The Crimes of Grindelwald

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

Christopher Nolan's films - Memento, the Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar - have often been charged with being 100% exposition. Characters both supporting and main, their singular function is to drive the plot forward. While I disagree with the sentiment, I get it - his films can often feel weighed down by the mechanics of getting from A to B; though arguably with such style, flair, tension and excitement that such a flaw is by the by. Which brings us to The Crimes of Grindelwald, where style, flair, tension and excitement appear to have been entirely forgotten. But hey, if it's exposition you're here for, boy are you in for a treat!

Let's back up a minute though. 2016's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them set out a fairly middling stall that - despite being born in the shadow of Potter - did a decent job of introducing new characters into an already character-rife universe. It was its own thing with some decent action beats, on the whole fairly inoffensive fare, even though you knew a whole slew of sequels would be waiting in the wings for better or worse. You'd like to think J.K. Rowling, being on sole screenwriting duties for this franchise, would have sat down and made sure everything hung together well (because, you know, she's an acclaimed best-selling author - surely half-decent at the storytelling game by now).

Well, you'd be wrong. Want to bring a character back (Jacob Kowalski) who had his memory erased in the last film? Turns out he only had the 'bad' memories erased, so now he remembers everything again! To say that particular convenience borders on the dreaded "it was all a dream" trope is an understatement. Want to have the nicest character in the entire film (Queenie Goldstein) toddle off with the baddie? No need for motivation! Just have her decide to do it right near the end, because sequels and all that. These are just two standout ball-drops in a film chock-full of them.

I really quite like the Potter films - they're stretched thin in places, but on the whole you give a shit about those crazy wizards and witches. Pretty much all of them, actually. But Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller)? In the first Beasts film, sure - depressed loner revealed to be the sympathetic bad guy all along. Interesting chap; would like to know more. Now? Couldn't give a fuck mate. He's got about half a dozen names and appears to be related to Dumbledore (though I'm still not entirely sure). But by the time that's revealed, I'd given up caring. I'm actually struggling to remember his journey in the film; I'm struggling to remember anyone's journey if I'm honest. It's about 60% plot, 38% magical bullshit (in a way that never ever feels fun or exciting - it just 'happens', all the sodding time, undermining any sense of jeopardy anyone could possibly ever be in), and 2% action.

Now I wouldn't ever want to label this an 'action' film. It's not. But for a film that cost $200 million, I don't think it's unfair to expect a few moments that make you go "ah, so that's where the money went". If anyone can point out those moments to me, please, be my guest. If anything even approaching exciting is about to happen, it is so undersold - CGI-laden, poorly shot and devoid of palpable tension - that I actually made several quizzical "WTF?" faces while watching it. I was tempted to turn round to the folks next to me and ask them if they were enjoying it, but I didn't want to come off as completely weird (I was there on my own - whispering to a stranger was way off the menu in a packed cinema). By the time the film's 'climax' is happening (it's hardly a climax, let's just call it the bit towards the end), I was genuinely baffled as to what anyone could be getting out of it - and that includes die-hard Potter fans.

I think a slightly left-field comparison would be Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. Sort of a spin-off-but-not from the main trilogy of LxG graphic novels, which essentially requires Wikipedia open at all times when reading. The sheer onslaught of references to pop culture characters and mythological creatures is insane; imagine a writer bellowing "I'm cleverer than you" in your face for 200 pages. One thing you can't level at it mind, is the fact it's well-researched. Moore knows his onions, and he wants to make damn sure you know his onions too. Rowling however... it's like she vaguely knew what she was doing on the first film, but this time is making the whole thing up on the spot. If subsequent films are an improvement on this effort (and I would be shocked if they weren't), The Crimes of Grindelwald will absolutely go down as the one film in this saga prefaced with "well, you have to watch it to understand what happens in the other films". Like an instruction manual you don't want to read, but are forced to plough through in order to get the VideoPlus+ working.

To wrap things up, you may notice an absence of plot description. That's because, there really isn't any. Despite the film being almost entirely filled with plot, of a sort. Grindelwald is bad (we knew that), Credence is sort of bad (we knew that), and Newt Scamander & Co. are good (we knew that). If anyone was making notes, maybe they'll be useful for the next film. But as it stands I don't really care, and I'd be surprised if half the audience did either.

Mark Kermode once said "If blockbusters make money no matter how bad they are, then why not make a good one for a change?". I found this quite a sneery comment at the time, as if all blockbusters are inherently trash. But films like The Crimes of Grindelwald are exactly what he's talking about. An audience needs a reason to care about what's happening on screen, and by that I mean more than a few shots of Hogwarts (if anything, they only serve to remind everyone just what fun the Potter films were compared to this turgid effluence). The critically-lauded Mission: Impossible - Fallout - another of this year's $200 million tentpoles - shows that you don't need to have seen the other films in the franchise or be given a ton of detail for future sequels (which I'm certain there will be) in order to be gripped and involved. Just put on a great show, and ideally make sure the dots join up. I would say it's not hard. But The Crimes of Grindelwald proves that it really, really is.

The Predator

Simon Bland, erstwhile pop culture hoover and enthusiastic purveyor of big, silly blockbuster entertainment, said this to me about The Predator:

"When will filmmakers learn to make a film about an intergalactic alien hunter stalking quip-loving marines with the depth and gravitas it so richly deserves?"

My response?

"They did learn - in 1987."

In short, The Predator is absolutely fucking awful. Laughably so. Anyone who has seen the trailer may have been suspicious that the film wasn't quite going to live up to expectations. Well you can be safe in the knowledge that it really doesn't; in fact the trailer has tried its best to polish a certifiable turd, a film so bafflingly moronic it would have been a disappointment as straight-to-video sequel fodder in the early 90s. It makes 2010's Predators look like a borderline masterpiece in comparison. Hell, it makes Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem look mildly ambitious. I may be over-egging the pudding a bit. But probably not. This really is 100% shit sandwich territory.

Just what was writer/director Shane Black thinking? Was he *even* thinking? Who knows. The guy was IN Predator, FFS;  he's got critically-acclaimed writing credentials under his belt; he even made a decent fist of Iron Man 3. Yet somehow, in channelling his inner 80s action movie nerd, he's managed to concoct an unwieldy beast of a film that never seems to know what it's trying to achieve, with so many tonal misfires it comes off more like a really bad comedy (swapping Jesse Ventura's "slack-jawed faggots" line for jokes about a man called Gaylord).

Okay, so I did it. I dropped the f-bomb. No matter which way you slice it, Predator - unequivocally excellent though the rest of the film is - has that line which is no doubt destined to feature in an upcoming Honest Trailer. Oh wait, here it is! Though to be fair, this kind of throwaway homophobia was unfortunately the case for many an 80s genre flick; a rather sad by-product of its time. A Christmas staff screening of Trading Places where I work yielded not just the f-bomb, but Dan Aykroyd in blackface. The atmosphere was awkward, to say the least. Anyway, I digress. What I think Black has tried to do with the aforementioned Gaylord joke (along with plenty of other 'funny' character traits - an army vet with Tourette's, anyone?) is rekindle elements of what he liked from the first film. That being, the kind of #bants only him and Michael Bay would find funny.

Not even the plot makes sense. Predators having some kind of interstellar battle end up crash-landing on earth (seems to be their favourite trick), with nearby military assassin (Boyd Holbrook) picking up some of the wreckage (a mask and wrist gauntlet) to send to his ex-wife's address as 'evidence'. He also swallows the predator's cloaking device, we assume in order for it not to be discovered on his way back across the border from Mexico. Which begs the question: why didn't he just cloak himself and go across the border undetected? This is the kind of film that ditches any potential logic in order for a man to chug a giant marble, just so he can 'comically' shit it out later. Absolute #bants.

Anyway, his (presumably) autistic son opens up said package and pisses about with the mask and gaultlet, triggering a further flotilla of predators back to earth. Turns out these crazy predators are using spinal fluid from 'the best' species across the galaxy in order to enhance themselves. In other words, they've made themselves taller. Oh, and they've bred predator dogs - let's call them 'Predadogs', like the rest of the internet is doing - for no particular reason. I'm also not sure why the Predadogs have dreadlocks like their predator kin. Makes you wonder what kind of distasteful gonzo science experiments they've been conducting in their forever-crashing spacecraft. It would be like us creating dogs with human faces. I've seen this before, and it's not pretty.

Throw a jerk-off military scientist, a weapons-handy biologist (!) and an Irish Theon Greyjoy into the mix, and you've got yourself a film where empathising with the characters is unequivocally impossible. Think of the taut simplicity of the first film - Schwarzenegger's band of ex-marines are macho as shit, but every single one of them you invest in and care about (also see John Carpenter's The Thing, where every character is vital as well as memorable). The utter absence of nuance or subtlety, in both plot and characterisation, is absurd - you give zero fucks what happens to anyone, or indeed what happens at all. Jokes are to be cringed at, not laughed at. The only laughing you will be doing is at how cack-handed the whole venture feels; no amount of money thrown at the screen could have resolved what is ultimately a sad, teenage wank fantasy from a writer/director who appears to have a) forgotten what constitutes a good film, and b) is completely hampered by his own misguided 80s nostalgia. I do wonder if he knows what a vapid monstrosity he's shat out into cinemas.

If nothing else, I would like to think The Predator shows studio executives it's not always a good idea to keep returning to a character just because they think an audience wants more of it. But I doubt they'll care. Sure, there's always going to a be a yearning for more of anything that was good, in and of its time. It's why a Back to the Future remake/reboot is never far away - studios can't keep their hands off something that will be a guaranteed moneymaker, no matter how shit or soul-destroying it might be. The RoboCop remake wasn't a total car crash, but was ultimately pointless, carrying none of the satiric weight or iconic production design of the original. But it made money, so fuck what the public thinks, so long as Hollywood be rollin' in that dollar.

But hey, at least the original is still great. No amount of crappy sequels or remakes or reboots or offshoots will change that. Turns out you really can have too much of a good thing... with The Predator, I think I've had my fill.

Ready Player One

Have any of you seen Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle? If not, no matter. But if you have, you'll already be familiar with the concept - kids go inside a video game to fight the baddie and save the world. Ready Player One isn't entirely dissimilar; however, Jumanji 2 is the superior film.

The sentence 'Jumanji 2 is the superior film' really isn't something I expected I'd write. Ever.

That's not to say Ready Player One is bad. It just took two viewings to work out exactly how I felt about it. It flies along at a rollicking pace, it's got action, humour and that indescribable Spielberg magic that is inherent in even his lesser work. Which begs the question: is this comparable to 1941? Always? Hook? Comparisons to the latter have already been made by critics with far more credibility than myself, Hook being a film beloved of those of a certain age but critically far less favoured. Ready Player One seems destined to leave a similar legacy, though admittedly for different reasons.

The plot itself is perfunctory: the year is 2045, and the world has gone to shit (hasn't it always?). Well, maybe not 'to shit' - more 'to Birmingham', though I can see how the two could be confused. To be fair, it's actually refreshing to see a future not quite as world-endingly bleak as we're used to - sure there's a divide between the slums ('stacks') and the glass office blocks filled with wretched hives of scum and villainy, but if the worst this particular future has to offer is a white, none-more-British sky the likes of which we've not seen since Kubrick used Beckton Gasworks to stage the Vietnam of Full Metal Jacket, I'm happy with that.

So it goes that most folk escape their grim reality in the Oasis, a massive worldwide virtual universe created by James Halliday (a beautifully nuanced turn from Mark Rylance) - a shy, nervous genius who, after his death, reveals he has hidden an easter egg (tech parlance for a hidden item or feature) that if found will bestow his entire accumulated wealth and control of the Oasis on whoever finds it. Cue Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a quintessential everynerd who, along with a few friends he manages to pick up along the way, wins the first of three challenges opening up further clues that lead to the egg.

Obviously there's a villain on his tail in the shape of Ben Mendelsohn's Nolan Sorrento, CEO of IOI (Innovative Online Industries), a company desperate for control of the Oasis so they can monetize it beyond reason (his opening sales pitch that they can sell "up to 80% of a player's field of vision before inducing seizures" paints him as the Zuckerberg of the future). Wade and Sorrento cross paths, Sorrento makes a few moves to try and see him off, Wade evades them and yadda yadda lots of races and fights and explosions and Mechagodzilla and The Iron Giant and the chestburster from Alien and Clark Kent and Gundam and The Shining and Buckaroo Banzai and- wait, I didn't mention any of this yet, did I?

You see in the Oasis, anything can exist and you can be anything you want to be. Hence, Wade Watts' avatar (Parzival) drives a DeLorean / K.I.T.T. hybrid. Potential love interest Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) rides Tetsuo's bike from Akira. He dresses as Buckaroo Banzai to impress her one evening (honestly, I think I was the only one in the cinema who knew who Buckaroo Banzai was, but that's because I'm an arsehole who assumes a multiplex crowd surely won't have seen W. D. Richter's insane 80s no-budget sci-fi with Peter Weller's dimension-jumping, rock band-fronting neurosurgeon who has a cool line in 80s upturned-suit collar threads).

It's this kind of permanent pop culture referencing that will either a) give you a nostalgic sugar rush every time something pops up you recognise; b) not bother you at all, because it serves the story, or c) annoy the fuck out of you. I think I flitted between camp A and B, but I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking Ready Player One is either the best film ever or the death knell for cinema as we know it. I'd say it was Marmite, but I think that's doing it a disservice.

The fact is, Spielberg is just good at putting this kind of stuff together, no matter how questionable certain aspects of it are. Tye Sheridan paints a bland, charmless picture in the real world, and sure if you're going to compare him to Michael J. Fox's Marty (Art3mis even refers to him as McFly at one point), it's an impossibly high watermark to reach. It's Parzival who's on the charm offensive here, not his real life counterpoint. Nolan Sorrento is a cardboard cut-out bad guy, but Mendelsohn imbues him with enough quality acting chops that you can forgive his two-dimensionalism.

There's much however that's sadly reductive of gaming and an assumed 'gaming culture' - it tries its best to be all-inclusive (the 11yr old ass-kicking Asian kid, the black lesbian with a male avatar) but everyone still comes off as the kind of Robot Wars loners and oddballs the general public expects to be into video games, shacked up in scrap yards or squatting in hellishly untidy abandoned offices. It's not something I was particularly bogged down by when watching it, but people who play video games don't all wear logos and badges referencing every bit of pop culture they can think of (a Mortal Kombat sticker here, a Wonder Woman patch there). If you start to unpick the threads holding it together, it becomes very unstable very quickly.

But maybe this is missing the point. The book (and as such, the film) is essentially a love letter to 80s ephemera, from John Cusack's ghetto blaster in Say Anything... to Chucky going apeshit on a bunch of IOI stooges. The protagonists literally wear their hearts on their sleeves. Oh, and there's section in the middle - let's call it 'the haunted house' - that is arguably worth the price of admission alone. It's a scene that is testament to the craft and care that has gone into constructing not just the Oasis, but Ready Player One as a whole.

Alan Silvestri's score masterfully weaves in cues from his Back to the Future suite - not the main theme, but moments that are instantly recognisable to those who know it. And if you don't know it, no big deal - you're not missing out, because it fits the story perfectly. The fact the film is rammed to the gills with 'things' and 'stuff' that an audience may recognise isn't what it lives or dies by; you don't have to be in on it. It's just a bonus for anyone with a keen eye - a film about an easter egg littered with easter eggs. But if you're not on the hunt for them, you'll still have a blast (watching a T-Rex and King Kong take down a Bigfoot monster truck and the 60s Batmobile in a chaotic street race is fun for all the family).

It's already been said that Spielberg has phoned it in; I would say nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, so much has gone into this film that it was always going to come off as some sort of grand folly. I don't want to compare it to the likes of Coppola's One From the Heart or some other auteur passion project; I doubt Spielberg has had a burning desire to make something like this for decades. But it speaks volumes about his directing ability that a film so ripe for criticism from so many angles can, ultimately, be a massively fun experience irrespective of its flaws. Compare it to the recently-released Pacific Rim: Uprising, for instance - another big daft film full of big daft robots, but with less than a hundredth of the charm Ready Player One has (even John Boyega's boundless charisma wanes when he's sprinkling toppings on ice cream like Salt Bae - there's a very fine line between comic and cringe).

With a tentpole release such as this, one could say you shouldn't have to watch it twice to know if you liked it or not. And with films such as Raiders, Jurassic Park and Tin Tin in Spielberg's oeuvre (the latter his most recent comparable work, considering the amount of CGI involved), his work proves you don't need time to process what you've just seen. They're solid, complete works of entertainment; perfect examples of big budget, mainstream cinema. But maybe Ready Player One is the more interesting film precisely because it's not perfect.

Would it work without the sheer onslaught of pop culture touchstones, perfectly-placed to distract and deceive? Possibly not. It's a proper romp, with enough cleverly-deployed twists and turns that all have their respective pay-offs. But so many of the pop culture touchstones are key to the narrative; it simply wouldn't work without them (neither would the book, for that matter). Could the material have been handled better by another director? Honestly, I doubt it. Even if Ready Player One is far from his best work, it's a film surely destined to garner a cult following. It taps into a desire so many of us have to hold on to memories from our childhood, even at the expense of what is happening in the real world. But hey, the real world is a pretty shitty place; maybe Ready Player One's Oasis is the sugar rush we all need right now.

Unless Jumanji 2 is on the cards. There's simply no contest.

The Shape of Water

I'm vexed. Vexed because this year's crop of awards season films are all (with very little exception) leaving me with a distinct taste of average in my mouth. Like going out for a meal, the food being pleasantly passable, but knowing full well it wasn't worth the price you paid for it. I'm vexed at how almost all these films are receiving near-universal acclaim. Since when did the bar get lowered? Is it just me? I can already hear the cries of "yes" from those who feel they know better. But I'd also like to think some of you are maybe - just maybe - a little vexed too.

Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water is - alongside Martin McDonaugh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - leading the 2018 awards charge with a myriad nominations between them. And if you were to believe the critics, they're pretty much masterpieces already - the former being touted as del Toro's best ever film in some quarters.

I, for one, am simply not having it.

With a wafer-thin plot focusing on Sally Hawkins' mute cleaner Eliza, the film doesn't really do much other than apply superfluous window dressing to the central romance between her and 'the creature' - a humanoid aquatic man-thing (expertly played by prosthetic make-up go-to guy Doug Jones) hauled into a scientific research centre for all the inhumane testing its early-60s period setting affords it. Michael Shannon's Strickland is the one administering said inhumanity, his justification being it isn't human - and it bit a couple of his fingers off, therefore he has carte blanche to be a full-blown one-dimensional prick for two hours. But don't worry, there's more cardboard cut-outs in this film than just Shannon riffing on sheer arseholery.

Eliza's flatmate, the usually dependable Richard Jenkins, is a clichéd older gay man who's enamoured with a much younger straight waiter at a nearby diner. In these heated times, I was under the impression certain communities and demographics were after being represented in a less-stereotypical and jaw-droppingly ham-fisted way. Maybe if you're del Toro, you're allowed to get away with hackneyed representation because, you know, you're a real auteur. I won't do him the disservice of comparing him to certain peers who are also guilty of this, but it does often seem that if you are held in high regard in the cine-literate community, you are allowed to get away with any old tosh if you know how to make it look nice.

And to del Toro's credit, The Shape of Water does indeed look nice. Utterly stunning in places. It's got a fetish for the colour green (Strickland's boiled sweets, the uniforms worn at the research centre, the algae poured into the amphibian's tanks and baths) that also spells out the main characters' journeys - do you get it? They're GREEN. As in, innocent and wide-eyed and whatnot. I've not read any reviews of the film, but I can only imagine the words 'whimsical' and 'enchanting' and 'beguiling' and 'childlike wonder' are bandied about like nobody's business. The kind of nonsense Western critics write about Studio Ghibli films, chucking five stars at them when the culturally-specific whimsy factor is dialled up to eleven.

In fact, I'm reminded of the unfortunate addendum Terry Gilliam stuck on the beginning of Tideland, after preview audiences felt a relationship between two characters (a young girl and a mentally-challenged adult man) was paedophilic in nature. Gilliam filmed an address to-camera, telling the audience to watch the film "through the eyes of a child". When you have to instruct your audience to watch a film a certain way - lest they perceive something in a manner you hadn't intended - you know you've failed quite spectacularly at what you were ever hoping to achieve. The Shape of Water doesn't suffer that same fate, thankfully. But it does ask that you are indeed 'enchanted', the film existing in a bubble where characters are basically fine with an aquatic man-thing eating the head off a pet cat (such whimsy!).

I guess I should have seen this coming. After all, del Toro has previous in the period-fantasy field with Pan's Labyrinth - a far superior film that in many ways The Shape of Water uses as a blueprint for its heightened fantasy-reality hotchpotch: instead of a razor to the face, this time we get a bullet going in one cheek and out the other; where Pan's Labyrinth was an allegorical sexual awakening, this time the main character is a grown woman who masturbates in the bath every morning (until she gets to play with aquaman's prawn cracker).

Now I know I might be coming off as flippant. I get why all these characters are drawn in the way they are. But del Toro wants to have his cake and eat it. The jarring clash of bedtime fairy tale with ostensibly adult overtones feels like Pan's Labyrinth minus the nuance. Several lines feel loaded with shock value; Strickland telling a colleague his "thumb, trigger and pussy finger still work" after having the other two fingers bitten off feels like a jolting reminder you're watching a film for grown-ups, rather than the line being essential to the story itself. It insists on these reminders every so often - like a particularly nasty episode of Boardwalk Empire crossed with Splash (no, seriously - it's outright plagiarism, cleverly disguised with beautiful cinematography and non-mainstream credentials beloved of cineastes who will leap to its defence).

You can see on one hand it's been a labour of love for del Toro, the whole venture basically a belated sequel to Creature from the Black Lagoon (del Toro has gone on record with this, the film playing out his fantasy of having Gill-man succeed in his romance with co-star Julie Adams). And for those who are able to overlook the film's numerous flaws in execution, there's much to enjoy - the use of sign language as both a plot device and conveyor of exposition is commendable, and from a purely visual standpoint you can't argue it's anything less than a stellar achievement. But I'm sick of saying "well, it looked good" after practically every duff film I watch these days. MOST new films look good. With a decent enough crew and a few quid chucked at it, it stands to reason. Darkest Hour looks bloody beautiful; it doesn't mean it's anything more than adequate entertainment (unless you're a Tory, in which case it's borderline pornography).

Which brings me back to my original point - the bar being lowered. Maybe it is me. Maybe I'm just getting old, and unable to enjoy new stuff the same way I used to. Then again I loved Blade Runner 2049, The Last Jedi and Downsizing. Plenty didn't. I sound like I'm just being contrary for the sake of it, like an average issue of Little White Lies. I'm really not. The Shape of Water is the Emperor's new clothes. Critics say its good, therefore it IS good. Without question. Oh look, now it's won some awards - it MUST be good! Well, it isn't. And I know I can't be alone in thinking this. If I get one person agreeing with me on Twitter, I'll be happy. Until then, I'm off to watch Splash.