Ghost In The Machine

I've been known to dabble a bit in film criticism here and on my old blog. I find it's an easy point on which to pivot into discussions of larger issues affecting American and (increasingly) global societies, doing what film has always done: providing a flickering but still luminous nexus point where high and popular culture overlap. An ephemera made of ephemera, but more durable and contagious than any virus.

With that in mind, I'm excited to talk about a gut-punch of a modern instant-classic of filmed genre fiction, using the specter of artificial intelligence to ask intellectually impertinent, but important questions right at the edge where the science fiction barely qualifies as speculative anymore. With that said, I present:

Ex Machina

Ha ha, just kidding. I have teenage boy children.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

directed by Joss Whedon (Serenity, the first Avengers, the non-Branagh Much Ado About Nothing, multiple TV shows about girls doing magic karate)

starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Samuel L. Jackson, Cobie Smulders, Paul Bettany and James Spader (voice only, but what else does he need really?)

I'm going to do the right thing up front and warn you: spoilers below. It's a Joss Whedon movie, so you know some motherfuckers you like are going to die. This is the same sociopath who took Wash from us, for no other reason than to remind us he could. And it's not even a spoiler to tell you that the person who dies is not Hawkeye. I know. I still can't believe it either.

Look, it's going to make it's money back, totes obvi. The points to be made about the plot sterilization of modern American-financed films, blunting the economic uncertainty of artistic risk by substituting event for plot, explosion for dialogue, you can find those. It's essentially a visual medium that now reflects the exact same way Americans try to communicate with any non-English-speaking foreigner: lots of shouting and big hand gestures. I get that.

And this isn't really the place where I'm going to delve a lot into the gender dynamics issue. That's been handled pretty extensively pretty much everywhere else on the interwebs, which is becoming more and more an open battlefield between not the social justice warriors and the reactionary dinosaurs, but really as openly as ever between the trolls and the trollable. There were even reports that Joss Whedon was hounded off of twitter by ladies being vocally and aggressively mad at him. Ole Joss says (probably rightly) that if you stick your face out there, there is a nearly gravitational certainty that someone is going to aim a boot-heel at it, so if he claims he left to take a breather, no real reason not to buy that. Except maybe for the sociopath thing (see above). Seriously, Wash of all people. Yeah, I get it, Jane was too obvious, but Zoe was a soldier. That almost makes sense. Sad, sure, but Jesus, not this, not Wash...

I will tell you also that this thing was edited, it seemed like to me, with the express intention to make large parts of it entirely unintelligible. It's a Whedon script, so the individual scenes were great, very quippy and pacey, the right balance of stylized prose and human speech, but between scenes, where things are supposed to make progressive, inertial sense, it was a bit... er... Let me put it this way: reports are he cut it down from 3+ hours; I'm suggesting maybe the wrong bits got cut. Lots of people showing up places for no particular reason. Lots of meat, not enough connective tissue. Am I seriously saying I wanted a 2 1/2 hour superhero movie to have been longer? I think maybe I am.

With these team-up ones as well, where the quantum threads of this universe entangle and everything becomes a kind of fuzzy aesthetic blur, I have to shake myself at the silliness of these people who won't leave the fancy-dress party. Captain America in his spangled blue onesie, Black Widow in her toothpaste-tube of a catsuit, Thor dressed basically in what would have been thought of as a very fancy restaurant in 1962, all of which are allowed to make sense in their standalone films but together sometimes strike me as a bit Village People.

All of that said: pretty well loved it. This is not a deep review. Is it possible to be a film critic having never seen a frame of a François Truffaut film? You're watching me do it right now, bitches. Will the analysis be a little more shallow as a result? The next positive point I was about to make was that Hemsworth spent just about the whole movie guns out. Judge the rest as you will.

I mean, it's got super-people fighting an army of robots. OK, not an automatic win for a film considering every Transformer movie, but these are James Spader robots. Go sit through Pretty in Pink again. Watch Ringwald and her creepy hipster stalker friend and McCarthy mumble their way through teen-movie-level performances in a teen movie and then watch what happens every time Spader is on the screen, in a absolute shit, cartoon of a role as a rich-guy-baddie, and he turns it into something glorious, sexy and human. Nothing he actually says is supportable by any human anywhere, but by pure strength of charisma and Nietzschean will, I was pretty close to willing to go along with it. Great parts of me wanted him to kick Duckie's ass. And remember, he was playing a character named "Steff" for fuck's sake. This is the talent we're talking about. Even masked in a CGI metal Frankenstein inexcusably fitted with lips, it is enough to shine through.

And before I get too far, the other robot, Paul Bettany as the Vision was... It's hard to describe. It's a character I know close to nothing about, so I had no real expectations, but it was so visually stunning and carried a genuine sentient pathos, like if your dog could finally tell you what it was feeling. And looked like Paul Bettany.

Everyone else was good too, yes. They've all lived in these characters long enough that there's no establishing going on anymore, it's all down to their comfort in the established dynamics, which Whedon does better than anyone (see: all his TV projects and their sprawling ensembles). Cobie Smulders' Maria Hill got lost a bit, but I guess someone has to be what Dennis Miller used to call "the expositional eunuch."

The only thing I'm kind of dreading is that next year, the "standalone" (ostensibly smaller) film Captain American: Civil War is due out and apparently the cast includes... uh... everyone? Again? Already?

My favorite of these Marvel movies so far was probably the last Captain America one, The Winter Soldier. It served the larger linked-in story, but had a style, a pace, an aesthetic of its own. The set-pieces were big and flashy, yes, but they still made it feel personal amidst the physically unsustainable level of carnage and ruin. Just thinking of the next sequel, with that many people in it and oy... I can barely even.

Maybe Ant-Man will be really good? Yeah. Yeah, "Ant-Man..." I'll be honest, it's going to have to surprise me.