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.
Conspiracy theorists are going to love the new “Godzilla” film.
In this big-budget reboot of the giant lizard series “Breaking Bad’s” Bryan Cranston plays Joe Brody, head of a nuclear facility in Tokyo. When something triggers a massive meltdown at the facility tragedy, both professional and personal strikes.
Fifteen years later Brody is living on the fringes, still obsessed with the accident that changed his life.
The army, the government and mainstream media wrote off the incident as a nuclear meltdown caused by earthquakes, but Brody is convinced it wasn’t Mother Nature but something more nefarious.
When he is arrested for trespassing on the accident site his son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a military bomb expert on leave in the United States, travels to Japan to bail him out and bring him back to San Francisco.
Before father and son can head west Brody Sr’s wild theories are proven correct. He was right that it something other than earthquakes and tsunamis responsible for the breakdown fifteen years previous. That “something” turns out to be a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism (or MUTO), a giant winged creature that feeds off earth’s natural radiation.
Unfortunately by the time his theories are validated the MUTOs have begun to wreak havoc and there is only one force on earth (or maybe just under the earth) powerful enough to battle the overgrown mosquitoes—Godzilla, king of the monsters.
In a movie like this you know that when Ford’s wife says, “You know you’re only going to be away for a few days… it’s not the end of the world,” that he’ll be gone for more than a few days and it just might be the end of the world, or something pretty close to it.
“Godzilla” plays by most of the rules of the giant lizard genre, but stomps all over 1998’s Roland Emmerich by-the-book remake. The standard kaiju kitsch is all in place—humungous monsters knock skyscrapers over with the flick of a tail and scientists talk mumbo jumbo—but director Gareth Edwards has added in some moments of real heartbreak, small sequences that underscore the huge amount of destruction the creatures cause.
Cranston hands in a dialed-up-to-eleven performance that occasionally feels like it might have worked better in Emmerich film, but supporting roles from Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Elizabeth Olsen and Taylor-Johnson are more modulated.
But who cares about the humans? They are merely the meat props that set the stage for what we’re really paying to see—the showdown between Godzilla and the MUTOs.
For the most part creature feature fans will be pleased. The MUTOs are malevolent spider-like beasts with scythe arms, a bad attitude, and worse, a need to reproduce. Godzilla is a towering figure with nasty looking spikes spouting from his back and tail, like a row of jagged mountains no man or monster will ever be able to cross.
The MUTOs are on full display, but if I have a complaint it’s that Godzilla doesn’t enter until a bit too late in the game. This whole “Cloverfield” don’t-show-the-monster thing is artistically noble, but if I wanted to NOT see Godzilla I’d go see “Million Dollar Arm” instead. For much of the movie every time we get to the cool ‘Zilla action, Edwards cuts to something else or shrouds him behind a cloud of soot and smoke. He is, as Sally Hawkins’ character says, “a God for all intents and purposes,” so we should be treated to a better look at him.
Perhaps a little Godzilla goes a long way for some, but the monster fanboy in me was greedy for more. The battle scenes, however, are top notch, shot from shifting points of view to give you the full experience of Godzilla’s awesome presence.
“Godzilla” plays like “Jurassic Park” times two, the thrills have been amped up but Edwards has managed to maintain the spirit of the original “Godzilla” movies while updating them for a new audience.
So you knew of Godzilla’s roots, but did you also know The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars were remakes of Asian films?
Add to that list this weekend’s Oldboy, a Spike Lee re-creation of a violent Chan-wook Park film. Josh Brolin plays a man searching for answers as to why he was kidnapped and held in solitary confinement for twenty years.
Spike Lee says the original director only offered up one piece of advice. “Josh went to Park and asked for his blessing,” he told MTV. “Park gave it, and the one thing he said to Josh — which Josh related to me — was ‘make a different film; don’t do the same thing I did.’ [So] that’s the way we did it.”
Hollywood has looked to Asia for inspiration for years.
Akira Kurosawa’s films provided fodder for two redone classics. The epic Seven Samarai became the Wild West gunfighter flick The Magnificent Seven and the director’s Yojimbo provided the backbone for A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood.
Once again old west gunfighters subbed for samurai but the premise of one man playing rivals off one another remains. Since the movie was an unofficial remake Kurosawa sued, won and later bragged he made more money off of Fistful of Dollars than Yojimbo.
At the turn of the millennium Japanese movies like Ringu, Ju-on and Geoul Sokeuro helped reinvent Hollywood horror. The best known of the Asian horror remakes was The Ring, an unlikely story of a cursed videotape that caused the viewer to die within a week of watching it. Roger Ebert called the movie boring and “borderline ridiculous” but it was a huge hit and paved the way for others like The Grudge and Dark Water.
Hollywood has often looked to Asia for inspiration, but sometimes it has worked the other way round.
Saidoweizu is a Japanese version of the wine soaked romantic dramedy Sideways, director Toshikazu Nagae put his own spin on Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night and A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop transports Blood Simple’s action from 1980s Texas to 19th century China.
Coming from director Roland Emmerich, you might expect “Anonymous” to be a large scale action movie about the end of the world, a prehistoric beast or giant Japanese monster. Instead the German director has left the disaster motifs of his previous work behind and created a large scale period piece about the importance of literature set against a backdrop of intrigue and sexual peccadilloes in seventeenth century England.
With a plot that mixes and matches themes from history and Shakespeare’s plays, “Anonymous” uses the backdrop of the struggle for succession between the Tudors and the Cecils as the Essex rebellion moves against Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave) to set the scene for the debut of Shakespeare’s plays. But were they actually written by Shakespeare? The movie supposes it was Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans)—the Anonymous of the title—who penned plays attributed to William Shakespeare. He kept to the shadows to save his family the embarassment of havimg a common writer in their midst and because thee plays were openly critical of the Queen’s advisors Cecil and Raleigh.
In a story ripe with mystery the only real question is how this got made at all. Big budget Shakespearean movies don’t get made much anymore, so I guess the next best thing is to make a big budget movie about Shakespeare, and Emmerich, despite his tendency to try and juggle too many story threads at one time does a good job at bringing the elegantly filthy world of Elizabethan Britain. Powdered faces, filthy fingernails and velvet jackets abound and the atmosphere adds much to the story.
This is a sprawling story with many twists and turns. The downside is the film’s sketchy casting. In flashbacks the queen and Edward appear to be the same age, but later after a major twist, are revealed to be sixteen years apart. This kind of lack of attention to detail muddies the waters in the flashbacks, making it difficult to follow the story in the first hour. Soon enough, however, all the players are straightened away and the pleasures of the story take hold.
A liberal mix of fact and fiction–there is no real life evidence that the Earl of Oxford penned the plays–“Anonymous” is a twisted tale about how politics and art intersect, and the written word’s ability to instigate change.
Director Roland Emmerich, whose films usually portray the end of times—Independence Day saw aliens try and conquer the Earth while The Day After Tomorrow had Mother Nature taking a swipe at life as we know it—has, this time, chosen to take us back to the beginning of time.
10,000 BC is what used to be known as a “caveman” movie, but in these more politically correct times is now called Neanderthal Drama.
A bombastic cross between Quest for Fire and Encino Man it tells the story of D’Leh (model and actor Steven Strait), a caveperson of considerable physical charms, whose mate Evolet (Camilla Belle) is kidnapped by marauders on horseback who D’Laeh mistakes for “four legged demons.”
Lovesick, he vows to get her back. In his quest to find his love he must battle giant computer generated Saber Tooth Tigers, Wooly Mammoths and something that looks like a steroid-crazed giant chicken.
Keeping the tradition of other Cro-Magnon epics like Teenage Caveman and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, 10,000 BC doesn’t skimp on the kitsch—dialogue like “You see that star out there, the one that doesn’t move? It’s like my love for you, in my heart” would be hard for any actor to pass off, let alone one wearing a loincloth—and don’t look for a history lesson either. In Emmerich’s version of history cavemen don’t live in caves but thatch-roofed villages. They travel on wooden sailboats and worship at pyramids and temples thousands of years before either of those things actually existed. Call it historical fantasy.
Apart from a wild Wooly Mammoth battle near the end I’m afraid even fellow caveman Fred Flintstone might give this one a pass. So to paraphrase the world’s best known caveman is 10,000 BC a Yabba-Dabba-Do or a Yabba-Dabba-Don’t? I think Fred would choose the latter and rent ancient epic Apocalypto instead.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel bored.” Nothing like a quick paraphrase of a classic R.E.M. song to sum up my feelings toward the latest end of the world CGI spectacular from Roland Emmerich. Unlike the 1970’s disaster genre, which tended to focus on one particular mishap, like a boat sinking or an office tower bursting into flames, “2012” is an all-purpose disaster movie. Emmerich lays it on thick, utilizing earthquakes, tsunamis and every other natural catastrophe in the Master of Disaster Handbook, to bring life as we know it to a screeching halt.
The film centers around a global doomsday event coinciding with the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar’s current cycle on December 21, 2012. In other words, four days before Christmas, 2012, the world goes boom. California falls into the sea, the South Pole ends up somewhere in Wisconsin and the Himalayas are submerged underwater. Staying one step ahead of the devastation is divorcée Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), who pulls out all the stops to get his ex-wife, kids and a handful of stragglers to a lifesaving Noah’s Arc in China called Genesis.
The fifteen year old boy in me enjoyed watching the world blow up real good; the adult in me, however, wanted characters I could believe in. Or at least care about a little bit. It’s not exactly the actor’s fault that I didn’t warm to / care about anyone on screen, they were simply doing their best with a script that had been run through the Cliché-O-Matic before filming began.
Occasionally the cheesy dialogue raises a smile. During a lover’s spat one character says to another, “I feel like something is pulling us apart,” as an earthquake splits the floor between them but more often than not each and every character is saddled with dialogue that would make Ed Wood Jr beam with pride. As all hell is breaking loose the president says to his daughter, “you look just like your mother when you get mad,” and everything is the “most important (insert event here) in the history of mankind!” A thousand monkeys banging away on a thousand typewriters for a week could probably write this script.
But clever wordplay is not why we go see movies like this. We go to revel in a make believe orgy of destruction. Nothing much happens in the first forty minutes however—we meet the large cast, but by the time George Segal shows up the cameo quotient begins to resemble an episode of “The Love Boat”—but when the earth’s crust begins to destabilize at the forty minute mark many spectacular scenes of world demolition follow. Hope you have a huge appetite for destruction because for the next two hours that’s pretty much all there is. “2012” becomes an end of the world spectacle to end all end of the world spectacles, which, works if a doom boom is all you’re interested in, but after a while the elaborate special effects becomes visual white noise.
Emmerich could have kept up interest by adding some real drama beyond timers counting down to zero or placing the hero in life or death situations that he is most certainly going to survive, or by shortening the running time—at a butt numbing 2 hours and 40 minutes “2012” feels like the end of the world is playing out in real time—but instead was content to fill the screen with flashy CGI and little else.
