The Road (2009) – the road in bleak dystopia

The Road (2009) directed by John Hillcoat is based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same title. This is a post-apocalyptic tale of hope and survival near to the bone where life is sweetest, to paraphrase Thoreau. I’m a huge McCarthy fan, which raises the stakes on the what I hope for from the movie, and I know that’s all kinds of foolish and overly optimistic. In this case, though, the movie delivers well enough.

The father is played by an exceedingly thin and haggard-looking Viggo Mortensen and the Boy by Kodi Smit-McPhee. Because these two are the main protagonists a lot rides on the report between them and it works surprisingly well. One of the main themes of this particular story is the love a father has for his son, the lengths he’s willing to go to to keep him alive and safe. Another theme is how to keep your humanity in a world where rape and cannibalism are real options for survival.

The father and the boy leave their home to travel south in a world where everything has died and the temperature keeps dropping. The animals are gone, the vegetation is dying and the sky is darkened by huge ominous clouds. Not only do the survivors have to worry about scavenging humans, they also have to try and stay alive through bitter cold, earthquakes, wildfires and falling trees. No explanations are given as to what actually happened, but it doesn’t really matter. The uncertainty adds to the sense of overall vulnerability of the few survivors that are still “carrying the fire” and trying to be good guys.

The boy’s mother (Charlize Theron) opts out before the man and the boy leave their home to go south. She simply can’t handle it anymore, something the viewer is showed in flashbacks. She does not want to just survive, so instead she walks away, literally. She takes off her hat and coat and heads out into the freezing night, committing suicide by simply giving up. The father can’t follow her, because of the boy, but the threat of murder/suicide looms large over the pair symbolized by a revolver with only two remaining bullets. Death is still better than being raped and eaten and the gun is kept as a kind of talisman to ward off a fate worse than death.

The wondrous thing about all this, no matter how bleak the circumstance, how hostile the environment, is that there are moments of light and hope, like when the pair find a survival shelter full of supplies when they are right at the brink of death by starvation. Every single human being they encounter is a potential threat, though, and that adds to the oppressive mood. On the road they meet many bad people who are trying to kill and eat them, but they also meet an old man (Robert Duvall) who is merely trying to stay alive.

There is also other things to contend with, like the fact that the father starts coughing and keeps getting progressively more ill as they travel on. There is the distinct sense that he only keeps himself alive to keep the boy alive and in that way the boy becomes a symbol for his hope for humanity. It’s all very grim, but the relationship between the boy and the father is still depicted as loving and above all profoundly important as a means of how to stay human, and keep some humanity intact.

This is not a hugely sentimental tale. The dialogue is restrained, the landscape viciously bleak, the characters constantly dwarfed by the mere scale of the devastation and the interaction between them is tinted by that. The only scenes given richness of texture and color and warmth are the dream sequences showing what life was like for the father and mother before the event. They are a startling contrast and serve mostly to exacerbate the horror of the now. They also act as a reminder that the boy was born after disaster struck and therefore has no idea of what life was like before.

The devotion between the father and son is sincere, but there’s no doubt that the father is moribund. The main question seems to be how to retain your humanity when faced with overwhelming odds and how to go on after disaster has struck. All McCarthy’s novels are deeply language driven and The Road is no exception, spare to the point of terseness. It’s difficult to translate that into moving images and not lose something vital, though this does a decent job of that. The color desaturation and the choice of locations, it all helps to give the scale of the destruction. This tale also ends on a strangely hopeful note, in a way. It’s not that anyone is going to live happily ever after, but more that life will go on as long as there are those that are “carrying the fire”. Sometimes that is really the best you can hope for.

All in all this is well worth watching, but it’s not easy fare and it’s not supposed to be, which you are well aware of if you’re familiar with the unrelenting nature of McCarthy’s fiction.

You’ll find what I thought of the book here;

http://librarianmule.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/on-the-road-in-dystopia/

Mule

Article first published as Movie Review: The Road (2009) on Blogcritics.

Stake Land Review

Just to change things up a little…

My latest review of the vampire movie Stake Land (2010) by Jim Mickle can be found and read at Cinema Sentries.

Check it out here:

http://cinemasentries.com/

Teaser:

In a parallel and immediate now, disaster strikes and a pandemic hits the world. Vampires take over, for any given value of that when they actually don’t retain any higher brain function other than the basic predator-feeding instinct. That does not mean they are not extremely dangerous, because they certainly are.

Mule

Pandorum (2009) – In Space No One Can Hear You… No, Wait, Wrong Movie

Article first published as Movie Review: Pandorum- In Space No One Can Hear You… No, Wait, Wrong Movie on Blogcritics.

In Pandorum (2009) Bower (Ben Foster) one of the crew members of the Elysium wakes up from his hypersleep only to find that the ship does not seem to be in very good shape. There are no lights, no other crew and no welcoming committee. The initial scene is surprisingly painful to watch, more like a birth than a peaceful awakening. It is clear that Bower does not remember where he is, or why, but all his technical knowledge and his mission specific skills are intact. Shortly after Bower’s awakening another crew member, Payton (Dennis Quaid) wakes up to the same confusion.

They set about trying to contact their superiors, figuring out where they are and what’s gone wrong with the ship. It’s not as easy as it seems.
Elysium is overrun with vaguely humanoid carnivores that may have started out human, but have now evolved into something more primal. They hunt in packs and they more or less have the run of the ship. Their favoured prey is the newly awoken crew members that emerge from their sleeping pods and summarily get eaten. There are still bigger problems, though. First of all, the reactor is acting up and needs to be manually restarted. Secondly, the ship has received a transmission that Earth is done, gone and over, and the ships crew is all there is left of mankind. Thirdly, there’s a space sickness called Pandorum which affects those that have been in suspended animation for too long. Or those that have been in space for too long. It starts as the shakes and graduates into full-blown paranoia and violent tendencies.

Elysium was on its way to Tanis, the only habitable planet in reasonable reach, when it launched and now there’s literally no way of telling where she is or if she’s just lost in deep space. Bower sets out for the bridge to try and open the door to the room he and Payton find themselves in when they wake up. The monsters roaming the hallways try to eat Bower a couple of times until he forms a tentative alliance with Nadia (Antje Traue) and Manh (Cung Le) a couple of crew members that have been awake for a while and managed to stay alive. Restarting the reactor becomes a more pressing matter half-way through this little jaunt.

In the end it turns out things are even more complicated than that, of course. The maneaters are probably a result of genetic enhancement meant to help the crew in their biological transition to their new home planet. The ship is run by a madman, one of the officers present when Earth’s last transmission was received, and a victim of Pandorum. Or maybe just megalomania, who knows? The ship is where it was supposed to be and not where is was supposed to be at the same time, meanwhile; this viewer is mostly going “huh?”at this point.

The environment is atmospheric, I will give it that. The mise-en-scene is darkly gorgeous. I like The Elysium, in all it’s gloomy, overrun, beleaguered and begrimed glory. It’s not one of those pristine, white and shiny ships, which I like. There’s an impressive sense of scale to it, too, without it losing its claustrophobia. The monsters mostly leave me indifferent. They’re fast and vicious, but the actual hunting and fighting feels a little too much like a computer game for me to invest too much in it. You can probably argue that gravity is different on board a spaceship, but still.

Both Ben Foster’s and Dennis Quaid’s performances are surprisingly layered and played straight, which definitely lends this the gravitas it needs not to descend into complete pulp fiction. The movie is ambitious, but maybe that is part of the problem. It wants to scare the viewer with dark things hunting the hero through long, dimly lit corridors, supply a creeping psychological horror and question the way memory works and the effects of long distance space travel. It’s a veritable cornucopia of fears to tap into, claustrophobia, loneliness, alienation, memory loss, fear of the dark and the things in the dark that can eat you, what we are reduced to when pushed to extremes, cannibalism… The overall effect is surprisingly un-frightening, though. There are better movies in this genre, like the Alien-movies, Solaris, Sunshine, 2001: A Space Odyssey just to mention a few obvious ones.
This is still good enough to merit a viewing, but it isn’t all it could have been if it had sharpened its focus a little and not tried to overreach itself.

Pandorum (2009) directed by Christian Alvart stars Ben Foster (Bower), Dennis Quaid (Payton), Cam Gigandet (Gallo), Antje Traue (Nadia), Cung Le (Manh), Eddie Rouse (Leland), Norman Reedus (Shephard), André Hennicke (Hunter Leader), Friederike Kempter (Evalon), Niels-Bruno Schmidt (Officer).

Legion – Angels Are Watching Over You… Sort Of

Article first published as Movie Review Legion – Angels Are Watching Over You…Sort Of on Blogcritics.

Legion (2010) is a horror flick with some pretensions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, it generally ensures that you can forgive minor grains of sand that could otherwise be irritating. In a truck stop in the Mohave desert a mismatched group of people seem to be gathering by coincidence. There’s the reluctantly pregnant girl Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid) and his son Jeep (Lucas Black) who own the place, Kyle Williams (Tyrese Gibson) who only stops for directions and the use of a phone, Percy Walker (Charles S. Dutton) the short order cook and the Anderson family, Howard (Jon Tenney) and Sandra (Kate Walsh) and their slightly rebellious daughter Audrey (Willa Holland).

When the television stops working and the phones die any seasoned horror movie watcher knows that something bad is coming. The first sign of how bad the bad thing that’s coming really is becomes obvious when the little old lady Gladys (Jeanette Miller) comes though the door with her walker and proceeds to smile beneficently at the gathering before she suddenly takes a bite out of Howard’s neck and then scales the wall like an insect.
Seconds later the extremely soft spoken and together Michael (Paul Bettany) shows up in a stolen police car with an armoury in the trunk and proceeds to proclaim that the end is nigh. Literally.

It turns out that Charlie’s unborn child is the only hope of all of mankind and that Michael is there to make sure that the child survives. The bad things that are coming are sent by God himself to wipe humanity out, a sort of etch-a-sketch approach to what ails the world. The archangel has actually gone against orders and come to our aid. Wave after wave of people possessed by angels attack the diner and decimate the survivors within until finally Michael’s equal, Gabriel (Kevin Durand) comes to put an end to the disobedience. By then Charlie has had the baby, so the morality of the whole thing has changed.

There are many little moments in this movie that really shine. Most of them have Paul Bettany in them. He speaks so softly and so convincingly, and he kicks some righteous behind in a way I, for one, really enjoyed. I’ve not seen him do action like this before, but he certainly has the physical presence for it. Adrianne Palicki gives a very good performance as the big-bellied Charlie, still smoking when she’s nine months pregnant, which is upsetting enough to watch in and of itself. Lucas Black does a very good job of portraying the steadfast Jeep who is actually good enough in his own way that he has managed to help Michael retain his faith in mankind as a whole, and Dennis Quaid is really a spectacularly good down-on-his-luck loser with something like a heart of gold, even when he falls asleep on the job.

All that being said, there is grit in the stew here. The director Scott Charles Stewart started his career in special effect and you can tell. There is a certain emphasis on the effects side of things, a certain love for some of the bad guys, like The Ice Cream Man (Doug Jones), and explosions and weapons and spectacular fight scenes, not that I don’t enjoy that, I do. The problem is, some things feel much too familiar, like the final scene of the movie that any fan of The Terminator will instantly clock on to. You can call that a homage, if you like, it’s certainly too explicit to be incidental. There is also hints and allusions to other general lore, of course, but for some reason the end result is just not more than the sum total of its parts, which is unfortunate. There is a lot of exposition, which allows the actors to shine, each in their own little moment, but which does not add anything to the overall story. It feels disjointed in an odd, rambling way. It also feels like the director/script writer doesn’t trust the audience to believe the motivation driving the characters to act the way they do.

The problem is that too much explanation is just as bad as not enough. The pacing is awkward, to say the least. Building suspense is not an easy thing and you really have to keep your finger on the button to be able to create the kind of unease that the waiting between attacks needs to have in order for the viewer to feel unsettled. That never really works here.

There is also the fine line between horror and splatter, one inducing the kind of creeping dread that has you on the edge of your seat and the latter just making you go “eeew” and there are a few instances of that here too, where horror would have been preferable.

It’s not a bad first effort, but it feels squandered when it could have been so much more considering the cast and the general idea.

Legion (2010) directed by Scott Charles Stewart stars Paul Bettany (Michael), Lucas Black (Jeep Hanson), Tyrese Gibson (Kyle Williams), Adrianne Palicki (Charlie), Charles S. Dutton (Percy Walker), Jon Tenney (Howard Anderson), Kate Walsh (Sandra Anderson), Willa Holland (Audrey Anderson), Dennis Quaid (Bob Hanson), Kevin Durand (Gabriel), Doug Jones (Ice Cream Man) and Jeanette Miller (Gladys).