Derivative fare
Movies seen in the dog days of 2005.
Originally written: August 2005
Mr and Mrs Smith
Batman Begins
War of the Worlds
It's not your imagination. Movies are getting more and more derivative and my introductions are starting to repeat themselves. We shouldn't be surprised that film is derivative (or that introductions start to repeat themselves). After all Greek tragedy kept reprising the same half-dozen plots and the skill was in writing the old as if it were new. So the fact that most movies are high concept (you can imagine the 'creators' of The Island, "It's Logan's Run with clones") or remakes or movie versions of television series or reversionings of movies made in another country does not mean that the resultant movie is going to be bad. Similarly creative individuality does not guarantee that the outcome will be good. Nonetheless, one of the major reasons for avoiding the cinema these past few months has been the number of remakes and reversionings being offered to an all-too-gullible, but not enthusiastic, public. Few, if any, have sounded to me the siren-call and insisted on my attendance and, with plenty of alternate ways of spending my time, I have spent my time alternately. I'm hoping this will improve in coming months and more offerings worthy of admission price will be made.
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Five bucks on Jane
A decade or so ago, the marital martial arts were practised by Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas. In The War of the Roses you always knew it was a mismatch and wimpy, weedy little Mike had no chance. (Jack Nicholson was a better match for Kathleen, even if Charley Partanna never came to physical blows with his Polack hitlady friend in defence of Prizzi's Honor.) These references echoes in my head as Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who may or may not be an item in the wake of the breakdown of his marriage to Jennifer Aniston) met in combat in Mr & Mrs Smith with, again, the odds unevened by the weakness of the male lead. In this parable of modern marriage disintegration, Brad and Ange are a couple of assassins, for rival networks, who meet cute in some Latin American republic, enjoy some passion and marry. "Five or six years later", with the passion waning, and each still in ignorance of the other's profession, their relationship is heading towards the rocks until their respective bosses assign them to kill each other. Given what is shown in the trailer, I don't think I am spoiling the plot by revealing that after an hour or so of fruitless confrontation between the twain, they join forces to turn the tables on their attackers, nor to suggest that the longer the movie goes, the less credible it becomes, and less enjoyable. This is movie-making by numbers, with a moronic plot-line, a steady stream of action sequences, successively more violent and confrontational, some derivative, if interesting, twists, that requires a high level of charisma from the leads. After all it is Brangelina that we've come to see. She has shown in the first Lara Croft movie that her special effects can carry a film; in a number of efforts, including the recent Troy, he has shown that he is effective only in a smaller supporting role, such as Ocean's Eleven. This movie demonstrates that lack of equality in the leads: she more than holds her own, providing the only enjoyable moments in the film; he fails to keep his end up, meaning that flab enters the picture. In any real battle between them you could not imagine Brad's Smith taking the honors from Ange's missus. Director Doug Liman, who was so good with The Bourne Identity, is let down here by his leading man and the script. He doesn't have the directorial tools to compensate for these disappointments. There are however a couple of good sidelights to note: a car chase scene that is top-drawer and the interpolated marriage counsellor scenes, where Brad and Ange demonstrate the emptiness of the marriage bed. I was disappointed that the script didn't tie the counselling into the film's resolution: a finale in which the re-united Smiths blew away their shrink would have been innovative. But that's not a term that comes to mind often in this film.
Dark (and Stormy) Knight
Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins is of an all-together different cut. It reflects many of the same elements that went into Mr & Mrs Smith: an old idea, wedded to some bold thinking, to try and create an original derivative movie. In most ways it succeeds where Brad and Ange failed. Like the Tim Burton Batman, this film seeks to discover how the Batman came into existence; like the 1989 film, it is dark, brooding and disturbing. Unlike Burton, Nolan's evil is not in the form of the almost benign, if bent, Joker but of a much more macabre (and, as far as is possible in such a strained gothic fantasy, realistic) nature, employing at its heart the psychological fears and aspirations that separate the 'mad' from the 'normal'. In the back story, we move with Bruce Wayne from his orphaning by the untimely death of his parents at the hands of a street criminal, an event more clearly tied to his own sense of guilt than is usual, through his troubled adolescence and his first attempts to confront and defeat evil, an odyssey that lands him in a jail in Bhutan, where the story opens. He is rescued and mentored by Liam Neeson's Ducard (an interesting echo of similar roles the same actor has played in the lives of Anakin Skywalker and Balian of Ibelin in Kingdom of Heaven) in an impossibly located structure high in the Himalayas. The film also deals well with his alienation from the Eastern cult into which he has fallen and his return to Gotham where newish versions of Alfred and James Gordon await him, not to mention a love interest now working as an assistant DA and a series of criminals, starting with an apparently powerful underworld crime-boss and a corrupt psychologist, whose methods are even more brutal because they leave his victims alive but unable to resist. The scenario is well thought out, as we see the evolution of the Batman, and are even given plausible explanations for the appearance of all that lovely hardware with which he has always been armed, from Batmobile, through Batsuit, to the more outrageous weapons. In Burton's vision, Bruce Wayne was almost catatonic and only came alive as Batman; Nolan's is even more interesting, suggesting that Bruce Wayne is the invention. Instead of being the person whose secret identity is the superhero, here we have the superhero who has to create a secret identity to enable him to have some contact with normality. As would be expected, Batman deals quite easily with Falcone, the crime boss, before confronting his real enemies, the Scarecrow and his secret master, and their fiendish plot, that Batman must derail. And derail it he does, literally in a spectacular monorail crash, that is the visual effects highlight of a movie replete with such effects. The cast is equal to the job here: Christian Bale is an interesting Batman with a very human side. Michael Caine and Gary Oldman are restrained as Alfred and Gordon, respectively, and Katie Holmes puts in one last decent performance, before she is thoroughly Cruised, as the love interest. Add The Last Samurai's Ken Watanabe, Tom Wilkinson, Liam Neeson and a very effective Cillian Murphy as villains and cultists and you have the recipe for an interesting mixture that is topped by a good cameo from Morgan Freeman as a Wayne scientist who has a number of interesting little gadgets tucked away. Christopher Nolan remains a director of wit and poise. After dealing in an interesting way with mysteries in Memento and Insomnia, he has brought his creative eye to the superhero genre and cast an interesting, if very dark, light both through the script and through his direction.
Intellects vast and cruel
Steven Spielberg's version of Orson Welles' HG Wells' War of the Worlds casts into stark relief the problems of the source material, and a few that seem generic to the director and his lead actor. But, before we get to that, let's consider the sea-change in Spielberg demonstrated by the film's key themes. SS has been the proponent of the nice-alien view of alien invasion. In both ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, no matter how unbelievable they were in their attempts to document the director's belief in the reality of UFOs as extraterrestrial craft, his invaders were essentially benevolent creatures with no inimical intent. Not so his tripods from Mars - or beyond. They are as far from benevolent as possible, intent on conquering and, apparently, eating us. There are some good set-piece scenes here and there in the movie, particularly the confrontation between Ray (Tom Cruise) and Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), and the 747 crash scene, but the lack of credibility adds up. Another Morgan Freeman narration opens the movie, in words familiar to the readers of Wells and the auditors of Welles:
No-one would have believed in the early years of the twenty-first century that our world was being watched by intelligences greater than our own; ... With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about the globe, confident of our empire over this world. Yet across the gulf of space, intellects vast and cruel and unsympathetic regarded our planet with envious eyes and slowly, and surely, drew their plans against us.
Then we are to believe that, despite the honeycomb of tunnels under our cities for water, gas, electricity and transport, not to mention all the foundations, cellars and underground car parks, there are tripod warships waiting for their masters to arrive by lightning; we are supposed to believe that the concomitant EMP knocked out all mechanical devices, except the video camera Spielberg needs an eye-witness to hold for a shot; that their carefully drawn plans, which include haunch of human as the main course, are based on destroying so much good meat to begin with; that the 'vast and cruel' intelligences 'greater than ours' cannot work out that they are being fooled by a mirror in a cellar; and that their vast intellect never encompassed the possibility that their anatomy, apparently similar enough to ours to be able to use us as food, might be susceptible to the bugs in the air and human gut. These plot holes are magnified by the episodic nature of the narrative. Instead of the detached scientist who was the point of view character for the Well(e)s brothers, we have Ray Everyman, the paterfamilias of a dysfunctional family who must protect and defend his littl'uns, while running real hard to provide the facade of color and movement to the movie. Spielberg may have, post 11 September 2001, lost his faith in the essential goodness of alienkind but he cannot leave behind the notion of the family that informs just about all his movies, often to their detriment. The movie had well and truly lost its credibility before the cellar scene, and then it went further down hill, when Ray apparently sacrifices himself to save his child. There is a further deus ex machina moment involving the other kid, coinciding with the expected cameo appearances of the stars of the 1953 version that, for all its clunkiness, is far superior to this one. In fact, the Welles' radio drama is superior to both because the Martians are in our imagination, not looking like some rude mechanical has had his inept way with a Meccano set. After the verve and excitement of The Minority Report, where Cruise and Spielberg were able to bury their obsessions with family within a credible package, this War of the Worlds is a particular disappointment. At the end of the film, Morgan is back: "By the toll of a billion deaths, man had earned his immunity, his right to survive among this planet's infinite organisms. And that right is ours against all challenges. For neither do men live nor die in vain." But sometimes they make films in vain.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]