Review: The Huntsman

It's obvious to say it, but expectations can have a huge effect on how we receive a movie. Expectations were not high for the original Snow White and the Huntsman, which may have helped its success -- it wasn't as bad as yet-another-Snow-White-adaptation could have been, and included some really nice visuals around a collection of bankable actors.

Even with low expectations, however, I felt that it was unimpressively bland enough to characterise with the "genie's wish gone awry" kind of story: "Oh, you want more epic fantasy movies? Here's yet another gritty re-imagining of a done-to-death fairytale. You want a strong female lead? Sure, but we'll slather her arc with generic Chosen-One portentousness and cast Kristen Stewart."

As you might be beginning to tell, I wasn't a fan. Still, including the aforementioned big-budget visuals, there were aspects to the movie that were quite good -- such as Charlize Theron's scenery-chewing Evil Queen or James Newton Howard's magical score. Not enough to raise my hopes high for The Huntsman: Winter's War, but enough to get me into the cinema.

The story of The Huntsman opens with a prologue establishing the Snow Queen (a naked attempt to rip off Elsa from Frozen) showing us why she steals children to create an army of huntsmen with which she can TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Going on for about ten minutes too long and broken up with Liam Neeson's overly explanatory narration, the film then awkwardly leapfrogs the events of Snow White and begins in earnest.

Positives, Mitchell, stay on the positives. Like last time, JNH's original score sets the mood appropriately and has some beautiful stand-out moments. What's more is that, with some exceptions, the colour palette is wider -- including a creative twist on the enchanted forest of the previous film that adds an Amazonian flavour. The costumes again, like last time, are all detailed and interesting in their own ways and the computer generated effects have a baroque kick.

So it's safe to say that the MVPs of The Huntsman are the production designers, because once you move past the look of the film it gets a bit murkier. At times, I would have said this movie felt like it came out of 2008 or 2009 in the wake of the Writer's Guild of America strike: the actual script of The Huntsman feels written without writers. Here and there are some good ideas but they are strung along with the most basic Joseph Campbell drudgery without any of the finesse required to turn it into an actual narrative. Hero? Check. Conflict? Check. Retrieving the Sword (or Mirror, as it is)? Check. Symbolic Death? Check. The Road Back? Check.

These are milestones intended to guide the story, not to make up the substance of it. The Huntsman is clearly trying at points to create a screw-ball rom-com atmosphere a la The Princess Bride, but without compelling characters and the growth thereof, the script is so inconsequential that there is no depth for the leads to find in their roles (Chris Hemsworth and Theron are back as the Huntsman himself and the Evil Queen respectively, with newcomers Emily Blunt as the Snow Queen and Jessica Chastain as Sara, the Huntsman's lover). The fact is, none of the characters have any perceivable character arc.

This is kind of essential in an adventure story.

I don't ask for anything major, just any change at all (and falling in love doesn't count: that's practically law in a fairytale). The Huntsman? Same at the end as he is at the start. Sara? She appears to have been on a journey, but it's just running in place and she ends the movie the same way she started. The villains? Emily Blunt at least has some kind of drama, but it's so telegraphed beforehand that even the characters don't seem to treat the twist as very much at all.

The worst part of this is that it's actually making me pine for Snow White from the previous movie. It may have been a generic Chosen One arc, but at least she grew and changed over the course of the story. Of course, this leads us to the elephant in the room that even the movie thinks is an elephant in the room: the missing major characters from The Huntsman's predecessor. Every time someone mentions Snow White's kingdom, the movie suddenly turns into a made-for-TV spinoff. "That stuff totally happened, it's just off screen!"

Not helping the made-for-TV tone, the action scenes are so perfunctory as to be almost non-existant. Forget the most boring use of a "rickety rope bridge sequence" that I can think of in an adventure film, the fist fights and clashing swords are cut as though to obscure each action as much as possible.

Don't get me wrong: I don't mean the incomprehensible shaky-cam nonsense of dudebro action flicks -- the actual framing of The Huntsman is decent. No, what this film does is more perplexing.

In a normal fast-cutting action scene, the idea is to draw the eye to an action by setting it up, and then follow it through, using the momentum to draw the eye to the next action. What The Huntsman does is like the opposite.

Instead of cutting from action to action, the actual actions themselves take place between the cuts and we're left with just the setup and the results. This seems to be a symptom of the greater issue at play where in The Huntsman there just isn't a lot of variety in shot length -- it's like the filmmakers were worried that the audience would get bored if there wasn't a completely new frame every few seconds.

Even given all these complaints, the movie isn't the absolute worst. It's inoffensively okay, not bad. In a world where Batman v Superman is so divisive, The Huntsman at least tries to please.

I only wish it had tried harder.

Being charitable, I'd say The Huntsman earns 2 / 5 stars.

Review: April and the Extraordinary World

If you grew up reading Asterix the Gaul or The Adventures of Tintin, you were probably intrigued by the trailers to Avril et le Monde truqué, or April and the Extraordinary World. The film, which uses a combination of computer-assisted hand drawn animation and CGI, is an original story based in a world created by bandes dessinées artist Jacques Tardi.

If you want the pure experience, go now, watch the movie and come back afterward. In a nutshell, if you enjoy Franco-Belgian comics, steampunk or Hayao Miyazaki's movies this will definitely be up your alley. I won't spoil anything major about the plot in the review below, but part of the fun in April is the thrill of discovery, much like the principles of science that motivate the characters therein.

There's a modern term that describes Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (and Historical Fiction sometimes) collectively as Speculative Fiction. Stories about the "What If".

Existing in the space between futuristic, historical, magical and scientific, April is very much a speculative-fiction story. In this case: what if the Franco-Prussian War never happened? What if there was nothing more to stand in the way of the French Empire? Add to that: what if the world's scientists began to disappear?

Of these scientists, two happen to be the protagonist's parents. Left with a priceless snowglobe, a love for science and a cat who can talk as a result of a failed experiment, April spends ten years stealing, sneaking and generally waifing-it-up around Paris trying to recreate her family's secret serum (the relevance of which I will leave up to the movie to detail).

April is not a spunky, Barbie-doll teenager but a much more down-to-earth personality who bears the weight of an orphan but is also weighed down as a citizen of the disgusting capital that Paris has become. The might of the French Empire was so hungry for fuel to fight its wars that it deforested the entire continent, belching so much smoke into the atmosphere that most Europeans wear gas masks in 1941 and the countryside has been turned into a grey wasteland. 

For April, the loss of her family and the destruction of the natural world might as well be the same thing: her first hopeful encounter in years happens at a memorial to the last tree and the journey to find her parents takes her away from the smoggy horror she's known for years. Her talking cat, Darwin, is the closest thing she has to a family member, and the smoke in the air is likely to take him from her too.

April charts an alternate history that results in, thanks to the lack of scientists, a world where electricity was never discovered and the burning of coal and wood is the only source of energy. Combined with the oppressive French Imperial regime, you have a recipe for classic steampunk.

Much like The Matrix and the genre of cyberpunk back in 1999, readers already familiar with this kind of setting might find the opening narration somewhat over-explanatory as to why April's world is this way. Most movie-goers, however, are less likely to take the preponderance of airships and chunky wood-fired machines for granted -- in which case this is the best introduction that one could ask for. Instead of treating the aesthetic as a fashion statement, April does a remarkable job of exploring both parts of the term "steampunk": an empire that needs fuel for its machines of war (the steam) and a dismal world where the only heroes are the outcasts and abnormals (the punks).

While its exploration of steampunk politics is a rare occurrence on film, the actual plot of April is pure old-fashioned adventure-romance, meaning not the lovy-dovy kind of romance but the two-fisted, derring-do kind. Taking inspiration from Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Howl's Moving Castle, Raiders of the Lost Ark and even James Bond and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at times, the film-makers clearly knew what they wanted to produce and who they were making it for. Often, thanks to the nearly perfect pacing, exciting action and silly slapstick, the movie seems to be blossoming out of pure love right before your eyes.

Is the plot predictable? Mostly, with a few minor exceptions. Do the villain/s plans seem far-fetched? Quite. Will the protagonists find themselves in a beautiful natural environment after spending the first half of the story in a smog-choked, overcrowded city? You bet! But accusing April of being unoriginal in these ways is as pointless as doing so to any of the aforementioned properties. Part of what makes something a "genre" in the first place is a set of guidelines and touchstones that are familiar to the audience, and April is no exception.

That said, if you happen to be sensitive to what Doug Walker (of the Nostalgia Critic) calls the "liar revealed" story¹, it rears its head in April, though it is downplayed to an extent: it's only so important to the characters until they next get into trouble (which as you might guess is quite often in a pulp adventure tale).

Strangely enough -- though I cannot be certain of how and when the production of April lines up -- there are multiple reflections, plot points and even visual motifs that seem to simultaneously evoke and rebuke last year's Tomorrowland. Perhaps it is from the overarching premise of disappearing scientists and the imminent death of the natural world. Even the villain/s motivations seem to expound upon and better rationalise the kind of character that the former film's Governor Nix became.

Regardless, while there are certain logistical questions left at the end of April that even the film admits may have gone a bit too far, it manages to tell a complete story in the way that Tomorrowland failed. Rather than a protracted first act and rushed conclusion, April goes to great lengths to provide a full beginning, middle and end. This is a movie that understands that an adventure (rather than say, a mystery story) needs the plot details to be doled out over the course of the story rather than dumped on the audience all at once in the climax.

Many of the fantastically staged action scenes wouldn't have had as much impact if the secrets had been withheld in this way -- and they really are fantastic. The aesthetic of the film is hands-down the best translation to animation of Tintin artist Hergé's pioneering "ligne claire" style (of which Jacques Tardi makes ample use in his work) that I have ever seen. I have not read many of Tardi's comics but I understand that his style also makes use of highly detailed backgrounds, another beautiful component of April's visual identity. The few conspicuous uses of 3D CGI are integrated as well as they can be and mostly just to maintain sensible proportions when depicting vehicles.

The biggest negative I have about April and the Extraordinary World is akin to one of the villain's core motivations: prejudice. That is, prejudice in the anglosphere against French films, and especially animated ones. When I showed the trailer to a friend earlier in the year, he remarked, "oh, an art film."

This is a movie that deserves to be as popular with kids and adults alike as any of the upcoming Dreamworks and Pixar projects, but like the stop motion extravaganzas of LAIKA is probably destined to be seen only as a cult classic. It has humour in abundance, wondrous sights, thrills and even manages to sneak in commentary on the importance of family.

April and the Extraordinary World is no Star Wars or How To Train Your Dragon -- the plot is maybe a tad too conventional -- but in a world with angry superheroes and lightspeed remakes or nostalgia grabs it allows the audience to have a different sort of adventure. It stands out from the norm, and that makes it extraordinary -- 4.0 / 5 Stars.

As they say in France, fin.

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1 That is to say, the rather overused device where a hero is caught in a deceit, and subsequently ostracised -- causing emotional turmoil in one or more characters who thought they could trust them -- even though the audience is well aware that the heroes will kiss and make up before the finale.

Remember the rule of three

It took me actually reading the script of Super 8 to finally realise what always irks me about J. J. Abrams' movies -- and why it doesn't necessarily irritate everyone. Here's a storyteller who (whether through directorial choices or the script he writes) doesn't care much for the rule of three, and pays only the meanest mind to foreshadowing.

The most glaring example (also the least in this argument, but I'll include it because J. J. was still responsible for the final product) was Star Trek Into Darkness, where Khan's super-blood is discovered by Bones to have healing properties because of his testing it on a dead tribble. The only tribble seen beforehand was the painfully ham-handed inclusion of Bones saying "I'm testing Khan's super-blood on a dead tribble because I think it might have healing properties." Cheers Orci and Kurtzman -- as though the rope afforded to a Noo Star Trek ("no longer sci-fi but an action movie instead") is also enough to have a poorly constructed denouement, even for a bad action movie.

Lucky, for fans of his other strengths, Mr Abrams isn't quite so brazenly bad at setting up plots, but in his own self-written movies we still see a lack of respect for the rule of three and foreshadowing. Take Super 8: the reason I decided to write this rant in the first place. Now those of us who dislike the end third of this film share a variety of story and thematic reasons for why it doesn't work -- chief among these (thanks Film Crit Hulk) being how the movie itself lacks evidence in its own understanding of what it wants to do with character resolution and themes. But the movie actually does know what it wants to say: it's just that there's not enough evidence that it does.

At the moment during the end when the alien picks up Joe, according to the shooting script the look it gives him with suddenly human-like eyes is 100% a callback to the Joe and Alice watching home movies scene (where she revealed her father's involvement in Joe's mother's death).

Here's the rub: if you want a particular idea (in this case "the eyes that see within") to sink in, you repeat it. This, in narrative language, highlights to the audience an intentional foreshadowing, rather than world-building or character filigree. You could in fact set aside other major problems with the ending of Super 8 ---

1. the tired cliché of human-like features cluing the audience to "oh, the scary alien's not so bad" (by gum, DOGS do this to us, it's not the most inventive idea), and

2. the fact that Joel Courtney's portrayal of Joe on screen (while captivating) is nowhere close to the suffering, loner tween that the final money shot needed him to be (thanks again to the Hulk -- the contrast between pre-letting-go-of-the-locket-Joe and the theoretical "better" Joe we hope for after the end of the movie just isn't there, he's too well adjusted) --

--- if you had just followed the rule of three, we'd be more inclined to believe "the eyes that see within" was reminiscent of Joe's mother. In other words, the ending of this still-flawed film could have been improved dramatically if the story had just used the rule of three for foreshadowing.

STAR WARS EPISODE VII SPOILERS INCOMING

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You can see the effect of following the rule contrasted with breaking it in the villain and hero of The Force Awakens -- Kylo Ren's struggle with the light sticks to the rule and so it is believable that in remedying his struggle he takes action, because we have had the issue first introduced, then developed at least once before it becomes important. Rule of three.

Conversely, all around the Internet, the detractors of Rey's arc cry foul at how improbably powerful she becomes during the final battle. A moment that was telegraphed when Maz Kanata tells her, part way into the film, that the Force is calling to her: that she has huge potential and she only needs to close her eyes and let it in. (Funny, I just realised that both this and the Super 8 example are "the eyes". Perhaps a running motif in Abrams' work, like super-blood in Orci and Kurtzman's?). You have to remember, and this part is well established, that Rey is not familiar with even hearing the word "Force", and so when Kylo offers to teach her in its ways, it is the mention of the word that causes Rey to recall Maz's teaching. Even with the other key developments with her use of the Force, between Maz and the climactic duel we never have that middle dialogue reference to "letting the Force in" that is necessary for the rule of three.

If the mention of the Force calling to Rey and her needing to let it in was developed before it became important once more in the fight with Kylo, I am fairly convinced that there would be fewer complaints about the apparent "ass pull". After all, one of the more acclaimed positives was Kylo's aforementioned struggle, which had the appropriate development.

For all we know, the infamously cut "Maz goes to the Resistance Base" sequence might have given us the developing mention of letting the Force in. In the final product, however, it doesn't matter because (and I'm being quite presumptuous here), Abrams cares more for pace, energy and ruthlessly propulsive editing than he does for whether or not viewers pick up an important motivational cue; one that can massage potential plot holes and appease narrative dorks like myself.