Atomic Blonde (2017)

Between Atomic Blonde and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, I’m really digging the “retro spy” genre – and I’m including throwback spy flicks like Kingsman. There’s something very satisfying about the technological limits placed on the story, which must proceed without the advantages of cell phones and Wi-Fi; usually that careful crafting leads to a more cerebral script – something I always appreciate – and ends up having a trickle-down effect on the rest of the creative process. Going into the theater, I hadn’t known that Atomic Blonde was a period piece, nor had I realized quite how much I’d like the film – both of which were welcome surprises.

It’s 1989. The Berlin Wall is about to come down, and MI6 sends Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) behind the Iron Curtain to find a list of operatives stolen from a dead agent. Berlin station chief Percival (James McAvoy) helps her into East Berlin and enlists her help with East German defector Spyglass (Eddie Marsan), who’s stolen the list. While Lorraine looks for the truth amid a dalliance with French operative Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella), she begins to wonder who she can trust.

I was exhausted after Atomic Blonde – not because the movie was overlong or boring to the point that my hindquarters went numb, but because I’d had to keep up with the film’s sneaky storytelling while enduring the intense and enervating action sequences. Atomic Blonde is not a film that goes for easy moments; none of it looks effortless, and the audience has to work just as hard as Lorraine to discover the identity of Satchel, a traitor in the ranks of MI6. But at least we have the good fortune not to get in the middle of those fight scenes, because they’re incredibly vicious.

Director David Leitch has done a fair job of staging his action scenes like single takes; there’s some digital trickery, to be sure, but in the moment it looks as though these long fights are all done in a straight cinematic line. We’ve got two long and arresting fights staged in apartment buildings – one in the living room, one on the stairs – that most other directors might have done in forty-cuts-per-second shakycam, but Leitch’s patient attention to the intensity of the fights allows them to exhaust the moviegoer and the characters, whose breathy pauses and stumbles make the combat even more real. Brownie points are due to the storytellers who devised Lorraine’s creative uses of an extension cord, a record player, and a doorframe.

In the interminable wait for Bond 25 and the ever-present question of whether Daniel Craig will suit up once or twice more, Charlize Theron proves herself a capable “Lady Bond,” although that does a disservice to Lorraine Broughton. There are certain similarities – their capabilities in close combat, their equal dexterity in the art of seduction – but Lorraine almost feels more of a piece with Bryan Mills in Taken, possessed of a “certain set of skills” that make her unstoppable, even as the odds against her increase. She’s more vulnerable than Mills, though, emotionally and physically; her stake in this fight is personal, and her fling with Delphine seems more genuine than any Bond girl’s. Moreover, those moments where she picks herself off the floor and continues to fight, even as she’s bruised and short of breath, give the character a smartly-crafted strength.

The soundtrack to the film is a smashing mix tape of 80s tracks, and the cinematography is as unforgivingly fluorescent as I imagine the 1980s would have been. It all adds up to a nicely unified experience, where the stark white lights of an interrogation room echo the neon pipes of a Berlin hotel room. Amid it all, there is the brainy sense of needing to keep up and the fervent hope that, as the credits roll, this won’t be the last time we see Lorraine Broughton. I’m ready to enroll her in the same camp as Wonder Woman, welcome alternatives to the same-old/same-old dudes who have run these genres for fifty years. Roll on the new, but please give me a moment to catch my breath.

Atomic Blonde is rated R for “sequences of strong violence, language throughout, and some sexuality/nudity.” Directed by David Leitch. Written by Kurt Johnstad. Based on the graphic novel The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart. Starring Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, Sofia Boutella, Eddie Marsan, John Goodman, and Toby Jones.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Upon receiving word of his wife’s death and the army marching on his gates, Macbeth famously lamented that life itself was nothing more than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” I return to this quotation every once in a while because it is, as so much of Shakespeare’s dialogue, incredibly poetic and deftly precise in expressing something ineffable about the human condition. And I can’t help feeling that Macbeth might have had a similar – if pronouncedly less fatalistic – reaction to George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, which has heretofore been hailed as one of the greatest action films of the past year, if not of all time.

To which I have to ask – did we all see the same movie? Because I didn’t see a movie that merits being labeled the #1 film of 2015, as more than a dozen critics have done. The movie I saw was a tale competently told by a very capable director, full of so much sound and fury they put it in the title and the name of a main character, ultimately signifying very little beyond its surface. It is far from distressingly poor, but it is certainly underwhelming after all of the hype.

Carrying a negligible connection to the Mel Gibson trilogy of yesteryear, the film finds the eponymous Max (Tom Hardy) along for the ride when Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) stages a breakout for the wives of warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). What ensues is a chaotic, frenetic, and seemingly endless chase across the barren wasteland of the apocalypse.

First of all, I don’t mind that the film is an extended chase sequence. As I said at the top of the review, the action scenes are very competently directed, and I give Miller a tip of the hat for managing to do much of it with practical effects and to keep a suitable level of tension even when the scenes become a tad protracted. (Kudos also to Junkie XL, who wears his Hans Zimmer homage on his sleeve with a score that smacks of Man of Steel.) The problem I have with the action sequences is that there really are too many of them at the same level of intensity to the point where I became desensitized fairly quickly. I wasn’t bored, although I did feel a certain languorous sensation after seeing someone run over by enormous tires for the ninth time. Miller has a wonderful bag of tricks in the first few “episodes” of car chases, but as the film continues to do the same stunts Fury Road loses something of its original feeling.

The film has a very specific rhythm, episodic in its approach to narrative repetition but ultimately cyclical because, yes, at one point in the chase they do turn around and head back the way they came, which maybe feels more like a metaphor for the film than Miller intended. We’re driving and we’re stopping, then we’re driving and we’re stopping, and by about the third go-round of this pattern Fury Road felt a bit like its own greatest-hits compilation.

Two comparisons here, the first of which is to the superlative Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, particularly the tank chase sequence. The reason that sequence stands out is because it’s unique; it does a number of things that the film hadn’t done and wouldn’t do again, and it does them all particularly well with a fantastic sense of peril even though we know there’s really no chance that Indy will meet a crunchy fate. Imagine, though, a film comprised of four or five tank sequences, turned up way past eleven, and with Tom Hardy’s monosyllabic grunts in lieu of the charisma of Harrison Ford, and you have something approximately like Fury Road. Again, there’s something to enjoy there, but I’m flabbergasted at the number of critics who put this at #1 of all of 2015.

Next, Pacific Rim. Now I know what you’re going to say – “This again?” Well, yes, and Mad Max: Fury Road is decidedly not Pacific Rim, thank heavens. But it does many things in common with Pacific Rim, which I find problematic in terms of getting me engaged as an audience member. Fury Road’s characters are largely archetypical, compared to Pacific Rim’s gross stereotypical figures. You have Max, who’s the good guy because he’s the good guy; Furiosa, the Strong Female Character whose motivations are to do the right thing because It’s The Right Thing; and Immortan Joe, the evil one-percenter who’s bad because he’s Bad. (Compare to Pacific Rim’s cliché Mako Mori, a Japanese woman skilled in the art of war to avenge her family, or the pigeonholed effete British scientist with a limp.) What I think resonates with Fury Road more than Pacific Rim, though both are essentially onomatopoetic, is that primal storytelling which relies on archetypes (the same reason The Force Awakens struck a chord). It is, however, extremely thin archetypal storytelling.

Why is it, though, that I felt physically enervated at the end of Whiplash but otherwise emotionless when the credits rolled on Fury Road? Again, I wasn’t as invested in Max and Furiosa as some of my friends and fellow critics have become. It was very much a sense of, “Oh, that’s it?” Quite honestly, I got quantitatively the same emotional rush from the trailer for Fury Road as I did from the full film, in about a single percentage of the time. It left me feeling a bit empty, as if Miller had relied on my complicity in the mutually agreed-upon coolness of the film. Yes, things do blow up, and I’m as big a fan of explosions as the next guy (who happens to be my father, in this case), but the charm wears off after the fourteenth car explodes after flipping over an indecent amount of times.

It’s competently made, but let’s not fall over ourselves in praising Mad Max: Fury Road. There is something very alchemical when a movie works and when it doesn’t, and for me Fury Road just wasn’t the transcendent experience I’d been led to expect. If we can revise a phrase from Shakespeare once more, it’s not exactly much ado about nothing, but it strikes me that Fury Road is a very loud amount of ado about very little.

Mad Max: Fury Road is rated R for “intense sequences of violence throughout, and for disturbing images.” Being that the film is essentially an extended post-apocalyptic car chase, there are numerous explosions and vehicular injuries, including people getting run over by tires. Several characters have what appear to be radiation burns and other deformities. While many of the women wear skimpy outfits throughout the film, one woman is seen fully naked, but from behind and at a great distance.

Prometheus (2012)

Like the titan Prometheus, Ridley Scott is sometimes treated like the man who brought science-fiction fire to the American cinema, if only for his impressive one-two punch of Alien and Blade Runner.  With Prometheus, Scott returns to his roots and, so to speak, mankind’s in a sci-fi epic that finds its protagonists exploring the genesis of man.  But while the scale is epic, the result is somewhat lukewarm, successful on many levels but in other places suffering from its servitude to its own mythology.

Funded by elderly tycoon Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), a team of scientists led by archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) travels to a distant world after disparate hieroglyphics point to humanity’s origins.  In search of “The Engineers,” mysterious beings that may have seeded Earth with the potential for life, Shaw and her colleagues soon discover that their destination is filled with horrors, and that Weyland employees Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) and the android David (Michael Fassbender) have their own agendas.

While Scott protested (perhaps too much) that Prometheus wasn’t quite a prequel to the Alien franchise, he later compromised by conceding that Prometheus was linked to Alien and contained prequel-like elements, insisting all the while that Prometheus needed to be taken on its own terms.  Since I’ve only seen the original once, when I was perhaps too young (indeed, my best memories of the film come from its place in Disney World’s “Great Movie Ride”), I can appreciate Prometheus as its own entity but can’t help recognizing how the movie very nearly falls apart because of its connection to the original series.

Screenwriter Damon Lindelof caught a lot of flak for ending Lost (with Carlton Cuse) without addressing much of the series’ mythology, instead focusing on the characters and their story arcs.  It seems that Lindelof is pulling the same trick here, introducing a mythology which the characters pursue but which the audience never quite comprehends.  Case in point:  the film begins with an Engineer planting the genetic seeds of human DNA on Earth millennia ago, yet the rest of the film abandons this premise in favor of Engineers who want to destroy Earth.  While the audience doesn’t need to be spoon-fed answers (although that happens a few times in the movie, often when characters say “Listen to me” or “You mean to tell me...?”), it’s insulting to the viewer when characters literally leave the confines of the film to seek answers, presumably in a sequel.

But wait! you cry.  Doesn’t it matter more how the characters are affected by their quest for answers?  Well, sure, except in Prometheus characters enter the film with questions and leave it to pursue those same questions, with no discernible development in between.  The only catharsis in the film comes in a last-second jump moment that finally and explicitly concretizes the connection between Prometheus and Alien.  While it’s a recognizable payoff, it’s more Easter egg than satisfying conclusion, as if we’re meant to cheer and not to recognize this isn’t an ending but rather a tease for Prometheus 2.  (A comparison:  it’s the same thing as if The Dark Knight had ended with Batman chasing after The Joker – cut to black – before showing us that Bane was breaking into Wayne Manor at that moment; end credits.  Thank heavens the Nolans are smarter writers than Lindelof.)

It’s unfortunate that Rapace, the ostensible star, has been given so little to do in this and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, her American blockbuster debuts, since she’s probably a very qualified actress (I’ve never seen her Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but have only heard promising things).  Indeed, the only actor who distinguishes himself in the cast is Fassbender, who does fascinating work as David.  While an android is supposedly emotionless and inhuman, Fassbender imbues David with several very subtle characteristics, including his fan-worship of Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia and his burgeoning disdain for his xenophobic (and robophobic) fellow travelers.  He’s a bit like Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, seemingly unfeeling but ultimately saying everything with a twitch as potent as a sob.

All of this would seem to suggest that Prometheus is a terrible movie, downright rubbish with only a Fassbender in the rough to redeem it.  Surprisingly, such isn’t quite the case with Prometheus.  Rather, this is a film that succeeds by being bizarrely compelling, if only as a spectacle.  Much of this is due to Scott’s dexterity as a storyteller; even if the story signifies nothing in the end, it’s told not by an idiot but by a skilled craftsman who knows exactly where to deploy his sound and fury.

If I were to sum up the one emotion I felt during the film, it’s “dread.”  Not dread of a bad movie without a refund, but dread – fear – terror – for the characters I shouldn’t have cared about.  Like a great horror/thriller ought to, Prometheus managed to get me to murmur, “No, no, that’s not good.  Don’t do that” time and time again as, perhaps predictably, the humans make a series of bad choices that leads to their inevitable extermination.  There’s no jump moment to rival the “last supper” scene in the original Alien, although an invasive surgical procedure got me squirming and led the guy two seats over to abandon his place in our row until the worst had passed.

Though I felt cheated by the way I hadn’t been given a full movie (much the same reaction I had to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, the reason I waited to rent Part 2), what prevented me from asking for a refund was that the story, while incomplete, was well-told.  Though Lindelof drops the ball a bit, Scott swoops in for a save and turns Prometheus from a fumble to a field goal (but a touchdown it ain’t).  If nothing else, it's ensured that this will not be the last time you see the world "Alien" on this site.

 Prometheus is rated R “for sci-fi violence including some intense images, and brief language.”  The terrors that await the crew of the ship are not for the faint-hearted, and such terrors include (but are not limited to) (POTENTIAL SPOILERS) entanglement, impalement, asphyxiation, smashing, decapitation, bludgeoning, incineration, and evaporation.  I can’t remember any off-color language, although Idris Elba has a hilarious verbal seduction scene with Charlize Theron.