INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 (21 page)

What would you do to regain your youth? Rutger Hauer recycles a
Tron
/
Total Recall
combo as the framing story for another tournament-of-death scenario in
RPG – Real Playing Game
(DVD, 8 September). Wealthy old folks wake up in young bodies and this lost-amnesiacs’ slasher-mystery unfolds with much bitter cynicism, and paranoia that mushrooms in twisted hearts/vacant minds in search of identity. “Now, we have another hour to kill.” There’s less intrigue than
Cluedo
murders. It eschews the flashy anti-heroics of
Gamer
. This makes
Hunger Games
seem like a Shakespearean drama.

Comicbook parody and freak show,
HK: FORBIDDEN SUPERHERO
(DVD/Blu-ray, 15 September) mixes smutty comedy sketches/absurd aggro like
Kick-Ass
meets
Spider-Man
, Japanese style. With used knickers for his mask, teenage hero Kyosuke gains homo-erotic powers and so hardly needs any clothes. “He’s a pervert, but…he’s so cool!” Gay panic is enough to disable gangs of school bullies, and prancing fu takes care of the rest. Even when the foes are sleazier than Pervert Mask, this remains a po-faced, eccentric farce that’s just ridiculously kitsch and tacky instead of very amusing.

NICK LOWE

LUCY

TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION

THE PURGE: ANARCHY

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

HERCULES

SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR

THE ANOMALY

EARTH TO ECHO

VAMPIRE ACADEMY

THE ROVER

THE CONGRESS

MOOD INDIGO

T
he average sf film only uses 10% of its imagination, and the average lead only 10% of her stellar mass. So third cheer in a row for Scarlett Johansson, unlikely first lady of posthuman cinema, who has cashed in her Marvel profile to lend bankability to three wildly out-there sf films that would have struggled in various ways to happen without her, while at the same time giving her things to do that small pouty blondes with leather-friendly booties rarely get the opportunity to explore in today’s Hollywood, and to thumb her perfect nose at her Marvel paymasters’ timidity over lady leads. Luc Besson has been making films about female superheroes since before anyone even noticed, from
Nikita
and
Joan of Arc
to
Adèle Blanc-Sec
and
The Lady
; and as in the best Besson, there’s a cheery rubbing of audience noses in the differences between Hollywood narrative and the things you can get away with if you feel sufficient contempt for American rules, as Lucy finds herself an American plunged terrifyingly into the middle of a Besson film, where brilliantly-cast gangs of heavies in immaculate black suits speak unsubtitled Korean in unsubtitled Shanghai for no reason we ever need to know, and anyone can get blown away on a whim. But as the progress bar of her intelligence rises, she comes to master her Besson narrative environment, throwing cars round Paris like a native and blowing strangers away as her humanity falls, quite poignantly, away.

Before rushing to judgment on
LUCY
’s daft endorsement of the 10% brain myth, it’s important to remind ourselves that Besson is not an idiot, and indeed only came to filmmaking after the teenage diving accident that derailed his original destiny as a marine biologist. (The laugh-out-loud line in
Lucy
about dolphins is partly a wistful wink to that lost road.) The fictional drug CPH4 is based on some surprisingly well-informed bluffing from genuine research in embryonic development and the links between hormones such as estradiol and early-weeks neural development.
Lucy
’s intentions can be read from the fact that it was written in Comic Sans, with a prefatory note explaining that the first half-hour is
Léon
, the second
Inception
, and the last
2001
. And sure enough, the film changes up through the genres from a bunch of Korean thugs to spinning-room stunts to a whited-out state of transcendence where Lucy gets her star child on and graduates from girlfriend to God. Now that’s a character arc.

2001
famously started out as a narrated film, from which Kubrick only removed the earnest Clarkean voiceover in a three-week editing frenzy before the press show. Besson’s less radical, but still audacious, solution is to retain the great slabs of portentous exporrhea intact, and simply cast twinkly voice-of-God Morgan Freeman to try and carry them off. (You may think he goes on a bit, but there was a
lot
more in the script.) In the end, though, the film has had to dial back a bit on the transcendence and compromise more than it intended with the 10% audience. Early drafts got rid of the drug-lord plot early on, as Lucy (quite reasonably) loses interest in banal plot goals like revenge, and it was a comparatively late decision to keep the shootout action going as background noise to the final sequence, which for some will be the point where the film gives up, and for others where it really takes off. As the lady says, “Life was given to us a billion years ago. What have we done with it?” That’s not an opening line you hear a lot in American film.

I
f Besson is an easy target for scorn, it’s easier still to take a pop at Michael Bay, so let’s briefly recap why he’s a filmmaker nobody should underestimate or dismiss. First if least importantly, you don’t get to be the apex predator in global blockbuster cinema on 10% of your movie brain. Bay is a very skilful and experienced filmmaker who (let’s remember) sat in the same classes at Wesleyan as Joss Whedon, and has built up a body of work, an audience, and a profit stream in blockbuster cinema to which
The Avengers
, for one, is ineradicably indebted. The
Transformers
films have established the despised and sneered-at genre of Japanese toy franchises as a four-quadrant package which has united the world and set the bar for photorealistic effects in mecha cinema, as well as demonstrating how to reach out beyond the domestic audience to make films for the world in a post-American age. The line in
TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION
about the Chinese central government’s staunchness in the face of the Decepticon threat to Hong Kong may knock western audiences back in their seats a bit, but there’s a reason you heard it first in a Transformers film, and why local martial-arts stars are so prominently featured in supporting roles.

And these are not stupid films. It’s true that
Age of Extinction
is a film about giant robots riding giant robot dinosaurs, which frankly should be sufficient warrant to exist in itself. But it also happens to be the one Hollywood film to predict the rise of ISIS, in an inverted but completely obvious allegory under which America is postwar Iraq and the Autobot pullout has left a weak and compromised government exposed to a new and genocidal Decepticon insurgency. Into the middle of this stumbles Mark Wahlberg’s backwoods shed mechanic, scavenging an old truck which turns out to be injured warrior Optimus Prime, and thereby makes his family a target for absolutely everyone, when all he wanted to do was protect his family. It’s a powerful evocation of the conditions of civilians left to pick up the pieces in a former war zone between great powers, on to which are projected the most primal of American emotions about the right to bear arms against anyone who looks interested at your daughter. Watch out especially for the CIA unit called Cemetery Wind. That’s a bowel condition you really do not want.

B
ay’s often-forgotten sideline in low-budget horror production has unleashed another dubious profit monkey in James DiMonaco’s
THE PURGE: ANARCHY
, a swift followup to last year’s manipulative home-invasion nasty about a 2020 US where all crime is permitted one night a year. Where the first film was a single-location siege movie centred on one house and family, this second instalment opens the action out to follow three initially separate stories through the streets of an entire city under lockdown while painty-faced Purge people roam the streets letting the American id run free with semi-automatics. As the stories converge and the vigilante lead finds his priorities challenged as he becomes responsible for a tag-along party of innocents, the film moves from a moderately interesting exploration of the franchise’s thought-experiment world to an increasingly silly plot about posh folks playing most dangerous game with the poor and big government using people power to crush the people. Like the first
Purge
, it recognises in its heart that the premise is beyond dumb, and its solemn message that tooling up and locking down are a dance of death is undercut by the exploitation of precisely the licensed discharge of fear and violence that the film deplores as a mechanism of utopianisation. But they can always say that that’s the point: that the reason these films make you sick to your stomach is because they invite you to identify with the same class terror and gun-happy vigilantism that they’re insisting are a disease of the American soul. Be glad it’s just one night a year.

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
takes a more thoughtful, but perhaps not less exploitative, address to some of the same issues of gun control and original sin, in a ten-years-on sequel where
Rise
’s simian flu has wiped out most of humanity while Caesar’s apetopia in Muir Woods thrives, only for contact with a surviving human community in San Francisco to precipitate a string of distrust and betrayals that bring violence to the apes’ forest dream and hawk/dove factional splits on both sides pull the bispecies world to the precipice of war. As has become well known, Matt Reeves’ film is itself the survivor of an apocalyptic extinction event, after
Rise
director Rupert Wyatt’s abrupt departure took the original storyline with him, and new screenwriter Mark Bomback found himself promoted from a couple of weeks’ polishing to creating a completely new film from nothing for the same release date. So instead of a tale from further down the timeline, we rewind to the moment of
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
, when the famous slogan “Ape shall never kill ape” is put to the test with the moral right to inherit the earth as the prize, and a terrestrial fantasy of first contact plays out some simplistic but resonant issues of human and animal nature against our ominous franchise foreknowledge of where all this will end up.

Technically, it’s an impressive achievement, breaking ground with the use of performance capture on location, and with the ape leads acting the B-list humans off the screen. The price that’s been paid for all this is a crudely mechanical plot about tree-huggers versus warlords, fathers and sons, and a climactic mano-a-mano atop a skyscraper with a bomb at the bottom, all played out by characters whose personality and motivation rarely rises beyond paper-cut puppets. Viewers of
Dawn
from countries where firearm ownership is not a given will also be disappointed by its subordination of thoughtful questions about original sin and the origins of aggression to parochial issues of gun control – even if the film rather aptly kicks off with the TSG Entertainment ident of Odysseus shooting through the axes, having earlier removed all arms from the hall on the reasoning that “iron by itself leads a man on”. But it’s certainly a more adventurous film than the one Fox would have made if they hadn’t been in release-date panic mode; and despite the spectacle and the set pieces, it’s surprisingly slow-paced for a summer blockbuster, which makes it all the more encouraging that audiences don’t seem particularly to have minded.

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2
is pretty much the same film, with heavily-armed militarists threatening a utopia of sanctuary wildlife and overthrowing a tentatively-established interspecies cooperation, until dragons together strong. Following on from the bridging
Legends
trilogy of shorts, we catch up with Hiccup and his fellow dragonriders five years on, the island of Berk now an eco-paradise of dragons and humans in soaring aerial
3
D harmony, till Djimon Hounsou’s psycho warlord (who is, as ever, “building an army”) introduces a kaiju-sized alpha dragon to the mix, and singing to Gerry Butler’s chiefly portfolio: “I’ll swim and sail on savage seas with ne’er a fear of drowning / And gladly ride the waves of life if you will marry me.” (Amazingly, Shane McGowan wrote that.) But it’s all part of Hiccup’s education in manhood and sense of identity: “I was so afraid of becoming my dad, mostly because I never could.” He certainly can’t do the accent, though at least he’s better than Cate Blanchett, who makes the very unfortunate mistake of trying.