Tag: Ben Mendelsohn

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Captain Marvel

Brie Larson (center) is perfectly adequate as Captain Marvel.

Maybe the best part about making a Captain Marvel movie is that you don’t have to care about continuity or canon, because, where that particular character is concerned, there basically isn’t any.

I knew the basic outlines of the saga of Captain Marvel, but in boning up for the Big Movie Event (TM), I dove into the story, and it’s more convoluted than I remembered. Captain Marvel was a Superman knock off, created the year after Action Comics #1 was published, who became the most popular comic book character of the 1940s. After Detective Comics (DC) sued the tights off Fawcett Comics, they took control of the character and changed the name to Shazam, which had been Captain Marvel’s catchphrase. Meanwhile, Marvel comics figured they need Captain Marvel for obvious reasons, and made a legally questionable deal with the smoking ruins of Fawcett to introduce their own Captain Marvel. Marvel’s Marvel never really caught on, but the terms of their contract said they had to publish at least every two years or lose the copyright, so they kept rebooting the character for decades. Captain Marvel has been an alien super soldier, a New Orleans cop, a clone, the sister of a clone, and some other stuff. She’s been a woman on and off since about 1982, but DC already beat them to that punch with their only good movie, Wonder Woman. So as far as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is concerned, they could go nuts with Captain Marvel—if they wanted to.

Say what again to Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury.

Maybe it would have been better if they had gone nuts. But the MCU has reached such a state of complexity, story wise, that many of Captain Marvel’s beats have been preordained for years. Ironically, in the light of the post-Oscar kerfuffle about Netflix productions not really being movies, but rather TV productions that should instead be eligible for Emmys, the theatrical business’ current cash cow is basically a TV series in its last season. (Further evidence of the film/TV narrative convergence: The final season of Game of Thrones will be six episodes, each as long as a feature film.) This prompts the question I’ve seen on social media: “Will I enjoy Captain Marvel if I’ve only seen less than half of the Marvel movies?” The answer is, sure, if you like going to the movies, you’ll probably dig it. The craftsmanship is impeccable, the actors likable, lasers are blasted, stuff blows up real good, and there’s a cute kitty. Besides, after Avengers: Infinity Wars, we all know how it ends, right? The ship sinks, and Captain Marvel is the deus ex machina.

Surf’s up for Ben Mendolsohn as Talos the Skrull.

Playing the infinitely powered god in the well-oiled Marvel machine is Brie Larson, one of her generation’s finest screen actresses, stacking that paper. The current comic Captain Marvel (who is actually younger than the MCU) is a test pilot turned irradiated super-being Carol Danvers, so Larson plays her as basically a gender flipped Chuck Yeager. She’s got a few wooden moments here and there, but really shines in the middle passage, when the film becomes a buddy cop movie between an amnesiac uberwoman and a digitally de-aged Samuel L. Jackson as young, binocular Nick Fury.

This is, of course, a “hero finding her powers” origin story, but it’s not quite by the numbers. What writer/director team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck get right here is Danvers’ shifting identity, and uncertainty of who, exactly, the good guys and bad guys are. This gives Ben Mendelsohn, who previously worked with Boden and Fleck on Mississippi Grind, a lot to chew on as the shapeshifting Talos the Skrull. Annette Bening was no doubt happy to add “Supreme Intelligence” to her IMDB listing. She, Jude Law as Kree commando Yon-Rogg, and Clark Gregg as beloved Colsen, Agent of Shield, are all welcome presences. Lashana Lynch is good as Danvers’ human partner Maria Rambeau—a character who herself was Captain Marvel in the mid-’80s.

Sometimes Brie Larson glows.

I’ve said before that all you need to do to get a good review out of me is to get the fundamentals right, and Captain Marvel certainly does that. It’s a state-of-the-art entertainment product, just like Alita: Battle Angel, the other $150 million film currently in theaters about a woman with amnesia who turns out to be a morally compromised alien super soldier with a heart of gold. Only this one has more familiar branded characters from Disney. Enjoy, consumers!

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Film Features Film/TV

Ready Player One

When future digital archeologists look at the internet, I wonder what they will make of the millions of pages of stories about Kirk and Spock having sex. Or Buffy and Hermione’s doomed love affair. Or the novel-length work about wrapping Roy Orbison in cling film. (Google it and weep for humanity.)

Fan fiction, as this stuff is loosely called, predates the internet, but it was only with the coming of the world wide web that the art form could flourish. It’s not true that no one wants to read my carefully thought-out story of R2-D2’s rich inner life — maybe a hundred people would like it, and since they’re all on LiveJournal writing robosexual fantasies, I know where to find them.

Fanfic is a way for the consumers of popular culture to take control of it, even if it’s in a small, limited way. Its reputation for bad writing is well-earned, but it’s not all amateurs out there. The entire Fifty Shades of Grey franchise started life as as an extremely popular BDSM Twilight fanfic — author E.L. James just changed vampires to rich people. But discounting Roy Orbison in cling film, fanfic’s crowning achievement is Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.

Cline’s protagonist Wade Watts lives in the teeming slums of the ruined future, but escapes into The Oasis, a fully immersive virtual world populated by billions who act out their fantasies in real time. Wade is one of thousands of other players on a years-long quest to solve a series of puzzles set out by James Halliday, the system’s creator. Halliday’s obsession was popular culture he loved as a kid, so Ready Player One’s great game is steeped in 1980s references, from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons to Zork. The first to find the three hidden keys can unlock the “easter egg” and be awarded ownership of the entire system.

The late creator envisioned a Willy Wonka scenario, but control of this virtual world would be fantastically lucrative, so Innovative Online Industries (IOI) CEO Nolan Sorrento is spending a lot of money and manpower to leverage gaming as a form of hostile corporate takeover. When Wade makes a breakthrough in the game, he becomes the target of Sorrento, who pursues him in both the virtual and real worlds.

Ready Player One is no literary masterpiece, but it is a good beach read. Once it became a bestseller, it was kind of inevitable that the film adaptation would be directed by Steven Spielberg, the man responsible for much of the ’80s aesthetic Cline is nostalgic for. Spielberg got Industrial Light and Magic on board, and worked his wizardry. He and screenwriter Zak Penn sanded off the book’s rough edges and worked around the inevitable intellectual property licensing conflicts inherent in a story that climaxes with Voltron dueling Mechagodzilla. (There’s a glaring lack of Star Wars, for example, and Voltron is demoted to just “a gundam.”)

Eager as I was to see the director of Raiders of the Lost Ark bring D&D creator Gary Gygax’s trap-tastic Tomb of Horrors to life, Spielberg’s virtuosic comedy-action sequence built around The Shining more than justifies his decision to dial back the book’s more esoteric digressions. But you don’t have to be a hopeless geek like me to get it when everything clicks, like when Wade (Tye Sheridan) and his Magic Pixie Dream Girl Art3mis (Oliva Cooke) float into an ethereal zero-G dance club with “Blue Monday” booming over the sound system. Cline’s book wants to be edgy YA dystopian fiction, but in Speilberg’s hands, it’s more Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

As long as he delivers the goods, Spielberg could be forgiven if he just made a delicious confection. But this film, though steeped in nostalgia, feels very much of the moment. As Sorrento, Ben Mendelsohn is doing a sly imitation of Principal Vernon from The Breakfast Club, but he’s also Mark Zuckerberg, seeking to control the world through domination of information flows. Mark Rylance plays Oasis creator Halliday as the archetypal computer geek hero who wants both information and people to be free. The characters believe their assumed online identities are more real than the ones they’re stuck with IRL.

Ready Player One is a lot of fun, but it also feels like the end of something. Now that Spielberg is filming his own fanfic, maybe postmodernism has reached its final form. Remixing the past is all fine and good, but now it’s time to go back to the future.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.”

Those are the opening words of the famous opening crawl from the original 1977 Star Wars. The entire plot of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is contained in those three sentences. A lot has changed in the almost four decades (!) since George Lucas’ space opera debuted, transforming filmmaking in its own image. In the early days, part of the mystique of Star Wars was the feeling that the galaxy was a huge, real, and lived-in place. The spaceships were not gleaming, shiny, and white, but grungy, dirty, and falling apart. The crawl, and subsequent hints in the dialog, hinted at an extensive and complex backstory. When Lucas revisited his universe, beginning in 1999, he focused on the big questions: How did the Old Republic become the Galactic Empire? How did Jedi Knight Obi Wan Kenobi’s apprentice Aanakin Skywalker become Darth Vader? True, there was much fertile ground for imagination there, but the results speak for themselves. The prequels consistently looked amazing, but the stories, written by Lucas himself, were bloated, confusing messes.

Felicity Jones as Jyn in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Lucas originally wanted to create a playground universe for other directors to work in. With the prequels, he abandoned that vision and tried to do it all himself. Now that Lucas is retired, and Lucasfilm sold to Disney, Executive Producer Kathleen Kennedy is trying to follow Lucas’ original vision. Last year, The Force Awakens continued the story of Luke, Leia, and Han with Lucas/Spielberg acolyte J.J. Abrams at the helm, proving that there was plenty of life left in the old formula.

Of course, the ultimate reason why Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion is to replicate the success of the Marvel franchise, which pumps out a couple of loosely connected movies a year based on the enormous stable of comic book superheroes Stan Lee and company built up over the years. In Star Wars, Disney saw another ATM to make annual withdrawals from moviegoers pockets, and that means the once-every-three-years schedule Lucas operated on had to be accelerated. If The Force Awakens was the Star Wars equivalent of The Avengers, then Rogue One is Doctor Strange—except it’s much better than Doctor Strange.

In all of the almost seven hours of the prequels, Lucas never touched on the epic story he (with the help of Brian De Palma) wrote into the 1977 opening crawl. John Knoll, who worked as the special effects supervisor for the prequels, pointed that out a decade ago, but Lucas, stung by the lukewarm reception to his prequel trilogy, didn’t want to listen. Fortunately, Kennedy did. Rogue One is a prequel done right, and it succeeds by focusing on the details. For the first time, there is no opening crawl text, because it’s not an installment of the Skywalker family saga, it’s about little people getting caught up in the sweep of war.

Diego Luna as Cassian Andor

And “war” is the operative word. The Star Wars formula can be boiled down to three elements: Kurosawa samurai film, Flash Gordon, and World War II movies. All three elements are present, but Rogue One shifts the balance toward the third—call it Saving Private Leia. Instead of an opening crawl, director Gareth Edwards kicks off with a flashback. Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), is a scientist who has fled the grip of the Emperor, hiding on a backwater planet with his daughter Jyn (Felicity Jones). But Orsen Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), director of weapons research for the Imperial Navy, is not one to take no for an answer. He and his squad of black-clad Death Troopers kidnap Galen, but Jyn manages to get away with the help of Saw Gerra (Forrest Whittaker), a revolutionary waging a one-man war against the Empire separate from the Alliance to Restore The Republic.

The flashback is revealed to be the dream of Jyn while she’s stewing in an Imperial prison years later. The Rebel Alliance has gotten word that Imperial defector Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed) has a message from Galen warning of a planet killing ultimate weapon. Bodhi is in the custody of Saw’s rogue cell, so Rebel intelligence officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is dispatched to spring Jyn from Imperial custody, make contact with Saw and get to the bottom of the situation. Along the way, Jyn and Andor collect a Seven Samurai-style ragtag team of misfits and hard cases for the desperate raid to steal the Death Star blueprints that Luke Skywalker will use to save the galaxy.

At times, Rogue One doesn’t feel like a Star Wars movie. For one thing, the films have always soft-pedaled the violence. In The Phantom Menace, war atrocities are alluded to but never seen. In A New Hope, the planetary genocide of Alderaan is seen from orbit, its doomed inhabitants are abstract. Rogue One foregrounds Imperial brutality, and the dire measures the rebels have to take to combat them. The pacing is different, too. J. J. Abrams has spent much of his career trying to recreate the rhythms editor Marcia Lucas developed in 1977. The first hour of Rogue One is paced more like Edwards’ 2010’s shoestring indie Monsters. But if it stayed at that pace, it would have ended up like his turgid 2014 Godzilla reboot. Instead, it carefully accelerates into one of the most thrilling climaxes in recent memory. The blowout third act is a staple of Marvel movies; they have become almost interchangeable blurs of brightly costumed heroes beating up on dull villains. Rogue One’s climax features not only thrilling heroics on the ground, but also the best space battle since Return Of The Jedi. The visuals are unlike anything Star Wars has ever attempted before, and they represent the pinnacle of the photorealistic style Industrial Light & Magic has been pursuing since 1977.

But none of that would matter without characters you can love and root for. Diego Luna’s performance makes Captain Andor one of the best characters in the Star Wars canon. Jones’ performance put me in mind of Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road. Other standouts are Donnie Yen as a Jedi Temple guardian inspired by Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman, Alan Tudyk as the wisecracking droid K-2SO, and Whitaker as the bitter warrior Saw. Among the film’s many outstanding technical achievements is the uncanny digital reconstruction of Grand Moff Tarkin, even though the original actor Peter Cushing passed away in 1994. There are more digitally reconstructed cameos, but I won’t spoil them here.

Rogue One has the same dark tone as The Empire Strikes Back, which should be expected from a story that takes place in what Obi Wan Kenobi called The Dark Times. Its swashbuckling is more desperate, and its plot twists more unpredictable, even as it moves towards the inevitable conclusion. It may not be a traditional Star Wars movie, but it is the Star Wars movie we need as we stare into our own version of the Dark Times—a story of courage in the face of seemingly overwhelming evil.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story