On the Big Screen: ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (2019)

Robert Rodriguez, once known for making exciting films on the cheap, had a ton of money thrown at him by James Cameron in order to realize a project that had been stewing in the latter's mind for about twenty years. Wikipedia reports that Cameron had been turned on to Yukito Kishiro's manga by Guillermo del Toro, but del Toro by now is too big a deal himself to be anyone else's hired gun. Rodriguez did an uncredited polish on a screenplay Cameron collaborated on, so the finished product is as much his interpretation of the story as anyone's. He deserves credit for how well it turned out, and I suspect that Alita will prove a no-lose proposition for him, since those who don't like it will most likely blame Cameron. I suspect a lot of people won't like it, and I'm not sure I can blame anyone who doesn't. It's not for everyone, even if it needs to be to break even; it lacks that jenesaisquois that makes Star Wars almost uniquely accessible to the mass audience for stuff of this kind. There's an audience guaranteed to enjoy this, but another more certainly guaranteed to resent its story's demands on their attention -- and a lot of them write film reviews.

While Alita is undeniably a work of great craftsmanship and visual dynamism, I don't know if it's possible at this point to do enough to differentiate the film's setting from other cyberpunk dystopias. If you're not into the concept at the primal generic level Alita could well look like just another of its kind to those for whom any one is enough. The film is also indisputably repetitive, presumably covering multiple episodes of the original Japanese strip. We get multiple go-rounds on the Motorball track -- the sport of the future is basically Rollerball on cyber-roids -- and multiple fights with an evil but relatively dull cyborg who's really no more than a tertiary villain in a hierarchy where the top is mostly unseen. We can question the pacing of the film, again arguably a consequence of biting off more of the original than it could chew. The cyborg heroine (Rosa Salazar) has a boyfriend (Keean Johnson) caught in an inescapable mortal predicament resolved by Alita decapitating him but diverting some of her own bloodstream into his brain so the head can be installed on a cyborg body. This looks like the setup for a happy ending of cyborg love, but just a few minutes later the boyfriend is off on a suicide mission and this time Alita can't save him. It makes you question the point of saving him the first time around. Meanwhile, while Cameron, Rodriguez and co-writer Laeta Kalogridis may have bitten off more than they could chew of the complete manga, the film isn't actually complete. While there's no cliffhanger, it does leave things open-ended with a promise of future battles between Alita and the nebulous big-bad (Edward Norton) if she finally acts on her centuries-old directive to destroy the villain's elitist floating city. I can imagine some people groaning at the promise of a sequel that I suspect will never happen, based on the sparse crowd I saw the movie with. But as far as I'm concerned the scene of Alita, now a champion-level Motorballer, raising her sword in apparent salute to the spectators but also in an implicit threat to the floating city, makes for an awesome ending.

Beyond that, despite her initially creepily cartoonish computerized face Salazar as Alita won me over with her fairy-tale Frankensteinian (or Pinocchian) good-little-death-machine personality, while Christoph Waltz, an on-and-off character actor, was quite charming as her surrogate father, a techno-nerd variation on his benign bounty hunter from Django Unchained. Jennifer Connelly was fine in a semi-villainous role and ultimately tragic role as Waltz's ex-wife, while Mahershala Ali often seemed to sleepwalk through a literally superficial secondary-villain role that required him often to play his own puppetmaster. All this aside, the real star of the film is Robert Rodriguez, one the great genre minds of our time, who somehow manages to foreground personality amid the massive production design while staging several amazing action scenes. If the overall film feels repetitive at times, Rodriguez knows when and how to escalate the action. You can see this in the difference between the scene where Alita is only an eager spectator for Motorball and the big tryout game where she's in the middle of the action, literally the target for all the other competitors. You can also see it in the way Alita makes relatively short work of her most frequent antagonist in their final encounter; by then, there's no need for them to have another long battle. Alita is a film that feels longer than it actually is -- just over two hours -- but it's a good kind of long, the kind that immerses you in a densely detailed and constantly strange cityscape and keeps your eye constantly engaged. It's a film that gets a lot done, and it left me, at least, sort of hoping that that sequel does get me. I'm just the sort of dope that likes this stuff.

SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (2018)

Many people drew conclusions about the Han Solo prequel once the intended auteurs, Miller and Lord of Lego Movie fame, were seen off by Disney in favor of Ron Howard, who promised nothing visionary, irreverent or even fresh. Public opinion has turned against Disney's Star Wars franchise for a number of reasons, ranging from a reflexive distrust of large corporations to a worrisome revulsion at the studio's commitment to diversity in the official episodes. Many people no doubt went into Solo, or stayed away from it, convinced that it could only be a soulless, mindless piece of hackwork. I stayed away myself, having recently seen and hated The Last Jedi for reasons having nothing to do with the race or gender of its protagonists. Now that I've seen it at home, I can say that at a minimum Solo is better than Episodes 7 and 8. It's nothing great, but it's what it was meant to be: entertaining in an easygoing way. Its weakest part comes early when young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) is a low-level thief on Corellia. The vaguely Fagin-esque milieu and Han's efforts at nervous con-man patter make this the most retrograde and corny part of the picture. It picks up once Han is off-planet, an imperial academy washout reduced to foot soldiery in some absurd before he manages to fall in with a band of smugglers who've infiltrated the military. He finds a mentor in the boss smuggler (Woody Harrelson) and an unlikely friend in Chewbacca the Wookie, briefly a fellow prisoner. In this meet-cute bit we finally see that Han can speak the Wookie language, and I found it appropriate that while his efforts in that enigmatic tongue are subtitled, we are never to be privy to the plain meaning of Chewie's own remarks.

Anyway, for a time we practically have a poor man's Guardians of the Galaxy, with Han in the Star Lord protege role and Harrelson as his Yondu-like mentor, plus a sort of Gamora (Thandie Newton), a sort of Rocket (a talkative multi-armed CGI critter) and Chewie as Groot. The filmmakers (Jonathan and Lawrence Kasdan are the credited writers) know better than to let the resemblance sink in, so some of the characters are eliminated before the core group reports to their employer, a vicious space gangster (Paul Bettany) whose moll (Emilia Clarke) is the girl poor Han had to leave behind back on Corellia. To save their lives after a recent failure, our merry band must steal a cargo of raw, volatile superfuel from a mining colony and transport it tout suite (via the legendary Kessel Run) to a refining facility. Along the way Han must match his raw wits with crooked gambler Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), who ends up tagging along, along with his uppity feminist droid, while looking out for the pirates who ruined their previous caper. There are surprises yet to come but there's nothing really novel to the proceedings, compared to the drastic difference in tone you get in Rogue One. Comparing the two standalone "stories" is really unfair, though, since Rogue One was ambitious in a way Solo probably never was meant to be. Whatever the original creative team had in mind, Solo was always going to be cinematic comfort food, and for that sort of thing Ron Howard is a reliable chef. What holds the thing together and makes it tolerable is Alden Ehrenreich's title performance. With admirable quickness he makes you stop comparing him to Harrison Ford and turns young Han into a viable, likable character in his own right, with issues yet to be resolved (though probably never on screen now) before he becomes the man we got to know back in 1977. In retrospect, Solo got a bad rap, but that's probably inevitable when so essentially ordinary (yet satisfactory) an adventure film is packaged as a blockbuster event by corporate imperative. Would it have been better had it been left to the intended auteurs? The fact that we'll never know shouldn't be held against the film we have.

ORBITER 9 (Órbita 9, 2017)

For an Anglophone moviegoer it's a novelty to see space exploration carried out in Spanish. This isn't some implausible chauvinism on the part of writer-director Hatem Khraiche, as he tells us eventually that Spain is just one of  four countries involved in the preparation of pioneer voyages to the planet Celeste, a goldilocks world that offers the only hope of survival for the people of an increasingly polluted Earth. A young Spanish woman, Helena (Clara Lago) is the sole crewmember of one of the family-sized colony ships. Stalled by an oxygen malfunction, she has waited for a repair ship for three years since her parents apparently sacrificed themselves to extend her oxygen supply. At last, Alex the engineer (Alex Gonzalez) arrives to fix the problem. He has only 50 hours of "autonomy" to do the job; after that, Helena will have another 20 years on her own before she reaches her destination. Alex is the first human being other than her parents that she's ever seen. Five minutes in you can guess the direction the picture will take, but your movie brain should tell you that that's probably too soon to jump to conclusions.  It may not surprise you to learn that Alex has some alarming secrets, and that his interaction with Helena will put both people in danger as they edge toward revolt against a manipulative government's plans. Órbita 9 is ultimately more of a thriller than an all-out sci-fi film, but the sort of dystopia that forms its backdrop does tend to lend itself to thriller plots. I've probably now made it sound like a rather conventional movie, and I suppose it is that, superficially speaking. But the lead actors put it over with convincing displays of moral indignation, with Gonzalez adding a level of guilty torment over his role in a past failed experiment. The romance angle is a little much, taking the ending almost to a fairy-tale level, but then again, this is, for all its trendy pessimism, a fantasy film that ends on an odd note of reconciliation, given the seemingly unforgivable ruthlessness the head scientist showed earlier in the picture. At 95 minutes it seems scrupulous about not overstaying its welcome, even if it strikes you a Twilight Zone episode opened out and padded to feature length. Thanks to Netflix I didn't have to go out of my way to see this, so I don't feel that I can hold much against it.

Too Much TV: FAHRENHEIT 451 (2018)

With all the talent involved it's stunning how bad the new version of Ray Bradbury's dystopian classic is, but 2018 is probably both the right and the wrong time for dystopias. The Donald Trump presidency has put a lot of people in a dystopian frame of mind, but that creates too great a temptation to turn any dystopia into a commentary on Trump and Trumpism, which are at most symptoms of potential dystopia rather than precipitating events. If someone uses "America" and "again" in the same sentence, especially as a slogan, as is done in Ramin Bahrani's film, it's all too obvious that you're saying something about Trump that isn't necessarily relevant to Bradbury's vision. Worse, however, is the new film's preoccupation with social media as the alternative to not only literature but all the arts, demonstrated mainly by using the fronts of skyscrapers as Facebook Watch style screens flooded with comment emojis (and words!) and constant invocation of "the Nine" as the place where everyone looks at everything. The story's message is muddled for no good reason by the idea that some of the classics, at least, survive in emoji translation, as if that somehow dilutes their dangerous potential. In general, Bahrani goes for a "day after tomorrow" look rather than the more futuristic vision Francois Truffaut aspired to in his 1966 adaptation, the Second Civil War that led to the rejection of books, on the ground that they provoke ideas that in turn provoke conflict, having happened only very recently from appearances. Bahrani's 451 is arguably more about 2018 than Bradbury's or Truffaut's were about the actual dates of their creation, to the new film's disadvantage. Its presentism arguably explains its abject failure as a dystopia, since it portrays a moment where the new order doesn't really seem to have sunk in, but must still resort to terror against a resistance (the "Eels") of uncertain scope. We never do meet true believers who take the post-literate order for granted, or at least we encounter none as important characters in the story. Instead, we get a villainous authority figure, the top "fireman" of Cleveland (Michael Shannon) who appears obsessed with text, writing excerpts from literature from memory on cigarette papers only to destroy them, even as he lectures his protege Montag (Michael B. Jordan) on the perils of books. This character is too ambiguous for the story's own good, while Montag himself, Bradbury's protagonist, is fatally detached from the ordinary dull society that actually alienates him; the scenes featuring his wife (Laura Harrier) were left on the cutting room floor for some reason. Perhaps Bahrani decided that her storyline and its preoccupation with status and conformity dated the overall story as a relic of the suburban Fifties. Whatever his reason, he reduces Montag to a loner who is, if anything, egged on to explore books by his conflicted commander -- and worse, he saddles the character with a hackneyed "fathers and sons" story in which flashbacks conveniently reveal long-suppressed truths about the elder fireman's fate. For an indie filmmaker who won acclaim for social-realist views of immigrant and working-class life, Bahrani is strangely determined here to reduce Bradbury's fiction to a collection of genre cliches, down to an inept climax involving a bird infected with the sum total of human knowledge needing to fly through a hole in a barn in a race against time with Shannon's slow-motion flamethrower, distracted by a Montag angling for martyrdom. As I recall, the Truffaut Fahrenheit is generally thought of as a failure, yet in retrospect it seems superior to the new Fahrenheit in every way. It shouldn't have been so, because it really isn't that hard to see how a consensus against uncomfortable ideas could arise in our time, and it shouldn't have been hard to translate that vision to film, yet the new film pays only lip service to how appealing and tempting that reaction might be in its rush to turn Bradbury's dystopia into just another action movie.

On the Big Screen: READY PLAYER ONE (2018)

For better or worse, Ready Player One is Steven Spielberg's Battle Royale. While those to whom that sentence might mean something figure it out for themselves, let me add that this adaptation of Ernest Cline's latter-day cyberpunk novel, co-written by the author, reminded me a little of Around the World in 80 Days -- the 1956 Oscar winner, that is, -- in that people may be more interested in scrutinizing each frame for some cameo by a pop-culture character than in the actual plot of the film. When this hits home video it'll probably have the slowest playback of any movie as completists strive to catch 'em all, and that's excusable, since the plot is basic stuff. In Dystopia 2045 nearly everyone escapes from the misery of everyday life by partaking of the Oasis, a VR multiverse created by geek genius James Halliday (current Spielberg alter ego/good luck charm Mark Rylance). The late Halliday has promised effective ownership and creative control over the place to whoever can complete a series of challenges and acquire the keys to the virtual kingdom. Among the favorites on this quest are Parzival, aka Wade Watts of Columbus OH (Tye Sheridan), and Art3mis, aka Samantha Cook of parts unknown (Olivia Cooke), who is as much interested in denying victory to the debt-peon hordes working for the IOI corporation as in winning the quest herself. At IOI, toady turned tycoon Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) hopes that victory in the quest will allow maximum commercialization of the Oasis, which we the audience are meant to see as an evil innovation -- which is rich considering how thoroughly infested the place is already with people using copyrighted cartoon, comics and movie characters as their avatars. In short, it's a treasure hunt with riddles, and Wade/Parzival's extensive scholarship in the minutiae of Halliday's exhaustively chronicled or recreated existence has an intellectual advantage over the competition, or at least the good luck to have insights tying the clues to  that are absolutely correct. Assisted by some friendly ethnic types -- a black woman whose avatar is some sort of male cyborg orc and two Asians who take quite predictable forms -- our heroes remain mostly a step ahead of the plodding Sorrento, an unimaginative character who can't remember his passwords and whose avatar looks like the idiot spawn of Superman and Captain Sternn (see, I can do it too!), and his real and virtual henchmen, until the corporate boob gets the upper hand for the sake of drama. Then it's time to rally the hosts for an epic battle of the memes that becomes less epic -- perhaps deliberately so -- when Spielberg peeks behind the curtain to show us the common people of Columbus doing their part by holding a mass conniption fit in the streets. Have you never yet shaken the suspicion that the person striding ahead of you chattering away on his or her Bluetooth is actually just a good old-fashioned paranoid schizophrenic? If so, then this fleeting moment may be the most frightening or the funniest in the whole film.

I suppose I sound mean, but this is still a Spielberg film in the old style and the old man can still stage entertaining action and does so with some extra relish now that he can play with so many licensed properties at once. Ready Player One is crowd-pleasing light entertainment on that level, but otherwise it's pretty dumb if not stupidly fatalistic in its ultimate acquiescence in dystopia. Sure, the world has gone to shit, though apparently not in any way that actually motivates people to change society itself, but we damn well can't let that bad old corporation turn our privately-held virtual commons to shit, now that there's a new boss as opposed to the old boss who was too much of a dweeb to be truly evil. The film's ultimate revolution consists of shutting down the Oasis two days a week so that boys can meet girls the way Halliday never could manage. Huzzah! Meanwhile, our hero is a cypher and his allies, dispersed across the globe though they may be, can appear by his side almost instantly in the real world, dystopia having not at all affected communications and transportation. They're cyphers too, pretty much -- but oh! One of them is a woman pretending to be male, and another is an 11 year old pretending to be an adult, played by an actor pretending to be a child, on the evidence I saw and heard. What of it? The film's fatal flaw is that it lacks the sort of "welcome to the desert of the real" moment that makes The Matrix potent, however silly I thought that was, to the present day. In fact, despite often heroic efforts by Spielberg's most loyal sidekick, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, it's alarmingly hard sometimes -- most damningly in what should be one of the film's most dramatic scenes, when corporate drones blow up the trailer-tower where Wade's aunt and uncle live -- to tell the real from the virtual world.

Scratch that. The film's real fatal flaw is that Eighties bullshit. Apparently the novel is like that, too, and if Cline explained it there -- like maybe it's because everyone emulates Halliday, who grew up back then -- he didn't translate it into his screenplay. It's as if the dystopian event that made Wade's world happened around 1999 rather than in the 2020s. There's precious little evidence in the picture that the 21st century actually took place, while one of our heroic quintet is chided for never having watched The Shining, as if 80% of teens today have seen the Kubrick film. Rationalize this as ye may, but I call it just another excuse to sell a nostalgic soundtrack album alongside Alan Silvestri's John Williams pastiche of a score, called into being presumably because the old master can't keep up with Spielberg any longer. The implausibility of this omnipresent nostalgia pretty much took me out of the picture, since it sounded like no future any sensible person might imagine, and none of the heroic characters had enough gravitas to draw me back in. Best in show goes to Mendelsohn, who between this and Rogue One may become the go-to organization-man loser villain of our time. And to be fair once more, even if the story and overall concept here are shallow if not cynical, but not satirical enough for their own good, Steven Spielberg is still a master of eye-candy spectacle and despite all I've said, I'm geek enough myself to have had some fun spotting all the pop-culture characters running around. If that sounds like fun to you, and if you don't expect anything deep, you probably won't be disappointed.

On the Big Screen: THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017)

Basically, Guillermo del Toro made a Tim Burton film, down to the kitschy nostalgia and the alienated misfits sticking it to bourgeois society. Only here's the difference. Burton empathizes with alienation from within bourgeois society. To put it more plainly, he deals with alienated whites. Del Toro gives us a cast of outsiders for whom alienation isn't simply a lifestyle choice: a mute, a gay man, a black woman and a gill-man. I suppose you can throw in the sympathetic Russia spy, too, since he's shown to be a better, more compassionate man than his KGB masters. Compassion apparently missing among the powerful puts all these characters on the same side. Del Toro and co-writer Vanessa Taylor can sometimes get heavy-handed about this. The gay man (Richard Jenkins), a commercial artist, is initially unwilling to help his mute neighbor (Sally Hawkins, this generation's Shelley Duvall) in her mad scheme to free the gill-man (Doug Jones) from government captivity. But after getting harshly rejected by the pie-shop clerk he'd been crushing on, and seeing him throw a black couple out of the place, the artist is all in. There's a solidarity of otherness here somewhat different from whatever solidarity of alienation exists in Burton's worlds, and perhaps a more eager embrace of the happy ending than Burton often could countenance. But let's say that if Burton were going to remake Splash, but del Toro inherited the project, The Shape of Water is quite close to what you'd probably get.

The film's true origin, we've been told, is the strange pang of romance little Guillermo felt when he saw the Creature from the Black Lagoon stalking Julia Adams underwater. The object of Shape of Water is to milk whatever romantic potential exists between a relatively homely, socially handicapped female and an amphibian man  who is said to be "beautiful," though he's a typical del Toro critter, and has conveniently godlike powers of healing. It helps that Elisa, the mute, has an aquatic fetish -- she masturbates in her bathtub and later recklessly floods her bathroom so she and the gill-man can get it on outside the tub's cramped confines -- that may date back to when she was found, Moses-like, in the water as a babe. Compassion forms the core of their romance; she, merely a cleaning lady at the Occam research facility ("The Simplest Explanation is the Best!"), seems to be the only person in the building really interested in communicating with the captive creature, offering it hard-boiled eggs while teaching it the sign for "egg." She shares her music collection with the creature -- this Sixties-set film admirably eschews the usual oldies in favor of the Forties music of the artist's beloved Fox musicals and the stuff Elisa presumably grew up on -- and gains self-esteem as she teaches another non-verbal being to communicate. However intelligent the gill-man might be, he will not see Elisa as "incomplete" because she can't talk. Like with plague-muted little Luna in War for the Planet of the Apes, there's an implication that doing without speech allows for more pure, guileless, communication.

The other side of that coin is the preference for silence during sex expressed by the creature's chief captor, Col. Strickland (Michael Shannon), who puts his maimed, bleeding hand over his wife's mouth to shut her up during intercourse. Strickland in some ways is more like a Burton protagonist in that he feels increasing alienation from his family's bland bourgeois existence ("Bonanza is much too violent!") He tries to buck the consumer fad for the color green -- the artist is ordered to recolor the Jell-O in his spec painting, for instance -- resisting the sales pitch for a green Cadillac until the salesman assures him that the color is actually teal. For whatever reason, his alienation takes oppressive, domineering form, with his cattle prod a surrogate phallus, perhaps because, as a general tells him, the military is the cruel face his society shows the outside world, while denying violence in its own midst; see also the artist's reluctance to watch news footage of the Birmingham police dogs attacking civil-rights protesters. Strickland's most obviously a control freak, refusing to accept the loss of two fingers at the gill-man's hands until the regrafted digits begin to rot and stink on him. But there's also a self-destructive streak that leads him to see himself as a Samson willing to destroy himself in order to take all his enemies down with him. Inevitably, when other characters are good guys simply by virtue of their otherness (see also Elisa's workplace protector, played by Octavia Spencer), Strickland ends up the most intriguing character, if also a tailor-made Michael Shannon villain.

The Shape of Water is an even weirder film than the ads and trailers let on, perhaps because even a snippet of Elisa's Rogers-Astaire fantasy dance with the gill-man might have been a too-Burtonesque deal-breaker for some prospective viewers. It's really more fairy-tale than horror film, or at least more of a fairy tale, in the "happily ever after" sense, than any previous del Toro film. It's a lovely looking film with well-dressed locations and sets shot by Dan Laustsen. The soundtrack is an intriguing mix of Forties tunes and an Alexander Desplat score that veers between Danny Elfman and Bernard Herrmann with some gallic touches of the composer's own. The film's on shakiest ground in imagining the interior life of the gill-man. He sometimes seems like a too-good-to-be-true innocent, but then del Toro has it kill and eat one of the artist's housecats. But if that was to remind us that the gill-man is a monster, the film promptly reverses that impression by having the creature apologize to the artist, after his fashion, and in the process heal both the scratches he inflicted on the artist's arm and his pattern baldness. If a last-supper scene where the gill-man's signing skills don't seem to have progressed past "egg" suggests that there's an inherent limit to his communication skills, he later manages to sign his desire that Elisa return to the sea with him. A stricken Strickland concludes that the gill-man really is a god -- he was worshiped as such in the land where the colonel found him -- but whether we're really meant to see him that way, or simply as a fairy-tale creature, is ultimately unclear. Each viewer can draw his or her own conclusion, but I think Shape of Water will succeed in getting most audiences to buy into Elisa's fantasy and del Toro's, if not necessarily his view of a time when America, as far as most people were concerned, was still great.

AIR HAWKS (1935)

Someone said once that the problem with socialism is socialism, while the problem with capitalism was capitalists. In other words, while socialism is an inherently flawed economic system, capitalism's credibility is undermined by capitalists who don't live up to the system's ideals. Popular fiction and cinema seemed to confirm this. Through the period of Code Enforcement and even through the anti-communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s, you hardly saw a film featuring competing businesses in which one of the competitors didn't cheat. A compact case in point is Albert Rogell's pulpy little programmer for Columbia.

Air Hawks is the film for those of you who think the only thing glaringly missing from Only Angels Have Wings was a death ray. We're still in the early days of commercial aviation here, with Independent Transcontinental Lines trying to earn a niche in the high-speed air-mail market. Since Barry Eldon (Ralph Bellamy) can't secure any more bank loans, he and his scrappy team of pilots have to prove themselves in the air. The established firm, Consolidated Airlines, appears to have all the advantages, but highly-connected casino owner Victor Arnold (the inevitably evil Douglas Dumbrille) advises Consolidated not to take chances. He has just the thing to end the competition: renegade scientist Schulter (Edward "Dr. Van Helsing" Van Sloan), who has perfected, on a small scale, a device to transmit a high-temperature current on a beam of light. In short, Arnold is suggesting that Consolidated hire a mad scientist to blast its competitors' planes out of the sky with a death ray. Consolidated likes the idea.

What more need I say? Van Sloan, gleefully playing for the other side, merrily incinerates a number of ITL pilots, the company's stock plummets, and Barry has to tell some Shirley Temple wannabe in a baby flight suit that Daddy will be flying another route for the foreseeable future. Air Hawks tugs at the heart strings, showing the scorched, mutilated baby doll Daddy was going to give to his daughter for her birthday, and in an extra macabre touch shows us that Barry has kept that grim memento in his desk until the poor tyke randomly finds it. Meanwhile, Barry's reporter pal manages to find and escape from Schulter's lair, while Barry tells the press that he'll personally set a speed record on the next high-altitude mail flight to prove ITL's viability.

 Slade Wilson's grandpa (Wiley Post) suits up for a Republic serial, but  Air Hawks wraps up in one long chapter.

Into the middle of this wanders real-life celebrity aviator Wiley Post, playing himself months before his fatal flight with Will Rogers. Tragic as Post's demise was, it probably didn't cost him further film opportunities, as his few mumbling minutes of screen time in Air Hawks proved him one of the most hopeless actors ever to recite lines before a camera. He volunteers to make the real mail flight, giving ITL added publicity, while Barry lures Arnold into his plane and takes him into the danger zone. The climax is a land-air battle as Barry dodges Schulter's mobile death ray while throwing bombs at the machine. The explosive climax comes complete with a dummy, presumably representing poor Schulter, blown out of the truck and flopping onto the dirt. It's all pure exhilarating idiocy carried out with succinct panache, and it's always fun to see Ralph Bellamy, at a point when he was already becoming the archetypal "Ralph Bellamy" who always loses the girl in romantic comedies, play the sort of two-fisted he-man he'd been more often in Pre-Code days. You can enjoy it as unpretentious camp with a dash of madness, and assure yourself that it's too silly to be subversive -- but was it?

BLADE RUNNER 2049 (2017) in SPOILERVISION

Once the mystery plot of Denis Villeneuve's film began moving, I had a bad feeling about where it would end up. But when it didn't end up there, I still felt disappointed, since it was now clear that the writers, including a contributor to the 1982 Blade Runner film, were just playing with the audience -- or else they realized sometime during the production that the most cliched of plot twists probably would have sullied a revered brand name. Whatever they thought, they had Villeneuve, who after last year's Arrival was poised to become dean of sci-fi filmmakers if 2049 hit big, plod ponderously toward a revelation anticipated even by the protagonist, only to leave audiences possibly wondering why, after all, we were supposed to be interested in a protagonist who turns out to be just another replicant. Of course, all replicants are supposed to be more human than human, and when given a chance Ryan Gosling, playing the replicant blade runner with the Kafkaesque nickname "K," did all right portraying the yearning introspection of a genuine artificial intelligence. The problem with 2049 is that while there arguably was a viable film idea in returning to the world Ridley Scott had extrapolated from Philip K. Dick's very different dystopian vision and following a new character, there was no point commercially to making a new Blade Runner film without catching up with fugitive recluse Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) thirty years of so after his romantic, violent heyday. Whatever the writers wanted to do with K, it had to connect at some point with the Deckard saga. As noted already, the film threatened to link them in the most hackneyed, tiresome way, but perhaps I should elaborate a bit.

So K. is a replicant blade runner, not really respected by his human police colleagues but also condemned as a traitor by his victims, such as Sapper Morton (for more on Dave Bautista's character, see one of the short subjects released online to promote the feature). Off duty, he leads a seemingly sad life, his only companionship coming from his personal Joi (Ana de Armas), who is basically Alexa with a holographic body. In the brief early scenes of his domestic life I thought the new film actually came slightly closer to the actual existence of the protagonist of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But before 2049 becomes an enhanced version of Her K has to follow up on a grisly discovery on Sapper's property. The now-retired replicant at some point buried a skeleton under a tree. The skeleton belonged to a woman who had been pregnant and may have died during childbirth, but closer examination reveals a serial number identifying the corpse as a replicant -- a replicant, that is, that indisputably gave birth, according to the forensic evidence. If the child of this dead replicant (you can guess who it was) is alive, that could revolutionize the expanding extra-global economy. The idea of reproducing replicants appeals greatly to Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), the tycoon who acquired the bankrupt Tyrell Corporation some years ago, because organic reproduction would be less expensive than mechanical production, while making available the large innately unfree workforce Wallace believes essential to humanity's further expansion across space. K's police boss (Robin Wright) sees replicant reproduction as a threat to human supremacy and sanctions K to find the child and retire it. The problem with this, from K's vantage, is that he has cause to suspect strongly that he is the child.

K. lies to the police, claiming to have found and killed the child. He's lucky he wasn't asked to produce a body, but the Wallace Corporation, spearheaded by replicant enforcer Luv (Syliva Hoeks) isn't fooled. They feel certain that K. continuing on his quest, will lead them to the child. Almost as good, he leads them to the long-missing Deckard, who's been hanging out in a recently irradiated Las Vegas with a whisky-swilling dog. Knowing of Deckard's relationship with Rachel the replicant (Sean Young appears in clips and apparently did some mo-cap and/or voice work for a 2049 vintage Rachel doppelganger), the Wallace crew thinks Deckard can point them to the child, so they overpower K, snatch Decker, and inexplicably leave K laying rather than retiring him or bringing him along -- didn't they suspect that he might be the mystery kid? This miscue proves costly, for Luv if not for Wallace himself, as K is retrieved by a replicant underground that tells him the presumably straight story of Rachel's pregnancy. This reduces K, even as he races to Deckard's rescue, to a facilitator of the actual father-child reunion while he, having little left to live for, has little time to live....

Blade Runner 2049 is too long and slow to work as the sort of sci-fi thriller the original film was. In choosing Villeneuve to direct, the producers, including Ridley Scott in an "executive" capacity, opted for mood over momentum, but for all his proven virtues the director isn't really the man for the sort of popcorn film 2049 has to be. It's stylish as hell, thanks largely to cinematography by Roger Deakins, and I appreciate they way the production design doubled down on the original film's vision of a corporate future in spite of the so-called "Blade Runner curse" that befell many of the companies advertising in the old film's cityscapes. There's not much new to those cityscapes, however, while the most striking scenes are set in the quasi-pornographic ruins of Vegas, which apparently has worse in store for it than last weekend's massacre. While the new film can recreate the original's architectural effects, the abandonment, for the most part, of the older film's neon-noir atmosphere somewhat undermines the effort to identify sequel with precursor. As for the actors, Gosling tried hard but is undercut as soon as Ford puts in his belated appearance. The older actor's performance is pretty much an ego trip, as the elderly Deckard is shown still to be a two-fisted he-man capable of beating up the presumably human goons Wallace has conveniently sent along with Luv to collect him. As the corporate baddie Jared Leto orates like a comic-book villain, apparently making up for the speeches he didn't get to make in Suicide Squad. As the top cop, Robin Wright may have finalized her new typecasting, following Wonder Woman, as a mature female authority figure. In sum, 2049 is far from terrible -- using a relevant benchmark, it's better than The Force Awakens --  but the fact that it's merely underwhelming is more disappointing, in a way, than if it had laughably bad.

On the Big Screen: WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (2017)

Matt Reeves' Planet of the Apes trilogy has gradually moved away from the concept's dystopian foundation, as established by original novelist Pierre Boulle and original screenwriter Rod Serling, making the saga of Caesar the chimp revolutionary a crowd-pleasing fantasy series. His movies remain superficially dystopian, portraying the further decline of the human race, but by now they don't feel dystopian in any meaningful way because no one's rooting for the humans. From the beginning, the Apes myth has been the sort of dystopia in which the victims had it coming; Charlton Heston's final rant in the 1968 movie sets the tone. Keep at it and the victims are bound to lose viewers' sympathy, especially when the filmmakers don't treat them as victims, but villains. The best proof of Reeves' success is that people don't ask themselves whether, as human beings, they should be happy with the results of his films. A lot of people will credit this to Andy Serkis's by-now overrated (But still good! Don't kill me!) motion-capture performances as Caesar and the sympathy he earns for the apes, but it really comes down to the writing -- and maybe also to a more misanthropic spirit in our time. You might expect a divided audience, some identifying more strongly with the apes while identifying the humans with certain more obnoxious or oppressive members of the species, while some still regard even the purely fictional prospect of human extinction with horror. But I doubt whether anyone watching War is not on Caesar's side, no matter what that means for those who aren't.

We open with the war promised at the end of the last picture underway. Diminished as they are by the simian flu, humans in northern California still outnumber and outgun Caesar's band of artificially-evolved apes, but still can't overcome the ape defenses in the dense forest. Nevertheless, each skirmish brings unacceptable losses, and Caesar hopes to break out of the forest and head south, where there are, presumably, fewer humans. Col. McCullough (Woody Harrelson), the leader of the local army, isn't going to let the apes go so easily. Doubly resentful now that he's discovered that simian flu is a gift that keeps on giving, McCullough (referred to by everyone else as simply "The Colonel") intends to exterminate the apes through slave labor. He's put captive apes to work building a wall -- don't freak out, anybody; the screenplay was written before anyone took Trump seriously, and in any event the wall is meant to keep out fellow humans, fellow soldiers even. A main force further north hasn't taken well with the Colonel's method of controlling the spread of secondary simian flu, which is to shoot anyone who contracts it, including his own son. Despite his extinction agenda, McCullough has simian collaborators: followers of the late Koba (Toby Kebbell takes a few encores to haunt Caesar's dreams) who paradoxically make common cause with humans out of fear and resentment of Caesar. In his greatest blunder as a leader, Caesar sends the majority of the apes south while he seeks personal revenge for casualties inflicted in one of the Colonel's raids on the forest. He's accompanied by his stalwarts: Luca the gorilla (Michael Adamthwaite), Maurice the orangutan (Karin Konoval) and Rocket the chimp (Terry Notary) -- and by a little human girl (Amiah Miller) that Caesar's crew inadvertently orphaned, and for whom the kindly Maurice in particular feels responsible. We learn eventually that her muteness is a result of the secondary virus, but more on that later. While this motley band, joined eventually by the first evolved ape they've ever seen who isn't part of their original group, heads toward a border station where they expect to find the Colonel, that clever man swept down upon the refugee apes with such swiftness and efficiency that they all arrive there and are put to work before Caesar reaches the place.

I prefer to keep spoilers at a minimum for non-superhero movies so I won't say much about the rest of the film, except to describe it as a cross between Apocalypse Now and The Ten Commandments, the latter proving the dominant strain even though Reeves openly invites comparison with the former with a bald, crazy colonel and some "Apepocalypse Now" graffiti. There's clever symbolic labeling throughout the film; the Colonel's soldiers call the apes "Kongs" but dub their gorilla collaborators "Donkeys"; one soldier's battle slogan, written on his helmet, is "Bedtime for Bonzo." There's more overt humor here than in the previous films, perhaps because Reeves recognizes by now how popular these films are. We even get a comedy-relief ape in the aforementioned but just-now identified "Bad Ape" (Steve Zahn), whose nebulous origin story opens the door to further exploration or the increasingly apish planet. He got smart like his fellow zoo apes but he honestly isn't very bright. His main trait is old-school comic cowardice of the sort that gets set aside when your buddies apply enough pressure. The little girl, who is given the easter-egg name "Nova" after one of Bad Ape's car-ornament trinkets, often proves more useful than this simian who never learned sign-language and thus can't communicate understand the other apes when Caesar's not around to translate. About the girl and her sickness: anyone who knows the history of Planet of the Apes can see that her plight evokes the mute humans Charlton Heston encounters. But what has happened to her exactly? For Col. McCullough the secondary flu is a fate worse than death because it robs people of speech. He also claims that victims are reduced to a "primitive" state, but we have only his hysterical word for that, compared to the evidence of Nova, who picks up the apes' sign language readily enough and displays numerous positive character traits that belie the Colonel's pejorative sense of "primitive." One could almost believe that the secondary flu has purified the girl, whose future is one of the more tantalizing threads that could be picked up in a post-Reeves sequel. For now, at least, it looks like Reeves and co-writer Mark Bombeck may have meant to make a point about our identification of sentience with speech or our reluctance to ascribe sentience to those without speech, but if so they fudge it a little by having Caesar talk more often than he probably needs to or should in story terms, for the obvious reason of reinforcing audience identification with the hero chimp.

As I said, the Ten Commandments gene ultimately overwhelms the film, inflicting a gratuitous disaster climax on top of the genuine climax of Caesar's escape from the Colonel's base in the middle of an air attack by the enemy army. It keeps up after that extra-climax with a sadly flat denouement at the edge of the promised land, with Maurice as Caesar's Aaron and Rocket as his Joshua, while Reeves can think of nothing better for Nova and Bad Ape to do than romp around in circles in something like a parody of play. But I won't hold the end of the picture against its actual story or Reeves' overall direction. War relies on emotional intensity rather than frantic action, often lingering on the wondrously expressive faces of Caeasr -- surely you can't credit Serkis alone for all of this -- and the other lead apes, and emphasizing Harrelson's profoundly menacing presence as the Colonel without requiring him to emote villainously. Reeves is at his best simply framing Harrelson watching the imprisoned Caesar from his balcony, or receiving the adulation of his troops while preoccupied with shaving his head. Harrelson does a tremendous job under Reeves' direction to compete with the lead apes, who probably are the best CGI creations on film to date, not counting Pixar movies. Reeves can shoot close-ups of their faces with Leonean intensity with full justification; you really do feel like you can see the inner workings of Caesar, Maurice or Rocket's mind when they're not talking or signing. War may not really stick the landing, but it should still go down as one of the best third films in a series. While there can and perhaps should be more films in this Apes series, Reeves' trilogy should stand for some time as one of the most impressive achievements in modern genre film.

ARES (2016)

There's something almost quaintly old-fashioned about the dystopia imagined by writer-director Jean-Patrick Benes in Ares. His dark future has nothing to do with French politics or demographics, haunted by neither a Muslim underclass nor the National Front. Instead, as was widely anticipated in the late 20th century, the corporations have taken over, with more widespread poverty and the further debasement of French culture as a result -- the latter signified by the death of Le Monde, France's answer to the New York Times. The rabble, as ever, are preoccupied by circuses if not also with bread. Cage fighting has become the leading spectator sport, made available for free on big screens hung from the country's cultural monuments. Fighters are openly sponsored by pharmaceutical companies whose stock value depends on their success in the cage. The competitors are injected with each corporation's proprietary serums in the open before each bout and sometimes between rounds.

Reda Kowalski (Ola Rapace) is about a decade past his prime, ranked #266 in France as the story begins. He fights under the ring name "Ares" when he isn't working as a private-security goon pounding on street protesters, who include his own relatives. His sister is some sort of investigative reporter or hacker who ends up getting arrested in an obvious frame-up. To raise bail money for her, Reda agrees to test a dangerous new super-fighter serum in the cage. It turns out that he's one of the lucky few who can take the drug without dying almost instantly, and there's no guarantee that he'll survive the comedown from his initial high. The stuff works well enough for Ares to score a major upset in the first round of the latest European tournament, and once Reda wakes up after fainting with no ill effects, stock in the company skyrockets. Having bet the farm on himself by proxy, Reda can now spring his sister, but learns that she was killed in prison. C'est la vie.

Reda smells a set-up and soon learns the terrible truth. He knows that he is "patient zero" for the new drug, the first test subject to survive, but thanks to some hackers who were friends with his sister he discovers that the corporation had killed 30,000 people with the stuff before they found him. He takes his revenge by twisting one of the ancient tropes of the fight-game genre and throwing his next fight in the tournament, causing the corporate stock to tank. He's too valuable for them to let him walk away, so their goons take his sister's kids hostage to bring him back in line. Suspecting that he'd refused to take the drug before the last fight, they want to continue experimenting with him, but they've underestimated the cunning of Reda's new friends and how far Reda himself will go to deny them what they want....

For a dystopian film Ares ends rather optimistically with its hero the hero of a presumably successful mass uprising against the corporate regime. It's nice that Benes and his co-writers believe that the masses would be aroused by Reda's story, but it also demonstrates the limits of their dystopian imagination. That aside, Ares is a modestly entertaining cyberpunk variation on oldtime boxing movies. It's clearly limited by a budget that doesn't allow the cage fights to play out before masses of extras in an arena. I'm not sure if the sport would catch on as the filmmakers claim it did without the enthusiasm of a live crowd for TV audiences to respond to, but I suppose you could call it a live version of any fighting-tournament video game, none of which need audiences to get over. The fighting itself is nothing special, but I suppose it doesn't need to be, since Ares is more film noir than martial arts movie in the final analysis. The plot is more compelling than the action, but not compelling enough to hide the datedness of its dystopia. The same film could have been made a quarter-century ago, and while I certainly don't mean to disparage anyone's fear of corporations taking over the world, I do doubt whether that's the subject for any really ambitious dystopian film in our own, already somewhat dystopian time.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 (2017) in SPOILERVISION

How can the Guardians of the Galaxy claim to be friends, one skeptic scoffs in James Gunn's sequel to his 2014 sleeper hit, when all they do is argue and yell at one another? The answer, as one might guess without seeing this film but having seen many another popular film of our time, is that the four interstellar misfits, plus the offspring of their late cohort, are not friends but "family." Gunn doubles down here on this more dubious aspect of the previous film, but people today apparently dig this idea. The interesting thing is that Guardians Vol. 2 harps on this theme while simultaneously highlighting a sororial blood feud and an act of celestial parricide. In the main event, Peter "Star Lord" Quill (Chris Pratt), the human being of the team, finally meets his father, the unselfconsciously named Ego (Kurt Russell), who gives the galaxy's biggest fan of 70s pop the great news that he has the genealogy of a god. Biological didn't bother until now because his momentarily conscience-stricken agent, the ravager Yondu (Michael Rooker), kept little Pete to train as an artful dodger. Now that Quill has proven himself a space hero -- the Guardians now hire out as a cosmic security detail, defending an obnoxious planet's power batteries against a random monster during the opening credits -- Ego wants to test whether he, of all his many, many offspring, has the divine spark. It turns out that he does, and that makes it possible for Ego, whose consciousness is one with the planet he lives on, to implement his long-cherished plan to exterminate all other life in the universe. Star Lord will come to realize almost too late, just as Gunn beats the point into our heads, that Yondo is more his true father than this literal rockhead. Meanwhile, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and her cyborg sister Nebula (Karen Gillan) carry on their lifelong battle, which climaxes this time with a space-opera homage to North By Northwest on the surface of the redundantly-named "Ego's Planet," yet appears to end on a tentative note of reconciliation. And wouldn't you know? Daddy's to blame. Family seems easier without one of those around.

The novelty of the first Guardians picture is irrecoverable, and the sort of shtick we often get in its place here is a poor replacement. There are times when you may imagine yourself reading the script and seeing "[Insert joke here]" with numbing regularity. Not even Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista) is as funny as he was before, though it's not the actor's fault that his best moments were used in the trailers. His imperturbable, sometimes arrogant imbecility, combined with lapses into childlike enthusiasm, still make Bautista the best thing about these films. He gets a new foil, and the film gets a much-needed breath of fresh air, in the form of the empath Mantis (Pom Klementieff), a reluctant protege of Ego's. She's based on one of Marvel Comics' most obnoxious characters of the 1970s -- which is saying a lot -- but writer/director and actress redeem her by emphasizing her naive insecurity and a plausibly alien nature compared to the Guardians, who all, regardless of species, seem all too human most of the time. There are many more weird new characters, including some sure to appear in the next Guardians film, if not sooner, among them a group of badass elders some may recognize as the original comic-book Guardians of the Galaxy, but the gold-skinned Sovereigns (ruled by Elizabeth Debicki), for whom war is a bloodless (for them) video game, don't make much of an impression despite their importance to some plot threads now and in the future. On every level Vol. 2 is less inspired than the first film, but despite its faults the sequel manages to get audiences emotionally invested in the heroes' climactic perils, and it retains the original's surprising sense of wonder amid all the hard-boiled antics. From the more attractive landscapes of Ego-land to the outer-space fireworks display during one character's viking funeral, Gunn's determination to hit us with moments of pure or at least aspiring beauty is one aspect of the Guardians series that continues to surprise.

On the Big Screen: GHOST IN THE SHELL (2017)

It's been more than twenty years since I saw the seminal cyberpunk-style anime that inspired Rupert Sanders' new film, and to be honest I don't remember much about it apart from the giant holographic signs and Kenji Kawai's tremendous theme song, which gets a welcome reprise over the new film's end credits. After doing some research to refresh my memory, I see that there's only superficial resemblances between the two films. The new screenplay boils down to a very ordinary "everything you thought you knew is wrong" story in which The Major (Scarlett Johansson), a highly skilled cyborg working for a shadowy department of the Japanese government, learns during her investigation of a crime wave masterminded by a cyborg terrorist that her makers fed her a fake story about her human origin. The one clever thing about this is that it inscribes the controversy over the "whitewashing" of the main character into the film itself. Since Ghost is known worldwide as a Japanese product, offense was taken -- more in the U.S. than in Japan itself, as I'm given to understand -- that an American actress got the lead role. Never mind that Scarlett Johansson probably is the most popular female action star on Earth right now, and that while Marvel Studios insanely refuses to put her in a solo Black Widow movie she has been typecast in recent films (Her, Under the Skin, Lucy) as a higher form of life. Never mind that the ability to make a cyborg look like whatever regardless of the "ghost's" true identity is part of the point of the project. What mattered to those this bothers, I suspect, is mainly that Johansson, so to speak, took away someone's rice bowl. In any event, the new film tells us that the Major herself has been whitewashed, that she was Japanese in her corporeal life but changed into something else, presumably because the head man of the robotics company is white himself. This still may not make sense given that she was purchased by the Japanese government and lives and works in Japan. Taking this into consideration, shouldn't she have been designed as a Japanese? Write it off as the whim of a villain, but note also that this film's Japan is quite the cosmopolitan place.

The Major's boss (a deceptively feeble looking Takeshi Kitano, splitting the difference between his directorial and thespian billings as " 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano" in the credits) has an international but Anglophone team of agents, including rising global star Pilou Asbaek as Major's sidekick Batou, who understand his Japanese but talk to him in English, which he understands just as well. Cybernetics, I guess. I waited the whole film for Takeshi to talk English in some badass moment, but the great man actually is so badass that he doesn't have to talk anyone else's language. Indeed, this is as international a film as you'll get this year, co-financed by American and Chinese companies and boasting Juliette Binoche, reigning queen of global cinema, in its supporting cast. Unfortunately, probably for the same reason it feels as completely generic a film as any you'll see this year. It's certainly not a bad film, but by 2017 there's no way that a live-action Ghost can be the sort of conceptual forward leap that the anime Ghost was in its time. It touches only lightly on the implicit horror of an age in which identity has grown almost helplessly vulnerable to manipulation, its best scene demonstrating the point during the interrogation of a hapless human implanted with false memories, who comes to realize with horror under questioning that everything he thought he knew was ... well, you get the idea. For all its spectacle, Sanders' Ghost is merely competent rather than visionary. It's Johansson's movie but I suspect that if anyone gets a rub from it it'll be Asbaek, who cements his action-hero credentials as Batou. Overall this isn't really a bad movie, but for a work of science-fiction contemplating a possible post-human or trans-human future it suffers a possibly insurmountable handicap of appearing to look backward rather than forward.

DVR Diary: TRANSATLANTIC TUNNEL (1935)

Known in Great Britain simply as The Tunnel, Maurice Elvey's film may be the first of its kind in one respect. It's the first film I can think of that hires a star actor for the cameo role of an anonymous President of the United States. Not only does it use Walter Huston, who had already played presidents at least twice on film -- Abraham Lincoln in D.W. Griffith's biopic of that name and a divinely-guided corpse in the megalomaniacal Gabriel Over the White House -- but it also enlists Mr. George Arliss, who had already won an Oscar playing such a person, as an anonymous, monocled Prime Minister of England. These men have easy jobs since their roles can hardly be called characters; they are only ever seen delivering speeches, and one wonders whether they had to bother memorizing anything.

Tunnel is very much like the sort of crisis film in which some famous actor as The President was touted as an extra added attraction. It has a premise that probably was obsolete when this picture, set sometime after 1940, was made: that ties between the U.S. and U.K., commercial and otherwise, could be strengthened by running a tunnel across the North Atlantic. The benefits of doing this as opposed to developing air travel are never really weighed, but nevertheless the Anglo-American team of engineer Mack McAllan (Richard "Cimarron" Dix), who has invented a new type steel for tunnel construction, and inventor Robbie Robbins (Leslie "The Most Dangerous Game" Banks), whose "radium drill" will cut the tunnel, manage to convince a small coteries of millionaires to bankroll their project. Disasters public and private ensue as Mack grows estranged from his wife and son, leaving his chaste chum Robbie to be their go-between, and the tunnel hits various snags, most dangerously an undersea volcano in its path. One can easily believe that Richard Dix could grow too preoccupied with mechanical tasks for family or any emotional ties, even if he's hardly more convincing as an engineer than Lon Chaney Jr. was in The Wolf Man. A nerd in the body of a lummox, Mack is first seen frantically scribbling figures while a very exclusive audience attends to a private performance by a symphony orchestra. Shortly thereafter he is seen tugging at the tight collar of his monkey suit like the oaf he appears to be. Yet women throw themselves at him, and Mrs. Mack (Madge Evans) truly resents his absence. She shows her resentment by taking a nursing job in the tunnel project's infirmary. Just as we learn that tunnel gases can cause blindness, she goes blind. The son, grown up over the years of construction (Jimmy Hanley), takes a tunnel job to prove his manhood to himself and his distant dad. He dies. There's also an attempt by a financier's daughter to lure Mack into marriage, an attempt by a munitions magnate to gain control of the tunnel company for who knows what purpose, and the looming threat of the Eastern Federation of Powers, which may exploit any failure of the tunnel project to make its move for world domination.

Through it all Mack and Robbie endeavor to persevere, and in spite of everything Mack and his Mrs. are reunited for the opening ceremonies, presided over by an invisibly Jesus-like "Ruler of the British Empire." It sounds more like a prototype for disaster movies than a pioneer sci-fi film (Britain had the lead over the U.S. in this race, with Things To Come still to come that decade), but as sci-fi Tunnel boasts some impressive sets and special effects, though some of these are reportedly borrowed from a German film based on the same (German) source novel. Interesting, Bernhard Kellerman's 1913 Der Tunnel  proves to be more prescient than the 1935 movie; it concludes with air travel having made the transatlantic tunnel instantly obsolete.

On the Big Screen: ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY (2016)

While J. J. Abrams' The Force Awakens, released as the seventh episode of the Star Wars saga, felt like a fanfiction in its attention to the original movie characters and its repetition of plot points, Gareth Edwards' Rogue One -- apparently including significant contributions from Tony Gilroy -- feels like a real reboot of the franchise, despite its CGI resurrection of Peter Cushing and the wheezy line readings of James Earl Jones and Anthony Daniels. It introduces new notes of complexity and moral ambiguity into the legend of the rebellion against the Galactic Empire. It looks more like a rebellion for our time, divided into factions of varying degrees of ruthlessness and fanaticism, though as yet we've seen no space-opera equivalent of ISIS among the rebels against this particular tyranny. As everyone should know by now, Rogue One is an immediate prequel to the original Star Wars film -- or as I suppose we must call it now, A New Hope. It concerns the intrigues and slaughters that ended with the plans to the Death Star, including its crucial flaw, in the hands of Princess Leia. We learn now that the outrageous flaw was actually a deliberate act of design sabotage by captive scientist Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), who now needs to get this secret detail to the rebels. In his captivity, however, he has missed the deterioration of the rebellion into factions. His great friend among the rebels is Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), who rescued Galen's daughter Jyn when Imperial forces kidnapped Galen and killed his wife. Since then, the mutilated, ailing Gerrera -- he may have been envisioned as a rebel analogue to Darth Vader, though there's something of Col. Kurtz to him, too -- has alienated himself from the official rebellion, i.e. the Alliance, and wages guerrilla or terrorist war from his base on the desert planet Jedha. Galen persuades an Imperial pilot, Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed) to defect and fly to Jedha with a hologram in which Galen explains the flaw, but Gerrera has grown paranoid and keeps Bodhi imprisoned, thinking him an Imperial plant, if not an agent of some other enemy. The Alliance knows about the pilot's defection and wants information from him, but fears a hostile reception from Gerrera. Their solution is to recruit the grown-up Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), an imprisoned criminal long since abandoned by Gerrera, as their entry to Jedha. Her Alliance escort, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), is tasked with using whatever information can be had from Jedha to track down Galen Erso, extract him from Imperial custody if possible, or kill him if necessary.

That's enough synopsis to show that Rogue One is operating on an entirely different level from other Star Wars films. This is a Star Wars film where nothing or no one has to be cute; its idea of comedy relief is an acerbic tactical droid who jokes about "accidentally" shooting Jyn and dispassionately reminds the other characters of the probability of their deaths at any given moment. He's not wrong to be concerned, as the movie is as ruthless as its characters. It gives a knife's-edge quality to nearly every scene, at least in the first half of the movie. And its complexity extends to the other side, where the Death Star is the object of an institutional feud between the real initiator of the project, Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), who captured Galen Erso, and Grand Moff Tarkin, who switches on a dime from bullying skepticism to credit poaching, while Darth Vader serves as an impatient, contemptuous referee. Despite the Sith lord's hovering over events, this is a Star Wars film refreshingly free from preoccupation with the Jedi and their powers and bloodlines. The Force exists here only as an object of religious veneration that inspires and possibly empowers the acolytes of the Kyber temple on Jedha (played by Donnie "Ip Man" Yen and Jiang "who ever dreamed of the director of Devils on the Doorstep in a Star Wars film?" Wen). Though people may think of Star Wars as the saga of the Jedi -- The Force Awakens does nothing to contradict that -- the heroes of Rouge One are really more heroic for not being able to depend on superpowers, and the heightened odds against them gives the new film a dramatic tension long absent from the franchise.

There's a point where the picture's character changes, and though I don't think that's when Gilroy took over from Edwards, there's a little awkwardness in the transition. Basically, Rogue One stops being a "dirty war" spy thriller and becomes more of a doomed mission war movie, and once it becomes that all the ambiguities exposed in the first half are resolved or papered over. At one moment Jyn Erso is angry at the Alliance for having used and, arguably, betrayed her, and in the next she's trying to inspire the leading Alliance senators to attack the planet where the Death Star plans are actually stored -- by this point Galen himself can no longer help them -- with a rah-rah speech so heavy on "hope" that it has sparked suspicion of a contemporary political subtext, even though the concept of hope clearly isn't alien to Star Wars. Once we're past this bump, however, Rogue One rushes to the typical multilayered Star Wars climax, as our main band of heroes disperse on various missions on the planet while an Alliance fleet joins the fray once it looks like our heroes have a chance at success. I actually felt that the climax stretched out a little longer than it needed to, but there's no disputing the power and poignancy of it. The effect is spoiled a little by an admittedly badass run-in by Vader and a final word from a CGI Leia, but I feel like I'm nitpicking to mention these things. The real story is that Rogue One is the best Star Wars movie since The Empire Strikes Back, and in an ideal galaxy it, rather than The Force Awakens (its inferior in every respect) would be the model for the future evolution of the Star Wars universe. That's probably not going to happen, however, since I have a feeling this is going to get bad word of mouth for its lack of "fun" or nostalgic pandering.  But it may be the most purely entertaining movie I've seen this year. It may not be "Star Wars" as far as some reviewers are concerned, but what counts is that it's a really good movie.

On the Big Screen: ARRIVAL (2016)

It's nice to see Hollywood spend some money on science fiction that isn't space opera, but it's not as if "first contact" isn't a familiar subgenre already. The really good thing about Dennis Villeneuve's film is how it problematizes that contact and explains the problems involved in comfortably dramatic fashion. We start with twelve contact lens-shaped alien ships appearing in apparently random parts of the world, including Montana USA. An Army colonel (Forest Whitaker) invites linguist and translator Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to interpret what the seven-limbed creatures (their vaguely cthulhoid appearance keeps our guard up) have tried to say so far. The colonel wants to cut to the chase and find out why the Heptapods are here, but Banks explains quite clearly how the building blocks of conversation have to be assembled before we can ask the colonel's question in comprehensible fashion. Quickly concluding that talking to the Heptapods may be impossible, Banks starts to teach them written English, and in turn learns the Heptapod language, written with natural ink in circular, distinctively blotted sentences that hang in the creatures' thick atmosphere or stick to the glass partition separating them from the humans. This allows the beginnings of communication, but specific meanings of "words" still need to be nailed down before false conclusions are drawn. In the most obvious case, the Heptapods seem to be saying that they're here to "offer weapon" to the different countries they're visiting -- including not just the U.S. but China, Russia, Pakistan, etc. -- and urging us to "use weapon." Are they really talking about a "weapon," and what do they mean by using it? The authoritarian countries, somehow led by a Chinese general rather than a party secretary, conclude that the Heptapods are hostile and prepare for military action. American instincts are along the same lines, but Banks bucks authority, backed by sympathetic physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), to get crucial clarification from the Montana Heptapods they've nicknamed, in a nod to cinematic language games of the past, Abbott and Costello....

I want to be more careful about spoilers with Arrival than I am with superhero films that, as components of larger projects, may only be comprehensible in contexts established by spoilers. Arrival happily stands alone and deserves to have the integrity of its surprises respected. I'll tease rather than spoil by warning you that the film toys with certain movie conventions in a manner that first seems disappointingly derivative -- one particular attempt at character development will seem to have been ripped off blatantly from another recent sci-fi film with a female protagonist -- but gains fresh meaning once the story resolves itself. I'm not sure I entirely comprehend the full story -- it's unclear to me whether an important attribute of the heroine is acquired or innate, though I lean toward the former -- but in this case, at least, that doesn't mean the picture is incomprehensible. While its portrayal of military-intelligence types is pretty cliched, Arrival overall is a film that respects your intelligence and deserves respect in return. Villeneuve directs in a classic widescreen style, with cinematography by Bradford Young, and even if it's not a space opera it's often spectacular to look at. I'm not ready to anoint Amy Adams an Oscar front-runner, but I appreciate why people appreciate her work as a character defined primarily by brains and I can't honestly say I've seen much better acting this year. It's nice to see her in an alternate universe she can share with Jeremy Renner (see also American Hustle) when their regular "cinematic universe" haunts are off-limits to each other. In a way, that makes the world of Arrival more real, no matter how fantastic a story it tells.

Too Much TV: WESTWORLD (2016-?)

For cable series with short seasons (13 episodes or less) I've tried to wait until after a season is over to write a review, but in Westworld's case an uncertainty about what the hell is going on is such an essential element of the show that I feel entitled to write something now, with only six episodes aired so far. HBO's long-in-the-works series is a radical revision of Michael Crichton's 1973 movie, the author's first imagining of a high-tech theme park where nothing could possibly go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong...Anyway, it follows in the footsteps of the Battlestar Galactica reboot by vesting its androids with personalities, and goes further by making them the most sympathetic characters on the show. As reimagined by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, with significant input from J. J. Abrams, Westworld is a vast playground where guests can take part in storylines with highly interactive "hosts," each with its own backstory. The guests pay huge sums for the ultimate privilege of using the hosts however they please. They can play along with the established storylines and be heroes, or they can go "blackhat" and kill, rape or otherwise the hosts with virtual impunity. Atrocities are routine, but every time a host is "killed," it's taken to the shop to have its body repaired and its memory purged, and then sent out to start its story over. Behind the scenes, employees battle for creative control of the storylines, and sometimes exploit the hosts in quasi-necrophiliac fashion. Ruling over it all is the perhaps too blatantly named Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the co-creator of Westworld who now theoretically answers to the Delos Corporation but seems to do as he damn well pleases regardless of heavy monetary losses and pressure from the Delos board to deliver new storylines.

We'd have no show if nothing went wrong, and the problem evolving as we arrive is that some hosts are starting to remember the traumas they've suffered. A line of Shakespeare, "These violent delights have violent ends," seems to be a trigger phrase activating deeply hidden protocols in the remaining first-generation hosts, thirty years after Westworld's opening was marred by the death of Ford's partner, a man we know only as Arnold, who has loomed ever larger as the series progresses. Two hosts serve as our point-of-view characters to these changes. They represent opposed western archetypes: the rancher's daughter Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and the whorehouse madam Maeve (Thandie Newton). Dolores got the trigger phrase from the host that played her father, and gave it to Maeve almost at random. Both hosts relive brutal attacks as dreams, and both seem to be victimized by the so-called Man in Black (Ed Harris), apparently a philanthropist in real life but a sadistic superman in Westworld. A regular if not addicted guest, the Man in Black has mastered the system so that he's virtually invincible, but continues hunting for hidden levels. He seems to believe that Westworld has not lived up to its potential and seeks to awaken that potential through extreme violence and cruelty to the hosts. He has a privileged status at Westworld ("That gentleman gets anything he wants," one staffer says), and why that should be is one of the show's most compelling mysteries so far. He now hopes to discover a maze that may be Westworld's ultimate level. For the hosts the maze is an Indian myth, but it may be something more than that. "The maze is not for you," one tells the Man in Black, and it may be for the hosts; a test they can undertake with a hint of true freedom at the end.

Dolores seems headed for the maze, accompanied by two corporate guests, one striving to be a good guy, the other a practiced blackhat. She's coached by a voice in her head that has enabled her to override the programming that prevents hosts from harming living creatures. She's also coached in a different way by one of Ford's top aides, Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), who breaks one of Ford's personal rules by interviewing a fully-clothed Dolores. Ford prefers that the hosts go naked in the shop to discourage the staff from humanizing them, though he has a sentimental mockup of his own family, including a host version of himself as a child, in an isolated location in the park. Dolores and the Man in Black seem to be on a collision course, unless you buy into the popular fan theory, perhaps inspired by NBC's nonlinear family drama This is Us, that their storylines are actually happening many years apart. Meanwhile, Maeve seems to be figuring things out for herself without the same coaching Dolores gets. She remembers waking up accidentally and seeing the inner workings of Westworld, remembers being shot despite having no scar where the wound should be, and cuts herself open to find a bullet staffers had forgotten to remove. Piecing these details together, she starts getting herself killed deliberately in the hope of waking up in the shop again, and eventually gets her wish. Now, while Dolores continues to blunder toward her destiny, Maeve blackmails some Westworld staffers into explaining how she functions and upgrading her for purposes that remain to be seen. While all this is happening there's evidence of corporate espionage inside the park, and increasing evidence that Arnold hasn't had his last word yet on the future of Westworld and its hosts....

Much of what I could say about Westworld right now remains speculative, but for genre fans that's part of the fun of the show. The show is a kind of mystery or puzzle in which speculation is essential to the experience; if you're impatient for explanations it won't be for you. The game-like nature of the show extends to its soundtrack, which each week challenges you to identify the contemporary rock tune being covered on the player piano in Maeve's brothel. The show exists, as my mom used to say when we asked why too often, to make you ask questions. Who is the Man in Black? How did Arnold actually die, if he's actually dead? Who among the guests or staff might actually be hosts? Any show can beg questions like this, but Westworld's writing and acting make the questions worth asking and trying to answer. When Hopkins first appeared, I thought dismissively that he'd become the rich man's Malcolm McDowell, but he seems to be on his game here, while Harris makes an evilly enigmatic Man in Black. Wood and Newton are the real stars here, as well as our surrogates as seekers after the truth of Westworld, In their contrasting quests they seem more human than human, given the despicable nature of so many human guests in this decadent playground. But there are plenty of sympathetic humans as well -- presuming that they're human, of course. The mysteries of Westworld give the show an expansiveness beyond its massive budget. My worry is that once its mysteries are resolved it will lose a lot of its mystique. It may be better not to know enough than to know too much, but only time will tell one way or another. For now, it's my favorite new show of the fall.