ROGUISH CHARM

A version of this review was published at the Film Experience

After Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol came out in 2011, it seemed that the series had finally figured out how to become the best version of itself and could go on forever doing the same thing. It was with that film that the movies stopped being somewhat dimwitted star vehicles for producer Tom Cruise and instead finally turned into the thing that the 1966-'73 TV series Mission: Impossible had once been: a well-built exercise in fluffy spy adventure that found a team of talented people using their very particular skills to solve complicated puzzle boxes and save the day from other, more evil spies. And while plenty of what made Ghost Protocol so particularly excellent was the intelligent popcorn filmmaking of director Brad Bird, nothing he did was so ground breaking that it couldn't be copied. And that's exactly what has now happened: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is slightly worse than its immediate predecessor in nearly every way, slightly better in a couple of others that are especially important, and is light years beyond the first three movies released between 1996 and 2006.

Like every M:I film, Rogue Nation is an almost perfect standalone object, with a couple throwaway lines referencing previous adventures and the assumption that you already know and like brash, middle-aged Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise), but otherwise assuming that it needs to make its own case for existing (I find it enormously gratifying in this age of shared universes and heavily choreographed multi-film narrative arcs that there's still one franchise out there that's willing to just make movies that work solely in reference to themselves. And it does this splendidly, throwing us right into the action with that "Tom Cruise hanging from the side of a plane" setpiece that has been the the focal point of the ad campaign, and building up to bigger and better things from there.

The story, put together by Christopher McQuarrie (also directing, his third movie in 15 years; on this film's evidence, he should have quite an enjoyable career for himself going forward) from an initial draft by Drew Pearce, ends up becoming a little too convoluted and heightened for its own good - though there are some ever so slightly tongue in cheek "my eleven dimensional chess skills are better than yours" moments near the end that suggest that this was entirely intentional - but initially, at least, it's a pretty clear piece of spy movie boilerplate: Hunt has been making a boob of himself insisting that something called the Syndicate is out in the world, murdering important figures to kneecap the world economy. His latest attempt to prove this organisation exists leads him to London, where he's nearly caught and killed, escaping only through the momentary kindness of wavering Syndicate agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). He goes on the run, while territorial CIA director Hunley (Alec Baldwin) manages to have the IMF absorbed into his agency and turning high level IMF agent William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) into his personal dancing monkey.

Six months later, Hunt has learned enough to know that he can't learn any more without help, and so he picks up former IMF agent Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), currently crunching numbers to no purpose in a CIA computer lab, to help him. As Hunley uses this new activity to close the net on Hunt, Brandt recruits Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames, the only actor besides Cruise to have gone 5-for-5 in the series to date) to help him find Hunt before the CIA can. Meanwhile, Hunt and Benji partially foil an assassination plot that throws them in with Faust, who now reveals herself to be an MI6 agent deep undercover as the right hand of Syndicate leader Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), though Brandt's information suggests that the double agent is, in fact, a triple.

That's about where the convolutions kick in, and I confess in my boring, simple way that I prefer the way that Ghost Protocol mostly abandons its plot in the third act to Rogue Nation's attempts to double-down on it. But the draw of either film is really the same thing: grand action sequences and upbeat, easy banter between the various members of the team. All the script needs to do is to construct a plausible enough ludicrous spy thriller that we won't complain about the interstitials.

With those goals in mind, Rogue Nation passes all its challenges with flying colors: this is a terrific action movie that suffers only from coming out in the same summer as the unbeatable Mad Max: Fury Road, and the character beats rank among the best in the franchise. The expanded role given to Pegg pays off well in giving Cruise a reliable comic scene partner, and Renner is a great deal looser and more charismatic than in the last film (to say nothing of his stilted turns for Marvel). The clear stand-out is Ferguson, a Swedish actress who has worked in her native country and on British TV, but is making just her second English-language feature here. It's a performance that, in a fair world, we'll all look back on as her great star-making turn; sharing virtually all of her moments with one of modern cinema's most charismatic stars and photogenic faces in the form of Cruise, she nonetheless runs away with the movie, playing a dangerously mysterious figure as a frank, open, likable human being and exactly matching Cruise's playful-serious attitude. It's a drag that the Mission: Impossible films seem so weirdly committed to limiting themselves to just one significant female character at a time (though it is said that Paula Patton's absence from this film was because of scheduling, not because the filmmakers didn't want her), but at least Ferguson is the best performance of the most complex woman the franchise has witnessed to date.

The setpieces, meanwhile, are too good to spoil in detail, but I'll give it a go at being vague. They're impressively shot and cut - the great Robert Elswit is on cinematography duties for the second M:I film running, and Eddie Hamilton edits - so that each of them has a different style: the opening plane stunt has lingering wide shots to stress the grand scope of the aerial action; an underwater suspense scene finds the camera drifting along with fluid, weightless dance moves (it's also a tremendously great piece of sustained tension even though it's much too early in the film for anything bad to happen); a motorcycle chase regular cuts over to manic bike-mounted angles that play up the speed and chaos of the action. The best sequence, the one destined to be this film's signature piece like the suspended computer hacking in Mission: Impossible or the Burj Khalifa climb in Ghost Protocol, is an elaborate multi-tiered fight sequence that follows Hunt's attempt to stop gunmen at an opera performance in the constantly-shifting flies behind the stage, cutting like a whirlwind and exploiting the bombast of "Nessun dorma" from Turandot to give it rhythm and momentum (Joe Kraemer's score then adopts elements from the aria as motifs for the rest of the movie). It's ballsy and insane how much McQuarrie and company encourage us to to flashback to Hitchcock's legendary Albert Hall sequence in The Man Who Knew Too Much; it's beyond belief how well the film ends up doing in that head-to-head comparison.

It's frivolous tosh, far less connectable to anything resembling real-world politics than a film with the subtitle Rogue Nation should possibly think it can get away with; but such very enjoyable, confidently-made tosh! This is big-budget major studio summer spectacle-mongering at its best: tightly paced, ambitiously conceived, superbly executed, and greatly enriched by the instincts and wits of its producer-star Cruise, but by no means dependent on him. It's terrifically entertaining, and if it's not smart, at least it's not stupid, and it's certainly never boring or anything less than fully committed to being the most high-energy entertainment it can be.

8/10

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COOL, CLEAR WATER

A review requested by Tim Van Autreve, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Director Claude Berri's Manon of the Spring from 1986 is maybe the best kind of sequel. It is greatly deepened in its emotional impact if you've seen Jean de Florette, its predecessor from earlier in 1986 (they were released in France about three months apart), and can fully appreciate the weight of history leaning down on the characters. But it works tremendously well as a standalone narrative (in fact, it does so better than Jean de Florette, which ends on something of a cliffhanger): the backstory is woven into character-building moments so fluidly that it doesn't register that we're having and entirely different film recapped, and having seen the original film, it doesn't register that we're having stuff we already know spit back at us.

This isn't actually all that much of an accident: Manon of the Spring began life as a 1952 film of the same name written and directed by the multi-talented Marcel Pagnol, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, director, and memoirist. As I understand it, the film was carved down so severely from Pagnol's original vision that he decided to turn it into a novel. And since he was already turning it into a novel, he went ahead and turned into a massive two-volume novel, so he could flesh out the film's backstory in its own full narrative. The hefty The Water of the Hills, or L'eau des collines, since everything is sexier in French (though I admit, I prefer the way Manon of the Spring feels in my mouth compared to Manon des sources) was published in 1963, and it was cyclically re-adapted by Berri and Gérard Brach, and so the overall point is, anyway, that if Manon of the Spring feels like it was worked out to stand on its own two feet, while Jean de Florette has an absence of resolution that gives it a kind of tacked-on feel, that's because that is precisely what happened.

I prefer Jean de Florette even so, but it's not worth being a dick about it: both movies are sort of terrific, much better than it seems like they should be on paper. They are relentlessly commercial 1980s French films - so 1980s French, right from the font used in the opening credits - designed for maximum international appeal in the period setting (the late '20s, approximately) and the casting, and shot by Bruno Nuytten (his last work as a cinematographer, before he shifted to directing) to shamelessly make Provence look as beautiful and tourist-friendly in its endlessly golden, sun-kissed fields and hills as any corner of God's earth ever has. The first time I watched the dyad, I approached with an undiluted suspicion verging on hostility, but it's simply too intelligently written and assembled not to overcome that. This is kind of the Gallic version of peak Merchant Ivory: it really seems like the thing that it is can't help but be awful, and instead it's really great.

Back to Manon itself, since that's the theoretical focus here. Some years ago, César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) contrived to block a spring that fed the neighboring property, to force Jean Cadoret, the owner, to sell; his conspiracy ended up getting out of hand and Jean died. Now César and his idiot manchild nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) own the property and use it to grow carnations, with the water from that very same spring. Jean's daughter, Manon (Emmanuelle Béart), who witnessed the Soubeyrans' treachery, now lives in the countryside as a goatherd, having come to accept her lot in life, though not forgetting the wrong done to her. This situation explodes because of three events: first, Ugolin watches Manon dancing nude in the hills to dry herself off after bathing, and grows obsessed with her. Later, on a trip to town, she overhears a pair of villagers talking about the wrong done to Jean all those years ago, and realises to her horror that the whole community knew about César's villainy, and did nothing to stop him, since he was such a prominent citizen. She'd be without any recourse, except that quite by accident one day, she discovered the small cave housing the spring that provides the village with all its water. Quicker than you can say "karma sucks, bitches", Manon blocks off the spring, forcing the villagers to come to reckoning with the past sins; they presume the dried-up water must be a sign of divine wrath. While this plays out, César grows increasingly obsessed with the idea that his inept, childless nephew is the last member of the line, and he feeds Ugolin's motivation for starting a family, which turns into an increasingly morbid obsession with Manon that, in turn, intensifies her desire to extract vengeance.

The title positions Manon as the protagonist, but in the actual film it's nothing of the sort: this is much more César's story and therefore a study in how past sins nag at the present, whether those are the sins of Jean de Florette's plot, or the history behind even that history. In the scene that most directly sets up the themes and stakes of his arc, he explains to Ugolin that the Soubeyran fortunes were done in by the family's greed and wretchedness in trying to wall out the rest of the world. "Interbreeding! It's bad for rabbits, and it's bad for people" he grouses to nephew, clearly a victim of that interbreeding.

In this context, Manon is an agent of fate more than a character in her own right, and Berri encourages us to think of that by keeping her dialogue and even her action to a minimum for the early parts of the movie. Casting Béart went a great deal of the way towards making that work: her incongruous beauty is absolutely never convincing as a rural shepherd girl, but it helps to make her seem like a nymph more than a person, something that the way she's filmed reinforces: our first glimpse of her is as a quick burst of motion that we can just make out as a human figure before it darts up a tree. When she's finally brought into the film as a proper character, we learn that she's articulate and inordinately intelligent for that place (a legacy from her intellectual father), and her behavior, coupled with Béart's deeply thoughtful expressions - it's not a very speech-dependent role - allows us to appreciate Manon as a fully-formed individual in her own right, and not just a prop for César's downfall and reckoning; but those early scenes cast a long shadow, and there's always a lingering feeling that she's an embodiment of nature's own revenge, and that the villagers' assumption that the blocked-up spring is a spiritual punishment is exactly right.

It is, in all ways, a film about the relationship of the land and the people who live on it, something accomplished especially well in wide shots that present human beings and their habitations as elements in the landscape, and not even the most important among those elements, sometimes. Even the postcard-appropriate photography contributes to this, focusing our attention on the scenery, which is given so much emphasis and liveliness that it becomes a character, if I may run headlong into a cliché. But clichés wouldn't be clichés if they didn't have some truth to them, and the sheer presence of the beautiful earth with its lush foliage and imposing rocky hills has much to do with how Manon of the Spring works at presenting its characters' place in the world.

In fairness, I don't know that anything that happens here could be honestly described as surprising; the film's themes are not new, and while its execution of them is especially handsome and well-tethered to its characters, it's not in any way challenging. If the film were American, I could describe it as "really good Oscarbait", I think you'd know exactly what I had in mind, and how hard that "really good" had to work. But the point is, that work happened: distinctly bourgeois art film sensibilities and all, Manon is smart and persuasive and very, very lovely to look at. It's not daring, but that's true of much of French cinema in the 1980s, and this film and its sibling are clearly among the strongest highlights in that country and decade.

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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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FURIOUSER AND FURIOUSER

Those of us who love the Fast & Furious franchise for its gonzo refusal to commit to any kind of rational naming convention have a new reason to be happy: the follow-up to the film officially titled Fast & Furious 6, but identified Furious 6 onscreen, has been advertised as Furious 7, but in the movie, we find it called FuriousSeven, complete with the not-at-all incidental lack of a space between the words.

Those of use who love the Fast & Furious franchise for all the other things have reason to be happy as well: it's pretty great. Or at least, it's pretty much exactly the movie it should be, even with all its lumps and missteps. There's nothing in it that can compete with the "dragging the bank vault" scene from Fast Five or the "endless runway" scene from FF6, and it commits one of the worst structural sins that an action movie can: its most enthralling, well-constructed, and original setpiece comes early on, leaving more than half of the runtime devoted to many perfectly fine action sequences that can't help but feel a little anticlimactic. Even the actual climax, in which the whole ensemble drives through the entirety of downtown Los Angeles while being chased by a helicopter and a missile-launching drone. It's got scale, and it's got duration, and it's got a host of individual character beats that are perfectly timed (allowing that in a movie like Furious 7, car tricks and gunplay qualify as "character beats"). But it's missing the, forgive me, the furiousness of that wonderful central sequence that begins by tossing five cars out of an airplane (without CGI!) and proceeds to raise the stakes from there.

The franchise already having transformed from a rather crummy if high-spirited series of racing crime movies into a series of globe-trotting heist picture with the (itself rather crummy) Fast & Furious (the fourth one, from 2009), Furious 7 commits to the shift started in FF6 of turning into, basically, Mission: Impossible with cars (down to a setpiece taking place on a giant skyscraper in the UAE). The basic situation: after Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his beloved polyglot extended family defeated mercenary terrorist Owen Shaw (Luke Evans, appearing here in a wordless, one-shot cameo), they were all set to retire to quiet lives, with their criminal records having been expunged. But Shaw's older, meaner brother Deckard (Jason Statham) - Deckard Shaw! when was the last time we had an action movie bad guy with such a perfect action movie bad guy name? - comes hunting to get revenge, first sending DSS agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) to the hospital while stealing the files identifying Dom's crew. Then it's off to Tokyo, to kill the unseen Han, and alerting Dom to his presence via a snotty phone call that Dom interprets as a death threat just quickly enough to save himself, his sister Mia O'Conner (Jordana Brewster), and Mia's husband Brian (Paul Walker) from a bomb sent to the Toretto homestead in Los Angeles. Fighting a world-class murder genius like Shaw seems hopeless, until his first head-to-head meeting with Dom is interrupted by the shadowy black ops forces of a smiling older man calling himself Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell). He comes with a deal: if Dom and crew can help him to steal a stolen surveillance program back from an African druglord named Mose Jakande (Djimon Hounsou), he'll let them use his organisation's resources to find and stop Shaw. And thus begins a trek that leads to Eurasia and Abu Dhabi before rounding back to Los Angeles, while Shaw and Jakande combine forces to stop our plucky heroes.

Of course it's convoluted and stupid; just enough to be playful, I'd say. The Fast & Furious movies have had an enormously weird relationship to tone, with the straight-faced, tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the over-elaborate plots of the last couple of movies being goofy enough to support the outlandish, cartoon action sequences, while the greatly sincere treatment of the characters by the filmmakers and the actors who very clearly believe in these roles with all of their generally limited talent ends up being enough to make us care about the stakes in spite of how utterly loopy and implausible the events are. That's particularly important for Furious 7, which was only around halfway through production when Walker died in an unrelated car accident. The film entirely shifts its last minutes to stop functioning as a narrative and instead act as a big, gooey straight guy tearjerker that lets the cast, the characters, and the audience all say goodbye to Walker, and by God, it works: Diesel has almost nothing but liabilities as an actor, and he's best when he's playing a kind of sluggish, threatening sarcasm, but the quavering in his voice as he delivers his closing monologue is legitimately tender and sad and sweet.

The slowed-down character beats end up devouring quite a lot of the film's much too generous 137-minute running time, and particularly in its first half, Furious 7 seems to be missing the boat on its promise to provide a non-stop explosion of automotive spectacle. Because, sincerity is nice and all, but these aren't the most nuanced dramatic actors in the world, and the plot can veer towards the utterly hokey - everything surrounding Dom's girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and her amnesia groans under the weight of how very much Chris Morgan's screenplay believes in it - and there's only so many ways Diesel can purr the same emphatic statements about the importance of family. So it's a relief when we get things like Russell's splendidly robust supporting turn, giving a vital blast of comic energy (he perfectly delivers the film's best visual joke, a bit of product placement so on-the-nose that it goes ridiculous), or the presentation of the menacingly implacable Shaw (Statham can do this kind of snappish outrage in his sleep, but it's still fun) in terms that suggest a slasher movie killer, appearing and disappearing at will. It leavens the thick, syrupy human drama without actually cheapening it.

Obviously, the draw of these films is the action, vehicular and otherwise, and Furious 7 has plenty of both once it finally discards character beats for momentum, though it suffers a bit from new director James Wan and his four editors, who tend to chop up all the fist fights more than they deserve. There are no points where the action necessarily becomes impossible to follow, but in a scene like the Johnson/Statham fight that mostly kicks things off, it would be gratifying to have a little bit less speed and a little bit more physical context. The car scenes are all immensely well-choreographed, though, and even in the most generic setpieces there are grace notes like Wan's tendency to flip the camera on its head along with the fighters, or the opening of the Diesel/Statham fight near the end, which composer Brian Tyler cheekily scores with a dramatic, operatic chant. If the spacing of the action isn't quite perfect, and the film spends its whole second half failing to match the extraordinary blend of creativity and technical elegance of its central sequence, involving aerial practical effects, wholly invisible CGI, a combination of driving action, gunplay, and fist fights, and the welcome presence of the otherwise under-used Tony Jaa (one of the great martial artists in film today, who deserved better for his American debut); well, that's a lot to live up to. The Abu Dhabi sequence is almost as inventive and cut better, while also feeling more oriented around the characters' personalities than their skills. And the L.A. finale... it's kind of too sprawling, actually, and it's one of the few places in the film where the effects let it down. But it's pace beautifully for something that goes on so long, and it at least gives Johnson, who till then seems to have been largely resigned to a brief cameo plenty of fun, ridiculous scenes to play.

There's no discipline to any of this: the film jerks along, the links between scene don't always make sense, and it includes a weird insertion that does nothing but re-incorporate the franchise's third film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, into continuity, and confirm that its star, Lucas Black, remains charmless. But its messiness feels so off a piece with the larking attitude that the cast exudes - for them, it's clearly a chance to hang out and goof around, and that radiates out of the film. It's the key difference between the noisy addle-minded nonsense of Furious 7 and the nonsense of the Transformers franchise, say; the sense that everybody involved loves what they're doing and is grateful to have the chance, instead of grimly marching through the steps needed to cash a big paycheck. Sincerity cuts all ways, and for all its flying cars, corny situations, and hypertrophic musclemen whaling on each other with wrenches, Furious 7 is never, for a single frame, any less than 100% sincere.

7/10

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DISNEY SEQUELS I MISSED IN 2014: I TINK, THEREFORE I AM

The once-proud DisneyToon Studios, formerly a mighty machine ceaselessly cranking out sequel upon sequel to the films of the Walt Disney Feature Animation canon, has of late been reduced to listlessly cranking out Planes and Tinker Bell movies at a slow drip. And between these two points, we run almost the whole gamut of the company's output: Planes and Planes: Fire & Rescue have been middling-to-awful, where as the Tinker Bells, when they are not busy telling pre-teen girls that science is stupid and a waste of time, have included some of the most thoughtful, nuanced stories in the entirety of the Disney direct-to-video program. And yes, that means we're talking about only a little bit of thought or nuance, but it's not nothing.

All of which is as much to say: I had expectations for The Pirate Fairy, the fifth feature in the Disney Fairies line, that were totally out of bounds for anything that it conceivably could have delivered. And it doesn't meet those expectations, though it's shockingly decent all in all: a considerable improvement over the somewhat idiotic Secret of the Wings from 2012, the last full-length film in the franchise. If it is a disappointment, it is a disappointment mostly at the level of theme: the whole deal of the series has been to expose young girls to what should be commonsense truisms about life and being a member of society, but are regrettably not. And The Pirate Fairy has no real theme of that sort: it does look for a while that it's trending back in the "oh, science, that's terrible stuff" direction of Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue, but the final scene so thoroughly muddies any kind of overriding message in any direction that the whole thing ends up being very little more than a straightforward adventure with pirates. And given the state of American animation right now, "girls can be the protagonist in adventures" actually does count as progressive messaging, which is the most depressing thing I can think of right this moment.

The story this time hinges on a new character, Zarina (Christina Hendricks), a fairy with radical and untested ideas about using experimentation and research to expand the possible uses of pixie dust. When one of these experiments goes wrong, she banishes herself from the fairy world for a full year, returning as the captain of a human pirate ship, to steal the fairie's precious blue pixie dust and continue her experiments, while also using the powers of the dust to aid in her career of piracy. The series standby heroes happen to be the only ones to avoid being walloped by Zarina's attack with sleeping dust, and so they head off to stop her: Tinker Bell (Mae Whitman), and the Southern one (Megan Hilty), and the bitchy one (Pamela Adlon), and the quiet one (Lucy Liu), and the nervous one (Raven-Symoné), and the nice one (Angela Bartys). Against them are Zarina and her human first mate, James (Tom Hiddleston), an excitable human pirate who can understand the fairy language.

The pirates form a more explicit link to Disney's Peter Pan than has yet been seen in any of these films, and it's not always a perfect join: there are details that do not line up at all concerning the relationship of that film's Captain Hook (whose identity is meant to be a shock here, and I suppose it might be to someone, somewhere, but the literal first shot in which the future Hook showed up got me to thinking, "oh, well I bet I know who he turns out to be...") and the crocodile who ate his hand. But then again, if the film didn't commit that continuity error, we'd have been deprived the sight of that same crocodile as a baby, and I would not give that up for anything whatsoever, because good God damn, is it cute.

The story itself is pretty basic and entirely functional, ushering the characters through the ginned-up conflict by which Zarina swaps out all the heroes' natural talents, and they have to spend almost a whole scene figuring out how to adapt. It's pleasantly entertaining by kids' movie standards, mind you, and it breezes by at a crisp 78 minutes, almost ten of which are credits; there's little depth, and the shift by which the pirates go from being Zarina's jolly crew to scurrilous traitors (because of course they do) is disappointingly abrupt and ill-motivated; the film had a chance to do something complex and make the process by which villains are formed feel more organic and aware of human desire and psychology, but it just plugs in a stock reveal by which we find out that they were terrible, wicked beasts all along. Subtlety and complicated morality isn't this film's strong suit, which is too bad: it is one of the things the Tinker Bell movies have done best.

As a shallow adventure movie for children, though, I can say nothing bad against it: the characters are likable and given more flexibility in their personalities than has elsewhere been true in the series, though five protagonists was definitely two more than director Peggy Holmes and her coterie of writers had the ideas to deal with. But there's a generosity with which even the most easily-forgotten of the characters is handled, and with which their in-group relationships are teased out, that makes it all very nice and easygoing. The result is a lived-in and familiar feeling that compensates for how rushed it all is.

Better still: the film looks pretty terrific. For the first time in the franchise, the characters don't feel like plastic toys: they have a flexibility and ranginess to their expression unknown in earlier films. Their faces evoke emotions other than revulsion; that's a huge step for this series.

The lighting and backgrounds are also quite lovely; this is not new for the films (they've always had better backgrounds than character animation), but the ambition of the dusty and foggy lighting here is at a whole new level.

It is, dare I say it, a Tinker Bell film that is pleasurable to look at: not up to the standards of the best feature animation, but an enormous improvement over the rest of DisneyToon's output to date. And that, coupled with the pleasant storytelling and character building, makes for a movie that ranks right up near the very best of the its franchise and thus the very best direct-to-video Disney movies ever. Even if it doesn't the thematic resonance of its forebears, it's enough fun as a simple, colorful yarn with genial broad comedy and energetic characters that it's surprisingly beguiling in its little way.

7/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: THE LOOK OF SILENCE (JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER, DENMARK / INDONESIA / NORWAY / FINLAND / UK)

Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/20
World premiere: 28 August, 2014, Venice International Film Festival

The Look of Silence is unmistakably a great film, though it is not a singular one. For one thing, it isn't an object totally complete unto itself, like director Joshua Oppenheimer's previous work, The Act of Killing: it is a sequel to that film, or perhaps we might call it a follow-up, a companion piece, or an addendum (yes, addendum, I think that's the one I like the best), and it's absolutely aware of that fact. In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer and the camera were able to vanish, recording the men whose testimonies and self-directed re-enactments made up the film from an invisible vantage point, and this was key to what the thing was: a chance for unrepentant murderers - why should they repent, their government and countrymen regard them as heroes for their role in the mass killings of over one million people in Indonesia in 1965, on the grounds that they were (or were accused of being) Communists - to comfortably and freely indict themselves on the full, limitless horror of what they did, expressed with braggadocio and zeal. But with The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer can't disappear; here is a film in which the subjects are aware of the first movie, and one of the key repeated images used to anchor the progression of the story is the sight of one man, Adi, watching footage of the men responsible for killing his elder brother Ramli, before he was ever born. Far from standing as a blank slate to receive their self-aggrandising, self-damning narratives, the old killers in this film have begun to figure out that the European with the camera isn't actually on their side: many interviews start to crumble with someone's agitated declaration that they're not interested in talking about this with "Josh" anymore.

It's also certainly true that The Look of Silence is more conventional in its goals and its construction, the almost inevitable side-effect of its re-focused attention. The Act of Killing was a film about the minds of people who had committed violence on an enormous scale, and it is appropriately florid and grotesque. The Look of Silence is instead about one single family of victims, and it is necessarily more subdued and intimate: it is not, after all, being filtered through the imagination of madmen. It has no chance to be as expressive and unprecedented. That's certainly no slight against the film, for it is still extraordinarily powerful and potent; maybe even more so, given that it can engage with sorrow and loss more directly. Certainly, I haven't seen a film in 2014 that left me feeling so hollowed-out and anguished - I mean, how many films are there that actually leave you feeling anguished? - and it seems unlikely that this shall not remain the case.

The concept is straightforward and feels distinctly like something executive producer Werner Herzog might do in one of his own films: in 2012, Oppenheimer showed Adi, a 44-year-old ophthalmologist, footage that was shot in 2003, of the people who perpetrated the Snake River massacre, an event at which Ramli was killed in a distinctive and disturbing manner even by the standards of the 1965 mass killings, which were marked perhaps especially by the prevalence of excessively cruel and brutal violence. And then, Oppenheimer took Adi to interview those same men, in the hopes of finding some spark of regret or guilt or just apology from these people (the possibly belabored "the eye doctor hopes to make these people 'see' the effects of their actions" metaphor is thankfully only trotted out once).

What results from all this is harrowing, soul-aching footage. What emerges is less the sense of killers realising that they need to atone for their crimes than killers being confronted, in no small amount of confusion, with the idea that decent people might actually think they did something horrible. What happens, time and time again (and even described in words close to this), is the ripping off of ancient scabs, leaving history raw and fresh and oozing. Indonesia, we find, is not a country that has taken ownership of its sins of made peace with them, but simply stuffed them down at the bottom of the drawer to fester, and in The Look of Silence, we see what happens when that is questioned, and when one person forces another person to reckon with the past.

It is ugly and painful, of course. The film contains an exceptional number of scenes that aren't just depressing, but are acutely uncomfortable to watch on top of it. One woman sitting next to her doddering father for what she plainly expects to be just a game of "let's reminisce" is shattered to learn that he, like many of the killers, drank the blood of his victims to stave off feelings of insanity from the knowledge of his actions (and really, isn't "if we don't drink this human blood, we might go crazy!" just the most perfectly horrifying window into how the minds of these killers?). In something like real-time, we get to watch as she begins reconstructing her worldview to decide that this information is something to be rejected or diminished. And that's not nearly the most cringe-inducing moment in a film where Adi learns that his mother's brother was involved in the system of killings, thinking himself free from guilt since he didn't, personally, take any lives; or a meeting with the family of a man who died sometime after Oppenheimer's 2003 interviews, furiously and passionately and repeatedly trying to deny that the things the director has immediate, firsthand proof of being true could possibly have ever happened.

None of this is, as such, "surprising". While The Act of Killing was a peek in to the minds of the insane, The Look of Silence is about the sane, and it's easier for us to follow along, and suppose, "well yes, that is how I would expect that person to feel about what's going on right now". But simply the lack of being revelatory isn't sufficient to cheapen what The Look of Silence is or what it does. It's no less powerful or important than the first film, using the particular case of one man's death in one period of chaos as a prism through which we can view and ponder the whole business of humans being cruel to other humans and not repenting, and yet never losing sight of the very specific true story being recorded for future historians. The film's consistent rerun to Adi and Ramli's parents, centenarians whose lifetime of suffering is worn visibly on their body (and here, my one big caveat: Adi's 109-year-old father is both mostly blind and mostly deaf, and just on the film's own terms, it's not clear that he could have given his informed consent to be involved in a film that obsessively shows him to be a desiccated man-skeleton being washed and tended for by his patient, loving family), is its best tool in making sure that, whatever universal meaning is easily plucked from the film, we never get to separate it from the specific history that has been almost totally scrubbed from history. Oppenheimer's project - which is probably done now, as he's indicated in interviews that he doesn't think it will be safe for him to return to Indonesia moving forward - is as important historically as cinematically, and if The Look of Silence feels like it needs that justification just a slight touch more than The Act of Killing, the fact remains that we now, in 2014, have a grand total of two important films about the Indonesia mass killings, and it would be irresponsible to pretend that their historical importance isn't a significant part of their legacy. It's wonderful indeed that they are both so powerful, intelligent, and beautifully made on top of it: this is painful and devastating stuff to watch, but so emphatically and movingly human that it's not possible to regret the experience

10/10

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OUT OF THE WEST

Daiei's second yokai film in 1968, which is most readily found in English under the title Spook Warfare, and with the implication that it came out first (the actual title is much closer to "great yokai war", which would eventually be used in the Western distribution of a different film 37 years later), is a marked improvement of its predecessor, 100 Monsters, in some ways, and a distinctly more slapdash, tossed-off affair in others. Which sounds like it turns out to be a push, but for one key thing: absolutely everything about Spook Warfare makes it considerably more fun than the first movie. It's so much goofier in every respect, and more aware that it's kind of actually a children's movie, and while the stakes are higher, the sense of danger is barely present at all. All of which sounds like I'm describing an absolute piece of shit, so let me back up a little bit.

The first and most obvious thing about Spook Warfare is that unlike all of Daiei's other "samurai movie with monsters" films - 100 Monsters, but also Daimajin and its sequels in 1966 - it's not at all a stock jidaigeki: it's not a tale of villagers fending off a wicked warlord until along come people in a suit to save the day. Which is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; Daimajin is a wonderful film after all. But it does shift the way the film functions quite a lot, and I think for the better. In effect, Spook Warfare isn't a film into which yokai arrive; it is a film about a band of yokai fighting... a wicked warlord. But he's a wicked demon warlord, so it still fits. The point being, by focusing from the onset on the spirits and monsters, and letting the humans serve as the side characters for most of the running time, the film acknowledges that we're pretty much all there for the effects, the creepy characters, and not so much the drama. But even setting that aside as a vote in favor of instant gratification and empty spectacle, the streamlined narrative of Spook Warriors and focused deployment of the yokai gives it a storybook feeling that's far stronger than anything in 100 Monsters; it has a direct progression of events that's fare clearer and more engaging, even if it ultimately burns down to "the funny and scary monsters do things".

And having talked about focus and clarity and all, I shall look like a fool for pointing out the other really apparent thing here, which is the film's wildly unconventional opening: I can't name any other Japanese movie that starts off in Mesopotamia. Here, two greedy treasure hunters accidentally unsealing a millennia-old Babylonian demon named Daimon (Hashimoto Chikara). I will assume that "Daimon the demon" doesn't sound so flippant and dumb in Japanese. Daimon is a being of obvious malice, from his rotten green features on down to the way he kills the treasure hunters without a second glance, and he's been pent up for long enough that he can't wait to start doing something evil, which involves him immediately transporting himself to feudal Japan. The reason why feudal Japan is, of course, because Spook Warfare is the second film in a series made in Japan on standing sets from jidaigeki, but in the context of the film it's the most random damn thing. But we have to push through this part to get to the actual movie, so even though the opening sequence is the exact opposite of streamlined narrative cohesion, it has to be dealt with.

The film, anyway, starts to become immediately more delightful in Japan, where Lord Isobe (Kanda Takashi), a local magistrate, and his daughter, Lady Chie (Kawasaki Akane), are fishing. The arrival of the storm which contains Daimon sends the party scurrying, but Isobe stays behind just long enough for the demon to kill him, drink his blood, and possess his body. Because Daimon, you see, isn't just a big scary Babylonian monster: he's the intrusion into the world of Japanese yokai of a specifically European conception of a vampire. And no, Babylon and Europe nearly aren't the same thing (nor is Egypt, where all of the "Babylonian" architecture seems to have come from), but give the number of Western-made films and stories to cram Japan, China, Korea, and certain bits of southeast Asia into one big sack, I elect not to get huffy about it.

The arrival of a Western monster isn't just a conceit, it's the whole plot hook. Daimon, disguised as Isobe, starts to wreak havoc and freak everybody out; the first person to attempt to figure out what's going on is Saheiji (Kimura Gen), Isobe's most trusted adviser. Their struggle is quick and ends with a fragment of Daimon's essence possessing Saheiji as well, but during the fight, in a surprisingly comic bit of business, a projectile falls into the pond in the middle of Isobe's courtyard, falling right on the head of the local kappa (Kuroki Gen) sleeping there. Kappa being the turtle-like river creatures of Japanese folklore, you know. The kappa gets annoyed, and even more annoyed to see that a foreign demon is trying to take over his turf, but Daimon makes immensely short work of the little creature. With nowhere else to turn, the kappa heads to the local haunted ruins, where a whole army of yokai hang around, and though he fails to convince them that a monster unknown in Japan is terrorising the land, he's done enough to lay the groundwork so that when Daimon overplays his hand - gathering up local children to drink their blood, his favorite food - the yokai are at least a little ready to wage war. But it still will take a collaboration with the hopelessly outmatched human contingent fighting Daimon from inside Isobe's palace to stop the interloper.

The film's charms are perhaps shallow, but the are legitimate: we get to watch as a whole gallery of yokai, gross and cute and fanciful creatures from across the range of folklore, plot how to oust a Japanified vampire out, to preserve the honor of Japanese monsterdom. There's no way not to make that kind of narrative scenario sound odd, but it's awfully sweet and fun, anyway. And since Spook Warfare unashamedly announces itself as a trifle for an audience of children, "sweet" and "fun" are far less insulting than they might otherwise sound. It also excuses the remarkably apparent shortcomings of Spook Warfare's production: the seams show all over, whether it's the poorly-hidden cutting to make things appear and disappear, or the fact that the green makeup Kuroki wears on his arms and legs as the kappa keeps rubbing off, or how much none of the yokai look like anything but cloth and rubber. This might, indeed, be part of the point: we get to see all of the marvelous creatures, but they're so obviously artificial that none of it is ever actually scary. Mostly just charming and goofy.

Which isn't to say that it's devoid of any kind of meat on its bones. The climactic battle is impressively serious and elaborate in its action choreography for something targeting a young audience. And while the various yokai are always presented in a way that makes it clear that we have nothing to worry about, it's just pretend (and besides the yokai are generally treated as comic figures by director Koroda Yoshiyuki, focusing on the silliness and bumbling when he can, on top of being protectors, not a menace), there's still that little frisson of enjoyable creepiness when we see things like the lady with the snake neck (Mori Ikuko), grinning with malevolent delight, or the full form of Daimon as a batlike creature with his ribs on the outside. It's uncanny without being dangerous in any way, and that's enough to make it something of a perfect little children's horror movie/bedtime story. Its guileless sense of adventure and bouncy approach to saying "boo!" don't at all mean it's not okay for adults too - as I imagine has long since been clear, I found the film utterly bewitching in its playfulness and haunted house whimsy. But what I think doesn't matter, and that's just fine. It's not for people like me, and I'm just pleased that I got to find it so likable and inviting anyway.

Reviews in this series
100 Monsters (Yasuda, 1968)
Spook Warfare (Kuroda, 1968)
Along with Ghosts (Yasuda & Kuroda, 1969)

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - GAMERA IS A GOOD TURTLE

I don't know at what point director Kaneko Shusuke and writer Ito Kazunori decided that their makeover of Daiei's loopy turtle monster Gamera was going to be a trilogy, nor do I know if they had it in mind from the very beginning how they were going to end. But oh, how much 1999's Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris (released three years after Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, for added build-up) feels like a conscious grand finale, every step of the way. It possess a grandeur and sense of monolithic scope far beyond that the daikaiju eiga genre would seem to be able to accomodate, let alone require. There are individual shots whose sense of immensity, dwarfing the humans included for scale, is enough to make you forget to breathe for a little bit: a specific perspective towards the film's end, from below Gamera and his foe Iris, is one of the best single images of giant monsters I think I've ever seen in a daikaija eiga or any other genre film, suggesting the colossal height and deadly weight of these creatures and making them seem much, much too real for big rubber suits. And that's not too long after a shot of the human characters looking down an immense pit of collapsed building, one of the best images at summing up the huge scale of destruction that these same creatures would be capable of producing that I'm familiar with in the annals of Japanese monster movies.

I'm going to have to walk that back a little bit, because I'm starting to describe the best daikaiju eiga ever made, and I honestly don't thing that Revenge of Iris is even the best of the 1990s Gamera trilogy. The story in Gamera: Guardian of the Universe is maybe a little bit tighter, and it has a more intoxicating build-up, while this final sequel has a graver and higher-impact series of climaxes. But I am honor-bound to admit that mostly, I'm just not all that fond of the Gamera redesign in this movie: he suddenly got all, like, spiny. In fact, it was only right in the act of typing that sentence that I figured out exactly my problem: he's suddenly turned into a live-action version of Bowser from the Super Mario franchise. Which, I get it, fire-breathing bipedal turtle with teeth, Bowser already was Gamera, basically. But this film pushes it to the point where apparently, after my subconscious happily smothered it for ten straight movies, I can't stop noticing it now.

Anyway, that's a shamefully nitpicky reason to slag on a movie. Revenge of Iris is really damn good, whatever minor shortcomings here or there, and things it does well are unmatched by just about any other daikaiju eiga out there. In fact - Big Steaming Hyperbole alert - in terms of creating a compelling and driving human story, in which character psychology is a key element in the film's function and its impact, Revenge of Iris does things that out of its entire genre, I've only otherwise seen in the 1954 Godzilla, where the damned things got started in the first place. And that brings us to Iris's revenge, which I had always assumed was some sort of "ancient enemy of Gamera resurrected and looking for vengeance" deal, which isn't it at all (though the ancient enemy motif does crop up; to whet our appetites, the film first half includes Gamera versus a resurgent population of Gyaoses).

In fact, the revenge is being wreaked by a teenage girl, Hirasaka Ayana (Maeda Ai), who witnessed the death of her parents four years earlier when they were collateral damage in Gamera's attack against the Gyaos threatening Japan at that point. She has, since then, harbored a much more intense feeling of hatred for the giant turtle than the government, which still hasn't decided if Gamera is a friend or foe (there is, happily, a little boy in a baseball cap who shows up long enough to clarify the point). And when Gamera returns to deal with the Gyaoses, killing a tremendous number of innocents in the process, it's more than Ayana can take. And it just so happens that her rage has a convenient outlet: she's been dazzled lately by a kind of stone egg in her local temple, and it hatches right about this time, revealing a sort of odd, vaguely squid-like critter with a kindly, cute expression, that forms a psychic bond with Ayana. Her bad luck: the thing, Iris, is a malevolent monster, growing at a fearsome rate, and it uses Ayana as its life source. This puts her in the center of a struggle between an anti-Gamera government agent, Asakura Mito (Yamazaki Senri), and our heroes from Gameras past, Gyaos-fighting ornithologist Nagamine Mayumi (Nakayame Shinobu), and Kusunagi Asagi (Fujitani Ayako), whose psychic link to Gamera is gone, but who still knows more about the giant turtle than anybody.

That the giant monsters are, in effect, proxies for human emotions is certainly one of the most unique and succesful things about Revenge of Iris; it's good-faith attempt to do something almost totally new in a daikaiju eiga while returning it the genre's roots, in which the monsters are versions of other, more real-world concerns. And for all the good work that Kaneko and cinematographer Tozawa Junichi and effects director Higuchi Shinji do in crafting a sense of awesome grandeur for the film, shamelessly trotting out one iconic image after another, and staging some of the most visually dramatic action shots in any daikaiju eiga - an early shot of a flaming Gyaos plummeting to earth is both subtle and deeply awe-inspiring, while the final shots of Gamera are so self-conscious about staging him as a godlike being that it's almost a little embarrassing - for all the Revenge of Iris has, in its images, an operatic flair for grandstanding and awe, the reason that it's one of the best in its breed is its firm and relatively complex emotional grounding, with the best performances, across the board, of any Gamera movie. Not that it's a tremendously competitive title...

There's real greatness in the film; not bad for anything involving a giant fire-breath monster, and particularly when it's part of the same geneology as Gamera: Super Monster. What I don't think it quite manages is being consistently great: some of the individual elements feel distinctly reheated (it's kind of hard to feel enthusiastic about a third consecutive film where the Japanese government would rather fight Gamera than his obviously more deadly opponent), some are forced (an explanation is given for why Japan uniquely attracts giant monsters, a question that I don't believe anybody had ever asked in the 45 years preceding this film's release), and generally speaking, the further we are from Ayana, the more generic the plotting becomes. Iris is a really solid monster that isn't especially memorable in any one way (certainly not after Legion), and while the filming of the action is beyond reproach, the specific choreography of the action is fine but not particularly special, until it starts to take a turn for the brutal near the end.

But I don't know that any of that matters. The bar for daikaija eiga is not very high, but Revenge of Iris vaults over it without breaking a sweat or inconveniencing itself in the least. This really is one of the finest Japanese monster movies I have ever seen: nuanced in its story and character, bold in its visual dynamism, boasting some really great visual effects for the time and the industry; and unafraid to end on a more ambivalent note than literally any other daikaiju eiga I can name. It is a definitive statement, and if it's not perfect, it's still awfully damn impressive in every way.

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THE SWARM

A little friendly argument flared up in the comments of my review of Gamera: Guardian of the Universe about the relative quality of the movies that make up director Kaneko Shusuke and writer Ito Kazunori's Gamera trilogy of the 1990s. And through this, I was amused to discover that, while there are only six possible ways to rank three movies, it appears that absolutely nobody can agree on a single ranking for these films.

So let me start off by acknowledging that I would set 1996's Gamera 2: Attack of Legion (whose onscreen English title refers to it as Advent of Legion, which is frankly a lot better) a solid step down in quality from Guardian of the Universe, largely on the grounds that while the first movie feels somewhat unlike any daikaiju eiga I have known, Attack of Legion is a lot more typical. Outside of a few individual moments, it closely resembles the 1980s/'90s Godzilla films, and while it is better than most of them (though one of the ones it's not better than is Godzilla vs. Biollante, the one it most particularly resembles), I feel like I enjoyed Kaneko and Ito more when they were pushing into newer, fresher storylines, and not just telling me the same sci-fi tinged tale of the military having a plan in place to stop any potential daikaiju, but it falls apart the first time it gets tried out, and only the large and destructive monster that has been largely mistrusted can save the day, though nobody's entirely sure if he's any better. And there's a psychic girl tossed in there for flimsy, continuity-related reasons.

That's a snippy way of reducing Attack of Legion to its most generic elements, but the happy fact is that however we want to rank the Kaneko Gameras, the difference in quality is fairly minor, and it's quite a privilege to have two consecutive films in one daikaiju eiga franchise both operating at such a high level of style, narrative coherence, and well-conceived action. A few months after Attack of Legion opened in Japan, Toho would bow its Rebirth of Mothra trilogy, in some ways a weird response to Daiei's new wave of Gamera vehicles (the RoM films are where Toho's daikaiju eiga first incorporated CGI, something that Guardian of the Universe had already employe, and Attack of Legion would rely on even more), and in other ways (mostly in that they're unambiguous children's movies, and not terribly bright ones, either), feeling like a conscious and deliberate attempt to totally ignore anything going on elsewhere in the world. Viewed against that backdrop, even the worst of Attack of Legion still makes it absolutely and incontrovertibly a top-shelf daikaiju eiga, regardless of whether it's slightly better or worse than its predecessor sitting on the same shelf.

I've basically already told you the plot, but just to flesh it out: about a year after the devastating battle between Gamera the giant tusked flying fire-breathing turtle and Gyaos the giant bat bird, Japan is still getting back on its feet, relying on international cooperation to rebuild and also police the oceans for the return of Gamera, still assumed to be a danger in the absence of counter-evidence. The potential of a giant turtle is about to be of no importance at all, though, for an aberrant meteor shower strikes Japan, and within the next couple of days, a cluster of enormous insect-like creatures have been spotted, and the city of Sapporo starts to be overrun by a kind of unknown plant material. Plucky scientist Honami Midori (Mizuno Miki) is the first to assemble all of these events into one: the meteor brought a species of space-insects to Earth, and now they're going to raid the planet for silicon, building a hive as they do so that will permit them to launch a new colony into space once they're down ravaging this planet into a dessicated husk. It takes every scrap of military power that the government, in the form of Colonel Watarase (Nagashima Toshiyuki), can throw at the insects (which have by this point been nicknamed "Legion" in reference to the swarm of malevolent spirits from the Christian Bible), just to keep them from advancing.

Japan and the world are just about fucked when out of the sea, in an absolutely terrific image that's only kind of spoiled by having the worst CGI in the whole movie, who should come but Gamera, protector of the whole world, to stop the aliens. He's been a bit slow, though, for the alien nest in Sapporo is about to produce an enormous creature almost twice Gamera's own size, all chitinous plates and enormous, crawly legs, and huge, utterly unknowable demon-bug face. And as is typically the case in Gamera films, the turtle gets much the worst of it in their first fight, being blasted into oblivion; all hope seems lost until Honami has the thought to contact Kusanagi Asani (Fujitani Ayako), the teenage girl who'd formed a special psychic bond with Gamera during his last appearance, and may be the only one who can do anything to bring him back now.

Good or bad, brilliant cinema or just tacky genre picture, there's one thing that even the crankiest hater couldn't deny: the enormous Legion Queen that comes to destroy Japan in the second half of the film is a magnificent movie monster. As much as the '90s Gamera design and the previous film's primordial beastie Gyaos are terrific, well-built, wonderfully detailed and articulated pieces of rubber sculpting at its best, the queen in this film has to count among the best monsters in any daikaiju eiga ever filmed. It is, for one thing, an alien being that honestly feels like it could not possibly have evolved on Earth, while looking familiar enough that we can immediately contextualise its sharp, stabbing edges and horrifying features: it is a marvelous creation out of the most fevered sort of nightmare, and just watching it twitch and snarl is fantastic. When it actually starts to fight with Gamera, the film takes off into the stratosphere: the final battle scene isn't merely better than anything in the first movie, it's as good as anything I've seen in any post-'60s daikaiju eiga, and it's enough to make me want to call effects director Higuchi Shinji, between this film and the last, the best man in his field since the death of Tsuburaya Eiji. The creativity of the attack strategies used (at one point, the queen zaps Gamera with whiplike tendrils made of energy, or something like that), the overwhelming drama of the smoky nighttime lighting, the rumbling momentum of Ohtani Ko's score, the excellence of the models, and the feeling of enormity are all basically perfect; colossi colliding into one another with the force of gods.

Nothing in the film is anywhere near as good as that climax; nothing in a lot of films is as good as that climax. Certainly, the only thing "wrong" with Attack of Legion is that it feels so unabashedly normal: after Guardian of the Universe told a tight thriller story that functioned entirely on its own, an interesting mystery even when it had nothing to do with daikaiju, the sequel falls into the trap of throwing a lot of stuff at the story, hopping from one narrative thread to another without doing anything to make them feel like they belong together. Not that the humans in Guardians of the Universe are rich, complex portraits of humanity, but at least they felt consistent through the feature, an anchor for the plot. The people in Attack of Legion are more like cogs.

What the film does boast that sets it above all the movies with similar plots is Kaneko's strong guiding hand and clear awareness of what he wants the movie to be. It is a serious film, with only enough humor to temper the controlled panic of its characters and the sense of real fear undergirding all of it: what is this unknowable creature from out of the blackest nightmares, why can't we stop it, what is it going to do to us? Encourage real stakes and a sense of danger are uncommon in daikaiju eiga; it is what made Kaneko's first movie such a surprise, but it's maybe even stronger here.

It's still, ultimately, a really well-made program filler, with some shaky acting (the Americans in the first scene are absolutely the pits), some amusingly overt product placement (the Legion likes Kirin Beer), an out-of-nowhere ecological lesson in the very last scene, and CGI that's, on the whole, not quite as good as in the last film, I assume because there's so much more of it. But those are not especially damning sins, and Attack of Legion is every bit as good a proof that its genre can have interesting, grown-up thoughts in its head as its remarkable predecessor was.

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