Gray Matter (2023)
As a lifelong film fan, I’ve always been fascinated with the trials and tribulations of the many seasons of Project Greenlight. It began in 2001 as a contest shepherded by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and irritable producer Chris Moore to select the best submitted script and turn it into a movie. The process would also be documented at every stage by TV cameras for an HBO documentary series, but this is an organization defined by its chaos and mistakes, which make for spellbinding schadenfreude television and rather disappointing movies. Each season tried to retool. Season one winner Peter Jones was more a writer than a director and not fully ready when he was thrust to also direct his winning script, so season two had separate submissions to select a winning writer and a winning director to pair. Season three realized that the coming-of-age indies of the first two seasons (Stolen Summer, The Battle of Shaker Heights) didn’t exactly ignite the box-office, so the intent was a more commercial genre script, which ended up becoming the monster siege thriller, Feast. Season four, coming nearly ten years later, decided that the commercial script needed to come from a more trusted and studio-backed source rather than amateurs. That source: Pete Jones, now having become a co-writer to some Farrelly Brothers comedies. That season only sought to select a director, having now completely ditched the screenwriting aspect from the start of the contest, but the winning director ditched the approved script to make a middling comedy feature of his own short film (The Leisure Class). Now, many years later, HBO Max (or now just… Max, because somebody thinks “HBO” lacks brand value) has rebooted Project Greenlight, again, and has another more commercially-minded script to serve the eventual directing winner, this time among a team of ten female finalists. So after twenty years and five movies, what has Project Greenlight proven? Good TV doesn’t mean good movies.
Gray Matter will forever be known as “the Project Greenlight movie,” and if it wasn’t for that series, we wouldn’t be seeing this movie because it’s so generic and underwritten, which, having spent the day binging through the new Greenlight season, are the same problems that all the many producers were complaining about with the script. Well, you folks picked this script, right?
Aurora (Mia Isaac) is a 16-year-old who just wants to feel like a normal teenager. Her mom, Ayla (Jessica Frances Dukes), is afraid she won’t be able to defend herself in this scary world. They’re a mother-daughter psionic duo, exhibiting mind powers. After a tragedy away from home, Aurora finds herself in a weird complex run by Derek (Garret Dillahunt), a mysterious authority figure who says he’s trying to find all the psionics he can to help them better understand their unique abilities. Aurora suspects her captors don’t really have her best interest at heart.
That plot description above sounds like a hundred other YA-tinged stories, from The Darkest Minds to Firestarter to the X-Men TV show The Gifted, which also co-starred Dillahunt. It’s a fine starting point but the story and characters need to find ways to better personalize this formula, and that’s where Gray Matter falters. It’s all too surface-level, from the mother-daughter relationship, to the determination of Ayla, to the self-actualization of our teen. It’s not that you’ve seen it before, it’s that you’ve seen it before much better in so many other stories.
The story pieces are present that can be developed for a more engaging and character-centric sci-fi drama. There is potential here. I think more could be made about Ayla’s past connections to this psionic complex, but instead of being offered to co-chair it as an administrator, it would have been more interesting if she had been younger, a pregnant teen, and her unborn baby was the course of great speculation for the facility, especially being the child of two psionics. This would add an extra layer of urgency why Ayla felt she had to leave as well as why Aurora would be more coveted than other psionics. It could also easily explain why Aurora would be more powerful than any other psionic. It would also personalize the sacrifice of Ayla as well as her paranoia about the lengths they will be hunted. We needed more time with Ayla as a character because once the daughter gets kidnapped around the Act One break, she’s seen more in flashback and fantasy sequences than reality. If this is going to be the emotional core of the movie, then we need to flesh out the mother and the scenes between them. As demonstrated in the movie, Aurora is here to push her daughter, tell her she isn’t ready, then restrict her but also not really restrict her, as Aurora seems to sneak out every night to meet boys. If this woman is so paranoid, why is she alternating between being a strict gatekeeper and a free-range parent? It didn’t make sense. She’s keeping her child out of school and the public and constantly moving, but hey, go ahead and fraternize with these teenagers supposedly behind my back?
It’s also a shame that our protagonist is such a boring blank. The puberty/super power allegory has been prevalent for decades, but for a movie that literally spends so much of its time inside the mind of its main character, she’s unfortunately too underdeveloped and unexplored. She’s just kind of present for too many of her scenes rather than an active participant. This is partly from the nature of the script, where Aurora has to learn about her powers and the history of psionics, but why does the first act of the movie resort to repeating this exposition? We have one scene where mom is explaining powers and what’s at stake, and then twenty minutes later we have another scene of Derek explaining powers and what’s at stake. The biggest problem with Gray Matter is that its central character feels like an afterthought of a simple yet empty empowerment message. It’s about a young woman coming into her own power, externally and internally, but it’s also expressed under such generic terms. What do we know about Aurora? She wants a “normal life” but what does this constitute? Does she resent her mother’s rules? Has she rebelled in the past? What really animates her? What is her sense of purpose? I don’t know, which diminishes all the sequences of her running in terror, and that dominates the middle hour. I wish the script had started with her sneaking out, hanging out with these kids who consider her “that weird homeschool girl,” and then when things go wrong we have to learn with what we see rather than sitting through multiple people trying to explain the world and rules. It would be a better shock when things go wrong, and the added time would allow more breathing room to try and flesh out Aurora before she’s defined by her powers.
Another aspect that needed further re-examination was the nature of the psionic powers. The plot needed to better define the rules of these powers, which are quite varied. We begin with the powers mostly being telekinetic, the ability to move things with one’s mind. Then it jumps into telepathy, the ability to speak through one’s mind, then read the minds of others, then project mental structures, then working all the way to teleportation. There is a good scene where Derek is impressed by Aurora’s ability to hide her thoughts with a false setting construct, and I enjoyed him pointing out the giveaway details, like a character reading a book that is only ever the same page. That was a smart scene that better visualized the powers. However, the characters talk too broadly about the powers in sweeping proclamations. I think the movie could have improved had the story ditched more of the powers and settled down on one, with Aurora having the ability to manifest more than one power being a sign of her extraordinary identity.
As a low-budget genre movie, Gray Matter looks like a professional movie and has good actors doing their best. Debut director Meko Winbush has made a genre movie that looks practically indistinguishable from other disposable Hollywood genre thrillers, and maybe on a sliding scale, feeling and looking like a generic sci-fi thriller might be a success in the history of Project Greenlight. But I doubt all the many people who lent their labor and names to this project were hoping for it to be on par with a forgettable streaming entity eventually crushed by a library of content. Winbush presents enough visual polish that could lead her to future work, something that has also plagued many of the director winners from seasons past (Jason Mann, the season four winner, has one feature credit after The Leisure Class, serving as DP to a 2019 Slovenian movie). It’s hard to feel what exactly people could get passionate about with Gray Matter, and they just waited for a rewrite to supply all the missing emotional engagement and introspection and fun that was absent. Once again, the finished film ends up being a disappointing season finale to a train wreck of reality TV.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Obstacle Corpse (2022)
Hope Madden has been an esteemed critic, journalist, and writer for many Columbus media publications and television for years. She and her husband, George Wolf, run MaddWolf, a popular film blog, and head the Fright Club podcast and horror film programming at the Gateway Theater. They know movies inside and out and they know horror. So it makes sense for Obstacle Corpse to be Madden’s first feature as a writer and director. It’s a high-concept horror comedy filmed in the Columbus, Ohio area and now available to watch on Amazon. Madden and Wolf are both part of my Columbus film critics’ group, and so I will, as I always strive for with reviewing Ohio-made indies, attempt to be as objective as possible knowing many involved in the cast and crew. Obstacle Corpse is, above all things, enjoyably demented. It’s a low-budget horror movie that understands that an indie horror movie is going to succeed through concept, personality, and mood, and Madden pays attention to each of those winning dimensions.
Sunny (Sylvie Mix) just wants to impress her domineering and dismissive father. She signs up for the Guts and Glory competition, a twelve-event obstacle course, to prove herself. Each contestant is expected to bring a partner, so she brings her best friend Ezra (Alan Tyson) who is ready to get back home and out of the woods pronto. That’s even before they discover that the teams have gathered for some brutal competition. Each team is also required to kill their teammate over the course of the grueling events, so will Sunny and Ezra survive, and will they possibly turn on one another to save themself from the deadly games?
The premise is a quick hook, a deadly version of an obstacle course, and makes twisted sense, not just from a canny take-something-from-childhood-but-make-it-deadly calculus of recent gimmicky horror. There are plenty of adult-oriented obstacle courses known for their physical endurance, like the Tough Mudders and Spartan Race and Ninja Warrior, so an escalation into literal life-and-death stakes as an experiential attraction makes sense in a twisted fashion. Madden has also done what I wish several other indie filmmakers would and distinguished her large net of crazy characters. There’s a wonderful sense of personality to the different groups, which helps the audience keep track of the many different faces, but it also allows the characters to be more playful. I don’t care why some would dress up like clowns for this competition and others as baseball players, I’m just glad that these characters are happy to stand out. I enjoyed a middle-aged man eager to transform every moment into a phony social media tableau. I readily enjoyed the hyper-competitive nature of Stephanie (Gareth Tidball), an intense woman who gets off on the thrill of each challenge. I enjoyed one grumbling angry man (Wolf) who could be counted on to struggle in last place no matter the obstacle. I enjoyed a tracksuit-clad bickering couple. I liked a family of siblings that distinguished itself in paired T-shirts, with one pair wearing “single” and the other wearing “double.” I didn’t quite understand it since they were both pairs but I liked the effort all the same. Even little details can add much.
The mood of Obstacle Corpse is chiefly one of carefree fun, an amiable tone that brings a comedic lightness to even the most ghastly of circumstances. It’s prevalent throughout the movie and makes the 80 minutes easy to digest. Madden’s good times are best summarized by the scene-stealing performance of Mason (Donovan Riley Wolfington, Madden’s son), a costumed chef dishing out cold vengeance from his ice cream truck. This character is presented as a change agent, an unexpected wildcard who is disrupting the establishment overseeing the games. He’s a live-wire of energy, channeling Deadpool or a Looney Tunes cartoon at different points, and he will dismember contestants while gleefully singing his violent versions of Christmas carols. It’s a standout performance in a large cast of varied characters, and Wolfington is just operating on another level of insane amusement. The character also becomes one to easily root for because he’s an antihero underdog taking advantage of others underestimating him, and he’s also that change agent, bringing a bloody sense of justice to those involved in the continuance of the games. A late-in-the-game revelation about his history made me wish for more development to better utilize the key info, but Wolfington is the best mascot for the movie’s demented charms.
Given its large cast, there are several that made a favorable impression as they navigated the comedy aspects. Mix (Poser, Double Walker) is a definite find for Columbus cinema and will be going places in no time. She is a natural actor and serves as our baseline of normality, a shifting concept in a world of violent mayhem. Tyson (Stowaway) is a great foil as Sunny’s friend. He’s more effete and unimposing, at first glance, so his incredulous reactions are a welcomed source of comedy and reason. Tony White does a lot as a clown/mime who befriends our “normal” characters. He gives a very expressive and charming performance, and yet there are a couple of moments where his tortured emotions serve as a surprising well of feelings (he is labeled as Sad Clown, after all). Even producer Jason Tostevin (Hellarious) has a laconic menace as the head of the games security, and he delivers a monologue about achieving your peak greatness that sounds like a self-help guru comfortable into the exploitative routines. He’s our face of the establishment, so as things begin going haywire from our anarchic chef, his discomfort provides a consistent outlet for satisfying comeuppance. You can tell the cast is enjoying themselves, and that casual camaraderie helps to add to the overall silly and bloody fun of the movie.
I wish the parameters of this killer event had a bit more clarity and development to really maximize the possibility. First, I thought that these many obstacles were themselves going to be part of the killer challenge, something akin to Squid Games where familiar childhood playground games have been transformed into life-and-death contests. That’s not the case, so watching characters overcome a cargo net or a set of tires feels somewhat disappointing because what would the appeal of this physical track be beyond the murdering? I think part of the joke is that these are ordinary park obstacles that are causing so many so much struggle. The rules of this course can also be rather murky. We see the enforcement of what happens when a contestant kills outside of an official obstacle course event, but the rest of the rules are left too vague. Contestants are welcome to bring their own weapons, like bats and knives, so could someone simply bring a high-powered gun and mow down the entire competition? How does this work exactly? What prize do the winners receive at the end other than having killed their partner? Did Sunny’s father understand what exactly she was getting into and approved? I’m also left slightly bewildered how many of these teams are family members that are so eager to kill one another. I’m not opposed to the possible fratricide plot, but I think the movie needs to present more conflicts within the couples to present as possible explanation for this murderous intent (maybe an old score to settle like stealing a girlfriend, maybe it’s an inheritance battle, maybe it’s sussing out what the particulars are of the familiar tension, etc.). It’s shocking to watch an older brother pitch his younger brother into a fire and kids killing kids (off-screen), but the shock value only goes so far, and having more setup or context could have added more satisfaction. I guess many are just wannabe psychopaths looking for any excuse to indulge their darker impulses.
I think about the brilliant simplicity of 2019’s Ready or Not. The movie’s premise is essentially a killer game of hide and seek, already a rather uncomplicated children’s game. But the filmmakers carefully established the rules and stakes, with the family holding to he belief they need to kill the person hiding before sunrise or else they will all die thanks to a generational curse. It’s outlandish but the movie presented all the vital information and then let things rip. In the case of Obstacle Corpse, it’s around the fifty-minute mark before our main characters, the normies, discover the actual deadly stakes of the game, and their response seems a tad… relaxed. Part of this is, as earlier described, the amiable low-stakes charm of the movie, so nobody ever brings too much of a sense of actual reality to the absurd competition and its slapstick violence.
I also wish Obstacle Corpse had coalesced more of a class-conscious political commentary. We are introduced to a wealthy couple who are bankrolling the games under the auspices of live online betting, a concept also explored in many other movies that summarize the villains as bored rich people betting on the lives of the poor (Squid Games, Escape Room, The Hunger Games, etc.). That works, though the script only gives us one or two check-ins with our wealthy couple as they seem more interested in canoodling than keeping up with their own spectacle. Maybe that signifies how blase they are about human life but it felt like a missed opportunity. I kept envisioning a version of Obstacle Corpse that really trained its fire on the callousness of the rich, with the teams each being a boss or CEO and some lackey or intern that they’re stringing along, meaning each competitive couple already has a class distinction. The plot informs us that the veterans know they are inviting their guest to their intended doom, so why not project onto a corporate or wealthy head and their contempt for a lower-class worker they see as literally disposable? Perhaps these fragile wealthy men think they’re so much more capable or threatening than they really are, a concept given some attention through the hyper-macho character of Richard (Brian Spangler) who can’t live up to his overblown expectations. There’s an overinflated sense of toxic masculinity that relates to physical dominance that was worthy of even more deconstruction and criticism. I think this dynamic would have allowed the movie to hone and target its ire with more potent satirical firepower.
Even with some of my misgivings about clarity and untapped thematic potential, Obstacle Corpse is an enjoyable horror comedy for fans. The blood gushes constantly and the gore is impressively grotesque for its minimal budget. There are some impressive shots for a movie 95 percent filmed in the woods. Madden has crafted a movie that works regardless of budget, with its larger-than-life characters and conflicts resulting from a strong and memorable high-concept premise. The emphasis is more on comedy than horror, like the world’s most demented summer camp outing. Given the large cast of characters, the movie always has a new batch of people to jump through, which keeps the movie fresh even when the suspense can slacken because of the comedic emphasis. It’s not a one-joke movie, and the fun of the cast can often be felt, especially the grand ball of a time had by Wolfington. There are things left out I wish had been explored further, but this is a solid start for Madden and her team in the realm of indie genre filmmaking. If you enjoy your comedy with a heaping helping of blood and bad taste, give Obstacle Corpse a chance.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Sound of Freedom (2023)
The surprise of an otherwise underwhelming summer at the box-office, so far, has been an indie movie made for only a fraction of the bigger studio fare. Sound of Freedom is an action drama originally filmed in 2018 and even resorted to crowdfunding for post-production assistance, so you’d be curious as to what about this movie is making it the hot commodity in 2023? Well, the answer is both uplifting and also dispiriting, with good intentions running against possible bad faith. However, as an action drama chronicling the ills of human trafficking, it’s pretty mediocre genre stuff and indulges too often in wallowing in the danger of these innocent children under the guise of raising awareness of a pertinent problem that too many may unfortunately misconstrue.
Reportedly based on the experiences of Tim Ballard (Jim Caviezel), a former Homeland Security agent who was tasked with breaking up child-trafficking rings. He even goes undercover to bust skeevy mustachioed pedophiles looking to meet up with buyers, which causes obvious physiological distress and a strain on his marriage, although his wife seems saintly (played by Mira Sorvino, who is only here briefly to urge her man on). A Honduran brother and sister are sold through the front of a child beauty pageant into sex slavery, and after rescuing the brother, he’s determined to reunite the siblings. His efforts lead to Ballard quitting his government job and going to Columbia to try and rescue the children being held as commodities by gangs.
Allow me to be a little glib, dear reader, as I summarize what the plot of Sound of Freedom boils down to. Here goes: the movie quickly establishes sex trafficking as bad. Not hard. Got it. Our hero sees this and says, “This is very bad. I should do something.” The government says, “This is very bad. But what are you gonna do, you know?” Then our hero proclaims, “I can do something,” and the government brass says, “Well, we don’t know if you should,” and then our hero declares, “Well, I’m gonna!” Then he infiltrates the trafficking ring and reunites a little girl with her brother, and by the end we all learned a valuable lesson that human trafficking is very bad. The end. Now, yes, when you reduce any movie to its most essential plot points, it can feel reductive and like you’re missing something (Star Wars: farm boy leaves home, has adventure with hermit, saves princess), but there isn’t anything more to this Sound of Freedom than any of the Taken movies. It’s not exactly illuminating though it feels very sincere in its convictions.
As an action movie, there sure is a deficit of action to go on for a movie pushing two hours. There’s a climactic rescue but the majority of this movie is the overly simplified journey of trying to find one missing girl. Criminal procedures can be intriguing when there’s a real sense of continuity and progression, chasing down leads, connecting the dots, building the case. It can be invigorating when done well by smart people, like in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty or the more recent true-life tale of exposing the murderous subject of 2022’s The Good Nurse. With Sound of Freedom, the problems are too easily overcome and the details are minimal. A lot of the breakthroughs are reliant upon chance.
Sound of Freedom feels like a professional action movie, with grimy cinematography and a mournful score, but there’s too little else going on here that is unknown to a general audience. It’s all pretty straightforward and yet sludgy with its overwrought pacing. This is a slow burn of a movie with an obvious end point manufactured for audience uplift, with Caviezel appearing as himself during the end credits to plead for others to donate to the cause and buy tickets for others for the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the twenty-first century,” which is what many are doing and donating them to others or passing them off to strangers.
There is one moment that I thought was unexpected, where reliable character actor Bill Camp (The Queen’s Gambit) plays an ally to assist Ballard in putting together a fake sex trafficking palace for pedophiles (this is much of the last act). Camp plays a businessman who indulged in the illicit excess of power until one fateful sexual encounter with a prostitute that he believed to be in her mid twenties. He’s sickened by the revelation that she was only fifteen years old, and this causes him to have a moral shakeup of his behavior, his complicity, and the entire system of wealthy and powerful people indulging in vices that leave others trapped in cycles of violence and degradation. It’s a potent moment that I wished that Camp’s character was the actual protagonist, a character with flaws trying to overcome a shameful past and do some measures to rectify change. That’s a more interesting starting point than a stoic yet familiar action hero who is defined by his dedicated calling to save the lives of children.
Nobody needs much persuasion to believe that sex trafficking is a definite bad thing, and yet the movie spends so much time wallowing in the grotesque terror of its captive children. It’s one thing to highlight the harsh reality of real-world trauma, but it’s another thing to keep going back for dramatic weight not provided through the rest of the movie. It’s hard to watch young children, gasping and crying, knowing they are likely minutes away from being abused, but why go back to this repeatedly? Did they think the audiences forgot what was happening? Because there is so little else to this movie, plot and character-wise, the frequent stops to watch kids in horror right before being abused are galling, and not just for the intended artistic purpose. Too much of Sound of Freedom is watching a grief-stricken dead-eyed Caviezel gravely intoning, “How can we let this happen?” intermingled with prolonged scenes of terrorized children. It feels too exploitative and gross. I recognized it as a cheap emotional cudgel, and one I didn’t appreciate considering the film’s intended message about the well-being of children.
Here’s where I think the movie’s good intentions run up against the reality of trafficking. The far majority of people who are victims of sex trafficking are not being abducted in public by foreign strangers, they’re not being grabbed at Target stores or somehow hidden in Wayfair furniture (this specific and moronic conspiracy theory was propagated by Ballard as well, sigh); instead, the common perpetrators are friends and family. Often it’s low-income parents with significant substance abuse issues who, in desperation, resort to the most cruel outcome to resolve their addiction. The far majority of trafficking victims are in their teens, seventy percent between 15-17. Victims are also often members of the LGBTQ community who have been kicked out of their homes, and some of these victims resort to trading sex for their own survival. Victims are often those seeking out relationships because of abuse and neglect at home and those coercive relationships then transforming into trafficking. The reality of human trafficking is a lot more complex. It is a worthy topic of imminent concern, but it’s not scary brown-skinned foreigners coming to steal your unsupervised babies. It’s not a cabal of Democrats wanting to drink the blood of children for its power (this specific and moronic conspiracy theory was propagated by Caviezel as well, sigh). The problem with crusading against sex trafficking is when your concept of the topic does not match the reality of the problem. It’s this sensationalized boogeyman, and not knowing the actual reality of the problem will only lead to misapplied solutions for a different reality. Also, the far majority of human trafficking is with labor trafficking, which will be much easier to succeed by lowering the age of child labor in certain states, so there’s that too.
By every objective measure, Sound of Freedom is a hit. The movie cost $14 million and has already grossed over $50 million at the U.S. box-office. While part of this is a campaign for people to buy tickets to then give away to others, the tickets are still purchased regardless of whether the seats are filled in their entirety. Many people have been inspired by the movie and its heroics, and far be it from me to deny them their uplift. I was let down by the deficiency of the find-and-rescue plot details and the sludgy pacing. I was especially put off by the excessive time spent exploiting the terror of abused children for unnecessary drama. Obviously the subject should make anyone feel uncomfortable, and sex trafficking is a very real evil that everyone should be able to condemn, but there needs to be more to this movie than reminding you that sex trafficking is very bad. I will credit Sound of Freedom with not depicting any specific pernicious QAnon conspiracies, but there’s significant overlap between that community and the audience for this. As a genre exercise, it’s kind of dull. As an expose on human trafficking, it has potential but skirts complexity for the finality of a feel-good mission with clear cut heroes and villains. There are obvious good intentions here wanting to highlight a worthy cause, and that might be enough for many viewers who can coast on the slick production values and overall stoicism.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Robots (2023)
Robots takes the romantic comedy genre and adds a dash of science fiction satire. Charles (Jack Whitehall) is a sleazy womanizer who likes to use his robot double, named C2, to put in all the getting-to-know-you effort with dates so then Charles can jump in for any later physical intimacy. Elaine (Shailene Woodley) uses her robot double, named E2, to bilk dumb men out of money and gifts. Then one day Charles and Elaine meet cute at an ice skating rink and begin a relationship. She doesn’t know Charles is really C2, and he doesn’t know Elaine is really E2. This confusion is cleared up when E2 and C2 run away together and abandon their human selves. The real Elaine and Charles must work together as they cross the country to find and regain their robots before they cause trouble.
Where Robots goes wrong is with its clunky execution, as its promising premise succumbs to gassed rom-com cliches and some tonally confounding comedy, when it does remember to be a comedy. It’s a given that our two human characters, or at least the flesh-and-blood versions, will grow closer together over the course of their road trip to find their runaway mechanical selves. This unique situation pushes them out of their comfort zones and allows them to better open up. The possibility is there to even follow a strict rom-com formula and still be satisfying, if the romance felt organic and charming. It does not. If anything, the movie uses your knowledge that these two will likely fall in love against you, speeding through the process with haste. The movie’s idea of romance consists of a montage sequence where our two characters laugh, get drunk, and hang out in a hotel room. It’s like the screenplay zapped over the actual development of the romance, the moments where one character saw another differently, where the initial conflict began to thaw, so what we’re left with feels hollow and artificial. The actual robot versions have a stronger bond than their human counterparts (I’m sure this is part of the joke). I didn’t care about our romantic couple because the movie itself didn’t seem to care enough about them to develop their romance beyond the basic framework of convention.
The comedy and commentary can also be very off-putting and incongruous. The premise deserves more scrutiny, either by the characters or the script itself. These two people are duping their prospective dates, one for money and the other for sex, and the movie just kind of shrugs about using robotic slaves for manipulative gain. I assume the filmmakers wanted to keep things light, but there’s at least more comedy to be had from the bad things these bad people made their innocent robots do for them, even a point of arguing who is the worst person. If they’re bad people, then dig into it. The movie also dispels with the contrasts between the couples too quickly. The screwball romance ramifications are ditched too early to send Charles and Elaine on their mission. When your premise has mistaken identity programmed front and center, you would think the comedy would take full advantage of this and escalate to farcical levels. Nope. There isn’t even anything approaching the cringe comedy co-director/co-writer Casper Christensen (Klown) is better known for. The humor is stuck on broad slapstick and easy jokes that confuse vulgarity with instant comedy. Robots includes a video of C2 and E2 committing a mass shooting. The plot purpose of this is for the robots to vilify their human identities and to force them to hide from the public out of fear of being caught, but why an implied mass shooting, especially in this day and age? Why not have them rob a bank? The purpose is to commit a crime and publicize themselves to make life harder for their humans. It’s too blunt a choice to work.
Likewise, the political commentary that pervades the opening is completely absent throughout the rest of the movie. We open with a buffoonish U.S. president celebrating the construction of a border wall with Mexico, never mind that it’s easy to slip through. Unexpectedly, the cry of “them Mexicans took our jobs” has now been replaced by “them robots took our jobs.” You would think there would be ample room here for satire on the economic struggles of Americans, the salivating exploitation of big business, or even the xenophobia that often coincides with economic distress. Any political commentary is done away with after this opening. If offices can just have robot doubles doing all the boring drudgery, then what does that do for human interaction? Surely businesses would prefer workers who technically lack human rights and never need to eat or sleep. The screenplay gives us one character to discuss any of these topics, an obnoxious best friend (Paul Jurewicz) to air out his hatred of robots. There’s also another character that serves as a plot convenience for how our two leads got their doubles. Other than that, the world seems oddly absent from any significant cultural shifts from robot inclusion. Part of this is the convenient plot point that “personal use” robots are outlawed, which again you would think would produce more conflict with our pair having to hide their ownership. Mostly though, it feels like the writers just didn’t think through how their world would be different in a meaningful way, which robs the movie of better satire, comedy, and simply ideas.
What makes the movie mildly worth watching are the talents of its two leads. I wouldn’t exactly say Woodley and Whitehall have a spark-worthy chemistry, but both actors are professionals who have no qualms about getting silly in the name of comedy. Whitehall (Jungle Cruise) is amusingly droll, and while his deadpan can be hilarious, it can also sap the energy of certain scenes. Still, he’s an enjoyable performer who has fun playing a louse. Woodley (Divergent) isn’t exactly the actress you’d think of for broad comedy but she has great fun playing the different versions of her character and tweaking sexist male fantasies. Both of these actors are good with the material that they’re given, so it makes you even more wistful about what could have been with even better material for them to really shine.
Robots is a comedy that could use more comedy, a romance that could use better romance, and a social satire that seems to forget pretty suddenly what it’s satirizing. That’s quite a surprise considering one of the co-writers/co-directors has both Borat films on his resume. It feels like a poorly developed episode of Black Mirror; however, I know I’m in the minority on this one, I find the majority of Black Mirror episodes to have intriguing premises that go nowhere. So, by that assessment, it is a Black Mirror episode. The actors are enjoyable and some of the jokes land, but you’re mostly left wondering what could have been from this wasted premise. The whole enterprise just seems to run out of ideas and energy and inspiration halfway through, stranding good actors and a fun premise in a movie that needed more beta testing to be its best version.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Nimona (2023)
Based on the graphic novel by ND Stevenson (She-Ra), itself a web comic from 2012-2014, Nimona was developed by Blue Sky Animation Studios and originally scheduled to be released in 2020, and then Disney bought Fox, shut down Blue Sky, and pushed back against the gay content of Nimona before just canceling it altogether in 2021, and then Netflix came in and saved the project and released it, gay and all, during the last day of Pride Month. It’s been a long, protracted journey for Nimona to get to your screen and, reader, it was worth it. The movie is a rambunctious and revisionist fairy tale that is both subversive and deeply sincere, enough so that an emotional confrontation of accepting someone on their own terms elicited genuine tears on my part (for those keeping record, that’s three straight animated movies in the month of June that caused me to cry). Nimona (voiced superbly by Chloe Grace Moretz) is a high-energy prankster in a fantasy world melding Medieval culture with future technology. She befriends a fellow outsider, Ballister (voiced by Riz Ahmed), after the kingdom views him as a wanted villain. Together, they try and clear Ballister’s name by finding the real killer, and maybe they can wreck some stuff too just for fun. The cell-shaded style, a familiar aesthetic in the realm of video games, adds a bright and slickly appealing quality to the animation, and the frenetic pace and anarchic humor keep the movie bristling with entertainment, while the emotional core (vulnerable outcasts finding community) sneaks up on you and delivers a more resonating climactic finish than simply vanquishing a baddie. The ending even has rich thematic notes of The Iron Giant, which is never a bad influence. The queer content is also treated without sensationalism and treated as any other aspect of human compassion. The heart and message are just as impressive as the visuals and the humor. Nimona is a funny all-ages adventure that deserves its big screen moment after its long gestation.
Nate’s Grade: B
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No Hard Feelings (2023)
If you can get past the icky premise, No Hard Feelings might surprise you. It’s a raunchy, R-rated sex comedy with a very game Jennifer Lawrence, also a producer, giving it her all. The premise involves Lawrence playing a down-on-her-luck 32-year-old who accepts a wanted ad to help a rich couple who are concerned that their 18-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) is too inexperienced in the matters of women and romance. This leads to Lawrence broadly trying to seduce the awkward, introverted young man. The comedy is less related to set pieces and more on the changing relationship of the two leads, which leads to fewer highs but at least consistent, albeit mild, amusement. Lawrence is the headlining name but the real star is Feldman. His comedic awkwardness reminded me of Michael Cera, and his reactions and sputtering from the brassy, larger-than-life vamping from Lawrence were even funnier than the broad punchlines. There’s one scene where Feldman sits at a piano and plays a ballad version of “Maneater” by Hall and Oates, and it’s a terrific and sincere moment that further made me appreciate the range this actor’s range. He’s appeared in several Internet musical short videos, and with how big he can get, to watch him hold back with this character and find even more subtle laughs, it’s just allthe more impressive. No Hard Feelings is an adequate sex comedy that doesn’t break any new raunchy ground. I appreciated its conclusion that doesn’t feel the need to tie everything into tidy endings, and the age-gap is addressed throughout, with Lawrence feeling particularly out of touch with today’s teenagers. It’s a possible good time but with some reservations.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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The Flash (2023)/ Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
Released within two weeks of one another, two big summer movies take the concept of a multiverse, now becoming the norm in comic book cinema, and explore the imaginative possibilities and wish-fulfillment that it proposes, but only one of them does it well. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is the sequel to the Oscar-winning 2018 revolutionary animated film, and it’s a glorious and thrilling and visually sumptuous experience, whereas DC’s much-hyped and much-troubled movie The Flash feels like a deflated project running in place and coming apart. Let this be a lesson to any studio executive, that multiverses are harder than they look.
Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) has the ability to travel at fantastic speeds as his superhero alter ego, The Flash. He’s tired of being the Justice League’s errand boy and still fighting to prove his father is innocent of the crime of killing Barry’s mother. Then Barry discovers he can run fast enough to actually travel back in time, so he returns with the intention of trying to save his mother. Except now he’s an extra Flash and has to train his alternate self (also Miller) how to control his powers. In this different timeline, there is no Justice League to combat General Zod (Michael Shannon, so thoroughly bored) from destroying the planet for Kryptonians.
This is the first big screen solo outing for The Flash, and after none other than Tom Cruise, Stephen King, and James Gunn calling it one of the best superhero movies of all time, it’s hard to square how trifling and mediocre so much plays out as an example of a creative enterprise being pulled in too many directions. Miller was cast as the speedster almost ten years ago, and this tale has gone through so much tortured development, leaping through numerous filmmakers and writers, that its purpose has now gone from being a pillar of the expanding DC cinematic universe began with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel in 2013 to becoming the Snyderverse’s death knell. The premise of traveling back in time is meant for Barry to learn important lessons about grief and responsibility and the limits of his powers, but it’s also intended as the reboot option for the future of these cross-connected comic franchises. It allows Gunn, now the co-head of the new way forward for DC movies and TV, to keep what they want (presumably Margot Robbie and Jason Momoa) and ditch the rest (Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck, Black Adam, Shazam, and Zack Snyder’s overall creative influence). So reviewing The Flash as only a movie is inadequate; it’s also a larger ploy by its corporate overlords to reset their comic book universe. In that regard, the quality level of the movie is secondary to its mission of wiping the creative slate clean.
Where the movie works best is with its personal stakes and the strange but appealing chemistry between the two Millers. It’s an easy starting point to understand why Barry does what he does, to save his mother. This provides a sturdy foundation to build a character arc, with Barry coming to terms with accepting his grief rather than trying to eradicate it. That stuff works, and the final talk he has to wrap up this storyline has an emotional pull that none of the other DCU movies have exhibited. Who wouldn’t want one last conversation with a departed loved one, one last opportunity to say how you feel or to even tell them goodbye? This search for closure is a relatable and an effective vehicle for Barry to learn, and it’s through his tutelage of the other Barry that he gets to see beyond himself. The movie is at its best not with all its assorted cameos and goofy action (more on both later) but when it’s a buddy comedy between the two Barrys. The older Barry becomes a mentor to himself and has to teach this inexperienced version how to hone and control his powers as well as their limits. It puts the hyper-charged character into a teaching position where he has to deal with a student just like him (or just him). It serves as a soft re-education for the audience alongside the other Barry without being a full origin story. The impetuous young Barry wanting to have everything, and the elation he feels about his powers, can be fun, but it’s even more fun with the older Barry having to corral his pupil. It also allows the character an interactive checkpoint for his own maturity and mental growth. Miller’s exuberant performances are quite entertaining and never fail to hit the comedy beats.
The problem is that the movie puts so much emphasis on too many things outside of its titular hero. Much was made of bringing back Keaton to reprise his Batman after 30 years. I just wish he came back for a better reason and had legitimate things to add. His role is that of the retired gunslinger being called back into action, and there’s an innate understanding with Barry wanting to go back in time and save his family, but too much of this character’s inclusion feels like a stab at stoking audience nostalgia (the callback lines all made me groan). I highly enjoyed Keaton as Batman and appreciated how weird he could make the billionaire-turned-vigilante, but he’s no more formed here than a hologram. The same thing happens with the inclusion of Super Girl a.k.a. Kara Zor-El (Sasha Callie). In this universe, there is no Superman, so she’s our requisite super-powered alien that Zod is hunting to complete his plans for terraforming Earth. She’s an intriguing character as a tortured refugee who has lingering doubts about whether humanity is worth the sacrifice, but much of her usage is meant only to make us think about Superman. She’s not given material to make her own impression, so she simply becomes the imitation of the familiar, the shadow to the archetype already being left behind. But these character additions aren’t even the worst of the nostalgia nods, as the final climactic sequence involves a collision of worlds that harkens to just about every iteration of the famous DC heroes, resurrecting several with dodgy CGI and uncomfortable implications (spoilers… the inclusion of George Reeves, when he felt so typecast as TV’s Superman that he supposedly killed himself because he thought his acting career was over, can be galling).
The action of The Flash is mostly fine but with one exceptional example that boggles my mind. In the opening sequence, no less, Barry is trying to help clean up a crumbling hospital when it collapses and literally sends a reign of babies falling through the air. I was beside myself when this happened, horrified and then stupefied that this absurd action sequence was actually happening. Barry goes into super speed to save the day, which more or less reverts the world into super slow-mo, though he needs to power up first, so we get a quick edit of him stuffing food into his face to load up on calories. We go from Barry breaking into a falling vending machine, stuffing himself in the face with snacks, getting the green light from his suit which I guess measures his caloric intake, and then grab a baby and literally put it in a microwave to shield it from danger. Just describing this event makes me feel insane. I figure the filmmakers were going for an over-the-top approach that also provides light-hearted goofiness to separate the movie from the oppressively dark grist of Snyder’s movies. However, this goes so far into the direction of absurdity that it destroys its credibility. It’s hard for me to fathom many watching this misguided and horrifying CGI baby-juggling sequence and say, “Yes, more please,” rather than scoff and shake their head. It’s not like the rest of the movie keeps to this tone either, which makes the sequence all the more baffling. There are Flash rules that are inconsistently applied to the action; Barry’s caloric intake is never a worry again, and the effects of moving a person during super speed don’t ever seem to be a problem except for one spewing gross-out gag.
While not being an unmitigated disaster, it’s hard for me to see the movie that got so many figures in the entertainment industry raving. The Flash has some notable emotional stakes, some amusing buddy comedy, and some goofy special effects sequences that run the gamut from amusing to confounding, but it’s also quite a mess of a movie, and too many of its nods to the fandom feel like empty gestures of nostalgia compensating for imagination. For all it gets right, or at least keeps interesting, it seems like another cog in a multi-billion-dollar machine, a stopping point also intended to be a reset and starting point. It feels like the character wasn’t trusted enough by the studio to lead his own solo movie even after years of buildup with Miller, nine seasons of the popular TV series, and 80-plus years of prominent placement in DC comics.
Conversely, Across the Spider-Verse is a sequel that expands an already stuffed story but knows what stories and themes to elevate so they don’t get lost amidst the fast-paced lunacy. Taking place a year later, Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) has grown into his role as the new Spider-Man for his world. He strains to meet the expectations of his parents, and keep up his grades, while fulfilling the duties of a superhero jumping into danger. When Gwen Stacey (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) reappears to discuss joining the multiverse police, Miles jumps at the chance, having genuinely missed his other Spider friends, especially Gwen. There are countless Spider people in countless worlds, even including a Spider-T. Rex and a Spider-Car (Peter Parked Car, I believe the name was). Miguel O’Hara (voiced by Oscar Isaac) is the Spider-Man tasked with keeping order across the many interconnected multiverses, and he insists that sacrifice is essential to maintain balance, one that hits too close to home for Miles to abide.
The 2018 original is a hard act to follow, and while Across the Spider-Verse doesn’t quite overrule its predecessor it is a more than worthy sequel that has everything fans loved about the first trip. The visual inventiveness has been taken even higher, with the mixture of even more different animation and art styles. I loved seeing each Spider person and how they fit into their unique art style of their world, like the living water colors of Gwen’s world and the punky paper collage style of Spider-Punk (voiced by Daniel Kaluuya). There’s a villain that comes from a paper universe, so he resembles a three-dimensional paper construction with hand-scribbled notes appearing around him like Da Vinci’s commentary. There is something to dazzle your senses in every second of this movie. The visuals are colorful, creative, and groundbreaking with the level of detail and development. There’s probably even too much to fully take in with just one viewing. I want to see the movie again not just because it’s outstanding but so I can catch the split-second vernacular asterisk boxes that pop up throughout the movie. Going further into living comic book aesthetics, new characters will be introduced with boxes citing their comics issue reference point, and certain names and vocab will get their own citations as well. These are split-second additions, nothing meant to distract from the larger narrative. Simply put, this is one of the most gorgeous looking movies of all time, animated or live action. It’s bursting, thrumming, nearly vibrating with life and love stuffed into every nook and cranny, and it’s exhilarating to just experience a vivid, thriving world with animators operating at peak talent.
However, the movie has an engrossing story to better position all those eye-popping visuals. The worry with any modern multiverse story is that the unlimited possibilities of variations and opportunities for characters to do just about anything will overwhelm a narrative, or like The Flash, become a checklist of overburdened and empty fan service. The screenplay by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Dave Callaham is all about relationships. If Miles’ relationship with his stern police lieutenant father (voiced by Brian Tyree Henry) wasn’t such an important focal point, then the emotional stakes of the movie would be meaningless. We see a relatable struggle from both sides, the parents trying to connect with their growing child and give him enough space to find himself, and the child who clearly loves his parents but doesn’t fully appreciate or understand their concerns. They worry about Miles leaving them and whether others will love and support him like his parents. Miles has to experience a wider world of possibility, but these experiences make him appreciate what he has at home, and what could be permanently lost. I don’t mind saying there were more than a few moments that caused me to tear up. I found Gwen’s storyline equally compelling, and her turmoil over keeping her secret identity and then coming out to her father was rather moving. The family bond resurfacing will get me every time, and the simple action of a hug can be as heartwarming and fulfilling as any romantic ode. Across the Spider-Verse makes sure we care about the characters and their personal journeys.
At a towering 140 minutes, this is the longest (American) animated movie ever, and it’s still only one half of a larger story. I knew ahead of time this was only the first part so as soon as we entered Act Three I kept gearing up for the cliffhanger ending. Every five or so minutes I thought, “Okay, this is going to be the end,” and then it kept going, and I was relieved. Not just because I got to spend more time in this unique universe but each new moment added even more to raise the stakes, twist the intrigue, and make me excited for what could happen next. I was shaking in my seat at different points, from the excitement of different sequences to the emotional catharsis of other moments. I cannot wait to experience this same feeling when the story picks back up reportedly in March 2024, though I fear it will get delayed to late 2024.
Even with the unlimited possibility of jokes and silly mayhem, the filmmakers keenly understand that it doesn’t matter unless we care about the characters and their fates. I am shocked that a goofy character I thought was going to be a one-scene joke, The Spot (voiced by Jason Schwartzman), could end up becoming the ultimate destroyer of worlds. I think this reflection nicely summarizes the impeccable artistry of Across the Spider-Verse, where even the moments or characters misjudged as fleeting or inconsequential can be of great power. It’s a movie that is full of surprises and thrills and laughs, all in equal measure, and a blessed experience for a movie fan. In the crush of comic book multiverse madness, Across the Spider-Verse is a refreshing and rejuvenating creative enterprise, one that builds off the formidable talent of its predecessor and carries it even further into artistic excellence that reminds us how transporting movies can be. If you see one superhero multiverse movie this summer, the choice should be as obvious as an inter-dimensional spider bite.
Nate’s Grades:
The Flash: C
Across the Spider-Verse: A
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Elemental (2023)
The joke is how Pixar has taken its storytelling motif of examining The Secret Life Of [Blank] and showing what happens in our world when we just aren’t paying attention. We’ve had toys with emotions, bugs with emotions, fish with emotion, cars with emotion, robots with emotion, rats with emotion, and even emotions with emotions, so why not break things down to their basics and give the elements of carbon-based life their own emotions too?
In Element City, Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) belongs to the fire community living on the outskirts of town, as the big city wasn’t built for their kind. The earth people, and water people, and air people go about their business while the fire people form their own thriving offshoot. Her father and mother came across the sea to give their baby a new life, and the family shop will pass over to Ember’s management when her traditionalist father thinks she’s ready. Her whole life has been about serving her family and trying to live up to their hopes and dreams. This gets more complicated when Wade (voiced by Mamoudou Athie), a water person and a health inspector, has to report her family’s shop for code violations. They work together to save the shop and also learn from one another’s cultures and differing perspectives, and then this unexpected friendship becomes an even more unexpected romance, but can elements so different stay together?
I was pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable Elemental is to experience and how wondrous its visual presentation is to watch. It is a certifiable treat for the eyes, with so many dazzling colors and quirky but easily readable character designs. There’s a mixture of hand-drawn animation used as Spider-Verse-style accents that provides a pleasing element that allows the images to pop even more. I was never bored looking at a single second of this movie, and even with my theater’s 3-D presentation, the glasses didn’t darken the screen and lessen my overall enjoyment. By existing within a fantasy universe, it allows for every scene and every location to better inform you about this new world and its rules and highlights (fire baby carriages that are barbecue grills). This is a bright, colorful, and supremely enchanting movie to watch because, at least visually, it feels very well developed as far as its world building and atmosphere. What would a community of fire people tend to look like? What would their jobs be? What would their celebrations be like? Their heritage from the Old Country? Naturally, with any fantasy universe, you can nit-pick it to death with questions, such as why do people even bother wearing clothes in this world? What part of the exposed fire or water is observed as obscene? How exactly do these different communities have their offspring? What does air exactly eat for food?
Where Elemental really takes off is with its charming and affecting romance. It’s been a while since romance was at the forefront for a Pixar movie, since 2008’s WALL-E (a.k.a. the greatest Pixar movie). Now there are themes and resonance that go beyond the romance and also enrich it, like Ember’s personal conflict of being a first-generation immigrant daughter and upholding the traditions and wishes of her family at the expense of her personal desires, but the core of this movie is on the burgeoning feelings between Ember and Wade. The movie begins with them butting heads as two elements seemingly in conflict but it doesn’t exactly follow an enemies-to-lovers path. She runs hot and explosive with trying to keep things under control whereas he is deeply empathetic of others and wants to help them become their best selves. He accepts who he is, and the movie doesn’t equate his full-bodied embrace of big feelings as some point of weakness. It brings about laughs from exaggeration, the streaming rivers that burst forth from his eyes upon crying, but it’s his compassion and acceptance that challenges Ember for the better and helps her assert her sense of self. They’re good together, and Wade helps serve as a guide to the wider world for Ember as she’s been isolated her whole life. Their interactions are cute and heartwarming and elevated by pleasant vocal performances. I was drawn into their story and cared about their well-being, enough that I don’t mind sharing that I shed some water myself by the end (I guess this could also make some people mistake that I peed my pants, and I assure you that was not the case, dear reader).
While the core relationships are poignant and winning, the world building and metaphorical allegories feel half-finished and a tad confusing. The movie also goes surprisingly soft exploring its miscegenation metaphor of two elements being forbidden to mix romantically. This universe has four communities of living elements, though air is represented as clouds and those are, literally, water vapor, and the xenophobia and discrimination that the fire people endure feels like a direct parallel to a disadvantaged minority group. However, this isn’t explored in any satisfying depth. We’re told that fire people aren’t really wanted in the city, and the city isn’t really built for them, which is typified by a rail line that splashes water discharge. There’s a lot more that could have gone into this including a more elaborate examination of the harm of red-lining and restricting the economic mobility of one group for bigoted reasons (I know, I can already hear people scolding me for even asking for such socio-political commentary in a family film). However, this metaphor gets a little murky when you take into account the literal danger that living fire exudes. Yes, you can drown, and you can get crushed under earth, but these creatures aren’t walking incendiary devices. This doesn’t translate directly to people, and thus applying class metaphors to actual races can be circumspect. Ember’s worry is that she’ll explode if she gets too angry, and this causes literal physical destruction around her. You can say it’s meant to represent when hurt, angry people lash out that they can inadvertently harm others, but not everyone can incinerate a block because they lose their temper. This kind of undercuts the lesson on misplaced fear.
Also, so much of the external story consists of bad public planning and everyone’s lackadaisical attitude toward fixing this infrastructure miscue. Again, if the larger point was a society that is actively hostile to the fire people, then the ignorant city planning that actively harms a disenfranchised group of people makes sense, but without that larger underlying conflict, it all seems so strangely forgotten. Much of this conflict is on the structure of a wall against a coming buildup of water, something possibly deadly to the fire community, so you would think this community would be a lot more concerned about this looming conflict. You might think that others would organize to provide better safeguards or maybe they would get the city’s attention. That this threat goes unreported and is played at such low stakes makes it all feel forced and manufactured. If the characters don’t seem to think it’s a big deal, then who are we to worry as well? And I can hear some of you trying to branch this out into, say, a metaphor for larger problems that go ignored, like climate change or societal inequalities, but that’s giving Elemental too much credit.
Elemental reminds me of 2020’s Onward, coincidentally one of the last movies I saw in theaters before the pandemic shutdown. I was worried that the core story looked weak but it was actually the world-building that was a bit hazy and under-developed and the emotional core was strong and authentic. It’s the same with Elemental, and while I can quibble about its dropped potential and misshapen world, it has a strong foundation that matters more. The relationships between Wade and Ember and Ember and her family are what makes the movie work and ultimately what made me smile and tear up. It’s an emotional nourishment that makes the movie feel satisfying and worthwhile no matter the lingering questions for this bizarre world. It’s also one of Pixar’s best looking movies, fully deserving of being seen on a large screen for added impact. Elemental has the right DNA for a charming and enjoyable family film for everyone.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Reality (2023)
Reality is a film experience where the devotion to verisimilitude is at the sacrifice of drama. The dialogue is reportedly taken one hundred percent from the FBI recordings of their questioning of the preposterously named Reality Winner, played by Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria). She works for a branch of U.S. national security and smuggled a classified document and submitted it to journalists to expose Russia’s intent to hack U.S. voting systems in the 2016 presidential election. The movie takes place more or less in real time as two FBI agents (Josh Hamilton, Marchant Davis) come to Reality’s small home in Augusta, Georgia, begin a search, and question her duties, behavior, and security clearances at her work. We’re inundated early with mundane details of asking about dogs and yoga class coverage while FBI agents are raiding Reality’s home, and the movie doesn’t allude to what everything is about until halfway through. Again, strictly sticking to the script of the government encounter limits creatively where and what the actors can do, so the overall inert feeling is, I suppose, part of the appeal for writer/director Tina Setter’s movie, based on her stage play. I think some people will read the protracted build-up as unsettling in its stubborn ordinariness, or that withholding the juicy drama only makes the collateral mystery and suspicions stronger. Reality is an interesting story told in a frustrating and gimmicky fashion that lessens its dramatic impact. If I just wanted to watch actors re-enact the transcripts, I’d seek out a documentary. I’m thinking of something like 2012’s Compliance, based on a true story and told over the course of one day, but it was harrowing and made me have to watch with my fingers covering my eyes because of the grueling drama that would not look away. There are a few interesting visual quirks here, like actors blinking out of a scene when they say words redacted from the transcript, but mostly it feels too stage bound. Sweeney comes unglued in pretty convincing manner as her different defenses and obfuscations crumble through the interrogation. Reality is a well-meaning movie meant to better frame one young woman’s extraordinary actions through an ordinary lens, but I kept getting antsy for the movie to drop its gimmick and accept that there was more inherent drama in this story than what was going unsaid while we discussed yoga and dogs.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Hulk (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released June 20, 2003:
Comic book movies are all the rage these days. The X-Men films, Spider-Man, even Daredevil all managed some level of success because they were, at their heart, entertaining pulp and treated the source material with some sense of reverence. Now Ang Lee’’s monstrous film Hulk lumbers into theaters and one could best describe it as being too serious for its own good.
Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) is the quiet guy, the one who bottles everything inside. His lab partner Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) has recently broken off their relationship due to his emotionally shut-off demeanor. Well Bruce gets hit with a lethal dose of gamma rays and it kicks up something inside him. You see, Bruce’s long-absent father (Nick Nolte, looking frightfully like his drunken mug shot photo) experimented some kind of regeneration serum on himself. When he fathered Bruce he passed on whatever genetic alteration. So now when Bruce gets mad he turns into a 15-foot raging Jolly Green Giant (the CGI in this movie is not good). He starts enjoying the freedom letting go can bring. Nothing gets him more mad than some yuppie (Josh Lucas, badly miscast) trying to buy out his lab and then kill him to sell his DNA to the military. Along the way, Betty’’s father (Sam Elliott) tries to hunt Bruce and his greener-on-the-other-side alter ego for the good of us all.
Director Ang Lee has injected most of his films with a sense of depression and repression, from the biting and darkly astute The Ice Storm to the stoic Gary Cooper-like silence of the aerobatic samurai in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. He’’s a master filmmaker without question. Lee bites off more than he can chew with Hulk much like the gifted Cameron Crowe did with the sci-fi Vanilla Sky. Lee is so damn ambitious that Hulk tries to be everything and it ends up fulfilling nothing. His film is the most ambitious and the most tedious super hero/comic book movie of all time. What does it say when the super green Hulk has more personality than the bland Bruce Banner?
The acting is a non-issue here. Connelly remains one of the most beautiful women in all of movies and has incredibly expressive eyes and brows. She has this strand of hair that’s always in the right side of her face. It’’s so awkward. Bana gets the least fun part as the mentally scarred kid afraid of his own anger. He doesn’’t do much but then he isn’’t given much. Elliott overacts with impressive gusto whereas Nolte overacts like every line was his last breath.
After about an hour or so of beleaguered talking and flat characters, I started to become restless. I wanted to see Hulk smash, Hulk smash good. Instead what you get is endless scenes of cheesy speeches, sci-fi babble speech, phony philosophy, and mind-numbingly awful pacing. Seriously, Hulk has worse pacing than glaciers. You’’ll see the Mona Lisa yellow faster than this movie will be over. And in some weird paradox, I think it’ will never be over.
Lee attempts to make the film a living comic book. You’’ve never seen this many wipes short of a Brady Bunch marathon on TV Land. Lee splits his screen into multiple panels and slides them around much like the layout of a comic book. However, this visual cue is overused and calls attention to itself in a “how-arty-are-we” kind of pretentious way. If Hulk was attempting to be a comic book movie, then where the hell did all the action go? This movie could have been subtitled The Hulk Goes to Therapy because everything excluding an over-the-top final act revolves around people working out childhood issues. Man, there’’s nothing I like to see more during the summer than a $150 million-dollar movie about – people working out childhood issues.
Hulk is an overlong and meandering film that’s incredibly serious, incredibly labored, and incredibly boring. Someone needs to tell the creators of this film to lighten up. The big-screen adaptation of the big green id may have heavy doses of Freudian psychoanalysis (try and tie THAT with the merchandising onslaught) but the film is barren when it comes to fun. Even comic book fans should be disappointed. I heard a story of a kid who saw Hulk and asked his mom when the movie was going to start, and she replied, “90 minutes ago.” Should you see Hulk in the theater at full price? No. Instead, give your money to me. It will have more resonance.
Hulk mad? Audience mad! Audience leave theater. See other better movies instead. Hulk sad. No Hulk 2. Audience happy.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Ang Lee’s Hulk is a unique experience that no other comic book movie has delivered in the ensuing twenty years. It’s clearly trying to do something heady, something more Freudian and psychological and cerebral, and yet it’s also doing so in a clumsy, wipe-heavy, panel-sliding bonanza of split screens and goofy transition shots. This movie would be fascinating to dissect if it wasn’t also so crushingly and unrepentantly boring. Even having seen the movie in 2003, I was still shocked how bored I was re-watching all 138 minutes in 2023. It’s such a strange experience to watch a movie that, at any moment, can be so weird and different, and then in the next minute make you contemplate doing your taxes again.
I think what Lee and his screenwriting partner James Schamus, who has written nine Lee movies going back to their very first, 1991’s Pushing Hands, were most intrigued by the Jekyll/Hyde allegory. Hulk is not alone in this regard in the realm of super hero dramatics; many characters lean into their alter ego as a form of personal wish-fulfillment, processing trauma, and/or freedom not allowed under their normal persona. The added complication with the Hulk is the monster factor, that when the man, Bruce Banner (Eric Bana), loses his temper and he unleashes his “big green id,” the ferocity he was holding back. The man/monster dynamic is what clearly interested Lee and Schamus, so we get plenty of dweeby Banner being bossed around and then confessing that, after his transformation, he likes it when he lets go and just succumbs to his more “smash everything” urges. However, this story angle is just crushed by the overwhelming weight of the overwrought psychoanalysis of Banner’s daddy issues and repression. The problem with this heavy-handed approach is that the answers are obvious and yet also confounding at every turn. Bruce’s father David (Nick Nolte) experimented on his own DNA, which he passed onto baby Bruce. The implications are used more as a handy explanation for why Bruce didn’t die from his fateful gamma radiation accident than as a cautionary tale of human experimentation. The repeated flashback reveals are drawn out far too long with the most obvious conclusions (Baby Bruce watched his father kill his mother and now he’s… upset). Every time his old family bedroom door showed up again, I would slump in my seat, losing more willpower. Likewise, it feels like Nolte is just crashing into the plot like an unwelcome sitcom guest, on a different acting plane and hamming it up as part-hobo and part-very transparent mad scientist. The man creates Hulk dogs from poodles and sets them on his son’s girlfriend. He bites a thick electrical cable like he’s in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. It’s silly and not worthy of portentous psychoanalysis with a figure this one-dimensional. David is such a boring and obvious bad dad figure with traits of megalomania and score-settling, so Bruce’s daddy issues are an extended story obstacle I was eager to already have gotten over.
Then there’s Lee’s artistic decision to film the movie like a living comic book, with the screen transforming into the panels and splash page art of sequential media. The problem with this is that movies are already sequential media, they’re already one image leading to the next to create a specific artistic impression. Lee’s editing and visual artifice lets you know at every turn that You Are Watching a Comic Book Movie. It broke my immersion every time, and even worse it detracted from the drama of the moment. A poorly timed split-screen or image swap can create its own form of derisive attention. I challenge anyone to watch the demise of Josh Lucas’ smarmy corporate bully and celebrate the freeze frame that then gets engulfed with flames and speed wipes to the next scene. It’s reminiscent of 2008’s Speed Racer, a movie I also just recently re-watched for a new evaluation since it’s taken on a bit of cult status, where the screen is overburdened with oppressive visual gimmicks, many transitional, to make it feel like a living anime. The problem is that live-action is its own reality, and trying to duplicate one from the pages of comics or the screen of high-energy anime brings its own tonal risks. Some times an artist can perfectly meld the different worlds, like 2010’s Scott Pilgrim Versus the World or 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse, and then other times, most often, you get stuff like Speed Racer and Hulk, movies that are trying so hard and annoying you with their try-hard visual whimsy. It’s not pretension as I dubbed it in 2003, it’s more grasping desperation to ape the source material, and it gets oh so tiresome. You might as well turn it into a drinking game whenever there’s a snap zoom or a strange transition wipe that makes you roll your eyes or release a deep, lung-clearing sigh.
The special effects weren’t quite there at the time to better realize the big green guy, though they were close. Most of the brief Hulk appearances are during darkness, to better camouflage the special effects (naturally Lee would say it’s to build up anticipation, but I think we know why). The big action doesn’t kick in until 90 minutes, and it’s a long slog to get to that point, almost like Lee and Schamus were wanting to stoke audience rage, grumbling and demanding something get smashed after the protracted buildup to perhaps better identify with the hero. This is a movie with a Hulk poodle and Nick Nolte turning into an electrical monster (his infamous 2002 mugshot was mere weeks after filming finished). The abilities of the Hulk also feel inconsistent, and I’m not just talking about the elasticity of his pants never breaking. He can jump miles into the air from simply standing? The darker human impulses that gave birth to the Hulk are so emphasized that the green guy feels less like an alter ego or other half of Banner and more like a fleeting dream, a mirage of a character that is merely this boring man getting to feel like a big man. Even the dichotomy feels so overwrought and limited in exploration, settling on psycho babble patter. As I said in my incensed 2003 review, “This movie could have been subtitled The Hulk Goes to Therapy because everything excluding an over-the-top final act revolves around people working out childhood issues. Man, there’’s nothing I like to see more during the summer than a $150 million-dollar movie about – people working out childhood issues.”
This is an interesting misstep for Lee, who has since gone to win two Oscars for Best Director in 2005 and 2012. He was hopping from genre to genre with wild abandon. He went from a dark suburban drama to a Civil War drama to a martial arts fantasy to Hulk to an award-winning tragic gay romance to a historical thriller set in occupied China that earned an NC-17 rating to a comedy about putting together the famous Woodstock concert to a mystical fantasy drama about a man abandoned at sea with a wild tiger. Perhaps only Steven Soderbergh could cite a comparatively varied resume. Lee’s last two movies feel more like failed exercises in the technology of high-frame rates than complete or engaging movies. He hasn’t directed a film since 2019’s Gemini Man, though he has a movie dramatizing the Thrilla in Manilla in the works (NOT written by Schamus, at least as of this writing). The man’s artistic need to experiment with form and special effects is evident with the entire visual approach to Hulk.
You’ll likely never see another Hulk solo movie again, and that’s because Universal still owns the rights to the character, at least for solo adventures. So if Marvel were to give their version of Banner (Mark Ruffalo) his own movie, they’d have to split the profits with Universal, and even though the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has become the gargantuan money-making machine it is today, they don’t want to share the wealth. You’ll just have to enjoy Ruffalo’s appearances in Marvel movies and the occasional TV series, like last year’s She Hulk. It’s probably for the best considering that the character seems to work best as part of an ensemble rather than a lead, as also evidenced by the 2008 big screen Incredible Hulk with Edward Norton. The only lasting factor from that movie that carried over into the ongoing MCU was William Hurt as General Ross, and since Hurt passed away in 2022, he has been recast as Harrison Ford, so now there is no connective tissue at all between the last big screen Hulk movie and the Marvel movies.
My original review in 2003 was full of incredulous snark, much of which I can still feel to this day. I’m less angry by this movie, as it takes something really offensive to get under my skin as a moviegoer these days, unless you’re Dinesh D’Souza, but I’m just as baffled, not that the filmmakers wanted to try something more cerebral and psychological but that their idea of that was so murky and underwritten. It’s not a smart movie, and the visual razzle dazzle is distracting, goofy, and tonally incongruent with the overwrought attempts at drama, in between killer poodles that is. This is a curious movie, a rare example of talented artists really just fumbling at a high level of studio money. I felt bad for Jennifer Connelly who seems to have been given one acting note: look wide-eyed and stunned. As a superhero movie, and as a summer blockbuster, Hulk will disappoint. As an experimental big-budget Freudian analysis of the duality of superheroes, Hulk will also disappoint. This is such a strange and boring movie, but it’s not worth your time in 2003 or 2023 or any other year. The grade remains the same twenty years later, sad to say.
Re-View Grade: D+
nathanzoebl 
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