Ad Astra

Quite A Mess And The Pitt

Ad Astra
Directed by James Gray
2019 China/Brazil/USA
UK cinema release print.

This movie has been getting some good word of mouth on Twitter and I have to say that, while it falls just slightly short of being an all time classic, Ad Astra is definitely one of the best films of the year. I have some reservations about it... or one anyway... and I’ll get to that a little later but this one is quite the spectacle. I was somewhat put off that people had been comparing this to the absolute brilliance of 2001 - A Space Odyssey (reviewed here) but I have to say that, in a way, they’re right. There are a few little shots scattered around here and there which, if you know Kubrick’s film well, you'll realise are pretty much done in homage, I think, to 2001... although shot in a totally different way of course. But, yeah, there are some direct references back to the look, or at least content, of certain moments in that.

What I haven’t seen mentioned as yet, although, I’m pretty sure I will be seeing a lot of this commentary fairly soon, is the film’s striking resemblance in terms of tone and narrative structure to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. This is something I really wasn’t expecting but by about 20 minutes into the movie I realised that this was definitely part of the vibe the writer/director was going for here.

The set up of the film is very close to the Coppola movie (and presumably Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness too, although it’s been so many decades since I read it that I can barely remember it). In the near future and after the start of a series of bursts of antimatter pulses originating from somewhere near Neptune, which almost kills main protagonist Roy McBride (played by Brad Pitt) during the film’s opening sequences, Roy is sent on a mission hopping from Earth... to the Moon... to Mars and then on to Neptune. His father who was said to have died in space decades before, working on something called the Lima Project near Neptune is, it turns out, suspected of being very much alive and probably gone insane. He is the prime suspect for directing these bursts that drain all power from their target and he needs to be dealt with as swiftly as possible, before the bursts get stronger and destroy everything in the universe. So he is obviously set up as the ‘Colonel Kurtz’ figure of the movie and the film is about Roy’s journey, including speculative voice-over narrative which helps bring the Apocalypse Now vibe into the mix, to try and get to his father and stop whatever is going on. Things are quite a mess up there.

Brad Pitt in this is very strong and I don’t know why I’m always so surprised when I see him turn in a good performance. After all, he’s done some great work in pictures like Inglourious Basterds and World War Z, not to mention his absolutely stunning job in Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. This film gives him some good stuff to work with, playing an almost machine-like character who is nearly always in control and who doesn’t get an accelerated heartbeat, even in times of crisis. Pitt shows the slight flaws and cracks in his character’s approach to life and he gives some nice, subtle shading to a role which could quite easily been a much more clinical, cypher of a part in the hands of certain other actors.

He’s joined by big, acting war horse names like Donald Sutherland and Tommy Lee Jones... plus some really interesting, more contemporary performers such as Ruth Negga and Liv Tyler. Between them all, they and their supporting cast do a terrific job here.

The special effects, quality of the set and prop design and just the overall mise en scène of the thing in general is all absolutely brilliant too and, even though there are a few concepts which threaten to enter more ‘fantasy’ rather than hard sci-fi territory on occasion, this ‘near future’ tale all seems very believable and relatable. It’s got a nice slow pacing but that’s kind of deceptive because there’s a lot of information flying around which has a progressive, emotional effect on the viewer.

For instance, when Donald Sutherland’s character exits the movie fairly early on, he leaves Roy with previously unseen information about the ‘top secret’ mission he’s on and, after this is revealed to both him and the audience, it makes one constantly ‘on the lookout’ for any life threatening situations which could covertly sneak up on the main protagonist and take him... and the audience, by surprise. So, a lot of the suspense comes... not from the actual situations and incidents depicted themselves (although there are some very intense moments, to be fair) but from the expectation that anything or anyone could be about to sabotage that mission and threaten its success in the most terminal fashion.

There’s also... and it’s a very delicate tightrope to walk so, hats off to the director for this... a few action sequences scattered throughout the film and, rather than jar against the tone of the piece, they actually complement and lift the plot rather well. So the ‘space buggy pirates’, not to mention the uneasy tension (due to heightened audience paranoia) of what happens when the crew go to check out a distress signal, make for some interesting moments and hugely enjoyable sequences which don’t damage the overall, less speedily paced nature of the beast.

The score by Max Richter and Lorne Balfe is also quite brilliant, managing to be low key and unobtrusive while still giving you an elevating background hit appropriate to the mostly non-action nature of a lot of the story. I’d love to get hold of this on CD but, as of the time of writing this, it just doesn’t seem to be available. Which is a shame because it’s really cool in the film.

Okay, so far so good. It’s a brilliant film but, for this audience member at least, not an all time classic. Why? Well, the ending just feels a little weak. When Roy finally gets himself to Neptune, by ways I won’t reveal here, the state of his dad and the real issue that is causing the pulses are... well... they’re a bit anticlimactic, to be honest. I did feel kind of short changed after such a sense of foreboding had been kept up throughout the movie and, to add insult to injury, the last ten minutes or so just seemed like Hollywood wanting to please audiences by giving a much nicer ending than any of the characters had a right to expect. So there’s that and it’s why, for me, Ad Astra is a great movie but not a classic. Maybe the ending will grow on me when I watch it again (which I certainly will be doing when I grab the Blu Ray) but, for now, I was a little deflated by the time I got to the final credits.

Ultimately though, if you like science fiction movies then you’re in for a treat with Ad Astra. Definitely go and see this one on as big a screen as possible because it’s fairly spectacular and, the journey to the home stretch is a really great cinematic experience. Like I said earlier, it’s easily one of the best films of the year and you can count on it being in my year end list when the time comes. Go see it.

Mechanic - Resurrection

Kill Life

Mechanic - Resurrection
2016 France/USA Directed by Dennis Gansel
UK cinema release print.

Mechanic Resurrection has less of a useful title than if it had been a sequel to the original Charlie Bronson film The Mechanic, rather than Simon West’s sequel starring Jason Statham. That being said, the title does at least hold some relevance in that an assassin who wishes to retire from the game wants people to think he is dead, I would guess. So there's that.

The footage from the last movie of Statham rolling from his car just as it’s about to explode at the gas station is used as leverage in the early stages of this movie... but not to as good effect as the second bait to lure him in to do a ‘three hit job’ for an 'old acquaintance'. And that’s basically the plot, pretty much all of it, with Jessica Alba as the lure and Michelle Yeoh as the person who falls for that lure, more so, than Statham’s Arthur Bishop character does... thus yanking her friend Bishop into the trap set for him.

This film is a completely different kettle of fish to the first movie, The Mechanic (reviewed here) and the fact that it’s not bound to being a remake from a specific source material, like that first one, is both this movie's strength and weakness. Weakness because the various characters seem a little less detailed and less intricately drawn in this one and, although the script does pay lip service to the Arthur Bishop character by having the lead still be a vinyl junkie, in a brief scene at the start (although the classical music is gone for this second outing), everything seems less ‘set up’ and less credible in terms of back story and that does kind of hurt it a little, I felt.

However, it is also this movie’s strength because, free from the constraints of any source, the film becomes much more explosive and fun in terms of the action and, although many people will possibly see this as a bad thing, it was kind of what I was expecting and what I was hoping for, to be honest. I like Jason Statham as an actor and, also, I believe he’s one of the few modern era performers who can safely be called a genuine movie star in the same way that greats like John Wayne, James Stewart or Cary Grant might be seen as that. True, the actors in question will bring their own fictional baggage with them to the films and Jason Statham is certainly no different in that respect... but it didn't hurt their careers much and neither, I suspect, does it do Statham any harm. So, for me, he joins modern, larger than life movie stars like Stallone, Schwarzenneger and Harrison Ford and, like them, he’s also a pretty darned good actor. So what I’m trying to say here is... without being a remake of something else, the film is free to be a typical Jason Statham action movie and, frankly, that’s just what I wanted to see.

The film starts off strong with a shorthand series of scenes showing us Arthur Bishop’s life direction after the end of the last movie before going into a wonderful and quite intense action sequence with nice little pieces of Mickey Spillane style brutalism, such as  pinning one antagonists hand with a dagger onto the back of another antagonist during a fight. Because of Statham’s experience in these kinds of roles, you believe he can do it and even his ludicrous, unplanned escape route takes on a layer of credibility as the writers and director pull off a stunt sequence that wouldn’t look out of place in a James Bond movie. It’s all good stuff.

Now, the plot is extremely simplistic, just like the first one, perhaps even more so. Statham is honey trapped into doing three impossible kills and to make them look like accidents, for someone in his past with a grudge against him. The second of these kills is extremely obvious but, like all in this movie, incredibly fun to watch and so I really don’t mind that the film is, in almost every way possible, predictable as hell. There are no surprises from the fate of Tommy Lee Jones character, the third on Bishop’s hit list, for example. In fact, the only surprising things about this movie is that a) Jessica Alba’s character didn’t turn out to be a little more complicated than she at first appears and b) the wonderful Michelle Yeoh doesn’t get in on the action stuff herself... which is a shame because I really like her when she does the action stuff. However, Yeoh brings the plausibility of someone a character like Bishop would trust with her to the proceedings because, heck, who’s not going to believe in someone like Michelle Yeoh. She’s a great actress and although she’s criminally underused here, she does bring a lot to the table in terms of getting certain messages across quickly, so a lot of character building stuff can be waived credibly. Jessica Alba is also great but, again, quite underused since she’s a pretty good actress too.

Now, the movie is directed by Dennis Gansel who, as far as I’m concerned, directed one of the few truly great vampire movies of the last ten years, We Are The Night, which I reviewed here. The film doesn’t look nearly as slick or decorative as that earlier film and he seems to have made a conscious decision to frame the shots and have them edited in a more ‘raw and edgy’ way. In fact, the film completely eschews those nice colour palettes and contrasts from scene to scene that were a deft touch on Simon West’s The Mechanic. So it would be true to say, therefore, that Mechanic Resurrection feels a little more Hollywood in its approach to the product but, honestly, for this kind of movie, that doesn’t hurt it either.

Mark Isham returns to score this sequel , which is less jazzy but equally cool with its emphasis on action music to match the on screen shenanigans of the lead character. I only hope the score gets a proper CD release from Lakeshore Records and doesn’t languish in electronic download hell for people who have the necessary virtual space and matching tin ears to be able to enjoy it compressed into such a package. After all, we got two different CD scores for the first movie so... I just hope this comes out in a proper physical medium sometime and, if it does, hopefully not just the kind of vinyl recording that the film's main protagonist would obsess over. As it is in the movie, though... great bit of scoring. I’ve always had a soft spot for Isham and he certainly provides a nice, action oriented soundtrack which is a succinct and appropriate match to the visual style of the film. Some nice work here.

So there you have it. A nice sequel to what was an okay remake. It’s certainly a film I’d watch more than the first and Statham and his costars certainly don’t let him down... including a slightly different kind of characterisation from Tommy Lee Jones than you may have seen him do before. I can see exactly why he took this part. Without giving too much away, I’m hoping that there will be a third ‘Mechanic’ movie before too long and, if they do go ahead with that, that it’ll have room for some of the characters invented for this second installment to return. If you like Jason Statham action movies then there’s no question you should go check this one out. Also, although it’s a sequel, there’s not too much reference made to the previous movie, so you can probably watch this as a stand alone without needing any info from the first one. Any blanks are quite easy to fill in and are all set up for this movie anyway... meaning that the back stories of every other character in this movie and their relationship to Arthur are not referencing the first one. So seriously give Mechanic: Resurrection a try if you like your stunts and action with a veneer of Stathamesque credibility. This one’s a good ‘un.

Jason Bourne

Billion Dollar Bourne

Jason Bourne
2016 USA Directed by Paul Greengrass
UK cinema release print. 

Warning: Very mild spoilers.

Hmmm.... okay, I’ll jump right in here with a quick history of my reaction to the Jason Bourne films. Still haven’t seen the Richard Chamberlain version of The Bourne Identity but it’s in the ‘to watch’ pile and I will get to that soon. Absolutely loved the Matt Damon remake of The Bourne Identity... one of the great spy films to join the classics such as The IPCRESS File (reviewed here), The Quiller Memorandum (reviewed here) and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, as far as I’m concerned. Then Paul Greengrass took over as director for The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum and, although the story content and acting etc was fine, the camera movement and editing made the action sequences barely watchable at best and, certainly, incomprehensible at their worst. There were some redeeming features in Supremacy such as Bourne’s visit to the daughter of two of his past victims but, ultimately, I didn’t think much of these movies other than continuing to love what John Powell was doing with the music in them.

Surprisingly, the Jeremy Renner starring The Bourne Legacy (reviewed here), while having an atrociously simplistic story which the writers seemed to be trying to disguise by giving it as many links to the Matt Damon films as possible, was actually quite entertaining. James Newton Howard’s score was cool too and I expect he might have gotten the gig with that after turning out an incredible pseudo-Bourne score for the Angelina Jolie vehicle Salt (reviewed here), a few years earlier.

And so now we come to Matt Damon’s semi-triumphant return to the Bourne films, along with Greengrass returning as director and.... it’s a mixed bag to be honest. I say semi-triumphant because, although I’m sure it will do the right numbers at the box office, Jason Bourne really doesn’t have too much going for it but, at least in terms of Matt Damon, his performance is worth watching, as always. So at least we have a credible main lead and the film feels like it’s got some kind of authentic link to the Bourne series.  However, even a great actor like Damon needs to have a half decent script to work from and... I really don’t think he got that here. In fact, this feels just as simplistic as The Bourne Legacy in terms of story content and no amount of heavy weight actors brought into this melange of  various, patched together conspiratorial shenanigans going on at the CIA is going to help make this anything which could reach the dizzying heights of the first movie.

We also have the return of Julia Stiles as Nicky Parsons in this, who really helps Damon keep this movie afloat, and as far as I could tell she’s the only other series regular in this one other than the title character. However, the way she's written in this story and her stupidity at attracting attention to herself, while brilliantly played by Stiles, really doesn’t do the character any favours. Well done to Stiles for making it work but, like most of this film, it’s the writing that’s the problem... not the acting.

The heavyweights I was referring to earlier are the three main supporting cast with Tommy Lee Jones as CIA Director Robert Dewey, Vincent Cassel as ‘The Asset’ (aka kick ass Bourne style assassin bad guy) and the relatively young Alicia Vikander as CIA tech guru Heather Lee. All of these people are good but they all serve a bad storyline. Jones is very much in the mould of CIA Directors from the previous films so, we pretty much know what’s coming from him and do we really need to see the CIA playing political games against each other involving fellow agents who are aggressively ‘taken out’ when they start to get in the way... yet again in the Bourne series? Can’t some of them just play as a team, once in a while. Vikander is pretty strong and just about manages to pull off the gravitas needed that not having so much ‘old timer character baggage’ from other films almost hinders. Her character works quite well and it’s someone the audience can root for as a possible ‘non evil’ character most of the time.

Vincent Cassel is always a nasty bad guy but, here, he really could have done with being given more lines, I think. Also, it has to be said, certain revelations about his character further serve to highlight just how amateurish the story is here. We have a back story to everything we already know about the Jason Bourne saga and his links to Treadstone, which is grafted on wholesale for this movie and which brings in Jason Bourne’s father... and what happened to him just before Bourne joined the CIA. When we get a true reveal on just who Cassel is playing in this, very near the end of the movie, it’s actually one of those things which you think of very early and then dismiss because, hey, that would be really lazy story telling, right? Everything seems to connect in this movie just a little too conveniently and way more than you would expect it to in real life... it seems to me. Cassel’s character is pretty much a victim to the cause and effect method of storytelling that a lot of US cinema tends to fall back on, crutch -like, these days and it’s a shame that the writers felt the need to do this, I think.

In terms of the way the camera moves and the editing... well it’s certainly fast paced but it suffers from the “Paul Greengrass special” school of filmmaking in that, a) the camera never stops moving around and b) it’s lots of short shots cut together continuously which, to be honest, can be more than a little disorientating and distracting  from the main action on-screen. I have to put my hand up and say, for once in a Paul Greengrass movie, I wasn’t totally lost in the action sequences and, for 90% of it, I was managing to figure out just what was going on. However, the editing and vertiginous camerawork never lets up and, after a while, you are just left wondering as to which part of the screen the director wants to show you, to be honest.

Composer John Powell returns to the fold with this one and he’s joined by composer David Buckley. Now I don’t know who scored which bits or what the nature of the collaboration was but I did notice how good the score throughout the movie was, when I could hear it above the ‘extra loud and in your face’ sound effects tracks. I’m looking forward to acquiring this asset on CD in a week or so and it will be interesting to hear it properly, away from the pop pop bang bang noises. The Jason Bourne theme is all over the movie but I wasn’t able to detect the Treadstone Assassin motif in this first sitting. I’m sure it must be on there though and this score certainly feels like it belongs in a traditional Jason Bourne film... so I would be interested in knowing who composed which bits.

Other than the score and the acting performances, however, it’s really not a good entry into The Jason Bourne series and, while it is pacey and quite entertaining, it has nothing of the power of the endings in previous Matt Damon entires in the franchise. The end here seems very contrived and, ultimately,  a bit anticlimactic... especially in terms of how Bourne is able to see and hear things for his not so mind blowing twist at the end. Even so, every plot point seems designed to propel the action forward without actually telling you what it really is everybody is playing this game for and I thought it really out of character when Bourne doesn’t run from it all at the start. All in all, if you like the previous Bourne films then I don’t think you’ll have a particularly bad time at the cinema with this one... it’s just not quite reaching that high bar which was set previously. It’s worth a watch if you like action spy movies with not much plot, though... so yeah, if that’s what you’re in to, maybe give Jason Bourne a go. There are a lot of worse things out there in the local cinemas at the moment.

Men In Black 3

Spare MIBs


Men In Black 3 USA  2012
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld
Playing at UK cinemas now

Men In Black 3 is not a roller-coaster ride of a movie.

Nor is it high octane, pulse pounding, thrilling adrenalin rush of a cinematic experience... and if that’s what you’re hoping for I think you may find yourself a little disappointed. And I think that may be the case with much of what the studio thinks is its target audience.

On the other hand, Men In Black 3 is exactly what I was hoping to get from another installment in the franchise...

A decent movie.

A film.

Something with a little story and a warm heart rather than just a whole flying saucer load of mind-numbing set pieces fused together with a storyline tagged on around it. In other words... it’s a nice, pleasant time at the cinema and not a confusing one.

Now I loved the original Men In Black movie when it hit cinemas back in 1997. It had a darkness and a downside to it that gave the movie a certain amount of warm fuzziness while still being a nice bit of a sci-fi adventure yarn. I even watched it once again when it was released on video tape. Men In Black 2, however, was a whole different ball game. It was competent enough and had some nice bits in it but, ultimately, I felt like that one was just a load of set pieces shoved together and tied up with a bow. It wasn’t terrible, how could it be when Rosario Dawson was in it (she is hot!)? Ultimately though, it didn’t provide what I was looking for and I never was tempted enough to look at it again when it hit the home video market.

It’s been ten years since that misfire (I’m sorry, that’s just how I see the second one) but the trailer to MIB3 looked pretty good and I’m always a sucker for time travel stories so I decided to check this one out... besides, my mum loves Will Smith so it was a shoe in I’d have to take her along to it anyway. Like I had a choice.

As I said above, MIB3 has a solid storyline and some genuinely funny moments. The banter between the warm Agent J (Will Smith) and his dead-pan senior partner Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) is all in fine form but after a major set piece or two at the start of the movie... yeah, okay, they put some major set pieces in, it’s not like they didn’t try to turn it into a roller coaster, they just didn’t succeed enough on that level to let it ruin the film okay? Anyway... as I was saying... after a major set piece or two at the start of the movie, Tommy Lee Jones goes missing in action. Quite literally missing. Missing from the present day time/space continuum, in fact, when a psychopathic alien (who reminded me a bit of Charlie Manson, it must be said) escapes from his lunar jail and goes back in time to the launch of the famous moon landing mission of 1969 at Cape Canavrel, killing Agent K and thus changing history. The only one who can remember K is Will Smith’s J... and with the world in peril from marauding alien invaders, J has to go back in time to 1969 to prevent the moon escapee, Boris The Animal, from killing Agent K and thus allowing the older Boris to succeed where he, in the past, failed.

And pretty much the rest of the movie’s short running time is spent with Agent J and a younger version of Agent K, played expertly by Josh Brolin in a performance which is a brilliant echo of Tommy Lee Jones own take on the role, as they do the whole “tracking down alien Men In Black” thing and we see some great moments in American history recreated to boot... including a nice series of moments in Andy Warhol’s factory (Andy Warhol, of course, turning out to be an undercover MIB). There were some nice little nods to the time and place the movie inhabits and I even, at one point, saw a blink and you’ll miss it cameo of a guy dressed up as a Metalunan Mutant from This Island Earth. That one really made me smile.

There’s some stuff towards the end of the movie when the two agents and their friend, who can see all the possible future events of the universe, are put in a situation when you realise there’s a good chance that nobody is going to get a very happy ending out of this one. You already know that the reason Agent K has looked miserable all these years is because of what happened the day that the movie is working itself up to and with both agents taking on a different version of Boris from two crossing time streams at once, the chances of them both surviving don’t look very good... and I’m happy to say that my best guess on this one was wrong. I expected this to be an exit for one of the characters, and not necessarily the one who it’s all set up to be the last exit for... so I was really glad that the movie wasn’t as obvious as I’d expected it to be in this area... although that outcome would have been a pretty bleak proposition. There’s also a bit I didn’t really understand with a little bump/bounceback in time happening with no apparent explanation... can anybody who’s seen the movie please explain that one to me?

I can, however, reveal one tiny thing without actually spoiling your viewing experience of the film. All I’m going to say is that Boris isn’t the only person who shares some simultaneous timeline with a younger version of himself... and I’ll leave it at that. You might have a suspicion from that but I’m guessing you’ll be wrong. There’s a nice little surprise before Agent J returns back to his own time stream. And when I say nice I mean the moment is tragic and dark and explains just why K is not the most cheerful person whenever we see him... and I really can’t say anymore. Suffice it to say that the movie is quite moving towards the end and gives a nice understanding of certain things that happened in the first movie... although I’m going to have to check that first movie again now to ensure that the third movie hasn’t created some glaringly new, timey-wimey continuity errors in the trilogy.

This film is well shot, well acted, has some nice visual effects, some gentle comedy, a villain you really won’t like too much... plus music by Danny Elfman riffing on his original baseline for the series, so what’s not to like on that “score”? It’s not a perfect movie, by any means. I would have liked to see more of Tommy Lee Jones in the movie, since he gets kind of jettisoned from the film about 20 - 30 minutes of the way in and then only comes back for about a minute or two at the end... that was a shame... but it’s not about the cast it’s about the overall effect and Men In Black 3 is a nice, respectful companion piece to the previous two movies and certainly doesn’t let the high standard set in the first one drop any. The 3D in this one wasn’t nearly as distracting either, I would say. Completely pointless and unnecessary, of course, specifically because of that reason... but not distracting.

If Men In Black is your thing then you shouldn’t find yourself disappointed by the third installment... it’s a really solid piece of movie making. Go see it.