Author: Arthur Martinez-Tebbel

Box Office Democracy: Alien: Covenant

I’m not entirely sure what I can ask of Ridley Scott at this point.  He’s made four or five honest-to-goodness classics and inspired an entire generation of science-fiction films.  He doesn’t owe me anything and I’ll watch just about anything he puts out because I have that kind of faith in him as a filmmaker.  He’s made a scary film with Alien: Covenant, but not one that I find particularly interesting.  Scott seems obsessed with giving me lore I don’t want instead of a higher concentration of scenes with scary aliens.

It’s impressive that they made the grossest Alien movie yet.  The one with the most visceral body horror.  They topped the terribleness of the chestburster in this one by making the alien birth process less discrete and more, for lack of a better word, fluid-y.  I don’t think it’s particularly worthwhile to discuss the particulars of the plot further.  There are scary aliens, some you’ll recognize and some you won’t, that chase a bunch of humans you never quite care about around a distant planet that is suspiciously earth-like.  This suspicion is both in the film and in the audience because it sure is cheaper to film in a planet that happens to be covered with plants from earth.  There are other things to be scared of, it isn’t important really as long as you find something in each scene potentially terrifying.  It definitely works as a horror movie; it will never be mistaken for a better Ridley Scott film.

Alien: Covenant is a movie carried by Michael Fassbender.  Playing a robot that struggles with showing emotion seems like a big challenge as an actor, and playing two that each have different motivations and different ways of hinting at their true intentions is just an incredible performance.  This prequel franchise is going to succeed or fail based on the audience willing to come and see more Alien-based horror, but artistically they’re inescapably linked to Fassbender at this point.  I wouldn’t go see the next one (and there shouldn’t be a next one but we’ll get there) without him.  He’s almost bigger than the Aliens at this point, even if I would kick him to the curb in a heartbeat for more Ripley.

The flaw in this movie is that I could not possibly care less about the origins of the Xenomoprhs.  I didn’t watch any other Alien movie thinking “if only we knew where these things came from” or anything like that.  Any explanation is going to make them less scary.  A bump in the dark is more scary than anything you could show on camera.  I won’t tell you the origins of the Xenomorphs, that would be cruel, but it’s not as good as whatever you had in your head, or even the non-explanation of “they’re just some terrifying aliens, those exist” that I had always assumed was the truth.  This is a movie answering a question I never asked and don’t care about what they have to tell me.

I wish I knew why they thought Alien prequels were more interesting than Alien sequels.  That what we want from a science-fiction horror franchise is less fantastical technology and more exposition.  I wonder if the whole Alien braintrust learned the wrong lesson from Resurrection and have decided they can’t move further in to the future.  I would rather watch an Alien without Weyland or synthetics or any of that rather than have more needless exposition shoveled on me.  That’s not what they’re making though so I have to make do with what we have— a legitimately scary movie with one tour de force performance and a fair amount of useless prattle.  Better than all the bad movies we’ll see this year full of useless prattle, I suppose.

Box Office Democracy: The Wall

I’m not sure what it would take for me to get solidly behind a war movie these days.  There’s certainly a fatigue component from the unending wars we seem to be fighting in real life, full of drama and heartbreak in their own kind.  It’s also very hard to get anything new out of the genre right now.  Perhaps because so many fantastic directors have made big important war movies, or maybe just because we seem to get three to five every year.  I would need either a fantastic take on the themes I’ve seen a thousand times (and I think you’re about to fall well short of that with Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan) or some fantastic new way of telling a story in the backdrop.  The Wall is an attempt at doing the latter; this is a horror/thriller movie set in the Iraqi desert, but it isn’t a good enough movie to get over my general distaste for the genre.

The Wall is not a complicated movie.  Two soldiers are in the Iraqi desert to investigate an attack and are ambushed by a sniper.  Staff Sergeant Shane Matthews (John Cena) is hit first and is incapacitated, and Sergeant Allen Isaac is shot in the leg and is trapped behind the eponymous wall.  The rest of the movie is mostly Sergeant Isaac talking to his assailant (Laith Nakli) over short-range radio while he devises numerous plans to stay alive, identify and locate his attacker, and try to escape.  It’s not the strongest plot in the world, but it’s only an 81 minute movie and it’s more than enough to make that time feel full.  It hits the necessary action beats, it has some unsatisfying twists which I’ll come back to, and it does what it can to find catharsis.

What the movie is missing is a coherent thesis statement.  For a short film it does an awful lot of bouncing around.  There’s a fair amount of assuring the audience that war is hell, but there’s not a person alive that hasn’t heard that a thousand times by now.  There’s a lot of dialogue about who is really the terrorist, the insurgent fighter or the invading army, but they undercut it pretty dramatically with the way in which the Iraqi sniper threatens to gouge out Isaac’s eyes or staple his tongue to his chest.  Ideology aside, I’m not looking to even entertain the idea of rooting for someone that wants to do that so there’s no incentive to look at both sides.  There’s a desperate last minute attempt on the part of the movie to perhaps assert that this was a movie about the way people deal with guilt and grief.  I could entertain that idea if it weren’t introduced in the last ten minutes of the film, that’s a little late to be telling me what the movie is actually about and seems more like a last ditch effort to seem important.

This isn’t a story that needed to be set in the Iraq War.  You could have set this in a city with only a couple changes.  It could be in the distant future or an awful lot of the earth’s past.  I kind of want to know why they decided to make it a movie about a modern war.  One of the twists late in the movie (and this is a spoiler and this is your spoiler warning and I hope you’ve stopped reading by now if this bothers you) is that the Iraqi sniper is using the information he gets from talking to Isaac to fake a distress call to command and he plans to ambush the rescue team, and he probably did the same to get Isaac and Matthews out here to begin with.  It turns the sniper from a troubled person who claims to feel forced by the circumstance of the war into a cold blooded serial killer in a snap.  It bucks the trend of the last 40 or so years of war movies, and instead of showing the adversaries as people fighting for country this man is undeniably evil and is killing for sport or pleasure.  If the whole movie were set up like this it would be one thing, but as a last minute reveal it works to dehumanize the enemy in a war we aren’t even fighting anymore.  It left me cold, I didn’t like it.

That said, I don’t think I was supposed to like it.  I’m not entirely confident who The Wall is made for but it isn’t me.  It’s violent and graphic in ways I’m not interested in seeing.  It’s a gritty war movie and I don’t need any more gritty war movies;  it’s not interested in deep or meaningful characters as it is in manipulative drama and shock moments.  It isn’t a movie for me, but it’s probably a movie for some.  There were two teenagers sitting behind me who seemed really into it.  They’ve probably seen a lot fewer war movies than I have.  Ironically, this movie about people who use fantastically precise weapons is a dull, blunt, instrument.

Box Office Democracy: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is an amazingly charming movie.  The characters they’ve constructed over these two movies are each a delight.  There’s an infectious camaraderie that makes it feel like it must be the best movie set to work on the there ever was.  The infectious joy and prodigious joke density easily carries a slightly disjointed script through the murky bits.  I don’t need everything to make sense or even be particularly important as long as I’m having fun and the rest of the theater is having fun.  There aren’t many movies more infectiously fun than Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

There are two separate stories being told in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. In one Star-Lord meets his father, Ego the Living Planet (Kurt Russell), and goes to his home planet (or his self? There’s nothing in the MLA rules about this) along with Gamora and Drax.  Why do Gamora and Drax come with him?  It would appear to balance the crew between the two stories because both of them barely interact with this story from the time they land on the planet until the third act.  In the other story, Rocket Racoon and Groot are captured by Ravagers and are going to be turned in for some sort of bounty involving stolen batteries.  This storyline is mostly about making baby Groot jokes and having people mistake Rocket for another kind of rodent.  It eventually hooks back up with the rest of the crew— not because it needs to, but more because they’re done.  These plots are not grand adventures in storytelling but rather a frame for character moments and jokes and they’re just fine for that, but I think they deserve to be called out for being a bit sparse.

The Guardians are such wonderfully distinct characters though.  Drax’s laugh is the glue that holds the first half of the movie together.  It isn’t what I thought would happen to the Drax character on the big screen, but he’s basically all comedy at this point with little action in sight.  Bradley Cooper is never going to get any recognition for this, but he’s doing fabulous work as Rocket.  He imbues a lot of humanity in to a character it would be so easy to not take seriously.  Rocket has a tearjerker of a line near the end that could easily fall flat.  The best scene in the whole film is between Gamora and Nebula talking about their familial relationship.  I never thought it would be believable to transition Nebula to the side of the Guardians after all the bad blood in the last movie and they accomplish it in three lines.  It’s the best scene between two women in any Marvel movie and I understand I’m not setting a particularly high bar.  It’s high now.

James Gunn has made a great looking movie.  There are so many shots with so much going on and they’re especially fun to take in in 3D.  There’s this concerted effort to have stuff going on in the background of shots and it’s a great way to sneak stuff in.  It looks an awful lot like a 1970s cosmic comic book.  I wouldn’t say Kirby-esque, I think we’re too liberal with Kirby-esque, it doesn’t look like Jack Kirby drew it but it looks an awful lot like Walter Simonson and that’s no slight.  The sequence that caps off the Rocket Racoon plot is the best of the whole film, it’s a great bit of elaborate camera work and fun violence.  The climax of the main plot is a little less impressive if only because there are a lot of supposed to be dramatic moments of people facing down grey goo.  Grey goo is not that scary.

Go see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.  It’s a great time.  Get a big popcorn and a smaller drink (it’s a very long movie) and just enjoy being in an air conditioned room with other people having a good time.  My wife remarked that the emphasis on family and reforming some former adversaries makes this Guardians feel like a step toward transitioning to a sort of Fast & Furious in space thing. I agree, and there’s nothing I would rather see from Marvel than something that leans so in to that kind of joy and absurdity.  I hope they can do it.

Box Office Democracy: Sleight

I remember once hearing Peter Bagge say that he regretted naming his comic book Hate because critics couldn’t resist headlines like “I Hate Hate” or something in that vein.  I wish the producers of Sleight had heard that same thing because I can’t help myself but say that Sleight is, well, kind of slight.  For a movie about magic tricks, gang violence, and subdermal electromagnets, there just isn’t that much going on.  Sometimes that’s great and it reads as a nice little slice of life movie with some fantastic elements on the fringe; other times you can just sort of see where the effects budget ran out.  Sleight is a good movie for $250,000 but I can’t help but pine for the version that cost a few million.

I appreciate that Sleight is trying to tell a smaller story, honestly I do.  I like that it’s a simpler story of a young man trying to make ends meet for his family while chasing a dream and meeting a girl.  It’s refreshing to have some trappings of a superhero movies but without having to have the entire fate of the world at stake.  Not every movie has to be The Fate of the Furious or The Avengers to be successful.

I would appreciate it more if I didn’t see budget constraints as the reasons for narrative problems.  The hero of this story, Bo (Jacob Latimore), spends this movie in mortal terror of a criminal enterprise that consists of only three people.  You can’t tell me that isn’t about not wanting to pay more actors.  You could get away from a three-person criminal organization by moving two or three cities away.  That’s not plausible for someone struggling to make ends meet, but it seems like the best possible option when you’ve raised $40k in money to pay them off.  Rather than spend days fretting about getting the last bit of money just use that money to get well clear of the world’s smallest drug gang.  This is a nitpick, but things like this loom over the film.  A lot of stuff happens off camera or is otherwise obscured from the audience not because it makes for a more compelling story but because they couldn’t afford to shoot it.

Sleight makes me consider what makes something a movie.  I don’t think there needs to be some sort of minimum amount of spectacle for something to be a feature film.  I’ve happily watched movies that were basically just sets of conversations.  Sleight feels like it could be a TV show with no real changes.  Hell, it might be better as an ongoing series because everything would have more of a chance to breathe.  I can’t put my finger on the thing that makes it not feel like a movie, but there’s something that isn’t in Sleight.

I feel like I’m being a bit relentless with hitting Sleight for looking cheap and that might be unfair, but it was all that was holding the movie back.  It’s a completely charming film that I would absolutely see a sequel to if that’s how this is going to go (how could a film not make back a budget of $250,000).  I also think it’s a great idea for a TV show ,but maybe that’s more of a commentary on the effects than some unique call from this story.  Sleight would be the best episode of Black Mirror I’ve ever seen.  It just doesn’t quite feel big enough to be a feature film.

Box Office Democracy: “Free Fire”

Something hit me like a bolt from the blue during the third act of Free Fire: I am all the way over nihilistic action movies.  I don’t want to watch movies full of people who don’t care about anything commit violence against each other anymore.  In my teens and twenties this felt ok; that it was worth it to explore the space of cinematic violence.  Either we’ve completely explored that space or I’ve aged out of it or maybe Free Fire is just a particularly bad example of the form, but I can’t stand for it anymore.  I need my action movies to have people who care about things in them and those things can’t be violence for the sake of violence or money.  I need more than that.

Free Fire is about an arms deal that goes bad and that’s the entire plot.  We spend the first 20 minutes getting to know the 10 principal characters, and then spend 70 minutes watching them shoot at each other in a warehouse.  There are only two moments I would consider plot or character development after the shooting starts, and so we just get sequence after sequence of people mostly futilely shooting at each other.  There are no grand twists or revelations just an escalation of carnage.  Anyone that’s been to more than ten movies in their life could probably guess who “wins” from the trailer.  I kept waiting for some kind of escalation or turn and it never comes— we just get people crouching in the dirt until they run out of time.

I expected to come home and do my preliminary research for this review and discover the movie was based off of a novella or something.  It would be a fine novella, all of the characters could have internal lives and explored backstories.  It’s not often I come home from a movie wishing for more exposition or more navel-gazing, but here we are.

I don’t know what else there is to say about a movie that I reject so completely as a story.  The acting is fine.  Brie Larson is always fun to watch but she’s asked to do very little here.  Cillian Murphy is pretty good but I wish he reached in to his bag of expressions and came back with something that wasn’t “handsome pensive” a couple times.  Sharlto Copely gives a completely off-the-wall performance that I can’t decide if it’s brilliant or just completely random, but it’s probably at least 70/30 in favor of the former.  I’m not entirely sure why the movie needed to be set in the 70s other than some whimsical wardrobe choices, but it’s kind of fun seeing people dressed like that and I chuckled the first time I saw someone put in an 8-track tape.  It’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel when you’re giving a movie credit for using antiquated audio technology.

I’m honestly not sure if Free Fire is as bad as I’m making it sound.  Perhaps ten years ago I would have seen this and spent the next week gushing about it to anyone who would listen.  It’s neither offensive nor spectacular in its failures such that I could imagine no reasonable person liking it.  It’s just a bland film that never seems to aspire to be an interesting film.  Free Fire is a movie that might have seemed like a revelation in a world where Reservoir Dogs didn’t exist and we hadn’t been seeing movies inspired by it for the last quarter of a century.  But Reservoir Dogs does exist, and so I can’t see what use Free Fire has at all.

Box Office Democracy: The Fate of the Furious

Box Office Democracy: The Fate of the Furious

I don’t believe in objective reviews of media.  I think the personal subjectivity of the reviewer is impossible to remove and, honestly, that it would be boring if you could.  That said, I am not capable of being remotely objective when it comes to the Fast & Furious franchise.  I find the formula they have stumbled upon since Fast Five to be unbelievably charming and I can’t separate the movie from the joy they’ve brought in to my life and the friendships these movies have enriched.  If this bothers you, I can give you the low down on how I feel about this movie and you can be on your way: if you’ve liked any of the last three entries in the franchise you’ll like this one, and if you didn’t this will not change your mind.  If my F&F obsession does not bother you, come on and let me geek out a little bit.

If you’ve seen the trailer you know the hook for The Fate of the Furious: Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) has turned against his crew, his family, and is now working for the super hacker Cipher (Charlize Theron).  That’s sort of the whole film.  Cipher has a nefarious plan but it’s very nebulous.  She wants nuclear weapons and she wants to launch one, but I’m not sure what she wants to do after that.  It all feels hastily thrown together so we can get the shots of Dom in his evil black jumpsuit driving a more evil-looking black Challenger.  That’s all fine, the plot is only there to hold top the action sequences— but this feels less substantial than usual.  There’s also the idea that Cipher would blackmail someone who has pulled off some of the zaniest heists and car chases in history but only uses him as a glorified bag man that rubbed me the wrong way— but again it’s all about big action sequences and meaningful glances, so whatever.

There are two signature action pieces in The Fate of the Furious and they’re the most important thing to judge the movie by.  There’s a big second act set piece in New York where Cipher hacks a bunch of cars and controls them remotely as a big swarm to take out a motorcade.  This is a visually interesting bit but it might finally be the moment where a Fast & Furious movie got too far out there for me.  I know cars don’t work like that.  More importantly, it doesn’t feature any characters we care about so it’s literally just cars smashing in to each other with no purpose.  The sequence picks up a lot when it becomes about Dom and the rest of the crew, but by that point you’re kind of tired of action.  The movie’s climax is a race across a frozen bay to stop a submarine while being chased by cars firing missiles.  I know I said self-driving cars were straining my suspension of disbelief earlier in this very paragraph, but I loved every ridiculous second of this sequence.  It feels a little like they’re trying to top the tank sequence from Fast & Furious 6 by using a bigger more menacing piece of military hardware and it doesn’t live up to it, maybe nothing ever could, but it’s great in its own right.

Fast Five was a heist movie with all the wonderful twists and turns inherent in the genre, and in the two films since they’ve abandoned that to make straight-up action movies.  While they haven’t gone back to stealing giant safes, they have returned to meaningful third act twists and I’m so thankful for it.  There’s so many things we find out were slightly different than the first time we saw them, and it’s what these movies need to not just be an endless parade of flashy car tricks.  It needs characters, it needs stakes, and it needs to be just a little bit surprising.

Reading this back, I can see how much I’m grading The Fate of the Furious on a curve.  If this was any other movie with the flaws this one has I would probably be here tearing it apart and begging you not to see it.  I love this franchise, I love these characters, and I can’t set that aside.  There are so many little things to appreciate from an eight movie franchise that can’t be replicated.  It’s nice just to hang out with these characters and exist in their world for another couple hours.  It’s fun to pick up on the callbacks and see them pick up threads that were set down years and years ago.  I still find The Fate of the Furious as refreshing as a Corona on a hot LA afternoon— and as long as that’s true, I’ll carry water for these movies.

Box Office Democracy: Gifted

I feel like I never see movies like Gifted anymore.  Gifted is a smaller movie, almost completely devoid of the spectacle that snobs complain about in modern cinema.  It’s as anonymous a movie as one can get from the director of The Amazing Spider-Man franchise, the star of Captain America and Octavia Spencer.  It’s funny when it wants to be, touching when it tries it’s absolute hardest, and if you’re willing to suspend an ample amount of disbelief there’s a heartwarming message to be found here.

There’s a reasonably famous book on screenwriting called Save the Cat.  It’s a guide to crafting marketable scripts, there’s good advice in there, and it sold a ton of copies.  The title refers to the need to have your main character do something early in the film to get the audience on their side; something like saving a cat.  I’m telling you this because in the first scene of Gifted we are introduced to Fred, the one-eyed cat who was adopted by Frank the protagonist of this film (Chris Evans).  He assures his niece Mary (Mckenna Grace) that while he doesn’t generally like cats, he likes this one.  It’s such a transparent use of this trope that was the title for this wildly successful screenwriting book that this is either an insane coincidence or a stunning lack of self-awareness on the part of the writer. (I know this probably won’t occur to 95% of the viewing audience who have never read any books on how to write a screenplay but it was distracting for me.)

Other than the whole cat bit (which also comes back in the third act for extra emotional stakes but I said I was moving on) the story is suitably interesting.  Mary goes to her first day of school and is clearly a prodigy, and through her being a precocious scamp who is good at math and beating the hell out of children twice her age she gets the attention of her grandmother Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan) who does not like Frank.  A custody battle ensues, and the crux of the film is if Mary should be allowed to have a “normal” life or if she should be pushed to be the mathematical whiz her mother was and that she seems to have the potential to be.  It’s kind of interesting that this film just assumes that mathematical aptitude is some kind of hereditary trait that was passed through three generations.  I could see that an overbearing mother like Evelyn could make her daughter in to a mathematician through constant effort but I’m not sure how Mary, orphaned as a young child and raised by smart but not genius Frank, is on the same level.  I suppose it isn’t exactly the point but it’s a weird universe to assume.

A lot of the movie is tied up in this custody battle and I like a good courtroom scene as much as the next person, but the real joy in the movie is away from all of that.  The scenes with Octavia Spencer as Roberta, the next-door neighbor, and Jenny Slate as Bonnie, Mary’s first grade teacher, are universally the best ones.  Chris Evans is great at trading barbs with his inexplicably British mother but I’d much rather see him having quasi-meaningful conversations with Jenny Slate.  This is the first dramatic role I can remember for Slate, and while she might not be the second coming of Meryl Streep she’s fun and interesting— and most importantly, a breath of fresh air for a part that sometimes feels like it cycles between the same six actresses over and over again.  Octavia Spencer is a delight in everything she does; I don’t feel compelled to sell anyone on her.  Spencer has a small part here, but she talks the most like a real person and that’s worth a lot.

Gifted is a fun movie.  It’s nice to see Evans and Slate playing against type.  It’s a heartwarming story that never twists itself in to being a downer.  I sort of wish that the end result of all of Frank’s handwringing about whether he’s going to screw up Mary’s life was answered by someone telling him that he will definitely screw up and it will definitely be okay because that’s what parenting is.  That isn’t what this movie is though, and it’s okay.  I liked watching Gifted and I would be absolutely thrilled to stumble upon it again on cable on a slow afternoon or on an airplane, it’s the perfect movie for those contexts.

Box Office Democracy: Ghost in the Shell

Scarlett Johansson in Ghost In The Shell

I’m sort of curious why Dreamworks even wanted to pay for the rights to make a Ghost in the Shell movie if they weren’t particularly interested in doing anything with the property they acquired. They seemed interested in making a cyberpunk movie, a cyberpunk movie about a badass lady android with some identity issues. I’m pretty sure you could just make an original one of those, no one owns cyberpunk or androids.  If you’re going to pay for a beloved property you could try and tell a story they’ve already told, or at the very least not one that’s just like one they’ve told but much simpler and with a healthy dose of cliche.  I don’t understand why you would buy a Japanese franchise and decide that you only want the Japanese-ness to be set dressing.  If this was an original property it would be a dull movie with a draggy second act; as Ghost in the Shell it’s a colossal failure.

For the movie adaptation they decided to make Ghost in the Shell an awful lot like Blade II. The Major is the first of her kind and her special forces team needs to take out a mysterious terrorist who turns out to be a failed attempt to create the same thing that The Major is.  if you replace “terrorist” with “vampire” and “The Major” with “Blade” that is a perfectly apt description of Blade II.  I happen to believe that Blade II is a terribly under-appreciated movie; it isn’t because it has the world’s most compelling plot.  In things it does worse than Blade II the bad guy i always talking about having his own neural network and there’s a location with a bunch of what look like religious types plugged in to some machines but they never even attempt to define any of that stuff.  It appears to be an artifact from when the plot more closely resembled the animated movie from the 90s and they didn’t want to throw away any of the imagery.

There’s some fantastic visual design in this movie.  The city sequences look a little like Blade Runner turned way way up.  There are these recurring holographic fish through the advertising in the movie, and there’s a certain sense of high tech whimsy inherent in seeing insubstantial fish float all over the place.  There’s a sequence where the robot design becomes absolutely chilling as a robot clearly designed to appear normal and non-threatening becomes less and less tethered to human form as it experiences more and more distress, showing off the horror of inhumanity.  I also enjoyed the cloaking device effect when they let it shimmer and fade and much less when it felt like an excuse to not actually film some action sequence or another.  It’s also an exceptionally well scored movie if you’re as into this vaguely pulsating cyberpunk-style of music as I am.

None of this is super important though, because the biggest problem with Ghost in the Shell is that it’s profoundly racist.  The central plot is all about how to make the next step in human evolution the brains have to be taken out of Japanese people and put in to more perfect robotic bodies, robotic bodies that happen to be Caucasian.  Despite taking place in a clearly Asian city (filmed in Hong Kong but seemingly trying to invoke Tokyo) none of the starring roles are played by Asian people.  There are two Asians in Section Nine but neither has an incredible number of lines.  The evil corporation is seemingly exclusively staffed by white people.  It’s like Dreamworks wanted the Japaneseness of the story but didn’t want to use any Japanese people as anything but small parts and set dressing.  Asian writing can be in the background, Asian people can be the majority of the extras, but if anyone needs to do a bunch of talking this movie would just prefer if they were white.

Ghost in the Shell would be a bad movie even if it had perfect racial politics, but instead it gets dragged down in to being a dreadful slog of a movie.  It’s poorly paced, the action sequences run hot and cold, and there’s just too much unexplained nonsense to let the movie work even at all.  This is a movie that will look great on the resume of a visual effects artist and everyone else will spend the rest of their careers trying to gloss over it.  Ghost in the Shell is a lousy movie and a repugnant adaptation of a beloved property.

Box Office Democracy: “Life”

Life is a fine movie.  It’s reasonably well-acted, the creature effects are stunning, and the script has enough twists and turns to keep the audience on its toes.  Unfortunately, Life is a monster movie set in a confined area in outer space— and while that’s a remarkably specific genre, it contains some titanic movies.  Life is a good movie; Alien is a timeless classic.  It’s not entirely fair to make Life stand against a movie like that but it was all I could think of while I was watching it.  Life begs to be compared to movies it withers against, and while I struggle to say an entire genre/setting is out of bounds, you should probably come with something that makes your movie undeniably special and not just an attempt to be incrementally better than the last horror movie they saw.

There’s a bit of a pacing problem in Life— although one that is kind of unavoidable in a movie like this.  Once the monster is on the loose it moves along nicely but it feels like forever until we get to that point.  Most of the first hour is gone before anything happens, and if we were building a deep understanding of the characters and their relationships it would feel just fine, but instead it just seems like the movie wants to go over the exposition two or three times.  I promise you: I understand that this alien is very strong and very adaptable.  That’s literally every science fiction alien that isn’t going for the War of the Worlds twist.

They have made a very scary alien though.  They stress (over and over) that the creature is infinitely adaptable, that every cell is a muscle, a brain, and an eye, and it gives them an impressive latitude to make the creature more terrifying every time we see it.  It starts as an amorphous blob and gets more and more defined as it gets bigger until it looks an awful lot like the horrifying cross between a dragon and a Rorschach blot.  I will say that for a creature that allegedly has vision capacity in every cell it definitely developed a traditional earth-like face and head, but honestly what do I know about Martian zoology?

Considering how long we have to get to the action it’s borderline outrageous that the characters never feel like more than rough sketches. We have the brash American, the stalwart business-like Russian commander, the British scientist who can’t see past the academic worth of the discovery, the Japanese man torn between the responsibilities of his job and his newborn daughter, the medic who has set the record for longest time in space and sees his home as being in orbit and not on the planet, and the quarantine officer with questionable allegiances.  That’s all the character anyone in this movie shows. It’s not like there aren’t good actors here, but there’s no depth to play.  We’re at the climax of the film and none of the decisions seem based on information that wasn’t in the first 20 minutes.  No one grows and no one changes except from living person to alien food.

If you just want to be scared in a movie theater for an hour and 45 minutes, then there’s honestly nothing wrong with Life, it’s got a great sense of tension and some original creature and effects work.  In the last month or so we’ve seen Get Out and Kong: Skull Island release and both are in the same general zone, and both blow Life out of the water.  Get Out is a smarter, more chilling intimate character piece and Kong is vastly superior at pumping out big spectacle.  There’s no space for Life in this cinematic climate and honesty, with the exception of just being dumped in the doldrum months I can’t imagine a time when Life would stand out.  It’s a fantastic movie to discover some random evening on HBO and a mediocre use of one’s time in a theater.

Box Office Democracy: The Belko Experiment

I saw two different kinds of ads for The Belko Experiment before it came out.  There were ads that were pitching it as a more or less straight up horror movie, and then there were ads that were selling it as a kind of comedy-horror hybrid.  It used a quote from an early review saying it was “Office Space meets Battle Royale” and while that’s a fine thing for a critic to say in a review as a shorthand to explain the movie, as an advertisement it’s completely inadequate.  The Belko Experiment isn’t funny and 99% of the time doesn’t even seem to be trying to be funny.  It’s more like Battle Royale meets a tall building or Battle Royale meets Die Hard if you want to just completely ignore anything that made Die Hard a good movie and just want to focus on the general aesthetic of the sets.

The titular experiment in Belko is: they seal an office building up and demand that the inhabitants kill each other in escalating quotas.  If you’ve ever seen any movie before, you can probably get from here to the end of the story.  There’s an everyman main character, a love interest, an antagonistic coworker, a friend coworker, a boss, and a bunch of nameless drones (allegedly 75 other office workers, but I would be absolutely floored if they had 80 actors in this movie).  The beats are all telegraphed, and there are no surprises bigger than something you knew was going to happen happening a few moments before you expected it.  This is a shockingly mundane affair for a movie with so much bloodshed.  There’s supposed to be some grand moral conflict here but it never gets off the ground; at best it’s like having the movie read you the Cliff’s Notes of Lord of the Flies.

I’m a bit of a baby when it comes to horror movies, so when I tell you that The Belko Experiment didn’t scare me at all I want you to understand what a low bar that was to limbo under.  Perhaps I’ve just been too desensitized to violence over the year but sudden violence is all this film has— and while I don’t love looking at gore, it isn’t inherently scary.  There’s very little tension events just sort of smoothly follow each other.  There’s no doubt in the outcome (although I suppose I never watch a slasher movie expecting the killer to win, those can still be scary) and so the audience is left watching the movie go from scene to scene checking off boxes until the finale can start.  The marketing for this film couldn’t wait to tell you that this was a James Gunn script, but left out that it was one from seven years ago that he didn’t think was strong enough to make on his own. The Belko Experiment needed two more drafts and a compelling antagonist to be even close to a competent horror movie.

The real shame is that John C. McGinley gets a stunning star turn in a movie that no one will remember in five years.  I doubt anyone who has really paid attention to his career is surprised that McGinley has the chops to steal a movie from a cast full of TV actors and marginal film stars, but he runs away with every scene he’s in.  He’s given a wide berth and no specific tethers to any sort of reality after the first ten minutes.  He’s the closest this movie has to the Joker— which is to say not particularly close, but a shining star compared to the dull surroundings.

The Belko Experiment is a Blumhouse film, and I think that explains a lot of what’s wrong with it.  It’s clearly made on a shoestring budget, and it very clearly doesn’t have the passionate backing of a big studio behind it.  What I don’t get is how this movie got put in to theaters instead of straight to digital.  This is an okay movie for $5 on iTunes or as part of Netflix or however the other Blumhouse movies get out there.  Nothing about The Belko Experiment feels like it has the polish of a feature film except the name James Gunn in the opening credits.

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