Guest Review: Intersellar (2014)

by Koshcat

I am of two minds when it comes to Interstellar the science fiction drama directed by Christopher Nolan: I liked it but the forced tensions bug me.

Overall the basic plot is simple. Crop blight is slowly destroying Earth’s crops and threatening humanity with starvation and lack of oxygen. Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a former NASA pilot, now widower farmer trying to raise two kids. A message from a “ghost” to his daughter leads him to a secret program to find a new planet for colonization.

A wormhole mysteriously appears near Saturn that allows passage to a distant galaxy where Professor Brand (Michael Caine) has sent 12 volunteers to find a suitable planet. They have transmitted that there are three promising sites near a black hole. There are two plans for colonization: A) move everyone from Earth to the new planet and B) repopulate the new planet with frozen embryos. Professor Brand is trying to work out plan A but the math doesn’t compute.

Cooper’s daughter, Murphy, joins Professor Brand in hopes of deriving the right formula but she needs the information hidden inside a black hole. Mr. Cooper agrees to pilot the spaceship with hopes of quickly finding the right planet and then returning to his family. Due to relativity, what takes Cooper months turns into decades back home. The first two planets turn out to be duds and Cooper sacrifices his life to push his crew mate Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), who is Professor Brand’s daughter, to the third and eventually suitable planet. His sacrifice is to fall into the blackhole where he is able to learn the secret formula and transmit it to his daughter as the “ghost” allowing the rest of humanity to be saved.

SPOILER ALERT

Why I liked this film, despite the gargantuan plot holes, is it focused more on the story and characters rather than the CGI to move the plot. The characters have fear and despair but other still have hope. Nobody is evil for evil’s sake. The closest “bad guys” might either be Professor Brand or Dr. Mann (Matt Damon), one of the first 12 astronauts. Professor Brand has faked the calculations for years because he has decided it is physically impossible to implement plan A. Plan B was the plan all along but lied to Cooper so he would leave his family in hopes of finding a new place for them. This isn’t from a place of evil but a decision out of despair and rationality. Dr. Mann is trapped on an inhospitable planet to die alone and has been transmitting false data. He is afraid, weak, and a coward and tries to kill Cooper to get off the planet. His decision is based on irrationality not evil intent. There is no greedy politician trying to control the Earth or multinational company trying to get rich. And any movie that makes Matt Damon look like a dick is ok with me.

The CGI is beautiful and acts as a backdrop rather than the central plot. The story behind the development of the black hole is fascinating as the most up to date theoretical equations where entered into the rendering software which then developed the visual effect (LINK). Finally, how many movies can discuss and show the theory of relativity and still keep people in their seats? This is what true Sci-Fi should look like.

What distracts me from the movie is the unnecessary and forced conflicts. Let’s start with the blight. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of biology knows that a disease that attacks completely different species is extremely rare to the point of impossibility. For the billions spent on building spaceships and sending people through wormholes, couldn’t they have built self-contained cities? It is also unlikely a blight would effect the plants underwater, wouldn’t it be easier to live there? How about just developing plants immune to the blight? Maybe they shouldn’t be so anti-GMO.

The next is the lying by Professor Brand. Why does he need to lie? Why can’t he just say that he can’t complete the formula without more information? Another is Murphy being so pissed at her dad for leaving that she won’t speak to him for decades and then accuses him of lying to her about the possibility of his never returning. I understand being angry and sad that her dad left, but couldn’t that emotion be better served to get him back? Eventually it does but her resentments simmers for years and seems like wasted energy. There is also tension between Murphy and her brother, Tom (Casey Affleck), that doesn’t seem to make any sense. Why did Tom punch her boyfriend who only wanted to help his family? If Tom had given up on life, why was he still farming? Why does Casey, a much better actor, get less attention than Ben?

Another issue is why do the robots have a sense of humor level? An honesty level? I would want my robot helpers to be boring and brutally honest. Having the potential planets around a blackhole leads to interesting scientific dilemmas, but seems like a terrible place to find a new home. Dr. Mann lying about the planet so he wouldn’t die alone makes sense to me, but killing the other astronauts doesn’t. It leads to a great scene where Cooper has to stabilize the ship, but I guess a simple malfunction or stray asteroid wouldn’t have provided enough tension. Finally, the whole scene inside the blackhole is all dues ex machina and Cooper’s return was, frankly, lame.

I watched it a second time with my wife and kids. My wife and daughter where crying through the whole movie and were irritated at the end despite the happy ending. I found this to be interesting. This movie touches and pulls on a lot of emotional strings, which a good movie should, but perhaps it was too much? I like the movie more than I disliked it because Nolan at least seems to understand that a good movie is dependent on story and characters and not how many spaceships are moving behind Yoda.

Thoughts?

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Film Friday: Monuments Men (2014)

I should have loved Monuments Men. It had so many things in it that I usually love. The cast is great. The idea is solid. The production values are first rate. And it's obvious this film was made with the idea of creating something lasting rather than yet another Big Shiny. But this film just bored me. Sad.

The Plot

Loosely based on the non-fiction book “The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History,” Monuments Men is the story of a unit of Allied soldier during World War II, who were assigned the task of tracking down all the great art works the Nazis plundered from the lands they conquered and to save them from destruction as the war came to a close and the desperate Nazis were destroying or hiding these things to cover their tracks.

The unit, called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Program, was created by FDR at the urging of Frank Stokes (George Clooney), who convinced FDR that letting the Nazis destroy the artistic history of Western Civilization would amount to a disaster, even if the Allies won the war. Stokes is directed to assemble a unit of museum directors, curators and art historians to find these treasures and make sure they are ultimately returned to their rightful owners. Joining him are the likes of John Goodman, Bill Murray and Matt Damon. The film follows their efforts.

On the other side of the story is Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett), a French museum curator who has been forced to assist Nazi Viktor Stahl as he finds and steals great art for Hitler and his cronies like Goering. Her brother is a resistance fighter who seems to specialize in stealing these items back.

The film is largely disguised episodic in nature with a loose narrative tying these events together. The main theme seems to be the resistance of regular soldiers to helping Clooney's team, and the plotlines tend to involve them learning the location of some missing art and then going to find it. Toward the end of the film, the team discovers that the Nazis are hiding vast amounts of art in abandoned mines. They must get to this art before the Soviets do, or the Soviets will steal it and take it back to Russia as a “war reparations.” They also capture Stahl and there are a couple moments where they briefly walk into combat scenes.

Why This Film Didn’t Work

The film received mixed to negative reviews. The Guardian said there were too many characters and the film never felt satisfying because it sent them all off to do little tasks, which often weren’t that interesting. The consensus at Rotten Tomatoes was that the film has “noble intentions” and a great cast, but they couldn’t overcome the “stiffly nostalgic tone and the curiously slack dialog.” Some Spanish rag called it “Hollywood war propaganda.” Yeah, leave Hitler alone, Hollywood! On the other hand, Rolling Stone liked it, calling it a movie about “aspiration” and “a proudly untrendy, uncynical movie.” Talk about true irony! Rolling Stone peddles pure cynicism and always has.

In any event, many of these critics have put their fingers on part of the problem: this film relies too heavily on its premise to sell the film rather than its execution. This was the same problem in The Family, which I reviewed recently, and with most of Clooney’s other recent films. Look, I like Clooney and I want to like his films, but in film after film it feels like he thinks that the concept itself is strong enough that he doesn’t need to offer more than his character walking through the film, discovering the concept and then acting upset or outraged at what he discovered, see e.g. Syrianna, Burn Before Reading, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Solaris, Michael Clayton, etc. These are all films with great concepts, solid casts and much promise, but they underwhelm as they end up more like a series of vignettes rather than real plots, and they rely on the audience feeling shocked that such things exist rather than feeling entertained by the plot.

Shocking audiences with something they never guessed existed before is a great start to any story. In fact, if you can find such a story premise, you are a major step ahead of all the formulaic crap out there. But that is only a beginning. For Monuments Men to be entertaining, they needed to develop the characters, put them into some sort of situation of conflict, and take us on that journey to resolve it one way or another. This film never does it.

For starters, as noted by the critics, there are too many characters for us to focus on which characters to care about. They try to make up for this by giving us actors who come with a history of goodwill already in place. This includes guys like Bill Murray and John Goodman and Clooney himself and Matt Damon. But liking the actors doesn’t compensate when I can’t tell you who the characters they played are or what they did. Moreover, I have to say that my goodwill for Murray and Damon is long gone and my goodwill for Clooney is waning.

So the audience doesn’t know who to care about or why or even what they really do that the others don’t. And that’s the next problem: we know in a broad sense what these guys do, but the film never manages to make it seem challenging. To the contrary, they seem to get tips from out of the blue. They never need to fight their way into those areas. The other American soldiers don’t seem to like them, but they don’t really stand in their way. The Nazis all surrender quickly and seem harmless as villains. Even the race against the Soviets is never presented as a race so much as a theoretical challenge.

The end result of this is that characters you don’t know or care about follow tips that seem to fall from Heaven and are always right to go pick up treasures with no genuine obstacles standing in their way. That’s not exciting... it’s not interesting. I honestly suspect that a documentary would have managed to be more exciting than this film turned out to be, and that’s sad.

Thoughts?

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Film Friday: Elysium (2013)

You’ve heard the expression “a sucker punch,” right? Well, Elysium is a sucker gang rape, and it just won’t stop. This film is a nonstop blast of nasty liberalism from start to finish, and it’s very annoying. It’s also not a very good film.

Writer, director Neill Blomkamp became famous for District 9, a film that criticizes apartheid through an alien analogy. Basically, undesirable aliens land in South Africa (they are derogatorily called “prawns”), and they are put onto a reservation away from the humans, where they are kept under martial law including forced abortions and extra-judicial killings. This is a metaphor for South Africa’s homelands and shantytowns, and you are meant to leave the film feeling that the humans (read: whites) are murderous and racist.

Interestingly, like all self-righteous liberals, Blomkamp actually creates a rather racist metaphor in the process of accusing everyone else of racism. Indeed, the aliens are a metaphor for South Africa’s blacks. And how does Blomkamp present them? They are presented as murderous, violent and oversexed. They are borderline retarded, with most residing south of the border. They are lazy. They steal for a living and without compunction. They “have no concept of private property.” And most tellingly, the ultimate point to the film is that exposure to these prawns will infect the humans (read: whites) and turn them into prawns. Call me crazy, but that sounds kind of racist to me. Oh, and like all child-races, they need white liberals like him to protect them.

Well, Blomkamp has done this again in Elysium. This time, the story ostensibly involves evil rich people (read: whites) who live in a floating space station which gives them a lifestyle similar to the McMansion lifestyle so in vogue today while Hispanics fester upon the Earth in the once livable city of Los Angeles, which has now been reduced to little more than a massive shantytown. What’s more, these poor Hispanics are kept down by a robotic police force, slave labor jobs, and a total lack of healthcare. Again, you are meant to leave the film feeling that the rich (read: whites) are murderous and racists.

Once again, however, let us examine the other half of the equation. Here, Hispanics have taken over the golden city of Los Angeles and they have turned it into a shantytown. No attempt is made at running a self-sustaining economy as the only jobs anyone holds are those given to them by whites. Law and order has collapsed. No one cares for their homes or their property. Most get by engaging in criminal activity, such as stealing cars from other poor people. Essentially, they are lazy, dirty thieves who have ruined paradise. And the only person who can save them is white (Matt Damon). Call me crazy, but that sounds kind of racist to me.

Anyway, Elysium takes place in 2154 and boy is it ever full of holes. Matt Damon works in a factory and gets injured in an accident. He will die in five days from radiation exposure. Of course, he's a parolee, so he's easy to manipulate by the evil boss (a standard liberal trope) and he is forced to sign a release to get medical treatment, which release then cuts him off from medical treatment (another liberal trope). The only thing that can save him now is if he finds a way to sneak aboard the Elysium space station where every family has their own medical machine which can cure anything that is wrong with you. To do this, Damon agrees to kidnap his boss for an Hispanics gangster and retrieve information from his head. Only, it turns out that his boss is working with Elysian Secretary of Defense Delacourt (Jodie Foster) to stage a coup so she can shoot any Hispanics who try to flee the surface to the space station – when the story begins, Elysium is run by an Indian President who is soft on killing immigrants. I’ll leave the rest for you to figure out, only I will say that the story involves a corporate hit team and shaky-cam chase scenes until you’re ready to vomit.

Everything about this film stinks.

The message of this film is idiotic and offensive. The idea here is that whites don’t want to help Hispanics. In reality, the US alone gave $56 billion in foreign aid in 2013. Even worse, the film implies that the whites are maliciously denying the Hispanics medical care. Indeed, at the end of the film, medical robots race to the planet to hand out free medical care, and they do so without costing the whites anything. Hence, the message of the film isn’t that whites are cheap, it’s that they are malicious and are withholding lifesaving care even though it would cost them nothing to provide it. In real life, the West is constantly providing medical care throughout the world, even at a cost of reducing the care available here. In the US, $80 billion in free medical care is given each year to illegal aliens. So this film is slander.

Even beyond the messages however, this is just a poorly done and idiotic film. First, the film is awash in a particularly annoying shaky cam. It is as bad as Cloverfield at times. Secondly, the film is hard to understand as the sound is poor and, even worse, the accents are hard to follow. Third, the logic of this film is a joke. Consider this:

● A human race that is capable of building Elysium is more than capable of turning the planet into a paradise, so why waste billions of trillions on building the space station when it would be cheaper to clean up the planet?

● Secondly, what’s the point in denying the surface dwellers healthcare when it wouldn’t cost the Elysium dwellers anything to send down a few robot doctors.

● Third, to stage the coup, Foster gets an arms-dealer (military industrial complex) to re-write Elysium’s code to have her recognized as President. Doesn’t anyone think the people who live there will notice that their President has been deposed?

● Fourth, why have the surface dwellers given up any attempt to improve the planet themselves or run their own affairs?

The film is also deeply manipulative, only you won’t buy into their manipulations, which makes those scenes annoying rather than emotional.

In the end, this film pounds you with liberalism at every turn, and with nonsense – each scene ends with you wondering why anyone would actually act the way the people do. It presents whites, corporations and the military in the most clichéd, liberal-fabricated-negative light possible while it washes away the responsibility of these people to care for themselves. The plot is paper thin. The acting is poor. The action is entirely predictable. The fight scenes are way too long. The cinematography and sound are horrible. And you won’t care for a second about any of the characters.

Put simply, this film sucks; it’s a hacky political hit piece. You should avoid it.

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Wither Elysium, An Original Property

So Elysium just crashed and burned. I’m not surprised. Matt Damon is an ass and his politicking has turned people off. And there’s no doubt this film was all about politicking. It was the story of a world where poor people build spaceships to illegally immigrate to a space station full of rich people who have universal healthcare machines and live forever. If Damon didn’t think Obama was too much of a right-winger, he probably would have included a push for a third term for El Presidente... and perhaps a love scene.

How badly did Elysium fail? Well, it made $29.8 million. That’s well below Sony’s already pathetic estimate of $35 million. It’s also $8 million below the $37 million opening of both Oblivion (cum: $90 million) and Pacific Rim (cum: $100 million) and just $2 million more than After Earth (cum: $60 million). In other words, it’s doing worse than three huge bombs from this summer. It’s also a lot worse than Director Blomkamp’s prior (also leftist political) film District 9, which brought in $37.4 on its opening and $115 million total. Of course, that only cost $30 million to make. Elysium cost $115 million to produce and then millions more to market.

This is yet another strike against Sony, which has just imploded this year and seems to be on the verge of a power struggle. But that’s not what interests me now. What interests me is that Hollywood is blaming the failure of Elysium not on its noxious politics or its rancid star or the bad marketing or the fact it looks like Oblivion II. No. They are blaming it on being “an original property.”

In other words, they are saying the film failed because it wasn’t an adaptation of a famous book or television show or a remake of a successful movie.

Bull.

Hollywood has become obsessed with only making films that have built-in audiences because they think that reduces the risk of the film being a bomb. Of course, that hasn’t worked out so well, but that’s not the point today either.

The point today is that Elysium didn’t fail because it was an original property, it failed because it doesn’t look like anything anyone wants to see. General audiences don’t avoid films just because they don’t know the “property” from which it comes... Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future and Close Encounters were all original properties. And science fiction fans certainly don’t avoid science fiction films just because they don’t know the property from which is comes.

People avoid films if they think the film is going to stink. The avoid films that star Matt Damon. They avoid films that look like propaganda. They avoid films that look like crap. They avoid films with bad marketing. This film has all of that. What exactly did the trailers tell you? Gee, a sweaty Matt Damon shoots at a robot thingy. I learned nothing more from the trailers. How does that make me want to see the film? How about these questions reviewers asked:

Why does only Los Angeles matter? What happened to China and Europe? How can these poor people afford to build spaceships to try to immigrate? How come the space station has no defenses? How come the cops only work when it’s convenient to the plot? Does denying everyone immortality really make you a bad guy as the film suggests? What happened to the middle class and upper class people? How do the people who clean the toilets on the space station afford to live there? Etc.

The problem wasn’t that this was an original property, the problem was that this was a poorly thought-out film that reeked of mindless propaganda, which starred an actor whose popularity is tanking, which looked like a rip off of the director’s prior work and several other films that bombed this same summer, and which had horrible marketing which gave no one a reason to see the film.

There’s your problem.

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Film Friday: Ocean’s Thirteen (2007)

I should hate this film on so... many... levels. Half the actors are jerks. The writing is nonsense. The whole film is nothing but a product placement. Wow. I should be railing against this sucker. Yet, I really enjoy this film. This is one of those rare films where style trumps everything else. This isn’t a film, it’s an experience, and if you’re using your brain, then you’re doing it wrong.

Plot

Willy Bank (Al Pacino) is an evil man. He dominates the Vegas casino industry and he just cheated his partner, Reuben, who just happens to be good friends with Danny Ocean (George Clooney). This was wrong. See, Bank shook Sinatra’s hand, as did Reuben, and that means Bank broke the code by cheating Reuben. So Danny and his crew set out to bankrupt Bank’s new casino to set things right. From there, the film becomes a Rube Goldberg heist plan in which Ocean and the boys need to break Bank’s security, rig the games to cheat in favor of the guests at a specific time, and then get all the guests out of the casino before they lose the money back.

Why This Film Works

To understand why this film works, let me explain why the original Ocean’s 11 worked... not the Soderbergh remake, but the original 1960’s film staring Frank Sinatra. Ocean’s 11 worked because of a form of nostalgia. Ocean’s 11 is like an invite to spend time with the hippest cats America has ever produced... the Rat Pack. When you watch Ocean’s 11, you aren’t watching to see if they pull off the heist, nor are you watching for plot or to see the acting. No. You are watching to get a glimpse of Frank Sinatra playing around with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. You are watching to get a sense of what it was like to go to Vegas in 1960 and sit in the audience as all these guys showed up and clowned around for a couple hours right in front of you... these singers and comedians who advised presidents and ran with the mob, married the most eligible women of the era, stormed Hollywood on their own terms, and dominated the music world. These guys represent an entire era in American culture.

What does this have to do with Ocean’s Thirteen? Well, Ocean’s Thirteen is the second sequel to Ocean’s Eleven, which is a sort of remake of Ocean’s 11. Only, whereas Ocean’s Eleven really was never more than just a heist film that borrowed characters from Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s Thirteen captures the spirit of Ocean’s 11.

Like Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s Thirteen is entirely about the experience, not the story. It is about accessing a world you will never access on your own, no matter what you achieve in life. It is a world of casino whales and high rollers at a fantasy casino that is so ornate and stylized that it is the very essence of the image we have of “the casino experience,” an image that wasn’t true in the 1960’s when it was created and certainly isn’t true today. Indeed, nowhere in this film will you see slovenly tourists in Bermuda shorts placing one dollar bets in this casino. There are no rooms the size of closets and no employees who don’t speak English. The hotel staff here look like models or Hollywood butlers, not fat, lazy SEUI members. The guests are models dressed to the nines. The rooms are like mansions decorated by the best designers. Everywhere you look there are designer brands, premium alcohol, luxury cars, beautiful people.

Within this world you find yourself among a huge group of friends: Danny and Rusty and Linus and Reuben and Terry and the rest. And these aren’t like any friends you know. No, these people are all highly educated, clever, funny, beautiful, athletic... celebrities. They have amazing skills you can only dream of – gymnastics, computer hacking, super scheming, card sharping, etc. They are classy too, and they live by a code... a code of infinite loyalty, the kind of loyalty that makes you spend every penny of your millions of dollars to set right an insult made against one member of your crew. Even beyond that, they have amazing chemistry. In fact, they finish each other’s thoughts all the time and any one of them can completely screw up the entire plan without a hint of reproach from the others, because loyalty comes first and they never give up and never lose hope.

They have a good time too. In fact, despite the film being about a heist, it really isn’t. To the contrary, this film is about a chess match played against the ultimate fantasy casino for amazing stakes with no prospect that you will lose and played in a consequence free environment.

To put it simply, this is a fantasy world as much as if it had dragons... it is the American consumer vision of Heaven, and it lets you in completely. That’s why this film is so great. It offers you more and better friends than you’ve ever had, a playground you can never experience, and a game you can never really play in real life. It’s a hell of a ride.

What’s interesting to me is how the film builds this, because there are some fascinating little tricks that other writers should examine closely. First, to create the environment, the director essentially made a study of what works in the luxury advertisement world, and then he brought it to life. If you drive a Rolls, then hot chicks will get out of the car with you. If you drink Gray Goose, you will be rich and respected. If you wear the right clothes, you will be hip. This film takes all of American high-end consumerism and distills it to the images that appeal to us and injects them directly into your brain.

The friendships are interesting too because of how they’re built. First, no one has friends like this. Name one friend of yours who would throw away ten million dollars, everything they own, just to avenge an insult made to another of your friends. Moreover, no one has this many close friends. In fact, management studies have found that humans aren’t capable of monitoring more than about eight relationships with any level of attention, which is why companies don’t put people directly in charge of hundreds of people. Yet, here you are literally surrounded by dozens of loyal-to-the-death friends who are closer to you than any real life friend... these are people you’ve adventured with.

Even more interestingly, to give you the feeling that they are in fact close friends, the writer uses a dialog trick to make you believe there’s a long-time relationship there. Specifically, the writer has the characters speak “in their own language,” by having them reference things you don’t know, and has them constantly finishing each other’s sentences and thoughts, as people who are long-time friends often do. Just as interestingly, the writer starts each scene with one character telling the end of a story involving people the two characters know. Not enough information is given to tell you the story, but enough information is given for you to guess what they are talking about. For example, a character might say, “So I jumped out the window as her husband chased me,” which is enough to let you understand what happened even if you don’t know any of the actual details. What this does is it gives you the feeling that you are in on their relationship because you can understand what they are talking about even as you think other people couldn’t understand because it’s an insider story. In effect, they trick you into thinking that you share their special language, which makes you part of the relationship. This is actually pretty brilliant writing.

Finally, the film rushes all of this past you in a bombarding montage of sound, colors and stylized images, sometimes even being shown in split-screen images. Essentially, the film runs at such a quick pace that you never get a chance to focus on anything you are watching. Adding to this intentional confusion, the film shows a good deal in quick flashbacks, which keep you disoriented, and it often requires you to keep track of the dialog between cuts, as the last line in one scene becomes the first line in the next scene. The result is a film that keeps you from focusing on the plot itself and makes you just “live in the moment.”

Ultimately, this film works not because it’s a good film, but because it immerses you into an idealized, stylized world of intense friendship and camaraderie, unimagined wealth, and an impossibly-high party atmosphere, all wrapped up in a thick sense of adventure. That’s why this film works and that’s why the original Ocean’s 11 worked: because it sells you a trip into a fantasy world with friends you could never have in real life. And for a brief moment, you can be buddies with the coolest people on earth.

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Film Friday: Contagion (2011)

Contagion begins with one person passing a disease to another. They spread it to others. All these people die within the first couple minutes of the film. The next few minutes involve CDC members trying to track down where the disease began. From there, the film becomes the disjointed story of several individuals who really don’t do anything, nor are they interesting. Indeed, nothing about this film is interesting.

** spoiler alert **

Though critics fawn over him, Steven Soderbergh is hit or miss as a director. For every Sex, Lies and Videotape and Ocean’s Eleven there’s a Solaris and The Informant!. When he hits, he’s provocative and stylistic. When he misses, he’s predictable and boooring. Contagion is a “realistic” portrayal of a highly contagious and lethal virus spreading through the modern world. “Realistic” is in quotes because the film takes itself very seriously, but there’s no substance behind the air of realism. In this regard, Contagion is like Soderbergh’s Traffic: polished, serious, and intensely shallow.

Contagion acts like it’s presenting a scientific and non-fictiony view of virus-events, only it really isn’t. There’s almost no science presented and the serious tone masks the fact that the story is nothing more than a couple characters making uninteresting personal decisions. We do see the virus pass from person to person, but only for a minute or two -- Outbreak did this with much greater tension, as have most zombie films. They also try to track down the first person to get the disease, which could be interesting, except it gets resolved almost instantly and they don’t even tell us why it matters. At one point, they seal off Chicago, which could be interesting, except you don’t get to see it happen.

So what do we get instead? Instead, the film is about bureaucrats harassing Kate Winslet for no reason, Laurence Fishburne agonizing over bringing home one CDC employee when two million have already died and calling his fiancé to tell her to leave Chicago, which briefly becomes a scandal that goes nowhere. We also see Matt Damon agonize that he can’t open the door to his house to let his daughter’s boyfriend in for a quickie, and Marion Cotillard makes an appearance as a doctor, though I honestly can’t tell you why. Elliot Gould appears too for some reason. Yawn.

The only thing this film really offers that’s somewhat original is Jude Law as Alan Krumwiede, an anti-government, conspiracy-theory blogger who sells his soul to a hedge fund and tells people they can cure this disease with snake oil. This is about as close as the film gets to an interesting storyline. Yet, while the film spends a lot of time on his character, you are never once shown any effect his actions have on anything. He just talks about getting a lot of page hits and the CDC people are upset at him. But it’s never even clear if he’s lying or what motivates him, nor do you ever see a single person get hurt following his advice.

So how could this film have been improved?

Well, for one thing, it needs focus. The Andromeda Strain created a compelling plot by focusing on whether or not the disease would escape the lab. Quarantine focused on a small group of people trapped with the infected as the government tried to bury the problem. The Crazies showed a group of uninfected trying to escape a town the government sealed off. Zombie movies, like Pontypool and Day of the Dead, thrive in portraying the early moments before the public is aware what is happening, and in showing the exponential math of infection. The Stand took another approach and built around the survivors, even as the virus was only starting. Twelve Monkeys showed mankind trying to rebuild afterwards. In each of these instances, the film followed characters whose survival was important. Their stories became the story of how the disease either spread or was stopped. As they learned information, you learned information, as they lost friends, you felt the loss. This pulled you in to the story.

Contagion isn’t like that. None of the characters in Contagion actually matter. If they all died in an industrial blender the moment the film began, not a single thing would change in the virus portion of the story. Even worse, these characters never learn anything they can pass on to the audience. Instead, the information is presented over radio broadcasts or it appears on the screen like an update. Thus, there’s no mystery and you have little actual connection to the virus story, it just seems to be going on in the background, even though these characters are presented as the most relevant characters to watch. That makes the film feel somewhat fraudulent bereft of drama.

Compare this film to Outbreak. Outbreak fell apart when it did the “crazed soldier” thing toward the end, but until that point the film was quite strong. Outbreak followed one character who had the ability to discover, diagnose and treat the virus, and it became the story of his race against the clock and the seemingly real hurdles he faced. Throughout the film, we knew little more than he did, and when we did it was used for dramatic effect. By comparison, in Contagion information gets handed out regularly and with little drama. For example, you will suddenly see the words, “2.3 million dead” written on the screen, which should be horrific except it’s just a number the way it gets presented. Moreover, in Outbreak, people close to the hero died, people we got to know. In Contagion, you almost never see anyone die and when you do, they are typically introduced as they are dying. So they’re all strangers.

This is why Contagion went wrong: it pretended it was a realistic portrayal of the spread of a deadly virus, but it gave us no realism, no science, no mystery, and no characters who mattered to the virus story. And the personal stories of the characters we were given just weren’t interesting, nor did they ultimately feel particularly relevant to anything. This was how Traffic felt. That was a film that seemed on the surface to be a serious exploration of the drug trade from Mexico to the United States, but there was no depth and nothing we hadn’t seen before. And the characters you did follow weren’t relevant to the larger point of the film, except that they were all anecdotally touched by the drug trade. It’s the same thing here. These characters don’t drive the story, they are passengers, people who kind-of-sort-of relate to the spreading of the virus.

Ultimately, a genuine story about the spread of a disease could be a fascinating film, but it needs to offer more than a glossy version of every other virus story. It needs to connect to the real people who make decisions so the audience can see how the important people would respond and the challenges they face, and it needs to connect us to the scale of death in a very personal way. Simply reading numbers of dead is not enough. Contagion does none of this.

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Film Friday: The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

I see where The Adjustment Bureau looked like a brilliant concept. Random chance brings a man and woman together. They fall in love. But God’s plan for the world requires they be apart. Angels separate them, but the man fights against God’s plan to be with his true love. That’s an incredible amount of fascinating conflict. Sadly, Bureau mishandles every aspect of this and muddles all the conflict, which makes it feel as tired and indifferent as the last few weeks of a canceled television show.

** spoiler alert -- I will talk about the ending **

The Plot

Matt Damon is the idealized liberal politician destined to become President. Damon meets a woman (Emily Blunt) and falls in love. Damon is kidnapped by men who turn out to be angels, and told he cannot be with the woman because it violates “the Chairman’s” plan (i.e. God). If he tries to be with her, they will blank his personality and leave him insane. Damon still tries to find her because he’s fallen in true love. He finds her. Now the angels warn Damon he will ruin her life and his if he doesn’t leave her. He does, but then goes back to her. Surprise! They chase him. He tries to see God to get God’s plan changed. True love conquers all.

Where It All Went Wrong

Based on a Philip K. Dick story, Bureau is one of those films that feels wrong when you watch it because you have a hard time caring about the things they tell you to care about, the mystery doesn’t seem mysterious, and it all feels pointless. Here’s why. Films are about conflict, and conflict requires interesting stakes. If there’s nothing worth gaining or losing, then the conflicts won’t interest the audience and the story will be hard to care about. Bureau is packed with conflict, but it keeps undercutting every single stake it tries to establish.

For example, there are problems at the outset with the believability of the characters. Damon is running for Senate and dreams of becoming president. This desire to be president is a vital point to the story, as you’ll see in a moment. But Damon’s character seems indifferent to the prospect. In fact, the only reason we know he wants to be President is because other characters tell us this is what Damon wants. This is bad writing and it happens throughout the film -- we are constantly told things are true even though there’s no evidence to support them.

The love story suffers similarly. Instead of finding some way to show us how much Damon and this woman love each other, we get only good- natured, self-depreciating ribbing along with a couple kisses. To convince us this is love and not just acquaintanceship, the writer has the other characters tell us repeatedly that these two are in love. In fact, they don’t just tell us they are in love, they tell us they are in God’s plan-shattering destiny LOVE. Yet, there isn’t the slightest hint of this from Damon or the woman. This is mainly the fault of really poor writing, but Damon plays a role in this failure too. Matt Damon has become a nasty man, and I don’t just mean politically. The likable Matt Damon of Good Will Hunting and Ocean’s 11 has been replaced by the brooding Jason Bourne, and Damon seems angry throughout this film.

Even beyond the love story, Damon’s character is hard to believe. He’s presented as the ideal (liberal) politician -- a young good looking environmentalist outsider who isn’t like other politicians. . . he’s “authentic!” And what proves he’s authentic is a concession speech he gives where he exposes the sordid underbelly of candidate packaging. But here’s the problem. This speech is pedantic and pointless. We’re supposed to believe he’s exposing some big secret which makes the world fall in love with his authenticity, but all he’s really doing is confessing that he paid a consultant to pick his tie and scuff his shoes. There’s no substance in the speech which would make the public love him. So how do we know the public loves him? Because every character tells us so -- the writer even obnoxiously has random characters call out Damon’s name as he walks around town and tell him they voted for him and they love him.

As an aside, Damon is clearly a white version of Barack Obama and the script is laced with Obamaism, like when one of the angels says he doesn’t know God’s plan because “that’s above my pay grade.”

But all of that is just the beginning of the problem. The film really falls apart when it gets to the stakes. The angels tell Damon that if he doesn’t abandon the woman, then his dream of becoming president will be destroyed. Those are the stakes: true love versus fulfilling his dream. But these are problematic stakes, because wanting to be president isn’t a dream people consider realistic. And there’s no reason to think he needs to be president to cause something good or stop something bad. Nor will he end up homeless eating garbage if he fails, he’ll still be rich and famous. That’s not really a horrible loss, so it’s hard to get worked up over this. Also as mentioned above, he certainly doesn’t seem to care about this personally.

And it gets worse. As the story unfolds, the angels tell us the reason he wants to be president is the plan calls for it, hence the angels put the desire to be president into his head. But this kills the stakes. Now Damon is being asked to give up true love or he won’t be able to fulfill a dream that was never his. See the problem?

It gets worse yet. For one thing, a little earlier in the film, when they established what the angels can and cannot do, we were told the angels can’t change your desires. Suddenly, we have a story-rules breakdown. Also, this undercuts his greatness as a politician because the angels tell us this desire derives from a desperate need to be loved by crowds. In other words, he doesn’t want to be president because he’s a principled person with good ideas, he wants to be president because he craves the public’s love.

Further, Damon is looking to give up “his” dream because he has fallen in true love with this woman, right? That’s what we’re told. And it is God’s will that they never hook up. Thus, this film is about Damon’s free will challenging the God-created fate which the angels are trying to impose -- indeed, this free will v. fate point is made repeatedly throughout the film. Only, it turns out that God had a plan before the current plan and in that Plan A, Damon and the woman were to fall deeply in love. And the reason the angels are having a problem keeping them apart is that remnants of the original Plan A are still out there interfering with the new Plan B.

Now think about this.

● This means Damon isn’t acting according to free will. He is instead a victim of two contradictory versions of fate colliding. Ergo, the entire free will v. destiny conflict is phony and we no longer have any reason to care how it resolves.

● This means the whole “greatest love ever” bit is phony as well. They haven’t fallen in love against the very will of God, they fell in love because God told them to under Plan A and screwed up his math on his new Plan B. Their love is not real, it is forced upon them. Thus, it’s really not worthy of being a stake and this undercuts the entire love story.

● The whole movie is premised on the idea that God can’t change his plan. This is why the angels are so desperate to force Damon to surrender his (non-existent) free will. But now we’re told God changed his plan already once for Damon. In fact, we’re told of two other instances where God changed his plan. Further, there’s a whole division of angels who swoop in to erase people’s personalities when they don’t do as they’re told, and thereby completely re-write the plan again. In effect, we’re told Damon is going against an unchangeable plan, yet that plan gets changed all the time.

● In the end, Damon tries to get God to change his plan. To do this, Damon goes through a door by turning the doorknob left instead of right, something he’s been told never to do because “that’s only for angels.” He does it anyway, “risking everything” and thereby proving his love is so powerful that God sees it as worthy of changing the unchangeable plan. But he’s not really risking anything because the angels are chasing him to blank him out. Thus, he either does this or he dies. That’s not “risking everything.”

This is why this film fails. It promises some interesting ideas but has no clue how to handle them as it keeps undercutting everything it does, from the conflicts it establishes to the reasons we’re supposed to believe the characters. And despite the cool philosophical implications of this film, the writer basically just wrote a chase-movie. Not only are ideas like omniscience, omnipotence, faith, and even the mercy of God ignored, but the writer chickens out on his subversive idea of man v. God by making the angels fools who can’t stop Damon, by refusing to call God “God” and instead calling him “the Chairman,” and by studiously avoiding all of the philosophical and theological questions. “The Chairman” could just as easily have been some alien or a government conspiracy and little would have needed to change in this film.

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