This is a science fiction film about the crew of a deep space exploration ship, U.S.S. Palomino, who, on a search for habitable planets, stumble upon a derelict vessel sitting at the edge of a black hole.
Kate McCrae, one of the crew members, recognizes it as the long-lost U.S.S. Cygnus because her father served aboard it, and has been missing and presumed dead since its disappearance.
At first, the Cygnus seems abandoned, but soon springs to life, lights flickering on and defense systems activating. The explorers are quickly conducted to the bridge, where they meet Dr. Hans Reinhardt, a brilliant scientist, who explains that he alone remained aboard after the ship became disabled. He ordered the rest of the crew to return to Earth, and is saddened to learn they did not make it.
Reinhardt has kept the ship running with a crew of robots that he has built, led by one sinister machine called “Maximillian.” The crew of the Palomino is duly impressed with what Reinhardt has accomplished, and assures him he’ll be hailed as a genius when he returns home with them.
But Reinhardt has other plans. Over the decades that he has waited at the edge of the black hole, he has been making calculations and running experiments, and become convinced that he can pilot the Cygnus into it and emerge somewhere else. He plans to conduct this experiment soon, and invites the members of the Palomino to act as observers. Until then, of course, he is happy to have them as his guests.
While Reinhardt is undoubtedly brilliant, it’s clear there’s something strange going on aboard his creepy, nearly-deserted ship. The captain of the Palomino witnesses the hooded robot crew performing something akin to a funeral ritual.
(I couldn’t find a good still of this scene online. The above was the best I could do, but it doesn’t do it justice. It’s super-eerie.)
Meanwhile, the Palomino‘s science officer, Dr. Durant, is gradually becoming just as obsessed with the beckoning void as Reinhardt is, and seems to be falling under the sway of the charismatic scientist. This culminates in a great scene where McCrae is trying to reason with him to return to the Palomino, and suddenly Reinhardt appears looming over them both, intoning the lines from the Book of Genesis:
And darkness was on the face of the deep. And the spirt of God moved upon the face of the waters.
(By the way, this verse is also used in “Fact of Existence” by Noah Goats, another story about a creepy spaceship run by a crew of robots built by a mad scientist. It’s a great piece of philosophical science-fiction, and I’ll never pass up a chance to hype it. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.)
Yes, if you hadn’t figured it out already, Dr. Reinhardt isn’t altogether on the level. He’s been concealing some important facts, which I won’t reveal here, but which you can probably guess.
The end of the film is a series of shootouts with Reinhardt’s robot crew, followed by an unexpected meteor barrage which tears the Cygnus apart even as Reinhardt, going full Captain Ahab, remains fixated on the black hole.
And yes, they do go into it eventually. What happens? Well, I’ll discuss that a little later on. For now, I want to summarize that this movie has almost all the elements I like in sci-fi: a creepy abandoned vessel in deep space, vaguely occult atmosphere, and battle robots with laser guns. And it weaves these elements into a fairly interesting story.
So, as a concept, I’d give The Black Hole an A+
But concept is only half the battle. What about the execution?
Seriously folks, as good as the basic idea of The Black Hole is, the actual translation of it to the screen leaves a great deal to be desired.
First of all, apart from Maximilian Schell as Reinhardt and Anthony Perkins as Durant, the acting is pretty bad. Most of the actors deliver their lines as if they’d learned them phonetically.
Then, there are the robots. Not the cool, bipedal evil robots; those are great! No, I mean the two little floating robots who serve as the comic relief:
These things are so annoying, and their cartoonish look clashes with the aesthetic of the rest of the film. I don’t understand why they are here.
Wait a minute; yes, I do! They’re in this film because it was the Walt Disney Company’s attempt to cash in on the popularity of science-fiction movies following Star Wars.
But the thing is, this movie otherwise doesn’t really feel like Star Wars, which was a fun space operatic romp. Until the third act, this is harder sci-fi; more Trek than Wars, and thus the robots feel out of place.
About that third act… that’s where everything goes to hell, in more ways than one. As the Cygnus collapses, so does any pretense of scientific realism or logic. Let it suffice to say that, if I could ask the director of the film, “Is there oxygen in outer space?”, I am not at all sure what kind of answer I would have received. It looks more like a hurricane than a black hole at that point.
Once through the black hole, things get weirder. If the rest of the film was Walt Disney’s Star Trek, this part is Walt Disney’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s no dialogue, just a series of weird images, evoking both Heaven and Hell, before a final extremely ambiguous and unsatisfying ending.
I’ll give it this: the Hell image is very striking. There are a number of references to Heaven, Hell, and God in the dialogue, including the Bible verse quoted above, and I’m almost tempted to read the film as a religious allegory of some sort. But I’m not qualified to do that. (Patrick Prescott is. So, Pat, if you’re reading this…)
My grade for the execution of this fantastic concept is a C-, and that’s being generous. It’s disappointing, because the film could have been so much more. It’s enough to make me wish for a remake with some of the flaws ironed out, but of course with its steadfast commitment to looking forward and boldly experimenting, Disney would never consider bringing an old property out of mothballs for a quick buck.
Earlier this week, Lydia Schoch asked me where I find the things I review. Obviously, I mostly review books, not films, but this is as good a place as any to answer this question. To put it simply, I look for stuff that’s weird. In this case, I saw a video on YouTube about The Black Hole and it sounded interesting. Especially because it’s a film by a big studio, with recognizable actors, and yet I’d never heard of it before.
Of course, I can’t always count on the YouTube algorithm to serve me up a gimme like that, especially when it comes to books. For those, I’ll sometimes just search Amazon for keywords that sound interesting to me, and see what comes up that has relatively few reviews. Another technique is to pick a famous book, then try to find out what other, less-famous books are like it, and read those. For example, say you want a story about a boy at a school for wizards who must learn magic to confront an evil sorcerer. You might find the 1991 novel Wizard’s Hall, by Jane Yolen. I have not yet read this book, but maybe someday.
Above all, when I look for things to review, I try to make them random. Of course, they are not truly random, as any scientist will be quick to tell you. But they are at least, I hope, a road less traveled by.
Lastly, I try to keep my search for interesting media informed by three quotes. The first is something Natalie Portman says in my favorite movie, Jane Got a Gun:
You might want to see a day where the sun don’t just shine on your story. Because there is a whole world out there of other people’s tales, if you just care and listen.
The second is a dialogue from the 1988 adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, when the great detective explains to Henry Baskerville why even a seemingly trivial matter is worth investigating:
Holmes: “I think it is worth troubling about, as a matter of fact.”
Books lead on to books, and sometimes in strange ways. They all seem to be connected somehow.
Keeping these words in mind always helps me remember to look for the unexpected connections and the weird little rabbit holes that lead in interesting directions.
That’s probably a longer answer than Lydia wanted, but I found it a fun question to ponder. Of course, it could be I’m a nut like Dr. Reinhardt in The Black Hole; too obsessed with the bizarre for his own good. But hey, he was the best character in the whole show, so maybe that’s not all bad.
This is a sequel to the original Universal Dracula film from 1931. It stars Lon Chaney Jr. as the titular vampire, although he is going by the name Alucard to avoid arousing suspicion. (There is a reason for this in vampire lore, but as a disguise it’s barely better than “Mr. Hilter.”) He is invited to New Orleans by a Katherine Caldwell (Louise Allbritton), the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner. Soon after his arrival, her father mysteriously dies, leaving his estate to Katherine and her sister Claire. (Evelyn Ankers)
Katherine’s boyfriend Frank (Robert Paige) is alarmed at her strange behavior, and enraged when he learns she has married Alucard in secret. He tries to shoot Alucard, but hits Katherine instead when the bullets go through his target. He flees in terror and grief, but after he confesses to the crime, returns to the estate with the police to find Katherine still apparently alive.
I say “apparently,” and I think you probably know why I said “apparently.” I’ll spare you the description of the part where they consult vampire experts to work it all out, and skip right to the bit where Katherine confesses to Frank that she truly loves him, and only wanted to obtain immortality. She asks Frank to join her as a vampire, and tells him how to destroy “Alucard” by burning his coffin.
However, Frank is not the type to be tempted by the dark powers. He is much more of a Frodo than a Boromir, and so he does the only thing his conscience will allow: burns both Alucard and Katherine’s coffins. The film ends with him staring solemnly at the flames.
How much darker is this than your typical old monster movie? Usually the good guys kill the monster and save the damsel at the end. Not here, though. I remember the first time I saw it (on television, late one Halloween) I was stunned at the bleak ending.
Also, the New Orleans setting works really well. The scene where Katherine meets Alucard one night on a swampy river is a particularly eerie one.
Speaking of Katherine, I really liked her character. She’s clearly an intelligent woman, seduced not so much by Dracula’s charms, which are minimal, but by the prospect of eternal life. It’s a classic trope, but it’s a classic because it works.
And here we get to the implicit “moral” built into the vampire legend. The vampire is a human which has obtained immortality, but at the price of their soul. The implication is that mortality is the burden we must bear, and seeking to subvert it, particularly at the cost of others’ lives, is an unnatural perversion. The vampire is fundamentally parasitic, since it can only live by consuming the blood of mortals.
So, bottom line: don’t trade your soul for immortality! It may sound like a good idea, but trust us; it isn’t. This is the fundamental theme of a huge amount of fiction. And so, this is obviously what makes the vampire myth so effective.
Thanks for your time, fellow horror fans, but I think we’ve pretty much cleared this one up easily. I’ll just show myself out.
<Columbo voice> Oh, uh, there is one more thing. How do you know if you’re trading your soul? Come to that, how did this Count, uh, Alucard did you say? How did he get the idea to trade his soul in the first place? Was he the first vampire? If so, how did he do it? If not, who was the first vampire? </End>
I’m asking these questions as a study of the literature, of course. But also as a student of history–what inspired this myth to begin with? Do we know? The story of Dracula is obviously iconic. But where did it come from? And why?
More questions than answers, I’m afraid. Our work is not done, but take heart; I feel sure that we are hot on the trail.
As usual, there will be spoilers. Don’t read if you don’t want to know what happens. But that’s probably not what’s going to turn off most of my readers. No, the hard part is going to be persuading those who have no interest in yet another superhero movie that it’s worthwhile to spend more than two seconds thinking about one.
Well, who can say what is a worthy subject for discussion in the world of fiction? Or any world for that matter? But I’ll do my best to make the case for why it might be.
The film begins with an intro sequence showing a young Diana competing in a race on Paradise Island. Yeah, yeah; I know it’s called “Themyscira” now, but if “Paradise Island” was good enough for Lynda Carter in the 1970s, it’s good enough for me.
After this, there is another intro sequence that shows the grown-up Diana as Wonder Woman in (duh) 1984, foiling an attempted theft at a shopping mall. Yes, that’s right–there are two intro sequences, one after the other! One of the rules of writing that people throw around is to eschew prologues. I disagree with this, but I think avoiding two successive prologues is probably fair advice for filmmaking.
Anyway, then the story gets going: Diana Prince works at the Smithsonian, studying ancient artifacts. Another scientist, Dr. Barbara Minerva arrives, and the two begin studying a mysterious stone that the thieves from the second intro sequence had been attempting to steal.
Dr. Minerva is nervous, shy and awkward, and she admires Diana’s cool confidence. Diana, it seems to her, is the woman who has everything. But Diana does not, in fact, have everything. We see she is desperately lonely; still mourning her lover, Steve Trevor, who perished nobly in the first Wonder Woman movie.
Anyway, that stone that Diana and Dr. Minerva are studying is also sought by businessman Maxwell Lord, a charismatic TV personality whose gaudy lifestyle and brash persona masks the fact that his company is on the brink of financial collapse.
He wants the stone because, as legend has it, touching the stone and making a wish will grant the holder’s request. We quickly see several demonstrations of this–Minerva held the stone and wished to be like Diana, and immediately became more confident and charismatic. And Diana has touched the stone and unconsciously wished to have Steve back. And suddenly, he is somehow restored to life, inhabiting the body of some random guest at a party that Diana is attending. To Diana, he appears as her old flame from 1917, and the two waste no time picking up where they left off.
Meanwhile, Lord meets Dr. Minerva, plays upon her craving for attention, and wheedles his way into making her give him the stone. He then makes a wish to make himself the stone, taking on its power and allowing him to grant people’s wishes, in exchange for taking something from them.
Chaos ensues, as Lord amasses greater wealth and power for himself. People wish to fulfill their selfish desires, sacrificing in the process something of theirs that Lord wants.
Diana and Steve eventually realize, given the stone’s malevolent nature and origins, that it will lead to an apocalyptic collapse of civilization. Dr. Minerva also realizes this, but sees that attempting to thwart Lord and end the spell will mean she loses all the physical powers she gained since making her wish, and she is not going to let that happen. So she joins forces with Lord, who by this point has managed to secure the powers of the Presidency itself, and in the process pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Steve finally convinces Diana that she must renounce her wish, and allow him to return to being nothing but a bittersweet memory. Once she accepts this, Diana is strong enough to pursue Lord and Minerva to a remote military installation, where the former has taken over an experimental global broadcast network, allowing him to tempt the entire planet with his dark powers of wish-granting.
After a fight with Dr. Minerva, who has transformed into a half-human, half-cheetah hybrid, Diana is able to stop Lord. I apologize for being vague on this point, but I actually did not understand how she did it, except by somehow appealing to the whole world to renounce their wishes. Then, moved by concern for his son Alistair, Lord renounces his own wish, and the total annihilation of the Earth is narrowly averted.
If you played “Deus Ex” this will surely remind you of Bob Page.
I omitted some details here and there–this movie has a lot of filler. Not that it’s bad material exactly, but many scenes go on for longer than they need to. The opening 15 minutes, with its two cool-but-superfluous opening sequences, sets the tone. Wonder Woman 1984 is many things, but “spare” is not one of them.
The cinematography started off really nice. The second opening sequence, in particular, features a full range of vibrant colors, but by the end it was back to the now-standard Hollywood palette of orange and blue.
On the other hand, I liked all the performances. Gal Gadot is a great Wonder Woman, and as in the first film, her chemistry with Chris Pine make their scenes together the best ones in the movie. Pedro Pascal is excellent as the smarmy con man who nonetheless has a really sympathetic side to him. And Kristen Wiig does a fantastic job portraying the rather tragic arc of Dr. Minerva’s transformation from an awkward, introverted woman driven by her desire for acceptance and respect to become a vindictive sadist.
So, what did I think of the movie? Well, for one thing, more than once while watching it, I said to myself “Patty Jenkins is the female George Lucas.” Interpret that as you will.
But my dominant impression on seeing the film, which coalesced in my mind while the faux-1980s static-filled credits were still rolling, was “That was the perfect film for 2020.”
I don’t mean that it was a perfect film. I’m not sure if there is any such thing as a perfect film, but if there is, Wonder Woman 1984 isn’t it. It’s frankly kind of a mess. How is Steve possessing the body of some random guy? Why did Diana and Steve steal a jet to fly to Egypt? How could Steve fly it? How did they get back? How did Dr. Minerva know Diana would be at the White House? Where was Alistair’s mother while her ex was becoming a famous megalomaniacal cult leader?
In the words of Kronk from The Emperor’s New Groove, “By all accounts, it doesn’t make sense.”
Of course, things don’t always make sense even in real life, but people will accept inexplicable things in real life more readily than they will in fiction. When something totally bizarre happens in real life, we say, “well, c’est la vie!” Whereas when it happens in fiction, we can’t help but feel that some writer somewhere is trying to cheat us.
Well, what we writers do is make up elaborate falsehoods. Speaking of falsehoods, this is a good place to begin with studying the themes in this movie. There are lot of lines in it about truth, such as Diana’s:
Nothing good is born from lies. And greatness is not what you think.
And during the final showdown with Lord, she says:
This world was a beautiful place just as it was, and you cannot have it all. You can only have the truth. And the truth is enough. The truth is beautiful. So look at this world, and look at what your wish is costing it. You must be the hero. Only you can save the day. Renounce your wish if you want to save this world.
Ah, yes–the wish. It’s the magic wish-granting stone that’s causing all this trouble, after all. And, we are informed, it was a creation of the god Dolos, later known as the Duke of Deception, a character who first appeared in Wonder Woman Issue #2 in 1942.
Yeah, that’s cool. But my thinking runs more towards the mythopoetic. When I hear about some notorious liar purporting to grant wishes, there’s only one thing I think of: The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus.
All right, admittedly that’s Marlowe’s title, and when we think of Faust, we usually think of Goethe’s Faust. But it’s an old legend that predates them both and has survived them both. As Wikipedia says, “‘Faust’ and the adjective ‘Faustian’ imply a situation in which an ambitious person surrenders moral integrity in order to achieve power and success for a limited term.”
Basically, the magic stone is the Devil. It grants wishes, but the wishes are based on lies, and in the end they have a cost. Everyone is seduced by the tempting lies of the stone, even the wise and powerful Wonder Woman.
And everyone makes their wishes for the most noble-sounding reasons. Diana wants to have her lover back. Lord wants to build a better life for his son. Dr. Minerva wants to be treated with respect. Even minor characters, like the Emir who wants to secure his nation’s sovereignty or the President who wants to force the Russians to the negotiating table, have good reasons for wishing what they wish.
There’s some old saying about good intentions and roads… I can’t quite remember it, though…
I have a scale for evaluating superhero movies. At the top is Thor, which in my opinion is everything a superhero movie can aspire to be. It was directed by Shakespearean actor/director Kenneth Branagh, who imbued it with all the dramatic power we might expect from a student of the Bard. It’s about an arrogant young nobleman, forced to prove himself worthy of his family’s throne.
At the other end of the scale is… Thor: The Dark World. It is some nonsense related to Dark Elves or some such folderol. Aside from a few funny lines, it’s pretty weak stuff. (Coincidentally, Patty Jenkins was originally supposed to direct it.)
Wonder Woman 1984 is closer to Thor than to TheDark World. It’s not just a lot of special effects and mindless banter. It has a strong thematic core to it, even if it sometimes makes no logical sense at all. You know, at the risk of offending Goethe’s rabid fanboys, Faust doesn’t make total sense either. But we’re still talking about it, aren’t we?
“Yes, Berthold, that’s all very well,” you say. “But you still haven’t explained why you think this was ‘the perfect movie for 2020.’ Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
I promise, we’re getting there. Like Wonder Woman 1984 itself, I like to take my time about these things. Feel free to go to the lobby for more popcorn while I’m padding out this exposition.
Ever since I heard of the title, I wondered why this movie was set in 1984. Was it some sort of Orwell reference? Or maybe it’s because we are approximately the same number of years removed from 1984 as the original 1970s Wonder Woman TV show was from its 1940s setting? Or just a blatant appeal to nostalgia?
Well, I’m sure the studio loved the nostalgia angle. There’s always a market for nostalgia. There’s only one thing that sells better than it. The fact that the time gap is the same as with World War II in the original series is probably just a coincidence–although I really like the film’s nods to that show. Don’t miss this fantastic trailer, done in the retro comic-book style of the TV show’s credits. Honestly, they should have incorporated that aesthetic into the movie.
That leaves Orwell. Is there any way in which this silly superhero movie ties together with the bleak vision of a totalitarian surveillance state imagined by a disillusioned 20th-century socialist?
Hmm… well, the villains don’t work for the Ministry of Love. There’s no mention of the Thought Police. In fact, the government is generally portrayed as hapless bystanders, from the police at the mall all the way up to the feeble and bewildered President. I’m not seeing any Orwell parallels. (Orwellels?)
But there is one thing… remember that Lord takes over a top-secret satellite communications network that allows him to reach the entire world at once with his seductive message. This does remind me a bit of the tele-screens in Orwell’s novel, and the constantly looming presence of Big Brother.
It’s also a complete anachronism. The idea of a worldwide network conveying a message to everyone across the globe at once was pretty far-fetched in 1984. At best, you could reach every TV and radio. It’s not like everyone had some portable device, all connected to the same network.
In 2020, of course, this is everyday reality. Moreover, there is an increasing body of evidence to suggest that it has in fact driven the world completely mad. And it has done this how? By tempting us with things that we want. Like, frankly, the ability to propound our eccentric theories about movies to people everywhere, for one thing.
The magic stone’s spell is only broken when Wonder Woman, having renounced her own wish, is able to convince others to give up theirs, and ultimately Lord recants to save his son. Diana’s and Steve’s love for one another, and Lord’s love for his son, are what ultimately overpower the stone.
Thematically, Wonder Woman 1984 exemplifies one of the most fundamental themes in all of literature: love conquers all. Yes, even a diabolical wish-fulfillment network that spans the globe and tempts people with fantasies of conquering death and defeating age. Accepting death and rejecting power are some of the oldest ideas in mythology. Probably because these are some of the hardest things to do.
When I think about it in these terms, I want to say it’s a great movie. But it’s not. It is, as I said, kind of a mess. There are so many things that are bizarre and inexplicable. And above all, it’s way too long. All the same points applied to 2020 also.
Jane Got a Gun premiered on January 29, 2016. I had been looking forward to it since I learned of its existence, and with the film finally, finally hitting the big screen, of course I had to see it on opening day. It was a bright, unseasonably warm day for winter in Ohio, and I went to the nearby AMC for an afternoon show in a nearly-deserted theater.
I enjoyed the film from the start. It was not just good, it was surprisingly good. Then, at a certain point, about halfway through the film, the drama reached a critical point, and I can distinctly remember thinking, “Oh, no–I certainly hope they’re not going to…”
But hold up a minute. I’m getting ahead of myself, diving right in to the memories and not putting things in the right order. Like the film’s heroine Jane Ballard (Natalie Portman) says at one point, “It’s hard to remember how things seemed… when you know how they actually turned out.”
***
The behind-the-scenes story of Jane Got a Gun begins in 2012, with a script by Brian Duffield, to be distributed by Relativity Media, directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Natalie Portman. Michael Fassbender was cast in the role of Dan Frost, Jane’s former fiancé. However, Fassbender soon left the part, and was replaced by Joel Edgerton, who had originally been cast as the villain, John Bishop. Jude Law and Bradley Cooper were both briefly on board, before finally Ewan McGregor was cast as Bishop. In the middle of all this, Ramsay left the production less than amicably, causing more turmoil that was resolved in part thanks to the timely intercession of lawyer David Boies.
Ramsay was replaced by Gavin O’Connor. O’Connor, Edgerton and screenwriter Anthony Tambakis then re-wrote Duffield’s script, and filming finally took place in 2013. The filming itself seems to have gone smoothly–in the words of Edgerton, “We’re winning out there.”
Relativity Media had initially scheduled the film for a February 2015 release. But it was delayed, and Relativity filed for bankruptcy in mid-2015. Fortunately, there was another studio that had agreed to distribute the film, and the rights to Jane Got a Gun were released from Relativity and secured by the Weinstein Company, which scheduled the film for distribution.
The Paris premiere was scheduled for November 15, 2015, but was canceled due to the November 13 terrorist attacks. The film finally premiered in Germany in late December 2015, and in France and the United States in January 2016.
Of course, I can’t talk about a Weinstein Company film without also talking about the infamous film producer, who was then about a year away from being publicly disgraced. One of the many unsavory aspects of Harvey Weinstein’s personality that came to light after his downfall was that he would occasionally sabotage his own company’s films. I have no idea if anything like that happened with Jane Got a Gun, but the decision not to screen the film for critics can’t have helped its chances, and undoubtedly contributed to its poor showing at the box office.
It was a film dogged at every step by negativity, with only cursory promotional efforts, in a relatively unpopular genre, and hamstrung by a misleading title that makes it sound more like a fast-paced action picture than what it really is.
And after all that, it was gone as soon as it had come. It was only in theaters for about three weeks and grossed about $3 million against a $25 million budget.
As anyone who followed my blog at the time knows, I loved the movie. I wrote a glowing review. Two glowing reviews, actually, because I wrote about it again in more detail when it came out on home media. And owing, I suspect, to the scarcity of other reviews, these were some of my most-viewed posts ever.
Which speaks to the fact that a major reason it wasn’t more successful is that not many movie-goers ever knew it existed. And I’d argue that the reasons not many movie-goers knew it existed can tell us a lot about the movie business, the entertainment industry as a whole, and American culture generally.
That sounds like quite a leap, I know. (Or, as Dan Frost would say, a “very big jump, my friend.”) To begin with, let’s talk about why Jane Got a Gun is significant to me.
***
Jane Ballard (Natalie Portman)
Natalie Portman is probably my favorite actress, and part of the reason for that, as I’ve discussed before, is her willingness to experiment. She doesn’t let herself be typecast, but is willing to play all sorts of different roles in different kinds of movies. I respect this risk-taking. Portman films aren’t always good, but they are almost always interesting.
I also like movies that take place in remote, bleak desert settings, and the New Mexico landscapes of Jane Got a Gun are just gorgeous to my eye. While I could do without the washed-out lens filter, the sweeping vistas and extraordinary rock formations make the setting instantly compelling.
I went into Jane Got a Gun hoping to see Natalie Portman in a good old-fashioned western adventure, and as a bonus, see the always-entertaining Ewan McGregor as a villain I loved to hate. And I got all that–but the movie surprised me at the same time, even while delivering on all fronts. How is that possible?
Time for one of my Socratic movie quizzes: what’s Jane Got a Gun about?
Okay, since many of you haven’t seen it, I’ll give you the cliffs-notes summary answer. It’s not the real answer, of course, but you know what I’m like. And anyway, a little plot synopsis will be handy to have as you read this.
Jane Got a Gun is about Jane Ballard, a woman who was kidnapped by a gang of criminals, escaped with the help of a man whom she married and built a new life with, only to find herself once again pursued by the gang, and forced to seek help from her ex-fiancé, Dan Frost, whom she had until recently believed died in the Civil War.
Dan Frost (Joel Edgerton) gazes forlornly down from a ridge.
Ah, Dan Frost. He’s as good a place as any to start with where this movie surprised me. Previously, I knew Joel Edgerton as young Uncle Owen in the Star Wars prequels, where he has about two minutes of screen time and does nothing but stand around and hold a dirty rag.
After you watch Jane Got a Gun, it’s impossible to watch the scenes with Owen in Attack of the Clones the same way. In the scene from Star Wars, Portman and Edgerton are both unremarkable, standing vacantly with no lines or “stage business” to do. In Jane Got a Gun, every scene between the two is filled with tension–Edgerton can convey so much emotion with simply an expression, or a grunt, or a small gesture. And as Edgerton said of his co-star’s talents, “We’ve actually coined the phrase ‘The Portman’ to describe how she can say a line without saying a word, just with a look.”
This illustrates one way in which Jane Got a Gun runs contrary to modern sensibilities. Characters–especially the good characters–do not wear their hearts on their sleeves, but for the most part behave with reserve and restraint. We only see Jane and Dan kiss in flashbacks–circumstances dictate they must keep their feelings controlled, and the few glimpses we see of their emotions bubbling close to the surface are moments of intense drama. Even as they prepare to fight for their lives, the couple is reminded constantly of their past.
One good example of this is the transition from Jane’s memory of a carefree afternoon with her fiancé back in Missouri to the grim present, as the sweaty, tired figure of her former lover takes a break from digging a defensive trench to check the vast desolation for any sign of the Bishop gang. Without a word being spoken, Portman’s face and the soundtrack convey the bittersweetness of remembering happier times.
Jane and Dan, in a flashback
***
I’ve lent my copy of Jane Got a Gun to a great many friends, at first just out of a sense of wanting to share something I enjoyed, and over time out of an interest in the different reactions they would have to it. Some of them have loved it as much as I do. Others thought it was just middling, still others have called it boring and bad. One friend told me he thought it was dull, but that perhaps that was an intentional choice, to capture the slower pace of life in the 1870s. Another friend of mine, who generally hates any movie made after 1965, complained about the lens filter but said his wife called the character of Jane Ballard “just about perfect.”
I’ve seen the movie enough times that it gallops by, but at the same time I guess I can understand how some would find it slow… sort of. Well, maybe. No, not really.
Here’s the thing: if you’re used to loud, fast, big, action-packed spectacles of movies, then I guess this would seem slow. And yeah, the title does imply that’s what this film is going to be. A pulse-pounding Wild West shoot-’em-up with a female gunslinger, kind of like the 2006 film Bandidas. Maybe that’s the kind of movie Duffield’s script originally called for. And there’s nothing wrong with that kind of movie. I like Bandidas.
But Jane Got a Gun isn’t that kind of movie. It’s mostly quiet, punctuated by a few moments of intense action. There are no over-the-top special effects or stunt-work. Because it’s not about the action scenes; not really. That’s why the title is so misleading. To say nothing of some of the posters…
(If you’ve ever wondered if people who make movie posters have to watch the movie beforehand, the answer is pretty clearly “no.”)
Jane Got a Gun is not about guns, even though there are guns in it. It’s not about Jane avenging the wrong that was done to her, although that does happen. It’s not about a frontierswoman proving herself just as adept a sharpshooter as the men, although that also happens.
Jane Got a Gun is actually about listening to other people.
***
I think 2016 will be remembered as a very significant year in history. I mean, every year is significant to a historian, since they are all part of a linked causal chain of events, but 2016 is going to be one of those dates that everyone will know, like 1776, 1865, 1939, and 1968.
2016 was the year when the American political system and the unending noise machine of modern communication combined to produce systemic shocks right to the heart of our centuries-old system of government. In 2016, all the fissures and divides across the nation were laid bare, and the repercussions are still being felt, and will be for decades; perhaps centuries to come.
2016 was the year that people shouting at each other through mass media finally, irrevocably, unforgettably, changed the landscape of American politics.
What does this have to do with Jane Got a Gun?
You know how sometimes you’ll hear about how a movie perfectly evokes the “mood” of a certain time? What pretentious critics, like me, call the “zeitgeist?” For example, how Taxi Driver supposedly captured the rebellious alienation of the 1970s.
Jane Got a Gun does the opposite of that. Jane Got a Gun is like if you captured the essential spirit of 2016, and then made something that was in every way the antithesis of it.
Jane and Dan’s relationship changes when they stop arguing and start listening. Dan’s relationship with Jane’s husband, Bill Hammond, changes when he stops making assumptions and listens to what Jane says about him. Even at the climax of the film, when Jane finally confronts John Bishop, she waits to hear what he says before bringing him to justice–and is rewarded for doing so.
It’s a quiet, old-fashioned movie, about the importance of understanding and reconciling with other people. There are villains, yes; but the real drama of Jane Got a Gun is in the relationship between Jane and Dan. It’s more of a romance than an action film, but a romance set against the backdrop of bleak and desolate frontier; a society being built in the shadow of a nation ravaged by war.
John Bishop (Ewan McGregor)
It’s not a Civil War movie, but the recent war has clearly left its mark on the characters, in all sorts of ways, as when the aristocratic John Bishop (who clearly avoided serving on either side) jovially shows off his war souvenirs to Frost. He casually tells the former soldier, while regarding an officer’s pistol used at the battle of Shiloh: “Shiloh means ‘place of peace’ in Hebrew.” Frost, having become all too familiar with the horrors of war, grimly replies, “Ain’t nothin’ peaceful about Shiloh.”
Much of the film is about coming to terms with the after-effects of something horrible, whether it’s Jane overcoming what Bishop and his gang did to her, or Dan overcoming his suffering in a prison camp. And that’s why it’s set in the post-war West, when the country was struggling to build anew, after enduring trauma.
Jane Got a Gun is a film about healing. It’s hard to imagine a film more out of sync with the atmosphere of 2016.
***
In an interview promoting the film, Portman described it as “very American.” Indeed, I’d argue that Jane Got a Gun is possibly one of the most quintessentially American movies made since the turn of the century. It’s a Western, which is the stereotypically American genre. It’s about a pivotal period in the nation’s history–essentially, a re-founding period when the modern United States was being created.
Jane Got a Gun was created by an international grouping of cast and filmmakers including Australians Joel Edgerton and director of photography Mandy Walker, Scottish actor Ewan McGregor, Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro, and Irish dialect coach Gerry Grinnell-all bringing new perspectives to the classic American Western.
Portman offers, “It’s always wonderful when people make art in unfamiliar surroundings. Tolstoy’s theory is about how art is about making things strange, and with an Australian and a Brazilian on board it’s already strange and so it’s immediately art. That’s why Sergio Leone made such great Westerns – to have that completely different, non-American vision of the West.”
Put all this together with the production difficulties, and you have a behind-the-scenes narrative that’s nearly as much of a romanticized vision of America as the classic Western genre itself. In my second blog post about the film, I wrote:
Jane Got a Gun evokes the best of the American frontier mythology: hope and triumph in the face of harsh and unforgiving circumstances. That it has such a diverse international cast and crew only adds to this feeling, as people of different nations coming together is very much the story of America itself.
There have been times when I think about these kinds of assertions and wonder, “Am I overstating this? Reading too much into it; seeing things that aren’t there?” I’ve been known to do that sometimes, so it’s certainly possible.
But then there’s this behind-the-scenes photo:
Left to right: Edgerton, Portman and Tambakis. Source
***
Does Jane Got a Gun still matter? Maybe that’s the wrong question. With the exceptions of the people who made it and me, it’s not clear that Jane Got a Gun mattered much to anybody in January 2016.
Does it matter to anyone else now, five years later?
This is the part where I’m supposed to say something like, ‘I’d argue that it does, because…’ or something of the sort. Certainly, it would be pretty rotten of me to lead you all the way down this particularly winding memory lane only to tell you no, it doesn’t matter.
But I can’t answer the question. It’s your call to make, dear reader; not mine. Pretentious critics–again, like me–think we can persuade people, that we can shape tastes, that we can, in some sense, tell people what to think of a film, or a book, or a painting. But we can’t. All we can really do is describe the complex, personal reactions that we have to art.
***
The really key scene in Jane Got a Gun; the one that I think is the emotional heart of it, is the one I mentioned at the start of this post, where for a moment, I was concerned the plot would go in a really stupid direction. It’s the scene where Jane walks out to Dan as he’s digging a defensive trench. Seeing him again has brought back a lot of memories for Jane, and she wants to try to smooth things over with him, on what could be their last day alive. So she says, “Why’d you change your mind to help me?”
Jane knows the answer, of course; and so does Dan: he loves her, even though he thinks she left him for another man, even though he’s probably going to die because of her–he loves her. But Dan is still furious at her, and besides which, she’s married. So he can’t say it, instead grumbling, “I dunno.”
This escalates to a tense discussion in which the two former lovers rehash their past, and all the choices that led them here, each one increasingly blaming the other, until finally Jane says, “You know what, Dan…”
I thought she was going to tell him to leave. I foresaw the most hackneyed Hollywood story imaginable: Jane tells him to get lost, Dan rides off in a huff, only to ride back in at the 11th hour and save the day.
But that didn’t happen. What happened instead is what sets Jane Got a Gun apart.
***
In an interview with Elle magazine in 2013–shortly after filming wrapped on Jane Got a Gun—Portman said:
The fallacy in Hollywood is that if you’re making a “feminist” story, the woman kicks ass and wins. That’s not feminist, that’s macho. A movie about a weak, vulnerable woman can be feminist if it shows a real person that we can empathize with.
One of the contemporary criticisms of Jane Got a Gun was exactly this–that Jane doesn’t single-handedly go in guns-blazing and wipe out Bishop and his gang. Jane Ballard isn’t a one-woman army, and if she were, the film would be worse for it. She fights back, but she does so in a way that makes her relatable.
She is, in other words, “a real person that we can empathize with.”
The film works, or doesn’t, to the extent that the audience is prepared to empathize with the characters. That might be true of most films, although I’d hesitate to say “all films”–there are some that pretty clearly rely solely on spectacle or nostalgia or fan service to sell themselves. That’s one reason Hollywood loves their sequels and franchises so much: it’s easier to expect audiences to continue following characters they already know.
Jane Got a Gun is a throwback to another era of filmmaking. That much is obvious just by virtue of it being a Western. Westerns used to be a staple of Hollywood in the 1950s and ’60s, but have since become increasingly rare. It’s also a throwback in its self-contained nature. Even if it had been a financial success, it’s hard to imagine it spawning a “Jane Ballard” franchise.
It’s a good match for me, because I am a throwback to a different era of filmgoer. I follow movie stars more than franchises, much as audiences did at the height of classic cinema. I saw Jane Got a Gun because it had Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor in it. (And after seeing it, I watched a bunch of Joel Edgerton films.)
I love the film for the cast’s expressive performances, that communicate so much in so few words. I love the haunting, melancholy soundtrack. I love the vast, sprawling desert setting that is both harsh and beautiful. I love the tight, spare script, that takes us on a journey that is at times very dark, but ultimately uplifting. I’m not ashamed to say I think I could recite the entire film from memory, but I’ll end this retrospective by quoting just two more lines.
The first is the one that I’ve been teasing you with throughout this review. The one that encapsulates the film’s theme–the empathetic optimism that enables Jane to triumph over all the darkness in her life. The line she says after, “You know what, Dan…” The script might have gone any number of directions just then, and maybe in previous iterations, it did.
But what Jane says next is the insight that makes me come back to it again and again, that makes it a film so blatantly out of step with the cultural mood of its epoch, and so wonderfully timeless. After everything she’s suffered, all the misery she’s had to endure, Jane takes a deep breath to collect herself and says to her former lover:
You might want to see a day where the sun don’t just shine on your story. Because there is a whole world out there of other people’s tales, if you just care and listen.
To which, dear reader, I will append only these words, that Dan says to Bill Hammond at a particularly tense moment:
…and I want you to think about that with the shank of time that you’ve got left.
Note that it’s Color out of Space, not The Color out of Space. The H.P. Lovecraft story it’s based on includes the definite article. (Also, Lovecraft used the spelling “colour.”) I’m not sure why they changed it.
Before I talk about this movie, I’d better briefly discuss that Lovecraft story. The plot is this: a meteorite crashes on the property of a New England farmer, and soon, the vegetation and animal life begins to mutate, and the farmer and his family begin to suffer mentally and physically. The culprit is clearly the strange color seeping from the meteor–a color like none ever seen on earth. As Lovecraft’s narrator puts it:
The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness.
Eventually, as is often the way in Lovecraft stories, the farmer and his family go mad and die. Witnesses describe seeing the mysterious color shooting into the sky, and the farm is reduced to ashen desolation.
Lovecraft considered the story one of his best. Personally, I think it’s pretty mediocre. It’s a cool idea–imagine, a color no one has ever seen!–but as a story, it’s kind of plodding. The farmer goes out one day and the chickens have mutated. Then the next day, the cows have mutated. Then the next day his son starts feeling ill. And so on. Each time, people wonder, could it possibly have anything to do with that weird meteorite? (Answer: duh.)
Lovecraft wrote the story in 1927, and the framing device is that it’s being told to our narrator by an old man who is one of the few who still remembers the bizarre event, which began in 1882.
The film adaptation places the setting in the present-day. It’s still a remote New England farm, but they have smartphones and internet connections and TV. Also, the family is given a pointless backstory. The mother is a cancer survivor. The eldest son is a pot-smoker. Oddest of all, the daughter is Wiccan, which makes it feel vaguely as if the film is trying to make some sort of moralizing commentary, although it’s not very coherent if it is.
Whenever people adapt Lovecraft stories, they try to flesh out the characters. And unless you’re Audrey Driscoll, that’s usually a bad idea. Lovecraft sort of, um, hated people, so his characters are generally little more than cardboard cut-outs. By his own admission, he didn’t care about human interest elements. I get that this goes against normal screenwriting advice, which is to make people relate to the characters, but it’s better to stick with the flimsy sketches Lovecraft used than to do what this film does: try to make them interesting by giving them random quirks and eccentricities. This made them seem like a bunch of oddballs even before the meteorite strike.
The bigger problem here, though, is the modern setting. In 1882, if a meteorite hit and began to poison the groundwater, you can imagine that the rustics wouldn’t immediately connect the two things. Likewise, you can see that if a malignant extraterrestrial entity began devouring everything on your property, you’d have fewer options for escaping. Even riding into Arkham would mean a long ride on treacherous roads.
In the present-day setting, none of this applies. The film tries to convince us that these people are super-isolated, and that somehow nobody believes this meteorite is worth looking into, and that everybody is so stupid they crowd around the meteor crash site right near the well, and don’t think that maybe that’s a concern, even after they know there is something wrong with the water.
This is two strikes against the movie, but these issues could be overcome. Otherwise, it plays out more or less like Lovecraft’s story: gnawing dread, weird mutations, unfathomable eldritch abominations from unlighted realms in infinite blackness, blah blah blah. The family gradually dies horribly, the farm is reduced to ash, and only our narrator, the surveyor Ward Phillips, is left to tell the tale of the horror from the stars that he witnessed.
But there’s another problem here. The first two strikes were understandable. But now we’re really down to the very core of the issue.
Lovecraft wrote a short story that asks the reader to imagine a color no one has ever seen. Now, that is, of course, impossible. We literally can’t think in those terms. We know the colors that we can see, and imagining another can’t be done. It’s a brain-teaser; trying to think a thought that’s literally unthinkable. It’s not enough to sustain an entire story, in my opinion, but it’s a neat concept.
Do you see the problem now?
This movie ought to have been called The Magenta Lens Filter That Killed Everyone. That’s what happens. We get a bunch of weird hallucinogenic magenta effects, hideous mutants bathed in magenta light, and then eventually it all ends in a magenta-colored explosion of static.
I’m sorry, but that’s not effective. It’s nothing against magenta; any other color would have been just as ineffective. Because it wouldn’t have been a new color. It couldn’t be.
Of all Lovecraft’s stories, this is the one that is by far the least-suited to being adapted for the screen. The idea of a new color is the only thing driving it. Take away that mind-bending premise, and you’re left with a story about some people gradually dying of radiation poisoning.
What really irritates me is that this movie so badly wants to be a film like Annihilation, a 2018 science-fiction/horror film also premised around the concept of a meteorite causing sinister mutations.
The thing is, Annihilation had explanations for why its characters behave the way they do. The main characters are a team of military scientists entering the poisoned zone created by the meteor. First and foremost, they’re doing it because they’re trying to understand the bizarre phenomenon that’s occurring, and second they each have personal psychological reasons for wanting to find answers. They all have solid justifications for being there, and not just running away screaming, which would be most people’s logical reaction.
The plot of Annihilation is structured as a journey. It’s always reminded me a bit of the Fisher King from Arthurian legend, complete with a protagonist who must journey into the dangerous unknown on a quest to heal both themselves as well as the sick land around them. It has an arc to it.
Color out of Space has no arc, no structure. It’s just a lot of weird special effects that gradually get more grotesque. (For the record, Annihilation‘s alien-mutant color palette was also more creative.) There’s no development. Which, to be fair, is also true of Lovecraft’s story, but again, he at least had an interesting idea at the core of it. The film doesn’t.
This film is the first in a trilogy of Lovecraft adaptations planned by director Richard Stanley. The next one in the works is The Dunwich Horror.
Well, hopefully that film will at least be better than the dreadful 1970s version. But Dunwich is another odd choice for an adaptation. In many ways it’s similar to TheColour out of Space–remote New England farmers troubled by blasphemous creatures from the depths of space unimaginable. Yawn.
Why don’t they adapt one of Lovecraft’s good stories, like “The Music of Erich Zann” or “The Haunter of the Dark”? “Nyarlathotep” and “The Hound” are creepy, unique, and evocative–good candidates for cinema. Or just throw a pastiche of Lovecraft ideas together and call it Azathoth. Any of those would be better than this.
Fifteen years ago today, my mom and dad took me to see Revenge of the Sith. I was not quite 15 years old. We had seen all the Star Wars movies together in the theater, and so of course we had to see what was then expected to be the last one.
It’s not the most significant thing Time magazine ever got wrong, but this cover didn’t age well.
I loved the movie, as I had loved all Star Wars films. It was dark and unsettling, and it had a message to it. Maybe it was a message only I could see, but it was a message all the same. More about that later.
On the way home afterward, we went to our local Borders bookstore. We always went to Borders (and Toys “R” Us) after the movies. This is something I suspect kids a few years from now will completely cease to understand—bookstores, toy stores and cinemas are all being shuttered, replaced by streaming, online orders, e-books and so on. These things are safer and more convenient, but make for less memorable experiences. If not for brick-and-mortar stores, I would not to this day recall walking across the parking lot with my dad, talking about whether or not it was ridiculous for Obi-Wan to come swaggering up to General Grievous like he does.I would have no memory of the way the clouds outside the store gathered on the horizon, portending a late spring storm in a way that I thought was just perfect given the mood of the film I’d just watched.
One thing I can’t remember is if we got the novelization at Borders or if my parents had already bought it for me and saved it as a gift. But either way, I recall reading it later that day and being enthralled by Matthew Stover’s prose as he retold the story of the film, adding depth and nuance to the characters, explaining their thought processes in certain key scenes.
Another memory that sticks with me from that day is a feeling of gratitude. I can distinctly remember thinking how happy I was to get to see a Star Wars film with mom and dad one more time. I was semi-aware that I was getting older, growing up, and for an instant, at least, was conscious enough to appreciate that moments like this wouldn’t last forever, and that I’d better be thankful for that one. I remember this vividly, because it’s such an important insight, flashed as if spoken by some deity of Greek myth (who were said to do such things) into the mind of an otherwise typically arrogant, narcissistic and spoiled teenaged boy.
For I was arrogant, narcissistic and spoiled, make no mistake about it. I was only dimly conscious of it at the time, but Revenge of the Sith is a story designed to speak to arrogant, narcissistic and spoiled teenage boys. I had but recently been introduced to the joys of literary analysis thanks to Gayden Wren’s A Most Ingenious Paradox, and was far from good at it, but even I was aware, for the first time, that this story was meant to do more than just entertain. It was telling me something else.
George Lucas has talked many times about the deeper meaning of the Star Wars prequels. He has said repeatedly that they were meant to explore how a democratic society can give way to authoritarianism. While drawing parallels to many different times and places throughout history, Lucas once claimed that his fictional galaxy most closely resembles the Roman Republic–and its eventual transformation into the Roman Empire.
In my opinion, this attempt at social and world-historical commentary is what sets the prequel trilogy apart from Lucas’ original trilogy, not to mention the Disney sequels. Nothing in the original films was explicitly designed as a commentary on forms of government and phases of a civilization’s existence. Sure, there are rebels and there are imperials, but it was only meant as a fun space adventure in the style of Flash Gordon.
The non-Lucas sequels have turned it into more of a space soap opera—a family saga, like the epics of old mythology. The family saga thread runs through the prequels as well, but only to the extent that Lucas meant for Anakin Skywalker’s personal story to mimic the life-cycle of the Republic itself.
Of course, careful readers will note that above I have said that this sets the prequels apart, and of course, setting apart is exactly what a prequel should not do—its aim is to tie together, to make a coherent whole of a story.
Revenge of the Sith fails catastrophically in this regard. A callback to the original trilogy’s first spaceship interior and a shot of silhouetted figures watching the twin suns set do not begin to make up for all the ways in which Revenge of the Sith not only does not tie-in with the originals, but actively contradicts them. For example: how do Yoda and Obi-Wan even know the Lars family exists? Why do they give the children to them, and not to, oh, say—Padmé’s family? You know, their actualgrandparents?
In the novelization, Stover tries mightily to make it all add up, but even he cannot square this circle—or perhaps, circle this square, since the whole idea is supposed to be that we have come back to the beginning.
The prequels are best understood not as an earlier part of the story told in Star Wars: A New Hope, but as a separate series of spinoff films meant to tell an entirely different story. This story is about how a constitutional republic is gradually replaced by a tyrannical government that imposes its will through naked military force.
To put all this in context: at the time Revenge of the Sith premiered, the United States was divided over the Iraq war and the broader “War on Terror.” Some feared that President Bush, and especially Vice-President Cheney, were expanding the powers of the executive branch far beyond what was normal or healthy. The scene where Anakin tells Obi-Wan, “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy,” was seen as being a reference to Bush’s “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
I was just becoming politically aware at the time, and finding out that my favorite movie series also was relevant to politics was pretty exciting, and I was delighted to study the social commentary aspect of the films.
But because Lucas was writing a drama, and not simply a dry treatise on forms of government, he needed a protagonist for his exploration of how republics collapse, and that is where Anakin Skywalker comes in.
Nobody much likes Anakin Skywalker as he is portrayed in the prequels, and for good reason. He demythologizes Darth Vader, who was an ideal villain in the original films. Hayden Christensen’s performance is uneven at best; although any actor probably would have struggled with some of the lines he’s given.
I’ll admit, reading the book so soon after seeing the film may have colored my impression of the character. Anakin’s behavior, which on the screen is over-the-top and ludicrously unstable, seems in the novel to be the product of an emotionally-drained, profoundly exhausted man struggling to think clearly. If you understand him to be suffering from extreme sleep-deprivation, as the novel explains, some of Anakin’s actions make more sense.
But even then, there are inherent flaws with his entire story arc that Stover couldn’t completely correct. Although I dislike the term, Anakin is what’s typically called a “Mary Sue,” in that he has everything handed to him on the basis of nothing more than some vague talk about prophecies and midi-chlorians.
Viewed this way, the Star Wars prequels are the story of a spoiled child who gets privileges he doesn’t deserve. In Revenge of the Sith, he’s granted a seat on the Jedi Council and doesn’t even seem grateful for it. (This is somewhat explained in the novel.)He’s a brat who keeps demanding more and more to feed his insatiable ego, throwing tantrums whenever his older, wiser teachers give any hint of a rebuke. As someone with a far better ear for the English language than George Lucas once put it:
And this is what I mean when I say that Revenge of the Sith is a story about and for spoiled teenage boys. The moment I’ll never forget from Revenge of the Sith—the emotional climax of the film—is the scene on the Mustafar landing pad when, soaking in the afterglow of a rage-fueled bloodbath, Anakin brags to Padmé about his newfound power. When she reacts in predictable horror, he flies into a rage and chokes her—ultimately leading to her death.
I could write a whole post about Padmé’s death and how it makes no sense. As if a strong woman would “lose the will to live”—after having just given birth, no less! Everything about Padmé up to that point tells us that she would, if anything, be motivated to fight harder for the republic she loves. And that’s not even touching the ludicrous plot hole it creates with Return of the Jedi when Leia is somehow able to remember her mother.
But remember, Revenge of the Sith is targeted at a very specific audience: arrogant, narcissistic and spoiled teenaged boys, and arrogant, narcissistic and spoiled teenaged boys aren’t empathetic enough to realize how contrived this is. No, what I remember thinking at that moment was:
Dude was married to Natalie Portman and he threw it all away because he was angry and wanted power.
Revenge of the Sith is a cautionary tale about where acting like an arrogant, narcissistic spoiled teenage boy gets you: you lose your lover, you lose your best friend, and you get mentally destroyed. (The fact that Anakin is also mutilated and burned alive is in line with the longstanding dramatic tradition of physical injury symbolizing psychic or spiritual wounds.)
As Stover writes, describing in the second person how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker:
“You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking about her, you were only thinking about yourself… it is in this blazing moment that you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith—because now your self is all you will ever have.”
It’s a morality tale, and characters in morality tales are rarely notable for their depth or nuance. This is a key thing to understand about Revenge of the Sith, because it makes a lot of its weirdly clunky dramatic choices more comprehensible. The fact that the entire universe seemingly revolves around Anakin Skywalker—a classic flaw in any story guilty of Mary Sue-ism—is because it’s fundamentally a story for narcissists. Stover himself makes mention of this, in a passage told from Mace Windu’s perspective:
“Skywalker no longer had a shatterpoint. He was a shatterpoint. The shatterpoint. Everything depended on him. Everything.”
The tragic irony is that Anakin thinks he’s doing the right thing; he thinks he’s helping the people he loves, but only because he’s too solipsistic to think beyond what he himself would want. He sells his soul to the devil to buy eternal life for Padmé without ever bothering to think about whether that’s what Padmé would want. In typical Faustian fashion, he is left with nothing at all.
This underscores the other obvious way the prequel trilogy is unlike the other Star Wars film cycles: it ends on a downer. It is a tragedy; a story of decline and defeat. The film tries to de-emphasize this slightly in the final scenes, but the novel’s ending is much more melancholy: “The long night has begun,” the final paragraph tells us, and Stover’s last image is not Owen and Beru watching the sunset, but Obi-Wan riding off to begin his exile.
By filling in Lucas’ visually stunning but sometimes incoherent sketch with rich details of nuance, emotion, and backstory, Stover’s novelization makes the story of Revenge of the Sith vastly more layered and complex. It’s a story of manipulation, betrayal, and civilizational collapse. Above all, it’s a story of how a young man’s passion and fear cause him to destroy himself.
Perhaps I feel this way because I saw it at just the right time in my life, but more than any other Star Wars film, it’s about coming to terms with the end of something: for the characters in the story, it’s the end of the republic, the end of the Jedi, the end of a romance. For audiences at the time, as well as George Lucas himself, it was about the end of cinematic Star Wars. And for me, it was about the end of my childhood. I grew up with the Star Wars movies—the special edition was released in theaters when I was seven, and I had followed it to the cusp of adulthood.
Of course, as we all know now, it wasn’t really the end of Star Wars. About a year and a half later, I found myself playing what I still consider to be the single greatest Star Wars story ever written: the video game Knights of the Old Republic II, which to this day remains one of my favorite works of fiction. And, for good or for ill, there has been a whole new crop of Star Wars movies, and no doubt there will continue to be.
But for all its flaws, Revenge of the Sith is the one I always come back to. It’s the darkest one; the one that isn’t about heroes toppling the evil empire, but about how the evil empire can be brought into being when we grow complacent, when we become arrogant or hard-headed, when we give in to our worst tendencies and emotions.
And it’s also about celebrating those who fight on even amid such dire circumstances, battling valiantly against overwhelming odds. As you can tell, there are many lines I cherish in the novel, but the one that I think of most often is this, from early in the book, as Stover introduces the massive space battle that kicks off the story:
“[T]he adults are wrong, and their younglings are right. Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last.”
I love that line. It’s so beautiful and so poignant. It’s about how there can be something noble, even amidst decay. It’s about finding something to hold on to, even when everything is collapsing around you. And for me, that’s what Revenge of the Sith is–at once a final, nostalgic glimpse at the joys of being a child who could be mindlessly entertained by a movie about space wizards, and a recognition that at some point, I had to move beyond such things; that sometimes such hero fantasies lead to more harm than good.
How much of that is the film, how much is the book, and how much is my own recollection of my 15 year-old self’s mindset, I can never say for sure. All three are forever intertwined in my memory, and that’s why Revenge of the Sith will always be special to me.
Let me start by saying I’m pretty tired of World War II films. There have been a lot of good ones, but there have been so many that at a certain point, I became exhausted with the period. It feels sometimes like the movie industry is barely aware of other times in history.
It’s understandable, of course; the period is full of drama, tragedy and fascinating stories. And the Nazis, with their horrific atrocities, cruel ideology, sinister iconography, and reputation for machine-like efficiency, are the perfect villains.
But all the same, I’ve seen so many movies about WWII that it takes a lot to convince me another one will contain something I haven’t seen before.
Jojo Rabbit is a film about a ten-year-old German boy named Johannes Betzler. Johannes is a fanatical believer in the Nazi party, even as the tide of war is turning against them. He is an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth, and his joy at learning how to fight for the Fatherland is only momentarily dampened when two older boys taunt him for his refusal to kill a rabbit in order to prove his devotion, which earns him the mocking nickname “Jojo Rabbit.”
He is consoled at this moment by his imaginary friend, to whom he often turns for encouragement: his ten-year-old mind’s idealized version of Adolf Hitler.
Imaginary Hitler is played primarily as a goofy, comical slapstick character, egging on Jojo’s fantasies of fighting glorious battles in a jovial, often nonsensical way. He seems like a lovable if rather silly father figure–something which Jojo craves since his own father is away in the war.
Unfortunately, taking his imaginary friend’s advice leads Jojo to an accident with a grenade, from which he needs a lengthy rehabilitation period. During this time, his mother Rosie more or less demands that the Hitler Youth leader now demoted to office work find odd jobs for her son while she is out working.
Jojo is assigned menial tasks such as distributing propaganda posters. One day, on coming home, he hears a noise from the bedroom that belonged to his now-deceased older sister and goes to investigate. He discovers a hidden panel in the wall, where there is a small nook concealing a teenaged Jewish girl named Elsa.
Jojo is terrified, and Elsa commands him not to tell his mother that he knows about her, threatening him with his own Hitler Youth dagger. Jojo retreats to his bedroom, to discuss with imaginary Hitler what to do about this existential threat.
Jojo, of course, believes completely in every anti-Semitic trope Nazi propaganda ever employed. And of course he would–it’s all he’s ever heard in his whole young life. However, since Elsa is older and stronger than he is, and since revealing that his mother is sheltering her would get her into trouble as well, Jojo is left with only one choice: to negotiate.
The result is a series of cautious interviews with Elsa, during which Jojo asks her various questions in an effort to learn the secrets of the people he so fears. Elsa at first is annoyed by his absurd, bigoted questions, and gives facetious answers, but slowly, the two form an almost sibling-like relationship.
Meanwhile, Jojo’s mother tries to manage things as best she can. In one touching scene, she and Jojo argue during dinner–she is gladdened by news of the Allies’ advance, Jojo is outraged at her disloyalty to the Reich. Jojo says he wishes his father were there, and, incensed, Rosie puts on his father’s Wehrmacht jacket, smears soot on her face like a beard, and gives a stern-but-loving impression of her husband.
This scene was fantastic. If you want a taste, you can see the beginning of it here. Prior to this, I’ve only seen Scarlett Johansson in action movies and one dreadful period drama. I was really impressed by her performance in this film, and this scene was the best example.
As the situation deteriorates further for Germany, things become more and more desperate. The film’s comedy mixes with horrific tragedy. The horrors of war, and of the Nazi government in particular, are not sugarcoated despite many of the film’s lighter elements. There is death and destruction and more than one heroic sacrifice. And at the end of the horror, Jojo and Elsa are faced with a very different world than either of them grew up in.
I’ve skipped over quite a lot in this review–there are some extremely interesting supporting characters in this film, such as the Hitler Youth leader Captain Klenzendorf and Jojo’s friend Yorki. Every performance in the film is terrific, but it would take quite a while to describe exactly why.
Normally, I would try to give them all their due, but this is another one of “those” reviews, where I need to go on at length and build up my case, so I’m not going to give you an analysis of every character on top of that. I’m sorry to do this to you twice in one week, but I just had to post this on the 75th anniversary of V-E Day.
What’s up with that? (If you’re expecting me to answer this straightforwardly like a normal person; I’m very sorry. You must be new here.)
Let’s start with the most basic question: what kind of film is it? It’s usually listed as a comedy-drama. Sometimes words like “war” or “dark comedy” or “satire” get thrown in as well.
So what’s the comedy part? Well, as I said, imaginary Hitler does a lot of silly, goofy, slapstick stuff. Many of Jojo’s lines are humorous, in the way they depict a naive child trying to seem mature and wise despite having been brainwashed with propaganda all his life. And the supporting characters do some comical things–such as Captain Klenzendorf’s ludicrously flamboyant redesign of the German uniform.
What’s the drama part? Well… it’s World War II. People get killed. Including–I’ll try not to spoil too much–good people. People we like, who don’t deserve it. This ain’t Hogan’s Heroes–the stakes feel real.
This definitely qualifies it as “dark comedy,” in the sense that the humor revolves around very non-humorous subjects. And most dark comedies are also usually satires.
For example, take the 2017 film, The Death of Stalin. It’s a slapstick comedy about the political struggle in the Soviet Union during the power vacuum created by… well, you’re smart; you can probably work out what event they were dealing with.
The point of mixing grim subjects like state-sanctioned murder and blatant propaganda with vulgar comedy in Death of Stalin is to underscore how fundamentally absurd the Soviet government was. The situation was bleak, but also laughable in the sheer illogical madness the lunatics in charge had created in their relentless pursuit of power.
There is something similar going on at times in Jojo Rabbit–maybe most obviously in the scene where the gestapo raids Jojo’s house, in which, despite the deadly seriousness of the situation, there is a bit of comic business where everyone must greet everyone else with a “Heil Hitler!”
But there’s more to the story here. After all, slapstick satires of Nazi Germany and its leadership are not exactly ground-breaking. For example, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictatoror The Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy! (both released in 1940) covered that concept pretty well.
The key lies in the opening credits, when we see footage of cheering crowds saluting the real Adolf Hitler, set to a German version of The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” This segues to a scene of young children frolicking at the Hitler Youth camp. It looks almost pleasant; kids having a good time at summer camp–except for the extremely unsettling presence of swastika banners and SS lightning bolts.
I remember seeing a documentary once about Hitler’s rise to power, and the way his speeches and events attracted throngs of cheering supporters. From what I gather, during his ascent he really did have an almost rock star-like following, complete with groupies.
Hitler-as-lovable-imaginary-pal/celebrity… young children playing amid symbols that every modern audience instantly associates with death camps and bodies piled in ditches… what on Earth is this film saying? If it’s out to satirize Nazism, why make it look so benign; like some sort of fan club?
One of the most interesting aspects of crowd psychology is the observation that people in large groups are not as smart as any one of them is individually. The old saying about groupthink “none of us is as stupid as all of us” summarizes it well. Large groups of people are roughly as intelligent as children–naive, easily-swayed, and in search of a leader (parent) to guide them.
Understanding group psychology is critical to understanding Nazism and the other authoritarian movements of the early 20th century. Once you realize that while 1930s Germany may have been composed of many brilliant individual scientists, doctors, artists, designers, soldiers, thinkers, tradespeople, businesspersons etc., their collective psychology was about as easy to manipulate as a ten-year-old boy’s: anyone who seemed confident and strong and promised them grand adventures of glorious conquest while wearing cool, scary-looking uniforms could get plenty of buy-in from the people.
Obviously, that didn’t work on everyone. But it worked on enough people. Tragically.
We all know, now, that the Nazi upper-echelon was composed of people who were evil psychopaths. Armed with this knowledge, it is unsurprising that the policies they implemented were evil and insane. The student of history looks back and wonders, “Why didn’t the German people see what was happening?”
The answer is that the evil psychopaths were handed the levers of power with the consent of enough of the people. This is not because all of these people were as evil or insane as the men they ushered into power, but because they, in the child-like state induced by mob psychology, were all too eager to be deceived by the implausible ethno-nationalist fairy-tale they had been told.
The German philosopher Oswald Spengler said of Hitler, “We need a real hero, not a heroic tenor,” implying that Hitler was merely play-acting at being the kind of leader the country truly needed. Despite this, Spengler voted for him anyway–because he too, despite being a man of learning, was susceptible to ethno-nationalist flights of fancy. So it goes.
Put in patriarchal terms, Hitler was playing at the role of father to a nation that collectively wanted just such a figure. Hitler tried to present himself as following in the tradition of beloved strong leaders from Germany’s past, like Otto von Bismarck and especially Frederick the Great. But he wasn’t. Both Frederick and Bismarck were pragmatic administrators, not single-minded zealots willing to destroy their own nation in a doomed bid for martial glory.
I dislike allegorical interpretations as a rule, but I think it’s reasonable to read Jojo and the imaginary Hitler he creates to stand in for his absent father as a representation of the German national psyche at the time–believing in comforting lies rather than admitting the awful truth, until the appalling costs become too great and too personal to ignore.
My interpretation of the film is that it’s a dramatization of how a collective mental disease progresses. But collective anything is difficult to portray, and so young Jojo is the substitute for “the people”–a malleable mind representing herd psychology.
I said before the film was polarizing, and so you may well ask, did I love it or hate it?
Well, I loved it. I thought it was one of the best World War II films I’ve seen, because it offers an insight into just how such a horrific event could have happened. Usually Nazis in film are portrayed as nothing more than cardboard villains, but in this film, the truly sinister thing about Nazism is made apparent: the awful seductiveness of it. How it could so easily become normalized, especially among young people who knew nothing else.
But if you were expecting a true satirical comedy, I can see you would be disappointed. Even offended, perhaps. Because the objective of the film isn’t to satirize Nazism. It’s more of an examination of how Nazism took root, which is a very dark and uncomfortable subject, and it’s frankly not very much fun to think about, so they sprinkled in some jokes. Otherwise it would just get too damn dispiriting.
And whatever else may be said about Jojo Rabbit, it isn’t dispiriting. It ends on a hopeful, if bittersweet, note. The fever has broken, the film implies, and the children have a chance to build a better future.
I think most people have read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, right? It usually gets assigned in high schools, and as a result, most of the familiar tropes of Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a totalitarian state are ingrained in our culture: telescreens broadcasting propaganda, a police state violently crushing all dissent, and of course, the corruption of language to control the population’s thoughts.
Orwell didn’t invent these ideas, of course; he merely extrapolated the methods he observed being used by dictators like Hitler and Stalin into the future, resulting in one of the seminal works of 20th-century literature.
V for Vendetta reimagines what Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been like if Batman had been there.
Is that a bit flip? Maybe you think so now, but let’s look at how this film begins: we have pretty young damsel Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman) walking home after curfew in a crumbling, futuristic London when she is attacked by government security agents known as “Fingermen,” who, upon finding a damsel, immediately propose to put her in distress. Already this movie is off on the wrong foot with me.
But then, the hero of the piece enters the scene: V (Hugo Weaving), a mysterious terrorist or freedom fighter wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, who rescues Evey from her attackers and then proceeds to give the following melodramatic speech:
Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.
He goes on like that for a while longer, and then takes Evey to the rooftops of London to watch as Old Bailey is demolished while the 1812 Overture plays over the public address speakers.
Okay, I can accept this character is a terrorist with a flair for drama. I can even accept, although it’s logically impossible, that he managed to miraculously time his rescue of Evey so that they could be on the roof at the stroke of midnight on November 5th.
But why the 1812 Overture? Why is a piece of music written by a Russian to commemorate the Tsar’s defeat of Emperor Napoleon I’s Grande Armée being used by a man who is supposedly fighting to liberate England? Why not use something from the English Civil War? For that matter, wouldn’t he see Napoleon’s defeat as a bad thing? A victory of the Tsarist aristocracy over a People’s Army? V is really much more like Napoleon than he is like Guy Fawkes, but that’s for later.
I know the reason the filmmakers used the 1812 Overture, of course: it’s because it’s a great piece of music, and it works well dramatically. But it feels contrived–an empty spectacle, lacking earned emotional weight. In truly great cinema, the filmmaker’s hand is invisible; the spectacle must arrive organically.
Anyway, later that day (?) Evey goes back to her job at the TV station. It’s not exactly clear to me what she does–apparently she’s some kind of assistant for a variety program hosted by Gordon Deitrich (Stephen Fry). She takes delivery of a bunch of boxes which prove to contain more Guy Fawkes masks, and soon after, V launches an attack on the television studio.
Meanwhile, police detective Finch (Stephen Rea) is working to figure out who attacked the Old Bailey, and from security camera footage, realizes Evey may know how to find V. He races to the television studio, but in the confusion of V’s attack, fails to capture him or Evey.
V takes over the airwaves and broadcasts a message to the people, condemning the government of High Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt):
[W]hile the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression.
And how did this come about? V addresses that as well:
I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.
Finally, he tells the bewildered citizens his demands:
I ask you to stand beside me one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot.
And with that, V departs, leaving a bunch of captives clad in Guy Fawkes masks. A policeman attempts to stop him on his way out, but Evey distracts him. The policeman punches her, but V knocks him out and takes the unconscious Evey to his secret underground lair.
Yes, his secret underground lair, full of priceless art, luxurious furnishings, and various other trinkets which V has acquired over the years. And here we must ask: exactly how scared can you be of a government that, for all its Orwellian bluster, can’t find a flamboyantly-dressed terrorist who resides in a maze of tunnels underneath their own capital city? I mean really, this would just not happen on Big Brother’s watch.
V explains that he needs Evey to stay with him for the entire year, until next November 5th. If she leaves, she could be captured and tortured to give the government information on his whereabouts. Evey gets mad at V, and then immediately forgives him. Evey does stuff like that–her psychology is based purely on the dramatic needs of the scene she happens to be in.
V then enlists Evey’s help in a campaign of murderous revenge against various people in the government–the host of a propaganda talk-show is first on his hit-list, followed by a sick, perverted priest. Evey continues her policy of doing random things and tries to get the priest to help her, but he doesn’t, because he really is a vile, twisted monster. V kills him, but Evey runs away and back to Deitrich’s house. Deitrich welcomes her and confesses that he, too, is a subversive whose activities the government would not look kindly upon–he owns a Quran and a collection of homoerotic photos.
While all this has been going on, Finch has been pursuing his own, much better, storyline. He has been uncovering connections among V’s victims, and traced them all to an experimental facility called Larkhill, where government prisoners were subjected to cruel and ultimately lethal experiments with biological weapons. This is further confirmed when V kills a doctor who experimented on him at the facility.
Meanwhile, Deitrich, for some insane reason, does a sketch on his television show mocking Chancellor Sutler, which prompts the police to raid his house. Evey escapes momentarily, but is knocked unconscious and dragged to a prison where she is tortured and her head shaved.
While imprisoned, she finds a note hidden in a small hole in the wall. It’s from a young woman named Valerie, previously imprisoned for being a lesbian. She recounts the rise of Sutler’s fascistic party and their murder of her partner. Evey takes courage from reading Valerie’s words, and refuses to submit to her captors, even when they threaten to kill her and offer her freedom in exchange for information about V.
At last, Evey is released from her cell to find that she’s actually back in V’s subterranean bat-cave! Yes, all along, it was V torturing her, as a test of her loyalty, as well as, he claims, a way to free her from fear. By losing her fear of death, Evey is now liberated! Or something.
This is stupid. First, it makes V seem less like a freedom fighter and more like just another gangster, almost as bad as the people he’s fighting. And second, it once again forces us to consider the question of “How the Hell has the Government Not Noticed V’s Fake Prison Adjacent to His Underground Art Museum?”
Meanwhile, Finch has pretty much pieced together the mystery of Larkhill. The biological weapon being tested there was a deadly virus, which then-Secretary of Defense Adam Sutler deployed against his own population in order to induce panic. Blaming the attack on terrorists, Sutler then used the promise of restoring order to lead his party to an overwhelming majority. Meanwhile, the upper-management of the Larkhill program enriched themselves by controlling the distribution of the vaccine.
Finch’s faith in the government is shaken by this. (Why he ever had any faith in this blatantly corrupt horror show is less clear.) Meanwhile, V is busy setting up dominoes on the floor of his secret lair to fall into an intricate mosaic of his “V” logo. Seriously, there’s a scene like that. It’s a metaphor, I guess.
V then distributes Guy Fawkes masks all across London, inspiring the increasingly discontented populace to rise up. Sutler responds with a heightened police and military presence to fight the angry mobs.
Once again, we reach November 5th, and Evey finds V and learns his ultimate plan, which is to send a trainload of explosives rolling into Parliament.
Yes, a train. Somehow there is an un-patrolled train tunnel leading into Parliament that the supposedly intrusive police state knows nothing about. These people aren’t totalitarians, if only because “totalitarian” is derived from “total,” and their control over the public is clearly not total. This state’s power ends at the ground, and anything that goes on below that is the Wild West.
V tells Evey that it’s up to her to pull the lever that will send the bomb-filled train on its way. He says that both he and the regime he is destroying are part of an old world, and the people who outlive both will make a new world. “They deserve to make that choice,” he says. I actually liked this bit. It’s a nice illustration of the philosophical concept of thesis -> antithesis -> synthesis.
V heads off to confront Chancellor Sutler, who has been betrayed by the head of his secret police. V then kills them all by bringing knives to a gunfight. (Only in Hollywood, folks.) However, in a small sop to plausibility, he sustains mortal injuries in the process.
He stumbles back to the train station and dies in Evey’s arms, telling her that he had been living for revenge every day until he met her, at which point he fell in love. It’s not really clear why–there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about her. On the other hand, since V has presumably been living alone in the catacombs all this time, you can see he would have been susceptible.
Evey loads V’s body onto the train and sends it on its way. Meanwhile, a huge mob of citizens wearing Guy Fawkes masks storm the military barricades surrounding parliament. The soldiers, with their government decapitated, stand down, allowing the crowd to surround the building and watch as it is blown to pieces, again accompanied by the 1812 Overture. Finch finally catches up with Evey, and as they watch the building explode, he asks her who V was. She replies, “He was all of us.”
One big problem I have with this film is that despite the omnipresent Guy Fawkes imagery, it seems only dimly aware of who Guy Fawkes actually was. V is fighting a religious extremist government; Fawkes was a religious extremist. And he was kind of a screw-up, judging by what a catastrophe the Gunpowder Plot turned out to be for him.
The film tries to draw on a lot of historical material to give it weight, but it doesn’t understand the historical context of its own references. The 1812 Overture was one example; another is V’s repeated references to The Count of Monte Cristo. V spends the lonely hours in his base of operations watching the 1934 film adaptation of the novel by Alexandre Dumas. V identifies with the protagonist’s quest for revenge.
Here’s an interesting factoid about The Count of Monte Cristo: the protagonist is sympathetic to Napoleon, as was Dumas himself. Quite frankly, if you want an example of someone who successfully led a movement to destroy a failing government and replace it with one that was at least semi-functional, Napoleon is a much better example to follow than Fawkes.
I know my loyal readers are wise to me, and will say I only think that because I’m an unreconstructed Bonapartist. Well, it’s a fair cop. But there are other historical figures who fit much more closely to the mold of what V is trying to accomplish. Oliver Cromwell was a religious zealot and a murderous thug, but at least his revolution succeeded for a while. Another possible model would be Alexander Kerensky, who arguably did what V does at the end of the film, giving the people a choice in their future. (In Kerensky’s case, the people did not choose wisely.)
I don’t think the filmmakers ever quite made up their minds about the age-old question asked of every fictional character: what’s their motivation? V’s motives are murky: he talks a lot about symbols and ideas, and how his masks and theatrical terrorist acts symbolize some idea or other. But when we find out he’s seeking vengeance against specific people in retribution for things they did to him, he seems less like an idealist and more like somebody who’s been wronged and is looking to get back at the people who wronged him.
There’s nothing wrong with either story. Stories about idealistic freedom fighters can be good. Stories about people seeking revenge for some wrongdoing can also be good. But by trying to be both, the end result is that V seems almost as hypocritical as the government he’s trying to destroy. That idea itself could be quite interesting. “He who fights with monsters…” etc. But the film doesn’t explore that either. It suggests we’re supposed to view V as unambiguously heroic, as Evey, the on-screen proxy for the audience, does–despite the fact that she is almost certainly suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
It took me years to finally watch this movie all the way through. I’d start it, get fairly deep into it, and then get so irritated I’d have to stop. Part of it may have been the dialogue, which takes a lot of words to say a little. People frequently say things like, “Can I ask you something?” to which the other character replies, “Yes,” and then they go on. Fat like that ought to be cut from a script.
But despite this, I wouldn’t say I hate this movie. It’s not what I consider a good film, but it is interesting. It has a cult following, and it’s easy to see why: it’s weird and offbeat and a bit subversive. There is a wealth of promising material here, but it’s not utilized as well as it could have been.
And yes, I know it’s based on a graphic novel, and no, I have not read it.
This is a modern take on a classic mystery setup: an older gentleman (Christopher Plummer) is murdered in his country estate, and there are plenty of suspects, each with possible motives for committing the crime. Into this atmosphere comes detective Benoit Blanc, (Daniel Craig) a master detective who has been hired to solve the crime. In addition to this mystery, he also is faced with a related question: who hired him in the first place? To aid him in solving the crime, he enlists the help of Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), the deceased gentleman’s nurse, who has an uncontrollable physical reaction to lying.
There are a lot of things I could say about this movie—about the eclectic cast of suspects, each one of which is unique and interesting, or the absolutely brilliant dialogue, or the intricately woven, well-paced plot and satisfying resolution. And then there’s Craig’s incredible performance as Blanc, which would be a showstopper by itself. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, and, I’m pleased to report, makes full use of the color palette, as opposed to that washed-out greyish-blue that’s so prevalent in modern movies.
Honestly, I could go on at length about so many things in Knives Out, but it would feel like taking a beautifully assembled jigsaw puzzle apart piece-by-piece to do so. The beauty of it is in the full effect of the finished product, and audiences deserve to see it all fall into place in the film’s own time. This movie is so fresh, so energetic, and so much fun to watch that it doesn’t need a critic’s eye to analyze or interpret. It’s just a good old-fashioned detective yarn that’s a pleasure to watch.
One thing I will say is that this is how you do an homage to a particular style or genre of story. If you like the classic murder mystery tales, you don’t need to “reboot” or “modernize” Poirot or Holmes; you just need to tell a good story of your own that follows the same principles Christie or Doyle used. That’s what Knives Out is, and it’s wonderful. One of the best movies I’ve seen in years.
Sometimes the most fun movies are the ones you stumble across purely by chance. I happened to be flipping through the channels the other night, and this came on.
It starts with an animated sequence narrated by a woman named Rebecca (Lori Petty) and the post-apocalyptic world she lives in. She tells us about “the Rippers,” a race of underground monsters that menace the struggling population, which has been largely deprived of water ever since a comet struck the earth. The majority of the water is controlled by a corporation called Water & Power, and run by a sadistic psychopath named Kesslee. (Malcolm McDowell)
The film switches to a live action sequence in which Water & Power thugs attack Rebecca’s home, killing her lover and kidnapping a young girl named Sam. The goons also capture Rebecca and torture her in the Water & Power prisons.
Rebecca befriends a fellow prisoner, a jet pilot/mechanic called simply “Jet Girl,” (Naomi Watts) who is repeatedly harassed by Kesslee’s second-in-command. Rebecca and Jet Girl escape after a Ripper attack on Water & Power; Jet Girl in a jet and Rebecca in—of course—a stolen tank, which she soon decorates according to her own punk-y tastes:
Together, they set out on a quest to find Sam, which takes them first through a surreal brothel, complete with an ensemble performance of a Cole Porter song, and then to the lair of the Rippers themselves.
The Rippers turn out not to be monsters, but rather a race of genetically engineered human/kangaroo crossbreeds. Created by the army to be the ultimate soldiers, they prove to be a friendly group of eccentrics. Though initially suspicious, they grow to trust Rebecca and Jet Girl, and ultimately they join forces for a final showdown against Kesslee and Water & Power.
I won’t spoil whether the heroes rescue the little girl from the hands of the over-the-top, eminently hate-able bad guy, or whether Jet Girl gets to serve the second-in-command his richly deserved comeuppance, or whether they are able to end the monopoly of Water & Power and the drought. But perhaps readers will guess the answers to all these when I say that what amazed me most about the movie was that—despite being a combination of live-action and surreal cartoon animation, despite the bizarre set design, despite the male love interest being part kangaroo—at its heart, it’s just a good old-fashioned tale of frontier justice.
It’s tough to make something weird and unique that is still compelling. Most well-worn tropes are well-worn because they work very well. Telling a story that is both innovative and yet follows a good, solid three-act plot structure that will satisfy an audience is hard to do, and Tank Girl does it.
I’m amazed I haven’t heard about this movie before now. It’s a funny, entertaining action film—Tank Girl’s one-liners are great, and most of the supporting characters have humorous lines as well. The film never takes itself too seriously, but it has an earnestness underneath all the silliness. Petty’s performance really encapsulates it: she seems cynical, snarky and sarcastic 90% of the time—but when she’s trying to save her young friend, there’s genuine concern in her eyes.
Interestingly, the film is directed by a woman, it features a woman in the lead role, another in the role of the sidekick, and the main plot concerns the two of them trying to rescue a little girl. Recently, there has been a lot of call for female-directed, female-led action movies, and yet I’ve never heard people mention this one, made all the way back in 1995. The film was neither a critical nor a financial success at the time, but it deserves to be re-evaluated. I think it might be more relevant now than it was in the ‘90s.
“It was reported in September 2019 that a reboot of the film was in early development.”
AAAARRRRGHHHH!!
Okay, time for one of my rants…
Look, movie people: you don’t need to reboot things all the time. The point of movies is that… follow me closely here… they record images to be presented again at a later date.
I agree with the sentiment that a Tank Girl movie released in 2020 or beyond could be a hit. What I don’t agree with is the idea that you need to make a whole new one. Just take the existing one, which probably most people have not even heard about, and re-release it in theaters.
Now, I get it: the special effects in Tank Girl are unmistakably those of a mid-‘90s low-budget film. Nobody is going to mistake it for a modern Marvel movie or anything like that. But so what? The aesthetic is unique, and screams “’90s Punk stuff.” Why mess with that?
And yes, I know there’s a comic book that it’s based on, and presumably a new film would attempt to be more faithful to it, and incorporate more of the undoubtedly rich and nuanced lore of the Tank Girl universe.
But here’s the thing: no adaptation can ever be 100% faithful, so it’s pointless to try. Make an adaptation, see what it looks like, and then move on to the next thing. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to improve on a concept, but when did the idea of a “spiritual sequel” become extinct?
Because there’s definitely room for more action comedies about wisecracking women fighting their way across surreal dystopias. Who wouldn’t enjoy that? But that doesn’t mean you should make the same one over again. Make a new one.
This is why I don’t watch more movies—a week ago I didn’t know Tank Girl existed, and now here I am complaining they might do a reboot of it.
Anyway, the point here is that it’s a surprisingly good film. It does have a lot of swearing and a few sex jokes that might put some people off. (Most of these are through implication and innuendo, rather than anything explicit.) The violence is stylized, in typical action movie form. And the animation sequences can be so rapid I could imagine that they might cause some viewers to become nauseated. The film is rated R, although I kind of suspect that today it would be PG-13. It’s fun, it’s weird, and it has gunfights and tanks and cheesy one-liners. What else do you want from an action movie?
This is a science fiction film about the crew of a deep space exploration ship, U.S.S. Palomino, who, on a search for habitable planets, stumble upon a derelict vessel sitting at the edge of a black hole.
This is a sequel to the original Universal Dracula film from 1931. It stars Lon Chaney Jr. as the titular vampire, although he is going by the name Alucard to avoid arousing suspicion. (There is a reason for this in vampire lore, but as a disguise it’s barely better than 
Speaking of Katherine, I really liked her character. She’s clearly an intelligent woman, seduced not so much by Dracula’s charms, which are minimal, but by the prospect of eternal life. It’s a classic trope, but it’s a classic because it works.
As usual, there will be 
Note that it’s Color out of Space, not 
Let me start by saying I’m pretty tired of World War II films. There have been a lot of good ones, but there have been so many that at a certain point, I became exhausted with the period. It feels sometimes like the movie industry is barely aware of other times in history.
This is a modern take on a classic mystery setup: an older gentleman (Christopher Plummer) is murdered in his country estate, and there are plenty of suspects, each with possible motives for committing the crime. Into this atmosphere comes detective Benoit Blanc, (Daniel Craig) a master detective who has been hired to solve the crime. In addition to this mystery, he also is faced with a related question: who hired him in the first place? To aid him in solving the crime, he enlists the help of Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), the deceased gentleman’s nurse, who has an uncontrollable physical reaction to lying.
