Black Bag

Unauthorised Item
In The Bagging Area

Black Bag
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
USA 2025
Focus Features
UK Cinema release print

Warning: Very light spoilers.

Steven Soderbergh retired from directing in 2013. Since then he’s directed another 11 movies plus assorted TV shows and one can’t help but think that he’s more prolific now than before he made that statement. In fact, this is the second cinema release to be written by David Koepp and directed by Soderbergh this year and it’s only March (the first being Presence, released at the end of January and reviewed here).

And, like the aforementioned Presence, his latest opus Black Bag is absolutely brilliant. A startling and intense, emotionally claustrophobic thriller which seems to be an homage to the best of the cold war spy movies of the 1960s. I’ll give a couple of the references as I run through this review. .

The always interesting Michael Fassbender plays British intelligence agent (that’s spy to you and me) George Woodhouse, which is surely not a coincidental first name as a reference to George Smiley in a number of John LeCarre’s famous books (not to mention a character appearing in a number of movie adaptations of them). He is married to Kathryn St. Jean, a similarly high ranking spy who is played by the always amazing Cate Blanchett. Both are playing very muffled versions of themselves here, as two very cautious denizens of the global spy network. Both relying on the spy term ‘black bag’ as an area of their work lives which are off limits to talk about in their marriage, due to authorisation levels and ‘need to know’ status.

After hearing that one of five in his organisation is a traitor putting a huge number of lives at risk, with his wife being one of that list, George invites all the names to a dinner party at his and Kathryn’s home, with a little spiking of some of the ingredients, to loosen tongues and behaviour (a choice which leads to some more than inflammatory behaviour between the guests). These guests are played by Tom Burke, Marisa Abela, Regé-Jean Page and the always brilliant Naomie Harris.

As the seeds of suspicion grow, the emotionally aloof and icy George starts exploring the twists and turns of the plot which features a device which could kill untold millions of people, called Severus. This includes suspicion and shadow thrown onto the head of the department, played by Pierce Brosnan. Shenanigans ensue and lovers of non-Bond sixties spycraft movies of the mostly British variety will love this suspenseful and well written thriller.

Well directed too, with Soderbergh directing, shooting and editing (using his mother’s name as a pseudonym) an intriguing concoction of thriller and ‘will he or won’t he shoot first and ask questions later’ style tension, as George moves ever closer to the solution of the problem (once he’s figured out that at least two people have been set up, including himself).

And it’s a damn near perfect movie, it has to be said.

The pre-credits sequence, filmed in a number of locations in London in one take (or appearing to be at least but, I suspect, just well staged and rehearsed and done in one take, as George arrives at a location and wanders a few floors of a busy bar until being led out somewhere else) with the camera firmly following George from behind, with his face hidden for this sequence.

Then, as we go into the credits, we see another major influence of the film as George prepares the meal in a way reminiscent of Michael Caine’s breakout role of Harry Palmer in The IPCRESS File, the first of his three movies playing the nameless character from Len Deighton’s famous spy novels. George even wears the exact same type of NHS spectacles which were synonymous with the Harry Palmer personality throughout the entirety of this movie. Soderbergh just couldn’t resist wearing his influences on his celluloid-like sleeve here.

The actors are all incredible in this, with an actress I don’t know, Marisa Abela, being particularly stand out as a young recruit who is perhaps a little too sensitive for the brutal world of international espionage. And she plays perfectly in a film which is, to be fair, only using the genre trappings of the spy movie to explore the depths of deception, loyalty and trust inherent in relationships, especially those in the spy game where the ‘black bag’ manifestation can be seen as a fallback to cover a multitude of sins, such as hiding a sexual affair.

Indeed, this is further explored in a scene which crosscuts between multiple subjects in a polygraph test.* A sequence which has been done to death in so many movies by this point that it’s become a very obvious cliché but, luckily for the audience, is executed to perfection here and which even gives some of the characters a little more depth than they had before this scene.

The ruse of the ‘gun on the table’ game towards the end of the movie will not surprise many people in the audience as to the intent of such an item on an open table but in terms of the surface story revelations as to the identity of the traitor in the ranks, it may well come as a surprise. Just like an Italian giallo trying to remain inscrutable by throwing motives at every single member of the cast, the traitor in this one could be anyone... even George. So when the traitor is finally revealed, coupled with the fortification of one character deciding not to kill that person when they had the chance to earlier in the film, it is somewhat surprising but, by that point there’s not much at stake in terms of the ultimate identity of said treacherous individual. And the film has a nice little punchline in terms of the secretive personal motivations of other characters in the narrative.

So there you have it. Black Bag gives us a  brilliant set of performances in a well written and directed motion picture which includes a very nice score by David Holmes, sadly not available on a proper CD at time of writing. This one is a full-on recommendation from me, especially for those lovers of cold war thrillers from days gone by. 

*Fun fact: The original lie detector test was invented by Professor William Moulton Marston who created and wrote the Wonder Woman character for comics in the 1940s. It's also why she has a 'rope of truth'. For more information, see my review of Professor Marston And The Wonder Women right here.

X-Men - Dark Phoenix

50 Shades Of Jean Grey

X-Men - Dark Phoenix
USA 2019 Directed by Simon Kinberg
UK cinema release print.

Well, my credibility as a reviewer is tested again as I seem to be of a completely opposite opinion to the rest of the world about this movie. I can’t remember hearing as much negative word of mouth about a film as I have about X-Men Dark Phoenix and, I have to say, since the continuity of the X-Men series was completely destroyed early on in their run, I have found the series to be a bit hit and miss, to say the least. And news just came in that the box office on this one is a disaster so... yeah, I guess I’m a bit out of synch with people in general. This one, however, is one of the better entries in the film series as a whole as far as I’m concerned and, I have to say, I really wasn’t expecting that.

The film is yet another adaptation... and I use that word in a very loose sense here... of the Dark Phoenix story arc from the comics and the first time around they tried this with Marvel Girl (aka Jean Grey), was way back in the first real mis-step of the series... X- Men - The Last Stand. In that film, Jean Grey was played by the wonderful Famke Jansenn in what turned out to be... definitely not the super-group’s last stand. Here she’s played by Sophie Turner and, over the last few films, I’ve really got used to her in the role and here, where she has to carry big chunks of the plot as the film is literally centred around her and her ‘Dark Phoenix’ incarnation, she proves herself more than capable of carrying the movie.

And, like the title implies, it’s a dark film. Well... mostly. It maybe is a little too light at the end but there is the death of one of the major characters fairly early on in the movie (no, I’m not going to spoil it and say which one) and, although I was kinda hoping for a Blake’s Seven style bloodbath at the end here, it does lighten up a little on the aftermath. Also, this is definitely the last of the X-Men films as we have come to know them. In a final twist coming in hard from the real world, this part of the Marvel Universe owned by 20th Century Fox is now owned by Disney (who now own Fox) and so when the characters inevitably return, I expect they’ll be going for a completely different look and feel so they can dovetail them into the current Marvel Cinematic Universe so, yeah, end of an era.

What this also means is it doesn’t make good on the post credits sequence of the previous movie and nor does it have its own post credits tease. More annoyingly, perhaps, is that the developing plot line of Quicksilver being Magneto’s son without the father realising yet is never finished off. No resolutions on that front here so... it’s kind of a shame they didn’t sort this loose end out.

However, almost everything else about this movie... I liked. The strong cast of regulars supporting Sophie Turner such as James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult etc were all great... as was Jessica Chastain as the lead alien villain of the piece. The action set pieces were good and the story was a little smaller in its focus but there is still a sense of something huge at stake here... not just the future safety of the Earth but also the impact of the consequences of events here flipping public attitudes to mutant-kind back to those of non-acceptance and intolerance (something which I don’t think was credibly resolved at the close of this film, to be honest).

There are also some nice shot compositions and transitions too, including a nice moment where, after pulling a wooden chest out and revealing his Magneto helmet, Fassbender pulls it down onto his head as a way of showing the audience he’s coming out of retirement which then immediately cuts to a similar close up of McAvoy as Professor X pulling off his Cerebro helmet.

There’s also Hans Zimmer’s score which, even though I love this composer (see here for a review of one of his wonderful live shows), I was somewhat sceptical of. As it happens, he does a really good job here and I’m looking forward to grabbing the CD of this one as soon as it goes on sale (it’s rumoured there will be a proper CD release sometime after the stupid download and I hope this is the case here... although the company might have a change of heart after seeing the box office if we’re extra unlucky).

The special effects look pretty good too and even the Magneto stuff, which I sometimes find a bit rubbishy looking, was pretty amazing this time around.

On the downside, this film continues to throw continuity to the wind and, after the events we heard hinted at in Logan (reviewed here), totally fails to conform to them in this movie and has you wondering just who the heck is green lighting writing decisions such as these.

However, despite the odd grumble, I have to say that this is easily the best Marvel movie so far this year.... after the not too terrible Captain Marvel and the, well, way too terrible and disappointing Avengers Endgame. X-Men Dark Phoenix walks all over them, in my opinion and I am just breathing a sigh of relief that, even though it’s had its ups and downs, the franchise is definitely going out on a high note here... despite what other reviewers would have you believe. Will definitely be picking this one up on Blu Ray the week it comes out over here and, you never know, might go back and have another look at it at the cinema too (the IMAX 3D was quite good on this one, for a change). Definitely a darkish film, like a few of its predecessors (one might even say a Dark Grey film) but that’s definitely a strength and it looks like a solid entry into the franchise to me.

The Snowman

We’re Stalking In The Air...

The Snowman
2017 UK/USA/Sweden
Directed by Tomas Alfredson
UK cinema release print.

The Snowman is set and shot in Norway... being, in some ways, an example of what is popularly becoming known as Nordic Noir. It’s based on a novel by Norweigan writer Jo Nesbø and I saw another, quite good movie based on a novel by him a few years back called Headhunters (reviewed here). This one... well it’s not so good, to be honest... although it does have a nice visual quirk that makes it kinda interesting at times. The trailer was pretty good, however (better than the film and I’ll come back to the trailer) and, since the movie stars the always brilliant Michael Fassbender, this was one of the movies I was looking forward to seeing this winter.

That being said, I’ve read or heard of reviews which have been tearing this to pieces, saying that the movie is incoherent and makes no sense. Well, that one I can certainly put to rest and say that, yes, the movie is certainly coherent and, yes, it makes complete sense... to the point where the identity of the killer might be fairly obvious to the audience, alas. However, to some of the more ‘high profile’ newspaper reviewers of this film I would say that they should maybe concentrate more on what is said when people open their mouths to talk as, you know, the storyline and connections made in this really aren’t rocket science. Or, you know, familiarise yourself with the language of cinema by maybe going out and watching more films... if you really are finding this stuff confusing.

However, what this film does suffer from, I would say, is a lack of on-screen content to allow for the more leisurely pacing that the director brings to this. I’ll get back to that in a minute but I’ll talk about some of the positive things in this first.

The number one positive is the acting in this is all nicely done. Not many duds here. Fassbender’s portrayal of Nesbø regular Harry Hole is pretty great and even though not everything is spelled out for us, we get a real sense that there’s an interesting history to this character (this is a number of books into the series, apparently, so I’m sure there certainly is). The character is pretty much on the rocks, drinking and trying to cope with, at the very least, being dumped by his girlfriend but still maintaining a friendship with her son and also, to an extent, with the son’s ‘new dad’. The way Fassbender plays him shows everything with his body language... you get the feeling that this man is completely out of shape but that he once used to be a brilliant detective and his previous career is briefly alluded to by his new partner, played pretty nicely by Rebecca Ferguson. They’re both ably backed up by an incredible bunch of actors including Chloë Sevigny, Val Kilmer (playing someone who you totally wouldn’t expect Val Kilmer to be playing and making it very different to some of his other work), J. K. Simmons (ditto, he’s certainly not typecasting himself here), Toby Jones and the always utterly compelling Charlotte Gainsbourg as Harry’s friendly ex-girlfriend Rakel.

And the story beats are good too. Once you get into the idea that the scenes with Val Kilmer are flashbacks and slowly start to sew them together in your head with the case Harry is working on, the more sense they make. I did not see the relationship between Kilmer and one of the characters in the modern timeline until it was pretty much revealed, so that’s a good thing. However, this also leads me onto some of the bad stuff like... no matter how stupidly coincidental all of the puzzle pieces are when they fit together, the unlikeliness of them does not detract you from being able to spot the killer a good long while before that identity is made known. So that’s not so good.

Another bad thing is that, when we have the final denouement between Harry and the killer, Harry is competely powerless to do anything much and the demise of said killer is competely coincidental. A serendipitous moment which seems really stupid... ironically poetic given the film’s pre-credit sequence, sure but... yeah, it’s not the smartest ending it could have had. It probably works much better, I suspect, in a novel than it does for an audience when confronted with the irony in a visual manner but, there you go.

Back to my thing about pacing versus content. Yeah, it feels like the film is being rushed and severely edited. For such languid pacing I would have expected something more like a three hour film which takes its time to build up more depth to the characters and the causes of the story they find themselves in. This seems a bit choppy and... this kinda makes sense actually, in terms of the end result. It wasn’t until I was leaving the cinema that I realised that there were a lot more things happening in the trailer than you actually see in the final release print of the movie. So... I might be wrong here but... I suspect the studio shortened it to tighten it somehow when, quite possibly, it would have worked much better as a longer piece. I obviously can’t ever do more than guess at that one but... that’s my very best guess.

Like I said though... some nice things too.

One of them being the director's seeming visual obsession of people looking at things through windows. Most of the characters seem to be constantly putting themselves in situations where they are either outside and showing the audience what’s going on from looking in through a window into a scene or, the reverse... where something’s going on outside and the audience are looking at a character looking outside the window. It’s a really bizarre thing because I’ve not noticed anyone doing this kind of thing quite so often in a movie before and it became fairly amusing waiting for the next ‘through the glass’ shot to pop up.

Also, the murders themselves are quite inventively grizzly. They mostly involve people being cut up into pieces with decapitation clearly a favourite of the killer. The antagonist’s trademark is to build a snowman nearby and, quite often he will either leave a snowman’s head in the bloody neck stump of his victim or, vice versa, plop the victims head onto the body of one of his snowmen. So some interestingly gruesome visuals in this thing, for sure, although the director plumps to not focus on them for very long. There’s a nice moment when someone’s head is blown clean off with a shotgun, too, which is not telegraphed in any fashion and comes as a surprise. So some interesting artistic decisions made around violence and its aftermath in this film, I would say.

And finally we have  Marco Beltrami’s excellent score which nicely captures the languid pacing in the way Harry Hole proceeds about his daily life. It kinda sounds like a spy movie score from the mid to late 1970s in its tone at some points. Not as strident or highly stylised as, say, a John Barry score from that era and more like the kind of ‘softer but definitely a distant cousin’ of that kind of cold war music that you were getting a decade later. It’s a good one and I’m pleased that the score is scheduled to get a proper CD release later in the month. Looking forward to giving this one a few spins away from the movie.

So there you have it. The Snowman is not the terrible movie that some of the critics have been saying, I think but... it is quite disappointing in that it’s not a great movie either. Fassbender and Gainsbourg are absolutely marvellous in these characters and I’d like to see them both return to play them again. Alas, I suspect the box office on this one won’t be so great either so I suspect that’s not a prospect I can look forward to in the near future. This one isn’t essential viewing but it’s okay if there’s nothing else on at your local that you want to see. Maybe give it a go.

Alien: Covenant

Xenomorphing Cower Strangers

Alien: Covenant
USA/Australia/New Zealand/UK 2017
Directed by Ridley Scott
UK cinema release print.

Warning: There’s a clearly marked SPOILER ZONE in this article. So I’ll warn you when you get there.

Gosh... this is kind of a difficult film to process. I really liked the ALIEN films up to and including the fifth in the series, the first ALIEN VS PREDATOR movie (despite the glaring continuity error in that last one and not including their cameo appearances in any solo Predator movies). However, the last two in the franchise, ALIEN VS PREDATOR: REQUIEM and the so called A L I E N prequel Prometheus (reviewed by me here) really didn’t sit well with me. AVP: REQUIEM pretty much reduced the beautiful Alien Xenomorphs to the level of a teenage slasher movie and might better have been called 'Aliens Meet Jason' or some such dreadful thing (although, it has to be said the movie did have one thing going for it... an outstanding score by Brian Tyler)... and Prometheus, which I and pretty much everyone I know had high hopes for, suffered from some really bad artistic choices.

In Prometheus the three biggest sins were the reduction of the beautiful space jockey designed by H. R. Giger for the very first film... transformed into tall men wearing bone suits (known as Engineers), the absence of the actual Xenomorphs themselves and, finally, the absolute lack of actually leaving us in a place where the first movie could actually pick up from in the first place. The film was beautifully executed and absolutely gripping during the first half and then it just got really disappointing very quickly, not long after the crew went on board the alien ship.

This new film in the franchise, once again directed by Ridley Scott, is pretty much more of the same combination of awesome movie making coupled with some disappointingly poor artistic choices as far as I’m concerned. I’d rate it a definite improvement on Prometheus but this is very much a sequel to Prometheus than it is a prequel to A L I E N, it has to be said.

The film starts off, after a scene with Michael Fassbender reprising his role of David, which is set some time before the events of Prometheus, before fast forwarding past the previous film by a good ten years. My first danger signs that made it feel like Ridley was trying way too hard and, more importantly, too clumsily, to win franchise fans back came with an opening credits sequence that tried to mimic the first film badly in terms of the typefaces appearing in sections but with the twin mistakes of having them appear way too fast and also going to a second line of the same for the film’s subtitle at the bottom of the screen. This already felt a bit rubbish but then having the composer Jed Kurzel, who does an appropriate job for a lot of the time, using a new variant of Jerry Goldsmith’s famous, unused opening titles for the original A L I E N to play out over them was just a little bit too much.

Indeed, as much as I enjoyed Kurzel’s score to this and am looking forward to acquiring the CD of it at some point soon, the first third to a half of the movie seems to be intent on parodying various moments of Goldsmith’s original score for A L I E N. Now, this maybe wouldn’t have seemed so out of place if the Alien franchise had a very definite musical identity grounding it. Alas, as far as I am aware, every single movie in the Alien series (including the Predator versions and Prometheus) have had a different composer and, while some of the orchestral textures shared a commonality in some of the movies, there is no underlying style which has given them a consistent, coherent musical identity (the modern Marvel Cinematic Universe films are guilty of exactly the same crimes against musical filmanity, by the way). So, much as I appreciated hearing all of this pseudo-Goldsmith pumped through the cinema speakers... it just seemed a little misplaced here.

Although the film makers have tried to at least retrofit the space ship Covenant to the Nostromo of the first movie, they somehow neglected to remember that they never had a load of hologram style technology in A L I E N, which was obviously set some time after the events in this film (although a big shout out to the set dressers for the return of one of my favourite things to the series, the drinking duck). We also have the continuation of the synthetic David character, portrayed so brilliantly by Michael Fassbender, who is, in himself, something of an anomaly. In James Cameron’s ALIENS, we had the idea that a synthetic crew member as part of the family, so to speak, was a normal thing to take with you on board a spaceship. However, people should maybe remember that the second film was set quite a long time in the future from the original A L I E N movie so, you know, things had moved onto where it became normal to have a synthetic on board. Before that, though? In A L I E N, Ian Holm portrayed Ash, a synthetic who was not known as an android to the rest of the crew. He was a secret plant by the Weyland Yutani company. So... and Prometheus had this problem too... how come that before the events of A L I E N, having a synthetic human on board seems to be par for the course already? It kinda makes no sense.

Okay... this is where the spoilers start, people.

Also, while I’m on the subject, it also makes no sense that he would posess superhuman speed and strength. Certainly Ash and Bishop in the first two movies displayed none of that and yet, here, they are hurling people around like action figures. So... yeah, the continuity is screwed. And the continuity is also screwed when it turns out that the Alien Xenomorphs we are familiar with through the original Giger designs are, in fact, engineered by David. Because this is still set many years in our future folks so, if this is the case, how in heck did they come to the planet Earth many years in our past, as established in the first ALIEN VS PREDATOR movie? None of it is really making much sense. Honestly people, we laugh at how screwed up the continuity is from film to film on those old 1940s sequels to Universal’s The Mummy but modern franchises like the X-Men films, the Resident Evil films and this ALIEN franchise are just as bad, if not worse. Future generations of film fans will look at these movies and laugh at how quaintly people of our time must have forgotten what was going on between films.

Okay, so I was hoping for a reappearance of Noomi Rapace as the sole human survivor of the last movie... Dr. Elisabeth Shaw... but she really doesn’t get anything more than an illegible visual recording and a sound recording in here. Which is a shame because, opening credits aside, the first half of the film is quite strong, leading all the way up to an attack by alien life forms of some sort, not long after the spaceship Covenant touches down on the Engineers planet. What’s left of the crew are ‘rescued’ by a hooded figure and I was really hoping the rescuer would be Shaw but, alas, it was Fassbender as David. Now Fassbender also does double duty here as a later model of the same character called Walter but, it has to be said, the story is really crude and obvious from this point on. Once we are shown that a synthetic human can grow hair (seriously?), we have two almost identical looking characters, one who is a good and loyal android and an evil/mad version of the same. So I have to say I defy anyone who doesn’t know what’s going to happen towards the end of the movie here. And when David starts cutting his hair it’s pretty much spelled out long before we ever get to that point in the film. It’s a crude plot device which wouldn’t seem out of place in the early days of TV but to still be using this whole ‘evil twin’ surprise thing here (and this franchise is not the only modern franchise using this tired, over played, intelligence insulting template) really shows how sloppy and uninventive modern movie writers have become.

End of spoiler zone.

Another bad thing about this movie is the xenomorphs themselves. For most of the film the key alien monster is a whitish pink thing not unlike the terrible ‘Casper The Friendly Ghost’ looking Alien at the finale of Alien Resurrection... it’s not quite as crude as that but... yeah, really not impressed, in all honesty. The smaller, ‘just hatched’ versions of these are much more effective here in terms of suspense than the grown versions. The xenomorphs do feature in this eventually... just not very much and, it has to be said, they looked really clunky in some scenes. In fact, they looked almost more like a man in a suit (which I’m told they’re not, here) than the original version in A L I E N and, it has to be said, are far less effective. The face huggers are way better used here but... well... remember when the acidic blood of these creatures could eat through several hulls of a spaceship? Well here it can’t even eat its way fully through the front of a human face so... seriously some major continuity errors here, I feel.

Well that’s all the bad stuff.

The good stuff is... it looks and sounds awesome. Ridley Scott makes beautiful looking films... of that there is no question. The cinematography is amazing and although a fellow movie goer was complaining that it was too darkly lit (especially compared to the same scenes in the trailer), I think this works in its favour to cover up some clunky CGI in some parts and allow the audience to bring their imagination to the party... which is always more effective. I think Scott really knows what he’s doing visually and it certainly shows here.

We also have a cast who are quite brilliant. Michael Fassbender always brings a lot to the party and seems to be extraordinary in anything he puts his mind to. His costars are all great in this too and with a special mention for Katherine Waterston who is the ‘strong but emotionally vulnerable female’ Ripley surrogate of this movie. She does some good work here, especially when it comes to one of the film’s key themes... how characters deal with the emotional loss of a loved one when they are suddenly taken from them with no warning. There’s a fair bit of that in this movie for several of the characters and I suspect I know just why that theme is touched upon quite so often here but, due to my own, admittedly slightly twisted, moral compass, I don’t want to point it out here because it’s an issue which may be sensitive to at least one of the artists involved with the making of this film.

There are a lot of things I could be saying about Alien Covenant, many of them bad and some, probably, fairly good but I don’t want to labour the points and I think I’ve touched on the key things I wanted to cover in this review. The more I think about this film, the more disappointed I am in it... although it was a heck of a lot more focused than Prometheus, that’s for sure. While I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to non-Alien fans, I would certainly shout it out to all of those who do love the majority of the previous movies. It’s going to make some money, I hope, because I really want to see Ridley finish it up with a link back ot the original A L I E N movie (which it gets nowhere near doing here) but, in all honesty, I think the xenomorphs are a little played out now, to tell the truth. Not a terrible film... not a great one. A kind of a quaint, almost 1950s style sci-fi/horror yarn with a few little shout outs, in some moments, to Scott’s greatest masterpiece, the original studio cut of Blade Runner. Glad I saw this one but it’s not a repeat watcher for me.

X-Men: Apocalypse

Mystique’s Roadshow

X-Men: Apocalypse
2016 USA Directed by Bryan Singer
UK cinema release print.

Partial Warning: The only spoilers in here
are already revealed in the trailers for the film.

I was fulling expecting to have to title this review Apocalypse, No! and to really give this movie some stick. Well, as it turns out, X-Men Apocalypse, the 12th X-Men movie in the series, is actually one of the more entertaining, technically competent and dramatic of the movies in the franchise. What a shame, then, that the writers still find themselves unable to correct the glaring continuity errors thrown up by the movies following the third film in the series, X-Men - Last Stand... something which everyone was pretty much hoping they would have been able to finally put to rest with the ‘time fixing’ previous, mostly awful installment in the franchise, X-Men - Days Of Future Past (reviewed by me here).

The way I see it we’ve got two main problems in the cinematic narrative that really aren’t taken care of. One is the previous movie starting out from a point where the original timeline version of Professor X, played by Patrick Stewart, is alive and well and somehow still inhabiting a body with the same physical appearance and vocal chords, even though he was killed before Jean Grey died, which Wolverine from that timeline clearly remembers happening. So they shot themselves in the foot straight away as far as I can tell.

Next we have them journeying back to a time after the Cerebro machine was already built in the X-Men First Class timeline, therefore not correcting the fact that Professor X and Magneto were supposed to have built it together.

Thirdly, we have the X-Men Origins - Wolverine movie (reviewed by me here) fairly compromised in various ways and... I’m not even going to attempt to go there and unravel the fallout on that.

Most of the other ‘seeming’ continuity errors are, for the most part, explainable but it’s really a shame that the same writers who have given us a script as interesting and entertaining as this one can’t be bothered to solve these issues properly. This is what happens when you don’t properly follow the franchise bible folks... this is pretty much the ‘George Lucas’ way of ‘ignoring stuff writing’ that’s going on here... and it’s only twelve films in!

Alas, not only does it not correct these errors... it seems to compound them further in some sequences. Also... what gives with the actors in this trilogy (this film and the previous two X-Men badged movies) being set in three different decades of the timeline? The 1960s (X-Men - First Class... reviewed by me here), the 1970s (X-Men - Days Of Future Past) and the 1980s (X-Men - Apocalypse) are all covered by the same actors playing mutants and humans alike who... somehow... don’t seem to age at all in the movies between decades. Okay, so in the case of Wolverine and Mystique you can kinda understand it but everyone else? This is not good time-lining, people? I guess that’s why Magneto’s son is revealed as Quicksilver perhaps (no spoilers here folks... it’s in the trailer) but a certain other mother/son relationship is kept under wraps still (as it was in X-Men 2). Michael Fassbender still looks a little too young but can maybe get away with it. The other two... people might not find it all that credible, methinks.

Also... it’s interesting that we have Quicksilver’s sister absent here but, she’s all over the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ Avengers franchise... with her origins somewhat different to the comic and with Quicksilver already killed off in that franchise. I’m wondering why more casual viewers to these films aren’t questioning this, to be honest. Or maybe people just don’t care?

Anyway, I suppose I’d better mention some of the good stuff about this movie now, right? Since I liked it so much.

Apocalypse is played absolutely brilliantly by Oscar Isaac, who manages to play a pretty shallowly written character with the amount of conviction necessary to make these cardboard bad guys stand out and seem way more interesting and vital than they perhaps usually are. You believe in him and his power to galvanise his ‘four horsemen’ and I really appreciated the Egyptian tint to the proceedings in the earlier part of the film. A very strong opening set in ancient Egypt satisfied my own penchant for the iconography of the time and place and, amazingly, the rest of the film lives up to the amazing opening sequence... not just in spectacle but in the way the characters interact. And that includes a lovely opening title design which matches the style of a lot of the previous films but with a load of entertaining ‘historical colour’ thrown in for good measure.

Michael Fassbender,  James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence all do a bang up job and they are ably supported by new and old cast members alike. The continuing drama of Magneto’s back story is extremely moving and takes us right back to reminders of the opening sequences of both X-Men and X-Men - First Class, building on the inherent, rich material of the character’s troubled legacy and adding to the psychological motivation of the character, explaining why he is who he is, still, and why he does what he does. It doesn’t quite explain the way in which the character veers towards the end of the movie, I think, but the choice he makes doesn’t break the boundaries of credibility too far and I think they just about get away with it without compromising Magneto too much, to be fair.

Evan Peters’ Quicksilver is great again in this one. He’s written well and his big set piece, which took some months to shoot and which involved him being on the set longer than any of the other cast members, by all accounts, is another triumphant one... with the quirky humour of the character coming out in a high pressure situation. Singer catches a repeat trick stylistically too, with composer John Ottman’s magnificent score stopping dead as the character is backed up again with a famous pop song for the entire sequence. Which is something which I suspect audiences will subconsciously get a lot of enjoyment out of... even if the sequence isn’t quite up to the calibre of the previous movie (which was one of the few good things about X-Men - Days Of Future Past).

And that’s about it for this one. If you like X-Men movies then this is certainly a good one... I’d say it’s my seventh favourite in the series so far. So don’t miss out on this one unless, like me, the screaming continuity problems of these films drives you absolutely mad. Then you might have a problem.

X-Men - Days Of Future Past

Future, Past Caring

X-Men - Days OF Future Past
2014 USA/UK
Directed by Bryan Singer
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Big spoilers in this one and I’m not even going to apologise for them... this is no more than this dreadful movie deserves to “call it out” to people.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” It’s strange but, I’ve only ever heard that quoted, usually incorrectly (from people who have remembered it wrong), by film-makers trying to defend the outrageous continuity errors evident in their films which their audience has had to point out to them. I have to say that, in terms of the context within which people quote this about their big screen stories, I have to disagree and bring my own inner hobgoblin to the table, in this case.

I believe that a film franchise succeeds or fails on a lot of different factors on a film by film basis but, one of the things which is really important, and which can kill a whole franchise if you let it, is consistency... in this case, the consistency of continuity. And, unfortunately, the X-Men franchise has now, as far as I’m concerned, sacrificed itself for a quick buck on the altar of the hobgoblins who were really only interested in having a good time at the movies but, instead, are forced to hold a mirror up to the movie and say... “Seriously? You think your audience are all this stupid?”

Before I rip into this awful mess properly, I just want you to know how I stand on the previous films in the franchise, so you can see where I’m coming from and judge my thoughts on X-Men: Days Of Future Past (or X-Men: Days Of Screwing The Continuity Even Further While Pretending To Solve It And Hoping Your Audience Doesn’t Think About The Movie For Too Long, as I now call it) so you can either agree or disagree with my thoughts in terms of this movie’s place compared to the others.

X-Men: Bryan Singer’s first movie was pretty much the first movie based on a Marvel comics property that was actually any good. Not just good, pretty damned brilliant, as it happens. It almost made up for not having the proper characters from the 1960s in it and changing the costume design... well... yeah, almost makes up for it. Something to note: Professor X and Magneto built Cerebro together, when they were friends, in this continuity.

X2: X-Men 2: This was at least as good as the first movie. Another brilliant piece of modern fantasy action from Bryan Singer with a strong opening and a strong ending leading into something very dark and with a consistent tone throughout. Basically, an epic feeling movie to set up the Dark Phoenix character arc.

X-Men: The Last Stand: This was awful. Brett Ratner took over the franchise and basically used every great set up from the previous films and managed to make them pretty boring and unwatchable for, pretty much, most of the film. A lot of people haven’t forgiven this movie for being so bad, as far as I can see. Something to note: Young “bald” Professor X and his friend, Young Magneto, go to recruit Jean Grey together. Professor X can both walk and simultaneously use his mutant powers. In this movie, Charles Xavier is killed/disintegrated, although his mind seems to have jumped into a “different” human being... if the post credits sting is anything to go by.

X-Men Origins - Wolverine: A lot of people didn’t dig this movie but I thought it was okay. A lot of fun and very much like an old 1980s or 1990s “straight to video” kind of B Movie.... but with an A Movie budget to play around with. Thought this was much better than the reaction it got. Things to note: Professor X is in this one too, at the end. My review is here.

X-Men: First Class: Absolutely brilliant. Had a lot of continuity errors which could not be explained as a hangover from the previous films but since it was technically a reboot of the franchise, I was happy with this when treated as a stand alone sequence of movies. Things to note: In this timeline, Magneto and Professor X did not build Cerebro. Professor X is crippled by the end of their first big adventure and way after he and Magneto were still friends, confounding the opening of X-Men: The Last Stand totally. My review is here.

The Wolverine: Nice little movie. Not as fun as the last one but different and kinda interesting. Things to note: Wolverine's adamantium claws are severed and are no longer something he has in this “continuity”. Instead, he has reverted back to the bone claws he was born with as a result of the events depicted in this film. Jean Grey haunts his dreams after he killed her in X-Men: The Last Stand. Also, Professor X and Magneto confront Wolverine in an airport in the post credits sting of the movie. Wolverine looks shocked because, obviously, Professor X is dead, isn’t he? At least, his body was destroyed. My review of this one is here.

Okay. Recap over.

So here we have X-Men: Days Of Future Past. And all I wanted from this movie right now is for it to fix all those stupid continuity holes from the clashes between the awful X-Men: The Last Stand and the amazingly cool X-Men: First Class... and in a fairly fun manner, if possible. And, if only the writers would have thought about it a little more, maybe they would even have nailed that because, frankly, while a bit silly, the central premise they use to wipe out the history of the characters in this one really works well... except it fails before they even start using it.

I can see how the idea here was maybe “borrowed” from the rebooted Star Trek films from a couple of years ago. In the first one (reviewed here), the Spock of the regular timeline is catapulted back into his past, which then changes the future of the younger versions of himself and his friends... thus giving the franchise new life to go back to the days of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in their prime for a movie series without having to worry about contradicting anything that came before. Revelling in that, in fact, by having a half remake of Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan for their sequel (reviewed here) and totally having their cake and eating it at the same time. And why the older version of Spock didn’t just wink out of existence because his timeline didn’t actually happen anymore, I’ll never know. Oh, yes I do... because they don’t care about the logic at the heart of the theory of time travel. Okay, whatever.

Singer’s approach in X-Men: Days Of Future Past is to have Wolverine’s “mind” sent back to his younger body in 1973 and get him to change the past then, to split everything off into a new timeline which doesn’t result in the death of mutant kind... and you know what? That could have worked out really well, and the film-makers obviously seem to think it did.. or they never would have released this shambles into cinemas in this form. But the thing is, to have someone sent back from the future to change that timeline... you need to have that future actually be a possibility in the first place. That reality has to have existed before you go back and change it... and there’s no way the point in time that Wolverine is sent back from could actually have happened within the continuity of the previous films without a lot of explaining away of certain things... and there’s absolutely no concession to this, nor concession to audience intelligence, in the movie.

It starts off well enough with concentration camp imagery of imprisoned and dead mutants (and potential mutants) and this is, of course, a nice echo of the World War II Nazi concentration camp sequences which open both the original X-Men and X-Men: First Class. So a really nice idea there from the director. Then we have a fairly cool fight which is basically just a set up to explain the major time travel element  in the film. And then we see the last surviving mutants holed up together, awaiting the coming of the deadly Sentinels. Among these mutants are Kitty Pride, Ice Man, Professor X, Magneto, Storm and Wolverine. They are, of course, the X-Men... well... err... X-Men and X-Women... except... woah... hold on a minute... who’s in that line up again?

I got really excited by the post-credit sting at the end of The Wolverine because the story confronted us with something that was just so impossible within the actual X-Men timeline... Professor X and Wolverine existing in the same continuity after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand... that I figured they must be really confident about undoing the mess they’d made of the consistency between the movies. If they could throw something like that in to be explained away in the next film then... hey... they could do anything.

But that’s the thing, guys and gals. This opening set up is why the whole premise of this movie fails totally. Not only don’t they explain it... they don’t even refer to the events depicted at the end of The Wolverine in any way, shape or form. They just act like the third film didn’t even happen... kinda. Stay with me here because it’s an important concept to get over. Wolverine’s claws in this version of the timeline are back to being adamantium claws. Yep... that’s right... it’s like the events of The Wolverine, released only last year, didn’t even happen. Except... here’s the rub... The Wolverine refers all the way through to Logan’s guilt at having to kill his beloved Jean Grey to save humanity and... err... mutantanity from certain doom. So we know that happened in that continuity. However, in this film, Wolverine also has painful memories of killing Jean Grey (or Dark Phoenix or even, my favourite, Marvel Girl) in that third movie... they actually use clips from it as flashbacks in this one. So then... Professor X is dead isn’t he? This makes no sense. And you can’t try to justify/explain this version as being a version in which the events of the third movie never took place, because they refer to that movie a number of times.

And that’s basically why this movie is screwed before it’s even started. Because the point in time from which our intrepid hero is travelling back from in his mind is absolutely not a reality which could have happened and no attempt is made to explain this. What, they thought we were going to be all overjoyed that most of the old crew were back that we wouldn’t notice the thing has no logic or reason to it at all?

Not only that but, at the end, Wolverine’s mind snaps back to the version of himself fifty years later in a timeline we haven’t seen and all his memories of those fifty years are replaced by his old ones (which is why he’s astonished to see people like Jean Grey and Cyclops back in his timeline). This also makes no sense... his mind didn’t have anywhere else to snap back to... his timeline was destroyed. Serious clangers all round here folks.

Okay, so now I’ve reiterated why the film just totally falls apart and screws the entire franchise sideways into a cocked, adamantium hat... what’s the movie like apart form the huge plot holes?

Well... it’s kinda okayish, in some ways. It’s got a good buzz about it early on but, ultimately, it all just felt a bit “by the numbers”. Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry and Ellen Page were all fine... but that was it for them. They were all just fine... and who can blame them in some ways. Their dialogue wasn’t exactly special. Ditto for most of the First Class team. Michael Fassbender is always damned watchable but he honestly didn’t seem to be present in most of his scenes, apart from when he loses it at Charles Xavier on the plane... that was pretty good. Jennifer Lawrence’s take on Raven/Mystique was okay too but she’s flying more or less solo in this one and, although she’s a bit of a stand out character, she’s mostly just seen beating people up.

James MacAvoy is fantastic and just like his Xavier character in X-Men: First Class. Absolutely a consistent and brilliant performance. However, asides from the cool acting, theres another basic continuity problem with this one. We saw him crippled at the end of the last movie but, in this one, Hank/The Beast has made him a serum which gives him his legs back every time he has his fix. However, this also has the side effect of relieving him of his mutant powers... further highlighting the absolute impossibility of the opening sequence of X-Men: The Last Stand as a path from this reality... except we know all that must have happened because Wolverine’s mind was just sent back from that future reality. Not very well thought out, is it? It’s like the writers kept painting themselves into a corner and then were trying to distract you with things to cover up the fact that they couldn’t address the issues this throws up. But hey, who cares, the audience won’t be paying attention will they? Um, whatever dudes.

There were some other nice things about the movie. The idea that Magneto was implicated in the murder of JFK but was actually trying to save him because he was a fellow mutant was nice. Some, not all, of the action sequences were nicely handled too, the really good ones being the opening fight scene and the sequence where Quicksilver saves them all in the Pentagon jailbreak scene. Which is a pretty great scene... except... oops. Now that’s another confusing thing for audiences who don’t understand that the rights to certain Marvel characters reside with more than one company...

So here you have Quicksilver who is played by Evan Peters in X-Men: Days Of Future Past.... which is a Marvel/20th Century Fox picture. However, we just saw him portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the first mid-credits sting at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (reviewed here), made by Marvel/Disney, and will see him portraying that character again in The Avengers: Age Of Ultron next year, also for Marvel/Disney. What’s worse is, the 20th Century Fox version of the character and the Marvel/Disney version of the character are not allowed to share the same history, The ones locked into the S.H.I.E.L.D timeline is not even allowed to mention “mutation” apparently. This is going to confuse a hell of a lot of audience members who don’t know the ins and outs of the situation, folks. All they’re going to know is you’ve got the same character played by two different actors with contradicting histories co-existing at the same time in cinema history. Probably not a great idea guys.

Okay, what else. Well, the music is okay. This one marks the first time that an X-Men movie has had the same composer twice and John Ottman’s score here reuses the X-Men theme he used for X-Men 2. Wait, what? Yeah, you can see the problem here, right? Even the music is, for one of the few rare times in a Marvel movie, insisting on a continuity which is already shot to hell. Which is a shame because Ottman’s score does the job here. It’s not as cool as his earlier X-Men 2 score, or even his two Fantastic Four scores, but it does it’s job and I’ll be grabbing a copy when the CD comes out in a couple of weeks.

And... what else? Um... the special effects are okay, if you like that kind of thing, and the film is competently shot and edited. So, some nice work there... but none of this goes anywhere near making up for the fact that this movie screws up the continuity even worse than X-Men: First Class did.

When the four sequels to Universal’s The Mummy were released in the 1940s, these sequels formed what was supposed to be a single continuity. However, some of the films took place decades after the previous one and in all that time, they were all set in contemporary America, give or take a few years. Worse, in one film, Kharis The Mummy gets buried in a swamp in one country and, when he rises from the swamp to live again in the next movie, it’s somehow relocated to another country. Now, it’s my belief that the majority of those 1940s audiences didn’t question these huge plot holes because, frankly, these were the decades well before anything like commercial home video viewing could even be imagined and re-release cinema screenings were less of a thing then. The movie played, you saw it, and it wasn’t until commercial television started out in the 1950s that these movies would get shown enough again to be able to spot stuff like this. However, note to people in Hollywoodland expecting a gullible audience to swallow the scripts they turn out with more holes in them than a Swiss cheese... your audience is no longer living in the 1940s. It’s not like somebody isn’t going to notice all this stuff somewhere along the line. You need to write smarter than this!

When I went to buy a ticket for X-Men: Days Of Future Past, for a performance a few hours later, there were a lot of firemen in the cinema and when I got to the front of the queue I was told that they were only giving out refunds. It turns out the cinema in question had been struck by lightning less than ten minutes before I’d arrived and it had knocked all the projection rooms out. When I tried again a few hours later, they’d literally just managed to get the cinema rebooted up and were selling tickets again. All I can say is... I should have taken this as some kind of omen, maybe? X-Men: Days Of Future Past is my joint, least favourite X-Men movie, tying with X-Men: The Last Stand in last place. This was not how I was hoping the latest film in a, mostly, fairly strong film series would play out and the only audience I could possibly recommend this to is an audience who haven’t seen any of the previous movies in the franchise because, honestly, this one just makes no sense. And it’s such a shame. It feels like Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (reviewed here) all over again. It just didn’t address the issues it needed to address... and these directors/writers/producers need to make a smarter product to keep the percentage of their audience interested in these things satisified, I’m afraid to say. The hobgoblins are loose... and their small minds are out to tear apart your inconsistencies.

Prometheus

Top row: Prometheus promotional posters.  Bottom row: Splash panel from the original Heavy Metal comic album of ALIEN (left) and the discovery of the "original" spcae jockey in Mario Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (right).





The Girl With The Alien Tattoo


Prometheus USA  2012
Directed by Sir Ridley Scott
Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: Yeah, there are marginal spoilers in here.

Hmmm... this really is going to be a bit of a mixed bag of a review, methinks.

Before going into this properly, though, it’s probably useful to you to know how I feel about the six previous ALIEN movies so you can gauge how I compare to your own opinions of these films and judge this review on that basis.

I never got to see the first ALIEN film at the cinema in 1979, the year it came out (although I certainly made up for that years later). I was too young at 11 years old to successfully sneak into an X certificate movie... so I had to stay with my nan while my parents went out for a very rare cinema trip to see it. They came back with glowing reports which further fuelled my desire to see it. I did however have the Heavy Metal comics adaptation of the movie to read (plus the making of book) and, believe me, that comic strip was far more vivid and violent than the on-screen counterpart. When I did get to see the movie just a few years later, the chest burster scene seemed extremely tame to my teenage brain and I wondered what all the fuss was about in terms of any violent content, considering the version depicted in said comic book was an absolute gore-fest! And since comic strip adaptations of films are often done from the scripts while the movie is still being shot, it also included scenes in it which I wouldn’t see on screen until they started to put deleted scenes on videos and DVD (Sir Ridley brought out his “new” cut of the movie with these sequences put back in but to the detriment of the movie since he also took out a load of stuff to speed up the action for... well... for the MTV generation). When I did see it, of course, although it was a lot tamer than I could have possibly imagined, it easily became on of my favourite sci-fi movies. The “atmosphere of the everyday” that Scott had created in meticulous detail was worth the price of admission alone. And of course, H. R. Giger’s designs and Goldsmith’s score were the cherry and icing on the biomechanical cake.

When ALIENS arrived at cinemas in 1986, we were all geared up for it and it kinda worked because it wasn’t trying to imitate the atmosphere of the original movie. Now, I have to go on record here that I found Cameron’s entry in the series to be the weakest of the four solo outings of the ALIEN species... but I don’t mean to say it’s not a good entry. It is. All the initial solo ALIEN movies are quality products and it’s a shame that Cameron had to cut this one down for its initial release as the scenes he added back later lost their impact due to knowledge of the way the scenes were going to play out. It’s a marvellous film, easily Cameron’s masterpiece... just the weakest of the initial four. Lifted quite a lot by James Horner’s score... back in the day when everybody my age thought he was an original and “the new hope” of the soundtrack composing community... as opposed to what he’s revealed himself to be over the years.

When Alien 3 (or Alien Cubed as it quickly became known) was released, there seemed to be a big backlash against the movie... although a lot of people, myself included, really loved the finished product. Sure it has big problems, not least of which is a completely redesigned “dog” version of the ALIEN which doesn’t match up to any of the “man in suit” close up shots. This is a film where communication with the second unit and effects guys seems to have gotten the better of Fincher... but still, the rich gothic atmosphere supported and enhanced by Goldenthal’s absolutely superb pseudo-religious scoring is everything in this movie and lifts it to the heavens despite its flawed nature. It also features the death of the main character of the initial series, Ellen Ripley, who sacrifices her life to kill the creature as it jumps from her chest... bit of a dramatic ending on this one.

And then we have the celebrated French director Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection, in which Ripley returns as a superpowered Alien-hybrid clone of herself and much continental quirkiness is afoot. Good movie, very bad, flawed new ALIEN design for the ending which, it has to be said, looks more like Casper The Friendly Ghost than something which is supposedly the spawn of something created by Giger (and I don’t think Giger was anywhere near this production, so that kinda explains it). Still, I liked this movie a lot (obviously better than Cameron’s entry) and John Frizzel’s score, which is almost like John Barry filtered through the ALIEN universe style, was another good piece of scoring. I was just waiting for the studio to follow this movie up with The Adventures Of Ripley-clone on Earth!

However, rather than continue the series in this manner, the studio decided to go the way of the Universal Pictures monster rallies of the 1940s (a sure sign that studios have lost faith in the ability of their solo characters to pull in crowds on their own) by making a “double sequel” movie to both the Alien and Predator franchises. AVP: Alien Vs Predator is actually quite a fun film (and certainly my favourite of the lamentable Predator movies) but seriously screws up continuity with the series. I can just about justify the Aliens appearing on Earth hundreds of years before they’re discovered in the future, for example, because their appearance then could have been the reason why the shadowy Weyland-Yutani corporation had an interest in pursuing them in the future, but the fact that they killed off Lance Henrikson in the present day, when we already know he turns up as exactly the same “real life” version of the character at the end of Alien 3, is a real clunker and I don’t understand why they allowed this to happen. The movie is quite fun and watchable though, supported by a competent score which doesn’t really let the side down... which doesn’t make what happened next any less of a bitter pill to swallow...

What happened next was the incredibly awful Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem which was not just the worst ALIEN or Predator movie in the collective franchises... it was also a bad film in general. This movie manages to take the classic ALIEN creatures and dilute them down to nothing by putting them slap bang in the middle of what seems to be a teen-slasher movie. Seriously, the ALIEN is nothing more than a roving serial killer to bring out all the tired old genre tropes which kiddie audiences seem to be so comfortable with. A truly dreadful end to the series and a true insult to Giger and Scott’s original creation... it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. The only good thing about it was up and coming composer Brian Tyler’s exemplary score, which was way more than the visuals he was given to work with deserved.

So now you know how I feel about the last six movies in the franchise, I suppose I’d better get on with reviewing the prequel, I guess.

If you’re on the same wavelength as me, you’ll probably twig that I hold Scott’s initial ALIEN (especially in its original cut) up as being the absolute best in the series... that much hasn’t changed after seeing Prometheus, I’m afraid. Scott goes back to the original “scene of the crime” of his first film by having a team of Earth archeologists, looking for the origins of man, finding the original “space jockey” ship... plus some biological weapons they were creating, plus a space jockey himself who is not the peaceful saviour that the central protagonists had hoped him to be.

The film starts off with one of these aliens (who look like an old bald headed humanoid from one of the earliest episodes of the original Star Trek) taking some kind of biochemical cocktail which destroys his DNA (in a “penetrating” close up shot that Dario Argento will just love when he sees it as it could almost have been lifted from one of his films) and disintegrates him into a big river... I think this must be what brings these specific aliens their initial downfall, but I’m just guessing as it’s really not made implicit in the film. The first thing I thought when watching this first scene though was... What is this? Star Trek 5?

I thought both this sequence and the next one, where the team of Archaeologists in Scotland fronted by Doctor Elizabeth Shaw (Any Pertwee era Doctor Who fans here guess why I was pulled out of the movie when I first heard this character name?), as played by the original Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Noomi Rapace, find another artefact depicting a specific star map where the human race is supposed to go ... were quite pedestrian in the way they’d been handled and not what I’d expect from a director with Sir Ridley’s usually impeccable visual taste. Also, although this plot point makes a great hook, it seems to be unlikely that the “space jockeys” have, as yet, visited Earth (if I’m interpreting the story correctly), so what the "buggery-F" these little constellation maps dotted throughout human history are having any business being here is anybody’s guess... again, it doesn’t seem to have been made implicit in the final cut of the movie.

Okay, so I had problems with the first ten minutes but from here on in the film was a flawed but thoroughly interesting ride. Scott’s rich visual style resurfaces after the first ten minutes or so and we’re treated to an absolutely beautiful sequence where the android Dave is alone on the ship (watching over the crew in suspended animation) and it’s very reminiscent (and almost equally as strong) as Kubrik’s sequence of another famous “sci-fi” Dave watching over a crew in suspended animation in 2001: A Space Odyssey... Fassbinder is excellent in it and so is Peter O’Toole... I’ll not elabourate if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Go see it for yourself.

When the crew awake and go to the planet, the horror/sci-fi movie starts proper and there are thrill and spills and an almost unbearable tension as Sir Ridley stretches out the suspense... you know something bad is going to happen... and he knows you know, so he’s obviously going to play to that. He does it very well and you cant fault him for delivering a very entertaining “screen excitement” as they used to say back in the day. Visually rich, brilliant performances all round and a definite recommendation of a night out at the cinema from me...

However...

It’s a bit of a flawed masterpiece in my opinion and I know that will probably rub some people up the wrong way. If you’re doing comparisons to the original ALIEN, for example, the acting is strong but the original had relative unknowns and Prometheus is filled with famous actors. It tries to be an ensemble piece but, even though it’s filled with big names... in addition to Fassbender and Rapace there are Idris Elba, Guy Pierce and Charlize Theron (I was a bit upset her character name wasn’t ALIEN Wuornos to be honest) who are also in the mix... Fassbender and Rapace’s characters definitely dominated the show here. It was very much their movie and they seemed to be the characters showcased more than the others... although, as I said before, all the performances were exemplary.

Another problem I had with it was the tone. There were some sequences of the movie, especially those involving Idris Elba, which could have been wrenched directly from the first film in in terms of the almost haphazard, naturalistic, “caught moments” way they had been shot. Just like a proper 70s movie! But these were juxtaposed and cross cut with more set piece motivated sequences, much less reminiscent of that style. It just about kind of worked but I felt it diluted the power of a lot of those shots and I would have liked it to be more like the shooting style of the original ALIEN all the way through... but that’s just a personal preference I guess.

The other thing was... well look. The way I described it to a friend was this...

“The first ten minutes of the movie are rubbish... as are the last twenty minutes or so. All the stuff between this is really excellent.”

And that’s how I feel. I’ve explained my reaction to the first ten minutes but the reason I didn’t think much of the last twenty was because... well... there’s an absolutely brilliant stand out scene where Noomi Rapace is in a small medical container with a “creature”. I don’t want to give away too much about what happens in this scene, other than to say that it is a) incredible in it’s execution and suspense and b) something you wouldn’t expect one of the characters involved to recover from... let alone run around doing run, jump, survive and get half beaten up scenes when the character is obviously in such a frail state. Dr. Liz Shaw, I don’t care how pumped full of futuristic space drugs you are... I don’t buy you, as a human being, being able to handle anything else that happens after this point in this movie. It just stretches the credibility too much and it was at this moment I failed to hold my “suspension of disbelief” for Scott. The rest of the movie, though nice to look at, stopped packing any punch for me and I was disappointed... especially at the tagged on, final revelation where baby royalty makes her first appearance (years in our future, thus rendering the Alien/Predator films even less a part of the same series). Talking of which... didn’t the crew of the Nostromo in ALIEN find the original “space jockey” in the chair with its ribs exploded outwards to indicate a chest burster had gotten to it... have a think about that when you go and see this movie. Did Sir Ridley even watch his original film again before rolling cameras on this one?

The film has a fifteen rating but I think it could have gotten away with a 12A. There’s very little, if any, blood in this movie and there’s certainly nothing as frightening or strong as the scenes that play out in Scott’s original masterpiece. There’s a lot of suspense in it and he really knows how to ratchet up the tension (his suspense dial goes up to eleven)... but when the denouement of each of each of these set pieces come, they seem to be somewhat underwhelming, I thought, and in the end I concluded that the movie was something considerably less than it’s glittery, shining parts.

Also, Scott came under a lot of flack after the first one for a lot of it being a kind of reworking of Mario Bava’s Planet Of The Vampires, so I thought he’d have avoided any obvious material for comparison this time around. Not so. Maybe his writers were working against him a little on this but fans of Bava’s original will certainly enjoy the, even more, blatant references in this one. I won’t give too much away but lets just say that the aliens in both movies share a musical interest.

Talking about music... the score sounds good in places and rather humdrum in others. I’d need to hear it away from the movie to make a proper judgement on it but I must say I wasn’t best amused when one of Jerry Goldsmith’s original themes for the series was subverted and used to recreate it as as a new leitmotif signature of the Weyland-Yutani company. Not worth doing, either, in my opinion.

All in all, though, a really nice looking movie... but I think it was a mistake trying to tie this into the original ALIEN franchise in general... and when I say mistake I mean a cold-blooded bid for money off the back of the old series by the suits at Fox... that’s what I mean. Not that I can blame Scott and co for going for the cash... just wish they’d have left it alone and introduced an entirely new set of creature (which in some ways they kinda did I suppose, in a Cthulhuesque kind of way). Certainly worth some of your time and money because it’s quite astonishing to look at in places (the projected, running “space jockeys” are particularly unnerving) but don’t go in their expecting something as cool as ALIEN... if you do you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

A Dangerous Method

Jung At Heart

A Dangerous Method 2011

UK/Germany/Canada/Switzerland

Directed by David Cronenberg

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: This review will certainly contain some dangerously

heavy spoilers... and probably a few Freudian Gym Slips too!

I’ve mostly enjoyed the movies of David Cronenberg and have followed his work with great interest. Although marginalised, perhaps rightly for a while, as a horror movie director and, on top of that, a “body-horror” director (a marginalisation of a marginalisation), he has come to be a little more well respected over the last few years with releases of movies which are not obsessed with the disintegration, metamorphosis or derangement of the human body but which fall into more “popular” concerns. As this happened, the mainstream audiences and critics seemed to have been happy to have embraced him almost instantly... it’s as if they needed an excuse to let him into their club.

I’ve never thought any less of Cronenberg for being a horror director. Frankly I’ve never thought of him as anything other than an auteur... a man holding a genuine artistic vision which he uses as his goal posts to plug in various talents such as Carol Spier (who’s not with him on this production), Denise Cronenberg and Howard Shore to help him to realise his vision on celluloid (or whatever today’s nasty digital equivalent of celluloid is called). As someone trying to talk about him (or write about him and his work) here, I find it problematic that he’s moved away from horror films because his stylistic traits are much easier to tag on something like eXistenZ or Videodrome where I can lazily just point out the obvious similarities in the amorphous, fleshy environments his characters populate. Take away little “critic crutches” like this and I really need to go back and watch his movies again and dig deeper than what seem to have become merely surface details... or maybe just another phase of his career as an artist. I don’t have time to do that here though so, don’t expect much insight into his leanings from me here on this one.

One thing, however, that I did realise about Cronenberg's output while watching this one in particular, which perhaps should have been obvious to me before now (and perhaps it was and I just forget... I’m in my forties now, I do that) is that, although he certainly has a very sharp eye for the details and look of his movies, he is very focussed on performance. He wants to take the actors away from their own comfort zone and to strip away their body props and trade tricks and force them to explore the depths that his characters are reaching... and his characters do usually go right into the depths of their own dark psyches, more often than not, with the obvious luxury (seeing as he’s done so many horror movies where such conclusions are not necessarily considered box office poison by the producers) of being able to leave his characters wallowing in their own darkness, or often dead from it, at the end of the movie.

A Dangerous Method is a case in point. Keira Knightley’s performance, especially at the start of the film, is phenomenal. Yeah, yeah, okay... it could be considered oscar bait posturing (play a character with a physical or mental impairment and they’ll love you for it and awards will be falling on you out of trees) but, frankly, I found her absolute paroxyms of “out of control” emotional outrages to be really quite naturalistic and, in some instances, almost disturbing to watch... which is all good. I honestly haven’t seen Knightley attempt anything half as hard as this kind of role in the past and I think it’s a credit to both Cronenberg and his actors that they will push themselves and dive into these depths for him.

The film tells the real life story of Jung (Michael Fassbender) and one of his patients, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), and also his relationship with Sigmund Freud (played by Viggo Mortensen). Once Jung has ascertained the true nature of Sabina’s debilitating mental abberation, and pretty much cured her of this, the two embark on a sado-masochistic affair before Jung calls it off due to feelings of guilt about his wife. However, by the end of the movie and after his split with both Sabina and Freud, Jung is left alone and regretting ever leaving the woman he loved to this infinitely passionate degree for the rest of his life. Confronted by a married and pregnant Sabina towards the end of the movie, after having left her twice, he refers to her bump and says that “that should have been mine”. This movie proves without a shadow of a doubt that when it comes to the person you come alive for, whether you are already married or in a relationship or not, you choose to ignore the obvious passion of the person you are destined to be with at your peril.

It’s a very talky movie (which is fair enough since it’s based on both the play called The Talking Cure, as well as the book A Very Dangerous Method) but this is really not a problem... the screenplay is well written and interestingly, indeed, devastatingly (in Keira Knightley’s case) performed and will hold your attention if you are aware of the nature of the subject matter beforehand (I even found Vincent Kassel watchable in this... which is something that never really happens to me... maybe he’s an entertaining actor after all, I’m thinking). Basically, if you like pipes, sex, lots of smouldering (and that’s just in the male leads!) and a bit of “original” BDSM, then you are in for a treat with this one... and Keira Knightley goes topless too which is another good thing (and I’m guessing Mr. Freud might have applauded me for pointing that important fact out). Catch it while you can!

Shame

Shame and Fortune

Shame 2011 UK

Directed by Steve McQueen

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: I don’t think there’s really much of anything to spoil in this one but t/read cautiously, just in case! The only spoilers will be the things I tell you which don't happen... as opposed to the things which do.

I guess it’s to be expected that a UK movie, made with UK actors and director, but shot in New York, should wait all this time to get released in its own country. It’s finally out over here, but this movie, which I wanted to see for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, was only playing late night performances at my local... and then only for a week. Way to get behind British movies Cineworld! Not!

Luckily, it’s still playing in London, so I took the trip in to see it.

Now... there were a couple of possible hooks to seeing this movie, but neither of the obvious ones were why I was in the audience for this particular shared experience.

Hook 1 would be the director, Steve McQueen. My only exposure to his work has been a short film which I’ve already forgotten the title of, which I saw playing as part of an art exhibition either at the Tate or the Hayward or the Royal Academy, probably over a decade ago. This is my first real exposure to his work though.

Hook 2 would be, for most people I guess, Michael Fassbender, who I would have to say is a hugely brilliant actor and who has been in a lot off stuff the last few years. He’s a stand up kind of guy (at least that’s how he seems from what I foolishly extrapolate from the myriad of screen roles he’s had) and it’s always a pleasure to see him on screen... however, that’s not why I was here either.

I was here because of my love for the Doctor Who episode Blink and the lead actress of that episode, Carey Mulligan, who has since gone on to conquer Hollywood in roles which I was mostly unaware of, largely because the Marketing campaigns for those movies failed to mention the one thing which was guaranteed to get those movies an audience... SALLY SPARROW FROM BLINK IS IN IT!

Ok... that’s done with. Now you know why I was there for the movie... so let’s get to the confusingly misleading publicity blurb and what the movie is really about.

The publicity blurb would have you believe that this movie is about some kind of voracious sexual addict. Not true. Maybe he seems like he’s got some kind of sexual addiction for audiences who, I don’t know... don’t have much of an interest in sex maybe? Honestly people, if this film is about a sexual addict then I must personally be a Sodom and Gomorrah resurrected upon the earth. Don’t believe the hype. This guy basically just has a healthy sex drive.

This film is more about, I believe, the isolation that this guy suffers from in terms of anything long term in his life. About the only proper relationship this guy has is a non-sexual, pals thing going with his boss at work... a married man who likes to go “on the pull” with Fassbender’s character, Brandon. You know the term “alone in a crowd”? Well, that’s what Brandon’s character is. He seems to be irresistible to the female sex and so he spends most nights in meaningless sexual escapades with multiple partners. Brandon is so isolated from the accoutrements of interpersonal relationships, in fact, that he won’t even take phone calls from his sister, Sissy (played by Carey Mulligan).

Sissy turns up at his apartment unannounced and moves in with him temporarily... which throws a spanner into the ordered workings of his day-to-day routine, especially when his boss ends up doing something/somebody at his apartment which “throws” Brandon emotionally. The film explores the way emotional context starts to screw up Brandons normal working week and it’s interesting to see that the only sexual encounter in which he can’t properly perform is one in which he’s spent a little time on a first date with a woman who starts to give him an emotional hit.

I’d like to tell you more about this movie but... it’s a movie where nothing much happens. This is not to any detriment of the film, I must add. I like movies where nothing much happens and this film in particular is both skillfully directed and uses the highest calibre of actors who turn in quite wonderful and raw performances. I always admire a film that can contain a slow, deliberate and specific atmosphere over a length of time without pushing at the edges of your credibility... and this film maintains that atmosphere in spades. It’s not exactly an intense film, as had been suggested to me by others, but it’s certainly puttering along at its own pace and it’s got some really nice framing in the shots... the visual space sliced up into sections quite often with only a small part of the widescreen being used for any action (if there is any action, like walking from one room to another, at all in a sequence). This is a very European style of filming (at least that’s how I perceive it) going back to Bergman and the like... the most leading proponent of modern US cinema I can think of who still uses that style of direction is Woody Allen, especially in his Bergman-heavy, referential seventies movies. In fact, I would go as far as to say that Shame is very much like an aurally muffled Woody Allen movie... but without the laughs. I hope McQueen himself would be okay with that analogy.

Ultimately though, for the kind of intensity the film hints at trying to play with (it really isn’t in any way a harrowing movie, people) it never really reaches the heights... or should that be depths... that it seems to be initially aiming for and the expected incest scene with Brandon’s sister, which is what I am assuming everyone else was also expecting to happen, never actually rears its head as a possibility in the film. This left me a bit perplexed and in the end I have to conclude that nothing much happens in this movie.

It’s a pleasant and competently made piece of nothing though... with a sure-footed and delicate sensibility from cast and crew and a nicely, almost clinically, melancholic soundtrack culled from a variety of sources and... woohoo, Carey Mulligan, fine actress that she is, gets her kit off! Bonus! Did you hear that Doctor Who fans? SALLY SPARROW IN THE NUDE! DON’T... BLINK!

Ultimately, though, this wouldn’t be a blind recommendation from me. It’s a solitude film for a Sunday afternoon and doesn’t really push any buttons which would go that extra mile into something truly astonishing... but maybe to assume it would want to is just me kind of missing the point. It’s a well crafted, well presented, delightfully performed examination of a man alone who finds solace in the explorations of his own sexuality. You’re either going to love it or just not be moved by it... I don’t think it has enough power in its frames to make anyone truly hate it... and what would be the point?

So there you go. Shame... a nice little film and definitely something you can put on the DVD player as a backdrop to your own thoughts. To see or not to see? That is the question... and I can’t answer it for you. It’s a film which is more about subjective response than ticking off objective boxes... and that’s not a bad thing either.