Author: Sean Gates

So, as mentioned earlier I did go see the new Bond movie, SPECTRE, with my friends Jeremy, Clayton, Steven and Moira tonight. I shared Drew McWeeny’s review when he put it online. Hoped he was wrong, hoped that this man who knows the Fleming novels as well as I do had somehow gotten it wrong in his review. Well, he didn’t. McWeeny was right.

I hate to admit it, but screenwriting is dead, at least in mainstream movies. On the drive home I mentioned to Clayton that it’s as if they filmed the synopsis or the notes, and in a rare moment he actually laughed at something I said — because it was true. SPECTRE, like basically any of the worst films in recent memory — Star Trek Into Darkness, The Amazing Spider-Man, any of the Transformers movies — has a series of bullet points that comprise the basic moments of a plot, but no connective tissue. We know things are important because we’re told they’re important, but they have no actual dramatic weight.

Clayton was talking about how he’d love to see the series stop trying to be an action series and be more of a mystery series, which is certainly more faithful to the Fleming novels. He also raised a great point that the reason the chase scene has no weight here is because you know Bond isn’t going to die. He’s on the defensive but you know he won’t die, so he’s going to get away from Dave Bautista sooner or later and there’s no tension. Whereas the chase in Casino Royale had Bond doing the chasing, will he catch them or won’t he is a far more compelling question. Likewise the beginning of Quantum of Solace, with Mr. White in the trunk, the stakes aren’t about Bond but Mr. White. This movie was made by people who don’t get that concept. There’s no drama when there’s no stakes.

The entirety of SPECTRE is a mess. It’s a love note to the late Connery-era, Roger Moore clown acts of yesteryear, with every major beat ripped from a previous entry in the series. By playing Moore-type comedy gags as straight as possible with Craig’s ruthless, haunted badass Bond, it manages to feel so much like self-parody that by the time Christoph Waltz shows up in his Nehru jacket and Chinese slippers, kissing a fluffly white cat, you automatically hear Mike Myers saying, “when Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset, PEOPLE DIE.”

And then, SPOILER ALERT, the film commits its cardinal sin: Blofeld is Bond’s adoptive brother. Blofeld’s daddy was nice to Bond after his parents died, so now Blofeld wants to ruin Bond’s life. He actually goes on record as saying that everything, from Vesper Lynd’s death to M’s, from Casino to Skyfall, was all his doing in order to punish Bond. So now nothing means anything. Bond’s heroics were just self-contained, he was fighting a guy who hates him for no reason this whole time and not just doing his duty to God and country because he’s a hero and that’s what he does. What planet do these people live on that they think this is compelling storytelling?

You know, the best thing about the Bond of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace is that he was a government assassin who killed people without remorse and often without breaking a sweat. I know that may seem like a twisted sentence, but come on. It’s Bond. He’s an assassin, he’s been conditioned to give no craps. That’s the point of him. I felt in Skyfall that he’d lost his edge, that he didn’t act when he ought to have and it cost some people their lives.

Here we get a Bond who spends half of the cold opening trying to choke out a helicopter pilot while the helicopter is flying, risking an horrific crash that would have killed scores of innocent Dia de los Muertos revelers in Mexico City, and at the end of the movie has his Walther pointed directly at Blofeld’s face on Westminster Bridge from three feet away, and elects not to pull the trigger, but to walk away. Are you kidding me? I know you can’t kill Blofeld, so don’t put Bond in a situation where he has the chance to do it, because the Bond I know would pull that trigger, smile coldly, and go have dinner and a sexy evening with Lea Seydoux. Sam Mendes, John Logan, all of you: WHAT YOU ARE DOING IS NOT STORYTELLING. PLEASE STOP.

And don’t get me started on the theme song and title sequence. We were laughing out loud during this. Not only is Sam Smith’s song six times as painful when you actually have to sit through the whole thing, but the title sequence that goes with it is like a joke. There’s a CGI octopus caressing naked women and naked women caressing a naked Bond who is on fire and staring dead-eyed into the camera. The octopus rides an explosion into the camera and…oh piss on it, there’s no point going on. This isn’t a Bond title sequence, it’s some kind of Japanese porn.

It’s like EON Productions is allergic to making good movies and can only stand to string two of them together at a time before making the stupidest possible crap for the next 6-10 years. I hate to say it, but I may be done with the series. Die Another Day damn near killed it for me, and if they hadn’t rebooted I’d have been done with it then. They had something going that I loved. And they just made me feel like an idiot for having done so. Well, you know the saying. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and the hell with the lot of you.

Or, alternatively, “WTF, Walnuts?”

To begin with, I’ve got to make it clear that I love the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  I nerded out so hard at Fellowship of the Ring that when the Balrog appeared I thought I was going to explode on a molecular level and potentially reform as a gelatinous goo.  I still think the Battle of Helm’s Deep is one of the coolest sequences ever filmed by anybody for any reason, and I will get a lump in my throat and cry the samurai tear at the stirring speeches delivered by Theoden King at the Pellenor Fields and by Aragorn at the Black Gate.  My face always seems to fit improperly on my skull when I hear the words, “For Frodo.”  So it is with great sadness that I report that I have not been enjoying The Hobbit.

The reasons are several, but I think Clayton Spinney has it right when he distills it all down to the fact that Peter Jackson has lost any semblance of restraint as a filmmaker.  You can actually see that happening to him as the Lord of the Rings series unfolds; Fellowship is still the best of the three.  But LOTR is such a huge story with such massive stakes (the end of the world, the rise to power of one of the devil’s captains in the world of men, the end of magic and the disappearance of God’s firstborn from the world; and the fate of mankind) and as such it earns the massive conclusion that is essentially an hour of final buildup and two hours of pure asskickery.

The trouble with the Hobbit is that Peter Jackson couldn’t just make The Hobbit.  He had to try to reproduce his success of a decade ago, bulking out Tolkien’s children’s tale with backstory from the LOTR appendices and stretching a more lighthearted jaunt with Bilbo and thirteen of Durin’s folk into a bloated three-film cycle where the stakes are really just, “get the treasure back from  S̶h̶e̶r̶l̶o̶c̶k̶  K̶h̶a̶n̶  J̶u̶l̶i̶a̶n̶ ̶A̶s̶s̶a̶n̶g̶e̶  a dragon” and while Benedict Cumberbatch is fantastic as Smaug, and everything Martin Freeman is doing as Bilbo is more gold than anything in Erebor, the movies are just too big for what the story, and the stakes, really amount to.

When you have thirteen dwarves I’m supposed to give a crap about, you need to do a better job making them memorable and not just in the broad strokes “Bofur’s got a silly hat” kind of way.  If you’re going to make three movies that take three weeks each to sit through, you might devote some of that time to character development, and less of it to “remember when we did this, but better, ten years ago?” which is mostly what the Hobbit seems to be about.

Jackson, Walsh and Boyens can’t seem to stop themselves from lifting lines wholesale from their earlier (better) films or from referencing them every chance they get.  Hell, they even recreated the beginning of Fellowship in “An Unexpected Journey” thus destroying any reason to ever attempt to watch the six films in order of the story, while simultaneously damaging the sanctity of Fellowship.  I mean if you’ve never seen LOTR and never read the books…the peril in “The Hobbit” comes from whether or not Bilbo is going to survive.  Something you decimate the moment you bookend the story with old man Bilbo reminiscing about the time he was Martin Freeman.

Likewise the inclusion of Legolas in this chapter seems little more than a commercial for those better movies.  Remember when Legolas had one over-the-top moment per film in the LOTR cycle?  Every second he’s onscreen in Desolation of Smaug is just one long sequence of Orlando Bloom’s digital stunt double doing ridiculous things for no apparent reason.  Don’t get me wrong, Desolation of Smaug is a better film than “An Unexpected Journey,” in most respects.  It’s bigger, more exciting, and has 100% less digitally-facelifted Ian Holm, so already we’re a leg up on the first chapter.

I don’t mind so much Jackson and company bollocksing with the source material.  I mean, I do, to an extent, but some of it is necessary to make a great book into a great film.  But Jackson and his team often struggle with walking that line, and while they altered Tolkien a lot in LOTR, I always felt the professor’s presence in the room.  You can decide whether or not that is metaphorical.  But old John Ronald is nowhere to be found with this cycle.

How thoroughly has Jackson forgotten the meaning of restraint?  Let’s flash back to 2001, and find Gandalf standing down a Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dum.  The bonus materials on the DVD made a point of celebrating their choice to have Gandalf’s magic be a thing of subtlety.  To make the top of his staff light up in Moria, he had placed a crystal in the hand-like socket at the top and rapped the base of the staff upon the ground.  It could almost be some device.   Now out on the bridge he fends off the Balrog’s flaming blade with the Elven-made Glamdring, and recites a version of the famous lines from the book, “I am a servant of the secret fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor; the dark fire shall not avail you, Flame of Udun!  Go back to the shadows…” When at last he finishes the ward, he smites the bridge with his staff.  “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”

There is a sharp crack; there is no flash of light, no thunder or lightning, no shockwave, no flare, no marching band, no Rockettes, no Pomp and Circumstance.  It isn’t until the Balrog steps out onto the center of the bridge that it crumbles beneath him, and he falls into the abyss.  In “Desolation of Smaug,” Gandalf travels to Dol Guldur to investigate the rumors of the necromancer there.  This is all more or less correct, we know from the Hobbit book and from the LOTR Appendices that this happened.  In the movie, though, when Gandalf breaks the spell that is on that place, hiding its nasty inhabitants from prying eyes, he somehow falls into a scene from “Harry Potter and the Anything Directed by David Yates,” wherein he creates a cartoon bubble of light around himself as he struggles to repel L̶o̶r̶d̶ ̶V̶o̶l̶d̶e̶m̶o̶r̶t̶ layers of swirling black mist.

By the end of the scene Gandalf is trapped, bloodied, and pinned to the wall to watch helplessly as evil stuff is going on below him.  Because remember when Christopher Lee did that to him ten years ago you guys?

Spoilers for “There and Back Again”: he lives, and gets Glamdring back too.  ZOMG.  My advice to Peter is to stop calling forward so much.  If someone wants to watch the Hobbit before seeing LOTR, none of this stuff is going to mean anything to them and they’ll wonder why it’s there.  If they’ve already seen LOTR, it’s just going to piss them off that the only way you can think of to try to make us like this crappy trilogy is to remind us of the good one it’s related to.  That’s a little like hinting that an Avengers castmember is going to be at your party and then showing up with Liam Hemsworth and introducing him by saying that he’s the brother of the guy who plays Thor.  It’s not fair to anybody in the room and it’s kind of embarrassing for Liam Hemsworth, who otherwise could have passed the evening entirely unnoticed.

The Hobbit was originally going to be two films and I think it would have been better if it had been.  And also if it had been directed by Guillermo del Toro.  And also if it had maybe only been one film.

So, I got up this afternoon to prepare a breakfast/lunch amalgam sort of thing (yes it’s my day off, and the hell with you) when I checked my phone and saw a Facebook message from Clayton, with a link to an article about Jose Padilha’s theory on RoboCop: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/07/25/the-philosophy-of-the-new-robocop

Now, in case you’ve been living in the real world for the past year or so, let me fill you in: Jose Padilha is a director whom nobody has heard of, and he’s remaking the 1980’s Paul Verhoeven classic “RoboCop” with a new lead actor whom nobody has heard of.  Because that’s what passes for creativity in Hollywood these days.  I know, I know, you’d call that bold talk from a guy who’s working on an indie production of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz…well, fill your hand, you son of a bitch!

What I mean to say is, it’s one thing to make a new adaptation of a previously adapted book when you have something new to say on the subject.  It’s another thing to remake a film that already said what there was to say, and did so effectively, and was not based on any previous source material, so that there are no wrongs to right in the adaptive arena.

I admit I’ve been against the RoboCop remake from the beginning.  The original is one of my all-time favorite films, and I see no artistic merit in remaking it.  But Padilha talks a lot about how he loves what the original film was trying to say.  So then, this article that Clayton sent me the link to, today.  I admit I did not finish reading it.  Padilha’s understanding of the original film is limited at best, and I think frankly misguided.

And in light of Detroit’s recent financial collapse, I think it’s as good a time as ever to talk about a twenty-six year old science fiction film that essentially predicted the future of Detroit.

Padilha spoke of the original RoboCop as being a film about “the relationship between fascism and robots.”  Yes, that’s a quote.  Fascism and robots.  Because that’s what RoboCop was all about, right?

Right?

No.  No, Jose Padilha.  No it is not.

RoboCop is a film about the relationship between humans and technology.  About the imperfect nature of human beings, and by default anything we create, and the benefits and costs of that basic nature.  At its most basic level of distillation, the film is about the working man’s fear of being replaced by a machine, the loss of jobs killing the economy, and the fear that technology would only increase the divide between the poor and the wealthy.  It is no accident that such a film would be set in Detroit.

Essentially. RoboCop is about our inherent fear of losing our future, whether it be to disease, violent crime, technology, corruption, or financial decline.  We fear the loss of our future.  Everything that Democrats and Republicans argue about every day can be distilled down to the fear of losing our future, and a couple of different viewpoints on how best to guarantee that it will still be there for us when we are old, and that it will be there for our children and our grandchildren.

I will admit that the sequels, RoboCops 2 and 3, dealt with the idea of fascism.  But those were also far less intelligent movies than the original, opting to blindly vilify the wealthy and successful, and hold up the poor as pure and heroic.  The original film did something far more daring: it suggested that we are ALL part of the problem, or all part of the solution, and that the simple nature of right and wrong is not as stark as the sun and shadows on a bright winter’s day.

But I’ve talked a lot without offering specific examples, so let’s get to it, shall we?

This is a future that begins in a conference room high above Detroit, a feeble old man (Dan O’Herlihy) presiding over a meeting of the brightest execs in his company, OmniConsumerProducts, or OCP.  The Old Man is concerned about the future of his city, and he wants to right the ship, to see Detroit cleaned up and rid of crime and corruption, to make it a great city once again.  He sees Detroit rising from the ashes on the cutting edge of technology, fashionably re-branded as Delta City.  To that end, he has contracted with the city to run the police force, and OCP is in the process of creating an automated law enforcement division that will prevent men and women from having to risk their lives on the streets to fight the war on crime.  It is actually a very noble cause, if a deeply misguided one.

The oldest exec and the heir apparent to the old man’s chair, is Dick Jones, played by Ronny Cox.  Jones seems affable enough at first, though when the unveil of his department’s latest creation, The Enforcement Droid series 209 (ED-209, for short) goes horribly wrong, resulting in the death of young Mr. Kenney, Jones’s reaction is not one of horror but disappointment that his project has failed.  Young Mr. Kenney be damned, apparently.

It is at this point that a junior exec named Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer), the head of Security Concepts, sees his opening and jumps in, pitching his RoboCop Project to the Old Man.  The Old Man thinks the project sounds promising and asks Morton for a full report to be sent up to his office on Monday, and with that one deft career move, Morton incurs the dreaded Wrath of Jones.

Paul Verhoeven is not a great filmmaker.  He’s kind of the ultimate broken clock, he’s been right twice in his career, but RoboCop is one of those times.  Ronny Cox plays a similar corporate baddie in another of Verhoeven’s films, the original Total Recall, which is the defective, mentally-challenged spiritual brother of RoboCop.  While Cox’s characters in both films are essentially the same guy, he plays RoboCop’s Dick Jones with enough restraint that he feels credible despite his basically one-note nature, unlike his twin in Total Recall who is twirling moustaches that haven’t even been grown yet.

The second plot thread in RoboCop deals with Officer Alex J. Murphy of OCP’s Detroit Police Department (the always awesome Peter Weller).  Transferred in from a less beleaguered division to fill the opening on the roster left by the recently deceased officer who is the latest victim of Clarence Boddicker and his gang, Murphy is an Irish Catholic family man walking blithely into an inner city station house that has become more meat grinder than police precinct.  His partner, Ann Lewis (a spunky, bubble-gum chewing Nancy Allen) quickly shows off her badassitude by kicking the crap out of an unruly prisoner in full view of the squadroom while the desk sergeant Warren Reed (Robert DoQui) looks on with a bored expression.

Murphy is impressed with her, still bright-eyed and fresh-faced from his previous assignment, and after some character-building moments on a coffee run during their first day on patrol together, they answer their first emergency call from dispatch, following Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith in full-on badass mode) and his crew in the aftermath of a major robbery, into an abandoned steel mill where, through a series of poor decisions, the two partners are separated leaving Lewis to watch helplessly as Murphy is butchered and left for dead by Clarence and his gang.

At this point these first two threads come together as Murphy, having signed a waiver when he joined the force, has given OCP ownership of his earthly remains, and Morton, in need of a human donor to take RoboCop to prototype, pounces on this opportunity as readily as he did the first, and salvages Alex Murphy’s heart, brain, and certain other biological material including his face, to use as raw material for RoboCop.

When the prototype is complete and is set loose upon Old Detroit, the results do speak for themselves.  RoboCop is awesome, a nearly flawless fusion of man and machine, and he does exactly as advertised, stopping criminals tirelessly and efficiently, treating the people he rescues with some approximation of compassion (admittedly it’s not a LOT of compassion, especially at first) and is quickly sensationalized as a hero in the press.  Morton is the Old Man’s new Golden Boy, and Dick Jones feels threatened.  Jones’s only real motivation in this film is that he wants to run the company.  He’s career-minded and that isn’t a bad thing, but he’s essentially a psychopath, willing to do horrible things to get where he wants to be.  Basically, Dick Jones feels no remorse nor indeed any kind of empathy for other people, and that’s what makes him a bad guy, not the suit and tie.

Miguel Ferrer’s Bob Morton is mostly a sympathetic character, though the movie doesn’t let him off scot-free as he is snorting cocaine off of a high-priced hooker when Clarence Boddicker busts into his house with a grenade and a message from Dick Jones.  Still, you’re angry and disappointed when Bob Morton makes his exit from the film, and you’re all the more ready for RoboCop to take on Dick Jones and his monstrous ED-209.

To tie everything back together, RoboCop encounters Boddicker’s right-hand man, Emil Antonowsky (Paul McCrane) holding up a gas station near the highway.  The scene that unfolds sees a weird standoff as RoboCop’s personal affectations (he uses certain favorite phrases of Murphy’s, and still has some of his mannerisms) shakes Emil to his core, while seeing Emil’s face sets off something in what’s left of Murphy’s subconscious, and he flashes on the faces of the men who killed him.

Now RoboCop (whom Lewis, too, has recognized, and still calls Murphy) is on a personal crusade to find Boddicker and his men and bring them to justice.  But Boddicker is on Dick Jones’s payroll, and Jones wants RoboCop gone.  He sets a trap for him, hinging on the secret fourth directive in RoboCop’s programming that Jones had secretly ordered, preventing RoboCop from ever opposing an OCP officer.   It is a trap from which RoboCop barely escapes with Lewis’s help, having been shot to hell by ED-209 and an entire squad of Detroit’s finest.  RoboCop and Lewis reconnoiter at the old steel mill where Murphy died, and with some help from Jones, Boddicker and his gang come after them.

After the final showdown, Murphy busts into the OCP conference room, where Jones is busy painting Morton as a failure and RoboCop as an outlaw.  RoboCop jacks into the video wall and plays a recording from his memory (it is mentioned in the film that RoboCop’s memory is admissible as evidence in court) of Jones admitting to having killed Bob Morton.  Jones takes the Old Man hostage, and starts making demands, but the Old Man fires him, and RoboCop kills Jones in a manner reminiscent of Mr. Kenney’s death at the hands of ED-209. It’s kind of a nice dramatic balance to the senselessness of the first death in the film; a satisfying death that brings justice at the end.  RoboCop spins his gun on his finger before holstering it (a move that Murphy had learned to impress his son) and turns to leave.  The Old Man compliments him on his shooting and asks his name.  RoboCop looks back over his shoulder and says, “Murphy,” reclaiming the humanity he had lost and in some sense, the hope for the future that came with it.

So let’s recap.  The only real villains in the film are Dick Jones, and Boddicker’s gang.  The Old Man is generally portrayed as kind, but out of touch, with a vision the scope of which he has perhaps not yet fully understood.  He wants to clean up his city and make it safer and better for everyone to live in.  His ideas may be misguided but it seems that his heart is in the right place (the second film retcons the living hell out of this, but remember we’re not talking about the lame sequels here).  He is trying to secure the future of his city.

Dick Jones is trying to secure the future of Dick Jones.  He’s greedy, cold-blooded and ruthless, and has risen through the ranks of OCP by doing who-knows-what.  Seems totally devoid of empathy or conscience.  Classic psychopath.

Bob Morton is a bright, young, upwardly-mobile exec who seizes opportunities where he finds them and is going to be successful because he is brilliant.  He’s building his own future.  But he’s also careless, and doesn’t recognize Dick Jones’s true nature, enraging a lion and not taking any precautions to defend himself.

Officer Alex J. Murphy is a good-natured, hard-working cop who just wants to provide for his family.  He is killed in the line of duty and resurrected by Morton as the ultimate law enforcement officer.  The fact that some part of Murphy remains to temper the cold machine with conscience and compassion is what sets RoboCop apart from ED-209; and both machines are perfect reflections of their creators.  Think about it.

Clarence Boddicker and his gang are psychopaths as well.  They not only kill Murphy in cold blood, they enjoy it and make light of his suffering as he lies before them dying.  They are thugs who steal money and sell drugs to secure their future, but it is not their poverty that makes them do bad things, it is their greed, coupled with lack of empathy and conscience.  And indeed they team up with Dick Jones when the price is right.

So we have a theme of people trying to guarantee the future; good guys by honest means and bad guys by dishonest ones; and in the middle of it all we have the war for Detroit’s soul, being fought by Murphy and his comrades in the Detroit Police Department, which is funded by the Old Man.

If the good people, rich and poor, work together; they can save their city.  If they follow the model of the bad guys and work against each other and deal in deceit and betrayal, they will all die.  Machines have no empathy and can be used by good people to good ends, or by bad people to bad ends.  This is true of a device as innocuous as a cellphone or as lethal as a gun, to say nothing of a mech like ED-209.  As I said before, it is RoboCop’s latent humanity, that part of Alex Murphy that survives inside of him, that makes him better than a pure machine, even as his mechanical nature makes him nearly immortal.  RoboCop represents a kind of harmony, while ED-209 is a blunt instrument of subjugation.

Thus if the film draws a conclusion about the dangers faced by Detroit (and indeed by everyone everywhere in the world) it says that we need to work together and have empathy and compassion, and not blame each other for our own failings or betray each other to get ahead.  I think it also makes the case that sometimes you gotta kill a bad guy, but who doesn’t think that?  James Bond has been doing it for decades.  The film is complex and mature enough to say that not all rich people are good or bad, not all poor people are good or bad, and that you have to both look for opportunities, and protect yourself along the way; and also have empathy and concern for your fellow human beings, and if you do these things the future will take care of itself.

So, yes, Jose Padilha…Robocop is about the relationship between fascism and robots the same way Lord of the Rings is about Jesus.  It’s IN there, sure, but you’re missing the real picture if all you’re doing is looking at one corner of it.

Oh, and your film’s going to blow.