Steven Spielberg: The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Having filled my viewing gaps in Spielberg's filmography, the status of The Lost World: Jurassic Park as one of the director's weakest films, if not his worst film, has never been less in doubt. Other low points in the director's career have at least shown promise or intriguing premises: Hook may rely far too much on its regrettably hip version of the Lost Boys' hideout, but it sports two great performances and a high concept floated it through many of its glaring flaws. 1941 showed the director's first major, explicit attempt to revive the films of his youth for the modern multiplex, an approach that would soon bear fruit with the Indiana Jones franchise. Even the forgotten Always, with its too-broad combination of haunting movies A Matter of Life and Death and Only Angels Have Wings, had moments of beauty worthy of those wrenching melodramas.

In comparison, The Lost World seems such a cynical cash-in for Spielberg's biggest hit that hardly any visible reason exists as to why he would do it. It's not like the world's richest and most powerful director needed to do this to get approval for another film. His previous two films, the first Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, eradicated whatever sliver of doubt remained that Spielberg was King of Hollywood. The knowledge of the uselessness of the sequel makes its wretched, slapstick construction all the more grating.

The first major transition—is it trying to be a wry match cut? Because to designate it so—sets the whole tone for this film. Awkwardly cutting from a scene so stiff it defeats its own horror to Ian Malcolm on a subway, this poor segue demonstrates the total absence of the director's usual skill; I can't even bring myself to bring his grace into the equation.

Instantly, we get a sense of how simplistic the film will be. The first film certainly didn't display a richness of character and theme, but Malcolm goes from being a collected, smarmy scientist who knows that everything will fall apart to a panicky buffoon, a collection of tics and frantic sarcasm with even less personality than he had in the first film. And once again, he's the most complicated person in the movie; imagine how awful the others are, then.

Malcolm finds himself back in the thick of it with dinosaurs thanks to a series of developments made up out of whole cloth: as it turns out, InGen had a whole other island where they made the dinosaurs, and after a storm they just vacated the place and let the animals run free. 'K. John Hammond, reduced from a showman blind to consequences to an environmentalist…blind to consequences. He casually sends a team of researchers to head off the new board of directors from finding a way to exploit the dinosaurs, ignoring the obvious danger. The only reason Malcolm agrees to go to Site B is because Hammond convinced his girlfriend, Sarah (Julianne Moore) to go, which she does despite hearing Malcolm's tales of his time on Isla Nubar. If this film has any real commentary to impart on the human condition, it is in our ceaseless inability to respond to the statement "Don't do that" with "What, this?" We are a race of scab-pickers.

The convolutions, inconsistencies and outright retconning of this film pile on so fast that no remote connection to the story can ever take hold. The team arrives on the island and promptly set up camp at the edge of a cliff for no reason, and we soon learn that Malcolm's petulant daughter Kelly stowed away in the trailer. Soon, InGen forces arrive with the intent of capturing specimens and bringing them to a park being erected in San Diego, truly one of the stupidest ideas to ever test one's cynicism. Misanthrope that I am, not even I can comprehend anyone approving of such an outrageous idea after the pure catastrophe of the events at Isla Nubar—an island designed from the ground up to contain these creatures.

And then, Spielberg and writer David Koepp actually succeed in making the team sent to stop this madness from occurring worse than the ostensible bad guys. When the director lays a particularly maudlin track over shots of these mercenaries subduing genetically engineered beasts that should be firebombed for the safety of mankind, you know you're in for a tedious bit of moralism. As it turns out, one of the researchers, photographer Nick (Vince Vaughn), is an environmentalist saboteur who promptly releases the captured animals to wreak havoc on the InGen camp, destroying all equipment and stranding dozens of people on a deadly island. Later, when Nick makes the stupefyingly dumb decision to take a wounded baby T-Rex back to their trailer and the parents naturally follow, the "baddies" arrive and lend a helping hand and allow the four remaining members of Hammond's party to accompany them.

But it doesn't stop there! Nick continues to mess with the hired guns, stealing the shells out of the shotgun of Roland (Pete Postlethwaite), the hunter leading the InGen operation for the company's head, Ludlow (Arliss Howard). (It is yet another sign of lazy writing that an experienced professional like Roland wouldn't check his weapon before firing.) This is after Ludlow gives Nick coordinates to a radio station to call for help and largely lets bygones be bygones for being indirectly responsible for the deaths of many people.

Nothing in this movie makes sense. Why does Malcolm deliberately go out into a wild habitat looking as if he's going to stand in front of the nearest brick wall and tell jokes? Why can't the "heroes" put aside their superiority to work together to get as many people off the island alive as possible? Is the well-being of creatures whose existence poses a direct threat to the stability of the natural ecosystem more important than the lives of a people paid to come to an island, some of whom surely must have had no idea what they were getting into? How does the captured adult T-Rex kill everyone on-board the boat as it heads to San Diego yet leave the ship itself unscathed? And, again, WHY would you bring that goddamn baby rex back to your trailer? Kelly's presence is a nuisance and nothing more than a laughable play for easy audience tension (which fails, since the girl is so selfish and unlikeable) and a means to shoehorn in the director's absent parent theme, but even she's smart enough to see what a horrible idea this is.

Suspense is founded on some basic sense of logic. Though I've cooled on it since my childhood, the first Jurassic Park creates genuine suspense because the characters find themselves in plausible situations within the film's suspension of disbelief; here, everything is so blatantly staged that you just keep waiting for the obvious thing to go wrong instead of searching any corner guessing at where the next scare is coming.

Not that scares seem to be high up on the director's list of priorities here, though. Replacing the already thin characterizations of this franchise is a load of broad comedy completely incongruous with the film's haughty moralism and its fleeting attempts to feel darker than the first with the open antipathy of humans to animals compared to the snowblind optimism of Hammond's original enterprise. Goldblum does everything but break out the jazz hands in his hammy performance, and awkward one-liners dot the film. A brief line about Kelly being a gymnast comes into play late in the film with a run-in with a velociraptor that borders on the offensive in its howlingly bad staging.

By far the biggest flaw, however, is the total absence of magic and wonder, especially because the film still attempts to trade on the awe of the first film. Instead of scientists like Grant and Sattler being overwhelmed by the sight of dinosaurs and framing their discussions in moral terms, we get eggheaded chatter that sounds as if some of the actors were reading from an encyclopedia. When we first meet Sarah, she runs through dinosaur theory so rapidly and flatly you can almost see the off-screen lines reflected in Moore's eyes. One of the InGen crew, Burke, speaks solely in expository jargon about the dinosaurs, as if he's less a scientist than a tour guide in a museum. There's no insight, no discussion, only the relaying of facts in a desperate bid to suggest some kind of research went into this slapstick farce that ends with a rampage in San Diego so tacked-on it seems someone threw it in on a whim.

I typically don't jive with the Nostalgia Critic's brand of loud, cloying humor, but his video on The Lost World actually serves as a solid summary not only of the incessant plot holes and disregard for continuity but the laziness of execution. The only memorable shot in this film is of the raptors closing in on panicked humans running into a field of long grass, tails raised like shark fins, but Spielberg ruins even this moment by picking off the runners by having them slip out of view. It's a completely nonsensical method of raptor attack considering how tall they are. This is but one small example of the rampant incompetence and lack of care put into the film, a monumental step backward for Steven Spielberg. The only film in his canon I can think of to match it is the fourth Indiana Jones film, and at least the director tried to find a fresh angle for that film. The Lost World exists to educate what handful of people out there might have thought Jaws 2 could have been good if Spielberg directed it. A cash-in is a cash-in, and not even the finest populist director of his time could find any spark in this overwhelming redundancy.

Steven Spielberg: Amistad

Amistad is the last film in Steven Spielberg's corpus I'm visiting for the first time. Surrounded by the more lauded dramatic achievements of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, not to mention colored by certain feelings of its preachiness among those who saw it, Spielberg's middle drama of the '90s never appeared on my radar as anything other than a faint blip. But just as I got to see Always through fresh eyes that countered a number of my expectations for that film, so too did Amistad prove far more than the half-forgotten mainstream consensus would have me believe.

In fact, Amistad might well be the most consistent of Spielberg's triumvirate of '90s prestige pictures. It lacks the overwhelming emotional impact of Schindler's List and the visceral power of Saving Private Ryan, but it makes up for these shortcomings by sidestepping the bouts of moral ambiguity and questionable "mainstreamification" of its serious themes. Amistad does have a bit of typical writing in its construction, but by and large it proves a deftly written, fleetingly problematic return to the issue Spielberg did not treat with full sincerity and conviction with The Color Purple: slavery and racism.

In its own way, the opening segment of Amistad is every bit as brilliant, dynamic and self-contained as the D-Day sequence of Saving Private Ryan. Keeping cinematographer Kimenski on board, Spielberg frame the uprising on the titular ship in shocking terms. It starts with extreme close-ups of the face of Cinqué (Djimon Honsou), a slave bound for Cuba, breathing laboriously and clearly struggling. Cut to another extreme close-up of his fingers scraping at the wood of his bench in an attempt to free the nail, the jaw-clenching squeaks across wood deafening in the silence of the rocking ship at night. Lightning flashes (divorced from any masking thunder) illuminate chipped fingernails and bleeding tips. The suspense is as unbearable as any shot of Jews hiding from Nazis.

At last, Cinqué frees himself and releases the other captives, who storm the ship and slaughter the Spanish crew. The same lightning that showed us the slave freeing himself also reveal yet cover up the bloodbath. Spielberg shows glimpses of the violence, flashes of beastly faces in fearsome war yells. The fury is terrible to behold, and Cinqué only just manages to stop himself from killing the final two crew members, aware that he needs them to steer him home. The whole sequence is one of Spielberg's finest moments, playing on his love of Judeo-Christian imagery (of slaves coming out of bondage via the removal of a nail in wood that has direct Christian connotations) and his ability to make something visceral out of moral drama. Were it not such a pure demonstration of humanity's primal urge to survive and assert free will, one might call the animalistic visions of rampaging blacks at least subconsciously racist. Compared to the borderline stereotypical posturing of the actors in The Color Purple, these depictions are prouder and more defiant.

Such depictions are also clarified through the film's later structure, which does not move in easy chronological order but contextualizes what we see in retrospect so we never glory in what's happening. Even when it seems all is won and even the characters cheer in victory, Spielberg is waiting to pull back and reveal the full scope of the issue at hand. It's a clear response to those who felt he focused on the "success story" of the Schindler Jews at the expense of the six million less-fortunate souls.

The rest of the film relies on considerably less showy direction than the opening -- it is a courtroom drama, after all -- but Spielberg manages to maintain his usual penchant for visual storytelling with more static shots. The first 20 minutes or so contain nary a word of English and few subtitles, placing the heft of narrative building solely on Spielberg's camera. With nothing more than the right distance and angle, Spielberg manages to eke out not only what's happening but an emotional current for it. Cinqué spares the two officers and orders the one who understands Mende to turn around and head back to Africa. We see Cinqué's pride and leadership skills as he interacts with other Mende, but we also get a glimpse of how out of his element he is: when he briefly plays with the ship's helm he seems almost childlike. Slowly, the director drops hints of trouble: food runs scarce and the slave ship keeps sailing past vessels with white people on them. At last, when they run aground and some of the rebel slaves go to fetch water, it becomes clear they couldn't be stopping on land at all if they were really on their way back over the Atlantic.

Sure enough, the slaves are captured by an American frigate and placed in jail in Connecticut. When they arrive, the white prisoners protest having to share so much as the same room with the slaves, who are soon brought to court for what promises to be an open-and-shut case. When complications arise, they are not over the issue of whether what the slaves did was justifiable; it is merely a question of whether the Africans are pirates or property. A sub-question: whose property are they? Spielberg has displayed a certain rose-colored view of America from time to time, and his moderate Hollywood liberalism has allowed him to play both sides of the fence with impunity for decades. But here he at last fully confronts that which he only gave a glancing blow 12 years earlier: the nation's history of slavery and racism.

I felt that The Color Purple's chief shortcoming was in its over-reliance of cheap humor that never meshed with the moments of sincerity and pain. Yet I never felt the heaping load of comedy injected into Amistad detracted from the film. Here, Spielberg and writer David Franzoni base the humor in situational comedy instead of the farce of The Color Purple. Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), the ambulance(-cart)-chasing lawyer who agrees to defend the Africans for a pair of abolitionist journalists (Morgan Freeman and Stellan Skarsgård), tries to communicate with the slaves, but the language barrier leads to minutes worth of mishaps and confusion. Even when a basic form of primitive gestures sort out a handful of problems between him and Cinqué, the two still make for a fine double act. Once a translator (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Royal Navy officer who joined the fleet after being freed by Britain's anti-slavery forces, enters and tells Cinqué's story, however, the laughs die in the throat.

In fairness, Amistad does have one too many Stanley Kramer-esque lapses of moralizing for its own good. The obvious arc of Baldwin from a brilliant-but-detached lawyer into a crusader for human rights is all too predictable, and the simplification of white characters into good and true liberals and frothing bigots who for some reason gather by the hundreds to jeer blacks for killing people from another country is tedious. Martin Van Buren gets thrown under the bus as a racist and conniver, leaving out the much more complex (and relevant) moral confusion of those politicians who did not support slavery but felt it necessary to keep the peace and avoid war. Amistad glosses over this hairy situation by making Van Buren as loathsome as possible and never giving the threat of war the gravity it deserves, especially in hindsight of the horrific costs of the Civil War.

But there are also flecks of some of Spielberg's most intelligent and thoughtful filmmaking. If he simplifies the bigoted antagonists, he at least explores the gray within the abolitionist cause: Tappan (Skarsgård), who came to anti-slavery through religion, sees value in martyrdom and would be willing to sacrifice the lives of the Africans if it meant stunning the public into action. He balks at Baldwin's strategy -- to render the matter of property null and void by proving the slaves came from Africa and therefore could not be taken as slaves following the criminalization of importing foreign slaves -- because it lacks a moral statement. He compares Baldwin's idea to Christ calling someone to get him off on a technicality, to which Baldwin replies, "But Christ lost."


Spielberg frames the racism in horrendously blunt terms, to the point that a few words of dismissal in the courtroom shock and disgust almost as much as flashbacks of murders, torture and rapes at the hands of Portuguese and Spanish sailors. Through the translator, Cinqué tells his story and of the atrocities he witnessed to Baldwin, and when the camera returns from his reverie he's in the courtroom relating this to the prosecution, U.S. Attorney William S. Holabird (Pete Postlethwaite), who instantly calls Cinqué's story a fabrication. He never once views Cinqué and the others as anything but wayward property, even when the African leader moves everyone else with his pidgin chant "Give us us free!" But really, no one in the court truly takes Cinqué's story seriously until a representative of the Royal Navy's anti-slavery troops, a white man, corroborates the slave's story. The film stresses this irony, laying percussive African music and mournful Western vocalization over Cinqué's flashbacks but reserving the somber, stunned chords for the mere words the naval officer says. And isn't it funny that those white people so disgusted by the very idea of blacks wear nothing but ink-black cloaks and clothes?

Amistad represents an autocritique of the traits Spielberg displayed in Schindler's List, even if, as I've argued, the seemingly problematic issues of that movie smooth out remarkably well on closer study. Schindler's List moved methodically through its horrors, to the point that one would be tempted to cheer if it ended Inlgourious Basterds style with Schinder's Jews machine-gunning Hitler and his companions. Here, he opens with an act of horror that later proves to be scarcely inadequate a show of rage. Yes, the audience will likely end up supporting the slaughter of Spaniards, but by putting so much distance between the outcome and the motivation, Spielberg takes all the "enjoyment" (for want of a better word) out of it and makes it something you think about it retrospect. And when it reaches what seems to be its triumphant climax, Spielberg reveals we've got another hour to go, enough time to let it sink in that, even if these slaves emerge triumphant and go home free men, that will barely put a dent on the slave trade (the illegality of which is ignored by everyone until a court is forced to deal with the issue), and their victory won't bring back the scores who died on their very ship from starvation and murder.

But the most surprising aspect of the film is Spielberg's harsh take on American politics and the notion of the American/Western ideal. John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins), former president and defeated old man, putters about the film for the first two thirds until Baldwin prevails upon him successfully to help the Africans when Van Buren kicks the case to the Supreme Court despite the issue seemingly being resolved. Adams worries about standing in the shadow of his father, a worry confirmed by the dismissive views of other politicians. Yet it eventually becomes clear to the man that the only way to build his own legacy separate from that of his father is to help the document John Adams helped write achieve its full potential instead of being held back by the same sort of reactionary fools who hobbled it in the first place.

Hopkins wisely chooses to play Quincy less as a crotchety old man embittered by his perceived failure than as a resigned idealist. His climactic speech is powerful, all the more so for incorporating Cinqué's own words as a sign of respect and equality, but Hopkins adds labored breaths and grunts under even the most solemn proclamation to ground the moment. When he finishes, no one applauds. They're too busy truly thinking about what was just said.

Its length may be unjustified, it oversimplifies history and some moments fall flat -- the parallels of Cinqué summoning the spirits of his ancestors and Quincy dealing with his own progenitor have too much of a "we're not so different after all!" feel, and the brief clip of Civil War action in the closing montage is embarrassing -- but Amistad deserves more credit than I was willing to give it going into the film. It gets one last parting shot in the final text scroll, noting that Cinqué returned to find his wife and child gone, themselves likely sold in slavery, a reminder that the significant victory he and the others enjoyed only made a small blip on the radar. But it was right, and that is the point Amistad makes even as it acknowledges the darkness of the full scope.

Pete Postlethwaite, 1946-2011

Like all mourning film fans, I awoke this morning to the terrible news of Pete Postlethwaite's passing.One of my favorite character actors, Postlethwaite will leave a hole that cannot be filled by any ordinary "that guy."


One of the great character actors, Postlethwaite carries a particular resonance in my life, as he was the first supporting player I ever noticed. When I was 7, I watched Dragonheart with a friend, not a film that set my wee mind ablaze even at such a young age, I nevertheless enjoyed but, more than the dragon or any of the action, I was mesmerized by this goofy side character, Brother Gilbert, a monk and aspiring poet who turned up at the oddest times and had the best lines. To this day, I remember giggling like the little brat I was when, during the climactic action scene, Gilbert secreted himself up a tree with a bow and arrow, inadvertently shot a man in the ass and said with hilariously focused glee, "Turn the other cheek, brother!" I was hooked. Who was this loon?

Since then, I've been delighted by him at nearly every turn, no matter how brief his appearances. He recently lit up an already strong cast in The Town with but two scenes that transcended the cops vs. robbers plot to show what real evil looks like. I didn't notice him at first in Inception, playing the dying but still disapproving billionaire father of Cillian Murphy's heir to the corporate throne, but when I did I got the same wash of elation I do whenever I recognized him in a movie.

It was part of the reason I never actively looked for his movies, never surfed IMDb to fill the gaps in the Postlethwaite canon, if you could call a series of roles that usually amounted to no more than a few lines of dialogue and one or two scenes each a "canon." I preferred to meet him as an old friend, randomly running into him on the street, thus preserving that constant delight I got from seeing him. Every time I got to see how he was doing, to briefly exchange pleasantries and move on to a day that suddenly seemed brighter.

Postlethwaite had "unconventional looks," though it's funny how the vast majority of people who have appeared in films since the medium's inception have not lined up with "conventional" beauty. He emerged looking fatherly, as if this man never existed as a youth but simply sprang up from the ground ready to look after children of his own. That paternal charm was double-edged: to take his two most prominent film roles, both of which were fathers, look at the difference between the man in In the Name of the Father and the tyrant of Distant Voices, Still Lives. In the former, he wants to help his son stay out of trouble, only to be used as leverage by outside for condemning the boy. In Terence Davies' anti-nostalgic poem, he captures the vicious, domineering, frightful side of patriarchy, a man who is violent and monstrous yet all the more terrifying before being raggedly, recognizably human. When he pauses while decorating the house for Christmas, a moment that occurs just before and after examples of his horrid abuse, his moment of gentle love, a touch that may have seemed a scripted, hollow moment in any other actor's hands becomes psychological and real.

That was his specialty: no part, no matter how small and even stilted, didn't leap off the page when he embodied it. Take his part as the hunter, Roland, in Steven Spielberg's misguided Jurassic Park sequel: The Lost World: he has killed beasts of all kinds and casually mounted some of the last of endangered species in a parlor, but when he sees the corporatization of animal herding, a cynical amalgamation of breeding and spectacle that outstrips even the most corrupt and abusive zoo, he blanches. It is a moment that makes no sense, the idea of a hunter suddenly leaving behind his ways when the only change in his usual ways is a matter of scale, but the look of utter disgust in his eyes, the dawning self-loathing that accompanies his friend's meaningless death and the capitalistic monetization of a primal impulse makes you feel the wrongness of what happens in that movie far more than Spielberg's overly suggestive camerawork and the speechifying of the good guys.

I'd follow Postlethwaite anywhere, always placing my trust in him but reserving enough wariness to expect his intensity. Sheila O'Malley already has a piece up on the actor that focuses on his devilish scene in The Town, where he sadistically and theatrically carves the thorns off roses while laying out why and how Ben Affleck's character will continue to work for him. It is a keenly acted piece, each thrust of the knife down the stem a punctuation to the mounting horror of his monologue. It's also a clever visualization of what Fergie is actually saying, his pruning of the rose matching up eerily to his descriptions of what he did to Doug's mother and what he'll do to his girlfriend if the disillusioned robber does not carry out his missions. The scene fits perfectly into Affleck's genre mash-up, a deliciously vile and exaggerated moment that taps into the character as totally as Jeremy Renner's own psychological development of his sociopath.

To say that I will miss Postlethwaite is an understatement. I would have loved to see his King Lear on the stage -- I cannot imagine an actor better suited for the role -- and to be left with a series of cameos seems unfitting for a talent that huge. But those performances still exist, some of which I've yet to discover, and I can still stumble upon his work with that same elation that I felt before when his sharp, foreboding but faintly kind face appeared on the screen. Steven Spielberg called him the best actor in the world, to which Pete responded in characteristically British fashion, "I'm sure what Spielberg actually said was, 'The thing about Pete is that he thinks he's the best actor in the world.'" But I have to side with Spielberg: even among the finest of character actors, few could do as much with as little as Pete Postlethwaite. May he rest in peace.

Distant Voices, Still Lives

Before Lars von Trier attempted to tear down the musical with his inventive but ultimately repugnant Dancer in the Dark, British director Terence Davies managed to make a movie entirely dependent on the power and freedom of music while placing these ideas in the genre most antithetical to their expression: the kitchen-sink drama. Well, two movies, to be specific, as Distant Voices, Still Lives combines two short films made two years apart with separate crews Von Trier at least let his protagonist indulge in a bit of fantastical revelry before smacking her down with cold reality. By contrast, the carefully arranged tableaux of family members Davies presents allow for no escape, and the flashbacks only ever seem to touch upon even unhappier times.

The first song filters over a static shot of the stairwell of a cozy but intimate home as the mother of the family (Freda Dowie) sings "I Get the Blues When It Rains." As her pure voice wafts over the soundtrack, the camera slowly swivels 180 degrees to focus on the house door, ending in a jump cut from the cloudy day to a sunny morning as a hearse arrives outside the home. Cut to a medium shot of a family arrayed in funereal blacks around a portrait of the deceased patriarch, so still and desaturated that the shot appears to be a photograph from an old family album until people begin to speak. Another cut shows the family in the same room but with wedding clothes, celebrating the betrothal of the oldest daughter, Eileen (Angela Walsh). That thin division between death and the promise of new life speaks to the hopelessness of this first part of Davies' diptych.

Before we can enjoy this happy moment, however, the children begin reminiscing about their childhood, taking us into frightening memories that unfold achronologically as memories always do. Eileen says aloud that she wishes her father could be there to see her wedding, but the other sister, Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne), vituperatively states she doesn't, and we flash back to her begging her father (Pete Postlethwaite) to let her go to the dance as he makes her rigorously scrub the floors as if a modern-day Cinderella. At last, the father throws down some coins, then grabs a broom and beats the girl. Some memories spring from the flashbacks themselves, taking us deeper still into this domestic nightmare. One beautifully arranged sequence pans from the present, as Eileen sobs in her husband's arms for her dad, through darkness before traveling back to the past to see Tommy dutifully decorating the house for Christmas and whispering "God bless, kids" as he hangs stockings on the stairwell. Then, at the dinner on Christmas Day, Tommy suddenly leaps to his feet and drags the tablecloth and all the food onto the floor, screaming for his wife to come clean up the mess.


Another director might have used such juxtaposition to point out the victimhood of the women characters, but Davies captures the complexity of domestic abuse. Not even codependency can be used as a quick explanation for why strange feelings of connection linger, and the confused feelings in the survivors (and never has that term seemed more apt when considering the bereaved) bypass the usual dysfunctional family theatrics straight to a deeply identifiable authenticity.

That layered emotion extends to the use of music as well. Never is this more apparent than in the heartbreaking scene wherein the young children ask their mother, cheerfully cleaning windows, why she married their father. With a wistful, slightly wounded voice, she notes that he used to be such a good dancer. As she does this, Ella Fitzgerald's "Taking a Chance on Love" plays in the background. Suddenly, the scene cuts to Tommy viciously beating her and commanding her to stop crying as he does so while the music still plays over the image. Rather than use the song for ironic purposes, Davies digs into its various meanings and interpretations, initially tackling the more romantic and nostalgic side as the mother thinks back to a simpler time when she saw the rakish goodness in her man. Then, the director tackles the material from another angle, revealing that some chances lead to negative outcomes. And as the camera follows the aftermath of that beating, showing the wife's bruised face and arms as she silently resumes cleaning, we are spared even the slightest hint of black comedy from using music ironically. The closest antecedent to Davies' take on musical tunes is Chaplin's Limelight, a film actually quoted here when the son, Tony (Dean Williams), goes AWOL goes AWOL during his army training to confront his father. Thrown in the brig for his insubordination, Tony takes out a harmonica and plays the theme to Limelight, despite the anachronism. Chaplin's musical, as with the rest of his art, was at once grandiose and nuanced and, like Davies' film, autobiographical. Dissatisfied with casting his drunken performer as a dour version of the usual musical star, Chaplin too managed to add layers to his movie.

Both Distant Voices and Still Lives, the latter set about a decade later than the former, use the same locations -- the family house, a nearby pub, a hospital ward, the Catholic parish -- to elicit familiar moods. Outside the house, where the daughters and their friends go to smoke and talk, is a modicum of freedom, even if a yell from the father can send the girls scurrying back inside. At the pub is a sense of catharsis, where family and friends engage in drunken group singing that offers respite from the misery.

The difference in tone between the two films, however, is vast even as one is informed by the other. Distant Voices, true to its opening moments, is funereal, shot in faded sepia tones that take the family-photo aesthetic and sap any possible hint of golden nostalgia from it. By the time of Still Lives, the father does not hang over the film as much, allowing for a sense of happiness to intrude into the characters' lives. The shots often fade to white in this second half, suggesting a more spiritual presence, and a hopeful one.

By the same token, the sins of the father are passed onto the child, and Still Lives does not drop the ball of depressing domestic violence by showing how abuse begets abuse. The husbands of Eileen, Maisie and their friend Micky all separate the women, to the point that those pub nights become even more needed as it's the only time they get to see each other. The music of the '50s may be lighter, having progressed to the age of economic security following the cynicism of postwar blues, but society has not yet reached the rock revolution, and the gentler pop serves only to mask the tumultuous restart of the cycle.

I confess that, while I will never write off any genre or style wholesale (unless you start getting into esoterica), realism interests me the least of any major form of film structuring. Seeking only to be a reflection of reality strikes me as a waste of the artform, as I can simply turn off the movie and walk outside if I want true reality. (This may be why Taste of Cherry is my least favorite Kiarostami to date, as it almost entirely lacks the reflexivity that turns Kiarostami's realism into poetry.) But Davies, like the best realists, finds a way to make something genuine while still taking liberties. His tableaux may be bleak and informed by his real life, but by filtering them through memory he can bound about time as he pleases and create elliptical suggestion instead of blunt narrative. We are never all that sure when any scene is, so those repeated locations come to take on the anchoring role time normally plays.

Additionally, some aspects of Davies' direction seem to break from reality entirely. Voices filter through the ether and family members appear in shadow as if ghosts (or demons) flowing in the background of memory. The split-screen of Tony and Eileen's husband falling in slow-motion through the same skylight, Davies' way of communicating that the two suffer industrial accidents around the same time, is pure fantasy. But even something that shows a clear remembrance of detail, such as the shot of Tommy's body lying in a viewing area with pennies over his eyes, has a surreal quality to it. It transcends Catholic tradition, suggesting the father may be headed to Hades, not a Christian afterlife. The direction is so subtle that the real becomes fantastical and the subjective breaks attain an effortless verisimilitude.

The subjectivity of Davies' structure makes the film feel truer to life. No one in this movie stands for anything. Even the father is no simple metaphor or symbol to be worked out the way one obsesses over the hyperrealistic portrait of a widowed homemaker in Jeanne Dielman. As the old cliché goes, this is a film with people, not characters. Even the shadow of World War II that hangs over the flashbacks of Distant Voices is about the way the children handle it instead of the results of the constant Luftwaffe attacks, and our understanding of them deepens with these events. Because we pick up on these characters and the way they see the world, we can see the cycles getting ready to repeat as the young women beg their father to go out dancing, the same way the mother met Tommy. When Tony cries the night of his wedding, one can intuit that he fears becoming his father, knowing that this moment of bliss will not last, and that even the most minor squabble could bring out his dark side.

A thoroughly British sensibility, from idiomatic conversation to obsolete pub drinks ordered each time the cast enters the local tavern. But Davies transcends any confinement: by rejecting Catholicism, he allows his film to find the spirituality of true humanism, in which people are viewed on their own terms and not as players on but one plane of existence. Too, even the Britishness, a means of expunging the cultural ties that also weigh down Davies' darker memories, does not limit the film's power to those who grew up in the ever-gray skies of London. True, a film like this set in America could not afford to be so bleak, even if Davies already contends that he softened what really happened in his life to make it remotely bearable on-screen. But who cannot identify with the family home, the local hideaway or the church that contains as many bad memories as good? All of this joins with the music, bleakly but never cynically used, to trigger and release as many of the audience's hangups as the director's. As the film's tagline says, "In memory, everything happens to music," and Davies understands that is because only music can fully capture the contradicting feelings of life. From misery comes hope, and while hope's only effect may be nothing more than to raise one's tolerance for pain so the universe doubles its efforts to break the psyche, it can still keep us going.

Little seen and outrageously left off DVD in the States (the UK didn't even get it until 2007), Distant Voices, Still Lives is one of the most profoundly moving and daringly conceived projects of the 1980s, and one of the most human and deeply felt movies I have ever seen. Normally, I must turn to Asian cinema to be so thoroughly moved. Davies has not been a prolific filmmaker since, though his 2008 documentary, Of Time and the City, won rave reviews at Cannes. Let us hope that revitalizes him somewhat. On the basis of this film alone, I would consider him to be a master of his art.

Alien3

Though it is rightly regarded as one of the most intriguing franchises in motion picture history, the Alien saga can also be viewed as a microcosm of changing studio values in the last quarter of the 20th century (and, if you count those Alien vs. Predator films, the beginning of the new millennium). The first film, made for a slightly hefty budget for the time, cast either unknowns or character actors and used the extra money afforded to craft something artistic and visionary out of a potential blockbuster. By the time James Cameron got attached to Aliens, the studios had figured out how to pump out blockbusters to make boatloads of cash. Alien and Star Wars had been creative gambles, but Cameron's film was a tax shelter, organized to be a write-off if it failed. Cameron did not have the opportunity to make something fully into his vision -- even the dynamic theatrical cut slices out much of the humanity to maximize the thrills -- but even the trimmed version displayed a clear directorial stamp, one that became clearer when Cameron cemented himself as the go-to guy for smartly paced (if dumbly written) action.

When 20th Century Fox began pre-production on the third film in the franchise, two things affected how the movie would be made. First, the artistic and commercial success of the previous two films created an intense pressure where there had previously been none, not even for Cameron's feature. Had Aliens failed, the numbers would have been balanced on the Fox budget, and fans of the original would simply go back to that film. When Cameron made a film every bit as good in its own right, now the franchise had the potential to the second-best and most profitable sci-fi franchise at Fox, next to George Lucas' space opera. Second, commercial cinema had entered into an uneasy amalgamation of '80s greed and New Hollywood talent searching. The only catch was that Hollywood never integrated the two, snatching up the Sundance talent and, for the most part, keeping them working with limited budgets that yielded potential for high profit ratios and awards prestige, only to continue to churn out big-budget features that managed to lack both the artistry of early blockbusters and the charming excess of the best of the '80s.

When David Fincher finally came on-board to the project after several directors had dropped out, any hint that he or any other filmmaker would have the last word on Alien³ had been openly eliminated. "We set out to make a release date, not a movie," laughs production executive Jon Landau ruefully in the comprehensive documentary on the making of the film, and Fincher, then known only for some music videos and commercials, had the unenviable task of making his first feature out of a wildly successful franchise and without the luxury of a script. Alien³ was written by committee and handed to the director in piecemeal each day, and the finished product is clearly not a bet on Fincher's talent, as the first two films were the results of gambles on unknowns who became stars. Instead, it takes elements of Scott's vision and Cameron's and filters them through a hired-hand who was too talented to be a conduit for the ideas of others.

Thus, the use of evil megacorporation Weyland-Yutani becomes, for the first time, an open metaphor for the studio system bankrolling the alien that the in-film company desires so deeply. Looking at the comparison retroactively, the first film puts the suggestion of corporate greed into the film, having the studio/company entrust the crew, only to make it known near the end that they are expendable in the name of profit. The second film, reflecting Hollywood's attitude in the '80s, shows Weyland-Yutani covering its bases by infecting many people rather than leave chance to a single creature. Here, they rely on a single egg once more as Fox limits the budget and tries to prevent costs from getting remotely out of control. Fincher would have his revenge in that respect, as the constant rewrites imposed by the studio forced him to go wildly over budget.

He also displays his disdain before the film itself even begins, subverting the 20th Century Fox theme to end on a minor chord before the end, sustaining the sound until it becomes ominous and vile instead of inspiring and exciting. The opening credits then establish a more cynical mood. Using quick cuts instead of the slow pans of the first and second movie, Fincher cruelly gets through the studio's desire to kill Newt and Hicks in their cryogenic pods, ending any hope for a happy life for Ripley. Between the black title cards, we see a hatched egg, a facehugger stretching into life, a medical scan of it attached to one of the passengers before dripping acidic blood onto the floor, leading to malfunctions that force a jettison of the pods in an emergency craft that crash lands on a planet. Without any time to get our bearings, Fincher destroys everything from the previous movie, a nihilistic slam to those who now felt that Ripley's character arc in Cameron's film meant nothing.

Before one assigns the usual "nihilist" label to Fincher, though, it is important to note that even the unfinished script did away with Newt and Hicks before Fincher came aboard. Fincher's credits sequence communicates the mandate that he combine the previous two films, trying for the disturbing mood of the first in the faster, active pacing of the second. It also speaks to the disdain he picked up for the project during shooting, cynically killing off key aspects of a film he clearly loved in a way that immediately throws a wrench into the franchise. He knew Alien³ would be a disaster, and even the elements of the film that remained in his control (which is exceedingly little, even in the superior workprint cut) communicate an exasperation and hopelessness. The only time I would genuinely consider Fincher a nihilist was when he got royally screwed.

Yet that alternate cut reveals Fincher's true outlook, one of cynicism but also perseverance. Marooned on a prison colony and suffering the loss of the makeshift family she created to fill the void of losing her real family, Ripley must worry about yet another outbreak with a group of people to whom she has even less connection than previous crews. She lives with prisoners who have converted to an apocalyptic religion as tehy toil in their rotting station, long ago abandoned by the company and kept running only because the prisoners asked to remain. Even with their conversion, however, they remain self-absorbed and violent, and when Ripley finally tells them about the alien and the company's intention to take and weaponize the creature at the expense of hundreds, maybe thousands of lives, no one seems to care. But Ripley continues to fight, just as Detective Somerset, try as he might, cannot bring himself to run from horror, Jack pushes back against the monster he created and Robert Graysmith continues to hunt the Zodiac killer. No one can accuse Fincher of being cheery, but even in the darkest moment of his career, he does not fully give in to hopelessness. What makes Alien³ unique is that someone else came in later and did the job for him.

Still, there are things that the film gets right, especially in the longer, admittedly lethargic version. The planet where Ripley crash-lands is perfect for the religious zealots in the colony. It's grimy, rotting, lit in industrial yellow and always dripping. The heat coming off the dilapidated machinery can almost be felt, and the grime cakes until it's as solid as the metal it rusts. If the planet in Aliens, still in the process of terraforming, resembled an Earth at the start of Genesis, unformed by God, then the fiery, collapsing world of Alien³ resembles one nearing the end of Revelation.

Killing Newt and Hicks may reek of cynicism on Fincher and the studio's part, but the decision allows Fincher to develop the series' narrative to its next logical step, wherein the alien is no longer as key a threat to the humans as the overarching corruption of Weyland-Yutani, which sends a rescue party to get Ripley off-planet not to save her but in the hopes of, once again, collecting a specimen. After proving they held sway over the military in the previous film, they here demonstrate that every level of society must be run by the company, even prison control. Nobody has any sympathy for the company -- the thought of Weyland-Yutani succeeding in getting an alien, only for it to tear through the science division is a darkly appealing idea -- but who can afford to leave its employ?

The deaths of Newt and Hicks also feed into the most ingenious element of the film, the effect of rampant misogyny on cinema's most visible action heroine. Aliens was all about maternity, taking the androgynous character from the first and emphasizing her femininity by contrasting it with the perverse idea of pregnancy and birth offered by the aliens. Ripley found a surrogate child in Newt and a possible romance in Hicks that promised to be mutually supportive, one where Hicks would give Ripley respect instead of shouting her down like the other men. Killing them rips Ripley's second family away from her, leaving her with nothing and symbolizing how cruel the world can be to a woman.

It also plants the idea in her head that maybe she's just bad luck, something the prisoners latch onto immediately. Not only are all the prisoners men, they have double-Y chromosomes. Having sworn themselves to celibacy to prevent the usual prison rapes, this band of rapists, murderers and molesters view the presence of a woman as an evil temptation, and the confluence of reactionary religion and hyper-masculine violent offenders makes Alien³ into a study of the effects of misogyny. After Cameron lightened up on the eroticism to focus on the more nurturing side of the gender issue running through the franchise, Fincher contacted H.R. Giger about reinjecting some blood into the series (or at least a certain body part). Sexual imagery abounds once more, from blood trickling out of Ripley's nose in menstrual fashion as men look on uncomfortably to the sensual design of the quadrupedal alien, even if designers ultimately rejected Giger's more outlandish features.

The longer cut fleshes out the ideas of perverted spirituality in a universe where one has traveled the stars and still hasn't seen God. Who knows how badly polluted and devastated Earth is in this franchise, but these colonies cannot be any sort of improvement, and it's understandable that these prisoners look to a cataclysmic event to deliver them. The spiritual leader, Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), understands that the driving motivation behind the colony's conversion is less hope for salvation than catharsis for their barely contained rage, and even the prison warden (Brian Glover) lets them maintain their reactionary views because the alternative would be riot. When the creature attacks, one prisoner, Golic (Paul McGann), is coated with another's blood, prompting a religious experience in which he views the alien as some sort of angel of death. In the theatrical version, Golic is randomly cut out of the movie: in the workprint, he actually foils Ripley and the others' efforts to trap the alien when he releases it from a hold expecting deliverance. He gets his wish.

Even in the version that displays more of what Fincher had in mind, however, Alien suffers from key flaws. The CGI is as clumsy as you'd expect from an early '90s movie, and even when the production swelled over budget, Fincher's movie never enjoyed the amount Jim Cameron required to make the computer animation in Terminator 2 so convincing. The cast here is as talented as the previous crews, but the shaving of everyone's heads makes it difficult to figure out who's on-screen. The Alien franchise impressively built its stock on not one but two separate casts of mostly unlikable people that do not make us root for clear favorites (the only exceptions being Newt and Ripley herself), but here it's next to impossible to discern which character is on-screen. Even when that's intentional, as in the bewildering climax, a chase through the labyrinthine corridors of the foundry's molding facility (complete with raucously clever use of POV Steadicams to show the alien running along the walls and ceiling), this confusion becomes irritating. Furthermore, the brief romance between Ripley and the colony's medic (Charles Dance) is unconvincing, unexplored and, frankly, too quickly inserted as Ripley contends with the death of her implicit new boyfriend, Hicks.

The biggest issue, however, is in the open struggle between what Fincher wanted to do with the material and the studio's attempt to make the sequel nothing more risky than an amalgam of what people liked about the first two films. Fincher himself seems to want to find a happy medium between atmospheric horror and a faster pace: his decision to shave Ripley's head brought the character back to her androgynous roots, while his experience making commercials and music videos made him a whiz at telling a story quickly (see how the credits sequence is a short narrative unto itself. But Fox's involvement cut out any hope he might have had to explore the area between Cameron and Scott. Renny Harlin, the first director attached to the project, left when the project came to resemble something made by Scott and Cameron and not something he might craft into his own work.

Even in the longer cut, the discrepancy between Fincher and the studio is evident. If anything, it's more obvious, because the theatrical version looks like the work of a decently talented hired hand with a bad script. The long version drags, not because it's 2.5 hours long but because one can see from scene to scene which moments were meticulously planned by Fincher and which were just handed down to him one day and forced to shoot. I was more fascinated by the epic Charles de Lauzirika documentary for this film than any of the others he made for the saga (and, at times, Alien³ itself), precisely because we see the devolution of the studio's idealism. Original planning of the film shows writers and executives hunting for the next big thing as the first two films had done, taking two directors who had just begun to raise a profile and shooting them into the stratosphere. Then, the script issues begin and the studio starts moving to cut possible losses, hobbling their potential wunderkind at every turn. In interviews conducted on-set and retroactively for the 2003 DVD release, the cast sings Fincher's praises to the heavens, all of them marveling that a first-time director could be so intuitive not only with the action and visuals but the characters and the ways that actors discover how the people they play live and function. They would gladly have given them their full confidence but, as ever, those with the least creativity had the last say.

Looking back today, Alien³ can be seen as an intriguing mess, an underrated attempt to get the franchise back to its erotic horror roots that is improved more by its alternate cut than even Aliens (at least that film was good in its theatrical version). One cannot help but wonder what might have happened had Fincher made Se7en first and proved his mettle, whether that would have secured him more freedom from the studio*. Sigourney Weaver purportedly refused to do the movie if executives rewrote a draft that had Ripley die at the end, but by the time we reach the film's conclusion, Ripley's self-sacrifice, a final act of defiance to the company, seems mostly a cathartic release for Fincher, who would eventually prove trusting executives correct when he proved a more visionary stylist than either the inconsistent Scott or the more pedestrian Cameron. I enjoyed the Assembly Cut of the film, having detested the theatrical version, and its post-industrial decay managed to take what would have otherwise been a rehash of the Aliens sets and made something original. No one can deny that the series took a sudden, drastic step downward, but those paying attention will also find it impossible to overlook how much of Fincher's innate ability was on display, even if the powers that be buried it at every juncture.



*I also wonder what might have come from sticking to Vincent Ward's original concept, in which the story took place on an ironically Luddite space station inhabited by a monastic order that would have taken the religious angle of the film to a whole new level. Storyboards depict a fascinating man-made planet segmented by climates and differing sects of monks, and the narrative was to be backed up with Bosch-like visuals in a Gothic throwback in space. At the same time, I sympathize with those who kept asking why the ship interior was to be all wood and the logistics not only of the ship within the film (one cannot create atmosphere without a much more massive size than a man-made orb) but also of designing the thing in a studio lot. Still, watching David Fincher get his start with a Boschian nightmare in space would be something, that's for sure.