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Showing posts with label Nicholas Hoult. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nicholas Hoult. Show all posts
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Thursday, May 14, 2015
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After a stunning series of trailers, each more cataclysmic than the last, I'd prepared myself for disappointment. After all, I've been fooled by trailers before and these were so great I suspected the film had blown its visual wad too early. Boy oh boy was I glad to be proved wrong. Fury Road is a two hour symphony of destruction, a visual and sonic feast so intense that it approaches abstraction.
Set in a post-apocalyptic Australia of "blood and fire", 'Mad' Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) is a guilt-ridden desert wanderer. A solitary, silent and stoic figure, he's focused on one thing: survival. Not five minutes into the film he's captured and imprisoned by desert warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Joe, with control over water, fuel and bullets, has established himself as a God figure at the centre of aperverse dictatorial society.
Legions of white-painted, suicidal 'war boys' carry out his violent bidding, while women are either sex slaves or perpetually pregnant human cows hooked to milking machines. A notable exception is Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), badass supreme and trusted leader of Joe's war parties. But the mistreatment of Joe's wives has gotten to her, and soon she's leading an escape party across the desert, hotly pursued by a swarm of war boys in modified death-machines. Max ends up chained to the front of one of them, and so the stage is set for carnage.
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| Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) |
It's difficult to emphasise how satisfying this action is. I have no aesthetic or philosophic axe to grind with regard to CGI, but Miller's practical effects are viscerally astonishing in a way that a render farm couldn't hope to capture. From the moment the first rusty metal hulk rumbles on screen we implicitly understand it's simple reality. As these spiky, juddering, roaring, flame-spewing hunks of metal clash amid clouds of dust, the film transforms into a kaleidoscope of chaos. It's the kind of action that drops your jaw to the floor - more you wonder 'how the hell did he film that?!'
The adventurousness continues into the score, which makes fascinating use of diegetic sound. JunkieXL's score is rhythmically accompanied by the throaty growl of engines, metal clanking against metal and the screams of the participants. The best example is the incredibly barmy war-machine-rig that accompanies the villains on their raids. On the rear are several drummers beating out a rhythm, on front is a red-clad man furiously shredding on a double-necked guitar. Which is also a flamethrower. Sonic strands weave in and out of the action in dizzying combinations; the confusion between what's diegetic and non-diegetic, combined with the visual overload leads to cinematic synaesthesia.
I'd be over the moon with just that, but Fury Road isn't just carnage. George Miller, arguably the creator of much of what we consider 'post-apocalyptic', loads the plot with social relevance and pointed gender politics. All too often, post-nuclear settings are used as right-wing libertarian playgrounds where life has reverted to a rugged 'natural' form once the corrupt liberal society have been blasted away.
Miller understands that this is bullshit, the world of Mad Max is less a place of freedom and more a place where the societal desires, needs and instincts are stronger than ever. The people of the wasteland desperately need gasoline, water and security, and so do we. The only difference is that we've insulated ourselves from the processes needed to supply it. Miller's world is the epitome of naked, vicious capitalism, the rabid competition between warlords underlining the fact that cooperation, kindness and empathy stand in eternal opposition to free market philosophies.
That point of view leads into the specifics of what Fury Road is about: sex slavery, rape and the broad objectification of women. Told in broad feminist strokes, the film shows us a battle of the sexes - domineering men seeking to possess, control and dehumanise women who have the gall to declare that they're no-one's property. The prime mover in this is Theron's impossibly badass Furiosa, who with a shaved head, robot arm, bad attitude and penchant for smearing oil over her face looks like a grown-up, pissed off Tank Girl. Furiosa is right up there with Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor, essentially sharing top-billing with Max himself. She's a wonderful creation, Theron mixing up rock-hard militaristic meanness that's punctuated only by brief, but touching glimpses of anguish and trauma.
Fury Road isn't at all cryptic about any of this - going so far as to daub its message on the scenery at times. Nonetheless it's gratifying to see a straightforwardly, unselfconscious feminist film that also has people getting their faces ripped off, flaming tornadoes and rad fire-guitar solos.
Whoever gave George Miller $150,000,000 to crash cars into each other in the desert deserves a medal. No action film is going to top this in 2015, so get yourself to the largest screen you can as soon as possible!
★★★★★
Mad Max: Fury Road is released 14 May 2015
Monday, March 18, 2013
Monday, March 18, 2013
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Urgh, another epic, 3D, CGI laden adaptation of a public domain fairytale? Is there anyone that’s even a big fan of Jack and the Beanstalk anyway? I’m not even sure I remember it that well; kid buys magic beans, beanstalk grows something something giants. Also, the buzz from across the Atlantic was that this was going to be one of the year’s notorious flops - 2013’s equivalent of John Carter. Sitting in the boomingly enormous SuperScreen at the o2 on Saturday morning nursing a faint hangover I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about what was to come.
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Thursday, February 7, 2013
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Why are zombies so popular at the moment? I’ve seen books about how to survive a zombie invasion, shot hordes of them bits in videogames, even met people with actual honest-to-god zombie preparedness plans and, of course, watched an inordinate amount of films about people surviving their way through the ruins of the modern world, now infested with shambling corpses. What does this obsession say about us?
I find the whole craze a bit tasteless; zombie invasion as an outlet for people's anti-social, violent fantasies. Everyone imagines themselves as the lone survivor, a ruthless and pragmatic shotgun wielding warrior eking their way across a damned world full of mindless, flesh-eating monsters. One of the most common factors in zombie survival films is the necessity of ruthlessness. The cliché scene is the frazzled survivor coming across a zombie and “oh no!” it’s their father. But he’s one of the undead now, and the only right thing to do is to shoot him in the head. It’s this frame of mind that I find most disturbing; the notion of surviving a zombie outbreak is a socially acceptable fantasy allowing you to murder or dismember your friends, family and countless strangers.
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| R (Nicholas Hoult) |
The solipsism inherent in the premise also bugs me. The zombie genre promotes a view of the individual being the most important unit in society. The worst fate in a zombie film is to be infected and become one of the masses, to join the shambling hordes. Traditionally zombies are a metaphor for mindless consumerism, but I’m with ‘The Real Doctor Phil’ on this when he identifies them thusly:
“Zombies as a horror staple are the result of some unfathomable biological or supernatural crisis that cannot be reversed. They are mindless. They are faceless. They are ugly. And they want to invade your home and feast on your flesh. If this does not work as an allegory for bourgeois attitudes to and fears of the working class, I don't know what does.
But at the same time zombies offer an opportunity for asserting superiority, mastery, contempt, and individuality against the mass. Zombies are slow and stupid. Humans are quick and intelligent. Zombies are limited by their reach. Humans can use all manner of weapons. Provided they are not swarming in great numbers, humans run rings around them - lopping off a limb here, beheading another there, removing their teeth, chaining them up, what fun can be had! And all without a troubled conscience too.
Zombie settings offer a simple fantasy where one can assert the self - sometimes heroically - against the world. You have to beat the undead hordes. Unlike the ever-popular vampires, one cannot join them. Zombies tune into ruling class anxieties and a popular longing for recognition and simplicity. And as long as capitalism blindly lurches from crisis to crisis in the mindless pursuit of profits, so the popularity of the zombie will endure.”
So where does ‘Warm Bodies’ fit into this paradigm? Perhaps inevitably it’s been labelled a ‘zomromcom’. The concept seems like a bad joke, a satire on the Twilight crowd like the atrocious ‘Vampires Suck’. Much of the appeal of this film is curiosity how they can make the bizarre premise of a Romeo and Juliet inspired love story between a zombie boy and a human girl work.
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| R and Julie (Teresa Palmer) |
To my complete surprise this relationship not only works, it works well. ‘Warm Bodies’ doesn’t skimp on the ‘zombie’-ness either. Our hero, ‘R’ (Nicholas Hoult) is a full on rotting shambling corpse. As the film opens he’s just another among an army of undead aimlessly making their way around an abandoned airport. He can just about speak if he concentrates, but can only mutter “hungry” or “eat”. We even get to see him killing a man, cracking his head open and feasting on the goo inside (probably a first for a lead in a romantic comedy).
Fortunately R gets an internal monologue throughout the film allowing him to express himself beyond moans and strangled words. He’s a likeable, pragmatic, wry sort of zombie, aware and importantly, accepting of his situation. In a fantastic opening sequence we see him meandering around the airport he calls home, explaining to us what a day in the life of a zombie is like. Hoult does an outstanding job as R, conveying neither misery nor elation at the life of the undead, but rather a sense of perpetual ennui, unable to communicate, dream or age, slowly rotting into feral oblivion. More impressively, for much the film he tells us all this through groaning and clumsily shrugging his shoulders.
It’s easy to see parallels the film draws between teenage angst and zombiehood, but I think it’s more interesting to view R’s undead nature as a metaphor for mild depression. The way R lonely trudges around a grey world, not caring about anything in particular captures ‘the blues’ perfectly. It’s only when he meets the shotgun wielding Julie (Teresa Palmer) that he begins to regain his humanity, piece by piece. He instantly falls head over heels for her, and without really knowing what or why he’s doing it, rescues her from the other zombies and brings her back to the abandoned plane he calls home. The scenes that follow are the best in the film as we see her terror melt into curiosity and eventually affection.
The first time you see them together, Julie is wide-eyed, panicked with fear at his presence, understandably so: R is shambling, moaning and looks like a corpse, and, in the past, zombies ate her mom. You wonder how the film can possibly going to make this relationship believable. But Hoult plays R with a rock solid devotion to Julie that’s immediately touching. Understandably given their respective situations neither R or Julie are especially extroverted which makes their relationship attractively humble, just two unlikely people randomly thrown together in a mixed-up world.
As the two grow closer to each other R begins to regain his humanity. Some of the grosser elements of his features begin to heal, he’s shocked when he realises he can feel cold and gradually he can speak more clearly. If you think this all sounds a bit cheesy you’re right. It’s literally a straightforward case of ‘love saves the day’, but you know what? Cheesy as it is, it’s cheese that works.
Much of the time ‘Warm Bodies’ doesn’t take itself very seriously; it’s a light-hearted comedy, one that’s not afraid to poke fun at its outlandish premise. So it’s a surprise when the film becomes genuinely moving. There’s a beautiful sequence when a group of zombies see R and Julie holding hands and don’t know quite how to react, followed by scenes where they begin to remember painful glimpses of their former lives. The message that all you need to pull yourself out of mindless zombieism is love and communication is conveyed about as subtly as a shotgun blast to the head, but hell, every other zombie film is a neverending nilhilistic nightmare, why can’t one be sweetly dippy?
More importantly, ‘Warm Bodies’ neatly subverts the themes of the zombie genre, explaining that hard-bitten ruthless individualism is the root of what causes mindless undead monsters in the first place. In pretty much every other piece of zombie media, zombies are mindless human-shaped walking targets, vehicles for people to work out their psychotic impulses on without guilt. This film points out how fucked up those impulses are, explaining that though the rest of the human race might sometimes seem like a mindless, terrifying mass, it’s communication, co-operation and understanding that saves the day, not chainsaws and crowbars.
I enjoyed ‘Warm Bodies’ far more than I expected. My expectations weren’t high, mainly because the marketing campaign is absolutely godawful, but the film won me over almost instantly. If I’d have known it was directed by Jonathan Levine, whose last film was the excellent ‘50/50’, I’d have been more optimistic going in. But ‘Warm Bodies’ is a solid film in practically every regard from start to finish, only wobbling slightly with some dodgy CG characters towards the end. It feels strange saying it, but this zombie film is the perfect Valentine’s date.
****/*****
‘Warm Bodies’ is on general release from the 8th of February.
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