films, page 14 of 31

In a perfect world, I’d never listen to, or read, film reviews. One of the best cinema-going experiences I ever had came as a result of an impulse decision to go and see a film I knew nothing about. It was, I think, 1991, I had a Wednesday afternoon off, and I just happened to overhear one person saying to another “…this film called Jacob’s Ladder…” Right, I thought, I’ll go and see this film called Jacob’s Ladder. Somehow, I even managed to walk into the cinema without seeing the poster, so I really had no idea what sort of film it was going to be.

I sat down (in a mostly empty theatre — a circumstance which added a certain efficacy to some of the film’s early scenes) and at first thought, “Oh dear, it’s about Vietnam.” I’m not a great one for war films, generally. But then it changed from being about Vietnam to Tim Robbins waking up on a subway train thinking he’s missed his stop, getting up and going into the next carriage to ask a starey-eyed woman if he’s missed it (and she just stares at him), and then noticing a drunk lying on a seat by the door. As he gets off the train at the next stop, Tim Robbins notices that the drunk seems to have a tail. I thought, “What the hell’s going on?” But, in a good way. And, partly because Tim Robbins’ character was also obviously thinking, “What the hell’s going on?” (though, for him, in more of a bad way), it soon became obvious that this film, Jacob’s Ladder, was the perfect film for me to go and see without knowing anything about it, because it was a film all about finding out what the film itself was about. And, as it was full of weird, unsettling, spooky, or even horrific moments (faceless men leering from a car that’s almost run you over, a heaving party at which Tim Robbins’ girlfriend seems to be dancing — or more than dancing — with a demon, a nightmare gurney-journey into the nether bowels of a rather unhealthy hospital, Macauley Culkin), it was, as luck would have it, just the sort of thing I liked anyway. Jacob’s Ladder has since become a favourite film, one that works just as well now I know what it’s about, but I always remember, whenever I watch it, how much I enjoyed that initial viewing for never having seen a trailer, or heard a review.

Ever since, although I do listen to and read film reviews (Mark Kermode & Simon Mayo’s podcast is a Saturday afternoon after-work fixture), I initially only pay attention as far as finding out the bare basics of what a new film is about, then, if I decide it’s the sort of thing I’d like to see, I add it to my LoveFilm list and don’t concentrate much on the details, unless it sounds like a real stinker. (And Mark Kermode tends to let you know if it’s a real stinker. Vociferously.)

A case in point is Pan’s Labyrinth. I remember seeing the mere mention of the title of this film in Empire magazine about a year before it came out, and instantly knew I was going to have to see it. After that, I avoided, as much as possible, any mention of what it was going to be about, and was deeply rewarded. Pan’s Labyrinth was, amazingly, so much more than I could have ever hoped it would be.

But with Jacob’s Ladder and Pan’s Labyrinth I was lucky. Because I also thought, from a brief summary, that Sucker Punch might be a film I’d like. After all, it seemed to mix the escape-into-fantasy-worlds and psychodrama strands of Jacob’s Ladder and Pan’s Labyrinth, so how could it fail? Well, by being a loose anthology of sub-adolescent pop video fight-outs with no plot, sensibility, emotion or meaning, is how. I should have listened to Dr Kermode. He hated it from the start. I didn’t watch this film, I endured it.

In a perfect world, some benevolent, perhaps web-based, vendor of books, films and music would somehow, perhaps through analysing my copious purchase history, get to know exactly what books, films and music I like, and issue increasingly spot-on recommendations, so I could repeat that Jacob’s Ladder/Pan’s Labyrinth experience on a daily basis. But though I’ve been dutifully rating my purchases from Amazon, and plugging my reading habits into Goodreads for some time now, still, whenever I look at the sort of thing they recommend I find myself thinking, “On what planet is this what I might like..?” I mean, they haven’t even worked out the basics, yet. (For instance, that though I buy Doctor Who DVDs, I don’t buy the new series. Guh! And my buying a Woody Allen box-set may mean I’m interested in the man’s films, but that doesn’t mean I like them so much I’d want to buy them again individually. And why, oh why, can’t LoveFilm let me forget last year’s foray into Carry On films? It’s practically all they’ve been recommending since!)

Perhaps it’s that, if even I can’t define the thing I’m looking for in films, books, and music, in each of my many moods & wants — the best way I can think of describing it is “humanity, and magic” — how can I expect a computer (devoid of humanity and magic as it is) to understand?

Or perhaps it’s that adjective, benevolent, I got wrong?

I will, usually, watch sequels & prequels to my favourite films, but never with any raised hopes. Ridley Scott’s Alien is one of my top three favourites (I can’t name a top one — the other two are Amelie and Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt), so of course I had to see Prometheus, Scott’s prequel-of-sorts to his breakthrough film. I don’t think it’s the sort of film to be ruined by discussing its plot — I heard one review beforehand and gleaned a good enough idea of what it was about to be in no way surprised — but this is a reaction to the film, not a review, so I’ll say it now: spoilers ahead.

My main feeling was Prometheus was pretty nihilistic. This may sound like an odd criticism for a horror film, but it was only after watching it that I realised how much Alien (and Aliens), being about survival in the face of terrible odds, are so life-affirming. They use their horror elements to increase the sense of the preciousness of life. Prometheus, though it does have many similar situations, doesn’t have the same feel at all. Perhaps because it’s more preoccupied with philosophical questions, its survival/action elements are tainted with a dour fatality, a feeling of “Yeah, but survive for what?” In a sense, the horror elements — one coming from the threat to individual survival, the other dealing with the ultimate source of human life — come from both sides at once, trapping the viewer in a pincer movement, and leaving no room for a sense of hope. I’ve come across criticisms of the film saying it doesn’t answer the philosophical questions it raises, but I don’t think that’s a weak point — the raising of philosophical questions (“Where do we come from? Where are we going?”) without answers is entirely valid, as it acknowledges very real areas of doubt. And doubt is okay. There’s a lot of it about. Besides, what possible answers could the film provide that would be in any way satisfying?

So, why does the film feel so nihilistic? It could be because a core trio of the main characters are so cold to each other (one, David, being a robot, another, Charlize Theron’s Meredith Vickers, whose utter coldness at the beginning — she changes midway, with no real reason — prompted what I thought was the best line in the script, when Captain Janek asks her “Are you a robot?”). But the closest I can come to identifying it lies in the imagery of the film. Alien was famous for having a lot of H R Giger’s warped images centring on the idea of impregnation and gestation (the way the alien enters & gestates in its human prey, for instance, or the way the main action takes place in the confines of a spaceship addressed as “Mother”); while Aliens was much more about motherhood (Ripley’s adoption of the traumatised Newt, plus of course the vast alien mother she fights at the end). Prometheus‘s main image, though, is of abortion, both actually (Doctor Elizabeth Shaw’s rather tacked-on super-fast pregnancy, and its termination) and metaphorically (what the alien Engineers are planning to do to their creations). The film also brings in what could be called a paternal strand, with the selfish, unfeeling presence of trillionaire Peter Weyland, and his quest to meet his makers (expecting, for some reason, paternalistic Gods, but not, of course, getting them). And this brings up a sort of flipside to the abortion imagery, voiced by the android David, who at one point asks, “Doesn’t everyone want to kill their parents?” An idea the film seems to accept without argument. So, Prometheus seemed to be mostly about parents wanting to kill their children, and children wanting to kill their parents — actually, metaphorically, and theologically. The result is a picture of a totally bleak, uncaring, in fact actively hostile, universe, with none of the contrasting, messy, crew camaraderie of Alien, or Aliens‘ feel of an impromptu family developing in the face of danger. In Prometheus, human survival has no point, because humanity isn’t human enough.

After Alien, Aliens worked so well because it took the basic idea of the first film (the perfect killer alien let loose on a bunch of humans) and put it in a slightly different genre. Alien was survival horror, and was about the individual; Aliens was a military film, and was about the survival of the group, the protection and raising of children (and, on the flipside, a new generation of alien creatures). After Aliens, I thought there was only one way to make a third film, and that was to bring the creatures to Earth (and so be about the survival of the race). I was disappointed, then, when the third Alien film settled for a sort of half-and-half Alien/Aliens hybrid, which worked on neither score, while the fourth (made by one of my otherwise favourite directors, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who was totally wrong for the series) might have worked as a dark comedy, had he been allowed to go really OTT, but was never going to be anything more than a footnote in the series. Prometheus, though it abandons the Alien creature, and though it is about the survival of the race, doesn’t do anything sufficiently different from Alien or Aliens to be judged on its own merits. (Considering the difference in plots, the film has an awful lot of similar scenes and situations, some of which feel they’ve been inserted merely for similarity’s sake.)

Guillermo del Toro saying he can’t make Mountains of Madness because Prometheus covers too similar ground is a great pity; Mountains of Madness would at least take the threat to Earth, and would make it that much more immediate and visceral. It also wouldn’t have had the baggage of previous films to feel it had to conform to. Not that Prometheus is bad, just that it isn’t as good as Alien or Aliens.

Drive, released last year, although not at all a fantasy, was really a superhero film. Its main character is a stunt driver who, on the side, hires himself out as a getaway driver for criminals. He has a simple rule — he’ll get you where you need to be, wait a specified time, then leave, with or without you. Added to this super-power of being able to out-race any cop (even a heli-cop) is an additional power of being able to launch into bursts of super-violence so suddenly he always beats his opponents. Even in a world of violent criminals, he wins his fights because, unlike the gangsters who have to psyche themselves up and get angry in order to be violent, the hero of Drive can turn from super-quiet to ultra-violent as though he’s merely flicking on a switch. In this, he’s similar to a long line of cinematic heroes and anti-heroes who do the same thing, the most obvious recent example being Heath Ledger’s Joker in Batman Returns. The key scene here is where the Joker goes to a meeting of criminals and seems to be playing with a pencil, trying to balance it on its blunt end. Suddenly, he uses the pencil to stab a goon’s eye, thus impressing everyone at the table with his power of switch-it-on ultra-violence. In that instant he becomes head of the criminal underworld.

This has become such a commonplace in films, usually thrillers, it’s almost a convention. The hero wins not because (as in King Arthur‘s day) right gives might, but because he can turn on the violence at a snap. And the reason he can do this is because, like the hero of Drive, he’s been scarred into emotional deadness, and so, to him, violence is as unemotional as any other activity. Usually, he’ll be given a dead wife or child to explain this raging void inside him, but this is done so often it’s become a convention, and is more a shorthand to get us to simultaneously sympathise with and hero-worship our hero, while granting him the power of ultra-violence. Drive wasn’t a bad film at all, but I felt it’s main fault was the way it took on this convention too much as a convention, without saying anything new about it.

Tyrannosaur is a far more gruelling watch. Which isn’t to say I didn’t laugh a couple of times — though I’m not sure if that wasn’t because I’m so used to seeing Olivia Colman in comedies, and her timing and delivery of lines is so perfectly comic, it can get you even in non-comedic scenes. I wasn’t laughing by the end, though. Unlike Drive, Tyrannosaur is all about that blind sense of objectless, burstingly-repressed rage that compels its characters to violence — and not the heroic, villain-bashing violence of Drive, but the petty, or worse-than-petty, violence to loved ones and neighbours. Its main character, Joseph (Peter Mullan), having started things off by kicking his own dog to death and throwing a brick through a Post Office window, takes refuge in a charity shop run by Hannah (Olivia Colman), who, being forgiving, meek and middle class, seems perfectly designed to annoy the always-annoyed Joseph. She is, however, the one person to show him any sort of emotion other than anger, and he can’t help coming back to see her, even if all he can offer in exchange, at first, is abuse. And it turns out Hannah is no stranger to abuse.

This is by no means a feelgood film — it has more in common with a Jacobean tragedy — though it avoids, to my mind, the sort of ultra-abject miserablism some have accused it of. But by the end of it, I had that peculiar washed-clean feeling you can get after watching a really stark, scouring, take-it-out-of-you drama. This is nothing like the air-punching triumphalism you’re invited to feel by a film such as Drive, whose hero uses his powers of ultra-violence to beat up the baddies (who need beating up because they’ve used their violence to beat up goodies), and walk away feeling he’s done a good deed. Here, you’re left feeling that the violence itself must surely have been exhausted, and perhaps, just perhaps, overcome, by its characters, though only by being taken to such awful extremes. In Drive, the hero’s emotional deadness leaves him heroically lonely by the end of the film, a sort of scapegoat for the violence of the society he lives in; in Tyrannosaur, the characters are far more human because, however emotionally dead they may think themselves, every repetition of violence or verbal abuse surprises them into feeling their own wounds yet again. For them, there is no escape from hurting themselves every time they hurt others, though they continue to do so for far too long. In this, it’s a far more honest, and brutal, depiction of violence.

Cinema is all too much in love with the glamour of violence, and films which rely on it for sheer spectacle all too often make lazy use of conventional signs about how violence affects its characters (the cop who ends every day soaking his sorrows over a photo of his estranged family, for instance) — a quick tip of the hat to the reality of things rather than an attempt to understand — then getting on with the action. Meanwhile, a film like Tyrannosaur comes along to illustrate how violence wounds the perpetrator as much as the victim, and the result is the sort of catharsis talked about as being the function of the great tragedies, be it Oedipus Rex or Hamlet. A sort of exhaustion of rage through being faced too much with its after-effects. Not an easy watch, by any means, but an oddly rewarding one.