At the Movies with General Havoc

[White Haven]

The biggest problem I had with the movie was its susceptibility to 'they're NPCs, so they're utterly irrelevant' syndrome.

Spoiler: show

The Vengeance shipyard? Has no sensors, no security, no windows, and no suspicion. Vengeance herself has no internal sensors and an incredibly low crew-to-crew-space ratio so numerically-insignificant boarders can traipse around more or less unopposed. The Klingons have apparently sweet fuckall for homeworld defense or perimeter monitoring, and also apparently have no real warships of their own anywhere near the homeworld, just pissant little patrol cutters. Nobody but Enterprise is anywhere around Earth, and Earth has no perimeter sensors either.

If the Player Characters or Primary Antagonists don't personally show up to do something, no one else actually...does anything. I still enjoyed it in spite of that, but I couldn't help but notice and sigh a bit whenever that tendency cropped up again. I expect some flaws; no movie is perfect, but this one grated more than some just because it was the same flaw showing up in several places, making itself more notable.

[General Havoc]

The biggest problem I had with the movie was its susceptibility to 'they're NPCs, so they're utterly irrelevant' syndrome.

Spoiler: show

The Vengeance shipyard? Has no sensors, no security, no windows, and no suspicion. Vengeance herself has no internal sensors and an incredibly low crew-to-crew-space ratio so numerically-insignificant boarders can traipse around more or less unopposed. The Klingons have apparently sweet fuckall for homeworld defense or perimeter monitoring, and also apparently have no real warships of their own anywhere near the homeworld, just pissant little patrol cutters. Nobody but Enterprise is anywhere around Earth, and Earth has no perimeter sensors either.

If the Player Characters or Primary Antagonists don't personally show up to do something, no one else actually...does anything. I still enjoyed it in spite of that, but I couldn't help but notice and sigh a bit whenever that tendency cropped up again. I expect some flaws; no movie is perfect, but this one grated more than some just because it was the same flaw showing up in several places, making itself more notable.

I will admit that the scale of the new Trek movies has always struck me as considerably smaller than it should be. Starfleet in TNG (or especially in DS9) was a vast, sprawling entity, equipped with thousands of ships spread across a large portion of the galaxy, of which the Enterprise was a particularly badass one. In new Trek, one gets the feeling that Starfleet and the Federation in specific is considerably smaller than that, a handful of worlds with a handful of ships. Perhaps that's more relevant to the TOS style, I don't know, but I frankly prefer the other way. Surely Earth would have a few ships around it at any given time besides the Enterprise.

[Stofsk]

I was entertained by the film, but in retrospect it has many problems and I think ultimately I'm disappointed with nuTrek.

RE: Scale of nuTrek being small. They're probably trying to emulate TOS more than TNG/DS9, with its 'only the Enterprise can save us!' motif. The thing is though, outside of TMP, TFF and maybe TWoK (they launched from earth on a training cruise, but the Mutara sector feels like it's in a remote location), the Enterprise was usually out in the middle of nowhere, so that whole theme worked. It doesn't work in this film because they hang around Earth and near Qo'noS too much.

Also one of the things that really bugs me about nuTrek, well, one of the many I guess - is the scale of the ship interiors. I don't like the aesthetic, but that's neither here nor there, but the scale of the internal space just feels wrong. Like engineering is a good example, it looks far larger than it ought to be, and they still have that 'we shot inside of a brewery' look for it. And the Vengeance is even worse. It's far larger than the Enterprise and yet there is absolutely no justification for it being so large when they say it can be run on a skeleton crew.

[General Havoc]

Mud

Alternate Title: Venue for Shirt Removal, Volume XIII

One sentence synopsis: An unknown drifter on the run from the law enlists the help of two boys in rural Arkansas.


Things Havoc liked: At some point, some years ago, Matthew McConaughey decided that he was tired of playing leading men, and began instead playing scuzy people engaged in sleazy business. As I hated every movie he served as the leading man of, I felt this was an excellent idea, and have followed him through such films as Bernie, Killer Joe, and Magic Mike. While Mud is not quite a step forward along this career renaissance path, as it casts him in the role of a heroic, misunderstood loner who removes his shirt (of course), it still represents an improvement over his earlier work, if only because Mud, despite what the trailers would tell you, is not about McConaughey at all, but about a pair of teenage kids played by unknown child actors Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland.

Yes, Mud, pitched to audiences as a crime drama, is really a coming of age story centered around two kids named Ellis and Neckbone, boys from the rural backwaters of Arkansas who live in fractured or fracturing homes and who meet and gradually become entangled in the lives on drifter Mud, his girlfriend Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), his 'father' Tom (Sam Shepard) and the men searching for him (led by the seemingly immortal Joe Don Baker). While Mud forms the focus of the plot, he's hardly the main character, and fortunately the two kids (particularly Lofland) act nearly everyone else off the screen. Too many coming-of-age movies are maudlin reminiscences on what some middle-aged writer thinks it was like to be young, or require the actors in question to recite dialogue which no teenager has ever uttered. Not here. Ellis and Neckbone have exactly the perfect combination of deep worldliness and astonishing naivety that many teenagers have but do not commonly evidence, and their conversation and demeanor, around one another and around the rest of the cast, is so perfectly right that it essentially carries the film.

Not that the boys don't have help. The movie has a large, ensemble cast, including Deadwood alums Ray McKinnon and Sarah Paulson as Ellis' separating parents, and soon-to-be-Zod Michael Shannon as Neckbone's adoptive uncle. Every one of these people, including those listed further above, carries just the right note for the area. Poor they may be, and redneck, but the movie never makes them into stereotypes, either in the drunken asshole sense, the bible-thumping fanatic sense, or the wise, magic poor man sense. It may sound like nothing, but a movie that manages to portray a dozen different characters as fully, believably human, is a rare commodity. And the film has the sense to simply let the characters interact and see where they go, rather than trying to drag things out through "shocking revelations" or sudden twists of plot.


Things Havoc disliked: Of course the director can only restrain himself for so long. The entire climax of the film (which I shall not spoil here) needed to be rethought, and the notion of the bounty hunters come to town to look for Mud was simply unworthy of a film so staunchly real. I do not deny that there are armed men for hire in the world willing to track a fugitive down and kill him (a number of them are on reality TV), but surely they do not conduct themselves the way they are portrayed as doing here.

But the other issue is McConaughey. No, he doesn't do a bad job, far from it. His character is reasonably interesting and works well off the kids (basically the only characters he ever meets). The issue is that his character was just not well thought out. He is a criminal and a killer, yes, but the movie immediately neuters this by constructing a set of circumstances around his crimes obviously contrived for the sole purpose of making him "still a good guy". It is churlish to criticize a movie for not being another movie, but it strikes me that a far more interesting film could have been made about the same characters interacting with a killer who was a real killer, not some sanitized saint who poses no threat to anybody but them what deserve it. At the very least, the film could have tried to ratchet up the uncertainty factor with Mud, but unfortunately it seems so afraid that people will spend some length of the film disliking McConaughey enough that it won't take any dramatic chances with his character.


Final Thoughts: Fortunately for the movie though, all of the characters besides Mud himself are so real and so interesting in their realness, that the film doesn't really suffer from turning Mud from a character into a plot device. The movie is not long, but the pace is slow and lugubrious, and lets the tension build naturally and not from plot absurdities, at least most of the time. What we're left with is a character study with multiple, interesting characters, all of them played well, and with dialog and shot construction that is both interesting and true. What more, honestly, do you want?

Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

Pain and Gain

Alternate Title: The Land of Sun and Steroids

One sentence synopsis: Three bodybuilders hatch a plan to kidnap and steal the life of a wealthy real estate magnate.


Things Havoc liked: I don't think anyone's neutral on the subject of Michael Bay. I'd present the debate that concerns his work in a balanced manner if I could, but my utter hate for the Transformers series makes it very difficult to do so. Leaving that abomination aside though, I just don't care for Bay's style of frenetic, hyper-kinetic action edited with a lawnmower. Bay admits openly that he makes movies for teenage boys, and while there's nothing wrong with that, the fact remains that teenagers have awful taste, a fact I was aware of even when I was one. The only movie of Bay's I've ever liked was The Rock, and that one only because of the endlessly entertaining performances of Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery. So imagine how much I was looking forward to this one...

Well... hell...

Pain and Gain stars Mark Wahlberg, a guy I can't ever decide if I like or not, and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, a guy I absolutely unironically love, along with Hurt Locker and Adjustment Bureau's Anthony Mackie as three stupid, sleazy bodybuilders, all of whom shoot enormous amounts of steroids while spouting awful lines stolen from bad TV self-help guides and politician apology press releases. Wahlberg here turns in the best single performance I've ever seen him give, a manic, ego-fanatical self-help 'roidster who convinces himself that he deserves success because of some half-mangled nonsense about the American dream. But his type-A intensity manages to convince both his compatriots and largely everyone else that he has the X-factor needed for success, even though his confidence is not even slightly backed up by accomplishment or brains.

But even Wahlberg can't compete with Johnson, who plays an ex-con bodybuilder who discovered Jesus while in prison for cocaine abuse and burglary. The Rock has always been a very self-aware actor, who understands (at least in good movies) that his physical presence is sufficient to sell any scene requiring mass, but that comedy requires he play not with but against type. As such, his character here is a maniac, hopped up on alternatingly absurd draughts of cocaine, Jesus, and cocaine. His bizzare, almost mice-and-men-like reaction to Wahlberg's increasingly insane "plans" gives his character just the perfect touch of hilarity, rendering the entire character into a hilarious, farcical cariacature, which is of course the point.

I mentioned above that Bay has a style to him and that I hate it, but this is not the Michael Bay I remember. The editing is reasonably paced, and takes its time with properly-framed sequences, a simple matter of competence than I honestly believed was entirely beyond Michael Bay. The movie is based on a true story (a fact it reminds us of repeatedly as things get weirder and weirder), but the material is so deranged that it becomes truly unpredictable, at least to me. Add in a superb soundtrack, and we have a film that could easily have been made by Oliver Stone.


Things Havoc disliked: There's a few aspects of this movie that I'm not clear on, such as why the crime victim (Tony Shaloub at his most un-Monk-like) is so reviled by everyone, or why the police don't take his claims of assault seriously when he's been clearly beaten, burnt, and run over with a car. I suppose the general incompetence of the police is another theme that this movie's working with, but it's nonetheless somewhat jarring in a movie where the protagonists are this generally stupid. There are also a few moments where some of Michael Bay's bad habits rear their ugly heads again (mostly in flashbacks), but nothing overly jarring.


Final Thoughts: I've heard this film described as some sort of anti-American rant on the part of a Michael Bay disgusted with his own crapulence, but such sentiments derive from too many martinis at the post-movie hangout. Pain and Gain is not classic cinema, but it's one of the funniest movies I've seen in a good long while, and proof positive that when he desperately wants to, even Michael Bay can produce quality work. Presently the movie is in the process of being savaged critically, a reaction that I have to imagine is derived from a general critical contempt for Bay and all his works. I can't exactly fault the theory (some people do just need to hang it up), but if Bay can produce more works like this one, I might well be tempted to call myself a fan.

And if not, at least it's one year we don't have to watch Shia LeBoeuf

Final Score: 7.5/10

[LadyTevar]

Just did a basic Google-search, and yes, Pain & Gain was based on a rather recent murder-spree in Miami. The show "48-Hours" will be airing the factual version sometime this week. At this time, the family of the victims and the cops are both "very upset" with the dark-comedic tone of the movie.

[General Havoc]

Man of Steel

Alternate Title: Clash of the Titans

One sentence synopsis: Superman fights the forces of the genocidal kryptonian, General Zod, who has arrived to wipe out humanity and restore Krypton.


Things Havoc liked: 2006's Superman Returns was a tremendously disappointing film for a large number of reasons, but one scene in particular from it remains etched in my mind. Early on in the film, as Superman flies about the Earth, righting wrongs and saving lives, he encounters a maniac who has bolted a minigun to the roof of a building, and is raining fire down on helpless police below. As Superman lands to confront him, the enraged madman turns the minigun on Superman, firing thousands of rounds into him uselessly, moments before dismounting the gun and firing a pistol at point blank range into Superman's face. We are then treated to a slow motion shot of the handgun bullet bouncing off of Superman's eye. A stupid, throwaway moment of no further consequence? Yes. But it was also a moment (the only moment in that wretched film) wherein I got the sense of grandiose wonder that should come from the titanic, unbridled, raw power of Superman.

So now I'd like you all to imagine a movie comprised entirely of this.

Man of Steel, Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan's take on the flagship character of DC comics, is a thunderous film, in the literal sense. I thought myself no longer capable of being enthralled by pure action any more, not with the man-weeks worth of fights I have seen on the screen, but I was simply wrong, for I have never seen something quite like this movie's unrelenting pace of violence and punishment. The action in this movie, and there is so much of it, is precisely what I think most people missed from Brian Singer's failed version of Superman, action which defines Superman as something utterly alien to this Earth, irreducibly above men, and with villains to match. Every scene, every combination, every single blow of the dozen-odd combats that fill this film is filmed and delivered with such raw force as to jackhammer into the viewer a sense of scale I've rarely if ever encountered in an action movie. Cities burn in this film. They are crushed beneath the forces of the universe itself, as Olympian Gods stride across the world bringing death and ruination to their enemies. A sequence midway through the film where Superman and another Kryptonian engage in a crust-shattering fistfight while under the active fire of tank-killing attack aircraft, or one later where they do not even bother to bat the flying cars raining down on their shoulders out of the air, in favor of bringing skyscrapers down onto one another, are truly like nothing I've ever seen before. There are many films who seek to have an epic feel for their action, generally by self-awarely highlighting one "signature" moment for the audience. No such thing here. The film rains titanic, mythological-scale action down upon the audience in a relentless torrent, drenching us in its sense of scale, and leaving us (or me at least), half-stunned at the revelation, always buried in the back of my mind, of just what this version of Superman is.

And who this new Superman? Why he's Henry Cavill, of 'the Tudors', 'Stardust', and the surprisingly underrated 'Immortals'. Unlike Christopher Reeve, Cavill does not portray two different characters in Clark Kent and Superman, as Superman does not exist when the movie begins, and Clark Kent, like many young men, doesn't even know who he is yet. He certainly looks the part, and if the movie surrounds him with better actors given weightier material, then it is only in keeping with the traditions of the franchise. One better actor is Russell Crowe, playing Jor-El, whose role (for obvious reasons) wanes as the film progresses, but who receives much more material than I expected, including a backstory that ties fairly convincingly in to our villain (more on him later). Another (astonishingly enough) is Kevin Costner, who still doesn't know quite how to deliver a line naturally, but manages to sell himself as Johnathan Kent quite satisfactorily by simply playing an older version of his stock Field-of-Dreams characters from long ago. As this is roughly how Pa Kent is supposed to sound, I'm quite all right with it, and his (surprisingly limited) scenes with the younger Clark actually manage to be downright moving. Diane Lane, as Martha Kent, hits just the right note, as someone long-since used to the odd nature of her son, having made the adjustments necessary to keep going. Standouts among the rest of the cast include Christopher Meloni (the third consecutive movie in which he has strongly impressed me) as a military officer trying desperately to contain the damage the invading Kryptonians are causing, and Lawrence Fishburne in a completely pointless, but still effective role as Perry White.

But the meat of a superhero film is often its villain, in this case General Zod, played by Michael Shannon (of Mud and Boardwalk Empire). I admit, I wasn't fond of his take on Zod at first, not because he failed to live up to Terence Stamp (whom I adore, but was admittedly camping the hell out of the role), but more because he seemed too wooden, his acting style too shallow for the role. But as the film progressed, I must admit, he grew on me, especially as his later appearances (as an older, wearier Zod) took on more of a patina, as it were. The film does give Zod some legitimate background, mad though it might be, and Shannon's screams of Dune-style vengeance notwithstanding, the character is actually fairly restrained, at least most of the time.

I mentioned the action before, buttressed as it is by effects, both visual and audio. The visual effects are seamless, of course, but the design is something to be seen. Kryptonian ships and technology are distinctive and very alien, employing strange, three-dimensional pinforms in place of screens or projectors, and presenting a strong sense of cohesiveness for a world we barely get to see. As to cinematography, Zach Snyder (oddly enough) chose this movie to put down the slow-motion controls, and pick up instead the Firefly-style tracking shots and foreground-background focus switches for his effects shots, a decision I don't pretend to understand, but can't deny the effectiveness of. But of all the various crew elements, it's the music, composed of course by Chrostopher Nolan's pet composer Hans Zimmer, which really drives this film. The soundtrack, particularly the main theme of the piece, is, if anything, even more evocative than John Williams' famous Superman march from thirty+ years ago (yeah, I said it!), and perfectly captures the tone and feel of the film as presented. Indeed, this film might well be Zimmer's strongest work, and given that Zimmer scored (among other things) Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the freaking Lion King, that is not a statement I make lightly.


Things Havoc disliked: I've always held that it's fair game to criticize a film for being bad, but not for being something other than the perfect film you had in your mind. Movies exist on their own, and it is not reasonable to object because they are not some other, different movie, which may or may not exist. For this reason, I have long rejected criticisms of Superman movies in particular based on nitpicks of setting or plot ("everyone would recognize Clark Kent despite the glasses!") as having missed the point. The premise of a Superman film must be accepted in order to appreciate the film at all, and to do otherwise is the same as objecting to a performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony because it did not have pretty graphics.

But... all that said... this was not the movie I wanted.

I know, I know, I'm a huge hypocrite. Bear with me. This movie had, when the marketing campaigns began, the single most effective movie trailer I can remember seeing, one that instantaneously put this film on my radar as one to not miss. It wisely took several of the strongest elements of the film (Zimmer's score, Crowe, Costner, the pre-Superman life of Clark Kent), and brought them front and center, resulting in a film I could barely wait to see. This is a terrible mindset to walk into a film with, as the movie in your head is almost always (Avengers is one of the only exceptions) going to far exceed the one on the screen. I recognize this, and yet at the same time I can't overlook the major flaws that stood out as I was watching the film. Not details of costuming or physics, for such things are irrelevant, ultimately, but the simple nature of what this film was and what it was not.

Despite the trailers, this movie spends nearly no time at all on characterization, and that, ultimately, is the decision I cannot understand. Batman Begins and the Dark Knight (to cite only Nolan's films) knew that superheros are interesting only insofar as they can be characterized properly, and that action, no matter how tremendous, does not sell a film. Nolan and Snyder here not only seem to disagree with that analysis, but actively sought to disprove it, by providing mountains of the finest action I've seen in a decade or more. And yet the shortchanged characterization, mostly told in flashback, makes the film seem highly unbalanced. We gloss over Clark's search for his origins, in favor of plunging directly into the conflict with Zod, pausing only periodically to show us retrospective scenes of Clark and his parents dealing with the inevitable problems that a Kryptonian child would have on Earth. None of these scenes are badly done (an early one showing a young Clark's inability to handle the sensory overload of his own Kryptonian body was particularly creative), but they are not the central focus of the film, and given that all of the great comic book films of the last seven years or so (Iron Man, Avengers, Thor, Batman) understood the need to make such things the central focus of their respective films, I'm baffled as to what these great filmmakers could possibly have been thinking.

Yes there are other issues I could point to. Amy Adams is simply not up to the task of replacing Margot Kidder from the original Superman films, although she wasn't as bad as Kate Bosworth. Several lines, particularly early on, do not land softly, and fall into the category of "obvious expositionary scenes". The Jesus-metaphors for Superman (always an element in his mythology) are a little thick here as well, from details like his age to shot construction at various points. But honestly, none of that matters to me as much as the missed opportunity to give Superman the character weight that many comic readers erroneously assume he is not capable of bearing, the sort of weight the trailers for the movie appeared to promise, and that never was forthcoming.


Final Thoughts: What do you do with a movie like this? A movie made with such consummate skill and sure-handed direction, that you cannot help but stand in awe of the production, whose flaws, major though they may appear to you, are less mistakes, and more active decisions on the part of the filmmakers to focus on this thing and not that one? What is fair here? To condemn the film for not being some other, wholly chimerical movie, that you imagined it might be? Or to forgive the film its flaws despite the fact that there were large sections of it that had you shaking your head and even cringing? How do you represent being simultaneously disappointed and awestruck by a movie? I don't know the answer. I've gone back and forth on this film since the moment I walked out of it, willing at times to give it a five and council against getting one's hopes up, willing at other times to give it an eight and praise it as an superbly-executed film which does precisely what it sets out to do. These are my reviews, yes, that represent my opinion, and yet I've always sought to separate out my own biases from the actual qualities on-offer. Maybe that's impossible here. Maybe it was always impossible.

Ultimately though, I suspect that most people's reactions to Man of Steel will be as intensely personal as mine was. I've spoken to many so far who watched the film, none of whom pointed to the same things as either flaws or moments of genius as anyone else. Things I glossed over as unimportant stood as towering bastions of rage-inducing tyranny to others, while matters I considered vital to the understanding of the film's qualities were utterly irrelevant to others. I strongly feel that most of those who have raged against this movie because of some flaw in logic or physics have missed the point entirely, and are engaged in nitpicking, but I accept that those people probably think the same of my analysis, and with good reason. As such, I'm left after all the song and dance with my original reaction to the film. Almost every aspect of the characterization the film did try worked flawlessly. I simply felt there wasn't enough.

And in the end, you can complain about any number of things in a movie, but if a film leaves you wishing there had been more of it, then honestly, how bad could it really have been?

Final Score: 7/10

[General Havoc]

World War Z

Alternate Title: 2,564 days later

One sentence synopsis: A former UN operative must travel the world to find the source of a zombie plague overwhelming the entire world.


Things Havoc liked: I loved Max Brooks' World War Z, one of the finest works of fake-nonfiction I've ever seen. For those who haven't read it, World War Z is a retrospective oral history, purportedly by a UN journalist, recording the stories of various civilian, military, and government officials, as well as ordinary people, in the aftermath of a worldwide, decade-long war against a zombie apocalypse. Exhaustively researched and tremendously detailed, the book comes the closest I've ever seen to making something as insane as a zombie apocalypse actually plausible, treating the subject with absolute seriousness and a clinical, sociological, and even historical view of what a worldwide war, given these premises, would actually look like. It's a book I can go back to and re-read over and over again.

World War Z, the film, has nothing whatsoever to do with this book. And yet I put all this in the "good stuff" category.

The premise is the same. The Zombie plague explodes out of control in largely the first few minutes of the movie. Where it comes from and how it functions is a mystery, at least initially, and we see the desperate efforts being made to evacuate cities and whole nations in something approximating order. Yet rather than jump from person to unit to country to scene, this time we follow a single man, played by Brad Pitt, a former government official who, in the absence of most major governments, is simply the best option to travel the planet and try to figure out what can be done to save the world. Simple? Maybe too simple? It's all in the execution. Pitt, who I frankly find boring sometimes, here plays the character perfectly straight. Levelheaded and reasonable at all times, all without seeming superhuman or some kind of monosyllabic movie-stoic, Pitt does an impeccable job playing someone just trying to find a way to save the planet while keeping his immediate loved ones safe. The duality between these things is not overplayed, as the government forces he works with act as reasonably as they can under the circumstances, and the movie wastes no time with absurd subplots or hackneyed drama about how the zombies "aren't the real enemy". As this was a common staple of Romero's films, it's nice to have a movie that actually understands that flesh-devouring monsters from beyond the grave can certainly hold one's attention as far as villains go.

And these are not the zombies you've seen before, not even in 28 days later or the other fast/other zombie films. The trailers have all showed the various human pyramids and dogpiles that the zombies get into, but what this movie gets across very well is the raw sense of inexorability that the zombies propose. Hordes, literal hordes of them spill over every barrier, overwhelm every defense, pouring like raging torrents down streets and over walls. A particularly excellent segment midway through the film leads our hero(es) in a running battle against a tide of zombies in the Old City of Jerusalem, overwhelming every barrier in their path and consuming the IDF as they go. I've always privately wondered about the logistics of a worldwide zombie contagion, relative to the various weapons humanity has to destroy one another, but this particular plague was able to convince me of the viability, given the evidence on-hand.

But the real triumph of World War Z is its tone. Other than Pitt, the movie is mostly populated by unknowns and character actors such as David Morse (of the Hurt Locker and Green Mile), Fana Mokoena (of Hotel Rawanda), Peter Capaldi (of In the Thick of it) and Pierfrancesco Favino (of a whole bunch of assorted stuff). Without exception, every single one of them plays the material sermon-straight, professional men and women doing professional work. Particularly good is unknown Daniella Kertesz, who plays an IDF soldier picked up by Pitt almost by accident, and who accompanies him through the rest of the film largely for lack of any other option. A lesser movie would have presented this situation as one of romantic tension or some such comic/tension-relaxing relief. This movie, exhaustively-paced as it is, and understanding that global catastrophes do not tend to permit such distractions. Yet neither does it seem like the movie is shortchanging us on character (unlike last week's Man of Steel). Instead the job of characterization is so well done through limited time and dialogue, and the characters themselves act with such reason, decision, and competence, all without seeming wooden, that the movie wisely trusts the audience to fill the blanks in themselves as it rolls through to the next sequence.


Things Havoc disliked: World War Z had a hellish production history to it, and seems to have come into being thanks mostly to a single-minded effort by Brad Pitt himself. Insofar as development hell movies go, this is one of the better, but the signs of the rushed production still linger. Many of the scenes from the trailer appear only in truncated form in the final movie, with obvious ADR changes and sudden drops. The editing mostly keeps up, preventing the film from becoming a mess, but there's still a few lingering issues that still seem a bit off. An early subplot with a Hispanic family that takes Pitt's family in during the initial stages of the emergency seems to be dropped in a rather perfunctory manner (albeit one that does make sense), and I had a few questions as to the UN's use of resources in shipping such a small group of people from ship to shore and seemingly back again. Nothing enormous though.

There's also the question of the last third or so of the film, where the movie shifts a bit from action-suspense to straight suspense, to the point where it comes about as close to a horror movie as I like to go. Don't get me wrong, the transition is both logically consistent and extremely effective, but it does render the overall flow of the film somewhat uneven, wherein the big action beats all come in the first half, and the slow, laborious stuff is saved for the end.


Final Thoughts: All that said, I don't want to give the wrong impression here. World War Z is, despite all my expectations, an excellent film, arguably the best zombie film I've ever seen, and certainly in the conversation for that title with the other shining examples of the genre (Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later). Despite all the nightmares that attended getting it to theaters, the end result is a pounding, tense, relentless action-thriller, bereft of the cliches that so mire the genre and fully cognizant of the spirit (if not the letter) of the book it was based upon. Those who go into it expecting anything resembling the source material will be disappointed, as ultimately they should have expected to be. The original book, while amazing, was patently unfilmable in any format other than a 12-hour Ken Burns-style documentary. But leaving the burden of source aside, what we are left with is an incredibly tightly-made film, crafted with care despite the chaos, one far better than I had anticipated it being.

In a summer season characterized thus far with nothing but disappointment and mediocrity, this was the last place I expected to find excellence. But when you see as many movies as I do, you learn not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Final Score: 8/10

[General Havoc]

White House Down

Alternate Title: Roland Emmerich vs. Monuments, Round XIV

One sentence synopsis: A would-be Secret Service agent must save the President of the United States from an army of mercenaries and an evil conspiracy.


Things Havoc liked: You really have to take Roland Emmerich as you find him. A lot of people don't care for his films, and sometimes I'm among them, but there's something almost cloyingly appealing about his utter disregard for such things as restraint, good taste, and comprehensible plot. There are those who find his work indistinguishable with Michael Bay's, and yet I feel there's more to him than Bay's shocking, borderline-racist furrows dug through the childhood of my generation (of course given Bay's last film, perhaps that's true of both of them). Though he tends to oscillate between "pretty bad" and "mediocre", there are good films on Emmerich's resume, including Stargate, Independence Day, and Universal Soldier (shut up, I liked that one). And overall, his movies have never had that quality of aggressive, contemptuous spite for their audience that Bay's atrocities have had. Indeed, if anything, Emmerich's films tend to have the opposite problem, sugar-infused doses of America-Rocks patriotism, and sunny faith in the power of "real American heroes" sufficient to make Rush Limbaugh pine for Al Jazeera. A strange thing to see, perhaps, from an extremely left wing, openly-gay German transplant, but there we have it.

In White House Down, Emmerich returns to themes that he clearly is enamored of, specifically lots of explosions involving major national landmarks, strategically placed to cover massive, cavernous plot holes with which the script is liberally well supplied. As movies like this require an everyman-cum-badass to work, this one supplies us with Channing Tatum, an Afghanistan veteran who is looking to join the US Secret Service, and whose daughter Emily (Joey King) is distant from him due to his being an unreliable father. If it sounds like you've heard this all before it's because you have, but Tatum, honestly, handles the material better than it deserves. His Bruce Willis impression isn't perfect, and he seems a bit too milquetoast at the beginning for someone who will be slaying numbers of armed men with knives by the climax, but he carries the action weight well enough, and never stoops to doing things that are overtly stupid or playing the material wrong. A better turn is provided by his counterpart in this action-buddy romp, Jamie Foxx, here playing the President of the United States.

Yes, this is a movie wherein the President of the United States teams up with Channing Tatum to defeat evil, and frankly, this is the best idea the film has. Movies like this usually either star the President as his own action hero (ala Air Force One), or use the President as a Macguffin/hostage occasionally called upon to deliver wise speeches and otherwise await rescue (ala XXX 2). This movie makes the President one half of a buddy action movie, an idea that really shouldn't work, and yet kind of does. Foxx, playing President James Sawyer, stops just short of a Barack Obama impression, and handles the notion of being the President thrown into his own action movie surprisingly well. Some of his wise and forethoughted political speeches fall flat (it's not easy to compete with the real Obama's oratory), but his conversations with Tatum and with the evildoers sound by and large like the kinds of conversations that real Presidents might have with real people. The movie wisely allows Tatum to handle most of the action work, letting the President get his own hands dirty only when absolutely necessary, and lets him make the right decisions throughout the crisis, even when that means leaving the Secret Service Agent behind so that he can escape, or refusing to give in to hostage blackmail when there are nuclear missile codes on the line.

But if you think that a buddy action flick starring Channing Tatum and the President is a ludicrous concept, then boy, you are not ready for some of the shit that happens in this film. A sequence midway through that involves the President being chased around the white house lawn in a bulletproof limousine by armored humvees firing miniguns is so absurd and ridiculous that it actually becomes wickedly funny, something I think was intentional, as it soon results in the President of the United States taking a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher to blow up his pursuers while under minigun fire, all while tanks and RPGs duel in the background. There is no way to play material like this straight, and yet the film doesn't dive into the excesses of stupid, offensive, comic relief crap that comprises half of your average Michael Bay film. Instead we have what feels like an intentional throwback to mid-late 90s action movies, complete with one-liners (some of whom are actually pretty good), hyperkinetic action, and the usual tropes that one comes to expect in these sorts of things (bad guys with wildly varying aiming skills, silencers and missiles working in ways other than reality, etc...).


Things Havoc disliked: WOW is this movie stupid. Stupid beyond all belief. Stupid to the point wherein you start to wonder if major supporting characters are in on the conspiracy based solely on the fact that they seem unwilling to act with any rational thought. Nothing about this movie makes the slightest shred of sense when even the most basic light of common sense and reason. I started listing nitpicks from the very first line in the film, and never stopped, until at length I was risking death from asphyxiation, being unable to take a breath for all the inanities on display. Not only does nothing in this movie (silencers, rocket launchers, tanks, helicopters, missiles, machine guns, computers, hacking) work the way it does in reality, but every single person in this movie who is not either the President or Channing Tatum is a complete idiot, especially the entirety of the United States' military, police forces, and government. Confronted with a hostage situation wherein terrorists who have stormed the White House have not only begun killing hostages on live television, but are threatening to hack into nuclear codes and end the world, and in possession of assurances that the President of the United States is free, but trapped in the White House, the officials in question decide to pull back their thousands of troops and armored vehicles from the White House in favor of a helicopter-raid with fifteen men into the teeth of the surface-to-air missiles they know for a fact to be emplaced on the roof.

I could go on for hours here about the stupidities in this film. Not only are we graced by "movie hacking", (a hacker manages to use the White House situation room to hack both NORAD and nuclear submarines, things I normally would not assume were connected to the internet), but the men crewing those aforementioned facilities are powerless to stop the hacker from firing nuclear weapons at largely anything he wants to. But not only is the movie's plot stupid, but half the characters are utterly useless. Front and center among the useless people is Maggie Gyllenhaal, an actress I have never liked and continue not to. The reason I do not like Gyllenhaal, here as in other films, is that she cannot act, turning every role she plays into that of an overgrown 15-year old girl throwing a tantrum. Here she is intended to be the Deputy Director of the Secret Service, and yet comes across like a a caricature of an out-of-touch hippie, whining to the men trying to prevent a nuclear apocalypse in the middle of an armed terrorist assault that has killed hundreds that the President "didn't believe in violence". Jason Clarke meanwhile, coming off his excellent performance in Zero Dark Thirty, here plays the exact same character, save without the nuance, wit, intelligence, or... well... character. Instead he's simply an unspecified special forces operative who wants "revenge" for some covert thing that happened... you know it doesn't even matter. The villains are all over the map here, some driven by revenge for wrongs done to them, some by racism and right wing radicalism, some by money, and some by shadowy connections to the evil military-industrial complex, a force that is, of course, at the root of everything evil in the world. Indeed, this movie's sense of politics is so shallow that it renders the President's 'wise speeches' concerning his plans for mid-east peace (plans that the evil terrorists want to destroy, of course), sound like the sort of grade-school analysis about peace that Republicans like to claim Democrats secretly believe. Apparently the only enemy of peace in the Middle East is the evil military-industrial complex, and if those people were prevented from forcing war on the world, the denizens of the Middle East, who have no intrinsic grievances whatsoever, will all join hands in peace and friendship. Automatically.

And don't get me started about the film's ending. Emmerich's movies have always been saccharine exercises in uber-patriotic flag waving (The Patriot was his work), but I've not seen anything this blatant in a long time. The entire end of the movie is a non-stop parade of "I believe in America" cliches, culminating in a literal flag-waving sequence narrated by the national media, who praises, in real time, the "courage" of the flag-waver. I'm a proud American with no sympathy for those who denigrate the country, but there is a hard limit to the levels of diabetic "oo-rah"-ness that I can tolerate, and this movie exceeds those limits with gusto.


Final Thoughts: I wanted to like this movie, as I have long wanted to like both Channing Tatum and Roland Emmerich. Particularly in a year wherein I was forced to praise Michael Bay, I was hoping to like this movie, and yet I could not. There is a level of stupid I am prepared to tolerate, particularly when necessary for the plot premise, but I do not go to movies to turn my brain off, and when the world of the film clashes so egregiously with the worlds of reality or common sense, I just can't take it anymore. It was not an awful movie by any means, nor did I experience great pain in watching it, but in terms of mediocre action flicks long on explosions and short on rational thought, this one is a perfect candidate for the dictionary example.

Final Score: 4.5/10

[Lys]

World War Z is, despite all my expectations, an excellent film, arguably the best zombie film I've ever seen, and certainly in the conversation for that title with the other shining examples of the genre (Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later).

Heresy! The best zombie film ever is Zombieland, and if you haven't seen it that's double heresy!

[General Havoc]

I confess, I'd forgotten Zombieland. I did say that World War Z was arguably the best. Zombieland is also in that conversation.

[General Havoc]

Much Ado About Nothing

Alternate Title: See Above

One sentence synopsis: Conspiracies abound to to unite and divide pairs of lovers during revelries at a villa owned by a mighty Lord.


Things Havoc liked: There are a lot of stupidities floating around concerning the career of Joss Whedon. I've heard the most absurd of charges made against him, that he's a hack, or a sexist, or some kind of monster. Where he gets all this hate, I don't pretend to know. Perhaps it's mere backlash against his fans, or perhaps some people are still sore about Alien Resurrection. Whatever the groupthink position is, I've long been a great champion of Whedon's work, particularly after his incredible double-triumph last year of Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers. As such, when I discovered that he had decided to turn his hand to, of all things, Shakespeare, I was sufficiently intrigued to give it a shot. You don't want to know my other options.

Whedon, like Werner Herzog, Woody Allen, or Christopher Guest, is one of those directors who has a "stable" of actors he returns to again and again, and like those other directors, he does so for the best of reasons. As such we should not be surprised to find that the two main roles (arguably) of Benedict and Beatrice are here played by Whedonesque regulars Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker (of Buffy and Angel), both of whom, it must be admitted, turn in quite good performances as the two archetypical will-they-or-won't-they rivals/lovers, who spend the first third of the play sniping wittily at one another before spending the last two falling in love. These are not easy roles to play, as the plot demands that they be both sharp, witty people of certain dignity, and also that they fall for one of the most transparent matchmaking schemes in the history of romantic fiction. Yet Acker and Denisof, despite a bit of unnecessary slapstick during their "eavesdropping" scenes, manage to pull it off quite well, delivering the sense of a lengthy history between the two, studded with failed romances and rivalries. The sense is that these two know each other far too well, and so when the plot requires that they fall in love, they know just how to do it.

But this is hardly the end to Whedon's stable-casting, indeed practically every major role is filled by one of his pet actors. Among them are Firefly's Nathan Fillion and Sean Maher, playing respectively Dogberry the Constable (the fool of the play), and Don John the Bastard (the villain of the play). Fillion in particular is awesome (as always), mugging for the camera just enough while retaining a sense of injured pride and displaying manifest, gross incompetence at all times. Maher meanwhile makes the most of a bit part (once played by Keanu Reeves no less), quietly slimy and assholish largely for the sake of being assholish. Also from the stable is Clark Gregg, otherwise known as Agent Coulson, here playing Leonato, Lord of the Manor at which this all takes place. Gregg has a suitably fatherly (and semi-alcoholic) charm to him the whole way through, just the right note for the host of the mad party.

Whedon shot this film at his home in Southern California, shooting in black and white and modern dress, a decision I'll go into later. Most of the film is shot with handheld cameras, giving it a certain rustic, low budget feel, but never cheap, and the film is well-buttressed by a low-key score that knows when to shoulder the weight and when to leave the characters to act by themselves. Whedon's cinematographic instincts have never been in question, not even from his detractors, and so this movie, like all his others, is extremely well-shot, and gets the maximum amount of work from a limited space and set. There are even a few new ideas here that I (who am by no means a Shakespeare expert), noticed and liked enough to laugh at. One particularly problematical line that has bedeviled Much Ado since its inception (involving a racial steriotype no longer acceptable in today's era) is handled beautifully with a single bit of cinematographic winking that acknowledges the line as what it is in context.


Things Havoc disliked: It's not fair to criticize a movie for its source material, but it's hard to separate the two in the case of a Shakespeare film, as we are not watching an adaptation rewritten by a screenwriter, but an actual performance of the play itself, laid down on celluloid as Shakespeare wrote it. And thus it's impossible to discuss this movie without mentioning that Much Ado About Nothing is a very silly play.

It was a silly play when Kenneth Branaugh did his famous adaptation in 1993, and it is a silly play now, and the problem with Whedon's version is that I don't think he realizes just how silly it is. Yes, I know, Shakespeare is timeless and his stories are the immortal truths of the human condition, etc. The fact remains that Much Ado About Nothing is a play about a number of noble Lords and important men arriving at the villa of an important grandee and immediately reverting to the behavior of 12-year-old girls, playing matchmaker with one another and giggling in a giddy fashion about who they can set up with who, all while the villain, recently captured in rebellion against his brother and liege lord, can think of no better revenge than tricking someone out of their wedding. It also involves such charmingly period concepts as one woman being wooed by proxy and "given" to another man, only to be accused of adultery on her wedding day and disowned by her own father. Perhaps this was normal behavior in the 16th Century, I don't know, but it is not normal behavior now, at least not in Southern California, and by setting the play in modern dress in a modern context (the actors are dressed in business suits and sunglasses, and packing guns), we are apparently expected to just forget this. And that's simply not easy when the actors in question are asking to be taken seriously.

On top of that, not all of Whedon's stable runs the race of their lives this time. Reed Diamond (Dollhouse) sounds and acts like an overgrown manchild in the role of Don Pedro, supposedly the most powerful Lord present, but one who instead acts like a spoiled eleven-year-old trying to buy friends with his new toys. But even he isn't as bad as Fran Kranz (Cabin in the Woods) and Jillian Morgheze, as Claudio and Hero, our two "lovers" who must be united by trickery, divided by more trickery, and then united again by yet further trickery. I loved Kranz in Cabin in the Woods, but he's grossly miscast here, coming across like a frightened teenager unsure of what to say to anyone, while Hero, a fairly thankless character to begin with, moves through the film like a wilting violet, content to let everyone else make all the decisions. Yes, this is probably as the characters were intended to be played, but if you're going to set the film in modern times, then you have some responsibility to set the film in a modern context as well.


Final Thoughts: I feel bad here, because while Much Ado About Nothing is ultimately a mediocre film, there isn't exactly a lot I can suggest to fix it. Branaugh's version, while no masterpiece, managed to elicit more emotional response by having better actors, period dress, and full, vibrant color, so perhaps there's that. The experience of viewing the movie is not unpleasant, and extreme aficionados of Shakespeare's comedies will probably appreciate the unusual fidelity that Whedon's script retains relative to the source material, but for the rest of us, there simply isn't that much here to warrant a look. Perhaps it's uncouth of me to criticize the movie for flaws that really reside in the play, but the reason that stipulation usually applies is because filmmakers are usually making a different product than the book or play the work is based on. When you make a decision to stick to the source this closely, then we have little else to go on but the source itself, and in this case, that source is not enough to maintain a modern film.

Final Score: 5.5/10

[White Haven]

While it can be unfair to criticize a movie for its source material, it's not at all unfair to criticize those involved in a movie for involving themselves with shaky source material to begin with. Once they're stuck in, sure, make the best of it, but I can't help but sigh when I see good talent thrown into the wind.

[General Havoc]

Pacific Rim

Alternate Title: Godzilla vs. Voltron

One sentence synopsis: The world turns to enormous battle-robots piloted by pairs of memory-linked pilots to defend the planet against gargantuan aquatic monsters.


Things Havoc liked: Pacific Rim has one of the best opening sequences I've seen since Watchmen, a rapid-fire series of establishing shots done over narration that effortlessly enmeshes you with the premises of this world. In less than five minutes, the film grounds you in the premise of its world, introducing the alien monsters that come from the sea, as well as the giant robots which fight them. But more importantly, the sequence is studded with wonderfully inventive shots that explain the actual effect these momentous changes have on society, the economy, the government, grounding the audience in the movie's world in less than five minutes, all while giving us snapshots of the awesomeness to come.

Directed and produced by Guillermo del Toro, the great Mexican fantasy filmmaker who last gave us the Hellboy series and the inspired Pan's Labyrinth, Pacific Rim is an unabashed love letter to two staples of Japanese cinema and culture since the end of World War 2: The giant robot movie, and the Kaiju (monster) movie. The premise, a transparent excuse to cause robots and giant monsters to battle one another within major cities, is hardly the first to decide to do so, but it might well have the strongest pedigree behind it. Unlike Roland Emmerich's Godzilla, del Toro has no shrinking archaeologists to clutter up the screen, preferring instead to leap directly into the world of robot pilots and bad motherfuckers, front and center of whom is the incomparable Idris Elba, for once allowed to play a role in his native English accent. Elba plays (I'm not making this up) General Stacker Pentecost, an officer with a name so ridiculous that it is actually awesome. The character is the usual stern commander, yet Elba seems to be channeling Samuel L. Jackson's turn as Nick Fury by blending a role that could easily have been the "pain-in-the-ass CO" with that of the "elder badass", a combination he is exceedingly good at producing. Yet believe it or not, Elba's character does not have the most absurd name in the movie. That award belongs to Ron Perlman's Hannibal Chau (yes, you read that right), a smuggler and black marketeer, who makes his living dealing in monster parts and organs, who despite limited screentime, manages to camp it up in his usual style. His character moreover represents another piece of a larger world, one that was hinted at in the opening credits, a world accustomed to sights as absurd as giant monsters and robots, and making the best of it.


Things Havoc disliked: Yeah, sorry guys, that's all I got.

Giant robot and Godzilla movies, honestly any sci fi SFX extravaganzas, work not because the effects are awesome, but because they offer a sense of scale. This is the reason why monuments play such a big role in the Emmerich-style disaster movies, and why Godzilla is always smashing up Tokyo in the old Toho films. To tell us that a robot is gigantic is meaningless, we must see that it is gigantic by comparing it with things that we know the scale of. Only then can we properly modulate and gauge what we are looking at by comparing it to our everyday lives. Unfortunately, for all the sturm und drang of the many, many battle sequences in this film, only twice does the movie bother to give us scale. Once is in Hong Kong, midway through the film, where we get to watch a robot beating a monster by using a cargo ship as a club, while the other is a flashback to a battle in Tokyo, seen entirely from the ground-level eyes of a little girl. These two sequences are awesome. The others however, all take place against the backdrop of the open ocean, distant skylines, or indiscriminate ruin, meaning that the robots and monsters in question might as well be five feet tall for all we can tell. This baffling decision robs the fights of any weight, as we might as well be watching guys in suits of armor battling guys in suits of foam and felt, as in the olden days.

And unfortunately, the non-battle parts of the film do not provide succor for the film. The leads here are unknown Charlie Hunnam and Babel's Rinko Kikuchi, playing respectively ace maverick pilot Raleigh and sheltered rookie pilot Mako. The description you just read, unfortunately, covers basically everything you need to know about these characters, and neither one are up to the task of elevating themselves beyond the usual cliches and boring PG-chaste will-they-or-won't-they dance of a thousand other films (to say nothing of the task of acting alongside Idris Elba). I realize that we're here for the giant robots and all, but I cannot fathom for the life of me why these two were even cast. They share no chemistry, elevate their characters not a whit, and provide nothing but padding between action scenes. Though in fairness, their padding is not so blatant as that of the other robot pilots, who are either useless (the Russians and Chinese) or bullshit antagonists in the Iceman-Top-Gun vein, only stupider (the Australians... oh god... the Australians). One would imagine with the fate of the world on the line, that people would have better things to do than get in one anothers' faces and recite clenched-jaw cliches about how someone is "not good enough" or "too reckless". It's enough that one begins to wonder where the homoerotic volleyball montage has gone.

And I'm sorry, I know this is one of those turn-your-brain-off plotless popcorn movies, but the decisions that went into this film make no goddamn sense. A major component of the movie is the fact that the giant robots must be piloted by two pilots synced together via some kind of memory-sharing technology, who then use AR overlays and robotic mimicry to control the bot. Unfortunately, what this means is that unlike in Iron Man, where we can just assume that Tony Stark IS his armor, we are cutting every five seconds to the "cockpit" of the robot, wherein the two pilots are performing synchronized Sentai martial-arts poses while strapped to a gurney. This looks stupid, irrespective of how you frame it, and it makes the actual robot's moves look stupid by association. On top of that, the concept makes no sense. We have robots today who can walk, jump, negotiate terrain, and even dance on anything from two to eight legs, automatically. You're telling me there's no way for the pilots of these robots to simply pilot the damn things without looking like rejected extra footage from Legend of the Rangers? I've piloted virtual mechwarriors from my home PC that had as much range of motion and capability as these robots evidence, for god's sake. Why the synchro-tech?

So much, and I haven't even begun to talk about the stupid scientists' subplot (an overabundance of comic relief is a good barometer of a bad film, I find), one of whom is a blithering idiot and the other of whom is a hyper-British blithering idiot. I haven't talked about the uproariously stupid relationship that this movie has with such concepts as fluid dynamics, nuclear bombs, and general physics. I haven't talked about the terrible score, a boring, visually-detached generic "techno-badass" soundtrack, made all the more baffling by the pedigree of its composer, Ramin Djawadi, a man whose credits include Iron Man and Game of Thrones. So much to talk about, and so little space, and yet every time I sit down to think about the movie, the list just gets longer.


Final Thoughts: Look, I understand how movies like this are supposed to work, and that I'm a critic who hates everything and doesn't understand the masterpiece and can't have any fun and blah blah blah. I'm sorry, but no. This movie is a summer blockbuster like a hundred other summer blockbusters, and judging it purely on those terms, it pales by comparison to even the other blockbusters of this summer like Iron Man 3 or Man of Steel, neither of which, I will remind you, were masterpieces. The movie's bumbling, sleepwalking plot, brainless, placeholder characters, and baffling, momentum-shattering decisions all combine, ultimately, to make a film that is watchable, but only barely. Maybe in a movie that had turned the camp to 11, this would have been less bad, but Pacific Rim is relentlessly serious in tone, except when it's not, except when it really is. After a certain point, you just stop caring what the director was thinking.

Del Toro has made great movies in the past. God willing, he will make great movies in the future. But in the present in which we live, all he has made is a giant mess.

Final Score: 4/10

[White Haven]

Clearly what this movie needed was a homoerotic mecha-based volleyball montage. The net may be slightly larger than regulation-sized.

[Steve]

Seeing GoT mentioned again alongside a mecha fiction made me realize.... a BattleTech series on HBO produced to similar standards would be epically awesome. You still have the squabbling noble houses, potential for debauchery as well as straight up romance, and epic robot fights. Hell, even the potential for space dogfights with aerospace fighters. What's not to like?

You'd even get the surprise ending to a wedding again! And different from the one in GoT to boot!

[LadyTevar]

Havoc, I diagree with you, and about the music in particular. I enjoyed the music, and the recognizable themes played for each robot as it appeared on the screen. This was best shown in the fight between the Chinese and Russian mechs and the bat-Kaiju.

The other disagreement is the scale. Perhaps you might go see the movie again, so you can notice all the shots of helicopters flying around the Mecha. There are men dwarfed by Gipsy's steel plates as they work on her. Cars crushed, and yes, a container ship used as a baseball bat, after using the shipping containers like a fist holding a roll of quarters. I had no problem at all with scale, which unlike some anime did not change size for dramatic purpose. The joys of CGI animation, keeping things in scale to each other.


Now, Steve? I would watch BattleTech: Successor Houses. The Liao alone would out-do the Lannisters in crazy. Kurita's Dragon would draw the Japanophiles. House Marek has a corner on the backstabbers, while Davion and Steiner are dancing court on each other. Then you have the REAL powerbrokers, ComStar, with all the trappings of the Catholic Church and all the dirty political games of Medici Italy.

[General Havoc]

Tev, I understand why people liked the film, or at least I think I do, but I stand by my position here. The music in this film is noticeably poor, which is a shock, as even a bad soundtrack is usually capable of just disappearing into the background. Here it sounds almost like the techno version of vaudeville. Rinky-dink music over what should be weighty stuff. Even the sequence you mentioned, with the Chinese and Russian and other robots getting into the act, consisted of nothing more than Chinese organ music followed by generic Russian chorus singing, whenever one robot or another is fighting. No effort is made (or at least none came through to me) to match the music with what is actually going on on screen, the beats of the fight, and whatnot. It's the most basic of matchings, chinese robot=chinese music, etc... And worse yet, the rest of the time, the music is just horribly mismatched to the sequence in question, barely managing to rise to the level of undetectable.

As to the scale, all those things are well and good when the robots are at rest, or under construction, or being transported. But the point of the robots is to fight, and there's no sense of scale during the fight sequences, save for a few cases. It's not that the robots aren't shown to be gigantic out of action, they are, it's that the robots are not also shown to be gigantic within the fights, or at least within the majority of them. The issue isn't that there's no establishment, it's that without the constant reenforcement of scale, you begin to regard the robots subconsciously as smaller than they are supposed to be, as they move with the fluidity of smaller objects, and their impacts, given the scale of the enemies they fight, do not have the weight one expects. It does no good to intellectually know that the robot is twelve stories tall if your eye is telling you that two human-sized creatures are doing battle in knee-deep water.

[frigidmagi]

Reading Havoc's review, I'm thinking they maybe should have gone another way




Might as well go for broke.

[LadyTevar]

Havoc, the PacRim love can be summed up in MEGAS XLR's opening theme: "WE DIG GIANT ROBOTS!!!"


Still... I think you have been watching too many "weighty" movies and gone Siskel/Ebert on us. Or one of those other critics who has forgotten how to sit back and just enjoy a film LOL

[frigidmagi]

You know I don't think that's fair Tev. He's made it very clear that his objections have nothing to do with the subject matter or genre. It's in how it is presented and the fact that from Havoc's view the writing and scoring is lazy, among other complaints. Dismissing his viewpoint as being "stuck up" does him and yourself a disservice. This is the guy who loved Real Steel after all, clearly it's not the robots holding him back.

'It's giant robots' isn't an excuse to be lazy, if anything it's the opposite...

Look, most people look down on scifi because of the *shrug* It's a movie about XYZ, just have fun and don't worry about it. Which means bluntly if you have any real business making these movies, you should bring your damn A game and not be lazy. If we want people to take this as a real story telling event, it should act like one.

I'll be blunt, I love Sci-Fi, I love monsters, I love giant robots. So the blockbuster western coming out of giant robots and monsters should show respect and give me a good story, good fights, and good characterization. There's nothing wrong with kid's shows and movies, but if you're not making one, don't treat like it like one.

I'm not saying Pacific Rim is any of the above because I haven't seen it yet. But I don't think it fair to hand wave away what Havoc is saying.

[General Havoc]

Tev, my rebuttal will be found in the next review.

[Steve]

Ah, Megas. I stumbled upon a crossover fic on SB recently called "Reapers Dig Giant Robots". Yes, Megas XLR/Mass Effect. I have been trumped in crazy crossover concepts.

Back on topic, my work schedule and finances forbid seeing movies very much, so I enjoy seeing GenHav's reviews while suspending my own judgement until I see a film.

[Cynical Cat]

To reinforce Havoc's point there was a teaser of Godzilla at Comicon and the teaser was all about scale.

http://io9.com/we-saw-a-glimpse-of-godz ... -851082801

[frigidmagi]

Okay, a buddy offered to cover my movie ticket, so I went and saw Pacific Rim. I liked it more than Havoc did, but frankly I found he made good points. I'll more into detail once I eat.