Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 49

Carrie (2013)

A bullied high school student discovers her telekinetic powers.

I never saw the 1976 original, but checking out its synopsis and comparing that with the remake, they were fairly similar*. The 2013 version benefitted from better production values, so the telekinesis scenes could be played up a little more intensely. They were a little understated in the original but didn’t look too doctored.

Chloë Grace Moretz, in the titular character role, I thought did a convincing job of being an unbearably victimized teenage girl, but she in a way was too attractive to drive the portrayal home. Sissy Spacek, who played Carrie in the 1976 version, had an awkward innocence about her face that’s difficult to act out. You either have it or you don’t.

One thing the original had done better than the remake was that Carrie hallucinated the laughing kids at the prom, but the kids laughing in the remake was genuine. In the remake, the shower menstruation scene in the beginning was recorded, because phones phones phones, and the resulting video was played on large screens (or projected, can’t remember) by that repulsive Nicki girl. Carrie’s telekinetic rage was a little more understandable in the remake, but there was good opportunity for Carrie in the original to feel guilt over killing some innocent folks. With the remake, it just ends up being an act of revenge and there’s not as much reason for Carrie to wrestle internally for what she had done.

And, I don’t know, except for the original group of girls that mocked Carrie in that shower scene, most kids seeing that video in public would be embarrassed about it. I doubt every student at the prom would be enjoying it like they did in the 2013 version. That kind of group reaction to cruelty is something you see in older sitcoms, not a serious horror movie.

* Carrie (1976) is free on a bunch of streaming channels, so I have it on now as I am writing. Strange to witness the indoor smoking era.

Penguin Highway

A scientifically-minded 8 year old, his two friends, and a dental assistant investigate the appearance of numerous penguins in their small town.

Annihilation meets The Place Promised In Our Early Days. It’s billed as a kids’ movie because it’s animated, the protagonists are mostly grade school kids, and there’s no cursing or ultra-violent scenes. It feels more YA because of the boob talk and some scatalogical scenes.

This is a quintessential “mysterious phenomenon” movie, where strange, but benign, behavior in the natural world hints at a metaphysical cause. This is where I want to point out the extreme differences, which I have done before on this blog, in how western films tend to view the supernatural, versus how eastern or some indigenous cultures might view it. Just look the comparison of the two movies I mentioned in the preceding paragraph. Annihilation is an American horror film based off an American science fiction book, and though the line is blurred on whether the Shimmer environment in that story is supernatural or alien in origin, it’s undoubtedly malevolent or dismissively neutral to humanity when it’s at its most well-behaved. The Place Promised…, a Japanese film, also straddles the line between the supernatural and alien in the geographic anomaly Macguffin, but it’s hardly depicted as horrific. Penguin Highway‘s Ocean is just there, and it affects things and people as a matter of course. It’s never viewed as evil but a part of the natural world that simply isn’t seen very often. For sure, there are plenty of horror stories coming out of far east film industries, but story premises involving the unknown are treated with much more respect than how westerners handle it.

The only thing throwing me off in Penguin is the relationship between Aoyama and the unnamed Lady, and I don’t think the slight gross-out feeling I get is a cultural bias. Despite Japan’s lower age of majority, a fourth grader isn’t going to become close platonic friends with a grown woman from the dentist’s office out of nowhere, unexplained. I think Tomihiko Morimi, the author of the book on which this film is based, didn’t include a backstory about their relationship in order to add to the Lady’s mysterious origins, which I suppose does the job. But there’re are other ways available to bring her into Aoyama’s life without it coming off as borderline improper. She could just be a woman that just showed up one day as, say, Aoyama’s neighbor, and became a friend of the family because Aoyama’s parents hired her as a babysitter on the weekends, or some such. Lots of different ways to work it in a believable fashion.

Some scenes in the middle of the second act drag, but the rather touching ending makes it worthwhile for me. The time investment paid off and pushes the movie into rewatchable territory.

Transformers One

Orion Pax and D-16, robot buddies working the mines in the blighted planet of Cybertron, discover the secrets about what happened to their planet and the missing Matrix of Leadership.

I was hoping this would riff off the excellent Covenant of Primus book, which went into detail about the origins of the Transformers from their very beginning to how they ended up on Earth. There was some of that in there, because Optimus Prime’s and Megatron’s origins are depicted in the book, and that backstory exposition scene in the beginning of One parallels the book, but I don’t think One and Covenant share a lot of elements other than that. There’s a ton of different continuity versions of the franchise that it doesn’t matter; I just wish there was a solid movie of what occurred in Covenant, because there’s a ton of good stories to mine in there. Transformers is a franchise mostly directed towards kids, and Covenant has some complicated material in there that would require an adult film (“adult film” not in that way), and that’s a tough challenge to get green lit.

Plenty of Gen Z/Gen Alpha humor here, which is to be expected, and at first I thought it didn’t fit what I know of the characters. It does make a bit of sense when you look at them as younger versions of what they become later on, despite it being a bit odd to think of near-immortal alien robots as being immature in some way. I suppose it means they can grow in similar ways that humans can. The “female” robot deuteragonist, who I thought was Arcee, was actually a different robot, Elita-1, which was something of a relief because Elita-1 played the tropey Mean Boss character. Most depictions of Arcee I’ve come across are nothing like that. Arcee is a speedy, intelligent and witty sharpshooter with extensive battle experience, loyal and compassionate towards her comrades. Elita-1 is a by-the-book and ambitious leader in training, didn’t care much for humor or horseplay from her subordinates, and had an uncaring honesty about her. So it was good to know she didn’t suffer from an obligatory boss bitch rewrite.

Hugo
A mechanically-inclined orphan boy makes an enemy of a toy shop owner, who is mysteriously connected to a broken automaton found by the orphan’s late father.

If there ever was a live-action Hayao Miyazaki movie with a clockpunk aesthetic, made by an American director, this would be it. Martin Scorsese’s children’s film, and because it’s so much like a Miyazaki story, adults can watch it as well without feeling skeevy or bored.

There’s lots of wide-angle, sweeping camera shots that really ground you in Scorsese’s colorfully stylized version of a bustling inter-war Paris. He’s always had a thing for exposition through voyeurism, and it’s obvious in Hugo. Characters, interactions, and scenery aren’t just established through showing them, but showing through the eyes of another character, like a filter or an extra step. It’s an interesting idea, because it’s as though you are learning about the world alongside Hugo as he listens and watches. You almost take the hero’s journey with the titular Hugo, since we feel we understand the same things he understands.

There’s a bit of a Woody Allen-type of switcheroo here, in that the story shifts its ultimate focus from the initial problem to be solved, the broken automaton and the message it would write, to a different arc. It’s hard to do this because the audience knows the runtime already, and we know how long movies generally are, so when the main hurdle is jumped, we’re already primed to not expect the resolution. The trick is, I think, to make the new puzzle to be solved, yes, different, but also heavily related in some way to the first puzzle. That seems like obvious advice, but maybe it’s not. I think it works in Hugo’s case, though, because Hugo is given the opportunity to open up from his insularity, and Méliès can resolve a very large past regret.

The Wild Robot
A robot washes up ashore on a secluded island and helps a runt gosling after accidentally killing his family.

Short Circuit meets E.T.. I saw this on recommendation from The Dark Herald. It’s a children’s movie but it doesn’t shy away from the realities of the animal world. You see woodland creatures get killed and eaten, though there’s no real gore, and there’s blunt talk about the “red in tooth and claw” way of life in the wild.

There was nothing objectionable here in the story, apart from a few stock character types and a little bit of treacly scenes. I expected that going in, knowing writer and director Chris Sanders’ past work. The story overall was well-executed and had a few different beats to it that separated it out from the standard Disney or Pixar story shape. Also breaking from the pack of modern science-fiction storytelling movies, Sanders had the believability and story logic nicely in pocket until one scene at the climax of the second act. It was a scene after the geese had migrated to the high-tech futuristic city outpost place, where all the robots were tending the garden. The geese were understandably seen as predators to the growing fruit trees there, but the city solution of deploying armed robots to clear them out was way over the top. Repelling a threat to a precious food supply makes sense, but the robots would not be shooting indiscriminately everywhere, like it’s a space battle. There’d be a methodical system in place to deal with pests and not cause so much collateral damage. I get that Longneck had to get blasted away so that Brightbill could have his “ascend to leadership” resolution, but there was probably a more believable yet action-oriented way to do it. I’ll forgo my usual amateur’s take on how to fix this sort of thing because my mental energy stores are a little tapped out right now.