13 FOR HALLOWEEN #13: The Cabin in the Woods

I’m not sure what the strangest element of ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ is: its fusion of two aesthetically different narratives, its batshit crazy last quarter of an hour, the sight of Chris Hemsworth – at pretty much the same point in his career that he beefed up like a motherfucker for ‘Thor’, ‘The Avengers’ and ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ – playing an expendable college jock, or the fact that a script by Joss Whedon, to whom the uber-budgeted ‘Avengers’ had just been trusted, was happily handed over to a novice director. 

To Drew Goddard’s credit, though, he turns in a proficient piece of work. True, there’s nothing going on here that’s particularly groundbreaking from a directorial point of view, but there doesn’t have to be. The pleasures of ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ lie in the audience’s familiarity with genre tropes.

The film kicks off with a cryptic bit of narrative between Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford), employees of an unidentified corporation which seems to operate like any other twenty-first century corporation with all of the office politics, casual cynicism, douchebag colleagues, inter-departmental rivalry and general all-round wankerish behaviour that said workplace environment suggests. It soon becomes clear, though, that Sitterson and Hadley’s behaviour – running a book on the outcome of their commission, drinking at work, using the IT system for frankly voyeuristic purposes – masks a desperation that is only contextualised when the nature of the business and the identity of the client is revealed.

Whedon and Goddard’s script is a masterpiece of lacunae: they know exactly how much detail to reveal vis-à-vis Sitterson and Hadley’s responsibilities, and in doing so sketch them in as fully formed characters rather than shadowy eminences grises. The script’s courtesies also extend to the five teenagers who head off for a weekend at the titular retreat in the film’s main narrative strand. The quintet comprises athletic hunky type Curt (Hemsworth) and his flirtatious airhead girlfriend Jules (Anna Hutchison), studious nice guy Holden (Jesse Williams), sensible girl next door type Dana (Kristen Connolly) and comic relief stoner Marty (Fran Kranz). And, yes, they all conform to those very same stereotypes. But the screenplay and a cluster of likeable performances gel to raise them above mere cliché.

Having said that, cliché is important to ‘The Cabin in the Woods’. Cliché is the fuel that kicks its plot mechanics into overdrive. And this is where I’m swiftly going to curtail the review, because the film works best if you’ve absolutely no idea where it’s headed. The interplay between the two narrative strands suggests a satire on reality TV à la Marc Evans’s ‘My Little Eye’, but Whedon and Goddard play their hand quite spectacularly and to entirely different effect during the last reel.

The cast embrace the material exuberantly, Hemsworth and Williams keeping it deadpan, Kranz having a hell of a lot of fun as the pothead whose recreational habit ends up being a plot device in and of itself, Jenkins and Whitford playing off each in fine style, and Connolly proving an immensely resilient and likeable final girl. The effects work is good, all lo-fi ‘Evil Dead’ style makeup in the first half, followed by an extravaganza of fan boy homages towards the end. The very last shot is a punchline too far, but by this point there’s no real mileage in carping. By this point, twists and turns and piss-takes (the J-horror send-up is a joy to behold) and a ‘Paul’-style last minute celebrity cameo have given ‘The Cabin in the Woods’ everything it needs to prove itself as the ideal beer-and-pizza movie for the post-modern smartarse generation. Plus, as Mrs F advocates, the Hemsworth is mighty fine.

This is The Agitation of the Mind’s fifth annual 13 For Halloween signing off on a note of unapologetic homoeroticism. Happy Halloween, folks. 

Marvel: the story so far

I started writing this as a few introductory paragraphs to a review of ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ but in typical Fulwood stylee it got all verbose and out of hand and became an article in and of itself. So you can either completely ignore it and check back in the next day or two for the ‘Cap’ review proper, or wade through my complete opinionated thoughts on the Marvel Cinematic Universe (a phrase that made me a little bit sick in my mouth when I typed it) and fill up the comments thread with all manner of outrage and correctiveness. Up to you.

Over the last six years, my interest in the MCU, if plotted on graph paper, would look like a polygraph test taken by an intermittent liar. Jon Favreau’s ‘Iron Man’ was first out of the traps and set the bar high: gripping origin story, iconic action set-pieces and a back-from-the-dead (or at least from rehab) turn by Robert Downey Jnr. Its rip-roaring success meant Marvel Studios got to play with the big boys right from the off.

Louis Leterrier’s ‘Hulk’ avoided the bouncy graphics and navel-gazing of Ang Lee’s take on the character, and was a bloody good chase movie up until the last twenty minutes when two screensavers basically twatted each other for what seemed longer than your average Bela Tarr flick. It wobbled at the box office, taking $263million against its £150million budget whereas ‘Iron Man’ netted £585million from a similar budget. It was two years until the next Marvel outing and the studio decided to play it safe with ‘Iron Man 2’ and Favreau back in the director’s chair.

This was where my interest started to dip: even the presence of Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell couldn’t disguise a meandering screenplay; it also made the cardinal mistake of giving us a vulnerable and insecure Tony Stark when all we really want to see is Tony Stark partying with dancing girls, driving a fuck-off cool Audi and throwing out smart-arse comments left, right and centre. Still, it rang the box office tills and it introduced Scarlett Johansson at Natasha “Black Widow” Romanoff.

Then came ‘Thor’ and, here at chez Agitation, the jury’s still out on the ‘Thor’ movies. While Shakespeare wallah Kenneth Branagh was a good choice for helmer in respect of the mythological aspects of the story, he’s no-one’s idea of an action movie or summer tentpole director. On the plus side, Chris Hemsworth made something out of what could have been a very silly characterisation, and was ably served by a stellar supporting cast: who else could have played Thor Snr but Anthony Hopkins? who can deliver sarcastic line readings anywhere near as cuttingly as Kat Dennings? Best of all, though, it gave us Tom Hiddleston as Loki and Tom Hiddleston is the single best thing in the whole of the MC-motherloving-U.

‘Captain America: The First Avenger’ was the one I went into with the most trepidation. Let’s face it, “Cap” is the easiest character to screw up. He doesn’t have the girls, gadgets and glib one-liners of Tony Stark, the destructive creature-from-the-id unpredictability of Bruce Banner, or the commanding intensity and fucking big hammer of Thor. What Steve Rogers has is true-blue patriotism and a rigorous sense of right and wrong. He could easily have been boring. His origin story – a period piece, with him battling Third Reich splinter group Hydra against the backdrop of World War II – doesn’t key into the contemporary America that even Thor traverses.

My doubts, however, were groundless: with Joe Johnston calling the shots and bringing his ‘Rocketeer’ playbook to the table; with Chris Evans striking just the right note in his characterisation; with Hayley Atwell giving even Johansson a run for her money as a kick-ass, sexy and appealing heroine; with Hugo Weaving channelling Werner Herzog to create the best Marvel baddie this side of Loki; with a cluster of terrific action scenes that were coherently shot and edited; and with characterisation and period recreation at the heart of the entire production, it fired me up for Marvel all over again. It romped into first place as my absolute favourite of the Mike Charlie Uniform.

So, with all the origin stories told, and with what Marvel have rather self-importantly referred to as “phase one” drawing to its conclusion, all that remained was to unite them. Responsibility for ‘The Avengers’ (or ‘Avengers Assemble’ as it was retitled for the UK market, to avoid comparison with a certain Ralph Fiennes/Uma Thurman turkey) was handed to Joss Whedon and fair dues to the man, he stepped up to bat. Consider for a moment the poisoned chalice that an ‘Avengers’ movie was at that time: a script that had to give enough time to four very different characters and very different actors; a threat that had to be significant enough to require all four protagonists; a new actor to embed (Mark Ruffalo, taking over from Ed Norton in the role of Bruce Banner). The potential for fuck-up-ery was off the scale. Whedon negotiated the pitfalls with aplomb. And while ‘The Avengers’ isn’t quite in the first rank (a saggy mid-section; the already clichéd uber-villain-allows-himself-to-be-captured-in-order-to-facilitate-next-stage-of-cunning-plan plot device) it’s still arguably the best that could have been done given the material and the movie-going public’s expectations.

Shane Black’s ‘Iron Man 3’ repeated the ‘Iron Man 2’ cock-up: it chipped away at everything that makes Tony Stark the risible yet loveable arrogant twat he is. To the point at which it seems more like a surreal sequel to the earlier Black/Downey Jnr outing ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ than an actual Marvel film. I can only speculate that Black threw in a dockyard shoot-out in which Stark doesn’t don the suit but a dozen other (empty) Iron Man suits going flying around and blowing things up in order to placate the Marvel Studios suits and ensure he wasn’t given his little pink slip while a PR type dug around for Jon Favreau’s phone number.

I still don’t know what to say about Alan Taylor’s ‘Thor: The Dark World’ or – as I’m convinced that original draft of the script was titled – ‘Carry On Up Your Asgard’ except that Tom Hiddleston was in it and Kat Dennings still does sarcasm better than anyone. Yes, it was entertaining in a five-pints-and-a-kebab kind of way; yes, Rene Russo had one hell of an exit scene; yes, it prompted a couple of hollow laughs. But seriously, what the fuck was that big fight scene all about? Antagonists dropping through time and space, occasionally smacking each other a few times before disappearing into another dimension … it was like ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ as if Paul Verhoeven had directed following a week-long drug binge fuelled by back-to-back episodes of ‘Red Dwarf’. Only not as funny.

Somewhere around ‘Thor: The Dark World’ swinging its hammer at box office tills the world over, Whedon took Marvel to the small screen with ‘Agents of SHIELD’. Although Whedon has done some fine work for TV, very little of it has demonstrated the longevity of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’. Moreover, Whedon’s internal quality control is iffy at best, and for everything that’s as downright well-written as ‘Firefly’ there’s plenty of material that’s messy, self-indulgent and riddled with pop-culture references. I’ll just say that I gave up on ‘Agents of SHIELD’ after two episodes and leave it at that.

Now we’re at ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’, the middle instalment in Marvel’s “phase two”, after which an entirely new slew of characters will be introduced in ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ – including, apparently, a racoon with a predilection for heavy-duty weaponry – before The Avengers reassemble for ‘Age of Ultron’ with Whedon back at the helm. Moving forward to “phase three”, two films are in pre-production: ‘Ant-Man’ and ‘Captain America 3’. The former piques my curiosity for no other reason than Edgar Wright’s involvement; and the latter, featuring the same creative team as ‘Winter Soldier’, is something I’m really hoping makes it three for three.

Avengers Assemble

‘Iron Man’ started it all, coming out of nowhere with the unlikeliest choice for director, and – whaddaya know? – it was pretty damned good. ‘The Incredible Hulk’ delivered a strong first half before degenerating into silliness and tedium with an arse-numblingly interminable denouement which basically featured two screensavers repeatedly twatting each other. ‘Iron Man 2’ wasn’t all it could have been, but featured a couple of stand-out set-pieces and a rollicking performance from Mickey Rourke. ‘Thor’ was hit-and-miss and proved (if ‘Frankenstein’ hadn’t already tipped us off) that Kenneth Branagh is best restricted to quirky low-budget character-driven movies and not mainstream blockbusters.

Then came ‘Captain America’ and – whaddaya know part two? – it was clear that Marvel Studios had got their game on again.

Now we have ‘Avengers Assemble’ (a last-minute retitling lest anyone confuse it with Jeremiah Chechik’s 1998 über-flop) and I took my seat with some trepidation. I had two big worries: there would be too many protagonists for whom screen-time would have to be found; and they’d have to face a threat so overwhelming that things could easily get OTT. And, to a greater or lesser degree, both those concerns remain inherent in the final product. But, with so much expectation – and so much riding on it in terms of future franchise instalments – I have to give writer/director Joss Whedon credit for just going for it with such balls-to-the-wall bravado. The man could easily have found himself in possession of a poisoned chalice. As it is, he serves up a generous measure of something that, even if it isn’t the finest or headiest wine, certainly goes down nicely while you’re partaking of it and never mind that it’s a tad forgettable afterwards.

So what’s it all about? Remember Thor (Chris Hemsworth)’s treacherous half-brother Loki (Tom Hiddlestone) in ‘Thor’? Remember the Tesseract, that blue glowing thing that looks like the bastard offspring of a drunken fumble between a Rubik’s cube and a lava lamp, from ‘Thor’ and ‘Captain America’? Well, Loki steals it from SHIELD – royally pissing off head honcho Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson, finally getting to have some fun with the character after all those cameos) – with the intention of using it to open a portal so that his new best buds, an alien race who want to destroy earth for pretty much the same reason that some people climb Everest (because it’s there), can bring a fuckton of high tech weaponry to the party and start some shit.

The Tesseract theft makes for a scene-setting pre-credits sequence, after which Whedon gets straight down to business which a “rounding up the team” sequence. Here, his opening shot is the best with Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson, looking hot and kicking ass with the best of ’em), in a perilous situation which she effortlessly turns to her advantage. In short order, we’re then re-introduced to Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, taking over from Edward Norton and doing a sterling job – he really communicates a sense of Banner’s battered but still noble humanity), Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jnr, on cruise control for most of the movie) and Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America (Chris Evans, recapturing the pitch-perfect tone of his erstwhile performance). Mismatched and conflicting in terms of their characters, they go after Loki. Then Thor – who has unfinished Loki-based business of his own – comes crashing into the plot and things go haywire.

Whedon has huge fun throwing his antagonistic protagonists together and turning up the heat under the slanging matches and in-fighting. Loki, a grinning nemesis given to Bond villain style speechifying and grotesque flights of egomania, plays them like a piano concerto, even when ostensibly in captivity. Entering its middle act, the film flags a little with the tit-for-tat my-super-power’s-better-than-your-super-power bickering becoming laboured and repetitive. Then Loki’s cohorts bring the fight directly to Fury’s command centre, while his alien backers get tired of waiting and the invasion of earth grows immient. At this point, Whedon changes horses in mid-stream and the in-jokey, fan-boy-friendly storyline segues into a symphony of destruction akin to Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay having a “who can blow up more buildings, trash more cars and conjure more orgasmic explosions” contest in the streets of Manhattan.

It’s not the only stylistic gear-shift Whedon effects. Inspired bits of comedic nonsense (how Loki is finally overpowered is so unapologetically juvenile that it had that audience I saw the film with in hysterics) awkwardly rub shoulders with po-faced serious moments that don’t really have any business in this kind of movie, while Whedon goes for one tub-thumping bit of patriotism too much, particularly in a montage towards the end which evokes (and cheapens) memories of 9/11.

As I said earlier, it’s enjoyable but forgettable. An hour and a half after I got home from the cinema, and I’m struggling to recall certain details. I’m screwed if I can remember what the alien race was called. It sounded like the Chihuahuas. And while we’re on the subject, the scenes on the alien planet are just plain dreadful.

So: better than ‘Iron Man 2’ and ‘Thor’ on points, not as good as the first half of ‘The Incredible Hulk’ but much better than its second half, straggling behind the original ‘Iron Man’ and nowhere near as good as ‘Captain America’. Not an unmitigated disaster, and perhaps as good as it was ever going to be, but with ‘Iron Man 3’ and ‘Captain America 2’ slated for next year and the year after, I’d say the Marvel franchise is a safer bet as individual projects rather than ensemble movies.

VIVA LA REVOLUTION! Day 1: Reasons to rebel

Viva la Revolution! The Agitation of the Mind joins forces with The Film Connoisseur for three days of revolution on film.



What makes a revolutionary? What causes someone to rebel against the accepted (or enforced) order of things? Where exactly is the dividing line between the freedom fighter and the terrorist? How easy is it to cross the line? These questions occupy a middle ground between idealism and activism; between the realization that a government/system/establishment is oppressive and the reality of risking one’s life/taking up arms to do something about it. These are powerful and morally difficult questions. It’s no surprise, then, that filmmakers have responded to the dramatic potential of the revolutionary figure.

Over these next three days, I’m joining forces with Francisco at The Film Connoisseur to present a celebration of revolution on film. Francisco will be exploring the cinematic representation of real-life revolutionaries, including an in-depth appraisal of Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che Guevara biopic. He’ll also be looking at films which celebrate the revolutionary achieving their political or social aims and instigating change.

Here on The Agitation of the Mind, I’ll be kicking things off today by considering what makes a rebel or a revolutionary. Tomorrow, I’ll be posting an article on depictions of revolutionary activity in my home country, with specific reference to movie adaptations of two of George Orwell’s most famous novels. On Wednesday, as a counterpoint to Francisco’s piece on successful revolutionaries, Agitation will sound a requiem for those who died for or because of their beliefs.

But let’s start by asking: what do we mean by “rebel” or “revolutionary”?

Personally, I don’t think anyone’s ever bettered Albert Camus’s eight-word definition: “A rebel is a man who says ‘no’.”

There’s a sliding scale to saying ‘no’. We’ve all probably done it at some point in our life. Ever sat through an appraisal at work that you’ve considered unjustly critical or had a complaint made against you by a colleague that was bullshit and as a result you’ve stood up against your line manager and spoken your mind and refused to take the crap that’s being dished out at you? You have? Congratulations: you’re a rebel. Now imagine that your firm is the government or your line manager is a corrupt despot. Imagine that instead of arguing the toss in a meeting room you’re carrying a gun and hiding in the forests or the mountains. Imagine that instead of possibly losing your job you could possibly lose your life.

Like I say: it’s a sliding scale. The point is, you don’t have to be political, idealistic or reactionary in your mindset. The average joe can become a revolutionary. It just takes a convergence of circumstances. Something that tests your mettle or opens your eyes to the truth. In John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’, transient labourer George Nada (Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of sunglasses which filter out the sheen of “normality” behind which the truth of the world is revealed: everything is propaganda. Behind the images on advertising hoardings, behind the columns of print in newspapers, behind the glossy photos in magazines there are orders: OBEY, MARRY AND REPRODUCE, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT; the design on banknotes hides the reminder: MONEY IS YOUR GOD.

Although pitched, particularly in its second half, on a borderline comedic level, ‘They Live’ is as acerbic, bitter and righteously angry as, say, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ or ‘Network’ (considered tomorrow and Wednesday respectively) in its depiction of a controlling oligarchy who deliberately subjugate and mislead the masses. Nada fights back as bluntly and unsubtly as one would expect of a working class hero, and the majority of his struggle is to open other people’s eyes. The scene where he gets into a five-minute punch-up with a friend who’s chary of donning the glasses is an hilariously satirical metaphor for the lengths to which some people will go for a quiet life – people who don’t want to see the truth and are more comfortable to accept things as they are.

John Carpenter’s work is full of rebellious characters who have no respect for authority and are willing to go the distance if provoked or disenfranchised. Arguably the most iconic of these characters is ‘Snake’ Plissken (Kurt Russell) in ‘Escape from New York’ and ‘Escape from L.A.’ The first film posits a dystopian future where the island of Manhattan has been turned into an open prison, walled off, the bridges leading to the mainland mined and escape attempts across the water quickly terminated by helicopter patrols. The prison, which contains only criminals, has developed its own form of society where the strongest, personified by The Duke (Isaac Hayes), rule and those with special abilities (such as Harry Dean Stanton’s Brain, who has refined the fuel that allows The Duke to run his ramshackle kingdom) are protected as long as their fealty is paid.

Into this environment hurtles an escape pod jettisoned from Air Force One: the President (Donald Pleasance), evading the freedom fighters who have gained control of his plane, finds himself out of the frying pan and into the fire. The establishment responds by recruiting recently arrested career criminal Plissken and coercing him into undertaking a suicide mission. The injection of a slow-acting poison into his bloodstream with the promise of the antidote once he delivers the President from harm – and, more importantly, the diplomatic MacGuffin the President alone has a copy of – is all the persuasion he needs.

‘Escape from New York’ flips the middle finger to the system during every minute of its running time, with Carpenter’s biggest “screw you” reserved for the finale in which, having made good on his side of the deal, Plissken scuppers the President’s ploy for a peaceable solution to the foreign problems threatening his administration. America, it is suggested, is in for one motherfucker of a shit-storm thanks to Plissken’s reactionary stunt; but everything that Plissken has gone through up till that moment leaves you in no doubt that the powers that be had it coming.

The sequel, while inferior on many levels and badly let down by embarrassingly shoddy effects work, certainly ups the ante in terms of Plissken’s final act of rebellion. In a film that follows its predecessor’s narrative arc with the slavish fidelity of a join-the-dots puzzle, Plissken strolls off into the end credits having not just fucked up world peace but pretty much sounded the death knoll for the planet’s future. The message is stark and brutal: shut down; start again.

‘Escape from New York’ was, of course, made as the 70s gave out to the 80s, the door just beginning to close on an astounding decade in American cinema where a new breed of directors were kicking down the doors and questioning the system. German cinema, in the last decade, has been demonstrating a similar renaissance, certainly in terms of movies which shine a penetrating and unflinching light on the darker aspects of Germany’s recent social and political history. ‘Downfall’ was the watershed film in this movement: the first German production ever to depict Hitler. What made it more thorny was that it was even-handed in its approach.

Just as thorny – and for the same reason – was Uli Edel’s ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’, which packs an immense amount of politics, ideology and compromised morality into its two and a half hours. The film charts the history of the group from Ulrike Meinhof (Martine Gedeck)’s transition from crusading journalist to activist, through Meinhof, Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtrau) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek)’s eventual arrest and trial, to the actions of the second generation members. Here, the focus is on explicitly political motives for revolution, and the sometimes awkward but always compelling combination of Bernd Eichinger’s incisive script and Edel’s bludgeoningly unsubtle direction present a depiction of the bastardization of ideology and the crossing of the line from revolutionary to terrorist.

An artistic/intellectual awakening is the focus of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s ‘The Lives of Others’, in which Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a Stasi surveillance expert, is deployed by his weasly boss Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) – himself a tool of corpulent and eminently corrupt politican Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) – to stake out the home of playwright Georg Draymann (Sebastian Koch), who has come under suspicion because of his association with dissident artist Paul Hauser (Hans Euw-Bauer). The old saying “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” gets a two and a quarter hour exposition in von Donnersmarck’s astoundingly assured directorial debut. Essentially, the film is the story of two awakenings: that of Draymann, who is inspired by Hauser to write a potentially contentious article for publication in the west; and that of Wiesler, whose hitherto blind adherence to the party is challenged by the humanitarian values of the man he’s sent to spy on and a gradual realization of the venality of his superiors’ ulterior motives.

If ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ and ‘The Lives of Others’ represent a strand of cinema rooted in social realism and driven by the political failings of recent history, then themes of rebellion couched in sci-fi tropes recall the golden age of that genre when political protest, social disaffection and an exaggerated extrapolation of contemporary issues cast a shadow over filmmakers’ visions of the future. Examples are myriad both in cinema and literature: H.G. Wells contesting the arrogant complacency of the Victorian era in ‘War of the Worlds’ (a subtext utterly neglected by both Byron Haskins’ and Steven Spielberg’s big screen adaptations); George Orwell contemplating the dark side of the socialist ideal in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and ‘Animal Farm’ (of which more tomorrow); Evgeny Zamyatin contemplating a similar theme from within the system in ‘We’; Aldous Huxley pinpointing the production-line slavery of Henry T. Ford’s car manufacturing plants as the genesis of human slavery to the industrial impulse in ‘Brave New World’.

Science-fiction, at its best and most cerebral, has held up a mirror to contemporary issues and had the naked courage to accept that the future, whether postulated as utopian or dystopian, presents a worry prospect. A utopian society is depicted in the under-rated ‘Aeon Flux’. There is cleanliness, social order, and protection from an outside world, 99% of which has been destroyed by a viral pandemic. The ruling dynasty are “descended” from the scientist, Dr Goodchild, who developed a cure. And yet the Goodchilds have become a ruling class, their interests protected by a private army and their power built on a secret hidden for centuries. The eponymous Aeon (Charlize Theron) works for an underground movement, the Monicans, who are dedicated to challenging the status quo. The world of ‘Aeon Flux’ recalls that of ‘Logan’s Run’ (one of the films being considered by Francisco at The Film Connoisseur on Wednesday): aesthetically pleasing, peaceful and seemingly affluent, its citizens wanting for nothing … except personal freedom. And yet people disappear. The Goodchilds rule with an iron fist in a velvet glove. The populace are deceived as a matter of course.

The future of Joss Whedon’s ‘Serenity’ – his big-screen farewell to the unjustly cancelled TV series ‘Firefly’ – is in sharp contrast to ‘Aeon Flux’. This is definitely a dystopia. How so? Well, our ostensible hero Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillon) is the leader of a ragtag group of outlaws reduced to robbing payrolls after fighting on the losing side against the Alliance, a patriarchal government who control a ring of inner planets where the younger generation are effectively brainwashed and “operatives” take care of anyone who questions or threatens governmental supremacy. The further flung planets are the province of Reivers, a vicious criminal society who practice their own form of despotism. Mal and his crew become unlikely rebels when they give passage to a psychic, River (Summer Glau), who has questioned the Alliance. As with the Goodchilds’ empire in ‘Aeon Flux’, the Alliance has been founded on a criminal act and a supposedly “better” society is the product of lies, whitewash and propaganda.

Every genre of cinema has had its share of cinematic rebels – I haven’t even touched on, say, the Zappata westerns; and biopics of revolutionaries, successful or not, seems to be a cottage industry in and of itself – and the films I’ve mentioned in this article are but a random sampling. Some of these I’ve already reviewed on the blog; others deserve in-depth stand-alone pieces.

Tomorrow, I’ll be narrowing the remit to a more specific selection of movies: those which consider an English perspective on revolution. In the meantime, don’t forget to head over to The Film Connoisseur - today, Francisco presents an in-depth and socially grounded analysis of the films 'Romero' and 'Salvador'.