I saw 'District 9' and was like "meh..."

Neill Blomkamp's feature film District 9, an expansion of his 2005 short Alive in Joburg, has been much anticipated for some time by sci-fi fans. The 29 year old Blomkamp has become a protege of sorts to Lord of the Rings producer/director Peter Jackson, with the two of them set to collaborate on Halo, a long in development - and currently in limbo - adaptation of a popular video game. When the Halo production collapsed, Jackson helped Blomkamp move ahead with District 9. The finished film was well received by film critics, and enthusiastically embraced by the fans who had been looking forward to it.

In the world the film depicts, it has been 20 years since a massive alien spacecraft stalled in the sky above Johannesburg in South Africa. The surviving aliens on board - an insectoid species who lost their commanding class through circumstances the film is vague on, leaving only the less advanced drone class - have been relocated to the district of the title, a sprawling shanty town where over time these interstellar visitors have been reduced to the status of third world refugees.

The basic setup is not unlike that of Alien Nation (1988, Graham Baker), but where the earlier film was pretty much a formulaic buddy cop film given an alien twist, District 9 presents an allegory for apartheid, problematically set in the same area where apartheid occurred. I say problematically because District 9 unfolds in documentary style, striving to present a realistic view of this world while conveniently ignoring the notion that international governments and institutions would be likely to become involved in the welfare of the "prawns" - as they have come to be known - rather than leaving their management to a callous combination of big business, a corrupt local government, and the military.

There is no indication in the film that anyone is aware of the irony of history repeating, nor that there is anyone on the planet who has responded to the aliens with anything other than contempt, disgust, or - at best - a desire to exploit them. The only people in the film shown to have any sort of relationship with the aliens are Nigerian crime gangs, who sell the aliens tinned cat food (a favourite food of theirs, recalling the aliens getting drunk on sour milk in Alien Nation) in exchange for highly advanced weaponry which cannot be operated by humans, being coded to only respond to the aliens' genetic imprint.

Evil corporation MNU has spent twenty years studying these weapons and slicing up aliens in a laboratory that looks like an abattoir, seemingly without actually learning anything about them. With unease growing in the nearby human population, the decision is made to relocate the aliens to District 10, a more isolated encampment. Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is the inept executive put in charge of the relocation. He is the one character in the film who is given any development. A lot of crazy things happen to him, but his progression is a simple one from racist idiot to simply idiot, with one or two unlikely detours into action man territory. Nearly all the other human characters in the film are xenophobic arseholes with no shades of grey whatsoever, which if nothing else is consistent with the uncharitable view of humanity as a whole.

The film uses the documentary form cleverly to convey a great deal of information efficiently, but then occasionally stoops to insulting the audience - the use of subtitles when a character is speaking heavily accented but still fairly intelligible English is a pet hate of mine. Elsewhere, the viewer is required to use imagination to breach vast gaps in logic - the MacGuffin which drives much of the action is a canister of fluid which seems to be either fuel or a power source but is then revealed to have DNA altering properties if a person is exposed to it, and a thwarted escape attempt in a long buried drop ship is rendered meaningless when, five minutes later, the drop ship is lifted up by a tractor beam from the mothership, activated by remote control from on board the drop ship.

It ended up feeling to me like a lot of really "cool" shots or moments linked together with ropey logic and contrivance: at one point Wikus, in a tight spot with a Nigerian crime lord, conveniently finds a powerful weapon lying on the ground within his reach. It has to be said that what Blomkamp has achieved technically with his 30 million dollar budget shows up how ridiculous it is to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a Transformers film. The aliens are never less than completely convincing, whether in a wide shot of dozens of them, or an expressive single close up of one of their faces, and Weta Digital's photorealistic spacecraft is always shown with loose hand held camerawork so we can admire how rock steady motion tracking software has become. Clinton Shorter's score throws Wailing Ethnic Woman (TM) at us when we're supposed to feel sad, but the drama the film presents is not compelling enough to smooth over the gaps in logic, let alone earn our tears.

Super

I rented Iron Man (2008, Jon Favreau) on Blu-ray this week. Now, there is no way that I'm in the target audience for a film like this. I suffer from an extreme case of superhero fatigue - tales of men with secret identities who dress in gadget laden outfits to fight crime and take vengeance don't interest me at all. Sometimes an individual film in the genre will take my fancy, but as a whole, superheroes just don't do it for me. I think Spiderman 2 (2004, Sam Raimi) is the contemporary high water mark for the form, much as Richard Donner's 1978 Superman was at the time.

Iron Man is a much loved and hugely successful film. Of course, so are Christopher Nolan's Batman films - Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008) -  and they both left me cold. So let's just say superhero films generally face an uphill battle when it comes to me liking them. It's a battle Iron Man struggled with for the first forty or so minutes, before I grudgingly came around to admitting that I was finding it quite enjoyable.

One of the things that was so great about Iron Man, I was breathlessly assured in blogs and conversations with aficionados of the genre, was how the main character, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is an arrogant prick who discovers compassion along the way. All very well and good, and the choice of Downey - a man who has been to hell and back with his own demons and never been boring onscreen - was promising. However, the film is not brave enough to challenge the audience to like the man - yes, he's never far from a whiskey on the rocks, even when being driven through a war zone in the Middle East, he treats his staff like dirt, and ignores the affections of the ever loyal Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), but he's really a likeable rogue, the kind of lovable bad boy that the film really just wants us to adore from the outset. He'd take a private jet to get milk and seduce the stewardess on the way, and every teenage male in the audience wants to be him.

I know, of all the things to complain about, I choose to complain about a character being likeable. For me, watching Iron Man was akin to sitting down to what is expected to be a spicy dish and instead being served vanilla ice-cream. The terrific cast acquit themselves well, and Jon Favreau proves himself a competent and workman-like director, certainly no visionary, but not a hack, either. The film improves as it goes along, with composer Ramin Djawadi dropping the annoying "hey kids, isn't this bit cool?" guitars when the film has to settle down to dramatic business in the climax - the score improves to the point of not being noticeable. How's that for damning with faint praise?

The film schizophrenically creates a character arc around Tony Stark's realisation that weapons manufacture may not be the best use for his talents, while celebrating and fetishising his increasingly sophisticated suit and fire power. A particularly troubling moment has Stark jetting into a Middle Eastern hotbed of terrorism and kicking butt, until he's faced with a multiple hostage situation - the hostages being a group of women and children (of course). He pauses for a moment, and we wonder how the situation will be resolved. Cut to the interior heads up display in Stark's helmet, a bunch of CGI target trackers isolating the bad guys, who are then all taken out by an array of weapons which appear from the shoulders of the suit, leaving the bewildered hostages standing while their aggressors drop dead around them. Within the space of one minute, the film has raised the notion of how complicated these real world situations can be and then solved it with a piece of simplistic wish fulfillment. Am I reading too much into this? I thought we might have left this stuff behind when James Cameron combined Islamic terrorism and comedy relief in his 1994 film True Lies, but apparently not.

Finally, I was pretty surprised by the number of gags the film lifts wholesale from older films, especially RoboCop (1987, Paul Verhoeven) and Rocketeer (1991, Joe Johnston). At least Favreau shows good taste in the films he steals from.

'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'

I know what you're thinking. You read the headline and thought "this is what Vader's kept me waiting six weeks for? His thoughts on Michael Bay's latest Spectacular Spectacular?"

Transformers began as a cheaply produced animated television show in 1984, devised to sell the new range of toys created by Hasbro. The basic premise - a race of robotic beings bring their eons old war to Earth, where they indulge their fetish for imitating human tech (cars, trucks, the odd fighter plane or portable CD player) - is so mind bogglingly moronic that bringing any expectations of sense or drama to a movie adaptation can only lead to disappointment. What was truly depressing about Michael Bay's Transformers (2007) was not what a poor effort the film was, but rather the fact that the movie-going public embraced it as the best that the contemporary Hollywood action film had to offer. Everyone drank the Kool-Aid and made the film a tremendous hit at the box office, as though we'd all made an unspoken pact to forget about films like Die Hard (1988, John McTiernan).

Most film critics, I felt, were too kind to Bay's film. The general feeling seemed to be that decrying the films lack of quality would be a waste of time in the face of a multi-million dollar marketing onslaught and rabid fan expectations. Conversely, reviews of the new sequel - the just released Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - are a bit harsh for what, to my eyes, is essentially a larger helping of the same dish Michael Bay served up in the first film.

Michael Bay is regularly given ridiculous amounts of money to make films with, and yet his films look like the work of a director who desperately needs to go to film school. His grasp of visual grammar is so poor that his action sequences are usually incoherent messes. The first Transformers was actually a better experience on home video - Michael Bay's restless cameras and ADD editing become more comprehensible on a smaller screen.

The new film has all the exact same problems and virtues as the first - an opening action sequence set in Shanghai is spectacularly staged, but had me confused at times as to which of the robotic machines on screen were good guys or bad guys. The only time the poor editors are permitted to linger on a shot for longer than 2 seconds is when the visual effects team have come up with a particularly spectacular shot involving complex particle animation. In fact, visual effects buffs - fans of rotoscoping, rendering, and compositing - will find much to enjoy during the excessive running time.

Elsewhere, it can be said that Shia LeBeouf once again demonstrates how fortunate the franchise is to have such a charismatic and capable actor to hang all the silliness from - as in the previous film, he is always believable, even when given the most ridiculous of scenarios to enact. John Turturro seems more comfortable here than in the first outing, and finds a better screen rapport with LeBeouf. Megan Fox - so fresh in the first film - is starting to resemble a Transformer herself from a misguided devotion to cosmetic work. She enters the film backlit and draped across a motorcycle, as though Bay forgot for a moment he was shooting a film instead of a pin-up calendar. Kevin Dunn and Julie White return as LeBeouf's parents, and again we are given a pair of capable and naturally funny actors wasted in thankless roles - the sequence where White, as Judy Witwicky, gets high on brownies during a visit to her son's college is a prime example of the type of "humour" we can find in a Transformers film. The audience I saw the film with was laughing, which is a little depressing.

The film is top notch technically, but is that really saying much when the budget is in the realm of $200 million? Composer Steve Jablonsky is no hack, but he's provided the film with another identikit, one-size-fits-all score (much as he did for the first film), aided by several credited additional composers, a team of orchestrators, with a prominent "thank you" to Hans Zimmer in the end credits. The film has made something like $200 million in five days, so it's unlikely that Hollywood will learn any lessons or attempt to make any improvements when the franchise makes the inevitable third outing.

No way to kick-start a franchise - 'Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan'

This one's for Vance...

Popping Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, Nicholas Meyer) into the PS3 the other day was an enjoyable reminder of what a truly terrific film this is. The phenomenon that is Star Trek has an interesting history - the original television series ran for three seasons before being cancelled due to poor ratings, despite a hardcore fanbase. It promptly rose from the dead as a huge hit in syndicated re-runs around the globe, leading to the production of an animated television series (with most of the cast from the live action show returning) which ran for a couple of seasons in the early 70s. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was involved in an attempt to launch a second television series in the late 70s. The project - called Star Trek: Phase II - was abandoned after the huge success of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), with Paramount (the studio who own the property) deciding the time was right for a big screen version.

Many elements that were devised for the television project ended up being adapted for the first feature film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979, Robert Wise). At the time the most expensive motion picture ever produced, the film - which is ponderous, humourless, and dull - became one of the notable box office disasters of its time. Despite the poor reception of the film, Paramount were willing to give the franchise another shot. The makers of The Wrath of Khan were fully aware that they were being given one final spin of the wheel, and were determined to go out with a bang.

The bang was big enough to re-ignite the franchise, which is actually kind of unfortunate: Khan is a great space opera/revenge story, but also a wistful meditation on growing old and facing mortality. Which didn't really leave the story much place to go over further films: the age of the main cast, having already been used for maximum emotional impact, is reduced to increasingly cheap gags in the following sequels.

Khan also boldly left the world of Star Trek in disarray - Kirk (William Shatner) is re-united with an old flame, Carol Marcus (Bibi Besch), as well as meeting for the first time her son by him, David (Merritt Butrick), now a grown man who despises everything Kirk stands for. Not to mention having his closest friend Spock (Leonard Nimoy) sacrificing himself to save the USS Enterprise and her crew.

The following two films (which, with Khan, comprise a loose trilogy) are stuck attempting to create drama whilst restoring the status quo. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984, Leonard Nimoy) takes everything back, with Spock resurrected via plot devices which had been planted in Khan (you know, just in case), Carol Marcus inexplicably vanishing between films, and David killed off by the Klingons - his death would be promptly forgotten until it resurfaces in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991, Nicholas Meyer) to motivate Kirk's deeply felt hatred of the Klingons, here manifesting as resistance to the failing Klingon Empire's attempts to make peace with the Federation.

Search for Spock does destroy the starship Enterprise - surely the most fetishised spaceship in all science fiction cinema. The ship is regularly showcased in indulgent effects sequences, the camera lovingly gliding across its lines and curves as it leaves spacedock. Composers Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner even create passable orchestral renditions of the sound of the ship zooming off at warp speed. The destruction of the ship in Search for Spock promisingly turns her crew into a group of vagabonds cruising the galaxy in a stolen Klingon warship, but again, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986, Leonard Nimoy) demonstrates that no-one's playing for keeps.

The final scene of The Voyage Home has the crew (with Kirk demoted from Admiral to Captain, another step towards ensuring the status quo) presented with a brand new, identical Enterprise, this one with the letter A appended to the registration number. Similarly, potential romantic interest Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks) - who travels with Kirk and co to the 23rd century from her native 1986 at the end of The Voyage Home - did not appear in any further films. Which is probably a good thing - my recent re-viewing of The Voyage Home revealed her to be a remarkably unhinged character, valuing her captive humpback whales over human relationships, offering Kirk and Spock a ride when all the evidence she's seen of them so far points to them being a pair of possibly dangerous lunatics, and finally abandoning her entire life to travel three centuries into the future at the drop of a hat.

The Voyage Home was the one true box-office smash out of the films featuring the original cast, but it seemed nothing could make Paramount executives forget the amount of money they had lost on the first film, as they kept applying pressure to keep costs on the films down - Khan reuses several visual effects sequences from the first film, and The Voyage Home keeps the Klingon warship cloaked (and hence cheaply invisible) for most of the running time.

The confident teaser poster for The Final Frontier had

people talking. Of course, no-one had yet seen the film.

Or perhaps their tight fist on the budget of the 1989 Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was down to a lack of faith in debutante film director William Shatner. The completed film - an unmitigated disaster - is not helped by substandard visual effects work, the result of an unwise decision to look at more cost effective alternatives than Industrial Light & Magic, who had provided visual effects for the previous three films. In terms of narrative, The Final Frontier is the most negligible of the films - the series had jumped through hoops to essentially hit a huge RESET button on the story, and Shatner's film never even vaguely threatens to end in any manner other than the whole crew back together and sailing off in the Enterprise. More than any of the other films, it resembles a poor episode of the original show - it remains the only film which never even has aspirations to do anything grander for the big screen. Which in a strange way is kind of charming: the film may be shite, but it's affectionately made shite. With one blow the franchise had lost all the goodwill generated by The Voyage Home, which remained the only one of the films to appeal to an audience broader than the Star Trek fanbase.

By this time, the franchise had returned more successfully to television in the form of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), which would be followed by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999), Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) and finally (so far) Enterprise (2001-2005). The cinematic franchise, however, resembled a pull start motor that just wouldn't ignite - Khan was a reboot of sorts, throwing out most new elements that had been introduced in The Motion Picture, and the sixth film, The Undiscovered Country, was devised to give the cast a decent send-off and wash out the after-taste of The Final Frontier.

Khan director Nicholas Meyer returned for this film. Again, the studio applied downward pressure on the budget, forcing set pieces to be scaled back and mandating the use of existing sets from the then in production television shows. The character of Saavik - a Vulcan cadet introduced in Khan and played in that film by Kirstie Alley (Robin Curtis played the role in the following two films when Paramount was unwilling to meet Alley's asking price, and the character was left behind on Vulcan at the beginning of The Voyage Home) - was originally included in the script in an attempt to lure Alley back to the role. Alley was unwilling to return to the role, and the character was re-written as Valeris (Kim Cattrall), which made it pretty obvious that she was a member of a conspiracy to prevent the Federation and the Klingons making peace - anyone who appears on the bridge of the Enterprise and is not part of the main cast ultimately exists to die, or be a bad guy, or both. Had the character been Saavik, her betrayal would have perhaps carried more emotional weight - in any case, Nimoy and Cattrall make the most of the situation. Cattrall - who was a livewire presence in many films in the 80s (many of them silly comedies) before belatedly coming to superstardom as Samantha Jones in Sex and the City - certainly demonstrates a greater commitment to the idea of playing a Vulcan than Kirstie Alley ever did. Where Alley was unwilling to sacrifice glamour and feminine allure, retaining her own Brooke Shields eyebrows and long flowing hair, Cattrall presents with shaved temples, angled Vulcan eyebrows and a dark bob.

Kirstie Alley as Saavik in The Wrath of Khan

- unwilling to lose her glamour to play a Vulcan.

Kim Cattrall as Valeris in The Undiscovered Country

- showing a bit more commitment.

It was safe to break some things for good by this time - Hikaru Sulu (George Takei) is finally given the command of his own starship, an idea which had been considered as early as the third film but abandoned when William Shatner protested, wanting to remain Captain to the entire crew. It was, after all, intended as the final film to feature the original cast, and anyway the drama of the Klingons wanting to become part of the Federation was preempted by The Next Generation, which is set some 70 years after the original show (but had been running for a few years when The Undiscovered Country was released) and has a Klingon officer serving on the Enterprise D. Nevertheless, rather than acknowledging that the crew of the Enterprise might have at some stage retired, lived the rest of their lives, and died, The Undiscovered Country wraps up with them sailing off into the blinding sunlight in the starship, before the signatures of the main cast are animated on screen (signing their own names rather than that of the characters) to the fanfares of Cliff Eidelmen's score. The suggestion seems to be that they sailed straight into myth.

Three years later, The Next Generation also made the transition to the cinema - Star Trek: Generations (1994, David Carson) was the first of four films which went through a familiar cycle of destroying and promptly replacing the Enterprise, making empty promises to develop character relationships, giving the Captain - this time around, Jean Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) - one-film-only special guest love interests, and giving cast members the chance to direct. The films played to an increasingly disinterested public and disappointed fanbase, with only one box office hit - Star Trek: First Contact (1996, Jonathan Frakes), another time travel story directed by a cast member which matches Jean Luc Picard with the appealing Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard, another potentially good addition to the cast who gets left behind at the end of the film). The advertising material kept promising that each film was bigger, better, and more action packed than the previous one, but the truth is Paramount was always a bit timid with the marketing of a new Trek film, at least until the currently screening J.J. Abrams reboot of the franchise, simply titled Star Trek (2009).

It is easy to imagine Paramount's marketing department breathing a huge sigh of relief that they are no longer saddled with trying to sell a cast mainly aged in their sixties to the much coveted youth demographic. This time around, those form fitting Starfleet uniforms adorn the hot young bodies of the likes of Chris Pine (Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock), and Zoe Saldana (replacing Nichelle Nichols as Uhura). As a reboot, it's a step in a promising direction, although it remains to be seen if the inevitable sequels will attain the sort of storytelling boldness which eluded the previous run of films.

On the bookshelf: The Stand, by Stephen King

I know some people who insist that Stephen King is a poor writer. I've often heard his work talked about as being the literary equivalent of a meal from McDonald's. It's a description the disarming author would probably not mind, indeed it's possible he may have used it himself in one of his hugely entertaining pieces of non-fiction. In many cases, these impressions have been based on the many cinematic adaptations of his work rather than from any first hand reading of the novels. Which is a shame, as the cinematic adaptations cross a wide spectrum, from low budget trash to glossy Oscar winners made by directors ranging from auteurs like Stanley Kubrick to journeyman-for-hire Lewis Teague.

But I think King has penned a few masterpieces in his time. For me, he even has a Holy Trinity of sorts in his work - 'Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), and The Stand (1978). The Stand was re-issued in 1990, this time with King being able to re-instate material that was edited out of the original publication to bring the hardcover price down to one the market could bear. It is this expanded edition that I recently finished reading. I had forgotten - until I came across the first one - that it had illustrations by long-time Stephen King collaborator Bernie Wrightson, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I love seeing how different film-makers have tackled the challenge of successfully translating a Stephen King novel to the screen. I've read a lot of the books and seen most of the adaptations, and it's fascinating to see the variations in fidelity to the source text, budget, director, and format - feature film or tv mini-series? - and how examples that have both worked and failed can be found across the whole spectrum of variables. And the fact that several novels have been adapted more than once, often in different formats, makes if even more informative.

I'm gonna digress for a moment here. I've just paused to wonder who would find this stuff informative, and why I find this stuff interesting. Which takes me to the purpose of this blog - an attempt to kickstart my own thought processes and get the rusty mental machinery of actually writing to work. So maybe it's the wanna-be-screenwriter like myself who could be interested. Or not, let's see where the hell I'm going with this...

Carrie was adapted into a feature film by director Brian DePalma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen in 1976. It was fairly faithful to the novel and captured the spirit of Stephen King's nasty schoolyard - if anything the film gave the material an even harsher edge. The film was a huge success, launching several careers - even Stephen King's, arguably - with Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie both receiving Oscar nominations for their performances, no mean feat for a cheap horror movie in one of Hollywood's best ever decades. The novel was adapted again in 2002, this time as a 132 minute telemovie. It has an interesting cast and hews much closer to the novel than the DePalma version, yet is much less effective.

And even bigger contrast is demonstrated by the two versions of The Shining. Stanley Kubrick's film absolutely guts the source text - the shell of the narrative remains, turning Stephen King's crazy spookshow into an intimate look at three people cracking up. And the film is an all-time great, undervalued at the time of release but now receiving due recognition. It's an unsettling film, right down to its very form, with the opening titles scrolling up the screen in a manner usually used for end credits - nothing has happened yet and we're already thrown, not quite knowing what to make of the film.

In 1997, The Shining was adapted again as a three part television mini-series directed by Mick Garris from a teleplay - Christ, how I hate that word, it's still a screen, why can't they use screenplay or just written by - a teleplay, I say, by Stephen King. This one was slavishly faithful to the novel and fumbled every ball on the way to the screen, not helped by silly things like rocking chairs gently rocking by themselves to lead into commercial breaks, as if to remind the audience - before the messages from the sponsors - that something spooky is going on in the Overlook Hotel. Big set pieces like little Danny Torrence being stalked by the hedge animals (a large lion, rabbit, and dog) - which Kubrick wisely avoided completely in 1980, but could have been realised wonderfully in 1997 - are ineffective and flat. Stephen King writes in vivid images and contrasts the total silence of the sunny late Autumn day with the soft clump of snow falling off the animals as they move, unseen. It's all there - the pictures (and even the soundtrack) are so clear, and work so wonderfully. Yet the mini-series smothers the whole scene with "hey guys, this is a spooky bit" music, and is too eager to get to the (not that great) CGI hedge animals, leeching everything effective from the scene. If the money to write and record the music had gone into a smaller number of CG shots (which would be more effective for the extra budget per shot), the scene would have been terrific. A similar "less is more" approach would have improved the entire mini-series, which has a good cast and is technically proficient but misses King's moods and tones completely.

'Salem's Lot became an effective television mini-series in 1979, directed by Tobe Hooper from the teleplay - there's that word again - by Paul Monash. Monash, who had previously adapted Peyton Place (one of Stephen King's admitted influences on 'Salem's Lot) for television, plays fast and loose with King's narrative and characters, yet the end result is much more memorable than the more faithful 2004 mini-series.

The Stand made it to the screen as a four part mini-series for television in 1994, directed by Mick Garris from a script by King. It's a decent enough show, probably ranking as one of the better television adaptations of a Stephen King novel, and it had a sensational cast including Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Miguel Ferrer, Laura San Giacomo, and Rob Lowe, but it fails to capture the epic scope and sense of doom of the novel. Reading the novel again, it's so hard to decide which sort of adaptation I would like to see more - a HBO series running over three years to get every little detail in there, or a stripped-to-the-bone and bigger-than-life cinemascope spectacular, leanly racing through the narrative with vivid imagery? Not that it matters now that the ultimate adaptation of the novel has arrived.

Marvel Comics have embarked on a large scale comic book (or shall I say 'graphic novel'?) adaptation of King's novel. It comprises six books, each made up of five issues, and is everything a fan of the novel could want. One of King's goals when writing The Stand was to create an epic story that would play like a dark Americana version of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. If there are other fans of The Stand like me out there - and I suspect there are many - King succeeded. The Stand is, for me, a beloved story that is always a joy to dive into, the beats of the story as familiar as the back of my hand and pleasurably anticipated whenever I read the book. And the Marvel Comics adaptation is - so far - absolutely nailing the story.

It was all leading up to this: 'No Country For Old Men'

No Country For Old Men (2007, Joel and Ethan Coen) is a brilliant film with one of those maddening non-endings that can go either way with me: when John Sayles abruptly cut to black in Limbo (1999) it took my breath away, but the final scene of No Country felt unsatisfying. Perhaps I just didn't "get it". No matter - I love the film to bits, it's not like the ending ruined it for me. What I adored so much about the film was that, for the first time in what seemed liked forever, I was sitting in the theatre excitedly wondering "what happens next?" - happily twisted around the Coens' little fingers. After years of "plot developments" eliciting bored moans it was delightful to feel like I was really being told a story. The other thing I loved about the film was that it seemed the perfect distillation of everything that was once great about the Coen brothers before they really went Hollywood and started making films like Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and The Ladykillers (2004). Truth be told, I think the rot was setting in before these sell-out low points - I enjoy The Big Lebowski (1998) enough but certainly not as much as its fans do, and found the highly acclaimed The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) to be an empty experience.

No for me, the Coens are all about their first six films, each one perfect in its own way: Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), and Fargo (1996). I know I am a rare Coens fan who will put Hudsucker on the good list over Lebowski, but so be it. I've just always really dug The Hudsucker Proxy.

And so No Country For Old Men really felt like a return to form for me. It was like they'd made a new Blood Simple, only this time with the best technical team given enough money and a dream cast. Like Blood Simple, No Country For Old Men is a twisty thriller set in the wastelands of Texas, and the films have almost identical openings, with a world weary voice over (M. Emmet Walsh in Blood Simple, Tommy Lee Jones in No Country) speaking over desolate shots of Texan plains. The critical difference - one which is not immediately apparent to the viewer - is who is behind the laconic voice over. Walsh is a sleazy private investigator out to double cross his employer, Jones is a morally upstanding lawman who looks on with increasing disbelief at the violent crime scenes he is faced with. Both films concern bungled crimes, red herrings, and vital clues hidden away in cheap motel rooms. But where Blood Simple is an intricate clockwork mechanism that invites the audience to watch the characters scurry around like rats in a maze, No Country eschews explanations and takes the senseless violence of its world as a given. A deputy examining the aftermath of a drug deal turned shootout remarks "they even shot the dog!" and then a few scenes later we are shown Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) - at that stage the main audience identification figure - put into a situation where he has to do exactly that, in a climax of a terrific chase sequence which begins with him being pursued across the plains in the dead of night by two armed men in a truck and ends with the wounded Moss desperately swimming down a swiftly running stream by the pre-dawn light, the soon to be dead hound in hot pursuit.

No Country even manages to recall Raising Arizona - the famous scene where the murderous Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) challenges a gas station proprietor to a high stakes coin toss resembles the black flip side of the scene in Arizona where two bumbling prison escapees turned kidnappers hold up a small grocery store, with the classic dialogue exchange:

 EVELLE

(re: balloons) 

These blow up into funny shapes at all?

CASHIER

Well no. Unless round is funny.

But if No Country For Old Men has a true sibling in the Coens' body of work, it must surely be Fargo. Both films feature a canny, moral law enforcement officer tracking criminals across desolate landscapes by the frequently bloody aftermath of their crimes. The snowbound Minnesota of Fargo is as harsh and unforgiving as the dusty plains of No Country - Fargo discovers a beautiful contrast between the vast landscape and the warm places humans huddle inside, as well as making maximum usage of the clue concealing properties of snow. But the real connection between the films are the police officers played by Frances McDormand (Fargo's Marge Gunderson) and Tommy Lee Jones (No Country's Sheriff Bell). Marge and Sherrif Bell are not the focus at the beginning of the films, which both set up other protagonists and conflicts, allowing McDormand and Jones to slowly creep into the story (Marge Gunderson doesn't appear until about half an hour into Fargo) before they eventually become the emotional core of their respective films. The characters are also an interesting study in contrasts, from the most obvious difference (that of gender) to the fact that Marge eventually finds and overcomes her quarry, whereas Bell never comes face to face with Chigurh, and the film makes it pretty clear that he would be unlikely to emerge the victor from such a confrontation: Chigurh is as unknowable and implacable a force of evil as Michael Myers in Halloween (1978, John Carpenter).  Marge Gunderson also has a more optimistic outlook than Sheriff Bell - No Country ends with Bell looking forward (at least subconsciously) to being released from this world, where the heavily pregnant Marge is in the process of creating a new life herself.

The remarkable thing about how heavily No Country For Old Men draws from the Coens' earlier work is that it is adapted with extraordinary fidelity (to a fault - the last page of the novel is a great ending to a book, but I'd argue it doesn't work as the final scene to a film) from Cormac McCarthy's novel. All the elements discussed above come directly - and in many cases, just about word-for-word - from the novel. Was McCarthy watching Blood Simple and Raising Arizona when outlining his story, perhaps?

No Country For Old Men, I believe, marks the beginning of a true second wind for the Coens. They're no longer trying to fit in to Hollywood, rather Hollywood is giving them the resources to make films exactly how they want to, only now with the very best actors (and stars, even) and the sort of marketing campaigns which films like Miller's Crossing (still their most perfect film as far as I'm concerned) never got to benefit by. If No Country For Old Men is Blood Simple 2.0, I found that watching their next film, Burn After Reading (2008) expecting Raising Arizona 2.0 is a very good way to have expectations confounded. Which of course is what the Coens like to do best - confound expectations. I need to see Burn After Reading again, this time without looking for the patterns I saw in No Country For Old Men, to fully appreciate it, I think. And how heartening that the boys are still making films that are worth going back to see a second time - very rare these days.

James Mason et al...

The other night I was doing some random internet searching - mainly on "living fossils" such as the Coelacanth - and ended up finding this superb page detailing scores of different designs for Captain Nemo's submarine the Nautilus from Jules Verne's prescient piece of speculative fiction 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Inspired, I dug out my region 1 DVD of the 1954 Walt Disney film, looking forward to revisiting it. Unfortunately, our old DVD player is becoming a little tempermental and refused to load the disc.

In desperation, I put it in the PS3, knowing full well that it is locked to region 4 and wouldn't play the disc, as was indeed the case. What to do? I'd developed a craving for a 1950s adaptation of a Jules Verne novel, preferably starring James Mason.

Fortunately, I have a region 4 disc of Henry Levin's 1959 film Journey to the Center of the Earth, another childhood favourite. While still fun, it's a poor substitute for 20,000 Leagues..., that's for sure. On the plus side, it's colourful, James Mason and Arlene Dahl have a terrific love/hate relationship, much of the effects work was terrific for the time (they sure had some cojones to shoot daytime scenes on a beach and then stick matte paintings on the top to place the location footage inside a gigantic subterranean cavern), and Bernard Herrmann provides a typically wonderful score, all thundering timpani and moody church organs.

It would have taken balls to even attempt

an effects shot like this in 1959.

On the minus side, Henry Levin's direction is static, the film takes a little too long to get going, some of the sets and effects work have not dated well, and James Mason's Oliver Lindenbrook lacks the magnetism and sex appeal of his Captain Nemo. Not to mention the terrible songs shoe-horned in to the film due to the presence of Pat Boone. I might be being a little harsh, but I was really in the mood for James Mason with a beard, Kirk Douglas singing to a friendly seal, Peter Lorre's shiftiness, and a fight with a giant squid. Some iguanas with rubber appendages stuck on to turn them into Dimetrodons just didn't do it for me tonight.

I followed up with another favourite of my youth, Jack Arnold's 1955 giant-spider-run-amok flick Tarantula. This one's full of classic 1950s stiffness, with characters stopping still to deliver exposition to each other, and a bizarre mix of progressive feminism and sexism in the character of of Stephanie 'Steve' Clayton (Mara Corday), a clever scientist in her own right who quips "beauty must come before science" as she absents herself from the lab to keep a hair appointment. The giant spider itself is superbly realised for the most part through high speed photography of a real tarantula matted into location photography (often the shadows of the spider were also matted in, providing an extra kiss of realism), and it would be remiss of me not to mentioned an early uncredited role for Clint Eastwood, playing one of the fighter pilots who come in at the end to napalm the beast to oblivion.

Diminishing returns and 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy

Damn, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) is a fine film. A careful, respectful film. The pressure was on: generations of Tolkien fans were anxious to see if co-writer/director Peter Jackson could pull it off. Rumour has it almost the entire budget for the planned trilogy was spent getting the first film finished, and that the additional funding to complete the next two films would be dependent on box office takings.

Even in a three hour film, Peter Jackson had to race through Tolkien's narrative, honing in on following the journey of Frodo (Elijah Wood) and the Ring. The most sorely felt loss for many Tolkien readers was the omission of Tom Bombadil, but for the most part the narrative compression was done with great care and skill, imbuing the story with a terrific sense of urgency.

The finished result won critical raves, played to huge - and adoring - audiences, and delighted all but the most hardcore of Tolkien's fanbase. Those that went looking for things to quibble about could find them, but they were more likely to be disputes about Elvish dialects rather than genuine problems with the adaptation. Some purists protested elements such as the involvement of Arwen (Liv Tyler) in events her character wasn't part of in the book, as in when Frodo journeys to Rivendell. Others found the use of Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) as comic relief ("no-one tosses the Dwarf!") objectionable. And for the most literary minded, no film could capture the beauty of Tolkien's prose. Of course, these people made up the tiniest proportion of the cinema going audience, who largely had the time of their lives - the aforementioned line from Gimli never failed to get a huge laugh whenever I saw the film at the theatre, which was probably five or six times.

It's a genuinely thrilling and moving film, sure footed from the first moments to the last. One walked out of the cinema already anticipating the next film, and knowing that there was a genuine Christmas present coming for audiences for the next two years. Peter Jackson showed a gift for maximising the drama of the story - the encounter with the Balrog being the best example, a sequence deliciously drawn out as the Fellowship descends gigantic crumbling stairways in flight from the as yet unseen fire demon. The excitement is cranked up to a pants-wetting level before the reveal of the magnificent CG creation, until now only glimpsed in a brief shot in the trailers. The tactic worked again for the following films - the Ents in The Two Towers (2002) and giant spider Shelob in The Return of the King (2003) were also cleverly withheld from being overexposed in promotional material. The only way to really see these beauties in action was to buy a ticket.

The production was unique - the three films were shot over an extended period of many, many months, a time frame which encompassed the release of the first two films. After the box office success of the first film demonstrated what a gold mine the trilogy would be, the only limitations on the resources allocated to Peter Jackson were those of completing the films in time for the release dates. Scenes were shot, reworked, and shot again, sometimes in a genuine two way dialogue between film makers and audience. When Tolkien fans responded negatively to news that sequences featuring Arwen at the battle of Helm's Deep had been shot, the relevant material was reshot without her. Enthusiastic response to the Dwarf tossing gag meant that the humorous aspect to the Gimli character was emphasised in the subsequent films.

The release of the extended version of Fellowship on DVD was a new revelation, the already great film enriched by the additional material, the narrative more fully rounded, although such was the cleverness of John Gilbert's outstanding editing work we never saw the rough edges in the shorter version.

The Two Towers was released the following year to an even more enthusiastic response than the first film, with the remarkable creation of Gollum - an unprecedented fusion of performance and character animation - a particular favourite. I enjoyed the film enough, but felt something was amiss. It wasn't until after a couple of days thinking about it that I came around to the conclusion that I loved it. My friend Kate remarked that it was a common response to the film among people she knew, with her take being that it took a couple of days for people to put a positive spin on the film. I disagreed at the time, but I now think Kate's comment was pretty astute. The screenwriters have again grafted new elements onto Tolkien's story, but unlike the first film, some new story threads seemed out of place here. The warg attack which leads to Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) being separated from his fellows on the way to Helm's Deep is the best/worst example. In a film which already had a few too many fake-out character deaths (did anyone really think that Billy Boyd's Pippin was trampled to death by that horse?), trying to wring emotion from the notion that Aragorn falls from a cliff and out of the story was a bit much.

This fight sequence provided an action beat on the long trek to Helm's Deep, but the main raison d'etre for the narrative detour was to rope Liv Tyler's Arwen back into the story. She appears to the wounded Aragorn in a vision, spurring him to fight for life and resolving his feelings in the romantic triangle with Arwen and Eowyn (Miranda Otto). Tolkien's famously laddish adventure has no time for love triangles - Eowyn pines for Aragorn but there is never even a hint that he would reciprocate - and I can't help feeling that there's an element of cynicism here, a conscious attempt to make sure that the female half of the audience remains engaged amongst all the Orcs and battle cries. Viggo Mortensen seemingly concurs with Tolkien, as his Aragorn never offers more than undying friendship and respect to Eowyn, and as a result the whole sequence feels more like screenwriting than an organic progression of the drama. The net result of the plot detour is essentially nil - Aragorn ends up making his way to Helm's Deep after all, giving Peter Jackson an excuse to indulge in another lugubrious reunion scene, with the Elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom) behaving more like a wife to Aragorn than Arwen ever did.

Elsewhere, Peter Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens include character and plot points at 180 degree reversals from Tolkien: in the novel, the Ents decide to take war to Isengard, yet in the film the Ents decide that the matter is not their concern, with Treebeard (voiced by John Rhys-Davies) only changing his mind when witnessing first hand the devastation wrought upon the forests by Saruman (Christopher Lee). And Faramir (David Wenham) proves resistant to the temptation of the One Ring in the novel, but here takes Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) along with him to the besieged city of Osgiliath with the intention of turning the Ring over to his father Denethor (John Noble). In a difficult middle act film with no real beginning or ending, this allows Jackson an excuse for further action near the climax, as well as the opportunity for an encounter with the flying Nazgul which is frankly too close to believe.

In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film - fourth edition, film critic David Thomson - writing in 2002, when only the first film in the trilogy had been seen - wonders 'whether the frighteners in the Rings might not get out of hand before the series ends'. His writing was prescient - look at the sequence where Frodo, Sam, and Gollum (Andy Serkis) cross the Dead Marshes. What is haunting and poetic in the novel is here reduced to the stuff of a ghost ride, green ghouls leering out at the audience, in a sign of Peter Jackson's propensity to crank everything up to eleven.

However, I judge the extended edition of The Two Towers to be the most improved from the theatrical cut. The cross cutting between the three major story strands is better handled here, somehow more balanced. And the battle at Helm's Deep does not dominate the final half of the film as much as it does in the shorter version.

The Return of the King has a lot to get through, even with major sequences (such as the Scouring of the Shire) omitted. There's some set up here, but the film is mainly comprised of big climaxes and extended farewells. In the rush to get to the action, the wrap up of Saruman - a role which had been played up in the first two films - was reduced to a single line referencing the unseen character, to the vocal displeasure of Christopher Lee. This film has - for me at least - the most damaging deviation from the novel, when Frodo - swayed by Gollum's treachery - sends Sam away on the climb up to Shelob's lair. In a Screenwriting 101/Robert McKee sense the writers have upped the ante here, turning the screws on character conflicts present in the novel to maximise the conflict. In story and character terms, it's a betrayal of Sam's character - the finale of the first film was predicated on the notion that Sam's loyalty to Frodo and determination to stay with him know no bounds. And it robs the characters of one of their great moments in the novel - facing the horror of giant spider Shelob together. Sam ends up a johnny-come-lately to his biggest moment of heroism in the entire story, getting his moment in the spotlight in the superbly realised fight with the monster, but leaving at least this Tolkien reader wondering if an important beat with the two characters had been skipped or short-changed.

Of course, by now I probably sound to you like one of those Tolkien fans quibbling over Elvish dialects. Or maybe I passed that point three or five paragraphs ago. Far be it from me to argue with a bazillion dollars at the box office and a record number of Oscars - the three films comprising The Lord of the Rings are all wonderfully made, acted with heart, gripping, and exciting. There were maybe turns taken that I would have preferred taken another way, but the crank-it-up story sensibility that I bemoan when it takes the story on certain paths is the same sensibility that made many sequences so wonderful. So the good definitely comes with the bad.

The extended DVD version of The Return of the King is a strange thing. The expansions of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers were both improvements on the shorter edits, especially with the second film which saw some rushed storytelling clarified. The longer version of The Return of the King seems to me to be on exactly the same level as the shorter edit, with no overall improvement to the film as a whole. A lot of good - and necessary - material has been restored, such as the final confrontation with Saruman. Other additions which might have been expected to smooth out some trouble spots are less effective. Take the restored scenes at the Houses of Healing, for example. The theatrical edit of the film has a moment in the first of its many endings where we see Eowyn standing beside Faramir, indicating a healing of her unrequited love for Aragorn as well as a redirection of those feelings to Faramir. The reinsertion of the Houses of Healing scene - wherein Eowyn, recuperating from battle, begins to notice Faramir noticing her - should have provided the linking material in the relationship, but somehow it fails to gel. This perhaps highlights an inherent problem in trying to construct a contemporary style cinematic narrative from Tolkien's novel - this beginning of a romance becomes lost amidst the culmination of so many other story threads.

Elsewhere, and for the first time in the extended versions, The Return of the King contains redundancy, most notably in the new sequence at the start of disc 2 where Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas conquer the Corsair ships with the aid of the Army of Dead. Maybe it's churlish to deny Peter Jackson and his department heads their additional cameos as the crew of the ship, but the use here of the visual gag of the Army of Dead materialising behind the sword-wielding Aragorn diminishes the impact of the same image later in the film when the ships arrive at Gondor. Can I reiterate here my complaint about haunting prose becoming an fx spookshow in the Army of the Dead - more glowing green ghouls, Peter?

I may be giving the impression here I don't like the films, which is far from the case. The collective trilogy makes great viewing as a six part mini-series - one disc a night. It's easy to talk about the greatness of the enterprise and the excellence in every aspect of the productions. Not many people talk about alterations to the narrative which may be less, rather than more effective. What's interesting here is not so much passing judgement on decisions made by Peter Jackson and his team as seeing how they reflect changes in storytelling and audience expectations. Is Aragorn a more interesting character with a more compelling arc because the films have given him a measure of self doubt to overcome before he fulfills his destiny? Do we find the Hobbits more relatable because they've been transformed from the overgrown garden gnomes that Tolkien artists have been depicting for half a century into a quartet of hot young men? I'm not convinced myself. I think the perfect adaptation of The Lord of the Rings is yet to be made, and it's more likely to come in the form of three seasons of episodic television, taking the time to enjoy the journey as the novel does instead of rushing from one event to the next.

Now, a little aside about sexy Hobbits. I like my men - as Hannibal Lecter would say - 'roomy', although hotness does come in all shapes and sizes. Sean Astin's Samwise Gamgee became my definition of 'sexy' for a couple of years after seeing The Fellowship of the Ring. This probably lasted until I saw Aaron Eckhart carrying an extra 30 lbs. and a 70s porno moustache in Your Friends and Neighbours (Neil LaBute, 1998) - va va voom! Anyway, meandering back to the point - the casting of the Hobbits did have the side effect of making Tolkien's strong bonds of friendship and love look totally gay, and the fodder for an astonishing amount of slash fiction. Now look, my mind is as filthy as the most ardent writer of slash (usually women, the heterosexual male fantasy geek is alienated enough without authoring homoerotica - and I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the level of alienation the homosexual male fantasy geek experiences) - in my mind, of course those randy hobbits are buggering each other in the bushes whenever Gandalf isn't looking. And I'm pretty sure Merry (Dominic Monaghan) tried it on with Boromir (Sean Bean) at least once before the Orcs came along and ruined it for everyone. But I'm gay - I'm allowed to think dirty thoughts when Sean Astin and Elijah Wood look deeply into each other's eyes. It's unfortunate that everyone who saw the films thought 'gay' whenever the Hobbits got too lovey-dovey. Perhaps if they weren't pretty boys? Or maybe what we're seeing is an indicator of our society's inability to look unembarrassed at deeply felt male friendship without resorting to the protective ironic distance of sniggering at innuendo? But hey, this post is long enough without opening that can of worms...

Rented last weekend

Only three posts in January. Must... try... harder...

What to say about the remarkable WALL•E that hasn't already been said? I didn't see this one at the theatre, perhaps a little wary after Finding Nemo, which felt to me as though the mechanics of Pixar's storytelling were starting to show. WALL•E truly lived up to the rave reviews. The animation is so detailed and lifelike that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that you're not watching live action. I was completely enthralled from the opening minutes to the end. It's worth mentioning that this is the only time a film or television show has used Richard Strauss' 'Also sprach Zarathustra' as a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey without making me groan.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army was less satisfying. I liked Hellboy enough, but I think I was mainly just overjoyed to finally see some decent Lovecraftian monster gods in a movie. The sequel is a classic Hollywood-blockbuster-empty-spectacle, with a fabulous menagerie of fantastical creatures and one of those aggressive soundmixes that needs to be noticed constantly, topped off with Danny Elfman phoning in another superhero score.

Welcome to 2009

I wasn't going to post about the casting of relatively unknown actor Matt Smith as the new Doctor, but since Wired have used it as an excuse for the flimsiest look at the eleven Doctors, I figured 'what the hell'...

My first response was shock at how young he was. The first seven Doctors were men when I was a child, David Tennant is about the same age as me, and now I'm seeing the Doctor played by someone almost young enough to be my child. Weird. However, incoming executive producer Steven Moffat has praised Smith for having a young/old quality which would be an important factor in playing the Doctor, and a second look at Smith confirms this. He's got an interesting face, and provided that his costume and behaviour are suitably different from Tennant, I don't see any reason why he can't work. The most fatal mistake would be for them to try and re-create Tennant, but as they say on the Outpost Gallifrey Doctor Who forum "in The Moff we trust". The production team have been doing everything right for four years, I doubt they're about to stuff up now. On a related note, I saw the Christmas special 'The Next Doctor' and it's great fun. Especially good to see Doctor Who finally get around to doing some proper steampunk.

I also saw The Clone Wars on Blu-ray. Now, I'm not one of those genre guys who rails against defiling of childhood treasures. If you've read my post on the latest Indiana Jones film, you'll know how benign my response was to that one. George Lucas' Star Wars prequels were all disappointments to varying degrees, but it doesn't bother me too much. I'm even pretty tolerant of the alterations he made to the original three films. Hell, when they seemingly destroyed Doctor Who for good with the 1996 telemovie, I didn't even bat an eye. And I find myself looking forward to J.J. Abrams' Star Trek more than I would have thought. The only defilement of a beloved story which really makes my blood boil is Brian Herbert's continuing exploitation of his father's Dune series, but even that one I usually just ignore. I'll always have Frank Herbert's original sextet of books, and nothing will take that away. I met Frank Herbert once - it was in 1985, about nine months before he died, and I got my movie tie in edition of his novel Dune signed by him. It's a memory I will always treasure. If I ever meet Brian Herbert, I will punch him in the face.

All of which is a windy prologue to my statement that The Clone Wars sucks, then blows, then sucks some more. The 2003 animated series was surprisingly good and more satisfying in a way than the prequel films. This one... where to begin? Anyone who knows anything about the Star Wars universe will find the main storyline - the Jedi Knights attempt to rescue the son of Jabba the Hutt from a separatist plot - about as plausible as if The Godfather II had a scene of Don Corleone imploring the US government for help. And those unfamiliar with Star Wars are shit out of luck - dumped into the middle of the clone war without a hint of setup or backstory, the only intro being a montage with an appalling newsreel style voice over, which plays like a scene from Starship Troopers without the satire. The storytelling - in terms of both visuals and dialogue - is so basic that it seems to be pitched at an audience that is just about ready to move on from the Teletubbies. Which is fine, although I'd argue that such an audience need not be confronted by the image of a Twi'lek whore dancing for the pleasure of a gross slug-like gangster lord. Dialogue is usually along the lines of 'protect Jabba's son' or 'we must keep those droids back' - bald statements of conflicts the audience are well aware of, and more than once a scene began with one character relating to another a description of the scene we just watched. The main dramatic conflict of the first ten minutes or so is a communications breakdown where a vital message ends up needing to conyeved in person. How thrilling is that?

No, The Clone Wars must rank as the least interesting Star Wars production - at least the notorious 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special had Harrison Ford! I nearly switched it off half way through, and in retrospect, my life would not have been any poorer if I had. I feel obliged to mention that the animation - a CG extension of the stylised characters from the 2003 show - is stunning, but here put to the service of a team of writers and a director who would struggle to tell the story of Goldilocks in a concise fashion. There are many, many, fan made Star Wars films with more compelling drama than this. One to avoid.

I really want to get around to reviewing The Mist, but I also got The Descent on Blu-ray for Christmas, and I reckon I'll end up writing about that one first. Second time around I loved it just as much - it's the genuine article, a scary horror film.