Screamers (1995)

 

In the year 2078, the planet Sirius 6B, once a thriving mining hub, has been reduced to a toxic wasteland by a war between the mining company, known as the New Economic Block ("the N.E.B."), and "The Alliance", a group of former mining and science personnel.

The war came about when the miners discovered that their extraction of ore released toxic gases.  They went on strike, and the mining company hired mercenaries as strike breakers.  Without the industrial scale or numbers to match the N.E.B., the Alliance looked to bolster their forces by creating "Screamers" — autonomous, artificially intelligent self-replicating machines that hunt down and kill N.E.B. soldiers on their own.

The war has reached an exhausted stalemate when a group of Alliance  troops recovers a message from a dead N.E.B. soldier, killed by screamers as he approached the Alliance compound, guaranteeing safe passage through N.E.B. territory to discuss a truce.  Their commander decides to at least hear the offer, and together with a new recruit from Earth, heads out across the wilderness.  It should be relatively straightforward; with their Alliance transponders, they should have nothing to fear from the Screamers.

But the thing about creating autonomous, artificially intelligent self-replicating machines is that ... well, they are autonomous, intelligent and self-replicating.

Screamers is loosely based on a short story by Philip K Dick, whose work also inspired Total Recall and Bladerunner.  I'm giving the film a qualified recommendation not because it's genuinely good, but for its ambience (it feels nicely desolate, paranoid and claustrophobic); for the gall of its blatant Terminator/Aliens mash-up of a script, and for one of the most laughable ending stingers ever offered up by a horror film.

All that faint praise aside though, I do have to give the film some credit for its technical aspects.  It generally makes good use of its limited resources, with well chosen locations and some decent practical effects.  It's all pretty impressive for a budget that was about one fifth that of something like Terminator 2.  The only real weak point in the effects is that a few the green screen overlays are ... not well executed.

The cast, headed by RoboCop's Peter Weller, are also a cut above what you might expect from a low budget science fiction horror film.

Where the film falls down a bit is the script.  I've already mentioned the liberal 'inspiration' it draws from other, better known films, but that's not the big problem.  The big problem is that the antagonists' strategy - and in fact, the plot in general - makes no sense whatsoever.  Moment by moment, the film is generally engaging enough that you don't worry about it as you're watching, but it doesn't bear much scrutiny if you think about it afterwards.

Overall, Screamers feels like elements of a much better story with some interesting themes; "what does it mean to be 'human'?" for instance; have been shaken up in a big bag with a lot of overly familiar action-horror film clichés.  The resulting film is a decent if slightly nonsensical watch; but it's a shame it falls short of what it feels like it could have been.

Miss Potter (2006)

 

London at the dawn of the 20th Century.  Beatrix Potter is a spinster in her mid-30s, living with her parents.  Miss Potter aspires to write and illustrate children's books, an ambition that meets with little approval from her parents, even when the publishing house of Frederick Warne & Co agrees to publish her work The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

In some respects, her parents are right to be sceptical: Mr Warne fully expects the book to be a failure, but it seems a harmless project with which to occupy his inexperienced younger brother, Norman.

Fortunately for Miss Potter, and children everywhere, while Norman might never have published a book before, he isn't the fool his brother believes him to be.  He likes the book, and he's thought deeply about how to make it a success.  He and Beatrix soon become steadfast allies, and over time, something more blossoms between them.

Peter Rabbit proves a huge success, and it seems that Beatrix may not only soon become Mrs Warne, but also has the wealth to be independent in her own right.  This is the real world, however - or at least, a biographical film of a real person - and sometimes things don't work out quite so smoothly.  Can Miss Potter navigate the shoals that the river of life has ahead for her?  Well, obviously; this is clearly not a film that's going to have a downer ending; but a journey can be interesting even when we know the destination, and so it proves here.

Miss Potter is a fine celebration of Potter's life and works; literary and otherwise.  Potter left almost all the original illustrations for her books, and nearly all her property, to the National Trust.  The latter included over 4,000 acres of land. It was then the largest gift ever received by the National Trust, and part of the property now forms part of the famed Lake District National Park.  As you might imagine from that last fact, the film is  also a visual treat, with many sequences set in wild and beautiful places.

Of course, good visuals alone will not generally make a film enjoyable, as the confused mess that is something like The Rise of Skywalker shows us.  Fortunately, there are not such problems here.  This is a well-written biographical film that intelligently explores themes of happiness, love, loss and recovery.  Importantly, at least to my mind, it draws a clear divide between happiness and romantic love, quietly demonstrating that people can have the former without the latter, even if the latter ultimately finds them.

I'm pleased to say that the script is as successful at the small scale, moment by moment elements as it is with its larger themes.  A wry but gentle humour laces its way through much of the dialogue and many of the interactions, frequently evoking chuckles from me.

Some of the success of the film must be attributed to the excellent cast, headed by a winsome performance from the ever-reliable Renee Zellweger.  The slow-burn romance between her Miss Potter and Ewan McGregor's Mr Warne is very well executed; they have excellent chemistry together, being convincingly not just in love but also great friends.  The whole cast is very good, though.  While I've only singled out these two by name, there's not a single bad performance here.

Miss Potter may be lacking in excitement for some, but I found it to be a lovely movie that left me feeling pleasantly uplifted.

Paddington 2 (2017)

 

Paddington Bear, having settled with the Brown family in Windsor Gardens, has become a popular figure in the local community.  He's particularly loved for his uncanny ability to offer people the emotional support they need in the way they need to receive it.

When he discovers a unique pop-up book of London in Samuel Gruber's antique shop, Paddington resolves to buy it for his aunt Lucy's 100th birthday.  Before he can do so, however, Gruber's shop is burgled and the book is stolen. Paddington gives chase, but the thief escapes, and Paddington is framed. 

Despite being sent to the Big House for a crime he did not commit, Paddington continues to work his special brand of interpersonal magic, soon becoming a favourite of the prison staff and inmates alike.  Meanwhile, the Browns are working to find proof of Paddington's innocence, but their efforts to do so mean they miss their visiting time with him.  Believing himself forgotten, Paddington agrees to participate in an escape attempt.  Will this precipitous decision leave him a lifelong fugitive, or will it somehow serendipitously lead to the revelation of the real villain?  Well, I think you already know the answer to that: this movie is about the journey, not the destination.

The original Paddington was one of the nicest surprises of my 2022 watch list: a wonderfully warm-hearted, enjoyable, smart little movie that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I'd love to be able to say that this sequel matches its predecessor, but alas it does not quite manage that feat.  To be fair though, that would be a very high bar to clear.

Instead, Paddington 2 slots solidly into 'pretty good' territory.  It's decent entertainment throughout, and I can certainly see how it is trying to replicate the heart and the cleverness of the first.  Particularly the latter: there are some obvious echoes of the same 'recurring side-gags turn out to have plot relevance' thing the original did so well.  Unfortunately, it doesn't quite manage the same deftness or pay-off.  It's enjoyable, but not excellent.

I think the key thing holding back the film is the plot.  It's very busy, and it introduces a blizzard of new characters that, while all likeable individually, pull a lot of the focus away from the bear himself.  The Brown family are also somewhat victims of this phenomenon.  While they do get a fair amount of screen time, they're separated from Paddington for much of the run time.  Given how much of their growth as characters and the emotional resonance of the first film came from their developing relationship with their unexpected house guest, I definitely felt this left an absence in the film.

All that said, the movie is still pretty good.  And Hugh Grant is obviously having a great time in his role as the film's villain.  Between this and the recent Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, it seems that he's carving out a new niche for his career as smarmy, superficially charming but morally bankrupt chancers.  And hey, more power to him: he's pretty good at it!

I, Frankenstein (2014)

 

In 1795, Doctor Victor Frankenstein creates a new form of life by putting together parts of corpses and reanimating them. Horrified by his creation and considering it a monster, the Doctor tries to destroy it, but the creature survives and murders Frankenstein's wife Elizabeth. A vengeful Frankenstein chases the creature to the Arctic, but he succumbs to the freezing weather.

When the creature returns home to bury Frankenstein, it is attacked by demons.  It proves strong enough to hold its own long enough to be rescued by two other supernatural creatures: gargoyles whose task it is to secretly battle demons on Earth and protect the oblivious humanity.

The Gargoyle Queen names the creature "Adam" and invites him to join them, but he has no desire to protect the humanity that spurned them and instead chooses to depart.  For the next two hundred years, he lives apart from society, killing any demon that pursues him and hiding from the rest.

But this is a status quo that cannot go unchanged forever.  The chief of all demons, Naberius, has plans to rebuild his army of demons to a point where they can overwhelm both gargoyles and humanity alike, and the key to those plans is the research of one Victor Frankenstein.

"Adam" doesn't trust humanity or the gargoyles, and many of the gargoyles now consider him a dangerous wild card, but they will need to find a way to work together, or Naberius will destroy them all.

My immediate reaction while watching this movie was "wow, there are lots of Aussies in this".  It turns out it was a US-Australian co-production, and as an Australian myself, I'd like to tell you it is a great film.  

I'd like to.  But unfortunately, it's not.

The film's first sin is clumsy story-telling, with the emphasis on the telling.  This is not a film that reveals things organically.  It delivers lectures instead.  We start with a longish initial narrative monologue, then after a brief break for some special effects we segue into lots of exposition.  From about the 7-10 minute mark the characters basically do nothing but spout an end-to-end info dump of the core conflict of the film, its main narrative theme (is Adam a soulless monster?), and a neatly packaged summary of "here's how demons work in this story".  

After which we get another round of monologuing.  It's all rather a bit like watching cut scenes from a video game.  In fact, Miranda Otto's Gargoyle queen character appears to exist largely as a video game style exposition-spouter and quest-giver / quest object.   A central plot point rests on the her being kidnapped by a single demon.  Admittedly a tough one who fights "Adam" to a standstill ... but why is she such a wimp when all her followers slaughter multiple demons each?

Also reminiscent of video games are the action scenes, which are much more concerned with spectacle than anything else, even if it makes the movie's whole backstory into nonsense.  Demons burst into flames when killed, and when gargoyles die they ascend into the sky in a blazing beam of light ... how exactly has this conflict stayed "secret"?  These guys are less subtle than the immortals in Highlander, and those guys made rocks explode with their swords!

So does the movie have any good bits?  Well, Bill Nighy definitely seems to be enjoying chewing the scenery as Naberius, and is quite fun to watch in a hammy, over the top movie bad guy kind of way.  And in among the generally clumsy story-telling beats there are even occasionally brief glimmers of humour.  I particularly like the instance where, much like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a seemingly deadly bad guy is surprisingly taken out in moments.  It genuinely got a chuckle out of me because this is not the kind of film where I was expecting it.

Overall though, it's really not surprising to me that this struggled to find an audience; it simply didn't do enough to make me care about the characters and their journey.

Brave (2012)

 

Princess Merida of the clan Dunbroch is given a bow and arrow by her father, King Fergus for her sixth birthday.  Her mother, Queen Elinor, is dismayed by the present - it is her ambition to make her daughter 'a proper princess of royalty', and that does not include archery - but Merida is thrilled.

Ten years later, Merida has become a skilled archer, but her independent streak and lack of interest in 'feminine pursuits' is a continuing point of conflict between her and her mother.  This ongoing situation finally comes to a head when Fergus and Elinor announce their intention to betroth Merida to the son of one of Fergus's allies.

Merida uses her archery skills to thwart the planned betrothal, but this provokes a fierce argument with her mother.  Merida flees into the forest, where she makes the fundamental fairy tale error of making a deal with a witch.  Most of the movie will be occupied with her efforts to rectify the disasters that spiral out of that mistake.

Brave is a Pixar-animated film.  It unsurprisingly looks and sounds great, with fun character designs, smooth animation, and a well-chosen voice cast. It also features much of Pixar's fun writing, which gleefully exploits the fact that the film is animated to do things that simply couldn't be done in live-action, such as slapstick comedy involving bears.  Speaking of comedy, the film is frequently very funny, with a lot of sight gags, snappy repartee, and other comedic elements.

Despite its many positive qualities, however, I can't quite put Brave into the top echelon of Pixar movies.  It's good, but it's not The Incredibles, Toy Story 2 or WALL-E level excellence.  The basic scenario of a teenager acting out against their overly-controlling, overly-protective parents is a very very familiar one.  Bad parenting decisions remain a thing in Disney/Pixar, I see!

Also, the resulting plot is perhaps a little thin in real content, relying much more on clever action scenes and quick-fire comedy to keep things motoring along than any real depth of emotion.  To be fair to the film-makers, they are smart enough to recognise that the film is best served by fast and snappy pacing: the movie definitely doesn't outstay its welcome, clocking in at a leanish hour-and-a-half.

To my mind, Brave is well worth seeing, but it's good-not-great, and unlikely to stay with you for a long time after its done.

Andor, Season 1 (2022)

 

Cassian Andor is a thief and scavenger whose home planet, Kenari, was rendered uninhabitable by a botched Imperial mining project.  

Despite the Empire's role in his planet's demise, Andor has little interest in ideas of rebellion or resistance.  His concerns are far more personal and selfish.  They include looking for his sister, who he believes may also have survived Kenari's destruction, looking after his adoptive mother, and making enough money to be comfortable.

The first of these objectives is about to render Andor's life very complicated, however.  His search for his sister leads to a fight with two security officers.  When Andor accidentally kills one of the two, he murders the other to cover his tracks, then looks to sell some black market technology so he can flee off planet.  His escape route turns out to be the Rebellion, who hire him to help complete a daring robbery.  His payment is both his passage off the planet and a big pile of credits.

Andor intends this to be a one-and-done deal.  He has no intention of joining the Rebellion on a full-time basis.  But as he soon discovers, even if you're not looking to be the enemy of a fascist autocracy, such autocracies are often more than willing to treat you as their enemy, regardless.

Andor is almost certainly the best piece of Disney-era Star Wars media, an intelligently written, well-constructed, well-acted dramatic thriller with steadily rising stakes and consequences.  It's a level above the simple nostalgia rush thrill ride of The Force Awakens or the self-consciously Campbellian SF-western stylings of The Mandalorian.  This is a show which has a deeper and more relevant theme at its core.  One that drives the action - and the actions of its characters - in meaningful ways.

This is a show about the  many costs of resistance to a fascist regime, which can physical, psychological or financial, or all three.  More than that, though, it also examines the cost of simply not actively collaborating with such a regime.  These costs are less immediate and even less certain than those of active resistance, but nonetheless very real.  The only 'safety' in such a regime is to actively participate as one of the agents of its oppression.  And even that is not the guarantee it might appear.  As anyone who has seen a Star Wars movie already knows, in the Empire, failure can be punished with lethal force.

Andor just wants to be left alone, and would happily ignore the Empire's oppression if it was not oppressing him.  This makes him a hard character to like, but also I think an easy one to understand, and one with a lot of clear room for growth.  He's perhaps the most interesting and complete character the franchise has yet offered up.

And he's not the only rich and interesting character her, as Andor looks beyond its title character to show us the ambitions and struggles of several other interesting characters.  The naively doctrinaire Syril Karn, who believes in the Empire's right to power because it has the power; the idealistic but ruthless Luthen Rael, who is compelled to fight tyranny but who makes himself as hard and terrible as those he opposes to do so; the ambitious Imperial officer Dedra Meero, who may I suspect find herself chewed up by the machine she serves; and of course senator Mon Mothma, who may have to sacrifice her principles - perhaps even her daughter - to fund the resistance against the Emperor.

It's a great, layered show, showing the messy consequences of an oppressive regime in all their myriad forms.

As far as weaknesses go?  I will admit that I found the first episode a little slow, but by the end of the second episode, I felt fully on board.

Ghost Squad (2018)

 

Stuck living with her abusive father, Rika finds herself struggling to keep from committing suicide as she continually has visions of strange ghosts around her.

Eventually Rika comes to understand that the ghosts want her to help them get revenge on their killers, who are still free living on Earth. Rika is initially reluctant, but when she finds out her only friend is secretly also a ghost seeking revenge, Rika decide to help the ghost women hone their supernatural powers, kill their murderers, and finally cross over into the afterlife.

Of course, this might be easier said than done, and it definitely carries risks.  Rika may have a trio of powerful ghosts on her side, but she herself is still entirely mortal ...

Ghost Squad comes from Japanese film-maker Noboru Iguchi, who previously brought the world the lunatic carnage of The Machine Girl, RoboGeisha and Dead Sushi, all of which I enjoyed, though I watched the first two too long ago for them to have a review on here.  This new film is very much in the same sort of style, but I have to admit I don't think it measures up to the others.  Let's talk about why.

The first issue is a simple matter of budget.  Iguchi's resources for making Ghost Squad were clearly a lot more constrained than in some of the earlier films.  This manifests in a couple of ways.  For one, his trademark over-the-top gore effects are much more clumsy and limited than in something like RoboGeisha. For another, the locations used are pretty limited and basic; it feels like he was limited to whatever places he was able to get on the cheap, rather than those that might best match the script.

The second and much bigger issue is the script, which has a number of weaknesses.

For one, I felt that this film was a bit more grim and mean-spirited than his earlier offerings.  While the earlier films were hugely violent and gory, and the villains sadistic monsters, the form of their violence was so extreme and absurd that it was less distressing than the more prosaic and 'realistic' violence here.  Or at least, the non-ghostly violence; once the ghostly revenge starts it does get goofier.

The script is also a more than a bit gratuitously sexualised in somewhat puerile ways.  The female ghosts get power by kissing the female human character, and one of them takes an "air shower" which involves stripping down to her underwear and jumping around for no obvious reason, while the camera ogles her bra and panties.

Finally, pacing is an issue. The story is thin and there are quite a lot of "slow motion walking" sequences and other tricks to pad the runtime.  This is particularly odd because they're so unnecessary: the film runs 100 minutes and would actually be much better off running 15 to 20 minutes shorter than that.

So are there any plusses to the film?  Well, climactic ghost rampage is sufficiently ludicrous as to be enjoyable.  On the other hand, it also has the issue that it goes on a bit long, and I don't think is enough to justify seeking out this movie when you could re-watch one of Iguchi's earlier, better offerings instead.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Season 1 (2013)

 

Skye is an orphan and hacker who lives off the grid as she endeavours both to discover the truth of who she is and the truth she believes is being hidden by shadowy government organisations like the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division - better known to fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Nick Fury's SHIELD.

Skye is therefore rather surprised when senior SHIELD agent Phil Coulson recruits her as a member of the team he has assembled to investigate superhumans and other related phenomena; which incidentally run much deeper than even Coulson himself is aware.

Together with the other members of Coulson's team, Skye begins to work both to protect society from superpowered threats, and also to guard innocent superhumans from exploitation by unscrupulous organisations.

Of course, Skye once believed that those unscrupulous organisations included SHIELD itself.  And while she and her team all seem to be motivated by a desire to help, it may be that for certain other elements of the organisation, those beliefs had good foundation ...

This TV series spin-off of the MCU was co-created by Avengers director Joss Whedon, and makes considerable use of that big screen connection.  Guest appearances by multiple actors from the MCU movies, such as Samuel L Jackson, help to give the series a 'bigger' feel. 

These guest spots also help connect the series to the wider MCU, which is important because the show definitely ties into the films.  This first season, for instance, is set in the aftermath of The Avengers, includes references to Iron Man 3 and Thor 2, and has a strong link and lead-in to Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

In some ways it must be said that the show needs that feeling of scope and connection, because its TV resources sometimes make it feel a bit small.  In particular, the effects budget is definitely too lean for what it has to try and take on. The effects are frequently a weak element of the show, being at best mediocre and sometimes - such as with the backgrounds in the shots out of their plane's loading bay - distractingly poor.

On the plus side, the casting team have done a good job.  All the main cast members do a good job in their roles. Their characters aren't all that nuanced, on the whole, but they are likeable and have enjoyable dynamics between them.

Writing-wise, the show does suffer from occasional annoying Whedonisms such as building up a dramatic moment only to 'ironically' undercut it and make it absurd, which feels like an awkward and slightly desperate effort to come across as hip and cool.

Overall though, if you are a fan of the MCU, you will probably enjoy this first season of Agents of SHIELD; it is pretty solid superhero TV.

The Alamo (1960)

 

In 1835, Texas - then a part of Mexico - declared independence.  The Mexican central authorities rejected this attempt to secede, plunging the area into a war for which neither side was especially well-prepared.

In February 1836, a large Mexican force under the command of General Santa Anna approached the Alamo, a former Spanish mission that had been converted into a fort and was being held by a combined force of Texan militia and volunteer fighters from the United States.

Outnumbered by perhaps as much as ten to one, the small group of defenders held off Santa Anna's army for two weeks before the Alamo finally fell.  The siege cost the lives of all but two of the defenders, and perhaps twice as many of the attackers.  The tactical victory for the Mexican army would prove a strategic defeat, however, as news of the spirited resistance brought fresh recruits flocking to the Texan forces.  A month later, in the Battle of San Jacinto, the Mexican army was surprised and shattered, and Santa Anna himself was captured.

The Battle of the Alamo went on to become a foundational legend of the state of Texas, acclaimed as a new Thermopylae where freedom-loving Texans defeated the cruel tyranny of Santa Anna's Mexico.  A narrative that conveniently ignores that the main 'tyranny' to which they objected was the Mexican Government's abolition of slavery.

Produced and directed in 1960 by John Wayne (who also stars in the film as Davy Crockett), this movie invests wholeheartedly in the legend, rather than the reality.  For some people, this Anglo-centric, anti-Hispanic, whitewashed version of events is something they will simply have no desire to see, and I think that's entirely fair.  I personally only chose to watch the movie in order to better understand "the Alamo legend" as context before I read a more modern, balanced account of the events.

So; assuming that this one-eyed, somewhat jingoistic view of events is not an automatic non-starter for you, how is the movie?

It's a bit of a mixed bag.

On the plus side, the larger scale battle sequences are one of the film's strengths.  They are quite impressively done, with large numbers of extras moving with purpose and some good practical effects.  On the other hand, when the camera comes in closer to the action, the staging on the more personal fighting is not very convincing.  To be fair, it was probably solid enough by contemporary standards in 1960, but that was more than six decades ago now, and fight stunt-work and choreography has come a long way.

The film is also hampered; possibly as a side-effect of its simplistic good-vs-evil view of events; by somewhat shallow characterisation.  Texan commander William Travis is brave but officious and rigid.  His colleague Jim Bowie is brave but drunk.  Davy Crockett meanwhile, is brave and charming.  Each of them is sketched in only the most broad of strokes. While I know from other films that John Wayne can act, he is certainly not asked to do so here, basically just portraying the same heroic character he'd done so many times before.  Though perhaps, as producer and director of the film, he needed to keep the role as something a bit less challenging.

Ultimately, the film depicts a very simplistic, idealised view of the siege of the Alamo, working as hard as it can to make the defence a triumph even as almost the entire force of defenders is wiped out.  It's a product of its time, and of a highly prejudiced and manufactured 'legend' that whitewashes some very unpleasant realities.  I found it interesting to view as a historical artefact, but as a work of entertainment, I cannot recommend it any more than I would D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.