Alex Garland's Civil War

Civil War is a movie about journalism—it is not a movie about politics or humanity. And, in fact, it follows most of the tropes of those movies, just without any serious emotional depth. I hated this movie, and mostly I hated it because this movie loves war and plays to the audience’s enjoyment of violence. 

There is a case to be made that Garland’s film tries to make a movie about journalism in a war-torn country while also avoiding the usual Orientalist or paternalist gaze that those movies turn toward the places where the stories are set. I think that’s probably true. The movie does avoid that.

But the movie still gets off on showing the audience a war zone and asking us to enjoy the thrill of destruction, murder, death, and wholesale slaughter. 

I did like the scene with Jesse Plemons. It’s taut and interesting, and it’s also politically sound, by which I mean that that sequence makes a smart anti-war case. The rest of the movie thinks guns are fun.

Also, have you all heard of Joe Dante's film The Second Civil War? It's much better than this business.

Annihilation and Alex Garland's Big Ideas

Annihilation has a lot of good ideas – well, it has one or two good ideas, but the film is a failure. The thing in its entirety just doesn't work. The movie wants to ask us to think about being, about what cells are and what it means to be an I if our cells mutate constantly. Annihilation uses the fact that our cells deteriorate over our lifespans to ask us to think about what it would mean to instead become something else, to become something new and different than whatever we are. This is all good and well, and it is actually quite an interesting question.

But, in the first place, Natalie Portman is the wrong actress to get us to think about these questions. She is primarily a reactive performer, and so she doesn't appear to be thinking actively about the questions the film poses. Instead she seems simply to respond to whatever the film throws at her. It didn't attack me; it mirrored me, she says of The Shimmer, late in the film, and that's what Portman does, too. She looks seriously and anxiously at whatever is just out of the frame, but she doesn't really do much more.

In the second place, Annihilation sort of wants to be a monster movie, but then it just can't quite keep it up. Whenever the monsters appear out of the Shimmer (and there are something like four or five of these sequences) I was loving this movie. The Shimmer (whatever it is) creates new things by mixing DNA (this is in the trailer, so don't act like I'm spoiling anything), and so we get to see these crazy looking hybrid monsters and strange (occasionally beautiful) lichens and flowers and trees. There are some even weirder monsters in the film's third act. But, the film disposes of these beautiful things easily, and although Portman stares at them and takes DNA samples, she, like the movie, doesn't really seem interested in whatever version of cell division is happening within the space/creature/Shimmer.

And then there's the ending, which is frustrating and easy. I won't spoil this, but Annihilation opts for an uncomplicated, obvious ending, that left me bored. This ending is no more interesting than the last Alien movie's stupid finale. (One is reminded, too, of Ex Machina's ill-considered ending.)

Still, the visuals are really cool, and (as with Alex Garland's last movie) I spent lots of the movie pondering the particular ontological query that the film proposes. The violence in the film, too, is exciting to watch (this was true of Ex Machina, as well). Garland, it seems to me, is fascinated by both being and by actions designed to destroy that being. His films seem to come alive when they focus on either of these things.

If only Annihilation spent more time thinking about the questions it poses; instead it opts for bad storytelling and a cliché finish.

Oscar Nominees 2016: Part 4 of 11

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11.

Sicario

3 Nominations

• Cinematography: Roger Deakins (Unbroken, Prisoners, Skyfall, True Grit, The Reader, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men, The Man Who Wasn't There, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Kundun, Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption)
• Original Score: Jóhann Jóhannsson (The Theory of Everything)
• Sound Editing

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro, Daniel Kaluuya, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Donovan, Victor Garber, Raoul Trujillo, Julia Cesar Cedillo, Bernardo Saracino, Maximiliano Hernandez, Lora Martinez-Cunningham, Edgar Arreola, Rio Alexander

I tried to stop hating this movie, but every time I think more about it I hate it more. It's exciting to watch, with many good performances, but what this message has to say about violence, about torture, about war, about international action, and about the violence perpetrated by our government is (to my mind) reprehensible. Still, I am glad that Jóhann Jóhannson got a nomination here. His score is interesting and creepy and metallic, and I am glad the Academy is recognizing scores like this. Roger Deakins' photography is gorgeous, as always; one day he will finally shoot a movie that people can really get behind and he can win an Oscar. This is thirteenth nomination. He's never won. But we might ask ourselves, as Judith Butler does in Frames of War, "As we watch a video or see an image, what kind of solicitation is at work? Are we being invited to take aim? Are we conscripted into the trajectory of the bullet or missile?" It is clear to me, as Butler says a little later, "that such visual and conceptual frames are ways of building and destroying populations as objects of knowledge and targets of war, and that such frames are the means through which social norms are relayed and made effective." Sicario celebrates violence, torture, and USAmerican exceptionalism far too much for me to have enjoyed watching it.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #51 out of 62

Steve Jobs

2 Nominations

• Actor: Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave)
• Supporting Actress: Kate Winslet (The Reader, Little Children, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Iris, Titanic, Sense and Sensibility)

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Fassbender, Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, Michael Stuhlbarg, Katherine Waterston, Sarah Snook, Perla Haney-Jardine, Makenzie Moss

Steve Jobs! I never wrote about this movie; I kept meaning to, but I just never got around to it, I guess. The thing is I really liked it. I thought it worked very well in its own way, and I loved the performances – Fassbender and Winslet, but also Katherine Waterston and Michael Stuhlbarg. Jobs is a fascinating figure, and the movie peels him apart and demonstrates how personal life and career (for a creative type) are so intertwined. I am not sure I know why people disliked this movie as much as they did, but I will say that it's structure is really stagey. It is as though Steve Jobs was a stage play that somehow found its way to the big screen, but Aaron Sorkin didn't seem to bother to update it so that it would work for film. This is mitigated somewhat by Danny Boyle, but no one could make this screenplay less of a stage play. It's embedded in the structure itself. Each of the film's three acts takes place in basically the same location, and we begin each of the acts by jumping forward in time many years so that the audience spends the first couple of minutes of the act figuring out when we are and what has happened in the interim. And then we watch what happens with Jobs in the minutes leading up to a new product-launch. One of these happens at the end of each act. At one point in the film, Jobs complains that "It’s like 5 minutes before every launch everyone goes to a bar, gets drunk and tells me what they really think." This isn't so much a line that describes how Jobs is feeling as a line that describes how Sorkin's screenplay works. That's exactly what happens in the film. Still, in many ways this is an interesting history of the technological advancement of the last 30 years and some of the people who made that happen, and, as I said, I loved the acting.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Supporting Actress
My Rating: #20 out of 62

Inside Out

2 Nominations

• Original Screenplay: Pete Docter (Up, WALL·E, Toy Story), Ronnie del Carmen, Josh Cooley, & Meg LeFauve
• Animated Feature

Director: Pete Docter

Cast: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Richard Kind, Kaitlyn Dias, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Paula Poundstone, Bobby Moynihan, Josh Cooley, John Ratzenberger, Rashida Jones

This is a really sweet children's movie, or, I guess, a movie for adolescents. It didn't really feel aimed at someone like me, so I have to say that I was sometimes bored in it. It was a little too cutesy and generic for me – the image above is a great example of the CandyLand way the film is designed. But everyone seemed to really like this movie, and I expect it to win the Oscar for Animated Feature. As much as filmmakers have tried to shift the perceptions of people toward animated film, most people still seem to see animated film as made for children (perhaps I include myself in "most people", as well). Inside Out strikes me as definitely not a film for adults, but adults have seemed to enjoy it, so I guess my initial impression is incorrect. I've linked above to where I have written a little about this, so I won't belabor the point, but I just never bought into the geography of the world inside the little girl's brain. It seemed at all times to be arbitrary, that is, the writers, at any given moment, would have been able to fix the problem – let the train leave just a little later and take Joy and Sadness back to central command, or whatever it is called, or let Joy and Sadness jump into the little memory chute that sends memories back up to HQ like Rob Lowe's shirt getting caught in that pneumatic tube in Tommy Boy. And a few times the writers did just adjust the rules of this brain-world whenever they wanted – the sequence where Bing Bong helps Joy escape the area of the little girl's brain where things are forgotten forever might pose a few questions for us such as: why can't the writers just make the wall of that place just a little lower? and: If that location means that things are forgotten forever, how is it that one is able to leave that place at all?
Will Win: Animated Feature

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #38 out of 62

Ex Machina

2 Nominations

• Original Screenplay: Alex Garland
• Visual Effects

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya Mizuno, Corey Johnson

I was definitely into Ex Machina, and I wrote a meditation on what I see as the important depths of the film's amazing screenplay, that I recommend you read if you've seen the movie. I am really happy about these two nominations – I don't think it can win an Oscar in either category, but Alex Garland has written a couple of great screenplays in his career so far: 28 Days Later... and Sunshine, a personal favorite. He deserves this nomination and deserves to be more widely recognized for his work. Obviously Gleeson, Isaac, and Vikander are all having a great year, too, so that's excellent. If only there were an Oscar category for choreography: I want to nominate the dance sequence in Ex Machina for an Oscar (even if it would lose to Cinderella). In any case, if you haven't seen Ex Machina, you really must. It's an exciting, deep thriller.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #24 out of 62

My Favorite Moment in Ex Machina

There were a couple of moments in Ex Machina that I loved. But my favorite moment in the movie was the sequence when Caleb, the young programmer who is visiting this isolated compound up in the mountains, starts to think that maybe he is a cyborg. This is all the more cool because the audience has already thought of this. I had been wondering this exact thing for the better part of thirty minutes, since seeing the oblique shot of the strange scars on Caleb's back as he shaved his face. By this point in Alex Garland's movie, Caleb has been so thoroughly tripped out by his boss Nathan (and by Nathan's creation Ava) that he has started to think that he might actually be a computer underneath the skin he has always thought was real.

Freak out over, Caleb is able to sleep. He presumably has confirmed that he is, finally, human, and not simply one of Nathan's creations. But, again, Nathan and Ex Machina know better. In a strange conversation about how desire might work, Nathan explicates a queer theory describing sexual desire itself as culturally contingent, explaining that Caleb "himself" – at one of the levels he considers most personal, human – has been programmed by media, by his parents, by his culture. It is a pretty great conversation, and one that makes it clear that Caleb is, no matter how "real" he thinks he is, actually a cyborg. It is too late for us not to be cyborgs. Who we (think we) are is so completely informed, molded, even dictated by the media we consume, even the media that we are consuming alone at our computer consoles. This is even more true for someone like Caleb, who spends his days at a computer, speaking in the computer's own language.
The internet, this ability to have information at our fingertips, this stream of every type of pornography imaginable, has permeated our very desires.

My second favorite sequence from the movie is Sonoya Mizuno and Oscar Isaac's incredible dance sequence. It's a surprising, odd section of the movie, mostly because it departs so fully from the visual world that Alex Garland has so-far created in the movie. The sequence is also totally chilling, because it becomes so clear in this sequence that Kyoko is a machine. Her dance moves copy Nathan's exactly. Or... well, doesn't this beg us to think about who Nathan is copying with his dance moves? I mean, it is clear that Kyoko can only copy the moves Nathan teaches her – they dance in unison – but Nathan's moves aren't original either, are they?

Ex Machina sort of devolves at its end – Garland has trouble dealing with the fallout of the situation and theoretical proposition he has set up for us – Sunshine (a much more successful movie, to my mind, at least on an emotional level) went similarly off the rails. It is as though the only possible response to the questions that Garland wishes to pose is violent action. For Garland, violence is what we find at the limits of subjectivity. Still, as with Sunshine, this violence is awesome to watch. The stabbings at the end of Ex Machina are one of the coolest things in the movie. That knife just goes in so easily, with an even beautiful simplicity. Violence, here, works to illustrate another limit of human subjectivity. The human body is subject to injury, to woundings, to violence, and human consciousness cannot (yet) live without the body that houses that consciousness. As Bussy asks in George Chapman's 1604 play Bussy D'Ambois:

Is my body then
But penetrable flesh? And must my mind
Follow my blood? Can my divine part add
No aid to th'earthly in extremity?

Bussy's question is rhetorical. The answer is an unequivocal yes, one that Chapman stages by having Bussy die onstage in front of our eyes. But in Ex Machina, we follow a different person out of the compound and back to the city. Her mind, perhaps, does not need to follow her blood.

I don't know. For me the film becomes confused here. I kept wondering about the body, particularly at the film's end. How is the body powered? Is Ava's body subject to the same time limit that human bodies are? How does she experience her stolen skin? How long will this body and its parts last? Isn't Ava just as human in this way, too? She cannot continue indefinitely, can she? And won't she – just as humanity itself, as Nathan reminds us – need to be replaced by a newer model who can experience things in even more varied ways?

Never Let Go, Jack

Mark Romanek's film of Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful novel Never Let Me Go does not work at all. I am not going to post a long diatribe about this, because it's too late to save the movie, but it's really a shame that this movie is not better.

The film of Never Let Me Go completely misses the friendship that is so apparent in the books; instead, the movie seems to think that the most important relationship in the story is Tommy & Kathy's. By focusing on Kathy's unconsummated love for Tommy, the movie misses the importance and real feeling of Kathy's relationship with Ruth. The trouble with this is that Kathy and Ruth's relationship is the point.

The movie also cuts almost all of the references to the "Never Let Me Go" song. This means we miss out on Tommy and Kathy's search for the old tape (instead, they moon at one another on a pier and look very serious). It also means that the scene with Madame at the end lacks any content whatsoever (in the film Madame says only "you poor creatures" or something equally banal). And the final sequence with the ideas about lost things from childhood washing up on the shore relates to nothing from earlier in the film because everything has been cut.

And the movie cuts all the sex. Ugh. It's like they started to write a screenplay and got all prudish. So instead of Kathy experimenting and finding pleasure, she mopes and cries about how much she loves Tommy, and when they finally have sex near the end of the film, the movie behaves as though she's been saving herself for him. This is ideological nonsense, of course, and an incredibly sex-negative twist on a very sex-positive book.

Worse yet, the movie is really bleak. It is almost oppressively downbeat, and the actors in the film (delightful though they may be, and I am fond of all of them) do nothing to cheer up the mood even when that is possible. Sally Hawkins is the only one who brings a modicum of cheer to the picture.

Finally, and here I will stop berating the movie for its failings, the last sequence in the film makes explicit what is only ever implicit in the book – that the lives of these young clones are the same as the lives of "real" people. This is clear in the book because of Kathy's relationship with Ruth, because of the nuances of feeling between them, because of her ability to care for Ruth, because of their desires and curiosities and explorations. In the film it becomes a sententious little speech that feels like a homily at the end of a – frankly, rather boring – church service.

So: read the book. It is lovely. Really. And skip this funeral of a movie. You will be glad you did.

Sunshine

Danny Boyle obviously has a highly developed visual sense. Even in smaller-scale movies like Millions, his visuals are clear and arresting. Couple this superb visionary ability with great storytelling and you get the best action movie of the summer, which is easily Sunshine.

The film stars Michelle Yeoh, Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Troy Garity, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rose Byrne and Cliff Curtis. The performances are great, but what is really awesome about this movie is how it looks. It's a total nail-biting thriller, and I both held my breath and cried at least three times apiece during the movie. But it's just so stunning to look at!

Go. I'm going to go again. If you can see it at the Arclight, go see it at the Arclight. It's definitely this year's The Fountain.