Se7en

David Fincher's Se7en remains in the public consciousness after a decade primarily for its climax -- both for its disturbing content and the endless parodies of Brad Pitt's anguished scream "What's in the baaaaahhhhx?! -- yet its influence on nearly all thrillers that would shoot for the adjective "dark" is nearly incalculable. Its grimy, slimy aesthetic informs countless psychological thrillers, and the extremity of the murders depicted set off a chain reaction that led to grisly crime on the ludicrous scale of Saw as well as the more scientific focus of C.S.I. and its spin-offs.

Upon revisiting Fincher's breakthrough, out now in a positively stunning Blu-Ray remaster, what stuck out at me was the surprising amount of emotion. The term "nihilistic" has been attached so often to the feature that even the new Blu-Ray describes it as such in its included booklet. Yet the film's downbeat, bleak ending does not translate to pure fatalism. Deep within the horrifying twists and turns of the film, Se7en ultimately focuses upon the central character, Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman), and his arduous journey out of the very nihilism that both supporters and detractors see in the movie.

The first shot of the film, in fact, occurs away from the hell of Se7en's unnamed city, safe in Somerset's quiet home. Yet Fincher prepares us for the world outside the man's bedroom by watching the old detective ready himself for work. Freeman, an actor who always casts off a calming vibe, lightly smooths the wrinkles from his jacket. Then, he pockets a switchblade. Something outside clearly made this cop feel that a sidearm alone could not protect him, and when we see what it is, Somerset's nihilism seems almost comical in its insufficiency. If anything, the idea that he thinks a knife can hold back the darkness becomes a hopeful gesture.

After viewing an all-too-common "crime of passion" that leaves a husband dead -- "Just look at all that passion on the wall," he sighs -- Somerset heads out to a crime scene that will severely mess up his plans to retire at the end of the week. With his young, cocky replacement, Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), in tow, Somerset enters a fetid, roach-filled home where a mammoth of a man lies dead face-down in a bowl of spaghetti. Everyone jokes that the man ate himself to death, until they notice his hands and feet bound by wire and a bruise on his temple that suggests a gun pressed to his head. They were right: this guy did eat his fat ass to death, but it wasn't because of a lack of self-control.

Somerset knows this kind of crime is too meticulously planned and executed to be a random act, and he practically begs his captain (R. Lee Ermey) to re-assign him so that he doesn't leave in a week haunted by this killer. Sure enough, when a notorious criminal lawyer turns up dead the next day having been bled to death and left with the word "GREED" scrawled on the floor in his blood, it takes no time for Somerset to realize the pattern.

Each of the murders, based of course on the seven deadly sins, is intricate and, with the exception of the last two, gruesome. Yet Fincher displays a surprising amount of restraint in his view of these extreme crimes. His love of deep focus and his wry method of eliding around gratuitous shots allow him to show grisly scenes while still leaving things to the audience's imagination. Consider the manner with which he presents the Lust murder: Somerset and Mills track down a clue to an S&M parlor where they look at a photo of something the parlor owner designed for the killer, cut to an industrial club/brothel and a backroom where a man sits shivering and hyperventilating next to a bed with a dead prostitute we never quite see, then move to two interrogation rooms, one with the obstinate club owner and the other with the terrified patron. As the man explains having a gun put in his mouth as the killer ordered him, we finally see the photo, showing a knife mounted to a codpiece, and we understand in an instant what he did to that hooker without having to look at it.

That refusal to revel in the salaciousness of the material permits Fincher to devote his time to the characters. He never shatters Mills' confidence (not until the end, anyway) but he does dig deeper and suggest that the young man regrets his brash desire to come to the big city to solve more interesting cases, while his wife's (Gwyneth Paltrow's) obvious discontent drives a wedge between the loving couple that never becomes too stereotypical. The interplay between Mills and Somerset plays on the usual dynamic of the young cop and the old, wizened veteran, yet Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker update it for the '90s: when Somerset figures out the pattern of the killings, he heads to the library to research any literary work he can think of that mentions the seven deadly sins. Mills, a member of the attention-deficit generation, has to buy the Cliff's Notes of those books because he can't stand trawling through Milton and Chaucer.

Even the killer, John Doe (Kevin Spacey), is richly defined despite only appearing in the final act. In his best performance, Spacey doesn't overplay his hand and embodies the banality of evil: there is nothing remarkable about John. He spent years slicing his fingers to destroy his prints, but no one would be able to identify him even if he left a print at the crime scene. So thoroughly boring is the man that he not only has to walk into a police precinct to get noticed but scream until people look. The eyes, however, give it away: in John Doe's eyes in the look of a man who cannot stomach the world around him, who's egotism found an outlet in horrific, fundamentalist Christianity. As he leads Mills and Somerset to his most disturbing setup, he spits venomous dismissal of his victims that betrays his self-absorption behind his religious facade.

But the heart of it all is Somerset. His despair is palpable, and unlike the usual retiring cop who looks back on his career with nostalgia and camaraderie, the detective behaves like the soldier in The Thin Red Line who learns he's being shipped home: rather than make a brave show of wanting to stay and help, he can barely contain his relief over his escape. Somerset sports a habit of ticking a metronome every night both to distract him from past horrors and to drown out the sound of street crime just outside. When Tracy, who doesn't know anyone else in the city, confides in him that she's expecting, he can only offer advice by way of relating his own experience with getting a young woman pregnant many years ago and talking her into an abortion to spare a child the nightmare of growing up in this hell.

Try as he might, however, he cannot leave his work behind them. It is Somerset who guesses the motivation for the killings, who does the thorough research and who even submits to being his replacement's inferior just to stay on and see the case through. A brief conversation with the captain uncovers the humanity in them both: the C.O.'s refusal to believe that Somerset can just quit after so many years on the force seems less a proud inability to see the dangers of the job rather than an insight into his own thought process. Implicit in his speech to Somerset is the notion that he, too, once thought of running away from this futile job, but he couldn't leave without feeling guilty about not helping, the same feeling that tugs at Somerset to finish the case and even stay with the police at the end.

Thus, Se7en is a film about humanity regained, not lost, and its grotesquerie comes to match the same level of exaggeration in numerous Christian allegories. The disillusioned priest in Shyamalan's Signs regains his faith after the terrifying ordeal of an alien invasion. Hell, the entire corpus of Flannery O'Connor reintroduces faith through downright catastrophic means. That religion should be the evil to motivate a character to rediscover his humanism is but the wryest and cleverest trick in a film that expresses a routine enthusiasm, never for the particulars of its crimes but in the ingenuity of its execution. This unexpectedly moral ending, which reveals the intelligence of the film, is the perfect book-end for the opening credits, which revel in the balls-to-the-wall, style-breaking aesthetic of the film. For a long time, that Brakhage-influenced opening represented the zenith of the picture, yet I didn't notice how smart the thing was until it was released at its most visually-appealing.

A Bug's Life

Following the game-changing success of Toy Story, Pixar still had something to prove but also won themselves a great deal more breathing room from the heavy executive supervision that plagued (and occasionally helped) their first feature. Demonstrating that the creative team's penchant for grabbing story ideas from interesting places was no fluke, Lasseter and co. decided to adapt a number of films rooted in the great Japanese masterpiece Seven Samurai, specifically its loose parody, Three Amigos! But how is that interesting, one might ask? Well, they transplanted the story into the microcosmic world of ants, a universe so small that the words on the poster were written in lowercase.

Small protagonists set against wide backdrops are a Pixar staple, from toys who make even a child seem a giant to clownfish in the Pacific Ocean to a rat scurrying through the city of Paris to a wee trash compactor with treads that explores outer space. So, the idea of ants scurrying around a world where a blade of grass is proportionate to the size of a tree to a human (thus making the actual tree in the middle of the any colony seem like the Tower of Babel) surely caught the animators' imaginations. As few could argue, A Bug's Life represents a marked step up from the animation of the limited backgrounds of Toy Story: gorgeous green blades rub up against blue skies and fertile soil gives way to cracked, arid riverbeds in dry season. As seen on Pixar's Blu-Ray, A Bug's Life is one of the more visually tantalizing works in terms of its color scheme and large-scale design.

Unfortunately, the beauty of the backgrounds outweighs just about anything else in the picture, from the story to the characters to the design of the characters. Still working with technological limitations, the lack of fine texture in the plant life is excusable, but there are as many ants as blades of grass, it seems, and the shortcuts the animators take with the creatures that move stick out like sore thumbs among the rest of Pixar's spellbinding work across the years. Nobody seems to have a mouth distinct of the rest of the body, each colored in the same color as the body of the character in question with rudimentary teeth. Limbs typically flail, because when they move at a normal speed the animation looks awkward and unfinished.

The story does not have the usual Pixar ambition, either. Even more popcorn-oriented works like Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. have a spark to them, a point-of-view that A Bug's Life lacks. One could go all the way back to 1912 and watch Władysław Starewicz's The Cameraman's Revenge to see a movie about anthropomorphizing bugs (and the director used actual roaches and such for his animation), and the Pixar team only fitfully attempts to build a unique point of view from this angle, choosing instead to insert a number of weak puns and lazily construct a world that looks like our own, albeit made from our scraps. There's nothing about a bug's life that seems so very different from a human's, except Bloody Marys are made with real blood.

Following the Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven/Three Amigos! line, the colony of ants depicted in the film are subject to the harsh rule of grasshoppers, who demand heavy tributes of grain to get them through the winter months, taking most of the harvest each year despite the far larger number of ants. Only one ant, Flik (Dave Foley), a misfit with a knack for thinking up inventions but an inability to make most of them function properly. After his idea for a motorized harvester ends up knocking the stone containing the tribute pile into the lake it overlooks and he subsequently attempts to stand up to the enraged grasshoppers until cowed into submission, Flik seeks to redeem himself by traveling off the island to hire larger bugs to defend the colony when the grasshoppers return.

Instead of finding warriors, Flik inadvertently recruits a band of failed circus performers -- masculine ladybug Francis, high-wire spider Rosie, gigantic rhinoceros beetle Dim, put-upon stick insect Slim, two foreign pill bugs, Teutonic caterpillar Heimlich, praying mantis magician Manny and his wife/lovely assistant Gypsy -- when he mistakes their reluctant altercation in a bar for valiance and strength. When Flik discovers his error after bringing the bugs back to the colony and receiving a hero's welcome, he spends much of the rest of the film covering up the truth so as not to diminish morale and earn yet more scorn.

But then the movie shifts to focus on the colony's feelings of togetherness, surely to build up the suspense to the inevitable fallout from the revelation of the true nature of the "warriors," but Lasseter lets the tension slack, laying the groundwork for a message of standing up to bullies and working together to pull off a plan bigger than any one person (or ant). That's fine and dandy, but even the short length of the film does not allow him to reach the reveal quickly enough to draw any weight from the scene. Worse, this entire plotline comes to feel like nothing more than a typical romantic comedy tale, complete with Big Misunderstanding.

A Bug's Life rallies at the end, when the grasshoppers return and Flik sets aside his self-doubt and inspires the ants to victory. We see the evil Hopper's resolve break when faced with a bird, real or fake, and the ants finally understand their power and how they never needed outside help at all, though they respect and value the circus bugs' contribution. Pixar don't yet have the technology, team size and/or budget for great water effects, but the rainstorm that hits is made convincingly terrifying from the small perspective despite the fact that the water does not seem to leave lasting wetness on what it touches. Yes, the ending is pat, but so is everything else in the movie; at least Lasseter finally injects some blood in the picture for the ants' fight back.

There are aspects of the film I quite admire. It's background animation, of course, which still lingers in my mind and makes a Blu-Ray purchase worth your money despite all the flaws. I also enjoy the idiosyncratic voice cast, from Phyllis Diller as the queen ant to NewsRadio geek Dave Foley as Flik. Though I usually side with the voice actors in their conflict with name stars getting fatter paychecks simply to talk in their normal voices, the choices here are too unique to be stunt casting. And finally, I think the message is great for young kids, who -- let's be honest -- are the target audience of Pixar's films, much as everyone might enshrine them in the annals of the entire medium. No shortage of anti-bully movies exists to my knowledge, but A Bug's Life makes the case for never taking abuse no matter your age.

Still, there is a tedium to this movie absent in nearly all other Pixar movies. The romantic subplot between Flik and Princess Atta detracts from the rest of the story and doesn't have nearly the charm of the other computer-animated ant movie from 1998, Antz (how weird is it that two such movies came out in the same year?). That film did a better job with its neurotic protagonist, more distinctive character animation that was also truer to bug movement while still humanizing the creatures, and just generally more imaginative. I still pop in A Bug's Life from time to time, but it always brings me down a little to watch a Pixar movie and focus only on the "pretty colors."

Moon

That many are quick to point out Duncan Jones' father is David Bowie is unfortunate, but inevitable. For one thing, the children of celebrities will always be defined by their parents but, more substantially, it's incredibly easy to look at this film and throw out words like "Space Oddity" and "Life on Mars." But never mind all of that; Jones' debut feature is of such admirable quality that he should be considered a talent to watch and not someone riding the coattails of his name.

Clearly channeling the classic science fiction of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris and Alien, as well as contemporary realistic sci-fi such as Sunshine, Moon is a gorgeous semi-thriller that seems more complicated than it is in some places and is deceptively simple in others. Jones made the film for $5 million, which would shame George Lucas if he still had a sense of artistic decency.

Yes, Jones actually uses miniatures for the film, making it look as real as possible. Remember miniatures and real props? The kind that sucked you into a film instead of inadvertently making you look for the digital seams? Setting the film on the moon allows him to keep these special effects shot minimalistic, yet they are at times overpowering in their beauty. Likewise, the interior of the helium-3 mining facility looks like a working class take on 2001's space station.

I'm hesitant to divulge much of the plot, as it takes a big twist early on and takes the story in a whole new direction. At the start, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of his three-year contract working in a helium-3 mining facility on the far side of the moon. His replacement is two weeks away, at which time he'll be reunited with his wife Tess and toddler daughter, Eve. Yet three years in a remote locale appears to have taken a toll on Sam, and he suffers recurring hallucinations of a young woman (an overt nod to Solaris). One day, he's so distracted by the vision that he crashes his lunar rover, and when he wakes up he sees...himself. Is this new Sam another hallucination? A clone? I shall say no more on the matter.

Sam's only companion -- well, besides himself -- is the facility's computer, Gerty. Voiced by Kevin Spacey, Gerty calls to mind HAL9000, but instead of HAL's pulsating, unresponsive red eye, Gerty sports the friendly emoticons of the future. Spacey's slightly altered voice sounds like a digital Nurse Ratched: so calm and clinically supportive that it sounds sinister. With only two characters in the film, you're naturally meant to suspect this robot from the start, but his real nature is actually surprising.

Gerty and Sam are the only two substantial characters in the film, so the entirety of the film rests on Rockwell's shoulders. Sam Rockwell has long been one of my favorite actors, and one of the most varied working today. Ebert might have been onto something when he compared Rockwell to Christopher Walken in his review for Choke, but Rockwell is more than just the weird guy: he can do broad comedy, satire, drama, tear-jerking, everything. Rockwell gives one of his finest performances to date as Sam; he pulls off Nathan Parker's dialogue with his snappy timing while simultaneously crafting a sympathetic character experiencing an existential crisis. He could have resorted to over-the-top acting to fill the gap or in his interactions with "himself," but he brings real subtlety to the film. Rockwell has bafflingly never received an Oscar nomination, but hopefully this year someone recognizes his excellent work here.

Earlier I mentioned the superb effects shots, but attention must also be paid to the makeup department. As cabin fever begins to take its toll on Sam, he looks worse and worse, and the makeup crew make him look terrifying at times. His deterioration is every bit as beautiful as the shots of the lunar surface and the facility interior, and they suggest a dark edge to his employment at Lunar Industries.

Thematically, Moon isn't all that complex: it contains the usual questions concerning what makes us human, where we will go in the future. But its sharp, on-target dialogue, the incredible effects work and Rockwell's tour-de-force make it the most entertaining film I've yet seen this year. My only quarrel with the film was the ending, but I read later that Jones intends to make a sort of trilogy the universe, so I withhold my criticisms of its final minute. Regardless, Moon deserves immediate placement in the list of great contemporary science fiction, alongside Children of Men, Sunshine and Serenity, and we should all be watching Duncan Jones with great interest.