Prometheus - Alien 0?

With all this football on at the moment I am getting even more behind in films than I've been recently. I'm not going to use my monthly quota on Lovefilm for the first time in ages. But I did get out of bed early enough last Saturday to catch the 11:15am showing of Prometheus at Bracknell Odeon. It had only been out a week, but I already felt well behind the times as friends of mine had to natter about it behind my back. Now normally I don't give a crap about spoilers, but the level of secrecy surrounding this film encouraged me to find out as little as possible. As such, I went into the cinema Saturday morning knowing remarkably little aside from the fact that this was meant to be Ridley Scott's prequel to Alien.

Before I start I need to get my cards on the table - Alien is my favourite film. Why? Because it's both the greatest horror and science fiction film ever - all rolled into one. It has a beauty in the design and aesthetics of its sets, costume and obviously its alien antagonist that set it apart. The plot is deceptively simple, yet with believable 'ordinary' characters, tangible shocks and SFX that still hold up even over 30 years later it packs in a huge number of hidden layers and themes. From its opening scenes establishing the distant isolation of space, through its natural character development, the greatest shock scene of all time and its desperate visceral finale (they always come back) - for me it sits a the apex of 100 years of cinema.  Plus it's absolutely terrifying. Follow that Prometheus - I dare you.

Pometheus' plot is thus - after the discovery by archaeologists on Earth of a series of coded messages that appear in the cave-writings of stone age dwellers, the research vessel Prometheus is sent to the stars to investigate the possibility that aliens have left a message for humanity on a distant planet. On the crew of the ship are scientists (Noomi Rapace, Logan Marshall-Green), an android caretaker (Michael Fassbender), the ship's captain (Idris Elba) and some corporate no-gooders (led by Charlize Theron). Not a bad cast by any standards. The crew begin an exploration of an alien construction on this foreign world, one which contains all sorts of mysteries about aliens past and present that look worryingly like all the junk the crew of the doomed Nostromo found on their mysterious planet back in 1979. Soon things start to go all horror film, and all hell breaks loose.

The film's central theme seems to be about what it means to be human, and to what lengths people will go to discover the meaning of their humanity. For our scientists they are looking for the aliens that created humanity - in particular Noomi Rapace's character is deeply religious, searching for the gods in alien form. Charlize Theron represents the interests of the Weyland corporation - AKA The Man, Peter Weyland is a dying man who wants to find out the meaning of life before he goes. Lastly, and best of all, is Fassbender as the synthetic life-form David - trying to work out if a) he can be human and b) if not - what can he be. Fassbender easily retains his 'best actor of the moment' crown with his performance here.

Clearly Prometheus was never going to be as good as Alien, but there's no reason why it can't be a very good science fiction film - which I think it is. There are a lot of plot holes that I wont go into (spoilers and all that) and a fair bit of stuff that doesn't seem to tie in to the Alien mythology, but Ridley Scott assures us all these problems will be dealt with in a series of future prequels. I enjoyed some of the nods to the original Alien series and I think I benefited from an unheightened expectation about what the film would give me. There is one scene of horrible ickiness involving a bit of self-surgery that keeps the film firmly in the horror genre (plus plenty of minion types getting butchered).  If you go into this expecting something as groundbreaking as Alien you'll be disappointed, but if you're prepared for a solid science fiction film that simply adds flavour to the Alien universe I think you'll come away pleased.

The Raid - Bone-crunching brilliance

Despite my excessive business at the moment I did get the chance to go down to Bracknell Odeon last Wednesday evening for the 10pm showing of 'The Raid'. There now follows something of a review...

There has been a lot of talk about this over recent months and weeks. You might have missed it if you're not really into this kind of thing though so don't be surprised if this is the first time you've heard of this. So before I go on too much further I'd better explain what it is. 'The Raid' is a Welsh / Indonesian production written and directed by Gareth Huw Evans but set in Indonesia and starring an entirely Indonesian cast. The plot is very simple: an armed police unit are sent to clear out a building that is ruled by a drug lord and populated by all manner of smack-heads, druggies, down-and-outs and general nutters. And by 'clear out' I mean that they're going to shoot, beat up, arrest and clobber a whole pile of nefarious people. Well that's what they think anyway. After working their way up the first few floors, the shit starts to hit the fan, a lot of people die and soon the police who remain alive are struggling to survive in this building from hell while they work out a way to escape.

In short - this is an action film. Not just any action film, but one in which everything that isn't bone-crunching violence has been stripped away. No one-liners, no dancing on the tree-tops, no multiple camera angled explosions; just martial arts and guns brought together in a superbly choreographed whirlwind of jarring combat. 'The Raid' stars Iko Uwais, who plays Rama. He is a rookie on the force, but he is also a man with an array of superbly-crafted hand-to-hand combat skills, skills that come out in at least 3 extended battle sequences that see him take on a huge array of variously-armed opponents. First in the corridors of the building's 7th floor, then in a large cocaine production area and lastly double-teaming a 'boss' character; the camera shudders in time with the audience each time a blow is landed.

Director Gareth Huw Evans deserves credit in his handling of the fight scenes, but equal credit must go to the fight choreographers and film editors. The former for coming up with such creative and unrepetitive sequences as they did, the latter for cutting everything together to making it followable. It is very much an 18 film. I imagine it's the kind of thing that 30 years ago might have been classified as a video nasty and been locked away from general release. Almost every character in the film is eventually killed without mercy, many of them in quite gruesome ways.
Of course there will be those out there are aren't interested in watching a film with a minimalist plot that involves people hitting each other for 90 minutes. But I'm sure that the purists of 1970s martial arts movies will appreciate a film that cuts out the bullshit and gets back to basics.

Hugo - not a typical Scorsese film

I'm very busy at work just now re-writing a whole chunk of Visual Basic code, plus with the Euro 2012 competition on there's very little time for me to watch any films let alone get any reviews together. I did get a few hours the other night though to watch 'Hugo', the Martin Scorsese 3D extravaganza that won 5 Oscars and was billed as a celebration of wide-eyed innocence and cinematic storytelling.  I didn't see it in 3D of course, can't do that with a DVD.

This is a film that looks amazing. It opens with an extravagant tracking shot of Paris in the 1930s, something that in itself is a masterpiece of special effects / model building / however they did it. We fly into a Parisian station and follow the life of Hugo, a boy who lives in the station clock because his Father and Uncle have both died in tragic circumstances. Hugo's dream is to complete his father's unfinished project, which is to restore an animatronic boy to working order and discover the message it hides. To do this, Hugo steals tools and trinkets from the station watch-maker (Ben Kingsley) while avoiding the attentions of the uncompromising station master (Sacha Baron Cohen). Not too much about a celebration of cinema in that plot; but soon Ben Kinsley's character is revealed to have a deep and close connection to the early days of cinema, which Hugo becomes obsessed by resolving.

Lots of good stuff so far, but this is a film that takes an excruciatingly long time to get to its one point, which is that cinema is great. It's trying too hard to be quirky with its depictions of the foibles of the Parisian train station with its community of shop-keepers and busy-body station master. Perhaps Cohen wasn't the right person to cast in the role, or perhaps Scorsese wanted him to ham up his performance, but each time he raises an eyebrow at something wacky or falls over a dog he's chasing the film becomes more unnatural. It starts to feel forced, over-the-top and scripted without much thought for what will actually work on screen.

It's a shame that I started to find the film boring as each quirky moment cumulatively got more and more on my nerves. It was a shame because the plot of the film is actually a neat little mystery that a couple of excited children busy themselves about solving - in other words, the stuff of classic storytelling. There are a couple of nice touches at the end that the film historians out there will probably get very excited about, in particular a tracking shot though a window that takes after the classic Citizen Kane moment, but this kind of stuff doesn't make up for the enforced quirkiness that bored me for the opening hour.

I can understand why the Academy gave it 5 Oscars; they love heaping praise on films that eulogise about the magic of cinema and I agree with them that the attention to detail in the sets and costumes is spectacular. What I don't really understand is why more people aren't underwhelmed by the trite side-plots and crow-barred quirkiness. In conclusion: Hugo had plenty of good points, but I'll not be watching it again.

Submarine - quirky

Here's a quirky film. That's quirky in a good way rather than a Zooey Deschanel 'look everyone I've got it wrong again' irritating quirky.  Set in rural Wales and following the confusing young life of Oliver Tate, 'Submarine' is a story in the mould of Adrian Mole, told from the confused point of view of the adolescent lead as he discovers he knows much more than he thought he did about some things while hardly as much as he should about others.

Oliver is a 13/14/15 (it isn't clear) year-old school kid in an idyllic part of rural Wales who is cursed with the need to over-analyse everything that happens in his life. He makes lists of things and feels compelled to intervene in what he perceives to be his parents' marital problems. He is helplessly attracted to the distant Jordana in his school, but is unable to work out first how to connect to her and then how to get her to have sex with him. After he succeeds on both these fronts, it's clear he has no idea what's expected of him next. When Jordana reveals that her mother is terminally ill, Oliver's idealistic view of how things should be is torn away by having to face the way things really are.

This is a film that does the simple things well. Like telling the story of how a wide-eyed adolescent might struggle to understand how his parents' apparent lack of enthusiasm for love and life is simply a factor of getting old. It's a film that tells us how pragmatism becomes more important than idealism as you age, but it manages to remain funny while doing so. Oliver's nutcase mate Chips has a few brilliantly quotable lines along with pearls of misplaced teenage certainty that Oliver himself comes out with. It's set in Wales but at no point plays on the foibles of that region for comedy, so it's a story for all of us. All this plus a decent cast (Sally Hawkins and Paddy Considine are solid British film actors that need to get their chance to break into the American mainstream at some point surely?) make Submarine an extremely enjoyable and tender film.

Post Mortem

Set in the midst of the US-backed coup against the Allende government of Chile in 1973, this is the story of one simple man's obsession with a dancer who lives over the road, but how everyone around him is consumed instead by the madness of Pinochet's rise to power.

The film is Chilean, and given that I'm currently in the middle of my 'advanced Spanish' course I attempted to watch it without the subtitles. This failed after about 1 minute, such was the speed of the dialogue. I guess it really is a shit load easier to understand a sympathetic speaker who's using simple words. The subtitles went on and I was introduced to the film's main character, Mario. This is a man who works in a mortuary by typing up post mortem reports and lives a rather dull life. We can tell his life is dull because the camera focuses on the numbing minutiae of his existence, things like brushing his teeth or frying some eggs - more of this later.

He spends his time pursuing an ageing dancer who is his neighbour. Then, in the middle of not a lot going on, Mario wakes up one morning to discover scenes of destruction outside his house. His neighbour's place has been ransacked and when he turns up to work there are men with guns bringing in piles of corpses for him to deal with. You see, the US-backed coup of 1973 has just taken place and the Chilean military are now running things. The film tells the story of that coup from a very singular view point, that being Mario's. Mario who lives his life day to day, eats bland food and types reports for a living. Mario and his colleagues then have to perform an autopsy on a man who appears to have shot himself in the head - this man is Salvador Allende.

This is one of these cases where the film really succeeds in painting a picture of utter boredom; so well in fact that the film has shot itself in the foot and become tedious in the extreme. The point might be to build a tension around the inevitability of historical events impinging on Mario's life, and to contrast that defining moment in Chile's history against the mundane and routine - but the film is so slow and boring that it renders all that a moot point. It ends on a silent 5 minute sequence that had me reaching for the fast forward button. Please avoid this film.  If you want to learn about the Chilean coup that brought Pinochet to power I'm sure there are plenty of other much more interesting source materials out there that'll bring the chilling events of September 1973 to life.