Streamin' Meemies: Wonder Woman 84

 

Wow, this movie was a disappointment. I hate saying that, but it's true.

The first Wonder Woman was one of my favorite movies of the past few years. Except for the overstuffed, over-the-top CGI of the third act, as an origin story for Diana, it worked. The scenes on Themyscira were wonderful. Diana sorely needed more women around her once she left the island, but her fish-out-of-water persona was funny and heartfelt, serving to show us the core of love and compassion that is Diana Prince. And of course, the defining sequence of the entire movie, No Man's Land, when Diana shed her untried Princess of Themyscira role and truly took on the mantle of Wonder Woman, was enough to bring tears to many viewers' eyes. So I was really looking forward to this, especially knowing that Patty Jenkins returned to direct it.

It gives me no pleasure to acknowledge that this movie is simply...not good. 

There are three major problems with this movie. The first is the villains. The writers made a mistake in having two villains, as both of them come off half-baked at best, even with Pedro Pascal overacting his little heart out. (I suppose his fast-talking, google-eyed hamminess befits the movie's 80's setting, and of course he's also a thinly disguised [and prettier] version of Donald Trump, but it's a wonder there was any background scenery left by the time Pascal finished chewing it.) Kristen Wiig's Barbara Minerva/Cheetah had the better initial setup, but in the chaotic mess of the third act, she went completely off the rails. (Don't get me started on the murky, poorly-lit, patent awfulness of Diana/Cheetah's final fight.) It's too bad, as she struck me as potentially being the more interesting character and villain, if she had been properly developed and written. The key to her character, I think, was her "people like you" rant to Diana when they first fought, and her combination envy and hatred of Wonder Woman, even though she had wished to be just like Diana Prince. This dichotomy could have made a great contrast and foil for our hero if the screenwriters had really delved into it, even though it would have meant a major reworking of the entire script. 

(But then again, the entire script, with the exception of the majestic opening sequence, felt like a rushed first draft. Also, it's set in the 80's, for frak's sake! Where's the 80's music?? They don't even have any 80's music playing in the mall! Even one song, like Led Zeppelin's "The Immigrant Song" in the middle of Thor: Ragnarok, could have better defined the movie. At the very least, when the fake Ronald Reagan came onscreen, they could have used Genesis' "Land of Confusion." I mean, this movie cost what? $200 million? They damn well could have spared a few million, or whatever, for music rights.)

The second problem is the central MacGuffin, the Dreamstone. The writers try to give this a twist by saying it's imbued with the magic of a trickster god, making it "wishes with tricks" (which made me wonder if Loki would show up...oops, wrong studio). However, when Pedro Pascal's Max Lord basically swallows the damn thing, turning him into a walking, bleeding Monkey's Paw, the concept falls completely flat. In the bad third act, when everybody on Earth is spewing their nastiest, most secret wishes, the murderous, amoral impulses most of us attempt to stifle, it was cringing enough to make me "wish" someone would request to blow up the planet and be done with it. Of course, that's almost what happens....

But the third problem, the one that really really bothers me, is how Steve Trevor was brought back to life. Diana is shown to be still pining for Steve (and I tend to cut her a little slack here...since she's functionally immortal, over 65 years for her would be equivalent to a few months, or a year, for us), and after her conversation with Barbara Minerva where she's asked if she was ever in love, naturally her thoughts are with Steve. So when she holds the Dreamstone, her fondest wish is that she could see him again. This is understandable. What is not understandable, to me, is the way the Dreamstone brings him back. Instead of constructing him a new body, a body fueled by Diana's powers (which would have been in keeping with the plot as presented, as Steve's presence slowly drains Diana and makes her vulnerable to harm), the Dreamstone recreates his mind and spirit...and inserts it in some other poor sap's body.

For crying out loud. Did no one stop to think how bad this looks? This poor guy is taken over and used without his consent, and it's treated as a joke. I can only suppose it was in the service of a clever meet-cute camera shot, as the camera slowly revolves around Diana and the stranger calling her out with Steve's lines from the first movie, until the second or third time around when Chris Pine's face appears and Diana realizes who it is. But though we have Chris Pine in the role (because he has second billing, har har), we're shown that Diana, and everyone else, actually sees the other man's face and body, because that's what reflects back in the mirror. So this man is taken over without his permission or knowledge, and we know nothing of how it disrupts his life. (Apparently he doesn't remember anything that happened during this time, as the same actor is shown in the sickly-sweet final Christmas scene.) And finally...Diana has sex with Steve in this man's body, knowing this. This is, to put no fine point on it, simply awful. 

Unfortunately, Patty Jenkins has a co-writing credit on this script. I am shocked and dismayed that she signed off on this. It's not right, and it's not funny. It's also fucking unnecessary. If the magical MacGuffin could create several dozen nuclear weapons out of nothing from Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's-addled mind, it damn well could have constructed Steve Trevor a new body.

Now, are there any good things in this movie? Amazingly enough, there are. The opening sequence, with a young Diana running an obstacle course that is the equivalent of a "Themyscira Ninja Warrior" contest and learning a lesson about taking shortcuts and the truth, is magnificent, wonderfully shot and edited. It recreates the spirit of the first film in a manner the rest of Wonder Woman 84 sorely lacks. Chris Pine has the same effortless chemistry with Gal Gadot, and the snippet of him parading various 80's wardrobe choices got a chuckle out of me, at least (although I think that's the only time I laughed). Finally, the end-credits cameo was delightful. 

But as for the rest....I'm glad I didn't see this in the theater, even if I could have. (As a matter of fact, I snagged a two-week free trial of HBO Max after a purchase at Best Buy, so I actually didn't pay anything to watch it.) I hope this film doesn't sink Wonder Woman III, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot really need to rethink their character and world after this debacle. 

"We're on an express elevator to hell, going down"

Review: Captive State--2 stars

(My ratings system: 1 star: Terrible; 2 stars: Okay; 3 stars: Liked; 4 stars: Really liked; 5 stars: Loved)

I really wanted to like this film. It has a promising beginning, with a fresh take on the "alien invasion" trope. Unlike Independence Day and others of its ilk, it doesn't show the actual invasion; the story picks up nine years afterwards, with the aliens (ironically, and tellingly, given the official name of the Legislators, unofficially called the "roaches," because they thrive in the dark) firmly ensconced on Earth and pretty much running the place. Apparently the governments of Earth rolled over when they came, signing agreements and bowing down (for sure, the aliens have the superior tech, but given the thousands of nuclear warheads still existing on the planet, you'd think somebody would have launched one, or more, of them rather than give in. Oh well, whatever). Now the mayor of Chicago, where the story is set, is touting the Legislators' rule as "saving humanity" or some such platitude. After a brief infodump recounting the invasion (and the apparent reduction of our society back to 80's era tech--bye bye smartphones, hello massive CRT's, minimal Internet, and dialup. Why? No reason given, other than to give the protagonist a job--uploading digital files and destroying the chips--where he could meet the rebels), we zero in on our protagonist, Gabriel Drummond. He is the younger brother of Rafael Drummond, a rebel leader now presumed dead, but revered to the point where his face is graffiti'd on brick walls citywide.

You already know what I'm going to say, don't you? Rafael ain't as dead as he seems to be. Gabriel is clumsily kinda-sorta trying to follow in his brother's footsteps, and friends of Rafe's lock a collar on him that blocks his tracking signal (everyone now has an ugly organic-looking tracking slug implanted in their throats) and takes him out to meet his abruptly-resurrected brother. The two are reunited in the best scene in the movie, as Rafe urges his brother to pick a side. Something big is going down, and Gabriel is not at all sure he wants to be in on it, but he gets dragged in anyway.

In this initial setup, we also meet John Goodman, a Chicago cop devoted to tracking down rebel cells, as the last revolutionary breakout resulted in the roaches wiping a section of Chicago off the map. This seems like an odd bit of casting, but he's surprisingly effective here (I guess someone saw Goodman's bravura performance in 10 Cloverfield Lane). He's introduced by way of a visit to a prostitute (the completely wasted Vera Farmiga--I don't know why in the hell she would take such a cliched, thankless role), to whom he unburdens himself, to a point, and apparently has been doing for some time. We find out Rafael and Gabriel's father, who was wasted by one of the aliens in the opening scenes (turned to a bloody mist, though I can't quite figure out why the parents in the car's front seats were killed and the kids in the back seat escaped unscathed. Oh yeah, that's right, because the plot demanded it) was Goodman's partner, and he's dedicated himself to watching after first Rafael and then his brother, whether Gabriel wants him to or not. Goodman's character, William Mulligan, is convinced that a new rebel cell is arising in Chicago, and he's determined to find it.

All well and good. Gabriel is an engaging character, and there are interesting questions raised regarding taking risks and fighting back vs. keeping one's head down and going along to survive, and just who are the real terrorists here. We follow Gabriel to the point where he ducks into a warehouse, pursued by a horde of alien drones that look like fleshy flying suckers, and barricades himself inside a glass-walled office. The drones plaster themselves to the glass, exposing their round creepy open mouths, and we don't know how Gabriel is going to get out of this....

And the movie cuts completely away from this suspenseful situation, to focus on a group of people we've either met briefly before or not at all, and to concentrate on what is eventually revealed (after a long dragass time) to be Rafael's resistance group. We're shown the coming together of its plan to infiltrate an upcoming rally at Wrigley Field, where the Legislators are actually going to make an appearance, and blow said Legislators up.

This interruption, and the cockamamie structure of the remainder of the film, threw me completely out of the story. After a bit of watching these people I didn't know and didn't give a shit about, I wanted to jump up and yell, "But what happened to Gabriel?" These two jumbled storylines do eventually dovetail together, sort of, but on reflection it seems to me the screenwriters were focusing on the wrong character. This is Gabriel's story, and it should have been Rafe's. This would have tightened up the story, and also would have improved an ending that gets more uncomfortable the more I think about it.

To wit: Rafael's blowing up the roaches at the rally succeeds, but then the aliens threaten to wipe more of Chicago off the map. Mulligan uses Gabriel to capture Rafe and his cell's survivors and lead the police to "Number One," the leader of the cell, who proves to be--guess who? Mulligan's girlfriend, who has also been screwing other higher-ups in the Chicago hierarchy. This is revealed in a lengthy bit of exposition (well, at least it was at the end of the film rather than the beginning), where Mulligan outlines the plot, names the terrorists and  many of the Chicago higher-ups who have been compromised (including the Commissioner) and is appointed acting Commissioner, which requires visiting the aliens in their stronghold underneath Chicago.

(And why are they there? We're not really told, other than "exploiting natural resources"--again, why?--and just to keep the aliens pretty much out of sight and the CGI costs down, I suppose. Although their one appearance, as a bipedal insectoid porcupine thing that communicates with whistles and clicks, is well-done and creepy.)

So the film's final twist is that Rafael and his compadres are taken aboard the aliens' ship and whisked offplanet, and Mulligan, the new Commissioner, gets on the elevator to drop down 300 feet to the alien stronghold. But as he goes down, we see a transparent liquidy goop begin to spread over his entire body--the same organic explosive that Rafael's crew used earlier--and we realize that this was a long, deep game orchestrated by Mulligan to get himself into the heart of the alien occupation and blow it to smithereens. Which would have been fine, if both Rafael and Number One (her name isn't listed on IMDB, but I remember it was being Rebecca) had ever been told about this. Instead, the ending carries a very unpleasant whiff of White Savior, as Mulligan manipulates and sacrifices both Rafe, Rebecca, and a great many other black and brown people to get to this point. This is why I think the protagonist should have been Rafael Drummond instead of his brother, and he (and Number One) should have been shown as consenting to and participating fully in this plan.

There's a lot of interesting ideas here, and it seems like there's a good film struggling to get out, but the poor storytelling structure and clashing storylines absolutely hamstring it. Somebody should have demanded the writers take another pass at the script, and also take a long hard look at just who gets to save who. This is 2019, people. We don't need old white guys saving us anymore.

Review: Godzilla

Yes, I know I'm behind the curve on this one, but I prefer to go to movies after the initial rush has died down. In this case, a 10 AM Sunday showing was perfect: not only did I save two dollars off the regular ticket price, there were very few people in the theater.

Unfortunately, I came out of the movie feeling deeply unsatisfied. Sure, it was a big, badass, blow-em-up, crash-and-bang, gorgeous-CGI monster movie, but it didn't feel finished somehow. I thought about it for a while, and finally realized what the problem was: the screenwriter had made the mistake of focusing his film on the most uninteresting character in the cast.

(And yeah, I know the movie's title is "Godzilla," and I realize he comes on the scene, destroys San Francisco, kills two giant preying-mantises-cum-bats before they spawn several hundred more of their kind, thus saving humanity's collective ass, and leaves. [Accompanied by a terribly schmaltzy tagline on CNN: "King of the Monsters--Savior of Our City"--or rather, what's left of it, which surely translates into a Pyrric victory. Barf.] But he's not really a character, just a terribly convenient Force of Nature and Serve-the-Plot-Device. [With one fleeting exception, which I'll get to later.] There was no discussion of his possible intelligence, other than Ken Watanabe mouthing a few platitudes about "the balance of nature," and there should have been. Either (a) he's not intelligent, in which case he would have gone on hibernating merrily away at the bottom of the ocean, since the Bat-Mantises weren't directly threatening him; or (b) he was intelligent, in which case I suspect he would have been righteously pissed off at human beings for all the attempts to kill him with so-called "A-bomb tests" in the Fifties, and he would've stayed out of the fight altogether. Either way, we wouldn't have had a movie, so let's just jump over that gigantic plot hole and go on.)

Bryan Cranston's Joe Brody starts off the show, as administrator of a nuclear plant in Janjira, Japan, who is concerned about a recent series of seismic events close to the plant; events he believes is becoming a pattern. He is threatening to shut the plant down, and sends his wife and her team into the reactor to check out what's happening. Of course, all hell breaks loose, the reactor is breached and superheated radioactive steam comes billowing up the hallways, killing Brody's wife and her team. This is a rather well-done death scene (although I hated for nearly the only woman in the cast to be refrigerated so soon), and looking back on it now, that was the writer's first mistake. Because that scene clearly should have set the tone for the rest of the movie, and Bryan Cranston's character should have been the protagonist.

Instead, he dies about a third of the way through, fifteen years later when he sneaks back into the Janjira Containment Zone, accompanied by his now-grown son, to find out just what the hell happened. What happened was Papa Bat-Mantis, newly hatched in the Philippines after a cave collapse, was drawn to Brody's plant by its radiation, which the Mutos (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) feed upon. The creature destroyed the plant and burrowed in for a fifteen-year hibernation, absorbing all the radiation that otherwise would have lethally contaminated the area, and emerges sexually mature and looking for his mate (who is still in a dormant state until he starts calling her, having been taken to the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Depository in Nevada--which is actually another gigantic plot hole you shouldn't think about too long; WHY THE HELL WOULD THEY HAVE DONE THAT??), setting the film in motion.

From then on, unfortunately, the focus is on Brody's grown son Ford, and a duller "hero" I have rarely encountered. I can't even remember the actor's name; he made no impression on me whatsoever, and he simply isn't capable of carrying the film. As I said, Bryan Cranston should have been the protagonist, and Ken Watanabe, as a scientist for Monarch, who has been hunting  for/studying the Mutos since World War II, should have been the antagonist. Because as far as I can see, it was his mistakes (and his unscientific awe and near-worship of the creatures--when he looks at Godzilla swimming, he appears to be staring into the face of his god) that led to both of the Bat-Mantises breaking out. I mean, why the devil didn't he destroy the male while it was in hibernation and in a relatively defenseless state? There was an attempt at an explanation given, but in light of later events, it proved to be catastrophically inadequate.

So: We should have had Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe, two wonderful actors, going toe-to-toe, instead of  mostly (especially so in Cranston's case) wasting them. At this point (and this is a good thing) Godzilla takes over the film, and the last half of the movie is a lay-waste-to-cities (Honolulu, Las Vegas and San Francisco respectively) fight. Godzilla finally manages to destroy both Mutos (and I don't know why he didn't whip out his deadly "atomic breath" earlier, but again, we wouldn't have had the entire third act if he had) and little Ford-the-Dullard does manage to do one thing: he destroys the female Muto's eggs. (But then, instead of disarming the warhead which was supposed to destroy both Mutos--and Godzilla as well--with its blast, he fails at the only reason for his character to be there, and passes out. Kee-ripes. The bomb is taken out to sea and detonates there, so all is good, but I swear, this script needed at least one more rewrite: PLEASE get rid of this guy, and keep Bryan Cranston. Which would also have necessitated eliminating Ford's wife and son, but they were only there for cynical audience manipulation anyway.)

There's one exception to my creeping dissatisfaction with the film. It's a brief scene when Godzilla is staggering after killing Papa Bat-Mantis, and he comes eyeball to eyeball with Ford-the-Dullard. Godzilla obviously doesn't speak in his movie, but they did some really good CGI in this scene: he looks unutterably weary, and you can tell what he's thinking: "Why am I getting beat up protecting these little human shits?" This goes back to my original question, which should have been explored. (Another wasted opportunity for a great scene between Cranston and Watanabe.) It makes about as much sense as me getting in a knock-down drag-out fight over an anthill.

Well, anyway. I'm glad I saw it. Kinda sorta. But it could have, and should have, been so much more.

The Rolling Stoned Pirate's One Hit

In my ongoing quest to determine which of my DVD's I like and will keep (and eventually switch to Blu-ray), and which I am going to get rid of, tonight's On the Fence offering is Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World's End.




This is a pretty shlocky series to begin with, to be sure, although in the first movie, The Curse of the Black Pearl, Johnny Depp's pirate-slash-rock-star performance, channeling (in the actor's words) Keith Richards, was pretty riveting. Johnny's still cute, still slurring his words beguilingly, but the shtick is wearing a little thin.

The plot itself is frantic and needlessly twisty, and the final battle goes on way too long. It's Not a Keeper, in other words. Honestly, the best part of the whole thing, for me, is Keith Richards' cameo as Captain Jack Sparrow's father. I wondered what happened when people saw it in theatres and the camera lingered on Keith's famous Rolling Stones silver skull ring (which is eerily apropos for a pirate as well) and audiences realized just who they were seeing....

And hey! YouTube rides to the rescue!

After watching that, I was reminded of perhaps the last great Rolling Stones video, "One Hit (To the Body)." Made at a time when Mick and Keith were not getting along AT ALL, there's a great deal of scowling, murderous looks, posturing, and guitar-swinging (at Mick, not into the air), which actually made for a good watch. You expected Keith to pounce on Mick any minute, except of course they would have edited that out.

So, in watching and thinking about this, I decided to merge it all together into one humongous post.

Happy New Year, y'all.