Blood’s Thicker Than Mud

I have only one criticism of Mudbound, Dee Rees’ sophomore feature adapting Hillary Jordan’s novel, so I’m gonna open with it and then be flatout done talking shit about Mudbound. Especially because it isn’t really an entirely fair criticism and it isn’t even close to justifying the amount of sleeping done on the film. But here I go anyway stating my obvious feeling about Mudbound: It is not as interesting looking a film as I’d like it to be. Much as I am happy to see Rachel Morrison’s name show up on the Oscar nominees for Best Cinematography (the very first woman to receive the honor), it is way too clean for the grubby tale of generational hardships in the South that Mudbound is, threatening to be the one element that gets in the way of allowing us to sink into the many points of view Mudbound provides because of how aesthetically picturesque the imagery is. It’s not as though Morrison doesn’t know how to settle the tone of the story, especially in the darker moments where she’s so mindful of shadows and rural color tones in a dusty olden manner, but it’s way too sharp in a modern way to not hold the viewer at a divide in the time setting.

But of course, “you’re too good at your job” is the best kind of criticism to have for some. And I like to think that my expectations were way too high on account of Dee Rees’ debut feature Pariah being handily one of the best-looking movies of the decade, possibly the century if I’m wildin’ a bit. And considering the quality of literally everything else in Mudbound, it’s still no excuse for the lack of marketing and campaigning on the part of Netflix, the lack of attention given to it by viewers, and the lack of love given it to it by an awards season that was DEFINITELY aware of its existence but still acted like better movies were around this year.

Yeah, I think at this point it should be obvious this is less a review than a rant, but I’ll try to reign it back after one more unqualified superlative: Mudbound is not only better than Pariah in otherwise every way, making the sort of evolutionary step in direction one dreams of out of the talented Rees, it’s also better than possibly all of Best Picture nominees this year*.

OK, wait one more superlative and this one I will be able to qualify: In spite of Bright and Mute‘s… *giggle* “world-building” and the production value of a Jolie film and all those super pigs, I handily believe Mudbound is the most ambitious film Netflix has released. Narrative and thematic ambition, mind you. There’s no super-pigs here. What Rees and co-writer Virgil Williams have managed to thread out of Jordan’s novel is a sprawling view of 1940s Mississippi and when I say sprawling, I mean sprawling. The screenplay casts its net wide on what it whats to observe about the state of existence in the years of and after World War II, what that means for a black woman to feel obligated out of survival to have to neglect her own children for the well-being of another, what that means for a black man to be in a position where he can build or earn his own property and yet the state of American society steels leaves him to be trampled underfoot, what it means to be a white woman resigned to domesticity too quickly to stifle her own romantic dreams and sinking into misery, what it means to be an entitled white man on the road to being the gargoyle of his monstrous father but desperate to establish a decent household in financially hard times.

The black woman is Florence Jackson (Mary J. Blige), the black man is her husband Hap (Rob Morgan). The white woman is Laura McAllan (Carey Mulligan), the white man is her husband Henry (Jason Clarke), son of the odious racist Pappy (Jonathan Banks). In the middle of all of this is still the perspectives of Florence and Hap’s oldest son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) and Henry’s younger brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), both of whom are drafted overseas to Europe in the thick of the war and discover a vastly more different environment than America – especially Ronsel, treated less objectionably for his skin color (this watering down of Europe’s own racism would possibly be more objectionable to me if it weren’t co-written by a black woman) – then return to the same old miserable South they came from.

It’s a film of many themes and many perspective (pretty much all the characters I named except Pappy have their points of view adopted by the movie): masculine camaraderie, surrounding violence, both sides of abandonment (as we later learn more about Ronsel’s life in Europe), the trauma of war, the resilience of enlightened youth versus the resignment of tired old. Race, gender, class. It’s all explored in this tapestry of the toughness of life and all the angles they have to come from: man or nature or cruelty or desperation. None of these elements are approached with less than the amount of intimacy that Rees afforded her lead character in Pariah. It’s the kind of storytelling that makes me think that Rees could make any movie in the world from this point on and do a decent job with it.

But as Ebert said, it’s not what you’re about, it’s how you’re about it. All the Great American Novel approaches in the world could not get me over the moon about this movie if it weren’t an incredible piece of craftsmanship, such as how Mako Kamitsuna deftly cuts into moments to give ownership of the moment to a particular character so we can understand their inner commentary, sometimes to more than one character at a time just by mere patience and condensing all of the things Mudbound wants to say into a powerful 2-hour package.

And there’s an even bigger gambit in between all of the sound design making us feel the infertile soil beneath the characters’ feet reflecting off of their inability to grow out of their situation with the decision to use multiple narrative voiceovers for our six characters, which is just an insanely bad idea most times. Mudbound is not one of those times, Rees and the soundtrack fully able to space out those voiceovers to work for interiority of character and them lift off of them for sweeping grandiosity, a providing of several pieces of a larger picture of a time and place that is far in the past without having the same sort of divide the cinematography gives us. This isn’t necessarily something that would be easy without the help of one of the year’s best ensembles, who prove to be just as adept at soulful recitations of thoughts as they are at weary postures showcasing how hard life has stepped on them** and their struggle to still retain humanity and dignity in all of that, but the fact that Rees could make such an outrageous move in only her second feature and pull it off without a false note ringing in any of the voiceover work should be enough of a indication of what a miracle Netflix’s most worthy Oscar contender yet has been.

*The only real nominee that gives it a run for its money rhymes with Thantom Phread.

**And mind you after everything the characters go through, the ending feels so emotionally right. I felt like crying.

The Final Level

There’s some kind of consensus going around that producer Berry Gordy’s 1985 Motown martial arts vehicle The Last Dragon is a movie that’s only possibly enjoyable in an ironic sense. Its status as a cult classic is uncontested, yet it maintains a low critical score on Rotten Tomatoes at 44% (audience score is significantly higher at 86%) and is considered by critics as respected as Leonard Maltin as “strictly kid-stuff”.

And I’m just here to say that’s straight up fucking bullshit.

There are to be fair more than a few flaws and faults of The Last Dragon as a motion picture, but I think it’s massively outweighed by just how much entertainment value it has overall and the different ways it functions as such – as cheesy martial arts inspirational movie, as relentless and genuine 80s time capsule (especially pre-Giuliani New York City), as African-American representation. And it doesn’t function as those things individually in a perfect way, but altogether it’s a singular object of grin-forcing fun.

And it gets that way because Gordy and director Michael Schultz approached the film’s production and style no differently than that of a music video. Apparently they did not wanting a single frame to be empty of something to show off and resulting in a film always energized with lights and motion, arguably at the cost of consistent narrative or thematic depth but that’s not rare in 1980s cinema to begin with and it don’t bother me none. The very beginning of the film is shot like an Olympic commercial, focusing on the shape and power of young martial artist Taimak. It’s all slow-motion backlit swift and controlled karate moves, the kind you want to linger on when you intend for the subject to be a remembered star — punctuated by Taimak’s real-life chopping of an arrow in mid-flight. An action force to be reckoned with is introduced to us and then we see how he is housed in the body of the boyish naive Leroy Green under the guidance of a master (Thomas Ikeda) who insists that Leroy is finally ready to move on beyond his training in achievement of the Final Level, at which point Leroy will receive The Glow. That last part is kind of hard to parse out to be honest, but it seems to be an achievement akin to Super Saiyan status.

In any case, he sends Leroy on his way to explore the concrete jungle of New York City in which they reside on his own and the first thing the now lost Leroy decides to do is his favorite pastime of catching Bruce Lee movies at the local 42nd street theater. Which is one of the ways The Last Dragon incorporates reflexivity unknowingly, the way that Leroy looks up to Lee and watches the O’Hara fight in Enter the Dragon with rapt attention and wonder at Lee’s abilities without the slightest distraction from the characteristically New York-ian raucous crowd surrounding him – it’s the most effective way to tell us how much the character wants to be Lee in a film where we hear him referred to directly as “Bruce Leroy” and respected because of his adherence to the discipline of the martial arts, enough to operate his own dojo in Harlem. That The Last Dragon also has some Orientalist bent in the third act including twists that are extremely ungenerous and feel mean-spirited, given how much that culture inspires and animates its very hero. Not to mention, it’s always a kindred joy to have a movie hero that loves movies just as passionately as the viewer.

There’s another sort of style that animates the film and that’s simply the music. Almost given as much screentime as Leroy’s Chinese inspirations is the apparent MTV-esque video music show 7th Heaven hosted by gorgeous VJ Laura Charles (Vanity) and Gordy and Schultz use that as the perfect opportunity to shove in a few music videos from the Motown label including Debarge’s “Rhythm of the Night”, which is the biggest nostalgia kick for me. 7th Heaven as a set alone is glimmering and flashy and shiny in such a loud 80s nightclub type of way, filled with dizzying mirrors sets and lasers, that it feels just at home for the impromptu pop setpieces that Vanity performs as an interlude to all the combat. And of course that’s to say nothing of the hilarious “Dirty Books”, a deliberately awful attempt at the vapidest New Wave knock-off you could find, performed by the lovable Faith Prince and with a gaudy bedroom set and even gaudier costumes for Prince to wear, basically literal trash attempting very transparently to pass off as fashion but completely betraying that it’s a traffic sign sewn over her butt and hazard lights over her breasts.

Between all of this, it’s no surprise that Def Jam Recordings later recruited Schultz for their own classic Hip Hop Artists musical vehicle Krush Groove (released later in the same year). Schultz also happened to direct Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which is the closest predecessor in his career to a movie this music-based and so I’m mortified by the possibility that that atrocity could have inspired Gordy to hire Schultz for this movie but hey… we got The Last Dragon out of it and hot damn does it pay off in extravagance, musical number-wise and action setpiece-wise (I’m not really surprising when I say the Glow does make an appearance and it’s literally exactly what it sounds like and it is chintzy and awesome to see in action).

“Dirty Books” is more or less the element that ignites the closest thing The Last Dragon could call a plot as Eddie Arkadian (Chris Murney), the gangster girlfriend to Prince’s character Angela, attempts continuously to blackmail and threaten Laura into playing the video on 7th Heaven only to be thwarted again and again by Leroy’s happening at the right place at the right time (and each time Laura’s infatuation with him grows to the anxiety of the clearly inexperienced Leroy). Eventually, it gets to a point where Arkadian decides to escalate his battle with Leroy to using the big gun and… well, by that point, we’ve already met the big gun but I held off until the very end to give one of my favorite characters of all time a proper introduction.

Arkadian, despite being more rooted in the plot, is not the main antagonist. No, our main antagonist is introduced in that same 42nd street theater we see Leroy watch Enter the Dragon in and immediately starts ripping the scenery apart with his angry jaws. He’s loud and bombastic, maintaining a tall stance and a twisted snarl on his face that telegraphs how clearly antagonistic the character is without making him any less fun to watch. He spits an exhaustive amount of quotable lines like “Kiss my converse!” and “You just get that sucker to the designated place at the designated time, and I will gladly designate his ass for dismemberment!” with dedicated oversold menace barely hiding how much joy he gets quipping like that. And every moment he’s on-screen is a highlight of The Last Dragon. For all it banks on personalities – especially given how easily Vanity plays celebrity seductress in a surprisingly clean way, I think she kind of needs more credit for that performance – the late, great Julius Carry gifts us with a personality that adopts the aggressive belligerence of 80s New York City to the unapologetic hamminess of movie villany from his wild hair to his loose black-and-red (the colors of EVIL!) gi. If there’s any one reason you need to watch The Last Dragon right this second (and there are many), it is this character.

Is he the meanest? Is he the prettiest? Is he the baddest mofo low down around this town? Well who is he? Who is he? He can’t hear you…

SHO’NUFF.

The Shogun of Harlem.

Cured of My Will to Live

So, here’s a thing: it’s already hard enough to get your ass up out to the theater to watch a movie you honestly don’t want to watch. Who wants to waste their time and money like that, right? It’s even more difficult when you’re in my previous position with Maze Runner: The Death Cure where I kept having to re-schedule the opportunities around my work and opportunities to see that movie do not come easily because it is 2 AND A MOTHERFUCKING HALF HOURS LONG, got damn. And yet, here I am having finally seen it and so very eager to get this franchise wrapped up that I started typing the moment I got home from the theater.

And I do have some words of praise to afford the filmmakers: first off, to actually seeing the franchise all the way to the end right at the cusp of when young adult dystopia material was reaching at its end, particularly in the wake of the Divergent series’ decision to give up. Several young adult franchises involved splitting the final book in their respective literary source series into two movies unnecessarily as has been the fad since Harry Potter‘s films and this is something Maze Runner did not choose to do, to my significant esteem. I suppose this decision may have been less spurred by narrative integrity than by the fact that as of the time Maze Runner: The Death Cure has been released, it has been a little under 2 years since The Divergent Series: Allegiant underperformed and a little over 2 years after The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 underperformed, a death knell to the type of material The Maze Runner operates in. But that circumstance is also why the tenacity of the filmmakers impresses me almost as much as the fact that they have been financially rewarded for their faith. And particularly since it’s no big secret that gap of time was prolonged by the unfortunate injury of lead actor Dylan O’Brien during filming, at which point the studio decided to hold off until he could recuperate properly because nobody needs to die while making a movie.

OK, and now with all that young adult adaptation background that I am very ashamed to have at my disposal, I can actually praise Maze Runner: The Death Cure for something actually within the text of the film itself: not only is it better than its predecessors – a low bar to clear – it might possibly be a decent watchable movie. That claim requires many caveats: to begin with, you have to have watched the first two movies because there is no hand-holding flashback or recap opening the film and – welcome in the wake of the exposition vomit that made up the scripts of Maze Runner and Scorch Trials – most of the movie is spent in actual narrative momentum with a clear objective in mind. That objective being, after the final moments of Scorch Trials where the evil corporation WCKD who accidentally invented desert zombies (zombies that don’t really appear as much in Death Cure except within the bookends) kidnaps several friends of our hero Thomas (O’Brien), he and his team arranges to break into WCKD’s walled metropolitan safe haven to specifically save Minho (Ki Hong Lee). Specifically Minho. I mean, sure there’s other folks that they mean to rescue but they only wanna mention Minho.

OK, I’m going to admit at this point while I’m getting snarky that while I’m sure The Death Cure pays off significantly to those who have been invested in the struggles of Thomas, his right hand man Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), Frypan (Dexter Darden), and Brenda (Rosa Salazar). As I’m sure anybody who followed the last two movies could figure out, I was not at all and while I concede that the movie does very well to collect all of the threads of the story and tie them into a neat conclusion, it ain’t my jam. For one thing, the kids’ acting got worse with the way they try to escalate and intensify their responses to each situation with puppy dog attempts at gruff exclamations of “shit!” and this is shoved in our faces when Brodie-Sangster has an arbitrary development to his character that feels nothing more than mean-spirited. He does little else with it than bark at other characters often and hyperventilate because Newt – like pretty much every other ally – doesn’t really have a personality beyond “is loyal to Thomas”.

It’s also shoved in our faces when the group’s mission is made complicated on the sudden romantic implication between Thomas and fellow Glader Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) that seems hella outta nowhere, especially considering how sex-less the first Maze Runner pointedly was about a girl living enclosed amongst boys and how little time they spent together in The Scorch Trials before Teresa was revealed to be a turncoat for WCKD. That the heroic group is apprehensive about Thomas’ desire to find some good in her again despite accepting the mid-film reveal of an easily guessable previously-thought-dead* murderous villain who apparently changed between movies from a violent psycho into a brusque senior rebel to look up to with few objections is just one of many inconsistencies that I rolled with because I wanted this movie to wrap up.

These threads are also the subject of an ending that really wants to sell you on the gravitas of the situation by suddenly taking stakes at the last minute that were barely on the ground before (though it ends on a much more hopeful note than that sounds) and add that to uncompelling performances from actors who are empty presences at worst and at best given little to do except Aidan Gillen’s evil militaristic Janson (which is essentially Gillen playing the same slimy contemptible piece of shit he built his career out of playing) and I’m just not here for the story, y’all. Power to those who are.

But if you’re watching Maze Runner: The Death Cure for the visuals of director Wes Ball and the cinematography of Gyula Pados, well… it’s actually a pretty good-looking movie. We’re not talking Deakins here, but the setting of the majority of the film in an area of urban ruins and sleek cold reflective surfaces as in the central Last City where WCKD centers itself gives Ball and Pados a lot of room to play with light and shadow to give Death Cure a more mature chilliness than any scene of young looking late 20-year-olds with guns could possibly have. In general, the design of The Last City feels like the modern response to the city from Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, a desperately authoritarian and insincere industrialization of survivalism all proven by how tall and closed-off the towers are. It’s not revelatory at all since we already had a feeling the makers were getting better within the sweltering desert heat of The Scorch Trials, but it’s impressive set-building and it does tell us what was the answer to The Maze Runner‘s visuals all along: keep Ball and Pados the fuck away from trees and grass.

A much more enjoyable benefit to yours truly: the action setpieces are all not only coherent and impactful, they’re also unhinged in a manner akin to the Fast and Furious movies. The central “break in and break out” heist of The Death Cure involves several “are you crazy?” type of stunts and actions on the parts of the characters that clearly would have killed any person in real-life physics – including a crane swinging a bus full of children by its front grill over a wall – and it’s the most joyous and alive the franchise has ever felt to me. And this isn’t something The Death Cure takes its sweet-ass time getting to: it opens on a kinetic grounded train heist that makes for great enough popcorn spectacle in the early months of the year.

So… is this enough to say I like Maze Runner: The Death Cure? Not really. Given how much I unexpectedly gave T.S. Nowlin’s final screenplay for the franchise, I’m starting to feel I spoke too soon in claiming it’s a decent movie. But it does recognize the job it has in closing out a franchise and establishing a brand new environment to blow to smithereens in its climax. And it sets its mind on completing that job no matter how messy it gets and for the franchise’s perseverance, I do admit admiration growing in seeing it finally reach the end of its own maze.

*I am aware that the character in question was revealed to be alive in the third book that this movie is based on, but I am not sure that his “apparent death” was as ludicrously severe as this character’s was.

Scorched Earth

In an effort for makeup work on writing a movie about nothing (and not in the fun Seinfeld variety), The Maze Runner‘s screenplay piled on a whole bunch of plot twists revealing the state of the world of the franchise and why the kids were trapped in giant circle for a long time, ending on its two most horrifying reveals.

The first is that Patricia Clarkson is forced to appear in this movie with a lifeless monologue to deliver, something she deserves so much better than it deserves. This is followed up by the more horrifying reveal that her character, Dr. Ava Paige, did not commit suicide as we were led to believe and so Clarkson was shackled to appear in this franchise as its apparent long-term antagonist. I can’t imagine this has any impact on a viewer not familiar with Clarkson as an actor, since our knowledge of the character’s existence up until the movie tells us she died is less than 2 minutes and less than a minute passes after that to tell us she’s alive and the bad guy.

Anyway, now Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials came about to bring along a cast of regretful and overqualified veterans to stifle her loneliness. Giancarlo Esposito’s on autopilot, Alan Tudyk’s playing a gay stereotype, Lili Taylor is just dying inside, and Barry Pepper’s the only one that’s giving a performance could call “committed”. But before any of them pop up, we are introduced shortly to Aidan Gillen’s apparent guardian Janson kicking off the overqualified adult actors after Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), the franchise’s hero, has an inscrutable flashback before waking up in the helicopter we saw him and his friends get scooped up in at the end of the previous film. Janson offers them quarter in his industrial facility with the total amount of trustworthiness that a character played by Aiden Gillen can provide, which is like… nothing so it’s not a shock when we quickly discover he’s actually working for the evil corporation of WCKD (something pronounced “wicked” but I totally feel like pronouncing as “wrecked” because I don’t wanna do a damn thing this movie asks). Thomas and his crew wisely escape upon this discovery into the real world.

By the way, included in Clarkson’s final lines of the last film was an observation that more kids survived the events of The Maze Runner than expected and clearly The Scorch Trials thought this as well because the group Thomas escapes Janson’s facility with is smaller than the group Thomas entered that facility with, I swear to God. And they get split up anyway halfway through the movie in search of a resistance group against WCKD called The Right Arm, so there’s little interest in any character that’s not Thomas and being interested in a character as bland as Thomas feels just, like, a bad move.

But there is a good thing about this new quest they go through is that they’re not stuck behind walls and that means WORLD-BUILDING in what we now see (and Clarkson again told us in the final minutes of The Maze Runner) is a ravaged post-apocalyptic world since a virus known as the Flare destroyed most of the world. It happens to be a virus that Thomas’ clan is immune, the point of being trapped in that hole in a maze. Yeah, it still sounds stupid to me too, but when I’m about to praise the world-building of Scorch Trials, I’m not talking about the verbose and exhaustive attempt at mythology screenwriter T.S. Nowlin (now working alone, still based on James Dashner’s novel) tries to stretch out the concept. Nor am I talking about the totally unmoving addition of zombies called Cranks into the terrain replacing the CGI monstrosities in the original (and being no more convincing).

I’m talking about the set design frankly, a place where director Wes Ball gets to use his background as a graphic artist and visually shape a world that feels completely abandoned by anything but heat and smoke. Most of the travels of Thomas and company take place in a giant desert filled with fallen edifices and drown metropolitan structures called The Scorch, which Ball and cinematographer Pados Gyula do a lot to make the landscape feel endlessly barren and dry. Which sounds like the same as the boring ol’ hole-in-a-maze of the first movie except without plants and with better color timing, but it’s not. There’s character in the Ozymandias structures these kids* run through and climb, the implication of our world past in some cases recognizable. In several cases to geographically confusing degree with the buildings we catch, but I’m trying to cease being mean to Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials for like two seconds.

And well before we even enter that desert, Jansen’s “sanctuary” to the kids is already so cold and character-less in a deliberate manner that it’s not surprising to find one’s self not entirely at ease when he leads the protagonists there with open arms (Good golly, could actually be visual directing of tone from Ball? Or was I just already on this movie’s bad side that my distrust extended to the textual context of its characters? Probably both.). Meanwhile, the little “guarded” hideout where we meet allies Jorge (Esposito) and Brenda is scrappy and desperate enough in its makeshift fashion that it’s kind of clear it’s the characters have some at-the-ropes alignment against WCKD and we can trust them. Tudyk’s corner is all unglamorous decadence in a bazaar-esque fashion, costumes and nightclub/opium den lair (with some drugged-up editing and lensing which seems… quite weird for a kids film, but aight).

Pepper and Taylor are living in a Western (Pepper’s performance especially reminds me of the one he gave in True Grit). It’s not a great Western but it’s a Western set with the same sort of texture and low-key design as the rest of Scorch Trials.

Basically, it’s not inventing the wheel in design and certain setpieces (The Scorch, Jansen’s lair) are a lot less interesting than otherwise (Pepper and Taylor’s home area), but it’s the closest Maze Runner: Scorch Trials has to feeling like it’s moving somewhere (it certainly has more momentum than its predecessor). And it doesn’t stop the story from feeling like a bunch of aimless wandering goose chases to find the legendary Right Arm until the movie decides to have WCKD show up to perform one “Very Evil Moment” yet again (but probably a godsend to one of the actors) and deliver another labored and contrived twist with one great big “is the movie over?” cut to black before returning for another scene to taunt me, but it’s something. Ball can use set design well enough once he’s out the gates and Lord let that keep me holding on when I dive into that one final Maze Runner movie and then forget this franchise ever existed.

*I have to note how weird it feels to regard these characters as “kids” when most of the actors are legit older than I am, but that says something about how I feel about Young Adult in general.

Like Rats in a Maze

So, like… I haven’t been in the target audience of Young Adult fiction for a little under a decade now and when I was part of it, I was already looking for the door, so I might not be entirely in the know about these works. To my memory, the only major series I’ve read were Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games. But, like, there’s usually some kind of social observation in the heart of it, no? Like hamfisted, absolutely undiluted social observation that you would have to be not paying attention to the unsubtle dialogue to miss. The Hunger Games had classism and the exploitative nature of the media, Harry Potter had a wizard version of the Ku Klux Klan that got more and more time as the main antagonists, Twilight for all that it ranks at the bottom barrel of things I’ve read and watched even has some muddled attempt at determinism (and Mormon looking views on romance).

So, we get The Maze Runner – one of these young adult works that I hadn’t even heard of until we suddenly had a film adaptation come out in 2014 and make enough money to have another aim at being the next Hunger Games-level box office franchise – and I just don’t get what the fuck it’s trying to be about.

I mean, I get what it’s trying to taking inspiration from – Terrence Malick’s landscape photography in consideration of how the majority of the movie takes place in an entrapped area of forestation (and I don’t mean to insult Malick but comparing him to a movie as terrible-looking as The Maze Runner), Lord of the Flies in how it revolves around a bunch of kids isolated from society trying to create their own community – but it doesn’t seem to have anything to say about any of that. Which is not only shocking, it just kind of makes me feel like I wasted my damn time worse than I already dreaded before spending two hours watching the thing. Like there was nothing to gain and it was philosophically and thematically empty from a genre that proudly wants to proclaim its themes and philosophies, adolescent as they may be, in a very urgent way.

Maybe the original novel by James Dashner, which I frankly have no intention of reading, does a better job of dicing up a message out of it. Maybe more likely is how the screenplay by Noah Oppenheim (yes, the president of NBC News, that same guy. No sarcasm.), Grant Pierce Myers, and T.S. Nowlin is so distracted by the necessity of stacking exposition dump upon exposition dump to slowly seep out some summary of what is happening to actually concern itself with depth and theme. I don’t think that excuses it, given that Divergent – another flipping Young Adult novel adaptation that’s desperately tried (and hilariously failed) to be the next Hunger Games – was also a movie packed to the brim with world-building exposition dump and you’d still be able to takeaway that story’s appeal to the importance of individualism, even if you had watched it blindfolded or with earmuffs or upside down (not at the same time, though. Be serious.) Still it’s just plausible that such was the case with The Maze Runner.

Those exposition dumps happen to be showing us how a young man we learn later to be named Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) is thrown into a large plain of grass called the Glade inhabited by several other boys mostly devoid of personality beyond their pragmatic status and none of these statuses seem remotely interesting except that of a Runner, the boys who are selected to run everyday into the walls that surround their little plain and try to find a way out of the maze within, running back to the community before the doors to the wall close every night and trap them in the maze lest they be attacked by a bunch of giant CGI monsters called Grievers. This is like… the premise of a movie, not a full on plot and yet it takes The Maze Runner more than 2/3 of its runtime to lay that all out. It’s not even world-building because everything they’re explaining and elaborating on is confined to the Glade and the Maze, nothing else.

And some of these things are of course delivered in some manner that has to do with the element of cutting and framing in cinema, like the sort of impressively trapped and uncomfortable flurry of opening shots where Thomas is practically launched into the Glade in unstoppable motion and quickly shifted from surrounding him from dark walls behind a steel cage into surrounding him from blinding light and laughter and boyish eyes no less confusing before he faceplants from fear. But that’s like it. That’s the only worthwhile moment conceived out of Wes Ball’s direction in the whole movie. The rest of that exposition through cutting is in the case of randomly clunked up flashbacks of Thomas’ time before the Glade, spurred on by Teresa’s (Kaya Scodelario) arrival into the Glade. Kind of glad there’s no “sexual tension” amongst these apparent teens played by guys in their 20s and 30s, but like… there’s practically no reaction to her arrival.

None except from the central antagonist Gally (Will Poulter), who brings the closest thing this movie could ever have to tangible conflict given how much of it is still just developing itself. Like all the other boys, Gally supplies more exposition but this time with a permanent scowl (without much effort, Poulter is best in show given how his face – particularly his eyebrows – compliments angry looks and he has an imposing build) and a tone of “I don’t trust these new folk” towards Thomas and Teresa (even though the implication is that THEY all were slowly sent into the Glade progressively so, like, aren’t they all new folk?).

Anyway, I think the film eventually figures out it’s running out of time and tries to have the reveals expand more in scope in a more accelerated fashion as it reaches its end and tries to actually make good on suggesting the state of a world beyond the maze, but it all felt like ambling and idling until the last three minutes when the literal plot police (I mean, fucking literal!) show up and tell them what’s going on with the franchise beyond before scooping them up and taking them out of the movie.

I mean, I get that maybe the premise of The Maze Runner isn’t my thing. But it’s not my thing because it seems like a concept that, unless under a skilled writer and director, can only be hamstrung be its self-imposed limitations. And I don’t think high enough of Young Adult works to think they usually house skilled writers and directors. And Ball and company have to work sooooo fucking hard to make a movie feel as unrewarding a waiting game as this. So why put myself through this? You assholes saw Maze Runner: The Death Cure enough to have it top the weekend box office and forced my fucking hand and now I’m covering it. I hate you all.

The Future Is Now

I highly think we haven’t been fair to 2010’s Terrence Malick in some ways. Since his Palme d’Or winning masterpiece The Tree of Life, he’s wasted no time suddenly changing his method of filmmaking and focusing more on essayistic than narratively-driven pictures. Given how Malick’s films have been famously “made in the editing room” (infamously in some facets such as Adrien Brody’s involvement with The Thin Red Line), it’s less a surprise that he got to this point in his filmmaking than it is that it took him this long in a nearly 50-year career to reach that point. And it must be stated that the subject matter of this moment in this particular span of his career is nowhere near as interesting as the material he worked with back in the first half of his career. He’s gone from philosophically dense landscape explorations about man’s relation with nature, inner or environmental, to naval-gazing self-reflections about his status in life where he casts Ben Affleck or Christian Bale as himself (I’m not sure who qualifies for his surrogate in the subject of this review). He’s also made Voyage of Time in the middle of this phase, which is essentially just an outtake out of The Tree of Life so I’m not sure I’d call it as invested as the rest of his feature works.

BUT. He’s challenging cinematic norms in positively every other way. Aesthetical decisions helped out by having his usual suspects of brilliant veterans in the visual department: Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki aka the best cinematographer alive, production designer Jack Fisk (one would argue that there isn’t much to “design” in this film and that’s not untrue, but there’s still a necessity to spy the sort of environments – urban and natural – based on the demands of the scene and Fisk’s awareness of how they will be presented with Malick and Chivo’s lens), and as usual a revolving door of editors all of which have worked with Malick and have some idea of what he wants them to focus on. Those editors being Rehman Nizar Ali, Hank Corwin, and Keith Fraase. Altogether, these films are formalist catnip.

And to be honest, as much as I enjoyed it, Song to Song – our subject here – is not as visually or structurally interesting as its predecessor Knight of Cups. Knight of Cups had a clear step-by-step focus and its decisions on sweeping through concrete terrains in GoPro cameras feels much more revelatory than the still-impressively gorgeous but all too familiar concert footage and leisure tour that is in Song to Song. But Song to Song also a clearer throughway in plot – it’s still abstract but so much less abstract than Knight of Cups (if anything, I’d probably show StS to friends before I showed KoC) – where the chronology doesn’t take effort to parse out and we can recognize an emotional and philosophical arc within our main four subjects.

Those subjects being musicians BV (Ryan Gosling) and Faye (Rooney Mara), record producer Cook (Michael Fassbender), and waitress Rhonda (Natalie Portman), all based in the city of Austin, Texas. Song to Song dances around these characters and how their relationships between each other tangle: The artistically driven BV is dating the more underground Faye and working for the sociopathic hedonistic Cook, but Faye is also having a secret affair with Cook in the middle of her internal identity crisis, and sometime into that Cook gets involved with the smitten Rhonda to the point of marriage and traps her into the shallow domesticity while not showing any signs of slowing down his debauchery in spite of her awareness. These strands begin to snap and expand in a naturalistic way probably based on something Malick does here that I can’t recall him ever doing elsewhere: he lets his actors sort of write the movie.

I mean, he’s still the credited writer and obviously shaped more of the narrative in post than in filming – loose as the editing might feel – and actors were obviously cut (including, to my disappointment, Trevante Rhodes) but the real soul of Song to Song is in how the actors are allowed to inhabit these characters, fill them up with their own internal developments, and Malick and the camera just observe. Not just observe, but Malick seems to augment the idea through his editing that this is a character-inspired emotional journey rather than try to reframe it as a visually driven tale until the final few minutes. I’d honestly say Mara’s performance as Faye, possibly my favorite of her whole career, is strengthened by the decisions the editors take in sharply navigating through her emotional states than otherwise. And while it might sound like an insult, I absolutely do not mean for it to be so when the main cast could feel like they’ve been playing the same personality they’re providing their whole career: Gosling’s quiet fear of loneliness, Fassbender’s second-nature shitheel, Cate Blanchett’s bored entrapment in an unfulfilling relationship, and so on. And in turn, Malick gets to take those and arrange them into distanced looks into disconnection from society and how these characters deal with it, without losing sight of the fact that they’re humans inhabiting this film. Malick’s just not handling that, he knows his cast has got it.

And of course this praise isn’t precisely restricted to just the lead actors, but the revolving door of musicians who make appearances and simply espouse their philosophy on life without the slightest amount of restraint: Johnny Rotten acting like an overgrown teenager talking about doing whatever the fuck he wants to, Big Freedia’s (who this movie introduced me to) bouncy hangout manner, or most heartbreakingly Patti Smith reciting to Faye her short-lived time with the love of her life, the late Fred Smith (unnamed but very obviously the subject of her monologue if you know Patti or the MC5s well). There’s still plenty of voiceover work by several of the leads, but none of them reach the sort of pained potency as Patti’s.

Malick is close to cinema verité in his encouragement of these performers to just exist in the Austin neighborhoods and cityscape. Something that in turn leads to easing the audience, if you’re willing to meet it halfway, into sinking into the experience of swimming around these relationships and how they collide, separate, and collide again. But then it’s still a stylized Malick film. I didn’t say it wasn’t, y’all, I said it was just a bit measured about it. Malick still wants to give Austin the same treatment he gave L.A. in Knight of Cups, with Chivo framing the interiors of Cook’s glass and chrome house like an inhuman prison, the clubs Cook brings BV to as a lurid Hades, or the sort of house he buys Rhonda’s mother as an empty shell. And the concert scenes are full of excitement and wild frenzy that frontloading them seems a smart choice to prime me enough for the length of the movie to follow (it is not a movie that outstays its welcome by me, but it gets pretty close).

Anyway, Song to Song is another of Malick’s interesting experiments – potentially the last one – but this time the experiment is more focused on how can one cohere a story with the sort of free reign to actors, rather than how can one cohere a philosophical treatise like with Knight of Cups. And I don’t think it’s entirely a success for in the end Song to Song seems entirely like its title suggests – a series of isolated moments moving into moments that happen to map well enough to give drive to the film, but not a story. It’s been almost a year since I first saw it and still I have much to chew on within the film, but it is nevertheless the sort of challenge I love diving in and that makes cinema more and more full of surprises everyday.