Reviews Worth Reading
Alien: Resurrection is not unified by its cynicism as Robocop was. It’s not a satire of us, but just a satire of Alien movies. It’s never boring and that’s actually something, in the realm of fourth entries. The reason this film is in the category of “Everyone Else is Wrong” is not because I think it’s good, but because I don’t know what people were expecting.
Director James Cameron, hot off The Terminator, warps passed Ridley Scott’s harrowing and sensitive tale of psycho-sexual terror into two hours of sadistic fun, a haunted house in space, a boo movie elevated to mythic status. No one will blame you for being exhausted. This is the Citizen Kane of bug hunts.
I have not in recent memory seen a film whose concept is more divergent from its filmmaking than The Cloverfield Paradox. It is a movie so dumbfoundingly predictable and yet so incomprehensible that it becomes meaningless even as an average film, a paradox only in the sense that its grand pretensions cannot occupy the same space as the need to connect a franchise that was never intended to be cohesive.
I’m aware that Alien 3 had a troubled development and a schizophrenic screenwriting cycle, all documented to any reasonable human’s satisfaction on Wikipedia. But if the result had been miraculous, Fincher would have reaped the credit as a directorial miracle worker. Blame is now the price of that possibility.
Superman II is exciting even in its flaws: even its badness seems to defy other kinds of movies, like so long as Superman is on top of this, everything else will be okay. It’s an uneven and delightful ride with defiant special effects — they defy the ambition of their practicality and also how that ambition has aged.
Watching the original Superman I was not filled with awe so much as a kind of quiet calm, as though a wise person had just reminded me of a well-worn truth. DC is terribly wrong. The old myths still soar.
The film is essentially about how Michael has failed to be his father, to garner real respect, and even to be truly Italian. The failure is a well-made sequel but was it necessary? It distorts the whole picture, as though Vito Corleone died for nothing.
If Raiders was a backyard adventure where we put on our explorer’s hat and went bucket-and-shoveling out into the woods for buried treasure, The Last Crusade is like watching a home movie of it. It’s still got the same gee-whizz endearment but in a “boy, don’t we look silly” kind of way.
The result is a fantasy of movie logic that contains within it some special mystery, some lavish neo-chanbara (“sword-fighting”) crossed with that appearance of frontier Americans that young boys saw within the Wayne construct (but which, I’d venture a guess, it would not have been American for him to acknowledge).
Finding Nemo has a brilliant way of keeping this theme in the shallows of its action, always present but rarely addressed directly in the ecosystem of all its wonderful ocean stuff.