Public Enemies

I’ve been waiting three years to delve into the work of one of my all time favourite film-makers Michael Mann, the great stylist of male machismo within the milieu of the crime film, the chronicler of the pursuit for perfection in not only what you do but how you live your life on either side of the rule of law. As a colour degraded Universal Studio title materialised on screen I knew we were in for quite a ride, as in all of Mann’s pictures every fragment of the film has been attuned to deliver a perfectly realised whole, in this case an assured 21st century update of the iconic gangster cycle of films unleashed by RKO and Warner Bothers back in the 30’s and 40’s.

   

It’s 1933 and America is in the midst of the great depression. Crime is booming as a parade of bank robbers, bandits and desperado’s unleash a tsunami of anarchy throughout the American landscape, a rogues gallery of colourful monikered criminals such as Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger making a mockery of the hamstrung police who are unable to pursue their quarry over state lines or make any concerted, integrated offensive to crush the transgressors. Johnny Depp is the infamous John Dillinger, the most successful and charismatic bank-robber of the era whose antics force the state, personified in J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) to create the nascent FBI, dispatching their top agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) to bring Dillinger and his crew to justice, dead or alive.

 

I’m not the first to realise that the film has a familiar structure to many of Mann’s other films and could slot quite easily into a trilogy with ‘Thief‘ and ‘Heat‘ – a charismatic central male protagonist who is operating at the very peak of his professional powers who is engaged in a tragic, doomed romance.  The anti-heroes personal code of honour ultimately signaling his demise at the hands of powerful forces beyond his control be they the criminal syndicate perturbed by the unwanted attention his infractions are bringing upon their organisation or the forces of law and order who demand retribution and the re-establishment of the status-quo. When I first saw the trailer I was a little worried that the HD technique wouldn’t gel with the historical period, thankfully those concerns swiftly disintegrated as the film unfurled, the digital verite technique plunging the viewer into a state of gripping immediacy, fully immersed in the midst of the action so much so that you’re almost crouching down in the seat to avoid the bullets ricocheting around the theatre during the battles and quietly admiring the contours of the performances during the character scenes. As usual with Mann the production values are state of the art, the locations are beautifully decorated and lit, the costume design magnificent, the evocation of period thoroughly convincing.

 

The robbery and combat sequences are outstanding and prove once again that Mann is the finest action director in America, the high point being a pitched battle staged at the Little Bohemia Lodge out in the remote Wisconsin woods. Incredibly this was shot not only in the real cabin that the real Dillinger fought his way out from but the scene was shot quite unintentionally (Mann only realised the coincidence after revisiting the production schedule) on the same date – April 22nd – that Dillinger evaded justice some 75 years prior. That’s serendipity. The cast – and what a cast – are also uniformly excellent, even Bale invests his character with more than  a simple brooding intensity which seems to be his autopilot mode these days, he’s a little more flippant yet still steely determined to take Dillinger down using the most advanced forensic methods available. Depp keeps things distant, you never quite get a grip on who Dillinger was or what drives his chaotic intentions, the only insight into his character delivered in a dialogue exchange with Billie where he replies to her concerns that she doesn’t know him enough to turn outcast with him - ’I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars… and you. What else you need to know?’ The likes of Stephen Graham (the nutter from ‘This is England’), Stephen Dorff, David Wenham, Lili Taylor and Leelee Sobieski round out one of the best casts I’ve seen for quite some time.

 

Mann is the undisputed master of the crime film and thoroughly understands its dimensions, archetypes and history. Beyond the pleasing references to prior masterpieces of the genre in the film he also alludes to some of the key components of gangster movies, the transformation from agrarian reform to the city that is manifest in the earlier Warner Brothers and RKO pictures as well as an almost abstract feeling of America in transition from the frontier world to mass industrialisation. This is evident when the rogues in ‘Public Enemies’ flee from jail or successful robberies and emerge in the American wilderness in short thrift, as the crime cycle of Cagney and Bogart in the 1930’s usurped the popularity of the Western in American cinema its heroes shifted from the gunslinger to gangster, bidding a fond farewell to their cinematic forebears. So here then is a collection of some of my favourite moments and reviews of one of my most admired directors as best I can track them down, I will keep links to my overall favourite gangster films for my ‘Once Upon A Time In America review. Let’s close on the climax of one of Mann’s other favourite films, Made it Ma, top of the world‘.

North By NorthWest

C’mon now, you didn’t really think I was going to go and see this over the weekend did you? Not a shock I’m sure to anyone who visits the Guardian film pages to see this fifty year old Hitchcock release given the Minty treatment, they’ve been giving it quite a few column inches over the past week or so. I have to confess (ha, do you see – ‘I Confess‘) that this is actually the first Hitchcock film I’ve seen at the cinema which is criminal. Many years ago I did turn up at the Curzon Soho on a Sunday lunchtime, eager to pop my Hitchcock cherry with a double bill of ‘Vertigo‘ and ‘The Birds‘ and I’d only gone and got the bloody dates wrong. Never mind, it was worth the wait as ‘Northwest’ is one of my favourite films by the master of suspense and it was quite a treat in the ideal environs of the well air-conditioned NFT1. I did have a quick look at this beforehand which was underwhelming to say the least, at a tenner a go I should really have killed time before the screening with another wander around Tate Modern down the road.. C’est la vie… 

The legendary Saul Bass at work there of course, Fincher paid tribute of sorts with the titles to ‘Panic Room‘. ‘Northwest’ might be a film about a suit, a sartorial wonder that our hero Cary Grant, the true personification of the word debonair, propels through a simmering world of hidden danger, macabre murder and deviant deception. Laconic Ad-man Roger Thornhill is mistakenly identified as the secret agent George Kaplan during a telegram mix-up in a New York restaurant, after being kidnapped by foreign agents the bewildered Thornhill is enveloped in a cat and mouse game with the nefarious Vandamm (James Mason, never better) and his henchman Leonard (Martin Landau) who frame Thornhill for the murder of a dignitary at the United Nations building. Seeking to clear his name Thornhill falls in with the archetypal Hitchcock icy blonde, the crystalline Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) and a burgeoning romance develops as the government agents and foreign devils struggle to smuggle the all important McGuffin microfiche out of the country….

   

It’s Hitchcock at the peak of his powers, coming off the previous years critically mauled ‘Vertigo‘ he purposely embarked on a more commercial thriller project which was then followed up with the grandfather of all those nasty little slashers ‘Psycho‘ the following year – not a bad run eh? All the usual suspects are here, cameraman Robert Burks, editor George Tomasini, composer Bernard Herrmann and screenwriter Ernest Lehman all contribute to forge one of Hitch’s most celebrated and loved golden age movies. Philip French recently alluded to a curious new theory doing the rounds about these three films forming a loose trilogy where one of the central protagonists is a ghost, a cipher, an invisible presence who may or may not exist – Madeleine in ‘Vertigo’, Kaplan in ‘Northwest’, Norma Bates in ‘Psycho’ but a cursory goggle hasn’t thrown up much, I’m sure there would be all sorts of allusions to psychoanalytic theory and the absence of an Oedipal or Elektra figure, the missing figure being the surrogate id or agent of the superego, all that sort of stuff which I enjoy reading if I’m in the right mood. Critics love to allude to the whirlpool of psychosis that structure our societies and how many of Hitchcock’s films puncture that veneer of normality to let the agents of chaos and murder run free, not dissimilar to much of Lynch’s work now that I think of it. It’s a testament to Hitchcock’s skills that he was able to embed such subtexts into the DNA of many of his films that academics are still coaxing out connections, links and refractions between his work some fifty, sixty years later. For me the star of the show was some of the examples of ‘pure’ cinema which I explore a little below, the gripping Herrmann score and the coolly chilling performance of James Mason, an actor who frequently nudges his way into my favourite actors of all time list, just take a look at ‘Odd Man Out‘, Nicholas Ray’s satirical ‘Bigger Than Life‘, ‘The Wicked Lady‘ and of course ‘Lolita‘ which neatly leads me to link to some recently excavated Kubrick material here.

Lets just take a quick look at this classic scene shall we? First of all, there is no score until the attack begins in earnest toward the end of the sequence, the first trick in Hitch’s arsenal to unsettle and unnerve the viewer. The opening establishing shot projects the dimensions of the action, the lack of cover for Thornhill to furtively scramble toward, an elevation of the importance of space from time in the sequence which is reinforced by each of the shots in the scene lasting roughly the same duration and the editing only accelerating in line with the action toward the scene’s finale. The ominous arrival of the older bus pedestrian raises suspense expectations – is this Kaplan? Is he armed? – which are dismissed through dialogue revelations then reaffirmed when he casually remarks ‘Funny, there’s no crops to be dusted there…..’

 

Truffaut called Hitch out on the scene and asked in a very respectful manner if the sequence wasn’t wholly gratuitous and absurd as it doesn’t in any sense move the plot forward, it doesn’t move the story along (actually it does as it demonstrates the apparent malevolence of Eve as she sent Thornhill to this place to meet the elusive Kaplan but that’s another story) to which Hitchcock customarily replied ‘I practice absurdity quite religiously’. He wanted to take the viewers down a different path, to give them another in the series of shots of adrenaline that peppered the film and climax with the celebrated Mount Rushmore (spoilers) finale. Moreover in usual maestro fashion Hitchcock had the idea to invert the idea of his hero being pursued by the usual trench-coated assassins, our hero in fear of his life, isolated in a pool of light on a shadow drenched city street, an ominous sleek limousine quietly prowling into shot in the distance, the usual cliché manner of presentation to build suspense and tension. Instead he decided to take our avatar into the bright sunlight, into blank open countryside where no hidden menace could lurk, a much more challenging puzzle for him to solve cinematically with theoretically a more profound effect on the audience – I’m also left wondering if it was the first example of a hero running away in mid-shot with an explosion erupting behind him. I like and appreciate the sequence like any film-fan but my favourite arrangement in the movie is the auction room scene, the construction is exquisite.

  

Curiously I’ve been thinking about Hitchcock recently in a slightly more tangential way due to one my film pod-casts broadcasting an article where they selected a list of the all time best cinema books that any cineaste should have read and own. This list had made an astoundingly glaring omission by not including this (incredible audio here), not only the seminal work on Hitchcock (although the Spoto is also good) but a project that set the template for the comprehensive interview format book with filmmakers which focused on the conceptions, ideas and ideologies behind the movies and how those themes were wielded with the artistic film-art choices (composition, camera movement, editing, the whole mise-en-scene elements, the employment of certain film stocks) rather than just some of the on-set anecdotal production stuff which of course can also be hugely entertaining. So for the record here is a selection of the best film books I’ve read, from the business and global financial elements through to overviews of specific eras and movements, proceeding on to specific directors and actors, closing on the homogeneous craft of film, there is certainly a wealth of material out there.

Skiff says Rock Steady…

No commentary, just nostalgia inspired by recent events when people mention moonwalks. I’m not being snarky or superior, at my brothers birthday last weekend he mentioned that Frosty Freeze had died which sparked an interest in this type of post. So it goes…..

Corporate;

Original;

I had this on my very first VHS tape, recorded from some ITV Royal Variety Programme. That’s some good memories gentle reader…

And finally here’s the classic BBC documentary…

Wake In Fright

Well here is an interesting relic. It’s always fun to stumble across a potentially brilliant, intruging piece of work but of course I don’t recommend absorbing this stuff on YT. I’ll wait for a proper transfer but in the interim, it looks interesing….

The great documentary that has acceleratd such interest in Ozplotation is here and is strongly recommended.

The Hangover & The Last House On The Left

 

Well I’ve had worse birthdays, a nine hour massacre of the German Blitzkrieg in 2005 was fairly underwhelming but at least I have the weekend for a 2 stage celebration with friends to look forward to. I spent most of the day at a CRC conference, the venue at least was interesting but the continual gags from the speakers about making Co2 emissions disappear wore pretty thin as the day elapsed. The possible irony of holding a climate change conference at the nexus of subterfuge and misdirection in London is not lost on me.

  

Film-wise I have a couple of reports which I’m going to keep as brief as possible. Firstly I caught ‘The Hangover‘ the day I got my new assignment, I had an afternoon to kill before being able to celebrate with  a friend in the evening. It started off with a promising premise for a comedy, four guys motor over to Vegas to launch a monumental stag party but the film deteriorates badly once they awake post celebration – badly hungover – and have to construct the evenings events and locate the missing groom. It has a couple of good moments but most of the comedy fell flat for me, I mean who hasn’t got inadvertently fucked up on GBH, taken the Bellagio for $50K, married a stripper, stole Mike Tyson’s tiger, lost a incisor and kidnapped a Korean under-boss. Amateurs.

  

I’m not sure how I can explain going to see ‘The Last House On The Left‘ remake which has been violating London screens. As usual I can only excuse such abhorrent behaviour on a drive to make the most of my spare time before launching into a new assignment, this wasn’t half as bad as I thought it was going to be but needed to be twice as good to be anything more than a horror movie completest curio. In chime with the original (both of which are loose reworkings of Bergman’s ‘The Virgin Spring’) two girls get kidnapped by a bunch of marauding weirdos who are on the run from the law after springing their leader from custody. After a nasty scene where (SPOILERS ABOUND FOR THE REST OF THE REVIEW) one of the girls is brutally killed, the other raped and left for dead the scumbags seek solace at a nearby remote house as a storm breaks. Of course the house is the second girls home but the parents generously offer shelter to the seemingly innocuous travellers as they think their daughter is staying with friends. Their abstract suspicions are confirmed once their mortally wounded daughter heroically limps home which launches an intense close quarter battle between the desperate parents and evil degenerates….

   

I caught up with the notorious Wes Craven directed original a few years ago once it finally got a UK uncut release and frankly it was boring. It certainly has that urgent, exploitation snuff movie sense that the film was made from 16mm cast offs from cheap 70’s porno’s and mondo movie weirdness but the whole enterprise left me undisgusted and unmoved. I’m not the biggest fan of these movies, some of those vérité, documentary style nasty films from the 70’s are hilarious fun that deliver a genuine, unsettling chill (”Texas Chainsaw‘ of course) but most of the others – ‘I Spit On Your Grave‘, ‘The Hills Have Eyes‘ – leave me cold despite their alleged submerged feminist and class critiques. The problems are two-fold with this reworking. Firstly it has a defined and conscious shooting style, a dour bleached colour scheme with hints of a graveyard ochre green which befits the subject matter but feels much too polished and forced to immerse you in the horrific events – it’s detached, it’s stylised, it’s neutered.

  

Secondly and most importantly for this stuff the remake is a survival film not a revenge film. In the original both girls are killed which raises the questions of how far would you go to avenge your child, in the wilderness, divorced from civilisation – that’s a reasonably interesting and valid premise for a horror flick as the viewer is encouraged to cheer on the violence inflicted on the transgressors, supposedly questioning his/her reaction on the drive home from the drive-in. In LHOTL2 the daughter is still barely alive and the dispatch of the criminals is an urgent necessity, an obstacle which enables the parents to launch into action movie heroics and ludicrous fight scenes to save the day. The murder & rape scene in version 2, like the original, is pretty hard to watch and kudos to the filmmakers in the remake for not diluting the key driver of the film – at least they got that right. The criminal leader Krug (it took me ages to identify him from other stuff) is suitably nasty and one of the revenge kills has some amusing echoes of the memorable kill in ”Torn Curtain‘, Hitch I’m sure would have been agreeably flattered. A mixed bag then and as I said, a curio if you’re in the mood for some retro reflection.

I pray that we may be entering the final stretch with this faintly dull strain of remakes, re-imagings, reboots and resurrections. Then again the ‘Nightmare On Elm Street‘ movie lurks around the corner and Rob Zombies ‘Halloween 2‘ is also in post so maybe not. I couldn’t care less about the former as I never cared for the Freddy movies back in the day, original included (which my parents rented for my 16th Birthday party, on preview that makes this post exactly twenty years later to the day which is brilliant), the former will another pointless, dull, inept and impotent movie like its sibling. Still, at least some sacred cows have been defended. Some other material is en route which may reinvigorate my faith in genre cinema. Finally, a quick laugh.

Flotsam & Jetsum XXVIII

 

So here we are. To paraphrase a childhood hero, life moves pretty fast my friends. If you’re understandably disinterested in any commentary on my career then you’ll need to jump a couple of paragraphs to get to some film stuff, since I treat this blog as something of a public diary on occasion and there have been some tumultuous shifts in this area I have some developments I need to get off my chest. So, I’ve quit my previous role – I’m being a little cautious with namechecks. It is without doubt one of the most dysfunctional and frustrating environments I have ever had the misfortune to work in, not surprising on reflection when you consider that it is a local authority that inadvertently kills children. Life’s too short to shoulder absurd workloads without support from corporate management, to manage contractors who lie and fabricate data, to ‘work’ with Councillors who notoriously move officers to tears with their outbursts and demands for results – fuck that. I’ve done my time in the trenches believe me – in an early assignment of this phase of my career I had to contend with drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual harassment and violent incidents – and this was just amongst my staff – I’ve had enough of those stresses to last me a lifetime. The authority was situated in a pretty nasty part of London, one of my team found a loaded 9mm pistol in a recycling centre two weeks into the role, that’s just one of many anecdotes I could report back to give you a glimmer of what it was like. I only ever took the role which was always a sideways step career wise to keep the money coming in and keep a roof over my head, for some reason the career angels where smiling upon me as a new opportunity arose shortly after I left which I have now secured.

   

The new assignment is quite frankly perfect in almost every way. Geographically it’s in Southwark meaning a twenty minute commute which is exceptional, it also centres me slap bang between Waterloo and Elephant & Castle which results in a ten minute walk to my beloved NFT and all the attractions of the South Bank. Being a senior role it exposes me to some very promising agencies such as GOL, the Mayors Office and GLA, Defra, the Environment Agency and a slew of sub-regional groups which is perfect. Most importantly though is the role itself which is in a sphere which is exploding in both central and local government – sustainability and climate change. It’s an area I’ve been musing over getting into for a while, it is gathering enormous attention around the world with the shift to green energy, to reducing C02 emissions and all the other tangential efforts that must be programmed and managed over the coming years and decades. It is quite a challenge to say the least, for implementing the infrastructure to meet challenging EU and Whitehall targets for an authority of 270,ooo residents and thousands of businesses, I’m assuming it will keep me out of mischief for a while. Reading that sentence back my blood has run a little cold. <exhales>. Oh well, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger eh?

     

Speaking of luck after a barren couple of months at the NFT – the extended James Bond season held no interest for me I’m afraid – it looks we’re back in the swing of things with two new runs in July, the first a series of material celebrating the 30th anniversary of the moon ‘landing’ – One Giant Leap – which includes a screening and discussion entitled ‘Kubrick’s Moon’ (stop sniggering), the documentary that was culled from the hours of interviews and research material he acquired during the prep of 2001 (which is getting two screenings, a godsend since I missed this back in March), I haven’t seen this documentary yet so you can imagine my reaction. There’s also a preview screening and director Q&A of ‘Moon‘ which has been garnering some terrific reviews from the US. Coupled with this in an effort I suspect to vaguely cash-in on the release of ‘Public Enemies’ is a comprehensive US gangster movie season. This looks particularly juicy with a slew of films from  Golden Age Hollywood – all the Edward G Robinson and Jimmy Cagney movies of the 1930’s (Hmm, great depression movies – interesting) through to ‘Bonnie & Clyde’, ‘Scarface’ etc. with the jewel in the crown being a screening of the 3 hour, 40 minute original cut of  ‘Once Upon A Time In America’. I haven’t pulled a mammoth evening at the NFT since I got through a screening of the re-cut of ‘Heaven’s Gate‘ many years ago so this should be a real treat. I’m a big Leone fan and ‘America’ is in my top ten gangster films so I’m jolly excited, it’s being projected in the main NFT1 as well. Bliss.

  

I’ve been quite productive with my time off, I visited the recently opened Whitechapel Gallery which was OK, I wasn’t hugely impressed although the centrepiece of the musuem, a tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica was quite impressive. I also managed a visit to a wonderful Diane Arbus exhibition at the Timothy Taylor art gallery. Finally, here are some links to some general film material that I’ve been catching up on since the imac expired, an excellent but frustratingly short del Toro interview, some Lynch, heck even this couldn’t dull my good mood. I must be maturing as I couldn’t give a damn, Scott was an advert director when he tackled ‘Alien’ (although of course he had the wonderful ‘Duellists‘ under his belt) so who knows what may emerge (NSFW, heh). Not that he’d be interested but give it to Cronenerg already. Finally, some youtube amusement;

 

Success!

Got a new assignment so a quick post with my current favourite track to celebrate. I’m off to see ‘The Hangover‘ for a laugh (hopefully) then on to Greenwich to get wasted this evening. More later….

Fermat’s Room

Slim pickings these days. I was in town for an interview and despite the lousy weather and tube strike decided to make an effort to catch something a little different, something a little more cerebral to cleanse the cinematic palate after the ‘Terminator: Salvation’ debacle. To my surprise none other than General Zod was ahead of me in the queue at the Apollo Piccadilly, accompanied by the Sheriff of Nottingham circa 1984, an actor it’s taken me a good three  nine hours to identify, ah, it’s him, from that series. Good old London eh? Ifyou watch one Stamp film make sure’s it’s this, criminally only available on import to the best of my knowledge. Anyway….

‘Fermat’s Room‘ is the story of four mathematicians at different stages of their lives and careers, each of whom are individually invited to gather at a remote location where they believe they will work together to resolve a uniquely challenging enigma that will test the limits of their hubristic intelligence. After being assigned ominous code-names, the names of famous past (i.e dead) mathematicians the mysterious ‘Fermat’ makes his excuses and leaves the location to visit his seemingly coma ridden daughter. A PDA holding further directions at the designated compound leads the group to make their way to the central room of the title and events take a sinister turn. It’s an intricate trap; the room is slowly shrinking, its walls relentlessly closing in and the four must solve a series of logic enigmas, a sequence of puzzles sent consecutively to the PDA in order to try and delay certain, suffocating death. All of course is not what it seems and the four have prior relationships that emerge as the chances of survival diminsh…..

Yeah, it’s a puzzle movie and that’s always a good starting point for me. If I was pitching it I’d have to go with a cross between ‘Primer‘ and ‘Cube‘ with a bit of this thrown in, filtered through a Spanish translator. Like any film debut it unfolds mostly on one set without any name actors, relying on its ingenuity and lo-fi charm to beguile the viewer. The puzzles enable the audience to engage with the story as the tension mounts – a variation on this (7:02) ‘classic’ was an amusing entry – it’s compelling enough and the tension is ratcheted up nicely as the revelations unfold and the film moves toward its frantic finale.

The Spanish seem to be knocking if out of the park these days. ‘The Orphanage‘ was great, ‘Rec‘ was OK with some nice moments, heck even ‘Los Cronocrímenes‘ which didn’t quite live up to its hype at least managed a vaguely new cinematic angle on the time travel SF staple. Knowing very little about ‘Fermat’ was an aid, most of the turns and tangles were reasonably predictable but at a brisk 90 minutes it doesn’t outstay its intriguing premise. It manages a wry sense of humor through the subtitles which was welcome, it should be interesting to see what the debut directors get up to next – I hope they don’t disappear into the ether as did the dudes behind ‘Primer’….

David Carradine RIP

I guess most people will be paying tribute with ‘Kill Bill’clips and quite rightly so, it resurrected his stalled career. I remember him at his best in these two – a great B movie actor with a presence in more serious fare:

Terminator: Salvation

Tha-thunk thunk tha-thunk. Tha-thunk thunk ta-thunk – he’ll be back. Well, actually he isn’t if you catch my drift, well, not entirely, but some of his mates are. With McG wielding the megaphone the latest installment of the Terminator franchise wasn’t exactly the most anticipated summer movie of the year but I think a secret excitement was building at the prospect of returning to the tech-noir time jumping genre hybrid which cemented the careers of some of the biggest American film action talents of the past twenty years. Ignoring the lamentable ‘Terminator 3′ the first two movies remain classics of their kind, the first as a regular staple of any movie fan’s viewing habits of the 80’s and the second as a benchmark moment in the development of new SFX that will be culminated in Cameron’s return to the big screen come December. That fusion of state of the art action with vaguely arresting paradoxes have always struck me as one of the films enduring qualities, has McG corrected the course of the franchise and delivered a new contemporary classic of its kind? In a word, no. No he hasn’t.

A prologue in 2003 introduces us to Marcus Wright, a death row prisoner who signs away his body to medical science following the pleas of the cancer stricken Dr. Kogan (a thoroughly unexpected Helena Bonham Carter), a senior scientist for the recently USAF acquired Cyberdine Systems – yes, we’ve heard of those jokers before. After Wright bites the needle we flash forward to post holocaust 2018 with mankind’s last struggle against the merciless Skynet in full swing, our last hope resting in the guise of John Conner (Christian Bale, broodily angry as usual) has acquired an ultimate weapon that can disable the mechanoids battle machines, a WMD that represents humanity’s last chance of survival. The arrival of a confused Wright, no older than the day he was executed some fifteen years before challenges Conner’s understanding of the future he was led to believe, is this Skynet’s last coup de grâce on the exhausted militia or an omen of a unseen, uncertain future?

 

Overall it’s an unfortunate waste. The post ‘Judgement Day’ west coast irridated USA could have been a potent playground for taking the franchise forward, genre fans like yours truly were always keen to see the dimensions of the furtive battles against our robotic overlords. Whilst it delivers some faintly impressive set-pieces – it’s not the utter travesty that was predicted – it clunks from one encounter to another with virtually nothing in-between, no context for the struggle, no examination of the burden that a self proclaimed saviour of mankind would endure and most critically no tangible grasp of the time skipping anomalies that could take the tale into uncharted waters. I don’t want to sound too churlish about this, at the end of the day it’s a big, bombastic action movie not a Cassavettes or Sayles character piece but I was hoping for more of a mariage of kinetics with intellect.  

 

Stylistically it’s the stalwart bleached film texture coupled with hand-held immediacy which seems de rigour for any movie with a $50 million plus budget made since ‘Saving Private Ryan‘ over a decade ago – can’t we move on? The film-makers chuck a few of the iconic lines in from previous installments (although they missed the finest dialogue exchange of the entire series, if they’d made her the correct Sarah Connor, that would have been interesting…) to warm the cockles of every fanboys heart and I’ll concur that the film does improve somewhat in the final act with a stealthy incursion into the heart of Skynet offering some genuine excitement and thrills (including an amusing CGI rendered cameo from a certain mono-syllabic politician) but it’s all too little too late. One of the more interesting aspects of the series – the time travel loop and its consequences – is paid mere lip service which was for me the films main failing. If you removed the Terminator mythos aspects of the plot you’d be left with little more than a mid-1980’s direct to video action-SF number which is all well and good if you’re in the mood for that, personally given the series previous achievements I was hoping for a little more substance. Just to be obvious, yes, here is a link to the films real cause célèbre, well it made me laugh……