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Showing posts with label Lana Wachowski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lana Wachowski. Show all posts
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Sunday, February 8, 2015
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Jupiter Ascending is about a Russian-American toilet cleaner called Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) who's rescued from murderous aliens by half-dog spaceman Caine Wise (Channing Tatum) and subsequently discovers she's the genetic reincarnation of a murdered space-vampire Queen. Also thrown into the mix are royalty detecting bees, an army of flying dinosaur-men, a crapload of gigantic explosions, some killer frocks and some outrageously hammy performances that leave no scenery unchewed.
God only knows who gave the Wachowskis the £175m budget, but they deserve kudos for funding one of the barmiest mainstream science fiction experiences in years. This is the kind of film that casually cuts from kitchen-sink comedy/drama to a destroyed alien world where three weirdoes chat gobbledegook about the end of the world, then cuts back to the real world without so much as blinking. This is the kind of film that you just have to 'go with', trusting that the ludicrous dialogue and nonsensical plot developments are building up to something.
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| Also you get to see Tuppence Middleton's butt. |
Well, not to spoil the film, but everything pretty much comes together in the final act. Though the Wachowski's revel in chucking bonkers new ideas onto the screen every five minutes or so, the actual plot isn't so dissimilar from The Matrix. Both here, as there, the accepted layers of reality are peeled away to reveal a horrible truth; that humanity is being exploited for our raw materials.
On its narrative merits, Jupiter Ascending often comes up short. Perhaps a victim of an overzealous studio mandated edit, the plot jumps forward in fits and starts. Characters are introduced with great fanfare then disappear from the plot, the heroine suddenly knows things she shouldn't and the film has at least two unrelated climaxes one after the other. Similarly, Mila Kunis' Jupiter is mostly a bit of a limp rag, forever falling off things and being caught in midair by Channing's hunky dogman, not to mention that she gets riches and fame purely by dint of who she is rather than actually doing anything to earn them.
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| Aw yeah. |
This adds up to a undeniably flawed movie, but also a deeply enjoyable, super fun one. By way of an example; there's a scene relatively early in the movie where Jupiter and Caine have temporarily escaped the clutches of the villains and headed to the countryside to seek help from grizzled space veteran Stinger Apini (Sean Bean). For some reason Stinger has filled his house with bees, hives growing from every wall and honey trickling down over the wallpaper. Jupiter reacts to this with understandable fear, brushing them away from her before they sting. But they don't sting.
It's then explained that she's not being stung because bees can instinctively detect royalty and as bees are incapable of lying (news to me!), this means Jupiter must be space royalty. The characters instantly kneel before her, referring to her as "Your Majesty" for the rest of the movie. There's two reasonable audience reactions to a scene like this. The first is "What the fuck is going on? This doesn't make any sense. I don't like it." The second (correct) reaction is "This doesn't make any sense! What the fuck is going on? This is amazing!".
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| These bees know the score. |
This freaky dream-logic bubbles under for most of the film, enjoyment largely predicated on audiences just accepting that right now Channing Tatum is breakdance fighting an angry winged Tyrannosaurus man on an exploding refinery in the middle of the planet Jupiter's eye and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
This rebellious, headstrong quality to the script that perfectly tickles away at my sensibilities. So when in the middle of the film, Jupiter Ascending decides it's going to be Terry Gilliam's Brazil for about 10 minutes you just roll with it, giggling along with it as it then produces Terry Gilliam himself to play an sinisterly eccentric intergalactic bureaucrat who proceeds to tattoo the heroine with a cool glowy symbol.
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| yes yes yes |
This stuffed-to-the-brim sci-fi maximilism is also realised in the baroque visuals. The spaceships in the film are ornate, gilded and elegant, decorated with gigantic golden statues and glass atriums. Parts of the ships shift and move around the core, the outlines never quite coalescing into something concrete and recognisable. A similar trick is played with the costumes, the most elaborate looking like the kind of thing Lady Gaga would turn down as too impractical. The best way I can summarise this aesthetic is if The Fifth Element and David Lynch's Dune had a lovechild, and that lovechild grew up to become seriously weird teenager.
All of this is extremely my shit, but I've as yet only alluded to the cherry on top of this teetering, sugary, whipped cream bedecked ice cream sundae of a film. This is Eddie Redmayne's Balem Abrasax, main baddie and the silliest thing for lightyears around. Redmayne appears to be channelling David Bowie's evil twin - all pouty lips, high collars and bizarre pronouncements. He does all this in a strangled theatrical mumble, punctuated by angry yelps of passion. He's perfectly attuned to the material, his every appearance sending the audience into giggling fits.
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| I love this guy! |
Cards on the table - whatever the Wachowski's are serving up I'll gobble up. Speed Racer, generally regarded as an embarrassing megaflop, is in my book a secret psychedelic masterpiece. Cloud Atlas, a film that confused and alienated it's meagre audience, was for me an imaginatively sincere spiritual quest. And so it is with Jupiter Ascending, a deeply creative, ultra-imaginative and playfully original sci-fi treasure that, let's face it, is probably destined to vanish into ill-regarded obscurity. Ask yourself: do you want cookie-cutter, grey-ass predictable bullshit? No? Then go and see this already!
OOH! OOH! I forgot to mention that when Channing Tatum's dogman fires his space gun it barks at the baddies! :D
★★★★
Jupiter Ascending is out now.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
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It's difficult to know where to start. 'Cloud Atlas' tries to do so much, some of the time it succeeds and some of the time it doesn't. The film, adapted from the book of the same name by David Mitchell, tells us a series of stories that manage to both interconnect with each other while remaining almost entirely separate. On a surface level they couldn't be more different, ranging from a 1970s detective story to a light-hearted escape from a Scottish retirement home to survival in a primitive post-apocalyptic tribal society. The film cuts between these stories freely, and by cleverly cutting between different sequences the directors subtly link actions a millennia apart.
Our cast is scattered across time, every actor playing multiple roles as they crop up in each story. For example, Halle Berry plays Luisa Rey, an investigative journalist in 1970s New York, but also Meronym, a scientist in a post-apocalyptic future. Both of these characters bond quickly with Tom Hanks' character, and seem to share a determination and curiosity even across time. But aside from these two, Berry shows up throughout the film, even if it's only for a split second, as say, a native slave in the 17th century, the wife of a Scottish composer in the 1930s or a cybernetic surgeon in futuristic Neo-Seoul.
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| Sonmi-351 (Doona Bae) and Ovid (Halle Berry) |
This approach has mixed results. Watching the same people recurring across time and space explicitly underlines a continuity throughout humanity. It's touching (in a temporally mixed up way) to see people we know fall in love in one time meeting in another and feeling some instant, inexplicable spark between them. The actors look like they're having an enormous amount of fun getting to play some much weirder characters than they'd normally be cast as. Tom Hanks in particular seems to take great relish in playing a violent Irish gangster novelist, or a demented ship's doctor. Hanks, for better or worse, does tend to play a lot of 'Tom Hanks roles', and although he's obviously fantastic at them, it's great to see him ham it up a bit.
But this tactic of casting the same people across time becomes a little distracting, and eventually starts to distract from the film itself. Very quickly you begin to play "let's spot the actor", with the result that you spend time trying to work out who is buried under a mountain of prosthetics and makeup rather than on what's going on in the scene. It gets to a point where casting, say Hugo Weaving as a Nurse Ratchet type, feels more like stunt casting than something that compliments the themes of the film, particularly as the prosthetics he gamely performs through aren't particularly convincing.
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| Jim Sturgess as a Scottish rugby fan about to bonk Hugo Weaving's Nurse Noakes on the head. |
'Cloud Atlas' relies on these prosthetic masks a lot, frequently to the detriment of the performance underneath. For all the film's bombast and scope, the stories nearly all focus on small, interpersonal developments between a duo. When one or more of their faces is hidden underneath a big blob of latex it's difficult to tell even what expression they're making. The principle offender in this regard is Jim Sturgess' 'Hae-Joo Chang', a revolutionary in future Neo-Seoul. He looks distractingly weird, less like a Korean and more like something out of Star Trek. This very strange prosthetic never stops looking extremely odd. The cherry on top is the constant awkward feeling that having a white actor playing a Korean man feels like a strange choice to make in 2012. 'Cloud Atlas' is genuinely thematically progressive when it comes to race: we have Halle Berry playing a white socialite in the 1930s or Doona Bae playing an English wife in the 18th century. This is a film that posits a 'post-racial' philosophy, which is admirable enough, but it's not being released in a post-racial culture, and so the way the character of 'Hae-Joo Chang' is presented is inescapably problematic.
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| A uh.. futuristic Korean, apparently. |
These problems are distracting but fortunately they don't overwhelm the film. At its finest moments it's unexpectedly and disarmingly touching. One of the main reasons I was anticipating this film was because of how much I adored the highly under-rated 'Speed Racer' (2008). That film is a kaleidoscope of intensely kinetic action sequences and cutting edge editing. 'Cloud Atlas' takes an entirely different tack altogether, the few big action set pieces are competently put together, but nothing to write home about. Where the film shifts into high-gear is when the emotional stakes are raised. My favourite performance in the film was Ben Whishaw's 'Robert Frobisher', a young bisexual composer in the 1930s struggling to complete his masterpiece symphony, the 'Cloud Atlas Sextet'. He's racked with depression as he's exploited and blackmailed, but even as the character reaches the end of his rope we still sense the bright young thing we met at the beginning of the film. He's brilliant here, talented but flawed and desperate. 'Cloud Atlas' is a long film, but it's worth it to let performances like this breathe.
This is not a film for everyone, on its release last September in the US it was greeted with what can charitably be described as mixed reviews. But it's difficult not to be admire the sheer gumption of some of the decisions and ambitions that went into this. For example, the far future society speaks a garbled, slangy version of English:
"Prescients come barterin' twice a year. Their ships creep-crawlin' on the waves, just floatin' on the smart of the old ones."
The film opens with dialogue like this, a lot of which is mumbled by Tom Hanks in a low voice. There are no concessions to the audience in trying to work out what's going on, and on first viewing you'll maybe understand half of it, if that. Forcing an audience to concentrate on what the characters are saying isn't necessarily a downside, it emphasises both the alien nature of the primitive world of the characters and their connection to our world.
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| Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) and Rufus Sixmith (James D'Arcy) |
The contrasts in tone between these stories are hugely impressive, particularly the way in which 'Cloud Atlas' cuts between the micro and macro scale. So we get an action-packed adventure through a futuristic city, complete with hoverbike chases, huge explosions and martial arts gunplay, and then without skipping a beat we'll be in a contemporary retirement home in Scotland plotting a 'jailbreak'. It's like going from 'Minority Report' to 'Last of the Summer Wine' in the blink of an eye. This isn't some refuge in audacity to distract from any failings, it actually works! Emotional high points in each story coincide with each other and there are myriad ways each the time periods subtly link together (this is definitely a film that benefits from multiple viewings). One stylistic choice the directors make is to shoot everything in the same way, with no concessions made to making the past seem distant, or the future especially visually confusing. The upshot is that there's a continuity to the visual style, which goes a long way towards making the film one larger story rather than six short films.
This all feeds into the messages of the film, namely that there are certain universal human qualities that transcend time and space. Everything about the way the film is constructed underlines this message: race, age, period and gender are irrelevancies as far as 'Cloud Atlas' is concerned. What's important are acts of kindness big and small, and co-operation and trust between people. Each of the stories examined features a series of collaborations between people, and over and over again we see great acts and works produced when people work together and tragedy striking when people act in their own self-interest at the expense of others.
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| Hugh Grant! |
The structure of 'Cloud Atlas' diminishes the role of the individual in the grand scale of things explaining that no-one can achieve greatness on their own, everyone stands on the shoulders of others. This sounds pretty straightforward and sensible, but puts the film in philosophical opposition to vast tracts of Western cinema, which tends to prioritise the Campbellian journey of the individual. 'Cloud Atlas' defiantly refuses to have a protagonist, and goes to great lengths to blur the line between heroism and villainy through the multiple roles each actor plays. In one story Jim Broadbent might play a bumbling loveable grump who learns the importance of co-operation, and in another a hateful, blackmailing old miser living leechlike off someone else's talent. Both characters share aspects of their personalities and so we have to evaluate why one is sympathetic and one isn't, and what choices led them to that point. Inevitably if you're thinking like this you begin to analyse yourself; what impact have the choices you've made had on your personality?
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| There is also an absolute smorgasbord of visual loveliness in this film. |
'Cloud Atlas' is far from a perfect film, or even a great one. But with its wild ambitions and earnest optimism it's difficult to dislike. I'd much rather see a film that's a bit hit and miss than something glossily successful that achieves its limited goals. They don't make many films like 'Cloud Atlas'; too unselfconsciously weird to be taken entirely seriously; too serious and moral to be made fun of. Sure it's butt-numbingly long, and at times it consciously sets out to alienate and confuse the audience, but for all its flaws the film is stuffed with moments of genuine lyricism that make it a must-see, if only to appreciate the scale of the cinematic ambition present in every frame.
****/*****
****/*****
'Cloud Atlas' is on general release from 22nd February.
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