Sunshine

Sunshine (2007). Danny Boyle’s ode to Alien and any number of other science fiction films is an effective and grim enterprise. It’s set in the near-future, when the sun is dying and life on earth hangs in jeopardy. Several years before the movie takes place, a spacecraft, the Icarus, was sent to blast a payload of nukes into the sun to try and revitalize it. That craft and her crew have not been heard from since, and now a new team must repeat the journey aboard the Icarus II. Only this time, there can be no mistakes. The payload aboard the Icarus II is the last of its kind, apparently due to the earth’s depleting resources. The crew should have known better than to name either one of their space ships after the boy who flew too close to the sun and then died. But Boyle of course cannot resist such an allusion, and we are filled with grim expectation as the movie pounds away, and bad situation after bad situation confronts the characters. We are filled with the stark realization that no good is going to come of this. As grim as Alien’s plot is, I always have a good time watching it, perhaps because I know that the entire survival of the planet isn’t at stake. But Sunshine, like too many films of late, must experience conflict on only the grandest of scales. In the last third of the movie, Boyle introduces a particularly strange (and none too well explained) plot element involving a possibly supernatural presence on board the ship, and at that point I stopped caring entirely. The performances, however, are convincing. The cast includes Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh, Troy Garity, Cliff Curtis, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Benedict Wong.

Skin Games: 'Transcendance' and 'Under the Skin'

In 2013's Her, Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlet Johansson. Now, in 2014's Transcendence, Rebecca Hall falls in love with her dead husband (Johnny Depp), whose brain has been uploaded into a computer. He's HAL with heart, or Her but only, you know, Him. They're both scientists--named Will and Evelyn Caster--working on inventive new ways to merge humans and technology. They've got big, wide-eyed goals for ending poverty and healing the planet, and they see our coming evolution and the advancement of technology as two interwoven strands of the same all-consuming trajectory. But when Will is killed by some militant anti-technology types (who ironically use technology to carry out their terrorist schemes), Evelyn, in a fit of grief, decides to try and code his consciousness, making him come alive again on a computer screen. But of course, is that really him? Or is it merely a simulacra? How can anyone really be transferred from bodily and conscious and spiritual form to...virtual...form?

Transcendence purports to be a heavier look at the direction in which our technology is taking us. I say heavier because it appears to be standard science fiction action fare from the advertising, but in actuality it's going for the cerebral, prestige-picture aura of a 2001 or a Solaris. The movie is frustratingly talky, meandering for two hours (which seem much, much longer) as we watch the relationship between Will and Evelyn morph from one that is loving and intellectually robust into something truly menacing and disturbing. After Will becomes a computerized being, he develops seemingly boundless powers, including the ability to heal others and stop anyone or anything that gets in his way. Basically, he's magic. It makes everything so easy for this movie. Indeed, Transcendence adorns Will with some pretty convenient abilities: he hacks into Evelyn's bank account to fudge the numbers in her favor, then the two of them buy out a small, dying town in the desert where they set up a solar-powered underground operations center. Here Will can achieve the full magnitude of his powers. Unfortunately, they go to his "head" (which now has the ability to hack into any computer database and instantaneously heal any person or object under its control), and the dream of making a perfect world is transmuted into one of unmitigated authority over the planet and everyone on the planet. (This is why we just need to throw these damn computers out and go back to quill pens and horses.)

Yes, Transcendence is in some ways a welcome surprise: it's not a harrowing, dizzying type of movie that needs to move at a million miles a minute to keep viewers interested. I was on board with its desire to be deliberately paced. But The heavy ideas that director Wally Pfister and screenwriter Jack Paglen explore--which are interesting initially--weigh the movie down like millstones. Pfister is Christopher Nolan's director of photography, and this is his directing debut. This is also Jack Paglen's first writing credit that I'm aware of. Between the two of them, Transcendence is a murky affair indeed. There's no levity, no verve, no chemistry between the actors, and no feeling of empathy for them. Depp is so boring, so calm, that he really is just a newer version of the HAL computer from 2001. And even though Rebecca Hall registers well (she's a lovely actress), her character becomes increasingly irrational and unable to see the danger of Will's new role in her life. Because we're stuck primarily in her head, it's more than a little exasperating. (As another note of praise for Rebecca Hall, I instantly perked up when I realized she was in this movie. Sadly, the film around her is mostly a disappointment.)

I wasn't particularly enamored of Will Caster before his tragic death, let alone after. His emergence as a superhuman computer villain doesn't in fact change his tone or his demeanor. He's always vaguely disinterested and unfeeling, like Marlon Brando's Jor-el in Superman. (I don't know how Johnny Depp keeps getting these crummy roles: he's either reduced to playing yet another version of Jack Sparrow or this: dull and duller. Go watch him in Cry Baby or Ed Wood and see him come alive in a totally different way.)

And the supporting cast, which includes Morgan Freeman and Paul Bettany as Will and Evelyn's colleagues, Cillian Murphy as an FBI agent, and Kate Mara as one of the "terrorists" fighting the perceived technological takeover, doesn't get to do much interesting work. They fill their characters' shoes with bland competency. Morgan Freeman's presence in movies nowadays seems like a kind of strange penance from Hollywood to the audience. Freeman is less and less required to act or be interesting. He and Michael Caine have become the grand old gentlemen of the cinema, presiding over "important" Hollywood product to guarantee a certain return in revenue. (Come to think of it, this might be Christopher Nolan's fault.)

In the process of trying to be so heavy, Transcendence loses any sense of fun or wonder. Then again, is there any sense of wonder about the technological age? Isn't it essentially privileging "information" over mystery? The mysteries of how we got here and whether or not there's a god, and whether or not we have souls, and what happens to us when we die, are only tangentially addressed in this movie. Pfister and Paglen either don't know how or don't want to attend to them.

Speaking of Scarlet Johansson and attending to the mysteries of life, I managed to catch a screening of the terrifically bizarre new film Under the Skin, which is everything that Transcendence is not: mysterious, erotic, strange, beautiful, grotesque, horrifying, creepy, hypnotic. It's also confusing if you're trying to find your way through the narrative. Scarlet Johansson plays a Scottish woman named Laura. Well, actually, she's something more than a woman. Laura lures men into her apartment, ostensibly for sex, where she consumes them. It's a bit hard to define exactly what happens to the men, but we see it in several dreamlike sequences, each revealing a little bit more than the previous one: the men follow Laura's lead, removing items of clothing as they follow her like mindless sex-hungry zombies, until they are submerged into an invisible pool of water, which is where they remain indefinitely. All of this pulsates to some labored staccato violins and the blaring of a seamy synth. (The music is by Mychael Danna.)

You can't not be affected by this movie. As oddball as it is, it commands you to watch. I haven't seen a movie this visually arresting in a long time. Yes, I wanted more clarity, but I also appreciated its stubborn refusal to give things away. Is "Laura" some kind of martian? A psychic vampire? A little of both? It's all vaguely reminiscent of, among other things, Philip Kaufman's version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as well as a very obscure Victorian horror novel called The Beetle.

Under the Skin is the first sci-fi movie in a long time (that I can think of) that doesn't explain itself to death. It doesn't explain itself much at all. And while this was at times maddening, it was also kind of freeing. You watch Under the Skin, and you experience it, in a far more authentic way. It's crazy, ambiguous indie trash, and I couldn't take my eyes off it.

Based on the novel by Michael Faber. Directed by Jonathan Glazer, who co-wrote the script with Walter Campbell.

Inception

Directed by Christopher Nolan of The Dark Knight (2008), it's like a blend of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Memento. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a dream “extractor,” who makes his living assembling and then inhabiting other people’s dreams in order to steal ideas. Faced with the consequences of failing a mission (his corporation doesn’t tolerate failure), as well as his fugitive status in America (the movie is mostly set outside the U.S., particularly in Paris), Dom assembles a team of fellow dream inhabitors to undertake a new kind of mission: Inception, or the planting of an idea into another person’s mind through dream assemblage and manipulation. Their target is the son of a dying corporate executive (Cillian Murphy, playing against type as a good guy). Murphy was Nolan's villain in Batman Begins and it's difficult here to treat him as the soft-hearted dupe who's a pawn in DiCaprio's ploy. On top of everything else, it seems a sophisticated shrink--or maybe a sophisticated hooker--could have planted the "idea" (dismantling his father's empire) into Murphy's mind without all this dream-meddling nonsense. Meanwhile, Dom has his own demons to fight. His nutbag of a wife (Marion Cotillard, whose character seems like something out of Play Misty For Me) keeps popping up in these dreams and dreams-within-dreams, which of course complicates Dom's mission. If it sounds like convoluted gobbledygook, that’s because it is.

Nolan said he wanted to make a movie that delivered the type of exciting pay-offs he expects at the movies: so that means lots and lots of explosions. Bang, boom, bang is the rhythm of Inception, beating to the signature of an intense, enveloping score (by Hans Zimmer) that at times recalls something Bernard Herrmann might have done for an Alfred Hitchcock picture (particularly Vertigo) except that this score rarely experiences a lull of subtlety. And of course all the booming happens in dreams—which we know are dreams. Nolan (who also wrote the screenplay) has constructed a complicated set of rules in order to protect his story from scrutiny. If you get shot in a normal dream, you just wake up. But if you’ve been sedated before hand and you get shot, you go into limbo and your brain turns into mush. 

The movie—despite its complicated plot—is admittedly exciting and involving in a superficial sort of way. After all, Nolan is one of the best at making the Bang Boom Bang fantasy sleek and shiny looking. But it’s got an inflated sense of grandiosity that you will become acutely aware of if you’re trying to read between the lines. (This seems the case with all his movies.) You leave the theater feeling as though you’ve been bombarded—the whole film is one major sensory overload—which to some is great moviemaking but to others who see it for what it is is just filling space with busyness. How much character development could we have exchanged for all those falling buildings and bombs going off and cars smashing? Indeed, the fact that all this happens in the dreams is a sort of relief--you can simply disengage from it without feeling you're missing anything.

There’s a great line by Edgar Allen Poe: “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” John Carpenter used this line to preface his 1980 chiller The Fog, and Inception seems to take its cue from Poe as well, but of course in a very different direction. It has one very intriguing component going for it: The act of going to the movies isn’t so far removed from the act of dreaming. When we go to the movies, we seek escape from reality, and it’s as if time stands still while we’re sitting in the darkened theater. When we walk out, we forgot if it was daylight; or if it’s gone from light to dark, we feel a strange sense that the movie had something to do with the alteration (but in reality the movie only passed the time--it didn't affect it). Inception delves into the subconscious dream state like no other movie before, and Christopher Nolan has plenty of fascinating material with which to work, but we shouldn’t be fooled into believing that this is some kind of masterpiece, even if it’s better than the rest of the summer junk of which it is simply a higher grade. With Joseph Gordon Levitt, Ellen Page (who's got a refreshing air about her as Dom's young protegee), Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Dileap Rao, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine (in a thankless role as Dom's father-in-law). 148 min. ★★