(J.J. Abrams, 2015)
I am one of Generation Star Wars.
Seeing the first two films in a double-bill around 1982 was a formative event in my childhood and, lame and corny though it sounds, helped to turn me into the person I am today. I accept the value of the myth created by George Lucas, I understand how it has shaped and turned popular culture, and in some ways, I've been waiting for this film for thirty-odd years. I know I brought a few metric tons of baggage into the cinema with me when I went to see The Force Awakens.
With that said, this is a good piece of genre entertainment, not a great one. The narrative is a bit of a mess, but so many other elements are excellent that they offer no little compensation. The story focuses on the search for a vanished Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), a quest which involves both sides of a conflict in a galaxy now overseen by a Republic. Those sides are the Resistance, led by Leia (Carrie Fisher), now a General; and the First Order, an Empire-worshipping army led by Supreme Commander Snoke (voiced by Andy Serkis) whose leadership includes a new version of the Darth Vader-Grand Moff Tarkin duo in Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Commander Nux (Domhnall Gleeson). That suggests one of the issues with this film: it has a karaoke feel to it, with almost every single element recalling or referring to one from the original trilogy.
Take the heroes: Rey (Daisy Ridley) is a scavenger who we first encounter alone and shiftless on a desert planet, just like Luke at the start of Star Wars. Finn (John Boyega) is a scrapper who makes one decision after another and winds up up to his neck in the Resistance, despite starting the film as a Stormtrooper. Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) is a cocksure, witty X-Wing Pilot, seemingly blustering and improvising his way through sticky situations, just like Han Solo when we first encountered him.
Speaking of Han Solo (Harrison Ford), he and Chewbacca show up too, going about their roguish smuggling business and drawn back into a conflict centred around the Force, just like they were in Star Wars.
Not only that; there is basically a new Death Star. There is a climactic light sabre duel. There is an X-Wing dogfight with Tie Fighters. There is a snowy planet. There is a cantina scene, complete with odd music. There is a wise old alien who knows more than she lets on and dispenses advice, informed by her awareness of the Force. There is the death of an old, mentor character at the hands of a younger character, who was once close to him.
Abrams takes Star Wars itself as a sub-sub-genre; sci-fi by way of space opera, and as all that quotation and repetition suggests, he is extremely faithful to the conventions of that sub-sub-genre. Perhaps too much so, in that this film is never really surprising, with even its twists reminiscent of twists from the original trilogy. But then a massive part of the pleasure here is that this film feels like Star Wars in a way none of the prequels really did.
And then there are the virtues that Abrams brings: he has always been good on character, and the characters here are fascinating. Take Kylo Ren's volatile brattishness (he is just the way Anakin Skywalker should have been in the prequels), soulfully played by Adam Driver. Or Daisy Ridley playing Rey and her gradual awakening to who and what she may be (accusations that her character is a "Mary Sue" seem ignorant of the "hidden Prince" trend which has been popular in the fantasy genre for decades, and of which she seems a prime example) as a frightening and then exhilarating journey. John Boyega's Finn, meanwhile, is the most entertaining of the three, finding himself while wisecracking and double-taking the whole time. The older characters, meanwhile, show up just like old friends, the changes in them moving and amusing in equal measure. Harrison Ford in particular seems to be having a good time as Solo, and he manages to play a few difficult moments with a lot of emotion and wit.
Abrams other chief strengths are aesthetic - his films are usually incredibly pacy, and The Force Awakens whips along throughout its two hour twenty running time, never really pausing for breath. That is useful, when the story is as messy and occasionally stupid as this one is. Another compensation is the visceral physicality of his storytelling. There have never been moments in Star Wars films like some of the shots here - Tie Fighters appearing against the sun, Storm Troopers waiting in a shuddering drop-ship.
Above all, Abrams knows how to make his films fun. The Force Awakens is stuffed with gags, great action beats, nice character moments and rich detail, and it is entertaining from start to finish, with a few passages which have resonance and emotion throbbing through them. It also sets up Rian Johnson's Episode VIII in a manner which suggests it has a great chance of becoming another Empire Strikes Back. Lets hope so. For now, The Force Awakens is a definitive statement - Star Wars is back, and it's good again. Whew.
Showing posts with label Oscar Isaac. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oscar Isaac. Show all posts
Sunday, 20 December 2015
Tuesday, 27 January 2015
EX MACHINA
(Alex Garland, 2015)
It's not a criticism of Ex Machina to say it resembles an extremely good episode of The Outer Limits stretched to feature length. In fact, it may be a compliment.
This provocative piece of science fiction, filled with ideas and founded around three strong characters makes for an intense, unsettling experience.
Domhnail Gleeson is Caleb, a coder at a hugely successful search engine company who wins a workplace lottery to spend a week at the isolated, beautiful estate of the reclusive founder-owner-genius Nathan (Oscar Isaac). There he discovers that Nathan has created a robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander), and he wants Caleb to perform a turing test on it through conversation.
Writer-director and former novelist Garland has structured his debut like a novel; it is split, with onscreen titles pages, into days and once during each day Caleb has a conversation with Ava. Afterwards he hangs out with the Bro-like Nathan (who gets drunk late at night, and alternates detox and boxing a punchbag in the mornings), becoming increasingly disturbed and suspicious about his methodology and motivations. This may have something to do with the fact that he might in fact be falling in love with Ava, who is worryingly beautiful, and even seems to be flirting with him.
Gleeson and Isaac are brilliantly cast here, with the former's jumpy anxiety a fine contrast to the cocky intensity of the latter. Isaac gets the best speeches and the most interesting depths, and much of this film plays like a theatrical two-hander - intense exchanges and arguments between intelligent individuals about abstract ideas. Their dynamic is perfect; Isaac penetrating, patronising and deliberately cool. Gleeson struggling to retain any composure.
Vikander's Ava then, comes out of left field. First seen in silhouette, she makes a lovely electronic whirring noise as she moves. But she seems more and more human with each scene, though Vikander never loses the odd, alien quality she gives the character - there in the way she holds herself, the way she turns her head. She seems to fall for Caleb just as much as he has fallen for her, but the film is full of dire warnings of the consequences for her creation: early on, Caleb equates Nathan with a God (Nathan's deliberate (?) misremembering of this moment is a quiet comic highlight) , and later, Nathan speculates that one day A.Is will view humans as we regard fossils on the plains of Africa - dumb apes and their clumsy tools. All of this and the growing tension between the three characters (together with Nathan's silent maid, Kyoko) makes for a growing sense of unease. Garland's cinematographer, Rob Hardy, is a vital contributor here - he shoots Nathan's house-cum-research facility with long, muted tracking shots down corridors, plenty of oblique angles on Ava, observed and aware, in her room, the nearby vastness of the green mountainsides and waterfalls emphasising the isolation of these characters as their drama plays out.
And it is a drama which has a great ending that makes perfect sense and seems inevitable, in retrospect. As if nothing else could have happened, it could have gone no other way. That's what's in the eyes of the three principals in the climactic moments: This is how it always had to be.
Garland should have a hell of a career ahead of him.
It's not a criticism of Ex Machina to say it resembles an extremely good episode of The Outer Limits stretched to feature length. In fact, it may be a compliment.
This provocative piece of science fiction, filled with ideas and founded around three strong characters makes for an intense, unsettling experience.
Domhnail Gleeson is Caleb, a coder at a hugely successful search engine company who wins a workplace lottery to spend a week at the isolated, beautiful estate of the reclusive founder-owner-genius Nathan (Oscar Isaac). There he discovers that Nathan has created a robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander), and he wants Caleb to perform a turing test on it through conversation.
Writer-director and former novelist Garland has structured his debut like a novel; it is split, with onscreen titles pages, into days and once during each day Caleb has a conversation with Ava. Afterwards he hangs out with the Bro-like Nathan (who gets drunk late at night, and alternates detox and boxing a punchbag in the mornings), becoming increasingly disturbed and suspicious about his methodology and motivations. This may have something to do with the fact that he might in fact be falling in love with Ava, who is worryingly beautiful, and even seems to be flirting with him.
Gleeson and Isaac are brilliantly cast here, with the former's jumpy anxiety a fine contrast to the cocky intensity of the latter. Isaac gets the best speeches and the most interesting depths, and much of this film plays like a theatrical two-hander - intense exchanges and arguments between intelligent individuals about abstract ideas. Their dynamic is perfect; Isaac penetrating, patronising and deliberately cool. Gleeson struggling to retain any composure.
Vikander's Ava then, comes out of left field. First seen in silhouette, she makes a lovely electronic whirring noise as she moves. But she seems more and more human with each scene, though Vikander never loses the odd, alien quality she gives the character - there in the way she holds herself, the way she turns her head. She seems to fall for Caleb just as much as he has fallen for her, but the film is full of dire warnings of the consequences for her creation: early on, Caleb equates Nathan with a God (Nathan's deliberate (?) misremembering of this moment is a quiet comic highlight) , and later, Nathan speculates that one day A.Is will view humans as we regard fossils on the plains of Africa - dumb apes and their clumsy tools. All of this and the growing tension between the three characters (together with Nathan's silent maid, Kyoko) makes for a growing sense of unease. Garland's cinematographer, Rob Hardy, is a vital contributor here - he shoots Nathan's house-cum-research facility with long, muted tracking shots down corridors, plenty of oblique angles on Ava, observed and aware, in her room, the nearby vastness of the green mountainsides and waterfalls emphasising the isolation of these characters as their drama plays out.
And it is a drama which has a great ending that makes perfect sense and seems inevitable, in retrospect. As if nothing else could have happened, it could have gone no other way. That's what's in the eyes of the three principals in the climactic moments: This is how it always had to be.
Garland should have a hell of a career ahead of him.
Saturday, 1 February 2014
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS
(Joel & Ethan Coen, 2013)
Great filmmakers - great artists, in fact, be they novelists, playwrights, comedians, poets - have the ability to capture how it feels to be alive. The Coen Brothers absolutely possess this ability. It gets forgotten, almost, lost in the rush to praise their brilliant screenplays, beautiful visual sense and their storytelling talent. What the mainstream brands as "quirky" is their incredible ability to combine comedy and drama so that certain scenes and passages in their best work play out. Half the audience will be laughing at the deadpan wit, the beautifully observed characters, the other half sit in silence, appreciating the human drama on display. Sometimes of course, they lean more in one direction than the other. There are the outright comedies, like Raising Arizona or Intolerable Cruelty. And the dramas: No Country for Old Men or Millers Crossing, say. But it is never simple. Anton Chigurgh in No Country for Old Men is as funny as any creation in the Coens' filmography for all that he is a terrifying character in a mostly serious film. There is pathos in Raising Arizona, despite its Tex Avery comic invention.
What never changes are those moments of truth: what it is to be alive, captured in an instant, an image, a beat. Songwriters and singers do that too, which is one of the subjects of Inside Llewyn Davis. A character study of the titular figure, a struggling folk-singer in '60s Greenwich Village, played with world-weary cynicism and muted sadness by Oscar Isaac, it is a classic Coens mix of comedy and drama. Llewyn is on the downslope of a career that never really went anywhere, and he only truly realises that during the course of the story, appalled as he is by what passes for folk music around him.
His life is a ruin. He sleeps on the couches of friends, many of whom he doesn't even seem to like or respect, has no money to buy himself a coat despite the fact that it's winter, and doesn't plan for the future. His sister's suggestion that he give up music and return to life as a merchant seaman is met with the words "Just exist?"
His closest friends are Jim (Justin Timberlake) and Jean (Carey Mulligan), a folk duo. Jean is pregnant, possibly by Llewyn, and her every word in his direction positively drips venom. It becomes apparent that he uses people, and though he is never warm or nice, his essential humanity, the loneliness of his situation and his effortless capacity for self-destruction, does make him sympathetic.
A long, surreal road trip to Canada alongside a loquacious hipster (John Goodman) and his laconic driver (Garrett Hedlund) is Llewyn's breaking point, and perhaps features the film's most beautiful and haunting sequences, as Bruno Delbonnel's exquisitely soft and dank cinematography captures several breathtaking scenes of nocturnal driving; snow drifting across highways, cities glimpsed off in the night.
The music is great, the cast perfect, the clockwork collapse of Llewyn's hopes and dreams hilarious and gruelling in equal measure.
Great filmmakers - great artists, in fact, be they novelists, playwrights, comedians, poets - have the ability to capture how it feels to be alive. The Coen Brothers absolutely possess this ability. It gets forgotten, almost, lost in the rush to praise their brilliant screenplays, beautiful visual sense and their storytelling talent. What the mainstream brands as "quirky" is their incredible ability to combine comedy and drama so that certain scenes and passages in their best work play out. Half the audience will be laughing at the deadpan wit, the beautifully observed characters, the other half sit in silence, appreciating the human drama on display. Sometimes of course, they lean more in one direction than the other. There are the outright comedies, like Raising Arizona or Intolerable Cruelty. And the dramas: No Country for Old Men or Millers Crossing, say. But it is never simple. Anton Chigurgh in No Country for Old Men is as funny as any creation in the Coens' filmography for all that he is a terrifying character in a mostly serious film. There is pathos in Raising Arizona, despite its Tex Avery comic invention.
What never changes are those moments of truth: what it is to be alive, captured in an instant, an image, a beat. Songwriters and singers do that too, which is one of the subjects of Inside Llewyn Davis. A character study of the titular figure, a struggling folk-singer in '60s Greenwich Village, played with world-weary cynicism and muted sadness by Oscar Isaac, it is a classic Coens mix of comedy and drama. Llewyn is on the downslope of a career that never really went anywhere, and he only truly realises that during the course of the story, appalled as he is by what passes for folk music around him.
His life is a ruin. He sleeps on the couches of friends, many of whom he doesn't even seem to like or respect, has no money to buy himself a coat despite the fact that it's winter, and doesn't plan for the future. His sister's suggestion that he give up music and return to life as a merchant seaman is met with the words "Just exist?"
His closest friends are Jim (Justin Timberlake) and Jean (Carey Mulligan), a folk duo. Jean is pregnant, possibly by Llewyn, and her every word in his direction positively drips venom. It becomes apparent that he uses people, and though he is never warm or nice, his essential humanity, the loneliness of his situation and his effortless capacity for self-destruction, does make him sympathetic.
A long, surreal road trip to Canada alongside a loquacious hipster (John Goodman) and his laconic driver (Garrett Hedlund) is Llewyn's breaking point, and perhaps features the film's most beautiful and haunting sequences, as Bruno Delbonnel's exquisitely soft and dank cinematography captures several breathtaking scenes of nocturnal driving; snow drifting across highways, cities glimpsed off in the night.
The music is great, the cast perfect, the clockwork collapse of Llewyn's hopes and dreams hilarious and gruelling in equal measure.
Tuesday, 26 November 2013
10 YEARS
(Jamie Linden, 2012)
Gathering together a genuinely impressive cast for his debut as writer-director, Linden tells a loose, modest, at times extremely charming story in the same vein as The Big Chill and The Return of The Secausus Seven and Beautiful Girls, returning a bunch of old friends to their hometown for a Highschool Reunion a decade on and observing the ensuing emotional revelations and collisions with a gentle, affectionate eye.
In doing so, he goes for broad types, and so we have Chris Pratt, stealing most of the laughs as the ex hellraiser and bully, now somewhat gone to seed as the suburban father of two, Justin Long and Max Minghella as the ex-Geeks still in love with the beauty queen (Lynn Collins), Brian Geraghty bringing his new wife who is shocked to discover that he acted like a black guy throughout Highschool, while most of the emotional ballast is carried by Oscar Isaac as the rock star still in love with the one who got away (Kate Mara) and Channing Tatum, who has not seen his first love (Rosario Dawson) since their traumatic split ten years before.
There are lovely moments here of universal humanity; a few big laughs and a couple of good musical sequences. But Linden always seems more comfortable with the romcom elements; and the film comes most vividly to life during the scenes between the excellent Isaac and Mara. The moment when he sings his big hit single for karaoke at a late night dive bar (which she has never heard) and she realises it is about her is beautifully acted by Mara. The cast are the films real glory, lending it a classy finish which it perhaps does not deserve.
Gathering together a genuinely impressive cast for his debut as writer-director, Linden tells a loose, modest, at times extremely charming story in the same vein as The Big Chill and The Return of The Secausus Seven and Beautiful Girls, returning a bunch of old friends to their hometown for a Highschool Reunion a decade on and observing the ensuing emotional revelations and collisions with a gentle, affectionate eye.
In doing so, he goes for broad types, and so we have Chris Pratt, stealing most of the laughs as the ex hellraiser and bully, now somewhat gone to seed as the suburban father of two, Justin Long and Max Minghella as the ex-Geeks still in love with the beauty queen (Lynn Collins), Brian Geraghty bringing his new wife who is shocked to discover that he acted like a black guy throughout Highschool, while most of the emotional ballast is carried by Oscar Isaac as the rock star still in love with the one who got away (Kate Mara) and Channing Tatum, who has not seen his first love (Rosario Dawson) since their traumatic split ten years before.
There are lovely moments here of universal humanity; a few big laughs and a couple of good musical sequences. But Linden always seems more comfortable with the romcom elements; and the film comes most vividly to life during the scenes between the excellent Isaac and Mara. The moment when he sings his big hit single for karaoke at a late night dive bar (which she has never heard) and she realises it is about her is beautifully acted by Mara. The cast are the films real glory, lending it a classy finish which it perhaps does not deserve.
Tuesday, 1 January 2013
ROBIN HOOD
(Ridley Scott, 2010)
While there is an unmistakeable whiff of something very much like contractual obligation about Robin Hood, that does not mean it is without its pleasures. It is that rare beast, a Summer Blockbuster aimed mostly at grown-ups. As such its extremely wordy - the machinations detailed in the opening act in order to set up the plot are nothing if not torturous, as Dukes plot with Kings who betray Barons and double-cross cousins against the backdrop of Anglo-French tension, political infighting and taxation disputes. All this happens while we are still getting to know the principals, Robin Longstride, a Northern Archer campaigning in France with King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston, tearing lumps of ham off with his bare hands) , and Marion Locksley (Cate Blanchett), an independent war widow who runs the lands owned by her infirm father-in-law (Max Von Sydow). They eventually meet after much complication, and finally Robin learns who he is and what his destiny must be. Strangely, considering its title, this is not really a "Robin Hood" film.
It ends just as Robin and his Merry (more bawdy, in this case) Men become outlaws, pursued by the Sheriff of Nottingham (an underused Matthew MacFadyen) and enemy to King John (Oscar Isaac, terrifically loathsome throughout) and living at one with nature in Sherwood Forest.
Before that it feels almost as if Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland had in mind a different story altogether, and decided to link it with the Robin Hood legend just because they could.
The Robin Hood film it most resembles is Robin and Marian, Richard Lester's superb 1976 elegy for youth, love and heroism lost. That comparison does this film no favours, but it does borrow some of the gritty textures and much of the material with Richard Lionheart in France. Bizarrely it yokes all that to a plot centred around the Magna carta, recasting Robin as a more outright freedom fighter than most narratives do, and throwing in a massive battle on a beach for its climax.
Despite being about 45 minutes too long, it just about works. Scott understands this sort of Epic filmmaking, and nobody visualises it quite like him - this is a film full of casually beautiful shots and sequences, and cinematographer John Mathieson does some staggering work. There are battles and banquets, hissable villains aplenty and dashing heroism, and an incredibly classy cast in even the smallest roles, from Mark Strong as the main villain to William Hurt as a sympathetic court advisor.
But this sort of thing really rests upon the leads; and Crowe and Blanchett make an extremely convincing and likeable couple. Crowe can do this sort of macho hero role in his sleep, and though his accent is all over the British Isles, he is one of the only movie stars we have who has true star quality and actual acting ability, and he combines them here. He and Blanchett - that rarity, a leading lady around his age - have significant chemistry, and she is just as powerful and commanding as he is.
Even when all the mayhem around them is clattering awkwardly along, an obviously impersonal corporate product and something of a mess from a director capable of so much more, the leads keep the focus intimate and real, and the film benefits massively from that.
While there is an unmistakeable whiff of something very much like contractual obligation about Robin Hood, that does not mean it is without its pleasures. It is that rare beast, a Summer Blockbuster aimed mostly at grown-ups. As such its extremely wordy - the machinations detailed in the opening act in order to set up the plot are nothing if not torturous, as Dukes plot with Kings who betray Barons and double-cross cousins against the backdrop of Anglo-French tension, political infighting and taxation disputes. All this happens while we are still getting to know the principals, Robin Longstride, a Northern Archer campaigning in France with King Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston, tearing lumps of ham off with his bare hands) , and Marion Locksley (Cate Blanchett), an independent war widow who runs the lands owned by her infirm father-in-law (Max Von Sydow). They eventually meet after much complication, and finally Robin learns who he is and what his destiny must be. Strangely, considering its title, this is not really a "Robin Hood" film.
It ends just as Robin and his Merry (more bawdy, in this case) Men become outlaws, pursued by the Sheriff of Nottingham (an underused Matthew MacFadyen) and enemy to King John (Oscar Isaac, terrifically loathsome throughout) and living at one with nature in Sherwood Forest.
Before that it feels almost as if Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland had in mind a different story altogether, and decided to link it with the Robin Hood legend just because they could.
The Robin Hood film it most resembles is Robin and Marian, Richard Lester's superb 1976 elegy for youth, love and heroism lost. That comparison does this film no favours, but it does borrow some of the gritty textures and much of the material with Richard Lionheart in France. Bizarrely it yokes all that to a plot centred around the Magna carta, recasting Robin as a more outright freedom fighter than most narratives do, and throwing in a massive battle on a beach for its climax.
Despite being about 45 minutes too long, it just about works. Scott understands this sort of Epic filmmaking, and nobody visualises it quite like him - this is a film full of casually beautiful shots and sequences, and cinematographer John Mathieson does some staggering work. There are battles and banquets, hissable villains aplenty and dashing heroism, and an incredibly classy cast in even the smallest roles, from Mark Strong as the main villain to William Hurt as a sympathetic court advisor.
But this sort of thing really rests upon the leads; and Crowe and Blanchett make an extremely convincing and likeable couple. Crowe can do this sort of macho hero role in his sleep, and though his accent is all over the British Isles, he is one of the only movie stars we have who has true star quality and actual acting ability, and he combines them here. He and Blanchett - that rarity, a leading lady around his age - have significant chemistry, and she is just as powerful and commanding as he is.
Even when all the mayhem around them is clattering awkwardly along, an obviously impersonal corporate product and something of a mess from a director capable of so much more, the leads keep the focus intimate and real, and the film benefits massively from that.
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