With your train, pierce the heavens

While Snowpiercer is based on a French graphic novel by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, it feels like the most natural thing in the world that it was given cinematic life as a South Korean film by director Bong Joon-Ho (best known internationally for his monster movie The Host). For more than a decade that country's national cinema has been largely defined by exercises in trying to cram as many and varied cinematic tones, styles and ideas into a single film as is reasonably possible (and usually far beyond). Lo and behold, Snowpiercer is a film about an eccentric visionary trying to cram the entirety of human civilisation into a tiny microcosm. The result is a beautiful marriage of form and content, and one of the best and brightest action movies of a year that has been surprisingly stacked with deceptively thoughtful and terrifically entertaining popcorn cinema.

Because it wasn't already enough of a mess of influences and origins, Snowpiercer takes place predominantly in English, with a fairly recognisable cast. The film begins in 2031, seventeen years after a misguided attempt to combat global warming flash-froze the entire planet Earth. The only survivors were those who made it aboard a colossal train whose tracks span the entire Earth, devised by an industrialist referred to only as Wilford (Ed Harris). The train is entirely self-sufficient and capable of sustaining life indefinitely, but that quality of life is immensely variable. Those who live near the front of the train do so in comfort and opulence, while the carriages further to the back are refugees who are subject to abuse and horrific living conditions in exchange for their continued survival. Having had quite enough of this after 17 years, one Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) moves to spearhead a rebellion in the train's rearmost carriage, under the guidance of an elderly passenger named Gilliam (John Hurt).

That's more of a plot skeleton than an actual synopsis, but most of the film's pleasures are found in its relentless push through carriage after carriage of the train, each door concealing wholly unexpected and delightful surprises, from blackly comic interludes, to surprisingly tender character moments, to a whole lot of rousing action setpieces. The cast is joined by supporting players like Octavia Spencer, Tilda Swinton and Host veterans Song Kang-Ho and Go Ah-Sung, among others, all acting in wildly different registers but all terrifically fun to watch. Bong has never been a director particularly bound by things like "consistency" or "flow", and the premise of Snowpiercer has invigorated those tendencies considerably. It even supports the film's themes in its own way; as things progress towards the front of the train and into the upper echelons of society, the imagery and the fabric of the film become more garish and excessive in keeping with the upper-class lifestyles on display.

I'm sure it's no surprise from that description that Snowpiercer wears its allegory on its sleeve in bright primary colours. Maybe it's the comic book origins, maybe it's the language barrier, maybe it's simply because it left more time to go wild with the visuals, but the film is full to the brim with declamatory dialogue and barbarically direct expression of its themes through dialogue. The cast helps a lot to sell it - Evans and Spencer downplay things fiercely and effectively, while Swinton, Song and Go run headlong and merrily into live-action cartoon. As far as I'm concerned this is an asset and not a failing of the film's, anyway; loud and direct is what keeps the energy high and the pacing unflagging.

Snowpiercer is not a great film because it is flawless, though. Some of it is baked into the movie, like the intentional and gleeful lack of any kind of conceptual rigour to the sci-fi trappings; Children of Men this is not. The linear, cramped nature of the setting also means that some of the last-act revelations don't really land with the force that they should - when characters and plot devices haven't shown up in a while, it's not difficult to surmise where they've gone - and without that force, one is left with a great deal more time to mull over some of the loopier developments. Finally, and this is probably the only flaw that undercuts what the film is actually trying to accomplish, rather than a case of failing to achieve things it was never trying to do: the cast is too goddamn white. The presence of Song, Go and Spencer is terrific, to be sure, but it's not enough. A film this loudly and passionately opposed to social inequality and the behaviour of the upper class should ideally have a little more awareness of the lines along which power and wealth are generally distributed. It's a problem that has plagued allegorical science fiction for a long time, but it's still irritating here, especially given the film's international pedigree.

So the whole movie is kind of a mess, then. But it's a mess with a great deal of character and a dogged pursuit of its goals, and its highs are greater and more sustained than its lows by a huge measure, even if its disparate elements don't entirely gel. It's everything that I, for one, would have hoped for from South Korea's biggest and splashiest cinematic release yet.

9/10

Egg on Your Face

This review comes to you courtesy of Jordan Whitmore, who commissioned me for a review of a film that I saw in the cinema at age six, and had blessedly not thought about once in the intervening years.

There are a great many things that mark Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius out as a product of the early 2000s, from within the film and without, right on up to the fact that it exists at all. At a time when Disney (and traditional animation generally) was at a low ebb and Pixar had demonstrated massive financial and artistic success in the realm of 3D animation, but before anyone had really figured out how to replicate it, there was an anything-goes environment that hasn't really existed since the staggering success of Finding Nemo and Shrek 2 in the middle of the decade set the mold for most 3D animation. These days a film like Jimmy Neutron, adapted from a handful of 90s shorts and intended to kickstart a TV series, would have been consigned from day one to a straight-to-video or TV premiere. In fact, that was the precise fate intended for the film until Paramount decided that it looked vaguely enough like a real movie to release it in theatres because, essentially, there was no reason not to at the time. Thank god we now live in a more civilised time, when we can breathe easy and eagerly await the release of Cars 3.

Releasing Jimmy Neutron theatrically was an impulse that paid off, too, when the film grossed over three times its budget and managed to land itself an Academy Award nomination, of all fucking things. Not an unimpressive fate for a movie that is not for one second visually appealing in the slightest, and stuffed end-to-end with characters who don't resemble human beings, in appearance or in behaviour, rendered in the cheapest and ugliest CGI money could buy in 2001. I suppose those things are easier to overlook in the company of the film's impressive litany of jokes revolving around bodily functions, or its transparent stabs at promoting merchandise and its own TV spinoff series.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around the adventures of its titular character (played by Debi Derryberry), a precocious 8-year-old from the town of Retroville whose antics are perpetually getting he and many of his peers into hot water. The most prominent of these other children are Carl Wheezer (Rob Paulsen), who is forever the subject of violence and ridicule, but is also fat, which makes it funny; Sheen Estevez (Jeffrey Garcia), who is obsessed with a superhero named Ultraman to the exclusion of all else; Nick Dean (Candi Milo), who wears denim and rides a skateboard and therefore could not be cooler by the standards of early-2000s media; and Cindy Vortex (Carolyn Lawrence), who has no time for Jimmy's reckless and impractical science and is therefore an uppity bitch who is jealous of how smart he is and probably has cooties too, because it's never too early to instill toxic attitudes like that in young boys.

Eventually, something like 30 minutes into a film that comes up at 79 total, the entire adult population of Retroville is kidnapped by aliens (whose king is played by an unfathomably overqualified Patrick Stewart) for reasons that are mostly contrived and entirely Jimmy's fault, and the film starts to shift gears into something that actually resembles a narrative. "Resembles", mind, because until the final fifteen minutes the film mostly continues to consist of aimless wackiness, but it's in space now and there's some lazy moralising about how total independence may look like fun, but children are really just helpless incompetents who should defer to their parents' wisdom at all times (Finding Nemo would end up treading similar thematic ground with a far more sensitive and nuanced approach only two years later).

Jimmy Neutron could not wear its television origins on its sleeve any more clearly. The entire film is locked into a rigidly monotonous episodic structure where five minutes of exposition leads into thirty seconds of gadget-fueled slapstick, over and over and over again until the film has spun its wheels long enough to scrape into feature length and everyone can fight the aliens and rescue their parents and go home. You could probably section the entire movie into ten-minute chunks and screen them one a week with no impact on its pacing or coherence, and for all I know that may have been the plan at one point or another during production.

While that's enough to seriously hamper the film, it might not necessarily be enough to bury it. "Gadget-based slapstick", after all, could also be used to describe Aardman animation's vastly wonderful Wallace and Gromit features, and they are masterpieces of animation all. Hell, Jimmy even has a robotic canine sidekick! The key difference is that Aardman's films are animated with great care and attention to detail, bursting at the seams with personality, while Jimmy Neutron was cobbled together with off-the-shelf animation software and burp jokes. It's a horrifyingly ugly movie, where everything is made up of textureless blobs and nobody has apparently ever heard of a neck. Seriously, Carl's head appears to jut out of the front of his torso, and poor Sheen is afflicted with a flat, chinless face that tapers to a point somewhere inside his shoulders.

It's funny, really, for a movie so concerning alien abductions to almost feel like it was made by aliens itself. Nothing in the animation or the writing or even the marketing suggests that anyone involved knew how human beings think or act or look. The film is entirely devoid of merit for adults, and I'm hard-pressed to imagine any child who would be more than moderately diverted by the lowbrow humour or the pandering concept. Certainly nobody then and especially not now could have responded with any great degree of positivity to its visual design or its cardboard cutout characters.

And yet I'd still sooner rewatch it than Shrek.

Up From The Depths, Thirty Storeys High

When Gareth Edwards' Monsters came out in 2010, I reasoned that many of its sometimes severe deficiencies were the result of a noble attempt on the part of its director to stretch a tiny budget further than it could reasonably be stretched. If there's one thing to be gleaned from Edwards' new film Godzilla, heralding the long-awaited return of cinema's most iconic movie monster, it's that Edwards actually suffers from some severely misaligned priorities. For even with a projected budget of $160 million behind him, he has once again turned out a film that is, in spite of a great deal of care and insight behind the camera, an absolute fucking slog in places where it really shouldn't be. It's a good deal more galling this time around, however. It doesn't just feel like a waste of that hyperinflated budget, but something trickier and all the more frustrating: there is a fantastic Godzilla film that could have been assembled from essentially nothing more than footage that already exists within the film, and to be instead saddled with the fitfully spectacular and frequently tedious film that we got instead is an outright tragedy.

Picking up the mantle from Japanese studio Toho after their iconic mascot was put to pasture ten years ago in the wake of increasingly lackluster box office returns, Godzilla serves as a reboot to the now 60-year-old franchise begun in 1954, and the first time an American production company has taken the reins since Roland Emmerich's spectacularly misbegotten 1998 misfire. The new film opens in Janjira, Japan, with nuclear plant supervisor Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) losing his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche, wasted) in a plant meltdown caused by freak seismic activity. Things jump forward 15 years to the present day and we're introduced to Brody's now-adult son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), returning from a stint in a US Navy bomb disposal squad before being unwillingly summoned to Japan to bail out his father, who has remained obsessed with uncovering the true cause of the meltdown, convinced that there was a cover-up. Joe is right, of course, and his snooping brings both he and his son to the attention of a shadowy team of scientists lead by Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins, also wasted). The Janjira plant has become the nesting grounds of a great big Something, dubbed MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism), and the Brodys have arrived just in time to see it hatch.

It's at this point that Brody the younger more or less takes over as the lone protagonist of the film and things turn into a race against time by the Navy to put a stop to a pair of MUTOs who are cutting a swathe across the United States - first Hawaii, then Nevada, and finally San Francisco. There is another Something hunting the MUTOs, though, and the film respects its audience's intelligence enough not to play coy with its identity. Yes indeed, a hulking prehistoric lizard dubbed Godzilla by Serizawa's team has been woken by all the seismic activity, and it is pissed. Ford also has a wife and son (Elizabeth Olsen and Carson Bolde respectively) in San Francisco, and that fact that I could summarise so much of the plot without mentioning them once is a keener demonstration of what they add to the film than anything else I could say. More worrying still is how little of that plot actually revolves around the presence of Godzilla himself. It was a ballsy move of the filmmakers to assume enough existing familiarity with Godzilla that precious screentime need not be wasted in establishing his importance, but it tips too far over the line into taking Godzilla for granted entirely, assuming that we will understand his importance and care about his fate simply because he is who he is.

I will say this much: for probably the first third of its running time, Godzilla  is damn near faultless. The fifteen-year timeskip feels dreadfully unnecessary and certainly contributes to a lot of the bloat later on in the film, but everything else is spot-on. Even the opening credits are thrilling; a rapid assault of historical footage and snatches of on-screen text that are hastily whisked away while the most driving and ingenious orchestration in Alexandre Desplat's otherwise forgettable score pounds away demands we sit up and pay attention and leaves us with just enough information that we're hungry for more. The following scenes detailing the tragedy at the plant and glimpses of Serizawa's research are nearly as good and set in motion a whirlwind of information and imagery that churns along at a breakneck pace and brings the film's giant monsters into the fold with hardly a wasted breath. Things get a little rockier when Godzilla's backstory is detailed, a moment of horribly strained writing that hits all the wrong notes and manages in one fell swoop to completely depoliticize one of the most political movie monsters in history, serving up mythology in place of allegory and leaving Watanabe helpless to salvage the moment with all the gravitas he can bring to bear.

The fumbling of such a pivotal moment is almost forgotten when MUTO hits Honolulu, though, in a scene that would have been inconceivable in the days when the monsters were men in rubber suits stomping around miniature sets. It's a scene that marries a human point of view with an immaculate sense of scale that could only have been achieved through the use of CGI, and it strikes a balance of awe and horror that could not be more perfectly suited to the material. It culminates in the first full shot of Godzilla, a slow upwards pan that shows off the new design, a perfect marriage of his traditional appearance with the increased detail and more animalistic features allowed by CGI. Godzilla gives of an earth-shaking roar, ready to fight, and... Cue a useless cutaway to Ford's wife and child that serves no purpose, narrative or emotional, and only serves to play keep-away with the scenes of monsters fighting that should be the movie's raison d'etre. It's at this point that Godzilla grinds to a halt and never fully recovers.

Ford Brody, you see, is just a godawful protagonist, and everything in Godzilla from there on out is focused on he and his family to the exclusion of nearly everything else, up to and including the giant monsters that everybody is presumably there to see. The Godzilla franchise is not known for its history of compelling human protagonists, of course, but then it has also been historically characterised by running times that come in south of 100 minutes (frequently south of 80!), at least 30 of which are given over to nothing but giant monsters beating the holy hell out of each other, something which is emphatically not true of Godzilla 2014. I don't entirely understand why the character of Ford and the fifteen-year timeskip were even necessary at all. Joe Brody is no-one's idea of a memorable or engaging character but Cranston draws on the guilt and obsession that motivate him and brings a livewire energy to the role that is miles more watchable than Taylor-Johnson's bland and inflectionless performance. It's made worse still by the aforementioned marriage of human POV and large-scale monster action, which means that we're given no respite from Ford's presence even when, after nearly an hour of wheel-spinning, the monsters start duking it out in earnest. What worked so well early in the film falls victim to diminishing returns swiftly, and it becomes clear that Edwards has no interest in trying anything else at all.

The tragic thing, though, is that when we do get an all-too-fleeting glimpse at the spectacle on offer, it's absolutely top-notch. Every moment that Godzilla and the MUTOs spend engaged in combat, the film could not be improved upon. Edwards has a great eye, and the choreography, lighting and use of colour in the action scenes leaves them stuffed with indelible imagery. If only it weren't doled out thirty seconds at a time, intercut with endless minutes of Taylor-Johnson's blank face! It's not even satisfying to think of in terms of quality over quantity: the exact same amount of monster action, if presented uninterrupted and in a film that was a good thirty minutes shorter, would be enormously satisfying. As it is the endless interruptions and lethargic pacing actually serve to dilute the strength of the spectacle, rendering what should be some of the franchise's all-time highs into far less than the sum of their parts.

History is littered with quite a few less-than-successful Godzilla reboots, so it's hardly surprising that this one, too, would be littered with problems - I haven't even addressed the way the film refuses to grapple with the US's role in creating Godzilla in the original, or why exactly a monster whose whole reason for existing was as a cautionary tale about nuclear warfare would appear in a movie with such a blasé attitude towards nuclear weaponry. Godzilla himself at least is in fine form; the new design strikes a perfect balance between paying homage to Godzillas past and bringing him into the modern blockbuster age (the MUTOs, unfortunately, feel like yet another rehash of the Cloverfield monster). It took some clumsy writing, positioning him as neither hero nor antagonist but simply a force of nature - a role arrived at much more organically in previous takes on the character - but Godzilla is now also in a prime position to reappear better than ever in future movies. Hopefully next time, he won't feel so much like the sidekick in his own starring vehicle.

6/10