Reel Entropy

Technically, Oblivion is a well-done film. Technically.

The movie follows Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) as he repairs drones on an Earth that has been lost in an alien war. According to Harper, the planet was rendered uninhabitable after the aliens destroyed the moon, which caused catastrophes due to the sudden shift in gravity. The nuclear arsenal was also deployed. Harper later finds that this is all a bold-faced lie.

Oblivion is one of those movies that is executed well, but doesn’t have much soul to speak of. The villains are sinister, the scenery is beautiful and the action is actiony, but the things that are wrong with it stand out so much further than the things that are right.

There are too many annoying, lazy tropes that encroach on the film’s potential. Morgan Freeman, despite second billing, has two whole scenes and is much less significant than Andrea Riseborough and Olga Kurylenko. The film leads with an extremely weak narration sequence that takes twice as long to set up the plot as the commercials did, and all the information is rehashed anyway. The invasion as it was described doesn’t make any sense, and even though it’s all a lie that’s bothersome.

The film makes a point of glossing over nuclear disarmament, despite it being a hot-button issue. Maybe that’s the moral writer/director/producer Joseph Kosinski (who also wrote the graphic novel on which it is based) was trying to establish — that nuclear disarmament is a bad thing. Or that it’s a good thing. I don’t know. Oblivion seems to have a message about nukes, but that message is unclear.

That’s not fair. This isn’t a bad movie, really, it isn’t. It’s shot beautifully, with Iceland’s odd majesty standing in beautifully for a buried New York City. Cruise, Kurylenko and Riseborough all do well, and at this point no one should expect more than a few scenes per movie out of Freeman.

There’s just something off about the whole thing. It’s one of the better things in theaters right now, but still isn’t worth going out for. Whether its the feel of being a mash-up between other, better films, or the fact that it feels about twice as long as it really is, or that still-so-annoying nonsense with physics, Oblivion just doesn’t have the goods.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. He would like to remind you to never trust strangers in parking lots.  For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back next week for a review of Pain & Gain.

42 sets itself up as a bio-pic, but it takes its cues more from World War II-era propaganda films.

The movie follows baseball icon Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) through his first year with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. The first black player in Major League Baseball, Robinson takes a lot of abuse throughout the year.

42 shoots its message at the audience with gaudy dialogue and lighting. Most of it is religious. Early in the film, manager Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford) makes Robinson into a Jesus analogue, and he never stops talking about God from there. Halo lighting is used exorbitantly to make sure the audience knows how Godly and glorious everything is.

The racial aspect of the story is focused on tightly. To a degree this should be expected, but the fact that Robinson was actually very good at baseball is only vaguely referenced, and that’s kind of a problem.

The film is more about sassy commentary from Robinson, Rickey and Red Barber (John C. McGinley). It’s basic wish-fulfillment — it gives the audience the pleasure of having the actions to drown out the bad guys’ words. It lets us root for the team we know is going to win.

But I can’t figure out the point of this larger-than-life bio-pic when the facts of Robinson’s career are staggering. This sensationalized fiction doesn’t live up to the reality.

In real life, Robinson is one of the most dynamic offensive players in Major League history. In the 1947 season, he lead the league in both sacrifice bunts and, somewhat counter intuitively, in stolen bases. He had 175 hits and 12 home runs, helping lead the Dodgers to the pennant where they would lose to the Yankees.

This is important, because Robinson wasn’t just notable because he was black — he was notable because he was a damn fine baseball player. 42 doesn’t mention any of his on-field accomplishments other than playing while black, and in doing so reduces him to the color of his skin. It’s pretty racist, really.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. He extends his deepest condolences to citizens of Boston and West, Texas . For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back next week for a review of Oblivion.

The latest remake of a beloved horror classic is out. Yawn.

Evil Dead follows a similar plot to 1981’s The Evil Dead — five teenagers go to an isolated cabin and find the Necronomicon. A character says something about demonic possession, and then the director breaks out the fire hydrants of fake blood and turns them all on at once. The minutia doesn’t really matter.

Evil Dead’s big, glaring issue is it’s boring. The series has always been much more about gore than suspense, but basically every scary scene is preceded by 10-15 seconds of tension-building despite the fact that anyone who’s even vaguely genre savvy knows what’s about to happen. This movie is a highway to splatter-gore, and it was never going to surprise anyone along the way. Attempts to do so only amount to wasted time.

There really isn’t a scene where this atmosphere of feaux-tension is present, and that’s kind of sad because the plot was good and deserved attention. Instead of a group of college kids headed to a cabin just because the plot required it, this film is about Mia’s (Jane Levy) heroine withdrawal. She’s there with her friends (Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas), brother (Shiloh Fernandez) and brother’s girlfriend (Elizabeth Blackmore) to quit cold turkey, and no one is allowed to leave until she’s better. So, when she starts doing her best Exorcist impression, everyone thinks it’s the withdrawal.

Evil Dead  sets itself up to add new meaning to the classic tale by making it a fantasy about the trials of withdrawal instead of just a scary movie. However, it’s kind of a red herring. The film starts with this thread, abandons it for the main body of the film and then picks it up for the closing act. It’s not done completely, but it’s more enjoyable and touching if you can think about it as about withdrawal.

It’s hard to see why Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Robert G. Tapert signed on to produce this. The fact that the writer/director, star and producer of the classic series were involved was a source of excitement and speculation that this might not be just another remake, but the fact of the matter is that’s all Evil Dead is.

There’s a half-hazard withdrawal storyline and it’s a little prettier, but I can’t see a reason for this to be here when the original is still so culturally relevant.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. He has a paralytic phobia of ducks. For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back next week for a review of 42.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation’s opening credits are pretty epic until the word “Hasbro” flashes on the screen.

The film is a sequel to 2009’s Rise of Cobra in name only. Retaliation features an entirely new set of writers, a new director and an entirely new cast — Ray Park and Lee Byung-hun return as those two ninjas (Byung-hun’s character died in the first one, but whatever) and Channing Tatum returns as Duke, but he dies five minutes in. Dwayne Johnson, Bruce Willis, Ray Stevenson and Luke Bracey come in as the principal characters, but their characters don’t require any acting. Jonathan Bryce returns as the president/that one bad guy who can disguise himself really well, and he actually has dialogue so that’s neat.

The thing to understand here is G.I. Joe: Retaliation does share two of it’s predecessor’s three producers. In that context, it is bafflingly, hilariously mishandled, even for the music video action movie it is.

Stephen Sommers, who only works on toy-selling movies, was canned as director in favor of Jon M. Chu, who lists a couple of Step Up movies and Justin Bieber concert movies to his credit. The film was pushed from a June 2012 release to a March 2013 one, despite having already committed to a Super Bowl commercial and a ton of merchandise. As mentioned above, Byung-hun’s character was impaled and dropped into the Arctic Ocean in the first movie, but he’s alive and well in this. Cobra Commander was re-cast from Joseph Gordon-Levitt to Bracey (that might not have been the producers’ decision).

This is a drawing the illustrator never cared about, and it shows. There are a lot of cool things in this movie, from the exploding fireflies to Johnson’s melt hands. Bryce, Stevenson and Walton Goggins turn in quality performances, Bryce in a major part. His character has the best nuclear disarmament plan ever.

But it’s impossible to focus on these when most of the movie is as poorly thought-out as it is. For every cool set piece, there’s a sequence where bullets don’t seem to work properly. Cobra Commander answers every good performance with lines like “Destro, you’re out of the band,” or “I need him for the war I’m about to start.” Adrienne Palicki’s role as a piece of meat is another mark against the cast’s ability to enhance the movie. After Zartan achieves nuclear zero with what is, again, the most glorious nuclear disarmament plan ever conceptualized, he destroys London.

No one seems to care about this movie, from the producers to the creative team to the actors all the way to the audience. It’s a speck of dust, a go-through-the-motions affair of ridiculous, tenuously connected action sequences. It’s industrial cinema at its worst.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. He constantly wonders why the U.S. doesn’t take North Korea more seriously. For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back next week for a review of Evil Dead.

When writer/director Andrew Niccol took on adapting The Host, Stephanie Meyer’s other book about supernatural love triangles, I was intrigued.

My mistake.

The melodrama follows Wanderer, a body-snatcher alien whose race has taken over the planet, from the point it takes over Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Roman) onward. Wanderer can’t control Stryder’s emotions, and is soon driven to the desert to look for Stryder’s loved ones. Once it finds them among a large colony of free humans, Wanderer lives in the colony and they all learn to trust each other and live in peace and harmony and extremely poor dialogue.

What Meyer has done here is she’s taken the plot from Animorphs and taken out everything that made it cool. Instead of pre-pubescent middle schoolers thrust into a situation they can’t possibly control, The Host features saucy post-pubescent teens who blow most of their time in an underground farm with nothing better to do. Instead of perseverance against all odds, the story stresses dependence and rewards indecision. Thought speech is in, shape shifting powers are out.

The Host tries to key in on the internal dissonance between Wanderer and Stryder. Unfortunately, it does this with a poorly-developed love triangle, because that is literally the only plot device Meyer understands. Ian (Jake Abel) forges a relationship with Wanderer, but the alien is held back by Stryder’s already established relationship with Jared (Max Irons). Somehow, it devolves into yet another story about a weak female lead surrounded by strong men who want to have sex with her. The dynamic could have been interesting this time, but with Stryder’s constant stream of thought-dialogue, it actually gets kind of rapey.

The audience’s ability to hear Stryder’s thoughts is The Host’s key problem. It externalizes an internal struggle,  turning what should have been a source of tension and unpredictability into a reality TV-style argument about who to sleep with.

It’s hard to tell why Niccol signed on here. Normally a writer of thoughtful science fiction, he was unable to adapt the stupid out of The Host. His directorial fingerprints are there, but the story itself is too overwhelmingly lame for anything to save it.

This film places absolutely no trust in the audience to understand or care about its characters without help. Its body is eviscerated by terrible dialogue and an extremely botched car roll, and its ending is absolutely nonsensical. There is no conceivable reason to spend time or money here.

Joshua Knopp is a formerly professional film critic, licensed massage therapist, journalism and film student at the University of North Texas and a staff writer for the NT Daily. He has long been an avid fan of K.A. Applegate’s Animorphs book series. For questions, rebuttals and further guidance about cinema, you can reach him at reelentropy@gmail.com. At this point, I’d like to remind you that you shouldn’t actually go to movies and form your own opinions. That’s what I’m here for. Be sure to come back tomorrow  for a review of G.I. Joe: Retaliation.