by TTA Press
If anything, Tolkien’s actual story has in fact been fairly drastically condensed, pulling nine hundred years of backstory into the timeframe of the film, and eliminating Gandalf’s earlier expeditions to Dol Guldur and his discovery of the Necromancer’s identity almost a century before the events of The Hobbit. How this squares with Gandalf’s acquisition of the key to Erebor from Thráin is unclear, though it will be unlike Jackson if he passes up the chance to exploit the Necromancer’s involvement in the death of Thorin’s father – especially since, for more Hollywood-compliant motivation, Azog the rather ropey digital orc has here been allowed to survive his canonical slaying by Dáin after offing Thorin’s granddad, and to assume the role taken in the novel by his son Bolg so that Thorin can avenge two generations of dads at once (result!). Hollywoodised in a different way is the restructured motivation of the quest to “take back Erebor”, which is here not about the treasure but the reestablishment of a homeland for the diasporised Durinfolk in “the last dwarvish kingdom in Middle-Earth” (erm, if you forget all about the Iron Hills) – and an arc for Bilbo that modulates from midlife Call to Adventure to homely hobbit’s sympathy for the unhomed. (Needless to say, this being Jackson/Walsh/Boyens, Bilbo doesn’t trust to show-don’t-tell but spells it out for them on the big dwarvish nose.) Dol Guldur is brought into the foreground storyline by introducing an orcish pursuit by Azog on the Necromancer’s business, even though this makes for a curious slippage between the scary orcs above ground and the comically inept goblins below. The White Council meet conveniently at Rivendell during Bilbo’s stopover to debate northern strategy, while big backstory inserts make screentime for the arrival of Smaug, the battle of Moria, and similar nods to Tolkien’s own unembarrassed fondness for analeptic flourishes. Yet mostly it’s still the Hobbit we know with bits of the untold tipped in, and some earnest if clumsy engagement with the questions Tolkien continued to wrestle with for decades: why a hobbit? Why Bilbo? What in the name of Manwë was Gandalf thinking?
As the technical landmark it seeks to be, the film is a fascinatingly mixed-success adventure. It’s thrilling to see Jackson finally let into the 3D party, with swooping tours of Erebor in its prime and the subterranean orcopolis delivering what the famous shots of the pits of Orthanc could only foreshadow. All the same, at my screening the left visual channel dropped temporarily out when we hit Rivendell, and the audience removed their glasses to wipe lenses in bemusement, only to find themselves awakened blinking into a glowing 2D world of brilliant light and colour in which many would have been quite happy to spend the rest of the film. And while the 3D is undeniably smoother in 48fps, the unexpected cultural problem with the crispness and clarity of HFR is that it looks to most eyes like television, an impression hardly helped by the engagement of so many small-screen faces. The dwarves do what they can, the broader performances nicely darkened by knowledge of Thorin’s arc, the fates of his nephews, and what will happen to the amiable Balin when he tries to replicate the Erebor triumph in Moria. But the cut from Ian Holm to Martin Freeman in the role of Bilbo only underlines the difference in register from the earlier trilogy, as a comic actor of great deftness and timing but more limited dramatic range takes over, still in his Arthur Dent dressing gown, from a stunning classical master of sixpence tonal turns. Freeman is good at pity staying his hand, but you still can’t quite imagine him doing Bilbo’s scene with the Ring in Rivendell in Fellowship.
While the action sequences and the landscapes all look lovely, the art of makeup has yet to catch up with the more ruthless scrutiny afforded. If you were going to choose a film to showcase the attractions of 48fps IMAX, you probably wouldn’t opt for one in which thirteen of your most closeupped characters perform in fake foreheads and latex honkers, and your returning stars are ten-years-older actors attempting to play versions of their characters sixty years younger. Gandalf is disconcertingly ravaged; you can see every one of Galadriel’s new elven wrinkles; and a painfully frail Saruman has had his sit-down role pasted digitally in from Pinewood and then telepathically talked over anyway (probably a mercy, as the audible part of his speech is frankly beneath his dignity, with some quite dreadful stuff about Radagast’s excessive consumption of mushrooms and a nonsense line about “calling himself the Necromancer” when they’ve just made that title up themselves). The overwhelming effect is to make the insanely expensive look cheap, and while one does attune to the look, it’s not in the immersive way its makers hope but rather in a heightened tolerance of artificiality and semiosis, with the long, actorly dialogue scenes and sub-illusory makeup repeatedly invoking the feel not of film but of theatre, quite often to the film’s advantage. The riddles in the dark, in particular, play beautifully as a nine-minute two-hander (only one pair of riddles is cut) between two scenery-eating performers at the very top of their game, and it seems almost incidental that one of them happens to be mocapped. Perhaps this is indeed the next revolution in cinema, but you can bet Jim Cameron is nervous.
From time to time in the writing of both Hobbit and LotR Tolkien would stop in his tracks and review the road ahead, and his Hobbit notes especially show the story being improvised as it went – which is why Thorin’s arc in the book takes such an unanticipated turn, and Bard is so belatedly promoted and named as a pivotal figure. Journey’s horripilant climactic shot of Erebor seen from the Eyrie invites a similar mapping of the way that will lie before them when Bilbo awakes in The Desolation of Smaug with the early sun in his eyes. That Jackson is playing a thoughtful long game is suggested by the almost impossibly dense allusions to Fellowship in particular, from the initial undeleted scenes from the day of Bilbo’s eleventy-first, via the myriad Bag End details reactivated for new meaning and resonance, to the visual quotation of Frodo’s moment in the Prancing Pony when the ring first falls on to Bilbo’s finger. Thranduil pops his head around the door as a teaser for his role in film 2, but nothing is yet seen of his famous son – nor of Glóin’s, at this time a youngster of 62, nor of any ten-year-old human ward wandering round Rivendell in the background, though it seems inconceivable that something will not occur on the back-again; and while it would be pleasant not to see any more of Liv Tyler, the smart money must be on some involvement of Lorien in the Dol Guldur campaign which would open a window of opportunism that Jackson might find hard to resist. Given that we open on an owl eye and end on Smaug’s, it’s a safe bet what the final shot of There and Back Again will be. Of course we can safely expect disappointments, even desolation – but perhaps at least a fourteenth share of gold.
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After del Toro parted ways with The Hobbit he took a consultant gig at DreamWorks, where he’s been particularly closely involved with Rise of the Guardians: an animated project originated by the great illustrator William Joyce, who has since produced his own Hobbitesque multi-part prequel epic in a rapidly-unfolding series of novels and picture books (five in the space of a year, with further volumes to come). The books are far stranger, wilder, and more deeply felt than the distinctly tame and formulaic film, if at the same time much less certain of their narrative and audience – threading a serial storyline that might kindly be called dreamlike around a fantastic interplanetary steampunk mythology about the war between bogeyman Pitch the Nightmare King and an alliance of heroic children with origin-story versions of Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and the Sandman. (Rise’s lead Jack Frost is scheduled for a future volume, but hasn’t yet made his print debut at all.) The film version, set centuries later in the present day, retains only the superhuman leads and versions of some of Joyce’s character designs – though the books’ Lyraesque human heroine Katherine, a warmly imagined version of the author’s late daughter, has been curiously parachuted instead into Blue Sky’s rival Joycean animation Epic. Instead, the film presents us with a high-concept superhero team of public-domain fantasy figures in what one gradually realises is essentially an unsettling family reimagining of American Gods.
Screenwriter David Lindsey-Abaire ha
s done this public-domain metamashup before on the film version of Inkheart, and has another in the oven with Oz the Great and Powerful. But Guardians is the most interestingly confused mythology, based as it is on a cast of invested lies: the fabrications that adults knowingly inflict on children, and the awakening from which constitutes an irreparable loss of innocence and abandonment of faith in adult authority. Pitch’s plan is to undo the visitations of Toothiana and Bunny so that children worldwide will no more believe in the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny than they currently believe in Jack Frost, leaving only the boogeyman as childhood’s true object of living belief: “No Christmas or Easter or little fairies that come in the night; there will be nothing but fear and darkness and me” – or, as we know it in this life, adulthood. Fortunately Jack, who has never been an object of active faith, is insulated against not being believed in, and can hold it together where the rest of them fail, sprinkle fun (“That’s it! That’s my centre!”) around kids so their eyes light druggily up and they attempt high-risk winter stunts you should absolutely not try at home unless there’s an invisible folk superhero looking out for you. It’s certainly the prettiest DreamWorks animation to date, its very strong visual design shot in warm illustratorly colours with Roger Deakins advising on the cinematography. But the film has underperformed domestically – perhaps because it’s a Christmas film set at Easter, which is, well, unexpected, but perhaps because it’s fairly nakedly about the survival of religion in a secularising world as essentially an infantile nostalgia for falsehood, a message further complicated by the tactical unbranding of Christmas and Easter as spiritual festivals for all faiths and none. “Easter is new beginnings, new life; Easter is about hope” – dispersing any illusion that it might be about the resurrection of a Judaean cult leader and agitator, or failing that about chocolate. Hope again, boys and girls.
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As one literary franchise rises afresh and another stumbles to likely oblivion, The Twilight Saga pulls its covers around it and kisses goodnight in Breaking Dawn Part 2. Spinning 169 minutes from six chapters of The Hobbit is nothing to the challenge facing Bella’s happy-forever-after finale, which has had to come up with an exciting way to cinematise a story whose defining, indeed climactic, feature is that nothing whatever happens. Stephenie Meyer’s disarmingly fannish relationship with her own creation largely forbids that characters cared about should come to harm, extending the grace of invulnerability and reluctant forgiveness even to series villains; and the second half of Breaking Dawn is essentially the final season of Buffy without the last episode, as the Cullens old and new assemble an army of sympathisers to square up against the Volturi legions for a huge, promiscuously cinematic battle-of-Hogwarts finale, only for a truce to be talkily negotiated that allows everyone to go home without a blow struck. Whatever one’s feelings about the book quartet – and no account can satisfy that doesn’t give due weight to their deep emotional empathy for their readership’s anxieties and dreams – it’s difficult not to admire the sheer perversity and refusal of infantile Hollywood comforts in this radical anticlimax, and more difficult still to see how it could ever translate to film. But the solution found, through some light replotting using established powers and characters in a slightly redirected way, is so elegant, ingenious, and effective at making the same point about the same outcome while giving the film the big X-Men 3 ending it craves, that one can’t but admire its craft. The preceding hour and a half are taken up with yeastless pre-plotting, an increasingly outré series of guest appearances as the Cullens host a protracted houseparty for silly vampires including ginger Irish ones (Thranduil pops up in this one too), and some extremely unsettling acceleration of Bella’s transition through the adult lifecycle as her progress from bride to mom is further speeded up by little Renesmée’s digital transition through a series of fantastically creepy vales of the uncanny from infancy to premature betrothal. But at the end everyone kisses and Bella lets Edward, who’s been surprisingly fun in this episode, into her head at last and flashbacks the whole trilogy for his benefit; and the last shot lingers on the book’s last word “forever”, before the aptly neverending credits wind back through the many versions of Sir and Lady Not Appearing in This Film. It’s been a bloody long journey there and back again with Bella and Edward, but like the cliff-dangling scenes in The Hobbit it only feels like we’ve been watching them forever. As the ring-bearing Bella now passes over sea to her Huntsman sequel in a future filled with dwarves, we shall unexpectedly miss them.
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Copyright © 2013 Nick Lowe
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LASER FODDER
TONY LEE
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DEATH WATCH
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THE ARRIVAL OF WANG
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THE CASTLE
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THE LORD OF THE RINGS
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U.F.O.
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CONTINUUM
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Shortly after TV series The Six Million Dollar Man (see Interzone #240), Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch (Blu-ray/DVD, 5 November) presented us with a fresh interpretation of the cybernetic eye, one with a fear of the dark that is both practical/symbolic, as low lighting damages the video camera implant, while nothing on the receiving screens means losing the audience. This is a far bolder SF movie than that bionic action show’s genre content. Based on a novel by David G. Compton, it weaves a tale of mortality and speculative media that riffs upon themes of corporate cynicism from Sidney Lumet’s classic satire Network, although it must be said that Compton’s book The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (US title: The Unsleeping Eye) actually predated Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for Network.
Shooting in gritty modern Glasgow, director Bertrand Tavernier (recently the maker of In the Electric Mist) rebels against the traditions of shiny futurism so that, in its look, this is the antithesis of stereotypical SF cinema. Instead of cool hardware, it offers a subjective narrative of romantic tragedy, screened through a distorting lens of reality TV. In a Britain where fatal illness is increasingly rare, an emotive storyline hinges upon cruel subterfuge that only a highly decadent society on the verge of quiet dystopia could enact. Among the film’s other genre ideas: Harriet, the computer that writes novels! Katherine (played by Romy Schneider, from Orson Welles’ adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial), is the ‘doomed’ woman, promoted as a new celebrity in a world of legalised euthanasia: “They pay you to die in public”.
It’s a future where privacy is diminishing alongside the targeted victim’s rights, when corporate programmes and prurient interests coincide – as amoral TV producer Ferriman (Harry Dean Stanton) notes, death is “the new pornography”. Katherine, of course, is on to the company’s scheming and, with “only one life to sell”, she milks the contract, apparently to fund her final big adventure. Although the main plot and the backstory mirror each other, the middle-class but still a bit kitchen-sink dilemmas of broken or failing relationships manage to avoid falling into the pits of a standard telly soap opera. There is a widescreen sketch of grim poverty found on a Strathclyde dock location, from where the heroine goes on the run as if she is trying to escape from her ignominious fate. Holed up with cameraman Roddy (Harvey Keitel) at the riverside cabin in vividly green Mull of Kintyre countryside, Katherine’s reminiscences of love and life continue, further embellishing already polished character studies. The finale exposes the stunt/hoax, to challenge our perceptions of all that we have seen so far, but it’s more than just a clever double-twist ending, it adds layers of poignancy when “Everything is important, but nothing matters”.
The HD transfer looks superb, and disc extras include a 40-minute interview, The Morality of Filmmaking, with Tavernier, whose revealing comments about the differences between European/Hollywood approaches to solving technical problems (much more than just an economical inventiveness versus studio production overkill) are often wryly amusing, and occasionally hilarious.
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nbsp; It’s a broad generalisation, but the differences between cinema and television are that cinema is largely concerned with spectacle of scope/scales in a format that appeals to artists and designers, while TV is usually all about the characters of a piece, presented with a cosy intimacy and tangled plotlines that provide regular work for many writers (and actors) to unravel. The current problem for genre in the media dichotomy is that while blockbuster movies can happily be one-hit wonders and, as such, get away with their limited stories, entertainment for small screens needs a formula, whether it’s for a serial narrative or an anthology format. I have always been a fan of shows like Outer Limits and Twilight Zone because they are creative outlets not unlike nursery farms. They form a welcome bridge between artistic vision that demands a high budget, and TV work that highlights prolific writing. As long as they adapt short fiction into short movies, those sci-fi programmes could continue with variable success, so it is terribly sad that recent TV schedules have a lacked any such genre series. It is a situation that forces many novice filmmakers, struggling to break into even low-budget movies, to stretch basic TV resources or 40-minute plots into feature-length works, often at the expense of a taut pace and briskly convincing character arcs. In a word: padding. It is a contrivance that almost ruins The Arrival Of Wang (DVD, 12 November) as good ‘first contact’ drama, or SF satire on realpolitik themes.
