Frankenstein, The Bride, and Adaptations

I did not like the book of Frankenstein but I thoroughly enjoyed Guillermo del Toro's film. As for the Bride, I'll get to that.

The thing I want to examine first is how I could enjoy what is celebrated as the closest adaptation yet of a book I think is bunk.

More or less everything I dislike about the book is encapsulated in its narrator, the sea captain, a man who has no knowledge of navigation at sea, nor arctic exploration, nor the leadership of men. It is almost impressive how little effort Mary Shelley put into imagining him as a believable character, and the disdain she clearly holds for any practical skill whatsoever. Instead Shelley's sea captain has the only two virtues she seems to give a damn about: a poetic sense of romantic, and money.

The same sensibilities continue as Shelley comes to draw the young Victor, who to the despair of his father, and later his professors, has very little time for the humdrum realities of modern science, preferring instead the grander dreams of long debunked medieval alchemists. 

That this must echo Shelley's own opinions become obvious when she reaches the great crux of the novel, Victor giving life to his creation, about which she tells us, astonishingly, absolutely nothing. Does Victor ignite the vital spark with lightning as he does in the films? It seems unlikely, he is, after all, living in rented rooms in Ingolstadt not some lonely castle - the electricity is surely just an invention of filmmakers. No, Victor had his eureka moment while studying chemistry, which invites us to imagine he produced a formula of some kind? But is it solid, gas, or liquid? How much is required? Was it difficult to create? Does everything from the abattoir and graveyard need to be treated or is it sufficient to dose one part and let the affect spread? Should it be taken orally? Or intravenously? Or by suppository? Shelley tells us exactly bupkiss. For all we know Victor is reciting incantations from the Necronomicon.

Supposedly her husband was fascinated with galvanism and the occult, and she was writing at about the time that morphine was isolated, just a couple of decades after the discovery of nitrous oxide as an anesthetic and the invention of the smallpox vaccine, allusions to which might have lent colour to Victor's adventures. For someone who is sometimes supposed to have invented science fiction, there is no evidence in the actual text that science interested Mary Shelley one jot.

But enough ranting, why do I think the adaptation works.

Much of what is cut from the book is simple expediency. It would be surprising if any scriptwriter kept the weird pointless romantic subplot with the cottagers, and no shock at all the Victor's childhood is truncated to a few short flashbacks, or that his friend, Henry Clerval, who only seems to exist in order to be murdered by the creature, is written out altogether, and instead characters are added who are more involved with Victor's work and with whom exposition can be delivered. That Victor's university is relocated to Edinburgh not only draws parallels with the great nineteenth century discoveries in anatomy and their darker, body snatching, side, but also allows the film to legitimately begin in English. Del Toro could perfectly reasonably claim to love Shelley's poetic dreamer of a sea captain, but to have replaced him with a more recognisable (gruff, competent) archetype in order to remove an early stumbling block for the audience.

Other alterations, the use of lightning among them, are perhaps only in order to tell a story visually, but in contrast with Shelley, Del Toro's love of science is manifest: he loves not only the look and feel of it, the chrome instruments, the arcane machines humming with potency, the dissected specimens splayed out like treasure maps (and a lost, fifth, Evelyn table); but also the actual application of it, the trial and error, the infuriating failures, the tunnel vision as the scientist is consumed by the problem, the bleakness of a dead end and the excitement when a new revelation suggests alternative paths.

More interestingly Del Toro changes Victor's childhood dramatically in order to make the story about the legacy of bad fathers. Victor's father ruins Victor. Victor ruins the creature. The creature stops the cycle by killing Victor. This all works because it is something about which Del Toro has something to say.

But perhaps most interesting is the change to Elizabeth. In the book she is Victor's love interest and has no inner life beyond that. She exists only to be murdered by the creature on her wedding night. In the film she is Victor's brother's wife, allowing her to chastise and refuse him, and chose the creature over him. She becomes the champion of the creature, which allows her not only to be the audience's, and Del Toro's, voice in the movie, but to reveal more starkly the crippling loneliness of the creature that is such a feature of the book. 

The crippling loneliness of the creature is where The Bride begins. 'Frank' turns up in Chicago begging a brilliant scientist to make him a companion, and wouldn't you know it Jesse Buckley had recently been possessed by the ghost of Mary Shelley and pushed down the stairs for her trouble. This is a straight continuation from the book, where the creature demands of Victor "a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself," and so far so much fun. They both look fantastic, and Jesse Buckley and Christian Bale are superb, and pretty soon they are on the run and you think it's going to be Boney and Clyde but with real monsters.

But somehow the momentum just dies away. Everything that happens on screen is fun and looks great (I love the dance scene!), but it never seemed to take off, I was not actually excited.

The reason is that it does not have a second act. The characters do not want anything. With Frank this is fine, he's got the companion he wanted, and now he mopes after her, happy as a Labrador with a tennis ball. The film does, after all, set itself up as a feminist movie (she even screams "me too" repeatedly at the end) so who cares what Frank wants, what does The Bride want?

What does The Bride want? We never find out. Some vague desire to punish bad men perhaps, except that's more the ghost of Mary Shelley than her, and she never does much about it either way. Her relationship with Frank is founded on a deception that never seems to come to much. Her past life is laid out by the police detective but has no baring on the plot whatsoever.

This failure to provide a motivation comes into sharp relief at the second attempted rape scene.

The first attempted rape comes when The Bride is newly reanimated on a night out with Frank. Two thugs from a nightclub who have been getting handsy on the dancefloor, thinking Franks entirely ineffectual, try to have their way with her, and Frank looses his temper and kills them both. This is good, Frank has been a bit ineffectual and diffident so far so it's great to see him stomp some people and demonstrate his feelings for The Bride, and more importantly it's the inciting incident that forces the pair together and sends them on the run.

The second attempted rape comes much later when the pair are stopped by a creepy traffic cop. Ahha! The audience thinks, he's gonna get it - he doesn't know she's a real monster. But instead she submits to his groping (the dead Mary Shelley even berates her for being so passive in the worst Signal From Fred I think I've ever seen) until eventually Frank steps in and shoots the cop.

It is exactly the same scene nearly an hour later in the film. The Bride, as a character, has gone precisely nowhere.

Frankenstein the book, I think, does not work because Mary Shelley cannot write a realistic character for toffee. Her prose style is great (there is a description of glacier that I adore) but her heroes are whiny fops, the people around them hollow shells, and only the creature appears to have an actual motivation and journey.

Frankenstein the movie, I think, works because Del Toro has a clear story he wants to tell and adapts freely in service of that story. That he excises so much of the book I disliked is because there was so little there to begin with. He can change Victor's motivations without ruining anything because Victor's motivations in the book are so damn ridiculous. He can give Elizabeth new desires and interests because she had none in the book whatsoever.

The Bride, I think, does not work because nobody bothered to come up with a story at all. It is just a polemic hung on some fun ideas. Many of the individual scenes are great, but they are in service of nothing.

The first half hour of Alien: Romulus

Alien and Aliens are, to my mind, almost perfect movies within their respective genres, and this near perfection is nowhere more evident than in their first half hours.

Half an hour into Alien is right before the face hugger hugs John Hurt's face, that is to say exactly when the establishing of characters and situation ends and the horrible things happening begins. Consider what the viewer knows at this point: we know these people are workers, just out there to do a a job and are only investigating the alien transmission because they were ordered to; given the choice they all would have climbed back into their cryo-tubes and gone home. We know they are professional and capable; the landing on the planet was difficult but handled without drama, the repair of the ship the same. We know they are very, very, isolated. 

We know the captain, Dallas, is laconic and unflappable, we know Lambert is not, we know Kane is enthusiastic, we know Ash is a bit strange, we know Parker and Brett have chips on their shoulder about being 'below deck' staff. We know Ripley in particular is especially capable. If we are at all familiar with 1970s movies we know this is a hell of a cast. We emphatically do not know which of them, if any, will survive.

When the shit hits the fan, as it is about to do, all their reactions make sense, all their deaths matter.

Half an hour into Aliens is just as the dropship is leaving the Sulaco, which is when the introductions of characters is done and the building of tension really begins. Cameron's film will make us wait nearly as long again before we get any actual action but this is the point when most of the cast start wearing helmets and identical uniforms, and if the viewer has not learned to tell them apart by now they have no hope in the future.

The viewer has though; Vasquez, Apone, and Hudson are all colourful characters who have stood out on the strength of their dialogue (and their names have been repeated more than once). Bishop gets one of the more memorable introductions in all of cinema. Hicks has been a quiet but important presence throughout and his clear admiration of Ripley's demonstration of her power-loader driving skills has made us notice him. Gormon is about to have a couple of lines of dialogue which will perfectly sum up exactly what we need to know about him: "How many drops is this for you lieutenant?" / "Thirty eight... simulated.  "How many combat drops?" Cameron is the most incredibly functional scriptwriter. There isn't an ounce of poetry in him but can he ever tell a story efficiently.

What do we know? We know Ripley's motivations in detail. We know we don't trust Carter Burke. We know Bishop seems alright. We know the marines are overconfident, they've been on 'bug hunts' before and consider it beneath them. None of them take Ripley's briefing seriously. We also know they are capable, well drilled, and (Gormon aside) experienced. By the time they are suited up and all their hardware has been displayed it is hard to imagine them coming off second best.

We probably don't know who half of them are, but that half is going to be wiped out soon anyway, the survivors, we are already invested in. When the action does finally come, and Ripley grabs the controls of APC while Gormon struggles to get a hold of himself, it is intensely thrilling because that character work has been done.

Alien: Romulus is not a perfect movie by any stretch. There is a lot to like in it: Cailee Spaeny's and David Jonsson's performances are excellent. The sets are outstanding. The action is well put together. The creature effects fantastic. It adds colour to life in the Weyland Yutani colonies and makes a game attempt to tie together Ridley Scott's quasi-religious Prometheus wackiness with the lore from the earlier films. There are missteps too, the logic of the plot does not bare close scrutiny (who was vacuum packing all the face huggers? and how? and why? and HOW?), the continuous callbacks to the previous films are distracting, and when there was only one alien it was a lot scarier than when it turned out there were many.

None of that would matter so much if it had done better in the first half hour.

I'm not sure exactly where the half-hour point lands but I guess it is as they're first exploring the space station, shortly after Kay has admitted she is pregnant, maybe when they first encounter the half android and a completely naive viewer, were there such a person, would finally know for certain that something very bad had happened there.

What do we know? We know Rain and Andy's relationship in detail, we know Rain has been abandoned on the colony by her parents and the company have screwed her over and that is why she is taking the risks she is to escape. We have met Tyler, Kay, Navarro and Bjorn and we know Tyler is the boss of the gang and Bjorn is a dick and Navarro is religious and Kay is bland and nice. We know Rain was planning to leave Andy behind but this is confusing, it goes against the grain of everything else we know about her and apparently seems to have been added purely to give Bjorn something to be a dick about - it has no real baring on the rest of the film.

In fact I was confused about quite a lot at this point and not much of what I did know had a great deal of baring on the rest of the film. Do the four kids own the Corbelan or are they stealing it? What is Rain's job? What are any of their jobs? (This matters: who can pilot the ship? who can build a flame thrower out of bits in a pinch? Did they just spend their time on the colony sitting around playing video games?) Who are they to each other? Wikipedia tells me Tyler is Rain's ex-boyfriend but I certainly didn't know that when I was sitting in the cinema - it is indicative of the weird sexlessness of modern cinema that despite being all young and beautiful, none of them get so much as a Corporal Hicks admiring look from any of the others. By process of elimination Bjorn must have been the father of Kay's baby but do they actually like each other? You'd be hard pressed to tell. (And are they not cousins!)

The first half hour matters tremendously in these sort of movies. There isn't going to be much time for character development once people are running away from face-huggers and inching past alien cocoons so it needs to get done early. It matters too. Every death in Alien is a wrench which changes the logic of their situation and the dynamic of the surviving crew. In particular Dallas' early loss propels Ripley into taking de-facto command, and she has to step up because some of the others are losing it (Lambert is all for taking the three-person shuttle and leaving someone behind!) The early decimation of the colonial marines nearly breaks them but Corporal Hick's cool head pulls them through. Every subsequent death is earned, even Gorman, who all but disappears for most of the film, gets a great end.

When Bjorn is trying to save Kay it matters if he loves her! It matters if he knows she is carrying his child! When Tyler and Rain are stuck together with scary corporate Andy it matters why they broke up! It matters if they might get together again! It ought to matter that Rain's childhood companion has turned into a scary corporate robot but she was planning on leaving him behind anyway so, meh! It matters if they've stolen the Corbelan or not (are they on the run now? do they have the option of just going back to the colony?). It matters who can pilot the ship and who cannot, why is Rain a 'space virgin' in the first half hour but competently doing space things in the last half hour.

The annoying thing is it would be so easy to fix. What if they had to leave the colony because Kay was pregnant (it doesn't appear to be any sort of place to bring up a baby). What if they had to steal the ship and we got to meet them doing something, showing off their skills rather than just lounging about. What if Rain initially would not leave Andy behind but he persuaded her to, because it was what was best for her. A few minutes thought finds you all sorts of better options which could have given the subsequent action-packed middle of the film a more sure-footed narrative momentum - and I wouldn't have been sitting in the cinema wondering how you vacuum pack a face-hugger because I would have cared too much about people's faces maybe getting hugged.

You can't hope to make an almost perfect movie, but you can try and learn from them.

Avengers: Endgame and the endless character reset

At the beginning of Avengers: Endgame we find Thor having given up on himself, grown fat on beer and hamburgers. He must learn to embrace his godhood again. Tony Stark has retreated into family life, he must rediscover what it means to be a hero again, eventually giving his life for the cause. Hawkeye has descended into a violent quest for revenge, he must relearn to value his friends who still care for him.

At the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War we find Thor humbled after losing a fight to Thanos. He must journey to the far edge of the universe to forge an axe and learn to embrace his godhood again.

At the beginning of Thor: Ragnarok we find Thor overconfident, believing he has prevented Ragnorok and saved Asgard. He is soon humbled by a new, more powerful enemy, has his hammer destroyed, and winds up in a hellish, insane world where he is reduced to a gladiator slave. He must learn to embrace his godhood in order to escape and save his people.

At the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2 we find Peter Quill cocky and reckless, happy to dismiss his adoptive father and to ignore his friends when he is united with his natural father. He must learn to take himself seriously and value his friends.

At the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy we find Peter Quill cocky and reckless, a thief and a self centred opportunist. He must learn to take himself seriously and value his friends.

At the beginning of ... well, you get the idea.

I have only picked films I liked for the above list, and only ones I can remember well, and yet I could go on. In particular I did not work my way back far-enough to hit an origin story, where an ordinary person finds they have superpowers and must, inevitably, learn what it means to be a hero. Thor (my personal favourite of the bunch) is a particularly egregious example; in five different movies he seems to need to rediscover what it truly means to be a god. Tony Stark, too forever seems to be learning how to balance a life between being Tony and being Iron Man. Peter Quill twice learned to be more serious and less self-centred, yet last we saw, on the fight on Titan, he costs the Avengers victory over Thanos in a moment of impetuous anger.

These personal journeys are nothing surprising, they are part of the well understood formula for storytelling, but over multiple films the endless character reset becomes jarring. Yet there have been multiple movies following the same superhero before without this niggle. It is new.

In the Richard Donner films, Superman never has a character ark beyond advancing his relationship with Lois Lane. He ends the movies no more committed to truth and justice and the American way than he began them. In the Tim Burton and Joel Schumaker Batman movies, Batman achieves no personal growth beyond his initial origin story. Stretching the definition of superhero, James Bond (his superpower is not falling over after three martinis) never learned anything about himself or confronted his own failings. Jet Li's marvellous Wong Fei Hung never discovered what it really means to be a Kung-Fu master.

Moving beyond the medium of film; the endless tea-time TV superheroes of my youth: Lou Ferrigno's Hulk, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, Manimal, The A-Team, Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap, the protagonists of Knight Rider and Airwolf, all ended each episode exactly the same person they began.

Comics are too wide a medium to make sweeping pronouncements on, but the dime-store periodicals where these characters began are famous for simply producing adventure after adventure after adventure. Superman might start an episode weakened by Kryptonite, but he never starts it with character flaws to overcome.

In novels too; Conan, Tarzan, Alan Quatermain, the myriad 'knight of the plains' cowboys modelled on Owen Wister's The Virginian, James Bond again. None of them are known for learning how to be heroes over the course of a book.

So has something has changed in the way we tell ourselves superhero stories?

Yes. Something simple. Something obvious. They're very popular now.

There are not enough superheros with the cultural cachet of Superman or Spiderman to populate a cinematic universe. Those two might get some buy-in from audiences before the curtains have risen, but Iron Man? If you want an audience of millions to watch an Iron Man movie, if you want to make a good film about Iron Man, you're going to have to introduce him to them properly, and make them like him, and make them care. You do this through good writing and acting, by creating a character who goes on a journey and grows as a person. It is what makes these characters attractive and the movies fun.

It is perhaps important to say that I think the Marvel movies are good movies. I'm not a huge fan (I like the funny ones best), but viewed as a single body of work the consistent quality is impressive; they are not always great but they are always fun. They are kind, and witty, and human. They have an admirable commitment to embracing all the camp visuals and wild lore of the comics while simultaneously bringing the characters down to earth, giving them real problems and real preoccupation. They try to embrace broader, more complex themes than just good versus evil while also eschewing the easy nihilism of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. They take place in the real world (even when they take place in space) where actions have consequences.

So the character reset is a property of good writing, not bad. The only problem is that superhero stories -hero stories if you prefer- impose one strict limitation that means it must be repeated every single time; the focus of each story is on the hero, it is about them. It is always the hero who must go on a journey and grow as a character, no matter how many times they have done so before.

It might, theoretically, be possible to have a hero -like Ellen Ripley- find reserves of steely strength in one film and learn to be a mother again in another, but his is hard (see Ripley learning to, err... appreciate the Alien's point of view? in cubed and Resurrection), it requires radically different circumstances for each story that you cannot just impose on pre-existing canon worlds.

So, instead, back we go each time to enjoy the ride again. Reset. Reset. Reset.

Servants of the People, All Out War, and Fall Out

Servants of the People is Andrew Rawnsley's account of the first term of Tony Blair's government. All Out War and Fall Out are Tim Shipman's accounts of the Brexit campaign and it's aftermath up to the end of 2017. Both authors are journalists experienced at wringing narrative from messy real world situations and all three books are excellent reads. Tim Shipman's two books in particular read like thrillers.

Rawnsley constructs his book as a series of anecdotes, mostly morality tales where New Labour's belief that it can spin it's way out of trouble winds up dumping it in more, or (at least twice) Peter Mandleson's failure to come clean to his friends means they cannot help him, or (often) Gordon and Tony's failure to communicate exacerbates a situation beyond all reasonable bounds. His overriding narrative is of Tony Blair's fear of ending up yet another single term Labour prime minister, thus all the individual battles add up into one story culminating in the 2001 election victory.

If there is a problem with this technique it is that, by focusing on the problems of New Labour, there is no explanation as to why they deserve a second term. Rawnsley occasionally has to point out that, however much an amusing basket-case Labour were, the Tories at the time were even worse.

Shipman on the other hand is much more focused on the overall arc of first the campaign and then the lead up to and play out of the 2017 election.

In the first book he has two stories to balance, one for each side. The Leave side is a tale of insurgency: the underdog with a lot of guile and a lot of luck unseating the favourite. The Remain side is a tale of hubris: Cameron and team's failure to ever really believe they might lose meant they were fighting with their eyes not on victory but on what happens after. Consequently they refused to risk either Britain's diplomatic relations or the future harmony of the conservative party by, for example, making a pronouncement on Turkey or making personal attacks on Boris Johnson.

The hubris continues in Fall Out as, similarly, failure to realise that the election might result in less than a landslide ends up in failure to fight it properly. In this book the mechanics of disfunction are dissected across a large cast of characters from cabinet ministers to political aids, and in particular Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, the chief villains of the piece. With no conclusion available Shipman ends on the final agreement of 'Sufficient Progress' in December 2017, which May somehow achieves despite trouble from within her cabinet and from the DUP. It gives, at least, a sense of things moving on.

What I find really interesting though, is how both narratives have changed in the context of subsequent events.

Things did not move on, and now, almost over a year later, what looked then like an untenable situation has largely remained unchanged. "Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus". The Tim Shipman books read, in this context, less an account of great events than of ridiculous accidents and dumb incompetence. All the heat and noise and manoeuvring leading to absolutely nothing. The UK still in the EU and Theresa May still Prime Minister. However events resolve themselves from now on it seems very unlikely that this will ever feel (even to sympathetic readers) like the account of a great step in the journey of a nation.

The further back we go the more context corrupts the narrative. Boris Johnson's hopeless leadership campaign now looks like it might be just a blip in his inevitable idiotic rise. A tactical victory for the Remain side during the campaign, bouncing the Leave side into admitting the UK would leave the Single Market, now looks like a strategical blunder for remainers. David Cameron's attempt to renegotiate the UK's membership now looks less like a half-arsed PR exercise and more like a fundamental misunderstanding of what the EU is.

In servants of the People the elephant in the room, Iraq, can be felt on every page; in every bumbling PR disaster, in every spat between ministers, in every bad news story, it all feels so small compared to what was to come. Worse though is the lead up to the invasion of Kosovo, which Rawnsley uses as something of a key character event and heart of the book. The reader is invited to admire Blair's tenacity and zeal when faced with a true moral choice, his certainty, his belief in doing the right thing. But the reader cannot. The reader can only remember the bloodshed to come and shudder.

Arrival

One of the interesting things about Arrival is that it uses your own literacy of the medium to trick you.

There is no particular reason why the opening montage of Louise Banks having, and then losing, her daughter had to be backstory. It could be a How We Got Here opening (indeed it is) but for the fact that no film which wasn't playing a dirty trick would how-we-got-here from such a gentle bitter-sweet character defining montage. We go in with expectations, this is a big budget Hollywood film after all, if it opens with a lengthy encapsulation of a character's life we assume that it does so in order to introduce the character to us.That is what we are expecting in any case: to be introduced to the characters. We assume it would not introduce the character from where she is at the end of the film, we are here to experience her journey, not appreciate her destination.

Louise Banks' subsequent distracted air, apparently sleepwalking through her life, has been called a Kuleshov Effect, an impression formed in the audience's mind by the juxtaposition of the daughter's death. I do not think this is justified. Banks reacts markedly differently to the alien's arrival than anyone else at the university, and not because of any professional interest at the time. Maybe Amy Adams played the scenes straight and I'm projecting a distracted air onto her, but the fact of her actions in the script betray that the film is playing a trick on us.

Also, what's she doing knocking about in that enormous house by the lake if she had not previously filled it with a family?



Ultimately, the film cannot sustain the trick as long as it wants for the same reason: our understanding of how it works.

From the opening montage on I was wondering where daddy was. At first I assumed he'd died while she was pregnant, but it still seemed odd not to see him at all. Again, this is a big budget Hollywood film, it shares a value system with it's audience. If, say, Banks had been artificially inseminated to have a daughter by herself the film would have needed to address that. If there was a man present at the conception the film would have deemed him important enough to mention, even if he played exactly no part in the story.

A book, which can focus solely on the mind of its protagonist, might have gotten away with this. A film deals in pictures from a third party viewpoint, and in any picture of a mother and daughter there is always going to be a space where the father isn't.

I did not work out the twist till, in a late flash-forward, Banks tells her daughter to ask her father about science questions, so it kept me guessing till very nearly the end. But I always knew there was something to guess. I knew it was playing a trick.

Midnight Special

Midnight Special feels like a much older movie than it is. In fact it feels a lot like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There are some obvious structural similarities: that it is a road trip; that it is focused on a single man driven by desires the viewer does not fully understand; that the government is at once both ignorant of what is happening and a sinister antagonist; that the driving emotional pull is of a young child in peril; that geographic coordinates are a critical plot device; that the mysterious other is, in the end, benign; that the finale features a big special effect sequence and raises as many questions as it answers.

There is something else as well. There is a sense of wonder.

A sense of wonder is something that has been missing from films of late. It makes the occasional appearance: in Gareth Edward's Monsters, the Forest God in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II. The reason is no mystery. For a movie to have a sense of wonder it must be about something wonderful, something that does not exist in the ordinary world, ergo something created by special effects - but SFX are no longer wonderful. With affordable CGI everything becomes possible and so nothing is special. A whole city is levitated in Avengers: Age of Ultron and it is exciting, and supplies a strong sense of peril, but it is never wondrous.

When, in Jurassic Park, Sam Neil fell to knees in awe at seeing real live dinosaurs we were on our knees with him, equally amazed. It was just two years after we'd seen what digital effects were capable of in Terminator 2, just a year since they were considered inherently amazing enough to hang a whole film off in Lawnmower Man. It felt like the start of a new era but it was also the end of one. Three years earlier the creators of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (not the greatest Star Trek) were so impressed by a light show they thought it would make a believable stand-in for God. Two years later in Independence Day nobody dropped to their knees in awe at the alien spaceships arriving, they pranged their cars as if it was giant wonderbra billboards descending through the clouds. Effects weren't magic anymore, at least not to filmmakers, and nobody would be truly amazed by them ever again.

So what makes Midnight Special so different?

It's not the effects. The glowing eyes are nothing that could not have been created with late eighties technology, and while done far better with CGI, the overall effect of the city at the end could have been achieved with matt paintings and miniatures.

The difference is primarily the realism, and also the mystery. Both are present from the get go, two characters barely speaking as they strip cardboard from a motel window and load guns into a bag. It's clear that the film is going to value genuine behaviour over explaining what is going on. The realism really hits though when the ranch is raided, the viewer expects it to be Waco but it is far from it. Everybody cooperates with the FBI. The FBI have to wade through interviews with everybody. It is so realistic it is almost boring.

In fact, for the first half of the movie it is only the mystery that keeps you hooked. What is special about the boy? What is the relationship between the father and his friend? Where are they heading? What happens if they are caught? By the time these start being answered you are hooked on the characters, which have been revealed slowly, and are doubly strong because of that.

Notice too how the main antagonists come to some sort of a sticky end, either arrested or perhaps even shot, but we never see it. The film is relentlessly focused on Alton and the people looking after him. It doesn't care about bad guys getting their comeuppance, this is a fantastic story but it is firmly set in the real world and you nobody gets that sort of neat satisfying end.

Consequently, by the finale the viewer is right there with characters wanting to know the answers, and equally as amazed when they are revealed. It is the mystery we came for but the realism that sold it. An invisible city covering the Gulf Coast would be no big deal in Avengers, but in a movie where everybody has looked and acted like a real person for two hours, it's huge.

And because of this the film can't tell us everything, can't wrap it up pat, or the spell would be broken. You're led to the possibility that the Alton is an angel but the reveal of the city, less heavenly towers than sci-fi brutalism, like a radical concept sketch for the South Bank Centre, muddies even that water.

In the end you're left standing there right with Alton's mother, wondering what just happened.

Hell Or High Water

Hell Or High Water is an excellent film about the problems of funding long term care through equity release schemes.

It's an super little movie; the performances are great and the dialogue is natural and often hilarious. Jeff Bridges at first appears to be going a little hard for a tobacco-chewing caricature of a Texas Ranger but he ends up a much more complex character than that. His reaction to his partners death, and then when he gets his subsequent revenge, is astonishingly good.

Similarly Ben Foster's Tanner is exceptionally well drawn. At first sight a familiar thuggish good ol' boy with a rakish charm, a tendency to sudden violence, and poor impulse control - he lends the movie the same sort of nervous energy that Joe Pesci gave Goodfellas; but Tanner is not the cartoonish villain that Tommy DeVito was: he understands his own failings and understands he is martyring himself for his brother. He is motivated and determined throughout; in the end it is Tanner's superior grasp of the situation, and superior commitment to his brother's plan, which sees that plan through.

Chris Pine's Toby I have some issues with, but I will come to that. What I want to talk about is how it achieves a sense of place.


Achieving a sense of place is interesting. I remember reading an interview with Nick Hornby where he proclaimed himself baffled at readers complementing him on evoking North London so well in High Fidelity when he only ever named it, never actually described it. I haven't actually read it but I'm willing to believe Nick never mentions halal butchers, or hasidic jews, or the particular aroma I remember nineties North London acquiring on hot days; but I'll bet all his characters go everywhere by tube, and live in flats converted from pre-war housing, and think nothing of having a takeaway and off-license at the bottom of the street. If you know a place you describe it without trying to. As Borges said:

...if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, [the] absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work

There is no doubt that Hell And High Water is about Texas, not just set there. Indeed the writer says as much in an interview. And despite apparently not a scene being shot there, it evokes an idea of Texas very strongly. There are three reasons why:

Firstly, it's in the photography. I've never set foot in West Texas but everything I expect is there: the flat grassland, featureless as far as the eye can see; the brooding skies; the hot empty streets of small towns; the long empty roads; the hard quality to the light.

Secondly, and more importantly, the location is vital to the plot. The motivating factor for the brothers is the age-old trope of a rancher striking oil, albeit with the modern hitch of a reverse mortgage to overcome. The brother's plan relies on a surfeit of small, near empty towns, each with one small bank branch. The stumbling block at the start of the third act only exists because of the great distances between those towns. In the finale the brothers are initially being chased not be the police but by armed citizens.

If there is a weakness in the story it is that it hangs off the simplistic notion of banks are bad, mmm'kay, but this plays into the idea of Texas too. At no point does the movie question why the Howard's mother had to go to the equity release market to fund her care. Set anywhere else it would be a film about the failings of the state rather than the rapaciousness of banks, but on the old American frontier that question never seems relevant.

Thirdly it is about the characters. The bit parts, from the sassy waitress to the other even sassier waitress, to the old boys in the diner, to everyone in the banks, stand out not just for their many, many great lines of dialogue, but because they are all, to a man and woman, fiercely strong willed and independent minded. Maybe this is a caricature but it is a relevant caricature, one that plays in to the sense of place and the overall theme of the film.

Here is where I have an issue with the character of Toby. This is a movie about masculinity (how could it be a movie about Texas and not be about masculinity), and to an extent that justifies the lack of women, but we are asked to believe that Toby has spent the last year or so tending to his dying mother, a profoundly feminine role. Do macho young Texas men put up with wiping their mother's backsides? I guess -like everybody- they do if they have to, but it's working against type.

More problematically, his plan at the end was entirely about his estranged wife and kids. The closing scene finds him doing up the ranch with seemingly no ambition whatsoever for himself. He is not attempting to get back together with his wife. As far as we know he is not even attempting to be part of his sons lives again. He is so selfless as to be nihilistic. He is such a well drawn and well played character during the movie, that the unlikelihood of his life before it starts and after it ends jars hard.

This was not unsolvable either. A much more likely backstory was that the reverse mortgage funded a Mexican nurse to help look after his mother. Toby and her could have fallen in love (not an unknown story). He could be planning a calm, homely, quiet life with her when everything was over.

This would not mean a happy ending of course, or what would he have sacrificed? Ultimately you would still have to keep the hint of a final, later, suicide-by-cop in order to revenge his brother. He is not a man who could let that go. But it would become a tragedy rather than nihilism.

I guess a happy ending just wouldn't be Texas.