Prometheus (2012)

Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by Jon Spaihts, Damon Lindelof
Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba



I thought long and hard about whether to write anything about Prometheus, primarily because everyone's written something about Prometheus.  I don't really have much else to contribute.  In the end, however, two good reasons convinced me:  firstly, that no-one's reading this so, hey!, what does it matter?; secondly, that an awful lot of what I've heard about the film I find myself disagreeing with intently.  Too many people are wrong, and if I need to shout in an empty room in order to not change their opinions in the slightest, then that's exactly what I shall do.  I shall don the garb of feigned self-importance and pretend that there's actually a point to any of the next 685 words.

Ah well.  Tilting at windmills it is then.

Folk out there, the cinemagoing public, dvdbuying public, specialeditionbonusfeatureswatching public, they do seem to love Ridley Scott.  Perhaps I don’t share quite the same fondness – for heaven’s sake, when are you people going to admit that Gladiator was hackneyed, predictable, drawn out tosh? – but, sure, I liked Alien.  It’s a great film.  Subtle, atmospheric, tense, sympathetically and carefully drawn characters, that startling and influential Giger design.  We’ll ignore the other Alien films, because they’re not Ridley Scott pictures; instead, Scott made one film thirty-odd years ago, and now revisits the idea for a second, a sort-of-prequel that the director insists isn’t a prequel, presumably because his third and fourth Alien movies will fill in the gap, the final one perhaps being the genuine prequel. 

Is it ever wise to go back to an idea, such a long time afterwards (not that Scott appears to doubt it, seeing as he’s setting off to do much the same with Blade Runner)?  Financially, it might be, but we’ll give the director the benefit of the doubt here, and presume that he returned to Alien to develop concepts that had been touched upon in the original.  And he certainly goes for the concepts, big concepts, concepts that occupy every waking thought of the characters so that they don’t really have the opportunity to talk about anything else.

Which is rather where it all goes wrong.  Didn’t I say Alien had characters that are sympathetically and carefully drawn?  Prometheus doesn’t.  I mean, it really, really doesn’t.  The characters in the earlier film were human, they had lives, jobs, things that annoyed them, things that made their time bearable.  And now, we have a ship full of cutouts, of off-the-shelf roles struggling to claim a second dimension as their own.  There are exceptions – Michael Fassbender’s android David is engaging, as Fassbender invariably is, and Noomi Rapace’s heroine has a backstory… well, she has a fertility problem, but it’s as close to depth as the film ever gets – but the overwhelming majority of the cast exist either to explain a plot point, or to make a plot point happen.  Nothing more, nothing less.  They might as well be vases on a mantelpiece.

Of course, the film looks terrific.  This was inevitable, but warrants praise nonetheless:  Ridley Scott does know how to make a film work visually, no dispute over that.  And though there may be a lack of creeping paranoia – such an integral part of the original – there are certainly a good number of bangs, flashes, and slimy things going rrrrrngghghhh. There’s even an Alien alien (okay, a xenomorph, though I don’t have much time for pleasing scifi pedants), albeit without any hint of how or why it happened to be there.  I imagine, somewhere, there’ll be a reason, perhaps in the next film.  I imagine that many of the questions and mysteries raised by Prometheus will be answered sooner or later.  No doubt there are already umpteen thousand websites proposing their own solutions. 

But I don’t care.  I really don’t.  And I’m someone who usually would, I’m just the kind of person who’d go trawling online for wise and considered explanations of enigmatic moments in films.  This time, however, I just couldn’t give a damn.  It’s not enough for a film merely to ask questions – it needs to give you a reason to want to know the answer.  You find the reason in an engaging film, a film whose characters and story draw you into their world, so that the mysteries of their world become every bit as important as those of our own.  The world of Prometheus is full of shallow, empty characters; I can’t care about them, so I can’t care about their world, and I can’t care about the questions their world raises. 

Ridley Scott doesn’t want this to be seen as a prequel to Alien; rather, it’s a film ‘that takes place in the same universe’.  The universe he creates is full of life, but sadly, it’s devoid of humanity.

The Devils (1971)

Directed by Ken Russell
Written by Ken Russell, John Whiting, Aldous Huxley (novel)
Starring Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave, Dudley Sutton



How do you make a deeply and angrily political film, using a broadly true story of a sex-and-demons scandal in seventeenth century France, with enough power to strongly influence viewers, and still persuade a major studio to support it all the way?  Well, perhaps you don't.  Certainly, if you're making it in 1971, you're going to have a spot of bother - which is why the BFI's new dvd release of The Devils is, after four decades, the closest we're likely to get to the film that the late Ken Russell wanted us to see.

It goes without saying that the loss for so long of the film in an unbutchered form is a great shame, not just because it's a hugely powerful and expressive picture - it is - but because the movie has so much to say, all of which was buried beneath the controversy for many years.  And it's worth addressing this controversy, the extremity of the movie:  yes, it's a difficult watch, confusing and aggressive and - by the standards of the early 1970s, although not today, not in our much-changed world - decidedly graphic.  Extremity for a reason, though, bombarding the viewer, confusing and grabbing the viewer, to give all the more impact to the message.

The message is important, too.  Very important, in 1971 as in 2012.  The movie tells of the very real 'craze' for identifying witchcraft and demonic possession across Europe at the height of the counter-reformation, and the exploitation of this mass panic and - for want of a better word - witchhunt to empower Cardinal Richelieu and the French regime.  Set in Loudun, a wealthy and rebellious city, resisting central rule but protected behind vast and unbreachable walls, we see the henchmen of Richelieu creating an uproar, a desperate and insane fear of demons, to bring down the leader of the city, and the city's defences with him.  Those henchmen, and Richelieu himself, are surrounded by odd hints of modernity - twentieth century glasses, steel chairs, a headquarters laid out like a prison of today - and we can discern in them a reflection of authority in the director's own time.  Where fear and desperation and ignorance are exploited to control the masses, we see a panic motivated by tales of demonic possession - but we can also see, between the lines, a panic motivated by tales of reds under the bed, Communist infiltration, unAmerican activities.

Can we not also see, in 2012, just the same fear of 'terrorism'?  Can we not also see governments preying on the scared and ignorant, claiming to drive out evil forces that move among us, but acting only to take away our rights and our liberties? As Oliver Reed's wrongfully accused priest cries

Look at your city! If your city is destroyed, your freedom is destroyed also... If you would remain free men, fight. Fight them or become their slaves!

while the people of the city, screaming and demented, stare at his execution and not at the walls coming down behind them, so any one of us could turn and see the ramparts of our rights being pulled apart, if only we could draw our eyes away from the witchhunts and the madness being played out for our amusement.

In a week that has seen the British government propose ever deeper attacks on our freedom in the name of 'defeating terrorism and organised crime', the fullest ever release of The Devils couldn't be more timely.

Rampart (2011)

Directed by Oren Moverman
Written by James Ellroy, Oren Moverman
Starring Woody Harrelson, Robin Wright, Anne Heche, Ned Beatty, Ice Cube


I've been sloppy, yes.  I've not been keeping this blog going.  The reasons... oh, you don't want to know the reasons (there aren't any, but if there were, you wouldn't want to know; this is a film blog, after all).  Anyway, I've not updated it in ages, not since The Artist.  In the interim, The Artist has been hailed almost universally - aside from the inevitable backlash which comes with the universal hailing of anything - and won a sackful of awards, perhaps heralding in these troubled times a fondness for warm, cosy, lovely, utterly charming pictures.  Simple pictures that set out to warm the cockles of our hearts, and achieve that aim marvellously.

Rampart didn't win any awards.  The reception has been mixed, to say the least.  It doesn't warm the cockles of anyone's heart.  It's not a feelgood picture, it's not charming, it's not lovely, it's not cosy or delightful.  It's not a movie to ease a few hours of the difficult days in which we live.  Unremittingly bleak, cruel, vicious and despairing, without a real beginning and no end to speak of, Rampart spends its hundred minutes showing us the darkness as a constant theme - in a similar sense to the (admittedly superior) No Country for Old Men, cruelty and violence are with us throughout, they're not some abberation that springs up at the beginning of a movie and disappears in a burst of good-will-outing two hours later.

And if you can stand the constant, crushing negativity, there is a very fine film here.  In the right role, Woody Harrelson can be a very intense, engaging actor (indeed, he was in No Country for Old Men), and with barely a moment in the film when he's not on screen, this is a towering and powerful performance.  It's also a very interestingly put-together picture - only Moverman's second as a director* - and laudably well-paced and trim.  Rampart is not at all perfect - the relationship between the central character and his increasingly estranged family is rather hackneyed - but as a character study of unpleasantness in the line of duty, and one that leaves open the question of whether duty is an acceptable excuse, it's certainly worth watching.



*He has, however, had a longer career as a screenwriter - including the execrable I'm Not There, which couldn't be more different to Rampart.

The Artist (2011)

Directed by Michel Hazanavicius
Written by Michel Hazanavicius
Starring Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell



Alfred Hitchcock made his first colour feature – Spellbound – in 1945.  He made his last black and white feature – Psycho – in 1960.  If colour was a leap forward, a natural progression for cinema (at least, affordable and natural colour; the first colour films go back to George Smith and William Friese-Greene* in the first years of the twentieth century, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that the technology became practical) then why go back to black and white?  Why retrace one’s steps against the march of cinematic progress?

Because it looked better.  In 1954, for the first time, the majority of American films were shot in colour; from that point onwards, every monochrome movie has been filmed that way deliberately, a conscious choice to reject colour film.  Mostly, the reasons have been artistic:  the bleakness of Schindler’s List, for instance, was augmented by its drab greys – although technical issues have sometimes reared their head, Martin Scorsese and Michael Chapman having photographed Raging Bull in monochrome primarily because of doubts over the quality of the available colour, particularly when transferred to television or the new-fangled VHS cassettes.

But technical concerns apart, there has always been, and will always be, a demand for the particular look of black and white film.  It’s not that it’s better (or worse) than colour film; rather that it offers something different, it’s a quite separate approach to the art.  Some films are best in black and white, others best in colour, and we should always credit the director who knows that their picture demands monochrome and sticks to his or her guns.

On the other hand, the second great technological breakthrough of that era has had a rather more absolute impact.  From The Jazz Singer’s first introduction of sound† in October 1927, it took barely two years for Hollywood to write the silent world into history; once an alternative was available, silent movies were abandoned with haste, much like penny-farthings, or trepanning.  Even cultures that had a long tradition of silent performance in the theatre, Japan and China, had committed entirely to talkies by the mid-30s.

How did silent become an unwanted relic when monochrome remains a cherished artistic approach?  Why do silent films by Keaton, Griffith, Lang, Murnau, Eisenstein and Chaplin regularly feature in all-time lists by venerable organisations if they pale so starkly in comparison to the joys of sound?  Why are performances of silent pictures so popular?  Sadly, recognition of the wonders of silent cinema, and the unique and separate art in its creation, didn’t even begin to take hold until thirty-odd years after its demise, thirty-odd years after the debate between sound and silence was settled in the studios.  Three decades were more than long enough to ensure that those beloved silent flicks are all from the ever-more-distant past, to ensure that silent cinema as a living breathing medium died in the 1920s, and all that we have are memories.

Not that I’m saying silent cinema is preferable to the talkies – rather, that the two are distinct artforms with their own merits.  Just as the predominance of colour doesn’t mean there’s no room for black and white where black and white is necessary, so there is room for silent pictures to be enjoyed alongside their noisier counterparts.

(Well, I say noisier – of course, there never was anything silent about silent cinema.  These were performances in the truest sense of the word, with live music and lively crowds.  But I digress.)

There is room, there has to be room for silent pictures to be enjoyed and indeed produced, once in a while, when that is the medium most suited to the message.  Studios need not be afraid, should a filmmaker come before them and insist that the proposed picture would be dialogue-free.  But to convince the money in Hollywood, the wider industry, critics, and - crucially - audiences that silent film has much to offer as an artform, there would surely need to be one made anew that was exceptional, that showed all that silent cinema has to offer, and that managed to draw crowds and acclaim and awards.  A unique and beautiful work to transcend the worlds of sound and silence and to breathe life into a dead art.

So, on behalf of all lovers of silent cinema, all those who can see what it offers that sets it apart from the talkies, thank you Michael Hazanavicius, for giving us something truly extraordinary.  And The Artist is extraordinary indeed, a touching, charming, funny, magical love letter to the cinema.  It is, inescapably, a movie about the movies, and the innocent wonder in the stream of light.  There are some lovely little touches too:  the decision to shoot in a good old-fashioned 1.37:1 aspect, the misspelling of a character's name in an early film credit (just look at any listing on IMDb - everyone has their name spelt wrong at the start of their career), the staggered credits in the opening title... everything is just right, crafted adoringly to tie the old magic to the too-often-ugly new world.  It will have achieved a great deal if it persuades even one person to look deeper and find the lost beauty of a joy abandoned too soon.  But quite apart from that, if no-one watches a solitary silent film because of this, then no matter.  The Artist is glorious.  It is glorious at the beginning of 2012.  It would be glorious in October 1927, or at any point in between.  Great cinema, great art is a wonderful thing, whether it has sound and dialogue or pristine silence.



*Friese-Green also developed a system for showing films in 3D in 1890.  It didn't catch on. 

†Not actually the first film with synchronised sound, but the first to introduce a practical and affordable solution.  Strictly speaking, the first was Charles Taze Russell's The Photo-Drama of Creation (1914), which was little more than a (very long) slideshow coupled with a record of sound effects and narration, to be played simultaneously.

The Eagle Has Landed (1976)

Michael Caine, as the Cockney German.

Directed by John Sturges
Written by Thomas F. Mankiewicz, Jack Higgins (novel)
Starring Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Jenny Agutter, Donald Pleasence, Larry Hagman



Somewhere in Hollywood, perhaps in a bunker midway between all the major studios, there’s a conveyor belt.  It’s just like the conveyor belts you get in airports, the big loop, people waiting for what they need to come around, and with a long, mysterious section hidden from the view.  It takes a fair while to make a complete circuit, perhaps twenty years or so, but it never stops entirely.  And on this conveyor, they place boxes full of used-up genres and plotlines, send them off into that strange world behind the curtain, and wait excitedly for another box to come out the other end, full of old ideas to put back into service.

Yet, hidden behind that curtain, there seems to be a box that’s fallen off.  How better to explain why there’s been no resurrection for a hugely popular strain of movies that came out between the late 60s and the mid-70s?  Big, grandiose pictures, with an all-star cast, striking, Technicolor vistas and usually a plot slightly thinner than the tub the popcorn came in.  For the most part, they were either about disasters (think The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure or the Airport films), or about the Second World War (The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone), were full of big set pieces and explosions, and nowadays they mostly turn up on television to fill a bank holiday afternoon.  And good fun they are too, good, stupid fun – but they’re preserved in aspic, a leftover of a last burst from the old star-centric studio system, never again to be repeated.

It’s certainly hard to imagine The Eagle Has Landed being made today.  The explosions would still be there – probably a lot more of them, probably directed by Michael Bay or Gore Verbinski, certainly full of CGI – but the all-star cast would be gone, as would the Boy’s Own adventure story.  It just wouldn’t be as charmingly daft.  It certainly wouldn’t be anything you’d see on a bank holiday afternoon.  Why (apart from the box falling off the conveyor)?  Well, for one thing, the studios know now that, thanks to dvd, tv and online aftersales, whatever film they put out isn’t going to lose any money, so there’s no point roping in quite so many names; for another, Hollywood productions have become far too focus-group and market driven to allow for such cheery silliness.  That’s not to say there’s no longer any stupidity in Hollywood pictures – there’s more than ever, if anything – but that it’s cynical, ugly, stupidity, a dumbed-down ugliness that stems from the new economics of the cinema.

I’d far rather watch a film which wears its over-the-top absurdity on its sleeve.  Here we not only have that bigger-is-better cast, but they’re all turning up in a wonderful variety of different accents – Robert Duvall doing standard movie German, Michael Caine doing, um, Cockney German, Donald Pleasance doing Donald Pleasence, Donald Sutherland doing comedy Oirish – and enthusiastically hamming their scenery-chewing way through a dashing tale of derring-do (which is, as it happens, lifted almost wholesale from Cavalcanti’s superb wartime propaganda film, Went the Day Well).  And what we don’t have is, by any sensible standard, a classic, a great movie, a significant contribution to the art.  It is, after all, idiotic tosh.  But, hey, so what?  It’s fun.  Particularly on a bank holiday afternoon.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

As ever, a beautifully shot film by Roger Deakins.

Directed by Andrew Dominik
Written by Andrew Dominik, Roy Hanson (novel)
Starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard


I've spoken before about twists, and about the spoiling of them.  It's not always easy to talk about a plot that takes a sudden and unexpected turn, without at least hinting about the change of direction.  On the other hand, do any of us really want to spoil a big twist in a film for anyone else?  Do we really want to give the ending away, do we really want to take away the joy of discovery?

It is with some relief, then, that I come to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  If ever a film was upfront about its intentions, this must be it.  There's no trickery in that title, there's no leading you down the wrong path.  Nor is it fundamentally incorrect, like Krakatoa East of Java.  Nor, for that matter, is it gently prodding you to the wrong conclusion, in the sense that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance wants you to believe that the fellow in question is James Stewart rather than John Wayne.  Nope, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford does exactly what it says, and never lets you forget it.  We've read the last page of the book, and now we're bound to watch the earlier pages being fitted into place.

In a sense, we're involved, we're voyeurs, we're caught in a story that we know will certainly end in death.  We know who's going to be killed, we know who's going to do the killing.  And this isn't a story like, say, Titanic, where we know the iceberg is coming but here's a girl and a boy making fools out of themselves to distract you for three and a half long, tortuous hours.  Nor is it Gandhi, a film that begins with the certainty of a shooting but never lets you think that the shooting is the be-all-and-end-all of the story; it's a conclusion that we have to reach, but there's so much more to see along the way.  No, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford isn't about anything else.  You're here to see the murder.  The title even tells you that it's not going to be a noble or heroic death.

However, the characters don't know this.  Hence the voyeurism; we know exactly what's coming, and how ugly it's going to be, but we're going to watch all concerned find out for themselves.  It's very appropriate that the film has us follow not the charismatic, legendary outlaw, but the coward of the title (a superb performance by the younger, and arguably more talented Affleck), his weakness, his guilt.  Jesse James is often distant, or part in shadow, or moving away from us - while we stay much closer to the antihero of the tale.  And that, ultimately, is where we belong; we can relate to the coward far more than we can relate to the outlaw.

Relating to the coward, following him voyeuristically, these are not easy subjects, and it would have been very easy for this film to fail, to become preachy and heartless.  Fortunately, it doesn't fail at all (although it could have been twenty minutes shorter without losing anything), thanks to a fine script and beautiful and inventive photography by the always wonderful Roger Deakins.  It's the elegance of the movie that allows us, nay makes us engage with Ford's weak and petty everyman.

Towards the end of the picture, Ford is asked why he did it:

Well, he was going to kill me.
So you were scared, and that's the only reason?
Yeah, and the reward money.

 Fear and avarice, in the end, are dreadfully human qualities, whether we want to admit to them or not.

Never Let Me Go (2010)

Directed by Mark Romanek

Written by Alex Garland, Kazuo Ishiguro (novel)

Starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley

Why is it that we’re so engaged by dystopian fantasies?  Why the fascination with a world that has headed off, or will head off, down a different and more problematic route to our own?  After all, there unquestionably is a fascination there – going back through Blade Runner, Nineteen Eighty-Fout, Metropolis, to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and far more points in between than I’ll be going into here*.  And if the surge in popularity of counterfactual novels  (or alternative histories, or uchronia) is anything to go by, it’s an allure that’s growing. 

But why?  Perhaps it’s because we live in uncertain times, and on-screen bleakness and suffering holds up a mirror to threats in the world we live in, much as Hollywood’s golden age of horror in the 30s and 40s coincided with darkness beyond the cinema’s walls.  Perhaps we’ve become used to a world so controlled and understood that any risk posed by events beyond our control seems exaggerated in its size and menace.  Or perhaps we just like to be reminded of how much worse things could be, perhaps it offers a crumb of comfort in showing us that life isn’t all that bad after all. 

Most dystopian and counterfactual stories deal with big, dramatic changes:  the Nazis won the war, Napoleon conquered the world, robots became intelligent, society collapsed under a global nuclear conflict, Kennedy wasn’t killed, Franz Ferdinand wasn’t killed, Hitler was.  However, in reality, it’s just as often small details and lifestyle changes that end up setting history on a different course entirely – changes that might not be noticed at the time, just as the passengers on a train don’t see the points being changed. 

As I’m writing this, physicists at the CERN institute are announcing that they’re a significant step closer to proving the existence of the Higgs field, an invisible flood of energy spread throughout the universe, thought to be responsible for allowing atoms to have the mass they need to exist.  It’s a big day for physics, with a number of others hopefully to come, and gives hope of the answers the project was looking to find.  Yet CERN has had a dramatic and unexpected impact on all of our lives (definitely on your life, you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise):  the software designed for sending data and theories and whatnot back and forth around the globe became the world wide web. 

These changes, slow-burning, little-noticed-at-the-time but ultimately huge, frequently emerge from technological and scientific discoveries, slowly filtering out from the academic community until they leave no-one untouched.  There are few if any counterfactual tales that ask ‘what if Jenner hadn’t discovered the smallpox vaccination?’ or ‘what if Lister hadn’t given the world antiseptic medicine?’, probably with very good reason from a literary point of view, but that doesn’t mean they transformed the world any less entirely. 

The world-changing breakthrough in Never Let Me Go is a medical one too.  But it’s also a discovery that's morally very questionable, one that saves countless lives while harming others.  Most importantly, it’s one viewed solely from the point of view of those who are harmed by it, those whose lives are not transformed for the better but lessened and shortened by the change.  This is where the dystopia exists – not for all those saved, happy and presumably either ignorant of the harm caused to others or choosing to look the other way, but for those who have to live a fractured shadow of a life. 

All of which raises a difficult question – to what extent, if any, should we be allowed to cause suffering in order to save lives?  Never Let Me Go, though raising the question poignantly and from the heart, does not seek to impose answers.  What it does, and does with great panache and elegance, fragile and delicate, is to give a very human dimension to a deeply moral question.  Not all dystopian tales must be universal; sometimes, a brighter future for the many ends up being built on the suffering of the few.

*Not least because there's no shortage of such lists out there; dystopianfilms.com is as good a place to start as any.