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

Not The Seth Rogen One

Going into The World's End, I had an unshakeable hunch that the movie I was about to see was not the one that most people were expecting. It's reasonable to expect that director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's follow-up to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, two of the funniest movies of their decade, might be similarly hilarious. And yet, going in, I couldn't shake the feeling that the new movie wasn't going to be very funny at all.

I am grateful for that hunch, because it turned out to be exactly right: The World's End is not very funny, and  in fact it's not really a comedy at all. There are maybe a dozen moments in the whole film that I found myself laughing out loud, and I think I laughed more often than anyone else in the cinema. So no, The World's End is not as funny as Shaun or Fuzz, but to get hung up on that is to risk missing the important fact that it is perhaps better than either of them. Which is, disappointing though the shift in tone and focus may be, ultimately the most important thing to take away from it.

I'm loathe to give away much if any of the movie, but it's difficult-unto-impossible to discuss what the film is and how it differs from its predecessors without at least talking about the first act, so here goes. Gary King (Pegg) dreams of a night in 1990 when he and five friends unsuccessfully attempted the "Golden Mile", a pub crawl that went through all twelve pubs in their hometown. Now entering his forties, Gary still considers that night the best of his life, but forever regrets not making it to the final pub on the route, The World's End. Hellbent on both conquering the challenge and recapturing the memories, he rounds up his old gang to take on the Mile once more. None of his old friends are very happy to see him again, least of all his once-best friend Andy Knightley (Frost), but all of them reluctantly agree to join him, if only to get him out of their hair once and for all.

Reunited, the gang returns home to find that the town has changed, and that Gary very much hasn't. He still treats his friends like props, squashing their feeble attempts to make the best of the night in the name of doggedly trying to repeat the past. Everyone's just about fed up only a few pubs in, when something happens that changes the course of the entire night. I won't say what, but where Shaun and Fuzz set their sights on zombie movies and buddy cop action respectively, The World's End is a science fiction film, specifically an alien invasion one. It's also a stunningly clever film, stuffed with grace notes that are sure to make repeat viewings satisfying for years to come. That much is to be expected of its pedigree, but what truly blindsided me is how biting the new film is. In place of jokes, The World's End has an abundance of complex, adult characters with very real problems and an array of themes that are expressed thoughtfully and (mostly) subtly.

There are two very important differences to this scenario as compared to the setups for the other two Cornetto films (for that is how the trilogy is collectively known): The first is the protagonist. While the slackers played by Pegg and Frost in the first two films were nobody's idea of a perfect human being they were likeable enough, and shaped by the actors and director with enough affection, that spending two hours with them in a silly comedy wasn't a hard ask. Gary, though, is too far gone to earn that kind of affection. He's too old, too desperate not to move on when everyone else has. He's pathetic, in a way that is far too raw and just plain sad to be funny. Pegg and Wright (who also wrote the script together) know this, and they are completely uncompromising - though not unsympathetic - in portraying him.

The second thing is that it takes a shockingly long time for the genre elements to rear their heads here. I didn't time it, but I'd estimate that things don't even begin to heat up until the thirty- or forty-minute mark of a film that comes in at a tidy 109 minutes total. This means that we spend an awfully long time in the company of Gary and his estranged friends before the carnage begins, and everything that happens afterwards is grounded by that first act. On top of that, the generic elements of the movie are far more subdued here than ever before. There are references aplenty, but they fade into the background , except where they intersect with the film's themes, or during its many action sequences. Gary may not be the biggest complication in his friends' lives any more, but they and the audience are never allowed to forget that their predicament is ultimately his fault.

The action sequences are, incidentally, fantastic. I run more cold than hot towards Wright's last film as director Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but one thing it had in abundance were dazzling and well-staged CGI-enhanced fight scenes, and the ones here more than live up to that standard. Wright has always been a smart director, and his instincts have never been sharper. His signature attention-grabbing editing motifs are back and better than ever, married to some truly beautiful cinematography by Bill Pope that takes on many distinct forms throughout the film, every one of them perfectly attuned to the emotional needs of the scene.

There are really only two things that I can really think of to say against the film. One of them is contextual; it simply does not feel of a piece with the other two Cornetto films, and there are enough deliberate callbacks that you can't entirely keep those films out of your head while watching. The other, and regrettably more serious flaw is the ending. It's not even that it's bad, as such, just that it doesn't feel like part of the same film, tonally or thematically. It's possible that I missed something, but I could not square the final moments of the film with everything that had gone before, and it left things on a slightly deflated note.

Still and all, The World's End is as fine a piece of popcorn entertainment as we've seen in this admittedly somewhat impoverished Summer season. Fun and fast-moving enough to never feel draggy, but rooted enough in intelligent and subtle characterisation to be satisfying and meaningful long after its fizzier pleasures have faded away.

8/10

It Came From Beneath The Sea

Guillermo del Toro's latest directorial effort Pacific Rim is that most frustrating of good movies: the kind that could have been immeasurably better with very little effort at all, and no matter how enjoyable it may be (which is frequently very much in this case) that enjoyment is forever shadowed by the even better version of the film lurking just out of sight.

Pacific Rim, is about giant robots, giant monsters and the point where those two things intersect violently. Very little time is wasted in establishing this: two title cards give us the names and definitions of the Kaiju (the monsters, so named for the Japanese genre films from which Godzilla and company hail) and the Jaegers (the robots), our protagonist Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) talks us through the early years of the human-Kaiju war and the creation of the Jaegers over a whirlwind of news footage, a short fight scene whets our appetite and establishes the tragic death of Raleigh's brother Yancy (Diego Klattennhoff), then it's off to the races.

Except not quite. It's at this point that the film brings us into its present day in 2025, and things slow down for a good while. After his brother's death Raleigh has resigned from pilot duties and turned to working for rations where he's found by general Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), who pulls him back into the fold to pilot his old Jaeger, one of only four left in the world after the Kaiju redoubled their efforts to wipe out the human race. He's brought to the Jaeger program's last outpost in Hong Kong, where he meets the other remaining pilots as well as Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), a pilot-in-training whom he immediately develops an interest in (although not, blessedly, a romantic one). What follows is 45-odd minutes of life at the base, intercut with a comic B-plot revolving around Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day), an obsessive Kaiju fanboy and his quest to acquire an intact Kaiju brain from Hannibal Chau (del Toro stalwart Ron Perlman), a black-market Kaiju organ dealer.

The script for Pacific Rim (co-written by del Toro and Travis Beacham) is not short on flaws. The dialogue is wooden and only comes in "expository" and "forced levity" varieties, exacerbated by the fact that, with the exception of a single speech that was in all of the trailers anyway, it's consistently doled out inversely relative to the talents of the actors it's given to. The biggest problem, though, is that Raleigh is just a godawful protagonist. Hunnam's performance is completely blank, and the character gets little to do except quarrel with the Australian Jaeger pilots (Max Martini and Robert Kazinsky, who owe the entire country an apology for their accents) and be generally surly. He's a big old heaping of vanilla all over the film, smothering the otherwise light tone and weighing down the early going with endless scenes of empty moping. He's not even enough of an inexperienced blank slate to serve any kind of audience-identification purpose, so we end up far more in tune with the greener Mako than we ever do with Captain Whitebread.

It's not hard to envision a version of the movie where Mako, who has just as much of a history with the Kaiju and a far more interesting relationship with Pentecost, among other things, is the protagonist and Raleigh is relegated to a supporting role or scrapped entirely, and it's this that I had in mind when I suggested that the film could have been easily and significantly improved. The removal or sidelining of Raleigh may not have resulted in the best possible version of Pacific Rim (which to my mind would need to have been made with rubber suits and miniature sets) but it would have resulted in a Pacific Rim with more clarity of purpose, better characterisation and a running time that came in a good 20 minutes shorter.

If Pacific Rim is too hamstrung by its weak script to ever be considered amongst del Toro's best work, it's perhaps even more of a testament to his abilities as a director than some of his better films, because he saves much more of the material from itself than I would have thought possible. Starting from a breathtaking opening shot where the night sky turns into the deep ocean, the film is stuffed full of some of the most memorable imagery to play on screens this year, albeit not quite as much as a Hellboy II or a Pan's Labyrinth. Even when he's not straight-up showing off, he keeps the film operating at a level of visual splendour that keeps the worst elements of the script at arm's length - I'm particularly fond of a visual motif involving various particles drifting in a blanket across the screen. An extended flashback to Mako's childhood should be excruciating on paper (and it still is a little, but only due to the unwelcome presence of Raleigh, The Beigefather) but in del Toro's hands it's a small masterpiece of poignancy married with visceral terror, and grounds the entirety of the monster action in the rest of the film with a sense of scale and genuine stakes.

Visually the film only has one real flaw, but it is admittedly a serious one: the Kaiju are simply not interesting to look at. This is disappointing (to put it mildly) coming from a director who has spent much of the last ten years gracing us with some of the most inspired and memorable movie monsters to grace the screen since movie monsters went out of fashion, and especially from that director's self-proclaimed love letter to the iconic B-movie monsters of yore. For starters, the monsters of Pacific Rim have a worrying tendency to disappear into the backgrounds of low-lit scenes, and since we only ever see them attack at night that's very nearly all the scenes they appear in. Even more disheartening is how interchangeable the whole lot of them are; a late fight scene features a Kaiju who we are assured in dialogue is the Biggest Baddest Most Threatening Kaiju Of Them All, and I could not for the life of me tell you which of the three on-screen monsters it was supposed to be. I also would have personally preferred that the entire species' unifying aesthetic couldn't have been quite as easily summed-up as "like the Cloverfield monster, but with glowing neon bits", but that much at least is a matter of taste.

Ultimately, though, the Kaiju are there to have the holy hell beat out of them by giant robots, and Pacific Rim delivers on that front far more successfully than its uninspiring marketing campaign had led me to expect. There is a weight and a "crunchiness" to the setpieces that is all too often absent from CGI-dependent blockbuster movies. That, coupled with a childlike sense of glee and an uncommon dedication to preventing civilian casualties gives the action a giddy thrill that secures it firmly near the top of the 2013 Summer season. Six years after Michael Bay seemingly ruined the concept for everyone in Transformers, we at last have a CGI-age giant robot picture that delivers on the promise of that concept. It's far from perfect but it's a it's a wholly successful proof-of-concept, and hey, that's what sequels are for, right?

7/10

I'm No Superman

With Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" trilogy all wrapped up and Marvel's film division absolutely monopolising the "fun" corner of the comic book adaptation market, Warner Brothers has turned its eye to dark-and-edgifyin' another iconic DC superhero. The result, in case you've been living under a rock for the last year, is Man of Steel, and it is a complete and utter failure of a motion picture.

Man of Steel more-or-less follows the template set by the marvelous Superman: The Movie back in 1978, with a few changes both major and minor to bring it in line with modern sensibilities (or more accurately, a film executive's idea of modern sensibilities), and a few more just for the hell of it - nearly all of them for the worse. It begins as that film did with a lengthy prologue set on the alien planet of Krypton, where leading Kryptonian scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) has failed to prevent the planet's imminent destruction. The only hope left for the survival of the Kryptonian race lies in he and wife Lara Lor-Van's (Ayelet Zurer with the absolute worst performance in the film, all glassy-eyed stares and stilted line deliveries) infant son Kal-El, who is sent away to Earth despite the best efforts of mutinous General Zod (Michael Shannon, whose performance is typically unhinged but distressingly free of nuance), who kills Jor-El in the process. For his crimes, Zod and his most loyal officers are banished shortly before Krypton is destroyed.

In the first of many abrupt shifts in the story, we find ourselves in the company of the adult Kal-El (Henry Cavill) on Earth, now rechristened Clark Kent, who is disillusioned with his life and searching for any trace of his Kryptonian heritage. For the next hour and change Clark's childhood in rural Kansas with adoptive human parents Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane respectively) is doled out piecemeal via flashback, inserted crudely into the present-day narrative at seemingly random intervals. As if this weren't fractured and aimless enough, we're also introduced to investigative reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams), who crosses paths Clark at a US military dig site in Canada and becomes determined to find out more about him. Fractured and aimless it is, but this first act is still home to the majority of Man of Steel's best moments. Adams's Lois Lane is the only wholly successful modern update to the material, and if she is thus given appallingly little to do in exchange, she at least walks out with her dignity intact. The "Clark's childhood" material, meanwhile, is home to many terrific tiny character moments between the young Clark (played at 9 by Cooper Timberline and 13 by Dylan Sprayberry) and his parents. Lane is a perfect emotional anchor and remains so throughout the film, while Costner is nearly good enough to make the severe character missteps in the script actually work out in his favour.

Ah, yes, here is where things get really thorny. Starting with scriptwriters David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan's (who also produced) decision to render Jonathan Kent as a far more morally grey and distant role model for the young Superman, Man of Steel embarks on a voyage that ends in the total character assassination of its hero. Towards the end of the first act things seem to be headed for something of a course correction: Clark is reunited with his biological father in the form of a holographic projection, who at least pays lip service to the notion that people are capable of greatness and that Superman's most important power is to unite them in reaching it, through dialogue that is largely taken from Superman's more iconic comic book outings. Indeed, a genuinely compelling middle act starts to take shape where this more troubled  version of Superman learns to love and trust the people of America and offer his services as their protector before that trust is tested in a huge way.

I was fully prepared to start really liking the film at this point, but then it chooses to sidestep having a middle act entirely. Instead the running time is given over over to the third act, nearly a full hour of relentless and desperately uninteresting action sequences. Many things explode, many buildings crumble, entire city blocks are laid waste, an unthinkable level of human life is wiped out, and Superman apparently does not give a shit. Here is where it becomes abundantly clear that Goyer and Nolan don't understand or care about a single fucking thing that they said earlier in the movie. Their Superman blithely decimates nearly an entire city without batting an eyelid, happily writing off any loss of life as necessary collateral damage to defeat the bad guy, and oh boy does "defeating the bad guy" take on a meaning that would ordinarily only be allowed to do so over Superman's dead body (as it does, literally, at one point in the comics).

Man of Steel is terrible Superman, then, but bad adaptations are often good cinema in their own right, which is ultimately their only responsibility. This particular adaptation, unfortunately, is not good cinema by any definition that I'm comfortable using. It borrows liberally and without thought or skill from Nolan's Batman films, all slate greys and jerky camera movements (a particularly awful shot during the Krypton sequence crash zooms in, then out, then in again in a single take) and frantic editing, without any consideration to why those films used that aesthetic the way they did. Where Nolan had an eye for physical plausibility and practical effects, keeping the action contained to a human-level idea of "large", Man of Steel is operating in a far grander register of giant shiny spaceships and cities being levelled and civilizations facing extinction; a register that is entirely incompatible with the gritty pseudo-realism of the visuals. On top of this, almost every scene is rotten with lens flares that would make JJ Abrams blush at the freedom with which they are allowed to obfuscate the on-screen action.

All of this is to say that it's director Zack Snyder's finest work since his 2004 debut, Dawn of the Dead. Hideous though the visuals might be, they are in every way an improvement on his last four efforts. Slate grey is an improvement over orange and teal, crash zooms and shaky-cam are preferable to pervasive speed ramping, and so on. What's more, he portrays the deaths of Superman's parents with a callous disinterest, expecting the cloying soundtrack to do the emotional heavy lifting. Not something that any director should be proud of, for sure, but for Snyder it represents the first and only time that he has successfully portrayed violence and mayhem without actively fetishising it, in Man of Steel or any other film. The film is not entirely free of directorial dick moves - a stupid gesture involving herds of CGI African fauna nearly scuttle what is otherwise the film's most (and only) successful feint towards spectacle, and there's a fantasy sequence involving Zod and Supes that is a fucking disaster of the heavy-handed visual metaphors and subsequent masturbatory wallowing that are a pervasive element of Snyder's back catalogue.

I understand (though I also reject) the desire to update Superman to appeal to a modern, more cynical audience, but what we have in Man of Steel is scarcely worthy of the name (not that it seems to want it; "superman" is used only twice in the film, and only mockingly at that). It's both morally and visually ugly, so larded up with expensive CGI and self-concious attempts to ape other contemporary superhero films that it aged more in the time it took me to leave the cinema than its forebear has in 35 years.

4/10, and it owes its supporting cast a hell of a lot for that

Something Something Black Sabbath Lyric

I can't be the only one suffering from Marvel fatigue by now, surely? I understand that they want to establish a consistent brand, but the fact that they've functionally remade Iron Man five times now with varying quality of acting and humour has well and truly worn thin. That said, the acting and humour are the best they've ever been in Iron Man 3, so consider that a recommendation if you're still thrilled at the thought of yet another entry in Marvel's long line of highly competent and deeply anonymous blockbuster filmmaking.

The acting and the humour really are top-notch, actually. Iron Man 3 trades the first two films' director Jon Favreau (who still puts in an appearance as Happy the overbearing security guard) for Shane Black, who also wrote the screenplay. Black previously collaborated with Iron Man 3 star Robert Downey Jr. on the wonderful Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005, where their personalities as director and actor were seemingly a perfect fit. If nothing else, Iron Man 3 proves that it wasn't a fluke - Downey Jr. hits a new peak as Tony Stark here, after coming off as a little disenchanted with it in The Avengers, while Black's acidic wit hasn't dulled at all (although it has been reined in; this is a PG-13 blockbuster).

Iron Man 3 opens with its absolute worst gesture: we're dumped in the middle of a flashback to 1999, being narrated by present-day Tony Stark. Flashbacks and voice-over are lazy storytelling at the best of times, but here it's only used to crudely insert a new villain into Tony's past for no reason that is ever satisfactorily paid-off. Why does Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) have to have crossed paths with Tony Stark prior to the present-day events of the movie? It never really ends up informing either character's motivations. Things pick up after that, at least. The voice-over is quietly taken out the back and shot while we catch up with Stark after the events of The Avengers. Things haven't been going too well - he can't sleep and he's been plagued by anxiety attacks ever since, and it's straining his relationship with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Meanwhile, America is being hit with a rash of terrorist attacks masterminded by the Mandarin (Sir Ben Kingsley), and no-one can quite figure out how he's doing it. Eventually he ends up on the wrong side of Stark's ire, but before Stark can take action his home is destroyed and he's sent on the run, without his expensive toys to back him up.

That's about as far as the plot can be synopsised without hitting spoiler territory. More than anything else, the plot of Iron Man 3 is characterised by shocking reveals, and it doesn't work at all. Putting aside the issue of predictability (I don't think I was ever less than two reveals ahead of the plot, your mileage may vary), it does awful things to the central conflict, or lack thereof. For most of its 135-minute running time, Iron Man 3 suffers from a distinct lack of a central villain, and it feels like there's a new (or a new old) one every ten minutes. Which is only compounded by the fact that none of the antagonists has much of a distinct personality, aside from Mandarin, who is entirely a gimmick.

At least the tone is mostly light. It's jokier than Iron Man 2, and probably the first film as well, and it stops the plot from getting too bogged down in its murky wheel-spinning. Eventually it culminates in an explosive climax, as these things do, and... Well, there's not a lot to say. The action is as it always has been. Did you enjoy the CGI-driven aerial combat in Iron Man and The Avengers? This is more of exactly the same. As someone who didn't, Iron Man 3 did not make me a convert. It's not a coincidence that the best film released under Marvel's studio to date is Captain America, which also had by far the smallest scale action, and it's telling that the best parts of this film are those in which Tony is robbed of his suit. Unfortunately, this only makes up about five minutes of the movie.

That's a lot of words spent discussing a movie that everyone already knows if they want to see or not. It's neither a disastrous misfire or a shot in the arm*. It's fun, in a very minor way, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit happy to see the back of it.

6/10

*At this point into the current superhero film cycle, I would welcome either with open arms.

Crood Humour

The Croods is a fucking ugly movie.

There's no other way to put it, and it's something that the movie is never able to fully recover from. Dreamworks animation have a storied history with regards to visual fidelity, with their previous films ranging from unspeakably hideous to kind of okay. The Croods is pretty uneven itself - many of the environments (quite a few of which are, admittedly, actually paintings) are quite lovely indeed, the menagerie of bizarre pseudo-prehistoric animals are a little less so, and the human characters are... well, there's where things get rocky. Bad enough that they should have the Dreamworks standard-issue waxy skin, but the poor humans in this movie suffer from a virtually never-ending series of afflictions: their hair is rendered in immobile  blocks that sit about a centimetre off their scalps, their teeth seem to float inside their mouths, their bodies don't respond to light and shadow properly, and they perpetually seem to be floating just a little bit in front of the frame. All this on top of character designs that already overshoot a comical idea of cavemen right into lumpy, inhuman flesh-things. I have no idea if it was the complicated production history (this began life as an Aardman project) or something else entirely, but The Croods does not for one second look like a 135 million dollar motion picture.

I make such a big deal of this not to condemn the film, however, but to commend directors Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco for making a film that ends up managing to be pretty damn good in the face of one of the most crippling flaws any film could be saddled with. Sanders, as we know from Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon (both of which he co-directed with Dean DeBlois, who sat this one out in favour of helming a sequel to HTTYD) is a fairly wonderful director of animation, capable of balancing tone, keeping the pace lively and engineering physical comedy with great panache. The Croods is not as fine as either of those movies, but it still makes for very light, breezy family entertainment - and it's at least more even than HTTYD, which I found had a deathly boring stretch towards the end.

The Croods centres on a primitive family - the Croods of the title - who live a quietly conservative existence out of their tiny cave. The family patriarch Grug (Nicolas Cage, choosing to behave himself) keeps his wife Ugga (a woefully underused Catherine Keener), mother-in-law (Cloris Leachman) and three children - son Thunk (Clark Duke) and daughters Eep (Emma Stone) and Sandy (Randy Thorn) - safe through constant fear and intimidation, treating anything new or unusual as life-threatening. Most of the Crood family isn't thrilled with this way of life, but it keeps them from going the way of their deceased neighbouring families, and that's good enough for them. Eep, however, chafes under her father's strict rules and longs to explore the world outside the cave. It's on one such sojourn that she runs into Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a more evolved kind of caveman who comes bearing tidings of the end of the world. He ends up being right, and the Croods are forced out of their cave and into the big wide world. If you guessed that from this point they meet up with Guy, tensions run high, lessons are learned and family bonds are strengthened then you get absolutely nothing, because no shit they do.

It's a hoary old plot, alright, but it goes down more than well enough thanks to a few things. First and possibly most importantly, the voice cast is firing on all cylinders to make the Crood family dynamic feel real and lived-in - they're absolutely convincing as a family of people who have known one another for years and who deeply love and can't stand each other in equal measure. In addition to this, the exact moment the plot kicks into gear and gets familiar is also the moment that we get exposed to the greater world of The Croods, and it's a terrific work of art design. Not all the designs are perfect (in particular, I never really warmed to the sabre-toothed cat that crops up throughout the movie), but most of the flora and fauna that dot the landscape of the film are a delight to see come to life in all their warped, cartoon glory. Finally, the directors do an excellent job of establishing real stakes at the climax, and making the danger facing the characters feel clear and present at all times, enough so that the eminently predictable ending actually feels surprising and earned.

Really though, the plot just fades into the background most of the time. The tone of The Croods is one of light comedy at almost all times, and that works out just fine for it. It's mostly well-assembled and elaborate physical comedy, although all of the characters except Ugga get at least one or two moments to shine in the dialogue. Not all of the humour lands; some of the physical comedy descends into too-broad slapstick, and there is one deeply regrettable animal sidekick whose jokes all revolve around the grating anachronistic humour that has plagued Dreamworks animated films since time immemorial, but I was laughing out loud more often than not.

It's hard not to feel at least a little disappointed by The Croods, and it's definitely a step down from Sanders's previous work as a director, but that still leaves it plenty of room to be big, silly and hugely entertaining, as well as position it well above the heap in the Dreamworks back catalogue.

7/10

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

I find it difficult to speak with anything approaching objectivity towards Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2010 film Confessions. It is, in so many ways, another in a long line of grim, misanthropic anti-thrillers that many directors, like Austria's Michael Haneke, have been producing over the last decade. And yet, while I find most of those movies to range from hateful to begrudgingly admirable, Confessions straight-up blindsided me.

The movie begins with what is essentially a its own contained short film. It’s the end of term and Class B’s teacher, Ms. Moriguchi (Takako Matsu) informs her unruly class that she won’t be returning after break. As the ensuing celebration dies down, she starts to talk about the recent death of her 4-year-old daughter, which she reveals was caused by two of her own students. After the class is well-and-truly riled up, she reveals one final piece of information, a cruel trick that she has perpetrated on the culprits (you can find out the nature of said trick in almost any synopsis of the film, but it’s such an effective shock moment that I'm loathe to spoil it).

Only after this does the story proper, adapted by Nakashima from a novel by Kanae Minato, kick into gear. The rest of the movie takes the form of a series of overlapping spoken confessions by several of the students in Moriguchi’s class as the ramifications of her actions start to take hold. As with any such film, however, the machinations of the plot are simply a springboard, here for a film about the cruelty that children are capable of, and the adult behaviour that enables it - as well as questions about the value of human life and the morality of revenge, and an attack on Japan's laws about criminal offenders to boot. Questions which, of course, the film has no interest in providing answers for. So far, so much like any other grim, provocative art-thriller.

The key difference is, I think, that where so many of those other movies traffic in an aesthetic of cynical detachment, Nakashima is operating in a style that’s much more meditative and openly emotional. Instead of feeling clinical and airless, Confessions is moody and frequently melodramatic. Nakashima tends to crowd his mise en scène, bringing the characters’ emotions out into the film frame to surround them, and renders each confession as something of a tone poem. Aiding and abetting the visuals are a small handful of licensed songs, used and repeated with the precision of a bullet (the second appearance of Radiohead’s “Last Flowers” in particular destroyed me) to create a thick atmosphere of unreality.

This heightened reality serves a double purpose of creating an environment where the most histrionic parts of the screenplay and the more outlandish plot twists feel more plausible, as well as making the ideas in play that much more confronting and affecting. I haven't seen either of Nakashima's earlier cult-hit films Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko, but my understanding is that Confessions is working on a totally different level to those movies, and doesn't seem to stem from his earlier work at all.

It’s true that after all this, up to and including its twisted punchline, Confessions only really adds up to so much provocation. But effective provocation has its place in cinema too, and Confessions is, as far as I'm concerned, effective and then some. It succeeded in utterly devastating me in spite of my instinctive resistance to material like this, and left me in a state of dumbfounded awe. And for that, I can only concede defeat to Tetsuya Nakashima and his tremendous suckerpunch of a film.

Almost as pointless as covering Led Zeppel- oh.

David Fincher has always been a filmmaker I've felt that I should like more than I do. I mean sure, I think Se7en is one of the stone-cold best films of the 90s and I'm of the (not at all big enough) camp that believes Zodiac to be even better. Hell, I even have time for the assembly cut of Alien³ most days. Here's a director with two honest-to-god masterpieces under his belt and a strong vision all of his own. And yet, I find it very difficult to ever get very excited about any new film he brings out. You see, David Fincher has fucking awful taste in projects. Alien³? Forgivable, he was an unproven music video director at the time. But then after proving to the world he was someone to pay attention to with Se7en, he followed it up with Fight Club, a film of consummate craftsmanship that is unbearably obnoxious on the rare occasions that it isn't downright offensive. Panic Room has already been condemned by history and needs no help from me, so I will settle for describing it as 'baffling', and the only outright 'bad' film of his ouevre. Zodiac was magnificent and very much a logical next step for the director of Se7en and a sign that he was well on his way to a bright future. So of course he followed it up with the unspeakably dull Benjamin Button, a film so competent and airless that it's not even interesting enough to be bad. Naturally, it went over well with the Academy, and having got a foot in the door at the Oscars, he returned with the edgy and topical The Social Network, a witty but forgettable script by the vastly overrated Aaron Sorkin that was never unenjoyable but ultimately forgettable and felt like a waste of the efforts of many very, very talented people. Now he's back with an adaptation of tepid bestselling thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it's not entirely mediocre. And that ends up being kind of the problem.

I perhaps shouldn't have gone on at such length to start with. The thing, you see, is that there is very little less interesting than talking about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. By this point in time the vast majority of people will be familiar with the story: disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (in this version played by Daniel Craig) is invited to an island in the north of Sweden to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of Harriet Vanger at the request of her still-grieving uncle Henrik (Christopher Plummer, who treats his dialogue like it's a race and babbles out exposition with no emotion other than the vague sense that he'd rather be elsewhere). During his investigation he crosses paths with the titular Girl, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a royally fucked-up ward of the state who has been dealing with an abusive carer (Yorick van Wageningen) and they join forces to get to the bottom of things, then Stieg Larsson complains about finance speculators for a hundred fucking pages.

It's likely anyone interested in TGWTDT is already familiar with one of its earlier incarnations, be it the book or the Swedish film, later adapted into a TV series as well. I certainly am - in fact, I was already pretty much sick of the story by the time this version came around. The mystery at the core is not without its appeal, but it's hardly one for the ages, and the socially conscious window-dressing feels staler and staler with every retelling.

None of this is the fault of Fincher or his incredibly talented team - in particular, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score betters even their own masterful work on Social Network, and longtime Fincher collaborators Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall's gunshot editing is propulsive and timed within an inch of its life. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth paints Sweden in a pallette of slate greys and sickly fluorescent yellows that is initially perfectly atmospheric and gloomy but becomes tiresome by the end of the film's 158 minutes (a compromise with the studio - Fincher's original cut runs three hours and thank god for someone with sense stepping in). It's technically flawless and not even without its fair share of artistic merit, but it feels like so much wasted breath on (and even sometimes at odds with) Steven Zailian's functional script or even Stieg Larsson's by-turns dry and vaguely sleazy novel. It's impossible in any meaningful way to call the Swedish version a better film, but something about that version's TV-level production values and artistic sensibilities felt more appropriate to the quality of the story it was telling.

The only remarkable part of either film version, really, is its leading lady. I'm more partial to Noomi Rapace's turn in the Swedish film, who tapped some incredibly dark places to find a version of Lisbeth Salander who might actually exist. Fans of the book will likely prefer Mara's decision to play the character as written; much more artificially a Character, she still acquits herself just fine playing the hell out of it. Craig, meanwhile, is miles away from the bland charm of the original's Michael Nyqvist, happy to play the character as weary and grumpy and kind of an asshole in an incredibly magnetic way. The Swedish film landed Rapace international stardom and the chance to break into Hollywood, a move which I hope and pray pays dividends, but only time will tell. Mara doesn't seem to have attracted quite the same accolades, but with an Oscar nomination* under her belt her future looks bright all the same. If it means more performances of this calibre in future then I wish her the best of luck, and promise to try my best not to think of her as 'that girl who sleepwalked through the dreary Nightmare on Elm Street remake'.

Ultimately there's nothing concrete I can really criticise about TGWTDT beyond how damn unecessary it feels. But at the same time it's hard to respond to it with anything more than muted enthusiasm. And I'd have liked to have been able to respond to something that so many great people have toiled over with something more than such faint praise. It's frustrating in a way that nothing in the film can make up for. Maybe next time, David. I hope so. I really do.

6/10

*Hasn't got a hope in hell of winning, though.

La Dolce Vita

A Bittersweet Life (a bastardisation of the original title which translates to "The Sweet Life", because irony is a lost art) is very eager to tell the audience that it isn't fucking around. "Get the hell out of my way" it says to the opening credits as cameras swoop and fly and track in a whirlwind with Kim Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) in the eye, finishing his meal and methodically going about his job as an employee of crime boss Kang (Kim Yeong-chol), effortlessly dispatching a group of rowdy thugs from a high-class hotel. This almost-wordless, frenetic opening sequence is almost all the character introduction we get for the rest of the film, and woe betide the audience member who isn't paying attention.

From there things fall into place fairly neatly. In a nutshell, Sun-woo is left to mind the shop for Kang while he's in Shanghai for a few days and is for the first time forced to re-evaluate his lifestyle for reasons that are not made explicit until the end of the film, if ever, but are easy enough to guess at, and he commits a couple of fuck-ups that leave him at the mercy of his own boss as well as rival kingpin President Baek (Hwang Jeong-min). With nowhere to run and seemingly nothing to live for, Sun-woo grits his teeth and swears revenge on everyone involved and from there it's off to the races.

It's a pretty well-worn story, but that's hardly a complaint in the face of where it allows director Kim Jee-woon to take things. He cites Le Samourai and Scarface (a combination which should already have eyebrows raised) as inspirations, but there's obviously more than a few overt influences at work here. The strongest voice in the film, however, is plainly that of Kim Jee-woon, and when he e.g. brazenly lifts a shot straight from Taxi Driver it's done to dynamo effect, one of a dozen grace notes that make the film just that little bit richer.

Jee-Woon is known primarily for being a bit of a magpie with genre, cherrypicking imagery, plot elements and techniques from any number of diverse and questionably compatible kinds of films and weaving them together into his own elaborate tapestry. The core of this particular frankenstein's monster is undoubtedly film-noir, with all the monochromatic palette and rise-and-fall, me-against-the-world plot setup you'd expect to follow. Following probably less expectedly are fight scenes staged like a martial arts movie or a climactic shootout that looks for all the world like a Hong Kong action movie or a handful of scenes that are straight-up gangster pastiche or so-on. It's a testament to Jee-woon's own strong visual sensibility that he's able to make it feel like part of a unified whole, in addition to being damn snazzy moment-to-moment.

And make no mistake, the thing looks fucking snazzy. I already mentioned the traditional noir colour scheme and all the delightful, shadowy compositions that it entails, but it's accompanied by flawless* cinematography that makes everything look shiny and sleek and Expensive in a very pointed and deliberate way as well as a handful of motifs that serve to provide the thematic meat and potatoes without ever forcing the script to slow everything down and throw the audience a bone to chew on. Combined with wonderful arrhythmic, abrupt editing it results in a film as driven as its protagonist that feels about a third as long as its two-hours-on-the-nose running time, and that's never a bad thing.

It's these visual reminders of the sheer inconsequence of Sun-woo's lost lifestyle that let A Bittersweet Life, like fellow genre-bending revenge story Kill Bill (and dammit I was trying so very hard to avoid comparisons to Tarantino or Miike in this review), have its cake and eat it too, providing a slick and exciting thriller edifice while constantly reminding us just how unfulfilling it ultimately is. That's overselling it all a wee bit though, though - A Bittersweet Life is first and foremost a crowd-pleaser, and an enormously successful one. That it is a formally audacious and unusually thoughtful one to boot is simply the icing on a cake that is very sweet indeed.

*Assuming that the lousy colour reproduction was a feature of the DVD I was watching and not the film.

Letters From Our Fathers

It is almost impossible for me to believe that Letters From Iwo Jima (originally given the far better title of Red Sun, Black Sand) was filmed back-to-back with Flags of Our Fathers. There isn't a single complaint that I leveled at that film that hasn't been deliberately excised from its sibling with surgical precision. It's just as well, too, because the American-made film focusing on the Japanese who fought at Iwo Jima as a companion to a film that was already hopelessly indelicate could very easily have been a total disaster. Instead, it ended up the finest war movie of the last decade.

Eastwood clearly knew how much was riding on the movie, because all the stops have been pulled out in making sure everything hews as close to real Japanese culture as humanly possible. Understanding that there was no way Paul Haggis could be allowed anywhere near the material, Eastwood instead hired Japanese-American writer Iris Yamashita (a woman with precisely zero other film credits, before or since) to pen the script. Haggis gets a story credit, but I suspect it may just be because Letters parallels his Flags script, as it must. The cast is also composed entirely of Japanese actors speaking their native language in place of the usual Hollywood approach of casting a slew of Pan-Asian actors and letting them butcher dialogue in a language that they quite possibly don't speak at all. I'm far too Caucasian to pass judgement myself, but the tremendous critical and commercial success that Letters saw in Japan makes me fairly comfortable in believing that there are no serious representational gaffes here.

The level of dedication shines through in the film itself. It's impossible to doubt for a second the filmmakers' dedication to their characters. If Flags was already a war film of unusual humanity, Letters bests it by a spectacular margin. Like Flags it focuses on three particular soldiers in the fight for Iwo Jima without ever really being about them at all. Where Flags was also about those men struggling to come to terms with life after the fact, Letters is instead about the fact that these men are going to die, and they know it. The letters of the title are written by the film's characters to their families, but they are written for the characters themselves, who know full-well that neither they or the letters will ever leave Iwo.

If I described Flags as 'restrained', the only adjective I could rightfully level at Letters is 'meditative'. In my review of Flags of Our Fathers I said that Iwo Jima was by far the most important character in the film*, and that it was never better than the moments it returned to that island. Letters From Iwo Jima (aside from a handful of flashbacks) never leaves those shores, and this allows it to settle into a steady rhythm, following the Japanese soldiers as they each continue trying to exist in the only way they know how. Even when the war finally reaches the island it's made to feel like an inevitable fact of life introducing further complications to the characters than the bloody combat that it really is. Even more than Flags the warfare is painted in broad, abstract strokes, with cinematography so desaturated that it more suggests colours rather than capturing them on film.

With its gentle rhythm, stripped-down aesthetic and endless reserves of humanity it's difficult not to become caught up in the lives of those Japanese soldiers yourself. When the inevitable comes and people start dying, their removal from the film's fabric feels more painful than the countless hectic, brutally violent war-film deaths. Being an Eastwood film, it's entirely unsurprising that Letters is a formal masterpiece. Being an Eastwood film, it's altogether surprising and greatly pleasing that it should so perfectly balance bitter anti-war outrage and raw emotion without ever feeling less than absolutely genuine. The director is genuinely not known for keeping his emotions in check, but he manages it here with grace to spare.

That Letters From Iwo Jima is alone the finest war film in a decade, probably more** would alone make it worthy of being remembered. The real magic, though, occurs in a roughly twenty-minute passage in the middle of the film where it directly overlaps with Flags of Our Fathers. In these moments the two films together do something that transcends either of them. No matter which of the two you are watching, it becomes impossible not to think of the very real men and their struggles on the opposite side of the battle, even as they appear no larger than ants milling about before the camera. In this way, both films (Flags especially, since it had further to climb) overcome their limitations, even many of the ones endemic to the medium, to become among the most powerful and effective anti-war statements ever conceived.

*At least, I wish I had.

**With the concession that The Thin Red Line beggars a descriptor like that.

Flags of Iwo Jima

Few great movies exist that are not subject to flaws. This is nothing new. It is rare, however, that great movies  are such in spite of flaws quite as big as the ones that face Flags of Our Fathers, a Clint Eastwood-helmed war film that uses the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photo as the centrepoint for a bold and sometimes shockingly vicious mission to re-evaluate just how we as a society should necessarily feel about World War II.

I know this to be the movie's mission, because writer Paul Haggis (working here with William Broyles, Jr.) was afraid I might not pick it up and helpfully has one of his three lead characters state it out loud in just about every scene. Namely soldiers John Bradley (Ryan Phillipe, in a rare turn of not making me want to punch him), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), the three men responsible for putting the flag up that day who lived long enough to report on the experience to their superiors.

Ira is also Native American, something Paul Haggis would like to point out at every possible opportunity, because apparently he wasn't quite done being condescing about race issues in America after the suffocatingly preachy Crash. This is to say nothing of Ira's DRINKING PROBLEM. Barely a scene passes in which he is not seen DRINKING ALCOHOL, or teetering around and being belligerent because he is DRUNK, at which point someone will remark on how very DRUNK he is, and that just maybe his DRINKING PROBLEM is the result of POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS. Because he was a SOLDIER. In the WAR. And you WEREN'T. I could happily hang shit on Paul Haggis and his shortcomings as a writer forever, but that would be a great disservice to the film and to anyone reading this review. Suffice it to say that Flags of Our Fathers is not at all a good script and leave it at that.

Thank god then, that Eastwood was not at all interested in sitting back and letting the script carry the film. It is his work (with, of course, his regular collaborators, cinematographer Tom Stern and editor Joel Cox) that elevates the film from 'Flags of Our Fathers, terrible script' to 'Flags of Our Fathers, entirely respectable war movie'. Anyone who knows anything about Eastwood as a director will find no surprises here - his usual minimalist aesthetic is here in full force, but it is used to uncommonly good effect. Where Haggis will bleat the same theme at us scene after scene, line after line, Eastwood far more adeptly layers subtle meanings over every shot, carefully, patiently and totally without mercy deconstructing and demythologising World War II without ever daring to marginalise the efforts of the people involved.

Generally speaking, the film operates on three levels: on the base level is the day of the landing on Iwo Jima, depicting the struggle to take the island and the activities surrounding the flag-raising itself. On top of that is the War Bonds campaign in the months after, following the three living flag-raisers on a tour of America to drum up public support for the war effort. On top of that sits the modern-day efforts of one of the soldiers' sons, trying to do the same thing as the film itself - piece together the events of that day and clear away the mess of publicity and hero-worship that has since distorted them. His third, unspoken role is to fill up a totally unnecessary narration track explaining in detail the movie's themes. Also generally speaking, the further things get from Iwo Jima, the living beating heart of the film, the worse they become as Eastwood is less and less able to save the script from itself.

When that heart is exposed, though, Eastwood siezes the opportunity with both hands. Having already established that one cannot understand the sensation of being in a warzone through film, he instead opts to shoot the battle scenes like some kind of hellish dreamscape. Iwo Jima as it appears in Flags (played by Iceland) is sparse, unforgiving and devoid of life (in the words of one of the film's characters, "an ugly, smelly, dirty little scab of rock"). Even at their most hectic the battles that take place there have a bare and surreal quality that gently reminds us of the unknowability of war. Even then Eastwood maintains his careful, controlled visual style, focusing as much as possible on the men fighting it and the way this is, for them, all part of the job they signed on for. And all without using graphic violence as a crutch, like some war movies I could mention. In these moments Flags is unimpeachable, and it carries its themes across in a way that the rest of the film's talking on the subject could never hope to.

So no, the film is not a home-run by any stretch; such a huge disconnect between script and film is never a desirable thing and the movie founders for much of its not-inconsiderable running time. A leaner, meaner script without any of the relentless Haggising (in particular, lose the damn framing device) to go with the brutally lean, mean visuals would have left Flags of Our Fathers in far better shape. As-is it's an uncommonly restrained and humane -albeit unfortunately preachy - war movie that struggles to hold itself entirely upright without its sibling for support. Ah, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Not the sequel to 'P'

2007 could, I think, be called the Year of the Tortureporno. The genesis of the fad can be traced to a handful of foreign horror films and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake circa 2003. Saw  cemented it in 2004 and a couple of notably disreputable entries trickled out over the next couple of years - the pair of dreadfully unpleasant Saw sequels and Eli Roth's Hostel probably the most so. In 2007, though, the floodgates opened.  A fourth entry saw the Saw movies making the leap from trilogy to franchise, Hostel saw its own follow-up, two French torture films, Frontier(s) and Inside, made waves,  Captivity generated massive controversy with its ad campaign and the year was capped off with today's subject, a tortureporn Christmas movie of all things, P2.

Indeed, P2 showcases a positive laundry list of trappings of this most unsavoury of subgenres: a relentless string of contrivances to keep salvation perpetually just out of reach of the protagonist(s, torture films are less given to having a designated Final Girl), a resolutely unthreatening villain, scenes of violence that focus far less on the gore and more on the suffering of the people involved, and a vein of sour misanthropy that takes weeks to shake after viewing. It's not true of all movies in the genre, but almost all of them also share the following trait with P2 as well: they are profoundly fucking awful movies.

The only thing that really sets P2 apart from so many of its contemporaries is the involvement of noted French filmmaker Alexandre Aja, who first broke on to the horror scene in a big way in 2003's neo-slasher Haute Tension. Written by Aja himself with regular collaborator Gregory Levasseur and directed by first-timer Franck Khalfoun, who had previously appeared in front of the camera in Haute Tension, the grubby fingerprints of the man behind that film and the Hills Have Eyes remake were all over this one.

P2 is delightfully mercenary in establishing its goals. Over the course of not more than fifteen minutes we're introduced to Angela (Rachel Nichols), a career woman working late one Christmas Eve who ends up stranded in her workplace's underground parking lot after her car refuses to start and the rest of her co-workers have headed home. Friendly night guard Thomas (Wes Bentley) lets her up to the lobby to wait for a cab before she finds out the front doors are sealed and at this point you could almost believe you were watching a particularly generic holiday comedy save for a couple of flimsy false scares. On her way back through the parking lot Angela is knocked out by Thomas and awakes chained to a table, facing him. The movie is barely a tenth over and that's all the plot and characterisation we'll be getting. From then on it's a slow crawl to the end credits as Angela sees herself stuck in torture setpiece after torture setpiece.

Alexandre Aja's involvement meant one good thing, at least - the director brought with him Maxime Alexandre, his regular cinematographer, and the thing looks a million bucks. Draped in moody shadows and contrasted with harsh neon lighting and vivid splashes of colour (the colour-coded pillars of the parking lot look particularly striking, as well as frequent uses of the colour red), the camera works its hardest to really capture the ominous feeling of an underground carpark late at night even as a generic, overmixed and wholly inappropriate score by the outstandingly douchily-named tomandandy does its best to ruin the mood.

That's about all the praise I have to sing, though, because the movie that plays out within that gorgeous and evocative setting is rancid. I already mentioned the plot contrivances but I'm going to mention them again because the movie is literally built out of them.  Everything from the general brunt of the plot to the tiniest little gruesome detail is contrived from some hellish place where screenwriting goes to die. Contrivance in horror is nothing new, but it adds up to vey little of anything here. I never cared that Angela was in jeopardy or pain because Angela barely existed, a non-character hidden behind an icy exterior, a lousy performance and a whole lot of tears. Even this could have crippled but not ruined the film if its villain wasn't every bit her equal. I was constantly torn between wondering if Thomas was supposed to be scary or hilarious, and Bentley's inability to do anything other than feign awkward conversation or scream shrilly did little to make it any clearer. By the time he proved himself a clown with a big Elvis song-n-dance number (no, really), I'd stopped caring because P2 clearly never gave a shit to begin with.

I'm not even the right person to be talking about this, though. This movie isn't about Angela, or Thomas. This is a film about watching people tear their own fingernails off. This is a film about seeing a dobermann stabbed to death with a tire iron. It's not even about the execution of those ideas - indeed, i've never lied about my love of a nice gooey gore effect, but there's not even a whole lot of that on display here. It's about wallowing in the idea of such acts, and praising the creators for... for what? For the willingness to Go There? I'm not buying it. I know that Alexandre Aja can make a delightfully amoral splatterfest that is full of energy and liveliness; I have seen Piranha 3D. Now there was a film that didn't make me feel like I had to shower afterwards.