What have you watched recently? 3D!

Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World (2003)

Gotta pour one out for this film, that it came out a few scant months after the phenomenon that was the first Pirate of the Caribbean movie: the franchise quickly depreciated as the sequels kept coming but in 2003 the Jack Sparrow imitators were everywhere; so in a typical spate of speculation, I wonder if by the time Master & Commander came out in November that this more sober and serious vehicle seemed so stale to casual audiences - maybe even boring - even with Russell Crowe, at the height of his star power, front & centre. Sure, I retain a fondness for the first Pirates film and as we watch the modern blockbuster curdle in front of us, Gore Verbinski's imagination & craft stand out to this day as part of the alchemy now lost at this tier - but I also despair a little that Peter Weir's only dalliance with a nine figure budget ($150 million in 2003(!!), given to The Truman Show and Dead Poets Society guy) was another small nail in the coffin saved for adult focused, big-budgeted entertainment. Say nothing of this film's failure further putting the tactility and physicality of blockbuster productions into the grave as well; Disney's CGI heavy alternative naval flick showing the way of the future - for good or bad.

Indeed, any casual cinemagoer in 2003 expecting more breezy & superficial swashbuckling fun likely had their hype instantly snuffed: here was a film that yes had its share of genuine tension & excitement, but it also quickly established a more reflective tone about the nature of comradeship & notions of duty - while also homing in on the mundanity of life at sea, in all its little trivialities. For sure each action set-piece was singular and pitched at exactly the right time in the narrative - with a predominance for what seemed like on-set FX and stunt work ensuring it felt wet, chaotic and terrifying - but as a whole Peter Weir's calm hand was visible across the entirety of this thing and kept the adventure deeply human.

And authentic, in a truly unvarnished way: here was a movie crammed with naval jargon but Weir used the language of cinema to translate otherwise impenetrable slang through visual action, be it with the ship's behaviour itself or the crew's. There wasn't a single audience surrogate, no convenient stowaway ignorant of this strict and insular world; the structure of this film's Text was as masterfully syncopated as the HMS Surprise itself. I was never lost, never confused by something that sounded close to a dialect.

Where the strongest imprint was left on me was the success in that balancing act in finding humanity within the grim, masculine necessity of purpose during war (or the most extreme environments people might be forced to exist in). A typical theme of war movies - particularly the great and memorable ones - can be this notion of foxhole camaraderie: themes where when pushed to the brink and constantly on the cusp of death, men (and it's usually men) might forge a kind of soulful connection incomparable with anything platonic or romantic from our civilian lives. As it was here, seen across the crew for sure but exemplified by Paul Bettany & Russel Crowe's unique & genuine chemistry; sure, I could see a reading of something more intimate along the margins, but it was all played quite subtly and earnestly that it was in many ways up to the viewer to plumb the depths of just how far the connection went.

Yet if there was all that quiet intimacy, it also contrasted a little with a warmer texture of that kind of sober purpose and professionalism seen in Michael Mann films: Truffaut said there was no such thing as an anti-war movie, that inevitably they all end up glorifying conflict by dint of the arresting quality of movies; so to this I think the success achieved here was another balancing act in possessing that adventurous spirit, absolutely - but didn't shy from the ugliness & borderline destitution of sailing on these vessels either. The film neither valorised the lower classes of this era, slaving away below decks for the promise of extra booze, nor did it wallow in their transparent misery either; an equilibrium of tone found that left me feeling the romanticism of adventure across oceans, while seeing the calloused and bloody realities as well.

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

On finishing I couldn't help but rationalise this as something of an Ur Film for cinema's occasional flirtation with "competency porn": that slightly hard-to-define sub-genre most easily demonstrated in narratives set in or around those working in the space industry; that ecosystem with its curious cocktail of precision engineering & mathematics alongside ad-hoc DIY bootstrapping. Where tension is built not so much from cock-up or scripted antagonistic forces, but from watching specialists and experts solve a problem that eludes them, their latent talent disqualifying the Idiot Ball trope from deployment as a convenient dramatic crutch. It's a thrill not dissimilar to that gleaned from the police procedural, with its own vicarious excitement in watching those smarter than us solve an existential crisis or puzzle, sometimes in real-time - and nearly always with lives on the line.

So while I can't say for sure that The Andromeda Strain was the Patient Zero here it sure felt that way from its 1971 release, seeing a throughline of big-brain heroism from it up to something more recent like The Martian; and while later adaptations of his work jettisoned the denser elements of his tomes, here was a stubborn choice to stick with Michael Crichton's famously sober, minutiae indulgent approach to the letter. In this, the quartet of broadly unflappable scientists' investigations was drawn as dry as a cracker, but in many respects that dogged insistence to render everything as utterly serious only served to accentuate that feeling of a dangerous & mysterious situation skirting the edge of disaster.

The concept alone was succinct and head turning, as Crichton's best work often was: an entire townspeople dead from exposure to an unknown and extraterrestrial pathogen - except for a baby & drunken geriatric. Now that's one hell of an arresting pitch. Director Robert Wise maintained the novel's sense of grounded authenticity by building the film as something almost documentarian through the use of chyrons, close-ups or cut-aways of printouts - and a framing device of a post-mortem hearing discussing what we were witnessing below ground in "Wildfire", an exacting governmental department founded to tackle just these kind of scenarios. And as an aside, it was a testament to Wise's flexibility that he could make something this prosaic, then a mere 9 years later helmed the first Star Trek film of all things.

The closest the film ever came to any kind of scripted error for the sake of drama was... a bit of paper caught in a printer: but trust me, it worked better in the story that it reads here; otherwise the tension was simply fashioned from increasingly stressed & tired professionals struggling to fathom a solution to this distinctly alien organism. While any shade of humour was gallows coloured throughout and mostly from the lips of the wonderfully sarcastic Dr. Ruth; Kate Reid's character the closest we got to a degree of depth in the cast, her patter a routine source of relief. Beyond that, that commitment to the scientific process kept the tension simmering masterfully. And across the cast as a whole the total absence of familiar or famous names ensured I never got too distracted by (say) any kind of Robert Redford level star power muscling the tone or suspension of disbelief out of the way.

And if the film had any distinct flaws - parking the potentially excessive dryness of execution as a case of personal taste - I'd have to lean towards the colour-coded, super-science lab that drifted towards a degree of archaic goofiness we'd later see mocked by the likes of Austin Powers; so I could appreciate how the less tolerant might snort at the heavy retro-futurist styling; but even then those aesthetics served a strict purpose within the narrative and were just another part of the kind of rigour established from Act One.

Robert Wise understood that the star in this entire vehicle was the science and the notion of professional consensus: and in some respects that had and still has something of a counter-cultural streak at work here; it dismissed the persistent - and distinctly American - thematic constant that the Individual was more important, and more critical to our "progress" or survival in a crisis. Indeed as we live in these depressingly anti-intellectual times, when populist movements glory in intentional ignorance and pushback against social, scientific or economic consensus, this film was a tonic that showed how cooperative and collective thinking was ultimately what often saved the day - not the myth and fallacy of the Great Man upending "the experts".

Watcher (2022)

As final shots go, this one set itself apart: the camera fixed itself squarely on the character as, eyes bulging, their silent expression conveyed the strongest sense of "See? I fúcking told you".

This was a distinctly moody and stylish looking psychological thriller, one where the Reverse Rear Window concept of the stalker plot ran parallel with a subtler trauma formed from being a foreigner in an unknown land. This strand very efficiently conveyed with a mechanical choice that seemed almost laughably obvious in retrospect, yet relatively untapped when I thought on it.

How efficiently could a film hope to convey an aching isolation born from being alone in a city - in a country - with no friends, no support network & limited by a language you couldn't speak, even to order a coffee? Well the tidiest solution from director Chloe Okuno was to simply withhold subtitles of all the Romanian dialogue; and while it probably made many check their TVs for faults, the end-result was to immediately transpose lead character Julia's addled discomfort and loneliness onto the viewer. And it was also entirely to Okuno's credit that she kept the locals relatively grounded and apparently unassuming: a lesser, more exploitative & inelegant picture might have presented overtly hostile caricatures, mining cheap anxiety and tension from lazy xenophobia beloved of many schlocky "Europe is full of creeps" films of yore ... yet in presenting the locals as broadly mundane, it grounded a more relatable and immersive sense of constant imbalance, festering quietly in the viewer's head. And when comprehension finally crystallised for Julia, it came at a crucial emotional moment - and had more impact in part because by then the Romanian character had presumed her ignorance was a constant, their joke not as privately expressed as they had thought.

And this was a very beautiful film, often making great use of its widescreen to render some properly sumptuous visuals that accentuated and heightened the sense of oppressive mood; again, not to render Bucharest as something malevolent no, rather as cold but beautiful and detached. That this came from a first-time feature director has made me curious to know where Munro might go from here. While Maika Monroe really did her part in front of the camera too: never overselling her simmering spiral into crippling anxiety, instead letting it nip at the edges of a broadly internal performance. Even the narrative itself stayed its hand in places where I had expected something painted with a broader brush: Julia's marriage was relatively stable, her husband not supportive enough of her growing & obvious distress - but not some apathetic monster either; and several moments seemed keyed up for jump scares that never came. Not fakeouts but Munro showed a confidence to let the drama unfold organically.

All that said, perhaps that combined restraint totally something whose pace was at times best summarised as laboured: never entirely glacial that my patience dropped through the floor but this was a script that lacked some sense of purpose or drive; not a lot actually happened by way of its story. Say what you will about those exploitation movies I cribbed about, they were often roller coasters designed to harry and cajole; while here, the very central premise invited a languid tone, with Julia remaining a broadly passive figure - save for a few hesitant moments trying to establish the truth of her suspected stalker.

Mars Express (2023)

Ha: so of course I shouldn't have been surprised the French version of Ghost in the Shell would have its robots horny for each other, rather than dwell on any existential angst they might destroy us.

All films of this ilk have always lived or died by their world-building in my mind, and the balance therein between establishing a deeply fictitious setting - and the rules behind it all - and the story or human beings living within it. I've watched films with rich and interesting concepts whose runtime became drowned with exposition and making sure the audience understood everything - only to end before anything interesting happened within the universe.

So the manner this film weaved its world-building into the narrative was something almost preternatural here, and deserved plaudits in its own right; there must have been a dozen different concepts, technologies and details thrown into the mix - admittedly much of it iconography broadly familiar to any causal enthusiast in the genre - yet never once did the movie's gears start crunching at the need to grind out some exposition. My favourite being the elegant way the nature of Carlos' existence was revealed: he was a singular & quite archaic looking robot surrounded by sleeker variants we kept meeting, yet little crumbs here & there garnished what became the simplest explanation via an off-hand comment; no need for clumsy scenes breaking the pace, the audience trusted to put it all together and the dialogue reflected an exchange between two people living this world - not surrogates projecting a presumed ignorance of some external viewer.

Now, I'm not sure the conspiracy plot came together in the end in both being quite straightforward yet quite muddled in its execution, and the ending came together a little abruptly for my tastes ... but this was a confident, stylish and adult Sci-Fi tale that made enough tweaks to its inspirations that skirted accusations of being totally derivative; while its animation felt both modern and classical in equal measure, embellished by a really sleek and attractive aesthetic of this future Mars. It was a very cyberpunk film whose design reflected contemporary inflections, not some retrograde or nostalgic 1990s vision.

The characters within felt alive and vital - expressive too given the art style was more simplistic rendering its humans than the environment around them. And like the conceptual aspects of the film, the characters had just enough variation to their stock foundations to make them stand out. The script had a nicely understated degree of soulful camaraderie between its two deeply flawed leads, both of whom never had any clumsy Road to Damascus moments addressing their key failures - no pat resolutions so they retained a stronger sense of humanity because of this. The patter between Carlos and Aline was also a joy to listen to, again reinforcing this sense of a platonic couple comfortable in each other's skin - minus that contrived quipiness beloved of modern fictional partnerships.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

As much as The Next Generation codified this idea of Star Trek as a font of morality plays written with SciFi twists, full of philosophical quandaries and scientific conundrums to solve, it's perhaps easy to forget just how much of the 1960s show was simple, goofy space nonsense.

Sure it had dalliances with more cerebral plots but it had a distinct foundation of pulpy, outlandish SciFi tales befitting the era it sprung from. Not without reason it's the iteration of Trek that has ... uh, aged the worst. It wasn't until TNG in the 80s that the concept of "Star Trek'' trended towards something more self-serious, with the kind of narrative pulse that announced a conceptual or thematic maturity in its execution. While arguably, Deep Space Nine was the series at the zenith of that emotional complexity - and for me the highest high-point of the franchise overall - but in terms of storytelling as a sequence of scientific puzzles? TNG is the Rosetta Stone of Trek in my mind, not TOS. TNG could be silly and then some, but it wasn't its baseline either.

So along came The Motion Picture in my radar, rewatched for the first time in a decade-plus, having gathered mould in my mental bucket marked "the bad Trek movies". As it started, I had forgotten how the theme from the opening titles became the TNG theme tune, revealing a clue towards understanding this film as something of a genetic interstitial: of an iterative step from those gung-ho adventures from the 60s to the kind of cerebral profundity beloved of TNG in its pomp. And like all generational steps, it was neither fish nor fowl, lacking superficial excitement that might flush the audience with dopamine thrills, nor offered enough philosophical texture to add impact in that respect either. Just in terms of a broad cinematic structure it sometimes became excruciatingly tedious in places - without the distraction of moral quandaries beloved of the franchise as it grew outward.

And that was the critical failing of this entire, insanely over budgeted feature, my younger self's opinion holding fast. Here was a film almost pathologically allergic to any kind of arresting pace. Which was kinda strange in some respects! Robert Wise had form in mining tension and drama from scientists standing in rooms as they watched or reacted to television screens; The Andromeda Strain was a fabulously dry example of turning the screw of something with no ostensible action. Yet here, this film seemed so lost in admiration of its own sense of mythology it left the execution completely bereft of pulse or basic narrative consistency. By way of example, we spent six(!) agonisingly long minutes luxuriating over the redesigned Enterprise's hull - all while characters stressed about the ticking clock & cosmic cloud descending on Earth. Or the midway point and a long, long, lonnnnnnnng scene of us watching the (admittedly fantastic looking) internal miniature FX of V'ger fly by in excruciating detail and glacial speed. JJ Abrams may have turned Trek into braindead hyperactive schlock in his 2009 reboot, but this film remained the polar opposite of that choice; absolute cinematic inertia.

Oh and the passing years had not made the costumes any better, not even in some kind of ironic, retro-futurist way. The choice to deck the Enterprise crew in onesies remained egregiously awful and hilarious in equal measure. To note Wise's previous work again, at least The Andromeda Strain's own jumpsuits served a narrative purpose - here it seemed like a conscious choice to fashion the most outlandish vision of what was supposed to be a uniform. How did they go to the toilet in those things?

All that wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't also a little undercooked with its characterisation onboard the Enterprise: it was a great idea to start with the crew having moved on with their lives but I think we needed more context with Admiral Kirks' insecurity to get the Enterprise back. It ultimately made him seem like a total ásshole in walking over his apparently perfectly-capable replacement Captain Decker and even if we had a few useful scenes of Kirk's vanity putting the ship at risk, it didn't stick as anything consequential. That said, this idea of Kirk being at odds with himself would be a seed that germinated in the best of the subsequent films - and even some of the crappier ones - where Kirk's core arc was a grappling with ageing out of a world increasingly disinterested in his empty bravado; that you could only bluff and cheat for so long. Generations slightly shat the bed but The Undiscovered Country set a bar for letting pensioners having one final adventure; our post-nostalgic culture could take many lessons from that film & how best to allow septuagenarians gracefully bow out.