Independence Day

Posted on July 4, 2008 at 8:00 am

In this heart-thumping, slam-bang action extravaganza, aliens arrive and blow up the world’s major cities. The president (Bill Pullman) and fighter pilots (led by Will Smith) must find a way to fight back. Some kids will find this too intense and scary, but others will want to see it over and over (and over) again. Themes to discuss include behavior in a crisis, honesty, the dilemma faced by the president in making the choice to use nuclear weapons, and, for film fanatics, finding all of the references to other classic films, from Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb to 2001 – A Space Odyssey.

Parents should know that the movie was justifiably accused of being sexist. One of the female leads is a stripper. We see her perform, though she remains covered. Her lover resists marrying her because it would hurt his career. Another couple divorced because she was too committed to her career. In addition, parents may be concerned about an unmarried couple that is clearly intiÂ¬mate, and by the tension as the characters are in peril, as well as a massive number of deaths, including two of the main characters.

Cloverfield

Posted on April 21, 2008 at 11:00 am

Stories, especially movies, are usually linear and organized in part because stories are how we make sense of the world but mostly because of the limits of time. If we are only going to give two hours of our lives to a movie, we don’t have time for irrelevant details. But real life is messy. Patterns only emerge in retrospect. Part of the appeal of scary movies is that we know that it’s just a movie. Those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or the great ape in King Kong are contained, not just within the limits of the screen but also within the formal limits of traditional story-telling. The perfect lighting and welling music provoke a response in us that is a kind of comfortable scariness.
This movie goes in another direction. A clever premise keeps the audience literally off-balance in “Cloverfield” from J.J. Abrams, the creator of Lost and Alias. We may be in stadium seating at the mall multiplex, eating popcorn, but what we are watching is not a feature film. It is an artifact, a home video found at a site “formerly known as Central Park” that happened to be running when something terrible happened. It’s as though the only documentation of a massive and devastating attack was a 21st century equivalent of the Zapruder film.

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I am Legend

Posted on March 18, 2008 at 8:00 am

Will Smith plays the last man on earth in this third movie based on Richard Matheson’s novella. Scientist Robert Neville was immune to the virus that wiped out everyone. He spends his days hunting for food in the deserted streets of Manhattan, now overgrown with brush and inhabited by deer, and working in the lab to find a cure for the virus. And he spends his nights barricaded to protect himself from the infected creatures who are hunting him. Once human, they are now mindlessly enraged vampire/zombie killers who can do nothing but devour.
Okay, they can do one other thing. They can learn. In their feral, furious way they can cooperate and plan. Neville can trap them for his experiments or throw them off his trail, but they keep getting smarter. He is not just their prey — he is their teacher, and he is teaching them how to get him.

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Sunshine

Posted on January 8, 2008 at 12:34 pm

The sun is dying. A rocket ship from earth, meaningfully named “Icarus,” failed in its mission to reboot the sun with a supercharged nuclear payload designed to “create a star within a star.” Now the earth’s last chance is Icarus II. If they do not deliver the payload, the sun and all of its planets will die.

But this is not the usual “and then something goes wrong” or “and then an alien leaps out of a crew member’s chest” space opera. This is a meticulously constructed story that presents its characters with a series of exponentially more complex moral and practical dilemmas as gripping as the perilous situations that threaten the mission.

Director Danny Boyle transcends genre. His films have ranged from horror (28 Days Later) to thrillers (Shallow Grave) to charming family fantasy (Millions). But all of his films focus on moral choices. In 28 Days Later, he showed us a world infested with enraged zombies where it is the uninfected humans who are the scariest predators. In both Shallow Grave and Millions, characters discover the corrosive effect of stolen money. Boyle likes to make us think about what we would do to survive, how far we would go to get something we wanted.

The crew of Icarus II has just passed the point where communication with earth has been cut off. They are alone, a community unto themselves, and they must struggle with the remnants of the priorities and procedures they have been given as they are confronted with increasingly dire circumstances and increasingly conflicted priorities.

Should they change their course to try to save anyone who might still be there? No, that would interfere with their mission. But what if it might increase the chance of completing the mission? And what if things change and it is essential for completing the mission?

And what if there is not enough oxygen for everyone? How do we decide who gets to live? By assigning blame? By rank? By who is most important for completion of the mission? And, at the end of these judgments, who are we? How do they change us?

Boyle and his able cast create an atmosphere of conviction and sincerity that makes us invest in the answers to these questions, and the debates as gripping as the action scenes.

Parents should know that this is an intense and disturbing movie, with extreme peril, some jump-out-at-you shocks, and some graphic violence. Characters are injured and killed and there is a suicide. One of the strengths of the movie is the way it presents moral issues in a provocative manner, and that may be disturbing for some audience members. Another strength of the movie is its portrayal of diverse characters.

Families who see this movie should talk about how the characters evaluated their choices. What were their priorities? When they disagreed, what were the determining factors? Authors often use science fiction and the device of putting diverse characters in an environment that is cut off from everyone else to highlight particular controversies. How would this story have been different if it took place today, in the US?

Families who enjoy this film will also enjoy Silent Running, Apollo 13, and 2001 – A Space Odyssey. Books like Tragic Choices and The Problems of Jurisprudence consider ways to evaluate options in a legal, economic, and public policy framework and of course many books consider moral, ethical, and spiritual approaches to these issues as well.

Resident Evil: Extinction

Posted on September 20, 2007 at 11:52 am

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong horror violence throughout and some nudity.
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Marijuana
Violence/ Scariness:	Explicit graphic violence and peril, slashing, impaling, shooting, exploding, zombie humans, dogs, and birds
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters, very strong women
Date Released to Theaters:	2007

Those meanies at the Umbrella Corporation are at it again in the third chapter of this series based on the popular computer game. That pesky virus they allowed to escape has wiped out nearly all life on earth except for raging feral zombies.

The corporate bad guys somehow all have clean shirts, a little English girl hologram to tell them what is going on, and working computers in those underground offices, the ones with the spooky mirrored corriders and intricate booby-traps. Bad guy number one talks like this: “their hunger for fleshhhhhh.” He is releasing a series of Alice clones (which have scars for some Lamarckian reason), but he needs the real thing to get her special blood for his anti-virus.

Meanwhile, Alice (Milla Jovovich)-in-anti-wonderland is riding around on a motorcycle like Mad Maxine, fighting off feral humans and those inside-out zombie dogs. She meets up with a hardy group of survivors led by Ali Larter (TV’s “Heroes). They all say a lot of brave and hearty things to each other in between rapping out commands about securing the perimeter and evac-ing the bus. The group includes a cute guy with an English accent (Christopher Egan), a cowboy, a girl named K-Mart, a guy good at tossing off wisecracks (Mike Epps), a warm-hearted medic (Ashanti), and a guy Alice likes a lot (Oded Fehr).

And Umbrella Corp’s Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) is trying to track down Alice to use her blood for an antivirus.

True to its video game origins, the movie is basically one set-piece after another, all going something like this. Alice (sometimes another character) enters a new environment. It is quiet. Too quiet. Then something scary and gross happens. And Alice (sometimes another character) responds by fighting back with knives, guns, explosives, a fireball, or kicking and punching. Cue “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

The scary and gross things include not only the ever-popular zombie dogs, but also zombie ravens and a tentacled zombie mutant, as well as the normal, everyday zombies. The environments include a broken-down gas station and a deserted Las Vegas. That’s deserted in both senses of the word. No one is there and “the desert has taken it back;” everything is buried under sand.

It is still more shooting gallery-style videogame than movie. The Resident Evil games themselves have far more by way of plot and characters. And it has to do without the interactivity that adds vitality, so it all seems rather remote, underscored by the cardboard dialogue. The best you can say is that it tries to provide some variety in all of the various battles with zombies, and that Epps, Larter, and Fehr seem to forget they are in a video game movie and for a moment when watching them we can forget it, too.

Parents should know that this movie has extremely gross and graphic violence, with many disgusting deaths and gross monsters. There are a lot of “ewwwwww” moments with spurting blood, sliced-off body parts, and disgusting sounds of pulverization. Characters are in extreme peril and most of them are killed. There is some strong language and non-sexual nudity and a joke about porn. Characters smoke cigarettes and a joint. A strength of the movie is the portrayal of exceptionally capable and courageous women, though of course they dress for combat in scanty clothing.

Families who see this movie should talk about the challenges of turning a game into a story. What can keep a corporation from becoming as powerful as Umbrella Corp? One difference between the good guys and the bad guys in this movie is shown by who is — and is not — willing to sacrifice himself or herself for the others. Where do we see that?

Families who enjoy this movie will enjoy the first twothe much better The Fifth Element, also starring Milla Jovovich, and zombie movies like 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead, and the “zom-rom-com” (zombie romantic comedy) Shaun of the Dead. They may also enjoy trying the the games.