Fantasy

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: Monkey See, Monkey Coup

Jeremy BeckReviews
Owen Teague, Freya Allan, and Peter Macon in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Whose side are you on? That was the key question posed by the most recent Planet of the Apes trilogy, which didn’t just chronicle an evolutionary shift where monkeys grew smarter as people got dumber; it framed humans as creatures of crudity and barbarism, thereby realigning our rooting interests to the hyperintelligent chimpanzees who warred against our own species. By the end of War for the Planet of the Apes, this battle appeared to be resolved; primates were now autonomous, while a devastating virus had crippled humans into a mute tribe of limited intellect. But in our era of IP churn, no franchise can remain dormant for long, and so now we have Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which takes place “many generations” after the events of War and which unfolds in a broadly post-human landscape. This means the issue is no longer whether we’re cheering for the monkeys or the men, but whether the simians selected as heroes can prevail versus foes who are also—in a biological sense—fellows.

This raises a more troubling question: Is Kingdom really a Planet of the Apes movie at all? On one level, the query is absurd; the troops of computer-generated monkeys clambering across the screen definitively establish that we’re located in the same cinematic universe where Charlton Heston screamed in anguish all those years ago (and, more recently, where Andy Serkis led an uprising on the Golden Gate Bridge). But despite some developmental tension—humans do in fact exist in this world, and while they’re generally regarded as inferior beings, some are less inferior than others—Kingdom is largely a portrait of intraspecies conflict, one that soberly violates the edict from the prior trilogy, “Ape not kill ape.” As a result, its story of tribal warfare and imperial conquest could mirror any number of historical pictures about rival clans. The warriors here just happen to be furrier than usual. Read More

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Godzilla x Kong, the New Empire: Animal Kingdumb

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

The tagline for Roland Emmerich’s 1998 version of Godzilla proclaimed, “Size does matter.” Fair enough, but so do scale, weight, and clarity. The computer-generated beasts who rampage through Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire are undeniably large. But as creatures of action cinema, they are paper tigers—ephemeral and insubstantial, lacking in true force. They look like giants and punch like toddlers.

This is something of a problem, because the whole point of an enterprise like Godzilla x Kong is for its titular monsters to haul off and kick ass. Director Adam Wingard, who previously helmed Godzilla vs. Kong (the prior entry in Warner Bros.’ increasingly unwieldy cinematic universe), is no fool; he knows that the audiences flocking to this movie expect it to feature extensive footage of the King of the Monsters and the Eighth Wonder of the World laying waste to assorted animal competitors. He obliges immediately, as the opening scene finds a grey-bearded King Kong sprinting through the jungles and mountains of the Hollow Earth—the subterranean realm where he’s taken up a semi-peaceful existence, away from prying human eyes—as he’s chased by snarling predators that look like a cross between a jackal and an anteater. Kong’s predictable thrashing of these puny foes immediately emblematizes the picture’s failings. The issue isn’t so much that the creatures look fake—the special effects are impressively detailed in terms of color and design—but that the combat carries no tangible impact. It feels like an elaborate WWE routine—all posturing and preening, no real pain. Read More

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Poor Things: Pride of Frankenstein

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things

Poor Things opens at a stately manor in Victorian London, where chickens bark, pigs quack, and legless horses draw steam-powered carriages. These hybridized bastardizations are the work of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a brilliant surgeon with scars on his face and curiosity in his heart. When he isn’t tutoring pompous medical students or belching out his farts through a contraption that turns gas into floating spheres, God (as he prefers to be called) toils in his vast private laboratory, concocting unholy experiments in his ongoing quest to investigate and bend the laws of nature. God wields his scalpel with such rigorous dispassion—a blend of mighty intelligence and clinical precision—that you might be tempted to perceive him as a proxy for Yorgos Lanthimos, the movie’s director and cinema’s preeminent scholar of human oddity. But that reading disserves Poor Things, which finds Lanthimos applying his craft with generosity as well as exactitude. God’s creations are perverse; Lanthimos has manufactured a miracle.

In doing so, he has sacrificed none of his talent for arresting imagery (not to mention caustic comedy). From its very first shot—that of a pregnant woman in a blue dress on a bridge, flinging herself to the icy waters below—Poor Things routinely marries the ghastly and the gorgeous. The production design, by Shona Heath and James Price, concocts environments of terrible wonder, like the airborne trams that slice through a smoggy metropolis or the yellow Escheresque staircase that crumbles in midair. (Even the black-and-white title cards that divide the picture into discrete chapters ripple with dazzling eccentricity.) The costumes, by Holly Waddington, are a resplendent array of gowns and bodices, despite every male character wanting to tear them to shreds. And the cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who also shot Lanthimos’ The Favourite, features bursts of bold color yet repeatedly contorts the frame into his singular fisheye style; at times he even shrinks the canvas to a small circle, as though we’re squinting through a peephole at all of the movie’s beautiful grotesqueries. Read More

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The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: The Ditty of Lost Children

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

The premise of the Hunger Games franchise—every year, the tyrants of The Capitol conscript two dozen children from the surrounding “districts” for a televised gladiatorial competition designed to continually cow potential rebels into submission—is one of recurrence. So it’s only natural that the series keeps perpetuating itself—first with three sequels (which were pretty good until they cratered), now with a prequel that rewinds 60-odd years and explores the ritual’s genesis. If The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes reminds us of what we’ve seen before, well, isn’t that the point?

To its credit, this new-old movie, which Francis Lawrence directed from a script by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt (adapting Suzanne Collins’ novel), isn’t overly reliant on its own mythology. Sure, there are some throwaway references to surnames like Flickerman and Heavensbee, and I suspect that the initiated will locate plenty more easter eggs in the margins. (When a character uttered the word “katniss,” the teen-heavy audience at my screening buzzed with audible recognition.) For the most part, though, Songbirds and Snakes has its own story to tell, one that is by turns awkward, engaging, clumsy, and commendable. It doesn’t really work, but the ways in which it doesn’t work are strangely satisfying. Read More

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From the Vault: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, 20 Years Later

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sean Connery in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

Here is a movie that, when all’s said and done, fails to possess an identity. It is unsure whether it is an action blockbuster, a broad comedy, or a glib satire, and so it tries to be all of these at once and winds up being none of them. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (or LXG, as it has taken to calling itself) is a rambling, self-destructive journey that ultimately has no purpose. To be sure, it has its moments of genuine imagination, but most of the time it feels woefully uninspired, especially when saddled with such an insipid plot. This is a forgettable mishmash that pretends to be sly and entertaining but is, in reality, just plain dull. Read More

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