WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES is an emotionally affecting, visually impressive, intelligent conclusion to the new trilogy of films that began with RISE and more recently DAWN.  As the film opens we find our sensitive ape hero, Caesar (Andy Serkis) holed up in a forest, fighting off incursions from the Colonel's soldiers.  The apes position is unsustainable, so Caesar entrusts his best friend Maurice to lead the tribe to a promised land across the mountains (very deliberate biblical parallels here). Meanwhile Caesar and a handful of followers goes on a revenge mission.  Along the way he encounters a young mute girl, who we will learn will become the future Nova (for those familiar with the Charlton Heston movie) and a tragicomically traumatised monkey called Bad Ape (Steve Zahn).  The bulk of the movie is, then, set in the ape prison camp run by Woody Harrelson's Colonel. We see infiltration, capture, and escape plans hatched and dramatic action sequences.

The resulting film is brilliantly nuanced and resonant.  Caesar is our hero, but he's guilt-ridden for killing his militant ape enemy Koba in the previous film.  We also have to consider the conflict between the needs of his tribe for a leader and his need for personal vengeance.  The Colonel is similarly nuanced despite an exaggerated performance, deliberately echoing Brando as Colonel Kurtz.  As the movie progresses we learn that he too is under threat for taking harsh and perhaps justified decisions that parallel Caesar's decision to kill Koba. And, in observing the Colonel's fate, one can't help but suspect that maybe he was right. 

There are certain aspects of this film that I suspect everyone will like.  The cinematography is spectacular.  The mist rising from the forest - the green gun lights shining through a waterfall and into a darkened cave - apes on horses riding across a beach in the morning sunlight reflected in the ripples of sand. And it's hard not to get drawn into the trials of Caesar - a character we have come to know and love over three movies, and to be affected at the mutual admiration between Caesar and Maurice. 

As for the rest, it will very much depend on your tolerance for the broad strokes of "big" cinema.  I have also mentioned Woody Harrelson's literally cigar-chomping performance as the messianic cult leader Colonel. And little Nova is very much an angelic martyr to the genetic mutations that are now sweeping mankind after the Simian flu epidemic.  But it's Caesar where the metaphors work hardest and loudest.  He is cast as a kind of Christ, crucified on the prison frame, and then as a kind of Moses, leading his apes to the Promised Land. And then, along the way, we have echoes of prison films from KWAI to THE GREAT ESCAPE to UNBROKEN and Caesar as the beaten up hero of them all. I personally loved this recasting of the prison film genre with a sensitive and intelligent ape as the lead. But for some, this could become ham-fisted. 

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 140 minutes.  The film is on global release. 

DUNKIRK

Christopher Nolan is a director of superlative technical skill, and his new film of the evacuation of DUNKIRK lives up to that billing.  However, in his choice to strip it of all historical context, and to keep a close-up on three sets of anonymous character tropes, he has created a film that has no epic sweep; that fails to convey the magnitude of Dunkirk; and that fails to move.  Where it works, it works because of fleeting nuanced moments of acting brilliance.  But this is no LAWRENCE and he is no Lean: he has failed to combine the epic with the personal.

So, some context, because the film gives you none. (I wonder if this will affect non-British audiences' ability to engage with the film?) We are in the early months of World War Two. Ignoring captured intelligence to German plans, French, Canadian and British and other allied troops have been lured into Belgium by a German feint and have now been encircled and driven back to the French coast. Roughly 340,000 men - the principal strength of the British army - crowded the beach at Dunkirk - a port protected by a mole, or sea wall, from which they could board the large vessels sent to ferry them back across the English channel.   In doing so, they were hugely aided by the French forces tangling up the German troops sent to cut them off at the Siege of Lille. They were also hugely aided by Hitler's inexplicable decision to order the Luftwaffe not to pursue the troops.  

The evacuation took days, and combined large ships taking people off the Mole with small requisitioned commercial vessels collecting soldiers from the shallows. All the time, the troops subject to aerial assault on the beach and in the water, and the risk of being torpedoes once aboard. The scale of the battle was thus immense - with the RAF flying 3,500 sorties and engaging the Luftwaffe in dogfights away from the beach (hence many soldiers wondering where the fuck they were) - 36 Royal Navy destroyers ferrying men home as well as the Small Ships flotilla - and c340,000 soldiers ultimately evacuated.  It was both a great military failure and a success - because as humiliating as the lost Battle of France was, it enabled Britain to survive to fight on with its men and materiel largely intact. 

Christopher Nolan makes the decision to avoid all of this explanation, and to give us a Dunkirk that focuses on the personal experiences of the war by land, sea and air.  These theatres are inter-cut but take place along different time-scales.  The land evacuation takes place over the week, although frankly days merge into each other and I couldn't keep track.  The sea rescue takes place over a day and the RAF dogfight takes place over an hour, roughly corresponding to a Spitfire's fuel limit.  I rather liked the concept of intercutting the three, and although we do get a cute crossover with the same character appearing in two of the theatres, Nolan doesn't make it too intrusive or incredible. 

Where I think his claustrophobic personal approach works best is in the air battles.  Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden play RAF Spitfire engaging in dogfights some distance from the beach. With IMAX cameras mounted on modified Yaks, Nolan takes us into the air for some quite spectacular aerial photography.  Nonetheless, the downside of this approach is that one gets the impression that the men on the ground are right to ask where the RAF are - that the scale of the aerial assault is minute when it wasn't.  I also find it absolutely incredible that a RAF pilot, knowing how desperate the British were for materiel, would risk his plane in the way that Hardy's character does.  This utterly took me out of the film. 

The sea battle is also done very well from a technical perspective.  We get a sense of the claustrophobia of being aboard ship, the shell-shock and the terror of a watery death, especially when combined with lit gasoline.  I thought the acting was by far the best in this segment.  I very much liked Mark Rylance's quiet earnestness as a civilian sailor sailing to Dunkirk with his son - the quiet communication between the two of them with glances - the profound sympathy toward Cillian Murphy's traumatised rescued RAF pilot.  And the scene of soldiers drowning under a fiery sea is one of the most memorable and rightly horrific in the film.  But I also had deep concerns with Nolan's portrayal of the naval evacuation.  He has Kenneth Branagh's Colonel declare that the Navy is only risking one Destroyer. This is just untrue. There were 36 in use! In general, his character summarises the worst of the writing on the film. He's not a character so much as a Patriotic Reaction Machine. When he gets teary at the sight of the Small Ships as Elgar floats up through the score (superbly done by Hans Zimmer), Nolan is telling us to shed a tear.  When he looks concerned at the Luftwaffe flying overhead, this is a cue for us to get concerned.  And when at the end he remains in peril to help the French, we are meant to think, ah well, this has been EXCLUSIVELY from the perspective of white male Brits, but never mind, we sorted out the French too.  Appallingly crass stuff. Still, this being Nolan, Branagh will probably get an Oscar nom for this nonsense.

Nonetheless, it is on the beach itself that this film ultimately fails.  We have small nuanced scenes of brilliance - a soldier decided to commit suicide by walking into the water - or the quietly proud smile of a Royal Engineer who has built a makeshift pier out of trucks - but there is no sense of scale or chaos. According to Nolan, the beach at Dunkirk was filled with about 3 columns of about 200 soldiers neatly waiting to be evacuated, and ducking and turning on cue to the director's megaphone. There's no fear, panic, chaos, disorder at all.  There's also no sense that we are dealing with hundreds of thousands of men.  Ultimately, then, Nolan has made a gross error.  He has given us a film that tries to convey intimacy - without ever naming a character or making a character more than a trope - and he has chosen NOT to convey the epic sweep of battle. Worst of all he has made gross historical simplifications and some outright errors that massively impact our understanding of what is happening.  And his refusal to name the enemy as the German army is simply perverse. 

DUNKIRK is rated PG-13. The film goes on global release the weekend of July 19th.

THE BEGUILED

Sofia Coppola's remake of the 1971 Don Siegel film, THE BEGUILED, is shorn of much of its historicity and hysteria, and teeters dangerously close to absurdity.  That is survives to become an enjoyable viewing experience is down to the evocative, romantic cinematography of Philippe le Sourd, a delicate score from Phoenix, and its perfect casting.

The story is based on a pulpy Southern gothic novel by Thomas Cullinan, and is set in Civil War Virginia.  A brutally injured Union soldier called McBurney (Colin Farrell) has deserted the battlefield and is rescued by a young schoolgirl at a pretentious plantation seminary run by two teachers and five girls who have no safe homes to go too.  McBurney may be crippled, but his charm is in tact, and he lays it on thick to ensure that the ladies don't turn him in to the Southern army or force him to find his own regiment. And the ladies are no less collusive in the decision to keep him on, justifying their own decisions in the echo chamber that is the claustrophobic schoolroom.  Each of them is beguiled - the younger girls claim special friendships - the teenager Miss Alicia (Elle Fanning) flirts with him outrageously - the younger teacher Miss Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) harbours dreams of marriage but secretly wants sexual fulfilment - and the headmistress, Miss Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman), seems to delight in the sheer companionship of an adult, but also comes close to a kiss. 

BABY DRIVER

With BABY DRIVER, writer-director Shaun Wright moves from British pastiche comedies to a stylish, beautifully choreographed American action movie. It's exhilarating, funny, moving and (weirdly) unique.  

The conceit of the film is that it's young protagonist "Baby" was involved in an horrific car accident as a child that left him scars and tinnitus;  a love of old-fashioned ipods stocked with great music; and a gift for both boosting and driving cars.  This leads him into debt with a local gangster who exploits his unique talents as a getaway driver, for a different crew every heist.

Naturally, this leads us into the territory of derivative genre-tropes.  Kevin Spacey's "Doc" is a cool calm business like crime boss straight out of a Tarantino movie, and the kooky collection of colourfully nick-named thieves are similarly Tarantino-esque.  Ansel Eglort's Baby is the classic good guy in a bad situation, doing that One Last Job before his debt is cleared, but like Al Pacino in Godfather 3, pulled back into a life of crime that wears him down.  And Lily James' diner waitress Debora is nothing more than a pretty vacuous heart of gold character upon which Baby can fashion his dreams of escape.

MY COUSIN RACHEL

Roger Michell has a track record in making rather ambiguous slippery stories of obsession, and after his superb ENDURING LOVE, returns to our screens with an equally ambitious if rather less successful costume thriller based on a book by Daphne Du Maurier.  The story centres on the relationship between three cousins. The elder man adopts his younger male cousin Philip after Philip's parents die. They live a pleasant bachelor live in Cornwall for many years.  We pick up the story when Philip (Sam Claflin) is a young man, and his elderly adoptive father has gone to Florence for his health. There he makes an improbably marriage to their mutual cousin Rachel (Rachel Weisz). This romance is communicated by letters back to Cornwall which Philip dutifully reads out to his godfather Kendall (Iain Glen) and his daughter (Holliday Grainger), for whom Philip seems to be intended.  But romance turns to suspicions - with the elder cousin claiming that his young wife has poisoned him for his fortune.  Philip is thus set up to hate his cousin on site, but find's himself charmed by her beauty. Indeed, realising that she has been disinherited, he even takes pity on her financial situation and makes rather a fool of himself. This comes against the advice of all involved. Meanwhile the central question for the audience is whether everyone's else's suspicions of Rachel are warranted, or whether she is a maligned woman.

As with REBECCA, the more famous of Du Maurier's novels to be adapted to the screen, the central mystery is around an enigmatic, beautiful, perhaps dastardly woman.  And while Michell cannot withhold Rachel from us forever, he does a good job of delaying her entrance to the film.  Rachel Weisz is also perfectly cast as someone who is both beautiful and communicates intelligence on screen. I also rather liked Holliday Grainger as the altogether practical spurned young woman.  But the problem with the film really lies in the source material - Philip is a far less charismatic and intriguing character than Max de Winter.  Indeed, he is rather unlikeably spoiled and petulant.  Accordingly, even as we judge Rachel, it's hard not to resent his presence both in her life and in the film.  It's a flaw that I'm not sure the film ever really recovers from.

Thus the choice of source material is a fatal flaw, and perhaps the casting of Sam Claflin.  Which is a shame because Roger Michell really does great work in liberating the piece from the banal typical camerawork of a costume drama, with absolutely superb framing and dynamic camerawork. 

MY COUSIN RACHEL has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated PG-13. It is currently on release in the UK and Ireland.

THE BIG SICK

THE BIG SICK is a culture-clash romantic comedy based on the true story of how stand up comedian Kumail Nanjiani (SILICON VALLEY) met his wife Emily Gordon (Zoe Kazan - RUBY SPARKS).  He grew up in Pakistan and though settled in Chicago his mum and dad (Anupam Kher) still expect him to be an observant Muslim and to marry a Pakistani wife, a parade of whom happen to drop by for family dinners so that he can choose one.  Even when Kumail meets psychology student Emily, and even when they both fall in love with her, he can't envisage a future with her if it means giving up his family who would ostracise him.  And so she breaks up with him and that should be that.  However, as in real life, Emily gets sick, goes into a medically induced coma, and Kumail realises how much he loves her. He also starts to bond with her parents - played by Ray Romano and Holly Hunter - nuanced characters who both resent his treatment of their daughter, but realise he loves her, and are battling with their own relationship issues.  The sickness also gives Kumail the courage to tell his parents how he feels, and to tentatively navigate a new relationship with them based on truth, chipping away at their froideur.