Man of Steal (MASSIVE SPOILERS)

At the outset, I'd like to declare one simple fact: Superman is the FIRST superhero ever. Without Superman, whether as a comic-book character or a big-screen hero, there would be no Spider-Man, no X-Men, no Iron Man, and none of the colorful characters whose adventures I have enjoyed reading or watching on the big screen since my childhood days.

It amused me quite a bit, therefore, that when I watched the latest Superman movie, Man of Steel, I recognized a number of plot devices/scenarios that had already been used in other superhero or superhero-inspired movies.

1) The death of a father figure following a cruel statement by the hero, from Spider-Man -This one was the most glaring for me.  In the 1978 Superman film, Jonathan Kent died of a heart attack, and the poignancy of that death stemmed from the fact that for all of his powers, there was nothing Superman could have done. That was retooled a bit for MoS, with the elder Kent basically allowing himself to get sucked up into a tornado so that Clark's superpowers could stay a secret, with Clark looking on helplessly. Now, scant minutes BEFORE that happened, there was an exchange of words between Clark and Jonathan in a car wherein Clark, knowing his extraterrestrial origin, haughtily asserted to Jonathan (and Martha, who was in the back seat), that they weren't really his parents. Wow. Powerful stuff. At least that's what I thought when I first saw this scene in 2002's Spider-Man in which Uncle Ben tried to engage in a heart-to-heart with the now super-powered Peter Parker, also in a car, and said "I know I'm not your father" whereupon Peter shouted "then stop pretending to be!" When I saw it in MoS, for all of its tweaks to differentiate it, all I could think was "hey, that was a lot like Uncle Ben's death!" This wasn't the first similarity I noticed between MoS and other superhero movies, but for me it was hands-down the most striking because this was clearly meant to be a pivotal character moment, and the fact that it felt altogether lifted from another script was more than a little distracting.

2) The small town battle from Thor - In the 1981 sequel Superman II, General Zod, then played by Terence Stamp, and his two flunkies wreak havoc in a small town, though Superman isn't around to battle them. In Man of Steel, though Superman and two of Zod's minions actually throw down in a small town in Kansas this time, basically leveling the whole place with their punches, flying bodies and the resulting explosions (although to be fair, the United States military helps the mayhem along quite a bit). One of the minions, a computer-generated Kyptonian, looks like he's about nine to ten feet tall.  That kind of calls to mind the slugfest in 2011's Thor in which the roughly-ten-foot-tall Asgardian robot called the Destroyer is sent to kill Thor and ends up wrecking a small town in New Mexico while duking it out with Thor and his comrades-in-arms, the Warriors Three. Again, even with tweaks (and superior visual effects for MoS), the similarity was pretty striking.

3)  The babies grown on trees from The Matrix - the idea of genetically-engineered babies, unless I'm mistaken, is a concept that's new to the Superman film franchise, with all Kryptonian babies grown in pods attached to what look like trees, all immersed in what I assume is a gigantic artificial womb known as a "genesis chamber." Now, The Matrix films, while not about a comic-book superhero, were no doubt inspired by Superman's exploits given that the hero, Neo, had fantastical powers, including flight. In fact, in one scene during which Neo was flying around the Matrix, one of the operators said "he's doing his Superman thing." Well, the whole concept of babies being grown in enormous fields on mechanical trees was realized quite vividly in the very first Matrix film, so vividly in fact that the moment I saw the genesis chamber of MoS I remembered it.The fact that two Matrix alumni, Laurence Fishburne and Harry Lennix, were part of the MoS cast only reinforced the connection for me.

4)  The climactic flying fistfight from The Matrix Revolutions - Back when he reviewed this film in 2003, popular (and sometimes infamous) geek guru Harry Knowles gushed over the flying fight scene between the heroic Neo and the villainous Agent Smith, and said something to the effect of "wouldn't it be cool if a future Superman movie had a fight that looked just like this!" Apparently Zack Snyder, Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, the respective director and screenwriters of MoS, read Harry Knowles' review. Also, considering that the movie never really explained how a man who grew up on a farm in Kansas with no formal fight training managed to hold his own in hand-to-hand combat against people who had been training for combat all their lives, all of whom had the same super powers as he did, I can't help but wonder if, in the beginning, when Jor-El "downloaded" the Codex into Kal-El, he basically downloaded fighting skills as well, like the "plug and play" martial arts learning that took place in the Matrix films.

5) The cataclysmic, city-leveling battle from The Avengers and Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Of all the story devices which seemed to have been cribbed from other blockbusters this one is perhaps the most understandable, considering that disaster porn is always fashionable, but it is no less glaring considering that in past incarnations of Superman on screen, specifically in Superman II, Supes would have been appalled to have caused as much destruction as he did and would have done everything to move the fight away from a populated area, something he did not seem particularly interested in doing while smashing Zod into buildings. To go back to the small town fight, at least he told people to get out of harm's way and shouted "it's not safe," but when he got to the city, he pretty much had at Zod without apparently sparing a thought for the thousands of innocents inside the buildings they trashed. At least the Avengers worked to get the civilians out of harm's way. If anything, Superman was more like the Transformers, who like him didn't seem to give a shit about civilians either when battling the bad guys. The subtext is disturbing; the Superman of the film was more like an alien robot than an actual hero. Ironically enough, it was when he finally killed the bad guy that he actually started showing some concern for life again.

For all of this, and for all the flaws I perceived in the script, I still enjoyed Man of Steel, but I cannot help but chuckle thinking about how liberally the filmmakers borrowed from movies based on characters whose existence was basically inspired by Superman, especially the Marvel characters.  Part of me wonders if the makers of the Marvel movies recognize this, and if they feel like Pepsi did when "New Coke" came out over twenty years ago.

So Superman Survived the Break-Up...What About Bryan Singer?

I find it rather striking that audiences were willing to embrace the new Superman movie, Man of Steel despite the stench left by Superman Returns, and the scathing reviews that gave audiences advance warning that this movie was nowhere near as cerebral as Nolan's critically-lauded Batman movies were, but I guess it just goes to show that all people really wanted was a nicely action-packed, if somewhat flawed Superman movie. The bottom line is that they got over SR pretty easily.

What I can't help but wonder, though, is whether or not they will forgive SR director Bryan Singer quite as easily when his first X-Men film since 2003, X-Men: Days of Future Past, hits cinemas sometime next year.

To me it feels like only yesterday that Singer was regarded as a demigod by fans of both comic books and comic-book-based movies. X2: X-Men United was a bona fide box-office hit and his stock was basically soaring, so much so that Warner Brothers was ready to lure him away from Twentieth Century Fox with a production budget north of $200 million and carte blanche to make the Superman movie he had always dreamed of making. Unfortunately, that happened to be Superman Returns. Since then Singer's directed two feature films, the offbeat Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as a Nazi who took part in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, and the recent Jack the Giant Slayer, neither of which was particularly well-received at the box office.

Singer is currently busy directing X-Men: Days of Future Past,  and personally I am more than happy to welcome him back into the fold. I was a little surprised, however, to discover that not exactly everyone felt the same way; message boards were suddenly full of venom for Singer, and amazingly, films like X-Men and X2 had become retroactively terrible in many fanboys' eyes.

Now, it's always advisable to take internet posters' comments with a grain of salt; after all, if all of them were to believed, Man of Steel would have made a billion dollars by now and Iron Man 3 would have tanked at the box-office. The next X-Men movie will succeed or fail regardless of what a handful of internet fanboys think. But their comments, coupled with the lukewarm if not utterly poor showing of Singer's latest directorial efforts at the box office have given me pause, and I cannot help but ask; do people hate Superman Returns  so much that it has retroactively erased every ounce of Singer's goodwill generated by his two X-Men movies? It feels unfair, especially considering that it was the first one that arguably began the Marvel Age of movies in earnest back in 2000. Even M. Night Shyamalan got more "second chances" from audiences than he arguably deserved, considering that the last commercially successful movie he made was 2004's The Village.

I, for one, believe that X-Men: Days of Future Past has a more than even chance of being a good, even great movie, even with a script by Simon Kinberg, a man of whose work I am not a fan.

Maybe it's not about Superman Returns; maybe X-men/Marvel fans are still bitter about Singer's having left the franchise for rival DC, and yet fans of Marvel Comics have regularly welcomed back writers and artists who would do stints, sometimes lasting years, over at Marvel's Distinguished Competition. I'm loath to think that this disdain over one creative misfire has anything to do with Singer's openly professed sexuality; I like to believe comic book fans on the whole are more evolved than that, even though many of them have proven me wrong time and again.

Well, whatever the reason some fans are not keen on seeing Singer back in the X-director's chair, I am more than happy to see the return of the guy responsible for bringing the X-men to the big screen.  Welcome back Bryan!

Reasonably Potent, If Not Quite Super: A Review of Man of Steel (Mild Spoilers Ahead)

Zack Snyder, the man who, with his breakout hit 300, reinvented the sword-and-sandals epic for the video-game generation, attempts something similar here for the first, and probably still most popular superhero of all time, Superman, with the new reboot Man of Steel.  He benefits from a script co-written by Dark Knight auteur Christopher Nolan and longtime comics-to-film scribe David S. Goyer.

The story basically resets the clock on the cinematic legend of Superman and begins on his dying homeworld of Krypton, at the moment of his birth to Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and his wife Lara (Ayelet Zurer), the first natural-born child on the planet in centuries, with every other baby on Krypton having been grown, Matrix-style, in a giant underwater plant nursery called a genesis chamber. Jor-El tries to convince the planet's leaders that it's time to send Krypton's inhabitants to other planets to save them from a doomed world, and asks for something called the Codex, which is apparently the genetic blueprint for all Kryptonians. He is interrupted, however, by a coup d'etat being staged by the planet's chief military officer, General Zod (Michael Shannon).

Suffice it to say, notwithstanding the chaos, Jor-El is able to obtain the Kryptonian Codex and ship it, and his newborn son Kal-El, off to a suitable planet for Kal-El to grow up (which happens to be Earth) while Zod's coup is foiled and he is sentenced to exile in the Phantom Zone, apparently scarcely moments before Krypton gives up the ghost.

One abrupt cut later, Kal-El is now thirtysomething Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) wandering around America doing odd jobs, and saving people in mortal peril while he's at it. His formative years as a super-powered alien grown up in Kansas, with his foster parents, the stern Jonathan (Kevin Costner) and doting Martha (Diane Lane) Kent, are told in flashbacks, which show that it was not the easiest childhood, but one which would prove crucial to helping shape who he would eventually become.

Clark is also a man in search of something, and when, while working at a bar, he overhears a couple of military types talking about a strange, possibly extraterrestrial find in the Arctic, he decides on his next odd job. While there, he encounters feisty, award-winning reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams), and, in finding out what the mysterious object is: his destiny.

As the second half of the story unfolds, it turns out that Clark's/Kal's destiny may also involve facing off against Zod and his minions including the fetching but deadly Faora (Antje Traue), who have escaped from their prison with the destruction of Krypton and are basically looking to make Earth their new home, even if it means wiping out everyone on it.  Thus, Kal-El finds himself having to choose between the remnants of the world he was born into, and his adopted world.

The film doesn't open in the United States until Friday, but early reviews have come in and they are, for the most part, almost nothing like the near universal praise that was heaped on Nolan's reshaping of the Batman legend with his Dark Knight trilogy. A lot of the good reviews seem somewhat qualified by a number of reservations, and many of the bad reviews are downright scathing in their appraisal of the new Supes outing.

Personally, I find a lot of the bad reviews a bit unfair, and more than a few of them smack of pre-cooked disdain for the action blockbuster, but apart from the more snide comments, I appreciated some of the points they made against this film.

I'd like to get this out of the way right now: to me, this film is easily better than Superman Returns.

To my mind, Snyder and crew got a lot right here, starting with the casting. While I doubt British actor Cavill will win any major acting awards for his performance as the last son of Krypton, he does a decent enough job filling in Superman's redesigned tights (read: no red briefs), and more importantly, ably conveys the pathos of someone who belongs to two worlds yet is not really part of either, at least not until he makes a crucial choice. Credit must also go to the two actors who played the younger Clark in flashbacks, Dylan Sprayberry and Cooper Timberline, who did a commendable job of showing how difficult it was for Clark to grow up being different from everyone else. The strongest performance here comes from Crowe, playing the doomed Jor-El.  I realize people regard the late Marlon Brando's take on the character as sacrosanct, but with all due respect I submit that Crowe is at least Brando's equal in the acting department, at least as far as this movie is concerned. Also, I highly doubt Brando could have squeezed into the tights Crowe rocked in this movie, let alone done an action scene in them, as Crowe did. Next up on my list are Lane's take on Martha Kent and Costner's take on Jonathan Kent. These are people who have no idea how to raise a Kryptonian but who do the very best they can, and I absolutely loved the humanity in their performance; their scenes with the actors playing young Clark are, for me, some of the very best in the movie. Even though the scene in which Pa Kent, in response to Clark's asking "can't I just go on pretending to be your son" tells Clark "you are my son" has been played over and over in the trailers, seeing it in the actual movie, complete with context, still left me a little misty-eyed.  I'll have to respectfully disagree with one of the reviews I read which described this film as having no heart; to my mind that's one of the things it does have. I also enjoyed Amy Adams' take on Lois Lane, though I'll go into that a little bit more later. Shannon does a solid but not quite exceptional job as Zod, who is not quite as villainous as he is fanatical in this film. There is not a bad performance in sight here, even if some actors are more remarkable than others.

Another thing this film has going for it is the rather nifty visuals. It's been seven years since the last Superman movie and a full thirty-three since Superman II, the first cinematic appearance of General Zod, and there has been plenty of advancement in visual effects technology since then, a fact of which the filmmakers take due advantage. From the striking rendition of Krypton, previously just a bunch of crystals and staid interiors, and now a strikingly-rendered, Avatar-style alien ecosystem, to the depiction to Superman's powers, ranging from his x-ray vision to his flying abilities, to the truly massive action sequences in the last half-hour or so of the film, this film is, as a technical achievement, far and away the most impressive of any of the films in the series. The final fight sequence and the massive destruction it wreaks, while reminiscent of the Transformers films, are quite spectacular. Also, as an aside, it was gratifying to see the aftermath of all the collateral damage; one thing that really irked me about last year's smash hit The Avengers was how, even after all the destruction that the battle with the aliens caused, the New York skyline basically remained intact as shown by the long shot taken right after the battle. For gosh sakes, alien warships the size of blue whales smashed into buildings, and yet nothing seemed the worse for wear! Here, though, the cataclysmic effects of the final battle and of another crucially destructive story point (which I won't spoil) really leave Metropolis (played by Chicago, which also played Gotham City in Nolan's Bat-movies) in shambles. In the name of a PG-13 rating, though, the human face of this otherwise 9/11 style carnage is mercifully (many could reasonably argue insensitively) obscured.

Oh, and I daresay I liked Hans Zimmer's new theme. No, he's no John Williams, but the Zimmer's credit he doesn't try to be, and why he does here works. It played well throughout the film and punctuated the end credits quite nicely.

Unfortunately, the film had more than its fair share of faults. From a lot of contrived moments in the script to the done-to-death Christian iconography to the flaws in the film's internal logic, there were a lot of somewhat jarring moments in the film, many of which, again unfortunately, I cannot really elaborate upon as they involve spoiling important plot points.  Now, as a fan of movies like this I take as a given the requirement of suspension of disbelief, but when a movie seems to have trouble sticking to its own internal logic then I have trouble accepting the movie.

The Christian overtones, though often present in this film's predecessors, were also a bit too blatant for my liking, like the fact that Superman is 33 years old, the same age as Jesus at the start of his ministry (and even older than Cavill actually is), a distinctly Christlike pose Superman assumes (I would argue unnecessarily) at a crucial point in the film, and the fact that Superman actually consults a priest when he is conflicted about an important decision, and actually stands in front of a stained-glass window depicting Jesus agonizing in the Garden of Gethsemane! To my knowledge, Superman's creators, the late Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were both Jewish so I can't help but wonder at what point in the character's history, in film or print, did he start to be identified as a Christ-like figure.  Also, in that connection, the declaration by Jor-El that artificial birth control had a hand in the destruction of Krypton feels a little heavy-handed and reminded me of the Catholic Church's stance against the same thing. I couldn't help but wonder if someone was pushing a bit of an agenda for a moment there.

Another of this film's sins for me was how utterly humorless it was, which is a pretty common critique, but one which, I will argue, is a valid one. A good friend of mine said "Superman is not Batman" and while I will dispute claims that the filmmakers tried to turn Superman into Batman here, I will agree that a lot of the fun of the earlier movies was drained out of this film.  It's equal parts brooding and menacing towards the end, but there are next to no lighthearted moments in this movie, which just feels wrong for a hero as colorful as Superman. About the biggest laughs I got in this movie were from how over-the-top the action during the climactic fight scene was.





(Spoiler Warning)




Worse still, and along the same lines, there's virtually none of the banter between Clark and Lois (who incidentally have zero chemistry despite an earnest performance by Amy Adams) that was a staple of not only the earlier films but of depictions of Superman in general over his seven-and-a-half-decade existence. They kiss at the end of the film, but it feels more like a product of Lois' post traumatic stress (she fell from an airplane, after all, with Superman catching her) than any actual affection she might have had for him.

The good news, however, is that this version of Lois Lane is far more credible as an ace reporter in this film as she is able to figure things out a lot better than her previous incarnations. In short, we won't have to harp on how stupid she is for not being able to see past a pair of glasses. 




(End Spoiler Warning)




My other problem with this film is one of style; I really was not fond of the conspicuously desaturated colors, which made the movie look as if the filmmakers were trying to film Saving Private Ryan with superheroes.  The deliberately drab look of the movie muted what could have been some very interesting visuals for Krypton, which depicted mainly in shades of brown, gray and some murky blue, though given that Superman's homeworld was basically about to explode when we were introduced to it I guess it was tonally consistent. Less justifiable for me, though, was the lack of color all throughout the rest of the movie. Again, I thought Superman was supposed to be an icon for hope, so this color palette really kind of baffled me. The worst part was that I actually watched this in 2-D, so I can only imagine how devoid of color the 3-D version must have looked. I wouldn't recommend going with 3-D for this film.

All told, if nothing else, this film sets the counter back to zero, which the franchise needed after the disastrous Superman Returns, and did so with some solid performances from some very talented actors and the very best visual effects that money can buy, so for all my reservations, I'm still giving this a thumbs-up.

I just hope they make a lot of improvements, should they ever make a sequel.

3.5/5

"Troubled Productions"

As a fan of the television series The Walking Dead, I find myself genuinely interested in the upcoming adaptation of Max Brooks' popular zombie novel World War Z, and upon reading about it was a little surprised to find out that the production has hit a number of roadblocks, some of them logistical in nature, but more than a few of them stemming creative issues. It's seen its script rewritten, its ending re-shot, and its budget skyrocket.

It got me thinking about the whole concept of the troubled production, which is hardly new in Hollywood, but which, in this day and age, feels a little silly. Script rewrites aren't new and neither are re-shoots for that matter. Heck, with the whole concept of test audiences, alternate endings have been around for a while too.

What's the difference, then, between then and now? Why should "troubled productions" be less common than they used to be?

Well, apart from the fact that most Hollywood scripts are practically written by committee these days, which by itself should provide plenty of opportunities to review and correct errant storytelling, there's also an oft-used technique nowadays called "pre-visualization" which, if I understand correctly, takes the whole concept of the storyboard into the 21st century. I first saw the "pre-viz" process on the DVD of the 2005 film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which the filmmakers, using a computer, basically mapped out how a given scene would look without shooting a single frame of footage.  It was a way to test the contents of the printed page in a moving, sort-of-living environment, and they got to work out everything from blocking to optimal camera angles.  Almost every big-budget movie these days utilizes pre-visualization; take the time to watch the credits of any effects-heavy film and one will see a sizable portion of the credits often goes to the pre-visualization department. These guys are as integral to any blockbuster as any visual effects vendor, with the only different being that they create their computer-generated imagery before and not after a film is shot.

Between script reviews, "pre-viz," and dailies, I'm hard-pressed to imagine why any major film production, after the conclusion of filming, would have to undergo extensive re-shoots that jack up the budget. Sure, if I were the mayor of the city where a particular film is shot or re-shot, or any of the local crew I'd probably be happy to have the extra income. Like I said in my previous post, lots of people can benefit from film shootings in general.

But then, often re-shoots are attempts to pander to the films' intended audiences. It's some of the most expensive second-guessing around; as this re-jiggering of the story are often initiated after a handful of people have seen the movie and delivered a verdict on it. Motion pictures being such expensive affairs these days some filmmakers are more than ready to hedge their $100 million dollar bets, even if it means spending MORE money with no ironclad guarantee of success. And the thing about pandering is that it is rarely, if ever, a purely artistic decision, but is often brought on by the machinations of the suits behind a film's production, whose sole purpose is not to tell a story but to turn a profit, regardless of the actual quality of the story involved, and so it's not unheard of that story quality is one of the first casualties.

 Of course, it's never really wise to generalize, but the thing about original endings is that, for better or worse, they often represent the filmmakers' uncompromising vision of what they want to put on the screen. Revised, often sanitized endings or sometimes scenes inevitably dilute this vision, and sometimes the disconnect between what the filmmakers intended and what was forced upon them is painfully evident. For example, I found Ridley Scott's 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven to be an unholy mess of a story, but when I read about a much longer director's cut that explained a lot of things that didn't make an ounce of sense to me in the drastically pruned theatrical cut, I looked more kindly on the film, even though I have yet to see that longer, more sensible version. Scott had wanted to tell a story, but the suits at 20th Century Fox had wanted to sell a summer movie, and in the end they both lost.

So as World War Z nears its opening,  questions linger as to what kind of quality viewers can expect from a film that has been obsessively tinkered with, most probably in the name of ensuring a handsome return on investment. The mere fact that this is a zombie movie touting a PG-13 rating already screams "watered down" considering that most hard-core zombie-centric movies like the George Romero films, their remakes, and Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later were all rated "R" and considering further that The Walking Dead would have enough gore and profanity to flirt with the dreaded "NC-17" rating if it were a movie, but the monumental production delays could represent another level of creative butchery altogether. There's naught left to do but wait and see.

Why I Wish We Had a Thriving Movie Industry

Last Sunday my kids and I watched Blue Sky's new film Epic, the review of which I have just posted. Thanks to all of these Marvel movies with post-credit Easter Eggs, we stayed throughout the end credits, hoping against hope for a little treat. We were disappointed, but I was struck by a little blurb at the end of the credits that said that the film created thousands of jobs. With the American economy being the way it is, this announcement is an important one for them.

This is the kind of thing I would love to read at the end of movies made in the Philippines; that jobs are created, and that food is put on the table for thousands of families thanks to people who make movies.

When The Bourne Legacy filmed here early last year, filmmaker Tony Gilroy and his crew had nothing but unabashed praise for his Filipino cast and crew members, and did not hesitate to describe them all as consummate professionals.


What makes the shooting of a movie such an attractive prospect for our work force is that there's so much more work that goes into making a motion picture than just the work of cameramen, stuntmen, makeup artists and extras.  There's the preparation of the food that people have to eat, the cleaning up of the locations, the building of props or sets, the medical checks for the cast and crew,  the driving of cast and crew from one location to another, the guys who fetch the coffee, the balancing of budgets, the contracts, and so on and so forth. A film crew can basically become, or support, an entire community if the production is well-funded.

Of course, the problem with our local film industry, which is very much in the doldrums, is that it is often a conveyor-belt, cookie-cutter affair, with the suits who make movies seeking, by and large, to pander to the lowest common denominator and trying to churn out the cheapest flicks possible in the shortest time possible. There are exceptions, of course, but perhaps one of the reasons our movies are where they are is that people just got sick of spending money on the same homogenized junk over and over again. Fortunately, many of those talented crew members probably get work for TV networks (churning out even more homogenized junk), so at least there's some consolation in knowing that these people are getting work.

But really, a thriving film industry would mean lots of people getting a lot of work doing all kinds of things on a regular basis, whether as crew for a local movie or for the occasional Hollywood blockbuster. Our country has had a long, storied relationship with Hollywood; we've hosted such heavyweights as John Wayne, Gary Gooper, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Tom Cruise and Martin Sheen to name but a few. Jackie Chan's been here too, if I remember correctly.

The Bourne Legacy, in a way, restored us to our former glory; it was the first Hollywood feature film in a long time which featured the Philippines playing itself, as opposed to doubling for Vietnam or some other Southeast Asian country, that managed to garner some mainstream success; it debuted at #1 in its opening weekend in the United States and managed to gross over $276 million at the global box-office. In short, a lot of people around the world got to see the Philippines onscreen, and the fact that Gilroy had nothing but kind things to say about his crew may very well mean that filmmakers from all around the world may actually perk up and take notice.

  

A Little Presumptuous: A Review of Epic

In the decade or so that it's been around, Blue Sky studios has produced films that have been heavy on humor and interesting visuals but light on plot and character development. Its films, such as the Ice Age series, Robots and Rio fall well short of the standard of excellence set by Pixar animated studios and even some of the works of rival Dreamworks' animation, even though many of them often make for some reasonably good viewing fun. Their latest film is called Epic.

Epic is the story of the a race of tiny creatures living in an unnamed forest, presumably somewhere deep in America, led by a beautiful queen named Tara (Beyonce Knowles) and guarded by an army of what I can only describe as miniature samurai known as the Leaf Men, led by the stoical Ronin (Colin Farrell). This civilization, and, as is usually the case with movies like this one, the whole world, is threatened by a race of similarly tiny, goblin-like creatures known as Boggans, led by the evil Mandrake (Christoph Waltz) who live solely to cause decay and rot.  Their story intersects with that of Mary Katherine (Amanda Seyfried) a full-sized human who goes to live with her scientist father Professor Bomba (Jason Sudeikis) after her mother dies. It so happens that Bomba lives in a house on the edge of the forest inhabited by the tiny creatures, and he has grown obsessed with finding them, arguably at the expense of everything else in his life, a fact of which Mary Katherine (or "M.K.") is keen to remind him. Through a whirlwind series of events, M.K. finds herself shrunken down to the size of the Leaf Men and  immediately charged with an important task, the success or failure of which could have significant consequences for the entire ecosystem. Fortunately, Ronin is ready to help, along with a former Leaf Man, the rebellious Nod (Josh Hutcherson). Still, time is not on their side and the task ahead is a daunting one.

I am loath to walk the path most likely trodden by many who have reviewed this film before I did, but the truth about Epic is that it simply...isn't. (It's not the most grammatically sound sentence, but it just feels apt, really). The title is not only a misnomer but one I found a little annoying as it came across to me as the handiwork of someone in Blue Sky's marketing department rather than that of the filmmakers themselves.

The story is the kind that, to my mind, would probably not survive a second viewing without my having spotted several plot holes, and in fact, I made it a point not to look for plot holes so that I could at least enjoy it. I took some solace from knowing there weren't any gaffes which were so gaping that I found myself dwelling on them before the movie was even finished. That happened to me with the recent film G.I. Joe: Retaliation, a film I did not even bother to review because of how thoroughly idiotic it was. Still, there were a lot of little tics that seemed out of place, like the somewhat abrupt musical number by the caterpillar played by Aerosmith frontman Steve Tyler, and even the names of some of the characters, like the Leaf Men "Ronin" and "Nod." For goodness' sake, is it so hard to think up decent names for characters?  Much of the character development and much of the dialogue would have felt more at home in a Cartoon Network T.V. movie than a feature film, and while I am not violently opposed to sitting down with my kids and enjoying the occasional T.V. movie, I actually expect more of a film that trumpets itself as a big deal, which is my understanding of what "epic" is supposed to mean.

All that said, the film does have a number of things going for it, the main thing being its astonishing visuals. I have always liked children's books that feature anthropomorphic flowers and plants, and the manner in which director Chris Wedge and his crew interpret the concept here really bowled me over. I even liked that the Leaf Men were modeled after samurai as it made much of their movement, especially during fight scenes, really fun to watch. My only quibble with the overall look of the film was with the design of Queen Tara and her royal garments, which looked a little plain and not quite in keeping with the overall aesthetic, though the animation of how her gown flowed behind her was topnotch. The voice acting was good all around, though highlights are the villainy of Christoph Waltz's Mandrake and the comic relief provided by Mub, a slug voiced by American comedian Aziz Ansari. I also liked Danny Elfman's score, which, while not one of his best, was appropriately lively.

Another aspect of the film that I really got into was its discussion and subsequent depiction of the differences in scale between the human world and the tiny world. The notion that tiny creatures like insects exist in a completely different dimension in terms of speed was actually pretty interesting to contemplate, and the manner in which it is shown is played for quite a few laughs along the way. This isn't a simple case of big people straining to hear little people talking with small voices; it really is a whole other world. Had the rest of the film been as intelligent as it was when exploring this concept, it could have been a lot more engaging than it actually was.

In fact, if the crew of Blue Sky had devoted as much effort to the story and characters of this movie as they had to its excellent visuals, then perhaps this movie would truly have been "Epic." As it was, it was "kind of okay," though I don't imagine that's the kind of title that gets people lining up to see movies.

3/5