I Saw Jurassic World: Dominion So That You Don’t Have To

Warning: total spoilers.

Jurassic World: Dominion is not a good movie. Let’s get that out of the way up top. Given how terrible the first two Jurassic World movies were, I wasn’t expecting it to be, and yet I felt the need to see it anyway, just to make sure. Possibly this coloured my perception of it from the outset, but generally speaking, I’m not a person who purposefully sets out to hatewatch things, as I’d much rather be pleasantly surprised by an okayish film than proven right by a dud. I will, however, spitefinish an aggravating film in order to justify writing about it afterwards, and having sat through all 146 minutes of Dominion – unlike my mother, who walked out of our session and went home after the first five minutes because it was so goddamn loud – I feel the need to save others the time and money of doing likewise.

At every level of execution, Dominion is sloppily made. It has the feel of a group project where only one person was really trying, leading everyone else to coast along on their coattails without stopping to consider whether their work itself, for all the effort put into it, was actually any good. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the dinosaurs themselves, which ought to be the best thing about a goddamn dinosaur movie, but which in Dominion are woefully underwhelming. There’s nothing inherently wrong with mixing practical effects and CGI – in fact, done well, the results can be spectacular, as per the original Jurassic Park film – but here, the inconsistency is maddening. The practical effects look rubbery and cheap, but even that wouldn’t matter if they had any soul; instead, they have less personality than the titular 90s sitcom Dinosaurs and are considerably less memorable.

The dinosaur CGI, meanwhile, is really only good for two things: dramatic, distant landscape shots of dinosaurs in the modern world, and very slow closeups. Put them in motion, however, and the animals end up with a weird, furze-edged blur to them, as if they’ve been clumsily greenscreened in circa 2003. Every scene with fast-running raptors – and there are a number of these – looks like a video game cutscene where your custom-built player-character is moving through a pre-rendered environment: there’s that constant sense of something fake being imposed on an a setting rather than being part of it, and for a film with this sort of budget, that’s inexcusable. Nor have any lessons been learned from the first two films regarding a consistent sense of scale: the dinosaur sizes wax and wane depending on the camera angle, changing from moment to moment in such an egregious fashion that even my nine year old noticed. And to top things off, the climactic dinosaur-on-dinosaur fight scene – tacked on and plot-pointless though it is – looks like it was shot in a gymsock only sporadically lit by a pen-light: you can barely see anything, and when you do, it’s shaky to the point of incoherence.

With veteran names like Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern and Sam Neill returned to the cast, you might hope the acting was good, but it’s not. With the exception of a few bit players, the performances are uniformly flat, a failing I’m inclined to lay directly at the feet of director and EP Colin Trevorrow. In addition to directing the first Jurassic World and executive producing Fallen Kingdom, Trevorrow has writing credits for all three films, and frankly that goes a long way towards explaining why they never get any better. Trevorrow’s dialogue is flat, his pacing abysmal and his plotting worse; that he also manages to get consistently stilted performances out of some otherwise talented actors makes him the quadruple threat no-one asked for. As with the dinosaurs, he also doesn’t know how to shoot people in anything other than closeup or running at a distance, presumably because letting the characters inhabit the space for more than two seconds at a time would require him to use functional, character-developing dialogue and a basic understanding of how to block non-action sequences. Given Hollywood’s propensity to let mediocre white men fail upwards, however, this doubtless means Disney will snap him up for the MCU or Star Wars, so it’s hard to feel too bad for him.

Another constant issue was the sound, which – look. Possibly the obscene volume of the action scenes at our session, which chased my mother out of the cinema and had the rest of us watching with our hands over our ears, was the fault of our local cinema. I’ve been there many times before – recently, even, to see Top Gun: Maverick, which to my great annoyance is a superbly constructed film – and never felt like my eardrums were being blown out, but perhaps today was an exception. Whatever the case, the dialogue was normal, but the music and sound effects came through at a volume that could shatter glass, and while the cinema might bear some blame, the clear disparity between the two felt very much like a sound balancing failure, such that if I’d been watching it at home, I suspect I’d have been constantly turning the volume up for the dialogue, then ratcheting it down again for the action scenes. 0/10, do not recommend.

And then there’s the actual plot.

After a completely pointless, never-to-be-revisited opening scene in which a giant prehistoric sea-crocodile eats a fishing boat in Alaska, Dominion kicks off with what can only be described as a shitty YouTube video recap of the previous two films. As a background montage of what’s meant to be phone-camera footage of regular people encountering dinosaurs plays, a journalistic voiceover explains why dinosaurs have been walking among us for the past four years while also mentioning “by the way, we think there’s a human clone of a lady called Charlotte Lockwood walking around somewhere, only she’s missing,” without ever explaining why this relates to dinosaurs or how anyone knows about her, because in-universe continuity is for the weak. As dinosaurs are now apparently a global problem, with underground genetic engineering and illegal breeding farms cropping up everywhere, we also learn that a company called Biosyn has emerged to do Good Dinosaur Science and is relocating rescued animals to a scenic sanctuary in the Italian mountains, where they can live safely while also being studied for Beneficial Medical Research Purposes. Biosyn is run by a man named Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), which is a callback to the original Jurassic Park, where “Dodgson” was the guy who paid Dennis Nedry to smuggle dinosaur DNA samples out in a shaving cream can. Presumably, this is meant to be the same guy many years later, but as that’s never confirmed and has no real bearing on the plot, it doesn’t actually matter. We get a glimpse of the journalist giving the voiceover walking through some trees as she explains all this, and then she, like so much else in this film, is never seen again.

Cut to Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) engaged in a midnight heist to rescue a random baby dinosaur from an illegal breeding facility. Some action happens as she and her buddy flee, and we see that she’s still in touch with Franklin (Justice Smith) from Fallen Kingdom, who now apparently works for the CIA’s dinosaur division (yes, really). Cut again to Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) as he lassos a random parasaurolophus from horseback, because that’s absolutely a thing you could do without dying. Dinosaur acquired, he proceeds to… I don’t know, hand it over to the dinosaur rescue people? It’s not really clear, and the rest of the herd just goes running off, so there’s not really any point to it except once again Making Chris Pratt Look Cool And Manly. Not to kinkshame anyone, but between this, Owen Grady Looking Like Rough Trade From A Vintage Coke Ad By A Motorcycle in the first film and Owen Grady Building A House By Hand (While Sweating) in the second film, it feels a little like Trevorrow has a particular masc fantasy he’s a little bit obsessed with, and which he perhaps might want to consider working through in a venue other than film. I dunno, man, I’m just spitballing.

Next up, we’re reintroduced to Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), aka Clone Daughter, now aged fourteen, who’s apparently been living in a rustic cabin in the woods with Claire and Owen as her parents for the last four years, because I guess that makes sense. The creepiness of the fact that they took her illegally and have kept her out of school and away from other people, let alone anyone her own age, is completely glossed over as fine, because they’re keeping her safe, you guys! Nor are we invited to wonder how this weird little family unit works; the fact that Claire and Owen weren’t even a couple four years ago goes unacknowledged, while Claire herself has morphed from a highly-strung, child-free CEO in heels into a homesteading mother and partner in flannel who rescues dinosaurs on the side with zero difficulty because the plot requires it of her. Maisie chafes at her confinement, but that’s ascribed to her being fourteen and moody instead of, you know, a kid in a fucked-up situation. Also, Blue the velociraptor is here, and she’s had a baby Blue, even though that should be impossible! But oh noes! A nefarious Dinosaur Bad Guy has followed Owen back from one of his dinosaur hunts and spotted both Maisie and Baby Blue, and is planning to kidnap them!

And then, because this film doesn’t have enough balls in the air, we cut randomly to Texas, where Dr Ellie Satler (Laura Dern) has been called in to investigate after a plague of giant locusts attacks an independent farmstead and eats all their crops. The neighbouring farm, however, remains untouched – because their crop comes from Biosyn seeds. Keen observers might wonder why Satler, who was a paleobotonist in the original film, is now being called in for locust attacks; the answer, as best I can tell, is Because Reasons, with base notes of Studying Extinct Plants Is Basically The Same As Studying Alive Insects, It’s All Science, Just Roll With It. Naturally, then, the only way for Ellie to prove that the giant, provably prehistorically-engineered locusts come from Biosyn – that is, the only company known to be dicking around with dinosaur DNA and whose crops are the only ones the locusts don’t eat, where the fuck else would anyone think the locusts came from – is to join up with her paleontologist ex, Alan Grant (Sam Neill), and use her in with chaotician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who now has a gig with Biosyn, so she and Alan can break into their labs and steal a matching DNA sample to prove where the locusts came from. Because this is clearly a job for them, and not, say, any of their journalist or government agency contacts. Obviously.

Back in Rustic Cabinlandia, Maisie and Baby Blue have now been kidnapped, because Maisie disobeyed and went outside on her own! Her protective kidnapper-parents were right after all! So Claire calls up Franklin at the dinosaur CIA, who tells them that the kidnapper is named Rainn Delacourt (Scott Haze), and that there’s a sting operation afoot to catch him doing illegal dinosaur stuff, which they should stay out of; he also explains that they have an inside man at Biosyn named Ramsay (Mamoudou Athie). Naturally, Claire and Owen ignore Franklin – or possibly he helps them during this bit; my attention was phasing in and out due to the terrible sound balancing – but either way, they head off to Malta, meet up with Owen’s old dinosaur-taming buddy Barry (Omar Sy), who we met briefly in Jurassic World, and then infiltrate a black market dinosaur bazaar, which, as we’re in Malta, looks exactly as stereotypical as you’d imagine. We’re also introduced to Kayla (DeWanda Wise), a pilot who takes Baby Blue to Biosyn and, in the process, catches sight of Maisie at the airstrip, so that when she then encounters Claire at the dino bazaar and realises she’s looking for her daughter, she feels obligated to help.

With Maisie nowhere in sight, Barry and Owen spot Rainn with a random evil henchlady, Soyona Santos (Dichen Lachman), who was responsible for transporting Maisie and Baby Blue for Dodgson, but who is now trying to offload some genetically modified raptors which h ave been trained-slashed-engineered to attack anyone she indicates with her special laser pointer. Do the raptors come from Biosyn? Who knows! It doesn’t matter! Santos is only there so that when Barry and the sting operation interrupt the deal, she can flash her little laser on everyone to instigate a big dinosaur chase scene, while other for-sale dinosaurs end up on the loose. (Rainn is summarily eaten by said dinosaurs, but not before Owen gets him to admit that Maisie is at Biosyn. You’ll forgive me if I’ve got the order of events slightly backwards, but this section in particular was both very loud and structurally incomprehensible.) Thus armed with the knowledge of Maisie’s wherebaouts, Owen runs away from raptors on a motorbike while Kayla and Claire do the same in a truck en route to the airstrip. (We get a glimpse of Barry arresting Santos, and then neither of them are ever seen again; as for what befalls the random civilians left to fend for themselves in the face of sudden dinosaur carnage, who knows? The movie certainly doesn’t!) This culminates in Owen riding his motorbike onto the moving plane just before it takes off, complete with an angry dinosaur falling into the ocean, and then we’re off to Italy!

Meanwhile, Ellie and Alan have met up with Ian Malcolm at Biosyn to try and do an espionage. Ian gives them the special key-bracelet that’ll let them into the labs where the locusts are held, while elsewhere in the same facility, perpetually shady geneticist Henry Wu (BD Wong) is explaining to the captive Maisie that actually, she’s not quite a clone after all. Instead, Charlotte Lockwood, who was apparently a brilliant scientist, contrived to give birth to Maisie as part of her research and also because she wanted a kid, and then, on learning that she (Charlotte) had an incurable genetic disease, altered all of Maisie’s DNA so that she wouldn’t have it. This is why Henry wants to study both Maisie and Baby Blue, who is now named Beta: if he can master their genetic power, he’ll understand how to use genetics to wipe out the evil locusts, which are now mutating and breeding at an alarming rate. None of this makes the least bit of sense, nor is it clear why Henry, who has been cheerfully on the side of evil corporate science for several movies now, has suddenly grown a conscience, but he is wearing a very large brown cardigan with oversized lapels, which surely counts for something.

Unmoved by any of this, Maisie releases Beta and escapes into the facility, where she runs into Ellie and Alan, who have just had a traumatic encounter with some giant locusts. As they plan their escape, we cut back to Kayla, Owen and Claire, now on approach to Biosyn. As Dodgson is made aware that Kayla is carrying extra passengers, he disables the ADS – Air Defense System – which is some sort of electronic Thing that keeps the pterodactyls from flying above a certain height. Right on cue, their plane is attacked by an angry quetzalcoatlus, which prompts Owen to strap Claire into the only parachute and send her off into the sky, where she is immediately menaced by angry flying dinosaurs before falling into a carnivore-infested forest. Owen and Kayla crash the plane on a frozen lake and have to contend with a feathered raptor of some sort in order to escape and look for Claire, who is also having some dinosaur-related issues; at the same time, Ramsay has helped Ellie, Alan and Maisie onto an underground train-thing, but Dodgson has it stopped when he realises Ian has abetted their locust-bothering. This forces them to get out and make their way through the old amber mines, which – of course – also contain dinosaurs.

Dodgson takes this moment to fire Ian, who gives a big exit speech about how evil Dodgson is without actually mentioning the secret locust project. Double agent Ramsay then equips Ian to go save the others, which culminates in Ian fumbling about trying to input a gate code while Maisie, Ellie and Alan are menaced by dinosaurs; unbeknownst to any of them, Ramsay does the actual code-changing back at base after seeing their peril on CCTV, which I guess makes sense. Shortly afterwards, Owen and Kayla find Claire in time to rescue her from an angry dilophosaurus – this is Foreshadowing – and are then fortuitously united with the other escapees when their jeep rolls down a hill. Back at Biosyn and unaware that the good guys are all together, Dodgson decides to get rid of his locusts by having the whole lot set on fire. However, it turns out – and I cannot believe I’m about to type this – that the locusts can survive while on fire, so that when the burning lab’s contents are vented into the sky, a massive swarm of burning locust fireballs is released into the forest. This causes everything else to be on fire, which means that Dodgson has no choice but to use the special neural implants in all his dinosaurs (because this, too, is apparently a Thing) to make them come to safety at the facility.

As our heroes try to get back to base so that Owen can save Beta – having promised Blue solemnly that he’d rescue her baby, because sexist chivalry apparently now extends to dinosaurs, too – they encounter an angry giganotosaurus blocking their path. As a burning locust flaps weakly by, the gigano eats it; this ought to be unremarkable, except that, minutes later, Ian spears another burning bug on a stick, waves it to distract the gigano a la the original movie, and then throws the whole thing into its mouth, which – and again, I cannot believe I’m about to type this – causes the fucking dinosaur to breathe fire. Like, significantly more fire than the locust was ever on, and yet nobody comments on this! It just happens, because this is a Colin Trevorrow movie and why the fuck not, apparently. More peril ensues, and then they get into the tunnels leading back to the main facility, where Dodgson, having realised that his evil schemes are unraveling, tries to run off with Ramsay and is shocked – shocked! – when Ramsay reveals himself to be a good guy after all. Strangely, this confrontation does not result in Dodgson trying to attack Ramsay, or even so much as restrain him. He’s just… allowed to walk out, and then Dodgson escapes himself to the underground train-thing, heading for the airfield.

Now back in the facility, the good guys encounter both a remorseful Henry, who explains his plans for stopping the locusts and is therefore allowed to come with, and a significantly more useful Ramsay, who knows how the park systems work. Then they split up: Kayla to get a plane, Owen, Alan and Maisie to get Beta, Claire and Ellie to turn off the power so that the ADS has sufficient power to turn back on (because something something emergency power routing something) and Ian and Ramsay to hold down the fort and look pretty. Kayla gets the plane, Owen gets Beta (while teaching Maisie and Alan how to do his patented Hold Up Your Hands To The Dinosaur So It Obeys You trick) and Ellie and Claire wade through a server room inexplicably full of dead and dying locusts to turn off the power, which causes Dodgson’s train-thing to shut down. This prompts him to run into the tunnel until dinosaur noises make him retreat, at which point he is unceremoniously killed by a trio of dilophosaurus while a shaving-cream-shaped canister rolls away from his hand – see! He met his end just like Nedry in the original Jurassic Park! What a callback moment!

With the ADS reactivated, Kayla comes to pick everyone up. There’s just one problem – all the dinosaurs were neurally commanded to return to the facility because of the raging forest fire, so our heroes have to dodge them to escape! This culminates in the obligatory fight between a t-rex and a giganotosaurus, which you could simulate by putting a couple of plastic dinosaur toys in a hamster ball and rolling it down a hill in the dark, during which Henry sustains a mild arm injury, and after which Ellie and Alan make out a little, because Ellie and the husband with which she apparently had two now college-aged kids have split up, and so why not. And then it’s done: everyone gets away, the t-rex wins and roars triumphantly (because of course it does), and we’re treated to a random voiceover from nowhere – I don’t even think it’s the same voiceover from the shitty YouTube journalism bit at the beginning – telling us that Ellie and Alan went on to testify against Biosyn, Henry did his Locust Science and released an infected bug to kill all the other bad ones, the UN designated the Italian valley a world sanctuary, and now humanity has to learn to coexist with dinosaurs. There’s a few very pretty distance shots of dinosaurs in various environments – parasaurolophus running with wild horses, rhamphorynchus nesting on a high rise building, a stegosaurus on the savannah – and that’s it. There’s no closure about what Maisie is, whether anyone’s sill after her or where she gets to go now (other than, presumably, with Claire and Owen), nobody wonders what happened to Dodgson (whose motives were never more than gestured at as Basic Rich Guy Hubris), and there’s no mention of dinosaur containment elsewhere: just roll credits.

What a fucking waste.

But, to be fair, there are two things I liked about Dominion: the feathery raptor dinosaur that Owen and Kayla encountered, which actually looked pretty decent, and the fact that, as stupid as the plot was, it still wasn’t as sexist as the original Jurassic World or as willfully idiotic as Fallen Kingdom. Okay, two and a half things: there’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it inference that Kayla is queer and has a history with Denise, the random Biosyn worker who tells Dodgson that her plane has unauthorised passengers on it, but otherwise, it’s just two and a half hours of dreary, worse-than-formulaic pablum. Even my nine year old, who enjoyed the other two movies, came out of this one complaining that it was too loud, too long, the dinosaurs were all the wrong size and that what happened to Dodgson was stupid, and if you cannot successfully entertain a nine year old who loves dinosaurs with your big budget dinosaur movie, then who the fuck is it even for, Colin?

Point being, if you want to see a shiny action film this summer, I would recommend literally anything else. Everything Everywhere All At Once is absolutely flawless, but if you’re really desperate to revisit a decades-old franchise for the nostalgia value, try Top Gun: Maverick – yes, it’s a spectacular work of US military propaganda starring a known Scientologist, but at least it has the decency to include real planes doing real aerial stunts, a tight yet emotionally complete script and a banging soundtrack, and I’ll take that over shitty dinosaurs who can’t decide what size they are and Chris Pratt’s smugly punchable face any day of the week. You’re welcome.

Jurassic World: A Summary

Jurassic World is a film that attempts to highlight the dangers of crassly commercialising dinosaurs by… well, crassly commercialising dinosaurs.

The irony of this was apparently lost on the writers.

Look: I get it. You wanted an excuse to make a dinosaur that was bigger than a t-rex, but you couldn’t be bothered looking up giganotosaurus or spinosaurus and anyway, that whole Meddling Mad Science angle is so appealing, why not go there instead? So you wrote an excuse for it into the script about how Kids These Days with their internets and their rap music are just so jaded that only bigger, better, newer dinosaurs can hold their attention, and then you spent the whole film explaining why building bigger, better, newer dinosaurs with Meddling Mad Science is, in fact, a terrible idea. But before all the carnage and death, when you were showing us the excited younger brother dragging his disaffected sibling through the park – and I’m sorry, but even with the 3D glasses on, it still looks like a plastic model in the panning shots – you made the mistake of assuming your actual audience is just as jaded as your fictional one. As such, you didn’t bother with a slow reveal, or a sense of wonder, or any sort of visual tease with the dinosaurs at all, which is more than a little disappointing for those of us who’ve been waiting for this film since 1997 (The Lost World was okay, but Jurassic Park III never happened, shhh). Everything was presented as ordinary, mundane, boring, right up until it all went to shit; and even then, your CGI indominus rex wasn’t a patch on Jurassic Park’s t-rex, not least because you couldn’t be bothered to keep the size and scale of it consistent, so that it gets noticeably bigger or smaller depending on the scene –

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about the sexism.

Let’s talk about Karen’s chirpy, passive-aggressive exchanges with her sons and husband. Let’s talk about how, when Zach’s girlfriend asks him to send her photos from his week away so she won’t forget what he looks like, then tells him she loves him, and Zach replies by basically shouting YEAH BYE and noping out to the car, she still stares adoringly after him, as though this is a thing an actual, emotionally invested girlfriend would do. Let’s talk about how Zach then spends the first half of the film staring creepily at every teenage girl he encounters. Let’s talk about Karen’s assumption that of course her single sister is going to want kids – not if she has them, but when – and the way she breaks down in guilt-inducing tears on the phone because Zach is just so mean to his little brother sometimes and why isn’t Claire there to make him play nice?  Let’s talk about Claire being criticised in the narrative for being trepidatious around a pair of kids she’s too busy to mind and hasn’t seen in seven years, as though she’s not doing her sister a bigass favour by taking them in the first place. Let’s talk about how Claire is apparently so clueless despite her high-powered job that not only can’t she remember how old her nephews are or how long it’s been since she’s seen them – as though this information never came up when the trip was organised – but when she’s out hunting them down, she unironically asks if Owen can track their scent, as though this is a skill that actual humans possess.

Let’s talk about how, after that one meeting with the executives we never see again, Claire is criticised by literally every man she encounters regardless of age and rank – Larry, her underling; Masrani, her boss; Zach and Gray, her nephews; Owen, her (ugh) love interest; Hoskins, the obligatory InGen douchebag who isn’t eaten by raptors anywhere near soon enough – and how not a single fucking person treats her as competent. Let’s talk about how the narrative never even tries to portray her as good at her job, given the whole ‘let’s send people into the indominus rex paddock before activating the tracking beacon that would’ve told me it was there the whole time’ fiasco that literally causes dozens of deaths and the ruin of the entire theme park. Let’s talk about how, when she finally does do something awesome by rescuing Owen from a pterodactyl, her nephews respond by asking who Owen is and, even though Claire just did something totally badass while Owen lay on the ground, he’s the one they want to stick with for protection. Let’s talk about how, when Claire has the similarly good idea of leading the t-rex out to fight the indominus, she somehow ends up lying behind it on the ground in an actual swimwear model pose, having spent the entire film steadily shedding clothing. Let’s talk about the needlessly protracted, gratuitous death of Zara. Let’s talk about Zach telling Gray not to cry about their parents getting divorced, even though he only found out about it himself that fucking second, because guys aren’t meant to do that, damn it! Let’s talk about how, in accordance with this dictum, the only other people who cry on screen are women.

Let’s talk about what the fuck the scriptwriters were even on when they wrote this mess, sweet Christ on a goddamn bicycle. Because even without all the shit mentioned above – and it is, as Dr Ian Malcolm so famously said, one big pile of shit – the script is more full of dropped threads than an amateur’s sewing basket.

The whole thing about Zach and Gray’s parents getting divorced? Never mentioned again. Zach’s girlfriend? Never mentioned again. The reason for Zach’s apparent lack of commitment to said girlfriend? Never even discussed. The opening gambit about Claire not wanting kids, which is – one charitably assumes – meant to evoke the same claim originally made by Dr Alan Grant in Jurassic Park? Irrelevant, given that, unlike Alan, Claire doesn’t then spend the whole film bonding with Zach and Gray; in fact, they barely communicate, and the boys end the film liking Owen more than her. (And don’t even get me started on the very salient contextual difference between one half of a lovingly married couple playfully bringing up the subject of kids with their male spouse, who eventually changes his mind, and a single professional woman being pressured to want children by a sibling who, to make the whole thing even more ironic, is going through a divorce.) The reason for Dr Wu’s apparent defection to InGen? Never explained. Owen’s status as a navy guy who somehow got tapped to work as a fucking dinosaur behaviouralist despite the fact that, as far as the script is concerned, he’s never even worked with animals before? Not explained. The thing where Gray is apparently smart enough to know everything there is to know about the park – and can apparently repair and jumpstart a decades-old Jeep he instantly identifies by make and model, Jesus Christ – but still somehow believes that his brother once killed a ghost to save him? I literally cannot even.

And okay, look. I get that a not inconsiderable portion of the internet has become rather swoony on the subject of Chris Pratt’s Captain Tight Pants transformation, but the scene where he’s introduced fixing a classic motorbike outside his charming bungalow while sipping Coke from a glass fucking bottle like he’s recreating Dylan O’Brien’s Teen Vogue photoshoot, and then proceeds to get all up in Claire’s business by making at least one horrible innuendo, mocking how terrible she was on their date and grinning because she’s a corporate suit who doesn’t understand the animals or like getting her hands dirty, while she stands there in what is effectively a jungle wearing a pristine white business suit? Yes, hello: nineteen eighty-four called, it wants its Romancing the Stone tropes back.

I mean, come ON.

 

Actually, scrap that: Romancing the Stone was a better film than Jurassic World, not least because it had a sense of its own ridiculousness, as well as – case in point – a scary gang boss who loved romance novels. And, you know, actual chemistry between the two lead characters, instead of the cardboard bickering that’s meant to pass for that between Pratt and Howard. Which, in fairness, is less their fault than it is a consequence of the utterly abysmal script, which riffs shamelessly on the original film with zero understanding of what made it work. (Hint: it wasn’t a Jimmy Fallon cameo.)

In Jurassic Park terms, then, here’s how bad the characterisation in Jurassic World is: Claire is a female version of Donald Gennaro, the bloodsucking lawyer famously eaten while taking a shit, who spends the whole film being alternately condescended to and hit on by a hybrid of Dr Ian Malcolm and Robert Muldoon, aka Owen. Their chemistry is dismal, their one kiss is worse, and both of them get less emotional development and catharsis than Blue the velociraptor, who’s probably just grateful – given that her siblings are called Charlie, Delta and Echo – that she wasn’t named Foxtrot.

Cool gyroscopes, though.

A Matter of Gaze

Recently, I tried to watch the new Netflix series, Marco Polo, and made it through three whole episodes before ragequitting in a fit of disgust. It wasn’t the lacklustre pacing and derivative scripting that got to me, though they certainly didn’t help: it was the Orientalism and rampant misogyny that saw every female character – all of them women of colour – either viscerally sexualised or defined solely by their relationships with men. That the show took the character of Khutulun, a Mongol warrior who famously vowed never to marry unless her husband could best her at wrestling, and turned her into a smirking seductress in a leather skirt was bad enough; but having her father state that Khutulun’s ‘virginity’ was ‘promised’ to a warrior who could defeat her – reframing an arguably feminist decision as a sexist mandate and thereby stripping her of its agency – had me spitting fire. The first episode alone introduced not one, but two separate female characters by showing them in the throes of sex, their laboured panting audible even before the camera cut to their nudity; other women were shown in the periphery of shots designed to give prominence to men, off to the side even when the ostensible purpose of the scene was to introduce the ladies.

But amidst all the dehumanising nakedness and concubine orgies, what really struck me was a comparatively small detail: the positioning of the camera in the few scenes showing the Princess Kokachin interacting with her young daughter. Even in moments where the two women were ostensibly its sole focus, the camera was still painting them with an outsider’s perspective – we saw them from a distance, like strangers observing a ritual, rather than intimately, from their own eyes. When men interrupted these scenes – which, inevitably, they did – the framing felt like a pre-emptive extension of their gaze, slewing back to confirm that yes, we were viewing the women at a remove, rather than tightening to suggest, as the narrative context otherwise did, that this was a male intrusion into a private, female space. Though not as overtly gratuitous as the surfeit of naked ladies, the direction in these moments felt equally dehumanising for its failure to recognise that women can have a gaze of their own; can be the active participants within a narrative, rather than merely passive subjects.

In the field of developmental psychology, there’s a concept called object permanence: our awareness of the fact that things continue to exist even when we can’t see them. The fact that babies lack an understanding of object permanence is why they can be entertained by games like peek-a-boo or grow distressed when a parent or cherished object is out of sight: in their perception, whatever they can’t see has ceased to exist. Adults, of course, are meant to know better, but when it comes to the portrayal of women in film especially, I often wonder if certain creators lack object permanence about their female characters: if they only exist in sight of men, and otherwise fade away.

It’s not just a question of our telling stories that are primarily about men as a cultural default, though this fact is often used, somewhat paradoxically, to excuse the very problem it represents. If the protagonist is male, the logic goes, then it only makes sense that we’d see any female characters purely through his eyes – an argument that conveniently ignores the many narratives with male heroes that still make time to fully develop and humanise their secondary male characters. Ladies in these stories are treated as accessories, not participants: their individuality is less important than their adornment of someone else’s triumph, and as such, what they do on their own time doesn’t matter.

When discussing the presence of women in narrative, we often use the Bechdel Test as a basic means of gauging whether or not female characters both exist in plurality and engage with one another. As yardsticks go, it’s something of a blunt instrument, in that it pays no attention to the type of character or representation on offer, retaining its usefulness only because the achingly low bar it represents too often goes unjumped. More recently, as a means of compensating for these limitations, the Mako Mori Test was coined to take account of the actual roles of women in narrative – a test of context rather than dialogue, and another important axis of representation. When it comes to the presence and characterisation of women in cinematic narratives, however, I’d like to suggest a third such tool: the Solo Test, which a film will pass if it:

a) shows a female character alone;

b) in a scene that neither begins with a man leaving nor ends with a man arriving;

c) that doesn’t focus primarily or exclusively on her physical attractiveness.

Though the Solo Test could quite easily be applied to other types of narrative, it is, I feel, of greatest relevance to film: a medium whose time constraints often necessitate smaller core casts than can be managed in serial narratives and whose culture is powerfully male-dominated, both in terms of creation and focus. The test is meant as a measurement of gaze and visual imperative, because, to put it bluntly, I’m sick of watching films that will happily take the time to show us how male characters behave while alone or in private, but whose female characters only show up when the men do – women who are never viewed alone, in their own right, unless they’re getting out of bed (naked) or into the shower (naked) or otherwise caught in the act of cleansing or dressing themselves. It’s astonishing how many films still treat female solitude with a sneaking-into-the-girl’s-locker-room-mentality, as though the primary value in a woman alone is necessarily voyeuristic, her feelings relevant only inasmuch as they decode the mystique of her secret reactions to men.

There are, of course, contextual limitations to the usefulness of such a test – as, indeed, is the case with the Bechdel and Mako Mori. An equally useful variant of the Solo Test, for instance – and one that provides a helpful counterpoint when assessing the treatment of male vs female secondary characters – let’s call it the Sidekick Test – might focus on the depth of characterisation afforded to any non-protagonist by asking similar questions, such as:

a) Are they shown in isolation?

b) Do they have conversations and/or demonstrable interests that don’t involve the protagonist?

c) Are they defined by more than their sexuality?

Whether used separately or in combination, these tests can hopefully provide an interesting analysis of gaze, and especially cinematic gaze, as a means of assessing whose individuality and personhood is considered narratively relevant to a given story, or suite of stories, and whose is considered optional. Nor is the applicability of such questions restricted wholly to issues of gender; applying them on the basis of race – or along multiple such intersections, as per comparing portrayals of white women with portrayals of women of colour – can provide an equally relevant (and revealing) analysis. Though the language of camera angles and comic book panels is crucial to the establishment of a visual gaze, the idea of a narrative gaze – those facts of characterisation that creators deem relevant vs their expression within the story – is similarly important, and goes a long way towards describing the role and focus of non-protagonist characters.

While the bulk of characterisation comes through engagement and interaction, we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of silence and solitude: the way a person behaves when the metaphorical cameras are off, when they exist for nobody but themselves. It’s in these moments that we see characters at their least guarded, their most honest, and if this space and privacy is routinely denied to women – if we see them only ever as others do, at a public remove, or else as voyeurs intent on their bodies – then we deny them personhood and object permanence both: we force them to exist as performers alone, and never for themselves.

The End of Harry Potter

Last night, I went with my husband to see the final Harry Potter film. It was good fun – we both choked up a little at various points – and a satisfying conclusion to a narrative which has saturated the popcultural zeitgeist from June 1997 to July 2011. Doubtless, the influence of and significance of the series will continue for many more years to come, but right now, I can’t help but cast an eye back on the past fourteen years and remember what the series has meant to me.

When Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone first hit the shelves in 1997, I was eleven years old – the same age as the protagonist, and, like him, just starting high school. I wish I could say I was quick off the mark, a devotee of the series from minute one, but in fact, as was doubtless the case for millions of other people, it wasn’t until the 1999 release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that I started to catch on. Which isn’t to say that I’d never heard of the series before then; even though I was unaware of their popularity, the first two books were so omnipresent that I couldn’t help but notice them. Stopping off at a grimy, tin-shack service station on the way back from a horse-riding lesson at the age of about twelve, I remember seeing the first book displayed prominently on a cardboard rack. My interest was piqued by the cover art, blurb and premise, but the location didn’t inspire confidence. Prior to that day, I’d never a book I’d want to read – or even, possibly, any book at all – on sale in a service station. Though I’d seen it proffered elsewhere, part of me wondered: what sort of book gets sold in a place like this? Unable to think of an answer, I let it be.

But in 1999, aged thirteen, Azkaban hooked me, and for a ludicrously cosmetic reason: the cover. Or, to be more specific, the hippogriff on the cover. A mythology nerd since primary school,  fantastic creatures were both a favourite obsession and a specialty area of knowledge. Unicorns and dragons, though tempting, were common – but a hippogriff? Beyond the pages of my reference books, I’d never seen one drawn before; certainly, I’d never seen them fictionalised. Throw in the fact that the book was a hardcover with a celloglazed dust jacket (I was, and always will be, a sucker for celloglaze) and on sale at a discount, and you had a match made in heaven. I didn’t even care that it was book three of a series – a fact which would paralyze me now, but which mattered much less then, despite the fact that I never got more than three chapters through any out-of-ordered read before lack of comprehension prompted me to abandon it. By all rights, I should have given up quickly, no matter how many hippogriffs there were.

Instead, I read the whole thing in an afternoon, pestered my parents for the first two volumes the rest of that week, and then, when they finally acquiesced the following weekend, I went back and read the whole story – including Azkaban – in a single, day-long session. From then on, I was hooked. When Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire finally came out in 2000, I bought it on the release day. I was fourteen years old, and my friend Smott – a fellow geekling, responsible in her adult incarnation for my Solace & Grief character art – was visiting for a week. We each bought a copy of the book and read it together the same day: Smott in a nest of blankets on the floor of my room, and me on my bed in the corner. I was slightly quicker, though; just as I’d reached the climatic graveyard scene, Smott exclaimed over some earlier moment, to which I snappishly replied:

‘Quiet! Harry’s fighting Voldemort!’

‘Of course he is,’ Smott said placidly, and the two of us kept reading.

It was three more years before the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – a longer gap than ever before, filled with fearful suggestions that J.K. Rowling had writer’s block. By the time of its release in June 2003, I was deep in my final year of high school, grappling with exam stress, depression and the perils of being seventeen. When the Weasley twins abandoned Hogwarts, I shouted and cheered them with all the fervour of every student-reader who could only ever dream of doing likewise. Another two years passed, and by July 2005, when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince came out, I was nearing the end of my second year at Sydney University. This time, though, I had a different reading buddy. Sometime late the previous year, my then-boyfriend-Sean’s housemate – a shy philosophy student by the name of Toby – had expressed a belief that the Potter books weren’t all they were cracked up to be. The two of us were lounging around in the dim-and-dusty Coogee flat he shared with Sean, who was presently elsewhere. I asked if he’d read any of them; Toby said no, to which I replied that I would respect his opinion if he tried the series. Toby accepted my challenge. Rather than dislike the books, however, he soon became as fond of them as I was. After moving in to a new place in 2005, not only did he take to checking the Leaky Cauldron website for updates on Prince, he even turned his mother into a fan, too. Busy with work on his Masters thesis and coping with family health problems, it took Toby longer to read the sixth book than I did, but once he had, we wasted no time in swapping theories about RAB and where the final installment was headed.

By the time Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in July 2007, Toby and I were engaged and living in Melbourne, with just two months left before our wedding. We each bought a copy from the local bookstore and read it together that same weekend. Since then, we’ve watched all the films together, whether at the cinema or on DVD.  And last night, we rounded things out with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, just one day after we returned from a trip to France to our new home in St Andrews, Scotland.

1997 – 2011. Fourteen years is a long time – long enough for a girl to grow up, change schools, fall in and out of various jobs, get married, become a published author and move continents. It wasn’t Harry Potter that brought Toby and I together, but it certainly helped, and we’ve shared those stories ever since. Come September, we’ll be celebrating our fourth wedding anniversary – and wouldn’t you know it? The appropriate gift is books.

Thanks, J. K. Rowling. For everything.

Sucker Punch

Warning: complete spoilers, much rant.

Up until about a week ago, I hadn’t planned on seeing Sucker Punch at the movies, primarily because I didn’t know it existed. That all changed when rumblings in the blogsphere alerted me both to the film itself and to the suggestion that it was a sexist, misogynistic piece of rape-obsessed trash, as opined (among others) by The Atlantic reviewer Sady Doyle and blogger Cassie Alexander. This did not provoke in me a desire to spend money at the box office so much as a profound feeling of disgust – and yet, I remained a little bit intrigued, too, if only because of the amount of controversy racking up. First, lead actresses Emma Browning and Abbie Cornish both defended the film, and then I saw a favourable review that had been published, of all places, on the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center blog, wherein the author praised it as “the best movie about dissociation [he’d] ever seen.” 

Despite my initial reaction, Sucker Punch was starting to look like something I ought to see, if only for curiosity’s sake. Going in, I was prepared for the worst, but also open to the possibility of redemptive surprise, particularly as I’ve found Zack Snyder’s previous three efforts to be something of a mixed bag: I loathed 300, was on the fence about Watchmen, and liked Legend of the Guardians. Given that these were all adaptations, what then might I make of a story that Snyder had written himself? Accompanied by my long-suffering husband, I bought some popcorn and prepared to find out.

Visually and narratively, Sucker Punch operates in three different realms: the real world, where heroine Baby Doll has been committed to an asylum after her abusive step-father frames her for the murder of her little sister; the first dissociative layer, portrayed as a bordello, where Baby Doll and four of the other inmates plot their escape while enduring sexual abuse at the hands of the male orderlies; and the second, deeper dissociative layer, where the girls’ efforts to overcome their situation are expressed as  fantastic battles against giant warriors, dragons, androids and – wait for it – steampunk zombie Nazis. (And I’ll bet you thought only Hellboy had those, right?) In honour of this approach, I’ve elected to critique the film on three different levels – construction, continuity and context – in order to cover all bases.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

1. Construction 

Besides Baby Doll and her fellow inmates – Sweet Pea, Rocket, Amber and Blondie – Sucker Punch has three other noteworthy characters: villain Blue Jones, a crazed orderly (real world) and sadistic pimp (bordello); ally Vera Gorski, their psychiatrist (real world) and madame (bordello); and a character listed only as the Wise Man, who commands the girls during their fantasy battles.  (He also appears in the real world, but we’ll get to that later.) From the moment she enters the asylum, Baby Doll is on a tight schedule: unless she can escape within five days, a doctor will come and lobotomise her. To this end, the Wise Man lists the items she needs to achieve a “perfect victory”:  a map, fire, a knife, a key, and a fifth thing he refuses to name, which Baby Doll doesn’t mention to her friends. One by one, these items are acquired during the fantasy scenes, returning afterwards to the bordello realm, in which we spend the greatest amount of time. Our only visits to the real world, in fact, are spaced far apart: the very beginning and very end of the film. While this lends a certain sort of symmetry to the narrative, it’s a conceit which swiftly becomes problematic (more of which during the continuity section).

Despite their disparate themes, Zack Snyder’s previous films are united by a common visual aesthetic to which Sucker Punch is no exception: stylistic slow motion interspersed with lighting-fast flashes of violence and a sepia-tinted colour scheme give the film an eerie feel, while his trademark close-ups and swooping vistas provide a strong contrast between personal scenes and battles. The soundtrack is, I’ll admit, catchy, but at a price: the song-to-dialogue ratio is so heavily skewed that vital character development is done away with in favour of what are, effectively, music videos. Snyder’s distinctive visuals only compound this problem: the action scenes are long, almost totally unscripted except for the Wise Man’s briefings, and delivered with such a predictable rhythm that they soon become self-defeating, like endless cut-scenes in a video game.

As per the traditional laziness of the trashy action genre, our five man – or in this case, five girl – army is desperately under-characterised. Although we witness the chain of events leading to Baby Doll’s imprisonment, these opening scenes have no dialogue, leaning heavily on the straw-man Evil Step-Father image to justify her wrongful incarceration. Of the other girls, only sisters Sweet Pea and Rocket are ever given the slightest bit of history, and even this is flimsily done: Rocket ran away from home after clashing with her parents, and Sweet Pea, despite not being part of the argument, followed. How they ended up in the asylum is anyone’s guess – but then, there’s not much real world logic to Sucker Punch, even when we’re actually in the real world.

2. Continuity

As was demonstrated by the recent success of Inception, it is entirely possible for a Hollywood blockbuster to switch back and forth between multiple interlocking realities in a way that actually makes sense. Sucker Punch, however, does not do this. Partly, this is down to laziness, but there’s also an ample helping of fridge logic, too. For starters, it’s inferred that the real world is not the present day, but rather sometime in the 1950s, an assumption supported not just by the cars, technology, clothing and general mood of these scenes, but by the type of asylum Baby Doll is sent to. The fact that her step-father openly bribes an orderly to admit her might still work in the present day, if one were willing to explain the visuals as an affectation; but the threat of a lobotomy conducted via a chisel through the skull-front is undeniably past tense. To borrow from another recent film, think Shutter Island with women. That’s our base level of reality, and even with the dearth of early dialogue, it’s still as plain as day.

And that, alas, is a problem. Even allowing for the creation of an internally dissociative fantasy, I cannot buy the presence in that world of anachronisms – one or two, maybe, but the number here is enormous. Baby Doll’s outfit, for instance, is pure weaponised Japanese schoolgirl, down to the fact that her gun is accessorised with cute little dangling charms. The same is true of all the fantasy costumes, never mind the presence of touch-screen technology, battle suits and silver-gleaming androids. This is further compounded by glitches in the bordello realm: near the end, one male orderly plays with a touchscreen device, his ears adorned with the trademark white earbuds of an iPod, while earlier, a major plot point revolves around Sweet Pea’s ability to photocopy a map of the asylum. Or at least, that’s what we assume she’s done: a machine that looks like a very old, very simple photocopier is shown in Blue’s office, and if Sweet Pea was only going to draw a copy – a lengthy and improbable option – she wouldn’t need to take the original off the wall.

But these are all nitpicks when placed against the bigger problem: understanding how anything in either fantasy world possibly corresponds to the real. In the bordello level, for instance, Baby Doll dances to distract the men while the other girls steal each item – but what does the dancing represent? Sex? Are we witnessing a calculated seduction of all the male orderlies as expressed through Baby Doll’s decision to dance for them, or is she taking advantage of their ongoing coercion? When Amber takes a lighter from one of the men, giggling in his lap while Baby Doll dances nearby, what is actually happening in the real world? Either way, Baby Doll is meant to be so distracting that the men don’t notice the other girls sneaking around – and that’s before you factor in that Baby Doll’s dance is always the cue to segue into the higher fantasy world.

During the botched theft that results in Rocket’s death, for instance, we switch back to the bordello from the fantasy to witness two interpretations of the same event. In the fantasy battle, Rocket is blown up by a bomb on a speeding train, unable to escape because her jetpack is broken. In the bordello, we see her stabbed by the cook, dying in Sweet Pea’s arms while finishing the conversation they’d  started on the train. At no point do we drop down into the real world – because, of course, doing so would reveal the entire action to make no sense at all. If the bordello-dance is already a layer of metaphor, then how do we explain a reality in which Baby Doll distracts the cook in his tiny, cramped kitchen so effectively that he doesn’t notice that four other girls are occupying the same space? The final break with reality comes when Blue kills both Amber and Blondie in the bordello world, with Gorski and several other orderlies as witnesses. Clearly, the girls must die by Blue’s hand in the real world, too: and yet, despite this overwhelming evidence of his savagery, Blue remains in charge. In fact, his next act is to try and rape Baby Doll, who defends herself by stabbing him in the shoulder. So total is the dissonance between the bordello world and reality that when, much later, real-world Gorski is explaining Baby Doll’s history to the lobotomist, she mentions that yes, the patient did stab Blue, but omits to mention that Blue is a murdering rapist. And lest we think she’s simply glossing over a tragic, traumatic event, in the very next scene, we see that Blue is still working at the asylum. As, for that matter, is the equally murdering cook.

Let me repeat that, in case you missed it: three girls have been killed by two staff members in the space of a week. Two of the murders took place in front of multiple staff witnesses. And yet neither man is disciplined, or queried, or imprisoned or suspected or anything until – cue the Narrative Convenience fairy, and also the fairy of Unbelievably Stupid And Offensive Plots – just after Baby Doll’s lobotomy.

Oh, yeah. She gets lobotomised at the end. Apparently, the fifth thing Baby Doll needed was to sacrifice herself so Sweet Pea could escape instead. And by “sacrifice herself”, I mean “get lobotomised”. By a doctor who didn’t really want to do it. In a way that makes no sense. Or, sorry: in a way that makes even less sense than you might already think, because in order to get Baby Doll lobotomised, Blue had to forge Gorski’s signature on the paperwork. Except that Gorski, who is standing right there throughout the procedure while holding the paperwork, objects to the lobotomy taking place. And presumably, if Blue had to forge her signature to get it done – this is, after all, what Baby Doll’s father bribed him to do – then only Gorski has the authority to authorise lobotomies. So you could be forgiven for wondering why, at some point prior to Baby Doll getting lobotomised, she didn’t stop to look at the fucking paperwork and question why the lobotomy was taking place. Oh, no – that particular revelation is saved for three seconds after an irreversible procedure has already happened. Which is also when, all of a sudden, the other orderlies suddenly declare that they don’t want to help Blue hurt the girls any more. Oh, but they’re still willing to leave him all alone with a newly lobotomised girl they’ve just helped strap to a chair – it’s just that they’ll feel bad about it now.

And then the cops come – literally, they reach the place in about two seconds – and arrest Blue, just in time to stop him molesting Baby Doll (well, molesting her more, anyway – he still gets a kiss in). And not because he killed Amber and Blondie, though. Heavens forbid! No: Gorski has dobbed him in for falsifying her paperwork. 

Capping off this carnival of narrative errors and continuity gaffes, we come to the final scene: the newly escaped Sweet Pea at a bus station, trying to find her way home. As the bus doors open, the police appear and try to question her on the suspicion that she is, indeed, an asylum escapee. It looks like she’s doomed, but wait! Who should the bus driver turn out to be but the Wise Man himself?That’s right: the figment of the girls’ collective dissociative imaginations who commanded them through their battles is actually a bus driver, that is to say, a person previously unknown to them who actually exists in the real world. And of course he lies to the police, telling them that Sweet Pea has been on his bus for miles now, when of course he’s never seen her before (But has he? Wait, no, because that makes no fucking sense) and so they let her go, and on she gets, right behind a young male passenger whose face, as it happens, we’ve also seen in the fantasy world, fighting in the trenches of the zombified World War I. Which also makes no sense.

Yeah. About that.

3. Context

Speaking in a recent and undeniably sympathetic interview, Zack Snyder said that Sucker Punch was “absolutely” a “critique on geek culture’s sexism.” Regarding two early moments of metatextual dialogue, he has the following to say:

“She [Sweet Pea] says, “The dance should be more than titillation, and mine’s personal,” and that’s exactly a comment on the movie itself. I think 90% are missing it, or they just don’t care… As soon as the fantasy starts, there’s that whole sequence where Sweet Pea breaks it down and says, “This is a joke, right? I get the sexy school girl and nurse thing, but what’s this? A lobotomized vegetable? How about something more commercial?” That is basically my comment on the film as well. She’s saying, “Why are you making this movie? You need to make a movie more commercial. It shouldn’t be so dark and weird.””

In some ways, this is a perfect explanation of the film’s failure. Snyder has tried to be ironic in his handling of sexiness and objectification, taking schoolgirl fetishism, harem fantasies and sexy nurses and putting them in a situation which is decidedly unsexy -that is to say, a deeply misogynistic environment rife with violence, rape and abuse of power – in order to make his male audience members feel guilty about finding the girls attractive, and thereby forcing them to realise that their lusts align with those of the villainous male characters. To quote the same interview:

“Someone asked me about why I dressed the girls like that, and I said, “Do you not get the metaphor there? The girls are in a brothel performing for men in the dark. In the fantasy sequences, the men in the dark are us. The men in the dark are basically me; dorky sci-fi kids.””

It’s a self-aware sentiment – and yet, the film itself is anything but self-aware. Despite his intentions, Snyder has created a film which systematically disenfranchises its women in order to teach men a lesson about not disenfranchising women. Which, you know, would seem to defeat the purpose. Certainly, it’s possible to empathise with the characters, despite how thinly they’re drawn – but that’s because the entire film is engineered to paint women as victims and men as abusive bastards. What Snyder sees as a dark, edgy ending, perhaps even a cautionary tale about the dangers of male lust – that is, Baby Doll’s lobotomy and the deaths of all her friends bar Sweet Pea – actually reads as a story of victimisation: the girls couldn’t save themselves. Even in the very depths of their fantasies, they still needed a male general to formulate their plans and give them orders. I understand the sexy costumes of the bordello realm, to an extent – it’s a logical leap of dissociation, given the culture of sexual abuse – but why, then, would the girls still imagine themselves in titillating outfits during the second realm’s fantasy battles? The answer is, they wouldn’t: those scenes are there as fanservice, not to make a disquieting point about fetishism and rape, and however much Snyder might have wanted the film to rebuke exactly the sort of objectification its merchandising provokes, the Hollywood factor means that in the end, it can’t help but reinforce the very cultures it attempted to satirise.

In the end, Sucker Punch is a sexist wasteland: a ham-fisted attempt to make chauvinist geeks care about rape by luring them in with action scenes. The idea of creating strong, competent, interesting female characters whose looks play no part in their marketability is apparently too radical for Snyder, who might have saved himself a lot of bother by watching Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and seeing what real girl action heroes can do, if only you don’t embrace the “rocks fall, everyone dies” approach to storytelling. Because, look: when your five main female characters are all being raped, wrongfully imprisoned and generally abused; when the only names they have are diminutive, sexy-sounding nicknames bestowed on them by rapists, which they then use even among themselves; when you dress them in sexy outfits, call it ironic and then merchandise statuettes of the characters wearing those outfits to your male fanbase; when your female resistors, even in their deepest dissociative fantasies, must still take all their orders from a Wise Man; when all your girls bar one are either murdered or lobotomised at the end, and that selfsame Wise Man calls it a “perfect victory”; then you have not created a film which is empowering for women. Instead, you have taken the old, sexist trope of hurting female characters to motivate goodness, chivalry and protectiveness in their male counterparts to a new and disturbing level: that is, you are hurting female characters to motivate goodness, chivalry and protectiveness in the male audience. And I’m sorry, but I just can’t bring myself to see that as an improvement. Because of how, you know. It’s not.

Great soundtrack, but.

The Problem of M. Night Shyamalan

There are two types of people in the cinema-going world: those who like M. Night Shyamalan films, and those who don’t. It’s not an issue on which there’s much, if any, middle ground. With the possible exception of The Sixth Sense, his films, while mainstream releases, have a tendency to polarise in the manner of arthouse flicks: either they’re revelations, or rot.

I used to be one of the unenlightened. Watching Signs on the big screen, I snorted with laughter. The Village left me irritable – what the hell kind of ending was that, anyway? I’d been frightened out of my young life when Haley Joel Osment confessed to seeing dead people, but at that point, I didn’t even realise the films were by the same guy. Had friends not taken me in hand, my opinion might never have changed, but after The Village, they sat me down and asked, in exacting tones, exactly why I was disappointed.

After twenty-odd minutes of flustered debating, we hit upon the crux of my frustrations, viz: the film had been marketed as horror. Although the first half of the narrative fit this pattern, the character relations, plot twist and conclusion took an entirely different turn, which lead me to believe that the whole was a botched attempt. So, my friends asked. Was the problem with the film, or just with what you thought it was meant to be?

I opened my mouth, closed it again, and thought back. I’d gone in expecting to see a horror film, and so had watched for narrative markers appropriate to the genre. They’d been there early on, but then vanished entirely, which left the possibility that I’d been actively misinterpreting the film, imposing my own assumptions on how it should work, and judging it wanting. It was a strange realisation, but the more I considered it, the more it made sense. Hadn’t I thought the same thing about Signs? It was as if I – and, for that matter, Hollywood – had been looking for The Sixth Sense in every subsequent Shyamalan film, when they weren’t really horror at all.

With Lady in the Water, I made a conscious effort to ignore the marketing and test my hypothesis: to watch with no expectations and an open mind. Might I see something I’d missed before?

I could, and did. Near the end, I realised what should’ve been obvious all along: Shyamalan’s films are always about people. The pseudo-horror setting is simply his preferred vehicle for storytelling, a background mechanism designed to threaten, not the audience, but his characters. Thus menaced, the point of their reaction isn’t fright, but inter-development: how they draw together, and how they mend. Because healing, faith and self-acceptance are big themes in Shyamalan’s work. In both The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, supernaturally gifted protagonists come to terms with their powers, not in order to save the world, but to help the people in it. Quietly and with inner strength, the heroes of Signs and Lady in the Water regain their faith, two broken widowers made whole. And in The Village, a community of emotionally scarred people are forced to confront their injuries by the actions of three who are physically wounded: a dying man, a blind girl and her mad brother.

The subtlety of Shyamalan films simultaneously acts as their blessing and curse. Early scenes deliberately set up the false horror that, inevitably, constitutes their sales pitch, but the plots become introverted. It is as if the film is a train travelling towards a junction: the audience expects to travel one way, and instead is taken another. What we protest is a percieved error – turn back, turn back! – when, in fact, our course was planned from the outset.

Except for The Sixth Sense, which he didn’t produce, and Wide Awake, which he neither produced nor appeared in, Shyamalan has, at 37, written, produced, directed and appeared in all his films. Given the excellent characterisation, scripting, cinematography and production values, it’s hard not to be impressed. But more impressive still are the moments of beauty and revelation which characterise his work: the idea that even though we are all flawed, we can fix ourselves.

The Orphanage

I saw The Orphanage on the strength of a David and Margaret review. A Spanish supternatural horror film, it follows on the heels of Pan’s Labyrinth: both movies were produced by Guillermo del Toro – which role, it seems, suits him better than that of director, if Hellboy and Blade II are anything to go by – and feature an eerie take on innocence.

After spending her early childhood in an orphanage, Laura (Belen Rueda) grows up to adopt Simon (Roger Princep) with her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo). Wanting to open her own home for disabled children, Laura returns to the orphanage of her youth – now empty – and begins to prepare for the arrival of her charges. Simon, ignorant of his adoption, has always been accompanied by invisible friends; but the arrival of an ominous third, Tomas, soon after their arrival, worries Laura.

As Simon begins to show knowledge of things his parents have kept hidden, Laura grows increasingly disturbed and disbelieving, until, on the day her children are due to arrive, Simon vanishes. Frightened by a series of strange occurences within the house, Laura begins a long and desperate search to find her son, distancing herself from Carlos and, in the process, unravelling the secrets of the orphanage.

From the stylised opening credits to the final reveal, The Orphanage doesn’t miss a single beat. Like a Celtic knot or a piece of music, significant ideas are woven seamlessly throughout the narrative, placed so naturally that their reappearance seems more a haunting echo than a deliberate ploy. There is nothing heavy-handed about this film: Laura’s grief and slow spiral towards understanding, the way she is helped (or hindered) by the authorities, the breakdown of her relationship with Carlos – and, perhaps most importantly, the sheer, ghostly presence of the house are all breathtakingly achieved. The music and cinematography combine to create an eerie captivation, while the script and acting are perfectly balanced.

Let’s be clear, however: The Orphanage is a horror film, on which premise it delivers magnificently. Moments of sheer, gut-wrenching terror are juxtaposed against drawn-out tension, violent fright, fey chills, mystery and an ethereal sense of the otherworldly. Although not as downright horrific as The Ring, The Orphanage is certainly of a similar ilk, and will leave you just as breathless. The only snag is its limited release; but for those willing to look beyond mainstream cinema for their kicks, consider this the perfect opportunity.  

Easily, The Orphanage is one of the best films I’ve seen in the last few years, and deserves every accolade it revieves.

Quadrilogy Syndrome

After Hollywood rediscovered the trilogy, with recent franchises like The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek, X-Men and Spiderman all proving that in the absence of a pre-planned, overarching narrative, big studios can be counted on to ruin at least one instalment, what was left to do? Answer: the quadrilogy, a word invented, or so it seems, exclusively to market the Alien series boxed DVD set. But rather than plan a four-film epic, the Powers That Be have stumbled on the idea of renewing older, already-proven stories, leading to the creation of Die Hard 4.0, Rambo 4, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and – according to today’s media – Beverly Hills Cop 4.

This is interesting on several levels, not in the least because Bruce Willis (53), Sylvester Stallone (62), Harrison Ford (66) and Eddie Murphy (47) are all reprising roles they first played in their twenties and thirties, although only Karen Allen (57) gets to play the same love interest. Narratively, there’s a strong appeal to these films that echoes our real-life sentiments: the image of the tough, rugged veteran slugging out one last battle is a powerful archetype, especially when balanced against the young, awed sidekick (Indiana Jones’s Shia LaBouf and Die Hard’s Justin Long). Having already accompanied the hero on similar missions, the audience is able to grin knowingly at his chutzpah, an immersive nostalgia quite unattainable in stand-alone flicks and therefore a new part of the film experience.

But why is it happening now? Unlike the traditional trilogy format, this ‘wait twenty years and go again’ approach seems a unique development. The only comparable format is James Bond, but Bond himself has been the same age for most of the twentieth century. Whether the trend arose from opportunity, need or inspiration remains to be seen, but given its obvious success, it seems likely that future films might follow the same course. Depending on Robert Ludlum, 2030 could see the return of Jason Bourne; Christian Bale might play an ageing Batman, as per the comics, or Hugh Jackman a grizzled Wolverine; even Johnny Depp might return as an older, drunker, wilier Captain Sparrow.

Until then, however, audiences are left wondering where Hollywood will turn next. Narnia was meant to sustain Disney for another decade, but unless The Voyage of the Dawntreader compensates spectacularly for Prince Caspian, the idea of an ongoing septrilogy might have to wait. Still, with Guillermo del Toro’s The Hobbit set to follow Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, book adaptations may remain a staple of blockbusters to come. The fact of Eragon’s dismal performance is no insurance against a possible Eldest and Brisingr, nor are other fantasy-trilogy adaptaions beyond the pale; indeed, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will form two separate films in order not to miss anything out, thus rounding out the movie versions to eight. Comics-based movies have also raked in a substantial heap of moolah, and until that well runs dry, the likelihood is that they’ll continue to do so, too. 

All of which promises that for as long as Hollywood can keep borrowing, adapting and otherwise big-screening existant literature, there’s no need to fret about where our films are coming from – even if some new series might not end for another thirty years.