THE IMPRESSION OF NORMALCY

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

There are many indisputably great films that it's clearly impossible for any normal audience member to complete unpack in all their nuances without the aid of some highly specialised arcane knowledge, but even then, writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist is a special case. It's the one and only quintessential all-time masterpiece I can name that trades, extensively, on its ideal viewer's knowledge of the history of 20th Century interior design. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro invariably gets all of the credit, as well he might, given the relatively easy argument that The Conformist is the most impeccably-shot color film yet made. But as gorgeously lit as the film is - and that is much too weak a claim for the stunning compositions of light, shadow, and diagonal lines that dominate the film's cinematography - the engine driving the film's visuals is far less often the film's camerawork and lighting than production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and his team's recreation of the Modernist-derived architecture and furniture design of Fascist Italy. There is no film I know that so compellingly describes a link between the design of its world, the mentality that produced that design, and the mentality that is in turn encouraged by that design; that is to say, it is a film about the mindset of a man who wanted very badly to be a totally anonymous, perfect Fascist, and the most important way that it evokes that mindset is by containing it in distinctively Fascist spaces, distinctively Fascist compositions. And this is where I bring us back to arcane knowledge, because the simple fact of the matter is that I don't know a damn thing more about fine art under Fascism than I suppose you do (if you are some kind of design historian, I know infinitely less than you), and while the film allows us to intuit the nature of Fascist design theory, there's an enormous gap between being able to extrapolate a film's intentions versus understanding at a deep level the film's frame of reference.

So now that I've made this sound like the most absolutely staid piece of entertainment you could ever hope to stumble across, let me promise that The Conformist is, in fact, a gripping piece of cinema, far more watchable than any description of its content could suggest. It's kind of a gangster thriller, if you allow that the Fascist party in Italy was kind of a gang, structured around the fluttery thoughts of Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant, who is in this film one of the greatest empty vessels ever performed onscreen) as he rides in the back seat of a fine car one wintry day, being driven by fellow party member Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) on a mission whose exact details only reveal themselves slowly, but which plainly cause Marcello no end of unhappiness to ponder. Over the course of the next hour and a half, this car serves as the movie's home base, while we follow along with Marcello's stream-of-consciousness recollection of his life, which largely centers on his emotionally flat marriage to Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), a smart choice of spouse rather than a passionate one, as well as his relationship with anti-Facist mentor Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio) and his obsession with Quadri's wife Anna (Dominique Sanda).

Viewed strictly as a psychological portrait, The Conformist is fairly blunt, overly Freudian, and not tremendously imaginative. As we see over the course of those chronologically erratic flashbacks, Marcello became aware as a preteen of his homosexual urges, and in particular had a rather ugly run-in with his family's pederastic chauffeur Lino (Pierre Clémenti) that ended with the older man dead by Marcello's hand. Absorbed by guilt and repulsed by his desires, Marcello has since spent his entire life attempting to disappear his own identity into the blank facade of a perfect conformist, behaving in the least aberrant way he possibly can, based on whatever is valued by the social order of the day. And that is, let us be honest, a bit overly schematic and just-so. Films about the sexual hypocrisy of the totalitarian parties in World War II were their own subgenre around this time, and there are those which have distinctly more sophisticated and less hoary ways of approaching that topic than The Conformist's frankly hoary appropriation of homosexuality as a metaphor (for the record, Luchino Visconti's The Damned from 1969 is my personal favorite example of the form).

But who needs crafty, unexpected screenwriting, when you have this kind of extraordinary psychoanalysis through style? This is, in places, massively obvious: the film's opening scene, as Marcello prepares to commit the worst sin he can imagine, finds the lighting from a neon sign outside his room gently washing him with red at intervals. A sequence synopsising the Allegory of the Cave, punctuated with the statement that those in the cave mistake a shadow of a thing for the thing itself, ends with Marcello's shadow against a wall being blotted out by another light source, the most straightforward "his self is dissolving" image that I could imagine. Frequently, the movie is craftier than that: an early scene where Marcello spills his guts and talks about how badly he wants to be normal and nondescript takes place in a dark room, with a window to a bright white radio studio casting into stark relief just how gloomy the world that Marcello wants to disappear into is. Naked, sexualised women are shown twice in the film, both times drenched in garish, colored lighting that renders them as something almost literally inhuman and unapproachable, the feverish dream version of normalised heterosexuality that Marcello reaches for and cannot attain. And the whole movie is dominated to the point of distraction with diagonal lines in the mise en scène and the lighting, imprisoning Marcello, slashing across his world and breaking it into fragments. It is among the most Expressionist films ever made in color, both in the descriptive sense (Expressionism, as a movement, was dedicated to expressing interior emotions through exterior form - hence the name), and in the more nitpicky sense that it uses the actual graphic techniques of German Expressionism: there's a shot of Sandrelli in a striped dress under striped lighting that is the most literally Expressionist shot that I have seen in any film made after the mid-'30s.

One could go through every single frame of the film and analyse how the composition, color, and lighting all reflect Marcello's mind, the dominance of the individuality-crushing cult of Fascism, or very often both. Certainly, it would go for tens of thousands of words beyond the meaningful scope of a "review" for me to fully work through every single image that I'd like to talk about - the one with the Eiffel Tower a hazy shape in the backdrop against a featureless grey sky, that's a profound emblem of isolation! The violet-selling woman singing "L'Internationale" is purposefully murky and blue to contrast against the ungainly brightness of he and his blonde mistress! Holy balls, the pullback to reveal Giulia patiently waiting as he fumbles his way through his first-ever confession to a priest, that's why they invented camera movement in the first place! - so I won't bother trying. There isn't, however, a single frame that feels accidental, anywhere in the movie: The Conformist is a dream movie for anyone who wants to play around with image analysis, just clicking around to random frames and unpack everything communicated by that shot, that pan, that marriage of visual desolation with the exquisite pain of Georges Delerue's great score, one of the best of the 1970s.

It is a greatly, audaciously cinematic movie, The Conformist is, imposingly precise in its arrangement of individual elements, and their collective shaping by Bertolucci into one grand statement about the the way that Fascism preyed upon humans and was created and bolstered by the same humans. Praising it feels a little obvious, like bothering to point out that there's some good stuff on the White Album; The Conformist is so direct and straightforward in so much of its symbolism that watching them feels like the movie has already done your work for you. But there are many layers to it, and they are not all so straightforward; I'll admit that I don't revisit this film as often as other of the great European art house classics of that generation, but every time I do, the film seems fresh and totally new, and that's the best thumbnail description of a masterpiece that I've got.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: SWAPPIN' CONSCIOUSNESS WITH TARSEM

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: director Tarsem Singh shows us the terrible things that can happen when two personalities are stuffed into one brain in Self/less. In this, he is merely returning to his roots.

When it was new, The Cell was at the center of controversy about its content: is there something wrong and wicked about how this movie used absolutely breathtaking images to depict horrible, violent acts, stripping them of their real-world gravity. How innocent a controversy it was! Back in 2000, when this movie came out, we hadn't even seen Saw yet (a film through which you can draw a surprisingly straight line from The Cell), and we didn't know just how pornographic violence could get. I don't know about you, but if I get to choose between a film that might be fetishising violence and is also gorgeous, and a film that definitely is fetishising violence and looks like it was shot on film stock made of dog turds, I'm not going to have to think very long.

But even that's begging the question. To be clear, no, I don't think that The Cell is a fetish object for anything, outside of perhaps the impossible fantasy costumes (Eiko Isihioka and April Napier share costuming duty; I'm going to assume without any real evidence that Napier is responsible for the clothing that looks like what human beings wear, while Isioka's contribution were all of the gilded parade floats with space for people's legs at the bottom). In fact, of all director Tarsem Singh's movies - this was his first - it strikes me as the one where style is most clearly used as a function of the needs of the story and the rather horrible psychological depths that story plumbs (his sophomore effort, The Fall, strikes me more as a story built more to facilitate style than the other way 'round; not that I feel for The Fall anything less than total love).

That said, style is still a very, very important thing; style muscles its way to our eyeballs right from the opening, while the story is still deliberately keeping itself hidden. In the beginning there is desert: shattering orange sand and glowing blue skies, the undiluted colors of the very concept of The Desert of legends and myth (this sequence was shot in Namibia, which would, 15 years later, provide the same uncompromising primary colors to Mad Max: Fury Road). In the desert is a woman all in beautiful, flowing, feathered white, looking like a dove come down from heaven - we don't know her yet, but she's Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), a psychologist. And we don't know this yet, either, but this desert is all in the mind of Edward Baines (Colton James), a boy of about 10. Deane is a member of a team working on an extraordinary technology to treat extraordinary mental disorders: she can literally enter another person's headspace and interact with their consciousness directly. Edward is suffering from a coma triggered by psychological trauma, and his well-to-do parents have sponsored the development of this extraordinary technology under the hands of Drs. Kent (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Cooperman (Becker).

I'm in awe of this opening for reasons that have nothing to do with its literally awe-inspiring scenery and the exquisite costuming. By the ten-minute mark of The Cell, Tarsem and screenwriter Mark Protosevich have told us exactly what their movie is going to be and how to watch it: there will be beautiful tableaux, framed with a sense of painterly composition by music video veteran Tarsem and music video cinematographer Paul Laufer (who shot only one other movie in his career) that is far more attuned to the rules of graphical art than traditional narrative cinema, and is meant to be read accordingly. These images are the expression of moods, and the moods moreover of very specific individuals: tell a sullen 10-year-old to think of a "desert", and it is very much the desert that we get in the opening scene that he'll probably have in mind. So the first thing we learn is to read the images as essential concepts, and not as narrative spaces. The second thing we learn is that we're either on-board with a device that lets a psychologist mind-meld with comatose patients suffering from transparently made-up mental conditions, or we are not. And the film makes its technology as unreasonable as it can: the rig is some kind of fantastic open space where the participants are suspended in mid-air on many fine wires, while wearing suits that make it look rather like they've been skinned alive, which cannot possibly be an accident given the film's eventual fixation on torture and murder. Basically, I mean to say, the opening ten minutes find the movie putting everything on the table: if we aren't on its side, we never will be, and I greatly admire a film that certain of itself.

The plot pretty clearly situates The Cell at the end of the big wave of film's cribbing from The Silence of the Lambs: there's a serial killer, see, who drowns women in an implausible elaborate automated drowning cube (the glassy set for which vividly predicts Saw and its sequels and their theatrical murder boxes), and then bleaches and paints them to resemble porcelain dolls. Catching this repugnant creature has become the fixation of FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn, in what is by an enormously exaggerated margin my favorite of his performances), who has finally scraped enough evidence together to catch the killer, Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), right in his house. The problem is, Stargher's kill factory isn't in his house. And Stargher is currently suffering from another made-up psychological coma, meaning that Novak and his team only have about 40 hours to find, based on no leads at all, where the killer's present victim has been imprisoned, before she drowns. And there follows the one piece of contrived screenwriting that I can't bring myself to overlook, out of the whole lacework of contrivances that makes up the first third of The Cell: Novak is somehow aware of the experimental dream-sharing machine, and he wants Deane to go hunting in the hideous reaches of Stargher's subconscious to find any scrap of evidence for where he might leave his victims while they die.

The thing that The Cell transforms into at this point is damned near impossible to describe - certainly, even attempting a verbal sketch of the imagery is pointlessness itself. Tarsem, along with Ishioka and Napier, production designer Tom Foden, set decorator Tessa Posnansky, and art director Geoff Hubbard, create mental worlds in this film, both Stargher's and eventually Deane's, that are without specific precedent, nor can I offhand name anything that has copied them since. A few points along the way, though: the film is not quite as straightforward as "the inside of a serial killer's mind is like this" symbolism, though that's enough to get by. Beyond that, it's a synthesis of imagery from European and at least South Asian artistic traditions, as well as American pop culture, and what this suggests within the film itself is not just "let's make the most horrifying hellscapes possible by drawing on multiple sources". Instead, it suggests that Stargher is himself making the same synthesis that the filmmakers do, pulling together fragments of remembered images to construct a worldview. Setting aside its applications to the film's deep wells of horror, this is a tremendously effective way of cinematically visualising the process of how human personalities are built out of piece of memory, whether from personal experience or appropriations of fantasies, stories, and the background radiation of culture. And of course, since this is horror, the personality we need to be chiefly concerned with is one dominated by suffering, directed inward and directed outward and even freestanding representations of pain and death that simply exist, independent of who caused the pain or who receives it.

Importantly, this all applies not just to Stargher, but to Deane herself (at which point I think it deserves saying: Lopez is better in this role than she gets credit for, a placidly calm presence whose relatively simple and straightforward way of presenting the character's beatific sensibilities starts paying considerable dividends when that simplicity runs into the dense imagery), who defines her inner life with signifiers of goodness as soft and generically calming as Stargher's are specific and increasingly draining to watch. The design is no less striking, for being less cruel; Deane's get-up like a cherry blossom that became a nun is among the film's boldest costumes. This is not about reducing the film to a Manichean good/bad framework, though the implication is certainly that Deane thinks in those terms. What it's about is providing a counterpoint to the inside of Stargher's head, while making the same point: we mentally visualise the world in terms of broad signifiers which we then decorate with our own reference points, and that process is called "having a personality". A variation on it is called "consuming art, up to and including the movie titled The Cell", and that's maybe the most cunning thing about the film: it contains within its own structure the expectation that we will be effected by what we're watching. If we are healthy and know that's what we're doing, we can leave the movie having broken down its enormously memorable visual setpieces into our own personal library of reference points. If we are not healthy, well, the movie has some very imaginative ideas about what happens to people whose personality-construction goes awry. The point being, though, that the film is one of the boldest depictions of how external stimuli are transformed into internal narrative, for good or otherwise, that I know the movies to have attempted, and that's rewarding even beyond the shockingly bold images that almost exclusively make up the film's final hour and change.

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NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS

The first thing to point out, because it's really amazing the more you think about it, it's a miracle that Pixar Animation Studios' 15th feature, Inside Out, functions at all. It's a feature-length metaphor, in which everything we're watching as the story isn't "actually" be happening, possibly not even within the world of the film. Most of the characters are literally concepts rather than psychological actors in their own right. The driving conflict is "there's a ticking clock and we have to get back before it runs out", or basically the third act that's always the most uninteresting part of Pixar movies stretched out to the full length of the 94-minute film

Regardless, it's Pixar's most effective and most moving feature since the six-year-old Up, and while I think the "Pixar's best!" chatter that you can find here and there is premature, it's very easy to see why somebody would want to promote that opinion. Surely, it's the most ambitious film in the studio's history: it's a feature-length metaphor, after all, which isn't something for the squeamish. Specifically, it's a metaphor about the processes of human memory and emotions in a time of extreme stress both environmental (moving to a new city) and biological (doing so at the very earliest years of adolescence), setting up shop in the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) and literalising the concepts of cognitive theory as physical spaces for the adventures had by her five core emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Fear (Bill Hader). Who are also literalised, as color-coded humanoids made out of quantum particles that you can just barely see in close-ups as a mottled, almost fuzzy surface of tiny floating spheres.

The actual "what really happened" plot is that Riley has just moved from Minnesota, where she loves her friends and adores playing hockey, to an old rundown building in San Francisco. Picking up on the extreme frustration and stress felt by her father (Kyle MacLachlan), whose business - the reason they moved in the first place - is hitting a potentially fatal snag, and her mother (Diane Lane), helplessly trying to track down their missing moving truck and clearly none too happy about being uprooted herself, Riley tries to force herself to be the same happy-go-lucky child her parents have always praised her for being, but this quickly curdles into a perpetual state of peevishness marked by bursts of terror, and eventually she decides to run away back to Minnesota. And as she does so, she slides into a depressive state where she can barely feel anything at all.

But ah! the way that Inside Out chooses to tell that story is gorgeous and complicated and crazily imaginative: inside the control room of Riley's mind, which has been the domain of the upbeat, bullying Joy for all of recorded history, an accident has sent her and Sadness spiraling into the recesses of Riley's memories, leaving the ill-equipped Anger, Fear, and Disgust to run the show. Meanwhile, Joy and Sadness journey through Riley's headspace, finding her subconscious, her imagination, and the chasm where all of her lost memories are dumped, never to be retrieved again, escorted by the cotton candy-cat-elephant-dolphin hybrid Bing Bong (Richard Kind), Riley's mostly-forgotten imaginary friend. The film presents all of the mercurial and abrupt shifts of personality that accompany being 11 and thrust into a new life as the results of the emotions' desperate attempts to find a solution to their predicament, with everybody (and especially Joy) anxious to get back to the unmixed state when Joy wouldn't let anybody else call the shots. Though with Sadness's shocking, newfound ability to alter the nature of Riley's memories just by touching them, it's clear to us long before the emotions are willing to admit it that Riley's days of unmixed joy are behind her.

The idea that our thoughts and feelings are sentient creatures bumbling around in our heads isn't new, of course: the earliest cinematic version I can name is the 1943 Disney WWII propaganda cartoon Reason and Emotion, and the image of the mind as a person sitting in the body directing it is an ancient one. But Inside Out is as perfect a filmed depiction of that hook as has ever been made, coming up with an expansive, highly creative world of intricately worked-out rules to explore the concepts of cognitive psychology in a simplified, even fabulistic way. It does an extraordinarily good job of establishing its world one piece at a time, so we grasp the basic vocabulary intuitively enough that when the movie starts to use that vocabulary in complicated ways later on, we don't need to have it explained what's going on. Knowing that colors map onto emotions, we can grasp the enormous difference between a day that has produced mostly yellow (Joy) memories and a day that has produced a slurry of green, red, and purple (Disgust, Anger, Fear) memories at a visceral level, both because the colors themselves are unpleasant and toxic all mixed together, but because the film trained us why that's upsetting without having openly told us it was doing so.

Cognitive modeling and inventive visual storytelling aside, Inside Out is simply a great amount of fun to watch. The actors are exemplary: the five core emotions are all obvious but phenomenally on-point casting decisions, especially in the subtle details, like how Poehler isn't just perfect for Joy, but perfect for a specifically bossy, arrogant Joy. And with that handled, the film has already done a huge part of its work, making the emotions appropriately broad, bold personalities to go with the film's searing bright colors and Seussian designs of the spaces inside Riley's head. With those personalities in place, the film can go about the business of mixing them around and working not just as a fun story of two mismatched characters on a journey, but, increasingly, as a deeply effective study of emotions jockeying for prominence, and learning the hard truth that feeling sad isn't always inappropriate and should be embraced when it's the right time for it. Which is a lesson that's not just bold for a nominal children's movie (though not since Ratatouille has Pixar made a movie that strikes me as more geared towards adults), but bold for anything made in American cinema. It's one of the ways that Inside Out feels like Pixar's very own Studio Ghibli film, more emotionally sophisticated and trusting of its audience than even the very best of what we'd normally expect from corporate family filmmaking.

It's also one of the ways that Inside Out is clearly the third film to be directed by Pete Docter, whose two previous films - Monsters, Inc. and Up - already marked him out as the feelingest of Pixar's director stable. His balance of goofy comedy and dumbfounding heartbreak is excellent here, as it would almost have to be; I'll confess that I was promised more robust, devastating tears than I got (the opening montage and scrapbook scenes in Up are both harder-hitting to my mind, as is the incomparable finale of Toy Story 3), but none of Inside Out's feints toward tear-jerking, nor its dumbest, most stereotyped jokes feel at all unearned or unconsidered. It tries to cover the whole range of feelings and it largely gets there.

It has a few rough patches, undoubtedly. Docter and his co-writers never came up with a really interesting idea for Disgust, who feels by far the least consequential of the core emotions, and outside of it main themes, Michael Giacchino's score is disappointingly rote, given that some of his career-best work has happened in Pixar films. And there are other nitpicks and niggles her and there. But the grandness of the film's ambitions and its ingenuity in realising those amibitions, its sheer cleverness and sophistication as a most unique kind of character study, these things eradicate any nitpicks and render niggles the nastiest kind of pettiness. This is at most only a hair shy of top-tier Pixar, and not just the kind of aesthetically adventurous storytelling that all animation should aspire to, it's what all of mainstream American cinema should want to be - funny and meaningfully sad, deeply thoughtful about its world and story.

9/10

(A hedge; I'm not quite willing to commit to 10 yet, though "yet" is the key word there. I can easily imagine liking this more with subsequent viewings, and I cannot conceive of liking it any less)

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SHINING AT THE END OF EVERY DAY

There has been some effort online to stress Damon Lindelof's presence as co-writer of Tomorrowland and thus somehow save the reputation of the film's director and other writer, Brad Bird. Which presumes in the first place that Tomorrowland is bad enough to justify insulating the beloved auteur from it, and I think that's far from an objective truth, even though it's obviously the worst of his five features. But more to the point, there's no separating Bird from Tomorrowland: it might share the name with a large segment of the Disneyland and Magic Kingdom theme parks and thus be part of the Disney corporation's endless game of "brand extension", and it might be a phenomenally overpriced summer tentpole, but this is no director-for-hire job; this is absolutely a movie made by the director of The Iron Giant, and much of what some people find annoying about it thematically derives directly from that fact. What people find annoying about the story structure is vintage Lindelof. I'll spot that part of it, not least because I absolutely agree with it.

That structure gets off to an inordinately rocky start, with one of the most damaging and irritating framework narratives I've seen in a long time. Damaging, because when it returns at the end of the movie, it sets up an implied relationship to those of us in the audience that Bird and Lindelof couldn't possibly have actually intended. Irritating, because it feels like a filmed improv exercise circling around the drain for endless agonising minutes, as two characters we'll eventually learn to be Frank Walker (George Clooney) and Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) bicker mindlessly about the right way to tell the story and the right place to start (and, incidentally, Frank's attitude in this scene also feels profoundly miscalculated given where it ends up arriving in the film's overall chronology). Eventually, they get out of this rut to open on the story of young Frank's (Thomas Robinson) experiences at the 1964 World's Fair in New York, where he introduced a semi-working jetpack to a glum fellow we'll later know as Nix (Hugh Laurie), and is invited by Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a girl about Frank's age, and despite her youth apparently an adviser to Nix. She's the one who gives Frank a pin that allows him access to a teleporter that takes him to a fantastical world of high technology, and then we trot ahead to 2015, our appetites having been presumably whetted.

Whetted, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and Tomorrowland makes the strategically baffling decision to simultaneously align itself at an audience of children and their families, while also basing virtually all of its appeal on nostalgia for the Space Age - something that not merely the children, but even their parents are largely too young to possesses, except secondhand. And this is the element of the film that directly recalls The Iron Giant: the wholehearted belief that things were better when there was more optimism about the future and less terror, and the promise of space exploration made everything seem bright, shiny, and futuristic. This sits comfortably right next to the film's thesis that the biggest problem with contemporary life is that we've gotten tremendously good at identifying everything rotten, and then putting exactly no effort into fixing it. Which I think is entirely true, though the movie's somewhat pie-eyed idea for solving this human shortcoming largely through the power of wishing and reminding everybody how much we all used to want jet-packs is not entirely true. Maybe not even mostly true.

So the movie is in 2015, where we find Casey, a high schooler who has been instilled with the very same belief in choosing optimism over fatalism by her dad (Tim McGraw), a NASA engineer. Casey's gung-ho attitude is so pronounced, it brings her to the attention of Athena, who hasn't aged an hour since 1964, and who gives the older? younger? girl a pin that, when touched, transports her into a strange high-tech world full of, wouldn't you know, jet-packs and such other chrome-coated signs of mid-century futurism. And her tour of this world, once she figures out how to use the pin safely (when in Tomorrowland, for that is this place, she still interacts physically with the real world), is the film's outright highlight, a synthetic long take that moves through one of the most impressive CGI landscapes ever put into a movie, craning around to catch every last detail. It is the perfect cinematic mechanism to put us in the exact same place of dumbfounded awe and childlike excitement that Casey feels, and if that was the solitary triumph of Bird and cinematographer Claudio Miranda's work on this project, I wouldn't be able to reject the film outright.

It triggers a quest, and that's exactly where Tomorrowland collapses. It's not worth going into all of the movie's odds and ends as Casey and Athena hunt down angry grown-up Frank, and Casey learns the secret of Tomorrowland, a place where all of the most gifted geniuses of the 20th Century gathered to make the world a better, kinder place, until cynicism and hopelessness caused them to lock it away and watch it decay into a husk of its former self (it's an unambiguous though maybe unintentional parody and subversion of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - the best and brightest hiding in a gulch, only here the geniuses are presented as moral failures because they refuse to freely share their knowledge and achievements with all of humanity. This has not prevented the film from being used as further evidence of Bird's crypto-Randianism by people with nothing more interesting to do with their lives than willfully misunderstand movies). The biggest flaw of the movie, in fact, is the fascination it has with those odds and ends, and the greedy way it dolls them out, piecemeal. It's the whole "mystery box" shtick that was pioneered by J.J. Abrams, mentor in different ways to both Lindelof and Bird, and it doesn't work in Tomorrowland at all.

The film is a punishing 130 minutes, and most of that is taken up with the endless second act, in which Casey drives from Florida to Texas to New York all while failing to learn things that could speed the film up considerably. That's not fair, actually. I mean, it absolutely is fair - the movie would be cleaner, faster, and more engaging if Athena and Frank would just fucking tell Casey what she eventually finds out. And we'd have a sense of the conflict sooner than 90 minutes into the movie, which would be nice, in this children's film from Disney. But it's not fair because the film also suffers from unneeded bloat: there's a trip to Paris that could be written out of the script with the barest amount of work, and several other moments that could be snugged up and shortened. The film could fly and get to the collapsing Tomorrowland well before the one-hour mark; instead it creeps and drags, with the heftiness of an epic but the simplicity of message movie for kids and parents to share. It's a terrible combination of flavors, and it makes a solid 40 minutes of the film seem to exist for no reason other than to keep the good parts as far separate as the filmmakers dared.

It's a pity that the script is so puffy, because a lot of Tomorrowland is really quite lovely: the design is terrific, Bird's adoration of mid-century science fiction is so palpable that it almost veers into self-parody (at one point, it does just that: there's a trip to a curiosity shop selling geek-friendly trinkets that's very little more than a delivery system for in-jokes), and the ingenuity of some of the setpieces both at the level of conception and visual execution is fun and playful. Clooney plays a snappish old man well enough, and Robertson and Cassidy are two absolutely indispensable discoveries - neither of them a "discovery" per se (it's not even Robertson's first leading role - she was in the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Longest Ride earlier in 2015. Though I imagine that Tomorrowland probably shot first), but given exemplary showcase roles her that make a strong argument for how much we should all want to follow both actors in the future.

All of the ingredients of the film are there, and many parts of it are beguiling summer movie candy; it's just not a great story. The beginning I liked, even for all its saccharine sentiment; the end I liked, even for its contrivance and one hellaciously stretched-out death scene. The middle, though, is nothing but an endurance test. I'm not even sure that the middle is what there's the most of it, but God knows it feels that way, and that's exactly the problem.

6/10

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CHILDHOOD DREAMS

A review requested by Vianney B, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. This was the opening film of the 48th Cannes International Film Festival, on 17 May, 1995 - more on the 1995 Cannes Festival project.

The two biggest problems with 1995's The City of Lost Children are that Delicatessen came out before it, and Amélie came out after it. And I concede that this is the least-fair way to go about the business of film criticism, but it's still hard to shake the sense that everything the film does well - and it does many things well - other films by the members of its directing team also do, as well or better (it's also heavily indebted to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but if we're going to start shitting on all the movies that crib from Brazil, we might as well not even bother having movies with production design).

The film is the second and last movie directed by Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet, before the lure of Hollywood's Alien: Resurrection drew Jeunet to America and broke up the team (though Caro did help with the visual design of that film). And while the thinness of animator & comic book artist Caro's film career in the 20 years since leads a lot of us into the habit of acting like there's a straight line between this and the rest of Jeunet's career, that's a mistake, particularly in this case. There's a profound tonal difference between Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children on the one hand, and everything Jeunet made by himself on the other. A kind of nightmare veneer covers the first two, not in the sense that the films are horrifying or disturbing, but that they present places which feel mean and dangerous in ways that can be neither predicted nor redirected. While Jeunet's solo work is more boisterous, carnivalesque, and sentimental; even his Alien film is more chipper and upbeat than Delicatessen, a pitch black comedy about cannibalism, or City of Lost Children, a movie about a child kidnapping ring whose plot leaps around in such arbitrary bursts that it comes close to Surrealism, the aggressive sort where we're meant to be in a constant state of mental disarray while we're watching it.

What can never be said is that it's not exactly the film that Caro and Jeunet intended for it to be, or at least so I assume. There are no moments in The City of Lost Children that feel accidental, and the film's mise en scène is so hermetically sealed off that every single thing we see onscreen has to be regarded as a deliberate choice. The result is a movie that is first and foremost an exercise in design. Not just the production design, by Caro and Jean Rabasse, though it is impossible to see the movie and not first notice this; nor the character design, and it does seem that "character design" is the more correct term to use than "costumes and makeup", given how much the film starts from the ground and goes up in making its human figures feel like extensions of the world they inhabit, with Jean-Paul Gaultier's striking costumes defining the shape of the wearers as line objects, growing out of the lines of the set design and erupting in the comic grotesques of the faces of all the characters in the story. I swear it's not just knowing Caro's background in cartooning that leads me to suggest that The City of Lost Children resembles French comics come to life; not the soft, kid-friendly kind like Asterix, but the more graphically sleek and otherworldly sort drawn by artists like Moebius.

It's this sense, that the film has been assembled according to the principles of graphic art rather than movie directing, that most sets The City of Lost Children apart from all the movies I started off by comparing it to, and makes it a genuinely important film to hunt out and watch. It feels like concept art come to life, in way that's arresting and genuinely exciting to look at. But you'll notice that other than the phrase"kidnapping ring", I haven't said a word about the plot, and other than vague handwaving about the way it subscribes the narrative logic of a nightmare, nothing about the way it feels. Which is exactly "the problem", though I don't know that the movie labors on believing that this is something it's doing wrong. Still, it's the reason that I prefer Delicatessen, with its clear command of tone throughout, and its straightforward narrative development, or Amélie, which in some ways is just as self-contained as The City of Lost Children, but is light and sweet-natured enough that it doesn't seem so locked away from us as viewers. There's a story here, written by the directors & Gilles Adrien, and it's even a bit of a complicated one that's interesting to follow with, even though it doesn't really make sense until the last thirty minutes or so start to provide the whys behind all these weird beings we've been following. The approximate shape of it is that there's an oil rig outside of a port town, and on this rig lives Krank (Daniel Emilfork), a balding mad scientist who's all lab coat and gangly limbs, the little woman Mlle. Bismuth (Mireille Mossé), six dimwitted clones (all played by Dominique Pinon, who has been in every one of Jeunet's films), and Uncle Irving, a brain in a tank (voiced by Jean-Louis Trintignant). Krank has been kidnappign children from the town to steal their dreams, and one of his latest acquisitions is the adopted brother of One (Ron Perlman, speaking French phonetically), a strongman who sets himself to the task of finding the lost children, aided by the little girl Miette (Judith Vittet), an escapee from a ring of orphan thieves controlled by a cruel pair of conjoined twins (Geneviève Brunet and Odile Mallet).

Straightforward enough, though the way the story develops is so heavily based in innuendo and mysteries that don't pay off for half the running time that it's all much more of a "just go along for the ride" experience than it sounds. It's the kind of film that doesn't make the smallest attempt to win you over to its side; if you aren't immediately grabbed by the demented look of its world, there's nothing in the first ten minutes that's going to convince you to stick with it. And this is by no means a world that tries to be inviting: it's made up suffocatingly close buildings that all feel like they're about to collapse and villains who are queasily bio-mechanical, like the abandoned concepts from a David Cronenberg children's film. Darius Khondji shoots all of it in a patina of mouldering greens that makes even the decayed look of his other 1995 film, Se7en, seem cheery. Now, I happen to find the look of the film utterly captivating, even as I wish that the film attached to that look had a bit more oxygen. If the visuals don't work for the individual, then the whole thing is done: Delicatessen is a better nightmare, even if it's less audaciously visual, and the visceral reactions it provokes are more sustained. Still, there are so many utterly unforgettable images here - the storybook illustration feeling of the sea and the oil rig, the flea's-eye view of the damp alleys of the town, the opening scene in which the clones stage a travesty of Christmas to attempt to cheer up the child they're kidnapping - that I'd still have to urge the movie on everybody I could. It's not always successful at being a thoroughly sui generis demented dreamscape and bedtime story bone dark, but it always tries to be, and that kind of unrestrained commitment is a precious thing.

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THE MAXIMUM FORCE OF THE FUTURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10/10

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

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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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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: YOUR A.I. WANTS TO KILL YOU

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the Walt Disney Company is about to make a ridiculous sum of money on a movie about an artificial intelligence that goes violent, using the best and brightest visual effects available, in Avengers: Age of Ultron. They've done this before, absent the "ridiculous sum of money" part.

The whole matter of Disney's desperate attempt to court a teenage audience in the wake of Star Wars resulted in some of the most batty movies in that studio's history, but even within that company, 1982's TRON is particularly weird. It's brazenly marketing-driven: the conceit was transparently to tap into the new vogue for science fiction and simultaneously the even newer vogue for these "video games" that were apparently a big deal. And if that's not hook enough, the film is also a self-conscious landmark in the history of visual effects: it was the first feature with extensive use of computer-generated scenery and objects, about 15 minutes' worth. It was as shameless a piece of bandwagon-hopping and spectacle-first filmmaking as you could hope for then or anytime in the intervening three decades and change, blindly commercial in every way. And yet it's so deranged in every aspect of its conception and execution that you'd never, for a minute, think that the people who made it had even the smallest commercial designs.

TRON is a baffling mixture of tech arcana with computer science so far off the charts that it's infinitely more fair to call this a fantasy than anything else, grafted onto a script that's at its best when it's ridden with clichés - at it's worst, you can't even make out what the story is meant to be. The opening 15 minutes, for example, throw a seemingly random collection of moments at us, first diving inside the circuits of an arcade cabinet to show the gameplay affecting the software inside as a real life-and-death struggle, and then zipping rather recklessly over to a hacker, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), using a computer program named CLU to dig into some unspecified files, which consists of a humanoid CLU - who looks just like Flynn - interacting with a three-dimensional environment representing the interior of a computer system. Or maybe it really is three-dimensional, only you have to be microscopically small to perceive it. By the time we even start to process what's going on, we've arrived at Ed Dillinger (David Warner), former software engineer and current head of ENCOM, speaking to a self-aware program he's developed called the Master Control Program (which talks with Warner's voice) about Flynn's intrusions into their network. And then we stumble into ENCOM engineers Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) and Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan), without having received any idea of what's going on or how things fit together. That's not an unfair strategy, of course: the idea, I'd imagine, was to pique our interest by making things just unclear enough that we wouldn't be able to contain our sense of curiosity.

But the effect is nothing remotely so elegant: the opening quarter-hour is a murky mess that at once explains things in far too exhaustive detail (using the good old "let's discuss this thing that we both know about already" trick) while leaving everything that's actually important for a single exposition dump delivered by Bridges at full speed with minimal artfulness. It's difficult to put into words the perplexing way that TRON mixes incredibly blunt explanations with maddeningly obtuse loose ends - the kind of film that establishes the villains are evil by letting them swap lines like "You're becoming brutal, and needlessly sadistic." / "Thank you.", but never actually clarifying out what the villains do, other than run a dystopian dictatorship for the hell of it. Director and co-writer Steve Lisberger, an independent animator who originated the idea when he hit upon the world and visual effects concepts, had the exact sort of career before and after TRON that equips one to do many things that aren't tell a story or communicate ideas clearly, and his film suffers mightily from those flaws. It's easy enough to say that a world in which computer programs of every sort are sapient humanoids in a physical space of buildings and canyons doesn't "make sense"; but even once you've bought in to that as a requirement of the film's plot, TRON's world is perplexingly inconsistent in some of the places where the plot depends on it the most. Particularly regarding how much the programs know about their Users, and vice versa. The film ends up as a rather off-kilter religious allegory, on top of all its other quirks (it even updates the idea of throwing the faithful into a gladiatorial arena, in more or less precisely those terms), and failing to clarify what relationship the characters have to their gods makes it immensely hard to take that part seriously.

That's a lot of energy devoted to proving the thesis "TRON has a shitty script", which is about as uncontroversial a claim about this movie as I could possibly have made. That's not to say that the film is without its charms, though they're not as pronounced as in its 28-years-later sequel, TRON: Legacy, which is better at being a Daft Punk music video than TRON is at being anything. Still, while its visual effects have aged laughably poorly, the original movie can be quite lovely to look at, particularly since its CGI isn't trying to represent anything more realistic than 1982-era CGI. That is to say, it makes sense that the virtual world inside an early '80s computer would look rather monotone and blocky. It even seems right that the characters (shot in black and white with hand-colored details on their costumes) would feel so jerkily disconnected from their setting (animated backdrops, for the most part) - it adds to the synthetic feeling. If nothing else, TRON does a splendid job of presenting a disconcerting otherworld, one that poor Flynn never quite figures out - oh, right, Flynn ends up getting zapped by a laser while he's trying to hack the Master Control Program, where he meets up with Alan's anti-MCP security program TRON and they journey through a computer hellscape to get some kind of uplink with Alan. But mostly production and costume design happens, interspersed with visual effects, and given a disconcerting sonic texture by some really impressive sound work and a wonderfully unnatural electronic score by Wendy Carlos, as obvious a choice for this job in 1982 as Daft Punk was in 2010.

At a certain point, TRON's eerily smooth surfaces and harsh contrasts of primary colors simply end up working as purely abstract experience: colored shapes interacting with each other in a network of oddly soothing sounds, considering how grating they are. Given the inventive, strange workarounds the filmmakers had to go through to execute their ideas, workarounds that would almost immediately become unnecessary, no film has ever been obliged to look like this, so no film ever has (certainly not its own sequel). Most films that rely on their outdated visual effects tend to benefit from being seen through a certain haze, but not this: the bleedingly crisp delineations of lines and colors available in high definition end up leaving TRON look quite beautiful, for all its limited palette and omnipresent darkness. Don't think of it as a story, but an exercise in hue, geometry, and textures ranging from ethereal glossiness to intense grain, and it's downright pleasant.

That doesn't excuse how much of a life-sucking slog it is to get to the point that Flynn gets sucked into the computer. It is a deathly long first act, with nothing but Bridges's demented energy and Warner's ever-reliable voice to provide anything that even marginally distracts from how stupid and aimless everything that we're watching is. That's the problem with style-driven movies: you can't ease up on the style for even a second, and TRON spends so much time wallowing in the most utterly boring tripe that it's largely burned off any possible reservoir of audience goodwill even before it does anything to earn it.

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THE BACK OF BEYOND

This review is dedicated to Father Chris J., whose dogged persistence in wanting me to review this movie has been incredible - and entirely justified, as I have finally learned.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is the sort of film that makes one badly want to start listing out all its apparent influences and the other movies it's copying from. Not as a way of proving that writer-director Panos Cosmatos's solitary feature to date is derivative, but the exact opposite - as a way of finding some way to get one's hands fully around the unrelentingly strange and inexplicable thing, making some first effort to crack open the Oh my God, what was this?-ness of it. You know, be able to happily declare that this bit here is reminiscent of Michael Mann's The Keep (a conscious influence Cosmatos acknowledges), that bit there of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (which he does not). Unluckily, one of the most clear-cut influences, or at least one of the best comparisons, is the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky, which is less a clarification of what, exactly, the film is going on about, and more a good way to generally indicate the specific flavor of dazzling inscrutability it favors.

Duly recapping the plot isn't much good either, since it suggests a level of concrete stability that's not really at play, but let's go for it anyway: as we see in an opening film reel, Dr. Mercurio Arboria (Scott Hylands) founded an institute in the 1960s which he named after himself, dedicated to bridging the caps between psychology and spirituality. By 1983, Arboria is now run by Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers), a tetchy and dark figure in all the ways that Dr. Arboria was idealistic and warm. Nyle's chief interest is a young woman named Elena (Eva Allan), whom he keeps in a foggy state in near-isolation in a softly-lit white room. Here, he interrogates her on a routine basis, not for an apparent interest in learning anything beyond how to push her buttons, and possibly how to trigger and exploit her psychic capabilities.

That being said, the appeal of Beyond the Black Rainbow lives entirely within the ways that its scenario is reflected and explored through its visuals and Jeremy Schmidt's droning music, and not really how that scenario develops as a narrative (which is for the record, largely trite when it's not befuddling). Like Jodorowsky, or Andrei Tarkovsky in his explicit genre films, Cosmatos is playing a game here of making emotional states and philosophical concepts concrete by means of visuals. Insofar as it is a film about the mental condition of being drugged into a state of confusion and inability to express oneself - and having slept on it, I think that's the best I've got - it depicts that through a series of heavily stylised and impenetrable shots that use color and focus to convey abstract feeling. And thus, like Jodorowsky, the film sits on a line between the categories of "narrative" and "experimental" film that's hard to parse. It's not always totally successful in splitting the difference - its late lunge towards psycho killer horror is odd, to say the least - but invariably fascinating and stunningly visual. I do not say "beautiful", since part of the film's conceit is to lather everything in a grainy, broken-down look that suggests a piece of '70s psychedelia that unnervingly accurately predicted the fashion of the 1980s, and hasn't been seen since the solitary, ratty print was passed around in underground film circles.

But oh, how very striking it is in every way. The film uses enormous solid swatches of colored lighting, reds and blues mostly, which create intense and discomfiting feelings of artifice and wrongness, especially when combined with the massively interesting faces of Rogers and Allan - the former, in particular, has a wan appearance that suggests Christian Bale playing a dessicated tortoise, and it's a very appropriate fit for his inhuman excitement about turning his dull-eyed prisoner into a lab experiment. At other times, the film blasts out white and the palest of blues, which in combination with cinematographer Norm Li's fearlessly soft, shallow focus, offers the sense that the film is attempting to dissolve itself. The bold colors tend to center on Nyle, the whites on Elena, giving the whole film something of a codebook for reading itself: the one figure is otherworldly, Expressionistic terror, the other is diffuse and barely able to cling to a sense of distinct self. The contrast between these visual modes drives what I think to be the film's theme, though I concede that I'm guessing a little bit: attempting to define and explore the limitless potential and indestructibility of the human psyche by means of confining and destroying it leads only to cruelty and madness for all involved.

Not everything that Beyond the Black Rainbow does well is limited to camerawork and lighting: it has some wonderfully peculiar mise en scène, on top of it, a clear nod to the geometry of '70s sci-fi in things like the triangular prism Nyle uses to control Elena's mind. And there's a little bit of body horror in things like the reveal of certain characters' true appearances - one scene of a body disassembling itself predicting the three-years-younger Under the Skin so closely that I'm convinced that there has to be some degree of influence there (in fact, Under the Skin echoes Beyond the Black Rainbow more than a couple of times, and it's difficult for me to imagine a fan of the more popular 2013 film not responding to this one in somewhat similar terms) - or just plain normal horror in some of the dreamiest slasher-style killings I've seen in a 21st Century movie. And then there are things I can't even define, like the flashback to 1966 and a psychic breakdown - in all senses of "psychic" - that takes the form of an explosive short film of pure horror imagery cut together with balletic editing and camera, something like a tour of Hell's art gallery.

I'm tremendously excited by everything happening in this film, which is, as such things go, a success; though it's honestly hard for me to imagine how something so deliberately abstruse and driven by making short-term emotional impact over and over again for almost two hours could be a "failure" on its own terms, short of being boring. And that is certainly not the case. Still, it could not be any less idiosyncratic and willfully off-putting, and nothing this visually conceptual would ever manage to be generally well-liked outside of a tiny population of self-selecting viewers. It's anchored too deeply in genre to feel like a pure art film, but absolutely not enough of a conventional narrative to work as a genre film; it is a film for people who might call Stalker their favorite movie of all time if only it were more opaque. So, you know, a little audience, but a passionate one.

And of course, it's from Canada. Goddammit, Canada, always making the most fascinating and complicated horror and thriller movies all the time.

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BOTTOM OF THE SEVENTH

I do not, in general, believe in the phenomenon of actors being the solitary saving grace of an otherwise disposable movie, but I'll say this: Jeff Bridges is clearly the solitary reason that Seventh Son is an absolute blast of a bad movie, the kind that immediately upon departing, I wanted to start listing the names of everybody I knew that I had to force it on, and not just a slog through generic plotting and insultingly clumsy dialogue. I like to think that what happened is that they got through the first day of rehearsal, and after realising what kind of cod-Medieval RenFaire bullshit he'd gotten himself wrapped up in, Bridges decided "well fuck this", and concluded that if he could not act so well as to make the film good, at least he could act so poorly as to make the film hilarious. I have not yet figured out the proper way to describe the accent he's up to in this film, but it ranks right up alongside Dick Van Dyke's in Mary Poppins in the hallowed annals of Are You Supposed To Be From England? Because You Sound Like A Looney Tune. The closest I can come up with is that it sounds the Dude doing an impression of Woody Allen playing Sir John Falstaff. It's dumbfounding and precious and beautiful, particularly when he uses it to assault such Bizarro World dialogue as "Stone chuckers chuck stone, and cattle rippers rip cattle" or "There are witches that need killing. Fucking witches". The latter line doubling as the most wildly discordant swear word in a period movie in ages; it pleases me to assume that Bridges ad-libbed it.

At any moment when Bridges is onscreen, talking in his unplaceable drunken drawl, Seven Son is a triumph; the best comedy of the young 2015, and apt to remain that way for a long time. When he's not onscreen, things take an awfully precipitous tumble. There was some money thrown at this, no doubt, and you can see it in things like the shockingly good visual effects (not consistently so - there are some nasty, under-rendered and ill-composited beasties throughout), and Dante Ferretti's rich production design, creating a world that is physically plausible with visual hints of its own history and unexplored backstory like no high fantasy since The Lord of the Rings. It's like taking one of those hilariously crappy sword-and-sorcery pictures from the early '80s, and throwing money and resources at it that the genre had never witnessed, and no matter how rough the going gets, there's always something to look at with childlike admiration.

The going gets very rough, though. The story isn't particularly objectionable, just a by-the-numbers Chosen One story about Thomas Ward (Ben Barnes), the seventh son of a seventh son, and thus destined by God and numerology to be the ideal apprentice to Master Gregory (Bridges), the last of the "spooks", a line of holy soldiers tasked with rooting out the dark creatures throughout the land. The need for such an apprentice is dire: the once-a-century blood moon is about to rise, and it has freed from her prison in the bowels of the earth Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore), a powerful witch-queen who immediately sets to gathering her army, in order to use the power of the full blood moon to take over the world. But Thomas is a poor study, and he's far more interested in flirting with the mysterious Alice (Alicia Vikander) than do anything else, not suspecting (and probably not caring) that she's Malkin's niece and spy.

That's boring and overdone, sure, but nothing about that necessarily has to be very bad. That only creeps in because, for as much fun as Bridges is plainly having, and as ambitious and complex as Ferretti's sets go - and what the hell, let's throw Jacqueline West and her inventive Middle Ages BDSM couture for the witches - there's not another human soul involved besides those three who has anything but disinterest in the film they're all making. This is patently obvious with even a slight glance at the cast: given a chewy, flashy villain that should make for some splendid hamminess, Moore can barely be bothered to do more than spit out her overblown lines about being Evil and blood-this and blood-that; the CGI dragon she transforms into has infinitely more personality. Vikander can barely contain her disinterest in Barnes, who mistakes keeping his eyes very wide open for being innocent and overawed. Olivia Williams, in the thanklessly small role as Thomas's mother, puts in some effort to bring human warmth to the proceedings, but the proceedings do not want that, and spit her right back out.

The rot goes much deeper, though, all the way to the screenplay adapted by Charles Leavitt, Steven Knight, and Matt Greenberg from the first in a series of children's novels (there does not seem to be much of a fear that Seventh Son will end up sparking a franchise). In a stripped-down form, it seems perfectly, fine, but the way that the story ends up functioning as an aimless tour through underdeveloped aspects of its world proves to be a bit dispiriting; the effect isn't a Tolkienesque vistas-beyond-vistas feeling in which untold stories lurk behind every rock, but the sense that the writers kept throwing in unnecessary details to keep themselves from being bored. The central - in some ways, film-defining - relationship between Thomas and Alice is painfully underdeveloped, leaving an enormous hole that nothing could possibly fill.

Meanwhile, Sergei Bodrov directs with listless slack that benefits nothing and no-one other than Bridges, Marco Beltrami's score drones on in a generic fantasy mode, and Newton Thomas Sigel shoots everything in a rainy palette that almost gives a sense of dour gravity to the film, except that it lacks the dramatic weight to support that. It's outrageously dumb, reductive, and lazy, more boring than bad - but it is aggressively boring. Aye, Bridges comes along and gives exactly the right perversity to make things fun in a dippy, loopy way, and so the aggregate effect of Seventh Son is not, in fact, boredom. But it should take more than one actor trying to blow a movie up from the inside to make it worth watching.

3/10

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BY JOVE

To begin with, Jupiter Ascending is pulp sci-fi of a very ancient stripe, and it is utterly proud of that fact. It tells the story of a secret space princess, set against the machinations of evil space corporations who hire burly lizardmen with bat wings as their guards; characters have names like "Titus Abrasax" and "Stinger Apini" and the protagonist gets the suitably alliterative handle "Jupiter Jones". From the look of it, one can quickly assume that directors Andy and Lana Wachowski, costume designer Kym Barrett, and production designer Hugh Bateup all spend months poring over magazine and paperback covers from the '40s and '50s before one sketch was drawn or one line of dialogue was written. And then the Wachowskis perhaps used those covers for their storyboards.

It's derivative as all hell, and yet it's like absolutely nothing that has come around in years: an extravagantly costly effects-driven adventure tailor-made for the narrowest slice of middle-aged genre fanboys. The only recent films to operate in anything like the same mode both tried mightily to distance themselves from all the goofy, juvenile trappings of the genre in different ways: the infamous 2012 flop John Carter by treating everything with crushing solemnity and leaden ponderousness, the 2014 smash hit Guardians of the Galaxy by coating everything in a protective layer of self-mocking irony. No such distance is afforded Jupiter Ascending, which openly loves the corny bullshit it's referencing and wants to bring it to breathtakingly gorgeous life with all of the money the Wachowskis could spirit away from a surprisingly spend-happy Warner Bros. (I have to assume it's this difference - total irony vs. total sincerity - that accounts for GotG receiving critical praise and becoming an enormous financial success, while JA has found only critical scolding and audience indifference, since they're otherwise virtually indistinguishable as exceptionally effective Star Wars knock-offs). It is a film that combines a passionate desire to remain forever 12 years old with the giddy engagement with Big Ideas that is the primary unifying characteristic of the Wachowskis' filmography; it's less the follow-up to their maddeningly under-appreciated Cloud Atlas (a collaboration with Tom Tykwer, which maybe explains the difference) than to their candy-colored pixie stix orgasm Speed Racer with more immediate gratification and a slightly more adolescent than pre-teen worldview.

The story is at once galaxy-spanning and blunt enough that you could write it on a cocktail napkin. The short version: Cinderella in space. Our hero is the aforementioned Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), born in the middle of the ocean while her single mother took her from Russia to the United States after the death of her English father, and now she actually does work as a maid. She's one of the cogs in the family business cleaning rich people's condos in Chicago (indulgent aside: the film makes spectacular use of Chicago's particular architecture and layout - nothing since The Dark Knight itself has been half so good in this respect), mostly stuck with the toilets for added indignation. But she is a Chosen One; the siblings of the unfathomably wealthy Abrasax family, a powerful dynasty of space industrialists, want her for their own reasons. Sister Kalique (Tuppence Middleton) and younger brother Titus (Douglas Booth) both seem to be at least kind of decent about it, but elder brother Balem (Eddie Redmayne), most powerful of the three, is extremely Bad News, with his all-black wardrobe, and his way of menacingly whispering theatrically.

He's the one who throws some terrifying skeletal beasts at her to kill her, from which she's saved by Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a bounty hunter with canid features just pronounced enough to not make Tatum look ugly. At which point we still know nothing, until Cain's earthbound alien friend Stinger (Sean Bean) discovers that she is, improbably, space royalty. Which is still rather more the start of things than the end of them: while it's a complete canard that Jupiter Ascending has a significantly complicated plot (everything important gets repeated, at least once), it does have an awfully overstuffed one, and it can hardly set up Jupiter as the resurrection of the Abrasax materfamilas fast enough to get to its galactic soap opera and dynastic wrangling.

It's neither elegant nor sophisticated, but the rush I, for one, got from following around all the story turns hits exactly the right beats: at its best, it's like a slightly dumber iteration of Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe, at its worst, it's still got the manic "we just escape from something that wants to kill us, but there's something else that wants to kill us even more!" pacing of a trashy adventure, mixed with fairy tale melodrama: one of the two climaxes hinges on a thrilling cross-cut race to interrupt a wedding with a scheming Victorian-style villain. Throughout, the Wachowski's script, and their direction of the actors wielding sometimes unmentionable lines, strikes a tasty mixture of taking itself deadly seriously when it has to for the sake of world-building, but openly and even arrogantly owning up to how very, very silly it can all be. So when the film needs us to believe in its batshit religion of genetics - or at least believe that the characters believe it - it presents reams of crazed technobabble (only Kunis, of the main cast, gets away without having to manage any walls of impenetrable text) with unblinking seriousness and gaping fascination. But when it wants to be a gorgeously over-designed piece of nonsensical eye candy, it can happily pull back and breezily let the movie be loopy fun, and so we get things like the wonderfully choreographed aerial fight over downtown Chicago that ends the film's... first act? Second? It's got a weird number of acts. It's fast paced and zippily edited, but slows down and backs off enough that there's never a point where it's confusing, and it all takes place from dusk to twilight, beautifully captured by cinematographer John Toll.

There are some absolutely unnecessary missteps, including a brutal shift from the first finale into the second, a weird reboot that has the feel of combining a planned sequel into the first film as insurance against not getting to make another one (which turns out to have been wise), and the actors are all over the map, from Redmayne's straight-up '30s matinee serial hamming to Tatum's quiet bafflement (only Bean, out of the whole cast, gives a clear-cut, classically "good" performance). And it's not apologetic for being a gee-whiz bit of fast-paced fluff, which makes it incredibly hard to suggest that it has any business being watched by sensible people who care about depth, weight, and emotions (Exhibit B: the awkward fumbling of everything that has anything to do with the love story between Jupiter and Cain). So I get why somebody would find it intolerably trashy. But set that against the sheer enormousness of its spectacle, its passionate respect for the highest and lowest achievements of its genre, its dazzlingly overwrought visuals, its vigorous post-John Williams score by Michael Giacchino, and I just cannot convince myself that I didn't have an enormous amount of fun.

8/10

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