Modern Culture - Of Monsters and Men

There will be spoilers in places so tread carefully young Jedis...

The Creator Has A Master Plan

I am a huge fan of Gareth Edwards - the film director, not the Welsh rugby legend. I think his debut feature Monsters is one of the best films of the 21st century; I thought his Godzilla reboot from 2014 was only spoiled by the rather uninteresting humans in it and while there is this belief that Rogue One: A Star Wars Tale was really someone else's film, I'd like to think it was Edwards' film that, like Godzilla, had too much interference from a major studio - in this case Disney (Ooh, might there be a theme developing here with Disney and how it loves to be the narcissist? Find out later in this blog).

The Creator is his latest effort and what a stunningly heartbreaking and spectacular movie it is. If you like good science fiction and want a thinking man's 'Terminator' then this is the film for you. I think it's possibly the best film I've seen this year and I'm aware that I'm biased because I think the director is an auteur, but this is a fantastically rounded story which essentially starts with John David Washington being exposed as a US spy trying to infiltrate the Asian headquarters of 'The Creator' - the person who allegedly turned AI against humanity and was responsible for exploding an atomic bomb on LA. Of course, it's a lot more complicated than that, but that's your premise.

Five years after seeing his cover blown, his wife killed and his new friends destroyed, the bitter and twisted Joshua is recruited again by the US government to return to Asia, find his presumed dead wife and help them locate a new weapon that is designed to destroy NOMAD, the USA's defence system that has essentially turned them into a rogue police state, disregarding other countries and international law in their pursuit of destroying all AI. It's smacks of real life USA, especially their 'war on terror' and it's probably why the film only has a 7.0 rating on IMDB because the USA are the enemies here; a bunch of ruthless and determined psychopaths hellbent on destroying AI and anything and anyone that gets in their way. By the end of the first hour if you haven't got the utmost contempt for the future USA then you're probably already a fascist with Nazi leanings. Edwards does a fantastic job of essentially pointing out what a ruthless bunch of cunts the US military are. There are other reasons why it probably has a lower rating, I won't say why, but I will give you an oblique clue - it doesn't end well for the USA.

The special effects are mindboggling; the robots are so lifelike and plausible; the acting is stunning, especially Madeleine Yuna Voyles as Alphie and always reliable Ken Watanabe as Harun. This truly is an epic film that in my opinion cements Edwards as one of the leading directors (and writers) in modern cinema. It has genuinely funny moments, painful heartbreaking ones and evokes so many emotions when you watch it from joy to anger to great sadness. It's even better than the next film I review - just below this - and I think that will win a hatful of Oscars. Watch The Creator first, it's an extraordinary movie.

And Man Created Mass Destruction

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a very long film, one that tells a very well known story - about how J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and his team created the hydrogen atomic bomb. What it also does is tell how one man orchestrated Oppenheimer's destruction from the Father of the Atom Bomb to a national disgrace and threat to security because of something that was said.

This is a film about two people - the eponymous creator of the bomb and the man who played a huge part in his life after the Second World War - Lewis Strauss, one-time head of the Atomic Energy Commission (played by Robert Downey Junior). Obviously the main focus is on Oppenheimer and his life leading up to the moment when Trinity was exploded in the New Mexico desert at Los Alamos, but from the start that history almost shared top billing with Strauss's efforts to be elected to a committee and what appeared to be his efforts to distance himself from Oppenheimer and his legacy. These parts of the film are in stark black and white, with a dynamic performance from RDJ, proving without a doubt what an incredible actor he is. That's not to say that Cillian Murphy shouldn't get a huge amount of acclaim as the scientist, because his performance as the womanising, decadent, communist sympathising scientist with a slightly narcissistic streak is superb.

This movie is literally wall-to-wall famous people, including Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer's wife; Rami Malik, Matt Damon, Josh Hartnett, Florence Pugh (like you'd never imagine her), Kenneth Branagh, Tom Conti, Casey Affleck, David Dastmalchian, Dane DeHaan, Matthew Modine and Gary Oldman - as a really dislikeable Harry S Truman - it's star-studded and five minutes short of three hours, yet it whizzes along like - well, like all really good films - and while few of the characters from history come across as particularly likeable, it doesn't really matter; this is not a film about personalities, it's about telling history and setting a record straight, because the USA appeared to want to destroy the man who basically ended the war against Japan and then turn his invention into something they could use to flex their muscles and show their strength to the rest of the world - and we pretty much know how that ended up. Whether Oppenheimer really did regret what he did and what happened, I don't know, but even if that was artistic licence, we do know that the USA is essentially a fascist, authoritarian hell that claims it stands for freedom and democracy, even if that means destroying half the planet or condoning war criminals to do it. Anyhow, this is a truly stunning film that should, if there's any justice, sweep the Oscars.

This Charming [Hit] Man

The new David Fincher film comes complete with a Smiths soundtrack that frankly didn't spoil it as much for me as I might have thought. The Killer is a clinical examination of the life of an assassin, how he does his business and what happens when a hit goes tragically wrong and the tables are turned on the killer.

Michael Fassbender plays the hitman, a person with countless humorous identities, such as Oscar Madison, Felix Unger and Howard Cunningham to name but three. He's thorough, cold blooded and does his job; he's faultless until a split second changes everything and he finds himself plunged into a paranoid dilemma. He knows the moment the hit went wrong that his life now has a price on it, so he bolts for his secret hideout only to discover the caretaker has been seriously injured fending off two other hitmen, his hideout no longer so secret. This rather pisses the Killer off and what follows is essentially a revenge thriller, but as I said earlier it's done in a clinical and cold fashion. This is personal but it's also business and he doesn't let personal interfere with business.

It's not Fincher's best film, but equally there's little wrong with this. It plays out a little like a hitman's manual - apparently it's based on a French comic book - and while it has a pervading feeling of paranoia throughout it, it explains that the more normal you look the less notice you bring on yourself - something that people don't seem to understand in the 21st century. People only look at you when you want them to look at you or you don't know how to act to avoid them looking at you. It's worth two hours of your time.

Big Japes, Poor CGI

Our Saturday night plans were thrown into disarray when the wife, who has been knitting Christmas presents, didn't want to watch Oppenheimer because she couldn't concentrate on it, so we opted for something she could just have on and that meant watching Jack the Giant Slayer from 2013 - a Bryan Singer film that was co-written by Chris McQuarrie (the man behind recent Mission Impossible films and a couple of Captain America movies).

It had been about ten years since we last saw it and the first thing that we remembered about it was the awful CGI looking giants, who really didn't look like actual giants. It's a sort of cross between The Princess Bride and Jabberwocky but without the humour - normal or surreal. It has its moments but essentially it's a film that has Stanley Tucci with hair and that is disconcerting enough. Nicholas Hoult makes a so-so hero, Ewan McGregor is always good value for money when playing a posh bloke and some of the other special effects weren't bad and that's about all I can think to say about it.

Hawkeye & Scarlet Witch with added Punisher

A slightly trite header for what was essentially a nasty little film; but it did star Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen and fleetingly Jon Bernthal and the movie was Wind River. Renner played Cory, a white American firmly entrenched in the Arapaho community in Wyoming, during a bitterly cold winter. He's a hunter and tracker, who was married to a Native American with two children, but one of them died tragically in unknown circumstances, so three years later when he finds his late daughter's best friend dead in the snow it isn't just another local tragedy, it's personal.

Olsen plays an out of her depth local FBI officer - Jane - who is called into the case because the girl may have been murdered and the FBI deal with cases such as that (it's a little more complicated than that, but it is explained in a scene with the coroner). She 'employs' Cory to do some tracking and hunting and what we discover over the next hour is that life for Native Americans on a reservation is a fucking horrible existence and largely down to dumbfuck redneck Americans and the complete lack of respect any of these mongrels give to any of the indigenous species. I've seen a few things over the years about how incomers relegate the indigenous to second and third class citizens, whether it's in the USA, Australia, South America or Israel and it is enough to make your blood boil.

What follows is a strange narrative that slowly winds its way to an almost ridiculously speedy resolution. Cory spots a track leading from the dead girl's brother's digs and he and Jane follow it and find the dead body of a man who turns out to be the dead girl's boyfriend; this leads them, the local police and the county police to a local mining camp where it quickly becomes clear that the five men there know exactly why the law have arrived and we get transported back - via flashback - to the night of the murder, which is violent, nasty and pretty grim - a theme we seem to be having with film and TV at the moment. There's a scene that pretty much telegraphs the workers' guilt and makes you wonder what the hell these men thought they could achieve, but it doesn't stop a violent, bloody and murderous confrontation. Only a Kevlar vest saves Jane's life and the help of Cory and his high powered maximum velocity hunting rifle; what follows this is a particularly nasty and satisfying piece of revenge.

Marvel's Melting..

Welcome to the Marvel Age of Flops. The Marvels took $47m in the USA on its opening weekend, making it the lowest opening weekend for any MCU film, including The Incredible Hulk, which wasn't technically an MCU film but was co-opted into the franchise by virtue of its epilogue featuring Tony Stark. The Marvels did fair slightly better on its worldwide opening, but the total of $110m is by far and away the lowest take of any real MCU film and is most definitely another nail in the coffin of superhero movies.

There are a number of factors at play here, but frankly they all sound like excuses rather than reasons. The blame appears to be an attempt at singling out Iman Vellani's poorly received Ms Marvel series, but this is one of those 'I smell racist and sexist bullshit' moments, although depending on two characters from TV shows to bolster Brie Larson's already rather unpopular Carol Danvers was always going to be a tough one. There's also the 6.1 rating the film has on IMDB - days after its release - and the poor audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It's going to be the lowest ranked Marvel film ever; there might not be any coming back from this... 

Even the addition of an X-Men related post credit scene hasn't done anything for this film and while Disney has shelved all by Deadpool 3 from the schedules for the next 18 months at least, I'm wondering if we're ever going to see Captain America: Brave New World at the cinemas, with suggestions that it might have some extra scenes added to it and made into a three-part mini-series for Disney+ in late 2024. Another distressing bit of news is that the anticipated Daredevil: Born Again MCU reboot has essentially been scrapped and is being 'remade' using only about 20% of the stuff from the already finished maxi-series; apparently Kevin Feige and his team were unimpressed with the finished product and sent it back to be remade, now with different directors, script writers and characters - it sounds like no one really knows what they're doing there any longer. Plus it suggests that anything MCU is now 'made' by committee and not by an individual; gone are the days when a writer and director took an idea to the company and it was made with little or no interference.

Whether or not we're ever going to see Blade or Thunderbolts is seriously up for question now and it could be that the revised film schedule might be as follows: Fantastic Four in 2025, Avengers: The Kang/Doom Dynasty in 2026 and Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027 and no new TV shows other than the ones that are already scheduled. However, there is talk that there could be a 2025 MCU/Disney TV series called The Mutants, which might lead into an X-Men feature film depending on its success. Time's up for Marvel; they threw too much shit at the wall and barely any of it stuck.

Big in Australia

Bill Bailey returned to our small screens on Sunday night as he travels the western side of Australia in Bill Bailey's Australian Adventure; this is a place that isn't often seen or focused on in the UK. Australia's wild west is a bit of an alien land with its own maverick spirit and the first part of this wasn't your average travelogue, with Bailey opting for some interesting adventures.

The problem I have with travelogues now is the feeling that most of them appear to be very scripted, however this had moments that were completely unexpected, like being approached by several fans at varying times who pretty much demanded his attention. Western Australia is quite unknown to me, although the brother of a friend has lived out there for the last 30 years, and it will be interesting to see what it looks like when he gets further north and into a landscape that is quite inhospitable, desolate and unknown. The most telling thing for me was when he met a Welsh lady who moved there many years earlier and when asked why she liked it there, she said it was a dangerous place - referring to the high number of things all over the continent that can kill or incapacitate you.

Goodbye to Wrexham, Until Next Year

The finale of this second season of Welcome to Wrexham quite rightly focused on the players and the coach and not on Rob, Ryan or any of the people handling the cash - yes, they were in it and the elation on Reynolds' face when Wrexham won the game they needed to secure promotion back to the EFL was one of a man who has discovered a genuine love for football. It was quite an emotional 38 minutes, I think the wife had a tear in her eye, because this has been a TV series about a football club that women have thoroughly gotten into. Next series will be a hoot and as I'm currently keeping an eye on these Welsh dragons, I already know some key things they'll be focusing on. But that can wait.

A Really Alien Landscape

My mate Chris doesn't have a good batting average with his recommendations for stuff for us to watch, but when he totally recommended Scavenger's Reign, an animated mini-series with a 9.0 rating on IMDB, I thought we'd give it a try. Sadly, the wife wasn't impressed and I struggled with it.

It's an intriguing premise; survivors from a malfunctioning deep space transporter crash land on a planet that is radically different from anything we've ever seen. A place where humanoids don't (so far to my knowledge) exist but the flora and fauna is weird, wonderful and a lot of it is trying to eat the survivors. There are four humans and a robot; the groups are two humans - a male and a female, who seem to have already worked out what's what and are utilising the natural elements to their own purposes - how they come to know that some of the flora can be used as electric cables or that fauna can be used as gas masks isn't explained and sits totally wrongly with me. The second group is a human and her robot, who is slowly being 'taken over' by the flora and changing the way it reacts and interacts with its 'master'; they have run out of food and are battling hostile arthropods. The final survivor is a man who has been trapped inside his escape pod at the top of some 'trees' and is 'rescued' by one of the creatures on the planet who not only feeds him but is also inside his head communicating with him by substituting itself for the man's former partner and using memories as metaphors.

The problem I have with it is it doesn't appear to be going anywhere and I'm not sure I want to persevere with it given I have so many other things to watch and while some of the animation is good, it suffers from this common anime style that I really have a problem with. I miss 1940s and 50s style animation with work and artistry built into it; I know it takes forever but it also is nice to look at and this, along with some wooden voice acting just didn't hit any spots. I might return to it, on my own, at a later date, but for the moment it's being shelved (not deleted).

The Gen Z Sherlock

A Murder at the End of the World is the latest Britt Marling effort and the first two parts dropped this week. I can safely say it has that slightly disconnected, odd feel that Marling's previous series The OA had and whether it's going to be as clever as people think it is really depends on whether or not the clues given so far are red herrings or just bad plotting...

The series opens with Darby Hart talking about her debut novel and explaining to an invited book signing audience how she became a murder detective and solved the case that propelled her into fame. From then on in what we have is a three pronged story - two in flashback and one in the present. The flashbacks are Darby as a teenager still in school and helping her dad who is a medical examiner/pathologist; later when she meets Bill, her partner in crime detection and in the present, at the retreat of billionaire innovator Andy Ronson and his wife Lee Anderson, who is something of a hero of Darby's. It has the feel of a contemporary, even futuristic Knives Out: Glass Onion type tale when the retreat is hit by a tragedy that directly involves Darby not just professionally but also personally.

Ronson is a creator; his AI called Ray is a quite brilliant bit of kit that surpasses all other AIs to the point that Ronson refers to him as Alternative rather than Artificial and it has been fully installed in the futuristic Icelandic hotel that Ronson had Darby's ex Bill design. Also in this wilderness are a handful of selected brilliant people including other tech designers, filmmakers, eco warriors and Darby, who it seems has been invited by Lee Anderson because she was who the dedication was to in Darby's book. It soon becomes slightly obvious that Lee might have been having an affair with Bill, now known as Fang. This throws up the most obvious red herring as Ronson seems keen to breeze over the tragic death of Fang and continue with his week long soiree, while Darby quickly surmises that this was not a tragic accidental death but in fact a murder, which immediately makes you think that Ronson - played by Clive Owen - is probably behind it...

However, we came up with a couple of theories while watching it; me the first, the wife the second and as we have no idea what the conclusion will bring, here's our thoughts: Ronson and Anderson's son, Zoomer, is introduced in the first episode and is eager to be part of the fun - he's a precocious five-year-old and I immediately suggested he wasn't even human, but would be another of Ronson's imaginative AI creations. The wife concluded that Zoomer will ultimately be the murderer because when Darby accesses the door camera footage, the victim opens the door you don't see anyone in the doorway and Zoomer is under three feet tall or thereabouts. Just our theory and it could well prove to be a red herring we're being led towards to cover the real killer. The opening two parts are intriguing, but I feel that the flashbacks to Darby's earlier life are far more interesting and enjoyable; there's something about a bunch of rich and famous people huddled together in snowy Iceland in a state of the art hotel trying to come up with solutions to save humanity that I found a bit [ahem] cold and uninspiring, so we'll see how this all unfolds over the following five parts...

Lessons in Letters

This wonderful television series delivered something really special this week - almost an entire episode devoted to the truly wonderful human being Calvin Evans - Mad's father and the love of Elizabeth's life. There have been so few truly likeable characters in television; people you'd want to exist in real life and be your friend and Calvin is without a doubt one of those people.

This week starts with his young life in St Luke's as an orphan and how he yearned for someone, preferably his parents, to come and rescue him from what he clearly felt was religious purgatory, but this is where his love of chemistry started to pay off as he produced hooch illegally to help provide funds for the church and this was also where there might be a clue as to where he originally came from. 

Things jumped forward to when he began working at Hastings as a brilliant young chemist and when he started a correspondence with Curtis Wakely - the reverend that coincidentally Mad has struck a friendship up with and that is essentially what most of the rest of the episode is about, these two people discussing life with each other - one a man of science, the other of God and it is a truly wonderful episode of TV, one made all the more painful by the fact that we don't see Calvin any more, so having an entire episode devoted to him was like dreaming about a dead relative. There's also something else that's become apparent; this series might appear to be about Elizabeth Zott and her rise, but it's really about Calvin and how he changed so many people and how he continues to have an effect on people. This episode ends with another clue to his past being uncovered just as Mad thinks she's hit a dead end. I tell you this every week, but you need to watch this. It is the best thing on television; it's even better than For All Mankind, for which you'll get a double helping next week as we couldn't watch the second part of season four because the wife wanted to go to bed after two solid days of travelling and shopping.

The Legacy of Godzilla

Apple TV+ never ceases to impress as it continues to pour entertainment gold into the streaming world and anyone who thought that Monarch: Legacy of Monsters was going to be cheesy or corny or both would have been put to rights with the opening two episodes of this series. This is a serious show about a not very serious concept and one that extrapolates on themes explored in the Legendary Pictures Godzilla/King Kong movies; maybe even putting too much meat on the bones although I doubt it will prove to be incongruous.

I had this feeling that this series would promise lots of monsters and deliver very little of them, but the first two parts quashes that theory like a city under Godzilla's size 400 foot. I'd say there were at least four new monsters introduced, along with footage of Godzilla and a giant spider - on separate occasions, not fighting each other; the spider fights a giant crab instead... This is conspiracy theory territory mixed with a top secret organisation with more oomph than you've ever seen in the films with a human interest story that is both confusing and compelling. It starts with footage taken by John Goodman from Kong: Skull Island and extrapolating on that as the legacy of Bill Randa unfolds and the dark secrets of Monarch come to light. This is a story about flashbacks - we go back to 1952, 1959, 1973, 2014 and to an undisclosed time - not the present, but a few years after the events in Gareth Edwards' 2014 Godzilla reboot and we even get some shots of the Big G that weren't lifted from any of his previous appearances.

This is a series that makes you wonder - like with The Creator - just who Marvel/Disney are using for their special effects to be so lousy, because this is excellent and the monsters we're introduced to in the opening 90 minutes are awesome and new. Cate Randa arrives in Tokyo to explore her missing presumed dead father's apartment only to find a family live there; Hiroshi Randa (the son of Bill and Keiko) it seems lived a double life with a family in San Francisco and one in Tokyo that knew nothing of each other. Hiroshi also worked for Monarch, which his father was the founder of and they want his files, which Cate and her half brother Kentaro have come into possession of. This is happening in the almost now, but in the 1950s Bill, Keiko and Lee Shaw are just discovering that dragons and other monsters really do exist. The two eras collide when the children of Hiroshi find the aged Lee in a 'retirement home' exclusively run by Monarch and as a certain Holmes would have said, the game is afoot.

This surprised me; a TV series loaded with monsters that also has a story and feels like adult TV not some cash in or compromise. It does feel a wee bit earnest at times, but the flashbacks to the 50s are excellent with a real Indiana Jones feel as the proto-Monarch starts to uncover the secrets of the world. Wyatt Russell - Kurt's son - plays his father's younger self and they're about the two most recognisable actors in the series so far, but don't let that detract you, this is an excellent beginning to the series and I don't expect it to trail off.

Next Time...

There's the probable season finale to the awesome Lessons In Chemistry, a double bubble of For All Mankind, more monsters and Monarch, Bill Bailey and Icelandic murders; plus season two of The Lazarus Project and possibly a couple of other things.

In the world of films... tough to say, depends what comes out, what we fancy off of the hard drive or Flash Drive of Doom or whether there's simply too much telly to fit a film or three in. The quality TV is being packed deep, especially given we're approaching the 'dead season' when the schedules are full of repeats and crappy Christmas-themed bollocks.