World War Z

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3552888&userid=118075#post416843041

The second shot of World War Z, if I recall, is Brad Pitt and wife lying in bed til their kids burst into the room. Anyone watching the film again (although, god, why would you?) should pay attention to the painting over their bed; it seems to depict a trail of blood leading to a black table. The wife then calls the kids 'little creatures', in an unsubtle metaphor.

What does this mean, though? Professor Clumsy's reading is that the film is kind of a dream of Brad Pitt throwing off the shackles of domesticity to feel like a big zombie-killer. Though he says he doesn't want to, his unconscious desire is to leave his family behind.

I'd argue the opposite: The opening scenes equate zombie combat with doing the dishes. The whole world war barely seems apocalyptic because it represents status quo. This, more than anything else, explains the frequent returns to the family on the boat. Brad Pitt going off to fight is an everyday occurrence that puts bread on the table. There was already blood over their bed from the beginning.

This is where the film gets questionable, because although we're told in expository dialogue that the zombies are all about the deterritorializing effects of capitalism and abstract stuff like that, the more concrete imagery is of infested slum tenements, their implicit truce with a homeless man, and their upsetting a lame multiculturalism parade in Israel.

Yep, these zombies are the downtrodden poor, the social abject. The inhuman excluded. What does it mean when [spoiler]the Latino family becomes bitten, absorbed by their tenement, and only their son escapes by following Brad Pitt?[/spoiler] There's something very wrong with the film, and it reaches a head with an entire segment of Israel and Palestine joining forces against... Palestine. The liberal, multiculturalism imagery is extremely on-point. Everyone is everyone is equal - so long as they fit in, act nice and sing happy songs. That's the message.

This logic spills over into the airplane sequence. Brad Pitt escapes with the few remaining Israelis in the first class seats of a jet liner, beating the zombie Palestinians in coach to death with the carry-on luggage. The first class vs coach imagery was not unintentional - see the stupid purse-dog thrown in for easy satire.

This is the point where Lindelof jumped in to rewrite the film, which should be fairly overt from the sudden appearance of his trademark [spoiler]Christ imagery. The whole system fucked, Brad Pitt blows a hole in the plane (intertextuality with Man Of Steel) and emerges with a spear through his side, having given up his phone and left his family without their meal ticket. Lindelof also wrote the opening scenes of domestic bliss sustained with blood, so Clumsy is right that the film is 'anti-family' in that sense. But this only occurs after the plane explodes, and is totally divorced from the globetrotting zombie-shooting antics.

And even then, it's not quite enough. Despite Lindelof's best efforts, this is a liberal Brad Pitt Jesus, sitting in a first-class seat. By the end of the film, he'll be helping the UN distribute little humanitarian care packages while massacring the inhumans and piling them into mass graves. It's the Israel sequence all over again. Instead of being an authentic Jesus figure, Brad comes across as a poverty tourist, 'slumming it' so that he can blend in with 'the other half' - before immediately heading back to scrub his hands. Compare with, say, Land of the Dead and its zombie-proletarian revolution.

The film doesn't follow through on its own logic of joining the zombies through infirmity - crippling alcoholism, loss of limbs. Not this quick-fix stuff. Things return to normal extremely quickly, with the images of mass graves intercut with Brad hugging his wife again. Blood hanging over the bed. It's extremely cynical.

But even overlooking that, this film is incredibly, distractingly poorly-made. Things stick out, like the random, pointless flashback to the Korean doctor getting bit. I really enjoyed the stump-bandaging sequence because, during the entire dramatic actors' showcase, the extra in the seat beside them is just sitting there not interacting with them in any way. There's the dumb shot where the camera zooms down into the zombie's eyeball for some reason. A suicide is presented so elliptically that the dude may as well have walked offscreen to take a shit, were it not for the badly-looped dialogue.

As anyone who's seen The Dark Knight knows, having characters narrate what's going on is a sign of their mediocrity. It's a surefire way to make them seem comically dumb compared to the real heroes, who are on top of things. The problem, in this film, is that every character is the 'is that a bazooka?' guy. The monologue about North Korea and the 'tenth man' thing have little to do with anything, are a supreme example of 'tell don't show', and aren't even well-written.

As pointed out before, there's not one great shot in the entire movie. The zombies aren't threatening at all, and PG-13 has nothing to do with it. It's okay that they never figure out what the zombies are. The problem is we have no idea what they do. The opening sequence shows ants swarming over a corpse, slowly eroding it. Why can't you have the imagery of people being engulfed by the swarm and vanishing? It's easy to convey thst sort of threat without gore. See the cow being fed to the velociraptors in Jurassic park, for example!

In the entire first attack scene, the zombies just kinda pounce at people and hit their heads on windows. There's no sense of the geometry of the swarm, when the opening credits show imagery of animals flocking and herding (intertextuality with After Earth). There's no clear pattern to their movement, except in the handful of CGI wave shots that are so badly-integrated as to seem like non sequiturs. This is the most obvious gulf in style between a film's all-CG and live-action shots since The Avengers.

Earlier, I predicted that the film would resemble Inception, with the flood of zombies representing the breakdown of symbolic reality and the capitalist dreamstate. I was close, except the dream doesn't break down. The zombies are banal, and so is fighting them. Everything goes as planned, and there's surprisingly little surrealism. In fact we only see the monsters clearly when they're failing to attack anyone - which makes Pitt's revelatory flashbacks even more ridiculous. The zombies are such non-entities that it's like reading those 'Garfield Without Garfield' comic-strip edits. This movie is such a shameful trainwreck-style debacle that would've been a great camp joke it were fun to watch at all.

Prometheus

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3428948&userid=118075&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post404490457

Well let's get down to brass tacks: this film is hilarious.

Guy Pearce in an old man suit appears out of nowhere, says "i want immortality," and then gets bludgeoned to death with Michael Fassbender's still-conscious severed head. This is funny. No, it's the funniest film I've seen in theatres since District 9.

Weyland's death is a stock ironic comeuppance played for extreme camp. The film glosses over it because it know that this is a trope. The glib speed with which it dismisses the search for immortality is the same with which it dismisses all the other characters' motivations. Dude say he wants money? DIES. Dude says he wants friendship? DIES. These aren't random deaths. They are equated by this same tone and attitude. Humans are stupid and die because they're stupid.

David reads Liz Shaw's dreams and then tells her straight up: you are a shallow character. Her dream looks like a hallmark card. "Your entire motivation is that you're infertile and your dad died of Ebola. I just summarized it in two sentences." The moral: robots don't have souls, and neither do people. But the robot is smarter because he understands this. If you've seen Blade Runner, you know what the warm-toned recording of the dream of a happy family means. It means she's a replicant.

"It's a quote from a movie I like."

Look at the specific quote from Lawrence of Arabia: 'the trick is not minding that it hurts'. David's character feels everything the humans feel, but he doesn't mind it. He's built up his ironic distance, he constructs his own identity and puts on an incredibly campy performance. The whole film aligns with his POV. As I said in general chat, Prometheus is a masterpiece of straight-faced camp.

The very first shot is quoted from 2001 (it's a quote from a movie I like). Prometheus is transparently Scott's grand statement on Science Fiction as a genre. It's not 'hard' science fiction. It's "Science Fiction", deeply embedded in quotation marks. The Prometheus/Pandora myth is like Scifi 101, first day of class. It's THE example of mythological proto-scifi. It's referenced in Frankenstein, the first piece of Science-Fiction literature. Alien references it. The films that Alien references reference it. The films that reference Alien reference it.

So the characters fly into space seeking all the answers to their questions, and what do they find? A rational, promethan man locked in an unending struggle against a irrational, pandoric vagina monster. Just slapping against eachother until there is a literal, onscreen shuddering climax and postcoital release. Again: this is funny! You can imagine people staring at this scene and saying "hmm... what does this all mean?" Or, better yet: "how did the squid monster grow so big without a food source?" - just angrily looking for logical clues in this prolonged sequence of a vagina and penis locked in combat.

Scott's grand statement on sci-fi is to issue a moratorium. The point of Prometheus is that these stories pretty much always boil down to the same basic archetypal conflict. The humans are painfully mundane - they are all artificial. Only David sees through the guise and understands that he's a character in a movie. This is a loving ode to gleefully bad sci-fi.

Important scene: Naomi Rapace looks at some bleeps and bloops on a screen. Two bar graphs allign. "This is it," she cries. "This is everything!" We cut back to the bar graph, and watch it bleep and bloop a while longer. Wow, what an impressive bar graph. Next scene, it turns out she just wants to get fucked.

There are two distinct scenes in the film of wacky dames who just need a good deep-dicking. One gets an abortion, the other crushed by a huge black protuberance. A guy smokes pot and then dies instantly. This is Friday the 13th logic. The class conflict in Alien is notably absent. All these people are rich idiots, so we're not supposed to cheer for them. Idris Elba, the closest thing to a 'lower class' character puts on a Southern Accent, says YEEHAW! and rockets his ship into a wall to save the day. Michael Bay would give an approving nod.

Why is there a zombie scene? Because it's wonderful slapstick. He gets shot like fifty times and his head gets run over. I couldn't stop laughing. But more importantly, the 'zombie' exists to shows us what Charlie was turning into. For a second, I though it was Charlie, back from the dead. Again, this treats the characters as slightly interchangable.

There are at least two shots lifted straight from Luigi Cozzi's (in)famous Italian Alien ripoff Contamination.

Prometheus owns.

Chernobyl Diaries

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3030395&pagenumber=383&perpage=40#post416074216

I wrote a couple posts about it in the old Gen. Chat thread:

"Chernobyl Diaries is actually one of the better films I've seen this year. It's not an uncompromised revelation like Area 407, but it's a good one - very similar in theme and tone to The Ruins, for fans of that film (like me). I was mildly disconcerted by the rather theatrical acting in the first half (before the screaming starts), but that can be read as a positive trait. The kids look and act like they're in a commercial for coffee, or life insurance. As in The Ruins, this will change. It's all about the inevitability of decay, and it's really effective. It's very Texas Chainsaw.

The objections some people have are understandable. The plot is generic, and the acting takes some getting used to, as noted. The film is also loaded with redundant or unnecessary exposition, which betrays a lack of faith in the audience (my one major gripe). But as I'd expected, folks overlooked the cinematography. It's really great cinematography, approximating the style of Children of Men. The handheld camera will often float around the characters before lingering on some interesting tableau. This creates some good tension between the POVs of the cameraman and the characters, while also seamlessly bridging them. The film is remarkably good at drawing tension from frames-within-frames, like empty doorways and clouded windows. It frequently just looks great. Perhaps it's too naturalistic for its own good, because they pull off some really neat stuff.

Why it's a good film: there's a lengthy, slowly-paced montage of the characters silently experiencing their environments, and documenting them.

The special effects are flawless, but also not at all show-offy. This is post-spectacular cinema, in the style of Battle: Los Angeles, where everything is presented matter-of-factly and you don't get any 'money shots' of the monsters posing. And about the monsters: I liked them. They're not 'scary', no. People have complained about that, but they don't appreciate the nuance. With their rubbery makeup and clumsiness, they approach Zaat's mixture of pity and revulsion towards a mutated creature. It's exploitative of the tragedy, yes - but very self-conciously about that exploitation. These are vengeful ghosts from a disaster reduced to a historical trivia and a cool thing you may have seen on the internet. That it feels skeevier than countless pop-cult stuff about nazi experiments is a testament to its success. Consider it a response to that video game. It's the important distinction between mere fodder to be killed and humans reduced to inhumanity, as covered in Peter Jackson's films. You can almost hear them lament how they've been reduced to movie mutants. But consider how easy it would have been to make them 'cool' mutants, and you can admire the restraint of making them appear almost fragile.

I liked how they subvert the 'glimpse of the monster in a photo' scene by having that information be totally useless to the characters and irrelevant to the plot. I like how it opens with an iPad screen and closes with a metal shutter covering a darkened window. I like the understated moment where these young photographers find find a destroyed photograph lying in the dirt and then forget about it (again, with no relevance to the plot).

In general, the film is just plain bleak and discomfiting. It's not discovered-footage, but obviously borrows a lot from that style. There's barely any score, and the takes are looong, lingering on 'empty' spaces. The shot choices are often very unconventional, playing with the lightweight camera like a subdued Crank. The production design is utterly fantastic as well, and it's all subtle and downbeat. Everything Bordwell wrote about Paranormal Activity [...] applies here, although in a film that's significantly better. They use the aesthetic to smuggle a lot of art-film in there. The film isn't as bold and confident as Area 407, but I'd still rank it higher than many on my 'runners up' list for last year.

[...]

It's a generic horror plot retold with extreme subtlety and understatement. Like you don't even realize, til the end, how it effortlessly shifted between protagonists. You don't get the subtextual importance of the one girl having trouble walking with heels on cobblestone. That just hit me now.

It seems condescending to say it's a film that rewards attention, because I'm sure folks paid attention. More accurately, it's a film without any of the usual conventional payoffs, so it's only rewarding for people willing to put up with that. There are no 'holy shit!' moments whatsoever.

It's just a sad, quiet film about how everyone you love will die and there's little you can do about it but try and forget. It's my kind of film because I'm a firm believer that cinema exists at the point where mere plot description fails to be adequate. Plot provides structure and context, but the little details are what's vital to me. Wikipedia isn't going to note the part where the girl has trouble walking in heels. It's not going to note the part where she just stands there and feels the world around her. And it's not going to cover the gradual, satisfying realization that [spoiler]she was the protagonist all along.[/spoiler]

Nuance is more vital than complexity, which is why I love Area 407."