MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

Mad Max: Fury Road is one bold film. It's directed, like all Max films, by George Miller, who starts with a simple, audacious hook — the entire film is one extended chase sequence — then somehow manages to build it up into a surprisingly complex piece of storytelling and comes out with a masterpiece of boom. A mad, surrealist cavalcade of rock and roll carnage aiming a fat middle finger at every big budget faux-action epic of the last decade.

That hook would kill many other directors who don't know how to handle the pacing, but Miller knows how to rev-up and downshift carefully, mostly moving too fast to get bogged down in the kind of extended exposition dumps that often kill intricate fantasy worlds before they get out of the gate. Instead Miller, who radically reinvents the Mad Max universe with every new installment, has the confidence to throw us into the deep end after a brief grounding voice over reminding us that the Wasteland is a post-apocalyptic world and Max (Tom Hardy) is its Man With No Name, before we're off and running, watching Max get chased down and imprisoned by a band of mutant freaks called the War Boys.

But despite being the title character, Max has always been more of an inciting incident than a full-tilt protagonist. The film's real hero is the awesomely named Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a worn-out one armed courier for irradiated despot Immortan Joe. Furiosa quickly goes rogue, speeding away from the citadel in a Hail Mary caper to smuggle Joe's five sex slaves to safety in her War Rig. Joe gets wind of this and goes after her with his entire of war boys, among whom is a joyously enthusiastic soldier named Nux (Nicholas Hoult) who brings Max along for horrifying reasons I'll leave you to discover.

A few bits of business and some shifting alliances aside, that's really about it in terms of plot. The film is focuses on pure kinetic action. Miller throws us into the middle of lightning tornado, BMX bombers, buzzsaw trucks saboteurs and chainsaw jugglers. The hyper-fast quick rhythm borders on abstraction at times, but never loses an ounce of cohesion or clarity. Miller and Cinematographer John Seale (The English Patient) often frame multiple things at once. Consider the moment where Furiosa is firing a gun off camera when behind her, a motorcycle jumps into frame and she turns and shoots the driver in mid-air. The film has a dynamic sense of balletic movement and timing that at once feels grounded and also recalls the kinetic motion of a Chuck Jones short. It's an understatement to just say that the action is clear, it has style, showmanship and a lot of daring in its superb stunt work. It's not just that the film has explosions – many films have explosions – it's that this film has some of the greatest explosions ever detonated, and it has a lot of them.

While all the booming unfolds, the world is being impressively built up the background. Miller has long had a talent for comic-book sensationalism that is also telling detail work. With the aid of an unlimited budget, and comic artist Brendan McCarthy as a "co-writer," the world of the Wasteland has never felt more fleshed out. The film rarely pauses for exposition, or dialogue of any kind, but it tells us a lot to see how Joe brainwashes people while controlling access to vehicles by distributing steering wheels at a religious alter. It tells us something about Furiosa when we notice the brand on her neck and the wrench on her robot arm. When Joe calls for reinforcements from neighboring fiefdoms, we get a sense at the power structure of the world. Joe himself is played with epic relish by Hugh Keays-Byrne cutting an imposing figure with a mask made from a human jawbone and if there was any doubt that Miller means to depict him as a symbol for corrupt patriarchy, showing us his pale, tumorous torso being clad in translucent vacuform muscles should settle it.

The film's handling of its sexual politics are quite refreshing. Furiosa is a kick ass character who more than steals the show, and alows the film to avoid the tired 'damsel' trope. It's a minor disappointment that the wives (Rose Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoe Kravitz, Abbey Lee and Courtney Eaton) aren't fleshed out just a bit more as individuals, but as a group, they're quite compelling as a group of emotionally damaged abuse survivors, trying to work together to escape, while having doubts about the agency they've just claimed for themselves. Too many action films deal with sexual violence as something that happens to women's bodies to motivate a man to fight back. But in the midst of all its mayhem, Miller actually engages with this issue in a genuine way.

This progressiveness isn't new for the series: Road Warrior used mankind's dependence on oil as pointed subtext. Fury goes further, not just substituting oil for sex-slavery and human trafficking but also water and all the things that come with it. Miller's Wasteland has expanded to show us a world where everything we take for granted is commodified by dictators to make people into slaves. The film isn't subtle about this (Joe refers to his water as Aqua-Cola) but Miller and his writers do all this in passing, and are thankfully never interested in preaching. It allows us to keep our attention on what we came to see – the 10,000 righteous, brain scrambling explosions the film delivers.
  
Fury Road is a blast, the kind of masterclass of visceral filmmaking that doesn't come along very often. Elements of this film will be imitated for years, and I suspect that its iconography will seep into the public consciousness much in the same way that Road Warrior did. Miller has said that he would like to make more films in the series but I wonder if the very things that made this film work so well may also make it unique. Miller is a master, but a series of delays going back 15 years allowed him and his collaborators to carefully craft every small element of the films world. At any rate, it's certainly one Hell of springboard.

Grade: A

Note: The film is availible in post-converted 3D. The quality of the conversion is adequate but the effect is minimal. See it in bright, clear 2D.

SNOWPIERCER

Bong Joon-Ho is proving to be a director of considerable range. Since his breakthrough film Memories of Murder, he's ping ponged between somber procedurals and inspired popcorn fair. This apparent bipolar mindset is evident in the films themselves, all featuring broad slapstick humor, political undercurrents of varying subtlety and dark brutality, often in rapid succession. His latest film, Snowpiercer, loosely adapted from the French comic of the same name, aims itself squarely towards blockbuster crowds, skillfully combining the relentless action of George Miller's Road Warrior and the broad societal statements we might expect in a Fritz Lang film.

It's 2031 and mankind has inadvertently frozen the planet trying to solve global warming. The last remnants of humanity survive in the massive, titular train which endlessly circles the globe once per year. In such post-apocalyptic worlds, repressive social orders often assert themselves. Here the rich live luxuriously at the front while the poor live in horrific squalor at the back. The film follows Curtis (Chris Evans) as he tries to engineer a car by car takeover with his fellow caboose dwellers.

On the surface that hook might appear cloyingly simplistic, and would be in the wrong hands. It's easy to watch the trailer and recall last years insultingly dumb sci-fi allegory Elysium. But Bong and screenwriter Kelly Masterson (Before The Devil Knows You're Dead) make the goofiness work by rendering the world with countless bold, imaginative strokes that are often as mysterious as they are revealing. Take the strange, black cubes our heroes are forced to eat, or how the guards take people away based on maddeningly bizarre criteria, sometimes asking for trained violinists but more often for children of very specific heights.

Then there are the characters. it's a large ensemble, so some sadly remain generic archetypes (albeit all gamely played), but many are made memorable with wonderful little quirks. There's the kindly mentor Gilliam (John Hurt) who for reasons revealed late in the film is a limbless torso making due with improvised hooks and canes. An artist who draws propaganda for the poor and Bong regular Song Kang-Ho awesomes things up as a security expert addicted to a drug made from industrial waste. The film's greatest performance though undoubtedly belongs to Tilda Swinton as Mason, a blood thirsty Thatcher surrogate who has a heated, possibly religious fervor for the train and its 'sacred engine' and is taken gleeful condemnations of Curtis's incursion: "Precisely 74% of you will die!" she cries while watching a fight through opera glasses.

Indeed, while the rebellion initially proceeds with the clean precision of a heist, it soon becomes a battle of blunt force and attrition. Bong has always had a dexterous sense of blocking which he puts to good use on the film's inventive action beats. The best of which takes place entirely in a single car but but goes through six distinct phases including near derailment of the train, tunnels and even finds time for Bong to homage the famous hallway fight from Oldboy. So much action gets tiring because it only attempts one note. Bong's action succeeds by never doing the same thing twice, unafraid to suddenly upend things, furiously determined to milk every possible train related gag.

But the train isn't merely a place for cool fights, Bong's attempts at political subtext may end up being a bit literal, but it spawns some jaw dropping production design in the train. Each car serving a different purpose and is its own self contained world able to ignore those around it. Indeed one of the most unnerving details of the film is how the aristos eerily seem not to notice our ever dwindling group of increasingly blood-stained rebels. The film occasionally suffers from a few dully conceived character arcs (Curtis's sadly among them) that feel like they were pruned back from a longer script, and maybe having the villains state their philosophy a few too many times without enough progression. But it hardly matters, Snowpiercer is a film of such propulsive gonzo imagination that it can spare to have a few details fall off the track, so to speak.

Grade: B+

Note: Snowpiercer is currently playing in very limited release and will hit VOD very soon. It was intended for wider release before Bong got into a notorious battle with U.S. distributor Harvey Weinstein who wanted to cut 20 minutes of the film's completely reasonable 125 minute run time. Weinstein agreed to leave the film alone but in return will only show it on art house screens (where it plays to sold out crowds). It's a shame not just because it limits how many people will be able to see the film, but because this film is clearly meant for the full multiplex experience (a good 3D conversion would be fantastic). It's possible that Weinstein felt the film too dark and somber for the popcorn populace, or it could be just another example of Weinstein's apparent disrespect for Asian movies despite the money they've made him.

GODZILLA (2014)

It's common for Godzilla movies to overestimate our interest in their human characters. It's an honest miscalculation, after all cinema is about human concerns and heartbreak and we extend this to our monsters as well who are often anthropomorphized, but it is in this respect that Godzilla is different from all other kinds of movies. Even in the 1954 original, which heartbreakingly dealt with the Japanese psyche after WWII, the actual characters are mostly bland as to not steal focus and the appeal of much of the series is not in watching humans doing human things, or even in political allegory, but in watching Godzilla smash things and the beast has no human qualities except for those of a 5 year old smashing the giant Lego towers he just built.

Yet it's interesting that no film in the franchise has circumvented humanity completely, we're needed not just as filler but to give context to the destruction. In his new American reboot of the series, director Gareth Edwards has taken this series convention and run with it as an existential idea. He doesn't give us deep and nuanced characters, but highly sentimental ones to drive home the point that we, in a cosmic way, simply do not matter.

The human story, such as it is, is an inter-generational tale involving Joe (Bryan Cranston), an American living in Japan as a nuclear technician when a mysterious earthquake causes a meltdown that destroys the whole town and kills, among many other people, his wife. Joe doesn't believe it was a natural event and years later is still trying to find answers and looks to all the world like he's joined the tinfoil hat brigade. His now grown son Ford(Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is tired of him but reluctantly sets out to try and bring him back to reality.

In the background there's a lot of clever reconfiguration of the Godzilla mythos. We get Ken Wantanabe as a scientist who explains that Godzilla wasn't created by U.S. atomic tests but was simply awakened by them and later tests were really attempts to kill the beast. This doesn't shift responsibility for the monster away from America so much as reposition him as being an allegory not just for nuclear energy but for all attempts by mankind to tame nature.

The bursts of sentiment work wonderfully up to a point. It helps that Cranston is an actor of such electric intensity that I partly expect him to fight Godzilla. But the focus eventually shifts to Ford in a way that inadvertently also closes off his story and new goal the film gives him, simply isn't as strong and our investment wains somewhat to the detriment of the third act. But that's okay to a degree because none of this matters and for once the answer is deeper than "because it's a Godzilla movie." It doesn't matter if Joe is vindicated or reconnects with his son because these creatures are here to, in the words of the film, "send us back to the Stone Age." The humans are irrelevant but the film knows this and instead of just rushing past them, Edwards and screenwriter Max Brenstien pause to underline the futility and insignificance of humanity. After Godzilla and the other monsters show up and start smashing, NATO quickly drafts a plan to destroy them but we know that no matter what they do, they're essentially rearranging deckchairs. Humanity is basically impotent and all we can do is run and cower as these ancient titans do battle above us.

The fights themselves are beautifully done. They have everything we want out of large scale monster-smashing and there's a joyous element of this being a wrestling match but Edwards stages them with a canny mix of a Spielbergian wonder and Lovecraftian revulsion that gives everything in the film a unique flavor. He also manages to avoid many of the traps of large scale destruction by always sincerely emphasizing the humanity of the situation. The film isn't entirely successful, but it's rare to see a blockbuster with this clear an idea told with any kind of distinct voice, but Gareth Edwards is clearly onto something here. Finally after all these years, someone did something with the humans.

Grade: B+

TREKKIN' IT: THE FINAL FRONTIER

Fair warning: review contains spoilers.

At its best Star Trek has been a standard bearer for intelligent, mainstream science fiction. But the longer it allowed its actors creative control, the more it risked being the victim of runaway egos. The series had done fine letting Leonard Nimoy direct a couple installments, but the franchise was about to suffer it's first bona fide dud with the William Shatner helmed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

 In interviews, producer Harve Bennett, who remains enthusiastic about the finished product, calls the film “Bill's turn,” referring to a contract clause that allowed Shatner a shot at directing solely because Nimoy had had one. That he would try directing a feature isn't surprising, he'd long been looking for ways to distinguish himself beyond acting. In addition to his infamous singing carrier, he had directed a few small plays and a smattering of T.J. Hooker episodes. The same year Final Frontier was released, Shatner published TekWar, the first in a series of cyberpunk novels he co-wrote with an uncredited Ron Goulart. Shatner viewed himself a storyteller and for his feature debut, he set his sights sky high for what he hoped would be the ultimate Star Trek film, one that would simultaneously take the franchise into darker, more action oriented territory whist pumping up the broad comedy and, most staggeringly, answer the question of 'is there a God' with a very preachy 'no.'

That's quite a checklist for a first time film director, but the film cannot be called a failure of ambition because that would imply that Shanter, Bennet and screenwriter David Loughery (Lakeview Terrace, Nurse 3D) had a clear, unified idea of what they were doing. Instead the film is the definition of egotism, going off in a hundred different, conflicting directions, thinking each one will be equally fantastic and perfect, and the resulting film is a complete mess.

The film is not without its moments. The film's prologue – one of the few moments where the film rises above its generally workmanlike visual look, a problem perhaps exacerbated by the films short shooting schedule – lands us on Nimbus III and introduces us to Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill), a renegade Vulcan who's brainwashing the local farmers into serving as his own personal army.

From here it gets really convoluted, really quickly. Through some awful dialogue delivered by David Warner (who seems to be in physical pain delivering it), we learn that Nimbus III is a diplomatic outpost in the Neutral Zone separating the Klingon and Romulan Empires from the Federation. The place is even refereed to as “the planet of Galactic peace.” Why then, we might ask, is the conference room where the ambassadors meet in a storage closet behind a seedy dive bar in the kind of town waiting for Clint Eastwood to ride through? It doesn't really matter. The film may go through a lot of trouble explaining Nimbus III, but it's all about to be thrown away. All that matters is that there are important people in the capital city that Sybok will use as hostages so he can steal a starship.

All this exposition is intercut with some shockingly disparate scenes where Kirk, Spock and McCoy go camping in Yosemite National Park. This 'action' climaxes with a campfire scene where the gang teaches Spock to sing “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat.” As a kid I remember kind of liking this, It's patently ridiculous, and the chemistry of the actors almost sells it, but as an adult it feels like little more than a way to fill time while scoring easy fan service.  The fact is that real fans already know that these people love each other, and if the film wanted to remind us of their bond for later in the film, there are a hundred simpler ways to do so that don't stop the action cold. It's never a good sign when the first half hour of a film feels like the first half.

Eventually, the crew is ordered to rescue Sybok's hostages and after arriving on Nimbus III we get a direct to video style action scene where Kirk and Spock ride on blue horses and charge a team of commandos into Paradise City (where the grass is not green and the girls are cats). Eventually Sybok wins and uses Kirk to takeover the understaffed and chronically malfunctioning Enterprise A. At this point we learn two unbelievably ridiculous things, 1) Sybock is really Spock's half brother and 2) The reason Sybok wants to steal the Enterprise is so he can travel to the center of the Galaxy and meet God.

The film uses the family revelation to shake up the Kirk/Spock/McCoy relationship. It's an admirable idea, but giving Spock an evil half-brother we've never heard of is such an out of nowhere Scooby Doo twist that it's a non-starter, as is the implication that the overly pragmatic Spock might betray Kirk and their multi-decade spanning friendship for an outcast half brother with whom he has an anecdotal relationship at best. Still, the film doggedly peruses the idea that the crew's loyalty is up for grabs as Sybok uses his Vulcan abilities to “remove their pain.” What that means exactly is very inconsistent. At the beginning of the film it seems like he's brainwashing people into joining him. But as the film goes on it tones down the Charles Manson vibe and it suddenly seems like his glassy eyed followers have free will, especially when it comes to characters we like.

This culminates in the film's only good scene, where Sybok attempts to take away McCoy's inner pain. He's forced to relive his father's death, for which he was responsible, while Kirk and Sybok argue as to the best way to deal with our daemons. Sybok insists that we must purge ourselves of the past in order to move forward, hence his whole “give me your pain” shtick. Where as Kirk believes that our past, especially our misfortunes define who we are and should be preserved at all costs. This is the kind of intellectual argument that Star Trek is best at, and the film would have done better to have more of this, but alas the film decides it really wants to meet God instead.

The Enterprise approaches the center of the Galaxy, passing through lots of lightning bolts, energy clouds and other special effects nonsense before arriving at a mysterious planet the crew dub Eden. Sybok and the core Trek trio set down on Eden and search while Jerry Goldsmith's score does an admirable job instilling a sense of wonder. For a moment it feels we just might have something, but then “God” shows up. We should not expect very much from a film that promises a cameo from the almighty, we have such high expectations that it's hard to impress us.

Sticking with the "big, white beard" look doesn't help.

To be fair, the being that appears isn't very well defined, it could be God, the Devil, some kind of alien, or some kind of combination of the three. I take it though that he is meant to be God in some fashion because that's what the finished film has set up, and it never really suggests otherwise. At any rate, he is revealed to be a fraud. After a shockingly short encounter, Kirk outsmarts “God” who seems to be nothing but a snake oil salesman who, like Sybok only wants to steal a starship, prompting Shatner's famous line: “What does God need with a starship?”

That's a good line, but it's the beginning of a thought not the end of one. At this point in the film it's fairly safe to assume that Shatner is an Atheist, which is fine and dandy if that's what works for you, but his film casually brushes off the idea of a God without any thought, insight, nuance or debate. The film had the wonderful opportunity to explore how faith can be corrupted and trap people or even suggest that this being only wants a starship so he too can search for his creator, which would be really interesting. But instead of doing any of those things, the film decides to half-ass the whole Atheism thing and paint Shatner's alter ego as "God's" outright superior: according to this film, God and his followers are either glassy-eyed hicks or hucksters who are easily outwitted by the glorious Captain Kirk, envy of all! That is, of course, before "God" is killed by a photon torpedo delivered by Spock (Trek's go to embodiment of all that is logical and scientific).

Final Frontier had a chance to be something interesting, but mistakes the kernels of ideas for fully formed ones. It wants to have big ideas but would rather go camping. All and all, it would have been best if Shatner had stuck to acting. Time has ensured that film isn't necessarily the lowest point in the series, but it's pretty damn close.

Grade: D

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Trekkin' It directory:
The Motion Picture
Space Seed / The Wrath of Khan
The Search for Spock
The Voyage Home
The Final Frontier
The Undiscovered Country

Generations
Best of Both Worlds / First Contact
Insurrection
Nemesis

Star Trek '09
Into Darkness (spoiler analysis) 

THE WORLD'S END

Few comedies are awaited with as much fervor as those of Edgar Wright who, along with frequent star and co-writer Simon Pegg seem to be vying for the title of "patron saint of Nerddom." While Wright's films, particularly those of the Cornetto Trilogy, are draped in nostalgia and genre thrills, they are unique in modern geekdom in that they don't rest on nostalgia so much as they serve as complex, enjoyably conflicted, frequently hilarious meditations on it.

It's hard growing up, particularly if you've been putting it off for a few decades. Such is the predicament of Gary King (Pegg), the rude, drunken and earnestly desperate protagonist of The World's End, the third and possibly best entry of the trilogy. For King, life never measurably improved on a drunken pub crawl he attempted with his friends when they were all 17.

Twenty-three years later King is suddenly eager to get the band back together and recreate that crawl, which he dubs "The Golden Mile:" 12 pints at all 12 of the pubs in their hometown of Newton Heaven, finishing at the titular World's End. But his friends (played by Wright regulars: Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine and Eddie Marsan) aren't so eager to join him. Unlike King, who lives his life in a shabby flat doing God-only-knows between AA meetings, they've all settled down and joined society. But one by one they're lured back by King's oily charm and the promise of days gone by.

But recapturing their glory days proves difficult, everything seems just out of reach and they can't settle in like they used to. The town feels slightly off, particularly the all important pubs which have lost their individual flair after a series of corporate take-overs: "Starbucking," they call it. There's a nice, quintessentially Wrightian touch, where every time they enter a new bar, the camera repeats the exact same establishing shot in what is clearly the same set with different extras. This persistent offness launches the gang into existential crisis mode. It's as if the world is against them cutting loose. Of course, this being a Cornetto film, the assertion is soon proven true when we learn that the town's increasing plainness is actually the result of a stealth takeover by space robots. 

This film might be the most confident of the series. We get no winking shots of flying saucers or anything to telegraph the genre shift a la Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. As much fun as that was in the previous installments, it's for the best that we don't get it here, as the importance of the pre-shift movie almost dominates the post-shift one. The film takes a lot of time setting up King and the gang to the point that we might all be perfectly content if the film remained Wright's version of The Big Chill. But the shift into Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory works because it all clicks thematically in fun and surprising ways. It's no accident that a film exploring the links between nostalgia and conformity selects automatons as its antagonists.

The film's visions of what conformity means is interesting in that Wright and Pegg don't automatically discount the Starbucked life the robots are offering. Like in Hot Fuzz, it seems as if nostalgia and conformity are linked in Wright's mind. King may prod and tease his friends for working for 'The Man' and living flavorless lives, but it seems like they have more options than King. He may have succeeded in staying away from societal norms, but his freedom and his refusal to let go of his youth has put him in damaging routines that he isn't even aware of. The film sympathizes with his desire to be the ultimate individual while observing that the quest has made him a friendless slave to drugs and alcohol. Ultimately, it seems that King knows he's a fuck-up, but he wants the freedom to be a fuck-up, even if that's not exactly freedom and has disastrous consequences for everyone around him. That's a pretty tough conundrum for a comedy to present but Wright handles it about as deftly as one can handle such a messy worldview. In a dark, telling echo of Shaun of the Dead, the gang doesn't just have to fight robots, but King, who's insistence that they finish the Golden Mile and get to The World's End starts to seem more self-serving and suicidal by the minute.

That multifaceted view of King and his situation is what makes the film so good, and that lens is also turned on King's "friends" who all have their own outlooks on their youth and how the town has changed. Nick Frost does a fantastic job playing against type as the mature one of the group and there's a scene where Eddie Marsan encounters a former bully that's touching to say the least. It is a pity that we don't get the same kind of detail with the character played by the wonderful Rosamund Pike, who is saddled with being "the girl." Pegg and Wright have consistently shown an eagerness to be emotionally honest and mature with the film's they make together, so they owe it to themselves to stop underwriting their female parts.

Still, World's End is fantastic. Wright and Pegg have capped off an already excellent series with their most thoughtful entry without ever losing their sense of humor. The film might be about alcoholism, lost innocence and self-destruction, but it's also a really funny movie about alcoholism, lost innocence and self-destruction. Also the robots are a blast. In a year filled with dumb sci-fi (Elysium, Man of Steel) and moronic looking comedies (does anyone actually want to see The Family?), it's exciting to see a film like this, take on these issues so successfully and emerge as a great ode to the joys and pitfalls of getting loaded.

Grade: A

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ELYSIUM

In 2009, Neil Bloomkamp made sizable splash with his debut feature District 9, with complex characters and a well thought out world, it seemed like a real piece of visionary filmmaking on par with the likes of Paul Verhoeven. Unfortunately Bloomkamp is suffering from the sophomore slump with his follow up, Elysium, an earnest, reductive, pandering, startlingly dumb film.

The year is 2154 and the rich have left Earth to live in the titular, hood ordainment shaped, space station. Elysium is meant to stand in for upper-class America, but unintentionally comes off as Heaven, where beautiful, kinda ethnically diverse people sit around all day by the pool and tan themselves and there is no sickness or pain because every home has a med-pod that magically cures you of anything instantly.

Our unambiguous, White Savior/friend to children hero is Max De Costa (Matt Damon), a lowly Earthling orphan with a dream in his heart to save up enough money to cross that Space Border into Space America. One day while working in a factory, making robots for The Man, Max sustains a heavy dose of radiation that will kill him in five day unless he can get to Elysium.

Getting there is going to be a challenge as Elysium is off limits to the proles on Earth which, in the absence of the wealthy, has become an over-populated, planet sized shanty town. Sometimes people try and sneak into Elysium, but more often than not they're shot down by the stations security chief, Delacourt (Jodie Foster in one of her worst performances), who really hates undocumented migrants for reasons never coherently explained.

Have you figured out the metaphor yet?  Because Bloomkamp doesn't think you have. Max recruits the help of Spider (Wagner Copley), a techno coyote who agrees to help if Max first agrees to a very convoluted heist that requires him to go under the knife and be outfitted with a neural link-up and exoskeleton. But, the exoskeleton is one of the film's many ideas and details it doesn't have time to develop. Yes, the film does look fantastic, particularly the Earth segments and there are few people with a sharper eye for future tech than Bloomkamp but great production design means squat in a word this flat and cartoonish. I'm a real sucker for immigrant stories and blue collar strife, but the border analogy Bloomkamp draws never progresses beyond its initial conception.  Everything feels sketchy, particularly as the action moves to the space station.

Bloomkamp has repeated a lot from his earlier film, both films are races against time with a hero who's physiology is altered against their will and must fight all powerful oppressors, and the similarities get even more specific from there. That's fine, there is a serviceable tradition of director's using newly acquired Hollywood resources to essentially remake their independent (or pseudo-indipendent) breakouts. What's startling is what he chose to not copy, namely the humanity. In District 9 we had a protagonist who was pitiful one second and complicit in the oppression of an entire race the next. That complex relationship between a film's main character and the audience is rare and kind of magical. At the very least that unpredictability gave the action scenes a huge shot in the arm. Elysium doesn't have that. Its characters are cardboard at best, running around, shouting and getting involved in some very badly done action scenes and the one or two moments where Bloomkamp does try to undercut Max are mindbogglingly forced.
 
Instead of treating the genre as a gateway to complexity, he indulges in simplistic, pandering fantasy. In Bloomkamp's mind, the poor are all helpless saints waiting for an able bodied white man to save them, women are damsels and the rich have always had the ability to magically cure all that ails us with a literal push of a button, but choose not too out of pure evil. If the film didn't favor the common man, Ayn Rand would be proud of how reductive this film film is. The film does have an admirable social consciousness, but an allegory this simplistic and lacking in humanity doesn't do any good. Elysium isn't a terrible entertainment, but boy it's a disappointing come down from an ambitious debut.

Grade: C

TREKKIN' IT: THE VOYAGE HOME

Leonard Nimoy is a big softy. After the financial success of Search For Spock, he was given greater creative control to direct Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and what kind of film does he make? Not a space combat film like Wrath of Khan or a sterile, alienating thinker like The Motion Picture, but a movie about friendship, teamwork and saving the whales. On paper, it's this film, not Final Frontier, that ought to be considered the big misstep, the one no one talks about. But instead Voyage Home is one of the best, and certainly most delightful films in the series.

Picking up where the last film left off, we find Kirk (William Shatner) and the rest of the crew in exile on Vulcan, deciding to return to Earth and face the consequences for all the rules they broke so they could save Spock (Nimoy). As they approach Earth, things get impossibly goofy: in a reworking of the V'Ger set-up from TMP, the planet is being devastated by a mysterious, alien probe. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) decodes the probes signal as a Humpback Whale song. Evidently, the probe had expected to make first contact with some kind of Whale based civilization and instead only finds the Humans who, in this world, had long ago hunted them into extinction. Consequently, the only way to save Earth is to go back in time and find some whales to talk to the probe. Yes, that is the actual set up and it's a real testament to just how good these actors are that they sell the gargantuan leaps necessary to move the plot along.

After a trippy time travel sequence, the crew sets down in 1986 San Fransisco and splits up into teams. Kirk and Spock case out a local aquarium while the rest of the crew concentrate on modifying and repairing the ship. It's at this point where the film gets to what it's best at: fish out of water comedy. We get a lot of fun scenes of the Enterprise crew trying to adjust to their 20th Century surroundings.The highlight might be Scotty and McCoy trying to figure out how to use a Mac Plus and handing out future technology willy nilly.

The film is unusually democratic in handing everyone screen time. For years Walter Keonig's Checkov has had very little to do but sit around and be the likable Russian (it's telling for a franchise where people are defined by their jobs that Checkov's skill set remains undefined), but here he finally gets his own subplot, scoring some of the films better laughs when his obliviousness to Cold War hostilities lands him in trouble when he has to sneak around a U.S. nuclear vessel.

We also have a small subplot about just how culturally displaced Spock is. He's unable to relate to his crew mates, the 20th Century is even harder. There's an endlessly amusing gag about him being absolutely terrible at swearing, even worse than Kirk, who charmingly thinks "Double dumb ass on you" is a real phrase people say in 1986. Spock's inability to act Human is interesting as he is indeed half Human. Because he was raised in Vulcan culture, he was never that warm to begin with, but he used to be able to fake it just a little. The film makes a point of telling us that the ritual that brought him back from the dead also reset his brain and erased all the years he'd spent trying to reconcile his two sides.

While this is a very small subplot in the film, and a character point rarely touched upon, Spock's regression is the flip of the direction the film's were taking. Like Spock himself, Trek has always had to navigate between brains and heart. At one point Trek was primarily about allegory and big ideas, but that began to noticeably shift during Nimoy's tenure as director, and it's most apparent here. The big ideas in Search for Spock where jumbled and confused, here they're stripped away almost completely so the film can romp around with the crew. No one's going to argue "save the whales" as a goal, and the crew is alarmingly unconcerned with altering timelines. This is the first Trek film that's more about the star-power of the actors than anything else. The human focus is a welcome 180 from where the series started, but in going for the opposite extreme it also sets precedent or the series most indulgent, least enjoyable entries as we'll see with Final Frontier and the mostly ego driven Next Generation films.

Voyage Home is goofy, strains all credibility, but it's funny and it works like gangbusters. While easily the broadest, and most accessible of the series, it's also the boldest departure. Until now, the series had followed the traditional "bigger, darker" sequel model, but after all the heaviness of the last few films, it's nice that the Trek series took a break and made an impossibly fluffy, vacation style movie like this.

Grade: B+

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Trekkin' It directory:
The Motion Picture
Space Seed / The Wrath of Khan
The Search for Spock
The Voyage Home
The Final Frontier
The Undiscovered Country

Generations
Best of Both Worlds / First Contact
Insurrection
Nemesis

Star Trek '09
Into Darkness (spoiler analysis) 

DEL TORO ROUNDTABLE: HELLBOY (DIRECTOR'S CUT)

Welcome back to Director's Roundtable. I'm Loren Greenblatt and joining me in this discussion of the directors cut of Guillermo Del Toro's 2004 superhero opus, Hellboy, is Max O'Connell of The Film Temple.

 Loren Greenblatt: We’re back with…(dramatic voice) HELLBOY!

Max O’Connell: (slightly frightened)…y-yes.

LG: Del Toro cites this as one of his most personal films, along with Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. And it’s easy to see why. It’s a Hollywood blockbuster, but there is a genuine heartbeat and emotional core to the film that’s really distinctive and indelible.

MO: I know Del Toro was a fan of the comic books, and a lot of that has to do with how much it’s into outsiders and misfits, something Del Toro has always been into.

LG: And the Mike Mignola comics are extremely gothic, yet darkly funny, they fit his sensibility so well that it’s natural that he’d direct it.

 MO: Basic background for anyone unfamiliar with Hellboy since it was only a modest hit- he’s from Hell, brought over by Rasputin (Karel Roden), who’s somehow still alive during World War II.

LG: He’s joined one of those fiendish Nazi experiments that Indiana Jones usually prevents, but Jones is busy that day, so they have Professor Bloom (played in the present day segments by John Hurt) doing the best he can with a group of American soldiers. The experiment is run by Rasputin and Kroenen (Ladislav Beran), a Nazi surgical-addict/clockwork man. They open a portal to Hell or Outer Space or something anyway it's where the seven gods of chaos live.

MO: It’s very Lovecraftian. I referred to all of those monsters on the other side as “Not Cthulu” (Del Toro’s trying very hard to get a film of At the Mountains of Madness going).

LG: Bloom and the soldiers stop Rasputin and seemingly kill him, but the portal was open long enough for infant Hellboy to get through. The film then jumps forward sixty years, where Hellboy is an agent for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, and a big celebrity among the Bigfoot/tinfoil hat crowd, appearing in blurred photographs and whatnot. The first Hellboy film is very X-Files-ish, where there’s a sense of paranoia where all the conspiracies are true.

MO: Hellboy is the sardonic version of Sasquatch. He’s beautifully played by Ron Perlman in what’s just about the best pairing of an actor with a superhero part outside of maybe Robert Downey, Jr. with Iron Man. It’s hard to see anyone else working in this role. Both Del Toro and Mignola wanted Perlman, which says something.

LG: The studio wanted Vin Diesel, which tells you something about studio mentality. We like Diesel fine, but no. Also in the idiot studio idea category- we have an unnecessary audience surrogate in this film, Agent Meyers, who’s there to babysit Hellboy and keep him from going out. He’s played adequately by Rupert Evans.

MO: Del Toro also considered Jeremy Renner and Jason Schwartzman, both of whom I like, but this is a pretty thankless role.

LG: He exists only to facilitate exposition and to give audiences a non-weirdo to latch onto, but it doesn't work. The character is Blandy McBlanderson, and it doesn’t help that the world around him is so bizarre and vivid.

MO: These films show Del Toro at his most Gilliam-esque.

LG: Meyers also doesn’t work because he’s not an outsider like the rest of the main characters. The film is very much about how one deals with being an other. We have Abe Sapien (played by Doug Jones, voiced by an uncredited David Hyde Pierce), a fish-man with psychic powers. He’s the most blasé about the outsider thing. He lives in a tank, and he’s just fine with his lot. There’s Hellboy, who resists being an outsider and tries very hard to pretend to be normal. He’s very arrogant about it, and his attempts to look normal just end up making him more eccentric. Then there’s Liz (Selma Blair), who looks human but has the least amount of control over her outsider status- she has pyrokinetic powers, and she has trouble handling it. Because she looks normal, she’s been hurt the most because she knows the pain of being outed, and she tends to recede from the outside world. It’s a wonderful combo- these characters give the film an aching emotional core. Even without knowing anything about Del Toro, one could sense how personal it is. If you’re a nerd or an outsider in any way, you'll connect.

MO: I love Abe’s line that “all us freaks have to stay together”. There’s a nice surrogate family here with those three. It’s lovely. Meyers doesn’t fit, so it’s nice that he won’t be back in Hellboy 2. Something I’d like to point out about the film is how Del Toro handles the villains. We have three villain: Ilsa (Bridget Hodson), the ultimate evil Nazi woman, there’s Rasputin, and there’s Kroenen, the clockwork-man Nazi character. It’s a wonderful combination of Del Toro’s view of evil- the organic, Ilsa,who we need more of. There’s Rasputin, the great supernatural villain. And then there’s Kroenen, the technological villain. He’s a wonderful villain who’s dedicated himself to removing his his humanity. He’s a literal clockwork man in that he has a clock on his body that he winds himself up with.

LG: He doesn’t even have blood - he has magic sand that keeps him alive. He has to wind himself up before he exerts himself too much. He’s also a very theatrical character. He has these ornamental masks- a different one for every occasion, and he has this very dramatic, balletic way of moving. We also have some third-tier villains- the monsters. One of the more notable ones is Sammael, the Hound of Resurrection. He functions similarly to the giant bugs in Mimic, but as with the Reapers in Blade II, there’s more personality and a better sense of how they work. Sammael lives in the sewers and lays eggs. I love also that Sammael looks like a tentacle-lion with double-joints.

MO: And I love that he’s the Hound of Resurrection- some Catholic and religious tropes flipped upside their heads. Whenever Sammael dies, his spirit splits in two and goes into two eggs.

LG: Good time to mention the Catholic stuff- the magical objects are very religious. We get rosaries, crosses, pinky bones in reliquaries, references to the Vatican. It doesn’t use these as an endpoint, but it gives the religious stuff a great weight and reverence.

MO: It’s notable that Bloom is a Catholic and that he’s raised Hellboy as his son. Something Frank Capra once said about Christianity is that it’s about second chances, and to a large degree that’s what the film is about. Hellboy is born with the ultimate original sin- he’s the offspring of Satan, with red skin, horns, a tail, and so on. Bloom has taught him religious and human lessons to give him a choice to be what he wants. He has a chance to reject his Satanic destiny.

LG: Which plays into the films wonderful emotional climax.

MO: What else is nice is that the Catholic material isn’t too full of itself, and the film has a nice balanced sense of humor coming from Ron Perlman’s delivery of sardonic one-liners. Rather than just have him say something self-righteous, Boondock Saints-style, when Rasputin says he’ll never fulfill his destiny, Hellboy says, “Well, I guess I’ll have to deal with that”.

LG: It’s a wonderful performance that’s conflicted, vulnerable and funny all at the same time, which is something considering that he’s under heavy make-up. Hellboy isn’t Del Toro’s character, but he is his to mold, unlike Blade, so Del Toro is able to take more potshots at macho material. Hellboy’s cool, but he’s very arrogant and pigheaded. Abe Sapien mockingly says that he’s doing “the lone hero thing”. This is a guy who doesn’t go outside much, so he’s probably learned a lot from TV. He has a gigantic bank of televisions in his room, which looks great visually. But this front of machismo gets him in trouble- he wants to ignore the bureau’s rules and go out alone, he gets hurt more than he needs to, and he ignores good counsel. A big part of the film is him growing up and Bloom trying to help him grow up.

MO: Bloom refers to him as a child, and there is something childish to the macho thing. Del Toro does a very good job illustrating that. And yet there’s some sensitivity there- he likes cats, he likes pancakes (which he adorably pronounces pamcakes), and deep down he’s a big softie. He’s also very aware of the flaws in his character. Earlier on, a couple of agent friends of his are killed in the line of duty, and he’s somewhat responsible because of his recklessness. There’s a sense of Catholic guilt, which is amplified after (spoilers) Bloom is killed by Kroenen because Hellboy was out spying on Liz, his not-quite-girlfriend. (end spoilers) She too has a sense of guilt, since she can’t control herself and how she could hurt someone. There’s a lot of Del Toro in here, since he’s a guy whose super-religious grandmother tried to exorcise him repeatedly because she didn’t like the monsters he drew.

LG: We saw the director's cut. Overall it's a much better cut, but some of the additions are superfluous.

MO: Everything added with Meyers, specifically, as we get more of a blooming “this isn’t going to work out because she’s going to end up with Hellboy” romance.

LG: It’s padding- false conflict to make Hellboy jealous, and we get plenty of it in the theatrical cut. But there’s one subplot that makes the Director’s Cut vital - earlier in the film, we learn Bloom is dying of cancer. It’s a nice scene - after he gets an opinion from the doctors, he pulls out a tarot card, which is his second opinion. It really colors the Director’s Cut. It gives a great arc to Hellboy and Bloom’s relationship, especially with Bloom trying to get Hellboy to grow up a little bit before he dies. It also changes his death scene - we knew it was coming anyway, but it’s a touching moment of self-sacrifice. The inevitability of death is all over this cut. We also check in with the villains more in this cut. In the theatrical, the second half has the problem of the villains’ plan feeling a bit nebulous.

MO: In this cut, we learn that there’s a timetable for their plan, which helps make things a little clearer. The little bits we get learning that there’s an eclipse coming that’ll open the portal to hell is essential. The director’s cut just makes a better film.

LG: And there’s a bit before Bloom’s death in the Director’s Cut that establishes that Bloom is angry with Hellboy just before he dies. It’s a real stab at our hearts. Can I mention that the score is fantastic?

MO: It’s Marco Beltrami, the same composer Del Toro had on Blade II and Mimic, but the score is a lot better here. There’s some nice emotional moments, but there’s also a sense of playfulness, which goes with Del Toro’s own sense of playfulness. There are some bits where Del Toro is playing with blockbuster and monster movie history. The lightning when Rasputin opens up the portal in the beginning reminds me of Metropolis. Del Toro evokes a pose from Watchmen as he did in Blade II, when a Nazi flies into the portal and looks like Dr. Manhattan blowing up, but this time he does it with the Wilhelm Scream thrown in there. There are a couple of Raiders of the Lost Ark homages, like Rasputin’s melting eyes at the portal, or Hellboy pulling his tail from under a closing door like Indiana Jones with the whip. When Kroenen kills Bloom, “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn, most famous for it's use in Dr. Strangelove, and it’s a nice touch because we’ve also got a clockwork Nazi like in the earlier film and because this is an emotional apocalypse for Hellboy. When Abe takes Bloom for a look back in time to see how Rasputin got Sammael into a museum, it reconstructs time events in front of them. It’s almost exactly like what Cronenberg did with The Dead Zone, and it’s great.

LG: One of the other characters we love is the Bureau chief, Manning (Jeffrey Tambor of Arrested Development). Tambor plays him as a guy who hates Hellboy, but he loves going on TV to explain away the photos of him as if they were nothing. He’s the one there to stab at Hellboy’s Catholic guilt, but I love that they become a bit more buddy-buddy by the end, as they discover they’re both cigar aficionados (macho stuff again!).

MO: Yeah, the “light a cigar with a match, not a lighter” thing might be a pretentious cigar-aficionado thing rather than a real thing, but it’s a nice moment. We talked about Blade II and how it only needed the scientific approach to monsters, rather than the religious. This film, on the other hand, is amplified by the religious/occult/scientific mix. The bullets in Hellboy’s gun have Holy Water in them, for God’s sake. It’s wonderful.

LG: Often I get annoyed by Christian themes in occult films (other religions have intricate mythologies too, guys), but it fits this movie very well. Should we talk about the action in this film a bit?

MO: I think Del Toro has become much more assured as an action director. There’s a comic book feel to the action in Blade II, but it's too post-Matrix for me. With this, it’s wise that he uses longer takes, and the fights between Hellboy and Sammael really benefit from that. They also benefit from the fact that it’s shot as Perlman vs. a guy in a suit, with a bit of CGI doubling later. It gives it more weight.

LG: I think that kinetic stuff worked for Blade II, but I’m glad they don’t do it for this. Hellboy and Sammael are big, heavy guys. They need to have a more lumbering feel. This is a good time to mention the other guy in a suit, Doug Jones as Abe, who’s one of Del Toro’s go-to guys, and a man who specializes in complicated body work under heavy make-up.

MO: Jones doesn’t voice Abe here like he does in the second film, but Pierce was so impressed with Jones that he went uncredited in order to not take away from Jones’ work. The effects work here is great, too. Even some of the shakier ones are kind of charming. I like Ivan, the half-skeleton guy Hellboy brings back to life as a guide who insults Hellboy in Russian.

LG: It feels like a living comic book. Everything feels brisk and cartoony and fun. And even though this is PG-13, Del Toro finds ways to have fun with the limitations. When Hellboy slams Sammael with a Payphone, rather than blood coming out, we see coins fly everywhere like in a videogame.

MO: Or how about inventiveness that’s moving. (Spoilers) Bloom’s death, it’s very cleverly framed as Kroenen steps behind him and stabs him. We don’t see it, but we hear it, and the impact is greater. (End Spoilers)

LG: It’s done so well that even if Del Toro could make this an R-rated film, he probably would have done it the same way.

MO: I love the fairytale-style narration we get at the beginning, as we learn where Hellboy came from and who he is. It fits right in with Del Toro’s sensibility.

LG: I remember when I first saw this film, my biggest gripe (apart from Meyers) was that there was a lot to digest, and it was a little too top-heavy with exposition. I’ve grown a little softer on it, since it’s a big world we need to set up. He's learned his lesson from Mimic and focused on the few characters that are important rather than trying to breathe life into an entire city. He’s also resisting the urge to drop in too many expository monologues.

MO: He sets it up so well that after the first twenty minutes we get to explore a lot of character bits rather than having more exposition. The relationship between Hellboy and Liz is one bit, and that’s one of the best superhero-girlfriend relationships in comic book movie history. There’s something very sweet about it. I think Del Toro can relate to being the big guy dating a woman he feels might be out of his league (not saying he’s an unattractive man). There’s a line Hellboy has when he’s courting Liz, “I can promise you, I’ll always look this good”. That’s something Del Toro really said to his wife when they met.

LG: It is a very earnest film. With another director without those experiences, it might feel false, but it works here, damn it!

MO: And that self-deprecation really fits in with everything else Hellboy says. Favorite Hellboy lines? Everyone loves his signature “Oh, crap”, but I also like the quick bits to Sammael, like “Hey…stinky…”

LG: “Didn’t I kill you already?”

MO: Or when Sammael plants an egg-sac in his arm, “He didn’t even buy me a drink”.

LG: “What’s a good, solid word for ‘need’?” “’Need’ is a good, solid word.” “Too needy.”

MO: “On a scale of one to ten, how confident are you about this?” “Two.”

LG: Or even one of Tambor’s lines, since he’s in the field for the first time in his life, after Kroenen attacks him- “Hey, what’s wrong with you?!”

MO: Probably one of our bigger complaints about the film is near the end, when Hellboy fights the big Not Cthulu monster that’s a hundred feet tall. Big build-up! How long is the fight?

LG: About a minute, minute and thirty seconds.

MO: The way he deals with the monster is nice, as he’s swallowed with a bunch of grenades (“this is gonna hurt”), but it is anticlimactic.

LG: It’s a boss fight that might not need to be there, or maybe it’s a problem with money, You got an expensive movie, you “gotta” have an expensive climax. But since the the action climax doesn’t match the emotional climax that came right before it and it feels perfunctory. But at least it has an emotional climax that actually means something. It works well enough especially compared to Blade II, but he still hasn't found a way to do both at once instead of in rapid succession. I used to think that Hellboy was just OK, but it’s grown on me over the years, and the Director’s Cut helps. And if anyone has the Director’s Cut DVD, for the love of God listen to the audio commentary. Some of it is about the film, but some of it becomes this TED-talk about 20^th century pulp literature, showing that Del Toro really is the poet laureate of pulp horror. He’s a relentlessly fascinating man.

Loren's Grade:  B+.

Max's Grade: B+

The theatrical cut of Hellboy (which I'd give a solid B)is available for streaming via Netflix Instant, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and Xbox Live. If you enjoyed this review, please like us on Facebook.

Roundtable Directory:
Geometria
Cronos
Mimic (director's cut)
The Devil's Backbone
Blade II
Hellboy (director's cut)
Pan's Labyrinth
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Unmade Del Toro
Pacific Rim

DEL TORO ROUNDTABLE: MIMIC (DIRECTOR'S CUT)

Welcome back to Director's Roundtable. I'm Loren Greenblatt and joining me in our continuing discussion of the work of Guillermo Del Toro is Max O'Connell of The Film Temple.

Max O'Connell: After Cronos made a big splash in the independent film world, Del Toro worked a number of projects. Mostly it seems that he worked on Devil's Backbone, but he also worked on stuff like a version of Count of Monte Cristo for Francis Ford Coppola. Eventually he was approached by Miramax to contribute to a Horror anthology film. For his section, Del Toro chose to adapt the short story "Mimic" by Donald A. Wollheim. Eventually it was decided that the short would be expanded into a feature film which was severely compromised by the studio to such a degree that even the Director's Cut we saw can't be said to represent Del Toro's full intentions and it shows. The film, as it stands, isn't his finest hour.

Loren Greenblatt: No. Mimic was Del Toro’s second feature film, and it has a lot of really interesting things that it completely undersells. It jumps around a lot. It starts off as a plague movie: there’s a plague that descends on New York City that’s spread by cockroaches…and then the cockroach plague is immediately cured by doctors who release genetically-engineered superbugs to kill the cockroaches. Then we jump forward three years and learn that the superbugs have evolved, grown huge, and can “mimic” human beings. It’s a bit like Jurassic Park in the “man interfering with nature” category.

MO: It’s really a lot like Jurassic Park.

LG: But with bugs!

MO: It’s also a lot like Alien in terms of atmospheric horror and the second half of Aliens because they have to kill the bug hive.

LG: But not until the very end, which leads to the biggest problem: the idea of giant monster bugs that can imitate human beings is really cool, and the reveal of it is really cool, but it happens so late in the film that nothing can really happen with it. I kept waiting for one of the characters to turn out to be a bug person or something.

MO: There are a number of ideas that it flirts with but doesn’t really use or develop. Early on, they find a church full of people who have to be quarantined because they’ve been boxed up around this disgusting bug goo. I got the idea that they could have been infected with something, but that doesn’t really go anywhere.

LG: Yeah, nothing happens with them. They were just near the bugs, I guess.

MO: Then Mira Sorvino, who plays one of the main scientists, gets stung by one of the bugs, and you’d think that that’ll be something, but it doesn’t go anywhere either.

LG: There’s a lot of busy work in this film to get to the underground bug lair. There’s a lot of characters who won’t show up again: there’s the street kids who deal exotic bugs to Mira Sorvino, and that’s neat, but nothing’s done with it. F. Murray Abraham shows up as Sorvino’s mentor but does nothing.

MO: He kind of feels like one of those slightly better known actors who was hired to give class to an old B-movie and all of their scenes are shot separate from everyone else.

LG: None of them really add very much. I’m going to say that almost every character in this film is completely superfluous.

MO: Del Toro usually has a talent of making minor characters memorable. Here, even the major characters feel underdeveloped. And these are good actors! Mira Sorvino- Oscar-winner (for a bad film, but she’s great). F. Murray Abraham, Oscar-winner. Josh Brolin is in this back when he was primarily known for The Goonies, but he would have that major comeback ten years later. He’s here essentially doing an impression of Brad Pitt’s character in Se7en, and he’s fine, but he’s not given a lot to do. Charles S. Dutton is a good actor, he’s not given a lot to do. Giancarlo Gianini’s a great actor, he’s given nothing to do. Almost everyone is wasted.

LG: I have no idea what the main character’s name was.

MO: I’ll do you one, better: who was the main character? Was it Sorvino or her husband, Jeremy Northam, the other scientist? Whose story was this?

LG: (stammering while answering this) That’s a good- uh- I have no clue! I guess Northam because he’s the one with the information that Sorvino is pregnant. That is actually kind of a nice idea that Del Toro will revisit in Hellboy 2 where they’re trying to get pregnant but can’t quite, and then one knows and the other doesn’t, but the roles reverse here. It’s kind of neat, since it ups his stakes, and it’s one of the better parts of the film.

MO: It is, though, I had seen the theatrical cut before this and that was completely discarded. There’s a scene where they have the pregnancy test, and it’s negative, and that’s it. A scene later in the Director’s Cut it turns positive, and Northam finds it. I felt that it was something wrong after she got stung.

LG: That would have been great, had it been something instead of nothing.

MO: Yeah, instead her being pregnant just adds to his urgency, I guess, since that was missing in the original cut, but it’s still not much.

LG: Now, you’ve seen the theatrical cut, and I decided to be the guy who’s only seen the Director’s Cut. Can you elaborate on the other differences in the cuts?

MO: Um…no. I can’t! There are so few differences that it hardly matters. Del Toro is famously not happy with this film because the Weinsteins took it away and forced him to shoot some things, didn’t let him shoot the bleak ending that he wanted. I’ve read the shooting script that he had prepared with a darker ending, and it’s still not very good, but it does have that. This cut, though, doesn’t have many differences from the theatrical other than a few added scenes that are completely arbitrary. There’s a scene where we meet Sorvino’s friend (who also doesn’t do anything). In the original, she tells a story about someone on a date trying to slip a roofie in her drink, and Sorvino exclaims “What a pervert!”. In this cut, she’s on a normal date, and she says the guy likes to wear ladies’ underwear, and Sorvino says, “What a pervert!”

LG: That’s perverted?

MO: That’s a downgrade, Del Toro, I don’t know why you changed that. But one of the more puzzling changes is a scene where Sorvino opens a box that has a superbug, and when she sees what’s in it, she says that they have to find those kids, with a panicked look on her face. Then it cuts back to a scene from the theatrical cut of her opening the box with a scalpel. Why did we include that? I was exasperated, because I was pretty sure that while he couldn’t take much from a shoot he wasn’t happy with, but there’s so little difference that I don’t even know why he bothered.

LG: To be fair, while he was writing this film his father was kidnapped in Mexico. Eventually he was released, but it caused Guillermo to move his family, and apparently he's never returned to Mexico because of it. That might have affected the writing. The film also got damaged by notes. For instance, Del Toro originally wanted the monsters to resemble beetles rather than roaches. The studio insisted on roaches, and yet after all the animatronics had been built they got angry that they looked like roaches. There were apparently some subplots that the studio cut out of the film. I know that one of the things Del Toro did do for this cut was replace as much of the second unit photography as he could with stuff he shot himself.

MO: Ah, well, that makes sense, I guess, if he could at least say he shot more of this version. It's still a film full of intriguing ideas that don't work, though. Here’s a couple of other ideas that don’t work: these bugs that mimic humans, how good are they at it?

LG: They’re terrible! There’s a wonderful shot where we see the two-part mask that’s part of their bodies that wraps around their face and looks…kind of like a human face. It works as a shot, but there’s no way this could pass. Maybe at night from a hundred feet away…

Would this fool you? That's a rhetorical question, of course it wouldn't

MO: …which, to be fair, there are a couple of scenes like that.

LG: But there’s no way these bugs could wander around in broad daylight or on the subway and pass as people. It’s just not happening. This already undercuts a huge amount of the dramatic possibilities of that idea. What’s the point of the bugs being able to mimic humans if they can't pass?

MO: They’re constantly evolving, so why not push it a little further?

LG: And again: it’s very late in the film when we learn this.

MO: I guess one of the bugs (played by Doug Jones, one of Del Toro’s main guys) walks around with a trench coat and a hat for a disguise, but I wonder how intelligent this bug is that he can do that, because we don’t really learn what makes these things tick.

LG: The idea is that because Mira Sorvino and Jeremy Northam messed with these bugs, their life cycle has progressed exponentially and they can evolve quickly because they have so many generations. That’s a great idea, but we don’t know if they’re super-intelligent.

MO: Also, Sorvino has a line about how they, like many bugs, learn to mimic their predators: US. But we weren’t even aware they were there! We didn’t do anything to them. The line makes no sense. And the thing is that the film plays with a lot of things Del Toro usually does well. This is the Frankenstein thing of scientists meddling in things they shouldn’t meddle with.

LG: But it explores it so similarly to Jurassic Park that we kept quoting that Jeff Goldblum line, “life will find a way”. Constantly.

MO: But Jurassic Park isn’t the only big 90s film that Mimic rips off, is it?

LG: This film looks different from a number of Del Toro films, as it wasn’t shot by Guillermo Navarro, and it has a slightly different feel. The film really, really wants to be Se7en. The credits are basically the same, but with butterflies and overblown, bombastic Marco Beltrami music.

MO: The most bombastic music in the world. We had to pause the movie and go out at one point, and we started mimicking the music for every minor action we did. turns on left-turn signal BWAAAAM. That’s how silly it is!

LG: And that’s ignoring the goofy soprano music singing to make it sound ominous. It’s turned way up to 11.

MO: It gets a little better in the second half, but for the first half the score will not shut the fuck up.

LG: Some of the griminess of it is also Se7en, though some of it is just natural Del Toro. Some of it is the way the film was lit. And I guess that’s fine, Se7en is a great film, but I don’t understand how that mood translates to the giant bug movie.

MO: I guess you can say that something else that’s more in the Del Toro vein is the use of religious iconography. How well does he use it here, and to what purpose?

LG: No real purpose. I’m not the Catholic here, but he doesn’t use it well. There are some images that are striking, like the angel statues wrapped in plastic, but that worked substantially better in Cronos. There’s a stigmata wound that Sorvino inflicts on herself with a crucifix, which is…cool, I guess. Bonus points for stigmata wounds?

MO: And the superbug is called the Judas Breed, obviously named after the Apostle who betrayed Christ…which, betraying your own kind, I guess? It’s not overplayed, but it’s not great, either. There’s also a priest who gets killed in the beginning while a neon “Jesus Saves” sign. That’s clever, but there’s really not much to it.

LG: Having a priest character could have been interesting, considering Del Toro’s status as a lapsed Catholic, but nothing comes of that either. Now, this is a film he’s not very satisfied with, but he likes bits of it, which he’s borrowed for later films to greater effect. In Blade II and Hellboy we’ll see underground societies and sewers, which he uses well. The pregnancy thing is in Hellboy 2.

MO: One thing that’s similar to Cronos and a few others is how he starts the film with a brief history of how we got to where we’ll be for the rest of the film, which is the plague-prologue. I don’t think it’s very well handled here. It’s rushing way too much.

LG: It works very little, and it makes us wonder why we couldn’t see that movie. I’d love to see a plague by the superbugs, or something, but here it just establishes the stakes and the backstory, but it doesn’t do much otherwise. Now, there are a lot of stylistic tropes that he uses well: the use of glowsticks as multi-colored lighting. It doesn’t have the fairytale elements that a lot of his films have, which, to be fair, not all of his films have fairytale elements, but this feels lacking for not having it.

MO: Right. I guess we could also mention that the film does look fantastic, and it’s very atmospheric at points. There’s one really great scene where Sorvino and her husband are investigating in this crevice in a subway station, and they drop a flashlight down a crack, and she has to stick her hand down to grab it. We see the bug under there, and it’s going to lash out, and it’s creepy.

LG: My favorite shot in the whole film happens after she’s been kidnapped by a giant superbug, and she’s trapped in the sewer. She looks up and calls for help, and out of the darkness you see the sun pouring in from the sewer grate, and people are walking over it completely unaware. It’s a gorgeous shot that really encapsulates how trapped she is in this world just beneath our feet. But it belongs to a better film.

MO: There’s a lot of set-pieces that belong to a better film. Josh Brolin’s death (a piece of second unit shot by Robert Rodriguez) is a fantastic set-piece, but it’s for a character we didn’t know very well.

LG: What was his name?

MO: Smartass. I actually think it was Josh, which I remember only because that’s his real name.

LG: Again, though, his character only exists for padding.

MO: But this goes even for the characters who stick it out until the end. Charles S. Dutton is given a memorable final moment. We learn that he sings blues songs when he’s scared, and he does that after he realizes that he’s going to die and he sacrifices himself to save everyone else. It’s an interesting moment, but we didn’t get to know much about him, so it’s all for naught.

LG: Yeah, I like that Del Toro wanted to create a living world full of people, but there's an art to making small characters feel like real people he hasn't mastered. If he cut out maybe half of these characters and focused on the ones that are around at the end, it’d be a much stronger script.

MO: Now, we need to talk about the kid. Del Toro is famous for using strange children in his movies. He has a strong sympathy for outsiders, since he kind of always felt like one. And he uses that in a really interesting way with a kid named Chuy, who’s the grandson of Giancarlo Gianini’s shoe-shine man on the subway. He’s autistic, and he’s got a Rain Man ability where he knows everything there is to know about shoes, and he has these spoons that he clicks together to mimic the sounds of different shoes walking. He also has a strange obsession with shiny wire that goes nowhere, but the spoons thing is interesting. When he first hears the clicking noises the bug makes, he refers to it as “Mr. Funny Shoes”, and he uses the spoons to try to mimic it. Because of that, when they kidnap him, they keep him alive because they recognize the sound.

LG: Is that why they have that?

MO: That’s what I gathered, though it’s not explained well. The thing I can say about how Del Toro uses the disabled child device is that it’s imaginative. But it’s still incredibly irritating as a device.

LG: Watching Cronos and Mimic, he hasn’t quite figured out how to make kids characters yet. When we get further on, he improves exponentially. Here, it feels like a missed opportunity, knowing just how far he’s going to come, because the kid really is just a device.

MO: I do like the wonderful gooeyness of the film, like in the scene they have to spread the bugs’ organs over themselves to mimic their scent. That’s a neat moment.

LG: It’s kind of like the garlic-vampire thing.

MO: Or a “look like your predator” thing, in a way that’s way better than the way the film does it with the bugs. It’s a clever bit in a film that doesn’t have a lot going on. Can we talk about the cop-out ending?

LG: (loud groan) Earlier in the film, when the bug dealer kids visit Sorvino, she demonstrates how a bug colony works with a laser pointer and a giant model, and she shows just how the bug-queen relationship works. It’s a wonderful scene, and you expect that it’ll set-up the climax, but it doesn’t. It’s not a set-up for the bug colony or anything. The objective is the same, but the colony isn’t there. I don’t know if Del Toro didn’t have the budget or wasn’t allowed to shoot it, but whatever the situation was, what happens instead doesn’t work.

MO: And that’s only the first cop-out. The script had a bleaker ending that would have been at least more interesting, even though the rest of the script is still problematic (though, to be fair, I don’t know if it’s Del Toro’s original draft or a compromised one that was about to be compromised further).

LG: They went through many drafts. Apparently John Sayles did a draft that Del Toro loved but the studio hated, and Soderbergh wrote a very interesting version that just didn't work tonally with what Del Toro wanted the film to be.

MO: The ending I read was that after the bug colony is blown up, the kid and Sorvino are the only survivors. They come to the surface and most of the people around them are the bugs, but no one notices.

LG: So they actually use the mimic idea? That’s a fantastic ending!

MO: It’s undercut by how bad the bug disguises are, but whaddya gonna do? It’s a clever enough idea. Instead, we just see them blow up the bug nest and that’s that. It’s a conventional ending, a bit of a cop-out, but it’s not the worst one. We lamented that Jeremy Northam sacrifices his life in order to save Sorvino and the kid (not to mention his unborn child in the Director’s Cut) and kill the only male bug, which is what’s letting the bugs reproduce.

LG: Did we mention that this film rips off Jurassic Park?

MO: And he manages to kill all of the bugs except the male bug. Now you could say that this is a horror movie convention with the final scare, but it mostly just seems like he’s incompetent.

LG: You had one job, Jeremy Northam! ONE JOB!

MO: It’s basically just a final “eek!” moment so that Sorvino can kill the bug in a, quite frankly, not very interesting way.

LG: For a film that takes so much from James Cameron’s Aliens, maybe they should have taken the ending from Aliens, which would have worked well here.

MO: But the one thing I thought that I could say for this cop-out ending is that at least Del Toro’s central theme of self-sacrifice was present. We don’t enough about Northam for it to matter, but he sacrifices himself to keep his pregnant wife alive, so it’s theoretically a nice moment…though I don’t know why he doesn’t tell her she’s pregnant earlier, that might have kept her from doing some of these dangerous things.

LG: You’d think that might be important. He whispers it into her ear as the film ends, and that’s how she knows.

MO: Oh yeah, by the way, he really lives, so his sacrifice means nothing.

LG: It’s supposed to be a triumphant moment, but it feels like every bad Hollywood ending ever.

MO: But Del Toro usually does this so well! This is clearly a studio-imposed thing rather than Del Toro losing his nerve.

LG: I understand that Del Toro is only slightly happier with this version. He’ll at least put his name on it rather than disown it. It’s a well-made film, but even under the best circumstances, there’s not a great film in here. At best, it’d be a good B-movie.

MO: Doesn’t explore its ideas, the characters are thin, and while it’s atmospheric and well-directed, there’s plenty of moments where I was bored.

LG: I agree. This is the only time in this marathon where I’m going to give a film a negative rating.

Loren's Grade: C.

Max's Grade: C+.

That's it for our review of the director's cut of Mimic. If you agree or disagree with our takes feel free to leave a comment below. The theatrical cut of Mimic is available for streaming on Netflix and Vudu. The directors cut is available on Blu-Ray and is available to rent via iTunes. You can find more of Max's reviews at The Film Temple, and you can follow Screen Vista's here on Facebook.

Roundtable Directory:
Geometria
Cronos
Mimic (director's cut)
The Devil's Backbone
Blade II
Hellboy (director's cut)
Pan's Labyrinth
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Unmade Del Toro
Pacific Rim