Midway Cert: 12A / 138 mins / Dir. Roland Emmerich / Trailer
"War", as George O'Dowd once sang, "is stupid". Not to let this lie, he further opined"and people are stupid". Now, a mere thirty five years later, Roland Emmerich has refined, combined and underlined those points with merciless efficiency in his new offering, Midway.
If you've ever wonder what the grubby-end of a brutal and complicated global conflict would look like when filtered through the brain which brought us twoIndependence Daymovies and White House Down, you're in luck. Although if you have ever wondered that, you already know exactly what it would be like before you sit down. God help up all.
PEARL Ostensibly telling the True Story™ of the eponymous 1942 battle which turned the tide for the Allies after the Pearl Harbour attack, Midway is exactly what you'd expect from a movie whose gritty, blue-collar, All-American reluctant hero is literally named Dick Best*1. And that accolade works both for and against the film, depending on your pre-existing view of these things. This is a war movie, and it looks, acts and smells like a war movie. The smell, in fact, is palpable.
Credit where it's due, the many adrenaline-fuelled aerial combat scenes in Midway are absolutely outstanding, although they're coincidentally the ones where the cast do the least amount of talking. The film's script - laughably mechanical, its delivery often moreso - appears to have been assembled using the most textbook lines from the corniest war flicks by a team of 15yr old Call Of Duty enthusiasts, one of whom has an older brother "in the army". To think that this is in any way a serious tribute to those who died during the Second World War rather than an emotionally clichéd, thinly-veiled disaster epic would be to walk straight into the trap of its mid-November release date.
HOWARD The whole thing appears to be anchored to enough historical fact to prevent it being a complete waste of time, but what a way to manhandle the truth. That said, I couldn't hate Midway because it is what it is and that's a Roland Emmerich movie. But it's very clearly - and very cynically - aimed at a particular type of audience, and in that regard I must concede that it succeeds fairly well*2. But rest assured, this is far closer to the flag-waving of Battleship than the reflection of They Shall Not Grow Old.
Approach with extreme caution.
Banging a tin tray on your head for just over two hours.
For the combat scenes, yes.
Everything there is to love about this movie is on a big screen, so no.
It is not.
That's incredibly likely.
Inexplicably not.
Level 1: Tobias Beckett is in this.
I mean let's not get excited, Tobias Beckett was in Venom...
*1 And let me stop you right there. Yes, thanks to the helpful caption-cards acting as the film's inevitable coda, I know that "Richard 'Dick' Best" is the actual pilot's actual name. I can also clearly envision Roland Emmerich sitting in a room learning that nugget of information and yelling "Lads! Lads! This film is fucking writing ITSELF!!!".
Dick Best.
Dick. Best.
The fact that it's true somehow makes it much, much worse. It's perhaps notable that the gentleman's wikipedia page makes one solitary mention of his informal nickname. Which is to say that the film could have just called him Rick or Richard, but didn't. There is so much testosterone in this movie that our cinema gave it a half-time intermission so it could go out for a shave. Adding insult to injury is that Best is played by Ed Skrein, an over-acting live-action cartoon of a performer who at least has finally found his natural habitat under Emmerich's auspices.
*2 Yes, I'm aware that this sounds incredibly snobby, but in my defence I am an incredible snob... [ 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.
Disclaimer #1: I'm going to try and write about The Darkest Minds without comparing it to the X-Men franchise in every single paragraph, although you can rest assured that this would be an accurate representation of how it feels to watch the film.
So, in a move which can best be described as intriguing, 20th Century Fox appear to be releasing a cinematic rendition of The Darkest Minds as a way of ripping off 20th Century Fox's X-Men: The New Mutants before it's even landed. Perhaps they're hoping to get a new franchise off the ground before the Marvel property is wrested from their grasp? This film has been adapted from a pre-existing young-adult novel of course, but the point still stands. Perhaps even more firmly considering it was originally intended for a different medium.
With the Hunger Games and Maze Runner series having run their course (and Divergent not even reaching the finish line), I thought the whole "you're special because you're a teenager" sub-genre of movies had petered out. I guess there are some stragglers which were still in pre-production when the market reached saturation point. Because that's definitely a more palatable thought than another wave of these coming through. You know a movie is aimed at the aspirational adolescent demographic when it's partially soundtracked by actual songs, whose bland, breathy lyrics are laid directly over scenes with character dialogue. Apparently, The Youth don't mind this, since it happens so fucking often that there must have been some manner of research or testing to support its repeated occurrence.
Anyway, the plot: Something something, mysterious virus. Something something, only affects teenagers and any which are left alive develop extraordinary powers. Something something, totalitarian government of The Nasty Adults then proceeds to lock up teenagers as a precaution. Something something, but one of them might just be the special one who can turn this crazy bus around! Despite being assembled from cast-offs of all other YA-inclined cinema (indeed, assembled from former cast members in places), The Darkest Minds owes so much to the X-Men that it's had to take out a loan from the Jedi Council just to keep up the repayments*1.
The film is simultaneously over-scripted and under-written, racing to its finish-line with poorly introduced characters (who are then abandoned with equal carelessness) and feeling like it's three movies edited down to one. Demographically, it's good to see that that the protagonist is a black female teenager, and Amandla Stenberg certainly does the best with what she's given. But a performer who's clearly this capable deserves better. The whole cast do. Hopefully The Darkest Minds will sit on their collective CVs as a springboard rather than a paperweight.
And then the final moments of the movie have the utter fucking gall to nod towards a sequel which, given the absolute self-indulgence of what we've not even finished watching yet, could charitably be described as "optimistic".
Five years ago, The Darkest Minds would have disappeared into the crowd as a forgettable, formulaic, teen adventure. In 2018, it stands out by feeling like a very dated version of the same thing…
Hahahahahaha, you are funny.
No.
Whatever.
Without having seen most of the cast elsewhere before, I'm going to say no.
This shouldn't be anybody's best work.
Unlikely, given the film's general reception.
There isn't.
Level 1: Well, early on there's a hospital called "New Hope", but Captain Phasma's in this.
*1 Let's take a quick look through the infringement charge-sheet…
1) A girl too scared to touch the person she cares about in case her uncontrollable power hurts them (Rogue from X-Men)
2) Another girl who wears rubber gloves so that her power doesn't accidentally spang anything-or-one she touches (also Rogue from X-Men)
3) Legally-backed persecution and institutionalised research / euthanisation of gifted youngsters headed by a government official who's terrified of his own mutant son (Stryker from X2, Worthington from X3: The Last Stand)
4) The instruction from a psychic to her pursuer that they should turn around and 'walk, keep walking and do not stop, ever' (Silver Fox to Stryker from Origins: Wolverine)
5) Teenagers are being rounded up since any who weren't killed by the outbreak were left with scary powers, so it really is The Evil Adults against misunderstood kids (pretty much any YA-fiction you'd care to name)
6) Our heroes in Act III fending off a squadron of orange-glowing psychopaths, brainwashed to be battlefield beserkers by the authorities trying to control the mutation for their own ends (the Extremis soldiers from Iron Man 3)
7) Ruby's main Force, err… Mutant, err enhanced power is mind-manipulation, ie extreme suggestibility. At one point she tells an armed guard who's stopped the car that he's not looking for them and they should be allowed to leave. He replies with an affirmative "…move along" in a way which suggests that the screenwriters thought this would be a "subtle" Mos Eisley reference rather than a straight photocopy.
8) The bad guys have a black-clad boss who walks around barking orders and kills his own subordinates as a reward for substandard performance. He's not the main, top-level boss though, just a powerful underling. Luckily, this version doesn't need a respirator.
9) Oh, and at one point Ruby and her dramatic counterpart start discussing the character-structure of the Harry Potter series, somehow unaware that Ruby had inadvertently done the 'forgetticus' spell on her own parents. Remember, like Hermione did in Harry Potter (albeit deliberately but still with the same level of post-trauma). But that's not the aspect of Harry Potter which is referenced in the characters' conversation. I mean for fuck's sake, which way do they want it? She'd remember the Hermione thing as soon as 'Harry Potter' plopped out of her mouth, wouldn't she? Has she read the books or not? I haven't even read them and I know about it.
10) And let's not even mention the Infinity-War-disintegration thing they've got going on with the poster, there. It's used fleetingly in the film too, but it's not a super-power, more a dramatic device. But still.
The Darkest Minds is like watching a bad covers-band play a greatest hits set of pop culture references from the last 40 years, to an audience they hope aren't recognising the tunes...[ BACK ]
OTHER (regular) 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.
I'm a fickle cinemagoer, I'll freely admit. We're smack in the middle of 'silly season' with a studio tent-pole movie landing almost every week, the knock-on result of which being that my local five-screener is taken up for months on end with a relatively small quantity of movies, all petering out of rotation with the next release hot on its heels. And then, when we do get something a little different, I stare blankly at the listings web-page grumbling "well what the hell is this that I've seen neither a trailer nor poster for in my cinema?". It's 47 Metres Down and it's a shark movie. Or, to put it more accurately, A Shark Movie™.
When friends Kate (Claire Holt) and Lisa (Mandy Moore) go on holiday to Mexico together, they decide to forego another day by the hotel pool and see some of the local wildlife, taking in an unregistered shark-spotting cruise to get up close and personal with their finned friends from the safety of a submerged cage. And for obvious reasons, this film wasn't made to chronicle thirty minutes of ooh-ing, a few photos for the album and cocktails back at the bar by sundown…
Now by this point, you'll have two questions. 1) Who needs a shark-based flick at the cinema when Asylum are doing such a sterling job of shovelling them all straight to VOD, albeit with additional gunships, zombies, nazis etc? And 2) But how does all this compare to Blake Lively becoming increasingly fraught and decreasingly clothed as she tries to get back to shore? The answer to the first of those is a noncommittal shrug. The second, I'll come back to later.
No please, tell us again in the first ten minutes how the shark-cage will only be lowered 5 metres into the water, on the off-chance that the seated audience has forgotten what the film is called…
The problem is how staggeringly pedestrian the whole thing is. Because unless you're following the aforementioned Asylum model, the general rule is: in water = danger, not in water = safe. And since that movie in 1975 both kickstarted and nullified the genre in a single stroke, countless others have tried to do The Same Thing But Different, and to mixed results. It gives me no great pleasure to report that 47 Metres Down is a film of mixed results.
On the plus-side, it's quite nice to see A Shark Movie™ where the hungry sea-dwellers aren't actually demonised as being a bunch of subaqueous bastards. For obvious reasons they're a threat in this movie, but it's also evident that's because the tour organisers are throwing buckets of chum into the water, followed by live-bait in the form of two hapless holidaymakers. Tonally, this is like the first ten minutes of an episode of Casualty, stretched out for an hour and a half. Indeed, from snapped winch-cables to trapped limbs and grabbing a harpoon by the business end, Kate and Lisa are dogged so relentlessly by bad maritime luck, I swear to god there's a deleted scene where they kill and eat an albatross the previous night…
Director Johannes Roberts conjures a good sense of agoraphobia once the main thrust of the film kicks in (after around ten minutes, this isn't a long movie so has little time to mess around), but with the requisite mood-lighting and dramatic score, it'd be hard not to. The underwater choreography is nice, although the cinematography comes off as murky, especially given that the characters start by saying "you can see for miles down here!" when the camera is pointing back up to the surface, so the audience can't (hazards of filming in a tank, I suppose.). Then again, a short orchestral silence followed immediately by a shark suddenly appearing out of the murk is the film's primary weapon, so this is to be expected. It's a solidly constructed tale, but in the pantheon of shark movies that just means it's predictable. Doesn't have to be, just is.
No please, explain nitrogen-narcosis induced hallucinations for the third time in five minutes, just so that everybody in the audience knows exactly what's you've got in mind for the third act…
The two lead characters are sketched in at the beginning, but only as much as the plot actually requires. Claire Holt's Kate blithely spills her best friend's glass of red wine in an opening-scene foreshadowing, and cares so little about the wastage of hotel-priced alcohol that I'd happily have thrown her into a shark-tank for that alone. Kate, on the other hand, seems to have been written in as the film's Captain Obvious, narrating developments for the hard-of-thinking and wasting precious oxygen with shrill observations like "I'm so scared!", "You're going to run out of air!", "We're going to die down here!" and "There are sharks everywhere!". I'm fully aware that real people say stupid things in dangerous situations, but that's not why I go to the cinema.
And speaking of speaking, the film jumps its obvious communication-hurdle by having radio-sets in the characters' scuba masks. Which is fine, except their ears are visibly outside the seal of the masks, and they don't appear to be wearing corresponding earpieces. Even assuming the receiver-speaker is on the inside, their ears are still insulated by the water outside, so it'd have to be loud enough to vibrate through their eyeballs, surely? I'm sure a lot of you lovely readers are scuba divers and will set me straight on this in the comments-section. I thank you in advance.
No, please, go ahead and homage 'the head shot' from Jaws. Since you're now demonstrably out of ideas, I shall expect the film to end imminently...
So, whereas The Shallows had a heavy subtext about grief, this movie features two young American women on holiday in Mexico, where they're talked into going on an illegal shark-spotting cruise by a pair of dodgy blokes in a bar and naturally everything goes wrong because they trusted the foreigners. Is this Trump's Hollywood?*2 Is this what we can expect for the next three and a half years? Dear lord.
But on the plus-side, if you're 15 and haven't seen any shark movies before, you're going to fucking love this…
Predictable disaster movies featuring protagonists with poor decision-making skills, bleeding onto everything in sight.
Not particularly, although it might as well be BIG, if anything.
…probably / maybe / sometimes / no?
To be honest, I have absolutely no idea.
And that's the way I like it.
Probably not. Try me.
There isn't.
Level 2: Matthew Modine's in this, and he was in that Full Metal Jacket with Bruce 'Rieekan' Boa.
*1 That's 47 Meters Down if you're in the US. Or 135ft, 2 inches Down if you're in the UK and still clinging to some misguided notion of imperialism despite decimalisation being a system which makes far more sense to actual humans in the 21st century. Oh yeah, I went there. Seriously though, talk about fucking up the marketing hashtags for an international audience. But in all fairness, the registered BBFC listing says "Metres", as does the poster up there, as does the film's title-card, which I was quite impressed by. I mean, only impressed in that someone went to the trouble of changing it as if that was going to be the clincher between 'gripping thriller' and 'emotionally illiterate, mechanical sharkathon'. [ 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.
