Attack on Titan Part II: End of the World - First Thoughts

Actually, my first thought about the second Attack on Titan movie was a six hour drive to watch a movie that lasts an hour and a half?  (It's that having an eleven-year thing I mentioned in part I.)  The first movie was about the same length.  Why, I wondered for the umpteenth time, didn't they just edit the film together to about two and a half hours or so.  That's about the average length anymore, seems to me.  Then I watched it.  Second first thoughts: oh, that's why.

The first film went out of its way to emphasize the sheer terror and horror of having a bunch of freaky looking giants trample your town and devour your friends and family.  I felt it more or less succeeded on that point.  Part II, however, feels like a completely different film.  The first part is essentially a political/conspiracy story.  The last half giant monster movie.  Honestly, it reminded me of a bunch of the kaiju-type movies I watched as a kid on Chiller Theater - down to the men in rubber suits.  Granted, these suits were much better than the old ones, but that's what it was nonetheless.  As a political thriller – meh.  It was something to hang the movie on.  As a giant monster movie – not bad.  You know who’s going to win, but  . . . it’s giant monsters fighting!

My eleven-year-old Attack on Titan expert assures me the second movie was the best.  She also told me she didn’t like it because of all the massive changes from the manga and anime.  I’m versed enough in the anime Satomi Ishihara as Hange Zoeto know the changes were massive, sort of along the lines of what happened to The Hobbit in parts two and three. Did it ruin it for me?  No.  It was a different take.  (Truth be told, it didn’t ruin it for her because if I’d recorded her two hour analysis on the drive back, you hear more positives than negatives.)  I think the really big thing the director did was include the origin of the titans – something the original story has yet to do.  Spoilers?  I really don’t know.

The cast dwindled if anything.  It was still a violent film.  According y expert and the audience we sat with, Satomi Ishihara as Hange Zoe stole the show.  She was hilarious and dead with the Hange we see in the anime.  All the story was resolved by the end.  There are still titans beyond the wall, but the city inside was saved.  Boy wins girl, and they are able to look out upon the world for the first time (again, different for the source material).  There definitely could be a sequel, and I’d probably end up watching it, not simply because my AoT expert.  I’ve seen a whole lot better.  I’ve seen a whole lot worse.  The Attack on Titan movies entertained me for a few hours.  Sometimes, that’s all I need.

Attack on Titan Part I - First Thoughts

Okay.  Had to drive three hours to watch this movie at a theater in the state of Kentucky, not because I wanted to necessarily.  I had to.  It's called having an eleven-year-old child who loves to watch anime and read manga.  You can no doubt guess her favorite - watch the trailer here.

I will say that I could have said no, but having watched the anime myself, I was curious.  My initial reaction about twenty minutes in - "Man, this movie's brutal."  Forty minutes in - "Geesh, this thing's brutal."  At the end - "Wow, that was brutal."  On average, I thought the movie was brutal.

Is that good?  Well, it was very true to the anime (I can't speak for the manga) in that there were lots of people devoured, ripped apart, and squashed like bugs.  At times, blood poured down on hapless citizens by the buckets full.  Over the top?  Perhaps, but I have no way of determining the reality of the situation.  I will say that the blood-rain created a quite appropriate mood of sheer terror and hopeless caused by the munching Titans.  I felt it more effective than the anime.  The titans themselves were more bizarre looking - quite unnerving at times.

Another strong suit for the movie was the setting itself.  Unlike the anime, the movie never lets us see outside the walls (in part I at least), so what you see is the only world these poor characters have known.  And it is much more squalid and lived in as opposed to the neat Renaissance-ish look of the anime.  The wall too is ugly and looks hastily built.  The coolest part to me, though, was the glimpses of relics from the past.  There is a helicopter on a platform near the top of the wall, and there's an old bomb casing.  They even mention nuking the titans in the great war before humanity fell.  

The other bit I like was the characters of Hange Zoe and Sasha.  They were straight out of the anime and a delight to see.  The other characters were there for the most part, some were dropped, some composited due to time restraints.  Armin was pulled off well enough, I thought, though my little anime-lover thought he looked too old.  And he wasn't blonde.  Mikasa and Eren were nice, too, though even I wasn't thrilled with how their backstories were changed.  Fan favorite Levi, you might have heard, has been replaced.  I wasn't thrilled by his replacement.  Instead of an air of detachment and confidence, this guy was a jerk.

My biggest beek agains the film is the CGI.  It was like Syfy channel effects for most of the movie.  At times, it did interfere with my susupension of disbelief (as much as you can have, anyway, with a bunch of giant things running around eating people).

Overall, I liked it.  I was entertained.  I've seen lots better and lots worse.  I think if you're familiar with the story at all, you'll want to check it out.  I've already bought tickets for Part II because I am curious to see how they finish out the story.

Have you seen it?  Let us hear what you thought.

I Liked Lifeforce and I Am Not Ashamed To Admit It!

Okay, so I do believe the title says it all. 

I saw Lifeforce in the theater twice.  I own it on DVD.  I've read Wilson's Space Vampires from cover to cover.  And yes, the first thing that comes to mind when I think about this film is the naked lady walking around the building. 

But honestly, I didn't know there was so much hostility aimed at the film.  It's not great, but it's entertaining - sometimes that's all you can ask for.  Anyway, here's the piece from Roger Ebert's site that got me thinking about it:  2315 Words On "Lifeforce." Yes. "Lifeforce" - by Peter Sobczynski.

May have to go dig out my DVD now . . .

Update on Sunday, February 24, 2013 at 09:29PM by Jeff Sergent

Just saw this - Lifeforce is coming to us in Bluray at the end of April.  You can pre-order at Amazon.  In case you're wondering, yes, I did.

Can John Carter Survive Today's Audiences?

Okay, this is scary.  Folks are predicting an epic fail for John Carter.  Why?  Well, you can read about that in this article that first appeared in The Hollywood Reporter: Disney Scrambles to Save its $250 Million Gamble. 

I think the promo people at Disney could've started by coming up with a better poster.My first thought is to blame the promoters.  Why haven't they emphasized the fact that this is John Carter OF MARS by EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS.  And why did they change the title form its original A Princess of Mars?  Well, I guess its Disney's tradition of princesses, and they didn't want the unkowning public to think this was one of their "princess" films, which could alienate (snicker) the male audience.  Then why not call it something pulpy like John Carter and the Princess of Mars?  You emphasize the hero (say, like Indiana Jones) and you pay homage to the source material.  Why not promote the creator and all he's done for science fiction and fantasy?  Who knows?

And then I have to wonder if the source material is too old.  Yes, it has inspired more material than I can possible list, let's just throw Star Wars out as an example, but is John Carter too heroic for today's audiences.  Burroughs's characters were, without a doubt, heroic and good.  The women were beautiful, needed to be rescued, and madly in love with the hero (even though she played hard to get).  I've already noticed they're turning Dejah into a warrior woman.  I can live with that, but I beg them not to turn JC into the brooding, insecure whiner which fills books and films today, let's throw Anikin from Star Wars out there as an example.  What's wrong with a hero being , well, heroic.  For some reason, that concept is dated and laughable to a lot of young folk today.

So, I guess I really blame those pour souls raised on recent films (say, like anything by Michael Bay) which is nothing more than a series of action sequences and lots of computer animation.  John Carter is definitely going to have its share of CGI (which always makes me nervous), but a lot of the discussion I've seen online has JC being called a rip off of AVATAR!  What!?  This, just to let you know, ticks me off greatly.  It's bad enough that these folks only acknowledge movies made within the last year or two as the only ones being worthy of watching, but it's worse that they have no conception of anything existing before the soulless tripe they love to watch so much.  I would love to look those folks in the eyes and ask how a film based on a book written about a hundred years ago could rip off something made a few years ago.  But then I stop, take a deep breath, and remember who I imagine I'm talking to.  Yes, the viewing public who would make the movie has already judged John Carter and found it wanting.  So is there any hope despite what the promoters will do?  I don't know.  I hope so.

I'd love to see the first three Barsoom books on film anyway - and Disney had planned on more than one film - but now, it looks grim.   John Carter may have saved Barsoom, but sadly, I don't know if he'll be able to save this film.

Review: Chronicle (2012) Dir. Josh Trank

Chronicle Review

One of my favorite comics of the last few years is Robert Kirkman’s Invincible. It tells the story of a regular teenager coming in to his superpowers. The comic eschews normal comic book conflict in favor of real, human problems. Chronicle takes a similar approach but goes one step further, stripping away all but the most necessary components of a super-hero story (the super powers themselves). This is the story of three young men who discover they have super powers and have no one to turn to for help other than each other.

The characters in Chronicle are cut from a pretty broad cloth. The three teens fit nicely in to familiar categories: the troubled outcast, the jock, the preppy. The jock (Matt) provides the connection between the others; he is the cousin of our troubled teen (Andrew) and friends with the preppy (Steve). When these three get super powers after discovering a mysterious object, we would have to be pretty vapid not to know where things are going. Give a troubled, abused teen super powers and things are bound to get bad before long. Chronicle doesn’t have much in the way of surprises for us. The teens behave like we expect movie teens in their situation to behave. There is inevitability to Andrew’s decline that permeates the film even during the festive scenes when the teens are discovering all of their new abilities. I’ve heard it suggested that the film could have been improved simply by changing which character goes “bad,” but that doesn’t work for me as it isn’t too uncommon to see a jock or a preppy go bad in genre films, which tend to celebrate the outcasts and vilify the popular. I think the characters, as archetypal as they may be, work well enough, thanks, mainly, to solid performances by the three principal actors.

The film is the first for director Josh Trank and writer Max Landis, who both come to the project after beginning in television. It is an auspicious debut for both. Though I would certainly have rather seen Trank abandon or, at least, supplement the “found footage” format, he keeps things moving briskly and provides the viewer with dozens of memorable images. The action scenes and big set pieces are especially well-handled, but the small, intimate scenes also play well.  Perhaps that is helped along by Landis’s screenplay, which puts words in the characters’ mouths that you could actually imagine them saying, a rarity for genre films, and gets the core emotions of all three protagonists just right.  Here’s hoping we can keep both of these gentlemen working in genre film for a while at least.  Does the Invincible project still need a director? a sceenplay?

Chronicle isn’t a perfect picture by any means.  I really disliked the poetic license the film took in order to get a camera in every scene (though the blending of hand-held and security cam footage was handled well).  Every character not among the main three was completely flat and uninteresting.  Still, despite those problems, the film was very enjoyable.   I especially enjoyed the section in which the teens were learning what all they were capable of, and, especially, the amazing talent show.  With any luck, getting such a solid genre picture in the wasteland that is February releases means we have a very good year to look forward to.   

Score:  8.5/10