directed by Mike Mitchell
written by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Five years ago, Warner Brothers released The Lego Movie and rode on a wave of goodwill stemming from worldwide love of the popular Lego brick toys, as well as a surprisingly well-written, well-directed and even well voice-acted film by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller to global success at the box office. What I had basically expected to be an extended toy commercial turned out to be a charming story about imagination, and a touching relationship between a father and his son.
The follow-up, while it no longer benefits from the element of surprise that made the impact of the first film that much more meaningful, still benefits from much the same charm, even though there is the inevitable repetitiveness of a sequel.
Following the events of "Taco Tuesday" in the first film, the sprawling Lego City of Bricksburg has been hit by one catastrophic alien invasion after another, and five years later, that once bustling metropolis is gone, having been replaced by the bleak and desolate Apocalypseburg, which, as the name suggests, is basically a Mad-Max-inspired, wasted landscape. It is here that Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt), Wildstyle (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett), Unikitty (Alison Brie), Benny (Charlie Day), Metalbeard (Nick Offerman) and all of the rest of the characters from the first movie now live, and while most of the citizens of this post apocalyptic world are immersed in it, Emmett remains irrepressibly joyful as always. When, following another alien attack, a mysterious outsider named General Mayhem (Stephanie Beatriz) arrives and kidnaps Wildstyle, Batman, Unikitty, Benny, and Metalbeard and takes them to the mysterious Systar System, ruled by the even more mysterious Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi (Tiffany Haddish), Emmet takes it on himself to follow them in his rocket house. Along the way, Emmet meets the rugged Rex Dangervest (Chris Pratt) a space explorer with a vague past who may either be the key to helping Emmet save his friends...or to helping him destroy the entire Systar System.
While this movie is definitely not one of those "better than the original" sequels, the good news is that it retains much of the charm of the first film, even though it no longer benefits from the element of surprise the way that film did. The new characters introduced, while primarily an excuse to sell new Lego sets, are charming in their own way, like Haddish as the Queen and Beatriz as General Mayhem who who may or may not be bad guys, and Pratt's new character Rex, who may or may not be a hero, but it's the old characters like Wildstyle and Emmet who continue to carry the show.
Of course, as it the first film, the theme is still about family, with this film tackling the often contentious relationship between siblings in a manner that is sweet, if sometimes a bit simplistic. It's gratifying that, even as they sell toys, the filmmakers at least make an effort to tell a story.
I was still a bit put off by the shoehorning in of DC Superheroes into the movie, who are basically just a blatant effort by Warner Brother to create visibility for their Intellectual Property by putting them into a story to which they are basically irrelevant, but at least Will Arnett was funny again.
This sequel, which was actually foreshadowed at the end of the first film, works pretty well as a narrative, and notably, it all ties up quite neatly in the end, so given this, and its so-so box office results, maybe it's time to wrap up this particular narrative and see what other stories the Lego "Cinematic Universe" can offer.
8/10
Tuesday, February 26, 2019
Sunday, February 17, 2019
A Movie that ONLY James Cameron Could Have Gotten Made: A Review of Alita: Battle Angel (SPOILERS AT THE END)
directed by Robert Rodriguez
written by James Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis and Rodriguez
I'll start off this review by stating an irrefutable fact: every single Hollywood adaptation of a Japanese animated cartoon (or "anime" as they are popularly known) has been a critical and commercial failure. This not up for debate; both boxofficemojo.com and rottentomatoes.com will disclose that every single time Americans (or Canadians) have made a live-action remake of a popular Japanese animated series or feature film, the result has been box office poison with almost uniformly bad reviews. Even when they made an animated remake, specifically 2009's Astro Boy which used computer-generated imagery in lieu of the hand-drawn animation in which Ozamu Tezuka created the character, audiences and critics turned their backs.
All this means is that it took James Cameron enormous balls of steel to not only dare to make Alita: Battle Angel, a live-action adaptation of a relatively obscure manga-turned-anime, but to sink nearly $200 million into it and then hand the director's reins off to Robert Rodriguez, a man who, while a competent enough action director in his own right (see the "Mariachi" trilogy), doesn't exactly have Cameron's Midas touch at the box office. The end product is a deeply flawed but visually arresting action spectacle.
In the year 2563, following a cataclysmic war, the Earth is divided between people who live on the sky city of Zalem, and those who live on what remains of the surface world, who congregate in Iron City. Among the residents of Iron City is a kindly cybersurgeon named Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), who repairs people's robot parts in exchange for fruit or basically nothing, and who scavenges the ground for parts he can use to help his patients. One day he finds a discarded robotic head and shoulders and is startled to find that a still-living brain is inside. He takes the distinctly female head home, attaches her to a robotic body once intended for his long-dead, paraplegic daughter, and "reboots" her. Because the now revived cyborg (Rosa Salazar) cannot remember her name, Ido names her after his daughter as well, calling her Alita. As the newly-reactivated Alita familiarizes herself with the new world around her, she finds friends, including Hugo (Keean Johnson), foes, including the murderous Grewishska (Jackie Earle Haley), and a sport called motorball. Behind the scenes, people who know who she really is, like motorball mogul Vector (Mahershala Ali), cybersurgeon Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), who happens to be Ido's ex-wife, and the mysterious Nova begin plotting her demise, and Alita will have to unlock the skill hidden in her forgotten past if she is to stay alive.
In truth, the movie feels a lot like the manga brought to the big screen. Not having seen the anime, I can't compare the two, but when it comes to the manga, director Rodriguez and his co-writers Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis have pretty much captured the atmosphere quite well, especially how unnerving the cyborg characters look. This is, for me, a big part of why this movie works; Rodriguez and co. take an entirely different approach to the dreaded "uncanny valley," in that, instead of trying to vault over it, they basically integrate it into the story. This actually goes a long way towards making the interactions between the human actors and their more fantastical counterparts that much more believable. Of course, state-of-the-art motion capture helps, too.
Of course, none of this would have worked if Rodriguez didn't have topnotch talent in front of the camera as well as behind it, and for the most part he has succeeded in this respect, especially by casting Rosa Salazar, without whose performance the digital magic would not have been enough to sell the walking, talking Photobooth distortion known as Alita. Salazar gets able, if slightly bland support from Oscar winners Waltz and Connelly. Dyson Ido is the second most prominent character in the film next to Alita, and if the character comes across as a little bit bland it's certainly not on Waltz's account, but rather on that of the script (more on that later). Unfortunately, as we get to the less prominent characters, the acting talent noticeably declines. Keean Johnson is all right as the nondescript love interest Hugo, as are Jorge Lendeborg, Jr. and Lara Condor as his buddies, but apart from them things really start to go downhill. Mahershala Ali, for one thing, seems content to ham it up as the villainous Vector, and while he doesn't have all that much time to chew the scenery, it does get grating at some points. With the exception of Ed Skrein as cyborg Hunter-Killer Zapan, all of the actors that play cyborgs, including veteran Jackie Earle Haley, completely immersed in CGI as Salazar is, basically turn in the kind of performances one would see in a badly-dubbed anime. It doesn't at all help that so much of the dialogue coming out of the characters' mouths, even those played by decent actors, is frequently quite clunky.
And that, for me, is the film's biggest problem in a nutshell; James Cameron, whose scriptwriting resume includes classics like Aliens and Terminator 2, appears so determined to lift dialogue from the manga that he's forgotten that a lot of the translations from the Japanese are just plain awkward, and that he would have just been better off infusing the dialogue with his own sensibility. He was a little too reverent to the source material here, and the film suffers for it, as it does from a number of hackneyed plot turns.
When the film's action switches on, though, it's actually possible to forget, if only for a few glorious moments, all of the narrative ungainliness because it is when Alita is kicking ass that the movie absolutely soars. Sure, Alita's "waif-fu" against opponents three times her size is a little silly to behold at times, even though it does have a pseudo-scientific explanation behind it, but I'll be damned if the fight choreography isn't some of the most astonishing I've witnessed in quite some time. Rodriguez has come a long way from sending Antonio Banderas sliding along tables while shooting two pistols; this is where he shows that Cameron's faith in him was justified. If the John Wick movies are the epitome of what practical movie fight scenes should look like, than Alita: Battle Angel has just showcased truly jaw-dropping fight scenes that can only happen with the aid of computer generated imagery.
Some actions scenes look better than others; the motorball sequences meant as the film's climactic moments, while energetic in their own right, have a been-there, done-that feel to them, especially since they seem lifted right out of another manga-turned-Hollywood-movie, Speed Racer. This movie depicts its action a bit more clearly than that one did, though, and in 3-D it really is a sight to behold.
The thing is, as much as I was willing to forgive the movie its narrative shortcomings because of its slam-bang action sequences, I found myself facing yet another stumbling block to liking this movie as much as I wanted to going in. If you want to know what that is, proceed past the final score to see what it is, but if not, stop reading here.
Suffice it to say, with this little twist, I could not bring myself to give this movie a higher score than I just have.
6/10
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
(SPOILER ALERT)
The movie actually ends on a bit of a downer as Alita's love interest, Hugo, whom she has actually just saved from death, gets killed trying to climb a cable from Iron City to Zalem. The final scene has Alita standing at the beginning of a motorball tournament, and holding her sword up against the big bad guy, Nova (played by Edward Norton) who looks on from Zalem, just before the film cuts to the end credits. I get that the manga ended on a similar anticlimax, but given that Cameron, Kalogridis and Rodriguez have already taken liberties with the manga's timeline, it feels shameless not to end the first installment of what is clearly planned as a franchise on a satisfactory note. As much as I want to see more of this story, I think they kind of got ahead of themselves here.
written by James Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis and Rodriguez
I'll start off this review by stating an irrefutable fact: every single Hollywood adaptation of a Japanese animated cartoon (or "anime" as they are popularly known) has been a critical and commercial failure. This not up for debate; both boxofficemojo.com and rottentomatoes.com will disclose that every single time Americans (or Canadians) have made a live-action remake of a popular Japanese animated series or feature film, the result has been box office poison with almost uniformly bad reviews. Even when they made an animated remake, specifically 2009's Astro Boy which used computer-generated imagery in lieu of the hand-drawn animation in which Ozamu Tezuka created the character, audiences and critics turned their backs.
All this means is that it took James Cameron enormous balls of steel to not only dare to make Alita: Battle Angel, a live-action adaptation of a relatively obscure manga-turned-anime, but to sink nearly $200 million into it and then hand the director's reins off to Robert Rodriguez, a man who, while a competent enough action director in his own right (see the "Mariachi" trilogy), doesn't exactly have Cameron's Midas touch at the box office. The end product is a deeply flawed but visually arresting action spectacle.
In the year 2563, following a cataclysmic war, the Earth is divided between people who live on the sky city of Zalem, and those who live on what remains of the surface world, who congregate in Iron City. Among the residents of Iron City is a kindly cybersurgeon named Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), who repairs people's robot parts in exchange for fruit or basically nothing, and who scavenges the ground for parts he can use to help his patients. One day he finds a discarded robotic head and shoulders and is startled to find that a still-living brain is inside. He takes the distinctly female head home, attaches her to a robotic body once intended for his long-dead, paraplegic daughter, and "reboots" her. Because the now revived cyborg (Rosa Salazar) cannot remember her name, Ido names her after his daughter as well, calling her Alita. As the newly-reactivated Alita familiarizes herself with the new world around her, she finds friends, including Hugo (Keean Johnson), foes, including the murderous Grewishska (Jackie Earle Haley), and a sport called motorball. Behind the scenes, people who know who she really is, like motorball mogul Vector (Mahershala Ali), cybersurgeon Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), who happens to be Ido's ex-wife, and the mysterious Nova begin plotting her demise, and Alita will have to unlock the skill hidden in her forgotten past if she is to stay alive.
In truth, the movie feels a lot like the manga brought to the big screen. Not having seen the anime, I can't compare the two, but when it comes to the manga, director Rodriguez and his co-writers Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis have pretty much captured the atmosphere quite well, especially how unnerving the cyborg characters look. This is, for me, a big part of why this movie works; Rodriguez and co. take an entirely different approach to the dreaded "uncanny valley," in that, instead of trying to vault over it, they basically integrate it into the story. This actually goes a long way towards making the interactions between the human actors and their more fantastical counterparts that much more believable. Of course, state-of-the-art motion capture helps, too.
Of course, none of this would have worked if Rodriguez didn't have topnotch talent in front of the camera as well as behind it, and for the most part he has succeeded in this respect, especially by casting Rosa Salazar, without whose performance the digital magic would not have been enough to sell the walking, talking Photobooth distortion known as Alita. Salazar gets able, if slightly bland support from Oscar winners Waltz and Connelly. Dyson Ido is the second most prominent character in the film next to Alita, and if the character comes across as a little bit bland it's certainly not on Waltz's account, but rather on that of the script (more on that later). Unfortunately, as we get to the less prominent characters, the acting talent noticeably declines. Keean Johnson is all right as the nondescript love interest Hugo, as are Jorge Lendeborg, Jr. and Lara Condor as his buddies, but apart from them things really start to go downhill. Mahershala Ali, for one thing, seems content to ham it up as the villainous Vector, and while he doesn't have all that much time to chew the scenery, it does get grating at some points. With the exception of Ed Skrein as cyborg Hunter-Killer Zapan, all of the actors that play cyborgs, including veteran Jackie Earle Haley, completely immersed in CGI as Salazar is, basically turn in the kind of performances one would see in a badly-dubbed anime. It doesn't at all help that so much of the dialogue coming out of the characters' mouths, even those played by decent actors, is frequently quite clunky.
And that, for me, is the film's biggest problem in a nutshell; James Cameron, whose scriptwriting resume includes classics like Aliens and Terminator 2, appears so determined to lift dialogue from the manga that he's forgotten that a lot of the translations from the Japanese are just plain awkward, and that he would have just been better off infusing the dialogue with his own sensibility. He was a little too reverent to the source material here, and the film suffers for it, as it does from a number of hackneyed plot turns.
When the film's action switches on, though, it's actually possible to forget, if only for a few glorious moments, all of the narrative ungainliness because it is when Alita is kicking ass that the movie absolutely soars. Sure, Alita's "waif-fu" against opponents three times her size is a little silly to behold at times, even though it does have a pseudo-scientific explanation behind it, but I'll be damned if the fight choreography isn't some of the most astonishing I've witnessed in quite some time. Rodriguez has come a long way from sending Antonio Banderas sliding along tables while shooting two pistols; this is where he shows that Cameron's faith in him was justified. If the John Wick movies are the epitome of what practical movie fight scenes should look like, than Alita: Battle Angel has just showcased truly jaw-dropping fight scenes that can only happen with the aid of computer generated imagery.
Some actions scenes look better than others; the motorball sequences meant as the film's climactic moments, while energetic in their own right, have a been-there, done-that feel to them, especially since they seem lifted right out of another manga-turned-Hollywood-movie, Speed Racer. This movie depicts its action a bit more clearly than that one did, though, and in 3-D it really is a sight to behold.
The thing is, as much as I was willing to forgive the movie its narrative shortcomings because of its slam-bang action sequences, I found myself facing yet another stumbling block to liking this movie as much as I wanted to going in. If you want to know what that is, proceed past the final score to see what it is, but if not, stop reading here.
Suffice it to say, with this little twist, I could not bring myself to give this movie a higher score than I just have.
6/10
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
(SPOILER ALERT)
The movie actually ends on a bit of a downer as Alita's love interest, Hugo, whom she has actually just saved from death, gets killed trying to climb a cable from Iron City to Zalem. The final scene has Alita standing at the beginning of a motorball tournament, and holding her sword up against the big bad guy, Nova (played by Edward Norton) who looks on from Zalem, just before the film cuts to the end credits. I get that the manga ended on a similar anticlimax, but given that Cameron, Kalogridis and Rodriguez have already taken liberties with the manga's timeline, it feels shameless not to end the first installment of what is clearly planned as a franchise on a satisfactory note. As much as I want to see more of this story, I think they kind of got ahead of themselves here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)