The Bay

Bay Tripper

The Bay 
2012 USA
Directed by Barry Levinson
Momentum Blu B

Warning: Spoilers on this one but nothing that isn’t already 
foreshadowed quite overtly at the opening of the movie itself.

You know, I really wanted to like The Bay. 

I saw the trailer online, maybe a year ago now, and it looked pretty good to me. And then I waited for what seemed an interminably long time for the film to hit my local cinema. It never did and, I suspect, it probably went straight to video (barring the odd FrightFest screening, I would imagine). When I found out that it had bypassed the cinema I got really angry because the specific trailer I’d seen looked so intriguing and I’m an admirer of “found footage” horror movies when they’re done well. These things should get a cinema release.

After the film hit the home sell-through market, I started getting some pretty mixed quotes and word-of-mouth on it. On the one hand you had the critics saying it was an intelligent horror movie for grown ups, or some such stuff (I’m still not sure if I’ve ever met a grown up but I’m sure one or two must exist somewhere), whilst various comments from people on Twitter and the bloggers who had seen it were more of the opinion that the film was, well, a bit rubbish.

I’m sorry to say, although this does seem to ring true these days when you pitch the majority of critics against bloggers and the general public at large, that the bloggers were right. I can understand why the film never got some kind of wide cinema release in this country (to my knowledge) but, having said that, I don’t want to fall into the obvious trap of blaming an old guard classic Hollywoodland director like Barry Levinson as being someone who would have been best leaving well alone and in the hands of a lower budget, younger film-maker either. Quite frankly this movie, and I may be way off base here in this speculation, looks like it’s been tampered with “after the fact” and that there’s been some “studio intervention” along the line. Maybe not but, well, that’d be my guess anyway.

So the film is about an attack on the coastal town of Cheasapake Bay which is pretty much wiped out by something appearing at first to be a contagion caught from the water... although this is a little murkier in terms of what is actually happening... but I don’t want to give too many plot details away.

The film comes at us with the premise that we are watching “banned but hacked” footage from many surveillance sources which the government has suppressed, and is narrated via Skype by one of the main protagonists... as much as this movie can be said to actually have a main protagonist. It’s a film she’s making to ensure that “the truth is out there” but the modus operandi that worked so well in George A. Romero’s Diary Of The Dead really falls at the first hurdle here.

The truth is, the footage that Levinson has shot and edited is, for the most part, quite sound and interestingly made but the presentation of that footage really works against it in terms of giving us something that is a) credible as found footage and b) actually scary.

Okay, so the first big problem has to be the use of music. If this is a compilation of footage constructed to show the world what is happening, then surely the use of diegetic music which is then continued into several other shots not related to the original shot in question, in other words it’s transformed into non-diegetic sound, would in no way, shape or form find itself in something that is supposed to be some kind of document of events. This is pretty bad in and of itself... why would the character cut the footage in this manner? Things get worse though because, after this happens fairly early on in the film, we then start to get scenes throughout the movie, quite a lot of them in fact, where sinister incidental music has been used.

Seriously?

In a movie posing as, for all intents and purposes, a “found footage” film. I mean, c’mon, I know a lot of documentary makers do this all the time but that’s because documentary film-making is rarely the embodiment of the truth, its the embodiment of a personal agenda. However, the only agenda the fictional character has in this work is to go public with the story. This is not about making people feel uncomfortable or hitting them with atonal shock notes when something scary happens... it’s about getting things out there. This movie has a full blown score... and it blows away all credibility of the movie’s central premise. And the really sad thing here is that the footage Levinson gets is done well enough to be scary on its own without sacrificing your illusion of “point of view”.

Another problem the movie has is that you really don’t need one of the characters giving you voice-over narrative about what’s happening as the events unfold. The dramatis personae is not needed and the footage cut together by itself, and without music, in such away that things build in a more linear fashion, would have been a much better proposition, I reckon, than the film as it’s been edited here. I suspect the studio wanted to make sure everyone in the audience is crystal clear on what is going on but, you know what? They don’t have to be. The footage, cut differently, would have pushed the atmosphere on its own terms and maybe then people would pick up the other stuff on repeat viewings if they liked it well enough.  With the additional narrative asides over the top of it, it just sounds a little like overkill when you really need to just be lulled by the scares on their own terms. Worse, it makes it look like the director didn’t get all the coverage he needed on the footage and that he’s trying to explain the stuff he’s missed or pad it out or something. I don’t think that could actually be the case, though, on a Levinson movie. At least I hope not.

Another annoying thing is the use of constant “flashback footage” scenes which are dotted throughout the running time. I’m all for this approach and can understand why these might have been deemed necessary... but I think they stall the narrative, repeat things you’ve already picked up on and are just generally bad for the movie when structured like this. Perhaps a better way to do it would have been to lump all that footage into one or two chunks and just have one of the characters find it three quarters of the way through the movie and play it all back in one hit then. This tactic worked pretty well in the first [REC] film with all the stuff about the Catholic church and their investigation of the horrors in that film’s milieu... so maybe this is something the studio could have considered?

Again, for all I know, this was not a mis-step from Levinson, who I respect a lot as a director, but possibly some kind of studio interference to help build suspense where it wasn’t needed. I guess if that’s the case we won’t find out for a long time but I wasn’t appreciative of the way this stuff was edited in at regular intervals and I did find myself getting confused by things at some point because of this kind of thing. I think found footage probably needs a fairly linear structure to it if you want it to play out right... or go with larger chunks of overlapping time frames like [REC] 2 maybe?

The saddest thing about The Bay is that the premise is cool, the acting is not terrible (mostly) and the effects and make up are really quite good. Like I said, it’s the way it’s been edited together and presented which really dulls its impact, I feel. It needs a more progressive, escalating rhythm than it has and the attempts at foreshadowing what’s going to happen, only serve to take away any suspense the movie might have had. This is not a film I could, in all conscience, recommend to many people, although I would love to see a better cut and treatment of it attempted at some point. Heck, even a remake might be a good idea because this film has a nice central premise (clichéd but nice) and would have been brilliant as, say, a third movie in The X Files franchise. Unfortunately, the film isn’t scary and the fake found footage feels exactly like what it is... a fake. And nobody likes it when you fake it, people!

Contagion

Bugs N’ Kisses

Contagion
2011 USA/United Arab Emirates
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Warner Brothers Blu Ray B 

Warning: Spoilers slowly mutating and spreading 
throughout this review as you read it.

Okay, so Contagion was a movie I really wanted to see when it came out in cinemas at the end of 2011 but I was already well into my 3-4 month Christmas preparations by then so I just couldn’t claw back any time to get out and see this one. I forgot about it after that, in all honesty, but when I saw a copy of the 2 disc Blu Ray/DVD edition in my local exchange shop going for a fiver, I finally remembered I’d wanted to see this one.

It’s interesting because, at the time it came out, I don’t remember this one being particularly marketed on the strength of the director and, considering it’s got a very big cast of ‘movie star’ actors like Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslett, Lawrence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law and Elliot Gould in it, it’s no wonder that the movie was kinda sold on its cast rather than any of the non-acting crew. In fact, because there are no credits at the start of the film, I managed to go all the way through the movie without knowing who directed it... although I did pick up right from the outset that the way this movie was shot was definitely something above average. I’d just assumed it was an old Hollywood director from the 60s and 70s come out of retirement to get that kind of ensemble piece going... but now that I know it’s Soderbergh and compare it to the last film I saw by him at the cinema, Side Effects (reviewed here), it all makes sense now.

Contagion is, for the most part, a quite impressive beast of a movie. It manages to look and feel epic in scope without really becoming too bloated by its own ambitions, although the second half of the movie did drag just a little in some places... but for the most part, especially in the first half, I was absolutely riveted.

Since I hadn’t known who the director was before I watched it, my main attraction for actually giving some time to this “virus movie” (yeah, it’s Outbreak without the monkey, but that’s okay) was actually Gwyneth Paltrow, who is an actress I seem to rate a lot higher than most people do. I rarely watch the kinds of films she’s in so I was looking forward to seeing what she was like in this one but, unfortunately, it turns out that she doesn’t make it through maybe even five minutes of the movie before dying from the virus she’s contracted on the day before the opening scene. There are some scenes with her later on in the movie where Soderbergh cleverly uses standard film footage and then freezes it at specific moments as a metaphor for the long distance security cam footage of this character that Kate Winslett’s character is reviewing simultaneous to this... but for the most part her quick death and the subsequent death of her son while Matt Damon is away having to deal with her dying in hospital, is merely used to make an opening point.

Matt Damon is not the main protagonist of this movie though... or, to put it another way... Matt Damon is one among many main protagonists throughout the film (as indicated by the actors playing them in the cast above) and as a result, no person stays as the focus of the film for very long. It’s also a film about the way characters can drop out of the narrative when you least want them too and it all meshes together to present an experience which is very much about a disease and the effects that disease has on every one (whether they have contracted the disease or not) and so, for instance, Kate Winslett’s World Health Organisation employee who is working for Lawrence Fishburne becomes this film’s Marion Crane character (Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho) as the story strands you are following with her character come to an end when she ends up being a customer in one of the big triage sites she has set up to deal with the onslaught of the virus. Her death works really well and, although you obviously have some warning of the end coming with her character, the slight shock value is not really deadened all that much by the inevitability of her situation.

However, in some scenes, this tactic about the film being about the effects of a disease rather than the people, backfires somewhat when the characters are maybe a little too fully explored than necessary (which is why I believe the second half of the movie loses it just a little) and while it’s very interesting and brilliant to explore just how Lawrence Fishburne’s character manages to get himself into trouble with the government just by showing a little empathy or the way in which Marion Cottilard’s character is kidnapped and used as a bargaining chip specifically because of her relationship with the World Health Organisation... or even how Jude Law’s unsympathetic (for the most part and dependent on your view of homeopathy and greed) blogger gets taken down by the CIA, I think we didn’t really need to have such closure on the ends of these mini stories because they detract from the “virus sweeping everyone along in its wake” kind of sensibility which a lot of the rest of the movie has in spades.

Actually, Lawrence Fishburne has to get an extra mention from me because he has been given some of the best lines (the dialogue is very 1970s “Hollywood crisp” in some sequences) and because his character is just so righteous and sympathetic that you would always want to be fighting in his corner. He is portrayed as a boss who actually does care about his workers and their personal physical and mental health as much as the jobs they need to carry out for him.

I said I knew right away that this movie had been directed by someone special. Well there’s at least two interesting things going on with this movie which I think I’ve got Soderbergh pegged on now. One is the way in which the colours go from very neutral to quite colourful (especially in the sequences with W.H.O workers in their more natural office environments, which are usually accompanied by some bright warm yellows and oranges) as opposed to the washed out greys and blues of the rest of the film and then switch back again from scene to scene. Even a bright green used to desaturate the feel of the shot at the start looks very drab because, as you probably know, green lighting usually kills off or neutralises flesh tones and this is used to give the usually glowing Gwyneth Paltrow a real visual sense of being someone who is feeling run down which, coupled with her excellent acting, works really well, of course.

The other great thing Soderbergh does is to have the camera lingering on little details in the shots... which is a tactic I’ve seen him use before to highlight certain details but which, in this movie, is used almost specifically to allow the audience to reflect on how something might be carrying the killer virus that is the main subject of the film. A folder left on a desk, for example, suddenly makes us think twice after the owner has walked off and we stay at the desk with a file. Or the way in which, instead of following Matt Damon and his daughter out of the hospital environment, our camera eye stays behind to linger and watch the door to the outside world slowly shutting, to make us think of the possible consequences of Matt Damon maybe being a carrier of the infection. That kind of thing is done at suitable intervals and it all raises this movie up and gives it a certain lift and entertainment value where another director might have made less of a point of it.

My only real complaint about the film, other than it trying to bring too much closure on certain scenes (the Stockholm Syndrome style reaction of Marion Cottilard towards the end after she has escaped and then goes back to warn her prior captors is something which stretched credibility just a little and which I could honestly have done without), is the score... which is quite wonderful in it’s own right as a score by Soderbergh regular Cliff Martinez but which seems to give us a little too much of a high in some scenes, where it deviates from it’s quiet, sinister tone into something more like techno dance in certain sequences. It’s a valid way of scoring the scenes in which it does this, I think,  but I kept asking myself if I should have been tapping my feet when everyone was fighting for their lives against a killer bug. It maybe works more appropriately in Italian giallo or horror movies than it did here but, still, it managed not to stretch things too far, maybe, and all in all it’s something I’d like to hear away from the movie if I get a chance. So that can’t be bad.

The ending scene was a slight disappointment, perhaps, only because you knew how this film was going to end from the first shot. The movie catalogues the number of days the virus has been active and we start the opening of the movie on Day Two and carry on from there... so it’s really not rocket science to figure out that with such an important moment remaining undisclosed, we will flash back to Day One for the finale and it certainly doesn’t play badly. Just might have been nice to be a little less predictable there, maybe.

So, anyway, my verdict for this movie is very much that it’s a film which is an impressive piece of screen art. It takes what is ostensibly a big name, Hollywood style cast and manages to pitch them against each other in the service of the story and main messages rather than use them as performances to just hang big movie moments on. This is a film which is put together as a creative and expressive piece, as much as a film like this could be, with the kinds of funding modern movies need and I was really pleased to have seen it. Definitely worth your time if you like big disaster movies or Soderbergh movies in general.