Director: Martin Campbell
Writer(s):
Greg Berlanti
Michael Green
Marc Guggenheim
Michael Goldenberg
Greg Berlanti
Michael Green
Marc Guggenheim

Cast:
Ryan Reynolds – Hal Jordan
Blake Lively – Carol Ferris
Peter Sarsgaard – Dr. Hector Hammond
Mark Strong – Thaal Sinestro
Angela Bassett – Dr. Amanda Waller

Preamble: One of DC’s more interesting characters, a superhero who can manifest his will as real world objects using a special ring, comes to the big screen with Ryan Reynolds starring.

Plot: an alien high council learns to harness willpower, the greatest power in the universe, and uses it to build not only a home planet (Oa) but a guild of intergalactic policemen. But one of the council’s own is driven mad by his attempt to harness the power of fear, and banished to a lost planet. When he escapes the prison the others have built to contain him there, he begins tearing a path through the galaxy. Eventually this path leads him to Earth, where a newly anointed Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) must quickly learn the ropes if he hopes to save his planet.

The Meat: This sounds like a pretty good setup for a cosmic superhero story, allowing for big action and alien interaction as Green Lantern learns about the other members of The Corps. Somewhere amidst the six screenwriters, and who knows how many rewrites, the screenplay loses all emotional impact. And the blame can’t solely be placed on the CG, which is good but overbearing in many places.

Ryan Reynolds is competent but forgettable as Hal Jordan, a hero who supposedly is given this honor because of his fearlessness, but who turns out to be a whiny sissy for much of the movie. Whereas ‘Iron Man’ embraced Tony Stark’s arrogance and showed his weaknesses without apologizing for who he was, apparently Warner Brothers thought it would be a good idea to turn ‘Green Lantern’ into a Lifetime movie for men – complete with under-cooked daddy issues. To top it off, any momentum in the action is routinely broken up by a serene romance between Reynolds and Blake Lively’s Carol Ferris that feels more like a brother/sister bond than anything remotely sexual. That lack of sexual tension is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the movie – nothing goes very far in either direction, and what we end up with is a middling snoozefest.

Take the secondary villain, Peter Sarsgaard’s Dr. Hank Hammond, who is powered by a small infection from Parallax’s power of fear. He becomes telepathic and telekinetic(and insane). But everything he does is confined to small gatherings on Earth (a dinner party, a laboratory). Remember the scale of the story’s setup, and the potential for a cosmic police chase? Completely ruined now. Instead of epic outer-space battles, we’re left with a movie focusing on Hammond’s problems with his father and Hal’s self-doubts and budding romance with Ferris. Meanwhile Parallax barrels through the galaxy murdering millions of alien life-forms offscreen. We only see Parallax truly in action when he rips the souls out of a few individuals, and by then it always feels like an afterthought.

No matter how much happens at once on screen, the amazing thing is that Green Lantern is never entertaining. Not once did the large group of people involved in its making decide what this movie was going to be about. Character arcs are meaningless, the alien designs don’t work, the humor is saccharine, and the threat never feels real or, more importantly, epic. There also is almost no time spent with Hal learning to use his powers, so the idea that he’s ready to confront Parallax is ludicrous. There’s nothing engaging here. If they do make a sequel, let’s hope there are more set pieces and the filmmakers have the self-restraint to use makeup for some of the aliens. That way maybe it won’t feel like a series of nicely rendered video game cut scenes. On the good side, the CG is well done in many places, and the movie does end in less than two hours which was a huge relief.

The Movie: 4/10

Director: Spike Jonze
Writer(s): Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers

Cast:
Max Records – Max
Catherine Keener – Connie
Forest Whitaker – Ira
James Gandolfini – Carol
Lauren Ambrose – KW
Catherine O’Hara – Judith
Michael Berry Jr. – The Bull
Chris Cooper – Douglas
Paul Dano – Alexander

Preamble:
The 1963 children’s book by Maurice Sendak, 48 pages and 10 sentences long, gets adapted to live action by Spike Jonze.

Plot Points:

There isn’t much in the way of plot, as the original picture book was largely unconcerned with it. The essence though, is that a child is upset, runs away, and imagines a better world for himself where his home life is “easier” and controlled by him.

The Meat:
The natural inclination when seeing a movie like this is to question the need for its existence. With such bare bones source material, isn’t the adaptation rife for failure? Is there so much visual invention in Spike’s work that he can cover up the lack of a human cast and linear storytelling? There’s plenty potential for a Transformers 2 type “why the hell was this movie made” response. The movie’s greatest achievement, however, might be in reminding adult viewers that ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ never existed to service a plot.

Max’s parents are probably divorced, at the very least his mother is dating. She’s not paying full attention to him, and the man she’s being friendly with downstairs (instead of playing with Max) certainly isn’t his father. Max has just learned that the sun will die one day. That’s the plot setup for the film, and it’s all we need. Escaping into a nearby forest area after losing it with his mother, still wearing his wolf costume, the imaginative protagonist does what many children do instinctively – he acts as his own therapist. Who better to illustrate the session than the director of ‘Adaptation’?

Max projects all of his emotions onto imaginary wild beings, unable to grasp larger concepts in more realistic terms. If the Sun is going to die and parents don’t stay together, a child’s frame of reference for things like permanence, love, and friendship is shattered. He has to redefine these things, prematurely forced into an emotional form of puberty as so many children in single-parent households are. It’s the aftermath of a car crash, and Max goes to regain his bearings in the forest. Here, he re-imagines sections of arguments he’s heard, combined with his own fears and wishes for both the adults in his life and himself. Wishing himself to be king and trying his best to bring happiness, Max takes ownership of a situation where he was powerless. He forces all the giants around him to just… “be still”. He then sets out to accomplish his stated mission, making everyone happy again.

The problem of course, is the way these giants make things more complicated than play time and sleep time(the illustration of selfish affection is especially well done). Carefully considering the nature of consequences and complex emotions, he realizes in time his own smallness. As one of the characters says about the Sun “why worry about that little thing when I’m so big?” It’s sad to see Max finally gain perspective, and appreciate all those “you’ll understand when you’re older” conversations; but it’s also fun watching him oversee a group of Giant creatures building a life-sized version of a child’s fort along the shore. ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ alternates heavily between the two emotions, between real grave situations and fantasy, and our protagonist acts and talks like children with overactive imaginations generally do. There’s never a “creepy child actor who speaks too well for his age” moment despite Max Records being nearly the only human actor for most of the film. For that, there aren’t many better examples of character studies of children in memory. Pan’s Labyrinth has a sister.

*Special nod for the voice work, which is as good as any animation.

Movie – 10/10

Director: Michael Bay
Writer(s): Ehren Kruger/Roberto Orci/Alex Kurtzman

Cast:
Shia LaBeouf – Sam Witwicky
Megan Fox – Mikaela Banes
Josh Duhamel – Major Lennox
Tyrese Gibson – USAF Master Sergeant Epps
John Turturro – Agent Simmons
Ramon Rodriguez – Leo Spitz

Preamble:
Transformers finds itself in the filmmaking limbo of a movie that’s too bad to be tolerable, and not bad in the specific ways that can make it fun to ridicule.

Plot Points:
At the end of the first film, Megatron was sunk to the bottom of the ocean and the Decepticons were sent scrambling. This time they’ve found a way to bring him back and are looking for revenge. The Allspark cube from the first Transformers film was destroyed, but it turns out there are two fragments remaining. The first is guarded by the military in a top secret underground location. The second was hidden in Sam’s jacket for the last two years (apparently he couldn’t feel the difference in weight), and is conveniently found when he’s getting ready to leave Bumblebee behind and move to college.

The Meat:
Let’s get the positives out of the way so we can talk about the other 99% of the movie. Megan Fox is stunning, Michael Bay knows how to shoot her, and the explosions are great.

While Sam extensively handled the allspark in the previous film without issue, the shard gives him uncontrollable visions in which advanced knowledge and understanding spew from him like a broken faucet. More amazing is the fact that, when Sam and Optimus Prime discuss the Allspark shortly thereafter, Sam somehow neglects to tell Optimus that he found a second piece in his jacket. The Decepticons are focused not only on retrieving the underground fragment, but the shard that Sam has given to his girlfriend. No explanation is given for why they actually want to kill him, but we’ll just assume it’s because they don’t like him very much. So as a recap, he not only knows that it’s a prized possession, but he (a) doesn’t tell Optimus about it (b) doesn’t use it to help Optimus when he desperately needs its power later in the film, and (c) doesn’t realize that putting it in his girlfriend’s hands will put her life in grave danger. This all despite the fact that when the shard falls out of his hands it radiates and rips through three floors in his parents’ house, as well as transforming nearby machines into mini Decepticons that attack him instantly. So let us at least say this, Sam isn’t overprotective.

Once the Decepticons realize Sam has the other piece, they send a female terminator type of machine to stalk him in college. Bringing in the element of evil machines disguised as humans draws comparisons to stories from the Terminator, Matrix, and Battlestar Galactica fiction. Transformers does not compare favorably to any of these. The fact that other people in the college know who she is suggests she was planted at the college well ahead of Sam’s arrival – representing a plot hole that is too gigantic to delve into. Sam, somehow, doesn’t realize her true nature, allowing for a conveniently timed visit from his actual girlfriend whom he had just stood up on a virtual date just as this machine is on top of him in bed. So, let us say this, Sam isn’t very observant. At this point, one realizes Transformers 2 is simply a bad 1980’s script for a farcical teenage comedy – with robots and explosions. Doesn’t sound like a good combination, does it?

A later side plot involves Sam’s college roommate, Leo, who runs a website dedicated to exposing the coverup of the Transformers’ presence. How it is that these giant machines, which constantly fight in crowded city environments, can still be the subject of a coverup is another unexplained plot hole. This is what happens when you have three people work on one script. For the rest of the film, Leo comes along for what can only be described as semi-comic relief. This doesn’t make any sense once John Turturro’s Agent Simmons is brought back into things, and his panicky nature doesn’t make sense as Sam’s character already covers that ground repeatedly. Then again it makes perfect sense for a movie where the answer to every question is “more”. It should also be noted that Simmons’ mock movie-voiceover sounds exactly like the actual narratives in the movie. It’s frustrating when your work is so bad that it accidentally mocks itself.

It gets worse: robots have dangling balls, use fluids like urine, are described as “shedding metal” with American soldiers, and in one case even hump a human’s leg like a dog. This is thrown in just in case the audience forgets the two earlier scenes where real life dogs are shown humping. Sam’s mother apparently has no idea what weed brownies are, which is incredible considering her age. A snooty stuffed shirt from the government is introduced to give the audience a human to dislike. His pandering, one dimensional character makes Bill Pullman’s President Clint Eastwood routine in ‘Independence Day’ look Shakespearian by comparison. Sam’s girlfriend figures out not to talk on the phone (maybe that’s something to think about when you’re fighting machines?), but the military yaps away while the Decepticons listen to every conversation they have. Sort of like when NASA scientists built Bruce Willis’ design upside down in ‘Armageddon’. Shia’s real life broken hand is not written into the script – it simply shows up with a bandage and a splint 2/3 of the way through the movie in the middle of the desert.

The “Fallen” from the title is revealed to be an ancient robotic threat to peace on Earth. This only opens up more inane plot holes, like the original Autobots sacrificing their lives in order to create a tomb for a sun-destroying machine. This instead of destroying it – apparently they were leaving it viable just in case modern scientists developed a more environmentally friendly purpose for a machine designed to end all life on the planet. There are also tons of shots of the military and all the gadgets and vehicles Michael Bay is fascinated with. Did we mention teleporting? There are teleporting Transformers – and they use walking canes. The horrible editing concludes with an hour long ending fight scene. The greatest injustice in having to sit through this triplechanger train wreck, is that it didn’t even have the decency to be short.

Movie – 2/10