In today’s world it’s not enough to simply be a hero. Now you must be a superhero. Unlike the old days when square-jawed movie stars rescued damsels in distress or battled cold-hearted landlords, today’s champions won’t get out of bed for anything less than the threat of complete world annihilation. Liberating a cat from a tree or performing the Heimlich Maneuver is considered HeroLite™, the work of lesser lifesavers.
Today it’s all about averting the apocalypse. In Captain America: Civil War the idea of how to police and ultimately save the world is at the heart of the action and X-Men: Apocalypse’s bad guy has grandiose plans to “cleanse mankind and create a new world order.”
This weekend the heroes of Independence Day: Resurgence join Mystique, Quicksilver, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello, Captain America and legendary do-gooders Batman and Superman in some good, old fashioned world saving.
The twenty-years-in-the-making sequel to Will Smith’s mega-hit sees aliens from outside the Solar System attack our planet. It’s life and death on a planetary scale, a premise that has become increasingly popular in recent years.
It’s not a surprise the stories are getting larger and louder. Audiences want a big bang for their buck and Hollywood is pleased to oblige with high stakes situations that provide frenetic action and happy endings (unless, of course you’re rooting for the bad guy). These days Hollywood also looks to overseas markets for mega-revenue and presenting globe-spanning stories helps to attract crowds in other countries.
Business aside, why have audiences embraced world-on-the-brink movies?
Films, says Dr. Norman Holland, Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar Emeritus at the University of Florida, work on different parts of your brain.
“The parts that turn off are the parts that plan action because you’re not going to act on what you see on the screen in front of you,” he says. “You turn off the systems that plan, that look ahead that evaluate futures. That explains the phenomenon of the willing suspension of disbelief. You accept the most improbable things, like Stars Wars or Spider-Man or whatever. At the same time the lower centres of your brain are generating emotions like mad in response to what you’re seeing. This is the peculiar phenomenon that you can feel and care about these people on the screen while at the same time knowing they are nothing but a fiction.”
In other words, it’s what legendary purveyor of thrills Alfred Hitchcock said. “People like to be scared when they feel safe.”
We live in unsettling and troubled times and going to the movies can provide an escape. In these heroic tales good almost always wins out, a comforting antidote to the nightly news where stories often don’t have happy endings. It makes us feel good, but, as Dr. Holland notes, it’s also restful.
“As you know they are redesigning movie theatres with recliner chairs so you can sleep through the movie,” he says. “Yes, it is relaxing. This is the part of your brain that worries, that plans for the future, that is concerned about the state of your body. All that shuts down. It’s restful, no question.”
Going to the movies is restful? Good for us? Seems like in our busy, stressful world it’s the films that are the heroes, not the characters.
“That is definitely bigger than the last one,” says David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum).
He’s talking about the alien spaceship that puts our planet in peril in “Independence Day: Resurgence,” the twenty-years-in-the-making sequel to Will Smith’s 90s mega-hit, but he could also be talking about the movie itself. It’s certainly bigger and louder than the original, but is it better?
In the two decades since the first invasion the world has become a better place. “Our survival is only possible when we stand together,” says President Lanford (Sela Ward). The White House has been rebuilt, a woman is President and countries now work together. There’s a military installation on the moon and using the ET technology salvaged from the downed spaceships they have safe guarded the planet from another attack.
Or so almost everyone thought.
Ex-President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) is plagued by bad dreams—or are they premonitions?—of another extra-terrestrial incursion and it turns out he’s right. A distress signal from the first wave of space invaders triggered another assault, this time with bigger, badder aliens from deep, deep, deep space.
“Make them pay,” says ex-first daughter Patricia Whitmore (Maika Monroe) to her boyfriend, warrior pilot Jake (Liam Hemsworth). “I’m not going out there to make friends,” he says. Look out aliens! Cue the computer generated carnage.
At their best big special effects movies like this should fill the viewer with wonder. Large-scale spectacle, like the world on the verge of collapse, should fill us with shock and awe but in “Independence Day: Resurgence” we have to settle for an unsettling sense of déjà vu. It’s a movie that exists as an excuse to showcase the special effects in a cynical attempt to recycle an idea that worked well enough the first time. Not only have we seen virtually everything here in the original film, we’ve seen similar images in every end-of-the-world movie from the last twenty years. Here they are bigger and louder, but not better.
Ditto the dialogue. It feels like a first draft to the original movie, updated for a new cast. Goldblum is always a welcome presence but he’s saddled with terrible, trite words and he gets most of the good lines. It’s the kind of movie were people ask questions instead of saying anything interesting. “How the hell did we miss this?” “What’s going on?” Or the classic, “What the…??!!,” delivered with mouth agape. It’s less a script than a series of catchphrases and questions cobbled together and sounds like it was all run through the Blandizer® before being handed over to the actors.
It’s the kind of movie where you root for the aliens, hoping they make quick work of humanity because that would be less painful than sitting through one more minute of this mess. You don’t watch “Independence Day: Resurgence,” you subject yourself to it because even though it could be the end of humanity there’s no real humanity here, just empty heroics.
The most alien thing about the movie is the presence of Lars Von Trier’s favourite actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. If anyone in the movie noticed she was there I’m sure they would say, “What the hell is she doing here?” Cashing a paycheque I imagine.
I really hated “Independence Day: Resurgence.” It’s a popcorn flick but this popcorn stale. “Independence Day”? More like “Groundhog Day.” We’ve seen it before and better.
This is a hard one to describe. It’s a metaphoric retelling of Bob Dylan’s life, but none of the characters in it are called Bob Dylan. Most of them don’t look like Dylan, and the one who most looks like Dylan is a woman. It’s a long, strange trip down memory lane with one of the most enigmatic characters of the 20th century.
Director Todd Haynes has assembled an all star cast to embody different segments of the folk singer’s life. When we first meet the Dylan character he is portrayed by a 13-year-old African-American child (Marcus Carl Franklin) obsessed with folk music. Later he’s glimpsed in his Pat Garret and Billy the Kid stage, played in that sequence by Richard Gere. British actor Ben Whishaw punctuates the proceedings, popping up now and again spouting the kind of elliptical nonsense that often make Dylan’s interviews an exercise in frustration.
Cate Blanchett is deservedly being touted for an Oscar nomination—will it be Best Actor or Actress?—for her take on the caustic, amphetamine-fueled Dylan circa 1965. In one of the more literal sequences Batman portrayer Christian Bale is Jack, a folk singer who embraces Christianity, eschewing the life of a music star to become an evangelist.
A bit murkier is Heath Ledger’s story thread featuring him as a chauvinistic movie star with a mysterious French girlfriend (Charlotte Gainsbourg).
How does it all relate to Dylan, the mumbling superstar who has made a career of keeping people guessing about his personal life? It’s hard to say, because as you may have guessed the movie isn’t a traditional biopic. What Haynes has done here is create a kind of tone poem using different elements from Dylan’s life to create an overall feel for this mysterious and elliptical character.
Unlike Walk the Line or Ray, which were both standard issue Hollywood biopics, I’m Not There doesn’t offer up an obvious timeline of the man’s life. There is nothing linear here, or even connected in many cases. Using a variety of styles from Warholian Pop Art to Godard’s jump-cuts and cinéma vérité, Haynes has cobbled together a portrait of the essence of Dylan. There is nothing straightforward about the man, so there should be nothing straightforward about the movie. It’s fascinating stuff, and while some may find it frustrating, I felt I knew more about what makes Bob Dylan tick when I walked out of the theatre after I’m Not There than I did for Johnny Cash following Walk the Line or Ray Charles after Ray.
At almost three hours it’s a taxing movie, but for the patient, the adventurous and the curious I’m Not There offers many pleasures from the amazing soundtrack to Cate Blanchett’s superior performance.
