Passengers

There are two different ways to look at Passengers. One way is to think of it is as an SF movie which doesn’t make any sense, and the other is to look at it as a deeply creepy movie about gender politics, Stockholm syndrome and magical negroes. I am buoyed by vaunting ambition and the knowledge that no-one but Russian bots is actually reading any of this, so I am going to try to cover both bases.

Firstly, deep creepiness, because all the real reviewers have had a field day, and I can cover this sketchily. Look at the trailers for this movie, and you get the impression that it’s all about two loveable charming actors stuck together in a bad situation and overcoming terrible peril with the power of love. Yeah. That’s false advertising. What actually happens is that Chris Pratt’s character gets woken up early on a 120 year suspended animation voyage from A to B, and looking down the barrel of 90 years with no-one to talk to than a creepy robot barman who looks just like a slightly more human version of Tony Blair, he decides to wake someone else up to share the same hell with him. 

Let’s not get mixed up about what this means. Pratt knows he can’t get go back into hibernation, and neither can anyone else who might wake up. The ship is full of people with plans to land on another plan and spend the rest of their lives there, surrounded by a community. Pratt knows he’s going to die on that ship, never seeing the destination. Anyone he wakes up is facing the same fate, with just him for company. He’s not exactly killing another person, but he’s taking from them the life they wanted to live, with no possibility of reprieve, just so that he can have some company. That’s a horrible thing to do, no matter how much you might want to do it. Hiring Chris Pratt to play the man who has that choice, and makes it, blurs the edges too much. Pratt can’t help being loveable. I spent a big chunk of the movie thinking about how much more relateably awful the whole thing might have been if it had been someone like Jake Gyllenhall in the same role. 

Once Jennifer Lawrence wakes up to the reality of what’s happened, we get some of the sense of what’s happened; for an all too short period in the middle of the movie, her rage and anguish begin to express what’s horribly wrong in the middle of all this. Watching her in those moments, it was easy to imagine how a much better movie could have come out of throwing the same script at a pair of actors who were as equally matched for talent as they are for charm. Instead, the rage becomes a tantrum which is then overwhelmed by emergency drama and a reconciliation under fire which we’re expected to believe will turn into a lifelong love story instead of burning out once the adrenalin stops whistling round them.

It’s not just that it’s creepy bollocks, it’s that it’s the kind of creepy bollocks that gives men bad ideas. Manipulate women, lie to them, use them, and then use a mixture of charm and terror to get them to melt back into your arms. Too many kinds of wrong.

And I’ve just enough space for magical negroes; poor old Lawrence Fishburne also wakes up and gets to be alive for exactly long enough to explain that Chris Pratt was just doing what a man has to do, explain how the complicated techy things work, and bequeath a magical bracelet which will open all the doors they need to open to save themselves. Then, having done enough to save the white folks, he dies. Man, there’s a lot to hate about the politics of this movie. Let’s switch to the SF.

Firstly, I have to say that it’s a continuing marvel that they had $12 million to pay Chris Pratt (and $20 million for JLaw, so at least we’ve finally made a start on beating the pay gap) and untold millions to show us space stuff, and somehow not enough money to give Chris a beard that looked like it actually grew out of a human face. How hard can a convincing beard be? It’s literally the only effect in the movie which isn’t first rate. Everything else looks great. It’s scientific nonsense, but it looks great. Just the beard.

I have to feel sorry for the 4998 colonists and 257 surviving crew of the Avalon when it reaches it destination. They’ve packed food for 5258 people for four months as they coast in to the destination and train everyone in; Chris and Jen will eat about 10% of that as they eke out their lives waiting to die in space, so everyone’s on short rations when they get to Homestead II. Mind you, I had to work out the numbers later, so I spent a big chunk of the movie thinking it would be much worse than that. Anyhow, even if they like what Chris and Jen have done with the place, they’re still going to be cursing them for putting them on a low calorie diet.

Avalon is doing 50% of light speed, but the stars are still white all around them instead of being blue shifted to the front and red shifted behind them. Avalon also has a shield to the front, but nothing to the sides, as though space debris is like windshield bugs and could never possibly come at it from any other angle than straight ahead. It’s constantly rotating, and it’s implied that this is to generate gravity, but from time to time the gravity just goes away instantly without the rotation stopping.

The Homestead Corporation’s business model makes no sense at all. It takes 120 years for the Avalon to reach Homestead II, and that’s ship time. I’m not remotely technical enough to figure out the actual acceleration curve for Avalon, but 32 years into the 120 years it’s doing 50% of light speed and the drive is on the whole time so it’s definitely accelerating continuously; peak speed is going to be more than 50% lightspeed, and that means time dilation is a real factor. 120 years ship time is going to be quite a bit longer in Earth’s frame of reference. It’s going to add at least 10% to the time back on Earth. The Homestead Corporation’s business plan is spelled out for us; subsidise many of the passengers in return for a share in their income when they arrive. That’s spend now, get a return starting a minimum of 130 years later. Worse than that, the return is on a planet it takes 120 years to get to, in a universe where messages can’t travel any faster than light (we see this when Chris can’t phone home and get an answer before he dies of old age), so it’s going to be at least 200 years before - let’s imagine - a wire transfer could get the money back to Earth where it was first spent. Homestead Corporation must have the world’s most gullible investors.

But more than that, what kind of business plan has them doing return trips? The ship’s going to get back at least 260 years after it set out. It’s going to be as if the Santa Ana arrived back from dropping off to Columbus and collided with the Great Eastern. They’ll just put it in a museum. Indeed, the chances are that by the time it gets to Homestead II, they’ll be met at that end by an improved ship which can travel faster than light. Or even at a sustained 90% light speed instead of peak 50-60% Even if took them 100 years to come up with it, it would still get there ahead of the Avalon. And everyone talks about these journeys as though they’re happening all the time and everyone knows how they works, but literally no-one will ever have seen one of these things come back before they could have got on board one going out. 

This is terrible SF, because it’s SF which isn’t thinking about the world it has to have for any of the stuff we’re seeing to be happening at all.

What else? Oh yeah, the best single setpiece has gravity failing while Jennifer Lawrence is swimming in the pool; which forms a huge bubble that she gets trapped in and can’t swim out of. On the one hand, there’s absolutely no reason for a huge mass of water to rise up out of the pool just because gravity has taken the day off. Inertia hasn’t taken a holiday, and nothing moves unless something pushes it. On the other hand, the problem in moving in zero gravity is that you’ve nothing to push back against and you just float in the air or the vacuum. But if you’re in a big bubble of water, you can push back against that easily; that’s why swimming works in the first place, even though you’re floating in the water. Gravity has nothing to do with it, and loss of gravity doesn’t change that. Great looking bit, whether it’s got Jennifer in a swimsuit or not, but it makes no scientific sense.

I’d like to imagine that they kept JLaw, hired Jake Gyllenhall, and had no more money than it took to make the first Solaris, so that they wound up making a movie about people dealing with a horrible choice and the horrible consequences, and had nothing left over to distract us with brilliant looking stupid effects. I bet they’d actually have wound up with more money in the bank. I’d have been a lot less fed up at the end of it too.

Rogue One: Star Wars just can't help itself

On paper Rogue One was a great idea; a scrappy little stand alone movie built out of a single throw away line in the very first Star Wars movie about how a lot of brave resistance agents died to get the plans of the Death Star. There was such a lot packed into that line for a generation of kids who had grown up on WWII movies; agents behind the lines skipping from shadow to shadow, never knowing when betrayal will cut the operation out from under them. When I heard about Rogue One, I imagined it was going to be that kind of movie; low key and menacing, full of character moments and the kind of personal tension that makes things like the sacher torte scene in Inglourious Basterds so iconic.

This was not that movie. Its DNA comes from things like The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare, with a generous dash of the downbeat fictions of the same era where the bad guys killed all the good guys before losing anyway. There is a lot of action. Damned nearly non stop action. And the movie chews through the cast like an unfenced buzz saw. Nobody is getting out of this alive, even though it takes a while for the movie to hammer home the point that it’s committed to delivering on the idea of lot of brave resistance agents dying.

The problem with non stop action is that it doesn’t really give the characters enough time to develop their relationships, whether with each other or with the audience. By the time a whole platoon of jaded special forces commandos follow Jyn Erso to certain death, we ought to have some idea why they thought that was a good idea. But she’s done nothing to earn that loyalty yet, at least nothing that the audience has seen. She’s been too busy running and ducking and occasionally fighting. We get a pretty good sense of Jyn as a person - what we never see is how anyone else would have been inspired by that person, or even made a connection to her. 

And, you know, we’re running flat out here. There isn’t a lot of time to think, hey, that doesn’t make all that much sense. But I saw Rogue One twice in the space of four days, so I could come at it the second time in a more reflective frame of mind. And of all the many little niggles which I would inevitably have with a blockbuster, that’s the one which sticks with me. Felicity Jones is really good; probably the one actor given enough room to build a character with more than one note in it, and good enough that you can tell from squinting through a gap in her helmet visor that she’s terrified of what’s coming next. No-one else gets the time to hit more than one note. I’m pretty sure they could have done more; they just don’t get the time or they don’t get the lines.

But wow, in places it looks great. The last three quarters of an hour are spent on the beach, and it’s a look Star Wars has never tried before, all greenery and fine sand and clear blue light instead of the dusty desert planets and dreary bog worlds of other movies in the series. I think it’s supposed to be a contrast with the combat scenes, but it’s also a huge contrast to everything else in the film canon. 

But there are things which it seems Star Wars can’t resist. There’s a space battle. Which of course requires something impossible to be hit somehow by star fighters (spoiler, they don’t hit it). It’s lavish and spectacular and probably cost a fortune, and it looks completely out of place in what ought to be a gritty movie about an undercover mission going massively wrong. This should have been a Star Wars movie which wasn’t like a Star Wars movie, but it’s like they couldn’t stop themselves from putting in the familiar business for the climax.

None of which is to say that this is a bad movie. I enjoyed it and it gets a lot right. There’s a scene stealing performance from Alan Tudyk as K2-SO, a deadpan droid who is funny without being a catchphrase machine. It would have been so easy to make him another C3-PO and source of comic relief, but instead he’s a grumpy presence who gets the occasional barbed line (personal favourite “I’ll be there for you. The Captain said I had to.”) And although the plot doesn’t really make all that much sense, the movie does come up with a convincing reason why the Death Star was built with a massive vulnerability, which kind of makes up for the fact that the Imperial plan for everything seems to be “blow it up and to hell with the casualties”. I could take that in my stride when it was an occupied moon that was clearly more trouble than it was worth, but it got a bit harder to understand when it involved demolishing a key data storage facility full of their own men and priceless information. And although it seemed kind of forced, the closing minute stitches the movie almost seamlessly into the opening of the original Star Wars. If it had been a Marvel film, it would have been an after the credits scene. Luckily Lucasfilm aren’t jerks.

The story goes that there were massive reshoots and rewrites towards the end of production, and I can’t help wondering what the movie might have looked like before the money men panicked and asked - I imagine - for more of what the audiences are used to. Maybe the DVD release will clear some of that up. Maybe the quieter movie I wanted will be hiding in the extras.

 

Post-script: Maybe the extras will also cover the writerly joke embedded in Ben Mendelsohn’s job title. The bad guy that even the other bad guys despise; hemmed in by bigger bosses looking for results; depending on real geniuses - who he exploits, humiliates and eventually kills - if he’s to get anything done; eclipsed by archetypal monsters and at the mercy of a CGI villain whose whims decide what he can do, before being destroyed in the end by the thing he ruined everything to build, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Director Krennick.

Adam Hamdy: Pendulum

Sometimes a book is good, and sometimes it’s not good. And sometimes, it’s something which feels like it could have been good. Pendulum  is one of those books. There’s a perfectly good book in there about how much it would suck in real life to be the victim of a botched serial killing. It opens with the protagonist being hanged by some obvious loon, dodging death by sheer chance, and jumping out of a window before the killer makes up any ground. Jumping out windows hurts, which is why it hasn’t been on my to-do list in simply ages, and running off to the police to explain that some loon tried to hang you leads to stays in hospitals of various kinds, not to mention strait jackets and all kinds of drugs which might be fun if you were taking them at your own preferred pace.

As long as the book is about how a pretty ordinary schlub is out of his depth dealing with lunacy, it’s a pretty good idea. It’s not super-well-written, but at least there’s something here which hasn’t been tried before, and Hamdy is doing his level best to get across the sheer awfulness of the character’s predicament.

If only Hamdy had stuck to that. But there’s more, much much more. On the one hand - spoiler alert - the book is really about the menace of a social media, and specifically Facebook. On the other hand, about every forty minutes all hell breaks loose and a whole bunch of people get killed. Every forty minutes? That seems curiously specific. Was I sitting there with a stopwatch? No, I was sitting there with a lifetime’s worth of pop culture, shaking my head wearily as Hamdy kept thinking it was time to end the episode on a cliff hanger. Just as the world is filling up with people telling us that TV is becoming more novelistic, someone wrote a novel which felt the need to pace itself like a low-budget TV show. I don’t know what was going on there. Did Hamdy get told to cram in more action sequences, or did he get told to put some kind of novel either side of the action sequences? Or did he really think that both belonged together?

It’s a shame. There could have been a good book here. A much simpler book. A book set in England with a simple cat and mouse game with a loon and an ordinary guy trying to catch each other. Instead, there’s massive gunplay, an ocean spanning plot, a villain who is simultaneously omnipotent and an idiot, and a game of bingo for anyone who wants to read it going “Oh, that bit’s totally taken out of Speed!” whenever the plot goes into high budget mode.

Instead, the books can’t make its mind up about what it wants to be, and it winds up making no sense in all kinds of different directions. If the serial killer is just a creep getting his rocks off hanging people, then of course he needs a superhero costume and a mask. But if he’s actually a tortured anti-hero taking a complex revenge on people he despises, then it doesn’t make sense for him to dress up. He doesn’t really care what his victims think, and a costume is more trouble than it’s worth. And sure, it makes a great last act twist for the villain to be a guy with a bigger plan, but the bigger plan doesn’t make any sense of what’s been done up to now. And round and round it goes in circles.

I complain about all this because the book is at its best when it’s about the impact of wickedness. There’s a lot of work done here on the impact of trauma and the way the people are marked forever when they’re victims of violence. It ends on just that note. Hamdy had something to say here - something which doesn’t show up often enough in fiction - and it’s a shame that the fireworks are getting in the way.

Alex Gerlis: The Best of Our Spies

Having mentioned this in the course of venting about Allied, I feel like I ought to flesh it out a bit. Simply put, The Best of Our Spies is a much more plausible story about a German spy setting up with an Allied officer and trying to steal all his secrets. It’s low key, and low stakes, and nobody blows up hardly anything from one end of it to the other. It’s one of those books I read a little chunk at a time, as I often do when the characters have been put together and then put in harm’s way. It’s the book reading equivalent of squinting at things through your fingers. You get invested, the characters start to feel like real people, all trying to do their best, and you just can’t bear to keep on looking as things get worse for them.

There is no big mystery; from the beginning we know that the spy we’re calling Nathalie has been working for the Germans, and so do the British high command. She’s not going to get caught, because she’s been caught without ever knowing it, rumbled when her radio operator gets caught and turned. From that point on, British Intelligence are playing her like a banjo, manipulating her and the poor schmuck they marry her off to. The game is cynical and simple; sure, they could turn Nathalie too, but if they keep her in play, letting her think she’s still spying, the intelligence she provides to the German will have a sense of authenticity to it which couldn’t be faked.

Once the game’s afoot, the tension is not whether Nathalie will get caught; it’s what will happen when all the contradictions collapse around her. Will she survive? Will she somehow be able to keep the fake life she’s built with her clueless Allied stooge? And perhaps the biggest mystery of all; how the hell did she even get into this mess? That’s as big a puzzle, right up to the end, as how the hell she’s going to get out of it.

It’s not quite Alan Furst, because, after all, what is? But it’s solid, and it’s heartfelt, and it never seems fantastical.

It would have been a perfect source text for a good movie with Marion Cotillard and some worthwhile, unflashy British actor, a McAvoy or a Whishaw or a McGregor. It was what I was half hoping Allied would turn out to be. Instead, I think that Allied has probably made sure that this much better story is always just going to be a book.

Allied: Marion Cotillard would be ready if all she had was cutlery

Marion Cotillard automatically outclasses pretty much anything she’s in. She was so effortlessly good in Public Enemies that she’s more or less the only thing I remember from what was supposed to be Johnny Depp’s star vehicle. She is so good that her two best scenes don’t even have dialogue. She is, in fact, so good, that for as long as the camera is on her in Allied, you can forget that it’s balderdash at just about every level. Her final scene is, despite everything I’d already seen, still somehow a punch in the gut, because Cotillard is just that good. She makes silence devastating. She can even make you think that terrible dialogue is a real person lost for something to say.

Brad Pitt, in the meantime, has - at most - upped his “my wife just died” game from the miserable baseline he set in Se7en, where his reaction to finding Gwynneth Paltrow’s head in a delivery box seemed to be based on hazy memories of how a friend looked when their younger brother’s hamster had died. The rest of the time he’s playing a straight arrow, which is a good way to remind us that “normal” Brad Pitt is about one step up from an animatronic display at Disneyworld.

So it’s Cotillard’s movie, but in more ways than one. Allied is like someone had a perfectly good script about deep cover and betrayal, and someone - someone, let’s say, Pitt-shaped - wedged a low budget war thriller into it, ruining both ideas beyond repair. There’s Cotillard’s movie, which is all about whether she could possibly have seduced an Allied spy, married him, had a baby and all so that she could get access to Allied secrets and slip them to the Germans. Could that possibly be true, or have the paranoid loons of Section V have got it ridiculously wrong? And then there’s Brad Pitt’s movie, in which things explode and people get shot to bits and there’s excitement of a particularly teenage kind. Man, I wish it had just been Cotillard’s movie, not least because it seemed from the trailer that someone might have been trying to adapt Alex Gerlis’ The Best of Our Spies.

Or, you know, I’d have been fine with Pitt’s movie, since if it had just been that, it would have been Brad and Marion, together they fight Nazis. I wouldn’t even have worried that there was another better movie; there would have been explosions and a cool female lead, and I’m easily pleased. The trailer promises that, in its way. It could have been fun.

Alas, it was not to be. And with plot and the pacing all over the place, and the camera not staying on Marion like God intended, I had way too much time for my mind to wander and ponder how many things were just plain wrong.

Over on the Brad Pitt plot front; he parachutes into Morocco for his deadly mission, landing miles from anywhere and marching across the desert to be picked up a local driver and driven to Casablanca. Where he transforms into a Frenchman just in from Parism with all the papers and clothes for the role, and two Sten guns in a suitcase. Along the march he skylines himself on the dunes, just like he wouldn’t have been trained to; that bugged me a bit. But the rest of the plan is madder. Everything has been done to make him someone who’s just arrived in Casablanca, except for the bit where he arrives the way his papers say he should have. It’s a small town, from a French emigré perspective, and there’s a war on. How long is it going to be before someone asks why they never saw him coming through the port or the airport?

And then there’s the thing he came to do; he’s there to assassinate the German ambassador. On the one hand, in 1942, Vichy Morocco wouldn’t have rated an Ambassador; it would have had a consul at best. On the other hand, Ambassadors are useless. I don’t know how many of them you’d have to shoot to make a difference to anything. It’s a great peace-time move, since it’s a diplomatic incident and casus belli, but once you’ve got a war on anyhow, what’s the point?

Meanwhile the spying and betrayal plot is breathtakingly wrong; Brad Pitt is told his wife may be a spy, and if she is …. he must execute her by his own hand. What? This is Britain, April 1944. Every German spy in England had been caught, and turned, and they were being used relentlessly to sow disinformation in Germany about D-day. And now MI5 has found a possible extra asset who the Germans think they’ve got past the British completely? They’d no sooner have her executed than a five year old would shoot Santa on Christmas Eve. This is melodrama for the sake of melodrama, when they had an actress who could have handled actual drama. In reality MI5 would have turned her round, rolled up her network and used the whole boiling to reinforce the message that the invasion was going to hit Calais. And with a real actor, as opposed to Brad Pitt playing it straight, they could have had real drama from the marriage falling apart. Nah, we’ve got this nonsense, and Brad flying to France to get intelligence, and - oh man, it’s not even worth getting into it.

But it could all be happening in an alternate reality of some kind, since this is a London where the Blitz is well underway in 1943, and the Luftwaffe is mounting massive raids in April 1944. Or so I thought, until I checked and it turns out that Operation Steinbock was underway at the time and it even involved He 177s, so the ridiculously over the top air raid and crashed bomber in Brad and Marion’s back garden are historically just about plausible.  Damn. I’d been all set to hate on that. Oh well, I enjoyed my annoyance while I was having it.

One movie or the other would have been fine. The Brad Pitt one could have been thrilling. The Marion Cotillard one could have been a classic. Trying to do them both at the same time just ruined everything. But still, it was almost worth it to see Marion dismissively smack down Brad Pitt wondering if she could do with hit with a Sten. “I could do it if all I had was cutlery.” She could. I’d watch it.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to FInd Them; no room left for a ...

I’ve managed not to consume any Potterverse materials up until now. Not out of any particular antipathy to the work of the world’s richest author. It’s just that it would be a tonne of work to read all the books and watch all the movies, and they’ve been so culturally prevalent since I got back to Ireland and points north that it didn’t feel like I needed to do more than let it all wash past me. Like pretty much anyone with an internet connection, I’m broadly aware of Snape and Dumbledore and muggles and what-all, and nothing about any of it has left me feeling that I need more than the ability to recognise that someone else is now talking about the whole Potter thing, smile at the bit which is obviously supposed to be hilarious, and carry on with my life. Perhaps I’m missing out, but there’s a big world of books out there and time is limited. Millions of other people are reading those books; I think I can leave that job to them and get on with reading books which millions of people should be reading but unaccountably aren’t.

Still, this frigid week there was pretty much nothing going on at the cinema other than Fantastic Beasts, and it’s not like I’m actively opposed to that stuff. So I put my head round the door of the Potter-verse, as it were, and found myself about as underwhelmed as I thought I might be. There’s magic. There’s beasts. There’s special effects. There’s a peril all set to destroy New York, as bloody usual. There’s Eddie Redmayne, still on double secret super probation after this, where his performance was so feyly bonkers that I left out mentioning it for fear that my fingers would melt. There’s Ron Perlman, because why not? And a bunch of folks I’d never seen before, who I assumed were the young kids who’d sold their next ten years to the franchise because they wanted to be super-rich, together with a bunch of folks I had seen before, who I assumed - correctly - would get killed by the end of the movie to give it some kind of emotional stakes. Ta-ta Samantha Morton and Colin Farrell, I know you’ve got better things to do, or at least I hope you do. And hi there Johnny Depp, who has a blink and you’ll miss it cameo right at the end which might even mean that we’re finally going to be spared any more Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

How does it all look? It looks like someone wedged a bunch of magic into an expertly realised version of Depression-era New York, which is to say sepia with moments of way too much CGI. The cast give it their best shot, which is to say the best shot you can give things when it’s all kind of bollocks and everyone knows it. There are moments of real power; when Porpentina almost gets offed, it’s quite affecting, and also throws in the single best line in the movie “Don’t panic!” “What do you suggest I do instead?” I’ll ‘ave that, I will.

There are going to be four more of these movies, covering a span of 20 years and ending with the end of WWII, and a bit of me really wants to see just what that might do. Not a very big bit, I have to admit, and it’s drowned out by the much bigger bit which figures that it won’t do much that’s any real use, since these are all prequels and nothing can happen to disrupt future history. 

And it was mulling on that which got me grumping about the subtext of all these movies. Just like superhero movies, it’s always the same narrative; there’s a big crowd of ordinary people and their elected representatives, who are just the worst, and there’s a little gang of wonder-children, who are just the best. And they’re just the best not because they’ve really worked hard or made a useful difference to the world, or done anything for other people, but because they were born talented. Or rich. Or rich and talented. But no-one appreciates their talents and the world is against them, and they have to hide their talents and keep the mob at bay. And in theory their talents could make everything so much better, but in practice they just wreck everything in squabbles with other badder talents, and in the end either everything is in ruins or it’s the same old status quo; nothing ever gets any better. Stop me if any of this reminds you of anything which has happened in the last month.

And I’m getting tired of this approach; not just weary with the reliance on just one damn story, but with the way in which a whole generation of people are growing up with this story being drummed into them from every side; the elite are wonderful victims of the faceless mob, and politicians and bureaucrats are all scoundrels who either incite the mob or pander to them. And really, I don’t care how much money JK Rowling is giving to charities off the back of the profits on this; it’s time she started telling a new story.

Arrival

Last year I saw Sicario, and it struck me as a weird movie where the centre of the story wasn’t so much a woman as the way that a woman was gradually moved away from what was happening so that men could get on with doing something terrible. That might feel strangely evocative of things which happened this year, but that’s not what this post, or any other post, is going to be about.

Arrival is instead a movie with a woman right in the middle of it, and the focus never really comes off her. Luckily, they hired Amy Adams. I can’t prove this, but I think you could point a camera at Amy Adams while she was doing her nails and it would get you something unexpected which could make the centre of a whole movie. There are other people in the movie - Jeremy Renner and Forrest Whitaker, for example - but it really doesn’t matter, because they’re just guys around the edges of a woman trying to figure out what seven legged space aliens are talking about.

After I saw the movie, I read the Ted Chiang short story it’s based on, and it’s a surprisingly good adaptation. It’s not actually a faithful adaptation, because the story is much more low key and evocative. In the short story, Louise is trying to come to terms with what she learned about the world and what matters when she was trying to learn a foreign language. In the movie, inevitably, Louise is trying to save the world. Because it’s apparently impossible to get funding for a science fiction movie, no matter how simple, unless it involves the fate of the world. Which has to rest on one lone maverick resisting the patriarchy.

But, I hear you say, Hollywood won’t give you the money to make a spectacle unless you give them a story they can understand. Sure, yeah, right. But the source text isn’t spectacular. A faithful adaptation could have been done for Doctor Who money, or even Midnight Special  money. Villeneuve could have put the exact story Chiang wrote right onto the screen, and with Amy Adam carrying the narrative, it would still have worked. However, I suspect that it might still have made a loss, because the general public won’t go to an SF movie unless it looks spectacular. John and I were in a packed house, which wasn’t the case when we went to Midnight Special.

And although I might have preferred a low key movie, something truer to the spirit of the story, that’s not to say it isn’t a good looking movie; the spectacle works, and the thriller-y moments probably do make it a more audience friendly film. The alien ships are startling, and they’re ambiguous; you can see them as whatever you want to. And while the alien writing doesn’t make a button of sense, it’s still great looking when it happens. And for all I know, it’s an alien powerpoint presentation and I shouldn’t be as worried as I was about how perfect coffee ring splotches appear out of nowhere and float in the mist. On the one hand, impossible to figure out how it happened, on the other hand, terrible as a way of writing anything so that people could read it. But if you imagine it as seven legged Steve Jobs making a pitch, a little less idiotic. Of course, there’s another explanation, but that would be giving the game away about what the movie is really about.

The real reason I wish they had filmed the story as written is that where the movie works best is as a meditation on loss, and the way in which the grief of loss is tied up so completely in the joy of all that came before the loss. What matters, in the end, is the totality of the experience, and how you cannot have one without the other. A movie which could have devoted itself entirely to that might not have been a spectacle, but it would have been spectacular.