Thursday, May 31, 2018

Captain Avengers: Age of Civil Wartron

Avengers: Age of Ultron
Directed by: Joss Whedon
Written by: Joss Whedon

Captain America: Civil War
Directed by: Anthony & Joe Russo
Written by: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely

Finally got around to seeing these two entries into Marvel’s sprawling cinematic universe, long after Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 convinced me that these safe but comfy cookie-cutter, by-the-numbers movies had nothing going for them but photogenic leads, CGI and the occasional quip.


I still think that’s the case, but it feels like the formula’s been improved and refined, so what you end up getting is a kind of junkie hit of pure, uncut, photogenic leads quipping in the middle of CGI action sequences. And let’s admit, that can be a lot of fun, because these photogenic leads are very photogenic, and they do have some very good quips indeed.


You can talk about plot, but really, these movies have kind of ceased to contain anything but the bantering, and are now about the characters we know and like just kind of bouncing off one another and their environment.


I think that’s one reason Marvel movies often get criticized for having weak or uninteresting villains—the bad guys are secondary, useful only as a prop to get our heroes back on their one-linering. Civil War goes a step further and makes the ostensible ‘bad guy’ almost a no-show in his own movie: his only role is to get the superheroes punching each other. (I think maybe this is also why, say, Marvel can get away with 3-4 movies a year while something like Star Wars feels odd having two movies 5 months apart--A Marvel movie is like meeting old friends, while Star Wars is listening to them tell you about their summer vacation). 


None of the paper-thin plots stands up to even the lightest and airiest of dramatic analyses.

In “Ultron,” Iron Man/Tony Stark/Robert Downey Junior creates an AI that goes berserk and tries to kill humanity, so the team’s solution is to hang out at a farm for a bit and then create an AI (Vision/Paul Bettany) that they just kind of hope won’t go berserk and kill humanity.


In “Civil War” (an Avengers movie in all but name), the whole plot revolves around whether or not the superhero team will submit to international oversight, though each character’s opinions on this seem entirely artificial and geared to making an even 50/50 split between the cast. Captain let’s-punch-the-Nazis America says no, because, um, reasons. Tony loose-cannon-I-spent-a-previous-movie-telling-the-government-to-back-off Stark says yes, because he’s the other big name and the two leads need to fight.


In terms of characters, they’re both incredibly overstuffed, but because characters are ALL they have, and they’re all as charming as a Tom Hiddleston wink, you don’t mind. Black Panther, Spider Man and Ant Man are in Civil War, because, well, these movies are just 12-year-old me mashing my G I Joes against the Star Wars action figures for the hell of it.

Marvel absolutely trades on their pop-culture familiarity: we get maybe five minutes of introducing Spider Man, because hey it’s Spider Man, maybe 30 seconds tops with Ant Man because eh, why not, and then we’re on to the next scene.


But for all that, they’re fun. Really, marshmallowy, rot-your-brain fun.


Civil War moreso than Ultron, but even that finds its feet when it isn’t trying to set everyone up on the right trajectories for the next 10 years of Marvel movies—an early party scene where everyone tries to lift Thor’s hammer is delightful, because it’s the distilled essence of Marvel: these dudes just hanging out and shooting the shit with each other (contrast that to when they try to do anything other than quip, like the utterly uncarbonated ‘romance’ between Black Widow and the Hulk).


For sheer Marvel-ness, Marvelosity, Marvelousness, Civil War probably outdoes Ultron, as the latter is so clunky that even the quipping often seems forced. It tries to shoehorn too much plot into movies that, like I say, really aren’t about plot at all. My only other criticism of Civil War (aside from the patently artificial setup) would be the false-gravity somberness of the ending, the movie’s insistence that the heroic infighting we saw was a serious matter which has torn this team apartbecausehahaha,  no of course it hasn’t, don’t be silly, you’ve got 3-4 more movies with these actors, come off it.


So, they’re very fun movies, no denying it, but I don’t really like them, if only when I spend a second or two thinking about them (which, as mentioned, is clearly optional).


Two reasons.


One problem I have is with the whole ‘superhero’ genre (both comics and movies). It’s a moral abdication, it’s giving up in the face of challenges or difficulties and hoping someone else is going to swoop in and solve everything for you. It’s not giving a fuck about the environment or poverty because Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk are going to solve everything for everyone and take us all to Mars or whatever—No, they aren’t. They’re lining their pockets and that’s the end of it. It’s up to regular people to fix what’s wrong in our world.


The cops or army you see in every superhero movie screwing things up or running around ineffectually? The civilians screaming and crying and waiting for someone to save them? That’s us. That’s you and me. And if there are no superheroes (and there aren’t, I checked), then those people are all in deep, deep shit.


Particularly in our age of media overload where the world can seem so overwhelming it’s tempting to just shrug and turn your back on the world’s problems, the idea of being saved by heroes seems a dangerous fantasy to indulge in. It’s the cheapest, easiest, most childish form of wish-fulfillment (I’d show them, if only I was magically gifted with laser eyes, instead of making an effort to improve myself…).


Give me Samwise Gamgee, the gardener willing to go into literal hell, give me John McClane the regular cop trying to stop the terrorists, give me the whole cast of Saving Private Ryan, people who actually had to work to become heroes.


That’s point one.


Point two is the gotta-catch-em-all structure in which Marvel tries to get you to watch every movie just so you can keep up with what’s happening in the other movies. None of these movies really have anything interesting to say about our world, the people living in it, or even about the characters that inhabit the fictional universe, they’re empty calories, and Marvel just wants you to keep coming back for more so that you can keep coming back for more. You have to watch the movies so that you can watch the movies.


It’s a bit like modern online-only video games, which generally require you to repetitively play (or ‘grind’) the same content over and over again so that you can be rewarded with some game item which allows you to … play the same content over and over again, but this time with a slightly larger number on the screen.

So I’m entertained by these movies, I enjoyed them, I admire the craft that went into their structure and production. But I do not love them.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Horus Hears a Who


Title: Horus Rising (Horus Heresy Book 1)
Author: Dan Abnett
Publisher: Black Library

When you’re writing about a premise as silly as Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 (W40K for short), or something equally silly like superheroes or giant robots, I think you’ve got two options: either revel in the silliness, play it with a wink and a smile and dial it up to 40,000, or else commit to it entirely, and really try to work out the realistic implications of the crazy premise so that you can wring some meaning from it.

If I can go on a quick tangent to illustrate what I mean, let’s look at some movies as examples: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Pacific Rim (2013) are very wink-wink we know this is ludicrous but ain’t it fun?, while Watchmen (2009) and Logan (2017) are committed to getting under the skin of either the whole idea of superheroes in the former case, or one superhero in particular in the latter case.

Point is, you can make it work either way, but this novel doesn’t.

THE SILLINESS AT THE CORE

The gonzo, over-the-top conceit of the W40K universe—a tabletop/miniatures wargame first published in 1987—is that in the year 40,000 giant, roided space marines in a pseudo-Roman intergalactic Empire will fight on distant planets against fantasy beasts, like Orks and Eldar (Elves), Ridley Scott Alien-esque Tyranids and other assorted weird creatures.

It’s supposed to be ‘grim’ in the sense that the default human protagonists belong to a bloodthirsty, evangelical crusade, and also in the sense that they have no hope of ever winning against the opposition ranged against them. That grimness, however, doesn’t quite hide the silliness at the core—it’s an over-the-top grimness, yet it’s never squalid or gratuitously shocking, so that grimness can be played for laughs.

So when it came time to build on W40K’s long-running popularity and expand the brand into the field of fiction, I think those two paths were open—go hard or go full ridiculous.

In 2006’s “Horus Rising,” the first of 48 (and counting) volumes in the “Horus Heresy” series, Games Workshop’s fiction imprint, Black Library, opted for serious, but it’s kind of a dull seriousness that never tries to scratch beneath the tropes it presents.

If the intent had been to produce a fun page-turner, then I think they’d have done far better to go the nudge-nudge, wink-wink route. Instead, the whole thing is a bit dour and downbeat, without any insight or innovation that might make such dreariness worth slogging through.

COMMITTED TO THE WRONG THINGS

Dan Abnett—whose career seems more focused on comics such as X-Men, the Punisher or Judge Dredd than novels—brings to the novel the Judge Dredd tone with none of the social commentary. It’s a competent and serviceable book, but really doesn’t have anything going for it beyond the mechanics of plot.

The story of this first book focuses on Space Marine Captain slash post-human superman Garviel Loken, and details how he and his avowedly atheist comrades deal with an encounter with supernatural, seemingly godlike creatures that live in W40K’s equivalent of hyperspace, called the Warp.

During a battle on an alien planet, one of Loken’s men is possessed by something that lives in the Warp, mutating him into a monster. Loken is shaken but reassured there is a scientific explanation, while one of the civilians who witnesses the horror is shocked into joining a secret cult that worships the Emperor (despite the latter’s insistence he is mortal). Meanwhile, Loken’s commander, Horus, is slowly corrupter by agents of the infernal/otherworldly power.

The question of “What happens to religion when humanity gets into space?” is maybe not an obvious choice for a wargame to tackle, and frankly one the book doesn’t spend too much time addressing despite it being the only thing of real interest happening—Abnett is much more focused on the machinations surrounding Horus and foreshadowing his eventual fall from grace. Presumably explored in more detail in the other 47 books in the series.

There’s potential in the idea, for sure. Will the triumph of reason represented by space exploration and colonization lead to the downfall of religions, when we do not find God or Allah or Zeus or whoever out there? Is religion truly just the retreat before the inexplicable, and will new mysteries in the galaxy drive us back into its arms? Interesting questions to ask, but not ones you can really deal with in a series—and oh what a series it is—of books about bloodshed and blowing things up across the galaxy.

MAXIMUM SILLINESS

So, for me at least, it feels committed to the wrong things: it’s committed to its premise, but only the surface details, the who is doing what to who, when and where, rather than the underlying concepts or ideas. I think Abnett could and should have jettisoned all the faux-introspection and just gone for maximum silliness—perhaps had the buffoonish Orks (who’ve always been presented as a kind of parody of the British working class in W40K) as foils to the serious space marines—and had more fun with this. 

Or is that ... HERESY?