There's an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that really fucked me up. Buffy gets stung by a demon that creates an alternate reality for her: one where vampires aren't real and she's a paranoid schizophrenic in an asylum. Stakes are raised when Buffy begins to believe she may actually be crazy and, urged by her alternate-reality physician and parents, attempts to kill the Scooby gang. Eventually, through the power of friendship and rational thinking, she resists her fantasy and comes back to reality. See you next week, right? Not quite. It turns out the demon created a genuine split reality and by rejecting her personality devoid of supernatural beasties, she unknowingly condemned said personality to a permanent psychological coma. I'd never seen something like this before. Alternate reality and past/future storylines generally leave me pretty emotionally devoid, because it always ends with the reset switch getting hit or everything returning to the status quo. If none of this will be real, why should I care now? This episode did something different. Buffy returned the status quo, but only in the reality she chose. By coming to be, the alternate reality persisted, and by abandoning it, she psychologically destroyed her alternate self. That's pretty heavy, and it got me accessing those things called feelings. Does X-Men: Days of Future Past do the same thing? Not at all, but that didn't stop me from having a shit hot good time with it.
Offering very little in the way of narrative accessibility, this may be the most comic-booky comic-book movie I've ever seen. It's assumed you already know everything that's happened within the cinematic universe, and that you're fully aware of every character's bio up until now. Professor X is alive again. Shadowcat can transport a person's mind through time. Wolverine has bone claws instead of adamantium in the '70s. All of these things go completely unexplained if you're not entering the film with prior knowledge. If you're not a fan of the comics or just a casual fan of the flicks, you're in the dark. And honestly, I really appreciate that. The Amazing Spider-Man was heavily bogged down in its first hour because it was telling a story we already knew. X-Men eschews that in favour of respect to its fan-base first and foremost. The uninitiated may have appreciated an opening montage chronicling the history of the flicks up to this point, but doing so would have cut time from the three storylines it's balancing. The film begins far in the future, where unstoppable robots called Sentinels have either enslaved or exterminated most of the mutants. Professor X, Magneto, Wolverine, Storm and others have holed up in Shanghai for their last ditch effort at saving the world. Their plan is to go back in time and alter the course of history so that the Sentinels never came to be. This kicks in the second storyline, in which Wolverine travels back to 1973 to hurriedly reconcile the differences between Professor X and Magneto so that they may work together in preventing Mystique from assassinating the inventor of the Sentinels, which is the event pinpointed as the catalyst for this turn of events. And on top of all this, the film regularly calls back upon the past that has already...passed. In the future. The fucking first three movies, alright? This is already a hugely complicated narrative to communicate in 130 minutes, and pausing for constant explanation of prior history would have resulted in an experience not too dissimilar from The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Mercifully, they made the right decision. That's not to say you can't enjoy Days of Future Past without a marathon of the prior six films. You'll just miss out on a lot of quiet, little moments.
For me though, it's these little moments that ultimately made the movie. The action scenes are perfectly serviceable, and showcase the various mutant's powers quite well. Blink in particular is a welcome addition, with her ability to create portals at any location resulting in some physics-bending fun times. Quicksilver as well proves you can't judge a book by it's cover. The reveal of his costume kicked fan's premature vitriol into gear, and granted, it's pretty horrible. But he's a teenager in the '70s with the ability to move at the speed of light. Of course he's going to dress like a fucking dork. Any judgemental idiot who swears off the movie because they don't like his silver goggles is going to miss out on a show-stealer, in which he saves Xavier, Magneto, Wolverine and Beast from a hail of bullets to the tune of Jim Croce's 'Time in a Bottle'. But it's within here that my previous point is made. It's the little things that make me love this movie. Quicksilver's dress code. A couple of subtle hints at his familial ties to another of the X-Men. Wolverine getting confused when he doesn't set off a metal detector. Magneto using his hands to have a drink while his powers sew a wound and create a projector with a light bulb and a glass. Wolverine unconsciously lifting his middle finger when he reunites with an old friend. These slight touches create a universe that shows love for its characters, and for their fans. There's some solid character drama on show as well. Xavier and Magneto share some intense scenes after the fallout of First Class, with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender meeting the acting abilities of Patrick Stewart and Ian Mckellen, leaving me at a loss for which of the two pairs I prefer. There's a rather moving reversal of roles between Xavier and Wolverine as well, with Logan now the one guiding and rehabilitating the Professor, who has taken such emotional damage that he is willing to see a future of his kind extinct if it means an end to his pain. This leads to an even more moving scene between him and his future self, in which Charles explains to Charles it's this pain that gives them the strength to bear everyone else's. Scenes like this are important to a series like X-Men, even if nobody's getting punched. When an entire universe is built around the notion that these mutations don't make them any less human, it's crucial to see moments of relatable humanity.
Now we come to my one gripe with the flick, and it's a doozy. I mentioned before that I usually check out emotionally in a time travel storyline, and Days of Future Past is no different. Seeing beloved characters perish did nothing to me, because I knew there was no way a big budget studio would allow the heroes to fail. Of course the reset switch will be hit, of course none of these characters are actually dead. There's a slight exception to this: watching a battle-wounded Magneto and Xavier shake hands and express their regrets in the face of death wrought a tear, but it was only the idea of these two characters sharing such a moment, not the moment itself. Days of Future Past goes one further, though. Mystique doesn't assassinate her target, and in doing so, the entire future is reset, including every X-Men flick up until First Class. You sly fox, Singer, you went and pulled a sneaky reboot! It doesn't matter if all of the same actors stuck around, or that technically it's all part of the same story. That doesn't change the fact that you've just nullified almost every film in the franchise. I can't help but feel a little bit like the last 14 years have been wasted...but hang on, kids! I spot a silver lining. That's right, The Last Stand, drunken uncle of the X-Men family, is well and truly included in that list, and in the film's final scene, Wolverine walks down the stairs of Charles Xavier's Schools of Gifted Youngsters. He's attempting to process the fact that he's the only person with the knowledge of the grim future that is no more when a familiar face stops him dead in his tracks. I'd be lying if I said that didn't hit me hard. X-Men: Days of Future Past stumbles under the weight of its premise, but for all of the gears turning beneath the surface, it does a well enough job pulling the wool over your eyes through its clear adoration of its characters and desire to get X-Men back to the glory it once had. As a fan, I can't ask for much more.
In preparation for Godzilla, I watched Monsters, the first and only feature Gareth Edwards directed before this, and seemingly one of the sole reasons he was picked for the job. It's not hard to see why. Filmed on a super low budget, it's an alien invasion flick told primarily from the perspective of two people crossing through the quarantined landscape the extra-terrestrials have taken up residence. Obviously, the financial restrictions severely limited the extent to which the audience was able to view the martians, but rather than let that lead to a boring, uneventful drag, Edwards instead thought opportunistically, employing the classic rule - one which I've harped on about before - that something is scarier the less you see of it, to his advantage. The result was a really cheap flick that cleverly tricked the audience into believing it was a really expensive one that was just sparing with its special effects (it's even more impressive when you learn he created everything on his own at his computer using affordable software). Watching Monsters got me even more excited for Godzilla. The way I saw it, a huge budget wasn't going to let loose the beast in Edwards, free from the shackles of needing to think economically with what he could show. The way I saw it, he was going to show things the exact same way. It was just going to look much better. How great it is to be right.
It would be a mistake to think that Godzilla has a problem with its protagonist. Yes, Aaron Taylor-Johnson's acting is pretty wooden, but I think that's the point. In a bizarre twist of fate, it's Bryan Cranston's habit of pouring his heart and soul into whatever's on the page that feels slightly out of place. The film eschews complicated characters in favour of cardboard cutouts to keep you firmly locked in place with the story, because ultimately, Godzilla's protagonist is humanity. Aaron Taylor-Johnson struggles to reveal depth, but maybe that's the point. He's not playing someone who requires depth, he's playing the idea of a husband and father caught in a dire, life-threatening situation separated from a wife and child. This is not to discredit Bryan Cranston's performance, by the way. I put the guttural scream he releases when he closes a door to stop radioactive smoke from billowing out into the public knowing full well in doing so that he just killed his wife further inside among the film's finest and most affecting moments, and it's entirely down to the conviction of his performance. It's just existing in a film that well and truly gets by with accessible, one-dimensional archetypes.
The reason it does get away with such banality is because of the lens through which we view it. A Godzilla by another director with mountains of cash might have taken the idea of two or three monsters fighting in a city and concluded, "Who cares? It's all computers. Let's just have some magic camera high up getting the whole thing. Who gives a fuck about artistic integrity? They'll think all this fake shit is shit hot!" Do you want to know why movies like Transformers or The Hobbit make you tired? It's not the length. It's the fact that your awareness of its falsity is made all the more apparent by its impossible cinematography. When you can do so much of the special thing, it ceases to be special. Godzilla understands this, and I can't stress this enough, fucking perfectly. If we as humanity are the protagonist, the movie is seen through our eyes, and this is done by keeping the camera stuck firmly on two legs. We catch glimpses of these humongous beasts through windshields, or from a rooftop, or from inside the goggles of a paratrooper descending into the den of Gods. If the camera is level, it's because we're looking out of a high-rise window, otherwise the camera is looking up. This is all to elicit a particular emotion from the audience. It's not excitement, it's not tension and it's not fear: it's awe. From amongst the smoke that's blanketing a destroyed city, a gigantic tail cuts through. Slowly, almost gracefully, it clears a path and we tilt our heads to see what it's connected to. We crane further and further and the dark tower seems to go on forever, until a bolt of lightning cracks and we see the outline of a head. It emerges from the haze, and it's only as it begins to inhale that we realise how quiet the world currently is. It doesn't cut the silence. It obliterates it, with an impossible, earth-shattering roar that lifts and throws paper lanterns hung from street lights. And all we can do is shiver and stand in wonder of what nature has wrought.
Godzilla also utlilises what I like to call 'Bruce's Gift' to illicit the right emotion from the audience. Steven Spielberg's initial vision for Jaws was to show the shark in full profile from the first scene. Unfortunately, his animatronic (they called it Bruce) driven by electricity wasn't too fond of water. A broken beast forced him to rethink his strategy to scare the audience, and by pulling from H.P. Lovecraft's idea that your imagination will always exceed the monster he puts to pen, he hid the monster away from us and let a chunk of dock being dragged by something below the water's surface fill our heads with all sorts of terrifying notions. It's almost an hour into Godzilla before we see a creature. Preceding it, we've been fed imagery such as huge amounts of forestry razed in a snake-like shape and an entire nuclear power plant destroyed by the tremors caused by something shifting below it. It's well over an hour before Godzilla, larger than his foe, steps into frame. His body rising from the ocean's depths causes a tidal wave. He passes underneath a naval ship for what seems like an eternity. By the time we actually see his face, our heads have built something far greater than what the film can offer. And it knows this. Godzilla roars, our jaws drop and the scene abruptly cuts to a mother and child far away from the action. We catch glimpses of the brawl from news footage on the television, but it's up to us to fill in the blanks. Eventually, in the final act, the camera pulls out and stays there to watch the fight, because by then we've earned it. But even after viewing their full profile, the film exercises restraint. We'll catch a minute or two of the carnage they're capable of inflicting upon one another before they retreat into the shadows, leaving us only with a silhouette in the distance and the destruction they've left behind. We're powerless to influence, aid or combat them. They're mythical. Godzilla rises from the ocean's depths to save Earth from something that would destroy it. Not us, but our planet. When the job is done, he returns to the ocean, and we stand in his wake, wondering if he is our saviour or simply a force of nature. I had what I was worried were too high expectations for Godzilla. It met them. I don't exaggerate when I say that in many ways, it elicited the same sense of awe and excitement as the first time I watched Jurassic Park, and it's because Godzilla, like Jurassic Park, knows that it's not about the dinosaurs. It's about how we see them.
The phrase "something for everyone" is a tricky one when it comes to movies. On the one hand, creating an experience that attempts to appeal to every demographic could end up being a washed-out, derivative piece of trash that appeals to none. On the other, it could end up being Bad Neighbours. A flick that well and truly earns its R rating, it succeeds in providing accommodating humour to the swag-touting, yolo-spouting dudebro generation and the older, more comedically-refined Bill Murray generation. Think Family Guy today as opposed to The Simpsons in 1997. Can you guess from that completely impartial comparison which of the two I belong to? A scene in which two young college boys trade variations on the phrase "Bros before Hoes" for upwards of 90 seconds is contrasted with one in which a Robert De Niro-themed party has some hilariously confused guests, including Samuel L. Jackson in Jackie Brown and Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, that eventually descends into a cacophony of terrible impressions. Bad Neighbours' greatest strength lies in its respect for both camps. It's okay if I didn't find two guys fighting by pushing dildos into each other's mouths hilarious, because right around the corner is an exchange of dialogue between a young guy named Garfield and a socially maladjusted cop who wants to know if he hates Mondays and loves lasagna. It approaches both styles of comedy with complete conviction, and it's only in this way that it succeeds where many others have failed.
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If I were to criticise this, as a movie, I would have to start with the fact that it fails at being a movie. Its 90 minute run time is a collection of disparate sketches based around the central idea of an older couple attempting to evict the noisy frat house next door. This wouldn't be a problem if the flick wasn't also occasionally haphazardly trying to become a full-fledged narrative. Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne are introduced attempting spontaneous living-room sex, but are thwarted by their baby who seems incapable of not looking at them, even when her chair has been turned to face the wall. This desire to hold onto their youth comes back when it's convenient, such as their obvious unwillingness to just call the cops when the war between houses escalates to dangerous levels because they finally have some drama in their lives again, or in their more subtle nonchalance at their baby munching on a balloon until they realise it's a condom, because an easily-potential suffocation isn't anything worth worrying about until it's also a potential fucked-up crazy story to tell their friends about their super exciting life. This would be fine, and maybe even great, if the movie weren't so quick to ditch this when it has an hilarious new sketch to chuck the characters into. Their depth disappears for the sake of laughs. Either approach works, but not in tandem.
This tonal schizophrenia extends to the frat house as well. While Zac Efron and Dave Franco are initially presented as good dudes willing to succumb to any level to protect their way of life, the film awkwardly tries to inject some level of motivation into their cause by way of relatively serious scenes of reflective dialogue regarding their fraternity. What Franco sees as a temporary and ultimately false good time until his solid grades get him somewhere real, Efron sees as his one and only chance to reign over something given his unwillingness to gain any sort of academic integrity ("Lame," he so eloquently puts it when the AT&T recruiter tells him his pitiful GPA won't get him any sort of professional attention). Once again, this is fine, but not in contrast with the rest of the film. In a relatively dark comedy, scenes that try to make you connect emotionally to the characters ring hollow. Perhaps it would have worked better treated as some form of satire as opposed to genuineness, something that these scenes occasionally threaten to be, examples being when Franco walks in on Efron staring intently at their Wall of Fame and remarks, "Wow, you're really villain-ing it up here...", or when Rogen and Efron are discussing the film's events in the last minutes and Rogen says, "Yeah, things really escalated quickly between us. Almost too quickly." Instead, it just serves to pump the brakes on a movie that isn't in need of any of it.
Bad Neighbours also suffers from the mistake I see a lot of flicks making these days: references to pop-culture content that is only presently relevant. Yes, it's kind-of-not-really funny right now for a newly single heterosexual male to be singing the praises of a casual sex matchmaking app called Grindr, in spite of the high frequency of men on there, but in less than a year, Grindr will have been eclipsed by the new big player, rendering the gag as irrelevant as the Myspace joke in Superbad. This isn't necessarily a new sin, it's just something I've seen in growing frequency recently. Perhaps it's part of the new type of comedy young people appreciate that I do not. And honestly, that's probably it. I didn't appreciate an extended history lesson on this particular fraternity's creation of beer pong, a kid shouting "YOLO!" and running away after receiving threats of violence or a grown man having breast milk shot into his face by his wife for yucks. What I did appreciate were the hilarious puns about cows quietly shared between the loving couple following the aforementioned, a code used by the frat house to break up a party pulled from a 1994 Outkast album and cartoon logic being employed by Rose Byrne to distract a stoned frat boy dangerously close to discovering her under a table (I nearly died). I'm fully aware of my total bias, but fuck you. Half of this movie was made for me. Stick to your shitty other half. Hang on a second, though. In the end, that's kind of where the point lies. All of this pompous, over-blown critical analysis goes out the window for a film like Bad Neighbours, replaced only by the tried and true golden question: Was it entertaining? There were moments in this movie that made me laugh harder than I have for a long time. I imagine the kids I feel completely alienated by will feel the same way for different reasons. Job well done.
