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).

Repo Men – Because you owe it to yourself…and your family

Article first published as Movie Review Repo Men Because you owe it to yourself … and your family on Blogcritics.

In a not too distant future you can buy yourself a new artificial organ from The Union if you have the funds. And if you don’t then you can make a payment plan. Sounds like a good idea, and like the salesman Frank (Liev Schreiber) tells you “you owe it to yourself… and to your family”. The downside is that if you can’t make your payments your artificial heart, liver, pancreas or what have you, will be repossessed if you fall behind more than three months. The repo men are required to ask if you would like to have an ambulance standing by but, honestly, that’s merely for forms sake. More often than not they don’t seem to bother asking until the client is already unconscious.

Remy (Jude Law) is one of the most successful repo men at Union. He and his pal Jake (Forest Whitaker) are very good at what they do. Remy and Jake are cheerfully sociopathic about their jobs. They have a shared background that goes all the way back to school, and then through their military careers onto their work for The Union. They seem to be two peas in a pod, which gives us some motivation for Jake’s actions. Remy balances this very down-and-dirty job with a reasonably normal home life with his wife Carol (Carice van Houten) and their son Peter (Chandler Canterbury). It quite quickly becomes obvious that Remy’s job is a point of contention between him and his wife and she demands that he make a choice between his job and his family. He chooses work. Remy and Jake have this reoccurring line between them “a job is a job”. One point you can make here, just as Remy eventually does, is that a job is not just a job.

On a routine repo Remy goes after T-Bone (RZA), a musician he admires, to get back a heart. When he goes to use the de fibrillation pads the wires are faulty and he shorts himself out by mistake. When he next wakes up he has been given a replacement heart and winds up in debt to The Union. It is one of those “I owe my soul to the company store”-kind of deals. With his new artificial heart he also gets a quickening of his conscience, which creates problems. He can no longer make the move into sales, like he has planned in order to win his wife and son back, and he can’t really repo anymore. He is actually less heartless with an artificial heart than he was with his organic heart. There’s some irony there. Before Remy knows it he is on the run from his former employee and all his former colleagues.

Repo Men has a lot going on. There are themes of familial obligation as opposed to work, friendship, trust and betrayal, love and money.
Forest Whitaker always surprises me as an action star, though why I can really say. Something about his body language says “gentle giant” until he starts actually fighting, but when he does close hand-to-hand combat I find him fully believable.

There’s a level of futuristic architecture reminiscent of Blade Runner, and I now that parallel is easy to make with pretty much any futuristic cityscape, but here it is more motivated than usual when you see the advertisement blimps propounding various messages floating around neon bedecked skyscrapers. There is also a very distinct difference between the moneyed clean suburbs and the slums where people running from the repo men live in squalor.

The love story between Remy and the urchin drug addict Beth (Alice Braga) feels odd, for a lot of different reasons. Beth is more bionic than real flesh and she reels off the names of her artificial limbs as a kind of calling card. She still fights like a professional, which I find incongruous, and she is street smart enough to know how to find what she needs on the black market – because of course there is one. This movie also has one of the most uncomfortable love scenes I have ever seen, and I mean “uncomfortable” in the truest sense of the word. Remy and Beth can only be free of the Union by repo-ing their various artificial limbs and they cut themselves open to do it, which is bloody and visceral and tempered by kisses and caresses, which really only serves to make it more cringe-worthy.

Right around the middle of the movie we take a sharp left from the realm of believability, which is a little rocky to begin with in this kind of narrative. There is a twist, of course. It relies pretty heavily on your involvement in the plot itself and a kind of meta-narrative awareness, but if you’re not having the kind of day when you’re not keeping your eye on the meta-narrative ball you are more likely to wind up thinking that this is just ridiculous long before we get to the twist. It’s not that the ride is not interesting, it is. The effects are cool and well executed, the overall themes are interesting enough and the fact that all characters are played with complete sincerity helps. This kind of story has to take itself seriously or it wouldn’t make it out the gate.

That being said, there is still something lacking. It’s stylish, I will give it that. The use of music is interesting. Overall it lacks a certain gritty authenticity, though, if that term can be allowed in this kind of dystopic health care sci-fi. It could have made a bid for being more of a social satire in the vein of Fight Club.
The problem with being clever is that you sometimes out-wit yourself, and that’s something to keep in mind here.

Repo Men (2010) directed by Miguel Sapochnik stars Jude Law (Remy), Forest Whitaker (Jake), Alice Braga (Beth), Liev Schreiber (Frank), Carice van Houten (Carol), Chandler Canterbury (Peter) and RZA (T-Bone).

Mule

Franklyn – Welcome to Meanwhile City

Article first published as Movie review: Franklyn – Welcome to Meanwhile City on Blogcritics.

Franklyn is a story of loss. Several losses, actually, and their effect on the human psyche. It is a meticulously put together several-strain narrative with distinctive separate points of view. It takes place in two alternate versions of reality, contemporary London and the elsewhere Meanwhile City. Jonathan Preest gives the voice over of a hardboiled anti-hero reminiscent of Sin City or Rorschach of Watchmen, to name the obvious connections. He moves through an atmospheric dystopic future cityscape as one of the last atheists in a world literally governed by religion. The “clerics” who chase him are sent by the totalitarian rulers and religion is everywhere, in an absurd sectarian way. He is looking to avenge a girl he couldn’t save from the most dangerous of all the sects around, a chapter run by The Individual.
Parallel to this version of reality we have London, where Milo (Sam Riley) has just been jilted at the altar. He does not cope well with the disappointment and seeks comfort first from his best friend Dan (Richard Coyle) and then from his childhood sweetheart Sally (Eva Green) who he just happens to run in to when he least expects it.
Emilia (Eva Green) is a struggling artist who seems to have developed an unhealthy obsession with her art project, a video performance that aims for either catharsis or death, whichever comes first. As the story develops the viewer realizes that she too is coping with loss. In her case it is the loss of innocence that haunts her.
Peter Esser (Bernard Hill) is trying to deal with the break-down of his family. His daughter has been killed in a car accident, his wife has left him and now his son, David (Ryan Phillippe), has broken out of the institution he has been living in since he came back from the war. David clearly suffers from post traumatic stress and Peter simply will not give up on him, stubbornly believing that David is getting better despite all evidence to the contrary.
The various realities don’t seem interconnected at first other than through this theme of loss and how that influences the characters, but slowly the interconnecting points start to become obvious. Peter Esser is a deeply religious man and his son has lost his faith and his grip on reality. Emilia has a very conflicted relationship with her mother (Susannah York), shown in a scene at their therapist and she tries to express herself in her performance art, staging suicide attempts with an underlying pulse of desperation as she tries to deal with childhood abuse. Milo’s childhood sweetheart turns out to be imaginary, something he does not even know until his mother shows him a photo album in which there are pictures where there is just empty space where the girl should be. Most troubled of all is David who lives entirely inside his own delusion, Meanwhile City, where he stalks the streets searching for The Individual because someone has to be held accountable for the death of the young girl.
The various story lines come together with the meticulous precision of clockworks in the final scenes. There is some bleed between the various realities in the very last scenes as well and there is a kind of redemption for at least some of the characters, mainly Milo and Emilia. David seems to find his way back from Meanwhile City, but that doesn’t mean he can come back to the here and now.
This is a complex an convoluted story that demands that the viewer pays close attention. The visual aspects of Meanwhile City are very well executed, it has the feel of a comic book movie, the monolithic architectural look of Blade Runner and a very different colour scheme, contrasting nicely with the reality of the real London. The all pervasive questioning of which reality is more real, and which version of reality is dominant, both in the contemporary narrative and in memory, is just as interesting. It appeals to the intellect as well as to the eye, but like with all movies that slip between category it is bound to make things complicated for the viewer that comes to this narrative with preconceived notions. You have to be willing to go along for the ride and keep one eye on the structure of the narrative throughout to really appreciate it.

Franklyn (2008) written and directed by Gerald McMorrow stars Ryan Phillippe (Jonathan Preest/David Esser), Sam Riley (Milo), Bernard Hill (The Individual/Peter Esser), Eva Green (Emilia Bryant/Sally), Richard Coyle (Dan), Susannah York (Margaret Bryant), James Faulkner (Dr. Earlle/Pastor Bone), Stephen Walter (Wormsnakes/Wasnik) and Sam Douglas (Saul).

And on The Topic of the End of the World…

T.S. Eliot put it best in his poem “The Hollow Men”

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I feel the need to amend myself for the previous post about the post-apocalyptic world of The Book of Eli. There’s a lot more to that story than I first indicated, such as the plucky young female side-kick Solara and the dirty western frontier feeling of Carnegie’s town and the fact that Eli is the book, embodies it, carries it within himself, cradled close to his heart. And the fact that people eat each other is just icing on the cake. Uhm. Well, maybe not icing. Well, strange icing then.

There are all kinds of post-apocalyptic landscapes. There’s excess and decay in Blade Runner (1984), a world where there is too much of everything but it’s all broken down and at odds with the high level of technological advancement. There’s the same general sense of too much stuff and an increasing level of urban ruins in Split Second (1992) where the futuristic London looks more like Venice, complete with rain and rising water levels. Hardware (1990) is post nuclear in the same way as The Book of Eli (2009), but here there’s an interesting mix of blasted wastelands and excess and changed climate. Technology features heavily in that movie as well, and it’s the same kind of retrofitted architecture in a dying structure where the difference between ghetto and high-end living are slim to none, merely depending on weather the technology works or not.

The future of the whole Terminator-series is blasted landscapes, ruins and dangers and technology gone rogue. It’s mostly a hostile environment, more fitted for machines than humans.
Mad Max (1979) had that same blasted desert feel to it even if it was still basically a revenge tale. And the following movies in that series had their merits and flaws. It’s still a forerunner in its genre, no matter what you might think of the leading actor today.

“If the future isn’t bright at least it’s colorful” Blixa Bargeld sings in one of Einstürzende Neubauten’s songs. That certainly applies to the movies mentioned above.

In Equilibrium (2002) the world still works, but things are not the way they should be. Just like with 1984 (1956 and again in 1984) things are bad, but the pressure is concentrated to the psychological realm in a totalitarian structure where you actually can’t argue that things aren’t what they should be, that the future isn’t a bright, clean and shiny place. These aren’t post-apocalyptic worlds in the same sense, they are dystopias, but there’s more to it than that. Reasons why aren’t always given, but the viewer can infer. And does, at least if they’re constructed like this viewer. You can argue where the line between post-apocalypse and dystopia should be drawn, but sometimes they are one and the same and sometimes they teeter-totter back and forth across that line.

There are plenty of post-apocalyptic scenarios that involve some kind of plague or bio-warfare, touching on our paranoia about diseases. Pandemic outbreaks of vampirism as in Daybreakers (2009) or I Am Legend (2007) or, tangentially, The Omega Man (1971) or any of the droves of zombie-movies, starting with the George Romero movies go at the topic slightly differently. The Last man on Earth (1964) combines vampirism, viruses and what-not. And David Cronenberg’s inimitable Rabid (1977) that creeps in under your skin for more reasons than one.

The premise is basically that everything else is the same, but the people needed to keep society going are the broken part of the machine, with the exception of small pockets of survivors. 28 Days Later… (2002) give us the modern view of the virus spreading in a world where communication and travel have developed to the point where pandemics are moving at epic speeds. Then there’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) of course, which is all of these things, decay and viruses and time travel and a hallucinatory drift in the fabric of reality with a cherry on top.

Planet of the Apes (1984) is of course another time-honoured classic that deserves a mention. Nothing’s really wrong here if you don’t take the fact that the human race managed to bomb themselves into the stone age proving themselves to be nothing more than an interesting footnote in history, reduced to myth at best. It’s that old fear of degeneration, a reversed Darwinian evolutionary curve making us irrelevant, which is something that not even Matrix (1999) took all the way. At least there humans serve some kind of utilitarian purpose, even if it’s not that great from our perspective.

Then there’s a lot of … uhm, let’s call them less successful movies on the same basic topic, like Interzone (1987), the storyline of which is given in haiku-style as “Humans fight mutants in a post-holocaust world.” Hmm… I haven’t seen that one. A Boy and His Dog (1975) I have seen, but I can’t exactly claim to have any interesting memories of it, apart from thinking that the sound quality was really bad and the voice-over of the Dog just felt incredibly wrong.

We bring it on ourselves.
That is surprisingly often the moral lesson in these narratives. It doesn’t matter if we are pawns in the game or victims of chance or just caught in the maelstrom of circumstance that are outside our control.

Our fears are pretty much the usual ones. Things ending badly, for whatever reason, are often brought about by greed and stupidity and all the things connected to excess and any of a variation of combinations of the seven deadly sins. Sometimes the humans in these narratives are like cockroaches, surviving despite of it all. Sometimes they are righteous men in a bleak free-for-all where people who eat people are the luckiest people in the world.

Mule

The Book of Eli (2010) Post Apocalypse Gray

Article first published as Movie Review: The Book of Eli – Post Apocalypse Gray on Blogcritics.

The Book of Eli starts when a man comes walking through a bleak and colorless post-apocalyptic landscape. He has a backpack and a machete and purpose. This is a quest of sorts, where Eli (Denzel Washington) is carrying a book, protecting it and “going West”. It’s not clear at first what the book is, who the wanderer is or where he’s going. The tale is hugely mythological and evoques images from Dante’s Inferno or whatever tale of wanderers you might be most familiar with.
On his travels he encounters good men and bad. Mostly bad.
He finds his way to a budding town ruled by Carnegie (Gary Oldman) who has spent a long time and a lot of resources looking for a book. It just so happens that Eli is carrying the book Carnegie is looking for. Carnegie tries to manipulate and seduce Eli to stay and share the book, but Eli respectfully declines. This is where the hunt-and-seek part of the story begins. Eli happens to befriend Solara (Mila Kunis), the daughter of Claudia (Jennifer Beals) who is Carnegie’s concubine, for lack of a better word. When Eli leaves the town Solara follows him.
Now, this is all very archetypical, so there is really no point in discussing the presence of certain conventions and clichés since that’s the whole point here. It’s a myth arch and the approach to the story fits.
There’s a great consistency in the visual aspects of the movie. Whatever happened is thirty years in the past and the survivors who remember what the world looked like before are few and far between. Eli and Carnegie are both of that generation and they suffer the unavoidable “paradise lost” emotions that that engenders. They remember, and in part that is what this whole movie is about. The book itself is a symbol of knowledge and pre-apocalypse times.
All vegetation has died, there is nothing green in this world. Whatever canned goods there were have been depleted over time and people are resorting to eating the other white meat, each other. That means this bleak future is a free-for-all and no one is safe.
Eli can handle himself, though. He’s a survivor and a fighter and a true believer who really does think he is on a mission, and that there is someone watching over him.
I like the look and feel of this dystopic future and I am frankly surprised at the stellar quality of the cast. Gary Oldman is suitably villainous, but still manages to inject enough depth into his character to make him interesting. Even bit-parts like The Engineer (Tom Waits), George (Michael Gambon) and Lombardi (Malcolm McDowell) are cast in a way that gives this unexpected weight and substance.
All that being said, I’m afraid this movie is probably not going to stay with you for very long. It ends on an oddly hopeful note, but nothing is really resolved and there are plenty of pitfalls on the way there, where it resorts to simple action-movie clichés. There’s a surprisingly hollow knell at the core of the whole premise that niggles at the viewer and I can’t really put my finger on what it is.
To be fair it’s competing with old favorites in the same genre, like Mad Max (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Hardware (1990) or, more recently The Road (2009).
It is most definitely worth watching, though, and the opening sequence sets the atmosphere of the whole movie. Just keep that in mind and you’ll see what I mean.

The Book of Eli (2010) directed by Albert & Allen Hughes stars Denzel Washington (Eli), Gary Oldman (Carnegie), Mila Kunis (Solara), Ray Stevenson (Redridge), Jennifer Beals (Claudia), Frances de la Tour (Martha), Michael Gambon (George), Tom Waits (Engineer), Malcolm McDowell (Lombardi), Evan Jones (Martz) and Joe Pingue (Hoyt).