Review: Elemental

Elemental
Cert: PG / 109 mins / Dir. Peter Sohn / Trailer

I must confess I’ve skipped on several recent animated offerings from Disney/Pixar after my lukewarm response to Inside Out, their psychological-explorational adventure which made several people I know act like a light had been switched on while I thought ‘wait, doesn’t everybody visualise their inner monologue this way?’. Don’t get me wrong, that’s enjoyable enough to watch, but I found it withered under the Battleship Curve™.

It was with some trepidation then, that I was treated to the mega-studio’s latest offering, Elemental, courtesy of my local Cineworld’s Secret Screening programme, whereby the film you’re going to watch is unveiled with the BBFC card after the ads and trailers. So the least I could do was give it a go, what with being already settled in to my favourite seat and half way through a coffee*¹.

SHORT

We open with a separate, five-minute short, Carl’s Date, which sees the elderly protagonist from Disney/Pixar’s Up asked out on a date by Ms Meyers from her nursing home. After initially panicking over the morality of his acceptance while still having his late wife’s picture on the mantlepiece, he’s convinced to follow this up by his dog, Dug.

What follows is an extended farcical montage as Carl realises he’s completely forgotten what he’s supposed to do on a date. This in itself is amusing enough, but the rock-solid heart of the piece comes from seeing the relationship between Carl and Dug (skewed of course by the fact that although Dug has a means of physically speaking to Carl, he still thinks like a dog).

The compacted run-time doesn’t allow for any slack, so writer/director Bob Peterson is incredibly focused on what he has to achieve and pulls the whole thing off masterfully. Carl’s Date also shows way more sincerity and comic inventiveness than the feature which it precedes, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves…

MERRY GO

And so onto Elemental. We open in Element City, a bustling metropolis peopled by anthropomorphised air, fire, earth and water. Each of these features the physical bonuses and drawbacks of their lineage, and we see how the ‘tribes’ come to settle into localised communities while still making up the cohesive city as a whole.

The story follows Ember Lumen (voiced by Leah Lewis), a fire elemental who dreams of taking over her elderly father’s ‘fire goods’ store once he retires. After a meet-cute with a city inspector who’s a water elemental (Wade Ripple, voiced by Mamoudou Athie), their frustrated lives become intertwined. But how can fire and water ever hope to mix?*²

With the setup firmly established, cue lots of scripted and visual puns (seriously, those character names are the tip of an iceberg), interspersed with Thomas Newman’s placeholder score and some of the blandest incidental pop-soundtrack you’ve ever wanted to stab biros into your own ears to stop listening to.

BONASERA

Elemental is, in its first act, a heavy-handed metaphor for the New York immigrant-experience of the Liberty Island-era; a tale about how cultural differences aren’t obstacles to divide us, but opportunities for partnership and collaboration. And admittedly this message is probably more relevant than ever, but for a film which is 80% metaphor, the script is remarkably linear.

It doesn’t help that the story gets bored exploring this idea and turns into a meet-the-parents comedy with added elements of class-divide and self-actualisation. Again, all of this is fine in itself, but Elemental’s screenplay was written by four people and feels like it. This is a diluted Inside Out, Zootropolis, and Onward, and as the film plays on the feeling quickly grows that you’ve seen it before.

FERRERA

Pixar’s visuals are solid of course, with backgrounds looking genuinely photo-realistic in certain lighting-states and physical textures exquisitely realised. The earth elementals (so usually looking like plants) are rendered as one would expect, but the visual over-engineering of air (so, clouds), fire and water elementals often feels more like an animation test-reel than the creation of properly memorable characters.

It’s also worth noting that the vocal performances are all over the shop here, even allowing for the random array of accents which are supposed to help the central premise along. Ember’s family are “Firish”, so half the time her apparently-first-generation father has a faintly Celtic twang, while in the rest he somehow sounds like a cross between Super Mario and Big Chief Sitting Bull. This undoubtedly undoes some of the good work that the movie’s setting out to bring.

Worse still, sadly, are the central turns from Lewis and Athie. Both are expressive enough as voice-performers, they just sound way too old for characters scripted like teenagers (even if they're probably supposed to be early twenties). Leah Lewis is 26, Mamoudou Athie is 34, and those years are written right into their voices. Neither feels cut out for the protagonist in a coming-of-age tale.

DRILLER KILLER

Don’t get me wrong, Elemental is an enjoyable enough hour and a half (note: there are no scenes during or after the credits) and means well to the point where its intention really cannot be faulted. It’s just the Disney-Mouse eating its own tail. It’s Pixar being so Pixar that the movie has next to no personality of its own.

The short film brought tears to my eyes. The long film did not. Elemental is still more technically accomplished and thoughtful than most other animation studios could produce, but when your self-set bar is this high, it’s no excuse for mediocrity…

CARL'S DATE:

ELEMENTAL:

*¹ Seriously, if it had been Gran Turismo I’d have bailed. You won’t be reading a review of that terrible-looking shite round these doors, summer-season or otherwise.
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*² Don’t worry, the film teases and teases and eventually goes on to answer this, and at the same time absolutely doesn’t.
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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: Underwater

Underwater
Cert: 15 / 95 mins / Dir. William Eubank / Trailer

The fates were already conspiring against William Eubank's new movie before the it began. Someone bastard my allocated-seat, a fire-exit sign shining directly onto the screen, then a delayed start-time due to a projector failure once the film itself began (which was going to be ten minutes, but became fifteen and then thirty*¹).

So Kristen Stewart was going to have to work pretty fucking hard to turn this around in a film with a painfully literal (and yet wholly nondescript) title and a trailer which makes Underwater look average, at best.

Reader, Underwater is average at best.

A mining station in the Marianas Trench is compromised when a series of earthquakes are revealed to be the work of mysterious creatures, the likes of which haven't been seen before. The small band of survivors must suit-up, leave their ruined base and cross the ocean bed on foot to reach a relay station where they can escape to the surface. During this perilous journey, members of the group are picked off one*² by one by the monsters, the environment, or a screenwriter who's only ever watched alien-invasion movies. Yeah, it's basically Aliens but underwater*³.

SCIENTIST

Credit where it's due, it has quite a strong cast for a film this inconsequential. Kristen Stewart leads the gang as a brainy-but-tough scientist. You know KStew's brainy because she's wearing glasses in the first scene. Glasses with a prescription so ethereal that they do not bend light in any way when viewed from an angle, which is probably why she gets through the rest of the film absolutely fine without them. It feels as if Stewart is picking roles like letters from a scrabble-bag these days. As a performer, Kristen is definitely better than this, yet it's becoming more difficult to pinpoint exactly what she should be doing any more.

Elsewhere, Vincent Cassel is vaguely unlikeable (again) and TJ Miller resorts to playing himself (again). Fair enough guys, stick to what you know.

HARDEST PART

A b-grade sci-fi/horror with a story that runs on rails, Underwater is the exact amount of silly bollocks you expect, and you'll enjoy it accordingly. Our heroes bicker, shriek and mumble their way through the script, so it's probably a good thing that words are largely redundant here. You could watch this dubbed into any language you don't speak and have exactly the same experience*⁴. You just can't shake the feeling that none of it matters. The movie looks great and is efficiently assembled, but feels generic.

Of course the film starts moralising about drilling and humanity's moral duty in its third act, but by that point the whole thing is so divorced from reality that it could segue into an episode of Spongebob Squarepants and make as much sense...

On paper, Underwater categorically does not need to exist, and the film does nothing to challenge that situation. But hey, at least it's not about sharks.

Aliens, The Abyss and who knows how many others.



Nope.



Stream it, tops.



Nope.



Yep.



Nope.



Level 1: Jess Pava is in this.





*¹ With audience-members still turning up during this time, the late-running of the movie rewarding their tardiness if anything. Outrageous. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² Because of course Mamoudou Athie, the only black cast-member with a character-name, is the first to die. Although that's probably a lucky escape, to be honest. ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ Movie exec 1: So what if we made Aliens, but underwater?!?
Movie exec 2: Pretty sure that's already been d--
Movie exec 1: Rhetorical question, Terry. Kristen Stewart has already signed on and agreed to run around in her pants for half of it. We start filming on Monday... ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁴ Although in an early scene, Stewart's character voiceovers that you lose track of time when you can't see daylight. And fair play, 95 minutes seems like fucking forever when you know you're going to be late getting across town for your next movie, as a 45-minute travel window is hacked down to quarter of an hour... ^{[ 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: Patti Cake$

Patti Cake$
Cert: 15 / 109 mins / Dir. Geremy Jasper / Trailer



Feeling once again like a movie which we should be getting in October's release-schedule, writer/director Geremy Jasper brings us Patti Cake$, a drama about a 23yr old waitress and family-carer (Danielle Macdonald) in smalltown New Jersey who wants to break free of the downward-spiral she sees as her life, becoming a successful rapper. With singer Jerry (Siddharth Dhananjay) and guitarist/mixer Basterd (Mamoudou Athie), the beleaguered Patti tries to puncture the membrane separating club-level, street acts and more successful, recognised performers. But competition is plentiful and life rarely lets you pursue your dreams without obstacle…

While Patti Cake$ is set against a backdrop of hip-hop, the strokes of the story are fairly broad, examining confidence, obligation and the legacy of failure in a family of coulda-made-its. This isn't quite the relentlessly gritty tale of social angst that the trailer makes out out to be, although that's definitely the primary ingredient. Underneath the raw contemporary feel, what we get is actually a fairly formulaic underdog story; Jasper also telegraphs the turns quite broadly, adding to the feeling that this isn't all it could be.

The cast give solid performances all round and the music marries up with the story perfectly, but they're not quite enough to save the coulda-made-it screenplay, building to a crescendo that the film doesn't quite earn. Maybe it's my own fault for loving that trailer and believing the pull-quotes telling me how fantastic it was. I thoroughly enjoyed Patti Cake$, but it didn't over-perform like I'd hoped it would. I wanted to be blown away, I was only swept along. Then again, I can hardly blame Geremy Jasper for my expectations…

With a movie about creative drive and the hunger to put your own unique musical stamp on the world, I probably shouldn't have come out of the cinema with Heart stuck in my head…

The aspiration of Sing Street with the urban decay of The Transfiguration...



While it's not typical 'big screen' fare, I think the film's sincerity will come over better in that format.



Just about.



Really couldn't say, on that front.



Not at all.



Not at all.



Level 2: This film stars Bridget Everett, who was in 2012's Gayby along with Adam 'Kylo' Driver.






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.