Paul W S Anderson: Alien vs. Predator

Now, the blog until this point may have given the impression that I like nothing more than wanky films. This is true to a certain extent, but I like to think that I haven’t lost my common touch, and I enjoy a nice, brainless summer cinematic crapfest as much as the next guy. And Alien vs Predator promised to be great on that account: a big, stupid summer action movie with lots of thoughtless violence, people (or aliens) hitting each other and stuff blowing up. And it certainly delivers on some of those counts. But it still manages to leave a bad taste.

The plot is simple enough. Eccentric billionaire tycoon has found a subterranean pyramid under the North Pole and puts together a team to go exploring. Unknown to him, it’s not only swarming with the xenomorphs from the Alien series, it’s also the location of an initiation ground for the Predator aliens, where they fight the xenomorphs to prove they are manly. And anyone who's seen an Alien or a Predator film can probably piece the rest together from there.

The predictability of the plot, though, isn’t something to sneer at in this case. This is an action film after all, and no one comes to this type of film looking for cinematic experimentation or complex storytelling. Neither do they come for characterisation, and I was glad to see that most of the characters are stereotypes (at a push, I suppose you could say archetypes) – the weedy guy who talks about his kids all the time, the hunky scientist, the authority-loathing, gun-toting idiot. And they all meet an equally predictable end, of course.

The main problem with the film is that the writers seem to have completely ignored the title. This is Aliens vs. Predator, and a large part of the film’s appeal was surely seeing the two alien beasties in a one-on-one fight. What we actually get is the Aliens picking off the archaeological team, the Predator wandering around with a nebulously defined task, mostly getting killed but occasionally holding their own. The time spent on actual fights between the eponymous extraterrestrials is probably less than three minutes. If you’re generous, you can count the final battle with the queen, where the Predator forms an intergalactic tag team with the female lead, Lex. But the main conflicts (conflicts rather than out-and-out massacres) are between the aliens and Lex, our politically correct heroine.

Obviously, they wanted a human in the film to have someone for the audience to get behind, but I don’t think it was necessary – as I’ve already said, people’s expectations of the film were most likely limited to having the two alien species fight. Humans need not have applied. The result is quite disappointing, and at the very least, they should have changed the title to Alien vs. Plucky Ethnic Heroine, which would have been a fairer description of the film’s content.

The other major problem is that there’s too much time given to explanations of the pyramid's history. If people wanted archaeology, they’d watch Time Team (well, repeats of Time Team). Clearly, there certainly needs to be a plot reason for the Aliens and Predators to come together, but it needn't be credible. Frankly, it could be as wafer-thin as the plot and the characters. It's really just a matter of paying it lip service and letting the violence ensue. Garbled anthropology does not make an interesting popcorn flick. And all the time spent translating hieroglyphics for the audience could be spent on bloody carnage and explosions.

So, all in all, not a bad film. The history lessons are mostly unnecessary, but it follows the genre fairly soundly, and only fails in not realising its audience’s expectations, handily contained in the film’s title.

Larry Clark: Ken Park

Larry Clark has cut out quite a nice little niche for himself since his debut feature, 1995’s Kids, succeeded because of (and not in spite of, as many claim) a large amount of controversy over what the film portrayed: kids having underage sex, smoking and drinking. Obviously, the main reason the film was so controversial was its stark realism; Clark does not make fantasy films. But, contrary not what that film's more puritanical critics may have claimed, there is certainly a moral core to Clark’s debut, although his unblinking glance sometimes distracts from it. Clark continued to court controversy with Another Day in Paradise and Bully, dealing with similar themes. He has, then, despite his growing years, become the quintessential bad boy of independent American cinema, an image which was very firmly establish when Ken Park was released in 2002.

Ken Park, though, is important for many reasons. Principally because, as a result of Clark refusing to make a single cut to what he considered a perfect film, it did not gain wide distribution in the USA and was never released in the UK. Fortunately, I was living in over-liberal France at the time, where they just stuck a 16 certificate on it and released it in cinemas all over. It’s also significant because, despite Clark’s claims, it is far from being perfect, and is significantly poorer in quality than the other three films mentioned above.

The film contains four separate narratives: one with a guy sleeping with his girlfriend’s mom, one with a father and his repressed homoerotic feelings for his son, one with a guy who murders his grandparents, and one with a girl whose father is religiously crazed. The narratives are linked by the characters’ friendship with Ken Park, a skater kid who shoots himself in the head at the end of the film (though before the events of the film itself).

As you can likely tell from the descriptions above, Clark’s film continues its depiction of teen life and sexuality as in his previous films, and three of the four contain some very sexually explicit scenes, including a teenager performing oral sex on a mature women, a father trying to fellate his son, and a two teenagers indulging in some light bondage. The fourth contains no sex whatsoever (though the character does masturbate while asphyxiating himself...) but it does contain a gory murder scene.

This is probably the closest Clark will come to writing a comedy. The kid who murders his grandparents in particular is very much played as dark comedy and the affair between an older woman and a teenage boy is often played for laughs. But while superficially the film provokes laughter, it never enlightens the viewer what message Clark is trying to send. Laughter can be a powerful weapon to force the audience to question their reactions and judgements when used by a deft hand, but here it never penetrates deep into the film, remaining nothing more than a superficial reaction.

Indeed, while the comedy makes the film feel superficial, so too does the plot and narrative strucutre. It simply comes across as a selection of controversial scenes rather than a cohesive whole. This is, notably for an art house stalwart, the first time Clark has abandoned a linear narrative structure and he doesn’t seem particularly adept at handling this sort of storytelling technique. As a result, it’s just a rather scattershot collection of stuff, nebulously floating around with nothing, whether a moral core or a directorial message to unite it. There are many lacunae in the film and while some can be filled in with a decent amount of thought and imagination, many just seem lazy and leave the plot and Clark’s message a murky mess and without a message at the core and behind the sex and gore, Clark’s usual shtick is reduced to nothing more than pornographic showboating.

Simply, then, the film is reduced to an exercise in critic-baiting, something I agree with in theory with a mischievous grin on my face, but in reality it doesn’t make for particularly entertaining viewing.

Lost (again)

A while back I wrote a review of the most recent season of Lost and came to the basic conclusion that, at that point, it had been a huge disappointment. But the producers still had 5 hours of TV to try to redeem themselves, so now that the season has ended I thought I’d update my thoughts. Unfortunately, the show never turned around from its general lethargy and dullness that had encompassed the entire season.

(As before, spoilers from here on in.)

As I stated in the last review, the main problem with this season is the pacing. It’s just become incredibly slow and while it’s clear that the producers are trying to draw out the explanations of what’s really happening on the island, they haven’t managed to find an interesting or entertaining way of doing it. They have “Point A: People crash on weird island” and “Point B: Explanation of crazy stuff” but they seem to have few ideas on how to fill the gap inbetween.

In the last review, I talked about how the castration of John Locke deliberately impeded the show’s forward momentum, as he was one of the first season’s most pro-active characters. But there are plenty of other examples that clearly show a lack of original ideas: the tail end survivors had several episodes dedicated to their introduction, but Ana-Lucia and Libby were killed off, Bernard is completely inconsequential, and Eko may or may not have survived the finale. Similarly with relationships: Ana-Lucia muddied the waters between Kate and Jack before permanently being taken out of the equation, Hurley gets with Libby who then gets shot dead, Claire and Charlie have a spat mid-season but kiss and make up in the finale. Likewise, the hatch is introduced properly at the start of the season and seemingly destroyed at the end. Everything just seems to be going around in circles.

Now, anywhere else, this would be a perfectly sensible storytelling technique: establish status quo, disrupt status quo, re-establish status quo or establish new status quo. But where the producers have opted to re-establish the status quo, they really needed a new status quo. Re-establishing a status quo is equivalent of revealing nothing and the main drawing power of the series, after all, is the mystery of what is going on with all the general weirdness and for that they need to move forward and have people making discoveries and a concerted effort to find out exactly what’s happening. If people are completely passive, not striving for revelations and the new status quo that they will put in place, the series is nothing more than a cat chasing its own tail. What the latest season has become is nothing more than a sometimes excruciatingly dull exercise in killing time.

Even when the many questions that were left over from the first season were resolved, they lacked sparkle. Kate’s original crime was revealed, Claire’s flashbacks to what happened when she was kidnapped, and Jack’s marriage break-up were shown but all somehow lacked any real drama, feeling rather workmanlike in execution, as though they were something the writers felt they had to address rather than something they truly wanted to. But perhaps the most frustrating aspect is the constant deluge of unanswered questions, many of which may prove to be inconsequential red herrings: Rose’s cancer, Sin and Jun’s baby, the foot statue, even more questions about Dharma and the ‘Others’, and the Walt storyline which was supposed to be resolved in the finale but wasn’t in a satisfactory way.

Another problem which plagued the last few episodes of the season was the fact that the writers began pointing out the blindingly obvious. Despite what American TV producers seem to think, sometimes mysteries don't need to be explained in agonising detail. One of the reasons I watch (and therefore review) so much Japanese stuff is simply for the reason that Japanese films and TV don’t patronise the viewer; they show the viewer what they need to know and let them work out the rest for themselves, thereby assuming that the viewer is smart enough to come to some reasonable conclusions based on that information. This is certainly the tactic that this program takes with character development, and I could talk at length about characters' actions and how that gives an impression of their personalities, an aspect of the show that seems lost on many judging by what I’ve read on various forums. Perhaps they should just have the characters wear badges describing their character traits (Sawyer – bastard with a heart of gold, Jack – he just wants to help people, Hurley – overweight everyman), as this is certainly the tactic they took at the end of the season with the plot.

At the end of episode 20, Michael shoots Ann-Lucia and Libby dead, an action which is very much out of character for Michael, unless, thinks the reasonably intelligent viewer, ‘the Others’ have got hold of him and coerced him into doing something in order to see Walt again. Everyone assumed that he was being blackmailed in some way, and yet we get an entire episode explaining exactly that. Similarly, at the start of the season when Jack and Sayid were exploring the hatch, the find the big magnet, leading many to speculate that it caused the plane to crash, and 20 very slow episodes later, it’s revealed that – shock horror! – it caused the plane to crash. The tendency has even invaded the dialogue, as after seeing the impressive visual of a statue of a huge, four-toed foot, Sayid kindly explains: “I’m not sure what’s more disturbing, that the rest of the statue is missing, or that it has four toes.” As if it needed explaining...

The series has jumped the shark as far as I’m concerned. The writers are clearly a lot of hacks who don’t know how to write an interesting, properly paced television series. There are still some interesting ideas lurking behind the poor execution, but I doubt I’ll invest any more of my time in the tedious wait for them to reveal what will no doubt by that point be blindingly obvious.

Brett Ratner: X-Men 3: The Final Confrontation

X-Men has developed a decent audience for itself as a sci-fi/action film franchise, unshackling itself from its comic roots and finding moviegoers who want intelligent action-based films with a moral message. The first two films were directed and creatively spearheaded by Brian Singer, who disappeared after the last film to make a Superman film for Time-Warner. Brett Ratner stepped in to fill his shoes and has actually done a decent job of continuing the franchise.

This film picks up not long after the last one left off. As a result of events portrayed in it, mutants are now politically represented by a Secretary of Mutant Affairs, Hank McCoy (played by Kelsey Grammar), and relations between mutants and the government are taking a step in the right direction. The school is trundling along nicely, except for Cyclops, who’s being broody and despondent because of Jean’s death. Then it’s announced on the news that a scientist has created a cure for mutants. Magneto sees this as a weapon that the military could use against mutants and begins recruiting an army for a final strike, even enlisting the help of a back-from-the-dead and mentally-unhinged Jean Grey. This all leads to a big showdown between the outnumbered X-Men and Magneto's army at the lab where the cure was created.

The problem with the first sequel was that it was overpopulated: too many characters struggling for screen time and an insistence on cramming in as many cameos as possible for the hardcore fans. Watching it, there was always the feeling that they were trying to fit a pint into a litre bottle. The result was an often unfocussed and meandering plot. This film tackles the problem quite efficiently by killing off two major characters, depowering another, having another run away, and not mentioning Nightcrawler whatsoever. Cameos are kept to a minimum and mostly serve the plot. The result is certainly a much more focussed film, in contrast to the more labyrinthine and sometimes tedious plot of X2.

It also benefits from simplifying the rivalries. In the second film, there was simply too much happening between characters: the Cyclops/Jean Grey/Wolverine love triangle, Wolverine’s search for his past and connections to Stryker and Lady Deathstrike, Nightcrawler’s introduction and flirting with Storm, and Pyro’s introduction and eventual desertion. All that on top of moving on a conspiracy plot that contained three factions vying for the upper hand. It was a very dense film, and not always particularly well paced. Here the plot is much simpler: Magneto is convinced (and correct) that the cure will be used as a weapon and is prepared to lead a militaristic first strike. The X-Men, on the other hand, while opposed to the cure, are not prepared to go to the same lengths as Magneto. Cue big fight. As far as personal relationships go, we have Iceman and Rogue growing apart because of her inability to touch people and Iceman meeting someone new, Wolverine and Jean’s romance rekindled leading to the poignant ending, and Iceman’s rivalry with Pyro. All much easier to follow, and it allows for a thankfully quicker pace.

The other major change, presumably due to a budget increase, is that the film goes in for large scale battle sequences, rather than the previous films’ one-on-one fights. This serves to convey that the X-Men are a team, and is also a more intense and enjoyable cinematic experience.

As for the acting, it’s easily up to the quality of the previous films. Except for Halle Berry, who gets her much-whinged-for screen time and the results may explain why Singer kept her role small in the previous films. Her delivery of important lines is stilted and forced and she lacks chemistry with any of the rest of the cast. The scene where The Beast and her discuss the cure is particularly painful to watch, as you can see Grammar doing his best to play off Berry's lines, and finding nothing. Grammar fairs far better elsewhere and brings just the right amount of quiet eloquence and dry wit to the character, and particularly excels in scenes where he banters with Jackman's Wolverine. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen are the consummate professionals we know them to be, and Hugh Jackman has Wolverine down to a tee.

The biggest problem the film faces is the fact it's trying to meld two unrelated stories here. The cure story is fine in its own right, but Jean Grey's ressurection as the Phoenix is added and the two plots do not complement each other at all. Further, neither story really has enough time to develop in its own right, a criticism particularly true of the Phoenix story which is one of the best-loved stories in the comics and could have been a film in its own right. Admittedly, some fat would have to be trimmed from the original comic which involves intergalactic space travel and a whole new set of villains, but it deserves more than being a distraction to the primary plot. Jean's return from the dead was a given after the events of X2, and they had to follow through on it, but it's just a shame they decided not to give it the full spotlight.

Another story which doesn't get enough time is Rogue giving up her powers. For a franchise that is supposed to advocate individuality, having a character 'cure' herself seems contrary to the film's overall message. It perhaps would have made more sense if Rogue's struggle with life not being able to touch others (and particularly her boyfriend) was portrayed in more detail, and it would have also given the film a good deal of emotional intensity, but as it stands, her actions are those of a petulent, insecure child who thinks her boyfriend is going to go get some elsewhere. They should have excised the Phoenix material and saved it for the next film, and expanded Rogue's dilemma, acting as a nice counterpoint to the Angel's mini-story cameo. As it stands, neither plot is particularly fulfilling, even if the film's pace manages to plough on nonetheless.

All in all, a very entertaining film that continues the franchise nicely. Fixing the errors of the previous two films, such as poor pacing, various budget restrictions, and an overloaded roster, and introducing some all of its own, principally two unconnected plots. It certainly benefits from better action scenes, and the film will likely be well received by the general public and comic nerds alike simply because it manages to ignore its weakness and charge toward an action-packed finale.