Assassin’s Creed (2016)

If you have played any of Ubisoft’s five thousand Assassin’s Creed games, you’ll know what this thing’s about. Otherwise: Templars bad, assassins good, history is a lie, we need that artefact. To be more precise, we need the Apple of Eden because it “contains the genetic code for free will”.

Frankly, the film’s dreadful, even when I put on my glasses with the highest possible tolerance for blockbusters and very carefully keep in mind what these films can and can’t do. It’s not just that the script is stupid, with character motivations that never make any damn sense at all and a plot that lacks any hooks that might make it exciting and a structure which misses any kind of effective throughline. The writing also makes the bizarre mistake to take all the AssCreed Templars versus assassins nonsense much too seriously, treating it as the most po-faced melodrama imaginable throughout, seemingly completely impervious to the fact that much of the tropes it uses are extremely silly, perhaps even outright goofy. Of course, that’s a problem the franchise’s games also tend to suffer under. A lightness of touch would not necessarily mean not taking emotional beats and metaphors seriously, but rather approaching them from an angle that makes sense. I don’t want to trot out Marvel Studios’ films as an ideal example how to do it again, but they are the obvious comparison, getting their tones just right without losing dramatic weight or excitement.

However, the script isn’t the film’s only problem. It’s also pretty boring from the perspective of sheer spectacle, a problem I can only fault director Justin Kurzel (last seen by me when directing the fantastic The Snowtown Murders) for. Kurzel apparently can’t direct a decent action sequence to save his life, so most of the fights and chases here are messed up by pointless sweeping camera movements, editing I can only call random and the director’s total inability to fulfil one of the most crucial rules of filmmaking when creating scenes that find characters traversing a dangerous environment: turn the environments into physical spaces in the audience’s minds. Otherwise, an action scene becomes just a series of random, pointless movements and shots of demonstrative coolness that never show anything that actually is cool because there’s no context to any of what we see. It’s like a musical whose director doesn’t realize he actually needs to show the dancers properly. There’s also a general air of emotional detachment surrounding the action scenes, something too abstracted, as if the film were going down a check list of what it needs to include but never finds any actual excitement in what it shows.

Because all these problems just don’t make the film quite tedious enough, Kurzel (or whoever actually is the guilty party) also decides to have his actors go through the (usually dumb) dialogue with all the emotional involvement of rocks, wasting a bunch of highly talented actors on the po-faced, lifeless staring of automatons. Not even Jeremy Irons’s big bad gets a decent moment of megalomania. Even the games don’t take themselves serious enough to make this particular mistake (and they are also much prettier to look at and more or less fun to play in the right-sized doses).

On the positive side, Marion Cotillard’s haircut is excellent. The production design is pretty good too, though Kurzel’s extremely muted colour schemes and distanced camera work don’t really do it any favours. But hey, it’s still better than a Michael Bay movie.

Avril et le monde truqué (2015)

aka April and the Extraordinary World

Most of the film takes place in an alternative 1941, where France is still ruled by an emperor Napoleon, and where the disappearance of most scientists some decades ago has added scientific stagnation to the cultural one. While the world is dominated by a lot of rather nifty steam devices, mankind has paid the price for that by exhausting first the Earth’s coal supply and now having nearly destroyed all of the plant life too. Consequently, all that steampunk science is covered with soot and rust, and what’s that “sun” you speak of?

The few scientists who don’t disappear are pressed into developing weapons, so that France can get at North America’s tree reserves. Our heroine, Avril (Marion Cotillard), is the daughter of a family of scientists who escaped the strange abductions as well as getting pressed into slave labour by their government for quite some time, but just when they seem to have achieved their big family goal – creating the Ultimate Serum that’ll make people ageless and invulnerable – the secret police come knocking. The ensuing chase sequence ends with Avril’s parents abducted by mysterious forces, her grandfather fleeing to parts unknown and the little girl just barely escaping a nice stay in an orphanage together with her talking cat Darwin (Philippe Katerine).

Ten years later, in 1941, Avril is living in a secret lair in a statue, still trying to produce the family’s serum, and earning her keep with a bit of pickpocketing. Soon, she’ll go through a series of adventures that’ll reunite her with her grandfather, lead her to discover what happens to the disappearing scientists, let her find love, and perhaps even give her the chance to change her world for the better.

Christian Desmares’s and Franck Ekinci’s film is a particularly fine piece of animated cinema. Inspired by the fantastical part of the works of great comics artist and writer Jacques Tardi – who is also responsible for some of the animated design (the rest keeping very much in the spirit of his work) and the general air of whimsy, intelligence and warmth of the whole affair – the film uses a more hand-drawn look to its animation, achieving a more personal and human feel than you get from the big Hollywood animation studios whose every film stylistically seems very much like the one before. There are some anime who use this approach of making the digitally animated look more hand-drawn, of course, but Avril is very much a thing all its own.

There’s a barrage of crazy ideas, homages (the sharp eyes will even spot a Dalek) and visual worldbuilding running through the film, but instead of feeling incoherent, everything on screen here is very much of one piece, the incidental details, the whimsy and the sometimes (again very much in the spirit of Tardi) very broad yet just as often warmly wry humour coming together to create a strange world that feels believable by its own logic. That it is also a delightfully strange world is only the cherry on top.

Plot and world aren’t only inspired by Tardi but also by the 19th century French scientific romance Tardi himself was inspired by, a field that goes much further than just the novels of Jules Verne. If you’re like me and still haven’t taught yourself French, the wonderful Blackcoat Press have translated and published quite a few books from this era in affordable editions that provide useful context through knowledgeable forewords. However, the filmmakers clearly didn’t set out to make a piece of nostalgia porn, so there are many plot elements and ideas, as well as certain directions of thought, which are very much of our time. This is all for the better, of course.

Apart from being beautiful to look at and bursting with joyful creativity, Avril also has a lot of actual warmth, showing characters that fulfil very traditional roles for this sort of tale (the hero of the piece being a late teenage girl instead of the more traditional boy really doesn’t change this aspect in itself) but giving most of them some added humanity that turns talking plot devices into characters an audience can care about.


All of this adds up to the kind of film that I can’t help but gush about, where enthusiasm, craftsmanship and art unite to become something very special indeed.

In short: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

After watching the final film of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, I've worked through various pieces of criticism about it, and I have to agree with about fifty percent of it. So yes, I agree this is a perhaps overlong, often overreaching and internally conflicted film. However, I actually think these things aren't bugs here, they are features; indeed they are for me what makes this a great film.

The thing with the film's overreaching, the way it wants to be about three or four films at once (one of them even a superhero version of A Tale of Two Cities) really comes down to what you expect of your multi-multi-million dollar movies: a tight, slick product, or an actual creative endeavour that sometimes won't be able to fulfil everything it tries, but that makes up for the moments - in this case about twenty percent of the time - when it fails with a willingness to go to interesting, sometimes even surprising, places between the spectacle and loud melodrama the blockbuster business affords. In other words, if we as an audience want our mainstream entertainment to take risks, we also have to accept that not everything in it will work out perfectly and slickly, that there will be roughness, but also honest excitement and actual ideas when things work out, which is what happens in about eighty percent of the movie.

The Dark Knight Rises is a film full of conflicting impulses in its narrative, its politics, its emotions, even its concept of heroism; despite being a superhero movie, it's a film lacking moral certainty (especially in the few moments when it pretends to have it). Things here are messy, and clear-cut answers are not to be found; this is about striving and asking questions, and questioning answers which for my tastes fits the character of Batman much better than making him a barrel-chested 70s love god and international adventurer or a grim and gritty psychopath. It's these cracks and the breaks in the film's structure and meaning that truly make the film work for me, its imperfections working as a reflection of the messiness of reality as well as the messiness of dreams.

Despite the remaining prevalence of Michael Baysian crap, it's a pretty exciting time for blockbuster cinema right now, when movies as different and great in their own ways like this or The Avengers can be made and will be watched by millions, movies that have no problems with pushing all the spectacle buttons while still being ambitious and aggressively non-dumb.

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