rating: ****
the story: Han Solo emerges from the ship-building grind of life on Corellia to become an intergalactic outlaw.
what it's all about: Incredibly, there seems to be a lot of discontent among Star Wars fans for a Han Solo origin movie. It's franchise fatigue. It happens to every franchise. If this is how you feel about Solo, move along. Move along.
In the new era of Star Wars movies, where George Lucas is no longer the guiding hand of the saga and there are movies that don't directly continue the saga...this might just be the first one capable of establishing it own legacy. Maybe not right away. Let pesky fans attempt to spoil it. Give it time. Pesky fans can't spoil the fun forever. This is the second "anthology" movie of the franchise. The first one, Rogue One, I thought was a horrible disaster. Fans didn't. They loved it. I thought it came to all the wrong conclusions about what Star Wars is all about, and was lazy about...everything. If that was what Star Wars was going to be for a new generation, I shuddered for the future. But Solo makes things right.
There's a lot to unpack here.
One of the things Solo does is nudge what's at the heart of Star Wars, whether or not George Lucas envisioned it as a response to Vietnam. That's one of the things Rogue One most misunderstood. It mistakenly correlated opposition to Vietnam with...tacit approval of terrorism in the Middle East. It really did. Solo handles it very differently. At one point Han has actually become a recruit of the Empire, and he finds himself in the latest in a series of campaigns he can't begin to comprehend, and he asks aloud what their objective is. In the post-Vietnam era, that's warfare. After WWII settled the last of the major international conflicts, the Cold War made it impossible for countries of comparable development to even consider engaging in open combat. The threat of nuclear assault made it unthinkable. Europe found itself depleted of real influence, and that left the US, the Soviets/Russia, and whoever wanted to be considered emerging powers, and this was usually determined with the achievement of nuclear weapons or the ambition to attain them. If a country didn't have them? So that's what Vietnam was, what Afghanistan was, what Iraq was. It was different warfare. Incomprehensible, to most perspectives. Han doesn't really say it's unjustifiable. Actually, he ends up with a group of thieves who are doing pretty much the same sort of thing as the Empire, just on a much smaller scale. The Rebellion isn't depicted as terrorists, but as intermediaries interested in stopping the random exploitation of others. I personally interpret that to take at least some of the edge off comparisons between the US and the Empire, whether or not you ever realized they were there. And I see it as a direct response to Rogue One.
Anyway, to return back to purely movie matters, Solo also is heavily engaged in reclaiming, well, Han Solo. Everyone's Han Solo these days. Tony Stark is Han Solo. Peter Quill is Han Solo. James T. Kirk is Han Solo. Even Jack Sparrow is Han Solo. So it only seems fitting that Han Solo gets to be Han Solo again. We last saw him in The Force Awakens, the first of the new sequels, getting killed by his own son. After the events of Return of the Jedi, Han seems to have backslid into the kind of life he had before A New Hope. That, and the whole being-killed-by-his-own-son thing, kind of put a damper on him, and Star Wars in general. Solo kind of explains what happened, how that could've happened, and it once and for explains what makes Han Solo, well, Han Solo, and what separates him from everyone else who wants to be Han Solo.
Han had a girl back home. Han had to leave the girl behind. Han eventually reunites with the girl. Happy ending? The girl doesn't die! But no, that's not how the movie ends. The movie ends with them deciding to go separate ways. Along with everything else that happens to him during the course of Solo, Han seems to decide forming long-term attachments is probably always going to be difficult. Chewie is different. Chewie sticks around, it seems, because they both know if Chewie ever wanted to leave, he can. At one point Han does say goodbye to Chewie in what he seems to think of as a permanent kind of way, but in pretty short order Chewie's back at his side. The movie is really about Han's relationship with a mentor figure who does everything he can to give Han a cynical outlook. By the time we catch up with Han again in A New Hope, that cynical outlook has taken a firm hold of his thought process, but by the end of Solo he doesn't have it yet. Despite everything he experiences he's much closer to being the good guy he ultimately proves to be.
But we're given every indication that refusing to be called a good guy, at the end of Solo, is what leads to that cynical outlook, refusing to accept that he can depend on others. Losing the girl is that first chink. Forget being betrayed by the mentor. That's nothing!
The movie otherwise presents itself as the modern era version of Han Solo. Everyone who's attempted to be Han Solo, that's what this movie consciously evokes. He gets a Guardians of the Galaxy crew around him, including a mouthy CGI guy (voiced by Jon Favreau). Alden Ehrenreich gets to give his own performance. Unlike Rogue One's horribly botched Tarkin, he isn't asked to imitate someone else. Harrison Ford is Harrison Ford. Instead, Ehrenreich feels a lot more like Chris Pine. True, he's not much like Tony Stark or Jack Sparrow, but that's a good thing. Those were much bigger departures from the archetype, took it places Han Solo ultimately never went. They permanently rogues. Han ultimately isn't.
Emilia Clarke gets another shot at striking big in another franchise (she's the face of Game of Thrones; she didn't really replace anyone's idea of Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys) as Han's girl. Paul Bettany is her boss, Woody Harrelson is Han's mentor. Thandie Newton shows up, but it's hard to recognize her. Donald Glover plays Lando Calrissian. I love Glover, but he seems to have chosen to underplay the part. Lando's droid plays up that unspoken aspect of Star Wars lore, the subservient nature of droids. Ironically or not it gets plugged into the Millennium Falcon and pretty much forgotten. Lando and Han's scenes seem inspired by Maverick.
I'll always be a Star Wars fan. I love the original trilogy. I love the prequels. I love what the sequels have done so far. I hated Rogue One. I think Solo sums up, with one movie, what Star Wars is all about (minus the Force). I love how it explains the famous Kessel Run. Genius. That alone makes the whole experience worth it.
Showing posts with label Paul Bettany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Bettany. Show all posts
Saturday, May 26, 2018
Iron Man (2008)
rating: ***
the story: Tony Stark is Iron Man.
what it's all about: I've never found Iron Man to be a particularly good movie. It opened the same year as The Dark Knight, which to my mind was a great movie. And of course it gave birth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which eventually became the only superhero movie franchise(s) anyone really took seriously. I liked Iron Man 2 a great deal, but the first one? I never felt particularly compelled to watch it again, and in fact it took me ten years (yesterday) to do so again, and my impression of it didn't at all change. This is odd for a number of reasons. One isn't really that it took me so long to rewatch it, but that I really didn't feel like doing so for so long. Instant desire to rewatch was something I had for Dark Knight. I couldn't get enough of Dark Knight. I like superhero movies. I like superheroes in general. Yeah, I'm a DC guy. By this I mean I tend to like DC superheroes and DC storytelling. It's not just the superheroes but the storytelling, too. Marvel doesn't often think of its superheroes in the same way DC does. At the movies, there's really just Logan and the two Amazing Spider-Man movies. Then there's stuff like the cartoonish logic of Bryan Singer's first two X-Men, Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man flicks. Ironically by the third one, which looked the most cartoonish, he finally went somewhere real. So of course fans hated it.
Fans loved Iron Man instantly. Visually it already looked timeless. It still looks timeless. The look of the armor matches up exactly in credibility with what you see in Avengers: Infinity War, ten years later. That's pretty good. It looks totally different than anything superhero movies had done before. That was what made Raimi's Spider-Man pop, what made audiences "believe a man can fly" in 1978. In that sense, of course the MCU took over the popular imagination. It did something no one had seen before, and that always hooks the masses.
But in terms of storytelling...It's awful. Just...awful.
Tony Stark is sold as a tech genius. Great! Fantastic! In 2008, Steve Jobs was a cultural icon! Totally legit! But...Tony Stark isn't sold as a Steve Jobs tech genius. He's sold as...a weapons manufacturer. And that's all he's known for. And...when he says he won't make weapons again...that's it. He's apparently done. Forever. And yet...We see his private lab, and he's got robots working for him. He's got J.A.R.V.I.S., the virtual assistant who would later merge with the android Vision. The rest of the world? Doesn't have those robots. Doesn't have J.A.R.V.I.S. I think Siri wasn't a thing yet, in 2008. Alexa wasn't a thing. And of course, Tony famously keeps Iron Man to himself.
Logistically this is idiotic. In every single sense. It only makes sense if you're trying to explain how Iron Man happens. But in the real world, Iron Man makes no sense. At all. So you have to either accept the insanity of it or you can't. And you see how idiotic the whole plot is.
Even as a weapons manufacturer, taking away everything else, Tony Stark makes no sense as a huge celebrity, appearing on every major magazine cover, as depicted in the film. Weapons manufacturers aren't celebrities. Name one. The only "name" weapons developer I can think of is Oppenheimer, and he was never celebrated like this. When Iron Man 2 shows a vintage video of Tony Stark's dad, it's clearly a pastiche of...Walt Disney. Hilarious, considering the first two Iron Man movies were distributed by...Paramount.
But even the conceit of Tony being captured in the midst of a weapons demonstration...in the field of engagement...That's stupid. I'm really sure that would never happen. And then he gets captured. And he's got shrapnel in his chest, so the bad guys...have the ability to give him tech that needs to be inserted onto/into his chest. That can also be modified to power a suit of armor he makes. Because.
This is the sort of nitpicking fans routinely give movies and/or TV shows they hate. Usually, I try really hard not to do it, because nitpicking usually is even more idiotic than what these fans are attempting to portray as idiotic. It's insipid. It's a poor way to analyze something. In this instance, though, these were problems I noticed immediately. I don't normally instantly have these sorts of problems. I hate how Singer uses Professor X as a macguffin in the first two X-Men movies. Both times the exact same way. It's lazy storytelling, something that needs to happen in order to move the story along because no one bothered to think the story through. In other words, I'm not talking about nitpicking at all (mindlessly being annoyed by story elements while attempting to portray yourself as smarter than the people who developed them), but bad storytelling. I always hate bad storytelling.
And Iron Man is, again, beyond anything else, bad storytelling.
The worst thing? Even as it completely rejuvenates Robert Downey Jr.'s career, making him far more popular and relevant than he's ever been...Iron Man completely wastes and trashes Jeff Bridges in the process. How does that even happen??? And you can sort of tell that it motivated him to seek better material, as suddenly he went into a whole career renaissance (Crazy Heart, True Grit, Hell or High Water) with material that was nothing like his lifeless role in Iron Man, the grizzled iconoclast Tony Stark only wishes he'll become, the culmination of everything Bridges had done before.
And Terrence Howard? Marvel has Terrence Howard, and...nope. Not in Iron Man 2. How does that even happen??? Faran Tahir, who would turn up as a Starfleet captain in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, lamented playing a terrorist in Iron Man. Do you think he ever changed his mind? In Iron Man 3 they change the whole idea of Tahir's role, giving the lead-up to the Mandarin to a sham played by Ben Kingsley. They try and pretend real terrorists were never a part of the story. Yeah!
Gwyneth Paltrow plays Pepper Potts, the Tony Stark assistant who in 2018 would probably be cheering on #MeToo, but instead becomes a slow-burning love interest, who puts up with all of Tony's antics...because. They never even try to develop her character, not in Iron Man, not in any other appearance. Clark Gregg, in his first appearance as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson, is mostly asked to dance around the joke of what S.H.I.E.L.D. actually stands for aside from a very elaborate excuse for an acronym. Leslie Bibb plays a hot chick who's also a reporter for Vanity Fair, which is one of those inexplicable magazines smitten with weapons manufacturer Tony Stark.
Really, it's only Downey Jr. and Bettany who appear fully-formed and presentable for future appearances. Good solid foundation, sure, but...
We learn late in the movie that Bridges' character was in cahoots with Tahir all along, that he set up Tony to die, as he did his father, to kill the golden goose, because...That part is never really made clear. It would make sense if it were because either Stark had figured out what he was doing, but...Yeah. Not in this movie. Not in any movie. He just likes to do away with tech geniuses, I guess. The movie goes out of its way to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that not only is Tony the only person capable of creating the tech he does, but that Bridges' character isn't even in the conversation. In the era of Steve Jobs? Bill Gates? Steve Wozniak???
The funny thing about all this is that 2011's Green Lantern actually borrows a lot of Iron Man's story elements, and does them better, and fans insist to this day that it's a badly made movie, full of plot holes. Really??? In the interests of full disclosure, Green Lantern is based on a DC superhero, and so you can call bias if you like, but for me it's still storytelling. Green Lantern has great storytelling. Iron Man doesn't.
So Iron Man 2 follows it with infinitely better storytelling. Fans disagree. But the insanely popular MCU happens anyway. I can't possibly be upset about that. There's still good material that results from it, the Captain America movies notably.
I'd hope that in the years to come, anyone looking to revisit the whole thing recognizes the first one in the sequence for what it is: a ridiculous mess.
the story: Tony Stark is Iron Man.
what it's all about: I've never found Iron Man to be a particularly good movie. It opened the same year as The Dark Knight, which to my mind was a great movie. And of course it gave birth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which eventually became the only superhero movie franchise(s) anyone really took seriously. I liked Iron Man 2 a great deal, but the first one? I never felt particularly compelled to watch it again, and in fact it took me ten years (yesterday) to do so again, and my impression of it didn't at all change. This is odd for a number of reasons. One isn't really that it took me so long to rewatch it, but that I really didn't feel like doing so for so long. Instant desire to rewatch was something I had for Dark Knight. I couldn't get enough of Dark Knight. I like superhero movies. I like superheroes in general. Yeah, I'm a DC guy. By this I mean I tend to like DC superheroes and DC storytelling. It's not just the superheroes but the storytelling, too. Marvel doesn't often think of its superheroes in the same way DC does. At the movies, there's really just Logan and the two Amazing Spider-Man movies. Then there's stuff like the cartoonish logic of Bryan Singer's first two X-Men, Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man flicks. Ironically by the third one, which looked the most cartoonish, he finally went somewhere real. So of course fans hated it.
Fans loved Iron Man instantly. Visually it already looked timeless. It still looks timeless. The look of the armor matches up exactly in credibility with what you see in Avengers: Infinity War, ten years later. That's pretty good. It looks totally different than anything superhero movies had done before. That was what made Raimi's Spider-Man pop, what made audiences "believe a man can fly" in 1978. In that sense, of course the MCU took over the popular imagination. It did something no one had seen before, and that always hooks the masses.
But in terms of storytelling...It's awful. Just...awful.
Tony Stark is sold as a tech genius. Great! Fantastic! In 2008, Steve Jobs was a cultural icon! Totally legit! But...Tony Stark isn't sold as a Steve Jobs tech genius. He's sold as...a weapons manufacturer. And that's all he's known for. And...when he says he won't make weapons again...that's it. He's apparently done. Forever. And yet...We see his private lab, and he's got robots working for him. He's got J.A.R.V.I.S., the virtual assistant who would later merge with the android Vision. The rest of the world? Doesn't have those robots. Doesn't have J.A.R.V.I.S. I think Siri wasn't a thing yet, in 2008. Alexa wasn't a thing. And of course, Tony famously keeps Iron Man to himself.
Logistically this is idiotic. In every single sense. It only makes sense if you're trying to explain how Iron Man happens. But in the real world, Iron Man makes no sense. At all. So you have to either accept the insanity of it or you can't. And you see how idiotic the whole plot is.
Even as a weapons manufacturer, taking away everything else, Tony Stark makes no sense as a huge celebrity, appearing on every major magazine cover, as depicted in the film. Weapons manufacturers aren't celebrities. Name one. The only "name" weapons developer I can think of is Oppenheimer, and he was never celebrated like this. When Iron Man 2 shows a vintage video of Tony Stark's dad, it's clearly a pastiche of...Walt Disney. Hilarious, considering the first two Iron Man movies were distributed by...Paramount.
But even the conceit of Tony being captured in the midst of a weapons demonstration...in the field of engagement...That's stupid. I'm really sure that would never happen. And then he gets captured. And he's got shrapnel in his chest, so the bad guys...have the ability to give him tech that needs to be inserted onto/into his chest. That can also be modified to power a suit of armor he makes. Because.
This is the sort of nitpicking fans routinely give movies and/or TV shows they hate. Usually, I try really hard not to do it, because nitpicking usually is even more idiotic than what these fans are attempting to portray as idiotic. It's insipid. It's a poor way to analyze something. In this instance, though, these were problems I noticed immediately. I don't normally instantly have these sorts of problems. I hate how Singer uses Professor X as a macguffin in the first two X-Men movies. Both times the exact same way. It's lazy storytelling, something that needs to happen in order to move the story along because no one bothered to think the story through. In other words, I'm not talking about nitpicking at all (mindlessly being annoyed by story elements while attempting to portray yourself as smarter than the people who developed them), but bad storytelling. I always hate bad storytelling.
And Iron Man is, again, beyond anything else, bad storytelling.
The worst thing? Even as it completely rejuvenates Robert Downey Jr.'s career, making him far more popular and relevant than he's ever been...Iron Man completely wastes and trashes Jeff Bridges in the process. How does that even happen??? And you can sort of tell that it motivated him to seek better material, as suddenly he went into a whole career renaissance (Crazy Heart, True Grit, Hell or High Water) with material that was nothing like his lifeless role in Iron Man, the grizzled iconoclast Tony Stark only wishes he'll become, the culmination of everything Bridges had done before.
And Terrence Howard? Marvel has Terrence Howard, and...nope. Not in Iron Man 2. How does that even happen??? Faran Tahir, who would turn up as a Starfleet captain in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, lamented playing a terrorist in Iron Man. Do you think he ever changed his mind? In Iron Man 3 they change the whole idea of Tahir's role, giving the lead-up to the Mandarin to a sham played by Ben Kingsley. They try and pretend real terrorists were never a part of the story. Yeah!
Gwyneth Paltrow plays Pepper Potts, the Tony Stark assistant who in 2018 would probably be cheering on #MeToo, but instead becomes a slow-burning love interest, who puts up with all of Tony's antics...because. They never even try to develop her character, not in Iron Man, not in any other appearance. Clark Gregg, in his first appearance as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson, is mostly asked to dance around the joke of what S.H.I.E.L.D. actually stands for aside from a very elaborate excuse for an acronym. Leslie Bibb plays a hot chick who's also a reporter for Vanity Fair, which is one of those inexplicable magazines smitten with weapons manufacturer Tony Stark.
Really, it's only Downey Jr. and Bettany who appear fully-formed and presentable for future appearances. Good solid foundation, sure, but...
We learn late in the movie that Bridges' character was in cahoots with Tahir all along, that he set up Tony to die, as he did his father, to kill the golden goose, because...That part is never really made clear. It would make sense if it were because either Stark had figured out what he was doing, but...Yeah. Not in this movie. Not in any movie. He just likes to do away with tech geniuses, I guess. The movie goes out of its way to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that not only is Tony the only person capable of creating the tech he does, but that Bridges' character isn't even in the conversation. In the era of Steve Jobs? Bill Gates? Steve Wozniak???
The funny thing about all this is that 2011's Green Lantern actually borrows a lot of Iron Man's story elements, and does them better, and fans insist to this day that it's a badly made movie, full of plot holes. Really??? In the interests of full disclosure, Green Lantern is based on a DC superhero, and so you can call bias if you like, but for me it's still storytelling. Green Lantern has great storytelling. Iron Man doesn't.
So Iron Man 2 follows it with infinitely better storytelling. Fans disagree. But the insanely popular MCU happens anyway. I can't possibly be upset about that. There's still good material that results from it, the Captain America movies notably.
I'd hope that in the years to come, anyone looking to revisit the whole thing recognizes the first one in the sequence for what it is: a ridiculous mess.
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