Thursday, October 19, 2006
Which Was Worse? - Part 3
In a mighty battle, Van Helsing overcame Godzilla to go through to our semi-final, proving that TFLers prefer dull shit to batshit insane shit. I did state before that Van Helsing would go on to battle Superman IV but, in a desperate bid to build tension, I'm going to put the four first-round winners in a hat to pick the semi-final match-ups, so keeping you in something like suspense for a little longer. So - two more first round match ups, two semis and a final then that will be enough crappy geek films for a while, I think. Next up are two titans of geek hate: Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones and The Matrix: Revolutions!
The Phantom Menace invented the Internet back in 1999 when it turned out it really sucked. Fans really did hate this film, and they should know as they watched it a dozen times in theatres. 2002 brought Attack of the Clones, which showed that George Lucas had been listening to the fans and was trying to appease them. Now we had more lightsaber action, more epic battles, more Yoda and less Jar Jar Binks. Initial reaction was positive. It was better than The Phantom Menace it seemed and finally we got our Clone War, even if it was only for twenty minutes at the end.
But time, and far too many viewings on DVD, gives a strange perspective on things. The Phantom Menace, while dull and childish, has a certain charm and consistency of vision to it. Attack of the Clones, it turns out, is almost unwatchable.
You should all, hopefully, be aware with George Lucas' obsession with digital technology by now. It's even been covered several times on this blog, born well after the after the final prequel was released. He shot the film entirely on digital and he shot everything on green-screen, to the point where the actors even had to mime eating food. It was state of the art technology, but even George admits the film was a testbed for a technology that was still finding its feet. A DVD transfer that emphasised the clarity of the shots only emhasised how fake and flat everything looks. But having a good looking film wasn't the point. The point was to show how much clarity you could get with digital technology.
While watching the final battle I wondered why the clone-troopers looked a little stiff - it was because they were, every one of them, CGI, even when having a simple conversation with Obi Wan Kenobi. The only reason George seems to give on the commentary is that, well, they could. It may have been state of the art, but it still looks crappy.
The space-cow scene.
It's all horribly cynical. Lucas pretty much admits that Star Wars now is his means of keeping his empire going. It is his main revenue stream so he has to keep refreshing it with new product, like movies for example, every few years. The prequels were his way of testing out the new technology on a property he knew everyone was going to lap up anyway.
But he did try and heed the cries of the fans. The fans loved Boba Fett, so Boba and his dad, Jango, are in this film. The kids loved the droids, so the droids are shoe-horned in too. Everyone hates Jar Jar, so he's hardly in it at all. Yoda's cool right? Let's have him fight!
The problem is that it is all done so very, very badly. Jango is not only the one behind the assassination attempt, but he's also the genetic model for the clone army that becomes the Empire's stormtroopers which also helps explain away why everyone called it the 'clone' wars in the original trilogy. It's all very conveinient and needlessly busy writing, that makes the universe small by having everyone know each other and it creates an horrendously complicated continuity. Lucas admits the first film worked precisely because we didn't know all that back story. The lack of nerdily obsessive continuity added to the mythicality of the story. Oh well.
Should I mention C3P0's one-liners? Or the attempts to make R2-D2 the 'cool' droid with 'where the fuck did that come from?' flying ability (it came from thinking up that factory action scene right at the last minute and having to fudge the details) who saves the day and is a bit of an action hero? Or how about the entirely lame fan-pandering of Yoda fighting like a rabid frog? No I shouldn't, you've seen them and you hate them.
The two strands of the entire trilogy were Anakin Skywalker turning into Darth Vader and the birth of the Empire. The two strands of this story do mirror that but, two hours into the film and over halfway through an entire trilogy, and they have both barely begun.
As The Empire Strikes Back took the original trilogy to richer and genuinely emotional places (relatively of course, but don't be a grump), you look for the deepening of the prequel trilogy's story. But it isn't there. There's just more dry exposition scenes about the minutiae of the Jedi Library. The spark of the love story never ignites, nor do the teeth of the political storyline ever really bite so, when things start to wrap up on Geonosis and the monsters come out to play you realise that all you have been watching is a glorified monster movie.
You may actually feel slightly relieved at this. You realise the adult in you doesn't have to take this silly space movie seriously and so you can sit back to enjoy watching a glorified monster movie. Yay! But then you realise that the flat acting and fakey-effects means the actors never look like they are being attacked anything by anything more than a middle aged bearded billionaire. They don't even look like they're really running because, back in the real world, they're worried abot running into that green screen wall five yards in front of them. The ability to digitally enhance scale means that while they can have dozens of lightsabers on screen at once, none of them have any impact. Anakin riding on that space rhino thing still looks awful. And the digital ability to tweak entire shots in post means that Lucas has spent the film's engorged post-produciton period tweaking everything he could until everything feels chopped up and bitty.
Next time you watch the film (yes you will), pay attention to the music in the Geonosis battle. It goes all over the place, changing every few seconds. This is because Lucas chopped and changed the footage after the score had been recorded, meaning it had to be cut and pasted as best it could be to fit the new flow of the film. It doesn't, of course.
Everything is there in the film, sure, but it feels just like a check list Lucas is ticking off. There's some big battle stuff, OK now put in some Anakin being angsty, OK now some C3-PO comedy for the kids, OK now a bit of the Force Theme, OK now lightsabers, OK now back to that faux hand-held zooming CGI shot we just created. A checklist does not make a film. Nothing holds together. Lacking that steady throughflow, the film descends into the bitty, awkward, laundry-list reading, tech-demo-feeling pile of crap it is.
And the tragedy is that, when the music does get to play - when Anakin is speeder-biking off to kill some sandpeople, or in the final sequence of star destroyers taking off - the old lump-in-the-throat Star Warsy feelings come back. Beyond all the yoda-hopping, continuity-mongering and cgi-abusing, it is the editing that kills the film.
We are, all of us, total marks for Star Wars and it doesn't take much to set us off. That creeping feeling that The Phantom Menace is not actually so bad is a testament to this. That Attack of the Clones fails to achieve even this is a testament to how really, really awful it is. If you can't even enjoy it is a cheesy monster movie, what exactly is there left?
Now, there are always some wankers who will try and convince you that The Matrix sequels are, actually, awesome. I'm one of them. They're awesome, seriously. While I will defend Reloaded and actually kind of mean it, the final film of the trilogy, Revolutions, is really not very good at all. As a fan I will give it a pass but, as a fan, my opinion should not be given any weight. At all.
It commits all of the faults of a bloated blockbuster and all of the faults of trilogy capper as well as finding some new faults of its own to rub in our faces.
It makes no attempt to be a film in its own right, leaping straight into a lot of expository scenes that make no sense unless taken in context of the previous films. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest also has these faults, with large chunks of it purely being set-up for the final part. But Dead Man's Chest knows how to have fun, and how to treat its more lumpen parts with humour and lightness. Revolutions is too unbearably portentious, self-serious and in love with its grand statements to pander to anything as shallow as entertaining the audience.
In the first film you get the sense that characters are actually enjoying themselves. Neo's arc of discovering his powers means that, when they attack the agent's building in the now famous lobby scene, you get the sense that he's having a great time, even if he is killing loads of innocent humans. In Revolutions, saving the world means never smiling at all.
This isn't helped by the emo-goth vibe all of the characters give off. They are all carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, pondering heavy thoughts and just generally being very angsty. They are all being teenage goths, who are quite possibly the worst people in the world. Unless they are hot women or have a sense of humour, that is. Unfortuantely both of these things are rather rare in a goth. It is no surprise that it is only Agent Smith, who is against our world-saving, mopey heroes, who displays any life in the film. His scenes are great fun, and almost reclaim the energy of the first film.
The cool thing about The Matrix, as the Wachowski Brothers state in their introduction to the films in the box set (which, yes, I own), is that it is a kick-ass sci-fi kung-fu film that also manages to have thematic and philosophical heft. It is cool-as-fuck entertainment that also has something on its mind. The greatness of the first film is that it manages that trick without any real compromises on either side. In Revolutions, the cool-as-fuckness as been entirely removed in favour of stodgy cogitation.
Characters are now entirely symbolic cyphers representing themes such as the conflict between mind, body and spirit. The plot is now a means to set up conflict and resolution between fate and freedom, reason and emotion, purpose and choice. As such the film is chock full of subtext, which I can argue mostly hangs together if you like, but simply has no text anymore. The characters are one dimensional, and the narrative has no internal cohesion at all.
As is a problem with many maximum scale films, when the film-makers are givn a free hand and blank cheque, every tiny bit of this film is blown up to massive scale. tertiary characters are given loads of screen time. Battles are obscenely distended. There is always 'more' with never any consideration of 'better'.
We have the character of 'The Kid', Link's girlfriend, her dykey friend (the one blatantly based on Vasquez from Aliens) and the commander of the Zion forces. We would have cared about them exactly as much if we had just been introduced to them in a single shot just before the battle, instead of having scene after scene of them nattering glumly and uninsightfully away - possibly even more, as we could project our own feelings on to their faces if we had been told nothing about them.
Also, as with any sequence of films that tell one over-all story, there is always the sense that they could have just told the good bits in one really awesome film. In Revolutions the only important plot thread is Neo's journey to the machine city to make peace between the warring factions. Everything in Zion is, basically, unnecessary and yet it takes up half the film. I wrote an article about Action Crap which complains about the modern blockbuster's habit of filling up time with narratively and dramatically empty spectacle. The Battle of Zion is a full half hour of unbroken Action Crap and, while being at times staggering to look it, is utterly pointless noise.
And noise is a major problem with Revolutions. They had the money and they had the technology so they spent it filling the screen with as much stuff as possible. There's probably a solid hour of this film that consists of thousands of things rushing at the screen and exploding. It was supposed to be intense, it was supposed to feel like a real and terrifying war was happening but mostly it feels being assaulted. Rather than exhilirating or immersive, it feels like being beaten up.
I do like the final fight between Neo and Agent Smith, I do think the film is really awesome to look at and I do think its thematic arc is resolved in a satisfying and beautiful way (shut it, you heathen dungeddit scum), but fuck me is it a slog getting to it.
So here we have two bloated sci-fi fx fests that utterly failed to recapture what made their originals so popular, replacing it with flat, lifeless, techno-masturbatorial noise and static. Visit any geek movie website and you will still find arguments about the Star Wars prequels and the Matrix sequels, as I believe they represent the two most loved modern movie myths (yes I can justify this. Try me), and the two most horribly sullied by their most recent tellings. But which was worse? You decide!
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