The Drum Beats Out of Time (An Edge of Tomorrow review)

Poster by Simon Delart.

Disclaimer: I, Jackson Alphonse Connell, being of sound mind and body, do solemnly swear to never mention the 1996 science fiction comedy film Groundhog Day while discussing the 2014 science fiction action film Edge of Tomorrow. The premise is already destined to invite more comparisons from other film critics, and I do not desire to add to those. This paragraph shall therefore be the first and only time I refer to Groundhog Day, and if I deviate from this, then may I be strapped to a chair and forced to watch Project X until my mind folds like a red-hot Mars bar.

Got all that? Good.

Based on the light novel All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, Tom Cruise IS Major William Cage, and despite having a name picked straight out of the Jar of Action Hero Noms de Guerre, he's a smug ad man working for the United Defense Force who's made a comfy job out of convincing brave men and women to strap on a mech-suit and die fighting a bunch of tentacled beasties called "Mimics". His cushy lifestyle runs out when General Brendan Gleeson sends him to the front line for a last stand against the alien/robot/Cthulhu(?) menace. You'd think sending a PR guy frightened of the sight of blood into battle would be a stupid idea, but it hardly matters since the operation is doomed from the start and everyone, including Cage, dies horribly.

Then he wakes up. The day's begun again. He's given grunt boots, Sergeant Bill Paxton gives a rousing speech about how combat makes everything equal and how we're the masters of our own fate, he makes himself unpopular with the international squaddies he'll be fighting with. Cage goes through the battle again, lives slightly longer, dies, then wakes up in the same place he started from. He's caught in a time loop, constantly fighting the same battle, and with the help of Rita Vrtarski (Emily Blunt), the so-called Angel of Verdun, he learns how to use this to end the war.

What Edge of Tomorrow resembles most is a 2000AD comic strip, that classic staple of British science fiction based around high concept ideas, hard-edged violence, attention to world-building and a streak of morbid humour running through it. Certainly, the decision to set most of it on a French coast and open with a battle strongly reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan adds to that impression. Then again, what other SF action flick would have a scene set in a dead caravan park? A movie that hinges around repetition would get stale quickly, and it's to Liman and the writers' credit that every new scenario feels fresh and offers some new development, even with the clunky exposition courtesy of Noah Taylor's moustachioed doctor. Quite a few scenes play out with the sense that Cage knows what's already happened, with an air of ambiguity over how many lives he's gone through to reach that point. Like a 2000AD story, it zips along at a brisk pace, with director Doug Liman using fake BBC/CNN news footage to set up the world from the start, then settling into the meat of the story.

And that story is Tom Cruise, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, dying a whole lot. Liman mines some laughs out of the silly, often amazingly quick ways Cage bites it - sometimes he's run over, sometimes he's squashed, but more often than not it's Vrataski shooting him in the head to reset the timeline. See, Cage's alien-infected blood gives him that power, and if he loses too much of it or gets it replaced, he loses the gift, so every time he suffers a big injury (which is quite often), Vrataski elects to start over by killing him and picking up where they left off the next time around. Having gotten used to the idea of Tom Cruise as an ageless robot man not affected by the elements, watching him die over and over and over again is surprisingly cathartic and enjoyable. I don't think Sean Bean has died more times in his entire career than Cruise does in Edge of Tomorrow.

Ghoulish satisfaction aside, I like how Cage has an arc throughout the film. He starts as an oily coward, more suited to selling an image and counting the money while countless people die horribly in battle, and constantly tries to get out of actually having to do a goddamn thing. His first deployment has him shivering, pale, a film of snot running to his mouth, a rare look for Cruise and one that reminds you that, yes, beneath all the Scientology craziness there is a good actor somewhere there. Cage learns to adapt, to change, to plan, and he becomes a hero in a way that feels earned.

This isn't to overlook his co-star. On the contrary, I came out in love with Rita Vrataski, and not just because she's the only character in the movie taking on the Mimics with a giant helicopter blade as a sword. (Not completely, anyway.) The "Full Metal Bitch", as she's charmingly dubbed, has been through the time loop before, and her cold behaviour is the result of dying thousands and thousands of times fighting a pointless battle, watching comrades die the same way over and over, earning a title she doesn't feel she warrants. This never undermines her as an action hero, however; there's no frail bird waiting to be nursed back to health. Blunt gets just as many opportunities to be badass, maybe even more so than Cruise.

There's a pleasing weight to the mechanised battlesuits the protagonists wear into battle. I maintain that the best visions of the future in SF films are ones that look lived-in. Spare me your chrome skyscrapers and sleek cars that look like they've been designed by Apple, and give me dirty grimy machines held together with duct tape. I can imagine actual humans using them, repairing them by hand, struggling to turn the safety off. That's what gives CG actual presence. Less successful are the Mimics themselves, an ungainly cross between the Sentinels from The Matrix and the bugs of Starship Troopers. They move at an unsettling gait, but they lack the sense of crushing dread provided by the former or the gruesome murderiness of the latter. They just seem to punch people to death with their tentacles, because we got to keep that PG-13 rating.

Edge of Tomorrow might be the best video game movie made so far, and you can take that as a positive or a negative, but it really reminds me of cult dungeon-crawler Dark Souls, the closest gaming has gotten to recreating a trip to the village dominatrix. Like Edge, the game is built around a protagonist going up against an unfairly large opponent, being reduced to jelly, picking themselves up and figuring out how not to be reduced to jelly. Cage and Vrataski map out their plan to win step-by-step, which direction to turn and when a Mimic is going to appear, and it's satisfying to watch characters we're invested in get smarter and get closer to victory.

That's the heart of what makes Edge of Tomorrow work. It isn't too interested in the philosophical aspects of its story, but it mines the most out of its gimmick and centres it around two solid characters and has just enough smart to distinguish it amongst other popcorn films. Liman doesn't quite land the ending, but it's still a taut muscular action romp that feels like a return to form not just for Cruise, but for his director. Sometimes that's all you need.

Now if it had just retained the original title.

Art of the Invisible (A Wolf of Wall Street review)

Poster by Daniel Devoy, sourced from designers of tumblr. 

With this money comes problems, and with these problems come solutions.

The Weeknd, "Coming Down" 

Money is just one of things I've never really understood. I get its purpose as a way of getting things, but how it actually works, the mechanisms of the stock market and the exchange rate, that's some arcane science you need to spend six months consulting Old Moore's Almanac before you properly grasp it. All I know is that when I decide I want something to drink, I hand over the little papery thing in exchange because the Bank of England has promised the guy behind the till he's actually getting five English pounds for his trouble. It's a £5 note because someone told us.

Jordan Belfort, at least the smooth charismatic one played by Leonardo DiCaprio, seems to get this, explaining to the audience the inner workings of his schemes before noticing the glazed look and moving on to the juicy details. So too does his mentor Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), a deranged Wall Street broker going through life in a constant narcotic haze. It's all about faking it, you see, if you want to get ahead. "Nobody knows if a stock is going up, down or fucking sideways, least of all stockbrokers. But we have to pretend that we know." He dispenses valuable advice to his protegé all the while snorting coke and getting Martinis delivered to the table every five minutes and doing some weird chest-beating chant that only makes sense to him and that the young Belfort will later turn into a war cry, all while emphasising that a stockbroker's only goal is to move the client's money to his pocket in such a way that the customer won't even notice.

So monetary exchange becomes an act of magic. Or, more accurately, an addiction, a drug. Hanna outright states that clients end up suckered in because they're hooked on the idea of getting even richer, and Belfort describes it as his favourite for how it makes you feel invincible. After all, with enough money, you can make anything happen. Save endangered animals, keep children and runaways off the street, buy your dear old mum the house of her dreams. Belfort would have you believe that the green stuff makes you a better person.

Not that he's a testament to that ideal. The Wolf of Wall Street's greatest strength is making Jordan Belfort, the author of the memoir the film is based on, an unreliable narrator. His frequent addresses to the audience are taken from Richard III, where the amoral protagonist takes the viewer under their wing and explains their actions, making them complacent in their deeds. A lot of criticism has been thrown at the film for glamorising the various partners and brokers of Stratton Oakmont, and all the bacchanalian shit they got up to. It doesn't help that quite a few places have been throwing "Wolf of Wall Street Parties".

They were probably watching a different film. The hedonism of Stratton Oakmont isn't stylised and aspirational, it's sweaty and writhing and covered in bodily fluids. An early celebration involving a nude marching band and a seemingly infinite supply of strippers quickly descends into a strobe-lit frenzy as women are tossed to the floor, underwear discarded by a bunch of men in braces and ties with their tongues hanging out, all set to the nightmarish blues of Howlin' Wolf. Martin Scorsese has dealt with this "portrayal = endorsement" mindset before in the likes of Goodfellas, and he isn't letting up here.

This is where Belfort as an unreliable narrator comes in. It's easy to accuse the film of sexism, what with every female character who's of legal age being hit on at the very least, and every other woman being part of an endless wallpaper of tits and Brazilian waxes. With the exception of the confident and calculating Naomi (a superb Margot Robbie, playing her as the only woman who can render Belfort a whinging puppy), they're not a major part of the story. But that story is Belfort's, and it's a story he edits on the fly to make himself look good. Scorsese and his Boardwalk Empire partner Terence Winter open with the title character driving a red Ferrari, which then changes to white mid-shot at his insistence. He glosses over the bloody suicide of one of his employees. He thinks his car is pristine after driving it home while whacked out of his skull, only to realise in the morning it looks like he drove it through a hurricane. You can't trust him.

And even if you did, he's not someone you really want to be like. He takes expired Quaaludes by the dozen with his deranged right-hand man Donnie (Jonah Hill) just to get a hit. The result is both men turning into drooling imbeciles who nearly kill themselves and destroy their business in an utterly hilarious scene that approaches Mr Bean levels of slapstick brilliance. Hanna makes the point that to work on Wall Street, you need to snort coke and wank in the office toilet at least twice a day. To be a stockbroker is to become a horny jagoff who literally can't get through the day without furious masturbation and doing enough yayo to fell a bison. Dare to dream, kids!

It's weird how, in 2013, DiCaprio appeared in two films about the dark side of the American Dream: this and Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby. While Luhrmann was too swept up in the glamour of the Roaring Twenties to really get to the heart of the source material, Scorsese is under no illusions, and it's fantastic to see an elder statesman of cinema make a film as fearless and powerful as this. Starting from humble beginnings, shedding your old skin and becoming a demon in the process is what the American Dream is now. And it's not like any of us haven't thought of it. We all have lists of What I'll Do When I'm Rich. Men like Belfort are grown in that environment. It's fitting the film ends with him delivering a Get Rich Quick seminar (introduced by the real Jordan Belfort no less) trying to get a bunch of stammering yokels to "sell me this pen". The exact phrase he used to get the original founders of Stratton Oakmont together.

Another wave of wolves pretending to be lions, then. Another congregation in a dark church seeking to become better people. Another hundred Jordan Belforts in the waiting.

I come from a world where even the signposts are fictional. Follow the white rabbit. Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning. And a more recent one, from forty years ago, the fictional direction given by a mysterious man to an eager journalist: follow the money. Economics is an artform. It's the art of the invisible. Money is fictional.

Warren Ellis 

Why Don't We Do It in the Road? (A Shame review)

Sometimes things go better in pairs. It helped Noah organise the passengers for his Ark, it's mostly prevented us from wearing odd shoes, and it's often the basis of fruitful collaborations: Bert & Ernie, Abbott & Costello, Alcohol & Regret. This extends to art as well; Dalí couldn't have functioned without the aid of his muse Gala. John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote some of the most renowned pop songs of all time, and neither produced as good work separately.

And, of course, there's the world of film. Given how prevalent the auteur theory is in film criticism, and the importance we place on directors, we can't help but pay special attention to the interplay between them and certain collaborators. Would Werner Herzog be cinema's lovable crazy uncle without Klaus Kinski driving him on? Probably not. Martin Scorsese would never have made Raging Bull were it not for De Niro visiting him in hospital with a copy of Jake La Motta's autobiography. Sometimes a creative partner just brings out the best in a director, and we're seeing something similar in the relationship between Michael Fassbender and Steve McQueen.

No, not that one.

That one.

(Normally I'd put an alternative poster up, but the one I've chosen is pretty NSFW, you'll see why after the jump.)