Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, 2012)

Haywire displays nearly all the traits of a modern Steven Soderbergh movie. It sports an A-list cast seemingly game for anything. It jet sets all over the world even though it hardly needs to, suggesting that the director A) insists on verisimilitude, B) loves studio-paid vacations, or C) both. Its shallow-focus digital cinematography creates paranoid, claustrophobic frames of doubt and suspicion; Haywire even opens with such abstracted, zoomed-in pixellation that the text telling the audience they're watching upstate New York simply must be a gag. And as with the cast of Bubble and Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, Haywire features a non-professional actor anchoring the action, in this case retired MMA fighter Gina Carano.

The film also works as the latest in Soderbergh's never-ending line of genre deconstructions. Despite its lean running time of 93 minutes, Haywire leaves gulfs of space around its revenge plot, Lem Dobbs' script asymptotically approaching exposition, only to flatline in vagueness before reaching it. Dobbs, of course, wrote the screenplays for Soderbergh's Kafka and, somewhat infamously, The Limey. Given the amount of dialogue, it stands to reason more of Dobbs' words remain here than in Soderbergh's masterfully elliptical anti-thriller, but Haywire nevertheless shares many qualities with the director's best film. Both are action thrillers that dismantle the conventions of their niches within the genre, finding beauty and agony in the all-too-single-minded attitudes of so many of these films.

One False Move (Carl Franklin, 1992)

One False Move, directed by Carl Franklin from Billy Bob Thornton's first and best screenplay, is a moral thriller and neo-noir posing as a simple cops-and-robbers action movie. It opens with a horrifying, virtuosic killing spree in L.A. as a trio of criminals—sloppy, unhinged Ray (Thornton); calm, psychopathic Pluto (Michael Beach); and Ray's gentler but still complicit girlfriend Fantasia (Cynda Williams)—viciously murder six to get their hands on a pile of cash and a small hill of cocaine. But Fantasia's minor act of conscience sets in motion a case that stretches across the country, uniting the unlikeliest of threads in a fantastically paced narrative with complex, human characters.

Look at the way we meet Dale Dixon, a sheriff far away from the grisly murder scene, in Star City, Ark.: though the film cuts away to him via the brilliantly scary match of a screaming child in the first sequence, our true introduction to the character comes in the form of a phone call the LAPD makes to him after clues point them in the direction of Star City. Bill Paxton, mostly off-camera, establishes his character with aplomb, his fast-talking simplicity revealing an insecurity and open desire to ingratiate himself with big city cops. We also get a taste of his oafishness but also his drive. We later learn that townsfolk call him "Hurricane," which may reference either the blustering hot wind he puffs out in gales or his energetic In-person, Paxton only deepens Dixon's clumsy but capable sheriff, the character's unlikely balance of stereotyping and originality a microcosm for the film's broader overview of this Arkansas town and the storm working its way there from Los Angeles.

Aliens

Ridley Scott's Alien ended in such a way that it begged for a sequel. Even those of us who roll our eyes at the prospect of unnecessary "enfranchisement" had to admit that Ripley's story didn't end with her slipping into cryogenic sleep and hoping someone intercepted her signal. Yet with Scott himself reluctant to get trapped on one series of films, the prospect of a sequel faded into the back of 20th Century Fox's corporate mind for years.

Enter a young upstart named James Cameron, an up-and-comer who'd been thrown off the set of the great Piranha II and then knocked on Hollywood's door with a sledgehammer with The Terminator. A fan of Scott's film, Cameron had an idea for a sequel, but changing hands at Fox put his initial work on hiatus, waiting to see how The Terminator fared at the box office before giving him the keys. Even when they finally relented, they gave Cameron a budget only $7 million higher than the one Scott received seven years earlier. And where Scott got by with only a few distinct sets and a single alien, Cameron's film called for all-out war with more locations, a bigger cast and more aliens.

Thus, when Aliens finally hit screens, the money-saving techniques were plainly evident. The narrower aspect ratio, the heavy grain in the film stock -- reversing the issue of the original Alien's soft stock by leaping to the other extreme -- the recycling of a handful of alien costumes. What is far more noticeable and relevant, however, is the manner in which Cameron dispenses almost entirely with the elements that made Alien great, only to re-assemble the broken parts into a masterpiece in its own right.

Where Scott's film was atmospheric, graceful, cerebral, Cameron's is quickly paced, blunt and in your face. The degree of difference can be seen all over the place, from substituting Jerry Goldsmith for the always on-the-nose James Horner to replacing Alien's tagline "In space, no one can hear you scream" to "This time, it's war." Aliens is loud and brash, with a cast of characters who, in true Cameron fashion, are utterly two-dimensional but just kooky enough to be endearing. Cameron even has the balls to return to the planet where the Nostromo stumbled across the eggs, risking all sorts of plot holes just to maintain a continuity and to avoid larger logical questions. Then, he manages to change everything anyway by dropping in a bit of dialogue that explains Ripley floated in stasis for nearly 60 years, and in the interim, Weyland-Yutani set up colonies on the planet.

This addition, especially as it is fleshed out in the vastly superior longer cut of the film, allows Cameron to develop two of the more tantalizing threads left in the ether in the first film: the vicious anti-corporate mentality of the franchise (and something that would concern Cameron intermittently across his career with the Terminator films as well as Avatar), and the character of Ripley. As we learn in the longer cut, Ripley had a daughter when she left, only to return and find that her child had grown into old age and died while she drifted in cryostasis for six decades. Now, she must sit in a company hospital, discredited by a board of trustees that not only denied her story but charged her with destroying a perfectly good tow-ship, left under nominal psychiatric care as she thinks of the life she no longer has.

Eventually, a company rep, Burke (Paul Reiser), sheepishly and discreetly comes to Ripley and mentions that all transmissions from the colony on LV-426 have ceased, coinciding with a shot given to the audience of colonists sent to inspect the alien ship they somehow never noticed while exploring the planet and returning with a facehugger attached. Ripley, still scarred by what happened to her seemingly only a few days ago, understandably does not wish to go back to the planet to survey what's happened, but Burke's invitation amounts to a tacit acknowledgment of her truthfulness, and Burke will send her with a contingent of marines, though she takes little comfort in this.

If Scott's predecessor cut against the grain of post-Star Wars cliché by presenting a cast of characters who were average and relatable to audiences despite the centuries between reality and fiction, Cameron's film messes with military tropes. It's not entirely clear who controls the marines, but the squad sent to investigate the colony ultimately answers to Burke. If the military is not privatized in this future, it does at least openly look out for business interests. Cameron has never been what you might call subtle, but he gets at a side of Vietnam with this film that even the slew of 'Nam movies didn't address so directly: that war was started by the military industrial complex and kept going long after it became evident we had no business there and, furthermore, could not win. Cameron takes it one step further and brazenly warns of using federal (or planetary) troops to protect business interests.

Furthermore, the initial arrogance of the marines, with their smart weapons and state-of-the-art equipment, falters in the face of a less advanced but more committed foe. Granted, the aliens have an advantage over the Vietcong in that their are biologically superior, but the most terrifying aspect of Aliens is the inability of the humans to even momentarily stop an advance no matter how many creatures they kill. The aliens never retreat, never show any sign of dwindling numbers, and they can pop out of anywhere. Sound familiar?

As for the actual cast, you gotta love 'em. Cameron makes these marines the most hilariously cocky-cum-terrified misfits you ever saw. The C.O., Lt. Gorman (William Hope), clearly just graduated from the academy and is out of his element with the rest of the squad, who've done their time and formed a bond. They make for a veritable who's who of clichés, from the tough-as-nails, black sergeant who whips them all into shape (played by Al Mathews, because Carl Weathers must have been busy); a fiery Latina who does not react to the taunts of her male comrades because she's tougher than all of them (Jenette Goldstein, making up for Veronica Cartwright's hysterics in the first film); and a sensible corporal who matches the sergeant's toughness with a softer side (Michael Biehn); and a private who talks the most shit during the preparation for the mission, only to instantly morph into a coward when he finally faces the enemy (Bill Paxton). Also accompanying them are Burke and Bishop (Lance Henriksen), an android who inspires distrust from Ripley based on Ash's actions and spends most of the film walking the line of suspicion.

Given how shallow these side characters are, it's a wonder what Cameron accomplished with Ripley. In the extended edition, the director delves into the character, making explicit her sense of maternal loss. This, of course, is explored more thoroughly through the character of Newt (Carrie Henn), a young girl and the only survivor of the alien outbreak in the colony. Her ingenuity saved her, but when the marine stumble upon her in their first sweep of the colony, she's been driven half-feral and silent from shock. As Ripley nurses her back to health, Newt clearly becomes a surrogate child for the daughter Ripley never got to see grow up. So touching and believable is their chemistry, in fact, that even the special edition, which adds mostly additional scenes on this dynamic, does not slow down the film's perfect pacing.

Let's talk about that pacing. Alien worked primarily because Ridley Scott had a keen sense for shot length and plot advancement. His film is slow enough to sink into the mind and give the audience space to inject their own fears into the mystery, yet quick enough not to lose the tension. Cameron faces the problem of maintaining the flow of an action movie. The lulls of a horror film can be as effective in scaring audiences as the actual moments in which something happens, but an action film languishes in its moments of empty character building. Despite the limited budget and the ambition of the project, Cameron never once lets the momentum sag, even in the longer cut. If so many supporting characters are two-dimensional, Cameron at least acknowledges it and doesn't bother saddling us with cheap, dispensable background for them. Apart from Ripley, all of these characters live in the present, and they react to the situation, not dwelling on some past issue. And who has time to even think about what's happening in the moment when dozens upon dozens of aliens bear down on the humans at all times?

The speed of the film also helps Ripley's transition into the ultimate badass for feminists. The first film showed Ripley growing until she proved she had the capacity to survive. In Aliens, she evolves until she proves the capacity to save others. When Gorman blanches in the face of the alien attacks, she steps in and capably directs the marines, who almost never question the force in her voice. She also displays the most self-restraint, choosing to spare the double-crossing Burke even when he locks Ripley and Newt in the medical bay and unleashes facehuggers in the attempt to implant them with embryos to be taken back to the company.

Occasionally, Cameron's lines take on a certain hard-boiled charm. Paxton's goofy performance allows him to toss out nugget after nugget, the best being his macho breakdown when he paces around screaming "Game over, man! Game over!" until Ripley and Cpl. Hicks have to slap some sense into him. When the depths of Burke's malfeasance appears, Ripley spits in disgust, "I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage." Of course, nothing beats that most crowd-rousing of lines, "Get away from her, you bitch!"

The finale of Aliens puts the final spin on the subject matter that crafts the film into its own distinct entity. Scott's film, leaving H.R. Giger's imagination to fill the cracks of our mind, presented an androgynous vision, pitting Sigourney Weaver, who, at six feet tall with an athletic build, combined traditionally feminine and masculine physical traits, against an alien comprising nothing but phallic and vaginal symbolism. Here, Ripley, traveling into the bowels of the infestation to save Newt, comes across the alien queen, a giant xenomorph laying dozens of eggs to wait for the next round of surveyors to infect. It's a maternal showdown that puts the final touches on Cameron's feminist vision. By triumphing over not only the male establishment that silenced her (by the end, the marines answer to her and the only one who lives, Hicks, treats her as an equal) but a projection of the motherhood she feels she lost, Ripley casts out her demons and just so happens to look like a complete badass doing so.

Upon its release, Aliens enjoyed a similar reaction to its predecessor: Scott's film got mixed reviews at first until the movie took off, but critics and fans alike instantly embraced Aliens, and its effect on reintroducing artistically qualified genre film to America, while not as powerful as the first movie, was substantial: Weaver even snagged a much-deserved Oscar nomination despite the Academy's long-standing ambivalence toward science fiction. The final two films in the proper Alien franchise would suffer from the sudden interest of the studio that casually let Cameron tinker with a classic, suddenly hounding studio hands during every bit of production and robbing the franchise of what made it stand out with its first two films: directorial ambition and artistic daring. Also, the other two had the rotten luck of following perhaps the two most enduringly entertaining and rewarding popular sci-fi films of the 20th century, and they just couldn't live up to the standard. After all, though I must confess to prefer the atmosphere of the first, Aliens is one of those precious few sequels that can stake a serious claim to being better than the original. Apart from Die Hard, I cannot name a more immaculately crafted action extravaganza. And Die Hard didn't also inject a thoughtful meditation on the role of women and maternal instincts within an action framework. Score one for Cameron.



*Some quick words on the Blu-Ray: I'm planning a Blu-Ray-specific review of the new Alien Anthology release for another site (if you're interested, check the Apocalypse Now review I did last week), but I thought I'd at least address some of the concerns related specifically to this entry in the saga. In an interview before the box set's release, James Cameron mentioned that he'd scrubbed all the grain from the picture's infamously thick and hazy stock, leading some to fear that he'd gone haywire with Digital Noise Reduction gizmos and smoothed things until the image looked too plastic. Fear not: Aliens has never looked so good, retaining a great deal of grain in most shots while adding a degree of dimension and depth never seen in the film's image. It's certainly not the greatest restoration I've seen, but frankly I'm impressed that Cameron and the crew that restored the film managed to create such a clear image, and they ought to share their methods with a number of other commercial studios (and to be fair, even Criterion restorers couldn't have totally salvaged this stock). A hearty round of applause all around for the transfer, which doesn't look as spectacular as the deepening of Alien's more softer look, but in many ways this is the more admirable of the two restorations.

Near Dark

The recent, richly deserved success of Kathryn Bigelow’s magnum opus, The Hurt Locker, has reinvigorated my interest in the director, or perhaps I should say “engendered” instead as I never paid any attention to the names attached to films back when I first saw some of her movies. Given my anal approach to (re-)investigating artists, I naturally returned to the beginning, to Bigelow’s vampire-centric major debut, Near Dark. Abetting this decision was the recent re-evaluation of the film in relation to that cultural behemoth, Twilight (the recent DVD release even displays its undead protagonist in a sparkling profile to recall Edward, albeit with a glint in the eyes that undermines any serious comparison). Does, however, Near Dark hold up on its own merits, or has its renewed reputation the result of its status as an “anti-Twilight” among those who feel the need for such a balancing force?

As it turns out, a little from Column A, a little from Column B. Near Dark reveals much of Bigelow’s incredible talent, her ability to mix fast-paced action -- and there are a number of handheld shots, some of them set in character’s point of view, an early precursor to the style she employed in her latest feature -- with a clear aesthetic and an definite sense of spatial relations. On top of that is the glorious weirdness of the narrative, a gonzo mash-up of vampire fiction, Westerns, hillbilly stereotypes and the road movie. It’s not the sort of material a director would choose for a breakthrough feature, particularly one meant to rake in dough and not play at festivals, and in some ways it marks Bigelow’s sense of adventurousness and resolve as much as her decision to film a war movie in extreme heat in a potentially hostile location.

Near Dark opens with the strains of Tangerine Dream -- oh, TD, you secretly ran the world during the Reagan years, didn’t you? -- as Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), a good ol’ country boy drives through a one-horse town in a dilapidated pickup. He swaps pleasant insults with buddies before spotting a pretty young woman strolling down the street. Caleb saunters up to Mae (Jenny Wright), an odd duck who picks up on certain words Caleb uses innocently, such as “bite” and “dying.” To drive the point home, she discusses the stars with Caleb and mentions how she will still be alive to see the light a star just emitted when it finally reaches Earth in a billion years. Mae calls their budding date short as the dawn breaks, but not before leaving Caleb with a parting gift, or two.

Caleb shakes off his bleeding love nip and walks home, and we cannot tell as he loses strength and limps forward whether the smoke around him is dust kicked up by his shuffle or his body sizzling. Only when Bigleow zooms in on the lad’s blackening face does the extent of his curse become clear. Within sight of his homestead and his father and sister, Caleb finds himself yanked into a mysterious van with covered windows.

The resultant tear across the dusty West makes for such an oddball story that Near Dark’s narrative largely stands the test of time, as parody has not diluted it; who could take the piss out of a film that introduces us to such a weird group of vampires in that van, among them Mae and camps played by Lance Henriksen, who adds gravitas to the strangest B-movie premises, and Bill Paxton, still firmly and wonderfully entrenched in his ‘80s era overacting?

These vampires can only be described in an adjective that seems so naturally fitting but has not applied to popular vampires in some time: bloodthirsty. They don’t kill out of some grand evil design, nor do they soften their images with quieter moments of reflection -- a vampire trapped in the body of a prepubescent boy (Joshua John Miller) mentions his situation, only to be instantly shot down for always going on about it. These vamps are just hungry, and they go out every night to find a meal.

This approach to characterization restricts the narrative to a fairly simple tale, but Bigelow makes the most of the spare story through brilliant shot and choreographed sequences. Her daytime shots have a dusty haze over them, as if the earth beneath our feet was created from the ash of crisped vampires past. At night, the air is cooler and cleaner, yet also more unsettling and ethereal. Nighttime is feeding time for these unholy creations, yet also the only moment in which they can go outside – I find Tangerine Dream’s ‘80s soundtracks to be hit or miss, but the one they supply here, for his hillbilly-vampire road Western, works precisely because of this aesthetic choice).

Bigelow’s action scenes are no less striking. The killing spree/feeding frenzy at the bar perfectly paces tension, from Bill Paxton’s first teasing of the patrons and bartender to the gentle but unmistakable escalation of hostile moods before the “family” starts picking off victims with cold precision. The awaited explosion of action never comes, even when the bartender shoots Caleb, thus preserving that mood of anxiety through the end of the sequence. Even better is the shootout between the vampires and a police squad who tracks them down, a scene that turns the old shootout visual style on its head. We’re used to seeing bullets pierce through walls, leaving behind holes that let in smoky light, but this film presents the holes -- and the light they allow -- as the true danger, not the bullets themselves.

Where the film falls flat is its final act, which contains a cure for vampirism that is a reach even as a solution to a fictional disease, as well as a final confrontation that doesn’t particularly have a reason to exist, other than to provide explosive closure to events. The rookie actors do not always deliver their lines with the utmost believability: Pasdar in particular fails to sell the few emotional moments of the film. The computer-animated flames** that burst from the vampires’ bodies, though far from terrible for the time, look dated today (the physical makeup effects remain exemplary).

Nevertheless, Near Dark is a hell of a fun film, bolstered by appropriately weighty work from Henriksen as the devilish leader of the clan, a performance that buoys the younger, inexperienced actors. Bigelow’s take on the vampire legend is down, dirty and vicious, and it contains a brutal brusqueness under its occasionally hypnotic visuals so lacking in modern vampiric lore. I also amused myself greatly by looking for connections to Joss Whedon’s seminal series Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the covered-up RV recalls a similar mode of transport used in the fifth season, while I suspect that Nathan Fillion’s Southern preacher-from-hell Caleb takes him name at least in part from the protagonist of this film.

I cannot imagine what it must be like for Bigelow to constantly deal with the issue of her gender, from both the gently condescending supporters who find it so amazing that a woman could make the sort of films she directs and the deniers who would fault her for daring not to craft films solely about women, as if featuring male protagonists somehow constitutes a sexual sellout. She does not make action films that are good “for a chick”; she makes action films that far exceed the capabilities of nearly all action filmmakers. Near Dark, with its surprisingly assured genre crossover, richly developed aesthetic and mostly excellent pacing, proves that this was true even when she started directing back in the genre’s heyday.


**Commenter javi was right to point out the unlikeliness that the flames would be computer animated and suggests that they were composite shots instead. Thanks for bringing this to my attention