My Week in Movies (6/12–6/18)

HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX — I mentioned a few weeks ago that my usual preparation for a new Harry Potter film has been to read the books, not to refresh on the films. In retrospect this was probably a mistake. It made me too aware of everything altered or omitted. Even when I tried to mitigate it by re-reading only the books up to, but not including, the upcoming film, the problem is as I alluded to in my GOBLET OF FIRE comments. Each film is a follow-up to the preceding films, not to the preceding books. If an earlier film omitted a certain plotline, that plotline no longer exists in the story universe of the films, and may have a ripple effect on changes that need to be made to later films.

All that to say, my purpose in re-watching the films and not re-reading the books as the eighth and final installment approaches is to immerse myself in the story universe of the films, and judge them on those merits as much as possible. I’ve read the books many times at this point, so the events of the story — particularly in the early books — are as ingrained in my imagination’s memory as those of The Odyssey. I can’t not notice when something’s different. But, by watching the movies in close succession, I’ve been less distracted by the changes, more able to take the films on their own merits.

I’ve long felt that ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, David Yates’ maiden voyage at the helm of the franchise, was a step backwards from the franchise’s upward trend in quality. But as I was surprised last week to find GOBLET a poorer film than I recalled, I was equally surprised to discover PHOENIX to be a much better one. I simply must have been holding the film hostage to the book. Naturally the book superior, but viewing the film as much on its own merits as is possible, the adaptation makes a lot of smart choices to condense storylines into their most important essence. In particular, the work done here to build Harry’s relationship with Sirius — something neglected in the previous film but important for the climax of this one — is very well done. There’s plenty missing, sure, but for the most part if you didn’t know it was there in the book, you wouldn’t feel its absence here.

Something that was handled particularly well was the connection between Harry and Voldemort. Unlike the ridiculous tongue-flicking by Crouch Jr. in GOBLET, we see Voldemort in one of Harry’s visions twisting his neck, as though to get a kink out. Throughout the film, Harry will do the same thing, usually coinciding with a sudden rush of fury or loathing. It’s a much more subtle and successful clue to the mystery.

Characterization is still off for a number of characters, and I mention this because it’s not an aspect of the films that reasonably needed to be changed in the adaptation. Particularly in the cases of Umbridge and Dumbledore — both characters, in the book, are highly composed, engaged in a battle of wits beneath a consistently pleasant (exaggeratedly so, in Umbridge’s case) exterior. Dumbledore is always avuncular, even when informing the Minister for Magic that he does not intend to, “what’s the phrase, ‘come quietly’?” And Umbridge is sickly sweet to mask her poisonous nature.

But here in the film, Dumbledore seems openly exasperated in nearly every scene, and cracks begin to show in Umbridge’s façade from the very first Defense against the Dark Arts lesson. For both of them to be unflappably collected, as originally written, is much more interesting in my opinion.

The other thing that still strikes me as not working is the film’s handling of Sirius’ death. In the book, Sirius is not hit by the killing curse, but by a stunning spell that blasts him through the veil, and that’s what kills him. It happens suddenly, almost too fast for anyone to realize what happened, and leaves Harry (and the reader) in denial about Sirius’ fate for some time. There was no time to say goodbye. Surely, this can’t be how heroes die.

In the film, Sirius is hit with the Avada Kedavra curse, but reacts like he’s been punched in the kidney, gasping for air — despite prior establishment that the curse kills instantly, and knocks its victims off their feet (we see flashbacks of Cedric getting killed several times, so it’s easy to compare them). He then slowly leans back and floats away into the veil.

I think the director must have wanted to make it a more dramatic moment, but the irony is that doing it this way makes it less impactful in the end, because drawing it out gives us a form of closure with the character. It gives the audience time to say goodbye. Maybe, after the way their relationship has been built, a clearer death makes most people feel Harry’s pain more sharply; but I think the sudden shock of Sirius vanishing through the veil — having not been Kedavra’d, having been vibrant and full of fighting spirit up until that very moment, having no right to be dead — would have had a much harder impact, as it does in the book. As it is, I think the moment falls woefully flat — and, unfortunately, as the entire film is built in support of that moment (as the screenwriter himself states in some of the BTS material), it robs the film of the strength it otherwise could have had.

My Week in Movies (6/5–6/11)

HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE — I remember this film being a good deal better than it is. Maybe I was just fascinated by studying another new director’s hand in the production; maybe I was giving it a wide pass because it was a long book that needed to be condensed somehow; or maybe I let it pass because the important scene — Voldemort’s return — was done wonderfully and introduced Ralph Fiennes’ You-Know-Who to the series. But I think Newell made a lot of missteps, particularly in what parts he chose to enhance and what he chose to leave out.

For example, someone who watched the movie without reading the books wouldn’t know that the connection between Voldemort’s and Harry’s wand is a result of the two wands sharing “twin cores” — both having feathers from the same phoenix within. It may be that in the version of the story that exists in the movies (necessarily an alternate universe to the version in the books), that isn’t actually the case. In the following movie, Dumbledore and Voldemort’s wands connect the same way. Maybe that’s just what happens when two wizards blast at each other.

The problem with that, of course, is that a) Harry ain’t Dumbledore, and shouldn’t be able to withstand Voldemort’s onslaught without an additional layer of protection like the twin cores, and b) the matter of the twin cores actually becomes really important when we get to Deathly Hallows, since that’s what leads Voldemort’s whole obsession with finding the Elder Wand (also not well-clarified in that film, but I’ll come to that in a few more weeks). Instead of explaining that, which would have taken like an extra minute of screen time, Dumbledore mumbles “priori incantatem…” without bothering to explain what the hell that means, only admonishing Harry that no spell can return the dead to life.

The film also minimizes the role of Rita Skeeter in the narrative, and while I can somewhat understand her subplot not being necessary in its entirety, the lies of Rita Skeeter directly impact the events of Order of the Phoenix. She is the reason the magical world at large does not believe Harry’s insistence that Voldemort has returned; she spends the entire year on a crusade of character assassination after he snubs her for an interview. To remove that character almost entirely, only keeping her as a sort of nod-wink to the fans, makes the actions of the magical world toward Harry more difficult to understand in the next installment.

The plot is built as a mystery, but the mystery gets all screwed up in the way it’s rolled out. In the course of four directly adjacent scenes:

1. Mad-Eye Moody confronts Barty Crouch with surprising hostility. He is the only person who has been openly hostile toward Crouch in the film. Moody does a weird flicking thing with his tongue, which the soundtrack emphasizes with synced cymbal stings, and which Crouch freaks out about.
2. Crouch’s dead body is found in the woods.
3. Harry sees the memory of Barty Crouch, Jr. being outed as a Death Eater, in which Junior flicks his tongue exactly the way Moody did.
4. Snape tells Harry that he knows someone in the castle is brewing Polyjuice Potion.

GOSH I WONDER WHAT’S GOING ON HERE

I think it’s the tongue flick that kills it — something that David Tennant improvised (it wasn’t in the book) and Newell decided that Crouch Jr. and Junior-as-Moody should do every single time they appeared onscreen. By the time the “secret” is revealed we’ve known it for an hour.

The film gets Dumbledore very wrong — or rather, it humanizes Dumbledore far too much. He’s frightened for Harry when he’s forced to compete, frustrated to distraction when he can’t sort out the villains’ plan, unable to control even the simplest situations, such as the kick-off of various tasks, thanks to the suddenly-silent bumbling of Filch.

Harry shouldn’t yet be privy to these moments of vulnerability and neither should we. Harry’s supposed to think Dumbledore’s got everything under control, always — which is what makes his death in Half-Blood Prince shake Harry to his core. To so early tip the hand, that Dumbledore is a man like any other, short-circuits a great chunk of Harry’s growth and understanding of the “real world” of being an adult.

It was Emma Watson’s turn to overindulge in her performance this time, and while emotionally she nails the character, her eyebrows emote at an 11 all the way through; it detracts badly from what would otherwise be a solid performance.

The Goblet of Fire book ends on a heavy but exciting note, with Crouch being kissed by a Dementor (thereby losing his soul and preventing him from ever giving testimony and backing up Harry’s story), the Minister for Magic vowing to discredit and deny Harry’s story, and the good guys preparing to form a resistance and fight Voldemort — and the Ministry, should it come to that. It’s the EMPIRE STRIKES BACK of the series, after which — as Hermione says in the film — everything’s going to change. But in the film, that line by Hermione is all that remains of this ending. It ends on a weirdly upbeat, even hopeful note, striking the completely wrong tone for the film’s conclusion and the sharp turn the story has taken.

Overall the film feels disjointed, more like a collection of fan-favorite and absolute-necessity scenes than a proper story being told. Instead of extending the dragon task to a sprawling (and kind of baffling) setpiece, Newell should’ve spent those minutes on character moments. It’s certainly more exciting and stylish than Columbus’ films, but at least Columbus’ had fairly clear throughlines.

HUDSON HAWK* — One of those movies famous for being a bomb, I saw that it was on Netflix and decided to check it out.

It’s… certainly unique. It’s essentially a live-action cartoon; everyone hams it up like crazy, and on top of it all, it revolves around a strange sci-fi premise wherein the bad guys are trying to get ahold of an alchemical device to turn lead into gold.^[1]

It’s amusing enough, but I completely see how it didn’t make back its (quite large, seemingly) budget, or really connect with an audience. I can’t figure out who this movie is meant to be for.

KUNG FU PANDA 2 — I enjoyed the first KUNG FU PANDA a great deal — I thought that the martial arts was decently done, though left room for improvement,^[2] and the story, if a little superficial, was strong enough and at least not all smarmy and postmodern like most of Dreamworks’ offerings to that point.

KUNG FU PANDA 2 continues Po’s story in some surprising but obvious ways, playing off the odd fact that Po’s “father” was a goose in the first film. Animated films don’t usually bother trying to make sense of interspecies families like this, so making it central to this film’s plot was unusual but refreshing. Po’s search for his external abilities in the first film are contrasted well by his search for inner strength and peace in this one, and I liked the development of the characters. Gary Oldman’s villainous peacock gave a brilliant performance, both in voice and animation.

So the PANDA part of the title was well-represented here, but the KUNG FU part left a lot to be desired. Whereas they’d clearly thought through the action and its presentation in the first film, this film resorted to incomprehensible kinetic shooting and cutting to conceal the fact that there was very little actual martial arts action in the film at all.

Prime example: there’s a scene where Tigress tells Po he can’t come with them on the mission, because a dark and forgotten chapter of his past has returned to haunt him, and his emotional distraction is making him a liability. Up until now the Furious 5 have deferred to Po, respecting his skill as the Dragon Warrior. He and Tigress have even been shown to be particularly close. But now Tigress is standing against him, and even though technically he should be able to beat her in a fight, he can’t. She’s proving the point that his distraction, his lack of inner peace, has rendered him powerless. And the fact that it’s come to this, between these characters, should be an emotionally powerful moment.

And we don’t see the vast majority of this fight. All we get is Po walking out of frame, some biff-pow sound effects, and Po flopping back into frame. This is a moment that the martial arts ought to be telling the story, just the way a musical uses its songs to tell a story, and it doesn’t. It’s like watching a musical where all the songs happen in another room, or are drowned out by the sound effects and the crowd. Why make a musical, then?

SUPER 8 — Think of a memory from your childhood. Say for example your mom used to bake cookies, and a lot of great memories are wrapped up in association with those cookies. Now, 25 years later, you find a scented candle that smells a lot like your mom’s cookies. All those associations, the memories and nostalgia, come flooding back to you when you light the candle. It’s not the same, it’s really only a pale imitation, but you appreciate the imitation for facilitating the feelings.

SUPER 8 is the equivalent of filling a room with about two dozen different candles and lighting them all at once. Before you know it, you’re reeling from one treasured memory to the next, giddy with nostalgic asphyxiation. Only when you walk out of the room and take a few deep, clear breaths do you realize that you’ve only been relishing old memories, not forming any lasting new ones.

J.J. Abrams has a theory of what he calls Mystery Box storytelling, and SUPER 8 is certainly a Mystery Box film. As such, I can’t say much about it without ruining some of the mystery and suspense. Also as such, I think the film loses replay value once you know the answer to the mystery. It certainly loses steam when, 2/3 of the way through, the mystery is explained.

What I can say is that the advertising is a bait-and-switch. If you watched the promotional material, you know a group of kids making a Super 8 film winds up on the scene of a train derailment, Something Escapes… and the Super 8 camera was running, and pointed at the event, the whole time.

You’d think this roll of Super 8 film would be something fundamental to the plot. The movie is called SUPER 8 after all.

But no. The Super 8 reel with footage of [redacted] on it has almost no bearing on the plot. In fact, the kids who were shooting the Super 8 reel have almost no bearing on the plot, other than that the film decides to follow them. I can see why — the kids are charismatic and entertaining, successfully emulating the child-ensemble films of yesteryear (e.g. E.T.; GOONIES; STAND BY ME). If anything makes the film worth watching, it’s these kids. But like the young protagonists in the Abrams-produced CLOVERFIELD, they don’t actually do anything except manage to be in the right place at the right time every 7-10 minutes so they, and we, can gain a little more information about what’s in the Mystery Box.

Spielberg’s early films (and other, similar-sensibilitied films of the same era) became modern classics because they gave us something to connect to emotionally. SUPER 8 goes through a lot of the right motions, but ultimately all it accomplishes — and sadly, all it seems to want to accomplish — is to remind us how good those other movies were. It’s content to be a paean to Abrams’ (and many of my peers’) childhood favorites, instead of a film that could itself become a childhood favorite for a new generation.

It’s fun and thrilling in its way, and I do think it’s worth seeing, especially by the aforementioned generational peers. But twenty years from now Spielberg’s films will still be classics, and SUPER 8 merely a related footnote.

---

1. da Vinci accidentally invented it when trying to find a way to turn lead into bronze. Yeah. You heard me. Never mind that bronze is an alloy of copper and tin — 32 and 53 atomic numbers from lead, respectively, versus gold’s 2, which is why lead was chosen by alchemists in the first place — nor that da Vinci would have had way more sense than that.↩
   
2. To be fair, I’m coming from the Shaw Brothers/Golden Harvest perspective where they have no problem fighting for 5-10 minutes at a stretch, so maybe my appetite for martial arts action is bigger than the average Dreamworks target.↩

My Week in Movies (5/29–6/4)

HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN — Last week when I said that the price of a safe SORCERER’S STONE and CHAMBER OF SECRETS was worth paying, I was thinking first and foremost of this film.

The POTTER series had a built-in fanbase in those who had read the books, but that won’t always translate into a successful film or franchise. Witness the slow implosion of the NARNIA adaptations, or the dull thuds that marked the debuts (and deaths) of would-be franchises HIS DARK MATERIALS (THE GOLDEN COMPASS) and PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS (THE LIGHTNING THIEF — for which the “safe” bet of Chris Columbus’ direction apparently proved to be a liability rather than an asset).

With two strong successes under their belt, and Columbus choosing to depart (for variously-reported reasons — the one I respect the most was that he decided the third book’s darker tone was outside his wheelhouse and he wouldn’t be able to do it justice), Warner Bros. and/or the producers seem to have felt that the HARRY POTTER brand on a film was enough to guarantee a reasonable success, almost no matter what they did, and they could therefore take some risks.

It’s perennially in vogue to disparage Hollywood studios (aka The System, The Suits, or — as Mamet hilariously called them in a now-famous story memo — The Penguins) as the bad guys. Lacking vision for anything but the bottom line, they’ll mangle a film and stifle the creative voices involved just to make it appeal to a broader audience and sell more lead-laced collector’s cups at McDonald’s. Based on many many many tales out of school, available in books and behind-the-scenes and magazine interviews and the rest, this characterization does generally seem to be accurate.

But it is clearly not always the case, and I think the Penguins deserve some credit when they make a call that shows true vision. One example I would make would be New Line’s Bob Shaye throwing $300 million at Kiwi schlock filmmaker Peter “Bad Taste” Jackson to make three epic fantasy films back-to-back. Another would be Warner Brothers hiring Alfonso Cuarón to take on HARRY POTTER.

I just can’t grasp how this happened. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it did — even at the time I was excited to hear that Cuarón was taking on the film, and that was before AZKABAN and CHILDREN OF MEN had cemented him as my #1 favorite filmmaker working today. But while Cuarón had technically dipped a toe in family entertainment, and even splashes of fantasy, with A LITTLE PRINCESS in 1995, his most recent work pre-AZKABAN was the hyper-sexual, unflinching Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN.

Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN had fascinated me with its shooting style — the long takes and handheld camerawork that have become Cuarón’s trademarks — and the strength of the performances, but I am still amazed that the WB Penguins were able to see past the film’s explicit sexuality. And that they were willing to approach the man who’d made such a sexually-charged film and say, “We want you to take our family fantasy franchise to the next level.”

As I say, they deserve credit for this, as it turned out to be the best choice not only for the film, but for the entire franchise. Cuarón is a director of strong sensibilities, and he brought those sensibilities to bear with full force on the way he made this film. Aside from inheriting the cast and the broad strokes of production design (though he noticeably altered the layout of Hogwarts to suit his preferences), he made this film his own. Beyond changing the way the movies approached magic, which I’ve praised before, I think his approach to the film sent a message to the directors who followed him, that they could and ought to make the films their own, not feel constrained by what preceding films and filmmakers had done.

PRISONER OF AZKABAN was for a long time my favorite book in the series (HALF-BLOOD PRINCE managed to come in at a tie, and finally DEATHLY HALLOWS edged past it), so you’d think I’d be pissed with the liberties Cuarón — providing guidance to screenwriter Steve Kloves — took with the material. But overall, I’m not. What made me such a fan of the book was that it took a turn away from the first two books, which both followed essentially the same formula: Harry comes to school, Voldemort through some vessel presents a threat, Harry and pals unlock the mystery, and despite adult interference and incompetence manage to save the day until our next episode. And it felt that way: episodic. I simply assumed that in every book, Voldemort was going to show up twirling his mustache and our heroes would thwart him once more. It was a fun enough jaunt each time that I was willing to go along with it, but I didn’t expect too much.

PoA starts out as though it will be more of the same, but at its climax in the Shrieking Shack we’re thrown for a loop — Sirius Black is not a minion of Voldemort. In fact, aside from references to him, Voldemort doesn’t figure into this installment whatsoever. Suddenly we’re on the back-foot; Rowling stuck to the formula just enough so we’d get comfortable, then pulled the rug out. She continues to subvert such structural expectations for the rest of the series. This is also the first installment where it really becomes clear that these are not simply “Harry & Pals thwart Voldemort” episodics, but all part of a single, unified narrative — one which really kicks into gear at the climax of Goblet of Fire.

As I mentioned in my HBP review, Cuarón’s insistence on focusing on the story and not concerning himself so much with every little beat of the plot — in making a film and not just staging the book onscreen — elevated the film and its successors to exactly the next level that presumably was what the producers hoped for when they hired him. In so doing, the film version of AZKABAN presents as much of a departure from its predecessors as the book did, making it a far worthier adaptation and translation of the work’s spirit, than a rote recital could ever have done.

One thing that Cuarón managed to capture, in reference to last week’s post, was some of the humor that was missing in previous installments. Sometimes it goes a little too far so as to become almost Looney Tunes-ish — the frozen, lightning-struck Hufflepuff Seeker in the Quidditch match, or the long “Uh-oh!” take when Hermione snags Harry’s shirt as the Whomping Willow is whipping her around — but it’s another thing that helped breathe some new life into the series. The actors have really started growing into their characters and it makes me look forward to revisiting the next ones.

My one quibble is that I do wish Cuarón had bothered with a little more of the backstory, specifically the connection between Lupin/Sirius/Pettigrew, and the “Mooney, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs” of the Marauder’s Map — as it is, Lupin’s knowing how to work the Map and the form of Harry’s Patronus (and why he was so convinced it was cast by his father) are completely unexplaned. Though perhaps Pettigrew’s oft-repeated nickname of “Wormtail” is enough information for astute viewers who haven’t read the books. (Or perhaps it doesn’t actually matter at all.) And the scene in the Shrieking Shack is so brilliantly executed in the book, with reversal after reversal, I wish that Cuarón had played it up and kept that a bit more as it was. Still, these are quibbles, and for all that we owe Columbus for laying the franchise’s foundation, we owe Cuarón for leading the others in building upon it.

A LITTLE PRINCESS* — I decided to have a mini Cuarón-athón and check out the film that I assumed probably had a larger role in getting him AZKABAN than YTMT.

The film is shot very traditionally, with only a few hints of what would become Cuarón’s style in evidence, with a few war scenes shot with roaming handheld perspectives but otherwise the camera is mostly static. There are a few places where you can feel that Cuarón wants to be more active with the camera, with a few large pull-outs and push-ins and a couple of jib shots used in the textbook manner of showing the balance of power shifting (jib down = subject starts to loom over camera and feels dominant, jib up = subject looks small and submissive), but if you showed me this film and didn’t tell me it was Cuarón I would probably never have guessed.

Set during World War I, the story follows a young girl from a wealthy family, whose father enrolls her in an all-girls boarding school when he enlists to fight for the British. When he is presumed killed in combat, the British government seizes all his assets. Without being able to pay for the expenses she’s incurred, the girl is forced to work as a servant.

It’s a solid film, with some fairly good (if occasionally a little too wide-eyed and breathless) performances from the cast of children. It’s based on a book from the 19th century, set in Victorian times, and despite being updated to World War I it displays a few unfortunate ethnocentricities, such as a variation of the Magical Negro — in this case the Magical Hindu — and a rather rosier and more egalitarian view of British colonialism in India than was probably the case (though I’m no historian so I could be wrong). And I had thought that AZKABAN had been Cuarón’s first foray into visual effects, but some (heavily-dated) creature VFX pops up in the stories that she tells the other girls. All-in-all, decent family entertainment. If this Cuarón had made AZKABAN, there would not have been much discernible difference from the first two. Now I want to see his GREAT EXPECTATIONS, to see if it displays a stylistic intermediate between the two extremes.

VAMPIRES IN HAVANA* — Netflix suggested this movie to me based on I don’t know what, however it is their suggestion system works. I decided to watch it primarily because I wanted to watch something and this is especially short (69 minutes).

There’s a genre of animation from the 60s and 70s that was geared toward an adult audience. It sounds weird to say that now, when animation for adults is widely accepted, but at the time (and really, up until The Simpsons) it was very much a niche. Such cartoons tended to be crude in both style and humor, essentially the descendants of the old penny dreadfuls.

VAMPIRES IN HAVANA is surprisingly less bawdy than I expected, and actually tells an odd but interesting story, about a vampire scientist who created a formula which allows vampires to walk in the sun (humorously, it’s a variation on the piña colada, which is why he stationed himself in Havana to work on it), the vampire nephew who has grown up immune to the sun as a proof of the formula’s success (and doesn’t know he’s a vampire), and warring factions of organized crime in the vampire community with their own designs on the formula. It’s silly but unique and if you’ve got about an hour to kill (and don’t mind reading subtitles — it’s in Spanish) it might be worth a look.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS — X-MEN is one of those franchises that I can take or leave. Like many elements of pop/geek culture, I’m aware of the broad strokes of the X-MEN mythology, and I watched some episodes of the animated series growing up, but I’m not engrossed or invested to the point where I’ll much care or even notice if they deviate from the established mythology, as long as they’re telling a solid and engaging story.

That being the case, X3 and WOLVERINE were abysmal, badly squandering all the creative potential built up by the original film and its even better sequel, to the point that I had written off future installments and spinoffs as a bad job from the outset. I paid little mind to the development or approach of X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, other than having an awareness of the truncated production schedule (10 months script-to-screen). But I’m a fan of Matthew Vaughn. He’s a director who understands character and is consistently concerned with telling a good, cinematic story. He involves himself in the scripts of the projects he makes, and in my view when he deviates from the source material he does so with good reason and it makes for a better film. So between his involvement, a pretty good theatrical trailer, and rave reviews, I decided to see FIRST CLASS in its first showing.

FIRST CLASS is probably the best X-MEN film to date. As a prequel to the existing films it does an outstanding job of delving deeper into the characters we know — particularly Charles Xavier and Erik “Magneto” Lehnsherr — and showing how they got to be the way they were in the 2000 film. The arcs are solid and plausible, as well as dripping with dramatic irony (Magneto’s journey takes him from seeking vengeance against the Nazis for what they did to him, to becoming convinced that mutants are a new Master Race). It also goes its own way in a few places and could not be 100% aligned with the originals without some inconsistencies, so it’s half-reboot. But then again comic books happily retool their internal mythology all the time if it suits the present story, so I suppose it’s nothing untoward.

Set in the 1960s, it’s actually made in many ways like a 60s film, including THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR-style splitscreening. It’s essentially “James Bond with mutants,” and it feels retro without the postmodern knowing wink. You get the feel (especially from the closing credits) that they wanted to make a film not just about the X-Men in the 60s, but almost the film that they would have made in the 60s had they the effects technology at their disposal. It’s more modern in style in its reliance on close-up singles and constructing performances in the edit, versus the prevalence of master shots and in-camera blocking in the 60s, but it finds just the right balance to create the flavor while still delivering what audiences expect in a contemporary action film.

By making a character-driven film Matthew Vaughn has created a new high-water mark for non-gritty superhero storytelling. Instead of focusing on the effects and the action, the people become real and we can engage at a deeper and more interesting level than before. That’s not to say that the effects and action aren’t themselves fantastic, but the spectacle was always in service of the story and the story in service of the characters. I hope to see more spectacle films, especially ensemble superhero films (*cough*AVENGERS*cough*) follow his lead.