane) but it made sure to keep her as a major protagonist, and we got to follow her on her sad journey. The original concept was to have an ordinary woman transformed by circumstances beyond her control, and T2 took that to the logical conclusion. T3‘s major flaw was to get rid of her altogether, with the excuse that she had died of leukemia, off camera, which was an appallingly lazy and dismissive way to go about it. Here Friedman convinced me he was going to do right by her, and immediately the barriers of distrust fell. I knew there would be no Arnie, no huge battle scenes, and possibly no adherence to canon, but he was trying to do right by one of my favourite movie characters ever, and for that I was grateful.


Since we last saw her, she has become involved with an EMT tech called Charley, played by Dean Winters, who was so memorable as Liz Lemon’s feckless boyfriend Dennis in 30 Rock. Whereas there he was the worst partner ever, here he is besotted and devoted, proposing marriage to Sarah (in bed after just waking up, which is one of the few missteps and sillinesses of the episode). This freaks her out, and so she gathers up future saviour of mankind John and drags him out of there. John (played by Thomas Dekker, formerly the almost-gay friend of Claire Bennett in half a season of Heroes) is miffed, having bonded with Charley, and correctly blaming his mother’s commitment-phobia for her departure and not her paranoid belief that they will get caught, which is another bit of writing I liked.

Unfortunately for them both, Charley loves Sarah enough to report her disappearance to the police, and there just happens to be an FBI agent, James Ellison, hanging around with a ton of information about Sarah, now hiding under the alias Sarah Reese. It’s been pointed out on AICN that it may not be the best name to hide under, but is a touch that made me beam with nerd-glee, and a tantrum later on in the episode shows she’s keeping it out of an obsessive need to keep the name of her future lover alive, so it works. Ellison (played, so far, with some anonymity by Richard T. Lewis) tells Charley about Sarah’s crazy past (in a quick bit of exposition that doesn’t slow the show down too much), and even whips out a photo of Dyson. Note that he is not played by Brother From Another Planet Joe Morton, but by Phil “Jackie Chiles” Morris, thus keeping the Dyson-casting awesomeness going strong.


Cleverly, not only does this quick scene give a bunch of information about the first two movies and the events that have happened since, as well as setting up the relationships between all four of these characters, it allows Sarah’s identity to be compromised and placed in the FBI database, which is being monitored by a Terminator sleeper agent, who then goes on the rampage and chases our heroes. It’s not the best writing in the history of storytelling, but it is excellent exposition conveyed between characters who have been purposely kept in the dark as well as advancing the plot. I’ll be getting to an example of bad exposition in the next part of this Face/Off.

John and Sarah head off to a new town to try to avoid all of the guys trying to make Sarah fall in love with them, apparently, and while at school John ends up getting stalked by none other than River Tam, aka Summer Glau. Now, I’ve often thought of River as one of the weakest links in the Fireflyniverse, mostly because the one writing tic Whedon has that I don’t like is the crazy talking, which was passably funny with Drusilla, annoying with Buffy season 7 Spike, and just flat out horrible with River. For almost all of Glau’s time on that show she had to put up with a bunch of nonsensical and frustrating madness chatter that added up to very little. Only at the end of Serenity did I warm to her at all, but that was the end of that, sadly. Also, when on Angel, she was a spell-addled ghost-thing that had to talk with a Russian accent, so I had no idea what she could be like talking like a human. Weirdly, the first time you see her, even though you will probably already know she is a new kind of Terminator, she gives what might be her first approximation of a non-quirky humanity.


Her responses, such as laughing too hard at John’s lame jokes, are ever-so-slightly heightened. It works well, as if her emotional programming (which, I assume, is the thing that she hints makes her different from other Terminators) is not quite right, but it’s her curiousness and ability to evoke confusion that work best. She looks perpetually befuddled by things around her (other than combat situations), and while this is not a new concept, it’s pulled off with some charm. She’s pretty goddamn great in this, and I’m thrilled that Friedman had her cast in the role. Her physicality works well too, and she puts that to use in an early scene where an evil Terminator shows up at school and tries to kill John.


Herc, from AICN, has railed against this scene, but he neglects to mention the new habit of naming the Terminators. Glau plays Cameron, a weird nod to the creator of the Terminator franchise, considering he has nothing to do with it any more now that ex-wife Linda Hamilton has sold the rights to Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar. Even stupider, the evil Terminator (played by Owain Yeoman) is called Cromartie. Is this because his endoskeleton is covered with chrome? In that case, is his actual name Marty?

Whatever. He reveals himself while trying to kill John (using a gun he had ickily hidden in his thigh, under his skin), at which point both he and Cameron start talking and moving like robots, which they didn’t do before. It looks stupid, but thankfully they also tend to throw each other around, demolish walls, get hit by cars, and take a bullet hit to the chest like a champ, which is what you want from a couple of Terminators. Cameron saves John using a truck (which has been done to death, but what else was she going to use?), and then says the second thing that made me drop my critical defences, and if you have seen the other movies, you know the line she says.


With a new robotic bodyguard in charge, John drives off to find his mom, who has turned up at the school to find him, instead encountering Cromartie (dang, that name never gets any less stupid), who kicks her around a bit. Realising he has no idea where John is, Sarah does the third thing I loved in this episode; pulls out a gun and tries to kill herself so that she can’t be used as leverage against her son. It’s a badass moment, all right.


Of course, she doesn’t get to go through with it, but Chromey talks to John on the phone, imitates Sarah using his cyber-throat, and gets him to go back to the house. Yes yes, just like in the movies. So not only has this show borrowed the format and look of the movies, but it’s reusing the old tricks. A strike against it, I thought, until John arrives at the house in a face-obscuring hoodie, only to get shot in the head by Chromey, and yet no! It was Cameron pretending to be John using her own cyber-throat to fool him! A nice touch. There follows a big fight scene with robots pushing each other through walls and floors, shotguns, a weapons cache hidden in a wall, electrification and, if the exposition a few scenes later is anything to be believed, a chair lined with kevlar just in case a Terminator shows up. A lot of viewers appear to have hated that, but I thought it was in keeping with Sarah’s way of thinking. Anyway, it’s a tight little scene, and quite thrilling.

After that we get some exposition between Sarah and Cameron as she gets to almost show some robo-boobies while pulling bullets out of her clavicle, and we find out that Skynet still gets built despite the events of T2. Pretty obvious, what with all the robots walking around, but whereas in T3 it’s not explained how the Air Force (who build Skynet after the destruction of Cyberdyne) develop the technology, and we had to just like it or lump it, here Cameron admits she doesn’t know how it happened, but as the episode rolls on, it becomes clear that the whole point of the show is finding out who builds Skynet. We’re going to spend the rest of the series finding out what’s going on, which is a far more promising approach.

Hopefully the real reason will not be a disappointment as in T3, though considering T3 seemed uninterested in a lot of what happened in the first two movies, this show earns many kudos for having Sarah take John and Cameron back to see Miles Dyson’s widow, where she reveals there is no way his work still exists anywhere in the world. It’s nice that they felt the need to revisit that character, especially as we get to see her sadness. Dyson’s death in the movie is already memorable, and it’s great to see that pathos carry forward into the series. Again, I am impressed. There then follows some more action, and the ‘splodey. Eat flame, you doucheinator!


At this point I was enjoying myself, but the next scenes feature a big plothole, with Sarah shot in the shoulder and getting maudlin over the possible loss of her son. I wonder if I watched the wrong version of this pilot, because the scene seems out of place, what with Sarah walking around next day as if nothing happened, and not having a wound on her arm at the end of the episode. Whatever is the reason, the scene serves very little purpose. We know she’s a badass who is good at dealing with pain and blood loss, and that she’s scared of John leaving her, though perhaps this is the first time she’s voiced the worry that he’ll just choose to leave instead of getting killed by a Terminator. Still, it’s the one bit of flab in the whole episode, and as such is annoying.

Also worrying me at this point was the feeling that the show was going to just be The Fugitive with robots, which works fine in a movie format, but has been overdone as a concept on TV. Though I liked this so far, would I eventually just get tired? How much could they do with the concept of the three saviours of mankind trying to destroy and electronics firm? Thankfully, Friedman must have had the same concerns, and throws an outrageous twist in right at the end. Cameron takes John and Sarah to a bank built in 1963, and stages a robbery that gets them into a vault tricked out with lots of sciencey stuff. There’s a gun that looks like a copper-wired, nuclear-powered tommy gun that kills Terminators, and a time machine made from 1960s parts that was built by someone sent back from the future by John Connor (we assume). It’s such a bizarre moment that the viewer can either go, “Screw this, I’m gonna watch American Gladiators instead,” or, “I’m sticking with this because that is some crazy shit!” I chose the latter option.


The show ends with our naked trio turning up in 2007, where they are assumed to be dead, on a search for Skynet, with Cameron learning about humanity, and John and Sarah dealing with the weirdness of the future (the second episode, which is also very good, shows John confused by the new technology that has sprung up in eight years, and Sarah learning about 9/11). Plus, Chromey is still running around despite his head getting blown off his robotic shoulders by Sarah’s tommy gun, James Ellison is looking for Sarah, and John is trying to reestablish contact with Charley even though he is now married to Lost and Tell Me You Love Me And Not The Mother Of The Saviour of All Mankind veteran, Sonya Walger, of all people. It’s a very very promising set-up.

It didn’t all work. Mostly the performances were okay, but it was touch and go every now and then. Thomas Dekker appears to be both less obnoxious and less likeable than Edward Furlong, and needs to stop with the frigging whining. One or two scenes were superfluous, some of the actors look a little unsure with the guns, the Terminators often seemed very stupid, and the dialogue was a little rough at times, but the homages to the original movies show an affection for them, which counts for a lot. For instance, the next episode also acknowledges Sarah’s cancer from T3 and weaves it into the plot, which is a great touch even though I hated that it ever happened in the first place. It’s not just following that format, though. So far the little quirks and twists display an urge to come up with new ideas, or to push the old ideas as far as they can go.

Plus, I loved the hints that Cameron is a different kind of Terminator whose behaviour, while still recognisably not human, has enough humanity to it to confuse poor hormonal John, who obviously has the hots for her. This is brilliantly shown in the second episode, where she touches him to assess his mental and physical state through an analysis of his body and sweat, and he interprets it as a sign of affection. all that and a soundtrack that has nods to Brad Feidel’s original iconic theme. It has real potential, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.