Automatic for the people

We adopted our cat when she was about eight weeks old. Her previous owners had abandoned her in the wilderness near our house, and we found her and took her in. She's twelve now, deaf, senile, and suffering from a chronic cold, making her a little unpleasant to be around. She's also very needy because she was taken from her mother at a young age, exploits every opportunity to curl up on you, even when it's inconvenient (say, when you're busy gardening), and she does not know to retract her claws. Plus, I'm allergic to cats. But we love her all the same.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a little like that: a deeply flawed - but, I insist, not fundamentally broken - show that I can't help loving anyway. It was cancelled after two seasons, and in all honesty it deserved to be: padded to the brim, unable to develop an identity, and frustrating to watch, its second season marked a steep decline from a promising opening. But even while mired in the depths of navel-gazing mid-season snoozefests there was a better series struggling to get through.

The Terminator (1984) is perhaps the best horror film of the eighties. Taut and terrifying, it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role he was born to play. (Okay, that's a lie. We all know Arnie was born to play Conan.) I prefer the original to its more family-friendly sequel (1991), but we can probably all agree that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) was an obnoxious misfire. After that, the direction the franchise could take was an open question. T3 had (spoiler right there in the title) ended with Skynet nuking humanity, so any future film iterations in that continuity had to be set after Judgment Day, as the uninspiring Terminator Salvation (2009) was.

But in a series about time travel there was another possibility: break continuity and establish an alternate timeline in which Skynet did not take over in 2003. A serial format would break the formula the films had fallen into, allowing for longer, slower-burning plotlines. After 2003 a TV series was the right artistic decision for the Terminator franchise: if I had to choose between The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the dreary Salvation, I'd pick the former any time. Not to mention that of course a series set in the present day was always more feasible than one filmed in a nuclear wasteland.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles accepts the Terminator chronology before (after? bloody time travel) T3 in broad strokes, tweaking a few details. In 1997, Sarah Connor (Lena Headey in the series, Sarah Hamilton in the films) and her son John (Thomas Dekker, for Edward Furlong) destroyed Skynet, which was to take over the world and wage war against a human resistance destined to be led by John Connor. In 1999, the Connors, still living under the radar, are attacked by T-888 Cromartie, proving that Skynet may yet be created, and time-travel to 2007 with the assistance of Cameron (Summer Glau), a reprogrammed Terminator sent back by Future-John to protect them. (The point of the time skip, of course, is to make sure we have our required setup of mid-thirties Sarah and teenage John, and to avoid a weird period piece set in 1999.)

Too much of this.

Sarah, John and Cameron decide to stop Skynet from ever being created, in which they're eventually assisted by Derek Reese (Brian Austin Green), John's uncle from the future. They're pursued by Cromartie, who, in one of the most awesome subplots of Season One, first has to reattach his severed head to his body and obtain a new biological covering, eventually assuming the identity of actor George Laszlo (Garret Dillahunt). The cast is rounded out by bible-quoting FBI agent James Ellison (Richard T. Jones) and, in Season Two, corporate executive and T-1001 Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson), teenage love interest Riley Dawson (Leven Rambin) and tough-as-nails future soldier Jesse (Stephanie Jacobsen of Battlestar Galactica: Razor).

Right, so we have a series about killer robots from the future - awesome - and the promise of a techno-thriller series dealing with same, not to mention the potential for lots of fanservice in the form of Lena Headey, Summer Glau (relentlessly exploited in Fox's advertising campaigns: see page image) and later Stephanie Jacobsen. And instead we get... lots of angst and teen drama. And I like teen drama, when done well: my favourite show is The O.C., for crying out loud. As Daniel of Television Without Pity memorably put it in an episode recap:

She asks if he ran the idea past his mom, because she doesn't like surprises, and is this a revenge fantasy, and blah blah blah, and I'd just like to say that if I wanted to watch Dawson's Creek or 90210 or whatever shit teen soap is all the rage these days, I'm perfectly capable of choosing to watch that shit on my own, but this show has FUTURISTIC KILLING MACHINES, and that's what we want to see.

Well, quite. Season One, at a nimble nine episodes, has enough forward movement and great plots to be promising, not to mention a killer season finale; but the second season went exactly wrong in stretching roughly the same amount of plot to twenty-two episodes. That means stupendous, relentless padding, both overall (lots of one-off episodes that go absolutely nowhere) and within episodes (endless angsty conversations about whether John's future is determined, whether Sarah distrusts Cameron, etc. etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam). The writers' habit of stringing along plot points before discarding them, totally unresolved, makes viewing an unrewarding experience - not to mention that almost all of Season Two sort of just happens, without anything obviously at stake in the larger scheme of things.

Not enough of this.

In short, the writers have mysteriously decided to make a character drama out of an action premise. (To be fair, the fairly horrible special effects indicate that may have been for budget reasons.) What's more, it's a series about the end of the world, and someone decided it must be unbearably miserable for that reason. This makes especially Sarah - always cagey, anxious, serious - a character we just don't enjoy spending time with. The sluggish pace barely picks up even within major plot-moving episodes. Take the Season Two (and series) finale: thirty minutes of this and that - misery misery - and then they decide to go totally insane and throw roughly thirty-seven plot twists at the viewer, mostly utterly nonsensical. Including one that, though intriguing, destroys the show's premise - a really gutsy move, and it's a shame we never got to see how they dealt with it.

But with the bad there's just so much good. The performances are decent: Lena Headey is saddled with an impossible character but acquits herself well; Thomas Dekker is allowed to lose the emo hair and grow up a bit in Season Two; Brian Austin Green does a good job with my favourite human character. But the show's real strength lies in its machines. Summer Glau's Cameron is a terrific character exceedingly well portrayed; several of the strongest episodes (like 'Allison from Palmdale') focus on her. She's inscrutable and ruthless, but strangely likeable, and possessed of a strange innocence ('That's a window, bird'). Garret Dillahunt's Cromartie is as good, especially when he's linked up to the advanced AI John Henry. Dillahunt's performance as John - a computer who learns by playing Dungeons & Dragons, among other things - is an absolute highlight, and a reason to wish the show hadn't been cancelled.

Cancelled it was, and as I said I'm not sure I can fault Fox. The Sarah Connor Chronicles needed better writing (the dialogue, excepting that given to the cyborgs, is among the weakest on television in recent years), a bigger budget - it says something that in Season Two we only see, I think, one endoskeleton, the nightmarish image most people associate with the franchise - but above all it needed a vision and a direction. There's a whole lot of bathwater, but it's still a pity about the baby.

Fin de cinéma

I believe I intellectually understood every element of Sucker Punch, and yet in a larger sense it leaves me absolutely baffled. What is Sucker Punch? Why is Sucker Punch? Where is Sucker Punch? I couldn't tell you. So in the course of this review, imagine me as Theseus in the labyrinth. One day I may find my way out. If I manage to slay Zack Snyder in the process, that'll be an added benefit.

In 1961, a twenty-year-old girl (Emily Browning) is blamed for her sister's death and confined to a mental asylum by her evil stepfather (Gerard Plunkett). Seconds before being lobotomised thanks to a signature forged by orderly Blue Jones (Oscar Isaac), the girl retreats to a fantasy world: now nicknamed Baby Doll, she is a newcomer in a brothel run by Blue, who rules over Amber (Jamie Chung), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens, of High School Musical fame), Rocket (Jena Malone), and her sister Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish).

The choreographer (Carla Gugino) discovers that Baby Doll is a prodigy when it comes to the erotic dances the girls are asked to perform, so much so that onlookers are hopelessly distracted for the duration of the show. When she dances, Baby Doll enters another fantasy world, in which the Wise Man (Scott Glenn) gives her weapons and tells her that she must find a number of objects that will facilitate her escape from the brothel. Together, the girls resolve to obtain the plot vouchers while Baby Doll dances, in sequences that are visualised as over-the-top fights against giant samurai golems, zombie First World War Germans, orcs and dragons.

Let's begin with the story. It's a three-layer narrative, fairly clearly presented (unlike my synopsis above). The action-fantasy battles symbolise the girls' quest to escape imprisonment at the brothel, and this escape attempt in turn symbolises their efforts to flee Bedlam. But the top layer is totally unnecessary. The mental instution adds nothing but asylum clichés and some card-shuffling; the entire structure could easily be rewritten into a two-layer narrative without losing anything of significance. The awful truth is that Zack Synder loved his three-layer story, finding it elegant and beautiful and poignant. It is not, but tell that to a man in love.

For Sucker Punch is nothing if not a labour of love for director Zack Snyder, who came up with the story and co-wrote the screenplay. Snyder is good at working with others' material: 300 and Watchmen have been criticised, but not usually for being poor adaptations. (I'll give it a try: 300 suffers from Snyder's stately direction compared to the fluidity and dynamism of Frank Miller's drawings.) With Sucker Punch we have a deeply passionate director released from the bonds of source material and/or executive meddling, free to throw at the screen anything and everything he liked when he was twelve years old.

That makes for a deeply self-indulgent and frankly tiresome film. Snyder is known for his stylised direction, and I'd venture that worked in 300. Not a frame of that film looked real, but that was a stroke of genius, perhaps the best cinematic rendering of how ancient Greek warriors actually saw themselves, rather than what classicists would like them to have been. But in Sucker Punch, the plastic unreality, equally present in the scenes supposedly set in the real world and in Baby Doll's fantasies, lessens the impact of everything that happens, especially since the film fails to get the audience invested in the characters and takes too long to get started (another thing to thank the three layers for).

Sucker Punch looks and feels exactly like a video game, and as a gamer I don't mean that as an insult. While watching it, I constantly thought how much I'd like to play the scenes portrayed, and how boring they are to watch. Imagine seeing someone else play an action-adventure for an hour and a half, and you get the idea.^* (I swear there are a couple of shots from a first-person shooter perspective, complete with the gun barrel at the bottom of the screen, and it is A Bad Thing.) Add to that the fact that the CGI isn't great: the curse of almost all computer-rendered imagery, a curious weightlessness, is present in spades, and even without that the work is frankly a little shabby. The real effects are much better, especially the steam-powered German zombies.

Snyder is invested in every aspect. The score, written by longtime Snyder collaborator Tyler Bates and Moulin Rouge! composer Marius de Vries, is excellent, consisting largely of atmospheric industrial cover versions of classic songs. The best of these is a dark, epic take on 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)' sung by Emily Browning, who I daresay deserves better than this. So do almost all the actors, especially Abbie Cornish, whose presence here is comically incongruous to anyone who has seen Bright Star.

There's one last aspect that deserves dissection: this is a film in which five girls in Catholic schoolgirl outfits slay hundreds of almost exclusively male monsters with guns and katanas. (Although there is a scene involving a sword and a dragon mother that would be an excellent subject for Freudian analysis.) Snyder clearly intends for all this to be empowering, but his pure intentions don't prevent a deeply confused message: are women cleaving their way through enemy hordes still liberating themselves if they're dressed like a popular male fantasy? The director argues that he's subverting fanboys' expectations, rendering Sucker Punch a critique of itself. Make of that what you will.

There we have it: a labour of love that is deeply unlovely. I wish it were otherwise: really, there need to be more fantastic hellscapes full of zeppelins. But I'm afraid Sucker Punch is a mess born of true, deep, tragically mistaken ambition on the part of its director, a wildly overblown magnum opus the world didn't need. I've liked Snyder's previous films, and I hope to like his future work: but someone needs to sedate the man and give him sensible material to work with, and never, ever, let him do exactly what he wants again.


* I understand they show StarCraft on the telly in Korea, but still.

Things fall apart. And by things I mean robots.

I liked Transformers. That may not be cool in certain circles, but those circles fail to love robots the way they should. I'm a fan of both Battlestar Galactica and Terminator, and by simple logic bigger robots should be more fun. That didn't work out perfectly, but the mixture of mecha-a-mecha action and teenage shenanigans appealed to me so much that I happily reckon Transformers a guilty pleasure. On the other hand, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen felt like someone reading the phone book to you while kicking your face in for three hours.

So now, two years and a big public fight between actress Megan Fox and director Michael Bay later, we have Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Glory in that title, earthlings! Dark of the Moon, well, it doesn't make sense at a basic level. They just picked random words out of a dictionary. And so the title breaks down the seeming fixedness of language itself, leaving us to navigate a sea of unstable meanings.

It's been argued that Revenge of the Fallen was the first poststructuralist blockbuster. The non-existence of plot, the disappearance of any structure connecting images, characters and events showed the loss of fixed relationships in postmodernity. If we consider RotF a deconstruction of the blockbuster, DotM marks a cautious attempt at reconstruction: it has a discernible plot, which it mostly follows for a significant part of the film's running time. Until, that is, it goes utterly insane. But more of that later.

Plot, then: Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) has graduated from university and been ditched by wrench wench Mikaela. Having taken up with new love interest Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), who works for wealthy, smarmy Dylan (Patrick Dempsey), Sam finds a job of uncertain description with psychotic Bruce Brazos (John Malkovich). Meanwhile, it is revealed that the real purpose of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission was to investigate the wreck of The Ark, a Cybertronian ship containing Sentinel Prime, the original leader of the Autobots. Sentinel, however, turns out to not share the other Autobots' views on coexistence with humanity, and soon the Autobots and their human allies must stop the Decepticons from taking over Earth and enslaving humanity with the aid of five pillars aboard The Ark.

Michael Bay is not a merciful man: subplots around Sam's boss, his parents, and Dylan are drowned like a sack of kittens. But at the centre we have a real plot about mankind's attempts to prevent total Decepticon domination. It's not the freshest or most sophisticated of plots: but it's there, it's quite gripping for a good portion of the running time, and I'd take that over the sub-Eisensteinian montages of RotF any day. What's more, the film is much less visually and sonically aggressive than its predecessor, which constituted an all-out assault on the audience.

But in the massive, extended climactic battle nothing makes sense anymore. This is a pity because a good part of that scene is, in fact, awesome. But alas, all Decepticons look the same to the untrained eye - a problem that has persistently plagued the series, although it seems to be worsening - and so I genuinely thought Megatron had perished about five times in the space of twenty minutes. Stated plot points are suddenly violated. And in the worst Michael Bay tradition, the editing and framing makes it impossible to establish who is where or what is happening at any moment, leaving the viewer with nothing but noises and colours and no framework to help interpret the experience.

In a sense, this is worse than it was in RotF because through the coherence of the film to this point, the audience has been lulled into a false sense of security. DotM suddenly pulls the rug out from under our feet, demolishing the universe of meaning wholesale and simulating the disorienting collapse of modernity into postmodernity. What's more, it is perhaps the most realistic war film ever: as in real combat, we have no idea at all what is happening. Cherished certainties of sequence and association dissolve into air.

Next to this ultra-hip poststructuralism, however, there's unfortunately some good old-fashioned misogyny. Bay never attempts to convince us Carly exists for any purpose other than fanservice. The mercenary way in which Megan Fox was replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley certainly does not inspire confidence in the director's intention to treat her as an actual human being. In the film's worst scene, Patrick Dempsey praises a car's design and 'curves' while the camera lingers over Miss Huntington-Whiteley's body. By association with the automobile she becomes nothing more than an object to be possessed by men. (Incidentally, her car-related job is proof that the writers just went through the script replacing 'Mikaela' with 'Carly'.)

There we have it, then: another film from this most distinctive of directors. It does not go as far in questioning the nature of cinema itself as RotF did, but its reliance on coherent plotting makes for a rather more enjoyable time at the cinema. 'Better', I'm afraid, is not good; and while freedom is indeed the right of all sentient beings, I may be willing to make an exception for Michael Bay.