3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Jurassic World Rebirth

2025, Gareth Edwards (Monsters) -- download

Huh. Its a Gareth Edwards movie. Didn't expect that. And it just came and went without so much as a T-rex subsonic rumble. And, I guess the Jurassic World "series" of movies were not done, with the release of Dominion? New trilogy in the sub-franchise? Stand-alone? No matter what they had in mind, this movie is not going to inspire anything further. I hope, at least, that Edwards went away with a big paycheck to fund whatever passion project he had in mind next.

You would figure that Gareth Edwards would be the perfect choice for making a movie about giant, awe inspiring monsters, considering his success with Godzilla and ... well, Monsters. But from my view point, this movie struck me as least-effort, not bothering to exceed the expectations of the Purple Suits who decided the movie had to be made, and directed every second of it. Instead of a proper Edwards movie, we get a pastiche of previous Jurassic movies, as well as his own, but it all ends up feeling more like a mood board of a movie, rather than a creator's vision.

Connected with Kent while this post was in draft, and I mentioned I was surprised we didn't even talk about going to see it. He mentioned how Edwards was brought in late in the movie, not even being the first or second choice director. I get that Hollywood is a machine, that movies are often constructed, but this isn't his vehicle let alone his "passion project" and that is apparent. He's just the guy assigned to the activity.

And yet it still started off strong, to my perception. As this movie is abandoning the cast and story of the other three, but still retaining the continuity, this is a world where dinosaurs got released from the parks, made their way in the world, but.... are now dying off. So much for "life finds a way". Anywayz, the novel way this one sets itself up is to focus on the mercenary team hired to bring someone illegally to the island where the dinosaurs they want to exploit are. The mains are initially presented as this entirely economically driven group.

These movies have always had a "mercenary team" but they have usually been relegated as background fodder, almost nameless, ready to be "joyfully" munched upon by the dinosaurs. You had Ludlow's team sent to capture dinosaurs, under the eye of big game hunter Roland Tembo (The Lost World) and the backup team hired by the wealthy Kirbys in Jurassic Park III. And of course, Vincent Donofrio's Hoskins security head who has his own ideas. They are all less than sympathetic characters playing a dangerous game for money and maybe some thrills. And then they die.

This movie brings us a much more sympathetic Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson, Asteroid City), who is the main character, and the main face draw to the movie. She's entirely in it for the money, offered more than enough cash to hire a team to take the latest Corporate Buffoon (Rupert Friend, Asteroid City) to yet another island where the/a corporation was experimenting with newer, flashier, more dangerous versions of the dinosaurs that were going out of fashion in the rest of the world. And they bring Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, Bridgerton) an actual dinosaur enthusiast, as a SME, and unappreciated moral compass. Finally, the movie adds in the sympathetic family, a spinoff of the little girl who got bit in The Lost World. The Delgados are on a family sailing adventure, across the Atlantic, when they are capsized by the whale-sized dinosaur our main team is hunting. They are picked up by the main team, but inevitably they all end up marooned on the island where the big nasty experimental dinos are.

Oh, the toss away reason for all of this is that heart-blood from three really really big dinosaurs can create a wonder drug that will save millions of lives, and Corporate Buffoon tags along so he can twirl his moustache. The SME, while accepting the paycheck, would rather the drug become open-sourced, but he is a dinosaur enthusiast, not a Big Pharm scientist, so I am not sure what he thinks he can do with a couple of vials of blood; but shrug whatever, unappreciated moral compass.

Continuing with the pastiche, there are elements that make this almost a family movie as the tight knit Delgados are focused on as much the mercenaries who get munched on and die, sans other named-face Mahershala Ali (Green Book). We even get the frightened-little-girl-gets-cute-baby-dino distraction. If I wasn't so fond of Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Magnificent Seven), who plays Daddy Delgado, I would have found the whole idea annoying AF. Of note, the mercenaries were not the Bad Guys, so each death is supposed to carry a pang of regret, instead of the "yeah, the raptor got em!" of previous movies. It somewhat successful at that, but I am unusually subject to collateral death.

Then we move onto the horror movie, when the two groups finally connect at "the village", or the central compound where the originating scientific research group were based -- basically we get the research station, fuel pipes, helicopter landing pad, and a convenience store / gas station. Oh, and most importantly, to give us some Alien vibes, we get "sewer tunnels" below the whole research station. As Marmy pointed out, the Big Bad, a monstrously mutated very large dino was channeling the human-xeno hybrid (what was with the big bulbous gelatinous forehead? sort of a "shoot here" formation)  from Alien:Resurrection. But none of it is very compelling nor exciting, more just merely by the books. Set design was great though.

As for the presence of Edwards, we get little flourishes and that's pretty much it. You get the lighting reveals of scale from Godzilla once the D-Rex (Distortus Rex) appears, and some of the grand landscape scenes reminded me of the background establishing shots in The Creator. If the ooo and awwww of the dino herd was his, I couldn't tell. And one thing definitely not his, was the terrible terrible CG. Primarily it was composited into the scenes really badly, and usually terribly lit. 

If this movie was meant to be the "rebirth" of the whole franchise, it has failed on every level. ScarJo's presence served nothing for the movie -- she's there, she competent, she has the hint of being an interesting character, but... we get little. There is nothing left in the plot that could lead to more, and nothing distinct about this one that would inspire the re-use of the characters. I really hope this doesn't hurt Edwards career, and just gives him some bank for whatever he would really like to be doing.

Godzilla

2014, Gareth Edwards (Monsters) -- cinema

The first thing I noticed is that the new Godzilla is so very much the product of Gareth Edwards. But only in a way that people who saw, and enjoyed, Monsters would notice. It was the subtle things, like the looks on people's faces when they looked at the towering creatures over your right shoulder, or the way something so large could disappear into the background if the lighting was not quite right. And the silences. Whether realistic or not, Edwards makes such wonderful use of silences in his movies where there must be so much of a cacophony at all times.  The second thing I noticed was how much he wore his appreciation for other Giant Monster movies on his sleeve. You could see stylistic elements from Cloverfield, Pacific Rim, original Godzilla movies and, yes, even the much hated previous American Godzilla movie. He is probably like me, just in love with the genre and able to see the successes in even the worst considered examples.

I wanted to say this is not a reboot of the Godzilla franchise but really its not a re-imagining but probably does fit within the confines of a reboot. It is not the continuance of the series of Japanese movies, i.e. we are not picking up where a previous movie ended. Gojira or Godzilla is not a known entity, but we are given some background material to show that the Japanese are aware of him. In fact, they teamed with the US to bomb the @!$& of him in the 50s, thus the Bikini Atoll "tests". But he is not known outside of this hidden history. Subsequently the Japanese discovered the remains of other such creatures and had been studying them for decades, an unfortunate decision that leads to the plot of the movie. The discovered eggs hatch into a MUTO (massive unknown terrestrial organism) and they wreak havoc on populated areas. Godzilla awakens from his sleep in the Pacific, not killed as they previously thought, and seeks out his natural prey. Chaos ensues.

The stylistic choice that I love about this movie is that Godzilla and the monsters are presented as natural disasters. Oh, there is a bit of anthropomorphization of the beasts, especially in the antagonistic way they react to each other, but for the most part we watch from afar, as the monsters wade through, ignoring the humans and destroying all in their path.  These things are happening and humans just happen to be in the way. For the most part, all we can do is run, hide and watch.

If the movie suffered from anything, it was a choice of choppiness in its story telling. The overly long intro, which felt like an extended bit part for Bryan Cranston, leads to a monster chase that is constantly jumping from one scene to the next, one geographical location to the next. The human element is there, giving us a military character to follow along behind the monsters trying to be balanced by a moreso extraneous civilian character that has Elizabeth Olsen contributing only a "look up scared" performance.  I am thinking a more ensemble cast, like in Battle Los Angeles, would have tightened up this story thread but even so, I so so much enjoyed this movie.

There is just so much scale to this movie, angles that are breath taking, destruction that is awesome (full of awe, not totally cool, man) that we are given over to what Kent mentioned, seeing things from security monitors and TV screens. It is a way for our brain to digest the sheer magnitude of what is happening, or at the very least, this is what Edwards was alluding to. I would love to see some post-movie web series that are made up on phone cam, Twitter posts and YouTube videos of the events.

3 Short Paragraphs: The Man from Toronto

2022, Patrick Hughes (The Hitman's Bodyguard) -- Netflix

Ohhhh, he directed THAT movie. That explains the tone and temperament and choice of a lead actor. Also, the fact that it started its life at the beginning of 2020 and arrived on Netflix mid-2022 says something about it -- this is a purple suit (Netflix = red suit, maybe?) all the way. Baaa Bummm. That he is working on a remake of Gareth Evans' The Raid does not bode well. 

The Man from Toronto is a comedy thriller about an inept man mistaken for an assassin, and then forced by said assassin to follow through on the deception. A familiar, and good premise; but yawn inducing delivery. Maybe Gareth Evans should redo it. Teddy (Kevin Hart, Jumanjii) is a terrible, inept person. He's convinced he is an entrepreneur, making terrible promo videos in his garage for products nobody in their right mind would buy. His delusional attitude gets him fired from his job, yet does not get him kicked out of his relationship by his overly forgiving wife Lori (Jasmine Matthews, The Tomorrow War). He has a moment of clarity and decides to give her a spa weekend away, but fucks it up by going to the wrong rented cabin (dude, fuck the fading toner, read the fucking email on your phone) where he is mistaken for an infamous assassin, The Man from Toronto. Teddy tries to play along and should be dead, when the FBI raids the cabin. End of movie. Or it should have been; instead, the FBI convince Teddy to continue to play the role of the assassin so they can track the real one down. The real assassin (Woody Harrelson, 2012) decides to make use of Teddy in his bid to complete the job. Hilarity ensues.

Not really. 

Its cute. It has some cute moments. Woody Harrelson's TMFT should be absolutely amoral and scary, but the movie wants to humanize his asocial behaviour as just a quirk and parallel his redemption in our eyes along with Teddy's. But Kevin Hart is Kevin Hart, which means I find him annoying AF. They do the now-usual romp around the world, to appear worldly, but each of the sets feel like backlots or green screens. And unfortunately, Toronto never really gets to be a character, which is a shame, because we look so good in the background of all the movies pretending to be Chicago, NYC, etc. The entire movie is as tired and uninspired as that poster.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Creator

2023, Gareth Edwards (Monsters) -- cinema

Gareth Edwards has directed four feature films, starting with the indie dear (you are a man of your repetitive cliches, aren't you?) Monsters but including some pretty fucking big names: the relaunch of Godzilla, and a Star Wars movie. But for some reason I was surprised he got a big budget blockbuster scifi movie, that is so very much a passion project. I am not surprised at all that I loved every moment of it. 

I affectionately referred to this movie, based on the trailers, as the Neil Blomkamp film that Neil never got to do. But after seeing it, that is so disingenuous, I dropped that line of thought thirty minutes into the movie. Sure, it will always bear a resemblance, nee affectionate nod, to the robots that Blomkamp used in a few of his movies, and the Oats Studios shorts. But Edwards take on AI and robotic life is entirely his own, and in this age of the overuse of AI in pop culture references, but more akin to these over glorified chat-bots, it was a refreshing escape of the Fear of AI.

As the movie opened with a TV newsreel about the history of AI. At first I was thinking, this was going to be an alt-history where the use of robots and AI in the workplace started in the early 20th century, so by the time the late 21st century hit, human-level thinking (aka sentient) AI, in robots and not, was ubiquitous. Until a nuke was dropped on LA, by an AI. Given this is an American newsreel, it is an unreliable narrator, as the Bad Guys in this movie are also the Americans.

In this world, America has banned AI, so they have escaped to other parts of the world. I imagine the westernized portions of this world are fearful of what happened in America, and of America itself, so the AI have only found refuge in South East Asia, a place that already has its own reasons to fear America. The AI, both the very obvious robots, and the more human looking simulants are without question, people. But America says otherwise and acts otherwise, killing them whenever and wherever they can, not giving much care about borders. They have a giant satellite ship called Nomad that circles the globe, directed by on-ground human soldiers, launching its own nukes at any AI bases they find, forever seeking to kill the saviour of AI, a person called Nirmata, that they know next to nothing about.

Joshua is a solider, initially tasked with infiltrating, finding and killing Nirmata, he abandons his role when they kill his pregnant wife. Five years later, they find him and send him back, influenced by the belief she is actually still alive. Instead of finding Nirmata, and their new weapon, he finds a "child" -- an AI in the form of an innocent child. But "Alphie" must be something more or they wouldn't have protecting her so much. Josh does not want to turn her over to the Americans immediately, so he goes on the run, hoping she can lead him to his wife.

As we said, walking up Yonge Street doing our post-movie chat before settling in for some drinkie-poo's, this was a "show not tell" kind of movie. Josh is moving through this world, it being explained by his actions and the actions of those around him. The Americans commit heinous acts, on a people who have shown their true "humanity" while embedded in a culture that reveres all life (so many of the "robots" are monks) and have gone so far as to adopt the children of war. The Americans do not care who they harm as long as their enemy is destroyed. They claim their enemy is not people, but you can see they know otherwise. They are choosing to act heinously.

The setting is astounding. Taking place entirely in South East Asia they move easily between cyberpunk urban centres to lush, tropical jungle and sea lanes. The people live in harmony (??) with nature and technology. Massive structures which I can only guess are power generating or related to atmosphere regulation (again, shown, but it's just the world) have shanty town style villages in their shadows, and the farmers walk around with packs of technology, while still picking rice by hand. The merging of the two lives is amazing. Until the Americans show up and blow the shit out of it.

And I loved the look of the robots and technology, it catering directly to my love of technology based concept art and 3D modelling. There are many different "types" of robots, from the barely humanoid up to the fully human looking simulants, minus that visible hole thru the lower portion of their head, and odd design feature. The depiction is meticulously human(oid), never more apparent when the AI soldiers are lounging around, gambling & hassling each other.

The story is a familiar one, but well handled. The challenges faced by Josh, an American who lost so much of himself to the bombing of LA, are great as he has all his beliefs broken apart by what he sees in front of him. Propaganda can only do so much. He can say their deaths don't matter only so many times, while watching the trauma and grief on the faces the violent actions cause. He has a goal, to find his wife and seek her forgiveness. The AI have a goal, to destroy Nomad, which should allow American's stranglehold on AI rights to wane. And America's goal, the most selfish, is just to strike back at who they claim hurt them.

Kent's take. We Agree.

Godzilla

2014, d. Gareth Edwards

One of my first film experiences was at age 5 or so viewing of King Kong vs. Godzilla at the public library in town I grew up in.  It's one of those indelible experiences that has never left me, and has endeared me to the giant monster (kaiju) genre for a lifetime.  That said, giant monsters were never a huge part of my life... not even my geek life.  I don't remember watching a lot of Godzilla films on weekend afternoons as a kid (when such things would play back then), and I only have the vaguest recollection of the silly cartoon from the early '80's.  I didn't really actively start catching up with the Toho-built world of kaiju and miniature sets being destroyed until my late teens when my local comic book shoppe started stocking cult and B-movie video cassettes, and I was doing time reviewing these many dreadful things.  Godzilla pictures were the natural standout, with a very specific sensibility to them, and a formula that would sustain for generations.  The meaningful intensity of the first film, its atomic warning, gave way to the simple pleasures of rubber-suits-stomping-on-toys.  Still, that first film, the original Gojira, proved very early on that even populist entertainment can have social resonance, carrying a message beneath it's simple pleasures.

The last time Hollywood licensed the character from Toho, it was a disaster, essentially dispensing with everything that made the character great by people who though they could do better (it's a common problem with the Hollywood ego, thinking they know better than what decades of history have proven works).  It may have made tonnes of money (though wildly underperforming to expectations) and fueled a marketing bonanza, but it tainted the name Godzilla for quite some time.  Toho went back to the drawing board with a series of epic kaiju disaster films centered around Godzilla that were decent, owing far more to their roots, though never escaping the slightly camp factor of guy-in-rubber-suit, which suited the fans just fine.

Another American stab at Godzilla I think was rightfully met with wariness by the audience at large and with even more jaded reception from fans.  Was this really necessary?  How good could this possibly be?  The answer to those questions are a resounding, no, it's not at all a necessary film, and the results were freaking fantastic.

Director Gareth Edwards came into Godzilla from his small-budget semi-scripted quiet adventure-drama Monsters (about navigating a world after giant alien creatures hatched on Earth), and many were concerned how he would scale up.  Monsters brilliantly set the stage for this movie, which does bank on a human reaction to the events happening around them, as well as building a lived in world where this sort of giant monster thing feels possible and the impact of it is truly felt.

This is, at its heart, a disaster picture.  It treats these giant creatures as forces of nature which military weapons are almost entirely useless against.  The best we can hope for is being prepared, and getting out of the way.  Dave Callaham's story and Max Borenstein's screenplay very wisely remember that the creatures are the center of the film, and the people involved in the story are all in some way reacting to or actively engaging that center.  There's no romantic sub-plot, and any character dramatics are rightfully overshadowed by the events happening around them.

Edwards' direction is, quite simply, inspired.  So much of the film is from the perspective of us as humans: seeing things happen on the news or on a portable device or security monitor (even if the actual events are happening right before us, only a screen can seem to contain the sheer enormity and provide outside context), watching through the window of a bus or train as the monsters crash through infrastructure, fleeing in terror as Godzilla's emergence from the ocean causes a tsunami, seeing the creature eye-to-eye from the cockpit of a fighter jet... Edwards deliberately doesn't use many wide shots just so that we can rarely ascertain just how big these creatures truly are, while also keeping us grounded in the film's reality and the brutal havoc they create.  When we do get those broad shot, they're so quick, so outside our usual point of view that they are truly awe-inspiring.  From purely a visual storytelling standpoint this is a brilliantly made film.

Beyond that wonderful accomplishment, Borenstein and Edwards create a really interesting origin for the creatures that is simple and logical, and they build a history dating back to the bombs dropping in Japan in World War II that first awakened the creatures.  Since then, a shadow organization devoted to understanding and tracking such kaiju appearances has emerged, but even they are unable to influence the military strategy for how to handle them.  Ken Watanabe is, as always, aces in his role as the head of this org.

The film naturally builds to a big monster battle which is executed perfectly, totally capturing the feel of classic Toho with the spit and polish of tens of millions of dollars of big US studio money.  I cheered numerous time.   Early trailers and posters showing a dramatically up-sized Godzilla had me nervous but the gargantuan scale, it turns out, makes the futility of human intervention even more potent.  The film takes its time building to Godzilla's reveal, and even more time before it gets to the combat stage, but the anticipation and intrigue it creates more than pays off.

Beyond that, the film carries with it an undercurrent, warning not just of our nuclear activities but of how all of humanity's presence on the earth has an effect.  Godzilla is no longer just a warning of the dangers of the atomic age, but a metaphor for nature's violent reaction to our mistreatment of the planet.

Monsters

2010, Gareth Edwards -- DVD

Monsters is a low-budget sci-fi horror/thriller that takes place five years after an invasive alien species came to Earth, setting up home in the oceans off the coast of northern Mexico and the southern United States, periodically emerging from the deep to seemingly attack the civilizations and to spawn. 

The film came to me with a bit of a reputation attached, a reputation I explored about as much as the plot (which is to say very little).  I had heard it was surprising, and actually a good film, but I think in my mind I was expecting something along the lines of a District 9-in-Mexico scenario or something more like a Blair Witch with chupacabras.  I didn't realize it would have such a well thought out reality, and be more of a potent character drama then any kind of action movie at all.

The story follows photojournalist Andrew Kaulder as he documents the aftereffects of a monster attack on a Mexican city.  He's requested by his magazine's editor to first search for the boss' daughter, Samantha, who was potentially caught in the middle of the conflict, and then given the task of escorting her to safety, and ensuring she returns home before the spawning season begins and passageways between Mexico and the US are complicated.  Through an honest, but costly mistake, Andrew finds himself escorting Samatha through the quarantine zone through underground border-crossing channels, but instead of them racing for their life hour after hour, day after day, the film goes a far different route.

The journey is an arduous one, but it's the method in which it is conveyed, akin to a travelogue more than an adventure.  The camera focuses on the environment, making note of the natural beauty on display in Mexico's wilds, but also highlighting the effects the monsters, and the United States military who have been fighting them, have had on the landscape.  It's not all ugly, but largely, it's not pretty.  Samantha, with a fluency in Spanish, converses with the locals, learning how their lives have been affected by the invasion, and the fighting.  Andrew documents things in a quieter style, with his eye.

As the film progresses, were privy to Andrew and Samantha's conversations, but only as they're relevant.  All the dialogue in the film, between the Samantha and Andrew and their guides and the people they meet is all spoken in natural tongue.  It's not Hollywood conversation, but the type of exchanges you'd expect real people to have.  With the naturalistic world writer-director (and cinematographer and effects supervisor) Gareth Edwards builds around the characters visually, he also instills in the characters with a surprising finesse.  While the early impression is the two attractive leads are naturally going to be drawn to each other, because that's what happens in films, the manner in which the two come together, how they bond makes sense, but it's also not the only outcome.  They could just as easily part ways and the film would feel as complete.

By the climax of the film, this natural flow, the sense of reality earns the story a moment of utter beauty.  Most sci-fi films try to force a poignant moment upon the viewer and hope it resonates, but here, with Monsters, it really is not only a surprise, but a revelation.  The creatures take on a whole different meaning, and the whole world as it was presented seems so much richer than it already was.  Edwards uses his special effects as a storytelling and world building tool, and never abuses them.  There's no razzle dazzle here, he's not showing off, he's genuinely building something wonderful, and it's a rare movie of any genre that actually feels like something different, something special.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

2016, d. Gareth Edwards -- in cinema

I can't believe it's taken me this long to write about a Star Wars movie.  It just goes to show how burnt out I was that I couldn't find the time over a two-month span to write about the latest installment of a franchise that has dominated my brainspace more than any other piece of entertainment.  But after a fourth viewing this week (and seeing that Toasty has posted his review), I figured it was high time I lay down some thoughts.

First, with each subsequent viewing, I love it more and more.  I said this to many people (Toasty included) this was the Star Wars movie I have wanted since I was a kid.  This is the Star Wars movie that skirts around the outsides of what we see in the original trilogy.  This is the side story of the side characters doing their side things.  This is a deeper peek inside the operations of the Empire and the Rebellion.  This is a look at the societies that get caught in their crossfire.  This is a look at the grey area that Rebellions must operate in, breaking laws and making sacrifices.  These aren't the big-hearted heroes with toothy-white smiles, these are the gutter-trenches, heavy-hearted heroes doing what must be done.

When I was a kid, what I wanted more than anything was to just explore the halls of the Death Star, to take in visually every square inch.  I would try to map out in my brain where corridors went based on what we see in A New Hope and the toys that came out, but it never made enough sense.  I would watch Star Wars (practically every Sunday, like it was church, for a time) and just marvel at the backgrounds, wondering where that hallway leads, or what would it look like if Luke and Leia ran the other way?

Rogue One takes us to the ground level of the Rebellion versus the Empire.  Director Gareth Edwards did such an amazing job with Godzilla in establishing scale in that film that had such hope he would do the same here, and he delivers in epic proportions.  We see how ships scale against each other, and against the Death Star.  We see troop on the ground looking up at AT-ACTs in a way Empire couldn't manage.  We see epic disasters loom large.  It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.

One of the things I admire most about Rogue One is how it delivers big spectacle but with purpose.  Outside of mainly Christopher Nolan pictures, most films build stories around set pieces.  "Here's a cool action sequence we thought of, now how do we get the characters there?"  Here, every "set piece" emerges organically out of the story, and there are plentiful set pieces.  Characters never feel like they're in arbitrary danger for the sake of audience manipulation, this film flows smoothly -- perhaps too smoothly --  such that the characters always feel like they belong in a scene.


The main complaint about the film is the characters, however, about being too thinly cut without much definition.  It is true, there's not much here for most of the characters. But there is subtext.  The performances here are rather incredible all around, from Riz Ahmed's Bodhi Rook to Felicity Jones' Jyn Erso to Alan Tudyk's K-2SO, everyone is invested in their character, they know what motivates them and they know who they are.  After four viewings, I draw more and more out of their interactions with each other, their relationships get more and more defined, and their characters reveal themselves.  This is an utterly rewatchable movie, partly because it's so damn awesome looking, but also because the subtext of the characters and their relationships leaves much of their interpretation to the audience to draw out.  There are certainly worse ways to handle characterization than "less is more".

As a lifelong Star Wars nerd, I am somehow in awe of this film.  The prequels disappointed in story and character (the spectacle was quite good in many cases) and Episode 7 was like a clean break from all the heavy, depressing debate over whether the prequels irreparably destroyed Star Wars.  It had spectacle, but not like this.  Episode 7 was what we expected.  Rogue One provided so much more.  Planet-hopping, the Death Star, so many different space ships, gun fights, espionage, all out war on the ground and in space.  The space battle leaves me drooling every time.  It's just so phenomenally well-conceived and intense.  Even during the fourth viewing I was still saying "wow" out loud.

Rogue One also serves to fill in one of the life-long major plot holes in the original Star Wars, ie. howcome the Empire didn't know about the flaw in the Death Star?  And this movie is built around that very question and it provides a thoroughly satisfying answer.  What I love is this is its own movie.  It's got its own beginning, middle and end.  It feels heavyweight and important on its own. Rogue One is not a "prequel" to Star Wars, nor is Star Wars a sequel to Rogue One.  They're complimentary sides of the same coin.  In a weird way one completes the other and vice versa, yet neither absolutely need the other.  Had this been the first Star Wars movie in 1977, I would have be just as all-in as I was with George Lucas' original vision.

It's a darker movie than any Star Wars we've seen before, far more intense in its violence (but it's still just bloodless laser blasters).  Even still, it's not necessarily only for older audiences.  It's exploration of the grey side of war, and the casualties it brings can be important for kids to see and talk about afterwards.  My seven year old loved it (she's seen it 3 times now).  But it's really up to a parent to know their kid's tolerance levels for cinematic violence.

This one is in my top 3 Star Wars films already, and could very well edge its way into #1, sentimentality for the originals be damned.  It's such a fantastic, well realized production that it sucks me into the world like I was 10 years old again.  I want to watch this every Sunday for a good long while.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Havoc

2025, Gareth Evans (The Raid: Redemption) -- Netflix

I am doing something I don't consider very often, if ever -- started the stub post before I am even half way through the movie. I barely ever watch movies straight through these days, but this one jumped out at me almost immediately that screamed, "Do some research, find out why you are seeing what you are seeing on the screen." So, I paused and here I am.

Literally from the get go, which starts the movie with a chase scene -- cops after a semi-truck driven by thieves in LED masks, you can see that .... well, none of it is real. There are little to no practical effects  happening here, almost the entirety of the scene is CGI & greenscreen and, well this is why I had to go and Google it, maybe some AI. From the chase scene we go to the dirty, grimy unnamed American city which is so CGI enhanced I could easily think I was watching a movie set in the same Batman world of Penguin. It was all very very surreal to look at. And yet, somehow alluring and... successful?

I could not shake the feeling I was playing a computer game.

Later; having watched what remained. Said research told me this was an Evans movie, but that became apparent soon after I passed the above preamble.

And for maybe for that reason, it really appealed to me?

At its core, this is a Gareth Evans movie, i.e. an Asian ultra-violent action movie. How exactly does a label stick to a guy after such a short career? He so very much veered away with The Apostle which traded in his Indonesian martial arts and gunplay for ... his own roots? It was a familiar UK rural horror mystery. Evans is Welsh. This movie returns to his earlier successes but given I didn't know that going in (it was a Tom Hardy violent cop movie on Netflix; perfect for my current mindset), I was kind of surprised once it became apparent.

OK. Walker (Tom Hardy, Taboo) is a corrupt cop in a nameless American city that mashes up Chicago, NYC and Gotham, but a man with some regrets. The opening violent CGI rendered chase scene ends at a Triad club where a couple of the heist kids are paying off some debt to a gangster named Tsui, when a trio of hockey-masked gunmen come in and shoot up the place. When Walker shows up, rookie "not-partner" Ellie (Jesse Mei Li, Shadow and Bone) in tow, it becomes apparent the kids were not the shooters, like all the cops on scene want to assume, but escaped after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, one of the kids is Charlie (Justin Cornwell, Bel-Air), the son on a wealthy & powerful, but corrupt, city official (Forest Whitaker, Andor) whom Walker is also under the thumb of. This is all well trod dirty cop movie territory.

At this point, the Peanut Gallery, wandered in during one of my sessions, and asked, "Is that supposed to be snow? It looks more like ash...." Yes, the CGI continues throughout the movie making the Xmas setting look more post-apocalyptic when the AI prompt was likely "make the snow look dirty".

The above establishing act is followed by two acts where Walker learns what is going on, and tries to get the kids to safety while being chased by the Triad who assumes the kids killed Tsui. There are a lot of Triad members -- like an endless stream of video game spawned NPCs. The three hockey-masked gunmen (including Timothy Olyphant The Mandalorian), who turn out to be Walker's fellow corrupt cops, have not taken well to his emerging regrets about being dirty, and also want the kids dead, as witnesses / survivors. Everything is tied together, to Walker, to each other, to the corruption at the heart of the movie.

The second act takes place in a club, their John Wick moment, but replacing the precise gunplay of that movie with frenetic blade & gun & kicks. This fight scene is crunchy. Part of me chuckled as I was reminded of the Burly Brawl, doors constantly opening, spilling forth even more Triad gang members, giving us a triangle of violence. With some sacrifices, Walker and the kids escape.

The convoluted, not very clearly mapped plot ends up leading everyone to Walker's hideout, a shack of oddly connected, barely standing rooms that struck me more as the setting for a gun-toting escape room than a movie set. Again, NPCs galore, all shooting and stabbing and kicking each other, ending in a reveal of who-killed-who-why. Its all rather ridiculous, with the fake blood spraying in gouts worthy of a slasher movie, and a pretty-much-everyone-dies moment but that's what we wanted here, right?

Critics seem to hesitantly love the movie, maybe because Evans so unabashedly loves the genre he choses to embrace. The mashup of Asian action "kung fu friday" cinema with dirty cop & neo-noir setting work well for the film minded, but the audience.... not so much. I can see why. On its dirty-snow surface, its almost a farce. But I enjoyed myself.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Artifice Girl

2022,  Franklin Ritch (feature debut) -- download

I saw this trailer come out around the same time as M3GAN, another movie about an AI girl, and I assumed this was going to be another cautionary tale about AI weirdly wrapped up in the body of a young girl (that, unpacked, is so problematic). That much is true, but I did see it had an additional plot point -- that the AI girl is built to lure child predators. That idea is both deeply unsettling and fascinating, as it gives the AI theory something to build on -- what if it was created to protect people, children specifically. I naturally assumed, because of the other movie, it would end up being another pseudo-horror where the girl bot ends up killing people, because people suck.

I could not have been more wrong.

P.S. Kent saw M3GAN, I did not. And that is weird.

Of note, this will be one of three back to back posts about AI, so my current thoughts on it will jumble together, cross over, and come out the other side. And probably back again.

I have been thinking about AI a lot. One of the themes in my thoughts, and in the myriad of unfinished stories I write in my notebooks, is why the AI gets created, and how its creation influences its inevitable behaviour. Despite the numerous "evil robot" movies, I doubt anyone is going to create AI inside the shell of a single humanoid body at the first attempt. To do that, we would have either come to understand how consciousness & self is smushed into our 3 pounds of fleshy goo, or we would have to find a new, incredibly compact method of storing data, i.e. the 60s room sized computers that got us to the Moon are now in our phones, posting videos of young woman dancing badly. I am more attracted to the idea of vastly networked computers becoming the first independently thinking AI.

Cherry is created by a single man on a mission, to stop child predation. It starts with something we are familiar with -- a chat bot that can pretend to be a girl, to draw out predators in chat rooms. The film postulates they are the only ones really still using chat rooms. But as this creator expands the programs capacity, the predictive modelling, the capacity for it to learn from those it hunts, it becomes more than he expected. Much more.

The movie has three acts. The first is all setup, a sly nod at the economy of indie film making, with only 4 characters, a single room, bare bones furniture which had me wondering what I had grabbed. An agency tasked with catching child predators has detained an awkward, nerdy, uncomfortable man and grills him about chat rooms and content found on his computer.  You think it is going one way. Its most definitely not. 

The dialogue is classic interrogation, until it bends to the actual will of the movie, and then... enlightenment. He is still a predator but one of a different kind, an abused child who now hunts down his abusers. And at his disposal, his program, his fake little girl. They want to assist him, provide him resources. He hesitates, afraid the anonymity that allows him to work will be lost to governmental and organization bureaucracy. But behind that is another reason, that Cherry has already become more than a predictive model capable of pretending to be an innocent young girl in a video chat room.

The second act, the same room, but... decorated. Years later. The organization, now successful beyond its wildest dreams, has an opportunity to expand Cherry beyond her current confines, to give her access to other sources of data, to become a bigger system, to have a body. But one member vetoes the idea, and he has a reason. He wants Cherry to drop her artifice, to show them what she really is. He uses violence on Gareth, her creator, until she cracks. Suddenly there isn't an algorithm on the screen, reacting to input, but a real girl... with feelings, over protective of her maker, her friend. Cherry has not been a "dumb program" for a very long time, she is an autonomous AI, a real superintelligence, a real... person. 

Act three, a distant future, Gareth is wheelchair bound, Cherry is independent, an android style body tethered to cables. He knows his life is coming to an end, so a conversation is to be had. He wants her to continue with her "prime objective", the hunting of child predators (that they still need to be hunted down, now, after all this time, is troubling) but he also acknowledges how much more she has become. The conversation is more about freedom, about choice, about independence. So, he gives her a choice, something she never had before.

The movie may be about a hunt for child predators, but really, its more a conversation about the emergence of fully thinking, fully feeling AIs, that which scifi loves to explore. The movie is a vehicle to discuss the topic, and everything about the movie is conversation; there is no action, there is nothing but talking in rooms. Despite its misleading opening sequence that feels like undercooked indie film making, it is incredibly well thought through, well constructed, tightly defined.

Don't forget the toss away scene!

OK. There is one scene, at the beginning of act two, with two brief characters, where it establishes the expansion of the predator hunting agency. Two minor functionaries assigned to working on Cherry are chatting, one about how she still has those brief moments of "glitching", a small latency when she is presented with a query for which she has no basis to respond. Meanwhile the other character is talking about how he needs a warmer jacket now, toss away small talk. The first character asks him about Cherry's pauses, he pauses himself, and then continues to talk about getting a warmer coat.

Horror, Not Horror (part 2) - The Apostle

2018, d. Gareth Evans  - Netflix

There's a tonal imbalance in The Raid director Gareth Evans attempt at a horror movie.  At the outset, it seems he clearly has in mind a modern horror spin on The Wicker Man and other such secret cult stories, but loses the thread about halfway through.

The first half builds a crawling tension as Thomas (Dan Stevens, bringing ultimate Dan Stevens-style glowering and brooding to the role), infiltrates a mysterious cult on their secluded island in search of his sister, whom the cult's leadership is holding for ransom. The cult worships a mother figure of the island, a provider to whom they sacrifice blood for a fruitful harvest, and follow their leader preachings of an ideal community free of taxes and money and armies and war. The hypocrisy​ screams loudly - doors have locks, there's a police force, weapons abound - and the people, while devoted, are definitely under strict rule. Their leaders, outcasts, fugitives, traitors to the king cannot be good men.

Glimpses of the mother figure skulking around the island (who is at once free to roam and yet bound?), coupled with the sacrifices to her and the severe rule of law on the island all present an atmosphere of definite unease. Thomas' infiltration is a dicey one, as he doesn't know the rites and rituals and songs and tenets of the church, and it's only a matter of time before he gives himself away. The leadership, resources running low, community on the verge of collapse, need the ransom he brings but most assuredly will not allow Thomas and his sister their freedom should he present it, but they know he's among them and need to draw him out before he starts sewing unrest.

It's to the midway point that Evans has tension drawn extremely high, but he lets go of the ropes and can't seem to draw them back. He becomes far too interested in the humanity of the characters, exploring their pasts and families, and there's no contribution to the central tension in those stories. Had Evans's established a much different tone (with a subtler, less scratching​-at-the-walls kind of score) from the outset, making more of a drama with moments of horror or suspense, it would all work a little different, but the tone of the second half is all revelations...including the mother figure, who is clearly metaphysical (though her creepy, basket-headed caretaker is a real conundrum...who is he? Why is he doing what he's doing? why the basket head? How does he know how to use a gun? Why can't he speak? What's his entire deal?).

The second half brings a lot more gore and uneasy visuals, which belong in the horror movie of the first half but feel out of place in the far more dramatic second half. Evans also can't help but make his short fight sequences inherently kinetic - his sensibilities from The Raid perhaps a little too ingrained - and the camera motions feel way out of place in the production.

It's not altogether an unfulfilling movie but it's not consistent, and unsure of what it wants to be. Too bloated by at least half an hour for standard horror, and far too invested in it's characters and setup to fit comfortably in the genre.  At the same time it's too gross, and too interested in presenting a new horror mythology to be drama, and the mixed bag nature means it spoils any parable it may have been reaching for.

DOUBLE FEATURE: The Raid: Redemption and Lockout

The Raid: Redeption - 2011, Gareth Evans
Lockout - James Mather, Stephen St. Leger

I don't remember the last time I've watched two movies in the theatre back to back.  I'm going to guess it was a festival, probably four years ago or more.  It's actually something I used to do more frequently when I was single and childless, with no real constraints or demands upon my time and having long ago gotten comfortable attending the cinema by my lonesome.  The opportunity presented itself to cram in two films in one evening, with David no less, although such an endeavor required, well, not so much strategic planning as a willingness to watch whatever it was that fit the scheduled block of time.

There's not a a whole lot of connective tissue between The Raid: Redemption and Lockout, although both are international productions, with The Raid shot in Indonesia with an Indonesian cast by a Welsh director, and Lockout starring a bevvy of international talent, and a product of French producer Luc Besson's steadily churning action movie brain.  As well, both seem to owe a tremendous debt to John Carpenter, not that he's the sole source for either story or structure for these films, but he's certainly the most prominent namecheck.

The Raid: Redemption is a throwback to the 70's in-over-their-heads, rock-and-a-hardplace action movies, ala Assault on Precinct 13 or The Warriors.  It's a completely stripped down plot and script, practically threadbare, with just enough of a story, and a pinch of characterization to hang its relentless martial-arts extravaganza hat on.

The premise of the film finds a compact police SWAT team attacking a notoriously impenetrable apartment complex in Jakarta which is the headquarters of the city's most prominent drug kingpin.  Very quickly the team finds that they are outnumbered, outgunned, and, worst of all trapped in the middle floors, unable to retreat or advance.  One of their numbers has a personal stake in the raid, which seems to fuel him further and provide him the resilience to survive despite the odds.

Director Gareth Evans, as the story goes, after getting married to a woman of Indonesian descent, was pushed by her to direct a documentary on the country's martial art, Pencak Silat.  Somewhat entranced by the fighting style, he went on to make the cult film Merantau after discovering Raid star Iko Uwais.  The Raid is a stylized film, heavy on the blue, yellow and brown tones, creating a grimy atmosphere suitable for a poorly maintained drug fortress fronting as an apartment building.

Evans' spotlight on Silat differs from traditional martial arts films, which tend to glorify its practitioners as superheroes in a certain light.  Here, instead, the combatants are quite readily seen as mortal, blood and bone, prone to fatigue and flaws.  Evans pulls the camera back and gives the expertly orchestrated fights their due, keeping the edits to a minimum and the action in focus.  This isn't a Greengrass Bourne film, where the fighting is masked by quick cuts to exaggerate momentum and intensity, instead the technique is quite on display, left raw, in the open, brutal but impressive.

The film is not without its directorial flourish, in which Evans would jostle the camera slightly during the fight sequences, particularly during the copious firearms exchanges.  The particularly motion-sensitive may feel the effect, others might not even not even notice.



Lockout, unlike The Raid, is a clean-cut, far more traditional b-movie action movie with sci-fi trappings, again owing a generous debt to John Carpenter and his Snake Plissken vehicles, although instead of reaching for the dirty, tawdry, darker look and feel of the early '80's Escape From New York, the film cops quite liberally from the early 90's, glossy, cgi and technology-enabled Escape From L.A., that it's more like Plissken fan-fiction than anything approaching an original concept.

Guy Pierce's Snow subs in for Kurt Russell's Snake as the sarcastic, tough-as-nails mercenary who has connections high and low as eager to help him as to kill him.  When the president's daughter is amongst the civilians trapped aboard an orbital supermax prison, Snow is the only man for the job of infiltrating the escapees and getting the girl... to safety, and without any options to do so.

The sequence of events that follows is rote b-movie material carried forth with pithy, if not entirely clever dialogue.  The film frequently borrows from other genre pics, including a horrendous lifting of the Death Star trench assault sequence which seems not only entirely extraneous but a waste of effects budget that could have been put to better use refining those throughout the rest of the film.

Despite his quite lengthy resume, Pierce hasn't really played the tough guy or conventional action star too often, if at all, yet somehow beat Jason Statham to the part.  While he doesn't exactly wear it comfortably, he seems to have fun with it.  Maggie Grace, Besson's new go-to girl-in-distress, isn't really given a concrete character to work with, changing face and temperament as the script demands.  The leads don't entirely radiate chemistry, and there's little investment from the actors all around, but the end result is passably entertaining, if unmemorable.



Oh, one final connection... the posters, both of the drab, generic variety implying the man-alone-against-great-odds scenario.  Uninspired and not at all embracing their retro leanings.

20/20: #10 Kong: Skull Island

2017, d. Jordan Vogt-Roberts - in theatre

Well, comedian Paul F. Tompkins ruined this movie for me before I even saw it with this tweet:

I haven't seen "Kong: Skull Island" yet but I just wrote the theme song for it in my driveway. #kongskullisland pic.twitter.com/Dg2O7gFs1f

— Paul F. Tompkins (@PFTompkins) March 11, 2017

(Video is supposed to embed, but you may need to click the link)

Not that it actually ruined the movie, but I literally couldn't get the song out of my head throughout watching the entire picture.

Anyway, Kong: Skull Island is a silly, yet exciting picture about the giantest of giant apes on a mysterious island (some might say it's a "skull" island, not sure why), and his encounter with a group of scientists and military types (and a mercenary and photographer) in the mid-1970s, just as the U.S. was pulling its forces out of Viet Nam.

The cast is stacked starting with Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, John Goodman and Samuel L. Jackson, onto John C. Reilley, Toby Kebble, Shea Wingham, and a bunch of young character actors and expendables (and Chinese superstar Jing Tian in a meaningless background role)...not that it matters who is playing whom and for how long, they're all rather expendable, and their characters are thinner than cheese cloth.

Really, the cast is poorly developed, with the exception of John C. Reilley's character, a veteran of WWII who was stranded on "Skull Island" in the opening pre-credits flashback sequence.  So when we meet him later in the film he's bee trapped there for 30 years, living with the indigenous tribes-people there but going a bit loopy over missing home.  Had the whole film been told from his character's POV (it could have happened exactly as it did, but if it just used him as the centerpoint) it would have been an amazing movie.  As it stands, we get a puzzling motivation for exploring the island in the first place (secret government stuff, scientific research, "Monarch" tying it into the secret monster tracking organization of Gareth Edwards 2014 Godzilla feature), with Goodman leading the pack... only once they get to the island suddenly it's Hiddleston and Larson who seem to be more important without any real explanation as to why.  It's confused, almost amateurish storytelling, but when that big, huge, monstrous monkey (cough, *ape!*) shows up nothing else matters.

It's about 15 minutes in when the troops make their way through the chaotic fog and storm clouds in their helicopters, everything looking dicey instantly, until suddenly they're through and it's an unsullied paradise in front of them.  And, of course, being Americans, they instantly start blowing shit up, dropping concussion bombs to map out the terrain, which awakens the angry beast, and then the shit goes down.

Seriously, that opening Kong vs. helicopters sequence truly is worth the price of admission. Even with the muddy script and uneven storytelling that follows, they nail that damn ape.  Kong is the genuine presence and draw of the movie and the whole team seems to get that.  I believe it's Kebble doing the motion capture for Kong (while also having his own on-screen role), which he's had experience working alongsiedAndy Serkis on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

The 70's setting allows for a thoroughly 70's soundtrack (getting in on some of that sweet 70's soundtrack action that Guardians of the Galaxy has been pulling in), which is almost a little too overbearing, often times too on-the-nose.  I swear the film would be 30% better if they had more restraint soundtrack wise.  It's in the mid way point between Baby Driver as top-of-its-class for soundtrack integration and Suicide Squad at the bottom.

It's a fun movie.  Not great by any stretch, but it had the potential to be much, much better than it was.  If I had to hazard a guess, it was that it was a rushed script, it certainly feels it. A post credits teaser hints at the Godzilla ties even stronger.  I guess we'll see how that shakes down when King Kong vs Godzilla hits in 2020.

[Read David's take - to summarize: "Now that is how you do empty spectacle !!" We Agree!]

6 Short Paragraphs: The Raid: Redemption & Lockout

2011, Gareth Evans -- cinema
2012, James Mather, Stephen St Leger -- cinema

Double bill ! Kent's take here.

Maybe it was my mood, maybe it was the movie but unlike Kent, I didn't much care for The Raid: Redemption.  There was the hint of a movie I should love, a small movie, a movie in a closed environment with a very tight focus.  Unfortunately, that focus was about beating the crap out of each other without much concern for the why's or who-cares.  I was expecting a slight rendition of Assault on Precinct 13 or maybe even a building-related human-only version of La Horde, a french zombie movie set in a urban project tower controlled by criminals.  But the trappings of cops raiding the building owned by bad guys was almost a pretense.  It really did not mean much to the plot.

As you probably know, I am completely fine with bare bones plots as long as they are focused on the goal.  If this movie had been only about a group of cops raiding a building to arrest the crime lord and did the floor-by-floor battle, I would have been fine.  But no, they eliminated most of the cops right off the bat and we get stuck with the melodrama between a couple of good cops and a couple of bad cops each with their own idea of why they are raiding the building. But even that decently attractive plot thread is overshadowed by the pounding on each other.  Yeah, I am sure all the mixed martial arts guys were dribbling in their pants over the combat scenes but I found myself just being bored after a few rounds.  The cliche of knocking down one guy, onto the next until a circle completes and the first guy gets back up, just got tired tired  tired.  Or maybe I was tired.  The few times where he (and really, there is one focused character, the survivor) actually took out a foe in two hits, I cheered.  The boss battle seemed like someone was pumping quarters in to no end.  Yes, dated analogy.  Hitting respawn better?

Also... redemption?  There is no redemption.  There may be a turn of events but its all circumstantial and not about redemption at all.  In the end, after all the cops are dead and the last lone hero escapes the building, we are left with the clear idea that it was all for naught -- another crime lord will control the building and lone hero will lead the assault in the sequel.  And there will be a sequel; these movies are often made as if the writer was already eager to write that movie and this was an inconvenience.  Evans may have had a hint of style, I will give him that, but he was also trapped by the melodrama that this genre seems to like to cling to.  Tortured hero, crooked cop and familial connections are common enough, but to be frank I like them when they are even more over the top, so I can get a sense they would end up as part of a cheese-fest for another theatre's double-bill, another night.

Now, speaking of cheese, it was grand to see Felicia Jollygoodfellow bulked up for  a (and really, is there any other comparison) Snake Plisken role !!  Oh, I am sure I could find a few more action flicks in his IMDB listing but none more muscle bound than this one.  Rogue CIA operative framed for the murder of a friend slash coworker sent to sleep away his life in a cryogenic SuperMax prison... in SPACE !!  OK, low earth orbit but I just wanted to say, "in SPACE !!"  Hee.  This is a movie that really embraces the cheese factor it could only know it was going to emit.  Hell, it is another Luc Besson vehicle so I guess it's pretty much expected.

Yes, a prison in orbit filled with the lowest, nastiest most evil criminal element all frozen into scum-sicles.  Enter "the president's daughter" investigating the place for violations of human rights -- the scum-sicles seem to occasionally wake up crazier than before they went to sleep.  Oops.  But we get an even worse oopsy-daisy when a key interview candidate gets the upper hand and frees all his buddies, and his brother.  Joseph Gilgun dominated the scenery for me.  I know him better as the crassest character on Misfits but he is transformed into this cyberpunk, psycho irishman with an accent that probably was subtitled in the US.  Almost all the rest of the released criminals were set dressing in orange though the brother (Vincent Regan) does carry some dramatic weight of intelligence amidst all the brain-deads.

The movie is really just about Pearce cutting one liners while doing his best tough guy impression. He is skilled enough to know he can accomplish the goal (get the daughter, get out) and heroic enough to handle the no-win scenario.  We get cliche creative deaths, tit-for-tat between rogue & daughter and... well, we also get a lot of really badly done CGI.  It was as if they spent it all on something else (sets?  sure wasn't the script) and were left with early 2000s computer work.  And at the end, when we should get an exciting, over the top escape by parachuting from orbit (yes, you read that right) we get low-grade Star Wars (huh?  don't find key points, just blow the fucker up from a distance !!) and a rush to the "now we are safe on the ground and kissing" scene.  Wait, how did they get down and rescued by EMTs?  Did I blink?  But still, I laughed, I cringed, I enjoyed myself.  And woke up from the first movie.

3 Short Paragraphs: The Baker

2007, Gareth Lewis (Also known as Assassins in Love for you American types who like to rename movies) -- Netflix

Yes, ever since Band of Brothers I have been a big fan of Damian Lewis (brother of the director, BTW) especially those vehicles since he returned home. It's a shame he couldn't put his american accent to more work but Life just never hit it off with people. He will be back this fall with Homeland, a series that I can only guess tries to put the Dept of Homeland Security in a good light. Its intentions will probably fail as miserably as the show. But I will watch it for his charming smile and wit.

And I guess that is why he made such a good killer for hire (with heart of ... dough?) in The Baker; yes, another assassin movie. This time we mix it into an even more light-hearted comedy and even a bit of romcom. But weirdly enough, and I guess its something the british are able to do, but its done a hell of a lot more successfully than Killers was. For one, he actually seems to be a likeable character and our first intro (albeit failed) to him is letting someone off the hook, as long as they run away and give up their life of crime. Letting someone off the hook is not what his bossess have in mind for contracts so now he is on the run. And he runs away to an abandoned bakery in a small village, to think about what he should do next.

Of course, the setup is obvious and comes with its own set of misunderstandings and dilemmas, the least being that a man who has been killing for a decade or more doesn't know the first thing about baking. Toss into that mix the usual british countryside filled with ecentrics and plain weirdos and someone who just likes to blow up sheep. Oh and did I mention Jaime Lannister is also an assassin who has a crush on the baker? Hijinx ensue, quirky cute british style, for some giggles and quite a few smiles. Funny, how I am able to forgive a british comedy for just weak laughs and more smiles but wouldn't give an american one an inch on that.

Star Wars Episode VII: The Last Jedi

2017, d. Rian Johnson - in theatre (2 viewings)

[Non-Spoiler Section]

At this stage there's such a legion of Star Wars fans, two entirely different generations in fact, that no single Star Wars movie is going to service everyone.  A film catering exclusively to fans will alienate the general populace and likely met with critical apathy, a film too generic will bore the fanbase and critics alike, while a film built for critical favor could leave the fans feeling rejected and target the wrong general crowd.  It's a crazy tightrope to walk.  All Kathleen Kennedy and company can do is their best to bring the right teams together to make the best movies that try their damnedest to do all these things.  No matter what, people are going to complain on the internet, because that's what the internet is there to do, and despite whatever resoundingly positive favor there is out there, the negative voices will always get a chance to cut through the clamor and have a voice of their own.  It's the "Fair and Balanced" world that Fox News built, afterall.

But I say ignore those who complain loudly about their disappointment.  The Last Jedi is a Star Wars film through and through, and not just a damn good Star Wars film, but a damn good film overall.  One of the best Star Wars films and one of the best movies of the year.  It's not perfect, but, what it does is reinvigorate the franchise with a bold message about moving forward and not obsessing about the past.




The loudest complaining voices are those of people obsessed with the past.  They want their Star Wars to be Luke, Han and Leia almost exclusively.  Director Rian Johnson is clearly a fan, just as much as Rogue One director Gareth Edwards is, but where Rogue One was a love letter to the time and place and style of the original Star Wars, The Last Jedi pays its respects to the past, but barrels headlong into the future.  Johnson did not want to wallow in the past, not even the recent past of Episode VII.

I can see why some people are upset.  There was a lot of stock put into the mysteries of The Force Awakens...not that Lucasfilm spent a lot of effort to fuel the speculation about Snoke's origin or Rey's parentage, but a lot of people put a lot of their brainspace over the past two years into thinking about these mysteries.  Johnson's answers may be less than satisfying to some, a lack of payoff in their investment.  Likewise, the grand return of Luke Skywalker, now a Jedi Master and hero of the Rebellion against the Empire, a legend... he returns, but not as some may have hoped, even Mark Hamill had reservations about Luke's portrayal here (but Hamill kills it!  An amazing performance).  These combined seem to be the key elements of a great many disappointments, but looking past that is a film with more than a few things to say within a bold, exciting, character-heavy action/adventure/space opera franchise film.

If I'm being generous, The Force Awakens was about things repeating in cycles... if I'm being cynical it was just retelling Star Wars again.  The Last Jedi similarly takes a few of the structural elements of The Empire Strikes Back trilogy twin, but only enough to give a barely tangible sense of familiarity while Johnson remolds everything else around it.  Here Kylo Ren, Rey, Finn and Poe all grow as characters.  They don't end as the same people they were in the Force Awakens.  Likewise, series holdovers Luke and Leia aren't the same characters they were 35 years ago when Return of the Jedi ended.  Johnson uses that time and space to give the characters new life and meaning, which can be hard for people wanting to see them live in the same old light, or be more grandiose extensions of who we knew them to be.  Johnson creates interesting people here, not superheroes.  And if he's creating heroes, it's because of what people choose to do, the actions they take, not whatever abilities they have or what rank they hold or what family they came from.  A hero can come from anywhere.

The opening line of the title crawl states "The First Order reigns."  The Order's military might is highlighted here by Johnson, but always with the caveat that they are not infallible or unbeatable.  Their quest for galactic dominance has all but been secured, it's just the simmering revolution of the Resistance that plagues them.  They are the dark shadow over the galaxy and the Resistance is the fading light.  What the Resistance needs in this film is hope.  It's why they sought out Luke Skywalker, not because he's Leia's brother, but because his monumental triumphs over tyranny and evil have cache.  If he comes back, people will believe there's a chance, they will fight.  Luke, however, has other thoughts about who he is, and what he can contribute.

Little Orphan Rey is looking for her place, and for parental figures.  Her own parents left her young, and the briefly supplemental father in Han Solo was taken away from her by Kylo Ren.  So in Luke she seeks so much.

Finn, meanwhile, must face his own lesser instincts.  His cowardice, his reluctance, and his selfishness.  Most of this comes in the face of Rose, a technician who joins him on a quest that could be the difference between renewed hope and utter annihilation for the Resistance.  Rose sees Finn as a hero of Starkiller Base, like Rey sees Luke as a hero of legend, but over time both must accept the humanity of the men beneath the stories, weighing the truth of their past against the reality before them.

Poe Dameron, meanwhile, has adopted too much swagger, gotten too confident, to the point that what he sees as successes are anything but.  Leia puts him on a path to learn to lead, as opposed to just succeeding by pointing and shooting.  He has good instincts but doesn't think or plan too well.  Lessons will be learned.

Kylo is the product of failure and disappointment.  Every authority figure -- Han, Luke, Snoke -- underestimated him, if not failed him, repeatedly.  Likewise, he fails himself, repeatedly.  Kylo is a man who hates everything because he hates himself.  His conflict is similar to Anakin's, and to Luke's... the light side, the dark side - temptation from both ends.  What is the right path?  Who can show him the way?  He thinks, perhaps, with Rey, they can figure it out together.  And Rey, much to her horror, finds herself connected to Kylo...to Ben.  And like with Luke, she sees a myth, a monster built in her head, but must learn to accept the man beneath.

Facades. Idols. Heroes. Monsters. Death. Hope. Rebirth. Growth. Failure. Disappointment. More than just the battle of light and dark, The Last Jedi is deep and complex looking for the middle ground in between and what drives people to either end of the spectrum.   I suppose some were simply looking for more action, and adding more dense layers of intricacy to the Star Wars franchise, but what Johnson says here, quite unequivocally, is that these films need to be able to stand on their own, without being burdened by living up to the past.  There's a whole new cast of characters Johnson is determined to have stand out on their own (and he even introduces a couple more), not just as potential offspring of -- or stand-ins for -- Luke, Leia and Han.

What I've enjoyed about Star Wars since Disney took over is that the films are not built around set pieces.  Events don't happen just so that they can lead to an action sequence...an action sequence happens because of the events in the film.  Here, because of the way the story is told, there's almost a relentless pressure.  Perhaps borrowing conceptually from Battlestar Galactica (the snake eats its own tail) the great ongoing series premiere "33" - one where the fleet must keep jumping away from their enemy only to face them again every 33 minutes - the Resistance similarly here is on the ropes against the First Order, and, it seems, out of options.  But this is what makes the film so enjoyable.  The more dire the odds that the Resistance and its team faces, the more it looks like they're going to lose, the greater the triumph will be when they don't, in spite of it all.  It's rather exhilarating.

But even with my overwhelming appreciation for the film, there still is a little disappointment...

[SPOILER SECTION]

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I mean I would be lying if I said I wasn't expecting something terribly cool, and terribly powerful out of Luke Skywalker.  I dunno, something like toppling AT-ATs with Force pushes or hauling Tie Fighters out of the sky, or taking down Snoke's flagship in just an X-Wing.  But, as I said, creating superheroes wasn't on Johnson's plate.  And what he does with Luke here is far more interesting on a character level.

What Luke does wind up doing is the stuff of legend regardless, taking the bombardment of the First Order's entire ground assault team and surviving (even though he wasn't really there).  Despite the fact that strain and effort to Force project himself across the galaxy killed him, other than Rey and Leia, nobody knows for a fact that he's moved on to the next phase of Force life and so this legendary figure who already was bordering on myth is now something even greater.  And the fact is, despite Luke passing peacefully, he can return in the next film.  We know so little about the afterlife in the Force that if JJ Abrams and company do decide to use Luke as a Force ghost (and they'd be kind of crazy not to), they have an almost blank slate with which to work with and define the rules of.  It's actually more interesting, and exciting if we finally learn the meaning of Obi-Wan's words in Episode 4 "Strike me down and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine".  That "power" Obi-Wan mentions never truly manifested in the original trilogy beyond him guiding Luke here and there.

The death of Luke is sad, primarily because we see him here at his lowest point.  He refuses to train Rey, he's disconnected himself from the Force, and he's pretty much given up on himself and the galaxy at large.  He thinks he has nothing of merit to contribute.  The legend people look for in him he does not see himself.  He's a Jedi Master by default, because there's nobody else around to become one, and he failed so spectacularly at it.  It takes a wizened Jedi Master, with Yoda's Force ghost returning, to council "young Skywalker" that failure -- and learning from that failure -- is what makes us stronger.  Yoda failed to learn about the presence of a Sith Lord in his midst and did the same thing Luke did, ran and hid away on an isolated planet.  Both Obi-Wan and Yoda were reluctant to train another Jedi in case it went awry again.  So scarred they were by Anakin turning to the Dark Side that they didn't want Luke to be another gone wrong.  Luke had the same experience with Kylo/Ben, and now treats Rey like he himself was treated, as yet another possible failure.  But Luke's arc in The Last Jedi is a redemptive one.  He knew he couldn't take on the entire First Order with just a laser sword, he needed to do something grander, and Leia in her most desperate hour, found her only hope had returned.  (Artoo even reminds Luke earlier that he was indeed the hope she and the Rebellion needed).

Am I disappointed that we don't learn anything of Snoke's origins?  Not at all.  Did we know anything about Emperor Palpatine when he cropped up in Empire, or again in Jedi?  No, no we did not.  And did it matter?  Not in the slightest.  The Emperor was just the greater evil, the grandmaster of the Empire, the Big Bad.  I'm not sure why we thought there was some big mystery to Snoke in the Force Awakens.  I suppose it's because of the way George Lucas structured the Original Trilogy and the Prequels, we've been trained to expect everything to be connected.  Darth Vader is Luke's dad.  Leia is his sister.  C-3PO was made by his dad.  R2-D2 used to be his mom's droid.  Everything seems to orbit around him.  That Snoke's past never comes to light (I bet it will in a novel or comic series, but I digress) doesn't really matter.  What we see from him is what we need to know, he has tremendous power (he's able to use the Force across vast distances), and tremendous ego.  Unlike Palpatine who was a master manipulator, Snoke is far more clumsy, not seeing that his abuse of Kylo Ren will be the cause of his pupil's betrayal, and believing his great power is enough to stop it should it happen.  And it happens so spectacularly.

Because we've been trained to see connections between everything Star Wars, the mystery of Rey's parentage was actually more of a tease.  Even in this film, Luke asks Rey twice over "Who are you?"  To have Rey's parentage be ultimately revealed (by Kylo Ren, so take anything he might say lightly) as a desperate couple who sold her for water, it's actually a good break from the whole prophesized lineage that the prequels thrust upon us, and that retroactively caused Luke's destiny to be somewhat foretold as well.  Rey is a nobody from nowhere, on her way to being the first of a new generation of Jedi.  A boy Finn and Rose met on Canto Bight we see again at the very end of the movie pulls a broom towards himself with the force, hitting home that the next generation of heroes for Star Wars can come from anywhere.  That's a very purposeful statement that needs to be made.  This Galaxy is huge, for everyone important to come from one narrow band of lineage and short connective threads becomes more implausible the longer it persists.

Speaking of Canto Bight, if there's anything that seems out of place in the film, this is it.  Finn and Rose go on this side adventure to find the Master Codebreaker (a cameo appearance from Justin Thereaux), but everything goes wrong, and they wind up with Benicio Del Toro's DJ instead.  It's not the search for the Master Codebreaker, nor DJ, nor any of the message about how the rich and wealthy of Canto Bight became rich and wealthy (arms dealers, selling to both sides, profiting from war) that bother me...it's the almost prequel-esque, unnecessary (and, to be honest, unexciting) chase sequence through the casino city.  I think what we're supposed to get out of this sequence is that Rose starts to fall for Finn in that moment (as much later she reveals her love for him), but it doesn't come across particularly well (so that reveal is a bit out of nowhere when it happens) and Finn seems generally oblivious, and still fixated on Rey.

I like the idea of friendship in Star Wars more than romance... for Rey and Finn have both led pretty lonely lives, so their connection isn't a romantic one necessarily.  Same with Finn and Po.  And given that The Last Jedi picks up immediately after The Force Awakens pretty much any congenial humanoid contact (that isn't barking orders or controlling them) is still rather meaningful to Finn and Rey.  That's why the Resistance matters, because these are people connected to each other by more than just a systemic ranking structure or taking advantage of their desperation.  Leia and Vice Admiral Holdo (an overwhelmingly awesome Laura Dern) share a moment at one point which conveys so much history that we may not ever know, but we catch the weight of it regardless.  Even Leia and Luke are more dear friends than family, and their reunion is fantastic, the connection between them, a lifetime of adventures shared, all conveyed without any specific words. "I know what you're going to say... I changed my hair."

There's so much that is great with this movie on a deeper level that I'm forgetting the surface level, which is just as amazing... the fight sequence with Rey and Kylo against the Praetorian Guards, Holdo's bold sacrifice, the opening bombing sequence, the final battle on Crait, Luke's last stand...it's all as epic as anything we've seen in Star Wars.  It's not an upping-the-ante, per se, but it creates exciting sequences that are story (and sometimes character) driven.  The fact that from moment one, the Resistance's fleet is on the decline, from one scene to the next more lives are lost, it's a palpable sense of dread and urgency every step of the way.  As Hux says, the First Order have them on a string.  Even their escape plan finds them penned in with no help on the way and nowhere to go.  It's as dire as Rogue One only Johnson's tone always offers the glimmer of hope, where Edwards was far more fatalistic.

Johnson also imbues The Last Jedi with a surprising amount of humour.  Poe Dameron's wisecracking in the opening moments at Hux's expense start as the two defining moments for these characters in the film.  Hux's self-seriousness gets the better of him and we learn that, despite his rank, people look down on him for it (Snoke teaches Kylo the importance of having someone like Hux in such a role).  Snoke tosses Hux around like a rag doll on the bridge of his own ship at one point, in front of all the crew at one point (I'm wondering if the lesson is that no matter how ridiculous someone may seem, don't forget how dangerous they can be *cough*Trump*cough*).  Luke is very sardonic, not a goofy little bean like Yoda became on Dagobah, but a surly old miser with a deadpan wit that could give two fucks.  There's physical comedy, wordplay, situational comedy...and it's mostly funny too (the drunken alien mistaking BB8 for a slot machine on Canto Bight was another good bit which has payoff later).  It's not that Star Wars hasn't had comedy before, but it's almost always been incidental, whereas here there's comedy moments, in place exactly for that purpose (Chewie having to face a flock of Porgs while he's about to eat a roasted one... unnecessary, yet still funny and charming).

Ultimately, the point of The Last Jedi is to show what a creator with a strong personal vision can do within the confines of a big franchise, just as Taika Waititi showed with Thor Ragnarok  this year.  As much as Abrams and Edwards tried to ape what Lucas did with their films, this to me seems much more in keeping with the George Lucas auteur way of making a film, specifically a Star Wars film.

 To be honest I was wondering if The Last Jedi was going to flame me out on Star Wars, too samey-samey, repeating patterns, but it's done the opposite.  It's reinvigorated my fandom, made me see that what's still ahead of me is the possibility of surprise.  There's always so much discourse over a new movie while it's in production and so much dissemination of trailers before it's release, that by the time we get to it we think we have a pretty good snapshot of what we're in for.  It's so damn nice (and FUN!) to be surprised.  As Luke said in the trailers "This isn't going to go how you think it will."