Hindsight: A 2015 Cinematic Retrospective

It appears that I saw more Hollywood films in 2015 than I did in 2014. Damn. You win this time, culture industry. As usual, let's begin with some films I didn't see.

Six 2015 Films You Might Have Expected Me To See, But I Didn't:

The Bad Education Movie

It's not exactly top-notch sitcom material, but I quite like Bad Education. It has some funny moments; it's better to watch while a bit drunk. Anyway, the film looked pretty uninspiring: the cringe factor of the show cranked up to a million, and the contrast between the "crazy" comedy characters and the scoffing, eye-rolling "straight man" characters exaggerated to an even greater degree. I don't think it would have ever been shown in cinemas over here.

Ex Machina

Apparently this is quite good. I just haven't seen it. Why haven't I seen this?

Update in 2017: I've seen this now. It was good, and rather challenging to my beliefs. It's odd to think about when apparently the director saw the robot, Ava, as the protagonist, while I viewed Caleb, who ends up trapped in the facility, in this role. Ava ends up becoming a murderer, but in a sense so was Nathan, and Caleb was his inadvertent stooge with a controlling saviour complex. At the same time, I wonder if the film's focus on punishing Caleb for his patriarchal decision-making overlooks the extent to which our actions are influenced by historical and social forces beyond our control. Also, we are left wondering how to view Ava; does she have emotions, but behaves selfishly, or is only following a routine? Is she justified in killing Nathan, who murdered several of her own kind (in a sense) and abandoning Caleb, who tried to save her for arguably selfish, patriarchal reasons of his own, because she was essentially created as a tool to manipulate men rather than as a person with her own identity and individuality? One to think on further, I suspect, and in any modern film that has to be a good thing.

The Hateful Eight

I don't mind a bit of Tarantino and I heard this was pretty decent. I just haven't seen it yet.

Update in 2017: I've seen this now. It was all right.

The Lobster

I understand that this weird dystopian satire is quite good too and I want to see it. It's supposedly a society where if you don't couple up with someone romantically and/or sexually, you turn into an animal. I'd be buggered, then.

Update in 2019: I was motivated to see this after seeing the director's film The Favourite, and I enjoyed both that and this. While as a dystopian text the equally oppressive nature of the City/hotel and the Loners could be construed as a false equivalence, as a reflection on the hypocrisies of both couplehood and singledom it was effective. The dull, stilted delivery really enhances the sense of the artificiality of how many relationships, both romantic and platonic, are navigated, the costuming is simple and effective, and the music and occasional dark humour create a sense of hyperreal oddness that tends to hit the spot for me. It's definitely not for everyone but I enjoyed it a great deal.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

More like the Man from C.U.... etc, am I right? I didn't really want to see this; I can't believe they're still trying to make films by rehashing old twentieth century spy and crime TV shows. Henry Cavill should play James Bond, probably.

Victor Frankenstein

Another horror film featuring Daniel Radcliffe? Can I expect more Woman in Black style quality? Probably not; I understand that this film is quite shit. I still want to see it, but it sounds like Universal is completely fumbling their attempts to bring their classic Horror franchises back to life.

Moving on...

Ten 2015 Films I Did Actually See:

Ant-Man

This was basically the definition of a generic superhero flick. Scott Lang (played by Paul Rudd, but underutilising his comedy potential) is an "honour among" style thief with a heart of (stolen) gold who just wants to be back in his young daughter's life. Thus he is hired to become the new Ant-Man, succeeding his new employer Hank Pym as a superhero who can become tiny and run inside people's ears and so on. The plot is incredibly derivative of Iron Man and Iron Man 2: the villain is an evil Ant-Man with his own, more powerful suit, who is going to cause terrible evil by flogging the suits to the military and/or Hydra. He and Ant-Man have a big punch up; Ant-Man wins. There are some good moments where normal things become tiny or huge, although it doesn't really make sense because the technology is said to just increase the space between atoms; if you turned a little Thomas the Tank Engine toy gigantic, for instance, it wouldn't smash through the side of the house, because it's still the same flimsy plastic, just stretched out further; the toy would still be the thing that broke. Also, if it just changes distance between atoms, how can Ant-Man shrink into subatomic size and risk disappearing into some weird microscopic dimension? Anyway, I believe this started off under the direction of Edgar Wright of British comedy fame but he quit part way through because Marvel kept interfering, and the film was finished by another bloke who played it safe. It shows. Rudd's Ant-Man is more interesting and funny in Captain America: Civil War than in this, his own film.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Ugh. This sucked. You can read my review of it here. At the time I didn't think it sucked that much, but in hindsight (which is the whole point of these annual articles) I'm pretty sure it did. The Avengers run around and have a fight with a big robot. A city gets smashed up in the process. Everything is basically Iron Man's fault, as usual. It feels like a piece of pointless filler padding out the cinematic universe.

Back in Time

I wouldn't have thought of this as a 2015 film but Wikipedia said it was, so let's say it was. This was a documentary about Back to the Future, because 2015 was when Marty came to the future in the second film. The bits in this where they were interviewing the actual cast and crew of the films was quite interesting, but loads of it was padded out with pointless bullshit like: fans at conventions who build their own DeLoreans (who cares?); some company trying to build a real life hoverboard (who cares?); the bloke who made that cartoon show "Rick and Morty" banging on about "Rick and Morty" (what does this really have to do with Back to the Future?) They should have made this just about the making of the films and reflecting back on it 30 years later, and relegated all the stuff about the tedious fans and the Rick and Morty guy patting himself on the back to a separate "fan" documentary that no one would have to watch.

Cinderella

I thought this was okay, to be honest; nothing special, but a pleasant enough way to pass the time. It's just a live-action remake of the classic Disney cartoon, which might seem like sacrilege to some but I'm just not nostalgic enough about those old Disney fairytale cartoons. It just felt a bit generic, kind of like that Gaiman adaptation Stardust. If they wanted to update the film, they could have provided a more realistic motivation for why the evil stepmother is so horrible. By contrast, if they wanted to keep it a bit absurd (as it still was at points, like when the fairy godmother appeared), they could have had the mice talk and stuff as well. Bonus points for having Hayley Atwell as the mum, but then negative bonus points because she gets killed off five minutes in.

Fantastic Four

Jesus. This was really terrible, and I'm honestly not saying that to go along with the crowd or something. I consider myself more of a Fantastic Four fan than your average punter (I have a medium-sized collection encompassing parts of the Lee/Kirby, Byrne and Hickman eras and, for whatever reason, the whole Waid era)  and this somehow was even worse than I expected. In some ways it tries to be its own thing too much, sort of like a B movie about teleportation rather than a superhero film, but it's also way too similar to the equally derided 2005 adaptation, with Doom having superpowers and the thin characterisation. I reckon this was done on the cheap, too, because huge amounts of it takes place in a single lab set. If you want more of my thoughts, see here, or listen to this podcast for thoughts which suspiciously coincide with mine. This probably gets my "worst film of 2015" award.

It Follows

This premiered in 2014 but come on, it's a 2015 film. Everyone saw it in 2015 (I actually only saw it this year). This was an interesting premise: a murderous "thing" is following a person; the only way they can fob it off onto someone else is by having "sex" with another person, and then the thing will start hunting them instead. They too must copulate furiously with someone to pass the curse or whatever off again. In contrast to The Lobster mentioned above, this wasn't too scary for me because I'd be completely safe from it wahey. Anyway, the idea is engaging and ominous, although the film isn't that scary in general. What it benefits from the most is an unsettling electronic soundtrack (by the same composer as that of the very pleasant soundtrack of the indie game Fez) and a curious dreamlike atmosphere in which the decade and time of year is very hard to pin down; it's sort of the past and the future at once, and the seasons seem to change between scenes. It's a film worth watching even if the premise is rather contrived.

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension

Much like The Farked Ones last year, I, uh, didn't see this at the cinema. I only saw it the other day, in fact. It concludes the franchise, supposedly, and in a sense it does a decent job in wrapping up the plot: apparently everything that happened was in service of giving the demon a body... in 1992, despite this being set in 2013. As such, the time travel used in The Marked Ones continues here, and permits some unsettling moments. It also follows up the plot of the third film, giving a reasonable sense of closure. My main issue with the film was that there was way too much CGI; a special camera is introduced that allows us to see the invisible supernatural things, and it turns out that Toby the Demon just looks like a mass of CGI smoky shadows with a Voldemort face in the middle. A bunch of big CGI tentacles are used to kill some of the characters, and little girl du jour is abducted to the past through a big CGI time tunnel. That wasn't my cup of tea. It's no better or worse than the last two, really, and more or less gets the job done, but its use of CGI hampers the suspension of disbelief a bit. There are also two secondary protagonists, the main male character's brother and the main female character's friend, who exist purely for comic relief and fan service respectively, which makes this instalment feel perhaps the most "generic horror" in terms of the scenario of all the films.

Spectre

It's a crappy James Bond film starring Daniel Craig with a completely misconceived attempt to reintroduce Blofeld and the eponymous evil organisation. Read my full review of it here and some further thoughts here. The plot and the climax are a complete rip-off of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It's not worth discussing any further. First Craig was leaving, then he wasn't, and now he is again. Who knows anymore. I don't have high hopes for the next one.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Am I still talking about this? See my initial thoughts here and my full review and recap here. It's a mediocre film with a few memorable moments. I rewatched it recently and found it quite dull, especially the middle act on the planet Takodana. The performances and screenplay are all tolerable but the story is cynical and lazy and it doesn't really tell much in the way of a complete story, making it feel far too much like a piece of product designed to keep consumers on the hook (which of course it is) rather than a logical and necessary continuation of the narrative of the original films (which it isn't). Is it better than the Prequels? It's directed in a more interesting way, but feels "off" - it feels like a J.J. Abrams film that happens to be "Star Wars", rather than a Star Wars film that happens to be directed by Abrams. The screenplay is probably less clunky than those of the Prequels, but again, a good deal of that is to do with the direction. In many respects it feels far less original because it relies so heavily on call backs to the original film and The Empire Strikes Back. Its use of practical effects also makes the use of CGI, when it does appear, more noticeable and very irritating. I want Episode VIII to be better than this.

By a process of elimination, because the above films were all mediocre to bad (except for It Follows, which is decent), my top film of 2015 is:

The Witch

This is a weird, disturbing horror film about colonial settlers in North America succumbing to their own isolation, paranoia and religious fundamentalism. It's atmospheric and creepy, exhibiting clearly the traumatic consequences of severe puritanical practices and the repression of human nature. A family of seven are exiled from their colonial town because of the father's heresy and they try to eke out a poor living in the woods, but accusations of witchcraft begin flying around among the family members when the youngest child, a baby, disappears. The characters speak in an early modern idiom appropriate to the time period, night scenes are really dark, and everything feels eminently realistic and believable, even as apparently supernatural things happen. In keeping with some of the best horror narratives, it's never completely clear whether the supernatural events are real or just paranoid hallucinations. Overlaid with this are traditional themes of spiritual terror about the theological complexities of salvation and damnation. It's good.

That's twice now I've given a horror film my "film of the year" award. Do the "good" horror films somehow get more exposure than the "good" films of other genres, like sci-fi, for some reason? Are other genres too saturated with Hollywood action hybrids, so we don't notice when the more cerebral stuff comes out? I guess so. I need to see Ex Machina. (Seen it now, but I think I still preferred The Witch)

How "Spectre" Could Have Been Better

 

This can also be titled "How Spectre Could Have Been Good" if you're of a more hard-line disposition. These are my thoughts on what could have made Spectre better.

1. Set up Spectre earlier

Obviously they only just got the rights back so they couldn't really do it, but the organisation would have benefited from being introduced earlier on. Given that Craig might be back for one more film, they could have easily established Spectre in this film and then dealt with it in the following film. This would make Spectre seem more genuinely pervasive and threatening.

2. Introduce 'Blofeld' earlier

When Oberhauser tells Bond that he's Blofeld in the secret base, it doesn't mean anything, 'cause it's just a name. Like Cumberbatch being Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, it's just there to titillate people with pre-existing knowledge of the character - not necessarily fans, even. Just people who can go "Ooh, I get that reference." Internally to the text, it doesn't serve any purpose.

Instead, it should have been established reasonably early that the leader of Spectre was a man named Ernst Stavro Blofeld, but no one really knew who he was. Then we can have that mystery present in the film, making Spectre seem extremely ominous: at the centre of the spider's web is a man no one can identify or target. If the organisation's leadership is so obscure, how can it possibly be dealt with?

Then it can go two ways. Personally, I would drop the 'adoptive brother' angle but there are ways of utilising it. Oberhauser could be retained as a high-ranking member of Spectre with a vendetta against Bond who knows who Blofeld is, and perhaps is a weak link in the chain for that reason.

The other possibility is that Bond believes that Oberhauser works for Blofeld - he knows of both people - but the twist or discovery is that Oberhauser and Blofeld are the same person: the reason no one from the outside can identify Blofeld is because he was there the whole time. The problem with this, however, is that much like the actual film it's a twist for twist's sake that doesn't serve the plot.

3. Construct the plot so that Spectre has already won

Rather than having a few minutes to save the world from some all-conquering surveillance mechanism secretly controlled by Spectre, the network should have been set up months ago, and Spectre have been using it the whole time for their advantage. I'm envisaging a scene with M at some kind of launch party for it early in the film. Thus Bond's mission goes from preventing Spectre to undoing Spectre's damage, and thus having to deal with the pervasive surveillance which is now at their disposal. This ups the stakes quite a bit: rather than stopping a bad thing from happening, Bond has to figure out how to stop it from continuing to happen. Again, this also makes Spectre seem much more powerful and dangerous.

4. Have more 'characters' in Spectre

In the old films, SPECTRE included a colourful cast of reprobates along with Blofeld: Irma Bunt, Red Grant, Dr. No and Largo, among others. In this we get one beefy henchman and that's it. We don't get a sense of Spectre's layers or command structure or anything like that, no levels that Bond has to work through to deal with the organisation.

5. Make it not shit

;)

"Spectre"

Not "SPECTRE" apparently, because here the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion seems to have no acronym and just be a bunch of people called 'Spectre' who aren't very nice.

Now Blofeld's back, surely Baron Samedi
is next on the 'villains to revive' list.

My review of Skyfall seems all too applicable to Spectre in some respects. I've yet to rewatch Skyfall (and I have little desire to do so, to be honest) but my primary objections to it haven't mellowed over time: I think it's fundamentally a rather pretentious film which absurdly expects me to take the character of James Bond seriously and care about his problems. As I stated in that review, I think treating Bond like a drama is inherently nonsensical, because it's a genre franchise about a larger-than-life character in almost wholly unrealistic situations, and therefore his feelings, thoughts and inner life fundamentally offer little for the audience to reflect upon.

Bond 25: Bond Has A Nice Cup Of Tea

The writers and directors of modern genre films need to realise that they are not writing the next great English/American novel, and that the nature of their medium innately precludes such aspirations from being sensible. The same delusions of dramatic grandeur affect current British television properties like modern Doctor Who and Sherlock, shows which similarly offer pointless masturbatory ruminations on the nature of unreal and unrealistic characters as if they have to compete with "literary" art.

Spectre is not as egregious in this as Skyfall was, but it suffers from many of the same problems: it's slow and dry, it's boring-looking, with a grey- and brown-dominated colour palette, and it's not shot or designed in a particularly interesting way. It feels more grounded in its own action than Skyfall admittedly, with a less dreamlike tone, but this accentuates its dryness. This is also emphasised by the fact that the plot is extremely unoriginal.

"Yeah, I'm all right."

Large parts of the plot of Spectre are extremely similar, if not identical to, 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, another dry and unexciting film. Consider this: in both films, the security agency (SHIELD, the Joint Intelligence Service) has a new headquarters in the nation's capital (by a body of water, even). It's revealed that the head of said agency (Pierce, C) is in fact allied with or a part of a nefarious secret organisation (HYDRA, Spectre) which wants to use the legitimate organisation to take over a massive surveillance network (Project Insight, Nine Eyes) to get up to mischief. A rag-tag team of surviving "good" members of the original organisation (Fury/Widow/Falcon/Maria Hill, M/Moneypenny/Q/Tanner) must infiltrate the new, compromised headquarters while the protagonist has a "personal" showdown with the film's other main antagonist with whom he has an almost fraternal connection (Bucky, Oberhauser). I felt like I'd seen a good deal of this before. Bucky and Oberhauser are both meant to have died in the snow only to have actually survived, for goodness' sake.

Good thing we all wear these suspicious rings
with this very retro-looking logo on them.

Now let's get to the main attraction: Spectre itself and Blofeld. I didn't think these were handled effectively. Having finally regained the rights, they shoot their bolt almost immediately by introducing the whole shebang: Spectre is this evil organisation which manipulates world events and their mysterious unseen leader is a man named Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Note that in the original Bond films, SPECTRE and Blofeld were dealt with over no less than six films. SPECTRE is first introduced in Dr. No as the titular villain's employer. In From Russia With Love they try to exacerbate tensions between East and West. Following an unrelated diversion for Goldfinger, Bond then deals with the second-in-command of the organisation, Emilio Largo, in Thunderball. It's not until You Only Live Twice that Bond finally meets Blofeld himself, and it takes that film and two more, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever, to finally deal with Blofeld and put an end to the entire situation. In fact, apart from Goldfinger, the entire Connery/Lazenby era involves SPECTRE in some shape or other.

"Seat belts on, please!"

That's a hell of a lot of story, and it makes SPECTRE seem appropriately sprawling and mysterious - octopoid, like its logo. And while some of SPECTRE's and/or Blofeld's activities are very over the top and have become clichés, like the volcano lair and the laser satellite, generally their motivations were fairly clear: to play the superpowers of the Cold War against each other for money and power. That's what SPECTRE is, essentially, in those films: a very elaborate criminal organisation. Yet at the same time it functions as a reflection and even a parody of the very powers it is playing: all of Bond's spying and all of the espionage and struggles between Western governments and the Soviet Union for political and economic supremacy are ultimately little different, in those stories' eyes, to the actions of criminals manipulating affairs for the sake of profit and control. Note that in Blofeld's fish tank in From Russia With Love, all three (the West, the USSR and SPECTRE) are the same creature.

Not so here, of course. The Cold War's long over (arguably), or has at least transformed, which leaves one wondering what SPECTRE's purpose really is. What do they get from the human trafficking, from the fake pharmaceuticals they apparently sell, from the elaborate surveillance network they intend to take over? It's all very unclear, and it seems as if the film can't really come up with a good reason for Spectre's existence in the "post 9/11 world", as opposed to the world of the Cold War, much in the same way that HYDRA's role in The Winter Soldier in my opinion lacked impact. Spectre seem menacing with their elaborate Rome meeting, but we don't have enough time to really see them do anything. The film tries to do far too much. Their most threatening element seems to be this bulky henchman with no neck who is apparently immune to punches, who seems to be intended as comparable to Red Grant or a similar figure but feels like an arbitrary stooge for Bond to have a difficult fight with.

"James, don't you remember how you shot my face off during The War?"

Let's turn finally to Blofeld himself. It's this which gives Spectre similar levels of pretension and delusions of grandeur equivalent to that of Skyfall. In that we saw Bond under siege in his old family home; here Blofeld is the pseudonym of Franz Oberhauser, who knew Bond as a child when his father looked after Bond for a couple of years when his parents died. Oberhauser apparently murdered his own father out of jealousy and faked his own death, before renaming himself Blofeld and establishing Spectre.

In my opinion, it's all far too personal. We learn all this "backstory", but nothing actually substantial about this new Blofeld, apart from the fact that he's clearly a patricidal psychopath. What else does he want? Why did he establish Spectre? What's he been up to for all these years? Most of all, how did he, as he claims, manipulate events behind the scenes in Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall when all of those films already explained themselves? Spectre tries to establish itself as some kind of shocking resolution to the "Daniel Craig tetralogy", but does so by simply telling us that it is and expecting us to believe it. We constantly hear references to past characters: Vesper, Le Chiffre, Greene, Silva and the like, but Spectre has no way of actually establishing any of the narrative connections it claims because they don't exist, which gives Blofeld's claim to being "the author of all your pain" (Bond's, that is) no substance or profundity whatsoever. Oberhauser even states that he only started going after Bond because he got in his way, which makes the plot revelation of their shared past completely unnecessary and irrelevant; it doesn't provide either of them with motivation, and is only there to shock the audience with the largely meaningless concept that Bond and his traditional arch-enemy knew each other for a couple of years as kids. So what? The film does nothing with it, so why should we care? But we're meant to care simply because the connection exists, and in this way the film treats the audience like gasping idiots who will swallow any twist, no matter how trivial, purely because it is a twist.

Land, no.

The older films were from an age where everything didn't have to be "personal" and Hollywood action films weren't incompetently striving to involve novelistic characterisation and discourse in modes for which they were completely unsuited. Blofeld was there characterised perfectly well: as a ruthless, cynical man who toyed with the lives of the whole world simply for his own personal profit. In Spectre it's simply not clear what Blofeld wants or why he is the way he is: he describes himself as a "visionary" of sorts but we're never informed of his vision; I don't know why he particularly cares to torture Bond the way he does unless he's simply some kind of sadist. The weak "personal connection" element and the need to rush through the character wastes Christoph Waltz in an admittedly rather unimaginatively cast role, in which the character and his organisation seem to exist not for the sake of the story but so that Bond fans will recognise the names and be titillated. While I think the "personal connection" aspect was unnecessary and doesn't really work for Bond in any event, there was no need for either the Spectre organisation or Blofeld himself to have a role in the film. The character is simply not very interesting, being not as visually striking as Donald Pleasence's Blofeld, not as effective a foil for Bond as Telly Savalas', and not as amusing as Charles Gray's (my personal favourite).

Everything else is fairly bland, as I've already stated. The most visually interesting part of the film is the Day of the Dead sequence in the beginning. There's nothing else that is particularly glamorous in terms of location or activity. The script contains a few chuckles, but not much. Daniel Craig puts in a workmanlike performance as Bond, but he's not especially interesting to watch for most of the time. Bond girl Madeleine Swann is okay as this instalment's "reasonably competent female deuteragonist" but nothing too memorable. Ralph Fiennes as M mostly has to do a lot of the grouching and grumbling that I thought was subverted as the best element of Skyfall. The final capture of Blofeld by Bond simply shooting his helicopter (something which consistently fails to succeed in almost every Bond film) was a little anticlimactic.

For your cool, cool glasses only.

In terms of good parts, the pre-titles sequence in Mexico City isn't bad at all, featuring characterful location work and a frantic punch-up in a helicopter. I don't mind the song for this one, and the title sequence itself was okay, even if the octopus motif was rather laboured. I was glad that they used M more effectively towards the end. As I said before, there are a few humorous moments, including from Craig himself. Other than that I didn't find much that was particularly engaging about it.

Assuming Daniel Craig doesn't do another Bond, it's disappointing that he's essentially three for four in terms of mediocre films (although admittedly a lot of people thought Skyfall was good for whatever reason). I think the explanation for this, however, almost lies in the fact that Craig was cast for Casino Royale, which is in my opinion a good film which worked perfectly well on its own terms, and in which the chemistry of Craig and Eva Green was ideal for a striking standalone Bond film which didn't need and couldn't benefit from sequels or follow-ups. It's possible that the tenets established for Casino Royale, such as a more serious tone, arguably more realism, more emotional drama and the like, have in fact burdened the rest of the Craig era because they were invented for the sake and success of that single film and not for an entire sequence of films. In that sense it's possible that the last three films were doomed from the start.

"Well, if we destroy Kansas the world may not hear about it for years."

Daniel Craig may be departing, but the great success of Skyfall and the relatively substantial success of Spectre mean that we're probably likely to see more of this kind of thing in the future, unfortunately. It would be appealing if the Bond franchise could recapture a little of the colour, glamour and energy of days gone by but I doubt they'll bother. It's disheartening to say it, but it seems unlikely that we'll see that kind of Bond film made again. "Blofeld" may have been spared, but it's possible that Bond is, in many ways, dead.