Film Review: Fury (2014)

Much of Fury can be described as a ham-handed, badly acted and poorly-written rehash of Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. The action sequences (with one notable exception) are impressively noisy and bloody, even gripping at times, but at it's heart this is a western, the kind in which our American heroes/gunslingers have to face off against hordes of Mexicans or Native Americans in a final climactic battle. Think of it as The Wild Bunch with tanks.

The tank commander, "Wardaddy", is played by Brad Pitt. It's a preening, scenery-chewing performance that shows what happens when a megastar isn't held in check by the director. Pitt doesn't create a character, he strikes a variety of poses and attitudes from every macho action film he's ever seen. The script does him no favours because he, along with the other four members of the tank crew, are products of a special key on the lazy scriptwriter's keyboard; it's a function key that automatically creates macho male characters who swear, argue, brawl, bicker, swear, spit, swear, kill, swear, weep copiously over the deaths of buddies (with extra swearing), drink hard, and finally die in a Twilight of the Gods firefight. It's homoerotic porn for gun nuts. David Ayer, the writer and director, goes the extra mile by making his main characters so frantically manly and tough they become loathsome. Aside from the wet behind the ears newbie, the rest of crew, including Pitt's character, are just cursing windbags of testosterone-addled idiocy. In a bit of clunky writing Ayer tries to explain their bestiality by saying that their long service at the front has brutalized them. OK, that was almost an original thought forty years ago. We get it, David, war is hell and you don't win battles with Boy Scouts. Moving on...

Fury would be just another slack-jawed action movie but for one notably offensive sequence that lumbers on stage at about the halfway point. Our "heroes" have taken a small German town, and Wardaddy and the newbie, called Norman, force their way into a home occupied by a woman and her teenaged female cousin. The threat or prospect of rape hangs heavy in the air. That's fine, because history tells us Allied troops did rape German women; not to the degree invading Russian troops did, but it certainly happened. The women are clearly terrified that one or both of them is going to be assaulted. Instead, Wardaddy, who speaks German, tells the older woman to cook for them. A short time later, however, Wardaddy tells Norman to take the young girl into the next room and screw her or he'll do it. A semi-reluctant Norman goes into a bedroom with the girl and does some kind of half-assed palm reading on her. She doesn't speak English and Norman doesn't have any German, but she's evidently so charmed, so smitten by these few seconds of interaction with her potential rapist she happily and enthusiastically has sex with him. WTF? What we have here is a rape fantasy, plain and simple. The female character is being coerced/forced into sex, but because her rapist shows a molecule of charm, she magically becomes eager for sex. And just to complete the fantasy aspect, the girl is gorgeous. The terrors and privations of Germany in 1945 haven't diminished her lingerie-model good looks one iota.

This sour, nasty scene is followed by a finale in which a couple of hundred SS troops launch an assault on Fury (the tank's name) and her crew. Wardaddy and Co. are all that stand between the Germans and an Allied supply depot. This action setpiece fits comfortably with your father's idea of what a World War Two movie should be like: the Germans lineup in an orderly fashion so that the good guys can mow them down in the most efficient manner possible. The Germans must have been scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel in 1945 because these guys have less tactical sense than the average paintball player. They stand in the open and fire rifles and machine guns at a tank. A tank! And then they look surprised when they're blown to smithereens. This last battle is doubly disappointing because some of the earlier tank fights are quite well done. Oh, well. At this point I was just grateful that I was seeing almost all the crew members meet a bloody end.

Film Review: 12 Years a Slave (2013)

Here's who I really want to see this film: Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg. The pair should be strapped into chairs, have their eyelids locked open a la Clockwork Orange, and be made to watch it over and over again until they begin screaming, "I get it! I get it!" The former will have learned that the history of American slavery is not a suitable subject for an action-comedy wankfest, and the latter will realize that a historical film about a grave and serious subject doesn't need to be buried under a pyroclastic flow of sentimentality, melodrama, bombastic music, and overripe production design.

12 Years a Slave is a harrowing true story about Solomon Northrup, a free black man living in Saratoga, New York, in 1841 who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. Northup's story (the film is based on the book he wrote about his experiences) is filled with the historical tropes of American slavery--beatings, separation of families, sexual exploitation, rape, lynchings, and backbreaking labour. All of these crimes have been shown before in films about the pre-Civil War South, so don't be expecting to see something new on the subject of slavery. What makes this film so exceptional is its artistry.

Director Steve McQueen has made the brilliant decision to let the facts speak for themselves. The horrors of slavery are presented without undue emphasis or sentimentality. One scene early in the film shows a black mother being sold and thereby permanently separated from her two small children. It would have been easy to go the Spielberg route and turn the scene into something overblown, like an aria from a tragic opera, but McQueen lets the scene play out sans editorial comment, and it becomes all the more ghastly because it's underplayed. The director's restraint is even more evident at the end of the film when a single scene encompasses both Northrup's salvation as his white Northern friends find him and secure his release, and his parting from Patsey, a female slave who's the tormented concubine of her demented owner, played brilliantly by Michael Fassbender. Any other director would have dragged this sequence out for maximum emotional value, but McQueen positively whips through the scene and captures that bolt from the blue feeling Northup must have experienced. McQueen clearly made the decision that the facts of Northrup's enslavement needed no dressing up.

This is also a beautifully shot film. There's no sweeping camerawork, no overuse of filters to create gaudy sunrises and sunsets, there's just one beautifully composed shot after another. Like the script and the direction, the cinematography isn't trying to manipulate our emotions or hammer home plot points. And the same can be said for the music by Hans Zimmer, which sometimes has a jarring, almost science fiction-y sound to it that emphasizes Northrup's transition from freedom to slavery. The actors are all top-notch, although Brad Pitt's cameo felt more like a movie star doing a cameo than an actor tackling a role. And yet more credit for McQueen for his choice of Lupita Nyong'o as Patsey. She's beautiful, but most directors would have chosen a more conventionally attractive actor for the role, and they certainly would have played up her looks to explain why she becomes her owner's sex slave. So, needless to say, this is my choice for best film of the year, and I might have to rate it as one of the best films of the last ten years. That it should have to face off against trash like American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street for Oscars is a tragedy of another kind.

Zombie Pogrom

Zombie Jesus, coming this Easter.

The zombie film genre began in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead. The template was thus: the recently dead are brought back to murderous life due to a virus/supernatural spell/radiation and begin to kill/feast upon the living. A minor variation has living people turned into killer zombies thanks to one of the three traditional causes. In either case zombies are mindless, implacable, unsightly killers who can't be reasoned with, only dispatched by sticking something pointy in their brains, although beheading and immolation also seem to be effective. If you're a non-zombie character in these films you have a simple mandate: kill or escape the zombies before they kill you.

Zombie films have been a B-movie staple ever since 1968, mostly because they're a cheap and cheerful way to make a horror film. You don't need much in the way of special effects, no CGI necessary,  just a lot of prosthetics, fake blood, and enthusiastic makeup artists. Somewhere along the way, however, the zombie film grew up. It may have been 28 Days Later (2002) that rebooted the genre. Previous to this, zombie films were definitely from the sweatshop end of the film industry. After 28 Days Later the public seemed to have an appetite for more and better zombie films. Since then we've had 28 Weeks Later, The Crazies, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, I Am Legend, [REC], Shaun of the Dead, Resident Evil, Zombieland, The Walking Dead TV series, and dozens and dozens of lesser titles. All these films are made to a higher standard than the vast majority of their predecessors, and this summer brings us World War Z starring Brad Pitt, a big budget zombie film with a big star.

The question has to be asked, why the, ahem, resurrection of the zombie genre? I'll go out on a bloody limb and say that its popularity is due to the way the genre legitimizes and indulges the suppressed genocidal impulses of its audiences. It's no use pretending people don't have a taste for genocide, history (ancient, modern and current) is littered with the corpses produced by genocidal violence. One of the key aspects of zombie films, its action film backbone, is seeing the humans slaughtering the zombies. Zombies are never shown mercy, they're simply mowed down by any means necessary, and their deaths are inevitably bloody and bizarre. And zombies are never seen as anything more than ghastly killing machines in human form; they don't speak or think, they just roam around with the sole purpose of killing the living. They are irredeemably evil and pernicious, and there are always far, far more of Them than of Us. It's not hard to see how this dovetails with the thinking of the people throughout history who've thought it was a good idea to pick up a rock or a torch or a gun and attack those people on the other side of town who speak/act/worship differently, and who are getting too numerous for the health of society.

Zombie films also allow audiences to project their fears of the Other onto undead surrogates. The past ten years has seen a rise in Us vs. Them hatreds at all levels and in many places. Iran makes genocidal threats against Israel; U.S. politics has become starkly polarized and venomous; Shiites and Sunnis wage a sectarian war in Iraq; North Korea promises to exterminate the South; an Israeli newspaper poll reveals that Israeli Jews would support an apartheid system; various minorities, from the Roma to Muslims, are vilified in Europe; and the poor and unemployed are increasingly described as "scroungers" or "parasites." All of this rests in the shadows of the World Trade Center towers. That act of terrorism seemed to usher in the current climate of genocidal and eliminationist language. Certainly in America there were a lot of people, including politicians, who were vocal about their desire to bomb various parts of the Middle East back to the Stone Age. So the following year we had 28 Days Later, and the zombie craze shows no signs of slowing down.

I've embedded the trailer for World War Z below, and this short sampler clearly shows the genocidal heart of the zombie film genre. The zombies, thanks to CGI, are shown behaving like a mindless swarm of enraged insects. They have no reasoning power, they don't even have any sense of self-preservation, they just want to kill Brad Pitt and his lovely family. Is it scary? Yes, but it also apes the thinking behind a lot of propaganda down through the years that has been used to put families in gas chambers or justify drone attacks. Before you kill people en masse, you first have to make them out to be sub-human, even animals, and this film seems to have that down pat. The trailer also shows us the other side of the equation: the mass, efficient slaughter of the Other thanks to badass machine guns mowing down the zombies in their hundreds. One half of the film makes us loathe and fear a group of humans, the other half releases the fear and tension by giving us a genocide.



Are World War Z audiences going to rush out and beat up the first minority group member they come across? No. But I think what gives zombie films that certain something that keeps them being made is that they tap into our deeply suppressed fears and hatreds of those we see as outsiders. As an experiment, just imagine it's 1938 and Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, has ordered that a zombie movie be made. I'm pretty sure he'd have the zombies wearing Stars of David. And I think he'd call that movie Zombie Pogrom.