KONG: SKULL ISLAND

The river snaked through the war like a main circuit cable plugging me straight into Kong!

            Like many people people, when I heard that this film was being made, I mentally rolled my eyes and thought: 'What a gigantically bad idea'.  Then, when I heard it was to tie-in with the hugely under-whelming Godzilla (2014), I mentally threw up my hands in exasperation.  Until I saw the first trailer.  This trailer: 

           

            After that, my response was a very childish “Shut up and take my money.”  Well, now they have.

            I love a title sequence, they’re a relatively rare thing these days, in the age of the 140 character attention span, but, like Godzilla, the film to which this is, indeed, a stable-mate, we get a big info dump of newsreel footage going from the South Pacific nuclear tests to the Viet-Nam war, while the credits roll.

            But, in truth, that’s pretty-much where the stylistic similarities end.  Where Godzilla was desperately humourless, this film benefits from a vein of humour which runs throughout.  

            This is the first film I’ve seen from Jordan Vogt-Roberts but, according to the Book of Wiki, he has mostly worked in comedy.  It seems that Warners have taken a leaf out of Marvel’s comic, since they learned some time ago (round about the time that Jon Favreau made such a phenomenal success of the first Iron Man) that comedy directors make great crowd-pleasing action films.

Although it lacks the pathos of Peter Jackson's Kong from 2005, it does have many glorious moments.  Images that stay with you long after the drive home!

          The writers must have also watched Jurassic Park (1993) and realised that the thing which made it the gold standard in monster movies isn’t the CGI, to which we are almost immune, these days, it’s Jeff Goldblum’s wry one-liners, it was the guy on the toilet; it was the humour. 

            Here we have the verbal wit of characters like Cole, the pilot (Shea Whigham), drily assessing their world-shaking first skirmish with Kong as “an unconventional encounter”.  But there is also visual irony in the way several characters are snatched away just at the moment of being saved.  One notable moment features a heroic sacrifice which, through a deft use of bathos, is as delightfully horrible as it is laugh-out-loud funny.

            Wisely, this story is set part-way between the nuclear blasts of the 1950s which supposedly released Godzilla, and the present day, giving the film a pleasingly retro feel and allowing the story they are intending to tell over several films to create some genuine back story.  The 1970s Viet-Nam War Movie aesthetic also allows for some kick-ass tunes on the soundtrack!

            Throughout, the concessions to the 70s are handled lightly, most characters wear uniforms, so there’s no danger of flares and, similarly, we don’t have to worry about any sideburns or porn-star ’taches.

 

What's left of John Goodman gives a typically solid performance as Randa, the man who talks everyone into visiting the island.

            In a crowded cast-list, we have, essentially, two groups: The Scientists, led by John Goodman, fulfilling the Dickie Attenborough role of being the visionary who gets everyone to the  island.  Brooks (Corey Hawkins), the Geologist, is there to be Dr. Exposition, teasing us with his theory about the existence of a ‘Hollow Earth’ from which all these prehistoric beasties ( or Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms, as he is pleased to call them) hail.  It’s a cracking notion, redolent of the romantic science fantasies of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Annoyingly, we don’t get to see that world.  Presumably they’re saving that for a later movie. 

            Then, in the blue corner, we have The Military.  Samuel Jackson’s Lt Col Packard loves his men, and they he, but he can’t face the end of the Viet-Nam war and his impending desk-job, so he is delighted to lead his men into harm’s way one last time.

            Toby Kebbell’s Maj. Chapman  serves, to some extent, as moral compass for Jackson, but they are separated leaving Col. Packard to go slowly mad, while Kebbell is left sitting on a prehistoric log waiting to be rescued.  It’s not the best use of Kebbell’s skills, but it allows Jackson to create a layered and nuanced character, something I didn’t expect to see in a film about giant monsters punching each other.

Remember that moment in Deep Blue Sea (1999) when Sam Jackson thought he was gonna get to face-off against a monster, and didn't?  He's been waiting a long time for his big chance

            Acting as referee between these two groups we have the Bear Grylls type tracker, Conrad, played by Tom Hiddleston; and alongside him the ‘anti-war photographer’, Mason Weaver, played by Brie Larson hot on the heels of her Best Actress Oscar.  In his first major leading role, Hiddleston is, essentially, cast against type, but he manages to come across as a convincing action-man (much more so that Adrien Brody - a similarly curious casting choice - in the 2005 version of King Kong, at any rate).  Larson is warm and amusing, but is mostly just there to stare in wide-eyed shock at the latest monster.  But, hey, at least she doesn’t have to do it in heels.

 

"I dunno, I think I could get my eyes a bit wider ..."

            So, the gang saddle-up and fly their ’copters over to this island, with nary a hint of Wagner music, thankfully, and promptly start dropping explosives into the jungle.  Well, when did that ever go wrong?

            Unlike the teaser trailer, there’s no hedging here, no coy playing with the audience’s expectations; on Skull Island things escalate quickly!  Kong is front and centre immediately, plucking helicopters out of the sky and smashing them together.  Just as well they brought a sizeable number of disposable soldiers, 'cos a lot of people die in this first skirmish.

            Vogt-Roberts has a wonderful eye for luminous details so, in the middle of this chaotic fight scene, we get painterly images of Kong back-lit by the setting sun, moody slow-motion shots of the copter rotors, a close up of a shell casing rattling around on a vibrating floor, and these passing moments lift the quality of the whole endeavour.

            The influences on this film are fairly obvious.  They draw on Jurassic Park and the previous King Kongs, for obvious reasons.  The Viet-Nam setting lets them wheel out all the ’60s and ’70s classics last heard in the late ’80s, when ‘the Viet-Nam War Film’ was a short-lived genre.  They pepper the film with nods particularly to the genre’s pioneer, 1979’s Apocalypse Now (hence the entirely official pastiche poster at the top of this review).  Hiddleston’s tracker is called Conrad and the grizzled World War II vet they discover on the island (a delightful John C. Reilly) is called Marlow.  Okay, we get it.  Very good.

 

There are some downright BEAUTIFUL effects shots in this film.  Worth the price of admission alone!

            Just as the film is taking a darker tone, given Packard’s developing obsession with killing Kong at all costs (couldn’t they have bitten the bullet and called him Kurtz?) along comes Marlow with his cheery, eccentric demeanour .  As he shakes the soldiers hands he happily informs them “You’re a good bunch of boys to die with!” 

            It’s worth mentioning that, even though Hiddleston gets top billing, this is an ensemble piece, several characters stand out and have their moments of glory.  And the impression they make is doubly impressive, given that the actual star of the show is the 200 foot tall CGI gorilla, whipped-up by the hundreds and hundreds of IT techs whose names you have to sit through, waiting for that inevitable end-of-credits scene.

Wide enough, Jordan?  I think I've got more ...

            Eventually, as Packard’s blood-lust draws them further and further into dinosaur territory, the story starts to get sillier and sillier.  At one point they are stalked by a lizard which gives away its position with flashing lights.  This scene reminded me of Hook being hunted by his ticking crocodile.  Then, the finale is, inevitably, a massive punch-up between massive monsters.  As such, it left me cold, but then scenes of giant robots belting each other in Transformers films has the same effect.  It’s just me, I guess.

            However, the inspiration that I felt was lacking in the closing moments of the film, is more than made up for by the delightful range of characters, the fantastic set-pieces, the clever plot-twists and the overall sense of fun the film maintains.

            Everything that Jurassic World (2015) got wrong, Skull Island gets right!

"How the hell do we defeat this armour-plated dinosaur from the centre of the Earth?"
"I can do my REALLY wide-eyed thing, if it'll help ..."

Kong: Skull Island

Cert: 12A

Dir: Jordan Vogt-Roberts

Script:  Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly

Dur: a brisk 118 mins. 

Barnes and Barnes ... And Bill

 

Bill Paxton in the criminally under-valued Frailty.  His only directorial feature.

                In a previous regeneration, I used to teach Film Studies.  Stop snickering at the back.

                Among the many other edifying and life-enhancing lessons I bestowed upon my congregation, was one about ‘Experimental Film’.  It was just a single session, so I couldn’t get too deeply embedded in Kenneth Anger or Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage or Man Ray.
                I tried to restrict myself to films that would be ‘fun’.  Learning needn’t be painful, after all.  Please bear in mind; this was the world before the global dominance of YouTube.  You can find most anything on there now, not so ten years ago.  Indeed, because of copyright concerns, there was one year when YouTube was blocked at my college.  So, some of these shorts were being played by me off VHS copies I’d recorded off-air, usually in the early hours, back in the 80s and 90s.

                We’re talking deep cuts, here.

                And, year after year, the experimental short that went down best, was an odd thing I snagged off MTV.  It was by a couple of performance artists called Barnes and Barnes and, at that time, I knew no more about it than that.

                I continued to know no more about it until this article appeared on the wonderful No Filmschool site last week.

                It’s a memoriam to Bill Paxton.  And what fascinated me was, not the baleful ‘game over, man’ tone that informed most of the copy following his shockingly untimely death.  That’s in there, but only after they’ve looked at some of his less-obvious work.  Including his video for Barnes and Barnes.

                Wow.  Mind = blown, as I believe the young people say.

                So, I started digging.

                Turns out that Barnes and Barnes were musician Robert Halmer and actor/musician, Bill Mumy.  What’s that?  The guy out of Lost in Space (1965 - ’68) and Babylon 5 (1994 - ’98)?  That’s the chap.

                Here he is talking about how the video came about.

                Fish Heads was directed by and ‘stars’ (in the loosest sense) Bill Paxton.  Some four years before he taunted a Terminator; seven years before he was assaulted by Aliens; a full ten years before his punch-up with the Predator.

                If you want to find out what a great director Paxton was (and what a subtle, nuanced performance he was capable of) then chase down his film Frailty (2001).  Watching it, one realises that he had so much more to give and, like Clint Eastwood, could very well have had a great late career behind the camera.  We’ll never know.

                But, for now, watch this.  It’s meant to be nonsense.  It’s meant to be fun.  Experiments needn’t be painful.

... And Billy.

Turns out, there's more. 

In 1974, when he was 19 years old, Paxton was involved in an art-house homo-erotic conspiracy kidnap movie.  Shot in Wales!  Of course he was.

The plot was largely improvised and, ultimately, the film wasn't finished.  Then, years later, it was re-cut and re-written by someone else, who was stoned, and who mixed in elements of the writings of William Burroughs.  Well, why wouldn't you?

But it all goes to show that Paxton was open-minded about his craft and his creativity, and wasn't scared to explore.

The story of the film's creation is recounted here, at Dangerous Minds.   And you can watch the full movie here:

CHILDREN OF X-MEN

                This is the end.  The end of an era.
                 When Bryan Singer’s X-Men came out in 2000, it was the first expression of Marvel’s upcoming domination of the box office.  Superhero films were, up to that point, so thin on the ground that they hardly constituted a genre.  Yes, Men in Black (1997) and Blade (1998) were based on comics, but they weren’t superheroes, they were science fiction and horror respectively. Whilst far from perfect, X-Men was shamelessly superheroic and, at least for this old Marvelite, an important part of its appeal was the casting of unknown singer Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.  He just got it.  Comic-book Logan is squat and Canadian, Jackman is six-foot and Australian, but that didn’t matter, he had the attitude and the first time those claws went snikt, I was hooked.

                Well, 17 years later, Wolverine has snikt for the last time.

                He needn’t have bothered.  

Old Man Logan.  You can pass on these future days.

                His cameo in X-Men Apocalypse (2016) closed the circle on the character, preceding (albeit by some distance) the cage-fighting scene which introduced him in the first film.  That would have left the fans satisfied, yet wanting more.  Logan left this fan regretting getting more.

                Okay, the disappointment set in early when it became clear that they couldn’t actually make a direct adaptation of Mark Millar’s comic book Old Man Logan (2008) because, as usual, Marvel and Fox were bickering about rights.  The lawyers won’t let Wolverine appear in the same film as Hulk and Hawkeye, who were major players in OML.  I understand that, but it would not be beyond the wit of man to adapt the story with the assets they do have.

                That said, they still can't summon the gumption to give screen credit to Len Wein, John Romita and Herb Trimpe, who created the character of Wolverine ... But that's another story. 
                The original OML was set in an America that has been divvied-up between super-villains.  In the film version, the only authority seems to be the private army of Alkali Transigen, the loosely-sketched-in corporation (which takes its name, in part, from the military installation where Wolverine was created).

                Logan really is an old man (knocking on 200 years, if you recall the opening of the first solo Wolverine film) and, in this story, he starts out weary, with a limp, infected wounds on his knuckles that no longer heal properly, an alcohol problem and, the ultimate indignity, a part-time job: the Übermensch has become an Uber driver. 

                These early scenes give us a few firsts: it’s the first time Wolverine is allowed a proper 15 certificate potty mouth and it’s the first time we really see his ‘berserker rage’, when his violence becomes unrestrained and prisoners are not taken.  We also get to see Jackman doing the best, deepest, most emotionally exhausting acting of his career.  Unfortunately, we don’t get to see any of the humour that he usually brings to the role.  Boy, does this film need humour.

Proper grown-up 'berserker rage' violence.  This fella had the death sentence on twelve systems.

                It starts bleak and proceeds through bleaker, with just the occasional pit stop at grim and hopeless, before arriving at bleakest-of-all.  The central performances of Logan and Xavier (played once again by Patrick Stewart, on positively Beckettian form, here) are key to the viewer’s involvement with the film, and here they are both weak, embittered and cynical.  It doesn’t work when they are both like that, there needs to be some light and shade.  The little girl, Laura, is added to the mix and, whilst the performance of 12-year-old Daphne Keen is excellent, she isn’t given much to do, save scowl a lot.

                Even Stephen Merchant’s Caliban, who essentially serves as mother in their twisted little family, doesn’t get the chance to be the comedy relief one would expect.  His character is just as worn-down and haunted by events (which we haven't seen) as the others.  Yes, this really is a laugh riot this one.

Bruce Spence wasn't available to revisit his Gyro Captain persona, so Stephen Merchant stepped in.

                Richard E Grant returns to the world of English-character-actor-playing-villain-in-Hollywood-movie and, to his credit, gives a relatively calm performance (I still haven’t forgotten his eye-rolling, foaming, scenery chewing in Hudson Hawk in 1991).  The problem is that his role is one of the many things in the film which are sketched or hinted at, but not fully explained.  His authority seems to be all-encompassing and, in his one dialogue scene with Logan, it seems that he’s the son of someone that Wolverine killed - but that isn’t his motivation for pursuing Logan.  So why mention it? 

                I felt that all of these back-stories were more interesting than the on-screen story.  Apparently no new mutants have been born for 25 years (which put me in mind of 2006’s vastly-superior Children of Men).  Furthermore, Xavier’s developed a mental illness which led him to commit some hinted-at heinous act, which resulted in a lot of mutant and human deaths, hence why he and Wolverine are on the run.  I wanted to know why there have been no new births.  I wanted to see the end of Westchester school and the fall of the mutants.  Either of those stories would have been more energising than this story.

                There are also plenty of lost opportunities here.  There are suggestions that Professor X is the really dangerous one - Grant refers to “a degenerative brain disease in the world’s most dangerous brain”, but this isn’t fully developed.  The brief moments where Logan and Laura fight side-by-side are electrifying, and immediately put me in mind of Lone Wolf and Cub (not to mention Big Daddy and Hit Girl), but the fight scenes are messy and poorly-resolved.  They’re like real fights, in that sense, but I don’t watch superhero movies to see the real world, I watch 'em to bask in the possibility of a world where problems are easily resolved and heroes actually exist.  There is an elegant, epic aesthetic to superhero comics, and the best films based on them.  This film lacks that.

Oh, she's as cute as a button.  And she's got her father's knives.

                With one or two exceptions, every plot development is telegraphed well in advance.  Logan has an adamantium bullet, which is the only kind that will definitely kill him.  One might call it Chekhov’s Bullet.  He has a persistent cough.  Well, we all know what that means in a movie.

                Something else that annoyed me is the (oh so common) problem that anyone who crosses the path of our protagonists inevitably get killed.  Guilty and innocent alike.  Have we learned nothing from Joss Whedon?  But then, I suppose, any film that takes its cues from Alan Ladd’s 1953 horse opera, Shane (the really soppy bit at the end) and the wrong bit of 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (the bit with the kids) has got fundamental problems.

                The film does touch on some thought-provoking themes, but doesn’t explore them.  So, families have essentially ceased to have any value in corporatised America, they are simply inconveniences, obstacles in the march of corporate progress.  They are unAmerican!  Children are no longer the focus of the American dream; they are manufactured “things with patents and copyrights”.  There’s a heavy-handed metaphor about taming wild horses at one point,

                Also, all of the new genetically-engineered mutants are Mexican, and their story is one of them fleeing across America towards Canada.  So, the racial difference of mutants has now been made more overt and America has become a place that minorities travel through but in which they are not welcome.  That’s a massive theme that could have been fruitfully developed further (especially in view of political events of the last year in the real States) but America barely features in this film, save as an indistinct back-drop for the action.

Hugh Jackman doesn't just carry the film.  He carries most of the cast too.

                The tone of despair and despondency at the film’s beginning would be far more effective (and affecting) if Logan’s actions made any difference to it but they don’t.  He isn’t Wolverine anymore, he isn’t a hero anymore, he’s just a beaten old man, and he stays that way.  I found myself wondering why are they all struggling so hard to stay in a world that is so unrelentingly awful?  It feels like the characters who die are well shot of the world, which does tend to undermine the tragedy.

                I appreciate that Mangold and Jackman tried to do something different, a grown-up superhero film which deals seriously with some grown-up issues.  I appreciate that Jackman and Stewart have purposefully given subtle, layered and pain-filled performances.  But the drama is miss-handled throughout; from its loooooong and poorly structured first act, to its inevitable second act and its confused, unsatisfactory conclusion.  Sadly, this is a disappointing end to Logan’s run.

LOGAN
Dir: James Mangold
Script: Scott Frank, James Mangold, Michael Green
Dur: 137 mins
Cert: 15 

Postscript:  In the interest of balance, it's worth noting that pretty much every other reviewer out there is of one mind.  The film's a masterpiece, apparently.  Obviously, it's one of those occasions when I didn't see what others saw.  That's fine.  Worth mentioning, though, that the film gets Len Wein's seal of approval.  Fair enough.