The Current War is a fairly low wattage affair

The Current War has spent so much time wandering in the cinematic wilderness that I really wanted to like it more than I did. Unfortunately the story of the film’s time in movie purdah may be the most interesting thing about it.

The film was screened at the Toronto Film Festival two years ago and was all set for release in October 2017. However as a Harvey Weinstein production it got caught up in his legal troubles and the demise of his company. In the end all trace of Weinstein has been removed from the credits, the film has been sold to new distributors and goes on release in the UK this month and the United States in October – just two years late.

In a perfect world The Current War would be the little movie that could; triumphing over adversity and sweeping all before it at the Oscars. Sadly this is an imperfect world and its chances are slim.

Like most films showcased at Toronto this was originally seen as an Academy Awards contender. It ticks a lot of Oscar bait boxes; serious subject, period drama, big cast in mutton chop whiskers, lavish production values, and educational too. In the end though this is a pretty workmanlike affair which fundamentally lacks drama and tries to cover too much ground.

Set in the latter part of the 19^th century it’s the story of the battle between two men, Thomas Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Joseph Westinghouse (Michael Shannon), to bring electricity to America. It should be about the dawn of the modern age, instead it is an argument about the merits of Edison’s Direct Current system versus the Alternative Current system proposed by Westinghouse. Nikola Tesla, played by Nicholas Hoult, also pops up but gets fairly short shrift.

One big flaw is that we are given no one to root for; Westinghouse was marginally the more decent of the two but it’s a close run thing. There is no real insight into these historical ciphers. The film becomes a debate about respective philosophies and since we are never told the fundamental difference between the two systems – there’s some flimsy guff about hosepipes – we can’t really form an opinion. It’s an argument that unfolds in front of us but in which, apart from those who are electricians or physicists, we have no agency.

Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon compensates for the basic lack of drama with a very fussy aesthetic. There are so many overhead ‘God shots’ that there should be a warning for vertigo sufferers. The camera operator also appears to be on a bungee cable as shots disappear out of the top of the frame or pan dizzyingly left or right. This endless movement took me right out of the picture. There is a difference between creating rhythm and letting the story settle.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Shannon anchor the film with solid, if unspectacular performances. One advantage of the delay is that Tom Holland is now a star but he’s not given a lot to do until it’s too late and Spider-Man fans will be disappointed. Overall the effect is very stagey – this is playwright turned screenwriter Michael Mitnick’s first screenplay – and no amount of dizzy camera tricks can change that.

Given the story this film should have been better than it is but the reality is we don’t know whose story it is or why we should care. There are so many heavy-handed allusions to the development of moving pictures that the overall message seems to be that we wouldn’t be watching anything at all if it wasn’t for his contribution.

Overall The Current War is a low wattage affair in which sparks resolutely refuse to fly.

This Spider-Man is good but not great

When I started reading comic books, back in the early 1960s, single-issue stories were the norm. Everything, with very rare exceptions, was done in one. Mind you in those days you had 25 pages of story to play with in book-length stories, although most issues had a 17-page main story and an 8-page back-up.

One of Marvel’s great innovations was the introduction of the story arc. Suddenly the narrative could run for three or four issues, the result was a more novelistic approach to storytelling and the beginning of an upward curve in the age of the readership. That said, this was still an immense source of frustration for those in the UK given the randomness of distribution.

The upshot of this is an increasingly interdependent comic book landscape and the growth of the comic book universe. Which brings us to Spider-Man: Far from Home, a film which doesn’t really need to exist in its own right but is vital to the continued integrity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

I should point out, as Tom Holland did in the trailer, that if you haven’t seen Avengers Endgame (2019) this would be a good point to stop reading this blog.

The death of Tony Stark/Iron Man along with, to a lesser extent, the absence of Captain America, Thor, and The Black Widow, have caused ripples in the Marvel Universe. The main function of this latest Spider-Man film is to allow those ripples to spread and ultimately disperse. This is a world which has lost some of its greatest heroes and dealt with the loss and recovery of half of its population in the so-called ‘Blip’ so there are a lot of blanks to fill in.

Meanwhile there is another emergent Avengers-level threat as a series of giant elemental creatures powered by air, fire, earth and water appear all across Europe. These may be from another version of earth in a parallel dimension – yet more complexity – and they are being pursued by Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), a hero from their world.

Inconveniently the only hero from our earth who appears to be handy is Spider-Man but he’s a bit mopey after the death of his mentor. Conveniently however he is on a school trip throughout Europe so the writers can bounce him from city to city as the creatures appear.

Mysterio is there to restore some of Spider-Man’s much-needed confidence and together they can combat the creatures in a story which seems to take Ian Fleming’s ‘thrilling cities’ approach to narrative.

It has to be said that Jake Gyllenhaal is just terrific; he is the ideal casting for a comic book movie. Ironically there was a time when he might have been Spider-Man but watching this film you get the sense he’d actually be a pretty good Superman.  He’s great and so prominent that Spidey ends up a bit like a guest star in his own movie; he’s not a character, more of a plot device.

Spider-Man has nothing to do except swing around on webs. There’s no wisecracking, there’s no exhilaration, there’s none of the stuff that made him such a fun character. This applies to a lot of the cast; Maria Hill for example is really underwritten, seen but not heard most of the time.

Actually the writing in the movie is very weak. It’s essentially a Young Adult romance with some super heroics thrown in. Compared to his work on Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) or Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), Chris McKenna’s writing seems very flat here. It looks a bit like ticking boxes rather than telling an interesting story. How convenient, for example, that everyone in Spider-Man’s life – and therefore in this film – were among those who were blipped. How much more interesting would it have been if Peter Parker or MJ or any of the other principal characters had no disappeared? This and many other things go unaddressed.

Spider-Man: Far from Home does all that you would expect but for me it was just a little flat; good but not great. However it does offer the promise of better days to come with a mid-credits sequence that might be one of the most significant events in the MCU and I’m really excited for that.

Apollo 11... a genuinely epic adventure

There is little doubt that the Apollo space programme was humankind’s boldest endeavour, in particular the Apollo 11 mission, which put men on the moon. The fact that we so quickly tired of this magnificent accomplishment speaks poorly of us as a society. Now, on the 50^th anniversary of this extraordinary event, those of us who were here first time round get a chance to appreciate just how remarkable it was.

Of course those of the generation seeing it for the first time may marvel for different reasons; for example that this outstanding achievement was accomplished with pen and paper, slide rules, pocket protectors, crisp white shirts, sober looking men in crew cuts, and less computer power than there is in the average schoolchild’s calculator. This is old school space exploration.

Apollo 11 is a superb documentary which transcends the form and takes us where few documentary makers have gone before. Editor and director Todd Douglas Miller has created an adventure that unfolds not quite in real time – the mission took eight days – but certainly as if it were happening in front of us.

There are no contemporary interviews, no nostalgia, and no reminiscences. This is simply archive footage presented, some of it for the first time, to tell a breathtakingly daring and present story. Where graphics are needed they are the satisfyingly low-fi graphics of the period; clunky black and white images which make the trip to the moon seem like a game of Pong.

One of the strengths of the film is its soundscape, the voices of the astronauts – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins – are mixed with the sonorous tones of Walter Cronkite, and the calm reassurance of fellow astronauts Jim Lovell and Deke Slayton at Mission Control, as our greatest adventure develops.

It is not a film that dwells on the scale or the improbability of the mission or indeed of the geopolitics of the Space Race. The only context provided is President Kennedy’s 1962 statement that they would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The rest is the story of a challenge accepted and ultimately fulfilled.

The real key to the success of the film lies in it unseen footage. NASA had planned to make a huge, widescreen feature documentary of the mission but it was scrapped for commercial reasons. Much of the footage has never been seen until now and it is breath-taking. This is high quality, 65mm wide-screen footage shot in the style of those sci-fi blockbusters of the period such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) so this has the look and feel of a movie epic. It goes without saying that you should see it on the biggest screen you can.

The devil however is in the detail and it is those things that were known but not revealed at the time that make Apollo 11 genuinely gripping. The moment, for example, when the astronauts go quiet and then come back on radio to reveal they had taken manual control because the computers were about to put them down in a deep crater. Or the fuel gauge which goes into the red and then some so they are effectively running on fumes when they finally touch down. This is heart-stopping stuff.

Throughout all of this great achievement there is remarkably little fuss. These are men going about a job; Armstrong and Aldrin get all the glory but the film also encourages us to feel a little sympathy for Collins as he keeps his lonely vigil in lunar orbit.

Like 2001 its fictional predecessor, Apollo 11 is a piece of visual poetry. A stirring saga of human endeavour and a reminder in these incredibly venal and self-serving times of what we are truly capable when we put our minds to it.

Maradona - the man who would be king

Identifying your favourite footballer has a lot to do with the age you are when you first see them; a bit like deciding on who is your favourite James Bond. I was thirteen when I saw Pele in his pomp at the 1970 World Cup; he was and remains majestic. I was entranced. I was similarly entranced when I saw Johann Cruyff pull off his trademark turn for the first time against Sweden in the 1974 World Cup. Maradona on the other hand left me a bit cold.

For many Maradona is the greatest of all time, or GOAT as we must now call them, but for me he comes a distant third behind Pele and Cruyff. I appreciate his skill, he was capable of sublime execution and vision, but there was just something about his play. There was a sense of drive and desperation which did not compare with the elegance and innateness of Pele and Cruyff. I never got the sense of joy from his play that I did with the others; even when he was celebrating it seemed more like catharsis.

It is this sense which is superbly investigated in Asif Kapadia’s latest film Diego Maradona. Although Maradona is still alive, unlike his other subjects, the film does round out a trilogy with Senna (2010) and Amy (2015) which is an anthem for doomed youth. Drawing exclusively on archive footage Kapadia paints an illuminating but frankly rather sad picture of Maradona during his years at Napoli, from 1984 to 1991.

This was a time when he made them one of the best teams in Europe but there was a price to be paid. Maradona may have gained the whole world but there is little doubt that Kapadia is suggesting it cost him his soul.

He has taken some 500 hours of archive footage and distilled it down to a gripping two-hour narrative of triumph and disaster. There are no talking head sequences, instead there are only archive audio clips interspersed with some contemporary audio interviews including with Maradona himself. The result is absorbing.

The key to the film for me lies in its title. Although he was normally referred to as Maradona, the film eschews the mononym; the title is Diego Maradona and this is important. Kapadia’s thesis is that there is a Jekyll and Hyde theme at play here. The superstar’s personal  trainer Fernando Signorini explains it very well.

For Signorini, who knew him better than most, there were two distinct people; Diego, who was innocent and likable and Maradona who was crafty and devious. According to Signorini you would do anything for Diego, but you wouldn’t give Maradona the time of day.

Through clever use of archive footage Kapadia gives the sense of these two characters vying for supremacy. In the early scenes in Naples he is young, enthusiastic, and a little overawed. However as the film goes on we can see in his eyes the sense of trepidation and anxiety; a sense that he is being trapped in a world he cannot quite control.

This after all is the quandary of Maradona. On the field he was master of all he surveyed; off the field he was a puppet increasingly in the thrall of some pretty shady characters. In the end he is the victim of his own hubris and, perhaps like Maradona himself, we are left to ponder what might have been.

Godzilla...when you come at the king, you best not miss

A sequel to the 2014 version of Godzilla and at the same time an extension of the monsterverse franchise that continued with Kong: Skull Island (2017), Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a film that delivers exactly what it promises. The log line for this movie should be ‘All kaiju, all the time’ because that’s pretty much what we have; a whisker over two hours of Godzilla alternately knocking seven bells out of monsters and having seven bells knocked out of him. And it’s great fun.

There’s no need to do all of that slow reveal of the monsters that you get in other movies. This film starts in 2014 at the end of the last movie with Godzilla stomping his way through what remains of San Francisco. Dodging his giant feet are scientists Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga and their kids.

Cut to five years later and we are in a post-Godzilla world in which other giant creatures known as Titans – ‘seventeen and counting’ – have been discovered. They are being held in secret by Monarch, the quasi-governmental SHIELD/Haliburton hybrid which is a constant in the monsterverse.

Enter a group of eco-terrorists led by Charles Dance who want to free all of the Titans believing they hold the key to a new, reborn, Earth. Their main target is the ultimate apex predator, the three-headed King Ghidorah. If he can be freed then all of the Titans will be drawn to him and in the aftermath of their rampaging the planet can be revitalised. Of course there is already an apex predator in the shape of Godzilla who plainly wants to have a say in proceedings.

The scene is set for a series of monstrous set pieces as the existing Titans – Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Rodan, and Mothra – slug it out while Monarch tries to pick up the pieces. These battle scenes are thrilling moments of colossal combat as the behemoths are prepared to slug it out with the planet as the prize.

This surely is what you came in for. I have heard people say that the human stories and characters – Chandler and Farmiga and their whiny daughter Millie Bobby Brown – are one dimensional. So what? That’s like going to La Scala for the opera and complaining about the shade of the curtains; it’s not why you paid your money.

If I want to see Chandler and Farmiga agonise over marital difficulties I’ll got see Carol (2015) or Up in the Air (2009), in which they are both excellent. Here they are just characters who say some stuff to fill in the gap while the big guy catches his breath between slugfests. I don’t care. Likewise Brown could be replaced by a cardboard cut-out at any stage and you wouldn’t notice. Again, I don’t care.

The clue is in the title. It’s a Godzilla movie. Granted it’s not a Japanese Godzilla movie – of which Shin Godzilla (2016) is superb – but lacking those specific Japanese cultural tropes this is a very good monster movie.

There is much to admire here. I love that there is a sense of scale to Godzilla – a singular failing of the Japanese films. He starts off colossal here and then puts on a couple of growth spurts. I love too that Mothra is treated right; there was always a spiritual quality to her in the Toho movies and this is preserved here. My only regret on the monster front was the absence of Ebirah, star of Ebirah, Monster of the Deep (1966), star of my first kaiju movie and the first film I ever went to see on my own. Still, this is an expanding franchise so I still have high hopes.

Despite their lack of appreciable story or character Chandler and Farmiga do well with that they are given, as do the likes of Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins, and Ken Watanabe. This is difficult to do with a straight face and their performances are wholehearted and absolutely what is needed.

So, does it have human drama and emotion? Not so much. Does it have kaiju laying waste to continents? In spades. That’s why Godzilla, King of the Monsters is such rip-roaring, knockabout, giant-sized fun and why you should stick around for the credits and the post-credits scene,

A sequel to the 2014 version of Godzilla and at the same time an extension of the monsterverse franchise that continued with Kong: Skull Island (2017), Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a film that delivers exactly what it promises. The log line for this movie should be ‘All kaiju, all the time’ because that’s pretty much what we have; a whisker over two hours of Godzilla alternately knocking seven bells out of monsters and having seven bells knocked out of him. And it’s great fun.

There’s no need to do all of that slow reveal of the monsters that you get in other movies. This film starts in 2014 at the end of the last movie with Godzilla stomping his way through what remains of San Francisco. Dodging his giant feet are scientists Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga and their kids.

Cut to five years later and we are in a post-Godzilla world in which other giant creatures known as Titans – ‘seventeen and counting’ – have been discovered. They are being held in secret by Monarch, the quasi-governmental SHIELD/Haliburton hybrid which is a constant in the monsterverse.

Enter a group of eco-terrorists led by Charles Dance who want to free all of the Titans believing they hold the key to a new, reborn, Earth. Their main target is the ultimate apex predator, the three-headed King Ghidorah. If he can be freed then all of the Titans will be drawn to him and in the aftermath of their rampaging the planet can be revitalised. Of course there is already an apex predator in the shape of Godzilla who plainly wants to have a say in proceedings.

The scene is set for a series of monstrous set pieces as the existing Titans – Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Rodan, and Mothra – slug it out while Monarch tries to pick up the pieces. These battle scenes are thrilling moments of colossal combat as the behemoths are prepared to slug it out with the planet as the prize.

This surely is what you came in for. I have heard people say that the human stories and characters – Chandler and Farmiga and their whiny daughter Millie Bobby Brown – are one dimensional. So what? That’s like going to La Scala for the opera and complaining about the shade of the curtains; it’s not why you paid your money.

If I want to see Chandler and Farmiga agonise over marital difficulties I’ll got see Carol (2015) or Up in the Air (2009), in which they are both excellent. Here they are just characters who say some stuff to fill in the gap while the big guy catches his breath between slugfests. I don’t care. Likewise Brown could be replaced by a cardboard cut-out at any stage and you wouldn’t notice. Again, I don’t care.

The clue is in the title. It’s a Godzilla movie. Granted it’s not a Japanese Godzilla movie – of which Shin Godzilla (2016) is superb – but lacking those specific Japanese cultural tropes this is a very good monster movie.

There is much to admire here. I love that there is a sense of scale to Godzilla – a singular failing of the Japanese films. He starts off colossal here and then puts on a couple of growth spurts. I love too that Mothra is treated right; there was always a spiritual quality to her in the Toho movies and this is preserved here. My only regret on the monster front was the absence of Ebirah, star of Ebirah, Monster of the Deep (1966), star of my first kaiju movie and the first film I ever went to see on my own. Still, this is an expanding franchise so I still have high hopes.

Despite their lack of appreciable story or character Chandler and Farmiga do well with that they are given, as do the likes of Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins, and Ken Watanabe. This is difficult to do with a straight face and their performances are wholehearted and absolutely what is needed.

So, does it have human drama and emotion? Not so much. Does it have kaiju laying waste to continents? In spades. That’s why Godzilla, King of the Monsters is such rip-roaring, knockabout, giant-sized fun and why you should stick around for the credits and the post-credits scene,