In which Nat talks briefly about the movies she’s been watching this week for no particular reason and that probably don’t warrant proper reviews, but hey? Wouldn’t it be nice if we all chatted about them anyway?
Happy New Year, everyone! It’s so good to be back! Sorry I was so rubbish last year, but hopefully I can get my schedule back into shape this year – it’s not the only thing on a diet, thanks to Christmas – and treat you to some movie reviews. Yay!
I even have a new idea for a feature that I’m going to unveil tomorrow. I hope you all like it!
Anyway, I digress. How have you all been? Job okay? Did you get the Christmas Covid like me and all my family? Ugh. I’m so sorry. At least it was Omicron, hey? Hope you’re feeling better?
Let’s talk about some movies to cheer ourselves up then and take our minds off our coughs. This is going to be a slightly brief rundown of all the movies I’ve watched in the cinema in the past month. I’ve watched many more movies than that but let’s save something for next week, hey?
So coming up, we have:
- Screen 1: Eternals (2021)
- Screen 2: Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
- Screen 3: The Matrix: Resurrections (2021)
Storming, hey?
Screen 1: Eternals (2021)
Available on Disney+ from January 12
Credits
Directed by Chloé Zhao
Chloé Zhao … (screenplay) and
Chloé Zhao … (screenplay by) &
Patrick Burleigh … (screenplay by) and
Ryan Firpo … (screenplay by) &
Kaz Firpo … (screenplay by)
Ryan Firpo … (screen story by) &
Kaz Firpo … (screen story by)
Jack Kirby … (based on the Marvel comics by)
Plot
The Eternals, a race of immortal beings with superhuman powers who have secretly lived on Earth for thousands of years, reunite to battle the evil Deviants.
Nat says: ‘I didn’t realise Marvel movies could be this boring’
I have a confession to make. I actually watched this movie before my last set of reviews. I even went uptown to see it and took a whole bunch of photos around Piccadilly Circus – exactly like Sersi (Gemma Chan) does at the beginning of the movie. What a surprise! What a coincidence! You can even see the cinema I saw it in in the movie.
So why did I completely forget I’d even see this movie when doing my previous round-up?
The reason is sad: Eternals is just flat out boring. I honestly didn’t think an action franchise full of big hitty things and people with laser eyes could be that boring. Although I admit I’ve refused to watch the Transformers movies.
It’s not for want of trying to be interesting on the Eternals‘ part. There’s the MCU’s first on-screen sex scene. There’s a good, diverse cast, including Angelina Jolie as Thena, goddess of War (yes, there’s no A). There are some surprisingly deep philosophical points: what if you knew you’d been created by God for a purpose and then decided you didn’t want to fulfil that purpose since you thought it was morally wrong? There are breathtakingly beautiful sets, locations and CGI including a vision of ancient Babylon that made me weep a little tear of happiness.
But fundamentally, it’s lacking in any real excitement, any real villainy and any really fascinating characters. It has some moments of humour, but not the usual Marvel jokes. It’s just so po-faced and serious! I know, right?
It alternates between religious tract, as our god-like eternals try to decide whether to interfere in the affairs of humanity over 7,000 years as they dwell among us, and detective story as they try to work out why they’re being attacked by their arch-foes, centuries after they were supposedly wiped out.
But it’s all set against the slowest Magnificent Seven imaginable, as we go from country to country meeting a new Eternal and learning about his or her latest issue. You just want something a bit more efficient to speed things along, you know?
Everything to do with Kumail Nanjiani’s Eternal-cum-Bollywood star was great, I’ll admit, but after all the effort I went to to see it, I was hoping for something much, much better, particularly if this is the next phase of the MCU.
Screen 2: Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
Still in cinemas
Credits
Directed by Jon Watts
Chris McKenna … (written by) &
Erik Sommers … (written by)
Stan Lee … (based on the Marvel comic book by) and
Steve Ditko … (based on the Marvel comic book by)
Plot
With Spider-Man’s identity now revealed, Peter asks Doctor Strange for help. When a spell goes wrong, dangerous foes from other worlds start to appear, forcing Peter to discover what it truly means to be Spider-Man.
Nat says: ‘Messy and fun, it’s the best Spider-Man movie so far’
It’s really hard to review Spider-Man: No Way Home without giving away a secret that most of the cast admirably managed to keep to themselves until the movie’s release, but I will try. I think if it’s in the trailer and the poster, that’s fair game, but everything else I’ll stay quiet about.
Eternals and Spider-Man: No Way Home are more or less mirror images of each other: one is how not to do a Marvel movie while the other reminds you how much fun Marvel movies can be. This is despite the fact both movies are equally long and bloated, with far too many characters for their own good. It’s a litmus test of Spider-Man‘s strengths that despite having too many characters, you end up leaving the cinema feeling like you’d wanted to have seen more.
Essentially setting up the next Phase of the MCU, the movie is actually a surprisingly backward-looking affair that draws its strengths not just from previous MCU and MCU Spider-Man movies but previous Sony Spider-Man movies, bringing back the villains from both Tobey Maguire’s and Andrew Garfield’s times to have another go, this time at the Tom Holland Spider-man.
This is both lovely fan service and meta-delight. It’s fascinating to see how characters who may have been under-served in previous outings fare when given the full Marvel treatment, so that both they and their actors get a second chance at holding our attention. You come out of the movie, not just loving this Spider-Man but feeling charitably inclined to all his predecessors’ movies – although not enough to watch the Andrew Garfield ones again. Oh no.
It’s a real romping delight from start to finish, packing with emotion and the self-sacrifice of the heroic Peter Parker we’ve come to expect. Where it fails horribly is in the clumsy Bechdel Test – it’s not a great test, but you know a movie is very much a boys-game when all the six villains are male, they’re facing off against a bunch of male heroes (including the returning Jon Favreau) and the only women of note are worried about the male protagonist and barely get to talk about their own lives. I went along with it for the sake of the fun, but it did leave me feeling a little excluded from the action by the end.
Flaws aside, there are so many great individual moments and unlike Eternals‘ clumsy efforts at philosophy, this movie tries to find an alternative to the action movie’s usual ‘kick, punch, you’re dead’ approach to conflict resolution that’s almost edifying. As much as a movie about a boy with the powers of a spider can be, at least.
Screen 3: The Matrix: Resurrections (2021)
Still in cinemas
Credits
Directed by Lana Wachowski … (directed by)
Lana Wachowski … (written by) &
David Mitchell … (written by) &
Aleksandar Hemon … (written by)
Lilly Wachowski … (based on characters created by) (as The Wachowskis) &
Lana Wachowski … (based on characters created by) (as The Wachowskis)
Plot
Return to a world of two realities: one, everyday life; the other, what lies behind it. To find out if his reality is a construct, to truly know himself, Mr. Anderson will have to choose to follow the white rabbit once more.
Nat says: ’20 years to make something not quite as good’
For the first half-hour, The Matrix: Resurrections comes perilously close to doing something exciting and different from what you’re expecting. Imagine that: knowing what to expect from a Matrix movie. It was so amazing, so innovative when it came out, no one knew what to expect from both it and its sequels. One of the lovely things about that first half hour is that it grapples with that, making a virtue of the fact its audience is expecting something even better than ‘bullet time’ this time round.
The sad thing is that after building up the audience’s expectations like that, the movie never actually gives us something that good, not even bullet time itself.
It starts off very well, with Neo now believing himself to be the creator of a game called The Matrix who now has to come up with a sequel that will be even better. Something doesn’t feel quite right about his life, though, and he’s seeing a therapist (Neil Patrick Harris). Was his old fantasy of living in the Matrix right all along?
The movie plays with all the audience’s expectations at this point and pushes further. The original’s dedication to Cartesian issues of reality are so well known now that they were used in a University of Edinburgh philosophy course I took during lockdown. This Matrix goes beyond that in ways that were actually quite stimulating to watch.
The trouble is that after that, it goes through all the highlights of the previous three movies, retreading them but never exceeding them. The kung fu is ordinary, which given the progress in movie martial arts over the past 20 years, as well as in CGI, is surprising, particularly given Keanu Reeves’ return to stardom as martial arts hero John Wick. The effects are better done elsewhere and show no new ideas. It’s obviously hard to come up with ideas that change movie-making as we know it, but you probably shouldn’t highlight that your previous movies did that if you’re not going to doing anything different this time.
Even if we don’t try to expect something groundbreaking, it fails to do anything as well as it did in the first movie. Bullet-time should be easy and should be in every fight scene, yet everything is nuts and bolts kicking and shooting. It fails to take advantage of things it should by all rights own.
I came out of it feeling that I’d seen someone who’d been a sharp innovator and hadn’t known the rules so broke them in their youth trying very hard to do the same again in their 40s or 50s and finding they just can’t get down with the kids any more. It’s like the worst case of skinny jeans at a nightclub.
For those hoping for a kick of nostalgia, while Reeves and the fabulous Carrie Anne-Moss are both back, Hugo Weaving and Laurence Fishburne aren’t, with various implausibilities in the script failing to provide a convincing explanation for their absence. Less welcome are the cast of the second and third Matrix movies that most people have largely chosen to have forgotten, thankfully.
It has some vision, some innovation and it’s certainly leagues ahead of the first set of sequels. It also patches over the androcentric hero worship of the first movies, which is a definite improvement at least. It’s just not especially remarkable.
