Alita - Battle Angel

Alita Shade Of Pale

Alita - Battle Angel
2018 Canada/Argentina/USA
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
UK cinema release print.

So the latest film by director Robert Rodriguez and producer James Cameron is a live action adaptation of a manga (and, later, an anime) called Gunnm (and also known as Battle Angel Alita). Now I’ll do my usual disclaimer here and state up front that I have neither read any of the volumes of the manga nor seen any of the adapted anime episodes of this so, the one thing I can’t do here is tell you how this is as an actual adaptation of the source material.

I can tell you some other stuff though including the fact that I was kinda conflicted about going to see this one because... well I’m not the biggest fan of James Cameron, although I quite liked his first film in The Terminator series, ALIENS and The Abyss. When you get to stuff like Avatar though... count me out. Rodriguez, however, is a director I’ve always quite liked.... especially his Sin City films, his Planet Terror contribution to the Grindhouse movie (especially the extended, stand alone version) and his Machete movies. However, when I saw the trailer, it didn’t really look like a Rodriguez movie... but it did look spectacular. I also found the enlarged eyes of the main Alita character kinda interesting.

The film tells the story of Alita, played by Rosa Salazar as a full CGI version (so I guess she does the voice and possibly motion capture), who is a cyborg found by Dr. Dyson (played by Christoph Waltz) on a garbage heap dumped from the last surviving sky city and left unwanted in Iron City (which is presumably on Earth). She has a human brain inside her head and when the doctor revives her, no memory of her former life although, as the movie throws her character into violent conflicts, she tends to have flashes of memory as to what she really was in her former life 300 years before.

And that’s all I’m going to tell you about the plot because, contrary to my worries that this film would be a special effects laden spectacular with no story... it does actually have a good tale to tell with the central mystery of the past held in Alita’s head and, frankly, a lot more heart than I was expecting from a film like this.

Yep... I really loved this movie and that kinda took me by surprise.

In addition to Salazar and Waltz... who are both utterly brilliant in their roles... we have Jennifer Connelly playing a sinister character and, also, Ed Skrein, who also plays a good villain (such as in Deadpool, reviewed by me here) but who also deserves to be given more heroic roles such as the surprisingly decent job he did jumping into Jason Statham’s shoes for The Transporter Refuelled (which I reviewed here). However, here he’s back to being a villain again and, as you would expect, he does a good job of it.

The set designs and art direction are first class and you can see how you would never have got to movies like this without a direct legacy back to the 1982 movie Blade Runner (reviewed here) and some of the other films influenced by it over the years such as The Fifth Element and Ghost In The Shell (reviewed here). But more than that, the title character has such charm and a kind of essential innocence to her character (in spite of some of the things she has obviously been trained to do in her former life) that you never lose sight of the story and it’s warm, beating human heart as we watch her eat chocolate for the first time, fall in love and learn how to play a violent roller skate sport which is obviously based on Rollerball and which takes up a lot of the screen time here in terms of the action sequences.

Now, I know there are some people out there who may find the story structure a bit disappointing. I think it was about half way through the movie when I realised there were going to be no main story resolutions here and you can kind of see where the potential sequels are going to pick up the ball. In fact, the director and producer (and writers, I guess) have been criticised with spending too long setting up the sequels but, frankly, I thought it was more a natural ebb and flow of the dramatic narrative and I think this is one of the few movies I’ve seen of recent years which manages to completely pull this off and still leave a certain amount of dramatic closure for the viewer.

Talking about narrative structure... there are a few scenes where things are implied rather than directly spelled out but that’s cool, I’m always down with not spoon feeding the audience too much on these things. I was also happy that the big eyes of Alita were not nearly as distracting as I thought they would be. You kind of get used to them really quickly and I found myself wondering, at one point, were they actually any bigger than a normal person’s eyes or was I imagining it? It really doesn’t take long for your brain to adapt.

So... shorter review I guess because I didn’t really have any grumbles with Alita - Battle Angel and was both thoroughly entertained and, surprisingly, quite moved by it in some places. Adding to the whole ambience of the movie was some nice action scoring by Junkie XL which really held things together and once more confirmed my suspicions that he’s one of the more promising composers working in film scoring these days. But there you have it... once again, sorry for the shorter review for this one but when you get a film as pitch perfect as Alita - Battle Angel then there’s not too much else to say until you’ve studied it on multiple viewings. Other than I’m hoping that this does really well at the box office so we can see the next installments sooner rather than later (or not at all, in the worst case scenario). My one bit of advice would be to make the journey to your local cinema to see this one because... yes it’s got heart and soul but, as you might suspect from the trailer, it also looks pretty darn spectacular. So don’t miss it in the venue it was designed for. After all, Alita bit of what you fancy does you good.

In Darkness

Sight Unseen

In Darkness
UK/USA 2018
Directed by Anthony Byrne
Universal Region B

I know we live in a bizarre time where cinema release patterns can go hand in hand with low quality downloads and home video versions... sometime without any real access for the majority of potential customers at all from the likes of seemingly evil corporations like Netflix. Even so, I have to say, I was surprised to find that, less than a month after it got a limited cinema release in this country, I was able to pick up a DVD of In Darkness from Fopp records (or Amazon, for that matter) for only the price of a crisp, five pound note. I think I was prompted to look at this one by seeing an interview with actress Natalie Dormer via a Twitter link and, having seen this now, I’m not sure if that was a good call or not.

In Darkness was co-produced and co-written with Miss Dormer’s fiance Anthony Byrne, who also takes up directing duties here and, on the strength of this, I’d have to say that I think he’s probably a much better director than he is writer. I was really optimistic when I started this film because, frankly, the first 20 minutes or so are absolutely compelling.

It starts off with a truly wonderful title sequence where a series of shots of the inner workings of a piano, bathed in red, synch up to the piano part of the accompanying music and then we go onto various shots of things which will mean something later in the movie... a scarf, a metronome... but mostly a shot of an eye, also initially bathed in red, which I’m guessing must be in homage to the opening title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo. Indeed, we even have the eye blinks from that opening sequence which, in this case, usher in new colour palette treatments of the 'eye shot' as Niall Byrne’s score, sadly only available as a download rather than a proper CD, gives us a sinister composition which, by the end, briefly ends up in the same domain of some of the more abstract compositions of György Ligeti.

We are then taken into the first shot of the movie which is of a young lady being strangled by a gloved killer and, yes, it looks like it’s been hoisted straight out of an early Dario Argento giallo and it feels very 1970s, especially with the score going full-on like something you’d hear from Ennio Morricone in the likes of The Bird With The Crystal Plumage or The Cat O’ Nine Tails. Then we get our first and, sadly, only surprise of the story when it turns out this is footage from a fictional film and we pull back to see we are at a scoring session for a movie in which our anti-heroine Sofie, played by Natalie Dormer, is playing the piano part in the orchestra.

It’s here that we are first presented with the idea that Sofie is blind and, after the sessions wrap for the day, we follow her on her journey home. It looks like she works in Westminster, if the platforms are anything to go by and there are definitely a couple of Jubilee line stops shown on her daily journey. Her travels in the film also take her to Camden Town, it seems, as I noticed her going past Mega City Comics at one point in her travels.

When she is home, she listens to a mock up demo of the score that she is helping to perform for the film and it’s a great juxtaposition because the sinister, gialloesqe notes becomes her own soundtrack for the audience as we watch. A musical window onto the world in which she lives as the source music turns into non-diegetic and vice versa. Which is kind of interesting stuff. We also see that she uses the ticking of a metronome to help her concentrate past other noises in the night and help get her to sleep. We also meet her upstairs neighbour, played by Emily Ratajkowski, who is the daughter of a war criminal given sanctuary in the UK and who soon takes a dive out of the window, leaving Sofie as a kind of ‘sound witness’ to the events which may have played out in the flat above her. Sofie also finds herself in possession of something which various interested parties are trying to reclaim, by any brutal means necessary, as she becomes embroiled in a plot involving various different factions and some really good actors like Neil Maskell, Ed Skrein, Joely Richardson and James Cosmo. So there’s a lot to recommend in this film, for sure.

Ditto on the direction and composition of the movie There are some lovely set ups with some nice fluid camerawork, occasionally punctuated by some fast and jerky hand held stuff at appropriate action points. The film looks gorgeous and the acting by everyone, especially Dormer, is first rate so I really didn’t mind paying a fiver for this movie. There are even some unusual scene juxtapositions... for example, where the post autopsy body of the upstairs neighbour is being washed in the morgue by her father which is cross cut with a scene of her in flashback, taking a shower. It’s a strange sequence but I’m all for seeing unusual things in cinema.

However, the problem with this movie is that, after about twenty minutes, I’d figured out all of the upcoming twists, especially the ‘big’ reveal in the last two minutes of the film. I’d suspected one or two things very early on and, unfortunately, the overly convoluted windings of the plot meant that none of my suspicions were diminished and... well, like I said earlier... no surprises here. In some ways, I wish the writers had the courage to stick with the simplistic set up of the opening and leave this premise untouched but, as the movie wore on, I just kept getting a little more discouraged that things were going exactly where I suspected they were going to go... which is a bit of a shame.

So, yes, ultimately, In Darkness is a bit of a visual and audio feast of a movie which packages things beautifully but can’t quite hide the fact that what is actually being packaged is a little bit run of the mill and less interesting once the contents are revealed. If you like good cinematography and music, however, then you might want to pick this one up while it’s still relatively cheap.

Deadpool

Metatext Tool

Deadpool
2015 USA/Canada
Directed by Tim Miller
UK cinema release print.

I have absolutely no idea who Deadpool is.

That is to say, he’s an early 1990s comic book creation... a time when I’d mostly given up on superhero comic books for... any other comic books that were more interesting. What I’m saying here is... I can’t judge this thing in terms of it being a good or bad adaptation.

I didn’t like the trailer for this movie much either... but the only time my friend, who actually did like the trailer, could go and see this was the first night it opened. So it was pretty much sold out for most of the screenings but we managed to get in. I’m really glad we did, as it happens.

Now I was going to be all sure of myself and say this is the third comic book movie I’d seen with Ryan Reynolds in it (an actor who I quite like)... but a quick check on IMDB reveals a slightly different picture. This is, in fact, his fifth comic book movie. He was in one of the Blade movies... which I’ve not seen but my dad is a big fan of those. He was in RIPD, which I kinda liked and my review is here. He was also Green Lantern, which I loved and reviewed here.  Yeah, I was that guy who liked that movie, so you might want to take anything I say with a pinch of salt from hereon in. The other comic book movie Reynolds was in was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, again another movie which I liked despite its general reception. I reviewed it here but... here’s the thing about that movie. I don’t actually even remember him in it but Ryan Reynolds played Deadpool in that movie too. Something which I just can’t recall but which I’m sure I’ll more than notice next time I pop that movie into the player.

This current variant of Deadpool has a slightly different origin, apparently due to the timeline set up from Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days Of Future Past, which I reviewed here and which I absolutely hated because of the total lack of logic of the starting point from where that movie told its tale. It completely broke continuity with previous films in the series. However, this apparently explains why both Deadpool and Colossus both have some differences to their characters... with Colossus even being played by a different actor.

However, with all this stuff out of the way, is Deadpool a good movie?

Oh yeah.

Like I said, I wasn’t that enamoured of the trailer but the movie itself is an absolute gem. After a quite funny opening title sequence which looks like it could have really been enhanced even more in some kind of 3D release, the film starts off with a battle scene between Deadpool and a load of bad guys which is filled with violence. A lot of the scenes in those trailers were made up from parts of this sequence. Then, just as the old Marvel comics used to do back in the good old days, we get the main character telling you the story of how he arrived at this point and, as the battle continues on, he keeps coming back to it at different points until about two thirds of the way through the narrative, when you’re about caught up on the back story and just why the title character is like he is. This style of getting you hooked on the action and playing ‘catch up’ afterwords is typical of the difference between the way rival companies DC and Marvel used to operate, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, actually. DC were always more linear... Marvel comics made you shift your mindset just a little to accommodate the sequencing.

Now, I said Deadpool, played brilliantly by Ryan Reynolds as some kind of ultra-violent Groucho Marx by way of Bugs Bunny character, tells the audience the story of how he got to this point. Well, he does this by breaking the fourth wall and I believe this is also something that is part of his character in the comics... similar to what John Byrne used to do with his run on The Sensational She-Hulk, I would guess. But when I say he breaks the fourth wall, I don’t mean he does it from time to time... I mean he does it constantly. In fact, he doesn’t break the fourth wall so much as rip it apart with a bulldozer, stamp on it, reassemble it and then kick it some more until he starts bleeding all over the audience... you might want to duck if you’re in the first few rows. And he doesn’t stop at just catching you up with the story... he is talking to the audience constantly, all the way through the movie, and making metatextual references, sometimes at the expense of other characters who are rooted in the narrative.

Slight spoiler in this paragraph: For example, he goes toe to toe with Colossus (played by Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (played brilliantly by someone called Brianna Hildebrand) and, when he goes to the X-Men Mansion for help later in the movie and it’s only the two of them at home, he makes a crack to the audience about the producers only being able to afford these two X-Men for the movie. He does this kind of thing constantly (no, I’m really not going to spoil all the jokes for you here) and you’d really think that this would get kind of old real fast but... it really doesn’t. The movie doesn’t become just one terrible metatextual joke and it’s still able to function as what it’s supposed to be... which is a really fun movie with adult themes. Parents should probably not be trying to sneak their kids into this one, though, I think.

The editing and structural fragmentation keeps everything moving forward in a really breezy and exciting, fast paced way and, once again, Ryan Reynolds proves that he can hold this kind of movie together pretty well when required. Of course, he has absolutely great support from the likes of the aforementioned X-Men, T. J Miller as his buddy, a treacherous Ed Skrein as the main villain (who did so well trying to fill Jason Statham’s shoes in the fourth of The Transporter movies... reviewed here) and the absolutely extraordinary Morena Baccarin as Deadpool’s sexy girlfriend Vanessa. Yeah, that’s right, Inara from Firefly/Serenity is in this and the chemistry between her and Reynolds is just electric.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say on Deadpool, I think. Absolutely brilliant movie which I, surprisingly, enjoyed way more than I thought I would, given my response to the trailers for this one. Definite recommendation from me for anyone who likes seeing characters from the Marvel universe done in a truly entertaining fashion and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they do for a sequel to this one, which has already been green lit in Hollywood, it would seem. Looking forward to the ‘harder’ cut on Blu Ray, which is apparently in the works, even more, I would say. Oh, word to the wise, there are a couple of extra scenes right at the end of the credits... well, more like an extra scene and then an extension of that scene hot on the heels of it. So you Marvel fans might want to stick around for that one. Anyway, what the heck? Go see this movie. I had a real blast with it and I hope you do too.

The Transporter Refuelled

Frank’s A Million

The Transporter Refuelled
2015 France/China
Directed by Camille Delamarre
UK cinema release print.

Hmmm... really didn’t think much of the idea of Besson and co doing a new Transporter movie without the leading actor of the previous three, Jason Statham, returning to the role he absolutely made his own. The concept just doesn’t wash but, I have to say that, although it’s absolutely true that this movie would have played a bit better if Statham had not withdrawn due to a rejection of his asking price, it’s really not the terrible movie I was expecting.

Partly that's due to the story, which is a lot simpler, like the original (and best) of The Transporter movies. The second in the series was, for my liking, way too Americanised in its sensibility for a British character living in France (which was one of the things that gave the first film something unique) and although Transporter 3 was almost a return to that and was a much better picture than the second, they’ve never really lived up to the original in impact as far as I’m concerned. I was one of the few people who actually liked the first movie on its original cinema release, thinking about it now. A lot of people I asked at the time hated it because the action scenes are so over the top in that first one but, I think there’s a lot to be said for a movie pushing way past the limits of credibility and it’s an easy one to defend but, I won’t waste space on that here now... I’m sure I’ll get around to reviewing the original movie on here some day.

Anyway, since I didn’t just catch up to the original on home video like a lot of the first movie’s fans did, and because I saw it in a partially empty cinema on its first week, I’ve always had a kind of emotional investment in the films being as entertaining as possible and, I have to say, a lot of that was due to Statham’s personality playing the lead character, Frank Martin. I’ve not seen the recent TV series because of this (at least when they turned Shaft into a TV show they kept Richard Roundtree on) and I was looking on giving this new film, which doesn’t even have Frank’s French Inspector pal in it either, a wider birth... but then I thought I might as well see what they’ve done with The Transporter Refuelled and, as it happens, barring the exclusion of Statham, they’ve done a really good job.

Now, all this makes it sound, maybe, like they’ve got a wooden block of an actor playing Frank Martin in this one and, again, I really expected this to be the case. Imagine my surprise when I found that the new guy,  Ed Skrein, does a really sound acting job in this... picking up on some of Statham’s mannerisms but then changing other things of the character. Considering he’s filling in from somebody who has left a very deep stamp on the series of films, I was amazed that this guy gave as good a performance as he did. He’s a pretty good actor and, luckily, the writing is backing him up on this so he has some interesting stuff to work with.

The fight choreography he gets involved in is pretty good in places too. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing as absolutely special in terms of the action sequences as the “oiled up Statham” scene from the very first movie but there are some pleasing moments like, for instance, a bit of action in a confined space involving pulling out drawers as part of the combat. The hand combat also doesn’t seem out of place with the style of choreography seen in the other three movies, so that’s pretty cool.

The story focuses on a small group of prostitutes who are trying to regain their freedom after many years of working for a ruthless boss and the way they do this is to first kidnap and then put in peril the life of Frank Martin’s father, Frank Senior, so they can acquire Frank and his “special skills”. Now the ladies are pretty fantastic as strong but manipulating characters, it has to be said... but it’s the character of Frank’s father, played as entertainingly as possible by a guy called Ray Stevenson, who is the real star turn here. It’s pretty heavily inferred that the character is some kind of super spy who has just retired and is collecting his pension... and Stevenson does this as a convincingly sophisticated, self confident James Bond like character in a way which gives some of the various Bond actors over the years a run for their money. There were times in this movie when I thought... “Oh, wow! If only Jason Statham and Timothy Dalton had played these two parts” and, while that would have been glorious, I think it’s a testament to both Ed Skrein and Ray Stevenson that they manage to work this angle together so well. There’s some really good chemistry between the two of them and the writing of the father is very much something Stevenson can get to grips with... he knows what expensive wines to buy and he knows how to keep someone alive using only sugar and cobwebs. No really... there are some nice little touches in the writing on this one.

The one thing which confused the hell out of me was the follow on from the last movie, which it doesn’t have in terms of the way the characters are left. By the end of the third film, which takes place contemporary to its release in 2008, Frank Martin had a new, regular girlfriend. In this movie she’s not mentioned although the timeframe is still right for that to happen. The Transporter Refuelled starts off with a sequence set in 1995... before jumping 15 years to the main action of this story, which dates it as being set in 2010. So some mention of the female lead from the last film would have been useful, I would have thought. Especially since some of the phones and gadgetry being used in this film dates way after the year in question. So already we have some bizarre anachronisms cropping up.

I read that the producers are treating this movie as a reboot rather than a sequel which is a shame, in a way, because it kind of makes it hard for Statham to sign back on board if he should ever want to. That being said, the new guy does a pretty good job so that’s possibly not going to be too much of a problem if the studio can still get good box office for this one... which is presumably a much harder sell without Statham on board. The fact that they’re treating it as a reboot, or even a partial reboot, is brazenly included in the title of the movie, The Transporter Refuelled... which might possibly be the first time a film has featured its status within its title, as far as I can remember. Anyone want to conform or refute that in the comments section?

Either way, I guess the reboot status partially justifies jettisoning the girlfriend and the French police inspector and, lets face it, the series continuity in this is way better than in something like, say, the Daniel Craig Bond movies from Casino Royale to Skyfall... which seem to make no sense whatsoever in terms of continuity as a whole or even amongst themselves, a lot of the time. If you like the previous Transporter movies then, fear not, The Transporter Refuelled, amazingly, doesn’t let the side down and, though you might miss Statham at first, the new guy does a good job with the role. You never know, a fifth outing might be on the horizon if this one goes down okay with the cinema or home video markets. I kinda liked it and if modern action movies are your thing, this one’s definitely worth a look.