The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

Starring: Lily Collins, Jamie Campbell Bower, Robert Sheehan, Lena Headey, Aiden Turner, Jonathan Rhys Meyers

Written by: Jessica Postigo (screenplay), book by Cassandra Clare

Directed by: Harald Zwart

The latest in Hollywood’s attempts to cash in on the post Twilight teen hysteria, City of Bones tells the story of Clary, a young woman in modern New York who wakes up one morning to find that she can see things no-one else can, most of which are horrifying or intriguingly pretty. I have to be honest. I’ve never read the books upon which the film is based, the trailer didn’t thrill me, and I wouldn’t have bothered going to see it if a friend and I had had anything better to do. I am apparently not alone in this; the sequel, which was due to start production this month, has been pushed back more or less indefinitely in the wake of a lacklustre opening weekend (as of September 19^th, it has internationally pulled in around $75,000,000, although it had a marketing budget alone of $60,000,000; with that sort of money, it’s a wonder any film makes a profit these days, but I digress). Cassandra Clare herself has gone on record as saying a delay in filming would probably be a good thing, having seen a draft of the script.

Having seen the film, it is easy to understand why the box office is disappointing, as there is little truly positive to say about it. The basic concept is one with potential – and in some respects, one I would like to see more of, albeit done with greater skill and quality – but is fairly uninspired. Cassandra Clare got her publishing contract in the wake of some popular and influential fanfiction stories for Harry Potter, so you might be forgiven for thinking that this was going to be something in the same vein. In reality, it is a fairly typical urban fantasy kitchen sink (vampires and werewolves and demons, oh my), with a liberal sprinkling of Twilight-esque romance. And leather. Lots of leather.

The early part of the film is quite interesting. We are slowly introduced to Clary – and you may well wonder about the closeness of that name to Cassandra Clare – and her artistic mother, and more importantly, Clary’s tendency to draw strange symbols apparently without realising it. Again, it’s not terribly revolutionary stuff, but it’s handled reasonably well, and there’s a nice chemistry between Collins and Sheehan as her best (and apparently only) friend Simon. Then, Clary sees a mysterious stranger in a mysterious club, and the plot really kicks in. This is a bad thing.

In large part, this is because Campbell Bower arrives on screen, playing the semi-angelic demon hunter Jace, and quite frankly it’s the worst performance I’ve seen in a very long time. You might think after seeing several of the Twilight films, I’d be a little more tolerant of – or at least resigned to – wooden performances, but Bower manages to deliver more such acting in one film than Pattinson, Stewart and Lautner packed into three films (I haven’t seen either part of Eclipse). I suppose from one perspective, that’s something to admire, but I can’t bring myself to be that generous. He has one facial expression and talks solely in monotone, whether he’s being commanding, sarcastic, or trying to display unbearable passion and sadness. Presumably someone somewhere decided his cheekbones made up for everything else, but that didn’t do much for me. It doesn’t help that the vast majority of his dialogue is truly awful; his delivery makes it worse, but it wouldn’t sound good coming from the mouth of the finest Shakespearian actor.

None of the cast really set the screen alight in fact, although in another similarity with the Twilight franchise, the side characters are far more entertaining than the main protagonists. Sheehan in particular has fun with a role that essentially involves pointing out how ridiculous everything is. Collins is probably the best value, but Clary isn’t a terribly interesting character as yet – or rather, there’s lots of potentially interesting stuff about her, but she seems to have been thrown into the character trope box and saddled with everything that stuck, leaving her a mesh of personality aspects rather than an actual character.

You can make that criticism about most of the film, to be honest; there’s an awful lot of stuff happening, but not much of it actually seems terribly important, not least because the already bland plot (a typical fantasy macguffin hunt) is sidelined a lot of the time in favour of the romantic angle, which involves Campbell Bower and therefore has all the passion of a haddock. The only interesting thing about it – and it must be said, this is a pretty unusual thing – is an eleventh hour twist which adds an intriguingly illicit edge to proceedings.

Elsewhere…well, the action scenes are entertaining enough, and some of the background concepts are fun – I’m particularly fond of JS Bach being a demon hunter. And kudos for being the first blockbuster this year that I can immediately think of to acknowledge the existence of gay characters. But essentially, this is a pretty generic film done without flair.

Riddick

Starring: Vin Diesel, Katee Sackhoff, Jordi Mollà, Matt Nable

Written by: David Twohy, Ken Wheat, Jim Wheat

Directed by: David Twohy

Way, way back in the year 2000, a little film by the name of Pitch Black was released. A low budget science-fiction thriller, it revolved around the crew and passengers of a crashed spaceship, trapped on a planet full of monstrous aliens that only came out at night, during an eclipse. It was a solid film, not particularly astounding in any respect, but taut and entertaining. It was followed in 2004 by The Chronicles of Riddick, which related the tale of Riddick’s battle against the Necromongers, a spacefaring race with mystical abilities. It was everything Pitch Black wasn’t; grandiose, epic, flabby, although I would have to admit to a slightly guilty appreciation for it.

In large part, this is due to Vin Diesel’s performance as Richard B. Riddick, notorious convict and murderer; while it is somewhat open to debate precisely how villainous he is, he is defiantly anti-heroic, but Diesel brings a certain feral charm to the role, making him if not necessarily entirely sympathetic, then at least someone you can engage with. And of course, he’s stupendously bad-ass. Seriously, in Chronicles he outruns the sun. Stupid, yes, but also rather awesome. It’s fortunate that he has this quality, as he is essentially the only surviving part of the previous film.

Chronicles of Riddick was not well received, for the reasons stated above, and it is telling that there is nearly a decade between Chronicles and Riddick. The new film attempts to rectify this by going back to basics: Riddick trapped on a hostile planet, forced to rely on only his wits and his ferocity to survive. And for the first half of the film, that’s more or less what he does. At the start, he’s badly injured, stripped of his ability to defend himself, and for probably the first time certainly on screen, we see him vulnerable. It isn’t spoiling anything to say that this doesn’t last long, in no small part because of some of the most macho surgery seen this year, but for quite a while, Riddick is almost more of a wild-life docu-drama than anything else. We see him rebuild, train and bond with a puppy (well, a space-puppy), and live what he seems to feel is the good life.

And then the plot kicks in.

This is a distinctly mixed blessing. On the one hand, it’s a much simpler affair than its predecessor. On the other hand, it’s essentially the same plot as Pitch Black. Almost literally the only difference in a synopsis would be that the monsters only come out when it’s raining rather than when it’s dark. Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot to be said for a series of cool action scenes of people killing monstrous aliens, although Pacific Rim rather has that market sown up this year. However, if you’ve seen Pitch Black then you aren’t going to be surprised by anything after the halfway mark. As plots go, it’s perfectly serviceable, and there’s a nice sub-plot that calls back to earlier films, but essentially there’s nothing you haven’t seen before.

Equally, the expansion of the cast list at this stage works for and against the film. It does provide us with the film’s best sequence, with two groups of mercenaries holed up in a bunker while Riddick stalks them. It’s this sort of thing that the series has always done best; it’s an incredibly grim universe, and while Riddick is a fairly unpleasant person in many respects, he has always been slightly more likeable than at least one other member of the cast. At first, this rule holds firm. The first batch of mercenaries we meet are complete scum, and there’s an undeniable satisfaction in watching Riddick thin them out. The second bunch, though…well, while they’re not exactly well developed characters, they aren’t obviously unpleasant enough to make us root for Riddick over them. This is a problem; while it is, as I’ve said, somewhat open to debate as to how villainous Riddick is, when the people he’s hunting mostly appear to be relatively upstanding individuals, it rather undermines the whole point of the film.

Far, far worse though is the sexual attitude of the film. Of the thirteen or so cast members, discounting a brief flashback, only two are women. Not an unusual statistic in modern cinema, but of those two, the first, as played by Keri Lynn Hilson, gets literally two minutes of screentime, just long enough to establish her as a multiple rape victim but not long enough to give her a name before she is killed off to provide Riddick with a justification for killing the mercenaries (because the fact that they want to cut his head off and put it in a box wasn’t motivation enough). Then there’s Dahl (Sackhoff, and pronounced as Doll throughout), the strong, tough mercenary who emphatically declares that “I don’t fuck men.” Now, fair’s fair; given the wide variety of sexual identities present in the world, and accepting the possibility of an even more wide-ranging variety in a futuristic science-fiction universe, this doesn’t necessarily have to mean that she’s a lesbian, and it is certainly never explicitly stated. And it could be put down to Dahl trying to minimise sexual interest from her colleagues. However, it doesn’t seem to unreasonable to take her statement at its most obvious interpretation, which makes Riddick’s confident declaration that he’s going to finish his day’s work “balls deep” in her, but only after she’s asked deeply unsavoury. The fact that he succeeds is indicative of a sexual attitude that was distasteful in Goldfinger, and ought to have been consigned to the past long before then. That’s before we even consider the wholly gratuitous topless scene she has, and the fact that she suffers repeated rape attempts that, once again, serve only to highlight how unpleasant Mollà’s character is.

A film of two halves then. One is interesting and entertaining, the other is predictable and really rather sordid. Far from a must-see, but despite the above criticisms, it would be unfair to say that the film loses all semblance of quality after the halfway mark; it’s just a lot harder to sit back and enjoy the mindless entertainment.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen

Written by Steven Erikson

Consisting of: Gardens of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates, Memories of Ice, House of Chains, Midnight Tides, The Bonehunters, Reapers Gale, Toll the Hounds, Dust of Dreams, The Crippled God

More than two years and ten books later, I have finally reached the conclusion of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Your mileage may vary on your response to the fact that my immediate desire is to go back and re-read it; it’s partly because I really enjoyed it, and am thoroughly in awe of the world that Erikson has created (well, co-created, but more on that later), but it is also because of the amount of detail I feel I’ve missed.

As you may guess from the figures at the start, this isn’t a short series. The shortest book, Gardens of the Moon, clocks in at just under eight hundred pages, while the later books could probably be used as offensive weapons, or be used to recreate scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I personally don’t view that as a negative quality, with the sole exception of when I’m trying to read them on the train, but it is worth bearing in mind. They are books you have to work at. To give you another figure, when settling down to write this post, I swung by Wikipedia and made my own little list of those characters I considered to be main ones. It clocked in at sixty, and that doesn’t even cover all the characters that get point of view scenes. I struggled to remember characters from earlier books when they reappeared, and events sometimes escaped me completely – you may feel that you need to read them with a notebook at your side to take notes.

This is a deliberate choice on Erikson’s part. My edition of Gardens of the Moon comes with a foreword which doubles as a warning, effectively saying “Yes, I’m going to drop you in at the deep end and you’re going to have to concentrate to get through it all. Sink or swim, dear reader.” This isn’t an inherent problem with the books, but again, it’s something to bear in mind before setting out on it, particularly because Erikson seems to view the books not just as a story, but windows into the world of the books; large swathes of the books are given over to essentially unimportant characters who may only get that one scene. Such scenes serve the thematic arcs of the individual books, of course, but it’s a style that can be off-putting.

The main attraction to the series is the setting. Erikson is an anthropologist by trade, and it shows in the depth and sense of realism of the world. More than any other series I’ve read, with the possible exception of Tolkien’s works, you feel as if it’s a real place. It helps that Erikson devised much of the setting and story with a friend, Ian Cameron Esslemont, who is an archaeologist in addition to writing stories set within the Malazan universe. Given that some of the books have their roots in events of several hundred thousands of years previously, and take in a wide range of cultures, their expertise is a clear benefit, and sets them apart from the vast quantities of fantasy that may well take in events of the past, but don’t necessarily feel like they involve actual history. And that’s really what the series is; a history of this world, with all that entails.

Beyond that, in many ways it’s a fairly typical fantasy setting, just done really, really well – it actually started out as a setting for Erikson and Esslemont’s Dungeons and Dragons game, which they then developed into a film script (which no-one wanted) before agreeing to write novels set within the universe (Esslemont has his own series, under the banner of Novels of the Malazan Empire, which focus more on the politics of the series; they’re now on my to read list). You have all the usual tropes: Gods, wizards, emperors, soldiers, assassins, thieves, nobles, urchins, elves (sort of), orcs (sort of), long forgotten schemes, barbarian heroes (sort of…well, barbarians definitely, but not quite so much with the heroism), cursed artefacts…the list goes on. It is really the scope and depth that singles the series out, and there were times when I felt like I was reading a retelling of something that had actually happened, more-so than any other fantasy story I’ve ever read, more-so in fact than some historical fiction. It’s the magnificent sense of place – and, for me, that insight into the wider, plot irrelevant context of the world.

Further appeal is found in the (massive) range of characters, with some of the most memorable creations I’ve read in a long time. The mercurial, sly wizard, Quick Ben, the messianic Anomander Rake, the deconstructive (in both the literary and almost literal sense) Karsa Orlong, the witty genius Tehol Beddict and his man-servant with hidden depths, Bugg…I could go on. But even the various species stick in the mind, with some inventive twists on some classic ideas. The most obvious are the T’Lan Imass and the K’Chain Che’malle; the former cast themselves into an undead state to wage war against their oppressors, functionally wiping their own species out in the process, while the latter are basically a race of zombie velociraptors with swords for hands.

In common with an awful lot of fantasy fiction these days, it isn’t a cheerful read, although if you’re reading a series titled Book of the Fallen, you have to expect a certain amount of death and destruction. Where it does differ though, is that the misery rarely feels like it’s there for the sake of misery or angst. When I read George R.R. Martin’s books, I occasionally feel like a character has been killed to provide a shock; in the Malazan series, it just feels like the logical conclusion of that characters arc, or at the very least, a logical result of the events happening around that character. Again, the world building helps with this, and while it may be a dangerous, bleak place to live, it still appeals, still feels…well, fantastical, perhaps. There’s danger, of course, and pain, and suffering (that rather being the key theme of the series, in a way), but it always feels justified.

That may or may not be a negative aspect of the books for you; similarly, Erikson’s writing is potentially divisive. He is much given to purple prose, especially in those books which feature the verbose Kruppe. For the most part it’s more or less acceptable, depending on your personal preferences, but even those who favour elaborate description and dialogue might tire of the sections where Erikson wanders off into philosophical musings. Whatever your opinion of the prose style, or the necessity of such scenes, the fact that characters often seem to break off from their own voice to talk in more intellectual tones is a significant flaw.

Given though that the series spans ten books, plus a prequel trilogy (only the first instalment of which has been published so far) and a sequence of side novels, the vast majority of which run to doorstopper status, that the occasional out of character moment is the only genuine, non-subjective flaw I can really spot is a hell of a recommendation. I’ll freely admit that the series isn’t for everyone; it’s literature that you need to work at, and it is certainly not a fun filled romp, but if you’re willing to stick at it, there is an awful lot to reward you.

Elysium

Starring: Matt Damon, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga, Jodie Foster, Diego Luna, William Fichtner

Directed by: Neill Blomkamp

Written by: Neill Blomkamp

When James Cameron’s magnum opus ‘Avatar’ was released, it quickly became derided – in certain circles – as ‘Fern Gully with guns’, due to the similarities in message and broad plot. If that statement is taken as true, then ‘Elysium’ can perhaps be taken, as my unfortunate viewing partner scoffed, as ‘Wall:E, but without the coherent plot and well-constructed world’.

In his last film, ‘District 9’, which actually came out in the same year as ‘Avatar’, Blomkamp took the idea of Apartheid and retold it with aliens. It wasn’t a terribly subtle film but it worked well, in large part because of some fine performances, a well thought out setting, and some thoroughly entertaining if occasionally nauseating set pieces. He brings many of the same building blocks to ‘Elysium’, but they somehow don’t quite stack together as well.

For a start, you’ve got the story. On the surface level, it’s quite similar to ‘District 9’, perhaps too similar. Matt Damon’s ex-con, Max, is a low level worker in an important corporation who winds up with fatal injuries. As a result, he goes on a quest for something to heal him, which may well end up in the downfall of an entire way of life, for good or worse. It’s nothing original, but in and of itself it isn’t anything particularly awful. However, there are certain things that really let it down; the shameless use of a sickly child as a device for plot and character development, not to mention the fact that if you sit down and think about it, the world of ‘Elysium’ makes absolutely no sense.

The basic premise is that over the course of the next century, the world has become so over-populated and polluted that the 1% have fled the planet to live on the titular space station, a place so technologically advanced that their med-pods can cure everything right up to and potentially including death (can you see where those ‘Wall:E’ similarities come in yet?). Everything down on Earth has gone to hell, with people scrabbling for jobs and money in a desperate attempt to survive or, more pertinently, to buy an illegal ticket to Elysium in a crushingly obvious parallel on immigrant smuggling, that parallel being contained within the broader parallel that rich people are bastards. This is the films overall message. Blomkamp allows nothing as adventurous as shades of grey in the film, and as such literally every character living on Elysium is either so cartoonishly villainous that Lex Luthor would scoff, or criminally apathetic to the point where it’s essentially a philosophical question as to who is worse.

It’s hard to really discuss this without going into spoiler territory, but an early example consists of Elysium’s defence system. Naturally, the citizens and government of Elysium don’t want those dirty poor people getting onto their nice clean space station, so there are systems in place to stop the shuttles arriving. Fair enough…if it weren’t for the fact that this system seems to consist solely of a hobo with a rocket launcher. Even worse, said hobo is actually living on Earth. When he’s called into action, he has to shoot down shuttles that have broken the atmospheric field, while standing in downtown Los Angeles. SF films that take loose approaches to the laws of physics are commonplace, and as a long-time fan of ‘Doctor Who’ I’ve learned to take such niggles in my stride, but ‘Elysium’ presents itself as a serious piece of work, and as such is held to a different standard; unfortunately, this example is the first of many niggles that jerk you out of the film. It’s even worse because there’s no reason for it; if people do get through, they’re escorted off the station with literally no effort or fuss, which brings us back to the cartoonish characterisation.

It’s hardly the first film to suffer from problems of logic – it isn’t even the first film this year to be undermined by such flaws; ‘Iron Man 3’, while an excellent film, relied upon the willingness of the audience to accept that on this occasion, none of the other super-heroes were going to show up, because…it’s an Iron Man film. ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ had a whole host of logical issues, not least of which was why there was a need for Star Fleet in a universe where you can teleport between planets. However, there are a few key differences in this. In the case of ‘Iron Man 3’, you could overlook niggles because it was a genuinely excellent film. In the case of ‘Into Darkness’, they were harder to overlook, but it wasn’t anything more than it claimed to be; an entertaining if shallow blockbuster. ‘Elysium’ is trying to be something different, a serious, ‘hard’ science-fiction film which might have big action scenes, but is fundamentally about political and social commentary – and that’s fine, but ‘Into Darkness’ has more nuance and subtlety, and whatever its merits, it is not an intellectual film.

However, there are other aspects of the film to consider. The story is clichéd and sledgehammer obvious, the characterisation is thin, but it isn’t entirely bad. The performances are perfectly adequate, although the only one that stands out as being especially engaging is Copley’s psychotic Kruger; given that he’s a murderous, gleefully insane mercenary who is also probably a rapist, it’s not necessarily a good thing that his is the most distinctive performance. Still, kudos to him for playing so thoroughly and successfully against his role in ‘District 9’.

Equally, there are some entertaining set pieces, some of which use slow-motion to better effect than anything since the original ‘Matrix’, and for all that much of the world doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny, it is beautifully designed and shot.

Sadly though, adequate performances and entertaining action don’t make up for the flaws. A sad disappointment.