Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

The idea of a relentless thrust through 2 hours of near-silent cinema with laconic characters who let the cars do the snarling is an enticing one, one that sets its own challenge. How can a film maintain its momentum when every scene is an explosive set piece, stacked-up against the last and precision-engineered to top whatever came before? The fuel needs to be pure and Mad Max: Fury Road certainly draws its own world with a set of bold visual ideas followed through to their absurd conclusions. It’s a great starting point.

Max is the least capable of the heroes we’re bound to. His initial attempts to escape the clutches of the weird-faced tyrant Immortan Joe are easily thwarted and he is still being used as an unwilling blood donor (strapped to the front of a car) even when the film is well on the road. He can’t shoot straight, nor is he particularly adept a driver as far as we can tell. Agency belongs to the females of the piece, in particular Imperator Furiosa whose journey back to the ‘green land’ of her youth provides the film its narrative arch. However, that Max is the eponym – and not Furiosa – rather highlights his philosophy “hope is a mistake” amid all this elusive struggling towards a better place. The film needs to pretend itself a direction, hence the diversionary storyline of Furiosa and the Wives that we, and Max himself, are riding with. But by having the directionless hero at its centre, the hero whose only drive is survival, its makers have nailed their colours to the darker corner of this dystopian nightmare. Hope is a mistake.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that I liked the film despite sometimes feeling on the wrong end of one of its blood transfusions. Everything about its design is immaculately cohesive, from the ridiculous teal/orange colour grading to the grinding gears and grinning martyrs that populate its fiery dust storms. It is a singular vision and gloriously female-led at times. The only problem, on the first viewing, is pacing. 2 hours 10 minutes of this stuff is too exhausting – it mars the final half hour of the film, which in any case is a kind of journey home that should have begun at its midpoint anyway. The editing of the action is expertly done, but add a little more punctuation here and there and we’re laughing (maniacally into the void). ((With silver spray-painted mouths.))

Prometheus (2012)

Despite it being hyped as Ridley Scott’s hugely anticipated return to the Alien franchise, it might be better to push that film (probably the biggest science fiction horror of all time) to the back of your mind as you sit in front of Prometheus. It does explain itself as a prequel to Alien but Scott does well to side step any A-B comparisons by setting this film on a planet not quite the same as the one in the 1979 original and having this crew harbour very different objectives to those of Sigourney Weaver and co 33 years ago.

Filmmaking is a visual art so I suppose that makes Prometheus a good film. Its immaculately well-designed sets and the thorough mise-en-scène certainly go a long way to immerse us in its world. Surprisingly, the CGI actually has a shaky start; the opening scene involving a hooded humanoid creature and a waterfall is probably the most iffy bit of digital trickery involved, possibly simply because it is also the only scene without human performers. However, once the real people begin populating the screen, the computer generated world smoothes itself around them with ease and it becomes effortless to trust in the authenticity of the visuals.

The same cannot be said for some of the dialogue. I don’t think it is quite the travesty that some reviewers have found it to be but it is a definite stumbling block. When it comes, the grandiose statements and lofty conversations about God, creation and existence aren’t too lengthy or out of place. Having said that, they are quite frequent and begin to grate in the way that you might suddenly find yourself able to visualise the writers sitting round a table penning the script rather than believing the words as they come out of the characters’ mouths. With a little more careful lacing around small talk, the big wow talk could be more effectively delivered and seem less contrived.

That said, it isn’t a major problem and doesn’t hinder the enjoyment of the film in any significant way. This is largely down to the acting of a great cast who manage to paper over the cracks in the script very capably. Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender are particularly superb, as is Guy Pearce – this is just as well, as these are the three players who carry the weight of the aforementioned themes. Despite the rambling speeches, on a narrative level these themes are knitted together in accomplished science fiction fashion. Most important is that of creation.

Unlike the crew in Alien, who are part of a commercial mission mining for resources when they become unwittingly dragged into an extra-terrestrial nightmare, the crew of Prometheus are actively searching for alien life in the hope that humanity’s big questions (the standard “Where do we come from? Why are we here?” business) can be answered. Mirroring the relationship between man and maker is the droid David whose maker is man. Fassbender really does play David to perfection. A mobile version of HAL from 2001, he has all the flaws of understanding when trying to relate to his human creators as the humans do when trying to comprehend theirs. Rapace’s character Elizabeth is one of the hungriest to find the beings who may have seeded life on earth (whom she calls ‘engineers’) but at one point finds herself the engineer of a new life and, it’s fair to say, she doesn’t enjoy it much. This particular scene harkens back nicely to the kind of 1970s body horror that Alien mastered and links the big metaphysical topics of this film to the primal fears of that one.

Despite the snags, there is a level of filmmaking on display here beyond which any problems can be accepted as minor. Ridley Scott is so accomplished a director that he reaches that level with ease. Prometheus has all the magnificence of the very best sci-fi films but falls short of the visceral element required to go down in history as truly legendary. Nevertheless, it is a good solid film, rare in its ambition and scope. Worth seeing twice.

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

One thing that has caught Hollywood’s imagination in recent years is the idea that European fairytales were originally much more ominous and frightening before they were diluted by Walt Disney in the middle of last century. Consequently, revisionist versions of stories such as Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella are currently all the rage.

Snow White and the Huntsman follows this trend, purporting to be a kind of dark restoration of the original Brothers Grimm tale with a bit of pop-feminism thrown in for good measure.

The most striking thing about the film is its visual style. Costume, colour, light –for the most part it is designed very well and knits the story’s world together in a convincing way. However, what becomes a nagging problem is that it never quite envelops the audience in the way it should. I didn’t know for sure until 5 minutes ago that director Rupert Sanders is a prolific maker of TV adverts but I was quietly confident. Dissolving fruit, porcelain skin, trees with consciously creeping branches, sped up flower-blooming, parted lips, hand bras – sitting there in the cinema, I got the urge to buy perfume about 7 times and didn’t know why.

Despite the distracting ‘buy me’ imagery, there is plenty more that undermines the escapism that a fantasy film like this is designed to provide. Foremost is the acting of Kristen Stewart , who isn’t all that convincing as a warrior princess. Firmly established in the Twilight saga as our age’s passive sap of a female character, Stewart carries her baffled face from those films to this one. Those awkward expressions work for Bella (flawed as that character may be) but not for Snow White.

Having said that, she is not as much to blame as the script, which is full of dodgy “Olde English” and clanging clichés. There’s nothing wrong with clichés – well there is, but the odd short stinging phrase muttered by an action hero on a close-up can work wonders. Here though, the characters are constantly coming out with relentlessly convoluted waffle. It might be funny if delivered ironically, but that isn’t the tone that the film is going for. Great work by Charlize Theron however, who does the best she possibly can with the lines she is given and lends the evil queen Ravenna a good deal of believable scariness with her histrionic delivery i.e. “You will DO THIS for me Huntsman!”

Although the first act is enough to almost give up on the film, it is rescued somewhat by the dwarves who enter the fray at around the 45-minute mark. Actors such as Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins and Eddie Marsden immediately improve the verisimilitude of the story and highlight the lacklustre performances of their taller co-stars. Just the small smirk or grimace or well-timed pause here and there give a much-needed depth and pathos. Their dialogue must be part improvised because it bears no resemblance to that of the other characters. The small talk they provide is often puerile and inconsequential but it at least offers the sense of something real. The trailers avoid the dwarves like their little jokes might undermine the dead seriousness of the piece (and out of context, they might) but in truth, no character does more to ground the film than they do.

Their presence even seems to have a positive effect on the edit and direction, which also dramatically improves about 45 minutes in. Especially effective is a scene where the dwarves sing a lament for one of their number who has died (that’s not a major spoiler). The pacing, which has up to this point been a bit all over the place, settles and a weight is added. It’s like suddenly getting some good earthy nutrition after having your face stuffed with style for an hour. The shot where the camera pans slowly from their campfire high up into the trees and then above to the firefly-specked sky is the single stand-out remarkable moment of the film.

Onto the “empowerment of Snow White’s character” thing which the trailers lean on so heavily. I don’t think it quite works. Besides Stewart’s acting, the big detraction from this thread is the way in which her status as a Princess is reiterated over and over again. Because she is the true heir to the throne, born into royalty, her character has no room to become heroic. She does after all get a troll to go away by just looking at it, get helped out of a deadly forest just because of her value as a royal commodity and is able to break the spell of Ravenna’s power because of her blue blood beauty. None of this she works for, all of it comes part and parcel of being the rightful Queen by God’s divine appointment. If it is her destiny to be the ruler of a Kingdom, there is no option other than fulfilling it. What she learns in the way of fighting skill is taught to her by a man and, once poisoned, she is helplessly paralysed until saved once again by the same man. The traditional Snow White tricolon goes like this “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as black as ebony.” You can’t just add “…oh, also the same spirit and defiance as a rose in winter” and automatically make it work as a fable of female empowerment. For one thing it ruins the rule of three. Which isn’t on.

Music. Who am I to criticise the score of 8-time Oscar-nominated James Newton Howard? Well, it is surprising to find that the man responsible is so experienced and highly rated, but I just heard it as simple pastiche. It is less memorable that the scores of other fantasy films and yet somehow more intrusive. It softens the threat by being there too much (but that could just as well be down to the director’s input) and is at best functional.

Maybe all of that sounds too critical because I actually had a good time watching Snow White and the Huntsman. Sure it fails to deliver certain things and plays like a polished commercial but it’s a fairly entertaining way of spending a bank holiday afternoon nevertheless. I mean hey, what else is there to do, watch the Queen slow-waving her way down the Thames on a glorified barge in the rain for 5 hours? Don’t be silly.