Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #222
Page 16
Nevertheless, while this may not be the best of the Watchmen we might have had, it's a massive improvement on other post-millennial versions; and if Snyder's interpretation hasn't the wit or sparkle that the Hamm/Gilliam version promised, it's partly because that was mooted at a time when the source was still sufficiently fresh and plastic as to permit more radical tinkering with the clockwork, infected by the exuberance and verve of British-invasion comics in one of the industry's all-time creative peaks. So much of what is wonderful in the original Watchmen is here when it didn't have to be: the hands on the beerglass; Captain Carnage; “All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.” Of course there are moments of monumental awfulness, but they pass, and there are plenty of compensating moments of real inspiration: not just the showy things like the richly staged credits montage of alternate history in hi-def Zapruder time, but the dozens of deft little narrative workarounds like “Where's my face?", “Nixon had him keeping tabs on us", and “I know what Jon would say.” The biggest shock on first viewing is the cutting of Hollis Mason's death, but when you go back and look at it the plot thread didn't really go anywhere. The climax has been more hit by budgetary squeeze, losing both the vivarium and the owl-bikes—with the result that Hendrix now incongruously sings the “two riders were approaching” line over a shot of them trudging through the snow instead. And yet the willingness to preserve that key soundtrack moment, even when its actual point has been stripped away, is touching in itself; and if the blue fairy has anything to say about the president's remarkable nose, he has the discretion to keep it to himself.
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Not so differently, Paul McGuigan's Push is an ambitious attempt to create a big superhero mythos within the margins of a single film, with Chris Evans and Dakota Fanning as fugitive members of a multistranded tribe of superpowered mutants living among us while the authorities seek to hunt them to extinction. Even with the basic familiarity assumed with versions of this scenario in X-Men and Heroes, it's a lot to try to squash into a self-contained film, with a large cast, elaborate backstory, and hugely convoluted plot of setups, double-crosses, and an ultimate suitcase of plot, climaxing in a series of bravura twists you see coming from early on (the title is a whopping clue) but can't quite see how they'll ever get them to work. Indeed, much of the point of the film is that our heroes have to outmanoeuvre an antagonist who, like the audience, can foresee their every move, to which Evans has a bold answer: “What if nothing we did made sense?” And sure enough, the final half-hour is so magnificently overplotted that nobody could really say by the end whether it did. But the Hong Kong settings are vivid and spectacular, and the climactic telekinetically assisted fistfight on a half-built skyscraper has verve even after being precognitively preempted in Dark Knight; while much work has gone into creating a striking new character and image for Fanning, who gets to overact ludicrously (including a first drunk scene), but still looks reassuringly lantern-headed, popeyed, and weird.
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Franklyn is a rather amazing Britflick with a complex multistranded plot that cuts between our world and the vaguely Miévillean fantasy noirscape of “Meanwhile City", an alternate London in which the Bank of England has (aptly enough) morphed into the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness from Time Bandits, and where Ryan Philippe plays a Rorschach-like figure on a quest for revenge against the shadowy hierarch of a society where religion is compulsory but baroquely diverse. (This doesn't really make sense, but the film has an answer up its sleeve to explain why it doesn't need to.) One of the film's boldest pleasures is how long it keeps us guessing about how all this relates to the three seemingly disconnected this-world strands: Eva Green's art project of filming her own suicide attempts; churchwarden Bernard Hill's quest for his missing son; and Sam Riley's pursuit of his former childhood sweetheart whom everyone else insists was imaginary. Even the basic network of relationships between characters and locations takes its time over establishing itself, and when characters start to leak between worlds there's a profoundly satisfying narrative disorientation of a kind that film rarely allows its audiences to linger in. Heavy hints are dropped that one of these worlds is a creation of one particular character in the other; but which, and who, and how, and why is the creator so elusive to track down?
Writer-director Gerald McMorrow's first gig was as a teenage runner on the fondly-remembered Richard Stanley's Hardware, the distillation of eighties UK comics sensibility on film; and Watchmen (alongside V for Vendetta) is clearly an influence, not least on the powerful and unsettling contrasts between the tropes of comics narrative and their counterparts in the real world. This is a film in which people who speak below the natural male vocal register are clearly not quite right in the head, even if they happen to be the creators of the world. McMorrow's dialogue isn't as strong as his visual and narrative sense, which falters only at the overblown and protracted climax. But this is a wonderful film in a distinctively British tradition, with beautiful concept art and a defiantly grown-up attitude to the infantilities that underlie Hollywood fantasy narrative. If only it was Spanish they'd already be tooling up the Hollywood remake.
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As if by the synchronous design of a cosmic watchmaker, some of the same religious and familial issues are indeed played out in the cruder accents of Hollywood dialect in Alex Proyas’ Knowing. Nicolas Cage vehicles are always a bumpy ride, but they do have the power to draw films into being around Cage's distinctive leading-man persona that at their best have a loopiness you'd be unlikely to see in a Will Smith project. Knowing is a particularly extreme case, beginning innocuously enough as a modest if batty numerological fantasy about an MIT prof coming into possession of a bit of paper that predicts disasters, and escalating by degrees into a kind of Hollywood version of Don McKellar's Last Night in which the end of the world actually happens and no amount of creepy “whisper people” standing around in the woods can prevent it from being as completely hero-proof a narrative as you're ever likely to see on film. Cage may be a hotshot astrophysicist, but even he can't renegotiate the laws of the cosmos; and by degrees you realise that whatever this film is going to pull out of the bag for a feelgood ending, it's going to be something pretty out-there. Until the final half-hour, it's possible to rest gently in the arms of the illusion that the title refers merely to foreknowledge of things to come, and that the crudely-shoehorned early discussions of the Drake equation and randomness versus determinism are what the film is actually about; that Cage's dad issues as the scientist son of a pastor are incidental character-deepening by numbers; and that the references to Ezekiel are nothing more outrageous than a decorative screenwriters’ conceit. But by the time apocalypse and revelations arrive, it becomes clear that references in the dialogue to a very different kind of knowing have been part of an elaborate higher design, which doesn't seem to mind that it's significantly at odds with the actual ending.
Yet if much of this seems a capitulation to middle-American end-times piety, at least the final scenes have the guts to stay within the boundaries of science, with Cage's inexplicable conversion to a more primitive mode of knowing elbowed aside in favour of a purely science-fictional conclusion, even if it does involve a final money shot of children running across the plains of heaven through Gladiator wheat in their new robes of beige under a moon as big as in the movies. It's still one of those films that rely on plunging you from plot point to plot point fast enough that you never have time to stop and think back on the manifold absurdities of the form “If what's really going on is X, then why the hell did they Y?” Indeed, Cage's colleague tells it to his face: “Right now my scientific mind is telling me to have nothing more to do with this, and you're shit too.” (Which he is, though I have reluctantly to assume I misheard.) But if Cage's character is a weak spot, Rose Byrne and the kid leads are excellent, the catastrophe set pieces are genuinely extraordinary, and the sheer “where is this going and will I be
able to gibber quietly enough not to be ejected?” casts a spell like no other. Once you know, it's no big deal. But as Dr Manhattan says to Adrian Veidt, “I'd almost forgotten the delights of not knowing; of uncertainty.” Especially in the face of Armageddon.
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The final act of Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) sees Dan Aykroyd's ‘Grocer’ attempting to recruit hero Marty (John Cusack) into a hit-men's union. A decade later, in a parallel world hellhole, Aykroyd is a former US Vice President, amoral cheerleader for grubby American imperialism, sending this flipside realm's troubleshooter assassin Hauser (Cusack, also co-writing and producing this film) into fictional ‘Turquistan’ state for a ‘Brand USA’ trade expo—which cynically exploits a profitable new ‘humanitarian aid’ crisis which aerial bombardment of entrepreneurial military action has created. Lord Of War meets Dr Strangelove, War, Inc. (DVD 16 March), boasts excessive and slapdash humour directed by TV documentarist Joshua Seftel. The film's premise entails a US military occupation having democracy-lite marketing campaign support, as ultimate sponsorship backup, so tank armour has poster adverts. Cusack's shrewd character is a deeply troubled antihero whose only confidant in all this urban chaos and corporate savagery is a (presumably online subscription-service) voice on his vehicle's Sat Nav and travel emergency helpmate. Marisa Tomei plays feisty reporter Natalie, Hauser's love interest, even before he single-handedly rescues her from snuff-movie peddling terrorists. Hauser's PR aide is the crazy smirk of Joan Cusack. Hilary Duff plays local pop star Yonica Babyyeah, packaged shamelessly as damaged ingénue/trainee virgin. Ben Kingsley is fine as an Oz-like villain orchestrating events from behind the scenes. Combat journalism is accelerated to VR ‘ride’ serving popcorn with friendly-fire risks. Glib protagonist Hauser wants to save the little girl masked by a pimped-out bride yet his employers weakness for “humane precision” air-strikes puts all civilians in urgent need of outsourced home comforts like dry-cleaning, here delivered by an armoured personnel carrier with a reckless crew. Truth is not just the first causality; any reason is abandoned entirely while addicted Hauser contemplates another shot of hot sauce.
Talk is fast and witty, or cheap gibberish offering pop-psych analyses that reveal this corrupt showbiz milieu, of indecency and injustice, is held together by nothing of real consequence except corporate branding, despite best mayhem-management efforts of Hauser and his shadowy puppetmaster. Art survives only as painting-by-numbers. Ray Davies’ scathing ‘The Tourist’ is the perfect aural accompaniment to intro scenes.
It scarcely matters that apparent refugees are slaughtered by gunships. A submarine's faulty Tomahawk missile displays a greater ‘poetic’ sense of morality than any soldier. As in Larry Charles’ extravagant satire Masked And Anonymous (2003), this explores a wild alternative reality, exposing much that's usually kept hidden or left unsaid, and is a far more valuable critique of US foreign policy, and the sheer preposterousness of modern warfare, than a merely-clever skewering of the disastrously incompetent and shallow Bush presidency in Oliver Stone's overhyped W.—really just another dreary Hollywood blathering about father-and-son issues.
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The Signal (DVD/BD 6 April) is written and directed by David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush as a fairly coherent three-part anthology of SF and extreme gore, in which each filmmaker picks up narrative threads from where his predecessor left off, continuing a tightly constructed plotline, shot in Atlanta, with fresh angles or Rashômon-styled alternative viewpoints. Transmission I: Crazy In Love sees adulteress Mya returning to suspicious husband Lewis (A.J. Bowen, Creepshow III) to find him arguing, like a child, with friends or neighbours. While TV strobes blurry colour, phones crackle and buzz, radios appear faulty too, and intense violence breaks out. It's like The Crazies meets The Happening, with raw immediacy in its Night Of The Living Dead mood as frequently unnerving senseless murders turn the block of flats into a slaughterhouse. Transmission II: Jealousy Monster, shifts to black comedy when, in a tormented and delusional state, Lewis gatecrashes a New Year's party, resulting in mistaken identity with torture-porn agonies leavened by gallows humour. Intrusive guest Clark offers vaguely coherent explanations for homicidal reactions to hypnotic signals, and Lewis thinks his tinfoil hat will block the insidious influence. For Transmission III: Escape From Terminus, Mya is reunited with lover Ben, and they struggle to make sense of the rationality-scrambling threat, which twists perception so it's difficult to surmise what's actual ‘reality’ here, and what's only in a character's head. A broken marriage as succinct allegory for complete social collapse ... horrific satire on slasher subgenre apocalypse ... straightforward but intriguing exploitation flick assured of cult status? Partly inspired by a student film project (included as an extra), this darkly witty shocker delivers plenty of anxious moments in its catalogue of madness—and a batch of Internet episodes inflate the drama—to explore related aspects and platform related incidents occurring elsewhere. It lacks the intelligence of Videodrome (1982) or the surrealist imagination of Kairo (aka: Pulse, 2001), but The Signal is a vicious, gripping psycho chiller and a must-see for any fans of those films.
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