(Brad Peyton, 2015)
As a fully-fledged disaster movie made in the era where cgi makes more or less anything possible in cinema, San Andreas seems to take much of its narrative dynamic from gaming.
The dull family dynamics and relationships come from the disaster movies of yore alright - Dwayne Johnson's Rescue Helicopter Pilot is forced to search for his daughter (Alexandra Daddario) with the wife (Carla Gugino) he lost as a result of his inability to deal with the death of another daughter some years before, just as a series of massive quakes rocks California, largely destroying Los Angeles and San Francisco. Daddario is trying to escape the city with a couple of British brothers, injecting a cynical note of teen romance into the story.
Meanwhile, the Seismologist (Paul Giamatti) who has been predicting the Quake is stuck in his CalTech lab, trying to get the word out about the coming disaster through a reporter (Archie Panjabi).
But the way the set-pieces are put together feels like it has come from a computer game. Each scene features a series of ridiculous escalations. Johnson can't just save Gugino from a rooftop L.A. restaurant. The roof has to have collapsed. Flame has to explode through piles of the rubble. A nearby skyscraper has to collapse. A dust cloud must shoot up, almost enveloping them. The flight out must be around a series of skyscrapers, wobbling and shedding concrete like trees shed leaves in autumn.
A later escape out of the San Francisco bay over the oncoming tsunami can't just be as simple and dramatic as just an enormous tsunami. No. It has to involve a cargo liner appearing directly in their path atop that tsunami at just the wrong moment. Escaping the liner can't be enough. Metal shipping containers have to start toppling off the liner all around their tiny boat.
And so on.
Johnson and Gugino are fine - though they say "Oh my God" an awful lot - but it is overlong, under-dramatic and never all that interesting.
Showing posts with label Disaster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disaster. Show all posts
Tuesday, 16 February 2016
Saturday, 24 May 2014
GODZILLA
(Gareth Edwards, 2014)
Though it does finally reveal itself to be a movie about an enormous dinosaur fighting with a pair of colossal monsters in the middle of a city, Godzilla is an uncommonly intelligent, even poetic movie about an enormous dinosaur fighting with a pair of colossal monsters in the middle of a city.
Director Edwards brought a sense of haunting stillness and surprising beauty to his low-budget debut, Monsters, and he manages to replicate some of that here too, despite the massive budget and epic scope of this undertaking. What is perhaps most impressive however, is the way he is able to stay true to some of the spirit of the many Japanese iterations of Godzilla while making a film which is decidedly his own. That isn't to say that this Godzilla is entirely satisfying. Instead, for all its accomplishment, it is an oddly flat film, told at a curious remove.
Edwards borrows a lot from Steven Spielberg, introducing his creatures in stages, hinting and teasing, giving us a series of glimpses of Godzilla long before we see him proper. There is a a great deal of exposition early on, and Edwards handles it well, skilfully introducing scientists Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins, part of an organisation devoted to tracking Godzilla. In the opening scene, they find something else; evidence of the emergence of a prehistoric giant creature which has come from deep underground in the Phillipines. That creature heads for the nearest source of Nuclear radiation , which happens to be a Japanese reactor. Its arrival there causes a meltdown, and is covered up by the Government. A decade later, Edwards introduces a family drama to add a little human interest. The family are whats left of the Brodys. After his wife (Juliette Binoche) dies in the meltdown, and executive at the plant (Bryan Cranston) becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth behind the cover-up. His son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is dragged into this when he travels back to Japan to get his Dad out of jail. Together they discover that the creature, named a MUTO by the organisation, has survived the meltdown and has been feeding on the radiation until, fully grown, it is ready to mate.
It escapes a containment facility and heads across the Pacific towards a female MUTO somewhere in North America, creating havoc in Hawaii and summoning what the scientists believe is an alpha predator. Thus the scene is set as Godzilla sets about tracking and killing the two MUTOs while various human characters attempt to get out of his way or stop him entirely.
Those human characters are a definite weak point here. After the terrific early meltdown scene establishing the tragedy that defines the two Brody men, the stakes never seem quite so high. Instead the film seems to quietly work a theme of nature's absolute indifference to humanity, and it is as if the film itself shares some of that indifference. Edwards focuses, Terrence Malick style, on insects in the background, dogs and wolves in Godzilla's path, the seagulls that cloud around him as he moves.
The people tend to stare dumbly at his enormity when he appears.
While the plot works overtime to allow Ford Brody to trail Godzilla across the pacific, he is never an interesting or compelling character. Part of that is down to Taylor-Johnson, a dull performer, but much of it is because the script gives him nothing but reactions to the situations he finds himself in. His wife (Elizabeth Olsen) is even less corporeal, a faint sketch of a character.
But Edwards still works some magic, engineering a handful of excellent set-pieces, imbuing some of them with that odd poetry he created in Monsters. The sequence where a squad of paratroopers HALO jump into a blacked-out San Francisco, trailing red smoke, is startlingly beautiful.
But soon after, the film focuses, as it must, on that enormous dinosaur, breathing blue flame at the two colossal monsters. And thats fine, and this is probably as good as any film about that could be, in one regard. But it is lacking something. For all that it is commendably devoted to shooting its monsters from a human-eye ground level, it seems to be lacking any humanity.
Though it does finally reveal itself to be a movie about an enormous dinosaur fighting with a pair of colossal monsters in the middle of a city, Godzilla is an uncommonly intelligent, even poetic movie about an enormous dinosaur fighting with a pair of colossal monsters in the middle of a city.
Director Edwards brought a sense of haunting stillness and surprising beauty to his low-budget debut, Monsters, and he manages to replicate some of that here too, despite the massive budget and epic scope of this undertaking. What is perhaps most impressive however, is the way he is able to stay true to some of the spirit of the many Japanese iterations of Godzilla while making a film which is decidedly his own. That isn't to say that this Godzilla is entirely satisfying. Instead, for all its accomplishment, it is an oddly flat film, told at a curious remove.
Edwards borrows a lot from Steven Spielberg, introducing his creatures in stages, hinting and teasing, giving us a series of glimpses of Godzilla long before we see him proper. There is a a great deal of exposition early on, and Edwards handles it well, skilfully introducing scientists Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins, part of an organisation devoted to tracking Godzilla. In the opening scene, they find something else; evidence of the emergence of a prehistoric giant creature which has come from deep underground in the Phillipines. That creature heads for the nearest source of Nuclear radiation , which happens to be a Japanese reactor. Its arrival there causes a meltdown, and is covered up by the Government. A decade later, Edwards introduces a family drama to add a little human interest. The family are whats left of the Brodys. After his wife (Juliette Binoche) dies in the meltdown, and executive at the plant (Bryan Cranston) becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth behind the cover-up. His son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is dragged into this when he travels back to Japan to get his Dad out of jail. Together they discover that the creature, named a MUTO by the organisation, has survived the meltdown and has been feeding on the radiation until, fully grown, it is ready to mate.
It escapes a containment facility and heads across the Pacific towards a female MUTO somewhere in North America, creating havoc in Hawaii and summoning what the scientists believe is an alpha predator. Thus the scene is set as Godzilla sets about tracking and killing the two MUTOs while various human characters attempt to get out of his way or stop him entirely.
Those human characters are a definite weak point here. After the terrific early meltdown scene establishing the tragedy that defines the two Brody men, the stakes never seem quite so high. Instead the film seems to quietly work a theme of nature's absolute indifference to humanity, and it is as if the film itself shares some of that indifference. Edwards focuses, Terrence Malick style, on insects in the background, dogs and wolves in Godzilla's path, the seagulls that cloud around him as he moves.
The people tend to stare dumbly at his enormity when he appears.
While the plot works overtime to allow Ford Brody to trail Godzilla across the pacific, he is never an interesting or compelling character. Part of that is down to Taylor-Johnson, a dull performer, but much of it is because the script gives him nothing but reactions to the situations he finds himself in. His wife (Elizabeth Olsen) is even less corporeal, a faint sketch of a character.
But Edwards still works some magic, engineering a handful of excellent set-pieces, imbuing some of them with that odd poetry he created in Monsters. The sequence where a squad of paratroopers HALO jump into a blacked-out San Francisco, trailing red smoke, is startlingly beautiful.
But soon after, the film focuses, as it must, on that enormous dinosaur, breathing blue flame at the two colossal monsters. And thats fine, and this is probably as good as any film about that could be, in one regard. But it is lacking something. For all that it is commendably devoted to shooting its monsters from a human-eye ground level, it seems to be lacking any humanity.
Monday, 5 May 2014
POMPEII
(Paul W.S. Anderson, 2014)
The influence of video games on Anderson's work is fascinating. It stands to reason, given that his reputation is founded on adaptations of two leading game franchises; Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil. But it is more interesting when he applies video game conventions to genres not traditionally associated with the form. So Pompeii stuffs the first two acts with gladiatorial combat - arena death-matches of the type featured in many games. Anderson shoots action well; eschewing the handheld, hyperactively edited style so common in modern action cinema in favour of nicely composed long take scenes. He spotlights the stunts and the movement, meaning that his fight sequences are always comprehensible and exciting on that basis.
The third act - after the eruption of the volcano and the transformation into a disaster movie - tips the hat to a different sort of game. Here Anderson's characters struggle to escape from the maze of the city of Pompeii as fireballs rain from the sky.
Those characters are problematic for their thinness. There is the hero, the Celt (Kit Harington) a British gladiator brought to Pompeii from the provinces. He falls in love - at smouldering first sight, naturally - with Cassia (Emily Browning), the daughter of a Pompeii businessman (Jared Harris), eager to gain the patronage of the new Caesar, represented by Senator Corvus (Keifer Sutherland), who many years before was responsible for the death of the Celt's parents when he crushed an uprising in Britain. The Celt befriends the badass gladiator Atticus (Adewale Akinuoye-Agbaje) just before everything goes, well, up in smoke.
Anderson is good at cramming events into shortened time-frames, giving his movies an inbuilt clock, another video-game trope. So that last act of Pompeii, filled with people fleeing, fighting, chasing, is tremendous fun. The first two are more workaday. Surprisingly old-fashioned in its approach, the story makes perfunctory attempts at Roman political chicanery before Anderson's genre mash-up spin the wheel settles on a mix of gladiator movie, disaster film and tragic love story. The love story is given short shrift - it's never been a strength of this director - but the other two genres do fine, helped by the impressive, often stunning action scenes.
Harington and Browning look pretty, but neither has much of a character to play. Sutherland hams it up well enough, but Akinuoye-Agbaje more or less steals the movie, with his malevolent leer and fearsome growl. The cgi is impressive once the apocalypse comes, bringing tsunamis, earthquakes and ash-clouds blotting out the sun in it's wake.
The influence of video games on Anderson's work is fascinating. It stands to reason, given that his reputation is founded on adaptations of two leading game franchises; Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil. But it is more interesting when he applies video game conventions to genres not traditionally associated with the form. So Pompeii stuffs the first two acts with gladiatorial combat - arena death-matches of the type featured in many games. Anderson shoots action well; eschewing the handheld, hyperactively edited style so common in modern action cinema in favour of nicely composed long take scenes. He spotlights the stunts and the movement, meaning that his fight sequences are always comprehensible and exciting on that basis.
The third act - after the eruption of the volcano and the transformation into a disaster movie - tips the hat to a different sort of game. Here Anderson's characters struggle to escape from the maze of the city of Pompeii as fireballs rain from the sky.
Those characters are problematic for their thinness. There is the hero, the Celt (Kit Harington) a British gladiator brought to Pompeii from the provinces. He falls in love - at smouldering first sight, naturally - with Cassia (Emily Browning), the daughter of a Pompeii businessman (Jared Harris), eager to gain the patronage of the new Caesar, represented by Senator Corvus (Keifer Sutherland), who many years before was responsible for the death of the Celt's parents when he crushed an uprising in Britain. The Celt befriends the badass gladiator Atticus (Adewale Akinuoye-Agbaje) just before everything goes, well, up in smoke.
Anderson is good at cramming events into shortened time-frames, giving his movies an inbuilt clock, another video-game trope. So that last act of Pompeii, filled with people fleeing, fighting, chasing, is tremendous fun. The first two are more workaday. Surprisingly old-fashioned in its approach, the story makes perfunctory attempts at Roman political chicanery before Anderson's genre mash-up spin the wheel settles on a mix of gladiator movie, disaster film and tragic love story. The love story is given short shrift - it's never been a strength of this director - but the other two genres do fine, helped by the impressive, often stunning action scenes.
Harington and Browning look pretty, but neither has much of a character to play. Sutherland hams it up well enough, but Akinuoye-Agbaje more or less steals the movie, with his malevolent leer and fearsome growl. The cgi is impressive once the apocalypse comes, bringing tsunamis, earthquakes and ash-clouds blotting out the sun in it's wake.
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
UNSTOPPABLE
(Tony Scott, 2010)
Unstoppable is probably Tony Scott's worst film since the risable The Fan, and yet, almost all of what is good about it is down to him.
Based on an actual incident, the film follows the efforts of various railroad workers to halt a driverless, runaway train before it reaches a large population centre where the chemicals amongst it's cargo are likely to cause a deadly accident. Chief amongst those workers are a predictably mismatched pair in the cab of another train on the same line, each with his own, not-all-that-interesting backstory (Denzel Washington and Chris Pine).
The acting is efficient enough, both leads displaying their different brands of starry charisma, but this is thin stuff, using characters as muscles to move the plot jerkily along, giving them the barest possible personality types, and massively over-reliant on tv news for exposition.
What makes it worthwhile is Scott's direction. He takes material which demands extremely repetitive imagery - trains, trains and more trains - and with his usual aggressive editing, he fills the frame with these powerful machines hurtling across beautifully desolate industrial landscapes, all rattling freight carriages and roaring engines. The people - and the story, even - seem almost irrelevant as he layers and builds his shots up into thrilling montages of locomotives crossing the earth, the sense of peril surrounding them never quite as arresting as it might be.
Unstoppable is probably Tony Scott's worst film since the risable The Fan, and yet, almost all of what is good about it is down to him.
Based on an actual incident, the film follows the efforts of various railroad workers to halt a driverless, runaway train before it reaches a large population centre where the chemicals amongst it's cargo are likely to cause a deadly accident. Chief amongst those workers are a predictably mismatched pair in the cab of another train on the same line, each with his own, not-all-that-interesting backstory (Denzel Washington and Chris Pine).
The acting is efficient enough, both leads displaying their different brands of starry charisma, but this is thin stuff, using characters as muscles to move the plot jerkily along, giving them the barest possible personality types, and massively over-reliant on tv news for exposition.
What makes it worthwhile is Scott's direction. He takes material which demands extremely repetitive imagery - trains, trains and more trains - and with his usual aggressive editing, he fills the frame with these powerful machines hurtling across beautifully desolate industrial landscapes, all rattling freight carriages and roaring engines. The people - and the story, even - seem almost irrelevant as he layers and builds his shots up into thrilling montages of locomotives crossing the earth, the sense of peril surrounding them never quite as arresting as it might be.
Saturday, 29 October 2011
CONTAGION
(Steven Soderbergh, 2011)
Taking a particular subgenre of the popular 1970s disaster movie, the pandemic thriller, and thoroughly modernising it, Soderbergh, together with his screenwriter Scott Z Burns, demonstrates again that there are few better filmmakers in America currently making adult entertainments. Contagion is a procedural, a precise account of how a virus spreads through the world, and also an account of how the bodies put in place by the human race identify it, classify it and eventually counter it. But it is also, in it's inimitably Soderberghian, chilly way, an utterly gripping thriller. We see people we like put at risk and tested by this virus, we wonder who it will take next, and the deaths of two major stars tell us early on that nobody is safe. Then we are with the scientists racing to create a vaccine in order to save not one, but millions of lives.
Then there is the fact that it is an epic. Almost casually epic, a globetrotting, international story with a massive cast of speaking parts and at least five separate and equally important narrative threads running simultaneously. And nobody - except perhaps Micahel Mann - captures the real world, "the now" quite as well as Soderbergh does. Each location feels different and distinctive, from Hong Kong to the American Midwest, largely due to Soderbergh's ability to pick up on detail and texture in his environments.
Detail is crucial here; early on the camera lingers an almost subliminal beat longer on certain objects and surfaces until the viewer queasily realises that these are all subject to communal touch; a bowl of peanuts on a bar, a door handle, a handrail on public transport. Later the visceral fear of germs, and by extension of other people, is vividly communicated in the arc following Damon's character, immune to the virus himself but terrified his teenaged daughter might get it.
He is as solid as ever, but each of the stars here dials down the wattage on their starpower in order to slip seamlessly into the impressive ensemble. Jennifer Ehle is perhaps the great standout, but she too is outshone by the film's focal character and protagonist; the virus itself.
Taking a particular subgenre of the popular 1970s disaster movie, the pandemic thriller, and thoroughly modernising it, Soderbergh, together with his screenwriter Scott Z Burns, demonstrates again that there are few better filmmakers in America currently making adult entertainments. Contagion is a procedural, a precise account of how a virus spreads through the world, and also an account of how the bodies put in place by the human race identify it, classify it and eventually counter it. But it is also, in it's inimitably Soderberghian, chilly way, an utterly gripping thriller. We see people we like put at risk and tested by this virus, we wonder who it will take next, and the deaths of two major stars tell us early on that nobody is safe. Then we are with the scientists racing to create a vaccine in order to save not one, but millions of lives.
Then there is the fact that it is an epic. Almost casually epic, a globetrotting, international story with a massive cast of speaking parts and at least five separate and equally important narrative threads running simultaneously. And nobody - except perhaps Micahel Mann - captures the real world, "the now" quite as well as Soderbergh does. Each location feels different and distinctive, from Hong Kong to the American Midwest, largely due to Soderbergh's ability to pick up on detail and texture in his environments.
Detail is crucial here; early on the camera lingers an almost subliminal beat longer on certain objects and surfaces until the viewer queasily realises that these are all subject to communal touch; a bowl of peanuts on a bar, a door handle, a handrail on public transport. Later the visceral fear of germs, and by extension of other people, is vividly communicated in the arc following Damon's character, immune to the virus himself but terrified his teenaged daughter might get it.
He is as solid as ever, but each of the stars here dials down the wattage on their starpower in order to slip seamlessly into the impressive ensemble. Jennifer Ehle is perhaps the great standout, but she too is outshone by the film's focal character and protagonist; the virus itself.
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