Review: The Creator

The Creator
Cert: 12A / 133 mins / Dir. Gareth Edwards / Trailer

As much as Gareth Edwards' new film is trumpeted as being from the director*¹ of Rogue One and tackling the bête du jour of AI, The Creator is at its heart a callback to the 1970s era of thought-provoking science fiction, which didn't get bogged down in being the start of A Universe™*².

Excellent lead performances from John David Washington, Madeleine Yuna Voyles and Gemma Chan blend seamlessly with strong supporting roles from Allison Janney and Ralph Ineson, as the film leans back from 'the robots are going to kill us' and asks instead what qualifies as Artificial when the Intelligence becomes truly self-aware. Much like Alex Garland's superb Ex Machina, the real enemy here isn't the behaviour of the machines but that of the humans they're reacting against. Director and co-writer Gilroy evokes sympathy without being mawkish, and showcases a beautifully gritty world and jaw-dropping effects work without getting lost in the detail. While the film has a serious point to make yet never lectures its audience, this open-ended approach to morality may seem non-committal to some, and there's certainly the feeling that The Creator is merely extremely impressive, rather than surprisingly profound.

But above all else, it's just great to see a fiction-movie in this day and age which is familiar without seeming derivative and interesting for its entire run-time. Bravo.

*¹ It's a topic for a different post admittedly, but Tony 'Andor' Gilroy deserves at least an equal amount of credit for the direction (and indeed the direction) of Rogue One. It's not that Gareth Edwards didn't put in a hell of a lot of vital work, but ultimately Gilroy is responsible for the movie we saw. But much like the Solo debacle, we'll likely never hear the full, true story behind all that. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² And let's be entirely fair, Star Wars caused that. ^{[ BACK ]}

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: The Pope's Exorcist

The Pope's Exorcist
Cert: 15 / 103 mins / Dir. Julius Avery / Trailer

Well, the Devil may have all the best tunes, but his screenplays are still appalling. Hollywood's favourite midlife crisis Russell Crowe barges his way through Evan Spiliotopoulos and Michael Petroni's ham-fisted script as Father Gabriel Amorth, The Pope's Exorcist*¹, called away from Rome in 1987 to investigate an apparent demonic possession*². Out in the Italian countryside (by which I mean rural Ireland, where it was filmed), a newly-arrived American family have moved into a deconsecrated church built right on top of a portal to Hell which opens when a builder nudges a brick in the cellar*³. Standard.

Gabe spends the film meting out righteously maverick Mediterranean justice, leaving a trail of dead farm animals in his wake while exposing higher clerical ineptitude. The Godfather Ted, if you will.

ENGLISH

Making the worst of a thuddingly linear storyline, Russell's dialogue is deftly split 80/20 between English and Italian*⁴. While I cannot vouch for the linguistic accuracy (or otherwise) of the latter, Crowe's accent work as 'world-weary Roman cleric' comes out closer to 'Polish Welder'*⁵. There are lines in his script which appear structured like dryly funny, off-hand quips, but our hero delivers them with the timing and nuance of a toddler looming over a box of eggs with a claw hammer.

Arguably more egregious though is Ralph Ineson as the voice of the spirit possessing the unfortunate child, who has decided that an Italian demon channelled through an American boy should sound like it's from Stepney...

MULLARD

To their (genuine) credit, the score, makeup, cinematography and effects are all passable here; the problem is the ideas and writing they're all being used to prop up, and the baffling miscasting used to deliver it all. The Pope's Exorcist is the Sony execs wanting to play in the fetid sandpit of Blumhouse for easy money, and coming back with just as much dogshit under their fingernails as a result.

This is every low-rent exorcism film you've ever seen, except now the film crew have managed to wangle a jolly to Ireland into the bargain. I'd not necessarily expected the movie to be a better effort than its classmates, but it's so happy to steal wholesale from them that it's an insult to an already-struggling genre.

In the end and after the batshit finale, we don't even see the family that all this has happened to. The survivors of an actual otherworldly intervention are written out with a 'yeah they're all recovered now they've gone away, they're probably fine and with no post-traumatic stress disorder lol' because The Pope's Exorcist is too busy going all Da Vinci Code and optimistically setting up a sequel/franchise.

This film should never have seen the light of day, but to unleash another on humanity would be truly demonic...

*¹ If someone as holy and divinely protected as The Pope needs his own exorcist, what hope do the rest of us have? It's a wonder there's anything left outside the walls of The Vatican... ^{[ BACK ]}

*² The Pope's not even really in this, by the way. Just some cardinal bloke that Russel Crowe reports to. But the film's not called "The Cardinal's Exorcist", is it? No, because they wanted a more eye-catching title. And having watched the film, what on earth has The Pope done to get implicated in all this? Actually, don't answer that...^{[ BACK ]}

*³ The story opens in 1987 with a newly-single mother driving to an idyllic retreat to start a new life, with two complaining kids in-tow and a soundtrack of 80s rock bangers. This transparent and unearned fanboy wink to The Lost Boys might be the most insulting thing about a movie which is the diametric opposite of fun... ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁴ The majority of which is even subtitled! By which I mean yes, there are lines and exchanges in this film which are delivered in Italian and which have no subs for an English-speaking audience. And that's not for dramatic concealment or comic effect, someone just that forgot to put them in there. Ottimo lavoro, ragazzi... ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁵ By my own admission I do not know any world-weary Italian clerics. But please be aware that my day-job brings me into regular contact with several Polish welders, so I'm confident on this one. ^{[ BACK ]}

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Star Wars - The Last Jedi (seventh-pass)

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (seventh-pass / 2D / SPOILERS!)
Cert: 12A / 152 mins / Dir. Rian Johnson / Trailer


Previous reviews: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Okay, I've touched on this in an earlier review, but the more I watch The Last Jedi, the less I'm buying this thing about Rey's parents being drunk/junk-traders*¹. The whole issue surrounding our heroine's lineage is focused on so much in this film that the brush-off of 'they're nothing / you're nothing' just screams of Ben Solo's wrong-headedness. And as I've also gone into previously, most of the central characters in The Last Jedi are pretty much wrong, pretty much most of the time.

Especially Ben Solo.

Now, more than ever, it is my belief that Rey is the daughter of Han Solo and Leia Organa. Previously hidden to keep her out of harm's way, fate has intervened (as it so often does in the GFFA) and reunited Rey with the ones she's destined to protect. And/or destroy. Often interchangeable in this timeline. My full list of character-foundations for Rey's lineage is in this Force Awakens review from last year, but I'll take a moment to reiterate these points in the earlier film:

26m30s: The opening notes of Luke & Leia's Theme from Return Of The Jedi play here.
Before we've met Luke in the film, before we've met Leia.



41m46s The opening notes of Luke & Leia's Theme from Return Of The Jedi play here. Again.
We're on the Falcon, but it's before we've met Luke in the film, before we've met Leia.
The score then goes into Rey's own theme immediately afterwards.

Now although my points so far would seem to suggest that Rey is the child of Luke or Leia (do be quiet at the back), I think it's notable that John Williams used this sequence with the new heroine, rather than just the Force Theme. Anyhow, there's another tie to the Princess…

1h57m02s: And we get a full-on Han Solo & The Princess motif in this scene, heavily suggesting that Rey might have something in common with the pair of them.

So, according to my internal-logic (no, don't laugh), unless Leia had a relationship with someone else around twenty years before the events of TFA/TLJ (unlikely since Solo only appears to have left the scene once Ben starting wearing a silly hat; ten years ago at most, according to the TLJ's Jedi Temple flashbacks), then it stands to reason that Han would be her father. Again, plenty of reasons for that in my previous post.

But that's all in the past, of course. What does The Last Jedi have to bring to this party? Well, in the scene on Luke's hideaway planet, Ahch-To, where Rey skips off at night to investigate the Seaweed-Encrusted Dark Side Well and kneels down to look into the aperture, we get a very brief first-couple-of-notes of either Han Solo & The Princess (as above), or Princess Leia's Theme, both of which point in the aforementioned direction (and for obvious reasons I have neither a time-code nor screenshot of this point in the film).

But surely, Ben's revelation that Rey's parents were lying in a pauper's grave in the Jakku desert holds some new revelation, no? Not really, no. Because when Ben and Rey touched hands through their Force-Time connection, Rey claims she saw Ben's future and that turned out to be… well, momentarily accurate albeit wildly open to interpretation. And Ben's already a great source of reasoned balance, truth and wisdom, given that his recollection of that night Luke Skywalker confronted him is notably different from both of Luke's re-tellings. Ben Solo can't be trusted to relay his own past, never mind provide insight into anyone else's. And this is before we factor in that the whole Force connection was orchestrated by Snoke. ie, the one guy who showed them both exactly what Snoke knew would bait them into action.

No, Ben Solo knows for sure who Rey's parents are in the same way that he confronts Luke Skywalker, not noticing that the blue lightsaber his former master ignites is the same one Ben himself helped to tear apart twenty-five minutes earlier. Ben is the unreliable narrator.

Back at the tail-end of the prequel trilogy, Luke and Leia were separated for their protection. And while I realise they aren't twins, a sibling relationship - direct descendants of the Skywalker bloodline - would account for Ben and Rey's pre-existing connection and unconscious familiarity. This would be precisely what the Organa-Solos were trying to avoid by hiding Rey (although why this would have occurred 8-10 years before Ben went bad is open to speculation). Han didn't get round to telling Rey the truth before he died, instead offering her a place on the family ship she'd already bonded with. By the time Rey returned to the Resistance base on D'Qar, she already knew enough about the troubled Ben/Han/Leia relationship that Leia didn't feel she could burden the girl with more responsibility. Instead she sends Rey off to uncover Luke, the training with her uncle hopefully being the ideal precursor to a family reunion further down the line. For Rey to know of her sibling in the meanwhile would compromise any action she had to take against him, and is something Ben would thoroughly exploit, in turn.

And for the record I don't think Luke knew about Rey's identity, certainly not until he reconnected with the Force at any rate. Although Yoda's conversation with Luke by the fire seems to be an unspoken 'there is another' moment. Yoda knew she'd taken the books off-planet, after all, his knowledge is greater than the sum of his dialogue.

The most telling thing is that the whole situation still isn't resolved, one more movie down the line. We'll see what Episode IX brings. In the meanwhile, if you needed it all spelling out any more clearly…

I'd love to be proved wrong about all this. But having Ben Solo garble some hot-take on a deliberately obscure vision he's been fed isn't settling anything…

The Star Wars.



Yes.



Yes.



It's strong.
It's very strong.



That all depends on how wrong you are.



There is.



Level 0: It is Star Wars.





*¹ In my mind, Drunk, Junk Traders is a daytime TV programme which airs the Galaxy Far, Far Away, more than likely hosted by Dom Littlewood. It's what Luke's been watching all these years in exile because the island caretakers love it. No wonder the man's grumpy. ^{[ BACK ]}

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: The Witch

The Witch, aka The VVitch (SPOILERS)
Cert: 15 / 93 mins / Dir. Robert Eggers / Trailer



Now, as a rule I don't read reviews of a movie before I've watched it. Verbal recommendations (or otherwise) are fine, but I don't think it's really fair for me to be predisposed to a movie based on someone else's detailed interpretation of it. I tend to limit my exposure to trailers and whatever promo-hubbub happens to be going on at the time. So sitting in the more upmarket end of London on Saturday for The Witch, I could already imagine the umbrage of audiences expecting a mainstream horror movie, instead having to deal with actual dialogue and slow-paced plot-building, rather than a haunting-by-numbers shriek-fest. Let's not mess around here, this movie is slow-paced, and very deliberately so. And from what I've seen afterward of the largely favourable reaction online, there is indeed a proportion of the audience who feels short-changed. Yet from a production standpoint, writer and director Robert Eggers appears to offer far less than his contemporaries but the film gains so much more as a result...

After a comparatively brisk opening sequence in settler-era America, during which William's (Ralph Ineson) family is banished from the fledgling township for being very religious but not quite puritanical enough, the film trundles a few miles out into the countryside*¹ and drops into a much lower gear, whereby the father, mother and four children are sporadically but methodically tormented by (purportedly) dark forces in the nearby woodland. And it's this grim claustrophobia which hangs around the audience's shoulders for much of the film, as events do unfurl, but at a pace designed to un-nerve rather than exhilirate.

And what a pleasant change it makes to have a 'horror' film which isn't just a shaky-cam padding around the cellar of an old house to a Quiet/Quiet/LOUD!™ audio-reel. I use the term horror fairly loosely as The Witch is more of a supernatural/psychological thriller, rather than the jump-circus that the genre has been prone to sliding into (for a long time, to be fair). And while even the movie itself shuns the H-word ("A New-England Folktale""), its marketing material can't quite bring itself to do the same. I suspect this genre-muddying will lead to a few disgruntled ratings from casual viewers scrolling through the EPG for something to go with the popcorn on a Saturday night. C'est la mort.

In fact, The Witch is such a well made film that I was rather put out by a couple of sticking points which stopped me from loving it...

The first thing is, you can have broad Lancashire accents for your boat-fresh, American settlers; you can have authentic 17th century period-dialogue for them; you can even have the cast mumbling their lines. But not all at once. As much as I admire the craft of what's been made here, whole scenes were pretty much lost to me just guessing what was being discussed through intonation and physical acting (which the performers achieve, to their credit). And I say that as someone who likes to think they have a good ear for accents (I certainly delight in spotting bad ones). Elsewhere Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson, the two youngest members of the (speaking) cast are quite remarkable given what's required of them, but are constantly tripping over the unwieldy script. The overall effect is of a nice touch, taken slightly too far by an on-set continuity advisor. Probably the kind of thing I'd be responsible for, let's be honest.

And the other thing is that the film loses points for its thoroughly unnecessary final sequence (basically everything which happens after William's eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) wakes up in the dark). Although we do indeed see 'The Witch' at regular intervals, the film is very careful to show us a highly subjective view of outré events, only ever from one character's point-of-view. Although these are far more 'primitive' times than we as an audience are used to, we see that William's family are rooted in the practical traits of self-sufficient survival first and foremost. While they're as susceptible to folklore and superstition as most people were at that time, the events befalling the family are only put down to Witchcraft™ once all feasible alternatives have been exhausted, and even at the crescendo of the story we're not sure if what we're seeing is the work of the supernatural or psychosomatic insanity. Then the final few minutes of the film lifts this painstakingly crafted orb of nuance and ambiguity, and boots it over the fence into the pigshit yelling "Look, witches! Nudey ones an'all! And they're flying! Do you see?"

But y'know, apart from those gripes, The Witch is really rather good...

Having watched this directly after a Ben Wheatley film, I think it has a lot in common with A Field In England, funnily enough.



You shouldn't lose too much if you watch this at home, but you'll want to keep the lights low/off.



Despite my grumbling, it actually does.



This is Eggers' first feature film and he's set his bar pretty high. But a great cast reflect his work and vice-versa.



Nope.



Nope.



Level 2: Well, Ralph Ineson has been in pretty much everything except Star Wars, so let's slot him as appearing in Kingsman: The Secret Service, a movie which starred Mark 'Skywalker' Hamill and Sam 'Windu' Jackson.



No, I said it loses points for the ending and I bloody well meant it! :P


*¹ Seriously though, is no-one else impressed that he's build a house, out there? Not like some hut or a luxury shed, but an actual house. With like wattle and daub walls and an upstairs and everything! He's built it out of, like, nothing (well y'know, the materials, obviously). But he's built it like, on his own (well, I imagine he got his four kids to help him, but anyone who's asked the kids to assist with any chore will know how much good they're going to be). No-one from the town would have been involved, because they're the ones who banished him out into the wilderness in the first place. I mean, the shed and the goat-pen are one thing, but this guy's built a bloody house! Hmm, well I thought it was good, anyway.


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.