reVIEW (47)
RENAISSANCE

Paris, 2054.
Young and extremely brilliant researcher Ilona Tasuiev is abducted, and her employer, the Avalon Corporation (“Your friend. For life.”) is desperate to recover her. Enter Lt. Barthélémy Karas, a cop only too willing to bend—or break—the rules to get the job done, and you have the basic set-up for Christian Volckman’s neo-noir animated film, Renaissance.
Executed via motion capture, in the stark contrast of chiaroscuro, this is one of those gorgeously-realized sci-fi futurescapes that pulls you into its environs with startling ease. The downside of that, of course, is that the narrative has to work doubly hard to be worthy of the production’s awesome visual palette.
To be fair, there is a story here, complete with cautionary underpinnings; I’ve long believed the best sci-fi stories are the cautionary ones.
Where Renaissance fumbles a tad though is the pacing of its narrative, which is slightly uneven, making its 105-minute running time feel vaguely longish. Still, if you’re patient with your cinema, Renaissance has a nice—if not sunshiny-happy—pay-off.
Renaissance is also guilty of servicing some of the genre tropes a little too slavishly; Karas getting involved with Ilona’s sister Bislane is both painfully predictable and achieved with an off-handed and almost insulting convenience. (Though the neat reversals pulled off by that aforementioned pay-off may arguably be more than enough to balance out the script’s more clichéd moments.)

And there is the matter of Renaissance’s voice cast.
Almost always, when it comes to a foreign animated film, I will insist on watching the English-subtitled version. (With a foreign live-action film, always.)
The English dubbing on Renaissance though, is exceptional, not at all displaying the overly theatrical—and in some cases, childish—flourishes you usually find in dubbed animation.
And there are notable names here, mind: Daniel Craig, Ian Holm, Jonathan Pryce, Catherine McCormack. The talent at the other end of the mic is top-notch, certainly worthy of Renaissance’s eye-widening visuals.

Ultimately, Renaissance may be slightly flawed, but it’s nonetheless an exceptional piece of animated sci-fi that furthered the cause of stylized storytelling in modern cinema, a wave that began with Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and barreled on with the mainstream success of such entries as Sin City and 300.* (Closer to Renaissance’s animated home of course, are Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.)
Renaissance also won the Feature Film Award at Annecy 2006 and the European Fantasy Film Grand Prize at Fantasporto 2007, so that should count for something, yes?

* Fans of the digitally-created artificial environs of this brand of storytelling are advised to check out the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer (review in Archive), and can also look forward to Frank Miller’s upcoming take on Will Eisner’s The Spirit, opening on Christmas Day 2008.

(Renaissance OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

THE GOLDEN COMPASS
(Review)

I’ve read the first two installments of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (been looking for quite a while now, but have yet to find The Amber Spyglass in the bargain bins), and enjoyed both tremendously.
Pullman understands—as do the likes of directors Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro—that fantasy should also possess a certain sense of horror for it to be informed with substance, a darkness to give everything else (not the least of which, the light and the wisdom that accompanies it) a proper weight.
Obviously, I didn’t expect the film adaptation of The Golden Compass (originally titled Northern Lights) to be as substantial as the source material.
Sadly though, it feels like a child who’s suffered a botched intercision.

Now, on the plus side, let me just say that The Golden Compass looks fabulous, like Nicole Kidman the first time we see her in the film: the divinely sinister Mrs. Coulter, in that dress.
Like Coulter at the university banquet, the film that contains her is visually stunning, and has resulted in Oscar nominations for Best Art Direction and Best Visual Effects. Here is a fantasy world that is amazingly realized, courtesy of a hefty budget (reportedly $180 million).
As much as I love Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust, The Golden Compass certainly looks a damn sight better. Compass, however, lacks not just the disarming charm of Stardust, it also lacks—as Mrs. Coulter apparently does—a certain sense of humanity.

For the most part, Compass feels like the ride Lyra (newcomer Dakota Blue Richards) takes atop warrior ice bear Iorek Byrnison (voiced by the brilliant Sir Ian McKellen). And though this sequence is one of the Compass bits that work, my comparison isn’t meant to be a flattering one.
In trying to fit all of the novel into the film’s 113-minute running time, director Chris Weitz (who also penned the script) treats us to a cavalcade of scenes that aren’t allowed to breathe, that aren’t given the time for the narrative (and the audience) to discover who these characters are and why they should warrant any attention or sympathy. The scenes only seem to take as long as is needed to get packets of information and heady concepts to the audience, before we’re whisked off to another locale and another handful of plot points.
Which is sad since Richards actually does a decent job at playing Lyra, the tale’s young heroine, and in a film like this, the young protagonist is always the key to fully enjoying and appreciating the material. If the child actor isn’t any good, chances are, the film falls apart.

In this case though, it’s the script that fails Richards, and most of the cast as well. 007 Daniel Craig is good as Lyra’s explorer uncle, Lord Asriel, as is Craig’s co-star in Casino Royale, Eva Green, as witch queen Serafina Pekkala (though Green does lack the gravity required for the film’s opening voice-over). Jim Carter also gamely gives his best shot at John Rhys-Davies, as Gyptian king, Lord John Faa.
But as good as these performers are, the truly exceptional ones are Sam Elliott as aeronaut Lee Scoresby, and the bears, Sir Ian, whose magnificently resonant vocal delivery captures the regal and fierce pride that informs Iorek, and Deadwood’s Ian McShane, who voices the bear king, Ragnar Sturlusson (renamed from Northern Lights’ Iofur Raknison so as to avoid confusion with Iorek).
Sadly though, there just isn’t enough Scoresby in The Golden Compass, and Ragnar has hardly been introduced to us, before he’s swept off the narrative’s board, and we’re off gallivanting towards the next plot point. Sir Ian at least, gets to unleash his inner ice bear, and it’s to Richard’s credit that she pulls off the scene where Lyra first meets Iorek rather admirably. Considering she was an inexperienced actress playing off a special effect made her performance all the more impressive.

When I first heard who The Golden Compass’ director was going to be, I couldn’t quite see why the choice was a proper fit. Yes, I loved Weitz’s screenplay for Antz, but the films Weitz actually had directing duties on were titles like the Hugh Grant-starrer About A Boy, the Chris Rock-starrer Down To Earth, and American Pie (though Weitz was uncredited for the last). Hardly the stuff of big budget fantasy films.
And if anything has been learned from some of the more recent cinematic entries in the genre, the director has to have a certain mindset where the special effects and the fantastic elements of the production are used as tools to enhance the narrative, the means to an end and not as the end itself.
Tragically (and despite the fact that Weitz first came on board as writer/director, then walked away from directing duties, only to return after Shopgirl director Anand Tucker came and went), Weitz seems to have gotten himself lost in both the story and the means by which the story is being told.

Even flawed as it is though, Weitz’s effort is possibly still one of the most substantive fantasy films yet, which is, of course, part of why it doesn’t work quite as well as it ought to.
The concepts are complex and weightier than your average wizards and warlocks fare, what, with souls externalized in the form of daemons, parallel worlds, and cosmic particles called “Dust,” the witches and ice bears seem like the terribly antiquated part of the equation.
Thus, much of The Golden Compass is exposition at the expense of character. And though Weitz has expressed a desire for an extended cut on DVD (which would have a running time of about two and a half hours), the theatrical cut sorely lacks a warmth it so desperately needs.
It also lacks that sense of horror I mentioned at the top of this review. There are just some scenes (particularly the reveal involving poor little Gyptian boy, Billy Costa, played by Charlie Rowe) that miss the mark, that fail to convey the inherent wrongness of the situation, given the norms of Lyra’s world.
And in a slightly similar vein, there is also a distinct lack of flourish in presenting us with the on-screen wonders we see. Yes, airships and the like are commonplace to that world, but they’re new to us (and to young Lyra as well, who is the audience’s proxy, after all), and yet most everything is treated as if it’s something we see everyday, as if it were as pedestrian as an apple in a dining table centerpiece.
Our first view of Scoresby’s ride is one such missed opportunity for a stirring money shot. And the climactic battle is frankly a disappointing sight as well.

Another shortcoming that bothers me is that Weitz never truly captures the deep ramifications of a life where one’s soul has a physical form outside of one’s own body. The intricate and intimate link between character and daemon doesn’t come across in any real and vital way. All we know for sure is that daemon and person feel the same thing, so if one dies, so does the other one (in the daemon’s case, in a burst of glittery CGI fairy dust).
Save for Lyra and Mrs. Coulter, we never quite get a proper sense of other characters’ daemons; if memory serves me right, Scoresby’s daemon Hester—voiced by Kathy Bates—actually only gets one line in the film, maybe two. Which seems like a terrible waste of Kathy Bates.
It’s also a terrible waste of the whole concept, when a person’s soul is reduced to a mere bunch of morphing pixels…

Clearly New Line’s shot at kick starting another fantasy franchise, by January 27, 2008, The Golden Compass had grossed a disappointing US total of just over $68 million. Its foreign box office though was a surprising $256 million, fully 78.8% of the film’s total cumulative box office of $325 million.
And though $325 million is a lot, so was that $180 million budget. Which puts a question mark over how New Line will approach the intended sequel, The Subtle Knife. Hossein Amini (who wrote the screenplays for Shekhar Kapur’s The Four Feathers and Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove) had already been tasked to adapt the novel even before Compass hit cinemas, but given that it didn’t perform as well as the studio had hoped, there’s a sense of hesitancy on New Line’s part now.
In light of the recent kiss-and-make up with Peter Jackson, giving a green light for two new Tolkien films (The Hobbit and a bridging film between The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy), New Line may feel even less charitable towards producing the second and third installments of His Dark Materials. Or at the very least be reluctant to throw as much money at it as they did at Compass.
Tolkien, after all, is already an established brand name for the studio, certainly a more reliable cash cow than Pullman (and without all that religious controversy hoo-hah on its coattails).

Still, I do hope New Line pushes through with completing the trilogy, giving them two more opportunities to get the material right. If they could only make more of an effort to get to the emotions and themes that inform the narrative, instead of the surface events that comprise the narrative, they would go a long way to justifying—and ultimately humanizing—all that expensive CGI so proudly on display.
That’s what His Dark Materials needs: more of its daemon back.

Parting shot: Third Dodgiest Cinematic ‘Do for 2007 (after Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men and Sacha Baron Cohen in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, both of which have reviews in the Archive): Simon McBurney, whose Magisterium meany Fra Pavel has a mop that looks like the hideous collision between a Trump comb-over and a Third Reich ‘cut.
See, kids? Bad guy = bad hair.
Thus endeth the lesson.

(The Golden Compass OS and images courtesy of aintitcool.com.)

THE INVASION
(Review)

So here’s my history with the pod people: I read Jack Finney’s novel, The Body Snatchers way back in grade school; and while Philip Kaufman’s 1978 adaptation, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is one of my all-time favourites, I thought Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (1993) paled in comparison to Kaufman’s effort. Small wonder, as Kaufman presented audiences with a tight, tension-filled exercise in urban paranoia, and left them with some unforgettable cinematic moments, while Ferrara didn’t really seem to add anything new to the tale, other than making the main protagonists younger.
So it was with some trepidation that I received word that there was to be a fourth film adaptation of Finney’s landmark novel. And when the news trickled in about the re-shoots and the eleventh-hour Wachowski/McTeigue intervention, I got even more concerned.
In a gross oversimplification of events, Oliver Hirschbiegel—director of the Oscar-nominated Der Untergang (Downfall)—began work on what was then being called The Visiting, described as “part thriller, part political allegory.” But when Hirschbiegel’s original cut reportedly didn’t quite click with test audiences, producer Joel Silver brought in the Wachowskis for a re-write; some reports indicate 30% of the film was re-written, others, nearly 70%.
Wachowski protégé James McTeigue (V For Vendetta) then came on-board for 17 days of re-shoots, and all this additional activity caused the original release date of August 2006 to be moved a whole year. At the end of it all, Joel Silver was quoted as saying: “I wasn't intending to make a little art film. I tend to make commercial, mainstream movies. [The Invasion] just needed a little help.”
It was clear then that whatever The Invasion turned out to be, it would most certainly not be the original vision screenwriter David Kajganich had, nor what Hirschbiegel shot over 45 days in Baltimore. This would then be the fifth re-working of Finney’s novel, completely bypassing the Kajganich/Hirschbiegel effort.
Was this a Hollywood train wreck waiting to happen, with extra conductors and replacement drivers ultimately arsing up the works? Or could the Wachowskis have actually hit this one out of the park?

In this redux of a redux, Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) is a divorced mother and psychiatrist who suddenly finds her world transformed by the arrival of an extraterrestrial virus which turns its victims into soulless versions of themselves: all of the memories and logic and habits, none of the messy emotions.
This crisis coincides with Carol’s son Oliver (Jackson Bond) visiting with his father (The Tudors’ Jeremy Northam, whose character is named Tucker Kaufman, presumably a nod to director Philip Kaufman), who happens to work for the CDC, and is an early victim of the virus.
As the strangeness escalates around Carol, the only ones she can turn to for help are her close friend Ben Driscoll (double-oh-seven Daniel Craig), and his colleague Stephen Galeano (Jeffrey Wright, HBO’s Angels in America and M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water; Wright was also Craig’s co-star in Casino Royale). Not only do the trio need to comprehend the workings of this virus, but Carol must also retrieve her son before he is infected.

Clearly, The Invasion has something to say, about the inherent savagery of the human race, and the possible price for a completely conflict-free world. But there are a myriad things which serve to distract the audience and obscure what might have been a fascinating and provocative exploration of what it truly means to be human.
Most conspicuous are a number of curious and spastic editing choices which do little more than interrupt and confuse the narrative flow. Also evident is the lack of a real character in Carol Bennell.
I don’t really know much about her beyond the fact that she’s a shrink, she’s a self-professed “post-modern feminist,” and she’s a Concerned Mother. There is a distinct lack of tiny grace notes that tell me she’s actually a living, breathing individual. (And the little word game she plays with Oliver doesn’t count; that’s a quick “Oh, look, she must really be close with her son and really care for him a lot” tic more than anything else.)
And with a performance that doesn’t quite have the “oomph” of some of her past work, Kidman could very well have been a pod person from the get-go.

And while the choice of turning the threat’s nature into a virus—as opposed to Finney’s idea (which has been used in all of The Body Snatchers’ previous cinematic iterations), where alien pods actually produce an emotionless clone while the original human’s body disintegrates—is certainly interesting and timely in this virulent age of SARS and bird flu, it also leaves a back door open, saddling us with an ending that rings a bit hollow and somehow diminishes the catastrophe itself to just another outbreak.
At the end of it all, there just doesn’t seem to be much weight to what came before, no real, substantial repercussions of the disaster.

To be fair though, there are a few bright spots.
Just as Kaufman made a nod to Donald Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the first adaptation from 1956) by giving Kevin McCarthy a brief cameo, re-enacting his final lines from Siegel’s version*, The Invasion sees Veronica Cartwright (brilliant in Kaufman’s version) in a small role as Wendy Lenk, a patient of Carol’s, who twigs to what’s going down early on when her normally volatile husband becomes a cold and calm automaton overnight.
Cartwright’s scene with Kidman is awesome, and I’m just disappointed that we don’t see more of her, and that, ultimately, her character seems more plot device (to reveal to Carol and company some of the characteristics of the virus they face) than actual person.
Also, while some of the sequences where Carol meets other uninfected humans, who teach her to survive by showing no emotion and not falling asleep, are effective, there is one (which is actually shown in the trailer) whose dodgy effects mar and dislodge whatever emotional weight the scene could have had.
Undeniably though, the projectile vomiting as vector for the virus is disturbing and very unsettling; that census taker at Carol’s door, mouth agape, is one of the film’s creepiest moments.

For all its pros and cons though, it’s difficult at this point to try and determine where the responsibility lies for the mess that is The Invasion; which bits are Hirschbiegel’s and which are the Wachowskis. As Silver so wonderfully puts it, “… we added some stuff to it.” Okay, so which “stuff”?**
Even though this is a sad truth—that more and more, the responsibility for much of Hollywood’s big budget product these days must be shared by everyone from the director on down to the members of all those test audiences, with producers, studio heads, and agents thrown in for “good” measure—it only becomes glaringly evident in films like The Invasion, where art is so obviously b!tchslapped into submission by economics.
Was Hirschbiegel’s version so much of “a little art film” that it would not have found an audience? Is the “commercial, mainstream” Invasion any better? There really is no way to tell.
All I really do know is that a) while The Invasion isn’t a complete disaster, it is far from Kaufman’s version (it’s also quite distant from a completely satisfying viewing experience); and b) I really do wish the Hirschbiegel cut gets released somehow, so we can all see the original vision, before Silver oh-so-decisively struck with the weighty hammer of box-office hungry Hollywood.

* This ingenious little bit thus turned Kaufman’s version, on some sly level, into a sequel, rather than a remake, showing a certain amount of respect and gratitude to Siegel’s adaptation.

** The climactic car chase though, was part of the McTeigue re-shoots, apparently an attempt to punch up the film’s action quotient.

Parting shot: The lead characters in the Siegel and Kaufman versions have the last names Bennell (Miles and Matthew) and Driscoll (Becky and Elizabeth). Apparently, in The Invasion, the genders are reversed.
Additionally, in Siegel’s adaptation, there are also characters named Dan Kauffman and Wilma Lentz.

Parting shot 2: Now that I’ve seen The Invasion, the only cinematic iteration I’ve yet to watch is, ironically enough, the first adaptation, Donald Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. As far as the films go, it’s kind of like meeting all these different pod people without ever actually having met the original.
Incidentally, Siegel also directed Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry.

(The Invasion OS courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com; image courtesy of collider.com.)