Oppenheimer (2023)

Last week was the fifteenth anniversary of The Dark Knight. It was a seismic and seminal moment in blockbuster cinema, a sort of coming-of-age for me as a filmgoer and for superhero cinema writ large. It was the movie that made comic book movies a billion-dollar business, and after a decade and a half it hasn’t lost a step. But it also made Christopher Nolan a household name – no mean feat for a director to become ostensibly the auteur star of his own show.
 
Oppenheimer is Nolan’s sixth film since The Dark Knight, which is (for better or worse) the North Star for his entire career. I think you’d be hard-pressed to say that The Dark Knight isn’t still his best film, a perfect diamond absolute of a film, but Oppenheimer is in a way his most ambitious since, precisely because it’s Nolan without his characteristic science-fictional flair, his high concept effects wizardry. It’s still got all his stylistic quirks and puzzle-box structure, but for a director who has been criticized for being impersonal and unemotional, Oppenheimer is a riveting three-hour character study of one of history’s greatest enigmas.
 
Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of American quantum physics and director of the Manhattan Project, which yielded the world’s first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Nolan’s intricate approach to the biopic catches three distinct moments in Oppenheimer’s life – his path to Los Alamos, his 1954 security clearance investigation, and a 1959 Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), an American bureaucrat who frequently butted heads with Oppenheimer.
 
Nolan has cited Oppenheimer as “the most important person who ever lived,” which – coming from one of the most important directors who ever lived – is high praise and certainly fair justification for the man who created Inception to turn his camera toward one particular scientific genius. Nolan has become one of those directors whose decisions (and films) may seem initially inscrutable, but like any good magician (cf. The Prestige) Nolan has a way of hiding his endgame in plain sight, only revealing his purpose at the moment when it best suits him. There are many moments in Oppenheimer that take one’s breath away – the Trinity bomb test certainly is orchestrated that way – but the film’s final exchange of dialogue recontextualizes the film by delivering Nolan’s ultimate thesis.
 
Nolan is both academic and prestidigitarian, technician and artisan, but what’s somewhat surprising about Oppenheimer is the example it sets of Nolan as a friend – of humanity, sure, but of his entire cast of players. Cillian Murphy has been a veteran of Nolan’s company since 2005’s Batman Begins, but his turn as Oppenheimer is a gift any performer would be envious to receive: three hours of, more or less, a one-man show about a living cipher, a man who embodied contradictions and challenged binaries, insisting all the while on neutrality and unreadability. Even his greatest triumph, the creation of the bomb, cannot be rendered in anything but code, as when he tells his wife over the telephone, “Bring the sheets in.”
 
As his wife, one of the two unwieldy women in his life, Emily Blunt is another performer treated by Nolan with kindness and grace. While the film is nominally her husband’s, Kitty Oppenheimer is given her own moments to shine, her own room to be her complicated self, petty yet resilient, sturdy and yet agreeing with her husband that they are “awful selfish people.” Blunt can do plenty with a steely look, particularly in two impactful sequences late in the film, but she can equally channel that quiet nerve into an explosion of emotion. Meanwhile, Florence Pugh is heartbreaking as Oppenheimer’s mistress Jean Tatlock, unable to articulate her own desires or her needs from a man who is himself less than forthcoming. Pugh is arguably one of our preeminent scene stealers; case in point, she was the only ray of sunshine in the paint-by-numbers Black Widow, though her work in fare like Midsommar proves she’s equally gifted as a lead performer.
 
And speaking of Marvel performers, Robert Downey Jr. is already being fitted for a Best Supporting Oscar for his monochromatic antagonist Lewis Strauss. For those of us who are used to Downey as the flawed-yet-saintly Tony Stark, his turn as Strauss is a reminder of how versatile he can be. Strauss is instantly dislikeable, vindictive and self-righteous, and Downey creates an all-time classic screen villain. I can’t recall ever seeing a Downey character as loathsome as this one, but I certainly hope it’s not the last time he plays the heel, because it’s equally apparent that he is having a ball interpreting Strauss’s version of the story.
 
I did not join with so many of my fellow moviegoers in partaking of the “Barbenheimer” double feature. Truth be told, I was enervated after three hours of Oppenheimer. Not that the film was overlong and stupefying – quite the opposite. The cast is chock full of characters, some of whom are played by quite famous faces in surprisingly small roles, but each of them adds something quite special and unique to the stew. (Shout-out to Gary Oldman in one scene as Harry S. Truman.) But in telling a story out of sequence, as Nolan is wont to do, he takes the audience on a scenic tour through one man’s life, which as it turns out might well be the fulcrum point of human history. But Nolan’s method of delivery is not unlike an atomic bomb itself – a bright flash of light, followed by a roaring shockwave of impact. If you let out a breath as the credits rolled, as I did, it would have been one of recognition, of understanding. And before you draw air again, you’ll have to reckon with a sobering proposition that followed Oppenheimer all his life. And that, dear readers, is the most amazing magic trick of all – that Nolan created a biopic with a surprise ending, an interpretive twist that shouldn’t be spoiled.
 

Oppenheimer is rated R for “some sexuality, nudity, and language.” Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, and Kenneth Branagh.

The King's Man (2021)

Matthew Vaughn knows he doesn’t need to keep making Kingsman movies, right? The original Kingsman film, The Secret Service, was a breath of fresh air (and a welcome bit of counterprogramming for those of us who didn’t want to see 50 Shades of Gray for Valentine’s Day 2015). The Golden Circle, however, was somewhat inert as a sequel, cringingly gross and overly enamored of itself. Fortunately, The King’s Man is a sight better than The Golden Circle, but it is dizzy and daft in a way that does it no favors.

The pacifist Orlando, Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes), wants nothing more than to keep his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) out of the military, but the rising tides of the First World War conspire against them. Orlando and his servants (Gemma Arterton, Djimon Hounsou) form an ad hoc intelligence agency with Conrad to root out a conspiracy that includes the likes of Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), Mata Hari (Valerie Pachner), and Vladimir Lenin (August Diehl).

 

It’s worth remembering, after seven years and three films, that this all began as an adaptation of a 2012 comic book by Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen). I haven’t read the original comic in some years now, but my recollection was that it’s a fine soft send-up of the James Bond formula. However, as I was watching The King’s Man, I was thinking of another comic book I’d been reading earlier that day – Bill Willingham’s Fables, which imagines (in the tradition of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) what would happen if all the fairy tales were true, their characters all inhabiting the same universe. And this is exactly the conceit of The King’s Man; with so many larger-than-life historical figures running around between 1914 and 1918, what if they all knew each other? What if most of them were in an international ring of espionage together?

 

When it’s done with fictional characters, it opens up a new world of possibilities, but there’s something discomfiting when it’s a constellation of real historical figures. Perhaps it’s a failing of my own imagination, but I think it’s also true that The King’s Man mucks about with very recent history in transparent and unfulfilling ways. Ultimately, it’s a failing of the film not to do something interesting with this reckless historiography. (See instead, for example, Inglourious Basterds.) If I’m spending time trying to remember my college survey courses in history, the film isn’t working.

 

Apologies to Ralph Fiennes, who is plainly better than anything the screenplay gives him to do. He works the dialogue like a prestige World War I film, and he navigates the action sequences like something out of a Daniel Craig 007 flick. It’s when the film channels its Bond DNA that The King’s Man really sings, as in a third-act confrontation atop a mountainous plateau. The franchise seems to have jettisoned the gross-out laddish humor of The Golden Circle, and it’s for the best, yet the Bond-ier sequences remind the audience just how good The Secret Service was, and why. 

 

As the film wound down its James Bond denouement, I found myself wishing more of the film had been like that, more Spy Who Loved Me and not alternate history. As it stands, The King’s Man is very episodic, which works somewhat in its favor; if you’re not enjoying the plot, so the old saying might go, stick around for twenty minutes until it changes. But consequently the film’s big claim that it all matters because it’s all interconnected – right up to a big bad reveal that’s a bit obvious even if you don’t recognize a certain actor’s voice – falls flat when it doesn’t quite feel like a united whole. Instead, The King’s Man is a collection of bits, some better and some worse, that never exactly add up to something grander.

 

Then there’s the matter of the postcredits scene, which promises/threatens that the historical muckraking will continue, with a particular bygone villain who is so baldly obvious that it might better have been left to a satire of The King’s Man. Indeed, so outlandish is the moment when two prominent historical figures shake hands and conspire toward The King’s Man II that one can only assume from the deadly straight-faced presentation that the filmmakers know how patently silly it is. We can also hope that they know better. The King’s Man is fun but not fun enough, and I think it is high time that Matthew Vaughn move on to something else.

 

The King’s Man is rated R for “sequences of strong/bloody violence, language, and some sexual material.” Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Written by Matthew Vaughn and Karl Gajdusek. Based on the comics by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons. Starring Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, Tom Hollander, Harris Dickinson, and Djimon Hounsou.

Greenstreet/Lorre: Passage to Marseille (1944)

If last week’s Background to Danger was an attempt to recapture the magic of Casablanca, Passage to Marseille is an even more transparent effort to reunite the stars, the director, and the atmosphere of its iconic predecessor. Passage gets nearer to the mark, thanks especially to returning star Humphrey Bogart, though its labyrinthine structure plays a weird and distancing game with its audience.

Passage to Marseille begins with the journalist Manning (John Loder) interviewing Captain Freycinet (Claude Rains) about a Free French outpost in England. Freycinet tells Manning the incredible story of the naval voyage aboard the Ville de Nancy, where he was introduced to the garrison’s infamous gunner, Jean Matrac (Humphrey Bogart). There Matrac relays the strange way and his band (including Peter Lorre, Helmut Dantine, George Tobias, and Philip Dorn) made their way from the Devil’s Island into the service of the French air force. 

 

Passage to Marseille has become notable for its Inception-like plotting, which features a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. It’s evident that the film is an adaptation of a novel, where such narrative devices are commonplace, but in a film it’s a bit disorienting to be continually reminded that what we are seeing is actually just a story being told to one of the characters. Freycinet tells Manning about his first meeting with Matrac, at which time Matrac told him a story about being imprisoned on Devil’s Island, at which time the prisoners told each other the story of Matrac’s arrest. The film spirals ever backwards into history, with four separate timelines; none of it is too confusing, and as narrators go one could do a lot worse than Claude Rains, but it is peculiar to have to wait for nearly half the film to understand why we should care about most of the characters.

 

Fortunately, Bogart’s star power does much of the heavy lifting. The minute we see him, we too are eager to learn more about Matrac, this haunted and driven gunner. Bogart’s performance is clearly meant to emulate Rick Blaine of Casablanca, with his specific brand of morality driving him away from, then into, the Second World War. But there is something too of Fred C. Dobbs from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Jean Matrac, particularly in the Devil’s Island sequence where we see Matrac wrestle with his captors, false imprisonment and his own budding madness. As ever, Bogart is electrifying, though the film neuters itself by reminding us that we have already seen that Matrac will escape.

 

While sporting an eyepatch, Claude Rains does his usual Claude Rains thing, all elegance and precision. I was a little surprised to see the film not flash back to the loss of Freycinet’s eye, though Rains weaves it into the understated backstory of the character, treating it not as a handicap but as a welcome challenge to how he can continue to serve France. Among the rest of the cast, Lorre is a stand-out, though perhaps I’m biased. His Marius seems to be Matrac’s deputy, helping first to recruit Matrac in the escape attempt and then aiding him as he leads the other men to freedom. In the Ville de Nancy timeline, Marius is eager to speak for himself and his brothers, while simultaneously deferring to Matrac when he deigns to lift his voice. 

 

Relative to our purposes this month, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre are once again kept apart for nearly all of the film, though the rampant chemistry between Bogart and Lorre is on full delightful display. Where he stumbled as a Nazi in Background to Danger, Greenstreet is better cast as the martinet Major Duval, who relies solely on his own intuition and who wields respect like a bullwhip. Greenstreet and Lorre only have the one significant scene together, in which Duval’s interrogation precedes Freycinet’s more sympathetic dialogue, and it’s a fine centerpiece for Greenstreet to tell us plenty about Duval. As usual, in this sequence Lorre tells us more about Marius in the moments when he’s not speaking, but one cannot help – especially this month – wanting more, more, more.

 

Director Michael Curtiz, himself of Casablanca, went to great pains to reassemble as much of the magic from that film in Passage to Marseille. So much of the cast returns for this one, right down to a cameo from singer Corinna Mura. (Even Michèle Morgan, in her thankless role as Matrac’s wife, has a Casablanca connection – she screen-tested for the role that inevitably went to Ingrid Bergman after Warner Bros lowballed RKO for a release from her contract.) Between Curtiz’s directorial eye and the musical ear of Max Steiner, who bombards the film with refrains from the French national anthem La Marseillaise, the film’s every impulse seems to invite comparisons with Casablanca – short of thinly remaking the film, as was the wont of the Golden Age of cinema, it seems there was little more that anyone could have done to make this film more like Casablanca. 

 

You don’t need me to tell you, however, that Casablanca needs no remake. It’s cute to watch them try, and a film starring Bogart in his prime is never a misuse of one’s time, but Passage to Marseille is neither quite what it aims to be nor precisely what its audience expects of it. As the old saying goes, though, here’s looking at you – even a vanilla Golden Age war film is still worth a look.

 

Passage to Marseille is not rated. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Written by Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt. Based on the novel Sans Patrie by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Michèle Morgan, Claude Rains, Philip Dorn, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, George Tobias, and Helmut Dantine.

Greenstreet/Lorre: Background to Danger (1943)

For the month of June, we’ll be celebrating the 117th birthday of Peter Lorre – one of my all-time favorite actors – by looking at five of his lesser-known collaborations with fellow character actor Sydney Greenstreet. The two met during Greenstreet’s film debut in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and starred in eight films together (nine, if you count their fun cameo in Hollywood Canteen). Despite being two very different performers, their chemistry was electric, their mannerisms impeccable. When you see their names on a bill together, you know you’re in for a treat.

After The Maltese Falcon, Lorre and Greenstreet were not quite reunited in Casablanca (1942); both give unforgettable performances as the squirrely Ugarte and the voluminous Ferrari, respectively, but the only misstep in an otherwise perfect film is that they never share the screen. (Their presences are so indelible, however, that you’d be forgiven for not noticing until now.) It would not be until Background to Danger in 1943 that the pair inhabited the cinematic frame together, albeit only for one tense sequence. The film is one of a host of Casablanca imitators, unmemorable but not unwatchable.

 

George Raft stars as traveling salesman Joe Barton, secretly a spy for the United States. After meeting the beautiful but doomed Ana Remzi (Osa Massen) on a train to Turkey, Barton comes into possession of secret documents that indicate the Nazis are about to implicate the Soviet Union in a fictitious invasion of Turkey, the better for Germany to take control. Barton is pursued by the plan’s architect, the Nazi Colonel Robinson (Greenstreet), but he’s also caught the attention of two Soviet spies, Nikolai Zaleshoff (Lorre) and his sister Tamara (Brenda Marshall).

 

Background to Danger is surprisingly complex in its plotting, taking its cue perhaps from the similarly suspicious Maltese Falcon, in which no one can be trusted and everyone is lying about something. Here, the MacGuffin is likewise an artifact of deception; there is to be no invasion, but the Germans want Turkey to think there will be. With Greenstreet as provocateur, authoring fiction after fiction to cover his own failings, there is something prescient about the film’s emphasis on “fake news” and its value as a weapon of war. As his Gutman was in The Maltese Falcon, Greenstreet’s Robinson is the only character with all the answers, and his mere presence alone gives you a satisfactory antagonist.

 

One cannot help but feel, however, that Greenstreet is only slightly miscast as the German spymaster. There is nothing German about his performance, neither his accent nor his wardrobe; nor is his very name – Robinson – anything less than stiff upper-lip British. Greenstreet is delightfully villainous, but something in his performance feels held back, as though he’s careful not to have too much fun as a Nazi. Likewise, George Raft seems out of his element as Barton, a role that hinges on the reveal that he’s an American spy. When Barton plays the part of a salesman, there’s never a sense that he’s not in total control of the situation; it’s worth noting that the original novel saw Barton as a forerunner to Cary Grant in North by Northwest, bewildered after an accidental plunge into the world of espionage. (The change was made at Raft’s insistence.) Here, though, it’s hard to see why anyone buys Barton’s “babe in the woods” routine, and when he shifts into spy mode, it’s hard to see Raft as anything but the hardboiled gangsters he played.

 

Perhaps the only casting that really works – at least, of the cast with anything of note to do in the script – is Peter Lorre as the Russian spy Nikolai. There is something stagey about Lorre’s performance here, and I mean that in a good way; Lorre imbues the character with a broad physicality, all stooping hunches and balled fists, such that you can imagine his parts of the film being stage plays. Even when he’s not the focus of attention, Lorre is constantly doing something, clutching his fists to his head or bemoaning his lack of vodka. Of all the times that the film asks you to doubt what you suspect about a character, Lorre is the best at walking that line of uncertainty, and I can’t help but wish Nikolai had been a recurring character in other WWII films.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best scene of the film is the moment when all the spies are in the same room together – Raft, Greenstreet, Lorre, and Marshall. At the top of the film’s third act, all the cards get put on the table, and all the actors get to play off each other like some of the more claustrophobic scenes from The Maltese Falcon. To add to the tension, everyone’s got a gun pointed at each other, but more importantly, it’s one of the most successful moments of shifting alliances and casual deception. Everything clicks in this scene, and the audience ought to be genuinely surprised at where the moment goes. It’s not quite the climax of the film, but everything that follows feels like denouement compared to the energy level of this dynamite sequence.

 

Between the restrictions of the Hays Code and the rah-rah patriotism of the era, there are not many surprises in how the film turns out, and it leads to an ending that is perhaps too overtly cheery to fit with the rest of the film, which tries to be a shadowy tale out of John le Carré’s playbook. Background to Danger is fairly emblematic of the Warner Brothers brand of 1940s war films, with most of its familiar faces flitting in and out. It’s not as good as Casablanca – but, then again, few films are.

 

Background to Danger is not rated. Directed by Raoul Walsh. Written by W.R. Burnett. Based on the novel Uncommon Danger by Eric Ambler. Starring George Raft, Brenda Marshall, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Osa Massen, and Turhan Bey.

Monster March: Invisible Agent (1942)

Is the Invisible Man series the franchise without a clue? Is it even a franchise at all? Is it fair to consider this a Universal Monsters series? The answer to all three questions is, I think, “Yes.” If we’re thinking about the Universal Classic Monsters as the first cinematic universe, The Invisible Man would be akin to an Iron Man franchise in which Tony Stark’s brother gives the suit away, while an unrelated inventor makes an iron suit, before Tony’s grandson builds his own suit. (Next week, to push the analogy, an entirely unrelated Stark is given the suit by another disconnected inventor.) Can you hinge a franchise on iconography alone?

Frank Griffin (Jon Hall) finds his print shop invaded by Nazis and Japanese agents (Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Peter Lorre) who demand that he turn over the secret formula for invisibility devised by his grandfather, the original Invisible Man. Instead, Frank escapes and signs over the formula to the U.S. government after Pearl Harbor, on one condition – that only Frank be permitted to use the invisibility serum. Frank parachutes into Germany to meet with a German spy (Ilona Massey), who promises she can get Frank a book of German operatives.

 

Maybe I’m just a sucker for (no pun intended) transparently propagandistic WWII films, but there is something infectiously gee-whiz about an invisible American parachuting behind enemy lines to bust up the Axis. In short, I really enjoyed Invisible Agent more than I thought I would, especially given the mileage-may-vary quality of these later Universal Monsters movies. But this movie ticks a lot of boxes for me, almost like an invisible Rocketeer – which readers of this blog should know is a major gold star in my book. There are, for me, few cinematic pleasures more pure than seeing an enthusiastically patriotic American get the better of Nazis who end up defeating themselves through their own hubris. It’s almost like Captain America in Casablanca.

 

As the eponymous invisible agent, Jon Hall is square-jawed and serviceable, the kind of newsreel hero you really don’t see any more. As an Invisible Man, however, Frank Griffin isn’t any sort of monstrous menace; there is no danger that his serum will drive him mad, brushed away by his claim that only he knows the potency of the formula. This deck-clearing moment allows Invisible Agent to be something closer to The Invisible Woman than The Invisible Man, opening the door for this Griffin to slapstick his way through Nazi Germany. He douses goons in hollandaise and sets his own Reichstag fire by igniting the curtains in Nazi HQ. It’s played for laughs and thrills, but there is rarely any danger to or from our invisible agent. 

 

Even his “appearance,” doused in cold cream rather than swathed in bandages, elicits a hearty chuckle. I’ve been repeatedly impressed by the special effects in these Invisible Man movies, proving that they are almost more the star of the franchise than any invisible protagonist him-or-herself. The cold cream gag works, both as a punchline and as a screen trick to see the unseeable, but I was more taken by the sequence directly before, in which Frank Griffin lathers up in the bathtub. We can see his hands covered in soap, and his legs come into view as he scrubs them – truly effective stuff, even if the DVD transfer makes the seams a bit visible. The aforementioned parachute sequence, too, is fairly incredible, as Griffin disrobes mid-air, dropping his clothes as he drops out of sight. 

 

Invisible Agent truly stands out for its villains, though, played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Peter Lorre – two performers who, let’s be honest, are so much better than the fourth Invisible Man film ought to deserve. I’ve been lukewarm on Hardwicke in The Invisible Man Returns and The Ghost of Frankenstein, but those films didn’t quite give him much to do. As Conrad Stauffer, though, Hardwicke sinks his teeth into the clipped disdain and opportunistic deception of a top-ranking Nazi. The performance is an exercise in restraint – less is more – and Hardwicke conjures up the image of a screen villain who’d be just as comfortable in the heightened reality of an Indiana Jones film. Likewise for Peter Lorre, one of my all-time favorite actors. By 1942, Lorre had carved out an odd niche for himself playing Japanese characters, particularly the detective Mr. Moto in an eight-film series. Lorre plays Baron Ikito without the aid of any discomfiting yellowface makeup, though one wonders why this Japanese villain has an Austrian accent. Still, Lorre is at his creepy best in a role that leans into the icky stereotypes of the Japanese as sadistic torturers, and he sends a real chill up your spine in the moments before he erupts into shocking violence.

 

Invisible Agent feels like a one-off in a franchise of one-offs, never quite coming to the level of The Invisible Man and its frantic mad monster. At the same time, though, it never quite feels as though it needs to meet the high bar set by Claude Rains. Instead it’s a flag-waving model of its time, taking the concept of a Universal Classic Monster and doing something sideways with it – and you know I’m always keen on mash-ups and genre-bending. I liked it better than I thought I would, and it’s only too bad that we didn’t get more like this – can you imagine Wolf Man of Berlin or Frankenstein vs. The Axis? (Sidebar: maybe that’s why God invented comic books; cf. The Creature Commandos, etc.)

 

The Invisible Agent is not rated. Directed by Edwin L. Marin. Written by Curtis Siodmak. Starring Jon Hall, Ilona Massey, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Peter Lorre, and J. Edward Bromberg. 

Tune in tomorrow for Franken-Friday, with Son of Frankenstein (1939) starring Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, and Bela Lugosi.

Next week for See-Thru Thursday, we’ll see – or not, as the case may be – The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944), starring Jon Hall. But for bonus invisible shenanigans, Silly Sunday revisits the franchise for Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Arthur Franz.

Darkest Hour (2017)

When I saw Dunkirk back in July, I can safely say that at no point in the film did I think to myself, “This movie could use more Gary Oldman.” And yet, here we are, with Darkest Hour as the unintentional other half of Dunkirk, treating at length the only part of the event that Christopher Nolan didn’t recount in full – the homefront. There is probably a very intriguing “Dunkirk Saga” to be crafted from editing the films together, though I think Hollywood’s efforts would be better spent at giving us more films of Oldman as Winston Churchill.

Gary Oldman stars as Winston Churchill, appointed Prime Minster of the United Kingdom after the appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) become untenable. Churchill, his wife Clemmie (Kristin Scott Thomas), and his secretary Elizabeth Layton (Lily James) move to 10 Downing Street to prepare for war – or peace – with Nazi Germany as it marches further into France.

It need not be said – for everyone already seems to be in unanimous agreement – that Gary Oldman gives a bravura performance as Churchill. Oldman’s name is being bandied about once more for an Oscar, to which I have to say it’d be about time. As Churchill, Oldman is (as ever) chameleonic, disappearing behind the jowls, the glasses, and the cigars in a performance that is not quite impersonation and certainly far from caricature, though it does resemble an uncanny impression in that Oldman is difficult to recognize in character. There’s something in the eyes, the voice, the stance, yes, but by and large it’s quite easy to disregard the artifice and believe we are watching Churchill himself. And while many times we clamor for a sequel because we want to know what happens next, I’m first in line for Darkest Hour II (“Dark Harder?”) because I want to spend more time in the company of a performance this fine.

The time frame of Darkest Hour is quite tight – less than a month – which is all the more astonishing when you consider what was asked of Churchill in those brisk days. To inherit an office diminished by one’s predecessor, and to be faced with several forms of political and military extinction, with little more than the English language as your principal weapon of defense... well, it’s not for nothing that Churchill’s wife at one point remarks that her husband has “the weight of the world on your shoulders.” A brief telephone call with Franklin D. Roosevelt might seem a moment for the Americans in the audience to feel involved, but it quickly becomes a reminder of how maddeningly unhelpful the isolationist America was at the time and how bitterly alone Churchill must have felt as he stared down the barrel of Hitler’s gun. “It’s late,” he breathes wearily, a sense of hopelessness edging into the film’s middle.

Director Joe Wright is perhaps still best known for directing the first-rate Atonement, so it comes as a slight shock that here too Wright takes the opportunity to revisit Dunkirk – recall, James McAvoy finds himself separated from Keira Knightley by the evacuation. Earlier this year, Christopher Nolan set his exploration of humanized hopelessness and fractured time at Dunkirk, but here Wright treats the event as the tipping point of a global conflagration, an Atlas-like burden which Churchill must shoulder with the full knowledge that the fate of the very world rests upon his response. But Wright is careful to keep his Churchill human, too; rather than err on the side of hagiography, Wright presents a Churchill wrestling with his doubts and willing to laugh at his faults, as when he initially mangles the “V for Victory” gesture.

At the heart of the film is a moment that shouldn’t work as well as it does. Having hung Chekhov’s gun on the wall when he mentions offhandedly he’s never ridden the subway, Churchill takes to the underground and mingles with the people. It feels initially like Screenwriting 101, setting Churchill amongst the proletariat, but the scene works so well that I didn’t want it to end. In that cramped subway car – and the film is, if nothing else, devoutly claustrophobic – Oldman imbues Churchill with such grace, humor, and candor that it’s not hard to believe a nation (indeed, a globe) was charmed by such a charismatic leader.

Darkest Hour is rated PG-13 “for some thematic material.” Directed by Joe Wright. Written by Anthony McCarten. Starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Ronald Pickup, Stephen Dillane, and Ben Mendelsohn.

Dunkirk (2017)

For a while there, Dunkirk ruined more than a few movies for me. The trailer for this movie, particularly the seven-minute IMAX preview, is so good that every time I saw it, I thought to myself, “Well, forget this movie. I want to see more of Dunkirk!” Thank heavens it’s finally here, so I can get back to my regularly scheduled programming, and thank heavens it was worth the wait because it shall come as no surprise that this Christopher Nolan disciple found much to love in the master’s latest work.

Dunkirk is the true story of the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk, France, in the midst of World War II, told across three intersecting narratives – the land evacuation (starring Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles, and Kenneth Branagh), the civilian boats recruited to aid the effort (starring Mark Rylance and Cillian Murphy), and the air cover provided by British fighter pilots (starring Tom Hardy).

With Interstellar in 2014, Nolan drew more than his fair share of comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – including from myself when I said that Interstellar “combin[ed] Kubrick’s science-fictional aesthetics with Nolan’s knack for tight and highly personal storytelling.” Surprisingly, though, Dunkirk also feels a bit like 2001, with its trio of timelines looking at what it means – and takes – to be human in a time of crisis, but Nolan out-Kubricks Kubrick by intermingling the timelines (one week, one day, and one hour) and playing them off against each other in a cerebral way that takes for granted an audience’s ability to keep up. For those of us who didn’t need navigational charts for Inception and Interstellar, Dunkirk is similarly smart, though it is less self-reflexively clever than past Nolan ventures; where Inception had occasional bouts of exposition and Interstellar made the MacGuffin of time travel a function of the plot, Dunkirk proceeds with its narrative play as a matter of course, again cycling back to the classic Nolan theme of the subjective experience of the time and the way we form communities around common goals.

Nolan veterans like Tom Hardy (playing to type as an unintelligible masked man) and Cillian Murphy (playing against type as a shell-shocked soldier) turn up and do the good work we expect of them, while Nolan newcomers like Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance – the closest we get to expositional figures – appear as sobering reminders of the moral challenge presented by Dunkirk, gifted actors prepared for the subtle challenges of their sophisticated roles. Dunkirk is largely, however, fleshed out by fresh and nameless faces who don’t have long and recognizable filmic pedigrees like their named counterparts, but there is something even more humanizing about a nameless sea of evacuees, and these actors are remarkable for their abilities, like Keaton or Chaplin, to evoke a range of emotions in largely silent stretches of the film.

In this way, too, Dunkirk evokes 2001 with its extended, silent, balletic scenes of aerial combat, of divebombing and running along the beach. 2001 began and ended sans dialogue, and there are similarly few conversations in Dunkirk, opportunities for Nolan and his performers to show off their command of the visual language of film. And again Dunkirk steps beyond 2001 with a dynamite score by Hans Zimmer; 2001 included the “Blue Danube Waltz” and “Also Sprach Zarathustra” but by and large didn’t carry the auditory weight that Dunkirk does. Like Inception before it, Dunkirk succeeds largely on the shoulders of Zimmer’s score, which is masterfully, unrelentingly, elegiacally tense.

“Unrelenting” is probably the best word for Dunkirk. From its first scene, the film grabs the audience by the shoulders and demands attention until the film is over. There are moments when that ending seems to come sooner than expected – even without noting that the film is, at 1:46, much shorter than most Nolan fare – doubtless mirroring the false hopes given throughout the Dunkirk evacuation, but Nolan’s actual finale grounds the film in a surprising way, a kind of echo of Inception’s last-frame fakeout but with more heart than Nolan is often acknowledged as having. It is an affirmation of Nolan’s continued status as a master filmmaker and – and I do not throw this word around lightly – a true genius.

Dunkirk is rated PG-13 for “intense war experience and some language.” Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Based on a true story. Starring Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard, Barry Keoghan, Harry Styles, James D’Arcy, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Hardy.

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

I’m not sure how much cache a ten-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival has to the world at large, but to me it says that a film is worth a look. And while a ten-minute standing ovation is difficult to fathom for most anything (I put more stock in rewatches and DVD sales), Hacksaw Ridge is a compelling war film that seems primed for a place of prominence when the Oscar calendar closes in a few weeks.

Andrew Garfield stars in the true story of Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who nevertheless enlists in World War II as a combat medic, refusing to carry a rifle and earning the ire of his commanding officers (Vince Vaughn and Sam Worthington). Throughout, Doss refuses to compromise his values, even amid the challenges of his Great War veteran father (Hugo Weaving) and new bride (Teresa Palmer).

What surprised me most about Hacksaw Ridge was the way that director Mel Gibson unites two very disparate tones in a way that’s surprisingly compelling and which makes the second half all the more effective. The film begins feelings very much at home in the 1940s, reminiscent of something like Sergeant York or The Best Years of Our Lives, with a very simple romantic plot arc that’s almost syrupy sweet. This nearly naïve worldview is thrown into stark contrast to the horrific fog of war in the film’s second half, in which Doss’s wide-eyed beliefs are tested in the most intense crucible imaginable. That the film doesn’t feel like two disparate halves is perhaps Gibson’s greatest achievement here.

When it comes to directing combat footage, Gibson’s no slouch, either. In this respect, the film has been compared to Saving Private Ryan (which, full confession, I still haven’t seen), and there’s a certain brutality to the war scenes that succeeds all the more because of the false sense of security into which the film’s first half lulls us. But even taken in isolation, Hacksaw Ridge has a grisly intensity in its war sequences that is both disconcerting for its gore and frightening in the number of jump moments Gibson manages to navigate. We truly feel, as Doss must have, that we are out of our element.

Garfield’s earnest portrayal of the peaceable country boy goes a long way toward selling the central conceit of the film, and I have to wonder if we’ll be looking at a Best Actor contender when the next Academy Awards roll around. (I also wonder if Gibson’s cactus-hugging days are behind him and if he’ll be up for Best Director, as well.) Garfield plays Doss as a man of conviction, a man for whom his decisions don’t come easily. When his father chastises him for wrestling with his conscience, it’s not a revelation for the character; we’ve already seen these conflicts play out on Garfield’s face and in the quaver of his voice. Even if he’ll always be a Spider-Man to me, Garfield proves himself capable of a range wider than my typecasting gives him credit.

It’s really a Gibson/Garfield show through and through, although the film wisely cedes the floor to the real Desmond Doss just before the credits roll, letting us see the real soldier on his own terms and revealing that the film doesn’t exaggerate much about his humility and his religious devotion. It’s these real-life clips which confirm the truth of the story that the film tells us, and in so doing it solidifies my belief that Hacksaw Ridge is one of the most powerful war films in recent memory. Uncompromising in both its wartime gore and its dedication to the true story of a remarkable hero, Hacksaw Ridge is a strong contender for early award buzz, and it’s entirely well-deserved.

Hacksaw Ridge is rated R for “intense prolonged realistically graphic sequences of war violence including grisly bloody images.” Directed by Mel Gibson. Written by Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight. Based on a true story. Starring Andrew Garfield, Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, Teresa Palmer, and Hugo Weaving.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)

After catching up on most of the Oscar flicks from the past year that I’d rather not have waited until DVD to see, 2016 begins with a military film. I’m not sure why – the records don’t bear it out – but it feels like this is exactly the sort of film with which I always begin my year, being a competently told but largely indistinguishable war film with a strongly personal focus bordering on hagiography. The real surprise, however, is that Michael Bay directed this one (about which, so much more later).

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi tells the true (and largely apolitical) story of a team of CIA military contractors (including among them John Krasinski and James Badge Dale) who defied the orders of their Chief (David Costabile) to mount an aid-and-rescue mission to the besieged American embassy in Benghazi in September 2012.

First of all, as an action film 13 Hours is a big success. My primary goal as a moviegoer (a kind of Declaration of Principles at the top of the year, for those just tuning in) is to escape – escape from today and into a narrative, preferably with some degree of spectacle. This isn’t to say that I require spectacle – Spotlight is definitely on my hypothetical Best-Of list for last year – but the project of escapism helps if something blows up. And boy, do things blow up in 13 Hours. The action sequences here don’t so much allow you to escape reality as grab you by your lapels and thrust you into an intense combat situation. Pair with that the film’s sense of unrelenting tension, the anxious attitude that the worst is just about to materialize, and you have a film that is very difficult to stop watching. I don’t imagine, for the home video crowd, that there are many good spots to get a refill or take a bathroom break.

To say that 13 Hours is compelling stuff is not, however, to say that it’s a new classic. There’s nothing particularly innovative in it, nothing really memorable beyond the memory of being engaged in the moment. It doesn’t demand a second viewing, doesn’t invite a critical rethinking of one’s premises. It is, in the most earnest sense of the phrase, a popcorn film, albeit one which is not lazily made. It is actually quite well-made, cogently directed but with little on either end of the lazy/ambitious spectrum.

This, then, is the film’s greatest surprise – that 13 Hours was directed by Michael Bay. It’s remarkable to realize that 13 Hours contains very little of the excess that made such a mess of the Transformers franchise. There is little inappropriate comic relief; one recognizes, though, that the translator Amahl (Peyman Moaadi) is the kind of character that would be played by John Turturro, dialed up to eleven, and/or be the focal point of a thousand gross stereotypes if this were a Transformers movie. More agreeably, 13 Hours contains none of the leery sexuality of Transformers, by which I mean there are no young women in skimpy clothing bending over cars. 13 Hours is, however, as hypermasculine and rah-rah patriotic, though it’s presented less in the form of an advertisement and more built into the narrative itself. That is, the entire movie is “the army saves the day” rather than relegate that moment to merely a montage set to the music of AC/DC. It is, dare I say it, a more restrained and perhaps even mature Michael Bay film (which is, admittedly, a short putt).

It’s evident that Bay has a tremendous respect for the Armed Forces, though it borders on canonization in a few moments. We’ve seen a turn in war films toward an emphasis on individual heroism and away from sweeping historical narratives; there’s little of overt political content in the film, though a few beats of narrative readily politicized by pundits and politicians alike. Bay is more interested in the human element than the currents of history, though the scriptwriting is so on-the-nose that a repeated quotation from Joseph Campbell – explicitly mythologizing the “secret soldiers” and deifying them with the subtlety of a Mack truck – falls flat because of both how out-of-place it feels and how carelessly overt it is. While the direction of the film is more discreet than Bay has delivered of late, the hagiography isn’t. (One could imagine a cut of the film which eliminates the Campbell altogether, allowing the audience to intuit Bay’s point, and I’d have to say I’d have preferred this version. Show, don’t tell.)

Not an instant classic, not a groundbreaker, nor the political bombshell the 2016 candidates might have wanted, 13 Hours is competent enough and compelling enough that it makes for a fine diversion at the start of the year. It bodes well enough for Bay’s maturity as a filmmaker as, at the very least, a step in the right direction, but then again Transformers 5 is due next year. So much for that idea.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is rated R for “strong combat violence throughout, bloody images, and language.” The film is intensely violent, often graphically so, but comprised more of explosions and gunfire punctuated by moments of gore. There are a fair amount of F-words, though the context makes them seem less distasteful.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015)

I’m going to start the review off by saying that I’m making a conscious and very deliberate decision here to review The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 as the second half of what really ought to have been one movie. I’m not going to review Part 1 on this blog, because the two films are irreconcilable to me (like both halves of Kill Bill); I watched both within 24 hours of each other, and I’m disinclined to think of them as two films for a number of reasons which will be elucidated below. Suffice it to say, Mockingjay is a strong and satisfying conclusion to the Hunger Games franchise, even against the misjudged split down the middle.

As the propaganda and military wars against the Capitol rage on, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) stands as the Mockingjay, the symbol for the revolution after her survival in two successive gladiatorial Hunger Games. Katniss, resistant to the manipulations of rebel leader President Coin (Julianne Moore), finds that her friend Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) has been brainwashed by the nefarious President Snow (Donald Sutherland), and she embarks on a mission to kill the man who has ruined their lives.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Hunger Games has been the spiritual successor to Harry Potter in ways that I don’t think Twilight or Divergent ever were. All managed to grab more or less the same demographic by the ears, but only Hunger Games plumbed the same depth of ideas that JK Rowling’s wizarding saga did. (And I’m aware that all but one of them pulled the split-the-last-film-in-two move, as well.) There have been moments like these throughout the franchise, but it’s especially prevalent in Mockingjay that I sat back and realized, “Wow, this is really weighty stuff” – and it’s handled quite deftly and smartly. Questions of war, power, and the power of the image pervade Mockingjay to great effect, and the filmmakers wisely reject any simplification of the novels for a film that is purposefully unsettling.

I must continue to heap praise on Jennifer Lawrence, who adds great credibility to the character of Katniss. For an Oscar winner to continue through a young adult franchise without seeming like it’s beneath her is a creditable move that speaks highly of both her character and her performative abilities. None in the cast does any less of a strong job – Sutherland especially seems to be having a grand time in a veritable mustache-twirler of an antagonist – but Lawrence is particularly noteworthy, in large part because her performance sheds light on two key scenes of ambiguity, frustrating in the novel but abundantly more clear in the film (for the benefit of the spoiler-phobic, I’ll be cryptic – the crucial vote, and the novel’s epilogue). We know precisely what Katniss is feeling in those moments because of the way Lawrence takes her pauses, shoots her glances like an arrow.

The film is, I daresay, deliberately anticlimactic, opting for a more poignant commentary on the nature of violence than a reductive “good guys always win” ending, and for that I applaud both the filmmakers and novelist Suzanne Collins for keeping the text smart. But I can’t help but feel that the effect might have been sharper had Mockingjay not been divided – quite arbitrarily, mind you – in two. Part 1 ends a scene after a cliffhanger reminiscent of the old Batman television show – “Will Katniss Everdeen save her friend? Or will the nefarious President Snow win his war? Tune in next November...” – as if to ameliorate the shock of an abrupt ending; Part 1 tells us Katniss will survive into the next film, but it’s a move that distracts from the fact that the film is bait-and-switching us into returning for another installment.

It’d be fine if each film had its own identity, its own logical starting and stopping point. For a while it seems like that’ll happen – Part 1 seems largely focused on the propaganda filmmaking and the power of the Mockingjay as an image, where Part 2 is the more action-oriented – but the division is, as I’ve said, largely arbitrary, at roughly a midpoint in runtime. The truth of the matter is that Katniss’s move from symbol to soldier would have been more potent within the boundaries of a singular film. A number of elements would have been stronger – President Snow’s declining health, President Coin’s surrender to ambition, the advisory role of Plutarch Heavensbee (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) – and it would have been frankly less off-putting than feeling the grab for cash.

I know I’ll likely be eating my words when Avengers: Infinity War arrives in its bifurcated form in 2018 and 2019, respectively, but it’s still possible that that pair will manage to feel like two distinct films rather than padded halves of a whole. As for Mockingjay, however, I strongly believe there’s enough substance to comprise a very powerful 150 minutes rather than two respective two-hour films. It very nearly compromises the integrity of the work, which is both potent and important, though Mockingjay is compelling enough viewing that you only begrudge the protraction a little bit.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, and for some thematic material.” Part 2 is by far the grimmest of the already grim franchise, with several of your favorite characters meeting unpleasant demises by way of arrows, explosions, and weird sewer mutants. Though the film isn’t particularly bloody, it is almost unbearably despondent in a few scenes.

American Sniper (2014)

I’m not sure why it was that American Sniper was quietly snubbed at the Oscars; despite several nominations, the film made barely a splash, and it seemed people were more interested in the (admittedly amateurish) fake baby than the frankly stellar performance by Bradley Cooper.  While I’m not saying he deserved the award more than Eddie Redmayne (or, for that matter, Michael Keaton), Cooper’s work here deserves another look, especially since the film seems to have been pigeonholed by what potential viewers likely assumed were the politics of the film.

Cooper stars as Chris Kyle in this biopic of the Navy Seal sniper who is credited with the greatest number of kills as a marksman during his service in Iraq.  Sienna Miller costars as his wife Taya, who finds it difficult to keep her family together while her husband is on and off the battlefield.

I think one reason American Sniper made little more than a ripple is because audiences expected (and some critics reported – wrongly, I might add) that the film was only a rah-rah patriotic exercise with little attention to the consequences of a military career.  To which I would say, the movie you’re probably thinking of is Lone Survivor, not this one.  Clint Eastwood has been largely brushed off by many for his conservative politics and/or his abrasive curmudgeonly attitude, but American Sniper never feels like a commercial for the military in the way that Peter Berg’s earlier film toed that same line.

No, this is something much closer to The Hurt Locker, that brilliant Oscar winner from a few years back in which Kathryn Bigelow gave us both a thriller of a war film and a very sober examination of the human psyche under such conditions.  American Sniper is comparable (though a little longer) in that it devotes about as much time to Kyle’s military experiences as to the pained moments where he’s unable to let go of the battlefield and readjust to civilian life.  What American Sniper adds to the narrative of The Hurt Locker is the sense that the country had, ultimately, failed Kyle by not helping him reassimilate.  It’s a smart humanizing move that Eastwood makes, particularly as it anticipates the claim (made by those who haven’t seen the movie) that the film essentially celebrates a murderer – Eastwood rejects that out of hand by showing the dire situation overseas, the pain through which Kyle was wrung, and his true heroism at film’s end (spoilers?) when he attains a kind of healing.

Cooper is frankly astonishing as Kyle, and in any other year I would have been rooting for him to win.  Let’s not forget that Cooper got his big break on Alias, ABC’s spy drama by way of Keri Russell’s Felicity; to see him here and in Silver Linings Playbook, doing amazing work with comedy and drama, is a career to be celebrated.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a disappearance into a role, but it is unequivocally a commendable transformation, particularly in his ability to emote beyond his physicality, refusing to let his bulk do the acting for him.  Eastwood is a star director of the action sequences, but it’s Cooper’s quieter moments that truly define the film and almost overshadow the film as a whole.

On the note of performances, I’d actually written off Sienna Miller about the time she did GI Joe – pretty face, Jude Law’s ex, never memorable in the one or two things I’d seen of hers before.  After American Sniper, though, I’d put her in the “one to watch” category, provided that she gets a good director.  I’m sure Eastwood is a stern hand at the till when it comes to directing, but kudos to Miller for stepping up her game and bringing in a very moving turn as the other side of this very human struggle to recover.

I don’t think American Sniper got the attention it deserved, for a number of reasons.  All of those reasons, however, are largely immaterial, more a discredit to the closed minds of the prospective audience than to the film itself.  What you have here are three very talented creative forces coming together for a film that is, if not outright moving, very intelligent about its subject matter in a way that I hope puts Eastwood back on the map as a director and keeps Cooper in the spotlight where he can do more first-rate work.

American Sniper is rated R for “strong and disturbing war violence, and language throughout including some sexual references.” Many of the combat scenes are very intense and bloody, in addition to being suspenseful and loud. The film is rather unflinching in the brutality and the immediacy of violent combat.  F-bombs proliferate, as does the typical kind of chauvinistic dialogue you’d expect in aggressive male camaraderie.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Edge of Tomorrow is literally Groundhog Day with space aliens; more accurately, it’s Groundhog Day meets Aliens, right down to the inclusion of Bill Paxton and a kickass female lead in a robotic suit.  It’s a fine popcorn film, engaging without any real dead spots and bankable in the best Tom Cruise tradition.

Cruise stars as Major Bill Cage, a military spokesman who is shanghaied into service on the front lines of a conflict between humanity and the invading “Mimic” aliens.  His first day of combat goes disastrously, but his newfound ability to “reset the day” and travel back in time brings him to legendary soldier Rita Vrtaski (Emily Blunt), who trains him to become a better fighter and take advantage of his time traveling powers to end the war.

Regardless of what one makes of Tom Cruise personally, the man is one of Hollywood’s more reliable action heroes.  His recent work has been consistently entertaining, due in large part to his charismatic on-screen personality.  Here that quintessential Cruise persona gets inverted a bit; when we first meet Cage, he is essentially a deserter, more at home selling a war than fighting it.  Cruise plays these early scenes very well, and he does a comparably good job with Cage’s transformation into a battle-hardened soldier.

In some ways, though, he’s still playing a version of Tom Cruise.  Don’t get me wrong – I very much like that character (he was plenty of fun in the underrated Jack Reacher), but it’s not really news.  What Edge of Tomorrow does give us that we haven’t seen a dozen times before is the commanding performance of Emily Blunt as the “Angel of Verdun.”  It’s a performance that does recall Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, especially with the mechanical exoskeleton iconography.  It’s not, however, a metaphor for her own resilience as was the case in Aliens; instead, Blunt humanizes Rita and saves her from the worst fate of all – the stereotypical romantic subplot.  And honestly, thank God – where Groundhog Day relegated Andie MacDowell (also playing a Rita – coincidence?) to the object of Bill Murray’s desire, Edge of Tomorrow flips that and gives us a hard-as-nails woman who is uninterested in Cruise’s amorous affection for her.  It helps that she’s incredibly immersed in the role, which could make its own successful feature in and of itself.

The film is surprisingly funny, which will definitely bring up those Groundhog Day vibes, and it’s to director Doug Liman’s credit that the film never feels uneven in that regard.  What holds it back from being a truly great film and restricts it to the province of popcorn blockbuster is that a lot of the film does feel somewhat undercooked.  We have two very compelling protagonists, but the villains are a bit underdeveloped; aside from a neat and original look, they’re really only there to fill the antagonist quota.  We don’t know what they want or why they’re on earth, which wouldn’t be too bad except for the fact that the film reminds us a few times that these questions are lingering.

Similarly, the members of J Squad (the military troop into which Cruise is drafted) aren’t very well crafted, functioning mostly as bodies when in combat and comic relief when not.  There’s value in comedy in the midst of a war film – see above for the unexpected humor in the film – but there are a few jokes that don’t feel earned and especially a few deaths in the supporting cast that never quite resonate because a) you’ve seen them die plenty of times before in rejected timelines, and b) you have to remind yourself, “Okay, they said he died, but which one was he again?”

All of this is not to say that Edge of Tomorrow is a bad film.  It’s at worst serviceable and at best a fun and entertaining flick that does enough things right to justify its own existence.  If I had to do it over again, I would.

Edge of Tomorrow is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, language and brief suggestive material.”  There are a lot of military combat sequences between armored humans and tentacled alien monsters, though they’re closer to the frenetic shaky-cam of video games than the brutal gore of Saving Private Ryan.  We see one bare bottom, Tom Cruise gets a rather funny three-quarters of an F-bomb, and a suggestive pick-up line (more of a shrug, really) is quickly and mercifully defused.

Check back on Thursday when The Cinema King assesses The Fault in Our Stars!

Lone Survivor (2014)

The box office receipts from this weekend indicate that Lone Survivor is a highly lucrative film, and it’s been compared to Saving Private Ryan.  While I’m not sure it’s as important a film as Spielberg’s take on World War II, it’s a compelling film that renders a true story in riveting detail, even if some of the storytelling itself is a little thin.

Mark Wahlberg stars as Marcus Luttrell, part of a four-man team (comprised also of Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, and Ben Foster) in pursuit of a terrorist in Afghanistan.  On the outskirts of an Afghani village, the mission goes horribly awry, putting the lives of the Navy SEALs in danger.

I’ll begin by saying that writer/director Peter Berg obviously has an immense respect for the work of servicemen like the ones portrayed in the film, and it’s refreshing to see a film this reverential; his last terrorism-themed movie, 2007’s The Kingdom, had a note of moral equivalency that still doesn’t taste right, but Lone Survivor just exudes a sense of unflinching admiration that might even turn off some cynical viewers.  But, as Phil Coulson says, “People might just need a little old-fashioned.”

Berg’s evident respect for the subject material and for Luttrell, who cameos as a SEAL in a few scenes, means that the combat sequences of the film are realistic and harrowing, highly effective at allowing the audience to feel some of the palpable terror that must come of being in such a situation – ambushed and outnumbered, staring down death.  Consequently, Lone Survivor is one of the more gripping films, and had the ending not been “spoiled” (see the title of the film and Luttrell’s presence on the PR circuits) it might have as suspenseful as Gravity because of how expertly directed both films were.

But Berg’s deft hand at the shootout scenes isn’t limited to just the one note.  Berg also knows when to punctuate the film with moments of levity, opportune placement of lines to elicit a smile or relieve the tension.  (Standout moments include a well-timed duck and a villager’s two-word summary of his opinion of the Taliban.)

What the film doesn’t manage to do very well is characterization.  On one level, portraying the SEALs as everymen allows the audience to put themselves in the soldiers’ shoes, heightening the anxiety of the situation as the danger escalates.  But on the other hand, the film feels a bit distanced when we don’t know much about the men or their personalities (it doesn’t help that some of them look very similar).  It’s not that the performances are bad – Wahlberg manages to suppress his Boston tough-guy persona enough to play up the real-life heroics of war – but the screenplay’s greater strengths lie in the violent action sequences and not in breathing much life into the characters themselves.

I wonder, though, if that’s not intentional.  Berg’s project here is clearly to valorize the real-life men who died during Operation Red Wings, so much so that he ends the film with an extended “in memoriam” montage that plays on the most basic heartstrings in the audience.  (Mine applauded at the end.)  There’s ultimately something missing from the film as a whole, but what we’re presented with is compelling enough and smartly put-together that it almost deserves better than a ghettoized mid-January release.

Lone Survivor is rated R “for strong bloody war violence and pervasive language.”  The violence is really quite brutal and often unpleasant to watch, frequently unrelenting after the first twenty minutes.  F-bombs pervade, as one would expect in a combat zone.