A Walk Through Hell

Last year at this time saw the release of Peter Jackson’s stunning documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. Thanks to the geniuses at Weta Digital, original footage shot during WWI was restored, colorized, and dub with sound. The soldier’s voices were recovered by having professional lip readers capture what they said, then voice actors dubbed the dialogue, while the narration came from hours upon hours of vets who recorded their experiences for the Imperial War Museum’s archives. (If you have any interest in history, I heartily recommend you watch this film.) The weaknesses of it, though, were the footage is propagandist in nature and, because of the crude technology of the equipment, battle scenes are shot at a distance. Now a year later, Sam Mendes has made the intimate war epic 1917 that captures trench warfare in all its gory glory.

Mendes was inspired by the war stories told by his grandfather Alfred, who was in his late teens and early twenties when he fought in the war. Alfred passed away in 1991, but the stories remained with Mendes who, for the first time in his career, wrote the script, in collaboration with Krysty Wilson-Cairns. (Wilson-Caines had done shorts before becoming a staff writer for the Showtime series “Penny Dreadful.” Now she’s an Academy Award nominee.)

The story is deceptively straightforward. A sergeant tells Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) to pick another man and follow him. Blake chooses his friend Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay). The sergeant leads to two men to a bunker where General Erinmore (Colin Firth) tells them that a regiment has chased the Germans far from the British lines. The commanding officer thinks he has Germans on the run, but intelligence has discovered it is an elaborate trap. When the regiment attacks the next morning, they will be wiped out. The two corporals must cross No Man’s Land and catch up to the regiment, carrying an order from the General to stop the attack. Blake has been selected because he has a reason to push to succeed – his brother Joseph (Richard Madden) is a lieutenant in the regiment.

What sets 1917 apart is it was filmed as one single shot in real time. The only break comes when a character is knocked out for a few hours. Hitchcock had made Rope that way in the 1950s, though it was actually a series of long takes. Hitchcock would pull the camera in tight on a person’s back as a place to cut the scene. It was a bit of showmanship from the director but ended up being a distraction. More successful were single long shots in films such as the opening sequence of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. Alfonso Cuaron has made such shots a feature of his films like Children of Men and Gravity, and his close friend Alejandro Inarritu played with the style in Birdman. With 1917, though, the style increases the tension of the story as well as centering the audience on Blake and Schofield. You feel you are literally walking through Hell with them (or running or crawling or diving for cover). It helps that Mendes recruited Roger Deakins to do the cinematography. He’s shot some of the best films in the past few decades, including Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption, O Brother Where Art Thou, No Country for Old Men, and the Coen Brothers version of True Grit. He’d previously worked with Mendes on Skyfall. With the digital film technology and steadycams, the camera floats around the main characters, weaving in and out, while hardly ever betraying where the scene was cut.

Mendes chose two fresh faces for his main characters. Chapman has mostly done television, where his biggest role was as the young King Tommen Baratheon on “Game of Thrones.” MacKay began acting at eleven and has amassed 40 credits, though his largest role was as Viggo Mortensen’s oldest son in Captain Fantastic. Both actors deliver powerful performances. Mendes filled in the supporting roles with stars. Along with Firth and Madden, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Adam Scott all have small but important roles.

While it’s episodic in nature – crossing No Man’s Land, passing through the enemy trenches, walking through a destroyed orchard – the film’s two hour run time means the audience only has a few brief moments to catch its breath before the story moves on to its next set piece. Throughout it, bodies lie where they were killed, and if you can’t handle rats, this is not a movie to see. While They Shall Not Grow Old gave you the long view, 1917 shoves your face into the brutality of war. Yet it also serves as a testament to the human spirit under inhuman conditions.

If only the world’s experiences of war could be limited to historical movies.

DC Finds Its Funny Bone

For the past few years, DC and Marvel have been competing like they once did in the early days of comic books. Instead of pulp-paper pages, though, it’s now on the silver screen. DC, in collaboration with Warner Brothers, has had success with their characters, especially the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy. Beginning in the 1970s, they also had the first hit superhero movies, first with Christopher Reeve’s Superman and then Michael Keaton’s Batman. In both cases, the quality took a sharp dive after the first sequel, and Keaton was smart enough to jump ship before the third movie. But in the ten years since Ironman premiered, Marvel has held the field. DC managed to put out 5 movies during that time, while Marvel quadrupled that number (not even counting the Spiderman or X-Men movies.) Marvel also cleaned up at the box office, with 7 films breaking the billion-dollar worldwide box office mark, compared to one for Warner Brothers/DC: last year’s Aquaman. The problem was the films helmed by Zack Snyder were deathly serious and featured cookie-cutter final battles that exchanged noise and over-the-top action for coherence and story. The fun quotient was essentially nil. Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman) and James Wan (Aquaman) gave their films a different feel, though the climactic battle scenes returned to Snyder’s style, just transferred to WWI Europe or submerged in the sea. None of the DC films came close to the comedic interplay featured in the Marvel Universe movies like Ant-Man or Guardians of the Galaxy, or the emotional resonance of Black Panther or Avengers: Infinity War.

Until now. Shazam! manages to both tickle your funny bone while still pulling at your heartstrings.

Like the Bond films, the super-hero genre needs a strong villain to support the hero’s story. Director David F. Sandberg and screenwriter Henry Gayden spend an extensive time at the movie’s beginning establishing Dr. Thaddeus Sivana as a worthy villain. He’s the scion of a wealthy family who couldn’t do anything right in his father’s eyes. As a young teen Sivana’s transported from the back seat of his family car to a mysterious cave where a wizard (Djimon Hounsou) offers him great power if he’s deemed worthy. Sivana fails the test, instead choosing the power of the 7 Deadly Sins. The wizard throws him back into the car. Years later, the adult Sivana (the eminently reliable bad guy, Mark Strong) has been funding research into what appears to be a delusion shared by dozens of people – being transported to the wizard’s lair only to be found unworthy. It finally gives him the key to return to the lair where he finally takes the power of the deadly sins into himself.

Billy Batson (Asher Angel) has been in the Pennsylvania Child Care system ever since he was separated from his mother as a very young child. Now a teenager, he’s never given up finding his birth mother, which has kept him from bonding with any of the many foster families he’s had. In Philadelphia, he’s assigned to the care of Victor and Rosa Vasquez (Cooper Andrews, Marta Milans) who’d both been in the system themselves and now run a group home. They introduce him to the rest of their ersatz family, who range from college-bound Mary (Grace Fulton) to pre-teen Darla (Faithe Herman), though Billy gets closest to Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), a super-hero fanatic with a bad leg. When bullies at school attack Freddy, Billy comes to his aid. Chased by the bullies, he gets away on the subway, only to be transported to the wizard’s lair himself. There he’s found worthy, and by uttering the wizard’s name – Shazam – he’s transformed into an adult superhero (Zachary Levi) with muscles on his muscles, lightning that shoots out of his fingers, super speed and bullet-proof skin, but who’s still a kid inside.

Levi’s an excellent choice for the main role, since he demonstrated his ability to balance genres in the comedy/spy series “Chuck.” He bulked up with about 20+ pounds of muscle to embody Shazam, but he also gives the best boy-in-a-man’s-body performance since Tom Hanks in Big. Angel’s Billy manages to be a regular kid, though one damaged by his history, and Grazer’s Freddy fills both the sidekick role as well as being a conscious for Shazam when he becomes too indulgent of his power.

Sandberg and Gayden were unusual choices as director and screenwriter. After creating a number of short films, Sandberg did two horror features prior to Shazam!: Lights Out (based on one of his shorts) and the entry in the possessed doll series, Annabelle: Creation. Gayden only had one screenplay produced before this, the sci-fi light story Earth to Echo, and was an assistant to the screenwriter of one of my least-favorite movies, Spider-Man 3. But as has happened before in the superhero genre, unknowns have scored huge successes when given the chance. The Russo brothers (Anthony & Joe) had worked in television and directed a couple of forgettable comedy flicks before they were given the directing job for arguably the best Marvel movie, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. They followed it up with Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and the upcoming Avengers: End Game, which will make them the only directors to have three billion-dollar movies to their credit.

You’ll laugh your face sore by the end of Shazam! It also manages a thrilling final battle that still has hilarious moments, including a twist on the bad guy explanation scene that’s just perfect.

As I related in my review of Captain Marvel, Shazam! shares an interconnected history with the Marvel character, and it’s a bit strange that both finally make it to the big screen within a month of each other. However, the two movies are completely different in tone. It’s unlikely Shazam! will beat Captain Marvel’s box office total, which has already zoomed past the billion mark worldwide. But Shazam! is a delight and worthy of its own success.

Knights of the Boardroom Table

In the 1960’s there were two main types of spy movies. There were the gritty, realistic films like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, The Ipcress File, and Funeral in Berlin (the last two both starring Michael Caine), and then there were the wry and slightly over the top – sometimes very over the top – James Bond films and its imitators like Our Man Flint or the Dean Martin “Matt Helm” films. With the latter movies, it was a short step to camp comedies like The 2^nd Best Secret Agent in the World or Modesty Blaise. The spy genre got a kickstart in the new millennium with the Bourne series, which reinvigorated James Bond when Daniel Craig slipped into the tux. Now, in the new movie Kingsman: The Secret Service, we have a paean to those earlier fantasy spy films, though it also has a strong dose of Bourne in its blood.

Based on the comic book “The Secret Service” by Mark Millar (who wrote the comics “Kick-Ass” and “Wanted,” both later filmed) and Dave Gibbons (who illustrated the classic “Watchmen”), the Kingsmen are operatives of a small but well-funded private intelligence operation. They take their cue from the legend of Arthur and his knights, roaming the world to do good, and their aliases are based on the characters from the legend. Harry Hart (Colin Firth) is known as Galahad, while its weapons, tech and training officer is Merlin (Mark Strong). The head of the organization is, appropriately, known as Arthur (Michael Caine). When one of the agents is killed during a mission to save a kidnapped scientist (Mark Hamill), the others are called upon to nominate a replacement, who are then all invited to a training class run by Merlin.

Galahad chooses Gary “Eggsy” Unwin (Taron Egerton), who on the face of it is an uncouth London youth on his way to becoming a criminal. Eggsy, though, is intelligent and capable, and he happens to be the son of a former Kingsman who sacrificed himself to save Galahad, Merlin and others. The training allows for a classic origins story, though with this one it’s like you’ve drunk a full bottle of adrenalin.

With Bond, the good ones have a great villain – something that is referenced in Kingsman. For this movie, it gets both a failing and a passing grade. The main villain, tech billionaire Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson), is too prissy and his lisp gets old real fast. What saves the film is his Odd Job, Gazelle (Sofia Boutella), whose lower legs have been replaced by knife-blade prosthetics. Her fights are a blend of ballerina and ninja.

Firth gets to cut loose from the proper characters he’s often played while still maintaining a gentlemanly decorum. It’s like he’s followed Liam Neeson and discovered his inner action hero at an age when most action heroes should have retired. Instead the casting works wonderfully. Taron Egerton had done a couple of shorts and TV series back in the UK before 2014, when starred in Testament of Youth and filmed Kingsman. He’s almost too neat at first, but you forget about that once he meets up with Galahad. Mark Strong is wonderful as Merlin, and having Caine as Arthur is perfect, a bridge to the 1960s spy films.

Writer/Director Matthew Vaughn knows how to handle comic book material. He, along with his co-writer Jane Goldman, had done Kick-ass in 2010, and then rebooted the X-Men series wonderfully with X-Men: First Class in 2011 as well as doing the story for X-Men: Days of Future Past. (They also wrote the excellent spy-revenge drama The Debt in 2010, which was directed by John Madden and starred Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain.) In visual style, Kingsman dances along the edge of parody, but it has a giddy time doing it. The movie definitely goes over the top near the end, though it’s nothing to lose your head over. What helps is an intelligent script that has several surprising twists, and one complete shock.

Kingsman is a popcorn movie, an action flick that’s a good waste of time. It’s rare to get one of these outside of summer, when they usually fill the cinemas, and especially not in February where you normally have studios dumping their bombs like Jupiter Ascending and Seventh Son. If you enjoy this type of action film, Kingsman does have some delights to offer.

Belated Honor

In the 1970s, in books such as “The Ultra Secret” and “Bodyguard of Lies,” the greatest secret of World War II was revealed – the Allies had broken the supposedly unbreakable German code Enigma. Enigma was a mechanical encoding/decoding machine that was the size of a portable typewriter. When the key code for the day was set, operators could type in the letters of a message and it would generate replacement letters on a lighted display. When the message was received, the operator there would type the coded letters into their Enigma machine and it would display the actual letters of the message. With options in the billions, it would take codebreakers searching manually for the right key code over a hundred years to find it. Since the codes were changed daily, the German High Command was justified in thinking the code was unbreakable. Now the movie The Imitation Game tells the story of the men (and woman) who broke the code, and the tragic final chapter of the man responsible for the breakthrough as well as for much of the technology we now use daily – Alan Turing.

Turing was a mathematician, logician and cryptographer who developed much of the computer theory needed for the machines. He formalized the concept of algorithm and computation, and developed the idea of the “Turing machine” that could mimic the work of other machines. The paper he wrote on that subject was titled “The Imitation Game.” Today most everyone’s life is touched by digital computers, but it was radical science back in the 1930s. When the war broke out in 1939, Britain had a secret outpost located in Bletchley Park where the finest cryptographers in the country were trying to break the German codes. Turing joined the group and soon realized men would never break Enigma. Their only hope was to create from scratch a working version of the Turing machine that could work the code infinitely faster than humans.

After the war, Turing taught at the University of Manchester. It was there in the 1950s that he was arrested for being a homosexual, the same charge that was brought against Oscar Wilde decades earlier. The arrest and conviction destroyed Turing’s life, a sad end for the man whose work shortened the war by years and saved millions of lives. None of that, though, could be said in his defense; his work at Bletchley remained secret for years.

The Imitation Game recreates the time in glorious detail. While the sparkling script by Graham Moore, based on Alan Hodges’ book “Alan Turing: The Enigma,” does take some liberties with the story, it gets the main points right and it finally gives Turing his due. The production was fortunate to have Benedict Cumberbatch in the role of Turing, as he gives a towering performance as the awkward, socially-maladroit mathematician, yet still makes him sympathetic. At the Golden Globes, Colin Firth joked that he was interested in doing the role, but the producers decided to wait until Cumberbatch was born. In truth, it’s hard to conceive of another actor who could have pulled off the role with the accomplishment of Cumberbatch.

He’s aided by an excellent supporting cast, including Kiera Knightley as Joan Clarke, a brilliant female mathematician at a time when the field was the province of men only. Charles Dance (most recently Tywin Lannister on “Game of Thrones”) plays the head of Bletchley Park, and Mark Strong is excellent as Stewart Menzies, the chief of MI6 from 1939 to 1952. Some think that Menzies was the basis for Ian Fleming’s M, although there are other candidates for that distinction.

This is the first English-language film for Director Morten Tyldum, who has worked mostly in his native Norway. In his hands the movie plays out like a riveting thriller that captures the distrust among countries who were allies during the war but who knew that would change once Hitler was defeated. The production design by Maria Djurkovic (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Mama Mia) is outstanding, as is Oscar Faura’s cinematography.

Colin Firth’s comment at the Golden Globes touched on another aspect of the movie. The script for The Imitation Game sat unproduced for several years. It was voted the best unproduced movie script in 2011. Now honor has belatedly come to the man that Churchill said made the single greatest contribution to the British war effort.

Cold War Redux

Every spy story of John Le Carre’s, starting with his first major hit, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, have been the antithesis of movie spy/action heroes like James Bond.  Le Carre’s thrills have always been anchored in reality.  Eleven years after Cold, Le Carre wrote what is arguably his masterpiece, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  The story features George Smiley, who was the main character in Le Carre’s first two books and a minor one in Cold.  After one more appearance, the character disappeared for several years, but then roared back in Tinker Tailor and the next two books of the Karla trilogy, The Honorable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.  In 1979, the BBC adapted Tinker Tailor for the small screen, with Sir Alec Guinness as George Smiley.  It was a success on both sides of the Atlantic.

Now Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has made it to the big screen, and the filmmakers have done the story proud.

Control (John Hurt) believes there is a mole highly placed in the British Foreign Intelligence Service (nicknamed the Circus).  He sends agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to get in touch with an Eastern Block general who may know the name of the mole.  But the meeting is blown and Prideaux is shot and captured.  The stink caused by the mess leads to Control being kicked out of the Circus, along with George Smiley (Gary Oldman).  That leaves the service under the overall leadership of Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), assisted by Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds) and Toby Esterhase (David Dencik).  Control passes away soon after he’s forced out.

Percy has been cultivating a highly-placed Russian source under the code name “Witchcraft.”  The source has given them what seems to be a gold mine of intelligence.  But then the government minister in charge of overseeing the Circus is contacted by rogue agent Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) who says the mission he was on was blown by a traitor inside the Circus.  The minister approaches Smiley, asking him to come out of retirement to catch the mole.

Smiley requests help from Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), a mid-level manager in the Circus.  In effect, Peter will be spying on his own bosses and stealing information for Smiley.  If he’s caught, he would be prosecuted as a traitor.

Working from an intelligent, nuanced screenplay by the husband/wife team of Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, Swedish Director Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In) has crafted a thriller in every sense of the word, even though there are only 4 gun shots in the film and not a single car chase.  The movie keeps winding back upon itself so you see scenes from different angles and learn more as Smiley learns more.  (Sadly, Ms. O’Connor passed away from cancer in 2010, shortly after completing the script.  The movie is dedicated to her.)

Oldman gives an interior performance, betraying very little as he absorbs information, yet it is riveting to watch.  He gained weight for the movie, so that he could have the middle-age paunch that Smiley would have had.  Cumberbatch is effective as the golden young boy helping Smiley.  Yet you can feel the inner tension within him, which finally bubbles over.  As Tarr, Hardy is an electric jolt within the film.  If this were a Bridge game, he’d be trumps.  Jones, Firth, Hinds and Dencik must remain enigmatic, so that all who haven’t read the book or seen the earlier TV adaptation won’t know until the final reveal the identity of the traitor.  But even if you’d read the book, as I did, you’ll be mesmerized by the peeling away of the covers to expose the mole.

The movie looks like it was filmed in 1970 – the props, the color schemes, the costumes are all wonderfully authentic.  The Circus is bland and low rent, realistic for those austere times in the UK.  This was long before MI-6 got their large modern office building along the Thames.  It’s a delight when you see the Circus’s Christmas party, with them drunkenly singing the theme song to The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World, a 1965 British spy spoof.  Or when Santa Claus appears in his red suit with a hammer and sickle on his chest and the whole group breaks into the Soviet national anthem.  (If you look carefully among the revelers, you will catch a glimpse of John Le Carre.)

While this is a movie tethered to the Cold War, it also transcends its time to look at the whole question of loyalty and betrayal, and how we can casually slide from one side to the other if we’re only concerned about ourselves.  As the traitor eventually explains, “It just got to point where I had to choose a side.”  That banal decision costs a number of people their lives in the course of the movie.

The movie has been nominated for 3 Oscars: Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Score.  In my opinion, it could also have been the 10^th Best Picture nominee.  If you want an intelligent thriller that involves your mind more than just your sense of sight and sound, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is that movie.