Mummy’s Boy: The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

The Mummy 3 Tomb of the Dragon Emperor movie poster

 

Per­haps it was the mood I hap­pened to be in the day I saw it in 1999, but I will freely admit I loved The Mummy, the first film in the lat­ter day incar­na­tion of the 1930s MGM hor­ror fran­chise. In con­cert with Simon West and Jan De Bont’s pair of Tomb Raider films, The Mummy picked up the period-piece action/adventure man­tle left dor­mant since the last Indi­ana Jones in 1989, and per­haps con­tributed to the fedora-clad adventurer’s return for The King­dom of the Crys­tal Skull almost 20 years later. It struck me as exactly what all big-budget action block­busters should aspire to be: good fun, with gen­uinely impres­sive spe­cial effects, thrills, a lit­tle romance, and a few laughs. Not a lit­tle of its charm came from the self-deprecating Bren­dan Fraser, a decid­edly dif­fer­ent kind of char­ac­ter com­pared to the arro­gance and near super­hu­man capa­bil­ity of Lara Croft and Indi­ana Jones.

The fran­chise proved unusu­ally fer­tile, spawn­ing an inevitable sequel (not really ter­ri­ble, but still nowhere near as fun as the orig­i­nal) and even two pre­quels star­ring The Rock: The Scor­pion King and The Scor­pion King 2: Rise of a War­rior. The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) came as some­thing of a sur­prise when the series had seemed to have petered out. Orig­i­nal direc­tor Stephen Som­mers had since moved on to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009), leav­ing it up to Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furi­ous, Stealth), to see if there was any fresh­ness to be found.

Maria Bello and Brendan Fraser in The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor“Sorry pal, there’s a mummy on the loose.”

Some time has passed, and Rick (Fraser) and Eve­lyn (Maria Bello) have retired to a staid Eng­lish manse. Eve­lyn earns a liv­ing from trans­form­ing her past adven­tures into the form of a pop­u­lar series of swash­buck­ling adven­ture nov­els, while Rick does, well, noth­ing. Both find their lives unful­fill­ing and yearn to return to adven­tur­ing. The youth­ful Fraser hasn’t even grayed his hair, but if Eve­lyn looks like an entirely new woman, it’s because she is; Bello replaces “think­ing man’s sex sym­bol” Rachel Weisz, who likely had higher aspi­ra­tions. Their son Alex (Luke Ford), now a rogue arche­ol­o­gist in his own right, forms a con­tentious rela­tion­ship with Lin (Isabella Leong), a girl with a con­sid­er­able secret — she and her mother Zi Yuan (Michelle Yeoh) are immor­tal (but she doesn’t seem to have matured her emo­tion­ally or intel­lec­tu­ally over her long life). The slightly fey John Han­nah is back in the role of gen­tle comic relief.

The enemy this time is China itself; the gov­ern­ment con­spires to awaken the cursed Emperor Han (Jet Li), pos­sessed of super­nat­ural pow­ers but encased in stone for all eter­nity. With its mod­ern mil­i­tary at the ser­vice of a super­hu­man immor­tal emperor, China plots noth­ing less than world dom­i­na­tion. The Emperor’s pow­ers also seem to be pretty vaguely defined, and he rarely uses them to best effect. Jet Li rarely appears onscreen in the flesh, lead­ing me to guess he prob­a­bly did a lot of motion-capture work à la Andy Serkis in the Lord of the Rings and King Kong. He spends much of his time made of inde­struc­tible molten rock, but can trans­form into a fierce dragon at will. Nonethe­less, he spends more than a few scenes stand­ing back as his min­ions fall before his foes, when he could sim­ply sweep in and kill every­body when­ever he wanted.

Michelle Yeoh and Isabella Leong in The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor“Here we go again!”

The movie pro­duces obsta­cles as it goes along, and you have no choice but to shrug as one MacGuf­fin piles up atop another. To wit: a spe­cial dia­mond needed to awaken a mum­mi­fied Chi­nese Emperor, the blood of some­one pure of heart, a drink from Shangri-La, and the sud­den appear­ance of the sole dag­ger capa­ble of killing the revived Emperor. Cap­ping it off is a trio of benev­o­lent yeti, but the Emperor is even­tu­ally defeated with the aid of a lit­eral ghost in the machine: Gen­eral Ming (Rus­sell Wong), van­quished ear­lier by the Emperor. The moral of this story seems to be: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Like a lot of con­tem­po­rary effects-oriented fea­tures (includ­ing Watch­men, Sin City, The Spirit), the best thing about it are its excel­lent clos­ing credits.


Offi­cial movie site: www.themummy.com

Buy the Blu-ray or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.


Gritty, Grimy, and Graffitied: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three movie poster

 

Plenty of genre movies have been set in New York City, such as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (dev­ilry on the Upper West Side), Wal­ter Salles’ Dark Water (ghosts on Roo­sevelt Island), Guillermo Del Toro’s Mimic (ver­min in the sub­way), and Spike Lee’s Inside Man (thiev­ery on Wall Street). The Tak­ing of Pel­ham One Two Three, directed by Joseph Sar­gent from the novel by John Godey, is one of the few New York movies seem­ingly made for New York­ers. Plenty of the world’s cities have under­ground tran­sit sys­tems, but this par­tic­u­lar story could be set nowhere else. It’s a potent premise that has been remade twice, first as a TV movie in 1998 and again in 2009 as a big-budget star vehi­cle for John Tra­volta and Den­zel Wash­ing­ton, directed by Tony Scott. It was even an indi­rect inspi­ra­tion for the famous color-coded crim­i­nal aliases used in Quentin Tarantino’s Reser­voir Dogs.

The Tak­ing of Pel­ham One Two Three is a time cap­sule, full of curiosi­ties about how the New York City sub­way looked and func­tioned in the 1970s. It also reveals a great deal about how the city itself was per­ceived and por­trayed in pop­u­lar cin­ema at the time. The cityscape is gritty, grimy, and graf­fi­tied. Women are just now begrudg­ingly being let into the M.T.A. work­force. A cyn­i­cal City Hall is will­ing to nego­ti­ate with ter­ror­ists if it means more votes in the next elec­tion. Hook­ers and pimps share the sub­way with drunks and robust eth­nic stereo­types. The unhealthy filth of mil­lions of peo­ple liv­ing in close quar­ters is evi­denced by a cold going around (which becomes a key plot point).

Walter Matthau in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three“Some­body down there knows how to drive a train. You don’t pick that up watch­ing Sesame Street.”

The movie’s racial pol­i­tics are dated, but per­haps more hon­est towards flawed human nature. Lt. Gar­ber (Wal­ter Matthau) is openly con­de­scend­ing towards vis­it­ing Japan­ese offi­cials study­ing the M.T.A. He’s flatly racist in a way no hero in a mod­ern film would ever allowed to be (he calls them “mon­keys”). But in fact, he actu­ally does get his come­up­pance. Matthau is, to say the least, an odd cast­ing choice for the hero of a thriller. But he was prob­a­bly about the cor­rect age for a Tran­sit Author­ity detec­tive, and had the right air of sar­donic dis­il­lu­sion­ment for a believ­able lower-level civic employee of the bleak New York City of the 1970s.

Speak­ing of roles that would never be con­ceived the same way in today’s Hol­ly­wood, the bad guys remain very effec­tively dis­guised through­out. Char­ac­ter actors Robert Shaw and Mar­tin Bal­sam were never exactly super­stars, but how many actors today would will­ingly dis­guise them­selves for most of a movie? I can really only think of Clive Owen in Inside Man and almost any­thing Gary Old­man does. Unsur­pris­ingly, no attempt is made to obscure the very expen­sive face of John Tra­volta for one frame of the 2009 remake. Note that Shaw unmask­ing is spoiled by his promi­nent appear­ance on the DVD sleeve.

Robert Shaw in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three“Excuse me, do you peo­ple still exe­cute in this state?”

Made decades before 9/11, The Tak­ing of Pel­ham One Two Three is nev­er­the­less a minia­ture night­mare sce­nario of one of the Manhattan’s myr­iad vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties to ter­ror­ism. In the 1970s, the famil­iar form of ter­ror­ism was to hold hostages for remu­ner­a­tion or to espouse a cause. Scott’s 2009 remake had to face 21st cen­tury audi­ences (many sit­ting in New York City movie the­aters) for whom ter­ror­ism means mass mur­der. But Scott takes the con­ven­tional route and boils down the plot into a con­flict between two men, on a per­sonal level. Scott’s choices high­light how much the orig­i­nal actu­ally bucks cliché.

In the orig­i­nal, we know prac­ti­cally noth­ing about the per­sonal lives of Gar­ber or the vil­lain­ous Mr. Blue (we may guess he’s some sort of ex-mercenary or sol­dier of for­tune, but he gives no hint of his ide­ol­ogy or moti­va­tions). In con­trast to the ice-cool Mr. Blue, Travolta’s char­ac­ter is manic and unhinged, and rants in a bar­rage of f-bombs. Just as Sargent’s old school run­away train sequence is more thrilling than Scott’s rapid-fire edit­ing and CGI flair, the orig­i­nal also outscores on pure cynicism.


Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.


A Man Alone: Babylon A.D.

Babylon A.D. movie poster

 

Vin Diesel has made some­thing of a spe­cialty in dystopian sci­ence fic­tion movies pos­sessed of aston­ish­ing visu­als but hor­rif­i­cally bad scripts (I’m look­ing at you, Pitch Black and The Chron­i­cles of Rid­dick). Does he seek these kinds of projects out, or has he been type­cast as a weary but action-ready man of the future? Math­ieu Kassovitz’s Baby­lon A.D. is yet more sci-fi trash with an inter­na­tional feel, not just in the spirit of Diesel’s own oeu­vre, but also very much a direct descen­dent of Luc Besson’s The Fifth Ele­ment. The pres­ence of Michelle Yeoh promises mar­tial arts ass­kick­ing that never really mate­ri­al­izes, and the pro­ceed­ings are given a mea­sure of class by Ger­ard Depar­dieu and Char­lotte Rampling.

Vin Diesel in Babylon A.D.The gog­gles… they do nothing!

The movie pre­dicts an espe­cially bleak future for Europe, wracked by per­pet­ual war and ter­ror attacks that leave the urban land­scape look­ing like Chech­nya and Bosnia. Toorop (Diesel) is a reluc­tant mer­ce­nary war­rior, some­thing like a mas­ter­less ronin from old samu­rai movies. I was pre­pared to like his char­ac­ter until he shoots a dis­armed man in the face and makes a lame Die Hard-like quip. I watched the extended unrated cut on DVD, which may explain why a full 22 min­utes lapses before the hero finally under­takes his task: to escort the genet­i­cally engi­neered girl Aurora (Mélanie Thierry) from the war-torn waste­lands of “New Ser­bia” to New York. The per­sis­tent tone of a-man-alone cyn­i­cism is some­thing else Baby­lon A.D. shares with many of Besson’s anti-heroes, espe­cially the Trans­porter films: Toorop knows he’s being used, but not by whom or why.

Michelle Yeoh and Melanie Thierry in Babylon A.D.

Some of the gen­uinely incred­i­ble shots and sequences to watch for, none of which are reflected in the pro­mo­tional stills:

  • The open­ing sequence is an unbro­ken shot zoom­ing straight down on planet Earth, hom­ing in on Man­hat­tan and into Diesel’s eyeball
  • A 270-degree cam­era move incor­po­rat­ing a CGI heli­copter and an ancient con­vent carved into a stone cliff
  • An estab­lish­ing shot of an unspec­i­fied Russ­ian city built around a giant crater, its ori­gins unex­plained (but a likely allu­sion to the post-WWIII Neo-Tokyo of Kat­suhiro Otomo’s Akira)
  • The entire island of Man­hat­tan lit up with a grossly expanded Times Square and com­pleted Free­dom Towers

The Manhattan of the Future Babylon A.D.The Free­dom Tow­ers dom­i­nate the Man­hat­tan of the future

Movies like Baby­lon A.D. always fall apart at some point, and this one finally suc­cumbs when the refugee party arrives in New York City. Aurora’s father sud­denly mate­ri­al­izes, appar­ently solely to pro­vide a mas­sive info­dump of expo­si­tion. The long, com­pli­cated back­story was barely hinted at before, if at all: Aurora is the prod­uct of an incor­po­rated reli­gion whose CEO and High Priest­ess (Char­lotte Ram­pling) hopes to man­u­fac­ture a mirac­u­lous vir­gin birth. All of this is told, not shown, which only cre­ates frus­tra­tion and con­fu­sion, and lit­tle emo­tional response.


Offi­cial movie site: www.babylonadmovie.com

Buy the Blu-ray or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.


Apocalypse on Wheels: Death Race

Death Race movie poster

 

Death Race evi­dences a cyn­i­cal, shal­low, indis­crim­i­nate out­rage at… every­thing. In this future dystopia, the U.S. econ­omy col­lapsed in 2012, fol­lowed by soar­ing unem­ploy­ment, crime, and incar­cer­a­tion. Echo­ing Roller­ball and Run­ning Man, pro­fes­sional sport has merged with the penal sys­tem, pro­vid­ing both tele­vised enter­tain­ment and a jus­tice sys­tem in one neat, cost-saving package.

In the key inci­dent that illus­trates the extent of this fallen soci­ety, the gov­ern­ment man­u­fac­tures a riot by shut­ting down a man­u­fac­tur­ing plant and lay­ing off all its work­ers. The incited riot­ers make con­ve­nient scape­goats for society’s short­com­ings, ulti­mately ben­e­fit­ting the gov­ern­ment. One of these inno­cent blue-collar labor­ers is Jensen Ames (Jason Statham), a for­mer crook try­ing to make an hon­est liv­ing as a fam­ily man. Like his char­ac­ter Frank in the Trans­porter films, his crim­i­nal forte was dri­ving. Dri­ving very fast. Unjustly impris­oned at Ter­mi­nal Island Pen­i­ten­tiary, he’s made an offer he can’t refuse; die or be drafted into the role of Franken­stein, a masked fic­ti­tious racer in the tit­u­lar Death Race. As with pro­fes­sional wrest­ing vil­lains and the Yan­kees, Franken­stein is a vil­lain per­fectly designed for the pub­lic to root against, and they don’t need to know that the real Franken­stein died long ago.

Jason Statham and Natalie Martinez in Death RaceThis ain’t your daddy’s prison movie

Death Race was orig­i­nally con­ceived as a higher-budgeted vehi­cle for co-producer/star Tom Cruise, but was grad­u­ally down­graded to this video game pas­tiche helmed by Paul W.S. Ander­son. It’s a dubi­ous choice of source mate­r­ial, con­sid­er­ing that the orig­i­nal Death Race 2000 (1975), star­ring David Car­ra­dine and Sylvester Stal­lone, is one of the lesser-known apoc­a­lyp­tic sci-fis of its era. Peers Soy­lent Green, Roller­ball, Logan’s Run, and The Ωmega Man) are all better-known and most were in line to be remade ear­lier. Car­ra­dine makes a voice cameo as the pre­vi­ous bearer of the Franken­stein mantle.

Since The Dork Report is never above point­ing out the crush­ingly obvi­ous, Death Race the film is only a few degrees removed from the “Death Race” it depicts: both are escapist enter­tain­ments built upon bru­tal­ity, sex­ism, and shaky moral ambiva­lence. The osten­si­bly hell­ish Ter­mi­nal Island Pen­i­ten­tiary actu­ally appears rather chaste and peace­ful, mak­ing the sce­nario less dis­taste­ful to audi­ences. Rape is never a worry, and racially moti­vated con­flict is only faintly alluded to by the pres­ence of eth­nic gangs (white suprema­cists are obliquely referred to as “The Broth­er­hood”). The dri­vers’ copi­lots are “Nav­i­ga­tors” recruited from the neigh­bor­ing women’s prison. These stun­ning model-quality lovelies were cherry-picked to tit­il­late by the War­den (Joan Allen), in ser­vice of greater rat­ings. Speak­ing of, Ander­son misses an oppor­tu­nity to sat­i­rize tele­vised sport­ing events as well as The Wachowski Broth­ers’ Speed Racer or even Dodge­ball did.

Jason Statham and Joan Allen in Death RaceGrav­i­tas or Botox?

Death Race is mind­lessly enter­tain­ing enough, until we’re asked to for­give unre­pen­tant mur­derer Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gib­son) solely because he lends a hand to our hero Jensen. The logic is con­fused: given an unjust prison sys­tem that exploits the guilty and inno­cent alike, should the guilty also be allowed to walk free? If truly guilty pris­on­ers like Machine Gun Joe are so plen­ti­ful, why does the war­den have to go to the bother of fram­ing inno­cent peo­ple in the first place?

Statham sup­plies his usual per­sona of buff, terse, reluc­tant hero who has no time for girls (seri­ously, what is up with that? Trans­porter 2 even flirts with the notion his char­ac­ter Frank might be gay). Attempts are made to class up the joint with the bizarre mis­cast­ing of Joan Allen, a fine actor that here seems wooden and inex­pres­sive (lit­er­ally so — a case of too much Botox?). Worse is the crim­i­nal waste of the pow­er­fully impos­ing Ian McShane. He was noth­ing less than awe­some in Dead­wood, bring­ing to life a crime lord more inter­est­ing than even Tony Soprano. McShane also ele­vated the short-lived TV series Kings, play­ing his part like he was in Shake­speare while every­one else was trapped in an ele­men­tary school play. But even he can’t do any­thing to res­cue this mess.


Offi­cial movie site: www.deathracemovie.net

Buy the Blu-ray or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.


Solitary Confinement: Moon

Moon movie poster

 

Moon is a rare sci­ence fic­tion thriller that doesn’t derive its ten­sion solely from the spec­ta­cle of space­ships, robots, or off­world locale. Rather, it’s a psy­chodrama about para­noia, in the Philip K. Dick tra­di­tion of Blade Run­ner, Minor­ity Report, and A Scan­ner Darkly (not to men­tion the count­less movies Dick indi­rectly inspired, such as Dark City, 12 Mon­keys, and The Matrix). Moon’s futur­is­tic trap­pings hide sev­eral onion lay­ers of deeper themes: bioethics, tor­ture, labor exploita­tion, and ques­tion­ing the nature of the self and one’s per­cep­tion of reality.

Direc­tor Dun­can Jones (aka Zowie Bowie, son of David Bowie), shot Moon on an extra­or­di­nar­ily eco­nom­i­cal bud­get of $5 mil­lion, achieved largely by restrict­ing pro­duc­tion to sound­stages and sub­sti­tut­ing prac­ti­cal minia­tures for costly CGI. A ben­e­fi­cial side-effect is a pleas­ing tac­til­ity lack­ing in most con­tem­po­rary sci-fi films, where entire char­ac­ters and envi­ron­ments are now rou­tinely vir­tual. As a beat-up moon rover slowly trun­dles across the uneven lunar sur­face, kick­ing up dust, bump­ing and rat­tling all the way, it feels real because it is.

Duncan Jones' MoonOur circuit’s dead, there’s some­thing wrong

As his character’s name Sam Bell implies, Jones con­ceived the role with Sam Rock­well in mind. Rock­well was great in Con­fes­sions of a Dan­ger­ous Mind and Match­stick Men, and is great here. He must hold the screen vir­tu­ally alone for most of the film, and Jones was right to hype him for an Acad­emy Award nomination.

Sam is a blue-collar miner and the sole occu­pant of a par­tially auto­mated base ded­i­cated to strip-mining the dark side of the moon for a com­pound needed back on earth for clean power. It may sound like tech­nob­a­b­ble but in fact the sci­ence is sound: Helium-3 is a real ele­ment believed to be plen­ti­ful on the moon and the­o­ret­i­cally may some­day pro­vide a sus­tain­able source of energy. But in the true sci-fi dystopian tra­di­tion, Sam’s employer Lunar Indus­tries turns out to be as insid­i­ous as the Weylan-Utani cor­po­ra­tion that exploits the Nos­tromo min­ing plat­form crew in Rid­ley Scott’s Alien.

Lunar Indus­tries boasts of prof­itably sav­ing the Earth’s envi­ron­ment by pro­vid­ing clean power on the cheap, made pos­si­ble by engag­ing in prac­tices that are arguably immoral but com­monly accepted. The exploita­tion of cloned life is a direct par­al­lel to today’s out­sourc­ing of labor to devel­op­ing coun­tries with more lax human rights. If one won­ders how a future soci­ety might be so inured to cloning that they would con­done Sam’s servi­tude, media broad­casts over­heard at the end of the film spill the beans: no, they don’t (that is, if we’re opti­mistic and assume what he hear is real — it’s pos­si­ble they’re the fan­tasy of a dying man imag­in­ing his moral vic­tory). But per­haps it’s like how many in the west­ern world live now; we enjoy afford­able con­sumer elec­tron­ics and cloth­ing man­u­fac­tured by work­ers that lit­er­ally live inside their fac­to­ries, and don’t ask why our pur­chases don’t cost more. Jones told Sui­cide Girls that Moon is the first part in a pro­jected tril­ogy, so per­haps we will see pre­quels or sequels that flesh out a world where human cloning is a fact of life.

Kevin Spacey in Duncan Jones' MoonGERTY ROTFLMAO

Sam’s mad­ness and phys­i­cal dete­ri­o­ra­tion is par­tially explained within the sci­ence fic­tion con­text as a result of the inher­ent insta­bil­ity of cloned life. Appar­ently, like early exper­i­ments with ani­mals like Dolly the sheep in 1996, clones are more prone to dis­ease, organ fail­ure, and pre­ma­ture death (Dolly sur­vived about half the nor­mal lifes­pan for a sheep). Like the “repli­cants” in Blade Run­ner, these clones come with built-in expi­ra­tion dates. But then, don’t we all? While Blade Runner’s Dekker comes to terms with his true nature through escape, Sam instead chooses to confront.

Dis­cov­er­ing he is merely a com­mer­cial prod­uct with inbuilt obso­les­cence is just one of Sam’s prob­lems. His quar­ters and work­space look like they might have once been as clean and white as 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Dis­cov­ery One ves­sel (or the inside of an Apple Store), but have long since become stained and soiled with the filth and grit of the many Sams that came before him. Also like the Dis­cov­ery One astro­nauts, Sam peri­od­i­cally receives pre­re­corded video mes­sages beamed from earth. These asyn­chro­nous con­ver­sa­tions are not unlike email, and a poor sub­sti­tute for real human interaction.

You don’t have to look far for a metaphor: the com­mon prac­tice of soli­tary con­fine­ment is increas­ingly rec­og­nized as a form of tor­ture. The har­row­ing New Yorker arti­cle “Hell­hole” by Atul Gawande recounts how a psy­cho­log­i­cally sta­ble per­son can go mad in a mat­ter of weeks or even days with­out human con­tact. We first meet Sam three years into his tour of duty.

Sam Rockwell in Duncan Jones' MoonI am oblig­ated to make a lame “Sam I Am” joke some­where in this review, so here it is

Sam’s inter­ac­tions with the base’s com­puter GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) are like­wise reduced to the rudi­ments of online com­mu­ni­ca­tion; its “face” is com­prised of happy/sad/neutral emoti­cons. GERTY is a rar­ity in sci­ence fic­tion: a com­pas­sion­ate exam­ple of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Count­less movies (includ­ing 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, Wargames, The Ter­mi­na­tor, I Robot, et al.) have trained us to expect arti­fi­cial intel­li­gences to be inher­ently evil or, at least, dan­ger­ously unsta­ble. But GERTY is more like David (Haley Joel Osment) in A.I.: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Robby the Robot in For­bid­den Planet, or Wall-E: an arti­fi­cial cre­ation that rigidly fol­lows its pro­gram­ming, but whose para­me­ters allow it to exhibit gen­uine com­pas­sion and car­ing for its charge.

I loved the movie over­all, but was dis­ap­pointed by the lack of ambi­gu­ity in its sto­ry­telling. The trailer reveals more than I would have liked to know if I had watched the movie cold, and the movie itself reveals its secrets very early by quickly drop­ping the word “clone.” Would it have been more inter­est­ing had there been hints of a pos­si­bil­ity that Sam might be delu­sional, hal­lu­ci­nat­ing a clone, and was in fact alone the whole time? Maybe I’ve been con­di­tioned by too many Twi­light Zone episodes, Fight Club, and M. Night Shya­malan movies, but I expected a twist end­ing that never came.

I’ve touched on sev­eral of Moon’s more obvi­ous inspi­ra­tions, but I’m also reminded of Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris remake, in which a clone-like crea­ture mur­ders his orig­i­nal. Cloning is just begin­ning to enter the zeit­geist, hav­ing recently fig­ured into the brain­dead actioner The Island but also the more con­tem­pla­tive Never Let Me Go, based on the highly regarded novel by Kazuo Ishig­uro. Clones may very well prove to be the next zom­bies or vampires.


Offi­cial movie site: www.moon-movie.com

Buy the Blu-ray, DVD, or Clint Mansell’s excel­lent sound­track CD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.


The Best of Inception Online

To fol­low up on my recent review of Incep­tion, here’s a col­lec­tion of the best online cov­er­age I’ve seen elsewhere:

Devin Faraci’s Never Wake Up: The Mean­ing and Secret of Incep­tion is the best thing you will read about Incep­tion, an opin­ion shared by The Awl. “Incep­tion is about mak­ing movies, and cin­ema is the shared dream that truly inter­ests the director.”

You have three min­utes to make a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion that will take me three hours to click through.” Christo­pher Nolan’s Imple­men­ta­tion, from The New Yorker, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. Via Kottke.org.

The Cobol Job, the offi­cial pre­quel, in comic book form.

Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio’s pal and fel­low ecow­ar­rior, gave Incep­tion a rare endorse­ment on his blog.

An appro­pri­ately Escher-esque info­graphic by Last Exit To Nowhere.

Cin­ema Blend pro­vides a very handy F.A.Q.

Pre­pare to have your mind blown all over again by this key musi­cal cue clue dis­cov­ered by YouTube user camiam321, draw­ing on hints dropped by com­poser Hans Zim­mer in the L.A. Times:


Christopher Nolan’s Fugue State: Inception

Inception movie poster

 

In his 1999 essay Cel­lu­loid Vs. Dig­i­tal, Roger Ebert cites stud­ies equat­ing the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing a movie to enter­ing a fugue state: “film cre­ates reverie, video cre­ates hyp­no­sis.” In other words, expe­ri­enc­ing a film in the tra­di­tional man­ner, pro­jected at 24 frames per sec­ond in a dark­ened the­ater, affects the brain in a way akin to dream­ing. Incep­tion is far from the first movie set in dreams, but it may be alone in attempt­ing to encode the expe­ri­ence into the archi­tec­ture of a film itself. Whether you com­pare it to onion skins or a puz­zle­box, the form fol­lows the content.

The bar has been set very low by the likes of Avatar, but Incep­tion is finally proof that movies with bud­gets in the hun­dreds of mil­lions need not be moronic and dis­pos­able. Yes, Incep­tion is a sci-fi action movie full of well-tailored out­laws, guns, fight sequences, and explod­ing moun­tain fortresses, but it’s also an intel­li­gent, com­plex expe­ri­ence for adults. If it took a weak remake and two movies about a vig­i­lante in a rub­ber bat cos­tume for Nolan to get here, then so be it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Inception“It’s not, strictly speak­ing, legal.”

Incep­tion is the nat­ural pro­gres­sion from Fol­low­ing, Memento, and The Pres­tige, Christo­pher Nolan’s quar­tet of wholly orig­i­nal visions. Insom­nia, a safe remake of the far more incen­di­ary Nor­we­gian orig­i­nal, now seems like a detour, a pay­ing of dues to enter the main­stream. His pair of Bat­man fran­chise entries injected a mod­icum of psy­cho­log­i­cal real­ism into the pulp source mate­r­ial, but the grimly pon­der­ous weight of it all was per­haps more than it could bear. For my money, nobody other than Tim Bur­ton has man­aged to find the right mix­ture of camp and solem­nity that makes up Batman.

While Incep­tion may have some sur­face resem­blance to numer­ous heist, caper, long con, action, and sci­ence fic­tion films, it is nev­er­the­less a very wel­come New Thing. Its deep­est the­matic links are prob­a­bly to cere­bral sci-fi med­i­ta­tions Solaris and Until the End of the World. The night­mare planet in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris haunted vis­i­tors with imper­fect rein­car­na­tions of their most emo­tion­ally sig­nif­i­cant oth­ers. When a griev­ing astro­naut is reunited with his ersatz wife, long dead of sui­cide, is it a bless­ing or a curse?

Inception“A sin­gle idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can trans­form the world and rewrite all the rules.”

Wim Wen­ders’ Until the End of the World posits a future in which dream-reading tech­nol­ogy would be enor­mously addic­tive, psy­cho­log­i­cally dam­ag­ing, and per­ma­nently alter soci­ety. If a tech­nol­ogy is ever invented for a group of peo­ple to not only enter an individual’s dreams but also to con­struct the dream­world itself, how plau­si­ble it is that soci­ety would not be rad­i­cally trans­formed? In Incep­tion, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a mas­ter at cor­po­rate espi­onage. His exper­tise is with a process nor­mally uti­lized for the “extrac­tion” of trade secrets, but inverted to incep­tion: to implant an idea, a task which proves to hold mas­sive sig­nif­i­cance to Cobb. Like a drug, we’re told, these machines grad­u­ally seep away users’ abil­ity to dream on his or her own. We glimpse a sort of opium den in which burned-out dream junkies go to re-experience the nor­mal­ity of not only dream­ing, but more impor­tantly, wak­ing up from dreams. Wen­ders’ The End of Vio­lence would sim­i­larly look at another dystopian future in which global sur­veil­lance is taken to its log­i­cal extreme.

Inception’s action sequences beg com­par­i­son to every­thing from James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble. Its cre­ative fight sequences, tak­ing place in vir­tual are­nas in which the laws of time and grav­ity are fluid, recall The Matrix. But the true nar­ra­tive and struc­tural tem­plate is much more along the lines of long-con tale much loved by David Mamet (par­tic­u­larly Homi­cide and Red­belt) and heist films Rififi, Thief, and Heat, in which a crack team of crim­i­nal experts work with a psy­cho­log­i­cally dam­aged leader on a high-stakes One Last Job.

The blood­less mas­sacre of hordes of armed thugs seems designed to resem­ble video games. The obliquely por­trayed vio­lence is partly explained by a PG-13 rat­ing that hyp­o­crit­i­cally per­mits dozens of onscreen shoot­ings, but dis­al­lows blood, and thus any sense of the reper­cus­sions and ram­i­fi­ca­tions of vio­lence. But in the world of the film, the thugs are explained to be man­i­fes­ta­tions of the sub­con­scious. A slight-of-hand moral­ity magic trick that makes it OK for our heroes to mow them down with machine guns and grenades (again, this flashes back to The Matrix, in which the good guys ratio­nal­ize away their mass killing of vir­tual avatars).

Marion Cotillard in Inception“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a lit­tle big­ger, darling.”

Incep­tion had already devel­oped a rep­u­ta­tion as a mind-bender even before release, but I found it to be sur­pris­ingly straight­for­ward if you pay a lit­tle bit of atten­tion. If you choose to take the film at face value, pretty much every­thing you need to know is spelled out for you, often in frankly lit­eral expo­si­tion (usu­ally in exchanges with Ellen Page’s inquis­i­tive char­ac­ter). The key ambi­gu­ity is a sim­ple but pro­found ques­tion raised in its final moments. Inter­preted one way, the film neatly wraps itself up in an air­tight box (which is extra­or­di­nary in and of itself, when most big-budget movies often fail to make log­i­cal sense). Inter­preted another way, it calls into ques­tion every­thing you’ve seen.

This moment hinges on Cobb’s totem, a per­sonal item that each dream-traveller must rely upon to detect whether or not they are awake. Both Cobb and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) warn Ari­adne (Ellen Page) to never allow any­one else to touch hers. But Cobb also freely admits that his totem first belonged to his wife Mol (Mar­ion Cotil­lard). Com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters, unless I missed some­thing, we never see her with it out­side of the dream world. The top had sym­bolic mean­ing to Mol, for she locked it up in a metaphor­i­cal safe in her dreams. Cobb then uses it to plant the notion in her head that the dream world is not real, in order to encour­age her to break her addic­tion and wake up with him. If the top was real, would she not be able to test her­self with it when she woke up?

One fur­ther clue that sug­gests much of what we saw may be Cobb’s dream: if he and Mol lived the equiv­a­lent of 50 years in Limbo, sev­eral lev­els deep into their sub­con­scious, why do they seem to only wake up through one level of dream­ing? Is Cobb still trapped a few lev­els down?

Ellen Page in Inception“Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we real­ize some­thing was actu­ally strange.”

And one won­ders about the implau­si­ble dream tech­nol­ogy itself. It’s offhand­edly said to have been devel­oped by the mil­i­tary for train­ing pur­poses, but very lit­tle time is spent on the mechan­ics of the tech­nol­ogy. Some sort of IV is involved in the process of link­ing peo­ple together, but how exactly does an Archi­tect cre­ate and real­ize the world? We see Ari­adne fid­dle with papier-mâché mod­els, and ver­bally describe the world to the par­tic­i­pants, but we’re also told that the archi­tect need not nec­es­sar­ily enter the dream per­son­ally, so it’s not her men­tal map that makes things pos­si­ble. If the agents are able to con­jure things on the fly (Eames pro­duces a grenade launcher out of thin air, and Ari­adne folds a city in half), why do they not take more advan­tage of their effec­tively unlim­ited abil­i­ties dur­ing the heist? Cobb makes a big deal out of a prospec­tive archi­tect being able to devise labyrinths, some­thing like a video game level designer. But Ariadne’s work is lit­er­ally short-circuited and we never see a dra­matic pay­off to the theme of mazes.

Ray Brad­bury once said that he was not con­cerned with the mechan­ics of inter­stel­lar travel; if a story he wished to tell required a rocket ship to ferry char­ac­ters to another world, that was good enough for him. So is it pedes­trian of me to won­der about these prac­ti­cal­i­ties, or do these ques­tions actu­ally mat­ter a great deal? Is the lack of speci­ficity about how this mirac­u­lous tech­nol­ogy actu­ally works a clue? I believe it is linked to the trou­bling ambi­gu­ity of Cobb’s desire to “go home.” Does he sim­ply want to clear his name so he can re-enter his home coun­try, or does he want to plunge deeper into his fan­tasy? Is he actu­ally guilty of a crime like Roman Polan­ski, or merely obsessed with indi­rect cul­pa­bil­ity like Kelvin in Solaris or Teddy in Shut­ter Island? Either way, he may have the oppor­tu­nity to con­struct a false real­ity in which he can absolve himself.

I believe Incep­tion is one for the ages, and not just because it has been endorsed by Al Gore. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Run­ner, it’s the rare sci­ence fic­tion film likely to remain well-regarded for years.

Ran­dom Observations:

  • How many heist movies have you seen in which the mas­ter thief attempts the myth­i­cal One Last Job before retiring?
  • Despite Leonardo DiCaprio sport­ing Nolan’s own hair­cut, Incep­tion might suf­fer in com­par­i­son to his some­what sim­i­lar char­ac­ter in his most recent film, Shut­ter Island. Two thrillers in a row about a man wracked with guilt over his dead spouse.
  • Wikipedia puts the bud­get at $160 mil­lion, plus a $100 mil­lion pub­lic­ity cam­paign. As usual, these num­bers make my head spin. But at least this time the result is a strong movie.
  • Like Paul Thomas Ander­son, Nolan has devel­oped his own per­sonal actors’ troupe. Incep­tion fea­tures return appear­ances by Michael Caine, Ken Watan­abe, Cil­lian Murphy.

Offi­cial movie site: www.inceptionmovie.com

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The Mutant Menagerie: X2: X-Men United

X-Men 2 movie poster

 

In ret­ro­spect, the first X-Men movie did an incred­i­ble job of man­ag­ing the intro­duc­tion of a wide array of char­ac­ters to mass audi­ences likely unfa­mil­iar with the decades’ worth of con­ti­nu­ity estab­lished in its comic book source mate­r­ial. But the sequel X2: X-Men United crowds the stage with too many new faces in addi­tion to the return­ing orig­i­nal cast. In short order, audi­ences not only have to rec­ol­lect the orig­i­nal char­ac­ters but also learn how Stryker (Brian Cox), Ice­man (Shawn Ash­more), Pyro (Aaron Stan­ford), and Lady Deathstryke (Kelly Hu) fit in to the mutant menagerie. X2 also expands the ranks of the Blue Man Mutant Group, with Night­crawler (Alan Cum­ming) join­ing Mys­tique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) in head-to-toe body paint, later to be accom­pa­nied by Beast (Kelsey Gram­mar) in Brett Ratner’s ris­i­ble X-Men 3: The Last Stand.

Alan Cumming in X2: X-Men UnitedNight­crawler audi­tions for a spot in the Blue Men Mutant Group

Holo­caust sur­vivor Mag­neto (Ian McK­ellen) is still just as geno­ci­dal as his for­mer Nazi oppres­sors, an irony he fails to per­ceive despite it being pointed out to him repeat­edly. His aims and obses­sions make for a very good vil­lain, but also for a vir­tual repeat of the pre­vi­ous movie’s plot. In the orig­i­nal (read The Dork Report review), Mag­neto built a device to forcibly mutate homo sapi­ens into homo supe­rior, the aris­ing species known as “mutants” to which both The X-Men and his Broth­er­hood of Evil Mutants belong. The weapon turned out to be faulty and instead sim­ply killed every human within range. To a man like Mag­neto, said glitch was not a bug but a fea­ture. Noth­ing if not per­sis­tent, he employs basi­cally the same scheme in X2. New bad­die Stryker has reverse-engineered Pro­fes­sor X’s mutant-detection device Cere­bro into a weapon capa­ble of killing all mutants en masse. Mag­neto plots to repur­pose it to kill all humans instead.

Also recy­cled from the pre­vi­ous movie is the fact that Mag­neto is again not the movie’s true vil­lain, despite long hold­ing the rank of the X-Men’s offi­cial neme­sis. The real antag­o­nist last time around was intol­er­ant politi­cian Sen­a­tor Robert Kelly (Bruce Davi­son). Now the foe is another pow­er­less human, Colonel Stryker, a war­mon­ger with a pri­vate army. Like Kelly, he’s a fer­vent speciesist, so enflamed with pas­sion­ate hatred of mutants that he trans­forms his own mutant son Jason (Michael Reid McKay) into a com­po­nent in his geno­ci­dal weapon.

Hugh Jackman in X2: X-Men UnitedWolver­ine babysits The New Mutants

One notable tweak to the orig­i­nal recipe is a health­ier dose of vio­lence and killing per­pe­trated by the fan-favorite Wolver­ine (Hugh Jack­man). As a char­ac­ter, Wolver­ine is capa­ble of both berserker rage and human empa­thy, but his movie incar­na­tion seems to be able to turn it on and off at will. Cou­pled with a PG-13 rat­ing dic­tat­ing that his slaugh­ter remain blood­less, this negates one of the tragic flaws of the char­ac­ter I recall from read­ing the comics as a kid. The Wolver­ine I remem­ber con­stantly strug­gled to keep his ani­mal­is­tic side in check in order to live among his friends, lovers, and allies. The movie Wolver­ine is a lit­tle bit of a softy, actu­ally, spend­ing much of film babysit­ting mopey teen trio Ice­man, Pyro, and Rogue, the lat­ter still har­bor­ing an unre­quited crush on a dude way too old, hairy, and Cana­dian for her.

X2’s biggest prob­lem is that it has no sense of humor, allow­ing the grim­ness of the sce­nario to drain most of the fun out of the expe­ri­ence. The orig­i­nal had only a sin­gle cred­ited screen­writer, David Hayter, but the sequel teams him with Michael Dougherty and Dan Har­ris — hint­ing that the crowded stage of actors was par­al­leled by a few too many cooks in the kitchen back­stage. One good scene, at least, pro­vides a reminder of what the first film got right: when the teen Ice­man reveals his super­pow­ers to his par­ents for the first time, his mother asks “Have you ever tried to… (awk­ward pause) not be a mutant?” It’s an excel­lent scene that uses humor to employ the sci-fi con­ceit of the mutant expe­ri­ence as a metaphor for a minority’s trou­bled com­ing of age.


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Lost in The Matrix

Now that the Lost fiasco finale has come and gone, and my blood pres­sure has dipped back down into safe lev­els, I am going to attempt to speak calmly about how the show let me down. Yes, I am aware that it is just a TV pro­gram, and there are a great many other things in the world worth being upset over (I’m look­ing at you, BP). But fol­low­ing a weekly TV show from the very begin­ning, for six years, earns you a lit­tle more than the often deroga­tory sobri­quet Fan. We afi­ciona­dos are not owed any­thing by any­body, but nev­er­the­less, our invest­ment of time and enthu­si­asm cre­ated an imbal­ance that was not sat­is­fied in the end.

Henry Ian Cusick in LostNeo Desmond enters Deus Ex MachinaThe Source

As my frus­tra­tion at being cheated sub­sides, another prob­lem­atic pop cul­tural touch­stone came to mind. Cer­tain par­al­lels between Lost and The Matrix tril­ogy now seem obvi­ous, and it’s not just that both hinge on a mys­te­ri­ous, glow­ing, ill-defined “Source.”

  1. Start out strong with a very sci­ence fiction-y, mostly plot-driven nar­ra­tive. The char­ac­ters are mar­gin­ally inter­est­ing, but the focus is on sce­nario and story. View­ers’ imag­i­na­tions are teased, spec­u­la­tion abounds, and sequels are demanded.
  2. Fol­low up with a sequel that reveals a loose frame­work of phi­los­o­phy sup­port­ing the sci­ence fic­tion con­ceit. Whether it gen­uinely inspired the orig­i­nal work or was bolted on after the fact is open to debate. Simul­ta­ne­ously amp up the soap-opera cheesi­ness con­cern­ing flat char­ac­ters that fans aren’t really invested in. (For what it’s worth, I con­tend that The Matrix Reloaded — the sec­ond in the tril­ogy — is not only under­rated, but in fact the best of the series, despite the nearly uni­ver­sal opin­ion that both sequels were failures)
  3. Con­trive a vio­lent, action-packed end­ing that A. strains to fit around the philo­soph­i­cal core (kinda sorta maybe) and B. focuses on char­ac­ter melo­drama (tragic deaths, roman­tic pin­ing, etc.). Myr­iad story issues are neglected and treated as merely periph­eral to the cre­ators’ pri­mary concerns.

In short, the cre­ative duos behind Lost and The Matrix mis­tak­enly assumed fans were more inter­ested in the philo­soph­i­cal angle and thin char­ac­ters than in the nar­ra­tive. And maybe, just maybe, some of us won­dered why we couldn’t have it both ways: a crack­ing good story with a strong sub­text of mys­ti­cism and phi­los­o­phy. As every high school cre­ative writ­ing teacher must explain to stu­dents that keep turn­ing in thinly veiled retellings of Bible sto­ries: just because an alle­gory fits (kinda sorta maybe), it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean there’s any addi­tional mean­ing to be con­strued. For The Wachowski Broth­ers, it was Jean Baudrillard’s Sim­u­lacra and Sim­u­la­tion. For Carl­ton Cuse and Damon Lin­de­lof, it was John Locke, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, etc. (to be fair, they also leaned heav­ily on writ­ers out­side the realm of phi­los­o­phy, includ­ing every­one from George Lucas to Stephen Hawking).

Keanu Reeves in The MatrixDesmond Neo enters The Source Deus Ex Machina

If, in the end, Cuse and Damon Lin­de­lof neglected their sto­ry­telling respon­si­bil­i­ties, they had already neatly set up two excuses for them to fall back upon:

  1. That Lost’s appeal was really the char­ac­ters, and fans ought to be pleased that they all lived hap­pily ever after, after a fashion.
  2. That Lost is really an alle­gory for a mélange of works of phi­los­o­phy, and that if you don’t get it, you’re a right-brainer too hung up on Star Trek-esque hard sci-fi to have your mind expanded, dude.

I don’t think I would be so upset if Cuse and Linedlof weren’t so out­ra­geously full of them­selves and self-congratulatory in inter­views (The Wachowskis are prob­a­bly right to refrain from pub­lic­ity). At least Lin­de­lof seemed con­scious of how their work might be received. He told Wired Mag­a­zine:

Locke is now the voice of a very large sub­set of the audi­ence who believes that when Lost is all said and done, we will have wasted six years of our lives, that we were mak­ing it up as we went along, and that there’s really no pur­pose. And Jack is now say­ing, “the only thing I have left to cling to is that there’s got to be some­thing really cool that’s going to hap­pen, because I have really, really fuck­ing suffered.”

Maybe Jack and Locke were both right; the show now appears to have been a head­long hur­dle into a faux-mystical conun­drum, leav­ing behind count­less aban­doned plot threads as so much nar­ra­tive shrap­nel. There is no short­age of blog posts clog­ging the inter­net with lists of unre­solved mys­ter­ies (includ­ing my own). Cuse dug him­self in deeper, in con­ver­sa­tion with the New York Times:

our goal is when we’re break­ing sto­ries, how are we going to really make each one of these com­mer­cial breaks really excit­ing. Those ques­tions led to a lot of really intense scenes and cool rever­sals and sur­prises, and I guess it must have been how Dick­ens would cliffhanger the end of his seri­als in the news­pa­per when he was writ­ing them to try to get peo­ple to show up the next day.

Cool like Dick­ens, eh? Wait, it gets bet­ter. In the recap spe­cial “The Final Jour­ney” that pre­ceded the final episode “The End,” they actu­ally had the balls to call their series “Shake­spearean,” which I think auto­mat­i­cally dis­qual­i­fies them from being taken seriously.

As for The Matrix, I think it’s telling that there’s lit­er­ally a char­ac­ter in the third film named “Deus Ex Machina.”


Must read: Phi­los­o­phy in Lost

Must read: The Matrix Explained

Offi­cial Lost site: abc.go.com/shows/lost

Buy the Lost Sea­son 6 DVD or Blu-ray from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.


Lost: The End

Lost Season 6 poster

 

I’ve always been a Lost apol­o­gist, at least lik­ing the show even dur­ing its weak points. Six years of good­will very nearly went out the win­dow along with my tele­vi­sion, thanks to its extremely frus­trat­ing final run of episodes. Close to the end, I attempted to resolve myself to the likely event that the finale would not answer every lit­tle nig­gling mys­tery. I hoped to shield myself from dis­ap­point­ment, and let the cre­ators fin­ish the story how they wished. Yet “The End” still failed to tell a sim­ple story. A story is not a string of dei ex machina, and every char­ac­ter arc need not end with a sud­den, bru­tal, arbi­trary death.

Carl­ton Cuse told Wired Mag­a­zine:

The great mys­ter­ies of life fun­da­men­tally can’t be addressed. We just have to tell a good story and let the chips fall where they may. We don’t know whether the res­o­lu­tion between the two time­lines is going to make peo­ple say, “Oh, that’s cool” or “Oh, fuck those guys, they belly-flopped at the end.”

The lat­ter, pretty much. What fol­lows is just a taste of my cat­a­logue of com­plaints, with no con­cern for spoilers.

Matthew Fox in Lost

SPINNING (DONKEY) WHEELS

For a show built atop a per­pet­u­ally com­pound­ing series of mys­ter­ies and conun­drums, it failed to legit­i­mately advance or resolve much of any­thing in the run-up to the polar­iz­ing finale. With so lit­tle time left, the penul­ti­mate episodes wasted time spin­ning wheels in clas­sic Lost fash­ion. Peo­ple get­ting locked in cages, escap­ing, get­ting locked up again. Groups split­ting up, hik­ing to oppo­site ends of the island(s), split­ting up into dif­fer­ent groups and hik­ing back. Board­ing water­craft and dis­em­bark­ing again. Mean­while, the sheer num­ber of aban­doned mys­ter­ies filled its own wiki, and as usual, Col­lege­Hu­mor said it best:

BOOM!

From the very begin­ning, one of Lost’s favorite con­ceits was the sud­den death of char­ac­ters. To be gen­er­ous, death is rarely “mean­ing­ful” in real life, but these plot twists also laid bare the prac­ti­cal­i­ties of ser­ial tele­vi­sion (actors quit, get fired, or age uncon­vinc­ingly). After the tenth or twen­ti­eth fatal­ity, I became sick of char­ac­ters get­ting sud­denly and arbi­trar­ily killed off for cheap shock. Past vic­tims included Eko, Libby, and Danielle, all vio­lently exit­ing the show before their sto­ry­lines reached any kind of res­o­lu­tion. In the final episodes, it hap­pened to Ilyana, Wid­more, Zoe, and (it seemed at first) Frank and Richard. We saw just enough of Zoe that I assumed she must be sig­nif­i­cant as some­thing more than just can­non fod­der, but appar­ently not. Sayid’s season-long arc (was he mys­ti­cally rein­car­nated as a soul­less killing machine, or was he merely con­vinced that he was essen­tially evil?) is short-circuited by his abrupt choice of self-sacrifice. How did he defeat his mys­ti­cal brain­wash­ing? Just killing off a char­ac­ter isn’t any kind of a res­o­lu­tion to a storyline.

A pos­i­tive exam­ple from the show’s past would be Char­lie, a char­ac­ter whose death fig­ured into the mythol­ogy in a big way. It had ram­i­fi­ca­tions, as opposed to: BOOM! Look, some­body just sud­denly blew them­selves up with dyna­mite, isn’t that HILARIOUS? Aren’t you SHOCKED? No? Well, let’s kill another char­ac­ter the same way!

I was never so sen­ti­men­tal for Lost that I felt the need for every char­ac­ter to live hap­pily ever after. But didn’t these cre­ations deserve a lit­tle better?

John Terry in Lost

ACROSS THE SEA

Lit­tle of the mythol­ogy Jacob finally revealed in the episode “Across the Sea” made any sense, and often directly con­tra­dicted my mem­o­ries of what went before. He tells Kate he scratched her off the list because she became a mother, but the job could still be hers if she wanted it. Does that mean his list is arbi­trary? It doesn’t mat­ter which of these last few sur­viv­ing can­di­dates will do it? And, for what­ever rea­son Jacob dis­qual­i­fies moms, is it related to why all women on the island die? Were all the other moth­ers also can­di­dates, for whom dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion means death? If so, why didn’t he kill Kate? Because she assumed cus­tody of Claire’s baby rather than hav­ing her own bio­log­i­cal child, I sup­pose. But if the audi­ence is asked to make too many strained sup­po­si­tions like this, based on lit­tle evi­dence in the text of the show, we’ll begin to won­der if the writ­ers have any idea themselves.

In the ear­lier episode “Ab Aeterno”, Jacob told the Man in Black that he brings peo­ple to the island to prove a point to him about human­ity. But now he tells Jack & co. that he sim­ply wants to find a replace­ment. Which is it? Both?

Jacob’s list of sev­eral hun­dred names even­tu­ally nar­rowed to a mere hand­ful of sur­vivors. Did he know he had to rule them all out until he got to the last name? And that the Man in Black would hap­pen to be very near escape at that point in time? If so, why didn’t he just scratch all but one name off the list? And now that Jack has vol­un­teered, does that mean that the other few have to die?

Allison Janney in Lost

NARRATIVE CHEATING

It’s cheap to resolve a plot thread by intro­duc­ing a totally new ele­ment, like the adop­tive mother of Jacob & The Man in Black (an unnamed char­ac­ter played by Alli­son Jan­ney). Imag­ine a mur­der mys­tery, in which the mur­derer turns out to be… oh this guy right here, whom you’ve never seen before now. The answer to the mys­tery of Jacob and The Man in Black needed to already be there, in the form of shuf­fled puz­zle pieces the audi­ence hasn’t seen the solu­tion to yet. Not in a single-episode guest star.

Which brings me to the glow­ing cave. If it’s really the key moti­vat­ing force for Jacob and The Man in Black, it’s the ulti­mate MacGuf­fin of the entire series. To not even so much as men­tion it until near the very end of a six-year long series is cheat­ing to say the least.

Let me go back even fur­ther: I’m irri­tated alto­gether by the injec­tion of Jacob and the Man in Black into the story. I know that the Man in Black tech­ni­cally appeared in the very first episode (as the sound effect we would later asso­ciate with the Smoke Mon­ster), and we’ve been hear­ing the name Jacob for a few years now. But it does not feel organic at all that the core mys­tery of the show came down to a mys­ti­cal strug­gle between two char­ac­ters that have barely fea­tured on the show at all. It should be about the char­ac­ters already on the stage from the very begin­ning, not two cyphers intro­duced so late in the game.

And the final, cap­ping atroc­ity that would get any kid kicked out of high school cre­ative writ­ing class is, of course, the rev­e­la­tion that the final season’s mys­te­ri­ous “side­ways time­line” was actu­ally a kind of Limbo or Pur­ga­tory. That this is wildly unsat­is­fac­tory (the only thing worse could have been an end­ing in which it is revealed to be someone’s dream, à la St. Else­where or Newhart) is over­shad­owed by the true crime: it’s explained via expo­si­tion by a minor char­ac­ter we hadn’t seen for months (Jack’s father Chris­t­ian). Expo­si­tion! “Show don’t tell” is a clichéd rule, and rules ought to be bro­ken, but this case of telling not show­ing is evi­dence of con­tempt for the audience.

Com­pare and con­trast with the truly mind-blowing con­clu­sion to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its word­less­ness is a sub­lime virtue, and its mys­ter­ies linger to pro­voke dis­cus­sion and fas­ci­na­tion decades later.

Michael Emmerson in Lost

BEN: A COMPLICATED GUY, OR LAZY WRITING?

I’m puz­zled by Ben’s appar­ent boomerang switcher from defeated and sort-of redeemed, to pure evil, and then back again. We’re left to sup­pose he real­ized some­thing in the penul­ti­mate episode that the audi­ence just didn’t know yet. We nat­u­rally expect to share his real­iza­tion in the final episode, but there doesn’t seem to be any­thing there to find. After the Man in Black is defeated, he’s not only for­given for his crimes (remem­ber, he is a mass mur­derer), but given a lead­er­ship role on the island. And, he gets to stay behind in Limbo and shag Rousseau (Mira Furlan, who, inci­den­tally, cleans up good, am I right?).

It bugs me that I had to repeat­edly ask this ques­tion at each plot turn: was it lazy writ­ing, or part of the mystery?

Henry Ian Cusick in Lost

THE DESMOND ZAP

I’m very con­fused about how much the side­ways char­ac­ters remem­ber about their alter­nate time­lines on the island after Desmond zaps them. Locke and Ben only seem to get a vague sense of déjà vu, but Hur­ley seems to have com­plete recall (for instance, he seems to know exactly who Ana Lucia is). By the finale, char­ac­ters need only touch each other for com­plete mem­o­ries to come flood­ing back. So why didn’t Jack & Juliet spark each other’s mem­o­ries dur­ing all the years were mar­ried, and not to put to fine a point on it, had sex and con­ceived a son? Again, part of the mys­tery, or sloppy writing?

CITING SOURCES

Some of the above is derived from a morning-after rant I shared with guest Dork Reporter Snark­bait.


Must read: Jason Kottke’s Lost finale roundup

Offi­cial Lost site: abc.go.com/shows/lost

Buy the Lost Sea­son 6 DVD or Blu-ray from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.