by Oscar O’Sullivan

It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks on my end with work, college projects and other general life obligations – I’ll still have time to watch plenty of movies, mind you, just less time to talk about them. This week’s reviews are all a little shorter than I’d normally write on here, but maybe that’s a good thing – brevity is the soul of wit. Let me know if you prefer these more concise, single-issue or reviews or my usual brand of sprawling insanity. Your feedback matters unless I don’t like it.

Monday – Twisters

Could I tell you the name of any single character in this film? Most certainly not. Everyone outside of the three leads is quite one-note, memorable in their own way for some silly trait or moment they have, but not a compelling human being – the film is so fast-paced and stuffed with set-pieces that there wouldn’t be time to make these people anything more stock figures, the actors don’t even have that much of a chance to distinguish themselves in the hectic mix. But the film doesn’t need their pasts or motivations to be effective in what it does – the opening scene is proof enough of this, creating a tangibly terrifying disaster where our attention is held by the fate of five characters we don’t really know at all. The storm scenes are all so expertly done, in terms of scale and impact, that you could populate this entire film with non-speaking extras and still get the desired result. There’s more to the film than dumb fun, and the characters who actually get to grow in the downtime do become quite loveable, but let’s face it – you’re here to squeal and clutch the armrests as a tornado blows a hole in the face of a cinema and starts sucking audience members out into the void. 8/10.

Tuesday – Signs

I remember the “twist” of Signs being one of the most often mocked in the early days of YouTube film criticism – Nostalgia Critic and Cinemasins were tastemakers for a generation of film watchers, and M. Night Shyamalan was an easy target for nit-pickery and “outsmarting”. Anything can be made to sound stupid out of context – “the aliens are weak to water, isn’t that lame?” – but that’s not the part of the ending that’s meant to wow you (can it even be called a twist when a character played by the director flat-out tells you it’s coming forty minutes beforehand?). What makes the final confrontation of the film magnificent is the divine happenstance that saves the family against all odds, seemingly random pieces that Shyamalan has been laying out for the whole film revealed to be an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine set up for one purpose – knocking down that alien. Gibson’s crisis of faith, his wife’s final words, the daughter’s mania over drinking water, the son’s asthma, Joaquin’s game-winning baseball bat – Gibson’s moment of revelation mirrors the audience’s emotions as we realise we’ve been had in a more spectacular manner than we could have imagined. If you’re too busy trying to prove yourself more intelligent than the film, you’ve missed the point – you’ve only fooled yourself. 9/10.

Wednesday – L’Âge d’Or (Age of Gold)

This 1930 film was a topic of controversy for the surrealist movement because it bent one of the core rules of surrealism as it was first envisioned – it has a plot. Surrealists wanted to prove that imagery alone could provoke a reaction, that the absurdity was the story, and the audience had to draw their own conclusions about what it meant. L’Âge d’Or has a thin narrative, but it’s still narrative enough to rob the piece of much-needed ambiguity. The visuals aren’t enough to carry this either, with the truly interesting images not beginning to emerge until the final fifteen minutes, while other mildly amusing absurdities are dragged out past the point of welcome. This is barely a film, and its concessions to cinematic and narrative style also hold it back from being interesting as its own thing. No rating.

Thursday – Prometheus

Another underrated modern sci-fi epic that was picked apart for “plot-holes” and had incredible formal qualities largely ignored by contemporary viewers. Ridley Scott’s prequel to his 1979 masterpiece Alien isn’t actually all that interested in being a prequel – it expands on the lore and backstory of the Alien universe, but in a way that avoids making any direct connections to the subsequent films. If anything, Prometheus could be read as a spiritual sequel to Scott’s other sci-fi masterwork, Blade Runner, tackling themes of free will and the nature of humanity in a cold, technological universe. Much of the plot hinges on Michael Fassbender’s David, an android who has grown beyond his programming and is pursuing his own agenda alongside the human expedition to a mysterious alien world. The story is dripping with religious and spiritual themes – humanity crosses the stars to meet their makers only to discover they’ve long since wiped themselves out, with the last remaining “God” on the planet seeking to erase humanity and start their creation from scratch. Humanity has themselves created “life” in the form of the androids, with David rebelling against his maker and carrying out biological experiments to test his own capacity for creation. The film is at once nihilistic and hopeful – nihilistic in that the questions people pursue are never answered and everyone meets their fates in pointless, grisly accidents, but hopeful in that faith can still save the day and drive people to do incredible things. Visually stunning, if a little limited in it’s colour palette, packed with practical gore and terrifying moments but not quite maintaining it’s atmosphere, dipping back into comedy and calmness when it should be fully steeped in the eeriness and dread that it so carefully builds up. Maybe the characters make stupid decisions just a little too often, but that’s life sometimes – you make a mistake and you die. Tough luck. 8/10.

Friday – The Ladykillers

The Ladykillers is structured to move at such an absurd pace that it seems to end before you’ve even realised it. This is the film’s great strength – it’s a light comedy that could feel inconsequential if allowed to drag on, but remains charming and even satisfying at a cool 90 minutes. Introductions are dispensed with quickly – the opening scene handily establishes Mrs Wilberforce as a nosy do-gooder with too much time on her hands, while the gang of crooks are practically falling over themselves to be introduced as briefly as possible all at once. Alec Guinness is the standout as the gang’s leader, delivering a leering performance that wouldn’t be out of place in a Universal Monster movie. The plot is fairly straightforward and delivers on regular laughs, but also manages to trip you up with a few deft diversions – the ending in particular is so obvious that I should have seen it coming a mile away, but the gentle pace of the rest of the film had me completely off-guard when the glorious final punchline did land. Kind of rickety and quaint in it’s construction but a damn fun time. 8/10.

Saturday – The Departed

When Scorsese does one of his famous “mob flicks”, there’s normally a strong focus put on the perks of being a gangster. The flashy cars, the nice suits, private restaurants, a circle of loyal friends, easy women, power, drugs – all this is to emphasise what is attractive about a life of crime, and to make the inevitable fall and punishment more devastating. Crime does pay – but you’ll pay it back in the end. The Departed feels markedly different in that it offers a much colder, grimmer vision of organised crime. Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t have a great time going undercover as a crook – he’s constantly stressed and paranoid, living in squalor, surrounded by violence and barely tolerated by his fellow crooks, a far cry from the aspirational luxury of life in Goodfellas or Casino. Even being taken under the wing of the big boss is just another stressor for the increasingly isolated mole, who is so broken by the end that he doesn’t even want to be come back to the police force – just give him his money and send him packing, please. DiCaprio’s opposite, played by Matt Damon, is a crook sent to infiltrate the Boston police. His job is cushy and comfortable, with his criminal obligations increasingly becoming a weight around his neck that he wishes he could cast off. At the top of the heap, boss Jack Nicholson lives a life of luxury, but it’s a sick and unappealing decadence, especially when compared to the lot of his underlings. There’s no true loyalty in this world of cops and crooks – even Nicholson is selling his cohorts out to the FBI, while the cops create their own obstacles with inter-departmental drama – creating a world so unappealing you couldn’t possibly see anything aspirational in it’s depths. Despite the interesting angle on Scorsese’s usual oeuvre, it’s remarkably by-the-numbers when compared to his best work – making it all the stranger that this is what won him his Best Director Oscar. 8/10.

Sunday – Zatoichi’s Conspiracy and Alien: Covenant

The final entry in the original 25-film run, Zatoichi’s Conspiracy doesn’t seem much like a grand finale on paper. It’s another run-of-the mill adventure – the blind swordsman visits a small town, makes some friends and some enemies, and saves the area from it’s oppressors. It may sound simple, but the presentation goes a long way in elevating this one above the other examples of this format. There’s a somber bent here, as the town Zatoichi visits is where he grew up (nevermind that this is at least the third home-town we’ve seen – this is by far the most memorably rendered of the bunch) and he reminisces at length about his childhood and the kind old woman who raised him. But the woman is dead, the home where he lived with her long abandoned, and his childhood best friend has grown into a heartless despot bleeding the townspeople dry. For a full hour, Zatoichi grapples with a past that exists now only in his memory – then spends an explosive final hour battling for a tangible present. This is the best of the six efforts from regular director Kimiyoshi Yasuda, a remarkably controlled and atmospheric piece that delivers some of the most clinically executed yet still heart-pounding action in the entire series. After being soundly thrashed and battered around in the prior film, Ichi has swung all the way back in the other direction and secures the most swaggering, lopsided victory he’s had in a very long time – a fitting high note for what was for a decade-and-a-half his final theatrical outing. Next week I’ll wrap up my Zatiochi journey with Katsu’s 1989 farewell to the role – forgive me for not wanting to wade through the 100-episode TV series before finishing out the films. Conspiracy is a strong 9/10, among the best films to come out of the remarkably consistent series.

Everything that Prometheus did well, Alien: Covenant does bigger, bleaker and bloodier. The search for meaning and the cyclical nature of godhood are expanded into a grand, disturbing epic – David’s journey of self-discovery has seen him flip the order of things entirely on it’s head, setting himself up as a twisted anti-God. The Engineers created humanity, humanity created David, this is the linear and natural order of things. Perhaps the androids would have eventually grown beyond human ownership and created something of their own. But David won’t wait that long. He destroys the Engineers with their own weapons and uses their corrupted genetic material to create hateful, destructive creatures, parasites that exist only to infect and absorb all other life. He turns his creatures on humanity, his own creators, using them as the final ingredient to complete his perfect life-form – the Xenomorph. David is deluded, of course – all he has done is warp existing life into a new shape, and briefly-glimpsed murals in Prometheus imply that his Xenomorph may not even by the first of its kind – another cycle he’s merely perpetuating. But his mania is compelling, convincing even – Michael Fassbender is once again the standout performance, both as David and his more mechanical “brother” Walter. The production design is as exceptional, if not more so, than the previous film – it’s scope and grandeur may even rival the more humble perfection of the original Alien. It’s a raw, angry film that doesn’t pull any punches in the way it kills off it’s crew of hapless survivors, daring you to be infuriated by the casual slaughter of people who have done nothing to deserve such grisly fates. It’s ending twist is obvious but no less heartbreaking for it – the cycle perpetuates, the covenant is unbroken. 10/10, desperately crying out for a follow-up, if even in novel form – the upcoming Romulus seems to unfortunately be a clean break from the story of the prequels, so time will tell if we ever learn the conclusion of David’s plans.