THE MAXIMUM FORCE OF THE FUTURE

Overhype is a deadly thing, and I don't want to contribute to it. So let's just leave it at this: if you're on the fence about Mad Max: Fury Road, I think you should see it. Go now, and do not be overhyped. If you're sticking around to find out why I think you should see it, one reason is because it's got some really lovely landscape photography of the Namib Desert, standing in for the post-apocalyptic Australian Outback. Another reason is because it's the best action movie since - if I'm trying really hard to be conservative - Hard Boiled in 1992. The second reason, I concede, is probably the more compelling one.

This is, maybe, the film that George Miller was born to make. Oh, sure, Mad Max 2, AKA The Road Warrior, is flawless, divine masterpiece, but it didn't cost a titanic sum of money. Fury Road did, and Miller and crew made every penny count to the utmost. This is what happens when you take a man who spent the early years of his career creating entirely new ways of doing action cinema on a shoestring, provide him with 30 years to think about what he wanted to do next, and then give him all the budget he could require to realise it. Seeing scrappy, ingenious filmmakers make a whole lot of practically nothing is inspiring and exciting, but seeing them make a whole lot out of a whole lot is absolutely mindblowing. And also inspiring - in an age when sums of money that could buy and sell whole nations are used to produce nice and safe popcorn movies that feel very much the same as a dozen other movies that cost equally as much, it's close to a sacred experience to stumble across a movie that wants to use all those limitless resources to do something that we have never, ever seen before in a movie, and which most of us, I'd wager, couldn't even have imagined in the first place.

The film has characters, and a plot - eerily fucking good characters, and a plot that gets all sinewy and dense when you start to pick at it - but mostly, it has an overwhelming, damn near unendurable sense of momentum (it's the most active, physical viewing experience I've had in a very long time, with the short lulls in the action invariably leading to a long slow release of breath and the relaxation of muscles I didn't realise I was tensing up). The film opens with a slow, steady shot of Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) staring off at the desert in what used to be Australia, intoning in ragged voice-over the minute amount of backstory selected from the first three Mad Max pictures we need in order to know what's going on - Max was a cop before the world ended, and now he's roaming the wasteland trying to survive and forget - and after he kills and eats a two-headed mutant lizard, he hops in his V-8 Interceptor and starts the engines. The one in the car, and the one in the movie, which immediately turns into a chase and does not cease to be one until its second-to-last scene, though there are variations in who is being chased by whom and for what reason vary from moment to moment, and there are pauses throughout the narrative when the people giving chase are far enough in the background that they're not an immediate concern.

The main object of the chase isn't Max himself, but Furiosa (Charlize Theron), an Imperator in the army of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, whose colorful villain credentials include the psychopathic biker Toecutter back in the original Mad Max), leader of the Citadel. It's one of the three human outposts in those part - Gas Town and Bullet Farm are the others - centered on a warrior death cult that Joe has derived and made himself the center of; and among the seemingly inexhaustible charms of Fury Road, one that makes me happiest to contemplate is the developmental arc it continues to form with the original trilogy. The Road Warrior shows post-apocalyptic world where the brightest light of civilisation is a disorganised, survivalist community a step above hunting and gathering; by the time of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, humanity has rediscovered towns, economy, and a cursory form of government; and here in Fury Road, religion has re-asserted itself, with the hierarchy and ritual attendant on those things.

But back to Furiosa. For reasons of her own, which are teased out throughout the movie, she has agreed to smuggle out five of Joe's "wives" - "breeding slaves" is rather more to the point, but religious despots have the luxury of defining terms - and bring them to safety far to the east of the region. Max, having already been captured by Joe's pasty white "war boys", is dragged along by one particularly zealous soldier named Nux (Nicholas Hoult), currently relying on Max as a blood donor to replenish his mostly exsanguinated, corpselike body. So Max is right at the heart of the Furiosa hunt, not that he gives any kind of shit, and as soon as he, the Imperator, and her five charges find themselves the only apparent survivors of a freakishly huge sandstorm, he's willing to abandon them to their doom, as long as he can get the hell away on Furiosa's heavily-armored war rig, a beastly hybrid of a semi truck and God knows what else. The only problem being that without her, he can't operate it, and she's not moving anywhere without the women he's protecting. So Max reluctantly becomes one half of the superhuman team trying to escape the combined military power of all three settlements, along with the nomadic terrorists who guard the canyon that's the only way deeper into the east.

Simple, pure, and responsible for the most crazed, beautifully-conceived, flawlessly executed car stunts in... ever? Probably ever. Any attempt to describe what happens across most of Fury Road, the first English-language movie I have ever seen that's more than 50% action setpieces, would quickly turn into tedious recitation of "this cool thing happened, and then this cool thing happened". Any attempt to describe how the filmmakers carried it off would quite stymie me, because I don't know, and "probably a fucking wizard" isn't a real answer. But it's flawless action, edited by Margaret Sixel to perfectly emphasise continuity across a whirlwind of shots from every angle as literally dozens of vehicles tear through the Namibian sand, with a simply phenomenal sound mix calling attention to every different component of every vehicle, and to Junkie XL's raging drums-and-guitar score, which is as rousing and intensifying to the viewer as it is to the characters onscreen (I'm going to allow myself one "this cool thing" aside: the giant truck of drums and a flamethrower guitar, present to arouse the war boys into a heightened state of bloodlust, and cunningly woven in and out of the film's soundscape, is pure popcorn movie pop-art genius). The film starts from the most outrageous concepts for staging fights, and only gets more and more involved and seemingly physically impossible as it goes along, with second unit director and stunt coordinator Guy Norris flinging human bodies and elaborately over-designed cars and trucks around the screen like the juggler of the gods. Meanwhile, John Seale's cinematography goes overboard on the boldest colors in the crayon box, leaving to one of the most potently saturated movies in recent memory, however limited its overall palette; at times it feels like Miller was answering a dare to prove that shooting a movie in almost nothing but the dreaded orange and teal could be uncompromisingly beautiful and absolutely essential to the creation of a particular mood in which the harsh sky and empty desert dominate every exterior moment.

Like all of the Mad Maxes, Fury Road's exposition happens at slantwise angles to the actual script, leaving us to collect data on the fly as the film goes along, and this time, we have to do it while the whole movie is moving at something close to the speed of sound. It's marvelous, not just because it frees the film up from having to slow down for talking, but because it permits the movie to shockingly dense with commentary about its society and our own, all of it explored so invisibly that it never for a fraction of a moment appears that the movie has anything else on its mind but adrenaline. But that is surely not the case: it's a study of women actively defying the patriarchy in the most literal possible meaning of that word, of the way that vague religious promises can be used to placate and control people, of the way that personality cults can shore up a totalitarian system of central control and make the exploited feel like they have a rooting interest in their exploiters. Miller and Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris's script dribbles out the necessary details to see these themes play out all out of order and in random places - the nature of Immortan Joe's death-and-rebirth religion especially shows up only when the characters would need it to - so it feels profoundly natural and organic, more a side-effect of the movie than the rhetorical justification for it.

And yet it's so deep in the film! It results in Fury Road boasting not just one of the most completely realised worlds in recent genre cinema, but two of the most complicated and interesting characters in Furiosa and Nux, the first combining raw feminism with a quiet self-loathing for all the good he hasn't done, the latter completing crisis-of-faith arc that is absurdly ambitious and unexpected for somebody that starts out as a thuggish sidekick. With the two chewiest parts, Theron and Hoult give the two best performances in a cast where nobody's less then strong; they, the cluster of actors playing the escaped sex slaves, and Hardy's more muted and soulful Max, far less detached and mythic than Mel Gibson's original take on the character (I do not know whether I think this works exclusively to the film's favor), give Fury Road the strong human spine it needs for its gonzo action to be emotionally involving on top being already quite exhilarating.

Providing spectacle of an unprecedented sort in the midst of one of the most fully fleshed-out artificial worlds in memory - here I am at the end, without even touching on Jenny Beavan's costume design and Colin Gibson's production design, despite those being two of the most important aspects of the whole movie, giving it the visual anchor it needs to feel real - Fury Road would already be quite a masterpiece of shallow entertainment, action with no purpose other than the sheer joy of movement and kinesis. But the sneaky intellectual depth of it, hardly the stuff of a philosophical text but impressively nuanced and complex for a movie that's devoting so much energy to expanding the vocabulary of movie action sequences, that's enough to put it on a level above even such recent instant-classics as The Raid, a film of pure genius that feels like cotton candy in comparison. Fury Road is a perfect action movie, and an improvement on the seemingly unimprovable Road Warrior, and one of the best films I've seen all decade.

10/10

Reviews in this series
Mad Max (Miller, 1979)
Mad Max 2 AKA The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller and Ogilvie, 1985)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)

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MAXED OUT

Making a sequel that significantly improves on a strong original is a feat that few enough filmmakers have ever achieved; asking those filmmakers to try their luck by doing the same thing twice in a row is clearly beyond reason. So it’s hardly a slight against Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome that it fails at the task of being as good or better than Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior. You can count the number of English-language action movies better than The Road Warrior on your hands, with fingers left to spare. It is a singularly high bar that director George Miller and his team set for themselves, and jumping over it, particularly with a project that Miller lost the heart to make even before he started, was never going to happen.

Still and all, it’s hard not to wonder why Beyond Thunderdome isn’t better. It was made by an almost identical creative team to the one behind The Road Warrior: Miller co-wrote the screenplay with Terry Hayes, Dean Semler shot it, Graham “Grace” Walker was the production designer, Norma Moriceau designed the costumes. There were a few big changes: one was Maurice Jarre replacing Brian May to write the score - which is, anyway, a clear trade-up on paper, and largely a trade-up in practice - and another was Richard Francis-Bruce coming on as editor. Miller shifted some of his duties as director to George Ogilvie, who according to the generally accepted account took over all of the story and character moments, while Miller oversaw the action sequences (Miller, in essence, demoted himself to being the second unit director on his own film). And this happened in part because producer Byron Kennedy had died in an accident during the film’s pre-production, leading to Miller’s disengagement from the project, which he completed out of a sense of duty to his colleague’s memory. He has openly confessed since then that he was too depressed about the whole situation to feel terribly invested in the project, and maybe that explains the generally deflated and uninspired feeling that clings to the movie like a shroud. Mad Max and The Road Warrior are tangible passion projects, oozing raw creativity and ambition. Beyond Thunderdome is a thing some people made.

The film takes place some undefined while after The Road Warrior and in no way relies on its narrative; it is a pure standalone sequel, using our foreknowledge of the first two films solely so that it doesn’t have to waste time explaining that the continent formerly known as Australia is now a desert wasteland with a crude civilisation that splits the middle between the industrial age on its way down and a neo-medieval feudalism on its way up. Here, we once again meet Max (Mel Gibson, for the third and last time), only identified by name once in the whole feature, looking a bit greyer and more hollowed-out than the last time we saw him, apparently in violation of the promise made by The Road Warrior’s narrator that Max’s experiences in that film led to a restoration of his humanity. To all appearances, Max is still eking out the smallest of existences in the ruins of the world - “to all appearances”, because Beyond Thunderdome does successfully replicate its predecessors’ great strength of refusing to give us any overly clear exposition about anything - and once again he’s on the receiving end of some petty trickery played by a ludicrous madman in a barely functioning flying machine (Bruce Spence, the first actor to return to the franchise in a role almost, but not quite, the same as one he played in a different movie). Following this weird fellow, Max arrives at Bartertown, a relatively stable community, as such things go, which relies on the methane produced by pigs to supply all its energy. This has resulted in a power struggle: Bartertown was founded and has been largely run by Aunty* (Tina Turner), but the methane plant is run by a symbiotic pair called Master Blaster; Master (Angelo Rossitto) is a little man who rides on the back of Blaster (Paul Larsson), a huge hulking brute of a man. Master Blaster has been contesting for ultimate power in Bartertown for quite some time, and while Aunty is perfectly willing to let Max die as a prisoner for the crime of being a stranger, she'll let him go if he challenges her rivals to a fight in the Thunderdome, the metal cage where all of Bartertown's squabbles and feuds are resolved.

So far, so great. Or at least, so pretty damn good. Everything in Beyond Thunderdome up to the showdown between Max and Blaster in Thunderdome is, if not quite at the one-of-a-kind level of The Road Warrior, still a fine follow-up that continues to build on the world constructed in that movie, widening its scale and showing a different way that life continues in a warped but still plausible direction. Bartertown is, absolutely, a well-conceived and brilliantly-realised setting, and Ogilvie's exploration of it and the strange characters who live there follows in the series' proud tradition of acting like some very baffling, almost caricatured customs and social orders don't need any kind of explanation at all. Plus, the battle in Thunderdome is a downright miracle and an action scene for the ages, with Max and Blaster on bungee cables being flung around the dome with furious brutality for something deliberately conceived to be the "family-friendly" Mad Max picture; it's a wonderful example of Miller working hard to raise the bar on himself, in what would prove to be his last action film for 30 years.

And then Beyond Thunderdome goes beyond Thunderdome, and more or less straight to hell. Max betrays Aunty, and is banished to die in the desert, surviving only because he's found by Savannah Nix (Helen Buday), one of the eldest of a group of children and adolescents living in an oasis. There's a bit more than half of the film's 107-minute running time left at this point (it's comfortably longer than either of its predecessors), and not a whole lot of that remaining time is spent on anything particularly interesting. I do not mind, as many people do, that Max becomes the babysitter to a group that might as well call themselves the Lost Boys (the giveaway is when the refer to "Tomorrow-morrow Land"). But everything about the film turns stupid at this point: Gibson's taciturn Man with No Name performance goes slack and disinterested, Jarre's terrific score collapses into idle nonsense, and Ogilvie's command of tone, so great at making Bartertown seem mysterious and gross and thoroughly real, evaporates, replaced by a halfway-decent facility at getting halfway-decent performance out of child actors.

Every now and then, an interesting concept pops up: I'm a great fan of the way that the script shows how the children piece together a comprehensive mythological history by narrating along to disconnected photographs and other images that they've assembled. Mostly, though, the entire second half of Beyond Thunderdome feels like a false start that keeps going on, functioning practically as a totally different second movie that doesn't know what its dramatic stakes are, and fails to convince us that Max has an emotional connection to the children. For that is, on a plot level, what's supposed to be happening: the surly old loner finding his soul by shepherding a group of innocents. In The Road Warrior, with one feral kid, this worked terrifically. Here, with a whole gaggle of them, it feels utterly inauthentic and corny.

It's all so much grinding until the far more interesting Bartertown plot can come back to intersect with the lost children, and trigger a massive chase scene that transparently wants to function as the climax of The Road Warrior, only more so. It doesn't get there, at all; the chase that ends The Road Warrior is one of the all-time greats, and Miller used himself up on the Thunderdome fight. If nothing else, it's distinctly shorter, though it includes some truly amazing wide shots - in fact, if there's any way in which Beyond Thunderdome can lay claim to improving on the second film, as opposed to just copying it to somewhat lesser or vastly lesser effect, it's that Semler's work is a bit more obviously textured and layered, with an even more mix of sandy landscape and blue sky, or the cluttered, dusky Bartertown interiors. And so the climax here, with its dramatic half-lighting, looks cooler than the climax of The Road Warrior, though it's not nearly as creative.

Still, judging the film as a standalone and not a sequel to one of the all-time genre greats, the last 10 or 15 minutes of Beyond Thunderdome are hard to quibble with. But even as a standalone, there's no defending the 40 minutes preceding that, an inert drama that strangles everything interesting about the movie up to that point. By all means, I enjoy Beyond Thunderdome; it's one of the best fixes a post-apocalypse junkie could ever hope to score. But it's a tremendously frustrating movie in a lot of ways, and even more frustrating a sequel.

Reviews in this series
Mad Max (Miller, 1979)
Mad Max 2 AKA The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller and Ogilvie, 1985)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)

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MAX OVERDRIVE

Mad Max 2 is, maybe, the perfect sequel. And if you'll let me pause on that very ebullient sentiment, a note on usage. The film is known by that title everywhere in the world except for North America; the original Mad Max had received a virtually invisible release in 1980, the victim of immensely poor timing, with its distributor American International Pictures in its final death throes at exactly the same time. When Warner Bros. prepared to release the sequel into the United States in 1982, the company (correctly) felt that marketing the film as a sequel to a movie that few people had heard of and fewer had actually seen would be commercial suicide, and so they retitled it, based on the film's dialogue. It was called, in the States, The Road Warrior, and that is how those of us who grew up in the States have learned its name. Including the present author, though I've only ever actually watched the film in prints that show the title as Mad Max 2 (the currently in-print DVD and Blu-ray have it as such). But that is not the reason I shall hereafter refer to the movie as The Road Warrior; I have far more boring pragmatic reasons. Mad Max and Mad Max 2 look very similar; Mad Max and The Road Warrior can be quickly distinguished and leave no room for any confusion. So now we can comfortably talk about the thing.

As I was saying, The Road Warrior is surely the perfect sequel. Structurally and as a story, it follows logically on from the circumstances of Mad Max, but it is entirely self-contained in its arcs, and can be readily appreciated with no more background than that provided in an opening montage including some footage from the earlier film (as is neatly attested to by the film becoming a hit Stateside and a star-making vehicle in the American film industry for Mel Gibson, despite most Americans having no clue what went on in Mad Max). It greatly expands upon the world established in the first film without any contradiction; it replicates the elements of the first movie that were most successful without simply repeating them. It is both "more of Mad Max", and "more than Mad Max", as beautiful an example of a filmmaker getting to do more of the same thing only with more resources and experience and as a result creating something that's better in almost every way than its predecessor (we'll get to the hedge in that "almost" soon enough).

In fact, The Road Warrior is such a perfect sequel that it also happens to be damn close to a perfect movie in and of itself. At any rate, I'd have a hard time scrounging up anything that's wrong with it; where it has limitations in its character writing and acting, it patches over them with its very particular tone, and it has not other limitations that I can speak of. And it is surely the single best post-apocalyptic movie ever made - and in its wake, there were a shit-ton of post-apocalyptic movies that copied its "leather daddies in the desert" aesthetic without a tenth of the inspiration or success - and as much respect as we should give to the exemplar of any genre, that happens to be one for which I have totally disproportionate affection anyway.

The film starts with a series of impressionistic snatches of imagery from Mad Max, from the end of The Road Warrior, and from news reels, with an aged narrator (Harold Baigent) recalling how all the civilisations in the world collapsed following a global war which avoided using nuclear weaponry (that favorite crutch of the post-apocalypse set), but still managed to leave the world in a pile of shit, by tapping all the resources available. In the short term, that led to the sagging, tired Australia of Mad Max. In the long term, even the spare framework of industrial civilisation remaining in that film has rotted away, and the machines left behind by the world's collapse have become the fetish objects of the humans left. And since a car in the desert is nothing but an immobile oven if you can't make it run, the meager resources of gasoline still remaining have turned into the most precious substance in the Outback. It's in this world that our narrator positions Max (Gibson), "a shell of a man; a burned-out, desolate man". He is the Road Warrior, a spirit of loss and tragedy roaming the wasteland until he has boiled away the last of his self. And so, before it even starts its plot, The Road Warrior has already overleapt its predecessor to become an honest-to-God myth; we are positioned decades after the events we're about to watch unfold, and invited to think of the film as a legend happening in real time. That's the definitive difference between this film and Mad Max, and it entirely favors the sequel.

The unfolding legend finds Max fleeing in the Last of the V-8 Interceptors from a gang of motorcycle hooligans who, like him, are scavenging fuel from anyplace they can find it; unlike him, they're willing to kill people to do it. The particular hooligan that especially causes Max difficulty is Wex (Vernon Wells), a mohawked psycho who keeps his slave and presumable lover (Jimmy Brown) chained to him; and while Max is able to endeavor to have a nasty-looking dart hit Wez in the arm, it only slows the biker down and sends him back to home base. In the meantime, Max's explorations of the desert scrub lead him to a trap set by a gangly, demented gyro captain (Bruce Spence), who also shows a marked willingness to ambush innocents for the fuel to power his currently dead autogyro, but Max takes virtually no time to turn the tables on his attacker. The gyro captain bargains for his life with some valuable knowledge: not very far away, there's a colony of relative pacifists living on a functioning oil refinery. Max immediately sets off, and finds the same gang which Wez belongs to attacking a pair of the refinery's residents; he's able to keep one of them alive just long enough to take him back on the promise that the man's life will be Max's bargaining chip to get some precious, precious fuel. The colony leader, Pappagallo (Mike Preston), has no interest in dealing with this stranger, but there are bigger problems: the gang, under the leadership of the Lord Humungus (Kjell Nilsson), has been attacking the refinery regularly, and the latest of those attacks is about to kick in. A feral boy (Emil Minty), who has taken a shine to Max, exacerbates the situation by killing Wez's slave with a sharpened boomerang, and with war about to break out, Max cuts a new deal, to help the refinery colonists escape Humungus's onslaught. And while the cold calculations of all involved don't seem to imply it, we can assume that the narrator's opening promise that Max's journeys through the wasteland led to the restoration of his humanity is going to kick in sometime through his attempts to save the colony.

I've made that seem more complicated than it is, but that's part of the joy of The Road Warrior: getting lost in the pile-up of details in story. It is, after all, an act of storytelling, presented explicitly as such in the opening moments, and the tone follows through on that consistently. Half of the cast has completely functional names - Gyro Captain, Feral Kid, Warrior Woman (Virginia Hey), the Toadie (Max Phipps) - and everybody in the cast plays their roles with a sort of detached superficiality; there's no room to dig into these characters' inner lives, because they are very self-consciously pitched as larger-than-life concepts in a larger-than-life mythic adventure that takes place in one of the most convincing fantastical settings in the movies, if the dehydrated post-war world on display can count as "fantastical".

It's quite a visual world, expressed as much in the costuming (by Norma Moriceau) and art direction (by Graham "Grace" Walker) as in the script - when I call this the best post-apocalypse movie ever made, what I'm largely thinking about is how thoughtfully it absorbs the nature of that apocalypse into its world and spits it out in the form of little details that are presented without any real comment, but matter deeply. The cobbled-together outfits and the reclaimed-garbage nature of many of the props and vehicles speaks to an entire society based on scavenging what still works from the old world and adapting it to the new; the whole film is so compellingly about the way that life might function in a post-industrial desert world, far more than any other film I can name. We are never, ever told what the rules are, of anything - not the gang's theatrical way of dressing (Humungus wears something that looks like a hockey mask designed to resemble the visor from a medieval helmet), not the codes of honor that guide Max and Pappagallo's interactions. And some of it never becomes clear; but much of it we can pick up, just by paying close attention to the way things are shot and how people behave. The best example I can think of is the way the film deals with ammunition: the Humungus has a fancy case with his ridiculously convoluted gun, and just five bullets - we don't need a single word of dialogue to understand that each of those bullets is used with the most reluctant care. Or when Max is given the gift of two shotgun shells, and we grasp what a profound thank-you this represents.

When it takes time away from world-building and myth-spinning, The Road Warrior is also an action movie, and this is that one single place I mentioned where it's not an improvement on Mad Max. There simply isn't as much action to go around. The first movie is a kaleidoscopic marvel of car chases staged with imagination and recklessness like the world had never seen; the sequel only really has one actual car chase to speak of, with a few smaller sequences that are over and done so quickly that they don't even deserve the name "setpieces". That one actual car chase is a fucking dream, though; a protracted climax that involves a small army of car chasing a tanker and another small army defending it, with people clambering on the outside of vehicles obviously tearing ass down the Australian highways, as Brian May's score urgently blasts from the soundtrack. It's a triumph of scale and knowing exactly the way to cut between individual moments within a huge tapestry of moving parts; between this and the similarly wide-ranging truck race in the back half of Raiders of the Lost Ark, I am fully inclined to call 1981 the year of Peak Car Chase.

Even if he doesn't have quite as much desire to show off radically inventive action sequences, though, director George Miller's enormous jump in talent from the last film means that the whole movie has the humming tension that Mad Max only enjoyed in its best moments. It's a terrifically confident piece of filmmaking, from the biggest strokes - Miller and cinematographer Dean Semler using the horizon line to slice the frame between sky and land in the most dramatic way possible to emphasise the desolation of their locations - down to the most immodestly little details, like the single white frame that flashes up when Wez headbutts one of the colonists, an almost boringly minute notion that makes that action have vastly more impact than it might otherwise. I cannot imagine how to make The Road Warrior a better version of itself: a drama of the brutality it takes to survive a merciless environment, filtered through memory, nostalgia, and the encoding of history into narrative forms. This is basically perfect cinema, using every cut, every piece of visual information, and every line of dialogue to guide us towards its unexpectedly rich broad-strokes storytelling and exhilarating triumph of decency over cynicism and cruelty (it is, in fact, a direct refutation of the nihilism of Mad Max). Out of the countless action movies produced in the 1980s, there only a few genuine works of art; and The Road Warrior might very well be the best of that extremely rarefied company.

Reviews in this series
Mad Max (Miller, 1979)
Mad Max 2 AKA The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller and Ogilvie, 1985)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)

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TO THE MAX

There's no way around it: Mad Max is an astonishingly impressive movie. It was made for pocket change by a bunch of of amateurs: director and co-writer George Miller was a medical doctor, of all things, before he and producer partner Byron Kennedy made the short Violence in the Cinema, Part 1. And that was in 1971, a full eight years before Mad Max found its way into theaters. And despite these grubby origins, the film was an enormous hit, holding the record for the highest ratio of production budget-to-theatrical gross for twenty years, until The Blair Witch Project came along. But the impressive part isn't that Miller and Kennedy and company made a whole fucking lot of money from just a little money. It's that they made a whole fucking lot of movie from just a little money - a movie so ambitious and inventive in its action choreography and cinematography that it effectively re-defined the way that car chases have been filmed for the intervening 36 years. And frankly, only a very small number of its uncountable imitators have managed to improve upon it in any way. This is a masterpiece of stretching resources to the snapping point; it is a film that's obligatory viewing for anybody want wants to make movies themselves. But it's also great purely as entertainment, with its perhaps unjustified narrative shortcuts hardly seeming to be much worth complaining about in the middle of its flawless action sequences.

An opening title card tells us that it's only a few years in the future, but otherwise leaves the backstory unstated. And this is one of the best things that Miller and co-writer James McCausland could possibly have done, since the film-wide lack of specifics doesn't offer any kind of distance between us and the film's world; there's no fantasy involved, as would be true of both of this film's sequels and most of its knock-offs. While Mad Max is usually described as a post-apocalyptic film, that's really not true: it's more of an intra-apocalyptic film, or maybe just ever so slightly pre-apocalyptic. What it depicts is a world with the framework of a functioning society that's starting to get very, very tired and is just about ready to collapse; and the lack of effort the screenwriters put into differentiating that world from our own serves to blur the distinction between Australia in 1979 and the fictional Australia of 1985 or so. The costumes (rather brilliant ones, designed by Clare Griffin), social mores, and car culture are all clearly different from the real world, but they're also close enough that Mad Max describes a culture in freefall that's distressingly easy to extrapolate from the real world. Now, I enjoy the whole genre of post-apocalyptic science fiction about as much as it's possible to do; I don't claim for Mad Max any kind of superiority because it avoids the usual tropes of its genre. I claim for it superiority because it functions as a more visceral cautionary tale than almost anything else in its genre. This isn't a metaphorical, "if we don't change our ways, we could end up in this Bizarro World" type of story. It's "look in the mirror, wouldn't you say we're already kind of there?"

In this apocalypsish world, an energy crisis has led to a general disintegration of the social safety net, and a new culture of lawlessness apparently based in the idea that, what the hell, if there's not enough oil left to save society, we might as well use what little we have left in the most spectacularly pointless ways. And thus the empty roads crisscrossing Australia are dominated by very showy car and motorcyle-based gangs, whose heavily customised vehicles are treated functionally as extensions of the self. With no real sense of morality in the world any longer, these gangs are mean, too. We learn that when we encounter the deranged Nightrider (Vince Gil) and his equally deranged ladyriend (Lulu Punkus) hooting and hollering and speeding around in a car stolen from the Main Patrol Force, the new police force that has been created more so the government can have a gang of its own to meet brutality with brutality, than because there's any real urge to serve and protect the citizenry. Nightrider's joyriding is cut short by one of the MPF's best officers, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), who forces the gangbanger into an explosive crash while offering crazed pursuit.

Nightrider's gang is led by a particularly brutal bastard called the Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who leads his boys and girls in a mournful celebration of destroying the town where they pick up what little bit remains of Nightrider, and chasing a young couple to the outskirts of town where they're raped and their car is ripped apart. One member of the gang, Johnny the Boy (Tim Burns) is too stoned to leave with his mates, and Max and his partner Goose (Steve Bisley) pick him up, only to find that the town is so terrified that not a single person - not even the couple - is willing to testify against him, and there's no option but to let him escape. This unfortunately means that the gang knows the cops names and faces, and before too long, they've extracted revenge on Goose. Max is ready to quit the force at this point, but his beleagured chief, "Fifi" Macaffe (Roger Ward) talks him into taking a vacation. And in a spectacularly unfortunate coincidence, Max, his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel), and their little boy Sprog (Brendan Heath) happen to vacation right in the same location that the gang has decamped to. They torment Jessie and Sprog, killing the boy and leaving the woman on death's door; and this, you might say, makes Max go a little bit mad.

What's not clear from a plot synopsis, but seems tremendously significant, is that there's no sense of Max's repeated encounters with the gang having some directed malice behind it. Their assault on the cops following Johnny the Boy's escape from justice is never informed by Nightrider's death; they start to attack Jessie wihtout knowing that she's Max's wife. The sense is less that a demented gang tries to revenge themselves on a cop, than it is of doom stalking the countryside: the Rockatanskys suffer because suffering is the best that you can hope for in a society as utterly rotten as this film's Australia-in-decline. And this is not really the suffering of innocents, either; Max's first action in the film is to casually murder a suspect and destroy costly police property in the process, and and no point from the opening shot of the Hall of Justice with the "U" about the fall off onwards does the film pretend that its cops are heroes just because they're the ones with badges. It's not a place that heroes can exist.

Actually, if the film has one clear-cut problem, it's that the lack of human decency it depicts is so pervasive that the movie itself starts to lose interest in its humans; nobody onscreen has much of a clearly defined personality or inner life, and the y stand out mostly due to how colorful they are. Now, between being an Australian film and taking placed in an exaggerated future, Mad Max has some extremely colorful characters indeed, but these are mostly the villains; Max and Jessie don't really register as anything but clockwork gears who turn because they're made to turn. Mad Max 2 picks up this shortcoming and turns it into one of its signature strengths; but the relative naturalism of Mad Max the first would be better served by having its protagonists exist as something more complex than The Amoral Cop and The Innocent Wife. The mythic scope that the franchise is noted for wasn't quite here yet, and mythic characters don't really fit. Meanwhile, Brian May's score punches up all the domestic scenes that don't quite gel with syrupy romantic motifs, underlining the emotional deficiencies even more.

But here I am, going on about the story and characters of Mad Max like they matter at all. Of course they don't. Unless we agree that the cars are characters at least as important as the humans, and the film makes that argument tremendously well: the scene where the young couple is attacked especially suggests that the vehicles in the film are so much a part of the humans driving them that they can't be distinguished. When the young woman screams in terror, it's placed into the soundtrack against shots of the car being smashes, as though the car itself was bellowing in pain; when Max and Goose find the crime scene, the human victims barely register, while pieces of the car are strewn about the road like bloody limbs after a massacre.

Anyway, the cars and motorcycles are the stars of the show, particularly Max's black-on-black Pursuit Special MFP Interceptor, presented as a combination of sex object and holy relic by Miller and cinematographer David Eggby's admiring camera. These vehicles are at the center of what were, in 1979, the most kinetic driving scenes ever filmed, mounting the camera inside and on the body of vehicles spinning and flipping and sailing through the air, edited by Cliff Hayes and Tony Paterson with a reckless speed that was mostly unknown to the action cinema of the '70s and earlier, but with a zealous attention to continuity that shames their decades of imitators. Mad Max captures frenzied, unpredictable movement with an impact and fluidity that simply did not exist prior to it. It remains tremendously exciting, though history has caught up with it in a way that it hasn't with Mad Max 2: while I insist, as I said up top, that few films have improved upon Mad Max, a larger number have managed to at least match it. For part of the film's genius was in demonstrating how far you could extend a small budget if you spent it on primarily cars and absolutely insane stunt drivers, and were willing to destroy the former, and like anything which made a huge pile of money, people were very eager to replicate it. The DNA of Mad Max is in every car chase to have been filmed since 1980.

But even if it's not a mind-blowingly fresh as it would have been when it was new, there's precious damn little to grouse about. This is an outstanding action movie, marred only slightly by its limitations as a story and not at all by its low budget. It is a legitimately radical movie, and I honestly suppose that I wouldn't even notice how much room it left for improvement if George Miller himself hadn't gone ahead and improved it two years later.


Reviews in this series
Mad Max (Miller, 1979)
Mad Max 2 AKA The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller and Ogilvie, 1985)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)

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ANIMAL BEHAVIOR

A review requested by Brian Malbon, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Two things at least can be confidently stated about Meet the Feebles: it's a movie that goes to great lengths to be the most fully-expressed version of itself possible; and Peter Jackson's career would have been indefinably more fascinating if he'd stayed in this vein instead of finding his way into enormously costly tentpole epics. The director's first feature was titled Bad Taste, and that's the quality that his third, Braindead/Dead Alive, exemplifies. But this 1989 sophomore effort is in a wholly different league from those. It's not enough to call it "bad taste" - Meet the Feebles goes so enthusiastically deep into offensive crudeness that it achieves a kind of freestanding surrealism above and beyond a scenario that's pretty damn surreal all on its own.

What we have here is basically a parody of The Muppet Show: a live TV variety show is being put on by a team of exaggerated animals, all carried off through puppetry and giant suits, and the personality quirks of the characters make it almost impossible to keep the show going on the way it's meant to. The parody is extremely specific in some ways: the gluttonous prima donna Heidi the Hippo (physically performed by Danny Mulheron - one of the Jackson's three co-writers - and voiced by Mark Hadlow) with a hopeless love for the show's producer is an obvious gloss on Miss Piggy. Mostly, though, the parody is more conceptual, taking the setting and goals of the Muppets and transforming them into an excitedly savage parody of celebrities, show business, and the awful things people do for fame and fortune. It's not devoid of humanism; unexpectedly, it ends up having a lot of patience and affection for its solitary mostly decent character, Robert the Hedgehog (Hadlow as well), an innocent lost in a sea of depravity who just wants to put on a show and make people happy. It's a bit odd that the film's most expressly Jim Henson-style character should end up treated so kindly by it, especially given the unhesitating violence that it's eager to mete out on the cast in particularly evocative effects work. That Peter Jackson, he's a big old Kiwi softie.

To be honest, the relative - relative - generosity with which Meet the Feebles handles Robert proves to be close to its saving grace. Without some kind of sympathetic anchor, it would be easy for the rest of the film to turn into a sour freak show (a lesson Jackson & co-writer/wife Fran Walsh would run with on Braindead, which is a full-on romcom once you scrape off the stage blood), nothing but a montage of pointlessly gross cheap shots at a much too easy target. Which is still a charge one could levy against the movie, and make it stick fairly easy. Frankly, "take this thing beloved by kids and make it obscene and nihilistic" is one of my least-favorite kinds of humor, since it comes almost exclusively from a place of smug faux-sophistication, though Meet the Feebles is exactly the kind of project to justify that "almost". Its bones might be a parody, but the film fully commits to its internal reality in a way that forestalls it being nothing but a piss-take of the Muppets. It is a story about pornographer rats and junkie frogs and sex-addict rabbits putting on a show that we're honestly meant to believe in, and everything about the way it has been shot and lit and scored, to say nothing of the impressive design and construction of the puppets and suits on what could not have been a very generous budget, is dedicated to that end. If there's a way to link the snot-nosed Peter Jackson of Meet the Feebles with the Oscar-winning Peter Jackson of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (and there are two - they both directed giant spider attacks using some virtually identical camera angles), it's that in both cases the director was able to keep a whole flotilla of craftspeople in line to make something unified and seamless set in a world that is completely made-up in every respect.

Purely in that respect, Meet the Feebles is miraculous accomplishment, all the more so since the film starts piling up baffling developments so quickly that keeping it tethered to its own reality seems like something of a paradox (it's also why I'm not bothering with a plot recap - it's an assemblage of several subplots stitched together with one-off gags, all barreling towards a deus ex machina ending). That's even without bringing up the film's enthusiastic embrace of gross-out humor of all stripes, some of which is purely disgusting (a gossip columnist fly - itself a fairly sophisticated multilingual gag, when we recall that "paparazzi" is ultimately derived from an Italian word for a buzzing insect - who graphically eats feces in one scene; and even that's a metaphor, if an appalling one), some of which is so startling random that it leaps beyond disgust into some Buñuelian register of incomprehensibility. For example, a seedy walrus promoter screwing a starlet cat is offensive on one level, but that's not the level the film presents it at; the sheer impossibility of the act comes first, then its relation to character, and only then the fact that the filmmakers are performing a travesty of children's entertainment. And that's a relatively sane moment; there are regurgitated talking fish already half-digested, lengthy Vietnam flashbacks, and inexplicable basement monsters ready to eat the corpses of animals accidental killed in making bondage porn to be had, and none of those are even half as explicable on a plot level as the film's frequent, anatomically implausible cross-species sex.

All of the shocking humor and the free-for-all plotting, combined with the inventive and frankly realistic filmmaking (no actual Muppet film ever used such a variety of close-ups, deep focus, and low angles in insisting on the physical reality of its characters), certainly leave Meet the Feebles as a unique experiment, and one whose insights into human behavior - people do awful things to be successful in show business and then hate themselves for it - aren't as important to it as its sense of curdled black humor. And yet it has insights nonetheless, so we can't write it off as just a gonzo provocation. It presents a pageant of terrible human activities with enough wit and creativity that I'm absolutely pleased it exists and that I've seen it; it also presents that pageant with an unsparing enough level of morbidity and cruelty that I'm pleased that I probably won't be seeing it again for a long time. But it sure is a special little gob of bile.

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IF YOU ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU'VE ALWAYS DONE

Talking about Predestination without confidently, fearlessly giving away plot points that shouldn't be given away is enormously hard. The best thing would be to go in totally cold, not even knowing what short story it's based on (having read the story - it is not at all obscure, though calling it "well-known" might be a stretch - I was unfortunately able to get ahead of the movie pretty early on when I recognised it, which was kind of disappointing), so if you trust me, please go find it; it's crawling across the U.S. right now, and also can be found VOD. If you only trust me a little, how about this to sweeten the pot: no matter what you end up thinking about it, it's worth seeing because in it, you will find Sarah Snook giving an immaculate, wholly-formed Star Is Born performance of the first order. Gimmickry, raging sentiment, immensely subtleties of facial expression and gesture, showy vocal work; whatever you thinking Great Acting is, she's got some of it for you. The role won the Australian Academy Award for Best Actress against some weighty contenders, and boy, it's not the half of what she deserved.

So I'll assume you either have seen the movie, or don't care (but no worries, I'll keep spoilers firmly limited to the first third). Predestination is, to begin with, a film by Australian filmmaking brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, whose last film, 2009's "what if?" vampire story Daybreakers, felt like a peerless example of a once-in-a-lifetime concept that simply didn't have enough done with it in the execution. No such hedging applies to Predestination, which has an equally hearty concept, but sees it through to its conclusion in a way the previous film didn't. That's partially because it's an adaptation of Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies-", one of those mid-century science fiction short stories that seems to exist primarily so that the author could show all his steps in solving a problem and disingenuously calling it a narrative; all the Spierigs had to do was minutely copy the story and just like that, full-realised narrative. And that is, in fact, mostly what they've done, even when it leaves their movie snagged on ideas that work as asides in a short story and feel like conspicuous dropped threads in a movie. The biggest change is to add a bit of a "stop the terrorist" thriller spine that extends the plot far enough beyond the "taa-daa, I've revealed everything" gesture that it feels like an actual story with actual stakes and themes. Which makes it, whatever else it is, one of the too-rare movies to have thoroughly improved upon its source material in the act of adaptation.

The plot, meanwhile, is designed with a few confusing fake-outs along the way (it opens with the kind of in medias res scenes that annoyingly telegraphs that we'll see bits of it again later, and then it will make sense; a gimmick that I have long grown tired of), but in its basic for, it goes like this: a man (Ethan Hawke, the lead in Daybreakers), who has just received a new face after being badly burned, has for uncertain reasons set himself up as a bartender in New York in the early 1970s. One night, another man comes in, and after some fencing that could be seen as basic bartender chitchat but feels like goading, this second man offers to tell the most amazing story that the bartender has ever heard, betting a fresh bottle of booze that it will knock his ass off. And then begins his story, of the time when he was a young woman named Jane (Snook), who grew up an orphan with a distinct sense of being Not Like Other Girls; at a certain point, to make ends meet while traveling into space, she attempts to get a job as one of the space-courtesans serving the astronauts growing lonely and horny on year-long missions (it's details like these where scrupulous fidelity trips up the movie a bit). This doesn't pan out, she gets involved with a man who leaves her pregnant, and the birth results in a shocking discovery: Jane is of biologically indeterminate gender, and to save her life after this turns out to have made giving birth a near-fatal ordeal, the doctors have elected to turn her into a man.

It's right about then that it all clicked for me: not that Jane was the man in the bar (that's made clear so early that it's unfair to call it a twist), but that Snook had been playing him all along. Prior to that, the odd vocal cadences and carriage that went into the performance seemed just like part of the pile-up of mysteries that Predestination was indulging in during its opening act; it literally didn't occur to me that it was a woman playing a man until the slow progression of make-up joining the two end points (the film boasts some stellare make-up effects) made it impossible to miss. Snook is that good at playing the chameleon, figuring how the personality of a depressed man in 1970 is different from a brittle, whip-smart woman in the early 1960s, and exploring those registers so fully that it seems like she's playing two entirely different characters; and yet, the evolution between the two of them feels totally natural and correct.

And that's just at the level of the central gimmick: at all points in her performance of both iterations of Jane/John, Snook's carefulness in letting the right emotions slip out at the right time is so flawless in such a sustained way that even if this was the most sedate, genre-free kind of story, her performance would be hardly any less exemplary. There's nothing about any moment she's onscreen that isn't mesmerising; even Hawke seems dumbfounded, happily handing her each and every scene they share together - and it goes into some place where they share some really weird scenes together - without compromising his own rather nuanced and tricky performance, but also without showboating.

The two leads are so faultless in their performances, and Snook is so commanding in every scene, whether as a worn-out man or a fierce woman, that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Predestination isn't actually a character study at heart; it's a carefully laid-out exercise in narrative mechanics, which asks multiple times, to varying degrees of explicitness, "are our actions the result of choice, or are they (wait for it) predestined? And if a certain choice is immoral, does the fact that it is predestined obviate our need to resist making it?" A bit dry and theoretical, sure; this does have its roots in '50s literary sci-fi, and dry theory never found a genre and a period that suited it better.

And, indeed, the dryness of it does tend to diminish the film's impact as more than a precisely-described puzzle with really urgent thematic questions that are more fun to think about then they are to apply to one's own life. The Spierigs do yeoman's work keeping the film's narrative clear and visually connected to itself, and the confidence of the filmmaking helps to keep things purring along any time the more logically-inclined viewers might start to feel the need to tug at the film's central impossibility. But it's very arid, in a lot of ways: impeccable but sterile, and only the fact that Snook and Hawke are in there, insisting on the warm, sloppy humanity of their characters allows Predestination to feel like a relatable story and not just an extraordinarily well-framed exercise.

But then, this is a movie, and movies do have actors, and maybe that was the point all along: take Heinlein's clinical chilliness, and make it into a rich human story by throwing some rich humans at it. I'm not sure it's quite enough to make Predestination an actual great piece of cinema, but it's absolutely enough to make it terrifically compelling viewing: a film with ideas and feelings that are inseparable from each other is nothing to discard lightly, even when it feels like it might be, at some level, a giant put-on.

8/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: WALKING ABOUT

In 1977, 27-year-old Robyn Davidson walked from Alice Springs, Australia, to the west coast of that country, a 2700-kilometer hike primarily through desert that took nine months. The trip was financed by National Geographic out of the United States, which published an article written by Davidson the year following her journey, and filmmakers have been trying to tell her story ever since (more precisely, ever since her 1980 memoir, Tracks). And now they have finally succeeded, with a film also called Tracks, starring Mia Wasikowska as Davidson - an actress whose lifespan is shorter than the story's time in Development Hell.

Was it worth the wait? Probably. The story is very worth the telling, though Tracks the movie is not, I suspect, the best telling it could have received. It doesn't have the same messiness that plagues the awfully similar American film Wild (which premiered at Telluride one year to the day later than Tracks's bow at the 2013 Venice Film Festival), but only because it lacks Wild's go-for-broke ambition. Tracks is a lovely little film - very literally lovely. Director John Curran and cinematographer Mandy Walker have framed the Outback with one heartstopping postcard-ready frame after another, emphasising the hard orange ground and the empty pale-blue sky as the totality of Robyn's world, gorgeous but also devoid of anything that allows human beings to interact with it. Of course, the Australian Outback is just one of those landscapes: if you can't make it look extravagantly beautiful in endless anamorphic widescreen vistas like the ones Tracks has, they take away your right to be a cinematographer, I'm pretty sure. But Australia native Walker has been here before (she shot Baz Luhrmann's Australia, for starters), and while she is primarily interested in making Tracks gorgeous, she's not only interested in that. Which counts for a hell of a lot.

The point being, Tracks looks as picturesquely desolate as you could ever hope for, which cuts both ways. On the one hand, it sure does look like the kind of landscape that you would not want to walk through, if you had any plans of not dying from thirst. On the other hand, it's the most obvious manifestation of a problem that kicks in the second that Robyn starts her walk and doesn't let up for a solid half of the film's overall running time: the film does a terrible job of making her walk seem all that arduous or dangerous. Obstacles come up, the kind that in real life could have easily resulted in Davidson's real-life death if she hadn't kept her wits about her and taken quick, decisive action. But in the movie, that's all they seem to be: obstacles. Not even very daunting ones, just kind of like petty annoyances that just have to be cleared out, sigh, why do these things happen to me in the middle of the most isolated corner of God's earth, populated by the nastiest, most deadly fauna ever bred in the pits of hell?

Only late in the film, well over 100 days into the journey, does the toll of the desert start to wear on the character Robyn, and that's not even because of the walking itself; it's because she finally got caught by the past she's been trying to keep ahead of (presented in a terribly shovey flashback, thankfully a device that the film mostly avoids), in the process of having to make a hard but necessary choice that would be all sorts of spoilers to bring it up. It means that the film ends far more effectively than it middles, but by then it's too little, too late.

Not that Tracks is a waste, or anything like that at all. It ends well; so does it begin well, not with Robyn's first steps into the wild, but a full half-hour detailing her lengthy, years-long planning, in which she gathered information and knowledge in the delicate art of handling camels, four of which follow her as pack animals during her otherwise isolated trek. We meet the usual collection of sharply-etched colorful locals from movies set in rural Australia, and the American photographer assigned by National Geographic to bother Robyn, Rick Smolan (Adam Driver), who the film teases as a romantic partner before real life obliges it to abandon that thread around midway through. And we get to bask in the best of Wasikowska's terrifically strong performance, when she is an immovable object steadily hewing to her plans in the face of every single person she meets besides Rick finding it odd and inexplicable, rather than doing so in the face of lots of desert. With the film steadily refusing to supply overt reasons for what she's doing, Waskikowska's Robyn has to seem strong and determined and prideful and resilient as qualities solely in reference to themselves, without coming off like some sort of robot acting according to the arbitrary whims of the scenario, and this she does marvelously well; without being permitted to open up a woman who is very clearly disinterested in letting us or any of the other characters psychoanalyze her, Wasikowska still manages to create a totally engaging and relatable protagonist.

Which is pretty much all that Tracks is interested in, ultimately. Marion Nelson's screenplay and Curran's directing alike are flatly presentational: "this happened, in roughly this way, and isn't that absolutely fascinating?" is pretty much the entirety of the film's editorial viewpoint. Nor does the filmmaking push any harder; some intriguingly aggressive close-ups and a few daring cuts to elide time are absolutely the only things challenging about it in any way. It has a story to tell and it tells it, with neither fuss nor much digging into the marrow of that story. There's something appealing to that kind of clarity and total lack of pretension, but it leaves us without all that much in the way of memorable cinema; if Tracks had anything in it to match Wasikowska's performance, we might have a real movie to pass down through the years, instead of something that's solid entertainment the one and probably only time ever you watch it.

7/10

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THIS IS A BITTER ADVENTURE, IF IT MUST END SO; AND NOT A MOUNTAIN OF GOLD CAN AMEND IT.

And thus does one of the most ill-considered experiments in franchise extension end precisely the way it was bound to end. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the grand finale of director Peter Jackson's three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1937 children's novel, feels like a weirdly-shaped movie fragment and not a movie at all. Though it's still perhaps the best individual film of the trilogy, if only by default. It starts out terribly, finds itself by the end of its first hour, starts to lose the thread during the wandering titular battle sequence that can only boast about its mass, and not its narrative momentum nor its visual excitement, and finds itself again in the last 15 minutes or so, when it refocuses itself on the hobbit whose status of protagonist has been more nominal than actual in two of three films now. So that's a lot of losing and finding and losing, but in the aggregate, the film ends up with more satisfying material, percentage-wise, than the achingly slow-paced The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which kicked things off (barely) in 2012, or the meth-addled flitting between ill-constructed subplots in 2013's The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

The film's biggest problem is the obvious one: not, precisely, the decision to break the meager little book into three long tentpole films, but the way that decision came up so late in the game. Initially, the idea was to make The Hobbit into a two-part adaptation, and the revised concept came after the script was written and principal photography was completed, and the material had been shaped into two individually contained features. Jackson and fellow writer-producers Fran Walsh and Philppa Boyens did a solid enough job of fashioning An Unexpected Journey into a fairly cohesive thing even after chopping its end off and bloating it up with extraneous material in the middle, but The Desolation of Smaug felt at once too rushed and too aimless in all its padding, and the cliffhanger ending tacked on after its somewhat functional third-act climax made it feel needlessly unfulfilled in a way that none of the team's earlier Tolkien films had. But the worst of it is only now coming to fruition: for if The Desolation of Smaug is kind of a self-contained object with the illusion of a final act, The Battle of the Five Armies is that film's actual final act, bafflingly inflated to 144 minutes and given no first and second acts of its own. It's literally about virtually nothing but the run-up to its battle and the battle itself, trying desperately to buttress that with enough character scenes to feel like it has some kind of self-contained arc.

The movie is never worse than in its hectic opening, which abruptly picks up with the massive dragon Smaug (voiced and motion captured by Benedict Cumberbatch) flying to destroy the lake town of Esgaroth, outside of the lonely mountain Erebor where he lived for many years in evil isolation, until some dwarves riled him up by dousing him in gold from giant molten statue. Fuck alive, the end of The Desolation of Smaug was asinine. So Smaug burns the hell out of Erebor, until he is eventually taken down with an enormous black arrow fired by the brave pessimist Bard (Luke Evans), who has been prepared for just such an occasion. I admire any film with the instinct to hit the ground running like this, but Smaug's attack is not at all suited to the function the film requires it to serve, and we're never really invited back into Jackson's Middle Earth so much as we are plopped there. As the film clumsily juggles characters and plot developments that follow as the Esgaroth populace re-orients itself and marches off to Erebor to demand their share of Smaug's treasure from newly-reinstated dwarf king Thorin (Richard Armitage), the blunt-force style of storytelling only really serves to call attention to how little reason we've been given to care about any of this even slightly. Near the end of the overall sequence, a dog wandering through the bottom of the frame looks straight into the camera in a manner that suggests it's trying to get out of the movie, please, and boy, did I ever feel for that dog.

The opening sequence is the most aimless, trivial, aggravating part of a film that swoops from grandeur and the best filmmaking of Jackson's career since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King all the way back to tin-eared dialogue and embarrassingly amateur shot set-ups and editing at a fairly regular clip. The Battle of the Five Armies is at one and the same time far too indulgent in stretching barely any narrative content out to some two and a quarter hours of movie, pre-credits, while hectically rushed in its depiction of what little bit is there. The subplot from the last movie that found the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellan, never less interesting in the role) trapped in a ruined haunted fortress is bluntly disposed of in about five minutes featuring weird cameos from Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, and Hugo Weaving; Stephen Fry's nefarious master of Esgaroth evaporates from this movie so quickly that I kept assuming he'd show up again.

Meanwhile, plenty of lengthy, soporific time is dedicated to politicking between elves and men, between dwarves and elves, and to maneuvering armies into place before they actually start to fighting. And a great deal too much time is turned over to the allegedly comic scallywag Alfrid (Ryan Gage), who gets himself into the most hellishly unentertaining scrapes and represents the single most ill-advised choice in this series, even worse than the dismal introduction of a romantic plot between dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner) and elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), the latter of whom makes it almost two-thirds into The Battle of the Five Armies before devolving into a generic action grrl damsel in distress. Some of this works better than other parts, and generally speaking, the tension the filmmakers creak out of the build-up is better than the actual fighting itself, which gets to be a bit numbing. And in the case of the protracted (so protracted) battle between Thorin and his CGI orc nemesis Azog (Manu Bennett), it's both numbing and boring, since the film's obvious hope that we'll regard this as a great clash between lifelong enemies is undercut by the crappy development of Thorin over the trilogy, and Armitage's limp performance thereof, and the complete absence of any development of Azog.

Regardless of the rest, nothing is better than when Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins is the focus. After being rudely sidelined in The Desolation of Smaug, the ostensible lead character is back to getting enough screentime to feel like he matters again, and he's used as well here as in any other point of the trilogy. The point of hobbits, really, is to domesticate high fantasy; this was their function in both of Tolkien's novels featuring them, and it's something that Jackson & company have never grasped better than they do here, using Freeman's comic fluster as a way of lightening and humanising (hobbitising?) the clashes of battles, the ponderously portentous dialogue, and Howard Shore's emphatically epic score. Freeman, I am more convinced than ever, is the most interesting performer in the entirety of the Jackson Middle Earth franchise, playing a character whose arc and emotions he has thought about far more than the writers ever did, and making his interpretation all about Bilbo, not about the enormity of the films themselves. It is a little performance, a silly and friendly performance, and a very true performance, and because of all this, it is the absolute, clear highlight of a sloppy movie.

Sloppy, but not without its compensations. Limited to basically just three locations - the ruined city outside the dwarf keep, the dwarf keep itself, and an enormous iron hellgate - the director's tendency towards gawking at his sets is tamped down a bit, and instead of feeling like a travelogue for a CGI-aided New Zealand, The Battle of the Five Armies actually starts to use the camera to shape the action and provide a sense of scale; it is the only one of the Hobbit movies to come even close to attaining the visual sweep of all three Lord of the Rings pictures. Even some of the least interesting moments, like the Thorin/Azog fight, are pepped up by the introduction of winter, adding a harsh edge of white to Andrew Lesnie's characteristically postcard-like cinematography. And for the first time in three films, there's no obviously weak CGI: some of the close-ups of Azog and other computer-made creatures probably could have done with a bit less bright, direct lighting, but there's not a single shot that matches the tacky video game aesthetic of An Unexpected Journey, especially.

In essence, it mostly works as a popcorn movie: a fatiguing popcorn movie whose action scenes are repetitive and occasionally too ridiculous to care about (once again, Orlando Bloom's forgettable Legolas shows up to turn things into Mario game), but which are presented with a passion and gravity that feels so, so much better than the meandering idiocy of the last two movies, and punctured by Freeman's wonderful low-key comedy when it all threatens to become top-heavy with pretension. It proves that the whole idea of a three-part Hobbit was a ruinous idea for more than it ever comes close to redeeming the first two, and it still feels like a paltry return to Middle Earth that would have been better left undone. But it has its moments. And next year, when the single-movie fan edits of the trilogy are complete, I don't mind supposing that some of the loveliest stuff will be in the 20 or so minutes that come out of this last movie.

6/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: THE BABADOOK (JENNIFER KENT, AUSTRALIA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/10 & 10/21
World premiere: 17 January, 2014, Sundance Film Festival

The business of being a fan of horror movies is a frustrating and thankless one, since they are so especially prone to being bad, but ever so often one comes along that you can stand up and cheer and point at and say "that one. That is what I have been waiting for". And this is what I have found to be the case with The Babadook, the first feature by writer-director Jennifer Kent, whose work I look forward to following with fawning enthusiasm over the next few years. It is, simply, one of the best scary movies in a decade, unflagging in its focus on presenting a completely unnerving spooky story about one of contemporary horror's most deliciously-expressed monsters. And for seasoning, it provides solid character drama, even more solid than it needs to be, on the relationship between a mother and young son who seem locked in some kind of mutually-defeating race to see who can be the more psychologically broken.

The mother is Amelia (Essie Davis), whose husband died in a car accident while taking her to the hospital to give birth to their first son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). This is a trauma from which Amelia hasn't come close to recovering, seven years on; among the tetchy and wrong-headed ways that she seeks to keep the memories of the accident buried down, we learn that she hasn't ever permitted Samuel to celebrate his birthday on his birthday, and it's clear that this is just the currently most overt way in which she defines herself in terms of loss and suffering. But she loves the boy, fiercely and protectively, and he does need a lot of protection: Samuel's apparent inability to distinguish properly between reality and fantasy has begun causing serious problems in school and in his ability to relate to other children.

It's a fucked situation all told, and like all fucked situations in the movies, it just wants one slight nudge to send it into nuclear overdrive. That nudge comes in the form of a pop-up book that neither Amelia nor Samuel recognises, but it was on his bookshelf, so it had to come from somewhere: it is titled "Mr. Babadook", and in its charcoaled, black-and-white-and-grey pages, Amelia reads to her son the slight tale of a funny man in a top hat and overcoat who comes knocking on your door like this: "ba-ba-ba, DOOK-DOOK-DOOK". And if you let him in… By the third page, Amelia's starting to figure out that this book, silly name and funny man and all, is the worst possible thing to read to a child, what with the long dagger-like fingers and the enormous teeth and the implication that Mr. Babadook wants to be let in so he can devour you body and soul, from the inside out. But books that came from nowhere in horror movies are like burnt popcorn: the stench lingers on for ages. And of course, it's not even a full day later before Samuel starts insisting that he has encountered Mr. Babadook, and Amelia starts spotting combinations of hats and overcoats that seem, for all the world, to be stalking her.

Generic boilerplate bullshit, but Kent plays this overfamiliar notes like a violin prodigy who's just been handed a Stradivarius. To begin with, there's the way that The Babadook actually succeeds at selling one of the hoariest and almost always least-convincing tricks in the horror movie handbook: it's quite impossible to tell, on the evidence presented onscreen, whether the Babadook exists, or if it's just one more of Samuel's overheated games, and this time Amelia's simply too worn out from the strain of pretending everything is fine to maintain her own grip on reality. The effect is much the same either way: we get to witness as a tenuous mother/son relationship descends into chaotic hell. It's fascinating how this plays out, and almost impossible to describe without spoiling it, but I think I can indicate without giving away the game that the film shifts its perspectives within that relationship, quietly but very abruptly, and its scene-by-scene understanding of what dangers Samuel is in versus what dangers Amelia is in, either from the Babadook or from anything else, is fluid enough that the whole movie becomes shifty and unpredictable in ways that I did not anticipate and thoroughly approve of. Though I am a little let down by how the final act starts to openly borrow from other, awfully famous horror films.

An intriguing and unsettling depiction of an unsustainable family situation is one thing, and it's what makes The Babadook all, like, respectable. But it's more the foundation for the movie's best triumph, which is how magnificently, wonderfully scary it is. I have been thinking over it for days, and I still can't say how Kent and her crew got so much out of such standard ingredients: certainly, the film's fevered, rattling sound mix helps, operating on a bone-vibrating level much in the same fashion as The Conjuring so effectively demonstrated last year. There's more to it than that, though, much more: something about The Babadook, and particularly the Babadook itself, ties into childhood fears about strange man-like beasts hiding in the shadows and under the bed, but it does so on a completely adult level. And that is the magic X-factor that Kent and her team have exploited to my complete enthusiasm, but also my absolute befuddlement. Certainly, whatever member of the design team was responsible for the pop-up book deserves some kind of newly-created Nobel Price in Bed-Wetting Terror; just the cover of the damn thing, with its shabby DIY feel and blood red color, was enough to have my quivering by the film's midway point.

For whatever reason, though, the film exists, and it's a marvel: intellectually horrifying for its merciless depiction of a parent and child feeding each other's psychological disintegration, viscerally horrifying for the Jungian nightmare beast creeping around on the edges. Though I have no clue how it all works, I can't wait to revisit it and re-revisit it throughout the years, trying to figure it out. This one is destined to become a genre classic.

9/10 (bumped from an original 8/10 in my CIFF guide)

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CHASING CARS

There's something especially annoying about a movie that veers between mostly good and very good for its entire running time, only to complete puke itself apart in the last few minutes. I present to you The Rover, writer-director David Michôd's sophomore feature after his impressive but in many ways frustratingly commonplace crime thriller Animal Kingdom. Two times isn't enough to make a tradition, but that's twice now that Michôd has almost succeeded in making a real genre classic, but just couldn't quite make it happen, and if it happens a third time, someone will have to give him a stern talking-to about the right things to do with one's obvious talent.

In the case of The Rover is that old chestnut, the Post-Apocalyptic Australian Movie About Desert Wanderers and Their Cars. It's not quite right to call the movie a knock-off of, or homage to Max Max and its series, so much as a distillation of themes, tropes, and iconography from across the gamut of post-apocalypse storytelling: the film Mad Max, the book The Road, the video game Fallout. Wisely, the film does not try to be about the fall (which it alludes to elliptically in an opening card, white on black: "Australia, ten years after the collapse"), nor the state of society after the fall; it takes for granted our ability to quickly tease out the general shape and scale of how much things have gone to shit, and uses that as the basis for a kind of character study. And I say "kind of" rather advisedly, for that's really the whole trick of the thing: it's actually more of an anti-character study, dedicating itself not to the explication of how one man's personality functions, but to the explication of how and why one man would cease to have a personality. It's a character study set in a world where character has become a liability, and our protagonist as succeeded in eradicating his.

That protagonist is very clearly and persistently never given a name: we can think of him as the rover of the title, though the end credits call him Eric, in a clear-cut case of bullshit. In any case, he's played fantastically by Guy Pearce, in the sort of performance that doesn't announce itself as "acting" in any conventional sense: Pearce doesn't do much with his line deliveries, since he only speaks in curt bursts of words; and he doesn't do much with his face, which is grimy, bearded, and mostly inflexible. It's his coiled-up body language that impresses: tension that speaks to a history of survival and violence, animalistic in the sense that human beings are animals, and the world the film depicts is one in which we're not much else.

At its best - and it really does spend a lot of time at its best, for something that left me feeling so itchily unsatisfied - The Rover plays like a fable of hopelessness, depicting a world where the state of mind that defines every character is the degree to which they remain optimistic that something like order and reason still exists. The rover is at one extreme end of that: he exists for nothing, seemingly, but the individual moment, having concluded that no future moment is likely to be so different from any other that it's worth bothering about any of them. He is a nihilist in an unusually exquisite and pure form: not your teenage nihilist, who just hates, and not your cynical nihilist, who uses it to secretly assume superiority. He is a nihilist because there's nothing not to be nihilistic about: he lives in a laweless, amoral world, nothing he does again will ever matter, and nobody will ever care. The film's plot occurs when three men - Henry (Scoot McNairy), Caleb (Tawanda Manyimo), and Archie (David Field) - steal his car from the little shithole in the middle of nowhere where he... lives? Is temporarily resting? It doesn't really matter. The point is, the three are in a frenzy, having recently fucked up a robbery that left Henry's brother dead, and have managed to crash their truck. The see a car just sitting there outside a little shack, and they steal it; the owner of that car manages to see it just too late to catch them, though he's able to get their truck started to follow them. Along the way, he finds that Henry's brother Rey (Robert Pattinson) isn't so dead as all that, and he grabs the young man of apparently limited mental capacity, first to help him track the fleeing robbers, then because he latches onto Rey as a companion in need of help and care. But that comes very late.

For the great bulk of its running time, The Rover appears to be a very simple, direct, feverishly focused depiction of a man who exists in such a rundown, stateless place of being that matters of motivation are simply pointless: his car was stolen, it is his car, he will retrieve his car. It's as brutal, bleak and nasty as you could please, while also being one of the most intelligent, unromantic, serious attempts to grapple with what actual post-collapse life might function like that I can call to mind. It suggests, rather cruelly, that we're on track to our own meaningless non-society, and demands that we ponder for at least the film's running time what it might feel like to live that way, to actually have no hope and no hope of hope. Until the end. I won't give away what happens; there's a protracted ending sequence that I didn't much care for, but was willing to concede that endings are hard, and sometimes the thing that seems right is to give the viewer the raucous payoff that the rest of the film has so rigidly avoided, even if it wasn't all that right. But the last, literally, 30 or 60 seconds of the film, are just fucking dumb - we find out that the rover had a motivation all along in a twist that completely shifts everything that has played out for the entire movie, but not to such interesting effect that it was worth having lied about it the whole time. I still like the movie in my head better, but the movie explained by the twist would be just fine, if it had explained itself early enough to inform the experience of watching the movie. But coming as it does, it's just a tedious "fuck you" - not even a fun "fuck you", the kind of "fuck you" that reinforces the film's nihilistic themes. It's a mean "fuck you" that exists only because, what the hell, twists are a thing you can end movies with. So why not end 'em that way.

And the twist having so completely broken the movie's spell, it becomes a lot easier to start carping on all the things that movie had been doing wrong the whole time, the scenes that don't play, the concepts that are bonkers in the wrong way, the flares-ups of melodrama and trite theme-explaining that were tolerable when the thing was a savage beast of driving momentum, and end up feeling like a gifted but undisciplined writing student doing a really swell Cormac McCarthy impersonation without McCarthy's cosmic gravity.

Now, parts of the movie still work no matter what: Pearce is brilliant, and Pattinson is at his career-best, playing a man who looks, at first, like an undistinguished Faulknerian man-child before he slowly reveals himself to be a dreamer, a moral thinker, an innocent who would have fit better in the pre-collapse world he apparently has some unfocused nostalgia for. Given all the ways the performance could have been annoying, it's pretty great that Pattinson turns his character's puppy-like craving for someone to guide him into an interesting, moving performance. The thing is also blessed by some breathtaking cinematography by Natasha Braier, which is by no stretch of the imagination "attractive", but presents the sand-blasted Outback in which the film takes place with amazing potency, stressing the vacantness, the far horizon, and the monochromatic dustiness. It's an amazing vision of the end of the world.

Basically, The Rover is a film I would have slightly adored if it had ended 10 minutes earlier, liked if it had ended one minute earlier and can't quite tolerate the way it is. Does that make it a failure? I don't know that I've quite worked that one out yet. It makes it hellaciously frustrating, that's for goddamn sure, and not the kind of frustrating that still ends up feeling rewarding, somehow.

6/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: SEQUELS TO MOVIES THAT ACTUALLY DESERVE SEQUELS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: we have two sequels coming out in one weekend to films that had no right to be as great as they were, and probably too great to work a second time; but it's still easy to hope for the very best from 22 Jump Street and How to Train Your Dragon 2. Typically, sequels to actually surprisingly great movies don't happen, but they exist, and they typically only give one hope for cautious optimism, at best.

Is it possible for a film to be legitimately good even if it's a completely awful sequel? I'm not really asking rhetorically: it's an interesting enough thought experiment that becomes completely, desperately important in the case of Baby: Pig in the City a 1998 sequel that has no small amount of merit, especially in the areas of production and costume design, but can certainly not claim for itself that it's in any meaningful way a successful or even appropriate follow-up to 1995's Babe, one of the great children's movies of all time. Pig in the City isn't just not one of the greatest children's movies of all time; I find myself wondering if any but the most perverse would be comfortable to call it a children's movie at all, instead of a movie that uses the texture and logic of a children's movie in service of something very different.

For Pig in the City is outlandishly brutal and dark. Not in that "kids can withstand darker stuff than you trust them with" sense whereby something like Bambi is not, in fact, endlessly traumatising and wicked. It's dark in the sense of being fucking dark. There's a scene towards the middle where the titular sheep-pig, who is voiced by Elizabeth Daily in this go-round (she's much more subdued and nervous than Christine Cavanaugh in the first film, though that may be the script), has just rescued a dog from drowning and now stands before a crowed of awestruck, admiring animals looking to him as something of a Christlike savior and leader; among those supplicating him for help include a dizzy pink-dyed poodle (Russi Taylor), suggesting an even more tragic and psychologically broken Blanche DuBois, having suffered through even more unendurable unspoken abuses in the past. And that's not even as horrifying as the litany of horror stories which are blown by so quickly that we only have time to register the ghastliness of it. "My human tied me in a bag and threw me in the river" says one puppy with the mindless optimism of, well, a puppy; "I'm hungry, my tummy hurts" drones a tiny kitten with a squeaky focus that suggests that this kitten has no familiarity with any other emotion than hunger.

We're a long, long way from even the blithe family-friendly morbidity of the first film in moments like that, and while even Pig in the City doesn't have the stones to spend more than a few seconds on a kitten contemplating its own death, its most optimistic moments tend to occupy about the same level as the first Babe's most hauntingly bleak. None of which makes it a bad film, I don't think, but all of which makes it a profoundly uncomfortable follow-up to the original, a sweet-minded fable in the most literal sense. And this brings me back to my first question: can we honestly say that Pig in the City is actually a good film if it goes so far out of its way to ignore the spirit of its forebear? Ordinarily, the intellectually fair thing is never to compare a movie to any other movie, but sequels tend to all but demand that we do so: they acknowledge, by the fact of their existence, that we're going to bring in some affection for the last film if we're going to commit the time and energy to thew new one, and we are going to view it through that very particular lens. Pig in the City, more than any other sequel I can call to mind, has the feeling of a deliberate renunciation and rejection of this notion. It's as clear a case as you'll find of a filmmaker essentially saying, "you want this? Tough, because I want this."

The filmmaker being George Miller, who co-produced and co-wrote the first Babe, but did not direct. Well, he directed the living shit out of this one - it's not exactly the film that you'd assume the director of the Mad Max pictures would make when tasked with making a kiddie sequel, but it's clearly from the mind of a creator who clearly, almost aggressively, does not give a shit about kids. Pig in the City is a movie made by someone with lots of ideas for a hypnotic, design-driven bad dream about what can happen when an innocent is surrounded by cruelty, cynicism, and selfishness with no support net; it seems that it ends up being broadly "family-friendly" only by accident, never by design.

Now, all that being the case, there's still a tremendous lot about Pig in the City that works a great deal. Maybe not it's weird, disjointed story - short version, Babe accidentally wounds Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell), so Mrs. Hoggett (Magda Szubanski) takes the pig to a fair to raise some money for presenting the famed sheep pig to admiring crowds; they get waylaid at the airport in the sprawling everycity of Metropolis, and from there Babe gets tangled up with a strange hotel of animal lost souls, while Mrs. Hoggett ends up in prison while hunting for Babe - full of scenes that really don't seem to connect to anything else, and serve just to throw the terrified pig into one new inexplicable situation after another. But Miller self-evidently isn't here for the story, but for the heady atmosphere: Roger Ford's production design, Colin Gibson's art direction, and Kerrie Brown's set decoration are the focus here, creating a world that's crammed with a mixture of every conceivable era and style of city design (Metropolis boasts landmarks from New York, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Sydney, Chicago, and London, and that's just the super-obvious ones), and has the weird angles and lines of a Tim Burton film without the Gothic flair that makes Burton's films sometimes a bit twee. Pig in the City is many things before it is twee, no small feat for a movie in which a talking pig encounters talking chimpanzees working for an inscrutable clown played by Mickey Rooney.

Between those strange, illogical sets and Andrew Lesnie's dusty black photography thereof (there are scenes set in the daytime but they don't land with nearly as much impact), Pig in the City has quite a fanciful, dreamy sensibility, a fairly astonishing depiction of the Urban Night that's light years from the pastoral charms of the original, but still has a twisted, strange appeal of its own. It is, maybe, the appeal of an adult recalling childhood nightmares with a kind of detached, nostalgic fondness; at any rate, the film moves like a kids' story and has the ellipses and contrived plot shifts of a kids' story, even as it has a stylised darkness that, however it might appeal to the right kind of kid, doesn't really care much if it gets to them.

The whole thing is, really, quite ingenious. The film is about the alien, disorienting feeling of being in the wrong place and not sure how to get away from it; there's not much of a better way to dramatise that with emphatic, visceral immediacy than to take a sweet, simple hero and plunge him into a chaotic world of Langian influences and psychologically broken animals, a far cry from the loving stock characters of Babe. And insofar as much of childhood is feeling disoriented, stuck in an adult world that doesn't make sense and can't be escaped, the film does work as a metaphor for children. Or maybe about children, I don't know. I was well into my 20s when I saw the film the first time, and it didn't strike me as the kind of thing I'd have enjoyed much when I was 8.

The point is, Miller has basically used Pig in the City as a laboratory to experiment with depicting a kind of mad environment of mad characters, for whomever wants it. I might be a little sad that he chose to conduct this experiment with figures I adore as much as I do Babe and company; but I will not pretend that I'm not absolutely delighted that the experiment was done, or that I don't regard Pig in the City as one of the more peculiar and idosyncratic successes of late '90s cinema. It's surely overselling it something fierce to call it the best film of the year that produced The Thin Red Line and saw the U.S. release of Taste of Cherry, as the late Gene Siskel famously did shortly before his death, but I'd far rather see it involved in that conversation than allow it to be swept away by the "this is dark and horrible and a violation of the first movie" response that, even after a decade and a half, it hasn't been entirely able to overcome.

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