nixsight

It isn’t often I watch this many movies in a week, so as always running a little late…

Wall-E

I have this unnatural reaction against things that are really popular, even when they’re really popular with people whose opinions I trust.

It almost certainly says more about me than it does about the things themselves. I know about this peculiar trait in myself, but haven’t yet been able to work out a coping strategy for it.

So it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise that once we eventually got to see it, “Wall-E” wasn’t just as good as people had said, it was better.

What I hadn’t realised about the movie until I’d seen it was that despite the tons of praise I’d heard heaped on it, few of the people talking about it had actually given much of a clue what it was actually about.

Of course, I knew it was about a robot in isolation. I’d been told that there isn’t any speech in the first twenty minutes, and in fact barely any verbal communication through most of the film – a choice which sounds ballsy when you hear about it, but actually seems much more brave when you experience it first hand, because that’s when you realise quite how many people would have to give the okay for it to happen in a risk-averse environment like Hollywood, where every second on screen is supposed to carry information – even if it’s rubbish information.

What I hadn’t realised was that it was also such a lovely love story. And, because I knew it was set in a future where the planet had been given over completely to rubbish, I’d expected a slightly twee movie that dealt, if only peripherally, with environmental issues.

What the film actually does is steer away from making lofty statements about the environment.

Once the humans show up, it does start to slide into deeper thematic water, but rather than dwelling on popular green issues, it instead opts to tackle the broader, less easy subjects of human complacency and torpor. Even that it doesn’t deal with head-on, letting it take it’s place as a story point, and ultimately giving it an optimistic spin rather than taking a preachy standpoint.

I wasn’t expecting any of those things at all. I really wasn’t expecting it to make obesity cute.

Ultimately, “Wall-E” is a really heartwarming, beautifully animated and genuinely funny movie, that covers some new ground even though it still ticks most of the boxes for a family friendly animated movie. I always pre-emptively decide not to watch Pixar movies, and it’s always a bonehead move, especially when they are so much better rounded than Dreamworks movies.

Splinter

“Splinter” is an atmospheric, claustrophobic and dirty little horror movie that, while a bit rough around the edges provides enough creepy visuals to carry you through it’s relatively short running time.

The film follows a couple who, after giving up their camping trip, find themselves hijacked by a pair of outlaws. As always happens in situations like this, the unlikely foursome end up stopping at a gas-station where something terrible is happening.

What follows isn’t the most inspired or new story ever made into a movie – after all, body horror has been around for a while, and survival horror and haunted cabin stories have been around even longer. We’ve seen any number of alien or supernatural infections, and every excuse for a corpse to be reanimated. We’ve also probably seen every permutation of the survival cycle – everybody dies, the virgin survives, a surrogate family of a male and female stranger and an orphaned child make it out alive… the infection is destroyed, or it spreads and the world dies.

So though the specific threat in this movie – never fully fleshed out but delightfully creepy, I promise – is unusual enough that we haven’t exactly seen it before, “Splinter” is pretty derivative.

At times, though, it does what it does really well. The characters never do anything so stupid or out of character that you find yourself screaming at the screen, or just disengaging entirely, and while there isn’t much in the way of character development or particularly deep exploration of them beyond establishing their roles in the film, there’s some sparky and cute dialogue, some interesting flourishes to the script, and nice, reliable performances across the board. I’ve always enjoyed Paulo Costanzo at a fairly shallow level – he’s a favourite in “Road Trip” and “Josie And The Pussycats”, so it’s interesting seeing him in a non-comedic role.

The horror effects are genuinely creepy, bolstered by some nice sound work, but the biggest problem in the movie is that during moments of sudden, panicky action, the editing goes beyond fast and verges on incompetent. These are the moments in a movie like this where the most visual data is delivered in the shortest time, so while it’s normal for the cuts to be fast, real self-control is required on the part of the editor.

In the case of “Splinter”, a couple of times you lose really important bits of information among the cuts… simple stuff like where the creature was and who the creature killed, and where they ended up.

It might be a deliberate effort to create a feeling of disorientation in the viewer, but I’m fairly certain that’s not the case.

Other than these slightly annoying glitches, it’s not a bad horror film – it’s never going to rock your world, but it’s probably a cut above whichever “Saw” sequel we’re on.

City Of Ember

Amid all of the other youth-oriented fantasy films of the last few years, “City Of Ember” appeared and disappeared pretty quickly when it was released in 2008.

This relative obscurity does the film an injustice, and says more about the lacklustre promotional efforts for the film than the final piece of work itself.

Having said that, this isn’t as easy a film as a Harry Potter or a Narnia, so maybe it was never going to be a massive movie, and might instead find an audience over time.

It isn’t easy because it’s premise is more fable than fantasy adventure, and the film doesn’t allow an in-road for a modern mass-audience the way other films of the genre do – there is no passage from our world to another, or any other contemporary touchstones. It starts and ends in a setting that is alien to us.

In fact, the film is more science-fiction than fantasy, though the sf is hidden in the walls, and concentrates on weaving ideological inquiry into the meat of the adventure story rather than on the technical trappings of the genre.

“City Of Ember” has more in common with the dystopic vision of “Logan’s Run”, or even the far-future humanity of “Wall-E”, a film with which it shares many themes. The city of Ember that the film is named for rests in the darkness – we are told of a barely sketched out threat that may destroy humanity in a prologue to the film, and a plan made by the authorities of the time to protect the species by building a city that can avoid the death of the world.

Like “Wall-E”, the plan includes a nursemaiding of the populace, though in this film that guardianship is more situational than literal. And also like that film, something has happened to make humanity’s exile last way longer than it was supposed to.

The citizens of Ember don’t know all of this, of course – as far as they are concerned, the species has always lived in Ember, in the darkness built for them by the Builders – and the film doesn’t insult the intelligence by restricting itself to metaphors for religion, although of course they are there: ultimately it is more practicality and complacency that keeps them from exploring the areas outside the city than a rule of law.

However, the city was never meant to last so long, and is breaking down – to the viewer it is more obvious how simple entropy is taking hold and will end the city if nothing is done, but the citizens, led by Bill Murray’s wonderfully oily Mayor, have faith that somehow it will all work out okay.

(Both Tim Robbins and Mackenzie Crook take prominent supporting roles, with Robbins in particular doing great, understated work with the eccentric paternal inventor).

Perhaps predictably, it takes a boy called Doon – played with serviceable attitude by “Meadowlands” Harry Treadaway – and a girl called Lina – a likeable performance from Saoirse Ronan – to realise that something needs to be done.

There follows a quest, of sorts, to find a way to save the city or escape, and it’s this quest that dominates the meager promotional effort for the film, with posters quietly aspiring to capture the fantasy quest audience. But the campaign never tried that hard, as if it knows it’s built on a misinterpretation of the film. And it is.

Because though the action - the forward motion of the movie – is pinned to the back of the quest, the film is actually about the attitudinal conflicts and challenges that the children face, as they at first try to influence change, and then find themselves at odds with the forces of complacency as they try to fix things themselves. And about the ways in which that complacency manifests itself cultural. This is where that fabulous trait I mentioned comes in – and the movie comes with added darkness and mortality, like every good fairy tale – though it’s more ideology than morality play.

The sets, costumes and production design are wonderful on this film, with beautifully rich and detailed settings that evoke an almost unique steam-punk infused and hard-weathered traditional olde-town setting. If that seems hard to picture, imagine Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “The City Of Lost Children”, or the European-looking anomaly of “Babe: Pig In The City”. The production, and the general feel of the film, is much more suited to a more mature audience – an audience in love with “Time Bandits” might find a place for it in their hearts.

The special effects live up to the beautiful production design, and only slip into the gratuitious towards the end with the obligatory “theme park ride” sequence which is still slickly done.

All in all, it’s not a surprise that the film didn’t find it’s audience first time out, though with a bit more word-of-mouth and a shift in the targetting of it from youth fantasy to young-adult allegory, it might have stood a better chance on the big screen.

We’ll definitely be watching it again, anyway!