Asteroid City

Casual Encounters
Of The Third Kind

Asteroid City
Directed by Wes Anderson
USA  2023 Indian Paintbrush
UK cinema release print

Warning: Light spoilers.

Asteroid City is the latest movie from Wes Anderson (co-written by Roman Coppola, the genius behind CQ) and, yeah, it’s certainly the best movie I’ve seen at the cinema so far this year. If you’re a lover of Wes Anderson’s exquisitely composed and controlled cinema, dealing with suppressed emotions and quirky themes in a lightly comedic but sometimes melancholic manner then, yeah, you’ll certainly know what to expect. Don’t particularly expect a story because, if there is one, it’s not immediately apparent and notions of what an individual may think of as the elements of a story would have to be brought into play and, you know, maybe argued about.

This film takes the form of documentary sections, filmed in black and white, of a performance of a playwright’s new play, Asteroid City. Most of the film is that play in full colour widescreen in an actual desert location that stands in for Asteroid City (not as a play, as such but, certainly being the play). This stuff makes up most of the footage with punctuations between acts and so on as the documentary footage in the form of... a play of the documentary footage... pops up to deliver narrative on events. However, sometimes the two formats bleed into each other, such as when the narrator played by Brian Cranston accidentally turns up on location and realises he’s not supposed to be here.

The film focuses... if a Wes Anderson film could be said to focus on any one character for any amount of time... on  Augie Steenbeck played by Jason Schwartzman, He hasn’t yet told his accompanying kids, who have arrived with him in Asteroid City so his son can receive a prize (being among some child inventors also receiving prizes for their startling achievements), that thier mother has recently died and is also accompanying them in the form of ashes in a Tupperware box. When his car breaks down, stranding them in the small town, along with various other characters played by the usual troop of people who want to work with Wes Anderson... such as Scarlet Johansson, Jeffrey Wright and Liev Schreiber... he calls his father-in-law, played by Tom Hanks, to come and collect the three daughters.

Soon after Hanks arrives, the small town has a ‘close encounter’ when an alien comes to borrow the asteroid which landed there millions of years ago and whisks it away in his spaceship. Naturally, the people in town are further delayed as the place is quarantined and the FBI move in to interrogate the many witnesses. And so on...

And it’s great. Some may find it a bit indulgent but, you know, that’s why you have auteur directors with very specific styles like Wes Anderson... if you like their work you want them to indulge and fully invest in their own quirkiness and that’s exactly what happens here. No Bill Murray in this one (he had Covid and had to be quickly replaced by Steve Carell) but most of the big stars you would expect to appear in a Wes Anderson movie... Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum etc etc... are all present and correct and all are absolutely marvellous, as you would expect with these kinds of highly stylised, somewhat deliberately muffled performances of dialogue. I shouldn’t have been surprised that ‘new to the Andersonville camp’ Tom Hanks was able to adjust his style of delivery to be absolutely perfect in this either... you get good actors and they deliver, simple as that.

And everything seems to be absolutely what you would expect from an Anderson movie, bordering on  cliché, almost. For example, Alexandre Desplat’s score for the film (which should be on a CD already... what’s wrong with you people?) is mixed heavily into the foreground and does exactly what you would expect from a score from this composer/director collaboration. Although the needle drop songs seemed to be more on point on this one rather than from very different styles. As such, however, there are no real surprises in the film other than the little moments (like Cranston’s character accidentally entering the wrong part of the movie). So, I knew that alien would be back to do one final thing and, yeah, it’s for the most Wes Andersonny purpose that the asteroid was temporarily absconded with.

All in all, I don’t understand some of the criticisms of this movie but, hey, I’m glad everyone is different. All I can say is, I loved Asteroid City and had a big smile on my face all the way through. Another masterpiece by one of my favourite living directors, for sure. 

PS. This 'city' is only a few structures and has a population of 87. Not sure why it's classified as a city.

Jurassic World Dominion

Dominion Reunion

Jurassic World Dominion
USA/China/Malta 2022
Directed by Colin Trevorrow
Universal

Warning: 65 million year old spoilers.

Okay, so I loved the original Jurassic Park trilogy, yes, even the third one, even though they got a little worse with each one. However, if you’ve been reading my reviews long enough, you’ll know that I am not exactly a fan of the modern Jurassic World sequels. That being said, the third part of the sequel trilogy is here, Jurassic World Dominion and, it’s actually not a bad film, certainly the best of the modern trilogy.

And it also serves as something of a reunion because, while Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are back from the previous two, along with the clone daughter of a brilliant scientist they escaped with in the last film (which I’d completely forgotten, since I’d only been able to stomach watching that one the once), played here pretty well by Isabella Sermon... it also reunites the three original protagonists from the very first Jurassic Park movie... played once again by Sam Neil, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, who are all given a lot more to do in this one and form half of the narrative, with both sets of protagonists meeting up for the last half an hour or so.

So, yeah, plotwise we have the film opening strongly with a newsreel, reminding people that the dinos are on the loose since the previous installment and that mankind is trying to live with the dinosaurs sharing our planet. But the clone daughter from the previous movie, along with velociraptor Blue’s young offspring Beta, are kidnapped and taken by an evil company called BioSyn. So Pratt and Howard need to get them back. Meanwhile, swarms of giant locusts who will be responsible for everyone’s extinction on the planet due to the way they are eating various targeted crops, are the concern of Neil, Dern and Goldblum, as they infiltrate Biosyn to get the evidence that these locusts are engineered to control the food chain by the company. And, as I said, the film finds the two sets of protagonists working together at the end as they all go through action set piece after set piece.

And, yeah, it’s really not bad. Especially the first half of the movie, where we get more of a glimpse of how mankind is both living with... and exploiting... their cohabitation with dinosaurs. And, honestly, the dialogue in this one seems a lot better too, with even Chris Pratt coming across as a more interesting version of his recurring character, for once.

There are also lots of nods to the original movie, of course. Dr. Wu is back, played once again by BD Wong but, also, we have a character returning from the original Jurassic Park, the nefarious Dogson (who wanted Nedrys to steal samples and put them in his fake shaving foam can, remember?) but, they’ve gone with a different actor this time (apparently, the original actor is now a convicted sex offender so, yeah, I was wondering why they’d not asked him back). There are also a lot of character beats and references back to the original such as Sam Neil giving a blood thirsty speech about how dinosaurs can kill a person, Laura Dern’s delight and enthusiasm about certain dinosaurs and, in a scene where I thought he really wasn’t going to make it this time, Jeff Goldblum’s character once again using something fiery to distract a huge dinosaur to divert attention from his friends.

Probably my favourite sequence, surprisingly, is one involving Pratt and Howard and a new character played by DeWanda Wise, as the team come together in a brilliant set piece set around an underground dinosaur exploitation meet up (dinosaur fights bet on, dinosaur meat for sale etc) leading to a double chase through the streets as various factions try to survive both bad guys and new dinosaurs trained to go after specific laser tagged individuals (yeah, guess who gets tagged by the villains to be dinosaur food?).

The film mostly tends to work but it is the longest of the franchise  (two and a half hours) and it does kinda drag towards the end... I think the last third really loses a little of its appeal where a lot of old clichés are rolled out, such as humans being saved from attacking dinosaurs by other attacking dinosaurs etc. Michael Giacchino’s music is on hand to keep the glue going although, like his previous Jurassic World scores, I really think he needed to put more of John William’s original themes in this, rather than just the odd, passing reference at key points. The score was serviceable but it isn’t great and I suspect the stand alone listening experience on this one might well be a similar story (but at least it’s getting a CD release so, I guess I’ll soon know).

And, yeah, that’s me pretty much done on Jurassic World Dominion... while it’s not as good as, pretty much any of the films in the original Jurassic Park trilogy, it certainly beats the other two Jurassic World movies hands down and so, if you are into those two, you should certainly have a good time with this one. It does kind of redeem the new trilogy a little by not absolutely sucking (which I think is not a quality that the previous two could claim) and so I’m also happy to recommend this to fans of the original trilogy too. Worth a watch if dinosaur movies are your thing.

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)

A Pod's As Good As A Wink

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)
USA 1978 Directed by Philip Kaufman
United Artists/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay so, hot on the heels of the original, it was time for me to rewatch the first of the official remakes of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. I say ‘official’ because, I think there were at least three horror movies which came out in 2019 which had kind of absconded with a variation the same concept and not acknowledged it (in the hopes nobody would notice presumably, one of them very high profile). This version of the story, which I would have first seen on television around 3 - 5 years after its initial cinema release (which was the earliest a TV show would have been allowed to show it back in those days), is one of those few remakes which is almost as good as the original (which I reviewed here). Don’t get me wrong, the original is always going to be the one I watch to death but this one looks and feels like a 1970s film, which is in its favour anyway but, also, kind of takes its own things from the original and makes them its own by adding stuff and just treating the whole concept from a slightly different angle. Highlighting some of the ideas of the basic template in a slightly different way.

The opening credits has a quite nicely done look at the tendrils of the alien seed pods drifting through our solar system and then landing on earth. Danny Zeitlin’s music on this part is ‘full on’ 1950s B-movie in tone before suddenly transforming, for the first hour of the movie at least, into something far more subtle and unsettling, or, if not subtle, at least less prescriptive to what some of the other horror films were using in those days.... although, I have to say, for a professor of psychiatry who only ever scored this one movie, I could honestly have done without the old cliché of the heartbeat on the soundtrack at one point. There’s even a ‘mickey mousing’ moment when we jump cut to one of a series of establishing shots to relocate the audience on Earth. I’ll get back to Zeitlin a little later on.

This version stars Donald Sutherland as ‘Matthew’ Bennell, rather than ‘Miles’ Bennell, which is the version played by Kevin McArthy in the original. Also, he’s not a doctor in this but a government health inspector who seems to take great glee in his job of closing down restaurants. As his ‘almost love interest’ we have the wonderful Brooke Adams playing, not ‘Becky’ Driscoll but ‘Elisabeth’ Driscoll, who works in the same Department of Health that Bennell works in. Wow, they certainly seem to have a problem with first names in this version of the film. At least they had no trouble with Bennell’s writer friend, who is once more Jack Belicec, here played by Jeff Goldblum in one of his earlier, feature roles. Alas the curse of the first name does extend to the character of his wife, instead of ‘Theodora’ Belicec like in the original, she’s ‘Nancy’ Belicec, played here by genre queen Veronica Lambert, who you will probably best know from her role in Ridley Scott’s A L I E N or, perhaps, in her role as the young girl in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Actually, she’s the only other member of the cast, besides Kevin McCarthy, who has been in two versions of this story (she was also in the fourth version of the film, which should get a review on here towards the end of this week).

And talking of the great Kevin McCarthy, here he appears in a wonderful cameo scene earlier on in the film, more or less playing the original Miles Bennell role, wearing pretty much the same costume and still running down the street, banging into cars telling everybody to “Watch out! They’re here already!”, just as he did in the pre-bookend scene of the original, which was where that version was supposed to end. This time, though, there’s a chilling end game to the scene which is one of the first things that tips off Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adam’s characters that, yes, there really is something worrying going on. It’ a lovely homage and one that McCarthy would repeat again a couple more times, just not in remakes of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Another cameo in this movie is a taxi driver, played by director Don Siegel, who helmed the original film.

Right from the outset of the film, though, we’re way ahead of the lead protagonists and, if you’re already familiar with the story and not a 'Body Snatchers virgin' when you go in, you can’t help but notice little non-sequitur sequences like an uncredited Robert Duvall cameoing as a priest on a swing in a children’s playground as being an example of a pod person not interacting correctly with his new environment. We also have Elisabeth finding a flower that she calls a ‘grex’, which is perhaps a little more of a complicated term, from what I can make out, than what she describes it as here... which is a hybrid of two plant organisms to create a third one. She’s basically found a flower which grows into one of the alien seed pods but it’s also, of course, a perfect analogy for what is about to happen when the seed pods drain their human victims to become facsimiles of them. So, yeah, nicely done.

Other nice tell tale signs that the aliens are ‘already here!’ are the constant shots of garbage trucks hauling away what obviously are, if you’re already familiar with the concept of the story, the leftover remains of the humans who have been replaced.

Actually, there are a lot of nice things the director does here to really push the paranoia inherent in both the original story and the first movie adaptation. For instance, there are a lot of roving camera shots which are made to feel like chaotic ‘point of view’ shots... so you kind of sense a presence of a great number of ‘antagonists’ observing things. Ditto when the camera constantly catches groups of people just staring from the background at what our main protagonists are doing in the foreground of various shots. Just, people watching people and, I wonder how many of these were really just people watching the shooting, which the director managed to utilise into the concept or, if every extra in these sequences was, indeed, placed there deliberately.

Another nice way it ramps up the tension is with unusual angles, overlapping dialogue (like you’d get in an Altman movie or, you know, the original The Thing From Another World, reviewed by me here) and shadows. For instance, Bennell’s psychiatrist friend, who is important to the way the story moves forward... and who is, in fact, played here by Star Trek’s most famous Vulcan actor, Leonard Nimoy... is having a book release party and the atmosphere at that party, where you get the impression that there’s a lot of pod people in the crowd, is somewhat chaotic with lots of things going on, conversations clashing with each other and, in a wonderful moment of in-camera distortion, Jeff Goldblum talking to Donald Sutherland on either side of him. That is to say, Donald Sutherland is on the middle of the screen talking into a phone while Goldblum is talking at him (rather than to him), with Goldblum three quarters turned away from us on the left of the screen... and his features hugely distorted and in close up on a trick fairground type mirror to Sutherland’s left. It’s an amazing shot actually and must have been somewhat difficult to set up.

Also, the scene where Bennell breaks into Elisabeth’s house to whisk her sleeping form away from her pod husband and the seed pod spawning next to her is filled with so many dutch angles combined with very dark, shadowy shots that it just drips paranoia. It’s a well thought out film and must have been fun to shape in the editing room.

There are also some less than subtle things about the movie, for sure.

For instance, the whole hand cut scene with Belicec to reveal the pod is replaced in this version by... Jeff Goldblum having an unmentioned (a casualty of the cutting room floor?) but fairly visible nose bleed. Also, Danny Zeitlin’s score does, towards the end of the movie, roam back into 1950s B-movie territory again with some nice nods to Carmen Dragon’s score from the original, I think... and it’s much more frenetic against the images. Indeed, the whole film has an almost intoxicating quiet to it for a lot of the movie but, in the final reel, it feels like, to borrow from a famous, fictional pop group... the sound is almost turned up to eleven. 

 Another moment in the original where Becky gives herself away because a dog is almost run over is much less subtle although, to be fair, it’s one of the iconic moments of this film. In an earlier sequence, Sutherland’s Bennell has accidentally damaged a seed pod as he goes past it, which is next to a tramp/busker sleeping on the street, his dog laying next to him. Later on, instead of the moment from the earlier movie, we have a pod version of a hybrid of the dog with the tramp's face chasing after them. It’s a nice addition, though and, I remember at the time in the school playground, one of the talking points of the movie.

A nice addition to the Body Snatchers concept is the ‘alien screech’ and pointing finger when one of the pod people recognises a human. This is used to good effect in a key moment of the film but I’m not going to mention where because, although a certain scene is actually quite heavily telegraphed (no matter how much the director tries to sell us about the absolute opposite being the final fate of one of the characters), it’s such a nice moment and goes some way to bringing the film back in line with the intentions of Don Siegel when he was directing the 1950s version.

So that’s that one. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978) is certainly no substitute for the first movie but it is a lovingly rendered version which exists as it’s own thing, with the occasional nod back to the original (such as the town square scene where the crowds of aliens are distributing the seed pods). If you liked the 1950s version then you’ll probably love this one too and vice versa. Definitely the first two versions are things every genre fan should watch at least once. For my next review this week, I shall be revisiting the 1993 version of the film so, check back with me if you want to see what I made of that one. 

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers at NUTS4R2

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)

Body Snatchers (1993)

The Invasion (2007)

Hotel Artemis

Tight Rules For The Job

Hotel Artemis
UK/USA Directed by Drew Pearce
UK cinema release print.

Wow. What a great movie.

I'm somewhat dismayed to find the one and two star reviews in abundance on the IMDB for this one. To be fair, these mostly seem to be from bizarre individuals who thought they were going to see some kind of mad John Wick style affair, for some reason but, in all honesty that’s not the kind of impression I took away with me when I first saw the trailer for this thing a couple of weeks ago.

Another thing I definitely didn’t realise from the trailer... but which hits you in some very obvious ways right from the outset of the movie, is that Hotel Artemis is very much a science fiction film in that it’s set in the near future in Los Angeles and, I have to admit, I did get a very slight Blade Runner vibe coming off it, although not quite so outlandish, in some ways, in its predictions.

What it really is, however, is something much older and traditional in its place in the history of cinema, I feel. This is like one of those old 1950s/60s criminal’s ‘hospital safe house’ kinds of movies which would show up in the guise of a film noir or, sometimes, a 1950s western siege kind of affair. In fact, I can very easily envisage the young, late 1970s version of John Carpenter making a very similar style of film to this if he’d had this script.

The film starts off with a bank job which goes wrong for one of the main, more heroic protagonists... Waikiki played by Stirling Brown... when his crew screw things up and his brother gets shot up quite badly. So he takes him to the special floor of the Hotel Artemis. That’s four guest rooms and a mini surgery embodying a ‘patch you up quick’ hospital run by The Nurse, played by Jodie Foster and her assistant Everest, played by David Bautista. It’s an establishment which has very hard, unbreakable rules such as not killing the other patients/guests, no smoking, absolutely no cops and, unless you are a paid up member to the place, you won’t be getting into her establishment and past her little arrival room. I say her establishment... she just runs the operation but it’s actually owned by the most feared crime kingpin in Los Angeles, Niagara, played by Jeff Goldblum. Oh, by the way, only the patient’s code names are used in the Hotel Artemis, named after the room they have been assigned to but, you do find out a few of their names as the movie progresses.

And what a movie it is... Nurse and Everest also have another couple of ‘guests’ staying there on the evening in question. Acapulco, played by Charlie Day and the absolutely drop dead gorgeous, professional assassin Nice, played by Sofia Boutella. This film is about the night where all the rules pretty much get broken and everything goes wrong for Nurse and Everest. Waikiki is in possession of something his brother stole when the job went south which belongs to Goldblum’s character and he will be dead if it’s caught on him (Niagara doesn’t take too kindly to robbery). Also, it becomes pretty clear that one of the other characters has another agenda attached to their stay at the Hotel Artemis. Plus, to make things worse, Goldblum’s son, played by Zachary Quinto, is heading in their direction to smooth the way because his father is injured and needing The Nurse’s services. And did I mention this all takes place when a huge riot over access to water is taking place in the streets of LA?

So yeah, all the early cinematic storytelling clichés are here in abundance but it’s all given a nice, fresh coat of paint by writer/director Drew Pearce on his first feature length movie and it’s a real treat for fans of genre cinema, that’s for sure. And fans of acting too...

Jodie Foster is beyond excellent, giving the confident but anxiety ridden (if she’s ever faced with the possibility of leaving the hotel) character a nice kind of shuffling gait to her run and helping flesh out the flashbacks to her dead son... which will of course, although she doesn’t realise it yet, tie into another character in the hotel. Goldblum, as usual, is great but David Bautista, who is someone I’ve had my eye on for a while, totally knocks it out the park again with a character which is a slight variant on the kind of person he played in Blade Runner 2049. I have a lot of time for this actor and putting him as a kind of double act with veteran actress Jodie Foster is an absolute stroke of genius. And then there’s Sofia Boutella, who impresses me more and more with her combination of smouldering looks coupled with the ability to make hand to hand combat look amazing and lethal without ever seeming empty headed in her approach to the characters she plays. I’m really surprised that Marvel haven’t tapped her yet to lend credibility as one of their super heroines in the current crop of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, to be honest.

And it’s a really great juggling act of modern movie making. Invoking the feel of those old westerns and hard boiled classics, cross pollinating it with a science fiction setting and then throwing in some well choreographed action scenes into the mix too. I was truly impressed by this movie and would say it’s one of the more interesting of this year’s Hollywood style movies, in all honesty. In fact, I’m toying with the idea of seeing it again in a week or two when it gets a general release over here in the UK (I saw it at a Cineworld preview screening) and, certainly, am looking forward to a Blu Ray purchase when the time comes. It’s also got a really nice score by Cliff Martinez which utilises, if my ears were hearing right, some nice cimbalom melodies, often synonymous with the kind of dark, cold world of the 1960s spy thrillers. Alas, as far as I can tell, this score is only available commercially as a download rather than a proper CD release so, once again the movie music labels have let me down and I don’t get to hear what it’s like as a stand alone listen. Which is a great shame. I wish labels like Lakeshore, who publish the download version of the score, would stop doing this.

At the end of the day, the wonderful compositions and the beautiful, claustrophobic atmosphere evoked in Hotel Artemis make it one of the better cinema experiences I’ve had in a while and I’ve got nothing but good things to say about it. A hard recommendation from me with this one and, if you do go, stick around for a little scene just after the end credits start rolling... there’s possible wriggle room for a sequel if this movie had set the box office alight the way it should have. If you are a lover of cinema, especially sci-fi noir, then don’t let this one pass you by.

Jurassic World - Fallen Kingdom

Amber-ling Entertainment

Jurassic World - Fallen Kingdom
2018 USA Directed by J.A. Bayona
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very minor spoilers.

Hmm... yeah. Okay this is not that great people. In fact... it’s far from good. I gave the previous entry of the five Jurassic Park films, Jurassic World, an okayish review (just here) but you can tell I was trying to be really kind to it and I said it was my fourth favourite of the bunch. This one... well, it’s not exactly terrible but, yeah, I guess this is my fifth favourite and it seems to be one of those franchises like Transformers or, to an extent, Pirates Of The Caribbean, which gets just a little bit worse each time around.

It’s pretty hard, I would have thought, to screw up a movie where giant dinosaurs run around eating people and, to be fair, this still holds true for this movie... kinda. Except there must be some real problems, it seems to me, when I find myself struggling to stop myself from looking at my watch during the movie.

Okay... so let me focus on the stuff they got right for a minute...

Well, the performances from returning actors Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are top notch and, even when they haven’t got great dialogue... and this is a film of a lot of scenes which don’t have great dialogue... they do an admirable performance in their roles here. As do co-stars Rafe Spall, Daniella Pineda and Justice Smith. Jeff Goldblum is, of course, always watchable but, as I suspected when I saw the trailer, he’s only in it for a couple of minutes at the start and a couple of minutes at the end so... not a great return for his character Ian Malcolm, to be honest. I was quite pleased when Toby Jones turns up as a nasty business man because the first thought you have is.. this guy is just here to get eaten. That’s almost his sole purpose in this movie... so that was another box ticked off.

Another positive is that the director seems to be making a concerted effort to design some nicely composed shots some of the time. There are cool examples of emphasising things by shifting focus and using sections at the edges of the screen in a few instances. So some nice, cinematic moments scattered throughout.

Okay so... that’s pretty much all the good stuff there.

Frankly, this film dragged quite a bit... even though it was full of action. Well, I say that... nothing much happens for the first twenty minutes or so but, once we get to the island, things go wrong for the main protagonists very quickly and heroes and villains are speedily identified. Everything is clearly marked but even the main characters seem to be acting like they have labels rather than names. Like many films, each character has their function but this movie makes it seem so obvious as to what role the characters are supposed to fulfil that you might as well just label them up... ‘velociraptor whisperer’, ‘high heel in peril girl’, ‘vet girl’, ‘button gal’, ‘computer guy’ etc. Everything slotted into place so obviously that there was nothing much to surprise you except... oh yeah... that one thing.

There’s a sleeper of a twist reveal which you kinda know is coming for the little girl played by Isabella Sermon as they keep dropping visual hints but... and this is a problem with a lot of things throughout the whole film... nobody, including the audience, really gets time to digest it when the big reveal is finally... um... revealed. And that’s a typical thing happening with this movie because, once the movie ramps up about 20 minutes or more in, there aren’t really that many pauses or time for reflection and suspense to build up before the next bus load of dino madness is upon us. So there’s no real weight or sense of terror lurking in the background and the suspense sequences feel just a little bit samey and anemic. Not something which has bothered me before when I see these things but it is a big problem here because this story really doesn’t have too much going for it. It really can’t afford to rollercoaster over those few good dramatic beats here and there in the way it does.

It’s interesting because this movie is much more graphic in its depiction of violence compared to the other Jurassic Park movies... it seems to me. Bearing in mind it’s a 12A rating in the UK, there’s a scene where half a guys arm gets pulled off while a dinosaur ‘toys with its food’ and another scene where you see a man ripped in half, Darth Maul style, between two dinosaur’s mouths. Now I’m not specifically blaming the director for what I’m about to say here but... you never really feel the violence and it shows just how beautifully crafted Steven Spielberg’s first two films in the franchise were because, with a minimum level of on screen goriness, you somehow feel the grizzly nature of violent death more in the way those are shot, edited and scored. Here, you see more but feel way less. Maybe a good demonstration of that old cliché ‘less is more’ in reverse here, it seems to me.

And talking of scoring. I love the majority of Michael Giacchino’s film music... heck, I even went to his birthday concert last year... but the music in this really is an unstoppable force and has a heck of a time trying to compete with the sound effects on this one. It seems simplistic and overpowering and, given the composers knack for weaving in other composers styles and melodies, the John Williams source material is barely referenced. In fact, there was probably more of it in the trailers than you got here and that’s just crazy because there are some real moments where the audience could benefit from the identification of those Williams themes to lift the emotions and, it just doesn’t really happen.

My one big, unforgivable mistake on this whole movie, however, happens within the first ten minutes or so and I was so angry about this that I could barely watch the next scene because my outrage was  persistent. In the early scenes they use a lot of BBC ‘newscast’ footage to recap the audience on what happened at certain points in the last movie as well as bring them up to speed as to what has happened in the couple of years chronologically between the two films. There were even scenes of people watching these broadcasts with their naked eyes and no special glasses... you know what’s coming don’t you? How in the heck are we supposed to believe that the BBC or whoever is broadcasting in 3D? Seriously, the TV footage stuff was all in 3D too and there’s absolutely no way that would happen. Popped me straight out of the movie. Just completely dumb. How is this stuff allowed to happen? I don’t even have the words to express my anger as to how a flat screen is suddenly able to magically broadcast in 3D. What were they thinking?

Also, while I’m at it... is it even possible for amber to break, let alone shatter from such a small distance? I think not, somehow.

So, yeah, I’ll just try and calm down now and say that... if you like the other Jurassic Park films then Jurassic World - Falllen Kingdom is probably going to hit some of the right buttons although, honestly, I’m getting really fed up with these now. There’s a post credit sequence which just underlines what you already know, which is that the producers obviously have a clear goal for the next movie in the series but, honestly, I’m just not sure I care what happens after this. A bit of a misfire but the kid inside you might like it. Or not. Who can tell? Give it a go and see what you think.

Thor - Ragnarok

Ragnarok N’ Roll

Thor - Ragnarok
2017 USA Directed by Taika Waititi
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very minor ‘ish’ story spoilers, I suppose.

So here we go again with Thor - Ragnarok. It's yet another, fairly impressive, entry into Marvel’s strand of MCU films (Marvel Cinematic Universe) which all take place in a shared universe and have interlocking characters, themes and situations which build on and support each other. So, essentially, this is yet another sequel to Iron Man, even though Robert Downey Jr’s version of Tony Stark is only mentioned here and doesn’t actually appear in the flesh. Although there have been a few misses along the way... Iron Man 2 and the two Guardians Of The Galaxy films really didn’t do much for me, it has to be said (although I do like the characters in the GOTG films... just not the story ideas surrounding them)... the films are mostly solid and, musical continuity aside, the Marvel films in this sequence seem to have a knack for good casting (both in front of and behind the cameras). This latest installment is no exception to that rule. Sure, it’s certainly not the best of them but it’s definitely somewhere in the upper half of fun Marvel movies, I would say.

The previous two Thor ‘solo’ movies (if you can call this a solo adventure) were different in tone to each other and this third entry again changes the look and feel of the stories. Starting off with Thor imprisoned and talking to the a captive audience abut how he got in this predicament, I at first thought the majority of the running time was going to be one long flashback telling us how Thor got to this point and that the conclusion would lead on from here. Not so, though, and in the first of many surprises, we have a typical James Bondian ‘end of a mission’ moment when Thor talks to a big fiery devil creature and gains an inkling about the duplicity of Loki’s last trick, when it was revealed to the audience but not to Thor that Loki had replaced Zeus and was impersonating him to rule Asgard (at the end of Thor - The Dark World reviewed here). Thor then does battle with the monster and, when he finally gets back to Asgard, uncovers Loki tricksterism (in a nice scene which spoofs Loki’s fake death from Thor - The Dark World). After the two go to find Zeus, played once again by Anthony Hopkins and helped in their quest by a recent addition to the Marvel Universe, they learn that they have an older sister, Hela (played by the wonderful Cate Blanchett), who was banished by Zeus in days gone by. She is the Goddess of Death and she’s pretty powerful.

In a mini showdown, Hela destroy’s Thor’s hammer and, while he and Loki are fleeing to Asgard, she follows them up the Bifrost and both Thor and Loki are thrown from that mode of transport into a random part of the Universe where Thor is taken prisoner by Jeff Goldblum’s ‘Grandmaster’ and forced to fight in the arena against... The Incredible Hulk. However, he has to find a way back to Asgard and so he teams up with Loki, Valkyrie and Hulk/Banner to try to make things right. And that’s the plot set up and that’s all I’m saying about it here... which is pretty much what you can gather from the trailer anyway.

So we have Chris Hemsworth back as Thor and Tom Hiddleston back as Loki and, frankly, the chemistry between them is great. We also have one of my favourite modern actors, Mark Ruffalo, back as Bruce Banner/Hulk and he’s always a fun watch but he’s mostly back as Hulk here, rather than in his human form. The Hulk character has, as you will have seen from the trailers, finally ‘found his voice’, so to speak and is more in keeping with the original comics in this way. I think the character also looks a lot more like Ruffalo here and, maybe I’m wrong here but his head seems to have grown smaller in size too? Seems to have been redesigned. We also have Tessa Thompson who seems miscast, racially, as the blonde haired, Wagnerian styled Valkyrie from the 1970s comics, although I don’t know if she’s been revamped in recent comics like the Nick Fury character was so I might just be showing my age here. Away from the ‘look’ of the character, though, she does do pretty well here and creates an entertaining screen personae but, again, she seems far removed from being The Enchantress as she ‘kinda/also’ was in the early 70s comics.

Idris Elba returns as Heimdall, partaking in some nice heroics and there are also a couple of special cameos here from Sam Neil and Luke ‘brother of Chris’ Hemsworth which provide a great moment when Thor gets back to Asgard. Karl Urban also turns up (although I didn’t actually recognise him, which shows just how good of an actor he is) as a... well he’s definitely someone you have to keep an eye on. He’s not a black and white character by any means, even though he’s still a quick sketch of one... in terms of the film moving at a very fast pace. My favourite new character here, though, was easily a rock creature called Korg who definitely gets all the best laughs in the movie... so I was surprised to learn later that he’d been played by the director, Taika Waititi.

And when I say he got the best laughs...

Thor - Ragnarok shouldn’t really work as well as it does here and this is due to the tone of this one. I mentioned earlier that the previous Thor movies seemed to have a slightly different tone but this one is a complete ‘about face’ to the way in which the characters were presented in the previous Thor adventures. In fact, this one is pretty much written as a comedy all the way through. The scripting pretty much consists of a load of jokes and one liners thrown together and, although a lot of it was apparently improvised on set for this particular film, it really works quite well for most of the time.

Now, you’d think that such an out and out comedy treatment of the subject matter might trivialise the story arc of the ‘big picture’ the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been building towards completing over the next two years but it really doesn’t fall into any of the traps it could have been tripped up with and the tone of the piece never really interferes with the tone and credibility of the established characters (for the most part... I’ll get to my one big complaint in a minute). Furthermore, although comedy is the order of the day in this one, you never really feel like it’s watering down the stakes which are quite high here. It’s also quite edgy in something it does to one of the characters and I realised at one point in the film that one of the scenes used in the trailers must have been shot twice (once with and once without... something) or at least had some heavy CGI work done on it in order to not reveal something which will be a permanent change to one of the regular characters in the MCU.

My one big problem here was the Banner/Hulk character... not in terms of acting but in terms of scripting. For starters, Banner’s few scenes in the movie seem to be really ‘out of character’ to me and it’s like he’s gone completely mad. I understand that after being ‘imprisoned’ in the Hulk’s body for two years the character might return a little dazed and confused but something about the writing here just didn’t seem to ring true to the excellent work Ruffalo has done with Bruce Banner in previous films in the series. Also... and I may be completely wrong about this... but isn’t the continuity completely wrong here. I thought the jet that Hulk used to escape in Avengers - Age Of Ultron (reviewed here) was found or tracked to a specific place on Earth, although Hulk was not found. Or did I remember that wrong because... that’s not in the back story here. The jet seems to have ended up somewhere completely different and ‘off world’. Also, the character makes reference to having been on another planet other than Earth and the one he’s currently on here and Thor seems to remember this too. Well, I don’t. When the heck did this happen in the intervening movies? So I was finding myself very puzzled during some scenes here.

Also, while I'm on the subject of continuity. If Thor was in a happy relationship with Natalie Portman's character still when he left Earth in Avengers - Age Of Ultron... how can they have had any time to 'split up', as is stated here, when he hasn't been back to Earth since then until a certain scene in this film? That makes no sense. Honestly Marvel, if you find yourself in the position where you have to write a character out because they don't want to do anymore, you could at least make it a little more credible.

However, this is all just minor stuff and, in terms of broad strokes, Thor - Ragnarok is definitely one of the better entries in the MCU. Mark Mothersbaugh’s score is nicely done too (although I would have liked to have heard what Brian Tyler might have done with this one) and there’s even a nice musical cameo from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, if I’m not much mistaken. If you’re a fan/follower’/true believer’ of the Marvel movies then you really need to see this... especially since it helps set up (as do they all, I guess), next year’s Avengers - Infinity War. It’s perhaps more married, in terms of the kind of comedy action style it has here, to the two Guardians Of The Galaxy movies but it doesn’t seem to make the same mistakes that those two did (for me) and this one was a much more positive experience. And, like I said, the stakes are high in this one and, by the end of the story, you definitely feel that various things have been changed forever in the wake of this movie. Things which certainly, in some ways, live up to the movie’s subtitle of Ragnarok. My big question of the writers, though, is this... where the heck is Lady Sif these days?

Independence Day - Resurgence

Resurge Gainsbourg

Independence Day - Resurgence
2016 USA Directed by Roland Emmerich
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Technically a slight spoiler for
the original movie, if you’ve never seen it.

Hmmm... okay. I guess we all remember the trailer campaign for the original Independence Day in 1996, right? Those of us who are old enough to remember... which it turns out wasn’t the case with the girl selling me my ticket to this screening, when I asked her about how this one was.

It was kind of a ‘wearing you down’ campaign for a hugely budgeted movie about Americans saving the planet from alien invaders by hacking into their alien technology with an Apple computer. This was in the days when Apple were truly great, of course, and not the huge, greedy, corporate money trap they’ve become in just the last few years. We all kinda half trusted Roland Emmerich in those days because he’d caught the current zeitgeist... or more like recreated it... when he brought out a movie before this called Stargate. So when we all sat down to watch the original Independence Day in cinemas, in spite of the gruelling trailer campaign, most of us kinda liked it. Which was okay and lasted about as long as until we got the home video version when, I suspect, a good deal of us realised that we would never want to watch this rubbish ever again.

So here we have a sequel that nobody wanted... or at least I didn’t... taking place 20 years after the original movie in both reality and fictional terms and calling itself Independence Day - Resurgence. I didn’t really want to see this one at all, to be honest, but I’d rather see it on my Cineworld Unlimited card for free (more or less) to find out if it’s any good rather than risk buying a cheap blu ray in a sale at a later point. So I went down to my local on its first Saturday morning and was astonished to find, just like the screening of Gods Of Egypt the week before (reviewed here), that there were only five people, including myself, in the screening for the 3D showing. So, yeah... wondering what that will mean for the box office.

Now, as it turns out, I quite enjoyed this sequel and found it to be a lot more engaging than the first movie. What surprised me, though, is that it felt like a different kind of film. Although the budget for this was somewhere around 165 million dollars... which is just silly... I would be lying if I were to say the money was easy to see on the screen and, despite an abundance of relatively impressive special effects shots, it actually felt more like a small, chamber piece of a sequel, rather than a full blown affair. The original movie back in 1996 maybe suffered from feeling too much like it was trying to be an epic movie. This time around, it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be too splashy and, surprisingly, that really helps it, I think.

Anyone hoping to see Will Smith reprise his character will have to make do with the substitute of that character’s son, played by Jessie T. Usher. He doesn’t get a heck of a lot of screen time to be honest but it’s okay because, like the first film, he’s joined by some great actors, a fair few who were veterans of the first movie. So we have newcomers Liam Hemsworth, Maika Monroe, Angelababy and the always watchable William Fichtner, mixing it up with the likes of the charismatic Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch, the brilliant Bill Pullman and, playing a slightly less irritating version of the character he played in the first movie... Brent Spiner. And the icing on the cake is the amazingly brilliant actress Charlotte Gainsbourg playing the love interest/female professor element to the film, Catherine Marceaux .

Okay, so a bunch of cool cast members does not a cool movie make but, like I said, we’re in luck because this feels a little different to the kind of movie the first one was. I mentioned above that it’s not just been made twenty years later... it’s set twenty years after the first film too. What that means in terms of the world that survived the alien invasion in that first one is that man has evolved into a species where every nation is at peace and where the technology has advanced to a level far removed by where we are in the real world. This is pure science fiction in that we have a weapons defence system around the Earth, a moonbase and... yeah, it’s definitely a highly futuristic version of 2016 presented here. So it feels less like it’s trying to be a disaster movie and maybe that’s why, in general, this sequel is a lot more pacier and entertaining than the first outing. It doesn’t hurt that it doesn’t have the humongous running time of the first one either. It’s a straight two hours but, this time around, it doesn’t get dull and it flies by real fast, I have to say.

The film is quite clichéd, as you would expect it to be, but that doesn’t rip the teeth out of those old tried and tested movie conventions and helps build drama in a way that you can tell the director is an old hand at manipulating people’s emotion through moving image... which is no bad thing when you are directing a sequel that nobody really wants, I guess. For instance, the writers spend a good deal of time setting up just how powerful the Earth’s defence against any returning invasion forces are and, when they start doing this, you just know they’re setting you up so that they can quickly rip them out from under you and bring you back to the equivalent of bows and arrows against the Gods and... yeah, that pretty much happens and exactly when you’d expect it to, to be honest. But, in a way, you kind of know that has to happen in order to move the story on so it’s not so much of a disappointment and, like I said... it’s an entertaining movie.

The writers also, however, add another factor to this movie which I don’t want to spoil too much but... lets just say, there’s a lot of scope for a future sequel and if that happens, it’s probably not going to be going in a direction that someone who hasn’t seen this particular movie would expect it to go in. I don’t want to spoil the surprises here but, suffice it to say, man shouldn’t always be arrogant enough to think he’s the most important species in the Universe and that’s kinda highlighted here, no doubt about that.

Now, I would have loved it if David Arnold could have returned to score this sequel to one of his big movie hits but, alas, this time the scoring duties go to Harald Kloser and Thomas Wanker (the latter being credited as Thomas Wander on this one, for some reason). Now, it’s really not a bad bit of scoring and I am going to see what it plays like on its own (assuming a proper, physical CD gets released) but I did feel it sounded a little inappropriate and over-the-top in its thematic exuberance at certain points. However, this probably just means I’ll enjoy it a hell of a lot more as a stand alone album so... yeah, that’ll happen for me at some point, I think. It mostly seems to work though so... would’ve been nice to reunite Arnold with the franchise but this isn’t too bad either.

And that’s me done for this movie. I kinda liked this one and I really wasn’t expecting to. The script isn’t terrible, the line delivery is good and it doesn’t quite throw the USA patriotic thing down your throat constantly like the original movie seemed to do... which is always a good thing.  If you liked the first Independence Day movie, then you probably won’t have too much of a problem with this one. If you didn’t think the first one was all that great then.. you might be pleasantly surprised because Independence Day: Resurgence is a much smaller affair compared to the large sprawl of the first film. There’s a good chance you won’t be bored here at all, in fact. I was quite glad I gave it a go, even though the trailer looked terrible, so... yeah, maybe give this one a chance.