Stealth

Starring: Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx
Director: Rob Cohen


How many times have we heard this one?
Lightning / power surge / coffee makes already scarily intelligent, quasi-sentient machine….ALIVE!

Stealth ain’t the first, it won’t be the last, and if they all make ‘em like this I say more power to them. This was way fun.

Rob Cohen pulls out all his training on The Fast And The Furious and takes it to 35,000 feet. When it works, don’t fuck with the formula:

Originality is overrated. This is 2001: Space Odyssey with stealth bombers. HAL is now EDI (pronounced Eddy for Extreme…something something). EDI is a UCAV ( Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle). He speaks, he flies like a pro, he downloads illegal MP3s and he kills his fellow wingmen. Lucas, Biel and a pre-Oscar Foxx are the 3 ace pilots in the Talon program – hypersonic jet fighters (they go up to Mach 5 or something) to be used on the WAR AGAINST TERROR WHICH WE STILL HAVEN’T WON. Naturally, it all goes to hell in a hand basket when EDI gets zapped, decides taking orders is for losers, and goes on a heat-seeking missile murder spree. Sound familiar? He even sounds like HAL. “Good morning, (insert polite but murderous comment here)”

Blow lotsa shit up. Rob Cohen recycles – and this is a good thing – his moves from The Fast And The Furious. A pilot fires a missile and we get a tour of the whole launch mechanism before the rocket lets loose. And really, hats off to the guys at Digital Domain – the aircraft effects are very real. Some very nifty camera work too. It really does feel like a rollercoaster: you fly across the ocean, in between fighters, up the rear thrusters with the jet wash shaking and frying the lens, then you zoom into the cockpit to hear the pilot spout some macho bullshit. And the explosions. Whoa. Dude. Two stick in my mind – a ring of fire at 30,000 ft and a multi-truck detonation that actually as people getting caught in every loving slo-mo second.

Show Jessica Biel. A lot. Like in the waterfall in a bikini. Like crawling around in the mud wearing her low-rise, hipster flight suit (what the?). I believe you can totally save a crap show with Jessica Biel. Hell, Jessica Biel might’ve saved King Arthur. Or The Punisher. Anybody who saw Blade Trinity will agree.

This was really good. Characters are cardboard, lines are cheesy, politics are all over the place (Sam Shepard sniggers “North Korea? We have no diplomatic ties with that country”). And because of all this, it is pitch perfect. EDI’s exit was a bit of a letdown, but every other criticism you have will need to be thought about and recalled. And in the end, you won’t mind one bit. Nu-uh.

The Island

Starring: (mostly) Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, (occasionally) Sean Bean, Djimon Hounsou, (briefly) Michael Clarke Duncan, Steve Buscemi, (surprisingly) Ethan Phillips a.k.a. Neelix from Star Trek: Voyager.
Director: Michael Bay

Briefly: It’s the year 20something-something (2019? 2027? Who cares?). Lincoln-Sex-Echo and Jordan-Two-Delta are two of the prettiest people on the planet. They all live in a pristine facility where they wear white figure-hugging jumpsuits, eat computer-monitored-and-optimized diets, work on assembly lines and go clubbing (no, really). And once a week, one of them wins a trip to The Island. The last natural land mass free from a never-explained ‘Contamination’ event.

Naturally, all’s not hunky dory for the happy couple.

And this is all fair and good. If you were forced to dress in white all day, not allowed to fall in love or for fuck’s sake eat bacon, well, there’s clearly evil shenanigans afoot.

The Island begins quite well. It’s a movie about cloning, but wisely, the writers don’t get all Michael Crichton and start explaining the scientific bits. The set designs, the way the clones are birthed, do the job of laying out the situation. Michael Bay’s breaks out his favourite moves: ultra-slo-mo shots, super-wide angles, flash editing, and a sudden jolt of action. This jolt sump-starts the movie’s heart and The Island just runs and runs and (yaaaaaawn) runs. It’s exciting but after a while, it just gets tiring as you get strung along – dragged - from one big action piece to the next. Each trying to top the one before it, and not quite succeeding.

The nice bits are in the little things:

• The side characters’ conversations: complaining bitterly about how some of them never win the lottery; their little crackpot theories as to how selection takes place; misspelling ‘Dude’ as ‘Dood.’

• How sterile their environment is: a computer tests your urine when you take a piss to decides if you should eat more bananas; if you have a bad dream, you have to go to the doctor.
  

• Brands we recognize from our time: futuristic versions of MSN, Nokia, Xbox, Puma, Lexus – scary that the blatant product placement is actually the one thing that helps improve the reality of it (“Hey, Xbox!”)

• Subtle treatment of the cloning technology: no science lesson, just camera pans showing bodies in various stages of development; all the clones talk like 15-years old, so limited is their experience of the real world

It’s this stuff, not the actors that are The Island’s texture. The actors – we’ve seen how capable they are in other shows – do nothing for the movie. It could be anyone, so I won’t go into it here. I won’t even talk about Scarlett Johansson with her almost pneumatically-perfect bosom.

It’s a lot of flash, with no real bang.
And that ending.
I won’t spoil it for you, mostly because I can’t.



Appendix:
Listen, I really wanted this one to be good. And I feel bit bad that it wasn’t so I’ll give you a list of movies you can see if you didn’t like the Island.

• Gattaca – Not cloning per se, but genetic perfection. Beautifully written, directed, hell everything.
• Bad Boys – Still Michael Bay’s best movie to my mind. Bad Boys 2, if you want to see a present day version of The Island’s highway chase scene (like a mirror!)
• Back To The Future 2 – The future, time travel, popular culture, laughs.
• Shallow Grave – The first time I saw Ewan McGregor, and the first movie Danny Boyle made. Wicked plot, and Ewan’s great in it.
• Eight Legged Freaks – Giant spiders attack town and Scarlett Johansson runs around in a top that I’d like to believe is not a special effect. Oh my.

Battlestar Galactica Season 2 begins

Midway through BSG Season 1, Episode 4 (I forget the title, but Starbuck captures the Cylon raider) I say to myself, no, I fucking pray to the Lords of Kobol, “Please, please let it stay this good.” I can’t remember the last time I wished that for a TV series.

Then they started with the whole Cylon gods thingie, and God’s purpose and I went “Oh fuuuuck…” Even before Season 2 premiered, I had a whole bunch of stuff I wish they’d keep/change/try. Michelle Pessoa has an excellent Season 2 wish list which pretty much mirrors the one I have in my head.

So when BSG Season 2 finally premiered, I was a little nervous.


IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN SEASON 2 YET, YOU SHOULD STOP READING NOW

What I liked:

They didn’t open with the whole Cylon god mumbo jumbo. Episode 1 opens with an FTL jump screw-up where they lose the entire fleet; the Raptor crew that crash-landed on Kobol last season are fired upon pretty much immediately.

The camera work is getting better in the outer-space scenes. They retain the hand-held style, but the framing’s better and they're trying new things. When Galactica misplaces the entire fleet, the way they pull out to emphasise how alone the ship is, is quite well done. They also have some neat bits where cameras are mounted on the sides of engines to show the viper’s speed and maneuverability,

New reveals with the Cylon raiders, without giving away too much. Showing the way they’re launched - like a shark shedding teeth - is a nice touch. And there’s that new model of raider we saw briefly in one of the episodes last season.


What I didn’t:

The character flaws are too obvious. Yes, Crashdown’s not a good leader, but didja have to make him such an asshole? Yes, Ellen Tigh’s a manipulative bitch, but she was more subtle, more under-the-radar with her scheming last season.

They’re starting to repeat the effects shots. The hard landings, the cannon fire, are all being recycled.

The Caprica story arc is shown just to re-establish. There’s no progress, no moving forward. Yes, Sharon’s a Cylon. Yes, she’s pregnant. Move on.

They cut out the title sneak peak. Now, I wasn’t sure myself when I first saw it. But the material and the editing was so strong, showing the scenes before the episode didn’t spoil or reveal anything. Set against the drums, the sneaks energized the episode. Why did they cut it out?


But hey, it’s still early days yet.
And despite all my nit-picking, I am glad it’s back.

War Of The Worlds

Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins
Real stars: ILM's fantastic Tripods

Not since Orson Welles scared the shit out of suburban America with his broadcast version of H.G. Wells' 107-year novel has there been a truly scary sci-fi invasion story. It's the idea of aliens I suppose. They are fantastical by nature, so our treatment of them tends to be comic, and whatever destruction visited upon us is merely a setup of how clever, how enduring we all really are as a species. You can bring your flying saucers and your zap guns. But we will open up a can of whup-ass for ya.

So Spielberg and screenwriter David Keopp decide to give us something new by giving us something old: returning to Wells’ original material and staying true to his theme: that there is no defense against an marauding alien force. It is a holocaust, an act of genocide, and viewed through the lens of our September 12 eyes, it is a terrorist attack on a planetary scale.

In this new version, no time is wasted. Cruise's Ray Ferrier is quickly established (crane operator, divorced, maybe a bit of an asshole) and the storm begins. The Tripods arrive, ripping the city to shreds by cutting a death ray swath through the city. And so begins what feels like an unbroken half-hour run for dear life as the Ferriers try to escape not just the Tripods but frenzied, desperate citizens reduced to mobs.

The movie is told through Ray's eyes, with no cutaways. We discover the devastation and learn about the invaders only as he discovers them – through TV reports, peeks through windows and terrified backward glances. But this first-person claustrophobia which kept the tension so high in the movie's first act becomes the movie's undoing.

We only see Ray's city, and the extent of this global ethnic cleansing - so expertly implied through the news coverage - is never fully explored. The carnage we see follows strictly the Ferriers' flight through their town. The inevitable military response is not shown, a missed opportunity to play out the spectacle of our impotent weapons against the Tripod's impressive force. What we were promised, a planet under attack, soon becomes a more localised event.

There are of course shiny bits. The madness that follows the initial shock is unnerving. In one scene a man attempts to widen a hole in the windshield to gain entry into the Ferriers’ car oblivious to the glass cutting into his hands. An attack on a ferry is the Titanic revisited. And there's the Tripods. Holy fuck, the Tripods. Possibly ILM’s best work, so different from the showy whiz-bang of Star Wars, ILM’s machines are so believably menacing because they are matter-of-fact. All steel and brute force and horrible, horrible sounds.

Human performances however, fall short. Dakota Fanning can do the screaming, crying child with her eyes closed. Ray’s son Robbie has no purpose except perhaps to irritate his father (not too different from Kim Bauer in 24). And what is perhaps Tom’s most different role – blue collar, not a prodigy in his field, a bit of a fuck-up – is one he cannot play.

The movie is very faithful to the book. During that first assault, when the characters are caught off guard, so are we. This is not a sci-fi film. It's a war movie. It is Saving Private Ryan and people are being oh Christ people are being slaughtered. But old habits are hard to break and instead of keeping it real and harsh, Steven derails his juggernaut with sentimentality. WOTW ends (literally) with rays of sunshine and hope and looks and oh shiat, closure.

The first 80% of the movie is incredible. That first half hour is very real, so fucking real in fact you don’t hear the word ‘Martian’ in the entire script. But when the Tripods finally fall, it's anti-climactic, and it feels like they had to end it quickly so they did. We were being chased, we were running for our lives only to discover quite suddenly, we are no longer being pursued. This can’t be all, we think. But it is.

Primer

Director: Shane Carruth (who wrote, directed, acted in and scored the music for the movie. Good on him. It won something at Sundance.)
Starring: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan

One of the things director Shane Carruth says on the commentary of the Primer DVD is he didn’t intend to make a sci-fi movie. He wanted to make a movie about the trust between people.

But Shane Carruth is an engineer by training so, there you have it.

Primer centers on two best friends, Aaron and Abe, who make error-checking devices in their garage (I know, I went “Huh?” too). In their spare time, they geek around hoping to come up with the Next Big Thing.

At this point, you gotta ask yourself:

• If you and friend invented the Next Big Thing, how long could you keep it to yourself?
• If the price of getting everything you ever wanted was merely doing something over and over again until you died, would you be able to do it? Or would you suddenly want to change things?
• If there was more than one you, would you feel you’re the ‘original’ one? Who gets to decide?

Primer is about these things.

Aaron and Abe invent something by accident, and though they realise how easily things can fuck up from here on out, they cannot stop themselves from finding out just how far this thing can go.

A lotta science fiction movies are about one thing that changes the world or the very fabric of the universe / space-time continuum. This is just about two friends, and the consequences their invention visits upon them unravels the only universe that really matters – theirs.

I found it very interesting.
I even found it disturbing and creepy in places.
And it’s been a while since that happened.

Come to it the way I did.
Watch the trailer.