Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

I went in expecting nothing whatsoever from the Robert Rodriguez directed, James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis written manga adaptation, and went out pretty happy with a very satisfying bit of big budget cyberpunk action cinema. Now, the usual critics will offer the usual complaint that the film uses well-worn tropes in a plot very much written to the still most popular structural model in modern blockbuster pop cinema. These gals and guys are only half wrong, for the film is indeed filled with genre tropes and does indeed follow a certain Blockbuster plotting 101 philosophy. However, you can use well-worn clichés with a sense of joy (and perhaps even a bit of intelligence); the standard blockbuster plot style exists in so many movies because it actually works very well inside the genres these films usually belong to. And really, all jokes about plot structure timed to the second in today’s mainstream cinema aside, there’s always wriggle room to do something interesting or weird in seemingly rigid structures.

What I am obviously leading up to is this: sure, Alita is full of variations on stuff you’ve heard and seen explode on a screen many times before, but it does more often than not use these elements with such joy and abandon that originality simply doesn’t come into play when you’re actually willing to watch the film instead of trying to watch it antagonistically (which is not the same as watching critically, whatever parts of the internet and the critical classes may believe); and while the film’s structure is indeed well-worn by now, the script really flows and works very well inside this structure. Rodriguez also manages to create a world weird enough to be appropriate to the manga it adapts, where a cameo by Jeff Fahey and his cyborg dogs (potential band name ahoy!) isn’t just a fun aside but also makes sense as a part of the film’s highly strange world. The trick here is that Rodriguez never seems to have accepted the idea that there’s a strict dividing line between the goofy and the cool, and so can pick and mix from both sides of this arbitrary divide, put the fun stuff on screen and let the audience decide to either enjoy themselves or find all of this very silly indeed. Me, I’m with the enjoyment.

This doesn’t mean the film is absolutely brain dead and only there to put its – actually pretty damn awesome – production design in your face. There’s some obvious (and obviously underplayed, no surprise given that this is mass market entertainment made for a giant company) business about class divisions and what the incessant want to need to make it big to escape them does to people. The film also manages to hit its emotional beats about the travails of a young heroine to define herself and her own destiny, as clichéd as they are, with great conviction, providing the film with a degree of mainstream feminist heft in the process. Plus, on a more technical level, the script does ably deliver exposition and world building, even a handful of flashbacks, in a way that feels organic instead of tedious, something I particularly appreciate after I’ve suffered through the new Hellboy movie.

Also pretty fun is how easily the film convinces us of the tiny Alita with the weird CGI face as an ass-kicking heroine who becomes more fun to watch the longer the film goes on. That’s not just because this sort of thing is just naturally fun (which proper nerd sides with the big bruiser against a tiny slip of a girl, after all?), but also because Rosa Salazar’s performance, despite that weird decision to CGI away most of her actual face for no good reason, is pretty fantastic for this sort of thing, making Alita feel absurdly grounded and human. In fact, one of the more interesting aspects of the film’s handling of Alita is how little it is interested in this cyborg’s basic humanity – listen to Salazar give even the bad lines of dialogue, and her humanity really isn’t in question at all. The acting’s pretty wonderful for this sort of thing on the whole, with Waltz making a wonderful likeable father figure and looking perfectly dignified when using an absurd manga style weapon, and Jennifer Connelly selling a somewhat underwritten surprise face turn by sheer power of personality. Why, the film’s so good with its actors, I didn’t even mind Ed Skrein, though perhaps because he is the butt of many a violent joke.


Last but not least, Alita amply demonstrates that having a great action director like Robert Rodriguez is still important in the digital filmmaking age. You’d think – and I’ve certainly done this from time to time – that today’s blockbuster with all the technological expertise and money thrown at them basically couldn’t miss having at least solid action sequences, but then just look at the sad excuses for action featured in Venom or Shazam (to mention the worst offenders I’ve seen in the last year or so) and compare the staging, imagining and execution of their action scenes to the fast, imaginative and fun things Rodriguez does with the same sort of technology and budget. Apparently, having a visual imagination and an innate sense of pacing still is pretty useful when it comes to action scenes in the post-analogue era.

Past Misdeeds: Étoile (1989)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


American ballerina Claire (Jennifer Connelly) travels to Budapest for an audition for either a role in "Swan Lake" or a place in a ballet academy (as about other things, Étoile is decidedly unclear about it, but it really doesn't matter in the long run). When her time to audition comes, though, Claire has a sudden case of nerves and flees, getting lost in the belly of the theatre the audition takes place in, until she comes to a stage where she, of course, begins to dance.

Claire is witnessed by the ballet troupe's director (Laurent Terzieff), who for some reason that will become clear later on calls her by the name of Nathalie. Which, of course, again drives Claire to flight.

Later, our heroine, in an understandably bad mood about her own behaviour, tries to distract herself by taking a walk through Budapest. She meets fellow American Jason (Gary McCleery) - with whom she had already met-cute before - and proceeds to do some of that earnest falling in love in minutes stuff young people in movies are so fond of; though it has to be said that Jason seems much more smitten with Claire than she is with him, for Claire has after all already found the love of her life in form of dancing, as she explains to him. Not one to be discouraged by that sort of thing, Jason promises to return to the theatre with Claire the next day to try and get her a second chance for her audition.

That very night, though, Claire is so disturbed by a nightmare about characters from "Swan Lake" the audience also already knows as part of the dance troupe she decides to just pack her things and fly back to the USA at once. Before she can escape whatever she's fleeing from, though, Claire's identity (and probably her reality, too)begins to shift. She signs a form with the name "Nathalie Horvath", and follows a call for a person of that name to the airport's information booth, from where she is directed to a car waiting for Nathalie/her. Not surprisingly, the car is driven by the dance troupe's factotum who brings Claire/Nathalie to a rather dilapidated mansion she had already entered once while cavorting with Jason.

From that point on, Claire becomes Nathalie, the prima ballerina of the dance troupe, and spends her time staring at swans in the park, rehearsing for "Swan Lake", and looking pretty zoned out.

On one of her outings to the park, Nathalie is observed by Jason, who had been pretty frustrated by her supposed return to the USA. When he tries to talk to her, Nathalie doesn't recognize him. Jason is understandably confused by the whole affair, and begins obsessing about Claire/Nathalie, follows her, sneaks around, succeeds in a Library Use roll, and eventually stumbles on the peculiar and rather horrible truth about his beloved's coming appearance in "Swan Lake". If Jason can't rescue Claire, a past tragedy will repeat itself.

To get the obvious question out of the way first, yes, there are clear parallels between Italian director Peter Del Monte's Étoile and Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, but even though both films share certain thematic interests (loss or fluidity of identity of a young woman), and - obviously - "Swan Lake" (a ballet made to explore shifting identities if ever there was one), both directors have very different approaches to their material that can't all be explained by the different eras their films were made in. Where Aronofsky's idea of the irrational is grounded in very traditional psychological models (bringing the dreaded bane of "realism" even into a not at all realistically styled film about somebody losing touch with reality), Del Monte goes a more European way. The Italian is not very interested in realistic psychology, and instead aims for the archetypes found in fairy tales and myths, where symbols and the things symbols are supposed to signify are often one and the same.

It's difficult to ignore the influence Hitchcock - especially Vertigo - seems to have had on Del Monte's movie. Watching the film, I was frequently reminded of a less hysterical twin to Brian De Palma's Hitchcock-influenced (some people would argue ripping off Hitchcock; these people are wrong) phase, an impression that certainly did not decrease through the themes and visual cues these films share. The clear parallels to Hitchcock and De Palma are a bit of a problem for Étoile from time to time, pushing me to comparisons that make it look worse than it deserves. To use an easy example, Gary McCleery sure is no James Stewart (not even a Cliff Robertson).

It would probably have been better to cast the leads five to ten years older, which probably would have made them too old for the fairy tale parallels, but could have improved one of the film's weak spots to no end. Don't misunderstand me, McCleery isn't bad, and young Jennifer Connelly does dreamy, dream-like and beautiful very well indeed, but he is lacking the edge his more obsessive scenes need, and she is not at all convincing in the scenes when she takes on the role of the black swan, both things somewhat more experienced actors – like Connelly herself only a couple of years later - could have sold better.

These problems on the acting side aren't what will make or break Étoile for most viewers though, I think. Basically, the potential audience of Étoile will encounter (or enjoy) the same problems-that-aren't-actually-problems-but-parts-of-the-general-aesthetic many of my favourite European films of the fantastic show: the languid pacing and ambiguous working of space and time that have more to do with the structure of a dream than that of a textbook narrative; the characters that don't pretend to function like real people; the emphasis on mood possibly to the detriment of believability and clearly to the detriment of realism. Of course, all these things belong in a movie with no interest in picturing reality, or being "believable" as a depiction of consensus reality.

Generally, Del Monte seems to have control over his film (not something I'd say about all movies in this style) until we come to the climax, that is, when trouble rears its head. Let's just say that the scene of Jason fighting a giant black swan clearly oversteps the line between the dream-like and symbolic and the painfully ridiculous, and that a dramatic highpoint should probably not be a film's worst scene.


For most of its running time, though, Étoile plays out like a dream, with all the symbolism and all the ambiguity of symbols that implies. I suspect most of the film's viewers will either adore - like me - or hate that dream-like mood dominating it; I don't feel neutrality to be much of an option

In short: The Rocketeer (1991)

This comic-based homage to serials, pulp and the late 30s (or rather, to the pop cultural ideal of what that time was all about), is about the only Disney film produced in the 90s I'm willing to watch repeatedly.

Our hero of the day is a slightly hapless but pure-hearted air race pilot named Cliff (Billy Campbell), who stumbles upon an experimental rocket-pack (that's a 1930's jetpack, bub), and decides to use it for a bit of peaceful monetary gain, but of course turns into a hero called the Rocketeer during the course of the movie. There are various factions looking for the rocket-pack - its inventor Howard Hughes (Terry O'Quinn) and his FBI goons, a group of Mafiosi lead by Paul Sorvino working for British Hollywood star Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton) who of course harbours a dark secret, and the faction Sinclair is working for.

Soon enough, Cliff and his fatherly mechanic friend Peevy (Alan Arkin) are on the run from everyone, Cliff's girlfriend, the aspiring actress Jenny (Jennifer Connelly) is kinda pissed at him and threatened by the romantic talents of Sinclair, the Nazis (you didn't expect them not to be in the movie, right?) are being nefarious, a zeppelin makes an appearance, and the course of history rests on Cliff's shoulders.

The Rocketeer is director Joe Johnston's training ground for the same sort of mood he'd later - after quite a few utterly dreadful movies - so successfully create in Captain America. I don't think it's quite as great a film as that later one - it gets a bit too nostalgic from time to time when it does things like cast Howard Hughes (even if he's as sympathetically played as here by O'Quinn, whom I'm certainly not going to tell what he can't do) as a combination of the real Hughes, a good mad scientist, and Father Christmas, is perhaps a bit too Saturday matinee harmless, and is not always as funny as it thinks it is.

On the other hand, more often than not, The Rocketeer's idealized pulp version of the world is just plain fun to watch, sending a semi-bumbling hero from one contrived situation into the next, with the mandatory daring escapes, threats to innocent people and kidnappings of girlfriends.The film also gives a very fine cast opportunities to chew scenery in various attractive and entertaining ways. Especially O'Quinn, Arkin, Dalton and Sorvino's teddybear-ish mafia boss are just great fun to watch, while Campbell is as bland as one expects of the hero in this sort of thin. And then there's Jennifer Connelly, who is not just being young Jennifer Connelly but also clearly having fun with a character that is neither as superficial, nor as incompetent, nor as helpless as pulp tradition and the expectations of her surroundings prescribe, and seems to revel in that, as do I.

It makes me quite nostalgic for the times when this film's co-writer Danny Bilson wasn't a suit in videogame companies, but working as excellent writer of films in a pulp mode, like this one, Trancers or the wonderful "Sergeant Rock and aliens versus Nazis" movie Zone Trooper.

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On WTF: Étoile (1989)

Clearly, everyone's favourite ballet "Swan Lake" is much too good a place to start an exploration of identity - or rather its loss - in a young woman from for Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan to have been the first movie to use it.

In fact, Italian director Peter Del Monte attempted something quite similar to, yet totally different from, the American movie a few decades earlier with Étoile, starring young Jennifer Connelly and some glorious set design. If you want to learn more, click on through to my column on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,other places,horror,fantasy,peter del monte,jennifer connelly,gary mccleery