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.

OPERATION FINALE

Chris Weitz - director of THE GOLDEN COMPASS and scriptwriter on ROGUE ONE - returns to our screens with this retelling of how a small team of Israeli secret agents abducted top ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and smuggled him out on an El Al flight to stand trial for his crimes in Israel.  As Israel Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (a cameo from Simon Russell Beale) explains to his agents, and so to the less historically literate audience - getting Eichmann to Israel is they key because it would be the the first time a Nazi would be put on trial by his victims, rather than by World War Two's victors. But should the mission fail, it would have been humiliating for the nascent state of Israel, and open it to justified accusations of having disrespected the sovereignty of Argentina.

And so we get a movie that is book-ended by a true-life thriller that is superbly executed.  Oscar Isaac plays the lead Mossad agent Peter Malkin and the only significant change to historical make-up of the team is including a female agent and love interest for Peter in Melanie Laurent's doctor - crucial in keeping the captor sedated.  We see the team take the intell from a Jew living in Argentina - his daughter is dating Adolf's son - and travel there to try and get a photo and a positive ID. These scenes are both the most tense and the most chilling - showing an active underground of Nazis in hiding and the rabid ideology of the next generation.  We then move to the abduction and Adolf's apparently rather quick admission of his real identity. 

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON - chiz moan groan

I have two problems with the TWILIGHT saga. In my review of the first flick, I summed up the first: "Instead of lashings of sex and death and sexy death and death-inducing sex, we get a lot of holding hands and big declarations of love but precious little rumpy-pumpy. Frankly, instead of all the narcissistic angst I would've far preferred the heroes to go and have some healthy sex and get over themselves. But that, my friends, kills the goose that laid the golden royalty cheques."

My second fundamental problem with the TWILIGHT saga is that it's completely dishonest. It's meant to be about pure love and abstinence but at the same time it makes no bones about showing buff guys stripped to the waist. Far from being about spiritual, emotional love, it's as much about the objectifying lust-objects as Baywatch. The only PC touch is that it's the men rather than the women who get their kit off.

These twin problems result in books and films that are as constrained as their characters: teens who want to jump each others bones but can't. And that leads to frustration on the part of the characters and the viewers.

NEW MOON opens with teen vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) abandoning his human girlfriend Bella Swann (Kristen Stewart) because he fears he can't keep her safe. So follows about ninety minutes of Bella going being depressed and boring. The only time she breaks off from this emo behaviour is to say something assinine to the newly buff teen were-wolf Jacob Black (newly buff Taylor Lautner). "You've gotten...um...really buff" etc. Unfortuntely (ironically?) given the lack of on-screen chemistry between Bella-Edward or Bella-Jacob the whole love triangle thing never gets off the ground. In the final half hour we get something that looks like narrative momentum. Edward's sister has had a vision of Bella committing suicide, which has prompted Edward to do the same, Romeo & Juliet stylee. Aforementioned sister and Bella thus rush to Italy (for no other reason than that it looks picturesque) to prevent Edward from inciting some powerful vampires from killing him. All this might have been quite dramatic were it not for the fact that Michael Sheen is evidently taking the piss and hamming up his performance as the super-powerful Vampire king or whatever he is meant to be.

All in all, a movie that is dull, assinine, dull, picturesque, camp, dull.

And there are how many more of these to go?

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON is on global release.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS aka The Gutless Cop-Out

What does it say about the times we live in that writer-director Chris Weitz has no qualms in having Jason Biggs masturbate on-screen with a warm apple-pie, but doesn't have the balls to depict an atheist's response to Paradise Lost? I don't know what saddens me more: the anti-liberal tyrannical response of my own Church to this movie, or the self-censorship of a studio too timid to respect Philip Pullman's profound artistic achievement. The upshot is that THE GOLDEN COMPASS is a rather feeble film. It looks pretty enough but it lacks the intellectual bravery of the source material. As a result, the viewer has to jump through the hoops of the complicated narrative without the concommitant emotional pay-off. In fact, the bizarre decision to cut short this adaptation before we have reached the final harrowing scenes of the book makes this film a deeply unsatisfying, unengaging experience indeed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In 1995, Philip Pullman published the first novel in a trilogy called His Dark Materials. It is that book - called Northern Lights in the UK and The Golden Compass in the US - that we now see brought to the screen. Pullman's trilogy is nominally a set of books for children, filled with fantasy adventure elements and set in a world that shares many characteristics with our own. A plucky young girl called Lyra Belaqua sets off for the North Pole to rescue her friend Roger from the mysterious Gobblers with the help of a truth-telling golden compass that once belonged to her guardian, an Oxford don called Lord Asriel. On the way, she escapes the clutches of the devestatingly charming Mrs Coulter and benefits from the help of a Gyptian king, a beautiful witch called Serafina Pekkala, an aeronaut called Lee Scoresby and an armoured bear called Iorek Byrnison.

The book works well as an adventure story. The "baddies" are suitably sinister, the good guys are wonderfully drawn, and we really believe in the strenth of the friendship between Lyra and Roger. But there is so much more to the story than that. In Pullman's version of the world, a tyrannical ideological Authority is stamping out free will and free thought. It is true that in the novel this Authority is explicitly religious and adopts some of the terminology of the Catholic Church. However I firmly believe that the Authority can be read as a symbol of all intellectual repression and anti-liberalism rather than any particular set of beliefs. Lyra and her guardian are thus battling for freedom and against tyranny - for truth against self- and imposed censorship.

It is, then, ironic, as well as tragic, to find this film refusing to speak plainly and to defend the intellectual freedom that Lord Asriel seeks to defend. Furthermore, having shorn the movie of its intellectual substance, Chris Weitz might at least have left us the searing emotional climax of the novel. But even here he chickens out - and leaves us with just another wishy-washy luke-warm Hollywood ending.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS is on release in the UK, Belgium, Finland, France, Israel, Norway, the Philippines and Spain. It opens tomorrow in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia and Singapore. It opens on Friday 7th December in Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey and the US. It opens the following weekend in Serbia, Argentina, Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Estonia and Italy. THE GOLDEN COMPASS opens in Italy, South Korea, Greece, Hong Kong, Brazil and Australia later in December and in Egypt on January 16th 2008. It opens in Japan on March 1st.