Double Dose: The Chrises Go Netflix

(Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme...pretty simple.  Today:  Chrises Evans and Hemsworth do Netflix [the lesser Chrises, Pine and Pratt are Amazon bound])

Spiderhead - 2022, d. Joseph Kosinski - Netflix
The Gray Man - 2022, d. Anthony and Joe Russo - Netflix

Director Joseph Kosinski made a big, bold splash for me with Tron: Legacy, a film that's far, far from flawless, but I have enjoyed a half dozen times over and will probably enjoy it at least as many times more.  It's a sumptuous visual feast, absolutely striking, with one of the best soundtracks of all time.  Kosinski followed it up in 2013 with the Tom Cruise-starring sci-fi vehicle Oblivion, another visually striking movie that I quite liked (but have yet to rewatch).  And since then...nothing.  This incredibly impressive visual stylist just sort of disappeared under a pile of films that just didn't get off the ground.

This year (thanks to a multi-year delay on one) we're treated to two new films from Kosinski.  The first, the mega-blockbuster of the year, Top Gun: Maverick, which would have secured Kosinski blank check status had he not also come out with Spiderhead mere weeks after.

I didn't really care for Maverick, but that film wasn't really Kosinski's vision...when you're working on a Tom Cruise vehicle, Cruise is in control.  I liked a little better Spiderhead, which finds Chris Hemsworth starring in his second Netflix movie, with Miles Teller giving Hemsworth a beef-show rivalry after getting shockingly jacked for his Maverick co-starring role.   The plot has Hemsworth, Steve, a tech billionaire, operating a legal, remote prison, where the prisoners are treated and fed very well but are subjects in a test of chemical control.  With a surgically installed unit in their spine, their handlers put the inmates in controlled room experiments, sometimes paired up, sometimes solo, where they mess with their emotions.

There's a level of amusement and (sometimes great) discomfort (and sometimes great discomfort at being amused), as we watch the subjects get pushed into traumatic depression, or heightened into states of orgasmic amour with an person they're otherwise not attracted to.  It seems to be that much of this is not necessarily science, but voyeurism and power tripping on Steve's part.  But the deeper we get into the film, the more we learn Steve has his own bag of secrets, some fascinating vulnerabilities (I wish the film had explored more) and also strange delusions as to what his place in this prison is.  Steve takes a real liking, and feels a strong sense of kinship with Teller's Jeff, who he starts trusting more and more, though never truly letting go of the warden/prisoner control.   It's a fun role for Hemsworth who gets to be charming, gregarious, but also menacing and sinister, and flip through those regularly.

The sets are right in my wheelhouse, a lot of concrete and wood panelling that feels retro-futuristic, very 70's but also beyond, and Kosinski really leans into all the angles this architecture presents.  Still a good visual stylist, the film looks good, but it feels a very contained movie.  

There's something a little obvious about the story, most of its rhythms feel completely expected.  There's not really any true surprises.  As much as I found both things to be intrigued with and generally enjoy, the final act, literally and figuratively, doesn't stick the landing and ultimately sinks the film for me. I was expecting it to end with something more in the dystopian chaos range of a j.g. ballard (see High Rise) -- the film operates mostly in that sphere for the first two acts (albeit a bit neutered with it's yacht rock soundtrack) -- the last 15 minutes or so don't adequately escalate in a way that makes sense for the conceit. It should have been an orgy of chaotic drug freakouts in that prison, and gotten very wild, but it doesn't really at all.  It feels safe when it shouldn't be at all.  It's downtempo finale honestly feels like a side effect of COVID-era filmmaking, keeping people apart and things small.

The Gray Man is the opposite of small.  The most expensive film Netflix has produced yet, the streamer I think felt that somehow the Russo's success with billions-earnings of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers:Endgame was a full credit to them, and not a confluence of dozens upon dozens of things going just right.  Yes, they can take some of the credit, but at best their take of the success of their MCU entries is 49%...not even a controlling share.

AppleTV+ found out with the critically maligned Cherry (with Tom Holland) that maybe the Russos need a producer behind them that knows exactly what they want to keep them on track.  I imagine The Gray Man was already deep in production by the time Cherry was released, and by then the genie ..err.. money couldn't be put back in the bottle.

Based off the bestselling novel of the same name (film studios love to tout "based off the bestselling novel" but at this stage a bestseller can be, like, 20,000 copies, a mere fraction of a fraction of Netflix's massive (though declining) global audience, so it means nothing) The Grey Man reteams the Russos with their MCU screenwriting collaborators Stephen McFeeley and Christopher Marcus, and former Captain America Chris Evans, so one would thing bringing that whole gang together for a globetrotting spy vs. spy action movie would been nothing but gold.

Gold sure isn't Gray. BAM! ZING! Got'em! (Ahem.)

The film puts Ryan Gosling in the role of an CIA operative who is the best at what he does.  He's a troubled man, whose proclivities for violence were put to "good use".  But when he discovers that his latest mission was a job meant to cover up his handler's misdeeds, he is cut loose by the agency and goes on the run.  The agency knows he's basically their best guy, so they send the only one they're sure can get him, a free-market mercenary maniac played by Evans, with a funny lil mustache.

The two chase each other across Europe, with Evans pulling zero punches in leveling buildings and destroying all manner of vehicles and possibly causing dozens of collateral damage deaths in the process, and Gosling spending little effort to stop the destruction. (The amount of people in this movie who have no problem with all the destruction and unseen death as a result but then get all upset to learn that Evans has kidnapped a preteen girl who Gosling is like the godfather of, well, then for some reason that just too far for them...it's absurd logic.  All that collateral damage, again, unseen, likely killed a half dozen girls).

The movie's cast is stacked.  Ana de Armis being a colleague of Gosling's who winds up helping him despite her reservations (despite the massive budget, de Armis doesn't get an action scene remotely as good as her role in No Time To Die).  Rege-Jean Page seems kind of wasted as the desk-bound CIA bad guy, and Jessica Henwick is definitely wasted as his lackey.  Billy Bob Thornton is Gosling's mentor, and is fine, while Alfre Woodard gets an all too brief cameo that seems over almost as soon as it starts.

There's a pretty huge action scene on a streetcar in Vienna, which is the only sequence in the film that implies how expensive the film was, and also the only one that really sticks out to my memory of the entire production.  The rest of the film sees a lot of action for action sake that hasn't stuck in my brain. 

Taking away the 200 million dollar price tag, and it's a slightly above average action film that feels kind of like an old school 80's superstar actioneer, the kind of perfectly fine movie you would find Schwartzenegger or Stallone in back in the day. But you slap that price tag on it and it needs to deliver a LOT more than it does.  It doesn't live up to the expectations of a film costing that much, and it's hard not to think about, or have it influence one's opinions on the movie.  I think had this been theatrically released first, and bombed with critics (and probably the mass audience) it would have found a second life in streaming as a "hey, that's not that bad" reclaimed sleeper hit.

I would watch another in this series (as it totally leaves it hanging) should it ever materialize, but reign the budget in folks.  

KWIF: No Other Choice (+3)

KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. January's here. It's real movie time. 

This Week: 
No Other Choice (2025, d. Park Chan-wook - in theatre)
Train Dreams (2025, d. Clint Bentley  - netflix)
F1 (aka F1: The Movie - 2025, d. Joseph Kosinski - appletv)
The Young Magician ("Tales for All #4") (1987, d.  - crave)

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With No Other Choice, director Park Chan-wook is in full control of his craft as he presents a viewing experience that is so emotionally twisting that for pretty much the entire runtime (just shy of 140 minutes) the audience is proactively and continuously meant to ponder their allegiance to and affinity for the film's protagonist. 

Adapting Donald Westlake's 1997 novel "The Ax" with co-writers Don McKellar (with whom Park worked with on HBO's *The Sympathizer*), Jahye Lee (with whom Park worked on Netflix's *Uprising*) and Lee Kyung-mi, No Other Choice is a tale of corporate downsizing and the satirically desperate extremes people will push themselves to in order to perpetuate their status in the toxic and uncaring reality of capitalism.

Lee Byung-hun stars as Man-su, who, as the film opens, manages a specialty paper factory. The factory has just come under new American ownership and he's been told that staff needs to be cut by twenty percent. He's preparing to rally and fight for the men he's been working with for years, only to find that he is among the twenty percent. He has invested a tremendous deal into his role, sacrificing time with his wife (who also give up her career), his stepson and his daughter to educate himself to be a leader in his field. But finding work in the field of paper, when demand is down, automation is up, mergers shrink the number of available employers, and competition from similarly out of work people is fierce, it all means Man-su is lost and, from his vantage point, out of options. 

His beautiful house, his upscale cars, his dance lessons, his Netflix...even his dogs are all on the list of potential cuts if he can't find work before his severance package runs dry. His loving wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) is ready to make sacrifices but Man-su is not. After 18 months of desperate hunting, Man-su lands on the idea of killing the man in really the only position he is suitable for, but stops himself... and not because he cannot bring himself to murder another man, but because he can't guarantee that there aren't more qualified men who would get the available position before he does.

Thus ensues a pitch-black comedy of errors that runs concurrently with a grim, distressing existential journey where Man-su's whole sense of self and where he fits in his own life falls out of step with his ambition and self-determined necessity. It's a masterful exercise in defying expectations and audience manipulation. The Man-su we meet at the start of this journey is a very different man than the one we see at the end, as is Miri who is about as devoted a wife as we ever see in secular, modern stories without ever undercutting her agency or intelligence.

But for spoilers, this is a film I would really like to deep dive into writing about, because it is rich and complicated in theme and subtext, a lot of which is masked by its wicked sense of humour and the nastier, distasteful side of humanity it takes us through. It's a long movie, but we're always allied with Man-su on his journey even when we've stopped sympathizing with him (it's a film that warps the audience greatly in that "he really shouldn't get away with this, but we want him to get away with this" fashion).

Director Park's visual acumen is incontestable, with his cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, this is as good as any of his films have looked, and they pretty much all look fantastic. Here, he stays on the warm side of the spectrum, even as our affinity for Man-su cools. The director wants us to know that no matter what twisted extremes Man-su has gone to, the film is still showing him in a favourable light (if not always positive). The film never wants us to fully disengage from Man-su. The refrain of "no other choice" goes from a laughable excuse for corporate greed to the aching plight of a desperate man to the words of a selfish and myopic person. The title of the film itself has its own journey.

I honestly cannot tell you if I liked this film, or if I enjoyed it. I am impressed by it. I was fully engaged with it, and in unpacking it, even just this little bit, I see much more of its depth that I was too emotionally distracted to fully take in during my first viewing. I have a feeling it will play much better upon rewatch.

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Without specifically spoiling the end of No Other Choice, it's final images are sights inside a fully automated paper factory, which juxtapose sharply against the busy, populated factory we see at the start of the film. In the last images we see, we are taken to a forest where we observe as a logging crane (excuse my lack of knowledge of the technical term) as it picks up a felled tree and relieves it of its branches in seconds. The scale of the machinery, its power and efficiency, and its dominance over nature was a surprisingly visceral visual, one I was surprised to have such an uncomfortable reaction to. Much like the factory scene that precedes it, there is not another person in sight and the message of consumerism and capitalism and its increasing disconnect from humanity is a potent one.

Train Dreams is the life story of a logger, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) working on clearing the way for railways in the summer months. At the film's start, logging is a fully manual profession, one man on either side of a massive hand saw cranking back and forth through a tree, their sweat moistening the ground beneath them. On a felled tree, men take their axes and hack away at the branches in just as demanding a physical effort. And then they need to section the tree. It's a labor intensive process that pays four dollars a day (minus expenses). It's extremely physical and dangerous work, but the need to expand the rails, and then the demand for paper during the second world war was great, so the job was dependable and the work steady. Robert would toil summer months, missing his beloved wife and later his young daughter and their remote cabin by a creek, but the money was good enough to keep them stable through the winter. Options, otherwise, were limited, as Robert would find out.

The film, through narration by Will Patton, is largely gentle and meditative, but personal and investing. It takes us through Robert's life, from his earliest memories as an orphan shipped out on a train, to his final year, without being at all pedantic about it. The narration helps step us back and forth through his life, with brief capsules of interest, some relevant to the moment on screen, some not. Robert's journey could have just been centered around tragedy - his earliest days on the logging crew he was confronted with the horrors of anti-Asian racism, as a Shanghai-born crewman is grabbed suddenly by a trio of men who drag him kicking and screaming before tossing him off a train bridge. Robert's brief motion to intervene is fruitless and he can do little but stand by, and then return to work with a seemingly disaffected crew. Robert is haunted by the man for the remains of his days... not perpetually, but the spectre never leaves him. The ghosts, in a manner of speaking, begin to pile up. 

Tragedy would befall Robert, and he would not return to logging for some time. His grief and misery would take a long time for him to come to terms with. When he returns to the work he did for so long, he's met with the future. A steam-driven truck roams the terrain, and the crew is stocked with chainsaws which Robert finds foreign and difficult to manage. The young crew treat him like a relic, but he wonders if he was the same in his younger years. Time marches on.

We spend most of Train Dreams in nature in various forms. There's not a lot of what you might call civilization in Robert's story because it seems like he avoided it. In Edgerton's portrayal, he's not the stoic, silent type, and he's not the cordial over-sharer, he's unremarkably average and he's so aware of the fact that nothing that happens in his life makes him any more special than anyone else. He's not a deep thinker, but he does contemplate existence, and meaning. His elder colleague in his early years (a remarkable William H. Macy) imparts on him the idea of nature and humanity's connection to nature and how our interference in nature has unknown consequences, ripple effects. Our understanding of the connectivity is still so very primitive, we evolved bipeds with our big brains think nature something to dominate, to control, to use and abuse without giving back. Robert fears nature also takes, and it's taken from him.

The end of Robert's journey takes him to civilization, and when we encounter a big city it's a shock to the system. It's the 1950s already (otherwise we have few guideposts as to the actual time periods within the film), there are cars and televisions and everything seems electric. Robert is a man out of time who just stepped into the future, but he's curious rather than frightened by it all. 

Reflecting upon capitalism and its effect on our conceptualization of standard of living is the centerpiece of No Other Choice, in Train Dreams it's more the byproduct of the story being told, but there's a curious sympatico between the two films. Robert does not want to be logging, but there are no other real choices for him. Similarly, the ending of No Other Choice informs the theme of Train Dreams unexpectedly. Where No Other Choice's ending visualization of logging specifically points to the lack of people involved in the largely mechanized process, Train Dreams makes us consider whether we should be logging at all, at least on the industrial scale we do.  No Other Choice bemoans the loss of jobs, while Train Dreams contemplates the impact of a whole many other kinds of losses.
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Earlier this year Toasty reviewed Joseph Kosinski's 2017 wildfire fighters biopic Only the Brave, with some commentary around whether he was going to be a Kosinski completist or not.  Spoiler, despite being somewhat affected by the film, he's opted out.

Kosinski's Tron: Legacy and Oblivion were visually captivating projects that boldly announced an exciting new director, one who is very design-centric and has an aptitude with kinetic movement and special effects. But, after Oblivion's less than stellar performance, Kosinski seemed to either abandon sci-fi, or he never wanted to be working in that genre in the first place. From Toasty's description it doesn't sound like there was much opportunity for design or kinetic action in Only the Brave, and his pandemic film, Spiderhead, didn't offer anything near to the scale of Tron or Oblivion.

He worked with Tom Cruise in Oblivion, and if Cruise likes you and works with you well enough on his terms, you become one of his guys. So he was tapped for Top Gun:Maverick, which, despite being held back by Cruise for two years until the pandemic lockdown was lifted, was a massive success, one of the highest earning films of the year. Largely because of Kosinski's camerawork on the flying scenes, he was widely praised as a key part of the film's success.  The status that Tron and Oblivion should have given him was now bestowed upon him. He's a premiere filmmaker. But before he's handed the reins to anything completely, he had to prove himself, thus F1, to show that it wasn't just the name brand of Top Gun and the starpower of Tom Cruise, that he brought something to the table as well. 

For the record, I love Tron:Legacy. It is one of my comfort films. There are a lot of elements to it that I love, but Kosinski's visual adeptness is a key part. I really disliked Top Gun: Maverick, but didn't blame Kosinski for its script, which was all about inflating Tom Cruise's ego, and appealing to boomer dads and grandads by having an old guy strut into a room, ignore everyone else's opinions and abilities, and let the praise heap upon him as the smartest, most talented, wisest and most skilled person alive.  It was a wish fulfillment power trip for an aging generation and it suuuucked. I guess the flying sequences were good, but they didn't do enough to pull me out of the ego boost/pander porn that was the film's story.

From the trailers for F1, it looked to be pretty much the exact same plot. Brad Pitt plays an aging driver who is brought in to help a struggling F1 team, only to steamroll everyone without consequence because he's the smartest, most talented, wisest and most skilled driver alive. Same plot, but race cars not planes, and race courses not military strikes. Why would I watch this? I really do not care for racing as a sport, and those Maverick vibes are very off putting.

When I loaded AppleTV, well, call it a moment of weakness. I saw it's 2h35 min runtime and nearly spat out my kombucha. I said I would give it 20 minutes and dip out. Then I watched the whole thing sitting on the edge of the couch, never bored, never intentionally doing a time check to see how long until it was over.

There are a few differences here between Maverick and F1, the first being Brad Pitt is not Tom Cruise. Without getting into Pitt's abusive alcoholic private life, the man has remained a pretty terrific actor, capable of letting go of ego and disappearing into a role. Tom Cruise, for the past decade (or more), just seems to be playing Tom Cruise, and the ego is inescapable. Pitt does not need his characters to be humanity's apex, so when he steps into a role like Sonny Hayes, an aging phenom who the script needs to walk into a room and take charge despite being the "new guy", well, Pitt doesn't play him with bully and bluster, but rather a sort of glib zen-ness. 

Sonny hasn't driven F1 in 30 years. In the meantime he's been a driver-for-hire across various motorsports. This movie postulates that anyone can just step into an F1 car and race and drive it without extensive time behind the wheel and qualifying trials, but we let it go, because the gist is Sonny is just that good at feeling things out. All the sensors and cameras and algorithms just can't tell you what gut instinct can.

But in Pitt's hands Sonny isn't perfect, he isn't flawless, he isn't so good his skills can defy all logic...just most logic. He makes mistakes that hurt others and hurt himself. Yet, it is a script that does pop in and out of making him magical sexagenarian but it's only eye rolling juuuust a little bit.

The film's plot is colour by numbers, there's pretty much no surprises in what happens here, and yet, Kosinski is not precious with it. He built a story that services the action in a way that builds tension for the characters, their relationships, the team and the race their in all at once. The stakes are presented, they're evident, and they just help lubricate the whole thing to move it forward without any resistance.  Hans Zimmer's score is symbiotically propulsive and, not unexpectedly, bombastic in Zimmer fashion, but he never gets cloying in his score around the drama, which I think may save the film.

It's all about the racing, and Kosinski levels up not just what he accomplished with the flying sequences in Maverick but also takes car racing cinematography to another level. It's maybe not quite as zany as Speed Racer, but there's a visceral and tangible nature to it that is undeniable. It made me a bit sad I didn't see this in theatres. As I said, I don't care about cars or racing, and the racing sequences in this are thrilling. Turns out, car races are fun when they edit down 60+ laps of a race to a 10-minute action sequence.

In some respects, both Top Gun:Maverick and F1 are like extensions of Tron:Legacy and Oblivion. Legacy had various racing and flying (and competition) sequences, while Oblivion had some great flying sequences. The former two and the latter two are otherwise quite unalike styilistically, but the DNA of propulsive filmmaking is there.  I half expect Kosinski's next project to be a Waterworld legasequel just to bring it all back around.

I think Kosinski is an exceptional technical director, another guy who can produce big screen-worthy, widely appealing productions. The aesthetic flavour that initially drew me to him is not a constant in his work, but it's clear he is very skilled at providing wow-inducing action sequences. I think the disappointment both Toast and I are feeling is we thought Kosinski would be one of us, a guy who liked nerdy shit and would be capable of getting big budgets and big names to make them. Instead he's like the nerdy teenager who started hitting the gym during the summer and now hangs around more with the meatheads and tries to hide his geekier tendencies.

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The fourth entry in Quebec producer Rock Demers' "Tales for all" is the highly bizarre Poland-Canada co-production of The Young Magician ("Cudowne dziecko" in Polish).  I mean, so far all of the "Tales for all" have had some aspect of "highly bizarre" to them (and The Peanut Butter Solution is straight up bonkers), but they all have an internal logic to them, no matter how weird they get.

Writer-director Waldermar Dziki was clearly inspired by American kids adventure cinema of the mid-1980s as this feels like a funhouse mirror reflection of its glossier across-the-sea counterparts. 13-year-old Peter (Rusty Jedwab) is having a challenging time...he's quit the hockey team because the captain won't play him, the girl he likes seems to like the hockey captain better than him, and, well, his parents take him to a magic show where he's pulled up on stage to help out with a trick (he "helps" by doing nothing).

After the magic show Peter becomes convinced that he should have telekinetic powers, so he keeps practicing until, eventually, he develops telekinetic powers. Only thing is, his telekinesis tends to make things go haywire. Being a teenager, he of course uses his newly developed superpower to show off, and then it gets him in trouble and then the military comes and takes him away for testing. They can't figure out at all how his powers manifested, so they want to drill into his head. Peter escapes and meets Alexander (Edward Garson), a young orphan cello prodigy who shows Peter the way to harness his power: practice.

Peter gets absolutely no practice in before they're off on another adventure, and then contacted by the police to help deal with a deadly canister of highly volatile material. Yup, let's get the kid with uncontrollable telekinesis who makes things explode all the time try to move the canister of highly explosive stuff. Genius. Turns out, it was genius. Peter removes it safe and suddenly the military doesn't want him anymore and he's a town hero. He helps Alexander get a philharmonic gig, the end.

What?

Yeah. This movie feels like it was made by taking a pile of note cards with plot points and character markers on them, shuffling them, cutting the deck in half and then tossing the deck in the air so that they land in a random order. Nothing about this story makes logical sense, beyond Peter being a teenager and using his power to do petty things. 

This is a dumb movie that introduces its secondary lead (Alexander) at the end of the second act. It probably had three times the budget of any of the previous "Tales for all" productions. I mean, there are so many helicopers in this film, and not always the same helicoper, and not stock footage.

It's clear this was made in Poland (even before seeing the credits, where most of the participants outside of the Canadian leads have Polish last names) but pretends to be Canada despite not looking Canadian at all.  There's no Polish audio track and I spent the first 20 minutes switching between the English and French dubs trying to see if either would synch up, and at times the English would mimic the movements of a character's mouth, but I suspect that there's not a version of this film with the original on-set dialogue. 

 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Spiderhead

2022, Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion) -- Netflix

OK, weird; I think I just side-stepped (my head canon for moving between alternate realities in the multiverse) from a reality where The Gorge was done by Kosinski, which was going to lead to a paragraph about directors working with actors they like. Miles Teller was in Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick (and his wildfire fighting movie Only the Brave -- ohhh, that's why its in My List)and is in this. Buuut, that's not this reality, so Spiderhead is actually his latest flick. That said, three flicks together does warrant that paragraph buuuut I kind of derailed it.

Anywayz.

The original short story called "Escape From Spiderhead" provides the key focus of this movie -- incarcerated criminals participating in drug trials voluntarily, drugs that elicit great emotional responses, and how the doctor administering the trials is manipulating the people so that the outcomes are favourable to his end goals, no matter the damage it causes to the inmates. Kosinski builds a movie around that premise.

Kosinski likes his architectural imagery. Even with Oblivion being a scifi movie set on an post-apocalyptic Earth, the look and feel of the watch posts that Jack and Vic live in, is spectacular, all curved widescreen smooth plastic and glossy white materials. This is not the post where I indulge in the design aesthetics, but Spiderhead establishes that in the initial fly-over of the facility, its incongruity against the isolated rural landscape. Once we are inside, it continues, all wide range concrete and wood but with pristine white observation rooms. Like Kent, I too enjoy this a lot.

Side-note: I have been doing a lot of rewatching of late as my brain gravitates to consuming known-factors. Enough, in fact, that I feel they warrant a "Rewatch Snippets" post.

Via flashbacks, we get that inmate Jeff (Miles Teller, The Gorge) drove drunk and killed his close friend, the younger brother of his girlfriend. It tortures him, but other than that, he is a stable guy. Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth, Extraction) leads the testing with his complicit assistant Mark (Mark Paguio, Lonesome). They appear to be the only two running the experiments, other than a handful of security/orderlies. Its odd, as it is very clear that there are a good number of violent, sociopathic criminals in there. Abnesti is friendly, confident and more than a little detached from the idea he is doing this to people, despite his affability. Alongside Jeff, we meet Lizzie (Jurnee Smollett, Lovecraft Country), who works the kitchens of the facility as well as being an inmate. Jeff and Lizzie connect.

Abnesti's testing is focused on marketable drugs, drugs the company can sell as legal recreationals. But you can tell by the way that he pushes Jeff that there is a darker motive at play. He also constantly plays a rather sinister card that it is not he that is demanding Jeff do the less than pleasant aspects of the testing, but the nameless faceless council running the facility. But Abnesti is not above manipulating everyone, including Mark, to get the results he wants.

Harkening back to the "Stanford prison experiment", where fake guards were asked to psychologically punish/torture fake prisoners, much of the movie focuses on complicity: Abnesti getting Jeff to perform the tests himself, Abnesti guilting Mark into helping him even when his conscience weighs on him. Through coercion and deception, Jeff does some things he is not proud of. Only when he starts to unravel Abnesti's lies does he start to question what is really going on.

The movie could have been darker, but it didn't want to be a horror / torture-porn movie. Its more a play of personalities, with obviously likeable Abnesti being setup to be truly heinous, while Jeff, initially meek and agreeable is understood to have performed a truly dark deed, but... not one we cannot  have sympathy for. I cannot fault the movie for the performances, but... it was all a bit vanilla? For a movie that was mostly about what Abnesti could convince Jeff to do, it never felt as if anything but the expected would happen.

Oblivion

2013, Joseph Kosinski

Oblivion is just one of many science-fiction "desolate earth"/"dystopian future" subgenre films hitting the theatres this year, a busy crowd that includes, most notably, M. Night Shyamalan's Smith family vehicle After Earth and Neill Blomcamp's Elysium starring Matt Damon and (a now retired?) Jody Foster.  What's surprising about each of the major entries in this new wave of genre filmmaking is how the concepts seem to be placed more in the center, acting less as a template for action setpieces and franchise building, and more a vehicle for storytelling.  It seems to be in this age of sequels and comic book adaptations, original and somewhat heady SF still has a place.  While I haven't seen any of the other films (yet), Oblivion seems to step backwards to a pre-Star Wars era of science fiction storytelling, one that wouldn't be out of place were it starring Charlton Heston 40 years ago.

Joseph Kosinski's first feature, Tron Legacy, was a visual feast, but one steeped in a 30-year-old mythos that the public-at-large couldn't be bothered to invest into.  Here he's directing a script that strips down the audience requirements, giving a very basic set-up of an Earth that was invaded, then abandoned, and now all that's left are resource harvesting machines and a two-person repair crew.  Tom Cruise plays Jack, the repairman, who frequently ventures down to the planet from his sleek glass lookout perched high above the ground, even if there's no repairs required or incidents to investigate.  He does this to the chagrin of his partner, Vicka (Andrea Riseborough), who monitors his actions and communicates with the Tet, a monolithic space station orbiting the earth that serves as headquarters for humanity's salvation efforts.  Vicka and Jack are romantically involved, but it's evident that their partnership is largely one of convenience, since Jack, despite a mind wipe, he still has fuzzy memories of what Earth was like before it was invaded and a fondness for exploring its fractured terrain, while Vicka wants little more than to finish their 5-year tour-of-duty and go to New Earth as promised.

Down in the ruins of New York, however, Jack encounters Scavs, leftover invaders who seem to want to interfere with any remaining human operations on the planet. But naturally very little is as it seems, and Jack begins to learn the truth about the Earth, the Tet, the Scavs and himself as the film progresses.  A lot of this is familiar ground for SF veterans, but it's still presented largely in a visually appealing, and elegantly paced manner that makes the journey more than work the investment.

There are some flaws though, like a perfunctory flying chase sequence (which get more and more tired the more I see them... compare the chase sequence here with the one against the Klingons in Star Trek Into Darkness or any others that have cropped up in genre films since the Empire Strikes Back did it best in an asteroid belt, and there's little exciting or new to them) or a gun battle with some renegade drones, which seem out of place in this otherwise quasi-meditative film.  There's also some dishonest filmmaking and storytelling, particularly film's duplicity surrounding the Scavs, used in order to make some of the turns a bigger surprise, when I don't think they were necessary deceptions at all (especially since some were already spoiled by the trailer). 

Kosinksi's work in Tron Legacy had him exploring a unreal, somewhat contained digital landscape, striving to make it at once foreign yet relatable, believable but fantastical, and largely succeeded, through his palette of deep black with neon highlights.  With Oblivion, Kosinski works in a polar contrast, bright, airy, seemingly without limitations, and yet boundaries are set which constantly reign Jack's Earth-based adventures in.  The designs are sleek, edgeless, somewhat organic, the single-person plane Jack flies is modeled after a dragonfly, while the station, Tower 49, is almost like a flower growing on a long stem reaching for the sun.  It's contrasted with the Scavs, trim-yet-clunky, living in a hollowed out mountain side, full of jagged rusty metal platforms and support beams.  Kosinski frequently captures imagery that could, in still frame, be novel cover by Michael Whelan or Kelly Freas.

The editing is economical, allowing scenes to breathe, and Kosinski's eye opens up his shot frequently to the broadest possible perspective of landscapes and scenery.  One of the most inspired images is that of the moon in the sky, a quarter of it having exploded outwards, looking like an upside-down-Pac Man trying to eat a trail of debris.  This wonderful imagery is enveloped by a modernistic soundtrack by french electronica artist M83 with instrumentation from Joseph Trapanese.  It's a sweeping, epic, affecting score, at times bristling with intensity, other's swelling to a grandiose apex.  There's a lot of similar cues as Daft Punk's Tron Legacy score (likely the influence of Trapanese) but some strong delineations as well.

Oblivion, with it's self-contained nature, and it's minimalistic scope, won't be remembered as a major event picture, or even a major picture in Tom Cruise's extensive resume, but it's appealing enough to have an endearing longevity, it the same respect as the Omega Man or Silent Running, genre films otherwise overshadowed by the likes of 2001, Star Wars and Alien.

[David's Review]

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Only the Brave

2017, Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion) -- Netflix

I thought I might as well fill in some Kosinski gaps, but not exactly sure why. Other than Oblivion (and probably Tron: Legacy but obviously not enough to generate rewatches), I cannot say his directorial stylings have captured me. Maybe now that he has broken from the mould created by his first two movies (visually impactful scifi), with things such as a Top Gun sequel, and this one, he can return to something I would more enjoy?

Anywayz, I am also not much of a biopic viewer, though I do have a good number in the "the hopper" (my downloads folder) unwatched and neglected. I also am not sure I knew this was a "based on a true story" movie, more thinking it was just going to be an exploration of something in the zeitgeist for the last decade or so -- wild fires and the men who fight them. But no, this is a sensitive, compassionate movie about the Granite Mountain Hotshots, who lost 19 members fighting the wildfire in Yarnell, Arizona in 2013. 

Hotshots are highly trained, front-line Wildland Firefighters. At least that is the term in America. They started as a "handcrew", basically a support team in fighting wildfires, preparing the land ahead of the fire to reduce potential danger. The movie is about their dream to become proper Hotshots, to tear the "trainee" sticker off their vehicle. They are led by Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin, Old Guy) and Jesse Steed (James Badge Dale, World War Z), and the movie depicts the add-on of a few new recruits, including addict Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller, The Gorge) who wants to clean up his act after his ex has his baby. Marsh takes a chance on him.

Much of the movie is about getting to know the guys, which in most movies can be tedious, but Kosinski gives us a no-nonsense setup. There's not a lot of gloss on these "good ol boys", Arizona being a land of cowboys and country music, but they all seem likeable enough, dispensing with the toxic masculinity for the most part. There was something solid about seeing their lives, without the movie taking turns into melodrama for the sake of excitement. 

But peppered into the movie are the fires they fight and the dangers presented. We keep on getting a wee bit of dramatic effect with visions of a bear made of fire rushing out of a massive landscape on fire. I expected it to be just that, a bit of CGI for the sake of metaphor, but it did end up connected to an experience Marsh had, something I imagine every wildfire firefighter experiences -- an animal fleeing the fire, its coat ablaze, into the darkness beyond. Marsh uses this memory to connect with and apologize to Brendan, that they are all fleeing something overwhelming in their lives, but the Hotshots turn around and step into it.

Again, going into the movie, not knowing the historical fact behind it, I was not expecting the deaths. But when the final act started, I saw the signs. It put a cold spot in my gut. I liked these guys, they were succeeding, they were overcoming odds, they all had so much to contribute. And in a flash, pun intended, the next thing we hear is "confirmed; 19". All the protective measures, all the training, all the experience could not protect them from the beast of a fire.

Brendan escapes death, having been put on reduced duty (assigned lookout at a critical point) due to his recovery from a snakebite. But the movie does not end with the deaths, as it also has to deal with him being a survivor when all his friends and mentors are dead, when all their families see him still alive. If the movie ended with so much death, it had to give us a bit of hope & life to close things out.

I was thinking, going into this movie, that I would close out my Kosinski collection, but honestly... not feeling  it. Sure, I enjoyed the movie, but not enough to deal with the dislike I have for the legacy of Top Gun. And nothing stands out for me in his directing that would compel me to watch it, nor the coming F1. Experiment over.

Note: Some really good supporting performances from Jeff Bridges (The Old Man) and Jennifer Connelly (Dark City). 

Series Minded: Trons

[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]

Tron (1982, d. Steven Lisberger - Disney+)
Tron: Legacy (2010, d. Josef Kosinski - Disney+/Blu-ray [my internet crapped out about halfway through so I had to switch formats, and let me say physical was so much better])
Tron: Ares (2025, d. Joachim Rønning - in theatre, IMAX 3-D)

Tron debuted in 1982, 43 years ago, as an extremely modest success, at least financially, making its budget back and a little extra for the Disney coffers. But it was not the nu-Star Wars smash that its corporate overlords had hoped. Toys went on discount, and the merchandising blitz and tie ins came and went. It’s only resounding wins were the piles of quarters dumped into its fairly radical (and still alluring) arcade cabinets.

Steven Lisberger’s idea for Tron would basically become the template of so many Pixar and Pixar-esque films: a what if x-inanimate objects or concepts had feelings and lives and culture and civilization. In Tron’s case, it’s a “what if programs were real?” The reality they exist in is called The Grid, and it was all conceived in a nascent computer age where 64 kilobytes (practically the size of this text document) was considered a lot of processing power. The general populace didn’t really understand computers on a technical level and were barely familiar with them on an operational level. It’s also like the screenwriters of Tron weren’t all that knowledgeable themselves. Either that or they liberated themselves from the restraints of that knowledge in order to make their techno-fantasy world, and frankly it’s a better film for it.

Tron, at its core, is about world building, with a story about a user getting trapped in the digital world as he seeks evidence of a corporate executive having stole his ideas for himself. The bad guy is Encom VP Ed Dillinger (David Warner, The Omen) whose master control program (MCP) started life as a chess game and evolved into a bloatware tyrant absorbing all useful programs and trashing the rest as it rampages its way through corporate and governmental systems. Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, Starman) created a half dozen very lucrative video games that Dillinger stole, passed off as his own, made the company some serious cash and got promoted and while Flynn fired. But Flynn has friends on the inside of Encom who help him get access to find the evidence he needs, only the MCP uses an experimental digitizing laser to zap Flynn into the digital world.

The titular Tron is, effectively, a security watchdog program, and Flynn needs Tron’s help if he’s going to both escape and bring down Dillinger as well as his tyrannical MCP.

Tron opens on the Grid with Flynn’s Clu avatar (also Jeff Bridges) driving a tank through the vector-graphics inspired world, communicating back and forth with Flynn as it seeks the evidence Flynn’s looking for but is overpowered by the MCP’s response team. Clu’s failure immediately takes us to the real world, where we see Dillinger interact with the MCP, concerned over yet another incursion, as well as introduce us to Flynn’s friends Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner, Scarecrow and Mrs. King) and Dr. Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan, Caddyshack). Alan is the creator of Tron, while Lori is the designer of the digitizing laser. There is a half-hearted love triangle (Lora is Flynn’s ex, and is currently dating Alan) that extends to the Grid when Flynn meets their avatars Tron and Yori.

The in-Grid world had three primary designers. Legendary French comics illustrator Jean “Moebius” Giraud worked sets and costumes, primarily, with neo-futurist designer Syd Mead creating the film’s vehicles, and digital commercial artist Peter Lloyd creating the landscapes. As much as the film is known for its extensive use of then cutting edge computer effects, much of it is trick-of-the-eye as painted backdrops and clever use of light and shadow as well as rotoscoping and a lot of manual processing was necessary to build the world. It was a strenuous and laborious process to create the look and feel of the Grid, shot in black and white, with up to ten layers of processing as well as merging with digital effects… it’s the only film of its kind like this and it never fails to impress. It’s so damn unique.

The film’s other trick-of-the-eye is in its use of sound to flesh out its world. There’s nothing else that sounds like Tron, effects wise. As the Skywalker Sound library has gotten pillaged over the years and the sound effects of Star Wars have bled into other films and television, the sounds of Tron remain uniquely its own. Rather than using the primitive 8-bit audio sounds from video games of the era, sound designer Frank Serafine built everything specifically for the film. 

Wendy Carlos, composer known for her pioneering digital compositions, most notably for her scores to A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, creates her own digital audio soundscape here. Like those Toto or Tangerine Dream scores of the fantasy and sci-fi films of the early 80’s, Carlos’s score feels so very coded to its time. Electronic music was still exceptionally primitive at this time, but even at this era, it was being blended into rock and pop to greater effect than as its own enjoyable compositions. But the mix of score with visuals as well as technical adventurousness now cements the film to its time and it feels so pointedly a snapshot of an era, a piece of history [something not lost on the makers of the new Tron: Ares, but also sadly not replicated].

Tron is simultaneously not a great movie and also a mindblowing one. It’s so awkward in its conception of programs as living beings, and the society of The Grid makes no sense, and their worship of users as deities seems especially cruel, but at the end of the day, when Jeff Bridges is your guide into an adventurous world of kick ass games like disc wars and lightcycles, it’s too enjoyable to really care that deeply about where it goes wrong.

The first resurrection of the Tron property came with "Tron 2.0" in 2003, a first-person-shooter videogame that was a sort of testbed for the appetite for new Tron content. It was modestly well received and modestly successful. Modesty would be an enduring theme for Tron.

2010, though, had designs on blowing the modesty right off of the perception of Tron. Josef Kosinski’s directorial debut would cost at least 170 million dollars to produce, and every damn penny of it is up on the screen. Kosinski, an architect by training, really wanted to reintroduce The Grid for a modern era. To do so he would design the living hell out of it. Though indebted to the first film, and holding true to the light-piping effect, and the bold colours, Kosinski and his team really leaned into the shadows and contrasts with this film, to make the colours pop even more, and boy do they pop.

The light cycles, the Recognizers and the tanks, the buildings, the costumes, the landscapes, they’re all taking those original designs and reimagining them with absolute love and care. The vision of Tron: Legacy is an utterly stunning one, and just may be the most eye-popping movie ever made. Not even joking.

The story of Legacy is a sweeping one, following Kevin Flynn’s kid, Sam (Garrett Hedlund, Pan) as he gets sucked into the grid on what he thinks is an accident, but turns out to be the work of a new Clu, designed by Flynn years earlier to create the perfect system. Unfortunately Clu became a tyrant, chasing the impossibility of perfection, with nothing to guide him. Kevin Flynn has been trapped in the grid for about 20 years, he missed Sam grow up, and he watched his other baby, the Grid, fall victim to authoritarian rule. The world inside the Grid is just as bad as the outside.

On top of the drama of Sam reuniting with his father, and Clu’s own “father issues” , the film seeds the story of the ISOs, a unique breed of program that sprang up organically, not programmed. New life. Flynn was on the cusp of introducing them to the world when Clu’s regime took over, and his jealousy and distrust of ISOs led to mass extermination. The only survivor is Quorra (Olivia Wide, House M.D.).

Flynn and Quorra must get Sam out of the Grid and into the real world before Clu does, as he’s breeding an army to head in to the real world  and make it the “perfect system” too.

Tron: Legacy, while certainly not the first of the “legasequels” definitely was at the forefront of the trend that ran wild in the 2010s and still has not abated. It’s also one of the best, if only because it’s “franchise restarting” designs didn’t yield a film that feels unresolved by the end of it. Sure, there were seeds for where a follow-up might go, and yes Cilian Murphy was cast in a small role as Ed Dillnger’s kid as foundation for a larger role later on, but the story of Tron: Legacy is self-contained much in the same way Tron was. It builds the world, tells its specific story and it ends with a basically happy ending.

Rewatching Tron: Legacy [which I seem to do often] is always transportive. It is a world I get sucked into and a world I am absolutely transfixed by. It’s not just visually attractive, it’s sexy, without ever intoning sex. It’s just pure dopamine fuel, eye candy so sweet you’ll have ocular diabetes afterwards. The sound design, once again, is on point, but unlike the first movie where even the footfalls announce themselves, here the sound design is so clearly second in line to the Daft Punk soundtrack.  The soundtrack is part of the otherworldliness of the Grid, it’s so well integrated into the film that it feels like it’s impossible to separate the sounds from the visuals… and yet, the soundtrack is such incredible listening on its own. But the reverse likely isn’t true…as pretty as the film is, it loses much without the score.

Bridges hit his academy award-winning elder statesman phase at this exact time, with his Crazy Heart Oscar win the year before and True Grit reteaming him with the Coen Brothers the same year, it’s a reminder of just how much he brings to any film he’s in. Nearly every line delivery (only exception: “Nice!”) is pure gold, carrying either the full weight of Bridges seniority, or his post Lebowski Dude-ness, sometimes both at once. The first Tron movie would be primarily a curious relic without his affable persona as its demi-heroic lead.  Garrett Hedlund got a bad rap at the time of being another of the “bland” young leads that Hollywood was trying to force out into the theatre. I don’t think Hedlund particularly pops, but he’s definitely got character, and his performance is full of subtlety.  He’s not the brash, big-talking, jokey hero… he plays a thrill-seeking rich kid with daddy issues as a very down-to-earth, likeable, believable guy..with daddy issues.  Olivia Wilde’s Quorra is maybe the only “born sexy yesterday” character that should be given a pass. The camera is definitely in love with her, but it’s never objectifying her. The camera looks at her like the way she looks at Sam, intrigued, captivated, curious and admiring. She is a skilled fighter, and she’s full of curiosity. She’s not dumb, but she’s only experienced life inside the Grid, and so her wanting to know more of the outside world where her mentor comes from is naturally her focal point with Sam. It’s too bad the character doesn’t have more of the weight of being the last of the ISO’s, the trauma of having watched her entire race get eradicated, sitting on her shoulders, but, to paraphrase a Bridges line, that would be, like, a total bummer man.

There are few movies I love watching more than Tron:Legacy, and there are few theatrical experiences that legitimately blew my mind like Tron:Legacy. For a long time I held out hope that Kosinski would return to Tron and deliver another all out audio-visual assault, but I knew once Top Gun: Maverick became the biggest movie of 2022 [not a legasequel, btw, as often erroneously ascribed] that we would not be getting Kosinski back on Tron unless he had an absolute passion to do so. He does not.

So Tron:Ares being announced not long after Top Gun: Maverick was a definite surprise, and one that I welcomed… with trepidation.

The first trailer whetted the appetite, as it presented light cycles and Recognizers moving through the real world (Vancouver) and seemed to maintain the same bold contrasts of Tron: Legacy. Those jet black blacks and those vibrant popping trails (mostly red in Ares’ case). The soundtrack, at first, was the tag on the end of the trailer. Nine Inch Nails. Yes, it’s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the duo responsible for many of the best soundtracks of the past dozen years, but they’re doing it as fucking Nine Inch Nails! Getting the band back together! It would go on to be the major point of the film’s marketing, boldly proclaiming the NIN soundtrack early and often in commercials. So we know the producers at least did  one thing right.

But the flipside was the film stars Jared Leto.

Leto (House of Gucci) is a frustrating performer and as a human being, real suspect. Reports of his “method” antics on set, and reports of his real-world activities leaves nothing but a bad taste in one’s mouth. On screen, he can deliver performances that range from incredible to damn annoying. It’s a backhanded compliment from Fight Club – “I felt like destroying something beautiful” (referring to the scene where Ed Norton bashes Leto’s face in during a fight) – that’s hard to erase from one’s memory every time you see him.

So this film had a lot of goodwill thanks to Tron: Legacy and NIN, but also had an uphill battle.

The end result is kind of a draw.

Directed by Joachim Rønning, the less-than visionary director of the last of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (for now) and the Maleficent sequel from a script from David DiGilio (The Terminal List), the creative impetus is not anything other than “make content to see if the property is still viable”.

With Tron: Legacy, the film was accompanied by a blitz of toys, comics, video games, an animated prequel series, merchandizing tie-ins. It didn’t gross the near-billions that I think Disney was hoping for, but it was a modest success at 400 million globally, and it’s had staying power, in no small part thanks to the Light Cycle rides at Disney parks.  Tron is never going to be the cash cow that Disney wants all its properties to be, but if the property is treated with reverence and care, then the fanbase will keep coming along.

There’s no multimedia merchandizing blitz for Tron:Ares, and even less love and care shown for the property in the movie itself. The film plays out nothing like the adventurous world building of the prior two films, and instead opts for a 2000s-era action film centered around the good guys and bad guys chasing a maguffin. It’s not exactly paint-by-numbers, because the Tron elements force at least a few intriguing deviations, but where those deviations SHOULD have been the story of the film, it can’t seem to get back to its nonsense plot fast enough.

Tron: Ares opens much like Tron:Legacy does, with a voiceover from Bridges explaining the Grid, and then news highlights filling the audience in on what’s happened in the world of Encom in the years since. The point here being to close the door on any further adventures of Sam Flynn and Quorra while tepidly introducing both our human protagonist, Eve Kim (Greta Lee, Past Lives) co-CEO of Encom, and Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters, X-Men: Apocalypse), the newest head of Dillinger Corp.  Both companies are in a race to bring the digital world to reality, and they’ve developed the 3-D printing technology to do it, to create living things and functional products, except the technology only lasts for 29 minutes before cohesiveness fatally breaks down. Eve wants to use the technology for the benefit of society and Dillinger wants to use it to make weapons.

Eve has discovered “the permanence code” from Flynn’s records and Dillinger wants it and will do anything to get it, including sending his Master Control Program, Ares (Leto), off Grid and into the real world to find Eve and take the code from her by force. The mission is successful, except Ares is discovering emotions and humanity in himself, and wants the permanence code for himself. The result is against programming, protecting Eve at all costs. So Dillinger sends the ruthless Athena (Jodi Turner-Smith, Bad Monkey) after them and she takes control of Dillinger Corp, prints out her own army, and is willing to decimate The City (Vancouver) to do so.

The plot seems like your standard direct-to-streaming sci-fi action movie premise, and lacks most of the Tron flavour. Our main “Grid” protagonist, Ares, is a nothingburger of a character, much like many a lead from said 2000’s-style action spectacles. Ares is just a curious program who has such a strong desire not to be a program anymore that he defies orders. He’s a weapon with a heart. He’s the Terminator in Terminator 2, with Athena being the T-1000. It’s largely been done before, and mostly better.

Leto is fine in the role, inoffensive, but there’s no real charm either. The character should be discovering himself, but there’s nothing behind the performance that says that’s what he’s doing, he just seems like a wide-eyed know-it-all who knows he doesn’t know it all (it’s really hard to power wash the smarm off of him). We’ve seen the little digital boy wants to be a real boy story so many times by now, it’s beyond cliche and nothing new is added to that cliche here. There is a scene where Ares encounters a legacy program of Flynn and we get even older than The Old Man Bridges, still full of more charm and life and unique energy than Leto 30 years his junior. 

Greta Lee does so much of the heavy lifting in this film. She has an innate sense of self-awareness that at once displays strength, smarts, confidence and vulnerability. She’s so alive, blood-pumping, playing against a character with barely a spark of life in him, whose veins bleed cold code. Jodi Turner-Smith needs to remain cold-cold-cold to the point of evil, which is always a flaw in these stories. They even state in the endgame that she was just fulfilling her programming, but at times it comes off as vengeful, emotional, and it’s too much for the character. I’m sure it’s what Turner was asked to do, and she does it well, I think it deserved more restraint. Peters as Dillnger is, again, an underbaked character. He’s so singularly focused on his objective that there’s no sense of calculation, just an idiot with a one-track mind. Gillian Anderson (American Gods) plays his mother, his advisor, the CEO he succeeded, and she’s trying to be the voice of reason and conscience and he ignores her. The conflicts between mother and son should be fascinating, but they’re like bargain basement Succession riffs and Peters falls short of being anything but a comic book villain.

The best moments in the film are two “Grid” sequences: the first in which Ares and Eve must escape Dillinger’s grid, and the second is Ares’ journey into the 1980’s Grid.  Both should have been full-act adventures on their own, instead they are mere sequences within the film that don’t amount to a whole hell of a lot. The ‘80’s Grid is largely a nostalgia tug that, sadly, has no reason to execute an action sequence (wouldn’t it have been more fun if Athena had infected the Grid and resurrected legacy protective programs and Ares had to find Tron to help him escape.... Or something?).  The journey into Dillinger’s Grid comes at the right time, right at the time where I was about to check out of the film for not really having the same vibe as the other films in the series. It just doesn’t last long enough and doesn’t explore what life in DIllinger’s militaristic Grid is really like.

The climax of the film, with Athena bringing a Recognizer into the real world (I don’t think that hangar bay was big enough to print that out completely…some assembly required?) is really the only “Tron-in-the-real-world” aspect that fully delivers on awe. The light cycles riding around Vancouver never quite feel tangibly part of their environment, and people in Tron costumes walking around real-world sets, well, often feel like people in Tron costumes walking around real-world sets. The Recognizer sequence seems to get, late in the film, how Tron-stuff works in the real world, but it’s still a sequence that feels like an action sequence and lacks real narrative thrust.

I watched the film in IMAX 3-D, and I have to say that 3-D technology, in IMAX at the very least, has advanced leaps and bounds since the last time I watched a 3-D movie. The depth of field seemed well orchestrated (especially where the light trails were involved) and the 3-D-ness of it all rarely called attention to itself. At the same time, I did have to wonder if some of the difficulty I was having with appreciating the action sequences was because of the 3-Dness, or if it was how Rønning shot the film. I didn’t have full clarity on the action sequences at all times. The fight choreography was also seriously underwhelming.

The Nine Inch Nails soundtrack is huge. It delivers, mostly. Because it’s playing with aspect from Legacy and the original, there are obvious nods to the Carlos and Daft Punk scores (and Carolos and Daft Punk sounds outside of their Tron work) as well NIN seem to crib notable sounds from Radiohead, Bjork and Massive Attack which left me puzzled as to the intent of the nod (I wonder how many would actually notice). It’s a kick ass soundtrack that, unfortunately, isn’t in complete lock-step with the film, and at times overpowers the imagery on screen.

Tron: Ares is satisfactory (but not satisfying). Like the prior two films it has an ending, but offers a braindead post-script (two actually) that tease where it could go in the future, and we're never going to get there.  Outside of it’s soundtrack, is not daring in any way. It does not live up to the legacy its predecessors established, and never fully feels connected to its past despite all the references and desperate efforts to tangentially connect it (really, the “permanence code” should have been related to the ISOs, to Quorra, but I suspect Disney was hoping to cater to a new new audience more than servicing an existing fanbase…and fair enough). It’s true crime is just being generic in its storytelling and action sensibilities in having the real world and the digital one collide. There should be more meat on those bones.

Tron:Ares will, unfortunately, put the lid back on the box for at least another 15 years before Disney decides to dust it off again. We'll see then what kind of effort they're willing to put into this modest property.

[Poster talk... quickly, as I've been at this for long enough. The main Tron poster, of Tron and Yuri and the ascending data disc in the (original) laser-in-the-sky is one of the series' most iconic images, so it was obviously replicated for both Legacy and Ares. Legacy tries to sexify it up a bit with Quorra's hand on Sam Flynn (which doesn't happen in the film), while Ares spoils the whole meeting of Ares with Flynn in the 80's Grid. Not sure how I feel about that. I really don't like the Ares' poster representing this, though).

Other posters for OG Tron are pretty clunky.  For Legacy, there's a plethora of posters highlighting all the gorgeous visual elements of the film, the costuming and vehicles with a big focus on the light cycles. Ares likewise focuses on the light cycles heavily in its posters.  I like the poster that highlights that Legacy introduces a new vehicle (though Legacy did not have a plane or glider poster which is too bad). Ares only introduced one new vehicle, a sort of monster truck/snowplow hybrid, and it didn't make the posters.

I didn't talk about Legacy's "digital de-aging" here, but it's curious that there are many posters spotlighting Clu and his weird cgi-reconstruction of Bridges young face.

Ares' poster series delivers the usual spate of character posters...so boring. It also leans heavily into the red accent of the film, but ignores the Triangle motif that the film tries to establish early on, only to abandon by the end of the first act. There are some Leto posters and just as many Turner-Smith posters, so, to quote Flynn... Nice. There's also a heavy focus for Ares on Tron-in-the-real-world including a series of posters with a light cycle driving through or past famous international landmarks. Meh.]

 

Top Gun: Maverick

 202(2?) - Joseph Kosinski - in theatre

I neither like nor care about the seminal 80's dude-bro movie Top Gun.  I don't believe I've ever watched the whole film all the way through in one sitting.  It was, as far as I can recall, a hyper-masculine dick-measuring contest between pilots with egos bigger than the fighter planes they fly in.  Add to that all the US/military jingoism, an overplayed soundtrack full of (let's face it) mediocre songs, and Tony Scott's icky grainy shooting style (looking at Scott's repertoire, the only film I have any zeal for is The Last Boy Scout) and it's a film I've long just categorized as "Not For Me".

So why go see Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited, long-gestating sequel to a film I possibly detest?  I promise it wasn't so I could just shit on it afterward.  I actually went into the screening optimistic.  I really like director Kosinski's two previous efforts (Tron: Legacy and Oblivion), and yeah, Cruise is still a mega-watt star who can carry a film on his own.  And no doubt there would be some form of spectacle to all this that, not for anything, would be entertaining.  Plus, a dash of Jon Hamm and Jennifer Connelly certainly didn't make it any less appealing.

The results, well... I want to be polite, as I was entertained, but I think I was entertained in the wrong way.  This film is corny, full of oft regurgitated mantras and platitudes as Cruise's Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell needs to whip a bunch of top-tier navy pilots into shape for a near-impossible mission (cue the theme) that is basically a "real-world" (or, rather, "Earth-set") Death Star trench run in nameless enemy territory.

The young moppets (all in their late-20s and 30s, both as performers and characters) behave like an unruly class of high-school kids, and their general vibe upon introduction is that of a band of Disney Channel teen-drama rejects with little charisma or personality.  The script seems completely disinterested in looking at them as human beings and there's never really that teacher-student connection established.  Maverick just takes the kids out into some simulated dog fighting and spanks them.

The film can never resist reaffirming that Maverick is just The Best.  It's a post-middle-aged white-guy Gen Xer fantasy, this film, one in which the old guy who never really grew up nor moved past the traumas he experienced in his youth is constantly vindicated for breaking rules and living the life he does, and is constantly proving to the younger generations that He Is Right. That His Way Is The Best Way. That He Is, And Always Will Be, Better Than Them.  Hell, he winds up with Jennifer Connelly (a character who exists to reaffirm his every decision, or to push him further into rebel behaviour) so it truly is a middle-age Gen Xer fantasy.  Connelly, for her part, gets to dominate Maverick by showing him how to sail, and by not being there waiting for him when he gets back from mission...she makes him wait.  It's about the only subversion of tropes this film carries off.

The final act, I can easily admit, is pretty exciting and worthy of the big screen treatment, but even still, it's full of nostalgia bait and riddled with cliches, as the entire film is.  I found myself chuckling inappropriately throughout the film because of the corny one liners, the banal mantras characters keep reciting back to one another ("it's not the plane, it's the pilot" gets dropped at least four times), and just how heavily the cheese is slabbed on.  The spirit of Goose looms large over the proceedings, as Maverick still feels guilty about his death, and he's had a falling out with Goose's son "Rooster" who is, of course, one of his students now.  There's inherent drama to be explored there, but it just kind of sits there ...it's dealt with in the stoic, manly way of not having a conversation but by saving each other's lives in combat.  You know, the relatable way every day people deal with their problems with each other.

Val Kilmer gets a big credit at the beginning of the film and for the longest time we wonder if he only exists as "Ice" over text, that Kilmer gets name checked solely for his presence in spirit.  But there is a Kilmer cameo, ultimately, and it's a painful one to watch, because it doesn't really give Kilmer much to act on (understood that Kilmer likely had a small threshold for what he could actually do), and it's still a scene that's All About Maverick.  I don't begrudge the film bringing Kilmer in and the hug between Mav and Ice is about the only thing in the film that came close to bringing a tear to my eye...but I wish they gave that scene more importance (but perhaps it's just my lack of connection to Top Gun that I wasn't really feeling it).

I wanted to like this movie. While I was somewhat entertained, I also think it's kind of a silly piece of work, and maybe, in many ways, a bad movie.  But I recognize that my feelings towards Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick are probably the same as how non-nerds feel about most sci-fi or superhero movies.  It just doesn't resonate with me so I feel almost completely dismissive of it.  It's firmly categorized as "Not For Me".

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A side note, I watched this, unintentionally, in "ScreenX", where there is basically additional (suitable) imagery projected on the side walls of the theatre to fill your peripheral vision as you watch the big action scenes in the film.  As described by Cineplex: "Surround yourself with exclusive imagery enhancing the narrative of a film in select scenes with the immersive 270 degree panoramic premium experience." I have to say, if anything, this was more of a distraction than an enhancement.  I found my eyes constantly being drawn away from the actual film and puzzling over what is projected on the side and why, and to what benefit?  Kosinski's such a clean director and he was crafting some very strong imagery on screen especially in the flight sequences, but I found the ScreenX projection made it hard for me to focus and appreciate the production values.  I will be avoiding these theatres in the future.

ReWatch Snippets: Indulged

Literally, the same paragraph from the original snippets post applies:

"In a desire to embrace the mental state which leads me from NOT watching a movie proper, but after flicking through the "channels" for a bit, end up rewatching a movie I have seen before, and not always enjoyed that much. So, why? What drew me back? Let's see if I can put a bit of it to words."

I am not sure I will always tell the why but maybe the words I use will tell me why. 

The Accountant, 2016 Gavin O'Connor (Producer Mare of Easttown) -- Netflix

The sequel is coming out, so I thought I would remind myself of the movie. What I recalled. Christian Wolff is a hitman that works a side-gig as a forensic accountant, and he meets Dana Cummings for a bit role. He has lots of guns and kills lots of people, and yet the movie is somewhat quiet and thoughtful. What I didn't remember. Wolff is autistic, and he's not really an assassin. But he does have a massive armoury outfitted like he was an assassin. He does work for criminals, doing the accounting they need, and does the forensic accounting on the side to explain away his money. Anna Kendrick's role is kind of the love interest but not really, though there is attraction there; in the end, he gives her a painting she likes, worth millions. JK Simmons also plays a bit part, as a Treasury Agent who is fed enough information (by an anonymous source) to make him a good cop, but also keep him off Wolff's real trail. Also, Christian Wolff is not his real name, just that of a famous mathematician. Jon Bernthal comes in as Christian's brother, also violent, but a good brother in the end -- he forgives his brother for killing all the men in his employ.

Oblivion, 2013 Joseph Kosinski (Spiderhead) -- Amazon

Jack and Vic are an effective team. In a future where the world was destroyed by aliens, leaving not much but gritty ruins, the pair monitors the integrity of ocean sucking machinery which is supposed to be making fuel for the space colony that the remaining humans have escaped to. But Jack is more attached to The Earth that Was than he should be, or is allowed to be. Until he learns the truth, that he is not fighting the remaining alien invaders, but the remaining human survivors. And he's a clone, one of many protecting the ocean sucking machinery which makes fuel for the Evil AI in the Sky, from the remaining humans.

Its such a beautiful movie of greys and grit and clean white plastic, and for me is an enduring scifi movie full of things to be constantly rediscovered. Still don't like the ending which implies Jack Clone Two is going to hookup with Jack Clone One's wife, who I guess consummated their "marriage" (its complicated clone stuff) before he left to blow up the Evil AI in the Sky. I mean, yes they are very similar, but are "people" that replaceable? I don't think I would like the answer.

The Girl with All the Gifts, 2016 Colm McCarthy (Bagman) -- Amazon

Also rewatched The Last of Us TV series (still not writing about TV), based on the video game that came out around the same time as the short story from which this movie derives. Its hard to know if one spun off the other, as both deal with an apocalyptic plague after the cordyceps fugus jumps to humans turning the infected into ravening zombies, and both stories have a young girl who could be the hope for a turnaround, as long as you are OK with them being murdered ... for science. If I want to get pedantic about zombie sub-genres, and I usually do, its more "infected" than "zombie" as in both instances they are still living creatures that can die from too much traumatic force.

The first two acts of the movie really do it for me; an eerie introduction to the hungry kids who were found as newborns after eating their way out of their infected mothers, and the subsequent road story as the main characters escape from the collapse of their "safe" zone. The third act, which is properly apocalyptic, just bugs me for some reason... too nihilistic even for me? From the loss of the friendly soldier Kieran to the gnashy teeth of adolescents, to the true End of the World, I just felt depressed.

The Fall Guy, 2024 David Leitch (Bullet Train) -- Amazon

I just needed some light fare, and the movie warranted a rewatch purely for all the little fun bits and the charming cast members. I confirmed that though the movie's central plot is toss away, it is more than made up for by the wink-wink-nod-nod nature of the entire movie's construction. That the movie is based on a hammy 80s TV show and the plot is as much. That pretty much every big scene in the movie is a stunt within a stunt. That the first time I did not even know Teresa Palmer was in the movie, and this time I still did not recognize her as such. Hannah Waddingham is great, Stephanie Hsu is great, Winston Duke is great. Its a great Hollywood Hollywood movie and deserved more attention.

Casino Royale, 2006 Martin Campbell (Dirty Angels) -- Amazon
Quantum of Solace, 2008 Marc Forster (World War Z) -- Amazon
Skyfall, 2012 Sam Mendes (1917) -- Amazon
Spectre, 2015 Sam Mendes (Jarhead) -- Amazon
No Time to Die, 2021 Cary Joji Fukunaga (Beasts of No Nation) -- Amazon

Is it OK to say I watched this run of James Bond movies for Daniel Craig's brutally violent and ruggedly macho version of Bond? And yet, at the same time, I am turned off by his callous probably way over the misogynist line treatment of women. I mean, in the first two movies he gets two women killed, and there is no fine line on that he is purely using them to reach his goals. He seems to have a wink of regret but that is about as far as it goes. This doesn't even change much when he unabashedly loves a woman. James definitely has some clinical issues with women. Its good that there are at least a few that don't fall to his wiles, my favourite being Paloma, of course. Swoon.

I liked that he died in the last one, in that it gives this Era of Bond its own continuity, even if they shared an M with earlier movies. Despite recent murmurs of an attempt to break the mould (of who could play the next Bond), I don't think the current climate would stomach it, and my favourite suggestion (Idris Elba) might age out of the possibility before we could embrace it again. 

Slither, 2006 James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) -- Amazon

"Leaving soon," the tag line on Amazon said. "Why not," I asked. Still love this gross, goofy, irreverent horror-comedy. I remember having a pang of sympathy for Grant ... Grant (yes, his name is Grant Grant) a few rewatches ago, but this time I just see a sad, controlling man who gets what's coming to him. 

Paddington, 2014 Paul King (Space Force) -- download
Paddington 2, 2017 Paul King (The Mighty Boosh) -- download

We were about to watch the new one, so we again thought, "Why not." Also, the political climate of late has added a solid lump of anxiety pain in the pit of our stomach and these movies are so full of moments to brightly smile at.

Repeatedly so. Non-stop. During the first one I just smiled and smiled and smiled. Not at the comedy meant for kids, like him cleaning out his ears with their toothbrushes, but the sweet nice stuff like the painting on the stairwell, or ... holey freholey, I never wrote about these movies when I first saw them!! So, stopping here, as these two deserve their own, must more written about post.