TO BECOME IMMORTAL AND THEN DIE

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

Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 debut feature and declaration of war Breathless* is a curious case. In hindsight, everything that is most daring about it would be repeated to stronger effect in more interesting movies overall by the same director - most directly in Band of Outsiders and Pierrot le fou, though almost everything he made throughout the 1960s reworks some element of his debut - which makes it frankly a wee bit harder to regard it with the same esteem that besotted critics and cinephiles did when it was brand new.And yet, this is The One. The single movie that you need to see and grapple with if you're going to have a reckoning with Godard's first phase, and arguably with the entirety of French cinema in that decade (arguably with any of the European New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s, of which the French New Wave that Breathless co-created with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows was the wellspring). It's indisputably on the shortlist (the top ten, let's say) of Movies You Need To See if you're going to have a proper conception of cinema history and the potential of cinematic form. So even while my heart says that we should care more about Band of Outsiders or Contempt or Masculin féminin, my head says not to be fucking daft.

The place: Paris in the '60s. The time: America during Prohibition. Here we meet self-identified bastard Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a young man who has certainly built most of his personality from a steady diet of B-grade Hollywood crime pictures, not unlike the writer-director who created him. He's apparently some kind of a real criminal, though you could be forgiven for supposing it's all an overbaked fantasy in his noir-soaked head, and he's also a loudmouth given to braggadocio and toxic sexism. Who's to say if we're supposed to admire him or find him absurdly hateful: the camera insinuates us right along side him, Belmondo's prickly acting and the relentlessly, self-consciously disagreeable things he keeps saying repel us, and the editing by Cécile Decugis, famously, doesn't much intend that we regard him as a real character at all: he's a dude in a movie with the misfortune to somewhat suspect that's the case, which leads him to act far too much like a movie character. And this is partially to blame for why he shoots a cop during a drive in the country.

I hope it says more about the film than my inattentiveness when I declare that, having seen Breathless God knows how many times now (I went to film school, and I'm a self-professed Godard fan - that's good for at least six viewings right there), and remembering with great fondness that it's the first of Godard's gangster movie riffs, I am infallibly surprised to remember that the entire plot hinges on Michel's murder of a cop. It's just not that kind of movie, except that of course it very much is - the rest of the film down to the last scene all revolves around the detectives hunting Michel down and ultimately getting their hooks into visiting American student Patricia (Jean Seberg), possibly the most important of his current paramours; she's the co-lead of the film, but at the same time they don't really seem to like each other very much, the evidence of the signature bedroom scene notwithstanding. But I'm going all out of order.

It is so deeply tempting and dangerously easy to lock in and adore Breathless for all its little flair: the popular introduction of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous technique of the jump cut, which I think we typically remember as showing up during a car ride that gets propelled ahead in an attempt to make it seem artificially exciting and tense, with the full aid and comfort of Martial Solal's pounding jazz-influenced score. But that's at least the third major scene involving jump cutting, and the other two are both conversations, one between Michel and another one of his girlfriends (it just so happens to be right after Michel mentions his recent work at famed movie studio Cinécitta), one between Patricia and the editor nudging her journalism career forward, both relatively banal. I wouldn't suggest anything so trite as to say that the jump cutting is the film's attempt to hurry us through the dully quotidian scenes that shouldn't even be in a nervy gangster thriller in the first place, but I wouldn't tell you not to make that claim for them.

Or there's the brilliant way that the killing of the cop is shot, with close-ups of the gun and the unsynchronised sound of an gunshot, immediately followed by a scene moments later - the jarring image editing and discontinuous sound standing in as surrogates for the act of violence instead of that act being depicted (both times a human being is murdered with a gun in Breathless, the sound of the gunshot does not match the onscreen imagery. Just a fun thing to be aware of). Which would easily lead us to the film's bravura use of sound editing, which for my money is the far bolder aspect of Breathless's aesthetic developments, though the film editing was more quickly, more widely copied. And then I would talk about the floating, ghostly voices in the scene with a great, famous author (played by New Wave progenitor Jean-Pierre Melville) being peppered with high-minded but insipid philosophical questions leading to purposefully shitty answers ("Rilke was a great poet, so undoubtedly right" is his considered response to some journalist's "look how I did my research!" moment), and maybe the way that the score keeps jolting its way into the movie, mostly but not always motivated by the onscreen action.

The mistake I have personally had in the past with doing that is to lose the forest for the trees: Breathless is not just the sum of Godard's aesthetic. And it is here, I think, that something on the order of Masculin féminin argues for itself as an improvement over Godard's debut, since that film more clearly demonstrates the reason for its aesthetic rather than simply wandering, as Breathless occasionally does, into "look at me, I can be formally outrageous for the sake of it!" territory.

So let's not indulge that limited reading, huh? Step back from the jump cutting and the sound, from Seberg's stiff French and Belmondo's posing for the camera, from the litany of Hollywood genre film references and in-jokes, and Breathless does in fact take on quite a distinctive shape. It's not just Godard's riff on gangster movies of both the American and French tradition, and not even just his riff on the kind of young people so infatuated with pop culture that they'd fall into the trap of defining their identity in terms of the movies they enjoy most. Though that's getting us closer.

It's really nothing else but the first in a chain of films where Godard is interested in youth itself, the issue of how young, or at least young-ish individuals manage to find their way around a quickly globalising world whose values are evolving at a startling rate. For Michel, this means retrenching to an archly conservative, performance-based notion of masculinity, and the whole movie bends itself around him - though by no means does it do so uncritically - and eschewing the real world in favor of the fantastic one he thinks of in movies.

Reality, in the form of aesthetic realism, insists on pushing its way through; I return us to that bedroom scene, in which a film constructed out of three- and four-minute blasts of narrative propulsion jams on the brakes for 23 minutes as Michel surprises Patricia in her hotel, they have sex, they discuss art insofar as his dickish, petulant refusal to take her questions seriously permits. The editing slows down, the lighting (from cinematographer Raoul Coutard) turns ragged and rough, the setting becomes almost sublimely unexceptional and devoid of storytelling momentum. It's like the "other" New Wave, the one by Truffaut (who co-wrote this film) and Rohmer, based in languid humanistic moments of unadorned conversation pushes its way into Godard's more manic, formalist New Wave for the duration of a whole act. But for the most part, the film permits Michel his fantasy, even though it requires him to be betrayed by a woman who seems a little perplexed herself why she's been obliged to be a femme fatale in the film's glorious final shot, a deeply ambivalent close-up on Seberg's face that ends with her turning her back on us.

The jarring and groundbreaking post-modernism of the filmmaking - Breathless is not the first movie that is aware that it's a movie and which acts to make sure we're aware that it's a movie (that's not even an invention of the sound era), but it's the film that kickstarted that as a tradition that has never since gone fully into hibernation - isn't, then, simply a radical response to the hidebound aesthetics of the bulk of post-war French cinema. Of course it's partly that. To assert otherwise would be to deny the volumes of Godard's own writing at this time, when he was still a critic at the legendary Cahiers du cinéma. But the aesthetic violence of the film is also an attempt to encapsulate the rage of its characters, whose youthful energy is given no functional outlet, and so must explode somehow. Within the world of the film, that means destroying the traditional structures of cinema. In the real world, that meant the increasing unrest of the '60s that resulted in the May 1968 protests across Europe - and while I'll not be such a Godardian as to claim that he could predict those protests were coming, any quick glance at his films in '67 - Week End, La chinoise - and their continued development of the self-destruction begun with Breathless suggests that the nascent youthful resentment of this film had continued festering and growing ever bolder, more radical, and more intense. As much as they're any one thing, Godard's films are deliberate diagnoses of the era in which he made them, and Breathless is as precise an identification of the culture of the '60s-to-come as I have seen in the movies.

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DO YOU WANNA KNOW A SECRET?

A second review requested by Zev Burrows, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

In his two-volume collection of lyrics and personal recollections, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat, Stephen Sondheim acknowledges that among his impressive corpus of skills, the ability to construct a dramatic narrative has eluded him. He has been blessed with strong collaborators to write the books for "his" shows, but a playwright he has never been.

There has been only one original story co-written by Sondheim produced, in fact, and it's not a theatrical piece. In the early 1970s, he and Anthony Perkins - it's his only writing credit as well - collaborated on a on a screenplay for a film that was ultimately directed by Herbert Ross and released by Warner Bros. in 1973, The Last of Sheila. It's an old-school murder mystery written by obvious genre enthusiasts, and it's a solid piece of work, neat and clean in all its particulars. But it also doesn't really dispel Sondheim's belief that writing great scripts isn't a strong suit. There's a certain mechanical soullessness to the way the story unfurls and how the characters are built into it that, at any rate, doesn't show off the natural skill of its co-writers. Sondheim and Perkins wrote two later screenplays that were never filmed, which is a pity: it seems fully possible that they grew more comfortable as they went along, for The Last of Sheila has all the earmarks of a promising first attempt by a pair of first-timers mostly concerned with proving they could get ideas down on paper, and with the jitters worked out of their systems, they could build on its foundation.

The scenario is deliberately contrived: a year after the death of his columnist wife Sheila (Hammer vet Yvonne Romain, cameoing in the swell opening scene), movie producer Clinton Greene (James Coburn) reunites the six friends who were his guests the night of the hit-and-run accident that widowed him. These include director Philip Dexter (James Mason), screenwriter Tom Parkman (Richard Benjamin) and his wife Lee (Joan Hackett), the only person at the party who's not a film professional (and this will later prove to be, if not "important", then at least a nice grace note), movie star Alice Wood (Raquel Welch) and her manager husband Anthony (Ian McShane), and agent Christine (Dyan Cannon). On Clinton's gigantic yacht off the coast of the French Riviera, he announces the rules for the Sheila Greene Memorial Gossip Game: each of the guests are assigned a secret - a piece of fake gossip - and on each of the trip's six nights, they'll go on a scavenger hunt in a different port town to uncover one of those secrets. The night's game ends when the individual whose secret is the subject of the hunt finds the proof, hopefully before any of the other five have already done so.

It's tough to describe, because it's frankly pretty damn convoluted, and that's the mechanical soullessness I had in mind. For much of his life, Sondheim had delighted in constructing absurdly elaborate mystery games for his friend, and these games only grew more ambitious once Perkins started helping him construct them in the 1960s. The Last of Sheila is in great part an attempt to memorialise these games on celluloid, and the momentum-deadening scene where Clinton explains the fussy rules to the partygoers comes straight out of that impulse. It is not a sequence that grows elegantly and organically out of characters; we haven't even really met the characters yet. This is nothing but showing off on the part of authors who are really proud of the ingenuity of their mechanism and want to make sure that we notice how conspicuously Written it is, right down to the sound of typewriter keys clacking at the beginning and ending.

This is, for good and ill, a major component of the screenplay. Not that it's a two-hour exercise in Stephen and Tony showing off, exactly; but it is very tangibly the result of people who love making and solving murder mysteries. It's very rare to find a mystery film - by the way, what ends up happening is that Clinton ends up dead on the second night, and everyone quickly concludes that it must have been the one who mowed down Sheila that night last year who killed him, and it then turns into a tense yachtbound stand-off as everyone starts to suspect everyone else - that's so conscientious in its construction to make sure that all the clues you need to figure the movie out are right there in plain sight, without foregrounding any of them with a neon sign reading "THIS IS A !!CLUE!!" Not even with a scene that finds Clinton grandly announcing, in almost so many words, "you can figure out everything just from the details presented in this scene". And I confess that I didn't figure out the movie and wasn't really interested in trying to. But that is, kind of, the point: it's an immaculately made puzzle that is damned proud to dot every i and cross every t, not like all of those other mysteries that hinge on an unpredictable twist (viz. The Sting, which came out later the same year).

That leads to a movie that's undeniably a bit chilly: the writers were so busy making sure the mystery was structurally airtight that they missed out on crafting rich, deep characters, or giving them anything but the most ordinary relationships to each other. This doesn't end up ruining the movie almost entirely because of the efforts of a number of people to make sure that interesting human wrinkles are saved from the gears of the plot: obviously one of these is Ross, whose direction has never been peppier in any of his films that I've seen (which isn't even half of them, and "peppier than Funny Lady" is one of the easiest bars to clear ever), and so are most of the cast, but it would be bad form to overlook production designer Ken Adam (miles away from the florid fantasy of his Bond fortresses), art director Tony Roman, and set decorator John Jarvis, for building a well-stocked box of little details and red herrings, and for the staging of Clinton's two successfully-executed and highly baroque puzzle rooms, and for augmenting the inherent loveliness of north Mediterranean architecture without feeling like they're gilding the lily. Hell, I'd even have to tip my hat to costume designer Joel Schumacher - that Joel Schumacher) - for the niceties of showing who has money and prestige, versus who had money and prestige through fashion. (I do not know who out of all the possibilities deserves credit for the strangulation via clown puppets climax, but they are a hero to me).

But back to Ross, whose aggressive show-off touches are few and far between, but are all the better for it. The opening sequence, the night Sheila died, is maybe the most elegant, impressive part of the movie: the camera follows Romain as she's obscured by people, plants, sheets of distorted class. It's easy to presume that this must be Sheila, but the film puts so much energy into hiding anything about her that it starts building up tension and mystery right away. There are other sharp visual moments: Clinton descending out of frame on a lifeboat as he finishes a florid monologue, or a hunt for clues inside an old monastery, setting up a stuffy, dark space that helps the artful misdirection that ends up taking place there, and which we see elucidated late on in flashbacks.

As for the cast, it's a collection of people who aren't, like great great - only Mason and Coburn had a truly impressive body of work in '73, and only McShane has come anywhere close to forming one since - but who have spirit and energy and dive into the one-note characterisations with a good eye to fleshing them out. Cannon especially; and when there is a film with Dyan Cannon and James Mason in it, and Cannon gives the better performance, we've entered some kind of mirror universe. But she gives maybe the most blunt and uninteresting of the characters a loopy, electric sense of presence; that's a hell of a lot. The only person whose performance falls short is Welch: she was angry and combative on set, by all accounts (including her own), and that seeps into the performance, which is all sharp angles and spikes in places that keep the other actors at bay, rather than the other characters, if you feel me.

Outside of her, the cast is having enough fun cruising the Riviera and play-acting detectives that their energy turns contagious: while the emphasis on problem-solving is enough to make The Last of Sheila fun for fans of mystery paperbacks, it takes a bit more of the human sparkle that the cast provides to make it fun for the rest of us. It's never more than a lark, but it's at least two different kinds of larks designed for two different audiences, and it's pretty damn good at both of them.

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A HELL OF A TOWN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: YOUR MISSION, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT

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: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation continues the unexpected late flowering of a TV-derived spy franchise into its best self. Is it not right, then, to take a look back to that franchise's beginnings?

There's an elephant in the room that two decades haven't gotten rid of: the 1996 feature film Mission: Impossible commits to a twist at the three-quarter mark that serves almost no purpose other than to thoroughly and pointlessly piss off anybody committed to the 1966-'73 American TV series Mission: Impossible to enough of a degree that the movie's title would function as a draw. There's damn little about the movie that capitalises on that connection: the plot, attitude, and even the genre are all completely different from the show, although obviously any movie that gets to include Lalo Schifrin's glorious theme music will benefit from doing so. So why do it? The character involved is enough of a non-entity within the film in and of itself that any subversive bite goes awry. The commentary on post-Cold War aimlessness in the intelligence community is identical if you change that character's name and thus avoid the whole bloody affair. All it really does is telegraph a lazy contempt for the property and its fanbase, and even if Mission: Impossible had no other flaws - and it certainly has other flaws - this would be enough to keep me from ever particularly cottoning to it, for I am indeed quite a fan of the show. And also, for some reason, I've spent all my energy so far trying like mad not to spoil a movie that came out two full generations of movie audiences ago, but it's a good habit to keep.

Despite its thorough and conscious rejection of the show it was based on, this was ground zero for the trend of strip-mining classic TV for new action tentpoles (most of the previous TV-to-film adaptations during the 1990s had been sitcoms turned into the movie version of sitcoms), and I will concede that the film's enormous financial success is easy to comprehend: the parts of this film that work, work really damn well, most especially but not only its instantly-iconic thriller sequence that finds Tom Cruise suspended from the ceiling of an austere white room while trying to silently hack a computer. The film kicked off one of the 21st Century's most interesting (even in its worst entries) action franchises, but Mission: Impossible is not itself all that much of an action movie: it's much more interested in plumbing the paranoia that attends to the life of a super-ultra double-top-secret spy, which it does through some elaborately staged moments of high tension that are frequently communicated through mundane speech and character beats.

"Just like Hitchcock!" one might want to say, upon recognising that M:I was directed by Brian De Palma, history's most famed Hitchock impersonator, but by 1996, he'd largely worked that out of his system, and the film is working in a different vein than that. This is still a big-budget studio movie, Paramount's big play for the summer, if not indeed the whole year (it ended up being the third-highest grosser of '96, behind the VFX tag-team of Independence Day and Twister), and it carries with a certain shallow gloss as a result of that. The incongruity of faces like Kristin Scott Thomas and Emmanuelle Béart (in, I believe, her only English-language film prior to 2014) cropping up in such an obvious Hollywood commercial play is one thing that might make us want to credit M:I with a little more artistic gravitas, as does the presence of De Palma, for that matter, clearly more interested personally in pulling at the wires inside a gigantic studio production than actually sitting down to make one like a good boy. These things are all to the credit of producer Cruise (his first project with Paula Wagner under their Cruise/Wagner banner), already at this point looking to start his fascinating project of tweaking, self-analysing, and inverting his superstar persona - Jerry Maguire came out later the same year, and his dates with Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson were next in line. But these things ultimately do not make Mission: Impossible any less of a '90s popcorn movie.

Nor, frankly, is it one of the better examples of such things. The blunt fact is that the story - credited to David Koepp and Steve Zaillian, with the finished script handled by Koepp and Robert Towne - is a bit of a shambling mess, bearing the unmistakable mark of a movie that was assembled from pieces of movies that were not made, with a couple of tremendously obvious loose ends (the most conspicuous being a Bible that serves as the clue to unlock the film's twist, but it makes absolutely no sense how it manages to do so), and a final act that takes the delicacy of the preceding 100 minutes and says "fuck it, just throw an exploding helicopter at it". De Palma's directing doesn't do much at all in the way of obviating these flaws, and it usually feels that he was more invested in pursuing ideas for the sake of it, than pursuing ideas for the sake of this exact movie. That pays off: Mission: Impossible is always at least interesting as an exercise in De Palma stylistics. The problem is that it is, frequently, only interesting as such an exercise.

But anyway, I should get around to the plot before I hit the 1000-word mark, even though in ignoring it I'm doing no worse than the movie. The Impossible Missions Force, a top-secret US government agency that solves the problems that can only be cracked with creativity, cunning, and extra-legal means, has lost a list of its agents' true identities, and top agent Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) and a team he's hand-picked have traveled to Prague to retrieve it. The team, including Ethan Hunt (Cruise), Sarah Davies (Scott Thomas), Jack Harmon (Emilio Estevez, uncredited), and Phelps's wife Claire (Béart), successfully infiltrate the American embassy in Prague, but the mission otherwise goes spectacularly wrong: starting with a sudden and shockingly gruesome death for Jack, the entire team except for Ethan ends up dead, a mere 26 minutes into the film. IMF director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) informs Ethan (rather stupidly, when it comes down to it) that this suggests to all involved that Ethan must therefore be the mole that the IMF was trying to smoke out with this mission, and so the agent now finds himself on the run to clear his name and find the real traitor, even if he has to enter the grey world of disavowed IMF agents and shady arms dealers to do it.

The scenario and tone split the difference neatly between the sour espionage realpolitik of John le Carré and the florid fantasies of James Bond, and that's by far the nicest thing I have it in me to say about Mission: Impossible as a story. The whole thing is so damnably confusing: not in the rewarding way where we're navigating a puzzle that snaps into place at the end as long as we've been paying full attention, but in the frustrating way where we only have to pay such close attention because the filmmakers made a huge mess of things. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the TV series's focus on group efforts to solve problems as a team of specialised experts; really, it's nothing but a spy-themed variant on the infinitely more satisfying The Fugitive from three years prior, subbing Cruise during an uncertain transitional phase for Harrison Ford at his peak powers. Like many an action film before or since - including all four of its own sequels to the date of this writing - it's primarily a scaffolding for setpieces, and it has the grave misfortune to end with by far the worst of its big three: a helicopter vs. train chase through a tunnel that suffers from all the idiotic bigness of popcorn cinema and lacks any grace in the filmmaking, on top of having primitive CGI that has aged unexpectedly poorly.

The other two are pretty great, though. The hacking scene I've touched on, but it's worth reiterating how well it uses deathly silence and uncomfortably intimate close-ups on Cruise's sweaty face to ramp up the suspense to exquisitely painful levels. The opening scene at the embassy, the only part that feels anything like the old Mission: Impossible, is a nifty marriage of quick cutting between elements of the team's plan, inspired spy movie balderdash (the series' beloved mask machines put in their first, most dramatically "Look at me! I'm cool!" appearance), and beautiful style: an overhead shot of the embassy stairs is an exercise in pure geometrical composition that speaks especially highly of De Palma's visual sensibility. The sequence uses unexpected but totally successful first-person shots to work us into the action; editor Paul Hirsch plows through scenes and lines with terrific momentum-building speed.

De Palma is good enough at suspense that he can even get some really taut tension from scenes where nothing seems to be happening at all: the conversation between Ethan and Kittridge is shot from an inconsistent array of sickening angles, far nastier than any basic two-shot situation has the guts to be, and it's great. It only goes so far, though. Ultimately, the film has a hard time defining its stakes (the MacGuffin is particularly MacGuffiny, primarily because of the number of different times it turns out not to be real), and its characters range from distinct but under-used (Scott Thomas gives Sarah attitude that's not in the script, but she dies before the conflict even begins) to dull functional objects in the script's gears (everybody else, though Béart is the most flaccid, I assume for reasons of language discomfort). After the later sequels left Cruise totally at ease with the role of Ethan Hunt, charming and hard and visibly thoughtful, I'd quite forgotten how stiff he was here; by '96, he'd already given some very good performances, but the real loosening-up that came from working with Cameron Crowe in Jerry Maguire and Anderson in Magnolia was needed before he could make Ethan anything but a generic action movie superhero, here unfortunately stuck in a wannabe-brainy spy thriller.

Credit where credit is due: the film tries to push against its genre, and the auteurist flourishes are unmistakable, which is much more than can be said for the vast majority of films at this level of commercial ambition in this era of Hollywood filmmaking. Mission: Impossible isn't always successful, but it's certainly never lazy. Its earnest desire to be a Bond picture with more thoughtfulness and challenging aesthetics are to be lauded, though I think it's telling that 15 years later, when Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol finally carved a top-notch movie out of this material, it was by going in a different direction than the original film in almost every way other than the mechanical ingenuity of its setpieces.

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TRAIN OF THOUGHT

A fourth review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for his many contributions to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

One would think that an action picture from Cannon Films titled Runaway Train would be a certain thing, and and one would be wrong as hell. Even going into the film armed with certain knowledge, like the fact that it snagged two acting Oscar nominations and managed to secure a competition slot at Cannes in 1986 (the film played Stateside in '85), I refused to assume that a Cannon Films production, titled, I hasten to remind you, Runaway Train, and with Eric Roberts in the second-largest role, could possibly be an actual film with actual artistry. Its director, Andrei Konchalovsky, was only four years from his date with Tango & Cash, for God's sake. And then, during the opening credits - which appear overlaid on a blood red rotoscoped train against black, all like some beastly locomotive from out of Hell - comes the title card "Based on a screenplay by Akira Kurosawa", separated by only one credit from the card reading "Produced by Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus". The human mind is not equipped to deal with such whiplash.

But it's easy to forget that, when they weren't finding new ways to put ninjas and Chuck Norris in the same movie, the Go-Go boys had some major art movie aspirations - these were the same gutter-scraping action & exploitation hucksters who gave Jean-Luc Godard the keys to make his inscrutable 1987 King Lear, after all, and made more trips to Cannes than just this one (and Runaway Train wasn't even their only film in competition that year). So on the face of it, there's no reason at all why it should be odd that they'd resurrect a script that Kurosawa had failed to get financed in the 1960s as a burly, brainy action-philosophy thriller (the new draft was by Djordje Milicevic & Paul Zinde & Edward Bunker. Maybe it's not even odd that it turns out to be tremendously good, certainly in the top range of Cannon releases. But I maintain it's odd as hell that Eric Roberts would turn out to be pretty fantastic, not just earning that Oscar nomination but even putting in a good claim to being the best candidate in his field.

Initially, the Kurosawa influence is much more obvious than the Cannon house style. Runaway Train is, at heart, a study of what happens to men who are treated like savage animals: they become the thing they are feared to be. So it is with Oscar "Manny" Manheim (Jon Voight), the star prisoner of Stonehaven Prison in the bleakest ass-end of Alaska. A particularly ill-tempered bank robber, Manny has been an iconic hero to his fellow prisoners and nothing but a bother to the equally beastly Warden Ranken (John P. Ryan), who has responded to Manny's repeated escape attempts in the most draconian way possible, by welding his cell door shut. Humanitarian organisations have finally succeeding in forcing Ranken to allow Manny back into the prison population at large, but Ranken does not think this is at all wise - "Manheim is an animal" he informs a reporter early on, in a calm, even gentle tone of voice, like explaining to a little child why you don't touch poison ivy. He immediately starts to goad Manny and his brother Jonah (co-writer Bunker) into trying an escape, solely to punish them again, and it takes only very little goading: an attack orchestrated by Ranken leaves Manny with a knife through his now uselessly mangled left hand, and Jonah in the infirmary ward, and it becomes clear that if there's going to be a breakout, it needs to happen now. Reluctantly leaving Jonah behind, Manny partners with a statutory rapist, Buck McGeehy (Roberts), who works in the laundry room, and the two men are soon tearing ass across the wintry landscape until they find a trainyard, hopping in the fourth of four locomotive engines chained into one massive supply vehicle to hide. All goes right according to plan, until the train engineer (Reid Cruickshanks), moments after starting the first engine, suffers a heart attack and manages to knock levers just so, to keep the train moving with its brakes sufficiently engaged that it won't be able to speak to the kill switch designed to prevent exactly this situation from happening. I have no clue if this is plausible in even the remotest degree. The point is, we now have a runaway train with two clueless convicts on it and no cars to weigh down the four speeding engines. Which means that it can run away very, very fast.

From this point on - 34 minutes into a movie that comes a bit short of two hours - it's a straightforward survival scenario: how will these two men, and the hostler Sara (Rebecca De Mornay) that they eventually discover was sleeping in the train when it entered its doom spiral, stop it in time to avoid killing themselves, while also managing to stay away from Ranken's unsurprisingly manic attempt to track them down? But even here, it's not the tough, burly action film that would be easy to expect from all the available evidence. Those opening 34 minutes see to that: it's a perfect length to let us get a full sense of the escapees' current relationship while also planting just enough seeds so that we can imagine where they're headed. Manny is brutally pragmatic, his experiences that left him looking like hell also having burned up his desire to be romantic; Buck is all romance, as excited to be on a train with his idol as a middle school basketball player would be to wind up alone on a road trip with LeBron James. He's also pretty dim, where Manny is fiercely intelligent, and this starts to imply the ugly turns their working relationship will take, as the older man uses his influence and cunning to make the younger man his tool. And this relationship goes from troubling to greatly intense once Sara shows up, immediately determines where the power imbalance between the men lies, and sides with Buck.

The film's entire identity is a function of two things: Konchalovsky lean directing, and the performances. The former is raw in ways that aren't totally unfamiliar from '80s action, though it is distinctly unpolished: the frequent use of handheld cameras to crane around inside the cramped compartments of the train are decidedly ugly in addition to being claustrophobic, ripping away whatever is left of the audience's hope to read this all as sentimental "criminals on the run" melodrama. Even the grand Alaskan-by-way-of-Montana snowscapes have a tendency to look dreary, dirty, and oppressive; it's impossible to film wide shots in those states and end up with zero beautiful landscapes, but Konchalovsky and cinematographer Alan Hume certainly don't give in without a fight. Only at the very end, as the film starts to drift from sinewy man-against-man psychological action cinema into a surprisingly well-earned elegiac register does the snow start to adopt a poetic feel; or rather, a Romantic poetic feel. The whole movie has its own kind of poetry, one more in line with the cropped prose of Hemingway or the vomitous directness of Bukowswki.

The actors, meanwhile, are in peak form: Roberts, as noted, gives the kind of performance I'd never have expected him to be capable of, drawling and casual in the line delivery, sleepy in the body language, and yet hard underneath all the signifiers of sloppiness. "That was a STATustory rape" he clarifies to Manny at one point, and between the way he's slumped into a wall, and the blurry and heavily emphasised pronunciation, and the fact that he's talking in a idle, bragging tone about raping a 15-year-old, it's a microcosm of everything relaxed and still dangerous about his work. As good as he is, though, Voight is better: it vies solely with Deliverance out of all the performances I've seen him give. It is roaring and violent, earning the film's regular verbal equations between himself and a beast - "No! - Worse! - Human!" he barks at Sara when she makes that point - but also plainly allowing us to understand that he was not inherently animalistic, and that not merely did he have to learn it, he still even now has to continuously play-act it and revise it. Animal behavior is a survival skill, not a personality trait, and it's the best thing about Runaway Train and Voight within it to explore how a man could come to commit himself to that behavior: what kind of already damaged person would think it was a good idea, what other damaged people would do to him to push him towards it.

The Voight/Roberts show is so good that it's quite deflating whenever Runaway Train turns its attention to anything else. De Mornay does what she can with Sara, but the role is inherently functional, the Woman in a movie whose men have no heterosexual instinct and which is so concerned with male codes of behavior that it has no idea what to do with her (this is grossly un-progressive of me to think, let alone say, but the film would be much stronger if her character was a third man). But at least her presence serves to divert the plot. The regular splits away from the main action to the train control center are a necessary evil that harms the film's momentum; the splits that involve Ranken's continued attempts to capture that wascally Manny aren't even necessary, they simply add a flourish of melodrama that the movie would be entirely better without, and motivate the corniest elements of an otherwise strong ending. That said, it's obviously something that would have been played up in a Kurosawa version of this story, that doubled-down on the sympathetic humanism. There's little of that in this film, which is at it best when it meditates on the broken and dangerous men at its center. In that mode, it's a terrific mix of tightly coiled action and psychoanalysis that has no place in a genre film from the '80s, but works splendidly regardless. It's just a pity that the film dilutes itself; an even more unsparing, lean version of this film could easily be one of the best mainstream American movies of the decade, instead of a way-better-than-you'd-expect thriller.

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IT'S ABOUT TIME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE LATE 1990s - BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH, HE KINDLY STOPPED FOR ME

I have named this penultimate leg of the final Summer of Blood "Horror in the Late 1990s", but the quick-witted will notice that Final Destination was released in 2000. And no, this isn't some enormously pretentious "you see, decades begin in the year ending in -1 and end in the year ending in -0, so 'the '90s' were actually 1991-2000" type of deal, though I would absolutely not put it past myself to do that.

Rather, it's that Final Destination strikes me as a particularly clear-cut bridge between two eras of horror cinema. The Age of Scream, with almost no exceptions, largely functioned as the theatrical wing of The WB, both in the literal sense that the teen-focused network largely shared a pool of actors with the many films that tried to cut off a slice of that Scream pie for themselves, and in the more general sense that a lot of these films were basically teen soaps into which violent death wandered. Final Destination has both of those angles covered: the headliners include Dawson's Creek regular Kerr Smith and two-shot guest star Ali Larter (in fairness, Larter's fame - such as it was - largely started with Final Destination, and she could fairly be called an unknown), American Pie stand-out Seann William Scott, and in the lead role, Devon Sawa. I'm damned if I can remember now why anybody cared about Devon Sawa prior to 2000, but I vividly remember knowing that he existed when this film first came out, and thinking that it was pandering to try and force him into movie stardom, though pandering to whom, I am also at a loss to remember.

The shift in American horror that culminated in 2004's Saw, meanwhile, was directly away from the sanded edges and glib friendliness of the reedy Scream followers, and back towards a measure of nastiness and violence-for-violence's-sake. It wasn't always scary and was frequently nothing but a gonzo show of elaborate, tacky gore, but this new mode of horror was at least unsafe. It punched, where the horror of the '90s tapped or tickled. And here, too, Final Destination stakes its claim: while the blood is spilled with quite a bit of a sense of humor that functions to delegitimise its horror, there's no mistaking how nasty this film is. It takes quite a lot of pride in the viciousness of its preposterously elaborate death sequences, and it makes them land with a real punch. Any ol' slasher movie can present its character deaths with a certain flair that makes them more fun and cool than actually visceral; this is usually done with a kind of showmanship that isolates the deaths as nothing but a self-contained setpiece. Final Destination has the setpieces, but not the isolation; the whole film is build around rising momentum and dread that spans its entire running time, with every character's behavior hinging on their awareness of horrible it must be to die.

Splitting the difference between the poles means that Final Destination ends up being more of a ghoulish black comedy than it gets credit for, if less than it could be. That, in fact, is the most signal achievement of Final Destination 2, from three years later: it fully embraces the sick humor that Final Destination merely hints at, in the process becoming a bit more enthusiastic in its cruelty and a bit less hard-hitting. It's an open question in my mind which of these two approaches results in the better film, but the main point is that, rather unpredictably, Final Destination and at least its first sequel both end up being good enough that "better film" isn't a totally incongruous phrase to use. There are a lot of forces working against Final Destination, including its largely bland cast and a scenario that makes a big damn point of not clarifying its own rules or explaining itself, but it's honestly as good as a teen-focused body count picture released in 2000 was ever possibly going to be.

So about that scenario: it's a real snazzy, gimmicky bastard. Once upon a time, a few dozen seniors from Mt. Abraham High School in Vancouverton, USA were heading on their senior trip to Paris, when one of them, Alex Browning (Sawa) had an intensely real dream of the plane exploding less than a minute after take off. His subsequent hissy fit gets so frantic and noisy that he's thrown off the plane, dragging several other students and two teachers, Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke) and Larry Murnau (Forbes Angus), with him. Larry is able to argue his way back on the plane - the kids can't be without a chaperone, after all - but Valerie and the other escapees, including Alex's best friend Tod Waggner (Chad E. Donella), his best enemy Carter Horton (Smith), Carter's girlfriend Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer), the dimwitted Billy Hitchcock (Scott), who was just making his way onto the plane when Alex had his freakout, and Clear Rivers (Larter), who uniquely among everybody involved chose to get off the plane because she actually believed Alex when he started shouting about his premonition. As well she might; the seven stranded folks haven't even caught their bearings from being unceremoniously dumped in the terminal when the plane does, in fact, explode.

39 days later, Alex has turned into a pariah and source of terror and fascination: Carter resents him even more know that he owes Alex his own life, Valerie is sickened just to look at him, Billy eagerly peppers him with questions about the future. Only Clear still wants to be his friend, I presume because of her asinine name that makes her incapable of having normal human interactions. It's Clear who serves as his sole ally when Tod dies of an apparent suicide that Alex just knows must have been an accident of some kind. We also know this, because we saw him die: we saw water inexplicably ooze across the bathroom floor, causing him to trip just so and fall across a rope hanging off the showerhead just so, and strangle to death. So we're ahead of the game when Alex and Clear sneak into the morgue to investigate Tod's body. But we're nowhere near as far ahead as the mortician, Mr. Bludworth (Tony Todd), who gently but menacingly informs the teens that they are being stalked by Death Itself, who wants to earn back the lives Alex saved with his psychic outburst. And as he says in a line that benefits immeasurably from Todd's irreplaceable bass purr, "You don't even want to fuck with that mack daddy".

And thus we have a concept loose enough to support five movies through 2011's Final Destination 5: survive an unsurvivable accident, and Death will catch up with you, though in an apparent fit of peevishness that you were able to get away from its grasp, your death is going to come in the form of a supremely complicated series of accidents that all add up to a spectacularly messy splotch where your body used to be. I will not run through the film's deaths, which start at the 36 minute mark and regularly punctuate the remaining hour, since the whole fun of Final Destination and its sequels lies in watching how much of a Rube Goldberg contraption the filmmakers can concoct to kill each cast member, and/or how much stage blood they can justify from a single human death.

What sets Final Destination apart from a routine slasher, as well as from at least some of its own sequels, is in the spirited attitude with which it moves through this mechanistic slaughtering of the innocents. There is a perfect mixture of the deadly serious and the hopelessly absurd throughout the whole movie; it's no surprise at all to learn that writer Jeffrey Reddick's first draft was a spec script for The X-Files, which is how X-Files producers Glen Morgan & James Wong picked up and rewrote it into what would become Wong's feature directorial debut. For it shares with that show a deadpan sensibility, an awareness that yes, yes, all of this is terrible - but it's also kind of ridiculous, and we're not going to try and sell you on the idea that it's not. The closest the film comes to acknowledging outright that it's a comedy at heart is when it throws a speeding bus at one of its victims quite without warning, splattering blood like a water balloon. But the whole thing has a hard time hiding its impish grin, especially in Valerie's unbelievably complex death sequence, punctuated by fake-outs where you can almost hear Wong chuckling "Gotcha! You totally expected that she was going to blow up the kitchen when she turned on that burner. Don't lie" over your shoulder.

It is, essentially, a film that knows it doesn't have the ingredients to be scary, only repulsive and nihilistic, so at least it's worth having a good time with it. Wong approaches this with a perfectly straight face, but the comedy is always right there, ready to erupt: the tasteless gag of having John Denver music play during or near every death; Scott's excellent performance as a starry-eyed moron (it is in fact my favorite of his performances, by no small margin); overblown audio cues, like a montage of packing scored like a murder scene, or a small circular fan that roars like a tiger, or the stove burners that ignite like a star exploding. It's a very heightened film that never calls attention to itself, which means that it's every bit as ominous as it is absurd: the whole movie positively looms with death, turning even the most innocuous moments and household objects into such leering avatars of destruction and bloody murder that it's hard to know whether to laugh or shudder.

At any rate, it is an ebullient movie that leaves nothing on the table; it commits hard to what it's depicting and how badly it wants to amuse & disgust the audience. Not everything plays: the "character surnames are famous horror directors" gag is musty and smug, though "Billy Hitchcock" is a magnificent character name. And the cardboard-thin performances Sawa and Larter give prevent the film from having even a smidgen of resonance - there really is no draw here besides the most superficial generic appeal, and the cackling delight the film shows in murdering its ensemble. But really, that's enough. Final Destination is shameless razzle-dazzle done by people who genuinely can't imagine why a pissed-off Death getting its revenge on meddling teenagers shouldn't be entertaining. It's crassly inhumane and too blunt to be scary, but it understands the spectacle to be gleaned from its bloody material far more viscerally than its teen-slasher forebears, and with more zest and good cheer than its torture porn descendents. All of which is enough to make it one of the few contemporary splatter pictures that also can lay claim to being something of a modern classic in horror.

Body Count: 292 if we count the plane crash, 5 if we don't, but of course, isn't the film's argument that the true body count is every single one of us?

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE SIZE OF A BUG

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: Marvel's Ant-Man shows us the fun side of being so small that you have to look up to an ant. Ah, but what of the scary side?

To begin with, it's thoroughly unreasonable to expect a '50s sci-fi thriller to star Orson Welles. But the teaser trailer for 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man makes me faintly angry for promising such a miracle, knowing full well that it would never come to pass.

But enough about film advertising. In truth, even deprived of Welles, The Incredible Shrinking Man is a pretty terrific example of its genre, despite some rather obvious and avoidable flaws of story structure and a rather massive shortchanging of the sociological analysis of Richard Matheson's source novel, in favor of more straightforward survivalist adventure. In the hands of Jack Arnold, Universal's best genre film director at that time (he was responsible for Creature from the Black Lagoon, the studio's best monster movie since the 1930s, and he went uncredited for reshooting the best parts of This Island Earth), the film has a merciless pace and excellent scenes of tension, carried on the back of some of the very best special and visual effects of the decade. And beyond the film's admirable strengths as a taut spectacle, Matheson's screenplay ends on an especially strong note, surprisingly managing to achieve in one speech all the moral philosophising that the film needs to feel like it has real depth and nuance, and that despite tapping from the same brand of flowery religiosity that did in many a sci-fi film of the time.

Having gone ahead and given itself that title, the film wastes the minimal possible amount of time in getting going. The Careys, Scott (Grant Williams) and Louise (Randy Stuart) are enjoying a boat ride on the Pacific coast, and at the exact moment that Louise heads belowdecks, a mysterious fog rolls in, covering Scott with a reflective sheen that apparently soaks into his bare skin. Six months later, he discovers that all of his clothes are slightly too large: loose in the belly, too high at the neck, too long in the arms. A doctor's appointment confirms that he's inexplicably become 5'11" instead of his customary 6'1", and he's dropped from 190 to 180 lbs. The doctor (William Schallert) comes up with pleasant, rational explanations for why this is absolutely nothing to worry about, but evidence increasingly pile up that not only is Scott smaller than he used to be, he's continuing to shrink. We're still in the first reel.

God bless the film for its haste in getting us to this point, but it's symptomatic of the film's one overriding, unanswerable shortcoming. It's worth pointing out that the novel is non-linear: it intercuts the story of the very tiny Scott trapped in his own basement, facing down a spider, with the story of how he came to be in that predicament. In other words, it throws the good stuff at the reader first, and then luxuriates in the fine details of the story in the sure knowledge that our attention has been grabbed. By straightening out the narrative line, the movie suddenly makes itself vulnerable to the killer of all B-movies - and classic status notwithstanding, this is nothing if it's not a B-movie - which is that it permits the viewer to become bored. In order to make sure that this doesn't happen, Arnold absolutely flies through all of the material between Scott's discovery of his loose clothes and the moment that his pet cat finally decides that this tiny little biped would probably be an extremely fun thing to chase and dismember, thus precipitating his fall into the depths of the basement. That escalation starts some 33 minutes into the movie, which means that an entire feature's worth of psychological discombobulation, domestic strife, and medical suspense are condensed into just a half of an hour.

Pragmatically, it works: every last moment of the film from the shot of the cat looming through the window of the dollhouse Scott now calls home to the stately appearance of the words "THE END" is gripping, and the film gets to it fast enough that there's no chance of having burned off the goodwill the audience inherently brings to a movie titled The Incredible Shrinking Man (by which I mean, if you're going to hate a movie for showing a man the size of a bug being menaced by a spider, you know damn well enough not to start watching it). Subjectively, I'd say that the film almost doesn't survive it. The paradox is that, by racing through the material so quickly, Arnold and Matheson don't give it any chance to land and linger, which makes it difficult to feel very connected to the onscreen action. Which, in turn, means that it's more boring, because of the exact technique the film uses to keep us from being bored. The most significant example of what I'm talking about is a subplot about Scott's friendship with a little person from a carnival, Clarice (April Kent), who is at that point just about his size; it's undernourished, and the ramifications are left totally ignored (I mean, hell, you could get a whole act just out of what this means to his increasingly frustrated marriage), and while it adds some depth to Scott's arc, it's patently obvious how much more it could be providing to the film with a little TLC.

Please, though, let me be absolutely clear: at its very worst, The Incredible Shrinking Man merely repeats the sins of any given '50s sci-fi movie, and it repeats them at a higher level or sophistication. At its very worst. At its best, you can count on one hand the number of its direct peers that match or top it. Even before Scott ends up in the basement there are several individually terrific sequences that stress the helplessness and weariness of the Careys' situation, or the awkwardness and dysfunction of Scott's condition. In the latter case, there's a scene with Scott's brother (Paul Langton) talking to Louise in front of a chair, and it's only belatedly and thanks to a blunt cut that we realise Scott has been sitting in that chair the whole time. In the former, the best of the film's many exemplary forced-perspective shots (it's every inch as good as the famously ambitious forced perspective in The Fellowship of the Ring, 44 years later), Louise and Scott are having a difficult time talking, and she refuses to make eye contact, thus not only further selling the illusion but also turning a visual effect setpiece into one of the best character moments in the movie.

It's in the basement, though, where the film shines, in every way. The effects work is peerless, with close-up photography of a tarantula seamlessly married to footage of Williams, and the sets and props are impressively convincing simulations of the quotidian world at several times the magnification, an exciting change from the usual chintzy foam objects populating the era's sci-fi. And Arnold stages the action from acute angles that emphasise the size and peril of these routine objects: a scene where Scott tries to use a paint-stirring stick to cross a deadly crevasse of a foot deep or more is my personal favorite part of the movie, finding a way to make the laughably common (dude can't even throw away his spent paint supplies) into something alien and nightmarish. The translation of the banal domestic world of cats, junk in the basement, and crappy water heaters into an endless chain of danger is the purest kind of horror, and it's what gives The Incredible Shrinking Man so much of its brutal punch. It's a more immediate, visceral surrogate for the thoughtful introspection of the book, which crops up only in the last scene and, to lesser effect, in the film's annoying reliance on voice-over; but it's a worthy trade-off, since it means this is also one of the most immediate, visceral sci-fi thrillers of its generation, on top of being one of the most technically audacious.

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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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