Quantum of Solace - Review

He's back. Daniel Craig allays any fear that he was just a one-Martini Bond, with this, his second 007 adventure, the perplexingly named Quantum Of Solace.

I've got to admit that this didn't excite me as much as Casino Royale and the villain is especially underpowered. But Craig personally has the chops, as they say in Hollywood. He's made the part his own, every inch the coolly ruthless agent-cum-killer, nursing a broken heart and coldly suppressed rage. If the Savile Row suit with the Beretta shoulder holster fits, wear it. And he's wearing it.

This is a crash-bang Bond, high on action, low on quips, long on location glamour, short on product placement.

Under the direction of Marc Forster, the movie ladles out the adrenalin in a string of deafening episodes: car chases, plane wrecks, motor boat collisions. If it's got an engine, and runs on fuel, and can crash into another similarly powered vehicle, with Bond at the wheel, and preferably with a delicious female companion in the passenger seat - well, it goes in the movie.

There are plenty of references to other Bond moments. A horribly dangerous skydive recalls The Spy Who Loved Me. A pile-up in Haiti which spills a macabre lorryload of coffins recalls the voodoo creepiness of Live And Let Die. And, most outrageously of all, the grotesque daubing of a female corpse brings back Goldfinger - though Sean Connery got an awful lot more mileage out of that sort of thing.

As in Casino Royale, the famous John Barry theme tune is saved up until the end; a baffling, decision, I always think, not to use this thrilling music at the beginning of the film.

Bond has hardly got his 007 spurs, when he's infuriating M, Judi Dench, with his insolence and insubordination. Out in the field, he's whacking enemy agents in short, sharp, bone-cracking bursts of violence when he should be bringing them in for questioning.

In theory, he is out to nail a sinister international business type: Dominic Greene, played by French star Mathieu Amalric, who under a spurious ecological cover plans to buy up swaths of South American desert and a portfolio of Latin American governments to control the water supply of an entire continent. As Greene, Amalric has the maddest eyes, creepiest leer, and dodgiest teeth imaginable.

Clearly, Bond has to take this fellow down. But he also wants to track down the man who took his beloved Vesper away from him in the previous movie: he is pathologically seeking payback, and to the fury of his superiors, this is getting personal. But it hasn't stopped him cultivating female company in the traditional, fantastically supercilious manner. His companions are as demurely submissive as ever. Olga Kurylenko plays Camille, a mysterious, smouldering figure, out to wreak vengeance on the corrupt Bolivian dictators who killed her family.

Britain's Gemma Arterton plays Agent Fields; she greets 007 wearing a trenchcoat with apparently little underneath, like some sort of MI6 strippogram. And she is the recipient of his ardour in the luxury hotel suite - that quintessential Bond habitat. This movie is, in fact, a reminder of how vital hotels are in Bond films, providing the essential narrative grammar: the checking in, the fight with the stranger in the room, the messages left at reception, the luxury cars lovingly photographed outside.

I was disappointed there was so little dialogue, flirtation and characterisation in this Bond: Forster and his writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade clearly thought this sort of sissy nonsense has to be cut out in favour of explosions. Well, perhaps that is what Bond fans want (not this Bond fan, though). But I was also baffled that relatively little was made of the deliciously villainous Amalric: especially the final encounter.

But set against this is the cool, cruel presence of Craig - his lips perpetually semi-pursed, as if savouring some new nastiness his opponents intend to dish out to him, and the nastiness he intends to dish out in return. This film, unlike the last, doesn't show him in his powder-blue swimming trunks (the least heterosexual image in 007 history), but it's a very physical performance. Quantum of Solace isn't as good as Casino Royale: the smart elegance of Craig's Bond debut has been toned down in favour of conventional action. But the man himself powers this movie; he carries the film: it's an indefinably difficult task for an actor. Craig measures up.

His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass - Review

When writer/director Chris Weitz adapted the first of Philip Pullman’s three His Dark Materials novels into a feature film, he skirted around the book’s anti-religion elements in order to cater to notoriously over-sensitive Christian groups. That’s alright, in The Golden Compass the Church was really only a stand in for any authoritarian, repressive organization and so Weitz has replaced them with generic fascists. It still gets the message across. Should the other books in the series ever get adapted, it may become more of a problem, since the story’s twists and turns lead to a desperate battle to kill God with the help of gay Angels. There’s no getting around that. No wonder the Catholic Church is protesting Weitz’s religiously cleansed Golden Compass anyway, perhaps afraid that if people see it, the rest of the books will get made and suddenly they’ll have a pew full of parishioners trying to stick Yaweh in the gut with a shiv. Or something like that.

For now though, Pullman’s tale is little damaged by a filmmaker’s fear of offending right-wingers, and The Golden Compass sticks rather closely to the narrative on which it’s based. It’s still the tale of Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards), a precocious little girl in a parallel world, caught up in magic and intrigue beyond her ken.

We first meet little Lyra scrambling through the streets around the University where she lives, playing games with the group of boys who are her enemies and friends. Her world is one not so different from our own, but yet very different in fundamental ways. It seems eternally trapped in the 18th Century, except an 18th Century where magic is real and often put to such humdrum uses as pulling horseless carriages. The carriages are horseless, because the animals in her world are all daemons. A daemon is the physical manifestation of a person’s soul. Every man and woman alive in Lyra’s world has one, and it takes the form of a talking animal, the shape it takes and the personality exudes being literal manifestations of who that person is on the inside. In Lyra’s world no one is ever alone, and on a cold night everybody has something fuzzy to cuddle up with. Teddy bear sales have no doubt been long mired in recession.

The daemons are a neat gimmick, but one fraught with filmmaking peril. Too much of them and Pullmans’ intrinsically dark and edgy tale turns into a mad caricature full of silly, Bugs Bunny like creatures running amok amongst humans. Too little of them, and the essential oddity of the story is lost, leaving us with yet another in a long line of bland, Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings clones. Weitz acceptably walks the line between those two extremes, giving us enough daemons to keep it interesting, but leaving the humans at the center of the story while daemons hang around in the background, out of frame, off camera, sometimes barely noticed as they would be if we were actually there with Lyra, and as used to seeing them and interacting with them as you would be any other appendage, like a pinky finger.

Soon after we meet them, Lyra and her daemon Pant are launched into adventure. She’s taken to live with the evil Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman), who though breathtakingly beautiful, is up to no good. Mrs. Coulter had a hand in kidnapping Lyra’s best friend Roger and so Lyra, with the help of an all too conveniently introduced band of nomadic sea-faring Gyptians, journeys to the far frozen north. There she’ll attempt to rescue her friend, meeting witches, Ice Bears and aeronauts along the way. Moment to moment the movie’s entertaining enough. Watching a talking polar bear slap on a suit of armor and charge into battle is pretty cool, and in his all too few and too brief moments on screen Sam Elliott runs away with the movie as a cowboy balloonist named Lee Scoresby with a jackrabbit daemon named Hester (voiced by Kathy Bates). But there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of the movie aside from the CGI and hand to hand fighting, intrigue and political maneuvering which Weitz glosses over with tedious, and predictable exposition scenes that never really fit in with the rest of the movie.

There’s just too much exposition and not enough explanation in Weitz’s film. His script spends a lot of time talking about the complexities of Lyra’s world, but little time showing any of it. I wonder if anyone who hasn’t already read the book will have any idea what’s going on. Most of what happens comes off as convenient, lazily written coincidence; if you haven’t read the book you’ll probably think it one of those movies where things turn out the way they do simply because it’s a movie, and not because there’s any rhyme or reason to what’s happened. Whether or not you’ve read the books you’ll enjoy The Golden Compass on some level, but it feels rushed, and I doubt anyone who hasn’t already read the books will be interested in going back for more if there’s ever a sequel.

The Invasion - Review

Even after 50 years and three movie adaptations, Jack Finney’s short story “The Body Snatchers” is still irresistible fodder for anyone wanting to make a political statement in the guise of creepy aliens. Even those who don’t remember the Cold War/Red Scare paranoia of 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or the Nixonian anti-government fear of the 1970’s film of the same name, are familiar with pod people, alien beings that attack and replace humans in order to completely restructure the human race.

With this summer’s The Invasion, the times have changed a bit, and not remotely for the better. Pod people have become gelatinous cellular alien blob somethings, and instead of killing humans and growing exact replicas in pods in the backyard, they change the host human’s DNA from the inside as they sleep, leaving that person to wake up looking exactly the same, but working for the alien agenda. Despite adhering to many of the details of the original two films, right down to the characters’ names, all attempts to update this property and give it real-life meaning fall completely flat thanks to a meandering plot and an overwhelming lack of vision.

Nicole Kidman plays our persistently human heroine Carol Bennell, with Daniel Craig as her sidekick and love interest. Craig is a doctor who, along with a lab assistant played by Jeffrey Wright, helps Carol wise up to the fact that everyone around them has become emotionless automatons, working tirelessly to transform all remaining humans by (in a disgusting touch) vomiting alien goo into their mouths. Carol soon realizes that her son Oliver—off for the weekend with the new, alien version of his father—is not only in danger of being alien-ized, but may possess the immunity to the alien virus necessary to reverse its effects. And so the chase begins.

Reports say that director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s original cut of the film was further edited and re-shot by the Wachowski Brothers (of The Matrix fame), which might explain the completely disjointed message The Invasion is sending us. The “pod people” concept has always made a great allegory, but this time no one can seem to decide what they want to say. There’s an obvious message about falling “asleep” and waking up not caring about anything or anyone, a slap on the wrist to a culture perfectly willing to ignore current strife. At the same time, the aliens’ lack of emotion results in the end of wars—real wars, like Iraq and Darfur—repeatedly shown via CNN reports. Carol clearly believes that humanity is worth saving regardless, but how about the Iraqi citizens who just achieved peace at the small cost of a few strands of alien DNA? It seems insane for any director to let us root for the aliens, but when it’s the lives of millions of real Sudanese vs. Nicole Kidman and her low-rent Haley Joel Osment son, the choice is easy.

All of the pseudo-intellectual posturing and mixed messages would be tolerable were the film not so damn slow. The main characters spend forever figuring out what the audiences knows within the first minutes of the film, and the last 45 minutes are stuffed with car chases, set-piece explosions and relentlessly-flashy editing that substitute for actual suspense. Because these pod people don’t actually kill their victims, just alter them, they’re not nearly as threatening as they ought to be; a twist thrown in at the end that threatens Oliver’s life simply doesn’t matter so late in the game.

Kidman does her best in an action hero role, but casting her as the only human in a world full of emotionless aliens is almost a joke. She’s one of the most expressionless actresses out there, and is far better at imitating the aliens—as she must do to walk safely among them—than being a real person. Craig does better, miraculously pulling off the “ignored best friend love interest” role despite the James Bond lurking within him, but never gets the attention he deserves.

Despite a classic premise, some talented actors and a few good ideas,

The Invasion is a snore-inducing mess. Though we look to the 50’s and 70’s versions of this story for insights into our national identity at the time, I can’t imagine The Invasion will even be remembered at all. At least, I hope not.