World War Z

Everyone should really have a zombie preparedness plan.  It's only a matter of time until the shuffling undead crowd our streets.  I know I have my own plan.  When the outbreak hits, I'm going to meet my friends Elise and John at Stone Mountain in Atlanta.  From there we will venture to the woods and live like Swiss Family Robinson.  With shotguns.  I'll be team leader, of course.  A huge ZZ Top beard will bedeck my chin and a ridiculously large revolver will swing low on my hip.  John will be demolitions man/sniper and Elise...she's going to cook.  She makes these amazing cloud cookies and, since I'm pretty sure she's the only one with the recipe, I don't want her fighting those drooling monsters.

Yeah, it's a nice fantasy.  I understand why zombies are all the craze right now.  When the world ends, it all goes back to zero.  Too big a balance on your credit card?  Did you buy one too many pairs of Christian Louboutins?  No problem.  You can wear those babies till the heels come off and no creditors will come calling.  Who cares about how many LinkedIn connections you have?  No one's hiring for entry level or middle management now.  No matter how far ahead or behind we may feel, everything we found to be important is gone.  Survival is the name of the game and, walking through a Wal-Mart, you'll probably pass by the cheap DVD bin and head straight for the batteries and Power bars.  The gaudy commercialism is just an echo of a former world.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but the zombie apocalypse hasn't happened and it probably won't happen for quite some time.  The Wal-marts of the world are still up and running and their shelves are filled...with zombies.  There are zombie videogames, zombie t-shirts, and zombie movies and TV shows.  I've even seen zombie dolls for the morbid little tykes.  We are inundated with the undead and it's getting annoying.

Thus, as I walked into the theatre for World War Z, the film already had some points against it.  Take an oversaturated film genre, give it a screenwriter I despise (Damon Lindelof), and give Marc Forster, one of the most mediocre directors in Hollywood, the helm.  All these things added up to a film I would rather avoid.  Still, I gave it a shot for my man Brad Pitt's sake and, I must say, I was not disappointed.  While it has its problems, World War Z is a competent, big-budget action film.  The story is tight, if a bit predictable. The dialogue is natural, if too expositional at times.  And, surprisingly, Marc Forster knows how to direct a sweeping, big-budget blockbuster.

Back in the early days of the zombie flick, everything was very small.  In the first modern zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, the narrative takes place in and around a little farmhouse.  In the sequel, Dawn of the Dead, the survivors opt for an empty mall, a much larger space. Still, it is one enclosed space.  Even a film like 28 Days Later restricts its environment to London and the surrounding cities.  In the early scenes of World War Z, we know that we are in for a much larger zombie film— perhaps the first "epic" zombie film.  Brad Pitt's Gerry Lane and his family sit in Philadelphia traffic when the outbreak occurs.  Large trucks crunch into one another, cars flip end over end, and hundreds, thousands of running slobbering creatures crawl over the entire mess.  There is more death and destruction in this opening scene than in all the George A. Romero zombie films combined.  Yep, it's big.

And it doesn't stop there.  Pitt's character must travel all over the world to track down the cure for this dangerous infection. Imagine Steven Soderberg's Contagion with 20 times the budget.  That's the plot.  In Max Brooks' novel, there is no central character, and the reader is given only vignettes of the destruction, instead of one narrative.  In Forster's film, this structure is mostly abandoned, but not completely.  As Pitt ventures from the Indian Ocean to South Korea to Israel, we see how different communities have reacted to the viral outbreak.  Pitt acts almost as a travelling narrator, and we feel the influence of Brooks' original story.

That's pretty much all Pitt has to do.  Sadly, there isn't much of a character in Gerry Lane.  He's handsome, smart, and he knows how to duct tape knives to stuff.  And...That’s it.  As always, the movie star is entertaining and likable and, even when his character feels flat, you still want to cheer for the guy.  Considering the rumors that Forster and Pitt stopped talking on the set, it is clear that Pitt is acting alone.  We get to see all his old tricks. My favorite is the one where he feels overwhelmed, looks up, and starts to cry. He does the same in Babel, Legends of the Fall, and The Assassination of Jesse James.  Hey, it works for the guy and Gerry Lane comes across as a loving father who wants to kick some ass.

While Forster attempts to add some sweet character moments between Lane and his family, they are swallowed by the surrounding story.  The film feels like a cross between Zero Dark Thirty, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Day of the Dead.  Forster never has had a very recognizable directorial style and, in World War Z, he clearly borrows his subdued tones and hyper-realistic style from directors like Kathryn Bigelow and Paul Greengrass.  There are moments when the computer-generated effects overcome the realistic tone, but, for the most part, it is all believable and exciting.  Forster clearly understands how too many visual effects can lose an audience's attention, so he sticks to real stunt performances and practical effects.  The zombie actors deserve credit for their shaky and unsettling silent performances.  Many of them look like corpses doing the Robot.  This really is a new type of zombie and, for the first film in a long time, the genre feels fresh.

Still, there is something missing.  Maybe it's the extra hour of story the film crew shot.  Maybe it's actors like Matthew Fox who show up for one scene and clearly have more backstory sitting on a cutting room floor somewhere.  Overall the film feels somewhat thrown together.  Like Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate or Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, this is what is left after 350 million dollars and years of production woes.  The film works, but it seems as if this is all they had to show.  The film fits together as a story, but just barely.  The supposed craziness of the shoot does not translate to the screen as it did with Apocalypse Now.  Instead, World War Z comes across as cold and a bit lifeless.  Pun intended.

I guess it's unfair to judge a film for what happened behind the scenes.  As a goreless and bloodless zombie film, World War Z is just fine.  The film is superior to many of the messy blockbusters of 2013.  The story is simple and the action is exciting.  In the end, Brad Pitt does okay in the zombie apocalypse.  Still, he would probably be better off with someone to bake him cloud cookies.  Sorry Brad, my zombie preparedness plan is much better than yours.

Man of Steel

It's scary being lost.  I often wake up and know with every fiber of my being that I am not doing what I was meant to do.  It is frustrating and terrifying.  Why did I get a Master's if I'm not using it?  Why aren't I married with kids like the rest of my adult friends?  Why do I feel like a 13-year-old in a 29-year-old body?  Like many people, I find myself in the middle of a big old identity crisis.

I suppose that's why I'm so drawn to comic books and superheroes.  Some may say that superhero films are pure escapism.  Who doesn't want to fly or climb walls?   I don't think that's it.  I believe I connect to superheroes because these are characters who have embraced their destiny.  While Lois Lanes and J. Jonah Jamesons attempt to uncover the masked vigilantes' secret identities, for the heroes there is no such mystery.  After years of training or self searching, these crime fighters have found out exactly who they are.  I'm jealous.

In Man of Steel, Zach Snyder's most recent foray into the world of comic books, Superman fights to discover himself in a strange world and, for the most part, he succeeds.  Man, this is a movie.  So few films actually feel like "movies" anymore.  The line between television and film has been blurred so that TV episodes feel like mini films and films feel like long episodes of television.  What does a movie look like?  Well, it looks like this.  

Man of Steel is big.  Like Henry Cavill's pecs, it's really, really big.  Did he do a thousand push-ups a day?  Maybe he injected saline into his chest.  I don't know what he did, but it sure worked . . . no wonder I feel like a 13-year-old.  I gotta get back to the gym . . . . Anyway, this film is an exercise in cinematic excess.  The natural vistas are as broad as anything shot by John Ford.  The action scenes will probably make Michael Bay go back to the drawing board.  The story is epic and brings to mind Wagnerian operas, Biblical heroes, and Greek myths.  It's loud, bombastic, and visually stimulating.

I have to admit, I am not a Zach Snyder fan.  I enjoyed his remake of Dawn of the Dead, but the rest of his oeuvre made me want to quit watching movies.  I saw Sucker Punch at midnight, and I was pretty sure my friends put some acid in my Diet Coke.  I'm not sure it even qualifies as cinema. Even 300 disgusted me.  While so many of my friends marveled at the oiled up muscles of a mush-mouthed Gerard Butler, I tried doing long division in my head to keep myself occupied.  Yeah, Zach Snyder isn't my favorite director.  When I heard he was directing Man of Steel, I did two things; I cried and made sure there wasn't any acid in my Diet Coke.  It had to be some kind of bad trip.

Well, I'm happy to say, Snyder pulled it out with Man of Steel.  It's a solid blockbuster movie.  The shots are dynamic and the action is mind-blowing.  I have never seen the powers of super human beings so perfectly displayed as in this film.  Superman and the villainous Kryptonian soldiers move at staggering speed and punch with frightening might.  Train cars fly through the air and muscly bodies crash through dry wall, concrete, and rebar.  You can feel the epic strength of Superman in every sequence as he breaks the sound barrier and lifts tons of heavy debris.   Unlike in most films today, the action is smart and memorable.

Snyder is lucky to have Henry Cavill to fill the tights of his lead character.  Though his character does come across as flat in a few scenes, for the most part, Cavill plays the role with great ease and charm.  He convinces the audience of his great power with his confidence and ramrod stance.  He is assisted by the cute and snarky Amy Adams.  Adams plays Lois Lane and, while she doesn't have much to do in the film, she is a fitting romantic sidekick for the man with the red cape.  Laurence Fishburne and Christopher Meloni also turn in solid performances as Perry White and Colonel Hardy, respectively.

The two actors who stand out the most are Michael Shannon and Russell Crowe.  I don't really mean that as a compliment.  I think Shannon is one of the finest actors working in film today.  His performances in Take Shelter and Shotgun Stories are true master classes in film acting.  However, in Man of Steel, he sticks out like a sore thumb.  This is Shannon's first enormous Hollywood film, and he has trouble transitioning between acting styles.  It appears that he watched the villainous roles of John Travolta for inspiration.  He yells a lot and stares with frightening google eyes.  Unlike Shannon, Russell Crowe is not new to big Hollywood films.  However, in this film, he simply chews scenery in his best impersonation of Marlon Brando.  He speaks every line like it is the most important thing ever said on Earth or on Krypton.  Still, he does get to ride a flying dinosaur and shoot a big laser cannon.  And, of course, he looks cool doing it.

Everybody and everything look really, really cool.  The film's greatest strengths are its production design and cinematography.  The opening scenes on Krypton rival the world building of Avatar.  Large-winged animals swoop through alien towers and craggy peaks.  The costumes and ships look like they were designed by H.R Giger.  The metal armor and breathing masks come right out of the design for Alien. It's all a bit phallic and vaginal, but maybe no one will notice. The film is cast in muted sepia tones and cool, foggy hues. It looks at once fantastic and hyper-realistic.  From a visual standpoint, the film is damn near perfect.

The script, however, is not so perfect. In fact, it's downright messy.  Though the superhero should struggle to find his identity, the superhero film should not have the same issue.  Unfortunately, that is the case with Man of Steel. Throughout the film, it is clear that screenwriter David Goyer and director Snyder aren't really sure who their protagonist is.  Superman is able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but the script should not leap large plot holes with a single line. The plot and character arcs are muddy throughout the film and the hero's journey skips around with great abandon.  At the end of the film, I didn't feel like I knew who Superman was or how he had gotten there.

Still, Superman is a hard character to grasp, and I can't fault the filmmakers for stumbling where so many have before.  I may be a little disappointed that Superman hasn't quite solved his identity crisis, but it's nice to know that even a man who can fly feels a little lost sometimes.  

The Purge

In the backroom of my friend's house, there hangs a bent golf club.  Passing by, most people think it means that he's just a bad golfer.  Most would never guess that he bent it busting in someone's windshield.  One night, some punks were trying to steal his neighbor's grill.  Surprisingly, he ran out and foiled the robbery with the help of his trusty golf club.  My friend is even more mild-mannered than me, and that bent golf club hangs as a reminder that even the most non-violent person has a breaking point.

In the home-invasion film, ordinary people find out where those breaking points lie.  In Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, a devout Christian father finds there is violence in his heart when a group of travelling outlaws comes calling.  In the film's remake, Last House on the Left, two "normal" parents use chainsaws and baseball bats to break bone, crack skulls, and exact revenge on three misanthropes.  In The Strangers, a loving young couple fight for their lives when a group of masked killers terrorize them at random.  And, in James DeMonaco's The Purge, a wealthy family must protect their home and fight for their hold on that spot in the coveted 1%.

I'm sure The Purge looks amazing on paper.  What a great idea for a film.  In the near future, the government sanctions an annual 12-hour killing spree.  Supposedly, this allows citizens to "purge" their pent up aggression and hatred in one violent night.  It feels like John Carpenter could have written this movie.  It has the "what-if" near future setting of Escape from New York and the invasion film narrative of Assault on Precinct 13.  Unfortunately, John Carpenter did not write this movie.  If he had, maybe this film wouldn't be so preachy, boring, and ineffective.

While James DeMonaco proves to be a simple and functional director, he just doesn't have the chops for a film like this.  Some of the scenes are tightly directed and the suspense is palpable, but the remainder of the film seems to be a rehash of old genre gimmicks and cheap scares.  A character walks across the foreground, revealing a killer standing right behind.  Someone hears a sound.  He turns.  He turns back and the killer is there.  It's not scary in the least.  So many of the scares and plot twists are telegraphed from the first scene.  In the beginning of the film, DeMonaco draws special attention to aspects of the house and certain props.  Of course, all of these previewed images come into play in the climax of the film.  Chekov would be proud.  Still, DeMonaco is too obvious in his exposition.  Leave some mystery for us.

The acting is not too laughable, but there isn't much to write home about.  Ethan Hawke is as serious as ever, and his teeth are as crooked as ever. My Dad has an unexplained dislike for Hawke.  Every time he shows up in a movie, my Dad says, "How does this guy keep getting work? He's really weird looking."  Hey, we can't all have perfect teeth, Dad.  Still, Hawke plays the caring yet alienating patriarch well.  Lena Headey is solid as the strong mother and shows off her action training from The Cave and 300.  The kids are fine in their generic roles.  The real highlight is the film's villain, Rhys Wakefield.  The actor has great fun as a sociopathic prep school student. The cadence of his dialogue is strange and off-putting.  He smiles through the whole performance, but you can see the menace underneath it all.

The film's main problem is its message.  Well, its main problem is that it tries to have a message.  At one point, the film attempts to show how violence is not the answer.  Hawke and Headey show that they are above all this killing. You can't put someone out on the street to die, even if it means the death of your family.  So, Mr. DeMonaco, violence is bad right?  Wrong.  In the latter part of the film, Hawke and Headey turn into complete badasses.  They don't just break windshields with golf clubs.  They gun down the invaders with great gusto, blood flying everywhere.  They use axes and knives in disgusting ways.  While Hawke looks sad at the sight of a female corpse, it is momentary and silly. The "message" is uneven, maybe nonexistent.  DeMonaco doesn't know what he's trying to say.

It's a shame, because most home invasion films have some interesting views on revenge and violence.  Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs is disturbing as it questions the evil that hides inside the human psyche.  In Bergman's The Virgin Spring, Max Van Sydow attempts to wash the blood off his revenge-soaked hands.  He screams at God, asking how his daughter was allowed to die.  Powerful stuff.  Definitely better than watching Ethan Hawke stumble around looking for an orthodontist.  Can't he afford Invisalign?  In Funny Games, Michael Haneke self-reflexively critiques the violence in media and society.  All of these films leave me feeling uncomfortable, and that is a good thing.  When violence is close to "home" maybe it shouldn't be so fun.

And this film was definitely fun for the audience.  I saw The Purge in a crowded auditorium where the people were cheering and clapping with each gruesome kill.  Watching films like Grindhouse or Dawn of the Dead, I'm the first to join in screaming and laughing.  However, in a film attempting social critique, this is troubling.  Or, perhaps this is a healthy way for us to experience horror and mayhem in a controlled, safe environment.  Maybe we do need to let it out, and horror films allow that.  Maybe films like The Purge allow audiences to purge themselves.