Sometimes the mystery is better than the solution. This is one of those times.
Marvel Comics’ X-Men movie trilogy was about a group of mostly young people with special “mutant” powers who were either victimized by or exploited by “regular” humans. These powers were first presented in most cases when the unsuspecting mutants became teenagers. It was effective as fantasy and more effective as metaphor for the changes of adolescence. One of the few grown-up characters is Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), a cigar-chomping tough guy with indestructible claws that slide out from between his knuckles and the power to heal all wounds almost instantly — and large pieces of his memory missing, which is the source of some intrigue.
Now Wolverine gets his own spin-off and it is an “origin” story, which anthropologists and comic fans know is a prequel, an up close and personal look at the superhero’s backstory to give us some insights into what made Logan into his Wolverine-y bad self and a chance to feel knowledgeable when we see the experiences that led to the characteristics and events we already know. Aha, so that’s where the name comes from! And who was behind that operation? And when do we get to see that always indispensable origin moment — Wolverine primal screaming up into the indifferent sky?
The movie’s version of adamantium, that super-strong metal alloy that gives Wolverine the super-powerful skeletal structure and shooting claws, is its three leads, all superb actors as well as action heroes. Liev Schreiber plays Victor, Logan’s similarly-powered brother, and Ryan Reynolds is a motor-mouthed swordsman named Wade Wilson. The evil military man who presides over the hideous medical experiments is Danny Houston and Logan’s romantic interest is the criminally underused Lynn Collins. There are some striking fight scenes, I love the way Wolverine races toward battle, and it has the usual intriguing murkiness about who is on which side that energizes the X-Men stories. But it never taps into the deeper themes of mutantcy as metaphor and the reveals are not especially revelatory.
Intense sports action and accidents, reference to serious injuries
Diversity Issues:
None
Date Released to Theaters:
August 21, 2009
Kids, don’t try this at home.
3D is X-treme film-making and thus well suited to the X Games, hyper-intense, hyper-dangerous, hyper-what are they thinking? sports that are closer to stunts. Young men compete on skateboard, snowboard, and on dirt bikes and motocross to defy the laws of physics. One of them says he feels about gravity the way some people feel about evolution: “It’s just a theory.”
Adolescent testosterone-friendly sponsors like Play Station, Taco Bell, Red Bull, and the Navy have helped make the X Games into an enormous and high-stakes event. Some of its most stunning images are of the homes these young men have purchased with the money they make breaking their bones to do these tricks.
And X can also stand for something else. At one point, a selection of one competitor’s past x-rays of injuries flash on the screen.
The stunts are astonishing and the 3D effects are so intense that you will feel like wiping the dirt kicked up by the motocross bike off your face. But there is more to the film. It has some important lessons about passion, commitment, being willing to ask “what if it is possible?” and being willing to fail in order to achieve ultimate success. The climax of the film comes in a three-way competition that includes one man coming back from a wipe-out the year before and one who is badly injured early on and insists on continuing to compete. The respect and affection between the competitors is genuinely touching and the way they ride their boards back and forth to the medical facility to check on the injured athlete is affecting. They are barely aware of how organic their attachment to the boards has become.
Rated PG for sci-fi action and brief historical smoking
Profanity:
None
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Social drinking, characters get drunk
Violence/ Scariness:
Sci-fi violence, characters in peril, injured and killed
Diversity Issues:
Mild joshing of 1950's stereotypes
Date Released to Theaters:
April 3, 2009
Date Released to DVD:
August 11, 2009
Amazon.com ASIN:
B0029W2V9U
Was there ever a time when cheesy 1950’s sci-fi movies were actually scary? Is it because they are so low tech in comparison to the intense realism of CGI? Or is it just the balsa wood sets and cardboard dialog that seems so endearingly innocent now? This affectionate tribute to the low budget movies that played in drive-ins and were shown on Saturday morning television comes from R.W. Goodwin, whose love for the movies he saw as a kid helped inspire him to co-produce “The X-Files.” And this is a loving appreciation, not a parody. There’s no winking at the camera. And there’s no exaggeration, but then, none is necessary.
The shrewd script gives us the perfect assortment of 1950’s archetypal characters, with special emphasis on two of the 1950’s primary fixations — the suburban married couple who exemplify “togetherness” and the teenagers who may look like Archie and Betty but could be juvenile delinquents. Like all of this category of movies, the space invaders plot is just a way of addressing that other fixation of the 1950’s, the cold war.
There’s Ted Lewis, a pipe-smoking professor (“Will and Grace’s” Eric McCormack) and his luscious wife Lana (Jody Thomson), who always seems to be pouring cocktails or lighting candles suggestively. There are the high school sweethearts, Penny (Sarah Smyth) in flared skirts and saddle shoes and Dick (Andrew Dunbar), the guy with the letter sweater. Their pal with the “Wild Ones” hair, t-shirt, and jacket is Cody (a terrific Aaron Brooks). There’s the about-to-retire sheriff (“Wonder Years'” Dan Lauria) and his get-em officer Vernon (Robert Patrick). And there’s Tammy, the waitress with artistic aspirations and a heart of gold (Jenni Baird).
Penny and Dick are out necking in the mountains when something strange happens and they race back to town. Professor Lewis sees it through his telescope and goes to investigate. He is sucked into a spaceship and when he emerges, he is…different. The professor’s body has been borrowed by a law enforcement alien who has come to earth to kill off an evil, destructive alien with tentacles.
Like the films it salutes, this was made quickly and on a minuscule budget. But there is a lot more talent behind and in front of the camera than there was in the originals. Goodwin said he made the movie because he loved those old films and wished there had been more of them. McCormack’s nimble timing, Baird’s sweet sincerity and the innocence of its message about intergalactic understanding make this one a worthy addition.
After an enormous train crash/explosion, a line of dialog reassures us that the engineer (played in a quick cameo by Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook) was not hurt. This is, reassuringly, a Disney movie. The entire planet may be at risk in the storyline but the latest in the Witch Mountain saga is more exciting than scary. The 1968 novel by Alexander Key about two kids with paranormal powers became the the cheesy-but beloved Disney 1970’s “Escape from Witch Mountain” and its sequel, “Return to Witch Mountain” and made-for TV follow-up “Beyond Witch Mountain.” The story has now been “re-imagined” for the 21st century with Duane “The Rock” Johnson as a Las Vegas cab driver whose mysterious teenage passengers have special powers. It may be high tech and big budget this time around, but it unabashedly retains its essential cheesiness.
Johnson plays Jack Bruno, a guy who is trying to stay out of trouble, which means keeping out of the way of some thugs who want him to work for them as he delivers costumed fanboys and an expert in extraterrestrials to a UFO convention. At first he thinks the blonde teenagers with the stiff demeanor and robotic speech patterns are just another pair of nutty nerds. And at first when he is chased by ominous black vehicles he thinks it is just the same thugs he keeps turning down. But he discovers that these are a different kind of thug — they are from one of those mysterious government agencies that act like big bullies all the time. There is also a Terminator-like armored stalker-sort of guy who is after the kids, too. And when you are being chased by bad guys from two different planets, it helps to have a former WWF champion around to open up a can of whup-, um, butt (I said it was a Disney movie).
Johnson is the always-appealing heart of the movie, whether he is making a self-deprecatory or skeptical wisecrack or throwing a punch. The kids’ roles are unfortunately all robotic delivery and special effects wizardry, which doesn’t give them much of a personality. I don’t know why it is that movie aliens, whether they look like humans or giant insects, whether they are super-smart or super-scary, never seem to have emotions or senses of humor. It would make them much more interesting and involving as characters. The very talented Carla Gugino does her best with the under-written role of the scientist who researches extra-terrestrial life and Garry Marshall has fun as her nemesis, who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t adopt, expand, and write a book about and who lines the windows of his RV with aluminum foil. Fans of the original films will enjoy seeing its child actors, Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards, appearing as a sympathetic sheriff and a waitress. Johnson’s warmth and star power and some cool effects are fun even when the storyline drags a bit, if not enough to make the suggestion for a sequel at the end especially welcome.
This movie deserves two separate reviews. The first is for fans of the the award-winning graphic novel, a dense, complex, challenging story of superheroes and costumed crusaders with lives that are messy, dysfunctional, and bleak.
You will be very satisfied with this film. Director Zack Snyder (300) is a fanboy who is passionately committed to the book and in essence and detail he really gets it right. The visuals are stunning, especially Night Owl’s flying “Archie,” and he has meticulously realized the vision of writer Alan Moore (V for Vendetta). Although Moore famously has had his name removed from the film because he does not believe that the story he designed to be told in panels on a page can be translated to screen, I think even he would agree that this is a much more sophisticated and faithful adaptation than “V for Vendetta” or “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.”
While there are moments that reflect Snyder’s understandable nervousness in meeting the demands of the graphic novel’s devoted — sometimes obsessive — fans and one serious weak point in the flat performance of Malin Ackerman as the story’s most significant female character (both Silk Spectre characters, mother and daughter, would appreciate the irony of apparently casting a performer solely for her looks to play one of their roles), overall the film faithfully and successfully grapples with the multi-layered storyline and the fascinatingly flawed characters.
Don’t expect “Iron Man,” “Spider-Man,” or “The Dark Knight.” In fact, as darkness goes, this makes “The Dark Knight” look positively sunny. These are not people who get bit by a radioactive spider or come to earth from an exploding planet. Most of them have no special powers. They are just adrenaline junkies who like to get up close and personal with things that are very dark and disturbing, sometimes for reasons that are very dark and disturbing. And this is a dark and disturbing film, a hard-R with sex and violence that is just this side of an NC-17.
If you think all of that relates to the fact that it takes place in a slightly tweaked alternate world in which Richard Nixon is still President in the 1980’s, then you are beginning to get the idea.
And just to give you some further sense of how fully-realized the world of Watchmen is, the graphic novel, which was on Time Magazine’s list of the top 100 books of the 20th century, is filled with all kinds of artifacts and ephemera, newspaper clippings, excerpts from a memoir, and a separate story about a boy reading a comic book about a pirate. Snyder has separately produced some of this material and it will be integrated into the film when it comes out on DVD.
One of the highlights of the film is the opening sequence set to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” bringing us up to date and provide some history and context. The song has, like everything else in the film, at least two meanings. The first is that intended by the song, the upheavals of the 20th century. The second is Moore’s cheeky parallel adjustments. In one quick shot, a female character replaces the sailor planting a kiss on the nurse in the iconic V-J Day photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt.
Years before, there was a group of masked crime-fighters called The Minutemen. One was the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a cigar-chomping, heavily-armed tough guy who sports an ironic (and anachronistic) smiley-button. It is his murder that sets off the story, and he appears in flashbacks that illuminate the past and present. The Comedian is the only Minuteman to belong to a sort of loose successor organization, The Watchmen. But caped crusaders have been outlawed by the Keene Act, and they are not working together any more, at least not officially. Former Watchmen members have gone on to other things. Ozymandias/Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), the most intelligent man in the world, now heads up a global corporation. Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), once a scientist, was turned into a blue creature with the appearance of a man but with power over time and space. When he needs to think, he hangs out on Mars. His girlfriend is Laurie/Silk Spectre (Akerman), a second-generation crime-fighter. Her mother, the first Silk Spectre, was one of the Minutemen. And then there is Rorschach (the superb Jackie Earle Haley), named for the famous ink-blot test that inspires his mask. As in “V for Vendetta,” these characters all struggle with ends/means issues, but in Rorschach’s case, the line between justice and vigilantism is especially permeable. Everyone is compromised. The good guys are not all good but, even more intriguing, the bad guys are not all bad.
The range of perspectives on how to confront injustice, the moral compromises, and the personal and professional demons of the characters are set in the political context of an escalating nuclear arms race. Do we as a society exploit those who are damaged in ways that are convenient for us, allowing them to do the dirty work while we have the satisfaction of moral superiority? Can you fight bad guys without becoming one of them? Is being smart the same as being wise? Who watches the Watchmen? Does knowing the future reconcile you to it? What is the mask and what is the face? And what does it say about us that we call this entertainment?
, a dense, complex, challenging story of superheroes and costumed crusaders with lives that are messy, dysfunctional, and bleak. 