By Brett Blake Any time we arrive at the fifth film in a franchise, it’s worth considering the potential options the filmmakers had before them. Do they reboot, and take everything back to basics? Do they change things up, and deliver a new take with a new vision? Or do they just give us more of the same? PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES is absolutely more of the same, for better or worse, though objectively it’s the most competently-constructed of the series since DEAD MAN’S CHEST. It offers up a production of giant proportions (all of the money is up on the screen, as they say) and no small amount of energetic fun. It won’t win over any new fans to the franchise, but those who’ve stuck with it up to this point will likely find themselves having a good time with it. The story concerns Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites), a young man who seeks to release his father, William Turner (Orlando Bloom), from a curse which traps him as the undead captain of the dreaded Flying Dutchman for eternity. Henry’s plan revolves around a search for the mythical Trident of Poseidon, which is said to be able to break any curse. Also searching for the Trident is a ship of ghostly pirate slayers led by Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem), who also has a personal vendetta against the one man Henry needs to help him find the Trident... Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Along with an intrepid young astronomer named Carina (Kaya Scodelario), Henry and Jack race to beat Salazar - and Jack’s sometimes foe, sometimes ally Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) - to the Trident. If that sounds in any way convoluted, that’s because it is. The story is unapologetically convoluted, with key beats hinging on which character has Jack’s magical compass at what time, or which set of characters on which ship are headed to which locale and when. The movie, rather cheerfully, doesn’t dwell on the logistics of how its plot works, and that’s probably for the best, considering that the least-good movie in this series, AT WORLD’S END, became almost incomprehensible for some due to its labyrinthine plotting. DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES makes enough sense as you’re watching it that the plot holes don’t leap out immediately. Over the course of the complex shenanigans, though, there’s an undeniable sense of nautical adventure and mischief that is quite appealing. The action sequences, though often more on the funny and silly side, have an energy and an inventiveness that does remind of the franchise’s heyday with THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL and DEAD MAN’S CHEST. The first big setpiece, involving the attempted robbery of a bank vault, is impressively preposterous, as is a delightfully goofy sequence where Jack and Henry are attacked by rotting zombie sharks. Aiding the action is very solid cinematography; a dodgy digital shot here and there aside, the visuals are splashy and colorful, and even downright beautiful at times. There’s a sequence set on a hidden island of volcanic rock which is embedded with thousands of sparkling jewels, gems, and diamonds that is one of the more striking photographic moments in the series. Javier Bardem, despite wearing a layer of makeup and CGI enhancements, commits to the role of Salazar. Save for a small handful of moments, he plays the role straight, and deftly projects the seething, nearly righteous anger and subtly wounded pride of this man who blames Jack Sparrow (correctly) for the predicament of himself and his crew. Geoffrey Rush is once again a pleasure as Barbossa, Jack Sparrow’s frequent piratical adversary, though Rush finds himself saddled with an emotional subplot that feels out of place. He does his very best to sell it, and almost manages to make it work, but it feels both unearned and totally out of character based on everything we’ve ever seen from Barbossa in the previous movies. Though Barbossa is very entertaining, he’s narratively misused here. Brenton Thwaites proves to be a fine successor to Orlando Bloom... in the sense that he competently plays the straight man to the more colorful and interesting characters in the story. There’s an earnest quality about Thwaites that is nice, but his Henry is easily the least compelling major player in this tale. He’s upstaged by Kaya Scodelario, who takes the cliched “fiery and smart young woman in a man’s world” and does a lot with it; she projects a keen wit and in-your-face independence which makes her a quite engaging presence. She’s also tasked with handling much of the gobbledygooky exposition (and there’s a lot of it), and she does so in ways that feel fairly natural. Being entirely unfamiliar with her before this film, Scodelario seems like a real find. Then, of course, we have the legend that is Captain Jack Sparrow, and there’s something weird going on with Johnny Depp this time around. I mean, granted, his Jack Sparrow has always been weird, but the issue in this film is that Sparrow has essentially become a parody of himself. To be fair, the movie does attempt to give a story justification for this (Jack is down on his luck and has hit the bottle even harder than usual), but if you go back and watch the first PIRATES movie, you will find that Sparrow is not merely a funny, buffoonish character; he’s got a sharp mind, and his antics more often feel like a put-on persona than anything else. The next three films slowly stepped away from that and embraced the drunken goofiness more and more, until we finally arrive at DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES, where we’re presented with the most broad version of Jack Sparrow we’ve seen so far. But here’s the rub... I still found that enjoyable. That’s the truly weird part of this. Perhaps against my better judgment, I found myself willing to be pulled along by the mugging and silliness of what Sparrow’s up to. Objectively, I think the characterization and usage of Sparrow in the screenplay is problematic on narrative and continuity levels, and the degree to which you’re still able to enjoy what Depp’s doing will likely determine how successful you think the overall movie is. I was entertained by him. That’s sort of the movie in a nutshell. At the end of the day, if you’ve (more or less) liked the previous movies, you will find things to like in here. If you haven’t, you probably won’t. Despite having problems with the shameless mumbo jumbo of the plot and the inconsistent characterizations, enough buckles were swashed for me to enjoy my time with DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES.
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By Brett Blake ALIEN: COVENANT is a difficult movie to review. Looking at it as objectively as possible, this is a film with some serious issues on a narrative level (and a few on an execution level). It tries to achieve two different and competing goals - be a spiritual and thematic successor to PROMETHEUS, and be a visceral, gory monster movie in the vein of the first two ALIEN movies - and neither goal feels truly of-a-piece with the other. And yet... I can’t say I didn’t enjoy my time with the movie. For all its flaws, the visual command of director Ridley Scott and all the associated strong craft work that goes along with that were enough to pull me through. The film kicks off with the crew of the colonization ship Covenant being awakened by a solar disturbance. Once awake, the crew - comprised of various people, but most importantly Daniels (Katherine Waterston), Tennessee (Danny McBride), Oram (Billy Crudup), and android Walter (Michael Fassbender) - receive a strange transmission which draws them to a mysterious Earth-like planet. Setting down on the planet to investigate, the crew soon find themselves confronted by terrifying alien lifeforms, apparently overseen by David (also Fassbender), the sole survivor of the doomed Prometheus mission from 10 years earlier (as seen in PROMETHEUS). Other reviews have said this, but it’s accurate, so worth repeating: the movie feels like a blend of PROMETHEUS, ALIEN, and ALIENS. We’ve got the philosophical and theological underpinnings that PROMETHEUS brought to the table, the more measured and deliberately-paced horror elements of ALIEN, and the action movie sensibility (particularly in the third act) of ALIENS. In some ways, this is an uneasy balance, as those three films are incredibly different from each other. This isn’t a film hurting for ideas, but there’s a tension between the more pretentious aims of PROMETHEUS and the more violent, monster movie horror/action that Scott all but surely mandated be included here after some were underwhelmed by the scarcity of that stuff in PROMETHEUS. Primarily this story is a sequel to PROMETHEUS, but where PROMETHEUS seemed overly preoccupied with its themes (some might say at the expense of everything else), this movie manages to better incorporate those ideas into a horror and action movie framework. Thematic ideas are not sacrificed, but are eased into place where they might have been hammered home in the previous film. There’s a trade-off, though. While the movie acquits itself (mostly) fine thematically, the actual plotting of the narrative leaves something to be desired. The structure is a fairly conventional retread of ALIEN, so much so that those very familiar with the rhythm of that story will likely be able to “feel” when certain story turns/developments are on the horizon here. There’s also an incredibly obvious, forced “twist” in the third act that is so predictable as to be vaguely insulting to the audience. Additionally, for narrative expediency the movie plays extremely fast and extremely loose with the nature and duration of the traditional alien life cycle in ways that are strikingly blatant and contradictory to the first ALIEN movie. These issues will be deal-breakers for some people, and that’s fair enough. For me, they drop the movie down a few pegs, but don’t totally sink it. As with any Ridley Scott film, ALIEN: COVENANT looks absolutely stellar. Scott is tremendously at ease with a production of this scale, and though none of the design elements reinvent the wheel, Scott puts them on the screen in ways that are compelling and entertaining. There’s an admirable usage of big-scale, practical sets and real locations, and the movie feels more impressive and grand than it otherwise might have if the production had been too green screen heavy. Additionally, the alien/creature horror is effectively handled, even if most of the big moments are slightly more intense, amped-up riffs on things we’ve seen in past entries of this series. The gore is in-your-face, wet, and freely-flowing, which is something genre fans should certainly appreciate, and the major new creature design has an eerie and unsettling visage that feels like an appropriate cousin to the more familiar title alien. There is one big caveat to the creature work, however: the usage of CGI instead of practical aliens is often pretty blatant and - at times - unconvincing. By the time we get to the third act, with fully-animated classic xenomorphs running and jumping around in daylight, the creature that was once a frightening denizen of the shadows loses a little bit of the mystique. The members of the cast all do fine work with (admittedly) fairly surface-level characters. Waterston and Crudup (who may be the sneaky MVP of the movie) get a complicated dynamic to play and invest their parts with as much depth as they can, while McBride surprises for the way he so naturally slips into a grounded “straight” role. But, given that Fassbender has a dual role here, it’s no surprise that he takes center stage, and the movie is all the better for it. His Walter is markedly different in personality from David, and Fassbender expertly illustrates these differences in overt (accents) and subtle (body language) ways. Every scene in which Fassbender - as either character - is a focus is great, and the moments he gets to play opposite himself are some of the strongest scenes in the movie. The film is obsessed with the concept of creation, and it uses these two characters to really drive at that. Walter respects humans as creatures capable of the incredible ingenuity and talent to create artificial life such as himself; David is totally dismissive of humans, seeing them as nothing more than fodder for his own creation experiments. He sees himself - a creation of man - as superior to man, godlike, and fully justified in pursuing morally questionable (and dangerous) experimentation. Fassbender sells this aspect of David with a chilling, fascinatingly unhinged quality which suggests the character has totally lost his (artificial) mind in the time since PROMETHEUS ended. As much as the screenplay tries to make Waterston’s Daniels the center of the story, it’s the Walter/David dynamic that truly feels like beating heart of the tale. Their discussions - about creativity, literature, human emotion - are totally compelling. I would hesitate to call ALIEN: COVENANT a “style over substance” movie because I think there is some legitimate substance here. Its faults are not with its intentions, but with the execution of some of its intentions on the page. Ridley Scott is someone whose particular brand of filmmaking I generally find very appealing, and that’s no different here. There’s enough good present to unashamedly recommend the movie for fans of Scott and/or the ALIEN series, but I suspect those with little attachment to either will be left somewhat cold. At the end of the day, it's the third-best ALIEN movie. Whether or not you think that's damning with faint praise will probably determine whether or not this is a film you're going to enjoy. Ultimately, I enjoyed it. By Brett Blake There are few tales as familiar and recognizable as the King Arthur legend. Just about everybody knows at least something about it, and its primary players and concepts have passed beyond iconic to become their own mythology: Excalibur, Camelot, Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table, the Lady of the Lake, and so on. The task with creating a new film about this story, then, becomes a matter of identity - how do you take the familiar tale and make it fresh and relevant? Director Guy Ritchie’s answer to that question seems to be to take the bare essentials of what everybody already knows, strip away some of the more iconic elements (or at least hold them back for a hypothetical sequel), and focus fairly narrowly on Arthur Pendragon’s rise after pulling Excalibur from the stone. The end result, KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD, is arguably better and more entertaining than it probably should be, propelled by a game cast and an ambitious embrace of the magical and weird. Does the movie bring enough new things to the table to justify its existence? Basically, yes. It plays fast and loose with the lore, but ultimately I think we have to allow filmmakers the room to try new things with a story that is as many centuries old as this one. On the hugely positive front, this is no “grounded” or “realistic” take on the classic story. It makes no apologies for being high fantasy, complete with magical creatures and monsters of all sorts, incantations, spells, prophecies, and a sword which turns its rightful holder into basically an unstoppable superhero. If nothing else, this is clearly the most fantastical (in a good way) interpretation of the Arthurian legend, and there’s a good bit of imagery in the film that is beautifully striking. Some may have had concerns with the look of this stuff being too reminiscent of GAME OF THRONES or LORD OF THE RINGS, but director Ritchie very much imbues things with a certain distinctiveness. There’s a conscious attempt here on the part of Ritchie and his collaborators to paint Arthur as just a guy from the streets, someone who doesn’t know his birthright (nor particularly cares), and is just trying to get by in the medieval world. This approach ran the risk of making Arthur basically a kind of rascally asshole, but Charlie Hunnam sells the character as fundamentally human, with a streak of decency that grows wider as the story progresses, and while the narrative doesn’t conclude with him having yet fully become the Arthur of the legend, the trajectory is there. Positioned as his adversary is Jude Law, who delivers a performance which has the right amount of scenery chewing without ever fully going over the top; his character is also given some humanizing moments which clash with his more overt acts of evil, and this adds some nice nuance... though it also makes the character feel a bit on the schizophrenic side. That may be a side effect of the editing. It’s possible that Law’s character was a bit differently conceived in an earlier cut, because the overall editing of the film itself leads one to believe we’re seeing a truncated or shifted-around version of what was originally planned. There is an energy to the cutting and the pacing (indeed, Ritchie’s handling of the early sections, which are constructed with heavy montage and flashback, feels aggressively modern, but it somehow works), but it does feel disjointed at times, particularly the midsection and the aforementioned characterization of Law’s villain. I’d wager there’s a significantly longer version of this movie sitting on a hard drive somewhere, and I’d be interested to see how different it might be. All told, KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD is perfectly fine summer viewing. It doesn’t break any new ground whatsoever, but it does put a contemporary spin on the classic legend, and there’s enough weird magical shenanigans to entertains fans of the fantasy genre. By Brett Blake The first GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY was a classic example of capturing lightning in a bottle. When it was announced, nobody took it seriously or expected all that much from it, but as it turns out, not only did it make a lot of money, it was actually a great movie. It was the best kind of surprise, because nobody knew what to expect. GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 now faces a different challenge. Not skepticism or disinterest, but expectation. Most people liked the first movie - a lot - so now the standard has been set, and VOL. 2 has a lot to live up to. So how does it fare? Thankfully, quite well. It’s worth saying right up front that it is not as good as the first film, and it lacks the straightforward narrative of the first, but it’s big, bright, exuberant fun. This is a blockbuster with both humor and heart, and writer/director James Gunn gives us more of the characters we enjoyed the first time around, but also sends them on some interesting (and very human) journeys in this sequel. The marketing for the film has given away very few plot points, so I’ll mostly stick with those: we find the Guardians of the Galaxy - Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (Dave Bautista), Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper), and Baby Groot (Vin Diesel) - on a mission for a group of golden-colored people called The Sovereign, led by their regal ruler Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki). When Rocket’s hijinks cause The Sovereign to violently turn on them, the Guardians are split into groups and sent off on several adventures, reuniting with familiar characters like Yondu (Michael Rooker) and Gamora’s psychotic sister, Nebula (Karen Gillan), while also meeting a handful of new faces, including Mantis (Pom Klementieff), an empathetic alien, and Ego (Kurt Russell), an incredibly powerful, nearly godlike force... and Peter’s long-lost father. Where this movie excels (as in the first film) is in the character department. James Gunn clearly had storytelling and thematic goals for all of the major players here, and the payoff is a roster of extremely likable and fun people... who also happen to be damaged in some way (generally emotionally or psychologically, but sometimes physically). On top of all the wonderful humor and wild action setpieces, we have a truly emotional and surprising human story about accepting yourself and others, flaws and all, and about what family and belonging really mean. All the Guardians have arcs (some bigger than others, admittedly) that hammer home these themes in different ways, and they’re all effective. More than anything, this movie has an incredibly big, emotional heart, and as silly and cosmically weird as it gets (and boy does it get weird!), there’s a fundamentally grounded, human quality at play all the way through. The returning Guardians cast all do very good work here (and Baby Groot may be the cutest creation to ever appear in a motion picture), but I’d like to focus in on one of the returning supporting players and two of the newcomers to this series: Michael Rooker, Pom Klementieff, and Kurt Russell. Rooker, quite simply, steals the entire film with a gruff, funny, and wounded turn as Yondu, a character played almost entirely for laughs in the first film but who reveals himself to have some legitimately emotional layers to him this time out (he also is the focus of the movie’s single best scene, which is a certified showstopper also involving Rocket and Baby Groot). Klementieff proves to be a delightful addition to the roster, playing her empath character with an intense and eager earnestness that is, frankly, adorable and charming, and her energy compliments her costars quite well (particularly Bautista). And then we have the man himself, Kurt Russell. The advertising has treated Russell’s character, Ego, very carefully, so I’ll honor that by not getting into specifics, but I can say this: Russell is absolutely fantastic in this, playing up an almost goofy, cliched version of his 1980s persona before finally revealing a level of pathos and intensity that is striking. I wish I could speak freely about his work here, because I really think it’s great and worth examining and praising in detail. I guess that will have to wait! The weakest element of the movie is the actual narrative itself. It has thematic concerns (which are well serviced), but not great plot concerns. That’s not to say there is no narrative, because there certainly is, but there’s an extremely laid-back quality to it; we’re not propelled forward through the story so much as we’re mostly hanging out with the characters in situations. Literally a good chunk of the middle of the movie has several of the Guardians just hanging out with Ego, and not doing much more than having character interactions. These interactions are universally good, don’t misunderstand, but there’s not really a major driving force in this story until some important revelations are made at the beginning of the third act. The movie is structured in a radically different way from the first, as the bulk of this film has the Guardians team split-up into separate plotlines (which do eventually converge); some will find this compounds the easy-going narrative, but a case could be made it gives the movie a greater variety of sequences to play with. A huge component of these movies is the music, and the songs are again wonderfully implemented here, delivering even more of an emotional impact at key moments than ever before. The score by Tyler Bates is also strong, as are all of the technical categories, particularly sound design and visual effects; Baby Groot and Rocket have such incredible expressiveness that you totally buy them as real characters. In the final analysis, I had a great time with GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2, and I suspect most fans of the first will find a ton to enjoy. Nothing can recapture the shockingly good surprise of the previous movie, but VOL. 2 expands on the characters, lets them grow a bit, and let’s us as an audience spend some time with these terrifically fun people. I call that a big win.
By Brett Blake
Breanne Brennan joins me for another of our annual traditions: analysis and speculation about the Summer Movie Season that is literally only hours away from kicking off with the release of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2. We work our way through the months of May, June, July, and August, and attempt to at least touch all the major (and some minor) movies headed our way!
If you’re interested in following along, here’s the lineup of films we cover in our discussion. Clicking on the titles will take you to the films' trailers!
MAY - Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (5th) - King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (12th) - Alien: Covenant (19th) - Baywatch (25th) - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (26th) JUNE - Wonder Woman (2nd) - The Mummy (9th) - It Comes at Night (9th) - Cars 3 (16th) - The Book of Henry (16th) - Transformers: The Last Knight (23rd) - Baby Driver (28th) - The Beguiled (30th) - Despicable Me 3 (30th) JULY - Spider-Man: Homecoming (7th) - War for the Planet of the Apes (14th) - Dunkirk (21st) - Atomic Blonde (28th) AUGUST - The Dark Tower (4th) - Annabelle: Creation (11th) Note: In our discussion of THE DARK TOWER, we reference the concerning fact that - at the time of our recording - we had yet to see a trailer for the film. As it happens, the first trailer arrived this morning! Disclaimer: The Cinematic Confab is a non-profit entertainment and analysis podcast. All audio clips and music cues used are the property of their individual copyright holders. They are presented here under the banner of “Fair Use,” for the purpose of analysis, criticism, and/or humor. No infringement of copyright is intended. |
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