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

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

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.

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.