Movie Review: Resistance

Resistance ** / *****

Directed by: Jonathan Jakubowicz.

Written by: Jonathan Jakubowicz.

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg (Marcel), Ed Harris (George S. Patton), Edgar Ramírez (Sigmund), Clémence Poésy (Emma), Matthias Schweighöfer (Klaus Barbie), Bella Ramsey (Elsbeth), Géza Röhrig (Georges), Karl Markovics (Charles), Félix Moati (Alain), Alicia von Rittberg (Regine), Vica Kerekes (Mila), Tobias Gareth Elman (Joseph), Kue Lawrence (Young Marcel).

 

If modern audiences know Marcel Marceau at all these days, it is as the world’s most famous mime – undeniably the last mime that was a household name. Maybe they remember him from Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, where the joke was that the world’s most famous mime was the only one to have a line. They probably don’t know that during WWII, he was active in the French Resistance – helping Jewish children escape from France in Switzerland and safety. Writer/director Jonathan Jakubowicz, clearly came across this story, and just felt it was too good to not make a movie of. The problem is though that Resistance is basically a run-of-the-mill Holocaust survival story, just with a mime at its center, and Jakubowicz doesn’t find a way to make it all that interesting – all that different than the dozens of others movie like this we have seen. If the hook here is Marceau, we do get some scenes early of him doing his work in a nightclub – or for the kids – and the climax is Marceau’s first big show for the American troops (brought on stage by General Patton, played by Ed Harris in a performance that makes you think he owed someone a favor), but for the majority of the runtime, it’s a fairly generic story. Jakubowicz also finds a way to graft the story of Klaus Barbie into the movie, and still, the film never becomes very involving.

 

None of this is the fault of Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Marceau in an inspired bit of casting. Eisenberg’s gift as an actor is often his motor mouthed delivery, but here, he proves himself a more than capable mime in the scenes where he needs to show off Marceau’s gifts. If he isn’t who you would immediately think to cast as a mime, well, then, what modern actor would be? Eisenberg is at his best in the early scenes of Resistance – when he is working for his butcher father, hitting on Emma (Clemence Poesy), and doing his nightclub act – all while trying to ignore the growing threat of Hitler and Germany. The movie makes it clear that Marceau cares more about his art than anything else – even if that means he is blithely ignorant of everything else. This is an interesting place to start – but the film soon abandons it. He starts working with the orphans, and then immediately melts, and becomes a humanitarian.

 

Most of the movie is filled with the type of scenes you’ve seen before. Clandestine meetings of resistance members, where they have to find ways to get around the Nazis, scenes of torture and capture, when people cannot get away from them. Scenes of Barbie and his wife – who is apparently horrified when she discovers what he is doing. Scenes of large groups of people trying to make it through the snow covered forests, and hide from the Nazis, etc.

 

None of this is new – nor is it handled all that well here. The film is pretty dull, never really building much of a sense of tension or surprise. Everyone seems to be going through the motions, delivering the type of scenes you expect in this type of movie, instead of the types of scenes you may really want to see in a film about Marcel Marceau taking on Nazis. The film does avoid the trap of say Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Died (supposedly), or Life is Beautiful or Jojo Rabbit, in that it never brings humor and Nazis together. But it doesn’t really do all that much else either. It just kind of sits there on screen – doing not much of anything.

Movie Review: 1917

1917 **** / *****

Directed by: Sam Mendes.

Written by: Sam Mendes & Krysty Wilson-Cairns.

Starring: George MacKay (Lance Corporal Schofield), Dean-Charles Chapman (Lance Corporal Blake), Daniel Mays (Sergeant Sanders), Colin Firth (General Erinmore), Andrew Scott (Lieutenant Leslie), Mark Strong (Captain Smith), Claire Duburcq (Lauri), Benedict Cumberbatch (MacKenzie), Richard Madden (Lieutenant Blake). 

 

Sam Mendes’ 1917 is primarily a technical achievement – and one that really cannot be denied. It is the latest film to try and fake its style as a single long shot stretched over its entire runtime (not quite, it cheats in the middle when the main character is knocked out cold for who knows how long, but how long should the camera of stayed trained on an unconscious man?). This isn’t a new idea – Birdman did it just a few years ago, Hitchcock did it in Rope in 1948, and Aleksandr Sokurov actually did all of Russian Ark in one take, no faking. Hell, 2019 also offered Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which featured a 58-minute single shot, in 3-D for added difficulty. Still, what Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins accomplish in 1917 is quite impressive – and they’ve picked the right story and setting to make their strategy work, and seem (at least slightly) less of a gimmick. There are drawbacks to this technique of course – the main ones being it doesn’t allow for as much character work, or even story beyond the propulsive nature of the mission, to make much of an impact. You’re dazzled by 1917 as you watch it, but after you may be at a loss to explain the larger messages of the film – or whether it even has them.

 

As the title implies, the film takes place in 1917, during WWI, and focuses on two British soldiers, given a perilous, and perhaps suicidal, mission. They have to make it to the front, and tell MacKenize to call off his planned attack at dawn the next morning – it’s a trap the Germans have set, and will lead to a massacre if it’s carried out. For added stakes, one of the men assigned – Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) has a brother among the men who will be killed. It’s just Schofield’s dumb luck that he was next to Blake when the assignment came in, and was forced to go along for the ride.

 

The faked single long tracking shot is especially effective in the early going, when Blake and Schofield have to walk through their own trenches, filled with men – bloodied and bruised, exhausted from fighting the Germans for every single inch of no man’s land. The trenches make an ideal place for long tracking shot – Kubrick knew this in Paths of Glory – and they make the most of it. It also works remarkably well when the pair start having to cross no man’s land – they’ve been told the Germans have abandoned it, but you never be sure. As they make their way across the muck, they stumble over barb wire, and dead bodies that cannot be retrieved. The scale of the lives lost becomes clearer.

 

As the film moves along, the technical achievement doesn’t waver. There is a mesmerizing shot late in the film where of the men runs towards the camera, while other run perpendicular to him, and bombs go off, and he has to stay on his feet. It is a brilliantly executed shot. It is also, unfortunately, one of the times that happen increasingly in the movie that seem completely implausible. As the film moves along, it feels like Mendes feels he has to keep upping the ante, upping the danger, and while all the scenes are exciting, they don’t exactly feel plausible, and it makes the already thin story and characters feel all the thinner.

 

I will say that the two leads – George McKay in particular – do more in their roles than you may think, given that so much of the film is running, jumping, shooting, dodging, ducking, etc. The film is at least partly about the horror of war – and how all you can do is try and survive it.

 

1917 works amazingly well when you watch. What Mendes has done, with Deakins, is worthy of praise – and the other design elements are as well. In particular, Thomas Newman’s score is one of his best, and does a lot of emotional heavy lifting, as well as to heighten the suspense and excitement. And yet, it was never a film where I forgot about the technique being used – where I never stopped looking for the cuts for instance (some are easy to spot, some nearly impossible). It is an amazing technical accomplishment, and a very good film. A great film would make you forget just how amazing a technical accomplishment it was.

Movie Review: Apocalypse Now: Final Cut

Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut ***** / *****

Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola.

Written by: John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Herr (narration) based on the novel by Joseph Conrad (uncredited).

Starring: Marlon Brando (Colonel Walter E. Kurtz), Martin Sheen (Captain Benjamin L. Willard), Robert Duvall (Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore), Frederic Forrest (Jay 'Chef' Hicks), Sam Bottoms (Lance B. Johnson), Laurence Fishburne (Tyrone 'Clean' Miller), Albert Hall (Chief Phillips), Harrison Ford (Colonel Lucas), Dennis Hopper (Photojournalist), G.D. Spradlin (General R. Corman), Jerry Ziesmer (Jerry, Civilian), Scott Glenn (Lieutenant Richard M. Colby).

 

Apocalypse Now is my favorite movie of all time. I’ve seen it countless times in many formats – I had a widescreen VHS back in the day that I watched a lot. I had a couple different DVD versions over the years, and then a Blu-Ray disc – both of which has gotten a lot of play. I’ve seen it on a big screen just once – back in 2001, when Coppola released Apocalypse Now Redux – which was 197 minutes long, a full 53 minutes longer than the theatrical cut. Watching Redux is a fascinating experience for someone who knows Apocalypse Now to see what Coppola thought either didn’t work, or he didn’t have time for, back in 1979. But while Redux is a fascinating experiment – it isn’t better than the original cut. It is too long, and the two major additions to the film – the two that make up the bulk of the additional runtime – don’t really work. The additional scenes with the Playmates is problematic in many ways, and really just don’t work. The massively long French Plantation sequence (seriously, it’s probably about 25 minutes) really does stop the movie in its tracks. It comes between the deaths of Clean and Chief – right in the stretch when the crew is getting closer and closer to Kurtz – or as Willard says, as the river is dragging them towards Kurtz. As a sequence unto itself, it kind of works – but it makes the themes of the film far too explicit, and really does stop the movie for this strange interlude.

 

For the films 40^th Anniversary, Coppola went back to the editing room once again, and the result in Apocalypse Now: Final Cut – which comes in at 180 minutes, between the theatrical version and Redux. In the intervening 18 years, Coppola seems to have thought better of including additional scenes with the Playmates – they are gone. But for reasons only he could explain, he keeps the entire French Plantation sequence. I think the only time I watched the Redux version was during that theatrical release – the original cut is better, so I never felt the need. Reading over the inclusions in Redux, it really does feel like that the changes in Final Cut compared to Redux is basically eliminating the additional Playmates sequence, and one sequence at the Kurtz compound featuring Kurtz reading about the war from Time Magazine to Willard as he is imprisoned. There could be a few other changes – but those appear the ones that are readily apparent.

 

In terms of what the ultimate version of Apocalypse Now is, I still say it’s the original cut. That French Plantation sequence still drags the movie to a halt, right when it should be ramping up – right when the crew should be on their unavoidable collision course with Kurtz. When death starts arriving for them one at a time. This strange, surreal interlude at the Plantation doesn’t work as part of the film.   

 

And yet, if you have a chance to see this Final Cut in a theatre this August, you absolutely must. I saw it on an IMAX screen (a far cry from the little art house theatre I saw Redux on in 2001) – and the experience is amazing. The entire Kilgore sequence in the film – from when they are first introduced to Robert Duvall’s insane Colonel (insane in a different way from Kurtz) shakes your insides from the sound. It is the best depiction of absolute chaos I have ever seen in a film – the sheer craziness of the war on full display. After that first hour, of course, the movie does become quieter – at least for a while – as the crew drifts done the river, towards a destination only Willard knows. And Willard gets sucked into the mind of Kurtz, and starts to understand him in a way that both fascinates and frightens him. Sequences such as a the surreal, nightmarish Do Lung Bridge sequence can only really be experienced in full on the big screen. And Brando’s hulking presence as Kurtz is best experienced on the big screen – where he truly does become larger than life.

 

But pretty much every sequence in the movie is brilliant. The trippy opening montage, with Willard drunkenly spending time in his hotel room, set to The Doors The End is a masterclass in editing. The conversation over lunch with the intelligence guys remains dark and mysterious. The Kilgore sequence is just an absolute masterpiece in itself. The Playboy sequence here, like in the original, when the three bunnies come to perform a USO show, and drive the men into a frenzy, crossing sex and violence together, is wonderful. The sequence where they stop a Vietnamese boat still has the power to disturb (even if the puppy is perhaps a touch too much). Everything with Dennis Hopper’s Photojournalist is wondrously comic, and disturbing at the same time. In any other movie, his insane, looping monologues would get more attention. And then Brando shows up, with completely different insane, looping monologues – delivering at a quarter of the speed of Hopper’s. I know there are still some who think the movie goes off the rails when they reach Kurtz’s compound – but they are still wrong. Brando’s performance remains one of the very best of his career – and therefore among the vest best of all time. He is matched by Robert Duvall as Kilgore – who has the big job of setting just how insane this movie is going to get, and doesn’t disappoint. Martin Sheen does get the credit he deserves for just how good he is here – perhaps because other than the narration, it’s a larger silent performance. He isn’t one of the men of the boat – he is apart from them, and they all know it. The men on the boat itself – Albert Hall as the by-the-books Chief, Frederic Forrest as the paranoid Chef, Sam Bottoms as the Stoner/Surfer kid Lance, and a very young Laurence Fishburne as the innocent (somewhat annoying) Clean – are all perfect as well.

 

Seeing the film on a massive screen, with the best sound quality imaginable is like seeing the movie anew. It takes sequences you know by heart, and makes you see them slightly differently. So, yes, the best version of this film remains the original cut. If you are watching at home, there is no reason to watch either Redux or Final Cut unless you are interested in what was cut – which is interesting, but would probably mainly work best as Extra Features. Still, seeing this film on the big screen is more than worth it – even with the misguided French Plantation sequence, because you get to see a master filmmaker, at the height of his craft – a height he would never reach again – pulling you down into the Heart of Darkness. And hey, the film is three hours, with no intermission – so when you hear French, it’s a good time for a bathroom break. Don’t worry, the French Plantation sequence will still be going on when you get back.

Movie Review: The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Robert D. Krzykowski.

Written by: Robert D. Krzykowski.

Starring: Sam Elliott (Calvin Barr), Aidan Turner (Calvin Barr), Caitlin FitzGerald (Maxine), Ron Livingston (Flag Pin), Sean Bridgers (Mr. Gardner), Ellar Coltrane (The Clerk), Larry Miller (Ed), Mark Steger (The Bigfoot), Rizwan Manji (Maple Leaf).

 

When you sit down to watch a movie entitled The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot, you are not wrong to have certain expectations for the movie you are going to get. The title implies a fun B-movie – something to watch at midnight in a grimy theater with a bunch of people hollering at the screen. That is certainly the film I thought I was sitting down to watch (sadly, not in a grimy theater, but in my living room – but I did start it at midnight, so there’s that) – and that is not the film that Robert D. Krzykowski has made here. As much as you can take the premise of this movie seriously, Krzykowski and company do – and they’ve really made a film about the cost of violence, and how it weighs on those who perpetuate it, even in a just cause. And also, at times a rather touching love story. It’s the type of film that you could kind of see Clint Eastwood directing and starring in about 20 years ago. This isn’t to say that The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot isn’t an odd film – it’s a very odd film – but perhaps not in the way you were thinking.

 

The film flashes back and forth in time to tell the story of Calvin Barr at two different parts of his life. During WWII, when he is played by Aidan Turner he is selected to carry out the mission that gives the first part of the title its name. Decades later, now played by Sam Elliott, he is a sad and lonely retiree just basically living out the string in grimy bars. He is single – which brings up questions, since in the past scenes, he has a tender romance with Maxine (Caitlin FitzGerald) and has pretty much closed himself off from all around him – his younger brother, Ed (Larry Miller) barely knows him, even though they do see each other often. It is then that he is approached by the government with the offer that gives the second part of the title its name – presumably because of his reputation during WWII, where his “glory” is whispered about, and also because he is an expert tracker, and somehow immune to what disease the Bigfoot has. This Bigfoot has been killing people, and the government is struggling to keep it under wraps.

 

Sam Elliott is undeniably the right choice to play the older Barr – yes, Eastwood would have been great in the late 1990s, but now, Elliott brings the same kind of weight and gravitas to the role that Eastwood would have, but also a kind of winking smile appropriate to the material. He has been experiencing a well-deserved career renaissance of sorts in recent years, and while this sounds like a B-movie, you can understand why he would be interested in it. A problem is Aidan Turner as the younger Barr – not because he’s bad (he’s pretty good) – but because you cannot really see him turning into Elliot at any point, even after he grows the mustache. Still, his scenes work in isolation – and his romance with FitzGerald is genuinely sweet and touching.

 

Be warned, walking into the movie, that Hitler and the Bigfoot don’t actually take up much of the runtime of this movie. The movie seems to take Barr’s lead on the Hitler part of the movie. Barr isn’t proud of what he did – he says “all I did was kill a man” – and says the real heroes are the others who fought for their country, rather than just killing a single guy. The buildup to the mission is far more satisfying than the mission itself – particularly a long scene in which Barr is shaved that grows more tense as it moves along. As for Bigfoot, we’re well over an hour in before he makes any sort of appearance. I do like how the movie wastes little time in getting to him though – once the mission of tracking bigfoot starts, we pretty much cut straight to the two of them engaged in a battle of wills of sorts.

 

I’m not going to argue that the film is some deep masterwork about violence and its consequences. This isn’t Unforgiven, A History of Violence of Munich here. I just appreciated that it seems like Krzykowski came up with the most ridiculous premise he could muster, then decided to take it seriously – and deliver a film that is more character study than exploitation film – and that gives Sam Elliott the kind of role he deserves. This is a strange little film – and I liked that it zigged, when it would have been easier to zag.

Movie Review: Overlord

Overlord *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Julius Avery.

Written by: Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith.

Starring: Jovan Adepo (Boyce), Wyatt Russell (Ford), Mathilde Ollivier (Chloe), Pilou Asbæk (Wafner), John Magaro (Tibbet), Iain De Caestecker (Chase), Jacob Anderson (Dawson), Dominic Applewhite (Rosenfeld), Gianny Taufer (Paul), Bokeem Woodbine (Rensin), Erich Redman (Dr. Schmidt).

 

Overlord is a nasty, goofy, gore drenched horror/war film that works best the less you think about it. They film has a relentless pace, and several great set pieces and just keeps chugging along, changing genres at will, and providing a lot of bang for its buck. The film is set during WWII – on D-Day to be precise – and starts out like other war films we’ve seen before. At some point it becomes a horror film, and then morphs into a hybrid of the two genres for its final act. It probably shouldn’t work at all – and yet somehow it all works really well.

 

The film begins on a plane the night before D-Day. On what will become a bumpy and violent flight, we stick with Boyce (Jovan Adepo), a young black soldier – and our audience surrogate. The men have been told their job – they are to parachute behind enemy lines, find a radio tower on top of a church in a small French village, and take it out before the invasion starts – or else air support won’t be possible. Of course, the plane is shot to hell – and when Boyce lands – after a chaotic fall – he realizes most of his friends. All that’s really left is an explosive expert, Ford (Wyatt Russell) – who none of the rest of them know, wisecracking Tibbet (John Magaro) and Chase (Ian De Casetecker) – who doesn’t have a personality aside from being the guy with the camera. If their odds were bad before they parachuted in, they’re even worse now that there’s only 4 of them. When they get to the small town, things seem even more bleak – the church is even more fortified and guarded then they thought. The only help they’re going to get is from Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier) – a beautiful young French woman, who has to protect her younger brother.

 

The best sequence in the movie comes at about the halfway point – when Boyce suddenly finds himself in the church, alone, stumbling around. When he gets to the basement he sees things – unholy things – and although any sane person would stop investigating the strange noises he hears, or unzipping the seeping bags of viscera he sees – well before he does – it’s still a great sequence as director Julius Avery builds the tension steadily – and knows how to build images to shock.

 

But it’s hardly alone as being a good set piece in the film. In fact, this film works best during the set pieces, and less well when its actually trying to tell a story of any kind. The opening airdrop sequence is intense and scary and brutal in its violence. There’s a scene where Ford and Boyce have to watch through cracks in the floor as a Nazi captain (Pilou Asbæk) comes into Chloe’s house, and tries to force himself on her. There are scenes in the back half in which various people get injected with a glowing serum the Nazis created – in which the results are not what is expected. And finally, when the climax gets here – the film does an excellent job of doing a kind of classic war movie shootout climax, with various horror movie sequences at the same time.

 

Overlord is, admittedly, a stupid movie in many ways. It’s best not to think about why some of its characters do some of the things they do – because there really is no reason for them to do them, except the movie needs them to. And yet, the movie moves at such a quick pace, has some many good set pieces, and is basically just so much bloody fun, that I didn’t really mind. I also didn’t really mind the kind of playing with the history Overlord does either – if you’re going to go all out into Nazi science experiments, you may as well go all out, which this film does in pretty much every way. Overlord is trash – but it’s fun trash.

Movie Review: Hunter Killer

Hunter Killer ** / *****

Directed by: Donovan Marsh.

Written by: Arne Schmidt and Jamie Moss based on the novel by George Wallace and Don Keith.

Starring: Gerard Butler (Captain Joe Glass), Gary Oldman (CJCS Charles Donnegan), Common (RA John Fisk), Linda Cardellini (Jayne Norquist), Alexander Diachenko (President Zakarin), Michael Gor (Admiral Dmitri Durov), Michael Nyqvist (Captain Andropov),Carter MacIntyre (XO Brian Edwards), Shane Taylor (TMC Turner), Kola Bokinni (McCaw), Mikey Collins (Brickowski), Will Attenborough (Kaplan), Kieron Bimpson (Nichols), David Gyasi (Cob Wallach), Michael Jibson (Reed), Christopher Goh (Park), Sarah Middleton (Liddy), Taylor John Smith  (Belford), Gabriel Chavarria (Jimenez), Toby Stephens (Bill Beaman), Michael Trucco (Devin Hall), Ryan McPartlin (Matt Johnstone), Zane Holtz (Paul Martinelli), Caroline Goodall (President Dover).

 

Hunter Killer is an action movie where essentially the Americans and the Russians have to work together to prevent WWIII from breaking out when the Russian Defense Minister goes rogue, kidnaps the Russian President, and starts a deadly game under the ice by first sabotaging a Russian sub to make it look like the Americans attacked, and then torpedoing an American sub to ensure an all-out war. In order to prevent this, American sends in a stealth sub, captained by Joe Glass (Gerard Butler) and a team of four highly trained marines in order to re-kidnap the Russian President, so he can stop the war. In order to do this, Glass rescues a Russian sub captain from that downed boat (Michael Nyqvist) to help him navigate through the dangerous Russian waters.

 

So yes, this is a movie in which the Americans and the Russians work together – and it’s been made at a time where in real life, the American President is under investigation for colluding with the Russians to win an election, and who has been constantly criticized for going too easy on Putin and Russia. And yet, Hunter Killer doesn’t really have anything at all to say about geopolitics – you cannot really criticize its politics, no matter what your thoughts on Russia are, because the film has no politics to speak of. It is more interested in once again watching Gerard Butler being stoic and emotionless, because of course, that’s how real men are. And he is a real man – someone who became a captain on a Nuclear submarine by working his way up through the ranks – not one of those guys who got there by going to Annapolis. He’s a manly man – and everyone else in the movie is a manly man as well – except for Linda Cardellini, who plays a NSA adviser, although for all I know she was written as a man and they decided to cast a woman instead so the entire cast wasn’t men (the same can be said for the only other two female characters in the movie – a Communications operator on the sub, and the President of the USA, who furrows her brow before saying her couple of lines at the midpoint of the movie.

 

The problem with Hunter Killer lays somewhere in there – not because I need a cheesy action movie on board a submarine to reflect my politics, or the men involved to be more in touch with their emotions, or anything like that – but because this movie tries to be as bland and down the middle as possible, robbing the film of any real personality. Butler isn’t the actor you cast for personality anyway – his career seems to be made up of movies Jason Statham was too busy to do, and other than Den of Thieves – in which he tries to be the bad guy – most of his recent work has him looking constipated – emotionally and physically – betraying no emotion, no personality, no anything really. At least the team of four Marines, who head in by land, have a kind of personality – yes, it the annoying “bro” personality that these films are filled with, but it’s something. The actors on land don’t have much to work with either – not the talented Cardellini, who I always like, but here doesn’t do much, no Common, who really should play a character who isn’t so outwardly good all the time (the best moment of his acting career is probably in the recent The Hate U Give, where he plays a cop who admits, with shame, that he’d treat a white suspect different than a black suspect), not even Gary Oldman, who has his Oscar now, so he can go back to doing this sort of supporting turn where he does nothing except yell at everyone around him.

 

But even with all of that, I don’t think I can really call Hunter Killer a bad movie – it doesn’t even have enough personality to warrant being called truly bad. It’s just kind of there – and seems to be tailored made for Sunday afternoon showings on TBS, where you half watch as your folder laundry, or drift in and out of a nap. If you watch it that way, don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything when you dozed off.

The Films of Spike Lee: Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

Directed by: Spike Lee.

Written by: James McBride based on his novel.

Starring: Derek Luke (Staff Sergeant Aubrey Stamps), Michael Ealy (Sergeant Bishop Cummings), Laz Alonso (Corporal Hector Negron), Omar Benson Miller (Private First Class Samuel “Sam” Train), Matteo Sciabordi (Angelo Torancelli – The Boy), Pierfrancesco Favino (Peppi ”The Great Butterfly” Grotta), Valentina Cervi (Renata Salducci), John Turturro (Detective Antonio "Tony" Ricci), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Tim Boyle), Kerry Washington (Zana Wilder), John Leguizamo (Enrico), D. B. Sweeney (Colonel Jack Driscoll), Robert John Burke (General Ned Almond), Omari Hardwick (Platoon Commander Huggs), Omero Antonutti (Ludovico Salducci), Sergio Albelli (Rodolfo Berelli), Lydia Biondi (Natalina), Michael K. Williams (frightened soldier), Christian Berkel (Eicholz), Jan Pohl (Hans Brundt), Alexandra Maria Lara (Mildred Gillars), Luigi Lo Cascio (Adult Angelo).

 

Spike Lee was very clear about his reasons for making Miracle at St. Anna – he was tired of American movies overlooking the contributions of black soldiers during WWII. Just two years prior to this film’s release, he got into a public spat with Clint Eastwood – about Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, about Iwo Jima, that had no black soldiers represented. To Lee, Miracle at St. Anna was meant to be a corrective of sorts – to finally tell the stories of black soldiers who fought and died for their country – a country Lee makes clear, didn’t treat them well at home. The goal is both admirable and necessary. Miracle at St. Anna though is a big, messy film – full of unnecessary diversions and subplots – the most egregious of which is unnecessary bookending scenes set in 1984. It is almost as if Lee wanted to counteract 70 years of movies in just one film – so the result is necessarily messy. I will say this though – I admire Lee’s efforts here, and the best things about the film truly are wonderful. A tighter film would have been better probably, but perhaps it would have been a little less of Spike Lee film, and a more typical war movie.

 

The film is mainly set in the waning days of WWII, in the Italian countryside. An all-black unit is one of many being tasked to advance on the Nazis, and take back control. After a bloody river crossing goes horribly wrong – in part because of a racist, white senior officer, who positioned himself well back from the front line, didn’t believe it when his black soldiers told them they made it to the other side of the river, and needed support, so he fired mortars that killed rather than helped his soldiers – four black soldiers are trapped on the other side of the river. Staff Sergeant Stamps (Derek Luke) is the de facto leader – and has the most sense of the bunch. Sergeant Bishop (Michael Ealy) is a little bit of a hothead, just trying to survive. Corporal Negron (Laz Alonso), a Puerto Rican, is the radio man – and actually speaks Italian. And then there is Private Train (Omar Benson Miller), a gentle giant of a man, who is a little slow, but also incredibly sweet. He saves a young Italian boy, Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi) from a collapsed barn, and then pretty much adopts the boy. They will end up in a small, mountainside village, surrounded by Nazis who are closing in, with orders to capture one of them in order to confirm intelligence reports. The villagers are wary of them at first. The partisans are also close by – although after years, they are getting tired and frustrated.

 

The biggest mistake I think Lee makes in the film is the bookend scenes – that add little other than celebrity cameos and runtime to the film. In 1984, Harlem a now much older Negron, working at the Stamps window at the post office, sees someone he clearly knows, pulls out a German luger, and calmly shoots him in the chest. Negron refuses to answer anyone’s questions as to why he did it – but the mystery is deepened when they find a stone head from a bridge in Florence in his apartment. Eventually, all of these questions will be answered in the body of the film, but the rather slow opening of about 20 minutes is more boring than anything else – despite the presence of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a cub reporter, John Turturro as a hardened cop and John Leguizamo as, well, I’m not quite sure. The film ends with the resolution of this case – adding in Kerry Washington as a high powered lawyer for good measure – but these scenes don’t really go anywhere, or add anything to the narrative. They’re just kind of there.

 

Lee’s ambitions get him trouble elsewhere as well. It’s as if he wants to give everyone a fair shake – so we get stories of the partisans, of Germans – both good and bad – the villagers, etc. He also adds in some weird, magical realism touches – how the old man in the village gets his power back for example. A love triangle of sorts develops between Stamps, Bishop and the beautiful Renata (Valentina Cervi) – the only villager who speaks English. It is resolved, but not in a way that makes sense (Renata makes a choice, but the movie seems to have no idea why she makes the choice she does. Other diversions work better – like a flashback to when the men are in training in the South, and head into town to get something to eat. They see German POWs being fed by at the restaurant, but its owners tells them to go around back- whites only.

 

There is a lot of great stuff in Miracle at St. Anna as well. The opening battle on the river is bloody and intense – not Saving Private Ryan great, but pretty damn great just the same. The final battle, in the streets of that small village, is equally as intense – and even more emotional, as by know we have gotten to know the characters. Derek Luke and Michael Ealy are both very good as Stamps and Bishop – they have a kind of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X dynamic between them. Omar Benson Miller has the kind of role that can go horribly wrong – but he makes it work.

 

So yes, it is certainly true that Miracle at St. Anna is a flawed film – a deeply flawed film. But like almost all of Lee’s films, it is flawed because of its ambition – flawed because Lee is trying to do too much, and he is swinging for the fences. That seems to be the only way he knows how to make movies – and bless him for that. I’ll always prefer a film that goes big, and doesn’t quite make it, then a film that plays it safe, and succeeds on its more modest terms.

Movie Review: Foxtrot

Foxtrot **** / *****

Directed by: Samuel Maoz.

Written by: Samuel Maoz.

Starring: Lior Ashkenazi (Michael Feldmann), Sarah Adler (Daphna Feldmann), Yonaton Shiray (Jonathan), Yehuda Almagor (Avigdor - Michael's Brother).

 

Foxtrot opens with a knock on the door – on the other side are two military men there to tell Michael (Lior Ashkenazi) that his son has been killed doing his military service. Michael is a successful architect in Israel – a military veteran himself – and yet once he gets the news, he seems to walk through the rest of the first act of the movie in a daze – paralyzed by indecision and fear, unable to figure out just what the hell to do next. Act 1 ends in a shock, and then in act II, the tone of the movie shifts. We are now with Michael’s son Jonathan (Yonaton Shiray) and his unit, who have been assigned a remote roadblock. Not much happens there, there aren’t many cars coming by, and the men are bored. This section is surreal, and more than a little bit funny, as these bored young men cannot quite figure out what they’re doing, or how things ended up so crooked. It’s funny right up to the point when it isn’t anymore.

 

Foxtrot is the second film by Samuel Maoz – coming 8 years after his debut, Lebanon, which was based on his own experiences inside a tank in that war in 1982. In many ways, Foxtrot is a companion piece to Lebanon – Michael is a veteran of the same war, and also haunted by it. He doesn’t suffer from PTSD in the way we would normally expect him to – but he is clearly not being completely up front with everything that happened, and he hasn’t dealt with it. He’s tried instead to become successful, and in doing so, thinks that will just excuse whatever happened in the past – and that if he just doesn’t talk about it, no one will know. He’s wrong.

 

Foxtrot is a more ambitious and better film than his debut – which others liked more than I did (I thought it was fine, but hardly great). Here, Maoz mixes tone very well – the first act is deep and dark, edging, only into its final minutes, into something slightly more absurd. The second act is surreal – a kind of waking dream that turns into a nightmare, complete with dancing, and absurd comedy. Its turn towards tragedy is the mirror image of the one at the end of act one. Maoz isn’t cheating here – but he’s going for something larger. This messed up Israeli family of men incapable of expressing themselves is something larger.

 

The third act of the film is more melancholy than the first two. You can probably guess where the movie is headed in terms of its plot, but it goes there with sensitivity and compassion. The final act is quieter than the first two, and more perhaps more thoughtful – maybe even optimistic, despite the price everyone has paid by that point. It’s really in this act that having an actor like Ashkenazi helps the most, as he’s able to bring a lighter touch to keep this thing from becoming depressing. This is a movie about several generations in Israel – from Holocaust survivors, to modern day Israel soldiers, all of whom are struggling in their own way. The film takes chances, and zigzags throughout – so even if you sense where the plot is going, it’s still fascinating to see it get there. This is a fascinating, bold, funny, tragic movie – and it’s amazing just how Maoz is able to make all those elements cohere together, so that the whole is even better than the sum of its parts.

Movie Review: Thank You For Your Service

Thank You for Your Service *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Jason Hall.

Written by: Jason Hall based on the book by David Finkel.

Starring: Miles Teller (Sergeant Adam Schumann), Haley Bennett (Saskia Schumann), Beulah Koale (Tausolo Aieti), Joe Cole (Will Waller), Amy Schumer (Amanda Doster), Brad Beyer (Sergeant James Doster), Keisha Castle-Hughes (Alea), Scott Haze (Michael Adam Emory), Omar Dorsey (Dante).

 

You would be forgiven in thinking that a film called Thank You for Your Service is another of those pro-military, overly patriotic films – another way in which America uses their veterans as props instead of treating them like people. Yet, the film really isn’t that – in fact, the title may well be meant somewhat ironically, since saying Thank You for Your Service to a veteran is a way say something to them when you have nothing else, more meaningful to say. The movie argues that a better way to thank veterans for their service would be to give them the support they so desperately need. This is a PTSD drama in which the main characters return from Iraq to an America who doesn’t really know what to do with them. The film has more in common with The Best Years of Our Lives than a John Wayne war film.

 

The film stars Miles Teller as Adam Schumann. It’s 2007, and he and his buddies are just getting out of Iraq – this time, they feel, for the last time. Schumann was a leader in Iraq – a sergeant, in charge of his men, but made decisions over there that haunt him. We see one of them in the first minutes of the film – but we are not really given the full context of it until the end. He returns with two buddies – who are more outwardly messed up than he is. There is Solo Aieti (Beulah Koale), an American Samoan, who is grateful to the military for helping him straighten out his life, but who also experienced a traumantic brain injury over there to go along with his PTSD – all he wants to do is get back to his unit, despite his is loving, and now pregnant, wife at home – and he never quite grasps that they are never going to let him back. There is Will Waller (Joe Cole), who outwardly seems fine, yet he returns to find his fiancé has left him – moved out of their house, with the child they had raised together, and all of their stuff. This pushes him even further over the edge.

 

The film was written and directed by Jason Hall, the screenwriter of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper – another film that I didn’t feel was quite the ra-ra pro-military film that many did. I do wonder however if the (correct) criticism of that movie – that it depicted PTSD as something the main character just “got over” in the span of about 10 minutes of screentime inspired this film – which makes it clear that it is not something like that. This film depicts the hard road veterans face when they return – faced with loved ones who don’t know what to say, and a heartless bureaucracy – containing many people who may want to help, but whose hands are tied, and are unable to actually do very much.

 

Teller is very good in the central role – playing the silent, every man here, who wants nothing else than appear strong for everyone, even though he’s breaking inside. As his wife, Haley Bennett is also quite good – she wants to help, but doesn’t know what to do. Newcomer Beulah Koale as Solo is even better. He’s unable to even tell what’s wrong with him, and is in danger of slipping down a deep slope. I admire Amy Schumer’s attempt at serious (read: not comedic) acting here as a war widow, but her role is underwritten, and she is given the most on the nose dialogue in the film that and is unable to quite make it work (I’m not sure anyone could though).

 

The film is perhaps a little too forthright and square jawed for its own good. Hall is an effective, but unflashly director of the material. I admired the screenplay more than the direction – even with its sometimes clunky dialogue – as it doesn’t try to force these characters into a standard issue plot, but rather lets them find their own story as it goes.

 

I fear that the studio picked the wrong time of year to release this film. This is the time where serious dramas need Oscar buzz to draw much of an audience – and as good as the film is, it isn’t going to the Oscars this year. It’s a strong, solid film – a grown up drama, made by a major studio – which itself is a rarity. It’s also much better than I feared it would be. It deserves an audience – and hopefully, will find one. 

Movie Review: Land of Mine

Land of Mine *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Martin Zandvliet.

Written by: Martin Zandvliet.

Starring: Roland Møller (Sgt. Carl Rasmussen), Louis Hofmann (Sebastian Schumann), Joel Basman (Helmut Morbach), Mikkel Boe Følsgaard (Lt. Ebbe Jensen), Laura Bro (Karin), Zoe Zandvliet (Elisabeth, Karins Daughter), Mads Riisom (Soldier Peter), Oskar Bökelmann (Ludwig Haffke), Emil Belton (Ernst Lessner), Oskar Belton (Werner Lessner), Leon Seidel (Wilhelm Hahn).

 

The Danish film, Land of Mine, - an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film at last year’s Oscars, is an odd film in that it takes place right at the end of WWII, and yet is more sympathetic to the German soldiers in the film, than the Danish ones. The film opens with a scenes of hundreds – or perhaps thousands – of German soldier marching out of Denmark back to Germany – as Sergeant Carl Rasmussen (Roland Moller) watches from his jeep. He flies into a rage however when he sees one soldier holding a folded up Danish flag – he not only takes the flag from the soldier, he also beats him to a bloody pulp before sending him on his way. This is our introduction to Rasmussen – who will spend the rest of the movie supervising a group of 14 young (and I mean young) German soldiers, who are being forced to defuse the mines left behind by the Germans. Hitler was convinced the allied attack would come through the beaches in Denmark – because of their proximity to Berlin – so there is something like 2.2 million mines buried there. Rasmussen supervises his group as they take up one stretch of beach, which apparently has 45,000 mines in it – all buried 15-20 cm below the surface. Rasmussen tells them if they work hard, they can go home in three months when all the mines are defused. Of course, one wrong move by any of these young men, and they are likely dead.

 

Land of Mine is a tense movie in that you are never quite sure when a mine is going to explode. The young soldiers crawl on their bellies, with long metal rods that they use to stick into the sand and see if there is a mine there. If so, they dig it up, carefully, and defuse it. There are many way things can go wrong – and they pretty much all do at one point or another. At first, Rasmussen seems like the sadistic hothead he first appeared as in that opening scene – he is cruel to the Germans, and doesn’t seem to give it much thought. But gradually, he does soften. The Germans are not really being fed – but the movie makes it clear that the decision to do that comes above Rasmussen, who will eventually try and get them more food. The local farm – being run by a single mother and her small child – at first don’t seem to like the Germans any more than Rasmussen does – but they soften as well.

 

Land of Mine tells what is apparently not a well-known story in Danish history – and for good reason, as apparently forcing these young Germans to do what they do constitutes a war crime (I’m not sure how a country is supposed to diffuse millions of mines left behind by a former combatant, but it’s not that). The movie, smartly, never does show us a worse side of the Germans – there is only one of the soldiers who seems at all like he may be a true believer, but even he isn’t that bad. The soldiers are all young – like below the normal recruiting age, brought in by Hitler as the war was winding down, and it was clear they were going to lose, but they still needed soldiers to fight. They are being held responsible for the decisions and actions of others.

 

Gradually, Rasmussen becomes a more complex character than he first appeared to be. He very likely has many reasons to hate the Germans – and his anger is understandable. He is softened because he gradually begins to see the Germans as more than his enemy – he backslides once – but in the end he is more complicated than he first seemed.

 

Land of Mine isn’t a great film – it’s a little too straight forward, and it telegraphs its big moments too far in advance in too obvious of ways, and the end struck me as false. But it’s a good film – and a film that serves as a reminder that the good guys are not always perfect, and the bad guys not always evil – the people responsible usually don’t have to pay for their decisions.

Movie Review: First They Killed My Father

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Angelina Jolie   

Written by: Loung Ung & Angelina Jolie based on the book by Loung Ung.

Starring: Sareum Srey Moch (Loung Ung), Phoeung Kompheak (Pa Ung), Sveng Socheata (Ma Ung), Tharoth Sam (Khmer Rouge Leader).

 

It is fairly common when an actor becomes a director for critics – and others – to describe their films are vanity projects. Often, this is because the actor, of course, casts themselves in the lead role. Angelina Jolie got (more) than her fair share of that when she made By the Sea – her third film as a director, and the only one she also starred in, alongside then husband Brad Pitt (I really need to see By the Sea – I somehow missed it). It’s also unfair, given that Jolie has now made four films behind the camera, two of them in a language other than English, and three of them without her in them. If nothing else, I hope that goes away with First They Killed My Father – which I don’t think is a great film, but is one that I think has greatness in it – and shows just how talented Jolie is behind the camera. She is the real deal as a filmmaker.

 

The film opens with a montage of American talking heads – mainly Nixon and Kissinger, talking about Cambodia – pretty much denying that they are conducting a secret war and bombings inside that country during the Vietnam war (spoiler alert – they’re lying), before putting us on the ground in Cambodia in 1975, after American troops have left Vietnam. Those scenes are the only bit of context that the film will give you for the next two hours and fifteen minutes, until the end credits, which will provide a little bit more. The rest of the movie stays focused on Loung Ung – who was five in 1975, and witnessed the atrocities that were about to happen in her country, saw and learned things she never should have had to, and somehow made it through. Because she doesn’t really understand what is happening and why, the film never explains to us either. And because she is five, and doesn’t truly understand, the emotions in the film are strangely muted as well. This is a film where horrific things happen, yet it ends of a slightly up note, and yet it is never quite as harrowing or inspirational as you would think it would be.

 

This seems to be by design for Jolie. Her biggest film to date – Unbroken – told a harrowing and inspiring story as well, but the film itself was rather muted in terms of those emotions. That didn’t make all that much sense to me than watching that film – but it does here. Children are strange in their ability to adapt to whatever situations they find themselves in – sure, they may cry, but then they soldier through. First They Killed My Father is about how Loung Ung does just that. We first see her being forced, alongside her whole family, to leave their home – she doesn’t understand why, and believes the soldiers. She doesn’t quite understand why her father is telling her to say he’s a dock worker either, since he doesn’t do that. She doesn’t understand when they take him away – or why her mother tells her and her siblings to split up run away. And on and on and on – she just doesn’t quite understand – she just listens to the adults around, and does what she is told – because that is what children do.

 

They film is very well made by Jolie – with great cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle, who stays on the same level as the film’s child protagonist. Because of the structure of the movie, and its point-of-view, it does at times feel like it’s a parade of misery – a rather by-the-numbers “then this happened” feel comes over the film at times. Still, I do think that’s deliberate on the part of Jolie. The film was co-written by the real life Luong Ung, and based on her book. She is looking back at her childhood with a strange mixture of horror and detachment – and the film gets that tone right.

 

What the film makes clear is that Jolie is a real filmmaker – she is not out to do a vanity project, and she doesn’t want to make a film full of false dramatics and phony uplift – but something closer to the ground. The film probably should have been shorter, and less repetitive, but overall, it is a solid, very well made film.

Movie Review: Dunkirk

Dunkirk  **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Christopher Nolan.

Written by: Christopher Nolan.

Starring: Fionn Whitehead (Tommy), Mark Rylance (Mr. Dawson), Tom Hardy (Farrier), Jack Lowden (Collins), Kenneth Branagh (Commander Bolton), Harry Styles (Alex), Cillian Murphy (Shivering Soldier), Aneurin Barnard (Gibson), Tom Glynn-Carney (Peter), Tom Nolan (Lieutenant), James D'Arcy (Colonel Winnant), Matthew Marsh (Rear Admiral).

 

It can be hard to do anything truly new when it comes to War movies – one of the oldest genres in cinema, and in many ways one that hasn’t changed all that much over the years – except in the techniques that directors use to capture the life and death struggle of men at war. Christopher Nolan’s wonderful Dunkirk comes as close as anything in the last couple of decades (perhaps as far back as 1998 – when Spielberg made Saving Private Ryan – a film that many have tried to outdo in terms of pure carnage, and Terrence Malick made The Thin Red Line, a less influential, but greater, more meditative film). The evacuation of Dunkirk has become the stuff of legend in England – where, with the help of civilian vessels, the British armed forced evacuated hundreds of thousands of their soldiers, feared doomed, from the beaches in France before they could be captured or slaughtered by the rapidly advancing Germans. Nolan undeniably concentrates almost solely on the Brits – the French, also on the beach, are almost a nuisance, the Germans, a mostly invisible threat. The film thrillingly, and daringly, combines three different stories, over three different time periods, into one visceral and exciting package. Nolan, whose films in the past could be accused of being bloated, doesn’t leave an ounce of fat on Dunkirk – which runs under two hours, and uses every minute perfectly.

 

Nolan quickly establishes the three timelines - a week on the beach with the soldiers waiting to be rescued, a day on a private yacht, driven by a good Samaritan, his son and his son’s friend, who are sailing across the channel to pick up as many soldiers as possible – just one of countless others who did the same – and one hour in the plane of a RAF fighter pilot, trying his best to shoot down as many German planes as possible, before they can slaughter his countrymen. Nolan ratchets up the tension in all three timelines, until they come together in thrilling fashion in the closing minutes of the film.

 

If you are looking for a wide overview of the evacuation of Dunkirk, this really isn’t that film. This is a film that lives in that minute by minute, on-the-ground terror of the various people spends time with. The beach scenes center on Tommy (newcomer Fionn Whitehead), although if his name is actually spoken in the film, I missed it. He is just one thousands of men – and Nolan deliberately blends many of these young men together (seriously, they all look the same) because theirs isn’t a story so much of individuals, but all of them. If that sounds to you like it could result in a cold, less emotionally connected film – you’d be wrong. While it’s true that Tommy – and the many young men who accompany him – aren’t particularly well developed, they don’t need to be – and you do feel that overwhelming anxiety in them. The other two stories are more intimate – with Mark Rylance once again showing why he’s one of the best actors around, as an older man with his son, and a teenage friend, willing to risk it all to help with the effort. They come across a lone sailor (Cillian Murphy) – a survivor of a lifeboat where everyone else died in a U-Boat attack, suffering from “shell shock” – desperate to do anything BUT return to Dunkirk. All four of these men are sketched quickly, but you know everything you need to know of them. The same is true for Tom Hardy as the RAF pilot – once again, showing he is the actor you want to cast if you need someone to cover up three-quarters of their face for the majority of his scenes, and still find ways to emote effectively. I’m sure the people who couldn’t understand Hardy’s Bane, will have trouble here as well (but then again, I never did have trouble, so, what do I know?).

 

Nolan’s filmmaking here is impeccable. Dunkirk is a loud movie, with the constant explosions, and Hans Zimmer’s, brilliant, pounding score going throughout. Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography is the best work of his career, immersive in the best way possible. The structure requires the editing to be airtight – and Lee Smith’s work is remarkable.

 

In short, Dunkirk is a triumph for Nolan, and all involved. It only seems like he’s working on a smaller, less ambitious scale than some of his recent epics. Dunkirk is tight, intense, exciting and nerve jangling. It’s one of the best films of the year.

Movie Review: War of the Planet of the Apes

War for the Planet of the Apes **** ½ / *****

Directed by: Matt Reeves.

Written by: Mark Bomback & Matt Reeves based on characters created by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver.

Starring: Andy Serkis (Caesar), Woody Harrelson (The Colonel), Steve Zahn (Bad Ape), Karin Konoval (Maurice), Amiah Miller (Nova), Terry Notary (Rocket), Ty Olsson (Red Donkey), Michael Adamthwaite (Luca), Toby Kebbell (Koba), Gabriel Chavarria (Preacher), Judy Greer (Cornelia), Sara Canning (Lake), Devyn Dalton (Cornelius), Aleks Paunovic (Winter), Alessandro Juliani (Spear), Max Lloyd-Jones (Blue Eyes).

 

I’m hard pressed to think of another blockbuster series of recent years that is better than the new Planet of the Apes films have been. Each film is distinct from each other – not just recycling what has come before, but expanding it, and continually building upon it, taking the fall of humanity and rise of ape as seriously as you can in a blockbuster trilogy like this without taking it too seriously. I still that the second film – Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – is probably the best of trilogy – it certainly is the most action packed and viscerally exciting, and has the best mixture of human and ape characters – but the first film – Rise of the Planet of the Apes – was perhaps the most emotional (it certainly was the most heartbreaking) – and both lead brilliantly into War of the Planet of the Apes, which caps off the trilogy in a brilliantly. All three films represent blockbuster filmmaking at its current best.

 

The infighting between Apes that made up the plot of the second film has pretty much been resolved. Caesar (Andy Serkis) and his apes are trying to live in peace in the forest – but humans just don’t seem to want to allow that. The opening sequence involves an army searching for Caesar’s hiding spot – and coming very close to it. The apes fight them off – and take a few prisoner. Caesar, trying to show that the apes are not savages, allows them to go free. That ends up being a mistake, and soon more soldiers – this time led by the Colonel (Woody Harrelson) return – and kill some of Caesar’s family. As the apes ready their next move – hopefully to a safer place – Caesar plots his vengeance on the Colonel. If only a few trusted allies, he sets out to find his enemy.

 

War of the Planet of the Apes wears its influences on its sleeve – it’s clearly a war movie in many ways, and it takes its lead mainly from Apocalypse Now and other Vietnam war movies (strangely enough, Kong: Skull Island did the same thing – this one does it better). Harrelson’s The Colonel is clearly based on Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kurtz – the gleaming bald head, the way he shaves it, the insane ramblings (this Colonel’s ramblings form a more coherent thought pattern than Kurtz’s – I think, anyway) – and Harrelson clearly relishes playing the bad guy here. As Caesar, Serkis is once again at his best (for better or worse, you’d be hard pressed to find a more influential performer in modern blockbusters than Serkis – who has already plays Gollum and King Kong for Peter Jackson in motion capture, but does career best work in this series). The special effects that allow the apes their expressiveness is quite honestly astonishing – and allows Caesar to become a more complex character here than he was before (in Rise he was more of a victim who fought back, in Dawn he was the principled leader – here, he is a leader, who makes mistakes and puts his own feelings above all else selfishly – and yet, he maintains the hero of the film in part because of how aware he is of his own shortcomings).

 

In many ways, director Matt Reeves has stepped up his filmmaking game here – the cinematography by veteran Michael Seresin is great, integrating the special effects in with the surroundings – the lush green forest that is made to feel like the jungles of Vietnam in those old movies, the cold blinding snow, the horrible prison camp of the last half. So many modern blockbusters who rely heavily on CGI (like, undeniably this one does) end up looking almost like a candy colored cartoon – this series has been an exception from the start, as it’s blended everything together well. The film goes long stretches with little to no dialogue – it almost exclusively stays with Caesar throughout, and many of the apes cannot talk – but communicate in sign language. Michael Giacchino’s brilliant score, does some of the emotional heavy lifting in those sequences, without laying anything on too thick.

 

Each film in this series work on its own terms – it doesn’t repeat what came before, but instead deepens it. As a trilogy, the whole is even better than the sum of its parts. Most Hollywood blockbusters don’t have room for ideas – let alone, allow themselves to address the darkest parts of our humanity (from the first film on, we’re clearly on the side of the apes, not the humans) – but this series went there, and did it with style and intelligence. They’re also three amazingly entertaining films. Modern day blockbusters don’t get much better than this series.