Oblivion - Moon-lite

The first film that I watched on my flight to Chicago two weeks ago was Oblivion.  This appears to be the latest attempt to re-invigorate Tom Cruise's up-and-down career, this time by giving him another sci-fi action role in which he gets to look tough and caring while having not only one but two love interests each young enough to be his daughter.  Seriously - Andrea Riseborough and Olga Kurylenko are 19 and 17 years younger than him respectively.  More evidence that you're not allowed to grow old and be female in Hollywood, aka the "What happened to Meg Ryan" effect.

Oblivion opens with a background story to a future gone wrong, a future in which Earth was attacked by aliens known as the Scavs.  It was a war that humanity eventually won, but at great cos to the Earth and its population.  The remains of humanity live off the surface now, on a great pyramid called the Tet that orbits the Earth and from which engineers struggle to make use of Earth's remaining meagre resources.  Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough play two such engineers, a crack team who live on a floating platform above the surface of the Earth and act as custodians to several huge fusion reactors and the flying drones that act as mobile defences against the remaining Scavs.  The perils of the mission in front of them is offset by a strong loving bond between them, as such they seem ideally-placed to carry out this long mission isolated from the rest of humanity.

After a close encounter with a group of Scavs, and after discovering a building that seems to be triggering dormant memories, Jack (Cruise's character) starts to ask a questions about the true purpose of their mission on Earth.  When an ancient relic of the war between the humans and the Scavs crashes nearby and he thinks he recognises one of the survivors, he resolves to get to the bottom of the nagging doubts gnawing away at his brain.

Oblivion is a very good science fiction film.  It has beautiful sets, a genuinely futuristic aesthetic, an excellent concept and nice little science fiction touches such as the deadly menace given off by the hovering drones.  Andrea Riseborough in particular gives an outstanding performance as a woman torn between loyalty to a person and loyalty to a mission.  The comparisons with Moon are undeniable though (though to actually compare them in detail would involve too many spoilers), and though it definitely isn't anywhere near being a rip-off it gets very close to it in many ways.

In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that Moon is such a spectacularly brilliant film I'm sure I would be rating Oblivion a lot higher.  The biggest downside to the film is that it feels a little bit like a committee of Hollywood execs saw Moon and decided that they fancied a slice of that pie for themselves.  So they got someone to write a similar-ish story but with more guns, action and attractive women but fewer disturbing smiley-faced androids.  There are some people out there who will see that as an upgrade, personally see it as bordering on copyright infringement.  A smaller let-down is that the film is billed as starring Morgan Freeman, and when he doesn't appear for 30 minutes a wandering mind might start to wonder where he is.  From there is isn't too hard to start guessing the plot twists.

Overall I want to end the review on a positive point, because I definitely enjoyed Oblivion.  It has the right blend of action, hard science fiction, future tech and humanity to keep everyone happy.  It mixes those things up well and tells an engaging story with a number of twisty bits which is only really damped when comparing to one of the best science fiction films of recent years.  The makers of Elysium should watch and learn.

Elysium - Universal Health Care gone mad

I have a lot of films to review since flying to Chicago and back from New York recently.  On the plane over to the States I watched The Bling Ring, Oblivion and Mud.  On the way back the flight was quite short and the entertainment system a bit more limited, so I re-watched Snatch - nothing new there, still funny as ever.  I'm going to start things off with a film that I went to see at the Chicago AMC, the brand new science fiction action film starring Matt Damon - Elysium.

Here's the plot part of the review.  In a future littered with standard science fiction depictions of society gone wrong, the haves live in a techno wet dream paradise that orbits the Earth named Elysium while the have-nots live on the surface of the planet.  Elysium is an idyllic palace populated by poshos talking in well-received English and the occasional French.  Earth is an extended refuse tip where people scratch out the barest of livings, speaking a mix of street English and Spanish.  Matt Damon plays an every-man who has some unspecified connection to a local crime-lord and once was 'the best' at something, but is now 'out of the game'.  Whatever that is.  After Damon's character Max suffers a near fatal injury at work because of his heartless employers on Elysium, he decides to suit up and steal his way to Elysium to get himself healed up.  Because on Elysium technology means that basically no disease exists, everything is curable, whereas on Earth to get or injured means incapacitation and a life of the scrap heap before a likely early grave.

This is the sort of thing that good science fiction is meant to do.  The problem with Elysium is that it's full of lazy characterisation and even lazier storytelling.  There are the haves, who clearly need to be able to speak French, while the have-nots must speak Mexican-Spanish.  Jodie Foster as the leader of the haves is tediously one-dimensional in her brand of evil, Matt Damon as the every-man we should root for is introduced with such a thin background that the only reason we know he is the hero is because the film tells us he is the hero.  Then there's the South African bounty hunter Kruger (admittedly played with a gleeful nastiness by Shalo Copley), who just runs around killing stuff for no apparent reward and gets to punch and be punched by Matt Damon in the film's numblingly inevitable final fistfight.

Plot holes are littered throughout Elysium.  Why is transporting information in people's brains more secure than standard wireless transmission if it's that easy to kidnap people and download the data?  What is the 'death' fail-safe thing that the information mule guy uses to transport his data?  Is that standard practice?  Wouldn't they use an expendable data mule for that purpose rather than using the chairman of the company if they're going to do that?  Can anyone think of a more obvious target for potential data interceptors?  Also the end makes no sense either, but I don't want to give away any more spoilers.

It doesn't take too much thinking to work out that Elysium is a poorly-disguised essay on the benefits of Universal Health Care.  Given the political shit-storm that has engulfed US politics since Obama's attempts to introduce even the smallest amount of universal healthcare provision in that nation, it is no surprise that a film like this should exist.  No surprise either that the film stars Matt Damon, well known for his liberal political activism.  As a confirmed socialist myself, I am fiercely in favour of universal healthcare and I believe it would do America a lot of good to have something like the NHS to replace their divisive private healthcare system.  But this film isn't going to do a lot of convince the naysayers otherwise.  It's unsubtle in the extreme, full of bad characters, mis-stepping plot lines, unimaginative uses of science fiction tropes and reduces itself to an over-reliance on punching and stabbing to resolve its story-line.  Some good special effects cannot save Elysium, it's a big disappointment.

Only God Forgives - but is it art?

I've waited all weekend before trying to put my thoughts about Only God Forgives down into the Blogosphere.  I saw the film on Friday evening last week.  I had been hoping to see one of the final showings of Pacific Rim, but due to poor takings that seems to have vanished off screens early.  Instead this new and very moody-looking film was offered up as a replacement.  The trailers for Only God Forgives make it look stylised and hint at a violently brutal storyline.

It turns out that the trailers did a very good job, because to call Only God Forgives stylised is to hugely understate what this film is.  It is one of the most heavily-stylised pieces of film-as-art I've seen in a long time.  If you thought Stoker was stylised, you aint seen nothing yet.  Not a single shot of Only God Forgives goes by without the director lovingly ensuring that the light from nearby street lamp falls in exactly the right place over a character's face, everything has been sculpted to an impossible level of perfection.

Ryan Gosling plays Julian, son to criminal Matriarch Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) and brother to a man murdered in vengeance for raping and killing a local girl prostitute.  Julian is a big time drug dealer in Bangkok, and when Crystal arrives in town to demand that Julian find and kill her son's murderer, Julian tells her that he has already found the man, but decided to let him go.  After all, he did rape and kill the man's daughter.  Crystal flies into a rage at this, and hires her own killers to do the job she thinks Julian wasn't man enough for.  All well and good, except for the local police chief Chang, the man who was responsible for telling the girl's father about her murder and effectively goading him into killing Julian's brother in revenge.  Crystal decides that he too is responsible for her son's death, and so resolves to kill him too.

It is around this conflict that the film then revolves.  For Chang is not the sort of person anyone should be messing with.  Chang is portrayed as a deliberately slow-mannered man.  He is a man who sings karaoke to a room full of police officers silently appreciating him, a man who walks as if carried on a cloud and hands out justice in the manner he sees fit with the pointy end of a sword.  He is a character that the film portrays as an almost other-worldly force, an entity that exists out of the realm of normality silently passing judgement on the filth of society in a variety of excruciatingly violent ways that more than justify an 18 rating.

The title of the film implies a connection to the Judeo-Christian concept of god.  The implication being that either Julian or Chang represent god, or that they perhaps each represent two halves of the god presented in the bible.  Julian perhaps is the god of the new testament, turning the other cheek to the killer of his brother; Chang perhaps is the god of the old testament, breathing fire and brimstone and bringing righteous vengeance upon anyone stupid enough to challenge him.  Perhaps instead Chang is the devil and Julian is god, Chang the bringer of vengeance and death, Julian using his inner strength to bring peace?

All of this is fine of course, except that the film itself is mostly over-stylised gibberish and miles too slow even for its short 90 minute run time.  It's art masquerading as cinema.  Director Nicholas Winding Refn clearly had a vision for what he wanted to do on screen and it's all up there without much in the way of script editing by anyone else.  There are too many scenes of Ryan Gosling staring at his knuckles or having visions of Chang or sitting in rooms with prostitutes milling / sitting around artistically (can anyone tell me why this is in the movie?).  No one needs more than one scene of Chang standing in front of his police underlings singing karaoke - here was have 3.

When I left the cinema on Friday I was astonished that someone would be willing to put such a film together, let alone show it in cinemas and claim it was a movie.  I was amazed that a movie exec somewhere hadn't vetoed what was going on before it became a mainstream release.  With the calm reflection of 5 days behind me though, I'm happy to give Only God Forgives a little more leeway and declare it at the least interesting.  If you thought Drive was too slow then you will hate this.  But if you're happy to sit through 90 minutes of slow-burning violence you might find something of interest here.  Have a go if you've got the time, but don't blame me if you hate it.