 The Last Voyage of the Demeter is an expansive adaptation of a single chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but - as many (including Norwegian director Andre Ovredal) have suggested - it might as well be Alien reconceived aboard a 19th-century seafaring vessel. Set in 1897, the story revolves around the titular ship as it sets sail for London, unaware that its Romanian cargo includes a certain fabled bloodsucker who begins feasting nightly on the crew. Given the title, it’s not really a spoiler to admit that things don’t turn out so well. Ovredal (Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) has legitimate filmmaking chops. He calibrates the creaking ropes, groaning shipboards and lashing rain for maximum visual and auditory impact - frequently evoking the gothic grandeur of the Hammer Horror era. The capable cast includes Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones) as the ship’s captain and the versatile Corey Hawkins (24: Legacy) as a medical man who’s a last-moment addition to the crew (the suddenly ubiquitous David Dastmalchian - already seen this summer in The Boogeyman and Oppenheimer - plays the ship’s gloomy first mate, who only grows gloomier as the voyage wears on). The film has an appreciable nasty streak; throats are torn out and blood is spilled liberally. The fate of the Captain’s grandson Toby (Norman Woody) - his underage status normally providing some built-in measure of protection - encapsulates the movie’s fundamental and unapologetic meanness. Most horror fans will readily applaud the cut of its jib. Alas, it’s a rather limited premise, however, and the script - in spite of a supposedly two-decade journey from spec to big-screen - makes little effort to fashion a, shall we say… less-limited approach, a clever riffing on Stoker’s basic melody. There are no narrative surprises. The character work is largely perfunctory (Hawkins noting his medical career’s been stymied by racism is about the sum total of it). Dracula’s unique allure has long been his dichotomy between stately aristocrat and savage predator… and while there’s something to be said for a version that’s entirely feral, after a while he just begins to feel like another creature feature concoction - a shallow F/X monstrosity. The character’s seductive charisma and dark wit are sorely missed. The Last Voyage of the Demeter slakes a basic appetite for grisly horror, but is not unlike its namesake - solid and seaworthy, but ultimately doomed.  Let’s be honest - it should *not* be this difficult to produce a genuinely groovy prehistoric shark thriller. The original Meg - released in 2018 and directed by Jon Turteltaub - was fine, but merely functional. It never rose to the tantalizing B-movie gusto of its premise. This sequel - randomly directed, as if on auto-pilot, by offbeat Brit auteur Ben Wheatley (Kill List, High-Rise, Free Fire) - promises a more off-the-rails, Meg-fueled extravaganza, but it mostly just vaporizes any brain cells in the immediate vicinity.
Jason Statham returns as Jonas Taylor, now battling eco-criminals when he’s not co-parenting the now teenage Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai) along with her Uncle, played by Wu Jing (it feels very much like original lead Li Bingbing simply declined to reprise her role, and the script was hastily revised in the most painless manner possible). A routine submersible dive into the Mariana Trench uncovers an illegal mining operation, one that involves the farming of rare earth minerals worth billions. Mercenary Montes (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) triggers an explosion to cover their tracks, leaving Jonas and his team stranded on the ocean’s floor and punching a hole in the thermocline - the all-important layer that keeps the Trench’s prehistoric ecosystem firmly in place. This first hour is astonishingly dull, toothless and largely shark-free stuff. Our leads must figure out a way to get from the station back to the surface (and unravel a bit of industrial espionage in the process)… and until they do, it’s as if the film is left puttering in neutral. The third act finally cuts loose as a trio of Megalodons - along with a giant octopus and a pack of lizard-like creatures known as "Snappers" (capable of wreaking havoc on land and sea in equal measure) - descend onto a tropical resort known as “Fun Island.” In theory, this is exactly the sort of Jaws-on-HGH nonsense that the original never quite pulled off, as Jonas goes shark-jousting on a jet ski and fends off a Meg with a severed helicopter rotor. But it’s all oddly lacking in creative flair. Unlike a movie such as Piranha 3D (hardly a noteworthy work of art to begin with), there’s no devious spark; it’s a bland and bloodless affair. Statham’s acting style is such that it’s virtually impossible to tell if he’s merely bored, but his hard-boiled gruffness at least carries some value in an enterprise such as this. The Meg should, by all accounts, be a hugely entertaining franchise, but so far it’s been little more than cinematic chum.
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8/22/2023 0 Comments oppenheimer Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a biopic that, ironically, is best approached as if it’s not actually a biopic at all. Ostensibly the story of its titular figure, theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project during World War II and father of the atomic bomb… the film would - perhaps - be more accurately described as Nolan’s own sober-eyed deconstruction of that inevitable and distinctly Promethean moment in which humanity willingly sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Oppenheimer would come to bear the weight of that burden, but we carry the fallout inside each and every one of us - a collective sin that continues to be passed on from generation to generation.
The early stages of the movie have a disorienting quality. Nolan touches on key, formative moments in Oppenheimer’s early life with the harried rhythm of someone scribbling physics calculations in the margins (a peevish attempt to poison his professor in Cambridge with a cyanide-laced apple speaks to Oppenheimer’s tendency to act without fully considering the repercussions). The scenes are juxtaposed against testimonial excerpts - both from Oppenheimer’s own controversial security hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, and the Senate confirmation of former AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss as Secretary of Commerce in 1958 (did I mention this is a film primed to gross almost a billion dollars?) - and the cross-cutting often feels not unlike hydrogen atoms smashing together, forcefully yet inelegantly. Oppenheimer is played by the great Irish actor Cillian Murphy, who conveys the lean, sharp-angled intelligence of his features, the probing and penetrative intuition of his gaze… and, eventually, the hollowed-out gravity of his haunted visage during the ensuing post-war years. Murphy keys in on Oppenheimer’s less flattering traits - his arrogance, his wandering eye, his self-absorption - and lives within the character’s crevices of complication. His piercing cobalt stare holds a 70mm IMAX screen unwaveringly - arguably better than any special effect. It’s a remarkable performance. The narrative jerkiness solidifies once Matt Damon arrives as General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project… and his character’s military-honed gruffness generates a pleasingly frictive rub with Oppenheimer’s smugly unerring confidence. In spite of his potentially troublesome flirtations with the Communist party (which includes a brief fling with Florence Pugh’s troubled Jean Tatlock), Oppenheimer eventually gets the gig and sets up shop in Los Alamos, assembling a scientific dream team that includes the likes of Benny Safdie’s Edward Teller and David Krumholtz’s Isidor Isaac Rabi. Nolan has little interest in canonizing his subject - if anything, he makes a deliberate point of portraying Oppenheimer less as a practical, hands-on genius and more as a wily and efficient project manger (his field of expertise was theoretical, after all). The Trinity test on July 16, 1945 is the movie’s centerpiece, and it’s a showstopper. Nolan, perhaps, overthinks how to dramatize the actual detonation, which takes a slightly abstract slant (we don’t get the immediate, inescapable horror of an IMAX screen awash in nuclear fire)… but the buildup to the button being pushed is some of the year’s most rigorously gripping filmmaking (calculations indicate there’s an infinitesimal chance of the explosion triggering a chain reaction that ignites the Earth’s atmosphere… which obviously didn’t occur, but still lends the sequence an aura of apocalyptic dread. Like any great showman, Nolan casts a spell that makes you believe - in the moment - that the worst *could* still happen). Nolan packs the film with A-list talent, which might seem like a self-indulgent flex, but there’s a stark logic to the approach - it’s by far the simplest cinematic hack when it comes to tracking the story’s dense network of characters (it’s unlikely secondary figure David L. Hill’s key testimony near the end of the movie would fully land were he not helpfully played by Oscar winner Rami Malek). Several make the most of their limited screentime (Casey Affleck is chillingly good in his lone scene, while Kenneth Branagh is excellent in his brief turn as Niels Bohr)… though the obvious standout, other than Murphy, is Robert Downey Jr. A generational talent who nearly threw it all away, he earned the comfort of serving as the face of Marvel’s billion-dollar Avengers brand - though seemingly at the cost of his incisive edge as an actor, which has steadily eroded over the past decade. It’s been a minute since Downey Jr. has done, well… anything really beyond riffing on his Tony Stark persona, but as the petty, conflicted Lewis Strauss he rediscovers his acting fire; there’s still an abundance of fuel left in that tank. Some have suggested the film slackens slightly during its third hour, as Oppenheimer - tormented by guilt - begins to advocate against further nuclear research (others have complained that the movie doesn’t actually show the bombs fall on Japan - as if the scene in which Oppenheimer addresses the cheering throngs in the Los Alamos gymnasium like a high school pep rally, only to see it all turn to nuclear ash before his very eyes doesn’t adamantly get the point across - a rather depressing commentary on how people expect literal spoon-feeding in place of critical thought these days). The aforementioned sequence is a harrowing standout; it’s like watching Oppenheimer’s psyche splinter in real time. He may have declared himself “Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” in the aftermath of the Trinity test, but this is the actual moment those words sear into reality. The rest of the movie does seemingly downshift into familiar scenes of men sitting in rooms, talking - between Oppenheimer being hauled before the AEC’s kangaroo court and Strauss’s increasingly fraught Senate confirmation - but its nails manage to dig even deeper, nearly drawing blood… the echo of Bohr’s observation that “You are the man who gave them the power to destroy themselves… and the world is not prepared” underscoring every moment. As a filmmaker, Nolan can often be too cute for his own good (Tenet’s deliberately muddy sound mix; the multi-timeframe structure of Dunkirk), but with this movie, he’s working in a register of righteous yet cold-flamed fury we haven’t seen from him before. Oppenheimer is a tough film to wrap your head around in a single viewing. It lingers with you. The missteps (and there are a few - such as Emily Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer having a vision of her husband and Tatlock copulating mid-testimony) are ultimately outweighed. The final scene, staged between the title character and Albert Einstein, is so starkly chilling and thematically unflinching, you’ll immediately want to experience the entire thing again.  Is Mission: Impossible the best currently ongoing studio franchise? You could certainly make that argument. The Tom Cruise-led series was initially a fascinating haven for A-list filmmakers to leave their own distinct creative stamp - Brian De Palma’s retro-flavored espionage… John Woo’s sleek pyrotechnics… JJ Abrams’s grounded and gritty emotional stakes… Brad Bird’s dazzlingly fleet-of-foot escapism - but has, in recent years, stabilized under the stewardship of director Christopher McQuarrie, who has arguably struck an appreciable balance between all that came before. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - the first half of a two-part blowout that may or may not serve as the franchise denouement - sees McQuarrie continuing comfortably in the same vein as Rogue Nation and Fallout… though his narrative grip feels slightly more tenuous this time. The spectacle remains as ambitious and adrenaline-jacked as ever, though the architecture underneath the hood doesn’t invite much poking or prodding.
But let’s be honest here - the plot in a Mission: Impossible film is, more often than not, beside the point (typically it boils down to Ethan Hunt and his IMF gang going rogue in order to avert global catastrophe)… and Dead Reckoning is no exception. All you really need to know is that there’s a rogue sentient AI known as “The Entity” and Ethan (joined, once again, by Ving Rhames’s Luther, Simon Pegg’s Benji, and Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa) is amongst several interested parties trying to acquire both halves of a cruciform key that can supposedly be used to control or destroy it (the jokes about Cruise - patron saint of theatrical moviemaking - targeting a streaming algorithm as the ultimate antagonist all but write themselves). The Entity is aligned with Gabriel, an ominous figure from Ethan’s past… and while Esai Morales has a slippery and pleasingly cultivated menace in the role, it’s surprising how firmly the movie keeps him at arm’s length from the audience - even taking into the account the revelations all-but-certain to come in the next installment. There’s a clear emotional wedge to his animosity towards Ethan (and vice versa)… we’re just not privy to it yet. Integral to the proceedings is Grace, a professional thief played by Hayley Atwell in yet another performance that begs the question of why she hasn’t been a bigger star. The franchise has largely been stripped of sexual tension at this point (Ethan now operating with an almost monk-like devotion to the job), but she and Cruise have an effective working rapport. McQuarrie stages a madcap car chase through Rome with the two of them handcuffed together (awkwardly shifting between vehicles and trading places behind the wheel on the fly) that almost feels like it’s been injected with a strand of screwball DNA from The Pink Panther, or one of Roger Moore’s sillier James Bond entries… but, as was the case with Ghost Protocol, the action never quite succumbs to the cartoonish. It maintains a gigglingly gleeful, kinetic momentum. Not everything is pulled off with quite such aplomb. There’s a key character death, and while it makes narrative sense, the moment doesn’t feel maximized; what should be emotionally shattering instead manages only a muted impact, frustratingly (some have suggested that the death will prove to be a fake-out in Part Two, but that feels even more cheaply manipulative). Pom Klementieff of Guardians of the Galaxy has a pleasingly feral ferocity as Gabriel’s henchwoman (her sociopathic, borderline orgasmic glee during the aforementioned car chase is a definite highlight), but the movie attempts to foist a character arc onto her late in the game that feels forced. There are arguably too many characters. It’s hard to have too much female awesomeness (anymore than you can have too much pizza), though Atwell, Ferguson, Klementieff and Vanessa Kirby’s deliciously posh arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis are a lot to juggle… on top of Henry Czerny (making a welcome return from the original) AND Cary Elwes as intelligence bigwigs of ethically uncertain motivation, as well as Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis as US agents fruitlessly chasing Hunt and his team (and starting to question why they’re doing so). But Dead Reckoning ultimately delivers in all the ways a Mission: Impossible entry should. Like John Wick: Chapter 4, the movie navigates its eyebrow-raising 165-minute runtime with a cool, well-calibrated propulsion. McQuarrie’s climax aboard the Orient Express is an absolute banger, particularly when Ethan and Grace are forced to chart a gravity-defying path through a string of train cars suspended terrifyingly over a chasm (it’s ironic that the craft of someone who began his career writing the densely labyrinthine script for The Usual Suspects has become almost entirely visual; McQuarrie has few peers in terms of technically audacious staging). Is the Entity an effective antagonist? Debatable. There is, of course, something inherently chilling about an opponent you literally can’t outthink (there’s a great early sequence in which Benji must unravel a set of riddles the Entity devised for him), though fairly or unfairly, the parallels to Hollywood’s current labor issues put a comedically meta slant on things that's hard to shake. At any rate, let’s put a pin in it until Part Two. The series, as usual, comes down to Cruise. The star has achieved an admirable equilibrium at this phase of his career - keeping his personal life compartmentalized and focusing on big, theatrical crowdpleasers that indulge his love of envelope-pushing stuntwork, rather than chasing awards season validation. At age 61, Cruise hasn’t lost a step. If Harrison Ford can still be reprising Indiana Jones when he’s 80, there’s no reason this still fully-juiced franchise can’t go another decade or more. |
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