Friday, May 22, 2015

Movie Review: Mad Max: Fury Road










George Miller (Mad Max) revs up for maximum car-nage in his franchise reboot, Mad Max: Fury Road.


Tom Hardy (Warrior) takes over the lead role (made famous by Mel Gibson way back in 1979) of Max Rockatansky.  Max is a drifter in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who gets taken by a band of cultish loonies led by resident psychopath Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays, Mad Max).  Joe controls the local population by controlling the limited water supply.  Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron, Devil's Advocate) is sick of his reign, so she steals his five breeding slaves wives to try to find a better place for all of them.  Max gets caught up in the ordeal and helps them out.  Armies of crazy cars and psychopaths are after them.  They find another unlikely companion in one of those crazies, Nux (Nicholas Hoult, X-Men: Days of Future Past).  Mayhem ensues....yada yada yada.


Let's be real, the plot doesn't matter in this film.  Hell, even Max himself is not super important to the overall story.  This should have been subtitled Furiosa Road.  It is just as much Theron's movie as it is Hardy's.  But I digress.  What does matter is everything else.  I have to preface by saying that on a re-watch of the original Mad Max Trilogy, I found them to be not that great.  There were long stretches of boring in them, broken up by some fun action.  It has been 30 years since Thunderdome, and in that time George Miller must have really been thinking about what parts of those movies did and did not work.  I have to say, if you are going to reboot a franchise, then this is how you do it.  What did work in the old films was the crazy characters and the world he created, and of course the action.  In Fury Road, he rebuilt that world, and when the insanity started from scene one, it didn't let up for the next two hours.


Most post-apocalyptic films are portrayed in bleak, drab colors.  Miller does something different here.  It is set in a desert wasteland, but it is bold, colorful, and beautiful to look at.  There are bright, fiery explosions over and over.  The vehicles are imaginative conglomerations of multiple vehicles welded together.  The characters are crazy.  You've got the cultish, suicidal followers of Joe who think that if they die for him they will be let into Valhalla.  Nux is one of these followers who becomes a main player.  Hoult does a wonderful job in this role giving just a dash of needed comedy relief without it becoming too much.  We're also given a kick-ass leading lady in the form of Furiosa who is missing her left arm and has a mechanical one in it's place.  Ironically, the only character I had any sort of problem with was Max himself.  I thought the character and his choices and reactions were all written and performed well.  It was just his voice.  Max has very few spoken lines of dialogue and what he does have is spoken in almost a caveman grunt by Hardy.  This was not a deal-breaker though.  I'm a fan of Hardy and thought everything else he did with the character was great and can't wait to see more in the sequels (of which he has apparently signed on for three more).  And I'd be remiss to not mention the man strapped to the front of a vehicle made almost entirely of speakers, playing a guitar that shoots flames....just because.  That's the type of movie this is.


What you really come to see though, is the action itself.  Go re-watch one of the trailers.  All of that car chasing and explosions?  Stretch that out for two hours and you have this movie.  And yes, this is a good thing.  The majority of the stunts and effects were done practically instead of CGI, which just makes it that much better.  If you want suicidal maniacs, car chases, and lots of explosive action, just go watch this.  You will not be disappointed.  If you don't like that stuff, first off, what's wrong with you?  Second, this is not for you.  This is a popcorn flick if ever there was one.


This film is a great example of how a reboot can be a good thing if handled right.  Miller took his own mediocre franchise and re-imagined it into something that grabs a hold of you and doesn't let go until the credits.  If you're ready for a blockbuster with a lot of action to keep your pulse racing and not a lot of plot to bog you down, then check this one out.  This also has to be seen on the big screen.  This film relies heavily on visuals that will just not have the same effect on your screen at home.


Rating: ********-- (8 out of 10) [matinee]


Memorable Quote:
Nux: Oh, what a day.  What a lovely day.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron



Joss Whedon (Serenity) assembles the team one more time for Avengers: Age of Ultron.


It's been an indeterminate amount of time since the previous film, and the Avengers have been raiding one Hydra base after another looking for Strucker and the staff from the first film.  This film starts off on their final raid, where they find the staff and take it back.  They also run into a couple of twins that Strucker has been experimenting on, Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen, Godzilla) and Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kick-Ass) Maximoff.  "He's fast, she's weird".  (Telekinesis weird)  Before Thor takes the staff back to Asgard, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner tinker around with it and find it has an artificial intelligence in it.  Stark has come up with a program called Ultron (without telling anyone else of course) that he was building as an ultimate guardian of Earth.  He sees this AI as a way to complete this project and downloads it.  Of course this all goes wrong and Ultron builds himself a robot body out of Stark's spare parts and decides that the best way to save Earth is by eradicating everyone and letting them start over.  Enter Noah....wait, wrong movie.  Enter the rest of the Avengers to help Iron Man stop the maniac that he created....along with the thousands of robots in Ultron's army.


This film is full of action and humor, just what you want to start kicking off the summer blockbuster season.  One advantage this film has over the previous is that it doesn't have to spend the first half hour introducing the characters to each other.  The opening battle shows that they have been doing this for a while now and are quite comfortable with fighting side by side.  This actually leads to some very fun combo moves between some of the characters.  It's apparent that Stark has slightly modified all of their "uniforms".  The only one that is distracting is Black Widow's tron suit.  I didn't really understand what blue neon lights down the side of her suit did for her.  This camaraderie made for all of the fights to be kind of cool, and there are a LOT of fights in the two and a half hour runtime.  One problem is that there is in-fighting again.  I'd like to see an Avengers movie where they were not fighting each other.  Granted some of it was mind control (which was used in the first film as well), and internal conflict in the team did lead to the Hulk-Buster being pulled out, but some of it was that Cap and Iron Man still don't see eye to eye and it was Iron Man's arrogance that caused the main conflict of the film.  We will of course see this butting of heads continue in the next Captain America, which follows the Civil War storyline.


Ironically, as well as this team works together in the field, and as long as they've been doing this, they don't know bubkis about each other.  We, as viewers, get to see watch their backgrounds come to the foreground.  This is good.  In doing this we also get a lot more focus on Hawkeye.  He doesn't have any superpowers, but we finally get the sense that he is the more grounded and "human" member of the group that holds them together.


This film, like most of the other Marvel films, is trying to expand the world building.  This is good and bad.  In the case of Cap and Iron Man, their conflict leads to the next Cap movie, but it stems from the problem that is the focus of this film, so it doesn't hinder as much.  The problem comes in with the Marvel crew trying to expand the Avengers for the future.  This leads to new characters being introduced and side characters from previous films coming in, all on top of the six core characters we already have.  It's exciting to see all of these superheroes joining the fray, but there are times when it gets to be a bit too much.  Luckily we have Joss Whedon at the helm, who keeps the issues to a minimum and manages to keep it fairly well-balanced throughout.  A lesser director, and we would have had quite the jumbled mess with this gigantic cast.


By now, the majority of this gigantic cast has grown quite comfortable in their respective roles.  This, along with that good old Joss Whedon witty writing keeps the dialogue snappy throughout the whole film.  There are one-liners zinging around all over the place.  I've seen some criticism that it's too much and too forced.  The writing kept me laughing and having a good time through the whole film, so I'm not sure how that's a bad thing.  I will say that even Ultron ended up being funnier than I thought, and that came close to making him less menacing, but I've forgiven it simply because he actually had some of the best lines, and that James Spader voice can keep things menacing even when he's making a joke.  Just like the first Avengers film, this one will require a second viewing to catch all the lines you missed because of the laughter.  Despite how bloated the cast got for this film, everyone did a great job.  The only distracting thing might be the Maximoff twins' accents.  It was like watching Boris and Natasha.  It got a little thick sometimes.  Other than that, they did a fine job too.  One of the other standouts was Paul Bettany.  He plays JARVIS once again, but his character goes further.  Most people know where it goes, but I'll avoid spoilers for those who miraculously avoided that reveal.


One last thing of note was the use Quicksilver (Pietro Maximoff).  Of course this same character was used in X-Men: Days of Future Past last year, and ended up having one of the best scenes in any movie of the entire year.  I was quite intrigued to see how they used the character after such an amazing sequence in the X-Men film.  Did this new Pietro have any scene that was as cool as the other one?  No.  Did this make him a lesser version?  No.  I thought he was well used in this film.  The problem with X-Men, is that he had that cool scene and then was tossed to the side and forgotten about.  Whedon and company gave him more to do and a little more character development.  The sum of the parts add up, and they were used differently enough that you can appreciate both versions.


So, there were a couple minor flaws (including an unnecessary and distracting budding romance storyline), but don't let them deter you from seeing this.  They are minor.  This film has what you want in a summer movie.  The action scenes are great, and the dialogue is quick-paced and witty.  Also, even at 2 1/2 hours, I felt it moved even quicker than the previous Avengers film.  Go see this soon, with a big crowd.  Grab the popcorn and enjoy.


Rating: *********- (9 out of 10) [Full price!]


Memorable Quote:
Captain America: Language!

Friday, May 1, 2015

Movie Review: Ex Machina



Alex Garland (writer, Sunshine) blurs the line between humans and machines in his directorial debut, Ex Machina.


Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson, About Time) is a programmer working at Bluebook, the world's leading search engine.  Through an office lottery, he wins the chance to go meet and stay with the CEO of the company, Nathan (Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis), for a week in his secluded mountain home.  While there he learns that Nathan has other plans than just a meet and greet.  After having Caleb sign a very extensive NDA, he tells him the real reason he brought someone in.  He has created the world's first AI robot, named Ava (Alicia Vikander, Seventh Son) and needed someone to perform a Turing test on it.  In a typical Turing test, Caleb would not be aware if responses were coming from the computer or a human.  The twist is, that Nathan has decided to have Caleb talk directly to the android.  If he still forms a bond with her as if she were human, then that would be a true success.


AI is, by far, not a new concept in the world of film.  Steven Spielberg himself made a movie with that very name, A.I. Artificial Intelligence.  Somehow Ex Machina still stands out above the crowd.  It's a simple story, but it is written so well (by the director himself) that it keeps you guessing to the very end.  The story is smart and is constantly throwing twists in without feeling forced or out of control.  The characters are so well written that it is hard knowing who is testing who.


Carrying the weight of this script is our three leads.  After the opening scenes there are only four actors for the majority of the rest of the film and the three leads comfortably carry this film.  Nathan is a billionaire recluse and Isaac plays him very unpredictably.  You can feel how the loneliness and isolation may be getting to him.  He is friendly and inviting to Caleb, but almost in an aggressive way.  He drinks heavily every night and seems to be right on the edge of becoming a complete sociopath at any moment.  You don't know the entire time if he's going to stay on that thin line or fall off the edge.  He does have a bizarre dance scene that may go down as one of the best movie scenes of 2015.  It's over the top, but is worked in so smoothly that it doesn't seem out of place and actually brings a much needed laugh to the tension in the air.  Domhnall also plays Caleb quite perfectly.  He is a programmer with a very analytical mind.  At first this seems like a detriment because he questions everything and can't relax and get comfortable with his situation.  Later, when things start to get strange, he shows he is quite clever, but you wonder if he is clever enough.  The final piece of the puzzle is Vikander playing Ava.  She plays her with just the right balance.  Is she self-aware?  Is she being programmed and manipulated by Nathan?  The complexity of each character keeps you guessing until the very end.


Most of this film is set in a single, claustrophobic location.  Within this house I feel there are certain set pieces that are very deliberate and symbolic, but I'll have to leave it at that to not provide any semblance of a spoiler.  This enclosed space is broken up occasionally when Nathan and Caleb step outside of the house to give the characters and the audience a breath of fresh air with amazing cinematography of a stunning landscape in the mountains.  The movie is a slow burn because, at the core, as stated above, it is essentially a man performing a Turing test.  However the mounting tension keeps it from feeling slow.  That tension is amplified by a wonderful score.  There are just a couple of times where the score gets a little too loud and obvious.


Alex Garland has written and directed something so well-crafted that it takes a simple concept that has been used a million times before (what makes us human?) and makes it feel completely fresh and new.  I look forward to not only his next project, but also a re-watch of this film.  Domhnall and Oscar have also been having a good run of films right now, and this just solidifies that they deserve it.  They will both be seen together again in The Force Awakens.  Could they potentially be in two of my favorite movies of the year?  We'll find out in December.  Until then, do yourself a favor and check out Ex Machina.


Rating: *********- (9 out of 10) [Full price!]


Memorable Quote:
Nathan: There you go again, Mr. Quotable.