CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR - Perpetual Motion Machine

Other Reviews in this Series.

Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Writers: Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely
Cast: Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Sebastian Stan, Scarlett Johansson, Chadwick Boseman, Daniel Bruhl, Anthony Mackie, Don Cheadle, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Renner, Emily VanCamp, William Hurt, Paul Rudd, Tom Holland, Frank Grillo, Martin Freeman, Marisa Tomei, John Kani, John Slattery, Hope Davis
Runtime: 147 mins.
2016

In the month since the release of Captain America: Civil War, I have been trying to parse my feelings about the film. I've always been a sucker for comic book cinema, ever since I was weaned on Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies,* but as I've become more discerning and my tastes have shifted, I've grown less and less comfortable with easy bankable formulas. In fact, my adoration of nerd culture in general has soured for reasons I'd prefer not to get into here.

*Spider-Man 1 + 2 still being the best pieces of superhero cinema in existence, with a sideward nod to The Dark Knight.

Over the years I've frequently pushed to redefine the arbitrary boundaries of what is fit to be included in discussions about art and academia to include certain "vulgar genre fiction" properties. I've tried to rally against biases folks have towards superhero fiction, children's movies, animation, speculative fiction, and so on. It's not about the surface level signifiers; it's about being able to meet a story on its own terms.

That being said, I've also had to flip that script on myself and confront my own delusions about properties that I wanted so badly to adore. 2012 was a watershed year for me; I had to face the one-two punch of The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises, both movies that I wanted to love so badly that I was blinded to their myriad flaws. In both cases, my wake-up call came in the form of my favorite film critic, Film Crit Hulk, who wrote eye-opening screeds against both of these films. Here they are, if you're interested.

Film Crit Hulk Smash: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN HAS 99 PROBLEMS BUT AN UNCLE BEN AIN'T ONE

Film Crit Hulk Smash: HULK VS. THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

CAPTAIN AMERICA: Cap-turing Character

In the weeks leading up to Marvel's next blockbuster juggernaut, Captain America: Civil War, we will be looking at every cinematic iteration of those two warring rapscallions, Captain America and Iron Man.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Albert Pyun
Writers: Stephen Tolkin, Lawrence Block
Cast: Matt Salinger, Kim Gillingham, Ronny Cox, Ned Beatty, Scott Paulin
Runtime: 97 mins.
1990

The 1990 American-Yugoslavian direct-to-video action film Captain America is the first cinematic adaptation of the character with some semblance of attention paid to the actual character. The first act plays out like a truncated version of Captain America: The First Avenger, with Cap being selected for the Super Soldier Serum, then squaring off against the Red Skull. Cap gets strapped to a rocket that he steers away from the White House and into, if I'm not mistaken, Alaska. After being frozen for about fifty years, Steve Rogers (Matt Salinger) breaks free from the ice and traipses from Alaska down through northern Canada in an attempt to find his way home. At first he does not accept that he is fifty years in the future, but this is a thematic and plot thread that predictably goes nowhere. Instead of exploring his man-outside-of-time psychology, Rogers teams up with his old girlfriend's daughter (a bit gross) and goes after the Red Skull, who is still alive and has recently kidnapped the President (Ronny Cox) because he doesn't like the President's environmental bill. Also, the Red Skull has had face reconstruction surgery since the forties so he no longer has a red skull, just an ugly face.

Captain America may engage with the iconography on the surface level, but as you can probably tell by that recap, the film isn't terribly interested in exploring why the character resonates. It probably would have been better served as a cheesy period piece, but the narrative break between WWII and present day is jarring and disappointing, especially since most of the rest of the movie involves Captain America trekking across the Canadian wilderness in his goofy suit, or sitting around in suburbia acting awfully calm for somebody who has just time traveled fifty years into the future.

The fact that the Red Skull is still around fifty years later, but has waited until now for his most dastardly plot, is also distressing from a storytelling perspective. Plus, taking away his iconic look feels like a cop out at best.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: Cap-ital Punishment

In the weeks leading up to Marvel's next blockbuster juggernaut, Captain America: Civil War, we will be looking at every cinematic iteration of those two warring rapscallions, Captain America and Iron Man.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Rod Holcomb
Writers: Don Ingalls, Chester Krumholz
Cast: Reb Brown, Len Birman, Heather Menzies-Urich, Robin Mattson, Joseph Ruskin
Runtime: 97 mins.
1979

The 1979 TV Movie Captain America has a simple premise: What if Captain America's son were a selfish, imbecilic slacker? And what if we made a movie about him?

Of course, the film doesn't seem altogether aware of its own premise, as we are apparently supposed to find this man impressive and heroic. He is not. Let me lay it out for you.

Steve Rogers (Reb Brown) is a hunky behemoth who has just returned from active military service. Now that he's out, his goal in life is to drive around in his van and be lazy for the foreseeable future. He also draws. These are his sole character traits.

BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE - Badman v Pooperman

Director: Zack Snyder
Writers: Chris Terrio, David S. Goyer
Cast: Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck, Jessie Eisenberg, Amy Adams, Gal Gadot, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Holly Hunter, Scoot McNairy
Runtime: 151 mins.
2016

It's bad. Wow, it's bad. It's bad, boring, and bloated.

The real kicker is that we've been hearing about this movie ceaselessly for three years. All that time, all that buildup, just for a roasted turd of a final product. Not that it ever at any point in the development process looked at all promising. First it was the terrible idea to crib from the infamous graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns for a movie that is supposed to kick off your extended superhero universe. Returns is a mythology-killing work, not a mythology-building work. That's the point. It is the Batman and Superman stories taken to their darkest and most brutally honest conclusions. It is an evisceration of the superhero genre. How could you possibly think it would be a good idea to use that story as a scaffolding to introduce a world of superheroes who we are supposed to support as superheroes? It's almost as if Snyder and co. read The Dark Knight Returns once or twice and totally ignored every single theme, both textual and subtextual. They just thought it was cool that Batman took on Superman.

Then we got the godawful title. That alone was a harbinger of doom. The cluttered grotesquerie of it screams of corporate committee decisionmaking. The title cannot function as anything but a parody of itself. It's so bad that I find it embarrassing to say out loud. Every time I've talked to people about the film this week, the title has caught in my throat. I've just said "Batman versus Superman" or "the Batman and Superman movie." I cannot bring myself to say "Batman vee Superman" let alone the hideous appendage at the end.

THE REVENANT: A Dish Served Cold

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Writers: Mark L. Smith, Alejandro González Iñárritu
Cast: Leondardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck
Runtime: 156 mins.
2015

Iñárritu has done it again. Following hot on the heels of his Best Picture win with Birdman, he has crafted yet another arthouse film that has thrust its way into mainstream consciousness. The Revenant has garnered a ton of buzz, topped the box office, and snagged a whole bunch of Oscar nominations. However, and I promise you I'm not simply being contrarian when I say this: The Revenant is a narrative failure. It's a bad story told haphazardly, yet in the most stylistically impressive way imaginable. It's all the more disappointing because it was close to being so much better.

Let's ignore the buzz surrounding the movie for a while. All that business about how difficult it was to film, and how Leo DiCaprio almost got killed a dozen times over--that'll come up later. For now let's just look at the film. Much of the runtime follows a scout for a party of trappers named Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio). He gets into arguments with fellow trapper John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) about how best to get back to safety in the wake of a brutal Native American raid. Then he gets destroyed by a bear. Glass appears to be slowly dying, so team captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) elects three men to stay behind and take care of him: Glass's half-Indian son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), the young and goodhearted Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), and the aforementioned greedy bastard Fitzgerald. The raiding party could come back at any point, so Fitzgerald goes ahead and tries to kill Glass, then kills Hawk instead and hides the body so that he and Bridger can move on, leaving Glass in a shallow grave. But Fitzgerald underestimates Glass's ability to crawl long distances.

MOCKINGJAY - PART 2: Capitol Punishment

Director: Francis Lawrence
Writers: Peter Craig, Danny Strong
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Willow Shields, Sam Claflin, Elizabeth Banks, Mahershala Ali, Jena Malone, Jeffrey Wright, Stanley Tucci, Patina Miller, Gwendoline Christie
Runtime: 137 mins.
2015

The real bummer about Mockingjay - Part 2 is how serviceable it is. The first Hunger Games movie had just enough problems that it left me cold, so I was shocked when Catching Fire ended up being one of my favorite movies of 2013. That film is jampacked with memorable characters who are each given a host of personality traits and political affiliations. Then along came Mockingjay - Part 1, a movie which retained all the memorable characters, but mostly had them walk around and talk to each other for two hours. If you can choke your way through my audio review of that movie, you'll hear that I found the actionlessness of Part 1 to be mostly enjoyable. Scenes meandered here and there, but the characters felt lived in, and the movie did some really interesting work with propaganda and symbolism. At any rate, the dullness of Part 1 was supposed to be a necessary byproduct of it being the first of a two-parter.

Now, a year later, we have the final entry, a movie that came with the promise of providing a wham-bang conclusion to one of the most successful movie franchises of our generation, and instead we get... serviceable. This time plenty of stuff happens, to be sure. It's just that nobody seems invested in doing these things. Between Francis Lawrence's workmanlike directing, the screenwriters' straightforward adaptation, and the lead actors' adequate performances, Mockingjay - Part 2 feels like a movie franchise that knows it has ended up one movie longer than it should have been. The franchise has outgrown itself.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: Viewers in a Half-Hell

Director: Jonathan Liebesman
Writers: Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec, Evan Daugherty
Cast: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Tohoru Masamune, Whoopi Goldberg, Johnny Knoxville, Tony Shalhoub, Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, Jeremy Howard, Pete Ploszek, Danny Woodburn
Runtime: 101 mins.
2014

In response to [Michael Bay's announcement about creative changes in the film], actor Robbie Rist, who voiced Michelangelo in the first three films, wrote to Bay accusing him of "sodomizing" the franchise. Rist later remarked that he could have been out of line since Bay makes more money than he does.
-Wikipedia

Somewhere, in the darkest stickiest corridors of adolescence, a full-time Minecraft player and habitual masturbator has mustered up the list of his (because it is inevitably a he) ten favorite movies--Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight, etc.--and from these has logically (because everything must be logical) determined the formula for the most perfect Ninja Turtles movie imaginable, for that is the intellectual property nearest and dearest to his heart, and he feels as if the special effects in the trilogy of extant Turtles films are not realistic enough (because the greatest value an action film can have is realism). From this hypothetical basement-dwelling woman-hating travesty of a subconsciousness, Jonathan Liebesman's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is born.

One more gem from Wikipedia before we get into this:

In mid-February 2013, actress Megan Fox was reported to be cast as April O'Neil, marking her first collaboration with Bay since her remark comparing him to Adolf Hitler.

LEFT BEHIND: An Open Letter

Director: Vic Armstrong
Writers: Paul Lalonde, John Patus
Cast: Nicolas Cage
Runtime: 110 mins.
2014

Dear Nicolas Cage,

I write to you as a longtime examiner of your livelihood. I currently hold the unique position of one who has seen your most recent attempt to shrug off crushing debt, Left Behind. I found it mostly to be a movie. That being said, I have a few questions that I believe you, and only you, Nicolas Cage, can answer.

I want to start with something real. Are you a religious man? I know that you were raised Catholic and that you staunchly refuse to comment upon your faith in interviews. I know your brother is a Christian pastor. But what about you? In interviews you suggest that taking this role was not just about the money, that you connected with the script and its themes. If that is really true, why do you sleepwalk through this movie like it's a PSA for fire safety? You're more invested in this library poster.

STARRY EYES: Constellation Frustration

Directors: Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer
Writers: Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer
Cast: Alex Essoe, Amanda Fuller, Noah Segan, Fabianne Therese, Pat Healy, Maria Olsen
Runtime: 98 mins.
2014

As you can see above, the DVD cover for Starry Eyes features a young dehydrated woman with her head tilted at a strange angle. She's probably looking up at that bizarrely generous pullquote from Time. "Did you see the same movie I did, Michael Roffman?" she asks. "Or maybe it's that you've never seen any of Lynch or Cronenberg's work." After all, those are two directors known more than anything for their uncanny weirdness, their ability to make us squint and squeam and walk away feeling gross, but also feeling like we'd just witnessed something totally unique.

The Starry Eyes DVD cover literally features a woman with stars on her eyes. That's pretty on the nose for a movie about eyes.

The central beat-you-over-the-heady metaphor gets even worse when you start watching the movie. Our protagonist is this girl Sarah (Alex Essoe), and she wants to be a star (!), but hasn't managed to land a breakthrough role. So instead of living the la-la land dream, she's stuck working at a lousy restaurant called Big Taters (essentially Hooters but potato-themed) and hanging around with a group of lousy millennials who just want to hang around at the poolside and party in dumb ways. But when a mysterious production company called Astraeus (!) Pictures (which means "starry surprise" in Greek or something like that) posts an ad seeking a young actress full of life and eager to give herself to the production of a film called The Silver Scream (!), she feels she has found her breakthrough role. Unfortunately, the casting process requires more of Sarah than she may be willing to give... such as her immortal soul (!).

EX MACHINA: Artificial Insemination

Director: Alex Garland
Writer: Alex Garland
Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander
Runtime: 108 mins.
2015

It's hard to know what to call Ex Machina. Sci-fi, of course, that goes without saying. It's about a young programmer named Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) who wins a mysterious contest that lets him spend a week with his reclusive boss Nathan (Oscar Isaac), only to discover that the purpose of his visit is to test Nathan's brilliant AI creation Ava (Alicia Vikander), to see whether she passes Nathan's version of the Turing Test. That's prime sci-fi material. But beyond that? Beyond that it gets messy.

Sometimes Ex Machina feels like a drama, a philosophical film of ideas. Sometimes it feels like a romance. Sometimes a coming of age story. Sometimes suspense, or even horror. The film's toe-dipping in all these different genres tends to correspond with revelation of information--how much we understand about the situation, plot, and characters at any given moment. I just said the movie "gets messy," but perhaps I should have chosen a different phrase, because Ex Machina is a masterclass of tight narrative and tonal control. It doesn't feel like a romance sometimes and horror other times because the storytelling is slapdash or undisciplined. The dipping in and out of genres is part of writer/director Alex Garland's master plan to jerk us around until we're forced to realize nasty things about ourselves and our assumptions that we should have already known. Ex Machina is an exercise in empathy that troubles us to our core.

PROXY: A Dead Baby Joke

In which our protagonists turn out to be antagonists and our antagonists turn out to be antagonists.

Director: Zack Parker
Writers: Kevin Donner, Zack Parker
Cast: Alexia Rasmussen, Alexa Havins, Kristina Klebe, Joe Swanberg
Runtime: 120 mins.
2013

Proxy is fundamentally deceptive. It's the kind of movie that makes you hate everybody, then tricks you into hating them for all new reasons that subsequently turn out not to be true. It tries to be high-minded and succeeds in being low-brow. It's a massive crock of M. Night Shyamalan plot twists, if Shyamalan turned out to be a teenager and also a sadist. It's like wandering through a winding maze full of cupboards, and behind each cupboard is a punch in the face. Proxy is deliberately designed to be a face-punching labyrinth.

So why, instead of just being hateful, is it also boring?

THE IMPOSSIBLE: It's Tsuna-me, Not Tsuna-you

In which Ewan McGregor kisses things for 50% of his screentime.

Director: J. A. Bayona

Writer: Sergio G. Sánchez

Cast: Naomi Watts, Tom Holland, Ewan McGregor, Samuel Joslin, Oaklee Pendergast

Runtime: 114 mins.

2012

Before I start the review, I should give you a comprehensive recap of this movie. Pay attention, it's going to be complicated:

This "true story" follows a British family vacationing in Thailand during the tsunami of Christmas 2004, and their efforts to find each other in the aftermath of the disaster.

That's about it. Now onto the review!

GODZILLA: Big Bad Ballet

Director: Gareth Edwards
Writers: Max Borenstein and Dave Callaham
Cast: Bryan Cranston, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Sally Hawkins
Runtime: 123 mins.
2014

I am not especially familiar with the Godzilla mythos.  Before this film, the only Godzilla movie I'd had the misfortune to see was the 1998 Roland Emmerich version, starring a big CGI iguana and featuring the deft tagline: "Size Does Matter".  The bar was set low.

For many others, however, the bar was rather high.  Godzilla is a titanic figure in Japanese pop culture, and at this point has to be considered a piece of Americana as well.  People have been craving a quality Hollywood treatment of the creature for years, one that isn't hampered by a special effects capacity that doesn't surpass "man in a rubber suit," and one that does not resemble 1998's Godzilla in any way, shape, or form.

This is what they've been waiting for.

ELYSIUM: The Dangers of Assumed Empathy

Director: Neill Blomkamp
Writer: Neill Blomkamp
Cast: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga
Runtime: 109 mins.
2013

I remember enjoying District 9.  It felt fresh, character-driven, and deep despite the straightforwardness of its political allegory.  Neill Blomkamp was going to be one to watch, especially with a blockbuster budget and Hollywood grade-A talent at his disposal.

What happened?

Elysium had a mountain of hype behind it, but its reception was lukewarm.  Many people seemed to like it, and they defended it against the critiques of the malcontents.  Full disclosure, I am one of the malcontents.  Being disillusioned with the film, I've been thinking about why the film was generally well-received.  Maybe it was the excellent special effects, or the cinematography (although I felt the pacing didn't allow me to take in any single moment).  Maybe it was the detailed sci-fi worldbuilding (although I wish they would have explored that world more).  Maybe it was that a big budget summer genre blockbuster had a discernible high-minded theme underpinning it (although I found that theme's presentation simple and borderline condescending).

These are all almost-merits.  But I won't get into the aesthetics of the movie very much.  I want to talk about how I found Elysium unsatisfactory on a basic narrative/dramatic level, and I want to do that by looking at each of the nine primary characters and their impact on the story.