Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Alternate Title:  You Either Die a Hero...

One sentence synopsis:    Manipulated by the evil Lex Luthor, Batman and Superman clash over contrasting ideologies to crime fighting.


Things Havoc liked: In a world filled with internet outrage culture, and the raging anger of fanboys galore, 2013's Man of Steel was one of the most contentious movies I have ever seen cross the cinema. I have had multiple violent arguments over the qualities of that film, watched grown men devolve into fistfights over the question of whether it was a faithful adaptation of Superman, or a disgusting betrayal of all that is right and good in the world. As those who remember my review can attest to, I liked the film, for its visual splendor, for its iconography, for the titanomachy-grade action that was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I liked it despite many glaring flaws as to tone and characterization and unfulfilled promises from the best trailer I have ever seen, but I liked it nonetheless. And yet in retrospect, the vitriol directed at Man of Steel by the many, many individuals who did not like it, not one little bit, served to taint the entire enterprise in my mind looking back. Perhaps my opinions are more malleable than they should be, or perhaps I was wrong initially and came slowly to see the light, but while I never came to hate Man of Steel, its star has definitely dimmed in the years that have passed from that moment to this one. With the raging hatred of those who abominated the first movie undimmed, and indeed increased, as we closed on the release date of its sequel, I decided to make a concerted effort to be objective with this one, above and beyond my customary disposal of preconceptions. Come Hell or High Water, there was a large segment of the internet that was going to hate this movie, and I refused to let that color my impression of Warner Brothers' go-for-broke attempt to have The Avengers' lunch.

Things Havoc disliked: All in vain...

If I have skipped over the "things I liked" section, understand that it is not because there was nothing in this movie that I liked. There was. I liked Jeremy Irons' turn as Alfred Pennyworth, a performance that is less rooted in Michael Caine and more in Michael Gough. I liked small touches that the movie introduces almost as throwaways, such as the fact that Batman, in this movie, eschews Christian-Bale-voice in favor of an actual vocoder. I liked Holly Hunter's turn as a wisecracking senator from Kentucky who chairs a senate committee charged with clarifying Superman's legal status. I even liked the effrontery with which Zack Snyder chose to hypothesize, rather than tone down, the christological parallels that the movie is riven with when it comes to Superman, explicitly including sequences where worshipful throngs of people kneel before his advent as though he were the second coming, while desperate encyclicals from the Vatican and other religious leaders declare that Superman is not actually Jesus Christ incarnated. The Christ parallels with Superman are inevitable, and were enormously thick in Man of Steel, but by calling them out explicitly, Snyder turns the subject around into a discussion of how people might actually react if an invulnerable alien god representing good and righteousness were to descend upon the planet. I liked this and all the other things I have cited, and yet I did not lump them all together within the "Things Havoc Liked" section, as is my usual wont. And I did not do that, because they are all ultimately irrelevant next to a single, impenetrable fact.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, is a piece of shit.

Not merely a piece of shit, but a huge, steaming, foul-odored piece of intestinal filth, enormous in scope and terrifying in impact. We live in an age of cinematic superheroes, not merely the shining lights of the MCU, but also the other great movies that have traveled in its wake, the Deadpools and X-men and all of the rest. And yet, confronted with the ranks of angels that have graced our screens for a decade and more, what has DC, Warner Brothers, and Zack Snyder, the man I have defended for years and years, done? They have produced the cinematic equivalent of a war crime, a movie that is and was and will remain one of the most cataclysmic misfires in modern history. For all the patience I have laid upon this collection of would-be dignitaries, forgiving Green Lantern, forgetting Catwoman, defending Man of Steel in the face of withering criticism, this is how I am repaid? This putrid abomination of a comic book film? This wholesale, willful negation of not just superheros but film as a medium and narrative as a concept? This is what they presented to me, in the expectation that I would lay praise at their feet and number them among my sainted elect? This was truly the best they could do?

Well they have sown the air, dear readers. Let them reap the whirlwind.

Batman v Superman is a disaster on every level of filmmaking I can cite and several others still waiting to be invented, a calamity that recalls parallels to the Hindenburg disaster, before which a critic and cinephile such as myself can do nothing but weep and lament the humanity that was lost in devising and producing it. It is a sour, bitter thing, a vindication to all of those who insisted to me that I was wrong to defend Watchmen, wrong to defend 300, wrong to defend Man of Steel, because they all led straight to this twisted, broken failure of imagination, creativity, and thought. No one, no one touched by this enterprise escapes it unscathed, certainly not Henry Cavill, whom I appreciated in the last movie for his earnestness and physicality, but who here has become a mopey, depressed un-character, shunting about almost robotically from scene to scene, as if he has read the script of the film and knows that nothing awaits him here but bitterness and ash. Superman is a character designed to embody our best natures, optimism, strength, courage and justice, and if Zack Snyder sought to do nothing more than piss on all four concepts through this portrayal, he succeeded. Ben Affleck meanwhile, who is an Oscar-winning director in his own right of great skill and talent, plays Batman like a man under the influence of several particularly dangerous steroid-PCP cocktails, a grunting, sweating dude-bro whose plotline through the movie is possibly the single stupidest plotline I've ever seen for a major superhero, and I remember both Spiderman 3 and Superman 4. In grotesque violation of the core tenets of the character, Snyder turns a hero famous for his legendarily inflexible prohibition against killing, into a cowled version of the Punisher, who slaughters his enemies with machine guns while obsessing over the possibilities of murdering Superman for no reason at all. I remember reading Frank Miller's All-Star Batman & Robin, a comic in which Batman referred to himself as "The Goddamn Batman", gloried over breaking his enemies' spines, and forced a small child to scavenge sewer rats for food, and this movie is still the worst version of Batman I have ever seen realized in any form, a character assassination so complete that no actor, be he Affleck, Keeton, or Lawrence freaking Olivier, could possibly have salvaged it.

And yet even with all of this, Affleck and Cavill are probably the best parts of the movie, for the true depths of awfulness on display here belong not to them but to Jesse Eisenberg, who is so staggeringly miscast as Lex Luthor that I considered seriously the possibility that the entire movie was arranged by a conspiracy of his sworn enemies. There have been many versions of Luther over the years, from Kevin Spacey and Gene Hackman's goofy versions to the more serious take Clancy Brown put on the character in the Justice League animated series. But Eisenberg, presented with infinite possibilities, is absolutely unable to make his mind up, switching motivations at least a dozen times throughout the movie, in some cases in mid-scene, from an arrogant tech-god in the (inevitable) Steve Jobs style, to an abused child lashing out at his dead father, to an atheistic terrorist desirous of literally killing God, to a mad scientist seeking the coolest toys, to a twisted harbinger of some terrible threat yet to come, to another thing and another and another. Eisenberg has no character except annoyance, no standard traits except stupidity, and his "evil plan" is not only one of the stupidest I have ever seen committed to film (a key element of his plans involves a jar of his own piss), but is additionally layered with redundancies, elementary mistakes, continuity-shattering plot holes, and utterly baffling decisions not just from him but from everyone he interacts with for any length of time, be they hero or not. But for all of his many, many flaws, Eisenberg's Luthor is at least occasionally entertaining to look at, if only from the sense that baffling stupidity may arise at any time while he is on the screen. The same cannot be said of Gal Gadot, an unknown Israeli actress and model who is called upon to finally, after infinite screaming by comic fans, to portray the most famous super-heroine in comics, Wonder Woman. She sucks. Gadot cannot act to save her life, not that the screenplay does her favors in this regard, relegating her to a handful of cameo appearances so nebulous that I seriously mistook her for a different comic character altogether. Shoehorned into the movie for no reason other than franchise maintenance, she has nothing to do with anything, and the tiny collection of scenes she appears in, either as Diana Prince or as Wonder Woman herself are nothing more than cheap fan-service, hoping to keep people hanging on until next year, when DC finally intends to release the Wonder Woman movie they proclaimed to be impossible so many times.

And yet, to simply call this or that actor's performance bad or even terrible does not even come close to the baffling anti-thought that permeates this movie like a miasma, afflicting everything from the derivative, over-bombastic Hans Zimmer score to the godawful cinematography and world design, to the plot and effects, which are so lackluster that they would not have appeared out of place in a mid-00s X-men spinoff. One of the few undeniable high-points of Man of Steel was the thunderous scale of the thing, a movie in which Olympian gods vented destruction and wrath upon their enemies in staggering, awe-inspiring spectacle. And yet of all the things from the original film to discard, the filmmakers chose not the fractured storytelling, not the stupefying plot contrivances, not the mutilation of beloved, century-old characters, but the sense of wonder that they had managed, against all odds, to produce. The action in Batman v Superman is almost uniformly some of the most boring action I have seen from a superhero film, a factor not helped by the "big bad" that our heroes must punch repeatedly being the laziest rendition of seminal Superman villain Doomsday that I've ever seen. The movie's version looks like someone crossed a troll from Lord of the Rings with The Scorpion King, and has CGI that would have been laughed off the set of Catwoman. There is no sense of scale, not to the final fight nor to the movie as a whole, as most of the titular Batman v Superman fighting takes place in an environment of Kryptonite gas, turning the entire thing into a battle between a meatheaded, drunken bully, and a depressive head-case who just wants the entire thing to stop. Not one fight has a sense of interest, of stakes, of personal agenda or emotion or even wow factor, but then neither do any of the dialogue or exposition scenes either, so why should I be surprised. This includes an extended sequence in the middle of the film where Wonder Woman is given a thumb drive containing top secret information from Luther's corporation, which turns out to be a series of trailers for future DC continuity movies. Which she watches. For five minutes. Yes, that means the movie stops dead in its tracks for five whole minutes so that it can advertise other movies to you that have not yet come out. I know some people think Marvel congratulates itself too much, but at least they usually save their ads for the next movie until after you have finished watching the current one!

But all of this, all of this, I might have forgiven (might), if it weren't for the final, damning element of this colossal misfire, the fact that the movie is so goddamn ugly. I don't mean ugly in the visual sense, although it absolutely is that, with a visual style that washes out the primary colors these characters are so well known-for into a dour, faded mockery of themselves, shot primarily in what appears to be a Detroit junkyard at night. No, I mean the ugliness of the sensibility that would lead to someone making a movie like this, a movie where Batman is a grotesque caricature of the sort Frank-Miller used in his more militant, crap works such as Holy Terror, a grunting parody of a "real man" who spends his time crossfit training before running out to murder people for no reason other than his own ego. I mean the ugliness required to produce a movie in which Superman, a character so defined by his moral sense that many people consider him boring and arrogant, undergoes an existentialist crisis before picking up the idiot ball and refusing to put it back down. I mean the ugliness and cynicism required to produce a movie ostensibly starring Wonder Woman after literal decades of denying women a place at the table, and then effectively whisking her off-screen like Charlie Brown's football and demanding that we go see another movie next year if we actually want to see her. I am talking here about a movie that reduces Lois Lane to a complete idiot with nothing better to do than find her way into death traps, that turns Lex Luthor into a simpering asshat whining about how unfair it is that people like superheroes, that turns the very notion of catharsis into a cruel joke, and then has the gall to turn around and mock Marvel's films for being too "unrealistic". I am talking about a movie that is ugly, nihilistic, and cruel, not merely in its worldview but in its active actions towards fan-base and casual film-goer alike. I am talking about a movie so irredeemably awful that I, comic book fan that I am, instantly wrote off every other movie in the DC canon from here on out, including this year's Suicide Squad. Because if this is the sort of product that the flywheels at DC and Warner Brothers believe is worthy of me and mine, then I suggest that they take a good solid look in the mirror, and then proceed to literally fuck themselves to death.

Final thoughts:     One of the great mysteries of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beyond the fact that it exists at all, is the consistent level of quality that it has maintained, such that weaker movies like Iron Man 2/3 or The Hulk still maintain a sense that serious people tried to make a good movie through the best methods they knew. The results are not always excellent (though the majority definitely are), but they are never the sorts of gross insults that a truly awful movie can feel like. But while I generally resist the temptation to describe bad or even terrible movies in such hyperbolic terms as "slaps in the face", Batman v Superman leaves me with little choice, made as it seemingly is by people grasping and jealous of the MCU's success, who could not stop themselves from voiding contempt for all those who supported Marvel in their endeavors instead of indulging in the "grim and gritty realism" that they offer up like offal disguised as ambrosia. As such, what is staggering about this film is not that it is bad, for a whole slew of DC-comics-related failures have adequately prepared me for that possibility, but that its badness comes in forms so ugly and hateful to myself and others, particularly given the fact that I was never a great fan of DC's characters in their comic form, and consequently have no fond childhood memories for them to stomp upon. Consider my rage then a cathartic thing, channeled on behalf of others, whose childhoods were spent between the pages of a Batman or Superman comic, and who have come to see their heroes realized on screen only to be confronted with one of the worst superhero films I have ever seen.

Where this series, for it is explicitly intended as one, goes from here, I cannot say. At time of writing, Batman v Superman did indeed make the hundreds of millions of dollars that superhero movies are wont to, and yet a steep and pronounced drop-off in second-day and second-week receipts point to something more than a handful of highbrow critics raging that their theaters have again been taken over by "teenager" fare. The deep apathy with which this movie was received by a public which may have bad taste but resents being spat upon does not speak well for the cornucopia of DC-comics movies that Warner Brothers has planned for the immediate future. I do not know if the lessons of Batman v Superman can be metabolized by a production unit so debased as to loose it upon us in the first place, and if I'm being entirely honest, I could not care less whether they can or not. Batman v Superman stands as a repudiation of the very reasons why I began this project, a cynical, slimy exercise in contemptible arrogance and shocking stupidity, a movie that hates you for liking superheroes, and hates itself for containing them. A studio capable of producing such a thing is one that I have no intention of supporting further by any means, and thus, in keeping with my stated policy of only going to see movies that I suspect have a chance to prove worthwhile, consider this my preemptive rejection of the entire DC cinematic universe. I do this project for many reasons, but one of the main ones is to let my readers know what films are worth seeing and what ones are not, but there is a limit to even my cinematic fortitude, and in consequence, I am afraid that if you wish to know how the future movies in this series will turn out, you shall all have to find out for yourselves.

And if, in doing so, you discover that the followup movies are nothing but cynical exercises in nihilistic defecation, thinly excused by wild gesticulations towards terms like "gritty realism" and "hardcore", then, in one way at least, I will be able to say that Batman v Superman told me the truth.

 

Final Score:  2.5/10

Next Time:  This film was DC's last hope.  But there is another...

Spectre

Alternate Title:  Staggeringly Putrid Excrement Created by TRepanation Enthusisasts

One sentence synopsis:     James Bond tracks down the mysterious architect of the events he has been investigating, as well as the shadowy criminal organization he heads.


A Note Before We Begin: Try as we might to avoid it, it became impossible to discuss this film rationally without resorting to SPOILERS. Do not read this review if you are desperate to avoid having a major plot-point spoiled for you.


Things Havoc liked: There are different rules for Bond films. We all know this. Bond is its own genre by now, with 24 movies spanning fifty years of spies, gadgets, seduction and daring-do. The most recent one of these was Skyfall, and I liked it a hell of a lot, a new beginning for a Bond series that has been many things over the course of its half-century lifespan, one that left the series open to any sort of followup the filmmakers wanted. Coming off a sterling performance by Javier Bardem as the previous installment's villain, and with the news that legendary German Tarantino-collaborator Christoph Waltz was to be taking his place as the evil criminal mastermind of Bond's most famous nemesis-organization, I was stoked to see this movie. Like with Skyfall, this seemed to promise the best combination of an excellent Bond (Daniel Craig is in the conversation for the best in the role, as far as I'm concerned), a brilliant villain (go see Inglorious Basterds if you want to know how well Waltz can play this sort of material), and a sleek, modern interpretation of the dynamic between Bond and his foes showcased through three previous movies, two of which were sort of brilliant and the last of which was merely okay. I have to see something every week, rain or shine, hell or high water, doldrums or Oscar season, but sometimes this blog writes itself. Bond was back. It was time to enjoy.

Things Havoc disliked: What the fuck was that?

Spectre is, without question in my mind, one of the most staggering, incomprehensible failures in moviemaking that I have ever seen. It is a disaster, a terrible film on both the level of a standalone action movie and the level of a Bond film, modern or otherwise. Comparing films to their predecessors may be gauche, but this is James Bond, a movie series with heft to it, and more importantly, one that had just finished a rousing triumph in the form of Skyfall, and for the filmmakers to follow Skyfall up with this, makes for perhaps the greatest collapse in quality between one film and another in the same series since Highlander 2: The Quickening. It is a terrible movie, no matter how you wish to slice it or what excuses you wish to give, and if you want to find out why, then we have to start with a little digging...

Bond films have always been silly, we know this. Sometimes, as in many of the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan films, they are more overtly so, and sometimes, as with Craig or Timothy Dalton's showcases, there is an attempt made to ground them in a grittier reality, but even when we're dealing with the former case, the silliness of Bond films comes from how over-the-top they are. Laser death traps, girls with ludicrous names, exotic henchmen with signature weapons, evil masterminds who could just kill Bond but prefer to monologue about their evil plan first, these things are staples of the series because they fit the series, or at least fit the movies they are in. Scaramanga works in Man with the Golden Gun because he's established as being an eccentric perfectionist who locks Bond in a dueling arena on his private island because his goal is to defeat Bond in a dueling arena on his private island. Jaws is a giant hitman with metal teeth because we are inhabiting a world with giant hitmen with metal teeth, same with Oddjob and Xenia Onnotop and Pussy Galore and all the rest. You don't drop villains like that into a movie like Casino Royale or License to Kill, at least not unless you intend to make terrible Bond films (Die Another Day comes to mind). So what do these filmmakers do? They get Christoph Waltz, a man who never found scenery he couldn't dine on, and tell him to play Ernst Blofeld (the reveal of which is treated like some grand dramatic thing, even though there is no context for who the hell that is within any of the previous films), zapping at Bond with some contraption of indeterminable purpose, or stashing him within elaborate death traps that he can easily escape, all while the other half of the movie is trying to be a Kathryn Bigelow-esque mediation on surveillance societies and privacy-infringing intelligence resources, material it plays so straight as to strangle all potential for any fun.

But I'm afraid blaming a tonal clash for this film's woes doesn't even scratch the surface. Plenty of movies have tried to be all things to all people, and some of them were even decent. This film however doesn't just fail on the level of ideas that clashed with one another, but because the ideas themselves that they are trying to fuse are BAD IDEAS. The movie goes all-out, trying to convince us that everything from the last three Bond films was leading up to this, all the events of the previous movies were orchestrated by some shadow-organization who is now being revealed, because hey, it's 2015, and we want every movie to be The Avengers now, right? Well Avengers managed that because they were A: Dealing with comic book characters, with strongly-defined archetypical characters, traits, and stories, and B: Marvel spent a goddamn decade building the world they would inhabit up through a whole series of previous films explicitly geared towards this end. You can't short-cut your way through that process by taking the three previous, barely-connected films, waving your hands at any muddled aspects of them that didn't make sense, and claiming that the very lack of specificity to some of the plot details we barely remember was all part of your brilliant plan. The effect is so tendentious as to be laughable, as the movie vainly tries to pretend that this was the plan all along, and when it fails (and oh, does it fail), turning around and doing something you only see when a movie has suffered a tremendous failure at the most fundamental level:

WARNING! SPOILERS LIE BELOW! DO NOT READ ON IF YOU WISH TO REMAIN UNSPOILED!

Making the villain a relative of the hero, about whom we have heard nothing previously, in a vain attempt to force some "emotional resonance" into the conflict between them without actually going through the trouble of establishing anything.

Yes, this is a film wherein it turns out that all of the events of the three previous Bond films happened because James Bond's step-brother, whom we have never heard of, became the literally greatest criminal in the world just so that he could torment James Bond and ruin his life through a series of hopelessly lame setpieces and death traps. And we are expected to swallow this despite there being no evidence in any of the previous movies (or frankly, in this one), that anything of the sort was being planned. The transparency of this ploy within the film is so stark as to stagger belief. It is like claiming that you did not kill that man moments after walking into the room with a machete, and, in front of seventeen witnesses, killing that man.

But fine, the plot is stupid beyond belief. Bond movies have survived that much before. What makes this movie fall totally to pieces? Everything else. The action, one staple of Bond films you can usually count on, is staggeringly inept, boring as all get out, with no energy, style, or interest to it. Remember Casino Royale? Its opening sequence, its fight in the bathroom or the parkour-heavy scene in the construction yard? Remember that silent, silhouetted fight scene from Skyfall, the one that took place against the backdrop of a ten-story neon sign? Well forget all that shit, we've got some of the most boring, pace-less, spectacle-free action you've ever seen here. Even Bond doesn't look interested as he lazily shoots down his targets. The fucking climax of the movie involves him firing a pistol at a helicopter while not being menaced even slightly. What is this, some attempt to drop Blofeld and Bond's wackiness into a John leCarre book? Even the henchman, usually a reliable source of fun in a Bond movie, is a hulking cypher of an irrelevancy played by Dave Bautista, who was awesome in Guardians of the Galaxy as Drax the Destroyer because that was a good movie made by skilled filmmakers with a brilliant script. This film, possessed of none of those qualities, makes him into Generic big tough guy number 18, to the point where it wasn't until after he had died that I realized his death sequence was supposed to be a major setpiece of the film.

And what of the Cast, the quality of the film I usually lead with? Useless. Léa Seydoux may be gorgeous, but she is simply a bad actress, something I've determined before from films as varied as The Grand Budapest Hotel and Farewell My Queen. Honestly, the problem here though isn't her, but the character written for her, a generic useless pretty person who has no actual point in either the story or the "grand plot" of the films, and yet whom we are supposed to believe Bond falls in love with to the point where he is willing to give up the life of an itinerant spy. The classic Bond girls of yesteryear were silly, yes, and there as eye candy, but they were also KGB spies and secret assassins and exotic heiresses looking for vengeance in their own right, and when Bond slept with them, you could see what it was that he found compelling. This one is a shrinking violet of no use to anyone, whose character arc is transparently used as an excuse to get her captured, again and again, so that Bond can have a dilemma. Monica Bellucci, meanwhile, about which so much was made prior to the film's release, that there would finally be an older Bond Girl, is basically not in the movie at all, and during the two minutes she does spend there, she accomplishes exactly zero, save of course for being seduced by Bond during her husband's funeral. We've discussed Waltz and Craig, both of whom look flat-out embarrassed to be there, but we also should bring up Ralph Fiennes, who has the unenviable task of basically playing Alec Baldwin's character from Mission Impossible 5 without the compensating quality of being Alec Baldwin. Andrew Scott, meanwhile, who played Morarty on the BBC's Sherlock, gets to play the evil government official who wants to activate a domestic spy program to rule the world, an idea that seems to come out of nowhere except the filmmaker's desire to pretend that this BOND FILM is actually a deep mediation on the questions of our times. Admittedly, this is the sort of shit that worked in Captain America 2, mostly because that movie starred Captain America, was written by someone who had seen a movie in the last thirty years, and was also entirely about the subject in question, rather than tacking it on as a B-plot to impress those who believe we can't have a spy movie that isn't also about how evil espionage is. This film meanwhile is so incompetently-made that we are treated to actual scenes in which Scott stands before his adversaries and sneers at them that they are clearly too naive weak for the modern world because they "are stupid enough to believe in... *scoff*... democracy!".

Final thoughts:    Spectre is not just a bad movie, but the worst kind of bad movie, a movie so bad that it makes me retroactively hate other movies related to it that I previously liked. I praised the hell out of Skyfall when it first came out, but reflecting on the thunderous mess that is Spectre makes me realize that the flaws that destroyed this film were present in its predecessor as well, waiting to strike once the filmmakers ran out of good ideas and threw their hands up in the air. That Sam Mendes, who made American Beauty, Jarhead, and Skyfall itself, was the director of this film, tells me that something went fantastically wrong early on in the process, to the point where nobody, not the cast, not the producers, not Mendes, and not the scriptwriters, were able to salvage anything from it. And yet to present this movie as some kind of Avengers-style capstone to a series that was plainly not aiming in this direction beforehand is a move so shameless that I can only describe it as contemptible. This is a film that tells you that the movies you watched before were other than what they were, and rather than try and figure out what made them popular, prefers to re-write them for the worse so as to peddle lazy swill before you, confident that an action movie in November is unlikely to have much competition.

I get a lot of flak every time I pan a stupid action movie, from people who claim that I am simply failing to get into the "spirit" of the thing by turning my brain off and enjoying the spectacle. While I would point out that you are speaking to the guy who liked both Kingsman and Fast & Furious 7, my counter is not so much that I don't have high expectations, but that a stupid action movie that wants to coast on its action and fun should probably include fun action. And when the film does not include fun action because fun is stupid and all movies have to rip off other successful movies regardless of whether their formulas are compatible, then they should not expect mercy from me when it comes time to review the quality of their work, particularly not when their only recourse is to try and convince me that movies I liked weren't all that good in the first place.

Final Score:  2.5/10

Next Time:  A movie this bad demands a retreat to the indie theaters for something a little... different...

Fantastic Four (Guest Review)

Alternate Title:  Shit-tastic Snore

A Note Before We Begin:     I had absolutely no intention of seeing this movie.  Among comic IPs, Fantastic Four has a pedigree worse than Catwoman, and despite the resurrection of X-Men by these very same means, I am not interested in going to see another movie whose very existence is a license-renewing contractual obligation.  Marvel movies not done by Marvel have an awful track record, and the same studio that brought us the Not-Amazing Spiderman was not one I was eager to see take another bite at the apple.  Fortunately for all of you people for whom my pain is a drug, a friend of mine volunteered to take a look at this one on my behalf, seeing as I had strictly no plans to fit it into the schedule.  Unfortunately, that was before the advanced buzz came back making this movie sound like a dumpster fire, and even more unfortunately, he is a man of his word.  I sincerely hope you all enjoy this one.  It was dearly bought.


Things Frigid... Saw?:  Hello, I go by Frigid on the internet and I write a book review blog called Frigidreads. Today however I will reviewing a movie in the good General's stead because it was feared if he saw this movie... Well it's likely best for all of us he doesn't see the movie. So I figured I'd volunteer, it's only a movie, how bad could it be? I'll be using the General's score for this despite having my own rating system because well, it's his series after all. Anyways on to the review:

So I went to see the movie against the advice of my family, my friends and my doctor. I should really start listening when everyone lines up to tell me not to do something.

I was told repeatedly that this film was a celebration of the comics. Well I saw damn little of the comics in this movie. The opening with Reed Richards and Ben Grimm is frankly tedious and eye rolling. Little Reed wants to be the first man to teleport organic matter (you know teleporting inorganic matter would be pretty damn revolutionary as well, just saying...) and announces this to his teacher and classmates. His teacher reacts to one of his students showing an interest in become a scientist by shitting all over him in front of his classmates and telling him to write a report on a “real” career. Really? I mean seriously, the kid before him chattered that he wanted to be a NFL quarterback. Bluntly Reed had a better chance of growing up to be a scientist working on teleportation than that kid, but no one shit on him. This displays one of the few consistent themes in this movie, any authority figure who is not named Storm is unreasonable and dislikes our main characters... For reasons.

The opening does show us how Reed and Ben met but frankly it's a waste. We're fed formulaic origin stories (Ben is alienated from his family who makes a living from their junkyard, Reed can't stand his stepfather and is a wacky child genius who is rejected and misunderstood). Hollywood, I know you love unreasonable authority figures who piss on our “heroes” for no reason but do a decent job with it, or don't do it. We jump to Reed and Ben as high school seniors in a science fair, where they show off the device and are disqualified for... reasons. This is so tired and hackneyed and cliched and they don't do a damn thing with it! It's just there to make them temporarily put upon! Why have this shit in your movie if you're not going to do anything with it?

Although the teacher does have a rather nice sneer. Reed is then offered a scholarship by Sue and Johnny Storm's father, Doctor Franklin Storm. By the way for those wondering, Susan is adopted. This isn't turned into a thing.

Ben, having served his betters for years is told 'thanks a lot now toddle on back home like a good servant'. Seriously this one burned me. In the comics Ben Grimm puts up a front of being a rather dim guy, but he met Reed in college, they took classes together. Yes, Ben is not in Reed's league but seriously who is? Regardless Ben Grimm is a fucking pilot who was good enough for fucking NASA! How is it a celebration of the comic books to take away all of Ben Grimm's skills and abilities and reduce him to Reed Richard's Igor and good luck charm? It turns their relationship from one of two men with different gifts and skills who regard themselves as equals to one of Reed graciously condescending to dribble crumbles to his friend who gave him spare parts. I would bitch about the movies getting rid of Ben's military service (he was an air force pilot before being accepted by the space program) but Marvel has got me fairly well covered with Captain America, Warmachine and Falcon. This treatment of Ben stands out all the more considering Susan Storm is turned into a scientist who while not as smart as Reed is still shown to have impressive intellectual gifts. Johnny Storm is shown to have good hardware and basic engineering skills. In the original story Sue was along literally because she and Reed were knocking boots and Johnny got to come because he was the little brother of Reed's girlfriend. So everyone got upgraded expect for Ben, who got downgraded, and there wasn't any reason for it that I can see. It added nothing to the story, it gave us no new information on Ben's character. So why have this in your movie if you're not going to do anything with it?

Then we have Victor Von Doom, except we don't. Because I don't know who the hell this guy is, but he ain't Doctor Doom. I don't know what Fox's problem is with actually getting one of the most Ionic and Memorable Comic Book Villains ever made right, but it seems they can't bear to simply give us Dr. Doom. In this movie Knock Off Doom is a withdrawn painfully introverted “genius” who will make cow eyes at Susan Storm for about a third of the movie, which I'll go into in a minute. They drop Doom's characterization for something completely different, jettison his background and origin for something completely different, and then (say it with me now) they don't do anything with it! Why even name this guy Doom? He's got nothing to do with Doom! For that matter they'll take him out of the movie and only bring him back in the last 20 minutes or so because someone pointed out they needed a bad guy and a superpower fight. So there's no build up, no foreshadowing, just Doom being lost on Planet Zero (Spent all night coming up with that name didn't ya fellas?) for a year (gonna cover this to) and being brought back where he immediately starts killing people because of crazy. To be fair if I thought I had escaped this movie and was dragged back in, I'd be pretty pissed off too.

I mean first of all... How to put this? Doom runs a country, bitch! He is a sovereign ruler with resources and abilities on par with the Fantastic Four despite not having any superpowers expect for the ones he steals from any cosmic being stupid enough to get close enough to him! He's epic, grand, petty, and spiteful, with an ego that would make gods suggest he needs to tone it down. Worse of all, at least half of the time he can back his shit up. They run from this like vampires from daylight, which only enforces that this movie is at best uncaring of its source material, or at worst ashamed of it. Which a comic book cannot be. Comic book movies can be a lot of things, as Marvel has gleefully proven with movies like Guardians of the Galaxy, Winter Soldier, and even Ant Man! But they cannot be ashamed of the comic books they spawned from. The sooner Fox figures this out, the faster they'll stop making shit superhero movies. I had believed between X-Men first class and Future Past they had figured it out. I was mistaken.

But let me get back to this thing. The movie tries to set up a Reed-Susan-Victor love triangle. It fails. Firstly because Reed is made painfully awkward (to be fair, I was worse in high school). Second, the actors have all the chemistry together of a pile of granite rocks. Thirdly, and this will surprise you gentle readers, the movie doesn't do anything with this plot! Seriously why bother with these tired cliches if you're not going to bother doing even a cliche ending to them? It's like someone told them all movies must have a romantic sub plot but they weren't sure what 'romantic' and 'plot' meant. Hell, it's not settled by Susan choosing to be with Reed or anyone admitting their feelings. Victor drops his half formed crush on Susan Storm to commit himself to genocide. All I could think at that point was at least someone in this movie was committing to something!

We have a montage after Reed is recruited to build a device to jump to a planet in another dimension, because space is too old school or something I guess? Despite the fact we live in a world where space travel is rapidly being privatized and there are an increasing number of organizations showing up to push back those boundaries, so a movie about people going to space would be relevant and pretty cool. But nope! We're teleporting to another dimension for reasons. I guess this could be a call back to the Negative Zone, but again they don't do anything with it! When they successfully teleport a chimp to and back, they're told that it's time to bring NASA in, and you'd think they were told that we were gonna build a new Gitmo there or something. So Reed, Victor and Johnny decide the only adult thing to do is get drunk and hijack the teleporter and do it first so they can be in the history books. Reed drunk dials Ben, because they need him to become a bad CGI rock monster. They go and bad things happen. Sue gets blasted because she walked in and tried to help. They are then turned over to the military and Reed flees because the military is bad. We now skip a year, so we have two time skips and a montage. I'm not saying that time skips are bad, but I am saying that so many in a single movie suggests to me that you need to go back to the story board. During that time skip Ben starts doing missions for the military, which is bad for reasons. The military develops ways for Susan and Johnny to control their powers and Johnny decides he wants to go on missions too. This is also bad for reasons.

The government and the military are treated as these sinister monsters who will surely destroy our heroes if left unchecked, but what do they do? They develop suits to help bring Susan and Johnny under control. I'm not a fan of these suits honestly but it's a minor plot point. They try to conduct research to understand Ben's condition and send him on missions for the US Army. When Susan says no, no one pressures or threatens her to make her do it. As to Johnny, after a year he gets ready to volunteer and everyone freaks out. Yes, clearly the stuff of villainy! I mean the most villainous person here is Doctor Storm's coworker in a suit who keeps referring to them as subjects behind their backs. But hey, an adult might be sent on a military mission of his own free will? That's awful! Speaking as a veteran of the Marine Corps? Fuck You.

But seriously why all this build up about how they can't trust the government or the military and then have the said government do... Really nothing at all that seems that sinister to me. At worst they took advantage of Ben to save other troops lives, but I guess our lives don't count. But hey, it doesn't matter because they do this build up and then... You guess it, they don't do anything with it. Instead there's Reed, who spent the year in Central America trying to rebuild the teleporter. They don't do anything with this either. Nor do they do anything with the fact the Ben is angry at Reed for taking him on a mission that turned him into a big orange monster and then fucking off to the jungle. They. Don't. Do. Anything. With. This.

It's all resolved with hand waves at the end of the movie, where they and Not-Doom have this really... generic, mundane let down of the a fight. Our heroes turn around to the military who gave them the training and equipment to win and tell them, hey we're done working for you. You're going to give us a huge fuck off lab, fund us to whatever amount we want and we're not going to share our work with you or do anything for you at all! Because you're evil. For reasons. It's an ending that reeks of the worst of Baby-Boomer-entitlement where authority exists only to give you everything you want but fuck you having to do anything or, you know, give anything back. The movie closes and I am left with this. The best part was the Star Wars Trailer and the knowledge that no one ever said they were the Fantastic Four in this film.

But I am left asking, why is it so hard to do a film about the F4? It's a simple concept: a family that loves to explore and push back the boundaries of knowledge and must at times fight against the new threats that exploration reveals. Instead Fox continually keeps trying to turn them into a generic superhero team, stripping away anything interesting or special in favor of movies that tell stories by waving about tired old cliches and then putting them down to wave another set of tired old cliches. So I have to close this review by asking the same question I've been asking throughout. Why have the rights to the Fantastic Four, why fight and scheme and sweat to keep those rights... If you're not going to do anything with them?

Final Score:  2.25/10

Next Time:  Most musical biopics do not involve machine guns.  This is not most musical biopics...

Terminator Genisys

Alternate Title:  A Song of Gripes and Ire

One sentence synopsis:     Kyle Reese is sent back in time to save Sarah Connor from a Terminator, only to find that the timelines have changed...


Things Havoc liked:  I feel perhaps that an explanation is in order...

I do not, ever, go see movies that I know are going to suck. What do I mean by that? You know. The Lone Rangers, the After Earths, the Battleships, the films that look like abject shit from the first time you lay eyes on their teasers. The films nobody needs to warn you about because the ounce of common sense that God gave all of us (except for movie execs) has given you warning that an atrocity is about to take place. Most people of reason would (and have) stated that this movie was, without question one of their number, as the trailers made it look like a seventeen-car pileup that was then hit by a train. In my own defense, I must answer that there is a difference between a guaranteed disaster and a risk, and that if I did not engage on occasion in the latter, going to see a movie that may look dodgy because I detect some possibility in it, I would have missed such films as Kingsman, Real Steel, Fury, and Cloud Atlas itself. Sometimes you need to go with your gut. Sometimes you need to try something new.

And sometimes it can work! For instance, I had all but written off Arnold Schwarzenegger as too old to make movies anymore, but the reality is that he's actually pretty decent in this movie. Not the equal to his great early performances of the 1980s certainly, but a credible presence, helped by a script which works his age into the story, and age-reducing technology that while still not perfect, has come a long way since Tron Legacy, and masks what twinges of Uncanny Valley remain behind the fact that we're supposed to be looking at inhuman robots. And J.K. Simmons, one of my favorite actors, is in this movie! Yes, he's playing a character whose identity I mistook twice for other characters in the movie (it's a time travel film, this happens), but he's in it, playing a frazzled, awkward, conspiracy-theorist/cop trying to make sense of a lunatic plot. I had no idea he was going to be in this movie, and discovering him there was a nice treat. And it's nice treats like that that keep me doing this, honestly. The notion that sometimes these Hail Mary passes can work.

Things Havoc disliked:  But most of the time...

Terminator Genisys, in addition to having the stupidest name in the history of movies (anyone who cites counterexamples will be eviscerated with an ice cream scoop), is a festering pile of dung, a categorical failure in everything it attempts to do and a complete waste of my valuable time, both to have seen and to be sitting here writing about. It manages, somehow, to do the literal impossible and actually become the worst film in he entire Terminator series, a statement I make in full recollection of the existence of 2009's Terminator Salvation. It is a plate of ass.. And it is by a wide, wide margin, the worst major Hollywood release I have seen in two years and more than a hundred films. Read the rest of my angry rant if my pain amuses you, but if you read only this far, know that you have now been warned.

Whose fault is it that this movie sucks? Well one is tempted to give the actors, at least, a pass, for who could possibly produce anything decent from s movie this misguided? But I'm afraid that no excuse imaginable would indemnify Emilia Clarke, Daenarys Targarian herself, from a performance THIS FUCKING BAD. I see what she was going for, trying to channel all of her Game of Thrones menace into playing Sarah Connor, the badass version. Unfortunately for her though, this is a character that was played to sublime perfection by Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, Hamilton's best performance and in my mind, the greatest action heroine performance in the history of film. Hamilton was on fire in that movie, transcending a mere badass and entering the hallowed realm of a "Bad Motherfucker" (which as defined as an incomparable badass who remains an incomparable badass even when they are doing such perfectly quotidian things as sitting at a picnic table and staring into space). The notion of Emilia Clarke, with her four foot even, ninety-pound frame, trying to successfully ape one of the great action performances of all time is simply farcical. She is not up to this task, especially not when saddled with a plot that gives her awful dialogue and a sweet pile of Daddy issues to have fun with. I get that this is some kind of alternate timeline wherein she was rescued by a terminator at the age of nine, but having her name the robot 'Pops' (I'm not making this up) was a bad idea on the scale of cutting the last Hunger Games in half. To put things in the most reasonable way possible, Linda Hamilton would probably never have allowed her character to utter such a phrase, for fear of sounding exactly as stupid as Clarke does.

But it's not like Clarke is the only one at fault. We also have the other Clarke, Jason Clarke, who needs to fire his goddamn agent or whoever it is that keeps dropping him into movies like this one or White House Down. Clarke plays John Connor himself (sort of), a character who does nothing but monologue endlessly about the most boring, non-pertinent shit imaginable. Half his fucking dialogue is nothing more than re-hashed, contextless quotes from the first movie that not only make no sense for the scene he is in, but actively undermine what he is attempting to say. How in God's name does it help your cause when trying to convince someone of your peaceful intentions and general trustworthyness to suddenly start quoting Reese's famous speech from the first movie about how Terminators "cannot be reasoned with" and don't feel pity or fear or remorse, applying those monikers to yourself! This is on top of the usual stupid idiot-ball antics of not killing the people his plans desperately require him to kill because... it's more sporting this way? But even Clarke has nothing on Jai Fucking Courtney, the action equivalent to Vincent D'Oonofrio, a man who has starred in nothing but shitty, shitty action movies like Die Hard 5, and who outdoes himself here by turning Kyle Reese into a useless, stupid, annoying, actively aggravating imbecile, mostly so that Sarah Connor can be shown to be a (sing it with me) Strong Independent Woman Who Don't Need No Man (unless of course that man is her surrogate robo-daddy).

Would that I could stop there, dear readers, but the woes of this film go well beyond its acting, and to apportion the blame properly, it is necessary to turn to director Alan Taylor, a television veteran whose most recent film was the perfectly serviceable Thor: The Dark World, and who here has presided over a colossal mess that makes even the worst Marvel film look like Citizen Kane. The writing in this film is utterly atrocious, clunky in the extreme, with dialogue so on-the-nose as to give the cast skull fractures, particularly a series of wretchedly-forced efforts to replicate Terminator 2's philosophical voiceover codas, so stupefyingly badly written that I was literally begging friends of mine to find some way, any way to stop the movie as they were going on, up to and including phoning in bomb threats to the theater. The "writers" of this abortion of a film, Canadian duo Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier, whose previous credits include such unjustly forgotten gems as Dracula 2003, Drive Angry 3D, and Oliver Stone's Alexander, have outdone themselves this time, producing a script and plot so convoluted and nonsensical that it may come to set a new bar for nonsensical time travel plots. Films as varied as Looper and Back to the Future have shown time and again all the myriad ways that one can do a time travel plot and have it make sense, but this is not among them. It's not that the plot requires anything fancy, it's that the storytelling is so bad that we never get fed such basic information as whether or not paradoxes are a thing in is universe, meaning that we don't know if the main villain of the piece is even allowed to kill the main heroes at any given time. Without knowing what the rules of the universe are, we have no idea why characters are doing anything, robbing us of all sense of consequence or importance, something that is helped in no way by the approximately eighteen different scenes in which the movie stops dead so that the characters can explain a fresh set of rules to the audience, ones seemingly drawn out of nowhere and which hold no actual implications for the story.

Final thoughts:   I know that lots of people, mindful of my claim to only go see movies that I think have a chance at being good (or at least interesting), will wonder why I went to see this film at all. I would be lying if I said that the same question didn't come to mind as I sat there watching this atrocity, but all I can say is that while I knew Terminator Genysis to be a risk, I had no idea that anything like this was waiting for me. Passing well beyond guilty pleasure territory and into the realm of war crime, if this movie does not kill the Terminator franchise at long last, then we live in a cruel and unjust world at the whim of an uncaring God. I am an avowed, dyed-in-the-wool fan of get original two Teminators, particularly the second, but this film would have been awful even if I had never heard of Terminator. That would, after all, judging by the evidence, have put me in a similar state as the director, writers, and most of the cast.

How bad was this movie? Let me put it this way. Of all the elements that went into creating this complete waste of my, your, and everyone's time, the single best one was the title.

Just think about that.

Final Score:  2.5/10

Next Time:  Catching up on a bit of backlog, hopefully with the help of a guest reviewer or two!

Leviathan

Alternate Title:  Misery

One sentence synopsis:    A Russian handiman confronts a corrupt small town mayor and the legal and religious systems around him intent on forcing him off his land and ruining his life.


Things Havoc liked:  ...

...

...

Ahem?! Things Havoc liked:

Go away.

What?

Go away. I don't wanna.

What the hell do you mean you don't wanna?

I don't wanna review Leviathan! I won't do it!

Oh come on now, it can't have been that -

It was that bad! It was awful! I don't wanna relive it! I'm not doing it!

Don't be such a baby.

TWO AND A HALF HOURS! I sat through this fucking thing for two and a half goddamn hours and you wanna call me a baby?!

But every critic on Earth called this a great film. Hell it was a nominee for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars!

SO WAS UNDER THE SKIN!

And this was -

- WORSE!!!

I don't believe that. Under the Skin was a hole in the space-time continuum. This thing at least had nice cinematography, didn't it?

*Sniff* Yeah...

And the actors weren't bad, were they?

I... I guess not...

So how bad could it possibly have been?

You don't understand... this movie is just... contrived misery. For hours on end. Everything sucks and we have to make sure it keeps sucking artificially, even when it makes no sense for it to suck. We've gotta drop plotlines midway through and arrange macguffins and use every contrivance in the book so that everything can suck as much as humanly possible BECAUSE ART.

I get all that, but -

YOU DON'T GET SHIT! You can't understand how horrible an experience it is to sit through something this goddamn vacuous for that long with no actual purpose to it beyond some pathological need to display arbitrary suffering.

Well it's trying to be a daring indictment of Russia's corruption and culture of alcoholism

BULLSHIT. It takes more to indict something than just splashing it on the screen. Russia isn't corrupt because God and the impersonal forces of the universe are in collusion to ruin some drunken idiot's life. That's like saying Commando was a daring indictment of South American kidnapping rings.

But... you liked Commando.

I liked Commando because it's entertaining. This movie's as boring as wallpaper paste. I started trying to identify the make and model of the shuttle busses just so I wouldn't go completely mad. It's not like the plot was occupying my attention.

Did it even hold together?

Hell no! That would have required straying away from the daring thematic elements. Think about this one. Let's say you've got a corrupt mayor, who is being threatened by a hotshot lawyer from Moscow who has dirt on him so explosive that he nearly has a heart attack to see it. The lawyer is established as having high level connections in Moscow, and yet the mayor decides to drag him out to a rock quarry and beat him up with goons before throwing him on a train out of town. What do you think happens next?

The... lawyer goes to his connections and gets the government to -

NOTHING HAPPENS WHATSOEVER. We never hear from the lawyer again. Why not? Because Evil Must Triumph Or It Isn't Art!

Surely you're being a little overdramatic...

There is a scene in this movie where the main character sits down on a beach littered with whale bones, drinks an entire bottle of vodka in one swig, then looks out at the camera and says, in perfect dramatic seriousness, "Why?!"

... really?

I swear to God.

Okay so... not very good then.

Not something I'm gonna be running out to buy the Blue-ray of, no.

But you've reviewed bad movies before. What's the problem with this one?

I... I just hated it SO MUCH. Every time I sit down to write the review I degenerate into incoherent screaming. It was an atrocity. And everyone loved it because it was "daring" enough to claim there's corruption in Russia!

Sounds kinda like Under the Skin.

Don't remind me. Still... you're right, I do kinda have to do something.

See, that's the spirit! You'll think of something, don't worry about -

Wait, I know!

You do? Great! What's the plan?

I'll review it IN SONG!!!

Wait, WHAT? NO! NO DON'T YOU DARE! WE ARE NOT HAVING ANOTHER MUSICAL NUMBER IN THIS GODDAMN BLOG! DAMMIT, YOU GET BACK HERE AND REVIEW THIS MOVIE NORMALLY!!!

*Skips away in psychotic glee*

GODDAMMIT, WHO FORGOT HIS MEDS THIS TIME?!

  
The Russian Film 'Leviathan'(Sung to "The Yellow Rose of Texas")  There's an indie film from Russia
The worst I've ever seen
With characters so wretched
They drink like Charlie Sheen
Two hours or more I sat there
It damn near stopped my heart
And if I find the filmmakers
I'll tear their lungs apart.

It's the bleakest fucking movie
This critic's ever viewed
With plot holes wide as oceans
And pace like superglue
You can talk about your Requiems
Or the Choices of Sophie
But the Russian film Leviathan's
The one that finished me.


When the Fireflies are buried
No longer shining bright
And the lists of Oskar Schindler
Have vanished in the night
I will lie awake regardless
For how was I to foresee?
That Leviathan will stick with you
And never leave you be.

It's the bleakest fucking movie
This critic's ever viewed
With plot holes wide as oceans
And pace like superglue
You can send me to Elysium
Or the Life of Timmy Green
But among them all this film's the one
I wish I'd never seen.


And now I've seen this movie
And my heart is full of woe
It's like the Last Airbender
Crossed with The fucking Road
Under the Skin was awful
Worse than any film before
But the film that I most hated
I shall call it nevermore

It's the bleakest fucking movie
This critic's ever viewed
With plot holes wide as oceans
And pace like superglue
You can talk about the second Tron
Or sing of Matrix 3
But I would not give Leviathan
To my worst enemy. 

Final Score:  2/10

Next Time:  Do I really have to?

... fine.. how about Silver Linings Playbook 2: This Time It's Personal?  It seriously cannot be worse than this.

Under the Skin

Alternate Title:  Purgatory

One sentence synopsis:   An alien masquerading as human kidnaps and murders lone drifters in Scotland.



Things Havoc liked:  So... let me explain.

Some weeks on this project are easy. Some weeks I have a plethora of films that I want to see, and the hardest decision I have to make is picking which one to see first. The week that Winter Soldier came out was not a particularly hard one for me to make up my mind about, for instance. That's not to say that these films are always amazing, reading back through my archive will reveal that much, but movies like that are no-brainers. Yet some weeks, particularly around Doldrums season, are not so simple, where it becomes increasingly hard to find something I want to watch. Normally in such cases, I take a guess as to what might look good or at least interesting, and see what I see. The results I experience with this policy vary (obviously), as it has led me to godawful movies at times (Timothy Green comes to mind), but also to hidden gems that I might not otherwise have seen (the original Raid, for instance). Indeed, I tend to approach occasions like this with a mixture of dread and hope, bearing in mind the whole time that hands down the best film I ever saw on this project, Cloud Atlas, was the product of one such week in which I had nothing to see and decided to take a chance. It is good to remember, when going into a film that one knows nothing about, that sometimes you get something wonderful.

Things Havoc disliked: And sometimes you get this.

I have seen bad movies in the course of this experiment, dear readers. I have seen horrors the likes of which would send a lesser critic screaming into the night. But even at the nadir of my experiences with cinema over the last three years it is rare that I run into a film as bad as this. A classic mark of a bad film is that it makes you start checking your cell phone to see how much time is left. A really bad film has you wondering if your phone's timekeeper has stopped. This film convinced me at one point that we had actually reached the end of linear time, and that all that was left was to watch Under The Skin. Forever.

First, the plot, which consists of [TO BE FILLED IN WHEN THE PLOT FINALLY SHOWS UP].  But forget the plot, let us focus on the characters, which include Scarlett Johansson as [???] and [is anyone else IN this movie?]. No seriously, that's about all I've got. Johansson's character is credited as "Laura", but she is never named within the film, nor given any sort of character or opportunity to develop one. Oh there are gestures in that direction, to be sure, as she revolts against the unseen forces leading her to commit her heinous acts such as "Motorcycle guy" and... um... "OTHER motorcycle guy" (in retrospect that might have been the same guy). But nowhere in the film do we get the slightest hint of who or even what she is, and given that the film is entirely about the question of "who she actually is, really", this is something of a serious problem!

I'm not making any sense, am I? Let me try this again.

"Laura", or "complete cypher" as I call her, is some kind of alien, a fact I, at least, discovered only at the end of the film. Why then am I spoiling it? Because the movie does not go out of its way to hide this fact from us, concealing it for some kind of narrative payoff. It is simply so shockingly poorly made that vital information such as this is not conveyed to the audience, even though the film clearly believes that it has been. Disguised as Scarlett Johannson (or something), she makes the rounds of the Scottish countryside, looking for drifters, loners, and people who will not otherwise be missed. She picks these men up under the promise of sex, taking them to dark, abandoned buildings where they strip naked before being drowned in some kind of oily fluid and rendered down into gory mulch, save only for their skins, which are (I think) harvested for the purposes of being worn by the other aliens. If this sounds horrifying or shocking, understand that this entire process is filmed in the style of a Calvin Klein ad, wherein everything is muted, and characters not only do not speak, but do not act in anything but the most foreordained manner, walking blindly ahead into pools of translucent oil so as to be stripped for parts, never once endeavoring to escape or even struggling. That men would wish to sleep with Scarlett Johansson I can easily believe, but are they being mind controlled? Have their libidos completely overwritten their sense of self-preservation (or sight)? If you, lured into a creepy building by a sexy woman, found that the floor had been converted into a gelatinous substance filled with mummified corpses, would you wade into it with nary a glance in the hopes that it was nothing but foreplay? Would you maybe at least ask a question? Possible answers could be given to this fundamental connundrum, but none are offered, leaving us watching people acting in self-destructive ways, wondering what the hell the director is trying to say.

But then, Under the Skin is not a film interested in telling us anything. Entire sequences appear and disappear at random and for no purpose. At one point, Johansson finds herself on a remote beach in Scotland, speaking to a Czech surfer about why he has come all the way out here. He gives her vague answers about trying to get away from it all, and then runs off to try and rescue a couple who have become caught in a riptide trying to rescue their dog. The couple drown, the Czech man nearly dies saving them, their baby is left abandoned and dies of exposure, and nothing about this subject ever comes up again, save for the fact that we later hear a report on the radio that the people in question are missing, a report to which nobody reacts. Perhaps the film is attempting to show us that Johansson's character is learning from the example of humanity around her, but if so, the lesson she learns is entirely opaque to me, as is the effect of every other thing that happens in the movie. She seduces a man with severe facial deformities. Why? We do not know. She strips the clothes from another woman brought to her by a man on a motorcycle. Why? We do not know. She is dragged unwillingly into a nightclub, attempts to escape, then changes her mind and seduces a patron, taking him back to the skinning factory where he obediently drowns himself like all the others. Why? How the hell should I know? Every action taken by every character in this film has zero context to it, such that when the film starts having characters act out of character, we barely even notice, as nothing the characters have done up to this point has made the slightest sense. It was forty-five minutes into Johansson's spirited rebellion against her alien masters before I even noticed that she was rebelling at all. You can't replace nonsensical bullshit devoid of context with other nonsensical bullshit devoid of context and then expect the audience to tell the difference.

And maybe it's me. Maybe I would have caught on earlier, except that my brain was busy trying to chisel its way out of my skull in a desperate attempt to escape the soul-devouring boredom that is sitting in the theater, watching this film. I've seen and enjoyed plenty of slow movies, including sci-fi and alien ones, from Stanley Kubrick's masterful "2001" to David Bowie's semi-sensical "The Man who Fell to Earth" to Andrei Tarkovsky's haunting, Soviet-era masterpiece, "Solaris". But those films were slow because the filmmakers wished to give the audience time to settle on images, or moods, or subconscious conjurations, so as to properly craft the experience that they were endeavoring to present. This film, on the other hand, is simply boring as paste, and tries to disguise this fact by showing us a lens flare for three and a half minutes while atonal electronic feedback is playing, perhaps in the hopes that if they drive the audience mad with disinterest, someone will mistake their film for avant-guard. Addicted to images stolen from better films, the movie takes six times longer to do every single thing than it has to, showing us, for instance, the process of Johannson walking towards a cabin (30 seconds), then staring at the door to the cabin (30 seconds), then the sign that tells us that the cabin is there for hikers to use (30 seconds), then her opening the door and walking inside (25 seconds), then the interior of the cabin as she selects where she wishes to lay down (45 more seconds), all of which is in the film so that the next morning she can leave the cabin (35 seconds-oh-GOD-MAKE-IT-STOP-I'LL-TELL-YOU-WHERE-THE-BODIES-ARE-BURIED-JUST-MAKE-IT-STOP!!!!!!!) A friend of mine, with whom I saw this film, asked me midway through to make her a solemn promise that this movie would, at some point, actually end, and that we would then be able to leave the theater. I'm a veteran at this sort of thing by now, dear readers, but I must confess, that by the time a seemingly major subplot of the film (a mysterious man on a motorcycle pursuing Johansson), one that had occupied 15 minutes of screen-time, resolved itself with a two minute, unbroken shot of the man slowly turning a complete circle while standing in a snowfield... I began to have my doubts.

Final thoughts:   If The Railway Man, last week's abysmal failure, was, as I described it, a "catastrophically bad film", then Under the Skin is the cinematic equivalent to a Biblical plague, a desolate, empty, thought-siphoning vacuity of a film that would be laughably bad if the experience of watching it were not so unremittingly unpleasant. Director Johnathan Glazer, whose debut film was the brilliantly sleazy Sexy Beast, has supposedly been laboring on this film for nearly a full decade, and based on the result, I'd say this shows every sign of a project that simply ran away from him, until finally he was forced to give up and release it without the coherent story that he was unable to provide it. I know that this review stands in stark contrast to the rave, universal acclaim that this movie is in the process of generating from film critics on either side of the pond, (Britain's Independent and Daily Express, and America's Hollywood Reporter providing lone voices of sanity amidst it all), but I do not care. I recognize that my own opinion is fallible, particularly on something as subjective as a movie, but this is plainly a case of bandwagonning hacks being unable to distinguish between the cerebral and the simpering. This is not a "deep" film, nor a "complex" one, nor a "masterpiece" nor a "work of genius". This film is a fraud, perpetrated against moviewatchers and abetted by professional critics, in the hopes that nobody will notice just how bad it actually is. And those critics (I have made a list) who had the bald-faced temerity to compare this movie to Cloud Atlas of all things should be driven from their offices with a horsewhip.

I went into this movie to see if Scarlett Johansson, an actress I've had problems with before, could act in a serious role. Unfortunately, I still don't know the answer, as no serious role was ever permitted to even come close to this movie.

Final Score:  2/10

Elysium

Alternate Title:  Sociology 101:  The White Man as Satan

One sentence synopsis:    A blue-collar worker dying from an industrial accident must find a way onto the exclusive orbital habitat of Elysium to access the life-saving technology there.

Things Havoc liked:  I've never been the biggest fan of Matt Damon, despite the good movies I keep seeing him in. Simply put, he always seems to play Matt Damon, regardless of the circumstance or role, and while there are times his witty-loser schtick works (Adjustment Bureau comes to mind), it doesn't exactly provide new and refreshing ideas week in and week out. Still, I'm willing to give Damon a shot, as he has an even chance of being good in anything he does, and several of his films have been pleasant surprises in this experiment of mine (once more, I cite Adjustment Bureau). In Elysium, Damon plays Max Da Costa, a former car thief and factory worker who, through a series of plot reasons, finds he needs to access the miraculous healing facilities available on the offworld enclave of Elysium, an obvious stand-in for the first world relative to the third. Damon doesn't do a vast amount with his character beyond brooding monotone, but his performance never dips below adequate. He is not the problem with this movie.

Neill Blomkamp, the South African director of District Nine, clearly has an obsession with the immigration debate. But ignoring that, his preferred visual style, that of rusted, lived-in supertechnology, is a welcome one in a world where Michael Bay and his clones dominate the surface of Hollywood. His Cinema Verite style is an acquired taste, but if nothing else it lends a wonderful continuity to the rusty, dirty, overcrowded world that he is attempting to portray here. Shot on location in one of the poorest slums in Mexico, the movie certainly feels real, even when flying cars are passing overhead or futuristic weapons and shields are being employed. The super-technology available to our poor heroes looks cobbled-together out of recognizable spare parts, in some cases literally duct-taped to one another. Following movie after movie in which supertech is considered so ubiquitous as to require no explanation, it's actually kind of refreshing to see our futuristic hero desperately trying to blow the dust off his vintage laptop, while his buddy covers him with what appears to be an AK-47 taped to a grenade launcher, all without consciously going for a post-apocalyptic vibe. The style is not the problem with this movie.

Things Havoc disliked:  No, the problem with this movie is every other goddamn thing.

Elysium is a stupefyingly bad film, a film so terrible that it flies right past outrage and into wonder and awe at the sheer achievement of having created such an atrocity. Following the surprise success of District 9, a film I enjoyed, Blomkamp had what amounted to carte blanche to pick his next project, and this movie, like so many other epochal disasters (Heaven's Gate, Connie & Carla) proves just why that practice, while inevitable, is rarely a good idea. Nothing works in this movie, not the acting, not the cinematography, not the premise, not the plot, not the ham-fisted political commentary, not the racist color-coding, not a goddamn thing at all. And having written, produced, and directed the film (not to mention run his mouth about its virtues at length), Blomkamp has left us with absolutely nobody else to blame.

One scarcely knows where to begin with a disaster of this magnitude, and so let us fly directly to the crux of the matter. Elysium is intended (Blomkamp has made that explicitly clear) as a parable for the immigration debate in the United States, in that it pits the overwhelmingly Hispanic inhabitants of Earth against the overwhelmingly White inhabitants of Elysium, and then frames their relationship as one of exploited and exploiter. I have no problem with this concept in theory. Science fiction has been used as parable for the debates of the day since as far back as Jack London and HG Wells, and there is plenty to criticize about American immigration policy. What I object to is how thunderously the film jackhammers its message home. It is not enough for the residents of Elysium to be uncaring about the plight of those left behind on Earth, they must demand that Earther-dwellers stop breathing in their presence and callously slaughter them with missiles when they attempt to break into Elysium. It is not enough for Elysium security to tase, shoot, and beat people as they try desperately to reach Elysium, they must throw children into livestock cages and engage in summary executions on people's lawns as a matter of policy. It is not enough for Elysium to have life-saving medical technology unavailable on Earth, the movie must go out of its way to show that this technology is unlimited and free of use, that dispensaries for it sit by the hundreds in warehouses on Elysium, unused, and that there is literally no reason why this technology is denied to the sick on Earth other than the fact that all white people are evil.

Oh you think I'm joking? This movie is so color-coded, at one point I thought we'd slipped into Birth of a Nation. There are a good thirty or forty characters in this film, counting the bit parts, and without exception, every single white character, be they Earther or Elysiumite, is an evil, murderous, psychotic killer who not only oppress everyone else but actively go out of their way to do so in the most horrific fashion possible. Meanwhile every character who is not white, including violent gang leaders, criminals, and organized crime bosses, are kind-hearted altruists desperately trying to do right whatever the cost, sacrificing themselves on the slimmest of hopes to bring salvation to their poor, benighted brethren. After a hundred plus reviews, I believe I am on safe ground when I say that I have no problem with either evil, slimy corporate types, nor with gangsters with hearts of gold, but the racial profiling of this film is so blatant as to bring to mind some inverted version of those Stormfront recruitment films that portray minorities as an evil, collective tide of mongrolism out to defile virtuous white womanhood. And lest someone retort that Matt Damon, who is white, does not conform to this categorization, I'll simply mention that the movie takes great pains to ensure we know he was orphaned at a young age and raised by Hispanic nuns at a Hispanic orphanage, and that therefore his evil "whiteness" has been purged from him.

But even if we leave aside all of the polemic and all of the ham-fisted politics that are packed into this film, the movie is simply incompetently made on the most basic levels. Action sequences are slow and plodding, and rely on heavy usage of the dreaded shakey-cam, predictably ensuring that the audience can actually see none of the elaborate action and special effects that the filmmakers presumably spent so much time and money producing. The plot, taken on its own, makes no goddamn sense, relying as it does on a series of coincidences so absurd as to beggar belief. Our heroes just happen to select as their primary agent a man who just happens to have it out for a specific CEO who just happens to be involved in a society-shattering conspiracy with the evil defense minister of Elysium, the vital information for which he just happens to be carrying at the exact moment the heroes put their plan into action. Meanwhile, the robotic exoskeleton that Matt Damon is screwed (literally) into, the one that the trailers made such a big deal about, is such an afterthought in the film that I literally could not tell what the point of it was in the first place. Yes, Damon uses it a few times to perform feats of abnormal strength, but the vast majority of the combat takes place via gun or sword, neither of which the exoskeleton assists with, and Damon's body is so ravaged by radiation and injury that he never gets the signature "cool" moments that we were assured would attend such a momentous thing. The obligatory love interest (Alice Braga) plays no role in the film except to be menaced by the psychotic madman and saved by the virtuous hero, while her sick daughter (Emma Tremblay) manages to actually stand out as the worst child-performance I've seen in years, and I remember The Odd Life of Timothy Green just as vividly as I ever did. Her spontaneous decision to recite a children's tale laced with (say it with me) deep meaning to Damon will live on in my memory as a particular example of terrible execution of a terrible idea.

Final thoughts:   At the end of this movie (spoiler alert), when our heroes have reprogrammed Elysium's central mainframe to recognize all of Earth's denizens as citizens of the enclave, a mighty fleet of magic healing-tech-equipped ambulance shuttles disembarks from Elysium under automated control, and descends upon the earth, bearing hundreds and thousands of healing machines to cure the world of its ills. What the filmmaker seems to have forgotten, however, is that this means the people of Elysium constructed a vast fleet of magic ambulances capable of curing all illness and injury upon the planet, a fleet for which they themselves had no conceivable use (every home in Elysium has one of these magic healing beds in the front parlor), and then placed them, unused, in garages and kept them from the needy people of Earth for no reason except evil. Blomkamp has gone on record as declaring that his film is not science fiction, but "Today. Now." Accordingly, I am left with the conclusion that according to Blomkamp, the immigration debate consists of a handful of psychopathic evil white people who deny life-giving resources that exist in unlimited quantities to the virtuous and deserving people of the rest of the world for no reason. I'm no fan of US immigration policy, but permit me the indulgence of suggesting that the actual debate is a little more nuanced than that.

Yes, parable is a thing. Yes, exaggerating a problem so as to draw attention to it has a long and rich history. But there is a massive difference between exaggerating an existing problem and distorting it beyond all recognition while simplifying the causes and solutions of it down to "if only the white people weren't all so evil". Of course, Blomkamp's pedigree and the politically-correct target he chooses to demonize have earned him a free pass from most of the mainstream critics I consulted prior to writing this review, as the consensus seems to be that the "rightness" of Blomkamp's cause excuse all of the lies, vilifications, and general incompetence of the film itself. They can do as they would, but it has never been my policy to give films free passes for merely having taken my side on a contentious issue. Elysium is an unmitigated disaster on nearly every level, one which, were the group being targeted anyone else, would certainly destroy the career of the man responsible. And Blomkamp's earnestness does not excuse either his incompetence nor his manifest ignorance of a subject he has the unabashed gall to presume he has "addressed" in some holistic manner.

I complained to a friend of mine recently that this year's crop of movies were a dull and mediocre lot compared to last year's, having offered neither spectacular films of staggering genius, nor truly epochal disasters of cataclysmic proportions. So much for that.

Final Score:  2.5/10