Dystopian Sci Fi Movie Face/Off! (Results)

As ever, my trawl through two similar movies eventually leads to this, an arcane and overcomplicated scoring system designed to show which movie is better on the basis of performances, liveliness (a term I used to describe a theory of film assessment that I have never fully articulated, and so remains semi-mysterious), and six arbitrary criteria that are specific to each different Face/Off. This time around I was considering just saying, look, I got all bummed out when I read The Road as it is miserable and depressing and miserable and really depressing, and the only thing that made me feel better about life was watching a movie that featured several graphic examples of violence to the head, and so plaudits and awards and telepathically-delivered love to all and sundry, but hell no. I have to categorise and quantify everything in life. If I were a Greek God, I would be the God of Filing Cabinets.

Babylon A.D.

Cast: Vin Diesel: -5
Michelle Yeoh: 2
Mélanie Thierry: 2
Mark Strong: 2
Gerard Depardieu: 2
Charlotte Rampling: -7
Total: -4

Much as it pains me to say bad things about Vin Diesel, there's no getting around how unconvincing his performance is. As I said in the previous Babylon A.D. post, it could be a consequence of the post-production interference, but his flat line-readings wore me down by film's end. Those editing rumours make it hard for me to assess any part of the movie, which makes this a frustrating experience. As for the rest of the cast, most of them were competent but unremarkable, making enough effort to keep the film afloat but doing nothing to distinguish it. I'm particularly aggrieved by Michelle Yeoh's lacklustre performance; I never thought I would give her such a low rating. Charlotte Rampling, on the other hand, deserves that mark. She might win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar on Mars, but not on this planet.

Elements specific to these films:
Convincing future vision: 5
Coherence: -7
Badassery: 3
Competence of action scene filming and editing: -1
Funky sci fi concepts: 4
Hair styling: 2

Total: 6

Yes yes, there is a category for hair. I had trouble coming up with six categories that applied to these two movies, and this filled a gap. Obviously, low marks for Diesel, who has none, and a shaky finger of disapproval at Mark Strong's latest distracting wig, but the day is saved by some lovely styling on Mélanie Thierry. Obviously being on the run via submarine, snowmobile, and Hummer is no impediment to a pretty 'do. I've already railed against the poorly constructed action scenes (it's the first movie to make Parkour seem mundane), and won't repeat myself regarding that stupid final act, but I will once more stress that the future is depicted with great rigour.


As for badassery, Diesel does have a cool moment avoiding death by Diesel-seeking missile, and Michelle Yeoh always adds to such a total just by turning up and kicking a couple of faces into mush, but overall, it's low on proper action beats. The same goes for future concepts. Memory-readers? Cybernetic arms (that look like plastic wrist-guards with some wires glued on)? Only the genetically engineered messiah idea works at all, and even then only in a limited way, i.e. if you don't think about it at all. I mean, putting artificial intelligence into babies? I suspect they mean putting extra intelligence into them, like topping up their IQs, but AI is a different thing. It's not like computers are already 30% smart, and AI designers and scientists are trying to make them 100% smart. It's about sentience, if you'll forgive me for reducing the definition so far. I'd wager that babies tend to gain sentience on their own without the help of science, you know. The misunderstanding of what AI boggles the mind. The mind which is naturally sentient without needing the help of a plastic-coated Lambert Wilson, I should say.

Miscellaneous:
Originality: -4
Liveliness: -6
Enthusiasm for project: 5
Avoidance of cliche: -4
Unique Selling Points: -5
Production values: 3
Total: -11

Though I feel it only right to knock a couple of points off for originality as it is an adaptation, Babylon A.D. still rehashes and remixes familiar genre tropes and imagery, pilfering ideas from cyberpunk books and films, to such an extent that very little about this feels fresh. How much of that is down to Dantec's novel and how much is the fault of Kassovitz, I won't know until I've read Babylon Babies. Even before that, there are dozens of brazen lifts from Minority Report and Children Of Men. Cliches riddle the movie, with Diesel's dialogue in particular sounding like a compilation of hardboiled cheeseball bluster. To make things worse, the pacing is off, scenes begin and end with little explanation, and nothing seems to matter. It's a hot mess. It's a genre film made by Fox. What did you expect?

Babylon A.D. overall total = -9

I keep coming back to the question of what a director's cut would be like. As it is, there's a lot of fail here, and I can't call it a good film on faith. For all the occasional glimmers of promise, the soul of the movie appears to be missing. The addition of a couple of extra scenes, or even just some extended versions of what is already onscreen, would go a long way toward enhancing the film, but we might never get to see that. There's a silver lining, though. That dreadful incoherence in the last twenty minutes means that Hancock no longer has the most exasperating final act of the year. I guess that counts for something.

Doomsday

Cast: Rhona Mitra: -2
Adrian Lester: 5
Craig Conway: 5
David O'Hara: 6
Bob Hoskins: 6
Malcolm McDowell: 2
Total: 22

I feel like a big meanie picking on Rhona Mitra, as her uninspiring performance could well have been the fault of Neil Marshall, who cut a lot of humour from the shooting script in order to make Eden Sinclair tougher without realising that that just makes her dour and uninteresting. Nevertheless, she is completely overshadowed by the rest of the cast. Reasonably good marks for everyone, with special kudos to Hoskins and O'Hara, both of whom commit to the film with enough conviction to give the entire film a lift. Though I've not yet mentioned them, I also enjoyed the supporting performances from MyAnna Buring and Darren Morfitt, whose onscreen relationship was endearing, and judged well by Marshall, who sidelined it while not removing it entirely and thus maintained the aggressive tone of the film at the same time that he made the goal of the protagonists (finding a cure) more resonant.

Elements specific to these films:
Convincing future vision: 5
Coherence: 6
Badassery: 6
Competence of action scene filming and editing: 5
Funky sci fi concepts: 2
Hair styling: 6

Total = 30

Doomsday gets points for depicting a decrepit Britain, though it would have been marked higher if it had spent more time showing what English society was like as a result of its pariah status. The one thing Babylon A.D. did well was give the audience a long look at the potential future of Eastern Europe, but then the meandering pace of that film allows for interesting digressions, whereas Doomsday's action plot needs to keep moving forward. Speaking of action, the score for it would have been higher if Marshall (co-editor with Andrew MacRitchie) had resisted the temptation to cut every second during the most hectic moments. While they still work well, none of the later action scenes are anywhere near as well-constructed as the hospital siege and rescue, which is taut and exciting.


Lots of score-defying short hair for many of the cast, but some entertaining mohawks on the punks raise the bar just high enough for the unevenly cut chaos on Mitra's head to knock that bar to the ground. Though I'm glad to see an action heroine look unkempt for a change, a mess is a mess. It seems longer on one side than the other. Intentional? Who knows? This is the future, after all. Low marks for futuristic frippery, sadly. There's little in the way of sci fi cleverness, other than Mitra's removable remote control camera eye (though it doesn't really do much new), but the amount of badassery makes up for that. Much graphic and gratuitous gore fills the screen almost from the first frame. I can imagine Fangoria readers will adore it.

Miscellaneous:
Originality: -8
Liveliness: 6
Enthusiasm for project: 8
Avoidance of cliche: -3
Unique Selling Points: 6
Production values: 6
Total = 15

There is no way I can give Doomsday a high score for originality, even if it tries very hard to do new things with the stolen bits of narrative and iconography. Marshall is unrepentant about what he is doing, even going so far as to list his influences and homages. It seems churlish to criticise the film for doing what it set out to do, but the impassive soul of the Score System does not care. It must be obeyed. There is also a reliance on cliche, again something that can't be avoided when making that hews so close to the traditional conventions of a genre, but a bit more effort could have maybe subverted some of those familiar moments. However, it looks great, it is well-paced (after a shocking opening it slows down until chaos breaks out about thirty minutes in, that delay in kicking off reminiscent of Aliens), and you can tell Marshall was having the time of his life paying tribute to his heroes. If you're willing to be forgiving, it's easy to fall under the spell of that enthusiasm, as I did.

Doomsday overall total = 67

Doomsday was just the tonic for my frail psyche, replacing images of the horror of post-apocalyptic desolation with images of the fun of post-apocalyptic desolation. Where Babylon A.D. almost totally failed to grab the attention of the audience, Doomsday screams in your face, pulls your hair, spits in your drink, and then runs away. Naked. Many thanks to everyone involved for dispelling my funk with crazy violence. Hopefully memories of its anarchic exuberance will keep me going through John Hillcoat's adaptation of The Road, which will probably trigger seismic emotional turmoil in me. I don't expect to be seeing anything as peculiar as Malcolm McDowell playing a scientist turned feudal lord in that bleak endurance test. Just ash. Lots and lots of ash. And death. Ash-coated death. ::shudders::

Dystopian Sci Fi Movie Face/Off! (Doomsday)

Released earlier this year (and on DVD this week), Neil Marshall's Doomsday was heavily anticipated by those of us who adored his previous movie The Descent. In contrast to the majority of British movies released in recent years, The Descent was ambitious, uncompromising, serious, and unabashedly a genre film. It was cold, brutal, terrifying, and unforgettable. Not only was it ballsy, with its bleak finale and shocking take on female relationships, it was made with consummate skill. Once the protagonists are trapped within a series of caves, all of which are pitch-black, Marshall and cinematographer Sam McCurdy have to come up with ever more inventive ways to light the film. Most British films are not in a position to paint themselves into a corner like that, so we rarely get to see anything but the most perfunctory displays of filmic technique (how do we make this stately home/Hoxton bar look pretty?), which made The Descent doubly impressive. It didn't back down from a challenge, and the result was cinematic genius. I do not exaggerate when I say it is my favourite British film of the decade so far.


Doomsday could only disappoint. The Descent raised the bar so high, managing to be that rarest of things, a genre movie that didn't feel like a third-rate cousin of movies made in countries that make more confident product. Too often British genre films are hamstrung by budget constraints or reflexive ironic detachment, as well as the inability of British actors to look like anything other than a posing fool when handling guns (see: Torchwood). Marshall's confident handling of The Descent, and his seriousness of purpose, were a refreshing change, but even so, that was a psychological thriller that also featured subterranean monstermen. He handled it all brilliantly, but Doomsday was a different kettle of fish.


The action movie is a genre that Britain has never been able to master. Many great British directors have travelled to the US and shown they are capable, but within this country there has been little success. It's a genre that seems antithetical to the British mindset, depending as it does on a lack of irony which comes naturally to the US but not to us. I'd happily attribute that to an innate snobbery towards US culture, meaning many UK filmmakers have a tendency to add reflexive japery to the movie as an apology for daring to make something that seems so definitively American.


Notably only Hot Fuzz has worked as a homage to US action cinema, and even then it operated as a spoof/homage hybrid that took the tropes of the genre and transposed them to a British locale, complete with incongruous English actors, phrases, and in-jokes. Any other tough guy movie made in Britain has seemed kind of embarrassing, with poorly constructed action scenes and UK actors spouting unconvincing macho dialogue. Don't forget, it's because of the British film industry that Paul W.S. Anderson is polluting cinemas even now. Sorry, everyone in the whole world who has ever seen one of his movies.


Doomsday looked to be another attempt to make a straight, unironic actioner mimicking American (and Australian) films, with British actors pretending to be hardcore, low-budget action scenes poorly shot and edited, and no awareness of how embarrassing it is to see our culture trying to jump onto a genre bandwagon that belongs so completely to another culture. Not only that, but Doomsday was also co-opting entire plot threads from other movies. The concept, that a virus breakout in Scotland leads to an enormous quarantine operation that separates the entire country from the rest of the world, leading to the survivors becoming feral punks, is already shamelessly lifted from other movies, before we get to the other similarities. Was Marshall, by trying not only to make a proper US-style action film but also one that evoked some of the most beloved examples of the genre, biting off more than he could chew?


Well, yes, but not only do I bow to him for trying so damn hard to pull off the impossible, but also for figuring out how to make a US-style action movie on UK terms. While Hot Fuzz managed to credibly reference action movie tropes and cliches by taking them out of their usual context and then playing them fairly straight (which of course made the whole thing funnier), Doomsday steals from tongue-in-cheek actioners and then treats them with the same amalgam of irreverence and seriousness as they originally were. By stealing from John Carpenter and George Miller, he can use their sense of humour to stand in for UK irony, while not sacrificing the integrity of the movie. That the film is only funny when it is being grisly or over the top is both a regrettable flaw and one of the best things about it (while the dialogue falls flat, the visual gags, either gruesome or silly, are top-notch).



For the first hour of the movie the "homages" to other movies are shockingly blatant: the central concept from Escape From New York, the denizens of Glasgow from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, the plague visuals from 28 Days Later, a setpiece involving armoured vehicles that Nathan Rabin notes is very similar in rhythm to a scene from Aliens, a battle in a hospital is straight out of the original Assault on Precinct 13, Tyler Bates' impressive score featuring some hilariously brazen John Carpenter riffs, and on and on.


It's disconcerting to see how openly Marshall has stolen whole scenes from other movies, with only a few concessions to alteration (Mitra's character, Eden Sinclair, is a Ripley/Plissken hybrid who was born in Scotland and escaped just as the wall was finished, and the feral Glaswegian survivors are militant cannibals, which manages to top George Miller's post-apocalyptic crazies). Though I was pleased to see Marshall had actually pulled off some impressively constructed setpieces, it was not enough to salvage it. I was ready to consign it to the dustbin, especially when the "homages" were as in-your-face as this graphic.


And then a funny thing happened. First, cannibal leader Sol whips his followers into a frenzy by dancing to Good Thing by Fine Young Cannibals. Then he joins in a ska-beat can-can with a group of kilt-wearing male dancers, which is all a lead-up to the act of cooking Sean Pertwee (his appearance, seemingly a prerequisite in all British films, is mercifully short), and feeds the masses who are all waving paper plates in the air (coloured red, white and blue; surely a satirical dig at the Union Jack). It was exactly what you would expect from a post-apocalyptic action film, being both morbid and absurd, but it was also quirky. Movies of this type are often sledge-hammer subtle, but this was sneaking in odd visual details that made the experience even sillier.


Not long after that, while being chased by a tooled-out coach called the Beelzebus, Shakespearean actor Adrian Lester exhorts his co-escapee to "leg it!", and Sol berates his hapless minions by calling them "fucking numpties". You don't get that in US actioners. Best of all, neither phrase felt out of place. Usually when UK movies try to pull off action, they end up snarling American phrases with inept sincerity despite the cultural inappropriateness of the lines (worst example ever; Alien 3), rendering their machismo unintentionally comedic. Here Marshall just uses British phrases, and they're the right kind of funny while being perfectly appropriate. Why has no one else done this before?


It was as if Doomsday suddenly clicked into place. Thinking back to the start of the movie I realised that what had seemed so derivative was a clever play on the natural antagonism between Scots and Englanders, and "the thorny issue of devolution", with Hadrian's Wall rebuilt as a 35ft high deathtrap. It's as if the only way devolution could ever happen with the backing of the English government would be as an act of hostile self-preservation, consigning Scotland to the dustbin of history, the sting in the tail being that England becomes a global pariah into the bargain. Certainly it could be read as a critique of the north/south divide, with both Scotland and London suffering at the hands of a Geordie film director.


It struck me as a funny choice when I saw it, but only because I was under the mistaken impression Marshall was Scottish. Now I know he was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, I'm amazed at the size of his balls. Apparently some Scottish commentators are offended by the suggestion that Scots would become anarchic cannibal thugs in that situation, but seriously, if being isolated from the world as approximately 90% of the population dies of an agonising and grisly viral outbreak, all while being denied medical help, power, and sanitation by an uncaring and selfish English bureaucracy, doesn't make the surviving populace become a crazed band of anarchic cannibal thugs, then nothing will.


Not only that, but Marshall is quite happy to take the tropes of the post-apocalyptic action genre and either reclaim it for Britain or introduce previously unused British iconography. The feral Glaswegians may look like the post-apocalyptic marauders of George Miller's Mad Max movies, but those marauders were inspired by the punk fashions of early 80s Britain. The assault on the armoured vehicles might be heavily influenced by Aliens, but that movie was filmed in England, had a crew that was almost entirely English, and was the sequel to a film directed by a Brit.


Later on, our protagonists hook up with a Will-Scarlet style scavenger, prior to travelling through an underground military base in an echo of the trek through the Mines of Moria (Lord of the Rings was, of course, written by an Englishman, though one born in South Africa, which is, coincidentally, where a lot of Doomsday was filmed).


Upon leaving that "mine", they are ambushed by knights on horseback, which was apparently the image that inspired Marshall to make the film.


They are taken to a castle ruled by Malcolm McDowell in full-on Sheriff of Nottingham mode, and policed by a Guy of Gisborne clone. Eden Sinclair is made to do gladiatorial combat with an enormous warrior, with sackcloth-wearing peasants baying for her blood. It was at this point that I realised resistance was futile. It was not just a proper schlock-action movie, but was also the first British-to-the-bone schlock-action movie I have seen.


The movie ends with a Mad Max homage that sidesteps any technical limitations or budgetary restrictions by being as silly and exaggerated as possible. That the cars are obviously travelling at 5mph matters not a jot; heads fly, cars explode, and blood gushes. It's a hugely entertaining scene. Following that we get more homages to Escape From New York, though the very final scene owes as much to the end of Chronicles of Riddick and The Descent. Despite the overlong wrap-up (potentially setting up a sequel), it was rather pleasing, and especially after the trauma inflicted by reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, it was great to kick back with a post-apocalyptic film that showed how much anarchic fun you could have driving a Bentley (another British icon) while being chased by cannibals. Kudos to McCarthy for illuminating the human condition and whatever, but eating humans and dismembering bodies can be fun too.


Though I was impressed by Marshall's handling of the action, and his ambition to fill a movie with as much referential iconography as possible, what pleased me most was his handling of tone. Doomsday strikes a perfect balance between earnest machismo, hysterical action, and pitch-black humour, just like the movies it pays homage to. The actors all treat the subject matter with deadly seriousness, never winking at the camera that it is all nonsense, with humour coming from gore or little touches of absurdity (I especially liked the throwaway shot of a medieval archer lazily chewing gum). I'm glad to say that that unironic acting approach is becoming commonplace, as filmmakers realise that, as I said regarding Hot Fuzz earlier, if you play something straight, it's far more effective than winking at the audience.


That said, he might have made a mistake with the lead character, who is so stoic as to barely register. Rhona Mitra is no one's idea of a screen icon, despite her striking looks, and the blankness of her performance might have seemed like a good idea at first, but ends up leaving a hole in the middle of the movie where a character should be. Marshall may have been inspired by the action icons of his youth, but though they are often impassive, there's more going on there.


Snake Plissken, the most obvious inspiration, might be an amoral hardass with a wicked cool eyepatch, but Kurt Russell is incapable of removing his natural charm, and so Snake is lovable despite (or because of) his cynical and cruel nature. Max Rockatansky is even more stone-faced, but he is haunted and tragic, the first in a long line of tortured, messianic characters to be played by Gibson. Ellen Ripley also has her tough guy moments, but she also has vulnerability as well as its emotionally conjoined twin, terrifying ruthlessness.


Eden Sinclair has none of those things. She's grumpy, and she'll kill you if you get in her way. Marshall has tried to make the character more compelling (she has flashes of temper when things don't go her way, for example), and wisely keeps the wisecracking to a minimum, but there's little going on. Her casting isn't a disaster, though. If her fight training looks like it wasn't completed (she's not the most convincing brawler), she has a physical presence that works perfectly. The definition on her arms puts my sludgy "guns" to shame. Compare her to the sylph-like Milla Jovovich, the go-to gal for lead action femme in shoddy genre shit like the piss-poor Resident Evil movies. Mitra is far more effective as a bruiser than her. Shame Doomsday's poor box office will almost certainly put a stop to any franchise dreams Marshall had. Though Eden disappointed, there is room for improvement, especially considering where she ends up.


Luckily, if Mitra is not the ideal action heroine, she is backed up by many other entertaining performances. Bob Hoskins, as her only real ally, is Britain's Ol' Dependable. He has a shtick, but it's a great one, and I've been guilty of taking him for granted in the past. Just a couple of weeks ago Canyon finally acquiesced after much annoying prodding and watched Louis Leterrier's Unleashed (aka Danny The Dog) with me, and it struck me just how much fun Hoskins can be when he sinks his teeth into a role. He was despicably evil yet human in that, and lovable and sad in this. Smart casting from Marshall.


Also spot on is Adrian Lester as Sgt. Norton. Seeing the respectable Lester running around with body armour and roundhouse-kicking bad guys in the head was huge fun. It's an underwritten role, and most actors would have had trouble making anything of it, but with Lester adding humanity and heft to the part, he supplies the audience empathy that Mitra cannot. As a result, the movie suffers when he's not on screen. It's not a killing blow, but it's noteworthy.


While the heroic side of the cast is a bit unbalanced, the villains are terrific. Alexander Siddig is amusingly bland and oily as a beardy Blairite PM, with a granite-faced second in command played with frightening intensity by David O'Hara. His quiet amoral persona is the tonal opposite of Craig Conway's Sol, who shrieks and rages and chews all the scenery like a Scottish Vernon Wells, but much closer to the imperious (and obviously insane) Kane, the Colonel Kurtz-like faux-king played by McDowell in sneer-mode.


It's probably fair to say that all of these characters are exactly as you would expect them to be, but getting serious actors to play them mitigates any charges of unoriginality that can be levelled at Marshall. Even as cliches, there is life in them. Perhaps Babylon A.D. would have benefited from more colourful villains. Instead we get Charlotte Rampling being all confusing and Mark Strong hiding his evilness behind his wig. I'm sure Kassovitz would say that Manichean good/bad dichotomies are not his style, but my God how much a film is enlivened by some shouty villains.


Technically the movie is impressive as well, even on a small budget. Sam McCurdy's photography is clear, colourful and varied, capturing the carnage with enough clarity to aid in comprehension. This sounds like faint praise, but it's a rarity to see action photography so dedicated to communicating what the hell is going on. McCurdy's work is a breath of fresh air, and is worthy of emulation by other directors. He films the battering of many many talented stuntmen with great skill.


Simon Bowles' production design (and that of the entire crew) is wonderful, turning Glasgow into a desolate, overgrown wilderness that echoes New York in I Am Legend. Praise also to the effects teams Double Negative, Framestore-CFC and The Senate VFX, who create some lovely matte shots that give the movie an epic feel.


I'm getting all emotional here. You can argue that Doomsday should be considered nothing more than an exploitative rehash of better movies, or you could be generous and say Marshall is trying to reclaim these films from the 80s and remake them for a new generation, paying full tribute to their gleefully shlocky nature. It's a matter of taste, I guess. I expected to be underwhelmed, but even if the dialogue is tin-eared, and even if the lead performance is forgettable, and even if the editing needed to be toned down a lot, the exuberant embrace of the material by everyone involved completely won me over, as did the gratuitous violence. I got all nostalgic by the end, which was surely Marshall's intention. I'd be lying and crazy if I said it was a total success, but for the most part it is just the ticket, especially after being soul-maimed by McCarthy. Recommended, then, as long as you are likely to laugh at decapitations, well-timed explosions, and crazy clashes of genres instead of actual jokes.

Dystopian Sci Fi Movie Face/Off! (Babylon A.D.)

As mentioned yesterday, exposure to the brain-lacerating horrors of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road has left me in a bit of an emotional state. His command of image and mood is been used to conjure up something even more terrifying than Anton Chigurh and Judge Holden combined and multiplied; a vision of a world turned to ash by nuclear war, with no sunlight and no plant life, the survivors pretty much waiting to die or banding together to eat their fellow man. McCarthy is ruthless and relentless, and by the time I was done with it, even the small glimmers of hope found within (and the beautifully rendered relationship between the protagonist and his son) are not enough to dispell the cloud of doom hanging over my head. Stupid genius writer.

In an attempt to cheer myself up I have watched comedies and quality contemporary drama, but neither did the trick. So, in an attempt to vaccinate myself (after the fact, but still), I decided to watch some dystopic sci fi set in post-apocalyptic future worlds, except this time I figured I should go for something less brutal, more fluffy. There are grades of awfulness within the genre, with The Road being at the top of the awfulness chart, and everything else seeming jolly in comparison. Several contenders came to mind, including Richard Stanley's Hardware, the 2000AD comic strip "adaptation" (i.e. the rip-off that caused a lawsuit) that came out in the 80s. It was shown on Zone Horror a week ago (not long after they screened Stanley's second film, Dust Devil), and I watched it to see if it was as bad as I remembered. Amazingly, it was even worse, being little more than a clumsy barrage of noise and image and embarrassing dialogue and silly acting. Just appalling, and quite hideous. It's so bad that I'm beginning to suspect that his version of The Island Of Doctor Moreau might have been just as bad as John Frankenheimer's version, and it might not even have been as entertaining. That would equal total fail.


So which films to watch? Thankfully Neil Marshall's Doomsday just hit DVD and Blu-Ray in the UK, and Mathieu Kassovitz' Babylon A.D. came out last Friday, so it seemed logical to try those out for size. I will say that, in their own way, they made me feel better about the forthcoming end of the world, but were they any good on their own terms?

Actually, Babylon A.D.'s only real gift to my tortured psyche was to show a plausible future world that wasn't a landscape of mere ash and death, but was a well-designed cyberpunk-style amalgam taken from various different sources, most notably Alfonso Cuaron's magnificent Children Of Men. Of course, as we're talking about cyberpunk here, there is also the unavoidable influence of William Gibson, godfather of the sub-genre, whose Neuromancer remains unfilmed while his ideas pop up in other movies all the time. And yes, I'm still bitter that Chris Cunningham never got to make his version of that book.

Babylon A.D. is based on a French cyberpunk novel called Babylon Babies, by Maurice G Dantec, whose hyper-aggressive website has to be seen to be believed. I'm sure I read somewhere that he is a contemporary of noted humorist Michel "Monsieur Happy" Houellebecq, which makes me want to read his books even more now (thanks to the lovely chaps at Aphrohead Books, my copy of Babylon Babies is on the way). From what I gather from this MIT Press synopsis, Dantec's book sounds pretty dissimilar to the movie I saw on Monday.

Set in the hidden "flesh and chip" breeding grounds of the first cyborg communities and peopled by Serbian Mafiosi, Babylon Babies has as its hero a hard-boiled leatherneck veteran of Sarajevo named Thoorop who is hired by a mysterious source to escort a young woman named Marie Zorn from Russia to Canada. A garden variety job, he figures. But when Thoorop is offered an even higher fee by another organization, he realizes Marie is no ordinary girl. A schizophrenic and the possible carrier of a new artificial virus, Marie is carrying a mutant embryo created by an American cult that dreams of producing a genetically modified messiah, a dream that spells out the end of human life as we know it.

Inspired by Philip K. Dick, William S. Burroughs, Gilles Deleuze, and other extrapolationists [OMG my new favourite word! - Neck] of the future, Babylon Babies unfolds at breakneck speed as Thoorop risks his life to save Marie, whose brain—linking to the neuromatrix—loses all limits and becomes the universe itself. Exploring the symbiosis between organic matter and computer power to spin new forms of consciousness, Maurice Dantec rides Nietzsche's prophecy: "Man is something to be overcome."

It sounds like a Gallic version of Gibson's Count Zero, but with a focus on Catholicism instead of voodoo. While the movie is set in the Russia of the future, and presented as a broken society filled with barely functioning ghettos, black marketeering, and militaristic mercenaries, it ends up in New York, which, according to this excellent review, is not how the book ends. It features hints of a virus bomb, ineptly expositioned by Vin Diesel during one of the many slow dialogue scenes (a shame as this hastily explained plot point is the engine that powers much of the later half of the movie), and the young girl ferried by his character Toorop is indeed a genetically engineered faux-Messiah created to give credence to a new religion formed by Evil Charlotte Rampling (the one idea in the movie that I liked), but there is nothing about a Neuromatrix, nothing about Jeremy Narby's theory of conscious communication with DNA itself (which is a damn shame), and barely anything about trans-human or post-human theory. Instead we get The Transporter, transposed to the grimy future, and without even a greased-up Jason Statham to entertain us.


Of course, as I've discussed before, Mathieu Kassovitz has publicly disowned the movie and called Fox a bunch of assholes, for which I will always kinda love him. The movie I saw on Monday is apparently nothing like the vision he had originally, and so maybe in the version there would have been a Neuromatrix, and a woman who is one with the universe, and ayahuasca visions, and a proper ending. Instead, the film is a framework of setpieces and locations, with talented performers moving from place to place and having conversations that mean nothing. Emotionally the film is dead in the water, and with budget cuts and other tamperings evident throughout, the action set-pieces slam and crash and oof but mean nothing. It's your actual "sound and fury signifying nothing", except in a credibly realised, if unimaginative, dystopian future.


The world Kassovitz has created is fun for the most part. The Russian scenes (filmed in the wintery cities of the Czech Republic) look convincingly desolate, with the locals dressed in either warm winter coats or Euro-trash tracksuits and bling, which was another touch I loved. The few shots we see of the country from the air show few lights, the odd enormous crater, cities broken and jerry-rigged. It's all great, and the industrial settings in "Vladivostok" are convincingly depressing, as are the scenes of cramped markets, crowds of refugees, and the odd bit of chaotic and ill-explained ultra-violence.


Nevertheless this cheered me up way more than McCarthy's bleak vision, because at least in that world there is still a semblance of society, with a barter system and entertainment and a version of community spirit that is brutal (i.e. Diesel punches the odd person while growling), but still better than the terror of The Road. I would hate to live in Babylon A.D.'s world, but it's better than McCarthy's alternative.


In contrast to the grungy desolation of Eastern Europe, when our band of heroes arrives in New York, we see it looks like it's doing just fine in the future, which struck me as strange. I'm sure any economist would predict America would not be thriving in a future that sees Europe fall so far towards the brink of anarchy, but I guess New York would certainly thrive (certainly in the centre of the city) while the rest of the country suffers. We don't get a chance to see what the rest of the US looks like at this point. It does seem to have a very strict passport policy (it involves implants in the neck), and outside Manhattan the roads are messy enough to allow for some ineptly edited car chases, so maybe it's falling apart there too. Still, at least New York has the obligatory futuristic talking adverts covering the sides of skyscrapers, though sadly it merely makes it look like Jean-Michel Jarre's concert in Houston taken to the Nth degree.


The onscreen world is pretty much all I liked about the movie. I've defended Diesel in the past, but he's on the verge of parody in this movie, posing as a tough guy in an unconvincing manner and merely hinting at an inner life of regret and courage. Again, perhaps a longer version of this will make a difference, and it is possible his performance was gutted by the editing as Kassovitz has hinted, so forgive me for being rude when in fact he might have been better in the original cut, but in the version I saw, he did not convince. He spends most of the movie with Mélanie Thierry (playing the Virgin Mary-esque Aurora) and Michelle Yeoh, whose role as a kung-fu nun should have been the best thing about the movie, but sadly wasn't.

The trio of characters certainly evoked memories of Children Of Men, which is a comparison Babylon A.D. just doesn't need, especially as, in the original novel, Toorop is joined by an Israeli army vet called Rebecca and Irish assassin named Dowie, and not a kung fu nun who spends most of the movie denying her kung fu nunniness, much to my disappointment. Why Kassovitz and co-writer Eric Besnard thought that echoing Cuaron's superior movie by paring the group down to three (and eventually two) was a good idea escapes me. Okay, so changing up Pam Ferris for Michelle Yeoh appeals to me as a dedicated Yeoh fan, but Ferris was great, as were Clive Owen and Clare-Hope Ashitey. Plus, Kassovitz is utterly unable to replicate Cuaron's imaginative action scenes and visual trickery, falling back on little more than the CGI effect of making cameras go through closed windows over and over again. He did this numerous times in Gothika as well. Can someone stop him from overusing this trick, please?


Mélanie Thierry is fine; she has to play vulnerable and messianic, and does those two things reasonably well (i.e. she shrieks and looks calm at different points of the movie), with the bonus challenge of feigning sexual interest in Diesel despite that being out of character, but Yeoh is utterly wasted. Her natural gravitas, maturity, and grace are barely in evidence here, replaced instead with almost mute fear and sporadic outbreaks of poorly shot kickassery that happen without explanation of how a nun from a Mongolian monastery is able to beat the crap out of anyone standing in her way. This is one of the cardinal sins of the movie, as Yeoh's presence was one of the deciding factors when debating whether to see this or not. She is the hardcore goddess of kung fu cinema, and keeps getting stuck in choad like this. Adding a bunch of free runners jumping around a cramped warehouse does not mitigate the side-lining of the formidable Yeoh.


The rest of the main cast are almost as wasted. Mark Strong appears wearing yet another unappealing wig, playing a smuggler who may or may not be trustworthy (hint: he's not, obviously). He gets little to do other than be friendly and then deceitful, and missed a trick by not cackling maniacally when his easily predicted betrayal happens about ten minutes after he is introduced. Lambert Wilson pops up as a geneticist who is also the father of Aurora. Entertainingly, he is covered with plastic wires to denote his part-cyborg nature, and is appropriately benevolent and tragic.


It's a bit of a nothing role, and his hasty departure from the movie leaves about a million questions unanswered. Compared to his memorably oily and hammy performance as The Merovingian in the Matrix sequels, this is forgettable stuff. Gerard Depardieu is also featured as Russian bigwig Gorsky, almost unrecognisable under a bad wig and a prosthetic face. He resembles Al Pacino in Dick Tracy, to be honest.


Why they did this is beyond me, and his low-wattage performance also disappoints. This is the guy who played the definitive Cyrano de Bergerac? Who acted De Niro off the screen in Bertollucci's 1900? Still, at least he's not playing Obelix again, even though anyone could have played this part. Hell, I could have done it. Slap a fake nose on me and I'll tyalk with Rhoshyan accent forrr pennies if necessary. Film producers, contact me via email if you need cheap acting in a hurry.


Worst of all, Charlotte Rampling's appearance as the High Priestess of the Noelite cult is utterly mystifying. She's only on screen for a little while, but she makes a hell of an impression. At first her cold and steely demeanour are de riguer for this kind of impassive and sinister religious nutjob, but as the film enters the incomprehensible final act, she starts twitching her head like a robot, delivering her lines with a mixture of artificial flatness and bad-guy posturing. It makes very little sense. Though it's not up there with Fiona Shaw's unmissably berserk appearance in Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia it's still the kind of eccentric acting that makes you wish there was more of it. Certainly a longer cut might give us more fun, though it could also explain what the hell is going on with her, and in a perverse way I don't want to know. It stands alone as a kind of curio; further exposition will merely remove the fascinating mystery.

Still, for the most part I was pleasantly bored, less than excited by the slow-moving plot and appallingly badly edited action scenes, but held in my chair by what I will have to refer to from now on as the Genre Baseline, which is the automatic amount of forgiveness and pleasure I will have for any film or book that is of a genre that I love (I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels this way). I've said it before, but just once more for the record, I love sci fi so much that even crappy sci fi holds a grip on me, as long as it has the odd good idea or gimmick. I'd much rather see the good stuff, obviously, but I'll be more forgiving of the not-so-good (example; Equilibrium is derivative tosh, but it's derivative tosh featuring GUNKATA and Christian Bale breaking bones and so therefore is automatically awesome).


For most of its running time, Babylon A.D. is kinda dull, with the odd interesting setpiece to distinguish it. I especially liked a mad scramble across an icy expanse to get onto a submarine, though sadly not long after that we're given a shoddy action scene with Diesel's stuntman flipping his snowmobile through the air and shooting down missile-laden drones. Where did they get the snowmobiles? Why are these dangerous drones vulnerable to pistol-fire? Bleh.


It continues in this manner until about fifteen minutes before the end of the film, with Aurora saving our hero by shooting him (?!?!?), doing something mystical with a big exploding missile (apparently the immaculately-conceived twins she is carrying are able to manipulate reality), and then disappearing. Lambert Wilson rebuilds Diesel using some plastic, and then hacks his memory to find out where Aurora is hiding. Diesel goes to find her with a couple of Wilson's men, while Wilson gets shot by the High Priestess, who then disappears from the movie and is never mentioned again.


Diesel finds Aurora, battles with some of the Noelite redshirts in a boring and badly edited car chase that involves Diesel using grenades and his brand-new enhanced arm to generate some extra 'splodey, and then several months later hangs out with Aurora as she is about to give birth. Look after the twins, she says, and so we fade to several years later. The twins (one black, one white, both girls) are sitting in a pretty garden as a white-clad and benevolently smiling Diesel walks up to them, tells them a storm is coming, and then takes them into the nearby house. The End.

I'm not kidding, that is how it ends. Now, I don't mind obscure finales, and have passionately defended many films with impenetrable final acts, but that is ridiculous. There is no line of dialogue anywhere else in the movie that sets up this finale. There is no way of interpreting it because there is no possible logical interpretation. It just ends, with characters dropping out for no reason (did Aurora die? Did she turn into a ball of light and vanish? Did the High Priestess just give up?), and no hint of what it is that the "storm" represents. Once more I assume Kassovitz and Besnard knew what they were doing originally, and had their cut changed by Fox suits, and apparently the French release has a different ending with no car chase and more chat between Diesel and Aurora, but who the hell thought this was an acceptable way to end a movie? Did some bean-counter at Fox get assigned to the film and think, "Fuck it, it's sci fi, we can just make the ending completely impenetrable and they'll make up excuses for it, cuz sci fi fans are stupid"? Did they get Richard Kelly to re-edit the ending? It certainly seems that way. Intentionally creating an ambiguous and incoherent ending in the mistaken belief that not making sense is the same as generating profundity and post-movie debate is his bag, after all (if you don't believe me, bite the bullet and watch the criminally terrible Southland Tales).


The ASBO-YOBS that filled the cinema when I saw it took great pleasure in hooting at the screen (prior to stabbing it with their knives), and I felt like joining in. I'm sure the source material has a peculiar ending, but it must have made sense to someone. This, on the other hand, is a debacle. I don't blame Kassovitz and Diesel for disowning it; I would have done the same thing. No matter how generous you feel, or how much you wanted it to succeed (and I certainly did), this is a failure. Once international box office is taken into account, perhaps the movie will make a tiny profit (it's not like Fox can be expected to add much to the surprisingly small $70m budget in terms of advertising, as the film got almost no promotion). If so, Fox will inevitably milk the teat with a director's cut, if Kassovitz is willing. If so, I look forward to it, and I can't wait to read Dantec's novel. That doesn't mean I think the world desperately needed to be told this story, but I'm willing to wait to see if there is a version of it that justifies this movie's existence, because this version sure as hell isn't it.

It's The End Of The World As We Know It...

...And I feel blue. There has been a temporary blog slowdown over the last few days, and you can blame Cormac McCarthy for it. Last week I read his breathtaking novel The Road, which paints such a convincing and relentlessly bleak picture of what the world would be like during a nuclear winter that I was propelled headlong into a brainfunk of catastrophic proportions. I can't remember the last time I read something that affected me so profoundly, though I do remember the last film that did; Cronenberg's criminally underrated Spider, doing for my psyche what Cronenberg had previously managed with Dead Ringers many years ago.


Maybe it wasn't just the fault of The Road. Over the last few months I have read Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement (the world has become completely irrational and it's only going to get worse), Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great (religious fundamentalists will be the death of us all), Scott Smith's The Ruins (a metaphor for how we are all doomed due to our ignorance and fear of facing our responsibilities, and a shit-scary horror classic to boot), and Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson's The Gods That Failed (a lengthy and eloquent rant about the forthcoming economic Armageddon that will make paupers of us all). The cumulative effect of all this bleak reading material is to make me even more pessimistic than I previously was.

Maybe if I had followed The Gods That Failed with Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew as planned, I might only be very miserable instead of emotionally washed-out, but it too will be a sobering and downbeat read, even taking into account Frank's deadpan wit. Instead, plumping for McCarthy's novel might have been the worst choice possible. It's all because photos of the adaptation hit the internet last week, showing Viggo Mortenson as the unnamed dad trudging across a blasted and ash-strewn hellscape with his son in tow, waiting for death to take them both before they fall to the hands of marauding cannibal rapists. Well, the photos only showed Viggo looking really miserable, so I went into the book not realising how well McCarthy would paint a picture of a world utterly without hope. Or colour. The inside of my head has been the same ash-gray since finishing the book which, incidentally, I did as quickly as I could in order to get it over and done with.


Though I'm sure most people stumbling across this blog have already read The Road, if you haven't I hesitate to recommend it due to the overwhelmingly negative empathic reaction I had to it. On a non-emotive level I definitely would recommend it. McCarthy is operating at the peak of his phenomenal powers, and with spare poetic prose creates an utterly convincing post-apocalyptic nightmare that has been designed with such rigour that there is no room for hope or optimism (I won't include spoilers that might or might not ultimately qualify that statement. Those who have read The Road will have their own ideas about whether that statement is true or not). It is a totally convincing scenario, and thanks to McCarthy's incredible descriptive facility, there is no escape from his vision of hell on earth. It felt like a mantrap had grabbed onto my soul. So yeah, stunning book, and one everyone should read, but if you don't feel like being really really glum for several days after, skip it.

So, even though I'm not the type to shy away from potentially downbeat material, I figured I needed to take a break from fiction or non-fiction making serious points about how fucked up the world is. Maybe spending the whole weekend watching pretty much the whole third season of The Shield wasn't the best move, but even though it featured nervous breakdowns, beloved characters either killing animals or beating each other almost to the brink of death, rape (perpetrated upon both male and female), dismemberment, moral compromise, racism, homophobia, systemic corruption, unrelenting tension, violence, and a bleak vision of urban decay, at least it was occasionally funny, plotted with astonishing precision, and was never less than riveting. A rewatching of Zoolander was more calming, as was a viewing of the last five episodes of Venture Brothers season three, which would have been an unqualified uplifting triumph if the last two minutes of the finale didn't make me so sad (stupid Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick making me unhappy with the shock ending!).


Nevertheless, the sadness has yet to pass, even with the best efforts of Canyon to cheer me up, which could be evidence that my soul has been tainted by the power of McCarthy's prose even unto its core. After spending some time pootling around the excellent Quiet Earth website, which is devoted to post-apocalyptic sci fi fiction, I realised that that kind of dystopian sci fi can either be depressing (The Road) or kinda fun (they linked to news that a director's cut of the exuberantly daft and entertaining Waterworld is being released, which was one of the few things over the last few days that has cheered me up, and all the Waterworld haters out there can kiss it). As a result, I have gone out of my way to experience less harrowing dystopic sci fi over the last couple of days, in an effort to replace McCarthy's harrowing vision with something that doesn't make me despair, and I shall spend the rest of the week discussing my efforts. If that doesn't appeal to our readers, apologies, but seriously, it beats moaning about Mike Leigh again, folks.