A HELL OF A TOWN

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

Obviously, 1981's Escape from New York is a transitional film in the career of director John Carpenter: his fifth feature (seventh if we include his television movies) is the one that finds him starting to really play with the resources of the Hollywood studios for the first time, and along with the immediately subsequent The Thing, it finds him somewhere in between the wiry little production of a Halloween and the unattractively clumsy commercialism of Christine. Less obviously, it's also, arguably, the film that first saw Carpenter lose a little of his shine as a bright young genius. Of the preceding six feature-length projects on his resume, all of them were largely different, though some of them (epecially Halloween, Someone's Watching Me! and The Fog) are pulling from the same toolkit. Escape from New York, however, is the first film in his career that feels in some ways redundant. I could easily say - and do so without hesitation - that The Fog is a movie from the director of Halloween that isn't as good, but I wouldn't go so far as to argue that The Fog therefore is a disappointing waste of the Halloween director's time; they're too far apart from each other. Whereas Escape from New York is clearly a film from the director of Assault on Precinct 13 that is not quite as good - the gap there is smaller than the gap between Halloween and The Fog - and does enough of the same things in broadly the same way (especially the Carpenter-penned music, which is virtually a direct lift from the earlier film) that it's really hard not to think of it as a step down.

Not, mind you, a particularly severe step down: if Escape from New York isn't quite in the top tier of Carpenter films, it is quite firmly ensconced near the top of the second tier. Knowing that the director and his co-writer Nick Castle (whose handful of writing credits are well and good, but surely we all know him best as the man behind the mask as Michael in Halloween) were consciously channeling Death Wish makes it clear just how great Escape from New York really is: the Carpenter film takes the 1974 revenge flick's vague notion of the city as a concrete and glass and steel jungle and goes to such infinitely richer places with it that only a madman would think to compare the two.

The film begins a little bit clunkily: onscreen text informs us that by 1988, crime had risen by 400 percent, and then a narrator (an uncredited Jamie Lee Curtis, in her last performance under Carpenter's direction) recites the exact same information, before going on to tell us the rest of the backstory without text. It's a weird little inelegant stumble right at the start, but it's quickly forgotten as we're told that Manhattan is now a walled-off prison camp where all the criminals of the United States get dumped to form their own hideous society of post-apocalyptic lawlessness. Then we skip ahead to 1997, for one brutal night on this hell island. Like most of Carpenter's best films, Escape from New York has a direct, thoroughly stripped-down narrative: the President of the United States (Donald Pleasance) has had his plane hijacked on the eve of a major peace summit, and his escape left him stranded on Manhattan, where he has been taken hostage by the Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes), the most powerful gang leader on the island. The terms of his release: all of New York's criminals must be allowed onto the mainland. The government wanting to avoid this very badly, and wanting to avoid a dead president equally as much, concludes that they need to fight fire with fire: to fight the criminals, they send ex-special forces soldier and current badass bank robber "Snake" Plissken (Kurt Russell) to the island, with an injection that will explode his body from within if he doesn't return with the president in roughly 22 hours. Thus begins a voyage through the ugly corners of Manhattan to meet the curious inhabitants thereof, most importantly Snake's guide Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), the survivalist Brain (Harry Dean Stanton), and his girlfriend Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau).

Across the spectrum of reactions to this film, no matter how much one adores its world building and sense of rotted style, or finds it unfocused, plotless nonsense - and both responses are equally defensible - one thing that I think can unite all opinions is that Snake, and Russell's performance of him, are the best thing in Escape from New York. We have here a marriage of character, actor, and writer/director of the first order - while I neither think that Snake is the best character in a Carpenter film, nor the best performance Russell gave for the director, it can easily and correctly be argued that we have here the most perfect, iconic movie hero in either man's career. Snake is part of a tradition of morally grey antiheroes working for good from selfish reasons, supporting the Powers That Be right a clear shudder of self-disgust at being involved in glad-handing bureaucracy - we can all rattle off examples of the form, I am sure, but not more than a small handful who surpass Snake's sheer presence and personality. In all of the annals of bitterly nihilistic tough guys, there might not be a moment that is so perfect, in my estimation, as the final-scene line "I'm too tired, maybe later" that Snake responds sourly to a man asking if Snake planned to kill him; the chilliness and indifference and the underlying hopelessness that Russell feeds into that line are astonishing. For the key to Snake isn't that he hates things; it's that he is constantly disappointed in things turning out exactly as badly as he anticipates. It is this that makes him so much more interesting and piercing than just another all-capable hunk of meat in just another action movie.

The film's episodic structure gives the film a vibe that's surprisingly close to The Odyssey (Carpenter and Castle were apparently aiming for a road movie structure, but what is The Odyssey if not the wellspring for all subsequent travelogues in Western narrative art?), and I love it for that, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that it doesn't leave the film facing in no particular direction for much of its running time. And this is simply not the best strength of the director's filmography: starting with Assault on Precinct 13, all of his finest movies, no matter what the genre, have a dreadful intensity of unflagging momentum, and even with its 22-hour ticking clock, Escape from New York very often would rather sit back - for far too long, in the case of the first 20 minutes or so, which move far too methodically for an action movie with a spare narrative hook - and enjoy the elaborate run-down beauty of the locations (Joe Alves served as production designer, but much of the movie is the unadorned foulness of St. Louis, MO and East St. Louis, IL as they existed at that time), shot in exceptionally noir-like shadows by Dean Cundey that fulfill the genre's great use of dark corners in blighted cities as shadowy pools from which the characters emerge, except when they don't, and that clotted blackness provides more of the moral heft of the film than the script would ever dare do explicitly.

And, above all, to let us watch Snake being Snake; the other characters are all colorful exaggerations, especially the Duke, lustfully played by Hayes and granted with the film's clear-cut best design choice - chandeliers on his car! - but, to pick a different literary analogue, they're all the denizens of Wonderland compared to Snake's Alice. We marvel at their ungainly weirdness, but we identify with and respond to his silently nuanced behavior around them, the one great human figure in what amounts to a fantasy otherwise.

My memory of the film is always of the characters, the general aura of the design, and the omnipresent feeling of gloom; I'm always a little bit surprised to recall that this is basically an action film, and this brings me back to that Assault on Precinct 13 comparison. Simply put, I think that Escape from New York spends much more time on its action than the action justifies; it's not as tightly blocked out as it is in that film, where the precise manipulation of limited space and our sense of time passing result in some absolutely tremendous setpieces. There's not a single setpiece in Escape from New York that I remember with any particular clarity for very long after watching it; the combined effort of the last half hour, as the movie starts to pick up a clear sense of momentum, certainly makes an impression, but nothing within that half-hour. The fight between Snake and the Duke's big man mountain Slag (Ox Baker), for example: it's a perfectly solid bit of fighting, with a suitably brutal punchline, but less than a day after watching it, I can't name any particular camera angles or cuts or grace notes of choreography that really "pop" in the scene, like I can for the showpiece fistfight in Carpenter's They Live. And it's been more than a half decade since I saw that film last.

Even with that being the case, that the film is a bit shaky in its action, there's still so much about it that I wouldn't trade for anything, even beyond Russell's one-of-a-kind antihero; this film's vision of a rundown future is absolutely terrific, for one thing, as much a parody of the trends in urban thrillers in the years preceding it as anything else, and coming out the same year as Mad Max 2 and one before Blade Runner, it avoids the incredibly common trap of simply copying one or the other of those movies. Its urban squalor looks impressively like 1981 extrapolated forward with technology used to compensate for that squalor rather than ironically counterpointing it, and if only because it came out so early in the '80s post-apocalypse cycle, Escape from New York manages to be one of the most unique of all the entries in that frequently derivative genre. Having maybe the best protagonist in all of the genre's history simply seals the deal that, imperfect as it can be, this is still something special.

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IT'S ABOUT TIME

A third review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing yet again to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Personal anecdotes aren't criticism, of course, but in this case the anecdote shall lead us to criticism, I promise. The thing is, when I was a wee cinephile, I was quite addicted to George Pal's 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. It was almost certainly the most violent and gory movie I had encountered at that point: one of the green-skinned subterranean humanoid monsters, the Morlocks, gushed blood out of its mouth when it died! Another one was shown onscreen decaying over the course of years rushed through in time-lapse, in extremely vivid detail! Its eye popped out! Basically, The Time Machine completely fucked me up, in the way that seven-year-olds crave being fucked up. I hadn't watched the film in fully two decades before seeing it for this review, but I could accurately remember some scenes right down to the editing. What I did not remember is that the sequence that so powerfully affected me is a mere blip in the overall movie; it's more than an hour into its 103 minutes before we even hear about the Morlocks, let alone see them, and they're not an active threat for more than 15 minutes or so.

Now the memoir turns back into a review, for what my experience teaches us is that you can't beat a great monster. Pal, an animator turned producer turned producer/director, knew from making a big impression with some good state of the art spectacle, and this time he went right off the edge of the map. Forget the staggering impact the film had on my 7-year-old self; as a fully-functioning thirtysomething, I'm still pretty well blown away by the film's violence. This is basically a silly matinee picture and it looks like it: one doesn't expect to run into gore effects that are as explicit as Hollywood in 1960 would have dared to try to sneak past the censors. Especially on MGM's dime, of all studios. It's legitimately shocking, even a half of a century after the specific effects that The Time Machine shows off have long since been surpassed. And it certainly tends to skew one's impression of what the film is and where its strengths lie, because the other thing I really really didn't remember is that the Morlock sequences are easily the worst part of the movie, despite all of Pal's bravura.

The movie starts on 5 January, 1900, which is dumb as hell, because it immediately flashes back to New Year's Eve just six days earlier, on the cusp of a new century. Here we find the greatly dissatisfied H. George Wells (Rod Taylor), a London inventor who thinks that humanity is the absolute goddamn worst. To get away from the miserable state of civilisation, George has perfected a time machine, or so he proclaims to his friends Philip Hillyer (Sebastian Cabot), Anthony Bridewell (Tom Helmore), Walter Kemp (Whit Bissell), and David Filby (Alan Young), the last of whom is the only one to even pretend that George hasn't gone completely around the bend. George doesn't care much about his friends' mockery, though; he's already built his machine, which allows him to travel any direction chronologically while staying in one place relative to the Earth's surface, and he hopes to use it to leave the ugly, amoral England of the Boer War to find a time when humanity has finally evolved beyond violence. His attempts dash all the optimism right out of him: he first lands in 1917, where he meets Filby's adult son James (still Young), and learns that his friend has dies in the Great War. George's second jump is even less successful: he stumbles right into an air raid during the Blitz of 1940. His luck takes an even worse turn when his third try lands him in 1966, just minutes before a nuclear strike that triggers a volcanic explosion. George has just enough time to enter his time bubble before he and his machine are covered with lava, and he has no choice but to move forward until the natural process of erosion reveals the outside world again.

That takes him all the way to 12 October, 802,701. Here, he finds a race of humans calling themselves the Eloi, according to Weena (Yvette Mimieux), a young woman who speaks pretty terrific English and looks pretty conventionally attractive for somebody with hundreds of thousands of cultural and physical evolution under her belt. George is eager to learn more about this apparently utopian future, but his inquiries reveal the Eloi to be massively incurious and almost dysfunctionally idiotic. It's the Morlocks, George starts to determine, who are the actual brains of this future society: they and the Eloi are two disparate branches of post-homo sapiens evolution, and the hideous underground dwellers are keeping the moronic surface dwellers as food stock. At any rate, they're smart enough to have stolen the time machine, and that means that George has to fight them off, all by himself, since the cow-like Eloi aren't going to put up any kind of resistance.

David Duncan's script leaves the plot of Wells's novel mostly in place, while denuding it of much of its detail and depth, but to be honest, I can't say that it's noticed. The movie is too busy being splendid to look at, frequently in ways that offer the illusion that it's brainier that it is, which was pretty much Pal's entire career as a producer of feature films. The biggest part of it is the setting: by virtue of setting its roots in Victorian London, The Time Machine attains an instantaneous level of seriousness, classiness, and literary prestige, and something about it just feels more weighty than if George was starting his forward journey from 1959 (if nothing else, the sequence in 1966, probably the most nuanced part of the movie - the way it makes a mere 6 years in the future seem dangerously alien is the sharpest piece of commentary Duncan and Pal line up - requires a Victorian time traveler to make any sense at all). And the movie does an absolutely extraordinary job setting up the reality of Victorian London right from the earliest moments, where a beautiful street set and some exquisite matte paintings establish the physical nature of the place as something that feels real but mediated, like it's a moving, living version of an aged photograph.

Then again, the effects work throughout the film is truly special (the film won an especially well-earned Oscar for them), starting with that matte and moving on to its groundbreaking use of time-lapse photography to visually depict time travel. It's too straightforward and unfaked for it not to have aged well, which makes this one of the only effects-driven films I can name that looks every inch as good after the passage of decades as it must have done when it was new (though the fact that its signature technique has become a mainstay of advertising and music videos means that it has lost absolutely all of its novelty), but eye candy isn't what matters. It's the way that the effects, as well as the design - particularly the design of the time machine itself, something like a sled with a giant spinning dish on the back of it that looks exactly like something a middle-class Victorian bachelor would assemble in his back yard as a hobby - casually establish the film's plausible reality in a way that isn't particular dazzling or spectacular: for the most part, the effects are just kind of there, hanging around over Taylor's shoulder, in the background. The showy parts are at least a little clever, not just dazzling: the film's justly celebrated use of a storefront mannequin and the change in fashions that occur over 40 years is a bravura moment, but also one that serves very specific story moments.

Generally, the steadiness and sensibility of the opening of the film - everything up to the lava explosion, itself a pretty marvelous effects sequence - is so confident and so very unlike the normal stylistic gyrations of sci-fi in that period that it's honestly disappointing to me when it stops, and the A-plot starts. The fable of the Eloi and the Morlocks simply isn't as successful visually: imagining a post-apocalyptic future was apparently harder than recreating Victorian England, or maybe the budget ran out, but really, everything in 802,701 looks a bit threadbare. I am powerfully reminded of the most ambitious episodes of Star Trek, to be specific, and it doesn't help that the story feels so much like something that could have showed up there - nor, for that matter, that Mimieux's performance is so shallow and blandly flirtatious, though in her defense, that's exactly what the role asks for.

Parts of it work, beyond a shadow of a doubt: the Eloi boneyard is good and spooky, and there are moments in which the Morlocks, standing in the shadows, can be made out only as a pair of glowing eyes that have a great tension and dreadfulness about them (and not just because the slightly shabby make-up can't be seen). It's just a bit shlocky in the execution, and given that The Time Machine is at best an example of really savvy, gifted execution of impressive sci-fi visuals, this is the worst possible sort of weakness to infect it at any point. Still, even in its weakest moments, the film benefits from being graded on a curve: in its production design, its historical orientation, and the scale of its production, this runs rings around nearly any other sci-fi film in its generational cohort. Eight years down the line, and this would look utterly primitive, but on its own merits, it's damned impressive stuff, and there's just enough esoteric concepts dancing through the screenplay to make it feel more intellectual than the usual sci-fi action-adventure. Between the handsome production and the nerdy writing, this offers an unusually smart, sophisticated aura for what amounts to an expensive B-movie. There's better sci-fi, undoubtedly, but not in 1960, particularly not with the sort of glossy studio polish that makes this such a treat to watch.

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THE FUTURE OF ANIMATION

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

I should like it very much if it were a bit easier to find any English-language resources on the reception granted to the 1988 anime feature Akira during its initial release in Japan. It was an enormous hit with quite a wide reach of influence, this is well-known and easily deduced from the sheer number of subsequent films that are in some manner Akira-esque. But I wonder if it was in any way seen as actually groundbreaking in its native country. Because holy shit, was it ever seen that way in the West. On its brief but staggeringly important release in the United States in 1989, it was hailed as one of the most important flashpoints in the history of animation: this was the first time that the great majority of English-language critics and scholars ever had to go head-to-head with the idea of an animated film with complex world-building, philosophical and narrative density, and especially its unstinting violence, gorily depicting a world in which many awful things happened to the deserving and undeserving alike, abruptly and brutally. An animated film for adults, in short.

Why Akira? Why 1989? Hell if I know. Anime had been addressing ever kind of audience in Japan for years, mostly without making serious inroads to the English-speaking world, though in 1985, an enormously compromised edit of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind had made at least a small impression. While that's not an adults-only proposition like Akira, it's clearly not a "kids' film" in any usual sense of that phrase. Meanwhile, the well-publicised career of Ralph Bakshi had been raising the profile of grown-up animation for close to two decades by that point. And yet Akira got all the credit. Possibly because of the classy implications of importing a movie from a foreign country. Probably because Akira is, even without being a landmark, a hell of an accomplished movie, a triumph for director Otomo Katsuhiro, adapting his own manga. It's one of the most lavish of all anime features in its vast, highly detailed backgrounds and even more in its unusually high frame rate - not even Studio Ghibli, anime's most reliable international superstar in the quarter century since Akira hit big, routinely animates on ones (that is, one drawing to one frame of exposed film; on twos, or one drawing to every two frames, is infinitely more common and even that is mostly limited to "expensive" animation) outside of selected showpiece sequences, but Akira's entire running time is on ones, as far as I can determine. That's as niggling and technical as it's possible for praise to get, but there's no pretending it doesn't matter - even if you don't know what the fuck "on ones" means, or even how animation is actually done, the unconventional fluidity of Akira is blatant, and it makes richer, more realistic, and more absorbing than it's possible to describe in words.

The vividness of the animation helps breathe an extraordinary amount of life into the film's design, which is absolutely to the good of all: on top of having beautifully organic animation, Akira has a perfect, if not totally unprecedented world to set its characters in, a post-war future in which the nukes of World War III (which the film cheekily identifies as first falling on 16 July, 1988, the date of its own premiere) have gutted the city now called Neo-Tokyo and forced it to rebuild in a desperate combination of hardscrabble survivalism and kinetic future tech. The result is a slippery world to pin down, in which bombed-out urban wastelands rub elbows with sleek futuristic motorcycles and bright lights. It would be a lie to say that nobody had seen anything like this before - it's one of the countless films to borrow huge chunks of its design mentality from Blade Runner - but it has the goodness to be a thoroughly successful version of itself.

Let us descend now to the rough streets of Neo-Tokyo, and the point where I'll stop having such breathlessly enthusiastic things to say about Akira. Whatever government exists is busying itself with God knows what secrets, playing mad scientist with the lives of the citizenry. Two such citizens are teenagers Kaneda (Iwata Mitsuo) and Tetsuo (Sasaki Nozomu), best friends since they grew up in a state children's home, and currently the leaders of a biker gang, the Capsules. One evening, while having what appears to be an utterly normal bloody battle with their arch-rival gang, the Clowns, the Capsules cross paths with a full-on shadow government crisis, as the police attempt to detain the strange little person Takashi (Nakamura Tatsuhiko), with the body of a child, the face of an ancient old man, and skin the color of antifreeze. The run-in with this being goes badly for Tetsuo, who is taken by the police and brought to the attention of Onishi (Suzuki Mizuho), the scientist in charge of whatever experimentation caused Takashi to end up the way he did, and Colonel Shikishima (Ishida Taro), the military liaison to Onishi's project who has rather snarling misgivings about the whole thing.

The plot gets convoluted beyond the point that a summary is possible, but suffice it to say that Kaneda ends up in the orbit of rebels Ryu (Genda Tesho) and Kei (Koyama Mami) during his hunt to figure out what's happening to Tetsuo, though he's more attracted by Kei's appearance than her ideology. Tetsuo is busily trying not to get fucked up by Onishi's nightmare tests, in which he is stymied by the weird behavior of three of his predecessors in the program: Takashi, as well as Kiyoko (Ito Fukue) and Masaru (Kamifuji Kazuhiro), who share his eerie physical mutations. He's already failed, unfortunately: by the time he comes to, he's already been subjected to the experiments that will awaken his potent latent psychic abilities - as potent as the mysterious "Akira", which obviously means nothing at all good even before who know who the hell Akira might be - which quickly overwhelm his nervous system and later his entire body. Eventually, he has become so much more, and so much freakishly different than a human being, that everybody running towards him from different directions needs to work together to prevent him from turning into something powerful enough to destroy the city, or the world, or who knows how much.

This is, in its essentials, and using exclusively American cinematic touchstones, a '50s juvenile delinquency movie crossed with a '70s paranoia thriller that very suddenly transitions into a gory remake of the last act of 2001: A Space Odyssey for its final half-hour. It would take an unabashed liar to pretend that this combination of ingredients isn't fascinating as hell, and worth seeing for its profound idiosyncracies even if it didn't work properly as a complete, cohesive movie. And I must now confess that to me, it in fact doesn't thus work. It's a very jam-packed movie, and there comes a point where the accumulation of narrative threads makes it pretty clear that there's not going to be a satisfactory way of tying them all off, not without falling back on the sudden arrival of an all-out spectacular action sequence. The movie has me by the throat for three-quarters of its running time, but once Tetsuo starts his ascent to godhood, marked by his appropriation of a bright red cape in parody of a superhero, it it feels like it's more interested in just finding a fucking ending, and throwing a lot of grandiose action to help it all go down. The enjoyable, highly distinctive characters turn into cogs in Otomo's gigantic machine; the themes double-down on being cryptic and cosmic at the expense of being truly satisfying.

I will bluntly declare that for virtually everything Akira does well, outside of its lush character animation, some other film, live-action or animated, has done it better. In particular, the 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell is to me an across-the-board improvement: its world is more visually striking and complex, its story more engaging and resonant, its treatment of the thematic idea of the human body being warped and expanded by technology far more nuanced and rewardingly difficult.

This does put Akira in the "victim of its own success" camp: if other films have been able to improve upon, that's because it issued such a bold, loud, fuck-you challenge to the rest of animation and cinema at large. It's striking in its broadest strokes - the visual and narrative portrait of a rotting society held together with cruelty and desperation - all the way down to its finest details, like the way that the character design of Kaneda and Tetsuo mark them out as powerfully distinct personalities, the former wide-eyed and fun and friendly, the latter's high forehead leaving him with a perpetual scowl of distrust, even when he's smiling. And I might add, Akira is one of the inordinately small number of anime I have seen where the characters actually take on the characteristic features of Japanese people, rather than simply being big-eyed cartoon characters riffing on Disney.

There are individual grace notes in the movie that are utterly terrific: a nighttime horror show in which childhood objects turn into demonic apparitions; the speed and physicality of the motorcycle races through the scorched landscape. Yamashiro Shoji's score is masterful, combining sleek futurism with tuneless appropriations of older musical forms that give the film a remarkable sense of timelessness, considering how explicitly it defines its setting in 2019. The characters are sharply etched to lend the action-heavy thriller both pathos and spiky humor. And yet I find myself incapable of really loving it, for reasons I can't always quite pin down. It's handsome and preposterously ambitious, and even its worst narrative missteps are a factor of that ambition, which is a favorite flaw of mine. But it feels distant even so, just a little too aware of its accomplishments for them to be completely enjoyable and natural in their expression.

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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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BLURGEY WURGEY MURGENT

The best thing that I could possibly will myself to say about Divergent is that it was by whatever thin margin the more watchable of 2014's two virtually indistinguishable post-apocalyptic YA adaptations about the Enormously Special Snowflake whose pluck and to-heck-with-your-rules-man attitude helps to knock the legs out from underneath an inscrutable and preposterously contrived writerly conceit masquerading as a functional fantasy world, just besting The Maze Runner. And now all that stored-up goodwill I had gets quite spoilt by The Divergent Series: Insurgent, whose repellent death march of a title is one of the best things about it. This is the quintessence of what I mean when I call a film joylessly mediocre: everything about Insurgent is functional in the most detached, unimaginative ways, precisely in the places where an allegory built on a loopy sci-fi premise particularly needs to be imaginative. It is not merely a film that has no fun with itself, it is a film that constantly calls your attention to all the fun that really absolutely should be going on, and makes the whole thing that much more teeth-grinding and enervating than is remotely fair.

The film drops us, via a clunky but straightforward bit of "I am your fascist dictator for the evening, and let me tell you things on giant monitors" re-expositioning, back into the world of Post-Apocalypse Future Chicago, the last outpost of humankind, where all people are separated into factions based on their solitary personality trait. Candor is home to reliable truth-tellers, Amity does good work for the betterment of all, and Erudite is home to cold evil logicians who worship knowledge and try to kill Christians. I mean, Abnegation, the ones who put the needs of the rest above themselves and get all the shitty work done, and who were effectively wiped out at the end of the last movie by that selfsame dictator Jeanine (Kate Winslet). For some reason, Jeanine's lack of a surname really started to crack me up this time around.

So in addition to the loss of nearly all Abnegationeers, the miltaristic police sect Dauntless has been scattered to the winds, leaving Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley), with a surprisingly fresh and salon-tousled new hairdo, considering that she gave it to herself with a pair of garden shears, hiding in Amity along with her hunky boyfriend Four (Theo James), her confused Erudite brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort), and her sullen, irritable rival from Dauntless, Peter (Miles Teller, completing the "Boys Who Have Played Shailene Woodley's Lovers" hat trick). But Tris, of course, is no Dauntless member at all; she is a Divergent, one of the magic special ones who combine all five extant personality traits. And for this reason, Jeanine wants to find her; for Jeanine, we now find, found a Box buried by the Founders 200 years ago and protected by Tris's now-dead parents, but the Founders made it so that only a Divergent could open the Box and thus receive their Message about what to do in this moment of Crisis, because having determined that just copying The Hunger Games was too limiting, the series at this point goes for the classics and starts stealing plot points from Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

In practice, this means a lot of trekking through parts of Georgia that make for a passable simulacrum of Illinois, encountering Four's estranged mother (Naomi Watts), and band of radical Factionless, which aren't the same thing as Divergents, but it's not totally clear why. And then Tris has to decide if she'll be the Mockingjay join with Mama Four's team to replace Jeanine's dictatorship with a different dictatorship or... not do that. The stakes are all a bit fuzzy. But eventually, she is taken by Jeanine and put through a series of video game levels to prove her righteousness to open the Box and discover the sequel hook. Except it's not a sequel hook at all: it feels precisely like the final beat of about a hundred other post-apocalypse films that that end with a slightly ambiguous "...and did they restore the world then? Perhaps, children. Perhaps" note as the limitless horizon stretches out. But there are in fact two more The Divergent Serieses to come, unless Insurgent's apparent inability to expand Divergent's audience even a tiny bit spooks Summit Entertainment into committing the unthinkable heresy of adapting a YA novel series with exactly as many movies as there are books.

The central problem of Divergent turns out to also be the central problem of Insurgent: this world doesn't work, and the screenwriters writing the adaptation - Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman (!), and Mark Bomback - don't have the creativity, or more likely the motivation, to find a way of fixing it. Inherently, this society can't work and doesn't make sense, though it's revealed in a mysterious film-ending transmission, by a mysterious woman whose identity the end credits totally give away (she's played, anyway, by Janet McTeer, completing the hat trick of stupidly over-qualified actresses who are reduced to this now? Fuck Hollywood), that it might have all been engineered to be this transparently artificial and synthetic. Which doesn't speak well of the Founders. Last time around, director Neil Burger directed with a deft enough touch and a good sense for how to work action sequences around characters that the draggy plot and nonsensical world-building at least felt like they had some momentum underpinning them, but his replacement, Robert Schwentke, suffers from a pronounced tendency towards flat visuals and too much time spent lingering on the barely present reactions of his actors, and his decidedly anti-epic staging leaves the feeling that the entire last kernel of humanity, spread throughout the city limits of a still semi-functioning Chicago, numbers around 1200 people.

Whereas Divergent at least felt like it took place somewhere, I mean to say, Insurgent feels like a cheap, jerry-rigged post-apocalypse on a budget. It's small and boring, and that just calls attention to how much the story is made up of jerky half-measures - go here, go here, stop, look sad, go here, get involved in some nonsensical battle with Shadow Link - and how utterly daft the whole allegorical conceit is.

It's so bland: it looks bland, and the actors play it excessively bland, either because, like James and Elgort, that's what they do; or like Woodley, they're aware that this is not going to be their $400 million ticket to Jennifer Lawrenceville, but they have to muscle through anyway; or like Watts, they've been weirdly made up to look like Elizabeth Olsen, despite being a 46-year-old woman. Winslet stands out: her absolute defeated dismay in ever single frame, like a starving person who just realised that the only food in the whole house is cream of wheat, is horrible sad to have to watch. Teller is the other; with a small part that has absolutely no shading, he goes for broke on playing up the most nauseating entitled personality of a lazy, self-satisfied asshole that he can muster - which is a lot, for Teller - and as a result emerges as the only onscreen human who feels like he has thoughts and feelings which aren't directly communicated by the lines of dialogue he says.

Anyway, there's not a single frame wrong with the movie, though some of the CGI is regrettable; but there also isn't anything in the whole of that's even fleetingly entertaining. It's as devoid of any energy as is possible, and it's every bit the soulless commercial calculation that has the word "Series" in its official goddamn title had ought to be.

4/10

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QUENCHING FIRE

If nothing else, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 demonstrates with bleak efficiency that the director can only do so much. Francis Lawrence, making his second Hunger Game, still has all the chops he demonstrated with 2013's THG: Catching Fire and back further still to the 2007 adaptation of I Am Legend, once again capturing with admirable rawness the desperation and raggedness of life after apocalypse. But consistency and strength of tone, as vital as they are in a film of this sort, are powerless in the face of such a useless script as the one adapted by Peter Craig, Danny Strong, and Suzanne Collins from the worst half of the worst book of Collins's dystopian trilogy. Catching Fire and I Am Legend weren't the most perfectest screenplays ever crafted, mind you, but Mockingjay 1 doesn't just have an imperfect screenplay: it has an actively draggy, tepid screenplay that all but dares you to find anything pleasurable or meaningful in its wretched plonking arrangement and re-arrangement of characters on a chessboard that the folks up at marketing said we can't actually play with yet.

This comes as no surprise - did we not see the Part 1 in the title? The arbitrary division of one book into two halves hasn't been made for artistic reasons yet (even Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, the instigator of the trend and easily the most successful, is pokey and frequently aimless), and Mockingjay isn't about to be the one to start. It's crippled from the outset by the structure of Collins's novel, which is all wind-up until almost exactly the point that the film is obliged to end at (and "obliged" is exactly the word: with the decision to cut the story in two coming from the corporate overseers and not the writers, presumably, there was virtually no other point at which it made sense to do so, while leaving Mockingjay 2 with any chance of being functional in its own right), and if that means that I get to be yet another critic to wander out of the film with a wan expression and the words "...but nothing happened" dancing on my lips.

Well, fuck originality. Nothing does happen in Mockingjay, just a lot of discussions of how something might happen if, like, we just... nope, nevermind, there it went. The film starts at least several hours, maybe a few days after the close of Catching Fire (offering no opportunity to play catch-up: sorry newbies, you don't get to join in this time), with Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) dealing very poorly with life in the underground bunker called District 13, home to the only military-trained rebels left to oppose the future dictatorship ruling North America from its glitzy, tawdry Capitol. The leader of District 13, the unsmiling commander President Coin (Julianne Moore), wants Katniss to serve as the face of the rebellion's propaganda, in the form of the "Mockingjay"; so do the far warmer faces of Beetee (Jeffrey Wright), a tech whiz who helped smuggle Katniss out of the Capitol's murderous Hunger Games, and Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his last completed role), a former Capitol bureaucrat, and Gale (Liam Hemsworth), Katniss's friend from their now-destroyed home, who gets more screentime than in the previous two movies combined, and no longer seems to give a shit about becoming Katniss's boyfriend. For her part, Katniss just wants to find some quiet hole to abandon all the world, but when the Capitol starts releasing its own propaganda videos, starring Katniss's friend and fellow victim of the Games, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), she's finally jabbed into action. And so the filming begins, as Katniss and the other District 13 refugees get a firsthand look at just how wretched live in the 11 surviving colonies has become as President Snow (Donald Sutherland) of the Capitol begins mercilessly cracking down on the revolutions that have sprung up in the wake of Katniss's defiance during two successive Hunger Games.

So, so many words for such a simple concept! "An apolitical woman reluctantly agrees to help the propaganda wing of an unpleasantly militaristic rebellion" - that's it, that's the plot. Not the logline, not the plot of the first half: the plot of the whole goddamn movie. Francis Lawrence and the writers do manage to push that to a running time almost all the way up to two hours, without end credits, but it's not interesting in the slightest. Just about the only thing in the entirety of all this slow drip of incidents that's remotely intriguing is the film's depiction of radicalism in an era of mass media, and its limited suggestion (due to be fleshed out more in the sequel) that just because one side is obviously bad, that doesn't mean that the other side is obviously good. None of which is terribly insightful or politically savvy in any way, but it helps to recall that Mockingjay has a target audience of teenagers, for whom these concepts are more revelatory than they are, I hope and pray, to grown-ups who've spent more years consuming carefully massaged political media.

Dramatically, though, it's one long, low, wet fart, consisting of scene after scene of people talking glumly, interspersed with scenes where the walk outside among ruins and corpses, even more glumly. Within the film's first ten minutes, it has a sequence consisting of Hoffman, Moore, Wright, and Jennifer Lawrence all sitting at a table arguing: that's a shitload of acting talent to have on one set at the same time, and yet all they get to do is mushily voice wobbly concepts and aching exposition, and Francis Lawrence does nobody any favors by framing all of the actors mostly in one-shots, so we only barely even get to see them respond and react to each other. And with so little interesting to do, none of the film's many terrific actors has much to do, and so they largely end up relaxing: Jennifer Lawrence irritably meanders her way through all but the biggest scenes (and even those are inconsistent: she completely blows her delivery of the big "They can take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom" speech in the middle by biting off each word too harshly), and she's still far livelier and more emotionally present than Moore, playing a brittle military commander as a collection of war movie clichés, or Wright, playing the world's most visibly bored tech nerd ever (I think Hoffman is doing the best work in the film, but I can't trust that it's not just mourning talking there).

The only thing that brings any kind of meat to the film whatsoever comes in Francis Lawrence's gift for ushering us through a world: it's what was best in I Am Legend, and it's what's best here, with the caveat that the film's limited dramatic scope is matched by its limited physical range. We spend a lot of time in District 13, and it's a dim, grey place; pointedly so, and it's a good physical expression of the kind of unimaginative concrete hole that a rebellion like this would have to occupy, but there are only so many ways it can be shot before it starts to get needlessly monotonous. Meanwhile, the script has cut out all the details about how District 13 actually functions, so the impression we get is of a bunch of people in grey jumpsuits who spend all their days walking back and forth against grey walls. It's brutal.

Outside, though, Lawrence and his team are in terrific shape: there is a shot of charred skeletons that the filmmakers frame with hideous awe, and it's powerful enough to make up for quite a lot of bland talking. Other moments are similiarly high-impact, and even within the warren of District 13, there are some shots where the geometry and action combine to suggest a level of tension and activity that brings the movie, temporarily, to life (one shot of a stairwell, in particular, is absolutely terrific, energising cinema).

We can argue if this is the point: the film is using its form to dramatise the stilted, tunnel-vision world of District 13 by contrasting it with moments of dread and disgust, asking the viewer's own shift from boredom to horror to serve as the stand-in for the gulf between the peremptory efficiency of the rebellion's higher-ups and the actual human lives they're sacrificing. But Jesus, is that ever meeting the film more than halfway. No, Mockingjay 1 is, I think, exactly what it seems to be: a tedious exercise in place-setting that could have been easily handled in 30 minutes, enlivened solely because its director has a good eye for expressing the misery of a bombed-out world in a PG-13 context. The film's commitment to market concerns over storytelling ones is vividly obvious throughout all of its aimless, airless minutes, and the only pleasure to be extracted from watching it is the knowledge that the thing coming out a year from now almost certainly has to be better.

5/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1995: In which we drink our pee

I foreground pee-drinking not because it's fun to take cheap shots (which it is), but because the film genuinely cares that much. Pee-drinking is the first thing that happens. We get the scene-setting as a portentous but oddly tinny-sounding narrator invokes "The future. The polar ice caps have melted, covering the Earth with water. Those who survived have adapted to a new world." And then this spectacularly expensive motion picture elects to introduce us to that new world by showing the main character running his freshly-pissed pee through a filter, and drinking it.

And thus does the Hollywood Century Trilogy of Spectacular Flops come to a close with the inevitable Waterworld the little $175 million film that couldn't. Though, whereas the legendary misfires Heaven's Gate and Ishtar both lost legitimately enormous sums of money, Waterworld actually came tolerably close to breaking even in 1995, which for a film of such a ridiculous price tag that is never seen onscreen, ain't half bad. What it certainly did not do was stain producer-star Kevin Costner with the stink of epic failure; two years later, Warner Bros. had the rather inexplicable lack of foresight to let him do the whole thing again, with the very similar The Postman (which came not even slightly close to breaking even). And in this it is much unlike the films that ended the careers of Michael Cimino and Elaine May.

I will confess to feeling extremely disappointed: I walked into Waterworld expecting something outrageously terrible, and I got something that's... hell, it's borderline halfway decent. For the first 25 minutes or so, it's even actually good, in its derivative way. The film baldly wants to be The Road Warrior on the open sea, copying the ur-film in the "post-apocalyptic badass vs. colorful weirdoes" genre in many specific beats, above and beyond the normal ripping-off that film had been subjected to in the 14 years since its creation. That being said, the open sea makes for an unusually novel setting for such an overworked scenario, which gives the film a surprisingly fun amount of personality that's entirely its own. The setting falls apart on even the slight push of logic: the world would not, in fact, be covered in water even if the polar caps and all the water bound up in glaciers atop mountains were to melt, nowhere close to it. As far as metaphors begging the audience to stop murdering the ozone layer go, it's not as scientifically inane as The Day After Tomorrow, but it's trending in that direction.

But if we can buy the film's backstory on its own terms, Waterworld makes surprisingly effective use of it for quite a good long while. Outside of that opening narration, the Pete Rader/David Twohy script mostly introduces the rules of the waterworld through showing, not telling, giving it an authentic, natural feeling without too much explaining getting in the way of what turns out to be surprisingly durable internal logic. We're first introduced to a nameless "mariner", apparently the figures in this world who explore the far reaches of known ocean scavenging for barter items, played by Costner in a performance that is by no means "good", in most senses of that word. And this is no real shock, given that Costner is by no means a reliably good actor. But his limitations are well-suited to the character: he plays a peremptory, self-centered man of cold efficiency and limited charms, and given what an enormous asshole he apparently was on the Waterworld shoot, this certainly fits him better than yet another attempt at playing a smooth charmer, something he had last successfully done seven years prior, in Bull Durham.

This mariner hears of a nearby "atoll", a collection of floating debris of the industrial world that was fashioned into a large platform functioning as a town. Here, he tries to find the best price for his most precious possession - a large pot of dirt - and is found out as a mutant, having developed gills behind his ears and webbing beneath his toes. The elders of the atoll consider him enough of a bad omen that they prepare to execute him by drowning him in their pit of compost sludge, but another group of strangers interrupt. Seems that among the many lost souls living on the atoll, there's a little girl named Enola (Tina Majorino), with a tattoo on her back that seemingly points the way to "Dryland", the mystical land which remains uncorrupted by the rising waters. Her guardian, Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and a dotty old inventor, Gregor (Michael Jeter) have been concocting a scheme to leave the atoll on a flying machine once they've decoded the tattoo, but despite all Helen's precautions, Enola's secret has been found out by a local piece of obvious bad news named Nord (Gerard Murphy), who is a spy of the local gang of colorful punks. And their leader, a madman naming himself the Deacon (Dennis Hopper), has been on the hunt for any leads on Dryland himself. And the Deacon and his gang of "smokers" - those who travel the open water on what's left of the powerboats and jet skis using what's left of the gasoline - strike the atoll at exactly the convenient moment to distract the mariner's executioners. Helen frees him during the chaos on one condition: he needs to take her and Enola to safety, and thence to whatever promised land Enola's back leads to.

It's right about this point that Waterworld asserts itself as a movie that's not very good: firstly, because Deacon is a destablising villain, too out-of-place in the film's otherwise consistent, thoughtful world, and played with a fiery flare by Hopper that's wildly out of proportion to virtually everybody else in the sullen, angsty cast. Secondly, because for all its charms as a post-apocalyptic travelogue (and I maintain that it has several, all the way to its final scenes), Waterworld turns out to be absolutely horrible as an action film. I do not blame director Kevin Reynolds nor his second unit for this: filming on water is a bitch, and staging elaborate action choreography that involves boats and jet skis is a fool's errand to begin with. But simply because it's excusable doesn't make these scenes any more exciting to watch, nor any more competently shot.

It's also certainly the case that Waterworld is longer than it has any reasonable justification for being. Not that a film of its scope can't earn a running time in excess of two hours, but the film doesn't fill that time with much of anything. After the escape from the atoll (which happens rather early on, all things considered), the writers have only a few basic situations that they cycle between, either the mariner and Helen sniping at each other, or the Deacon setting some manner of trap. Once, there's an impressively-designed but biologically unlikely sea monster. And all this, coupled with the necessary emptiness of the setting, leads to a movie that's circular and slow and draggy right when it needs to be tight and tense.

Still, as an exercise in sloppy, excessive action-adventure cinema - something the 1990s excelled at, just in 1995 alone we have the likes of Judge Dredd and Jumanji and Congo - Waterworld acquits itself far better than its reputation suggests. Outside of a few lines of dialogue the screenwriters missed ("you're a turd that won't flush", snarks the Deacon at one point, in a world where flush toilets have presumably not existed for at least a century or two), the film's world is well-built and provides a suitable setting for its generic story. The sets range from convincing to embarrassingly cheap (this is, again, not a film that looks in any way like it cost half of $175 million), but the imagination and conceptual integrity of the sets (designed by Dennis Gassner), rickety skeletons of torn and ancient metal, and the hacked-together scraps making up the costumes (designed by John Bloomfield), are genuinely impressive, and the story the tell is at least as convincing as the one the characters act out. Dean Semler's cinematographer capturing these things is crisp and bright, nimbly capturing the harshness of light on the open water. It is not a good film - it is often dull, and always trite - but in a period when tentpoles were starting to get drunk on scale and noisy impact, it's far from the most stupid, the most ineptly written, or most generic - just in 1995 alone we have Judge Dredd and Jumanji and Congo. But it's certainly not bad enough to be a cultural punchline, and I admire it for its thoughtful attempt to punch some new life into the post-apocalypse world of deserts and ruined cities, even if its execution leaves a good amount of room for improvement.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1995
-For the actual shape of the future, look to Pixar's Toy Story, the first all-CGI animated feature
-The highest-grossing NC-17 release of all time, Paul Verhoeven's infamous Showgirls, is released
-Richard Linklater directs the quiet story of two kids who fall in love on a train, Before Sunrise, accidentally inaugurating one of cinema's all-time greatest franchises

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1995
-To celebrate the centennial of the Lumière brothers' first exhibition, 40 directors from around the globe contribute a micro-short to the anthology Lumière et compagnie
-Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg announce the rules of Denmark's new hyper-realist Dogme 95 movement
-Britain's favorite movie spy, James Bond, comes out of a six-year retirement in GoldenEye

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APE-OCALYPSE NOW

Good sequels are rare; good sequels to prequels are rare enough that I can't remember the last one prior to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which isn't merely good, it's in some ways outright terrific. In fact, not only is it a more than worthy successor to 2011's surprisingly good Rise of the Planet of the Apes - and I think it's appropriate to point out, though I am not the first to do so, that there's more rising than dawning in the newest movie - it's pretty commandingly the best movie in the sprawling, disconnected franchise since the very first Planet of the Apes in 1968. It's all the more impressive given that Dawn is in a great many respects an uncredited remake of 1973's Battle for the Planet of the Apes, the worst of the now eight Apes films (yes, worse than than the deadening Tim Burton film from 2001, which at least had some great design and make-up).

Like that rather glum, under-budgeted affair, Dawn takes place many years after the event which caused the balance of power to shift away from a human-dominated Earth: the release of a lab-created biological agent called "simian flu" in the media, the exact beat upon which Rise ended, and upon which Dawn begins, with one of the very best "montage of news reports" exposition bursts that I have seen in many days, as fragments of talking head segments appear beneath a map of the earth showing the vectors by which the flu spread and also depicting the fading out of lights representing human civilisation, so that at end, when we arrive back where we started on the West Coast of the United States, it's all dark and empty and cold, as Michael Giacchino's score mournful taps out a few dying notes. You can't ask for a more atmospheric opening than that, nor one which more efficiently tells us everything we need to know (not least of the reasons that Dawn is such a terrific sequel is that it's so good at standing on its own two feet as a completely self-contained narrative).

And so we arrive, ten years after Rise, to find that the super-intelligent chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans created in that movie have built a primitive but very stable and literate society in the depths of Muir Woods, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. Led by the first mutant ape, Caesar (Andy Serkis, in a performance that re-writes the rulebook on what you can achieve with motion capture), the apes have no desire to become the dominant species of anything, but simply to live in quiet contentment in their small corner of the world; this becomes untenable when a group of humans - thought extinct for two years now - stumble upon the ape village while in the woods on entirely unrelated business. One of them, Carver (Kirk Acevedo), panics and shoots the juvenile ape Ash (Doc Shaw), and from there on out, everything snowballs: Caesar and the leader of the human expedition, Malcolm (Jason Clarke) are able to put off immediate conflict between the two populations, and even strike a deal for the humans to continue their exploration to find and repair a hydroelectric dam in the woods, the last hope for keeping electricity flowing to San Francisco, which has already devolved into a dead, weed-choked collection of buildings with all the humans clustered into one unfinished skyscraper. But Caesar's apparent second-in-command Koba (Toby Kebbell) refuses to forgive or trust the humans, remembering their horrible treatment of him when he was still a lab animal, and Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), the leader of the human colony, responds to the discovery that the apes have formed a nascent human-like society by breaking out the stockpiled weapons to make sure they still work, and as is the case, when a population begins to ready for war, it has a tendency to make sure that war will break out.

Mordant stuff, but even at their very worst, the Planet of the Apes films have been more concerned with how to use a population of intelligent simians as a metaphor for how we humans structure our own societies, with all their warts and jerry-rigged alliances (though its vocabulary suggests otherwise, it's always seemed clear that the series is aware that humans are, after all, apes ourselves). And even with its rather bleak outlook on the hopes of peace between distrustful neighbors, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is about as rousing and involving as any summer movie ought to be, not because is packed full of heightened action, but because it makes its action count so much, by basing it so firmly in character rather than raw spectacle.

The film triumphs in making a rich, complex web of characters we admire and characters we despise, but who in both cases always seem to be acting out of an honest internal place rather than because the script needs "heroes", "villains", and "conflict", and this is even more impressive given that the best of them are CGI apes who communicate either with subtitled sign language or grunting, grammatically half-baked English. It is astonishingly nuanced for a big honking summertime movie, with Serkis and Kebbell in particular (along with the small army of technicians turning their performances into CGI characters with amazingly flexible facial expressions) creating such conflicted, ambivalent figures that even as the plot structure insists that Koba must be the Bad Guy and Caesar the Hero, there are shadings within those binaries that go far beyond that. Caesar is not a pacifist, but a realist; Koba is not a slavering maniac, but a deeply wounded, resentful figure. Both have many wonderful moments, a scene in which Koba distracts some gun-toting humans by acting like a daffy circus chimp is a beautifully sad and creepy moment, pure popcorn movie magic.

And having done such a good job of building its characters (the non-human ones; though it's so clearly the "point" that the humans feel kind of undernourished and one-note that I tend to see it as a strength, not a flaw), the film then proceeds on to the business of setpieces and a generally grim and overly-sober worldview, but it feels earned here in a way that it hasn't since The Dark Knight, where the whole "summer movies have to be harsh and not fun" shtick first set up shot. There are sublime moments: the sight of a gas station in the woods coming to life and promising hope and a future; a shot from atop a tank gun turret spinning listlessly and bringing the camera with it, the kind of thing that might sound generically cool for most tentpoles, but is given great depth and drama thanks to the hard, colorless lighting and the moaning score (seriously, Giacchino is up to some great things with the music: looking back to the groundbreaking original, collating modern blockbuster music tropes, tugging at our heart in a most shameless way. I think he might be the single most important person in making the film what it is). Director Matt Reeves finds the exact right mixture here between grandiosity and visual storytelling here in a way that makes for fine, compelling epic filmmaking, and while this is one of the film's best single gestures, it is not the only place where the emotional needs of the moment and the desire to make broad, crowd-pleasing spectacle are satisfied simultaneously. It's a perfectly balanced film, one that escalates things steadily but not with a predictable rhythm, and one that has invested so much in the character drama that even though the climax is a simple one-on-one fight, it feels more visceral and important than all the exploding cities that recent years have thrown at us.

It is, basically a rich film; one of the richest that has come along on a giant studio budget into a prominent summer slot in a long time. I don't suppose that it's necessarily trying to break any new ground; it's more that it's doing extremely well things that are typically only done satisfactorily. But I had an easier time investing emotionally in the film's story, its characters, and its setting (designed, fucking brilliantly, by James Chinlund, and handsomely shot by Michael Seresin) than I've had with a movie of similar market position and aims in a very long time, and for a movie about that time that mutant apes took over the planet, that's an outstanding achievement.

9/10 8/10
I was flipping back and forth for three days before I wrote the review, it only seems right to keep on doing it now that it's published. It's the old conundrum: not as good as the 9/10 Edge of Tomorrow, better than the 8/10 Days of Future Past, and I hate decimal points.

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