MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

(George Miller, 2015)

One viewing of Mad Max: Fury Road won't be enough. There is too much detail, too much crammed into some of George Miller's frames for anybody to take in on first viewing.
This is what action cinema can do, Miller seems to be saying to the many hacks and charlatans who have come to dominate the genre since he made his last Mad Max film in 1985. This is what it can be. And what it can be is a relentless, absurdly beautiful steam train of narrative momentum, with no body fat, moments of incredible spectacle unlike anything in recent cinema, a minimum of exposition or dialogue, character who are defined by their actions, a streak of jet-black wit straight through the middle, and a grotesque edge which makes it almost queasily unforgettable.
Very loosely a sequel, the film picks up Max (Tom Hardy) wandering the post-apocalyptic wasteland, still traumatised by past losses, as he is chased down and captured by a band of white-painted War Boys (whose chant does recall the Duran Duran song "Wild Boys", the video of which was a straight Russell Mulcahy-helmed Mad Max: The Road Warrior rip-off). They take him back to the Citadel, run by Megaton Joe (Hugh Keys-Byrne), a tumorous old warlord kept alive by a breathing apparatus attached to his face, who maintains order by rationing the water he has drilled for underground, keeps a farm of wet nurses to supply mothers milk, grows crops and guarantees obedience from his legions of soldiers through the mythology he has concocted, a mix of suicide bomber Paradise talk and Viking beliefs ("Valhalla" crops up repeatedly) with modern notions and chrome spray-paint.
Max is used as a "blood-bag", reviving ailing War Boy Nux (Nicholas Hoult). Soon he is chained to the hood of a car and hunting down the rogue Furiosa (Charleze Theron) through the wastes as she makes a run for it  in her War Rig (a huge, customised lorry) with Megaton Joe's entire stable of young wives in tow. Soon enough she and Max have made an uneasy truce, both intent on survival, as hordes of Joe's warriors chase them on an armada of vehicles.
Perhaps 15-20 minutes of this film are made up of dialogue, spoken by characters who are not otherwise engaged in violence of one kind or another. The rest is all action. And Miller is a master of action, orchestrating immensely complex sequences featuring dozens of vehicles which are never remotely confusing or incoherent. The audience always knows what is at stake and who is where. Cars flip and explode, ram and jump, actors are flung and shot and catapulted, and you can feel it all, understand why it is happening and how it relates to everything else. This is a terribly rare quality in modern cinema, unfortunately, and it gives every action scene huge impact.
Even the relatively sparing use of cgi is effective - a dust storm early in the pursuit made me wince as it buffeted Max. A three-way fistfight is brilliantly done, reflecting character and personality just as much as it does the preferences of the fight co-ordinator.
Miraculously, none of these action scenes feel remotely pointless or ostentatious. They all advance the story or illustrate character. Just like every one of the thousands of details here, everything feels thought-out and organic.
The cast vanish into these roles. Hardy and Theron share first billing, and if he lacks something of Mel Gibson's raw and volatile star power in the role of Max, he is still magnetic and convincingly desperate and resourceful, and his physicality makes him believable in the action scenes. When he vanishes into the cobalt at night and returns with a blood-splattered face and a bag full of guns, you believe he's been capable of some awful violence. Theron has more of an arc and makes the most of it, making Furiosa a commanding warrior who craves escape. Hoult is almost as good as the War Boy who loses his faith, and the rest of the cast all fit beautifully into this bizarre, somewhat unhinged world, bringing its corners and edges to vivid life.
It looks and sounds amazing, too: cinematographer John Seale came out of retirement for this, and his work is exceptionally vibrant. This is probably the most beautiful action film ever made. Junkie XL's score is thunderous and exciting too.
But really, this is all about George Miller. Always a meter storyteller, at the age of 70 he has surpassed everybody else currently working at this sort of material with what may be the greatest film of his career. This is a glorious film.

YOUNG ADULT

(Jason Reitman, 2011)

Blessed with a Diablo Cody screenplay which is sporadically breathtaking in its ferocity, Young Adult is a beautifully sustained and focused character study. The character at its centre is Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), a 37 year old writer ("author" she insists) of a series of Young Adult novels set in High School who lives what is established is an empty and unrewarding single life in Minneapolis. Divorced and with only her dog for company as she completes the final novel in the cancelled series, Mavis becomes fixated on her high-school flame Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson in another of his series of finely shaded studies of modern masculinity), who has just had a baby with his wife. She returns to her loathed hometown of Mercury, Minneasota, planning to win Buddy back. There she runs into Matt (Patton Oswalt), a self-described "fat geek"who she ignored throughout High School. She only remembers him when she realises he is the "hatecrime guy", referring to an incident where he was beaten with crowbars by some jocks who thought he was gay, breaking his legs and mangling his penis, leaving him with a limp and a cane for life. Now, as a felow outcast, they have common ground, and she confesses her plans to him as she attempts to woo Buddy away from his wife and infant daughter.
Theron is fantastic as Mavis, a truly awful figure who sees her own life through the prism of High School, both her writing and history twisted in her psyche. We hear snatches of her narrative as she writes, its symbiotic relationship with her own life growing as everything becomes more involved and disturbed. Mavis, the "psychotic prom queen bitch" is monumentally selfish, unable to censor herself, hilariously vain, and caught up in a massive self-deception, intent on a fantasy of a life with Buddy, her one true love. She shows no vulnerability whatsoever until the last act, when reality crashes into her life at a (somewhat contrived) social gathering, in the kind of scene that provides a climax of sorts but would never ever happen in reality.
The film gets away with that because Cody and director Reitman have done such an impressive job establishing these characters and the world of Mercury in all its safe, retail-park (in)glory. Buddy is happy in his regular, small life, happy with his sports bar and job in ad sales, while Mavis lies about her own success. The opening ten minutes, following Mavis through her days in Minneapolis, are curiously, perfectly flat - the light is grey and harsh, there is no music, only the dim jabber of the reality tv she keeps on in the background. As soon as she leaves for Mercury, her teen dream reawakened, Teenage Fanclub burst onto the soundtrack, and that town, for all its dull safeness, is portrayed with a warmth and humanity absent from the scenes of the big city. The other characters feel just as well-imagined and true as Mavis and her old boyfriend. Oswalt's Matt is resigned to his life but shows flashes of bitterness, and Mavis' parents offer a glimpse into the banality of her upbringing.
Reitman's direction is nicely judged throughout, sensitive to mood and character interplay, but with a good sense of comic timing too.
But really this is Theron's show, and she makes Mavis a fascinating, flawed monster, all too aware of her own beauty but incapable of enjoying it, or anything. That would be difficult to bear if the film weren't so darkly funny, but it is full of blistering one-liners and quietly agonising social embarrassment, and Theron plays it all with a conviction which only makes it funnier.

PROMETHEUS

(Ridley Scott, 2012)

There are lots of little things - and a few very big things - to admire about Prometheus.
Admire yes, love no.
This is a chilly, downbeat film, it's look dominated by the textures of steel and rock, and love just slides off it's beautiful surface. And it is beautiful. Ridley Scott, for all his flaws as a storyteller, has always had an outstanding ability as a shotmaker, and this film is at times absurdly beautiful, giving him the time and space to create a future world and fill in it's many crucial gee-whizz details. That stuff - the look and design of the ship, the spacesuits, the weaponry and clothing, the technology the characters use casually - is important in science fiction and Scott excels at it.
All of that, together with a patient, unembarrassed way with exposition, makes the first hour or so of Prometheus an involving experience. We witness two archaeologists find some cave paintings on the Isle of Skye which contain a pictogram matching ones they have found from other ancient civilisations across the globe. Then the film jumps forward a few years as they awaken from hypersleep as their ship - with a crew of scientists, doctors and corporate security - arrives at the planet the pictograms mapped for them. They are searching for the origins of life on earth and hoping for answers. What they find is something very different.
These passages suggest this will be a piece of idea-driven, relatively adult sci-fi. And partly, it is. But as it develops it introduces some weak material about Dr Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and her faith, before finally succumbing to it's basest commercial instincts and transforming into a horror film of sorts, with elements of body horror, tentacles in dark corridors and other overly-predictable genre beats you knew were coming.
They are well-mounted as these things go - Scott is too accomplished and experienced a director to mess up those moments - but all the potential and interesting questions of the first act are squandered in the rush for spectacle and excitement. Scott's recent films have all suffered from similar problems - he seems determined to make audience-pleasing movies, no matter how rote and tired that might make them in their dull following of established structures and techniques to assure a narrative is resolved. That's is only exaggerated in a film which starts out seeming distinctive and unusual.
But there are those little things to admire. The cast is splendid; Michael Fassbender steals the film as David, the enigmatic, somewhat smug robot with his own agenda, but Rapace is good in the lead (despite being saddled with a truly awful scene where she weeps over her own ability to bear children), Idris Elba and Charlize Theron do well with underwritten, one-dimensional roles, and English character actors Rafe Spall and Sean Harris are great as the only crew members who react normally (ie. with stark, acknowledged terror) to what they find in the alien pyramid.
Then there is a hammy but effective Guy Pearce, buried under make-up as the Billionaire funding the mission, in what is a surprisingly negative portrayal of a Rupert Murdoch type in a film produced by Murdoch's 20th Century Fox.
The design of the alien structures and creatures is front and centre and though it feels a little second-hand, it mostly works within the look of the film.
The film resonates with a few isolated scenes; Rapace's grisly, visceral self-administered surgery is probably the best passage throughout, though the scenes of Fassbender alone on the ship, watching and imitating Lawrence of Arabia, playing basketball and studying languages, run it close.
The closing scenes, which link with the Alien films and suggest a direct sequel to this film, are less successful. For all its early ambition and overstuffed insistence on a few big ideas, Prometheus isn't quite thrilling or interesting enough to warrant a sequel on it's own merits. But it works as a solid piece of grown-up genre entertainment. Perhaps hoping for anymore in such an expensive mass-market product was unrealistic. If only that first hour or so hadn't suggested that it could be something more..

SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

(Rupert Sanders, 2012)

Considering the whole thing is based on the faulty premise that Kristin Stewart is more beautiful than Charlize Theron, Snow White And The Huntsman isn't half bad.
Oh, it tries to do far too much, turning the Snow White story into a Lord of the Rings-style mini-Epic, full of battles, trolls, witches and rugged landscapes, but its exceptional visual beauty is almost enough to make it worthwhile. Debutant feature director Rupert Sanders has done some stunning work in advertising, and he has the visual chops that suggest he may someday be capable of a great movie. But this isn't it.
His sure, occasionally inspired direction, together with the brilliant, beautiful production design, elevate some scenes to another level. These scenes are generally centred around the quieter moments of discovery, and new worlds revealed; a lakeside village glimpsed through mist, the dark forest aggressively attacking an interloper, and the fairies retreat coming alive at Snow White's approach.
The story is familiar, even if a few details have been altered the better to suit a teen audience. Mainly that means beefing up the role of the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth, easily charming and at home with all the action) while making Snow White (Kristin Stewart, slightly miscast but making do) a more assertively heroic figure. Charlize Theron plainly enjoys the chance to chew some scenery as a wicked Queen, and the gallery of Brits playing the dwarves (Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane, Eddie Marsan, Toby Jones etc) bring some welcome humour to what is largely a grim, angst-ridden experience.
That is partly tonal and partly down to the exuberantly gothic design and the over-abundance of sword battles. Sanders handles the action well - this is a vividly textured and visceral experience throughout - but it all feels a bit predictable and focus-grouped, right down to the climactic rousing speech and final showdown. And there is something missing here where a romance should be - an attraction between hero and heroine is repeatedly suggested but never made explicit, and never quite goes anywhere.
The whole thing feels a little pointless and underwhelming, in fact, for all the time and money that have obviously gone into it. Perhaps it's most interesting aspect is how odd the mix of elements and target markets have made this: it's a battle film, a fairytale, a dark and scary fantasy film aimed squarely at teenaged girls without any romance and with action thrown in for teenaged boys. In short, it's a bit of a mess. Yet consequently, it's never really dull, and is occasionally even quite good.