Annabelle - Film Review

Annabelle is the latest offering in the long-running line of horror thrillers inspired by the Japanese New Wave Horror era of the late 1990s and early 2000s that saw the release of films such as Ringu, adapted in the US as The Ring, Dark Water, Pulse, Audition and Ju on; the original version of The Grudge. Australian-raised James Wan took the Western horror genre and gave it all new life with 2004’s Saw, a film whose story and tone borrowed heavily from the Japanese New Wave. It’s no surprise to see Wan’s name on the credits of Annabelle, as this new film is a follow-up to Wan’s massively successful horror offering from 2013, The Conjuring.

Annabelle is set in the same universe as The Conjuring, serving as a prologue to the events that would take place in Wan’s film. The screenplay, by specialist horror scribe Gary Dauberman, takes place in late 1969 and cleverly weaves into its narrative the fear that gripped Los Angeles in light of the Tate-LaBianca committed by Manson Family members in August that year. The story introduces a young couple, Annabelle Wallis as Mia & Ward Horton as John, who are devoted Catholics expecting their first child. Mia and John’s life is thrown into turmoil when their next door neighbours are murdered in a frenzied attack by two intruders. John is attacked by one of the intruders when he goes to his neighbour’s to investigate, but the other intruder, a female, manages to slip into Mia and John’s house. The woman, who seems possessed by some unworldly force, tells Mia that she likes the antique doll that John has bought her as a special gift to help finalise her collection. The woman is soon joined by her cohort and the pair viciously attacks Mia. John, realising his wife is in mortal danger, rushes back to their house to save Mia. By this time, the police have arrived and shoot the male attacker. The female attacker rushes into the adjourning soon-to-be baby nursery and commits suicide; her blood running from a gaping neck wound down into the eye socket of the antique doll. From this point forward in the story, some serious demonic intimidation takes place.

It’s hard not to compare Annabelle to The Conjuring because of the narrative link between the two films and, unfortunately for this latest movie, it’s never quite as menacing or atmospheric as the latter. Despite a good set-up and use of the historical references, Dauberman’s script is unable to sustain its intensity and relies too heavily on clichéd narrative tropes to drive suspense. In the time-honoured tradition of the “lone female going somewhere alone in the dark”, one set-piece sees Mia leave he new-born baby alone in their apartment to and put some cardboard in the couple’s basement storage lock-up. Even movie-goers not familiar with the horror genre will find it difficult to believe that the character, after several extremely unusual occurrences in the couple’s apartment, would leave their child alone and venture off alone … Having said that, the ensuing scene in the basement and malfunctioning lift will give viewers pause to think next time they’re alone in a lift as to what they may be confronted with when the doors open!

As far as performances go, Annabelle Wallis & Ward Horton are a cute couple up on the screen, but are pretty wooden in their delivery. They play their characters with a mixture of nerdy cluelessness that wears thin after it becomes clear that they’re in real danger. Annabelle Wallis picks up the tempo in the final act; benefiting greatly from the arrival of Alfre Woodard’s character of Evelyn. Woodard brings a combination of jittery resignation to her part that help to legitimise the torment that Mia has been suffering. Tony Amendola as Father Perez comes in and out of the story but plays a role in helping both John and Mia to try and understand what they are truly battling against. TV character actor Erik Ladin is the film’s other most notable actor in the role of Police Detective Clarkin. It’s only a small role, but his character plays a vital expository role in helping Mia to understand the background of the attacks from the beginning of the film and their connection to events later in the story.

Experienced cinematographer John R. Leonetti takes the directing reign on Annabelle, having served as Director of Photography on The Conjuring for James Wan. Leonetti’s inexperience as a director goes some way to explaining the woodiness of his two leads, but his framing of scenes is excellent and he, along with cinematographer James Kneist, manage to get the most out of their set-ups. Annabelle’s film editing is somewhat of a let-down, as Leonetti and Film Editor Tom Elkins miss some opportunities to ramp up the scare-factor. One sequence with Tony Amendola’s Father Perez could have been one of the great car ride sequences, but it falls flat as the shot selections and pacing are too short and sharp to build the kind of nerve-twisting tension that Dauberman’s screenplay was aiming for. One of the highlights of Annabelle is its desire to depict the late 60s as faithfully as possible and it’s a credit to the whole production that the film achieves a level of visual authenticity that makes it stand-out in this department.

Annabelle will, without doubt, have its fans. The film’s connection to The Conjuring will make sure of that. It’s a solid piece of horror-suspense film-making that delivers enough scares to make it worth the price of a movie ticket without being a truly great entry into the genre. 

The Giver - Film Review

The Giver is a very odd movie. It features a couple of very appealing young actors in Australia’s Brenton Thwaites as Jonas and Odeya Rush as Fiona; the film’s leads. It has the presence of Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep in key supporting roles. It even has a small role for singer Taylor Swift designed, no doubt, to appeal to the young adults who buy her music. The film is directed by Phillip Noyce, another Australian with a wealth of film-making experience dating back to the 1970s, who has directed some great action thriller movies. It’s based on the controversial but very successful book of the same name, written by author Lois Lowry. Yet, The Giver lacks focus and feels too much like a series of scenes tied together by quick-cuts of home movies that serve to fill the space in places where it should be creating its own dramatic moments but, instead, relies on stock footage to convey the emotion it wants it characters and its audience to feel.

The challenge of adapting The Giver into a movie is highlighted in the visualisation of the drab, emotionless, colourless, homogenous society in which the bulk of the story takes place. As with many young adult science fiction stories, this one is set in a dystopian future where some kind of “climate event” has forced the creation of a large-scale secured community, where individuality is not allowed, the inhabitants are drugged and the government of “elders” rule by way of pseudo-martial law. The setting is a variation on the 1976 Logan’s Run movie and it would not be surprising if the owners of the Logan’s Run copyright took legal action if ever they see The Giver, the similarities are so pronounced. One of the opening scenes comes so close to plagiarising the opening Carousel sequence from Logan’s Run that it’s concerning that somebody else’s intellectual property could be so easily infringed without consequence.

The tedium of the film is reflected in the tedium of the various cultural ceremonies that are depicted, including one where the “children” – Jonas, Fiona and their friend Asher played by Cameron Monaghan – become “adults” when they are allocated their responsibility within the community. Fiona is nominated as a care-giver for the young, while Asher, in a way too on-the-nose set-up of “he’s the bad guy”, is selected to become a drone pilot. (It’s a pretty ham-fisted piece of analogy that criticises America’s use of the type of technology in the real world.) Jonas, however, misses out and is left standing on his own after his other 149 classmates have all received their job allocations. Meryl Streep, sleep-walking her way through the role of Chief Elder, announces that Jonas will become the Receiver; the most important role in the community. Watching on is Jeff Bridges as the current Receiver, who will instruct Jonas and transfer the knowledge of the outside world and past history to him.

It’s all very cliché and by-the-numbers film making. Moments where obvious tension should exist, there’s none. Scenes where the viewer should care whether or not Jonas will succeed in becoming the next Receiver fall flat and fizzle to nothing. Perhaps the bland setting of the film itself somehow infected the production with an inertia that made it difficult for any of them to energise their performances to a point that makes the film’s 100 minute running time of any real interest to the viewer. Jeff Bridges gives yet another gruff performance that has become his stock and trade in recent years and, in this role, has a serious case of the ‘Marlon Brando Mumbles’. To make matters worse, screenwriters Michael Mitnick and Robert Weide introduce a sub-plot for Bridge’s character that is so poorly executed that it only serves to confuse the already-struggling narrative drive of the film. The manner in which the film has been edited together leaves a very definite suspicion that important story material was left out; much of which was exposition to help the audience understand how Thwaites and Bridges’ characters are able to communicate the way they do and to provide a more detailed account of the meaning behind the film’s ending.

The Giver also commits the movie-making crime of not providing the audience with a clear-cut resolution to the story it’s trying to tell. Admittedly, this is a carry-over from Lois Lowry’s novel and if Christopher Nolan had made The Giver perhaps the ambiguity of the ending may have been more meaningful because of what had preceded it. Phillip Noyce is no Christopher Nolan and The Giver is not Inception. Those familiar with Lowry’s other books already know the fate of Jonas, but the way in which the film presents its ending feels like a cheat because it leaves the impression that The Giver’s producers are trying to create a franchise for future adventures. The problem with this approach is that it takes the audience who have paid good money to see a self-contained movie with a self-contained story for granted. More and more movie makers are trying to achieve “franchise” success with their movies but it creates schizophrenic story-telling because the plot gets hi-jacked by story points that are not related to the film’s narrative. The Giver is an example of this, although not quite on the same scale as The Amazing Spiderman 2.

The Giver is an underwhelming addition to the growing sub-genre of young adult dystopian science fiction and, unfortunately, has been released at a time when more superior versions of this type of film have either just been released or will soon be released -The Maze Runner and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One. 

The Equalizer - Film Review

The Equalizer is an entertaining film but serves to frustrate because, upon reflection, the viewer comes to realise that it could have been so much better if more consideration had been given to logical progression of its story. Denzel Washington turns in an every-man performance that allows him to display enough semblance of humanity to keep the film from becoming a preposterous exercise in the pursuit of gratuitous violence. What could have been a genuinely great film that expanded upon the central concept of its 1980s TV namesake teeters on the edge of becoming yet another entry in the rapidly expanding over-50s action revenge thriller sub-genre that has seen Liam Neeson reshape his career into an admired anti-hero.

Fortunately, Denzel Washington, as the mysterious Robert McCall, never allows himself to fall into the trap of muttering down the end of the phone to a disembodied antagonist, but he sure comes close as The Mechanic and Expendables 2 writer Richard Wenk’s script struggles to maintain a dramatic balance from which to make Washington’s character credible. The movie starts extremely well, as the First Act establishes a compelling scenario and range of secondary characters that enable McCall to become the avenging protagonist of the film’s title in its final stages. McCall is a man with a past, but the first half of the film doesn’t feel the need to embellish his story it simply allows the audience to partake in his routine and engage in conjecture as to the kind of man he is and may have been.

The Second Act fails to capitalise on the strong set-up as Chloe Grace-Moretz’s character of Teri, who is the reason why McCall takes up the mantle of The Equalizer, all but disappears from the story. Instead, Washington’s McCall engages in a cat-and-mouse game with Teddy, a Russian mob enforcer played with scenery-chomping glee by versatile Kiwi actor Marton Csokas. Teddy starts much like McCall; very understated, but he soon turns into a force of nature as he single-handedly starts taking apart the Boston criminal network in search of the man who has killed his goons.

Toward the end of the Second Act, McCall takes the opportunity to leave Boston and meet with former colleagues Brian and Susan Plummer, played respectively by Bill Pullman and Melissa Leo. This odd diversion serves as pure exposition and the audience discovers over the course of a few minutes McCall’s entire background. Despite the seriousness with which the scenes are played, there’s a sense of inevitable cliché about this digression which creates the circumstances through which the audience can throw their fourth-wall support behind Washington as he confronts corrupt elements of the Boston Police and the Russian mobsters who operate outside the law.

By the time the Third Act is done, the audience will be in one of two camps. There will be those who regard the film as an above-average action thriller that doesn’t shy away from violence but never quite reaches Tarantino-type gratuity and successfully positions Washington at a tilt for Neeson’s anti-hero title. The other group of viewers will walk away questioning how one man could be capable of what has just played out over the course of the last 130 minutes and will be entirely unconvinced of the premise or its outcome.

Fortunately, the production value of The Equalizer was enough for this reviewer to lean toward the former rather than the latter. Special mention must be made of Director of Photography Mauro Fiore, who employs his wonderful sense of composition and lighting to The Equalizer; elevating it above the standard action thriller “hero” point-of-view camera perspective. Fiore is currently one of cinema’s most sought after cameramen, with credits that range from James Cameron’s technologically-spectacular Avatar to the Peter Berg’s political thriller The Kingdom. In one of the most interesting and bizarre camera moves in recent mainstream cinema, Fiore and Fuqua design a scene that visually captures just how different Teddy’s Russian mobster is by comparison to the “American” environment in which he finds himself. The shot itself extends from the bottom half to the top half of his shirtless tattooed torso, but the contortion of his body makes him appear to be some sort of cross between an alien and a reptile fighting some unseen inner-demon that the audience will never quite fathom. It’s a unique shot that serves to highlight just how good and different The Equalizer could have been had this level of cinematic creativity been used throughout the entire production.

While Washington’s presence is a bonus and a blessing, Marton Csokas provides no shortage of support to help keep the film moving toward its inevitable showdown between McCall and Teddy. One scene at the mobster’s restaurant is especially riveting and was reminiscent of the great Diner meeting between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Michael Mann’s Heat. There’s no doubt that Anton Fuqua, the film’s Director, has the ability to direct good actors into the extended investigation of character’s personal lives and domestic matters that bears the comparison between him and Mann. Fuqua helped Washington realise an Academy Award in 2001’s Training Day; a film that has held up reasonably well since its release. Unfortunately, The Equalizer also suffers from some of Fuqua’s excesses that were so prominent in 2013’s artistic misstep Olympus Has Fallen. The Equalizer doesn’t have the “Director for hire” feel of that film, as it exhibits a higher level of craftsmanship, but a more considerate approach to the utilisation of the characters so well established in the first part of the film would have resulted in a much better movie; especially with such a great performer as Denzel Washington head-lining the project.

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES - Movie Review

An eerie silence fell over the cinema and the lights came up as the credits started to roll up the screen for ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’. Audiences had been taken by surprise with Rupert Wyatt’s 2011 re-imagining of the endearing science fiction saga from the late 1960s and first half of the 1970s. If you were “surprised” by ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’, then be prepared to be completely overwhelmed by this new movie. ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ can be summarised in two words: SIMPLY STUNNING!

At its very best, cinema can completely and utterly immerse its audience in the power of story and the power of images. Under the direction of ‘Cloverfield’ director Matt Reeves, ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ creates the most complete “world” since James Cameron transported audiences to Pandora in ‘Avatar’. The preview audience at the screening of this new film didn’t know whether to clap in appreciation or shout out for the sheer imagination that they had just been unrolled before them. Judging by the number of people gathered in the foyer immediately after the screening, ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ is a movie that is going to give moviegoers a lot to talk about.

The film’s story, and resulting screenplay, is incredibly well structured. On one side, you have the escalating tension of the two main apes of 'Caesar', played by Andy Serkis, and 'Koba', played by Toby Kebbell. On the other, there’s 'Malcolm', played by Jason Clarke, and 'Dreyfus', played by Gary Oldman. The story cleverly transitions these four main characters throughout the course of the movie, with the humans starting off as the threat to the apes, but as events occur it becomes clear that the apes very quickly shake-off their noble savage idealism and take up arms against the threats posed to them. What makes the story even more compelling is that the apes descent into more sophisticated savagery comes after a great amount of time has been spent showing how much all the apes care for each other and the community they have built is truly representative of family. As their world becomes more and more compromised, the viewer appreciates the terrible sense of loss that is happening right before their eyes. 

Without elaborating too much, the film’s final act is superb. These days, many blockbusters don’t know when to quit. (Michael Bay and its 165 minute running time…) ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ clocks in at 130 minutes, but its length feels right. The action is well staged and the great majority of it is 100% CGI, but, unlike many films over the last few years, the animation is seamless and required to tell the story. The editing moves back and forth between the apes and the human part of the story that plays out between Clarke’s and Oldman’s characters during a tense and more-then-satisfying finale. Moviegoers looking for their next ‘Transformers’ hit should steer well clear of this movie; however, if you like a touch of pathos in your endings, then ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ could be what you’ve been hoping for.

It’s easy to get swept up in the immediacy of the viewing, but this movie would have to stand as one of the great follow-up films of all time. It’s not a direct sequel, but the main ape characters from the first movie all appear. Ten years have passed since the events of ‘Rise’ and the exposition to move the story to the time of ‘Dawn’ is handled nicely in an opening credits prologue. What the screenplay and Reeves’ direction do really well is to reintroduce the apes and expand upon what the audience already knew about them at the conclusion of ‘Rise’. Dare it be said, but tonally there’s a little bit of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ and ‘Terminator 2: Judgement Day’ about ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’. Characters that the audience thought they knew are written and played differently this time and there’s a great balance between the intimate and the epic.

Central to the success of all this is Andy Serkis, who returns as ‘Caesar’, the ape whose intellect has benefited the most from the use of an experimental drug in the first film. Serkis is the pre-eminent motion capture actor working in films at the moment and his performance in ‘Dawn’ is astounding. You may never see the real Serkis, but his vocal and physical work is outstanding and very seldom is there any consideration that ‘Caesar’ is an animated character. Even more astounding is how much of the dialogue between the ape characters is done in sign language. It’s a credit to not only Serkis, but to all of the actors portraying apes in ‘Dawn’, that so much emotion is conveyed in such a minimalist way. It’s incredibly effective and keeps the audience focussed on the actor’s performance. 

Special mention also goes to Toby Kebbell with his portrayal of ‘Koba’. His performance makes ‘Koba’ one of the truly great movie villains in recent memory; full of duplicity, anger and envy. One of the unfortunate parts of this movie is the brevity of the screen time for the human characters. Jason Clarke shares a lot of scenes with the ape characters, but Keri Russell, Gary Oldman and Kodi Smit-McPhee all feel as though their characters could have far more screen time, but, then, the film would have run for 165 minutes… Other than Clarke, Smit-McPhee really shines as Clarke’s character’s son, Alexander. His scenes with ‘Maurice’, played by Karin Konoval, are really touching as the two of them are among the first of the humans and apes to recognise what the other may have to offer.

It’s hard to fault the technical execution of ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’. From the top down, it’s a very assured film. Matt Reeves has not directed many movies but he has surely stamped himself as someone who can handle big budget fare such as ‘Dawn’. His previous two feature films were nowhere near as great in scope as this film, but it’s a great sign that directors with limited ‘blockbuster’ exposure like Reeves, Gareth Edwards, Josh Trank, Colin Trevorrow and Scott Derrickson are getting a shot at these larger films and making them both financially successful and creatively appealing. 

In addition to Reeves, credit must be given to Michael Seresin, the film’s cinematographer. Lighting and shooting a movie with such complex motion capture work must be incredibly difficult, but ‘Dawn’ has its own visual style that makes it very different in its look to the previous film. Both the set and location photography for this film could not have been easy given it’s raining for the first two-thirds of the movie, but Seresin uses this to his advantage to create the visual metaphors that relate to the film’s title, with the dawn of the apes struggle and the regression of humanity into the darkness.

‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ also gets the Michael Giacchino musical treatment. Once again, he demonstrates why he is the ‘Go To’ guy for movie music currently. Giacchino’s musical score mixes his own original pieces with cues from the original 1968 Jerry Goldsmith score for ‘Planet of the Apes’. It’s extremely clever and it adds an authenticity to ‘Dawn’ that, for older fans of the franchise, feel as though they are viewing part of the ongoing saga that started 46 years ago!

The fundamental question for ‘Future Fantastique’ is whether this film is good science fiction? The answer is a resounding YES. ‘Dawn’ moves the story far enough forward in its timeframe that it becomes a commentary about the end of a dystopian society and the emergence of a new society that has to make a choice as to whether or not it itself becomes either dystopian or utopian. All sorts of moral, ethical, political and social dilemmas emerge and play-out as a result. It’s great science fiction. It’s riveting to watch and leaves the viewer much to contemplate even after the lights have come up on the final credits. A lot of thought has gone into making ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’. This is clear from the story & its screenplay right the way through the production. It’s a real joy to watch a film that is so well crafted but also has all the hallmarks of being a smash hit blockbuster. Matt Reeves and screenwriters Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver and Mark Bomback have given audiences a real treat and one that is neck and neck with ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ as the best science fiction, fantasy or comic book genre entry so far in 2014. Make sure you see this film at the cinema and in 3-D.

Is Transformers:Age of Extinction the reboot that fans deserve?

‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’ is NOT a great film; it’s not even a good film. Quite simply: it’s terrible. The great shame is that $165 million was given to Michael Bay and he has produced something so bad that there’s no certainty that even loyal fans of the previous three films will find it in their hearts to pay hard-earned money to see ‘Age of Extinction’. If they do, they will come away feeling the same way they did after the last film in the series, ‘Dark of the Moon’, which itself was a very mediocre affair. On the upside for the film’s financiers, there will be millions of teenagers on summer vacation in the Northern Hemisphere who, with nothing better to do, will flock to their local cinema complexes in search of some mind-numbing entertainment that will outlast their investment in the jumbo popcorn that they paid too much for at the Candy Counter. ‘Age of Extinction’ is tailor-made for that purpose.

There’s no doubting the success of the ‘Transformer’ franchise. Michael Bay has hit on a formula that has been very successful and he may be one of film-making’s great unheralded geniuses because his first three ‘Transformer’ films generated a combined $2.6 billion in box office receipts between 2007 and 2011. Sadly, the fact that Bay’s films have been successful has more to do with the intent with which these films are conceived and represents the great conundrum that faces movie-makers of the 21^st Century. ‘Age of Extinction’ is a by-product of this problem and Bay is the poster-boy. Entertainment produced for the lowest common denominator has the best chance at appealing to the broadest possible audience. Without sounding like a film snob, this type of film is manufactured for an audience that does not regard film as a culturally significant communication medium. Rather, the enjoyment comes from how well the viewer’s visual and auditory senses are stimulated in comparison to the latest game, app or social media outlet. The biggest disappointment about this film, as well as the previous three, is Steven Spielberg’s association with the ‘Transformers’ franchise. In 2013, Spielberg and George Lucas publicly bemoaned the spiralling budgets of blockbusters like ‘Age Of Extinction’, yet, less than a year later, Spielberg has his name attached to the very type of film he declared was killing diversity in movies. From an individual who has contributed so much to movies as an art form, it is frustrating to see his name emboldened alongside Michael Bay’s on a ‘Transformer’ film.

The other big problem with this new film is that, not only does it set low expectations; it is in and of itself a poor piece of film-making. All films start with their story, followed closely by the screenplay, and ‘Age of Extinction’ fails on both fronts with a poorly constructed narrative and a screenplay that is so directionless at times that it becomes quite obvious that sequences have been stitched together in the editing suite in an effort to deliver a story that makes some kind of sense. The architect of all of this Ehren Kruger, who, even after the mess that was ‘Dark of the Moon’, gets another shot at the franchise and, once again, hamstrings the whole project with a screenplay that is devoid of logic, good dialogue and any real character arc for either humans or robots!

Goodness only knows in which management meeting somebody came up with the idea of 'Transformer' dinosaurs 

The story and screenplay, however, are but one of the problems with ‘Age of Extinction’. The cinematography is worthy of mention because of how varied the results are from one sequence to the next. Cinematographer Amir Mokri continues his association with the franchise and provides some genuinely inspired shots mixed with some truly horrible efforts. Mokri has become a specialist in this sort of big budget film, having worked on 2013’s ‘Man of Steel’, ‘Transformers: Dark of the Moon’, ‘Fast & Furious’ and ‘National Treasure: Book of Secrets’. The film’s final act, set in Hong Kong, is the film’s most visually interesting section and Mokri and Bay do a nice job at capturing images that portray the cityscape in a favourable light. Viewing the IMAX version of the film is especially unforgiving of the film’s mixed photography, as the non-IMAX footage looks grainy and almost out-of-focus in parts.

The actors’ performances continue the uneven tone of the film, as the Autobot vocal performances are completely at odds with the live-action work. Mark Wahlberg has been drafted into this fourth film, in place of the fast-falling Shia LeBouf, and tries valiantly to drag something out of his dialogue to make his character more than just an adjunct to the computer animation that dominates the film. One incredibly grating issue with the live-action performances is the use of post-recorded dialogue into scenes that call for an injection of humanity that would be otherwise dominated by the conflict between the various robots featured throughout the film. Of all the performances, the only actor who comes out of this with any shred of credibility is Stanley Tucci, who plays the billionaire owner of a company who is complicit in a plan to weaponise the Transformer technology for the American Army. Tucci clearly worked out during the shoot that this film was not going to be one for the ages and chews the scenery, at first, with the megalomaniac air of a Bond villain and, then, as a likeable rogue who sees the error of his ways and injects some much needed humour into a story that is taking itself much too seriously. As for the rest of the cast, there’s not much to say. Peter Cullen returns for his fourth feature as the voice of ‘Optimus Prime’, this time joined by John Goodman and ken Watanabe as fellow Autobots ‘Hound’ and ‘Drift’, while Kelsey Grammer is entirely forgettable as CIA operative Harold Attinger.

Why are these two men laughing so hard?

There is not a great deal to recommend about this film. At 165 minutes, it’s far too long. The screenplay lacks structure and jumps from set-piece to set-piece with no real thought. There’s the unending product placements, many of which have been positioned to appeal to the massive Chinese audience the film is banking on to provide a large slice of its box office receipts. These become so obvious by the end of the film that no longer is it a question of whether they will or won’t appear, it becomes a game of how many you can count throughout the duration of the movie. There are two things that are disturbing about ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’. One, there will be a ‘Transformers 5’. Paramount have already announced it before they’ve even seen how this film fares. That’s confidence! Second, despite everything that is wrong with this film, it will be hugely successful. That seems wrong. In a movie season where a well-made, original science fiction film like ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ will be judged a failure because it makes $350 million at the worldwide box office, ‘Age of Extinction’ will do more than double that despite the fact that it is  bloated, ill-conceived and poorly-executed… Despite an inability to speak at public gatherings; privately, Michael Bay is laughing, but it may not be “with” us.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Exclusive Footage Presentation!

20^th Century Fox hosted an exclusive screening of approximately 15 minutes of footage from the new Matt Reeves film ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ On Thursday June 19, 2014. The screening was attended by Erik Winquist, who was the Visual Effects Supervisor for New Zealand’s WETA Digital Effects on the movie.

The screening showed a lot of new footage and, given Winquist’s attendance, concentrated on depicting the evolution of the Apes in this film. As previously reported, the new film is set ten years after the conclusion of the first. For those with a good memory, you’ll recall that the end credits of the first film showed the spread of the ‘Simian Flu’ around the planet with the inference that mankind was in for a rough time in the near future.

From the footage shown, this film is certainly more ‘epic’ than the first. It’s clear that the Apes have not seen or heard from the humans since the outbreak of the ‘Simian Flu’ and Caesar, once again played by Andy Serkis, is not even sure there are any still alive. The Apes themselves have flourished in their woodland setting and appear now to number in the hundreds if not the thousands. The Apes questions about whether or not humanity has survived are soon answered when a group humans, lead by Jason Clarke, cross paths with two Apes in the woodlands. The scene is punctuated by Caesar yelling at the trespassers to “GO!”

Not to spoil what was in the footage, or the movie for that matter, the revelation of Caesar’s development to a new group of humans brings their own survival in to sharp focus. On the one hand, Clarke’s character seeks to understand Caesar and his civilisation, while Gary Oldman’s character is more of a ‘Hawk’; advocating all-out pre-emptive attack to ensure the Apes can never grow strong enough in number to overwhelm the remaining population of San Francisco.

The footage ended with the standard pyrotechnic display associated with a big-budget Hollywood film and it was the visual effects that everyone wanted to hear about. Winquist spoke in great detail about the motion capture for this film, explaining that ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ represents an evolution of the mo-cap technology that WETA has helped to revolutionise in the film industry. One such evolution was the development of wireless mo-cap, which has obvious benefits for the performer; especially in such a physical role. The absence of any connecting wires for the head-mounted camera provides the actor a greater range of freedom and allows the Director more flexibility of his master shot of the scene.

Winquist spoke about the need for him to be on-set for the film’s principal photography because the motion capture performances are so integral to this story. He spoke about the emotion of watching the performances being played out on set and, at various times, the emotion coming mo-cap actors was so overwhelming that crew members were brought to tears. He relayed one such scene where Andy Serkis is sitting with his son, talking in sign language, and how it made him emotional to watch the scene being played out. He commented that these may be motion-capture performances but the people who are playing the characters are no lesser actors just because their final performance “look” is animated.

In addition to his duties as overall VFX supervisor for WETA on the film, Winquist also pulled double-duty, and was the lead supervisor on the character of ‘Koba’, who is explored more thoroughly in the second film and becomes a catalyst for the events that unfold in the second half of the movie. He was especially complimentary of the actor who took over the role of ‘Koba’ in this film – Toby Kebbell. With no prior motion-capture acting experience, Kebbell, according to Winquist, threw himself into the role and pulled off an amazing performance. If the results in the footage presentation are what audiences can expect from the character throughout the entire film, ‘Koba’ is going to be a real talking-point for Apes aficionados and a role model in villainy!

An opportunity was extended to the audience to ask questions and ‘Future Fantastique’ was ready to go with a series of questions about the motion capture process and how it’s integrated with the film’s other effects.

FF started by asking how many actors the motion capture was used for and Erik answered telling the audience that it varied depending on the scene. There are eight main Apes in the film’s story but the motion capture was used more extensively than just those eight depending on the requirements – especially the scope – of the scene.

This prompted the question from FF about the integration of all the different effects techniques into one seamless process. Winquist, who had earlier mentioned that the film’s climax occurs entirely within a CG environment, told the audience that the motion capture for this film was seamlessly blended with CGI.

While the CGI is a very technical exercise, location filming is not and FF was keen to understand what that means for the use of high-end technology on a shoot like ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’. Winquist acknowledged that location shooting adds another dimension to the overall effects process, especially when the film integrates real environmental impacts such as rain and wind into the story. There’s a consideration to be made of the equipment being used such as the wireless motion capture cameras, which translates into a consideration for the animators back at WETA about having to include droplets of water on fur in close-ups and more dynamic elements such as wind pushing fur around when riding on horseback. He said it’s a time-consuming process which one this movie involved the creative efforts of 1000 staff just at WETA.

FF asked Winquist about Caesar’s voice; something that had been a point of intrigue from the first film. It was a simple enough question … Having seen the original performance, prior to animation, is Andy Serkis’s voice altered in any way in the post-production process? The answer was a surprising ‘No’. Erik said that Serkis has a tremendous ability to adapt his voice and found a very low, slow delivery for Caesar that allowed his dialogue to be captured without any work being done after principal photography wrapped.

The final FF question was about the complexity of ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ compared to other films that he personally and WETA as a company had worked on. Winquist stated that ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ has been the hardest, most difficult project the company has worked on so far, but it wasn’t the answer of a man who sounded in any way shape or form tired or sick of his job; quite the contrary. The tone of his answer was that of a man who relished the challenge and was more than happy to keep pushing the envelope of a movie-making process that he has become one of the best in the world at leading!

X-Men: First Class - Retrospective Film Review

X-Men: First Class is an entertaining story based on Marvel’s popular comic book property. The film is a big budget project, but it’s the acting talent that makes First Class successful. James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence are great actors and, in their respective roles, deliver performances that help elevate the film to a level that transcends the somewhat forgettable slew of comic book films that have become part and parcel of the American Summer movie season since the beginning of the new millennium.

The film’s story shows the formation of Charles Xavier’s ‘X-Men’ and Erik Lensherr’s ‘Mutant Brotherhood’ and, at its core, is a story an individual’s right to exist free of persecution. This theme has always been the core of the ‘X-Men’ stories, both on film and in the original comic book source material, where ‘Mutant’ powers were a euphemism for the real-world challenges of racism, sexism and religious discrimination. ‘First Class’ is quite overt about its theme. Right from the opening scene, which shows a young Erik Lensherr in a German concentration camp during World War II, the movie does not shy away from depicting both the physical and mental abuse being inflicted upon the film’s main characters. The young Erik’s persecution by Nazi Doctor Sebastian Shaw, played with scenery-chewing glee by Kevin Bacon, is the basis for all that follows and plays directly into the story’s climax. The older Lensherr, played by the versatile & excellent Michael Fassbender, is all consumed in his quest to track down Shaw. His quest for vengeance brings him into contact with Charles Xavier, played by McAvoy, who tries to help Lensherr balance his anger with a desire to show Mutants are humanity’s evolution to something better than what they have been.

At its core, ‘First Class’ is about Charles and Erik working together to find Mutants and convince them to join the fight against Shaw and his efforts to ignite World War III. Lensherr’s underlying motivation is to kill Shaw and avenge his mother’s death. The first act tells the story of how they meet and Xavier’s efforts to convince Erik that life can be good. Despite the Professor’s best efforts, Fassbender plays Erik in such a manner that the audience knows that Charles hasn’t convinced him to take the course of action that’s best for all concerned and not just for himself. When the two are shown working together, the film has some its best moments. The vignettes that depict their recruiting efforts are cleverly done and some of their exchanges provide the film with cross-franchise continuity that helps to clarify and rectify some of the problems created by previous entries.

The time spent establishing the relationships in the first and second acts sees the final act of the film dedicated largely to action and pushing the story to the confrontation between Fassbender’s Lensherr and Kevin Bacon’s Shaw. The film’s writers, of which there were six credited, cleverly use the real historical incident of the Cuban missile crisis as the smoke-screen for Shaw’s plan for world domination and sees the convergence of all of the film’s characters in one place at one time without it seeming forced and manipulative. Without ruining the ending of the film, it’s relatively safe to say that Fassbender’s Lensherr exacts his vengeance with a degree of precision that is consistent with his actions throughout this story, but is also consistent with the older Ian McKellen-version of Magneto from the original trilogy of ‘X-Men’ movies.

Director Matthew Vaughan, who had previously walked away from the chance to direct ‘X-Men 3’, was fortunate to secure James McAvoy for the role of the younger Xavier. McAvoy is a seriously good actor and the combination with Fassbender is a believable pairing in light of their older counter-parts from the previous films, played respectively by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. In addition to McAvoy and Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence brings the younger version of Raven/Mystique to life. Rebecca Romajin played the character in the first three films, but she was always secondary to the focus on McKellen’s Magneto. Lawrence’s character takes centre-stage early in the film; meeting Charles Xavier for the first time when both are just children. She becomes a pseudo-sister to him as the pair takes comfort in their respective mutant abilities.

Kevin Bacon and Nicholas Hoult stand-out in their supporting roles as Shaw and Hank McCoy, who becomes the bright blue Mutant ‘Beast’. Kevin Bacon plays Shaw as a pre-cursor to ‘Magneto’ with one major difference. Magneto’s motivation is use Mutant powers to protect their own kind whereas Shaw is just plain evil and aspires to world domination through the control of Mutant powers. This one-dimensional characterisation does make Shaw seem a touch like the Bond villains of the 1960s and 1970s, whose raison d’etre usually involved new and unique ways to use nuclear weapons to destroy the world! The design of ‘First Class’ suggests a deliberate effort to pay homage to the Bond films, with the impressive set designs utilising large cavernous spaces that provide enough room to fit the ego of a budding megalomaniac!

Nicholas Hoult plays the younger version of Hank McCoy, who was played by Kelsey Grammer in ‘The Last Stand’. The focus of the ‘Beast’ arc in ‘First Class’ focusses on Hank’s experiments to reverse his mutation, the moral dilemma it creates in his relationships with other Mutants and, ultimately, the effect it has on speeding-up his transformation into his ‘Beast’ alter-ego. Hoult brings a youthful exuberance, naivety and insecurity to the younger Hank.

The challenge faced by ‘First Class’ was always how it was going to reference the three ‘X-Men’ movies and the stand-alone ‘Wolverine’ film. While it acknowledges many of the established characters and story arcs, the film is not a slave to its predecessors. The writers wisely choose to not retrofit any of the ‘X-Men III’ story and also ignore any implications that the stand-alone ‘Wolverine’ may have had on their story. The success of the story comes from the focus on the relationships, especially between Charles, Erik and Raven. Their story is representative of the greater drama at play in ‘First Class’, where there is ‘Light’ and there is ‘Dark’, but there’s also a hell of a lot of grey in between.