Serenity

I aim to misbehave.

Serenity is the movie that continued Joss Whedon’s stunning Science Fiction/Western Firefly. It doesn’t fall short of that series.

[Note: the following review will have SPOILERs.]

Admittedly, the transition from television series to movie is not a perfect one. Besides the alterations done to the world’s and characters’ backstory, the change in format from successive forty minute segments to a single two hour block requires a vast shift in pacing and in focus. Here, we have a far faster pace that frequently explodes into violence and often delves into darkness. Of course, all the strength and mounting emotional destruction of the movie is still offset by Whedon’s omnipresent humor, here manifesting itself in countless one liners and fantastic reaction lines. One particular choice bit near the beginning has the ship plummeting down to the planet below when Mal tells Wash to just get us on the ground, to which Wash responds: That part’ll happen pretty definitely. Still, The laidback, horses and towns under the hot sun feel of Firefly that brought out the Western elements is largely absent, swapped out for a greater focus on the epic and the Science Fictional.

Along with the aforementioned changes comes the shift in focus away from the ensemble cast and towards Mal’s character. Some of the others, like Wash, still manage to define themselves in an iconic scene or two without taking much screen time. Others, like Jayne, never get to do a great deal but are still a notable presence. But some, such as Kaylee, end up becoming part of the background; her role in the movie is pining after Simon and just about nothing else. Furthermore, the shift pushes some unresolved questions from Firefly into the abyss. Mal and Inara get a few small interactions but make no ultimate progress. Book, meanwhile, responds to Mal’s you have to tell me about [your past] sometime with No, I don’t, which, when one considers his brutal death not long after, rather shuts the lid on our ever knowing.

But while I might wish we could have a few more stories in the world, I certainly don’t mean to cast aspersions on the power of this one. In two hours, Whedon takes River’s storyline and manages to fully develop it and her in a fashion that, even if it’s not completely consistent with the hints we received in the show, is nonetheless satisfying and resplendent with awesomely choreographed action. It’s Mal’s development, though, that makes Serenity truly excellent. Here we finally see the exploration of evolution of Mal’s philosophy and character, and we see it in stark contrast to the Alliance’s Operative that pursues him to slay River.

In his pursuit of Mal, the Operative does great evil. This is not a subjective determination necessitated by nothing but the camera’s choosing to follow Mal, rather than the Operative, around. No, the Operative owns up to his evil. In fact, it defines him. When Mal accuses him of killing the innocent, the Operative proudly, determinedly says: I do [murder children]. If I have to.

The Operative is fighting because he believes in something, because he believes in a better world […] without sin, and he will commit any crime to reach that world. Of course, he is stained in the process. The Operative knows this. His and the Alliance’s morality is black and white, but it is not a black and white so selfishly twisted as to color their own actions white. The Operative will have no place in the promised land he brings about; his role, rather, is to create it by destroying those foes, like Mal, that stand in its way.

Mal, needless to say, is not the black that the Operative thinks him. He cares deeply about his crew and ship, and, as we saw demonstrated innumerable times throughout the series, will put his life on the line to save the innocent. But neither is he white on some alternative spectrum that the Operative fails to see.  Mal had his morality, once. In the first episode of the show (confusingly enough also entitled Serenity), we saw the last vestiges of his faith in man die in the Battle of Serenity Valley, die when free men failed to fight their oppressors and, overmatched, bowed before them.

Since, Mal has been a rogue and a smuggler, capable of identifying evil and loving to prick it and save the little man from it but knowing he can do nothing against it. As he says: War’s long done. We’re all just folk now. And he has committed crimes of his own. His code allows any actions needed against those that stand in his way and don’t have the luck of falling into his few protected categories. In Serenity, we first witness him in a heist. When things go wrong, when the Reavers storm the town, he finds himself with a choice: he can save the loot or save an innocent man. He keeps the loot and gives the man a mercy killing.

In Serenity, Mal is forced out of subsistence and back into the larger conflict. He is forced to, as Abigail Nussbaum discusses in her piece “Oh Captain, My Captain: MalReynolds, Anti-Anti-Hero,” become a force for moral good in an amoral universe. At no point does he regain his faith in men or in grand causes. But the Operative’s relentless hounding, the Operative’s slaughtering of all those associated with Mal and all those associated with them, the Alliance’s crimes and refusal to let anything stand before them or stand untouched and unmanipulated by them, force Mal to take a stand against them, even if his stand is more one against evil than one directly for good. This ability – the ability to be a force for right, even without direct guidance as to what it might be – was espoused by Shepherd Book throughout Firefly. And, through Book is sadly almost absent from Serenity, he does get to crystalize that view in the movie, telling Mal: I don't care what you believe in, just believe in it.

Mal comes to stand opposite the Operative and the Alliance, but the axis he opposes them on is not the black/white or good/evil that they operate upon; it is, rather, that of freedom/oppression. The Alliance has taken the political independence of the worlds. As we saw in Firefly, its reach is ever expanding, deeper and deeper into space, limiting and meddling on every world. But its reach is not just political. The Operative speaks of a world without sin, and the Alliance has taken steps to achieve that world. On Miranda, they pumped gasses into the atmosphere to render the population docile, to strip them of their aggression. As the report says: The people here stopped fighting. […] There's 30 million people here, and they all just let themselves die. Those that didn’t die went mad with rage and became the Reavers.

It is this kind of control, the control that takes people’s very emotions and humanity from them, that Mal is against. It is, ultimately, the idea that people can be progressed beyond themselves. As he says, the Alliance holds the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. At the movie’s climax, once Mal has beaten the Operative and restrained him, Mal broadcasts the knowledge of what the Alliance did on Miranda. Hell, I’m going to grant your greatest wish, Mal tells the Operative before showing him the footage. I’m going to show you a world without sin. There is, indeed, no sin amidst the corpses on Miranda and no humanity either. Mal is fighting for man as they are, not for man as they might someday be twisted into being.

Though the freedom/oppression battle waged here also comes to, by the end, seemingly coincide with our conventional definitions of good/evil, it is a mistake to limit its impact to that of that axis and to try and shoehorn all that Mal is into the role of white knight. The darkness we see in Mal’s character in the movie’s opening is not banished with his shift from survivor to warrior. It is no coincidence that Mal’s first words after his conversation with the Operative that forces him to accept his new role are, Get these bodies together […] I want them laid out on the nose of our ship. It is immediately after his transformation that Mal engages in his darkest acts. He disguises himself as a Reaver, takes on the guise of ultimate evil to fight the Alliance’s oppression and desecrates the corpses of those who died for him in order to do it. In fact, in his role as warrior, Mal abandons his previous code as a survivor. By going toe to toe with the alliance, he puts his crew, the family he would do anything to protect, into mortal danger and ultimately kills Wash (and, if you’ll allow me to unprofessionally fixate on that for a moment, what a death scene it is!).

Of course, the eternal championing of freedom, and freedom uncomplicated by good/evil morality, bears with it a few problems. Chief among them is the issue that, for all a world without sin may be an inhuman proposition, there are terrors yet inherent in sin that Mal seems to be removing the safeguards from, as Abigail Nussbaum (well isn’t this turning into the essay for referencing her?) writes in her “Well, Maybe You Can Take That Part ofthe Sky.” I am not, ultimately, sure that Whedon is as unaware of this problem as Nussbaum seems to suppose. Many of the problems seen in Firefly were caused by relatively small time criminals and crime lords just as on the run from the Alliance as Mal. Admittedly, Mal gives the poor folk oppressed by this lower level of evil little thought in Serenity, but I wonder if that might be more a product of Whedon’s compression of his idea into two hours rather than dozens of episodes than it is a product of Whedon’s actual vision. Still, giving Whedon points for what I think he might have later wrote is growing untenable.

And, within, the bounds of what we do see in Serenity, I found myself incredulous at how Whedon dodged the consequences of Mal’s actions. After Mal’s heroic defiance of authority and acceptance of the death that would likely result, Whedon grabs that seemingly inevitable result back off the table, leaving, despite a few cursory words about a possibility to the contrary, the Alliance’s vengeance one forestalled by them all suddenly turning into very reasonable chaps who are quite aware when they are beaten. Arguing that, if we are just heroic enough, we may get spared the consequences of our heroism seems to be a questionable proposition.

Such gaps and questions leave one wishing Whedon had gotten more time to play with the universe of Firefly. But what he has given us is mighty indeed. Serenity is an excellent Science Fiction movie, one that brims with wit, boasts a plethora of simply awesome sequences, and explores and evolves the philosophy of character of the enigmatic and fascinating Mal.

Skyfall

Skyfall acts like a parody of James Bond, one created and enacted by actors both struggling to keep a straight face amidst its (surely, surely it must be intentional?) zaniness while striving to point out the espionage genre’s obsolescence and misogyny.

[Warning: SPOILERS]

Fittingly enough, the movie's main villain is irrelevance. The present in the changing, and the past might not be as golden as once thought. This is a new age, and the, as one obstructionist character puts it, “golden days of espionage” are over. In the wake of an intelligence disaster, the leaked identities of numerous undercover agents, MI6 is now to be held accountable to the British public. In defiance to this, Judi Dench’s M gives a speech before Parliament in which she admits that MI6 has no more obvious enemies, but doesn’t everyone still feel all afraid? After all, she says, they have to be wary of foes from “the shadows.” This nonsensical bit of vague fear mongering is, in the eyes of the movie’s characters, vindicated by the villain’s picking that moment to barge in.

But I’m not quite sure it’s as much of a win as MI6 seems to think, for the villain – Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva, who primarily shows his ickiness through acting gay – is actually only pissed because he’s a former MI6 agent, left to die by M. Besides showing how MI6 evidently really doesn’t have anyone left to fight besides those villains they themselves create, this all does bring up where exactly Silva gets his army of henchmen. He’s not seeking any sort of power or promising them anything. It’s his personal vengeance, yet dozens of unidentified folk seem to have nothing better to do than to die for him. Well, anyway, their dying for him and all does seem to convince the whole world that MI6 is totally awesome and beyond reproach, and its former detractors abruptly turn around and lick its boots. They then promptly forget about the whole security breach thing.

Even once we’ve decided that secret agents are still the way to go, there’s still the question (providing you have spent the last few decades under a rock) of whether Bond is our man; 007 is, here, battling his own obsolescence. Bond has, after all, been at this whole secret agent thing for a while, and the grievous injury and potentially more scarring still emotional damage he suffers after the film’s opening knock him out of the action for quite some time. When Bond returns, M tells him he has to take a battery of standard tests before he can return to service. The audience snickers at this routine waste of time. Bond then fails the tests, each and every one of them, and does so miserably. Perhaps, then, Bond really is done?

But no. Once the film actually kicks into gear, Bond is once more at the peak of physical fitness, perfectly performing the myriad tasks we were told he was simply unfit for. We don’t even get the requisite The Dark Knight Rises-style training back to form sequence. Towards the movie’s end, Bond displays his perfect marksmanship, and another character makes a witty remark, as if asking the audience if they expected anything less. The response, “”Why yes I did, I saw the opening of the film, didn’t you?” is not considered.

Once our obsolete hero is back in the field to fight for his obsolete agency, we are treated to the action at the film’s heart, and what should have been pulse pounding is instead something best described as silliness peppered with explosions. The violence in a Bond film is, of course, supposed to be over the top, but here it is all so over the top that it has no tension at all. The opening, which occurs before we’re given a single clue as to why we’ve got to see Bond’s target dead so desperately, includes just about every kind of chase imaginable before Bond ends up attempting to defeat his foe with a crane located on a train car. The entire thing happens so fast that the audience can barely register that we’ve switched tactics – car! motorcycle! foot! train! crane! (and seriously, what was he even trying to do with the crane? crush the guy?) – and each ends before it can be developed, like they aren’t actual contests between Bond and the villain in their own right but rather stages in an elaborately choreographed dance routine that swings them from the crowded streets of Foreign City to the wreckage of a train that inexplicably keeps going, passengers just about calm, despite the carnage (crowds not reacting in any way to deadly violence might even be called the film’s dominant motif).

It’s not just the opening that is pushed to eleven and utterly toothless; the entire plot is a collection of nonsensical decisions and advancements, coupled together by absolutely bizarre actions and sequences. Bond’s pursuit of Silva is a host of set pieces tied together by each’s drive to out-exotic the next. Silva’s super villain-esque, nigh-omniscient ability to plan and manipulate MI6 is made possible not only by his insider knowledge but also by his ability to hack; Skyfall treats computers as a magic box capable of exploding the world if prodded the wrong way. Of course, it doesn’t help that everyone is incredibly gullible. Silva, after all, obtained his island (every villain has to have an island) by telling the inhabitants that there was a chemical leak. They all fled, and no one ever thought to check up on the situation.

The pseudo logic continues, relentless. Now, with Silva’s after them and so able to penetrate MI6’s security, Bond and M decide to flee London and hide out in the country to face Silva alone, evidently concluding that the backup of the rest of the agency is something only a sucker would take advantage of. When Silva attacks Bond’s ancestral home (they thought that the ultimate hideout for some unfathomable reason), M and the gruff and unnecessary gamekeeper escape through a secret tunnel. That deposits them a scant dozen feet from the front door. They take off across the open field. Silva follows. Bond follows, too… and inexplicably ends up struggling to cross a frozen lake that nobody else encountered. Silva comes up behind him, even though he was just in front of him. Bond escapes by plunging himself into freezing water and arrives just in time to save M. Who then dies anyway. Whoo!

But it’s not just over the top violence that’s a Bond tradition: there’s also the misogyny to relish. In their haste to write panegyrics, critics have focused on M and declared this film a departure from Bond’s usual sexism. Focusing just on M, that’s fair enough. But the film has two other female characters. The first is Naomie Harris’ Eve Moneypenny, who begins as a field agent, eventually realizes she’s not cut out for the front lines, and becomes Bond’s secretary.

And Moneypenny’s arc’s a beautiful thing when compared to that enjoyed by Bérénice Lim Marlohe’s Sévérine. Silva saved Sévérine from the sex trade, and he owns her now. She’s terrified of him, and Bond seems to offer an escape. He makes good on that offer by breaking into her room, waiting for her to shower, pointing out how she’s defenseless, and then having hot (consensual?) sex with her. This sets the stage for the film’s most horrific scene. Having realized Bond’s affection for her, and desirous of taunting the captured Bond over his poor scores on the marksmanship test given by MI6, Silva ties Sévérine up and places a shot glass on her head. While his guards watch, Silva hands Bond a pistol and says that they’ll take turns trying to shoot the glass from her head. Bond shoots high. Silva gets the glass off her head by shooting her. Bond watches, impassively, and he and Silva continue their antagonism. For these old MI6 hands, it seems, espionage is a game for powerful men that uses women for advantage and sport and then slaughters them. Bond escapes moments later, but he never so much as mentions Sévérine’s name.

Skyfall is at its most persuasive when it argues for its own irrelevancy, and the disconnected pyrotechnics it tries to distract us with afterwards do little to make us forget. I came in expecting entertainment and at least some moderate level of coherency. I got neither.

The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods starts with two layers. On the first, we have a group of five students heading out to a distant relative’s cabin in the woods for a vacation; they ignore the absurdly obvious and ominous warning signs on the way and soon find themselves ruthlessly hunted down by what the second layer refers to as a family of Redneck Torture Zombies. That second layer’s composed of men in suites, watching everything that happens in the cabin on innumerable screens, twisting the vacationers into horror movie archetypes, and triggering the various beasties at their disposal, of which the Rednecks were just one. The scientists, in short, are running a real live torture film where the blades actually cut and the dead stay down (or rise back up to tear out your throat), and the vacationers are trapped in the hell that the scientists create.

It’s a damn intriguing premise, one ripe for subversion, and Whedon and Goddard don’t let it off lightly. Being five relatively normal human beings, the vacationers don’t conform immediately to the stupidities expected of them by horror clichés. So the scientists force them to conform, manipulating them with chemicals to force them into their roles. One scene has a character proposing that they split up, a suggestion that’s roundly shot down by his fellows – until gas rises from the floorboards, and they all see the great merits of cowering alone in their rooms until the beasties come for them. The writers’ targets aren’t confined to those present at the filming. Scenes of the scientists laughing and being delighted by the vacationers’ plight and slaughter disgust us, yet we are watching in the same way as they are, just at one more remove. The delightfully referential stew of dozens and dozens of horror clichés that the writers’ have created allows them to go wild towards the end, culminating in one particularly spectacular scene where a hallway full of armed soldiers is decimated by an endless swarm of different creatures.

The fact that there was a handy button or two in the scientists’ installation for the main characters to push in order to unleash hell on earth, however, leads us to my first big problem with The Cabin in the Woods: it is an idiot plot through and through. Without exception, every one of the movie’s developments, twists, and turns relies entirely on the characters being too stupid to properly get out of bed in the morning or tie their shoes. For the vacationers being slaughtered by Rednecks, this makes sense. They’ve been shoved into that role, after all, and the silliness of it all is part of the charm.

But the scientists are just as stupid. Hell, so far as we can tell, the entire planet’s on that infantile level of intelligence. Why is there no real protocol for a beastie breakout in the scientists’ installation? In fact, why do the beasties’ elevators lead to the installation itself at all? Why are the unused beasties kept perfectly ready to go, while we are on the subject? Why can’t any of the scientists properly lock a door? And so on and so forth. The incompetence of every single character makes the first layer’s intentional predictability hold true for the entire movie. When you know that everyone’s a fool, there’s no question of their survival, and you are just sitting back and waiting for their grisly death. Not that it’s unpleasant waiting, mind you; the spectacle’s still there. But the tension has all gone out of it.

The scientists aren’t playing sadists just for kicks; they’re in it to save the world. The Old Gods or Ancient Ones beneath the earth demand these sacrifices. If the blood ever stops, and if the game fails to be played out exactly as these eldritch deities command, they will rise and end the earth. Interestingly enough, therefore, the scientists might even be the good guys. And the vacationers, or at least the two that survive the cabin and are determined to do whatever they must to stay alive, might even be called the villains.

It’s an interesting inversion, and it’s also one that is less examined than an extra’s shirt buttons. The movie seems to simply go along with their decision to stay alive at the cost of the entire human race. To be fair, the pothead does mumble generic crap about how we need to tear down the system and so on. But there’s no argument for why presented. You might be able to make a very interesting movie that argues you don’t have an obligation to give your life to a system that oppresses you (by, say, living out horror movie clichés upon your flesh), but Whedon and Goddard don’t argue the point; they simply assume that everyone will go along with them. Well, uh, no. Why would the world be a better place, again, if it ceased to exist? You're going to have to spell that one out for me.

The Cabin in the Woods plays an interesting game with our expectations of horror movies, and it uses those expectations and clichés to create a fair few great scenes. Ultimately, however, it falls for one of the genre’s worst clichés – the abject stupidity of every character. Furthermore, the film’s thematic heart and ending are both left utterly unsubstantiated and unexplored. In the end, I felt rather like a master comedian had started to tell a joke, proceeded through an extremely obvious but nonetheless elaborate set up, and then had wandered off stage before finishing up the punch line.

I Am Number Four [Movie Review]

I Am Number Four the movie is based on a 2010 genre debut of the same name, nominally written by "Pittacus Lore" and implicated in the whole James Frey debacle of recent history, though I do believe that it predates the remarked upon incident. Perhaps, if you read that book, the events here make sense, but the movie itself is nonsensical. I Am Number Four is clichéd, but the real insult is that it's so rushed and slapdash that it can't even manage to execute its clichés. This is a mess from start to finish, generic and confusing, riddled with plot holes and thoroughly forgettable.

Let's start with the back story. The planet Lorien was destroyed by the evil Mogadorians, and the nine remaining Loriens have fled to Earth (because). The Loriens are exactly like people, only they have weird growths on their legs. Each of them is numbered, one through nine. Each of them is guarded by a warrior from their home world, which might make you think that there are really eighteen Loriens, but…there aren't. Because. Those warrior guardians are armed with knives, because guns are for pussies, and none of the nine know any of the others. The Mogadorians – who look just like people, only with tattoos on their heads, gills (though they're not aquatic), and snake teeth – are hunting down the nine in numerical order (because), and the nine are the only ones who can stop the Magodorians (because). The Magodorians, by the way, are, we are explicitly told, not there to "colonize" new worlds but merely to "decimate" them. Oh. Sounds like a worthy goal.

The overarching story, like the individual scenes, is set up purely for effect. If the Magodorians just want the end of the human race, there doesn't seem to be much stopping them from just bombarding us and the Loriens from orbit, but, no, they're going to come down and fight their knife-wielding foes with ineffective fisher price laser guns. This philosophy is reflected in their every encounter. In the opening, we see Number Three die when Magodorians surround his wooden shack in the woods. Instead of, say, burning it down around him while he sleeps, they decide to knock on his door, go hide behind some trees, and then go on a merry chase through the woods to hunt him down. Sensible.

Alright, maybe I'm not being fair to I Am Number Four. A passion for spectacle's not exactly a penchant for pedophilia, and so what if the back story isn't that well considered. It's perfectly possible to have a good science fiction film that focuses on the characters...

In case you couldn't tell, that last paragraph was a set up for me mercilessly bashing the characters and plot of the picture. I Am Number Four ruins whatever promise it might have had (if its back story had, hypothetically, given it any) by jerking the plot this way and that to ram in ever illogical cliché of the last few years that it can. The characters here are archetypes, often archetypes taken to ludicrous levels, and the movie makes no attempt to elaborate on them in any way shape or form, trusting to the audience's familiarity with the concepts to provide all the necessary emotion and soul. Frankly, almost every bit of character interaction makes the viewer feel like they've missed half an hour of film in which any of this was set up.

Number Four – alias John Smith (clever…) – is determined to go to school, even though his protector Henri thinks this is a bad idea. Seriously, the alien wants to go to high school. In case you were thinking that I Am Number Four's high school would differentiate itself, the movie swiftly disabuses you of that notion. Moments after walking in, our character meets: A. the quirky love interest; B. the bullies, complete with obligatory prior relationship to love interest, shoving people into lockers, and police chief fathers; and C. the nerdy but smart kid who the bullies pick on.

Let's look into our quirky love interest first. She's defined by liking photography. These are the scenes in which she and John interact: she guides John to his locker; he sees her during recess; he meets up with her in town and they have dinner; they meet up again and discuss how they can think of nothing but each other and could never contemplate separating. It's mind blowing. It's like the movie knows how obvious the romance is, so it doesn't even bother trying to set it up. When John predictably tells Henri that he's not moving again because he loves Sarah, it took me a few seconds to realize that he wasn't being sarcastic the whole thing was so by the numbers.

Tying into the Quirky Love Interest is I Am Number Four's treatment of technology. This is a movie set in the 21^st century, and iphone product placements won't let you forget that. And yet this is the 21^st century as portrayed by someone with a very, very vague grasp of technology. The tone is set when Quirky Love Interest is berated for posting pictures of people in school online without the subject's express permission. Sorry, Mr. Stock Principle, but if that was illegal most of facebook would be felons about now. More glaring by far is the amount of attention that I Am Number Four thinks people pay to random high school web sites. John's picture being on Quirky Love Interest's site is a massive security breach, but the true horror comes when there's a video of him reacting to Number Three's death up on some random conspiracy theorist's site. Within a day, the bad guys have found the video and picked up on his location. But then again, maybe I shouldn't be expecting technological sophistication from a movie in which Henri takes John's picture, searches the internet for matches using that picture, and then deletes all those matches at the touch of a button.

But technology's not important in a Science Fiction movie. What's important is a good group of bullies. These guys are a crude parody of overdone movie bullies everywhere, right down to throwing a football at the nerdy kid's head (in keeping with the rest of its style, I Am Number Four differentiates that scene from the norm by making it even more over the top). But that's nothing to what's to come. Just before John Smith and his Quirky Love Interest declare their eternal love, they're at a carnival. Unbeknownst to them, the bullies spy on them the entire time with night vision goggles – then the bullies leap out of the shrubbery and attack en masse. Unsurprisingly, John beats them up, but this is one of those moments where a villain's plan is so colossally bizarre that it's almost better for them that it got foiled. Was a group of high school kids seriously using military hardware to carry out an assault followed by a kidnapping? What?

Finally there's the smart kid. First off, the kid's generic, but I doubt that will come as much of a surprise by now. More bemusing is the fact that the writers of the film evidently confused science geek with science fiction geek. Now, mind you, I like Science Fiction. I've even got this whole blog here to prove it. But it's not science, and it alone is not an indicator of intelligence. Sam is not good in school, and he shows no hints of intelligence. He just believes in UFOs. Fabulous, someone give this kid a Nobel Prize.

But enough about the characters. They're all as set up as they're going to get. Let's get to the plot. The movie, determined to work in every overdone idea possible, then shows us John struggling to control his newfound powers. In a better movie, I might call this an overused metaphor of strange abilities and adolescence, but we don't even reach that point here; one scene of jumping around and our boy John is a master. Whoop de doo.

Now, I won't spoil the story, but John and company are overpowered enough to turn the Mogadorians into standard action movie fodder, and all further danger comes from them conspicuously forgetting about their powers. Various events make no sense, various characters act completely out of character, the awful combination of school drama and alien invasion is unsubtly brought to a climax with the final battle taking place in the school, there's one bizarrely horrific scene, etc. The important thing is that the movie reaches an ending that promises a sequel and answers none of its own questions, and, more importantly, that the audience can now politely get up, leave the theater, and then go do something worthwhile with their time (like, say, write a scathing review).

So was the movie completely worthless? No, there's one scene where the genocidal aliens make faces at kids in a car and freak them out. That was pretty funny, and I'm sure it'll be on youtube before too long. Besides that, yeah, it's a total waste of time.

I went into I Am Number Four knowing nothing about it but that it had something to do with the lovable Mr. Frey. I came out with my non-expectations thoroughly shattered. This movie is cliché, shallow, stuffed with poor characterization and plotting, and bleeding from a dozen dozen holes. Avoid.

Little Fockers [Movie Review]

Little Fockers concludes with a “remix” song of the first two movies. The jokes that were fairly amusing before are reproduced out of context and with painfully obvious set ups. If one were feeling uncharitable, they could compare that unentertaining remix with the entire movie, perhaps ending with a statement like “but at least the remix was shorter.”

Such statements would be completely wrong. Little Fockers is a masterpiece. A marvel of cinema that needs to be seen by all.

Of course, there are some comparisons with prior movies. The first of these is the inappropriateness of every title since the opening film. The first film in the Fockers Trilogy, Meet the Parents, shows Gaylord “Greg” Focker meeting his fiancée's parents for the first time (and no, I did not put the quote marks on the wrong word). Jack Brynes, a retired CIA agent who now gets his kicks from being an overprotective and intrusive parent, mistrusts Gaylord’s intentions, uses over the top espionage techniques to fall victim to misunderstandings, and, at the end, learns a lesson about trust.

The sequel, Meet the Fockers, is nominally about Gaylord’s parents, but is, really, about how Jack (again) mistrusts Gaylord’s intention, uses over the top espionage techniques to fall victim to misunderstandings, and, at the end, learns a lesson about trust. Little Fockers is nominally about Gaylord’s children, but we again focus on how Jack mistrusts Gaylord’s intentions, uses over the top espionage techniques to fall victim to misunderstandings, and, at the end, learns a lesson about trust.

Those with nothing better to do than insult the series talk about how the similarities among the movies show the creators’ dearth of imagination. They might even say, if so inclined, that the varying titles and increasingly more outlandish scenarios are simply attempts to take the same, moderately funny set up (overprotective, ex CIA father) and dress it up in different clothes so that the audience doesn’t realize how horribly tired it is by the third iteration until after they’ve paid their ten dollars.

But such a statement would, of course, be wrong. The various films that comprise the Focker trilogy are each different looks at the same themes, varying takes on the same idea. They are all necessary.

The third movie, for instance, brings us the long awaited resolution to several hanging plot threads, or at least the acknowledgment of several long running but unstated jokes, primarily those to do with names. For instance, Gaylord’s name is, for the first time, used in an overt gay joke. There were, before, raised eyebrows when the name was mentioned in conjunction with his profession as a male nurse, but now we’ve progressed to the out and out explicit joke. The male nurse thing aspect is so fascinating for the creators of the film that they went so far as to put it in quotes in the synopsis displayed in the theater.

In addition, there’s the matter of the Focker name. The word obviously sounds similar to “Fucker,” but the directors before were at least respectful enough of their audience’s intelligence to not go right out and state the similarity. Well, no longer. Little Fockers is intent on allowing even the most dimwitted viewer to appreciate its subtleties, and we get the first (of what this reviewer hopes will be many) jokes about the name.

The names are not the only things made explicit here. The creators spell out every little thing, making sure that no punch line goes off alone and ambiguous to the screen. The Early Human School, for instance, is an obvious (though highly sophisticated) satire of the American fixation for higher learning. But it’s not enough for the school to talk about how many of its kindergarten-aged students go onto the top secondary schools in the nation. No, that might be open to misinterpretation from people who have never heard of ‘college.’ Little Fockers takes the time to explicitly, and repeatedly, draw the connections with Harvard. Thanks movie, I almost missed that one.

I’ve already mentioned that the movie is built on misunderstandings. As anyone who watched the first two movies knows, the misunderstandings basically came from Jack failing to grasp absolutely everything that Gaylord does. Though not exactly the holy grail of screenwriting, the various jokes were written well into the plot, and the soon-to-be-mistaken actions did not come with warning signs attached.

In Little Fockers, on the other hand, every joke is helpfully highlighted. Our hijinks here are so far from integrated that you can hear the plot’s gears grinding and groaning as they painfully try to accommodate the implausible situations that the characters’ repeatedly find themselves in. The overall story is no less predictable. After the opening two scenes, the viewer that could not write the entire story for themselves was most likely watching the movie without volume. Actually, no, I’m sure they’d still be able to understand just about everything they needed from the first sight of our stupid-enough-to-jump-into-a-dirt-pit-thinking-it-was-a-pool female lead.

But is predictability always bad? Little Fockers is not a movie based on shallow twists but rather based on inevitability. We know that Gaylord will get in trouble due to being seen with the aforementioned female lead, but the anticipation as to when exactly the sighting will occur keeps us on the edge of our seats.

In addition to being obvious, the jokes are over the top. Well, you are no doubt saying, duh. But I don’t mean the slightly escalated nature of, say, the truth serum in the second movie. Oh no. This is a whole new level of shameless lack of subtlety, and each joke is ridden long past when the most stoned viewer could possibly find it amusing. Jack takes some medicine for erectile dysfunction and goes on to have a five hour erection. Ha ha. But wait, we’re not done! Turns out that Gaylord has to inject said erection with a shot of adrenaline. Oh the hilarity. But wait! We’re still not done! Gaylord’s son walks in for the moment. Now that is comedy. Or, if that’s not drawn out enough for you, there the scene where two characters are having a fight in a ball pit. Yippee, that’s…not as funny as the writers probably thought it was. And then it goes on. And on. And on.

So, in conclusion, Little Fockers is brilliant. If you’re going to see one movie in your life, consider making it this. Etc.

It is, after all, the kind of comedy so unfunny that it’s not even fun to laugh at, let alone with. It’s just vaguely uncomfortable, which is, of course, the best feeling of all. Or something like that.

Avoid.

Inception [Movie Review]

Cobb: What is the most resilient parasite? A bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? 

Arthur: Ah, what Mr Cobb is trying to...

Cobb: An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed, fully understood. That sticks, right in there somewhere. [points to his head] 

Saito: For someone like you to steel?

Arthur: Yes in dream state your conscious defenses are lowered and it makes your thoughts vulnerable to theft. It's called extraction.

Inception is the dizzyingly complex, fiendishly simple story of a dream within a dream. Within a dream. (Within a dream?) Inception is a two and a half hour movie mostly built up of simple scenes, with clearly defined goals and almost comically overblown action. When scenes are taken with their predecessors, they become almost incomprehensible, characters popping in and out of comprehension. When taken as a whole, the movie makes perfect sense, a tapestry smashed out of order but easy to repair. Even if there are a half dozen readily apparent orders to put the pieces in.

In classic Science Fiction fashion, we begin with an idea: our dreams are vulnerable, and our deepest secrets can be stolen from us while we slept. The idea then comes to define the world, every other element falling into place in its wake. The genius of Inception is how self referential it is. Much like how the characters’ dreams are layered, the movie manages to create a layered suspension of disbelief, using our understanding of its opening concepts to get across its twists and gambits.

As Cobb says, the key aspect of dreams is that we feel confident but understand nothing:

Well dreams, they feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize that something was actually strange. Let me ask you a question, you...you never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on.

Inception operates in the same way. Each scene is a hook, forestalling our questions with easily latched onto action. As things spiral increasingly out of control, we get increasingly obvious set ups. We open (after a brief and initially incomprehensible prologue) with spies trying to convince a businessman. Like many scenes in the movie, it could have been taken from Goldfinger or From Russia with Love with ease. There are hints of uncertainties, of course, both minor and major. They are speaking of extraction and dreams, something slightly outside of our adopted thriller framework. Much more importantly, we don’t know where they come from or who they are. But, like a dream, we allow them to carry on, allow ourselves to be swept up in the moment and, for a time, to not question.

When the scene ends with yet more uncertainty, and when the transition savages all thoughts of conventionality with a savage blow to the head, the next proper scene gets an even more obvious hook: a timer. Outside the window, a mob is approaching, smashing cars to pieces and hollering for blood. We don’t understand what the characters are after, what test Satio is speaking of, what the inaccuracies of the carpet mean – but we don’t need to. There is tension, still, regardless of our understanding, and it’s through the use of this small scale drama that Christopher Nolan drags us into the bigger picture without needing to show his hand until we’re far too involved to back away.

An obvious consequence of learning the rules in such a distended fashion is that the viewer is, right up until the very end, unsure of what’s going on. There are times when it seems that we have a complete understanding before then, of course. When Cobb explains the mechanics of the world to Ariadne, for instance, it would be easy to assume that we have the complete picture. And yet Cobb is playing the viewer along with the rest of the team, manipulating us in the same way that they manipulate their quarry.

Such manipulation could, of course, often feel like simple contrivance. When Cobb changes an easily escaped and easily won game to one that cannot be fled and is fraught with danger, all through a few beforehand undisclosed quirks of dreaming, it’s easy to feel cheated. Why would they enter if they’d known this? Clearly, the only reason the plot got to this stage is that the creators had no choice but to hold the knowledge back from both audience and characters until it was too late to make use of it.

Nolan, however, is far too good a storyteller to allow himself to be caught stacking the deck so obviously. Because the standard gut reaction to the scene is correct; it would have been suicide for the characters to enter the dream under those conditions – which is why they, like the audience, were not informed of them. By putting the cast in the same position as the viewer, Nolan channels our feelings of betrayal into empathy, letting our annoyance bolster, not detract from, our connection to his world.

Much more than the revelation of the rules is artificial in Inception. The cast is skillfully drawn and well played, but the movie is centered around DiCaprio’s Cobb, and Cobb is as manipulative as they come. He has shaped his world for so long that he cannot stop. Dreaming has shaped and dominated his world, and it has separated him from his children. In his quest to get back to them, he will do anything. His earnestness is a façade, his cold ruthlessness often terrifying as he pursues his humane goals.

Character arcs are built on change, and Inception is the story of Cobb – and yet its character arc is split into two parts. Cobb himself does no grow. He has created a prison for his past, a world that he is endlessly trying to superimpose upon reality in which he and his family are, again, one. His problems are worsening, not bettering. Does he grow at the end? That’s a question that will have to be left open for debate, his rationalization and realization so intertwined that to draw one conclusion is all but impossible.

Growth can only be found with Robert Fischer. In a bizarre, almost sociopathic travesty of warmth and reconciliation, Fischer is made to reexamine his relationship with his father, propelled into love by lies and gunfire. In the end, the simple chemistry of the cast, the warmth of their interaction, is a calculated thing. The movie’s emotional core is a lie. The ultimate moral realization a fabrication, as Cobb and his team play god with another’s emotions:

Dom Cobb: We need to shift his animosity from his father to his godfather. 

Ariadne: We're going to destroy his one positive relationship?

Eames: No, it repairs his relationship with his father, thus, exposing his godfather's true nature. We should charge Fischer a lot more than science for this job.

That is not to say that there is no true feeling in the movie, but rather that what genuine camaraderie there is is passed aside and gradually pushed towards irrelevancy. The friendship between Cobb and Arthur is never reflected upon but is unmistakable. Arthur is aware of Cobb’s eccentricities, whether the quirk in question is a dislike of trains or an obsession with a dead wife. As the movie progresses, however, Cobb sorely abuses their bond. He lies to and misleads his friends, putting them in grave danger. When his team falls short of his impossible expectations (expectations that he, too, is unable to live up to), his reaction is not sympathy but rage. Cobb’s callousness leaves our sympathy to him tinted with anger, hoping that his flaws won’t lead to the undeserved deaths of those around him, those that trusted him.

DiCaprio is far from the only effective actor. To me, every character came off as vibrant and alive. Cotillard’s tender insanity is brilliantly portrayed, and she’s magnetic in every scene that she’s in. The minor characters are just as strong. Rao’s Yusuf, Gordon-Levitt’s Arthur, Hardy’s Eames, and Watanabe’s Saito are all captivating. Murphy’s role as Fischer is, in many ways, the emotional core of the film, and he manages to appear vulnerable enough to gather the audience’s goodwill, turning him from gullible dupe to proper player.

Finally, I’ve heard some people complaining about Ellen Page’s performance as Ariadne. From what I can gather, the complaints basically amount to: “but she was in Juno!” If there’s some basis within the actual film for the criticism, I can’t see it; Ariadne’s sympathy and desire to help is powerful and only made more so by the many situations in which she’s rendered ineffective.

I mentioned before that the individual scenes of Inception function as hooks, but to leave off there would be superficial. Every aspect of Inception is over the top – and excellently so, at least for the most part. It would have been easy for Nolan to try and keep the action realistic, but to do so would have left his fantastic landscapes feeling almost pedestrian, their potential untapped. As Eames remarks when he conjures a grenade launcher with which to destroy a half dozen attackers, You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.

Of course, every scene is not equal in its excess, and the action scenes that fall into the uncomfortable dead zone between stylization and realism often come across as simply silly. Still, for every unconvincing gunfight, there are two moments of delightful imagination. The film’s highlight is the gravity and mindbending scene where Arthur and a succession of projections battle in a hotel where the rules shift all around them:

The actors and the writing are matched by the special effects. Of course, to say that a modern movie has good special effects isn’t to say much at all. 2012, after all, looked great, but I doubt that anyone would hold it up as exemplary in any way shape or form. Inception, however, is the rare movie that understands how to use bombastic effects in order to augment script and character, rather than using writing as a means to simply set up larger explosions. Here, explosions and distortions are expressions of the bizarre’s intrusion into our sleeping world, and slow motion is the ramming home of time dilation as plotlines are dragged increasingly apart.

I’m tempted to go on for another thousand words and discuss implications. It’s hard to not offer my own theories, to refrain from circling spinning tops and mazelike city streets, faceless organizations and actors’ ages, cryptic phrases and circular story structures. But to do so would, I think, to be to overstep my bounds. Inception is a movie that simply has to be seen. There are a myriad of different realities contained in these scenes, and each of them demands to be seen, understood, and either embraced or rejected as you barrel through. So go out and buy Inception. Watch it, maybe watch it twice. Then perhaps I’ll get to work telling you why your theories are all wrong.