SOURCE CODE- Review

Duncan Jones properly makes a name for himself with Source Code- and goodness knows it's not easy to make a name for yourself when your birth name is Zowie Bowie. After his astonishingly good debut Moon in 2009, he takes on a bigger budget to direct Jake Gyllenhaal as an Air Force helicopter pilot who's drafted into a top secret government science project.

Captain Colter Stevens wakes up on board a commuter train, in a body that is not his own. Everyone else sees him as the man he appears to have inhabited, a teacher called Sean Fentress, including Sean's colleague Christina. Eight minutes later, the train explodes, bombed by an unknown attacker. In a cramped capsule at a government facility, Colter is repeatedly put through those eight minutes by a technology called source code, with the goal of discovering the bomber's identity before he strikes again in the real world.

Following The Adjustment Bureau and Limitless in recent weeks, Source Code presents itself as another more intelligent sci-fi, driven by characters and generally very well executed. Duncan Jones is once again directing from a script that is not his, but he still indelibly makes it his own film. It shares some of the same themes as Moon, and some selected shots of Jake Gyllenhaal in isolation that echo those in the earlier film.

Of the script however, it has to be said that the wrong director could have easily gone off the rails with it. Imagining Tony Scott directing this script is a concept that... well, it's actually remarkably like Deja Vu, a Scott film in which frequent collaborator Denzel Washington plays a cop tasked with travelling back in time to prevent a terrorist attack. The easy distinction to make here is that Source Code does not uphold the idea that the past can be changed, instead opting for a multiversal approach.

Each time Colter attempts his mission, it creates a new reality, and there's always the sense that those realities go on even after Colter reawakens in his capsule. It's a fascinating conceit, and one that leads to the maximum amount of emotional turmoil for the pilot as he falls in love with Michelle Monaghan's Christina. Monaghan is a vastly underappreciated actress, and she makes the most out of what is essentially an underwritten character, getting the audience on-side from the offset.

Gyllenhaal is less distinctive but no less accomplished in the lead role. Jones' leading man from Moon, Sam Rockwell could arguably have pulled it off better, but it's certainly not bad casting. It pains me to say that the single instance of bad casting, which almost pulled down the whole movie for me, involves the usually reliable Jeffrey Wright. He channels Shatner as Professor Rutledge, hamming it up in a performance that really belongs in another movie. By contrast, Vera Farmiga, with whom he shares most of his scenes, is the very picture of restraint and consideration.

The best thing to say in the film's favour is that it never seems repetitive, even for a moment. This is a plot that is predicated upon a character repeating the last eight minutes of a man's life ad infinitum, doing things a little differently each time, and it always feels fresh. The premise reminded me a little of Quantum Leap, and to that effect, Jones cast Scott Bakula in a short cameo. That's just one example of the intertextual nous at Jones' disposal, which complements and enhances his visionary approach.

It's a nimble watch at 93 minutes, and as far as its denouement, it seems to occupy the same headspace as Back to the Future. Neither that film nor Source Code particularly bothered to ground the mechanics of their central apparatus in actually established scientific knowledge, and both films circumnavigate their plotholes by being accessible and hugely entertaining. Duncan Jones continues to be an exciting filmmaker, and long may he continue to exhibit his beating heart as much as his brain, in clever and touching sci-fi features like this one.

Source Code is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Source Code, why not share your comments below? It's my birthday today, so be nice.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

LIMITLESS- Review

After the last few weeks of bombardment from Battle Los Angeles and No Strings Attached, a quick fix of intelligence sounds just as appealing to me as it does to Bradley Cooper's character in the new sci-fi thriller Limitless. Chuck in the fact that he's a struggling writer who quickly gets stressed out when more stuff comes into his life, and it could have been made for me.

Eddie is our hero's name, and it's purely by chance that he's fixed up with an experimental drug called NZT, by his scummy ex-brother-in-law. NZT is a transparent tablet, about the size of an aspirin, but its consumption stimulates the receptors of the human brain and boosts the body's access to its potential. Eddie begins quaffing pills right away, little realising the price of his newfound intelligence.

For a while, Limitless was reminding me of Fight Club, in places replicating that film's dark humour, mode of storytelling, and overwhelming righteous anger at The Way Things Are. Certainly, it is to Bradley Cooper what Fight Club was to Brad Pitt, giving Cooper a chance to really work his acting chops and open him up to a second appraisal after the frat comedies and romcoms he's made his name in. And while we're talking about Cooper, I was very impressed at how he convinced me as a loser just as much as he convinced as the successful and handsome bloke he really is, later on in the film. But it took a while longer for me to twig exactly what the film reminded me of as a whole, and that's Unbreakable.

NZT effectively makes Eddie into a man of superhuman intelligence, not only able to recall everything he has ever learned and apply it to his current life but also capable of learning new things at an exponential rate. If they'd wanted to take it that way, the filmmakers could have made this a superhero origin story. But while Bruce Willis' character in Unbreakable was a suburban Superman, his invulnerability seemingly natural, Eddie's powers are fuelled by narcotics, but more pertinently, using hypothetical science that messes with nature, in the view of fuddy-duddy conservative Hollywood.

So it's a Faustian tale, and thusly, the pitfalls of addiction are thoroughly examined. As you might expect of a pill sourced from a random acquaintance with a history of being an unreliable drug dealing bastard, it has chemical faults that manifest themselves in the course of Eddie's addiction, but that's not all. The title is Limitless, but Eddie's intellectual omnipotence isn't immune to other people. While you can anticipate the greed of others or, as the film puts it, the human tendency to overreach, you can't always stop external forces from messing up your life.

Director Neil Burger pulls off a great bit of visual storytelling in representing Eddie's addiction. In the beginning of the story, the visuals are bleached, drab and milky. When Eddie first swallows that clear pill and lets it take effect, the world brightens up, illuminated by sunshine and broadened by a wide-angle lens that allows him to see everything in front of him. In a period where he goes cold turkey, it's drab and milky again, but still clear. And once he's fixed up again, that sunshine starts to look awful bright. Blinding, even. The effects don't change, but the context does, and it's very clever stuff.

But unfortunately, the limits of the film aren't just within the story- they're outside of it too, in the script and in the production. With a great head of momentum building between Eddie's successes and his addiction to the drug, the film ultimately doesn't have enough in it to give us a strong conclusion. It does that thing that annoyed me in The Adjustment Bureau, of jumping forward in time, but these scenes feels after the fact in the wake of the climactic scenes preceding it. As is human nature then, the film overreaches.

This is where the comedown begins. You gradually begin to realise that the film isn't as clever as it thinks, or indeed, as clever as you thought up until that point. The high of the earlier part of the film begins to dissipate, and coming down allows you to realise, as you plummet towards the credits and then walk out of the cinema, that you can't account for certain plotholes. Is that subplot really not going to come back? Is that really it for that character? Wait, what was that all about? And one of the early highlights of the movie, when Eddie outright asks the audience what they would do in his situation, given the risk, is negated by the way the film closes the book on any persistent ambiguities about the pros and cons of NZT.

Another recent Faust-inspired movie, Philip Ridley's Heartless, had more heart than the title would suggest. Similarly, Limitless is a good film, but one with more inhibitions than either its title or its pacey swagger would suggest. I was enthralled enough by the premise and Bradley Cooper's performance to give it a rock-solid recommendation, and I stand by that. However, its inconsistencies and its closed-minded conclusion mean that ironically, it's a film for which you might need to leave your brain at the door, if only to avoid the subsequent comedown.

Limitless is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Limitless, why not share your comments below? And yes, I know Robert DeNiro was in this too. When he gives an interesting performance, I'll have something to say.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU- Review

In the echelons of inaccurate pull-quotes, there shall be a special place for the Total Film assessment of the snappily titled sci-fi romance, The Adjustment Bureau, which appears on the poster and in many of the TV spots. Total Film called it "Bourne Meets Inception", when it's not really like either of those things, but hey, we're in a week where everything is "Bourne Meets" something or other.

So, what The Adjustment Bureau is really like is the Phillip K. Dick story from which it was inspired. David is a Congressman who looks set for a meteoric rise in the world of politics. He has a chance encounter with a dancer called Elise, and he's instantly smitten. However, when he meets her again a short while later, a powerful force interferes. A bureau of men in hats and suits posit that David and Elise were never meant to meet again, and they try their utmost to rectify the course of the plan that is rapidly unravelling as this couple fall deeper and deeper in love.

If we have to compare The Adjustment Bureau to something other than what it actually is, which is a romantic thriller with an otherworldly and theological concept, the comparison that most immediately struck me while watching it was with A Matter of Life and Death. Particularly in its later movements, the similarities are obvious when you're looking at a film about a couple trying to prove that they're destined to be together, even in the face of a higher force that is trying to divide them.  

A Matter of Life and Death is one of my favourite films of all time, so this film would inevitably suffer from that comparison, but it also means that I enjoyed it quite a lot. The masterstroke as far as this one is concerned is either in the casting or in what the lead actors managed to construct when they were thrown together. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are on fire in this film, whenever they appear together, with a scorching and yet very charming chemistry that really gets you on side.

However, throughout their extended Meet-Cute scenes, the sci-fi elements are established via these men in hats and suits being rather sinister in what they believe is doing right by David and Elise. In the lower rankings of the titular bureau, you get Anthony Mackie, who's ultimately quite friendly and pragmatic, but further up, you get the more rigid and authoritarian John Slattery. Go higher, and you get Terence "General Zod" Stamp, which gives a sense of the ingrained values of this powerful organisation.

They are the opposing force in what is basically a debate about determinism, and the role of free will. If there's a problem with the film, it is that the rules are too vaguely established. We are intended to follow that the Adjustment Bureau give human beings less individual choice in their own destinies because actual free will is a failed experiment that threw up the Dark Ages, two world wars and the Cuban missile crisis. That doesn't explain how their level of control allows for the current atrocities committed all over the world after those events.

These men work in mysterious ways, which is as much as I'm prepared to say without just spitting it out and telling you what we're meant to figure out ourselves while watching the film. In that framework, I can kind of forgive the film some of its vagaries, not least because it's just a very engaging watch. On the downside, I was less enamored of the abrupt time-skips that were brought in throughout the film, because nothing disrupts the momentum more than a sudden "Three years later". The film doesn't exactly outstay its welcome, but there are surely better and more inventive ways to illustrate a vast leap in the narrative.

The Adjustment Bureau was put back to this month from its original release date last summer, and despite having highly anticipated it for a long time, I can now appreciate the wisdom of that decision. In a relatively quiet month at the cinema, it has room to breathe, rather than being shot out of a cannon as counter-programming to Piranha or The Expendables. It's very easy to like, and slightly harder to dismiss some of its flaws, but crucially, it pitches a compelling romance between Damon and Blunt while working through a passage between romantic thriller and sci-fi parable.

The Adjustment Bureau is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen The Adjustment Bureau, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

NEVER LET ME GO- Review

Enough of last week's review of The Fighter was given over to me bitching about how Mark Wahlberg has been overlooked this awards season, which was me placing far too much importance in other people's views on filmmaking excellence. So I'm only going to say it once here and then leave it- Never Let Me Go has been robbed of the awards season kudos it so richly deserves.

Based on Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go is a science fiction drama centred in an alternate history where scientific advances in medicine have surpassed all terminal diseases. The price for this is that generation upon generation are essentially groomed to serve a single purpose throughout their entire lifetime. Three young'uns- Kathy, Tommy and Ruth- become unusually close during their time at a special boarding school called Hailsham, and grow up together, on their way to an uncertain future.

Science fiction is the correct term there. Not "sci-fi", which is to science what calling Christmas "Xmas" is to Christians. Sci-fi allows for such woolly movie science as seen in the films of Roland Emmerich, in which Professor Exposito is able to explain how and why the polar ice caps are about to explode and kill everyone. The science at hand here is already a tangible achievement, and Ishiguro's novel, and now Mark Romanek's film version both explore what happens when that science advances so far that the produce become just that- products. And for this amongst other reasons, the film is one that you want to savour, frame by frame, to properly appreciate everything brilliant about it.

One of the clever things we see in Never Let Me Go is that it doesn't actually bring in Professor Exposito to explain through dialogue what's happening to our three heroes, but allows the visuals to speak volumes about the world that the film inhabits. This includes the creepy omnipresence of an ID scanner inside the door of every abode we see them enter or exit, but also the continuous allusions to the day that they will "complete". This in particular feels true to the British setting, utilising the stereotypical repression and politeness of our nationality to convey something that's much nastier than it actually sounds. The sophisticated world building is just visible enough, without overshadowing the more prominent character drama at its heart.

Alex Garland's adaptation of the book provokes a deep pity for Kathy, Tommy and Ruth as much as it invites sympathy for their plight. Their upbringing, ostensibly a happy one, is shadowed by their impending completions. These are products of the world we see in Never Let Me Go, not seen as people but as human storage spaces. We, the audience, are let in on the deep and personal relationship these three characters share, letting us know they're people too, even if nobody else seems to notice. It also sets us up for a fall right along with them.

Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield are at the top of their game as Ruth and Tommy, each perfectly projecting the idea of compromised identity. Knightley's character turns out as a de facto antagonist, but only so far as that her fear of death manifests itself more selfishly than her friends', and Garfield is so good that it's actually a real shame his next role will be as Peter Parker. I'm sure he'll be good, but it's difficult to imagine what he can possibly do with that role that would be as arresting or as moving as the pitch-perfect performance he turns in here.

Carey Mulligan might be less challenged by the comparatively brighter audience in-point embodied by Kathy, but she's still terrific. She's got screen crying down to a fine art- it always seems to come naturally and sudden to her, without any need to gurn to start the tears rolling, in a way that's very convincing. In a much smaller role as a teacher at Hailsham, Sally Hawkins proves to be the most dazzling thing in the film, bar Andrew Garfield. She has only a few scenes, but she exits the film with an indelibly haunting monologue to her class. Hawkins is one of my favourite actresses working today, and she's pure class in an already very classy film.

As much as I'm eager to mark it as a science fiction film, it also does more than enough to earn its tag as a weepy. Bizarrely, some people seem to be calling it an emotionally cold film. The bleakness and difficulty of tone cannot and must not be mistaken for a lack of emotional substance. This film is about the most penetrating and compassionate kind of love, and its characters are as sympathetic as they are pitiable. Mark Romanek sucks you into the film and then shatters your heart into a million pieces. I was never going to hold this up as a Valentine's date movie, but what's the point in conforming when this is by far the least commercial film released this Friday and it's this damn good?

The biggest disappointment relating to the awards bigwigs overlooking Never Let Me Go is that nominating a film like this for awards normally gets audiences interested. Looking at the rest of this week's releases, I will inevitably find myself saddened when next week's box office figures come out and it turns out that more people saw that new Adam Sandler movie than this touching and excellently constructed love story. The cast are fantastic without exception, the direction is sumptuous and the story, though rife with injustice and gloom, is profoundly moving and still fairly accessible. It's a film that deserves more praise than it's getting, so please go and see it.

Never Let Me Go is showing in cinemas nationwide from February 11th.
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If you've seen Never Let Me Go, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.