Series Minded: Resident Evils

 [Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop.] 

Resident Evil (2002, d. Paul WS Anderson - crave)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004, d. Alexander Witt - crave)
Resident Evil: Extinction (2007, d. Russell Mulcahy - crave)
Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010, d. Paul WS Anderson - crave)
Resident Evil: Retribution (2012, d. Paul WS Anderson)
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016, d. Paul WS Anderson)

PREAMBLE

I remember when the first Resident Evil film came out. Fans were not happy. But fans, especially the ones who rage extensively online (yep, even in 2002 it was a thing), are so rarely happy. Anything but a very literal translation is usually met with some form of derision. Resident Evil, the movie, apparently, wasn't anything like the video game (not that I would know). For instance, its protagonist, Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, was not a character in the game (how dare they), and the movie takes place just as the outbreak is starting, sort of like a prequel.

Look, I've never played the game, probably never will. Of the many hobbies I have and things I care about, video games are far, far down the list (a few notches below crockery and just above marbles). Any adaptation of a video game has to work as a standalone movie for me, it can't be all about easter eggs and knowing winks or shortcuts in storytelling because the fans already know certain things. I always heard that the Resident Evil movies were not very good movies on top of being not-great adaptations of the games (including from Toasty who had some positive things to say about the first one (less so the second) here, and the third one (less so the fourth one) here, and then the final two here.)

Yet, in spite of being not very good, the Paul WS Anderson-era of Resident Evil bore six(!) films, earned a pretty decent amount of money every time, and apparently managed to build its own fanbase of appreciators.  Something can't flourish for this long without there being some redeeming quality to it, right? Right?

I'll be honest, I've never really wanted to watch these (although I've always been curious about the one [edit: Apocalypse] where in the trailer Jovovich is running down the side of Toronto's City Hall ...that image has stuck in my mind) but two of my podcasts are recapping the series leading into the new Zach (Barbarian, Weapons) Cregger-directed Resident Evil adaptation this fall, so I figured...why not just dive in...?

ONE

I really did not like this first movie of this Resident Evil franchise. I was bored and annoyed for most of the film. This is a bad sign for my viewing the rest of the series, which, from a quick gander at Toasty's reviews, does not seem to get a whole lot better (holding out hope for Extinction). 

Anderson is not a terrible director, but he's also not a great one. He's got a proficiency in B-movie genre fare that most others do not. His films look alright for their budgets and have ambition in the scale they're trying to operate in, but they mostly fall apart in the story. He's good at fashioning moments, bad at developing characters. Here he's playing with a horror genre (zombies) and turns it into an action movie that's basically aping Aliens. There's nothing scary here, and little real tension.

First, we're given a mystery. Someone has let the T-virus loose in the underground labs of the Umbrella Corporation. And then we meet Alice, who wakes up naked on the floor of a spacious tiled shower in a massive, creepy, mostly empty mansion with no memory of who she is. Another mystery...Alice, who the fuck is Alice? And then some spiky-haired douche (but not really a douche, appearances can be deceiving...poor Eric Mabius and his resting douche face) turns up at her door, says he's a cop (but he's clearly not...another mystery!), before a team of draped-in black special ops-types with heavy weaponry and night vision goggles come busting in (Colin Salmon, Michelle Rodriguez, and other zombie fodder). 

They take Alice and spiky hair along with them as they board a train car inside the house! There's a train inside the house, guys! There they find another amnesiac, Spence (James Purefoy) on the train, which takes them deep into the Earth into a supposedly massive underground complex.  The virus is loose, all the scientists and technicians and security that were there are now zombie-like flesh-eaters, as well as there being other security devices and experiments that are exceptionally dangerous.

Even though it's not a direct adaptation of any Resident Evil game, the film is basically like watching a video game. It follows the ever-dwindling group of characters as they traverse through the labs, fighting zombies and zombie dogs and "the Licker" (a so-so cgi effect in an otherwise largely practically-made film), among the escape rooms and other threats they face, all with the objective of escaping on the train before the lock-down timer goes off and they're trapped in quarantine forever. Hey, watching people play video games can be entertaining. This one, not so much.

The stuff about "who set the virus loose?" is painfully obvious, the "why" barely matters to the plot or characters. If Alice had her full memories from the get-go, nothing about this story would be different, and so the reveals of her past and what she knows feel perfunctory, and lack anything of interest or insight into her character. Beyond Jovovich being a performer Anderson's camera loves (Jovovich and Anderson would eventually marry), there's nothing to invest us in on Alice as a character (or anyone else for that matter)  which makes it really bizarre to me that there's five more of these films with this character.

The good: Michelle Rodriguez, just a powerhouse presence.
- The digital map explaining the mansion facade, the train, and the underground lab complex.
- The laser tunnel sequence. Makes absolutely no logical sense, but the highlight moment of the film.
- The last shot, teeing up the sequel, a great shot, even if the sequence leading up to it is basically the same as 28 Days Later. Cribbed or parallel thinking?

TWO

Resident Evil: Apocalypse finds Alice leaving an abandoned Umbrella facility where she's been experimented on and now has superpowers (super strength, heightened senses and reaction time). The city is being evacuated because the plague is starting to run rampant. Apparently there's, like, only one bridge out of Raccoon City and there's a big fortified gate that can shut it down, so the Umbrella Corp. does just that, leaving many of their own people inside. One of the Corp.'s chief scientists (an overqualified and under-utilized Jared Harris, wheelchair bound and with the tiniest of eyeglasses) is on the safe side of the wall but refuses to leave as his daughter is trapped inside.  Using the city's ample surveillance network, he searches for Umbrella assets with the promise of helping them get out of Raccoon City if they rescue Angela.

Instead of giving Alice the assignment and letting her pick up new allies in this riff on Escape from New York, the story decides to spend a whole bunch of time with new characters like halter-top/short-shorts-wearing gun-nut cop Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), S.T.A.R.S. agent Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr) and spunky civilian Lloyd Jefferson Wade (Mike Epps). Much like the first film, none of these new characters are given much of a personality, and since we spend so much time away from Alice, we really get no character development with her either. 

Alice was barely developed at all in the prior film. Here anything that changes her is strictly plot and/or world building (and maybe extruded from video game lore). Near the climax of the film, Alice has to fight the Nemesis beast (think a hulking, fleshy, zombie Robocop), who she discerns is spiky hair from the previous film, and she has an emotional breakdown (well acted by Jovovich, but nonsense in context...her and spiky hair spent maybe 8 hours together and barely got to know each other, why is she so attached?).  By the end of the film Alice is dead and I feel nothing. But then she's resurrected and, again I feel nothing.

Apocalypse gets too hung up in all the wrong places. It wants to explore it's newly created mid-catastrophe environment but it's not in the slightest interested in the characters exploring the space or how they might be feeling in this situation. But, by the sheer fact that it's working in an open environment and the massive increase in scale, I actually enjoyed this more than the last one despite being a worse directed, acted and edited film.  

I'm always delighted by seeing Toronto on screen and how it is used in movies. Here it's "standing in" for Raccoon City, but key T.dot landmarks like the C.N. Tower, City Hall, and our streetcars (not landmarks, I know, but iconic) are everywhere. Toasty speculated that Raccoon City might just be alternate-reality Toronto... perhaps a world where Toronto was annexed by the U.S. by force (one of the city's buildings is shown sporting an American flag), handed over to a massive corporation by a corrupt government as an experimental testing ground, and militarized (as well as flooded with guns...). 

The good: The garbage chute escape.
- The City Hall descent.
- The ending newsreel that exposed the Umbrella Corp's evil deeds in Raccoon City, but then quickly dismissed as a hoax in the media (obviously Umbrella has the money and cache to influence the truth)... the most honest part of the film. 
- Toronto.

THREE

Extinction opens not just rehashing but reusing Alice's awakening-in-the-shower-with-no-memory scene from the first film and then puts her in the laser hallway, which she escapes and then through into a clinic's hallway where there's a host of dangers that eventually kills her. Her body is taken above ground in the middle of the desert where a chain link fence holds back a significant amount of zombies. Her body is tossed into a pit full of other Alices.  Like traversing through a video game, Alice must learn the patterns, die and try again.  That's one way of introducing to us that Alice is a clone.

The world has wholly become an apocalyptic wasteland. The T-virus didn't just kill all the people but pretty much all life (vegetation included) on the planet. Where the first film was a James Cameron homage, and Apocalypse was largely a John Carpenter nod, this is George Miller Mad Max pastiche all the way.  

Alice wanders the deserts. We learn mostly to evade the Umbrella Corp, who is trying to track her. We're really not sure what else she's doing out in the wastelands. Meanwhile, LJ and Carlos - who we met last film (no sign of Jill Valentine though) - are back, travelling the deserted highways convoy-style, looking for food and refuge, the safety of what remaining survivors they can find is their primary concern. They're led by Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), who has no specific objective other than survival.

Meanwhile, evil Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen), introduced at the end of the last film as a head scientist at Umbrella, is back too. He answers to some dyed blonde dickhead who always wears sunglasses indoors (Jason O'Mara) . Isaacs has gone rogue and is doing projects off-book and consuming massive amounts of Umbrella's resources. 

By the end of the first act, Alice has met up with the convoy, where she has to use her telekinetic powers to save the survivors (where'd those powers come from? Well, that's Isaac's experiments, changing the T-virus into a genetic enhancement, but only Alice clones seem to respond to it without it going horribly awry). The use of her powers trips alarms and gives away their location. There's a fight in Vegas wastelands where Isaacs unleashes a horde of experimental zombies and only a few survivors remain afterword. But now they know there's a helicopter and Alice found a book that tells of Arcadia, a location of, possibly, a zombie-free community in Alaska. So they need to make a full frontal assault on the Umbrella labs entrance in the desert to capture the chopper and for Alice to...I dunno, get revenge on Umbrella? Still not sure her motivation 3 films in..

Director Russell Mulcahy of Highlander fame attempts to inject some actual horror into the proceedings, but Anderson's script is still too invested in sci-fi, action, superheroes and world building for this to be truly scary. But this time around the director leans into his actors and lets them have moments which inform us as to who they are and who they are to each other, if not necessarily presenting a specific arc for any of them. Mulcahy gets better performances out of his actors than in prior films, but some of the tertiary performers and voice-over work is still quite terrible. Mulcahy's film also eschews the "electro-rawk guitar" soundtrack that still sounds so cliched and '90s for something more traditional and atmospheric (decent work here from Charlie Clouser).

The film ends with Alice facing off against a mutated Dr. Issac with Alice discovering the reservoir of clones. (Anderson clearly cannot get enough of his not-yet-wife)

The good:  A murder of zombie crows are pretty much the only scary thing in 3 movies.
- Ali Larter makes for an effective stoic leader.
- The scene where you can see the plentiful highway traffic moving in the desert background...oops. Made me laugh.
- This one is much gooder than the prior two, I will have to agree with Toasty on that one.

FOUR

Ten years post-Matrix and here we have Anderson's totally unapologetic Matrix-riff as Alice and her clone army, clad in pleather and spandex, armed with samurai swords and automatic handguns, assail a tower complex which is Umbrella's Tokyo-based headquarters. So much slow-mo, so much bullet-time-on-a-budget. The blonde dickhead with sunglasses (no longer Jason O'Mara, instead Shawn Roberts aping the vocal fry of Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith), is the big final boss, having injected himself with the next evolution of T-cells. Only one Alice manages to escape on the plane with him before he explodes Toyko. He injects Alice with a serum that nukes her T-cells (and thus depowers her...just as the superhero boom is taking place? How curious). The plane crashes. Alice survives.  

This first act could have been the finale of a whole other movie but I imagine they didn't have the budget for all the Alice duplicates for a whole film (and even still, here, it's a pretty dodgy effect anytime there's more than one Milla on screen).

So Alice takes small plane to Alaska where she seeks the Arcadia refuge she sent Claire and the others to in the chopper. There she finds a plethora of planes and nobody but an amnesiac Claire. Again, they could have built a whole movie around "Alaska" and what happened to the survivors from the previous movie, but Anderson sets it up and closes it out (sort of) in a matter of minutes. 

Alice and Claire fly from Alaska to L.A., unbeknownst to them they are being tracked by satellite. In L.A.  they spy a small band of survivors on the roof of a very large building which turns out to be an old prison. in the middle of L.A. Kay.  Alice even without her super reflexes still manages to land the plane (The building is surrounded by zombies so it's the only place they could land...taking off again is a later problem).

There they meet a rag-tag group of survivors, including a wannabe actress, a big shot agent and his assistant, a creepo, a superstar basketball player (his fancy watch billboard is just across the way) and a prisoner who claims to be special forces and erroneously confined...and with the knowledge of how to get out. Turns out the prisoner is, improbably, Claire's brother Chris (Wentworth Miller) and not a dangerous offender, which would be more interesting if it was, like Riddick. If you think there's some tearful reunion or the sight of her brother would help with her memory problems or there would be any emotional or character-building resonance at all, you haven't been paying attention to Paul W.S. Anderson's career.  

Anyway creatures get in, people die. Surprise surprise but the one's with plot armour make it out alive and to the Arcadia which is an Umbrella mobile lab on a container ship where all the survivors are now in stasis tubes for later experimentation. Oh and blonde dickhead with the glasses is still alive. He has a big brawl against our gang of survivors but is defeated, he escapes on a VTOL but accidentally blows himself up. Ha ha. Alice and friends commandeer the Arcadia only for Umbrella to send out an absurd number of VTOL assault craft to their location. The end.

The score shifts only away from the 90's rawk guitar of the first two films (but deviating completely from the third's more traditional score)  with Tomandandy bringing their electronica sounds to the rawk guitar but toning the edgelord vibe down just a smidge. It's not outright awful, but it still feels remarkably dated for a 2010 movie to sound like this.

The good: Conceptually I really, really liked the opening sequence of an army of Alices. In actual execution it's pretty shaky. But a nifty opening that acts as epilogue to the prior film and prologue to this one.
- Happy Claire is back...I guess. Except in giving her amnesia they've stolen the grizzled wastelands veteran archetype Ali Larter brought to the character last film. She disappears for extended sequences here for no reason.
- Always happy to see Wentworth Miller, but Chris turns out to be such a big nothing of a character. (wait, these are the good?)
- Boris Kodjoe brings a lot of innate charm as pro-basketball player/athlete Luther West. It was a shame to see him killed, but then pretty awesome to see he survived. But we don't ever see him again in the remaining films so he's probably dead like everyone else.
- The interior of the Arcadia was pretty damn cool. A great set (which they obviously redressed three times over to look like three separate rooms, but hey, no shade cast...literally and figuratively).

FIVE

Colour me shocked. Resident Evil: Retribution's opening sequence was insanely awesome, a five minute slow-motion special effects extravaganza that tells the tale of Umbrella's destruction of the Arcadia and Alice's survival (of course) backwards. I repeat, backwards. It opens with Alice floating in the water and slowly pulls her to the surface and inverts her splash into the Pacific, back up to the boat two-guns firing. The Arcadia just being bombarded by a fleet of VTOL as the reverse slow-mo shows us all the massacre and destruction and the fight Alice nobly put up as it backs all the way to the closing shot of the previous film (also Jill Valentine [Sienna Guillory] is still alive but now working for Umbrella, but I didn't actually recognize her because of the 100% different look). This may just be the highlight of Paul W.S. Anderson's career. This could be the accompanying visuals to, like, a Radiohead or Bjork music video (we get a decent Tomandandy composition over it though). But I am also shocked that this ostensibly kills off Claire and Chris Redfield and undoes what little victory Alice managed to have at the end of the last film (just as the fourth film undoes what little victory Claire and the survivors had in escaping  on the helicopter). But do we ever actually feel the weight or horror of these crushing blows? Hell no, that would involve Anderson having to invest in the emotions of the characters, and he's just not interested.

Then, as these films do, Alice explains, in brief, everything that came before...all the twisty-turny plot bits from four movies, in large part to remind us that cast members from the first, second and fourth films exist.  As such this film will see the return of Michelle Rodriguez, Colin Salmon, Sienna Guillory, Boris Kodjoe and, of course the blonde dickhead with glasses is back. After Alice's recap, the open sequence plays again, only this time in forward motion at regular speed, and it's, like, a 60-second sequence that moves far too quickly to be impressive.

Alice is captured, wakes up inside an Umbrella facility which is a massive sealab somewhere off the coast of Northern Russia. She's set free by Ada Wong (Li Bingbing) with the aid of blonde dickhead with glasses who, surprise surprise, no longer works for Umbrella and is now trying to take it down (we only learn at the very end of the film that the AI "Red Queen" is trying to destroy all of humanity).  A team of special ops agents including Luther, Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb) and Barry Burton (an overqualified Kevin Durand) invade the facility to blow it up and hopefully rescue Alice and Ada beforehand.

Unlike the prior 3 films which just layer plot point upon plot point, this one goes back to the simple action-movie premise of "escape the facility alive", and has very little in the way of plot, and just the tiniest smidge more characterization, but only for Alice, who discovers that all of the testing simulations in the facility involve clones, sometimes clones of her, and sometimes those clones are mommy to a precious little deaf girl. So now Alice is a mom, even though not really, and once again it's unclear how or if the memories of clones are transferring to Alice (though it sure seems they are).

If Anderson is aping other directors' works with each film, here he's in his Zack Snyder mode, where most of the action sequences seem to be operating in slow motion. Anderson's compositions aren't as pretty as Snyder's, but they are just as illogical (why did so much of this need to be in slow-mo? What is the dramatic impact of it being in slow-mo?). Is it all just to pad the film out (this is about 10 minutes longer than the previous films which all clocked in at a tight 90 minutes or so).

In the end, Alice and her "daughter" and a few chums escape, head to Washington DC where blonde dickhead with glasses (Shawn Roberts still doing that Agent Smith impersonation) is sitting in the Oval Office and injects Alice with the T-virus again so she gets her powers back. He says she's the ultimate weapon in humanity's last stand against the Red Queen, and we pan out to see the city completely beseiged by zombie creatures of all sorts. I really don't know how one woman is supposed to turn the tide against all that.

This was the worst entry since the first, just action sequence after fight sequence, greenscreen nonsense around every corner, not a lick of character development here. Bringing back all the greatest hits characters from prior films amounts to little or nothing at all. If anyone, Jovovich included, has more than a dozen lines of dialogue, I'd be shocked. There's next to nothing here, no purpose for it existing beyond it resolving the end of the prior film and setting up the next one. Alice could literally have fallen in the water off the Arcadia and woken up in Washington and we wouldn't have missed, really, anything.

The good: That opening sequence. 
- I want to say it's nice to see Michelle Rodriguez back, but she's sorely misused (though not as badly as Colin Salmon who might as well have just been a mannequin for all he contributes).
- It was good to see Luther back, RIP.
- I love a sealab, and I love a sealab blowing up.
- Maybe my favourite parts of any Resident Evil movie is the skeletal wireframes that show us the set-up of the Umbrella Complexes.

SIX

Like the other films, Alice provide an opening monologue for Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. But instead of being a catch-up of the prior films Alice provides us some key background details on the origins of the Umbrella Corporation and the invention of the T-cells and how it all started getting out of control. It's information barely even hinted at before now explained in 4-minutes of voice over after 14 years and five films without it. It provides a certain context to what came in the past films, and would have been information any decent production might have provided us in the first, or at latest, second film in the series.

Also like the other films, The Final Chapter begins by usurping the end of the prior film. Washington D.C., where we ended Retribution, was "a trap" according to Alice, and is now almost completely obliterated (it looks only marginally worse than what Trump's done with the place). Alice and a few creatures and the air raid sirens seem to be all that's survived (so, you know, her "daughter" and the other survivors from the last film...all dead).

Much like last film where suddenly blonde dickhead with glasses turns out to be Alice's unlikely ally, now the Red Queen finds Alice and asks her to help unleash an anti-virus which will stop the infection globally. It's located in the wastes of Raccoon City. The Red Queen predicts within 48 hours the remaining 4000-iish humans left on Earth will all be dead. So Alice is given her maguffin as well as her quest and her time constraints. And the promise of ending the T-virus plague also means ending her own life.

After the cut, we find Alice has been driving for 12 hours and still has 418 miles to go (... if Raccoon City is Toronto, that's only 477 miles away...what has Alice been doing all this time? And if she's travelling on Interstate 64, she's going the wrong way. Also, I have to presume that most of the remaining 4000 humans left are Umbrella goons). She's picked up by Dr. Isaacs (turned out she killed his clone in Extinction) who's just out roaming the wastes in a convoy of pretty rad-looking mobile battle tanks. She escapes and with 17 hour to go arrives in Raccoon City, which has a big crater in the center of it from the nuke. 

She's knocked unconscious, again, and wakes up to find Claire Redfield and a handful of highly agitated survivors. With Issacs' battle tanks and the crawling hordes of zombies behind them on their way, there's yet another threat level to Alice getting into the Hive and recovering the anti-virus, and, unexpectedly, answers to everything she's ever wanted to know (also, as Toasty pointed out, involving a whole lot of retconning of the answers sort-of given in Apocalypse and the way the Wesker/Isaacs relationship was portrayed in Extinction... I could be upset if I, or even anyone involved in making this stuff, actually cared).

At first I thought Anderson might be channelling I Am Legend with a "last (wo)man on earth" tale, and, frankly, that could have been a pretty good take for this film. But Anderson's ADHD kicked back into high gear and there's side quests galore and a cast of new (and old) survivors who get no development but exist only to be killed. Yet, somehow, this is much more focused than any of the previous films. Well except for the fact that Anderson's opted for a Paul Greengrass-esque hyperactive editing style (gone is the slo-mo of Retribution, now tracking the fight choreography and action is the challenge).

The ticking clock gives The Final Chapter a decisive through line, and returning to Raccoon City and the Hive where it all started finds the series coming back full circle. It's by no means an opera but, in the process of Alice getting the cure and defeating the Umbrella Corporation, she finds her origin story and the answer to her true purpose all along. I mean, she been a pretty blank void for five films, having answers as to why and giving her a sense of progress for the first time is quite rewarding.

The good: hey, character development!
- Claire's back!
- A clear purpose for this story.
- Answers, background, details!
- A plethora of neat set-pieces, actually. 
- A somewhat satisfying resolution.

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FINAL THOUGHTS and 

I honestly wound up liking this whole experience far more than I thought I would even if only two of these movies even come close to touching an objective quality of "good". The fact that Anderson wrote the whole series and had pretty tight control over it means that, in spite of everything, it's got a pretty singular voice to it (if not necessarily vision)...one which cares very little for its characters or happy endings or internal consistency/logic.  It's never not an action series, and it only seems to flirt with its horror elements occasionally, and probably flirted with bringing in actual video game elements just as much (and when they were brought it, whether specific zombie creatures or characters, they're almost all ...whaaaaaat? Character designs from the video games seem quite out of place in the world of Anderson's Resident Evil.)

I found the films and their weird pacing and flow both challenging and charming. Almost everyone Alice encounters dies, even when it appears as if she's saved them. The way in which Anderson undoes all of Alice's good work is kind of hilarious actually (it would be more upsetting if we had any real reason to care about any of them). There's an insane amount of gun violence in this film, a real "guns solve everything" mentality to the pictures (even though, clearly, guns solve nothing), and it was always at its most interesting when the characters had to use hand weapons or makeshift weapons than guns. The underlying moral is corporations are a lot scarier than zombies are...a sentence which gives me a weird sense of deja vu.  I'm not sure I'll ever come back to these films, but I did indeed get some entertainment out of watching them.

RANKING

1. Resident Evil: Extinction
2. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
3. Resident Evil: Afterlife
4. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
5. Resident Evil
6. Resident Evil: Retribution

KWIF: The End of Oak Street (+1)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. 

This Week:
The End of Oak Street (2026, d. David Robert Mitchell - in theatre)
Your Name. (2016, d. Makoto Shinaki - in theatre)

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Youtube essayist Patrick H. Willems, in a recent video asked "why aren't there more dinosaur movies?" If the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World films can continually make upwards of a billion dollars with each release, despite being of questionable quality, why are there not more films with dinos in them?

While David Robert Mitchell, director of It Follows and Under The Silver Lake, hasn't exactly decided to address Willems directly with The End of Oak Street (this film would have been in post-production by the time Willems released his video), it will for certain be an answer to that question.  In its first weekend, the film was still surpassed by summer juggernauts The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. It's looking like it will at least break even, but it's not even coming close to Jurassic Park numbers.

Mitchell's film finds the Platt family struggling to survive when their neighbourhood is mysteriously transported form 1982 to an age of dinosaurs. Up until this moment, mom Denise (Anne Hathaway in her fourth film role) has been plugging away at a novel which hints at her dissatisfaction with her home life. Dad Greg (Ewan McGregor) is struggling with alcohol consumption and employment, and works delivering pizza. Their eldest, Audrey (Maisy Stella) faces graduation and the realization that her interest in astronomy will likely go unfulfilled as community college seems the only post-secondary in reach. While the youngest, Brian (Christian Convey), worries about getting beaten up by his bully's older brother, and crushes on the new neighbour girl. 

Once teleported to an entirely different time, it seems a time for the family to come together. Will they bond as a unit or will Greg's perpetual optimism and Denise's pragmatism in the situation only serve to pull them further apart?

The most unfortunate part of The End of Oak Street is that the premise was given away in the marketing. The first teaser didn't give away much, and it was tremendously intriguing. The second trailer kind of gave it all away. So, if you know, you come into The End of Oak Street without the mystery. And so when the Platt's grumpy neighbour complains about the "prank" the kids pulled on him which turns out to be a massive pile of dino-poop, we already know exactly what it is. And when Denise is visiting her elderly friend who is helping edit her book, she's shown a prehistoric plant in her back yard, but they're utterly confounded by what it is. And then there's the lights at night, which may have a mysterious origin, but we know what the effect is the lights are going to have long before the characters do.

These sequences are all handled in quite the Spielberg-ian fashion, but the film spends time pondering these mysteries when we, the audience, are already a few steps ahead. It's not painful to sit through, but it doesn't feel like a satisfying tee-up for what's to come. It might as well have been a single flash with no lead in for pretty much the same effect. It's not like these mysteries weigh on the characters for any significant amount of time or impact their life all that much.

Once the Platts are sent back in time, though, the film kicks off into high gear immediately. Mitchell, for the next 15-20 minutes keeps the creatures hidden, barely glimpses of shadows or tails or spinal plates in the distance or behind buildings or fences. It's cheeky and fun toying with the audience until the reveal of the first full creature, a feathered dinosaur with a sharp beak that is beautiful and terrifying. These feathered creatures seem freshly untethered, like the big open space of suburbia is the ideal hunting grounds they've just been waiting for, and...it gets grisly. They're fast and vicious.

The family have their reasons for coming and going from their home, including searching for their lost dog Starbuck (someone's a Battlestar Galactica fan in the house). The world outside is oppressive and violent, and survival seems impossible. Mitchell's film gives us quiet moments to contemplate how utterly fucked we would be if we were suddenly cast down a few rungs on the food chain. Human weapons, our capacity for violence, aren't at all up to the challenge of what nature had in store millions of years past.

This isn't the Jurassic franchise, for which my own enjoyment ran out a long time ago (but I'm clearly in the minority). It's better. There was the capability to build a franchise out of this but Mitchell chooses to keep it self-contained, to provide an ending that is mostly satisfying if, perhaps, everything works out a little too nicely for this slightly troubled family. The effects work here, for a modestly budgeted picture, is pretty incredible. Even ignoring the creatures (and can you really ignore the brontos having sex or pooping...no, no you cannot) the setting of 1982 homesteads surrounding by vibrant prehistoric flora is incredible. 

Hathaway is having a banner year, and while this is a film that casts equal weight to all the members of the family, Denise is the richest character in the picture, and that's in large part thanks to what Hathaway brings to her performance. She is a woman torn by love for her family, disappointment in her partner, and a desire for something more, something of her own. The move in time demolishes the pathway to being someone else, and instead keeps her at home with her family, and she has to grapple both with resentment and with her instinctual desire to protect her family. So little of what is going on within Denise is said explicitly on screen, and instead resides in the movement of Hathaway's eyes and the lines on her face. She's always been a really tremendous actor, but it seems she's leveled up.

Somehow the Jurassic movies have been deemed "family" movies (this perception is part of their success), despite having a nasty streak within them. The End of Oak Street, in dipping its toe into an Amblin-esque production, has this same bent to it. It is ostensibly a family picture (in that it is a movie about a family) but it's got a bit of menace to it, a severity which will disarm and upset and surprise and thrill. I know I let out more than a few uncontrollable chortles as the events on screen. 

The End of Oak Street doesn't look like it will be setting any new trends. The next big dinosaur movie will be a Jurassic one and we won't be likely to see others in the meantime. But its good we have this, it's good we have options.

---

In my younger years, I used to be virulently anti-anime. I lumped a whole culture of films into one simplified basked because, basically, I hated Akira. Loud, flashy, somewhat impenetrable, somewhat nonsensical. Style over substance. This seemed to be anime to me. It took me a long time and many Studio Ghibli films to get over that perception. And, to tell the truth, I'm still not over it. Not fully.

My youngest, now almost of voting age, is big into anime and manga. Given the physical media I have -- thousands of comics and graphic novels and hundreds of movies and tv shows -- yeah it's kind of disappointing that they turned to basically the one area of entertainment I had basically written off and had virtually nothing of in my collections. But we all find our own paths and interests and rebel against our parents in our own ways.

They were really psyched that Your Name. was getting a limited theatrical run, and they asked if I wanted to go see it with them. Since I have shifted my opinions on anime (somewhat) yeah, I was game. They had seen it before, and obviously it meant something to them to go see it on the big screen (unfortunately we had to see it in the local closet cinema, since the bigger venue showings were in the 19+ VIP theatres). I had asked them what the film was, genre wise (besides "anime"), and they couldn't tell me. Was it romance? Drama? Comedy? Sci-fi? Sort of yes-ish to all. They just couldn't pin it down. Having seen it, I get it now.

Your Name. is a body switch comedy, at least to start. Mitsuha wakes up and is somewhat astonished to find she's in her own body. She feels like she's been living in a dream world, and as she goes about her day in her small village - going to school, hanging with friends, nothing much to do - she's told over and over again that she was behaving differently the day before.  And then she goes to sleep and wakes up in the body of Taki, fumbling her way through his life in Tokyo, going to school, hanging with friends, going to his job waiting tables. It's a delirious dream that Mitsuha enjoys at first, the big city life she's always dreamed of, but working so hard is unfamiliar to her.

And then we see the flipside as Taki lives a day in his life after having acting very different the day before when Mitsuha was in charge, followed by a day in his life in Mitsuha's body (and naturally he just can't stop fondling her breasts, which Mitsuha's younger sister catches him doing... every. time. Funny!)

My initial thought, upon watching the plot play out in this first act was how fantastic a premise this is for a complex exploration of gender and sexual identity. Immediately the finale was playing out in my head where Mitsuha and Taki either are trapped in each other's bodies, willingly, and return to their proper homes living as the other gender...or they return to their own bodies but decide to transition.... And then I remembered that Japan isn't the most progressive of nations about these things, certainly not in 2016, and that it would never happen, even if that's the most exciting and impactful this story could possibly get. There is hints though that Mitsuha is a bit gender questioning (before she's even aware of body switching, she does wish she was a boy living in Tokyo, and she also seems pretty into the fetching Ms. Okudera from Taki's work...but neither of these thoughts are explored in any depth).

There's also perfect romantic comedy in this set-up, one which I was not expecting and was excited to see play out. But that's not the film director Shinaki was making, and he lets you know by montaging (montage-ing?) the hell out of what seems like weeks of instances of Mitsuha and Taki switching bodies and living each others' lives. We get voice over from Mitsuha telling us the rules they set up for each other and how they communicate with each other. But it robs us of all the comedic set ups, and building out the supporting cast, as well as inhibits the growth of romantic tension. At the end of a montage, we learn Mitsuha has set Taki up on a date with Ms. Okudera - a woman in her mid-20s to Taki's 17(!) and then both Mitsuha and Taki have conflicted feelings about said date. This is how we learn the body-switchers like each other, but there's only been like 5 minutes of communication between them as presented through montage. It's not satisfying in the slightest (plus "voice-over over a montage of scenes" always gives the perception of a troubled production and extensive reshoots).

The reason Taki and Mitsuha are body switching is as a result of a passing comet. And when the comet passes, neither Taki nor Mitsuha are switching bodies anymore...but they both have fallen for each other. Taki tries to call Mitsuha but cannot seem to locate her. And, like a dream, their memories of each other start fading. This is the "romance" part of a rom com. The "meet-cute" of Taki and Mitsuha was basically looking in a mirror and seeing each other's lives from inside. Now they need to find each other but so many complications get in the way (far too many).

Taki becomes obsessed with finding Mitsuha, sketching everything he can remember of her town. His friend Tsukasa  joins him on a trip to try and find the town where Mitsuha lives (he never learned that while he was pretending to be her?!? Or is it just the fading dreamlike memories...this movie is very inconsistent with how their memories work). Ms. Okudera joins them (which, given that they're teens and she's a full fledged adult, seems wildly inappropriate. There's like an Y Tu Mama Tambien set-up here that doesn't happen at all). 

And now ***SPOILERS***

Taki does find the village...but it was decimated by a meteorite that fell off the comet 3 years ago! Not only were Mitsuha and Taki body switching, but they were time traveling and never realized it. I guess they don't have calendars or write down dates in school? This film asks for a lot of suspension of disbelief, which is fine for the higher-concept stuff, but then they push you to believe that neither one would have, I dunno, put their details into each other's phone or notebook. Or learn where their exact address is. And then, when the comet passes all the little notes Mitsuha had been leaving in Taki's diary on his phone just spontaneously delete themselves? I have to call bullshit on that one. It's like the film is saying that all evidence of Mitsuha didn't exist, except the fact that Mitsuha went to visit Taki 3 years earlier (he hadn't body switched with her yet, so their meeting meant nothing to him) and she gave him a woven ribbon that he's been wearing as a bracelet every day since. Director Shinaki cheats, and he really didn't have to.

Through drinking some spit-sake (is this a real tradition? Yup... kuchikamizake) Mitsuha made and some mystical shenanigans, Taki transcends time and space and reconnects with Mitsuha, and the third act then becomes Taki-as-Mitsuha trying to save her and her town from the looming disaster.

There is some beautiful animation in these sequences, particularly in the wild trip Taki takes upon drinking the saki, and all the visuals of the comet.  Also director Shinaki manages to effectively cross cut between the Taki-as-Mitsuha and oblivious-Taki-from-three-years earlier to create a grand sense of time and scale and the weight that rests on the shoulders of Taki-as-Mitsuha. But in spite of its scale and beauty, it is a complete distraction from what is central to the story, which is the connection between the characters and the romance that has erupted between them. When the climax of the story should be effort to bring these two characters together, it's overly focused on one huge obstacle in their way.

In a grand moment of cosmic collision, Taki and Mitsuha have a moment where space and time allow them to physically connect and it's proposed they write their names on each others hands so that when the dream state starts to rob them of their memories, they never forget each other's names. Taki writes first, and in a cosmic joke, Mitsuha barely gets to draw a line.  And stupid-ass Taki writes "I love you" instead of his name. The town is saved but they both forget each other.

In an exceptionally effective coda, five years later (from Taki's time, 8 years for Mitsuha) Taki has been searching for something that he can't explain. He knows he was obsessed by this town that got struck by a comet but he can't remember why, and in more cheats from the storyteller, neither can Ms. Okuder or Tsukasa.  The reunion of Taki and Mitsuha is quite satisfying with a sweeping era-appropriate rock ballad (which is in stark contrast to the horrible early 2000's alt-rock stylings of the songs and score earlier in the film, which undermine the film and make it feel like we're watching a sub-par CW teen soap opera).

***End Spoilers***

As I was discussing these critiques of the story my kid was explaining to me various tropes of anime, and how this falls in line with them.  This is not a badly made movie, but it's also not a well-told story. The director manipulates the characters and manipulates the edit thus manipulating the audience, hoping you won't notice. Just like with Hallmark movies where I can grade them on a curve because I've seen so many of them, I'm sure if I were more well versed in anime I might hold this in higher regard (or maybe not, I dunno) but as just a stand-alone movie going experience, it had its moments, but mostly left me wishing it were something other than what it is.

KWIF: The Invite (+1)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. A quieter week.

This Week:
The Invite (2026, d. Olivia Wilde - in theatre)
The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026, d. Kiyoshi Kurosawa - in theatre)

---

Late in the week a whole slew of new releases dropped that I want to check out in theatre. Early in the week, I had nothing I was itching to see. So I saw The Invite.

I've enjoyed Olivia Wilde's films in the past (Booksmart was fantastic and Don't Worry Darling was a mess, yes, but an interesting one). The Invite really intrigued me until I started hearing critical feedback (almost universally positive and/or glowing) that talked about the premise of the film. Like The Drama earlier this year, another critically well-received movie (and very successful one at that, grossing over 100mil at the box office), I was intrigued but upon hearing that premise but my aversion to discomfort steered me away.

The Invite's simple premise conjured little but cringe comedy in my mind, and I just don't have the stomach for such comedic affairs anymore. Here Angela (Wilde) and her husband Joe (Seth Rogen) are hosting their upstairs neighbours Pina (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Ed Norton) for a getting-to-know you dinner. They get to know their upstairs neighbours alright, they get to know that they are swingers and the titular invite is not for dinner, but to have group sex. (Uh, spoiler, I guess)

You can already start to see the many, many opportunities to have one's hackles raised just in such a simple description. But it seems so much worse...potentially... when you learn, within the first ten minutes of the film, that Angela and Joe are both miserable in their relationship, do little other than argue, and Joe is totally not on board with the short-notice event Angela has arranged.  You can just picture the cringe-inducing moments as Joe and Angela put on their game faces and try to hid their bitterness towards each other for the benefit of the guests.

But that's not this film. Mercifully that's not this film.

Not to say that The Invite is a comforting watch by any means, but it is not interested in being cringe comedy in the slightest.

With a savvy script from Rashida Jones and Will McCormack (based of a 2021 Spanish film The People Upstairs), The Invite immediately cuts out the pretense the moment Pina and Hawk walk in the door. Joe is not hiding in the slightest his displeasure about this dinner date, while Pina and Hawk immediately fess up that they heard their hosts arguing through the door when they arrived.

The smart play in all this is that Angela and Joe are emotionally repressed, while Pina and Hawk are emotionally intuitive. Pina is also a therapist so she, in particular, has a way of approaching a hostile environment and cutting through the tension. Hawk has such an easy going, friendly demeanour that he not only seems open to talking about anything, he kind of draws things out of people.

And so the evening, set for disaster, is...well... a disaster, but a disaster that ebbs and flows in waves. Joe and Angela are unable to contain their hostility but Pina and Hawk are continually able to disarm them, to a point.  Joe wants nothing more than to confront their upstairs neighbours about their loud, middle-of-the-night sex noises, but Angela is committed to saying nothing and wanting to make friends (which are in short supply).

When the truth about Pina and Hawk's sexual proclivities come to light, suddenly you see Angela and Joe in a whole new light. Their elation and excitement and curiosity becomes a shared moment where they seem like a loving couple and best friends... for a little bit.  And then the ebb and flow begins again.

The Invite is a comedy-drama. It lives squarely between those two worlds. There are some pretty good laughs, but there's also dramatic intensity as the core of this film is not a goofy sex comedy but a break-up story. To paraphrase a review on Letterboxed, this may be the film that launches a thousand divorces. 

It's a pretty exceptional production featuring a cast of only four actors that carry pretty the entire hour and forty minutes with remarkable performances. Rogen provides a reminder that, yes, he may be a very specific type, but within that type he's got exceptional range and is undervalued as a dramatic performer. Wiled is a perfect bundle of tension looking for release.  Cruz is effortlessly alluring that you have to wonder if it's a put on and Norton is at his best in a very long time being affable, enticing but also a little weird and sad. 

It's a film that is part TV bottle episode, part stage play, but only feels at home structured as a movie. Wilde's direction is exceptional and intriguing that follows the appropriate action to accentuate the comedy or the drama (and sometimes cleverly elides over details for comedic or dramatic effect). The opening credits are an editing smorgasbord of repeating frames and or split screens that doesn't necessarily prepare you for the film to come based on the content of the images presented, but gives the feeling of a 70's relationship comedy and/or drama, which should tell you what you're in for. 

My immediate impulse was to compare it to Woody Allen's work of the 70's and 80's, sans-neuroses, and I only hesitate because Allen's reputation has been tainted so greatly by, well, you know (and if you don't, look it up), that it seems wrong to compare anything to his work. And yet, I can't think of much else other than Allen's work looking at relationships and sex and mixing it with awkward comedy and emotionally impactful drama that seems to have all but disappeared in the wake of, well, Allen's irrelevance (as if the whole realm or style storytelling was verboten). There's been few films that really trigger that sense of "oh, here's what we've been missing from our cinematic diet" so specifically.

I was indeed surprised to find not a cringe comedy, but a thoughtful, thought-provoking, funny, fascinating, mature and entertaining film that challenges the audience who may cross their arms with discomfort, but asks them to uncross them and open up.

---

I am by no means an expert of samurai fare...though I have dabbled in it infrequently over my many decades. It's a subgenre of historical storytelling that fascinates me every time I watch (or read) it. While I have watched a decent amount (and read a not so decent amount), I have only the remotest of understandings of the many eras in which samurai culture was predominant, the tides of Japanese culture across those eras, the topography in which the samurai traverse, and meaningful understanding the social, political and economic structures as well as the deeper workings of the religious and samurai cultures of these stories tend to elude me time after time. It's not my history, it's not my culture, but it is something I'm almost always satisfied with spending time exploring.

This is all to say I'm going to have a tremendously difficult time really talking about The Samurai and the Prisoner, a new drama set in the late 1500's where much of Japan is in the midst of war. On one side is Lord Oda, who is barely seen in the picture at all, but his presence is felt almost constantly. He is a man to be feared, and his desire is nothing less than ruling the world.  On the other side is Lord Araki (Masahiro Motoki), who has banded a small collection of lords together to oppose Oda, with tenuous allegiances making a war council inside the impregnable walls of Arioka Castle (which Araki presides over having himself taken it with force as an ally of Oda).

Oda sends an envoy to Arioka Castle, Kanbei (Masaki Suda), who Araki tries to turn to his side, but he is rebuffed. Rather than let Kanbei return with a message, or killing him (which itself is a message), Araki imprisons Kanbei. Soon after there's a murder within the castle walls, a seemingly impossible mystery which Araki's closes advisors can't seem to make sense of.

At this early stage in the film, with this sweeping drama of politics and war in play, it seemed like the story was going to swing completely into a sort of police procedural/CSI-Samurai and I got pretty excited. So it was to my own minor disappointment that Araki turned to Kanbei's wisdom to tease out the solution, and suddenly there was an answer...sort of. In the next season there comes another mystery, and again the season after that, and so establishes a pattern within Arioka Castle between phenomenal events and its Lord seeking the counsel of the only man in his cells.

Running at almost 150 minutes, Kurosawa's incredibly patient-but-eventful film never ceases being interesting though it's hard at times to truly understand where it is going or why until well past the half-way point.

Eventually we come to understand that the protagonist of our film, Lord Araki, may be a merciful man, but his mercy is still a calculation, it's still strategy. He wishes for a world free of conflict, war and murder, but he's also a brilliant military tactician who can't stop thinking about the ways of war. He's haunted by senseless death, though well aware that sometimes one death can prevent many more.  His prisoner's life is spared, but Kanbei has no life in a prison cell except to serve Araki's requests, and the fate of his son, held by Oda to keep his loyalty in check, remains a torturous mystery for him.

The curious structure of the film told over the approximate span of a year, presents big events which lead to smaller events which lead to ripples barely noticed, but still felt by Araki. Every gambit or ploy Araki makes against Oda, or defends against, seems to result in just a little more chaos within Castle Arioka. Big waves to Araki are ripples to others, while little ripples eventually form into waves that cannot be ignored.  It's all connected in some way, but it feels both organized and chaotic...who can say. Kanbei? Maybe.

The world within Castle Arioka is so well realized and so intricately understood by its director that you feel like you could turn to practically anyone who passes by on screen and follow them as a fully fleshed out individual. Meanwhile, the world outside the walls feels vast and unknowable. All the reports we hear of Oda's machinations and manoeuvres, and the bending to his whims of other Lords, seem questionable...but there's no other choice except to trust it.

It's a well-composed film that only falters when it tries to go big. A battle scene seems lit by floodlights in an abandoned field with sneaker prints all over it, and feels starkly uncertain as a production compared to the assuredness of the remainder of the film.

It's a production that feels like it could do with some pruning, and perhaps its resolution isn't as satisfying (or unpredictable) as the remainder of the film, but it's time certainly well spent if this genre is at all in one's wheelhouse.

---

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Disclosure Day

2026 Steven Spielberg (War of the Worlds) -- download

Spielberg's career was not built on aliens -- he actually has an incredibly varied catalog -- but a number of his movies do focus on aliens coming to Earth, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, of which this one may be seen as a spiritual successor.

Google has a 'Disclosure Day' search result animation - a cardinal. Huh.

Not sure I am going to do a play by play recap of this movie. We know its about "disclosing" the existence of what has to be alien life, even if the trailers don't say it out loud. I mean, I spoiled that in the first sentence. But what is the movie really about ??

"You can't HANDLE the truth!!!" yells Colonel Jessep (Jack Nicholson).

We can't handle the truth. In February of this year, President Donald "Cheeto Benito" Trump signed an executive order to release all the files they had on UFO phenomena, or as they are calling them now - UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena).

Do doo de doo doo.

We handled the truth. There was nothing to be "handled". Even if the fucking US Dept of War official website looks like part of an AR game, this news came and went without even a whisper. The "truth" was just as ambiguous as it always had been. But what if something tangible had been revealed? What if the documents had shown incontrovertible proof that there were alien bodies stored in Area 51 and they had, at the very least, parts of downed alien craft? How would the world have reacted?

In the movie, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, Young Sherlock) of Wardex (Waived Reporting, Development, and Extraction) vehemently states that if said incontrovertible truth about alien existence, in the form of terabytes of footage & files, was released to the world, they would panic, utterly lose their shit. For the movie's world, which is already teetering on the brink of war, it would mean the End of Things. The movie even postulates that religion would collapse, when we learn we are not alone in the universe.

Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor, The Crown), a genius level data scientist in Wardex, believes, and was influenced into believing by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo, The Electric State), an ex-Wardex employee, that the world deserves to know. Needs to know. He believes vehemently that we can handle it, that it is exactly what the world needs now, as it is about to wipe itself out. He has escaped with a backpack full of said data. And Wardex is after him.

Meanwhile, unconnected to Daniel's whistleblower activities, weather person Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt, The Fall Guy) is having a really weird day. After a Disney Princess encounter with a bright red cardinal, things have been... odd. She's guessing what her boyfriend (Wyatt Russell, Overlord) is going to say, before he opens his mouth, and speaking Russian. In the studio she is unphased by her new ability to understand Korean, but collapses after speaking an alien language on-air, for everyone to hear. Something is very wrong.

But Daniel understands what she is saying, when no one else does. So, the two are connected, and are being influenced by Something Bigger Than Them. So much of the movie hinges on the idea that Something Bigger is Happening. Its the driving factor of the movie. Its what propels us towards a climax of the actual release of the files and videos to the entire world, via the news broadcasting framework.

So much of this movie displays as the product of a Very Good Filmmaker. The production budget allows for so much, so many things and Spielberg is able to masterfully engage us. The train scene, for one, is an exciting spin on a classic -- a classic he really subscribes to, as you can easily see this whole thing happening in an Indiana Jones movie. But its also just the lighting and the way he frames a shot. You can easily envision the mock-buster of this movie; I wouldn't be surprised if the idea "an alien conspiracy whistleblower running from a shadowy government agency" is already the plot of one, or many, Straight To movies in the VHS days. I rather enjoyed watching skilled people do their thing.

But in the end, I was, surprisingly to myself, not satisfied with the actual "disclosure". So, they release all this footage to the news, masterfully convincing a bunch of news TV shows to all connect together and show the footage. So what? Most people will think its fake, even if they accept the idea of world covering "breaking news" doesn't happen for AI Deepfakes. And once the governments, including the US Govt which was unaware of what Wardex was doing, get their shit together, it will just quietly become yesterday's news. 

And, what was the alien agenda here? We are meant to believe they a benevolent alien species that lives by empathy instead of tyranny. But what have they been doing for 50 years? Abducting children and subjecting them to terrifying experimentation we know. And I understand that if human interaction like Wardex showed them to be fearful of humans, I get the hiding, but they are still massively technologically advanced compared to us. Do they have to hide? And now, once revealed, what's next? The movie would rather just have us postulate this on our own, as it literally is only about the "disclosure", but since I did not buy into the almost-religious-experience level of awe this was supposed to inspire, I am again left with "so what?" I need to know the answer of that question. 

Kent.

KWIF: a grab bag of film across decades

 KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. I suppose the big watch of this week is the long-awaited release of Kill Bill as a single feature, but, well, we'll get into it. The best watch this week was certainly The Outfit, but I think I may have been one of very few who were eager to get the new Arrow blu-ray in my grubby little hands.

This Week:

In the Blink of an Eye (2026, d. Andrew Stanton - disney+)
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2004, d. Quentin Tarantino - blu-ray)

Mars Attacks! (1996, d. Tim Burton - tubi)
Def-Con 4 (1985, d. Paul Donovan, Digby Cook - tubi)

The Outfit (1973, d. John Flynn - blu-ray)

---

Director Andrew Stanton's In the Blink of an Eye went direct to streaming on Hulu/Disney+ earlier this with absolutely no fanfare, unlike his other film Toy Story 5 whose marketing campaign was inescapable and has made over a billion dollars at the international box office (it's not quite pulling Spider-Man: Brand New Day numbers, but hey, second place and a billion-plus dollars ain't too shabby). There's no real point in comparing Stanton's two 2026 releases, as they are vastly different films with vastly different styles and intentions.

This film takes place in three different time periods. The first is in 47,000 BC, which follows the life of neanderthal Thorn (Jorge Vargas), his pregnant mate Hera (Tanaya Beatty), and his children Lark (Skywalker Hughes, real name) and Ebb. The second tracks the life of anthropology grad student Claire Robertson (Rashida Jones) and her relationship with stats major Greg (Daveed Diggs) in modern times. The third takes place aboard a space ship in the 2400s with Coakley (Kate McKinnon) making a centuries-long trip to a new planet with the fate of humanity at stake, her only companion the onboard AI Rosco (also Rashida Jones...I think?).

There's not a specific storyline being told across these three eras, but more exploring all the elements of what it means to live, to be human. There family bonds, and romantic bonds, and friendship. There's fear and anxiety, there's pain, physical and emotional.  There's sex and pleasure and awkwarness. There's birth, and death, there's disease and healing, there's community and evolution, support and trade, and so much more.

The film presents this journey through these moments of existence without any specific linear narrative to them as a whole, thought there are arcs for the characters, each whose stories span decades. Stanton and screenwriter Colby Day present parallels across the three different eras such that what one character is going through in one era, another is dealing with something similar in a different era. The point obviously being that these human conditions are eternal and not unique to any specific time or reality.

These jumps across time aren't always the cleanest or clearest (for instance, I didn't pick up on the fact that Claire and Greg were supposed to be students, not professors or researchers or whatever, basically playing about 20 years younger when we first meet them), but even if some of the nuance is lost, it's not hard to track the emotional storytelling Stanton is working towards. 

It's all underpinned by a Thomas Newmann score which is ever present and would be just as suitable for a relaxing massage or a yoga session. It's truly a vibes based movie, there's no heighted drama nor any specific action to raise the blood pressure. It's rapid journey through time across eras is meant to be reflective, not impactful, and at times I was genuinely moved by what I was feeling. That said, I was also bored at times. Both can be true.

It's so specifically constructed that it seems that Stanton achieved exactly what he wanted with this, but it's no WALL-E or Finding Nemo.

In the Blink of an Eye has not been a warmly received movie critically and it's already been buried in the Disney+ streaming catalogue to the point that it seems the only way to find it is to search for it directly. I don't know that it deserves to be so quickly dismissed, but it's also such a specific mood piece that I find it hard to recommend.

---

I've been waiting for The Whole Bloody Affair pretty much since Tarantino first mentioned it when Kill Bill Vol. 1 came out in 2004. I understood that the intention of splitting Kill Bill into two volumes was a Weinstein money move, but I always thought Kill Bill would be presented as the whole it was intended to be once it got to home video. I really didn't think it would take over two decades for that to happen. I've never owned Kill Bill on physical media solely because I was waiting, even though, at a certain point, I assumed it was just never going to happen.

And now, after a brief theatrical run (which I missed due to life's poor timing), The Whole Bloody Affair is here on 4k/Blu-ray and...it really doesn't feel that different than watching Kill Bill as two separate movies.

This home video release still breaks the film up across two discs, but instead of there being closing credits after the Bride's wintery duel with O-ren Ishii, it cuts to an intermission title card and song. Unlike back in the laserdisc days where a screen caption would instruct you to flip the disc or insert the next one, here, after the intermission ends the disc cuts back to the menu screen. Sub-optimal. Disc two then autoplays on its own jumping right into the longer portion of the film.

I've always enjoyed the first "volume" of Kill Bill more than the second. The first 110 minutes are so propulsive, energetic and dazzling, with incredible choreographed fight sequences and a flashy anime sequence exploring O-Ren's backstory (what became readily apparent in the recompiling of the two volumes is that this whole bloody affair winds up being a 4-hour-plus movie. None of the other characters get such a detailed back story as O-Ren, not even Beatrix Kiddo, so the whole anime backstory feels utterly extraneous when presented as a single unit).  

The next 140 minutes (credits are 20 minutes of that, including both end credit sequences from Volumes 1 & 2) are much, much slower paced, all leading the the final hour where The Bride finally finds Bill, spends time with the child she didn't know survived, and then, fulfills the title contract.  There are some excellent moments in this. The Bride's flashback to her 1-inch-punch training and her escape from her buried coffin, her fight with Elle Driver in that trailer home, and Thurman's excellent performance upon seeing her child for the first time. But when there's a four-hour run-time Budd's sorry life at the strip club or Bill's extended speechifying (especially his whole "Superman" speech) feels like unnecessary indulgence from the director.

I still really like Kill Bill generally, but somehow, for me, it worked better as two films than one. Two films feels like it has the appropriate room to breathe. As one, I start checking the clock and contemplating what seems unnecessary. 

I have covered Tarantino a fair amount on this blog, including a full rewatch and ranking back in 2019 (just after Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood premiered) where I ranked Vol 1&2 as a whole in second place of Tarantino's works. I'm not sure I would put it in that same position now (probably bumped down to 4th).  

I don't think I've watched a Tarantino movie since I wrote that rewatch and ranking post (though I read his books, and I did listen to his podcast until it went up behind a paywall). Part of it is I've been more focused on new experiences with my film watching this decade, and the other part is, I think, maybe my fandom has tempered in my middle age.  Perhaps Tarantino's shift from filmmaker to film critic/podcaster (aka the Kevin Smith track) lessens the allure. Perhaps his lack of new features lessens my interest to revisit the old ones. Perhaps I was sated with 25 years of fandom and I've moved on.  Perhaps I've seen roughly a thousand movies since I did that rewatch and ranking and I'm more versed in Tarantino's influences and I'm starting to see the seams. We'll see how I feel about the Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood pseudo-sequel Cliff Booth Tarantino wrote and David Fincher directed this fall.

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Celebrating its 30th anniversary (!), Mars Attacks! was seen as both a bomb and a blunder upon release, but has become a cult classic in the intervening years. 

There was only so much story to tell in adapting a series of trading cards into a movie, but Burton's enthusiasm for this production seems to rival his earliest efforts like Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice.  

I only have a passing familiarity with the trading cards, but it seems evident by the film's lack of direct narrative coherence that Burton was using the imagery from the cards as his guide in constructing the project.

While it flirts with the idea of being a Dr. Strangelove-esque political/social satire, it doesn't commit that hard to the bit. It wants to have too much fun with the "Ack-ack"-ing aliens (watching with the subtitles on and reading along is great!) and their giddy bloodlust for the destruction of the human race, alongside their many institutions and totems.

The digital effects, still pretty new at rapidly evolving the time, have a clumsiness to them that, I'm sure in 1996 and 2006 and probably 2016 seemed kind of atrocious compared to the advances in the technology that would follow, but in 2026 the clumsiness of the digital effects is part of the charm. Just as the film itself was throwing back to the 1950's, now it feels like the effects are a part of the intentional throwback charm.

There's a rich celebrity roster here, with Jack Nicholson taking the forefront in two roles, one as the president of America, the other as a rich Texan looking to get into the casino game in Vegas. Glenn Close plays the wife of the former, while Annette Benning is the partner of the latter. Natalie Portman is the First Daughter, while Michael J Fox and Sarah Jessica Parker play a couple who are also competing news reporters. Lucas Haas is a sweet rural kid who loves his grandma with dementia, while his 'Murica-loving trailer-park parents played by Joe Don Baker and O-Lan Jones disapprove of his sweetness and wish he was more like his jarhead brother, played by very young Jack Black (Christina Applegate plays Jack Black's girlfriend in pretty much an unspeaking role). Legends Jim Brown and Pam Grier play an estranged couple, Rod Steiger is a pro-war military general, Pierce Brosnan is a peace-loving scientist, Danny DeVito, Tom Jones, Martin Short, Salma Hayak and more also appear.  It's just a ridiculously stacked cast playing characters who have no real ark, almost all serving the purpose as being laser-fire fodder for the aliens (voiced by Frank Welker).

The joy of Mars Attacks! is the unfettered glee of the ultra silly aliens joyously destroying humanity (they're proto-Minions in their comically violent antics), and then conversely the icky fun of seeing these nuisance creatures heads get squishe or splattered into a spray of green goo.

It's pure ridiculousness, right up until the notorious finale when it's discovered that Slim Whitman's warble is the alien's surprise weakness (it's a delightful play on War of the Worlds mundane fix for the invasion, and a far better turn than, say, Signs).  Don't think too hard about anything, in fact don't think at all.

This thing should be in the Criterion Collection and I should have it in the binders.

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Back in the days of video stores, many, many movies -  most of them in the sci-fi or horror genre - were sold completely by the cover art of the box on the shelf. So many incredible - usually painted - images that just struck the eye, got stuck in the mind and inspired the brain to go to wild, wild places that, inevitably, the film in the case never actually takes you to.

The box art for Def-Con 4 was a staple in every video store I can remember going to (were Canadian video shops mandated to have this as part of their Canadian Content?) That image of the downed satellite looming large in the background and a space suit with a skeleton inside in the foreground I'm sure was responsible for thousands of thousands of rentals. I never did get to it though. Perhaps the reputation that the movie didn't live up to the box art spread across playground and high school hallways?

Def-Con 4 was brought up recently in an interview with Blackberry/Nirvanna The Band The etc... director Matt Johnson and that image immediately flooded my mind. In my (unfortunately only) recent interest in Canadian film I put it on the to-watch list.

It's a garbage nonsense movie about the end of civilization as we know it. It starts in space as a crew aboard a defence satellite catch word that Libya has hijacked a US ship armed with nuke and are setting them off. Or something. They eventually respond unleashing their payload. Humanity is decaying rapidly under the fallout, or, at least, TV has gone off the air (same thing).

This opening sequence which simultaneously moves too quickly and drags on far too long, seems like its setting up the film's trio of astronaut protagonists, and trying to give us something akin to insight into their motivations for being on this mission in space and hints as to their life back home, but it's so awkwardly written, we're not ever sure what we're supposed to take from all this jumbled info. One of the crew, Commander Cecil Howe, wants to return back to his wife (even though she's been quarantined for some illness and the baby is dead and the radiation is going to kill everyone anyway). But after re-entry they crash land off-course and on a beach. One of them is taken immediately by cannibals, J.J. is left inside unconscious and concussed while Howe looks for help.

Howe is immediately captured by Vinny McKinnon (Maury Chaykin) who threatens to kill him, but he decides to make a trade for supplies on his capsule. Vinny has also kidnapped Alice (Donna King) , and now we have our trio of protagonists who... oh, nevermind. They get kidnapped by a military regime led by a petty, preppy high school student (Kevin King) who is mostly just upset his girlfiend (Alice) left him.  

This post-apocalyptic wasteland is so, so pathetic as to be far more banal than scary.  The rhythms of this are so familiar (it's somehow not all that different than, like, 28 Days Later) and yet it's so underbaked as to basically be raw elements with little to no investment in the characters. The only real drama is the tension between  teenagers Gideon Hayes and Alice and they're like the fourth and fifth leads of this film.

Its Canadianness shines through in, mostly, the worst ways possible, mostly in production value, but also scripting and performance and editing where it feels like multiple takes were just not possible within the budget so they had to deal with what one or two takes got them (I don't know this for sure, but that's sure what it seems like).

The only redeeming quality of this is one absolutely out of place scene where Howe catches some bad guys by surprise and tells them at gunpoint to get off the boat, and then the guys keep reaching for their guns and Howe keeps telling them to stop reaching for the guns. It's a silly farce that seems straight out of The Naked Gun, and I can only imagine how entertaining this would have been had they leaned into this type of humour throughout.  Alas.

That poster, though, remains incredible.

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One of my slow-burn projects on this blog of late has been to watch all the adaptations that have been made of the Parker novels.  The character, written under Donald E. Westlake's pen-name, was a relative unknown commodity to me until I read the incredible comic book adaptations by the late Darwyn Cooke. Reading those lit a Parker fire under me (though, not even close to being enough to actually read the novels.... Reading?  Bleh. Who even reads anymore. Given the stats on this blog, like, a dozen people?).

There are a few adaptations that are just out there, readily available, from the two versions of Payback,  the awful Jason Statham film, to the stone cold classic Lee Marvin joint Point Blank ,to the most recent attempt I can't bring myself to watch (yet). Then there's the ones you have to deep dive for, like Slayground, Made in the USA, Pillaged, The Split and this one, The Outfit.

Robert Duvall isn't exactly the mind's eye perfect Parker (or Parker analog). The character is described as a big, broad beast of a man, shaggy and expressionless. The only actor who has portrayed him that really fits the description is Lee Marvin, but even then, he's maybe not as dangerous looking as Westlake described him. I'm not exceptionally experienced with Duvall's filmography, but everything I have seen him in, he's been incredible. I don't think he could take a wrong step if he tried. He's a true character actor, disappearing into a role. There's no specific type for Duvall, as such, despite lacking height or width or the big block fists described on the page, Duvall's Eddie Macklin kind of makes for the most screen accurate Parker in every other context.

Macklin is so, so cold in this film, but for the briefest moments of fleeting humanity, where an errant emotion flashes on his face but then disappears.  We meet Macklin coming out of jail, being picked up by a former lover, Bett (Karen Black), who informs him that his brother's been murdered. She was responsible for giving him up after being tortured. The Outfit, it turns out, was not happy with the fact that Macklin, his brother and their accomplice Cody (Joe Don Baker) hit one of their crooked banks. They're sending a message to everyone.

But Macklin has his own sense of propriety and justice. After getting the jump on some outfit goons he sends a message back. Either they pay up 250K for murdering his brother, or else he keeps hitting them, and hitting them hard, doing what no right-minded thief would do. A joint is a joint, and they all can be hit up. All's fair as far as Macklin's concerned. The heat bears down on him, Cody and Bett, but if he feels it he doesn't let on, and while Bett wants to get out, Cody is ride-or-die. It's not that he's a tactical genius or that shrewd in his calculating. He's just determined to get what he wants, his drive and motivation trump anything else.

While not the most elegantly directed movie, nor the prettiest, Duvall leads a pretty exceptional cast on a an uncommon journey. Knowing that Macklin doesn't have a plan gives the story an anything-can-happen vibe and you're never quite sure what's next on the agenda, or at times, exactly how Macklin is going to get out of a situation.  Whatever the code is that he operates by has an internal logic in the film, and it creates ample surprises and unique moments.

I've been searching for The Outfit for some time, and the new Arrow Video release, full of special features diving into Westlake's history as well as the film's history makes for a very welcome release. It's maybe not a "classic" in the strictest sense but it's certainly a forgotten gem worthy of rediscovery.