Tag: Sophie Turner

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Dark Phoenix

I’ll admit I got a little choked up at the beginning of Dark Phoenix when the 20th Century Fox fanfare sounded. Since 1935, it has signaled the beginning of so many great movies. Originally it was Charlie Chan mysteries that kept the lights on, then Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes was the studio’s big star. Henry Fonda starred in Young Mr. Lincoln and The Grapes of Wrath. John Ford got the studio’s first Best Picture with How Green Was My Valley. In the 1940s, Fox had both the courage to take on anti-Semitism with Best Picture winner Gentleman’s Agreement and the silliness to let Howard Hawks and Cary Grant make I Was a Male War Bride. In the ’50s, Fox churned out 30 pictures a year, including gems like All About Eve. The ’60s kicked off with Marylin Monroe in Let’s Make Love before the bloated historical epic Cleopatra almost sank the studio, despite being the highest-grossing movie of 1963. The decade ended with Planet of the Apes and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, then the 1970s began with M*A*S*H*. There was Young Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and, of course, Star Wars in 1977, a film which changed the entire calculous of Hollywood. The 1980s ranged from the serious Chariots of Fire to the unserious Cannonball Run. In 1984, Tom Hanks got his start thanks to Fox with Bachelor Party. A nine-month period in 1986-87 produced John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, James Cameron’s Aliens, and the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona. The 1990s began with Point Break and Miller’s Crossing, made a star out of Keanu Reeves with Speed, then ended with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

The X-Men franchise turns to ash with Dark Phoenix, starring Game of Thrones alum Sophie Turner.

The new century began with X-Men, the moment when the superhero trend kicked into high gear. Bryan Singer, a Sundance winner whose commercial career began with The Usual Suspects, was the director who was finally able to make a non-Batman comic book movie respectable. It would set the studio’s course for the new century — and ultimately lead to its demise.

After the Star Wars prequels concluded in 2005, X-Men became the franchise that kept the lights on at Twentieth. The series had its high points, like Singer’s first two films and 2014’s Days of Future Past. But as Marvel and Disney grew into a spandex juggernaut, Fox’s creative team seemed adrift, unable to even make a decent Fantastic Four movie. X-Men: Apocalypse was an unmitigated disaster, due mostly to Singer, who, it turns out, is a serial sex predator who just stopped coming to work one day in the middle of production. The moody, low-key Logan should have been the end of the series, but here we are.

Jessica Chastain (left) and Sophie Turner try to rise from the ashes in Dark Phoenix.

Last year, Disney was flush with Avengers and Star Wars cash, and the Murdoch family decided they wanted out of the film business so they could devote themselves to destroying the world full-time. Disney officially took control of Fox in March, ending an era in Hollywood, cancelling dozens of productions, and laying off 4,000 people.

Dark Phoenix was in production during the negotiations, and odds are it will be the last film to feature the Fox fanfare. It’s an adaptation of one of the greatest and most beloved stories in comic book history — and one that Fox already mined for the awful X-Men: The Last Stand. This was to be a do-over, and give Simon Kinberg, the guy who cleaned up Singer’s mess, a chance for greatness. Kinberg is an experienced producer and studio apparatchik, but this is his first official project in the director’s chair, and it shows.

It gets off to a promising enough start. It’s 1992, and the space shuttle Endeavor is disabled in orbit. Professor X (James McAvoy) sends the X-Men to rescue the astronauts, but when things go pear-shaped, Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) ends up irradiated by the strange cosmic force that waylaid the shuttle. Instead of killing her, it makes her stronger, until she becomes a danger to everyone around her.

Unfortunately, no one seems to care. Turner, fresh from the triumph of Game of Thrones, looks lost in what should be her big leading-woman moment. Jennifer Lawrence as Raven mostly just stares blankly into the camera. McAvoy at least looks like he’s trying as Professor X. The edit is flaccid at best, there’s some shoddy camerawork that is simply inexcusable in a $200 million production, and the score by Hans Zimmer sounds like a series of electric farts.

The Marvel theme is “with great power comes great responsibility,” and the Dark Phoenix saga is meant to show what happens when that maxim fails. Instead, it shows what happens when no one cares about their job anymore. It’s an ignominious end to a once-great franchise and a once-proud studio.

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As Game Of Thrones Builds To An Epic Finale, What Has Been Lost Along The Way?

Game of Thrones‘ transition into sloppy blockbuster storytelling somehow feels exactly right: What better way to subvert expectations than to undermine its own fame for smart narrative? The lack of attention to detail in its scripts grows, but the community has already been made: this is the bread and butter of millions. As with Westerosi religions, you do not need anything meaningful at the center to worship.

Daenerys Targarian (Emilia Clark) rides into battle on Drogon.

If you are unfamiliar, the series’ plot and title itself are a wonderful shorthand for how humanity misuses its collective resources, for both the medieval and modern idea that those adept at becoming rich attain power then maintain and bequeath it, abandoning the common good in its stead. They ignore threats like global warming, inaccessible health care, dragon riding invaders, or ice zombies. The series is on its second-to-last shortened season and has become a worldwide phenomenon. It itself has become rich, and like all things with money attached, there is an enormous pressure to make more of itself.

As an acolyte, I am snobbish towards those who treat the series like football—and this sometimes extends to its makers. I’ll be lured back with the next bit of spectacle, then the process will repeat. The show has always been escapist fantasy tinged with a wonderful amount of dread about the human condition, and our aforementioned inability to deal with possible collective doom, be the system feudal or democratic. Episodes like this season’s penultimate “Beyond the Wall,” dispense with all that in a flurry of plot that doesn’t hold up to even the minor inspection of one viewing.

The Night King (Vladimír Furdík) has mad javelin skills.

In that episode, our heroes head north into the Land of Always Winter to capture a ice zombie and bring it back to Queen Cersei as proof of the existential threat posed by the Night King and his White Walkers. There, they do action movie things until a final, beautiful sequence involving a dragon’s death. Because the setup makes no sense (Queen Cersei already has a zombie on her staff. The Wall is supposed to block all White Walkers. No one objects to a plan that means certain death to Jon Snow, the King of the North.) and the rules of time and space break down to facilitate a series of dei ex machina, the episode has become a bit of a rallying cry online. It is at least among the regular viewing and reading that I, like a sports fan, use to ritually wash down each episode. (For starters I recommend the Israeli college professors GoT Academy and the smoothly voiced conspiracy theorist Preston Jacobs.) It has united fans of the novel who are unable to get over expectations for complicated storytelling with those who just need character motivation to make slightly more sense.

The show has been rudderless for awhile now. Without George R.R. Martin’s books as base, complex story has faded. Now, our heroes’ whim-based decisions are cogs in plot machinery, and most of the artistry has shifted to wonderfully realized action setpieces. But still, these climactic moments are better than most cinematic epics.

On the plus side, Flaming zombie polar bears.

There are worse fates. The show has done its homework for years, studiously adapting the books internecine politics, and now in its dotage it can abandon them and devolve into an action movie battle of unabashed good and evil.

Game of Thrones will probably stick its landing with aplomb, considering how excellent it is at climaxes. But its very success lessens its impact a little bit. A show like Deadwood, cancelled in its prime, has the forever-young quality of James Dean or Marilyn Monroe: its characters are forever caught in a cliffhanger in which evil capitalist George Hearst dominates and controls them, and it comes across like an ugly truth. Martin has said the ending to his books, which will be spoiled before they ever come, will be “bittersweet.” To match that, the show needs to err, as it did in its start, on the side of displeasing its viewers.

The Sisters Stark: Sansa (Sophie Turner) and Arya (Maise Williams) have a rocky reunion in Game Of Thrones season 7.

Both book and show’s emphasis on royals ruling nations while detouring to highlight the problems of serfs doesn’t quite sell the sadness of real history. We are handed quite a lot of information about a select few and their wars and reigns, but less information about the commoners with whom we share an affinity. The everyday life of most is lost to time while the wealthy’s every wart is recorded and propagandized. Martin did recently allegorize the anti-feudal 1381 Peasant’s Revolt (in his prequel The Princess and The Queen) which in real life birthed the wonderful phrase, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” Spoiler: the nobility killed the peasants.

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Film Features Film/TV

X-Men: Apocalypse

You can always tell a survivor of the Cola Wars by their sallow complexion, bulging waistline, and rotting teeth. Back in the 1980s, Coke and Pepsi, two competing manufacturers of carbonated sugar water, spent millions of advertising dollars to convince the world that their product was superior, when in fact, the two were virtually indistinguishable. In the summer of 2016, we find ourselves caught in the crossfire of a similar conflict, only this time with superhero movies.

In retrospect, the studios flying the Marvel and DC flags owe much of their success to Bryan Singer. The director proved he could handle an ensemble cast with his 1995 indie hit The Usual Suspects and then used those skills to bring Marvel’s flagship superhero property X-Men to the big screen in 2000, which mutated Aussie musical theater actor Hugh Jackman into an international movie star and paired Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier with his frenemy, Ian McKellen’s Magneto for the first time. This year alone, we’ve seen three films that borrowed heavily from Singer’s first two X-Men films: from the boring Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice to the more successful Captain America: Civil War to the genre-expanding lewdness of Deadpool (who, technically at least, is an X-Man himself).

Singer did two X-Men movies before leaving the franchise for the ill-fated Superman Returns, leaving Brett Ratner to butcher the resolution of the Dark Phoenix storyline in The Last Stand. Since then, Hugh Jackman got a pair of spinoff stand-alone Wolverine stories that proved imminently forgettable, and Singer returned to the series as a producer for a prequel trilogy, which got an unexpectedly spiffy start with 2011’s First Class. Singer directed 2014’s Days of Future Past, which featured Wolverine time traveling back to 1973 to prevent a mutant genocide, and now the prequel series concludes with X-Men: Apocalypse. Or probably concludes. Who knows with these things?

Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse ushers in a new age of endless permutations of superhero franchises.

The good news about Apocalypse is the same as the bad news: It’s a Bryan Singer X-Men movie, with all that implies. The cold open takes us back to 3,600 B.C.E., where the original mutant, Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), is in the process of absorbing another mutant’s healing powers to gain immortality, when he is imprisoned underneath a collapsed pyramid by rebellious slaves. Singer’s brief foray into Pharaonic times is 10 times more rewarding than all of the misbegotten Gods of Egypt.

Flash forward to 1983, when CIA agent Moria Mactaggert (Rose Byrne) witnesses the resurrection of the fearsome mutant by his cult in Cairo. Apocalypse sets out to find and enhance four mutants, beginning with Storm (a mohawked Alexandra Shipp) Angel (Ben Hardy), Psylocke (Oliva Munn), and finally Magneto (Michael Fassbender).

Meanwhile, Magneto’s former protege Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is running an underground railroad to get mutants out of communist Eastern Europe, where she meets Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and inadvertently helps bring the teleporting Catholic into the fold of Professor Xavier (James McAvoy), who is training Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan), who will one day become Cyclops, the leader of the X-Men. Summers’ slowly blossoming affection for Jean Gray (Sophie Turner, aka Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones) as the showdown with Apocalypse looms is the film’s most deftly executed subplot.

Due to the current state of Marvel copyright case law, the X-Men franchise is in the hands of 20th Century Fox, and thus is not a part of the Disney conveyor belt. That works in Apocalypse‘s favor, highlighting Singer’s distinct look and feel. But Apocalypse still feels like a warmed-over version of what worked better 16 years ago. McAvoy and Fassbender work hard at animating Professor X and Magneto, but they still can’t fill the X-shoes of Stewart and McKellen. Lawrence brings humanity to Mystique, but I miss the chilly cunning of Rebecca Romijn. Only Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy improves on the previous incarnation of Beast. And Storm is as underutilized as always. Apocalypse arrives in a season when even single-hero movies such as Captain America have expanded into super team-ups. Whether you choose Coke or Pepsi, it’s still the same brown sludge.