Road to Infinity War - Phase 3 - Black Panther (2018)

First thing's first. No Soul Stone here in Wakanda. Just a ton of Vibranium waiting to be turned into a shield or thousands of murder bots. All the Marvel fans were wrong. It isn't there. The teaser for Infinity War showing the massive battle in Wakanda wrong footed us all. It's not the Soul Stone they are protecting but Vision and his Mind Stone.
So where is the Soul Stone? Who cares, for now it is time to discuss the highest grossing superhero film in US history, Black Panther.
For a film that comes directly before Avengers Infinity War, it is surprisingly self-contained and features very few references to the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe beyond the return of the two "Tolkein" white guys Everett Ross and Ulysses Klaue (Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis).
I was slightly indifferent to the film first time round, and you can read that full review here.
Rewatching on the Road to Infinity War, it has improved in some areas but there remain some rather large flaws. Particularly in the final act.
The first half of the film remains very strong as it plays out like a Bond movie with T'Challa as Bond, sister Shuri as Q, with Okoye and Nakia as anything but Bond girls. The entire Busan sequence is the standout highlight of the movie.
Once the action returns to Wakanda and Killmonger has made his play for the throne, that's where things get a little bit... The Lion King.
Think about it. A son mourning the death of his father is usurped to the throne by a treacherous, vindictive relative who believes they should be King. Following a period of self-discovery that involves speaking with his dead dad, returns to fight and claim the throne that is rightfully his. Accompanied by M'Bakku and Ross aka Timon and Pumba.
Joking aside, the final battle is where the film lets itself down. The CGI is not as sharp as other MCU films and the face off between T'Challa and Erik in their Panther suits on a rail track looks like a deleted scene out of Tron Legacy.
There is also the bizarre moment that a war rhino stops charging when Okoye steps in front of it. This plot point was not mentioned previously but it also is exactly the same as a moment involving Elton John of all people in Kingsman 2.
It is a shame that it doesn't nail the landing because the relationship between the once and future kings is fascinating and has parallels to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (and also Professor X and Magneto). They both ultimately have the same goal but want to achieve it in very different ways.
Still, the performances are fantastic and while Jordan's charisma and swagger threatens to overshadow Boseman, there is purpose to it in uniting some of the Wakandan tribes to his cause, and leads to his powerful speech about how death is better than bondage.
While certainly not a perfect film, the foundations for the Black Panther franchise and place within the MCU are as strong as vibranium.

Infinity Stone counter = 5

Black Panther - review

The road to Avengers: Infinity War marches on with the Marvel Studios' 18th film since the Marvel Cinematic Universe began with Iron Man ten years ago in 2008.
With 18 films under their belts, it could be easy for Marvel to rest on their laurels and produce carbon copies of their greatest hits time and time again. Instead they are taking bigger and bigger risks.
After all, this is the company that gave us a movie starring a talking raccoon and a tree monster and a Flash Gordon-esque Thor sequel from the director of What We Do In The Shadows.
There are only two things they are still to achieve:
1) We still don't have a female-led solo movie yet. We have to wait till 2019 and Captain Marvel for that, and is the only thing that DC can claim they have bettered Marvel at.
2) A MCU origin film that doesn't end with two CGI characters beating the crap out of each other.
While Black Panther might not buck the trend in this department, it represents a huge leap forward in other ways and could be one of the most significant cultural events in Hollywood.
Writer-director Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed) brings Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa back to his home country of Wakanda for his coronation as King and take on the mantle of Black Panther following his father's death in Captain America: Civil War.
To tell this story, Coogler has assembled an incredible cast of veterans, rising stars and two "Tolkien" white guys. It is truly an embarrassment of riches that include Oscar winners Forest Whitaker & Lupita N'Yongo, nominees Angela Bassett & Daniel Kayuula and Emmy winner Sterling K. Brown.

It is impossible to overstate how important this moment in cinema could be. To have so many people of colour in the leading roles in a mainstream movie outside of Madea marks a welcome change and not only that, it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colours. The four leading women are all strong, independent queens, warriors, spies and inventors who are not sidelined in a wasted romantic subplot.

All this looks to deliver a bumper box office weekend as the audience, often underserved by Hollywood, come out in force. It's just a shame that the final product doesn't quite live up to the hype, instead coming in around mid-tier Marvel and plays out like a standard superhero origin tale.
The early signs are promising with the first half playing out like a Bond movie with Boseman as the gentlemen spy supplied with Vibranium powered gadgets by his precocious little sister Shuri who is a teenage Q and played with gleeful delight by Letitia Wright. The action jet sets around the globe from a daring robbery in London to a casino shootout and car chase in Busan with Martin Freeman's Everett Ross as Felix Lighter and Ulysses Klaue as the accented, maniacal super villain. Having spent so many years hidden underneath CGI and a motion capture suit, he is clearly relishing the chance to ham it up in front of the camera, and get time for a Hobbit reunion with Bilbo.

The issues come when the action returns to the CG heavy Wakanda and the real plot and villain in the form of Michael B. Jordan's Eric "Killmonger" come to the fore and the film switches from a spy movie to Marvel's version of The Lion King, with a prince battling to regain the throne from an evil relative following the death of his father.

The central struggle between T'Challa and Killmonger comes from an interesting place in that both want to advance the fortunes of Wakanda albeit from different perspectives and methods. One wants the country to do more through outreach and development while the other wants to provide arms to have communities rise up against their oppressors. This is Boseman's stoic MLK vs Jordan's charasmatic Malcolm X.

At the heart of it is a fascinating struggle but the power is somewhat lost as it descends into a standard Marvel third act which includes a mass CG brawl involving war rhinos, a one-on-one fight that could have been cut straight out of Tron Legacy and story beats right of the original Iron Man playbook.

It might follow the superhero formula but this is a standalone film with very few references to the wider MCU so the casual filmgoer can enjoy it for what it is without worrying too much about how it sets things up for Infinity War.

This is a superhero film straight outta Wakanda but this reviewer has a feline that Black Panther will, like the lion, find it's roar in the future.

3 stars

Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes - review

You know the phrase give 1000 monkeys a 1000 typewriters and eventually you'll get Shakespeare?

Well in truth if the monkeys were writing a story, surely they would write something like Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes first right?

I asked Caesar that very question and he replied "Apes writing movie together Strong. And don't call me Shirley"

The Planet Of The Apes was a franchise built on the foundations of Oscar-winning make up and THAT twist ending, which can't even be called a twist anymore as it is featured on the DVD cover.

2011's Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes began to tell the story of how the apes took over the planet and its biggest twist was that turned out to be one of that year's best blockbusters, skilfully blending an intelligent screenplay with action and featured some of the greatest CGI effects ever seen, led by Andy Serkis's motion capture performance as Caesar.

Dawn picks up ten years after the simian flu outbreak has killed off the majority of the humans on the planet and the apes are living in a colony in the forests outside San Francisco but they certainly do not reside anywhere near the uncanny valley as the effects are absolutely impeccable and you really will forget you are watching a CG character, particularly the orangutan Maurice.

They hunt, gather, provide, have an education system and live together harmoniously until humans from a group of survivors visit the forest to try and repair a dam that will provide them with power.

Things start off all "Oobi Doo, I Wanna Be Like You" with an uneasy truce between the species but soon enough it turns into "I hate every ape I see from chimpan-aye to chimpanzee" thanks to the actions of distrustful parties on both sides (Gary Oldman's military man Dreyfus and Caesar's angry second-in-command Koba).

Make no mistake, these films are called Planet Of The Apes for a reason and just like the human race in the original, the humans in this film play second fiddle to the apes as this is Caesar's story and his rise from test subject to curiosity to liberator to leader is the main focus of the story.

This film really should have be called Rise as it is the one where they fight the humans and learn to use weapons. Dawn is a more appropriate title for the first film especially as despite the name there is very little female representation here with the only female ape restricted to giving birth and nearly dying afterwards. One wonders if there was more to Caesar's wife Cornelia in the original script and it ended up on the cutting room floor.

Dawn is one of the most intelligent blockbusters of the year with lots of social and political undercurrents to the action. After an incredible middle act that sees the apes down tools and execute their American right to bear arms (will there be a more iconic action image this year than a crazed ape firing two machine guns while riding a horse?), it is interesting that the final fight is not for the planet but comes down to the fight for control of each faction with human vs human and ape vs ape.

There is no monkeying around with this refreshing antidote to brainless dumb summer crap like Transformers: Age Of Extinction but it does feel like the middle act of a trilogy as it leaves you wanting to immediately continue the story.

In terms of 2014 movies about simians, this one is chimply the best.

4 stars

The Adventures Of Tintin - review

This is the first of several planned Tintin films by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson and is an amalgamation of three of Herge's stories The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham's Treasure and The Crab with the Golden Claws, but more appropriately it could have been called Tintin And His Attempt To Escape The Uncanny Valley.
There was a lot of debate amongst fans of the books when it was first announced that the film would be produced using motion capture rather than animation.  You can understand its purpose when it encorporates otherworldly or non-human characters into live action films (Na'vi, Gollum, Caesar, etc) but when the style is that close to animation, is there any real benefit?
The answer, unfortunately, is not really.
The main benefit of using mo-cap over voice work is that you can use the actor's whole performance and therefore choose actors whole will bring something to the part, but the likes of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Jamie Bell are fairly anonymous in their portrayals, adding little more than a star name on the poster.
I don't know if it was Bell's fault, the script or if the character is the same in the comics, but Tintin was almost a non-entity in the film.  He's one dimensional as the sketch he is given at the beginning of the film based on Herge's drawing.  If you aren't familiar with the comics then the only character development we get as an audience is that he's a reporter (of undetermined age) who has a dog called Snowy.   That's it, otherwise he is just there to move the plot from A to B.  As adventurer's go, Indiana Jones he is not.

Rather unsurprisingly, the only one to be as three dimensional as the impressive visuals is Captain Archibald Haddock, thanks to being played by the King of Motion Capture, Mr Andy Serkis.  Although I can't be the only one who thought Haddock shared more than a passing resemblance to producer Peter Jackson.  It may not be as impressive a performance as that of Caesar from ROTPOTA, but Serkis is clearly having a ball as the drunken, boorish Scottish seaman (snigger) who comes to learn that his destiny lies along a different course... but perhaps Serkis was just happy at not having to play Snowy the dog!
Spielberg first became aware of Tintin back in 1982 when film critics compared elements of Raiders of the Lost Ark to the boy reporter's series of adventures, and this film is more in keeping with the tone and feel of Raiders than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Exotic locations, missing treasure and artefacts, non-stop action, and of course, a terrific John Williams score.  The film excels during some stunning action sequences but it's a shame the script doesn't masure in terms of the vision which is disappointing considering it was written by such talented guys as Moffat, Wright & Cornish.
Spielberg demonstrates why he is one of the best directors of all time with a chase sequence through the port of Bacchar that is done in one complete shot and rivals the truck chase in Raiders or the mine cart chase in Temple of Doom for sheer excitement.
With CGI and motion capture, what can be achieved on screen is only limited by imagination, and Spielberg shows how good he is with Haddock vividly recounting the tale of his grandfather and Pirate Red Rackham as it seamlessly switches between flashback and present day.
If the script and characterisation can match the imagination, passion and vision of messers Spielberg and Jackson, then I'm prepared to give Tintin another shot... as long as the sequel doesn't involve aliens!

3 stars