Interstellar

So far as I can tell, the best vindication for Christopher Nolan's method in Interstellar is its black hole. Like so much of this director's work, black holes are spectacularly dense but ultimately empty, and yet the fallen star of this film casts a warm afterglow. That most lethal of all world-killers—an appetite incarnate that eats global warming for breakfast and Creation for doomsday brunch—is presented not as the jaws of nonexistence but rather a swirl of molten glass. It isn't an impediment or the object of dread; it's closer to being a miracle. Like so much that comes out of Hollywood, this image seemed too beautiful to be true. But, by feeding 800 terabytes worth of astrophysical research into special-effects software, the filmmakers have created the most scientifically accurate model of a black hole ever visualized. The artist's instinct is to find truth in beauty; Nolan has found beauty in data.

Interstellar wants to ascend to the heavens, but it's pulled down by the blue ribbons that Nolan has tied to every last meteoroid. Maybe ten minutes have passed before Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is told by his father (John Lithgow) that this world was never enough for him. Those lousy bureaucrats who don't believe in dreams have reduced this erstwhile engineer, test pilot, and all-around gentleman and scholar to subsistence farming. In the midst of something-or-other that somehow relates to climate change, our intrepid hero's old employer, NASA, has been defunded. Instead of trying to stanch this cataclysmic dustbowl, the powers-at-be are sticking every able body with a pitchfork, and rewriting textbooks to remind kids that the moon landings were faked. Strangely enough, for what appears to be a rapidly collapsing, quasi-totalitarian state, the military has also been abolished. The plow is mightier than the sword—until it comes time to take out the riot gear. 
 

The Giver

It takes imagination to make interesting its lack. Considering the ring of meh around Phillip Noyce's film The Giver, I was surprised to see how faithful it was to Lois Lowry's Newbery Medal-winning book. Its faith only breaks on commercial commonplaces—on Y-A clichés that have either blinkered the imagination of filmmakers or conked the source material into an ironic bow. Or maybe a little of both. Published in 1993, the novel predates the current Y-A boom, but is coolly prescient about which marks to hit. It is set in a Huxleyan dystopia: a Bored New World wherein conformity is the opiate of the masses—of everyone, really. Like Harry Potter, the adolescent hero, Jonas, is more special than he thinks; he is, in fact, more special than everybody else. And what makes him special is that he has been selected for an honor that all adolescents in our world are forced to endure: *feelings*.

Jonas's society is literally sterile; starting at the cusp of puberty, its citizens take pills to banish the "stirrings." Absent that impulse, and the concomitant commitment of love—a word that has fallen out of general use—family life is blunted into a polite form of social husbandry. Giving birth is a dispassionate occupation that, like all occupations, is assigned to one by the Council of Elders when one is 12 years old. When the story begins, Jonas is at the tail end of his 11th year. One of his friends gets assigned to the birthing center, where Jonas's father works. Other peers are dispatched to the Hall of Justice, the workplace of his mother. Jonas, however, is appointed to the hieratic position of Receiver of Memory, in whom all experience of past sensation, passion, nuance, and even color, is kept—all that was purged generations ago when the community retreated into insensate, choiceless sameness. The current officeholder is a trenchant, prematurely wizened man called The Giver; he transfers the memories of snow and war and sunburn and love to Jonas, who comes to understand that the tranquility of his parents and peers—who will, by design, never understand what he is going through—is a lie. This is a lesson that any teenage reader who's high on hormones and low on perspective could appreciate, and a lesson that those who mean to court that demographic have shrewdly learned.

Snowpiercer

A train that chugs around the world with nowhere to go is an astute metaphor for Snowpiercer. In Bong Joon-ho's fever dream of the near future, a countermeasure against global warming has made Siberia blanket the earth; the remnants of humanity, crammed into several dozen cars on a self-sustaining train, makes a yearly circuit around the globe. The train, which is called the Snowpiercer, was the brainchild of a crackpot billionaire named Wilford. It isn't clear whether he had intended it to be a Noah's ark all along or whether its construction just happened to coincide with the apocalypse, but the result is a case study in apartheid: the haves live near the engine and the have-nots bring up the rear. But what was it that the haves had? Were the groups segregated on a first-come-first-serve basis? Skin color isn't a factor. Save for the imperious Wilford—who has claimed the engine as his throne room—an individual's on-board status doesn't appear to correlate with his former income level or earthly station: the first-class manifest includes Tilda Swinton as a yokel with an oik accent and false teeth, and a onetime violinist for the Boston Symphony is mixed in with the rabble. Money wouldn't have much currency at the end of the world, but the hedonistic first-class passengers don't seem to have paid their way in practical skills. If the film's sympathies with Occupy Wall Street are to be taken seriously, this isn't a small bone to pick; the invocation of the One Percent seems the result of fuzzy math, as those languishing in steerage appear to be the minority. Even Marx wouldn't have given the plot-launching insurrection by the lower orders his imprimatur: with one grotesque exception, the train doesn't run on the back of labor. Just about every review of this movie cautions you to take its political allegory with a grain of salt. I would suggest a quarry.  

At the risk of sounding obvious, Boon has a vision, but it is strictly visual. Along with his co-writer Kelly Masterson—with whom he has adapted a French graphic novel—the director has some intriguing ideas that, in the conservative world of the entertainment industry, might pass for edgy; but he has little talent for integrating them. All of the foreshadowing, which imbues the whimsical design with an oracular tone, just ends up making the movie bottom-heavy; revelations sputter out like mad ravings, but, as in Oldboy, the absurdity and paranoia are justified by an overblown Christopher Nolan-like windup. Chris Evans, who is impressive as the rebel leader, gives a wallop of a monologue toward the end that might have been more effective earlier, when it would have clarified the goings on and given substance to the rebel cause. Bong and Masterson pick off big names and major characters with the ease of George R. R. Martin, but not the facility; some of the goners hadn't enough opportunities to earn much grief for their loss, so the effect is just a jab at convention. Still, there are moments in which Boon proves himself as a top-notch visual storyteller. He takes advantage of the narrow-gauge width of these characters' world; the whole movie has the effect of being shot with a fish-eye lens, but without the peripheral distortion. You have to take a cold shower to shrug it off. At one point, Evans and his sidekick Jamie Bell lie in two separate bunks but look squished like sardines. There's an expressively distended sequence which sums up Evans's choice between The Cause and its collateral in a simple but wrenching way—and it's parodied moments later by Swinton. There are also excellently staged action-movie flourishes, like a witty shootout when the Snowpiercer is rounding a bend or a hide-and-seek sequence in a car full of saunas that may as well be trees in a wood. But these are effective set pieces, nothing more. Moments like Evans's flicker of decision have a human gravity that Boon clearly wants to express, but he fails to inform his more idiosyncratic elements with pathos. The intended effect is 12 Monkeys, but the result is a cockeyed spoof like The Fifth Element.

Ida

Humanity is meted out in Ida, as if hope and happiness were going out of stock. Shot in standard—four-by-thee—ratio, and black-and-white, Paweł Pawlikowski's film resembles the behind-the-wall hits of the era in which it is set, such as Miloš Forman's Czech tragicomedy Loves of a Blonde (1965). But a style which once implied alacrity is, in Ida, painstakingly composed, with subjects trapped by staircases and power lines, stark contrasts and infinite sky, snow blowing nowhere. The muted expressions, which glaze the women's faces and have few rest stops on the road from numbness to suffering, are circumscribed by the limits of one character's experiences and the other's expectations. It's like Melancholia externalized: an everyday, institutional apocalypse. 

 

Ida makes one feel cloistered; it begins, fittingly, at an abbey, where Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is on the verge of taking her vows. Before this happens, the novitiate is instructed to visit with her only living relative, an aunt named Wanda (Agata Kulesza), who she has never met. (Anna had been deposited at the convent as a baby.) Wanda, whose apartment is luxurious by Lodz standards, goes through cigarettes and assignations on an assembly line, and greases the gears with booze; she has the worn, black pout of Jeanne Moreau. When she informs Anna that she's a "Jewish nun," the revelation is loaded like a black joke or insult. To Anna, it's a non sequitur. Shown no more hospitality than a photograph of her dead mother, and neither expecting nor feeling entitled to more, she is back at the bus station that afternoon—until Wanda relents. They embark for the provinces to find where Anna's parents were buried during the Nazi occupation. 

Edge of Tomorrow

It’s a testament to something that Doug Liman has used footage from the 24-hour-news cycle as a prologue to his last two films: Fair Game (2010), the story of the Bush regime’s persecution of Iraq War dissenter Valerie Plame, and the new Edge of Tomorrow, which is about an alien invasion that throws Tom Cruise for a time loop. With a face that could set the white balance, Cruise’s talking head looks perfectly natural floating above the word “expert” in the CNN chyron. The primped uniform on his person belongs to Major William Cage, who is shilling victory to the viewing public in the form of suits of armor that turn soldiers into inverted Terminators: buggy exoskeletons with soft human innards. Forgive me if I’m being glib, but when Cage transitions—by virtue of a janky, somewhat implausible device—from his on-camera cable sinecure to conscription into active duty and combat and thence into the movie’s stripped-for-action Groundhog Day scenario, it’s like he’s going from one pernicious loop to another.

Whether I’m being glib or not, Edge of Tomorrow has been graced with an intelligence that makes such readings more than idle or perverse. Source Code teased the military-industrial complex into the time-warp formula; but never, to my reckoning, has it been allied with the notion of “endless war,” or the trench-war futility of World War I, which the writers (Christopher McQuarrie and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, from a graphic novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka) overtly cite. Their intelligence finds a rare partner in optimism—a disposition that has become largely, perhaps systematically, outmoded in the summer-blockbuster form—and which possibly accounts for the blammo cyberpunk D-Day reenactment. In a way, the film is a superhero origin story on themes from Malcolm Gladwell: a spray of gunk spurs Cage’s change from weasel to warrior, but it’s the 10,000 hours of boot camp he gets from Rita (Emily Blunt) that makes him an authentic hero. 

Rita is the Morpheus to Cage's Neo, but has to be reminded of this each time he resets the game clock. Rita used to have Cage’s power to relive the previous day every time she died in battle; the aliens have used time travel as their secret weapon all along, but inadvertently surrender their control over it whenever they bleed on an opponent. With each resurrection, Rita learned from her mistakes; this led to her winning the home team’s only victory, as well as the monikers “Angel of Verdun” and “Full-Metal Bitch.” But once she lost the power, which is undone by transfusions of measly old human blood, the ball was back in the aliens' court. Blunt gives Rita substance; she challenges Cruise, and the pathos might have been overwhelming had Cage not been shaped to his persona, and made to give off the vibe of a marketing guru who lives to give TED talks. Cage is at a perpetual disadvantage because Rita’s default is to be dismissive of him, and he’s a stranger after every reboot. Damaged by her own failures, she’s too focused on the mission to notice, as we do, how weary he is of watching her die.

Upstream Color

Shane Carruth's Upstream Color, which is deliberately muffled and dislocated, is almost promiscuously allusive. When it decides, on a whim, to be in the "normal" world, it's jarring because one becomes accustomed to the dislocation; there are very few moments when someone's lips are mouthing the dialogue we hear, and what we hear is indistinct. At one point, when the heroine is bobbing up and down in a pool, murmuring at intervals, the hero asks her what she's saying. It seems almost an inside joke--and then we realize she's reciting Walden, which her captor (who hypnotized her with worms harvested from orchids) was leafing through early on. Her captor says he cannot be looked at because he's made of the same material as the sun. This movie can't be looked at head-on, or else its own spell is broken. But its aural-visual-rhythmic flow has its magic.

After her captor (called the "Thief") extorts money from her--which seems a peculiarly earthbound motive--and leaves her alone with a pinhead, infantilized mind and worms coursing through her body, the heroine instinctively treks into the wilderness where a balding man--the "Sampler"--saves her, possibly by transplanting flesh from a living pig. The pig, tagged with her name, is released to a farm; the Sampler is a pig farmer, surgeon, and sound man. He seems to care for his livestock, but is impatient when they act out; a few end up in a sack in the river, where they secrete the blue color of the wormy orchids. The Sampler also peers invisibly over the shoulder of random people--presumably they've been tagged, too--and mixes sounds such as those of streams running or stones sliding down drainage tunnels. The pigs are clearly doubles of the people, who can hear the sounds he records--he has his own label--at home, and are drawn to him like baseball players to the Field of Dreams. There's other doubling: The Sampler throws the sheet music that, one assumes, he cannot replicate with his nature recordings into the water, and the hero does the same with office paperwork at the hotel he works at, for reasons unknown. When the couple puts the Sampler out of his misery, and take ownership of the pig farm--mailing out copies of Walden to their fellow survivors--they are clearly taking back their own lives, and going back to nature. It's fascinating to read the Sampler as a sort of non-omnipotent God, a benign caretaker who observes his flock rather helplessly. The cycle is broken; those larval worms (the first stage of life) can no longer be harvested by older-looking versions of kids we saw in the beginning with the Thief, popping the worms like drugs.

When the people talk about their personal lives, it's like watching a movie within a movie. Carruth shows some talent for a more domestic piece about two survivors of trauma finding each other and finding love when the hero hides the heroine's prescription bottles with a menu at a cafe. But the film isn't tethered to their "story," which is about as grounded as a series of flashbacks would be: the B story to another movie's A story. But this gives Upstream Color a dreamy texture. What doesn't is the Malicky running of hands across surfaces, a celebration of the sensory which has no more meaning than the impulse a child has to touch all the artwork at a museum. And there's (probably a lot) that doesn't add up, such as why the hero and heroine's childhood memories are intertwined. But I'm glad there's mystery; it balances out the obviousness in the homages to Walden, which themselves give a contemporary meaning and narrative propulsion not normally found in films this abstract. It's about finding one's baseline in nature and love.