The Oslo bands were called Mayhem and Burzum.
And to say they got a little too INTO the whole dark/Goth/Death Metal ethos is an understatement.
Here’s an outline of the “true” story.
The film version of “Lords of Chaos?” It opens this in limited release Friday, wider over the course of the next two months.
The payoff comes midway through “Destroyer,” the big moment when all the street cred that Nicole Kidman has been building up with her worn, raw, nose-busted appearance in scene after scene.
She’s a deep undercover cop ready to storm into a bank that’s being robbed, taking out a gang she infiltrated and hellbent on taking down its charismatic leader (Toby Kebbell). Two cops emerge from a patrol car and take up positions.
“Let’s go,” Det. Erin Bell growls.
“You’re not gonna wait for BACKUP?”
“This is a f—–g GUNFIGHT!”
Director Karyn Kusama (“Girlfight”) stages a decent shootout, even if she is no Michael Mann, Walter Hill, Kathryn Bigelow or Antoine Fuqua. But what she was going for here was a violent tone poem sketched in shades of addiction, guilt, grief, revenge and responsibility. The screenwriters and the director herself, with her addiction to closeups of her star, get in their own way and keep that tone poem from coming off.
The screenplay takes us back and forth in time, to events eighteen years before, when Erin was a young cop who had fallen in love with the partner (Sebastian Stan) who was with her as they crossed ethical lines to cozy up to Silas and his murderous gang.
Something went sideways. People died. Loot was stashed. And now, all these years later, with a daughter she’s barely raised (Jade Pettyjohn) who is making her first Big Mistake about a man, and colleagues who give her too long a leash mainly because they don’t want to be around her, Erin is strung-out, drunk a lot of the time and looking for one last chance at redemption.
“If you come back , I’ll kill you. It’ll be easy. Because I don’t care what happens to me.”
But whatever Kusama was going for, in delivering her Oscar winning star, one of the great pale screen beauties of our time, in splotchy, mottled brown-toothed closeups, she all but ensured all anybody would talk about here is Kidman’s “transformation,” her “courage” in playing somebody with Erin’s hard highway miles showing in every wrinkle, every dingy gray hair, every freckle or age spot (look at her hands) the camera captures.
Flipping back and forth in time, we can see the young undercover cop and the digital kiss of youth Kidman wears in her scenes with her partner — conspiring, planning, reacting to the violence that they’re unable to prevent, “getting their stories straight” to cover up what they knew and when they knew it.
Kusama’s film has hints of the Jason Patric/Jennifer Jason Leigh-Lili Fini Zanuck drug thriller “Rush” in it, of William Friedkin’s cops making too many compromises, endangering too many innocents to catch the villain in “To Live and Die in LA.” .
But the Phil Hay/Matt Manfredi script is so caught up in trickiness — confusing time shifts, long, bland whispered stretches between the action beats — that “Destroyer” fritters away any chance it has at suspense, any forward motion the narrative might have achieved.
Erin is hunting a “Destroyer,” and its obvious she has become one herself — pitiless, beyond the law. Her capture of a female bank robber — played by Tatiana Maslany — with whom she has history has the film’s roughest violence and grittiest moments. And yet Erin is not utterly blind to the damage she’s passed on to others, even her daughter.
Focusing so narrowly on her lead character allows Kusuma to get this point across. But zeroing in on the transformation her leading lady makes becomes a distraction.
And when all anybody is talking about is how rough Kidman “looks” in the movie, it’s no wonder audiences have ignored it, and no great surprise that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences “snubbed” her and it. It’s a star vehicle, awards bait and a showcase thriller that barely holds your interest as you wait through the whispers and “She looks TERRIBLE” closeups for something exciting or moving to happen.
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, violence, some sexual content and brief drug use
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Toby Kebbell, Sebastian Stan, Tatiana Maslany, Scoot McNairy, Toby Huss, Bradley Whitford and Jade Pettyjohn
Credits: Directed by Karyn Kusama, script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi. An Annapurna release.
Running time: 2:01
The re-adjustment to life after combat is rarely an easy one. Whatever else the end of the daily peril many face brings with it can be accompanied by a loss of excitement and sense of purpose, a craving for camaraderie.
At the end of World War II, some bored, under-employed or disaffected veterans coming home to the United States formed the first motorcycle gangs. They’d use the abbreviation “MC” or “MCC” to separate themselves from more mainstream clubs, put their imprint on their attire, as “leathers” became leather vests covered in patches and embroidered gang names, places they’d been or served.
“Among Wolves” is about copycat behavior in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Veterans of the long and bloody 1990s war with Serbia and Croatia were young men who fought against the invasion and “ethnic cleansing” of their countries. When the war ended, some of them formed a club.
When we meet “Moto Club Vulkovi” — The Wolves Motorcycle Club — they’re engaging in behavior straight out of “The Wild One,” or at least its real-life versions — the Sturgis Rally or Bike Week at Daytona Beach. Bikers, many of them older, some obese, ride around in black sleeveless T-shirts, leather vests covered in patches, drinking and partying, entertained by strippers at their encampment.
“This town, Livno, lives for the Wolves Moto Club,” one member chortles as his mates cut up on bikes and belly up to the bar.
But as the rally goes on, the core group is lectured by their leader, Lija, about their behavior.
“Kepa,” he says (in Bosnian, with English subtitles). “You ride on one wheel more often than you ride on two.” Enough with the “trouble making,” he barks. “Cut out that crap.”
As Lija was the leader of a group of paramilitaries who successfully defended the town, the bikers, young and old, listen to him.
And as “Among Wolves” unfolds, with scenic rides through rolling hills and towns still bearing the scars of war, we start to see this “moto club” as a biker gang of a different color, mostly made up of veterans who don’t relish telling war stories.
They visit a spot and point to where the minefields used to be, blast out the music of their combat youth and visit a display of aircraft, tanks and armored personnel carriers — “Drove this in Kraljevo in ’91.”
And when they stop manhandling the museum’s wares, they head back to what used to be the front lines, the higher hills where a herd of wild horses still roam.
They all pitch in on blood drives, a few bikers help out at an orphanage, and others help deliver medical supplies to another town across the border in a town in Croatia, the land of their former enemies.
But protecting their horses is their mission and passion.
As Braco drives his battered Range Rover into the hills to check on the 350 or so wild stallions, he points to a far mountainside and notes “I bombarded that place over there — 110s (millimeter shells) — chased them back into the woods.”
And then he and others tell the story of the horses of Borovo Clava, wild and free and there long before the war, barely surviving the combat, the minefields, the hard times that had locals killing them for food in “the anarchy” that came after combat ended and international journalists left and moved on to the next conflict zone.
They prefer to be “away from people who aren’t veterans,” Lija confesses, “away from people in general” at times. They may pull out their guns — pistols and an AK-47 — for a little let-off-steam shooting. But people who have seen real conflict don’t need to play soldier or fetishize guns.
“This ammo’s no good,” one laughs and grouses. You wonder if this scene was just staged for filmmaker Shawn Convey. The guys seem pretty disinterested in firearms. And these family men — doting dads, working class Joes — in scary biker gear don’t really have the time.
Several take up positions by a not-terribly-busy country road, slowing or stopping drivers, taking care to let the herd move from one side of the road to another.
“Don’t scare them. Don’t scare them. Let them come.”
The herd is small enough that they recognize the different generations, predict behavior and see an analogy to their own lives — wounded, scarred, needing help to survive.
“What else should we be doing if not charity work?” Lija asks, question that can sound like a challenge to other such clubs and gangs in other countries — especially this one.
The film played the festival circuit where it picked up awards, here and there, and earns a theatrical and video on demand release Feb. 12.
There are things about the gently-uplifting slice-of-life that “Among Wolves” is that work against the film. We hear names, but nobody is really identified. Lija’s role in the war, his former position of leadership which corresponds to his current one, I had to look up elsewhere.
All this information should be on the screen, leading the viewer through the film and deepening our connection with the characters.
But “Among Wolves” is still a documentary of gentle surprises, reflection and tenderness, depicting a troubled part of the world’s truly original take on the concept of what a “biker gang” could be.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Credits: Directed by Shawn Convey, script by Kevin Ripp. An MVD Entertainment Group release
Running time: 1:29
Nobody is better at kvetching on screen than Matthew Broderick. Nobody.
In “To Dust,” he plays Albert, a community college science teacher who keeps calling a Hasidic husband in mourning over his late wife “Rabbi.”
Albert tries to brush the persistent pest of a man off. He makes suggestions that Shmuel (Géza Röhrig) refer to studies on the decomposition of pigs, which are consumed by bacteria and bugs pretty much the same way humans are. After all “Who doesn’t like bacon?” And then he realizes, after the Orthodox Jew has gone out and BOUGHT a dead pig, that even that’s not the best suggestion.
“If you brought me a pig, more like your wife…no offense…and buried her like a Jew…no offense…then I think we would probably be cooking…This, THIS is a mockery of science!”
“To Dust” is a deft and daft culture clash comedy, a dark farce that makes you cringe every bit as often as it makes you laugh. Both men are in mourning. Both have suffered loss. But in their unlikely pairing, maybe one can find peace and the other just a little of his missing sense-of-purpose.
Shmuel isn’t a rabbi. He’s just a man thrown completely off balance by his wife’s death, obsessed with how her body “dismantles” in the Earth after death, an obsession that seems driven by how unsatisfying the rigid funeral rituals of his faith leave him feeling.
He goes looking for answers. His aged Rebbe (Ben Hammer) is no help.
“How does she return to the Earth?” the morbid Shmuel wants to know. How long until she’s returned “To Dust?”
“Maybe you don’t think of these things, Shmuel,”
Visiting a non-Jewish funeral home is his first transgression, begging a Gentile (Joseph Siprut, hilarious) for the grim details because “Our burial societies are not very forthcoming in these matters.”
Mr. “Just a coffin salesman” gently says that “I can’t say we really check up on their progress” after embalming, but Shmuel won’t let it go and thus gets a deserved earful.
“Sometimes, in the hermetically sealed containers? The bodies EXPLODE! Gas. Trapped. Nowhere to go!”
And yet, Shmuel persists. He takes his questions to New Hempstead Community College, and after engaging in a delicate bit of patriarchal roundelay with a secretary — “May I speak to a man, please?” “We appear to be out of those.” — he finds someone he can latch onto — Albert.
It doesn’t matter that repeatedly telling this hapless, divorced and burned-out science professor that despite the black suit, wide-brimmed hat, beard and ringleted “payot” (sideburns) that he’s not a rabbi falls on deaf ears. Albert, newly-divorced, stuck with vexing students and trapped in 1980 (he smokes pot while listening to Jethro Tull) is not the sort of guy who sheds anything — pests included — easily.
Director and co-writer Shawn Snyder’s film goes for a blend of the poignant and pathetically ridiculous. He sets its tone in an opening title, a quote from the Torah, followed by a Jethro Tull lyric — “God is an overwhelming responsibility.”
Shmuel’s wife dies in a cancer ward and he reaches to ritually rip his coat. And can’t. Fortunately, his mother is prepared. She has tiny scissors. But it’s a well-made jacket.
We see the body-washing ritual before burial, and Shmuel staring at the empty twin bed across from his in their townhouse. And we see his young sons start their own research when a punk at Hebrew school tells them their dad must have eaten a “Dybbuk,” an evil spirit.
The Hungarian actor Röhrig (“Son of Saul”) is much better at playing up Shmuel’s infuriating peskiness side than the grief the man is supposedly channeling through his new obsession. He bursts in on Albert’s classes and student office hour sessions. He buys one pig and pignaps another.
“Sorry for your loss,” never ends it. Never. He’s maddening in his persistence.
Albert gives up his cursing, his “Just LEAVE man!” and “You have seriously crossed the stated boundaries of the professor/rabbi relationship” impatience for a growing fascination for the science experiment he has inadvertently talked Shmuel into undertaking.
But boy, let Albert barge in on the holier-than-everybody Shmuel’s sheltered world, HIS home, and he gets an earful. His English seems shaky, but the man in mourning picks up American profanity in a flash.
The story takes both men on a journey, gives their characters “arcs.” But it vexes us, not just with Shmuel’s patience-pounding pestering, by never quite delivering the closure Shmuel, Albert and we are looking for.
But Snyder and co-writer Jason Begue paint a delightful alternative portrait of Hasidism and its practioners, going beyond the rituals and beyond respectful mockery, showing us foul-mouthed kids and an insular world clumsily at odds with the culture they’ve settled in.
In “To Dust,” they manage to walk a funny line between “We’re quaint and we have our ways, but we have the ANSWERS” and “We’re lost in this culture and our rituals won’t save or even heal us.” That’s no mean feat.
MPAA Rating: R for language and some disturbing images
Cast: Matthew Broderick, Géza Röhrig, Sammy Voit, Bern Cohen, Ben Hammer
Credits: Directed by Shawn Snyder, script by Jason Begue, Shawn Snyder. A Good Deed release.
Running time: 1:32
The heat of a forbidden love affair runs up against the chill that settled in behind “The Iron Curtain” in “Cold War,” the latest black and white “communist era” drama from the Polish writer-director, Pawel Pawlikowski (“Ida”).
The Oscar nominated result is lovely, wintry and austere tale of romantic longing set against a last-gasp-of-jazz background, an ill-starred romance that feels much longer than its announced 89 minute run time.
The passion between Wiktor (Tomasz Kot, a brooding hunk), a pianist/composer/arranger in post-war Poland, and his Bardot-ish former student Zula (Joanna Kulig, giving us beauty without warmth) seems ill-fated to the point of artifice. But their persistence in the face of personal trials and political obstacles straight out of “1984” gives the romance weight, and the stark contrasts of its black and white cinematography suggest depth out of proportion to the film’s “Doctor Zhivago Lite” story and characters.
Yes, it’s up for the Best Foreign Language Film and Best Director Oscars. I would handicap it as the third best film in a five-contender category.
“Cold War” opens in 1949 Poland, when the State sends a team — a musician, Wiktor, a dance teacher (Agata Kulesza of “Ida”) and a would-be Commisar-driver, Kaczmarek (Borys Szyc) — on the road, traveling folklorists looking for “Poland’s Got Talent” folk singers and dancers from the provinces of the war-torn/Russian servant state.
“No more will the talents of The People go to waste!” Kaczmarek thunders. No, the villages are filled with singers of the old songs, dancers in the Old Tradition.
As they audition prospects for their Mazurek (Mazurka) School, Wiktor is struck by the young blonde Zula (Kulig) who angles her way into consideration. His more skeptical colleague (Kulesza) is overruled. Even though Zula has a prison record. She stabbed someone.
Her father “mistook me for my mother,” she explains (in Polish, with English subtitles). “I used a knife to show him the difference.”
Zula begins her mercurial career with the Mazurek troupe, and she begins her forbidden affair with Wiktor. She is “the woman of my life,” he says at several points.” She vows to “be with you until the end of the world!”
But she’s ratting him out to the commissar, who is sweet on her. She’s much younger, impulsive, unschooled. It’s just that Wiktor is intoxicated by her.
Years pass, with various appease-the-Russians alterations to their program (“The Internationale” and more Stalinesque tunes join their repertoire), and they tour Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall goes up. Wiktor uses the occasion of a performance in Berlin to plan their escape.
But circumstances and a under-considered doubt prevent Zula from taking the plunge. As she becomes a star of the company and Wiktor starts a new life playing jazz, composing for films and scoring arrangements in Paris, they find ways to cross paths, mostly at his inception, often with frustrating results.
Finally pairing them up in Paris after assorted run-ins with The State and confessions of having moved on (she marries, he takes up with a French poetess) doesn’t make the path of true love any smoother.
The leads are showcased engagingly, the locations — even ruined a bombed out Polish church, but including Paris, Yugoslavia and Occupied Berlin — rendered in romantic tones. But there’s not enough connection between those leads to generate the level of heat aimed for here.
The suggestion of a love triangle — a coupling of convenience with Kaczmarek with its “Zhivago” like love triangle, is frankly half-assed onto the screen.
But it’s a perfectly watchable 90 minutes that feels longer. Especially if, like me, you love jazz and scenes of the musical medium at its peak, with Zula dancing to “Rock Around the Clock” to signify the doom hanging over their art (she becomes a torch singer), their love and the world they fell in love in.
MPAA Rating: R, for some sexual content, nudity and language
Cast: Joanna Kulig, Tomasz Kot, Borys Szyc
Credits: Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, script by Pawel Pawlikowski, Janusz Glowacki and Piotr Borkowski. An Amazon Studios release.
Running: 1:29
A terrible January, an historically low Super Bowl Weekend…
This is what the Academy gets by putting so much Oscar attention on a Netflix film (“Roma”) that won’t benefit Hollywood’s bottom line during awards season.
“Green Book” is the only Oscar contender, re-issued in time for the Academy Awards, still in the Top Ten.
“Black Panther” will re-enter theaters for a Black History Month (free showings) pre-Oscar release.
But enough of that. “Glass” looks to edge out the surprisingly strong Kevin Hart/Bryan Cranston dramedy “The Upside” yet again, with @$9 million (a little less) for the weekend. “Upside” should finish, based on Friday’s numbers, a few $hundred thousand behind, per Deadline.com.
Peter Jackson’s colorized (“colourized”) updating/alteration of World War I in the trenches with the Tommies, “They Shall Not Grow Old” opened in Britain, where it had an audience, and played as a string of single – night/short weekend bookings in North America, playing up the anniversary of the end of The Great War, World War I.
It did well. So well the studio decided to give it wide release on this Super Bowl weekend. And damned if it didn’t break into the Top Ten, just under $3 million in tickets sold.
Sony’s “Miss Bala” was counter-programmed against The Big Game weekend, the notion being a Latin flavored English language thriller might draw an audience that doesn’t care about American “futbol.” It’s not working out, as the Gina Rodriguez vehicle is only managing $6.5 million.
“The Kid Who Would be King” isn’t a total write-off for Fox, but a weak opening weekend and shrug off of a second one means it’s only going to reach maybe $22 (It’s at $13 now) before it loses its screens.
Fox would KILL for the numbers that “A Dog’s Way Home” has managed. The no-budget lost pet picture will clear the $35 million mark by Sunday midnight.
It’ll take some doing to take the world by surprise and tickle the funny bone the way “The Lego Movie” (an no “Lego Movie” since) did.
“The Second Part” opens Feb. 8. I’m cautiously optimistic about this one, but we’ll see.
“Capurnaum” may be the dark horse in the Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars. But Nadine Labaki‘s picaresque drama about the undocumented, a Cannes award winner, stands apart as the most moving film in the field.
It’s built around one of those heart-stopping “natural” child performances that burn into the memory, even if the kid never makes another movie.
It’s about a boy growing up on the streets of Beirut. We don’t learn much about his background. He could be Palestinian or Syrian because however long his family has lived there, Zain has no birth certificate, no “papers” of any sort. He doesn’t even know his age, and his overwhelmed and distracted mother (Kawsar Al Haddad) can’t tell him if he’s 12 or 13.
Zain (Zain Al Rafeea ) was never enrolled in school. If he brings that subject up to his depressed, lazy father (Fadi Yousef ), Selim rouses himself from his many naps (when he isn’t impregnating Zain’s mother again) for a dismissive lecture.
“What do you want to go to school for? Keep working at Assaad’s.”
When Zain isn’t running fake prescriptions by pharmacists or selling tomato juice or what have you on the street with his sister Sahar, he makes deliveries for Assaad (Nour El Hussein). Assaad lets the family — there must be ten or 11 of them — live rent-free in their apartment. Assaad sends extra food home with Zain because he fancies Zain’s sister.
Sahar (Haita ‘Cedra’ Izzam) is 11 years old. And the moment the streetwise Zain sees that she’s having her first menstrual period, he springs into action. He warns her about being “thrown out,” given away as he frantically scrubs her clothes and nags her to clean up and hide her status.
He starts questioning their parents, heated profane threats about what they might be planning, what they’ve done in such situations in the past and how he isn’t letting this happen to Sahar. But his plans to rescue aren’t far enough along to save her.
His mother lies to his face and his father hauls the little girl away to her fate as Sahar rains blows on his back, trapped behind him on his moped.
That’s why Zain runs away. That’s why, when we meet him, he’s in jail — a tweenage kid in stir “because I stabbed a sonofabitch” (in Arabic, with English subtitles).
“Carpernaum” is a linear flashback, with return trips to Zain in jail and in court. He has drawn the attention of the country by getting media attention for demanding that he be allowed to sue his parents. In court, he’s putting on trial those irresponsible, self-martyred parents, a “system” and a culture that created them and indeed caused Zain to be born into such circumstances.
Labacki, an actress (she plays Zain’s lawyer) turned director (“Where do We Go Now?”), has quite a story to tell in just the making of “Capernaum” (the name of an ancient Hebrew village, translated here as “Chaos.”). She paints this story in alternately picaresque and pitiful brush strokes.
Zain befriends an Ethiopian (Yordanos Shiferaw) waitress who takes him in. He winds up caring for her toddler as she struggles to earn money, get working papers and make a better life. Zain takes to this responsibility like the old soul that he is. Zain’s hilariously profane narration of Middle Eastern cartoons that they watch, his enterprising ways of caring for and feeding little Yonas — check out what he uses for a stroller — give “Capernaum” a lightness that belies the dark tale being told, the dire straits most everyone here is in.
Zain himself seems malnourished and small for his age. Everybody in this corner of Beirut is scraping by, and all these desperately poor people — again, many of them refugees — are being exploited at every turn.
For all the film’s early condemnation of poor people worsening their lot by having baby after baby, we get a taste of the parents’ circumscribed circumstances, too. They’re not raising their children at all, but is there a way they could have been anything but what they turned out to be?
Labiki isn’t above manipulating us as she lightly underlines the points she wants to emphasize, but she never lets “Capernaum” turn into a lecture.
And she gets natural, engaging performances out of one and all as lets us see cruel circumstances and the way some thrive in them, the desperation and despair of those old enough to see the doom they’re sentencing children to and the confusion and outrage of one extraordinary kid who is just now figuring out the game is rigged and that the future doesn’t exist. Not for him.
MPAA Rating: R for language and some drug material
Cast: Zain Al Rafeea, Haita ‘Cedra’ Izzam , Boluwatife Treasure Bankole, Yordanos Shiferaw
Credits: Directed by Nadine Labaki, script by Nadine Labaki, Jihad Hojeily Michelle Keserwany, Georges Khabbaz and Khaled Mouzanar. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 2:02
One hour into “Alita: Battle Angel,” the Robert Rodriguez/James Cameron adaptation of a popular Japanese graphic novel series, the combat gets funny, the dialogue snappier and the trash talk flippant and smarter.
We just have time to wonder “Where has this wit, this tone, been until now?” when it’s gone again. And the visually striking, manga-inspired movie mash-up settles back in for another tedious hour.
The “Sin City” director and “Avatar” and “Terminator” co-writer and producer always give us dazzling visuals, and the eye candy here is first-rate, an integration of human actors and their motion-capture animation avatars that is a step beyond “Avatar.”
But Cameron’s plodding storytelling and tin-eared dialogue — The catch-phrase here is “You underestimated me.” I can see the T-shirts now. — overwhelms Rodriguez’s lighter touch for a movie that plays and feels like an ungainly Frankenstein lacking the humanity that might give it life.
I can’t speak to the manga that inspired it, but Cameron, Rodriguez and third screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis give us settings, characters and story elements from “Blade Runner,” “Robocop” and “Rollerball,” all hanging from the framework of Cameron’s TV series, “Dark Angel.”
Whatever comfort these over-familiar tropes deliver, “surprise” and “invention” don’t figure here.
Five hundred years hence, “three hundred years After the Fall,” Earth is a crowded, crumbling but functional dystopia where The Singularity seems to have set in. Most people have varying levels of machinery grafted onto their persons.
We’ll get to the “sexless future” this sort of dystopia suggests and popularizes in movies of this genre later.
Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) keeps the assorted worker drones, street toughs and bounty hunters of this lawless “technarchy” going. And in his spare time, he rummages through the hi-tech garbage dropped from the last sky city floating above his home here on the ground, Iron City.
That’s where he finds the remnants of a teen girl cyborg whom he names Alita and re-assembles. Alita (Rosa Salazar of “Maze Runner” and Netflix’s “Bird Box”) “wakes up” with a lot of memory loss. But her new “father” lets her play outside after imparting just the occasional life lesson.
“People do terrible things to each other here.”
Such as scavenge parts off their fellow cyborgs or carve up flesh and blood humans whose organs, we figure, wind up re-used in Salem (pronounced “Zalem” here), the oligarchical promised land floating just over their heads.
Alita meets cute, souped-up unicycle driving hustler Hugo (Keean Johnson of TV’s “Nashville”). He takes a shine to the “hard body,” hangs out with her and teaches her about the popular, no-holds-barred motorized roller-blading sport of Motor Ball.
The masses LOVE Motor Ball. Champions there have the promise of making it up the drooping pipelines that take people and supplies up to Zalem.
Alita has a warrior past which shows up in martial arts form when assorted murderous scavengers and hunter-warriors menace her and her new “family.” Instincts are programmable, but mental flashbacks show her the soldier’s life she used to lead, battling on the moon or Mars.
Chiren (Jennifer Connelly) is another cyborg-fixing doctor who takes notice of who Alita is and what she was. Local “Factory” boss Vector (Mahershala Ali) keeps siccing his motorized man-mountain (an unrecognizable Jackie Earle Haley) on her, and Zapan the hunter-warrior (Ed Skrein) is always pulling out his “Damascus Blade” (guns are banned) and trying to take Alita’s head off.
They’re all staggering forward to the Big Game/Hunger Game/Rollerball finale where they’ll settle scores on the track.
The fights — and there are many — are even more technically impressive than the interface between human actors and animated ones. If it’s physics-defying combat (Alita leaps and changes trajectory, mid-leap, from time to time) you want, “Alita” is hard to top.
But they introduce us to a world that feels barely sketched-in — a polyglot of races, languages (as in “Blade Runner”), technology and government by “Factory.”
The Alita-Hugo romance has, technically and romantically, nowhere to go, and Johnson, acting opposite a leading lady wrapped in a motion-capture suit, fails to generate any hint that it can.
Alita is an impressive creation, with huge anime eyes, a perfectly-contoured face (a little scar on her nose, pores) and minimal emotional expressiveness. Whatever the limitations of the technology, at least a little of that falls on Salazar. It’s got to be daunting “acting” under these conditions. The body motion is a lot more natural looking.
Among other cyborgs motion-captured by real actors, Skrein, Michelle Rodriguez and Jeff Fahey are recognizable, though none are really wholly developed characters.
Of the supporting cast, only Connelly makes much of an impression — icy, heartless, posed in futuristic lingerie in one scene, “Alita’s” sole suggestion of sex.
So back to that “sexless future” thing. Manga got its start in Japan, first described by Western outsiders as “comic books for grown men.” The fantasy worlds woven with their pretty boy heroes and eternally school-girlish heroines have proven to be catnip to a worldwide audience, including North America.
Anime and video games have deepened the immersion into this obsessive cosplay-friendly fantasy world, but with consequences. The “sexless future” that the chaste, adolescent romance of “Alita” portrays seems to be a part of that appeal, pandering to those looking for an emotional remove that lumps the film in with online avatar “hook ups,” guys with lifelong schoolgirl fantasies and sex-with-dolls-until-we-can-have-sex-with-robots dreams.
In Japan they have a name for the arrested development men (mostly) who go deep into this cosplay lifestyle — Hikikomori. A plunging birthrate there is at least partly blamed on this addiction and the infantilization that often accompanies it.
Cameron and his fellow screenwriters altered and Americanized this Japanese tale (that always had American settings), but not that permanent pubescent American Hikikomori appeal. Because nobody knows what fanboys want better than JC.
“I will not stand by…in the presence of EVIL.”
But they’ve made a movie where they can crow about the technology and the eye candy they deliver, conveniently skating past the chilly inhumanity of it all and ignoring its quasi-perverse asexuality. They may have a new franchise on their hands. It’s a pity they’ve manufactured one without a heart.
MPAA Rating: PG-13, violence, sci-fi action, profanity
Cast: Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Keean Johnson, Mahershala Ali and motion captured versions of Rosa Salazar, Ed Skrein, Michelle Rodriguez and Jackie Earle Haley, Casper Van Dien
Credits: Directed by Robert Rodriguez, script by James Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis and Robert Rodriguez, based on the Yokito Kishiro graphic novel series “Gunnm. A 20th Century Fox release.
Running time: 2:02
I’ll Grant you, maybe it’s just my own personal movie Hell.
Movie Nation 