Supposedly we only use 10-20% of our brain capacity, and in the sci fi thriller Lucy, Scarlett Johannson gets to show what it would look like if we could harness 100% of our intelligence. Johannson plays the title character, who is captured by an especially merciless Chinese crime lord and then get dosed with a designer drug that unharnesses her full brainpower. Processing more information much faster than everyone else is a superpower that allows her to wreak mayhem upon the bad guys. She’s in a race against time to find and snag the rest of the world’s supply of the drug and to download what’s she’s learned to a brainiac scientist (Morgan Freeman) before she implodes. Kind of a sci fi D.O.A.
French director Luc Besson is an unapologetic lover of American action films. He really does excel at action, notably in the underrated parkour film District B13. He has also delivered kickass female characters in Leon: The Professional (Natalie Portman’s breakout role) and La Femme Nikita.
Fortunately, Besson has Scarlett Johannson’s magnetic screen presence at his disposal. Here, she gets to show off an amazing intensity that comes when her character’s superbrain is whirring away. Her throaty voice turns out to be perfect for delivering very authoritative statements. Of course, she looks great in a t-shirt (first half of movie) and a little black dress (second half). She doesn’t take herself too seriously and clearly has fun with these roles where she is kicking some serious ass.
Not too deep and with great eye candy visuals, Lucy is pedal-to-the-medal summer fun.
The romance I Origins (which opens tomorrow) explores the conflict between science and spirituality. Our scientist protagonist (Michael Pitt) is completely empirical and militantly anti-spiritual. He is obsessed with the study of iris scans and patterns of the eye (the “I” in the title is a pun). He is hoping to prove that eyes can be evolved, which he believes will debunk the Creationist pseudo-science of Intelligent Design. He meets a model (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) – and they don’t meet CUTE, they meet HOT. Through a string of scientifically improbable coincidences, he is able to track her down for a second encounter that is sharply romantic. They fall in love – an attraction of opposites because she is mercurial and vaguely New Agey.
Along the way, he gains a new lab assistant (Brit Marling), who is just as smart and more driven than is he. Together they find the lab breakthrough to prove his theory. The main three characters are affected by a life-altering tragedy. Seven years later, the story resumes with the public release of the discovery. As our hero takes his victory lap over religion, he is faced with new evidence that cannot be explained by science…
Writer-director Mike Cahill (Another Earth, also starring Marling) has constructed a story that sets up a discussion on the limits of empiricism. I give Cahill extra points for raising the issue without ponderosity or pretension. Some critics have harshly judged the movie, but they see it wrongly as a corny religion-beats-science movie instead of a contemplation on the possibilities. And they altogether miss the fact that the film is basically a romance, which Cahill himself sees as one of the two central aspects of I Origins. Cahill explores and compares the intense lust-at-first-sight, opposites-attract type of love with the love relationship based on common values and aspirations.
There are, however, two shots involving pivotal moments in the story (and both involving billboards) that are such self-consciously ostentatious filmmaking that they distracted me, rather than bringing emphasis to each moment.
Pitt, an actor of sometimes unsettling affect, is very good here, as he was in The Dreamers and Last Days. Berges-Frisbey and Marling deliver fine performances, too. If Marling is in a movie, it aspires to being good – I loved The East, which she co-write and starred in. Archie Panjabi, without the boots and the upfront sexiness she wears on The Good Wife, is solid in a minor part.
I Origins works both as a scientific detective story and as a meditation on romance. I found it to be smart and entertaining.
Snowpiercer is that rare sci fi thriller that effectively explores some serious questions without becoming ponderous or pretentious. Here’s the setup. In an attempt to fix global warming by chemically cooling the earth, mankind has moved the needle too far and has instead FROZEN the planet. The only survivors are a few thousand humans packed into a nuclear-powered, “self-sustainable” train that rattles around the earth on a circuitous track. The wealthy elite lives in comfort at the front of the train, while their cruel armed guards keep the wretched, unwashed poor in the back of the train. Naturally, the poor revolt and assault the front of the train.
So we have a conflict in a claustrophobic space, and the thrills come from how the poor think and fight their way up car-by-car. Because the train’s systems have been engineered to prevent this, it takes a lot of ingenuity. And it takes a lot of violence, too, and because the elite has almost run out of bullets repressing previous revolts, that violence is often of the medieval hacking-and-thumping sort.
The train in Snowpiercer, of course, is an allegory for a society with an extreme disparity of wealth – and it’s not far removed from similar societies in human history and even today. In Snowpiercer’s most pointed moments, the mouthpiece for the elite continually tells the poor that they are undeserving and lucky to get the morsels that they are allowed. But the more challenging question – and one that Snowpiercer leaves the audience to ponder – is what are the limits of order; naturally, we’re all against repression, but how about when the very survival of the species is up for grabs?
The production design of Snowpiercer is exceptional. The snowy planet is cool, but the best part of Snowpiercer is experiencing each part of the train, including the greenhouse car, the aquarium car, and (my favorite) the disco car. The imagination that went into creating a mobile space that must sustain itself with making its own food, treating its own water, educating its own kids, etc., is remarkable (and Oscar-worthy).
As the stonefaced leader of the uprising, Chris Evans is okay but doesn’t get to do much. That’s too bad, because I know he can act from his quirky role in The Iceman as hitman Mr. Freezy, who works out of his ice cream truck. Because I don’t watch superhero movies, I was unaware that Evans has recently starred as Captain America in The Avengers and as Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four movies.
The best performance comes from Kang-ho Song as Snowpiercer’s most interesting character, a high-tech locksmith addicted, along with his 17-year-old daughter, to a drug of the future. Tilda Swinton is gloriously outrageous as a loathsome middle manager for the evil elite. After a spate of emo dramas, Octavia Spencer gets to swing her axe through a herd of bad guys. And Ed Harris, John Hurt and Alison Pill are all reliably good too.
I’m a big fan of Korean writer/director Joon-ho Bong, who made the brilliant 2003 detectives-hunting-serial killer movie Memories of a Murder (also with Kang-ho Song) and the 2009 drama Mother, which made my yearly Best Of list. Memories of a Murder is available on DVD from Netflix, and you can find Mother on DVD from Netflix and streaming on iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video. He also co-wrote the upcoming on-the-seas thriller Sea Fog (Haemoo) which plays at the Toronto International Film Fest this fall.
You can also stream Snowpiercer on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and DirecTV.
Under the Skin is the most bizarro movie of the year so far – by a long shot. A space alien in the form of a human woman attracts men sexually and then harvests their bodies. As each man steps forward, entranced in lust, he doesn’t notice that he is sinking into an ever deeper black pool until he vanishes. Later, we learn that he is suspended in the viscous liquid until, suddenly, his body is deflated like a popped balloon, leaving just the latex-like skin, while a red pulp (presumably pulverized human bone and tissue) heads up on a conveyor belt to the aliens for their use. This lurid story is set in the gloomy dank of Scotland and yo-yos between the gritty streets of Glasgow and a highly stylized sci-fi world a la Solaris.
Scarlett Johansson, who puts the lure in allure, plays the alien who any heterosexual man would crawl on his knees across broken glass for. Scarlett is a helluva good sport. Johansson is that rare A-list movie star who doesn’t take herself too seriously and has VERY good taste. You can’t criticize her for picking up a paycheck in the occasional comic book movie when you consider a body of top-tier work that is remarkable for a 29-year-old: Ghost World, Lost in Translation, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Match Point, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Her. Here, she is suitably sensual and perfectly nails the alien’s changing degree of emotional detachment/attachment, which is really the core of the movie (I think). And she gets naked several times.
Director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) co-wrote the screenplay with Walter Campbell from a Michael Faber novel. This is NOT a movie for those who need to know what is going on at all times. And, to connect the dots the best we can, we have to sit through some VERY repetitive action.
Again and again, the alien drives around Glasgow, scanning hundreds of men, asking the ones with the most unintelligible accents for directions and picking up the single ones. This happens a lot. She has an alien handler in the form of a human man dressed in motorcycle gear, who strides around with aggressive purposefulness and speeds around the Scottish back roads on his bike and never speaks. This happens a lot, too.
Under the Skin is getting critical praise (currently a Metacritic score of 77), which I attribute to its novel look and overall trippiness and to its being the first movie in three months that challenges the audience. But overall, the payoff isn’t really worth watching the repetition, trying to figure out what’s going on and why.
SPOILER ALERT: As an alien people-harvester, she is initially emotionally uninvolved with humans. She has no reaction to a family beach tragedy that would highly disturb a human. Dragged into a disco, she is disoriented until some poor guy chats her up and she can lapse into the role she was trained/programmed for.
But then she picks up an Elephant Man for harvesting; she is touched by his longing for companionship and sex – and ends up letting him go. Another man shows her kindness and she tries out humanity, tapping her fingers to human music, trying a bite of chocolate cake (and spitting it out, gagging). She attaches to the kind man but finds herself biologically unequipped to take the relationship to a new level.
And there are some holes in the story. If this alien race is so advanced, why can’t her handler find her with some GPS-like capacity? Why don’t the aliens harvest more people, and why do they just pick the solitary loners? Why don’t they consume the skin? But that’s just thinking too much about Under the Skin.
Having been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, Gravity has been re-released in theaters in 3D. Gripping and visually spectacular, Gravity is less a sci-fi film than it is a basic Man Against Nature (mostly Woman Against Nature) survival tale set in space. A catastrophe strikes a space station, and it’s in doubt whether the two survivors (Sandra Bullock and George Clooney) will be able to make it back to Earth or be forever lost in space.
The skeleton of the story may be simple, but Gravity is an exceptional experience because writer-director Alfonso Cuarón, in a triumph of special effects, captures both the messy nuts and bolts of space travel and the potential lethality of the space environment. I’ve seen my share of space movies, but I’ve never experienced a better sense of the terrifying dark and silent vastness of space. A human in space is suspended in an infinity in which, without a man-made propulsion device, he/she can only helplessly drift. Space is not so much hostile to humans as it is indifferent to our tiny existences.
The technical marvels of manned space missions have dulled us to the reality that space-walking astronauts are just one broken tether or one lost grip from floating away and becoming lifeless space lint. Cuarón brings his audience into that reality, and keeps our tension acute during Ms. Bullock’s Wild Ride.
The Mexico City-born Cuarón will certainly receive an Academy Award nomination for directing. Now Cuarón is an amazingly gifted filmmaker – he also wrote and directed Children of Men, my #2 movie of 2006 and Y Tu Mama Tambien, my #1 movie of 2002. Along the way, he also directed one of the best Harry Potter movies – Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azbakan (the one with the Dementors, Sirius Black and the werewolf).
There are essentially only two characters on the screen, and Cuarón benefits from two instantly sympathetic movie stars, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Clooney, of course, can do anything on the screen, and he nails the less complex role of a The Right Stuff style space jock. (In a wonderful nod to Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff, Ed Harris voices the earth-based NASA control chief.)
I’m generally not a huge fan of Bullock but acknowledge her ability to sometimes excel in comedy (The Heat) and to bring something extra to action (Speed). But I’ve gotta say that she’s never been better than she is in Gravity. Here she plays the Everyman role of a person with ordinary skills thrust into overwhelming peril – the kind of cinematic part that made icons out of James Stewart and Tom Hanks. There isn’t a false moment in Bullock’s performance, and she keeps us rooting for her on whole wild ride.
Gravity currently has an unbelievably high 96 Metacritic rating because critics are rightly acknowledging Cuarón’s achievements in directing and special effects. Gravity is without flaws, and it’s damn entertaining, but I’m not going to rate it as the year’s best; I think that some indies and foreign films are more emotionally compelling and have more textured stories. But Gravity is definitely the one of the best Hollywood films of the year and deserves its Oscar nod.
The gripping visually spectacular Gravity is less a sci-fi film than it is a basic Man Against Nature (mostly Woman Against Nature) survival tale set in space. A catastrophe strikes a space station, and it’s in doubt whether the two survivors (Sandra Bullock and George Clooney) will be able to make it back to Earth or be forever lost in space.
The skeleton of the story may be simple, but Gravity is an exceptional experience because writer-director Alfonso Cuarón, in a triumph of special effects, captures both the messy nuts and bolts of space travel and the potential lethality of the space environment. I’ve seen my share of space movies, but I’ve never experienced a better sense of the terrifying dark and silent vastness of space. A human in space is suspended in an infinity in which, without a man-made propulsion device, he/she can only helplessly drift. Space is not so much hostile to humans as it is indifferent to our tiny existences.
The technical marvels of manned space missions have dulled us to the reality that space-walking astronauts are just one broken tether or one lost grip from floating away and becoming lifeless space lint. Cuarón brings his audience into that reality, and keeps our tension acute during Ms. Bullock’s Wild Ride.
The Mexico City-born Cuarón will certainly receive an Academy Award nomination for directing. Now Cuarón is an amazingly gifted filmmaker – he also wrote and directed Children of Men, my #2 movie of 2006 and Y Tu Mama Tambien, my #1 movie of 2002. Along the way, he also directed one of the best Harry Potter movies – Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azbakan (the one with the Dementors, Sirius Black and the werewolf).
There are essentially only two characters on the screen, and Cuarón benefits from two instantly sympathetic movie stars, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Clooney, of course, can do anything on the screen, and he nails the less complex role of a The Right Stuff style space jock. (In a wonderful nod to Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff, Ed Harris voices the earth-based NASA control chief.)
I’m generally not a huge fan of Bullock but acknowledge her ability to sometimes excel in comedy (The Heat) and to bring something extra to action (Speed). But I’ve gotta say that she’s never been better than she is in Gravity. Here she plays the Everyman role of a person with ordinary skills thrust into overwhelming peril – the kind of cinematic part that made icons out of James Stewart and Tom Hanks. There isn’t a false moment in Bullock’s performance, and she keeps us rooting for her on whole wild ride.
Gravity currently has an unbelievably high 96 Metacritic rating because critics are rightly acknowledging Cuarón’s achievements in directing and special effects. Gravity is without flaws, and it’s damn entertaining, but I’m not going to rate it as the year’s best; I think that some indies and foreign films are more emotionally compelling and have more textured stories. But Gravity is definitely the best Hollywood film of the year so far.
There’s a big budget Hollywood movie named Oblivion opening this week. I really enjoyed the original version, the sci fi spoof 1994 Oblivion, now available on DVD. It is set in the year 3030 on the planet Oblivion, which strongly resembles a frontier town from a spaghetti Western, peppered with the occasional cyborg, ray gun and ATM machine.
Oblivion is intentionally campy, has a silly plot and lots of tongue-in-cheek dialogue. The scene where the funeral is interrupted by the weekly bingo game upstairs is especially funny. The cast seems to be having lots of fun with the material. Musetta Vander as the rawhide whip-wielding dominatrix Lash and Carel Struycken as the death-forboding undertaker Gaunt are especially over-the-top good. In addition, Julie Newmar plays a cougarish saloon proprietor, and Star Trek’s George Takei is the Jim Beam-swilling town doc. Amazingly, Oblivion rated a 1996 sequel, Oblivion 2: Backlash, in which most of the cast returned.
Our favorite alien-zapping secret agents return in the delightful Men in Black 3. We still have the yapping Will Smith paired with the Titan of Terseness, Tommy Lee Jones. In this edition of the sci fi comedy franchise, Smith must travel back to 1969 to save his partner and the world from a new odious and scary alien villain, Boris The Animal. We get a Mad Men size dose of 1969, including Andy Warhol’s Factory, the Miracle Mets, the Moon Launch, some hippies and lots of skinny neckties.
The cast is all good, but the most inspired casting has to be Josh Brolin as the young Tommy Lee Jones. Michael Stuhlbarg, last seen as the uptight depressive in A Serious Man, here almost steals the movie as a blissed out but hyper-perceptive alien. Michael Chernus, so good in a serious role in Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground, is excellent as a shady geek. Bill Hader is very funny as Warhol.
I’m usually not one for franchise movies, but MIB3 is gloriously entertaining. BTW in the trailer (but not the movie) we briefly glimpse the torch-wielding Columbia Picture lady wearing MIB shades – very cool.
I liked Looper because it’s old school sci fi – based on an idea, in this case, what happens if humans learn how to time travel? I think that much of the sci fi in that past thirty years hasn’t been idea-based, but more an excuse to clothe a monster movie or an action movie in cool-looking sci fi settings. The credit here goes to writer-director Rian Johnson who has imagined a 2044 in which the richest 10% (including organized criminals) live pretty well, but the rest of us vie for scraps in decayed cities that haven’t seen any investment since maybe 2012. In Johnson’s foul future, time travel is discovered, but by 2074, is used by criminals to dispose of their victims back in 2044.
In Looper, 2044 hit man Joseph Gordon-Levitt is confronted with the 2074 version of himself, played by Bruce Willis. Willis is on a mission to do something in 2044 that will change an outcome in 2074. The mission is shocking – would you murder a child to prevent him from growing up to become a Hitler-like monster?
In a year with many excellent performances by child actors, Pierce Gagnon plays one compellingly terrifying four-year-old. As a bonus, one of my favorite character actors, Garret Dillahunt (No Country for Old Men, Assassination of Jesse James, Winter’s Bone) has a nice turn near the end of the movie.
As Looper climaxes, the audience needs to think along – if history is altered, how will the dominoes fall?
Prometheus is a striking and well-acted sci fi adventure with a horror film tinge. What you want in a sci fi movie is cool alien worlds and cool alien creatures – and, for that, it’s hard to top director Ridley Scott, who made the classic sci fi thrillers Blade Runner and Alien (as well as Gladiator, Thelma & Louise and Black Hawk Down).
In Prometheus, there is a space mission to find out if a species of aliens created us and returned to their world in another solar system. The mission successfully finds the answer, finds the aliens and finds some terrifyingly lethal space monsters.
Don’t think too much about the premise. The movie is a little ponderous when it drills down to the existential questions here. We’re far better off enjoying the cool visuals and just rooting for the good guys to escape the space monsters. And the space monsters are damn scary. The final sequence, however, makes the inevitable sequel all too obvious.
If you’re looking for a girl that can take a licking and keep on ticking, you can’t do any better than to cast Noomi Rapace, the star of the Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. As the lead scientist on the mission, Rapace needs to survive a an impressive series of perils, including an alarming self-surgical procedure.
Michael Fassbinder is even better as an android with punctilious correctness and insincere charm, which some reviewers have compared to the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Idris Elba (The Wire) is also notable because he plays the commander of the spaceship more as a tugboat captain than Captain Kirk. Guy Pearce plays the elderly mogul who is financing the mission; distractingly, he is apparently wearing the same makeup as Dustin Hoffman did to play 121-year-old Jack Crabb in Little Big Man.
Sci fi is not one of my favorite genres and I won’t recommend it as a “must see” to a general audience, but if you’re a sci fi fan, then by all means, see Prometheus.
3D or not 3D? If you’re gonna see Prometheus, I’d recommend forking over the premium and seeing it in 3D, especially for some scenes in which Fassbender’s android activates some floating holographic images in the alien HQ.
