Tom Salinsky

By and large, I’m a Christopher Nolan fan. I’m aware that Memento doesn’t entirely make sense but it was such an arresting and compelling device that I’m not minded to go back and try and pick it apart. All of the Batman movies are eminently watchable, with the middle episode being by far the best. Inception I thought was marvellous – a brilliant combination of eye-popping effects, bright performances, a few weighty themes to chew on, and an emotional story which didn’t swamp the narrative but which managed to hold its own against the noise and colour.

So, I sat down to watch Interstellar, at the BFI IMAX in a happy mood, but my overall impression, at the end of a lengthy run-time was disappointment. There is good stuff here, but key moments are flubbed, and crucially, the film doesn’t do for me what I’m pretty sure Nolan thinks it’s doing. It doesn’t stir my soul, it doesn’t mash my brain and it doesn’t even delight my eyes the way I thought it would. Let’s get into this. There will be some spoilers, but I won’t assume you’ve seen the film.

Firstly, the film borrows from earlier works with a magpie-ish zeal which makes Tarantino look like a hermit-like recluse who’s never seen a film in his life. Just off the top of my head, Nolan has stirred in chunks of Contact, Armageddon, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Gravity, The Right Stuff, Solaris, Disney’s The Black Hole and great dollops of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is the most damning comparison, but we’ll get to that later.

We open in a future world where an unspecified ecological disaster has created a crop blight, with the result that no wheat or barley can grow and so America (and we assume the world) is subsisting on corn. Given that we will spend only about a quarter of the film in this environment, Nolan attempts to avoid lengthy and tedious world-building. We are spared long professorial lectures about just what has happened and when (although long professorial lectures are coming, don’t worry) and instead just spend time getting to know Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper (no first name is given) and his family including John Lithgow who is given absolutely nothing to do.

But Nolan fills these early sections with set-pieces which are either obvious set-ups for pay-offs which result later in the movie (Murph’s “ghost”) or obvious set-ups for pay-offs which never arrive (Cooper wrangling a rogue drone back to Earth). Meanwhile, back-story which might actually help, like whatever the hell crash McConaughey is trying to get over, is scarcely referred to again.

But this approach means that I’m still asking vital questions about what is happening down on earth after McConaghey’s mission, and struggling to believe it all. The story we are told about NASA – unfunded, unloved, a misfit band of scientists still toiling away in isolation – is totally at odds with what they have accomplished – building enormous ships capable of interplanetary travel and devising a plan to save the lives of thousands of people. And the last-minute recruiting of McConaghey on to the mission also seems profoundly unlikely, no matter how much gravitas Michael Caine brings to his long professorial lectures (see I told you).

Once we leave the planet, things take a turn for the better. The world on board the various spaceships is better defined, even if, again what we are told is often at odds with what we see. This is our near future where the need for better farming has caused society to turn its back on science (because how could science help with making food? – that’s crazytown) and yet, this same technologically backwards culture has created miraculous double-jointed robots with Genuine People Personalities of the kind we can barely dream of (but which are a staple of science fiction movie-making).

There are other niggles here as well. Filming partly with IMAX cameras means that the aspect ratio keeps jumping about, and Nolan keeps shooting the ship our heroes are in from inside or from a “camera” “clamped” to its hull (I’m aware this was all CGI). That means it’s absolutely ages before we get a clear idea of what the thing actually looks like. We also have to hear about and not see the earlier missions. Not having any visual reference makes it hard to keep everything straight, and it seems an odd narrative choice to have one last rescue ship following twelve earlier ships, three of whom might have found something useful. These ships can transmit “data” but nothing useful about what the planets are actually like. You know, like “hey watch out for waves” or pictures of the surface. And vital mission strategy decisions seem to be taken by the four astronauts on the fly instead of being figured out before take-off. I guess this distributes the exposition more evenly, but the movie’s bigger problem by far is that I’m struggling to believe any of it.

Much has been made of the scientific accuracy of the film, and Nolan in interviews has claimed again and again that his pet physicist Kip Thorne wouldn’t allow anything in which couldn’t be justified scientifically. However, Thorne also seems to know which side his bread is buttered as he is developing a nice side-line in Hollywood and I suspect has let a lot of nonsense past. In particular, the planet on which time passes more rapidly for those on its surface than for those in orbit around it. This is a perfectly fine science fiction conceit, but it has nothing to do with relativistic time dilation at all as far as I can tell. If McConaghey and co accelerated away from crew-member David Gyasi at near light speed and then returned, they could find he had aged 23 years while they had been gone only a few hours, but nothing like this actually occurs.

Gyasi meanwhile is gathering “data” from the black hole for years on end. “Data”, you see is what Michael Caine needs for his “equations” which will save the human race. In my screening, Gyasi’s 23 years of isolation and loneliness were greeted with sniggers, but really it’s the Michael Caine / Jessica Chastain equation narrative which is most derisibly thin. Chastain works hard to sell it, but is given nothing to work with. Her breezy optimism is preferable at least to Anne Hathaway’s relentless earnestness. In a film sorely lacking in humour, her character is a particular dead-spot, and her freakish features, accentuated by her pixie cut make her seem distractingly alien in a movie which is trying so hard to suggest but not quite say that there are Mysterious Forces Beyond Our Comprehension Somewhere Out There.

Still, the adventures on Waterworld are at least exciting, and the decisions the crew have to make next are a neat dilemma. Arrival on Iceworld with Secret Guest Star Matt Damon also brings fresh pleasures, and if Damon’s evil secret is a) blatantly obvious and b) his plan makes hardly any sense, well we can put that down to Space Madness. In fact, pretty much everything from Saturn to Gargantua is at least good, and some of it is great action adventure, thrilling-escape-from-death stuff.

However, in its final act, when the debt to 2001 becomes a crippling sub-prime mortgage and when the film imagines it is at its most poetic, lyrical and spiritual, I actually experienced it as thuddingly, ploddingly literal. It surely can’t have escaped the attention of many viewers that McConaghey leaves Earth a) with a massive unsolved mystery in the form of those NASA coordinates spelled out by “gravity” and b) through a wormhole theorised to have been constructed by friendly aliens and that there is bound to be some causal link between these two and that link is McConaghey!

But even if the link between the two was a surprise to you, it is just far, far less interesting than what happens to Dave Bowman through the stargate, and at the same time the “data” is a McGuffin that makes no sense at all.

The coda on board a space station heading for the stars also barely makes any sense and the impression I am left with is that Nolan has badly overreached himself. This masterly creator of epic adventure tales, who also delights in playing with memory and reality, has failed to effectively realise most of the various worlds his story takes place in, has failed to create a sense of awe and mystery which his story depends on, is at best weak when it comes to the father-daughter emotions which the plot depends on, and has a very misguided idea of how scientifically accurate the whole thing is.

But a lot of it looks pretty and there is a good bit in the middle with mountain sized waves and a fist fight on a glacier and a demented docking manoeuvre and Matt Damon.

Deborah and I spent the weekend at Sundance watching five films and seeing four panels in three days. No, we didn’t go to Utah – for the last few years Sundance has come to the bizarre environs of the O2 so we were able to catch the latest in independent film without leaving London. I won’t go through the panels, except occasionally if they’re relevant, because panels are one-offs, but here are the movies we saw.

Obvious Child (wd. Gillian Robsepierre. Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffman)

Our first film is so indie it almost hurts. A simple, unambitious tale of a newly-single stand-up comedian (Slate, familiar from Parks and Recreation) flailing around through something approximating adult life. Wistfully amusing, rather than laugh out loud funny with fun cameos from the likes of Richard Kind and David Cross, the main plot when it emerges might shock America’s conservative heartland but seems unremarkable in liberal London Town. The same goes for Slate’s “earthy humour” (i.e. fart jokes). Obvious Child works but aims fairly low, which I suppose is better than wildly overreaching but it made for a rather low-key start to the Sundance experience.

The Case Against 8 (d. Ben Cotner, Ryan White)

After panels about film music and “finding your story” we were back in the cinema for what was the undoubted highlight of the whole Sundance experience. When Californian voters passed “Proposition 8”, overturning the state’s recent commitment to gay marriage, young filmmakers Cotner and White followed the legal proceedings instigated by the American Federation for Equal Rights. For over four years, through endless appeals, the legal process ground on and Cotner and White’s extraordinary access documents the whole thing. Elegantly streamlined to a sub-two hour running time, the whole film is expertly judged, full of humour, insight, emotion and brilliant storytelling. A fascinating account of a vital human rights battle which deserves the biggest possible audience.

Hits (wd. David Cross. Matt Walsh, James Adomian, Meredith Hagner)

Things took an immediate turn for the worse later on Saturday night. Hits is the directorial debut of Arrested Development’s David Cross and it bears all the hallmarks of a sketch comedy writer and actor trying to tackle a full-length narrative for the first time. Hits is beset with problems, from the tonal to the structural. The story of a young woman who lusts for talent-show fame, it cannot find a focus, immediately shifting point-of-view to whomever happens to be in the frame, with the result that no coherent narrative emerges. Rather, it feels as if five different films are fighting for dominance. Compounding the problems, the satire is years if not decades old, and piss-weak, with an extra dose of supposed shock-value at the end doing nothing to pep the film up. But these weakness might have been overcome were it not for the fact that writer-director Cross so evidently loathes and despises all of the characters, from the bitchy local official to the idiot racist dad to the self-obsessed hipsters. In his panel with David Wain (read on), Cross earnestly told the audience that he took jokes out of the script to protect the story. In my view, the story wasn’t worth preserving, even if it had been structured with more discipline. A welter of funny jokes might have been a saving grace, but we are denied even that. Awful. Avoid.

The One I Love (w. Justin Lader, d. Charlie McDowell. Elisabeth Moss, Mark Duplass, Ted Danson)

The best fiction film we saw, this nifty drama sees Mad Men’s Moss and husband Duplass bundled off to a weekend retreat for couples in need of reconnecting. Once there, they… man, this film is hard to describe fairly. Let’s just say that some weird shit goes down and leave it at that, shall we? The film expertly judges the tone, presenting the aforementioned weird shit simply and effectively and mining the premise carefully and satisfyingly, while the two leads tackle the often difficult material with grace and style. Only in the last ten minutes, when the filmmakers become a little too interested in the mechanism of the premise does the movie even threaten to go off the rails, but by that time I had had too good a time to care much. I will be fascinated to see how this one is marketed and how well it does at the box office, but if it comes to a screen near you, I urge you to go and see it while reading as little about it as you possibly can.

They Came Together (w David Wain, Michael Showalter; d. Wain. Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler)

Significantly less ghastly than Hits, this was still a disappointment. A spoof romantic comedy, this isn’t quite the all-out joke-fest of Airplane and it’s ilk, but it’s far too broad to be genuinely romantic in the way that Scream was genuinely scary. Good jokes (Poehler and Rudd frolick in autumn leaves, oblivious to the mouldering corpse buried just under them) sit next to poor jokes (Poehler’s approach to running her candy store is just to give all the candy away, because why not) but often the demands of the narrative lead to joke-free passages where the thin nature of the material becomes painfully apparent. Even the good jokes aren’t always capitalised upon which is particularly remarkable and disappointing. The line between characterisation and running joke is a very fine one in a movie like this, but even when Poehler’s character is identified as an adorable klutz, and Poehler very amusingly pulls a load of boxes down on her own head apparently on purpose – subsequently this trait is never referred to again. Much of the time the laughs come from characters smugly commenting on the tropes they are enacting, in the way which might seem witty in an improv setting, but here just seems a bit laboured. Every so often there’s a performance or a gag which threatens to make the whole thing worthwhile, but ultimately this is weak sauce.

Short Film Programme

We rounded off Sunday night with one of two short film programmes. Rather than go through all the ten-or-so shorts we saw, I will pick out two favourites. Firstly I Think This Is the Closest to How the Footage Looked (d. Yuval Hameiri). In this haunting piece, a young man reenacts the last hour’s of his sick mother’s life with household objects. The reason for the reenactment becomes devastatingly clear half-way through. A huge emotional bang for barely a single buck, Hameiri’s film is a tiny triumph of feeling over resources. More traditional in form is the Irish documentary The Last Days of Peter Bergmann (d. Ciaran Cassidy) which uses interview and CCTV footage to document the meticulous preparations of an unknown man who checked into a hotel in Sligo, Ireland, using the fake name Peter Bergmann. A 20 minute human mystery that may never be solved, Bergmann is a touching riddle, a fleeting enigma, a tiny treatise on how to take charge of matters which no-one can truly control.

All the Sundance staff (though not all the O2 staff) were friendly and helpful and although we felt a bit abandoned to the tender mercies of a dozen or so chain restaurants in the TGI Fridays vein when it came to food and drink, we left the festival inspired, invigorated and largely entertained.

Well, that was… er, underwhelming for the most part.

To take the hosting first, Ellen Degeneres could hardly fail to be generous, amusing and gregarious, but she seemed determined to play it safe. I’m sure I remember Jonathan Ross ordering pizza for the whole studio audience about twenty years ago, but he at least ordered enough for everyone. It was better than Seth McFarlane’s smug misogyny but a far cry from the glory days of Billy Crystal and David Letterman. Where’s the spark? When Amy Poehler and Tina Fey can so accurately and yet so benevolently skewer all of their targets, why is the Oscars host so determined to pussyfoot around? More than that, where’s the ambition? When Neil Patrick Harris celebrates Broadway with a routine which would put many Broadway shows to shame, why does Hollywood celebrate its achievements with a show which would make Broadway die of embarrassment at its paucity of imagination?

Worse than the genial but low-key hosting was the presenters’ lack of wit and preparation. It says a lot for the ceremony as a whole when the arguable highpoint of the whole show was one presenter mangling the name of a singer (I’m looking at you, Jewel Oltaveen) but a lot of people stumbled and fluffed and many looked awkward. One or two were briefly amusing, but no-one could clamber up to the level of actually funny, not even Jim Carrey (who at least tried). Two acceptance speeches stand out in my mind and for opposite reasons. Picking up the award for Best Supporting Actress, radiant Lupita Nyong’o was graceful, self-effacing and sincere. Following her searing performance in 12 Years A Slave,  I can only hope she nimbly escapes the guilt-porn cul-de-sac and starts showing her range in a variety of other roles, for she is clearly a magnificent talent. On the other hand, Matthew McConnaghey failed even to mention the name of the dead man on whose grave he scampered to Oscar glory, preferring to name himself as his own personal hero. This takes nothing away from his excellent performance in Dallas Buyers Club but does make me wish – again! – that he had been up against Tom Hanks, as justice and reason dictated.

So, as you all know, my 12-1 long shot of Gravity for Best Picture failed to make me any money, but I did end up not only winning our personal sweepstake, and with a completely clean sheet too (I hedged my bets by going for Slave for Best Picture). However, even if I’d placed an accumulator bet across all eight major categories, all of my choices had such poor odds, I’d have been lucky to double my money.

It might be worthwhile describing how I run my sweepstake, in case anyone reading this wants to run their own next year. Oscar sweepstakes have a couple of typical approaches, which have opposite vices and virtues. You can go for the top eight only, but then you tend to get a lot of general agreement – many are two-horse races such as Best Director this year, and many are one horse races – who would have bet against Cate Blanchett?

The other obvious option is to have everybody predict the winner in all 24-odd categories, but for many people, choosing who will win Best Sound Effects Editing or Best Documentary Short is going to be little short of guesswork. So, you may get a greater spread of entries, but people may well get bored of filling in quite  so many boxes and start choosing at random which makes a win much less satisfying.

I’ve found a way of splitting the difference. Everybody makes their choice of the Big Eight (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay) and all the other categories are put into a hat. Each player pulls just one “wildcard” category from the hat and makes their choices of that and only that category for a total of nine picks per player. This has a number of advantages. It adds a little bit of luck – if you got Best Song this time round, it was pretty easy to pick “Let It Go” – but does allow you to do your homework to find out, for example, what the documentary aficionados were raving about this year, without the project taking hours on end. It also makes the ceremony more fun. “Best Score is up next – Sam, that’s your wildcard”.

As to whether justice was done or not, I’m not convinced that 12 Years a Slave will necessarily be a film for the ages. Gravity I think will either turn out to be a groundbreaker which is quickly overtaken, or more likely a Terminator 2 where the effects are both groundbreaking and rarely equalled. The advantage of the streamlined storytelling is that it contains less material which is likely to date it. The drawback of course is that it may be too thin to really resonate through the ensuing years. What the Best Director win will have done for Alfonso Cuaron is to buy him carte blanche to direct absolutely whatever he likes next. That promises to be interesting.

On the screenplay front, the win for Spike Jonze is certainly worthy. The win for John Ridley maybe less so, but I don’t know which contender deserved it a lot more – Wolf of Wall Street maybe? As I predicted, American Hustle was overlooked entirely, which I also think is just. It’s a lot of fun, but it feels a little hollow compared to a lot of its more substantial neighbours. It was a shame that Nebraska didn’t win anything, but going category-by-category I can’t see an obvious oversight.

That’s it then for another year. Join me in 2015 and we’ll do it all again.

Last of my cycle of Oscar movies for 2014 and in many ways it’s the smallest story. The benefit of allowing more movies to battle it out for Academy glory (which doesn’t quite outway the drawback of cluttering the field with irrelevant also-rans) is that movies which are smaller in scope get a chance to compete along with the weighty historical epics, gigantic triumph-over-adversity narratives and special effects fantasies.

Jean-Marc Vallee’s tightly-focused movie centres on Ron Woodroof, diagnosed in 1985, to his horror and disgust, with HIV and given 30 days to live. Although the clock doesn’t run out quite that quickly, his life is changed by the diagnosis, but even compared to the small stakes of Philomena, this tale feels tiny. Woodruff doesn’t change the world, the law, or even his mind except in very small degrees, but it’s a testament to the clarity and energy of the filmmaking and the commitment of the actors that it never feels small as it unfolds.

As Woodroof, McConaughey is revelatory. Painfully gaunt, his lean features framed by an absurd porn-star moustache, his anxious eyes darting from behind heavy lids, he seems poleaxed by the diagnosis, only to flare up into indignant rage and then nimbly transform into a charmy, swaggering with easy charisma. Equally well-judged in a showier role which could so easily have become a cartoon, is Jared Leto as transgender Raymond/Rayon, as Woodroof’s partner in crime. Distrustful of the AZT being pushed by Dr Dennis O’Hare (decent, but given little to do), the two AIDS patients set up a “buyers club”, $400 monthly membership of which includes free experimental HIV drugs smuggled in from Mexico, Japan or wherever Woodroof can procure them.

Pitched between O’Hare’s drug company party line and McConnaghey’s maverick free-marketeering is Jennifer Garner whose Dr Saks is eventually so supportive of McConnaghey’s efforts that it costs her her job. Hers is probably the least satisfactory character, although Garner is as luminous as ever, as the screenplay can’t spare the time to create any kind of real emotional life for her and so she just watches from the sidelines as the movie unfolds around her.

The real triumph of the film is the way director Vallee marshalls the meagre resources at his disposal. With a drastically truncated 25 day shoot, he cuts nimbly, propels the story not just efficiently but effervescently, the drive of the storytelling preventing the grimness of the subject matter from overwhelming the piece. Unable to mount complicated set-ups, he uses the loose hand-held style to his advantage, and in particular uses sound design absolutely brilliantly to make his audience at one with Woodruff’s symptoms and emotional state.

Only in the last 10 or so minutes does it stumble at all, with a court case introduced too late in the day to seem truly relevant or interesting, and lacking the presence of the delightful Leto, but this is a minor quibble in a compelling and charismatic movie that does prove that McConnaghey is more than shirtless rom-com fodder, but does much else besides.

So, with the awards themselves just hours away I am revising my predictions slightly. McConnaghey I think may have the edge over Ejiofor for Best Actor, but it will be a close race. In the screenplay stakes, Her also seems to be gaining ground over American Hustle which might walk away gonglessly despite its wealth of nominations. Other than that, I think I’m on firm ground, but as so many of my picks are the bookies’ favourites, even an accumulator can’t win me any real cash, so I’m still holding out the faintest of hopes that Gravity will walk away with Best Picture, netting me £120 for a ten quid stake.

Overall, though, my favourite of this year’s nine isn’t as groundbreaking as Alfonso Cuaron’s film, nor as moving as 12 Years, nor even as charming as Philomena, but it was the most purely entertaining of the set and included a career-defining performance as well as any number of stunning sequences – it’s Martin Scorse’s The Wolf of Wall Street, a very fine film in what’s been a pretty strong year, Llewyn Davis aside.

Some spoilers – be warned.

As previously noted, I thought this was a dreadful idea for a movie. Electric Dreams seemed facile and absurd in 1984, but computers being so much more commonplace in 2014, we know so much more about their strengths and limitations now which makes a movie like this very, very tricky to pull off. Anyone who has talked to Siri for any length of time will no doubt have been delighted by the wit of some of the reponses and will also have been frustrated by the system’s inability to parse what would seem like very simple instructions to another human.

And yet, from this thinnest and seemingly most unproductive of premises, Spike Jonze as writer and director has created something rather magical. This sweet, sad, odd, funny, charming, moving film is by no means perfect but it is one of the most purely original and beguiling films of the year, and I think earns its place come Oscar time, albeit in the “also-ran” category.

The pitch is as follows – sometime in the near future, when trousers are worn extremely high and writing sappy letters on behalf of other people is a full-time job, a new operating system will be developed which has full artificial intelligence and which is expressly designed to interact with you. Theodore Twombly, whose personal life is a disaster, purchases and installs this software, creating a virtual companion for himself, named Samantha, whom he proceeds to fall in love with.

There are numerous pitfalls here for an unwary director. The first is to make the software convincing. By beginning the story in a future world, where video games take up half the living room and where natural language interaction is the usual way of issuing instructions to personal computers, Jonze creates a very useful credibility stepping-stone from the limitations of today’s devices to the unlimited processing powers of Samantha. The second is to avoid it being creepy. If we feel like Samantha is a made-to-order psychological prostitute, we will lose sympathy for the lead character very quickly. Jonze carefully lays the groundwork, confronting Twombly with a genuine creep in the form of a very funny voice-only cameo from Kristen Wiig as one “SexyKitten” whom Twombly meets in an online sex chat room. But he is also helped enormously by Joaquin Phoenix’s performance, which is suitably off-kilter – a straight-arrow leading man actor like Matt Damon or Tom Cruise kills the movie dead – but also achingly vulnerable and uncertain.

It’s also clear that – as far as Jonze is concerned – this isn’t really a science fiction movie. The world-building is all relegated to the background, we have no idea what breakthroughs have made this technology possible, and the details of how “Samantha” works are glossed over (the interview which the installer conducts is over with almost before it’s begun – this isn’t a made-to-order perfect woman unless the company has been spying on Twombly for months). And there’s no broadening of the scope of the story to show, for example, the company which created this software getting wiped out on the stock exchange when all the sentient OSes suddenly decide to “leave”. Sometimes, this refusal to remove the narrative blinkers is a weakness. When Samantha goes off-line, leaving Twombly to panic and rush his hand-set to the IT emergency room, she blithely replies on her return that she had sent him an email informing him of her forthcoming absence. Fine, but how is he expected to read an email without an operating system?

However, when the ramifications of this “magic bean” intersect with the human drama which is unfolding, then the follow-through is admirably thorough. Human/OS romantic relationships are, if not taken for granted, certainly expected and talked about. Of course! Of course Theodore wouldn’t be the only one to become intimate with his gracefully personal personal assistant. An OS has more in common with another OSes than with a human master. Of course! And of course they would be able to communicate effortlessly with each other in this connected world.

The limited scope of the movie puts a lot of weight on a relatively small cast. As well as Phoenix, Jonze casts Rooney Mara as Twombly’s ex-wife, Chris Pratt as his work buddy, Olivia Wilde as his blind date, Amy Adams as his best gal-pal and – apparently – a 25-year-old David Hyde Pierce as her husband. All do excellent work, especially Wilde who makes the most of a two-scene cameo. Amy Adams is on fine form too, far less glamorous then in American Hustle but equally compelling.

As Twombly blunders through misunderstanding after crass remark, he is permitted some moments of happiness, even joy, in Samantha’s company and Scarlett Johansson also does lovely work as the voice of the software. It’s these scenes which give us hope for the future. Twombly’s relationship with his computer may have been a horribly misguided, fucked-up, dead end (nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the extraordinary scene where Samantha procures a sexual surrogate to consummate her and Theodore’s love) but it helped heal some wounds, and Theodore ends the film if not having been made whole then at least having learned to feel again, to laugh again, to share again.

With a lovely and very distinctive soundtrack from Canadian band Arcade Fire, Her is a very carefully controlled piece of work – delicate, intimate and precisely focused. By avoiding really exploring the wider consequences of the creation of an army of Samanthas, Jonze is able to tell a deeply personal story about one man’s struggle against loneliness. But it’s still occasionally frustrating to get only tiny glimpses of another, broader, more technological but no less interesting, story happening outside the frame. Whether it would have been possible to set such a fragile love story in this wider context is unanswerable. What’s clear is that Spike Jonze achieved exactly what he set out to, and the result is rather lovely.

I was surprised that this didn’t sneak into the Best Picture nominees. Ever since 1996’s Fargo, the Academy has tended to appreciate the Coen Brothers’ efforts, nominating True Grit in 2010, A Serious Man in 2009 and No Country for Old Men which won in 2007. I was even more surprised given the near-universal critical acclaim it received, and since I’ve enjoyed almost everything the Coens have produced, I fully expected to love this one. Having seen it, I’m no longer surprised that it wasn’t nominated and even more startled at the unstinting praise it seems to have garnered.

It starts promisingly, with Oscar Isaac brilliantly portraying Llewyn Davis as a bitter, misanthropic, parasitical, drifter, permanently couch-surfing as he struggles to scratch together a few hundred bucks here and there playing folk music. On leaving the apartment of his bewilderingly benevolent uptown friends the Gorfeins, he mistakenly lets their cat out and ends up almost adopting the poor thing. From here, he ends up at Carey Mulligan’s Greenwich Village apartment and manages to make a little bit of cash playing guitar on a novelty song written by her boyfriend played by Justin Timberlake.

So far, so good. We are offered a bracingly unlikeable hero, struggling for meaning and identity in a heartless universe – see also Barton Fink, Larry Gopnik and to some extent, even Fargo’s Jerry  Lundegaard. But this is a movie trying to find a centre, a narrative thread that will pull us through. We have various plots set in motion – Llewyn’s opportunity to return to the navy, the Gorfein’s cat, his ex-girlfriend who may have secretly raised his child in Akron, the abortion which he has to procur for Mulligan, the song he has recorded with Timberlake, but they have not yet begun to satisfyingly mesh.

And suddenly, they are all, repeat all, underline all, abandoned for an entirely self-contained thirty minute stretch in the middle of the movie, wherein Llewyn shares a car with an absurdly over-the-top John Goodman, laboriously makes his way to Chicago, gets an amazing offer from record magnate F Murray Abraham, turns it down and equally laboriously makes his way back to Chicago to rejoin the movie I thought I was watching. By now, even if the Coens had been interested in joining up the plot-threads, there isn’t time, so it’s left to a clumsy revisiting of an earlier flash-forward to try and give this narrative porridge some sense of structure. It’s worth noticing that this is the third rather episodic film I’ve seen in a row to use this device and here it’s done particularly pointlessly. The sequence we have to watch twice is hardly any more interesting or significant than those around it, and it’s far from clear when we first see it that it is a flash-forward which briefly threatens to turn the whole film into Groundhog Day when suddenly it starts happening again.

I can certainly see what other critics liked about this – Llewyn is a fascinating character, brilliantly realised by Oscar Isaac and by music supervisors T-Bone Burnett and Marcus Mumford. The supporting cast are all fine, and some (Abraham, Mulligan) are exceptional. Some of the episodes are diverting in themselves, others are just a bit “so-what”, but the whole is so wilfully disorganised and uninterested in cause-and-effect that it just starts to become tedious. If you can’t be bothered to arrange the episodes in your story to create some semblance of relevance, I’m not sure I can be bothered to watch.

We get to see Llewyn at his most vulnerable when his doctor friend reveals that he might have a child in Akron. It’s possibly the most powerful scene in the film. Later as he is driving back from Chicago, he passes the turning for Akron – but declines to take it. In a movie which generally has been well-structured and where the plot is strong, this would be a fascinating character beat. In a movie which is characterised by hopeful juxtaposition of unrelated cameos, it’s the last straw.

I return briefly to some points I made about 12 Years a Slave, while noting that Llewyn Davis is by far the lesser film. It is certainly arguable that the events depicting in the Coens’ film are much more like real-life. But it’s also worth pointing out that real life is frequently very boring. The job of an entertainer in a narrative medium is to cut out the dull bits and give the rest relevance and power by properly constructing the architecture of the story. It is also no doubt true that the point of the film is largely that Llewyn is fundamentally incapable of change, growth or development, but it nevertheless seems to me that the story of a character who cannot change can be much more powerfully told if placed in a context where familiar screen archetypes would change. Instead, Llewyn’s “fuck this” attitude seems to have infected the entire screenplay, resulting in a series of unrelated events which wouldn’t really have the power to change anybody.

I don’t know if this kind of what-the-hell plotting is intended to give the movie greater poignancy, significance, insight or profundity. I do know that simply typing up a handful of unrelated incidents and stopping on page 120 is a hell of lot easier than constructing a satisfying narrative, with set-ups and payoffs and cause-and-effect throughout. A major disappointment from one of my favourite movie-makers and I can’t for the life of me understand why everyone else seems to love it so much.

It occurs to me that I am pretty much a Coen completest, so for context, here’s a quick rundown of my take on their other movies.

Blood Simple
Powerful, brooding, brilliantly plotted and properly nasty. The low budget shows from time to time, but with a script and performances this good, who cares?

Raising Arizona
Their breakthrough, a sort of live-action cartoon, radically different from their debut, with brilliantly demented lead performances from Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter. I don’t love it the way some people do, but I like it a lot.

Miller’s Crossing
Amazingly complicated film noir with classic scene after classic scene. Just great.

Barton Fink
Just possibly my favourite – a film only the Coens could make. A satire on Hollywood capitalism and East Coast narcissism equally which suddenly turns into a ferocious grand-guinol nightmare in the final reel.

The Hudsucker Proxy
Maybe their most charming film, although a big flop at the box office, especially compared to its more than usually lavish budget. I like it a great deal, possibly because of how unpopular it is amongst Coen fans.

Fargo
A masterpiece of atmosphere, characterisation, plotting and cinematography. Earns all the praise the gets lavished upon it.

The Big Lebowski
Sprawls where Fargo marches relentlessly, bloated where Fink is lean and focused, but by combining the life-and-death stakes of Fargo’s kidnapping plot, with Hudsucker’s charmingly naive characters, the Coens fashioned another classic which won them armies of new fans.

O Brother Where Art Thou?
A disappointment after the brilliant run of form they experienced up till now. The cheerful stupidity of the characters pulls in the opposite direction from the Homeric template they’ve given themselves and so the film lurches about a bit and goes past several possible endings. The lead performances however are great and the film contains many stand-out sequences.

The Man Who Wasn’t There
Powerful stuff to begin with, but the plot runs out of steam and eventually turns into the same pointless slurry as Llewyn Davis only without the songs. My least favourite of their films by quite a distance.

Intolerable Cruelty
The reviews of this were so bad, I had to stay away. It’s not a true Coen Brothers movie in any case, as Joel and Ethan were drafted in to doctor an ailing script and somehow ended up directing it.

The Ladykillers
Just horrible. If you have the urge to watch this film, just put on the 1955 Alexander Mackendrick version instead. Watch it all the way to the end. Then watch it again. Then destroy any copy of the Coens film in your possession. The only reason I like this more than The Man Who Wasn’t There is Tom Hanks as The Professor. He is electrifying throughout.

No Country for Old Men
Frustrating, because again any semblance of plotting is abandoned in the final third, but the shift in emphasis seems somewhat more purposeful here, and all the sequences are excellent, even if it feels a little bit like reels from two different, but related, movies have been accidentally spliced together.

Burn After Reading
Somewhat trivial, but bouncy and fun. Very happily passes the time.

A Serious Man
A very similar theme to Llewyn Davis but Larry Gopnik is basically a decent guy who makes good decisions, which makes the tiny calamities which unravel his life so much more meaningful. Larry Gopnik’s life doesn’t make much sense to him, but he notices this and complains about it, and seems to live in a narrative world where choices matter. Llewyn Davis lives in a narrative world where it doesn’t much matter what he or anybody else does, because no idea carries over from one scene to the next.

True Grit
A far more faithful version of the novel than the earlier version starring John Wayne, with better supporting performances and with better-staged action. After the intensely personal A Serious Man though, this felt a bit workmanlike.

Next up, Spike Jonze’s Her…

I haven’t seen Steve McQueen’s earlier efforts, Hunger (which friends of mine hated) and Shame (which friends of mine loved) and as noted in my earlier post, I was a little wary of guilt porn here. It’s not that the brutal horrors of the American slave trade need not be recreated on film, it’s more a question of what can McQueen add to what has been depicted already. Slim Pickens opting to save a handcart from quicksand but leaving his slaves to their doom in Blazing Saddles is shocking and funny, but Blazing Saddles was a long time ago.

The recent cycle of Hollywood movies examining America’s racist past has so failed to produce a major movie which wasn’t either twee (The Help), focused only on politics (Lincoln) or simply demented (Django Unchained) so there is maybe a need for a movie like this, just as there was, arguably, a need for Schindler’s List to be made, which almost trumps any conversation about the film’s actual merits as a piece of cinema.

Well, I don’t really think I’m sticking my neck out too far when I say that broadly speaking I think slavery was A Bad Thing and so I’m not surprised to have left the cinema sickened and horrified by the brutalisation of those poor unfortunate wretches who found themselves owned by other humans. But overall, I didn’t leave the cinema feeling that this was a magnificent piece of film-making. Important, yes. Necessary, possibly. Deeply felt, almost certainly. But free of flaw? That’s another matter.

The story, just in case you didn’t know, concerns one Solomon Northup, living as a free man in Saratoga, New York, who unwisely accepts the invitation of a couple of white strangers to come and play violin with them in Washington (where slavery is still legal). After imbibing a Mickey Finn, he comes to in chains, and is told that his name is now Platt and that he is free no longer. He is passed from owner to owner until, well, the title of the film kind of spoils the ending.

As might be expected, McQueen and cinematographer Sean Bobbit compose the shots wonderfully, holding on certain images for much longer than might be expected which gives them a stark beauty, even if what is being depicted is horrendously inhumane. And McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley assemble any number of individual scenes of tremendous power – the slave trader touting his wares, the plantation owner’s wife who hurls a decanter at the comely young slave woman who is her husband’s favourite, Northup desperately lying his way out of trouble at knife-point when his letters to his wife and children are discovered, and most shockingly of all, Northup forced to whip another slave to the point of death. Guilt porn? Maybe just a little, but McQueen’s camera – neither cold, dispassionate observer like Michael Hanneke’s, nor soaringly emotive like Spielberg’s – makes you feel every horrible lash.

However, where the filmmakers stumble is in their failure to successfully link individual scenes together to make arresting sequences. This is a film full of unnecessary stops-and-starts, with far too many one-or-two scene guest stars (Paul Giamatti, Brad Pitt, Alfre Woodard, Michael K Williams, Sal off of Mad Men) breaking up the flow. Almost no element of the story carries over from one scene to the next, and several key moments are robbed of their power, either because the context is missing, or in one case, the bizarre choice to show that moment as a very early flash-forward before the film has really got going.

It’s also striking to me that, in common with Schindler’s List, McQueen has chosen a very particular, very unusual slave story to tell, just as Spielberg didn’t want to tell a tale of everyday ordinary Auschwitz folk. Oskar Schindler’s perspective on the Nazi holocaust is utterly unique and the moral calculus which he performs gives a very specific lens through which to view the terrors of the Final Solution. In theory, Northup’s position does the same. Although many free black man and women were kidnapped by the slave trade, almost none escaped to tell the tale, and so Northup’s story is very unusual, and he also makes an excellent viewpoint character. How much easier for McQueen’s affluent, free audience to identify with a man who had everything they had but had it snatched away?

And yet the demands of the plot mean that we only very occasionally get this perspective. Northup is told early on – tell no-one who you really are, tell no-one you can read and write – and so most of the time, he looks and sounds like all the other slaves and this opportunity for a new vantage point is at the very least muted. That’s why it is so frustrating to see his early attempts at writing a letter thrown away as an unnecessary throw-forward. It’s also striking that his eventual release is dealt with in an almost perfunctory manner, in the last few minutes of the film, and his reunion with his family and rehabilitation after the agonies he has suffered provide none of the expected catharsis.

So, why is this and why does nobody else care? Well, there’s a perception that a well-crafted screenplay with neat set-ups and payoffs is formulaic or cheating. This I think is very far from the truth. Obviously, such a thing can be done badly and when the plot gears grind too loudly, one can no longer believe in the events depicted. But even to do this badly takes a lot more effort than what has apparently been done here – make a list of the noteworthy events in Northup’s 12 years’ incarceration and then run them in sequence until he is released. But maybe this stop-start, never building, never crescendoing quality is deliberate? Either to make the film seem more important, or to make it seem more authentic, or to give it the grinding, never-ending, soul-crushing feeling of a life in servitude.

None of these seem to me to be defensible positions. The Shawshank Redemption, for example, free of the perceived need to tell an important story about a terrible human tragedy manages to be authentically relentless, and well-structured, and even to include moments of grace and beauty which Slave can’t or won’t. And it’s not like writing the script didn’t involve making a thousand creative decisions about what to include, what to leave out, what to emphasise, what to overlook and how to paper over the gaps in Northup’s account. All of these choices certainly have been made – this is not a documentary and it certainly doesn’t suffer from walking Wikipedia entry syndrome like say, Behind the Candelabra.

Thankfully, this shortcoming ultimately does very little to undermine what is essentially a very fine piece of film-making. The performances are excellent throughout, with especial praise going to Fassbender and newcomer Lupita Nyong’o who I think must now be a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress for her heart-rending turn as the luckless Patsey. But it’s on Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sturdy shoulders that the whole enterprise rests and he is nothing short of magnificent. When McQueen’s camera hangs on his face, impassive and yet hauntingly expressive, he is able to take the disparate bits and pieces of Northup’s life and somehow braid them together in the way he stares at the horizon. In those moments, the film achieves an almost terrible beauty and an almost unbearable sadness.

Edited 2/2/14 to correct some errors of fact and poor phrasing picked up by commenters – thank you.

It’s Oscar time again. Ladies and gentlemen here are the runners and riders…

The ones I’ve seen already…

Gravity

Tying with American Hustle for most nominations (ten, one more than 12 Years A Slave) it’s perhaps a little surprising to see this getting quite so much Academy love. Pared-back and innovatively-shot it may be, but it’s still essentially a blockbuster thrill-ride at its core. What’s even more surprising is that it hasn’t been overlooked in the “big six” department. Alfonso Cuarón is nominated for Best Director as is Sandra Bullock for Best Actress. To be honest, I don’t think it has much of a chance in any of these categories, except possibly Best Picture ironically. I wouldn’t give myself odds of better than 4-1 but since Paddy Power was offering 12-1 I’ve put a tenner on it. My full review is here.

Captain Phillips

Another one-person-against-the-odds movie (Robert Redford’s All is Lost didn’t get a nod), Paul Greengrass makes a huge virtue of his lean, documentary shooting style and Tom Hanks makes an appealingly unsympathetic hero – although his real-life crew insist that the real guy was even a bigger asshole – but what knocked me out is the total collapse of the Captain Phillips character when the ordeal is over. Tom Hanks’ raw, authentic, bewildered inability to cope with his recent experience is some of the very best screen acting I have ever seen and his failure to be nominated is utterly confounding – especially when antagonist Barkhad Abdi has got a nod for Best Supporting Actor. This is not to take anything away from Abdi’s performance which is very fine, but Hanks’ snub would be easier to understand if the Academy had failed to notice any of the acting in the movie. Anyway, this won’t win the big prize.

Philomena

A delightful, personal, and very moving film showcasing a completely different side of Steve Coogan, who abandons Partridge-style mugging completely to carve out a much more detailed and intimate portrait of a journalist whose compassionate zeal never tips the story into mawkish sentimentality. In fact the whole film pulls off a very delicate balancing act between humour, soap opera, detective story and politics. The detective story is the loser, but it’s by far the least interesting and necessary component. Judi Dench also gets yet another acting nomination. Nothing for Coogan as actor (which would have been surprising but not wholly undeserved) but the screenplay gets a hat-tip.

Nebraska

Alexander Payne continues an extraordinary run beginning (for me at least) with the brilliantly spiky Election, continued with the more subdued but still excellent About Schmidt, the splendidly freewheeling Sideways and the truly marvellous The Descendents which readers may recall I favoured over eventual Best Picture winner The Artist. Nebraska is a very, very simple story. In fact my only real criticism is how noisily the plot gears were grinding in the first twenty minutes to achieve its fairly straightforward set-up, viz – septuagenarian Woody Grant mistakenly believing himself to have won a million bucks in a sweepstake stops off in his old home town en route to collect his winnings.

As soon as we arrive in Hawthorne, however, we are off to the races as Woody reunites with old friends, family and rivals, most of whom are eager to get their hands on his new-found dough. Accompanied by his son (SNL’s Will Forte – a revelation), and eventually his wife (June Squibb, delightful) and brother (Bob Odenkirk), Woody drifts through much of the movie in somewhat of a senior daze, but this lack of desperate questing serves to give the rest of the movie time to settle. Much of the dialogue is peppered with one-liners, but nothing ever seems forced, except possibly the final pay-off which is just a little too neat.

Immaculately shot in cool, grainy black-and-white, this is a real treat and it’s great to see “little” movies like this and Philomena getting the Academy’s attention as well as the big spectaculars, all-star casts and “important” movies – see below.

The ones I haven’t seen yet…

American Hustle

A strong contender in the three horse race for Best Picture, only a year after Silver Linings Playbook, director David O Russell assembles much of the same cast and gets them nominated in all four acting categories again. I was dissatisfied with Silver Linings because I felt the ending sold the characters down the river. Early reports of this suggest that the plotting also goes awry towards the end, but we’ll see. Like Argo, this could make it if the Academy finds Gravity too frivolous and 12 Years A Slave too self-important.

Dallas Buyers Club

This is the one I know the least about. Part of the recent rehabilitation of Matthew McConaughey which began with 2012’s rather unsatisfactory The Paperboy, it also stars Jared Leto as a transgender character and follows the tale of a drug smuggler – not cocaine but untested HIV pharmaceuticals. It’s released in the UK on 7 February so look out for a full review some time after that date.

Her

One of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard for a movie, grinding through the unproductive furrow of the wretched S1m0ne, and the absurd Electric Dreams as well as the ghastly AI and the limp Bicentennial Man. I didn’t see Robot and Frank so maybe that was better. On the other hand, this is Spike Jonze who can usually relied on to be interesting, so let’s give it a whirl. It’s released here, appropriately enough on Valentine’s Day.

The Wolf of Wall Street

I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to a Martin Scorsese movie this much. I couldn’t get on board with The Departed which began by examining the mirror-image moral conundrums faced by a cop-turned-mobster and a mobster-turned-cop, then turned the movie over to Jack Nicholson who proceeded to Nicholson all over the middle third. After his character’s demise, the afore-mentioned moral conundrum is entirely lost in a welter of gunfire and bodies hitting the decks. It scarcely seems to matter what moral choices any of these characters make, today everybody dies. Completely pointless in my view. Shutter Island was diverting but ultimately a rather empty puzzle-box picture, and Hugo was very disappointing (full review here). This, on the other hand, seems to have a much clearer direction to head in, a crackerjack cast and – hey! – jokes! I doubt it will sweep the board though, in what is looking like a pretty strong year.

12 Years A Slave

And here it is – the bookies’ favourite and the likely front-runner, but it remains to be seen after Django Unchained, Lincoln and The Help how much more guilt-porn the Academy can take. It also remains to be seen if it’s any good. I haven’t seen either The Hunger or Shame but I’ve heard extremely mixed reports about both. 12 Years has been largely praised by critics and has done decent box office, but I worry that it will be too worthy and not engaging enough as a piece of narrative.

What wasn’t nominated

As well as All is Lost missing out, I had expected to see Inside Llewyn Davis get a mention and possibly August: Osage County. I feared that the execrable Blue Jasmine would appear and vaguely wondered if The Butler was in with a chance. Although I loved Saving Mr Banks and although the Academy generally appreciates Hollywood-devours-itself movies, that film always looked too… breezy to be in with a chance. In fact, the breezy parts I liked the best. When it attempts to wring psychological depth out of a piece of fruit, and when we spend endless tediously repetitive minutes cavorting with Colin Farrell in what is meant to be small-town Australia, I want to check out.

Other predictions…

If it all goes Steve McQueen’s way, and it still could, then Chiwetel Ejiofor has a good chance for Best Actor and McQueen himself for Best Director. Best Actress is probably going to Cate Blanchett – it’s hard to overlook such a stellar performance if, like me, you didn’t think much of the script. For people who liked the rest of the movie, it must have seemed virtually god-given.

As is often the case, the supporting nominations are a little more open. Michael Fassbender is probably the front-runner, again for 12 Years A Slave, but I wonder if Jared Leto might just nick it. For Best Actress, June Squibb must be a good bet. The Academy loves them some old ladies and if those old ladies are on film lifting up their skirts in a graveyard in order to taunt an old suitor in his grave, so much the better.

Best Director will probably go the same way as Best Picture, so if they give it to Alfonso Cuarón, and your bookie is still open, put a big bet down on Gravity immediately. On the other hand if, as seems more likely, it isn’t Gravity’s night, I can see these two awards splitting between Slave and Hustle although I’m not sure which way around is more likely.

Finally, screenplays and as usual we have two bites at the cherry as the Academy distinguishes (sometimes eccentrically) between original screenplays and adaptions. In the Original Screenplay category, I imagine American Hustle has it sewn up, and likewise I would expect Adapted to go to 12 Years A Slave. If, say, The Wolf of Wall Street pinches Best Adapted Screenplay, we could be in for some 3:00am surprises.

Okay, that’s where we’re at. More reviews coming soon.

This is a quick spoiler-free review of Gravity which I saw yesterday at the IMAX. A more thorough review, full of spoiler-y goodness may follow later. Or not.

So, firstly – believe the hype. Everything you’ve heard about these being the best space sequences, and especially the best weightless sequences ever shot – that’s all true. Almost every frame is stupefyingly convincing. IMAX 3D makes all the difference, I imagine this would lose a lot on Blu-Ray, or heaven forbid DVD.

And I’ve been pretty down on 3D in the past but here it’s used with remarkable taste and restraint. We got a trailer for The Hobbit before the movie and it had that awful cardboard cut-out look that so many stereoscopic movies have these days. In Gravity, apart from some flying debris, what you mainly get is depth – horrifying, unimaginable, inky, depth.

The storyline is lean to the point of austere. After a dizzying 12 minute sequence with no apparent cuts, all hell breaks lose when a cloud of debris ploughs in to astronauts repairing the Hubble Space Telescope. Minutes later George Clooney’s grizzled and loquacious old space-salt and Sandra Bullock’s wet-behind-the-ears scientist are the only survivors with no working shuttle to get them back to Earth. What follows is an amazingly contained and sustained ordeal as they struggle to make it back to Earth safely.

Director Alfonso Cuarón (who wrote the screenplay with his son Jonas) is extraordinarily rigorous about point-of-view, almost never showing us material which would not be visible to the protagonists, and only allowing such sounds as would be likely to transmit through spacesuits to be heard. In one groundbreaking shot, the camera drifts, almost lazily, inside Sandra Bullock’s helmet and back out again. What’s impressive is that this doesn’t seem like showboating, it’s a natural part of the visual grammar of the movie.

It isn’t perfect. Most of the technical quibbles are irrelevant to me, when they got so much else right. I don’t really care that the shuttle has been decommissioned, or that orbital mechanics make journeys from one craft to another much more complex than is depicted here. I’m sure the law and medicine I see practiced in movies isn’t accurate either. So what? But I do have some issues of pure audience credibility in the last few minutes.

And the tone wobbles a little in the middle. By making the bold, and probably correct, decision to avoid clumsy flashbacks to her life back on Earth, Cuarón as writer and director requires that Sandra Bullock’s back-story is delivered almost entirely in two brief dialogue scenes, at least one of which felt just a little forced. But Bullock and Clooney both do excellent work here – theirs are basically the only faces we see – aided by (of course) Ed Harris as mission control, voice only and precious little of that.

Gravity is an extraordinary achievement, a fine adventure story in a breathtaking environment, helmed with precision and rigour. I don’t know how much of it will live with me, but I’ve very, very pleased to have seen it, and delighted to see it get made. Such a strongly authored piece, with no franchise to back it (and it’s essentially immune to sequels) deserves to do well and it’s been killing it at the box office.

There is even talk of Oscar nominations – about which, more very shortly…

Here are two reviews of Star Trek into Darkness. The first is the review I would have written immediately upon leaving the IMAX cinema. The second is the review I would have written a week later.

Initial reaction

Now that’s how you do a Star Trek movie for the masses – in fact, that’s how you do a tent-pole, late-franchise blockbuster. Driving action, great character beats, well plotted and hugely entertaining. A genuinely hissable villain, who still gets some depth; fantastic set pieces directed with genuine brio; loveable characters with snappy banter; peerless effects work and – amazingly enough – a plot which basically makes sense all the way through. Even the villain’s evil plan makes some sort of sense! Add to this some for-the-fans kisses to the past and you have a pretty much perfect package. Only that silly name lets it down.

One week later

Fucking hell, what was I thinking?

Okay, it does look great on an IMAX screen, and the cast are basically all up for it – the new trio of Pine, Quinto and Saldana (no love for Bones?) are keenly aided by regulars Pegg, Urban, Cho and Yelchin. Guest stars Peter Weller and Benedict Cumberbatch understand what is expected of them and Alice Eve, I dunno, gets her kit off for absolutely no reason at all.

And yes, the big sweep of the plot makes some kind of sense, but all the details are badly handled. The opening sequence (oh, by the way – spoilers!) in which Kirk and co detonate a device to prevent a volcano from wiping out a primitive civilisation and in which Kirk demonstrates that violating the Prime Directive is worth saving a crew member for (especially if it’s Spock) is fine, except when you start thinking about it, which a week after I’d seen the movie, unfortunately I was.

So, let’s take it as read that for reasons unspecified, the Enterprise happens to be close enough to this planet to notice that a) the volcano is about to blow and b) the people on the surface are not technologically advanced enough to be able to survive. And let’s also grant that Spock, who is supposed to be on the side of non-interference don’t forget, agrees that interfering on this occasion is warranted, provided they don’t get caught. This is all pretty thin, but okay.

So, they will save the day with a magic anti-volcano device. I say magic because we are given no indication whatever about how it is meant to work, but it seems to be freezing or solidifying the erupting material, which means that the pressure will continue to build up. The Enterprise crew may have only bought the Tribe of Face Paint a day or two. But this preposterously advanced device which can manipulate matter in undreamt of ways, created by a civilisation hundreds of years ahead of our own has to be put there by a bloke and not sent in by a robot? We have pilot-less drones that can drop bombs on autopilot today – did we just forget how to do that in the 23^rd century? Okay, fine – who will we send on this unnecessary and incredibly risky mission? How about the second most senior bridge officer? Brilliant!

Oh, and that’s before we come to the Enterprise’s cunning hiding place – under the sea. On the day, this looked so spectacular, I quite forgot to ask how the rubbery fuck it got down there without anyone seeing or hearing it!? Like so much of this damn movie, it sounds good for a second, it looks great for a moment, but it doesn’t really mean anything or make any sense.

I could go on at much, much greater length than this – almost every scene makes this error in one way or another, (Federation top brass doesn’t sit behind bullet proof glass, that wasn’t what you said Trans-Warp was in the last film, sure let’s have these very suspicious torpedoes on board, Bones has cured death etc. etc.), but instead I’d like to touch on just two points. I’m even going to give the movie a pass on the whole villain’s-plan-was-to-get-captured-by-the-good-guys-all-along trope. Well, be fair, I gave Skyfall a pass on that too, and I’d hate to be inconsistent! (I even gave Skyfall a pass on Silva trying to kill James Bond by throwing a tube train at him, because – even on second viewing – I’m having such a good time with the movie, I’d far rather gape in happy stupefaction at the awesome spectacle, than gripe humourlessly about how, and why, one would actually set such a thing up. Suspension of disbelief has its limits, however.)

No, I want to talk about two ways in which JJ’s Trek is very different from Roddenberry’s (or Berman’s or Meyer’s for that matter). The first is that JJ goes to great lengths to make everything in the movie solid, tangible and physical. The bomb which Bones and Marcus (why Bones!?) have to defuse, for example, clamps Bone’s hand inside it; the piece of machinery which Kirk has to fix must be battered into alignment and so on. For a time I thought this was a plus, but it sometimes has the effect of making things which should be extraordinary and amazing, instead feel prosaic and ordinary.

In Stephen J Whitfield’s amazing book Star Trek: The Making of A Television Series, published after the second season of the original series went out, and which goes into fascinating detail about how this landmark show struggled on to the air, Roddenberry is described striding into the offices of the effects team and telling them that whatever method of propulsion the Enterprise used should look hugely powerful, but that he never wanted to see any rockets, plumes of smoke or anything familiar from current Earth technology. He then strode out, leaving the team feeling he had asked for the impossible. But the way the Enterprise moves through space is impossible and so it needed not to look ordinary. The glowing nacelles of the Federation fleet have been modified many times since then, but that wise dictum has always been adhered to.

Until now.

Now, when – following a scene of appalling carnage which gets completely glossed over – the Enterprise pulls out of a near-fatal dive, lots of absurd little rockets are seen firing out of the saucer section to keep the thing aloft. Suddenly, we have to confront the physics of what could possibly keep this colossal ship in the air, and the whole thing starts to seem entirely ridiculous.

To be clear – I’m not saying “Roddenberry said it and so it can never be changed.” Roddenberry said all sorts of nonsense, and TNG in particular improved dramatically when he stepped away. But I am saying that on this occasion he was dead right and JJ was so, so, so wrong.

Worse however is this film’s insistence on homaging Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – probably the best of the Trek movies to date, with its only real competition being First Contact in my opinion (Voyage Home is fun, but it isn’t really a Star Trek movie and Undiscovered Country is hugely flattered by the films either side of it, but pales next to Khan). This trend started in the first JJ film, wherein we actually get to see Kirk’s completion of the Kobyashi Maru test.

A major theme of Khan (see, it’s a proper movie, it has things like themes) is whether or not Kirk can face a no-win situation. The Kobyashi Maru is an unrealistically tough simulation which Star Fleet cadets are put through. Facing a highly unlikely attack by super aggressive Klingon war-birds, rookie captains will have no choice but to abandon ship or be destroyed. Kirk, we learn in the 1982 movie, covertly rewrote the simulation so it was possible to win – for which he was awarded a special prize for initiative but, notes Spock, he thus avoided having to face a no-win situation which was the point of the test.

The 2009 film actually shows this incident, but whereas I had always assumed that the point of Kirk’s deception was to fool the Academy into thinking that their supposedly no-win situation actually did present a perceptive commanding officer with a way to win, here the simulation which Kirk plays out has quite clearly been altered. I had always assumed that he hoped to get away with it, and be thought an astoundingly brilliant commander, not a grubby-handed hacker. How would it help his career in any way at all to cheat in such an obnoxiously obvious way. Chris Pine plays the scene with apple-chomping insouciance which I imagine is supposed to be crowd-pleasing but in fact, since the rewritten simulation could have been beaten by a five-year-old, he just seems like a jerk; and because his deception is instantly obvious to all, it is entirely without reason.

Star Trek Into Darkness continues revisiting and traducing its far worthier progenitor, but here we go one step beyond dramatizing scenes we had previously only heard about (and in the process turning subtle character beats into farcical kids cartoon sequences). Again and again, the new movie repeats scenes from Khan but – wait for it – with a twist. Alas, on a second viewing my reaction shifts from being a happy chuckle of aren’t-I-clever recognition into the slightly seedy cough of a laugh on seeing a familiar scene from a classic movie largely and witlessly reproduced in the service of some ghastly spoof such as Scary Movie or Dracula Dead and Loving It.

Spock giving his life for Kirk was shocking, moving and meant something in 1982. Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto’s cross-cast karaoke version of the same scene is unoriginal, unearned, frustratingly impermanent (because Bones has cured death) and frankly laughable. What next? Will the next Pine/Quinto film give us the death of Spock’s son instead of Kirk’s? Then manatees instead of whales? God help us when we get to the fifth film, if we get that far. Must we endure bad photocopies of favourite scenes for movie after movie? What the hell happened to creating original plots?

And the name is still stupid.

JJ is moving on, of course, to Star Wars. We can only wait and see what he makes of that franchise.