Star Trek Beyond (2016)

Star Trek Beyond (2016):  written by Simon Pegg, Doug Jung, Roberto Orci, Patrick McKay, and John D. Payne; directed by Justin Lin; starring Chris Pine (Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock), Karl Urban (McCoy), Zoe Saldana (Uhura), Simon Pegg (Scotty), John Cho (Sulu), Anton Yelchin (Chekov), Idris Elba (Krall), and Sofia Boutella (Jaylah): 

The jolliest, most Trek-like of the reboot movies -- which probably explains why it lagged behind the first two in box office, given its relative lack of sturm-und-drang. The NuTrek cast is in fine form and the script gets in a lot of zingers and a certain amount of drama, along with the biggest Starbase we've ever seen. But one meta-zinger -- Chris Pine's Kirk opining that his life feels "episodic" three years into the Five-Year Mission -- really describes a movie that is itself episodic.

But that episodic nature does make it seem natural on TV and more entertaining than it was in the theatre. 

Director Justin Lin delivers a few too many Fast-and-Furious chasey moments, but otherwise does solid work. The movie misses its chance for a true Star Trek moment late in the game involving the villain, Krall, whom Idris Elba tries to invest with the menace the script mostly leaves out. The decision to hide Elba under several pounds of alien make-up seems willfully perverse -- let him be human and perhaps give a Trek movie a compelling villain for the first time in decades.

Given Trek's normal box-office levels pre-reboot, Paramount really needs to find this series its own Harve Bennett before it prices itself out of existence: these need to be $100 million movies that look like $200 million movies, not the other way around. Maybe we could mostly just leave them on the ship next time. You know, like cost-saving Wrath of Khan and its mostly space-borne setting? Stop trying to reinvent the wheel by blowing stuff up. Recommended.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Thor: Ragnarok (2017): based on characters and stories by Jack Kirby, Walt Simonson, Sal Buscema, Larry Lieber, Stan Lee, and others; written by Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, and Christopher Yost; directed by Taika Waititi; starring Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Cate Blanchett (Hela), Idris Elba (Heimdall), Mark Ruffalo (Banner/Hulk), Tessa Thompson (Valkyrie), Jeff Goldblum (Grandmaster), and Karl Urban (Skurge the Executioner): Almost too jolly and jaunty an entry in the Marvel Movie Sweepstakes, given the death toll in the movie. Reducing Gotterdammerung to a punchline seems both too much and not enough.

Oh, well. Thor: Ragnarok is also the Marvel movie that looks most like the comic books it's based on, particularly Jack Kirby's 1960's work on Thor and Walt Simonson's writer-artist duties on his great Thor run of the 1980's. 

The tone is really more Simonson than Kirby -- there was a jocularity and a sense of the absurd to his run, though he was better than the film-makers at balancing the epic and the absurd. Full credit to director Taika Waititi, whose What We Do In the Shadows was an absurdly hilarious faux-documentary. 

The movie goes on about 15 minutes' worth of CGI battles too long. All the actors are as fresh and lively as in any Marvel production to date, and Cate Blanchett camps it up as super-villain Hela, whose crazy head-piece comes right off the Jack Kirby pages (so, too, the designs of many of the aliens in campy Jeff Goldblum's space-court, extras from Kirby's 1970's space-god saga The Eternals). Even Bruce Banner and the Hulk are funny. Recommended.

Prequel and Sequels

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016): written by J.K. Rowling; directed by David Yates; starring Eddie Redmayne (Newt Scamander), Colin Farrell (Graves), Katherine Waterston (Tina), Alison Sudol (Queenie), Dan Fogler (Jacob), Ezra Miller (Credence), and Johnny Depp (Grindenwald): A Harry Potter prequel (one of at least four, apparently) set in New York in the 1920's. The rare modern movie whose charms lie almost entirely on the CGI end of things. Eddie Redmayne, mumbling and whispering and retiring, was a terrible choice to play the lead: he's perpetually drowned out by pretty much everything else in the movie. 

The film might have been 25% better if David Tennant had played Scamander in full blustery Doctor Who mode. Between this and his performance in Jupiter Ascending, bad in a different way, Redmayne really needs to avoid potential tent-pole blockbusters. He's too finely tuned an actor to look comfortable in front of a green-screen battling for attention with giant birds and immense balls of crackly darkness.

J.K. Rowling's first original screenplay is a mess, vague and unfocused and rambling for the first hour. Characters we don't care about whiz by, leaving only Eddie Fogler's Muggle-out-of-water baker and Alison Sudol's perky telepath to cheer for, and be cheered by. A movie about the two of them and their magical bakery would be a Potter prequel I could get behind. The appearance of Johnny Depp at the end inspires the wrong kind of dread for the future of the series. Lightly recommended.

Spider-Man 2 (2004): based on characters created by Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, John Romita, and others; written by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, Michael Chabon, and Alvin Sargent; starring Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), James Franco (Harry Osborn), Alfred Molina (Dr. Octopus), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May), and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson): 15 years further into The Superhero-Movie Age, Spider-Man 2 seems smarter and more human than ever. The actors charm, the villain is more of a tragic figure than anything else, and everything hinges not on a final fist-fight but on a final appeal to a doomed character's humanity. 

In terms of choreography and spectacle, the final battle isn't quite as interesting as two earlier set-pieces, though that may explain the sudden left-hand turn the plot takes at its conclusion away from all-out punchiness. Only the decision to have Spider-Man's webs be biological rather than mechanical is a drag: the fun of Spider-Man's encounters with super-villains in the comic books sprang partially from his scientific and engineering prowess deployed in the service of stopping said super-villains, and Spidey could really use some high-test webbing when he battles the homicidal, cybernetic arms of Dr. Octopus! Highly recommended.

The Dark Tower (2017): adapted by Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen, and Nikolaj Arcel from the series by Stephen King; directed by Nikolaj Arcel; starring Idris Elba (Roland), Tom Taylor (Jake), and Matthew McConaughey (Walter): Shortly before its release, The Dark Tower was called a sequel to the 8-novel+ Stephen King series by its creators. And it actually makes sense as one if you've read the series. 

Is it a great movie? No. It's bracingly short and compact, though maybe 20 minutes' more questing and world-building would have been nice. Idris Elba does fine work as a more tortured Roland the Gunslinger than we see in the novels. Tom Taylor does fine work as Jake, the boy on 'our' Earth who dreams of the Gunslinger and his fantastic quest to save the Dark Tower at the centre of reality. And Matthew McConaughey is suitably smarmy and smug as Walter, the Man in Black who's trying to bring down the Dark Tower in service to his own dark god(s). 

There are Stephen King Easter Eggs galore (Hello, Charlie the Choo-Choo! Hello, Room 1408!). There are rat-men and assorted other servants of darkness. Its weakness is occasionally seeming rushed, though that's better than bloat in my book any day. The Dark Tower also understatedly offers a multi-racial cast, something that seems to have gone unremarked upon the curious critical rush to pan the movie. Oh, well. Recommended.

Mysteries and Lamentations

The Pure in Heart: Simon Serrailler Crime Novel #2 by Susan Hill (2005):  Realistic in its depiction of a police search for a kidnapped child, often melodramatic and overly determined in its depiction of everything else: welcome to the world of Susan Hill's Detective-Chief-Inspector Simon Serrailler and the relatively small English cathedral town in which he works. This is an improvement on the first Serrailler novel, which featured an improbable serial killer doing unprecedented things for a serial killer and virtually no Simon Serrailler. Of course, more Simon Serrailler in this novel means more space to notice what a drip he is. Hill has labelled these novels 'crime novels' rather than mysteries or procedurals. That's mainly because the novels don't focus exclusively on the solving of a crime, but rather the effects of horrific events on everyone pulled into that crime. So if you like mysteries and family melodrama but don't like closure, this series may be for you. Lightly recommended.

The Unborn: written and directed by David Goyer; starring Odette Yustman (Casey), Gary Oldman (Rabbi Sendak), Cam Gigandet (Mark), Meagan Good (Romy), Idris Elba (Wyndham), and Jane Alexander (Sofi Kozma) (2009): Poor Odette Yustman has to spend the first half of this movie as a scantily clad victim who shows an awful lot of camel-toe in one scene. The cheesecake doesn't do the movie any favours. Writer-director David Goyer has actually fashioned a pretty interesting horror movie that uses Jewish legends to good effect. It also throws several startlingly distorted monsters at the viewer. 

Yustman does a good job with an occasionally thankless role. The movie would probably have benefited from not air-lifting Gary Oldman and Idris Elba in to play surprisingly small parts that might have been better served by character actors (the more rumpled and lived-in the character actor, the better). Still, this is a surprisingly good modern horror movie, especially from a major studio. It would actually be better if it were about a quarter-hour longer, so long as those fifteen minutes were spent on plot and character and scares and not more camel-toe. Lightly recommended.

Eyes of God

The Reaping: written by Brian Russo, Carey Hayes, and Chad Hayes; directed by Stephen Hopkins; starring Hilary Swank (Katherine), David Morrissey (Doug) and Idris Elba (Ben) (2007): Dumb but good-looking horror film in that venerable sub-genre of the Christian apocalypse. Plagues start descending on a small, isolated Louisiana town. Plagues like the ten plagues of Egypt! Well, not quite, but the movie says they are.

So a female priest who's lost her faith after the death of her daughter and husband in the Sudan turns that loss of faith into the world's only university job as a debunker of miracles. That's Hilary Swank. And I'm not kidding.

She's even got Idris Elba as her scientist sidekick. And apparently they travel the world disproving miracles. And then she lectures about it at her Louisiana university. Does she have tenure? What department is she in? Did they pay a two-time Best Actress Oscar winner a lot for appearing in this movie? I hope so. They stick her in a peculiarly unfetching tank top for much of the film. Aren't there a lot of bugs in the bayou? Surely sleeves would be a good idea.

As this is a Hollywood production, debunking miracles proves to be an entirely bad thing, even though Hilary Swank saves a group of Chileans from an on-going toxic waste problem at the beginning of the film. But screw that, right?

Various shenanigans cause a bunch of residents of the Louisiana bayou town of Haven to call for Swank's help in solving the mystery of what appears to be a possessed girl and a mysterious murder. Pretty soon, dogs and cats are living together and there's mass hysteria. Also boils, blood for water, a rain of frogs, lice...

Stephen Rea periodically appears as a mostly useless Roman Catholic priest who knew Swank's character in Africa. He delivers some exposition that, as is de rigeur in dumb Christian horror movies, refers to absolutely nothing in terms of actual Christian mythology, and does so with great portentousness and absolutely no sense. Truly, he is Father Basil Exposition. Truly, God works in completely confusing ways so that the movie can go on for 100 minutes.

Stephen Hopkins directs in his usual competent way. There are a couple of nice moments involving locusts. Oh, and some fireballs. Lots of fireballs. Out of nowhere also comes the theft of a scene from the first Terminator movie. Don't worry. You'll know it when you see it. Not recommended.

Cube: written by Andre Bijelic, Vincenzo Natali, and Graeme Manson; directed by Vincenzo Natali; starring Maurice Dean Wint (Quentin), David Hewlett (Worth), Nicole de Boer (Leaven), Nicky Guadagni (Holloway), Andrew Miller (Kazan), Julian Richings (Alderson) and Wayne Robson (Rennes) (1997): Fun, occasionally thought-provoking bit of horror in which several people wake up in a trap-filled building that consists of cubes they need to move through to find a (hypothetical) exit. It's certainly better than most subsequent horror efforts in this bizarre sub-genre, riffing on "The Lady or the Tiger?" in a technological world. The writers and director have real talent.

Performances are the key, and Nicole de Boer (Star Trek: DS9) and David Hewlett (Stargate: Atlantis) do much of the heavy lifting, along with Maurice Dean Wint as a cop with anger-control issues. The sets (or should I say set, as only one cube-room was built to stand in for all of them) are clever, as are elements of the script. Mathematics is important, kids! And be nice to autistic people -- you'll never know when you might need one's help.

That the whole movie functions as an occasionally heavy-handed metaphor for life itself pretty much goes without saying. While there are a few gory moments, the whole thing is much more in the vein of classic Twilight Zone than it is the torture-porn horror movies that would follow it into the 'escape from horror prison' sub-genre. Recommended.

Bash and Pop

The Purge: written and directed by James DeMonaco; starring Ethan Hawke (James Sandin), Lena Headey (Mary Sandin), Max Burkholder (Charlie Sandin), Adelaide Kane (Zoey Sandin), Edwin Hodge (Bloody Stranger), and Rhys Wakefield (Polite Leader) (2013): Efficient little dystopic pot-boiler that would probably have benefitted from having a no-name cast. Still, the actors are fine in this story of an America that purges its violent tendencies every year with 12 hours of state-sanctioned violence. Yes, it's the Red Hour from the original Star Trek episode "The Return of the Archons." Rich people either hide behind fancy security systems or go out hunting the poor; the poor run around and hide. The allegory is so transparent that I'm not sure it qualifies as allegory. Less than 90 minutes long, though, including credits! Huzzah! Lightly recommended.

Pacific Rim: written by Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Charlie Hunnam (Raleigh Becket), Idris Elba (Pentecost), Rinko Kikuchi (Mako Mori), Burn Gorman (Gottlieb), Charlie Day (Geiszler), and Ron Perlman (Hannibal Chau) (2013): Still fun the second time around, even on the home screen. About the only problem is that on a smaller scale, a couple of the giant robot-armour fighters are virtually indistinguishable from one another in the final battle scene. Or maybe I'm just getting old. Still, pretty much the modern gold standard for giant robots punching giant monsters. Highly recommended.

Pacific Rocket Punch

Pacific Rim: written by Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro; directed by Guillermo del Toro; starring Charlie Hunnam (Raleigh Becket), Idris Elba (Pentecost), Rinko Kikuchi (Mako Mori), Burn Gorman (Gottlieb), Charlie Day (Geiszler), and Ron Perlman (Hannibal Chau) (2013): Pacific Rim is a hoot, an expensive homage to every Japanese movie and cartoon that gave us gigantic, city-destroying monsters and/or giant, man-shaped, world-saving robots and cyborgs. There's even a rocket punch, and monsters that could clearly beat the crap out of Leonard Maltin AND Sydney Poitier. But not Robert Smith!!!

The movie even mostly hangs together as a thought experiment, though it overcomplicates the plot in a couple of ways. The most problematic overcomplication is the movie's premise that humanity has stopped making Jaegers -- the giant human-run robots that are the only effective defense against the monstrous Kaiju that periodically come striding out of a dimensional rift in the Pacific Ocean floor -- and instead turned to building a giant, and soon-to-be-proven useless, wall around the Pacific (!!!!!!!!). It would have been a lot simpler to note that the defense program is temporaily short on Jaegers due to the increase in period and frequency of Kaiju attacks, and move on.

Other than that, though, the movie is a lot of fun, with an emphasis on teamwork over individuality, and a multi-national cast that may have hindered its box-office performance in the United States. Either that, or they should have just titled it Transformers: Pacific Rim, even though the robots don't actually transform.

The main cast of Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, and Idris Elba is tremendously likeable; the twitchy scientists played by Burn Gorman and Charlie Day are intermittently amusing and ultimately heroic; the Kaiju organlegger played by Ron Perlman is a welcome jolt of energy. The robots look great, as do the Kaiju, though I wish the filmmakers had spent a bit more on visual effects and given us one extended Jaeger vs. Kaiju battle staged entirely in the day-time. The murkiness of the night battles and the undersea battles sometimes gets a bit annoying.

The best Kaiju sequence, as if from a postmodern fairytale, involves one of the gargantuan monsters -- this one vaguely crab-like -- chasing a little girl through the streets of Tokyo. It's scary and funny, and better than pretty much any visual effects sequence from any other blockbuster this summer. Highly recommended.

Prometheus Unbound by Basic Logic

Prometheus: written by John Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, based on characters and concepts created by Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett, Walter Hill, and Ridley Scott; directed by Ridley Scott; starring Noomi Rapace (Liz Shaw), Michael Fassbender (David), Charlize Theron (Meredith Vickers), Idris Elba (Janek), Guy Pearce (Weyland), and Logan Marshall-Green (Charlie Holloway) (2012): The prequel to Alien (but only Alien and not the sequels or attendant Predator prequels), Prometheus looks fantastic and moves beautifully. I wasn't bored, and I didn't look at my watch for the whole two hours. Admittedly, that had something to do with the extremely comfortable theatre seats, but still...

On the other hand, Prometheus is a hilarious mess when it comes to science, character motivation, and basic plot logic. Somehow, this enriches the experience. You'll have a lot to talk about when you're done. Boy, howdy.

Billions of years ago, aliens start life on Earth. Well, maybe they start animal life on Earth because there's definitely vegetable life on Earth in the scenes we see. In truth, what they do makes no evolutionary sense, so I'm instead going to say that billions of years ago, an alien visiting Earth got drunk, passed out, and fell into Niagara Falls. Billions of years later and thousands of years ago, giant aliens left star maps all over the world pointing to a particular solar system.

And in the year 2091, a nefarious trillionaire named Peter Weyland (yes, the Weyland corporation, as of 2091 not yet joined with Yutani) sends a mission on the starship Prometheus to that star system for his own sinister purposes. The archaeologist who figured out the whole star map thing, Liz Shaw (Noomi Rapace), goes along, as does her partner/life-partner, a bunch of cannon fodder, an annoying business woman (Charlize Theron), a curious robot (Michael Fassbender), and an accordion-playing captain (The Wire's Idris Elba).

And in case you're wondering, the planet (well, technically a moon) they land on is not the planet from Alien. This is LV-223; that was LV-426. I note this to save you a lot of time trying to figure out how things ended up like they did for the beginning of Alien on this planet. It's not the same planet. Though if you want to believe they are the same planets to simulate our confused discussion at the end of the film, you'll have a good time coming up with scenarios that put the fossilized, gut-busted Pilot back in that funky space chair surrounded by giant eggs.

In any case, the Prometheus arrives at LV-223. Rather than survey the entire planet, it lands at the first visible structure. Against the Captain's warnings that sundown is coming (a warning that really only makes a huge amount of sense if the Captain's last mission was to the Planet of the Vampires), the scientists proceed to rush into the structure. Needless to say, shenanigans ensue, many of them caused by the simple fact that this is the dumbest crew of any Alien movie, dumber even than the crew in the godawful Alien Resurrection.

The pacing and visual design really carry this movie. It looks great. It moves like a rollercoaster. And Rapace (Lisbeth Salander in the original Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Fassbender as curious robot David, and Elba as the Captain put in strong performances. Fassbender especially stands out, his character ultimately sympathetic despite the crappy things he does, or is ordered to do. There are clever character bits throughout related to David's fascination with Lawrence of Arabia and the Captain's interest in Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Theron is suitably icy playing, well, Paul Reiser in Aliens.

References and allusions are shovelled into the movie willynilly, and perhaps even higgily-piggily. Scott's own directorial efforts Alien (natch) and Blade Runner, Aliens, The Thing, several Doctor Who serials, the nightmarish Space: 1999 episode with the crazy-ass tentacle monster, David Cronenberg's The Fly, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Quatermass and the Pit...it goes on.

Does anyone connected with the writing of this movie show the faintest understanding of how evolution works and how DNA develops? Hell, no. But to paraphrase a line from another Ridley Scott movie, I was entertained. Recommended.