Movie Review: “The Happening”

My father is one of those infamous people for whom it is impossible to buy gifts. So, this father’s day, he relented and suggested that I take him to see The Happening.

I saw Signs, a previous movie by M. Night Shyamalan, who directed The Happening, and found it to be funny, atmospheric, at times absolutely frightening, and a pleasure to watch. I’ve never been a great fan of the horror genre, but there is something about Shyamalan’s films which is more engaging than the dross that usually gets placed in that genre.

The film begins in Central Park, where suddenly, people begin behaving strangely. In moments, there are people committing suicide in droves all over the city. Panic ensues, and an evacuation begins.

For the most part, The Happening follows Elliot (played by Mark Whalberg) and wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) as they attempt to survive the continuing onslaughts of suicide-inducing poisonous gas. The plot is realistic enough (even if the science is a little “approximate” for my tastes) to be engaging, but surreal enough to also be unnerving, and at times, quite funny.

But the plot isn’t what I really noticed about The Happening. What I really noticed was the fact that, at times during the movie, my heart rate began to edge up. From a twitchy, nervous guy like me, a movie that can get my heart going is really something. Even in the scenes where the outcome is obvious, there’s often a great deal of suspense.

Interleaved with the suspenseful scenes are the aforementioned surreal scenes. We see person after person sit down calmly and come up with bizarre and disturbing ways to do themselves in. The fact that there is no real enemy, that the enemy is your self-destructive tendencies, while a little disorienting, about doubles the creep factor.

The music helps this along a great deal. It’s unfortunate how little attention some films pay to their score, but that was not a problem with The Happening. Lonely piano and symphonic melodies underscore the surrealer and creepier moments, but the film isn’t afraid to use silence when necessary.

Still — and once again, the same is true for all the Shyamalan movies I’ve seen — there’s something slightly off about The Happening. It’s not exactly clear, but there’s a sort of strange, almost hallucinatory eeriness to the whole film. It’s hard to pin down, but at times, it can get distracting, and sometimes, it manifests directly, like in a particularly sadistic scene featuring a child and a shotgun. It doesn’t detract much (if any) from the film, but it does give one the feeling that Shyamalan is not the kind of person you’d like to sit next to on a long bus ride.

All in all, though, The Happening seems to be classic Shyamalan: the normal world backlit by strange and horrible circumstances. And although it starts to drag its feet a bit in the end, it’s still interesting, entertaining, truly scary, and very engaging. Worth seeing. Not worth buying any popcorn for, though. That shit’s gotten expensive!

“Vantage Point”

Ever since I moved out, my father, apparently afflicted by some sort of empty-nest syndrome, has suggested that we go see a movie nearly every weekend. I can’t fault him for it, though, since it’s given me an opportunity to hone my review skills. An unfortunate side-effect of this, however, is the fact that I have to see contemporary movies, which are, almost entirely, cliché-riddled retreads (or outright remakes) of old storylines, with one-dimensional characters and atrocious dialogue apparently inspired by a 1990’s soap opera.

Pete Travis’s Vantage Point, however, is not such a film.

Vantage Point follows…actually…I can’t use my standard “follows the adventures of grizzled action hero X” here, since it doesn’t actually follow anyone in particular. More on that later. But basically, the plot of the film is thus: the president is speaking at some sort of anti-terrorism summit, and an assassination attempt is made, then the summit is bombed. But then, the audience finds out that it goes much deeper than that, but I wont’ spoil the rest.

This is one of those rare films that’s built around a concept. This is quite refreshing, since I haven’t seen a concept film in at least a decade. Most of the films I’ve seen of late have been character-based (which, don’t get me wrong, is probably the best way to tell a story) or based on nothing in particular (such as, say, any movie with Resident Evil in the title). But Vantage Point is based more around the idea of slowly assembling the plot by showing it through the viewpoint of five or six different people. Not an idea that’s been used very often.

Now, I must admit, I wasn’t expecting much. This kind of film is usually little more than an interesting experiment. Telling a story this way is also horrendously complicated, and I have a very low opinion of the ability of most modern directors to handle complicated stories. So I was incredibly surprised when I watched Vantage Point. It was actually good.

Its major saving grace is the novel way of telling the story: basically, you see one person’s view of the assassination attempt, the bombing, et cetera, then you jump back in time to the original starting point, and get to see those same events through the eyes of another character. Although this sounds like an idea that would have been done to death by now, it hasn’t, and is fresh enough that what would have been a fairly boring action-movie plot is transformed into something quite fresh and engaging. There were times, such as a car-chase sequence, when I actually found myself on the edge of my seat. I haven’t been excited by a movie since I saw Twister as a child in 1996, but the continual jumps don’t give you a chance to get used to, or worse, get bored with, the action.

The other thing that surprised me about Vantage Point was the maturity of the plot. Of course, any action movie is bound to have a juvenile flavor to it, but this movie overcomes that by trying its hardest to feel genuine and to really say something. I’ve seen a few movies which try to cope with the idea of terrorism, but this is one of the few that I’ve seen that actually tries to say something about the politics of it, which is a nice change. And it helps the maturity factor a great deal that the characters aren’t so much cardboard cutouts. As you might expect, a film like Vantage Point, which basically has to be five or six mini-films, doesn’t have much time for character development, but it manages this quite competently nonetheless, using clean, concise exposition.

All that said, this is not a perfect movie. While the film’s multiple-viewpoint concept is interesting and refreshing, it really feels like a great deal was sacrificed for its sake, leading to some really contrived plot segments that annoyed me a great deal. You’ve heard of deus ex machina, that horrible “storytelling” technique where something unlikely appears at the last second to save a dying character or pull the storyline back together? Well, Vantage Point is guilty of using deus ex machina’s dark cousin, deus ex technologica. I won’t give anything away, but suffice to say, one of the terrorists does more with a high-tech little cell phone than I ever knew was possible. For example, I searched my own phone’s menus for hours after the movie, looking for the “fire a sniper rifle”,” detonate a bomb”, and “make the plot make sense” buttons I saw the head terrorist use. After accidentally deleting most of my contact numbers, it dawned on me that the mutant phone-gadget-thing was no more than a way to neatly tie up the dozen or so loose ends that are the inevitable product of trying to do a story like this.

Even so, it’s an interesting movie, and entertaining, and the concept it revolves around is well-executed enough that it feels quite fresh. Even with the magic phones and the “shell-shocked old-time secret service agent” bit, it still comes together well enough that it’s worth seeing. Hell, it might even be worth it to see this one on the big screen.

Final Judgment:

* * * * * * * ` ~ ~ (7.5/10 asterisks)

Revised Review: “SimCity Societies”

A month or two ago, I reviewed Will Wright’s new game SimCity Societies. I heaped praise on it for being atmospheric and fun and all that, but with the benefit of hindsight, I feel like I ought to revise my review.

As fun as SimCity Societies is, it’s only fun the first few times you play. The kinds of societies you can develop are starkly limited black-and-white distinctions between, basically, a hippie utopia, some sort of hybrid between Orwell’s Oceania and soviet Russia, a Buddhist fundamentalist state (?), and a glass-tower capitalist “paradise” (in other words, America). The game has very limited replay value, and after the warm, fuzzy enjoyment of your first few games fades, it basically becomes a slow-running version of SimCity 4. There’s just not enough variety in the gameplay to keep it interesting for very long.

And what’s worse, one gets the irritating feeling that Will Wright is just trying to kill time until Spore finally comes out — which, given his disturbingly Valve-esque delays (apologies to Gabe Newell, but hey, you had that one coming), will probably be around the time washing machines start passing the Turing Test. I know this is a common tactic among game developers, but I’d come to expect more from Will Wright. In the end it doesn’t really deserve all the praise I heaped on it. It’s a competent game, but little more than that, but when you get down to it, the few extra game elements that have been added don’t really do enough to dispel the feeling that you’re playing a graphically-enhanced version of SimCity.

Revised Rating:

* * * * * * ~ ~ ~ ~ (6/10 asterisks).

Review: “Sunshine”

I enjoy being cynical. Anybody who’s read even a handful of my posts will know that. But, like a character in a bad movie, I have a soft spot for certain things.

One of those is great science fiction. I was impressed by the writings of Arthur C. Clarke, Charles Stross, and Isaac Asimov. I was intrigued by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I was greatly moved by Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.

Sunshine is the story of a group of astronauts sent to deliver a bomb to “re-start” the dying sun. This plot sounds remarkably standard, and in a way it is, but then again, so is “Man wakes up in a post-civilized world, surrounded by zombies and struggling survivors,” and Danny Boyle managed to make that one come alive in 28 Days Later.

This may sound like disjointed gushing, but I honestly believe that Sunshine has to be one of the best science fiction films of the last ten or twenty years. The characters are very compelling, and unlike in most movies (science fiction or otherwise) of today, they actually feel like human beings. You come to feel for them, to understand them. Very rarely does one see that in movies these days.

The special effects are — and I feel like something of a fool for saying this — beautiful. Never before have I seen modern CGI used to such tremendous effect. The film manages to portray the sun’s incomprehensible brightness, and something of its great beauty as well. I never thought I’d say this, but for once, a movie left me with a profound appreciation for something.

The effects are impressive primarily because they mesh so well with the film’s overall artistic style. This style is incredibly rich and deep, and very compelling. I’m not sure how, but somehow, Sunshine manages to blend sound and light, letting our ears take over when the light gets too bright for our eyes to even comprehend. The movie makes light seem very substantial, very real, and dangerously beautiful.

This blurring between sound and light serves to accentuate the soundtrack, which is up to the extraordinarily high standards Boyle set in 28 Days Later. Frank Murphy and Underworld score the film with what has to be one of the most haunting soundtracks I’ve ever heard. Even the sound of a distress beacon is heavy with emotional impact, a lonely, heartbreaking sound that fits so well with the rest of the movie.

So, I’m several paragraphs into my review and already I’ve sung Sunshine’s praises as though it were the god of my new religion. Make no mistake, the film is not a golden gift from the gods, but it gets about as close as any mainstream movie. Nonetheless, there were elements that bothered me. The movie developed a withering, aimless feel in its later scenes, and did not recover until somewhere near the end. There’s a rather oddly recurring villain who adds a confusing fundamentalist religious element to these scenes as well, and whom they might have done without. And, it fell victim to that omnipresent scourge, weak science.

In this case, however, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before, and will hopefully never do again: I’m going to forgive Boyle for his bad science. It’s a very rare thing when the characters are moving enough, the story is good enough, and the visuals are pretty enough to make me gloss over scientific omissions and mistakes, but that’s what happened here. Hell, I was even willing to ignore the fact that the film had sounds in the vacuum of space (which regular readers will know annoys me to no end). That’s how good the rest of the film is. It’s definitely a must-see for nerds and science-fiction fans. Normal people would probably enjoy it, too.

NOTE: Yes, I am fully aware that Sunshine came out in 2007. I’d intended to see it on the big screen (and I imagine it was even more incredible in the theater), but since there was less publicity than I’d been expecting, I somehow missed it when it was in theaters. Damn.

Review: “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem”

Having seen the previous Aliens vs. Predator, I walked into the theater not expecting much of the sequel (pseudo-creatively titled Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem). Every now and then, I’ll walk into a theater not expecting much, and come out pleasantly surprised. (This happened with I Am Legend) This, unfortunately, was not one of those times.

The movie starts off from the last film’s shamelessly sequel-friendly ending. From there, it takes off, and never even considers landing. This might sound like a complement, but I assure you that it is not. By “takes off,” I mean in the manner that a hummingbird might take off after some mischievous birdwatcher filled a birdfeeder with amphetamines. The movie’s attention span about matches that of it’s intended audience. Once again, this is not a complement, since it would appear that its intended audience is indeed a bunch amphetamine-addled hummingbirds. I can’t remember a single scene — and this (unlike my previous descriptions) is not an exaggeration — that lasted more than about five minutes. The cuts were so jarring and furious that what little plot there was was completely obscured.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead!)

Review: “SimCity Societies”

Ever since I first played the original Sim City Classic sometime last century, I’ve been a fan of pretty much all of Will Wright’s games. I’m the sort of guy who really enjoys open-ended experimentation, and Will Wright certainly delivers in that department. I played the original “Sims” for untold hours, and The Sims 2 for untold hours more. Needless to say, when I stumbled across an advert for his upcoming game Sim City Societies, I was immediately interested.

The game’s basic premise is something like a combination of The Sims and Sim City 4. You build your city from premade parts such as row houses and workplaces, and all that other good stuff. Each of these buildings produces or consumes a slew of things. Most buildings consume power, and the other kinds of standard resources, but what’s interesting about SimCity Societies are the societal resources buildings produce and consume. The “Propaganda Ministry,” for example, produces 40 units of what the game calls “Authority.”

After taking a brief run through the tutorial — which, I must say, was rather more controlling than many I’ve experienced — I decided to get to work constructing my own society. I plunked down some wind farms for power, and built a couple of row houses, then struck upon the idea to see if I could build something of a dystopian Orwellian hell-hole. I went to work immediately, building Conditioning Theaters, police stations, and of course, the obligatory Re-Education Facility. It didn’t take long for my authoritarian society to begin collapsing. Criminals ran wild, unhappiness was rampant, and rioters rapidly shut down all of my bureaucracy offices.

After about ninety mintues’ worth of play, I discovered another of the game’s lovely little aesthetic features. As my society leaned more and more towards a totalitarian police state, the road’s appearance changed. Now, where there had been plain asphalt roads, the roads were replaced with some kind of bland stuff that could only be described as “institutional concrete.” Then, as I scrolled around my city to see what else had changed, I happened to notice the security cameras sprouting from every lamppost, and the listening devices atop the fire hydrants. This had to be one of the game’s most endearing features.

All that said, it should come as no surprise when I say that “SimCity Societies” is incredibly fun. Will Wright’s high standard of simulation design has not faltered, and this game may arguably be one of his deepest yet. The dynamics are incredibly rich, it’s creative and energetic, and — thankfully — it has all the personality that Wright’s games have been lacking of late; he finally brought back the ever-amusing News Ticker, and seemed to finally be re-incorporating some of his famous dry wit, which I found disappointingly absent from The Sims 2.

One of the game’s features which was pleasantly surprising was the music. Since Sim City 3000, Will Wright’s games have always had great music, and SimCity Societies was no exception. The game’s music is pleasant, atmospheric, and generally lovely. What surprised me, though, was how appropriate it was. As my socialist dystopia began to blossom, I was regaled with what sounded like an amusingly modern rendition of the Russian National Anthem, a perfectly ministerial, bureaucratic piece for my ministerial, bureaucratic city. And when I leaned a bit towards environmentalism, I was rewarded with a very soothing New-Agey piece that sounded like it belonged in an Al Gore film.

But what kind of reviewer would I be without complaints? I suppose my chief complaint would have to be the graphics: they’re somewhat excessive, and ran a little slow with the default settings. I had to dial the resolution down to 800×600 and turn off the shadows and day-night cycle altogether to get it to run smoothly enough to be playable. Another problem is that the game is a bit hard to get into at first, since the menu system is so incredibly complex.

The game is also plagued at times with a feeling of excessive direction. Maybe it’s because I haven’t played it long enough to really explore the possibilities, but there are some facets of SimCity Societies which give the general impression of being overly rigid.

But the thing that irritated me the most was the evil hand of British Petroleum (BP, the oil company) marring Will Wright’s otherwise-environmentalist game. Somehow — don’t ask me how — they conspired to have their name and logo put on the wind power plants, and on the signs at the gas stations in the game. What is this? Some kind of subliminal advertising? It struck me as incredibly sinister, and irritated me to no end. Whatever they might like to think, as long as they buy and sell petroleum products, BP will never be as environmentally-friendly as they think they are.

Still, SimCity Societies is a lot of fun, and it looks poised to revive Will Wright’s now-sluggish gaming juggernaut. It will certainly keep myself and my fellow simulation junkies glued to their monitors for the rest of the winter, or at least until Spore comes out.

Overall Rating: ********~~ (8/10 asterisks)

Review: “I Am Legend”

Recently, I went to see Francis Lawrence’s film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. I entered the theater expecting the same kind of action-dense, sarcastic, humorous, and vaguely amusing movie that Will Smith is famous for, and came out in a state of utter shock.

Ladies and gentlemen, I Am Legend is, by far, Will Smith’s best performance. Ever. Better than Independence Day. Better than I, Robot. Better, even, than The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

So that I don’t ruin an excellent movie for you, I’m going to save all potential spoilers for the next section. Read on, if you want to know more.