Tenet

 

Welcome To The Palindrome

Tenet
UK/USA 2020
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Warner Brothers

Warning: This one will have big  spoilers so, you know,
if you don’t want to know then please don’t read.

Regular readers of my blog will know I’m not the biggest fan of Christopher Nolan. I’ve seen nine of his feature films now but was generally disappointed by most of them and truly baffled by the bizarre impression that they’re somehow high brow and almost impenetrable in their construction (pedestrian and obvious would have been my thoughts). I’ve been disappointed by hopeful expectations almost every single time and, the only films of his I’ve really thought were worth a ticket purchase, were the second and third installments of his Dark Knight Trilogy (after a fairly shaky, fumbled first installment with Batman Begins). I’m never really wanting to go into his films expecting them to be bad but I’ve almost resigned myself to that now and... now that I’ve finally seen Tenet... yeah, I have to say that, okay, it’s not as bad as Inception but, it’s still a bit drab, in all honesty.

Tenet has a nice central concept but it’s a whopper of a suspension of disbelief in terms of the fantasy element of the movie and, frankly, I’m more likely to be on board with fire breathing dragons and magical swords than I am with what he’s done here, which is to hijack the concept of the flow of time as, crucially to the plot, something of an alternating current that you can ride both ways and, well, ridiculing the science while, to his credit at least, remaining totally poe faced about the whole thing.

It’s somewhat strange and a bit of a dud as far as I’m concerned because... I’ve never really believed in the passage of time. I don’t have Alzheimers yet (as far as I know) but, if I did I think I might well be perceiving the universe as it really exists... as a single playing field which, due to the limitations of my standard ape brain, I can only perceive in a linear fashion, to the point where the whole human race participates in the measuring of this fictional thing known as time and begins to see it as something beyond the huge convenience which that specific measure was invented for... to synch up various actions and events with each other. So the idea that you can run backwards and forwards through time as though it’s something that can be viewed from differing viewpoints kind of misses the point, for me. Also, one of my favourite ideas when I was growing up was the metaphorical use of entropy to describe the chaotic, moral decadence of human nature but, when you get down to it, I’ve either completely misunderstood the concept of what entropy is all my life or... Nolan’s just not using it in a plausible fashion. Entropy isn’t something that can be reversed folks so... yeah... like I said, a fantasy film. And I don’t mind a fantasy film, for sure but... it just felt a bit flat for me.

So the main premise of a secret organisation which literally wears the name of its underlying strategic tactic on its sleeve, so to speak, seems to me to be a little overly silly. Actually there’s a scene in the film which popped me out of the movie because it features two of the central protagonists hatching the details of their upcoming ‘heist’ on a crowded bus and I was like, “Seriously, you’re supposed to be a secret organisation, do you imagine none of your fellow passengers are listening in on your plans?” Now that I contemplate the full extent of their ‘special word’ though, I found myself thinking... well, yeah, what do you expect of such people. They need to recruit some professionals instead.

That being said, Tenet isn’t a bad movie... it’s watchable and holds your interest. The main lead,  John David Washington, holds the attention and he did a really good job in this. Despite the limitations of his script he brought a certain confidence to the role and I’d like to see him in something similar but, perhaps, something less overtly fantastical. Ditto for Robert Pattinson who, frankly, I often have a hard time taking seriously but, I think he does an excellent job here. Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh are equally watchable in their roles and, in terms of actors and on screen chemistry, the whole thing works rather well.

The film looks quite good in terms of the 'cleanliness of shot' which I tend to associate with this director. He seems to have a penchant for symmetry and a lack of clutter which, honestly, gives everything a kind of polish and layer of shininess which doesn’t always help the credibility of the milieu but, well, it’s easy on the eye, at least. The music by Ludwig Göransson is also pretty good although, I have to confess, if I hadn’t known he was scoring this picture I would have assumed, on hearing it, that Nolan’s regular composer, Hans Zimmer, was on the job. Honestly, it sounds pretty much the same as what I would expect him to compose for a movie so... yeah, great score and I’ll definitely try and grab a copy on CD before long but, well, I certainly couldn’t pick up Göransson’s personal signature from this one (mind you, it doesn’t help that so few of his scores have actually made it onto CD, instead of a useless electronic download, so I don’t exactly have an opportunity to listen to his stuff properly).

My real disappointment comes, perhaps, from my expectations for the film about half way through. I was sure that Robert Pattinson was going to turn out to be an early version of Kenneth Branagh’s character but, instead, the implication from the final shot of the movie seems to be that he’s Branagh’s son. At least, that’s the obvious conclusion I came to from watching this and, yeah, it might be that I’m wanting to cheer the film on to at least some sense of a twist or slightly more interesting denouement because, frankly, Kenneth Branagh quoting the old chestnut about the world ending with a whimper rather than a bang could well be equally applied to this film itself. It’s just a bit dull and, although the film was apparently made in a very clever and impressive fashion, frankly, I’ve seen film being reversed through a projector since I was a young boy and it failed to impress me then too (doubly so when Superman somehow managed to break established temporal mechanics... such as they are... and reverse the world at the end of Superman The Movie... that made no sense). So, if your trick to attempted spectacle is to have various things in a shot running backwards and forwards at the same time... I’m really not that impressed, to be honest.

All I can conclude, I think, is that Tenet has its moments but is not my idea of a truly great action movie and it just felt a little lacklustre in places. Not unwatchable though, for sure... although I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. As for me, I think I’ll stick to The Dark Knight, thank you very much.

Venom

Venom Seed

Venom
2018 USA
Directed by Ruben Fleischer
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very slight spoiler in here.

Well this was a bit of a surprise.

I saw the trailer to Venom and it looked awful. This was followed up with a lot of negative, bad word of mouth comments on Twitter on the first couple of days of its release. However, I wanted to keep abreast of things because the Fox Marvel Universe looks like it will be properly merging with the Disney owned Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) any time now and so there’s a possibility that the character could be crossing over into that world at some point, possibly with the same actors attached.

What can I say? I may be out of step with the zeitgeist again because I had a really good time with it. There are a few issues (not as many as you might think from people’s reactions) but overall it’s a pretty great Marvel movie and I hope they make good on the promise of the first of the two extended post credits scenes (so that’ll be the mid-end credits scene then) at some point. So hoping for some good box office on this one but, judging from people’s reactions, it might not get it.

I’m not that up on Venom as a character, to be honest. He’s only about 30 years old and I think I’ve only ever read the first ten or twelve years of Spider-Man in the comics. But this highlights one of the biggest problems of this movie right there, in relation to this source material and its pretence to be an adaptation of it because, although there are Spider-Man universe references in it, the primary one being that J. Jonah Jameson’s son, the astronaut, gets a few brief shots at the start of the movie and the other being mention of Eddie Brock’s New York problems (I’ll get to the final post-credits scene soon), this incarnation of Venom has nothing to do with Spider-Man at all which is odd here because... well okay here’s why.

Venom first appeared as an alien symbiont in a Spider -Man story called Homecoming... which is what the last solo(ish) Spider-Man movie was called, right? The story was part of a big Marvel event called Secret Wars in the comic, which featured all the Marvel characters battling each other on an alien world. It’s here where Spidey picked up the black, alien symbiotic costume and, many issues later, got rid of it when it became the villainous Venom and bonded with, among others, reporter Eddie Brock. Now, we saw some of this story already on screen when it was used, alas minus the Secret Wars part, for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3. So I can half understand why they didn’t want to go down that route here and instead give him a new origin again (kind of, not really but I’m not going to condemn them for it) but we still have the problem that Venom still totally looks like Spider-Man.... because that’s who he first bonded with.

And that’s my biggest problem with the new movie. Venom bonds with Eddie Brock, played here quite comically by Tom Hardy who portrays him as a much more sympathetic character than I recall. And for the first twenty or so minutes after he bonds with Eddie, which in itself is a fair way into the movie... which is fine, it’s a slow burn... we don’t ever see him manifest as a full character and all the while I was thinking... oh, they’re doing this right. Soon he’ll see some footage or a picture of Spider-Man and that will justify him looking like the character. And that’s where they slipped up because, when Venom does manifest to Eddie and various others, he looks just like Spider-Man but with absolutely no justification for that. Which is what I was worried about when I first heard they were doing a stand alone Venom movie and, yeah, they really dropped the ball here.

Most everything else is great though. The movie takes time to build up the characters like Eddie, his former girlfriend Anne (played by Michelle Williams) and the movie’s main villain Carlton Drake (played really well by Riz Ahmed). And there’s even another symbiont (there’s a few actually but one other main one) which starts the movie as kind of a red herring because you assume it’s Venom but then it turns out... oh no it’s not. This character is useful in the early parts of the movie (and works much better then than in the end third of the film) because it allows the writers and director to play with the idea of the alien symbionts in almost a horror movie kind of way. This is something that’s further enhanced by Ludwig Göransson’s rather appropriate, almost cheesy riffs on a kind of 1950s style scary sci-fi approach to the scoring... which surprised me from this composer and is spot on for this. Well done to Sony for giving it a CD release at the end of next week. Much appreciated.

The musical style also changes when it needs to, especially when, somewhere in the last third or so of the movie, the tone shifts and it becomes an all out adventure Super Symbiont style action fest in the Mighty Marvel Manner (as they used to say in the comics). And this kind of works for the film too... it’s a fun watch with some nice, fast pacing and there’s even a brief appearance of a sexy Lady Venom at one point (or She-Venom as she was known in the comics, apparently). The point is, everyone is good and everything, more or less, follows through on story logic. I don’t know why people are saying it’s a mess and doesn’t make sense because, it clearly does... even if it does come off as a bit of a cross between the plotting of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here) and Rampage (reviewed here) at certain points.

I have only two other problems with it.

One is the time continuity. At the start of the picture we have a rocket crashing on Earth and then Eddie Brock brought in to to do a puff piece interview with Carlton Drake as damage control on that event. Soon after, we have a caption that reads “Six months later” and Eddie is in a bar watching a news item. All well and good except the news announcer is talking about that same rocket crash which happened... one month ago. I appreciate that the timing relocated to a longer period makes more sense with what’s happened in the progression of the characters in the intervening months... but if you’re going to slap a caption on there then make sure the dubbing on the news cast synchs up with it. Mind you, it’s not as bad as the appalling time continuity error made at the start of Spider-Man Homecoming (reviewed here) with it’s proximity to the events of The Avengers (aka Avengers Assemble, reviewed here) so I think we can let these guys off the hook on this a little.

What really made no sense however, especially after a quite cool, extended mid end credits sequence, was an extended post-credits end sequence which is an action scene from the new Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse movie released in December... especially as it seems to have absolutely nothing to do with Venom or the rest of the film. So that was a bit strange but not especially damaging to the rest of the picture, I guess.

So what else can I say? Despite the unbelievably bad word of mouth the movie has been getting, I thought this one was a really fun ride and there are a lot worse things you could be seeing at your cinema at the moment. It’s not super great but it’s certainly not a dud and it’s also got a memorable cameo from Stan Lee near the end of the picture. So if you are one of those fans who are fond of the old phrase “Make Mine Marvel”, I think you’ll find Venom is at least worth a look. I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

Black Panther

Wakanda Man Is He?

Black Panther
2018 USA Directed by Ryan Coogler
UK cinema release print.

Black Panther is the latest in the chain-linked Marvel Cinematic Universe movies which have set modern cinematic trends on fire since the debut of the first Iron Man film. It carries on directly from story and character elements set up in both Avengers - Age Of Ultron (reviewed here) and Captain America - Civil War (reviewed here).

Now, I’m not a big Black Panther comic book fan, truth be told. I remember I used to draw him occasionally as a kid (like most of the Marvel and DC superheroes) but I never really had any of his stand alone appearances... just the odd appearance in a hardback UK british Marvel annual or Marvel Treasury edition guesting in other heroes' stories. So, in terms of the comic book roots for this film, I can’t really talk with any authority.

I do, however, remember Klaw (aka Ulysses Klau) and was really stoked when he turned up in Age Of Ultron, portrayed by Andy Serkis, because I wanted to see him in the colourful costume and with the ‘sonic claw’ he used to wear on his arm. Alas, my biggest disappointment with this movie is that, although Serkis once again shows up to do the honours, I felt he was a really under utilised character and, alas, doesn’t have either the costume or that big metal stump  with the sonic antenna sticking out of it... which is a shame. I had further disappointment with this character’s arc here too... used as a bit of a plot point rather than a character in his own right... but I can’t say too much here because I want this review to be spoiler free.

As it happens though, in spite of this, Black Panther is actually pretty good and certainly holds its own with a fair amount of the MCU movies over the years. And in terms of art direction... well in that respect it’s probably the best of the current Marvel movies... at least in a visual sense.

The film has good performances all around and that helps a lot for a movie with not many ties to the other films being present in the flesh, so to speak. Chadwick Boseman really seems to have grown into the role fairly quickly and he has some of the humour which the character was missing in Captain America - Civil War. Which is not surprising since his involvement in that movie came from his reaction to the death of his father. Martin Freeman returns here too, as the CIA agent he played in Civil War and he is also a heck of a lot more palatable this time around with him taking a more heroic role... though having an American accent coming out of his mouth is still just plain wrong and sounds quite terrible. Lupita Lupita Nyong'o, Letitia Wright, Angela Bassett, Daniel Kaluuya and Forest Whitaker are all, as expected, strong in their varies supporting roles and, I have to say, Michael B. Jordan as the villanous Killmonger is quite striking, both in presence and appearance here.

Okay. So there’s a lot of good stuff here with an almost ‘international espionage’ tone to some of the scenes (my favourite part of the movie was the ‘incident’ set in a casino in Busan) and the action is as competently handled as well as it is in all the other Marvel movies of recent years. That being said, in a movie which is pretty entertaining a lot of the time, I did have a few little grumbles with it.

Okay, so my main problem was that it was quite repetitive all the way through. You have three (technically) combat challenge scenes, three spirit journey scenes and the whole thing kept feeling like... "Didn’t I see this stuff enough earlier in the movie?" I take the point that most Marvel movies like this are somewhat formulaic in that they are ‘battle - pause - battle - pause - battle - pause’ movies but I just felt the types of situations which presented these conflicts could have been a little more varied in the execution. This is maybe, partially, due to the fact that the film doesn’t ‘globe hop’ as much as some of the others (most of it is set in the fictional country of Wakanda) and... I dunno... it just got a bit ‘samey’ after a while.

The only other problem I have with it is in the continuity of the Black Panther character in relation to his other appearance. We saw in Captain America - Civil War how he failed to stop the murder of his father and then took over the mantle of Black Panther. However, it turns out he doesn’t get his ‘panther powers’ bestowed on him - by the ingestion of a specific herb - until this part of the story, set after those events from the former film. So are we saying the version of the character in that one was not operating at optimum strength? Especially when, to be honest, I couldn’t see much (if any) difference between that version of the character and this one? I either didn’t understand something or there was some sloppy writing in here. Not sure which, to be honest.

These are all fairly minor grumbles though and there’s a lot of good stuff to make up for it.

I said the film has the best art direction of any of the MCU films to date and the colours utilised throughout are fantastic. I loved the clashes of the red costumes of the king’s personal guard against the various sets/locations and there are some amazing, probably artifically enhanced, skies in this film. It’s really nice to look at and marks this director out as someone to watch, I think.

It also has a really nice score by Ludwig Göransson but I’m really unhappy that, just like another MCU film Guardians Of The Galaxy 2 (reviewed here), the powers that be have not seen fit to issue a CD release of this one... instead going down the incredibly stupid ‘download’ route. Way to exclude the soundtrack listeners who wanted to purchase this thing people! This practice should be outlawed.

So there you have it. A pretty cool film. I don’t think it deserves all the unbelievable hype it seems to be getting and, frankly, it’s no Wonder Woman (reviewed here) but it is a pretty good entry in the series and it certainly doesn’t let the other movies down... although I didn’t like it as much as some of the others from the last couple of years of the ongoing saga, truth be told. It does have a certain power though and brings, again, a slightly different feel to the Marvel Cinematic Universe which will be useful in future crossovers... the next one being the big Avengers - Infinity War film in two months time. With regards to that, this film has two post credits scenes... one in the middle and one right at the end so, you know, you might want to stick around for those two. A certain character makes an appearance in the second of these who I was expecting to turn up in the main body of the movie properly and lend a hand, given the set up in a previous film but... oh well, at least he’s in here.

If you are a lover of the Marvel superhero movies then Black Panther is a little different and definitely one to have a look at... especially if you want to know what’s going on for the next one. Definitely give this one a go if this is your thing. A solid entry in the ongoing Marvel juggernaut.

Creed

Jord Of The Rings

Creed
2015 USA
Directed by Ryan Coogler
UK cinema release print.

So here we go again with a film that is very much the seventh entry in the Rocky series and, though fans of the original movies know who the character Apollo Creed was, I think the title here is maybe not quite grabbing the less built-in audience for this film in the most opportune manner. I’ve also seen this film listed on some UK posters as Creed: The Rocky Legacy but... yeah, I think the marketeers behind this one could maybe have gone for another title. Not that I don’t like this one, actually... I just don’t think it markets the film to its best advantage, is all.

I’ve always kind of had a soft spot for Sylvester Stallone and for the Rocky movies too. I’ve only ever seen them all once (something I plan to rectify with rewatches sometime over the next few years) but I remember them being big dramatic pieces which were, contrary to some accounts I’ve heard, not really about boxing. Yeah, that’s right. For the most part, the movies are about the personal journey of the Rocky character with the boxing scenario used to explore his personality, relationships with other people and growth as a person... and the majority of them are not bad movies.

After the exception, the atrocious fifth movie in the series, I was kinda happy with where they took the character in the sixth one, Rocky Balboa. Here was a man nearing the end of his life and certainly the end of his boxing career and... it was a lovely finish to the sequence. I couldn’t see Stallone writing anything more eloquent as a send off for the character and, as it happens, he hasn’t. This movie is actually, for the first time in the series as far as I can recall, not actually written by Stallone himself (his screenplay for the first movie was even nominated for an Oscar).

All that being said... this new movie, which follows the fortunes of Apollo Creed’s son Adonis, is actually a pretty good add on. It strays from the series quite a lot... not just because it focuses primarily on the story of the title character rather than Rocky himself... but because it’s not so much about personal growth this time as it is about boxing. Although, that being said, there are really only three official boxing matches in the whole movie. However, the story does also give Stallone a fair amount of time recreating the role which shot him to fame back in the 1970s and this time around he is coaxed into training Creed, taking on the same kind of character mantle that the late, great Burgess Meredith took on as Rocky’s trainer in the original movies. It’s nice to see this happen with Rocky becoming this person for someone else and, although in terms of Stallone it’s probably not a necessary film to make for the character, it certainly doesn’t disrespect the material in any way. It doesn’t add anything to the Rocky series but it certainly doesn’t take anything away from it either.

Michael B. Jordan, an actor who I really liked for his portrayal of a teenage superhero in Chronicle (reviewed here) is absolutely great as young Adonis Creed and he easily keeps up with Stallone in the acting stakes. They’re both pretty cool in this... as is Creed’s love interest Bianca. Played by Tessa Thompson, she’s something a little more three dimensional, and therefore better, than you would expect for this kind of role. That being said, because the character is kinda interesting and Thompson is so good in it, I felt that she could have done with a few more scenes in this movie, to be honest.

The film does a lot of the stuff you’d expect a boxing movie to do and we have lots of little training montages and a few good boxing matches. The second of the three main non-training bouts in the film is absolutely terrific, it has to be said, and you almost feel you are right in the ring trading blows with the two opponents yourself. The fluid camerawork is very slick and, though not a million miles away from the stuff in the early films, gives this new movie a little bit of an edge in the fight choreography department, I think. That being said, the movie is a 12A and it seems to be getting away with a lot less in terms of injury to the main protagonists and antagonists as the movie plays out. Either way though, it doesn’t seem inappropriate to the surrounding story and it works well in the context of the shooting styles used around it.

The music is pretty good too but, since there are so many little references to the previous Rocky movies in the film in general (even I was picking up on a lot of them and I’m not all that familiar with the series), I was surprised that the composer,  Ludwig Göransson, held back on using Bill Conti’s famous Rocky signature theme so often. I only detected different parts of it twice in the whole movie (I’m sure it’s possibly used just a little more) and while I understand the way of thinking that Creed has his own themes and songs as it’s essentially his journey, I felt there was some contradiction towards the end when the Rocky intro leitmotif comes in full blast at the start of the last bout. If you’re going to take the stance that Rocky is standing in the corner and the music takes on some of his heroic theme... then I think that maybe could have been a stronger element throughout the whole movie. Regardless, the score certainly holds its own and elevates the movie the way a good score is supposed to so... no real complaints about it here.

You know, back in the day, those early Rocky movies were never a foregone conclusion as to where they were going to end up. Would Rocky end up victorious in the ring or would he take a fall? Would his winning or losing the final fight mean he achieved personal growth or was something else going on? There was always the possibility of some ambiguity there and the end result of the boxing match was never a foregone conclusion. You would have to wait until maybe even after the last punch was thrown to find out if the hero would win or lose. I don’t want to spoil anything in this review, of course, by telling you what happens in this one but I will say that, in terms of tone, pacing and predictability... this one really doesn’t let the series down. You won’t know what’s going to happen until it’s over.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this movie kickstarts another entry or two in this series and, if it does, I sincerely hope that the writers and producers bring Sylvester Stallone along for the ride. After all, if there were no Rocky movies, there would be no Creed.