Only the Brave: A soaring tribute

Only the Brave (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, occasional profanity, mild sensuality and fleeting drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.20.17

Everything that makes this fact-based drama compelling — and its qualities are many — also will make it a very difficult experience for Northern California viewers.

Having helped to establish a "border" by digging trenches, cutting back small trees and
shrubs, and lighting controlled back burns, Brendan (Miles Teller, left) and Christopher
(Taylor Kitsch) wait to see if their efforts will help diminish an expanding wildfire.

Serendipity is a curious beast, particularly when cinema collides with the real world. The China Syndrome was disparaged as alarmist fantasy when released on March 16, 1979; twelve days later, the film proved eerily prophetic when Pennsylvania’s Dauphin County experienced its Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

Similarly, the folks at Sony/Columbia couldn’t have known, when they scheduled Only the Brave for release today, that California still would be struggling to contain the worst and deadliest series of firestorms in state history. Director Joseph Kosinski and scripters Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer simply wished to venerate the Granite Mountain Hotshots, whose heroic efforts to battle Arizona’s Yarnell Hill Fire made headlines in late June 2013.

The filmmakers achieved that goal. Only the Brave is intelligently scripted, persuasively acted, and sensitively directed: a thoroughly engaging example of heartstring-tugging melodrama. The gripping narrative blends angst, suspense and humor with a spirit of comradely bonding that succeeds because of the care with which the actors tackle their parts.

Numerous characters populate this story, all of them depicted as distinct individuals: a rare thing, when so many high-profile Hollywood projects feature a few stars who overshadow one-dimensional supporting players, who do little but take up space.

At its core, this is a war movie: Instead of man against man, it’s man against nature. Josh Brolin’s Eric Marsh has a telling line, early on, when he leads his team to a mountaintop forest overlook, and encourages the newest recruits to savor the view in the manner of civilian innocents, who admires the majestic ocean of gently swaying green.

Because after having endured a battle against flame, Marsh warns, the next time “You’ll only see fuel.”

Lone Survivor: Heartbreak ridge

Lone Survivor (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: R, for strong war violence and pervasive profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.10.14

Color me surprised: Peter Berg finally made another decent movie.

The actor-turned-writer/director scored an indisputable hit with 2004’s warm-hearted Friday Night Lights, a character-driven study of small-town Texas high school football; the film led to an equally well-received TV series that kept fans happy for three well-scripted seasons (with Berg supervising the entire run).

Having trekked to a vantage point where they can see their targeted enemy combatant,
the covert SEAL team — from left, Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Marcus (Mark Wahlberg),
Axe (Ben Foster) and Dietz (Emile Hirsch) — contemplate their next move. Sadly,
that decision is about to be taken out of their hands.

On the big screen, though, Berg’s résumé didn’t merely stall; it nose-dived into overwrought wretched excess. The Kingdom (2007) was marred by unpleasantly vicious racism; Hancock (2008) did little but embarrass star Will Smith; and the less said about 2012’s laughably atrocious Battleship, the better.

That’s a rather sad and pathetic downward spiral.

I therefore held out very little hope for Lone Survivor, upon learning that Berg was directing and scripting from Marcus Luttrell’s gripping 2007 memoir ... which just goes to prove, once again, the folly of rash assumptions. This film deserves place of pride alongside A Bridge Too Far, Gallipoli, Black Hawk Down and other war dramas that honor the grit, bravery, indomitable will and almost superhuman resilience of overwhelmed, ground-based soldiers betrayed by circumstances beyond their control.

Lone Survivor isn’t merely stirring; it’s nail-bitingly tense and, ultimately, heartbreaking.

The story details a SEAL operation code-named Operation Red Wings, which in June 2005 sent four men into a mountainous region of Afghanistan; they were tasked with locating and killing Ahmad Shah, a Taliban sympathizer who had orchestrated the ambush of 20 Marines the previous week.

To say that everything went wrong would be an understatement. Radio communications were spotty at best, absent entirely when the subsequent crisis erupted. Worse yet, American intel seriously underestimated the size of Shah’s resident militia. When the dust had settled, as this film’s title warns us, only one man had survived ... and the fatalities had expanded to include far more than the initial SEAL team.

Berg, long a gung-ho champion of American warrior spirit, unveils this film’s credits against actual footage of formidable SEAL training sessions; our immediate takeaway is that these men will endure anything, battling far beyond “normal” levels of pain and punishment, in the pursuit of successfully completing a mission and returning home with their comrades.

It’s an impressive montage, and it certainly sets the mood for what is to come.

We meet our protagonists immediately prior to their mission, during a typical “waiting” period at Camp Ouellette, at Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield. They cheerfully compete with each other, send e-mails to loved ones back home, make plans for the future. The day’s most significant event involves the “induction” of newbie SEAL Shane Patton (Alexander Ludwig, appropriately enthusiastic), a process that involves some mild hazing and considerable hoo-rah bonding.

Battleship: Deserves to be sunk

Battleship (2012) • View trailer
One star. Rating: PG-13, for intense action violence, mayhem and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.18.12

Battleship is a movie for folks who found the Transformers flicks too intellectually challenging.

Alex (Taylor Kitsch), hurled into command when every other senior officer gets
blown up, shredded or otherwise sliced 'n' diced by nasty alien weapons, seeks
inspiration from the screen monitored by Petty Officer Second Class Cora
Raikes (Rihanna). Now, if she'd burst into song, that might improve this dud.

Erich and Jon Hoeber’s laughably moronic plot would make a great discussion topic in a fifth-grade science class, where 10-year-olds would gleefully pick it to shreds. Let’s start with preposterous coincidence, total ignorance of physical reality, and an invading alien force bearing nasty weaponry clearly capable of wiping us off the planet ... except when the script says no, we can’t let that happen in this scene. Just because.

No lie: At times, for absolutely no reason, the massively armed alien warrior ships simply don’t fire upon our sitting-duck ocean vessels. Beats the hell out of me.

I’d call this flick a cartoon, but that’s an insult to animators. And it’s not even a decent comic book movie, because that genre’s writers have been operating at a much higher level of intelligence since, oh, the early 1960s.

But, then, what should we expect from a film based on a board game?

The one-dimensional characters here, so insubstantial that I’d expect them to blow away in a stiff breeze, speak in clipped grunts that would have been retro in the Cro-Magnon age. I truly worry that if one of these folks attempted a three-syllable word, he’d forget the first by the time he reached the third.

Except for the token Scientific Geek, of course, who’s both a technobabble motormouth and a clichéd liberal wimp: We can’t have those pussies getting in the way of real soldiers determined to wipe this alien scum off the face of the Earth. John Wayne — who you’ll recall turned 1968’s The Green Berets into a notoriously pro-Vietnam War screed — would have loved this flick.

Actually, that’s always been one of my many objections to actor-turned-director Peter Berg. Bad enough that he makes dumbed-down nonsense apparently aimed toward trailer-trash intellectuals; he’s also jingoistic and frequently racist. His 2007 take on our American presence in the Middle East, The Kingdom, traded on wincingly offensive stereotypes, while suggesting that the whole problem could be solved if good ol’ American men and women simply shot every “towelhead” in sight.

John Carter: Thud and blunder

John Carter (2012) • View trailer
Two stars. Rating: PG-13, for relentless fantasy violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.9.12


What a slab of meat.

A clumsy, disorganized and bone-stupid script is the biggest problem afflicting John Carter, but Taylor Kitsch’s stiff and wooden starring performance also leaves much to be desired.

After capturing John Carter (Taylor Kitsch, right), the Thark chieftan Tars Tarkas
(center) argues the displaced Earthman's fate with a rival warrior, Tal Hajus, while
the entire tribe waits to see what will happen next.

The young actor, who made such a strong impression as a troubled high school football player on TV’s Friday Night Lights, has made a laughably poor transition to big-screen leading man. Given his much stronger work on the tube, blame must be assigned director Andrew Stanton: an accusation given greater weight by the similarly dismal acting delivered by Kitsch’s co-stars.

When even seasoned professionals such as Ciarán Hinds and Mark Strong look silly, the guy in charge clearly is at fault.

Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) is the second Pixar filmmaker to make the ambitious leap from pixels to flesh-and-blood performers, but he hasn’t done nearly as well as colleague Brad Bird, who recently brought such stylish snap to Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Based on this evidence, Stanton can’t direct live actors, period.

But — as mentioned above — that isn’t this film’s worst sin. The haphazard script scarcely makes sense from one action sequence to the next; it feels as if scenes are being fabricated on the fly. Stanton and co-scripters Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon have made an absolute mess of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ characters, not to mention the novel (1912’s A Princess of Mars, first in what became an 11-book series) on which this misfire is based.

Chabon’s participation should raise some eyebrows. You’d certainly think that the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who brought us The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay would better understand how to deliver a pulpish sci-fi adventure, but the evidence here suggests otherwise.

Most cruelly, Stanton & Co. have maligned the character of Carter much the way vintage Hollywood films bungled the big-screen adaptation of Burroughs’ other, more famous creation. Tarzan — born John Clayton, later Viscount Greystoke — was a perceptive, noble and impressively intelligent man who rejected the “hypocrisy of civilization” in order to lead a purer life in the African jungle with his wife, Jane.

Needless to say, the archetypical film image of Tarzan — forever cemented by Johnny Weissmuller’s disheveled, monosyllabic jungle warrior — made a mockery of such lofty origins.

The same is true of this film’s concept of John Carter. Granted, the 19th century Southern cordiality is present, as are Carter’s virtuous instincts; he also has been granted a tragic back-story. And, to their credit, Stanton and his fellow scripters retain the clever mystery revolving around Carter’s Earthly “death” in 1881, which triggers a summons to his nephew, Edgar “Ned” Burroughs (Daryl Sabara).

But once Carter gets zapped to Mars by a mysterious amulet, he turns into little more than a Martian version of Conan the Barbarian. Scratch that: Next to Carter, Conan could have been a Rhodes scholar. What follows is pulp-style twaddle at its worst ... and even that might have been all right, if Stanton had acknowledged and embraced such a campy atmosphere.

But no: All this nonsense is intended to be taken seriously, which turns the film into the worst sort of big-screen comic book.