Sci-Fi

dir: Richard Kelly

This is not a good movie. It’s not even mediocre. It’s just incompetent.

It’s not as utterly godawful at his last awful foray into moviemaking, which was the truly dire Southland Tales, but whilst it’s not as asinine, it’s not much better. It’s staggeringly not much better.

Richard Kelly came to prominence with Donnie Darko, and since then has been squandering whatever goodwill the flick engendered with a much too forgiving audience. Honestly, these other films he’s been making are so eye-rottingly rotten that it makes me think Donnie Darko was a fluke, a goddamn fluke.

Maybe the elements that he was able to put together coherently the first time have never been able to coalesce since then. I know this is a review of his latest shitfest The Box, but bear with me for a second: I think you can see the seeds of his failure even back in Donnie Darko, by comparing the theatrical cut with his director’s cut.

That’s what it comes down to: Kelly doesn’t know how to edit his own flicks. Of course, the companies hire editors to actually edit the films, but the directors (and often producers) can end up sitting in at every stage to ensure their singular ‘vision’ gets carried through.

The director’s cut of Donnie Darko spends an inordinate amount of time explaining elements of the story that don’t matter, no-one other than Richard Kelly cares about, and that don’t make sense anyway. The most important part is that these sections don’t add anything, because they’re for arbitrary elements anyway.

Ignoring the poorly rendered story, the grainy and dulled visuals and the actors who clearly have no idea what they’re doing, it’s the editing which really takes the viewer out of the experience here.

A long time ago, there was a Twilight Zone episode called 'Button, Button', and it dealt with a mysterious guy knocking on a couple’s door, and presenting them with a dilemma: here’s a box with a button on it; if you press the button someone, somewhere whom you don’t know dies, and you get a million dollars. If you don’t press it, nothing happens and you get nothing.

The couple agonise over the decision, the pros and cons, the rationalisations and justifications, and finally make their decision. The clincher, twist or punch-line of the episode, coming as they always did on the Zone, right at the end, is the remark from the mysterious man that the box, with its button, will now go to someone else, someone that this couple doesn’t know.

The implication is clear, but I’m leaving it muddy, deliberately. It worked, concisely, and it delivered that queasy gut-punch that was the show’s trademark, leaving you with that sinking feeling accompanying realisation. This was a half-hour tv episode, which actually, with ad breaks, amounts to 22 or so minutes.

Richard Kelly, who obviously saw this episode at some point in his life, became obsessed with it, and thought “I shall turn that into a two-hour film, and include shit from my own life, and give an explanation of how the box works, and who the mysterious guy is. That’s the ticket!”

My point is, for Kelly to do what he’s done, means he completely missed the point of why the original episode worked. And (it’s more likely, since I’m sure he’s a highly intelligent guy, that he does grasp this obvious truth), in a remarkable time-wasting exercise, he decides to elaborate upon the parts of the story that are the least meaningful and least rewarding.

dir: John Hillcoat

Oh gods is this film depressing. It’s not as completely hideous and bleak as the Cormac McCarthy novel from which it takes its name, since it leaves out some of the most horrifying bits. Even without some of that stuff, good goddamn is it depressing.

John Hillcoat has made some grim flicks, like Ghosts… Of the Civil Dead and The Proposition, but this out-grims them all. And as with The Proposition, adding to the bleak landscape and sombre atmosphere is a score created by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Of the soundtracks they’ve done together, well, this is of a piece, and whilst it’s not as powerful as the one they managed for that Jesse James flick whose title was almost longer than its running time, it’s still pretty devastating.

This film mostly has three characters. Sure there are others, but three characters are the majority that we look at and care about. There’s The Man (Viggo Mortensen), there’s The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and then there’s the dead world they walk upon.

This is a post-apocalyptic story with a difference. The difference is that there’s nothing cool or romantic about this devastated place where we spend two hours of our lives and the last days of humanity. Plenty of flicks have been set in some nebulous future setting where nuclear war, robots, a virus, melting icecaps, zombies, evolved monkeys or Michael Bay have been responsible for wiping out human civilisation as we knew it. In almost all of those stories, though, the world left behind might be seriously fucked up and rubble strewn, but there’s still life, of a sort, and as they say, where there’s life, there’s fucking. I mean, where there’s life there’s hope.

The Road posits a world where there will be no redemption, no Hand of God coming down from the heavens to save / kill us, no rebuilding, no preservation of a copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz for future generations, no hope. The world is cold and getting colder, ashen, dead, really dead, and it’s just waiting for its last species to violently expire in order for the whole planet to become as quiet as a global grave can be.

dir: JJ Abrams

Excitement might have been high in some quarters; dread might have been higher in others. The prospect of a new Star Trek film might have seemed inevitable to some, and downright puzzling to most. After all, the Trek flicks, either the ones with the ancient crew or with the still quite old Next Generation crew never really made that much money (certainly not blockbuster numbers), and the last hurrah critically and financially was back in the 90s.

And yet they kept putting out films as if there was a burning need in the public to see these same weak characters age poorly and deliver groan-worthy jokes that seemed outdated even back in the era where the only form of mass entertainment were cave paintings and hitting each other over the head with clubs.

As with a whole bunch of other franchises, properties, brands recently, they decided to bring it all back and to undertake a reboot / reinvention in order to rekindle interest in a largely apathetic public. And they handed the responsibility for directing this, the eleventh, or XIth, if you want to get all Roman numeral and classy, entry in the franchise to J.J. Abrams, the guy who, amongst other crimes, created the television shows Felicity, Alias and Lost, and directed the third Mission: Impossible flick.