Trainwreck

I wouldn't have the vision for Tenouttaten that I do if it weren't for Film Crit Hulk. His brilliant, post-modern dissections of cinema are among the most thoughtful and inspiring validations of criticism that exist in the pantheon of the internet, and he consistently makes me want to be better than I am. In his essay on Gone Girl, he cites an interview with Gillian Flynn in which she addresses some of the criticism leveled at her work for being sexist; that Amy Dunne was nothing more than the 'psycho bitch' trope. Gillian's response is that Amy isn't a psycho bitch, she's just psycho. More than that, women deserve a character like this; a character that transcends their gender to become a monster. The media we consume projects women to be either to-their-core nurturing and good, or outwardly negative through their 'bitchiness'. Both of those extremes still hold gender to their identity. In his essay, Hulk takes these quotes to theorise that in Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn finally offers women a female Hannibal Lecter, a character whose identity doesn't stem from being a man, but from being a monster. And, in that regard, with Trainwreck, Amy Schumer offers women a female Bill Murray in Groundhog Day; an affirmation that you are allowed to be damaged, and to be a shitty human being, because you are human, and you're trying your best. And maybe, if you can finally admit that you have a problem, you can start to get better.

There's a scene in Trainwreck where Amy (Amy Schumer) is eulogising her late father. As we see in the first scene of the film, he's the one who taught Amy that monogamy is a fallacy, and set her on her path of having as good of a time for herself and herself only. She starts off professional, and well-meaning, before acknowledging that her dad was kind of a shithead. He was a racist homophobe, and with a show of hands, everyone at the funeral had been personally offended by him at some point in their lives. But in the same thought, she also acknowledges that he was honest about himself, and his shortcomings, and each person who had raised their hands could leave them raised for a time in which he had touched them with the good person he was at his core. To me, the only scene that even comes close to as accurately portraying the deep pain beneath Amy's surface is when her boyfriend Aaron (Bill Hader) suggests that they take a couple of days off and walks out the door, leaving Amy on the couch desperately trying to hold back sobs before hard-cutting to her getting wasted and dancing against her workmates in a club. There may have been a point in Amy's life when this lifestyle was exactly what she needed, and she should not be held accountable for that. This movie is not slut-shaming anybody. But Amy's at a point in her life now where that lifestyle isn't reaping the same benefits. Her flippant, carefree lifestyle is now hurting people. Her boyfriend at the start of the film, Steven (John Cena), finds out about her promiscuity, and when she can't see how it could possibly be hurtful for him to have this knowledge, he says, "Fuck you, Amy. You are a mean person." Try as she might to continue looking out for number one, she spends the film losing the battle inside of herself that's trying to tell her she's looking for something more. And it all comes from that eulogy: her parents were just as damaged as she is now, but they were good people deep down, and so is she. So are we all.

It could be argued that the fact that Amy gets the guy in the end in spite of herself isn't an earned victory. To me, it wasn't a victory, it was a second chance, and to say that she wasn't deserving of that is to say that Fight Club celebrates Tyler Durden. Trainwreck makes you work hard to see the good person beneath Amy's shell, but it is there. I can name innumerable situations in which I've been unbelievably selfish, with little to no regard for those I care about, but I still consider myself to be a good person. Why? Because I can admit the times when I wasn't good. Amy's efforts to win back Aaron demonstrate a person admitting that she needs to get better, and she wants to try. This transcends her gender, and demonstrates, as I've mentioned before, feminism as it truly is: equality. Feminism is about recognising that every human being has the capacity to be the same person. More so, in her final act of penance, a synchronised dance with the Knicks City cheerleaders, she transcends the deep, cultural understanding we have that only one body type can dance, and dance good, and look good. She knocks it out of the fucking park because she's a human being laid bare, and you can trace that back through the rest of the film. We don't see her and Aaron old and happy together; for all we know, he is but a chapter in her life. What we do know is that Amy has acknowledged that she isn't happy with who she is, and she wants to change. She doesn't win the guy, she earns the opportunity to try and get better. She's a character that is more than her gender. She's Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. She's fucking brilliant.

Ant-Man

Ant-Man is the right movie to follow up Avengers: Age of Ultron. Love A:AOU or not, there's no denying it's exhaustive qualities; an inevitability when you're combining four film and one or two television universes into a single digestible experience. I've made my thoughts on it clear, but I'm not about to say it wasn't a well-made, as good as good can be experience. It was heavy, however, and heavy only has weight in film when it's the exception to the rule. The fate of the world/universe is a high stake, one that us as audience members can immediately impress ourselves upon, but if that's all that's ever at stake, why should we continue to worry whether or not the good guys will prevail? The audience isn't dumb; give them something deeply personal, and write it well, and they'll still see themselves in the shoes of the hero. Mercifully, Ant-Man gets this. While the world is still in danger through its events, it's only by proxy. The third act usually reserved for nerve gas, or nukes, or floating cities recreating the impact of an asteroid, is instead here a father fighting to save his daughter inside of her bedroom. It's bizarre to call a film with a budget of $130,000,000 small-scale, but reflected upon the norm of today's cinema, that's exactly what it is.

What it drops in scale, however, it replaces with heart. The stakes are smaller, but they feel so much more personal. Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is a thief who is fighting tooth and nail to, as mentor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) says, "be the hero your daughter already thinks you are." Scott is desperate to prove to his ex-wife Maggie (Judy Greer) that his daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) deserves to have him in his life, something that Maggie's new husband, Paxton (Bobby Cannavale), is vehemently against. It's here that Ant-Man really shines and, ironically, takes some giant strides. Paxton isn't a villain in this piece; he's just a step-dad concerned for the safety and upbringing of a child now in his care. As a police officer, he's seen what people like Scott can be, and it's not a responsible role model. But, of course, it's Scott's movie, so he has to prevail in the end. Having said that, where a movie like this would normally end with Paxton being humiliated, or murdered, or to simply have Maggie realise how much happier she was with Scott, Ant-Man instead simply shows Paxton and Maggie that Scott has changed for the better, and the film ends with all of them having dinner together. Cassie has done a cartwheel for the first time, and Paxton shows Scott the footage on his phone. The divorce is amicable, and they've found a way for Cassie to still have a complete family. Even a throwaway gag of Cassie feeding an ant that was enlarged to the size of a dog during the climax demonstrates Paxton and Maggie's willingness to integrate Scott's new identity into the family dynamic. This level of sensitivity and care also demonstrates itself during the action set-piece the majority of the film is building towards: a heist on the headquarters of the film's villain, who is dangerously close to replicating Hank Pym's shrinking technology (oh yeah, the suit makes you really small and ant-strong) for weaponised purposes. Scott enlists the help of his thieving buddies, as a chance for them to, as well, do something better. His best friend of the bunch, Luis (Michael Pena), is ecstatic at the opportunity. "We get to be the good guys? We're the good guys now?" he asks with joy. The heist culminates with Scott and crew blowing up the building. During the escape, Luis runs past the room in which he'd knocked out a security guard prior. He stops, sees the tied up body, and sprints inside to help him out. "We're the good guys now," he reminds himself. It's such a small, utterly wonderful moment, that is 100% more heroic than any action taken in something more focused on wanton destruction like Man of Steel. 

Here's the really great thing about Ant-Man, though: I can hardly remember it. Apart from the aforementioned staple moments, I'd really struggle to tell you what actually happened. And I think that's great. As I've already said, this is a movie that feels smaller (it's even filmed in a lower aspect ratio than its counterparts; 1.85:1 as opposed to 2.35:1), and it's very well aware of its place in the universe. This is not trying to be Iron Man; this is not trying to reinvent the superhero movie. It's just out to tell a heartfelt, personal story of who this guy fights for. It's also well aware of its inherent silliness. This is a guy who gets small and talks to ants. It tries to instill as much pathos as possible into that, and when the ant Scott formed a bond with, calling it Antony, catches a stray bullet and falls to its death, there is a brief emotional sting...before Scott drops onto the next available ant and flies away. Because it's a fucking ant. People are, and likely will continue, arguing about what Edgar Wright's version of this movie would have been before he got too creative for his own good. To those people, I say that you need to forget about it. You didn't read his script, you didn't see his movie. It didn't happen, so just appreciate Peyton Reed's Ant-Man for what it is: light entertainment. It respects your intelligence as much as it respects its place in the universe. It wants to entertain you, and then it wants you to go home and forget about it. I really want to stop doing this, but fuck you, Jurassic World, this is entertainment.

Inside Out

There's a moment in Inside Out that fucking destroyed me. It's one of the few instances in which the film jumps out of 11 year old Riley's (Kaitlyn Dias) mind, and into someone else's. Riley's at the dinner table, and something is clearly troubling her. Her mother (Diane Lane), is trying to visually communicate to her father (Kyle Maclachlan), that something is up. We then fly into her mother's mind and see that, like Riley, her mind is a control center manned by five primary emotions we all share: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. As the only mind we've seen into prior is Riley's, we assume everyone's is the same: Joy runs the show, and every other emotion does their best not to get in the way. Flying into her mother's mind, however, its revealed that her dominant emotion is Sadness. And when we then move into her father's mind, we see that his dominant emotion is Anger. This is not to say that these two people are outwardly sad or angry, because as their respective control centers show, their emotions have found a way to work with each other. But it does mean that every decision they've made, every action they take, is underpinned by this dominant trait. There's a quiet devastation to that moment that bleeds through to everything else the film offers. It's a moment primarily intended to work as a joke, but I began to cry, because I realised that this was going to be the central struggle of the film: which emotion is going to dominate Riley's life? And to see the way that the film very simply shows the utter complexity of emotion, and memory, and the relationship between the two terrified me for Riley. Because emotions and memory are complex, and it can be near impossible to understand that when you're a child.

So, I've mentioned that there are five emotions running the show in everyone's heads here, but Inside Out, as far as Riley is concerned, is about the relationship between Joy (Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith). In Riley's infancy, she can't understand the need for Sadness, and neither can Sadness herself. Even though Joy stresses the importance for Sadness to stay in the corner and not interfere with the control panel, Sadness is still compelled to touch everything, infecting Riley's happy memories to remind her that there was a sadness to many of them as well. You see, Riley doesn't understand the second side to every coin yet, and it's something even adults struggle with. Who wants to acknowledge Sadness just because Joy is its opposite? Joy doesn't see the purpose of Sadness until she meets Bing Bong. Riley's past imaginary friend since forgotten, Bing Bong is a big, pink amalgam of different animals that wanders the banks of Riley's long-term memories, hoarding those that the two shared together, unaware that doing so gets Riley further away from remembering. At one point in their journey, Bing Bong acknowledges his irrelevance to her, and begins to cry. Sadness sits beside Bing Bong, and together the two embrace each other and weep. Then, much to Joy's surprise, Bing Bong and Sadness feel better. It's this acknowledgement that allows Bing Bong to reconcile that he's no longer a part of Riley's life and sacrifice himself so that Joy can get herself and Sadness back to the control center. Sitting in the recesses of Riley's Memory Dump as Joy rockets to safety in the magic cart Riley and Bing Bong created as a child, Bing Bong says, "Take her to the moon for me, Joy." It's important to stress that though these are separate characters with unique personalities, they're all elements of Riley's singular existence. So the emotional gut punch that is that moment has a second hit on the way when you realise this is Riley subconsciously letting go of Bing Bong to save her maturity.

I've talked before about this incredible interview with Louis C.K.; of the profound truth that resides in the declaration to embrace both extremes of the emotional spectrum because of the mutual relationship the two extremes share, and it's just as relevant here. In Riley's infancy, she possesses a desire to store memory in stark black and white, happy and sad. A memory of her parents sitting on a tree branch with her in the winter is something Sadness feels compelled to interfere with, to Joy's horror. Their incompatibility leads to their accidentally being ejected from Riley's control center, leaving Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Fear (Bill Hader) in control, and Riley depressed and apathetic towards life. It's only when Joy finally sees Sadness's capacity for positive effect that she revisits that fond memory and remembers that Riley was sitting on that branch because she'd lost the hockey game that day, and was thinking about quitting sports forever. Reunited in the control center, Joy and Sadness create a new control panel, that allows for cross-emotional networking, and together, they help Riley break down and tell her parents that she wishes they hadn't moved, that she misses her old life. And together, they break, and they cry, and they piece each other back together. This is Inside Out's most profound lesson, something so simple and so crucial to a child's emotional upbringing: life is really, really hard, and it's okay to be sad about it sometimes.

Mad Max: Fury Road

I regularly fantasize about what it would be like to see older films knowing nothing about them going in. To watch Jaws, the greatest movie ever made (yep, you heard it here), in the cinema, opening night, knowing nothing more than the poster; to imagine such an experience genuinely makes me excited. Giddy, even. Such an experience is so hard to achieve today. The internet, for all of its undisputed merit, has unfortunately sucked dry a lot of the mystery of cinema. While I don't know for myself whether or not a film is good, enough links have popped up in my news feeds to let me know what the world thinks before I've gotten a chance. Not only that, but shocking, or controversial, or just plain good moments are being discussed hours after the first screenings have come and gone. An article titled "Let's talk about THAT MOMENT" calls itself spoiler-free, but that's a load of shit. For me, it's ruining movie magic in a way, and it's something I've wrestled with for a while. I made a huge effort to avoid advertising for Mad Max: Fury Road. Like Jaws, I've fantasized about a virginal viewing of the Mad Max films. How could you not? To hear Nightrider soliloquise, "I'm a fuel-injected suicide machine. I am the rocker, I am the roller, I am the out-of-controller!", to this day is still amazing, but imagine if you hadn't already seen it in fifteen Bert Newton-hosted countdown specials. Imagine if you were seeing that anarchic madness fresh, for the first time. That's what I tried to capture with Mad Max: Fury Road, hoping upon all hope that technological advancements of visual effects wouldn't change the series that I loved for its adherence to practicality. And early on, there is a scene in which a convoy of cars modified into war machines is advancing on our hero. Gorgeous camera pans swoop around real cars driving through a real desert, while thick, combat percussion scores the journey, and I think to myself how awesome it would be if that drumming was coming from people within the scene. Lo and behold, the camera swoops behind a truck to reveal four rows of war drummers beating in perfect time to the soundtrack. I couldn't believe it. But the camera didn't stop moving. It continued to pan around, and a guitar hook started to fade in. "No way," I whispered, completely and utterly dumbstruck. At the front of the truck, amongst a wall of speakers, a blindfolded, red-jumpsuited, demonic looking fella was strapped up in a bungee cord, playing a double-necked guitar that, as the solo reached its apex, spewed fire. A flame-throwing guitar player and war drummers scoring their own battle. Not only was George Miller hip to the idea, he knew exactly how to one-up it. I began to weep. I'm not kidding. Mad Max: Fury Road engaged me on a level I can't even imagine beginning to describe, but it's my job, so I'm going to try. Get ready, folks, I'm about to gush.

Mad Max: Fury Road finishes with a quote. It reads, "Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves? - The First History of Man." Coming at the tail end of what has just transpired, and in light of the rhetoric of the Mad Max franchise in general, it certainly has an immediate tonal resonance, but when I searched for the source at home, I found that there wasn't one. It was made up for the film. I was surprised at first, until I gave it some thought, and came to the clarifying realisation of one of my favourite things about this film: it has a thoroughly rich, well-developed backstory and overarching universe, and it's offering up none of it. The movie is a two-hour car chase (genuinely), and as such, there's no time for wheel-spin, no time for overwrought expository dialogue. You are placed into a moment of time in this universe, in which everyone already knows everything, and it leaves the blank filling up to you. But you do fill in the blanks, because the work has been done to ensure that none of it seems improvised. Everything makes sense, even if you're not sure why. Which makes it all the more disappointing to me that George Miller is offering up this backstory freely when asked. I don't want to know where the Doof Warrior (Iota, the aforementioned pyro-guitarist) came from. I don't want to know what a single shred of Immortan Joe's (motherfucking Hugh Keays-Byrne) appearance represents. The film gives you enough to go with, because everything that happens, happens because the characters understand their place in the world to advance the plot, not to show a fish out of water how the world works. When Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) tells Max Rockatanksy (Tom Hardy) that what they share is a need for redemption, I don't find myself pining for a comic series to tell me what she meant by that. I want to fill in the blanks for myself. I may sound redundant at this point, my stressing on the importance of practicality over digital wizardry again and again, but cars actually crashing into other cars makes the world feel real, and when a world feels real, you feel like you're in it; a part of it. And I stress this a bunch, too, but semiotics isn't just some pseudo-psychoanalytical bullshit word every uni student seems to know. Our ability to assign meaning and resonance to otherwise foreign imagery is the real deal, and it's what makes something like Mad Max: Fury Road work so effectively while effectively telling us nothing. Immortan Joe's Warboys shoot spray paint into their mouths before a fight, and we get it. Huffing paint gets you high, ergo, in a world slavishly devoted to chrome, it gets you good and ready for a fight. Or maybe that's nothing more than my interpretation. That's what's so wonderful about fully developing a universe and offering up none of it: it's entirely coherent, and entirely up for debate. Ask David Lynch. I still don't know what the fuck Ben's deal is in Blue Velvet; every time I watch it, I come away with a new understanding. But that's what's so wonderful about revisiting it; with my attention on one new cryptic detail, everything old is new again.

Speaking of old and new, I want to talk about how Max Rockatansky is like the heroes of old, in that in Mad Max: Fury Road, he isn't a hero. In fact, he kind of sucks. He spends the entirety of the film's first act strapped to the front of a car, with a needle in his neck feeding blood into a dying, hopped-up Warboy. He spends a good chunk of the film's second act in chains, trying to remove a metal brace strapped around his mouth. Even in the film's final act, when he's good and ready for a fight, the dispatch of the film's villain doesn't even happen at his hands; the duty to chillingly shout, "Remember me?" and tear off the mask connected to Joe's flesh left to Furiosa. In fact, his one moment of heroic glory, in which he appears to effectively destroy an entire vehicle of murderers who have a lot of guns, happens off-screen. The reason this is so wonderful is summed up just before it happens. The car is approaching, and Furiosa is trying to work out what to do, while also trying to get their truck unstuck from the mud. Max says he'll take care of the approaching vehicle. Furiosa looks at Max like he's insane. "What if you're not back before we get the engines running?" Max looks back at her with the same face. "...you keep moving," he mumbles, and walks into the fog. Max exists in a world distilled to such wanton cruelty, cruelty that the demons haunting him remind him of, literally, that he has adapted to a single instinct: survival. When he joins Furiosa's cause, it's not because he sees it as the right thing to do, but because he sees it as his best chance to not die. If that means saving the lives of a few people in the process, then so be it. Except he's not really there to save anybody's life, he's just along for the ride, trying to stay alive like them. Going back to the aforementioned scene, when the car first approaches, Max attempts to snipe its searchlight with only two rounds in the chamber. He doesn't even come close to a hit with the first one, and gives the gun to Furiosa to do the job for him with their last chance. Even in the bridge between the film's second and third acts, when the trademark "hero stays behind while the group presses on" story beat arrives, a five-second visit from his ghosts leads him to say, "Nah, fuck this" and deliver an idea to Furiosa and her crew. Not a plan, mind you, an idea. The reason this is so great is because it understands the lesson modern action films have forgotten: a hero is not someone who acts heroically. A hero is someone we can recognise, someone who is like us, someone who would be terrified and selfish and every bad quality we would all possess in a situation like this, so that when the hero has their moment of redemption, it allows us to feel like we can, too. In Man of Steel, Superman spends the whole film talking about how conflicted he feels, whilst never once demonstrating that conflict. A hero shouldn't have to say that they're conflicted, a hero should emanate that from the moment they're on screen. Max does. Every dick move, every animalistic grunt, every weak allowance of amicability he allows his companions to see, the aforementioned moment when he sees a caravan of people advancing to certain death, and tells them that there may be another way, his willingness to give blood so that Furiosa won't die as he finally tells her, "My name is Max", right down to disappearing into the crowd after he knows the job is done, contributes to his, and our, journey to becoming a real hero.

Here's the thing, though, the really dirty secret: Max isn't the hero of this movie, Furiosa is. Now, at this point, I could talk about a whole bunch of things. I could talk about the Bechdel Test, and about how Mad Max: Fury Road passes it, proving how ridiculously fucking easy it is to do so without harming any preconceived notions of what constitutes entertainment for gender. I could talk about this dopey bullshit, and the other edge of the sword I have to fall on when I so vehemently stress the need for every opinion to have the right to be heard. Instead, I want to talk about feminism, and about how this movie is feminist not in the way the word has been twisted, but as it actually is: equal. I mentioned earlier that Max is often useless in this movie, and that Furiosa often does the job for him. When a conflict arises, she has an answer, and as I've also mentioned earlier, the villain has a direct emotional relationship to her, and he is hers to kill. But here's the actual dirty secret: Furiosa isn't the hero of this movie, no-one is. The goal of our protagonists is to get a truck carrying a group of women that Immortan Joe had enslaved to bear his children to the place that Furiosa grew up. Every man and woman on board is capable, and not one of them needs another to survive. What they need is each other's help to stay together. And it's here that George Miller really nails it. Feminism isn't about reversing or abolishing the rights or privileges of men, it's simply about leveling the fucking playing field, and Mad Max: Fury Road understands that no better than in its willingness to kill old ladies. This is a cold, hostile wasteland that has no time to set aside ground rules for what's culturally acceptable or not. There is only the fight for survival, and if you're in it, that means you have as much chance of dying as you do surviving. Nobody is incapable of fighting. With the honed skills that anyone with the perseverance and discipline to do so can achieve, everyone on the truck fights and dies for their cause, including the men, including the women. Max's uselessness in a fight isn't there to communicate him as somewhat lesser than his female counterparts, because as the movie comes to communicate, he's no more or less capable than anyone around him. Max needs Furiosa to shoot the car's light, and Furiosa needs Max to give her his blood when she's dying. Even the motive of the film's antagonist isn't saying anything particularly condemning of gender politics. Immortan Joe has picked these women, whom he sees as the most aesthetically perfect, to bear his children and continue his legacy. He sees them as objects, but only in the exact same way he sees the city of people he holds at ransom with his hand on the water supply as objects. In this world, there's no time for something as inane and stupid as the idea that different chromosomes equals different rights. There is only alive and dead, the fight and who wins it. That's feminism.

There's a moment in Mad Max: Fury Road that made me make a noise I can't even begin to describe. Warboys sway back and forth on long poles attached to the back of cars, to pick up and pass anyone they need to. One of them grabs Max, and on the back swing, comes so close to the ground that Max's hair brushes against the rocky surface of the road. A groan lurched from me, out of a pure, visceral, gut reaction to what I was seeing. I can't remember the last time an action movie elicited that sort of reaction from me. Actually, you know what? For the first time, I'm going to admit hyperbole (whilst still committing hyperbole). I can remember the last time a movie elicited that sort of reaction from me. It was any movie that had real people doing real stunts. I can preach, and have preached (even in this review), about how practical will forever beat digital, but there's no greater argument than a film like Mad Max: Fury Road. Visual effects are at their best when you can't separate the real from the fake, and it brought me such joy to find out that CGI, for the most part, was only used to enhance that which was real. And make no mistake, real isn't synonymous with boring, or safe. The shit that goes down in this flick, and all of Miller's masterpieces before it, is unbelievable. Hell, Guy Norris, Miller's long-time go-to stunt coordinator, retired after one particular coordinated crash because nothing from then on could possibly be as amazing, or as purely fucking dangerous, as that one. Mad Max: Fury Road stands, and exists, on its own, as it well should, but in a lot of ways, it seems to be looking back and commenting on all of the action films of the last ten years. While its series has a history, and a lineage, it bears no requirement that you are aware of any of it. It's not a sequel, or a prequel, or a reboot. It is simply another chapter in this character's life. There are no references to what came before it, what will come after it, what's behind or on the horizon; it exists in the now for this very moment. I think a lot of people are confusing quality with consistency when it comes to Marvel. Human beings are inherent problem solvers, so being given the opportunity to connect two dots will always elicit a positive reaction. But, as I've covered already, losing sight of the now to focus on the upcoming will result in a disappointing retrospective, unless something changes that, and soon. I sincerely hope everyone's paying attention to Mad Max: Fury Road. It's fast, and frenetic, and really, really, fucking exciting, but it has something to say, and it knows exactly when it needs to be said. A lot of people die, but it doesn't revel or glorify the violence, choosing to direct its focus to the colliding chunks of metal rather than the people within them. It gives you bizarre characters in a cruel world and allows you to feel like you could be them. It looks back on the action movies of old, and steadfastly steers them into the new. Jurassic World doesn't need to get hit with another potshot, but fuck you, Jurassic World. Dinosaurs are still amazing, and so are car crashes. You will be forgotten, Mad Max: Fury Road will not.

Jurassic World

I don't need to be another voice on the Internet telling you that Steven Spielberg's 1993 masterpiece Jurassic Park is much better than it is often given credit for. There are plenty of voices on the Internet that have done it better than I could. But seriously, Jurassic Park is really fucking good. It still looks amazing as far as special effects go, and it's a summer blockbuster that respects your intelligence and follows through with its themes. It shows immense restraint with the tools at its disposal, because it knows all of the lights (read: scary dinosaurs) don't count for shit if there aren't three-dimensional people there to be affected by them. For how can you, the audience, be affected if you have nothing to relate to? It's a movie that actually warrants the buzz phrase, "You'll laugh, you'll gasp, you'll cry, it'll change your life." The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park 3, not so much, but what they still had going for them was the understanding that there is an inherent awe to these animals; these humongous beasts that once occupied the space in which we now reside. They also don't attempt to decry or skew Jurassic Park's message that the man-made existence of these creatures is inherently wrong, and that a time will never come when they are entirely in our control. In The Lost World: Jurassic Park, idiot hunters and philanthropists think they can capture and bring dinosaurs back to North America, slaughter being the penalty for their hubris. In Jurassic Park 3, journeys to the island are an illegal tourist attraction that rarely go right. Jurassic World has had a long development cycle, changing names and those involved multiple times, and warning flags have been going up with each passing year, none-so-much as the idiotic title that either indicates a globe-trotting journey in which dinosaurs have left the island, or a point in history in which a corporate group has found a way to keep the dinosaurs in check long enough to trademark the shit out of a piece of land and cut the ceremonial ribbon. Honestly, after seeing Jurassic World, I think I may have preferred the former, because while I wasn't expecting to walk out of the theater ready to kick Spielberg off his pedestal (let's not forget The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park 3), I most definitely was not expecting to walk out feeling like Jurassic World hated me for loving Jurassic Park. 

That's not hyperbole, and it's not me reading too far into it (though, let's be honest, it might be): Jurassic World has an open contempt for its audience, whomever you may be. Are you, like me, still desperately in love with the film you remember seeing for the first time in 1993? Fuck you. Are you someone who thinks of Jurassic Park as a film that shows its age, and are more interested in seeing what newer, cooler things Hollywood can think of? Fuck you too. There's a scene early in the film that demonstrates this. Jurassic World's operations manager, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), drops by the control booth to see how things are going. Resident hipster Lowery (Jake Johnson), sporting a moustache and a desk covered in dinosaur toys, has just bought a new shirt off eBay for a ridiculous sum of money: a Jurassic Park t-shirt. He's supposed to represent me and all of you like me; the 'fans' of the original, the "everything was cooler back then, man" generation. Claire tells him never to wear it to work again, because heaven help him if he reminds anyone of a time when things really were cooler. This is just before she debuts, and I quote, "Verizon presents the Indominus Rex." Lowery rolls his eyes at the name and quips, "What's next? The Dorito-saurus?" before promptly being told to shut up if he wants to keep getting paid. Outside in the park, the John Hammond memorial building is preceded by Samsung, everyone drives a Mercedes, there's a Starbucks on every corner, along with Pandora and Margaritaville. I've covered this before in my The Secret Life of Walter Mitty review, but the artifice of name dropping corporations to comment on corporate sponsorship is that money still needs to be exchanged for the mention and display of them. To make matters worse, it seems like Jurassic World thinks you'll be fine with it if it just acknowledges its existence with a sly wink. Because it thinks that'll be enough for a fucking moron like you.

In the same way Jurassic World denounces corporate sponsorship while happily taking money for it, it approaches shameless reboots of old movies with the same sneering spitefulness. I'm tempted to cite the prime example of this as John William's iconic score making its triumphant return as a child runs through a Hilton hotel room, camera tracking along before exiting out the window to a glory shot of the park with not a single fucking dinosaur in sight, but I can get a little more analytical than that. Let's return to the reveal of the Indominus Rex. You're not going to find that name in your science books, kids. It seems focus testing has revealed that people are bored with dinosaurs, now that the initial excitement of their resurrection has died down. And like any live-action adaptation of a Hanna-Barbera property (and because genetic experimentation and modification is totally ducky), the words scarier, bigger, and cooler got thrown into a blender and out popped the Indominus Rex, a super dinosaur that inevitably escapes and punishes everyone who thought creating it was a good idea. What a clever skewering of audience's current reactions to summer blockbusters, right? Except it's using this as a solution to a problem that I don't think exists. Claire claims that people aren't wowed by dinosaurs anymore, and Lowery agrees, effectively making the argument for both of the aforementioned audience members. But I respectfully disagree with that sentiment. I made an argument that supports this back in May when I reviewed Godzilla, a film that understood the reason Jurassic Park still looks better than most big-budget productions is because it knew where the camera had to be, and knew when practical effects would work better, to instill a sense of awe. When the dinosaurs are first revealed in Jurassic Park, consider where the camera sits. It's not right there in the thick of the action. It's far away from it, so as to display the scale of these animals, but also to hide its falsity. When the camera is up close, we're looking at animatronics, so that the characters can react to something they can actually see. Compare the reactions of the children in the T-Rex attack on the Jeep to the reactions of the children in the Indominus Rex attack on the big hamster ball. It's painfully aware which one seems more realistic, because there was something on set that was real. And when the third act all-out brawl hits, the magic camera swoops, dips and soars around the monsters as they tear through each other, with zero consideration for the fact that this shit looks fake. And you can call me a grumpy old man and ask me how we can't be using these advances in technology to make action scenes look better. My response is that maybe if we can't make the majority of the scene feel real, we shouldn't be making it in the first place.

While we're on that final fight, let's talk about its rhetoric. The chips are well and truly down at this point. The Indominus Rex has led a trail of carnage and destruction from the back end of the park to the front gates. Everyone has had a go at taking it down, including a pack of Velociratpors, to no avail. How are you supposed to destroy a monster that seems to grow every superpower as soon as it needs it (heat-signature masking, intelligence, camouflage and part-raptor are those that we hear of)? Claire has an epiphany, sprints off to a big gate with a flare in hand and demands that Lowery open the door. In a shot that, granted, is pretty fucking great, she lights the flare and creates a bright red beacon that gets reflected in two distant eyes high above her. The familiar face of the Tyrannosaurus Rex lumbers out of the darkness, and Claire leads it back to the Indominus Rex to do its duty and save the day just like it did in the first film. Now, this would be a nice, if hamfisted, throwback to the legacy of these films if it weren't also completely undermining the point of the T-Rex saving the day in the first place. In Jurassic Park, the T-Rex technically saves the day. Alan, Ellie, Lex, and Tim are cornered by the velociraptors, and in the moment before death, the Teus-Rex Machina swoops out of nowhere to attack the raptors and create a diversion for the humans to bail. In doing so, it proves Ian Malcom's chaos theory. How could the T-Rex have gotten into the building without making a sound? How could it have gotten in at all? How could it have known the perfect moment to make itself known? It's convenient, but it's still chaos. It's not there to save them, it's there to be an animal. They didn't bring it there, it simply found a way (sorry). In Jurassic World, Claire enlists the T-Rex to do its duty. This is a foe big and bad enough that the T-Rex even needs to share a look with a Velociraptor to communicate, "Yes, we will lay down our differences to tackle the greater evil." On top of that, this mightiest of allegiances still isn't enough, and it's not until the Indominus Rex is tackled close enough to the water's edge to be within range of the Mosasaur (big underwater dinosaur) to do its duty of jumping out of the water and pulling things in, that the day is truly saved. But remember that the battle doesn't really end in Jurassic Park. It's never explicitly stated that the T-Rex kills each Velociraptor. In a way, it feels like the humans are bailing from a fight that will go on forever. The heroes and villains were only technical, and interchangeable, because they were based on our need to prescribe higher meaning to simple animal nature. Jurassic World thinks that's about as dumb as you are, too.

There's a scene about halfway through Jurassic World that sums up my feelings for it pretty well. The aviary has been destroyed, and a flock of Pteradons are descending on the park. Magic cameras swoop among the carnage, as people are lifted and thrown about. Claire's assistant, Zara (Katie McGrath), was assigned to look after the aforementioned irritating children, who she subsequently lost sight of, and has now found again. She runs toward them, and is picked up by a Pteradon. What follows is a 45-second scene of torture, as the magic camera follows Zara being thrown between dinosaurs, dunked repeatedly into water, screaming in terror and pain the entire time, before being eaten along with the Pteradon by the aforementioned big underwater dinosaur of narrative convenience. This is a death scene that seems particularly cruel in a film with a body count higher than any Jurassic Park before it. Why? Well, there's a few reasons. First, it's included in a list of the bizarre gender politics this film seems to have, but that could be an essay in its own right. Read this to get an understanding. It seems to be trying to echo the death of Gennaro, the lawyer in Jurassic Park, whose contemptuous negligence of the children led to him being eaten on a toilet. But Gennaro deserved it in a way. What's Zara's crime? Spending too much time on her phone, and not being interesting enough to warrant surviving. You could say it's instead trying to invoke the death of Eddie in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, in which he's torn in half whilst trying to save the rest of the heroes, but in that instance, his death was reflected on the faces of those heroes, who are devastated by their loss. In Jurassic World, Zara is scooped up and removed from the action, to the point that none of the main characters witness her demise. On top of that, her death is immediately followed by the film's two heroes experiencing a personal victory and admitting their feelings for each other with a hug and a kiss. Even the film's human villain, Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio) is granted the respect of an off-screen death, making the glorification of Zara's seem all the more troubling. So we have an exploitative torture scene that serves to insult the memories its invoking, whilst also delivering a cooler, more exciting technical experience that shames you for thinking this is what you wanted. Its narrative inconsistencies serve this bizarre motivation as well. The voice of reason adamantly stresses that dinosaurs cannot be controlled, that the bond he and them share is out of mutual respect. This aligns and even evolves, to a point, the argument of Jurassic Park, until the script decides the dinosaurs can in fact be controlled, and are. John Hammond's replacement, Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), echoes his former by endorsing his oft-used phrase, "Spare no expense", until the thought of terminating the Indominus Rex comes up, at which point he says it's too expensive. Jurassic World denounces corporate sponsorship and shameless reboots, while doing nothing to be anything other than that. You can ask me why I so vehemently denounce this film while giving Jurassic Park 3 a pass. The difference between the two is that Jurassic Park 3 isn't trying to comment on Jurassic Park. It just wants to be the goofy fun time that it is. Jurassic World, on the other hand, has something to say, and it's that you're a fucking idiot for thinking that you wanted this. It's wrong, though. It came to that conclusion by assuming that we couldn't still be wowed by the techniques of that which came before it. Godzilla proved that not to be the case, as did Mad Max: Fury Road. But hey, maybe it isn't wrong. Maybe I am. It's certainly not struggling to fill seats. Maybe what people want from movies really is changing. All I really know is that if you put Chris Pratt in the lead role of your film, and drain all of his charisma and wit to the point that in a 2400 word essay, I don't feel the need to mention his name once, and people still rush to see it, then maybe we've entered an age where people appreciate a film that hates them.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

I think I like the idea of Avengers: Age of Ultron more than I like Avengers: Age of Ultron. It's certainly not economical on ambition: not only does it seek to further develop the dysfunctional team dynamic that was introduced in The Avengers (a team of six, mind), it seeks to destroy the family while adding to it, bring in secondary characters from the family member's standalone flicks, and set in motion the events of subsequent films. The ingredients are right: Marvel continues to hold its "never bad" standard, it's the longest of the franchise at 135 minutes and back on board is one of the best at somehow managing to make huge ensemble pieces feel whole and equal, Joss Whedon. But, and I say this in every sense of the phrase, it's not enough. The ingredients don't mix together well enough to save it from buckling in on itself, and there's simply not enough time to do everything that needs to get done done well. Now, everything does get done - every point is made and every arc is arced, but unless you're paying the strictest of attention, you're going to miss some shit. If you don't really let it resonate when Tony Stark makes a throwaway comment about wanting a permanent vacation, then his bailing on the team at the end of the film ain't gonna make much sense. The info is there, but there's simply not enough time to dwell on any of it before the next story beat comes rushing around the corner. None of this is to say that I didn't like Avengers: Age of Ultron. Like Jackie Brown to Quentin Tarantino, a not-so-great Joss Whedon film is still better than most. But I stand strong by the sentiment that began this paragraph. When I speak fondly of Avengers: Age of Ultron, it will not be for a good film, but for the moments in the film that were good.

Case in point: during the film's second act, the team takes a pretty significant beating at the hands of the titular Ultron. They need to lay low for a bit, and hide out in Hawkeye's secret farm with his wife and kids. Introductions are occurring, and Thor accidentally stands on a Lego house. Slightly embarrassed, he uses his humongous Asgardian boots to sweep the shattered plastic under a coffee table. Seconds later, a young girl approaches him and looks up, way up, into his eyes. Thor looks down at the child, then up and around, and a look washes over his face - a look that begs the question, "What the fuck am I doing here?" He turns, walks outside and flies away. It's a pretty heavy moment, and further proof that even the silliest character can achieve gravitas if written the right way. But what surrounds the moment, and the context for Thor coming to this realisation, is entirely unnecessary for this film. In the aforementioned beatdown by Ultron, two new characters are further developed. They're Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, the sibling totally-but-not-legally-allowed-to-be-called mutants, and as Agent Hill puts it, "He's fast and she's weird." As Quicksilver dashes around a shipyard keeping everybody's attention, Scarlet Witch sneaks up behind Earth's Mightiest Heroes and plants inside them their greatest fears. Iron Man is absent, but he already got the treatment in the film's opening: a vision of a team and world annihilated at his fault, an annihilation that he survives. Black Widow is taken back to her childhood of being trained to be a ruthless, unfeeling killer, including being sterilised. "One less thing to worry about," she says in an emotional gut punch of a scene. Bruce Banner is convinced that Hulk is needed, and sets to destroying Johannesburg. Captain America sees what scares him most: the war being over and him going home. It's genuinely chilling, the latter especially. But what does Thor get? A vision of the next Thor movie. Sure, there are throwaway lines that indicate Thor's fear is abandoning his home to the point that an outside force is able to invade and destroy, but the prevalent point made is that this is what Thor 3 is going to be about. When Thor leaves the farmhouse, it's simultaneously because the ever-tenuous familial bond he has to our world has been broken again,  but also because there needs to be another quick tease of what's to come for the son of Odin. So he goes and sits in a magic dream pool, has a cryptic conversation with Stringer Bell, never references it again for the rest of the movie, and shows back up half an hour later as the literal Deus Ex Machina to help Tony Stark bring to life something representative of the very thing he previously held him against the wall for having the nerve to suggest should exist.

The problem here is that nothing feels whole, or complete. The theme is persistent, and is concluded: everyone is obsessed with consequences both predictable and unforeseen. The film's villain is born of Tony Stark's continued emotional fallout from the amount of death that wore his name, and his introduction to an evil that no earthly power could hope to contest. An opportunity to make an artificial intelligence whose sole mission is world peace backfires when the thing with free will and unlimited intelligence immediately learns the Internet in full straight after being born. It's not surprising that something immediately introduced to everything ever would gravitate most towards the amount of conflict in humanity's short history, and the Old Testament, and conclude that evolution by way of extinction is the best course of action. Seems like that's something Tony might be a little embarrassed about, and would garner at least a, "Hey, yeah, sorry about that." But for the film's duration, his sole emotional reaction to his creative kerfuffle is a giggle. What the fuck, right? Well, here's the thing: if this film had any breathing room at all, you would come to know that Tony is fucking devastated by his actions, but he's not about to show that to anyone but himself, and he's not about to let a single consequence affect the mission. The movie doesn't have breathing room, though. His one moment in the film he could have had to drop a bit of self-reflection, he has to do that in tandem with Nick Fury (who must have been waiting in that barn for fucking hours), which further serves to undermine understanding him because, as I've just stipulated, Tony doesn't open up to nobody but Tony. The end result is a guy who wasn't supposed to have a character arc not having enough time to explain that he wasn't supposed to have a character arc and rather than coming off as persistent at all costs to a worthy cause, he instead just appears to act out against everyone but himself like a cold, fucking jerk.

The same lack of development spreads across every character in the film, except for, bizarrely enough, Hawkeye. Who'd have thought the only character with a satisfying character arc in the fucking Avengers sequel was going to be the loser with the arrows? But it's all there. He is mortally wounded in the film's opening, leading to many lines at his expense about his uselessness in the team. His home life is brought into question at around the same time, successfully peppering the right amount of foreshadowing to the aforementioned second act half-time in the farmhouse where we meet the Hawkeye household. As really the only moment in the film where the characters get to just stop and talk about their feelings and shit, Hawkeye has a moment with his wife where they discuss the notion that his place in the team doesn't make much sense. "You don't think they need me?" he asks. "Actually, I think they do," she replies. "They're gods, and they need someone to keep them down to earth." But this human element of the team is exactly that: human. It's a job that comes with a death clock. Hawkeye understands, and promises that once this Ultron business is closed, it's time to retire. And when that fight comes, and Scarlet Witch cowers in an abandoned home as a young child exposed to and asked to fight in a war would, Hawkeye is the one that gets to deliver a knockout speech. "The city is flying, we're fighting an army of robots, and I have a bow and arrow. None of this makes sense. But I'm going back out there because it's my job. Okay? ... If you step out that door, you're an Avenger." He's basically wearing a sign the entire film saying, "I'm the character that sits enough between primary and secondary that my death would not affect any of the surrounding franchises, but would be considered an emotionally affecting event." And when he's sitting in the escape pod, and sees the child trapped underneath rubble ahead of him, and sighs because he knows he's going back out there, and when Ultron approaches in the helicopter showering machine gun fire in their path, and he shields the young boy with his back, you're ready for the uncharacteristically obvious trademark Whedon death. But that's when he hits you. Quicksilver zips into the line of fire just in time to catch about fifty bullets in his chest. "Bet you didn't see that coming," he mutters before falling to the ground. You're right, Quicksilver, I didn't, but your death (a true hero's death) is supposed to have an impact. This is supposed to be the bittersweet period to Hawkeye's character arc. This is the only character that he actively hates in the film, the one who mortally wounds him in the film's opening and the one he not-so-jovially threatened to kill just minutes prior. But it simply can't resonate, because Quicksilver's entire screen time amounts to roughly 10 minutes total. Whedon does his best - his all-too-fleeting moments on screen aren't wasted, and he knows the two best ways to show the impact of his death are to reflect it in the agony on his twin sister's face and through Hawkeye lying beside his dead body and saying, "Long day", and they do hit, but it's all too hollow. You simply didn't know Quicksilver well enough to care that he's now gone (not to mention his death seems a little convenient given the aforementioned legal trouble surrounding his existence in another franchise).

The narrative clusterfuck that is Avengers: Age of Ultron left me with a thought: when are we going to be able to point to one of these movies and say, "Yeah, that was the one. That's when it all paid off." It seems to be Marvel's mantra now to ensure that every film has multiple threads leading to the next set of films. This isn't necessarily a problem, until it encroaches upon the film's ability to exist in its own right, which is exactly what happens here. After seeing the first Avengers, I assumed that the individual character's movies would have all the tags, so that the team-up movies could be the staples - the ones where it all comes together and concludes that phase. Not to say I get the business of this better than the money-pool divers that are Disney, but I'd be willing to have a guess that there's a sizable chunk of Avengers: Age of Ultron's audience whose last Marvel movie was Avengers Assemble. They don't give a shit about the individuals' stories, so why the fuck are the individuals' stories showing up here to the point that it affects the coherency of the core narrative? What's just as bad is how difficult it's becoming to continually refresh the memory bank of where we're at with each new installment of the cinematic universe. This isn't comics. These movies aren't month to month, but year to year. So much of my understanding of this film hasn't come from multiple viewings, but from people on the internet. And this isn't even thematic resonance or artistic intent I'm searching for, the things that make mandatory multiple viewings acceptable, I'm just trying to work out what fucking happened. It may sound like I'm getting all worked up over a movie that's just stuffed a bit too full, but this is indicative of a much larger problem. Avengers: Age of Ultron has already made a literal metric fuck-ton of dollars, with no signs that it's going to slow down any time soon. Disney is steadily gaining control of everything we see at Summer, and if these figures are anything to go by, a narrative clusterfuck is going to be the blueprint for all future releases. And the worst part, the really insidious shit of it all, is that the film really isn't even as bad as I make it out to be. I've mentioned in previous reviews, including the start of this one, that Disney has this almost endearing mantra to never be bad - in that regardless of how short of totally amazing they fall, they must never make a truly rank piece of shit. Avengers: Age of Ultron, for one, deserves credit for being a superhero movie that actively and repeatedly shows the good guys saving people. Almost certainly a response to Man of Steel, there are multiple scenes in which wanton destruction of architecture is only done once the area is clear of human folk, and the climactic battle is about saving the people on the floating city first, and beating the shit out of the villain second. That should be commended. For two, it has some wonderful character moments that I haven't already mentioned: everyone trying to pick up Thor's hammer, Vision having a quiet moment with Thor after just being born in which he looks at the Asgardian, and his cape, nods and grows one of his own, Thor patronisingly telling War Machine that his less-interesting superhero story was, "Very good", Thor quietly telling Tony that his girlfriend is better -- you know what? Let's just call it every bit with Thor that wasn't a precursor to Thor 3: Party Hardy. And it's these truly brilliant small touches that can anesthetise an audience into believing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But if Gestalt is what Marvel has always been going for, they've fucked it up this time. I truly hope that they recognise this unsustainable system before it's too late, but if the zeroes in their bank accounts are anything to go by, that may not be the case. Like it or not, we're entering the future of cinema - the Age of Wheelspin - where a film willingly sacrifices the coherency of its narrative to let you know what's just around the corner, where the next five years have already been mapped out to ensure you can't get off the train, and where everyone behind the camera is too good at their job to allow these hot messes to clearly not be worth your time. And it's working. For all of my ranting, I'm just as much a part of the problem as you, and I know that. But I'll be there to see everything that's coming, because even if at the back of my mind, I'm scared it never will, I just gotta see how it ends.

"I'M SO CONFLICTED AND GORGEOUS."

Chappie

I don't know what to say about Chappie, but I do know what to say about Neill Blomkamp. I love that Neill Blomkamp gets to keep making movies, even though, out of three, I've yet to see one that I would actively say is 'good'. But what the fuck does good mean? There's no greater rationale for the argument that it doesn't mean jack shit than Neill Blomkamp's filmography. His Metacritic score isn't the best you'll ever see, especially for Elysium and the aforementioned, and yet I dare you to tell me that each of them aren't really fucking fascinating to watch. District 9 was an intense, visceral alien flick that was kind-of-not-but-totally-was about Apartheid. Elysium was a big, dumb hammer to the head of Universal Health Care that had the first villain to genuinely scare me since The Dark Knight. And now we have Chappie, a story that borrows liberally from Big Hero 6 in the way that Big Hero 6 borrowed liberally from The Iron Giant, in the way that The Iron Giant borrowed liberally from *batteries not included, in the way that *batteries not included borrowed liberally from Short Circuit, that is also about the implications of a robotic police force (Robocop), the moral line that gets blurred as we approach sentient artificial intelligence (her), and the very real ways that childhood indoctrination can occur (take your pick). It's equal parts a harrowing and heartwarming tale of growing up in a cruel world, a real world story with intermittent documentary footage, a crime film with the inevitable all-out three-way gang fight, a corporate espionage thriller, and a feature-length advertisement for a hip-hop, performance art duo. To me, it doesn't eclipse the sheer originality of District 9, but in a lot of ways, it's better than all of the best parts of Elysium, and worse than all of its worst. But like I've said already, that doesn't, and shouldn't, matter. Really, the best thing I can say about Chappie is that I have no fucking idea what to say about it.

Seriously, I have no idea where to start. I guess if the impetus of this essay is that Chappie is fascinating, I should go through all of the things that left me so fascinated. So let's start at the end, where Chappie quietly drops the idea before stepping back and refusing to argue the point that if we find a way to transfer our minds into robot bodies, we should do it. Let's back up a bit. Slumdog Millionaire (Dev Patel) is an engineer at a robotics company, who has created a legacy for himself in a line of efficient, obedient police robots. But Slumdog dreams of more; he's on the cusp of creating a robot that can, as he says, "look at a piece of art, and tell you if they like it." Big boss Alien: Resurrection (Sigourney Weaver) gives him the thumbs down to a robot with feelings, as any CEO making a mint from gunbots would. Like that would stop someone on the brink of playing God, though. Slumdog steals a decommissioned robot on the scrap heap, who caught a rocket launcher to the chest in the film's opening moments. Neglecting the fact that the battery fused to the chest plate effectively makes the unit nonchargeable (read: mortal), Slumdog gives the robot sentience, and Chappie is born. For the first few days of his five day lifespan, he learns from his various parental figures about what it means to be human, for better and, mostly, worse. Eventually, he finds out that things die, including him, and he doesn't accept that. Utilising a VR headset and six PS4s, Chappie learns the whole Internet in seconds and works out a way to transfer his consciousness into ASCII art on a TV screen. He does a copy of his soul. The core conflict of the film's final act, or one of its three or four core conflicts, becomes finding a new body for Chappie before the battery goes dead. But then Slumdog catches a bullet in the stomach, and with only one spare robot body, Chappie does a soul copy on Slumdog and transfers his entire being into the bucket of bolts. Slumdog then performs a wireless transfer of Chappie's soul into one of the many dead robots on the streets of Johannesburg (big blanket virus, don't ask), and the two literally run off into the sunset together, happily ever immortal. I don't think I need to offer any needlessly verbose deconstructions of the implications to this conclusion, suffice to say that it's dangerous, terrifying, and kind of brilliant in its courage to have this happen, and present it as a happy ending, with zero follow-up on the potential consequences. Blomkamp has said he plans for this to be part one of a trilogy, but I think it's ballsier to leave it at this. The film opens with stock interview footage of people saying that Chappie rocked the world, and its up to us to work out how, and whether their statement was foreboding or celebratory.

It's heavy shit, and it's as awkward with its delivery as that which came before it, but like District 9 and Elysium, it's hellbent on making sure you don't leave thinking you had a bad time. This go around, it's enlisted the help of Die Antwoord (Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser) to liven things up. To the uninitiated, Die Antwoord is a hip-hop group started by Watkin Jones and Anri du Toit, designed to be performance art satirising the lower middle class lifestyle prevalent in areas of post-Apartheid South Africa. They've been playing characters for years, and in Chappie, they continue the trend, playing themselves in the not-too-distant future, in which their music careers have tanked, and they've resolved to a life of crime, hiding in an abandoned factory while listening to their old albums, and eventually acting as surrogate parents to a sentient robot. It's fucking bizarre to watch as someone who knows Die Antwoord, I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like for someone who doesn't. They blend in well with Blomkamp's universe however - his films certainly weren't devoid of kooky characters before this. And speaking of, Russell Coight (Hugh Jackman) is the most ocker-inest Aussie villain you've seen this side of Uluru. If Die Antwoord and, to an extent, Chappie, are exaggerated caricatures of South African culture, Russell Coight is the Australian equivalent. He sports a mullet, a button up polo shirt and the shortest shorts you've ever seen, he threatens co-workers with pistols and fires at them before laughing, showing them the empty chamber, and exclaiming that no-one in the office can take a joke, and he literally utters the phrase, "Cross as a frog in a sock." I don't even know what the fuck that means. The only thing missing to make him more of an Australian stereotype that Australians don't identify with is a can of Fosters and a kangaroo for a car. This is not to sound like someone who can dish out it, but can't take it - his character is unbelievably entertaining in spite of his limited screen-time. And as per usual for a Neill Blomkamp film, there's an eccentric crime kingpin popping in occasionally, this time sporting a haircut not unlike Dennis Hopper in Super Mario Brothers, who is subtitled even though he only speaks Afrikaans once or twice, talking perfectly clear English for the rest of the film.

It's credit to how batshit crazy this movie is though that, in spite of the animated personalities on display, the most compelling of them all is the robot. People are going nuts for the quality of the motion capture, which once again serves to show how much Neill Blomkamp can do with so little. The motion capture isn't good - it's actually pretty cheap - but what's being motion-captured is a robot that behaves like a dog, full of jerky, erratic movement. And shitty mo-cap gets really good results if what you're after is jerky, erratic movement. An equal amount of credit should go to Sharlto Copley, who knocks it right out of the park as-per-fucking-usual. Watching him develop from a timid child emulating He-Man on the TV, to allowing himself to be brainwashed by Ninja into a crotch-grabbing, car-jacking gangsta, all with an adorably stunted vocabulary and syntax, is as good as it sounds, and Copley sells it beautifully. It should not be understated how easy it would be for this performance to tip over into the dreaded realm of "too much", but Copley deftly walks the line by committing to exactly what the role calls for in the moment. I genuinely wonder if he isn't, in time, going to be recognised as a critically successful Nicolas Cage (which totally sucks, Nicolas Cage is fearless and should be held in exactly the same regard as Daniel Day-Lewis). The fact that a montage in which Chappie steals cars from rich yuppies, believing them to have been stolen from "Daddy"(Ninja), can be equally parts hilarious ("You're a bad man! Don't steal cars from Daddy!" as he throws the driver across the road), and terrifying as parallels are inevitably drawn between what impressionable Chappie believes, and how something similar probably gets told to children in this situation, is testament almost purely to Copley's ability to sell it. But credit needs to go to Neill Blomkamp as well, for without him and his writing partner Terri Tatchell, District 9 would not have come to be and, by proxy, neither would have Elysium or Chappie. We come back to what I said about the man when I started this: you cannot say that his movies are not interesting to watch. Forget good and bad. Seeing a Neill Blomkamp movie is an experience only akin to his prior films. And they're fucking technical marvels. Say what you will about the quality of his storytelling, but his ability to squeeze every dollar out of a modest budget and turn out a beautiful product will keep this dude in the game for a long time. It's just a big ol' bonus that I happen to love everything he does, flaws and all. I don't think anyone should have any reservations about what he's about to do with the Alien franchise. As someone who thought Alien 3 was a flawed masterpiece and had a shit-hot good, dumb time with Alien: Resurrection, I don't think there's anybody better suited to the job today. If Michael Bay strived to achieve half with his stupidly large budgets that Neill Blomkamp achieves with his stupidly small budgets, the term "popcorn movie" would be in a far better place. Until that day, I'll keep singing his praises.