Borderlands

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Cinema is supported by a number of foundations: the sturdiest being the adaptation. Most of cinema’s bulk, and shape, and heft is made up of adaptations. They have started and sometimes ended entire careers. Heck, they have even spawned and reared major motion picture studios! And like any core pillar, the phenomenon of adaptations has splintered into beams that help support and widen the reach of cinema, adding to its mighty girth.

Obviously, adaptations of books and traditional oral stories have been inspiring and reshaping cinema for over a century, but as humanity has concocted new ways to tell stories and entertain itself, new subgenres of adaptations have appeared. The subject of today’s film review falls into one such subgenre: the videogame adaptation.

Videogame adaptations are not necessarily new, but they are certainly rising to prominence in a rather quick and feverish fashion. Within the last 5 years alone we have seen a solid number of movies and TV shows spawned from the videogame genre: Fallout, The Last of Us, The SuperMario Bros Movie, Five Nights At Freddy’s, and it has been confirmed that Alien: Romulus has been inspired by the videogame Alien: Isolation. This week, I treated myself to a solo night out for dinner and a movie and went and saw the newest addition to this list: Borderlands.

On the wasteland planet of Pandora there is a vault that is said to contain technologies from an alien race known as the Eridians. Vault hunters have been after this treasure for years, but no one has ever gotten close to finding it, let alone opening it. Until now. When the CEO of the Atlas Corporation hires cynical and bad-tempered bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett) to rescue his kidnapped daughter, it seems like an easy cheque. Until Lilith discovers that Atlas’ ‘daughter’ is actually a clone that he engineered to be the key to opening the Eridian Vault and her return to Atlas would very likely be her end. Lilith joins the ragtag team protecting Tiny Tina from Atlas, aiming to get to the Vault first and give Tina the upper hand against him.

This movie has been universally panned by critics and gamers alike, apparently hosting a myriad of ailments including being a mashup of various game narratives, an oppressive lack of narrative and character development, a terrible botching of beloved characters, and an overall attempt to be like Mad Max meets Guardians of the Galaxy and failing miserably. I agree that the movie suffers from all these things. I also agree with Jamie Tram in their ABC review of the film: “Borderlands is competent enough to simply be forgettable.”

Let me clarify that I do not consider myself a gamer, though I do play videogames, and I have never played any of the Borderlands games or knew anything about them when entering the cinema on Wednesday night. I review this movie simply as a movie. I walked in expecting garbage, but I was pleasantly presented with hot garbage -thanks to the ethereal luminescence of Cate Blanchett- and I honestly had a fun time by myself watching this film.

I agree that the writing is definitely where the film falls flat on its face, but honestly I’m inclined to chalk that to the fact that this film was in Development Hell since 2015 so by the time actual filming and production rolled around, everyone had already given up. Do you remember that trick of removing a stick of gum from the wrapper and then folding the wrapper again so that it still looked like it contained gum? That’s this movie. It’s got a very shiny and enticing wrapper that holds the promise of sweetness or minty freshness within, but it’s just empty. The story is very predictable, even for people who wander in completely oblivious to the source material, and there is no real camaraderie between the characters so it’s very hard to form any sort of emotional investment in them. At one point there is a semi-interesting theme of maternalism that gets minutely explored, but it doesn’t really go anywhere so that fascination is short-lived.

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All the cast did a fine job. I could honestly watch Cate Blanchett all day and, to be fair, it did look like she was having a rather fun time so I can get behind that. Jack black as the robot Claptrap was cutely sarcastic, Jamie Lee Curtis as researcher Tannis was quite entertaining to watch, Ariana Greenblatt, while no Ashley Birch, did a solid job of Tiny Tina, and Kevin Hart is there too.

Visually, the film is kinda cool. The dystopian wasteland of Pandora, while nothing we haven’t already seen, is still a good setting for the various forms of violence that flavour the film, and the space-age trinkets and technologies still provide some fun novelty.

Can Borderlands be considered cinematic art? Absolutely not. Could things have been better? 100%. But at the end of the day, I still had a nice time out watching this movie: I chuckled a few times, my mind did not wander to other things, and I left the cinema feeling that I had not wasted my time.

Director: Eli Roth, 2024

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Jack Black, Florian Munteanu, Janina Gavankar, Gina Hershon, Hayley Bennett, Edgar Ramirez, & Jamie Lee Curtis.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2

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After reviewing Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes this morning and it being a ridiculously hot day in here Aus, I decided that there was no better time to finish watching the Hunger Games saga than today. So, I sat down after lunch and watched all four movies. At least I can say that I’ve seen them all now…if nothing else.

The rebels living beneath the rubble of District 13 have successfully extracted Peeta and the other hostages from the Capitol, but the victory is cut short when Peeta tries to kill Katniss. Brainwashed and broken into being an assassin, Peeta undergoes procedures to reverse the Capitol’s manipulation while Katniss makes a plan to sneak into the Capitol and assassinate President Snow. The war is in full swing and Katniss goes to the front lines to enact her plan, but as more and more people begin to drop hints not to trust President Coin, Katniss begins to wonder if she’s not just a pawn in another, bloody, game.

I have been reminded why I lost interest in these movies. As soon as they switched from dystopian to war movie, I was out. Without the drama of the arena, the characters all became pretty boring and the larger story of a reluctant girl becoming the voice of a revolution just doesn’t captivate.  I found nothing about this film interesting at all, it’s as if everything that it originally had going for it was left to peter out and all that was left was this uninteresting urban war film with the no more emotional payoff than a bar of soap.

The performances are all fine, though I felt that they too had been left to become flat, and by the end of the movie, I was still of the sound opinion that Katniss Everdeen is one of the most unapproachable and uninteresting heroines in film and literature.

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All this is not to say that Mockingjay Part 2 is a bad film, merely a boring one. It’s got action, drama, and a few plot twists that made the needle on the pulse machine twitch, but nothing more. I’m glad I can say I’ve watched them all, but I definitely won’t be revisiting them again.

Director: Francis Lawrence, 2015

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Julianne Moore, Willow Shields, Sam Clafin, Jeffrey Wright, Mahershala Ali, Jena Malone, Stanley Tucci & Phillip Seymour Hoffman

Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

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So, for a little bit of context: I never actually finished watching The Hunger Games series. I read the books and then gave up after the third movie. Not sure why, I guess I just grew out of it. As far as dystopian sagas go, there are more interesting works out there. But I recently got free tickets to the new Hunger Games film, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and I thought why not? So, I got a group of friends together and we had ourselves a little movie night. All in all, it was very enjoyable, and I even rather liked the film.

Young Coriolanus Snow thinks himself a sure win for the Plinth Prize, academically outranking the rest of his class despite his poor home circumstances. But his hopes for the prize money and a better life are thrown into turmoil when his class his given a new last-minute assignment: mentor a tribute in the Hunger Games and come up with a way to get the public watching again. Coriolanus is paired with an outcast songbird from District 12 and as they work together, he starts to develop feelings for her. But the Capital is just as harsh a world as the outer districts and Coriolanus quickly learns that there might not be a way for him to have the life he wants and the love he wants.

The film is a disturbingly fascinating rise to power story of Coriolanus Snow, later President Snow; rising from humble beginnings with a moral and hopeful attitude that gets warped by ambition into power-hungry madness. Sort of a villain’s origin story, as most villains begin life trying to do what’s best for those they love and getting scorched in the process. The story is filled with betrayals, manipulation, and chapters of horrendous physical and ethical conflict and violence.

The Hunger Games have yet to become the great spectacle of Katniss’ time, here there is merely an empty arena dotted about with rusty pitchforks and axes and the ‘thrill’ of the game is seeing people commit savage brutality to stay alive. But the Hunger Games themselves only make up half the film. The remainder fills in the blanks of how Coriolanus became the heartless and evil person we know from the series. And there are heaps of terrible trials and betrayals that really leave you silent and staring.

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The performances are all brilliant, with Tom Blyth very alarmingly beginning the film a little wooden as the upstanding Capital citizen and falling into mad and savage frenzy during the third act. His performance in the second half really comes alive as his circumstance begin to reveal his true character. Rachel Zegler is instantly admirable and loveable as Lucy Gray Baird, from the first moment you see her, you’re instantly on her side. But I was all about Viola Davis as the delightfully twisted Dr. Gaul; she’s the type of villain you just want more of.

Hunger Games: Ballad Of Songbirds and Snakes is a disturbing character journey, but a pretty enjoyable film filled with action, violence, hope, a whole lot of drama. It might even have got me considering revisiting the series again and finishing it this time…

Director: Francis Lawrence, 2023

Cast: Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Hunter Schafer, Fionnula Flanagan, Viola Davis, Ashley Liao, Josh Andres Rivera, Jason Schwartzman, & Peter Dinklage

Zombieland: Double Tap

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It seems like an eternity since I went to the movies! I think It Chapter II might have been the last and that was only because I had a cheap promo ticket thing. There has just been nothing on, a real movie drought, but it looks like November is when we can expect a little rain. I started off this cinematic wet-season with Zombieland: Double Tap.

Families can be hard to keep together. More so in the face of an ever-present zombie hoard. After Columbus (Jessie Eisenberg), Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Wichita (Emma Stone), and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) move into the abandoned White House, tensions start to rise as Little Rock yearns to be around survivors her own age, Columbus and Wichita have couples issues, and Tallahassee starts to get the nomadic itch. And the outside world is just as tense, with a new type of zombie emerging; one that’s smarter, faster, and harder to kill. Bring it on!

This metafictive little gem is a whole lot of fun. It adheres to the same style and humour of the first film, but with a refreshing twist of new narratives, character development, and relatable themes. The funniest thing about the movie is how the central conflict stems from these everyday dramas that each and every one of us goes through, and it’s made more epic by the fact that these normalities are trying to be achieved in a totally un-normal world. Who would think to make a coming-of-age/grown ups growing up film set against a dystopian, zombie-apocalypse background? Ruben Fleischer, Dave Callaham, Rhett Reese, and Paul Wernick!

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The same cutting humour and dialogue from the first movie is still the real hero of this film, being delivered with perfect timing and performance from the cast. Between Eisenberg’s speedy and intelligent monologues and Harrelson’s brutish and hilarious bouts of rhyming, it’s nothing but happy fun times ahead.

Snaps definitely go to the makeup and effects department for their delightfully gross and stomach-churning achievements in zombie gore.

Zombieland: Double Tap really is more of the same thing as Zombieland and there’s nothing wrong with that! If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it!

Director: Ruben Fleischer, 2019

Cast: Jessie Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson, Abigail Breslin, Zoe Deutch, Avan Jogia, Rosario Dawson, Luke Wilson, Thomas Middleditch, and Bill Murray

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

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What better way to while away an afternoon than with a little trip into the post-apocalyptic? This afternoon’s movie of choice was Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Mel Gibson’s third foray into the dusty wilderlands as that silent badass, Max.

After his car and all his possessions are stolen, Max tracks the thief down to Bartertown, a trading town run by a sassy lawmaker named Aunt Entity (Tina Turner). When a power struggle ensues between Entity and a methane producer named Master, who powers the city, Max becomes entangled in the middle as a pawn of Entity’s, played against a mighty gladiator in the deadly arena of Thunderdome; where two men enter and one man leaves.

Honestly, by the time we get to Thunderdome, one has to wonder what the point of these movies is. While the idea of a lone, leather clad rider, trekking it through the desert, getting into fights, and begrudgingly helping out the weaker folk, cannot be denied, watching sequels like Road Warrior and Thunderdome just work as further proof that a single character does not necessarily make a good film. The central story of this film, rather like Road Warrior is that Max wants to be reunited with his car and fuel and be left to drive around in peace, but somehow ends up having to be a badass hero to a bunch of people; in this case, a tribe of abandoned children.

Where the film makes itself interesting is in the great, dirty set pieces of Bartertown and, of course the central fight in Thunderdome as well as the car chases. A dusty, greasy, and bloody frenzy of implied violence and gore is what one is in for with this film, but its perks are purely visual with no narrative delights to be found anywhere.

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I’ll concede that the film’s fascinating explorations into the many types of civilisation survival made me wonder. While Bartertown has the recognisable shape of pre-apocalyptic civilisation while being completely populated with adults, it’s the clan of children with their retreat into nature and (for want of a better word) religion that ends up having longevity and providing the film with its hopeful(?) tone at the end. A very interesting contrasting binary.

At the end of the day, Beyond Thunderdome is a stupid and fun action romp that reminds us that there was a time when Australia was making ridiculous, but kick-ass movies because we fucking could! The Ozploitation era was a boon for Aussie cinema and despite many of these types of film not having any real narrative value, there is still an entertaining cinematic experience to be had from them.

Director: George Miller & George Ogilvie (1985)

Cast: Mel Gibson, Tina Turner, Angry Andersen, Bruce Spence, Frank Thring, Angelo Rossitto, Robert Grubb, and Justine Clark

The Road Warrior [Mad Max 2]

Image credit: IMDb

Our political sphere is incorrect, our cultural identity (right now) is not so crash hot, and we’re absolutely ruining our precious and beautiful flora and fauna, but there is still one thing I love and will always love about Australia, its films.

It’s been a long time coming, but this afternoon I finally sat down and watched the second instalment in George Miller’s Mad Max trilogy: The Road Warrior.

Set in a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland, a badass, leather-clad drifter traverses the wilderness in the search for gasoline. Outrunning a gang of ruthless highway pirates, Max (Mel Gibson) discovers a human colony pumping and defending gallons of fuel from the feral sieges of Wasteland gangs. Aiding the colony in the hope of gaining some fuel, he puts pedal to the metal to destroy the Wasteland ‘leader’, the Humungus, and help the colonists escape to a better life.

This is the movie that cemented Ozploitation films internationally, and gained Australian cinema its badass and free-wheelin’ (yeah I went there) reputation abroad. While the first movie is the (now) critically-revered gemstone of Aussie cinema, The Road Warrior is the film that everyone knows and it catapulted Mel Gibson into new realms of stardom.

Coming out at a time when Australia was making B and ‘bad’ movies just because we fucking could, The Road Warrior is sci-fi rev-head’s wet dream! Having no real story to speak of aside from ‘ the quest for fuel’, the film is nothing but bondage, piracy, epic car-chases, and apocalyptic explosions.

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Max is the un-killable bad boy that all guys who live in their parents’ basement are in their dreams. After suffering absolute loss in the first movie, he wanders throughout this one with no emotion whatsoever, in the words of Po, he’s so hardcore he doesn’t feel anything! Even a canine companion and an annoying child actor can’t bring a smile to this dude’s dusty and (often) blood-streaked face and, I’m not going to lie, it’s so much fucking fun to watch!

The rest of the movie is pure, adrenaline-pinching chaos; a whole sperm-bank of action movie tropes and visual badassery, set against a dry and dusty world of orange that is Australia.

Despite its short running-time, The Road Warrior still manages to pack a spiked, knuckle-dusted punch over three decades later!

Director: George Miller, 1981

Cast: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Michael Preston, Max Phipps, Vernon Wells, Kjell Nilsson, Virginia Hey, William Zappa, and Emil Minty

Alita: Battle Angel

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While there are many franchises and story ideas that have been successfully adapted to the screen as feature films; thousands throughout the years, there are and inevitably always will be, epic flops that beg the question ‘why was this even made?’ One classic example of this that I experienced recently was Alita: Battle Angel.

The film is an origin story –without being presented as such- telling the tale of a decapitated, yet still functional cyborg (Rosa Salazar) that is found by an engineer/bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) and given a new body. Alita, as the engineer calls her then spends the rest of the movie learning about her surroundings and trying to peace together fragments of an identity that she can’t remember, but which clearly involves kicking a lot of butt!

Alita already had a strike against it for a certain audience because it’s an anime that’s been taken by Hollywood, Westernised and flung to the masses. I have not seen the anime and indeed knew nothing about the character before walking into the cinema, so I’m not here to bitch about that aspect. I am here to talk about the cinematic experience it offered… which was not good. I actually came out of the cinema feeling angry!

The initial appeal of Alita was the idea of this strong female lead and the fact that the movie is a heavily CGI-driven feature showcasing a science-fiction dystopian society a la ‘80s sci-fi flicks like Total Recall, Blade Runner, or even Soylent Green. The computer magic of the movie is definitely worthy of praise, despite being absolutely everywhere. The design of Alita, once you get used to the Instagram-filtered big eyes is actually really sleek and beautiful: money well spent, and what’s particularly nice about the entire film is that the CGI itself is a continuous aesthetic that looks really good and creates a fairly genuine feel for the world it’s showing. The class systems of the world are quite impressively depicted in the shift from sleek and shiny CGI architecture to shoddy, janky slums of older technological generation and to give credit where it is due, the film’s computer generated characters and environments create a very full world and good voyeuristic experience.

Sadly, this is where the praise ends. While Alita looks like a cool movie, it suffers from candy wrapper syndrome: where the packaging looks great, but there is something boring and without nourishment inside. Like many anime-turned-movies, games-turned-movies, and comic book-turned-movies, the film is completely let down by its writers, producers, director etc making a fan movie rather than a movie for the fans. Quite often, watering down a much-loved franchise to get butts in seats just doesn’t cut it and Alita is a classic example of this. The story is substandard and boring, the characters are not particularly interesting in any way, and therefore we don’t get any emotional payoff when one triumphs and another fails, and a lot of potential points of interest are either not explained at all or merely hand-waved away with ‘because science-fiction’.

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But the major bugbear that myself and others like me will have with this film is that it creates the worst cinematic experience, because you come away feeling cheated. Alita is an origin story, no doubt there is intent have more movies follow it, but at no point in the film are there any cues to prime you for that way of thinking. Instead, we’re waiting for an epic battle and dramatic third act, which we don’t get! There is absolutely no narrative payoff at the end of this film and this is what causes you to come away feeling like you’ve been had.

Newsflash movie makers, no one likes this feeling!

And so Alita: Battle Angel joins films such as The Golden Compass in the barracks of movies that just have you wanting to punch someone at the very end.

Director: Robert Rodriguez, 2019

Cast: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Ed Skrein, Jackie Earle Haley, Keean Johnson, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Lana Condor, Casper Van Dien, Idara Victor, and Edward Norton

A Quiet Place

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As you all probably know there’s a lot of hype surrounding Josh Krasinski’s horror film A Quiet Place. So far I’ve heard nothing but praise and stories of audiences being so scared of making noises that no one dares to eat their popcorn! Last night –like an idiot- I bought into the hype and went along to the movies to see what the fuss was about. What I got was bitter, bitter, bitter disappointment –thank goodness I had a free ticket!

Set in a remote wood in a world where the majority of humanity has been wiped out by horrific blind monsters with a heightened sense of hearing, a family struggles to survive. Communicating through sign language they lead a simple life: doing laundry, preparing for the arrival of a new baby, and engineering stronger hearing aids for their daughter. But a spanner is thrown into the works when a series of noises brings the dreaded beasts right to their front door.

Like my movie experiences with The Greatest Showman, Wonder Woman, and La La Land I really wanted to like this movie because everyone else was praising it and I just couldn’t… because it’s not good. In a nutshell A Quiet Place is a novelty horror flick: ooh a horror movie without dialogue. There’s hundreds of these films already around, they’re called silent movies and I don’t mind saying that I would watch Phantom of the Opera or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari over this movie any day of the week. Hell, I’d even opt for Metropolis over this flick.

The film’s central problem is that it literally has no point. Most horror movies have some deeper, allegorical aspect to them that makes them worth our time and this film had nada. Because of this there was –for me at least- no immersive component of the film, which made me feel disjointed and forced to see everything that is wrong with it. And there was a lot. The story’s lack of stakes is what really brings it down because it dampens the tension and suspense that a film like this thrives on. The only bodily and emotional tensing that I indulged in was when I knew there was a jump scare around the corner. Another problem. Jump scares can be good when they are timed perfectly and work to heighten the fright factor. These ones were just there to make people jump. It’s so annoying when a horror movie relies on this trick because it’s a quick cheat that triggers a reflex response rather than establishing actual fear. If a jump scare is thrown in just for that purpose, I don’t feel scared I feel jibbed and it’s a breach of the unspoken contract between film genre and its audiences. You go to a horror movie to get scared not simply have your nerves startled. If I wanted that I would just stay at home and give myself electric shocks!

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Then there are a lot of questions that your mind’s screaming because you’re not immersed in the film. Questions like ‘how can a creature with super sensitive hearing hear a raccoon treading on sand, but not hear a woman breathing through labor even when they’re in the same room?’ Not to mention the question of the amount of electricity this family has without a generator –and I didn’t see any solar panels- or the gaping plot hole that comes to light towards the end. The problem is that we’re expected to hand wave a love of these issues away for some reason, but the film doesn’t establish what that reason is and I just can’t suspend my belief if there isn’t a reason to.

Even with the monsters themselves! We have to assume they’re some sort of underground creature or inter-dimensional being that has surfaced because –despite their resemblance to the Predator and xenomorphs- it would make absolutely no sense if they were aliens.

But to give credit where it’s due the film has a good pace and its timing is more or less on point, the performances were solid and I appreciate that it attempted to establish certain relationships between the characters –not quite hitting the dramatic high notes, but still working well- and there is definitely a fascinating novelty to the plot.

Starring: John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Cade Woodward, and Leon Russom

Akira

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Having just finished this movie I don’t think any dystopian, science fiction flick even comes close to rivaling the incredible devastation and annihilation of the Apocalypse! Despite being thirty years old, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira still proves to be an intense experience for the senses as well as the analytical side of the brain. Truthfully, ‘intense’ is an understatement.

Set in the dirty, decaying city of Neo-Tokyo –so named after the original Tokyo was destroyed in World War III- the film chronicles the struggles of Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata) when his best friend suddenly develops terrifying telekinetic powers that could destroy hundreds. As Tetsuo becomes consumed and goes on an unstoppable warpath, Kaneda joins a gang of antigovernment terrorists in their search for the mysterious Akira – a telepath even more powerful than Tetsuo.

The cleverest thing about this movie is its links between the apocalypse and adolescence. The ‘world gone mad’ that is Neo-Tokyo – a genetic splice between Mad Max and Blade Runner- is characterised by a decaying society peopled with activists, the military, and angry rebellious teens. Violence and frustration is the norm so you can imagine how intense it gets to be when a repressed and angry teenager develops powers that take out the city. A delicious sense of doom and gloom peppered with distaste for your fellow man constantly hangs over the film, leaving you hopeless and repulsed but unable to leave your seat.

The crisp animation only heightens this filmic experience, sparing no one from the violence, destruction, and absolute horror that grip the world. The brightest colours in the paint box are yellow, orange, and red and they are used constantly to light up the city and bring it to the ground. The apocalyptic setting and continual bouts of city-wide destruction cleanly and horribly reference the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II as well as explore concurrent themes attached including malaise and social collapse.

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The paranormal theme running alongside the prevalent themes of social decline and enraged youth makes it extraordinarily disturbing. I’m seriously going to have nightmares about that climax! And because it’s animated there’s this extra sense of the macabre and the horrific as things happen to people that could not possibly be done in a live-action movie, cementing the film’s position in movie history!

Starring: Mitsuo Iwata, Nozumo Sasaki, Mami Koyama, Tessho Genda, Hiroshi Otake, Koichi Kitamura, Michihiro Ikemizu, Yuriko Fuchizaki, Masaaki Okura, Taro Arakawa, Takeshi Kusao, Kazumi Tanaka, Masayuki Kato, Yosuke Akimoto, and Masato Hirano

The Last Woman on Earth

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I can’t help but find it funny that Vincent Price did a movie called The Last Man on Earth, which was about him surviving day to day amidst a population of zombies. But, have a film called The Last Woman On Earth and it’s nowhere near as fun. 

Set in Puerto Rico, this Roger Corman drama, is about a crook, his wife, and his lawyer that go diving while on vacation. When they return to the surface, they discover that something has happened to the oxygen and humanity has been wiped out. As H2O returns, the three try to come to grips with being the last people left in the world and for a while they live happily until the two men turn against each other over Evelyn. 

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Whilst having a predictable and not very ‘horrific’ story idea, this movie is not without its charm. It still manages to do what many classic zombie and apocalypse movies have done: that is depicting the breakdown of society and unearthing man’s animal nature. Although I guess in a refreshing turn of events, this part of the film is not as dramatic as it easily could have been. 

Rather than have a long, suspense-drawn-out thriller, or a weird veneer of horror like some of his other films, Corman delivers an interesting and engaging drama set against disaster that doesn’t really go anywhere and, thus has a funny bit realism to it. I mean, when the world ends and every social construct that had meaning ends with it, what else is there to do but chill out and await the inevitable? 

The central drama comes from the three characters being unhappy on some level to start with and for a while there is hope that a happy ending is in sight. But then the ending comes and you’re left wondering. The performances are nothing to write home about, but they’re as engaging as they can be given that it’s literally just the three of them throughout. 

And Corman does display some skill in keeping our attention, not giving any clues away as to where the movie’s going or what type of ride we’re in for. 

It’s not an amazing movie, it’s not a great movie, you could even argue that’s it’s not even a good movie, but there is something interesting about The Last Woman On Earth and if you’re a fan of B-grade and cult movies, it might be worth a watch. 

Starring: Betsy Jones-Morland, Anthony Carbone, and Robert Towne 

Year: 1960

War for the Planet of the Apes

It’s here. The conclusion to a prequel trilogy spawned by a true 1960’s sci-fi classic. We saw the stubbornness and self-entitlement of humans in Rise and we saw Caesar and Koba battle through their own demons and start a war in Dawn. Now the war is in full swing and the end is nigh. 

It’s been two years since the U.S. military was called in to fight off Caesar’s tribe of apes and the war has not abated. After a rogue faction of troops are captured and released by Caesar with a message that he desires peace, the battle becomes personal when the ruthless Colonel infiltrates the tribe’s home and murders Caesar’s wife and eldest son. Forced to flee to a new home, the apes leave the woods, but Caesar leaves to go on his own quest of revenge against the Colonel. Followed by Maurice, Luca, and Rocket, Caesar’s simple mission of vengeance takes a turn when he discovers various humans unable to speak and his tribe is captured and forced to work as prisoners of war. 

This is the movie where the writers got to play with genre. The first was exposition and origin stories, the second was character exploration and development, this one is where they got to cram in all the clichéd metaphoric imagery and war movie references they could. Intertextual allusions are not a bad thing, when done right. But when done wrong or hurriedly, they can put the brakes on the cinematic experience. We’re left with no doubt from the beginning of War that this is a war movie. Various scenes immediately put us in mind of Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, which is cool for the film admittedly, but the cliché of it does take away from the excitement. Nothing about the story or the characters is heightened by them so they just end up sitting there with very little purpose, making us turn our attention to them and go,’ why’d they even bother?’ 

A brief interlude of the road movie provides breathing space before we’re thrown into the world of the POW film. The second half of the movie becomes a POW escape flick reminiscent of both The Great Escape and The Bridge on the River Kwai (at least narrative-wise). It’s weird because on the one hand, it does make the story engaging and empowering as well as proves opportune for film spectacle, but on the other hand it flattens a fair bit of the conflict that’s happening and shifts it aside. 

The confusing thing about this movie is its two conflicting central dramas. It’s a war between apes and humans, but it feels more like one trying to outdo the other in terms of reasons for fighting. Caesar’s driving force for the majority of the movie is revenge and defiance in the face of oppression, as well as the whole “apes together, strong” thing and that grows a bit stale after a while. The human side of the coin completely contradicts this with a story reminiscent of Apocalypse Now happening between this rogue Colonel and the rest of the U.S. military. Looking at the two side by side, it’s not so much war for the planet rather than little wars all happening at the same time and a lot of the grandeur and epic-ness of the title gets taken away. 

On a more positive note, the performances continue to be mesmerizing, especially those of Andy Serkis and his troupe of motion-capturists. And, for the most part, there is a lot of exciting and engaging spectacle happening on screen that gets adrenaline going and inspires sound emotional responses. Drama is also heightened by the film’s wonderful soundtrack by Michael Giacchino. 

From the trilogy, Dawn is the one that really stands out, but War is a solid follow-on and, regardless of some of its flaws, it’s a perfect way to end the trilogy. 

Starring: Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zhan, Karin Konoval, Amiah Miller, Terry Notary, Ty Olsson, Michael Adamtwaite, Judy Greer, Sara Canning, and Devyn Dalton 

Year: 2017 

Rating: M

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The first movie ever to blend animation and live performance within the same scene was a silent short film of the 1900s called, The Enchanted Drawing, and features an artist drawing a person with a hat, a bottle of wine, and a cigar, and then plucking the items one by one from the easel into the real world, angering the man in the drawing. The art of animation magic has certainly come a long way over the years, but one thing that has never changed is animation’s ability to create characters and personalities out of thin air. Iconic moments in cinema like Dick Van Dyke dancing with cartoon penguins, Jessica Rabbit’s lap-dance for Bob Hoskins, or Frodo and Sam’s interactions with Gollum and Smeagol simply pound the hammer over our heads more and make us continually marvel at how far animation has come. We now turn our attention to motion-capture animation, apes, and the deep breath before the plunge into the end of the world: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. 

Set ten years after James Franco created a super-smart ape named Caesar (Andy Serkis) as well as an accidental virus that has spread across the world and wiped out a large portion of the human race, Caesar and his colony of live peacefully in the woods until a group of humans show up with a plan to use the dam to power their city. As Caesar attempts peaceful negotiations with the humans about their presence in ape-homes, Koba (Toby Kebbell), still hateful of humans, distrusts their intentions and rallies together a group demanding that they fight. As tensions continue to mount within the colony, all that’s needed is a spark to ignite war. 

As filler movies go, Dawn works really well. A definite step up from the first movie, it not only draws out the suspense before the climax successfully, but also manages to achieve a lot of complex character development. Indeed the strongest component of this movie is the villain, Koba. We already know the whole ‘you maniacs, you blew it up’ ending and it was pretty clear from the first movie that humans, the stubborn and self-entitled species that we are screwed ourselves up, therefore, have no real status as heroes and villains anymore. Basically it’s, “sorry you had to find out this way, but you’re not that important.” 

So, with all that major drama and exposition covered in the first film, Dawn turns its attention to building the characters of the apes, namely the development of Caesar and Koba. Caesar’s leadership story is quite a recognisable one. The hard lessons that he learns, the hurdles that he must clear, and the walls that he must get through have all been seen before in everything from courtroom dramas to biopics about the Royal Family. This familiarity works on a dual level because it hammers home the film’s point of humans and apes being like each other. The fear of the Other is a strong narrative trope that works wonderfully in this type of story, and while the film is all about Caesar realising how alike the two species are, it’s nice that the audience are given their own illustration of that point. 

The development of Koba’s character is truly engaging. We’re given clichéd clues about his wickedness from his physical appearance and behaviour towards Jacobs in the first movie, but Dawn actually makes us retract a few of these primed judgements and prejudices. I cannot delve too deeply into this without giving away some spoilers, but I will say that Koba’s character arc is probably one of the realest that I’ve seen. He goes through loyalty, betrayal, and a constant struggle to see things how Caesar sees them and, in the end, there are more wars happening than the mere human vs. ape. 

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes rises above its predecessor namely because it now has the time and freedom to explore and develop its characters and it does it really well. No opportunity is wasted in this movie and it’s great to see a film that does that. 

Starring: Andy Serkis, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell, Jason Clarke, Toby Kebbell, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Kirk Acevedo, Nick Thurston, Terry Notary, Karin Konoval, and Judy Greer 

Year: 2014 

Rating: M

Alien: Covenant

It’s strange to think that the Xenomorph, one of the most fearsome and beautiful aliens in cinema, has been terrorising screens and churning guts for over three decades now. The success of Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi/horror hybrid spawned a complete saga of films as well as a crossover series with Predator. But as the saying goes, you can’t have too much of a good thing and inevitably what goes up must come down. Ok, I never actually saw Prometheus, but from what I have heard it was nothing to rave about and it seems that Scott is not going to take theses responses lying down. 

Alien: Covenant takes places years after the events of Prometheus with the ship, Covenant, travelling through space on a colonisation mission. When disaster happens, resulting in the loss of their captain, the crew are wakened from their hyper-sleep early and receive a strange transmission from an uncharted planet. Putting the mission on hold, Captain Oram (Billy Crudup) land on the planet and takes a team out to investigate, only to find that it’s not the paradise they initially thought. When two team members are infected and become incubators for Xenomporphs, all seems lost, but hope comes in the form of an android named David (Michael Fassbender) who happens upon the troupe and take them to his home. Unbeknownst to Oram and his team, the nightmare is only beginning, as David quickly turns out to be not as nice as he appears and has a horrifying ulterior motive for helping them. 

You can give an Alien movie any title you like and it’s still going to tell a story exactly like all its predecessors. The first problem with Alien: Covenant is that it’s highly predictable and even though the gore and jump scares do the trick of creating flinches and exclamations of ‘ew’, they feel like they’re just there for a quick and easy way to do that; the equivalent of adding cornflour to thicken a sauce. There’s not a lot of payoff with any of the violence or gore that happens and this creates a bit of a distance between the film and audience because the same-old-same-old events and tricks just don’t inspire investment. 

Story-wise, it feels as though this is a means in which Scott can justify Prometheus and these themes of humanity and superiority of species come into the mix, sadly just not really bringing any value to it. 

There are quite a few characters and none of them get any real development, they’re all sort of boring and generic and whilst the performances are all fine, no attachments of any kind are established between us and them. 

And honestly, I did not really get the point of the whole Fassbender-on-Fassbender thing: was it exploring themes of narcissism and self-hate or did Michael just say to Scott, “so I really liked playing dual roles in Assassins Creed, think we can work that in here?” 

Admittedly, at the end of the day Alien: Covenant gets the squirms, the in-seat flinches, and the exclamations of “don’t do it!”, but this can be chalked up to its use of genre tricks that always work and therefore are employed a little lazily. The story itself is predictable, the violence and gore is there for violence and gore sake and the characters are nothing o write home about. It’s not the worst movie in the world, but I wouldn’t waste a full-priced ticket on it. 

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterson, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demian Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez, Amy Seimetz, Nathaniel Dean, Alexander England, Benjamin Rigby, Uli Latukefu, Tess Haubrich, and Lorelei King 

Rating: MA 

Year: 2017