HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1***

I was surprised to find myself rather enjoying the first instalment of Kevin Costner's Horizon saga.  It came to our screens freighted with controversy.  Costner had apparently bilked out of the wildly popular Yellowstone TV show to make his passion project, enduring a messy divorce in the process.  Much like Frances Ford Coppola's MEGALOPOLIS, early feedback was that HORIZON was a bloated, boring, self-indulgent, intentionally regressive film.

To speak to the latter accusation, this film is indeed wilfully old-fashioned but in a way that I appreciate. It's a good old-fashioned Western where men are men (good or evil) and women are either loving home-makers or hookers with a heart of gold. This film is not interested in character nuance.  But it's not entirely without modern concerns: note that whether men are good or evil comes down to whether they have an accommodative or antagonistic attitude toward Native Americans.  And while there's probably a PHD to be written on how these issues are dealt with in Yellowstone and Horizon, I think Costner has probably benefited from exposure to the former. 

The problem with the film isn't so much its political attitude as its format. This isn't a film with a beginning middle and end so much as a three hour prequel that establishes character. Heck, the real baddie doesn't even show up except in a final montage sequence setting up the second instalment. All of which makes me believe that this multi-film cinema project would have played far better as a TV miniseries where a patient three-episode build-up would have been better tolerated. Instead, what Costner got was a box office failure that has condemned the second film to a streaming roll-out anyway.

And what of this instalment?  I very much liked Sienna Miller as the earnest widowed housewife who begins a romance with Sam Worthington's equally earnest military man.  That's strand one of the film, and the closest set of characters to the newly established town of Horizon. In the film's second strand Kevin Costner is in Montana, hooking up with Abbey Miller implausibly bleach blonde sex worker.  It was nice to see Jena Malone back on screen in this strand. In the final strand, it was also lovely to see Luke Wilson back on screen as the leader of a wagon train, also making its way to Horizon. In all three segments, the cinematography was lovely. I will indeed watch the sequel.There is an honest joy in seeing the landscapes of the Wild West so lovingly portrayed on screen.

HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1 is rated R, has a running time of 181 minutes, and is available to rent and own.

HACKSAW RIDGE

HACKSAW RIDGE is Mel Gibson's re-telling of the true story of Desmond Doss, a deeply religious US soldier who fought in the Pacific against the Japanese and won his country's highest military honour despite being a conscientious objector.  Doss refused to hold or fire a weapon but went into battle as a combat medic. And when his company was forced to retreat in ignominious circumstances, he stayed on top of Hacksaw Ridge and single-handedly rescued over seventy men.  He attributed his success and his survival to his faith, and overturned the prejudices of the men who thought him a coward.

It's easy to see why such material would appeal to Mel Gibson, a man whose faith is a quite extreme version of Catholicism, and whose films are obsessed with a close-up and cloying depiction of violence.   What Gibson isn't interested in are female characters or emotional nuance.  The result is a film, with a script by Robert Schenkkan (THE PACIFIC) and Andrew Knight (THE WATER DIVINER) that is heavy-handed, emotionally manipulative, and full of cliches and cheesy dialogue, and yet despite all this contains moments of great power and tragedy.

The first half of the film is a kind of PRIVATE BENJAMIN slash FORREST GUMP remake but with Andrew Garfield (THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN) cast as a kind of goofy simpleton.  He just wants to marry his gorgeous nurse sweetheart and protect his fellow soldiers in war despite his objections to holding a gun. We learn in flashback that this stems partly from a backyard scrap with his brother that nearly killed him, but also the example of seeing his father, traumatised by his experience of World War One, turn into a violent alcoholic.  In this section, Vince Vaughn gets to do his usual comedy schtick as the fast-talking mean Sergeant who wants to bully Doss out of the army.  Poor Teresa Palmer gets nothing to do as Doss' girlfriend except to look pretty and angelic and to be utterly supportive.  Indeed the only moment of real cinematic value is Hugo Weaving, who with his portrayal of the tortured ex soldier Papa Doss seems to be acting in another film entirely.

THE KEEPING ROOM - LFF14 - Day Seven

In the final months of the American civil war General Sherman undertook his March to the Sea enacting a policy of ruthless property destruction designed to bring a swift capitulation of the South.  Looting was officially forbidden but clearly occurred, and the men being away at war, it was the women who bore the brunt of the destruction.  In the new film from British director Daniel Barber (HARRY BROWN) we see what happens when three women have to deal with this threat - a minutely observed and incredibly tense study of what happens to normal people in extra-ordinary circumstances - much in the tradition of Susanne Bier. 

Two of the women are sisters - the elder Augusta (Brit Marling) is realistic about their situation - starving, forced to manual labour, and living in the keeping/store room rather than the old great house.  The younger, Louisa (Hailee Steinfeld) starts the film as naive and wilful and cruel, particularly toward the Mad (Muna Otaru) - their slave.  But what we quickly see is that the need to survive has made these women equals of a sort. Mad has a wisdom born of painful experience that the other women come to admire and in a particularly potent scene early on we see that Mad knows her value.

The first half hour of the film is an exercise is almost tortuously slow ratcheting up of tension.  We see through Augusta's eyes the hollowing out of village life - death, fear and the advance scouts of the Union army. In the final hour, those scouts come to the keeping room and the movie becomes a tense cat and mouse shoot out. Intertwined with this is a kind of tentative attraction between Augusta and one of the men, who may well have the capacity to be decent, and is as much a victim of the brutalisation of war.

I can't tell you how much I fell for this movie after some misgivings about the pacing at the start. Like THE DROP, it's a slow burn but worth sticking with.  The austerity of it is breathtaking.  It's also one of the few movies where, when the final scene rolls, I really wanted a sequel to show what happened next to those characters, so much had I taken them to my heart. We rarely see strong women on screen, let alone women who have a relationship with each other - the female dramatic version of the bromance.  Accordingly, this movie is an absolutely treat. Kudos to all involved.

THE KEEPING ROOM has a running time of 95 minutes.  The movie played Toronto and London 2014 and does not yet have a commercial release date.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - CLASH OF THE TITANS

I would imagine that you have to try pretty hard to take material that is literally mythic, and a stellar cast, and produce a movie as plodding, hokey and unconvincing as CLASH OF THE TITANS. Director Louis Leterrier (THE INCREDIBLE HULK, THE TRANSPORTER) delivers a flick in which the CGI looks shittier than Harryhausen stop-motion and every single actor looks as automated as the Kraken. Leterrier has supermodels cast as Greek godesses and the not unattractive Mads Mikkelsen swinging a sword. He has Liam Neeson cast as Zeus; Ralph Fiennes cast as Hades and throws bit parts away on actors with the heft of Pete Postlethwaite. Most of all, he has a story filled with characters that have captivated audiences since thousands of years before Christ was born. And with all this, he creates a quivering mess. Shame, shame, shame.

This is, I suspect, what happens when you have a big budget, big actors and a lot of CGI. There's a sort of spreadsheet calculation that the movie simply can't fail. And yet, and yet, where is the directorial vision to cut through the large cast of characters and shape the underlying story? Where is the unique style of an epic like 300? Where is the producer to pull up the director and tell him that the eighty foot scorpion-Kraken is laughable?

Long story short, this movie sucks. But for the sake of form (and I can't believe I'm doing this because didn't we all learn this in school?) here's the plot summary. Zeus, chief God on Mount Olympus is pissed off because the people of Argos have become so arrogant that they refuse to worship him. In a fit of pique he allows his brother Hades to terrify the Argosians by unleashing a big beastie called the Krakan. Hades tells Zeus that this will cause the men to love him again and beg for his help; really Hades just wants to cause panic and seize power himself. So, back in Argos, the King's daughter Andromeda is to be sacrificed to the Kraken unless the demi-god Perseus (Sam Worthington - Aussie accent comical) can kill the Kraken first. He does this by cutting off the snake-addled head of Medusa (Natalia Vodianova) and using it is as a weapon. All this while Perseus has to come to terms with the fact that daddy was a god who forced himself upon mummy and then had his family killed. Perseus defeats the Kraken with the help of some buff Argossians (Mads Mikkelsen) and a hot chick who doesn't age (Gemma Arterton). And in an ending that defies legend with typical Hollywood producer arrogance, Perseus and Io have a nice romantic ending despite the fact she is pace legend basically his great grand-mother to the power of n.

Additional tags: Alexa Davalos, Elizabeth McGovern, Luke Treadaway, Travis Beacham, Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi, Beverley Cross, Agyness Deyn, Natalia Vodianova, Ramin Djawadi, Peter Mezies Jr

CLASH OF THE TITANS was released in April 2010 and is available on DVD and on iTunes.

AVATAR - you can have too much of a good thing

AVATAR is the much hyped new film from writer-director and special effects obsessive James Cameron - the man who brought us TITANIC, ALIENS and TERMINATOR. Let us say that James Cameron has consistently pushed forward the technology of film, and has produced consistently thoughtful sci-flicks. Indeed, I would argue that he deserves more kudos than Spielberg - creating fewer but more consistently entertaining and polished blockbusters. But let us also admit that Cameron is the master of hyping himself, and has saddled us both with Celine Dion and with a 130 minute movie of arse-numbing proportions.

First, the praise. AVATAR is a technical marvel. Not because it does anything new - rather, it pulls together all of the advances of the last five years and pushes them further and does them better than anyone else. The 3-D is immersive rather than trying to shock us. The CGI is photo realistic. The characters and animals have weight and heft. The natural science detailing on the plants and animals is breathtaking. Fantastic creatures seem real. It is easy to mock a director who goes to the lengths of actually inventing a new language for his fictional race, the Na'vi. But it works. Much like LORD OF THE RINGS, AVATAR works because it makes us believe in an alternate world, and through believing, we care about its future.

AVATAR is also tightly structured and directed so well that it maintains momentum throughout its runtime (which is not to say it couldn't have done with being a good forty minutes shorter). Cameron may be a master of CGI but he never forgets that story comes before technical wizardry. The movie plays a three-act drama. We are in a dystopian future where humans live on a dieing world, and have colonised a planet called Pandora, in order to mine a precious metal, whose main deposits lie underneath the "hometree" of the indigenous Na'vi people. In Act One, the audience invests its sympathy with the hero and heroine. A disabled jarhead pilots an avatar Na'vi body in order to infiltrate the tribe and negotiate a relocation by any means necessary. Problem is, he becomes fascinated by their respect for nature and falls for a Na'vi chick. In Act Two, the stakes are established. The army, impatient for profits, decimates the hometree, scattering the Na'vi people, and destroying their trust in the Jarhead. The science team establish that the whole ecosystem of the planet is connected and a powerful source of energy. In Act Three, we have the dramatic climax and resolution. The Na'vi regroup and with their human allies take on the colonials.

The strength of the AVATAR story is that James Cameron knows who to weave successful aspects of genre fiction into his more modern allegory of environmental degradation and ruthless military exploitation. We have a good old-fashioned romance between the jarhead and the Na'vi chick. We have a coming of age story, as the jarhead learns the rules of the new world. We have a buddy movie as the jarhead bonds with the science officer. And finally, we have a spiritual story of redemption. I love the fact that Cameron is willing to tackle both issues of science, politics and religion in the same film - to that end, it reminded me a lot of the better aspects of Ronald D Moore's BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.

Given all these positives, it isn't a surprise that I had a good time watching this flick, even though it did seem just too long to spend in a cinema for what should just be a bit of entertainment, albeit intelligent entertainment.

But there are negatives. AVATAR features some of the most hokey dialogue and two-dimensional characterisation seen on film since STAR WARS. And maybe that's no coincidence. Maybe when a writer-director is having to balance different genres, a large cast, action, technology and romance, it's just too much to ask to have good dialogue and nuanced characterisation too? But then again, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA did, by and large, pull that off. One of the strengths of that series was its ability to present conflicted characters who changed, evolved, and felt three-dimensional. By contrast, in AVATAR, you're either a righteous hippie earth-child or a cigar-chomping, profiteering rat-bastard. And characters say the stupidest things. Towit, jarhead to Na'vi chick: "why didn't you kill me?" Na'vi chick to jarhead: "Because you have a big heart." I mean, no-one, not enough imaginary aliens, speaks like this! There's also something slightly hypocritical in a movie that thinks nasty evil people who blow shit up are bad, but nevertheless wants us to be excited by a final act which is basically about people blowing shit up in more and more noisy ways.

Ultimately, AVATAR is such a feat of imagination that, like STAR WARS IV: A NEW HOPE, it survives the hammy dialogue and weak characterisation. It's nice to spend time in this world. It would've been even nicer to have been all done in two hours.

AVATAR is on global release.

TERMINATOR SALVATION - a lovely little walking toaster of your very own

TERMINATOR SALVATION is a technically well-made, visually interesting addition to the franchise. Problem is, the plot and character ideas are so ill-developed that the action sequences lose all meaning and dissolve into one long roar of sound and fury.

All if which is a great shame, because director McG (of CHARLIE'S ANGELS fame) clearly had aspirations for greatness, citing influences from THE GREAT ESCAPE to Cormac McCarthy's grim post-apocalyptic novel, THE ROAD. The colour and design of this film is sombre and the mood serious. We have shots of a concrete building collapsing on itself and white dust billowing over the wreckage - an image straight from 9-11. We have scenes of humanity turned savage, fighting over food and fuel. The only wink to the in-joke of the franchise comes late in.

The set-up of the film is promising but squandered. Christian Bale takes on the role of John Connor, prophesied leader of the Resistance against Skynet - the sentient defense machine that launched a pre-emptive strike against humanity on Judgment Day. Terminator robots were designed and sent back in time to kill Connor, his mother and his father with no success. Radical rethinking was required. Skynet creates a Cylon - half human, half android - a Terminator with a real heart. The stage is set for brilliant drama. How far can the Cylon have free will, and counter his programming to destroy the humans? In what sense can a woman really fall in love with a man who is half-robot? These are some of the questions that were explored with great insight and wit in the re-imagined BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.

But TERMINATOR SALVATION is only interested in these questions insofar as they provide breathing room between the set-piece action sequences. Time and again, we have rushed, superficial scenes that hint at deeper questions but never give them room to develop. Thus, resistance fighter Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood, weak performance) falls for the Cylon who saved her life, and risks her own life to set him free. All this is essayed in five minutes and one scene of laughably Mills & Boon dialogue. Later in the film, the Cylon confronts his creators and asserts his humanity. Sam Worthington gives a good performance despite his inability to hold down an American accent, but we soon jump back to Christian Bale's attack on Skynet HQ.

And what about Christian Bale? His involvement with this film will no doubt be remembered for his ill-tempered attack on the Director of Photography, replayed to the masses on Youtube. This draws attention away from the fact that he has turned in a very mediocre performance in a thankless role. As in the THE DARK KNIGHT, he seems to think that adopting a growling deep voice conveys profundity and authority. And, as in THE DARK KNIGHT, he is upstaged by another actor, for this is really Sam Worthington's film. Maybe Bale just wasn't inspired by a character that is basically one-dimensional. There is an argument that if you were raised by your mother to be the saviour of humanity you WOULD be earnest, single-minded and dull. But, Connor should be charismatic - and when asking the Resistance to commit mutiny - he should sound more convincing, more inspiring than he does. Anton Yelchin, as Connor's teenage father-to-be, Kyle Reese, has more charisma, and indeed, more screen presence, than Bale.

All of this speaks to the weakness of the script overall - as evidenced by the numerous re-writes. Let's only hope they do a better job on the already announced, McG-helmed, TERMINATOR 5.

TERMINATOR SAVLATION is on release everywhere but Japan, where it opens next week, and Mexico, where it opens on July 31st.