On the Net: James Bond is back

Another photo was revealed from the Skyfall set showing Daniel Craig’s Bond holding a gun.

Much debate ensued.

Most of it was over that stubble.

I should add that I was also transfixed by his stubble, not by trying to figure out where that particular scene came in the film’s plot (or ‘gasp’, why he has stubble in the first place) but because it reminded of someone or something else.

Step forward Michael Ironside’s gravelly voiced Sam Fisher from Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell series.

Am I the only one who sees the resemblance?

 

In Cinemas: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

“If you touch me I’ll more than alarm you”

I wasn’t swept away when The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo became this unavoidable thing in modern culture. I haven’t read the Stieg Larsson’s book but I have seen the Swedish original and while it boasted an impressive performance from Noomi Rapace as the titular character it came across as a rather dour and slow murder mystery. With a remake fast-tracked into existence we now have a film from Se7en and Fight Club director David Fincher, something that’s not too far from his wheelhouse in dealing with serial killers and obsessive characters.

I’ve cooled down on remakes although I still question the financial benefits of making them. Like any original film they have a shot at being good or bad and this effort outclasses the original but falls prey to same problem which must be down to the source as both adaptations trip over themselves in similar fashion.

It’s effectively the same story (with a few twists near the end), disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is given the opportunity clear his name when he’s asked to investigate into the Vanger family by their patriarch Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer). He’s helped in his search for a woman who’s been missing for forty years by Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a young, socially disruptive computer hacker.

The mystery at the heart of the film is unsatisfying but (and again I haven’t read the novel) this approach feels deliberate (although I could be vastly wrong). The film is not wholly concerned about it or enveloping its central strand in a series of twists and revelations. The killer is obvious, mainly through a lack of genuine suspects. It’s not that person or that person so it must be this person by default; the mystery is a device to propel the plot and bring Salander and Blomkvist together.

Craig is nicely understated imbuing Blomkvist with a rather weak and wimpy core, the kind of man who’s too polite to say no even when he knows it will get him into trouble. Rooney’s Salander on the other hand has both middle fingers up at anyone who tries to take advantage of her, a feral presence who’s the highlight of the film. Their relationship is the film’s fulcrum and without it I wonder if it would be as good.

Unlike the original Swedish film, Salander is more of a girl (a child even) than the adult Rapace embodied. Eating a McDonald’s Happy Meal or almost shying away from a girl in a club, Mara’s tiny frame makes her Salander feel fragile and in danger of being shattered only to have extremely rough edges that should come with one of those yellow “danger of death” signs. Like Heath Ledger as The Joker she fully inhabits the role making of the most of this punk/rebellious character.

Fincher brings his meticulous approach to the proceedings, upping the tempo and slowing it down when it pleases him (the first five minutes feel like an extended trailer with its quick cuts). The film is undoubtedly violent and frosty with the only semblance of colour coming from memories of old. It’s identifiably Fincher and yet what must have been a taxing production comes across as a film that lacks a tiny bit of his invention.

Regardless The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a film with an absorbing performance and an almost purposefully listless mystery. For Rooney’s performance and the atmosphere Fincher creates it should be seen.

Oh, and the opening credits set to Karen O’s version of Immigrant Song is wonderfully out of place, full of the kind of images that would give people nightmares about it.

8/10

In Cinemas: Cowboys and Aliens

Whether you end up in Heaven or Hell isn’t God’s plan, it’s your own. You just have to remember what it is.

It took five writers to come up with this?

The mixed reception afforded to Cowboys and Aliens lingered in my head as I sat down in the cinema with a friend (given even more time to roam after waiting half-an-hour through assorted trailers and adverts). An annoying facet of reading reviews is uncovering the film’s perceived positive and negative attributes before seeing a frame. With Cowboys and Aliens its faults are too obvious not to take notice of and its more positive aspects are shrouded behind the mundanity of what’s on show.

Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the desert, bloodied and dirtied without a name, boots on his feet or memory of who he is. In a fantastic scene setter, Lonergan violently dispatches a gang before heading towards to the town of Absolution. There he encounters the mysterious Ella (Olivia Wilde) and Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), a man who wants Lonergan for an incident that happened in the not-too distant past. When the town comes under attack from alien spaceships and abducts several of the townsfolk, Lonergan and Dolarhyde band together to rescue their kin before it’s too late.

Cowboys and Aliens downfall is that it’s just like every other alien invasion film, with just an older, dustier facade replacing the modern cityscapes. It must have taken numerous drafts and re-drafts to rid the film of anything particularly interesting (if it was interesting at all) and fill it with something so rote and ordinary. A John Ford esque western mixed with alien film should feel unique, instead Jon Favreau and co conform to the standard of a blockbuster without injecting any danger or excitement.

There’s a workmanlike quality behind the film’s structure, setting the various strands and character motivations in a very traditional and serious way that fails to have much fun with the concept. When it does let loose, it opts for shock and awe, explosions and CGI, something audiences are accustomed to seeing on a regular basis. Cowboys and Aliens doesn’t differentiate itself from the pack enough and believes that marrying the Western and Sci-Fi genres is all it needs to do. It’s not, it needs surprises, it needs invention and it needs to do something more than just a conventional three act structure with the resolution at the end that is entirely predictable.

The reveal of Olivia Wilde’s Ella is interesting but also faintly ridiculous. Interesting because it is genuinely unexpected and ridiculous because it doesn’t make much sense for her character to have behaved the way she did prior to that revelation. The aliens are unthreatening (and look like bigger, hulking versions of the beasties in War of the Worlds) and worst of all look fake, continuing the trend of this summer’s unimaginative alien design. Matters aren’t helped by loosely applied logic, in one moment a character suggests that the aliens “don’t see very well in the sunlight” and then the aliens go on to disprove that notion straight away, it’s like no-one bothered to check the script for consistency.

But Cowboys and Aliens isn’t as bad as I’ve made it out to be, it’s an average film, a deeply average one in fact but funnily enough what saves it is its familiarity. It goes for the tried and tested formula and is completely predictable and soulless for it. In its attempts to offer up blockbuster fare, it at least hits the expected notes/beats and is never less than watchable even if the film fails to inspire as much entertainment as its premise does.

6/10