Movie Review: "Ex Machina" (Alex Garland, 2015)

BLOOD AND SOFTWARE by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Above: Alicia Vikander is Ava in Mr. Garland's film. Photo ©Universal Pictures, Film4, and DNA Films

Thrum.  That is the noise of the score for “Ex Machina”—sustained, gyrating electronic beats, prolonged until they vibrate painfully in your ears.  The music is the (sublime) work of composers Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury.  Yet it’s also a symptom of director Alex Garland’s lushly queasy storytelling.  With nigh effortless grace, he has created a dread-seeped saga of technological omnipotence, yet with none of the harried skittering of a Google search.  His movie is pure, smoothly-modulated unease.

            In chief, “Ex Machina” is a robot movie, albeit one with some nimble human actors.  Like Richard Curtis and Lenny Abrahamson before him, Mr. Garland calls upon Domhnall Gleeson to play an affably skinny nerd—in this case, Caleb, a dopily excitable computer programmer ushered into the home of a mysterious entrepreneur and scientist known only as “Nathan” (Oscar Isaac).

            A practiced connoisseur of cool, Nathan has no use for dowdy white lab coats; he strides through his glass-walled estate wearing a stylishly sweaty gray tank top, pounding the occasional punching bag with audible force.  He’s a genial fellow (one who ends every other sentence with “man” and “dude”), but Mr. Isaac adds a touch of fury to his eyes.  You never doubt that venom haunts Nathan’s extravagantly friendly facade.

            But “Ex Machina” is not really about Nathan; in fact, it’s not really about Caleb either.  What truly commands our heroes’ eyes (and ours) is Ava (Alicia Vikander), a robot who Nathan has asked Caleb to test.  Is she truly intelligent?  Self-aware even?  Nathan believes Caleb can find the answer.

            How though?  When you look at Ava, you see right through her.  Ms. Vikander, her face superimposed onto a digital body, looks like a mass of electronic gears with a beautiful woman’s face glued to their surface.  “Are you attracted to me?” she asks Caleb.  Mr. Gleeson’s fretfully aroused face answers that question far better than words could.

            And so begins the core of “Ex Machina.”  The movie is divided into “sessions” (during which Caleb interviews Ava)—sessions that quickly go off script.  “You’re wrong about Nathan,” Ava says with suave anger.  “He isn’t your friend.”  And as mysterious power outages bathe the house in red light and Nathan lustfully downs bottles of liquor, you can practically see incumbent horror lurking on the edge of each carefully-composed frame.

            I drank every ounce of this morbidity with voracious glee, hungry to discover what kind of conspiracy Caleb had stumbled into.  Yet I felt underwhelmed by the movie’s denouement.  Late in the film, Caleb stares into a mirror, convinced that somehow, he might be just as robotic as Ava.  That possibility revs “Ex Machina” to wade deep into the waters of the surreal.  Yet the film never does; its savage, pulpy climax is a yet another bland warning about the perils of rapidly advancing technology.

            Still, Mr. Garland (who also wrote the film) offers points worth probing.  In the movie’s opening scene, we see Caleb grinning before computer screen as he discovers that he’s been invited to chez Nathan.  Immediately, congratulations flow in—on his iPhone.  And even after Caleb meets Nathan, the outside world might as well not exist.  Nathan’s carefully cultivated home, amassed with gadgets and views of trees and mountains as flatly pretty as screensavers, is an oasis of detachment, a descendant of the lonely world born of Facebook.  “Was there a party?” Caleb inquires when he arrives to find Nathan punching off a hangover.  The answer is clear from Nathan’s face: stupid question.

            Of course, science fiction movies often say more through their narrative flourishes than their wordily expressed ideas.  And as I walked out of “Ex Machina,” pulse racing, I felt haunted less by its thoughts on humanity and technology than by its seductive aura of dread, by the images of Caleb questioning Ava, terrified and intoxicated at the same time.

Movie Review: "Batman Vs. Robin" (Jay Oliva, 2015)

SECRETS AND LIES IN GOTHAM CITY by Mo Shaunette

Seventy-five years.  That's how long Batman has been around and that's how long comics creators have had to bring vastly different interpretations and revelations to the world of the Dark Knight Detective.  Denny O’Neil and Neil Adams brought a globetrotting sense of adventure to Batman’s exploits; Frank Miller provided grim and gritty noir tales; and Grant Morrison mixed Silver Age nostalgia with lurid, psychedelic storytelling.

Which brings me to Scott Snyder.  As DC Comics’ current Bat-scribe, he has placed horror at the forefront of the saga—his Batman has fought increasingly monstrous foes beneath an overhang of palpable dread.  Chief among Mr. Snyder’s run is the story arc “Night of the Owls,” a paranoid thriller in which the Caped Crusader battles the Court of Owls, a cabal of Gotham’s elite who had been secretly controlling the city since its foundation.  The story enthralled bat-fans, so it’s no surprise that it’s become the basis of the latest DC Animated feature, “Batman vs. Robin.”

Set just a few months after the animated “Son of Batman” (which I also reviewed for this site), “Batman vs. Robin” finds Damian Wayne (Stuart Allen) wrestling with his new role as Robin, even as he suppresses his violent instincts to earn the trust of his father, Batman/Bruce Wayne (Jason O’Mara).  Batman, meanwhile, is investigating the Court of Owls, which has risen to prominence in Gotham and want Bruce Wayne to join their ranks.  Needless to say, he scoffs at the invitation, though the Court’s elite assassin Talon (Jeremy Sisto) is intent on probing Robin’s dark side and luring him into the fold as well.

My introduction aside, this movie isn’t a direct adaptation of the “Night of the Owls” comic book; in fact, it seems like the only reason the Court was included in this movie is because they happen to be trendy villains.  This is probably also why Bat-baddie Dollmaker appears in the film’s opening set-piece (voiced by “Weird Al” Yankovic, because I guess when you’ve mastered comedy songwriting, the next step is doing voiceovers).  Really, “Batman vs. Robin” is a Damian story, a “Son of Batman” do-over that makes for a fairly compelling hero’s journey—but robs its villains of their mystique and terror (in the film, the comic’s famous “labyrinth” segment is cut from a week of psychological torture to a few minutes of Batman moping).

What of the acting?  Misters O’Mara and Allan are credible as Batman and Robin, even though they occasionally deliver a flat reading or fail salvage a bad line. Meanwhile, Mr. Sisto invests Talon with genuine personality and returning players Sean Maher and David McCallum are still on point as Nightwing and Alfred (and yes, Weird Al is satisfyingly creepy as the Dollmaker).

“Batman vs. Robin” is hardly faultless; its first two acts are clunky and oddly- paced, making much of its character development feel unfinished.  But the film’s action beats are remarkably generous.  The character movements may occasionally wander into the uncanny valley, but for the most part the animation is fast, smooth, and fun, particularly during the third act climax when the Court’s forces descend upon the entire Bat-family.

For those reasons, I’m giving “Batman vs. Robin” a very tentative recommendation.  If you can sit through the underwhelming two-thirds of Bat-drama before the climax, then go check it out; otherwise, turn to the comics and see how you feel about them.

Movie Review: "Queen And Country" (John Boorman, 2015)

TYPING HIS WAY THROUGH WAR by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

The gleaming fantasy.  The dutiful biopic.  The unnerving tragedy.  Try as they might, movies are often doomed to predictability by the codes of their chosen genres—codes that we absorb like succulent, cinema-adoring sponges.  But John Boorman’s “Queen and Country,” somehow, defies any pattern.  At first, it is a playful comedy.  Yet gradually, the bantering mischief is tainted.  Egos are burnished, engagements are broken, and innocence, finally, is lost.

            We are in the realm of the military.  The Korean War is afoot and in England, so too is the draft.  And so we follow Bill Rohan (Callum Turner) and Percy Hapgood (Caleb Landry Jones) as they enter a regiment of slob soldiers run by the ferociously disdainful Sergeant Bradley (David Thewlis).

            Bill and Percy make a farce of it all.  Considered too moronic for active duty, they’re assigned to teach typing lessons, during which they instruct they’re young charges to slouch and repeatedly type the phrase “all good boys deserve sex.”  It’s a gag; the war is on, but our heroes greet it a sly smirk.  Bill smiles knowingly as he lectures his students, at once pleased with himself for having escaped the horrors of combat and conscious of how ridiculous his mundane role in the army really is.

            And yet the mischief can’t last.  A mysterious woman (Tasmin Egerton), immaculately dressed in a blue coat, beguiles Bill, then breaks his spirit; and as the story unfolds, Bill and Percy find themselves increasingly furious with Bradley (when criticizing them isn’t enough, he nastily rips into Percy’s girlfriend).  Bradley, though, is just a symptom of his regiment, where silly antics and slithering corruption march side by side.

            How did I feel after watching “Queen and Country”?  Mostly sad.  This is a beautifully told story; it’s clean and clear like a classic Hollywood drama, yet something about its rhythm takes you aback, keeps you from armoring up against bitter emotional aftertaste.  That is why in the end, the fates of the characters—rejection, prison, insanity—left me feeling that even for the ones that do emerge unscathed, something has been irrevocably lost.   

Profile: James Cameron

WHY JAMES CAMERON MATTERS by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

What a ride it’s been.

            When I started watching the movies of James Cameron to prepare for our week-long Cameron critical blowout, I had an inkling of what I was getting into—blunt dialogue, boisterous visuals, and crass humor mixed with joyous wonder.  Yet even knowing all that (having seen Mr. Cameron’s “Titanic” and “Avatar”), there was still so much I was unprepared for.

            To begin with, I hadn’t understood how profoundly one-dimensional Mr. Cameron’s movies are.  That’s not a criticism; the simplicity of his stories is what grants them such momentous emotional force—what makes his work at once addictive and inspiring.  He has little need for ambiguity; he prefers to let his heroines and heroes righteously rage against the societal machine. 

Examples abound.  In “Aliens,” the space-faring Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) silences a crew of soldiers with a bitter call to alien-slaughtering action; Sarah Conner (of the “Terminator” series) pummels a path out of an insane asylum to confront an apocalyptic future; and the beautifully doomed lovers of “Titanic,” Jack and Rose, literally beat down doors to survive a disaster unleashed by wealth and folly.

These struggles are fiercely depicted; it’s intoxicating to watch them unfold.  Yet despite such cinematic rapture, there is also a queasy cynicism in Mr. Cameron’s work.  In many ways he is a visionary, a progressive…and yet, in the same breath of calling him a feminist, you might also call him a misogynist.

His underwater epic “The Abyss” is certainly an offender.  Its heroine, Lindsay (Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio) is first seen as a pair of high heels plopping down on a ship deck (never doubt Mr. Cameron’s knack for masterfully symbolic imagery).  She quickly solidifies into a tough-minded, submarine-steering warrior…only to dopily submit to the obnoxious “I hate you/I lay down my life for you” ministrations of her husband (Ed Harris) for a smugly-directed denouement.

Don’t think it gets any slimier?  Then watch “True Lies,” a mightily unfunny espionage farce that visually fondles Jamie Lee Curtis.  Or better yet, keep in mind that even Mr. Cameron’s seemingly feminist movies (including “The Terminator” and “Titanic”) require their warrior women to be swept from danger by warrior men before they can ascend to the gladiatorial stature of Hollywood Blockbuster Savior.

These skin-crawling motifs are at the core of Mr. Cameron’s rough convolutions (and they’re certainly in tune with the same spirit that made him turn “Avatar,” a would-be ode to nature, into a “let’s blow ‘em up” pro-war fantasia).  Yet I still think that his movies remain transcendent.  Bold filmmakers stumble boldly, and Mr. Cameron is nothing if not bold.  He is the maestro of more and, I believe, one of the greatest storytellers alive. 

Why?  Because in his finest films, there is a sweet sincerity, a passion of a beautifully un-cynical nature.  “I know now why you cry,” the titular cyborg of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” tells John Connor (Edward Furlong).  As makeshift father and rogue son, they have bonded; now, as the Terminator sacrifices himself, his death (and John’s grief) wrenches you with gratifyingly cathartic power.

There are plenty of moviegoers eager to sneer at such moments.  And yet while shooting our Cameron video series with my fellow critics Patrick Belin and Mo Shaunette, I discovered that I was not alone in my love for Mr. Cameron’s unabashedly sentimental flourishes.  At the Healthy Orange, we’ve watched countless movies, many of them terrible; we have every reason to be jaded.  And yet we all felt something not only for “Terminator 2,” but for “Titanic” and its tender, soap-operatic love story of a boy and a girl fighting to survive. 

There is ample evidence that James Cameron is a rude, even cruel person.  Yet I think that the love communicated through his movies is genuine.  I’m not just talking about the ocean-defying romance in “Titanic” (or for that matter, the more tangential twosomes of “Avatar” or “The Abyss”).  I’m also thinking of heated moments, like the ferocious climax that wraps “Terminator 2”: Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), faced with an unstoppable killing machine, firing and reloading, seething with rage and defiance.  She’s not just opening fire; she’s defending everything and everyone she loves, railing on, with every last ounce of her indomitable strength.  

Movie Review: "'71" (Yann Demange, 2014)

ONE DAY IN BELFAST by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

War is hell, war is a drug…you know the drill.  Inside every director of war movies lurks two dueling impulses—one, to dutifully thrust us into the horror of people killing each other; the other to buoyantly gloat, “But all this bloodshed is tragically poetic, right?”  Both “The Hurt Locker” and “American Sniper” hovered between those two poles; now, Yann Demange’s “’71” hurtles you back into that grisly conundrum with thrilling, punishing force.

            Except we’re not in Iraq anymore.  It’s 1971 and private Gary Hook (a flawless Jack O’Connell) is among the battalion of Brits dispatched to deal with “the situation in Belfast,” as one officer calls it.  Protestants and Catholics are warring and Gary and company have been sent to “let the people know that we’re here to protect them”—a mission that turns out to be almost ludicrously resistant to their efforts.  When the Brits arrive in Ireland, they’re smattered by a volley or water balloons…a prelude to an assault of rocks, knives, and guns that leaves Gary stranded, racing through narrow passageways and streets while the furious men and boys of Belfast charge after him.

            And so the real story of “’71”—the story of a man on the run—begins.  Yet we’re not in the playfully sinister realm of “North By Northwest,” or even the grimly exhilarating shadows of “The Bourne Supremacy.”  With ferocious commitment, Mr. Demange rolls up his sleeves and insists that we watch the unwatchable—Gary, sobbing into his hands as he realizes he’ll probably be dead soon; shrapnel cuts, stitched up in horribly graphic detail; a little boy, his arms blown off by a double agent’s bomb.  

            Yet Mr. Demange doses us with adrenaline to alleviate the pain.  As Gary stumbles up and down a metal staircase at the pitch of the movie’s climax, I caught myself glowing at the sublime precision of the moment—at the way that you can see, with perfect clarity, the exact distance between Gary and his pursuers.   Of course, “’71” never truly becomes an entertainment. 

Watching the movie, we know nothing about Gary aside from the fact that he has a son and that he’s in the army (he isn’t even referred to by name until halfway through the picture).  “You’re just a piece of meat,” someone tells him and the film agrees—it paints Gary not as a saintly knight or a necessary evil, but as a dehumanized victim who never realizes that beyond the smooth rush of preparing for battle lie fierce city streets, waiting to swallow their next victim.

Report: Brett Ratner Will Direct "X-Men: Apocalypse"

RETURN OF THE RAT by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

“Do you think that this studio would give me several hundred million dollars if I wasn’t a serious filmmaker?”  According to the legions of “X-Men” lovers who despise his film “X-Men: The Last Stand,” the answer to director Brett Ratner’s leering query is a resounding, “Yes!”  Mr. Ratner’s movie may have made over two-hundred million dollars in the United States alone, but it remains one of the most violently despised blockbusters of the twenty-first century—a crude, overblown epic that turned “X-Men,” a science fiction allegory for racism and homophobia, into trashy, sexist entertainment.

            Alas, it will not long be alone.  Today, Twentieth Century Fox announced that Mr. Ratner will direct the forthcoming sequel “X-Men: Apocalypse.”  At a press conference, an obviously elated Mr. Ratner seized the microphone, nearly screaming his credo of victory.  “My return to ‘X-Men’ is a global event!” he crowed to a crowd of dismayed reporters.  “The franchise has been gotten too dark and heavy since I left.  I’m here to make it cool and fun again.”

            The appointment of Mr. Ratner is certainly shocking since “Apocalypse” has, for nearly a year, been in preproduction under the guidance of critically-acclaimed filmmaker Bryan Singer (director of the Academy Award-winning heist thriller “The Usual Suspects”).  But producer Lauren Shuler Donner has declared that she is “absolutely sick to death of [Mr. Singer’s] pretentious, faux-artsy direction.”

            “He’s a nightmare!” she exclaimed while Mr. Ratner grinned wolfishly beside her.  “Bryan has this borderline fanatic obsession with making each scene beautiful and poetic.  Quite frankly, his artistic integrity was starting to piss me off.  I mean, we’re here to sell tickets, not to make the next ‘Godfather’!”  “I love Bryan,” Mr. Ratner countered.  “I consider him a close friend.  But he just doesn’t get that twenty-first century audiences don’t care about nuanced storytelling.  They just want to see some freaking good explosions.”

            No doubt these statements will chafe “X-Men” film fans, many of whom consider Mr. Singer’s work (“X-Men,” “X2,” and last year’s international blockbuster “X-Men: Days of Future Past”) to be the zenith of the franchise.  But Mr. Ratner scoffed at the notion that “Apocalypse” should be a movie made for solely for hardcore “X-Men” devotees.  “Fans?” he sneered.  “We’re talking about a bunch of nerds!  I just want to make a movie that’ll give the average American family a good time.”

            As the press conference concluded, one reporter gustily asked Mr. Ratner to “please tell us that is all some sick dream.”  At this, Mr. Ratner smiled.  “Oh it’s a dream all right,” he chortled.  “And it’s coming to life!  We’ll be in theaters next year—the same weekend as that new movie co-directed by Christopher Nolan and Nancy Meyers!”

HAPPY APRIL FOOL’S DAY EVERYBODY!

~From the Healthy Orange gang J