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: I Love Boosters (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Ol' Kent here celebrated the end of his 50th year with some epic boardgaming, epic toy and collectibles hunting, epic medical diagnostic imaging, and not so much epic movie watching (or reviewing)...just a little.

This Week:
I Love Boosters (2026, d. Boots Riley - in theatre)
Tuner (2025, d. Daniel Roher - in theatre)
Exit 8 (2025, d. Genki Kawamura - rental)
Made of Honor (2008, d. Paul Welland - hollywoodsuite)

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I think this will wind up being my
 favourite movie poster of the year.
I want this as a puzzle.

As the credits were rolling on our sparsely attended early Saturday matinee of I Love Boosters, one white male millennial audience member stood up and stretched, turned around and engaged the other millenial couple behind him. The part my wife overheard him say was "I mean, I liked it, but can you tell me why you thought it was funny?"

Humour is subjective. I get that. But I Love Boosters is undoubtedly a comedy. It's part farce, part Looney Tunes (by way of Stephen Chow), part social satire, part absurdism, and so many other little parts of things that congeal to make a wildly appealing, chaotic, inventive whole.

Kiki Palmer (Nope) - one of the most charismatic performers of her generation - leads this film as Corvette, a wanna-be fashion designer who just can't seem to find her way into the industry. She lives in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant and steals clothes for a living to resell at steep discounts on the black market to the less rich. She's aided in the "Velvet Gang" by her best friend Sade (Naomi Ackie, Mickey 17) who is obsessed with a multi-level marketing scheme, and Mariah (Taylour Paige, Zola) who thinks her boosting is a revolutionary act.

They don't steal from just anywhere, or just anyone, but instead focus on the chain of Metro Designers stores which are owned by fashion mogul and certified genius Christie Smith (Demi Moore, The Substance). Corvette is obsessed with Smith, idolizes her, and in her own way sees her boosting of Smith's clothes as a form of flattery, but Smith, who calls the Velvet Gang "low class, urban bitches" is increasingly perturbed by them.  Corvette learns of a delivery of $100,000 suits and sets her sights on that being the ultimate target (especially after discovering that Smith has stolen a design Corvette submitted to a fashion contest earlier in the year, it becomes about revenge). To make a boost this big, they need to work on the inside.

So they get a job working at Metro Designers under Grayson (Will Poulter, Warfare), who has totally drunk the Christie Smith corporate kool-aid, and meet Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez, Bloodshot) who is trying to organize a union within Metro Designers.  And then they are robbed..the entire store gone in seconds.  

I could go on for paragraphs breaking down the larger strokes of this film. It is very busy, but earns its busyness.  Boots Riley cut his teeth with the incredible satire Sorry To Bother You, and takes the social satire and ambition of that film to a whole other level here. The picture is vibrant, with bold monochromes at each of the Metro Designers sets, while the wardrobe is off the charts with all the leads looking ridiculous or stylish or ridiculously stylish. It'd be the most fashionable movie of the year, if not for The Devil Wears Prada 2. There are extended sequences involving stop motion animation (that recall John Carpenter's They Live) an extended chase sequence done in minature (some shades of Wes Anderson there), a building on a canted angle leaving a set sloped at 20 degrees which all but Christie Smith seem to have difficulty navigating, and a gigantic ball of stress made up of bills and all the other things haunting Corvette, stalking her at random times.

I Love Boosters is unfettered creativity from a director who doesn't see limits on what can be done in storytelling. It's the first mass-released film since Everything Everywhere All At Once that feels like there are no restrictions in how a story can be told. Even if I Love Boosters is only nominally less successful at coherently conveying its central message than that Oscar-winner, it's still an exceptionally entertaining and provocative ride.  [I haven't even mentioned the soul-eating demon/love interest played by Lakieth Stanfield (Atlanta), but he's an intriguing distraction for both the picture and Corvette that pops up at both the most opportune and inopportune times. He's a total aside, but a deliciously amusing one.]

While its employment of magical realism and surrealist fantasy is wickedly enjoyable and compliments its anti-capitalism message in unusual but agreeable ways, I Love Boosters' use of a science fiction technology alongside abstract concepts of "situational acceleration and deconstructionism", as well as teleportation is a tad less concrete. There is a device introduced in the second act which then becomes the inciting agent for the rest of the film, and the employment of these speculative conceits become the hardest part of the film to wrap one's head around, particularly at the accelerated pace the film moves at.  It leads to a lot of fun and clever sequences in the film, and effectively incites the film's ultimate, pro-union, power-in-numbers message, but it does so with an asterisk.

What I Love Boosters ultimate goal is to promote a character who realizes that sometimes there's a greater goal, a greater purpose to one's actions than fulfilling their own desires. That perhaps too many of us are concerned more with individual achievement than collective growth is the realization Corvette needs to have on her journey, even if it isn't the most personally satisfying, it does seem the most rewarding. 

[As an aside, as a person who is basically deaf in one ear, I had a very difficult time with the sound mix on this film. As a musician himself, Riley loves music, and there's always music playing in the background of any scene, whether it's diegetic or the fantastic score from TuneYards, along with layers of ambient noise or sometimes background dialogue and/or TV footage.  In person, I have a hard time in cacophonous situations picking out what people are saying, and turns out it's the same with on screen situations. I can't wait for Blu-Ray, which I will absolutely be getting, so I can watch this with the closed captioning on and pick up on so much of what I missed].

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Speaking of my hearing disorder, it was fascinating for me to watch a film about someone on the other end of the aural spectrum than I am. In Tuner, Niki (Leo Woodall, Cherry) has hyperacusis, an affliction in which he is exceptionally hypersensitive to sound to a debilitating degree. For the majority of the picture he is wearing custom ear plugs, and often with noise cancelling headset over that. Even then particularly sharp or loud noises can send him into disarray, even proving so painful as to render him unconscious.

Niki also has perfect pitch and starts the film working as protege piano tuner to family friend Harry Horowicz (Dustin Hoffman, Tootsie), a beloved figure in the music community. Harry is losing his hearing and starting to be a bit forgetful, but he's a delight to be around (I'm normally not a big Hoffman fan, but he is very likeable in the role). Niki is sweetly devoted to Harry and his wife Marla, like family. When Harry falls ill, Niki agrees to help out with the medical bills by buying Harry's truck and taking over his business. While on a job he meets Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu, AfrAId), and over a few encounters their attraction becomes undeniable, but while on a different job, Niki meets Uri (Lior Raz, Gladiator II) and his boys as they attempt to drill into the safe of the house they are both working at. Niki learned his hearing disorder actually was a boon for safecracking and gets into the safe for the boys. Uri, who works in private security for elite individuals, offers Niki a job if he wants to make "real money". To pay Harry's bills, Niki has no choice, and he helps them steal from Uri's client's safes "things they wouldn't notice are missing".  Of course, getting involved with criminals is never going to end well for Niki and it threatens to destroy what comfort he has in life and maybe take everyone else he loves down with him.

Woodall is very unassuming as Niki, at first, with Hoffman dominating each scene they're in together early on. But eventually Woodall is handed control and Niki becomes quite captivating in his quiet temperament, and the reality of his affliction (handled with superb sound design) is clearly conveyed to the audience at all times. Canadian director Daniel Roher, who won an Oscar for his documentary on Alexei Navalni in 2022, proves he has an incredibly steady hand for directing a modestly budgeted dramatic thriller like this. In his debut narrative feature, Roher utilizes montages to perfect effect (time will tell if this is a signature move or just something stylistic for this feature, metering up with the film's soft jazzy piano score, and symphonic bits).

Tuner works very well as a character study but its crime element is unfortunately quite predictable, lacking a lot of real surprises. Thankfully Roher is more interested in the character than he is in the jobs Niki is assisting on, and so the segments of safecracking, for the most part, are pretty brisk and don't employ the tension of the risk of getting caught too heavily. There is one particular Chechov-ian item that presents itself early on, and the manner in which it goes off is such a deus ex machina that it borders on unforgivable...but just sits on that border.

Otherwise, this is an agreeable throwback to the kind of thriller we saw plenty of through the 70's, 80's and 90's, but have largely disappeared in the past two decades. We could do with more.

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I knew nothing about Exit 8 except the concept: a man gets lost in a maze of subway hallways searching for Exit 8, finding horrors along the way. I was in. I love subway tiles, and hallways and escape rooms, so this movie was beckoning me like a siren of the sea. 

In the film, our "lost man" is played by Kazunari Ninomiya, a seemingly hapless and perhaps depressed young man who doesn't seem ready for the world. We first meet him on a subway train during rush hour as he witnesses a man in a suit berate a young mother for bringing her crying baby on the train. Everyone's looking at their phones, and, after he puts his earbuds back in, so does he. When he gets off the train he receives a phone call from his ex. She's at the hospital and tells him she's pregnant. She doesn't know whether she wants to keep it or terminate the pregnancy, and is asking for his input. He doesn't know either. Not paying attention, he finds himself in an Z-shaped hallway that seems to repeat without end...the same man walking past him, the same adverts on the wall, the same lockers and photobooth....

And then he spies a sign, telling him that he needs to leave through Exit 8. If he spies an anomaly, turn back, and if there are no anomalies, keep going.

I didn't know Exit 8 was based off an indie video game sensation, but really it didn't take me long to discern such a thing, especially when the "rules" were introduced. What could have just been cheap horror, though, is so much more from director/writer Genki Kawamura (co-written with Kentaro Hirase). It's not just an endless maze of repeating tunnels, but a metaphor for repetitive cycles in life, of fearing change and indecision., alerting us to look for the differences, and that we need to embrace those differences to make it out the other end.

If it were just our "lost man" encountering terrifying anomalies, it would have been a fine movie, but it's not just that. There is a delicious surprise (SPOILER) in act 2, where the film completely pivots away from our "lost man" and instead follows the man he's passed dozens of times at this point, and we learn the "walking man's" story. Both men, however, encounter a young boy who they each think is a facet of this purgatory they're in, but come to learn (if not embrace) that the child is as trapped as they are and, maybe, has better instincts for getting out.

Though slight on story, and maybe light on horrors, I absolutely loved this movie. It was completely my thing.  The repetition encourages audience engagement, looking at the same hallway walls and wondering what's different...if anything, and knowing it could come down to something so easily overlooked as the fine text on one of the posters, or a tile placed askew (although, mercifully it's never that).

The sound design is as crucial as the visual design, and as integral to the repetition. It's obviously largely borrowed from the video game, but it's brought into "reality" so effectively. Ninomiya has such a soulful face that your empathy is immediately with him, and he conveys his emotions so blatantly and effectively. The "walking man" played by Yamato Kochi is intensely terrifying in his early scenes where the lost man turns around the find the walking man immediately in his face with a grin that'll make your skin crawl, but then it only takes Kochi seconds with the second act pivot to bring you over to sympathizing with his plight in the corridors.

The film creates a text that the video game never had, a reason for why our protagonist(s) are in this purgatory, and letting the audience know that they need to have a reason to get out. I feel like we can apply this to life somehow....

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I've made no secret out of enjoying cheesy romance movies and romantic comedies, but that's not universal approval of all of them. In fact, there are scant few romcoms I would consider good or worth watching again, and even fewer I actually want to watch in the first place. To some extent most romcoms I just tend to avoid because, in execution (if not conceptually), they're so cloying as to be repulsive.

In concept, Made of Honor should not be such a film. The story of a tomcat of a man who is best friends with a woman whom he learns after years and years that he's actually in love with her, only for her to turn up engaged before he can say anything...well, that sounds like a serviceable, if predictable romcom format, and not egregiously offensive. But show me that trailer, or even just the poster, and I'm steering clear like it's plague-bearing.

I never needed to see Made of Honor, there was nothing compelling me to watch it, but it was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and after I finished watching a film on dvd, it turned up on cable when the player shut off. I spied Patrick Dempsey and his basketball-playing bro-pals (including Kadeem Hardison and Chris Messina) attempting to help the man navigate his emotions over his best friend Hannah (Michelle Monaghan) being away on a work trip and missing her so much he couldn't enjoy his many many dates with hot women in her absence.  It's a particular turning point in pop culture when men were allowed to support other men emotionally but only if it was in a really really butch situation, with like sports and/or alcohol, but points for letting them get there. But it treats these scenes as if they were comedy, not as if there's real emotional stakes at play which gets to what's so wrong with this film.... 

Made of Honor makes the biggest cardinal sin of the romantic comedy genre: it's not funny. It tries to be funny and fails pretty much every time. There's two possible reasons, and it's an and/or situation: casting and/or the director. 

Dempsey is cute, handsome and charming, but he's not innately funny. Ditto for Monaghan. Hardison and Messina both have comedic acting experience, and Monaghan's coterie of bridesmaids includes Busy Philipps and Whitney Cummings, but none of them squeeze out any real guffaws despite trying. 

Monaghan returns from her trip engaged to rugged Scotsman Kevin McKidd, who threatens Dempsey's masculinity in every way. Any attempt to one-up him ends in failure. Just as any attempt for either to be funny falls entirely flat.

There is a scene where Dempsey is going to meet Monaghan for the first time since her return home, only to be surprised by her new beau, and he smashes into a waiter and they topple to the floor, his bouquet of flowers everywhere (which he lies were never his). It's close to being a good pratfall. Later in the scene, after an awkward dinner, Dempsey gets up from his chair at an awkward moment and tumbles into the same waiter again. The whole sequence should be full of humour around the discomfort, complete with the pratfall starter and capper, but it doesn't take, like, at all. And that's direction. Director Welland seems to be too lost in finding an emotional center to really let the humour of the scene play, and its stars aren't gifted enough comedically to innately play up the humour and the emotion. 

But boy do they look good not being funny. Dempsey is real fit, and kinda dashing, while Monaghan is just so effortlessly pretty (with a team of make-up and wardrobe people putting great effort into that effortlessness).

Without the humour, this movie feels tedious, rehashing the same points over and over again. I don't know that Dempsey and Monaghan ever found the "friendship" dynamic this film needed to sell that part of it. They're just too good looking together and they play into the attraction even when it's not fully supposed to be there yet. This needed two decent-to-good looking comedic performers to pull this off. (Like Jason Segel and Mila Kunis in Forgetting Sarah Marshall...a far superior film, and one which I would definitely not sacrifice to put those leads into Made of Honor. What's a pairing that didn't happen... maybe like, Paul Rudd and Isla Fisher?)

There's both a good romance and good comedy waiting to happen in this script. It's been 20 years, maybe a remake is in order with a director and starring pair that can get it right.

KWIF: The Devil Wears Prada 2 (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. It was a real toss up: final two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again's second season, or the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. It was no toss up. Daredevil has been, to put it bluntly, repetitive and boring, while TDWP2 is an event! It wasn't even a competition.

This Week:
The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026, d.  David Frankel - in theatre)
Mortal Kombat II (2026, d. Simon McQuoid - in theatre)
Keyhole (2011, d. Guy Maddin - tubi)
Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (2002, d. Takashi Miike - tubi)
Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988, d. Akio Jissoji - tubi)

I am not a journalist. Despite having been a writer and for many online resources for over 30 years, nothing I've done is what I would call journalism. The closest I came was a 3 year stint on editorial at my student newspaper in University (I thought this was an extraordinary and fundamental time in my life but in hindsight, turns out it was a somewhat juvenile and retroactively embarrassing era for both myself and the paper, full of (my own) sloppy work, ill-informed editorials, and errors in judgement. My desire to be more like the Harvard Lampoon or Mad Magazine than anything with journalistic integrity (which is not to diminish the work of my collaborators, but I was really not up to the task...but I digress). 

I got a degree in business, not journalism, and I cared about each equally (which is to say, minimally). It's probably for the best I never went into journalism professionally (though I tried on a few occasions). I don't have the stones for it. Much like being an artist, being a journalist requires sacrifice, and the rewards are not monetary, and you have to love it (which I don't...I respect it, don't love it so much). Plus, in the past 15 years or so, there's been a decided attack on journalism as an institution. Truth telling is now all a matter of perspective (or so the 1% overlords would have us believe). It's been a rough dozen-plus years for the media. Most of my favourite writers are now doing their own Substack or Substack-adjacent writing, and supplementing any written work with podcasting. The world is a lesser place for social media having supplanted traditional media as people's primary source of news (or, rather, "news"). There's no security to working in the world of journalism.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a sequel that doesn't need to exist. Nothing about the end of The Devil Wears Prada demands we know more. But now that it does exist, that it sets itself on top of the backdrop of the failing state of traditional media and the billionaire bros who snap up media outlets so they can control the narrative with their detached-from-the-layman world view...well, at least there's something for it say, something to explore in this moment, even if it doesn't quite have the firmest grasp on its message.

We find, when this film starts, Andy Sach (Anne Hathaway) has just won a journalism award but also, at almost the same moment, via text, finds out that she and her entire staff at the newspaper she was writing for have been laid off. Meanwhile Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) has just had an expose written about how Runway Magazine has promoted and supported a brand who runs a manufacturing sweatshop. This is a scandal, one which Miranda of 20 years ago would never have found herself in (it's telling in many ways that she has).  The owner of Runway's media parent, Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman) needs damage control, and thus returns Andy to Runway, the place where she interned 20 years ago, now as the new features editor.

She reunites with Nigel (Stanley Tucci) and Miranda (who doesn't remember her, or so she says), and is instantly swept into a meeting with their key advertiser, Dior, where Emily (Emily Blunt) now works as retail manager.

Andy finds Miranda in a subdued position relative to where she once was. Still a titan of the industry, print media is all but dead, and the online sphere for Runway has trouble competing with other scroll-and-like spaces. Andy's role is, at first, damage control, but also about trying to raise Runway's profile up.  It needs to be more than just about the pictures, people need to read it for the articles too.  Without saying it, it's attempting to "Teen Vogue" it (where in the mid-2010s Teen Vogue shifted its focus from fashion and entertainment and rapidly gained attention for it's provocative and insightful political articles.... Teen Vogue was collapsed into the parent Vogue in 2025 by its publishing overlords, according to many to stifle its anti-right wing messaging).

Andy's efforts to raise the status of the magazine is noticed in the media, but not represented in the site traffic. She needs a big gambit both to secure her place and to gain at least a modicum of respect from Miranda. She needs to land the white whale interview: Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu). The ex-wife of one of the world's richest men (a chuckling tech bro doofus played brilliantly under gobs of makeup by Justin Theroux) is now the world's richest woman, but Sasha hasn't given an interview in the three years since the divorce. Andy lands the interview (conducted by Miranda but the article written by Andy) and not only gets in Miranda's good graces once again but becomes a bit of a legend.  

The crux of the film, however, is that no matter what one good story brings for a day, a week, or a month, it's not enough. The cycles move on so fast that there's no time to rest, and media and journalism are still a dying form, unable to demand enough attention in the attention economy when there's injured baby foxes being fed milk from a bottle or video game live streams that run for two days straight to compete with. Runway is on the table to be sold...or on the chopping block to be axed.

While the first act is all about Andy getting reacquainted with a world she left behind 20 years earlier and noting both the similarities and shocking differences, the second act is about settling in, about establishing a new life in a roller-coaster world of uncertainty and insecurity. Miranda is the only one who seems like teflon-coated steel, nothing penetrates and nothing sticks...but even she is showing signs that that it's all actually getting to her too. The world is changing and she can only do so much to change with it.

The third act then becomes about Andy's perception of the situation, that the threat to Runway, one of the last bastions of traditional media, is the warning siren and that saving it means much more than just saving a magazine but providing hope for the entire industry of journalism.  It's idealist and optimistic, and it takes the audience on that ride of hope and scrappy-can-do attitude.

And then Miranda slaps her in the face with reality. It's only a matter of time. There's a boa wrapped tightly around every industry, squeezing tighter and tighter trying to milk them for everything they're worth, until they're worth nothing, at least monetarily. The solution to the troubles in this picture all rely on the good graces of an ultra-rich benefactor to whom minimal, or no returns (or even negative returns) are worth the investment for the art and integrity. You can't monetize artistry and integrity.

This, mercifully, isn't a naive film, although at times Andy is far too naive as a character, and Miranda is far too withholding to fully invest in the driving story forces at play. It does oversimplify its narrative so that it can have a satisfying ending while still being cognizant that there remains a dark cloud overhead and the struggle will continue after the last pan of the New York skyline.

The Devil Wears Prada was a really good movie that has become sort of legendary. The sequel doesn't tarnish the legend, though it fails to find its own legendary status in the process. It's a pretty picture, with tons of fabulous outfits, sets, and settings (and boy does Anne Hathaway look more amazing than she ever has), all of which are a must, and it mercifully doesn't wallow in the past. It does unfortunately seems obliged to put Andy kind of in the same place she was in during the first movie, even though she has two decades of prestigious experience, world travelling and her own life under her belt. It's natural for someone to find themselves repeating patterns of behaviour when with certain people, but I just felt like she should be much more assured than she is here. Similarly, Miranda shows next to no sign of growth, yet she feels muted compared to the ruthless ferocity which she had in the prior film. But she's also almost 70 now, and there does come something of a softening with age which we should find believable.

Already a massive box office success, the best we can say about The Devil Wears Prada 2 is that it does fine as a sequel. It doesn't at all diminish what came before, nor does it immediately discount its own existence. I find myself wishing that it were more interested in its setting, exploring the erosion of media and journalism, especially given the eyes it has on it, but that's not the audience its serving (this isn't The Paper 2 or Broadcast News 2). It serves its audience well...or well enough.

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I didn't see the 2021 iteration of Mortal Kombat (but Toasty did) and, to be honest, I didn't care to. From all reports it was attempting to be a character-driven narrative exploring the characters of Sub-Zero and Scorpion, and that there was not, in fact, any Mortal Kombat to be had. I mean, what's the point then?

I am by no means invested in Mortal Kombat as a property. The last version of the game I played was its original incarnation. But that said, I've long had a soft spot for the '95 cinematic treatment from Paul WS Anderson, a film that has aged surprisingly well in that it was always kind of hokey and wasn't taking the whole thing too seriously. The last thing we need to do is take Mortal Kombat too seriously.

It seemed like (at least from Toasty's report) MK2021 was taking things too seriously. Mortal Kombat II wants you to think it's not taking things too seriously... but it still is. What story there is within the film is wildly unfocussed and largely predictable, with absolutely no tension built along the way (for a number of reasons). The movie starts by introducing the concept of "Mortal Kombat", where two realms, instead of waging war, compete in a tournament of 10 fights. The first to win five of these fights is victor and the losing side's realm is theirs. Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) watches her father get brutally defeated by Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford) and her mother and people immediately subjugated under him. He takes her as his daughter (I can't say for certain the scriptwriter was just aping Gamora's story from Guardians of the Galaxy/Infinity War but it's basically the same) which I'm sure will work out fine for everyone as a big happy new family.

Meanwhile Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) is a washed up Stephen Segal-type 90's action star who nobody cares about anymore. He's sad about his life but Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) recruit him for Mortal Kombat, Raiden promising him a greater, more fulfilling destiny. He declines, but, it turns out, he doesn't have a choice.

And so Kitana fights for her father, reluctantly, while Johnny Cage fights for Earth, reluctantly, only it turns out Kitana is a spy for Raiden and Johnny Cage has a warrior within, so the dramatic narrative arcs these characters can take are, well, straight lines rather than curves. Their stories go from A-to-C without even thinking about venturing towards B along the way.

So if there's no real character arcs in this film, surely it will have fun with team dynamics, right? Inner conflict and romances and whatnot? Notsomuch. Or at all. The "team" here, Raiden, Sonya, Johnny, Cole Young (Lewis Tan), Jax (Mechad Brooks), and Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) spend their time together largely spitting exposition. There's no real sense of camaraderie or any sense of these characters becoming friends or connected to each other in any way (we're told that Sonya and Jax are old friends, but do we feel it? Notsomuch). 

The film spends a lot of time trying to circle back on characters from the prior movie, even though they are not central figures here. As such, unless you are really invested in MK2021 then these beats have little to no weight on their own (like, Hiroyuki Sanada returns as Scorpion, but in the underworld, where he resumes his fight against the revived Sub-Zero to no real effect of the story at hand). 

So, if it fails at developing anything meaningful with its characters, MKII must be all about the tournament and the fighting, right? Yes and no. It does feature heavily its match-ups, the one-on-one fights, but none of them carry with them the weight of what the stakes of the tournament, and the fate of the "Earth realm". The film brutally fails at finding any tension within the tournament itself. With one or two exceptions, nobody witnesses the fights, so there's no crowd reactions, no cut to team-mates or friends as they watch their friends succeed or fail brutally. There's just nothing exciting outside of maybe a few cool manoeuvres or a particularly gory fatality, and there's not enough of those to justify a feature length movie this uninteresting.

It wouldn't be so bad if the film at least had style, but it's so evident that it was filmed on the Volume or similar on-set digital backdrop technology, and that the crew were either inexperienced with it or didn't have the time to refine their shots. The actors are lit so horrendously that they have a soft glow outline around them much of the time, while the backdrops too often don't feel tangible at all (I will concede that it's entirely possible that watching this on an IMAX screen made this so much more evident than a standard movie screen, or any home viewing implement). The few sets actually constructed feel cheap, much cheaper than an $80million budget would presume.  That, visually, this film feels inferior to the 1995 adaptation of Mortal Kombat is very telling.  That film used mostly practical sets that were well lit and well shot. This film seemed hampered by its constraints and is pretty ugly as a result.  At the very least the 1995 film had a still-iconic techno soundtrack, and this film's score doesn't even seem to be trying. 

There is one sequence not shot on a set, where Johnny, Liu Kang, Sonya and Jax venture into the home terrain of the excessively-toothed character Barada. It's an exterior desert set that has scale and doesn't feel contained by walls or barriers. Since it's outdoors there's a lot of natural light, and it does everyone a world of favours that the rest of the film does not. The fight between Johnny and Barada is fun and silly and feels like the only real payoff for Johnny (or any character for that matter) in the film.

Fans of the franchise will probably get more out of this than I will, but a films at this budget really should be trying for something more than fan service.

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I'm a bad Canadian cinephile. I don't spend enough time exploring the films or filmmakers of my home country. This is in large part due to the fact that Canadian cinema, by and large, doesn't have the resources that the films of other countries do. And with the exception of Quebec, which has an industry all its own, most of our best talents get co-opted by our neighbours to the South, obfuscating a film's Canadian-ness, if anything remains at all.

There are a few notable filmmakers who have made a name on an international scale that still largely work within the Canadian system and tell stories set within the country.  Guy Maddin is definitely such an auteur, one who likes to combine his fascination with the earliest era of filmmaking with a love of his homeland. Or so I've been told. I've seen maybe one or two of his films in the distant past, and have long been meaning to catch up.

Keyhole, his 2011 effort, was maybe not the first place to start. A psychological noir set in a haunted house, the film follows Ulysses Pick (Jason Patrick) and his gang of thugs as they barricade themselves in Ulysses' home. 

Our key signal that things are askew finds Ulysses' second-in-command telling the dead to face the wall and the living to face forward. The dead, then, march out the back door to face a proper disposal.

Ulysses emerges from the rain with Denny (Brooke Pallson) slung over his shoulder. They're both drenched. Eventually Ulysses will get dry, Denny will always seem perpetually wet, despite a change of clothes.

Ulysses warns the gang the house is haunted and to beware of touching ghosts. Meanwhile he searches the house with Denny in tow, her ability to read into his thoughts aid him in his quest to find his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini) within the twisted maze of hallways and stairs and doors. 

He is vexed by the ghost of Hyacinth's father (a very nude Louis Negin), who manipulates environments throughout the house, though does not seem to have any real control.

The journey is an abstract one, lacking decisive logic, living between metaphors. As a film, it is an exploration of Ulysses' life, his failures as a husband and father, and it questions whether these failures mean anything to him.

It's a puzzling film which it both its greatest and most detrimental asset. Bending your brain to understand what it is Maddin is trying to convey has its rewards when you can reach an understanding in what you see, but the dream logic that prevails often has no meaning, serving primarily to keep the audience off balance.

Maddin's first digitally-shot film, it's a black-and-white production but doesn't have the olde-timey feel (the heavy make-up of the silent or gangster film eras, for example) and it doesn't look particularly good. The sets, lighting and costume seem constructed on a shoestring budget (which they probably were) and lack the usual hand-crafted flair of the films of Maddin's I'm (not-so-)familiar with.

What probably lets the film down the most, however, is the character of Ulysses, who just isn't very compelling. Whether it's Patrick's performance or what he was given to work with, I was never certain why we should care about Ulysses or his journey.

Once I get into the swing of watching Maddin's pictures, acquainting myself anew with his sensibilities, I might soften on Keyhole, but as stands I found it a pretty rough watch.

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If I were to attempt to catch up on the works of Takasi Miike, it would have to be the only movies I watched in a year. The director has made around 120 films since his debut in the early 1990s and dozens upon dozens of television episodes. That prolific level of output seems unprecedented, and one has to wonder what gets sacrificed in the process of producing as such speed.

Like Guy Maddin above, I'm not particularly well-versed in Miike's repertoire, certainly not enough to speak to any overall style or sensibilities (a quick search of this blog finds no entries of Miike films...which surprises, me. I thought for sure Toasty would have one or two Miikes written up). 

Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (aka "Noboru Ando's True Outlaw Tales: Raging Fire") opens with a primal scream over a heavy metal track. The camera tracks a young man running full tilt through the streets of Tokyo (intercut with flashes of...other things, a perplexing montage of images at this stage of a film to be sure). Finally the young man, guns drawn, leaps over a small barricading wall of an outdoor stairwell and begins firing on the group of men below (clearly mobsters, based on the way the one man is dressed compared to the other men around him). The gunman dispatches everyone, having hit the boss at least once at this point. The boss does not fall, he keeps lumbering forward, taking more and more bullets, until he has his hands around his assailant's throat. The only escape the gunman has is to cut the man's hand's off. Thankfully his partner has come by for clean-up.  The next shot of the young assassin, we see him naked on a couch, the severed hands still attached to his throat.

Yeah, this is kind of what I think of when I think of a Miike film. Extremes.

The story of the film finds Arata Kunisada (Riki Takeuchi ) freed from prison. The mob boss that was just assassinated was a father figure to him, and he is distraught and vengeful. 

But this isn't a one-man-assassin squad/John Wickian tale, at least not yet. The film cuts between different mob factions and Kunisada's journey, which for much of the film's run time finds him hiding out, rather than pursuing his revenge.  But eventually Kunisada gets back on track and, well, finds a missile launcher to help him on his quest.

Having just watched the excellent Italian mob-revenge actioner Big Guns, this very much feels like another take on the same story, right down to the police sort of standing by, or perhaps even aiding the protagonist in their mission of revenge. The difference is Big Guns felt quite calculated and detailed in its execution. Rekka on the other hand feels quite rushed and unrefined. That shagginess has a bit of an appeal, for sure, but it makes for some confusing story beats, or even whole acts. (There's a detour that Kunisada takes with a possible love interest that seems completely inconsequential to the overall story, and, for the amount of screentime it takes, contributes little to our understanding of this rather one note character).

The film dabbles with character drama and mafia intrigue but isn't particularly committed to either, and by the time the big rocket-launcher climax happens, it becomes a big old cartoon that betrays whatever it was trying to do emotionally before. 

The film closes with the ghost of a dead mob boss popping his head into frame, shouting "rock and roll!" It's not a vibes movie, per se, but perhaps Miike is a vibes director, and you're either on his wavelength or you're not. I dunno...Rekka wasn't boring, except when it was.

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One thing I'm always searching for is films from the 1980s with great special effects, including miniatures and big sets and puppets and stop-motion animation. I've exhausted most of the North American releases some time ago (though there is still the rare surprise) and have to look internationally for such pleasures. The main problem is I have no idea where to look, or what I'm looking for, and sacrificing a few hours hoping for something inspired to look at can be such a gamble.

The opening moments of Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (aka "Teito Monogatari") deliver instantly. A glorious barrage of manufactured clouds, impeccably lit with purple and red hues leads way to a massive set where a group of mages start mumbling incantations, causing the set to rumble and fracture and animated lighting to strike. There are rods sticking up from the ground that receive the lightning and are rotoscoped with a glowing red tinge. This is all glorious even if the dialogue of the scene is moving so fast that I had to rewind at least three times over to catch all the exposition.

The gist of The Last Megalopolis is that, centuries ago, Taira no Masakado led an uprising against the lords of Tokyo and failed. His spirit, though dormant, haunts the city. Should anyone dare to desecrate the site where he lay, he will awaken and destroy the city. And so, the demon Yasunori Kato (garbed in an Imperial Officer uniform, he is no doubt the inspiration for M. Bison in the Street Fighter video games) seeks to do just that, but in order to awaken the Masakado, he needs the blood of his descendant to do so. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

What follows is a convoluted but enthralling tale that takes place over three time periods from the early 1910s to the late 1920s. It's heavy on incantations, sorcery and witchcraft (of a type), and a bevvy of effects to go along with it. The best special effects in the film find paper being dispatched by both the good guys and bad, sailing on the wind before crumpling itself up and then transmogrifying into a bird or a wee little rat-like beastie. It's really, really cool.

The Last Magalopolis is based off the novel "Teito Monogatari" (adapted into Manga prior to the film's release and into an anime series in the early 1990s), and combines elements of real Tokyo history with epic fantasy and spirituality. A lot of the characters in this story are actual historical figures, and I guess the production team thought that it was enough of a shorthand to not really explore these characters at all.  It is completely a story-driven film, and figures wind their way in and out of the story in such a manner that if you're not used to Japanese names it can get confusing as to who is being referred to in a given situation and why. Also, this film is not waiting for you to catch up.

It's a propulsive narrative, even at two hour and fourteen minutes, and by the end while it has a resolution, barely feels resolved... because it isn't. This is effectively the first half of the story, condensed. A follow-up film, Tokyo: The Last War would be released the subsequent year. 

Part fantasy, part horror, part historical fanfic it's a wild and dense production that perplexes and delights in equal measure.

KWIF: A Minecraft Movie (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week In Film.  I thought being away from home for the better part of a week with pretty much nothing but time on my hands would mean I would be watching a ton of films, but, turns out, not so much. In fact the first two films on the list below I watched before I left for my trip. But then, upon my retrun, I did a rare triple stint at the theatre in one day because I wasn't ready to return to the usual day-to-day yet.

This Week:
A Minecraft Movie (2025, d. Jared Hess - crave)
Warfare (2025, d. Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland - amazonprime)
The Phoenician Scheme (2025, Wes Anderson - in theatre)
The Life of Chuck (2025, Mike Flanagan - in theatre)
Daniela Forever (2024, Nacho Vigalondo - in theatre)
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I really had no intention of ever seeing A Minecraft Movie. Trailers made it look like a CGI nightmare with overblown performances, and the unofficial "rowdy" screenings of TikTok kids memeifying "S
TEVE!" and "CHICKEN JOCKEY!" certainly wasn't any further enticement.  But a funny thing happened on the way to avoiding the theatre... not only was A Minecraft Movie an absolute monster of a blockbuster motion picture, but some critics who I trust...well, by all that is squarely, they enjoyed it.

Both my kids (now a teen and an adult) played Minecraft and were avid fans. Neither wanted to see the movie.(because they're now a teen and an adult), which, really, wasn't all that surprising. Maybe it was a little disappointing as it's hard to find common ground and experiences with these ones these days. But as I do, I forged onward on my own and...waited for it to hit some streaming platform that I was already subscribed to and then proceed to watch the dang thing over 8 days in at least 4 different sittings.

The opening 20 minutes of A Minecraft Movie (well, once they get past the detail-stuffed intro, anyway), I genuinely adored. Jared Hess, creator of the wonky worlds of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre was at it again, creating a kooky near-reality that's just a notch or two askew from our own world. I liked the introduction to former video-game prodigy now nostalgia marketer Garrett Garrison (Jason Momoa) and orphans Natalie (Emma Myers) and Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen) who are new to town.  The vibe of this part of the movie reminded me of early Taika Waititi, especially Eagle vs. Shark, which is no great surprise given that the film was primarily shot in New Zealand. New Zealander and Hess regular Jemaine Clement puts in a delicious cameo as a storage locker owner who wants nothing more than to be besties with an oblivious Garrett.

Garrett decides to take outcast Henry on as mentor, and his efforts to teach him, well, anything of use are pretty hilarious. Momoa has a specific persona he usually channels, but this is decidedly not that. Instead he seems to be calling upon Patrick Warburton's Puddy from Seinfeld mixed with Jack Burton from Big Trouble In Little China.  Whatever his inspiration, it just may be Momoa's finest comedic performance.

It's all so unfortunate then that going into the Minecraft world, encountering Steve (Jack Black), and facing off against the pig-things that are trying to take over that reality. The film basically forgets about making any of the character arcs meaningful in any way, and just goes about having a goofy time in this strange blocky world. It wavers wildly between amusing and dull and stupid-in-a-good-way and stupid-in-a-bad-way. I love Jack Black, but the script gives Steve nothing for him to hang a character off of, so he's basically just Jack Black's stage persona. (I also find it funny that "Steve" is the player character of classic Minecraft, a real blocky dude, and they hire one of cinema's most notoriously round performers to play him).

I have to admit I loved Rachel House's voice work for Malgosha, the head pig in charge. The character design for Malgosha was also pretty incredible as I was constantly questioning whether it was a practical costume, or completely digital, or a combination.  I also thought the same of the "Nitwit" villager (mind-blowingly portrayed by Oscar winner Bret McKenzie and voiced by Matt Berry) who escapes into the "real" world and is, literally, picked up by Jennifer Coolige's lonely divorcee. Those Nitwit sequences are so ridiculous, but Coolige sells the lunacy of it so well.

In a 100 minute movie, I would say that maybe 40% of it (maybe even 50%) was pretty entertaining, and at one point, early on, I was wondering if we had maybe another Lego Movie on our hands... it's not even close to being as good as The Lego Movie. That it's even as good as it is is still kind of a minor miracle. I mean...what else could a live-action Minecraft movie look like? I certainly can't think of anything much better, but I can think of far, far worse.

[Toastypost - we disagree, and yet, also agree]

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Warfare kind of snuck into theatres unannounced, and left just as quietly, and hit AmazonPrime with about the same amount of fanfare. Recalling the war in Iraq, and specifically the American side of that war, in this year of 2025, was something most people weren't at all interested in partaking in. I should have known coming from Alex Garland that it wouldn't be "rah rah 'merica", and even still it was only with the most hesitant of clicks that I pressed play.

Warfare proved quickly to be an intense military procedural/fight for survival starring a rich swath of fantastic actors pulled straight from some of the best TV shows of the decade so far. You've got Reservation Dogs' D'Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, Shogun's Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn from Stranger Things, Daredevil: Born Again's Michael Gandolfini, Kent household favourite Noah Centineo, Finn Bennett from Season 4 of True Detective and more. It's a really impressive cast that really didn't need to be this impressive for what its acting its performers to do, but still, I'm impressed.

The real challenge here was to make a picture about the misbegotten war in Iraq that doesn't glorify it or its participants, while also not outright villifying them either, and it succeeds surprisingly well.  It is a compelling and nerve-shredding film that shows in excruciating detail the horror and intensity and violence and consequences of warfare, especially in residential sector. Still, telling the story from an American vantage point remains is the film's biggest barrier to entry in the current political climate. But the film is based on the true recollections of some of the soldiers involved in the incident, including co-director/co-writer Ray Mendoza, who Woon-A-Tai plays in the film (Mendoza happened to be the military advisor on Garland's Civil War, which is how this project came about).

The most impactful part of this movie is one word... "Why?" To which the SEALs on screen, and the film itself have no answer. 

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Binary statements like "you either love Wes Anderson movies or you don't" have become increasingly annoying to me as they are completely incalculable, devoid of any gray area, and well  fundamentally untrue. They are statements made by lazy writers (like myself, certainly) to try to simplify arguments to two simple sides.  It's like saying "you're either liberal or you're conservative" and that takes out all the nuance of life and thought and opinion.

That said, everything within me really wants to argue that people who know Wes Anderson's work either love it unconditionally or don't understand it, but such a statement just cuts out the majority of the potential film-going audience by really only referring to the minority of people who pay any attention to filmmakers and the work they do.  That statement also presupposes that no matter the quality or content of an Anderson film, that one side of the coin is predisposed to loving said film, while the other will hate it or just avoid it altogether.

Even as I know this argument to be false -- since I really disliked Moonrise Kingdom and Rushmore does nothing for me so I know there are shades of grey in Anderson's fandom -- I still want to proclaim that if you're an Anderson fan you obviously have to love The Phoenician Scheme, and if you don't like Anderson's work, why would you even waste your time with it at this point.

I stepped into The Phoenician Scheme ready to love it by nature of just being a Wes Anderson movie. I was placing myself into the love side of the "you either love Wes Anderson movies or you don't" binary fallacy, convinced that, no matter what I would come out of the picture feeling enriched and delighted.

Turns out, not so much. If you were to ask me, right now, The Phoenician Scheme sits above Moorise and Rushmore and maybe even Isle of Dogs and Bottle Rocket, but it's definitely in the bottom half of ranking Anderson's oeuvre for me. 

The reason is largely because I had a hard time following the movie, which is not something I generally have difficulty with. I mean, I understood Tenet without even having to think about it that hard. But The Phoenician Scheme is absolutely loaded with Anderson's rapid-fire expressionless patter that moves so quickly and is so information dense that it's hard to extract, at least upon first viewing, what is important about what is being said. There's no doubt that all of it is completely sensible to Anderson, but in the conveying to the audience it is bound to overwhelm.

As well, the titular scheme upon which the film revolves around, well, I never quite got it. It's the reason that problematic industrialist Zsa-Zsa Korda and his daughter (or is she) and heir (on a trial basis) Leisl (Mia Threapleton) make the adventurous journey they do, making five stops to different investors in the scheme to try to convince them to cover the gap made after a consortium of governments raise the price of rivets to negatively impact and possibly scuttle the scheme. Zsa-Zsa, it turns out, is not really a good guy, and Leisl, a convent-raised nun-to-be, seems well aware of his reputation.

The journey, then, isn't so much about the scheme but about a father and daughter connecting, bridging the gap between cold-hearted capitalist and possible murderer, and a selflessly altruistic pacifist. The thing is, though, the scheme eats up so much screen time and dominates the balance of the film that the familial engagement seems secondary. But when the film ends, its coda makes it pretty explicit that it was about Zsa-Zsa becoming a father and finding joy in life as opposed to riches. It's an anti-capitalistic tale, I suppose, but definitely an unfocussed one.

The performances are all great. Anderson's very specific way of writing his character and directing may seem limiting at first blush, but it frees them to do some very, very silly work with the sternest of poker faces. Michael Cera is the obvious highlight, and to say why would be spoiler-y, but you will know it to see it. It's amazing he's not been part of Anderson's cabal of performers before this, but he's a natural fit. A lot of Anderson's newer stable of regular performers like Jeffrey Wright, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Mathieu Almaric, Richard Ayoade, Benedict Cumberbatch and Rupert Friend all have smaller but delightful parts to play in this, and longer-term Anderson regulars like Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe have basically glorified cameos. It's actually a great thing that Anderson branches out on a regular basis and doesn't rely upon the same stable time and again, as accusations of "sameness" would be further emboldened.

If ever you wondered what a Wes Anderson action-thriller would look like, well, it looks like this...a Wes Anderson movies. Alexandre Desplat's score is full of ominous and foreboding notes on either end of the piano that feels like it was ripped out a Hitchcock thriller or an British espionage tale of yore. The score both affirms the subgenres Anderson is referencing, but it's also a comedic juxtaposition to the arch tone that prevails through most of Anderson's films. It's a great score.

It's not an entirely successful movie, but if you're an Anderson fan you will enjoy it far more than if you are not.

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If I see a movie weeks after it has released (sometimes even days after) it's hard for me not to write my reviews completely shaped around the critical commentary I've read/heard, or the reactionary headlines or Letterboxd hot takes. I'm steeped in film commentary in my podcast routine and my socials, less than some but more than your average person is, for sure. So I know that The Life of Chuck has been a pretty divisive movie. A lot of the reaction has been very positive towards it, praising it for being a rewarding, enriching, life-affirming experience, while a large amount of critical reaction has tossed it as cloying and overly sentimental.

Either way, these are not criticisms you typically hear about something adapted from a Steven King story. Nor are they really descriptions you would find for a typical Mike Flanagan project.

And yet The Life of Chuck does have aspirations to being a somewhat sentimental and life-affirming experience, despite its opening act (labelled as "Act Three") that basically presents the end of the world from the perspective of the characters in a mid-sized mid-American city and through the eyes of teacher Chiwetel Eijiofor and nurse Karen Gillan. The internet has stopped working, California has fallen into the sea, the food-producing areas of the world are being devastated by floods or fires or drought, it's all coming to an end much faster than anyone expected. It's heavy and it sucks, and people are trying to go about their daily lives, but what does any of it really matter? And yet, perplexingly, billboards, radio ads, TV ads start popping up "Charles Krantz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!" What does it mean, as the stars blink out of existence?  It's intriguing and perplexing.

The second act steps back with narration from Nick Offerman providing colour and detail on the characters we see on screen. Taylor (Taylor Gordon) a Julliard drop-out sets up her drum kit on a Saturday, ready to perform for the day, yet after 40 minutes not quite feeling it. Meanwhile accountant Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) is on break from an accounting conference and feeling a bit dispirited. And Janice (Annalise Basso) just receives a break-up text from her boyfriend who she didn't really even like that much and she storms through the town's promenade. As Chuck approaches Taylor, she starts to match his pace with her drumming. It catches Chuck's attention and draws him near. It eventually breaks into dance, and Chuck's exceptional dancing fires up Janice who joins him and they tear the street up with Taylor's amazing rhythm. It's a simple moment of people needing joy and spreading joy and it leads to a moment of connection. What you extrapolate from that is probably very individualistic, but after the end of the world, to step into something so expressive as rhythm and dance, it's genuinely moving, unless you are at your utmost cynical.

The third act steps back even further in Chuck's life. A lot happens in this "Act 1" to bridge what we've seen and been told in the previous two acts, but we witness Chuck as a child (Benjamin Pajak), his life married with trajedy, learning to love dance with his Bubbe (Mia Sara), and then take it up as an extracurricular at school and become exceptional at it. The segment centers a lot around his grandparent's house and specifically the cupola which is locked and ruled off-limits by his Zadie (Mark Hamill). Zadie tells him, one night when he's deep in his cups, that there are ghosts in that room, ghost of the past and future. It's only years later after Zadie's passing that teen Chuck (Jacob Tremblay) learns what he means. But the lesson, presented to him by a bohemian teacher, and the crux of the film, is that life should be lived to its fullest, that we can be wonderful, that we deserve to be wonderful, and we contain multitudes. It's a mantra that, we see from act 2, is hard to keep in mind as life and career and family and the world weigh on us, but if we remember, we can experience something, shape something, build something at the very least inside of us, if not outside as well.

As a production the author's voice is much more Flanagan than King's, but the story got the horror maestro's fingerprints all over it. Flanagan has adapted King enough times, and his work is so King influenced in general, that sometimes it hard to separate the two, but Flanagan's voice is unique and shows up prominently in the execution. His penchant for long monologues and his emotional connection to his characters are much more a part of his storytelling than King's as evident here.

Is it sentimental? I suppose it is, but I didn't find it overbearingly so. Is it saccharine? Not at all, nor is it cloying or preachy. But I get why it is divisive. It's a film that presents an end of the world scenario in a time where things are as challenging and bleak on a global scale as they have been since world wars were happening. It's all so overwhelming and dire, that a film like this, a movie that dares to say in the face of all of that, at this time, that there's still something about living life on this planet that is truly wonderful...I get how hard that is to accept.

And yet, the notion itself is lovely, even if I am challenged myself to accept it. I'm glad it exists, I'm glad that King and Flanagan have put it out into the world, that is is seeded there to make even one person's life a little better. I liked this movie. I was moved by it.

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The most prominent works of director Nacho Vigalondo are Colossal [a film covered by both David and myself on this blog] and Timecrimes, a film I have seen and written about but in the world before this blog.  The former was a high concept drama that connected the troubled life of an American woman with Kaiju attacks in South Korea. Timecrimes was a twisty Spanish thriller about a series of unfortunate events that collapse in on themselves as time travel gets involved. In both cases, they are rather high concept stories, the former much more of a dramatic production and character study, while the latter was perhaps more playful and energetic.

I don't know that I loved either film, as neither sits fondly in my memory, and yet, I think I genuinely respect Vigalondo's approach to genre. Maybe his execution falters, but conceptually, there's definitely a lot of meat on the bones and he clearly isn't interested in repeating what already exists.

His latest film, Daniela Forever, is more akin to Colossal than Timecrimes. It is a high concept sci-fi story rooted in character drama, executed with a lower-budget, but never lacking for ambition. Here Henry Golding plays Nicolas, a British DJ living in Madrid who has recently lost his girlfriend, Daniela (Beatrice Grannò) after she was hit by vehicle. A year has passed since she died but he is still deep in grief and depression. He is recommended by a friend to an experimental drug trial which is designed to engage the user in a new form of Lucid Dreaming. Nicolas doesn't follow the treatment plan and the dream cues provided to him, instead he learns he can build a world in his mind, one where Daniela still exists.

But the deeper into his trial regimen he goes, the more time he spends with this construct of Daniela in this construct of Madrid, the more it starts to escape his control.

Unlike The Life of Chuck, I went into Daniela Forever totally cold, having not even seen the trailer nor read or heard a single review. It's a rare experience where a film has every opportunity to surprise me, and it never truly did. It never lost my interest, but I also never felt it pushed itself or its concept like I wanted it to. At its root, Nicolas is lost before the story even starts, there's no hope for a positive outcome for him. I've seen too much Black Mirror for this to go well. And that is this film's biggest challenge... distancing itself from Black Mirror. 

We've seen enough stories of loss and grief and reviving loved ones through technology in Black Mirror, this story does the same but through chemicals. So there's a familiarity to the story and a sense that we know where it is going, even though we shouldn't, even though it should really be a story that exists in a constant state of revelation.  I couldn't help but find it a little predictable.

What Vigalondo does to distance itself from Black Mirror is all in style. The director makes the choice to film the "real world" sequences using (I don't know the technical specs here), like, 1970's TV cameras. They are presented in a 4:3 ratio, staged and composed like soap operas, and every second the format was used I was questioning why. It looks, flat out, terrible. It's a terrible aesthetic. When it was the only TV aesthetic we had, we were conditioned to it, but in this high-def 4K world we live in, it's so hard to look at. I found it highly distracting and unpleasant. The dream-state however looks gorgeous, Madrid looks lovely, even the areas that Nicolas has never seen that are "greyboxed", like TV static.

Golding has to do all the heavy lifting here as our central character and he really succeeds at times, yet goes a step or two beyond what's necessary in some scenes. It's hard to tell whether those are a result of directing, script or performance, but there's times where there seems to be a lack of control. Grannò has the harder task of performing a character who is a construct, easily manipulated by the man whose mind she exists in (there is a darker edge to this story that it never actually reckons with). 

The film end (or attempts to end) on a high note, but it comes at the expense of ambiguity and obfuscation that I believe the director wants to leave the audience with something to think about but I don't think provides the right keys to unlock it. 

As much as I sound frustrated with it, I did like it more than Colossal, in part because even the weird stylistic factors engaged me. I wish it were more twisty and fun like Timecrimes (a movie I really need to watch again) and I wish I could trust that the director really knew everything that was going on in his story. At the same time I appreciate Vigalondo's desire to create a sci-fi story that is small but feels ambitious. I applaud the effort if not all of the results.