2021, d. Roseanne Liang - netflix
The film opens with a retro-styled WWII-era animated film meant to remind soldiers that there's no such thing as "gremlins" that will destroy their aircraft, that it's only human negligence that causes such errors. It's a pretty great start, and seems to take more than a bit of inspiration from Roald Dahl's The Gremlins which was intended to be a Disney animated feature.
Following the animated intro, the first note of score features Carpenter-style 80's synth cue, a cue which pops up later in the film, but only stands out in its sporadic use. This very well could be an homage to Carpenter-style action-horror(-camp) storytelling, but it's apparent they only wanted to hint at it, not commit to it. It's a very Cameron-esque movie, complete with a modest budget, contained setting, the genre bits and pieces, and some semblance of a message underpinning it.
It's a tight 88 minutes full of creatures, aerial action, and so. much. peril. An ensemble piece where 90% of the ensemble is off screen and only heard over the radio 90% of the time. It asks a lot of Chloe Grace Moretz who has to carry all the weight of the film's ridiculous twists, as well as add some (no pun intended) grace to a character facing an agressively flagrant (and, unfortunately, not unrealistic) amount of mysogeny as she interlopes on the military boy's club aboard a war plane, seemingly with a clandestine mission which turns out to be something very personal. Meanwhile, there's a gremlin tearing the plane apart, and Japanese fighters on attack.
In a film that posits plane-destroying gremlins are real, Moretz (no pun intended) grounds this to such a degree that it's only when she she has to extremely crawl out on the underside of the plane's wing like a seasoned freeclimber, using the bulletholes as finger and toe holds, (a simultaneously ridiculous and awesome sequence, especially given her character is operating with a broken pointer finger) that the film seems to be stretching its limits of credibility (relatively speaking).
Taking a script from (guh) Max Landis, director Roseanne Liang rewrote it into something that speaks truth to sexism women have constantly faced as they enter male dominated fields, and how they have to navigate insult and patronization with gritted teeth, courtesy and inner strength. Moretz's officer and pilot is confident, competent and more than capable, and certainly knows how to (no pun intended) navigate the patriarchy, but is still laid subject to it. Her character has to got to a lot of unusual places emotionally but she does so in a way that feel like a consistent character, that is until the finale. There she decides to go toe-to-toe against a wounded gremlin in what seems like it's revenge motivated, but it's such a typical movie machismo thing where the hero beats the villain creature with their own bare hands...something that a male writer would write to make a female character seem like a badass. It doesn't really feel like an in-character moment. But I liked Moretz ripping off her sleeve to reveal the muscles that just confirmed she was capable of hanging upside down from the underside of a plane wing while in flight.
It is a brisk romp that has no shame about the wild twists and turns it goes through. It doesn't try to explain gremlins, they just are. The parable here is that a woman faces many enemies, the monster that makes itself known, the shadows that lurk with potential to strike at any time, and the enemies she must walk amongst, the ones that say they're friendly but are perhaps the most dangerous of them all. This, I believe, Liang shaped into a film about the lengths women have to go to to escape these threats, and the strength they possess is kind of beyond belief.
It's not perfect. There are definite questions left unanswered, and certainly inquiries about how certain things truly operate, but like Carpenter in the 80's, Liang doesn't slow down long enough for these questions to matter. Not perfect, but also not boring and quite a bit of fun.
Just trolling through the archives and I was surprised to find that I had both watched and reviewed this movie. I had no recollection of it. The blog serves its purpose (yay!)
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