If you've ever wanted to know what it felt like to push Tom Holland out of an airplane, Uncharted is the film for you!
The Super Bowl is over (who won again?), and you’re looking to get out of the house and catch a flick. You’ve got a lot of variety to choose from in Memphis theaters this weekend.
The big debut is Uncharted, a $120 million adaptation of the hit video game series starring Mark Wahlberg and the spider-guy who is arguably the biggest movie star in the world right now, Tom Holland. Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer’s film is an origin story for Uncharted‘s fortune hunter Nathan Drake, and an action-adventure in the tradition of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Tomb Raider. Judging from the trailer, you’ll believe 15th-century caravels can fly!
The other new release this weekend is Dog, starring Channing Tatum as a PTSD’d vet of the War on Terror who gets a simple assignment: Drive a decorated war vet to their partner’s funeral. What seems like a milk run turns into a nightmare when the passenger turns out to be a total bitch.
But now, the real reason I’ve called you all together here on Al Gore’s interwebs: One of you is a MURDERER! Well, not really (But maybe? Who knows?), but that’s what Agatha Christie’s fastidious detective Hercule Poirot says in Death on the Nile. Kenneth Branagh plays Poirot and directs an all-star cast, including Annette Bening, Russell Brand, and a champagne-swilling Gal Gadot, in this adaptation of Christie’s quintessential detective mystery.
If that’s not enough Kenneth Branagh for you (and really, can anyone have enough Branagh in their life?), Belfast, his black-and-white, semi-memoir of growing up in Ireland during the Troubles is still at Malco Ridgeway. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Dame Judi Dench.
If you’re looking for a total disaster, Roland Emmerich has got you covered with Moonfall. Realism has never been his strong suit, nor has logic or taste or respect for basic norms of filmmaking, and this one is no exception. You’ll believe the moon can’t fly!
And finally, if you can’t believe a boat can fly, or that a dog can earn a purple heart (spoiler alert: they can), or that Kenneth Branagh is interesting, or literally anything about Moonfall, maybe you’ll believe that extremely hot person Jennifer Lopez can be hot for comedic sad-sack Owen Wilson. If that’s the case, then set sail for rom-com island with Marry Me.
John David Washington (center) and Robert Pattinson (right) are impeccably dressed secret time agents in Tenet.
Entropy increases. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the ironclad rule of physics that most defines our universe. Entropy is a slippery concept. It’s much more complex than “disorder” or “energy flows from hotter objects to colder objects” or just “things fall apart.” The constant, incremental increase in entropy is what defines time itself. Einstein told us that time and space are inseparable, but how come you can move in two directions in the three physical dimensions — forward or backwards, up or down, left or right — but only one way through time — from past to future? Because entropy increases.
Throughout human history, our perspective was trapped in time’s relentless advance. But the invention of the film camera changed that. Very soon after the Lumiére Brothers and Thomas Edison figured out how to simulate motion by quickly flipping through sequential still images, someone had the bright idea to see what it would look like if you ran the pictures backwards. What they saw was something that never happens in nature: entropy decreasing. Broken shards of glass strewn across a floor suddenly rush toward each other, form a vase, and then leap into the air, landing in a waiting hand. Ashes sprout flame and re-form into a log. Waves rebuild sandcastles. Effects come before causes.
Movies have always been obsessed with time. What we film folk refer to as “structure” is really just the order in which events happen in a screenplay. But few filmmakers have been as obsessed with the increase of entropy as Christopher Nolan. His breakthrough film (and, for my money, still the best thing he’s ever done) was 2000’s Memento, a story told backwards to illustrate Guy Pearce’s lack of long-term memory. He loves playing with the rate of time’s passage, as in Inception and Dunkirk. In Tenet, he takes his temporal obsession to new heights.
Tenet begins with a literal overture. An opera house in Kiev, Ukraine, is taken hostage, and a group of CIA special ops troops, led by John David Washington, who is known only as Protagonist, effect a rescue. The bravado sequence is a direct reference to Hitchcock’s famous climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and it’s just the first in a movie comprised almost entirely of bravado sequences.
While in the opera house, the CIA team recovers a mysterious artifact. But things go sideways for our meta-named Protagonist, and he ends up the prisoner of a mysterious terrorist group. Rather than talk, he chomps down on a suicide pill, and quickly loses consciousness. Then, he wakes up. The suicide pill was fake, and the operation was part of a test to see if our Protagonist was worthy of joining a super-secret organization called Tenet. Physicist Laura (Clémence Poésy) briefs him on their mission. The mysterious artifact recovered at the opera house is part of an increasing number of objects uncovered worldwide that seem to be moving backwards in time. In other words, their entropy has been reversed. This is as unnatural as it gets, and Protagonist’s mission is to figure out what’s going on.
The search will lead Protagonist and his partner Neil (Robert Pattinson) on a worldwide hunt. Tracing the bullets from a reversed gun leads them to an arms dealer in Mumbai, India, named Priya (Dimple Kapadia) and a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). Sator, it seems, is in communication with people from the far future who are understandably pissed off about climate change, and have a twisted time travel-based plot that is not so understandable. If said plot comes to fruition, it will be the end of everything — or maybe the beginning of everything. It’s complicated.
Tenet mashes up the jet-setting glamor of James Bond with the hard science-fiction of Interstellar. Nolan’s script is as high-concept as it gets, and it uses the premise to stage insane sequences like a chase with half the cars going forward in time and half going backwards in time. But clarity is not Nolan’s strong suit, and by the time we get to the Bond-inspired, climactic paramilitary raid on an underground nuclear test site, I was hard-pressed to figure out who was fighting whom, and which direction we were traveling in time.
Nolan’s visual mastery is undeniable, and he gets brownie points for not leaning on CGI. The vast majority of what’s on the screen is staged in real life, and if there was an Oscar for backwards acting (an underappreciated skill that goes back to the silent era), Washington deserves it. But Tenet’s bloodless worldview is best illustrated by the name “Protagonist.” It’s a too-clever in-joke that covers up an active disinterest in the messiness of human emotion. Tenet addresses some important themes, such as the dangers of technology concentrating world-shattering powers in the hands of unaccountable individuals, but it treats the world as an abstraction of physics, not as a real place where real people live. It feels like an essay with explosions.
It was strange to watch Disney’s new, live-action Cinderella so soon after seeing Into the Woods. In Stephen Sondheim’s fairy tale musical mashup, Cinderella, who was played in last year’s film adaption by the extraordinarily talented Anna Kendrick, is a flighty, witty presence who toys with the Prince because she can’t seem to make up her mind about much of anything. But the new Disney Cinderella played by Downton Abbey‘s Lily James is none of those things, which is why Sondheim’s take on the character is labeled “revisionist.” For better or worse, this Cinderella is as familiar and unthreatening as Disney’s branding department needs her to be.
The director Disney chose to revamp the intellectual property Walt appropriated from the cultural commons of fairy tale land is Kenneth Branagh. A prolific Irish stage actor who was hailed as the second coming of Sir Lawrence Olivier, Branagh is no stranger to screen adaptations, having began his film career in 1989 the same way Oliver did in 1944, with a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Henry V. And while he has done yeoman’s work adopting the Bard over the years (Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hamlet), lately, he’s found success adopting Marvel heroes (Thor) and Tom Clancy novels (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit).
Even working within the Disney corporate environment, Branagh’s hand is evident in Cinderella. He approaches this adaptation in the same classy way he approaches Shakespeare. But here’s the thing: It’s not the Grimm version of the tale he’s adopting, like Sondheim did in Into the Woods. Nor is it the 17th-century French version of the tale Cendrillon, which introduced the Fairy Godmother and the glass slippers. Branagh’s bailiwick is to adopt Disney’s 1950 animated musical Cinderella into a live-action, non-musical version.
I’m still pondering why anyone thought this would be a good idea. Cinderella is extremely important to Disney. It’s widely credited as being the film that saved the studio, reversing Walt’s sliding fortunes after a decade of war and bad luck had pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy. After all, Disneyland’s centerpiece is Cinderella’s Castle. It’s built right into their corporate logo. And no one has been more successful with musicals in the 21st century than Disney, as hordes of parents who can’t get “Let It Go” from Frozen out of their heads will be the first to tell you. So why strip out the music from the corporate flagship, dooming it from the very beginning to be a tinny echo of the original?
Branagh does his best, as he always does, and over all, the production benefits from his taste and style. Cinderella reads Pepys to her melancholy father (Ben Chaplin) after her mother (Hayley Atwell of Agent Carter fame) dies. The diction is much higher than with most movies aimed primarily at preteen girls, with narrator and Fairy God Mother Helena Bonham Carter opining about how “economies were taken” when Cinderella’s father dies offscreen, leaving her stepmother (Cate Blanchett, who steals every scene she’s in) and stepsisters Drisella (Sophie McShera) and Anastasia (Holliday Grainger) without any means of support. James’ Cinderella and the Prince (Richard Madden from Game of Thrones) actually have good chemistry, and they appropriately share some of the film’s best scenes together, such as when Branagh has them circle each other on horseback when they first meet in the forest, and when they steal away during the ball so he can show her his “secret garden.” Visually, the director takes frequent inspiration from the animated version, from the color coding of the wicked stepsisters to the way Cinderella’s pumpkin coach dissolves when the Fairy Godmother’s spell wears off.
Branagh’s swooping camera and sumptuous CGI palaces look good enough, but they can’t replace the classic, hand-drawn animation of the old-school Cinderella. And even without the songs, this version is almost 50 minutes longer than the classic. Most of the extra running time comes in the beginning, when Branagh spends time exploring more of the family’s backstory, although he wisely gives Blanchett’s Wicked Stepmother as much screen time as possible. Cinderella‘s not a bad movie, per se, it’s just turgid, overly long, and desperate for a reason to exist beyond the boffo box office numbers it put up last weekend. But we all know that, for the House of Mouse, $132 million is reason enough.
