A30: ALIEN 30 pt 1

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It was Hallowe'en 1979 … Halloweens in Britain back then weren’t how they are now. There was no new slate of horror films at the cinema, no Saw, no shelves of skeleton hands and glowing eye-balls in the supermarkets, no tribes of kids prowling the neighbourhood in masks. That was an American affectation. Only the year before, in 1978, we’d watched Michael Myers laying waste to a typical American Halloween, with its masks and lanterns and wondered how Halloween could ever get scarier than that.

Well, Halloween 1979 was when Fox unleashed Alien and things would never be quite the same again. To mark the thirtieth anniversary of the passing of a nation’s innocence, I’m going to roll out a series of articles I wrote to mark the twentieth anniversary. I’ll go through and update the cultural references where I can but, otherwise, these articles will run very much as they did back in ’99 when they appeared in the magazine Model Mart.

WHICH CAME FIRST, THE ALIEN OR THE EGG?

Do you remember 1980’s Inseminoid or Saturn 3? No? How about 1989’s Leviathan? No? Did you see 1997’s Event Horizon? 1998’s Deep Rising? No? Well, check out Pandorum when it appears soon. Maybe you’re a gamer … maybe you played Doom or Quake back in the day? Or Resident Evil or Half Life, or Resistance or, more recently, Dead Space? Still nothing? Well, all of these movies and games, among dozens upon dozens of others, follow, with tedious precision, the blue-print laid down by the block-busting success of Alien. Yet, even in 1979, that blue-print was not new.

Alien did not burst fully formed from the heads of writer Dan O’Bannon and director Ridley Scott - nor, for that matter, from the chest of John Hurt. It is not a unique thing, conceived in a vacuum and cast out into an unsuspecting universe; rather it is an end product, fed and fattened and lifted high on the celluloid shoulders of a plethora of cheap and occasionally nasty earlier films. So, let us climb Alien’s family tree and perch on its branches to consider a few of its more conspicuous relatives:

Firstly, Alien is an off-shoot of the ancient and noble line of Hollywood hokum known as ‘Old Dark House’ movies. These will be familiar to fans of mystery fiction - they are the ones where an old spooky house-full of innocent and guilty people mingle with an unknown killer (usually psychotic) who picks them off one-by-one. One of the earliest iterations of this was The Cat and the Canary (play 1922, films 1927 and 1939) and James Whale’s self-explanatory The Old Dark House (1932) which, pretty-much does what it says on the tin. The grand-dame, and possibly the most celebrated exponent of this sub-genre, was Agatha Christie with her novel And Then There Were None (very properly re-titled from the original Nursery-rhyme inspired Ten Little Niggers, 1939) and her play The Mousetrap (1952).

As the motif developed into a cliché and the internal psychological scarring of the killer became external physical disfigurement, horribly mutilated murderers have stalked the dumb and the doomed down darkened corridors in any number of alternative locations, . The idea was even rendered safe for children with the release of the Waddington’s board-game ‘Cluedo’ in 1949 (which itself became the film Clue in 1985). Alien simply took the idea and moved it to outer space. But even this wasn’t the first film to borrow the ‘Old Dark House’ for science fictional purposes.

A generation earlier, in 1951, Howard Hawks oversaw the production of The Thing From Another World (and, some say, he actually directed it, although Christian Nyby gets the screen credit). Taking sf legend John W. Campbell’s 1938 short story ‘Who Goes There’ as its starting point, this film re-locates the Old Dark House to the ferociously inhospitable wastes of the North Pole.

A team of American scientists and soldiers find a huge circular object buried in the ice (it turns out to be a derelict space-ship) they bring something back to their base and, after it thaws out, it turns out to be evil-tempered hulking great vege-man (played by James Arness), equipped with ten-men’s strength and a wicked line in horny knuckles.

Of course, The Thing touched a nerve in the American consciousness, it talked of invasion, of the Great American Way of Life being destroyed. It was a cunning metaphor for those darn Russkies! Consequently, the film was a huge success and opened the flood-gates for a decade of tackily delightful black and white ‘sci-fi’ quickies. You know the sort of thing that turn up after midnight on TV from time to time.

One element the movie omitted from Campbell’s story was the alien’s shape-changing ability, its way of hiding in plain sight. Cashing-in on the cultural phenomenon of the film, novelist Robert A Heinlein wrote The Puppet Masters (1951), a book about parasitic aliens attaching themselves to people’s bodies and taking control. Jack Finney followed this with his book The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955 – remade in 1978 featuring Veronica ‘Lambert’ Cartwright), in which alien spores float out of the sky and conspire to inherit the earth by invading and consuming people.

All of these stories metaphoricise America’s paranoia about Russian invasion into a more personal anxiety about the body and mind being invaded. Seen through their films, the Americans of the mid-twentieth century will appear to history to be a deeply insecure, paranoid people.

Their films of the seventies are, in many ways, a reaction to this. Thanks to political assassinations, political corruption and a futile war on the far side of the planet, the voracious national pride of the fifties had leeched away, leaving a population cynical, fatalistic, listless and stoned. The young were at the dull edge of this ‘counter-revolution’, and one such group made, purely as a student experiment, a short sf film which eventually became the 1974 feature Dark Star.

An antidote to the glossy, sophisticated majesty of 2001 - A Space Odyssey (1968), the students’ film was grim and grimy. It suggested that the wonders of space-flight would one-day become so matter-of-fact that they would be positively boring. Astronauts become blue-collar workers. The titular space-ship aimlessly wanders the far-reaches of space, blowing up asteroids. It is essentially vacuuming dirt from the ignored corners of the galaxy.

The writer and co-star of Dark Star (he played the hassled Sergeant Pinback) was one Dan O’Bannon. A fan of those old fifties sci-fi movies, but very much a product of his decade, O’Bannon had a head-full of sf ideas - and one was to take the Old Dark House out into space.

Initially calling it Space Beast, D O’B’s worked on his next project after Dark Star whilst living in his business partner’s back room and sleeping on his sofa. Hey, its a glamorous life in Hollywood! Fortunately, said partner (Ronald Shussett) had a substantial input into the script, making key suggestions - possibly the most significant of which was to show the script to a big Hollywood studio. O’Bannon had seen the piece as another a small-scale character piece. Most of all, he wanted to keep it simple. Shussett had bigger plans.

And so it was that the now re-named Space Beast became a big-budget movie called Alien, conceived on a vast scale, and going on to be one of only a dozen-or-so films which had, up to that point, earned more than $100 million.

When you look closely at Alien, peering around its exquisitely designed corners and through its artfully photographed gloom - you find a post-modern montage of quotes, references and influences. Although Alien owes its shape and substance to that Old Dark House, its debts are more numerous and varied than anyone - at least consciously - could have realised when the cameras were rolling.

The film begins quietly, slowly - in a white-washed room full of sleeping astronauts. All around them ‘Mother’, the on-board computer is bringing the ship back to life, like a behemoth awakening. Neons popping into life, crew padding bleary-eyed through the motions, unable to speak until they’ve downed their first cup of stewed coffee. The routines they run through for another day in space are convincingly depicted. The last time we saw anything quite like his was on ‘The Discovery’, in 2001. But, when their conversation begins, we realise how boring and lacking in glamour long-term space-flight is, just as in Dark Star.

That space-ship was run by Hal 9000, an omni-presence who, for reasons the film doesn’t explain, has calculated that its crew is expendable. In Alien, Mother’s central core is like Hal’s - a room lined with twinkling lights. When Ripley hacks into Mother’s program, she finds that the computer intends to bring the monster back and that the crew are not just expendable, but, given the beast’s reproductive method, their death is necessary!

Taking this news with an understandable lack of grace, Ripley sets the ship to self destruct (setting-off a pedantic vocal count-down reminiscent of the smart bombs in Dark Star) but, before hitting the boom button, she pauses to read the backlit instructions - a direct visual homage to Kubrick’s one stab at humour in 2001: the zero-g toilet.

Philip Strick, in his ‘Sight and Sound’ review of the film, reads Alien as a paean to quarantine, that terribly British need to hold potential disease carriers at bay. He sees it as following on from films like The Quatermass Experiment (1955) and Village of the Damned (1960) in that they demonstrate a paranoid fear of this sceptr’d isle being invaded by something far less scrutable than jack-booted Germans. Well, if it’s good enough for the Americans …

Certainly, Alien raises the issue of quarantine, when astronaut Kane - in the grips of what would come to be called ‘The Face-Hugger’ - is refused re-entry to the ship by Ripley because of the danger of contamination. How right she was. If she’d been allowed to stick to her guns, Alien would have been a much shorter film about nothing much happening to a bunch of space-truckers.

The classic scenario of explorers stumbling across the remains of an ancient civilisation, and accidentally unleashing the djinn, is practically as old as fiction itself. Where would Aladdin, Allan Quatermain or Tarzan have been without it? Between the wars, science fiction ‘pulps’ and comics adapted and employed it many times. Indeed, the motif of a team of interstellar adventurers stumbling across a derelict spaceship on a spooky, haunted planet, had become so ubiquitous it had dropped into redundancy by the sixties, yet had only rarely made it onto the big screen.

Hawks’ The Thing employed it, of course, but the only other examples this side of the BBC’s TV show Dr Who, is Italian director Mario Bava’s Terrore Nello Spazio - (aka Planet of the Vampires, 1965) and Tarkovsky’s Russian rendering Solaris (1971). Although as different in approach as films can be, they are similar in that their alien worlds don’t contain a tangible monster, but rather a madness which makes the characters destroy themselves.

So, once more, we return to The Thing. Rescued from a crashed spaceship, its monster stalks the dark and claustrophobic corridors of an Arctic Station, which is buried in a blizzard so no one can escape. One of the crew - a doctor named Carrington - tries, in the name of science, to reason with his fellows, to study the monster instead of kill it. Eventually, he sides with the beast over the humans and meets the kind of sticky end traditionally reserved for traitors.

In Alien, one of the crew - a doctor named Ashe - tries, in the name of science, to reason with his fellows, to study the monster instead of kill it. Eventually, he sides with the beast over the humans, and … you get the point.

In The Thing, a tray of peculiar plants gives a hint to the monster’s life-cycle, beginning as a pod and growing into a strapping seven-foot ex-football player. In Alien, the tray of pods becomes a cathedralic cavern full of inert, leathery eggs, each of which contains the first, deceptively small stage of the alien life-cycle.

Generally speaking, drawing such ‘inspiration’ is accepted as a natural part of the creative process; hey, even Shakespeare borrowed ideas from other playwrights. Borrowed? He stole shamelessly … and, if it’s good enough for Will …

Of course, if the ‘homage’ becomes too in-depth, issues of plagiarism and copyright infringement can arise. One ‘homage’ which was not greeted with indulgence and humour, was to A.E. Van Vogt’s 1939 short story ‘Discord in Scarlet’ (which can now be found as part of the novel ‘The Voyage of the Space Beagle’). This features an alien beastie stalking the corridors of a space-ship, picking off the crew one-by-one. Fingers were pointed, accusations were made and eventually an out of court settlement was reached, to the tune of $50,000.

Curiously, a similar claim was not made by Van Vogt’s people against the substantially less-successful sci-fi pot-boiler It - The Terror From Beyond Space (1958), where ‘our heroes’ chase the bog-standard rubber-suited boogey-man through corridors and air-shafts of a creaky old space-ship, until they herd It into an airlock and blast It out into space.

In both this film and The Thing, the ill-equipped humans, their numbers dwindling, desperately patch together weapons from their scant resources, whilst relying on old-fashioned human ingenuity to get them through each successive narrow-scrape. In Alien, the unarmed crew make-do with cattle-prods and (when they realise that baby alien has rapidly grown into scary alien) flame-throwers, to aid them in their pursuit down corridors and through air-shafts. Their plan has a simple but familiar ring to it: Herd It into an airlock and blast It out into space.

All of which leaves the small matter of the epilepsy-inducing finale - the blueprint for action movie finales to this very day. Nowadays, if it doesn’t have klaxons, flashing lights, steam and (optionally) an ominous count-down - all wrapped-up in a satisfyingly huge explosion - well it’s hardly a finale at all. Several commentators have noted that the strobing of the hazard-lights during Ripley’s escape, are borrowed from the rapid-cut rape/murder scenes in Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977). Which makes the xenomorph’s determined pursuit of Ripley seem rather too much like a date that goes dramatically wrong.

When the huge oil-tanker (or Old Dark House, whichever you prefer) finally bows out - in a spectacular (for the time) big bang - we are put in mind of the detonations that rounded off Forbidden Planet in 1956, or took out This Island Earth’s besieged planet Metaluna one year earlier. For that matter, the death throes of Superman’s Krypton and Darth Vader’s Death Star also come to mind. Yet the Technicolor ‘swoosh’ of energy that escapes space-zero is clearly and unambiguously a nod to The Star Gate at the end of 2001. As we began, so do we end.

The one genuine revelation in Alien is Scott’s camera-work, this was totally pre-emptive. When was the last time that you saw a horror movie which didn’t employ steel grills and steam and strong back-lighting!? Yet, up until 1979, no film in this genre had ever before employed the moody, shadow-laden motifs of the film noir. The naturalistic acting and documentary air to the film’s first half, depict deep-space flight as a more natural, more believable extension of that pioneered in Dark Star, itself a response to the 2001, and Silent Running (1972), yet this has been largely forgotten. All most people remember about Alien now, are those long gang-way corridors, the claustrophobic air-shafts, the cricket-pad and fish-bowl space-suits and, of course, John Hurt giving birth on the dining table.

But more of that in the next installment of A30: Alien @ 30.

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UP

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There’s one thing which immediately strikes you about Up. It is abundantly clear from its opening frames that no focus group was involved at any point during its inception or execution. There was no committee stage. No list of Executive Producers all wanting their little bit of input. No interference from The Money. If there had been … imagine how the pitch session would have gone: “So, it’s a kids’ cartoon, okay, and it tells the story of a bereaved, grumpy pensioner and this little, fat Japanese kid he can’t stand. Because he wants to die, the pensioner floats his home away on a load of balloons and they meet up with a big bird and a talking dog. Oh, and the bad-guy looks like Kirk Douglas and has an airship.” Yes, that’ll go down massive with the fat Japanese pensioner demographic. That’s a big dollar! Where do I sign!?

No, it’s fair to say that Up was made the way films used to be made … the way films should be made. Experienced creative individuals got together and said “Wouldn’t it be great if …” Of course, these film makers are no fools, they knew they’d need to keep The Money happy, so they hypnotised It with the magic words “In 3D”. That was it, the deal was done.

The end product breaks rules magnificently. The first fifteen minutes is a short film all in itself, beginning before the Second World War and telling the story of young Carl Fredricksen and his best friend Ellie, who eventually becomes his wife. In probably the sweetest, most moving sequence in any animation, ever, we see snapshot moments of their lives together, all played out without a word of dialogue, culminating in Ellie’s death and all the colour and joy going out of Carl’s life. This prologue sets in place all the building blocks out of which the rest of the story will be built, but does so whilst also telling a perfect, complete and compelling story in its own right. This opening sequence is a miracle of modern film-making and a stark example of why Pixar stands so far above everyone else when it comes to creating animation that viewers will want to return to for generations.

The rest of the film is almost a let-down after this tour-de-force opening, but the vision of writer/directors Pete Doctor and Bob Peterson (plus their co-writer, Thomas McCarthy) is so clear and economical that they don’t drop their creative guard for a moment.

The thing that originally brought Carl and Ellie together was their imaginative love of explorer and adventurer Charles Muntz … who set off in his airship in the 1930s to ‘Paradise Falls’ in South America, and never returned. Carl (now voiced by the venerable Ed Asner), in a move intended to be the final act of his life, decides to honour the promise he made to Ellie seventy-odd years before, to go to Paradise Falls. The way he chooses to do this is a moment of pure Roald Dahlian invention … attaching thousands of balloons to his house to float it to South America. This took me straight back to my days as a six year-old, shining the classroom floor with the seat of my short pants as our teacher read James and the Giant Peach to us. Main-lining such raw, uncut imagination is a heady experience. You never forget you first hit of pure fantasy.

Of course, Carl is not alone on his voyage, he has a stowaway in the form of little Russell (voiced by seven-year-old Jordan Nagai) and it is with his inclusion that one realises just how clever Doctor and Peterson are being. There is a real affection, a real connection between the very young and the very old and Up exploits this mercilessly. The affection between the two grows, inevitably, and gives proceedings a humanity and a warmth that they would lack otherwise.

Even the gimmicky 3D process has been used sympathetically, so it is possible to watch the film in 2D, as I have, and not even notice the attempts to create artificial vertigo in the mind of the poor, benighted viewer.

Weaving together influences from Jules Verne’s Nemo to Conan-Doyle’s Lost World with touches of Norman Rockwell’s Americana, the film is actually deceptively simple in its look and feel. Up has less on-screen detail than The Incredibles, less social satire than Wall E, less gags than Toy Story. However, like Doctor’s previous effort, Monster’s Inc, what this film has in bucket-loads … is heart.

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Dir: Pete Doctor & Bob Peterson

Stars: Ed Asner, Jordan Nagai, Christopher Plummer

Dur: 87 mins

Cert: U

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DISTRICT 9

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One of a slack handful of films being released this year which play with the number nine, District 9 is a nice piece of post-modern pastiche which hails, surprisingly, from the Southern Hemisphere.  Indeed, as its opening monologue wryly comments: “To everyone’s surprise, the alien spaceship didn’t come to a halt over Manhattan”.  In fact, it picked Johannesburg.

This film marks the first completed project from ex 3D animator, Neill Blomkamp, originally from South Africa, and Peter Jackson from across the water in New Zealand.  As lurkers in the internet rumour mills will know, they worked together, for a while, on a film version of the video-game Halo, which ultimately didn’t happen.  So they seem to have gathered up their toys, their bug-eyed aliens, their advanced weapons and their mobile armour and taken it all away with them, to re-work it into District 9.

The significance of the subject matter of this, the first breakout South African film since … well, since ever … is not lost on those of us who have memories long enough to recall the horrors of apartheid.  Even if only glimpsed briefly and from a distance courtesy of the television news, we know that South Africa does not exactly have an exemplary record when it comes to race relations.

Therefore, at a time when economic migrants from the Southern Hemisphere are heading north, when words like “Asylum-Seeker” and “Scrounger” are synonymous, at least in the pages of certain loathsome newspapers, Blomquist et al are to be congratulated in taking on this complex question at this precipitous time.

Whether or not a science-fiction fable can say anything significant and constructive about race relations in the real world is, of course, another question, but it certainly doesn’t miss any opportunity to have a go.  During the film’s opening news report, a vox pop of locals demanding the aliens ‘go home’ is mostly made up of black faces.  When we are introduced to our hapless protagonist, minor government official Wikus Van De Merwe he defiantly attests “This is our land!”  Of course, being a white Afrikaner and therefore a colonist of the Zulu kingdom, that’s not entirely true, is it!

As MNU (Multi-National United) move in to the slums where the ‘prawns’ are caged and forced to scratch an existence, it gradually becomes clear that they have two agenda, one: control the prawns, two: relieve them of any futuristic alien weapons.  (For MNU, then, read OCP – the ominous, omniscient, omnipotent corporation from 1987’s Robocop).

It is during these scenes of slum clearance that the TV coverage of the movie’s early moments evolve into a hand-held, fly-on-the-wall documentary style, but this technique doesn’t become a rod for the film-maker’s back as they simply abandon it when it suits them.  Where Wikus begins by talking directly to the camera, acknowledging its presence, he soon goes off on his own into situations where no camera crew could possibly follow.

To help avoid the race issue appearing too – ahem – black and white, we have the Nigerian gangs, also living among the ‘prawns’ in their slum, feeding them and exploiting them mercilessly.  Indeed, we have all human life here in this quagmire of mixed metaphors.  Every inhumanity you can imagine us visiting upon each other, we can now visit upon the newcomers.  The race issue becomes especially grey when the bullying, petty-bureaucrat, Wicket becomes infected by the aliens, changing his DNA and slowly transforming him.  He becomes an outcast of both societies, not enough Us to stay here, not enough Them to go there.

The ‘prawns’ are given human eyes, so we will identify with them, empathise with them, fear for them.  But the humans themselves have no such redemptive qualities.  This film betrays an unrelentingly bleak vision of humanity, weaving together corporate corruption, slavery, vivisection, ethnic cleansing, racial stereotypes and a bottomless pit of human greed. 

There is a puerile and rather obvious conspiracy that develops around Wicked, who, in his altered state, is increasingly perceived as an asset to be exploited rather than a person.  As he is abused, humiliated and rejected by everyone he wrongly thought loved him, our sympathy slowly, oh so slowly, turns in his direction.

It was at this point that something which had been niggling at the back of my mind suddenly clicked.  The ‘prawns’ reminded me of something, but I couldn’t quite think what then, as Wiki looked down in horror at his own transformed arm, glistening, twitching and insectoid I realised where I’d seen this before: Chris Walas’ final Fly design for Cronenberg’s film The Fly (1986).  Mixed with a bit of Doctor Who’s Ood.

Under Peter Jackson’s skilled stewardship, the marketing for this film was masterful, conveying the basic premise in a beautifully appetite-whetting way.  Alien Nation (1988) but shot like Cloverfield (2008) was, I imagine, the pitch.  Unfortunately, the script of the finished film isn’t up to the standard of this high concept.  Many sequences are, in themselves, very skilfully put together, and there’s no denying that the CGI ‘prawns’ have been seamlessly woven into the fabric of the film so you completely believe in them, but the plot simply doesn’t hold together.  

I’m not one to insist that the Aristotelian Unities be slavishly adhered to, but this film is social commentary, black comedy, body horror pastiche, sci-fi actioner and, ultimately, war film.  That’s too much.  But, in accordance with all of the Hollywood script-writing classes, the film’s closing act barrels towards a chaotic, nose-bleedingly fast-paced, explosive and, of course, redemptive finale that they obviously hoped would cover-up for the inadequacies and inconsistencies of the script’s earlier acts.

The uncomfortable verite of the early scenes progressively falls away until, by the end, we have something that would not have looked out of place in Michael Bay’s tub-thumping, flag-waving Transformers behemoth.  That’s about as far from documentary and social commentary as you can get in a single medium, let alone a single film.

Oh, and can someone explain to me quite why a very large dead spaceship would continue to hover in the air, a few hundred feet above the ground, for twenty years, when it has no internal power?  Hm?

Dir:  Neill Blomkamp

Stars: Sharlto Copley

Dur: 112 mins

Cert: 15

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INGLORIOUS BASTERDS

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Like Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell, this film starts with the old Universal logo and, like Drag Me To Hell, this film is the product of a fan-boy playing with the elements of the movies he loved in his adolescence. Well, when did Quentin Tarantino ever do anything else?

I remember, my first encounter with him was at Birmingham’s now defunct Film and TV Festival, back in the autumn of 1991, when I was young and alive and still had my hair. I saw Reservoir Dogs at the Triangle Cinema on Birmingham's Aston University campus, having got there on public transport and on foot (this was before buying my first car and thusly using it as an excuse to keep the soles of my shoes clean by never again letting them touch the ground). I was there because its write-up in the festival programme made it sound like a heist movie (and always enjoy a good heist movie) and it starred Harvey Keitel who I’ve always thought of as giving good value (who, then, could have imagined his execrable turn in the superfluous Life On Mars remake?)

If you can imagine such a thing (and even if you can't) this was the world before the internet. There was no rumour-mill generating a head of hysterical steam about this film, and the controversy it had already generated at festivals around the world was relatively unknown to we few brave souls who turned up that afternoon. So, I walked in completely unprepared for what I was about to experience.

About half an hour in, several people got up and left. During the ear-cutting scene, several more did the same. By the time the film was over, the afternoon crowd I’d seen it with had dwindled down to roughly half its original size. But those of us who stayed knew we’d seen something special.

Obviously Reservoir Dogs went on to be something of a phenomenon in British cinema-going. Even after its video release, it continued to pack cinemas at midnight screenings for years. It was, to the best of my knowledge, the only American film to have made more money at the British box-office than at home.

And then Pulp Fiction emerged. I went to an official press showing of that, some weeks before it was due for general release. The journo in the row in front of me sparked up a joint as the opening strains of 'Misirlou' filled the auditorium. He giggled through the first ten minutes of the film then, presumably, fell asleep. Nowadays, when you aren’t allowed to smoke anything indoors - nor within a thousand yards of another human being - that would be shocking behaviour, but back then I merely thought of it as a waste of perfectly good dope. Or a waste of perfectly good Tarantino. One or the other.

Pulp Fiction changed everything. It wasn’t the first independent film to be a massive success, but it was arguably the one that had the biggest influence on other film-makers, studios and film-going audiences. Yes it is cool, yes it is funny and exciting and mischievous and yes, it does contain some very big movie stars doing some very uncharacteristic things. But, you know what? The reason that it deserved all the hyperbole and the hysteria was because it was so brilliantly written.

By this point, it’s fair to say that I felt I had a special relationship with Mr T’s films. I had discovered them before the hype machine had got to them and I had seen the quality before anyone else had had chance to point it out to me. We don’t get the privilege of making our own minds up very often in this country, most decisions are made at the American box-office before we even get a sniff at a film. So, on the rare occasions we do get a film first, get the chance to appreciate it first, it feels deeply satisfying!

Recently, I sat down and watched Pulp Fiction again for the first time in many years and it still stands up as a magnificent, mature, miraculous piece of writing. Note that word ‘mature’. There is a stylistic sophistication to Pulp Fiction that still impresses fifteen years later. The young Tarantino had a skill, a confidence and a voice that few writers develop after decades behind the keyboard. But, his characters are beautifully drawn ciphers, nothing more. They have been designed to fit perfectly into the unique situations Tarantino dreams up for them, but you can’t imagine they have any life beyond that situation. You can’t imagine them growing up or, indeed, growing old. They aren’t people. They aren’t fully-rounded humans and don’t interact in any human way.

Jackie Brown, on the other hand, was full of people interacting in a very human way. The world was still at one remove from the real world, the soundtrack still marked it out as a Tarantino film, but with the emphasis leaning towards the female characters who had had fairly short shrift from his other scripts. He also made Jackie and bail bondsman ?? credible, believable people. You could imagine these people having a life beyond the constraints of Tarantino’s beautifully-tooled script (and, in the case of Michael Keaton’s Ray Nicolette that literally came to pass, as the same actor, playing the same character, appears a year later in Steven Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight) This was Tarantino still doing what he does best – two-hander dialogue scenes featuring one-liners so sharp they cut – but adding to his arsenal, developing his skills in turning that stylish mastery into drawing characters the viewer believed in and cared for. But, for me, Jackie Brown lacks the narrative flare, the energy, of its predecessors.

Then came the mindless fun of From Disk Till Dawn (1996), Kill Bill pt 1, The Rest of Kill Bill (2003 - 4) and Death Proof (2007). At least two of which are delightful, stylish, empty-headed bubble-gum, the other two a betrayal of all the promise he’d shown earlier. None of them were fitting successors to Pulp Fiction.

I waited for my Tarantino to return.

And waited.

And waited.

And, now, finally, with Inglorious Basterds … he's back!

As with all his films, this is divided into chapters. As with all his films, it is at its best when it features two people doing nothing more than talk. As with his latter films, the main character is a woman after revenge (not, surprisingly, the Brad Pitt character all the publicity is centred around). As with all his films, it is set in a world almost indistinguishable from our own … but not quite our own.

We begin at an isolated farmhouse, positioned like an American pioneer’s homestead in the wide-open country. The inter-title tell us this is Chapter 1, reassuring us that this film will at least be linear, and the location is “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France”. The music is Morricone and, as Monsieur LaPadite stands outside his homestead, waiting, the man in black who steps onto his land is not Henry Fonda, but Christoph Waltz, Quentin’s latest discovery, who is given free reign in this exquisitely long prologue, to dig his nails into a film he resolutely refuses to let go of for the next two and a half hours.

This is Tarantino taking a leaf out of Hitchcock’s book. A surprisingly mainstream book for him and a rather over-used one (thanks to Brian DePalma keeping it open for the last thirty years) but, as books go, there are few better. Hitchcock always used to describe the process of creating suspense as one whereby you have two characters sitting at a table, discussing something inane, then you show a bomb stuck to the underside of the table, you show a close-up of the clock, with a minute to go, then you cut back to the characters continuing their conversation, unaware of the existence of the bomb. Suddenly something ordinary and mundane becomes something thrillingly filled with tension.

Hitchcock himself perfectly illustrated this by having a child innocently carrying a package which he is unaware contains a bomb, in Sabotage (1936 - a film which is quite deliberately referenced here later on) Well, Tarantino takes this thought experiment and brings it exquisitely to life in these opening moments – not with a bomb, but with a narrative conceit equally as explosive. He knows his blood-thirsty audience want to get to the violence. They want to cheer as the blood flies … they know it does because it’s there in the trailer … They want to see Brad Pitt with the rope-burn round his neck and his chin stuck out demanding a hundred scalps … but Tarantino makes them wait. He teases them with exquisite anticipation.

Throughout, Tarantino has, as always, created a montage of music which lifts the story into its own, particular reality. Here the majority of his choices are Morricone, filling the film with the (forgive the pun) hair-raising eeriness of the Spaghettis. That felt a little odd, at first, since the Spaghettis were Westerns and this, at least nominally, is a war film. But why not? There’s no reason why music that works effectively in one genre can’t be just as powerful in another!

The story proper gets underway outside a cinema in Paris, the city of cinemas, when our main protagonist (to whom Pitt’s Aldo Raine is really just the supporting feature) meets a German soldier who also happens to be a celebrity and a confidante of Goebbles, who is looking for a venue in which to premiere his new propaganda masterpiece.

So the convoluted plot slowly unravels. Sudden explosions of extreme violence punctuating the long, rambling dialogue scenes. Unusually, this film acknowledges that Germans didn’t necessarily hatch their plots in perfect clipped English, nor, for that matter, do the French necessarily resist in English with a vaguely Gallic accent. No, the primary tongues through most of this film’s numerous and lengthy dialogue scenes are German and French. Occasionally the scenes are extended even further by the fact that characters are talking to each other through translators and we get all the lines twice.

Oh, how this must have irritated the blood-hungry youngsters who think that Tarantino’s only previous achievement is the Technicolor chop-socky of Kill Bill.

Of course, to be truly in-keeping with the Italian schlock that Tarantino so loves, these scenes should really be badly dubbed. Maybe we can have that as an alternative dialogue track on the Blu-Ray.

It is during one of these protracted sitting-around-a-table sequences that Waltz’s Landy makes his return. As fastidiously polite as before, with the same oral fixation, he is captivating, hypnotic, his extra-ordinarily elaborate performance is nothing short of genius and deserves a supporting actor nod come next Spring’s Oscars. It is often said that you can measure the quality of a hero by the quality of the villain well, in this case, the villain is Grade A, solid gold!

But let us look at the crowd of heroes Tarantino has assembled … Starting with Pitt’s Aldo Raine, a wonderfully, witty performance, allowing Pitt to show off his comedy timing (which he doesn’t get to do nearly enough) and give us yet another of his Southern Red-Neck accents. Then there are his Basterds, a cadre of blood-thirsty Jewish soldiers, led by The Bear Jew, played with nebbish bathos by film director Eli Roth. But the real heroes of the piece are a cinema manager and a film reviewer.

I’ve done both jobs in my time and I’m glad these crucial, life-and-death roles are finally being afforded the respect they so richly deserve.

The story of how the Basterds earned their name is not this film. It is a different film. A film I’d happily watch but, it is not a what concerns Tarantino here. Their story hovers around this film, just outside the frame. Landy’s story, too, is fascinating and almost entirely absent. How does he earn his name The Jew Hunter? Why does he come to hate that name? All of that is another story for another day. Suffice it to say that all these deep, rich characters are brought together at this time in this place to tell this story.

This perfectly illustrates what a wonderful confidence trick has been perpetrated here. Everything leading to the film’s release gave the anxious, impatient viewer to understand that this would be a magnificent blood-bath in the style of Kill Bill, featuring Pitt’s square-chinned performance throughout. What we get, however, is a film where the Basterds earn their fearsome reputation off-screen. Pitt only puts in an appearance every half-hour or so. Instead we have a film about the two things that Tarantino cares most about: movies and conversation. Oh, and a plot to kill Hitler is thrown in there for good measure.

One imagines Bryan Singer must have watched this movie and wept, for it really is the film that he, in his wettest dream, wishes Valkyrie were. Where Valkyrie was staid and cold, this is vibrant and red-hot, where that was reverential and serious, this is irreverent and hilarious. Where that was a tedious history lesson, this is an uplifting film-making lesson!

By the time Emmanuelle dons her red dress, red nail-varnish and red lipstick, accompanied by the incongruous strains of David Bowie’s Cat People (Putting Out Fire) and descends the curving staircase to meet her Nazi guests like Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946), Tarantino’s mischievous sense of humour had the audience I saw this with in the palm of his hand.

Yes this film has moments of brutality, but also moments of almost operatic high melodrama, it has performances which are delicious to digest, with both Waltz and Pitt failing to disguise their grins at several points. It has a show-down which turns Cinema Paradiso into Cinema Inferno. It is peppered throughout with intelligent little nods to Alfred Hitchcock. It has the beautifully-tooled dialogue that we learned to expect from Tarantino after Res Dogs and Pulp Fiction. But more, much more than all of this, it shows a real maturity on behalf of the auteur.

The film will be less parodied than Kill Bill, it is less visual, less visceral, its set-pieces are less instant. But, as a viewing experience, it is far more satisfying, showing measurable progress from Jackie Brown. After the detours of the last ten years, finally Tarantino has produced something that is worthy of the promise he showed early. I imagine his next film will be as different again and, if his track record is anything to go by, I probably won’t be taken with that film. But that’s okay. When someone is capable of producing something of this quality, one is prepared to wait for them to do it again. Meanwhile, it’s entirely possible this might just be his masterpiece.

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Writer / Director: Quentin Tarantino

Stars: Mẽlanie Laurent, Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth

Dur: 153 mins

Cert: 18

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THE HURT LOCKER

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Full, Unexploded 1,700 word Version

This film begins with a robot’s tracks rolling over the rubble of an urban battlefield, very much as The Terminator did back in 1984. Given that Kathryn Bigelow was married to James Cameron once upon a time, you might be forgiven for thinking that this, her latest film, was going in a similar direction … but you could hardly be more wrong.

Here, the urban battlefield is not in some non-specific place in some non-specific future, it’s in Baghdad, during the recent unpleasantness there and the robot is a remote bomb disposal unit.

Those who are familiar with Bigelow’s previous films, such as Near Dark (1987), Strange Days (1995) and particularly Point Break (1991) will know that she is fascinated with exploring the relationship between violence with masculinity. Well, there are few places where you can study that more closely than in a theatre of war. And uniquely among the armed forces – the bomb disposal specialists are the guys who walk towards bombs.

The bomb-proof body-armour they wear when doing this is one part medieval armour to two parts deep-sea diving suit … and whenever they put it on, they walk away from the world of relative safety, of support, of some sort of sanity, into a mad, upside-down world where they are all alone … just them and their bomb. Or bombs.

As in Memphis Belle (1990) and Platoon (1986), films about two very different wars, we feel the pressure mount as the end of Bravo Company’s tour of duty approaches … no one says it, but everyone is thinking: “How many more times can we put ourselves in harm’s way … before it’s our turn to not come back?”

Well, that’s a gamble new kid on the Baghdad block, Will James (Jeremy Renner), seems determined to take. When he puts on the armour, he’s an adrenaline-junkie, prone to taking liberties with his own life and his two colleagues’ without hesitation. The other two (played with minimalist restrain by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) see his macho posturing for what it is … unnecessary and dangerous. When he is told that his responsibility is to stay safe, he shrugs, smiles and dismisses the idea with a casual “It’s combat, buddy”.

The several bomb-disposal set-pieces are nerve-shredding in their intensity. Watching the lone man, in his armour, walking alone down the middle of a deserted, rubble-strewn street puts one in mind of the recent swathe of end-of-the-world and zombie movies the post-9/11 hysteria has given rise to. Indeed, when he finds himself surrounded by mines, he pulls on the cord that connects them, and they rise up out of the dirt like zombies … but such similarities are merely perceptual and peripheral. This film may be a comment on the hysteria of mainstream cinema, but it’s not a contribution to it.

What makes this film even more disturbing is the knowledge that scriptwriter Mark Boal based it on his experiences as a journalist embedded with a unit of bomb technicians. So the man knows of whence he writes.

When Will is faced with a car full of mines, his first thought is to divest himself of his armour because, with that much explosive, it’ll make no difference. Freed from its restrictions, he doggedly traces the wires through the nooks and crannies of the burnt-out car, determined to defuse the bombs, even as the soldiers around him are becoming ever more panicky, feeling besieged by the onlookers on every rooftop. Yet, such is the skill of Bigelow and Boal, such is their determination to present the truth of the war in all its complicated moral greyness, this scene seems more reckless than heroic.

James is the maverick, the rebel, exactly the sort of character that typically makes for the most engaging Hollywood protagonists, but here he is seen from the perspective of his colleagues and, to their mind, his death wish is simply going to get them killed too. The only back-story we get from him is when the others are looking through the box of mementoes he has, bits of different bombs he has defused, which he describes as a box is full of things that nearly killed him. Significantly, his wedding ring is in there also.

Throughout the film there are deftly-handled references to several other war films, the afore-mentioned Platoon for one, Full Metal Jacket (1987) for another and, inevitably, Apocalypse Now (1979), but these aren’t just post-modern jokes there for the sake of it, they reflect the reality of the lives of these soldiers … it stands to reason that they will see the war they are fighting in relation to the movies they grew up watching and the first-person-shooters they grew up playing.

Back in the safety of The Green Zone, they play Gears of War (which is just the latest iteration of the ideas Bigelow’s ex-husband first had when working on Aliens in 1986). Why do they play this? Well, because this is a controllable sort of war, one where you know who the enemy is, who your friends are and you have a clear objective in mind. It’s nothing like the war they fight on a daily basis, it’s a fantasy!

It is here that Specialist Eldridge is gripped by survivor guilt, which gets keener the nearer he gets to going home. His doctor helpfully counsels him that war is a once in a lifetime experience which “could be fun!” He, unlike Boal and Bigelow, clearly hasn’t understood the difference between Gears of War and the real thing.

Cameo performances from Guy Pearce, as the disposal specialist who demonstrates to us just how dangerous the job is, David Morse as the officer who has clearly watched Apocalypse Now too often and desperately wants to be Colonel Kilgore and Ralph Fiennes, in an extraordinary turn as a mercenary we meet in the middle of the desert, are all so well drawn and bring with them so much texture, they add to the feeling that what we are seeing just one small story in a much larger on-going narrative.

The film succeeds in avoiding the problem I had with Black Hawk Down (20001) by concentrating on a small crew. So there’s only three cloned troopers wearing identical hair and camouflage to tell apart, and one of those is black. Makes it a lot easier to identify with a character when you can actually pick them out of a crowd.

Finally, the three specialists come together as a unit during an extraordinary sequence when they find themselves pinned down by snipers and have to fight back using bullets which are, symbolically, already stained with blood.

This film overflows with extraordinary moments, there’s not just the edge-of-the-seat defusings, there’s also the ambush, there’s Will, fully clothed, standing in a shower which quickly fills up with blood, there’s haunting footage of him out of uniform, running through the neon-lit late-night streets which, for some peculiar reason, reminded me of Taxi Driver (1975).

Jarhead (2005) made the burning Kuwaiti oil-fields look like something out of a Biblical dark fantasy, not that it had to try hard, because they did look like Hell on Earth … here, the site of a night-time bus explosion, rubble lit by burning trees, is a similarly Biblical, similarly diabolical vision … accompanied by the unearthly wailing of women. All of which reminded me of the No Lung Bridge sequence from Apocalypse Now, the moment when sanity finally and completely transformed into insanity … when Willard and his crew stepped off the map. Here Will and his team take it upon themselves to leave the protection of their comrades and plunge into the dark labyrinth of streets and alleys that the bombers, “The Haj”, call home.

Whilst the demilitarised area where some vestige of normalacy exists, might be called The Green Zone, the war is clearly being fought in a perpetual Grey Zone … where nothing quite makes sense and one’s moral compass just goes round and round.

The main performance by Jeremy Renner is a study in caged rage. As impactful as Colin Farrell’s debut in the thematically-similar Tigerland (2000), I hope this does for Renner’s career what that did for Farrell’s, because he deserves it. Thanks to his fiercely intense eyes, he manages to communicate so much intense emotion while saying nothing. The moment when he finally breaks is when he finds the corpse of a child, with a booby-trap surgically implanted inside it. This reminds him of his own son, the one he abandoned to go off and get shot at and, because of this, it’s just one horror too many.

The dialogue is sparse, the narrative fragmentary, yet the performances are humane enough that we come to care for these guys in a very deep and real sense. We’re glad they’re out there, instead of us. The film never shrinks away from the contradictions in their characters, and doesn’t proffer pat, psycho-babble explanations for their behaviour. These guys don’t communicate in an open, healthy way. They deal with their emotions by staging a really-quite-vicious gut-punching contest with each-other instead. Like all real people, they’re complex and contradictory. Sometimes we understand them, sometimes we don’t, and the mystifying decision that James makes at the end of the movie is both horrifying and, sadly inevitable.

Only in the film’s closing moments, do we fully understand the quotation we see at the beginning.

The Hurt Locker has spent much of this year walking its way around the world’s festivals, hoovering up accolades as it goes, and justifiably so. That’s the intelligent way to market a film, especially on as critic-friendly as this one, because it allows you to build up that word of mouth gradually that ensures this film will be the sleeper hit it richly deserves to be.

This is this year’s The Wrestler … a film that comes out of nowhere and stands confident and proud in crowd of complacent, lazy films. In time, The Hurt Locker will be spoken of in the same breath as Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket and, for an analysis of the greyness of modern warfare, I can think of no greater achievement.

DEAD SNOW (Død Snø)

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Fully Undead 900 word Version:

This is an early eighties American movie … it just happens to have been made in Norway in the late noughties. It begins, as Evil Dead (1981) does, with a group of students in a car heading out into the woods for a weekend getaway in an isolated cabin. We even have a few aerial shots of them driving along the side of a snow-bound lake in the mountains, which will put us immediately in mind of The Shining (1980).

Of course, these references, and the others that pepper the film, are quite deliberate. As the students wade through the snow along the repeatedly-mentioned “45 minute hike” from the road to the cabin, one of their number, a film-geek named Erlend, asks: “Hang on … How many films start like this?” Lots. About as many as have the obligatory post-modern film-geek character, I’d say.

Unlike your typical Grindhouse schlock-fest, this film features some stunning snowscape photography by the not-remotely-Nordic-sounding Matthew Weston. While Sweden’s Let The Right One (2008) and, to a lesser extent, America’s 30 Days of Night (2007) showed us how dark and claustrophobic snow could be, this film immediately opens up the aperture to let all that reflected sunlight come flooding in. It has the audacity to allow its horror to take place in the broadest imaginable daylight which, of course, means that you can see the horror coming from further away … the downside being: It can see you, too. You can run, but you certainly can’t hide.

During their first night in the cabin, the traditional Mysterious Stranger knocks on the door, to warn the unwary of the horrors they can expect to encounter. In a mesmerising monologue, the unnamed stranger tells the students about the Eisatz, the platoon of Germans who were stationed there during the war and who were “evil, hellish bastards” led by the devilish Colonel Herzog. He finishes with the wonderfully quotable warning “People tread lightly up here” then takes his leave to, rather foolishly, pitch his tent somewhere in the middle of the killing snowfields.

Soon after he leaves, the students find a box of Nazi gold under the cabin floorboards (“Fortune and glory, kid” mutters the film geek … if you don’t know why, I won’t bore you with the reason) which discovery brings the long-dormant local undead rising from their resting places in the snow to retrieve it.

Død Snø wears its heart (and its intestines) so openly on its sleeve that Erlend has on a Braindead t-shirt when he is torn-apart, in a good-old-fashioned latex prosthetic special-effect with lashings of livid red 80s-style blood. Vegard, the nominal leader of the gang, gets to act like Bruce Campbell engaging in a fist-fight with the first zombie. Martin, the specky nerd character, has to chainsaw his own arm off. This is the film that My Name is Bruce wishes it was!

If you haven’t already clicked, it’ll be about here that you realise you’re actually watching a comedy. One which very quickly escalates to almost undreamed-of heights of gory slap-stick. The silliest and sickest effects take place in bright, unforgiving daylight, with gouts of bright blood spraying liberally against the pristine white background, with the considerable short-comings of the effects unashamedly there for all to see but, of course, quality counts for nothing: When a character is hanging off a cliff, clinging to a rope made of writhing zombie entrails, you don’t really worry too much about how realistic they look.

For all its fearless exuberance, the film has some real problems. You are left to wonder where, exactly, have the Nazis been hiding for the last sixty years and may notice that, since they’re working together and taking orders from their commander, they can’t really be zombies! Even the central conceit, the Nazi zombie idea, has been done before in Shock Waves (1977) and, more recently, Outpost (2008), but that’s okay because there is no attempt to be original here … this film is a celebration of schlock, not an attempt to rehabilitate it.

So, you are encouraged to look upon this film as disposable, forgettable slap-stick, but then the wonderfully sophisticated visuals, sharp editing and excellent use of music are all quite at odds with the lampooning of the one-dimensional characters and loopy half-written plot. I think, with a bit more experience and the support of the more highly-developed American studios (who have apparently already drawn him into their web) director Wirkola will hopefully turn into an inspired and enterprising new talent. He certainly has the connections to make it big!

Sara, the girl who owns the cabin and who was, unbeknownst to her friends, killed in the film’s pre-title sequence, is played by Ane Dahl Torp, a veritable Norwegian mega-star; while The Mysterious Stranger is played by Bjørn Sundquist, Norway’s favourite serious actor. He clearly relishes his time slumming it in a genre movie and presumably both he and Torp supported this project (and worked at considerably below their usual pay scale, no doubt) because Wirkola persuaded them that this was an opportunity to push Norwegian cinema onto the world stage. Which is exactly what Død Snø has done. Apparently it received only lukewarm reviews in the Norwegian press upon its release but then it wasn’t made for Norwegian critics … it was made for people who love The Evil Dead … it was made for you!

Director: Tommy Wirkola.
Writers: Stig Frode Henriksen & Tommy Wirkola.
Cast: Charlotte Frogner, Ørjan Garnst, Stig Frode Henriksen, Bjorn Sundquist, Ane Dahl Torp.
Dur: 91 mins
Cert: 18

HARRY POTTER AND THE SOMETHING OR OTHER

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I haven’t read the book. There, I’ve said it. It’s out in the open. I’ve got it off my chest. Whew.

But, here’s a thing … a lot of the people paying their money to watch the film won’t have read the book. And many of them, myself included, won’t have seen the previous film (Harry Potter and the Order of Fried Rice - 2007) since its release two long cold summers ago. So, they, like me, are going to be a bit dazed and confused by the first fifteen minutes or so of this film. Note to the producers: A “Previously on Harry Potter …” like they do at the beginning of 24 or Lost was in order!

Because, let’s face it, this is nothing more than another episode in an ongoing series. There’s going to be no resolution at the end because, even noggin-scratching muggles like me know fine well that it isn’t the end. There’s another, final, book in the series, which they are apparently going to split into two separate films (a sort of Kill Harry pts 1 and 2) for release next year. So Harry Potter and the Half Baked Idea was never going to be anything more than a teaser trailer for next year’s instalments.

Further, those of us who have only experienced these stories on screen have noticed how progressively less twee they have become and, as we move inexorably towards the end, how their ever-darkening tone is more and more concerned with existential thoughts of mortality. I don’t imagine that is mere coincidence that has brought them, at the same time, ever-closer to us here in the real world. (Well, to those in London, at any rate … I guess The Smoke counts as the real world).

So this film starts in our London, with Harry all by himself on a tube station caff at midnight, while the smoke-like Death Eaters (so-called, I suppose, because they seemingly don’t eat much death) roar through the streets overhead, caring nothing for the muggles who see them as they tear the Millennium Bridge apart. I’m guessing they were architectural critics in a previous life. Unravelling a footbridge across the Thames … well, let’s face it, its not quite as iconic an opening gambit as tearing The Golden Gate Bridge apart … but, this being London, I guess it’ll do.

But anyway, why is Harry all on his todd, in a greasy-spoon after dark? Well, because he’s discovered girls (finally) and rather fancies his chances with the waitress. But, just as he’s practicing his best moves on her, his Manifest Destiny comes a-knocking once again in the form of Dumbledore, looking not at all out-of-place in his dress and waist-length beard, standing on a underground platform in our real world.

So Harry stands on his own metaphorical bridge, the one between the two worlds he inhabits … on one side the world of having to work in a café at night to earn a living … on the other, the world of getting everything one wants just by essentially wishing for it. Which way will he go? Stay with the girl or go with the beckoning weirdo in the frock? Well, we won’t have much of a movie if he stays with the girl, so ...

As ever, Gambon’s performance walks the fine line between trustworthy and suspicious. He clearly knows more than he’s letting on and the nagging doubt remains about his judgement of what to tell Harry and when to tell him it. I’m not sure he’s the kind of stranger I’d like my child wandering off with but, as Harry himself puts it, over the years he’s just learned to go with it.

Now, a cynical person might pause to wonder why, after several defeats, ole Darth Voldemort doesn’t have a pop at Harry over the summer months when he’s off on his own, unprotected, hanging around in tube stations in our magic-free world, rather than waiting until he’s back a Hogwarts, supported by his friends and surrounded by the strongest wizards in the world. More of a challenge, I suppose! After all, Voldy is demonstrably the kind of guy who cuts off his nose to spite his face. (Not that you’d know that from this film, since he’s nowhere to be seen apart from during a peculiar “Ooh, that cloud looks like Rafe Feinnes with no nose” moment).

So, Dumbledum takes Harry to meet this year’s deux ex machina supply teacher, Slughorn, played to bumbling perfection by Jim Broadbent, one of the ever-dwindling number of quality British thesps who haven’t already taken Warner’s coin for a cameo appearance here. Slughorn is living in someone else’s house while they’re away. He’s on the run and never stays anywhere for more than a week, so he’s quite relieved to take a place behind Hogwarts’ ever-changing protective walls.

The first school assembly here sings with nostalgia … reminding me of the earlier films, when the kids were more innocent, the atmosphere less doom-laden and the convenient cure-all of magic tricks were less at odds with the fatalistic reality of the films. Even the quidditch match is played on a dank, grey mist-enshrouded and very British day, not the magical, sun-kissed days of yore.

As usual, the few lessons our heroes attend provide them with the convenient solutions to some problems they’ll encounter later, Ron is there to provide comic relief, as ever, and Hermione is there to be emotional and distracting. As the films move on they seem to be increasingly irrelevant to the films, receiving less and less significant screen-time, which is a shame because, when events do kick off, Harry relies on his friends and dumb luck as usual because, let’s face it, he’s never been much cop as a magician.

The only real surprises are in the quality of the acting in that, after six films, Alan Rickman’s Snape finally gets to do some. Meanwhile, stepping out of the shadows after being in the background for several films, Tom Felton has grown into quite the young man, cutting quite a dash as Draco in his sharp suits. Instead of the annoyingly smug, impotent little shit he played in the early films, he’s become something altogether more complicated, positively haunted by the responsibility he has undertaken. Felton has taken his chance to use this performance as his audition for the rest of his career, once Potter’s golden shackles fall away, and credit to him for it.

The other new ingredient here is the sexual chemistry … which was still being resisted in the last film, two years ago (rightly, I think, given the age of the characters) but now, as the age gap between the characters and the actors playing then widens, it seems less exploitative to finally be acknowledging (even in a girly, romanticised way) what kids in their late teens really think about all day. After all, that’s what the Twilight books and films trade on, the Potter franchise will be missing a trick and possibly alienating its audience (who are also in their late teens and twenties now) if it doesn’t follow suit.

The third act, when Harry steps away from the comfortable surroundings of Hogwarts, followed by the shocking revelations of his return, are genuinely creepy and make evident, for those who hadn’t already noticed, what a great debt these later Potter films owe to Tolkein / Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Lucas’ Star Wars films and indeed, any of the films that follow Joseph Campbell’s rules of the Hero’s Journey.

For those of us who understand the rules, the ending of this film was always inevitable, it was not a matter of ‘if’ so much as ‘when’. So the only surprises lie in the all-important ‘how’ which, in this case, is dealt with surprisingly well, giving the film a delightfully post-modern twist which, I gather, is quite different from the way the matter was handled in the book. Hm, I might have to go against all my natural instincts and actually have a look at the book. Just don’t tell anyone, alright!?