Meg 2 - The Trench

The Trench Back
Of Votre Doom

Meg 2 - The Trench
Directed by Ben Wheatley
USA/China  2023 Apelles Entertainment
UK cinema release print

Warning: Slight spoilers highlighting some fun stuff.... if you read it, you’ll want to go see this to make sure I’m not making this stuff up.

Wow... what can I say? I wasn’t expecting this. I kinda half enjoyed The Meg (reviewed here) but I wasn’t particularly looking for a sequel. However, one was announced and, when I heard that famous British director Ben Wheatley was coming on to direct, well... I had to see how he would be able to handle this kind of big budget, schlocky movie and, boy, he did not disappoint. Meg 2 - The Trench is based on another of Steve Alten’s Meg novels, this one called The Trench. Since I still haven’t read any of these (yet, I’ll get to them), I don’t know how close the movie version is to the source novel (not that close, I would guess) but, it has to be said that this movie is everything I was hoping for from the first movie, which it kinda failed to deliver in regards to my expectations back in 2018.

Yup, Jason Statham is back as ‘eco protector’ Jonas Taylor and a fair few of the original cast are also back including Cliff Curtis as Mac (who is an actor I’m not seeing enough of). This one is an all out rollercoaster... err... no... make that waterslide... of absolute silliness and brutal action but, unlike the first movie, it doesn’t insult the intelligence of the audience and actually plays more like everyone’s ‘in on the joke’ in regards to the over the top nature of the narrative. And it’s also a few action/suspense/nature attacks movies rolled into one with clear demarcations between the various segments which, sounds like it could get boring but no, it’s actually quite a solid piece of movie making and it manages to segue into each different style of genre quite effortlessly.

So, following an ‘there’s always a bigger fish’ pre-creds sequence set in pre-historic times (which was used in the trailers), the opening post-title card set piece shows Jason Statham infiltrating a ship at sea with a hostile crew who are dumping toxic waste in the ocean. It’s basically ‘the Stath’ versus dozens of armed crewmen as he manages to escape from the vessel with the photographic evidence of their shady deeds... which involves a pretty well choreographed chase/fight sequence which would not look out of place in one of The Transporter movies. And yeah... you can quote me on saying this movie plays just like The Transporter VS shark, for sure.

Okay, so after this we get the usual meet the crew and main characters set up before two mini submarines of people, Statham included, are stranded past a trench in the sea... followed by some big Megaladon’s who are hunting them... and then they find a shady bunch of villains destroying their shady mining operation down there, which they discover they have helped fund and equip due to a person... or actually persons plural... who have betrayed them and who are working towards evil ends.

Their subs are wrecked but the two surviving teams of the good guy squad manage to walk to the now abandoned enemy station across the ocean floor... just like the ‘team good guy’ squad did in the excellent Underwater (reviewed here) a few years ago. But then they are trapped there for a while with no hope of escape (until one presents itself)... but by now the good guys are hemorrhaging team mates (not to mention finding some of them are on team bad guy now). So this is all the ‘hold your breath’ underwater survival part of the movie.

Then a handful of survivors escape back to ‘camp good guy’ base, which has been overtaken by bad guys and so they need to rescue their friends in an ‘infiltrate and escape’ section of the movie. Meanwhile, a load of Megs plus some other new species they encountered in ‘the trench’, such as dino-lizard fish things which are also quite fast on land... and a giant octopus... have followed them and when the remaining protagonists escape to a holiday resort called Fun Island, the final section of the movie starts up... as it’s good guys vs bad guys vs civilians vs various creatures who all want to eat everyone indiscriminately.

And it’s awesome... you will see such sights as ‘The Stath’ luring sharks out on his wet bike so he can use his jury-rigged exploding harpoons against them, an exploding helicopter crash, a humongous and amazingly well executed giant octopus vs shark scrap and Jason Statham wielding a giant, exploded helicopter rotor blade as a lethal weapon in a hand to hand combat moment with a big Meg. My only real criticism is what looks like a remnant of a former script turning up in the movie. There’s a scene early on where these new pressure exo-suits which can multiply a persons strength into superheroic proportions are introduced, however... although the suits are definitely worn in one sequence, their specialist properties are not actually used in any scene so, yeah, I’m guessing it’s a hangover from an earlier drat where the suits were put to more practical use but, who knows for sure... and who would be willing to tell?

But, honestly people, what’s not to like about all of this? It’s big and dumb but it’s been put together by a very smart director this time around so... it certainly knows it’s big and dumb and everybody’s  having fun with it. And as far as I’m concerned, that includes the audience... I was absolutely grinning at the ‘suspend your disbelief’ audacity of the movie at times and, yeah, I had way more fun with it than I did with, say, this year's entries into the Indiana Jones (reviewed here) and Mission Impossible (reviewed here) franchises, for sure. If you like silly movies with lots of action, ridiculous dialogue and lots of mayhem, then you really should take a look at Meg 2 - The Trench. It’s got a lot going for it as far as I can see and I’ll be snapping up the Blu Ray of this one pretty quickly.

Reminiscence

Remembering
It Wholesale

Reminiscence
Warner Brothers USA 2021
Directed by Lisa Joy

You know, I suspect this movie is probably going to invite comparisons to Blade Runner from some critics and, thinking about it, I wouldn’t blame them if they do. Written and directed by Lisa Joy, Reminiscence is a beautiful, beautiful film which has exactly the kind of soft science fiction concept at its heart that was the speciality of the literary giant Philip K. Dick. And, added to this, the writer has built a nearish future world, shot in a convincing and breathtaking way, feeding directly into the viewers imaginations and then done the cool 1980s thing, by using the concept and the world to tell a classic 1940s style film noir thriller. Complete with a voice-over running narrative provided by the main protagonist, no less.

The film is set mostly in Miami (with a dash of New Orleans thrown into the mix) in a future where the water levels of the Earth have risen significantly... which brought a war along with it as humanity tried to cope with the new way of living. The post-war result, beautifully rendered in the film, are cities which live on top of water. The levels of the water sloshing around on the walkable streets are also used to suggest the distinction with the class divisions in this future... with the super rich actually living in ‘dry lands’... city complexes protected by huge damns to keep the water out. It all looks fantastic and quite gorgeously inspiring, like the worlds built in movies like the aforementioned Blade Runner (reviewed here) or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (reviewed here).

The film stars the brilliant Hugh Jackman as Nick Bannister who, along with his business partner, ex-army buddy Watts, played by equally brilliant Thandiwe Newton, is a memory broker of some kind. That is to say, he uses a special tank and a mixture of chemicals to allow people to revisit past moments in their lives, for a price. The special pods they use were originally designed for interrogation in the war and so the two are also employed sometimes by the city’s DA, to churn up memories to help acquit or convict various suspects in legal cases.

Then one day, in the best film noir tradition, a femme fatale called Mae, played by the always amazing Rebecca Ferguson, walks into Nick’s life on the pretext of needing a quick memory fix to locate some misplaced keys she can’t remember losing that morning and then, well, I don’t want to give the terribly convoluted and, thankfully, fairly impenetrable and surprising plot twists away but it’s a wonderful noir concoction which manages to juggle a bleak outlook with stunning cityscapes in a convincing and addicting manner.

Not content to let the central concept kick start and guide the impetus of the story, the writer/director has the confidence to use the memory trips of various characters to shape the context of the viewpoint of the story and to use as reveals in certain places in the narrative structure. There is absolutely no lazy writing in this one and it really is one of the best modern noirs I can think of. It’s first rate science fiction which stretches back to movie genre ancestors such as Soylent Green through to recent genre successes like Hotel Artemis (reviewed here). It certainly holds up to its predecessors and possibly is more successful than some of those classics, even.

The special effects are flawless and so are the actors here. Rounding out the cast is a ‘bent cop turned freelance villain’, so to speak, played by Cliff Curtis... who appeared, like Rebecca Ferguson, in the big screen adaptation of Doctor Sleep. He’s playing a much more ruthless and unforgiving character than I’m used to seeing him playing here though. The actors manage to keep their character’s secrets until the reveals and, this perhaps says as much about their performances here as it does about the writing.

Another nice element of the world depicted here, which certainly highlights and maintains the ‘film noir’ atmosphere in which the story line marinates, is the fact that in the future depicted here, the days have become much too hot to do much of anything. So mankind’s solution is to flip their lifestyles to suit the new globally warmed planet. People sleep during the day and work by night, for the majority of the time. It’s a neat trick to have all the action take place in an intriguing world of wispy, smoky colours and shadows and it certainly works a treat. Ramin Djawadi’s score which is, alas, unavailable on CD at time of writing, is just another element which merges perfectly with the shadow world depicted here.

Reminiscence is definitely one of those films where all of the elements seem to come together in the best way possible to serve the story (including the quite beautiful sentiment behind it) and wrap everything up in a wonderful package. If you are a fan of science fiction, especially the kind of ideas you’d find in the softer areas explored by writers in the 1950s to 1970s, then you should really go and check this one out. I hope this one comes out on Blu Ray before Christmas as I would love to show it to the people I love.

Doctor Sleep

Look Before You Sleep

Doctor Sleep
2019 USA Directed by Mike Flanagan
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Contains spoilers for the original novel of Doctor Sleep.

Doctor Sleep is a pretty good film but I’m really surprised that Stephen King himself, the author of this sequel to his earlier book The Shining, has endorsed it. It’s not a secret that King hated Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation of The Shining (reviewed by me here) because of the way it differed from the novel and there are two reasons why I would have thought that King would have been equally damning of this new movie adaptation of Doctor Sleep. One is that the last third of the movie is nothing like the last third of the original book (which I reviewed here). It takes so many more liberties with the text than Kubrick did on his adaptation of The Shining and the ending is completely changed. That in itself would have been something he would be quite critical of, I’d have thought but you also have to factor in that director Mike Flanagan (who directed the wonderful Absentia, which I reviewed here) has deliberately synched it in visually, in a lot of it, to Kubrick’s version of The Shining... which King hated. So, yeah, puzzled but happy, at least, that the famous horror novelist is finally recognising a good movie, albeit a slightly flawed version of his original novel here.

So lets get to it then.

The film will give fans of Kubrick’s original chills right from the opening Warner Brothers logo, as the Newton Brothers recreate the first few bars of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s opening title variation of the Deus Irae from The Shining before they go into their own thing. The film starts off not long after the original and we get some scenes showing Danny and his mother after the events of that film. These two don’t look as much like the original actors as you might like but they’ve done their best to make them look like variations of what they might look like at that point in time. Then the movie picks up speed and jumps to Ewan McGregor playing a grown up version of the first film’s/novel’s central child protagonist Danny Torrance, first in the scene where he wakes up in a woman’s bed in full ‘morning after’ mode and, then, as he ends up in New Hampshire and is helped back into both employment and into the local alcoholics anonymous group by his new friend Billy (played here by Cliff Curtis). We also get background on the group of antagonists called The Knott, headed up by Rebecca Ferguson as Rose The Hat.

The film then jumps forward another eight years and carries on with the story of the novel for a good way, building up the tension in The Knott but precluding them systematically dying from measles due to contaminated steam (steam is basically their name for the essence found inside people who ‘shine’). So we get them noticing the young girl protagonist Abra (who has a powerful version of ‘the shining’ in her and who is played by Kyliegh Curran here) and we get Abra’s psychic relationship with Danny reaching the point that, after she psychically witnesses the slow murder and absorption of a kid at the hands of The Knott, she seeks Danny out in real life and the two ultimately hatch a plan to put a stop to The Knott before The Knott can find and kill them too.

Then, around about the point where The Knott spring a trap set by Danny, Abra and Billy, the film deviates massively from the original novel in a lot of ways. Although the last battle takes place in the grounds of the Overlook Hotel it’s only Rose in that final battle and not a big battle royale with a large portion of The Knott. Also, in the book the Overlook is no longer there and The Knott have their campsite in the ruins. In the movie, Danny and Abra lure Rose to the still standing Overlook Hotel for their final showdown. There are other characters that make more appearances than they did in the novel too and, frankly, the number of survivors of ‘the good guys’ and the specific people still left standing at the end is completely different. It is like watching a new story from this point on.

It all looks and sounds fabulous though. The performances by McGregor, Ferguson and Curran are brilliant and Curtis give solid support as Billy. In fact, there really isn’t a bad performance in this movie. Even Alex Essoe, who takes over from Shelley Duvall as Danny’s mum Wendy, does a good job here... especially since she doesn’t look all that like the original actress (the same could perhaps be said of whoever they’ve got playing Jack Torrance in lieu of Jack Nicholson here... I can’t find out who plays him in this as the Internet seems somehow shrouded in mystery about him right now).

The last third features a lot more Stanley Kubrick references (pitching in with the references at the opening of the film) and it’s a fun time if you’re an admirer of the Kubrick picture. Some of the sets and shot set ups have been recreated (and that’s down to the sound design too) but, nice as they are to look at, it’s all a bit of a strange mix up. For instance, in the novel, Jack Torrance makes an appearance right at the end in a rescue/redemption moment. Here that’s gone and the scene and necessity for his appearance is also not here... instead, Flanagan tries to shoehorn the character into a much bigger role and... honestly, it doesn’t work that well here, I think. Also, the character’s effect on Danny and the subsequent chase scene is... well it’s a bit laboured, it seems to me.

However, the party guests, the brief reappearance of the twins and other things are done pretty well.  One cameo and set up for the new denouement which people who haven’t read King’s The Shining may find puzzling is also strangely mixed in here and, like I said, if you have only seen Stanley’s take on the story, then it might seem like a really clumsy 'deus ex machina' moment. I’m talking about the boiler in the Overlook Hotel... I’m not going to say much about it here other than to remind readers that, in the original novel The Shining, it played a huge role... and I’m saying that bearing in mind that I haven’t read the novel since the late 1970s/early 1980s but, yeah, even I can remember the boiler room being a big thing in the book. So, yeah, Flanagan and co bring that back in to the mix but, like I said, it’s going to seem like a really sloppy addition if you haven't read The Shining.

The cinematography is all good though and the music from the Newton Brothers gets back nearer to the soundscape of The Shining soundtrack once you get into the last third. Honestly, there’s a series of shots which come just after the film really starts deviating from the book and I was kinda expecting them to happen and I was thinking, I hope they remember to properly use Carlos and Elkind’s Deus Irae here again... yeah, they do and although the sequence of shots is much, much shorter than the original ones the director is parodying (and shot at night in this instance), it does feel good when this little moment comes.

And that’s me done on this one I think. I hate the new ending as I thought the one in the book was perfect and, frankly, if King ever gets it into his head to write a third novel in that sequence, the movie studios are going to surely find it hard to adapt it after the big U-Turn ending this film takes. That being said, in spite of all these terrible changes plus the overuse of a character who would have been much better left as the brief but weighty appearance he has in the novel, I still thoroughly enjoyed the ride on this one and will certainly be grabbing the Blu Ray when this one gets released. UK fans of the score may want to know that there’s a CDR release of it on US Amazon which they’ll ship to the UK, if you want to hear the music properly rather than attempt to listen to a disappointing and compressed electronic download. Looking forward to giving that one a spin when it finally arrives in the mail. Anyway, Doctor Sleep is definitely something you should see if you liked the Kubrick version of The Shining but please don’t expect something close to the book... there are some wild deviations here.

The Meg

Accentuate The Posi-Stath, Eliminate The MegaTeeth

The Meg
2018 China/USA Directed by Jon Turteltaub
UK cinema release print.

Based, very loosely from what I can gather, on the first of a series of novels by Steve Alten called Meg - A Novel Of Deep Terror, this film has been stuck in Hollywood development hell for just over 20 years. However, it’s finally surfaced into the wild waters of your local dodgyplex cinemas so you can enjoy The Meg in the cinematic environment it was best designed for.

The film tells a cautionary tale of what happens if you let the giant sized, likeable personality of modern action cinema named Jason Statham go toe to toe with a giant, pre-historic shark called Megaladon. I loved the trailer to this and it was a no brainer that if you put The Stath against a giant sized shark in your movie then I was going to be first in line to see this thing when it finally hit cinemas. Despite some problems in terms of the audience this has been pitched towards, because of just what the producers have allowed to be ‘gotten away with’ in terms of a piece of art depicting the eating habits of a vicious predator, I can confirm that the film is, indeed, a bit of a fun ride and definitely worth a watch if you are into shark movies.

Now, the premise is that, after a pre-credits sequence where a top Navy undersea rescue guy called Jonas, played by the always watchable Statham, has to sacrifice the lives of two of his crew to save many more because he saw something big which nobody else believes exists... we have a crew from a big, billionaire funded ocean research base penetrating the shelf of the ocean as they’ve figured out it’s actually just a bit of cold cloud keeping the mysteries of the ‘even deeper undersea world we’ve never seen before’ away from the rest of the ocean. Of course, the sub and crew they send down there runs into trouble so Jonas is pulled out of self-imposed retirement to help out and, when the rescue is accomplished (not without cost) he bonds with the team as they fight to track down and destroy a giant megaladon shark which escapes from ‘the other undersea kingdom’ and keep it from chowing down on pretty much everyone in the vicinity.

So, yeah, as you would expect, this film is full of shark/action movie clichés but it’s also, to a certain extent, self aware of the silly concept and you have an excellent cast headed by Statham, ably supported by the likes of Bingbing Li, Winston Chao, Ruby Rose and Cliff Curtis... all pitching in to give a credible set of performances to help the audience suspend their disbelief and to make sure they’re rooting for the right people. We even have Rainn Wilson playing the walking cliché of a  half likeable, half dangerous and clueless billionaire to give the audience a ‘corporate greed’ style character to be wary of. And it’s great fun.

Now, the film does do a lot of stuff which is a little frustrating in terms of trumpeting the fact that it probably doesn’t think much of the intelligence of the audience a great deal in several places. For instance, there’s a sequence where the camera suddenly and for no apparent reason switches to a POV of the character in the water and, every time that character suddenly looks under the water to try and see the title creature, the camera goes down and then comes back again. Of course, you just know that on the last time the camera goes under the shark is going to be right up close and personal and, although you feel the almost obligatory tension in the way this small sequence has been constructed, you kind of are already fed up with it before it’s even played out. So it’s a shame that this is a trick the director uses at least two variations of throughout the running time of the movie.

Another thing the director seems to like to do here is a lot of double takes of things happening. So, for instance, you’ll have the shark come towards the camera and then get a reveal to show that the behemoth of the depths has missed its human target before, oh no, it’s just come straight back for another chomp, kind of modus operandi. Again, I don’t mind it once but it does get predictable, especially in the demise of one of the main characters about two thirds of the way through the movie and, although it certainly doesn’t kill the fun of the piece, it does get played out after a very short time.

The main problem here, though, is the lack of blood and gore on display in the picture, considering it’s a shark movie. There’s way less than even the original Jaws and it really says a lot about the mentality of the studios behind these things that this has a 12A, kid-friendly rating on a movie which is supposed to be about big teeth and rending flesh. Even a small sequence which 'makes a thing' about a discarded limb fished out of the ocean doesn’t really have any blood to be seen in it and is executed in the most kid-friendly manner you could think of... and if you have read some of my previous reviews you’ll know I am not happy about movies that deliberately hide the consequences of violence to get a lower rating. If kids can’t see the consequences of these kinds of things then they are more likely to rush blindly into danger themselves, is my take on that whole bloodless violence phenomena which seems to have overtaken the American studio picture.

All that being said, though, I still had a pretty great time with this movie and especially with the ‘French ending’ which I shall say no more about... except to gracefully acknowledge that I like the odd pun. I’d quite like to hear the score on this one away from the images but, alas, it’s only available as a download and not on a proper CD so it looks like I’ll have to give that purchase a miss. Still, a likeable movie with a few genuine surprises... in the way they’ve been executed at least, if not in terms of expectation of something happening in any given scene... and this should be a definite crowd pleaser of a piece.  That is, if your crowd happens to be composed of people who like watching shark bait splashing around in the water and causing general mayhem and havoc as the stupid humans in the way of the title character try to escape the big chomp. The Meg is definitely better than some of the more recent shark movies I’ve seen in cinemas over the last two years and worth taking the swim to your local for.