(Peter Berg, 2013)
America: Fuck Yeah!
Four heroic Navy SEALs on a recon mission in Afghanistan find themselves caught in open ground by multiple Taliban fighters. Without access to communications and with nowhere to run, they begin a desperate rearguard action, killing dozens of enemy soldiers. But they are whittled down gradually until only one remains...
Reminiscent of Ridley Scott's superior Black Hawk Down, this a a combat movie that sentimentalises the band of brothers at its heart while turning the faceless enemy combatants into little better than 1st person shooter video game cannon fodder. That is, when the enemy is not being identified as evil Taliban leadership, responsible directly for the deaths of US soldiers. Berg isn't interested in the politics or morals of the conflict in Afghanistan, and so he reduces it to a jingoistic claptrap of black and white, good versus evil.
In this case the good are represented by American movie stars: Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster (the standout) play the four SEALs, with Eric Bana their commanding officer. Berg knows what he's doing and the battle scenes here are ferocious, and crucially always maintain some spatial coherence - you know exactly where everybody is in relation to everybody else, despite all the gunfire and explosions.
Documentary footage over the opening credits shows how tough SEAL training is and that should serve as a warning of sorts - these men (literally) jump off two cliffs as part of their retreat, and this film is really as much of a gruelling survival ordeal as it is a War movie. The cast are fine, the script efficient but hideously bombastic - Afghans die rapidly, meaninglessly, one after another. Each American death, meanwhile, is underlined somehow; in slow motion, given a heavy musical backing, crosscut with another event: these men are HEROES, and don't you forget it, son.
It works if you like that sort of thing, I guess.
Showing posts with label Taylor Kitsch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Taylor Kitsch. Show all posts
Thursday, 16 January 2014
Saturday, 25 August 2012
BATTLESHIP
(Peter Berg, 2012)
Aping the peculiar glossy bombast of the blockbuster cinema of Michael Bay, Battleship is a little surprising, proving to be better than anything Bay has made in over a decade. It's still a bloated, sporadically terrible mess of cliches and moments stolen from other films, but there is some wit here and a few capably-delivered action sequences.
Based obviously loosely on the Hasbro board game, the film focuses on Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) a young screw-up with impulse control and maturity issues (we know this because characters mention it repeatedly, cringily foregrounding his character arc for the idiots in the audience) who is forced to join the US Navy by his officer brother (Alexander Skarsgârd) and swiftly finds himself promoted to the role of Weapons Officer on a Destroyer. During an International Wargames gathering off the coast of Hawaii, after he has ruined his career and destroyed his chances of winning the approval of the Admiral father (Liam Neeson) of his girlfriend (Brooklyn Decker), an attack by Alien vessels seal Hopper and his crewmates inside a vast forcefield, rendering them, yes, you guessed it; humanities last hope. What ensues is lots of cgi battles and destruction, together with a couple of neat references to the board game - an aerial shot of the two sides in formation as on the board, and a late sequence when the Navy have to fire blind and anticipate exactly where their technologically superior enemy will be in the ocean.
Meanwhile Hopper's girlfriend Sam is given something to do, finding herself in a crucial location at just the right time, teaming up with a crippled veteran (Gregory Gadson) and a Scientist (Hamish Linklater in the Jeff Goldblum part) to fight some aliens on land.
Added to all this are a few standout sailors (Rihanna and Jesse Plemons) and a revoltingly earnest celebration of ageing US veterans, folded into the generally jingoistic fetishization of the might of the US Military.
The characterisation is primitive, the dialogue at times embarrassing, and the whole thing caked in loud music, from Steve Jablonsky's score to a succession of rock songs by the likes of AC/DC, the Black Keys and Stone Temple Pilots over more or less every scene. The aliens (humanoid but for some Star Trek-style adjustments to cranial architecture and number of fingers) and their technology are almost throwaway in their over-familiarity, an early sequence set during a soccer match features perhaps the worst cinematic example of such I have ever seen, and the cast are almost uniformly wasted.
Still; it is better than any of Bay's Transformers films (which it most obviously resembles) due to Berg's occasional flashes of wit (the alien missiles looking like pegs from the board game, and Kitsch's misunderstanding of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", for instance), his slightly more classical style - not quite so many cuts and slo-mo Money Shots as Bay prefers - and a couple of decent action scenes.
Saturday, 10 March 2012
JOHN CARTER
(Andrew Stanton, 2012)
Pulp - old pulp, real pulp, the kind of thing written by Robert E Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, tales of high adventure and fantastic creatures, full of exotic lands, beautiful women, brave warriors, romance and action - that sort of pulp has been largely absent from cinema for a few decades. Modern cinema is sleeker, slicker, more cynical.
Though pulp still seeps through the cracks occasionally. It's there in the Star Wars films, in Indiana Jones, in Pirates of the Caribbean, even though it is often obscured by contemporary style, suffering from death by a thousand cuts due to modern editing rhythms and buffeted by cgi until its most essential, old-fashioned nature is hard to make out.
Andrew Stanton's John Carter is an admirable, earnest attempt to revive that old-fashioned pulp. As such, it adapts one of the core texts of the genre, Rice Burroughs' "Princess of Mars", the novel which introduced John Carter, Confederate Veteran of the Civil War, and transported him to Mars, where he becomes involved in the disputes between various Martian species, discovers the Martian atmosphere gives him great strength and agility, and falls in love with a Martian Princess.
Stanton adapts much of that surprisingly faithfully, and it is a strange testament to the massive influence Burroughs' books have had upon pop culture that a lot of the material here seems very familiar. That is partly down to the many works that have stolen from Burroughs and partly down to Stanton's classical, old-fashioned storytelling. No hyperactive editing here; he fills the screen with big landscapes and bold imagery, and he takes his time. If John Carter seems to share some DNA with Lucas' Star Wars series, then that is mainly down to their cinematic influences; both are heavily reliant on Lean, Kurosawa and Ford for their epic stateliness, and both take much of their visual grandeur from the costume Epics of the 50s and 60s.
And this film is epic; a sweeping tale which begins in turn of the Century New York, moves to an Arizona populated by Apache, Cavalrymen and ornery miners before it alights on Mars (or "Barsoom" as this film has it). Stanton manages the delicate dance between such a grand narrative and a more intimate, character-based piece throughout.
If that makes John Carter sound a tad overstuffed, well, that may be it's big flaw. It takes on a lot; masses of plot, numerous major characters, and far too many themes for this kind of action spectacle to handle. But it works. The plot means there is an overlong scene or two of dry exposition in the first act, the characters make strong impressions with little screen time (a quality Stanton learned well at Pixar) and the themes are generally nicely-integrated with the story. Only Carter's status as a soldier who fought for the South in the Civil War is glossed over, which in a film full of characters making speeches about freedom and oppression, seems most odd.
It is all, undeniably, a bit of a mess. But what a glorious mess! Stanton understands the appeal of the material, so that there is a genuine sense of wonder to many of the sequences, from Carter discovering the extent of his abilities on Barsoom to the reveal of the Thark's temple. That wonder is crossed with a distinct strangeness; something antiquarian and colonial, perhaps taken from Burroughs, is discernible here in the encounters between Carter and these "primitive" aliens, and even in much of the production design. The action scenes are thrilling and muscular, even beautiful at times - Carter fighting an entire army of Tharks, most notably - and the strong characters give it a compulsively watchable momentum even when the plot is at its most knotty and discursive.
The cast is mainly composed of British class, with James Purefoy, Ciaran Hinds, Samantha Morton, Dominic West and Mark Strong all vivid presences. Taylor Kitsch is perhaps slightly too contemporary for the lead, but he is a star; charismatic and physically beautiful, he delivers especially in the action scenes, and his passion for his leading lady is convincing. That may be because Collins is fantastic here; lovely, fierce, intelligent, she carries much of the emotional weight of the film.
The other standout is Willem Defoe as Tars Tarkas, leader of the Tharks, the tall, green-skinned, four-armed, tusked Apache-Mongol-like alien race who capture and adopt Carter. Defoe - and the animators who brought his character to life - make the alien a proud, complex creature who is the source of much of the film's easy humour. The other source is another cgi alien; Woola, the dog-like animal who bonds with Carter and protects him with almost touching enthusiasm.
Both aliens are good examples of the film's great design; they reference the heritage of John Carter in popular culture - from Frazetta book covers to Marvel Comics - but they integrate that within a coherent, thought-out alien civilisation with a touch of steampunk to its technology and a lot of ancient Rome in its pageantry and costumes. Stanton and cinematographer Daniel Mindel keep the film visually lush and timeless, to match its confident pacing, and Michaell Giacchino provides a beautifully stirring Epic score which binds it all together.
The film's probable commercial failure may mean that the franchise it establishes is never continued, which would be a great shame, for John Carter is an interesting, exciting, fun, soaringly romantic and at times batty old-fashioned Sci-Fi Epic worth a dozen modern summer blockbusters.
Pulp - old pulp, real pulp, the kind of thing written by Robert E Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, tales of high adventure and fantastic creatures, full of exotic lands, beautiful women, brave warriors, romance and action - that sort of pulp has been largely absent from cinema for a few decades. Modern cinema is sleeker, slicker, more cynical.
Though pulp still seeps through the cracks occasionally. It's there in the Star Wars films, in Indiana Jones, in Pirates of the Caribbean, even though it is often obscured by contemporary style, suffering from death by a thousand cuts due to modern editing rhythms and buffeted by cgi until its most essential, old-fashioned nature is hard to make out.
Andrew Stanton's John Carter is an admirable, earnest attempt to revive that old-fashioned pulp. As such, it adapts one of the core texts of the genre, Rice Burroughs' "Princess of Mars", the novel which introduced John Carter, Confederate Veteran of the Civil War, and transported him to Mars, where he becomes involved in the disputes between various Martian species, discovers the Martian atmosphere gives him great strength and agility, and falls in love with a Martian Princess.
Stanton adapts much of that surprisingly faithfully, and it is a strange testament to the massive influence Burroughs' books have had upon pop culture that a lot of the material here seems very familiar. That is partly down to the many works that have stolen from Burroughs and partly down to Stanton's classical, old-fashioned storytelling. No hyperactive editing here; he fills the screen with big landscapes and bold imagery, and he takes his time. If John Carter seems to share some DNA with Lucas' Star Wars series, then that is mainly down to their cinematic influences; both are heavily reliant on Lean, Kurosawa and Ford for their epic stateliness, and both take much of their visual grandeur from the costume Epics of the 50s and 60s.
And this film is epic; a sweeping tale which begins in turn of the Century New York, moves to an Arizona populated by Apache, Cavalrymen and ornery miners before it alights on Mars (or "Barsoom" as this film has it). Stanton manages the delicate dance between such a grand narrative and a more intimate, character-based piece throughout.
If that makes John Carter sound a tad overstuffed, well, that may be it's big flaw. It takes on a lot; masses of plot, numerous major characters, and far too many themes for this kind of action spectacle to handle. But it works. The plot means there is an overlong scene or two of dry exposition in the first act, the characters make strong impressions with little screen time (a quality Stanton learned well at Pixar) and the themes are generally nicely-integrated with the story. Only Carter's status as a soldier who fought for the South in the Civil War is glossed over, which in a film full of characters making speeches about freedom and oppression, seems most odd.
It is all, undeniably, a bit of a mess. But what a glorious mess! Stanton understands the appeal of the material, so that there is a genuine sense of wonder to many of the sequences, from Carter discovering the extent of his abilities on Barsoom to the reveal of the Thark's temple. That wonder is crossed with a distinct strangeness; something antiquarian and colonial, perhaps taken from Burroughs, is discernible here in the encounters between Carter and these "primitive" aliens, and even in much of the production design. The action scenes are thrilling and muscular, even beautiful at times - Carter fighting an entire army of Tharks, most notably - and the strong characters give it a compulsively watchable momentum even when the plot is at its most knotty and discursive.
The cast is mainly composed of British class, with James Purefoy, Ciaran Hinds, Samantha Morton, Dominic West and Mark Strong all vivid presences. Taylor Kitsch is perhaps slightly too contemporary for the lead, but he is a star; charismatic and physically beautiful, he delivers especially in the action scenes, and his passion for his leading lady is convincing. That may be because Collins is fantastic here; lovely, fierce, intelligent, she carries much of the emotional weight of the film.
The other standout is Willem Defoe as Tars Tarkas, leader of the Tharks, the tall, green-skinned, four-armed, tusked Apache-Mongol-like alien race who capture and adopt Carter. Defoe - and the animators who brought his character to life - make the alien a proud, complex creature who is the source of much of the film's easy humour. The other source is another cgi alien; Woola, the dog-like animal who bonds with Carter and protects him with almost touching enthusiasm.
Both aliens are good examples of the film's great design; they reference the heritage of John Carter in popular culture - from Frazetta book covers to Marvel Comics - but they integrate that within a coherent, thought-out alien civilisation with a touch of steampunk to its technology and a lot of ancient Rome in its pageantry and costumes. Stanton and cinematographer Daniel Mindel keep the film visually lush and timeless, to match its confident pacing, and Michaell Giacchino provides a beautifully stirring Epic score which binds it all together.
The film's probable commercial failure may mean that the franchise it establishes is never continued, which would be a great shame, for John Carter is an interesting, exciting, fun, soaringly romantic and at times batty old-fashioned Sci-Fi Epic worth a dozen modern summer blockbusters.
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