The Listeners

Do You Want
To Hear A Secret?

The Listeners
Directed by Janicza Bravo
BBC Four Episodes
November 2024

The Listeners is a BBC TV show, based on the novel of the same title written by Jordan Tannahill, who also writes the screenplay in this TV version. One of my all time favourite modern ctresses, Rebecca Hall, plays the lead, an English teacher called Claire. She wakes one morning to find she can hear a sound, a bit like a low level hum, constantly in the background of her head. Her husband and daughter assume it’s something like a mental health problem or tinnitus but she knows it isn’t. Furthermore, one of her students, Kyle, played brilliantly by Ollie West, can also hear the sound and it’s not long before, in their mutual exploration to figure out just what the sound is, they come into conflict with the education community and Kyle’s mother, who all assume the two are having an affair (which in spirit, in a way, they kind of are).

The idea for the novel came from the real world phenomena known as The Hum, which can be found in various countries and cities, sometimes named after each area in which it is found (such as the Aukland Hum or the Windsor Hum). Sounds which are audible to some folk but not others and which can provoke reactions from people who just want to be free of the noise (much like tinnitus) and which are often explained away by concrete things such as gas pipes when, yeah, it seems they’re obviously not.

The TV show (I haven’t read the novel so can’t say anything about that) is a gripping drama and Rebecca Hall continues to prove she is one of the best actresses of her generation as she and Kyle discover and then become regular attendees of a group... started by and comprising of people, from all walks of society, who are able to hear the noise. Coping mechanisms and discussions as to the origins of the sound are the order of the day there, including the advice of the people running the group to embrace the noise and open themselves to it. But, in terms of the drama or the intent of the writing, it’s not there to seek an explanation of the mystery of the sound itself (at least that’s my belief and the last episode certainly doesn’t bring the audience any closer to understanding the nature and intent of the sound, if indeed intent is something which it has) but instead, like all good science fiction or speculative fiction, to explore the very human problems which result from the pursuit of the mystery at its heart.

So, for the main protagonists, it becomes about living with and handling (or often not handling) the fallout of the noise in their family and work spaces and also takes a look at the group and flirts quite strongly with the idea that Claire and Kyle might possibly have been indoctrinated into a cult, perhaps caught up in something far more sinister and about human control. Or not in that last case… depending on how you look at it.

What can I say? The acting is wonderful, the musical score is glorious (sadly not available on CD), the cinematography is awesome (and really beautiful in some places) and the sound design, with the sound the protagonists’ hear taking over the soundtrack and being used often as an indicator of the turn of emotions and to interrupt the flow of the situations (rather like what a good musical score can do), is also absolutely brilliant. My one down point is that the ending, in terms of the solution to the mystery, is pretty much non-existent. It’s one of those endings which leave it up to the viewer but without giving them a clear option as to what it could actually be. Which makes me want to read the novel although, since it’s written by the same guy, I suspect I won’t get much more insight in regards to that matter.

So yeah, that’s me done with this one and I may, if it comes down to much cheaper, grab the Blu Ray at some point in a few years. I’d also like to see or hear an opera from a few years ago, also based on this novel and, again, with the same title but, alas, I can’t find it on CD or Blu Ray so, it looks like I’m out of luck on that count at the moment too. But, regardless, The Listeners is a great TV mini series and, if the ending is a little underwhelming, the journey getting there is certainly worth taking.

Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire

Peanuts Gal For
Monkey Magic

Godzilla X Kong -
The New Empire
Directed by Adam Wingard
USA 2024
Warner Brothers
UK Theatrical Cut

Warning: Mild spoilers.

Last week I went to the cinema to see Ghostbusters - Frozen Empire (reviewed here) in which a centuries long imprisoned creature is released and aims to turn the Earth into a new ice age. This week I saw Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire which, apart from having a superfluous X that makes it the most ridiculous and childish title for a Godzilla movie ever, deals with a centuries long imprisoned creature who is released back into the mix with his followers and big ice creature, with the intent of conquering the Earth by turning it into a new ice age. I bet the makers of this one were pretty miffed that the new Ghostbusters had a better title that they could have used themselves.

This one is, by my counts, the fifth in the sequence of the US Monsterverse franchise, comprising Godzilla (reviewed here), Kong - Skull Island (reviewed here), Godzilla King Of The Monsters (reviewed here), Godzilla VS Kong (reviewed here) and now this one. Not to mention the relatively recent Monarch TV series, which I haven’t got around to watching as yet. It carries over three characters from the previous movie, as played by the great Rebecca Hall reprising the role of the main scientist, the extremely cool Kaylee Hottle as her deaf/mute adopted Skull Island daughter and Brian Tyree Henry, providing comic relief as the vlogger who was helping out Millie Bobby Brown in the last movie.

And, not only is this installment in the franchise way better in most respects than Godzilla VS Kong, it’s also a very fun watch and I really rather enjoyed it. Now, given the critical and commercial success of the Academy Award winning Japanese movie Godzilla Minus One (reviewed here ) a few months ago, I was fully expecting to be able to say that the aforementioned movie was way better than this one. And... yeah okay, I am saying that... no comparison. I’d take a film like that one over this any day of the week. However, you have to remember that you really can’t cant compare the two. Godzilla Minus One is very much a serious film similar in tone to the original 1954 Gojira movie (reviewed here) and uses Godzilla as a surrogate for the post survivor trauma of the ‘failed’ kamikaze pilot who is the film’s main protagonist. It’s carrying a lot of weight and it does it beautifully.

In contrast to that, Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire is very much in the style of the fun, mid 1960s to mid 1970s Toho Godzilla ‘monster romp’ movies... and as a lover of both kinds, I am quite happy with what the US filmmakers are able to achieve here, to be honest. It’s a different flavour of Godzilla but they are doing a much better job of that kind of brief here.

Now, the movie almost totally takes place in the Hollow Earth world discovered in the last film, asides from a few sequences where Godzilla and Kong manage to wreck part of Egypt and Brazil between them. And also one memorable moment where the movie’s other main protagonist, a monster veterinarian played by Dan Stevens, extracts Kong’s infected tooth with his helicopter and gives him a new, super duper tooth. Also, after a sequence where Kong suffers from frostbite in his right arm, due to reasons I won’t disclose, he cures it and gives him a new armoured glove so he can punch things better. So yay!

Also, Kaylee Hottle’s character ends up fulfilling the same role as The Peanuts did in the original Mothra films from the 1960s. She is the new human envoy to Mothra and she wakes her up to help out when Kong is trying to lure Godzilla into lending a hand in tackling their bigger problem. It’s nice stuff but, alas, she doesn’t sing the famous Mothra song... which would have been a nice touch.

And was that a shop sign depicting Gamera I saw for a second before Godzilla smashed through it? I’m pretty sure that’s what I saw... can anyone else confirm in the comments?

And it’s a film filled with good action, much better acting than you would expect and a fun storyline. My only real criticism is that the score by Antonio Di Lorio and Tom Holkenborg is bereft of any of the iconic Godzilla themes from the Toho series and, just fails miserably on that level. Every time you are expecting there to be a big Ifukube moment, the score does something which seems, I dunno, like a melody falling just short of the original to evade copyright payments. Which is a shame because, even the great Godzilla Minus One, which had a far superior score to this one, recognised the value in popping in Ifukube’s melodies into certain scenes. And to add insult to injury, the score to this one seems to be unavailable on a proper CD (which is a first for the films, it would be the only live action Godzilla theatrical release without CD representation to date). Shame on Watertower Records for not releasing it in the only physical format that real music lovers want. I hate this backwards decade, ignoring the essential physical media releases which should accompany these films.

Apart from the ‘knock off’ sounding scoring though, Godzilla X Kong - The New Empire was way more entertaining than I was expecting it to be and, if you liked Kong VS Godzilla (I kinda didn’t think it was all that), then you should definitely love this one. Don’t expect to be seeing the same kind of story substance present in Godzilla Minus One though... two very different kinds of films.

The Night House

 

The House By
The Symmetry

The Night House
USA/UK 2020
Directed by David Bruckner
Walt Disney

Warning: Some mild spoilers.

The Night House is an interesting film and I almost had a really great time with it. I say almost because, like the plot development of the dream world depicted in certain moments in the film, it’s very much a game of two halves. I’ll get to that in a while but let me tell you some of the plot set up and the good stuff first.

Well, for starters, it’s got one of my favourite modern actresses playing the lead protagonist, Rebecca Hall (from amazing movies like The Awakening, reviewed here and Professor Marston And The Wonder Women, reviewed here) as Beth. And she really is fantastic in this (isn’t she always, even in lesser movies like Iron Man 2). The film starts when she returns to her lake house, after her husband’s funeral. Her husband, who designed and built the house, has shot himself in a boat in the lake with no inclination that he had suicidal tendencies and Beth, a local school teacher, is left to deal with her grief. There are a few other characters in the film such as her best friend Claire, played by Sarah Goldberg... but the majority of the film is just Beth dealing with her grief and then being caught up in weird events when she is regularly awoken by a presence she believes is her dead husband.

And all that stuff is great. There are a few good jump scares to it although, admittedly, when it does try this one too many times too often, such as a shot following Beth dozing off while laying on Claire’s knee (I don’t think it was supposed to be a reference to Éric Rohmer), the scares do start getting more predictable and, therefore, not scary, it has to be said. But the moody atmosphere is kept going throughout and I’m pleased to say, in terms of the supernatural occurrences in the film, the movie delivers the goods and doesn’t cop out when it comes to escalating the degrees and machinations of the antagonistic phenomena.

Also, Rebecca Hall really does carry the movie for a lot of the time. In her interactions with the occasional character that crops up, such as a woman she finds her husband may have had an affair with (it’s more complicated than that), Beth is written as a very sharp, stand offish, confrontational and smart woman and, yeah, that’s tailor made for an intelligent actress like Hall, for sure. And great swathes of the movie are just her on her own with barely any dialogue, so you need someone like her in this kind of movie.

The film is loaded with beautiful shot compositions too. The director uses very clear vertical sections and splits to delineate different areas of the house and even uses a shot I’d seen done in a new movie a few weeks before, where Beth’s head is small in the shot and framed within a rectangle of a grid of windows, as we look in at her from outside the house. It turns out, the symmetry of the compositions and the camera movements around those little vertical splits are very much a part of the story and there is a really neat trick where the director uses the negative shape of a column (think of the old candlestick illusion of the two faces in profile), which looks like a man’s face, to surprise the audience when the face made out of the negative space looks around at Beth. Unfortunately, the director seems so pleased with this shot that he repeats the trick a fair few times after that and it loses its impact very quickly.

The real problem is the bizarre mix of over sharing the various mysteries of the house... it’s ‘backwards’ twin house, some kind of occult rituals, Beth’s back story containing a ‘dead for four minutes’ experience, a book on Caerdroia (a term for a Welsh turf maze which I think is supposed to be a metaphor for the construction of the house itself) and various ghost women running to the lake... and giving the audience too many elements to process without really explaining the relevance of a lot of them. Now I know the ‘secret’ at the heart of the mystery, for example, I am still left scratching my head about the relevance of a lot of the plot elements found in the movie. It feels, by the last reel, vaguely unsatisfying and like the writers just let it all go and spoiled all that good build up. I must confess that, once I’d realised the film was over, I said to myself that I must read the novel this film is obviously based on to find out the real significance of all the occult jigsaw puzzle pieces scattered throughout... only to find out that it’s not even based on a book and is an original screenplay. So, yeah, I really didn’t understand how a lot of these things fit in and I’m not usually that slow on the uptake in most movies.

So, what else can I say about The Night House other than it has a gorgeous score by Ben Lovett which I wish had gotten a proper CD release? If you’re a big Rebecca Hall fan then definitely take a look at this one as she’s always an interesting actress to watch. If you’re a horror fan... I suspect this wasn’t made with you in mind because it’s not going to scare you much, I would think. If you’re not normally a watcher of the genre, then you may get something out of this one and it’s probably a good, light introduction to the supernatural, if you have a hankering to try out something like that. I probably won’t be watching this one again anytime soon and I just wish someone would tap Rebecca Hall to make a proper sequel to The Awakening at some point in the near future, to be honest.

Godzilla VS Kong

Kaiju KO

Godzilla VS Kong
USA/Australia/Canada/India 2021
Directed by Adam Wingard
Warner Brothers

Warning: This review will have kaiju sized spoilers.

Oof! Godzilla VS Kong is something I’d been looking forward to for a while. The fourth in the new US Monsterverse movies and following on from the two good films in the series, Kong: Skull Island (reviewed here) and Godzilla: King Of The Monsters (reviewed here), I was probably expecting a lot more from it than it could maybe, in hindsight, have credibly delivered. Also, I’ve quite liked some of director Adam Wingard’s previous movies and, although I think it’s a bigger film than he’s used to heading up... I had a lot of confidence in him on this.

And I can certainly confirm that the film looks really nice and has some beautiful, bright colours and lots of ‘monster smack’ carnage on show. It also has returning performers from one of the previous installments in the form of  Millie Bobby Brown and Kyle Chandler reprising their roles from Godzilla - King Of The Monsters. They are joined by some equally cool people such as Alexander Skarsgård as a good guy scientist and one of my favourite modern actresses, Rebecca Hall. And it even has the return of one of my favourite, iconic kaiju characters who tends to turn up from time to time in the Godzilla movies over the years, Mecha-Godzilla. So, yeah, I should have probably got a lot more out of this than I did. It looks great, has lots of explosions and punching of things and has great actors delivering the lines. Terrible nonsense lines though so, that doesn’t help things along, to start with.

I think my biggest complaint after seeing it is that I just didn’t understand what the heck this movie was about at all. Now it doesn’t help I was being hit by ‘buffering’ every minute or so for a while (I don’t know why streaming is so popular in the UK when our internet infrastructure is so terrible trying to handle anything remotely HD) and I’m sure I would have responded to this much better if I’d seen it in a proper cinema (the only way a movie should be watched the first time)... but I’m not sure anything would have helped me comprehend the plot to this film, which re-positions Godzilla as the bad guy and then, at the end, says it’s alright because he was just attacking ‘company x’ because they were doing bad things. Nope. He was killing innocent people and destroying cities in the process and that’s not a cool look... Gojira was definitely back to his old 1954 self as far as I’m concerned. And the general comments shouted by the rest of the family as we were watching, echoing mine such as... “What’s going on?”, “What just happened?”, “Was there two of him in that shot... how?”, “Is someone going to come and explain why they’re doing this and what this means?”... well, I think they speak for themselves.

I know that, for some reason I couldn’t figure out, people needed to get Kong to get them to the centre of the Earth (you know, the old hollow Earth theory again) but something to do with the gravity shift was a danger but... it’s okay because Kong was with them and... sorry, what? And a ludicrous subplot that re-introduced a less than interesting redesign of Mecha-Godzilla when, frankly, after we saw a giant mechanical eyeball near the start of the movie, we really didn’t need it spelled out. And no Charles Dance in sight? We saw him as the main villain making off with a dead Ghidorah head in the post-credits of the last movie but here, the head is back but the villain isn’t. Like he just disappeared into the ether.

But we do have the Ghidorah head... now a skull. Because obviously, a human mind needs to make a connection with a Ghidorah head to be able to control the man-made Mecha-Godzilla right? I mean, what? Just what? And then, when the human brain is destroyed, this makes Mecha-G go off into its own rampage... why? Lots of whys and whats here because... I’m sorry but this movie’s plot is just absolute twaddle. And don’t get me started on how it’s set just a couple of years in our future but there’s no mention made of the Coronavirus. I’m pretty sure that’s going to be around for a while and it seems kinda stupid that Hollywood would think we would forget about that. Nobody is masking up in this film, for sure.

Also, I know the director and composer are probably huge fans of the original films in the respective franchises but, I felt the whole thing played out with a lot less respect than either monster deserved. Junkie XL’s score has one, possibly accidental, similarity to Ifukube’s five note power theme for The Big G which I noticed in one action scene and which I suspect was just serendipitous. The previous score by the great Bear McCreary was loaded with musical references to a whole host of Toho monster themes giving the leitmotifs associated with them their due in a fan pleasing score that really served the movie well. This new score is appropriate to the action but just feels like a wasted opportunity and gives no real reference to Ifukube, Sato, Koseki or even Max Steiner in its make up. It’s just another score which could have been ‘anything appropriate’ when it’s been demonstrated in the last film that a good, striking, use of the previous material as musical building blocks can be carried out very well. I felt like this was a major step backwards for these movies and it’s now the fourth in a series which, like the previous three, has absolutely no musical continuity with any of the others. It’s just egos doing their own thing when they could have served a more functional purpose for the good of the whole canon of works.

And, by the way, King Kong has been around since 1933 whereas Godzilla is a relatively new character from 1954. Show some respect... there’s no way, despite Kong being stripped of his royal nomenclature for these movies, that Godzilla would beat him to near death. Kong's more dexterous. It just beggars belief. And, although the shout out to certain other Kong and kaiju movies where human intervention is necessary to restart (or in some films replace) a slowing heart is appreciated, the circumstances which took us to that point felt somehow unacceptable to me.

And so there you have it. Godzilla VS Kong looks great, has made huge gains at the box office but, sadly, under all the hullabaloo it’s just an empty and somehow inarticulate shell of a movie masquerading as something much bigger than it actually is. I can enjoy the moments of monster carnage and will probably do so again on Blu Ray but, as a consequential entry in the entire body of work of both the King Kong and Godzilla franchises, it leaves no mark and is, perhaps, best left forgotten. I was, at the end of the last picture, looking forward to this franchise continuing but now I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. Everything seems to be thrown away and the dots that are meant join the films together make a tenuous and unnecessary trail at best. I can’t recommend this one, to be honest.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

Shibari Boom-De-Ay

Professor Marston and
the Wonder Women
2017 USA Directed by Angela Robinson
London Film Festival Sunday 15th October

Okay, so this was my last film of this year’s London Film Festival and I couldn’t have picked a better one. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is a truly joyful experience and, also, the timing couldn’t have been better for the producers in terms of following this year's big hit Wonder Woman (reviewed by me here). This is the story of the man who created that iconic character (under the pseudonym Charles Moulton), psychologist Professor William Moulton Marston and the two women in his (and each others) life... his wife, psychologist Elisabeth Marston and their live in lover Olive Byrne.

The film is damn near perfect too.

I knew the movie would have to tackle the Frederic Wertham stuff and it kinda does, in a way... or at least the growing sentiment in America that the relatively new comic book phenomenon was perverted, corrupting and harmful to the children of America (and presumably to the GI’s too since comics were popular with them also). Wertham would be the mascot boy for the terrifying anti-comics crusade to come and so he’s not specifically mentioned here as this movie ends roughly around the time of Marston’s death, which was just a few years early for the full horror of Wertham’s pseudo-psycho babble to take a grip on minds across the country.

However, the growing scare of sensationalist comic books is a perfect place to look back from and writer/director Angela Robinson kicks off the movie with kids collecting unwanted comics in carts as the credits play out before we see Marston looking on at everyone burning comic books and we see an issue of one of the early comics to feature Wonder Woman, perhaps Marston’s most enduring invention, burning up with the rest of them on a bonfire of four colour funnies. We then join Marston defending Wonder Woman to Josette Frank, who was appointed to help National Comics Publications, kinda, self certify before the real storm came later (soon after and decades before they made it official, National Comics branded themselves with the initials of their popular Batman title, Detective Comics, as the now more familiar DC). It’s from this scene, with Frank (played by Connie Britton) asking the hard questions and Marston remembering the relevant parts of this life, that we glimpse the majority of the film in flashback, with constant stops back to the early 1940s when this sequence is happening.

So we have Professor Marston played by Luke Evans and  Elisabeth played by Rebecca Hall (who I loved so much in The Awakening - reviewed here - that I thought she should have been heading up a franchise with the character from that movie) giving lectures in Marston’s new psychological theory DISC (which stands for Dominance, Influence, Submission, and Compliance) and taking on a new assistant whom they both, as it happens, want to sleep with... called Olive, played by Bella Heathcote. And we see their story through their personal lens as they build a loving relationship under the same household (mostly) and have various children and struggle with various problems of their specific lifestyle choices versus what is socially acceptable in the 1920s and beyond.

In addition to seeing them discover each other we also see them inventing and testing the lie detector (finally realising the missing ingredient of the ‘false positives’ they are getting by using their possible future (at this stage) relationship in conjunction with it to finally get the correct results. We also see the discovery of illegal pornography as a defining moment in their life and, specifically, Marston’s accidental introduction to the ‘underground’ S&M scene (we all call it BDSM nowadays) including an introduction to bondage via a demonstration the Professor gets set up in the back room of a shop which specialises in... ‘fantasy dress’, shall we say. The bondage demonstrated, first on a model and then on Olive in the showroom is not unlike what we would know a little better these days as ‘shibari’ rope bondage (although the term itself was not, I think, in more common practice, even in Japan, until the 1950s) and this kickstarts another important aspect of Marston and the gals ‘relationship identity’. This is something they already touched upon earlier in the film in a spanking scene in a College ritual and the photographs that Marston later buys to pique the girls’ interest are, he insists, visual representations of his DISC ideas rendered in just four pictures. This later helps give him the idea to inject the same theories into his Wonder Woman character, who would make her first appearance in an issue of All Star Comics before headlining her run in Sensation Comics.

Of course, much is made of the lie detector, the bondage rope and the costume that Olive wears at one point as the early ideas that sparked certain aspects of Wonder Woman (who gets rid of the false words of her enemies with her magic rope of truth and who is constantly getting tied up in the strip during that period). It’s a great story and it’s all laid out from A-Z with Marston finally selling his idea of Suprema The Wonder Woman and writing the stories himself after he and Elisabeth are both fired from their college jobs due to the nature of their relationship with Olive and their various children. This includes a brilliant turn from Oliver Platt as legendary comics publisher M. C. Gaines which is pretty good, with him dumping the name Suprema and going with just the character name which is more familiar to her fans today... Wonder Woman.

And this movie sparkles so much.

The style is quite leisurely with lots of either static or slow moving camera shots which are held for quite reasonable lengths of time to let the performances of the three brilliant leads shine through. The writing is unbelievably witty and sparkly too and it’s a bit like a quick fire 1930s romantic comedy in the way the actors deliver this immensely intelligent dialogue, which juxtaposes nicely with the slower visual style without it clashing - the two things just seem to complement each other perfectly and the movie sings along very quickly. It’s also very funny with some great one liners such as Elisabeth saying something along the lines of “You can’t keep using science to justify the whims of your cock.” That’s probably not the exact quote but it’s not far off and, like many of the humour beats that hit the mark throughout this movie, the audience at the screening I attended were highly appreciative.

The film also has some nice things going on in those shot compositions too. The sorority ritual scene where Marston and his wife get hot and bothered watching Olive spank another student is partially shot from in front of a set of bannisters which partly obscures their features while allowing you to easily glimpse the mood being put through in their performance and it’s a really nice moment. Another really great thing is the deep focus photography used on some of the shots of the rope where Elisabeth ties up Olive in the shop and the texture of the rope is sharp in places where everything else in the shot is blurred out like an old Hollywood, ‘vaseline on the lens’ shot. It’s stuff like this which really gets into your eyeballs, coupled with the dazzling script and the superb acting from all the leads here.

I was a bit worried that the movie wouldn’t be able to legally use images of Wonder Woman due to rights issues but there seems to be no such problems here and there’s even a montage sequence (or two) with various comic panels from the strip set to the music of the famous jazz standard Big Noise from Winnetka, which I suspect might have been inspired by a similar musically charged montage with the same piece from the film Comic Book Confidential. Wherever that idea came from, it works just fine here and this is not to undercut the brilliance of Tom Howe’s wonderful score for the movie either (which I shall be picking up on CD as soon as I can get my hands on it after the release date).

The film ends with the time honoured, various facts about ‘what happened next’ in the lives of the three central protagonists and then the credits roll with photos of the real life William, Elisabeth and Olive... which really hits home, actually, just how glamourous the movie versions of the characters are in comparison to the people that inspired it. Although that’s a discussion for a different time, methinks.

All in all, Professor Marston And The Wonder Women is easily one of the best movies of 2017 and I can’t wait to see this one again when it gets a November release in the UK (and also buy the Blu Ray when it comes out). Don’t be on the fence about this one if you like cinema and also like to see a good, romantic yarn with humour, sadness and poignancy in spades. As far as writer/director Angela Robinson goes with this movie, I shall quote another movie from this year taking everyone’s famous amazonian superhero as it’s subject matter and just say... “You should be very proud.”

Transcendence

WiFi Art Thou?

Transcendence
2014 UK/Chine/USA
Directed by Wally Pfister
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Some slight spoilers here... 
most of which are in the trailer anyway, to be honest.

It strange the way things work out sometimes.

I saw the trailer for Transcendence a fair number of times at the cinema, for at least a month before its release over here. My desire to see one of the better actors of our time, Johnny Depp, in something that looked like a film rooted in fairly hard science fiction concepts, albeit probably recycled via 1950s and 1960s short stories, was so tempered by the fact that the trailer made the film look about as exciting and as intriguing as an unused tea bag, that I’d pretty much decided to just give the movie a miss. Or at least, ignore it for long enough so that the choice of whether I really had to go and see this thing or not was taken away from me by default.

However, since my internet connection at home had been out for something like a month, which is ironic given the subject matter of this film, and since it was a Sunday afternoon and the sun wasn’t completely covered up by black clouds, I found myself bored enough that I decided a walk down to my local Cineworld wouldn’t be too terrible a waste of my time. And so I went and saw it anyway... and I’m rather glad I did.

Transcendence is a movie that has a celluloid heritage which is perhaps best identified as it being a descendant of various “computer consciousness takes over” sci-fi films of the early 1970s such as The Forbin Project and Demon Seed. While it would certainly be true to say that it is, as I’d suspected, one of those modern 50s/60s recycled concept movies we’ve been getting so much of lately, it has to also be said that this movie carries off its recycling with a certain amount of panache and technical competency from all the cast and crew.

Johnny Depp plays a clever science type, called Will Caster, who has ben experimenting with computers to the point that he now has what he’s pretty sure is a self aware machine. He dreams of ultimately finding a way to transcend the human creatures populating the planet and upgrade them as a next stage of human evolution... conquering death in a brief nod to Frankenstein, perhaps. At a conference with his equally clever science type wife, Evelyn, played by Rebecca Hall (who I’ve loved since I saw her as the lead protagonist in The Awakening, reviewed here) and his friend Max, played by Paul Bettany, Will gets shot by a member of a group of anti-AI nutters... although he initially survives the shooting. As an FBI agent played by Cillian Murphy tells him, various of his science buddy colleagues aren’t so lucky with, in one particular set of offices, a professor played by Morgan Freeman being the only survivor... due to blind luck more than anything else.

However, it turns out Will isn’t as lucky as he thought, as the bullet he was shot with was laced with a radioactive chemical which will slowly kill him over the course of the month. Before that happens, however, Evelyn turns him and Paul Bettany’s character Max onto the idea of uploading Will's consciousness into an AI.

Now you all know this is obviously going to work otherwise you wouldn't have a movie and the film soon becomes a cat and mouse game between Will’s enhanced consciousness, which has been downloaded into the internet and controls the entire world, and the group of ludites who shot him in the first place and who recruit various of the characters to their cause. As the situation seems both threatening and also wonderful simultaneously, the stakes are raised and pretty soon Will is enhancing humans into super beings and even, at one point (and this is in the trailer so I’m hopefully not giving anything away here... although if you don’t see this one coming you must be very young), building a new body identical in looks and feel to his old one for himself.

By the last part of the film, where all out war between the AI and our brave cell of misguided and not so misguided idiots is reaching some explosive moments, the film turns out to be a film about love and sacrifice... but with Will anticipating every move made against him, just who is going to be doing the sacrificing?

Like all good sci-fi, even the warmed up leftovers from decades gone by, Transcendence explores concepts such as “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” and also gets into the old chestnut of “What is a human soul?” and "How does one define the state of self awareness?". Questions which can’t be answered, perhaps, in the real world but, to this movie’s credit above other stories of a similar nature, one of these questions does get answered in terms of the main protagonists in this movie and I was really pleased with the ending of this one, which turns out to be not the one you’re necessarily expecting. Thank goodness.

It’s not a perfect movie by any means. Some of the sequences seem a bit wrong in terms of their placement in the movie. For instance, only a couple of hours after being shot in the torso, Johnny Depp is out and about and talking to his friends, and the FBI, in his office, while showing off his AI programme. Similarly, a cut from a perceived danger to one of the protagonists is suddenly shown to be something the character in question is expecting and able to act on straight away with no questions asked... which could be explained within the context of the story just about, if you want to make excuses for it, but which ultimately is not something the audience has any knowledge of and which kinda grates when you see it happen. Similarly, a series of sequences which you assume to take place over a number of months given the amount of screen time allocated, are followed at one point by a scene which takes place only two days after the start of the events in one of the sections of the film... which doesn’t make sense and which I suspect has been re-edited to the place where it ended up to remind audiences of the FBI character... rather than have it play out as a slow build, which would have been preferable. I don’t mind a movie about artifical intelligence as long as it doesn’t try to insult what little intelligence I myself possess, is my feelings about that.

The last 20 or so minutes, truth be told, feel a little dragged out, basically in terms of the story of the two main leads, the husband and wife, of the film... but it doesn’t ruin it and it does have a certain sense of beauty and melancholy about it which is worth the wait. Also, the film is bookended at start and finish by a sequence showing the aftermath of the event in the main body of the movie. Personally, although there is a twinge of possibility in the last shot, I would have preferred to go into the epilogue without seeing the set up at the start of the film because, basically, it tells you something of the outcome of the story before it’s even properly been started.

However, the cast are all amazing, there are some lovely shots, it has an incredibly fine score by composer Mychael Danna (the US Amazon CD-R is hopefully in the post to me soon) and, all in all, I was impressed at how a movie with such a tired old concept could be told so well, shot and edited so beautifully and, also, take me to a place where I wasn’t quite expecting the ending to go. It was always an option but it’s a bold writer, in this day and age, to outright tackle the issue of the soul of a man in a computer in such a definite and conclusive manner. So yeah, this one is, frankly, a well made and nice little sci-fi thriller with a little more action than I was expecting and which is certainly not the boring yawn-fest the trailer made it out to be. If you like computer oriented science fiction stories, then this one is definitely something worth checking out. I’ll be catching up with this again on blu-ray, no doubt.

The Awakening

Waking Dreams

The Awakening 2011 UK

Directed by Nick Murphy

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: Silently stalking spoilers will rise up from

this article to haunt the doll’s house of your mind.

Okay, there are good and bad things sharing the load in equal number in The Awakening... not to be confused with the second of the three adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars, which shares the same title as this movie.

The real problems this film has, if you agree it has any problems at all, lie within the script but only, it seems to me, in terms of the story and not the dialogue. I got a real split reaction to this movie but, overall, I think the positives on this one far outweigh the, frankly inevitable, negative points about this piece.

So let me share with you first, by way of showing you why this movie is worth seeing, the main positive on offer here. The main, central character... and she really is the main character as she’s pretty much in almost every shot apart from a few establishing shots and a couple of minor sequences where the camera has to follow another character... is something of a great, literary pulp creation and it’ll be a shame if this movie is the only thing this character ever turns up in. The character’s name is Florence Cathcart and I don’t care if she turns up again in a film, a TV series, a series of novels or what... this character is great and I want more of her.

Florence Cathcart, who I might normally call the main protagonist but in this case I’ll make and exception and call her... our heroine, is a professional sceptic. Set in 1921, a few years after she loses her lover to World War I, Miss. Cathcart makes her living by publishing her books about her exploits as... well... as a professional sceptic I guess would be an apt term. That is to say, she goes around with various parapsychology detecting equipment and disproves the existence of the ghostly and, often, exposing fraudulent practitioners of spiritualist endeavours who are out to make a quick buck off of the less fortunate.

And this is, in fact, how our story starts... by setting up the character and showing her breaking up a spiritualist seance. In this opening sequence, we see we have a director who knows how to be efficient with his cinematic shorthand. We see the seance as it takes place, see Florence expose them and call in the police, see the culprits taken away and then, in a brilliant little moment, we see her slapped in the face in a really great little cinematic “jump” shot and this shows the way in which, even the people whom she has saved from throwing away good money after bad, resent her from taking away their illusions of an afterlife... and then this basic set up is used to depict the distressed/depressed darker part of Cathcart’s character... it’s all filmed in the most economical manner. Florence is played quite brilliantly by actress Rebecca Hall who delivers some quite intelligent and witty dialogue against some other quite splendid actors and actresses which, at the same time, also manages to add real depth to the character... a character who, we will later find out, we know nothing about really after all.

However, if the script is brilliant in terms of dialogue and the way it informs the characters, it lacks in other areas because, frankly, it’s very unlikely that anything much in this movie is going to take you by surprise and, although I am blaming the writing for this (obviously) I do feel, since I did have a good time with this movie, that it’s not entirely the fault of the people writing this film.

You see, the plot of this one involves our newly established and cynical heroine called in to help the teachers and boys in a boarding school rid themselves of the ghost who has been appearing in their school photos for years on end and who seems to have killed someone recently... and herein lies the problem with what ails the script. The trouble with these kinds of ghostly, haunted house horror films is that the audience, whether they are aware there’s going to be some kind of twist or not, are always on the lookout for any such twist to occur, often without even knowing about it... and more often than not (and such is the case on this one I’m afraid) the audience are going to guess the nature of the twist as soon as they see the first sign of a clue and these kinds of movies don’t really have a lot of options anyway when it comes to tricks up their sleeve. In this one, for example, I was already on my guard before Florence had even arrived at the school, taking part in that old horror film favourite of “trying to spot the character who isn’t actually alive”... and I have to say, it didn’t take me very long, on that characters first shot, in fact, before I’d spotted our undead friend and started trying to unravel the second big twist I knew would be coming after that.

I don’t want to spoil it too much for anyone who’s not seen it yet but I will say that the solution to the mystery at the heart of the movie is pretty obvious... but I also have to say that, even when you’ve put all the pieces together in your head, the sleight of hand in this one is such that you will probably forget about them or dismiss them as too obvious before they’re actually revealed... and that’s what horror films of this nature are all about really isn’t it? Sleight of hand?

Now there are some wonderful sequences in this film... including an absolutely brilliant set of rooms within a doll's house which mirror the haunting sequences which have just taken place... and it is such a brilliant and simple idea (however obvious). The heroine sees the scenes including the little recent episodes of “encounters” (even those from just 30 seconds before she starts looking in the doll's house)... only to eventually come to a room which has her looking in the doll's house... with a ghostly figure standing just behind her. Real nape of the neck stuff people. Very much from the Shirley Jackson/Steven Moffett school of... “never mind worrying about if it’s going to happen, it’s already happening, you just haven’t realised it yet” school of “fright delivering”. It has to be said though, The Awakening does tend to overplay its hand just a little too much as it gets closer to the actual reveal.

But the great thing about this movie is... it doesn’t matter! This film has great acting, great dialogue, sure and steady (nothing too flashy) but nicely composed camerawork and even a nice, haunting score going for it. And even though you know it’s going to be a bit obvious... the eerie atmosphere and occasional jump scares are so well done that you shouldn’t go away feeling too disappointed by the film. And did I mention it has a great character who, although she will go on a journey of self discovery as the film progresses (it’s in the title people!)... really should come back in something else please. Preferably as played by the delightful Rebecca Hall who really elevates this movie from being a competent time at the movies to a fun time at the cinema. Definitely one to watch out for if you are into your chilly, gothic hauntings. Give it a go.