OBLIVION Is Big, Beautiful And Uninspired

"How can a man die better / then facing fearful odds / for the ashes of his fathers / and the temples of his Gods."

As soon as the credits started to roll on Oblivion, I turned to my friend Jeff and said, "You know, one of these days someone's going to give Joseph Kosinski a decent script, and he's gonna make a hell of a movie."

I'm a big fan of the original Tron, so I was pretty excited at the prospect of a sequel with old man Jeff Bridges.  Kosinski was handed the reigns to Tron: Legacy and it turned out...disappointing.  But you have to admit it's a very good looking movie.  Most of the problems stem not from Kosinski's visuals, but from a script that's lackluster at best and a leading man who looked uncomfortable in his own skin.  (Garrett Hedlund looks far more compelling in smaller budget stuff like On The Road and Inside Llewyn Davies, so maybe he should just steer clear of franchise studio pictures.)

Pretty much all the credit/blame for Oblivion goes directly to Kosinski, as it's almost entirely his creation.  He wrote the graphic novels which served as the treatment for this film, and he wrote the script along with talented guys like Michael Arndt and Karl Gajdusek.  Also, I will fully admit that I just plain love Tom Cruise.  Yeah, in real life the guy might be absolutely batshit crazy, but I could care less so long as he keeps giving us entertaining performances.  And whatever you may think of him personally, you simply cannot accuse him of ever phoning it in for a paycheck.  Whenever he's on screen, Cruise absolutely throws himself into the role 1012% (that's a precise calculation) so that even his less successful films can usually boast solid work from the actor.  One of my favorite single Cruise moments is at the end of Mission: Impossible III, when he's running along the banks of a river in China to save his wife and the guy is just HAULING ASS.  Most actors will pace themselves in a scene like that, because they know they're gonna have to do multiple takes from multiple angles so they can stitch the shots together to create excitement and tension.  But here it's just one long tracking shot and Cruise doesn't break stride for even a second.  In a way, that one shot tells you everything you need to know about Cruise.

I'll say this much for Oblivion: it's a fucking gorgeous film.  Watching this movie in anything other than IMAX (2D!) is almost a disservice to the film itself, if that's any indication.  Kosinski specializes in breathtaking imagery of tremendous depth and scale, so it really does behoove you to watch this as large and as crisp as humanly possible.  (This is the opposite of an airplane movie, although I have no doubt that it will be appearing on JetBlue before long.)  Kosinski strikes me as more of a technical, George Lucas-y director than an emotional, Steven Speilberg-y director; that is to say that he seems more interested in experimenting with the look and feel of his movies than he is in crafting memorable characters and stories.  Put another way, he's so in love with building worlds that he neglects the people in them.  Here's a taste of what I'm talking about.  Above the post-apocalyptic scenery, both lush and desolate, is the Sky Tower.  It's a glass-encased home on a dizzying spindle where Jack Harper and Victoria (Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough, respectively) live and work to maintain a series of drones and generators which provide power to the last human colony on Titan.  Normally the stunning views from such a location would be achieved digitally and the actors would be performing on a large green screen stage, but Kosinksi decided to go in a much cooler, old-school direction:

I love everything about that set-up.  It's so smart in a number of different ways.  Also, I want to live there.

That being said, the story and the characters both just sort of lay there flat.  Since I'm behind the curve here (I expect the film will be out of theaters sometime in the next two weeks) I'm not gonna run through the story and it's various reveals, but most reviews have already pointed out that the plot borrows liberally from numerous other/better sci-fi films like Moon, Wall-E, and Beneath The Planet Of The Apes.  To be honest, that didn't bother me so much; sci-fi is constantly drawing ideas and stories from the same communal well.  Sure it would have been nice if Kosinksi could have taken all those familiar elements and elevated them in some way, or put his own spin on them.  But when it's all said and done, it doesn't feel like lazy storytelling, just uninspired.  Besides, these are the kinds of concepts I always enjoy watching, even if they're inadequately explored.  Time travel is inherently cool, so pretty much any movie involving time travel instantly becomes interesting to me.  (There's no time travel here, it's just an example.)

By now it's clear that Oblivion is not a movie that's going to set the world on fire, but I think it's entertaining enough.  Cruise isn't amazing, but that's the fault of the script, not his performance.  Andrea Riseborough gives a lovely, fragile performance as Cruise's partner, especially when Olga Kurylenko's mystery woman shows up.  Morgan Freeman gets a cool wardrobe and a cigar, while Melissa Leo and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are both squandered talents.  Also, Zoe Bell may or may not have been silently standing around the entire time, but I didn't notice her until three minutes before the movie ended.  It's Kurylenko that truly feels like the weak link here.  She feels like she's following in the footsteps of Thandie Newton, an actress who's never given a performance I've enjoyed.  Granted Kurylenko is better here than she was in Quantum Of Solace, but not by much.  I've got Martin McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths queued up to watch tonight and I'm hoping to catch up with Terrence Malick's To The Wonder as well.  If neither of those guys can coax a convincing performance out of her, I think that's probably game, set, match.

And let's be honest: it's nice to see a big budget, (visually) ambitious sci-fi movie that's not based on a pre-existing property.  Those are the movies that always stretch the boundaries of our imagination, and these days such efforts feel few and far between.

At least we still have Elysium to look forward to.

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Title: Oblivion
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Starring: Tom Cruise, Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko, Morgan Freeman, Melissa Leo, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Zoe Bell
Year Of Release: 2013
Viewing Method: IMAX (Jordan's - Reading)

"Ape-stronauts!" I Never Want To ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES

"Because I loathe bananas."

Okay, I get it now.

The first Apes movie is a legitimately great movie, while the second one tries for big sci-fi ideas and fails spectacularly.  The third one knows exactly where its bread is buttered.  What do I mean?  Here we open on the familiar spacecraft floating in the Pacific ocean, but now we've got a helicopter full of modern day humans flying overhead.  The army shows up and drags the the crashed ship onto the shore and opens up the hatch.  Three astronauts emerge and remove their helmets only to reveal...they're apes!  Apes in spacesuits!  Ape-stronauts!

I don't think I've been won over by a movie so quickly.

Long story short: Cornelius, Zira and newcomer Dr. Milo managed to salvage Taylor's spaceship, figure out the controls and blast off just in time to see the Earth destroyed.  The ship is somehow catapulted backward in time to 1971, leaving our favorite apes to find their way in late 20th century Los Angeles.  So basically, it's the Star Trek IV of Apes movies.

Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter are back and they are both spectacular.  There's obviously a lot of humor to be mined from intelligent, talking apes from the future becoming celebrities in 1970s LA, doubly so when viewing it 40 years later.  (The fashion choices alone are pretty amazing.)  The biggest fault of Beneath The Planet Of The Apes was Cornelius and Zira's abrupt disappearance halfway through the movie, so you've gotta give them credit for turning that weakness to their advantage in the third installment.  And where Beneath was overwhelmingly dour, this movie has a playful tone that really plays into turning the tables and making the apes the fish out of water.  I'm sure a big part of that story choice was driven by budgetary concerns; it's certainly a lot cheaper to shoot two apes (Milo is accidentally killed early on) in a modern setting than to build elaborate sets and put dozens of actors and extras in complex simian makeup.

McDowell and Hunter are clearly having a blast reprising their roles.  Writer Paul Dehn seems to realize who the stars of its franchise really are and they are both given great material to play.  Again, there's plenty of comedy here and both Zira and Cornelius get in some sharp zingers as they explore this new world.  But the story eventually takes a darker tone.  The U.S. government, spearheaded by the President's chief science advisor Dr. Otto Hasslein, is very interested in exactly where the apes came from, why they traveled back in time, and how their species eventually came to dominate man.  There are public hearings that eventually give way to secret interrogations involving truth serum.  When Zira is revealed to be pregnant, Dr. Hasslein is convinced that the offspring of these two apes will eventually beget a race of apes that will spell humanity's downfall.  He believes that they must be killed for the good of mankind, and even though there's no doubt that Hasslein's in the wrong, I appreciated that the script actually gives him somewhat of a nuanced position.  He gives a great speech about how the human race is prone to procrastination when it comes to solving large scale problems like pollution and overpopulation.  Eric Braeden's performance stops short of turning Hasslein into a mustache-twirling villain and it's clear that he truly believes he's doing the right and necessary thing, even if Zira and Cornelius personally have only the best of intentions towards man.

Eventually Zira and Cornelius escape from the military base where they're being held, thanks in part to the efforts of the animal psychologists who first took care of them upon their arrival in the past.  He takes them to a friend's circus to hide out.  The circusmaster?  Ricardo Motherfucking Montalban!

It's like this movie was made for me.

The movie's finale gets super dark.  (Spoilers follow)  Dr. Hasslein tracks Cornelius, Zira and their baby Milo to an abandoned freighter ship and the Doctor eventually shoots both Zira and the baby.  Cornelius thusly shoots Hasslein dead in front of a squad of police officers, who, in turn, shoot Cornelius.  His lifeless body topples down from the top of the ship to the deck below and the ailing Zira dumps the baby's body in the water and crawls over to die next to her husband.  And as the audience is once again left wondering how they plan to keep this franchise going, we cut back to Ricardo Montalban's circus, only to see that Zira actually swapped babies with one of the circus apes.  Baby Milo (an actual ape) clutches the bars of his cage and as the picture fades to black, we hear him crying out, "Mama!  Mama!  MAAAAMAAAA!"  Talk about a killer ending!

While the first two Apes movies made me curious to see where the story would go, this one left me damn near RABID for the next installment.  I suspect that the last two movies will take place primarily in the modern day, but at the same time this franchise has a willingness to completely rewrite its own history whenever it suits it.  For example, during his interrogation Cornelius tells the story of how the apes initially came to overtake humanity.  He speaks of a plague that wiped out dogs and cats, thus causing humans to adopt apes as pets.  Eventually the apes became smart enough to carry out complicated yet menial tasks like cooking and cleaning, until the apes eventually came to grasp the concept of slavery.  They finally rose up against their masters, and an ape named Aldo spoke the first word.  He said, "No."

While I appreciate the way it would come to be echoed by Andy Serkis's Caesar in Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, it also runs completely contrary to the history established in the first Apes movie.  There we saw Cornelius's archeological dig, where he had uncovered evidence of the long gone human civilization.  However they were convinced it must have been some ancient apes, because the idea of intelligent, vocal humans seemed an impossibility.  Now he's talking about every ape celebrating the day that Aldo first spoke his refusal against man.  This isn't so much retconning as it is just changing the rules whenever it's convenient.  In Beneath it seemed annoying and lazy, but now that it's become a systemic feature of the franchise it's actually morphed into a rather charming attribute.  Hey, maybe it means they'll find a way to bring Cornelius and Zira back from the dead.  Who knows?

While the first Planet Of The Apes is definitely the most impressive movie of the franchise so far, Escape is probably my favorite and I suspect that it will probably end up being watched in heavier rotation in our house when all is said and done.

Then again, I've got two more chapters to go and my hopes have never been higher.


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Title: Escape From The Planet Of The Apes
Director: Don Taylor
Starring: Roddy McDowell, Kim Hunter, Bradford Dillman, Eric Braeden
Year Of Release: 1971
Viewing Method: Digital Copy (TV)

My Sanity Is Buried BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES

"The Lawgiver bleeds!"

Holy balls, this movie is totally bonkers.

I'm not gonna dwell on the second Apes movie too long, because I suspect that it's not going to end up playing a huge part in the rest of the franchise.  Why do I think that?  Because it ends with the destruction of the planet.

Let's back up.

The movie opens in the last few minutes of the first installment, with Taylor and Nova riding off along the shoreline and discovering the remains of the Statue Of Liberty.  They continue to ride silently across the Forbidden Zone through the opening credits...then we cut away to another spaceship crashed in the desert, identical to the one which brought Taylor and crew so far into the future.  Two astronauts have survived the crash.  It seems they were on a rescue mission to find Taylor, but much like their predecessor they also assume they're on some alien planet rather than the Earth of the future.  It's here where we get our first inkling that something isn't quite right, as one astronaut who looks like Charlton Heston Lite remarks to his ailing partner that the computer says the current Earth year is 3955, which is about twenty years before the first movie.  No reason, no explanation, simply a lack of research/continuity.  This already does not bode well.

The older astronaut dies, leaving our Heston look-a-like, Brent, to fend for himself.  That is until Nova rides up sans Taylor.  Brent tries to communicate with her, but she's still unable to speak.  He quickly notices that she's wearing dogtags identical to his own, and he asks her about Taylor.  We're treated to a flashback of Taylor and Nova alone in the desert, with Taylor unsuccessfully trying to teach her how to say his name.  The two ride on until they encounter a wall of fire, strange lightning bolts, and eventually a cliff face that appears out of nowhere in the middle of the desert plain.  Taylor tries to investigate, giving Nova his dogtags and telling her if anything happens to go back to the Ape city and find Zira.  Again, let's pause.  Where the hell did the dogtags come from?  He certainly never had them in the first movie, and it's not as if his tiny loincloth has pockets.  Anyway, Taylor reaches out for the cliff face and immediately disappears.

Brent wants Nova to take him to Taylor, but instead she brings him to the apes.  They observe a town hall meeting where General Ursus is rallying the crowd to send an army into the Forbidden Zone, as he believes there are humans living there that killed a scout squad.  There are some peacenik chimps, marching in a circle with pickets signs espousing peace, but the crowd is largely amped for war.  Brent and Nova quickly find Zira and Cornelius, now suddenly married, and Brent is quickly brought up to speed with the rest of the audience.  Apes run the show, humans can't talk, desert wasteland, etc.  Zira tells him that Taylor went off into the Forbidden Zone and Brent is determined to find him.  Dr Zaius shows up and we get yet another really weird moment.  Zira was helping to treat Brent's wounds and is unable to hide the bloody bandages when Zaius arrives.  So, to explain them away she tells Zaius that Cornelius HIT HER because she disagreed with the warmongering crowd at the town meeting.  But it's okay because, as she tells Dr. Zaius, "I don't resent it, but his nails need clipping."  No big deal.  WHAT THE FUCK?  Later on they make a whole point about how apes don't shoot other apes, but slapping around the lady apes is a-okay?  This scene makes Taylor's previous chauvinism seem downright charming.

Anyway, after spending a little time in an ape prison with other mute natives, Brent and Nova escape into the Forbidden Zone, with the ape army not far behind.  They stumble upon an cave that leads to an underground passage and then things start to get REALLY batshit.  Brent finds himself in an abandoned New York City subway station, having his own mini-State Of Liberty moment.  (Seriously, he even echoes Taylor's words, saying "My god, did we finally do it?  Did we finally, really do it?")  Further exploration of the underground reveals a buried New York Public Library, New York Stock Exchange, city buses, and even Radio City Music Hall.  Here's where I really started to get excited.  The ape stuff is all kind of a retread from last time, but this felt like we were pushing into new territory and really expanding the ape world.  Plus, underground New York just flat out looks cool as shit.

My excitement quickly dissipated as Brent discovers a lone man dressed like Jor-El who's not only talking, he's praying.  To a nuclear missile.

Confession: at this point I realized that I had actually see part of this movie when I was a kid.  The missile has the Greek symbols Alpha and Omega on the fin, which identifies it as a doomsday bomb.  I've always had an affinity for the Greek alphabet, so suffice it to say that ten-year-old Daley thought this was tremendously clever.  Somehow that particular image stayed with me, but really nothing else from the film.  I didn't even remember it being from a Planet Of The Apes movie.  How is that possible?  Because from this point out, the Apes are largely absent.  WHICH IS TOTALLY FUCKING DUMB.  Brent discovers a whole civilization of people with strange psychic abilities who have been living underground and worshiping "the glory of the bomb and the Holy Fallout."

Oh but wait, it gets better.  These people are apparently defenseless in their underground cave, using their mental powers to project illusions of fire and lightning throughout the Forbidden Zone.  They attempt scare off the advancing ape army, but Dr. Zaius sees through the ruse and pushes the troops forward.  The nuclear disciples conclude they have no choice but to detonate the bomb and, gathering for a final religious ceremony that is chock full of creepy hymns, they reveal their true selves unto their god: they each peel off their faces to reveal that they are actually irradiated mutants that look like this:

Yeeeeaaaaahhhh......

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS MOVIE?  Where the hell are the damn, dirty apes?

Brent is soon locked away with...Taylor!  He's alive!  The reunion is quickly spoiled when the mutant guard uses his mind control power to make the two men fight each other to the death.  We basically get a lamer version of the classic Kirk vs Spock duel, albeit this time it's a cage match with spiked clubs.  Luckily Nova distracts the guard by shouting out Taylor's name (Progress!) and they're able to escape.  FINALLY the apes show up to wreck the joint, looking to literally smash any trace of humanity.  Unfortunately an ape shoots Nova in the back, which finally pushes Taylor right over the edge.  Apes, mutants...he's ready to do away with the whole lot of them.  By now the apes have slaughtered the baldies and are attempting to pull down the doomsday bomb, so Brent starts shooting up the room while Taylor goes for the bomb controls.  The distraction isn't so successful and Taylor gets shot in the chest.  He begs Dr. Zaius to help him, but the ape refuses saying, "Man is evil, capable of nothing but destruction."

So Taylor shows him a thing or two and blows up the world.  Just to drive the point home, the screen cuts to black and a monotone voiceover kicks in and says, "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium size star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead."

So...FUCK YOU AUDIENCE!

This is easily one of the most misguided sequels I've ever encountered.  First of all, it totally feels like this started off as a completely unrelated movie that was co-opted into the Apes franchise.  The new creative team clearly had no understanding of what was appealing about the first movie.  I'll give you a hint: it wasn't the biggest asshole in the history of space travel.  Spending the first half of the movie trapped in a watered down rehash of the first one is an unfortunate misstep.  Not only that, but the apes themselves are a bit of a let down.  Roddy McDowell was unavailable so they pull a makeup assisted bait-and-switch, recasting Cornelius for the two scenes he appears in.  (This move would become famously litigated when Crispin Glover was replaced in Back To The Future Part Two.)  Along with a lead who looks like Charlton Heston's actual stand-in, it's hard not to feel like we're watching the JV team.  To add insult to injury, the reduced budget meant that many of the ape extras are actually wearing rubber masks rather than the extensive makeup that so impressed audiences in the last go round.

Then they completely overcompensate by abandoning the apes almost entirely in the second half.  It's a pretty fatal blow, one that the movie never really recovers from.  The idea of underground survivors is fine and all, but they're so cut off and separate from the apes that we never get any kind of meaningful connection to the rest of this world which had such intriguing potential.  Really I want to hear more about the history and culture of the ape civilization.  Other than the hippie protestor apes, the only fresh clues we get here are a few more references and statues to the Lawgiver ape and a nonchalant attitude towards spousal abuse.  

Charlton Heston's very presence in the movie also feels really off.  He's got two scenes, disappears for the next hour, then shows up at the end solely to try and kill his successor and then avenge the death of his mute concubine by literally destroying the world.  While watching it I joked that the only reason they probably convinced Heston to return was the promise that they'd shoot him out in a week.  Hilariously, IMDB seems to confirm this.

Oh yeah, also they BLEW UP THE EARTH.  Now I'm extra fascinated to see how they managed to keep this franchise going for three more movies.

Look I'm all for really weird, out-there sci-fi that wants to play with big ideas, but everything about Beneath The Planet Of The Apes feels downright lazy, especially the doomsday ending.  It plays almost like some kind of Monty Python sketch where they don't know how to end it and just cut away to an explosion.  It was kind of fun, but I'm not sure I see myself revisiting this one very frequently.

Well, not sober at least.


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Title: Beneath The Planet Of The Apes
Director: Ted Post
Starring: James Franciscus, Linda Harrison, Maurice Evans, Kim Hunter, Charlton Heston
Year Of Release: 1970
Viewing Method: Digital Copy