Star Trek Into Darkness Isn’t Perfect, But Delivers Solid Blockbuster Goodness

As was the case when it came to me watching Star Trek in 2009, I know little about, and care even less for, the history of Star Trek and the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.  I can reel off the names of the ship’s crew, some of the enemies the series has created and know enough about it to recognise when it is being parodied or referenced in television or popular culture, but I’ve never watched any of the various TV series set in that universe, and although I’ve seen bits of the previous films, I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually watched them or not.

But despite that, I still enjoyed JJ Abrams’ rebooting of the series in 2009, and as a fan of a lot of his work (he has been involved at some level in so many TV and film projects that it’s almost impossible to be an Abrams completest, or like everything he’s been involved in), that meant that Star Trek Into Darkness became a film I wanted to see.

The 2009 Star Trek was an origin story (Enterprisers Assemble, if you will), and Into Darkness picks up the story with the crew of the Enterprise more established as a team, working together to save an alien species from extinction by preventing a volcano from erupting and destroying their planet.  But Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) has done this without permission, and when his First Officer, Mr Spock (Zachary Quinto), hands over a true report of the alien encounter, Kirk is demoted to First Officer level, losing control of the Enterprise.  But after a terrorist attack in London, a man named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) attacks an emergency meeting of Starfleet command and kills Admiral Pike, Kirk’s mentor and the man who demoted him.  So Kirk is restored as Captain of the Enterprise, and goes after Harrison, planning to stop his from attempting further attacks.

After that, I have to admit that I got a little lost about the plot.  John Harrison is clearly an unhappy man and has very personal unresolved issues with certain members of Starfleet command, and he has a complicated plan to get revenge.  Like the Joker in The Dark Knight, Raoul Silva in Skyfall or Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3, Harrison’s plan is a little sketchy and over-elaborate.  He wants revenge and has an idea of how to get it, but it’s not really clear what his end-game is. If he gets his revenge, what next?  You could probably spend a lot of time picking holes in his plan, and thinking ‘Well why didn’t he just do that instead’, but ultimately a villainous plan like that isn’t really much more than a Macguffin, a way to bring the good guys and the bad guys together to beat each other up until one man (or one crew) is left standing.

So Star Trek Into Darkness doesn’t really dwell on the whats and whys of the story, and instead moves along at a rapid pace that keeps you entertained and interested for the duration of the film.  There are very few scenes of people standing around telling themselves (and the audience) what is happening any why, and it’s never too long before another big (and impressive) set piece enters the story, giving the film a real impetus.  And it’s only really after the film has ended that you might find yourself thinking ‘Wait, why did he do that?’ or ‘Why did that thing do that?’

Because Into Darkness is hugely entertaining, moving from one location to another with and one battle to the next without pausing for much of a breath.  If the plot is lacking, the action more than makes up for it, as Kirk and his crew battle Klingons (who look more bad-ass than they have previously, although they are only briefly in the film), Harrison and other, unexpected enemies.  It also does a good job of establishing the bonds that have grown between the crew of the Enterprise, particularly the relationship between Spock and Kirk as they become great friends, while still unable to fully understand the differences between their species.

While the Enterprise crew are more developed and all give good performances, there’s little doubt that Cumberbatch is the standout in the film.  He’s already firmly established himself as a TV star in Sherlock, but he excels in his biggest film role to date, and is sure to get himself plenty of offers for big roles in film in the future (but hopefully not so many that gaps between series Sherlock get too big).

Star Trek Into Darkness isn’t a perfect film; at times it relies a little too much on familiar beats from the original series, whether it’s in the dialogue or the way certain characters act, and yes, the plot is bit flimsy when you really think about what’s just happened.  And perhaps the weakest part of the film is the abrupt ending, which really does seem to come out of nowhere.  It’s almost like Abrams and his writers realised they’d reached the two hour mark and just decided to stop, with the resolution of the film coming just a little bit too easily given what has happened before.

But the film is ultimately what it should be; a fast-paced and exciting sci-fi blockbuster that improves upon what made the first (or more accurately, the eleventh) Star Trek film a success.  What happens next is somewhat uncertain as JJ Abrams has another space-related franchise to re-invent (I forget its name) before he can consider directing a third film, but it certainly feels like the right tools are in place in front of, and behind, the camera to continue the story of the Enterprise over the next decade or so.

@TheGlassCase

Evil Dead Lacks Everything That Made Sam Raimi’s Original A Classic

While there’s nothing new about films being remade, it does feel like cinema goers have been bombarded with remakes, reboots and even ‘reimaginings’ of classic films (and bad films too) in the last decade or so.  In particular, classic horror movies of the 70s and 80s seem to be the go to genre for remakes, with the likes of Halloween, Last House On The Left, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Piranha and The Thing (although that serves more as a prequel to John Carpenter’s film that a remake) even though there’s yet to be a particularly good remake of any film from that time.

The latest remake from that era is Fede Alvarez’s take on Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead.  Retitled Evil Dead, it’s not exactly a remake; there’s no character called Ash, and a pre-credits sequence shows the end of a previous encounter with a book known as the Naturom Demonto (known as the Necronomicon in Raimi’s films), suggesting that what happens in the original film may just be one of many times the book has (literally) raised hell.

Another difference between the two films is the reason why five twenty-something people visit a cabin in the woods for the weekend.  Rather than the standard horny group plus one geek set up, the five friends gathering at the cabin have a more serious task in mind; getting Mia (Jane Levy) to quit drugs and go cold turkey.  Naturally, there’s something not quite right about this cabin, and a lingering smell turns out to be a collection of dead cats hanging from the ceiling in the cellar.  While two of the group explore the stinky underground, they find a book sealed inside a black rubbish bag with barbed wire.  It would make for a boring movie (although Evil Dead is a boring movie anyway), if one of them said ‘Eh, let’s just leave that where it is’, so Eric (he’s the geeky one, you can tell because of his long hair and glasses) brings it up with him, and later opens it up, finding all kinds of weird shit inside, including a passage that he reads out loud, bringing forth a demon.

Alvarez has repeated Raimi’s flying demon camera set up, and the demon finds Mia, who is outside after attempting to flee the cabin (she’s been seeing a ghostly woman, and crashes the car she’s driving when the woman appears in the road in front of her), and takes possession of her.   When the group get her back to the cabin, she tries to warm them about what has happened, but her claims are dismissed, as she has lied before, with this being the second time she’s tried to quit drugs (apparently she over-dosed and ‘legally died’ when she took up drugs again last time).  But after she scalds herself in the shower, her brother David tries to drive her to a hospital, only to find a river overflowing and blocking the road back into town.

So the group are trapped at the cabin, and from there, things get extremely gory, gruesome and definitively not fun, for the characters, or the viewer.  Because Evil Dead just isn’t all that interesting.  The special effects might be better, but the writing isn’t, and the characters are extremely under-written, with so little substance to them that they can’t even be the clichéd characters you normally see when a fun trip to a remote cabin goes horribly wrong.

Maybe the biggest problem with the film is that there’s just nothing left to do at a cabin in the woods that hasn’t been seen before.  The film is extremely violent, with lots of limbs (mostly arms) being removed in various ways, and you’re never more than a few feet away from a pool of blood.  But mysterious cabins have become such a staple of the horror genre that there are no surprises, and no scares either, in the way the characters are killed off.  Perhaps The Cabin In The Woods, one of my favourite films of 2012 has just killed off that trope for good.  That film was, in some ways, a spoof of films like The Evil Dead or Cabin Fever, but while it satirised the clichés of those films, it was also extremely entertaining, drenched in blood but funny, smart and most importantly, scary.

I just never cared about any of the characters in Evil Dead, and there’s no-one in the cast who grabs your attention like Bruce Campbell did as Ash in Raimi’s film (although no-one can really grab your attention like Bruce Campbell can), making them all the more disposable.  The film is also entirely lacking in any kind of humour, making it even less enjoyable.  The original film had the perfect blend of character, humour and scares, and these are the three key ingredients that are missing in Evil Dead.

The film has already enjoyed box office success in the US, so a sequel seems inevitable, but rumours that Raimi is looking to make a sequel to the gloriously stupid (in a very groovy way) Army of Darkness are much more interesting.  Despite Raimi and Campbell being on board as producers, Evil Dead is a stale take on a cult classic, a film that is very unlikely to have the kind of longevity that Raimi’s 1981 debut continues to have.  It’s not a terrible film, but it’s too familiar to be good.

@TheGlassCase

Black Mirror – The Waldo Moment

The final episode of Black Mirror’s second series pushes the idea that people don’t like politicians, but do like people who successfully make them look stupid, to the nth degree.  Daniel Rigby (otherwise known as ‘That bloke from the annoying BT ads’) plays Jamie Slater, a failed comedian, who in turn plays Waldo, a successful animated character from a satirical news show who goes from winding up politicians in an Ali G style, to becoming a candidate in a local election.

The episode is again written by Charlie Brooker, but the idea dates back to his Nathan Barley days with Chris Morris.  And like the last two episodes, there is a good idea in ‘The Waldo Moment’, but it ultimately doesn’t quite work.  But for me, the reason that it doesn’t work is that the story isn’t served well by the constraints of having to be an hour long (really closer to 40 minutes minus adverts) TV show, rather than a film of 90 minutes or more.

Everything happens too quickly to really resonate, with Jamie going from being frustrated by his career being defined by a cartoon to starting to enjoy the power Waldo gives him, to that power wearing off and his career (and life) going off the rails more than it ever had before.

There are many things to like about ‘The Waldo Moment’ though.  Rigby gives a solid performance and proves that he can be more than just a kind of funny bloke from a long-running series of adverts (and to be fair, he has won a BAFTA for his role in the BBC’s Eric & Ernie), while Jason Flemyng is enjoyably annoying as a producer and the man who owns the rights to the Waldo character and is quite willing to do anything he wants to with him if it will make him money and get him ratings.

A scene set in a student version of Newsnight is probably the high point of the episode as a Conservative MP that Waldo has been harassing (and continues to harass during the event) tries to turn the tables on Waldo by naming and shaming Jamie.  But Jamie’s anger works in his favour, pushing Waldo from being an irritant to something that almost feels like an alternative voice in the political world.  His pride has been wounded, but his anger gets the audience’s attention, and suddenly he’s become more than just a comedy character.

But because ‘The Waldo Moment’ feels like it needs more time to really be successful, it makes the second series of Black Mirror not quite as good as the first.  ‘The National Anthem’ and ‘The Entire History of You’ were really excellent episodes, and nothing in this second series has met those standards.  The first episode had a good idea but an abrupt ending that was lacking a decent payoff, while last week’s episode pushed a decent idea too far to feel like something that could really happen.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t enjoyed many aspects of it, and I hope that there’s more Black Mirror in the future.  I do still think that it’s something that Brooker could use to give other writers a chance to create something that ties into the theme of the series, rather than having Brooker doing all the writing himself.  I like most of the things he’s been involved in (let’s not talk about A Touch of Cloth), but I don’t think his writing is quite strong enough for him to do everything on his own.

@TheGlassCase

The Walking Dead – I Ain’t A Judas

After an excellent first half of a season, The Walking Dead suddenly finds itself in something of a holding pattern as season three comes to an end.  Everyone is waiting for a Rick vs. Phil the Governor Mortal Kombat-style face-to-face fight to the death, but there are still another five episodes of this season to go, so the show has to find other ways to fill the time.  Unfortunately, the writers have decided that the best way to do this is by pushing Andrea, the worst character in the show by a distance, to the forefront, and make ‘I Ain’t A Judas’ a bit of a non-event as an episode.

Andrea finds out that the Governor has gone to the prison and there’s been a battle, and she’s not happy about it.  The Governor claims that the people at the prison have changed since Andrea knew them and that they fired first (which isn’t true, of course), but she wants to go to the prison and speak to them to try and avoid more battles in the future.  But the Governor doesn’t want to hear it, and tells her that if she goes, she should stay there.

I don’t think I’m alone in agreeing with the Governor’s assertion there, as a lot of people would like Andrea to just go away and never come back (or failing that, get munched on by a walker or two….or five), but she’s made her mind up, she’s going to the prison, and she wants Milton to help her.  Milton is another problem character for the show but he’s not annoying so much as he is pointless.  He’s been created for the show, but has already served his purpose (he’s been experimenting on walkers, and basically made no progress), so he just lingers around Woodbury.  He agrees to help Andrea, but is actually following the Governor’s orders.

Out in the wild, Andrea follows Michonne’s lead by capturing one and hacking off its arms before American History X-ing its jaw off, and she gets some help from Tyreese and his group, who are directed to Woodbury by Milton.  Andrea reaches the prison, but Rick doesn’t exactly afford her a warm welcome, and she’s surprised to hear that the Governor fired on them first.  She’s trying to negotiate a truce, but when that doesn’t work, she blames Michonne for ‘poisoning’ the group against the Governor, even though he’s quite clearly a bit of a nutjob.

Andrea leaves the prison by car, with the group making her consider killing the Governor for them, ending the threat of war before it starts, and we’re treated to the bizarre (in the context of The Walking Dead as a show) sight of a naked Andrea (or most likely a butt-double) climbing out of the Governor’s bed and taking a knife, as she considers killing him in his sleep, something she is ultimately unable to do.

I worried last week that the show was in danger of repeating itself and getting stuck in the same routine heading into season four, and this episode is another disappointing one.  Andrea and Merle are annoying characters that don’t really bring anything to the table, and delaying the showdown between Rick and the Governor (something that looks like being delayed further, based on the preview of next week’s episode) is stalling the show’s progress.

The Walking Dead really needs to find more to do with itself than just having the original group moving to a new destination each season, and season 3 seems to be coming to a stuttering end.

@TheGlassCase

To The Wonder Is A Film That Shows The Best, And The Worst, Of Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick films tend to divide critics and audiences, and it’s not difficult to see why.  They are always beautifully shot and he gets brilliant performances from his casts, but plots and dialogue are almost foreign concepts in some of his films.  But when he gets things right, and in my mind, he usually does, he can produce mesmerizing films unlike anything anybody else makes.

He made his directorial debut in 1973 with Badlands, but he’s never been exactly prolific, so his latest film, To The Wonder, is just his sixth, although it does come just two years after the release of his last film, The Tree Of Life.  That film was one of my favourites of 2011; although the plot was barely there, the imagery was staggering, and Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and newcomer Hunter McCracken gave brilliant performances.  So I was very much looking forward to To The Wonder, especially after a beautiful looking trailer appeared online earlier in the year.

To The Wonder received a mixed reaction when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, with a mixture of jeers and cheers when it finished, and laughs from the audience when Javier Bardem appeared on screen as a priest (although why that would provoke laughter is beyond me).  You do get the sense that some people just want to get attention by having extreme reactions to his films (people booed after The Tree Of Life premiered at Cannes), but at the same time, I can understand why some people find it difficult to love his work.

And that’s certainly true of To The Wonder, a film where the plot and dialogue seem even more of an afterthought than in The Tree Of Life, which makes it a film that just didn’t engage me, despite more beautiful photography and an outstanding performance from Olga Kurylenko.

The production of the film has been somewhat controversial, as Malick has cut a host of stars entirely from the film, including Jessica Chastain, Rachel Weisz and Michael Sheen, leaving just Kurylenko, Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams as the stars.  But the truth is that even Affleck and McAdams are barely in the film at all, even with Affleck being arguably the key figure in the story (such as it is), as he is the link between Kurylenko and McAdams, as he has relationships with both of them.

Stories from the set suggest that Affleck and Weisz in particular had much bigger roles in the film at various times, but while Weisz is gone completely, Affleck is relegated to the background, particularly when his time is being spent with Kurylenko.  Whatever Malick intended the film to be when he started production on it, the finished product is very much Kurylenko’s film, with everything revolving around her, and whatever else you say about the film, Kurylenko’s performance is a brilliant one.

She plays Marina, a French woman in a relationship with Affleck’s Neil in Paris, who appear to have talked about marriage.  They move to America with Marina’s daughter, but she has a hard time settling down in a small town, especially as Affleck’s job (which is never really explored, but he appears to be doing geophysical work) keeps him away from home for long periods of time.  She starts to become frustrated by her life and her life with him, and when her visa expires, she returns to Paris (her daughter has already gone to live with her father).

Neil meets Jane (McAdams), who appears to be a childhood friend, or perhaps a friend of his sisters, and they start a passionate relationship, although that passion seems to be short-lived, as Marina remains on Neil’s mind, and eventually returns to America, where they marry.  Bardem’s priest appears intermittently, as both Neil and Marina attend his church, and he appears to be searching for something, not something religious perhaps, but another meaning for his life (an elderly woman tells him that she prays for him because he seems so lonely).

There are no bad performances in To The Wonder, but Marina is the only character in it that really does anything.  All the others characters are very much in the background, and she has an almost other-worldly presence in the film, thinking and acting like a free spirit and unable to cope with a normal life.  It makes the film difficult to follow, and even more difficult to enjoy, as you never really know what the state of Neil and Marina’s relationship is, because well, the film simply never shows them having conversations.  They get married, we see them during a doctor’s appointment where Marina is relieved to learn that she doesn’t need a hysterectomy, and we see them argue, but it’s never clear how their relationship is going.

It sounds incredibly pretentious to describe the film as visual poetry (because it definitely is), but that’s how it feels, with the characters often interacting outside in fields or amongst wildlife (one of the more beautiful scenes in the film sees Neil and Jane in fields surrounded by bison), and the dialogue sometimes barely more than a whisper.

Ultimately, the film just feels too Malick-y, with the things that people criticise his films for being pushed to the limit, leaving the viewer with little to relate to.  Despite the stunning images and Kurylenko’s outstanding performance, To The Wonder leaves you wondering (sorry) just what it’s supposed to mean or represent.  I didn’t hate the film, I just didn’t understand it.

@TheGlassCase

Black Mirror – White Bear

The recurring theme is Black Mirror is our obsession with technology and pushing the boundaries of what technology should be able to do.  Most of the episodes have appeared to take place in the not too-distant future, with the technology in the episodes looking like they are maybe only a few years away from reality, or at least a conceivable advancement for existing technology.

And for the most part, the ideas explored in the first four episodes have been successful (although I don’t expect David Cameron to have sex with a pig any time soon).  I felt that last week’s episode ran out of steam and had a somewhat disappointing ending, but I liked the idea and again, it felt like something that could conceivably happen in the near future.  But ‘White Bear’ is an episode where I felt that what I was seeing couldn’t happen, and that’s a first for Black Mirror.

The episode starts of in a strange, confusing way, as we see a woman (Victoria, played by Lenora Crichlow) waking up in a room in a confused state.  She looks ill, there are pills scattered on the floor, and her wrists are bandaged.  She’s come to in a normal looking house, but the only signs of life in it are two televisions with a strange symbol flashing on the screens.  She picks up a photograph of a child and has a sharp flashback to what looks like her filming the child, so we assume that it’s her daughter.  When she goes outside, she notices people filming her from the windows of the houses on an estate, but when she calls to them (she can’t remember who she is), they make no effort to communicate with her, instead standing passively with their cameras or phones out and watching.

Things go from strange to sinister as a man wearing a balaclava with the same logo from the TV screens printed on it pulls a shotgun from the boot of his car and marches towards her.  He shoots and she runs, eventually into a petrol station, where a man and a woman reluctantly help her.  She and the girl (Jem), manage to escape, but the man is shot in the stomach.  Victoria and Jem then see two more strangely dressed people, but get away from them too, and Jem later explains that a strange signal that was broadcast on televisions has changed people into watchers or hunters, with the hunters doing terrible things to people unaffected by the broadcast, while the watchers record their actions.

Jem (Tuppence Middleton) and Victoria are helped by another man unaffected by the signal (played by Michael Smiley), who drives them to a remote location in the woods where he claims they will be safe because he can’t get a signal.  But he turns out to be a hunter too, and is threatening Victoria with a drill when Jem rescues her by killing him and allowing them to escape.  Their plan is to head to a transmitter to stop the signal and save themselves.  Victoria continues to be haunted by random flashbacks, and we see her asking the girl to hide as she and a man drive past police officers.

They reach the transmitter, but before they can destroy it, two of the hunters find them and when Victoria fires a shotgun, all that comes out of it is glitter, and suddenly the transmitter room opens up to an audience.  It’s a very confusing moment, but then Michael Smiley’s character appears unharmed as a presenter of what seems to be a TV show of some kind.  We discover that Victoria was actually an accomplice of a horrific crime, as she filmed her boyfriend torturing and murdering the girl.  He killed himself in prison, so Victoria has become part of a game to properly punish her.

And for me, it’s a revelation that just doesn’t work.  There has been an interestingly weird atmosphere to everything that’s happened in the episode to that point, but I didn’t think the twist really made a lot of sense.  Suddenly Victoria is the villain of the piece, and her punishment is to live out a kind of Groundhog Day existence, where she’s forced to replay this day in front of different people who can pay to watch her live action mental torture.  It’s obviously Charlie Brooker taking a swipe at the gang mentality that can rise up when the perpetrators of a terrible crime appear to be punished insufficiently, but it’s an idea that’s too unbelievable to accept, even in the world of Black Mirror.

It’s not a terrible episode because the first half of it is at least interesting, but how it resolves itself feels like too much.

@TheGlassCase

The Walking Dead – Home

One of the biggest problems The Walking Dead has had since it began is the sheer number of annoying, or just badly written characters.  That really became a problem during the second half of season 2, when everything happened on, or just off, Hershel Green’s farm, and the conversations (and arguments) between many of the characters just became a blur and a reason to shout abuse at the television when someone as crushingly dull as Dale was babbling on about morals etc.

So when Glen Mazzara replaced Frank Darabont as show runner, he had problems to deal with, and he did a good job of that in the final episodes of that season, and continued to do so as season 3 began.  So the likes of Dale, Shane, Lori and T-Dog were killed off, because they were either really annoying or crushingly dull (sometimes both), and then the survivors finally got off the farm and back on the road.  And season 3 has been much better, with Rick taking control of the group, and making them into a tighter unit; a more ruthless and self-reliant group of people who found a prison and took control of it, giving themselves a place to stay in relative safety.  It’s also seen the introduction of David Morrissey as the Governor, and Danai Gurira as Michonne, giving the show better characters and, more importantly, different locations to film on.

But everything isn’t rosy in the world of The Walking Dead, and season 3’s 10^th episode (‘Home’) is one that has a lot of problems, although it does have a finale that somewhat makes up for what happens earlier in the episode.  There’s certainly no competition for the worst thing about the episode, and that is Rick’s continued nuttiness, as he wanders off outside the perimeters of the prison following ghost Lori around.  After Lori was (mercifully) killed off, Rick had one episode of madness as he had imagined telephone conversations with Lori and other people who he’d known and lost.  To an extent, that was fine, as no-one is going to argue that losing your wife and gaining a daughter would mess with anyone’s head, even if they weren’t living in a world over-run by flesh-eating zombies.  But to be blunt, Andrew Lincoln’s ‘I’m mad and I’m seeing things’ acting is rubbish, and it’s a relief when his mental stupor is broken by a surprise attack from the Governor and his men at the episode’s end.

With Rick having a breakdown, and Daryl going off with Merle, Glenn puts himself in charge of the prison group, and he’s intent on striking at the Governor before he strikes at them, even though they would be hopelessly outnumbered and ammunition is running low.  He’s unable to convince the others that this is a sound plan, and can’t rely on Maggie to back him up as she’s understandably in shock after everything that happened at Woodbury.  Over at Woodbury, Andrea is asking questions again, and it’s an element of the show that’s really difficult to take to.  Andrea has always been one of those annoying characters The Walking Dead forces upon its audience, and this is a good example of why.  She’s charmed her way into the Governor’s bed, but now seems to think she’s an important member of the community in Woodbury, and it’s no surprise when Milton and others shrug off her questions about where some of the men of the town are.

That’s because even though the Governor has told Andrea that he won’t attack the prison, he’s actually planning to do exactly that (because obviously).

Talking of annoying characters, Merle has resumed his old ways with Daryl (in other words, bullying him and generally being obnoxious) as they head out on their own.  Merle is a very one-dimensional character, and his presence on the show is becoming a chore.  The pair happen upon a group of Mexicans caught in a walker herd, and while Daryl wants to help, Merle prefers to chastise Daryl while also firing off racial epithets and looking for things to steal from the group.  It all leads to Daryl deciding to leave Merle and head back to the prison, and you’re left wondering why he bothered going with his brother in the first place.  There’s just no place for Michael Rooker’s character in the show, and even though he follows Daryl to the prison and helps against the Governor’s assault, the sooner he gets written out of the show the better.

What the episode does do well is the surprise factor of the Governor’s assault.  The surprise comes via a bullet to Axel’s head, as he’s chatting away to Carol, blissfully unaware of an impending threat.  He was also a character that didn’t have much to do, so the show won’t miss him, but it’s still a good way to start a battle that sees Rick snap out of his daze and a new fight for the prison group to face.  It’s a bloody fight that brings some much needed spark to an otherwise poor episode.

The show is inevitably building to a showdown between Rick and the Governor, but that in itself throws up some questions about the long-term future of the show.  I would assume that Team Rick will triumph over the Governor, but if they do, what happens next?  If season 4 continued in the prison, where’s the story?  If the survivors head back out on the road, what makes future episodes different from what’s come before?

With Glen Mazzara stepping down as show-runner, there must be some questions about the show’s future.  It may be time for it to go in a new direction, and instead of focusing on survival, find a way to explore the story from different angles.

I haven’t suddenly fallen out of love with The Walking Dead, but it’s in danger of becoming a show that repeats itself.

@TheGlassCase

Complicit Is An Excellent Drama That Leaves You Wanting More

Channel 4’s decision to air Complicit now feels like a timely one.  This one-off drama tells the story of an MI5 agent who has been tracking a suspected terrorist for years, and believes that a ricin attack is imminent.  It airs shortly after the debate (and in some cases, hysteria) over the depiction of torture in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, and explores similar themes, as Edward (played by David Oyelowo) feels compelled to cross the legal boundaries when it comes to interrogating prisoners.

But it’s also timely thanks to Oyelowo’s presence.  After making his name on BBC drama Spooks, Oyelowo has moved into film, and in the last two years has starred opposite the likes of James Franco (in Rise of the Planet of the Apes), Tom Cruise (in Jack Reacher) and Daniel Day-Lewis (in a small, but important, role in Lincoln).

Complicit joins his character as he trails Waleed Ahmed (Arsher Ali, Four Lions), a man Edward believes to be a terrorist, and who claims to be travelling to Yemen for the wedding of a cousin, although one of Edward’s sources tells him that the cousin in question wants nothing to do with Waleed.  When Waleed is captured in Cairo, Edward flies out to interrogate him, but becomes frustrated by the legal process when Waleed claims he has been tortured.  With Edward’s fears about the imminence of the ricin attack growing, he feels forced to consider torture as the only way of getting the information he needs to prevent the attacks.

So Complicit is a drama that has a lot of things going for it, and for the most part, it delivers.  It gets off to a little bit of a slow start, with not much in the way of exposition as we see Edward just doing his job, already deep into his investigation of Waleed, and looking for even the smallest clue to indicate what he’s up to.  Edward is frustrated by the response of his superiors when he goes to them with the news about Waleed’s visit to Yemen, as they feel there isn’t enough evidence to show that he is going there as part of the process of constructing a ricin attack.  They do eventually agree to follow him in Yemen, but they lose him, and he’s eventually captured in Egypt.

When Edward arrives in Cairo to question Waleed face-to-face, he finds that he is up against a very intelligent and confident man.  Waleed protests his innocence, and claims that he was tortured after being arrested, knowing that such an accusation means that he cannot be questioned until the accusation has been investigated.  So Edward is left with little to do in Cairo except wait for the outcome of the investigation, despite a police chief claiming Waleed was not mis-treated.

It’s from this point on that Complicit really starts to become an interesting and compelling watch.  As Edward becomes increasingly frustrated by the speed with which the investigation is progressing and what he sees as a lack of support from his superiors, he meets with Colonel Hazem Ashraf (Makram Khoury), who makes it clear to Edward that he has tortured men for information in the past, and is willing to do so again.

Arsher Ali and Oyelowo both give particularly strong performances in Complicit, and their scenes together are the best thing about it.  They are both pushing each other, trying to break each other, in the scenes when they are together, as Waleed racially abuses Edward to try and provoke him, and then defines the idea of terrorism for Edward by telling him that the ricin is already in the UK…or maybe it isn’t and he just wants him to think it is.

Complicit builds from a slow start to an impressive finish, as Edward decides to cross a line to get the answers he needs, and suffers the consequences, while Waleed seems to get away with his crimes (or intended crimes).  I enjoyed it a lot, with the only real criticism I have of it being that it left me wanting a bit more.

It’s a very well written show, and at times it felt like I was watching a particularly good episode of a series, and that’s maybe its biggest problem.  The start of Complicit felt like a pilot, but without enough exposition, and while it got better as it went on, the end felt a bit like a cliff-hanger ending to a series.  Things had changed for Edward and Waleed, and if it had been the final episode of a series, the one that followed could see both sides going after each other in different ways.

And Complicit felt very different to TV series with similar themes like Homeland or 24, so a full series of it could find an audience without just looking like UK version of either of them.

But when my biggest criticism of a TV show is ‘I want to see more!’, then it must mean that Complicit was a success.  I hope there will be more of it, but if there isn’t it stands up very well as a one-off drama.

@TheGlassCase

Black Mirror – Be Right Back

The first series of Black Mirror was, for the most part, a success.  Two of the three one-off dramas were very good (The National Anthem and The Entire History Of You), while the other (15 Million Merits) had a good idea but didn’t quite work.  Two of those episodes were written by Charlie Brooker (the second with his wife Konnie Huq), with the third, The Entire History Of You, being written by Jesse Armstrong, and I thought at the time that Black Mirror could become a series with Brooker’s name on it that would allow various writers to bring their ideas to television.

But all three episodes are written by Brooker this time around, and the series begins with ‘Be Right Back’, starring Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson.  The recurring theme of Black Mirror is modern technology and ways of communication and how, with slight tweaks to the way they are now, things can go wrong or strange if technology is pushed too far.  But there has been a sense that what happens in each episode could happen, and that’s the case in Be Right Back too.

In this episode, Hayley Atwell’s character Martha is told of an online service that allows her to communicate with her recently dead boyfriend Ash (Gleeson), or at least, an avatar of him.  The service gathers information about people from their social media accounts, building a portrait of what they were like based on Tweets, Facebook messages, photos and any other recording of them.  Martha is devastated by Ash’s death, and when she discovers that she’s pregnant, she decides to give it a try.

She starts by sending him messages online, but then starts talking to him on the phone.  But the more she enjoys the conversations, the more she realises how much she misses him, and she decides to take the next step, which is to buy a literal avatar of Ash, an initially lifeless blank shell that develops into a very young looking version of him.  So now she can talk to him and touch him, but she soon starts to realise that things aren’t the same as they used to be.

And this is an idea that mostly works well.  Atwell gives a very good performance as a broken woman desperate for something to cling on to after her boyfriend’s death and discovering that she’s pregnant, while there’s a strange, but effective, creepiness to Gleeson’s performance as the avatar Ash.  It’s a drama with an unusual premise, but it treats it seriously (although some drunken flirting and a sex scene seem strangely out of place) and it is quite emotionally affecting.  Although we don’t get to know much about Martha or Ash, I did believe in their relationship and Atwell does a good job of showing the frustrations of trying to teach a version of her boyfriend exactly how he would react in certain situations.

But the problem with the episode is how it ends.  Martha starts to find the little differences between the Ash she knew and his avatar too much to handle.  For example, he doesn’t need to sleep, so lies in bed with his eyes open, but then doesn’t breathe, and she can tell that his breathing is fake.  He understands something of what Ash was like, but Martha is always having to explain subtle differences and she begins to realise that she’s made a mistake.  The episode ends with Ash and Martha on the edge of a cliff, with Martha trying to make Ash jump off and ‘kill’ himself.  But when she tries to make him respond like the real Ash would to what she’s demanding of him, it pushes her too far.  After that, the story flashes forward to Martha celebrating her daughter’s birthday.  Her daughter wants an extra slice of cake, which she takes into the attic, to share with Ash, who is living up there alone.

It doesn’t really work as an ending, and it feels like Brooker ran out of steam when writing the script.  I think it’s an idea that would have worked a little better as a feature length film, giving it more time to grow and change.  But apart from the last couple of minutes, I felt that this was a good start to the second series.   I liked the idea and the characters, and it’s re-assuring to see Brooker getting this (mostly) right after A Touch Of Cloth went so horribly wrong.  I look forward to the rest of the series.

@TheGlassCase

Girls – One Man’s Trash

A couple of weeks ago, I didn’t like an episode of Girls for the first time.  It wasn’t that the episode (‘Bad Friend’) was bad as much as I just didn’t understand the choices some of the characters made in it.  But that seemed to be just a little blip in my enjoyment of the show as last week’s episode, ‘It’s A Shame About Ray’ was really good, and everything seemed alright again.

So I hadn’t expected to watch episode 5 (‘One Man’s Trash’) and not enjoy it at all, and find it to be utterly self-indulgent and make no sense whatsoever.  But that’s exactly what happened, and the episode was so bad that I actually considered giving up on the show entirely while watching it.

It begins reasonably enough, with Hannah telling Ray that she thinks she’s invented a new word, ‘sexit’ (which means leaving a party early to have sex with someone), and some fun exchanges between the two as Ray asks her to use it in a sentence, and then he checks Urban Dictionary to settle the argument between them as to whether it already existed or not (to Hannah’s disappointment, it does, with the definition she used too).  But from here, the episode takes a sharp turn right off the edge of a cliff.

Because in walks a disgruntled Patrick Wilson, as Joshua, a man who lives near to the coffee shop that Ray manages, and is there to complain about someone dumping the shop’s rubbish in his bins, rather than their own.  For some reason, Ray refuses to entertain Joshua’s story in any way, even though Joshua is initially fairly polite with his request.  Although Alex Karpovsky’s performance is very good, it doesn’t make any sense for him to take such aggressive offence to Joshua’s reasonable request and he becomes belligerent as he yells at Joshua for bringing it up at all.  Hannah, who is working for Ray, doesn’t like the way he handles things either, and decides to leave.

She then finds Joshua’s apartment and ends up inside with the intention of making a confession; she’s been dumping the rubbish because she lost the key for the bins at the coffee shop, and is afraid to tell Ray.  That’s an example of how bad this episode is; just last week Hannah had invited Ray and Shoshanna round for dinner, and minutes ago having a dumb conversation about a new word with Ray, but suddenly we’re supposed to believe that he’s some sort of unapproachable tyrant in the work place.

That’s the least of this episode’s worries though, because after Joshua has invited Hannah into his house for lemonade and hears her confession about the rubbish, she kisses him and he likes it, which leads them to have a passionate 48 hour affair and gives Lena Dunham an excuse to be naked almost constantly.  And that is something that is starting to irritate me about Girls.  I don’t object to seeing Dunham naked on screen because of the size or shape of her body, or because I find her hideously unattractive, but the reasons for Hannah to be naked seem to be becoming more flimsy every week, and it really does feel like she’s naked at least once in every single episode.  And in this episode she’s naked more often than she’s ever been, as she and Joshua have sex many times over two days, we see her naked in the shower, and she plays table tennis (and has sex on the table) topless too.

Her nudity in this episode only serves to highlight how absurd the premise of it is.  Patrick Wilson is generally considered to be an attractive man, and although there’s a sense of his character being a lonely, slightly depressed man following a recent break up with his wife, it doesn’t make any sense that he’d invite Hannah into his home when she turns up at his door about to confess to dumping rubbish in his bins, let alone that he’d reciprocate when she kissed him, and allow her to stay in his home for two days while he stays home and calls in sick to work (he’s a doctor, but it doesn’t matter if he takes a sick day, because only ’10 to 20 people would die’.  That’s one of the few funny lines in the episode by the way).

The way Hannah acts throughout this episode is hard to stomach too.  After passing out in Joshua’s shower (she doesn’t seem to understand how it works), she suddenly breaks down while he’s trying to make her feel better, telling him that she just wants to be happy and telling him some weird details about her life and why she’s tired of making decisions just for the experience of doing the things that those decisions lead her to.  I suppose it’s meant to be a moment of clarity for Hannah, but the timing of her realisation is bizarre and there’s a sudden switch in her character where she starts attacking Joshua for not opening up to her, because he’s told her very little about himself and his failed relationship, and won’t let her call him Josh either.

It’s just a very strange, unbelievable episode of Girls and one that I really didn’t like at all.  It almost feels like Lena Dunham decided she has a crush on Patrick Wilson and stuck him in an episode just so her character could have a wild affair with him.  It’s an episode that feels out of context with everything that has happened in the series so far and almost like a ‘How do you like them apples’ extended middle finger to people who already hate the show.  I’m a huge fan of Girls and didn’t like this episode, so I can only imagine how much people who don’t like the show hated it.

The events of ‘One Man’s Trash’ will almost certainly never be mentioned again in the show, so I hope that it’s just a one-off bad episode.

@TheGlassCase