Aquaman (2018): Aquaman created by Mort Weisinger and Paul Norris; written by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Will Beall, Geoff Johns, and James Wan; directed by James Wan; starring Jason Momoa (Arthur Curry/ Aquaman), Amber Heard (Mera), Willem Dafoe (Vulko), Nicole Kidman (Atlanna), Temuera Morrison (Tom Curry), Patrick Wilson (Orm), Dolph Lundgren (Nereus), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Black Manta), and Julie Andrews (Voice of Karathen):
Maybe nothing epitomizes better the odd, endearing, Frankensteinian assemblage that is Aquaman then the use of Julie Andrews to voice a giant sea monster and Dolph Lundgren to play a slightly pink-haired Atlantean King. The people behind Aquaman seemed to decide to throw in a wide variety of genres and tones in an effort to please everyone. As Aquaman approaches $1 billion in world-wide box office, the approach seems to have worked.
It's a weirdly likable movie with sudden shifts in genre and tone that recall DC Comics blockbusters of earlier times, especially Superman: The Movie (1978) and Batman (1989). In one bewildering 15-minute sequence, Aquaman riffs on Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Da Vinci Code, the Jason Bourne movies, and the Roger Moore James Bond movies before doing a quick 'head in a toilet' gag and then jumping to Lovecraftian monsters before emerging in, well, Jurassic Park.
It works because while Jason Momoa is an, ahem, limited actor, he's a likable screen presence whom the movie allows to be likable (contrast this with Henry Cavill's dour Superman in Man of Steel). It also works because director James Wan, known primarily for horror movies that include Saw and The Conjuring, seems comfortable with a superhero movie that is visually more Lord of the Rings meets Avatar than Iron Man or The Dark Knight.
Vast undersea armies, weird creatures, and one really big creature (voiced by Julie Andrews!) don't need to look entirely 'real' for the CGI to work. Instead, they're colourful and strange and drawn in many cases from the comic art of people like Esteban Marato in the 1980 DC miniseries The Atlantis Chronicles. It's overlong and overstuffed and many of the 'comic' bits fall pretty flat, especially when they rely on Momoa's ability to deliver a line.
Aquaman also has prestige actors in supporting roles, recalling Superman (1978) and those Irwin Allen disaster movies of the 1970's. One can imagine a movie poster with little boxes with actor's faces running along the bottom -- Nicole Kidman as "Atlanna", Willem DaFoe as "Vulko", and Julie Andrews as "Karathen." So much CGI work is done to de-age Kidman and DaFoe for flashback sequences that they almost qualify as visual effects.
Nonetheless, it's actually fun and weird and worth looking at -- easily the most 'comic-booky' of all of these attempts to create a DC Cinematic Universe to rival Marvel's, and all the more welcome for that sense of weird superhero mayhem and earnestness. Recommended.
Hugo (2011): adapted by John Logan from the novel by Brian Selznick; directed by Martin Scorsese; starring Ben Kingsley (George Melies), Sacha Baron Cohen (Station Inspector), Asa Butterfield (Hugo Cabret), Chloe Grace Moretz (Isabelle), Helen McCrory (Mama Jeanne), Christopher Lee (M. Labisse), Emily Mortimer (Lisette), Michael Stuhlbarg (Rene Tabard), and Jude Law (Mr. Cabret): Hugo pretty much swept the 2011 artistic and technical Academy Awards for sound, art direction, visual effects, and cinematography. It was Martin Scorsese's first foray into 3-D film-making AND Young-Adult-friendly narrative.
On the small, non-3-D screen, Hugo still boasts some impressive set and production design as it depicts a somewhat fanciful Paris c. 1932. Unbeknownst to the authorities as embodied in Station Inspector Sacha Baron Cohen, the orphaned Hugo Cabret keeps the clocks running in the film's central location, the main Paris train station.
Hugo also works to repair an automaton rescued from museum storage by his late father. And unbeknownst to Hugo, the cranky toy-stall owner at the station is seminal French film director Georges Melies. Is that a spoiler?
Hugo is slow in its initial hour or so, and the supporting characters never seem to be drawn sharply or funnily enough. However, the movie looks great, and Asa Butterfield and Chloe Grace Moretz make a charming pair of investigators. More time devoted to recreations of Melies' fanciful films would have been nice -- there's a little too much lead-foot in the movie's shoes when it comes to film's ability to transport a viewer to new, strange places. Scorsese may simply be too rooted in the quotidian, no matter the goodness of his intentions, and John Logan (Gladiator, Star Trek: Nemesis) is something of a literal-minded plodder when it comes to the fantastic. Nonetheless, recommended.
The Boy (2016): written by Stacey Menear; directed by William Brent Bell; starring Lauren Cohan (Greta), Rupert Evans (Malcolm), and Ben Robson (Cole): Who names their son Brahms? Oh, well. Lauren Cohan plays an American hired as a nanny/au pair by an elderly English couple. She's there to take care of their eight-year-old son while they go on vacation. The son is a life-sized doll. OK!
The Walking Dead's Cohan carries much of the film's best moments, as improbable as they often seem. And the movie plays fair until the epilogue, which one could argue is as much an imagined nightmare as the 'hand shots' that appear near the ends of Carrie and Deliverance. Rupert Evans brings a muted affability to the thankless role of New English Love Interest. The doll is pretty creepy.
The director whiffs several times on disguising the fact that the movie was shot in and around Victoria, British Columbia rather than England. Either that or The Boy takes place in an alternate universe in which England has redwood trees. Lightly recommended.
Spider-man (2002): created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee; written by David Koepp; directed by Sam Raimi; starring Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker/ Spider-man), Willem Dafoe (Norman Osborn/ Green Goblin), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), James Franco (Harry Osborn), Cliff Robertson (Uncle Ben), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May), and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson): Still a mostly jolly, romantic romp, this Spider-man. Maybe a bit too romantic, but the doomed love affair of Mary Jane and Spider-man was a key factor in drawing in a better-than-average-female-audience (for superhero and/or action movies, that is).
Raimi and company dumb Spider-man down, eliminating the comic-book wish-fulfillment genius that allowed him to create mechanical web-shooters and many other awesome Spidey gadgets, which is a shame -- organic web-shooters are gross, and suggest that Peter Parker must spend a lot of time eating high-protein foods after a particularly heavy bout of web-slinging.
Still, the cast -- even James Franco as Parker pal Harry Osborn -- is a delight. Would that they had come up with a better rendition of the Green Goblin's comic-book costume, though, if only so that many scenes didn't look like Spider-man vs. the Green Mattel Chocobot. Recommended.
John Carter of Mars: adapted by Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon from the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs; directed by Andrew Stanton; starring Taylor Kitsch (John Carter), Lynn Collins (Dejah Thoris), Mark Strong (Matai Shang), James Purefoy (Kantos Kan), and the voices of Willem Dafoe (Tars Tarkas), Samantha Morton (Sola), and Polly Walker (Sarkoja) (2012): A lot of critics attacked the source material for this movie as the reason for its North-American box-office failure because, as we all know, we are way smarter and cooler now than we were in 1912, and, like, those old-timey books all sucked, eh? Twilight is so much better.
Well, yeah. In reality, the filmmakers seemed to take cues from the makers of the similarly misguided (though much worse) Green Lantern movie by highlighting exposition and technobabble, substituting Screenwriting 101 bullet points for the original motivations of the characters, and making some terrible decisions when it came to the computer-generated effects.
Still, I can think of a lot of financially successful science-fiction movies John Carter surpasses: the entire Star Wars prequel trilogy, the last two Matrix movies, the Transformers movies, Iron Man 2...actually, it's a pretty long list. This isn't a terrible movie: the acting is pretty much universally solid, the performances far better than anything Lucas elicited for the Stars Wars prequels (or Michael Bay elicited for any of the Transformers movies).
It was originally a simple story, immensely popular for its time: former Confederate soldier finds himself on Mars, meets girl, saves planet. That was the first John Carter novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, entitled Under the Moons of Mars when first serialized and subsequently titled A Princess of Mars for book publication. It was the first novel of the immensely popular Burroughs, who also created Tarzan.
Here, the visuals are striking, well-thought-out, and mostly capture the descriptions from the Burroughs Mars novels. Woola the loyal Frog-dog both looks and acts exactly as he does in the first novel (his species is indeed the fastest land-creature on Mars. or 'Barsoom' as the natives call it); the giant, green, six-limbed Tharks look pretty spot-on, though they've been made a wee bit shorter than they are in the novels so that they can comfortably share a frame with humans.
However, the filmmakers unwisely chose to go understated with the colouring of the Red Martians, a decision that makes the ability of everyone to figure out that John Carter isn't from around here quite baffling -- he pretty much looks exactly like a Red Martian, who are supposed to have a rich copper hue but instead look as if they've all got a mild sunburn.
The worst story-telling decision is the labourious frame tale. It's partially in the novel as well, but there it takes up a handful of pages while here it takes up nearly a quarter of the movie. Bad decision. Also a bad decision was throwing in material from later Mars novels: much of the technobabble and tedious exposition while on Mars derives entirely from this interpolated material lifted from later in the series, as too does Mark Strong's villainous White Martian.
Along the way, the filmmakers also throw out some nice character-building material in favour of their own Screenwriting 101 Character Motivation Chart: suddenly John Carter has a wife and child who died during the Civil War...and this explains everything! Including why he's such a goddamned jerk for the first half of the movie, whereas in the first novel he's heroic and courteous and a re-civilizing influence on the noble but somewhat degraded Green Martian Tharks ('Thark' is a tribal name and not the species name for all Green Martians. Because The More You Know).
The biggest visual miscue, one which really throws one out of the movie and occasionally into muffled hysterics, is the decision to give John Carter the jumping abilities of Superman. The CGI for much of this jumping clearly depicts a John Carter who has no weight whatsoever, making him look like a cartoon character regardless of how finely he's rendered.
This is again not in the novel -- Carter can indeed jump a long way in the books, and he does have super-strength related to the Martians thanks to growing up on a planet with much higher gravity, but he doesn't defy the laws of motion, action, and reaction. The movie-makers seems to have decided that lower weight also equals lower mass. Or maybe they just fell in love with their goofy visuals. But if you ever end up on Mars or the Moon, remember this basic fact: running into a wall at 100 miles an hour on the Moon will kill you with the same force as doing the same thing on Earth. The Lunar astronauts walked with that weird, cautious jumping motion because it's dangerous to get yourself going too quickly when you're not fighting as much gravity.
So it goes. It's an interesting partial failure, in any event, and certainly not deserving of the hatred poured upon it by the media. Lightly recommended.
