Fury (2014)

Brad Pitt is still ripped, Shia LeBeouf seems to think crying a lot will get him an Oscar, and lots of Nazis get killed. Lots and lots and lots of Nazis.

Fury is a 2014 war film directed by David Ayer and starring Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena and Shia LeBeouf.

The violence in Fury makes Saving Private Ryan look like a doddy old Aunt’s home movies.  It’s frequent and it’s brutal. In the opening minute or two we witness a guy being repeatedly stabbed in the face. Repeatedly. In the face. And it just gets worse. People are shot, stabbed, beaten, burned and blown to pieces regularly throughout the film. The American GI’s in Fury are not a Band of Brothers. The film is set during the closing days of the war, as the American forces are closing in on Berlin. The American troops here are battle-weary, dirty, shell-shocked and angry. They don’t want medals or promotions. They just want the Germans to hurry up and surrender so everyone can go home.

The fanaticism that existed in Nazi Germany has always fascinated and horrified me. None more so than what existed as the Third Reich was in its death throes. In Fury we see this madness all around – children in army uniforms, ‘traitors’ hung from telegraph poles, Waffen SS troops fighting to their last breaths even as they are run over by advancing American tanks.

Fury employs some war movie clichés and stereotypes, but it does it so well I didn’t mind too much. It’s sort of like director David Ayer wanted to make the classic war movie he grew up watching, but an updated version, a more accurate version. A version that lets you know what it really looks like when a decomposing body gets minced under the treads of a tank. It’s pretty fucking ugly.

Anyway, in Fury we have the battle-hardened Sergeant (Pitt), the religious guy (Shia LeBoeuf), and the ‘new guy’, (Logan Lerman). One of the film’s more disturbing scenes is early on. As his initiation, the guys make the new guy clean the inside of the tank. He basically has to scrub the remains of the guy he’s replacing off the seat he will be occupying. As he scrubs the blood away he comes across the remains of the guy’s face, which has sort of been peeled off like a mask. It’s a fairly horrific image.

The story revolves around Pitt’s tank crew as they set out on missions to secure a couple of towns and crossroads. Since that is what pretty much every World War II movie is about, Ayer wisely focuses on the action and the characters rather than the details of their mission. He also wisely doesn’t go for the ‘big battle’, there’s no heroic charge towards enemy lines or massive tank battles that get confusing and lost in spectacle. The action all revolves around their tank (which they’ve named Fury).

The film reminded me a little of The Hurt Locker, in that it is basically made up of several set pieces, with a few connecting scenes in between. The first is a fantastic tank battle that pits Fury and three other American tanks against some German ground troops with anti-tank guns. It’s clear early on that Pitt’s crew know what they’re doing. It’s all by the book, and brutally efficient. They spot the enemy, zero in, and fire. Rinse, repeat, and advance.

My favourite of these set pieces is one that sees Fury set out with the other three tanks again, but this time instead of ground troops they encounter a far superior German ‘Tiger’ tank. At the beginning of the film we’re told that the German tanks were much better armed and armoured than the American tanks. This is made very clear when the Tiger makes short work of the other three tanks and their crews, leaving Fury all alone. What I love about this scene is that it comes down to the skill of the tank crews rather than the machinery. Pitt’s character masterfully uses the American tank’s superior speed to manoeuvre around behind the Tiger and attack its weak spot at the rear. I can’t do the suspense of the scene justice. I was literally gripping the arm rests.

As brilliant as the battle scenes are, the stuff that connects them is the where the film starts to falter. There’s a scene in a house in a ruined town where Pitt and the new guy meet two German women. The new guy shows his sensitive side by playing the piano and then gets laid. The scene is played out like tough-as-nails Pitt is going to rape one of the women, but of course he doesn’t, he instead gives her food and cigarettes and they share a meal together. The scene is not bad, it just rings false. Plus, it’s woefully predictable. The new guy befriends the German girl and promises to write to her, so of course she’s going to die. And sure enough, no sooner do all the American guys get safely out of the building, it gets shelled and she dies.

And I can’t bring myself to like Shia LeBeouf. His acting range is extremely limited. In this film he spends half his screen time crying. He seems to permanently have a tear rolling down his muddy cheek. Seriously, I’ve never seen someone cry so much in a war film. It gets really irritating. It’s like he figured that because he was in a war film he needed his lines to be heartfelt, so he says them all while teary-eyed. He's about as deep as a fucking contact lens.

And in his earlier film Harsh Times, which was also about the dehumanising effect of exposure to wartime violence, David Ayer at least gave the main character some motivation. We saw how his experiences in the Gulf War shaped his behaviour throughout the film. Fury doesn’t have that, so when we see Brad Pitt make the decision to stay and fight against impossible odds rather than abandon his tank, we have absolutely no idea why. It makes the final ‘Custer’s last stand’ scene a bit ridiculous. They could have abandoned their crippled tank and made it back to the American lines, regrouped, and lived to fight another day. Instead we get a silly scene where they all heroically band together behind their Sergeant and decide to fight to the death. 

This scene is even more puzzling because earlier in the film Pitt tells new guy that he made a promise to his men when they first met – that he would get them through the war alive. And that he failed in that promise when the gunner that new guy replaces ended up dying. What the? Is he just so intent on not doing things by halves that he figures now he’ll just make sure the rest of them die too?

I couldn’t help but feel with this scene that maybe Ayer was making a statement about the fanaticism on the German side by having the Americans show the same sort of nihilism.

Maybe. But it turns what is a brutally realistic war film into a sort of 300 Spartans against the Persian army stand off. It even has a vertical camera pull back showing the smouldering tank surrounded by dead Germans, an almost identical shot to the closing shot of Zack Snyder’s 300.

And as well filmed as the scene is, it stretches belief far too much. So many times in war films we see a tank taken out by a guy simply dropping a grenade through the hatch. I struggled to believe an entire battalion of Waffen SS troops wouldn’t have thought of doing that to an immobilised tank. A couple of guys actually do open the hatch, but all they do is peer inside and wait to be shot in the face. Plus, when we see the German troops advancing, Ayer makes the point of showing half of them carrying anti-tank rockets. Yet during the prolonged shoot out that follows, these weapons are mysteriously nowhere to be seen.

Another thing bothered me. New guy’s character (his name in the film is Norman). Norman starts out as the wet-behind-the-ears recruit who deplores violence. By the end, he’s happily machine gunning Nazis left right and centre, at one point even declaring that he’s started to enjoy it. I understand this is supposed to be some kind of comment about him becoming desensitized yadda yadda, but I just didn’t buy it. I would have preferred something less predictable.

I mentioned before that Ayer seems inspired by war films he’s seen. I think that is ultimately what keeps this film from being great. It seems to chop between being a visceral look at war time violence, (ala Saving Private Ryan), a dense character study on the mental trauma of war (ala The Thin Red Line) and a gung ho macho war flick (ala pretty much any pre-Platoon war film). Oddly though, it reminded me a lot of the Sam Fuller war film The Big Red One, albeit with slightly less likeable characters.

Small gripes aside, Fury is an excellent film. Brad Pitt is superb in it. He's matured into a far better actor than I ever thought he would become. The production design is beyond good. It's awesome. Saving Private Ryan may have set the bar for realism, but Fury leaps right over it. Everything about the film works.

It goes without saying that real WWII veteran Fuller did it better (no scene in Fury has the emotional impact of Lee Marvin carrying the dying girl around on his shoulders), but David Ayer has made a gritty wartime drama that has some of the best action scenes ever committed to film. This is just over two hours very well spent.

Alien (1979)

An alien mistakes a towing vessel for the Contiki cruise ship he was booked to go on, gets tormented with flame throwers and cattle prods, and is then blasted out into space. That’s what you get for booking through cheapholidays.com.

Alien is a 1979 sci fi horror film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, and Ian Holm.

It didn’t surprise me to read somewhere that the original idea that sparked Alien was a recurring nightmare one of the writers experienced. The whole film plays out like one. And it’s excellent.

Alien succeeds at being a fascinating science fiction film and a superb horror film all at once. It’s a great example of ‘less-is-more’ (the Alien itself has very little screen time, but every second is wonderfully effective), and employs the lost art of the long, slow build up, amping up the tension of several scenes to absolute breaking point. The film scared the beejesus out of me when I first saw it as a kid. I still get squirmy during the last half hour when Ripley is alone on the ship being stalked by the Alien.

This film is an early example of what Ridley Scott does so well – establishes a believable world. This is far from the clean universe of so much of the other science fiction that existed in 1979. Scott’s universe is grimy and lived-in. The Nostromo is like an oil rig – we have a dishevelled, working class crew and machinery that seems old and worn down. These people aren’t out bravely exploring new worlds; they are company workers eager to get home after a long-haul and keen for a meal and a paycheck. This makes them so much more relatable than cardboard characters in jumpsuits. And thus the film is so much scarier when we start to see them get picked off one by one by the Alien.

The Alien itself is a wonder of design and special effects. Ridley Scott masterfully overcomes the limits of costume design and budget by keeping the Alien in the shadows for most of the film. This makes it all the more terrifying, and makes the jump scares work perfectly when it lashes out from those shadows. But what I love most is how the creature is explained by the Company android, Ash (Ian Holm). Somehow his admiration of the Alien and his description of it just make it all the more horrifying. I love his line about the Alien’s “structural perfection… matched only by its hostility.” And I love his parting thoughts to the rest of the crew about their chances of survival: “You have my sympathies.”

And I really love the slow build up. It’s over an hour into the film before the Alien makes its first kill.

This first kill is undoubtedly my favourite, though they are all so effectively done I had a hard time deciding. But I just love Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) wandering through the ship looking for the cat. This scene employs what has become a very tired (and often parodied) horror movie cliché – the character who gets separated from the group. Once Brett wanders off by himself we know he’s fucked. But Ridley Scott knows that we know. So he teases out this scene to an almost unbearable length. And when the Alien finally does emerge, I love that the killing is all off-screen. I love the way the focus is instead on the cat watching Brett being killed. The cat has this wonderful look on its face – sort of a mix of stunned curiosity and utter indifference.

Another almost uncomfortably tense scene is where Dallas (Tom Skerritt) goes into the air ducts to try and flush out the Alien. Again, we know how this will end, so we get another long, drawn out sequence where Dallas crawls through narrow, claustrophobic tunnels, the only lighting the flickering flames at the end of his flamethrower. It’s a wonderful use of light and shadow. But what I love most about this scene is that Ridley Scott keeps pulling us out of the action and showing us the other characters watching a ‘motion tracker’ device. Instead of cutting to shots of the Alien stalking through the tunnels, the only thing we see is a blip on a monitor showing it slowly advancing on Dallas.

As much as I love the Alien and the claustrophobia, my favourite part of the film is actually the first hour, where the Nostromo’s crew is awoken from cryosleep by a distress call that sends them down to the surface of LV-426 to investigate. Again, it’s the slow build up that I like. And again, it’s the android Ash’s dialogue during this sequence that makes it all the more creepy and effective. While Dallas, Kane and Lambert are going off to explore the derelict ship the signal is coming from, Ripley discovers that what they thought was a distress call might actually be a warning, a beacon someone set up to tell people to stay the hell away from the planet. I love Ash’s cold, calculating reaction to this: “the time it takes to get there…they’ll know if it’s a warning or not, yes?”

That said I’ll always have a soft spot for the film’s final sequence, where Ripley is finally alone with the Alien on the ship. She sets the Nostromo’s self-destruct so that she can escape in the shuttle but then hears the cat’s frantic meows over the PA. So, with strobe lights flashing she goes back and tries to reverse the self-destruct sequence, but it’s too late. What makes this scene so utterly terrifying is that she now has to run around the ship, not knowing where the Alien is. And she no longer has any help to call on. She’s alone. So you know the Alien has no one left to stalk except her. My favourite bit in this scene is right at the end, when she finally spots the Alien. In her panic she’s dropped the cat carrier and goes back for it, but the Alien has beaten her to it. I love the way the Alien stares at the cat in the cage. Again, it’s the way the two creatures regard each other with that curiosity that only animals possess that I like.

And the closing moments of the film will always be among my favourite scenes in any film, ever. Ripley has finally escaped in the shuttle and blasted the Alien out into space. She’s about to put herself into cryosleep for the journey home, but she stops to record a final message on the ship’s log. It’s a wonderfully reflective, quiet moment to close an incredibly tense film. I love the way she tiredly says, “This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo…signing off.”

Two terrifying hours extremely well spent.

Aliens (1986)

Ants don’t live in hives, Hudson, you stupid redneck. Bees have hives. You got that? Bees!

Aliens is a 1986 sci fi action film directed by James Cameron and starring Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Carrie Henn and Paul Reiser.

There’s about 25 minutes in the middle of Aliens that remains one of the most nailbiting sequences in any movie I’ve ever seen. What makes it all the more compelling is the slow build up to it (which is lessened somewhat in the director’s cut, but I’ll get to that later). It’s the part where the marines, overconfident and cocky looking forward to their ‘bug hunt’, are methodically working their way through the deserted space station looking for any surviving colonists. The ‘motion trackers’ are a brilliant bit of movie-making. The whole sequence is incredibly tense.

I love the way it eventually explodes when the aliens first appear and start to make mincemeat of the gung ho marines. The frantic retreat to the APC is a brilliantly executed action sequence. Everything about it is perfect. And the bit following it, where the survivors realise they are trapped on the planet facing an enemy they can’t defeat, is wonderful.

This brings me to one addition to the director’s cut that has always bugged me. It’s the bit showing the colony before the alien attack, where we are first introduced to Newt (Carrie Henn). What made the marines’ search through the colony so suspenseful in the original cut was that sense of the unknown – the mystery as to what happened there. That suspense is ruined in the director’s cut. It also slows the pace of the film’s first half – it simply takes too long to get to the first appearance of the aliens.

And I think the theatrical cut clocks a far better pace. I appreciate the extra scenes in the director’s cut, but I can also appreciate why they were taken out in the first place. Unlike the massacred Alien 3 theatrical cut, the scenes in the Aliens director’s cut were cut for reasons of pacing. As such, I do actually think the theatrical cut is the better version. But, I do think that the scene where it’s explained that while Ripley spent half a century floating in space, her daughter died should have been left in. It goes a long way to explaining Ripley’s later relationship with Newt.

The theatrical cut has the same kind of pacing as James Cameron’s earlier The Terminator – relentless. The director’s cut sacrifices some of that for the sake of a bit of added character development and some nifty shenanigans with remote sentry guns.

Anyway, I could go on all day about the director’s cut vs the theatrical cut. My small gripes about pacing aside, Aliens is a very near perfect film. It’s certainly a textbook example of what a great sequel should be – it pays homage to the original while building on the alien universe and taking things in a new direction. Where Ridley Scott’s Alien was a tense, brooding horror film, James Cameron’s sequel is a brilliantly executed action film that stays true to the horrific elements of the first.

What’s so brilliant in Aliens and what I love about these earlier James Cameron films is the allegory. Aliens draws parallels with the American war in Vietnam – a technologically superior military force gradually worn down and slaughtered by an enemy that may not be technologically superior, but that utilises its environment better and has overwhelming advantage in numbers. There’s also the disconnect between the Lieutenant watching the combat unfold on a monitor, and the grunts in the field. I love the scene where he uselessly barks orders into a headset while they are being slaughtered.

Just getting back to the way that James Cameron builds on things from the first film, I love the Weyland Yutani company android in this film. After Ash in Alien, we expect another evil Company plant. And at the beginning Ripley treats him accordingly (side note – I first saw this movie before I saw Alien, so I couldn’t understand why she was treating him like this, I thought she was just being mean). But Bishop (Lance Henriksen) turns out to be one of the film’s most memorable characters and one of the most heroic.

That’s another thing I love about this film – the memorable characters. Far from being mere cannon fodder, all the ‘grunts’ have distinct personalities and believable relationships – you have no trouble imagining these people have fought together before and come to trust each other.

But my favourite character is actually Newt. I dig a survivor and she is that and then some. A lot of the time I find kids in movies irritating to say the least. But Carrie Henn is no whining, screaming Dakota Fanning. She plays the haunted Newt brilliantly. I love her vacant stare when Ripley first speaks to her. I also love the fact that she is not awed by the marines, and doesn’t immediately feel safe around them and their guns. She has seen firsthand what they are facing. I love it when Ripley tries to reassure her, telling her the marines are highly trained and well-armed. She simply replies “it won’t make any difference.”

But I also enjoy the more subtle stuff with her character. I like the way she gradually warms to Ripley, and slowly begins to drop her guard and become a little girl again rather than the hardened survivor we first meet. The tiny moment at the end when Ripley rescues her and she unconsciously calls her “Mommy”, breaks my heart every time.

Another brilliant way that James Cameron expands the alien universe is the introduction of the Queen. It’s a masterpiece of special effects design that also succeeds in being a believable character. This is extremely well done in the scenes between Ripley and the Queen where Ripley threatens to torch her eggs. I like the way the Queen conveys her message with simple moves of her head. And I love that this final fight basically comes down to two mothers protecting their young. 

Aliens firmly established James Cameron’s reputation as a very talented director. Whatever version you prefer, the film is a perfect blend of action, horror, and science fiction. Two (or two and a half) hours very well spent.

Alien 3 (1992)

A dangerous alien wreaks havoc on a remote prison planet as a desperate band of survivors struggle to kill it before a murderous corporation can take it back to Earth. But all this is unimportant. The real issue is, Sigourney Weaver shaved her head!

Alien 3 is a 1992 sci fi horror directed by David Fincher and starring Sigourney Weaver, Charles Dance, Charles S Dutton and a rubber prop that looks like Lance Henriksen

A lot of people hate Alien 3. It unapologetically kills off three of Aliens’ beloved characters, and the original theatrical cut of the film is sometimes a confusing, choppy mess. But I love it. For me, I liked Alien 3’s complete reversal of James Cameron’s sugar coated happy ending to Aliens. I like that the series returned to the bleak hopelessness of the original film. And I also liked the confusion of the big chase-through-tunnels set piece in the theatrical cut. Until I saw the ‘assembly cut’, I mistakenly thought the choppy editing was on purpose, and I applauded the film for being deliberately incoherent.

I’d go as far as to say that Alien 3 is actually a better film than Aliens. Don’t get me wrong, Aliens is a superb action film and it holds up far better than most action films of that decade. To watch it now, you’d never know it was made over 20 years ago. But Alien 3 is a tighter film (when compared to the Aliens director’s cut) and is far more atmospheric. It’s dark, it’s threatening and it’s brilliantly bleak.
Also, Alien 3 was my first exposure to David Fincher, and I’ve been a devoted fan ever since. His stylistic touches and directorial flourishes, though in their infancy (he was 26 when he directed this) are unmistakable here.

What I also love about this third instalment is that is deepens the role of the mysterious, shadowy Weyland Yutani ‘Company’. The Company seems to be this all-seeing, omnipresent threat which I thought was a great compliment to the immediacy of the threat of the alien itself. You figured that even if our heroes managed to destroy the xenomorph, the Company was still out there, endlessly pursuing this biological weapon for their nefarious, capitalist purposes.

Another unfair criticism of Alien 3 is that the characters are one-dimensional. This seems to be simply because they all have shaved heads. When I hear this complaint I always wonder if the reviewer watched the same film as me. Yes, there are some peripheral characters that are ‘cannon fodder’ and are fairly unremarkable, but the main characters are all played by fairly accomplished British actors who are far from cookie cutter and are all memorable. There’s Charles Dance as the doctor. He has precious few scenes but he steals them all, especially his monologue about how he came to be the doctor on an isolated prison planet. His joking-but-serious “at least I got off the morphine” is a great line and he delivers it superbly.

And Paul McGann is brilliant as the unhinged prisoner driven mad after witnessing the alien killing one of the other prisoners. I was glad to see his role fleshed out in the ‘assembly cut’. In the theatrical cut he mysteriously disappears –he’s confined to the prison infirmary, and then we never see him again. In the ‘assembly cut’ what happened to his character is finally explained and as such explains a massive chunk of the film that was utterly baffling in the theatrical cut.

Charles S Dutton is also brilliant as the de facto leader of the prisoners. I love his hand-to-hand fight with the alien – he lasts longer than any other character in the entire series and to make it all the more enjoyable, he gives the alien shit as he’s doing so “is that all you got?” He has the film’s best dialogue. His speech to the other prisoners is a highlight, as is his back and forth with Ripley where he explains why he won’t indulge her wish to take the easy way out and have him kill her. It’s a nice call back to her first meeting with him where he tells her he is an inmate because he was a “murderer of women”.

And Sigourney Weaver is of course great in her third outing as Ripley. I particularly liked her quiet reaction to Charles Dance explaining that they found “a mark…a burn” at the scene of one of the prisoners having an unfortunate ‘accident’. And I love the scene where she is going over the ‘black box’ of sorts (the remains of the android, Bishop) and discovers that an alien crash landed with her. It’s a hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment, and it’s brilliant.

And the film also has some nicely poetic moments. The cremation scene in particular is brilliant. Charles S Dutton’s dialogue is superb, Elliot Goldenthal’s score is hauntingly emotive, and the way it’s juxtaposed with the alien birth is just fantastic.

Just getting back to the ‘assembly cut’ and the Company – I also like the race-against-time element that is introduced in the extended version when we find the prisoners actually did manage to trap the alien in the toxic waste silo by burning it out of the tunnels. The Company man informs them via message that they have the alien trapped and requests permission to destroy it. We then get the wonderfully predictable ‘No’ and the reply message that the Company is on its way. I love how this feeds into the other added scenes of the insane Paul McGann setting the alien free. On the one hand, we loathe him because now the alien is on the loose again after they fought so hard to trap it. But we also applaud his actions because we know it would have fallen into the Company’s hands and the Company considers the prisoners expendable anyway.

And the ending is another thing critics of the film moan about. Not only do they do away with Hicks, Newt and Bishop, they go and kill off Ripley as well! The nerve! Even when I first saw this film at 13, I thought it was a brilliantly ballsy move and a fantastic full-circle ending to the series. I loved Ripley’s ultimate sacrifice. I loved that there was a small part of me watching the film thinking ‘she has an alien inside her…how they hell is she going to get out of this one?’ and I loved that the film didn’t deus-ex-machina or find some other cop out miracle medical procedure to remove the alien. I loved her cynical look when the Company rep tells her all they want to do is remove the alien from her and take her home. It’s a brilliant piece of acting. She knows he is full of shit but there’s a tiny shred of hope in her eyes.

My only gripe is not actually with this film. It’s simply that the franchise didn’t end here. This is two hours well spent.

Tora Tora Tora (1970)

Ben Affleck single-handedly wins World War Two while Kate Beckinsale thinks he's dead and...hang on...aw crap I hired the wrong movie!

Tora! Tora! Tora! is a 1970 film directed by Richard Fleischer, Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda and starring way too many people to name here.

It’s a little ridiculous to make a comparison (given that one is a serious attempt at a war film, the other basically a bad romance novel set during a war), but I can’t help it: I’d take this film over Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor any day. One has interesting characters, exciting action, and a well-told story. The other has a love triangle made up of two nitwits and an airhead. One has some unintentional humour. The other would be humorous if it wasn’t so god-awful. One attempts to paint a reasonably accurate picture of a horrific act of aggression. The other one is a horrific act of aggression.

Films today rarely do what Tora Tora Tora does so well – the long, slow build up to the action. I mean basically for the first 90 minutes you watch people sitting around talking. Now, I have a reasonably short attention span, but I wasn’t bored for a minute. Because all the talking perfectly sets the scene for when the action does happen. It’s set up so well that every explosion during the film’s last 40 minutes makes sense. “See, he told you not to park all those planes so close together!!”

There are a few unintentional laughs that I love. There’s a war room where the Americans are using a code breaking machine to decipher Japanese radio traffic. I really dig the guy’s explanation for how the code-breaking machine works. It’s very scientific: “We feed the code in here, it goes round and round in there, then it comes out here.” Brilliant!

And I find people having doors closed in their faces very comedic. The code-breaking guy does this to his secretary a few times over the course of the film – she has this bewildered expression as he barks an order and then slams the door on her. It’s almost spoof-like in its goofiness.

There is also the scene with a Japanese officer describing the plan of attack while shirtless and sweaty, his eyes closed and slowly rubbing his head as he speaks. I love the way the guy behind him slowly backs out of the room and closes the door, and I love that he just continues talking once the guy’s gone. The whole scene is delightfully odd.

It’s the intentional humour that doesn’t work as well. Like the two morons who mistake a Japanese bomber for an American plane: “Get that guy’s number, I’m going to bring him up on charges!” And the military band conductor - as he strikes the last note of the US anthem, the ship beneath him explodes. The comedic tone of the moment is woefully out of place.

And I always admire the logistics of such vast productions. It must have been an incredible task to put this film together. And the film, for the most part makes an effort to tell a balanced story. I like that the Japanese are never depicted as the “bad guys” - you see the cause-and-effect of the political and military decisions that led to their disastrous decision to attack the US naval base. And they are not just the faceless enemy – each of the main Japanese characters is just as fleshed out and interesting, if not more so, as the American participants. Yes, the film has some pro-American sentiment - the most obvious is Yamamoto’s “Americans are a proud and just people” speech, but it’s not always that cut and dried. Mostly it depicts a series of events leading to an inevitable conclusion. The film knows that we know how it ends – so it makes no attempt to hide this and that means that even during it’s slowest scenes, it’s never uninteresting.

In fact it’s the slower bits that I find the most compelling. The Pearl Harbor attack is an incredibly well-staged set piece, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen in other war films, and how it plays out is a no-brainer to anyone with even a passing knowledge of WWII. I like the closed-door discussions and the foreboding series of events leading to the attack – the combination of ignorance and hubris among the US military brass, and the massive ideological divide between the military and the diplomats on the Japanese side.

Plus it ends with possibly the best war-time quote of all time, Japanese Admiral Yamamoto’s famous: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” Two and a half hours well spent.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

A giant cheese grater and that William guy who always plays a bad guy do battle with four giant turtles and a rat while that guy from 30 Rock tries to crack onto Megan Fox. If this doesn’t spell ‘good time had by all’ to you, you’re dead inside.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a 2014 film mercifully not directed by Michael Bay and starring Megan Fox, Will Arnett, and some voice actors.

When I heard ‘Ninja Turtles’ and ‘Michael Bay’ in the same sentence I wanted to crawl into a hole and hibernate for a thousand years. The Turtles getting the Transformers treatment? I figured it spelled death. But being an insane Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan, I went along to see it. And despite the 3D (3D makes me feel like my eyeballs are drunk but the rest of me is sober) I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this movie.

But let’s get the bad out of the way. Megan Fox as April O’Neal. No. Just…no. I know mental giants who can’t keep their hands off their dicks think she’s hot, but she’s just a nitwit. She brings nothing but a C-cup and her trademark lack of discernible talent to the role. And there’s a really nonsensical moment just after she first meets the Turtles where she doesn’t realise that four giant talking turtles wearing coloured bandannas are the same four turtles she raised in a genetics lab when she was a little girl (and painted the same coloured dots on their shells). She’s not even supposed to be playing an airhead in this movie. The moment is so badly written it’s cringe worthy. Nobody could be that stupid.

Anyway, aside from a few missteps like that the film is incredibly enjoyable. Internet fan boys moaned about the ‘look’ of the turtles here, but I think they’re fine. They are bulked up as per every other superhero movie out there at the moment, but they have distinct personalities and the voice acting is, with one exception, spot on.

The Shredder is also great (though I could have sworn it was Ken Watanabe when he first appears). He is suitably badass and his voice is really creepy.

I also like that this version omits the Casey Jones character, and instead the turtles fill the roles of New York’s ‘vigilantes’. One thing did bug me. Raphael was always my favourite. I identified with the ‘brooding loner’ thing. So I was a little disappointed that in this iteration he is actually the least interesting of the four. His voice also makes him sound like a huge black guy. It’s strangely out of place. It momentarily jarred me out of the film every time he spoke. Maybe it’s just that his Brooklyn wiseguy accent in the 1990 live action film was so perfect I was just expecting something different.

Anyway, it’s a pretty minor complaint. Leonardo and Michelangelo are probably the most fully realised of the bunch. Mikey steals every scene he’s in. Thankfully in this film he’s not relegated to the wisecracking moron role. While some of his jokes fall flat, most really appealed to my juvenile sense of humour and a scene in an elevator is worth the price of admission twice over.

Most of the fight scenes, although really well staged, are filmed in that Bourne Supremacy-jerky way that is off-putting enough in 2D, but this time had me wrenching the 3D glasses off intermittently and blinking like a mental patient to avoid a seizure. Thankfully the major set piece – a fight scene atop an out of control semitrailer hurtling down a mountainside - is superbly filmed and so exciting it had me bouncing in my seat like a hyperactive toddler.

And although the film ends with the expected ‘these days we don’t do movies, we do franchises’ moment (the Shredder is not really dead…wow, didn’t see that one coming), it’s forgivable because it’s such a short snippet of footage you could actually miss it, and the film does work as a standalone movie.

The 1990 live action film remains the best adaptation of the Laird/Eastman comic book foursome, but this film is brief, engaging, and humorous. It’s lots of fun. 100 minutes well wasted and 100 minutes I will gladly waste again.

Carrie (2013)

Babe is slaughtered by some drunk teenagers, Julianne Moore takes the Bible way too literally, and an angry girl destroys a gorgeous cherry red 1971 Pontiac...and some other stuff.

Carrie is a remake based on a Stephen King novel, directed by Kimberly Peirce and starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Gabriella Wilde and Ansel Elgort.

I’ve lost interest in remakes to such a massive degree that I didn’t even know that this one existed. It was only that my girlfriend hired this one for us to watch one Friday night that it even came to my attention, otherwise I probably would never have even been aware of it.

The original Carrie was quite shocking for its day. This remake tries to up the ante, blood-wise, which is not a bad thing but it never really succeeds in being as creepily effective as the Sissy Spacek version. It’s not a bad film though. I particularly liked the opening. Julianne Moore is a fine actress, and she plays Carrie’s religious fanatic mother. She’s great in the opening scene that sees her torn between a motherly instinct and…plunging a giant pair of scissors into a newborn. Christian fundamentalist bullshit scares me more than horror films ever could, so I found most of the scenes with Carrie’s mother quite disturbing.

The performances are actually all quite good. As good as Julianne Moore is, my favourite though was probably Carrie’s bully, Chris (Portia Doubleday). She pulls off the sociopath thing so believably I have to wonder what she’s like in real life. The character is well written and relatable, I mean every high school in the world has a girl like this lurking just a few lockers away down the hall poised to start screaming and tearing other people’s hair out when she doesn’t get her way.

And Chloe Moretz is good as Carrie, but I had one problem with her. She’s too pretty. The original Carrie character worked so well because Sissy Spacek was ‘girl next door’. She wasn’t one of the ‘beautiful people’ at her school. It’s a minor issue yeah, but I just had trouble believing a girl that good looking would struggle to get a date to the prom.

I was also really impressed with Ansel Elgort as Tommy, the hapless jock who is talked into taking Carrie to the prom. He’s not a bad actor. As long as he stays away from the personal trainers and grilled chicken, I think he’ll turn out some pretty decent performances. In this film, he’s a genuinely nice guy. I kept waiting for him to do something bastardly, but he’s a gentleman all the way. It made me all the more sympathetic to his demise – he gets clocked in the head with the blood bucket and this, for some weird reason, kills him. I can’t remember if this was in the original, but it’s both pathetic and hilarious.

Anyway, Carrie’s revenge scene is just as satisfying in this version as in the original. You know you shouldn’t be cheering for her (she’s basically slaughtering a room full of innocent people) but you can’t help but relish in the moment as much as she does. Points to Moretz’s performance for that. She doesn’t quite cackle like a witch, but it’s definitely in her eyes.

And the events leading up to it are actually very well directed – the scenes of Carrie making her own dress for the prom, and waiting for her date, are really well done and make the ‘you know it’s coming’ bucket of blood moment all the more effective.

The ending is cheap and predictable (can I even use that term when talking about a remake?) but considering what’s come before it, it actually works. This film has renewed my faith that remakes of classic horror films can actually be worth checking out. 100 minutes well spent.