WALL•E

2008 // USA // Andrew Stanton // July 27, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - WALL•E delivers to the anemic landscape of science fiction cinema a much-needed shot of vitality and depth. This is especially the case for that rare subspecies of sci-fi film that WALL•E delightfully embodies, one that is at once engaging, challenging, and appropriate for children. If the film has a flaw--and its flaws are rare indeed--it is the filmmakers' dogged insistence on exploring a proflieration of ethical and philosophical quandries when a sublime little allegory might have sufficed. Lest I damn with faint praise, let's be clear about one thing: WALL•E is simultaneously the best animated film, children's film, and science fiction film of the year. The electricity that tingles within its comfortable tropes signals a turning point in Pixar's oeuvre, not to mention Disney's. Although it lacks the virtuosity that made the studio's Ratatouille one of the best films of 2007, WALL•E has an ache of grand ambition in its bones, one that bodes well for the potential of "children's entertainment" to still take people of all ages to undiscovered worlds without and within.

WALL•E himself ("voiced" by digital sound whiz Ben Burtt) is an oddly adorable little wonder, a vaguely anthropomorphic trash compactor with binocular eyes and bulldozer treads. His appeal owes much to the early magic of R2-D2, with some obvious visual and aural nods to E.T. and Short Circuit's Number Five. Director Andrew Stanton's approach to WALL•E's personality is a distinctly human one. This pint-size mechanical garbage man scans not so much as a representative of technology and its relationship to humanity, but more as a stand-in for humanity itself. Or, more particularly, for the Modern Individual: at once industrious and passive, full of queer habits and obsessions, and fundamentally alone and lonely. Laboring away in solitude in an urban apocalyptic wasteland, dutifully crushing mountains of trash into cubes and neatly stacking them, WALL•E calls to mind not an just an Omega Near-Man, but every person who toils in emotional isolation. WALL•E's Earth is one of toxic beauty and castoff majesty. Skyscrapers of rusting and crumbling junk tower into a firmament rendered overcast and sickly orange with pollution. There appears to be no life but cockroaches, and all the other robots of WALL•E's model lie in degrading heaps. This robot seems unaware that he is laboring in the graveyard of both his own kind and the whole of human civilization.

Into WALL•E's oddly peaceful world of daytime drudgery and nocturnal amusement—spent in the company of a meticulously organized junk collection and a precious videocassette of Hello, Dolly!—drops EVE, a sleek probe-robot left by a spaceship. EVE (Elissa Knight) is a late-model beauty, a glossy white capsule whose design clearly owes some debt to Apple. Whizzing over the blasted landscape of WALL•E's world and shooting anything that twitches with her plasma blaster, EVE is an automaton wholly unlike our humble protagonist. Not that this dissuades WALL•E, who becomes hopelessly infatuated with this new arrival. (Don't we all risk infatuation when we encounter something arresting in its strangeness and novelty?) EVE's appearance signals the end of WALL•E's flat, beige existence, and also heralds the film's eventual shift from elegant allegory to a more convoluted tale, one featuring bolder themes and more typical Pixar pop extravagance.

EVE, it turns out, is an emissary of Earth's exiled population, now dwelling—as motion-activated ads in WALL•E's barren cityscape still helpfully explain—in a titanic corporate spaceship. Said ship serves as a sort of interstellar resort-metropolis where a legion of robots attend to every need and coddle every whim. Centuries after an environmental apocalypse, obese space-dwelling humans now glide without effort through a world of garish advertisements, virtual activities, and lots and lots of food. It's both dazzling and horrifying, a triumph of futurist visualization that urges the viewer to gawk with envy and revulsion.

It is eventually revealed that EVE is crucial to humanity's future, although it is actually WALL•E who provides the key to its salvation. WALL•Es first act is a triumph: touching, gorgeously rendered, nearly wordless, it could be an animated short film. Almost inevitably, then, there is a nagging trace of a thematic seam at that first act's trailing edge. Thereafter, WALL•E unfolds into an admirable, compelling science fiction tale, but it also loses some of its joyous simplicity and humane resonance. It gets grander, denser, and more dizzying, with thick dollops of typical kinetic animated action. One gets the sense that this wasn't wholly necessary. WALL•E could have been a entirely respectable children's film (and a more enviable one at that) if it had maintained the slower pace and more innovative storycraft of its early scenes.

Still, the film juggles its expanding ambitions quite well. There is a gracefulness in the way it intertwines its twin tensions: WALL•E and EVE's romance (as it were) on one hand and humanity's fate on the other. There are gentle thematic echoes in this deft pairing that compensate for the dilution of the film's initial potency and giddy humor. If nothing else, the filmmakers are clear-eyed and sure-footed in their exploration of familiar science fiction elements, while eschewing the genre's typical sneering sanctimony and weepy despair. Although its Everyman allegory is always there, rippling with good-natured energy beneath the film's surface, WALL•E lustily tackles a plethora of weighty matters with a more direct line of attack.

And there is plenty to chew on: humankind's dependency on and infantilization by technology; the sanctity of primitive knowledge in the face of said same electronic isolation; the necessity for emotional connection whether one's life is meaningless drudgery or blissful comfort; and the role of corporations in manufacturing desire and encouraging consumption. Granted, kids will giggle along at all the robot mayhem—the brutal slapstick endured by WALL•E is outright hilarious—but there is plenty of Big Idea musing within the film's narrative, often forthrightly so. This may be the only factor that prevents WALL•E from achieving a kind of masterpiece sheen. It is both so assuredly about Big Ideas, and so ruthlessly cribs from the seminal works in the genre—2001 in particular, to the point of homage and then parody—that it lacks a sense of spontaneous novelty. This twinge of dissatisfaction, however, is about the roughest criticism I can lob at the film.

Despite the fact that its robot characters are ostensibly the protagonists, WALL•E has no time for speculation on how thinking machines might, well, think. The robots are humanized to the point where the notion that WALL•E and EVE might feel love is non-controversial. Pixar has created a film with robots but not particularly about robots, which is refreshing in a way. This isn't to say that the film doesn't do its robots well. Although they are decidedly non-human in appearance, the mechanical helpers that populate its world are astonishingly expressive. Certainly, they exhibit more diversity and passion than the tubby human exiles who putter around in their hover-chairs and slurp liquid cupcakes.

Of course, as much as we might see ourselves in a robot's wistful loneliness or his dogged pursuit of his beloved, WALL•EE also urges us to see ourselves in its human characters. Not only in their grotesque fetal passivity, but also in the ease with which a sedentary society can prodded into action and aspiration, often by the unlikeliest forces. Stanton asks us to believe that we can, as a civilization, come full circle to a primal awareness of our surroundings and thereby forestall ecological calamity. Perhaps most heretically, in a genre littered with Terminators and Agent Smiths, WALL•E suggests that our artificial helpmates can aid our journey to a healthier, richer, and more sustainable existence.

The Dark Knight

2008 // USA - UK // Christopher Nolan // July 20, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - Indulge me for a moment, as I'm going get effusive right off the bat (pun intended). With The Dark Knight, writer-director Christopher Nolan sets upon the "comic book film" with sledgehammer and napalm, and delivers the sort of sorely needed genre reconstruction that occurs once in a generation. Here we have, at long last, a film that winnows away the limitations of comics, distills their strengths, and emerges as a work wholly cinematic in character, leaving its ancestral medium far behind. The Dark Knight is a noir action epic of the grandest, bleakest, most exhilarating sort. It is not a flawless film, nor is it a masterpiece. However, it is a wonder to behold. It is a film so ambitious, so dizzying in its lofty heights and abyssal depths, I suspect that it was only the appealing Batman branding that permitted Nolan to create it at all. This is Hollywood film-making as bloodless revolution. As Heath Ledger's terrifying Joker observes, "You've changed things. There's no going back."

Perhaps The Dark Knight's most startling achievement is the final annihilation of that term, "comic book film". It no longer has any utility, much as "novel film" is an essentially empty descriptor. That The Dark Knight is adapted from a popular comic is incidental to the film's merits, never mind how essential that fact might be for its revenue prospects. Nolan's admirable franchise reboot, Batman Begins, signaled that the director was intent on cutting the cords that tethered the Caped Crusader to his original medium. The Dark Knight finally completes this evolutionary leap. This film is unmistakably and foremost an action film rather than a "comic book film", probably the most powerful and important action film in a decade.

The Dark Knight picks up a year after the events of Batman Begins. Bruce Wayne's alter ego has intimidated the Gotham City underworld into spooking at its own shadow. The city has a new district attorney, the fearless and incorruptible Harvey Dent, who has launched a crusade against Gotham's remaining crime lords. There is a wrinkle, however, in the form of the Joker, a bank-robbing, anarchistic sociopath in smudged clown makeup. Where this madman comes from is never established. What he wants is simple: a world in flames.

I doubt that I could reconstruct the plot of The Dark Knight from memory. Nor should I deprive anyone of the chilling experience of witnessing it unspool. How can I explain it? It must be seen. The Joker unleashes scheme upon scheme upon scheme, each more demented than the last. The overpowering strength of this film is its velocity, its terrifying, perfectly realized tone of imminent destruction and death. I can't recall a time when a film made my pulse race for over two hours straight. No mere vehicle for hollow thrills, The Dark Knight is a triumph of action film-making at its blackest and most resonant. It seamlessly blends the cynical urban rot of the hardboiled detective tradition with the modern fear of sudden, irrational violence. Here we have the first film since September 11, 2001 to successfully syncretize the despair of city life and the anxiety of terrorism: Gotham City as Dashiell Hammett's Nightmare Town and as Ground Zero.

The neat, slightly stale three act structure of Batman Begins has been set aside in The Dark Knight. The new film favors a denser, more unfamiliar, more exhausting marathon style, a moon-shot of bullets and chases and never-ending fire. It's a gamble, certainly, and by the film's final showdown it begins to grow somewhat wearisome. Indeed, the sheer relentless quality of The Dark Knight might have been a fatal flaw. Might, that is, if all parties involved—the performers, Nolan, and invaluable scorers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard—were not so intent on conveying their tale of urban apocalypse with absolute sincerity and gravity. Gone are Batman Begins' occasional gestures towards slapstick and good-natured frippery. Aside from a handful of wry comments from butler Alfred, The Dark Knight in unabashedly grim.

In keeping with its intentions as the mother of all origin stories, Begins took as its foundation the most tantalizing (and embarrassingly optimistic) essence of the Batman legend. We were asked to believe that principled vigilantism could offer hope; that urban fear could be turned against the lawless; and that disgust with a corrupt way of life could be transformed into civic pride and peace if one man dared to show people the path. The Dark Knight takes these noble notions and subverts them, exposes them, and stomps all over them. This act of thematic violence might be seen as a betrayal by who thought Begins a perfect superhero film. For braver film-goers, it is a necessary Molotov cocktail lobbed at the comfortable edifice that Begins constructed.

Where, I wonder, was Batman supposed to go after the events in the previous film? To merely follow along for two hours as he foiled yet another villain's scheme for power, money, or infamy would have been a lowering of the stakes. To be sure, both Begins' superheroic realism and its determination to explore Batman's psychology more completely than its forebears made for an exciting step in the right direction. However, the unintended consequence of The Dark Knight may be to render its predecessor a weaker film: one safer, more conventional, and even duller in hindsight.

The Dark Knight aims higher. It thrusts Batman's personal struggle into the wider world, suggesting that the savior himself is a symptom of the sickness that afflicts society. Plundering its tone and events partly from the anxious, revelatory comic series, Batman: The Long Halloween, the film provides a glimpse of Gotham on the cusp. The problem, as Gary Oldman's Lieutenant Gordon astutely observed at the end of Begins, is one of escalation. The old guard, represented by the traditional ethnic criminal organizations, is crumbling, but the "freaks"—that would be the supervillains—are rising to take their place. Gone are the men who merely craved wealth and power. Now Gotham is home to psychos who delight in chaos for its own sake.

The Joker embodies this new breed of criminal. Rest assured, Heath Ledger is every inch as good as the hype suggests. Granted, it's a twitchy, over-the-top performance, but if any iconic villain deserves such treatment, surely it must be Batman's nemesis. Ledger chews the scenery with gusto, but it never comes across as senseless or indulgent. With his mannerisms, his eyes, and especially his voice—a scrunched, muttering, nasal mook voice—Ledger hypnotically conveys a man who has no desires beyond amusement and Armageddon. Not to put too fine a point on it, he is frightening as fuck.

Christian Bale is as strong as ever in the title role, but he also has a gracious quality as an actor that is essential to this expansive, intricate film. It allows him to step into the suit, to fill it and dominate it, and yet not demand that the story be his and his alone. Oldman's Jim Gordon is now neck-deep in the saga of Gotham City, and the mutable veteran actor is never more compelling than here, lending energy and parched righteousness to the proverbial Last Honest Cop. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman return, providing needed history and texture to Alfred Pennyworth and Lucius Fox, without overpowering the film with their presence. And it goes without saying that the luscious Maggie Gyllenhaal—she of the odd beauty, boundless resolve, and those wounded glass eyes—is a superior Rachel Dawes to her predecessor. Aaron Eckhart, as Harvey Dent, is the film's only uncertain choice. Eckhart certainly seems the right fit for a cocky counselor who fears no one and takes unnecessary gambles, a Golden Boy short-changed on self-awareness. It's challenging to say how Eckhart's portrayal fails, except to say that it just isn't as good or believable as those that surround him. Unfortunately, Eckhart's presence in the final confrontation—easily the film's flimsiest scene, narratively speaking—only highlights the relative flimsiness of Dent's character.

The Dark Knight is so fierce a film, such a potent re-branding of what a superhero movie can be, that its flaws—its arguably overly complex plot, its occasional bit of distracting science fiction implausibility, the flat notes in its characterization—fade into the shadows. Nolan shows us, as the film's promotion glibly but accurately asserts, a world without rules. It's a world where simple choices have horrifying consequences. It's world where anyone can die at any time. It's a world where heroes can become villains, by fate, by design, or by choice. It's the Joker's world. It's a world remarkably like our own, and all the more terrifying for that.

Roman de Gare

2007 // France // Claude Lelouch // July 16, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - Here is a curious thing: a mind-bending thriller about writing and secrets, that ultimately proves to be not so mind-bending after all. In fact, Roman de Gare's destination is so distractingly ordinary, I found myself wondering whether some grand thematic gesture had slipped past me. This frustration lingers, and forestalls the film's ambitions for inky insight, if it ever had any. No matter. Roman de Gare thrills for its first two acts, scrawling the viewer's psyche with whorls of maddening suspense. The tidiness of its resolution will be welcome to some, but there is a vacuous and vulgar dimension to the film's conclusion. The elegant thematic breadth of the film vanishes in a puff of ugly comeuppance, leaving only a balm of soothing sentimentality.

Roman de Gare begins with a writer. The Paris police interrogate a novelist, Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant), who may or may not have committed a murder. The detective urges her to start at the beginning. Judith cannot approach it any other way, because she is a writer. In flashback, we glimpse her touring a winery in Burgundy, where she is researching a new novel. Then the film leaves Judith and eavesdrops on other people. Huguette (Audrey Dana) and her fiancé bicker during a car trip to visit her bumpkin family. He strands her at a gas station, and a mysterious man (Dominique Pinon) offers her a ride. Clues suggest that he may be a teacher who has just abandoned his wife and children, or the novelist's ghost writer, or an escaped serial killer. We also meet a Parisian housewife whose husband has recently vanished, as well as the detective she pleads with for help. Who are all these people? How are they connected? The languid pace and curious menace of Roman de Gare urge patience. All will be revealed.

Things Happen in this film, but I shan't discuss how the events resolve themselves into a plot. The slow reveal of that plot is the film's central joy. Yet the wicked pleasures of Roman de Gare are less cinematic in nature than literary. Scenes unfold and circle each other, the components gradually snapping into place. This is a film that carefully doles out "Aha!" moments. Early on there is a Lynch-ian sensation of disconnect, and a creeping suspicion—part dread, part thrill—that hallucinatory juxtaposition may the only rationale for some of the film's scenes. Alas, Roman de Gare isn't that ambitious. Undeniably, the film exhibits a enviable, fiendishly untraceable ability to conjure dread from normalcy. Tension is established with the most unassuming props and lines: a bouquet of flowers, a newspaper, a suggestion for a walk in the woods. The film's most electric, stomach-flipping moment deals with the unexpected appearance of a car. Impressive also is Roman de Gare's ability to execute dizzying reversals as to the source of its suspense, a deftness that would do Hitchcock proud. One moment we are anxious that a character's deception will unravel. The next moment we are plagued with unseemly fears when he is left alone with a young girl. Unlike the elegant emotional shell game of Psycho, however, Roman de Gare's shifts rely on an unreliable narrator and a careful rationing of revelations.

Who are we to sympathize with? Who are we to believe? Like most thrillers, Roman de Gare takes deception as a primary theme. Like nearly all thrillers about writing, it also putters with meta-textual notions of authorship and character. It inevitably calls to mind last year's Atonement, another seductive but flawed film about writing, fiction, and the rationales for deceit. While Roman de Gare lacks Atonement's aimlessness—indeed, it is almost too neat—it also lacks that film's grandeur and aura of crumbling doom. Roman de Gare concerns itself with the cruelty of characters, rather than that of calamity or fate, and as a consequence the film craves a screenplay that can cover its tracks. Sadly, writer-director Claude Lelouch isn't up to the challenge, and too often the film's otherwise engaging characters behave as if tugged around by their collars.

The performers themselves, meanwhile, are a pleasure to behold. Pinon, all simian lips and gray stubble, exudes that strange brand of male magnetism that even the most gnomish of urban Frenchmen seem to possess. He brings to his mysterious traveler a disarming realism, with marvelously understated glimmers of confusion, menace, and anguish. Ardant plays her ambitious novelist to the giddy hilt--first a satin charmer, then a harpy. The film's captivating fulcrum is Dana, however. Even more than Pinon's mystery man, her Huguette is an enigma, a woman who confesses everything in a tearful rush, and yet still harbors secrets and shifting schemes. More than once she recalls Rebecca Pidgeon's little gray mouse-turned-tiger in The Spanish Prisoner. Watch Dana carefully—and Pinon too—in a scene where the police stop their car in her family's shitheel town. Dana's demeanor turns on a dime to deliver a convincing performance for the policeman's benefit, the intensity of it setting Pinon (and us) on edge. Then keep an ear open for a scene where she fakes a mind-blowing orgasm, for reasons I can't explain here. It's worth the price of admission, and emblematic of the film itself. Roman de Gare coaxes forth expectations of a bolder film alongside its thrills, and then leaves them unfulfilled.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

2008 // USA - Germany // Guillermo del Toro // July 12, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - With Hellboy II: The Golden Army, director Guillermo del Toro—that Mexican gothic with a boundless sympathy for monsters and a gluttony for visual spectacle—returns to Mike Mignola's fantasy comic-verse in a shower of goblin sparks. In visiting the demonic well once again, del Toro perhaps inevitably fails to capture the freshness that made the first outing such a pleasure. In Hellboy, the originality of the film's blend of otherworldly design, authentic pathos, and cartoon wit was central to its appeal. The Golden Army compensates for its familiar territory by emphasizing the design—ramping it up, in fact, to Oz-esque levels. The heart and the laughs are still there, but del Toro seems most intent on wonder. It's a credit to his skill, then, that The Golden Army engages despite fiddling with the delicate balance of the first film. Moreover, the film adeptly fulfills the purpose that all fantasy sequels should at minimum fulfill: moving its world forward, in terms of plot, themes, and mythic richness.

Mignola's comics borrow extensively from mythology, urban legend, and literature, while refusing to be constrained by any particular cosmology. As such, we have Hellboy (Ron Perlman), an unstoppable demon warrior sired in the Inferno, who partners with psychic fish-man Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and firestarter Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) to battle the things that go bump in the night on behalf of Uncle Sam. Where the plot of the first Hellboy concerned Nazi conspiracies and Lovecraftian elder gods, The Golden Army is a tale of faeries gone bad. del Toro delivers the background in a prologue-flashback, where Professor Broom (John Hurt in an appreciated cameo) reads a bedtime story to a young Hellboy on Christmas Eve. Broom's tale, animated in delightful stop-motion, describes an ancient war between humankind and the elves, goblins, and ogres of the wilds. To aid the faerie side, the goblins constructed a clockwork legion—the titular Golden Army—that laid waste to the humans. Despite the decisive victory, the elf king Balor, weary of bloodshed, accepted a truce from the defeated humans. The crown that controlled the automaton horde was broken, and a fragment given to the humans to ensure the peace.

In the modern day, the strange romance between Hellboy and Liz is maturing into surprisingly normal relationship territory: bickering, negligence, and resentment. Marital difficulties are the least of their worries, however. It seems that King Balor's son, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) is fed up with humanity's pillaging of nature and its waning belief in monsters. He is preparing to break the truce and command the Golden Army once again, in defiance of his father and sister, Princess Nuala (Anna Walton). Naturally, government minder Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor) dispatches Hellboy and his allies to stop Nuada. Unfortunately, not only is the Prince a powerful fey champion in his own right—he single-handedly slices his way through the King's honor guard—but he also commands a host of strange creatures. There are the insectoid tooth-fairies, which, true to their name, have a voracious appetite for teeth; the tusked ogre Mr. Wink, whose can hurl his mechanical fist on a great chain; and a forest behemoth, all writhing vines and bristling clover, birthed from what appears to be a Lima bean. Hellboy's team—particularly a besotted Abe—ally with the Princess, and they race from one fantasy action set piece to another to recover the crown fragments and stop the Prince. Along the way, the heroes get a new commander, Johann Krauss (Seth MacFarlane), a fussy German scientist in what appears to be a vintage cosmonaut suit. This strange attire is actually a practical consideration, as Krauss is composed entirely of white mist.

It's a stretch to say that these bizarre and marvelous sights could only spring from the minds of Mignola and del Toro, but few artists revel in them with such eerie familiarity. Perhaps this is why the "funny-pages gothic" tone of both Hellboy films comes across with such giddy precision. The badass gallows humor of the franchise rests to some extent on the notion that slaying monsters is all in a day's work. It's a tricky tap dance—wonder and terror that seem commonplace—but del Toro is up to the task. This, after all, is the man who gave us the hilarious, horrifying Blade II, a better film by miles than any vampire sequel had a right to be. With The Golden Army, the director again demonstrates his enduring talent for juggling slapstick and quips alongside sweetness and sorrow. Credit is due del Toro for pulling it all together, but production designer Stephen Scott's eye for grotesque beauty is the key to this film's memorable look. His vision renders The Golden Army as the director's wildest, weirdest fantasy to date.

There are so many unbelievable sights at every turn that del Toro occasionally risks neglecting the sincere emotional punch that a Hellboy film needs. As a result, The Golden Army never quite achieves the first chapter's remarkable fusion of tone. Still, the filmmakers deserve kudos for advancing the characters in unexpected ways. Now that Hellboy and Liz are sharing a life (and a bed), they start taking each other for granted and engaging in little deceptions. As the anxious, smoldering Liz, Blair was one of the focuses of Hellboy, but she gets shuffled to the background a bit during this outing in favor of the previously neglected Abe. A scene where Hellboy and Abe get hammered on Mexican beer and belt love songs is played for broad comedy, but to the credit of del Toro and the performers, it will also have a familiar sting of romantic woe for many viewers.

The scene is typical of how The Golden Army finds the crucial emotional upwellings within its curious blend of action-fantasy-horror. The film isn't afraid to allow its characters to change. They bump into new conflicts and anxieties, rather than recycling tropes from the previous film. The sequel also exhibits a satisfying recognition of Mignola's broader multi-mythic world, even as it hints at things yet to come. Consider a scene where Princess Nuala speaks Hellboy's true demon name and demands that his status as an infernal noble be recognized under faerie law. (Therefore we see in Hellboy and Prince Nuada's duels the battle between two mythological systems: one Catholic, one pagan.) Or consider a chilling sequence where Liz must confront Death itself and demonstrate her devotion to Hellboy, in a nifty reversal of a scene from the previous film.

If The Golden Army has a structural flaw, it's one of pacing. The action sequences feel both a little obligatory and a little too long. While the sight of tooth-fairies and ogres and clockwork soldiers is never boring, there's a distressing... ordinariness to all the brawls between Hellboy and the film's folklore beasties. The outcome of these fights is mostly never in doubt, and while del Toro makes the action fun, it sometimes feels like mere filler before he reveals a new, even more wondrous terror. That said, Hellboy II: The Golden Army is the satisfying sort of sequel that consistently raises the stakes. For del Toro, it solidifies his reputation as one of the world's most imaginative and astute fantasy filmmakers. For the wider world of Hellboy, The Golden Army opens the door to reveal a vista more glorious, more intricate, and far darker than we dreamed.

The Happening

2008 // USA - India - France // M. Night Shyalaman // July 7, 2008 // Theatrical Print

D - After Unbreakable seduced me with its empathic, gorgeous take on the superhero origin story, I came away an admirer of M. Night Shyalaman's ability to repackage well-worn stories with a fresh dose of pained humanity and absolute sincerity. Signs confirmed my assessment, as well as the writer-director's instincts for chills. The Village was... less great. Lady in the Water arrived as a sweet and embarrassing jumble, a vanity project with a sour aftertaste. And now we have The Happening, and given the public nature of Shyalaman's descent from artistic grace, how can this film be anything but a Rorschach test on how far the former wunderkind of genre filmmaking has fallen? To be sure, The Happening has a germ of the director's flair for compelling concepts and attractive composition. However, the film is so aggressively bad in so many ways, I came away wondering whether Shyalaman has always been a covertly poor filmmaker, or one who just matured into ineptitude.

The story is fairly straightforward, and in its outlines it shows some of Shyalaman's old grit for tantalizing hooks. Beginning in New York City's Central Park, some sort of silent, widespread biological or chemical attack elicits a horrifying change in people. First come the disorientation and the garbled speech, then an overwhelming compulsion for self-destruction. This might have come off as half-baked, but one of the film's rare strengths is the grim, gut-wrenching quality to the mass suicide set pieces. Construction workers casually walk off building girders. A man starts a lawnmower and languidly watches it circle around the yard before lying down in front of it. A policeman pulls out his handgun and shoots himself, and then a bystander retrieves the weapon and does likewise, followed by another...

There's a hint of nihilism in the glib, generally awful nature of the deaths that Shyalaman shows us. Fortunately, the filmmaker finds a handhold that prevents The Happening from descending into outright suicide pornography. Unfortunately, that handhold is high school teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanal), who just might be the most uninteresting science fiction protagonists in memory. It's not that they're morons, although Alma has the moral development of a six-year-old. Elliot is a pretty competent guy, and his responses under pressure vary from admirably collected to all-too-understandable. Yet both Elliot and Alma are both about as exciting as buckets of dirty mop water, which is pretty unforgivable in a film allegedly about the awful human tragedy of unexplained mass suicides. I couldn't care less about whether this pair survived the mysterious attacks.

Elliot and Alma, however, didn't ask for my opinion, and they attempt to flee into rural Pennsylvania with fellow teacher Julian (John Leguizamo) and his young daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). The biological attacks, you see, seem to be focused on population centers, although they are swiftly moving into more lightly peopled areas. I really shouldn't say more, because I would be ruining the... Oh, who cares. It's the plants, okay? The world's plants are apparently spreading a gaseous chemical into the air that triggers suicidal behavior in humans.

Now, I'm a scientist by profession, and this doesn't bother me as much as it seems to be bother some folks. Bad science is par for the course in science fiction. If a filmmaker can construct a forceful and humane story around a shaky factual foundation, I'm very forgiving. I was prepared to accept that ITSTHEPLANTS, because Shyalaman uses the conceit to set up some creative and wonderfully nasty plot elements. There's not a lot of cinematic terror to be had in undetectable crazy gas, so the sight of a sudden breeze blowing through the trees or the grass becomes a proxy for the biological menace. This leads to some improbable but oddly effectual scenes of characters attempting to outrun the wind, calling to mind The Day After Tomorrow's racing frost snap. Shyalaman also gets some nice mileage out of the notion that large numbers of humans seem to catalyze the plants' attacks, resulting in some fiendish sequences where splitting up is the wisest strategy.

However, The Happening's occasional moments of real horror don't make up for all the missteps, all the terrible decisions, or the sheer badness of the thing. It's tricky for me to put my finger on any single feature that dooms the enterprise. The killer plants don't bother me, and the plot is fairly unobjectionable. Yet Shyalaman just fumbles again and again. There's the tone-deaf approach to nearly every human interaction in the film, and the generally wretched performances all around. This goes for even the usually exciting Wahlberg and especially for Deschanal, who spends most of the film in a goggle-eyed, whiny trance, like a television-addled toddler. She's admittedly gorgeous and I know she can act, but Christ Almighty what is she doing here?

The performances might be where the rubber meets the road, but The Happening's teeth-gritting awkwardness extends deep into its direction and screenplay. You can almost see Wahlberg trying his mightiest, his gears grinding relentlessly during every oddly scored, jarring closeup as he tries to find something resembling a real human emotion in his character. But Shyalaman isn't having it. It's almost like the whole enterprise has to be as unpleasant as possible. I'm not sure what possessed the writer-director to render almost the entire supporting cast of characters as a pack of colossally unsympathetic oddballs (with the occasional shrieking lunatic) but damn if that isn't exactly what he does. It seems inconceivable that the cunning of Unbreakable's solitary weirdo—the supervillain hiding in plain sight, complete with purple monologues—has mutated into a gaggle of "colorful" people who don't act much like people at all, and serve no purpose but to perish without eliciting a flicker of regret from the audience.

What else is there? How about the endless, lingering shots that are intended to convey dread but only had me thinking, "I get it. You can cut away now." How about the unpleasantness of disposing of two young teenage characters in an unspeakably brutal fashion? How about a script that trades the ungainly stilted qualities of The Village and hokey earnestness of Lady in the Water for unintentional goofiness? How about story continuity errors that provide characters with knowledge they could not possibly have? How about Shyalaman shamelessly cribbing from one of the scariest moments in Signs, and thereby diminishing it? How about a falsely "ominous" ending that contributes exactly nothing to the film's blunt, damning environmental and psychiatric subtext?

I could got on and on. I won't, because I prefer not think about this wasteful disappointment of a film.

The Incredible Hulk

​2008 // USA // Louis Leterrier // July 7, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - The Incredible Hulk surprised me. It is a superhero film that wallows in its genre conventions with almost no joy, a kind of Twelve Steps out of Hell served up as popcorn entertainment. Perhaps this shouldn’t be so unexpected. The Hulk, after all, is one of Marvel’s darkest heroes. Lacking Spider-Man’s humor or the X-Men’s warmth, the Hulk comics principally offer rage, anxiety, and the peculiar kind of fatalistic despair. Louis Leterrier’s sequel-slash-reboot of Ang Lee’s gloriously overreaching Hulk never really rises to any kind of greatness. Indeed, it often feels overly familiar. (The thickly applied nods to the Bill Bixby television series might be partly to blame for this.) Yet The Incredible Hulk gives this year’s best superhero film to date, Iron Man, a run for its money. It does this not with mesmerizing performances or thematic heft, but with a precise awareness of how a Hulk film should be realized, and in particular how to balance the terror and empathy for the big green lug.

Leterrier picks up where Lee left off, but also dramatically revises what has come before. The Incredible Hulk opens with a rapid-fire credit sequence that takes us through the re-imagined origin of the creature lurking inside Bruce Banner. Leterrier’s version cribs from the Bixby series, right down to the iconic image of Bruce (Edward Norton) with those menacing crosshairs of light sliding over his face. Fortunately, this opening sequence is a fine example of breakneck storytelling, a visual debriefing to bring the whole audience up to speed—regardless of whether they have seen Lee’s film or the television series, or read any Hulk comics. Those of us in the geekier set already know the score: Banner’s experiments in radiation resistance led to an accident that transformed him into a ferocious green ogre. The effect was temporary, but the fugitive Banner now risks the terrifying change whenever he becomes agitated.

The Incredible Hulk reunites us with Banner in a Brazilian slum, where he is laying low, working menial jobs, and practicing meditative techniques to control his transformations. He is also collaborating with an Internet pal named Mr. Blue—by means of a battered laptop and crude laboratory equipment—to try to perfect an outright cure for his condition. However, the United States military finally catches up to Banner, in the form of General Thaddeus Ross (a distractingly mustachioed William Hurt) and Special Forces tough Emil Blonsky (a stubbly, oily Tim Roth). This sets off the first of the film’s three major action set pieces, all of which are extraordinarily fun. The Incredible Hulk’s finest achievement is how deftly the filmmakers execute the mayhem, which, in any Hulk blockbuster worth its salt, should be the centerpiece, after all. There’s nothing particularly innovative about how the action is realized, but it’s done with a remarkable intelligence and precision of tone.

Each of the major set pieces, for example, raises the stakes in elementary but crucial ways. In the first showdown between the Hulk and the military, the green beast is only glimpsed through shadow and smoke. During the second round, Leterrier gives us a brutal confrontation in a wide-open space and full sunlight. The climax pits the Hulk against an equally powerful but more monstrous foe, the Abomination, on the streets of New York City. This is action storycraft at its most elegant, yet an all-too-rare thing in the age of big-budget excess.

Most vitally, The Incredible Hulk summons exactly the right sensation of seat-gripping tension with its action. It offers a richly satisfying blend of sheer free-fall terror and sympathetic fear for Banner’s fate, a gestalt thrill that fuses two distinct anxieties: A) “Can the Hulk be stopped?”; and B) “I hope the Hulk doesn’t get hurt.” By nailing this tricky balance, Leterrier lets us slip into Banner’s psychological space, and that of his erstwhile girlfriend, Betsy (Liv Tyler). Will the film’s action be as stirring on a second viewing? Hard to say.

In most other respects, The Incredible Hulk is passable summer entertainment. The script is mostly content to stick to an overly grave B-movie tone, and none of the performers—alas, even Norton—bring much to the table. If the action sequences are marvelously unpredictable, everything in between suffers from the usual blockbuster triteness. To be fair, the film never veers into stupidity, or even (most of the time) boredom. Leterrier and the actors keep the material sufficiently smart and snappy to engage. There’s just not much that’s surprising. Roth gets the best scenery-chewing—Why do none of the other characters seem to sense that he is a sociopath?—and Tim Blake Nelson has an amusing but oddly dissonant role as a scientist who aids Banner.

For Marvel-philes, the filmmakers sneak in plenty of tempting tidbits. There are references to the research program that created Captain America, and a possible origin for Hulk’s hyper-intelligent nemesis, The Leader. The film also provides a connection to Iron Man that comes as a pleasant surprise, another thread pulling the cinematic Marvelverse together.

The challenge of The Incredible Hulk is that it may be too bleak for some viewers. It’s not especially bloody or gruesome, and hardly the most existential superhero film to come along in recent years. Yet what Leterrier and screenwriter Zak Penn deliver is a relatively thin story, a mere chapter in the life of a man struggling for control. There is little revelation or redemption to be had in The Incredible Hulk. Norton’s Banner, like Bixby’s, must keep hiding and keep moving. This film is just one stop on his long, never-ending flight.