Recent Articles
Showing posts with label sigourney weaver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sigourney weaver. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
- 0 Comments
That a film with the pitch 'an autonomous police robot equipped with an experimental learning AI is stolen by South African 'zef' rap band Die Antwoord who raise it to be their gangsta robo-son' was put into production, made and has been given a wide release proves that we truly are in the best of all possible worlds. In typically bold Blomkamp style, Chappie plunges us into sci-fi as political allegory, the film a prism through which various theories of class, culture and philosophies are refracted in deeply entertaining ways.
We open in near future Johannesburg. Faced with a violent crime epidemic, robotics company Tetravaal have invented and implemented a mechanised robot police force. Working in tandem with human officers, these Judge Dredd-like automatons are programmed to violently resist any criminals with a variety of high ordinance. Under the cosh of these bulletproof overlords, crime falls.
This is a problem for criminals across the city, but especially for eccentric performance art gangstas Ninja and Yo-Landi. With a rival boss after their blood for a botched drug deal, they realise they have to pull off a major heist to pacify him. Knowing they don't stand a chance against Tetravaal's robots they hatch a plan to kidnap their designer Deon (Dev Patel) and get him to reveal how to switch them off. What they inadvertently end up with is Chappie (mocapped by Sharlto Copley), a damaged, child-like police robot with a quick-learning AI brain.
 |
| Chappie and Yo-Landi |
Under Ninja and Yo-Landi's tutelage (and to Deon's dismay), Chappie becomes a foul-mouthed, strutting, dayglo gangsta robot - perfect for a crime spree. Watching angrily from the wings is rival robot designed Vincent (Hugh Jackman), whose huge Metal-Gear-a-like VR piloted 'MOOSE' is roundly mocked as overkill. The seeds of confrontation are thus set, society rapidly devolving into anarchy while Ninja, Yo-Landi and Chappie struggle to survive assaults from rival gangsters, cops and Vincent's MOOSE.
First things first; enjoyment of Chappie is largely predicated on your tolerance for Die Antwoord. For those not in the know they're a rap duo as performance art project, the two members devoted to living zef. In practice this means ridiculously vulgar materialism, a commitment to being as obnoxious as possible at all times, a childish dayglo aesthetic and religious devotion to the 'gangsta' ideal (all of which are summarised in one of their excellent videos). Needless to say I think they're dead cool.
In Chappie they play lightly fictionalised versions of themselves, wear their own merchandise and spraypaint the eponymous robot with their logos. Thus, the film stands as an extension of their zef evangelism. At it's core Chappie is a paean to punk - demonstrating the joys of removing yourself from bougie society by donning a liberated art gangsta persona that's ready to gob a big ball of sticky phlegm in the eye of anyone that'd dare to disrespect you.
Sounds fun right? Well in both Chappie and reality, this translates to Ninja and Yo-Landi being irredeemably scummy arseholes (especially Ninja). They're such an affront to polite, middle class sensibilities that when Deon disgustedly refers to Ninja as a stupid, vicious moron it's difficult not to agree. It's similarly really easy to sympathise with his horror as he sees the child-like, naive Chappie becoming morally corrupted by his zef education. But peer a little closer and Chappie's 'corruption' reveals itself to be personal liberation, a perfect example of Ninja's philosophy: "People are unconscious and you have to use your art as a shock machine to wake them up."
 |
| Ninja |
A repeated motif in Chappie is the notion of fully identifying with the 'black sheep' - permanently aligning yourself with hated, deviant outsiders in order to realise your maximum potential for social change. This means that Chappie eventually evolves from mindless cog in the system towards agent of revolutionary change, the zef 'black sheep' perspective allowing him to see new solutions; the creation not only surpassing, saving and educating his creator, but eventually seizing the means of robotic production and acting as midwife to a 'new society'.
Chappie fits neatly alongside Blomkamp's excellent District 9 and the flawed but ideologically sound Elysium in outlining the potential transformative power of the downtrodden, spat-upon and discriminated against. These politics, combined with Die Antwoord's obnoxious aesthetic and performance art sensibilities combines to create a science fiction treat that's as smart as it is cool.
There's also giant robot fights, brill comedy sequences, beautiful special effects and Hugh Jackman in some very tight shorts. Chappie is bold, brave, brilliant cinema, and miles from your usual multiplex fare. Go and see it already!
★★★★
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Thursday, December 4, 2014
- 0 Comments
Exodus: Gods and Kings is very nearly a secular Bible adventure. Yahweh's influence is steadily pared back to a series of logically consistent natural disasters and vivid hallucinations after by Moses gets bonked on the head by a big rock. This is the core argument at the centre of Exodus: Moses fanatical religious revolution clashing with the pragmatic realpolitik of Rhamses. Ridley Scott appears to be asking "Is Moses crazy? And if he is does it matter?"
Set in 1300BCE we meet Moses (Christian Bale) as the adopted son and general in Pharoah Seti's (John Turturro) army. He's favoured by the court and gently rankles heir apparent Rhamses (Joel Edgerton). Still, the two are brothers-in-arms and it becomes quickly apparent that they'd die for one another. But once the Seti dies and Rhamses takes the throne political constraints begin to wind their way around the new Pharoah's heart.
With the revelation of Moses' birth to a slave mother he's summarily exiled from Memphis, wandering across the blasted landscape until he eventually comes across the model-sexy nomadic goat-tender Zipporah (Maria Valverde). Nine years later Moses is settled with a wife and kids, happily tending to his flock and whiling away the hours happily throwing rocks into a bucket.
But then he's whanged on the head by a big rock and has a hallucinatory freakout, concluding that God has told him to liberate the Jewish slaves of Egypt. He returns to Memphis as a crazed religious revolutionary, drawing followers to him with his magnetic presence while disturbing them with his fanaticism. After making his demands soon comes a river of blood, frogs, flies, locusts and so on.
 |
| John Turturro makes a neat Pharoah. But there's not much of him. |
The obvious antecedent to Exodus is Darren Aronofsky's excellent Noah. These two biblical films share a rough aesthetic, dragging divine stories through the dust and giving their (literally) iconic heroes a big dollop of psychological turmoil. The difference is that while a large portion of Noah's success is derived from willingness to portray what's in scripture - no matter how weird - Exodus often feels a bit embarrassed about the whole God thing.
It's not quite spiritually insincere; Christian Bale's performance as Moses has a hyper-focussed intensity that reminds you why he's such a great actor. Key to his Moses is that Bale takes everything utterly seriously; doubling down on the madness of Moses and playing him as a genuinely weird, mad-eyed, scraggly bearded zealot. He's odd to the point where other characters treat him with kid gloves, hiding behind rocks and worriedly watching him argue with his imaginary friends.
Next to Bale's Moses everyone else feels a bit dulled. Edgerton's Rhamses eventually builds up to a maniacal emotional peak, but for most of the film he's stuck in a mild miff. Everyone else feels a bit wasted, with great actors playing underdeveloped characters that don't have proper dramatic arcs. A prime offender is Aaron Paul's Joshua, who's relegated to staring on in disbelief, any depth to him apparently left on the cutting room floor. Sigourney Weaver as Rhamses' mother Tuya fares even worse, getting just one or two clipped lines before unceremoniously vanishing.
This reeks of a future director's cut that fleshes out these trimmed subplots. It wouldn't be the first time Ridley Scott's directorial hand has been forced; critical consensus on Kingdom of Heaven was notably revised once the diluted theatrical version was supplanted by a longer cut on DVD. I suspect the same will happen to Exodus, even at two and a half hours it feels a bit cramped.
Where it does succeed is creating a sense of massiveness Scott is shooting for an old school, DW Griffiths/DeMille style and largely succeeds. The plague sequences are imaginatively and pretty grossly shot, with nauseating shots of swarming flies and writhing, wet frogs. The film reaches a visual peak in the parting of the sea sequence, which (as you'd expect) works as a neat depiction of mankind's powerlessness in the face of humongous elemental forces.
Despite Scott's easy talent for spectacle and the impressive production values (the eyeliner budget alone must be enormous) Exodus never quite emotionally connects with the audience, settling at showing us the story of Moses without asking us to become spiritually or emotionally involved with it. To be fair, some of this is a symptom of narrative problems with The Bible. Having a protagonist that begins as a proactive revolutionary end up as a reactive observer drains his autonomy. Ideally Moses would have been the instigator of the plagues, personally bearing the burden of deciding what's to happen to the Egyptians himself. But I suppose doing this is probably not worth having a load of Bible nerds getting all shirty that you'd taken liberties with the source material.
Exodus isn't a disaster but neither is it that great. This a competent, sometimes visually interesting film that plays the story of Moses about as safe as you reasonably can in 2014. Neither willing to go full Noah crazy with the miracles, nor bold enough to present a secular vision of Moses' story, it feels like it's trying to please believers and non-believers alike. And so, in the end it truly pleases no-one.
★★
Exodus: Gods and Kings is released 26th December in the UK, 12th December in the US.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
