The Darkness

Five Little Indians

The Darkness
2016 USA Directed by Greg McLean
UK cinema release print.

Okay. Yeah... kinda liked this one.

The Darkness is one of those entertainments that you can add to the recent list of horror films which are not absolutely great movies or classics of the genre but, at the same time, are skilled enough with the clichés and shorthand of their archetype to be able to deliver an enjoyable and competent addition to the list of similar films being made. Where The Darkness really wins some respect from me is with the addition of the Native American demons and their hostile attempt to return from the dimension that they were trapped in many years ago by their own people. Don’t quite remember that kind of mythology being tapped before (although I’m sure somebody must have already covered it at some point).

The film starts off with Peter and Bonny, played as well as you would expect by Kevin Bacon and Radha Mitchell, and their two children, on a vacation with their friends near the Grand Canyon. The youngest of the two, the boy, is autistic and, when he’s left alone for a minute by his sister who’s supposed to be watching him, he falls through into a cavern and finds five pebbles inscribed with icons and which he removes from their specific, ritualistic place in the cave, taking them home in his ruck sack. This, of course, opens the household up to various ‘haunting’ phenomena, which the boy is usually blamed for, as this has allowed the all powerful demons something to anchor themselves onto, so they can begin to free themselves from the confines of their prison. Of course, because the boy Michael (played by Gotham’s young Bruce Wayne, David Mazouz), is autistic, he can see what ‘the sky people’ are doing and even tries to help them for most of the picture.

It’s nothing particularly special as a movie, for sure, but it does have that mythological edge to it in the Indian legend. In terms of the story and the eventual ‘final solution’ of the movie, it does at least stick with the rules and back story it sets up for itself... something which some horror movies seem to have trouble doing, these days, for some reason. So I was pretty glad when we had some follow through on this stuff beyond the point of... this is how the spooky, sinister force came to be here and now we’re just going to do our own thing with it, without referring to the origins again.

The film is fairly well shot and, though it doesn’t exactly go nuts on the intensity of the scares along the way, it does get quite suspenseful at some points in the movie. The use of black dirt handprints as a signature that a ghostly and demonic presence is at work is used quite well a lot of the time and these are used to build tension throughout as they are manifested in various places, including being imprinted on a couple of the characters themselves, when they face their supernatural opposition.

The performances in this are all pretty good, too. Bacon is always cool, as is Radha Mitchell... who really needs to get more lead roles. David Mazouz is very good as the autistic son and his character’s sister, Stephanie, played by Lucy Fry, also does well at portraying an angry and troubled teenager. It was nice seeing Paul Reiser back on the big screen, playing an even bigger and annoying idiot than he did in ALIENS but it was the character of his wife who I really sat up and took note of. She’s not in it that much but it was nice seeing the beautiful Ming-Na Wen, aka Agent May from Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD on the big screen. We need more of her in Hollywoodland too, me thinks.

So not much more to say about this one except we have another nice touch in the fact that the person (or people) who the family go to in order to fight back against their supernatural threat are actually of some help in this case (as those kinds of ‘Van Helsing’ figures were in the Insidious series too, I guess)... although, at the end of the day, any salvation in the final act comes from a different avenue. In fact that, for me, was the one weak point of the film... in the last ten minutes I was at a place where I started thinking... “Oh, really. They’re going to do that, now?” However, it does at least fit in with the stuff we know about the antagonist demons from their back story so, I wasn’t too upset by the place the ending went to. Although, it did feel a little anti-climactic, if truth be told.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say on this one. The score by Johnny Klimek was pretty good and perhaps just a little more subtle and less ‘stinger led’ than a lot of modern horrors have been. I’d probably buy the score if it was available but... so far, there seems to be nothing released on CD for this one. Maybe we’ll get something released later, though, if the film does well enough at the box office?

So there you have it. A pretty short review and, for some reason, I don’t have much to say about this one. If you’re into horror movies then you probably won’t be blown away by The Darkness but it’s certainly well put together and good enough to go on your ‘to watch’ list, I would have thought. If you’re not that used to horror movies then this will probably scare you enough into watching some more of them... or avoiding them. Not sure which but it is fairly effective in certain sequences, at any rate. Not one I’d go out of my way for but certainly worth spending a little time with, I think. So maybe give this one a go.

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Control

Cloud Atlas
2012 Germany/USA/Hong Kong/Singapore
Directed by Tom Tykwer & The Wachowski Siblings
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Region B

I remember wanting to see this, kind of, at the cinema when it came out in the UK in February of 2103 but there were too many demands being made on my time around then so I was forced to give it a miss. That’s okay though... this is why we have Computer Exchange stores across the land. So we can buy Blu Rays of the movies we missed at dirt cheap prices many months after the initial home video release has passed us by.

Cloud Atlas is one of those movies that is extremely impressive and full of mystery when you watch it. It’s a long film, nearly three hours, and it managed to hold my interest throughout the running time in a way which subsequent viewings possibly wouldn’t. That is to say that the intrigue generated from the initial conceptual set up is the driving force behind the narrative path, if it can be said to indeed have a narrative path, and once the intricacies of the connective tissue turn out to be, maybe, a little bit like the Emporer’s New Clothes in terms of its ultimate message... the film ends up being a little flat and without any real meaning to it by the finish of things.

On the other hand, a similar case could be made for such masterpieces as Citizen Kane, among others, so let’s not count this one out of the running either.

The film walks a very delicate and difficult path in that it maintains a cross cutting narrative that spans at least five, by my count, separate time zones in Earth’s history... past, present and future. How it does this is a remarkable achievement in terms of allowing the audience to keep everything in their heads without losing the plot and the film makers should be congratulated in this task. This couldn’t have been an easy film to shoot and, frankly, probably even less easy to edit.

It helps though that the colour palette on each segment is just a little different without being too at odds with the prevailing style (there’s a heck of a lot of deep focus photography in this thing) and the various directors use every visual and aural trick in the book to guide the audience into a cross cut jump from one time zone to another while trying to assure said audience don't, at first, notice that transition.

One of the most helpful things is that the ridiculous idea of having a heck of a lot of characters with several members of the cast playing several roles in different time zones, helps with familiarity through the actors, becoming a kind of visual cement to enhance the idea that life is all about ripples in time and connections between eras.

It helps the various directors in their visual chicanery quite well, in fact. For example, the director might use a cut on a shot, bringing to the main part of the screen a specific visual key point like an actress’ hand, with the camera panning around and holding it at the centre of one’s focus. The following shot might, for instance, mirror the speed and direction of the shot and continue with highlighting the same thing, sometimes with even the same actor, but after a while your brain catches up and you realise the transition has gone from the hand belonging to one character in the future to the same artist portraying someone in the past. It’s disorienting but, because there’s a lot of detail and visual indicators kicking in as a kind of aftershock on the consciousness, the transitions become seamless while your head catches up to the on screen action.

Similarly, the sound design is used in a manner which will help the brain cope with the various interpenetrating story transitions, such as the sound of horses hooves pounding against the ground metamorphosing into the rhythmic rumble of a steam train as it continues on its journey in a different chronological setting. These are all good tricks to use and the technical aspects of the film are all pulled off brilliantly.

What this does, of course, is allow the viewer to seamlessly cut between, not just different scenarios in time but, also, different shifts in tone. For instance, while most of the stories that play out in this movie are all quite serious and, for the most part, quite downbeat, the screenplay manages to juggle a kind of modern comedy routine of a setting and integrate it into the rest of the scenarios without shifting the tone of the various individual narrative threads, perhaps even enhancing those by contrast and their place within the overall structure of the film.

Asides from the tremendous acting performances and the amazing editing which often cuts on movement, the set design and overall art direction is absolutely brilliant. I found this especially noticeable in one of the “realms” dealing with earth in the future, where animated, interactive, desktop-style background wallpapers are used in the interior of buildings on the walls and floors. Animated fish can swim under foot, for example, and when a foot is put down a virtual splash of water accompanies this action. This is all great stuff and another impressive layer to the movie.

What wasn’t so impressive to me, in the context of the film itself, was the score by Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer... at least not as it is used and lost in the mix. And while the score is probably stronger than I at first perceived, from what I hear of the on-line samples, it seems a pity to me that, for a film where a specific musical piece is used as a major thematic and transitional glue, the score should be so buried under the sound mix for a lot of the time. So that’s a bit of a shame (I'm actually listening to the freshly arrived CD soundtrack as I ready this review and can confirm that the score works very well as a stand alone listen).

My other main problem with the film, and I touched upon this in my opening remarks, is that it doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere. Okay, so we’re hooked in on the fact that various characters from different time zones are played by the same actors from the other parts of the movie and that certainly gets one’s attention. Similarly the concept of a running, comet shaped birth mark through the decades is also an interesting hook. However, at the end, there’s no prevailing explanation as to why any of these things are actually put in place in the first place. Some characters do share a certain connection but not enough to warrant the exploration of these ideas in the first place, it seems to me. The film doesn’t seem to have any real, underlying, central idea it’s trying to convey other than, maybe, everybody should love each other and all start trying to get along. There’s no attempt at anything like closure in the movie in terms of anything other than the conclusion of each, individual story within the narrative... no real effort is made to tie everything in other than by the use of random chance... at least that’s the way it seemed to me.

As an answer to that particular expectation of mine, which was the reason for my investment in the narrative in the first place, you might want to take the tack that a big screen entertainment is just that.. a big screen entertainment. I couldn’t really argue about that myself, other than to recall that the movie had maybe set up my expectations to expect something which had a specific point to make by the end of it. Now I’ve not read the original novel on which this movie was based (as yet), so I’ve no idea if the source story had a more concrete narrative goal and this maybe got lost in translation when it came to the movie adaptation of it. However, in terms of investing my time for almost three hours... I felt the film was a little flat and unsatisfying towards the end. Again, though, whether a movie is required to give this level of closure or whether it should be merely an empty spectacle is an argument for another time. I think there’s room in the world for both types, personally.

So there you have it. Cloud Atlas is a spectacular, attention grabbing film which manages to give a great deal of emotional empathy to the various characters and their situations, while still seeming a little bereft of anything really concrete to say about any of the issues it brings up, it seems to me. That being said, it is a great movie and if you can forget about the “puzzle solving” and reward aspect of the particular journey the filmmakers lead you on with, it’s a stunning piece of cinematic art, worthy of your time.  One thing’s for sure... you won’t find it boring.