X-Men: Apocalypse

The accepted critical thinking on ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ is that:

1. It’s the same old “battle for Erik Lenscherr’s soul” story pace ‘First Class’ and ‘Days of Future Past’;

2. The Auschwitz bit is really tasteless;

3. The Quicksilver set piece is merely a reprise of the one in ‘Days of Future Past’;

4. Too many characters are thrust into one movie without development;

5. The finale is sprawling and incoherent.

Maybe I saw a totally different cut of the film, but I enjoyed the hell out of ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’. Granted, it might not have the sharp stylishness of ‘First Class’ (which I still regard as a Bond movie with mutants) or the timeline-jinking audacity of ‘Days of Future Past (which I still consider a horribly clunky title); nor is it as keyed into its period setting as those two. But it develops the themes of family, mistrust, politics and absolute power present in the preceding instalments; it brings Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) and Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) into the new timeline in fine style; and it turns its mutants vs. mutants storyline into a commentary on political manipulation, menticide and man’s inhumanity to man. In this respect, just as ‘Days of Future Past’ earned itself major kudos for obliterating the fuck-awful ‘Last Stand’ from the chronology, ‘Apocalypse’ assimilates everything ‘Last Stand’ tries to be and does the job properly.

Only the mainstream reviewers would have you think otherwise, so in lieu of the more traditional Agitation review, let’s have a look at that quintet of critical carping and subject each item to a validity test:

1. The Professor X (James McAvoy)/Magneto (Michael Fassbender) conflict is the dynamic upon which the franchise is founded. It’s like Bond/Blofeld or Batman/the Joker, and for my money the new X-Men timeline ups the ante on the conflict by grounding it not in the differences between Professor X and Magneto but the battered and compromised but still salvageable friendship between Charles and Erik. Throwing all of that away just to have Magneto as an all-purpose villain would be akin to flushing the crux of the franchise’s human drama down the shitter;

2. Yes it is, but this is the third film that explicitly references Auschwitz and (a) the sequence is shorter than in ‘X-Men’ or ‘First Class’; (b) nobody carped about using the Final Solution as a plot device in those two films; and (c) it’s where Magneto’s powers and his anger were forged so of course it’s where Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) would take Magneto to ensure his complicity;

3. Quicksilver (Evan Peters) having a big set piece where time seems to slow down as he casually moves people and objects across a spatially intense chess board is basically what Quicksilver fucking does and having him in the movie and not giving him that moment would be like having Blofeld in a Bond movie and not giving him a crack at world domination, or not letting Inspector Morse have a pint while he listens to some Wagner. Or not letting Inspector Regan clobber a suspect. Or not letting Scottie beam anybody up. You’d be missing the fucking point. Besides, the context, logistics and outcome of Quicksilver’s race against time are drastically different from ‘Days of Future Past’.

4. True to a degree, with Storm (Alexandra Shipp) locked into a narrative arc requiring a last reel volte face that never quite seems earned and Psylocke (Olivia Munn) given some visually iconic moments but criminally underused; but the same can be said of ‘Captain America: Civil War’ and again nobody seemed to complain about the overstuffed and – let’s be honest – unsuspenseful airport showdown.

5. No more so than any finale in any superhero movie ever. In fact, it didn’t seem to drag on anywhere near as long as the ‘Hulk’ finale (in which I zoned out as two screensavers threw ever larger objects at which other), the ‘Age of Ultron’ slugfest or the double denouement of ‘Batman vs Superman’. In fact, I’d say that ‘Apocalypse’ is the paciest of this year’s triptych of two-and-a-half hour comic book adaptations. (Assuming that neither ‘Suicide Squad’ or ‘Doctor Strange’ will be grasping for such epic running times.)

In addition to the above, factor in Jennifer Lawrence finally making Mystique her own, stepping out of the shadows of both Magneto in terms of the character and Rebecca Romjin-Stamos in terms of performance; Fassbender nailing a squirmily inevitable moment where Magneto, trying to live a normal life, is pushed back onto a vengeful and destructive path; a Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) cameo that gives us the character as a vessel of pure animalistic rage; CGI that serves the story rather than swamping it; and a genuinely chilling scene, scored to the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, where Apocalypse prompts a simultaneous launch into space of all nuclear missiles.

All things considered, it’s only the foul-mouthed and fourth-wall-breaking loveability of ‘Deadpool’ that’s stopping me from proclaiming this as the best superhero movie of the year. Sorry, Cap.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #10: Let Me In

Pretty much the only misstep Matt Reeves’s ‘Let Me In’ makes is the truncation of its title from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel – and Tomas Alfredson’s earlier film adaptation – ‘Let the Right One In’. “Let me in” is a blunt request or command. “Let the right one in” has about it more of a caution or a warning; it adds an extra layer of meaning to the book/film.

Lindqvist made an immediate name for himself with ‘Let the Right One In’, earning comparisons to Stephen King. And the book certainly has the narrative verve and economic characterisations that typify King’s best (i.e. least verbose) works. It’s also pulpy as all hell, and no-one’s idea of literary fiction no matter what some of the more fawning reviewers might have you think.

Alfredson’s Swedish language adaptation took a chilly, somewhat Cronenbergian approach to the material; a good aesthetic decision, but I found the direction a little too removed from the story being told; the performances slightly too well-considered. It lacked, for want of a better expression, the human element. Granted, the human element in a story about a bullied kid forming a tentative relationship with a centuries-old vampire trapped in the body of the 12-year-old girl whose requirement for blood necessitates a series of grisly murders carried out by her middle-aged paedophile companion is a relative concept; but nonetheless, the relationship between troubled child and vampire is at the centre of the narrative and without some degree of emotional engagement, the concept flounders.

Reeves (making a quantum leap as director from the hackneyed ‘Cloverfield’) trusts to the director’s two greatest allies: script (his own) and cast. The script keeps its real horrors (bullying, broken homes, social disenfranchisement) to the forefront while backgrounding the supernatural elements – quite literally backgrounding: virtually every scene of Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz) attacking someone for their blood or scaling is done in long-shot. Close-ups are reserved for the aftermath: the smears of blood on her face; the crazed look of an animal in her eyes. The script also strips away Lindqvist’s more heavy-handed moments, particularly the pile-up of narrative developments that make the second half of the book so top-heavy. It also sanitizes the relationship between Abby and Thomas (Richard Jenkins), almost conjuring him as a sympathetic character rather than abject failure of a human being crushed by self-hate that Lindqvist and Alfredson have him as.

And having mentioned Moretz and Jenkins in that last paragraph, let’s sing the praises of the cast. In a career that’s consisted of youthfulness juxtaposed with worldly-wise (or, in the case of ‘Kick-Ass’, wholly inappropriate) behaviour, Moretz was the obvious choice to play a character who is essentially Nosferatu shoehorned into Lolita’s prepubescent form. Her performance is understated and, at times, purposefully gauche; yet, when Reeves needs her to remind the audience exactly what Abby is capable of, she’s chilling. That scene in ‘Goodfellas’ where de Niro stands at the bar, eyes flicking from person to the next as he works out who he needs to silence? Moretz does a similar thing, but straight to camera. Jenkins is basically faultless: I’ve never seen a Richard Jenkins performance that’s less than pitch perfect. He’s simply one of the best actors around. Smit-McPhee, as the luckless Owen, a victim who’s only a couple of steps away from becoming an aggressor himself, is astounding. Your heart breaks for him in one scene, only for his burgeoning obsession with knives to worry the hell out of you moments later.

Three great central performances; three instinctive pieces of characterisation. And yet it’s Reeves as director I keep coming back to – a man whose CV prior to ‘Let Me In’ suggested, at best, a proficient hack – not only for his intuitively empathetic script and his facility with an exemplary cast, but his confidence in the pacing of the film, allowing the characters to emerge as products of their past or their environment, letting the drama and tension develop organically, letting the genre elements gradually bleed into an already tautly disturbing set-up.

‘Let Me In’ isn’t just a damn good vampire movie or horror movie; it’s a damn good work of cinema, period. As a remake, it’s peerless.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #4: ParaNorman

This one almost wasn’t on my radar. Or, at the very least, had been relegated to “add to rental queue” status. Peak time cinema tickets being so stupidly pricey that me and Mrs F going to see a film on the big screen is currently pricier than actually buying the damn thing on DVD a few months later or, if it’s in 3D, actually buying the damn thing on DVD and still having change for a bottle of wine, I don’t tend to go to the cinema much nowadays. It has to be something good. Something I really hopped up for. Something that’s an absolute must-see.

I’m still smarting over the money I spent on ‘Prometheus’, and all I can say is ‘Skyfall’ had better be a billion-fold improvement on ‘Quantum of Solace’.

But I digress. Last week, driving home from work, traffic was solid. Having spent half an hour getting nowhere fast, I doubled back and tried another route. Bad move. If anything, the gridlock was even worse. We inched slowly along the boulevard, a sign directing us to the access road to the Showcase multiplex. Mrs F suggested: “Wanna go to the cinema?” We parked up, hoofed in, and asked for a ticket for whatever was showing in the next ten minutes.

Hence: ‘ParaNorman’.

The plot, in brief, concerns Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), a young kid who’s bullied at school and despaired of by his parents on account of his ability to communicate with the dead, and the thankless duty, passed onto him by his eccentric uncle, of placating an angry spirit who threatens to return from the dead each year on the anniversary of her execution as a witch. A duty he’s unable to complete thanks to the ministrations of snivelling bully Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the ramifications of which are immediate: the dead rise from their graves and all hell breaks loose.

At an early stage in the proceedings, there’s an extended scene where Norman tries to wrest free a book gripped in the rigor mortis ridden hands of a corpse. Slapstick humour and tombstone humour combine in what is genuinely funny and icky in equal measure. And even as I was laughing, I was acutely aware that a bunch of kids – very small ones – were sitting a few rows behind me.

I thought of those kids (interestingly, they didn’t make much noise during the movie – and that includes laughing) during several John Carpenter references that niftily worked in. Went over their heads, I reckon. And I thought of them again towards the end of the film. Norman is faced with the spirit of the executed witch – she’s an eleven year-old girl. Just a kid, like Norman. A kid cursed with the ability to speak to the dead. Like Norman. And just as Norman is bullied, she was executed. Directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell depict the girl’s spirit as literally incandescent with rage. Norman’s attempts to ameliorate her anger make for a tense scene.

‘ParaNorman’ is essentially about the vulnerability of children and the stupidity of adults. Mob mentality and an inability to listen are the hallmarks of virtually all of the adult characters. There’s a telling scene in which the townsfolk set on a group of zombies – in a reversal of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and pretty much every other zombie film you can think of, it ends with the zombies barricaded inside a building and the living clamouring to get in. But these zombies are freighted with guilt and want to make amends rather than terrorizing the living. Again, ‘ParaNorman’ goes into deeper and more poignant territory than I was expecting.

Of course, there’s an honourable tradition of animated films ostensibly aimed at the kiddie market being better and more intelligent than most mainstream adult-centric fare. But ‘ParaNorman’ strikes me as being a little darker, a little more thought-provoking than the norm. It certainly has one of the most put-upon protagonists of any children’s film I’ve seen – poor old Norman gets the shit end of the stick right up until the end when his unwanted gift finally allows him to emerge as the hero of the day. That’s another tradition of animated kiddie fare: the happy ending. In ‘ParaNorman’ it’s hard-earned and all the more welcome as a result.