BOOK OF ELI

So this is Joel Silver’s take on The Road. 

Here we are, thirty years after The Flash, the war that led to the end of the world and down that road, through the scorched desert wilderness, walks a man called Eli.  A man on a mission.  Denzel Washington is using that confident, rolling stride of his to walk across America, heading always West.  Has been ever since the war.

Hang on?  Thirty years walking in a straight line?  A quick bit of maths:  If he wanders along at two miles an hour for, say, eight hours a day, has weekends off, gives himself four weeks holiday a year for good behaviour and keeps that up for thirty years … that’s a hair over 115,000 miles.  In a straight line.  Just how big do Americans think their country is?

Anyway.  Interestingly, it seems that the war was fought over religion and, immediately after it, religious books like The Bible were gathered together and burned.  He carries something very precious, therefore: the last surviving Bible.  He knows it’s the last one because, presumably, God told him.

He certainly claims that God told him where to find it and that he has to take it West where, one day, he will find somewhere were he and it will be safe. Until he gets there, he must read it every day.  Until he gets there, he must kill everyone who tries to take it from him. Until he gets there, he will be protected by it.

Well, that part seems to be born-out by experience because, whenever he encounters violent resistance (invariably in the form of half-a-dozen or more people arranged in a circle around him) he successfully manages to take them all out with his very impressive high-speed kung-fu.

Washington’s kung-fu is so good he can escape from a locked room without anyone noticing and he can produce a bow and arrow from nowhere at will.  His kung-fu is so good bullets just pass harmlessly through him (Hm.  Maybe he’s The One … oh, sorry, wrong Joel Silver film).  Indeed, during one ludicrous sequence, machine-guns, a mini-gun and a rocket-launcher all fail to touch him.

This is a useful skill to have because, when he wanders into a ramshackle border town to get his ipod re-charged (yes, really), he finds it is run by Carnegie who is played by Gary Oldman in full-on furniture-chewing mode and you know there aren’t many ways that can be a good thing.

Indeed it can’t.  Carnegie is one of the few literate men left in the world and he has a passion for books – but he desires one book in particular.  Can you guess which one?  Can you?  That’s right.  Dumb luck, a contrived script or God’s inscrutable plan have brought the only man with a Bible into the precincts of the only other man who wants it bad enough to kill for it.

As he quickly runs short of henchmen, Carnegie demonstrates that he will quite literally sacrifice anything to possess the book.  But Washington doesn’t want to play.  He continues heading in one direction, Oldman following close behind in a convoy of cars he mysteriously has the fuel for.  His few remaining henchmen bristling with all varieties of machine-guns which he, equally mysteriously, has ammo for.

Unfortunately, by this time, my disbelief would need wings to stay suspended.  Why?  Well, partly because Denzel briefly holes-up with a couple of dotty old homesteaders, played by Frances De La Tour and Michael Gambon – who both have a riotous time taking the piss mercilessly out of these poor, dumb Americans.  They both have ‘the shakes’ which, Washington sagely informs us, is brought on by eating too much human meat.   Yes, you did read that correctly: Dumbledore is a cannibal!  How could I take the film seriously after that?

There are some excellent cinematic flourishes here … not least in the staging of the thrilling fight-scenes, one of which is acted out entirely in silhouette under a bridge.  Also, the assault on the old folks’ home is filmed with a sweeping camera which moves in and out and around with no apparent edits.  Both sequences remind one of the visual virtuosity of The Hughes Brothers’ Dead Presidents (1995).

But, overall, the film demands too much forgiveness.  And here’s where I’m going to spoil the film for those who haven’t seen it.

Read no further if you have any interest in seeing this film.

Seriously.

Okay, have they gone?

Good. 

So … exactly how far are we prepared to forgive the Hugheses their trespasses?

 

Are we prepared to forgive them for ram-raiding Mad Max 2 (1981)?  Yes, I suppose so.  How about Fahrenheit 451 (book 1953, film 1966).  Hmm … at a push.  Will we forgive them for being the latest in a long line of movies to semi-demolished The Golden Gate Bridge?  Well, of course.  It wouldn’t be an end-of-the-world movie without old reliable.

But what about the more serious sins of incredible plotting, the blame for which would seem to lie firmly at the door of first-time script-writer Gary Whitta?  Well, Whitta’s background includes designing video games wherein one can pick up and put down weapons at will without carrying them and where re-spawning when dead is common-place.  Okay, so that can explain some of Washington’s kung-fu powers. But … and here’s the big one … can we forgive him the conceit of having a blind man successfully demonstrating none of the behaviour of a man with no sight?

There is a heritage of blind fighters in Eastern cinema (Zatoichi, for example) so we can, I suppose, let that slide.  If absolutely pushed, I might begrudgingly acknowledge that he can have a sense of direction and therefore know when he’s heading West.  But to walk so confidently with no fear of encountering an obstruction in the road, not even a pot-hole?  To be woken up every morning by the sun?  To know there is a house in the middle of an otherwise deserted plain?  To jump when opening a door and finding a hanging body?

I’m sorry but, unless he has Daredevil’s radar I really can’t buy that he never gives even the slightest hint of his blindness to anyone, even another blind person.

Fair enough, as surprise endings go, you’ll no more have seen this one coming than Eli would himself … but that’s because you’ll be expecting a twist that is both clever and possible.  However elegant the last few moments of the movie may seem, they just don’t bear thinking about too much.

The one saving grace of this denouement, is the fate reserved for the book once delivered.  It is put on a shelf, next to the last existing copy of The Koran and there, presumably, it will remain; like Indy’s Ark of the Covenant: filed out of harm’s way … until God tells someone else where to find it.

Dirs: Albert and Allan Hughes

Stars: Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson.

Dur: 118 mins

Cert: 15

Images © Entertainment Film Distributors

THE ROAD

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As I write this, I’m listening to Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ soundtrack on The Spotify.  Its atonal scrapings and wheezings are helping me evoke my feelings and order my thoughts about the film.  I’ve been chewing over this review for some days.  It’s about time to spit it out.

If you’ve read the book, you’ll know.  You’ll know the bleak, icicle-sharp precision of Cormac McCarthy’s vision.  You’ll know that the world he envisions for the future is more metaphysical poetry than a serious attempt at science-fiction prediction.  You’ll know that it is the story of a man’s love for his child and how, even if the rest of the world went away, that would endure.  You’ll know how tense you were reading the book, teetering permanently on the brink of an explosion of emotions you couldn’t bear to feel.  You’ll know.

If, however, you come to the film innocent, you’ll have to learn. 

The book won the Pulitzer Prize.  I have yet to find a review of it that is anything other than awe-struck and reverential in its praise.  The last time a Pulitzer winner was so universally adored and then adapted into a film was, I think, To Kill A Mockingbird (book 1960, film 1962).  That’s a lot to live up to … which is why, after just one viewing, my thoughts on John Hillcoat’s film adaptation of McCarthy’s novel tend to focus on the differences, which irritated me at first like grit on the tongue, but I am now coming to terms with them. 

As I watch the film again and again, as I surely shall, the memory of these irritations will fade and I will be able to see the film as a work unto itself.  Yes, it is different, because that is what a process of adaptation necessitates, but is it better?  No, of course not.  Such notions are irrelevant when you are dealing with a work as subtle and layered as this.  Is it, then, worthy?  Is it a suitable counterpoint to the book, a fitting interpretation and representation of the themes?  Will it break your heart? Yes, yes and avowedly, yes.

McCarthy’s vision is more nightmarish than Hillcoat’s, sketched in charcoal tones, imperfect and indistinct and all the more chilling for it.  Two unnamed pilgrims, a father and son, slowly trudge through the ash and snow and dead leaves of a dead land, also nameless, heading vaguely South … trying to stay ahead of the ever-worsening perpetual winter in which the world is suspended, timeless, unmoving.  Evolution has come to an end, all that is left is the inevitable devolution and decay.

Those who have read the book may be relieved to know that the most grotesque, most inhuman moments in the book (or the most human, depending on your perspective), the starkest realisations of the depths to which civilisation has so completely sunk, the ones that burrow into your imagination and revisit you long after you’ve put the book back on the shelf, are mostly missing.  They would seem too prurient on the big screen, I imagine. 

But, of course, what works on the page and in the mind’s eye cannot always be relied upon on the screen.  The book has the chaotic atmosphere of a Bosch painting … take, for example, the description of a passing caravan:

“They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys … Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harnesses … and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each …” 

If the film had included this image, it would have pushed our memories in the direction of Mad Max 2 (1981), a very differently-purposed vision of civilisation’s afterlife.  As it is, during the film’s few urban scenes, we see vistas of grey tumbledown buildings stretching into the distance, which tweaked my memories of old-fashioned matte paintings of ruined cities from the likes of The Time Machine (1960), Logan’s Run (1976), Damnation Alley (1977) and the Twilight Zone episode Time Enough, At Last (1959) to name but a few.  You see, this sort of thing is common coin in movies and Hillcoat had to take care not to let his road lead him into too many clichés.

Hillcoat’s vision doesn’t have the timeless, placeless quality of the novel and, therefore, the tragic waste is more specifically American and less universal.  I wondered about this, I couldn’t pick out quite what made this so, then I realised … It’s the baseball caps.  The few people they encounter on the road, are usually wearing baseball caps.  In the book the fashion is for rags.  You get descriptions like “Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators” and “He looked like a pile of rags fallen off a cart”.  In one scene in the film, a colourfully-dressed mother and child are chased across a field by a band of cannibals and it is, for all the world, a moment lifted from any one of a dozen zombie movies.  This film needs the unearthliness Hillcoat brought to The Proposition (2005) but, instead, it gets an occasional unwelcome whiff of Romero pastiche.  The recognisably modern, recognisably American clothes in the film have limited the vision of the book to a specific where and when.

Ironically, the world in the book is blessed with limited vision.  Because of the constant haze of falling ash and grey clouds of pollution the travellers get only rare glimpses of the full scope of the hellish landscape, more familiar are lines like “ … he could see the shape of a house and barn … Shrouded in the carbon fog.”  Often the boy’s young eyes see things older, tired eyes will miss.  But this myopia serves a narrative, tonal and metaphorical purpose: “He looked at the sky.  As if there were anything there to be seen”.

This perpetual haze, too, is missing from the film, but that may have been a visual decision forced upon Hillcoat by the producers, keen to avoid making the film look like Darabont’s The Mist (2007) which was excellent, but died on its arse at the box office.  Never-the-less, we still get an impressionistic world of greys and browns, of bare, broken, dead trees.  We see the tree-line burning in a subtly Biblical way, and the flash-backs to the unstated apocalypse are lit from without by the burning of the world.

The film has a little more narrative drive than the novel and a barely perceptible vein of irony has been added to the film’s last moments (which I won’t discuss, in case you haven’t read or seen them).  Previous to this, one or two things are stated that, in the book, were implied.  The reason why it is important to have two bullets in their gun, for example.

Further, the film displays more overt emotion.  The role of the mother (here played by Charlize Theron) has been greatly expanded, partly, I imagine, for marketing reasons, but also to ground the man in his memories.  The culmination of these flashbacks is the realisation of just how immensely strong the man has been to weather this endless storm, of how Sisyphean a labour his protection of his son is and, therefore, how complete the failure of the mother. 

In the book, the man is stoical under the weight of this responsibility, he is numb, he has suffered so much he can suffer no more.  This is why he has no place left in his heart for memories.  In the film, he is haunted constantly by his memories.  In the book, he leaves all his memories in the middle of the road and walks way from them.   That had a stark, awful, simple poetry.  In the film, he drops them from a nose-bleedingly tall road-bridge, and this gives the gesture a grandiosity it doesn’t need.

By pointing out these differences, I am not denigrating the film.  I’m sure I will come to love it for its differences as much as its similarities to the book.  It is a different take on a tale which deserves to be told to as many people as possible.  A grown-up, heartfelt, pure tale which tells us more about the power of love than a thousand simpering rom-coms or a year’s supply of silly love songs.

The only sustained dialogue scene in the book to involve anyone other than the man and his son is here brought to life by Robert Duvall, whose rough-hewn, time-worn tones can deliver McCarthy’s lines with the doomy, elusive, terrifying honesty they require.  A perfect piece of casting, there.

And Viggo Mortensen, a man who typically looks as though he bears the weight of the world on his shoulders, is undoubtedly the person I would trust to carry The Fire – the love that binds man and boy together.  McCarthy made him nameless because he is Everyman. Viggo Mortensen is not every man, but looking at the steadfast dread etched in his drawn face, every man must marvel at his fortitude and quietly fear that, one day, we might be so tested and be found wanting. 

The boy, Everyboy, doesn’t carry the baggage of a fallen world.  He was born during the fires and therefore has no memory of the before.   He cannot know that life was once plentiful and cheap, to him all life is precious.  His father thinks that his son is The Word of God, but his son thinks that of all souls.  

The boy is the heart and the hope of both the film and the book.  McCarthy, of course, wrote the book because he became a father surprisingly late in life and wanted to celebrate the fact.  Yes, he chose an odd way to show his love, by depicting it tested beyond endurance.  But then, what other love is there between a parent and child?  As played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, the boy’s mix of deep wisdom and beautiful innocence is far more moving, I felt, on screen than on the page.

For me, the book belonged to the man.  The film belongs equally to them both and, through the film, I realised, that the man belongs to the boy.

If you know the book, you know the end of the road.  If you don’t, you need to know that it will break your heart, but leave you with a newer, fuller heart than before.  For that is McCarthy’s point … if you have a heart to break then you, too, are that rare and precious thing in which his boy believes with fierce, unshakeable faith: You are someone who carries The Fire.  You are a heart filled with love and a soul worth saving!

Dir: John Hillcoat

Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall

Dur: 111 mins

Cert: 15

Images © Icon / Dimension

2012

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I suppose, if you go to see yet another Roland-Emmerich-Brings-The-World-To-An-End movie, you pretty much know what you’re going to get … bags of preposterously spectacular laws-of-physics-defying special effects wrapped round a soap-bubble plot and gormless characters whose every line is a time-worn cliché. There’ll be a noble scientist, a tenacious layman with kids to protect, a fearless American president (by far the least credible element in any of these films) and no women of any consequence.

But, hey, at least he’s consistent.

What I didn’t expect was to see actors of the calibre of John Cusack and Chiwetel Ejiofor signing on the dotted line. I mean, wasn’t Con Air (1997) enough for Cusack? Or does he think that sufficient time has passed for us to have forgotten?

Here he is unsuccessful novelist and part-time chauffeur Jackson Curtis (yes, really) who takes his kids to Jellystone Park for a trip, clambers over a ‘No Trespassing’ sign and wanders down to a seething dry lake-bad, variously decorated with the cooked corpses of critters. Turns out that here is where the upcoming apocalypse will first make its presence felt. Okay, so he’s not the smartest tie on the rack, but without recklessly endangering his children in this casual manner, he would never have encountered wild woodsman Woody Harrelson who theatrically foretells the upcoming catastrophe, seems to have somehow come into possession of a map that will lead Cusack to potential safety and who also, by the way, will be the first of the roughly six and a half billion casualties to die during the next two and a half hours of movie.

In fact, John Cusack seems to be something of a Jonah Cusack. As well as being at ground zero when it all kicks off, his wife is in the first of several earthquakes that wrack America, and the Russian gangster for whom he is the driver is also one of the select few people on Earth who know about mankind’s last hope for survival.

So, without further ado, the world starts falling apart. Fortunately, Cusack and his extended family are in the world’s fastest and most indestructible Limo, so the earthquake that follows them down the road, and the buildings that collapse all around them, are of no concern. This risible tone is very much reflecting that set by the film itself. California breaking up and sinking into the ground, at the cost of ten of millions of lives, is played for laughs.

But then, the film wastes almost no time considering the human cost of the visual splendour it creates. As Cusack and Co head off in a plane through the toppling tower-blocks (because his kids’ step-dad conveniently happens to be a pilot) we see one shot of tiny people falling to their deaths out of the side of a building which is folding-up around them. This shot was a real stab in the heart, reminding one momentarily of those horrifying September 11th images of tiny ant-like figures throwing themselves out of the World Trade Centre windows rather than face the fire.

The tone is so utterly inappropriate for the severity and intensity of the events unfolding. But, it has all been created with both eyes firmly fixed on a family audience – so there can be nothing too disturbing. Yes, Cusack does get to utter the obligatory single “Fuck” that guarantees the all-important 12A certificate but, thereafter, everything is carefully and reassuringly bloodless to ensure that the under twelves this will attract like bees to honey, will not be unduly traumatised by the extermination of everything. The film’s BBFC ‘consumer advice’ labelled this “Sustained Moderate Threat”. How many people have to die for the threat not to be considered moderate, I wonder?

As the for-want-of-a-more-accurate-term plot unfurls, we realise just how deeply derivative Emmerich’s oeuvre has become. Not only does he ram raid three of his own films (Independence Day, 1996, Godzilla, 1998 and The Day After Tomorrow, 2004) but his recipe requires ingredients stolen from sources as diverse as Frank Darabont’s The Mist (2007), Crack In The World (1965) When Worlds Collide (1951), Twister (1996), Armageddon (1998), Volcano (1997), The Core (2003), and even The Poseidon Adventure (1972).

As always in films such as this, the work done by the special effects teams is much more impressive than that done by the script-writers: The tearing asunder of the Earth is gob-smacking on the big screen and, somehow, watching Las Vegas being consumed by the fires of rising magma seems oddly appropriate.

For me, the one big surprise from this film was that Mankind’s Last Hope actually wasn’t a rocket into space. I won’t give away what it is, in case you are still foolish enough to want to watch this drivel, but it’s fair to say that it is in-keeping with the loosely Biblical themes that run beneath the surface of this film, only becoming apparent during scenes like the fall of Rome where a crack appears symbolically between God and Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, before the whole lot comes down on the heads of the thousands grovelling in St Peter’s Square.

The film’s final act comes down to a race against time against a glaring design flaw in the Escape Plan, the outcome of which is never in any doubt because, well, however much peril Mr. Cusack finds himself in, it’s only ever going to be moderate, isn’t it!

Ultimately, you do emerge from this far-far-far too long film, wanting to congratulate Roland Emmerich for, once again, creating a visually stunning, logically ridiculous and emotionally empty end of the world.

This, then, is how the world ends. Not with a whimper but with a bag of popcorn.

Writer/Director: Roland Emmerich
Stars: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oliver Platt, Woody Harrelson
Cert: 12A
Dur:  Endless
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9

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Another film to be so enchanted by the date 2009 it just had to be named after it (all together now: “I didn’t go to see it ’cos I haven’t seen the first eight!” Hur-hur).

This is an animation which, in their capacity as producers, brings together the visionary imaginations of Timur Bekmambetov and Tim Burton, a tempting prospect and no mistake. The film itself is an animation directed by Shane Acker, based on his Oscar nominated 2006 short which you can watch here.

It begins rather like Henry Selick’s Coraline, with cloth puppets being sewn together; but here these puppets are not a vessel for connecting a fantasy world with a real one they are, instead, a time capsule from a desperate, war-torn apocalyptic present to a hoped-for future.

We are told: “ … our blind pursuit of technology only sped us to our doom …” so, once again, we are faced with the dichotomy of a CGI movie, created with the finest, fastest computers modern technology can conjure up, advising us to abandon technology and live a natural life. I imagine we’ll get the same message from Avatar in about six weeks’ time. We’ve certainly had that hand-wringing, brow-furroughed earnestness time and again in the 32 years since Star Wars first employed cutting-edge technology to tell us to turn off our machines and trust to faith.

So, what’s different this time? Well, thankfully, for a CGI animation, this one isn’t in 3D Gimmick-o-Scope, so we can concentrate on the story-telling and leave the sideshow antics to other movies. Also unusually for an animation, we have a gloomy, dark, gothic depiction of the end of times where a few cloth puppets live as scavengers on the wreckage of the fallen civilisation which spawned them. Here they are preyed upon by the last surviving bio-mechanical chimeras, such as the creature they call The Beast which, sporting a bleached cat skull held together with wires and featuring one garish red light-bulb eyeball plus lots and lots of spikes, is one part Bosch to two-parts Terry Gilliam.

Indeed, all the creatures in this broken land seem to made of bones and blades. There is no soft tissue left, the softest material available being the Hessian from which the puppets are woven.

It is not insignificant that these rough-hewn stragglers hide from the night like mice in a church. At one point, the leader of their little community – voiced by the magisterial Christopher Plummer – makes a good point … sometimes fear is the appropriate response.

Throughout their, admittedly rather limited world, the burned-out memories of grand buildings tower massively above them, reminding one both of Terry Gilliam’s haunting 12 Monkeys (which, of course, featured Plummer back in 1995) and, of course, of the architecture of Bekmambetov’s own Russian homeland.

Plummer (puppet number 1) has been keeping his group safe these many years, through caution and stealth whilst waiting, presumably, for the inevitable end to come and hoping that, for his people, it will at least be a peaceful one. Then 9 arrives, newly awoken, full of questions and the arrogance of youth, who inadvertently sparks off a catastrophic chain of events. 9 awakens The Machine, the great self-aware device which wrought the destruction of mankind with its mechanical weapons and which, once awake, resumes building its wartoys, now with the single-minded purpose of capturing the numbered puppets and draining them of their life-force.

Puppets suffer. Puppets die.

At one point they are attached by a sock-puppet-snake which was chillingly conceived and is terrifyingly executed. The fires burning in the heart of The Machine’s dark, Satanic factory remind one of an extermination camp, surrounded, as it is, by bunkers, barbed-wire and trenches.

All of this is played out on a canvas splashed with a quite exquisite palette of colours. Stark blues and greys are offset with burning reds and oranges. The imagination unleashed by this film and the artistic eye for composition, colour and texture unleash a barrage of emotions in you as you watch.

Lord, this film was gorgeous on the big screen. Tragically, inevitably, it didn’t last there long enough for many people to see it. But, on Blu-Ray this will be a Must Own.

The story is fairly flimsy, the characters are the expected archetypes, the denouement almost inevitable, but the execution is so deliciously complex, the world so heavy with secretive wonder, the visuals so mouth-dryingly dramatic that I could forgive it almost anything, even its disappointingly short 79 minute run time.

If the end of the world can look this good, it should have ended years ago.

Director: Shane Acker
Stars: Elijah Wood, Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, Jennifer Connolly
Dur: 79 mins
Cert: 12A
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Image © Focus Features
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