Interstellar: Way, way out

Interstellar (2014) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, perilous action and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.7.14

Nobody could accuse Christopher Nolan of possessing modest ambitions.

His newest big-screen extravaganza is a grim sci-fi drama that could be viewed as a reverential blend of 1951’s When Worlds Collide and 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with additional nods to 1972’s Silent Running and Robert Heinlein’s 1956 novel, Time for the Stars.

When a solar-powered drone cuts across the sky above their corn field — a striking
reminder of science long absent from a decaying United States — Cooper (Matthew
McConaughey, left) attempts to hijack it while being watched by children Murphy
(Mackenzie Foy) and Tom (Timothée Chalamet).

Along with — and this is a problem — the bleak despair and distasteful human behavior found in the 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road.

I had the same problem with 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan’s final entry in his otherwise impressive Batman trilogy. He and co-scripter (and real-world brother) Jonathan have a harsh view of people facing large-scale calamity, a trait shared with novelist Stephen King, at his gloomier moments. All three tend to assume the worst from mob mentality, with little of the nobler instincts that might make our race worth saving.

Then again, perhaps I’m unduly optimistic, choosing to believe better of my fellow citizens.

Such philosophical musings aside, Christopher Nolan has, over time, focused more on high-concept narratives and visual pizzazz, and less on character development. That’s a bigger problem. His dream-within-a-dream-laden Inception may have been a jaw-dropping head trip, but its characters were flat, sterile and uninvolving: two-dimensional archetypes about whom we didn’t give a damn.

Nolan has become more puppet master than actor-oriented director, manipulating his characters solely to maximize unexpected plot developments, as opposed to allowing them behavior that seems recognizably credible. In a way, then, Nolan is akin to his dueling magicians in The Prestige — Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale — forever tricking each other for the sheer sake of one-upmanship.

That’s not as immediately noticeable with this new film, mostly because Matthew McConaughey delivers enough agonized angst to carry the first two acts. He has matured into a richly expressive actor, and several of his scenes here are heartbreaking: none more so than the manner in which his character’s face yields to uncontrolled sobs, while catching up with some long-distance correspondence.

But that comes much later.

The Dark Knight Rises: Opulent and ominous

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) • View trailer
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, and somewhat generously, for intense sequences of violence and action, along with some sensuality and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.20.12

Unlike the cinematic Superman — always portrayed as the true-blue Boy Scout, as honorably American as baseball, motherhood and apple pie — Batman’s on-screen image has changed, depending on whose hand has pulled the strings.

After sneaking into Wayne Manor under false pretenses, and stealing
something from a concealed safe, Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway)
believes that she has gotten away clean. Imagine her surprise, then,
when Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) cuts in during a high society
dance and seems to know a great deal about her...

The 1960s Batman was known by his colorfully campy TV series; Tim Burton went operatic and kinky for the late 1980s re-boot.

A generation later, Christopher Nolan’s take on the dark night detective has focused on psychology: the seriously dysfunctional variety. Following the obligatory origin story in 2005’s Batman Begins, Nolan then explored the depths of depravity with 2008’s The Dark Knight. Nobody, but nobody, could fail to be mesmerized by the chilling, capricious evil represented by the late Heath Ledger’s magnificent portrayal of the Joker.

The Dark Knight also displayed a disturbing undertone, with its notion that regular folks, if backed into a corner and frightened badly enough, would squabble and tear out each other’s throats with the ferocity of mad dogs. Nobility, self-sacrifice and God’s grace are granted only to the shadowy warrior heroes of Nolan’s Gotham City; her civilians apparently don’t warrant such lofty virtues.

This is a dreadfully cynical view of humanity, although Nolan — along with frequent scripting collaborators David S. Goyer and Jonathan Nolan — made it play reasonably well in The Dark Knight. Ledger’s memorably scary presence was balanced by glimmers of the good and gentle, notably from Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Rachel, Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent and Gary Oldman’s honest Police Commissioner Jim Gordon.

Surely, then, Nolan would move in a different direction for his wrap-up, with The Dark Knight Rises.

Well ... no.

This storyline is even more dystopian, its view of humanity even more depressing; Nolan and his same two collaborators have populated Gotham City with folks who apparently couldn’t survive without their superheroic totems, and probably don’t deserve to survive, regardless. When things get bad in this saga — and they get very, very bad — the common herd turns ugly and every bit as depraved as Ledger’s Joker.

I’ve always been an optimist, viewing the glass as half-full, when it comes to humanity’s behavior during a crisis; Nolan’s glass apparently is 7/8 empty. If this is his commentary on how the 99 percent would “handle” the 1 percent, we should be grateful he’s not likely to hold public office.

Inception: Bad dream

Inception (2010) • View trailer for Inception
Three stars (out of five). Rating: Pg-13, for unrelenting action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.16.10
Buy DVD: Inception • Buy Blu-Ray: Inception (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo + Digital Copy)

This overcooked flick is a lot of fuss and bother, just to learn the identity of Rosebud.

Writer/director Christopher Nolan's brain-bending fantasy boasts a genuinely fascinating premise, but the execution is wanting; the self-indulgent running time (148 minutes) can't be justified by a storyline that isn't nearly as complex — or coherent — as Nolan would like us to believe.

"Draw me a maze in two minutes," Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) tells Ariadne
(Ellen Page), shortly after meeting her, "that takes me at least a minute to
solve." After a couple of blown attempts, Ariadne adjusts to the complexity of
the test, at which point Dom acknowledges that she might be the perfect
"architect" for his team of dream-thieves. Goodie, goodie...!

Inception is the sort of film that results when an inventive and financially successful filmmaker, armed with a few box-office hits — in this case, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight — is let off the company leash for a long-gestating "dream project" (no pun intended) and granted unfettered access to the studio bank account. Inevitably, the outcome is runaway hubris.

We've seen it happen time and again, with talents as stellar as James Cameron (The Abyss) and Barry Levinson (Toys). The most famous example remains Michael Cimino, whose bloated production of Heaven's Gate literally bankrupted United Artists, back in 1980.

Inception won't bankrupt Warner Bros., but it also won't be the summer blockbuster we've been hoping for, given the film's ultra-top-secret production and tantalizingly vague advance publicity. The rewards remain few in this visually bombastic but emotionally barren drama.

I'm halfway persuaded that Nolan set out to create a film with a climax — running the entire final hour — that out-weirds the LSD-esque sequence that concluded 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey. That sci-fi classic had its devoted acolytes at the time (and still does), but I can't help remembering, with a whimsical smile, that many (most?) of the warm bodies filling theater seats during the waning days of that hippy-dippy decade were, ah, chemically altered.

That stargate sequence was the ultimate head-trip, man.

So's the entire second half of Inception. And it'll definitely impress a lot of viewers.

An intriguing idea? Absolutely. Quite thought-provoking, at times. But only at times.

We hit the ground running, as Nolan introduces us to Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his unusual team of professional "dream thieves," as they try to extract a closely guarded secret while having invaded the sleeping mind of Saito (Ken Watanabe), a rich and powerful business magnate.

Dreamtime landscapes have their own logical illogic, and Dom is close to emptying the contents of Saito's mental safe when the mission goes awry, thanks to the intervention of Mal (Marion Cotillard), a mysterious woman able to interfere with Dom's subconscious sleuthing.

Once back in the waking world, Saito is unbothered by this most personal incursion, choosing to view the experience as an odd sort of audition. He offers Dom and longtime dream-thief partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) a rich assignment with a fresh target: Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), who's about to inherit control of his dying father's multibillion-dollar empire. The Fischer family is the sole obstacle to Saito's desire to control the entire world's energy market, and he wants that obstacle removed.

The tantalizing solution: Invade Robert Fischer's mind and plant a suggestion — an "inception" — that he should break up his father's corporate monolith.

Ah, but uncovering deeply buried secrets is easy, Arthur objects, when compared to embedding a foreign idea. Apparently the host mind is quick to perceive the introduction of an alien thought, and will create mental defenses to repel and even destroy the invader, much the way white blood cells will overwhelm an infection site.

OK, fine, whatever...

Dom and Arthur assemble a team, much the way Peter Graves' Jim Phelps cherry-picked associates for each Mission: Impossible caper. Eames (Tom Hardy) can "forge" another identity in somebody else's dream, effectively becoming a trusted friend or family member. Yusuf (Dileep Rao) is an unorthodox pharmacologist who devises the drug cocktails that keep subjects — and invaders — in dream sleep, while allowing a means for controlled waking.

Saito insists on coming along for the ride, to protect his investment.

Ariadne (Ellen Page), finally, is a university architectural student given the opportunity to "build" the dream landscapes. It's necessary for such realms to appear real to the dreaming subject, again to maintain the necessary level of verisimilitude. As the team's token newbie, Ariadne is our conduit to all this crazy stuff: the person who asks the questions that force explanations from Dom, so that she — and we — can make sense of all this twaddle.

Funny thing, though: Ariadne also is a savvy psychologist, since she quickly perceives that bad things are rattling around in Dom's subconscious ... and that such distractions could have deadly consequences once the dream thieves infiltrate a host mind in order to do their thing.

About those deadly consequences: Dying in a dream can be a quick way to regain consciousness in the real world, but only in a surface dream. But Dom and his crew are planning to "incept" Robert Fischer by layering several levels of dreams within dreams, and dying within a deeper level results in the invading dreamer's banishment to a limbo-like purgatory, where years can pass during single minutes in the actual waking world.

Mostly, though, all this mumbo-jumbo is Nolan's excuse to populate these dream worlds with nifty visuals — buildings erupting like flowers from a barren landscape, or crashing down in noisy shards; city streets folding over on themselves, becoming Escher-like environments with cars traveling at vertical perpendiculars to each others — and gun-toting, car-chasing assassins.

Indeed, the deepest level of Ariadne's faux constructs resembles the ski-chasing battles from the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service: a pretty thin excuse for inserting action violence into the rarefied premise of dream sleep.

And in so doing, Nolan falls into the same trap that snared director/scripter Peter Jackson, when he recently adapted Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. Jackson became so fixated by the dead Saoirse Ronan's afterlife landscape, in all its colorful weirdness, that he failed to pay sufficient attention to the necessary drama involving the living characters, most notably how a mother would react to the death of her daughter.

Nolan similarly glosses over the human element in this story, and spends far too much time with gunfire and chaotic vehicular pursuits. (It would seem that dreamscape bad guys can't hit a damn thing they shoot at, much like their waking-world counterparts in countless dumb action flicks.)

It's therefore impossible to care a jot about any of these characters — none of whom has a back-story, aside from Dom — or be concerned over their potential peril. Actual danger? In a dream? Where all rules of movement and behavior change from one moment to the next?

Page is a remarkably intelligent and gifted actress, and she does her best to give Ariadne legitimate reasons for caring about Dom, and for wanting to help him root out his psychoses. But it's an uphill struggle, and DiCaprio doesn't help much; his default handling of Dom is as a morose, exhausted, gaunt-eyed automaton whose extensive activities in the dream state have left him unable to properly process real-world concerns. As we're repeatedly told.

Similarly, it's difficult to get a bead on the complicated relationship between Dom and Mal. DiCaprio and Cotillard speak their lines with reasonable conviction, but the dynamic uniting these two simply doesn't resonate. (It doesn't help that we recently watched DiCaprio deal with similar mental phantasms earlier this year, in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island.)

Gordon-Levitt and Hardy inject flickering moments of mordant humor, and Michael Caine does his usual commendable work at Dom's father-in-law, Miles. I'm hard-pressed to understand why Miles would be so sympathetic toward Dom, however, once necessary details are revealed to us.

Nolan apparently is striving for the sort of dual universe that made the first Matrix film such a marvelous gotcha, particularly when Keanu Reeves first tumbled out of his (our) humdrum illusory world, and woke in the gloppy brain scan chamber monitored by the sophisticated man-made computers and machines that had taken over the Earth and enslaved humanity. Now that was a head-trip.

It also made sense, to a point (much less so, in the two sequels).

Inception really doesn't make sense. Too many questions abound, starting with where all this dream-invasive tech came from in the first place. Who hired Dom to invade Saito's mind, and why? Who invented these suitcase-size mechanisms? Does anybody else have them except Dom and his team? Knowing of the existence of such tech, could anybody ever trust that any experience is real?

For that matter, what bloody year is it?

And the biggie: Why would anybody, for any length of time, knowingly place his or her vulnerable, unconscious body at the mercy of anybody wandering into the room ... not to mention trusting his or her mind to an unpredictable dream state manipulated by somebody with glaringly obvious but undiagnosed psychoses?

We're to swallow the notion that Page's Ariadne, an obviously intelligent young woman, would do this capriciously, with scarcely a second thought?

Only in your dreams, Christopher.

The Dark Knight: Pitch black

The Dark Knight (2008) • View trailer for The Dark Knight
4.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for action violence and a relentlessly grim tone
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.18.08
Buy DVD: The Dark Knight • Buy Blu-Ray: The Dark Knight (+ BD Live) [Blu-ray]


This one has teeth.

Sharp teeth.

Determined to extract some information from the jailed Joker (Heath Ledger),
Batman (Christian Bale) unexpectedly appears in the criminal's cell, hoping
to startle him into a confession. But the Joker doesn't startle easily — indeed,
not at all — and this battle of wits is only beginning.

Patrons accustomed to a certain frivolous atmosphere from superhero movies — a larger-than-life approach to both characterization and storyline, with elements so fantastic that emotional engagement remains difficult, if even superfluous — are in for a nasty surprise with The Dark Knight.

This newest, exceedingly well-named entry in the Batman franchise is extremely dark indeed, not to mention uncomfortably realistic, its story an acutely perceptive dissection of humanity's frailties and failings. Longtime comic book fans who've hungered for a cinematic re-boot to match the grim tone of Frank Miller's graphic novels can rejoice: This is, without question, the way Batman was intended to be presented.

Director/co-writer Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale made a serious step in the proper direction with 2005's Batman Begins, although that film suffered a bit from the need to trace the character's origins and develop fresh exposition. With that foundation sufficiently established, though, they've now unleashed — and that really is the proper word — a macabre, brooding and at times agonizingly suspenseful sequel that deserves to be called a serious drama.

Comic book storylines undergo a metamorphosis every decade or so, as new writers struggle to inject fresh issues into franchise characters who, to a certain degree, cannot change all that much. It's an intriguing challenge, and one current permutation involves trying to confront the real-world social implications of having a superhero in town. (Will Smith's Hancock also covers this territory, albeit quite badly.)

The current and quite seductive concept can be viewed as a corollary to the frustrating economic truism that expenditures always rise to meet income: Because Nature abhors a vacuum, a metropolis systematically cleansed of crime by a powerful vigilante will, as an inevitable side effect, produce ever-more-determined villains. In other words, supervillains rise up to wage war against superheroes ... not the other way around.

And so The Dark Knight begins — its methodical and psychologically astute script by Nolan, Jonathan Nolan and David S. Goyer — as Bruce Wayne's dour alter-ego joins dedicated Gotham City cop Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and forthright new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) in an ambitious plan to bring the local mob to its knees, once and for all.

Their efforts are effective, to a degree, and the various mob bosses — the most frequent face being Salvatore Maroni (Eric Roberts, at his smarmy best) — find themselves backed into a corner and perhaps more willing to consider a previously unthinkable option:

The enthusiastic, if unpredictable, involvement of a vicious and deranged madman who has dubbed himself The Joker (Heath Ledger).