I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am that I’m only just now going to tell you how fucking amazing the new TheMagnificent Seven movie is. Because it is fucking amazing. If it’s still showing in your area, you should go see it while you still can.
Though I will add one important caveat: go in with the clear knowledge that this movie is a Western, and keeps with some of the very classic motifs. (Which is a remarkable and beautiful, multilayered thing when you consider it’s based on Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai, translated to a different era, a different genre.) The villain (Peter Sarsgaard as Bartholomew Bogue) is a scenery-chewing, cartoonish capitalist-as-black-hat. The heroes are super stoic and the character development isn’t exactly deep. It’s all about men (and a single woman) with guns, shooting their way to justice. There are some wonderful revisionist elements called forth by the casting, but it still plays to trope.
So basically, if you don’t like westerns, you’re not going to like this movie, even though it’s wonderful.
Weeks after watching the movie, when I’m having to check my notes to remember details I liked or didn’t, there are certain things that stick with me. One, it’s absolutely gorgeous. Antoine Fuqua draws out the rugged beauty of the Western landscape with breathtaking detail, including location shots in the Valles Caldera in New Mexico. It’s landscape porn at its finest. But even when the camera isn’t making love to he scrubby desert, so much detail in the shots of the people is perfect. The opening credits of the man in black (Denzel Washington and his glorious sideburns playing Chisolm) approaching through the wavering heat of the desert gave me chills.
But beyond all that stark beauty, it’s the casting that really hit me. Denzel Washington is amazing as the Chisolm, the marshal who has his own reasons for going into this fight. Byung-hun Lee as Billy Rocks stole every scene he was in. Faraday (Chris Pratt) and Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) better have a serious amount of fanfiction about them on AO3 or I’m going to question fandom’s dedication to slash. And Martin Sensmeier as Red Harvest stole every scene that Byung-hun Lee hadn’t gotten to first and brought a massive amount of depth to a character who said the least out of all seven.
Basically, they were all wonderful. And the act of casting so many men of color (four out of the seven) is one of the greatest revisionist acts of this version of The Magnificent Seven. It’s hopefully not a surprise to you at this point to hear that the classic Hollywood vision of the west is incredibly whitewashed, even just looking at the percentage of cowboys who were black or Hispanic. And that all four of the non-white characters are so integral to the story—the team up literally would not have happened without Chisolm at the helm, for example—shows Fuqua’s vision of creating a Western everyone can see themselves in.
(Well, everyone male, at least.)
Come for the landscapes, stay for the fucking amazing gunfights and Denzel Washington’s sideburns. You won’t be sorry.
This is a trend that’s been endemic since the first new Trek film and has only gotten worse with each movie. The original Trek movies always had their special effects moments, but it was always about the thematic story (even if it was a dumb story sometimes) with the action as a seasoning rather than the point. The new movies? Action set after action set piece with a thin connective tissue of something plot-like, normally driven by a villain who would have a more understandable motivation if they were a cardboard cut-out.
And this is the thing. I don’t dislike action movies. I like big, dumb, explodey movies as much as the next person, particularly when they have a thin veneer of science fiction over them to provide rule of cool physics. But those aren’t Star Trek movies. What always made Star Trek special was its philosophical heart and that the story tried–even if it failed sometimes–to be about something bigger than just blowing shit up.
It’s that heart that’s missing from Star Trek Beyond, just like in the other movies.
Probably the best metaphor for the film is Yorktown, the nonsensical, enormous space station that’s been built on the frontier of explored and is densely populated with aliens and humans (including Sulu’s husband and daughter) for reasons that are never explained. The station itself looks like a giant snow globe with a lattice work of open air linear cities built on tubes that star ships go through. There’s free flowing water and air. Every part of the lattice has its own individual gravity. It’s an beautiful design and makes absolutely no goddamn sense as anything that was made specifically to facilitate several interminable action set pieces. It actively aggravated me.
The plot, such as it is, begins and ends at Yorktown. The Enterprise arrives there after letting us know that Jim Kirk and Spock are having individual quarter life crises. An unknown ship comes out of the giant, unexplored nebula (which is apparently full of asteroids, we see later, okay then) and asks for help. Of course the Enterprise goes, and of course it ends up being a trap and of course the Enterprise gets destroyed yet again. The big bad is a complete waste of Idris Elba’s acting talents named Krall, who wants a random MacGuffin off the Enterprise so he can complete his MacGuffin machine and finally make a fucking cup of coffee murder everyone. Because reasons. The crew, stranded on the planet, meet up with an alien named Jayla, free the rest of their people, and take off in an old Federation ship that Scotty and Jayla manage to repair, all in order to prevent Krall from killing Yorktown.
The extremely thin plot careens from set piece to set piece, contorting to come up with reasons for Kirk to ride around on a motorcycle, or have a fist fight, or for people to fly around in ships in a way that’s visually pretty but very difficult to orient in space. I got tired of the action set pieces. The movie feels longer than it actually is because it’s like okay, here’s a little plot, and now we’re going to pause to randomly run away from something.
Krall is paper-thin even as action movie villains go. Why does he have followers? Where did he get the cool swarm ships? Why does he keep dragging Uhura around and yelling her? Why does he want to destroy Yorktown? What the fuck is “here is where the frontier pushes back” supposed to even mean in the context of his character? There’s what should be a really cool reveal on him at the end, but it doesn’t really explain anything, and it’s completely unearned. There’s nothing before that to hint that there’s more, to build up to it. It’s just suddenly there, and flops because it had no scaffolding of plot holding it up. There might be more commentary to be had here, on Starfleet as a non-military organization, about soldiers being left behind by the society that once depended upon them, but as in ST:ID, any point was hopelessly muddled and underdeveloped to the point of incoherence.
I’m probably making the movie sound worse than it is, but that’s because I’m frustrated. There were some things I truly liked about the movie, and I could see where it could have been so much more if they would have just backed off on the fucking action set pieces and focused on the story. And perhaps some of the overbearing action sequences can be pinned on director Justin Lin, but I think the places where the film really shines are also a sign of his influence.
Lin is best known as the director of several of the Fast & Furious films. Which, yes, Kirk on a motorcycle. But the other major strength of that franchise is its strong ensemble cast, and in each film, everyone gets a moment to be cool. This is the first Trek movie since the reboot in which I felt that everyone in the crew really did get a chance to shine brightly–heck, I think this film did a better job giving everyone a moment than any of the older Trek films did either. Uhura particularly got to stand out even more than in ST:ID, and got to have a couple of cool moments that called on her skills as the comms officer. And when it was character moments, that’s when this movie did feel like it was Star Trek in more than name. Sulu gets to take over command again and we see in him the echo of George Takei’s Sulu in command of the Excelsior. Chekhov gets some one-on-one time with Kirk. The dryly humorous friendship between Spock and Bones gets some much-needed and long-awaited screen time. The new character, Jayla, had some great moments as well, and there’s a plot setup for her potential return, which I’m excited about.
And I’ll admit, for all I bitch about the action set pieces, I fucking loved every moment of action that was accompanied by the Beastie Boys song Sabotage. It was a clever ship battle move backed up by campily bullshit Star Trek science, and as weird as it might sound to say, in that moment it felt gloriously like Trek–but yet unique to this younger, new crew.
I’m frustrated because I want to love these movies. I’m frustrated because I care about the cast, which is still absolutely stand out. I want these films to be successful, but more than that, I want them to be successful and still Star Trek. This one has come the closest of the three, and much credit is probably due to Simon Pegg, who was one of the writers for the script and who deeply loves Star Trek in the same way I do. Star Trek Beyond proved that the reboot could finally move past cannibalizing the plots of the original, and I’m grateful for that, make no mistake. But here’s hoping it can also move beyond the soulless action effects blockbuster formula and become the franchise the cast and the fans deserve.
Warning: depending upon your spoiler sensitivity level, you may want to skip the plot synopsis (red) until after you’ve seen the film.
Ghostbusters (2016) comes to us in a world saturated with sequels and remakes and reboots that no one wanted, needed, or asked for—and finally, we get a reboot we actually deserve.
I have a lot of love in my heart for 1984’s original Ghostbusters, which came out in theaters when I was way too young to see it. I remember my parents showing me the movie when I was a bit older, and recall that I thought the first ghost in the library was absolutely fucking terrifying, and that Egon was my favorite ghostbuster. I have a moderate little wad of affection for the at-times cringe-worthy sequel, Ghostbusters 2. I got up extra early on Saturday mornings for years so I could watch The Real Ghostbusters cartoon series. I owned action figures. My Ghostbusters love is not a matter for debate.
Two years ago, for the thirtieth anniversary of the movie, I got to watch Ghostbusters (1984) properly in a movie theater. It was still funny, and fun, and I still loved it to pieces. But it broke my heart a little when adult me noticed the incredibly creepy sexism of Venkman that child me skated around and just thought was at worst an endearing quirk.
And now today, I rode my bike over to a movie theater so I could eat some overpriced popcorn and watch a new Ghostbusters that made it all better.
On its surface, this new Ghostbusters has a lot in common plot-wise with the old Ghostbusters. A team of scientific-minded paranormal investigators starts catching ghosts in New York City and notices that the ghastly activity is ramping way the hell up. They’re called frauds by some and loved by others. They figure out their technology, realize what the hell is going on, and try unsuccessfully to stop the coming spiritual apocalypse. Then it’s showdown time.
But one twist that really marks the departure from the original is that the villain of Ghostbusters (2016) isn’t an apartment building or an ancient god, but an ordinary man named Rowan (Neil Casey) who might as well be a stand-in for every internet neckbeard who’s been desperately trying to slime the movie since its inception. His entire motivation is anger at the world for not recognizing his genius and throwing itself at his feet—and it’s made absolutely explicit when he says as much to Abby (Melissa McCarthy) and she points out yes, this is the same sort of thing all of the female ghostbusters deal with daily. The difference is they lack Rowan’s profound sense of entitlement.
Makes you wonder how much of Rowan’s role (and his amazing sideburns) got scripted after the internet backlash started up. There’s also some delicious pokes about people being jerks in youtube comments.
In a way, 2016’s Ghostbusters is a film in dialog with its original. It reaches for the things that made the original film so great—the humor, the inherent ridiculousness of the supernatural crossing into an otherwise ordinary world, and ghosts that are just scary enough to make the stakes feel real without crossing the line into horror. It borrows a few of everyone’s favorite beats from the original (the team’s first encounter with a ghost, something giant destroying the city, etc) but turns them sideways enough to make it feel like a joke between friends, a wink, not outright copying like we felt from The Force Awakens. The story of Ghostbusters 2016 is very much its own, and the characters have their own lives. There is no female Egon, Venkman, Ray, or Winston—we get Abby, Erin, Holtzmann and Patty and they are decidedly themselves. It’s a parallel universe in which the events of 1984 never happened, but we can still see beloved old landmarks like the firehouse.
And it’s a reaction to the less-than-stellar parts of the 1984 film, tweaking them, mocking them, and holding a mirror up to them. Instead of an all-male team, we get an all-female team. Instead of Janine as the receptionist and Dana Barrett as the victim of both ghosts and Venkman’s creeping, we get Chris Hemsworth as the puppyishly dumb beefcake receptionist Kevin. And while Erin (Kristen Wiig) does a bit of objectifying and creeping at Kevin of her own, she notably doesn’t get rewarded for it at the end with a relationship.
This is Kevin. He would like to know which of these pictures makes him look more like a doctor.
The one part of the Ghostbusters (1984) legacy that 2016 doesn’t face so head-on is the profound injustice done to the character of Winston Zeddemore, the only non-white ghostbuster in the original. Ernie Hudson has written with heartbreaking eloquence about his experience of Winston’s character being diminished, of disappearing as the “soul” of the original team. There was a chance to have made that completely right with Patty Tolan (Leslie Jones)—and the movie does make a start. From the moment she appears, Patty is knowledgeable, independent, and determined. She decides to join the team because she feels she has valuable skills and wants to be part of the action. And from that moment, she is an integral part of the Ghostbusters who doesn’t ever disappear from the screen. She is undeniably the soul of the team that Winston was supposed to be. But listening to her get diminished as the only non-scientist was still damned painful.
So you get all of the above meta meatiness, and then the movie is fucking hilarious. I laughed more at this film than I ever laughed at the original. The end credits sequence alone almost killed me. The four women who make up the team are all excellent comedians in their own right, and what they make together is hilarious magic. Even better, they form a solid team of close friends—and the film never resorts to the sort of in-team friction as plot driver that we’ve seen in every damn Avengers-adjacent film. The fact that this is happening in an all-female team, where the women support each other and protect each other, feels even more profound because that is still so unusual, particularly in comedy.
Chris Hemsworth deserves his own paragraph here as well, for his amazing turn as a lovable buffoon who is a walking non sequitur with extremely nice pecs. This is probably the best role I’ve ever seen him in, and you can tell he’s having a hell of a good time—and so is everyone else, including all of the major castmembers of 1984’s Ghostbusters. There’s a Stan Lee-esque cameo in the film for each one of them, every appearance more delightful than the rest. Bill Murray wears a fedora. This is not a drill.
Perhaps the thing I’m the least thrilled about in the whole film were the CGI ghosts (though the mannequin was damned creepy) for the same reason I’m generally not thrilled any time there’s a lot of obvious CGI in a live action film. It’s less egregious when it’s ghosts, because they’re not supposed to look entirely real anyway, but there were too many of them. It felt like action for the sake of having an action sequence and using some of the special effects budget.
But really? It was hella fun. I’m going to see it again. I’m going to buy it when it comes out for home video and watch it regularly. And I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that if 2016 gets a Ghostbusters 2, it’ll be a damn sight better than the original.
And yet, I still can’t say that I love it more than I loved the 1984 movie. I don’t think that’s a judgment on the quality of the 2016 version, but rather an artifact of the original film being so ingrained as part of my nerd psyche. I grew up watching that movie. My older brother was a freaking ghostbuster one Halloween. The original, warts and all, is indelibly in my blood. And with that history in my head, the 2016 film will always feel a little derivative, a little unoriginal even if it does everything better than the first film did and I can watch it without cringing every time Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver are on screen together.
What I do wonder is how it will feel to those for whom Ghostbusters (2016) is their first love, and they go back to watch the 1984 film. I wouldn’t be surprised if this new one, with its hilarious women and doofy male receptionist accidentally poking himself in the eyes, will be their favorite, and rightfully so.
It says a lot that it’s been something like two weeks since I saw Warcraft and I’m only now writing about it. Mostly because… honestly? I don’t have a lot to say.
The thing you need to understand here is that I’ve played all the original Warcraft RTS games, and devoted more hours of my life than I’m willing to actually count to World of Warcraft. So there is a huge part of me that cannot look at this film in an uncritical way because other criticisms aside, it looked like Warcraft. It’s gorgeous. My god, the humans go flying around on gryphons, HOW COOL IS THAT. The orcs look great. AND OH MY GOD THAT WAS DUROTAN FROSTWOLF CLAN REPRESENT and KHADGAR JUST SHEEPED THAT GUY DID YOU SEE THAT OH MY FUCK and–and–and–
This was a big part of my teenage and twenty-something gamer years, splashed out on the screen and looking cool. I knew the story going in. I knew the characters. I just about shit myself over Gul’dan in the first two minutes.
But this is the thing. I can take a step back and try to address it from the perspective of someone who hasn’t been a fan of the Warcraft franchise, and in that case, the movie is severely wanting. Seriously, if you don’t know who Khadgar is, if you haven’t run the Karazhan raid a million times and known in the marrow of your bones what a dickbag Medivh is, does any of it come out to more than just-so stories and alphabet name soup? From what my few friends who went in canon-blind to see it had to say afterward, the answer is no. The characters aren’t nearly as exciting and compelling when you have no idea where they’re going to be going or what their significance is to a world you’ve never been to. There’s way too many characters, way too much going on in the film, and way too much unspoken backstory that fans can and will fill in easily, but leaves everyone else scratching their heads. Even some of the hand-waving orc culture stuff was a bit much for me, and I knew what was coming.
And that makes me sad to say it, but I also don’t know if there’s really a solution. Warcraft was going to either be a movie that the fans like me would love, or it would be a movie that people unacquainted with the lore could really sink their teeth into. I honestly never thought it was going to be the latter, because translating this much sprawling lore into something you can consume and feel satisfied by in a feature? That’s one hell of a tall task, and at that point would it be recognizable as Warcraft any more? But goddamn, if you’re a fan, it was an amazing two hours. The real question on my mind now is if the film’s going to make enough money for there to be more. It hasn’t done so hot in the US ($45 million so far, oof), but it’s been doing much better internationally ($376 million). I’d love to see another film. I want Thrall: The Movie. I’m hoping I get it, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
But damn you Blizzard, now I want to re-up my WoW account.
By the way, I recently also saw Now You See Me 2. I decided to write up my review of that for my Patreon subscribers only, so if you’re curious, all it takes is a buck.
In news that should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever spent five minutes in a room with me, I enjoyed the hell out of this movie.
Please note here, I am not going to make any claims that it is a good movie, by whatever measure of good you want to pretend is in some way objective. To me? It was fun, it was enjoyable, I want to see it again, but it certainly was not: innovative, groundbreaking, special, excellent, unexpected, exceptional, or artful. On the other hand, you have seen the original Independence Day, right? It wasn’t any of those things either, but it was hella fun and caused the consumption of mass quantities of popcorn. Considering the size of the shared popcorn bucket my friend and I consumed in ID:R, we’re right on track.
Independence Day: Resurgence takes place 20 years after the first invasion. Humanity has recovered, the world’s basically become multinational and peaceful thanks to humans having something bigger to worry about killing than each other, and alien technology has been incorporated fully into this alternate 2016. On the anniversary celebration of humanity’s epic win, people who were psychically exposed to the aliens (like Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore, prematurely aged by the experience) are Having A Bad Feeling About This. The aliens show back up in an even more ridiculously enormous ship that has even less of a passing relationship with physics as we know it, and decide to drill to Earth’s nougatty center because reasons. It’s up to the old and new generations to fight impossible odds and save the Earth again, though this time there might be some mysterious help that I won’t describe further because it’s a bit of a spoiler.
There were a few things here that were a bit stupid even for me, which had me rolling my eyes at the movie rather than grinning along with the fun dumbness of it–namely the 3000-mile-wide alien mothership (for reference, that gives is a bigger diameter than the Moon) that has its own personal gravity field when it’s convenient for the purposes of special effects and then doesn’t every other time. If nothing else, even if it’s got a larger diameter than the Moon, it’s not spherical, so I have a hard time believing that it actually out-masses the moon; beyond that, the Earth is still a hell of a lot bigger. And while I don’t come to movies like this for the science–GOODNESS NO–that was a bit too dumb even for my popcorn-addled brain. Particularly when the disaster special effects that it’s used to explain really are a bit to the boring side. At some point, the thing you’re attempting to blow up is just too big and impersonal and it looks like you’re throwing a box of tinkertoys up in the air. The whole “drilling to the Earth’s core” thing was also derisive snort-worthy, particularly when they had to find a melodramatic way to ratchet up the ticking clock even more. Then again, basically any alien invasion movie that works under the assumption that the aliens are after some kind of resource we have (most often water) that they can suck away and leave Earth a lifeless husk really shows laziness on the part of the writers; either they don’t know that any resource of that nature on Earth can be found more easily and more abundantly by harvesting asteroids and comets, or they just don’t care.
That said? I loved pretty much everything else. Many of the beats in this film mirrored ID4; fair enough since they are both alien invasion films and big budget action tentpoles, which means there will be certain required beats that have to be met. But those story beats are accompanied by a world that has indelibly changed in 20 years, and that keeps it from feeling like an exact retread. To me, the best part of ID:R really was the alternate 2016 imagined in the film. The alien technology incorporated into human military technology makes for some fun variation on standard alien invasion fare, because it does touch on something that so often gets ignored–of course we’d try to figure out what makes the technology tick and then incorporate the helpful bits to prepare for the next invasion. And it makes the fun point that after twenty years of prep time, humanity has really stepped up its game–while the aliens are pretty much coming at us with the same bag of tricks they had before. The film tries to address the aftermath of so much worldwide destruction in the first movie, including the large number of orphans left behind, and the effect that had on the kids who have grown up and are now taking on a fight they’ve believed might be coming for their whole lives. Even the fact that the older generation told those kids that if the fight came, they’d be ready, and they’d win again is brought in–as a moment where the older characters fight off despair and try to find a way to keep that promise. (Look at the Baby Boomers and Millenials cooperating in alternate 2016; all it took was a world-wide disaster induced by alien invasion.) I loved the world of ID:R. I loved the setup it makes as a springboard for another film that promises to be significantly different.
International cooperation is placed at the forefront. The casting is more diverse in a lot of ways than in ID4. I loved Rain Lao (Angelababy) and Patricia Whitmore (Maika Monroe) flying jet-spaceship hybrids around. Both old characters and new had great moments, the only exception being I’m still not sure what purpose Julius Levinson (Judd Hirsch) really served in the narrative. Things get blown up. Aliens get punched in the face. Female fighter pilots get to be badass. American exceptionalism has been replaced by human exceptionalism, which is still cringe-worthy in context, but a vast improvement that cannot be understated. But my favorite part? The return of Dr. Okun, and I have very specific reasons for that, which I’ll explain past the spoiler wall.
At any rate, if you’re looking for dumb, explodey fun to accompany shoving popcorn into your food hole, I recommend it. I enjoyed the hell out of this movie.
Well, holy shit. I went in expecting a hot mess that I’d love anyway (hello, Age of Ultron) and instead got a movie that I feel like I need to make dying seagull noises about and then place it on a shelf next to Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
I’m not going to write a more standard-ish review. I fucking loved this movie, end of story. If you liked CA:TWS, you’ll probably love it too. Instead, I want to scream about some very particular things, so this is going to be nothing but SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT.
The Boss isn’t getting very good reviews. As of right now, it’s at 17% on Rotten Tomatoes. (For what it’s worth, The Huntsman: Winter’s War is only at 19% and I thought that was pulpy fantasy fun, so maybe I just have terrible taste.) But I decided to see it anyway, for exactly one reason: the cookie seller street fight scene.
I don’t know if it’s because I was a Girl Scout for years, and put in a lot of time selling cookies, but to me, that alone was worth the price of admission.
The Boss is about Michelle Darnell (Melissa McCarthy), who has made a ton of money doing nebulous business things and screwing over everyone, including her former flame Renault (Peter Dinklage). He turns her in to the FTC for insider trading and gets her thrown in white collar country club jail for five months, during which time she loses all of her assets. She emerges, deposits herself on her former assistant Claire’s (Kristen Bell) doorstep, and comes up with a new scheme quickly: selling Claire’s amazing brownies with a knock-off, capitalistic version of Girl Scouts.
This is definitely not the most well put together comedy movie I’ve ever seen. It’s got its problems with internal consistency, has some weird pacing hiccups, and at times feels like a loose collection of sketches for McCarthy to ad-lib her Michelle Darnell character. The plot at times doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, and the Michelle Darnell character arc is incredibly predictable and pat, something that feels steered by script beats rather than organically developed.
It also, I’m sorry to say, has the Lazy Trans Joke. Bleh.
On the other hand? It had a lot of really funny moments. I never really bought Claire as a character or her muddled arc, but her love interest Mike (Tyler Labine) was delightful. The interplay between Michelle and Claire’s daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) had some great moments. And Chrystal (Eva Peterson) the resident “giant” for Darnell’s Darlings was the MVP of every scene she was in. And Renault? Fucking hilarious, I thought. And Lazy Trans Joke aside, like many of McCarthy’s movies, it showcases women being hilarious with other women in an expansive rather than self-hating way.
I’ve heard from a lot of people that Spy is superior in every way to this movie, and I’m looking forward to watching it. (Still mad that I didn’t get a chance to see it in the theater.) Hopefully it’ll be On Demand with my cable company, I just haven’t had a chance to check yet. But I’ll probably write a little post about it when I do and let everyone know they were right. As for The Boss, I’m kind of on the fence whether to recommend it or not. If you really love Melissa McCarthy and did your time in the Girl Scouts, you might find it suitably amusing, but your mileage may vary.
As half-prequel, half-sequel to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman, The Huntsman: Winter’s War pretty much nails everything that was fun about the first film (namely, the Huntsman and the Evil Queen Ravenna) and leaves behind the less arresting bits (eg: Kristen Stewart’s Snow White). If you liked the first movie, you’re going to like this one. If you didn’t, then I’d be shocked if Winter’s War changes your mind.
The beginning of the movie explains the origin of Eric the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) and identifies the source of his deep font of manpain, Sara the Huntsman (Jessica Chastain). It also brings us a new evil queen, Ravenna’s little sister Freya (Emily Blunt), who has her own utterly tragic reasons for being evil and wearing some incredibly beautiful costumes. Freya, driven into the depths of despair by the murder of her infant daughter by her would-be husband, decides the best way to deal with all that pain is to conquer the entire north (lots of planets have a north) and take all available children so she can craft them into an army of badass, leather-jerkin-wearing super soldiers who are admonished that only chumps believe in love. Eric and Sara are among these children and as they grow up, they develop a forbidden love for each other, which Freya Does Not Take Well.
Fast forward seven years to after the events of Snow White and the Huntsman, and we find Eric once again living in the woods and apparently avoiding baths if his hair is anything to go by. He’s dragged back into the world of having to interact with other humans when he’s told that Ravenna’s mirror has gone missing, and sets off to find it before Freya does.
This movie is utterly gorgeous, far more so than the first. There’s actual color, and lots of it. The costumes that Freya and Ravenna wear alone deserve to have a shrine built to them. The story is pulpy fantasy fun, as are the action sequences. The comic relief dwarves (Nick Frost and Rob Brydon) are well overmatched by the absolutely delightful she-dwarves (Sophie Cookson and Alexandra Roach). It’s predictable in places, and a bit weirdly discontinuous with its own mythology in others (more on that later), but all in good fun.
And it’s actually a fantasy movie that manages to pass the Bechdel-Wallace test, believe it or not. Ravenna and Freya manage to have some evil queen back and forth that does not center around men. The main casting is delightfully female heavy: two male dwarves, two female dwarves, one male huntsman, one female huntsman, and two evil queens. Lovely! I was also charmed by the equal partnership between Eric and Sara–and Sara’s fierce independence as she tells Eric, “I choose for me, not for you.” She has an excellent speech about how their relationship is not determined by the man passing some test and then she has to love him. It’s a nice jab at fairy tale tropes when that normally is what it boils down to. Ravenna remains the most compelling character of the franchise, though I’m not sure I’m on board with the implicit statement that both evil queens have their magic because they have eschewed love and family for various reasons.
Winter’s War is ever so slightly less lily-white than Snow White and the Huntsman. There are non-white background actors in Freya’s kingdom, which is… something. Sope Disiru plays another of the Huntsman, Tull, who has a speaking role and feels curiously like he should be much more vital to the movie than he really is. I came out of the film wishing I knew more about him, his motivations, his relation to Sara and Eric, because he feels like he must have been pulling some narrative weight that ultimately (and disappointingly) fell to the cutting room floor. I’m also not really sure about the depiction of goblins in this fantasy land as midnight-black, savage, horned gorilla-like creatures with tar for blood.
I also could have done without the aggressively heterosexual ending, in which every male-female couple possible shows the audience that they will be getting together happily ever after, because love conquers all and saves the day if you’re straight and monogamous, I guess. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being straight, I get that it’s not a choice or anything, but do they have to flaunt it like that?
Not flawless but fun, worth a watch if you want to see Chris Hemsworth run around in leather pants and be cute. As you do.
Hardcore Henry is a scifi action film shot entirely in first person. Unlike handheld camera movies like Blair Witch or Cloverfield, there’s never an outside look at the protagonist; we’re supposed to be literally seeing through his eyes. It feels like someone’s taken a first person shooter game and rendered it in film, which is its strength as a gimmick, but also a major weakness.
First off, if you have any problems with getting motion sick in movies that have a lot of shaky camera movements, I do not recommend this one. That’s the number one problem with the first person format here. We’re getting all the shakiness of a mounted camera, which actually works counter to the first person shooter effect because it reminds us that we’re looking through a camera, not actually experiencing the film first person.
Let me explain what I mean.
When you’re running, jumping, doing whatever as a person, you’ll notice that your vision doesn’t actually shake that much, even if you’re really pounding ground. That’s because there are a ton of physical factors, from the stabilization of your neck muscles to your inner ears to the way your brain processes the visual input that work to make what you see relatively smooth. You experience, say, some bobbing motion if you’re running, but not a lot of the vibration or shaking even if that’s literally what’s happening to you. You’re compensating for it.
This is what makes first person shooter games work. The movement you get on the screen is very smooth, with at most some up and down indicating running. (Here’s an example of gameplay from Destiny.) But you’ll notice a lot of the indicators of physical motion we get are from seeing the arms move, for example. So in a weird way, a first person shooter looks more real than something like Hardcore Henry because it more closely apes how we visually experience movement. Even if in a technical sense, Hardcore Henry is more real because it’s literally a camera that is strapped to someone.
This is something that the people who made the Doom movie really got when they shot the film’s famous first person shooter scene. (Though arguably, they made it a tad too smooth.)
Unfortunately, with Hardcore Henry, we’re spending an entire movie watching a camera get flung around rather than perceiving what’s going on in a much more stabilized way, like the character Henry would. This works against the movie, because while I’m sure a lot of the action sequences were extremely cool, I couldn’t tell what the fuck was going on in most of them. There was too much unstable movement for me to be able to track it. So it’s an interesting gimmick, but I wish it had worked better.
As far as the actual plot goes, it really does feel like standard video game setup. Hello, player, here is your cipher character that you occupy, here’s your goal (save your wife Estelle), here’s the major antagonist, here’s your contact Jimmy who will give you the various missions you need to run to level up. The fight at the end certainly felt like Epic Final Boss Battle. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some fun stuff in there if you’re a fan of action movies and just want to see some badguys get punched. There’s also a couple little twists to be had, including the deal with Jimmy (Sharlto Copley) apparently being the master of disguise, and the denouement with Estelle.
On the other hand, I really could have done without the extended bordello scene, which highlighted the fact that other than Estelle, there really weren’t any women in the movie who weren’t gun-wielding prostitutes. (Guys, you do realize that many a non-dude-bro plays FPS games and thus might have an interest in your film, right?) And I still don’t know what the deal was with the villain, Akan, other than he just wants a private army of cyborgs because reasons. Reasons only an albino with psychic powers could possibly understand and doesn’t see fit to share with you, the viewer. Which is really another contributing factor to the FPS game feel, because let’s be honest, some of those games are pretty thin on the plot. Who needs reasons when you can grab the heavy ammo drop?
I think we’re pretty close to having a full, first person film that’s not going to make people motion sick. This just isn’t it. And here’s hoping that when that film finally comes out, we can skip the whorehouse scene.
