47 Ronin

Let's say you're English. Or British. Either. Both. Anyway, let's say you're familiar with the legend of Robin Hood, pretty much *the* most important British legend alongside King Arthur. It's a story the basics of which you know well and you know broadly how it *should* go. So you go to a cinema to see the latest version and instead of what you're expecting there's an American in the main role.

Ah. Yeah, they already did that, didn't they?

OK. Well, leaving that aside, what about-

Seriously? He's a Kiwi. Come on.

ANYWAY. Let's imagine that you go to see Robin Hood and there's a COMPLETELY INVENTED character who's American-

Oh for fuck's sake. Although at least he disguised his accent a bit.

RIGHT. You go to the cinema and there's a COMPLETELY INVENTED character who's American AND WHO IS NOW THE MAIN STAR OF THE MOVIE and speaks IN AN AMERICAN ACCENT. As in, Robin Hood has become a sort-of sidekick to this completely invented American character.

Now you're starting to understand what we're dealing with here.

He is, to paraphrase Eddie Izzard, "the American dropped into a Japanese movie to make it sell".

I've done a little research, and the story of the 47 Ronin is one of Japan's best-known tales, although opinions differ on whether their actions were or were not a good example of bushido as is claimed by some. Regardless, the main idea is Lord Asano dishonours himself by striking an exceptionally rude guest called Lord Kira, and then has to commit seppuku to restore his family's honour, and then his now-landless samurai led by a bloke called Oishi go and kill Lord Kira to avenge him. So far, so Japanese - everyone's going to die anyway, but how and why they die is the critical thing.

OK, it might not be *just* a Japanese thing.

However, in this Hollywood-ised version of the tale at the heart of Japan's culture, the Japanese roles are upstaged by the completely created character of Kai, a Japanese-British 'half breed' who was apparently raised by demons. Lord Asano and his daughter Mika see something in the boy and decide to keep him, but he is regarded with scorn by... someone else.

OK. I'm mildly prosopagnostic. I have real trouble telling apart the faces of people I don't know. That's generally more difficult when everyone's wearing a fucking kimono and has the same damn hairdo. Someone doesn't like Kai, but I'm damned if I know who. I thought it was Asano's son, but then about twenty minutes in his daughter is apparently his only child, so I've no clue. And she's in love with Kai, because no movie about culture-appropriate vengeance is complete without lines like "I would search for you through a thousand worlds and ten thousand lifetimes" delivered in Reeves' trademark, completely emotionless husk.

So THAT'S what the reincarnation thing was about.

My film reviews normally contain spoilers, as I praise or (more usually) shit all over what I've just seen, but I'm not sure I can really spoil this movie. Besides which... nothing really happens. There's supposed peril-aplenty, but never really any tension or drama. For a movie which involves sword fights, demons, monsters and a fantastically hammy witch (Rinko Kikuchi apparently having attended the Eric Roberts school of acting for this role, perhaps to make up for Reeves' lack of emotion or... anything), the fact that it falls so flat is pretty much a miracle.

The only member of the cast who actually seemed to be enjoying herself.

I could harp on about the lack of logic; Kai and Mika being the same age as kids and then Reeves looking all of his nearly twenty years more when they're adults... presumably the same Hollywood ageing which allowed Jeremy Renner to be Gemma Arterton's brother in 'Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters; the demons which raised Kai giving him a bunch of swords when he needed them because... I'm not sure; Kikuchi's character trying to get the Lady Mika to kill herself before she's forced to marry Lord Kira - the witch's employer - because... I don't know; the witch setting up an ambush for Oishi's men and then happily reporting back that they were all dead even though most of them escaped, because... yeah, you get the idea. However, the real logical fallacy here came from trying to make a film for Western audiences which was tied to such an essentially Japanese story.

Few Western audiences are going to want to see a centuries-old story about a group of Ronin exacting vengeance for their dead master and then all ritually killing themselves; it's just not something which appeals to our psyches, in general. Yes, you can throw in demons and witches and giant samurais to try to glamourise it a bit, but all that's really achieved here is bastardising the original story without really giving it enough of a kick. You want to tell the story of the 47 Ronin, you tell the story of the 47 Ronin. You want to write a fantasy epic in Japan, you get a good scriptwriter and you write a goddamn fantasy epic in Japan, and stop trying to attach it to any 'true story' in an attempt to staple some credibility onto it.

Oh, and while you're at it, don't make this guy the second-largest on the film poster when he only has two lines, simply because you think his tattoos are cool:

Can anyone tell that the director for this had mainly done adverts previously?

It's all about the visuals, nothing about the content.

In conclusion: this is a film which tries to be two things and succeeds at neither, probably pissing off most of a nation in the process, and can't have done anyone involved any favours, least of all the serious Japanese actors involved.

Pacific Rim, or, B-Movies Are An Art Form

Went to see 'Pacific Rim' today, otherwise known as the movie made by Guillermo Del Toro to prove that no, he's not at all bitter about it not working out on 'The Hobbit', no, really, incidentally have you seen my massive robots hitting these things which look a bit like dragons? That's like totally awesome and completely coincidental GODDAMN YOU PEEDER JIGSON.

Let's face it, this mess could have been sorted a lot quicker

if the dwarves had just built themselves a decent mecha.

So, anyway - this was never going to be a movie in contention for an Oscar for screenwriting. It was always going to be a big, ballsy, stupid, gung-ho, rock-em-sock-em punchfest as giant robots called Jaeger battled weird alien monsters called Kaiju.

Not these guys, sadly, but that would have been hilarious. If you want

your head messed with, look up 'Kaiju Big Battel' on YouTube.

Yeah, there's going to be spoilers in here. Just so you know.

Is 'Pacific Rim' entertaining? Yes... to a point. However, there are just so MANY things wrong with it that after a while your brain sort of gets dragged down into a quagmire of "huh?" while you try to reconcile the different bits of shit with a normal cinematic experience. The first and most obvious thing to me was the pacing of it; I understand that there's a movie which needs to happen, and action which needs to take place, and so let's skip over the boring exposition. However, the opening monologue feels forced, and we just skip over so much stuff so quickly. Then we meet the hero, Raleigh Beckett.

That's what I'm thinking of for the rest of the film. Well done.

But that's not all. His boss, played by Idris Elba, is called PENTECOST STACKER. That's not a name, that's a church shop job description. Whatever else Del Toro can do, he can't think up names for shit. Don't believe me? I mean, he'll do better naming the goddamn battle robots, right? Let's meet the contestants.

Gipsy Danger. Sounds like a pole dancer.

Striker Eureka. Two unconnected words, ahoy!

Cherno Alpha, aka 'The Russian one, so neither word has to be English'.

Crimson Typhoon. You win, hands down. All three of 'em.

Right, that brief sidewind into atrocious names dealt with, back to the pacing issue. Beckett's brother is killed while he's mind-linked with him in charge of a Jaeger, and he quits the whole 'fight the monsters' programme. Understandable. So he works in construction for five years, of which we get to see about ninety seconds before Stacker shows up offering him his old job back. Yes, there's a movie to be done and monsters to be fought BUT, we as the viewing public have barely had time to think "Oh, so he's down on his luck now and- oh, no he isn't."

So he's brought back to run a Jaeger, but he'll need a co-pilot, and it'll need to be someone whom he can form a good bond with. The Chinese one is run by triplets, the Australian one by father and son, he used to do it with his brother, the Russian one is run by... two Russians? Maybe both being Russian with appalling bleach jobs is enough, hell if I know.

So THAT'S what Zangief is up to these days.

Now we get into my second major bugbear with this movie - so many things are mentioned as apparent plot devices or simply as cool things and then... are contradicted, or just not followed up on. AGAIN AND AGAIN.

All the possibilities Stacker has lined up for Beckett to team up with are useless except his brightest star, his adoptive daughter, whom he absolutely won't let get into the Jaeger with Beckett because... reasons? I'm not sure if this was simply meant to be 'overprotective step-daddy' bit or more genuine concern about her ability to restrain her vengeful wishes for her dead family. Anyway, after about thirty minutes of "No, it won't happen. No, you're not piloting a Jaeger," he gives up for no apparent reason and she does the mind-meld with Beckett and, of course, it fails and she goes into a catatonic reaction thinking back to how she was nearly killed by a Kaiju when she was a kid (maybe this was triggered by Stacker giving her the shoe she was wearing at the time right beforehand? You know, bringing the old memories back? Nice work there) and she unconsciously activates the weapon and nearly blows the hangar up.

OK, so that didn't work. Any non-Russian woman is too weak to run a Jaeger, it appears. Gotcha.

But hang on, because when the next attack comes in and two of the other Jaegers are taken down (unsurprisingly, the Chinese and the Russian ones), Gipsy Danger and its two pilots are deployed. Rather than going back to his pool of admittedly slightly lack-lustre recruits to co-pilot with Beckett, Stacker sticks his adoptive daughter back into the machine even though she went catatonic and nearly blew the base up last time. And they function perfectly as a team for the rest of the film, with not even a mention of that first little problem which nearly killed everyone. I should also point out that she seems obsessed by Beckett before she meets him and has apparently studied him intently, and she tells him that she doesn't think he should be sent on the mission because he takes stupid risks but then she really wants to be his co-pilot. Girl, you need to get your head straight.

Also, one of the new Kaiju debuts an EMP which knocks out the circuits of the Jaegers and also Hong Kong. However, according to Beckett, Gipsy Danger "is analogue, she's nuclear". Now, I have a few problems with this:

1) The power source might be nuclear, but there's a shitload of electronics in there, including the damn mind-meld thing.

2) When the Russian Jaeger is getting pounded, one of the pilots screams "Water is getting into the reactor!" So... I'm not sure what's going on there.

3) EMP Kaiju doesn't even try that trick again when faced with Gipsy Danger, so it wouldn't have mattered anyway. I'd have expected to see it try it and be confused when it doesn't work, allowing the Jaeger to knock its block off.

Now, don't get me wrong - the fight scenes in this movie are amazing. The CGi is truly spectacular and you do really get a sense of the size and weight involved... at least, until one of the Kaiju spreads WINGS and takes off HOLDING GIPSY DANGER and then FLIES HIGH ENOUGH THAT THEY START TO LOSE OXYGEN. Let's remember that a Kaiju weight was given as 140,000 tonnes, and that Kaiju was smaller than this one. Let's remember that it's carrying a Jaeger as well. Let's remember that the higher you go the thinner the air is, so the more difficult it would be to fly. I KNOW I'm not meant to talk about physics when we've got massive alien monsters emerging from a rift in the floor of the Pacific Ocean, but come on. I can just about wrap my head around these things walking and moving on the surface of the Earth, but flying? And then there's the fact that a Jaeger can go undersea and the pilots can still breathe just fine, but they can't go to a high altitude?

Anyway, all that aside, they have a plan to drop a nuke down the rift to get back at the Kaiju. Meanwhile, Skinny Dennis Nedry is a Kaiju scientist who does a mind-meld with a secondary Kaiju brain they happen to have lying around, and he gets some success, and Stacker sends him off to track down a Kaiju black market dealer to get another brain to do another mind meld with. He blabs about this to the dealer (Rob Perlman playing Hannibal Chau - OK, that name is awesome), who points out that if they have a hive mind then now the Kaiju know about this guy. And when one of the Kaiju hits the city SDN runs for a bunker and the Kaiju attacks that bunker and it knows he's there and it seems to be reaching for him with its tongue and... then Gipsy Danger jumps it from behind and THIS IS NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN.

"Eh, no wonder you went extinct."

According to Skinny Dennis Nedry, the Kaiju are grown as warbeasts by an alien race which move from place to place, consuming resources and then moving on.

"I think you'll find that's our schtick."

But actually, my little Jurassic Park reference up there works better than you'd think (apart from them both being egotistical guys with similar accents) because according to SDN, the dinosaurs were this alien race's first attempt at this idea.

"Son, I am disappoint."

After narrowly surviving being chosen for... dinner? Kisses? Meaningful conversation? by the Kaiju, SDN returns to Ron Perlman and aggressively yells "You owe me a Kaiju brain, you one-eyed son of a bitch!"

Um. No he doesn't.

He's a black market dealer and he doesn't owe you shit. You're not even offering him any money. He thought the whole 'mind-melding with a Kaiju' thing was absolutely idiotic. He nearly cut your nose off because you wouldn't tell him your name. You think he's just going to let you go mind-meld with a Kaiju now you know him, when he cuts up and sells Kaijus and as far as he's concerned what you know, they will know? That's got to be the stupidest-

Oh wait, here you are at the death site of a Kaiju and he's going to let you do it. Well I never.

Well, this Kaiju's brain is damaged, but there's a heartbeat in there! OH MY GOD IT'S PREGNANT!

This may be a larger job than you bargained for, ladies.

A biologically-constructed warbeast is pregnant. My mind is boggling at that one. Why would you build that feature in? When did it mate? I... yeah. Anyway, the offspring dies and SDN mind-melds with it and OH GODS THE PLAN WE HAVE ISN'T GOING TO WORK, because the plan involves dropping a nuke through the rift to severely piss off the guys on the other side who are sending all these monsters.

"I think you'll find that's my schtick."

So... this would be a... wait for it... JAEGER BOMB?? :D :D :D

(My wife takes credit for that one)

But the plan of dropping a nuke through never worked before, and they thought it would work this time because... I'm not sure. Stacker said he had a plan, but he never explained why he thought it'd work this time. Anyway, SDN and British Numbers Guy who did the mind-meld with him now know how to make the plan work, and they rush back and tell the guys at base, because Striker Eureka and Gipsy Danger are off to bomb the rift. Of course, Australian Dad's arm is injured so the new co-pilot for Australian Jerk Son is Pentecost "I'll die if I get in another Jaeger" Stacker, who neatly shits all over the idea of needing a good bond with your co-pilot by saying "I take nothing into the drift; no rank, no memories, no emotions", or words to that effect. Um... OK. So what you're saying is that if only humanity had crewed Jaegers with psychopaths, this whole 'close bond' thing wouldn't have been necessary? IS SOME INTERNAL CONSISTENCY TOO MUCH TO ASK, DAMN IT!?

I wonder where they got the nuke from? Perhaps they needed some weapons-grade uranium...

One for regular readers, this.

Blah blah, Kaiju attack, blah blah, malfunction, blah blah, bomb can't be released by Striker Eureka, blah blah, blow up to clear the way, blah blah, Gipsy Danger goes through the rift, blah blah send its nuclear reactor into meltdown, blah blah, eject in lifepods.

Eject.

Out of the Jaeger which is now IN ANOTHER DIMENSION and back through the rift into our world. Despite the fact that the truth uncovered by Skinny Dennis Nedry and British Numbers Guy is that the rift has to recognise a Kaiju's genetic signature to let it through. That's why the bombs had always bounced before. And sure, you were clutching a Kaiju on the way down but now you're on the way up and it's just going to let you through? I mean, let's not forget, every Kaiju so far has rampaged until it was killed. No Kaiju has ever gone back down the rift anyway, so when they're saying "it recognises the Kaiju's DNA and lets them through" they had to be talking about the way up, right?

Right?

Oh wait. Internal consistency. Nevermind.

So both pilots make it back to the surface after Gipsy Danger goes boom and collapses the rift with a nuclear blast, and Beckett is apparently dead after his trip back from the void, but he recovers to consciousness following no real medical attention by anyone beyond a display of emotion.

"No, seriously, I'm going to sue."

And with that the movie ends. So now let me address my third and final bugbear with the movie; the direction. I guess the 'pacing' bit could come into this (and also the sound mixing - there is no excuse for me to not be able to hear dialogue between characters in a cinema, even if I am deaf), but I'm more talking here about the portrayals of the characters. First of all, other than Skinny Dennis Nedry (who overacts a bit, but does so amusingly enough to get away with it), there's precious little truly good acting going on. Idris Elba is a good actor, but Pentecost Stacker is too one-dimensional to do much with. Sure, he threatens to cut loose occasionally, but even in his "rousing" speech near the end it's all a bit... dry. Raleigh Beckett might as well be "American Action Movie Trope a) Washed-Up Former Hero" and is almost completely unmemorable. Even Ron Perlman seems off - it shouldn't be hard for him to convince as a menacing, amoral black market dealer, but it just doesn't click for some reason.

Then there's the racial stereotyping. The Japanese girl is timid, the Russians are dour, the British Numbers Guy is painfully stereotyped, the Aussies are brash and obnoxious (although hilarious on one occasion when they do, as someone else put it, "something really brave, stupid and Australian"), and the Chinese all look the same (okay, they're meant to be triplets. Even so).

In conclusion, 'Pacific Rim' is a movie which could have been so much more... but possibly should have been so much less. It tried to strike a balance between brainless action smash-em-up and something with a logical plot and character dynamics, but the second part just ended up dragging the first down a little. If you're going to explain things then they need to actually make sense... at least, if you're paying to see it in the movies. If you're watching 'Sand Sharks' on Syfy then I'm quite content to hear Brooke Hogan talking about how the grooves on a shark's skin allow it to swim through the microvortices between grains of sand because no-one expects that to make sense.

All I can say is, thank gods this man never got hold of 'The Hobbit'.

A Good Day To Lose Morals

So, John McClane is back! Yippee-kay-aye, Mother Russia!

I heard that.

As the script-writers run out of things for John to get unfeasibly involved in State-side it turns out that he can now go and wreak his own brand of havoc over in Russia, thanks to the involvement of his son Jack. Now, I like Die Hard. The first one is brilliant, the second is good (both adapted from novels, don'tcherknow. Didyaknow? Nowyaknow), the third one has Samuel L Jackson and so is automatically good despite the baddie being Jeremy "who Hollywood calls when they need an English villain and Alan Rickman is not available" Irons, and the fourth is... well, it's entertaining enough, and there's amusement to be had seeing Kevin Smith playing an adult teenage nerd. So how does the fifth movie measure up?

In terms of entertaining set pieces: excellently. The first movie was obviously a very claustrophobic movie, by necessity. From DH2:DH onwards however, we had chases: snowtrak chase, taxi careering through Central Park, car being chased by cars, helicopter, fighter jet. There is certainly an epic chase in this one featuring a van, a military armoured vehicle and two different trucks driven by McClane senior,  with muchos crashes and stunts. The ending scene is highly impressive as well, as anything that crashes a helicopter into a nuclear power plant gets my vote.

"Not even God knows what you're doing!"

The acting? Also good. Willis's McClane has adapted and evolved, and he's no longer the reluctant hero but now the belligerent tough old bastard who does what he does because it's what he's done for so long, although that does come at the price of some of his character's three-dimensionality. Jai Courtney is convincing as an even more hard-bitten version of his father, a CIA operative who organises prison breaks, blows up buildings and uncovers caches of guns without blinking. The dancing bad guy Arik is rather over-the-top, but Sebastian Koch convinces well as Yuri, the eventual mastermind of the whole series of unfolding events.

However, it's the events themselves that bring the film down, in my reckoning.

First of all, it's the fact that at the end of everything, the McClane boys are entirely irrelevant to the vast majority of the plot. The jailbreak that gets Yuri and Jack out was masterminded by Chagarin, the defence minister Yuri is supposedly going to testify against, and even though the CIA must have known about it to plant Jack in the courtroom, they weren't involved in it. But of course, Yuri knew about it too, and *his* plan involving his daughter working as a double-agent was based on this. In the end, the McClanes were nothing more than an irritation to everyone wanting Yuri to get kidnapped by Chagarin's men, and only turned up at the end to piss on Yuri's eventual plans. Now, granted the fact that they did this stopped the shipping of a bunch of nuclear warheads out of Chernobyl that Yuri had made ages ago out of the uranium there...

Did someone say uranium?

Now, I'm fairly certain that domestic nuclear power stations don't involve weapons-grade uranium. However, I'm not a nuclear scientist so I'll let that one slide. I am however dubious about the whole setup at Chernobyl in the first place, given that it was allegedly Chagarin's men being ready to extract the file and having the mysterious radiation-eating spray to get rid of the problem, but then actually it was Yuri's men being ready to shift out the crates. Shouldn't Arik or someone have gone "hang on, why are all these guys here, and what's with all the helicopters?"

Also, Chernobyl? That's in Ukraine. The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. You're telling me that two Americans with various injuries can drive a car with a boot full of automatic weapons and grenades over the border from Russia into Ukraine and no-one bats an eyelid? Maybe they just shot the border guards.

...in fact, maybe they did. This is my greatest problem with DH5 - the fact that John McClane loses all sense of morality when he leaves the USA. The first four Die Hard films were defined by the fact that he was the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time and he did what he did to protect people. Normal people. Yeah, OK, it was his wife involved in the first two, but still. However, as soon as he gets to Russia and sees his son, who's charged with murder let's remember and as far as McClane Snr knows is dodgy as fuck, breaking out of a jail and running away, what does he do? Does he hold up his hands and go "OK, I screwed up here, best stay out of the way"? No.

John McClane steals a truck and heads off in pursuit.

What's more, when he crashes his first truck he assaults a driver and steals another truck and heads off again. Using this truck, he drives over a whole host of other vehicles including ones with screaming people in simply so he can chase down his delinquent son and the people who seem to be in pursuit. It's not his job, he's just interjecting himself. If there was any incident of him showing regret for his actions, I wouldn't mind so much, but as it is he comes over as the worst stereotype of an American abroad - he can do what he wants because he's an American, and all you people should just speak American so he can understand you.

I can only assume that this is acceptable to Hollywood because the people involved aren't Americans. I'm sure McClane commandeers a few vehicles in previous movies, but that has been because the lives of many people have been at risk (and he's been acting as an officer of the law). Here, he's simply being a bloody nuisance, because he has no evidence that anyone's life is at risk other than his son's, who was about to stand trial for murder anyway and would have been "lucky to get life".

There's also the issue of his son casually tossing Yuri off a building into helicopter roters to be shredded. Yes, the image is a homage to Hans Gruber's demise (although why McClane doesn't mentioned anything about Gruber when he shoots down the glass ceilings in the ballroom is beyond me), but the difference was that Gruber dropped to his death because he was dragging Holly McClane to her death with him and was about to shoot John in the head. Jack kills Yuri simply because he doesn't want to leave him alive.

Willis has said that he'd like to do one more movie and then retire the character. I'm hoping the last instalment is back up to scratch, as this one was a little disappointing.