Endurance Test: Tomb Raider

Alicia Vikander in Tomb Raider.

The cross-pollination between video games and cinema is something I’ve spoken about here before. A generation of filmmakers raised on games has started to make those influences more immediately apparent in their work, which is to say nothing of the way cinema has informed the way modern games are designed and presented. This evolving media genealogy makes director Roar Uthaug’s Tomb Raider feel less like an anomaly and more like an inevitability.

As an almost direct adaptation of 2013’s game of the same name, which also sought to reboot the Lara Croft brand from scratch, Tomb Raider is a film infused with the language of video games, but unfortunately much is lost in translation; you could say the film’s dialect is clumsy and uneducated. It lifts action sequences wholesale from the game (featured heavily in the film’s marketing) which retain none of the tension imparted by actually controlling Lara; it borrows characters and storylines from the game but fails to mine them for the same entertainment value; and it discards some of the only narrative and tonal elements that made the game feel distinct from its source material (namely, the Indiana Jones franchise). The result is a film that will appeal neither to fans of the game, who have already paid for a richer version of the same experience, nor to general moviegoing audiences, who will be bored by the film’s cut-and-paste plot and generic action sequences.

Swingin’ Sixties: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Photo by Daniel Smith, Warner Bros. Pictures)

The bar for espionage antics in 2015 has been raised unreasonably high by Ethan Hunt and his Impossible Missions Force, so I wasn’t sure at all that an old-fashioned Cold War caper like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. could even compete. Sure, it was the first film by Guy Ritchie since his Robert Downey Jr-led Sherlock Holmes sequel, A Game of Shadows, and sure, the trailer promised a heaping helping of old-school charm and mid-60s mod fashion. But is that enough to put it in the ring with what is, in my opinion, the best action spy thriller in recent memory?

God Complex: Ex Machina

Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina.

So-called “cerebral sci-fi” films are often like superhero origin stories, in that they can succumb to the third-act pitfall of not knowing what to do after their big revelations have landed. The burgeoning superhero finally dons a cape, the intelligent machine finally achieves self-awareness, and everything goes to shit. It’s a disappointing trend that debut director Alex Garland nimbly dodges by marrying the plot for his film, Ex Machina, with its underlying thematic structure – consciousness, manipulation, deceit, purpose, self-interest – in a way that feels both wholly natural and refreshingly unique. As an established screenwriter and novelist (Garland cut his teeth as a Danny Boyle mainstay, penning 28 Days Later and its sequel, as well as 2012’s undervalued Dredd), he’s well-equipped to do it. Strange, though, that one of the genre’s premiere examples of this narrative stumbling block was his own script for Boyle’s Sunshine (2007). Many critics are lambasting Ex Machina for its similarities to that promising-yet-disappointing interstellar excursion, but I don’t think they’re looking closely enough at what it does differently – and what it does better.

Still Bourne: Paul Greengrass' Jason Bourne

Matt Damon in Jason Bourne.

Jason Bourne is the fifth installment of the espionage franchise and the third in which Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass have teamed up (the fourth, a spin-off, saw Jeremy Renner in the lead). It's been an exhilarating partnership so far, producing the most taut chase scenes, desperate hand-to-hand struggles, and precision minimalist acting from an ever-expanding cast of characters. I'm happy to report that the latest film retains these features. Greengrass' action direction is uncanny, with several bravura sequences that will leave you slack-jawed. In one, Bourne races through the streets of Athens on a motorcycle in the middle of a full-scale popular uprising, replete with Molotov cocktails, tear gas, fire hoses, and pitched battles between rioters and armored police. It is a staggering, visceral piece of direction. Your sensory apparatus can hardly register the kinetic movement. The only thing I've ever seen that surpasses it is the final minutes of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men and perhaps Joe Wright’s Dunkirk sequence in Atonement. Damon continues his disciplined approach to the role; Tommy Lee Jones effortlessly steps into the shoes of the villain, nefarious CIA chief Robert Dewey; and Alicia Vikander gets the acting style of the franchise just right in the role of Heather Lee, Dewey’s protege.

But despite this craftsmanship and professionalism, Jason Bourne lacks the human conflict that lay at the core of the previous Damon films, a struggle that connected all of the movies’ elements into a tightly congealed ball. If you recall, the first movies trace the story of how Bourne--suffering from amnesia--comes to remember his past life as a CIA assassin even as he evades the Agency’s desperate attempts to eliminate him. His identity crisis was a moral crisis--he wanted to know the truth of his life so as to atone for the murders he committed. The problem was, he couldn’t escape being an assassin--he kept being forced to use his deadly abilities on the various black ops agents that came after him. Despite his desire to lead a quiet life, he had to keep killing, for the those agents would never have arisen if it weren’t for Bourne himself. He was the prototype, the first experiment in Dick Cheney’s 'dark side' operations. And so killing those agents and exposing their superiors was the only way to undo his painful legacy. That it fit in with his identity quest is what made the movies deeply compelling. This emotional weight lent a further urgency and excitement to the action sequences: the stakes were high.

Love in Excess: Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina

Keira Knightley stars in Joe Wright's adaptation of Anna Karenina

If you’d asked me last year which contemporary director I’d most like to see adapt Anna Karenina, I would have named Joe Wright. David Yates, who made the last four Harry Potter movies and directed the majestic BBC miniseries of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, would have been a close second. Yates has a magical feel for the epic scope of Victorian fiction – a quality he excavates out of J.K. Rowling’s already Dickensian material – and perhaps more than any other recent director he has succeeded in transmuting the addictive pacing of the capacious novel form to the seriality of television and the film series, capturing the velocity of the novels rather than trying to outdo them. But it’s Wright’s films that distill and remediate the pleasure that novel reading can give us. In Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007), the experience of reading as both subject and visual motif suffuses the movies with a gently expressive awareness of the translation from page to screen.

A Few Brief Thoughts on Some Interesting Short Films

James Baldwin in Terence Dixon’s Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970).

It’s been a year now since the pandemic officially began, and from the rate of vaccination it looks like it’ll be another year yet before it’s under control. Taiwan, from where I’m writing, wasn’t hit as hard, but we still had our moments, and in any case the fragmentation of time and attention span seems to be one of those things that are in the air (or the zeitgeist). For this reason, and others – I finally got my PhD in English – I saw vastly fewer films these 366 days than the last 365, despite being recently added to Rotten Tomatoes; and I saw more short films than I’ve seen in the previous years combined. The coronavirus death tally has also impressed upon me the fleetingness of life and the value of time, so I declined to finish films that didn’t engage me (“engage” is of course different from “entertain”). From the short films I did finish, here are those I think most noteworthy, in chronological order of premiere date, with one exception that I will explain below. If I don’t provide a YouTube link, I saw it on MUBI.