Regular readers of Shades of Caruso will have noticed that posting has become patchy of late. All three contributors -- myself, Canyon, and Masticator -- have had the usual Real Life complications stand in the way of regular posting, which is probably the way most blogs end up. There have been a vast number of posts I've started but not been able to finish, and the sight of them in my dashboard is like torture. The aborted Face/Offs (Knowing vs. The Day The Earth Stood Still; 28 Dresses vs. I Could Never Be Your Woman; The Fountain vs. Southland Tales), the unfinished Sci-Fi Through Time And Space entries (Charlie Jade, Dante 01), the incomplete BBC Breakfast Watch posts (so much fear of the future), the unstarted CSI: Miami recaps (dropped so long ago when they turned this blog into a weird battleground for some very very angry people)... Oh how I wanted to finish them. But I didn't. If I'm not going to write about all of the things I'm passionate about, what's the point?
And yet, at the risk of sounding unhinged, I need this in my life. It's the place where I keep my thoughts on pop culture straight. That's something that Twitter and the various message boards and comment threads I inhabit cannot do for me. Nevertheless, this unlovely blog template and the crappy functionality, which make me feel so depressed whenever I see it, have got to go. I know I'm not alone. One regular reader's very first comment on the blog was, "It's ugly". She did eventually said she liked some of the content. Still, the hurt remains.
So, I'm trying something out. Though I'm not going the whole hog by sorting out servers and downloading WordPress 2.8.1 or whatever the hell it's called (hours have been wasted trying to figure out what an FTP Client is. Embarrassing), I've started the new Shades of Caruso in a new, prettier place. It's still under construction, but I've been putting off doing this for way too long. Consider this blog an archive of the old stuff, and this the final post (unless something weird happens). The new stuff is over at shadesofcaruso.wordpress.com, and to commemorate this, I'm announcing the winners (and losers) of the annual Shades of Caruso TV Awards for the 2008-2009 TV season. Incentive! That's how these things work, right?
Bye bye Blogger. Hello Wordpress...
Showing posts with label Sci Fi Through Space/Time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sci Fi Through Space/Time. Show all posts
Monday, September 14, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
Sci Fi Through Space/Time: Push
It's a testament to the success and widespread acceptance of the superhero genre in recent years that David Bourla and Paul McGuigan's Push has been derided as a second-rate superhero movie and not a second-rate rip-off of Scanners and The Fury. To be honest the idea of a group of psychic-powered individuals hiding in plain sight from dubious governmental agencies certainly is a staple of superhero stories, but this feels more like the kind of thing Stephen King touched on in Firestarter, Carrie, or The Dead Zone. The major difference is that now we are able to leapfrog past the long set-ups of those late 70s / early 80s stories - as we already accept the conventions of this sub-sub-genre through over-exposure - and can instead tell stories with large and complicated mythologies. A billion comics, usually in lower-tier comic universes separate from the big two of Marvel and DC, have taken this approach, and now we see it in a brand new potential franchise.
The question is, have Bourla and McGuigan brought something new to the table to justify investment in that potential franchise, or will this fade into the background like some Hong-Kong-based Misfits of Science? The backstory, blasted through in hyper-exposition-mode during an inventively created title montage, sets out a humdrum universe of scientific experimentation into creating psychic soldiers, based on Nazi research during the war. The powered types can be divided into different groups based on their powers. From what I can remember, Pushers are able to manipulate people's minds (though not read them), Watchers can see the future, Sniffs have a kind of psychometric power that regrettably manifests only when they sniff objects (there's no way to make the act of intensely smelling something look anything less than stupid), Stitches can manipulate living tissue, Shadows are able to hide powered individuals just by hanging around them, and Bleeders have a scream that can demolish things (and makes their eyes go lizardy for no apparent reason). Thankfully most of this info is revealed as we go along, interspersed throughout the mostly dreary back-and-forth of much of the movie's running time. Here is a list of them if you're desperate to know more.
All of this is surface dressing on a predictable story about psychics on the run from the evil government psychic division, known as Division (not to be confused with the inept bureaucratic jerks in 24, also known as Division). This sort of thing has been done before, and I have to admit, I've been in two minds about seeing Push for exactly that reason, and not because it looks like Jumper, as pointed out by Masticator. That, too, had the plot of powered individuals chased by shady operatives of a mysterious organisation, which just goes to show that it is a very appealing kind of story on a deep level. Who hasn't fantasised that they are somehow special, and yet misunderstood and persecuted by a force greater than themselves? (Please don't tell me that's just me and a lot of Matrix fans!)
Luckily, Push has more up its sleeve than just having a bunch of photogenic people with Amazing Powers of the Brain trying to elude The Man. Those photogenic people with Amazing Powers of the Brain are also trying to elude a power-crazed Chinese gang who also have Amazing Powers of the Brain. The film tends to get rather busy with the powered people a la Heroes, though sadly we don't get those powers used willy-nilly as in Jumper.
Our hero, Nick, played by Chris Evans, is a loser whose psychic powers (he's a telekinetic, or Mover) have done nothing to stop him being a jerkoff dropout living in Hong Kong and getting into trouble with gambling debts, as people do in the movies (though they don't usually look as hott as Chris Evans). His loser status is attributed to the trauma of seeing his psychic father murdered by a dastardly member of Division played by Djimon Hounsou, wearing an evil goatee. Haunted by relentless Flashback Syndrome in times of great stress, Nick is a burnout, and to make things worse, his Amazing Powers of the Brain are actually very Mediocre.
Into his life comes Cassie, played by a pubescent Dakota Fanning wearing punkish gear and a skirt so short Canyon exclaimed in horror upon seeing the trailer. It fits the character, weirdly. She's older than her years, bossing people about and getting hammered on cheap booze to "improve her powers", though really she's just being a brat. Her past is also filled with that screenwriting staple of emotional pain caused by the fate of her parent, this time her super-Watcher mother, a woman of immense power who has been captured by Division.
Eager to save her, Fanning enlists the help of Evans in the search for Kira, a Pusher played by Camilla Belle (winner of 2008's prestigious Caruso Award for Most Improbably Styled Hair as well as a Worst Actress Dishonourable Mention, thanks to her mystifyingly poor performance in 10000 B.C.). Belle is on the run from Division after absconding with a MacGuffin; a syringe filled with a drug that causes Amazing Powers of the Brain, as well as Not So Amazing Side Effects of the Death, except in certain arbitrarily determined circumstances.
In order to prevail against the machinations of Division, Evans and Fanning enlist the help of various other psychics dotted about Hong Kong. Cliff Curtis, Ming Na, and Nate Mooney (as a nine-fingered sleaze called Pinky Stein) get dragged into the proceedings with varying degrees of enthusiasm. This sadly does not mean we get to see a lot of exciting action, but then the movie has other ideas on its mind. We also don't see the psychics here use their powers to help people, which I've banged on about before. Okay, so I'd argue this doesn't really count as a superhero movie, so these guys have no real narrative obligation to do it, but any conversations within the film about stopping Division from creating an army of super-soldiers seem even more feeble than usual when the two main characters are more interested in gaining some kind of leverage over Division in order to settle their old scores / parental issues.
Okay, sorry, bugbear rant over. As I was saying, in addition to the cliched shady operative antagonists, our heroes also have to contend with a ruthless clan of cliched Chinese gangsters who are desperately seeking the MacGuffin. The number of confrontations between good and bad guys is minimal, which is probably down to the low budget (about $38m; it looks fantastic for the money), and is thus understandable. Instead, for the most part Push features our photogenic heroes meeting a variety of powered people to find other powered people who will help them find their MacGuffin in order to something something. One of the posters for this movie shows someone using telekinesis to blast a car into the air. Trust me, no cars get blown into the air. There are lots and lots of sarcastic conversations, but that's a little harder to dramatise in a poster. Also, who wants to watch a film like that? Other than me, obviously.
There are a couple of action sequences, but sadly they're cut with such a shockingly poor understanding of how editing should work that I silently raged in my seat. McGuigan does such a piss-poor job of cutting these sequences that he makes Quantum of Solace look like it was directed by Tarkovsky. Any joy I might have had at the sight of faceless goons getting thrown through the air with telekinesis was totally scuppered. This scene, from the big finale, is cut and shot so unclearly that you can't tell who is getting hurt, and how. Are the light FX denoting energy in the punches, or deflections? I've watched it a number of times and I just don't know what the hell is going on. I do know it looks as goofy as hell, though.
What does set Push apart is that it evolves into a peculiar hybrid of the usual psychic runaway blah blah as described above, and stern Ocean's Eleven-style con job japery. Again, this is very hard to communicate through trailers and posters, and so I was taken aback as the final half of the movie becomes a chaotic and barely logical series of tricks, counter-tricks, and final act twists, except here the con is complicated by the various superpowers of all the major players. And believe me, when I say complicated, I really really mean complicated.
Complicated is fine if the con has been worked out properly, but regrettably the con makes very little sense. Our heroes -- who, in a nice touch, are not all that great a bunch of psychics compared to the professionals -- need to get hold of the MacGuffin, but not only do they need to figure out where it is, they also have to do so without alerting the various Watchers who are monitoring the future for signs of alteration. The precognition powers are the ones given the most attention and exposition, which was gratifying. Most tales featuring precognition tend to fudge the details of how such powers would affect the actions of everyone involved, or get tangled up in messy continuity. For the most part, Push gets it right, setting out some solid ground rules early on, and sticking to them for much of the film.
Especially interesting is Fanning's explanation of how the future is so malleable even talking about her predictions can often change the future again. So often people hear about their destiny and either do nothing about it, or make it come true through their attempts to avoid it (a million bad stories have ended that way). Push at least accepts that the future is not set in stone, which creates new storytelling opportunities, as every move they make changes something in the future, until at some point they seem doomed thanks to the intervention of a super-Watcher, a Chinese gang-member who apparently has no name, if IMDb and Wikipedia are anything to go by.
This Watcher, focused only on our band of sarcastic heroes, is predicting every move they make, so they have no hope of changing their destiny. Bourla has decided that the future actions of a person can be deduced as soon as they make a decision to do something. It's as if their precognition is linked to some kind of telepathy. It's this conceit that allows Evans to come up with his too-complicated con plot, which involves giving sealed instructions to his group of psychics and then getting his memory wiped so as to confound The Pop Girl (seriously, that's what she seems to be known as). As no one knows what they are going to do right up until the moment they are going to do it, The Pop Girl can't predict what is going to happen.
That's a pretty cool idea, and seems to make some kind of sense within the parameters set out earlier (as well as making the most of the heroes' ingenuity in the face of superior brainpower), but the execution is confusing. Evans' mind gets wiped after three of the envelopes are opened, which seems to contradict those rules. Even weirder, The Pop Girl is already sketching her vision of the future when this happens, and then makes a big fuss about losing that image.
What, she can't remember what she was drawing two seconds earlier? I guess that's the downfall of this new sub-sub-sub-genre; cons work fine onscreen when it's all crafty hand-offs, rigged props, and Matt Damon in a fake nose. As soon as you bring metaphysics into the equation, that flow of set-up / con / "prestige" falls apart.
There's also a lack of rigour to it, especially as the twists and deus ex machina of the final act start happening. One is kinda clever: Fanning is saved from the death she has been predicting since the start of the movie by the intervention of the creepy brainsuck guy who has been hovering around in the background for a while. He has been hired by Fanning's mother, who has seen so far into the future that she can maneouvre people into place years in advance. It's a cute twist, though having an offscreen character influence the plot in such an extreme way inevitably feels like a cheat, no matter how well it has been set up.
There is also a lot of back and forth between Evans, Belle, and Hounsou about whether Belle was his former girlfriend or a sleeper agent from Division that goes through several complicated twists, all of which contradict each other. The only way the final scene could possibly work is if you fanwank like crazy, assuming that Fanning's previous vague predictions were suddenly incredibly precise, or Evans' written instructions to Belle were very complex and called for her to Push Hounsou the moment she meets him, though even that would require yet more contrivance and fanwanking.
That final scene seemed very clever when I first saw it, but by the time I had returned home it had started to fall apart with even a tiny bit of scrutiny. Much of the rest of the film seemed hollow too, suggesting the script wasn't thought through enough during writing, and the filmmakers figured no one would notice, or there were reshoots and rewrites that rendered some of those twists incomprehensible. It's a shame, because the idea of creating a movie like this is very appealing. Yes, I like to see psychic action scenes, but this felt like there was a fresh idea trying to break out from all of the intense concentrating, elaborate gesturing, and eye-morphing effects.
It wasn't all bad, though. Chris Evans has long been a favourite in our house, thanks to his pitch-perfect work on the otherwise risible Fantastic Four movies, as well as his charming performance in Cellular and his intense grouchiness in Sunshine. Watching him turn up in forgettable dreck like The Nanny Diaries (as, I swear to God, Harvard Hottie) has been dispiriting, and then appearing in an underpromoted action film like Push makes things worse. When is he going to hit big? Does anyone else even care? His Wikipedia page hasn't even been updated with the news that he's going to be playing one of the evil ex-boyfriends in Edgar Wright's adaptation of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Am I going to have to join to update the damn thing myself? I could be Keeper of the Flame, I guess.
He's predictably terrific in Push, playing a stock character (the lovable and acerbic loser) with much charm and conviction. Even better, he's paired up with Fanning, who does a great job as the old-beyond-her-years Cassie. Plagued with visions of her own death, she's a nihilist and alcoholic 13-year old who sasses everyone. I gather I'm supposed to dislike her because she's precocious, and yes, I usually have a problem with child actors, but I thought she was one of the best things about War of the Worlds, and the same thing applies here. Her chemistry with Evans is one of the things I enjoyed the most about Push, their snarky paranoia tempered by growing affection and concern.
Much of the supporting cast are entertaining too. Cliff Curtis can be variable, depending on the movie he is in. I was deeply disappointed by his work in Fracture and Die Hard 4, but he was great in Three Kings and Sunshine. Here he's light and charming, which is a nice departure from his more serious roles. Nate Mooney, as Pinky, is also very likable, and won over the group of teenage girls sitting at the back of the cinema when I saw it. Everything he said was greeted with a delighted cackle. Ming Na gets little to do other than be cynical about everything, which was a bit of a waste. Hounsou glowers a lot. There's not much else for him to do, I guess.
In an improvement on her performance in 10000 B.C., Belle adds a third expression to her repertoire. As with the caveman movie she has happy and scared down-pat, but now she has intense focus mastered too. At this rate, she'll be a watchable actress in about 30 movies. She was recently featured in a Glamour magazine photoshoot of up-and-coming talent pretending to be icons of fashion and female empowerment, for which she should thank her publicist with diamonds and unicorns and suchlike. Nothing she has done on film to date has warranted any attention. Maybe there are hidden depths there, but they are really really well hidden so far.
(N.B. I appreciate that picking on Belle for being out of place in that photoshoot is a bit rich, as the equally micro-talented Hayden Panettierre, Alexis Bledel, and Odette Yustman are also in there too. Basically, except for the inclusion of America Ferrera, the whole thing is an embarrassment.)
McGuigan may fluff the action scenes, but there is other stuff to enjoy there. The Hong Kong location shooting is interesting, only occasionally succumbing to the temptation to postcarditise the city. I also liked his use of pastel colours. It's possible he did that annoying thing of using colours like this because that's what comics do (seriously, only Warren Beatty made that work in Dick Tracy, and only because he went all-out), but nevertheless, it made my eyes very happy. The annoying flashy over-editing irked, though, and not just in the action scenes. At times it feels like Slumdog Millionaire, if Slumdog was about psychics and not implausible fairytale gamepieces.
One decision he has made doesn't work as well as he would have hoped. Turning his back on digital effects (except for where they are necessary), McGuigan fills the screen with physical effects, with the powers having a visceral effect. When people are being thrown around using wirework, that decision pays off, but a floaty gunfight between Evans and Hounsou's Mover right-hand man (played with silent scowly menace by Neil Jackson) rapidly become ridiculous. Seeing two guns hover through the air, obviously stuck to the end of green sticks removed in post, is unintentionally hilarious. Seeing one gun pressed against Hounsou's temple totally broke the spell. I didn't bother to check the credits to see if there was a gun-pole wrangler, as his/her work was terribly unconvincing.
So is it worth watching? As a rental, maybe so, even though that labyrinthine plot is contrived and filled with illogicalities, and the finale hints at future installments that will almost certainly not happen (even with a small budget, it's not going to make a profit, unless there was an amazing deal made for post-theatrical rights). Considering the interesting additions made to the stock plot, it still feels humdrum, and would only really appeal to fans of Chris Evans, psychic-story completists, and people who enjoy seeing things fly through the air because some guy is gesturing like someone infected with Ultra-Vogue Fever. So that's probably just me and three excitable girls who liked Pinky. I will say that even though Franklyn was an underdog film with lots of ambition, I got more out of this psych-heist flick, though again that's mainly because I get a thrill from this kind of thing. Nevertheless, I'm not going to lie to myself and everyone else and act like it's a good movie. It's not even as good as Jumper. I can imagine that anyone reading this it not about to rush out and rent it now. Oh, Chris Evans! Forgive me!
The question is, have Bourla and McGuigan brought something new to the table to justify investment in that potential franchise, or will this fade into the background like some Hong-Kong-based Misfits of Science? The backstory, blasted through in hyper-exposition-mode during an inventively created title montage, sets out a humdrum universe of scientific experimentation into creating psychic soldiers, based on Nazi research during the war. The powered types can be divided into different groups based on their powers. From what I can remember, Pushers are able to manipulate people's minds (though not read them), Watchers can see the future, Sniffs have a kind of psychometric power that regrettably manifests only when they sniff objects (there's no way to make the act of intensely smelling something look anything less than stupid), Stitches can manipulate living tissue, Shadows are able to hide powered individuals just by hanging around them, and Bleeders have a scream that can demolish things (and makes their eyes go lizardy for no apparent reason). Thankfully most of this info is revealed as we go along, interspersed throughout the mostly dreary back-and-forth of much of the movie's running time. Here is a list of them if you're desperate to know more.
All of this is surface dressing on a predictable story about psychics on the run from the evil government psychic division, known as Division (not to be confused with the inept bureaucratic jerks in 24, also known as Division). This sort of thing has been done before, and I have to admit, I've been in two minds about seeing Push for exactly that reason, and not because it looks like Jumper, as pointed out by Masticator. That, too, had the plot of powered individuals chased by shady operatives of a mysterious organisation, which just goes to show that it is a very appealing kind of story on a deep level. Who hasn't fantasised that they are somehow special, and yet misunderstood and persecuted by a force greater than themselves? (Please don't tell me that's just me and a lot of Matrix fans!)
Luckily, Push has more up its sleeve than just having a bunch of photogenic people with Amazing Powers of the Brain trying to elude The Man. Those photogenic people with Amazing Powers of the Brain are also trying to elude a power-crazed Chinese gang who also have Amazing Powers of the Brain. The film tends to get rather busy with the powered people a la Heroes, though sadly we don't get those powers used willy-nilly as in Jumper.
Our hero, Nick, played by Chris Evans, is a loser whose psychic powers (he's a telekinetic, or Mover) have done nothing to stop him being a jerkoff dropout living in Hong Kong and getting into trouble with gambling debts, as people do in the movies (though they don't usually look as hott as Chris Evans). His loser status is attributed to the trauma of seeing his psychic father murdered by a dastardly member of Division played by Djimon Hounsou, wearing an evil goatee. Haunted by relentless Flashback Syndrome in times of great stress, Nick is a burnout, and to make things worse, his Amazing Powers of the Brain are actually very Mediocre.
Into his life comes Cassie, played by a pubescent Dakota Fanning wearing punkish gear and a skirt so short Canyon exclaimed in horror upon seeing the trailer. It fits the character, weirdly. She's older than her years, bossing people about and getting hammered on cheap booze to "improve her powers", though really she's just being a brat. Her past is also filled with that screenwriting staple of emotional pain caused by the fate of her parent, this time her super-Watcher mother, a woman of immense power who has been captured by Division.
Eager to save her, Fanning enlists the help of Evans in the search for Kira, a Pusher played by Camilla Belle (winner of 2008's prestigious Caruso Award for Most Improbably Styled Hair as well as a Worst Actress Dishonourable Mention, thanks to her mystifyingly poor performance in 10000 B.C.). Belle is on the run from Division after absconding with a MacGuffin; a syringe filled with a drug that causes Amazing Powers of the Brain, as well as Not So Amazing Side Effects of the Death, except in certain arbitrarily determined circumstances.
In order to prevail against the machinations of Division, Evans and Fanning enlist the help of various other psychics dotted about Hong Kong. Cliff Curtis, Ming Na, and Nate Mooney (as a nine-fingered sleaze called Pinky Stein) get dragged into the proceedings with varying degrees of enthusiasm. This sadly does not mean we get to see a lot of exciting action, but then the movie has other ideas on its mind. We also don't see the psychics here use their powers to help people, which I've banged on about before. Okay, so I'd argue this doesn't really count as a superhero movie, so these guys have no real narrative obligation to do it, but any conversations within the film about stopping Division from creating an army of super-soldiers seem even more feeble than usual when the two main characters are more interested in gaining some kind of leverage over Division in order to settle their old scores / parental issues.
Okay, sorry, bugbear rant over. As I was saying, in addition to the cliched shady operative antagonists, our heroes also have to contend with a ruthless clan of cliched Chinese gangsters who are desperately seeking the MacGuffin. The number of confrontations between good and bad guys is minimal, which is probably down to the low budget (about $38m; it looks fantastic for the money), and is thus understandable. Instead, for the most part Push features our photogenic heroes meeting a variety of powered people to find other powered people who will help them find their MacGuffin in order to something something. One of the posters for this movie shows someone using telekinesis to blast a car into the air. Trust me, no cars get blown into the air. There are lots and lots of sarcastic conversations, but that's a little harder to dramatise in a poster. Also, who wants to watch a film like that? Other than me, obviously.
There are a couple of action sequences, but sadly they're cut with such a shockingly poor understanding of how editing should work that I silently raged in my seat. McGuigan does such a piss-poor job of cutting these sequences that he makes Quantum of Solace look like it was directed by Tarkovsky. Any joy I might have had at the sight of faceless goons getting thrown through the air with telekinesis was totally scuppered. This scene, from the big finale, is cut and shot so unclearly that you can't tell who is getting hurt, and how. Are the light FX denoting energy in the punches, or deflections? I've watched it a number of times and I just don't know what the hell is going on. I do know it looks as goofy as hell, though.
What does set Push apart is that it evolves into a peculiar hybrid of the usual psychic runaway blah blah as described above, and stern Ocean's Eleven-style con job japery. Again, this is very hard to communicate through trailers and posters, and so I was taken aback as the final half of the movie becomes a chaotic and barely logical series of tricks, counter-tricks, and final act twists, except here the con is complicated by the various superpowers of all the major players. And believe me, when I say complicated, I really really mean complicated.
Complicated is fine if the con has been worked out properly, but regrettably the con makes very little sense. Our heroes -- who, in a nice touch, are not all that great a bunch of psychics compared to the professionals -- need to get hold of the MacGuffin, but not only do they need to figure out where it is, they also have to do so without alerting the various Watchers who are monitoring the future for signs of alteration. The precognition powers are the ones given the most attention and exposition, which was gratifying. Most tales featuring precognition tend to fudge the details of how such powers would affect the actions of everyone involved, or get tangled up in messy continuity. For the most part, Push gets it right, setting out some solid ground rules early on, and sticking to them for much of the film.
Especially interesting is Fanning's explanation of how the future is so malleable even talking about her predictions can often change the future again. So often people hear about their destiny and either do nothing about it, or make it come true through their attempts to avoid it (a million bad stories have ended that way). Push at least accepts that the future is not set in stone, which creates new storytelling opportunities, as every move they make changes something in the future, until at some point they seem doomed thanks to the intervention of a super-Watcher, a Chinese gang-member who apparently has no name, if IMDb and Wikipedia are anything to go by.
This Watcher, focused only on our band of sarcastic heroes, is predicting every move they make, so they have no hope of changing their destiny. Bourla has decided that the future actions of a person can be deduced as soon as they make a decision to do something. It's as if their precognition is linked to some kind of telepathy. It's this conceit that allows Evans to come up with his too-complicated con plot, which involves giving sealed instructions to his group of psychics and then getting his memory wiped so as to confound The Pop Girl (seriously, that's what she seems to be known as). As no one knows what they are going to do right up until the moment they are going to do it, The Pop Girl can't predict what is going to happen.
That's a pretty cool idea, and seems to make some kind of sense within the parameters set out earlier (as well as making the most of the heroes' ingenuity in the face of superior brainpower), but the execution is confusing. Evans' mind gets wiped after three of the envelopes are opened, which seems to contradict those rules. Even weirder, The Pop Girl is already sketching her vision of the future when this happens, and then makes a big fuss about losing that image.
What, she can't remember what she was drawing two seconds earlier? I guess that's the downfall of this new sub-sub-sub-genre; cons work fine onscreen when it's all crafty hand-offs, rigged props, and Matt Damon in a fake nose. As soon as you bring metaphysics into the equation, that flow of set-up / con / "prestige" falls apart.
There's also a lack of rigour to it, especially as the twists and deus ex machina of the final act start happening. One is kinda clever: Fanning is saved from the death she has been predicting since the start of the movie by the intervention of the creepy brainsuck guy who has been hovering around in the background for a while. He has been hired by Fanning's mother, who has seen so far into the future that she can maneouvre people into place years in advance. It's a cute twist, though having an offscreen character influence the plot in such an extreme way inevitably feels like a cheat, no matter how well it has been set up.
There is also a lot of back and forth between Evans, Belle, and Hounsou about whether Belle was his former girlfriend or a sleeper agent from Division that goes through several complicated twists, all of which contradict each other. The only way the final scene could possibly work is if you fanwank like crazy, assuming that Fanning's previous vague predictions were suddenly incredibly precise, or Evans' written instructions to Belle were very complex and called for her to Push Hounsou the moment she meets him, though even that would require yet more contrivance and fanwanking.
That final scene seemed very clever when I first saw it, but by the time I had returned home it had started to fall apart with even a tiny bit of scrutiny. Much of the rest of the film seemed hollow too, suggesting the script wasn't thought through enough during writing, and the filmmakers figured no one would notice, or there were reshoots and rewrites that rendered some of those twists incomprehensible. It's a shame, because the idea of creating a movie like this is very appealing. Yes, I like to see psychic action scenes, but this felt like there was a fresh idea trying to break out from all of the intense concentrating, elaborate gesturing, and eye-morphing effects.
It wasn't all bad, though. Chris Evans has long been a favourite in our house, thanks to his pitch-perfect work on the otherwise risible Fantastic Four movies, as well as his charming performance in Cellular and his intense grouchiness in Sunshine. Watching him turn up in forgettable dreck like The Nanny Diaries (as, I swear to God, Harvard Hottie) has been dispiriting, and then appearing in an underpromoted action film like Push makes things worse. When is he going to hit big? Does anyone else even care? His Wikipedia page hasn't even been updated with the news that he's going to be playing one of the evil ex-boyfriends in Edgar Wright's adaptation of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Am I going to have to join to update the damn thing myself? I could be Keeper of the Flame, I guess.
He's predictably terrific in Push, playing a stock character (the lovable and acerbic loser) with much charm and conviction. Even better, he's paired up with Fanning, who does a great job as the old-beyond-her-years Cassie. Plagued with visions of her own death, she's a nihilist and alcoholic 13-year old who sasses everyone. I gather I'm supposed to dislike her because she's precocious, and yes, I usually have a problem with child actors, but I thought she was one of the best things about War of the Worlds, and the same thing applies here. Her chemistry with Evans is one of the things I enjoyed the most about Push, their snarky paranoia tempered by growing affection and concern.
Much of the supporting cast are entertaining too. Cliff Curtis can be variable, depending on the movie he is in. I was deeply disappointed by his work in Fracture and Die Hard 4, but he was great in Three Kings and Sunshine. Here he's light and charming, which is a nice departure from his more serious roles. Nate Mooney, as Pinky, is also very likable, and won over the group of teenage girls sitting at the back of the cinema when I saw it. Everything he said was greeted with a delighted cackle. Ming Na gets little to do other than be cynical about everything, which was a bit of a waste. Hounsou glowers a lot. There's not much else for him to do, I guess.
In an improvement on her performance in 10000 B.C., Belle adds a third expression to her repertoire. As with the caveman movie she has happy and scared down-pat, but now she has intense focus mastered too. At this rate, she'll be a watchable actress in about 30 movies. She was recently featured in a Glamour magazine photoshoot of up-and-coming talent pretending to be icons of fashion and female empowerment, for which she should thank her publicist with diamonds and unicorns and suchlike. Nothing she has done on film to date has warranted any attention. Maybe there are hidden depths there, but they are really really well hidden so far.
(N.B. I appreciate that picking on Belle for being out of place in that photoshoot is a bit rich, as the equally micro-talented Hayden Panettierre, Alexis Bledel, and Odette Yustman are also in there too. Basically, except for the inclusion of America Ferrera, the whole thing is an embarrassment.)
McGuigan may fluff the action scenes, but there is other stuff to enjoy there. The Hong Kong location shooting is interesting, only occasionally succumbing to the temptation to postcarditise the city. I also liked his use of pastel colours. It's possible he did that annoying thing of using colours like this because that's what comics do (seriously, only Warren Beatty made that work in Dick Tracy, and only because he went all-out), but nevertheless, it made my eyes very happy. The annoying flashy over-editing irked, though, and not just in the action scenes. At times it feels like Slumdog Millionaire, if Slumdog was about psychics and not implausible fairytale gamepieces.
One decision he has made doesn't work as well as he would have hoped. Turning his back on digital effects (except for where they are necessary), McGuigan fills the screen with physical effects, with the powers having a visceral effect. When people are being thrown around using wirework, that decision pays off, but a floaty gunfight between Evans and Hounsou's Mover right-hand man (played with silent scowly menace by Neil Jackson) rapidly become ridiculous. Seeing two guns hover through the air, obviously stuck to the end of green sticks removed in post, is unintentionally hilarious. Seeing one gun pressed against Hounsou's temple totally broke the spell. I didn't bother to check the credits to see if there was a gun-pole wrangler, as his/her work was terribly unconvincing.
So is it worth watching? As a rental, maybe so, even though that labyrinthine plot is contrived and filled with illogicalities, and the finale hints at future installments that will almost certainly not happen (even with a small budget, it's not going to make a profit, unless there was an amazing deal made for post-theatrical rights). Considering the interesting additions made to the stock plot, it still feels humdrum, and would only really appeal to fans of Chris Evans, psychic-story completists, and people who enjoy seeing things fly through the air because some guy is gesturing like someone infected with Ultra-Vogue Fever. So that's probably just me and three excitable girls who liked Pinky. I will say that even though Franklyn was an underdog film with lots of ambition, I got more out of this psych-heist flick, though again that's mainly because I get a thrill from this kind of thing. Nevertheless, I'm not going to lie to myself and everyone else and act like it's a good movie. It's not even as good as Jumper. I can imagine that anyone reading this it not about to rush out and rent it now. Oh, Chris Evans! Forgive me!
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Sci Fi Through Space / Time: Franklyn
Have you ever wanted to like a movie because hating it makes you seem like a big jerk? Have you ever railed against your country's film industry for not trying hard enough, and then, when you get your way, you can't stand what you end up with? Seeing Gerald McMorrow's Franklyn was pretty much the ultimate downer, as I finally got to see what I thought was going to be an ambitious sci fi thriller, but ended up being an empty exercise in puzzle-movie mechanics with some extraneous fantasy trappings from a first-time director who should surely earn praise for getting such an anti-audience project off the ground. Disliking it makes me feel like I'm dropping a rock on a tiny bird moments after it has learned how to fly.
Franklyn concerns four lonely people, played by Sam Riley as a hopeless romantic trying to connect with his childhood sweetheart between moping sessions, Eva Green as the world's most pretentious art student, Bernard Hill as a delusional man looking for his mentally unstable son, and, in the movie's most striking scenes, Ryan Phillippe, as a vigilante-cum-militant-atheist roaming a gothic land called Meanwhile City in search of an evil prophet called The Individual.
(Warning! Franklyn spoilers from here onwards!!!)
So far so perplexing. Sadly, the links between these characters are nowhere near as interesting as you would hope. As soon as it is revealed that Bernard Hill's son is mentally ill, all the efforts to hide photos of him from the audience come to naught. The fantasy land exists in Philippe's head, and the reveals of how all of the peculiar details from his plot-thread match up to the real world unfurl much as you would expect. It's rather disappointing.
For the most part the visually impressive Meanwhile City sequences could have been dropped from the film, as they add little but a bit of variety to the drawn-out scenes of Riley, Green, and Hill wandering around various unpleasant backstreets of Grey London. Riley seems almost totally fixated on Tottenham Court Road, and even passes within projectile vomiting distance of my old haunt Bradley's Spanish Bar. The meat of the film seems to be pushing the characters together through "cosmic intervention", with the only true fantasy element of the film being the two mysterious beings who intervene throughout. One is an Eastern European hospital janitor who is probably God. That detail, sure to infuriate xenophobic Mail readers throughout our dyspeptic and crotchety land, was delightful, though sadly reminiscent of the Godly janitor from The Hudsucker Proxy. The other Godly presence is a doubly-employed Eva Green, this time wearing a mad red wig. This also delights, in a different way.
That's one of the fatal flaws of Franklyn. Working like a cross between Dark City, It's A Wonderful Life, and Lost (with regards to its interconnected plots), Franklyn's ambition is hobbled by echoes of other stories. The moments where McMorrow allows his film to become a torrent of ideas, especially the religious mania of Meanwhile City, are the most interesting, but perhaps there's a movie to be made about that, instead of stapling it to this other story. To be honest, I doubt even that would work. As enjoyable as the detailed matte paintings are, Meanwhile City's conceit - that living there is only allowed if you adhere to a faith - is at worst an ill-thought out satire on New Age thinking, at best part of a greater theme throughout the movie about belief and self-deception.
Perhaps I'm being generous. Sam Riley's plot-thread revolves around his unrequited love, caused by a fixation on a childhood sweetheart who turns out to have been an imaginary friend-cum-guardian angel. He has created a fantasy world of his own, a lot less elaborate than Phillippe's, but containing more mad wigs. He also refers to a tale about a Storyteller who spins yarns that can then come true (Riley's onscreen BFF, played by Richard Coyne, makes a wet comment about that being a great superpower, which is kinda unfortunate, as this means McMorrow has never heard of this recently introduced Marvel character). That theme, of the delusion made real, pops up at the end as Phillippe's fantasy bleeds out into the world, to be seen by Eva Green. So what's the point McMorrow is making? That we make the world in our own image? That perception is all? That faith is the same thing as that, or perhaps a lesser form of self-delusion than daydreaming? It's a thread that could have been followed with more vigour, but instead falls short.
To make matters worse, it seems like all of the cosmic interventions are all in the service of so little. Green, who appears to be on the way to killing herself (her attempts disguised as a boring art project), is redeemed at the end by meeting Riley, who seems thrilled to have found a non-bewigged version of his guardian angel. Of course, he meets her in the final moments of the film, so a couple of weeks listening to her wittering on about her shitty art will probably put him off, but I think we're meant to find her solipsism and brattiness charming. As for Phillippe, he dies, and his dad sees it happen. I think he's meant to be given the opportunity to move on, but it seems like a pretty crappy way to do it. Your crazy son is dead, dude. Time to get a hobby. Thanks, Janitor God!
Maybe if there was a sense that more was at stake this would have worked better, but even with the threat of Bernard Hill dying at his son's hands, the loudly-whirring machinations of the plot signal that any attempt on his life is merely going to trigger something else. In that sense, Riley's flesh-wound seems to be important, but it really isn't. He doesn't have to be hurt for him to meet Eva Green. It's all meant to seem like something has happened, but nothing really has. The film runs on the spot for an hour and a half just so we can see a couple meet-cute. Or, considering the bloodshed, pyrotechnics, matte paintings, Godly interventions, and contrivance, perhaps I should say meet-complicated.
It's not all bad. Green is, as ever, a compelling screen presence even while playing an obnoxious art-school YBA parody, and effortlessly rises above the material. Phillippe is obscured by a mask that screams Desperately Seeking Iconic Status, and it's tempting to think he's been replaced by a body double for the majority of the film. When he's not in the mask, he speaks his dialogue through his traditional mouth-full-of-intensity, though his diction clears up when adopting a British accent for the final act. Bernard Hill is typically brilliant, though playing an infuriating loser strips him of all of his King Theoden charisma, which is a shame. Art Malik crops up in a dual role, and is almost unrecognisable while wearing his Meanwhile City White Contact Lenses Of Otherworldly Freakiness. It's good to see him around, even though he's not given much to do.
Sam Riley, sadly, is pretty bloody awful. I've been hearing a lot about him since he played Ian Curtis in Control, but this introduction to his work has soured me, hopefully temporarily. It doesn't help that his character is utterly wet and silly, whining repeatedly about how sad he is about not finding the right girl. Jilted by his fiancee in his first scene, he never recovers, so much so that after an hour and a half watching him mope and then stalk his guardian angel (yes, you can actually stalk imaginary people, apparently), you wonder how someone as feeble as him could ever appeal to someone as intense as Green's pretentious artist.
Perhaps that's why I felt so robbed at the end. All of this because two self-absorbed twits are meant to hook up in the final scene? And there's no way on earth they could ever make each other happy? It all felt like a lot of effort in service of nothing. The Meanwhile City ideas are left to dissipate in the air, unloved and undeveloped, with some gratuitous fight scenes added just to make you feel like something is happening. Bernard Hill is only there to look sad, for all the effect he has on the plot. Riley does literally nothing for the first hour of the film. Only Green gets anything meaty to do, and even then it's just giving up, though giving up in suicidal style.
Anyone who knows me knows I get very upset at the British film industry for not trying hard enough to tackle ambitious projects, and am rarely happy with the films that do get a wide release (this was one of the few times I ever sounded optimistic about it). Film4 and the UK Film Council funded McMorrow's project, and with the small budget (approximately $6m), he has done wonders. Ben Davis' photography is impressive, capturing the greyness of modern London depressingly well. Joby Talbot's soundtrack is also worthy of praise. However, McMorrow - who is originally a video and ad director - has fallen into the same trap as the mighty TARSEM! by letting his visual imagination run riot to the extent that any old narrative bolted on will serve to deliver those eye-bending images (if you think I'm being harsh about Tarsem's likeable and beautiful The Fall, bear in mind even that very slight film was based on Valeri Petrov's Yo Ho Ho, a fact that struggled to be discovered in the press coverage upon the film's theatrical release. That's how little attention people were paying to the plot).
Of course, McMorrow doesn't have the resources Tarsem had on hand, so his film is bound to be a lot less interesting visually. That's not his fault. However, while The Fall felt unsatisfying on a narrative level but still delivered a generally satisfying experience, Franklyn is a major disappointment. Though I commend McMorrow for getting this project onto the screen (no mean feat these days), he would do well to consider directing screenplays by stronger writers before he does so again. One day, with the inevitable support he will get from the fans that will champion this film as a visionary success (inevitable, if misguided, IMO), he could make something really worthy of attention. I look forward to joining that band of fans.
Franklyn concerns four lonely people, played by Sam Riley as a hopeless romantic trying to connect with his childhood sweetheart between moping sessions, Eva Green as the world's most pretentious art student, Bernard Hill as a delusional man looking for his mentally unstable son, and, in the movie's most striking scenes, Ryan Phillippe, as a vigilante-cum-militant-atheist roaming a gothic land called Meanwhile City in search of an evil prophet called The Individual.
(Warning! Franklyn spoilers from here onwards!!!)
So far so perplexing. Sadly, the links between these characters are nowhere near as interesting as you would hope. As soon as it is revealed that Bernard Hill's son is mentally ill, all the efforts to hide photos of him from the audience come to naught. The fantasy land exists in Philippe's head, and the reveals of how all of the peculiar details from his plot-thread match up to the real world unfurl much as you would expect. It's rather disappointing.
For the most part the visually impressive Meanwhile City sequences could have been dropped from the film, as they add little but a bit of variety to the drawn-out scenes of Riley, Green, and Hill wandering around various unpleasant backstreets of Grey London. Riley seems almost totally fixated on Tottenham Court Road, and even passes within projectile vomiting distance of my old haunt Bradley's Spanish Bar. The meat of the film seems to be pushing the characters together through "cosmic intervention", with the only true fantasy element of the film being the two mysterious beings who intervene throughout. One is an Eastern European hospital janitor who is probably God. That detail, sure to infuriate xenophobic Mail readers throughout our dyspeptic and crotchety land, was delightful, though sadly reminiscent of the Godly janitor from The Hudsucker Proxy. The other Godly presence is a doubly-employed Eva Green, this time wearing a mad red wig. This also delights, in a different way.
That's one of the fatal flaws of Franklyn. Working like a cross between Dark City, It's A Wonderful Life, and Lost (with regards to its interconnected plots), Franklyn's ambition is hobbled by echoes of other stories. The moments where McMorrow allows his film to become a torrent of ideas, especially the religious mania of Meanwhile City, are the most interesting, but perhaps there's a movie to be made about that, instead of stapling it to this other story. To be honest, I doubt even that would work. As enjoyable as the detailed matte paintings are, Meanwhile City's conceit - that living there is only allowed if you adhere to a faith - is at worst an ill-thought out satire on New Age thinking, at best part of a greater theme throughout the movie about belief and self-deception.
Perhaps I'm being generous. Sam Riley's plot-thread revolves around his unrequited love, caused by a fixation on a childhood sweetheart who turns out to have been an imaginary friend-cum-guardian angel. He has created a fantasy world of his own, a lot less elaborate than Phillippe's, but containing more mad wigs. He also refers to a tale about a Storyteller who spins yarns that can then come true (Riley's onscreen BFF, played by Richard Coyne, makes a wet comment about that being a great superpower, which is kinda unfortunate, as this means McMorrow has never heard of this recently introduced Marvel character). That theme, of the delusion made real, pops up at the end as Phillippe's fantasy bleeds out into the world, to be seen by Eva Green. So what's the point McMorrow is making? That we make the world in our own image? That perception is all? That faith is the same thing as that, or perhaps a lesser form of self-delusion than daydreaming? It's a thread that could have been followed with more vigour, but instead falls short.
To make matters worse, it seems like all of the cosmic interventions are all in the service of so little. Green, who appears to be on the way to killing herself (her attempts disguised as a boring art project), is redeemed at the end by meeting Riley, who seems thrilled to have found a non-bewigged version of his guardian angel. Of course, he meets her in the final moments of the film, so a couple of weeks listening to her wittering on about her shitty art will probably put him off, but I think we're meant to find her solipsism and brattiness charming. As for Phillippe, he dies, and his dad sees it happen. I think he's meant to be given the opportunity to move on, but it seems like a pretty crappy way to do it. Your crazy son is dead, dude. Time to get a hobby. Thanks, Janitor God!
Maybe if there was a sense that more was at stake this would have worked better, but even with the threat of Bernard Hill dying at his son's hands, the loudly-whirring machinations of the plot signal that any attempt on his life is merely going to trigger something else. In that sense, Riley's flesh-wound seems to be important, but it really isn't. He doesn't have to be hurt for him to meet Eva Green. It's all meant to seem like something has happened, but nothing really has. The film runs on the spot for an hour and a half just so we can see a couple meet-cute. Or, considering the bloodshed, pyrotechnics, matte paintings, Godly interventions, and contrivance, perhaps I should say meet-complicated.
It's not all bad. Green is, as ever, a compelling screen presence even while playing an obnoxious art-school YBA parody, and effortlessly rises above the material. Phillippe is obscured by a mask that screams Desperately Seeking Iconic Status, and it's tempting to think he's been replaced by a body double for the majority of the film. When he's not in the mask, he speaks his dialogue through his traditional mouth-full-of-intensity, though his diction clears up when adopting a British accent for the final act. Bernard Hill is typically brilliant, though playing an infuriating loser strips him of all of his King Theoden charisma, which is a shame. Art Malik crops up in a dual role, and is almost unrecognisable while wearing his Meanwhile City White Contact Lenses Of Otherworldly Freakiness. It's good to see him around, even though he's not given much to do.
Sam Riley, sadly, is pretty bloody awful. I've been hearing a lot about him since he played Ian Curtis in Control, but this introduction to his work has soured me, hopefully temporarily. It doesn't help that his character is utterly wet and silly, whining repeatedly about how sad he is about not finding the right girl. Jilted by his fiancee in his first scene, he never recovers, so much so that after an hour and a half watching him mope and then stalk his guardian angel (yes, you can actually stalk imaginary people, apparently), you wonder how someone as feeble as him could ever appeal to someone as intense as Green's pretentious artist.
Perhaps that's why I felt so robbed at the end. All of this because two self-absorbed twits are meant to hook up in the final scene? And there's no way on earth they could ever make each other happy? It all felt like a lot of effort in service of nothing. The Meanwhile City ideas are left to dissipate in the air, unloved and undeveloped, with some gratuitous fight scenes added just to make you feel like something is happening. Bernard Hill is only there to look sad, for all the effect he has on the plot. Riley does literally nothing for the first hour of the film. Only Green gets anything meaty to do, and even then it's just giving up, though giving up in suicidal style.
Anyone who knows me knows I get very upset at the British film industry for not trying hard enough to tackle ambitious projects, and am rarely happy with the films that do get a wide release (this was one of the few times I ever sounded optimistic about it). Film4 and the UK Film Council funded McMorrow's project, and with the small budget (approximately $6m), he has done wonders. Ben Davis' photography is impressive, capturing the greyness of modern London depressingly well. Joby Talbot's soundtrack is also worthy of praise. However, McMorrow - who is originally a video and ad director - has fallen into the same trap as the mighty TARSEM! by letting his visual imagination run riot to the extent that any old narrative bolted on will serve to deliver those eye-bending images (if you think I'm being harsh about Tarsem's likeable and beautiful The Fall, bear in mind even that very slight film was based on Valeri Petrov's Yo Ho Ho, a fact that struggled to be discovered in the press coverage upon the film's theatrical release. That's how little attention people were paying to the plot).
Of course, McMorrow doesn't have the resources Tarsem had on hand, so his film is bound to be a lot less interesting visually. That's not his fault. However, while The Fall felt unsatisfying on a narrative level but still delivered a generally satisfying experience, Franklyn is a major disappointment. Though I commend McMorrow for getting this project onto the screen (no mean feat these days), he would do well to consider directing screenplays by stronger writers before he does so again. One day, with the inevitable support he will get from the fans that will champion this film as a visionary success (inevitable, if misguided, IMO), he could make something really worthy of attention. I look forward to joining that band of fans.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Sci Fi Through Space/Time: The Last Mimzy
(Apologies to anyone who read an early draft of this and thought it was poorly edited. It was, partially because I'm a terrible idiot, but mostly because the computer I'm using is massively unreliable and I had to just post and walk away or it would have gone out of the window. Hopefully things are fixed now.)
My plan to chronicle my adventures in sci fi cinema pretty much foundered not long after I started, a long-gestating plan to talk about Southland Tales falling by the wayside. That said, I still do intend to inspect that, as it is a fascinating project (which is not praise, BTW), but it will be in a different, more combative format. I've still been experiencing good and bad sci fi since my last Sci Fi Through Space/Time post, but never got around to talking about them. In fact, I woke up today fully intending to talk about a movie I saw recently and fell in love with, but instead, while trying to eat a bowl of penne (aka the worst pasta shape in the world), I decided to watch Bob Shaye's The Last Mimzy, and it's such an oddity I just had to bring it up here. The other movie will have to wait until another time (hopefully not next September).
Ostensibly a kids’ movie owing a debt to ET, The Last Mimzy is actually a mash note to Buddha that will doubtless be picked up by New Agers the world over, portraying as it does a post-Age of Aquarius world filled with flowers and telepathy and flying children in stark contrast to the nasty now, which contains nothing but hate and gadgets and fear and other deeply unpleasant things. I got a hint of that from the trailers, and it made me curious to see it when it had a feeble release last year, but mainly it stuck in my head because Charlie Brooker used to use the word "mimsy" as a slang word for the lower ladyparts, and the thought of a kids’ movie about that amused me greatly.
Instead of weird and surely illegal child-friendly porn, it's based on this short story, Mimsy Were The Borogoves, by sci fi writers Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, operating under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett. Originally (as you can see if you read that handy version of it linked to above), it was a dark tale of children coming across a box from the future, filled with toys (to be used as markers and nothing more) which educate them enough that they learn a new language and a form of multidimensional geometry that enables them to translate the Lewis Carroll poem Jabberwocky (written by Carroll's muse, who was in possession of another future toy sent back earlier). With this knowledge at hand, the children create a wormhole taking them from our dimension, much to the horror of their booze-drinking jerk parents. It's quirky and clever and kind of sinister. It was previously adapted as a TV series on French TV as Tout spliques étaient les Borogoves. I have no idea how that turned out.
The Last Mimzy ignores the intellectual and atmospheric (even quite cynical) tone of the story, going instead for something much more optimistic and woolly, but with incidental details that held my interest throughout. As I said when I started this project, I was looking for sci fi films that were not of the norm, that were as inventive and original and peculiar and stimulating as the best of sci fi literature, and though this falls far short of those expectations, it represents a collision of sci fi tropes, cultural markers, and potential corporate fiddlings that fascinated me.
Beginning in a cuddly tunic-wearing pastoral future of much lazy sci fi, a teacher mind-melds with her young students and tells them the history of their civilisation, beginning with the travails of a scientist attempting to save humanity from itself. The world soul and the gene pool have become so corrupted that humanity faces extinction. Nothing in that world is pure enough to save us, and so he sends objects back in time using a complicated and interestingly visualised Einstein-Rosen Bridge in the hope of educating the recipients enough to reconstruct the mechanism and send back the living computer (known as a Mimzy, and yes, I did smirk) with a sample of their DNA, which, compared to that of his fellow man, is pure. Knowing that adults would not be able to understand such a concept (an idea taken from the short story), he packages the Mimzy as a toy rabbit, in the hope that it would be handed to a child, who would then communicate with the Mimzy, learn from it, and save the future.
There's a hodge-podge of ideas all over this plot, and that's before I get into the meat of the movie (the previous paragraph accounts for 3% of the movie's length, and about 75% of the interesting ideas). There are many influences here, more than I could find right now, so I'll just go through the ones that came to mind while watching.
Sending things to the past to save the future = The Terminator franchise (and Harlan Ellison's Soldier primarily please don't sue me Harlan!!!). Using the past to save the future = John Varley's short story Air Raid and the subsequent movie Millennium, which also reminded me of The Last Mimzy due to its unorthodox effects and ugly, muted pallette. Children targeted by peculiar force =
John Wyndham's Chocky, as well as the kids’ TV show from the 80s, which also featured tunnel effects and crystal shapes. Children taught to use advanced technology during dreams = Explorers, which was one of my favourite films when younger. Humanity transformed to a higher state of being thanks to powers that appear to be paranormal = Phenomenon, one of the most New Age movies ever made. Future jeopardised by the death of the world soul = Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within, as well as the seventh installment of the game that inspired the movie. Future society as utopian, peaceful land of plenty = Star Trek.
Well, there are lots of examples of utopian sci fi, but that's the one that sprang to mind, mostly because The Last Mimzy is filled with the kind of New Age sentiment and imagery beloved of the more extreme Star Trek fans, the ones who believe Gene Roddenberry was providing a template for humanity to live by (similar to the goals of Scientology, though without the Church and the structure and financial power). The film definitely posits that we will one day be saved by the potential of the human race (a potential which is contained within an object of such unbelievable sentimental significance that it threatens to drown the movie in a sea of cynicism from the more sceptical viewer, but I'll get to that soon), and living in a utopian society that makes Roddenberry's vision look like Baltimore in The Wire, but prior to that it has to cast us as lost souls missing out on realising our full potential, and it leads to some amazing anvillicious moments.
Shaye and his writers Bruce Joel Rubin and Toby Emmerich (from a screen story by Carol Skilken and J.M. Barrie fan James V. Hart) go to great lengths to show us how the modern world is in the process of enormous FAIL. Metal detectors erected in schools, kids using technology to cheat at exams, a populace disassociated form itself; it's horrible! Except not really. My favourite shot is of a bus full of people ignoring each other because they're listening to iPods, texting, typing on laptops, and playing PSPs (which appear throughout, though I can imagine Sony is really pissed at how the machine is used as a symbol of youth corruption). I weep for humanity!
Except that might work in an idyllic area like the one this film is set in (the outskirts of Seattle and some lovely looking areas of British Columbia), but everywhere else, there is no way people want to be talking on the bus. Just a couple of days ago, while trying to get home and read a book I was really interested in, I had to wait for the driver to argue with a guy who crashed into our vehicle, and then bitch at some passengers who had a go at him a bit later. There was no one on that bus I wanted to talk to. Yay distractions that stop me from having to communicate with my fellow man who are often quite hostile and unpleasant!
After setting up this horrible world of soullessness, we are introduced to our two protagonists, Noah and Emma Wilder, played by Chris O'Neil and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn. He's older and is truly obnoxious and nasty, she's cutesy and innocent and cloying. Noah is a pretty unpleasant kid at the start, deep in an existential fugue so powerful he lashes out at everything around him, hating himself and his life, cutting himself off from everyone by incessantly playing evil computer games, and picking on his sister. By the end he is a little hero helping to save humanity, but in the early stages he is tough to associate with. That's fine. I get what the goal was there, but showing him using games to cut himself off from everyone else is a bit rich coming from a film co-written and directed by men whose company, New Line, licences out its film properties to gaming companies for adaptation. Perhaps Shaye resents this, and doesn't want the money. If so, it's news to Peter Jackson. As you can see, I had trouble reconciling the nature of the filmmakers and the message they were trying to sell.
The kids are taken to a beach house by their mother, Jo (played by Joely Richardson), while their father David (played by Timothy Hutton), can't make it because his law job keeps him from spending time with his kids blah blah, While playing on a beach they find the mysterious box sent from the future by the scientist. Inside it are weird mineral artifacts, a blue blob thing (which I thought would come to life and start interacting with the kids, though it thankfully doesn't), and a toy rabbit that talks to Emma and educates her. Noah fixates upon a slab of green crystal, which his mother only sees as a rock. Oh adults, your wonderless minds are impermeable as steel!
After spending time with the objects, the kids (especially Emma) realise they have properties that appear magical, much as Arthur C. Clarke said future technology would appear like magic to us. Fragments of a broken rock, when thrown at the floor, will hover and rotate, creating a localised field that temporarily undoes objects on a molecular level. Mimzy communicates with Emma and unlocks her telepathic potential, as well as predicts the future for her. The crystal slab improves Noah's vision, as well as teaches him how to access a lattice of connective energy in reality that can be used to open small wormholes, and shows him how to generate sound waves on a frequency that can be used to manipulate insects and spiders into doing his bidding. Using that, he makes a mindblowing science fair entry, using spiders to create a bridge structure that could revolutionise the construction industry. This is what would happen more regularly if computer games and Facebook were banned obviously.
This was my favourite section of the movie, pulling weird concepts and effects out of the ether even though many of the ideas would come to nothing later. I particularly liked the scene with Hutton showing his son how to play golf, and Noah using his wormhole power to send the ball 300ft. So, you know, yay for humanity, but bad news for Titleist. I guess the future contains no sport. (Wow, can I go there tomorrow?)
Sadly, the film goes off the rails in a peculiar way at that point, and by peculiar I mean predictable, but featuring plot developments I really thought I would never see in a kids’ movie. The growing power of the kids scares their parents, who react badly to the presence of the objects. Richardson in particular has an unpleasant freakout, after which the family starts to fall apart. At around this time the crystal slab merges with the weird blob artifact, creating a new object in an electromagnetic pulse explosion that wipes out Seattle's power grid.
This is enough to attract the attention of Homeland Security, headed up by Michael Clarke Duncan, who barges into their house under the authority of the PATRIOT Act (yes, in the middle of a kids’ film), and detains the family, impounds the objects, and generally acts like a bit of a dick. It's at this point that we can add Poltergeist (family unit threatened by outside force) and ET (family unit exposed to otherworldly thing detained by government) to the list of films mimicked.
Poltergeist was strongly on my mind during the scenes with Noah's science teacher, Larry (played by super-awesome Rainn Wilson), and his fiancee Naomi, played by Kathryn Hahn. Noah's accelerated braingrowth attracts Larry's attention, as does his doodling of complex Tibetan mandalas. While Noah and Emma's parents are wary of their children now that they have begun to change, Larry and Naomi see the potential of the two, Larry because of the science angle, Naomi because she is a big Buddhist hippie type. They try to convince Jo that the kids are special, in a scene similar to one in Poltergeist, when benign paranormal investigators attempt to help the Freeling family. However, in that film JoBeth Williams is receptive to what they say, but here Joely Richardson's character freaks out.
To be honest, I don't blame her. She has put the weird behaviour of her kids down as just growing pains, and then suddenly two hippies show up blathering on about mandalas, tulkus and palm reading. This is especially bogus as, except for the mandala idea (mandalas being maps of the universe, as well as being a pretty pattern that shows up throughout the movie), none this litany of Buddhist folklore has any bearing on the film whatsoever.
Which is one of the reasons the movie baffled me so much. Here I was watching a very optimistic movie (almost to the point of parody) that had been made by guys I thought were nothing more than suits, as well as being co-written by someone who appeared to be the most downbeat person in Hollywood. In the past I have resisted watching movies by Bruce Joel Rubin as they are entirely humourless and self-consciously obsessed with death. In an interview with Premiere magazine conducted prior to the release of Jacob's Ladder, Rubin spent a lot of time talking about how fascinated he was by death, and how it was his muse. A quick look at his IMDb page shows him working almost exclusively on this topic for years. Brainstorm is the bonkers tale of a machine that records what happens to Louise Fletcher after her death. Ghost is obviously about Patrick Swayze stalking his girlfriend after death. Jacob's Ladder is about a Vietnam vet who doesn't realise he is dead and in a Hell populated with Francis-Bacon-esque fellas with the rapid shaky head thing that's been ripped off repeatedly ever since. My Life is about a terminally ill man coming to terms with his impending doom. Deep Impact is about an entire planet coming to terms with its impending doom. Even his adaptations of books, Deceived and Deadly Friend, are about death in some way (faked death and implanting a brain into a robot after death, respectively). Only Stuart Little 2 seems to have escaped that, though I haven't seen it. Perhaps the whole family dies at the end, after trying to come to terms with it for a while.
I don't know. It's an impressive sight, someone who has managed to corner the market on an entire subject, but his obsession with it always smacked of self-importance, as if this was his badge of profundity, not helped that his scripts have often been horribly depressing. Deep Impact in particular made me miserable for weeks after seeing it. Of those movies, I only really enjoyed Brainstorm, and I don't even think it's that great. I just liked the concept, and Doug Trumbull's weird decision to turn it into a slapstick comedy whenever he could.
Turns out I misunderstood where Rubin was coming from, and poking around the internet today has shown me the error of my ways. His obsession with death is not the morbid and ostentatious thing I thought it was, but rooted in his belief in Buddhism. He's been a believer for twenty-five years, and though the theme of dealing with death has been prevalent in his work, The Last Mimzy is the first film of his that I've seen that deals with his Buddhism. Seems I was wrong about his interest in death all along. That's not to say I suddenly like his work. I still don't enjoy any of the films I listed earlier. I just think he's not as pretentious now, is all.
Sadly, considering this is the first time I've seen Rubin's belief system represented within a film, it's via the characters of Larry and Naomi, who are almost the comic relief. Perhaps it's just that Rainn Wilson and Kathryn Hahn are light and likeable (and of course Wilson is Dwight Schrute, which tends to hang in the head even when he plays someone completely different), but their Buddhism isn't taken very seriously. Rubin isn't the last name on the script; the last draft of the script appears to belong to New Line Head of Production Toby Emmerich, who might have rewritten them a bit. I suspect this is definitely the case as Emmerich's only other screenplay credit is on Frequency, at the end of which a secondary character become a multi-millionaire by investing in Yahoo! thanks to a stock tip from the future. In The Last Mimzy, Naomi obsesses over a dream Larry had where he accurately predicted lottery numbers that he never played, and at the end of the film he has another prediction. Emmerich has a big boner for characters coming into unearned money, it seems.
The thing that really grates about that scene, though, is that Naomi reads Emma's palm and sees that she is indeed a tulku, and has great potential to change the world. This turns out to be the case, but what has her status as a tulku got to do with the future? Why is she the chosen one? She discovered the box by accident, and there's no hint that it was aimed at her. It's just a weird shout-out to Buddha that is shoe-horned in with extra palm-reading thrown in (or is part of a larger plot that was removed in the final draft). Even the mandala stuff is half-heartedly explained. It's a map of the universe? Or a nice design for a rug? You decide. It's all such a peculiar hodgepodge of religion, superstition, and science.
When Homeland Security finally storm in and arrest the whole family, they take Mimzy from Emma, who is already freaking out about her friend dying in a total lift from ET designed to add some artificial suspense to what has been aimlessly flicking back and forth between genial sci fi exploration and shrill family drama. After the scientists have had a chance to poke around with it, they discover it is in fact an enormously powerful sentient computer, and an electron microscope shot of part of it unveils the most bizarre bit of product placement since Evolution turned into a huge ad for Head and Shoulders shampoo.
Yes, Mimzy is built using an Intel processor. Again, not the best product placement as Mimzy is dying by this point, but it's okay. Using their new powers, Noah and Emma escape the building and meet up with Larry and Naomi (who gets contacted via dreamail), before heading back to the beach house to send Mimzy back. While on their way there, Emma cries about Mimzy's increasing feebleness (not as emotional a scene as Elliot crying over ET's corpse, but then it is an inanimate toy that occasionally chirrups that we're talking about), and a tear falls on the rabbit/supercomputer. You know where I'm going with this, don't you.
In a burst of effects, Noah and Emma manage to use the future tech to send Mimzy back to the future, with all the adults present. Michael Clarke Duncan's Homeland Security boss is turned into a pussycat and forgives everyone, the family reconciles, and Larry gets those lottery numbers. Better still, the future scientist uses the DNA included in the tear to heal humanity, and the benevolent future-teacher finishes her story, at which point her students lift into the air and fly off. Very satisfying, though utterly mechanical.
At this point the film goes into code-overdrive, with image after image of New Age significance appearing. Just like Republican presidents are good at filling their speeches with coded lines that can only be picked up by their hard-Right Christian followers, The Last Mimzy resonates with New Age symbolism. In ET the film ended with a resurrection and a rainbow, two things that chimed with Christian viewers. Here we have mandalas, greys (or rather future dwellers wearing environment suits that look alien), doorways of light, and vortexes, all of which would excite those viewers who think The X-Files is a documentary in disguise.
That's not a criticism, but it's something you would expect from a filmmaker operating on the fringe of Hollywood. Instead it's directed by the CEO of a major motion picture production house, written by an Oscar winner and the head of production of that same studio, and given a hard sell and wide opening on over 3000 screens (an opening it didn't capitalise on; it only grossed $26,702,770 worldwide). It's not a good enough movie to justify the time I've spent talking about it except that it is such a peculiar movie to come out of Hollywood, pretty much qualifying as ET meets What The Fuck Do We Know?
Shaye seems like a hard-ass in his business dealings, and has a reputation as someone less in touch with their inner child than most New Agers, and has created many controversial and violent films that could be considered damaging to the innocence of his fellow man (scroll down this list of New Line movies) but if this interview is to be believed, he is quite serious about the message of this movie. It's a shame his arguments are often so ill thought out.
Staring off into space is pretty much analogous with looking out of a bus window at the pretty trees, Bob. I too like looking at pretty things, and it definitely makes me momentarily happy, but working on a laptop, playing a handheld game, or surfing the net is a form of interaction far deeper than passively staring at stuff. The mind is working, not idling. Still, I do think he believes in what he's talking about, even though I think he's horribly wrong. Moving on, I especially like how he rationalises making horror movies and then railing against modern civilisation.
Or, as Canyon pointed out, it's because the news is horribly boring to a teenager. Yes, Bob, even your brainy kids. To be honest, fair enough. I do not hold to the theory that modern culture and media are responsible for the alienation of children and the breakdown of society, so I'll give him a break on that (especially as some of my favourite movies are on that New Line list), but his complaints about technology are ill-served by the movie. He seems to think they're part of the reason our society is so fractured, but anyone who uses the internet on a regular basis, and interacts with people over it, knows what a wonderful connective technology it is. One of the movie's utopian ideas is that eventually we will become telepathic. Great! Less strain on our vocal chords. Otherwise, it would bring people together in much the same way that the internet does now.
But people who use the internet are not interacting with the people around them, I hear you cry (using my telepathy)! Fine by me. When I'm at work and using the internet to communicate with people, that's because I don't want to talk to the people around me. Better than any form of communication yet devised, the internet brings people with similar interests or mindsets together, and that's a wonderful, inclusive, joyous thing, and being done via a laptop or iPhone or Nintendo DS doesn't make it any less valid. Canyon and I know all about this, having met online.
What's worse is that no matter how cleverly the objects sent from the future are made to look like natural objects (slivers of crystalline mica, sea-shells with crystals embedded in them, floating rocks), they're still forms of technology. Human potential appears to be unlocked in a New Agey way, but how much of that is because of the presence of the technology? Will the kids keep their powers once the tech is sent back to the future? Even if they do, it's all down to the machines we make. Worry all you like about technology, but right now, email and message boards and talkbacks and online gaming (yes, even the kind where 12 year olds call me a faggot and then teabag me) bring us together. Sorry, personal bugbear. I'll move on now.
Oh, and that future tech is used to fix those awful problems and save the world. So how can he really hate it? Right, sorry, now I'll move on.
Thanks to all of this research, I realise now that Shaye and Rubin and Emmerich really seem to believe in what they are doing, and have committed themselves to sending a message, using the film to teach kids about New Age philosophy in much the same way the artifacts teach the kids. Creepy, but I guess they're honest about it. Shaye in particular is very happy with the idea of a child's tear saving the world, an idea so schmaltzy it could actually kill a person. I'm serious. His explanation of why that was included is almost more entertaining than the film itself.
Ignoring the fact that someone with Shaye's fierce reputation is worrying about other people losing their childlike viewpoint is a bit rich, I guess even the most committed of storytellers will be afraid to go all out and just use phrases like "Gene of Innocence" in their movies, but I'm quite pleased that Shaye thought that idea was important but was willing to not use it because of a test screening. If he had ignored it, after using test screenings to judge his studio's movies, I would have cried havoc and let slip the Dogs of War (they're outside right now, in the Kennel of War, chewing on a Bonio Dog Biscuit of War).
So, I find myself in an odd position, tentatively welcoming a personal vision of the world from a bunch of multi-millionaires who would normally be considered to be the enemy of personal visions, and in one case has been instrumental in screwing over a filmmaker who just wanted to know how much money his movies had made (which is not exactly advanced future ethics at play there). A project like this that is willing to run as counter-programming to the Christian monopoly over message movies is rare enough, but I guess when you're as rich as Croesus and have a studio at your beck and call you can make whatever the hell you want. Shame The Golden Compass had its balls removed though, eh Bob?
So what about the film itself? It qualifies as occasionally intriguing sci fi even though it often feels like a mixture of ideas from other better works, but is it actually any good? For the most part, no. The performances are quite indifferent (and the kids are not that well handled by Shaye), though I enjoyed watching Wilson and Hahn, who seemed to be the only cast members trying to force some life into the movie. It's also a strikingly ugly movie, lit poorly and blocked incompetently, with some scenes featuring a hand-held camera so badly operated that it masks what is going on and interferes with the tone being set.
What makes that especially irksome is that the DoP is the usually excellent Jim Muro, whose work on Roll Bounce and Open Range was so impressive, and who was responsible for the classic horror-comedy Street Trash. For some reason, his work on this is murky and hard to watch. It annoyed me greatly. Even worse is the insipid and repetitive soundtrack by musical genius Howard Shore, whose work on the Lord of the Rings films was so beautiful, and whose ongoing collaboration with David Cronenberg is one of the most fruitful joint ventures in cinema history. His "discography" is littered with classics, and many a poor movie has been saved by his work. Here, however, I wanted to mute the movie.
Horribly disappointing stuff, and that's before we get to the big song, Hello (I Love You) by Roger Waters. Quick disclosure: I hate Pink Floyd and cannot understand the appeal of their dreary prog noodlings. Only a couple of tracks from Dark Side of the Moon would get onto my iPod, and then I'd probably delete them after one listen and then hate myself for spending 79p on them. When I realised that Pink Floyd references kept cropping up throughout the movie I was annoyed, but as it seemed in keeping with the New Age ethos, I let it go. And then, over the credits, plays the most insipid piece of sentimental doggerel I've heard since Ringo Starr's Liverpool 8. Apologies if you feel compelled to click on this video and are rendered diabetic by the cloying sentiment within.
That video encapsulates why I ended up not liking the movie. For all of the stuff I liked, and for all of the boldness of the concept (especially as this is meant to be a kids’ film), and ignoring the shoddiness of the filmmaking on show, the pompous and self-important tone of it was alienating. Didacticism in movies is bad enough when the thing you're being lectured about isn't even a concrete thing. Bitching to kids that playing games is no way to live your life is one thing (and as a gamer I resent that already), but not having anything to replace that is pretty rich. Is the film telling kids to put down their games and master the ability to warp reality? If so, is there something about today's youth that we don't know about? Screw knife crime, I want to make sure I don't get teleported into a volcano, Jumper-style.
For a kids' film it's not very entertaining, and for adults it's too light, so it ends up pleasing no one, despite the positive things it has. Compare that to Joe Dante's Explorers, which features three kids getting dream messages that contain plans for a force-field generating circuit that, when plugged up to a PC and car battery, allows them to fly into space to meet the aliens who beamed the information to them. Whereas The Last Mimzy features desperate scientists contacting children to save the future, in Explorers the aliens are just teenagers who are bored, have stolen a spaceship from their dad, and are looking to make friends and watch TV with them. It's the tonal opposite to The Last Mimzy, and is flawed, but works beautifully anyway just by being so willfully odd and eager to flout convention.
That said, there is one thing The Last Mimzy has over all of the films I've mentioned here: Rainn Wilson walking around in his pants!
I'll let you decide if this is a good or a bad thing.
My plan to chronicle my adventures in sci fi cinema pretty much foundered not long after I started, a long-gestating plan to talk about Southland Tales falling by the wayside. That said, I still do intend to inspect that, as it is a fascinating project (which is not praise, BTW), but it will be in a different, more combative format. I've still been experiencing good and bad sci fi since my last Sci Fi Through Space/Time post, but never got around to talking about them. In fact, I woke up today fully intending to talk about a movie I saw recently and fell in love with, but instead, while trying to eat a bowl of penne (aka the worst pasta shape in the world), I decided to watch Bob Shaye's The Last Mimzy, and it's such an oddity I just had to bring it up here. The other movie will have to wait until another time (hopefully not next September).
Ostensibly a kids’ movie owing a debt to ET, The Last Mimzy is actually a mash note to Buddha that will doubtless be picked up by New Agers the world over, portraying as it does a post-Age of Aquarius world filled with flowers and telepathy and flying children in stark contrast to the nasty now, which contains nothing but hate and gadgets and fear and other deeply unpleasant things. I got a hint of that from the trailers, and it made me curious to see it when it had a feeble release last year, but mainly it stuck in my head because Charlie Brooker used to use the word "mimsy" as a slang word for the lower ladyparts, and the thought of a kids’ movie about that amused me greatly.
Instead of weird and surely illegal child-friendly porn, it's based on this short story, Mimsy Were The Borogoves, by sci fi writers Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, operating under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett. Originally (as you can see if you read that handy version of it linked to above), it was a dark tale of children coming across a box from the future, filled with toys (to be used as markers and nothing more) which educate them enough that they learn a new language and a form of multidimensional geometry that enables them to translate the Lewis Carroll poem Jabberwocky (written by Carroll's muse, who was in possession of another future toy sent back earlier). With this knowledge at hand, the children create a wormhole taking them from our dimension, much to the horror of their booze-drinking jerk parents. It's quirky and clever and kind of sinister. It was previously adapted as a TV series on French TV as Tout spliques étaient les Borogoves. I have no idea how that turned out.
The Last Mimzy ignores the intellectual and atmospheric (even quite cynical) tone of the story, going instead for something much more optimistic and woolly, but with incidental details that held my interest throughout. As I said when I started this project, I was looking for sci fi films that were not of the norm, that were as inventive and original and peculiar and stimulating as the best of sci fi literature, and though this falls far short of those expectations, it represents a collision of sci fi tropes, cultural markers, and potential corporate fiddlings that fascinated me.
Beginning in a cuddly tunic-wearing pastoral future of much lazy sci fi, a teacher mind-melds with her young students and tells them the history of their civilisation, beginning with the travails of a scientist attempting to save humanity from itself. The world soul and the gene pool have become so corrupted that humanity faces extinction. Nothing in that world is pure enough to save us, and so he sends objects back in time using a complicated and interestingly visualised Einstein-Rosen Bridge in the hope of educating the recipients enough to reconstruct the mechanism and send back the living computer (known as a Mimzy, and yes, I did smirk) with a sample of their DNA, which, compared to that of his fellow man, is pure. Knowing that adults would not be able to understand such a concept (an idea taken from the short story), he packages the Mimzy as a toy rabbit, in the hope that it would be handed to a child, who would then communicate with the Mimzy, learn from it, and save the future.
There's a hodge-podge of ideas all over this plot, and that's before I get into the meat of the movie (the previous paragraph accounts for 3% of the movie's length, and about 75% of the interesting ideas). There are many influences here, more than I could find right now, so I'll just go through the ones that came to mind while watching.
John Wyndham's Chocky, as well as the kids’ TV show from the 80s, which also featured tunnel effects and crystal shapes.
Well, there are lots of examples of utopian sci fi, but that's the one that sprang to mind, mostly because The Last Mimzy is filled with the kind of New Age sentiment and imagery beloved of the more extreme Star Trek fans, the ones who believe Gene Roddenberry was providing a template for humanity to live by (similar to the goals of Scientology, though without the Church and the structure and financial power). The film definitely posits that we will one day be saved by the potential of the human race (a potential which is contained within an object of such unbelievable sentimental significance that it threatens to drown the movie in a sea of cynicism from the more sceptical viewer, but I'll get to that soon), and living in a utopian society that makes Roddenberry's vision look like Baltimore in The Wire, but prior to that it has to cast us as lost souls missing out on realising our full potential, and it leads to some amazing anvillicious moments.
Shaye and his writers Bruce Joel Rubin and Toby Emmerich (from a screen story by Carol Skilken and J.M. Barrie fan James V. Hart) go to great lengths to show us how the modern world is in the process of enormous FAIL. Metal detectors erected in schools, kids using technology to cheat at exams, a populace disassociated form itself; it's horrible! Except not really. My favourite shot is of a bus full of people ignoring each other because they're listening to iPods, texting, typing on laptops, and playing PSPs (which appear throughout, though I can imagine Sony is really pissed at how the machine is used as a symbol of youth corruption). I weep for humanity!
Except that might work in an idyllic area like the one this film is set in (the outskirts of Seattle and some lovely looking areas of British Columbia), but everywhere else, there is no way people want to be talking on the bus. Just a couple of days ago, while trying to get home and read a book I was really interested in, I had to wait for the driver to argue with a guy who crashed into our vehicle, and then bitch at some passengers who had a go at him a bit later. There was no one on that bus I wanted to talk to. Yay distractions that stop me from having to communicate with my fellow man who are often quite hostile and unpleasant!
After setting up this horrible world of soullessness, we are introduced to our two protagonists, Noah and Emma Wilder, played by Chris O'Neil and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn. He's older and is truly obnoxious and nasty, she's cutesy and innocent and cloying. Noah is a pretty unpleasant kid at the start, deep in an existential fugue so powerful he lashes out at everything around him, hating himself and his life, cutting himself off from everyone by incessantly playing evil computer games, and picking on his sister. By the end he is a little hero helping to save humanity, but in the early stages he is tough to associate with. That's fine. I get what the goal was there, but showing him using games to cut himself off from everyone else is a bit rich coming from a film co-written and directed by men whose company, New Line, licences out its film properties to gaming companies for adaptation. Perhaps Shaye resents this, and doesn't want the money. If so, it's news to Peter Jackson. As you can see, I had trouble reconciling the nature of the filmmakers and the message they were trying to sell.
The kids are taken to a beach house by their mother, Jo (played by Joely Richardson), while their father David (played by Timothy Hutton), can't make it because his law job keeps him from spending time with his kids blah blah, While playing on a beach they find the mysterious box sent from the future by the scientist. Inside it are weird mineral artifacts, a blue blob thing (which I thought would come to life and start interacting with the kids, though it thankfully doesn't), and a toy rabbit that talks to Emma and educates her. Noah fixates upon a slab of green crystal, which his mother only sees as a rock. Oh adults, your wonderless minds are impermeable as steel!
After spending time with the objects, the kids (especially Emma) realise they have properties that appear magical, much as Arthur C. Clarke said future technology would appear like magic to us. Fragments of a broken rock, when thrown at the floor, will hover and rotate, creating a localised field that temporarily undoes objects on a molecular level. Mimzy communicates with Emma and unlocks her telepathic potential, as well as predicts the future for her. The crystal slab improves Noah's vision, as well as teaches him how to access a lattice of connective energy in reality that can be used to open small wormholes, and shows him how to generate sound waves on a frequency that can be used to manipulate insects and spiders into doing his bidding. Using that, he makes a mindblowing science fair entry, using spiders to create a bridge structure that could revolutionise the construction industry. This is what would happen more regularly if computer games and Facebook were banned obviously.
This was my favourite section of the movie, pulling weird concepts and effects out of the ether even though many of the ideas would come to nothing later. I particularly liked the scene with Hutton showing his son how to play golf, and Noah using his wormhole power to send the ball 300ft. So, you know, yay for humanity, but bad news for Titleist. I guess the future contains no sport. (Wow, can I go there tomorrow?)
Sadly, the film goes off the rails in a peculiar way at that point, and by peculiar I mean predictable, but featuring plot developments I really thought I would never see in a kids’ movie. The growing power of the kids scares their parents, who react badly to the presence of the objects. Richardson in particular has an unpleasant freakout, after which the family starts to fall apart. At around this time the crystal slab merges with the weird blob artifact, creating a new object in an electromagnetic pulse explosion that wipes out Seattle's power grid.
This is enough to attract the attention of Homeland Security, headed up by Michael Clarke Duncan, who barges into their house under the authority of the PATRIOT Act (yes, in the middle of a kids’ film), and detains the family, impounds the objects, and generally acts like a bit of a dick. It's at this point that we can add Poltergeist (family unit threatened by outside force) and ET (family unit exposed to otherworldly thing detained by government) to the list of films mimicked.
Poltergeist was strongly on my mind during the scenes with Noah's science teacher, Larry (played by super-awesome Rainn Wilson), and his fiancee Naomi, played by Kathryn Hahn. Noah's accelerated braingrowth attracts Larry's attention, as does his doodling of complex Tibetan mandalas. While Noah and Emma's parents are wary of their children now that they have begun to change, Larry and Naomi see the potential of the two, Larry because of the science angle, Naomi because she is a big Buddhist hippie type. They try to convince Jo that the kids are special, in a scene similar to one in Poltergeist, when benign paranormal investigators attempt to help the Freeling family. However, in that film JoBeth Williams is receptive to what they say, but here Joely Richardson's character freaks out.
To be honest, I don't blame her. She has put the weird behaviour of her kids down as just growing pains, and then suddenly two hippies show up blathering on about mandalas, tulkus and palm reading. This is especially bogus as, except for the mandala idea (mandalas being maps of the universe, as well as being a pretty pattern that shows up throughout the movie), none this litany of Buddhist folklore has any bearing on the film whatsoever.
Which is one of the reasons the movie baffled me so much. Here I was watching a very optimistic movie (almost to the point of parody) that had been made by guys I thought were nothing more than suits, as well as being co-written by someone who appeared to be the most downbeat person in Hollywood. In the past I have resisted watching movies by Bruce Joel Rubin as they are entirely humourless and self-consciously obsessed with death. In an interview with Premiere magazine conducted prior to the release of Jacob's Ladder, Rubin spent a lot of time talking about how fascinated he was by death, and how it was his muse. A quick look at his IMDb page shows him working almost exclusively on this topic for years. Brainstorm is the bonkers tale of a machine that records what happens to Louise Fletcher after her death. Ghost is obviously about Patrick Swayze stalking his girlfriend after death. Jacob's Ladder is about a Vietnam vet who doesn't realise he is dead and in a Hell populated with Francis-Bacon-esque fellas with the rapid shaky head thing that's been ripped off repeatedly ever since. My Life is about a terminally ill man coming to terms with his impending doom. Deep Impact is about an entire planet coming to terms with its impending doom. Even his adaptations of books, Deceived and Deadly Friend, are about death in some way (faked death and implanting a brain into a robot after death, respectively). Only Stuart Little 2 seems to have escaped that, though I haven't seen it. Perhaps the whole family dies at the end, after trying to come to terms with it for a while.
I don't know. It's an impressive sight, someone who has managed to corner the market on an entire subject, but his obsession with it always smacked of self-importance, as if this was his badge of profundity, not helped that his scripts have often been horribly depressing. Deep Impact in particular made me miserable for weeks after seeing it. Of those movies, I only really enjoyed Brainstorm, and I don't even think it's that great. I just liked the concept, and Doug Trumbull's weird decision to turn it into a slapstick comedy whenever he could.
Turns out I misunderstood where Rubin was coming from, and poking around the internet today has shown me the error of my ways. His obsession with death is not the morbid and ostentatious thing I thought it was, but rooted in his belief in Buddhism. He's been a believer for twenty-five years, and though the theme of dealing with death has been prevalent in his work, The Last Mimzy is the first film of his that I've seen that deals with his Buddhism. Seems I was wrong about his interest in death all along. That's not to say I suddenly like his work. I still don't enjoy any of the films I listed earlier. I just think he's not as pretentious now, is all.
Sadly, considering this is the first time I've seen Rubin's belief system represented within a film, it's via the characters of Larry and Naomi, who are almost the comic relief. Perhaps it's just that Rainn Wilson and Kathryn Hahn are light and likeable (and of course Wilson is Dwight Schrute, which tends to hang in the head even when he plays someone completely different), but their Buddhism isn't taken very seriously. Rubin isn't the last name on the script; the last draft of the script appears to belong to New Line Head of Production Toby Emmerich, who might have rewritten them a bit. I suspect this is definitely the case as Emmerich's only other screenplay credit is on Frequency, at the end of which a secondary character become a multi-millionaire by investing in Yahoo! thanks to a stock tip from the future. In The Last Mimzy, Naomi obsesses over a dream Larry had where he accurately predicted lottery numbers that he never played, and at the end of the film he has another prediction. Emmerich has a big boner for characters coming into unearned money, it seems.
The thing that really grates about that scene, though, is that Naomi reads Emma's palm and sees that she is indeed a tulku, and has great potential to change the world. This turns out to be the case, but what has her status as a tulku got to do with the future? Why is she the chosen one? She discovered the box by accident, and there's no hint that it was aimed at her. It's just a weird shout-out to Buddha that is shoe-horned in with extra palm-reading thrown in (or is part of a larger plot that was removed in the final draft). Even the mandala stuff is half-heartedly explained. It's a map of the universe? Or a nice design for a rug? You decide. It's all such a peculiar hodgepodge of religion, superstition, and science.
When Homeland Security finally storm in and arrest the whole family, they take Mimzy from Emma, who is already freaking out about her friend dying in a total lift from ET designed to add some artificial suspense to what has been aimlessly flicking back and forth between genial sci fi exploration and shrill family drama. After the scientists have had a chance to poke around with it, they discover it is in fact an enormously powerful sentient computer, and an electron microscope shot of part of it unveils the most bizarre bit of product placement since Evolution turned into a huge ad for Head and Shoulders shampoo.
Yes, Mimzy is built using an Intel processor. Again, not the best product placement as Mimzy is dying by this point, but it's okay. Using their new powers, Noah and Emma escape the building and meet up with Larry and Naomi (who gets contacted via dreamail), before heading back to the beach house to send Mimzy back. While on their way there, Emma cries about Mimzy's increasing feebleness (not as emotional a scene as Elliot crying over ET's corpse, but then it is an inanimate toy that occasionally chirrups that we're talking about), and a tear falls on the rabbit/supercomputer. You know where I'm going with this, don't you.
In a burst of effects, Noah and Emma manage to use the future tech to send Mimzy back to the future, with all the adults present. Michael Clarke Duncan's Homeland Security boss is turned into a pussycat and forgives everyone, the family reconciles, and Larry gets those lottery numbers. Better still, the future scientist uses the DNA included in the tear to heal humanity, and the benevolent future-teacher finishes her story, at which point her students lift into the air and fly off. Very satisfying, though utterly mechanical.
At this point the film goes into code-overdrive, with image after image of New Age significance appearing. Just like Republican presidents are good at filling their speeches with coded lines that can only be picked up by their hard-Right Christian followers, The Last Mimzy resonates with New Age symbolism. In ET the film ended with a resurrection and a rainbow, two things that chimed with Christian viewers. Here we have mandalas, greys (or rather future dwellers wearing environment suits that look alien), doorways of light, and vortexes, all of which would excite those viewers who think The X-Files is a documentary in disguise.
That's not a criticism, but it's something you would expect from a filmmaker operating on the fringe of Hollywood. Instead it's directed by the CEO of a major motion picture production house, written by an Oscar winner and the head of production of that same studio, and given a hard sell and wide opening on over 3000 screens (an opening it didn't capitalise on; it only grossed $26,702,770 worldwide). It's not a good enough movie to justify the time I've spent talking about it except that it is such a peculiar movie to come out of Hollywood, pretty much qualifying as ET meets What The Fuck Do We Know?
Shaye seems like a hard-ass in his business dealings, and has a reputation as someone less in touch with their inner child than most New Agers, and has created many controversial and violent films that could be considered damaging to the innocence of his fellow man (scroll down this list of New Line movies) but if this interview is to be believed, he is quite serious about the message of this movie. It's a shame his arguments are often so ill thought out.
I’ve shown this movie to a lot of people and most people don’t think twice about televisions in the family house all the time. That, a little bit more heavy-handed way at the beginning of the movie – that bus scene where the two kids are riding, there was a lot more stuff about people working on computers; it’s beautiful outside in the middle of Seattle, the mountains are incredible, the mist and all that stuff – and all people can do is watch their video screens, or listening to music, or stare off into space.
Staring off into space is pretty much analogous with looking out of a bus window at the pretty trees, Bob. I too like looking at pretty things, and it definitely makes me momentarily happy, but working on a laptop, playing a handheld game, or surfing the net is a form of interaction far deeper than passively staring at stuff. The mind is working, not idling. Still, I do think he believes in what he's talking about, even though I think he's horribly wrong. Moving on, I especially like how he rationalises making horror movies and then railing against modern civilisation.
So, am I worried about humanity? Well, I am worried about humanity, but there’s more to it than that, and this does make you count after a while when you don’t recognize this stuff. When I was making Nightmare on Elm Street, I had two daughters, who at that time were 10-12 years old; and I actually showed them early cuts of the movie – ‘Is this scary? Do you like this?’ They gave me good ideas and they were really delightful. When I came home after work, I would turn on the television and the news would be on, and they would get up and walk out of the room, every time; and it finally dawned on me what was going on – it was just too bloody scary.
Or, as Canyon pointed out, it's because the news is horribly boring to a teenager. Yes, Bob, even your brainy kids. To be honest, fair enough. I do not hold to the theory that modern culture and media are responsible for the alienation of children and the breakdown of society, so I'll give him a break on that (especially as some of my favourite movies are on that New Line list), but his complaints about technology are ill-served by the movie. He seems to think they're part of the reason our society is so fractured, but anyone who uses the internet on a regular basis, and interacts with people over it, knows what a wonderful connective technology it is. One of the movie's utopian ideas is that eventually we will become telepathic. Great! Less strain on our vocal chords. Otherwise, it would bring people together in much the same way that the internet does now.
But people who use the internet are not interacting with the people around them, I hear you cry (using my telepathy)! Fine by me. When I'm at work and using the internet to communicate with people, that's because I don't want to talk to the people around me. Better than any form of communication yet devised, the internet brings people with similar interests or mindsets together, and that's a wonderful, inclusive, joyous thing, and being done via a laptop or iPhone or Nintendo DS doesn't make it any less valid. Canyon and I know all about this, having met online.
What's worse is that no matter how cleverly the objects sent from the future are made to look like natural objects (slivers of crystalline mica, sea-shells with crystals embedded in them, floating rocks), they're still forms of technology. Human potential appears to be unlocked in a New Agey way, but how much of that is because of the presence of the technology? Will the kids keep their powers once the tech is sent back to the future? Even if they do, it's all down to the machines we make. Worry all you like about technology, but right now, email and message boards and talkbacks and online gaming (yes, even the kind where 12 year olds call me a faggot and then teabag me) bring us together. Sorry, personal bugbear. I'll move on now.
Oh, and that future tech is used to fix those awful problems and save the world. So how can he really hate it? Right, sorry, now I'll move on.
Thanks to all of this research, I realise now that Shaye and Rubin and Emmerich really seem to believe in what they are doing, and have committed themselves to sending a message, using the film to teach kids about New Age philosophy in much the same way the artifacts teach the kids. Creepy, but I guess they're honest about it. Shaye in particular is very happy with the idea of a child's tear saving the world, an idea so schmaltzy it could actually kill a person. I'm serious. His explanation of why that was included is almost more entertaining than the film itself.
So, that is ultimately what this is about; is it possible, and it happens to be scientifically feasible, that there are a set of genes that actually together are responsible for behavior that we would call innocence. And there is good scientific evidence that there very well might be; and as we do carry junk DNA around in our body, nobody knows what this is doing there – this is DNA that doesn’t operate, it doesn’t turn on other genes, it doesn’t do anything. They don’t know what that DNA used to do, and it is possible that over time, whatever the kind of ‘quote, innocence, unquote’ that we carry around us today, because of disuse, they may ultimately turn off, and that’s the underlying theme.
An interesting story, I don’t know if it’s press worthy, but I’ll tell you anyhow; so, the little voice over at the end where the teacher is talking about Emma’s tears and all that stuff, there was a line in the film that ‘The precious gene of innocence was returned to humanity.’ It may be a little overly arch, but notwithstanding that; so at the last test screening, when we were in the middle of mixing the film, it got very good test reactions. They said, the guy who was running the test, the focus group, how many people rated the film ‘excellent’ – I don’t know, half the group did; how many rated it ‘very good,’ and another third, and how many rated it ‘good,’ and that’s what they would get. So just to sort of get a perspective on what’s going on, he asked one of the guys who rated it very good, ‘Why didn’t you rate it excellent,’ cause that’s what they do. He said, ‘I was about to rate it excellent, until that teacher, or who ever it was, talked about the gene of innocence; I said enough of that stuff.’ So we actually went into the mixing studio the next day and took the line out and changed it. So as I said, it’s a fine line to tell a story, but not really tell the story; but I do believe we are getting isolated, more and more isolated.
Ignoring the fact that someone with Shaye's fierce reputation is worrying about other people losing their childlike viewpoint is a bit rich, I guess even the most committed of storytellers will be afraid to go all out and just use phrases like "Gene of Innocence" in their movies, but I'm quite pleased that Shaye thought that idea was important but was willing to not use it because of a test screening. If he had ignored it, after using test screenings to judge his studio's movies, I would have cried havoc and let slip the Dogs of War (they're outside right now, in the Kennel of War, chewing on a Bonio Dog Biscuit of War).
So, I find myself in an odd position, tentatively welcoming a personal vision of the world from a bunch of multi-millionaires who would normally be considered to be the enemy of personal visions, and in one case has been instrumental in screwing over a filmmaker who just wanted to know how much money his movies had made (which is not exactly advanced future ethics at play there). A project like this that is willing to run as counter-programming to the Christian monopoly over message movies is rare enough, but I guess when you're as rich as Croesus and have a studio at your beck and call you can make whatever the hell you want. Shame The Golden Compass had its balls removed though, eh Bob?
So what about the film itself? It qualifies as occasionally intriguing sci fi even though it often feels like a mixture of ideas from other better works, but is it actually any good? For the most part, no. The performances are quite indifferent (and the kids are not that well handled by Shaye), though I enjoyed watching Wilson and Hahn, who seemed to be the only cast members trying to force some life into the movie. It's also a strikingly ugly movie, lit poorly and blocked incompetently, with some scenes featuring a hand-held camera so badly operated that it masks what is going on and interferes with the tone being set.
What makes that especially irksome is that the DoP is the usually excellent Jim Muro, whose work on Roll Bounce and Open Range was so impressive, and who was responsible for the classic horror-comedy Street Trash. For some reason, his work on this is murky and hard to watch. It annoyed me greatly. Even worse is the insipid and repetitive soundtrack by musical genius Howard Shore, whose work on the Lord of the Rings films was so beautiful, and whose ongoing collaboration with David Cronenberg is one of the most fruitful joint ventures in cinema history. His "discography" is littered with classics, and many a poor movie has been saved by his work. Here, however, I wanted to mute the movie.
Horribly disappointing stuff, and that's before we get to the big song, Hello (I Love You) by Roger Waters. Quick disclosure: I hate Pink Floyd and cannot understand the appeal of their dreary prog noodlings. Only a couple of tracks from Dark Side of the Moon would get onto my iPod, and then I'd probably delete them after one listen and then hate myself for spending 79p on them. When I realised that Pink Floyd references kept cropping up throughout the movie I was annoyed, but as it seemed in keeping with the New Age ethos, I let it go. And then, over the credits, plays the most insipid piece of sentimental doggerel I've heard since Ringo Starr's Liverpool 8. Apologies if you feel compelled to click on this video and are rendered diabetic by the cloying sentiment within.
That video encapsulates why I ended up not liking the movie. For all of the stuff I liked, and for all of the boldness of the concept (especially as this is meant to be a kids’ film), and ignoring the shoddiness of the filmmaking on show, the pompous and self-important tone of it was alienating. Didacticism in movies is bad enough when the thing you're being lectured about isn't even a concrete thing. Bitching to kids that playing games is no way to live your life is one thing (and as a gamer I resent that already), but not having anything to replace that is pretty rich. Is the film telling kids to put down their games and master the ability to warp reality? If so, is there something about today's youth that we don't know about? Screw knife crime, I want to make sure I don't get teleported into a volcano, Jumper-style.
For a kids' film it's not very entertaining, and for adults it's too light, so it ends up pleasing no one, despite the positive things it has. Compare that to Joe Dante's Explorers, which features three kids getting dream messages that contain plans for a force-field generating circuit that, when plugged up to a PC and car battery, allows them to fly into space to meet the aliens who beamed the information to them. Whereas The Last Mimzy features desperate scientists contacting children to save the future, in Explorers the aliens are just teenagers who are bored, have stolen a spaceship from their dad, and are looking to make friends and watch TV with them. It's the tonal opposite to The Last Mimzy, and is flawed, but works beautifully anyway just by being so willfully odd and eager to flout convention.
That said, there is one thing The Last Mimzy has over all of the films I've mentioned here: Rainn Wilson walking around in his pants!
I'll let you decide if this is a good or a bad thing.
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