Monthly Archives: February 2012

People Are Vectors: George A. Romero’s The Crazies

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The George A. Romero Zombie Cycle

The Crazies movie poster

 

George A. Romero prac­ti­cally invented the lucra­tive zom­bie sub­genre with Night of the Liv­ing Dead in 1968, simul­ta­ne­ously trap­ping him­self within it for most of his sub­se­quent career. Romero’s zom­bies served him well enough for six films and count­ing, at least two of which tran­scended the genre and are still dis­cussed in seri­ous terms. His less famous later cre­ations the “cra­zies” only appeared in one of his films, but their influ­ence on pop­u­lar cul­ture is dis­pro­por­tion­ate to their fame. They are arguably the­mat­i­cally richer and — despite not tech­ni­cally being zom­bies, per se — exert a greater influ­ence on most sig­nif­i­cant sub­se­quent zom­bie films by other directors.

The Cra­zies (1973) may not belong to Romero’s offi­cial Liv­ing Dead cycle, but what sets it apart is mostly a mat­ter of brand­ing. Zom­bies had cap­tured the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion in a way that the more vaguely-defined cra­zies could not, at least at first. The clas­si­cal Romero-style zom­bie is sim­ply a rean­i­mated corpse with an insa­tiable ani­mal hunger in place of higher brain func­tion — in effect a sub­trac­tion of the intan­gi­ble human essence, or what a reli­gious per­son would describe as a soul. In con­trast, a crazy is exactly what it sounds like: a liv­ing per­son dri­ven to unchecked vio­lence and lust, while still remain­ing rec­og­niz­ably human.

A scene from George A. Romero's The Crazies“Peo­ple are vectors.”

The most sig­nif­i­cant inno­va­tion Romero intro­duced in The Cra­zies can be summed up in its most chill­ing line: “peo­ple are vec­tors.” In Night of the Liv­ing Dead, it was enough for Romero to vaguely drop hints of some sort of mys­te­ri­ous extrater­res­trial radi­a­tion caus­ing the dead to rise. The virus fac­tor would pre­oc­cupy sub­se­quent zom­bie auteurs for decades, par­tic­u­larly Danny Boyle with 28 Days Later. It’s a rich con­cept that touches on many sen­si­tive themes: pol­lu­tion, con­spir­acy the­o­ries, bio­log­i­cal war­fare, sex­u­ally trans­mit­ted dis­eases, and pan­demics. While now vir­tu­ally every non-Romero zom­bie movie defaults to a viral ori­gin story, it seems that Romero him­self is dis­in­ter­ested in the mechan­ics of either zom­bies or cra­zies. He’d much rather focus on randomly-selected bands of sur­vivors, on the run in a world where soci­ety has bro­ken down. Liv­ing humans are a greater dan­ger than mon­sters, and death is no longer absolute.

All the usual Romero tropes are present, par­tic­u­larly insti­tu­tional cor­rup­tion and inep­ti­tude. On the macro level, the U.S. gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary serve their own inter­ests first, to the degree that they func­tion at all. The gov­ern­ment has secretly engi­neered and weaponized a virus with the innocu­ous code­name Trixie and acci­den­tally releases it into the water sup­ply of small town Evans City, PA (a real town, where por­tions were actu­ally filmed). As in Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers, the action remains in the small burb for the entirety of the film. For­get Patient Zero; this is Town Zero.

George A. Romero's The CraziesThe mil­i­tary tries to clean up its own mess

The author­i­ties swoop in and attempt to quar­an­tine the bucolic burb until the virus burns itself out. We learn they were blithely aware of the risks in trans­port­ing the virus, and remain chill­ingly apa­thetic even after the begin­nings of cat­a­stro­phe. One espe­cially cold­blooded gen­eral casu­ally munches sand­wiches while dis­cussing how to con­tain the epi­demic. Romero’s usual sym­pa­thies are for the indi­vid­ual con­science ham­strung by soul­less bureau­cra­cies. Even in Day of the Dead, where the mil­i­tary was the pri­mary source of con­flict, some indi­vid­u­als remained sym­pa­thetic. In The Cra­zies, Major Ryder (Harry Spill­man) and Colonel Peckam (Lloyd Hol­lar) strug­gle as much against their supe­ri­ors’ coun­ter­pro­duc­tive orders as they do try­ing to pacify the cra­zies on the bat­tle­field and pro­tect the uninfected.

Even the civil­ians have deep ties to the armed forces. David (Will MacMil­lan) and Clank (Harold Wayne Jones) are Viet­nam War vet­er­ans who now find them­selves in oppo­si­tion to the insti­tu­tions they once served. They spend most of the movie com­pletely in the dark as to why their town is in chaos, and in fact come into vio­lent con­flict more fre­quently with the mil­i­tary than with their now-insane for­mer friends and neighbors.

Romero also con­tin­ues his tra­di­tion of fore­ground­ing women and peo­ple of color. The ranks of Duane Jones in Night of the Liv­ing Dead, Lori Cardille in Day of the Dead, and John Leguizom­bie Leguizamo in Land of the Dead are joined by Judy (Lane Car­roll), a preg­nant nurse who ini­tially assists the military’s con­tain­ment efforts. Her char­ac­ter is far more sig­nif­i­cant and inte­gral to the plot than her equiv­a­lent in Breck Eisner’s mediocre 2010 remake, played by Radha Mitchell. It’s sad but per­haps unsur­pris­ing that a B-movie from 1973 would fea­ture a stronger fem­i­nist char­ac­ter than one from the 21st century.

George A. Romero's The CraziesLynn Lowry inau­gu­rates her career as a scream queen

But on the other hand (you knew that “but” was com­ing), the other pri­mary female role is played by Lynn Lowry as an impos­si­bly ethe­real and wil­lowy teen with a marked resem­blance to Sissy Spacek. The character’s pri­mary func­tion is to look inno­cently gor­geous and be raped by her infected father. Lowry would go on to a long career as a scream queen in sex­ploita­tion films.

The Cra­zies is largely humor­less in tone, save for ironic music cues through­out. A per­sis­tent mar­tial snare drum plays under oth­er­wise rather dull scenes of Ryder and Peckam argu­ing in a cheap office set, and “Johnny Comes March­ing Home” accom­pa­nies sequences of desen­si­tized sol­diers sum­mar­ily exe­cut­ing detainees.

The estab­lish­ment of mar­tial law and mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion of a town on Amer­i­can soil raise the ques­tion: how do you tell the dif­fer­ence between gen­uine resis­tance and mur­der­ous rage, which is to say, just plain crazy plus capital-c Crazy? Is not killing and shoot­ing other human beings by def­i­n­i­tion crazy, espe­cially when sys­tem­at­i­cally oper­ated by the gov­ern­men­tal and mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tions that are sup­posed to pro­tect and serve life? In the movie’s most charged sequence, a priest immo­lates him­self on his church steps. In 1973, it would have been an unmis­tak­able visual allu­sion to the Bud­dhist monks that self-immolated to protest the Viet­nam War. A sol­dier exe­cutes him. Was the priest protest­ing or Crazy? Was the sol­dier mer­ci­ful or Crazy?

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After the End of the World: Adapting Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

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The Road movie poster

 

Genre fic­tion has long resided on the wrong side of the chasm between escapism and lit­er­a­ture. But as The Atlantic notes, cult writ­ers like Neil Gaiman are cross­ing over into the main­stream while estab­lished nov­el­ists like Michael Chabon are explor­ing the genre ter­ri­tory blazed by the likes of Mar­garet Atwood. Few know these blur­ring bar­ri­ers as well as Cor­mac McCarthy, a writer with firm bona fides in the lit­er­ary world whose dev­as­tat­ing 2006 novel The Road incor­po­rated ele­ments of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion. It become a crossover hit and landed a spot in the world’s biggest book club: The Oprah Win­frey Show. Its vision of a burned world pop­u­lated by scav­engers drained of all human­ity is some­times even described as a zom­bie story, spark­ing an argu­ment over whether or not it qual­i­fies as hor­ror or sci­ence fic­tion. My own two-fold answer: of course it does, and the ques­tion is also irrel­e­vant. Spec­u­la­tive futures and fan­ci­ful tech­nol­ogy are not the true sub­jects of sci­ence fic­tion, but rather means to an end: explor­ing the here and now.

The Road made its way to the­aters shortly after a very dif­fer­ent vision of life after the apoc­a­lypse. Direc­tor McG’s Ter­mi­na­tor Sal­va­tion was the fourth entry in an escapist action fran­chise detail­ing a for­mu­laic bat­tle for the fate of human­ity. The Road is set at a time long after such heroic strug­gles can even be imag­ined, and when the drudgery of mere sur­vival is wan­ing. The world itself is ter­ri­fy­ingly real­ized onscreen, using real des­o­late loca­tions: par­tic­u­larly an eerily aban­doned stretch of turn­pike in Pitts­burgh, and the still largely life­less blasted remains of Mount St. Helens in Wash­ing­ton. The only tech­ni­cal prob­lem I noticed was the some­what dis­tract­ing tooth con­ti­nu­ity through­out. Decay: now you see it, now you don’t.

A scene from The Road“If I were God, I would have made the world just so and no different.”

I re-read the novel a few days before see­ing the film, which turned out to be a mis­take. The book remained the emo­tional, vis­ceral expe­ri­ence it was on my first read, but its fresh­ness in my mind kept me some­what detached through­out the movie. I could not help but dis­pas­sion­ately ana­lyze the par­tic­u­lars of the adap­ta­tion. I’m among those who loved the book, but didn’t nec­es­sar­ily desire the movie to be faith­ful. The mechan­ics of how it could be done fas­ci­nated me. How do you adapt a book that lives and dies on the Stein­beck­ian terse, harsh, under­stated poetry of its lan­guage? Joe Penhall’s screen­play is remark­ably faith­ful in terms of plot and sequence of events, and the few changes are mostly effec­tive. In par­tic­u­lar, a neat trick involved seam­lessly com­bin­ing three sep­a­rate inci­dents in the novel into a sin­gle sequence: The Boy falls ill, The Man loots an aban­doned boat, and they are robbed.

It’s hard to imag­ine a bet­ter direc­tor for The Road than John Hill­coat, whose pre­vi­ous film The Propo­si­tion, from a screen­play by Nick Cave, could have been the movie that Cor­mac McCarthy never made him­self. But The Road as a film some­how fails to recre­ate the emo­tion­ally dev­as­tat­ing effect of its source mate­r­ial. Another can­di­date for direc­tor might have been Alfonso Cuarón, who man­aged to trans­form P.D. James’ novel Chil­dren of Men into a gut-wrenching vision of a near-future soci­ety dis­in­te­grat­ing before our eyes. McCarthy had pre­sented Hill­coat with a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge; The Road is, in a sense, a long dénoue­ment to a story we didn’t see. Per­haps the strongest argu­ment against genre fans claim­ing The Road as their own is that most zom­bie sto­ries con­cern the fall of civ­i­liza­tion. The Road is set far after an implied cat­a­clysm, where every­thing has been taken away, even the very names of the peo­ple and places that remain.

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in The Road“If there is a God up there, he would have turned his back on us by now. And who­ever made human­ity will find no human­ity here.”

That said, the McCarthy does glanc­ingly allude to a cat­a­clysmic event fol­lowed by vio­lence on a mas­sive scale, waged by tribes described as Blood­cults. There are many aspects of the back story that Hill­coat and Pen­hall opt to clar­ify (par­tic­u­larly the Man & Boy’s fam­ily life), but the mas­sive wars that swept the coun­try in the pre­ceed­ing years is not one of them. This largely unspo­ken past in cru­cial to the book, as the reader con­tem­plates how the Man, the Boy, and every­one they encoun­tered some­how lived through it all, be it through fight­ing, hid­ing, or col­lab­o­rat­ing. The Man’s strat­egy for sur­vival is to lay low and instill in his son the need to pre­serve a metaphor­i­cal “light” of basic human­ity. We see numer­ous alter­na­tive strate­gies that also worked, but which result in the destruc­tion of the soul. One such walk­ing dead man we meet is Old Man (Robert Duvall), who appar­ently col­lab­o­rated with the Blood­cults until the toxic land­scape claimed his health.

Some of McCarthy’s poet­i­cally spare lan­guage is pre­served in the lim­ited voiceover nar­ra­tion deliv­ered by the Man (Viggo Mortensen). But some evi­dence exists onscreen that the film­mak­ers feared the audi­ence might not be able to put two and two together. While being scarcely men­tioned by name in the book, “can­ni­bal­ism” is one of the first words spo­ken in the film. It presents this sav­agery as the spe­cific omnipresent threat that forces the Man and Boy to remain totally alone and self-reliant. Another clue the movie is more obsessed with can­ni­bal­ism than the book: in the clos­ing cred­its, a plump female char­ac­ter is chill­ingly named “well-fed woman”. That’s cer­tainly more humor than can be found in the text.

Viggo Mortensen in The Road“I told the boy when you dream about bad things hap­pen­ing, it means you’re still fight­ing and you’re still alive. It’s when you start to dream about good things that you should start to worry.”

Another key ele­ment I missed from the book is the real­iza­tion that the Boy has lit­er­ally never seen another child, ever, which goes a long way towards explain­ing his care­less reac­tion to glimps­ing another boy. Long accus­tomed to hid­ing from all con­tact, he explodes with the dan­ger­ous need to con­nect. Although The Boy has evi­dently known lit­tle else, he seems to have the inborn need to cling to signs of life. The boy also mar­vels at a glimpse of a bee­tle — a detail which I believe was added — whose metallic-like wings refract the gray­ish light and pro­vide one of the film’s only flashes of color.

The end­ing of the novel is some­thing that can only work in prose. A sim­ple change in verb tense hints at a pos­si­ble future, a rad­i­cal change in think­ing for char­ac­ters pre­vi­ously forced to orga­nize their lives around imme­di­ate sur­vival. Beyond an over­ar­ch­ing quest to reach the ocean, they indulged in lit­tle talk of the future, or of any kind of con­tin­u­ance at all. Life on the lit­eral and metaphor­i­cal road is a sick com­bi­na­tion of drudgery and ter­ror. Every event in their lives is sud­den, unex­pected, and never likely to recur in quite the same way. The final words in the novel are per­haps the first thing the boy hears that hints of a com­fort­ing rou­tine he might expect in his future. Trans­lated to film, Hill­coat and screen­writer Joe Pen­hall do per­haps the only thing they could do: plug a bunch of words into a character’s mouth that was silent in the book.

Charlize Theron in The Road“My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born.”

The cast­ing is pretty much per­fect, par­tic­u­larly Kodi Smit-McPhee, who so resem­bles Char­l­ize Theron that it’s eerie. Even the sup­port­ing cast is superla­tive, includ­ing Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Michael K. Williams, Molly Parker, and Gar­ret Dil­lahunt. The lat­ter is an inter­est­ing, ver­sa­tile actor, hav­ing played an upper-crust psy­chopath in Dead­wood, a crim­i­nal idiot in The Assas­si­na­tion of Jesse James by the Cow­ard Robert Ford, a mur­der­ous cyborg in Ter­mi­na­tor: The Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles, and here a vile can­ni­bal. That’s a remark­able range of deranged char­ac­ters, but will he ever have a chance to play a nor­mal guy?

Offi­cial site: www.theroad-movie.com

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Rewind & Reboot: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

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X-Men Origins Wolverine movie poster

 

Much of what’s wrong with X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine can be traced right back to its con­fused con­cep­tion, indeed begin­ning with its clumsy title. The ungainly pre­fix is clum­sily bolted on solely for it to alpha­bet­ize adja­cent to the three pre­vi­ous X-Men films on Wal­mart shelves, iTunes, Pay-Per-View, and tor­rent track­ers. The two halves split by a colon try to have it both ways: “X-Men Ori­gins” brands it as part of a pro­posed series of pre­quels to the lucra­tive orig­i­nal tril­ogy (none else of which have yet to mate­ri­al­ize, appar­ently dis­carded in favor of the com­plete reboot X-Men: First Class), while “Wolver­ine” promises a fresh new fran­chise in and of itself.

With the orig­i­nal tril­ogy still warm in its grave, barely a decade after it began, why rewind and start over again so soon? There’s no rea­son why a pre­quel fea­tur­ing honest-to-goodness movie star Hugh Jack­man as the fan-favorite icon couldn’t have stood on its own. One gets the feel­ing X-Men and X2: X-Men United were pre­ma­turely dis­carded. All of this is quite the pity, as direc­tor Bryan Singer’s inter­pre­ta­tion was far supe­rior than this and Brett Ratner’s weak X-Men 3: The Last Stand.

I can under­stand the desire to cre­ate a jumping-on point for new view­ers, one that does not require a detailed mem­ory of the events of the pre­vi­ous install­ments. But if what 20th Cen­tury Fox and Mar­vel Comics sought was a fresh start, this isn’t exactly it. The nar­ra­tive con­torts itself to slot into some of the estab­lished chronol­ogy, while simul­ta­ne­ously ignor­ing or con­tra­dict­ing many other sig­nif­i­cant ele­ments of the canon.

Liev Schreiber and Hugh Jackman in X-Men Origins: WolverineSabre­tooth and Wolver­ine demon­strate the proper pro­to­col in exe­cut­ing a man hug

Danny Hous­ton por­trays a younger ver­sion of William Stryker, a role orig­i­nated by Brian Cox in X2: X-Men United. We learn a lit­tle more of his vil­lain­ous moti­va­tions and ties to Wolverine’s secret ori­gin, none of which really sur­prise or illu­mi­nate. Fans might be pleased by super­flu­ous cameos by a younger Cyclops (Tim Pocock) and Pro­fes­sor X (a dig­i­tally reju­ve­nated Patrick Stew­art). Then there’s the mat­ter of Sabre­tooth, whom we already met as Magneto’s hench­man (Tyler Mane) in the orig­i­nal X-Men (2000), but now entirely recast and recon­ceived as Logan’s brother Vic­tor Creed (Liev Schreiber).

A pro­logue set in Canada’s North­west Ter­ri­to­ries in the mid 1800s reveals Logan’s dam­aged psy­chol­ogy to be the prod­uct of frat­ri­cide. He and brother Vic­tor were doted upon by a wealthy adop­tive father, but their super­sti­tious bio­log­i­cal father wanted to kill them. The best sequence imme­di­ately fol­lows: an impres­sive mon­tage of the broth­ers fight­ing side-by-side through the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War, Civil War, World Wars I and II, and Viet­nam. The word­less sequence suc­cinctly illus­trates the immor­tal war­riors grow­ing apart, as Vic­tor becomes increas­ingly unsta­ble while Logan slowly devel­ops a moral code and dis­taste for killing.

A Wolver­ine film seemed like a promis­ing idea when I first heard of it; it could have pro­vided a neat way to shake off the detri­tus that had accu­mu­lated by the end of the orig­i­nal tril­ogy. Each sub­se­quent install­ment added too many addi­tional char­ac­ters drawn from decades of Mar­vel Comics his­tory, and quickly snow­balled to the point where the ensem­ble cast became com­i­cally unwieldy (pun intended). So, the notion of a fresh story focused around just one char­ac­ter sounded like a wise choice. But expect­ing a smart cre­ative choice from 20th Cen­tury Fox was obvi­ously too much. X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine is over­stuffed with a tremen­dous num­ber of X-Men b-listers, includ­ing The Blob (Kevin Durand), Dead­pool (Ryan Reynolds), Gam­bit (Tay­lor Kitsch), The White Queen (Tahyna Tozzi), and Bolt (Dominic Mon­aghan). The lat­ter, inci­den­tally, fea­tures in one of the best scenes in the film, in a low-key con­fronta­tion with Vic­tor that approaches real drama.

Taylor Kitsch, will.i.am, Liev Schreiber, Hugh Jackman, Tim Pocock, Ryan Reynolds, and Lynn Collins in X-Men Origins: WolverineThe Amaz­ing Adven­tures of the Uncanny C-List Char­ac­ters, com­ing soon from Mar­vel Comics

Worse than the pro­lif­er­a­tion of sup­port­ing char­ac­ters is its menagerie of vil­lains. Like Spider-Man 3, the film fea­tures a mud­dled array of ene­mies when just one well-developed vil­lain would have suited the story bet­ter. At least three mor­tal neme­ses align them­selves against our hero here: Stryker, Sabre­tooth, and Weapon XI. The best, most iconic comic book vil­lains are flam­boy­ant char­ac­ters intri­cately tied in with the ori­gins of the hero: Bat­man vs. The Joker (Jack Nichol­son, Heath Ledger), Spider-Man vs. The Green Gob­lin (Willem Dafoe), and Super­man vs. Lex Luthor (Gene Hack­man, Kevin Spacey). But Wolverine’s most seri­ous foe here is the lit­er­ally mute and expres­sion­less Weapon XI, devoid of char­ac­ter or charisma. Worse, his moniker looks much bet­ter in print than spo­ken aloud; “Weapon Eleven” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.

X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine is directed by Gavin Hood, of the crit­i­cally respected film Tsotsi, mak­ing it unusu­ally finely pedi­greed for an escapist piece of enter­tain­ment based on kids’ comic books. Mar­vel Comics seems not to have learned its les­son from hand­ing Hulk to Ang Lee and Thor to Ken­neth Branagh. A good case study for Fox and Mar­vel would have been Warner Bros.’ dis­as­trous Inva­sion, from Oliver Hirsch­biegel, direc­tor of Down­fall. Both Inva­sion and X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine are some­how fatally bro­ken, to the point where they fail to make rudi­men­tary sense (which ought to be a base require­ment for pop­corn special-effects-driven block­busters). Is it too much to ask that films like this at least be inter­nally logical?

Stryker’s scheme sim­ply doesn’t add up. What exactly does he intend to do? Stryker is evi­dently dis­sat­is­fied with his cre­ation Weapon X (who escaped and became Wolver­ine). After what he per­ceives as a failed beta test, Stryker moves on to Weapon XI, an osten­si­bly per­fect sol­dier with super­pow­ers extracted from other mutants. So why does he go to extreme lengths to keep Wolver­ine under obser­va­tion by a fake girl­friend (Lynn Collins) for sev­eral years, when all he has to do is kill him and extract his pow­ers with his super-syringe? Even more puz­zling, if Stryker wants Logan dead, why does he trick him into sign­ing up to become Weapon X? Stryker suc­ceeds only in mak­ing an already near-indestructible man even more so.

Tahyna Tozzi and Lynn Collins in X-Men Origins: WolverineThe White Queen and Sil­ver­fox look wor­ried as they dash through some cor­ri­dor or some­thing, what­ever, who am I kid­ding — Tahyna Tozzi and Lynn Collins are just in this movie to tit­il­late the fanboys

The prob­lem with comic book super­hero sto­ries is that there’s a point at which your pow­er­ful pro­tag­o­nist becomes lit­er­ally inhu­man, and thus dif­fi­cult to find sym­pa­thetic or relat­able. The best exam­ple is Super­man, lit­er­ally an alien who can do almost any­thing. What kinds of prob­lems would such a crea­ture have, and how can any viewer relate to him? Here, Logan and his neme­sis Vic­tor are both effec­tively immor­tal, so there is lit­tle at stake in their con­flict. The most inter­est­ing comic book super­heroes must rec­on­cile super­hu­man pow­ers with their deep flaws and anx­i­eties, like Spider-Man’s inse­cu­ri­ties and Daredevil’s dis­abil­ity, or are nor­mal human beings with extra­or­di­nary drive, like Bat­man and Iron Man.

A pirated ver­sion of X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine infa­mously leaked online before its offi­cial the­atri­cal release. It was roundly panned, and Fox attempted dam­age con­trol by claim­ing it was an unfin­ished workprint with place­holder CGI, sound effects, and titles. Accord­ing to the Los Ange­les Times, the ver­sion finally released in the­aters was report­edly almost iden­ti­cal, an embar­rass­ment to say the least.

The spe­cial effects are rather shoddy, espe­cially com­pared to the state of the art as seen in its con­tem­po­raries Star Trek and Trans­form­ers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Wolverine’s claws and Sabretooth’s bound­ing and pounc­ing suf­fer espe­cially from uncon­vinc­ing cheap­ness. The only two gen­uinely impres­sive excep­tions were wasted, to show­case sup­port­ing char­ac­ter Cyclops’ laser eye-beams slic­ing large struc­tures into geo­met­ric chunks.

Stray Obser­va­tions:

  • Two easter egg codas fol­low the cred­its. One is totally unnec­es­sary (Stryker’s fate is bet­ter left to the imag­i­na­tion), but the other is enjoy­ably campy, with a kind of sick humor that could have enlivened the rest of the film.
  • The DVD fea­tures an anti-smoking Pub­lic Ser­vice Announce­ment, no doubt penance for Logan’s sig­na­ture cigar-chomping. But where are the warn­ings against drink­ing alco­hol, rid­ing motor­cy­cles with­out hel­mets, killing peo­ple with blades, and per­form­ing uneth­i­cal med­ical atrocities?
  • The script is a non­stop bar­rage of clichés: if I had sub­tracted one star for every time some­body utters “Let’s do this” or “Look what the cat dragged in,” my rat­ing would be, well, a lot of neg­a­tive stars.

Offi­cial movie site: www.x-menorigins.com

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