2016 #45
Neill Blomkamp | 115 mins | streaming (HD) | 2.35:1 | USA & South Africa / English | 15 / R
Neill Blomkamp | 115 mins | streaming (HD) | 2.35:1 | USA & South Africa / English | 15 / R
Neill Blomkamp seems to be on M. Night Shyamalan’s career path: a massively-praised Oscar-nominated breakthrough genre movie, followed by a series of increasingly maligned follow-ups.
His latest is the story of a police robot that gets inducted into South African rap/gang culture. It’s incredibly idiosyncratic, and actually kind of interesting in its oddness and the way it exposes a different culture. So there’s something to be got out of it, but it feels like a failed experiment rather than a successful realisation of a bold idea.
Still, in the homogenised landscape of big-budget sci-fi movies, at least it’s something different.
After years producing movies in the 
Score: 
The first English language feature from Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos (of 
Even if you accept these goals, Lanthimos’ film eventually goes off the rails. Without meaning to spoil too much, David eventually falls in with the loners, who have their own very specific social rules designed to inhibit partnering up. Revelation: the outsiders are fundamentally the same, just with different rules! That’s about the extent of what I got from this portion of the film; unfortunately, it goes on for a really, really long time. Among this group David meets ‘Short Sighted Woman’ (everyone aside from David is similarly named) and falls in love with her — I mean, of course he does, she’s played by Rachel Weisz. They develop a secret mode of communicating, but will be harshly punished if caught. This storyline is what the film uses to occupy its remaining time, but what it lacks in the offbeat humour of the time in The Hotel it makes up for with… nothing.
The Batman v Superman Ultimate Edition has been available via various means for a month or more now, but has only hit disc in the UK this past week (and I waited for it, because I’m a good boy). This extended cut adds half-an-hour of material, give or take (comparing the two Blu-rays tells me the difference is just under 31 minutes; 
You may have read that the photographer with Lois in Africa is Jimmy Olsen, identified in the credits but not on screen in the theatrical cut. In this version he is named on screen, but that’s not the important part. More is done to establish why Lois is in Africa, what she’s hoping to achieve, and lay the seeds for why it’s all going to go wrong. This is achieved in such a short space of time that it seems ludicrous it was cut out, leaving theatrical viewers playing catch-up when a couple of extra moments would’ve explained it clearly. (Of course, there may be an element of re-viewing bias in this: I already know what’s happening so of course I cottoned on to everything sooner.) When things do go south, more material makes it explicit what happened — what the bad guys do to frame Superman, essentially. It’s possible some of this material was cut to achieve the PG-13 rating, but in doing so they left out bits and pieces that are referenced later, heightening the sense of confusion for theatrical viewers — how are we meant to know a woman testifying to a congressional hearing about “burned bodies” is a reference to events we just witnessed if we don’t see anyone burning any bodies?
Less vital to the overall plot, but which certainly contributes to the titular conflict, is that Clark’s investigation into the Batman is seriously beefed up. It makes Clark/Superman feel like more of a leading character in a film that was, at least as originally conceived, his sequel. In some respects this storyline is a more understandable excision, because Superman’s dislike for the Batman and his methods isn’t entirely unclear in the theatrical cut. Equally, it does flesh it out better and connect up some of the dots, like why he intervened when Batman was trying to steal the Kryptonite at the docks (essentially: a Bat-victim’s girlfriend said Batman needed stopping. Maybe not a great reason, but hey, it’s a reason). It’s a case in point of how this film simply has too much going on. To create a workable version it’s had to be three hours long — that’s the length of two movies, and it does feel like two movies’ worth of material. Not back-to-back movies — you couldn’t cut it in two at the middle and be left with two independent films — but two movies that occur concurrently; intercut. I mean, there are even two big action climaxes, back to back.
I don’t think it sinks to the level of spelling it all out slowly and carefully in case you missed it, but it does make it more explicit; and, as discussed, it does that by showing more of Lois’ investigation, so it feels like her role is more substantial too. She felt a little cursory in 
One thing that is pretty apparent about Snyder’s intentions is that he really wanted to make a Batman movie, and I suspect Man of Steel was his way in to getting to do that. Despite launching out of the events of Man of Steel, and engaging with issues of what it means to be Superman (therefore continuing MoS’s theme of “what would it be like if Superman was real?”), and having Lex Luthor as the main antagonist, BvS feels like a Batman-driven movie more often than it does a Superman one. Personally, I get it — I’m more of a Batman fan than a Superman fan too, so that approach warrants little complaint from me — but I can see why Supes’ fans would be miffed.
Other, more minor changes in this cut include increased violence, though personally I barely noticed it. Some people seem adamant this should’ve upped it to a 15 certificate, but I think you can justify saying it stops just short of that. Quite what the MPAA saw that merited an R, I’m not entirely sure. More interesting to my weirdly-obsessed mind is that the film actually includes the “Ultimate Edition” title on screen, both during the opening credits and at the end (where it’s technically titled “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition” without any additional punctuation). How many other extended cuts actually change their title card to reflect that fact? Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any.
GoT produced two of its greatest-ever episodes to conclude this season. Actually, that’s arguably an understatement: based on IMDb votes, if nothing else, Thrones produced two of the best episodes of TV ever made. But what do IMDb voters know? Well, more than some people give them credit for. Obviously everyone has different tastes, but for the genres Thrones operates in — and, in some instances, even transcending those — these are incredible hours of TV. Episode 9, Battle of the Bastards, is surely one of the most thoroughly-realised medieval-style battles ever depicted on screen: the scale is epic, the strategy is clear, the feeling of what it’s like to be in the thick of that environment is palpable. How it turns out may have been predictable, but something being predictable is not the same as it being bad — not everything needs to be a twist.
As for the forthcoming seventh season, it’s pretty clear we’re now entering the show’s endgame — though we’re going to have to wait even longer for it, with the next season set to have a later-than-normal premiere and the final end not coming until the season after that. It’s going to be an excruciating wait, but if they can maintain the form displayed throughout season six, it’ll be worth it.
This is done and dusted Stateside now, but goodness knows when Channel 5 will choose to ‘officially’ air it over here, so I’m just getting on with it. I used to despise most of PoI’s arc plots and often wished it would stick to being just a pretty cool vigilante procedural; but at this point, it’s so invested in the epic Super-AI vs. Super-AI sci-fi storyline that any attempts at case-of-the-week episodes feel like a waste of time — especially when this truncated season is fast approaching the show’s final end. I really hope it comes to a proper conclusion, because there’s too much going on here to let it end forever on a cliffhanger. (Obviously that answer’s now out there, but naturally I’m avoiding spoilers.)
I’m a bit behind on this at the minute (the latest episode was the eighth), but, as of the halfway point, it’s definitely settled into its own skin — or maybe it was always settled there, but it’s taken time for viewers (or this viewer) to get past the expectations brought as a reader of the comic books. It’s still far from being a literally faithful adaptation, carving out its own path from some of the comic’s building blocks, which makes it an odd and hard-to-judge work if you have read any of the original. Still, it’s an entertaining series, and people involved keep talking about this season being something of a prequel to what we saw in the comic, so maybe the already-commissioned season two will feel more recognisable.
This month, I have mostly been missing stuff I don’t even know I’m missing. By which I mean, I haven’t been paying enough attention to the TV schedules to know what I’ve missed. The BBC’s supernatural drama The Living and the Dead sounds kind of interesting; I know Mr Robot is back, not that I ever got round to season one; plus The Musketeers continues (though I hear it’s gone off the rails this season); and I keep hearing vaguely good things about Netflix’s new series, Stranger Things, like that it’s a cross between Steven Spielberg and Stephen King, or The Goonies mixed with The X Files… which just reminds me that I need to get round to seeing The Goonies someday.
The same summer that Christopher Nolan revitalised the Dark Knight with the critically acclaimed and commercially successful 
All of that was ten years ago now, since when plans for a sequel have been abandoned, the character has had 
often for good reason, but (a) sometimes a new telling is the right way to go, and (b) if you’re going to pick up a character mid-life, you still need to treat it as a new and standalone story if its immediate predecessor was released decades ago.
that actually takes up the first half-hour-or-so. I can imagine an edit of the movie that begins on that plane: just a bunch of journalists observing the press demonstration of the new shuttle technology, when suddenly, inexplicably, it fails — they’re all going to die — then Superman turns up completely out of nowhere and saves them. Then you have the credits, which are immediately followed by Lex’s whole journey to the Fortress of Solitude, and only then do you get in to the stuff with Superman only having just returned, wondering what his places is now, and so on. Maybe lose the scene of him basically stalking Lois’ new family, though.
The final thing this all makes me think of is the forthcoming Marvel Spidey movie, 
There are a good number of well-regarded John Carpenter films I’ve not seen that I could spend my time on, but I chose to expend it on this critically-mauled sci-fi-horror-Western from the first year of the current millennium. But sometimes watching poorly-regarded films pays off, because while Ghosts of Mars is no classic, it is actually pretty entertaining.
If people thought this had been made in the ’80s, would they view it as kindly as they do some ’80s genre-classics that are just as bad and/or dated?
I’m not sure when I last watched ID4 (as it was so often branded and marketed, for only semi-clear reasons — sure, US Independence Day is July 4th, but other than that the “4” has nothing to do with anything), but it’s been a damn long time — my DVD copy, which I know I never watched (I have the shiny new remastered Blu-ray now), has a postcard inside advertising the forthcoming 
because it was all about the spectacle when it came out; but of course, things date, and what counted as sheer cinematic spectacle in 1996 is (it would seem) underwhelmingly run-of-the-mill in 2016. It’s fair to say that not all of the model effects still hold up, but there’s a physicality to them that really works. The best ones are still among the best movie effects ever.
and some of the blame for it can surely be traced back to the popularity of ID4. However, here the destruction isn’t so unfeeling: the morning after the aliens’ famous landmark obliteration, President Whitmore mulls over how many people died and how many didn’t have to if he’d made different choices. Both Marvel and DC have had to make that kind of reflection a plot point in sequels to retrospectively justify it happening in the first place.
allowing for a drastically new status quo on Earth when the aliens return, but with blockbusters released all year round now, and CGI meaning every one is overloaded with effects shots that are far more epic than ID4 had, there’s little doubt that the sequel won’t have the same enduring impact on the blockbuster firmament. For its faults, you can’t deny ID4 that.
100Films.co.uk 