Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011)

Captain America: The First Avenger is so enjoyable it prompts not merely a reevaluation of the relevant worth of a superhero intrinsically tied to an outdated nationalist self-perception but of the abilities of its director. Joe Johnston, an art director who apprenticed under George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and then promptly made a solo career that did nothing to live up to that resumé, finally demonstrates a keen understanding of what his early bosses did with the help of his talents. Captain America is outrageously big, using CGI to extrapolate realistic objects to absurd dimensions. In fact, Johnston's movie feels more like an Indiana Jones film than Spielberg's last entry.

I typically enter these comic-book movies blind, with only the mass pop-culture resonance of basic backstory as my guide. But I have read Ed Brubaker's fantastic revival of the character, a run that effectively revitalized the Captain for an age of mass disillusionment. Johnston, along with writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, ably mimic Brubaker's balance of the character's old-school idealism with modern sensibilities. The film's subtitle is already cumbersome and limiting—it defines the film essentially as an advertisement for an upcoming one rather than its own entry—but it seems especially unnecessary considering that, among the rushed crop of Avengers-preparing movies (Iron Man 2, Thor), Captain America is the only one that truly works as a standalone property, as well as the first origin story since Iron Man to remotely justify its feature length.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Made only a decade after he first garnered attention for his Britcom, Spaced, Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World could serve as a bookend to his brief but infinitely rewarding career to this point. Spaced was about the VCR Generation, late-Gen-X slackers who communicated solely through pop culture references to cult movies and genre T.V. shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Scott Pilgrim, adapted from Bryan Lee O'Malley's comic series, plays like Spaced jumped forward a generation, charting millennials whose basis of shared knowledge is video games, animé and the Alpha and Omega of the Internet.

The key difference between Wright's breakthrough series and this film, of course, is that in the interim between them, he create two of the funniest, wildest and most visually astute genre films of the last 25 years. Shaun of the Dead turned a minuscule budget into a zombie spoof that worked perfectly as a zombie film, and therefore it also worked as a piercing social critique. The same slackers who wandered around dead-eyed in Spaced were now equated with zombies, forcing the protagonist to beat down creatures whom he somewhat resembled. Hot Fuzz, of course, was about a hero cop foisted onto a calm hamlet where the police force was made up of slackers of all ages, as if the refuse of each generation somehow trickled down their separate paths into the same delta.

With these films, Wright stands with Quentin Tarantino as the most daring and insightful genre movie director around, and both work so well because of layers not easily gleaned from their wild rides. As I argued in my defense of Tarantino's masterpiece, Inglourious Basterds, the director is a surprising moralist in the vein of Sam Peckinpah, capable of reveling in everything he's subtly warning us against. If Peckinpah warned us against fascism by becoming fascist himself in Straw Dogs, Tarantino left glimpses of meditation in the middle of the animé lunacy of Kill Bill, and he celebrated his Jewish revenge fantasy even as he condemned the good guys for becoming terrorists to fight terror. His fans are routinely as blind to this as his detractors, hence the proliferation of movies that simply glorify violence entirely.

Wright, on the other hand, eschews moralism for a sense of empathy. Beneath the wild mash-ups of Spaced is an interest in character that develops a cast of oddballs to the point that their quirks no longer seem an added flight of fancy to give the material a hook but genuine, identifiably human traits grounded in feelings of loneliness and doubt. Shaun of the Dead may have suggested that only something as destructive as a supernatural holocaust could snap youth out of their self-consumed reverie, but it nevertheless advanced its characters, touching upon responsibilities in relationships both Platonic and romantic. Hot Fuzz played up the latent homosexuality rampant in buddy cop films, but Wright developed the story until the two leads felt more convincingly like friends and partners than in nearly any "legitimate" buddy film.

Now, without Simon Pegg helping as his writing partner, Wright tackles material that almost seems as if it were written to be filmed by him. Scott Pilgrim follows a world so similar yet so completely removed from '90s geekdom that even the older siblings of teenagers may feel culture shock. Where the layabouts of yore connected through all those geek movies and TV shows, now the linking element is YouTube and video games. People form clans on World of Warcraft, discuss battle plans for Modern Warfare 2 as if actually going into a fight and communicate through written snippets sent instantly on Twitter, Facebook, Skype and other programs. Everything is flashy, pixellated and brief, and the kids who grow up this way are attention deficit and emotionally transient, capable of moving from fad to fad so quickly that even the fading pop culture items of the '70s and '80s seem permanent hallmarks in comparison.

Within minutes, one can see that Wright understood all of this. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World has a kaleidoscopic, kinetic mise-en-scène to shame the previous example of mainstream sensory overload, the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer. A mash-up of video games, action movies, frenzied electropop, comic book drawings that blend American styles with manga and everything else that occurs to Wright, the film borders on the avant-garde in its visualization of the modern worldview. You cannot focus not because you're dumber than your parents but because you have access to all the world's information simultaneously. The Internet's capacity for storage and real-time access may well be the equivalent to hearing God's voice, an endless void of knowledge and power suddenly forced into a gray, mushy bundle of synapses and nerves that cannot handle the strain. Much of the comedy of the film and the comic series comes from Scott's perennial inability to retain anything, but that's not because he's an idiot but because his hard drive simply crashed.

The first thing you should know about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that it is funny. Damn funny. As Gene Siskel once raved about Kingpin, every time it wants you laugh, it will make you do so. Visual gags litter the screen, from hipster-flecked title cards to sidebars indicating characters' ages, coolness ratings and fun facts. This is a film where the protagonist goes to the bathroom, and his bladder capacity is shown via a "Pee Bar" that drains as the young man urinates. We even see his thoughts visualized as a roulette wheel that spins through a series of excuses to give to his girlfriend and what appears to be a voltmeter that jumps from "No Clue" to "Gets It" when something finally sinks into Scott's thick skull.

When we meet Scott, he's a 22-year-old nobody who plays bass in a band he cheerfully admits is terrible, showing up for gigs that may or may not pay and not bothering to support himself with anything so ridiculous as a "job." His bandmates -- ex-girlfriend Kim Pine (Alison Pill, so frosty that the constant snowfall in the film's Toronto setting may be her mental projection), bandleader/only person with any emotional attachment to the group whatsoever Stephen Stills (Mark Webber) and hanger-on Young Neil (Johnny Simmons), whom no one can consistently recognize despite the band's practice room being his apartment -- are just as shiftless. When Scott brags at the beginning of his new girlfriend, a pure-as-the-driven-snow Chinese-Canadian named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), only Kim has much to say, and all of it about how she's only 17 (and a Catholic schoolgirl, no less).

His short-lived quasi-romance ends, however, when he sees a strange, roller-skating woman in his dreams with hot pink hair, a seemingly innocuous occurrence until Scott begins to spot her in real-life. Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is too cool for Scott -- so is Knives, frankly, but Ramona has the added points of being hip and from America -- but he manages to win her over and enters into a new-new relationship that seems great. Until a strange Indian man crashes a band gig and challenges Scott to a fight for Ramona's hand, that is.


In cramming the six graphic novels of the comic series into just under two hours, Wright devotes most of the film to these battles with the League of Evil Exes, seven specters from Ramona's past who make normal ordeals with dealing with partner's exes seem trivial in comparison. Because so much of the movie involves various fights, Scott Pilgrim can feel repetitive, or at least it could have if Wright hadn't been in charge. Understanding the need to keep things fresh, Wright brings something different to each fight: one plays as a sort of dance-off, another a competition between bassists, yet another as a fight with an action star (Chris Evans) who forces Scott to fight all of his stunt doubles. Each fight has its own moves, unique color palettes and a host of contextual jokes that don't let the humor flag for a second.

From a writing standpoint, the percentage of one-liners that land with precision accuracy in this film is stunning. Rare is the film that can make a decently filled theater laugh incessantly, but the barrage of Scott's vacuous incredulity, Kim's venomous put-downs, Ramona's bemused observations and the contributions of everyone else ensure that every scene, even the more serious ones, get at least one good chuckle. Characters rarely speak for longer than a sentence or two, reflecting a generation raised to express themselves in 140 characters or less, and poor Knives' face even turns into a shocked emoticon when her musical heroine (and Scott's conniving ex-girlfriend) comes to town.

Everything about the film, in fact, plays off of the idea of a generation prescribed ADHD medication en masse. Film courses could and should use Scott Pilgrim to demonstrate match cuts, as the opening arc of the film jumps time and place as conversations continue seamlessly, noting how little Scott ever seems to remember and how often you just seem to end up where you were going without processing the journey there. Reality breaks apart more often (and with more oneiric an atmosphere) than in Inception, with Scott slipping in and out of dreams, walking through eerily pitch-black, snow-covered Toronto streets and surrounding by flying streaks of onomatopoeic letters whisking about for telephone rings, landed punches and the rarely changing D chord he pounds out of his Rickenbacker. Wright's usual trickery slips into the film, such as his penchant for using his quickest edits for the most banal moments, ridiculing the action movie conceit of the superhero suiting up by quickly showing Scott zipping up and slipping on armbands and then arduously drawing out the boy tying his shoe until it becomes the funniest bit in the film. In one instance, Scott returns to the apartment he shares with his roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin, playing Middle America's worst nightmare as a gay man who can instantly seduce heterosexuals with his charm), and Wright plays a sitcom laugh track over it, recalling its usage in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, previously the most daring and experimental mainstream feature on the market. Incidentally, experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage purportedly loved Stone's deliberately overcooked satire, and the influence of Brakhage creeps in here too, with an opening credits played over jarring and jittering displays of pure color and a devil-may-care attitude toward traditional film grammar.

Beneath the rambunctious battle sequences and the endless one-liners, however, is that same empathy that powers Wright's previous efforts. While not as prominent as in Shaun of the Dead or Spaced, the heart of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is as vital to the film's memorability as its gleeful destruction of whatever boundaries still existed for action films. The entire arc of the film concerns Scott's growth from a listless twentysomething who cannot process anything other than his own desires into someone finally reading to accept maturity. Ramona, too, has an uncertainty about life she needs to figure out, and while Scott has a right to be indignant when she sums up their relationship by saying, "You're what I need right now," he doesn't understand that she's just as confused as he is. As I approach the end of my collegiate years, I understand these feelings: you think college will prepare you for life, then you leave and realize that, even if you excelled, you spent 4-6 years with routine breaks between classes, nap times, endless trips to coffee houses, partying. I'll go into the job market less prepared for a full 9-5 occupation than I would have been after high school with its rigid scheduling. These young men and women reached some imaginary border and were told, "Now you're adults!" and then cast into the void, and they don't know what to make of it. If their journey looks flashier than ours, it's no less daunting.

Nary a hair is out of place in the film. Michael Cera's presence has been a sticking point for many I've spoken to, citing Cera burnout, but he works in charm in a way he hasn't before: Scott Pilgrim is once entirely innocent and incredible corrupt, so attention-deficit that he cannot really remember how many people he's actually hurt -- in a way, he recalls the amnesiac Leonard from Memento. Winstead finds a similar balance, never apologizing for her life but not remotely proud of it either, and the fact that she's more clearheaded than Scott only makes her sadder and more filled with regret. The supporting cast are uniformly excellent, from Culkin's incessant witticisms to Pill's bitter musings to Aubrey Plaza's foul-mouthed Julie ("Has Issues," as a bit of text helpfully explains) and Anna Kendrick's lovable bitchiness as Scott's Sister. Jason Schwartzman, Chris Evans, Brandon Routh and more make for film villains, all with enough personal and physical differences to prevent the lineup of Evil Exes from feeling samey; Schwartzman in particular hasn't been this hilariously smug since perhaps Rushmore. Wong deserves to break into some other work, effortlessly conveying Knives' naïveté and overall sweetness and playing off young actors with years more experience without once flagging.

Remarkably, they all understand what the story is really about as much as Wright does. Only just in their own adulthood, the actors realize that we all spend our youths trying to find our identity through movies or the Internet, objects that are paradoxically shared experiences even though we process them alone (and I loved the moment where a character says something witty and Scott asks, "What's that from?" expecting a movie title, only for the other to spit, "My brain!"). Then, we enter into relationships, but they're not yet serious because we're feeling our way around new territory. Only when we finally expand our perspectives to wonder how the other people in our lives see us do we ever figure ourselves out. This is a revelation more thoroughly covered in the comics, but the beauty of Wright's film is how deftly he manages to fit the core of this theme into a movie that could easily have been two hours of flashy nothingness. Instead, he mixes the avant-garde with the tangible, crafting his most frenzied genre mash-up yet but never losing sight of the heart that gives it meaning, and even the seriousness adds to the exhilaration of one of the most purely enjoyable films in years.

Sunshine

Danny Boyle, whether he intended it or not, succeeded where John Carpenter failed: a Hawksian jack of all trades who can hop vast genre chasms seemingly without effort. As with Carpenter, Boyle scored big early in his career, but he managed to break out of the shadow of Trainspotting (whereas Carpenter found himself shoehorned into horror). In a career spanning only 15 years, he's produced excellent entries in dark comedy (Trainspotting), children's film (Millions), horror (28 Days Later) and Dickensian fairy tales (Slumdog Millionaire). In 2007, he also took a stab at science fiction, and he came so very, very close to making the finest sci-fi picture since Dark City, if not Blade Runner.

The plot reads as though Boyle and writer Alex Garland spent some time with the twin 1997 space thrillers Armageddon and Event Horizon: in the near future, our sun is dying, and Earth collects all of its fissile material (anything that can sustain a chain reaction of nuclear fission) into a single mega-nuclear bomb to be flown into the star's core and detonated, hopefully re-igniting it. This of course also calls to mind The Core, but I'm happy to say that Sunshine aims higher than the level occupied by that disaster, or the directorial incompetence of Michael Bay or Paul W.S. Anderson. (OK, so maybe Event Horizon is actually pretty good; even a stopped clock is right twice a day.)

No, Garland clearly looks to the greatest of all science fiction films, 2001: A Space Odyssey, for guidance, as well as that film's humanist response, Solaris. The death of the sun opens up global warming parallels (purportedly what Boyle was striving for), but more importantly, how technology affects humanity (the main thrust of 2001) and how our own brilliance blinds us to our arrogance. Where 2001 and Solaris hinted at their themes through direction and action, Boyle and Garland address them through the interactions of the ensemble crew of Icarus II: is it right for mankind to so egregiously tamper with nature, even if we're doing so to ensure our survival? Is it right that these people are sent on a suicide mission to save a planet full of people they don't know?

I do not mean to say that the direction lacks panache, Always visually inventive, Boyle pulls out all the stops for his venture into space. Wide-angles, over-saturation, haunting silence and meditative close-ups and medium shots capture the majesty of space as well as the claustrophobic feel of the spacecraft. Boyle had miniatures and models crafted for the film, giving it a beautiful, believable look that would warrant a recommendation even if everything around it was crap. The coldness of space is brightly lit by the looming sun, harsh yellows and reds that contrast the detailed blacks of space and the hull of Icarus II. Boyle films the interiors with vivid greens and blues and dull grays; the only yellows and reds that appear inside the ship are either computer projections of the sun or the odd burst of actual sunlight, let in in minuscule increments to alleviate the cabin fever.

Boyle's style has never been more overwhelming or enticing. Two shots in particular stand as some of the most hauntingly beautiful you'll ever see. One concerns one of the crew space-hopping between the wreckage of Icarus I, the first ship sent on an unsuccessful mission to re-ignite the sun, and Icarus II after the airlock between the two breaks apart. He misses, freezes to death in space, then disintegrates in an instant when he floats beyond the protective heat shield of the spacecraft. Another isn't one shot but several; in a number of scenes, crew members expose themselves to the sun whilst wearing protective goggles, or they spacewalk in special suits that limit vision to a tiny strip. Watching the endless yellow flood over these people through their visors is awesome in the literal sense of the word, in that it left me breathless time and again.

But let's not forget the other side to Boyle's direction: his ability to coax terrific performances from his actors. He didn't display this talent so much with his recent Slumdog Millionaire (though I still love it as a pure cinematic joyride), but he assembles a terrific ensemble cast with this feature. Cillian Murphy is the obvious lead as the physicist Capa, as the mission cannot succeed without his expertise. Murphy remains a center of deadly calm as the people around him slowly come undone from the stress of the mission and all that goes wrong, and he carries several scenes with his eyes alone. He and Michelle Yeoh are the closest you'll come to readily recognizable stars, but the biggest surprise of the film has to be a fantastic performance from Fantastic Four alumnus (perhaps survivor is a better term) Chris Evans. The eight-person crew function as real people, trapped in a mission they can't abandon (at least until insanity sets in); when the first captain dies, the communications officer assumes command, and when he must make that fateful jump across space, he loses himself in panic as he attempts to order Capa to give him his spacesuit (though Capa is actually vital to the mission). He isn't bravely committed to success as so many filmic clichés. Whether they're conversing naturally at the start of the film or falling apart later, I bought all of the actors' performances, and I couldn't help but think of the natural "space workers" of Alien. Neither films particularly flesh out their characters beyond establishing traits and mannerisms, but they are relatable, believable people in extraordinary settings.

The Alien parallels kick into high gear when Sunshine moves into its controversial end-run. What had been a plot-driven but meditative and tense reflection on themes suddenly turns into an Alien-esque claustrophobic horror film: after the survivors make their way back to Icarus II after docking with the derelict ship, Capa discovers that the captain of Icarus I, Pinbacker (Mark Strong) survived the seven-year interim and has gone insane. He believes himself to be the last man in the universe, and he shall let the sun die so he can bring mankind to heaven. When I first sat down with Sunshine, this sudden shift lost me completely, but now I can see that the film was building toward this from the start. Besides, there's something intriguing about a combination of 2001 and Alien. It falls down, however, in the kinetic, blurry direction of these chase scenes. I understand Boyle's desire to disorient, and to mask the hideous, burned flesh of Pinbacker (what brief glimpses we get prove that the director retained some of the tricks he learned on 28 Days Later), but his earlier, more composed shots of the ships interiors ratcheted up tension just as much as these disorienting moments, occasionally more so.

Happily, Boyle shifts the film back on the rails for the last few minutes, though the ending may strike many (including me) as Hollywood pat. I wanted something vaguer, in the style of 2001 or Solaris. Seeing it again, though, I must admit that this film needed a definitive end. 2001 was about astronauts investigating a mysterious device, but Sunshine had a literally life-or-death mission; it couldn't just jump on a tangent and end on a purely philosophical note. Still, I wish it had raised more questions at the end instead of tying up so many of its threads.

I would suspect that Boyle had to head in a straightforward direction at least some of the time because we no longer enjoy a film industry that will bank something as ambitious as 2001 on a large scale. Studios actually noticed the similarities of the film to Solaris, which only made them uneasy after Steven Soderbergh's well-received remake utterly tanked at the box office. Despite the limitations placed upon it by the system, Sunshine nevertheless displays an ingenuity and craftsmanship rarely seen in contemporary cinema. It might not fit into the traditional "hard sci-fi" criteria, because too many of its futuristic elements go unexplained. But this is a film you sit back and let overwhelm you; its plot holes are no match for its overall impact. The final 20 minutes prevent it from joining the ranks of sci-fi masterpieces, but Sunshine is still one of the most engrossing, meditative, enthralling, visually resplendent hard sci-fi films ever made.