Ad Astra

Quite A Mess And The Pitt

Ad Astra
Directed by James Gray
2019 China/Brazil/USA
UK cinema release print.

This movie has been getting some good word of mouth on Twitter and I have to say that, while it falls just slightly short of being an all time classic, Ad Astra is definitely one of the best films of the year. I have some reservations about it... or one anyway... and I’ll get to that a little later but this one is quite the spectacle. I was somewhat put off that people had been comparing this to the absolute brilliance of 2001 - A Space Odyssey (reviewed here) but I have to say that, in a way, they’re right. There are a few little shots scattered around here and there which, if you know Kubrick’s film well, you'll realise are pretty much done in homage, I think, to 2001... although shot in a totally different way of course. But, yeah, there are some direct references back to the look, or at least content, of certain moments in that.

What I haven’t seen mentioned as yet, although, I’m pretty sure I will be seeing a lot of this commentary fairly soon, is the film’s striking resemblance in terms of tone and narrative structure to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. This is something I really wasn’t expecting but by about 20 minutes into the movie I realised that this was definitely part of the vibe the writer/director was going for here.

The set up of the film is very close to the Coppola movie (and presumably Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness too, although it’s been so many decades since I read it that I can barely remember it). In the near future and after the start of a series of bursts of antimatter pulses originating from somewhere near Neptune, which almost kills main protagonist Roy McBride (played by Brad Pitt) during the film’s opening sequences, Roy is sent on a mission hopping from Earth... to the Moon... to Mars and then on to Neptune. His father who was said to have died in space decades before, working on something called the Lima Project near Neptune is, it turns out, suspected of being very much alive and probably gone insane. He is the prime suspect for directing these bursts that drain all power from their target and he needs to be dealt with as swiftly as possible, before the bursts get stronger and destroy everything in the universe. So he is obviously set up as the ‘Colonel Kurtz’ figure of the movie and the film is about Roy’s journey, including speculative voice-over narrative which helps bring the Apocalypse Now vibe into the mix, to try and get to his father and stop whatever is going on. Things are quite a mess up there.

Brad Pitt in this is very strong and I don’t know why I’m always so surprised when I see him turn in a good performance. After all, he’s done some great work in pictures like Inglourious Basterds and World War Z, not to mention his absolutely stunning job in Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. This film gives him some good stuff to work with, playing an almost machine-like character who is nearly always in control and who doesn’t get an accelerated heartbeat, even in times of crisis. Pitt shows the slight flaws and cracks in his character’s approach to life and he gives some nice, subtle shading to a role which could quite easily been a much more clinical, cypher of a part in the hands of certain other actors.

He’s joined by big, acting war horse names like Donald Sutherland and Tommy Lee Jones... plus some really interesting, more contemporary performers such as Ruth Negga and Liv Tyler. Between them all, they and their supporting cast do a terrific job here.

The special effects, quality of the set and prop design and just the overall mise en scène of the thing in general is all absolutely brilliant too and, even though there are a few concepts which threaten to enter more ‘fantasy’ rather than hard sci-fi territory on occasion, this ‘near future’ tale all seems very believable and relatable. It’s got a nice slow pacing but that’s kind of deceptive because there’s a lot of information flying around which has a progressive, emotional effect on the viewer.

For instance, when Donald Sutherland’s character exits the movie fairly early on, he leaves Roy with previously unseen information about the ‘top secret’ mission he’s on and, after this is revealed to both him and the audience, it makes one constantly ‘on the lookout’ for any life threatening situations which could covertly sneak up on the main protagonist and take him... and the audience, by surprise. So, a lot of the suspense comes... not from the actual situations and incidents depicted themselves (although there are some very intense moments, to be fair) but from the expectation that anything or anyone could be about to sabotage that mission and threaten its success in the most terminal fashion.

There’s also... and it’s a very delicate tightrope to walk so, hats off to the director for this... a few action sequences scattered throughout the film and, rather than jar against the tone of the piece, they actually complement and lift the plot rather well. So the ‘space buggy pirates’, not to mention the uneasy tension (due to heightened audience paranoia) of what happens when the crew go to check out a distress signal, make for some interesting moments and hugely enjoyable sequences which don’t damage the overall, less speedily paced nature of the beast.

The score by Max Richter and Lorne Balfe is also quite brilliant, managing to be low key and unobtrusive while still giving you an elevating background hit appropriate to the mostly non-action nature of a lot of the story. I’d love to get hold of this on CD but, as of the time of writing this, it just doesn’t seem to be available. Which is a shame because it’s really cool in the film.

Okay, so far so good. It’s a brilliant film but, for this audience member at least, not an all time classic. Why? Well, the ending just feels a little weak. When Roy finally gets himself to Neptune, by ways I won’t reveal here, the state of his dad and the real issue that is causing the pulses are... well... they’re a bit anticlimactic, to be honest. I did feel kind of short changed after such a sense of foreboding had been kept up throughout the movie and, to add insult to injury, the last ten minutes or so just seemed like Hollywood wanting to please audiences by giving a much nicer ending than any of the characters had a right to expect. So there’s that and it’s why, for me, Ad Astra is a great movie but not a classic. Maybe the ending will grow on me when I watch it again (which I certainly will be doing when I grab the Blu Ray) but, for now, I was a little deflated by the time I got to the final credits.

Ultimately though, if you like science fiction movies then you’re in for a treat with Ad Astra. Definitely go and see this one on as big a screen as possible because it’s fairly spectacular and, the journey to the home stretch is a really great cinematic experience. Like I said earlier, it’s easily one of the best films of the year and you can count on it being in my year end list when the time comes. Go see it.

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood

Bruise Lee

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood
UK/USA/China 2019 Directed Quentin Tarantino
UK cinema release print

Warning: Even the presence of a spoiler warning for this movie would constitute a spoiler so you can see the kind of Catch 22 situation I am in with this... so let’s just say that, yes, there is a spoiler here.

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood is the... well, since I don’t seem to be as mathematically challenged as the Hollywood marketing machine, let’s just call it the ‘latest’ movie directed by Quentin Tarantino, who also wrote it. It’s a film I had been looking forward to for a while since, although I find the director a bit hit and miss, when he’s on form he does create absolute masterpieces of cinema (such as Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds) and a film doing the ‘Manson murders’ and set in Hollywood in 1969 seems like a match made in heaven.

And, as a film it’s kinda entertaining but it’s also somewhat less than I was expecting from it, although I do reserve the right to change my mind on this one because, like some of the best Marvel movies of recent years, it might be that my brain needs to have longer to process it and it’s quite possible that if I ever do see this one a second time, I might like it a lot better than I did before.

Saying that, I still had a fairly good time with this movie... after all, one of the chief pleasures of watching a movie by Tarantino is spotting all the visual and audio references to other peoples movies and, as you can imagine, this film is filled to the brim with them in a much more overt manner (if such a thing is possible when it comes to Mr. T) than any of his other works.

The film follows fictional movie star Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and his stuntman/driver/best friend Cliff Booth played by Brad Pitt. It also follows real life Sharon Tate played here by Margot Robbie, who was of course the most noted of the victims of the slaughter by the hippy followers of Charlie Manson on that grim August night in 1969.

Now, while I loved both all the references to various movies which the film is littered with and, frankly, loved the film and TV shows created to slot into this era by Tarantino for the Rick Dalton character (I especially loved the authenticity of his Italian secret agent movie although, on reflection, it maybe looked a little more like a ‘polizei’ movie than the specific strand of Italian spy movies it was emulating). However, it has to be said that there was practically no story on this one and its all over the place in terms of the way elements of the characters are revealed...

Now I’ve got no trouble with this usually, especially coming from Tarantino. As he’s demonstrated in a few of his movies, he can do this kind of slowly developing story image put together out of myriad scenes which tell something intrinsic about the characters very well and he usually does it in an effective manner which is a joy to watch. However, this particular hodge podge of scenes involving the various main characters and people such as Bruce Lee or Steve McQueen are... well, they’re all still a joy to watch individually but for some reason they never really forward the story that much. At least that’s how it seemed to me. The reason being, I think, is as I said in the paragraph above, there is no story, as such. And everyone knows the outcome of the Manson murders, right?

Okay... spoiler coming up.

I had a couple of conversations with different friends on the lead up to the release of this film about what I thought was going to happen because people keep telling people not to ‘spoil’ the movie and, frankly, it’s hard to spoil a movie when you know how historic events play out. So, this led me to believe that, just as he completely rewrote the end of World War Two in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino would change the outcome of events as they happened in real life and create a ‘new ending’ for Sharon Tate and Manson’s followers. Indeed, asides from the obvious tribute to Sergio Leone in the title, it would also suggest a certain fairy-tale quality to the narrative being presented here and suggests that there will be a certain amount of, shall we say, ‘deviation’ in terms of how things are left. And... yeah. I totally called it, this film left things exactly as I thought they would leave them when I heard about this project so... the film’s two main male protagonists are injected into history and, of course, change it in the way that very few people other than Tarantino would do without some kind of logical alternate to the ending, or lack of, of certain characters... such as in the movies From Hell or The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot (which I reviewed here).

And yes, it’s kind of a double edged sword in terms of the education of young movie goers everywhere when you present fiction as implied facts like this. I work at a college and know a lot of the kids think the war ended when Hitler was machine gunned down in a cinema and... I'm pretty sure that a lot of those same teenagers will be checking the IMDB after this to see what films Sharon Tate has been in recently too. It’s not fair that ignorance of history should block cinematic art like these Tarantino flicks and it’s no reason to censor the art in any way but... a disclaimer at the end might help clarify things to a certain section of the audience maybe. You know... like a statement saying that in real life Sharon Tate, her friends and unborn child were brutally slaughtered by the followers of Charlie Manson... something like that.

Anyway, other than this and despite the kind of directionless, almost spectator sport of 'picking out little details on the screen' kind of nature of the film, there are still some sequences which demonstrate Tarantino’s absolute mastery of the art. Two scenes spring to mind, both featuring Brad Pitt where, frankly, even though I’d worked out exactly how they were going to play out before they finished, were nevertheless almost excruciatingly suspenseful to watch and this is where the director really shows why we go and see his films time and time again. One is where Brad Pitt goes to check out an old friend on a ranch (I won’t say more) and the other is when a bunch of hippies invade a house towards the end of the picture. I’d liken them to the scenes with Alfred Molina in them from Boogie Nights in terms of just how insanely intense they are here and, as always, Tarantino has a way of taking things which we take for granted as fetishised instruments of death and reminding us that they are, truly, very dangerous.

And that’s me about done on this one. The common Tarantino needle-drop approach to the music was less appealing to me this time around (and it really shouldn’t have been since I love that period in music) and, although there is the obvious Manson reference to The Beatles White Album in the dialogue, you don’t actually get to hear any of it in the movie. Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood is probably not a film I would recommend to anyone but the most cine-literate of my friends, truth be told but I expect it will grow on me in time and might even be worth a Blu Ray purchase at some point in the next few years. Nothing more to say except... stay on for the end credits.

Fury

Cantankerous

Fury
2014  UK/China/USA
Directed by David Ayer
UK cinema release print.

Fury is the name of a tank.

This film follows the war time exploits of that tank and it’s crew, commanded by Brad Pitt as Don Collier, during the last year of the Second World War.

As such, it hasn’t got a standard story, or traditional plot line. It’s a very basic, drive your tank here, point it over there and shoot but, of course, that’s a very simple minded appreciation of what we have here which is a very tight and gripping war movie, trying very hard to be as authentic as it can be to what it was like to be in one of those tanks at that point in time. War didn’t have stories as we know them but it also had thousands of stories every day, depending on your view of the term. So in some ways, I guess this does have a story of sorts... the story which is the arc of the personal histories of the men who are driving the tank.

Now with a bunch of actors like Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña and Jon Bernthal... who are all beyond excellent in this and stuck in close proximity in the claustrophobia inducing, cramped conditions of one of these things... you’d expect this to be a character piece and, certainly, you do get a measure of the men these actors are bringing to life in front of you. However, it’s interesting in that it’s not a character piece in terms of the history of any of the men. There are occasional little hints or flourishes which allow you to make shrewd guesses about the back story of some of the main characters but, ultimately, you are in the same position as someone who would be taking Brad Pitt’s advice to his new gunner, Logan Lerman, for the first time... don’t get too close to anyone. So this film is very much a study of the way that men who are none too palatable, in some cases, bond through war and have become a crack fighting team in spite of their differences.

And I have to say the film works really well in this.

For instance, when you are first introduced, pre-credits, to the majority of the crew, they don’t exactly seem to be a well oiled machine in terms of their ability to gel as a team. There are some points in the film where people take a swipe at each other and generally don’t get on with their fellow men, thrust into the mix inside a ticking time bomb of metal carnage... but this film, after deliberately setting up that inconsistency with the way the characters act and react to each other, shows that beneath the surface of these men, there is an overreaching spirit to complete their mission for their country or go down fighting. It’s in this way that the true character of the people involved comes out. The hooligan of the group, who often starts trouble, has a telling scene in which he tells the new recruit that he believes him to be a good man. Everyone has a heart, it seems. They just don’t let it show.

Pitt’s commander is very much a man who is holding together a unit while trying to hold himself together at the same time. There are more than hints that he’s already suffering from some kind of combat fatigue but, unlike a similar condition displayed by Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, he keeps it in check with a minimum of fuss and Pitt’s performance here is such that it becomes very easy to see the sympathetic and extremely empathic man underneath the fierce veneer... and it is a very fierce and challenging veneer as he forces his new recruit, quite physically, into shooting a captured nazi, for example.

Logan Lerman plays Norman Ellison, the new boy, and he also has his own journey/story... as he goes from pacificistic Christian to out and out nazi killer over the course of the film... a journey that Brad Pitt facilitates due to the necessity of having to survive in this kind of conflict. There’s a certain irony to Norman’s attitude by the end of the film when he comes face to face with a nazi searching for survivors but, since I don’t want to spoil the ending of the movie for you, I’ll hold off pointing it out in this review and just urge you to go see it and think about it for yourself.

I’ve not seen any other movies by writer/director David Ayer but he does a fine job here and makes some very interesting, almost puzzling choices in the way he shoots certain kinds of scenes. Specifically the battle scenes.

He goes with hand held camera reacting to things, as you might expect for a modern film about conflict, but he tempers that with absolute static shots of whats going on, in terms of camera movement, every two or three shots in the combat sections. It’s actually curious but quite grounding... like a series of mini establishing shots cut into the battle. The editing is quite pacey but it’s not too fast like a fair number of modern action movies and I think it might be due to the static nature of some of those shots which helps the audience not lose sight of the geography of the action a lot of the time. You really feel those fraught and suspenseful battle scenes too so it’s not something which lessens the emotional pull and drain you get when this kind of stuff is going on.

The other really phenomenal thing about this movie is the score by Steven Price. It’s interesting because it’s quite unlike a traditional war score, bringing a very contemporary style of beats and electronica into the mix. At the same time, possibly due to the mixing but probably due to the spotting, because it does have a chance to shine within the mix, it feels very appropriately scored throughout and you never really question the decisions made with the make up of the music... so it’s another good one from him. I have to say, the CD has gone straight to the top of my Christmas list this year.

Not much else to say on this one. The ending has divided some people and I think the irony of it at a certain point is a bit much to swallow, but overall I think it caps things off quite nicely and I’m not going to be too critical of that because, one of the things I know about trying to get by in a chaotic world, is you don’t always make decisions that make sense. It works well enough and, overall, Fury is a movie which pulls no punches and reminds you of the heroes who died for their countries during conflicts ike these. A good, solid war movie if that’s the kind of thing that floats your DUKW or tracks your tank. Take a look at this one on a big screen if you get a chance.

World War Z (aka World War Zed)

Dead’s Zed, Baby

World War Z (aka World War Zed)
2013 USA/Malta
Directed by Marc Forster
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Dead looking spoilers
suddenly springing to unlife to bite you...

I really didn’t know much about World War Z going in.

In fact, the only four things which I did know were as follows...

1. Brad Pitt is in it. I don’t mind him as an actor but at least one of his decisions in the past, if what I read was reported accurately, caused some bad consequences for other people in the business and consequently, since I don’t know him... I am wary of him. That said, his performance in 12 Monkeys was astonishing and I enjoyed his comic book performance in Inglourious Basterds a heck of a lot too. However, he’s a major star (and producer of this film) and my feelings say that major stars change the tone of projects... and that’s not often a good thing.

2. There was a lot of fuss, really a lot of reported news in the film press, that this project has been going for a long time and that major changes and reshoots were made. This is usually a sign of a bad movie, or often a really good movie which doesn’t match studio expectations of it, which is deemed in need of fixing and that tampering, from what I see of it, is rarely for the better (the extended cut of the Universal remake of The Wolfman, for example, became a contradictory mess in its longer version, whereas the original studio cut is quite watchable - reviewed here).

3. I’ve not read the original novel this thing is based on but I’m told that there is no one central protagonist in the book and that everything is pieced together from different news reports on a global level. Now this could be perceived as a problem because Hollywood and its stars don’t react well to narratives which have no real main protagonists in them but, you can tell even from the trailer, that this movie did have a starring lead role for the picture... Brad Pitt. I wasn’t too worried about this (not as much as I might have been had I read the book, for sure) and I think sometimes in the film industry you have to streamline things down to a central narrative character arc in order to get the film to something watchable... so not too many worries there.

4. The trailer worked really well for me. We had gazillions of zombies eating everything in sight and people in peril. So, really, whatever cynicism I might have been harbouring for the final product on screen... it was going on hold. I like zombie movies. They’re strangely comforting (for the most part).

Now just a couple of days prior to this, I’d heard some criticisms of this film on twitter based on it being filled with action for the first two thirds of the movie and having a strangely subdued last third and, yeah, I can almost see how some people might have had a hard time with that except for one thing, and it’s this...

Although the movie does celebrate zombie action over anything else for the first couple of acts, the third act, while slower in pacing and less spectacular in setting (although no less spectacular in set design), is certainly no less an intense or a suspenseful sequence than what has gone before it. In fact, I’d argue that it’s a whole lot more breathtaking and interesting than the rest of the movie put together... even though by now you’ve completely figured out how the movie is going to finish (I’ll get to that later).

So what we have here is like a big computer game with the first couple of levels in action mode and the final level in stealth mode. Pitt is quite convincing in his role and although it’s not a character driven plot, the film does take time to invest you with a feeling of Pitt’s “family unit”, which is a dead giveaway to the emotional state you will get to at the end of the film and why you know Pitt’s “final solution” will work... it has to in order to pan out the family drama. This drama is badly handled right at the last couple of minutes, I feel, and is one of the worst things about the movie, imbibed with a certain saccharine sweet sentiment instead of going for the natural sugar which was all it needed at this point.

Nevertheless, despite critics redundant rumblings, World War Z is a pretty entertaining time at the movies. It’s basically the big budget end of Hollywood finally catching up to something the low budget end of US film-making has been doing well since the late 1960s and, in this, it does kind of come across as George R. Romero meets 28 Days Later but with a slicker, commercial feel and lots of money to do it in style. But so what? It’s fine by me... I get to see a big budget zombie movie which actually gets to play at local cinemas with enough showings for me to be able to catch it. That’s not a bad thing and, as I say, it was pretty entertaining.

The film enthusiastically goes from one impressive set piece to another and is basically split up into three acts:

1. Escape from the zombie epidemic that suddenly hits where you are living and destroys your entire city in the space of an hour...

2. Become a globe-hopping researcher to try to find the cause of the plague and find some way to stop it... with impressive stop overs in both Korea and Palestine.

3. Go to Cardiff in Wales and sneak around a zombie infested World Health Organisation building with all the atmosphere (and some of the cast) of a really good Season 2 or Season 3 Torchwood episode.

Job done. Great film.

I did find it to be a bit “art-imitates-reality” poignant when Pitt’s character discovers that by immediately lopping off the hand of a female colleague he can halt the infection before it starts, considering the tragic events that have recently plagued his own real life family, but this film is a really well oiled machine of what is known these days as “the summer blockbuster” and it didn’t fail to deliver the goods (as many of them, of course, do fail to do just that).

There were a couple of disappointing things about the movie, though.

I don’t understand the USA ratings system but certainly, over here in the UK, the movie has a 15 rating. That’s kinda crazy because this film is pretty bloodless and lacking the kind of goriness you would usually expect from a good zombie movie. It’s like the producers were playing it safe on every level and not wanting to annoy the censors too much. So anything which might have been better explained by seeing it demonstrated as on screen violence, like the aforementioned, quick fire hand amputation or the killing of an “up-close-and-personal” zombie threat is often just off the side or bottom of the screen where you can’t properly get a handle on it quickly enough. It’s not too detracting or damaging to the movie as a whole, although it obviously distracted me enough to notice it each time they did (or rather, didn’t) do it but I’m guessing this just means there’ll be a harder, longer  and more satisfying cut of the movie released on video at some point.

The other thing which bothered me was the obviousness of the final solution and it’s successful outcome. By the time of the third act, Brad Pitt (and the audience) will have more or less figured out what the “chink” in the zombies’ armour is. However, in the last part the film makers place the lead character in a position where he is surrounded by zombies and there is no way out... unless he tests out his theory on himself and goes with his final solution. Which is what he does and, since we’re already so invested in him getting back to his family, we know it’s going to work, no question. This kind of lets it down in some ways but it doesn’t make it any less watchable for it and it’s only the very end of the picture with the family reunion where it gets maybe just a little less palatable... on the whole.

But there it is. World War Z is a pretty entertaining movie and it certainly won’t let down people who are into these kinds of monster infected pleasures (myself included, of course). The performances are fine and, aside from that one mis-step with the predictability of the “cure”, the writing is pretty good too with some excellent and hard hitting dialogue in places, performed by a cast who are obviously enthusiastic about hitting the right kind of tone for the story. I can’t speak for anyone else who’s seen this movie, obviously, but from my end, that of the endless audience, it’s certainly a top notch summer pop corn movie and people should have a good time with this one. I certainly enjoyed it a heck of a lot more than the last film I saw by this director, Quantum Of Solace, which perhaps isn’t saying a lot, come to think of it. However, World War Z is something I am quite looking forward to introducing to mum and dad when it comes out on Blu Ray... and that’s not a bad thing. Go see it.