JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH****

It is with no small irony that the new Jurassic Park film asks us to imagine a world in which consumers are bored with dinosaurs, given that this franchise has offered diminishing returns to the viewer since its inception thirty years ago.   In this new film, boredom, climate change, and disease have combined to make dinosaurs irrelevant to anyone living beyond a narrow band around the equator where they still flourish, and humans are strictly forbidden. Of course, that won't stop unscrupulous capitalists trying to exploit them for cash. Cue a trip to the Caribbean for Rupert Friend's evil pharma exec,  Scarlett Johansson's special ops team leader and Mahershala Ali's ship's captain. And, because Jurassic Park, they will pick up some capsized cute kids en route.  

Set up complete. What about the execution?  Gareth Edwards (ROGUE ONE) has made THE BEST Jurassic Park film since the original and, whisper it quietly, perhaps even surpassed the iconic Spielberg original. A tight script from the original screenwriter, David Koepp combine with superb performances from a heavyweight cast to create character depth and backstory quickly and convincingly. I actually cared about these characters' moral choices and evolving emotional relationships.  

And what of the thrills and spills? It should comes as no surprise that the director who made MONSTERS knows what he's doing with simultaneously frightening and awe-inspiring beasties. We see them move through the water like Jaws, or nuzzle up to each other in fond embrace. It's all spectacular. I particularly liked a scene shot behind a character where a beastie we know well from the original is taken out by its predator. But the tour de force set piece is in the film's final act, where chiaroscuro lighting, tension-inducing editing, superb scoring from Alexandre Desplat and a truly mesmerising performance from Mahershala Ali combine to captivate us. And because of David Koepp's script we know enough about his character to truly understand and respect his motivations. The only bum note in the film is when Edwards chickens out with a bit of improbable schmaltz, more befitting a Spielberg film than one of this own. But we can't have everything I guess.

It also surprises me that social media trolls haven't labelled this film woke, and have instead directed their ire at SUPERMAN and SNOW WHITE.  After all, the message of this film (which I heartily endorse) is that "science is for everyone" not corporations with patents.  And in a lightly-done but profound scene, we hear a hispanic dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) tell his daughter's apparently feckless but actually rather lovely boyfriend (David Iacono) not to think the worst of himself - others do that already. This is what a David Koepp script gives you.  Subtle moments rather than heavy-handed exposition.  

JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH has a running time of 133 minutes, is rated PG-13 and is global release.

THE CREATOR**

Gareth Edwards (ROGUE ONE) returns to our screens with a sci-fi film that feels like a cross between Battlestar Galactica and The Golden Child, except this time Sada Numpse is Allison Janney. I was surprised at just how slow, dull and soapy the film felt: all saccharine tears and overwrought emotion.  I wanted an intelligent interrogation of the real threat that AI poses. Instead I got sanctimony and a disappointingly guessable plot twist.

The film is set forty years in the future in a world where the West has decided to eliminate AI after it nuked LA, but for some unknown reason "New Asia" has decided it's cool with being out-evolved. For now, the US has the upper hand thanks to a suspiciously Death-Star hover-nuke called Nomad that can take out enemies at will, napalm-in-the-morning style. But New Asia is fighting back: its mysterious scientist Namrata has created a new AI that can neutralise any other tech, embodied in a cute little Cylon child. 

That's about as much actual sci-fi as we get. The film seems far more concerned with moody action sequences in beautifully evocative Asian settings. These hinge on John David Washington's US soldier Joshua being on the lam with the aforementioned Golden Child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) as they search for Namrata and Joshua's Asian wife Maya (Gemma Chan in a hugely underwritten part).  There are some car chases and a lot of shooting. Ken Watanabe has a rather moving cameo.  But the overwhelming feeling I had was, come on, are we there yet? And when we do finally get there, it's all so underwhelming, and indeed laughable (poor Allison Janney!)

The overall impression I get is that Gareth Edwards has made a film that looks fantastic, and imagines a beautiful, grungy, lived-in world.  But his choice to set the action in Asia and to use the Golden Child trope is problematic. His writing is very thin, and this hamstrings his actors. An example of the bad writing is given below: warning it contains spoilers.

THE CREATOR is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 133 minutes. It is on global release.

MONSTERS - ceci n'est pas un horror flick

MONSTERS is a movie that has been much-hyped as a totem for how movie-making has become democratised by cheap digital cameras and editing packages. The young British director Gareth Edwards has proved that a talented visual effects artist can create a horror movie that looks every bit as slick and full of special effects as the largest Hollywood studio with a few digital cameras and an editing package on a laptop. I'm not sure what all this fuss about laptops is. I mean, if you have a team of CGI animators and visual effects artists in LA or Soho they're basically just using a bunch of computers. The idea of a "laptop" as somehow impoverished and amateur is nonsense. And I say that typing this on an Alienware M17x with a terrabyte of internal storage and enough speed and power to conquer mainland China. However, in fairness to Gareth Edwards, he's made this point on many a TV and radio show. Indeed, he has also admitted that the budget for his "miraculously low-budget but hi-fi looking" movie isn't as low as people think. This is a little disingenuous though - he is modest but then again he's all over the media talking about how gonzo his filming style was. To hear him tell it, he basically decided to make a monster movie, got two young actors, a translater and a van, roamed up and down Mexico shooting people and places that caught their interest, improv'ing dialogue around a set of pre-defined scenes. I have this Scooby Doo vision of pesky kids harassing Mexicans for access to their tavernas.

At any rate, this is a rather nastier and long-winded start to a review than I normally cobble together, and actually doesn't reflect on my feelings about Gareth Edwards' work but rather for the sycophantic, near-hysterical reception it has received among the mainstream reviewers. They are so proud of themselves for having discovered a gonzo movie - a movie to stick it in the eye to Avatar - that they are positively falling over themselves to praise it. It's as though everything else in the film must be great because, hey, it was made by a plucky Englishman in his bedroom! So, let's all stand back and take a long hard look at MONSTERS and ask ourselves what we'd think of it if we didn't know how it was made. If someone gave us a tenner and told us to pick a movie and we watched it, what would we think? And the answer to that question is, "yeah, it's okay, but it's not really scary, or original is it?"

Essentially the movie is a two-hander between Scoot McNairy and his real-life girlfriend Whitney Able. He plays a rough and tumble photojournalist, and she plays a rich girl who ran away from her fiancé, and whose father has charged the photojournalist with bringing her back home. And so we get a planes, trains and automobiles story where two young good-looking kids discover that, basically, they really really like each other, and that while they both want to get home, they want to get home for each other. This, ladies and gentlemen, is nothing new in cinema. Moreover, it's so obvious, the dialogue so clichéd that it's about as annoying as the heroine's oh so edgy, hipster haircut.

Now, the backdrop for this lo-fi road movie romance is the Mexican-American border. Back in the day, nasty evil alien squid things landed in Mexico and were cordoned off in an "infected zone". When this story begins, aliens are just a fact of life, an ever-present threat against whom the humans lash out, descending to practises that violate basic principles of humanity. DISTRICT 9 anyone? Except MONSTERS wishes it were DISTRICT 9. It creates a walled border between Mexico and America, with aliens kept "outside" and people with passports finding it easier and cheaper to get across. The movie deliberately raises the analogy of present-day immigration politics and then doesn't do anything subtle or sophisticated with it. Where DISTRICT 9 was closely observed, satirical and scabrous, MONSTERS is ham-fisted, amateur and superficial. Essentially, there is no substitute for a script. And, as for the praise heaped upon a lo-fi film for looking good, yes, to be sure, the cinematography is superb. There are scenes of a sunrise on the water that are just breath-taking. And the use of CGI to replace real bill-boards and signs with Monster related iconography is very well done. But the monsters themselves are lolloping giant squid and look about as scary as a Pepe the Prawn.

So, in the final analysis, MONSTERS is beautifully shot and throws up some interesting ideas. But as romance, it's hackneyed, and as horror movie, it isn't scary, and as political allegory, it doesn't even try to get beyond the interest of its initial concept.

MONSTERS played the festival circuit and opened in the USA, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada and Australia earlier this year. It is currently on release in France, Indonesia and the UK. It opens on December 9th in Germany and on January 20th in 2011.