I haven't posted movie reviews in a few months (since September or July or even April). I have been seeing movies during this time, but somehow life and other matters have gotten in the way of writing reviews. Well, no more! The time has come to rectify this problem with reviews of three movies I've seen recently: Doctor Sleep, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Ad Astra. There's not much that unites them besides the facts that they are all broadly "speculative fiction" and they are all movies that some people didn't like, but I did.
Doctor Sleep
This was one of my most anticipated movies of the last few months. Director Mike Flanagan (of The Haunting of Hill House fame) took on the adaptation of Stephen King's novel, which is a 2013 sequel to 1977's The Shining. The film is complicated by the fact of also trying to be a sequel to Stanley Kubrick's iconic 1980 adaptation of The Shining, an adaptation that is a cultural icon of its own but differs in several ways from the book. Stephen King also has famous quibbles with Kubrick's film that I thought actually make sense when I watched a theatrical re-release of The Shining in October; for example, in the novel Jack Torrance is supposed to start off as a regular guy, while Jack Nicholson is, well, Jack Nicholson. None of this is to deny that Kubrick's The Shining is a culturally significant film and one of the best horror films of all time, but King has a point.
I was excited to see how the film of Doctor Sleep could navigate all this. I'm also in awe that Mike Flanagan or anyone would take on such a daunting project. And I loved it! Don't let critics or box office numbers keep you away. If you are a fan of King or Kubrick or (ideally) both, I recommend it.
Having just read the novel (see my review), I was interested to see how it would be adapted to the big screen as a sequel that continues the story without simply rehashing it, but with the added complication of being a sequel to an iconic film. Somehow it does all of this. I'm not sure how, but it does.
The story of the film follows the novel pretty closely until the third act. Sure, fans of the novel will miss some of the detail and backstory and there are a few significant differences, but you have to give up something to make a film out of a 530-page novel and make it consistent with the Kubrick film (although some of these differences are handled in an interesting way, like with one important character who died in the Kubrick film but not the The Shining novel).
Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) is an adult who became an alcoholic like dear old dad. He's looking pretty rough (or as rough as Ewan McGregor can look). He comes to a small town in New Hampshire, where he joins AA and starts turning his life around, all while dealing with the trauma of his past and working at a nursing home where he's known as Doctor Sleep because he, along with a cat named Azrael, has a way of helping people die peacefully.
So far it seems like a straightforward sequel, but wait, there's more! He gets in touch with a 13-year-old girl named Abra (Kyleigh Curran) who has the Shine far stronger than he does. And we learn about the existence of the True Knot, a band of soul-sucking psychic vampires who roam the country in the most malevolent mode possible: recreational vehicles. And we meet their leader who is one of the best King villains since Pennywise: Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson). I loved Ferguson as Rose. She's creepy but charismatic in exactly the way you'd expect a psychic vampire of indeterminate age to be. The book made me shudder at the sight of recreational vehicles. The movie will make me afraid of people in hats.
Of course, it turns out the True Knot are after Abra's "steam" (like her essence, which they can only get from people with the Shine). And Danny wants to help her fight them off. I should also add that the ways Flanagan chose to translate the steam and the psychic conversations/adventures/battles onto the screen make for some fascinating viewing. I wouldn't begin to imagine how to put any of that into a visual medium, but I guess that's why Flanagan is a film director and I'm just writing a blog post.
I'd like to discuss a few changes, which may require some mild spoilers. So....
<<<SPOILER ALERT.>>
One major change Kubrick made was that he didn't burn down the Overlook at the end of the film. So in the Doctor Sleep novel, the final showdown happens where the Overlook used to be, but in the film it can happen at the Overlook itself, which has been long abandoned. This makes it possible for Danny to literally confront his past in a way that honestly works better in a visual medium. I really loved this decision. I was less sure about killing off a major character at the end. Maybe it dramatizes the sacrifice of the fight, but I'm not sure. Also, while the afterlife is very real in the novel, the whole talking to dead people thing is maybe slightly overused in the film.
<end spoilers>
But whatever my criticisms are, they're pretty mild compared to my awe at the achievement of reconciling two great novels and one iconic film into a sequel that somehow works. And it's all super creepy and deep on top of it (for more on the philosophical bits, which are mostly preserved in the film, see my book review). Bravo!
(Since I've always been a casual fan of film scores and have come to enjoy them even more in my middle age, I should also note that the score is pretty cool. It's composed by the Newton Brothers, who have worked with Flanagan before.)
Terminator: Dark Fate
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| Sarah Connor: Still a Fucking Badass |
I love the Terminator movies. Obviously the first two are science fiction classics, and Terminator 2 is probably one of my all time favorite films. While it's popular to hate on the other sequels, I thought they were okay. I was even one of maybe five people who really enjoyed Terminator: Genisys (see my reviews here and here, which delve pretty deeply into the metaphysics of time travel).
So when I heard there was a new Terminator movie with both Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, I was totally on board. I didn't see a lot of trailers for this one, so I went into it with a pretty open mind. I liked it a lot! It's not the classic that the first two movies are, but I wasn't expecting that. But it's a worthy sequel. While I have a soft spot for Genisys, Dark Fate is probably my favorite of the bunch outside of the first two.
We start with yet another timeline (yeah, I know, but by now I've learned to stop worrying and love the franchise). In this timeline we see Sarah and John in Guatemala in the late 90's after having thwarted the 1997 Judgment Day (the one that may or may not have happened depending on which movie and which timeline you're considering). I'm not sure how much of a spoiler this is, but let it be written nonetheless: <spoiler alert>. John is killed by by an old Terminator who finally caught up with them. So Sarah stays on the run but occasionally gets info from mysterious sources about other Terminator-type invaders from the future.... <spoilers over>
After the prologue, we meet Dani (Natalia Reyes), a young woman in Mexico City looking after her brother and father while working in a car factory with workers whose jobs are threatened by ... you guessed it, robots! (I thought that was a nice touch). Lucky for monolingual Americans who don't like subtitles, Dani is conveniently teaching English to her brother. We also meet, through the time travel sequence that is just as cool as ever, a being that first seems to be a Terminator, but we later come to learn is a human woman named Grace who has had a lot of cybernetic enhancements (Mackenzie Davis brings a caring intensity to the role). Grace's mission is to protect Dani from yet another kind of Terminator, the REV-9 (played with creepy intensity by Gabriel Luna--not quite Robert Patrick from T2, but somewhere in the neighborhood).
So when the REV-9 catches up with Dani and Grace is fighting him off, guess who shows up?
I apologize to readers with delicate sensibilities, but there's really no other way to answer this question: Motherfucking SARAH CONNOR who is a FUCKING BADASS!
I could sing the praises of Linda Hamilton's badassery all day, but this has been done better by Emily Asher-Perrin, who also notes that Dark Fate finally gives Sarah Connor the arc that her character deserves. Asher-Perrin also discusses the weight of having a big budget science fiction film focused on three women, each of whom is a leader and a teammate in her own right. There's also a a nice arc for Dani, which you can see a mile away in the middle of the film, but I won't spoil that.
Of course, one more person does show up eventually: Arnold! He's a Terminator left without a mission in the past and had to find something like morality and purpose (or as close to that as Terminators can get). Can machines learn to be moral? And if they can, why do so many humans have such trouble with that? He's also going though life as "Carl," a guy who sells drapes and has an adopted family. I thought Arnold was hilarious without overpowering the main story, but you might listen to some of the panelists on a recent episode of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy for a different take.
(I also like the score, which isn't surprising since it was done by Tom Holkenborg, who also did the Dark Tower movie score, which I also really liked).
Some big philosophical questions in Dark Fate arise from the idea that some kind of judgment day is inevitable. As soon as you thwart the SkyNet Judgment Day, you get another damn thing coming along and trying to kill all humans. I have two questions about this. First, what happened to the SkyNet future when it was changed? Did it disappear? Is it still out there? Is this evidence for the idea I argued for after I watched Genisys that all of the Terminator movies after the first one are actually about alternate dimensions rather than time travel within one universe?
Terminator movies have always been a touchstone for my second question (along with The Matrix and so many others): why would artificial intelligence want to kill us, apparently with such necessity that this happens in all timelines/alternate dimensions/bizarro worlds? Why wouldn't they be indifferent or even like us? I realize this conflict drives the plot of all the Terminator movies, but Iain M. Banks has shown that AIs might rather be delighted and amused by humans and our fragile biological ways. And, sure Luke, Leia, Rey, and Finn chip in, but it's obvious that R2D2 is the true hero of the Star Wars movies. So where do the AIs get their genocidal impulses? From us? From the nature of self-awareness? From our anxieties about technology?
I'm not sure what the answers to these conundrums may be, but I'll keep watching Terminator movies to keep thinking about them
Ad Astra
I’m a sucker for a quiet space movie. 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably my all-time favorite film. I’ve written and thought a lot about Interstellar (here, here, here, and here). Ad Astra is a quiet space movie, but it even more clearly sits within the genre of White Dude Has Daddy Issues.
Ad Astra doesn't have quite the philosophical depth of 2001 or Interstellar. But it is a beautiful movie. The space sequences are simply breathtaking. Honestly, this is probably some of the best space stuff I've seen on film since 2001. Like 2001, it captures the sheer desolation and loneliness and weirdness of space. I didn't even really care about the plot that much. The scenery stole the show.
But there is a plot, of course. Astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt, who brings a sadness and depth you may not expect) is one of the best astronauts around as evidenced by his constant heart rate even in dire situations. But he's haunted by the disappearance of his astronaut father decades earlier (I told you there were daddy issues).
At this point it's been several weeks since I saw it, and I'm forgetting a lot of the details, which I guess means the plot was somewhat forgettable. But here's one part I do remember (with mild spoilers, but this isn't really the kind of movie you can spoil): Roy travels to Neptune (which is as coldly sublime as you'd expect!), where his father (representing an uncaring universe) tells him he never cared about him, just his search for extraterrestrial life, which has been so far unsuccessful and seems a bit unhinged at this point. But Roy tries to save his father, anyway, and in his own quiet way comes to care about humanity despite our apparent cosmic loneliness.
It's a weird, space-y version of Albert Camus, I think. The universe (aka, daddy) may not care about us, but we can affirm our human values even after realizing the absurdity of our relation to the vast, cold, uncaring universe. There's also something about how children can love their parents even if they can't save their parents from themselves, a message for those whose daddy issues are of a more terrestrial and less cosmic variety.
(Another great score and also not surprising why: it's partly by Max Richter, whose work was part of the score of Arrival. The other, more synth-y part is by Lorne Balfe, who apparently also did the score of Terminator: Genisys. Small timeline!).
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