The Road is a movie that I enjoyed a lot more than I expected
to. I’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s award-winning novel (one of the best books I’ve read in a decade, and I’m a pretty voracious reader by most standards), and the bar set by the Coen Bros. with their Oscar-winning film of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (pretty much a flawless movie, in my estimation) is so high that it’s effectively unreachable. Not helping director John Hillcoat and Joe Penhall is the fact that the source material is actually far less film-friendly than the more plot-driven No Country. But I was very pleasantly surprised by their version of The Road, which, while it doesn’t approach the perfection of No Country for Old Men, is still a very good movie that manages to hit many of the book’s emotional beats without being too depressing or bleak. There’s a core of hope to the book that the filmmakers manage to tap into, and it makes The Road much, much more than an overly serious riff on The Road Warrior.
The Road, if you’re unfamiliar with the book, follows a father and son in post-apocalyptic America. The cause of the catastrophe is never explained, nor are the characters’ histories explored beyond a handful of golden-hued flashbacks, which Hillcoat and Penhall expanded considerably from the even more vague flashbacks in the novel. McCarthy’s book is less proper prose than a sort of tone poem about humanity, and the plot – The Man and The Boy (never named) are making their way south in the hopes of finding a more friendly climate on the coast – is almost non-existent. The Road is basically a collection of sequences of the Man and the Boy encountering other survivors (most of them bad; the death of just about every plant and animal on the planet has led many to turn to cannibalism), and Hillcoat and Penhall sort of stumble by trying to serve two masters: the novel and the moviegoing audience. The biggest problem with The Road – and it’s hardly a major one, and will really only be noticed by people who’ve read the book – is that it sort of falls halfway between being an incredibly loyal adaptation (à la No Country) and a more Hollywood-style revamp (i.e. with beefed-up action and a more traditional narrative arc). It doesn’t ruin the movie, and thankfully Hillcoat and Penhall err on the side of being faithful to McCarthy’s novel, changing the structure considerably but otherwise staying very true to the book. (Hillcoat says in his commentary that McCarthy approved of the final film.)
But The Road lives and dies by its actors, and Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee are both incredible as the Man and the Boy. McPhee, in particular, is fantastic, and I look forward to seeing him in the otherwise ill-advised upcoming remake of the mind-blowingly great Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In (read me gush about it here and here). Mortenson is just so reliably good at this point in his career that I can’t even come up with anything clever to say about his performance. He’s simply awesome in what’s clearly a very challenging role.
In addition to the leads, there’s also a handful of other great actors who turn up in tiny roles (often just a single scene), including Charlize Theron, glimpsed in flashbacks as the Woman, whose emotional scenes with a heartbroken Mortenson are almost difficult to watch. Guy Pearce and Michael K. Williams (best known as Omar from The Wire) also turn up, but it was Robert 
Duvall who blew everyone else away as an old blind man. His scene with Mortenson and McPhee at the campfire was, for me, easily the best scene in the entire film.
Beyond the lineup of stellar actors, The Road really benefits from Hillcoat’s direction. The Australian first grabbed me with his Outback western The Proposition (which starred Pearce), probably the grimiest, dirtiest film I’ve ever seen. His gritty visual style is perfect for the ash-covered world of The Road. The crew also used mostly real locations (much of it was shot in and around Pittsburgh), as opposed to using CGI to create the film’s desolate, blasted landscapes, and the results make the movie seem that much more real. Hillcoat also does an excellent job of ramping up the tension – I don’t remember the last time I saw a movie where the mere fact that there was a person in the distance could inspire bowel-clenching terror – and The Road is as scary as any horror movie.
As for the DVD itself, there’s a commentary track from Hillcoat that’s a little dry, but he’s charmingly self-conscious about his lack of experience doing commentaries, and once he gets comfortable he provides lots of interesting insights into the process of bringing The Road to the screen, including the process of involving McCarthy. There’s also a pretty good making-of featurette, as well as a small collection of deleted and extended scenes.
Overall The Road really surpassed my guarded expectations, and while it’s not best-film-of-the-year material, it’s emotionally involving without being too much of a downer, filled with incredible performances and some really striking imagery. The Road is a refreshingly mature, grown-up post-apocalyptic movie with genuine heart.
Labels: DVD review, sci-fi
¶ 10:30 AM 0 Comments
THE MOVIE
I’m quite a fan of the original District 13, the parkour-influenced 2004 sci-fi/martial arts movie co-written and produced by Luc Besson. It’s a fun martial arts flick that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and really exists as a showcase for martial artist Cyril Raffaelli and parkour co-creator David Belle. It’s set in a near-future France where civil and economic unrest has deteriorated to the point where the slums have been walled off into 
numbered districts where all sorts of illegal activities go down and even the police fear to enter. The story follows straight-laced cop Damien (Rafaelli), who must team up with streetwise outlaw Leito (Belle) to save Leito’s sister from evil drug dealers, and also save Leito’s building (which he rules as a benevolent protector, outlawing drugs and other shady activity), and the rest of District 13 from a bomb the corrupt government wants to use to level the entire district for some impromptu gentrification.
District 13: Ultimatum is the sequel, reteaming Belle and Rafaelli as Leito and Damien, and it ups the ante in just about every sense. A text crawl at the beginning explains that in the three years since the first movie, literally nothing in District 13 has changed – the promise Leito got that the government would clean up the slums has gone, unsurprisingly, unfulfilled (“The government reneged on a promise?,” another character deadpans in response to Leito’s gripes. “That’s a total outrage!”) – and quickly establishes that Leito is up to his old tricks fighting back against The Man. The plot this time around really expands on the social commentary in the first movie – the original District 13, as much as it’s an action flick, also had a lot to say about the state of modern France, which, at the time of its release, was dealing with a lot of street violence and anti-immigrant sentiment – concerning an incendiary video of cops apparently being gunned down in cold blood by District 13 residents, which almost sparks a civil war. Naturally, some shady government types (seemingly a cross between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the CIA) are behind it all, and its up to Damien and Leito to expose the conspiracy.
Regular readers know of my love of martial arts movies, and the first time I saw parkour in action – it was actually a YouTube clip of what turned out to be the best sequence in District 13, showing Leito eluding a gang of cops – I thought it was one of the coolest and craziest things I’d ever seen. I love the speed and kinetics of a well-choreographed fight scene, and what Belle was doing was sort of similar, but with less emphasis on fighting and more on speed and graceful movements. It was just a blast to watch him do what he does. So when I found out that this crazy sequence was from a movie, I was incredibly excited – even more so when I learned that Belle’s co-star was Rafaelli, who I recognized from a great fight scene with Jet Li in the otherwise forgettable (but similarly Besson-produced) 2001 actioner Kiss of the Dragon. The idea of a movie that mixes parkour and martial arts is a brilliant one, and the original District 13 is a wonderfully fun movie with boundless energy.
My main problem with the original District 13 – which my comic-addled mind considers the greatest Batman/Superman movie never made – is that it makes the cardinal action-movie sin of peaking early, putting the most impressive sequences near the beginning, which ends up making the rest of the movie feel like a letdown after those incredible early action scenes (not that the ending isn’t cool – the filmmakers seemed to realize that they couldn’t really provide Damien or Leito with an adequate adversary for the climax, so instead they have to fight each other), but thankfully Ultimatum doesn’t fall into that trap. Director Patrick Alessandrin wisely ramps up the action scenes, and he doesn’t frontload the movie with the coolest stuff. Instead, the action gets crazier and crazier as the film goes along (our heroes drive a car through a government building midway through the film, and that’s before the parkour army shows up), making Ultimatum feel like an old-fashioned sequel; everyone involved is trying to give fans more of what they loved about the first movie, and in this case, it definitely works.
There’s a nice vibe between Belle and Rafaelli in these movies that’s oddly infectious. Sure, neither of them is going to win any acting awards for their work here, but they have a natural chemistry together and, as a fan of the first movie, I was surprised how much of a kick I got out of the scene where the two characters finally hook up again. There’s a great (if traditional) dynamic between the almost comically by-the-book cop and the more cynical, streetwise tough, and both Rafaelli and Belle bring a great dry humor to their roles, and their odd-couple banter is never overdone.
The strangest part of District 13: Ultimatum was the ham-fisted political commentary, which is thankfully confined to just the last couple of minutes. There was a bit of the same in the first movie, but screenwriter Luc Besson lays it on far thicker in the sequel, from the name of the evil corporation at the center of the conspiracy (Harriburton!) to the left-wing fanfiction ending, District 13: Ultimatum wears its political standpoint on its sleeve, and it’s oddly charming (if for no reason other than I really don’t think an American-made action film would have the stones to take things as far as this movie is willing to). It’s very much a reaction to the immigration debate currently raging in France, but to Besson’s and director Patrick Alessandrin’s credit, the film manages to say what it has to say without really bogging the proceedings down or making it anything less than fun. Overall, District 13: Ultimatum is an incredibly fun action movie with tons of eye-popping stunts and great fights. If you’re into this kind of movie, I recommend it highly.
GRADE: B+
EXTRAS
District 13: Ultimatum has the best collection of deleted and extended scenes I’ve seen in a while, as they’re all extended versions of the movies fight sequences. It’s sort of a surprising decision to cut down the fight scenes in a martial arts movie (it’s sort of like cutting out scenes of the two good-looking leads together in a romantic comedy), but I’m assuming they were trimmed to help the movie’s pacing, and nothing crucial was excised. But the longer scenes are on the DVD, and they’re pretty much all awesome. There’s also a French rap video, and a pretty decent making-of featurette in French (with English subtitles) that goes over most aspects of production (stunts, casting, etc.). It’s fairly interesting stuff, if nothing groundbreaking.
Labels: DVD review, martial arts, sci-fi
¶ 10:00 AM 1 Comments
I’ve made no secret of my giddy anticipation of Tron Legacy this December, winner of this year’s District 9 Awad for Movie I Keep Finding Excuses To Write About, and clearly I’m not the only child of the ‘80s looking forward to Disney’s sequel. I found this the other day, and it filled me with nerd-glee; it’s a shockingly effective modern-style trailer that someone edited together for the original 1982 Tron, and it makes it look as awesome as The Dark Knight.
I didn’t really need any more reason to throw in my 20th Anniversary Edition DVD of Tron this weekend, but now I’ve got it. If you haven’t seen Tron before, or in a long time, I dare you not to check it out after watching this.
Labels: nostalgia, sci-fi, trailers
¶ 10:00 AM 0 Comments
Pandorum is a weird little sci-fi/horror movie. In some senses it’s better than I expected it to be, and in others it’s really quite bad. The story takes place on a ship in deep space, and follo
ws Bower (Ben Foster), a member of the flight crew who awakens from hyper-sleep apparently before he’s supposed to. He finds the ship empty and apparently without power, and wakes Lt. Payton (Dennis Quaid), one of his superiors, to try to figure out what’s going on. The problem is that one of the side effects of the hyper-sleep process is temporary memory loss, so neither of them has much of an idea what they’re doing there. The two get separated when Bower descends into the bowels of the ship to try to get the power back on, only to find out he and Payton are far from the only people (or things) awake on the ship. (The title refers to a sort of “space madness” that causes hallucinations and other craziness as a result of long-term space travel.)Pandorum, while being a sci-fi/horror movie that borrows very liberally from Alien and the Resident Evil movies (it shares producers with the latter series), is also structured largely as a mystery. Because of the conceit that Bower doesn’t really remember what he’s doing on the ship or even what their mission is, co-writer/director Christian Alvart doles out information a bit at a time as Bower pieces his memories back together. It’s an interesting idea (if a fairly obvious device to manufacture the mystery), and that’s where Pandorum’s strengths lie. Alvart is obviously a serious fan of science fiction, and the concepts he delves into, particularly in the final act as the mysteries in the film are revealed, are (with one glaring exception that I’ll touch on in a moment) certainly more intriguing and reminiscent of classic sci-fi stories about space travel than I expected.
Where Pandorum definitely does not work is the action. It’s explained in the DVD extras that the film started when two separate, similar projects (about the effects of extended space travel on the crew) were merged, and when I learned that, most of my issues with the movie seemed to be retroactively explained. The parts that work are the sci-fi elements; the parts that don’t are the horror and action elements. See, shortly after waking up, Bower encounters a bizarre, freakish mutant-thing with metal spikes sticking out of it, and subsequently learns from a couple o
f human survivors (who have clearly been awake for quite some time now, another nice little detail that deepens the pervading sense that something’s just wrong) that these creatures are infesting the ship.The monsters aren’t necessarily lame because of how they look (they’re actually fairly creepy, especially their noseless leader…they were designed by Stan Winston studio; I just wish the late, great master’s final work was a better movie), but rather the explanation for what they are is vague and ultimately disappointing. I won’t spoil it, but considering how freakish they look, and how much the movie relies on them as a driver of the plot, their origin is basically tossed off in a line in passing. But in the light of the film’s aforementioned genesis as two separate projects, I assume the half-assed nature of the monsters is a casualty of that process. Maybe in the movie that was about monsters in space (rather than a bunch of people trying to figure out what’s going on with the ship while also evading bizarre monsters) they were more fleshed out. Usually things that go unexplained are scarier in movies like this (and I’m not asking for a prequel graphic novel or anything explaining how they came to be), but here the monsters are just a weird distraction, a way to keep things “exciting” by just having some more flesh-eating freaks show up every few minutes so the audience doesn’t get bored with all the talking. (The monsters, for some reason, also leap through the air, Crouching Tiger style, when they fight. It’s an incredibly irritating and stupid detail that makes no sense, is never explained, and makes the already-weak monsters even worse. I can’t express enough in words how much I hated that detail.)
While Bower’s dodging flesh-eating monsters, Payton remains on the bridge, trying to get the ship back up and running and figure out the situation for himself. He finds another crew member, Gallo (Cam Gigandet), hiding in a bunch of wires, and naturally, he has some more information to dole out to Quaid’s character in between cuts back to Bower and the two survivors he finds (played by German actress Antje Traue and mixed martial arts fighter Cung Le) as they sneak and fight their way through the ship.
Traue, while very hot, is charged with delivering the bulk of the film’s exposition – and in a movie relying this much on mystery to create tension, there is much explaining to be done – and her thick accent makes those scenes even more leaden than they should be (s
he also adopts an unfortunate “tough chick” growl that sounds totally put-on; her whole character is just a paint-by-numbers “ass-kicking woman,” which has, in itself, become a tired cliché in genre movies like this one). She sounds like she’s speaking phonetically, and it’s really noticeable every time she’s onscreen. That said, she is really hot, and there are worse things than watching her run around in a grimy tank-top.Foster and Quaid, though, are the ones tasked with most of the heavy lifting in terms of acting, and they’re both solid. Foster is fast becoming one of my favorite young actors (his tweaked-out turn in Alpha Dog is amazing, and I’ve always lamented how wasted he was in the third X-Men movie), and he’s very good in his first big lead role. He wisely doesn’t play Bower as some sort of badass; of the three characters he spends the bulk of the movie with, he’s easily the least capable in a fight, which is an interesting dynamic considering he’s the hero. A less compelling actor in the role probably would have rendered much of Pandorum unwatchable. Quaid is also quite good, and he gets most of the over-the-top stuff to do – Payton is shown to be afflicted with Pandorum fairly early on, and Quaid is clearly having fun playing a guy gripped by space madness.
I actually dug most of the story and the ideas at play in Pandorum, but ultimately Alvart and company just didn’t do enough with it (not to mention the clearly shoehorned-in monsters). There’s a battle going on between a “things going wrong in space” thriller (an odd little subgenre of sci-fi thrillers than I have a major soft spot for) and a horror movie about flesh-eating monsters with big pieces of metal sticking out of them, and Pandorum’s biggest flaw is its failure to combine the two into anything more than a third-rate cross between Alien (a great movie, and a smart one to borrow from) and Resident Evil (decidedly less so). The twists at the end are actually pretty clever, and I didn’t see any of it coming. The mysteries are also handled well enough that, as much as I didn’t necessarily enjoy the movie, I can’t pretend I wasn’t interested to learn the explanation for everything. And with the exception of the origin of the monsters, all the revelations (and the ideas behind them) are intriguing enough that I was actually sort of disappointed they were lost in such an otherwise generic, unoriginal movie.
GRADE: C
THE EXTRAS
The Pandorum DVD has a nice assortment of stuff on it, including a commentary track from director Christian Alvart and producer Jeremy Bolt. Alvart’s clearly a smart guy who understands not only movies but also science fiction, and his perspective is fairly interesting, focusing more on the story and the characters and what he was going for in a given scene, while Bolt focuses more on the details of production. I never got bored by the track, but it didn’t really blow me away either.
There’s a collection of deleted and extended scenes, and most of them are slight variations or extensions of what’s already in the movie. The alternate ending is actually pretty cool, but it’s considerably darker then the one used; Alvart (correctly) notes in the commentary that it’s unusual for a film like this to have something approaching a happy ending, so it would have also made his film feel even more generic and ripped-off if he’d used it.
There’s a pretty standard making-of featurette that’s nothing special, but it’s interesting enough. Also included are two odd little extras, neither of which works particularly well: ‘What Happened to Nadia’s Team’ ostensibly shows what happened to Antje Traue’s team of scientists before things went pear-shaped on the ship. It only runs a few minutes and is shot Blair Witch-style with a handheld camera. It looks cheap, and nothing about it really clicks with the movie itself. It just feels like a weird, gimmicky thing to put on a DVD, and I failed to see the point of it. There’s also a ‘Flight Team Training Video’ which purports to be a video shown to members of the ship’s crew before the ship takes off, and it doesn’t really do much other than remind the viewer of some aspects of the plot. It’s sort of cute, and not as lame as ‘Nadia’s Team,’ but, again, I didn’t see why it was included.
Labels: DVD review, sci-fi
¶ 7:54 AM 2 Comments
