‘A Quiet Place’: genius or ungenius?

Spoilers!!

A Quiet Place has been getting rave reviews from some and “But hang on?” reviews from others.

I can see where the positive reviewers are coming from. It is a film that contains very little dialogue on account of the predicament the world is in. (All the chatty extroverts were eaten by noise-sensitive monsters about 400 days before the time this film is set.) The storytelling relies on physical acting and contextual clues rather than verbal exposition. It is tense and gripping. It doesn’t pull punches.

I am annoyingly demanding of the films I watch, and even I thoroughly enjoyed it (despite its flaws) and would recommend that you watch it immediately.

And I mean immediately because there’s no going back once you read on. I plan to spoil the film for you forever.

OK, now that you’ve watched it…

But Hang On?

Like After Earth before it, this film features creatures that are almost impervious to human weaponry, almost supernaturally effective killers, but also massively flawed. These ones can’t see anything (they seem to echolocate like bats, which I guess is how they don’t sprint into trees), but they have phenomenal hearing. Any sound louder than a whisper will alert them to your presence.

But like After Earth before it, this is where the majority of the problems lie. Here are just some of them.

1. With so much danger, why let your youngest child walk at the back? Unsupervised. Perhaps he farts or skins his knee. What then? If you’re so scared of noise that you build and maintain sand pathways all the way to town, why are you so complacent that you’d leave a three-year-old lagging 50m back?

Not pictured: youngest still miles further back

2. Why did the whole family make the dangerous trip at all? They’re carrying the older kid because he’s that sick, but it seems as though all they needed were some meds for the lad. It’s a one-person job. Why drag the sickling and two other kids who are a liability when one adult could simply have stayed home with them?

3. I know you lost your kid and all, but this is only 18 months into the crisis. You couldn’t maybe have got some birth control from that pharmacy and held off having another child for a couple of years? Maybe a solution presents itself and you could have a kid safely? Babies are nothing if not noisy.

4. If you snag your dress on something pointy sticking out of the floor, stop and check what it is. Perhaps it’s a nail that you’re going to stand on at an inopportune time. You’re all barefoot (because noise), so surely foot health ought to be much more of a priority?

5. The movie should be called a noisy place, because the film itself acknowledges that you’re safe around lots of noise. Being in a quiet place is the worst possible idea. Build a house at the waterfall, guys!

6. Even if you must live in a quiet place, perhaps:

• Get proper soundproofing.
• Monster-proof your property. The monster could tear out of a silo, but not (quickly) into the top of their pick-up truck. So maybe don’t live in a house made of matchsticks.
• Live off the ground and pull up the ladder.
• Make your quiet place a noisy place by setting up a perimeter of sound systems that are playing dubstep or monster-food noises. Sleep with earplugs.

7. In terms of defeating these monsters, again, maybe trying to be quiet isn’t the trick. You’ve had 450 days to think this over. Perhaps at least some of these ideas might have occurred to someone:

• Don’t bring squishy dad-bods to an armoured monster fight. Stay in the tank and machine-gun them to bits.

OK, but why, military? You’re literally fighting a speedy medieval knight.

• Swat them with large military-grade tennis racquets that will bypass their echolocation. It won’t kill them, but it would be hella funny.
• Try blaring out things to mess with their hearing, such as Lloyd Christmas’s most annoying sound in the world.

A medieval knight who keeps taking his helmet off.

• They are indiscriminately attracted to noise, so lure them to a tower that they can’t climb and shoot them in their stupid blind faces.
• Cover a tasty animal with remotely detonated explosives and when they show their gooey face parts explode the food-bomb.
• Lure them into a deep concrete pit and then charge an entrance fee for people to come and play polka music at them or pelt them with cat bells.

In short, there seem to be a lot of places these monsters couldn’t get into and from which a large number of Americans could finally put their assault rifles to good use. Waiting for your dumb kid to knock over a lantern and get the whole family killed is not a plan.

Lucy the Movie

Lucy is a movie based on that long-debunked myth that humans only use 10% of their brains, and speculates what someone could do if they used 100%. For a film that purports to be teaching us how the cleverest ever person would see the world, this is a pretty wonky start. If they start with a ‘truth’ that 5 minutes of fact-checking would have overturned, how much should I trust their conclusion?

For a film with such a heavy-weight cast and respected director, it really is the most obvious, surprise-less garbage that I’ve seen in a while. The plot is: Drug gives ordinary girl superpowers. Superpowers make her unstoppable. No one stops her. Movie ends. The most comprehensive and accurate catalogue of its crimes has been provided by Cinema Sins (you should watch that here–warning: lots of implied swearing and spoilers).

But my biggest gripe with the film is the worldview that it tries to pass off as the most enlightened way of seeing the world–the next step in human evolution (‘Lucy’ the human ancestor ape-thing is here a symbol for the first stage of humanity, whereas the Scarlet Johansson Lucy is everything that we could be–the start of a new humanity). And what is this massive step in human enlightenment? Well, it’s 2nd Century gnosticism, basically, or perhaps a variation on one of the many ‘oneness spiritualities’ that the world has seen since.

The basic idea is that our individuality, our separateness, is all an illusion. Deep down we are all part of one basic stuff–whether it is energy, or divine spark, or (in Lucy) just the fact that all matter is made up of atoms and so there are no real boundaries between one thing and another. There Is No Spoon. So if you were clever enough, you would see that you are part of the great Oneness, and you would then have access to all experience and knowledge, and you would eventually merge into Pure Consciousness, as Lucy does in the end. Oh spoiler. Sorry. (I’m not really).

My problem with this is simple. The makers of this film seem to think that they’re cleverer than everyone else to have seen how the world really is (that we are all connected), but they’re really just committing a logical fallacy–the continuum one. The mistake is to assume that because distinctions between things are fuzzy, they do not actually exist at all. In other words, because my body and the air are both collections of atoms, there is really no border between body and air at all–it is all connected.

This is not a new idea (even if the atomic framing of it is comparatively novel), and it is not a function of higher intelligence, as this film cringe-worthily brags. It is a function of that ongoing problem of reconciling the dual human experience of unity and alienation: we are aware that we are connected to one another, to the world, perhaps even to a spiritual, eternal realm, but we also feel unique and special, or (less positively) alone, different, separated.

Gnosticism dealt with this by teaching that difference, baseness and individuality belong in the temporal, material realm, whereas oneness belongs in the spiritual, divine, eternal realm. Other mystical systems tend to have a variation on this theme–enlightenment frees me from the cycle of reincarnation and merges me with nirvana.

In other words, the worldview of this film is not genius. It is the inability to cope with paradox. It cannot find a place for both sides of human experience, so it relegates individuality to the status of ‘illusion’, and assigns oneness the status of ‘divine’.

Christianity? Pffft. That’s that thing about a baby that rises from the dead? Yeah man, I’m done with stupid myths.

Christianity gets a hard time these days, being treated as though it is everything else’s dumber cousin, but it has a way more elegant solution to this paradox. The final end of Christianity is not just to be merged into divine oneness and thus to cease to exist as an individual. Rather, Christianity holds that each of us is a created thing (I’m struggling for a word here–a machine? an artwork? a puzzle piece?) with our own quirky shape and our own rough edges, but rather than being merged into generic eternal goo, we are shaped to fit and play a role in a huge, multi-faceted body. In other words, the way in which we all become one is not by losing ourselves, but by being perfectly the part in the whole that we were created to be. And it is with this community of united individuals that God will be in relationship.

So there is a solution to the paradox that resonates with both facets of human experience, and enables us to affirm true unity and true human individuality. I hesitate to say it, but there is divine genius there if it’s anywhere.

Just one question for Will Smith’s ‘After Earth’

This movie is real. Watching it is a choice.

Writing is hard, you guys. I dabble in it, but anyone who perseveres to the point of producing something for public consumption should be cut some slack. You have a cool idea, you try to flesh it out to a 90-minute running time, you add a few cliches and formulae–OK and a few more–blunder through a couple of tricky areas, and then release it to the adoring public hoping they’ll be nice.

Will Smith gave this a go and I say good for him. After Earth was almost nice. It gave his boy something to do over the Summer. Great. I just wonder how the army of people who must have read the script managed to yes-man it all the way into theatres without pointing out some pretty fundamental weaknesses. I offer this one:

1. Why are your monsters so impossibly dumb?

MOMMM?? Where are my socks?

In the story, Earth has been Republicanned to the point of toxicity, and people have upped sticks to another planet. Unfortunately some unwelcoming enemies have airdropped horrid beasties called the Ursa into this world in order to exterminate all human life. They are blind, but hunt by smelling fear pheromones. Will Smith has learned that fear is a choice and so he doesn’t smell scared. He can walk up to these giant naked mole-rats undetected and kill them with his high-tech scimitar.

So the army has invested much money and risk trying to teach soldiers to have no fear so that they can kill the Ursa.

This seems incredibly dumb to me. Firstly, just shoot the things. They can be killed by stabs, so they can be killed by guns, tanks, drones, air-to-ground weapons, traps baited with cowardly Rhesus Monkeys… anything.

But even if you have to walk up to them and cut them, I present to you the invincible Ursa warrior:

Suppress the emission of pheromones and Bam! you’re invisible, Will. Avoid stinking up the place with your fear and you’re golden–a fact clearly acknowledged in the film when little Jaden’s sister sticks him in a glass bubble to hide him from a death mole (advice she herself might have followed). You don’t have to control involuntary bodily processes, you can just do what humans are good at and use your brain. Sigh.

Ten questions for Captain America

“Ha! I can catch your magic shield with my magic arm! Wait, but why didn’t that nice doctor give me two of these arms? And the same tech in my legs? And why don’t I have one of these indestructible shields? Why is there only one of everything??”

On the recommendation of almost every movie critic in the world (89% on Rotten Tomatoes with a 94% audience rating) we went to watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It was utter garbage, and shame on you for liking it.

If you’ve yet to see it, from here on there are numerous spoilers, which I actually consider a public service to you, but I’m warning you anyway.

Firstly: why the critics liked it. It explores the oh-so-novel theme: ‘Those enemies of freedom must never be allowed to take away our freedom’, via a rebooted Nazi world domination plot (cf. reductio ad hitlerum). Apparently the topical issue of govt invading personal liberty in order to preserve public security is enough depth to get critical buy-in. The fact that the commentary is as complex as ‘I think it’s bad, you guys’, and padded out with 120 minutes of punching, seems not to matter.

But here are some other puzzles that the Marvel Universe threw up this time. In no particular order:

1. Why is Cap’s shield sentient sometimes? How does it come back?
2. Why, while shooting endless bullets at Cap’s shield with no effect, does no one think to shoot his legs? “Shoot him in the shield!! … It’s not working! … I know!! I’ll shoot him in the shield!”
3. Dear pretty CIA nurse lady, if you are a superhero-level marksman (marksperson?) holding a dangerous special-ops guy at gunpoint, is it utterly necessary to stand within knife range?
4. Why is it interesting to watch two invincible foes fighting each other? It either ends nonsensically or not at all, neither of which seems worth watching to me.
5. Which sensei did these guys train with? Why in every fight does one hero finally get his deadly hands on his defeated adversary, only to toss him aside like it’s WWE. “I’ve got you right where I want you, so now I shall… throw you away from me to safety!! Take that!!!”
6. If Nick Fury’s car has windows that can withstand all assault weapons and a swat battering ram for about five minutes, why can Winter Soldier assassinate the pilot of one of SHIELD’s planes through its windscreen with a single shot from a handgun? Why is there only one of everything?
7. If you’re going to fake your own death, isn’t it a bit risky to do it by getting shot unexpectedly by an assassin that your enemy hired to kill you? And assuming therefore that it was a plan-B situation, who came up with the plan while Fury was busy being mostly dead? And why did the plan maker need to deceive even the doctors who were trying to save his life? To keep the secret very secret? How then did some other lot of doctors who did know the plan get his ‘corpse’ and save his now-even-more-threatened life in time and with no one noticing (so as to ruin the secrecy)?
   

   Why, CapAm, why?

8. Why did the bad guys make their super soldier out of a broken American one that they found lying around instead of a well-made German soldier? Oh and he was also coincidentally Cap’s best friend. Surely this was not all just to manufacture human drama, surely?
9. If you can make a near-immortal super-soldier with a super-strong bionic arm, and if you can do so even out of left-over soldier casualties, why wouldn’t you make another one, and another? And give them Capn America shields? Why only one hero for each side? Do superheroes get jealous and cannibalise one another? Why is there only one of everything?
10. Given that Tony Stark is named in connection with the project on which the story is focused, why does he not bring his army of Iron Men to help out when the world is about to go belly up? You know he was going to be near the top of the bad guys’ hit list, but no need for a little warning there? Perhaps he was busy filming Iron Man 3.

And exposition! There’s going to be eleven questions now, it turns out. Why would Hydra go to the trouble of hiding their brains-trust in a hidden lair under old-SHIELD, and yet when the enemies of shield discover it, the brain in question blurts out all their secrets for no reason? When Samson told Delilah that cutting his hair would render him powerless, she at least had to nag him to tears, and even he faked her out three times first.

High-class Reviews!

Because of my roaring social life, I have had time to watch lots more of yesteryear’s television and movies that everyone has already forgotten about. You heard it here last! Reviews of blockbuster movie Pacific Rim, and
TV’s Suits.

Pacific Rim

Director Guillermo Del Toro is best known for giving me diagnosable post-traumatic stress disorder after watching most of Pan’s Labyrinth. Earlier this year, he released the less-disturbing bigger-budget sci-fi behemoth
Pacific Rim.

It’s about huge alien monsters, called Kaiju, who’ve invaded earth via a portal in the sea-floor. To avert their extermination, the humans unite to develop sky-scraper-sized mechwarriors piloted by pairs of synchronous street-fighting humans, who pound the aliens back to where they belong. But now, the monsters are evolving…

It’s full of colossal-scale martial-arts robot-alien battles, wrecking cities in the hope of saving mankind. What’s not to like?

<Minor-plot-hole-spoiler-that-might-ruin-the-movie-if-you-haven’t-seen-it to follow>

One thing.

The sword.

OK two things. The scientists are as annoying and cliched as it is possible to be. But the sword!

An hour into the movie… an hour full of epic battles in which the robots fist-punch the monsters, zap them with plasma weapons, blitz them with missiles, and so on, all of which only seems to annoy the creatures, and which is so dangerous that most of the crews are killed… an hour into this movie, the main surviving team seems to be all out of ammo and out of options when…
the sword.

One of the heroes even says, ‘Oh no, Other Lead Actor, we’re out of options! This is it!’

To which Other Lead Actor responds, ‘No we still have the sword!’

She then activates the sword, they whip it out, and cut the monster clean in half with the first swing. I know it would be a much shorter movie, but shouldn’t they just always be using the sword? They had to punch and kick the aliens through buildings for ages before they even dazed the suckers, but they could have just cut them in two without any effort? They have this 100% effective weapon as a last resort? So much of a last resort that one of them forgets they even have it?

I can’t forgive the sword.

Suits (TV)

Suits is like LA Law for people who were born after LA Law. Except the kid (not the Corbin-Bernsen-looking guy) in this one has law super-powers, and I can’t remember if LA Law had
super-powers in it.

Effectively, Corbin mark2 was supposed to find a new junior associate who would be the Next Big Thing, but all the Harvard graduates were cliches. So he accidentally finds this super-power kid who doesn’t actually have a law degree, but is better at law than all the lawyers.

He wants to hire him as an associate (because that’s the position he was supposed to fill, so what choice did he have?), but he’s not qualified.

What would you do in this situation, especially if you were Harvard-clever?

What’s that? You’d hire him as an associate anyway and find extremely fraudulent and incriminating ways to help him practice law without a licence, making it certain that you would lose your own lawyering licence and destroy the firm in which you’re senior partner if anyone found out? You too?

Because that’s the solution that drives the tension in this show from
episode one onwards.

Me? I’d hire him as a researcher so that I could get him to read all the stuff I didn’t want to, and so that I could take all the credit for his lawyering super-powers, which is mostly what happens anyway. Or, I’d find a way of getting him into Harvard legitimately, seeing as that is exactly what this very lawyer’s boss had done for him.

Again, it would be a shorter and more boring show, but at least it wouldn’t be incredibly stupid.