All Quiet On The Western Front; Elysium

All Quiet On The Western Front

All Quiet On the Western Front (AQOTWF) is practically a template for most modern takes on war, with many sequences used over and over again, proving that either war rarely changes or the cinematic depiction of it can’t be bettered.

As opposed to the patriotic WW2 movies of the 40s and 50s, AQOTWF is the prototype of the anti-war film depicting war as hell.

A number of sequences are fully formed that can still be found today - the first clash with authority in the barracks as the shouty sergeant whips the new blood into shape; the humiliation and repetition of training; the bullying and violence in training before the soldiers even get to the front (though here it’s directed at pompous authority rather than in-fighting between recruits); the idealism of the new recruits versus the old-hand vets; the realities of war at the front and the distillation of importance to food and shelter; the shock and horror of death as it takes people you know, as you take others lives; the psychological breakdown of men by war, either completely, or into killers.

It’s easy to see how the film was banned by many countries preparing for the build up to the next war - the anti-war sentiment is overt, both in the way the war affects the schoolboys we follow from their classroom to the front, and in the speech given by central character Paul at the end.

A number of points are drilled home throughout the film, including the futility of war as the soldiers go over the top of the trenches with numerous of deaths on both signs but no ground gained, conversations highlighting how the soldiers involved aren’t even sure why they are at war and the more obvious affects of deaths and dismemberment as lives are shattered.

Some of the film is a little clunky, with the acting in particular a little overwrought, although this is likely to be a hangover of the move from silent movies to talkies, and the numerous east coast American accents are very hard to reconcile with the German uniforms, though I imagine those very accents could have been intentional in order to acclimatise an American audience and emphasise that ‘they’ are just like ‘us’.  But other sequences such as the trench fighting and no man’s land advances are still unnerving. Due to the quirk of old cinema where action is comparatively sped up, the hand-to-hand trench fighting feels particularly vicious, and the scenes of the soldiers cowering in their fox hole as bombardment goes on seemingly without end helps you sympathise with the men driven to shrieking madness.

Ultimately AQOTWF doesn’t quite stand up to the sophistication (and emulation) of war films that have come since then, but as an example of what was being made over 80 years ago it’s a stark reminder to question the jingoistic and patriotic urges to send the young into war.

Elysium

After the success of District 9, Neil Blomkamp’s sci-fi critique on racism in South Africa, it’s easy to see the same slums though on a much larger scale in the sets of Elysium. Los Angeles of the future is a giant mega-city, but rather than the crumbling towers of 2000AD, Blomkamp’s vision is of dusty shanty-towns, very reminiscent of those occupied by the ‘prawns’ of District 9.

Elysium isn’t particularly original for a sci-fi tale, but neither was District 9 whose closest ancestor was 1988’s Alien Nation. In the same way that film took an old idea and ran with it, making it fresh and exciting, Elysium updates one of the oldest tales in cinema, that of Metropolis and the Time Machine, of Huxley’s Brave New World and myriad other dystopias involving a downtrodden underclass serving a ruling class.

Whilst the Morlocks were underground in the Time Machine, the ruling class of Elysium are above their servile underlings in another way, orbiting Earth in a ring-world space station with its own atmosphere.

Although the Elysium station is a typical sci-fi creation, all efficient robots, clean air and sharp lines, the main point of difference is the near-magical medical stations which automatically cure all ills. Healthcare back on Earth is lacking, and whilst people are desperate to board rickety shuttles just to try and stay on the heavenly Elysium station, the main driving force is illness and those seeking to cure it. This all leads to a lump in the throat ending as the Elysium computer system is told all Earth’s population are now citizens and it sends out medical ships to the surface to cure everyone in some sort of socialist wet-dream.

This worldview also comes out in the ‘worker’s struggle’ vein as our anti-hero, Matt Damon’s Max, is an ex-gang banger turned honest worker who gets screwed over by the boss on a robot production line, receiving a fatal dose of radiation for his efforts.

With the help of underworld contacts he’s assigned the task of kidnapping the CEO of his ex-employers company for his brain-implanted ID details, with the aid of an exo-skeleton grafted to his body. Thus begins his struggle against adversity and ultimately a tale of self-sacrifice.

There’s also a childhood friend and potential love interest, another cipher for cliche as she encompasses being a single mother and a nurse as well as a focus for Max’s efforts.

This back-story serves as a stable basis to weave a tale based on effects and set pieces, with a rather fetishised view of military hardware and a number of gory moments.

Matt Damon continues his run of star turns in the Bruce Willis role of the everyday shmoe in extraordinary circumstances who racks up a list of injuries, Alice Braga does well in the inevitably sketchy love interest part and Jodie Foster delivers an atypical performance as the ruthless politician/military type, but the stand out performance here is Sharlto Copley, back working with Blomkamp after his star turn in District 9.

In the role of Kruger (what a bad guy name!) he shines, in a dirty, brutal way, given that the character is that of a sleeper unit mercenary, part of a larger South African team who are called on to do Elysium’s dirty work. It’s in the confrontation between this crew and Max that most of the weapon idolisation takes place as we are treated to the effects of future guns and grenades.

Both action and story complement each other and push each other forward in a satisfying (if expected) way.

It’s good to see sci-fi based on ideas again, even if those ideas are recycled.

The Book of Eli; The Road

The Book of Eli

What can be said about Denzel Washington? If you want an actor to have an air of gravitas, a certain dignity and authority, yet still have a threatening presence, he’s your man. Liam Neeson is another actor with the bearing and worldly-wise sense of statesmanship to fit similar roles, but when called on to perform more violent scenes his sneer and snarl can possibly be read as that of the bad guy, whereas Denzel comes across a man who would kill with regret, attacking as a last resort.

And so to the Book of Eli. It’s hard to work out whether it’s a film about the redemptive power of Christian faith masquerading as a film about the post-apocalyptic American wasteland, or a kick-ass dystopian action movie masquerading as a film about faith?

The final twist - that Eli is blind - is a little hard to stomach. It’s not hard to recall scenes where other heightened senses don’t serve as sufficient explanation for his actions. Any amount of accurate violence can be attributed to finely trained senses of smell and hearing, but general orientation is a little harder to bear. In one scene there is a shoot out in the main street of a ramshackle town in the Western tradition. Eli takes out each henchman with a pistol, a mere one or two shots for each, but how does he navigate the street itself and know where to find cover?

For the majority of the film it doesn’t seem to be an issue - you’ll look back on scenes of feeling the sunlight on skin rather than needing to see it; knowing a woman’s hands were shaking not by sight, but because of the teacup and saucer she held.

For the most part the main impact comes from the blasted landscape of dust and saturated colour that Eli makes his way through, on an incongruously pristine highway headed west.

Such emphasis on the visual aspects come through in the first scene of the film, reminiscent of recent Wushu/Wuxia features, a twilight forest with ash lightly raining down. Panning across the body of a man, pistol dropped from his hand, we see a hairless cat approach the corpse, sniff and start to feed. Further off we see an imposing figure in the gloom and ash, hooded and gas-masked, his legs strain at a bow held level with the ground and aimed at the bait - his trap that the cat has sprung.

On the road we see Eli’s encounters with cannibal bandits, dispatching his enemies with lethal efficiency. The Wushu influences come forward again as Eli slices through his enemies with swift, fluid movements.

His journey takes him to a small town led by Gary Oldman in the style of another Western tradition - from the upstairs of a saloon bar. He sends teams of bandits into the wastes to search for books, after one in particular - the bible, a weapon to rule men’s hearts and minds.

The cause of the apocalypse is never spelled out but talk of a war, and of the sky ripped apart to see the sun fall to the earth and set it on fire accompany the blinding of most of the survivors of that time.

Few of the new Americans (all white, incidentally, and in the classic post-apocalypse ‘scrappy punk’ style) are able to read, but they serve as evidence that despite the harsh conditions people still went on having kids.

One such new citizen is Solara (Mila Kunis), the impossibly beautiful mini-clone of Angelina Jolie, all big eyes, full lips and dark, smouldering looks. How she has kept this alluring visage in the face of such devastation is a mystery; Gary Oldman’s Carnegie basically owns her and her blind mother, keeping both safe from harm (from others, at least), but there’s only so much soap, shampoo and moisturiser left in this ravaged world.

Still, she does a good job of standing in for innocent youth and the possibilities of the future.

Cannibals can apparently be detected as their hands get the shakes - presumably no-one suffers from any traumatic stress in this nightmare.

There is a slightly comedic moment when Eli & Solara come across the booby-trapped farmhouse of an old couple of cannibals, Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour as George and Martha, who swing from threat to allies when Oldman and goons arrive, somehow tracking them on a straight road even though we see Eli and Solara look down on the house from a cliff top.

In the West is Alcatraz, repurposed as the museum of culture, a sanctuary where none other than Malcolm MacDowell in mad professor guise compiles examples of art and literature and other pre-war cultural treasures. Most copies of the bible were burned shortly after the war as apparently it was seen as the cause, so Eli’s book is a very rare specimen. The end of the film sees him cleaned and shaved and dressed in a white robe, laid in repose and reciting the entirety of the bible before passing away, presumably not from the gutshot wound he sustained before starting to recite aloud the entire King James bible.

Apparently it is 31 years since he has been travelling. It’s never explicitly stated when in this time he had a voice tell him to take the bible and head West, but it’s safe to presume it doesn’t take that many years to walk across a mostly deserted United States. And how can he calculate that it has been 31 years since the war, but not remember his age?

The Book of Eli is very silly but Denzel’s very watchable and it’s always nice to see Gary Oldman getting his ham on.

*the Book of Eli gets two pictures due to the lovely artwork of Chris Weston: 

The Road

Literary adaptations are a hard one. Quite often what makes for a good book doesn’t necessarily translate to the screen, especially if it’s the quality of prose and character development that shines rather than the snappiness of the “Snakes. On a PLANE!” plot.

The Road is quite a faithful adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, but even it falls foul of the traps that often plague such translations between media. No matter how talented the actor, there is only so much you can convey without words in the limited time available during a standard feature length, and The Road makes use of a voice over which slightly detracts from the story, giving you a third perspective of the father looking upon himself and his son, removing you a step from the business of their struggle for survival. Likewise, the flashback/dream sequences of Charlize Theron as the mother seem more numerous than in the source material, and again serve to pull you back a little from your identification with the pair.

Conversely, we are so used to representations of post-apocalyptic life involving extras from Duran Duran’s Wild Boys video (see everything from Mad Max and Escape from New York to Doomsday and Book of Eli) that the wandering survivors of the Road seems less threatening in comparison, more desperate tramps than fearsome cannibals, with the key confrontation having more of a Deliverance feel than anything.

Aside from this the film is wonderfully made, a cold and dirty wasteland of dead, creaking trees with a haggard looking Viggo Mortensen as the father, struggling along in rags in an attempt to get his son South. In a couple of scenes we see him strip and are witness to the Machinist-style methods to which Viggo went to in order to bring the character to life, starving himself down to ribs and knobbled spine, but these glimpses are only fleeting and I did wonder whether it was necessary to the film in order to convince us of his dedication. His starvation may indeed be a plot point, but you’d hardly expect the rest of the actors to follow suit; it’s something that can be alluded to rather than shown.

And this is the general feeling I get from the film - yes, it’s impressive and care and attention have been expended on the production, but at the end of the day what is the point - what has it added? As a straight adaptation of the book there does seem to be something lost in translation.

As an entry into the increasingly crowded dystopia genre, however, The Road fares well, leaning much more toward a realistic take as in Haneke’s Time of the Wolf, rather than the more fantastical readings of the aforementioned punk-haircut fests. Severed from the source material The Road stands a chance of competing well and will no doubt showered with award nominations, if not awards themselves, which isn’t bad for such a bleak view on the fall of man, where the thought of suicide is constantly on the mind as a viable option.

Not as good as the book, no, but a decent attempt at a realist survival tale.