Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

If you had just three weeks to live, what would you do? Try and see long-lost friends and relatives before the time came? Make an effort to re-connect with an old love? Finally get round to reading War and Peace? Travel as much as you could? Go on a crime spree? With an asteroid called Matilda hurtling towards the planet, that's the very conundrum facing Dodge Petersen (Steve Carell). Within moments of the car radio telling them that a last-ditch attempt to stop Matilda has failed, Dodge watches on as his wife Linda (Nancy Carell) gets out of the car and runs away from him and their life together. It's probably for the best anyway: she was having an affair and he only married her because he was scared of dying alone. Some people try and flee, as his wife did. Others join orgies and parties and some get things over with and take their own lives. Dodge reacts altogether differently, carrying on his humdrum life as normal. He goes to work, checks his empty letterbox and tries to tell his cleaning lady that with the apocalypse approaching, she doesn't have to come to work anymore. She thinks he's trying to fire her, so he relents and lets her carry on.

Dodge's friends aren't interested in business as usual, not in the slightest. Warren (Rob Corddry) and Diane (Connie Britton) invite him to a dinner party and try and set him up with their enthusiastic friend Karen (Melanie Lynskey), reasoning that no-one should die alone. They've hit the nail on the head - he doesn't want to die alone, but other than that, he doesn't know what he wants. He does know however that he's not interested in Karen or Diane's sexual advances, nor does he fancy taking heroin. So, he leaves the party and goes home. As he reminisces about Olivia, his old high school sweetheart, he sees his neighbour Penny (Keira Knightley) crying outside his window. She's missed the last flight back to England to see her family so he consoles her and invites her in. She falls asleep on his sofa and the next morning, gives him a pile of letters that the postman had wrongly delivered to her apartment over the years. They've never spoken before despite being neighbours for a long time so she has no idea that the man she assumed was his "roommate's boyfriend" was in fact his wife's lover. After trying to kill himself, Dodge reads the letters and finds one from Olivia where she tells him that she's divorced with a son and that he was the love of her life. Filled with a renewed sense of purpose and with a crowd of looters approaching their apartment block, he rescues Penny and tells her that if she helps him track down Olivia, he will hook her up with his friend who has a private plane that can take her back home to Surrey.

Thus begins the movie proper and from this point onwards it's a strange romantic drama-cum-black comedy-cum-apocalyptic science fiction film. Some parts work really well. For example, Dodge maintaining the semblance of a normal life as the sky falls around him (literally); the dinner party at Warren and Diane's; almost joining in an orgy at a diner and attending a mass baptism at a beach. It's just a pity that so many scenes fall flat on their face. Dodge's attempt to commit suicide was either supposed to be poignant or funny and it couldn't decide which. Dodge and Penny's encounter with an unusually vigilant policeman sees the film swerve completely off course and delivers easily the most boring and frustrating five minutes of the film. Their meeting with survivalists had promise but it was completely lacking any satirical edge and just felt like it had been shoehorned in. The only joke had at their expense came when they walked in on one of them on the toilet. Martin Sheen's character likewise feels tacked on and doesn't serve much purpose other than to provide a plot device. Finally, the ending. I can see some people really liking it, but I didn't really. I won't spoil it but of the three main ways I thought it could have ended as I was watching it - abrupt black comedy, tearful reunion and unhappy resolution - they picked the weakest of the three. After it finishes I wondered if there was an alternate ending but there is not.

Strange and unholy mash-up it might be but fortunately, there is glue holding the whole ramshackle structure together and it is the performances of Carell and Knightley. He deadpans his way through the film, his occasional outbursts of emotion and playful flirting making for a confidently understated performance. She is full of spunky energy, another excellent performance to add to the already long list. Together they make a likeable and believable pairing, often providing the only high points in scenes that otherwise drag along under the weight of their own superfluousness.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a bit of a strange film and has as many hits as it does misses. It would all come unstuck were it not for Steve Carell and Keira Knightley. She in particular is superb and without their winning performances, the whole thing would come crashing down.

6 out of 10.

The Mist (2007)

"People are basically good, decent. My god, we're a civilised society."

"Sure, as long as the machines are workin' and you can dial 911, but you take those things away, you throw people in the dark, you scare the shit out of them, no more rules, you'll see how primitive they get."

"You scare people badly enough, you can get 'em to do anything. They'll turn to whoever promises a solution, or whatever."

"As a species, we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?"

And thus is summed up The Mist in 109 words. What happens when a few dozen terrified Americans are crammed together in a supermarket and hemmed in by a thick, otherworldly mist that brings death to all who step into it? They turn on each other, in horrible, inhuman ways.

When a powerful storm hits the small town of Bridgton, Maine, David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and his son Billy (Nathan Gamble) head into town to pick up some supplies and materials to repair the storm damage to their house. David's wife Stephanie (Kelly Lintz) stays at home but he gives a lift to their neighbour, Brent (Andre Braugher). A lawyer from New York with a holiday home in the town, Brent has previously sued the Draytons over a property dispute, which he lost. This, combined with his intransigence in the face of David's politeness and his belief that the townspeople see him as an out-of-towner who doesn't belong means the two have an uneasy relationship at best. At the supermarket, they shop and run into fellow townspeople, among them Amanda (Laurie Holden), a teacher and friend of the family; Ollie (Toby Jones), the shop's assistant manager; Dan (Jeffrey DeMunn), a friend of David's; Irene (Frances Sternhagen), an elderly retired teacher; Jim (William Sadler), a mechanic; Sally (Alexa Davalos), Billy's babysitter and an assistant at the shop; and Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), an infamous and softly-spoken townswoman whose fanatical right-wing Christian views make Rick Santorum look like a godless socialist.

As they shop, the mist, which had been rolling down from the hills, sweeps into the town and engulfs it, swallowing up the supermarket and everything in sight of it. As the townspeople gawp out of the shop's large front windows at the impenetrable mist, people run in from the car park and when Dan bursts in with a bleeding nose and tales of something in the mist attacking people, panic sets in. Some decide to run for it, trying to make it to their cars before whatever is in the mist can get to them. They don't make it, their screams carrying back to the large majority who remained inside. Trapped and terrified, rifts begin to appear between the townspeople. David quickly realises the enormity of what they're facing but Brent and some of the others refuse to believe what's really outside, even when it's right in front of them. But, most insidious of all is Mrs. Carmody. She begins her sermons of hate and no-one listens to her, but when the things outside break through the windows and panic sets in, more and more people listen to her. She spews forth messages about the end of the world and judgement for those who refuse to repent. Slowly and surely, she and her followers become just as dangerous as the creatures that lurk outside in the mist.

What makes this film really special isn't just the otherworldly monsters but the human monsters, whether they begin that way or are scared and bullied into doing the horrific deeds they go on to commit. With the townspeople splitting between the rational, logical group led by David and the fundamentalist, fire and brimstone group led by Mrs. Carmody, the real divide that exists in America is sharply illustrated. Clearly the film is made from the point of view of the former and David and his friends are the protagonists but given a few tweaks here and there, it's easy to see how one could present Mrs. Carmody as a dedicated, devoted Christian woman just trying to do what she knows to be right. Fortunately, Marcia Gay Harden plays her perfectly. She's understated enough to be creepy and passionate enough to be persuasive, without ever crossing the line into parody. In fact, the performances are superb all round. Many of the actors are regular collaborators with director Frank Darabont so he knows exactly how to get the best out of them.

With the human monsters so effectively portrayed, and given that the film is only five years old, it's disappointing to note that the CGI for the creatures is slightly unconvincing. It's not so much the case for the larger creatures, but for the smaller and more numerous creatures, it's sometimes no better than average. Furthermore, the designs are surprisingly unimaginative. Fortunately, the mist often shrouds the creatures so it doesn't detract too much from their impact, but it is the only downside to this otherwise fine feature.

All in all though, it's still a very good film. The performances are terrific, the characters are believable and the ending is absolutely superb. Not only is it a great monster movie but as a mini-essay on the dangers of irrationality and religious fundamentalism, it simply can't be beaten.

8 out of 10.

Looper (2012)

Hype can be a dangerous thing. The posters and trailers for Looper were covered in lashings of quotes about how brilliant it is and studded with stars in clusters of four and five. One critic's hyperbolic review even suggested that it was "the new Matrix". With a build-up like that, how could the film possibly disappoint me!

In hindsight, perhaps it was always going to disappoint me. That's not to say that the film's bad, it's certainly not. It's good. But that's all it is: good.

Joe (Joseph-Gordon-Levitt) is an eponymous Looper: an assassin hired by criminals living in the future to kill people they send back in time and then dispose of their bodies. He lives in Kansas in 2044. They live in 2074 when time travel has been invented and, according to his boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), who has moved permanently from the future to run the looper operation, it is apparently advantageous to know Mandarin. Loopers are paid in silver bars strapped to the people that are sent back in time for them to kill, except for when they are released from their service and gold bars are strapped to their future selves. After killing themselves, they have a few decades to live as they please before their future self is abducted and sent back in time for their past self to kill. Failure to kill your future self is punishable by death and is brutally enforced. Everything's going fine until a mysterious figure in the future called "the Rainman" decides to start having all of the loopers kill themselves off. After Joe fails to kill his future self (Bruce Willis), the two go on the run from Abe's goons whilst trying to solve the mystery of who the Rainmaker is and why he is shutting the looper programme down.

The film, to its credit, doesn't get into complex metaphysical discussions of the inner workings of time travel and give us a conversation we've already seen and had many times before. In a scene in a diner, Future Joe tells Present Joe that it makes his head hurt and the younger man drops the subject. It also presents an interesting argument: that if your future self came back in time and told you to change your actions, you'd probably carry on and do what you thought was right anyway. Still, for pleasing moments like those, there are some very dumb ones as well. Particularly, the fact that in the future time travel has been banned and is operated only by crime lords who use it to dispose of their victims. Joe gives us some reason about people in the future being "chipped" and the film brushes it off, but it's not a satisfying explanation and makes you really wonder what's going on with these gangs that possess incredibly complex and illegal technology like time travel, but haven't mastered the art of surgically removing tracking chips or throwing bodies in the ocean à la Dexter Morgan. Furthermore, requiring loopers to kill themselves presents myriad problems and results in both Joe and a looper friend of his (Paul Dano) failing to kill themselves. The much simpler idea of loopers at the end of their contract receiving a pile of gold bars and their future self being sent to a different looper to be killed apparently went over the heads of the criminals from the future.

After the two Joes meet, the younger man fails to kill himself. They later meet in a diner and Future Joe tells Present Joe that someone called "the Rainmaker" is killing off the loopers and he's going to find out who he is and kill him as a child. After the diner they're meeting at is attacked by Abe's men, Present Joe nearly gets caught and ends up hiding at a farm owned by Sara (Emily Blunt), who lives with her young son, Cid (Pierce Gagnon).

Some parts of the film may feel superfluous but turn out to play a necessary part in the film, namely Joe's stripper friend and lover Suzie (Piper Perabo) and the mutation that affects one tenth of the world's population and gives them the power to make small objects like coins and cigarette lighters levitate. Both of these feel like pointless plot additions when they come up but don't pass them off as such. Instead, there are plenty of other pointless characters - Kid Blue (Noah Segan), an incompetent employee of Abe who more than outstays his welcome and Future Joe's wife (Xu Qing), who serves only to highlight that the film has serious problems with plot holes. Additionally, the main problem is that the film pretty much comes to a grinding halt just over half way through. When Present Joe arrives at Sara's farm, he decides to hide there while Future Joe does his thing and spends most of the rest of the film hiding and talking to Sara and her son and, quite frankly, it's a bit boring.

In contrast with a fantastic first act full of action, great visuals and effective storytelling, the second act sees the film going round in circles, like Present Joe lost in Sara's corn field. It apes The Terminator as Future Joe tries to change the world and Present Joe hides out with a woman and develops feelings for her. If you've seen that film, you should be able to see the "twist" that arrives in this one. When the third act rolls around, director Rian Johnson throws in a couple of shootouts and tries to cobble things together but the damage has already been done. The resolution is different but still feels unsatisfying. I'd like to see if there's an alternate ending provided with the DVD release.

Plot holes, logical inconsistencies and a rambling middle section detract from interesting ideas and good performances. Jeff Bridges in particular is very good and Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a decent Bruce Willis impression. It's just a pity the two share so little screen time after their meeting in the diner.

It's not the new Matrix but it's better than both of that film's sequels put together. An infuriating case of what might have been.

7 out of 10.

Battleship (2012)

Meet our plucky hero. He doesn't always get on with his family, he's a bit of a bum, struggling to find his place in the world and he doesn't have a job. Despite all this, he has a gorgeous supermodel for a girlfriend. When aliens land on planet Earth, he and his friends are all that stand between us and them, our last line of defence, humanity's only hope. No, I'm not reviewing Transformers 3, this is Battleship, the film based on the board game of the same name.

Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) is the eponymous hero, impressed into the U.S. Navy in 2005 by his elder brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard), after he is arrested trying to impress the beautiful Samantha (Brooklyn Decker), who just happens to be the daughter of Admiral Terrence Shane (Liam Neeson). Meanwhile, NASA has begun transmitting signals from Hawaii to an Earth-like planet in a habitable zone orbiting a nearby star. Seven years later, Alex is a lieutenant with an attitude problem and Stone has command of his own ship. As the brothers prepare to take part in that year's RIMPAC at Pearl Harbour under Admiral Shane, scientist Cal Zapata (Hamish Linklater) and his assistant Danny (Christopher McGahan) intercept a strange signal. I'm not saying it's aliens. But it's aliens.

Four alien ships crash down into the pacific ocean near Hawaii and three destroyers close in and investigate. One of the alien ships erects a force field and the three others engage the destroyers. Two of the destroyers are sunk, killing Stone. After several officers are killed on Alex's ship, he assumes command. Meanwhile, Admiral Shane and the rest of the fleet are trapped outside the force field; Samantha, an army physiotherapist, is hiking with double amputee Mick Canales (Gregory D. Gadson) and the aliens land on Hawaii and commandeer the NASA transmitters to summon reinforcements from their home planet. Alex bands together with friends from his ship and survivors from the others, including gunner Cora Raikes (Rihanna), Japanese Captain Nagata (Tadanobu Asano) and crewmen Walter Lynch (John Tiu) and Jimmy Ord (Jesse Plemons).

As night falls, Alex and his ship literally play Battleship by judging the position of the alien ships based on readings from buoys, sinking two of them. On the island, Cal flees from the aliens and runs into Samantha and Mick. Together, they resolve to destroy the facility and stop more aliens from arriving. When the sun rises, Alex and his crew destroy the third alien ship, leaving only the force field and the ship guarding it. With their destroyer badly damaged, they decide to re-activate the battleship USS Missouri for the final showdown.

Films that give actors top billing and then kill them off quickly or feature them in barely more than cameos annoy me. Battleship does it twice. Alexander Skarsgard is killed off after forty-five minutes and Liam Neeson gets barely ten minutes on screen. Instead, the painfully wooden Taylor Kitsch leads the proceedings, "supported" by the dreadful Rhianna, who should clearly stick to her day job. I had expected supermodel Brooklyn Decker to be almost as woeful as Rosie Huntington-Whiteley was in Transformers 3 but she's actually not bad.

Dreadful acting aside, the film takes forever to get going. Fifteen minutes is wasted on a pointless scene showing how Alex and Samantha met back in 2005 and another in the present day as the brothers play a football game against a Japanese team in the build-up to the naval exercises. After that, it's another fifteen minutes of Alex being an asshole and getting himself into trouble before the aliens even appear on the radar. When they finally land, battle is not joined for about ten minutes as we have to endure a standoff as everyone looks through their binoculars and wonders what to do. Of course, it's the humans who fire first. What better way to welcome some intergalactic visitors than to fire a warning shot at them! After sinking two of the destroyers, the alien ships launch "shredders", giant spinning balls that bounce along the ground and destroy the air base on Hawaii. If they look familiar, it's because they bear a striking resemblance to the flaming balls that the Trojans attack the Greeks with in Wolfgang Petersen's Troy. The film as a whole is basically Transformers at sea but other influences are clearly visible, from Independence Day to Pearl Harbour and even The Final Countdown. Whilst Battleship compares poorly to all those films, it is at least better than Transformers 3. It may struggle with pacing and take ages to get going but mercifully it clocks in at twenty-three minutes shorter than T3.

Some ruthless editing and better casting would have helped but even that wouldn't have covered up for the lack of ideas and poor script. When they're reduced to actually playing Battleship, you know they're struggling for ideas to fill the time. When the USS Missouri is re-activated, that does at least present some nice footage of the venerable old battleship. Alex's crew are assisted by World War Two veterans who currently look after the ship in its current capacity as a floating museum but when you put the visual to one side it leaves a rather baffling question: why not recruit more recent veterans instead? Having octogenarians crew the ship is a silly idea. The Missouri was re-activated in the 1980s and served during the First Gulf War so the old men would not be familiar with the upgrades installed some forty years after they last crewed her. But hey, why let a silly thing like common sense get in the way of some good old-fashioned American flag-waving? Speaking of common sense, the moment when the forty-five thousand ton battleship turns at a right-angle because Taylor Kitsch drops the anchor is one of the most egregious examples of the laws of physics being shit on in a Hollywood blockbuster since the whole of Armageddon.

Acting, pacing, the script and moments of sheer idiocy aside, there's still very little to recommend here. There are some fancy explosions but when most of them are preceded by someone saying "boom" or "welcome to Earth, motherf...." (yes, it's cut off, a la Die Hard 4), the enjoyment is quickly sapped. Still, at least the aliens are cool, right? No, I'm afraid not. They spend most of their time clonking around in giant suits and even though they regularly punch characters with enough force to break bones, our heroes just get back up and carry on fighting. As for what they look like without their helmets on, think of the vampires from I Am Legend with toothpicks on their chins. Oh and they have the same sensitivity to light too.

"It's better than Transformers 3" is really the only positive thing I can think of to say about this film. When blockbusters are getting so bad that the only good thing you can say about them is "well, at least it's not the worst one I've ever seen", you know that standards are slipping. Poorly acted, badly written, with plotting and pacing problems aplenty, Battleship is a dismal, boring film. That's two hours and eleven minutes of my life gone that I'm never getting back.

In summary: Battleship is battleshit.

3 out of 10.

In Time (2011)

Sometimes, I watch a film even though I know it will be rubbish. You've done it too, I'm sure. We all have. I've seen the mediocre romantic comedy Bride Wars three times for goodness sake! Why? It's not bad, it's comfortingly average and sometimes that's just what we're looking for. In that spirit, I decided to watch In Time. I'd read the reviews but still I was drawn to it, like a moth to a shit-stained light bulb.

The story's pretty similar to Logan's Run. The year is 2161 and thanks to genetic modifications, people stop ageing at 25. Instead, on their 25th birthday, a bar code on their arm is activated and begins counting down from 1 year. Time has become the new currency, paying for everything from coffee to travel through the "time zones", barriers that separate the ghetto-like Dayton from the futuristic and serene paradise of New Greenwich. Time can be gained by working or by betting, stealing or fighting with other people. When your time runs out, you die instantly. Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) lives in Dayton with his mother Rachel (Olivia Wilde). When his mother's time runs out and he saves 105 year-old Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer) from the vigilante gang the Minutemen and their leader Fortis (Alex Pettyfer), Henry gives Will his remaining 116 years and dies, telling him that he is tired of living. Unburdened by ties to Dayton, Will travels to New Greenwich and gambles with the uber-wealthy Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser), besting him and earning an invitation to a party at his house. There, he meets his daughter, Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried), and is confronted by the Timekeepers (Collins Pennie and Cillian Murphy) who suspect him of murdering Henry. He takes Sylvia hostage and goes on the run.

From then on, it's standard action film fare: car chases, gun fights and romantic interludes between Will and Sylvia. Unfortunately, the film suffers from two major flaws: it's very badly written and both Timberlake and Seyfried are awful. Timberlake struggles when given minor supporting roles where he's playing himself (The Social Network, Bad Teacher) and I don't know what possessed the makers of this film to think he could carry it. He can't. He wonders around absent-mindedly, talking like he's reading his script for the first time. As for Seyfried, she has a permanent glassy-eyed, vacant look on her face. A lump of plywood would have been more convincing as the bored and frustrated spoilt little rich girl yearning for excitement and freedom. About the only time she does anything is when she sprints (not runs, sprints) in her tottering six-inch high heels. I'm really frustrated with her. She's a very good young actress but in her last two roles, this and Red Riding Hood, she looks like she doesn't give a shit, like she's just there for the paycheck. The idea itself isn't bad but it's badly executed. Given a re-write and with a competent leading man and a leading woman who looks like she actually wants to be there, this could have been an intriguing science fiction film.

A wasted opportunity. Don't spend an hour and fifty minutes of your life on it.

3 out of 10.

Apollo 18 (2011)

"Found-footage" horror films have become a sub-genre of their own. They're nothing new, of course. The original found-footage horror was 1980's Cannibal Holocaust and the most infamous is 1999's The Blair Witch Project. It wasn't until 2007, however, that the genre really took off with Paranormal Activity, Diary of the Dead and REC being unleashed onto an unsuspecting audience. They were soon followed by Cloverfield, Quarantine, REC 2, Paranormal Activity 2 and 3, The Last Exorcism and Troll Hunter as well as countless others; some brilliant, others utter bollocks. Now, the genre moves into outer space with Spanish director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego's first English-language production.

The story goes that after Apollo 17, the final public mission to the Moon, the US Department of Defence instigated another, secret mission, Apollo 18. So far, so conspiracy nonsense. After landing on the Moon, the pair of astronauts down on the lunar surface discover a Soviet lander and things start getting weird - their communications go down and something attacks their rover and, hilariously, their flag. Clocking in at only one hour and twenty-six minutes, and with ten minutes (!) of credits, the story is over in about an hour and a quarter. And thank goodness for that!

Nothing happens. For long, yawning, vacuous stretches of time, absolutely nothing happens. If this was intended as a metaphor for the vastness of the universe and the isolation and loneliness that astronauts can face in the great emptiness of space, then I doff my hat to the director. But I doubt it. After what seems like an eternity, something finally happens and they discover the Soviet lander. Make a note of that scene for it's the only one that made me jump, although I knew it was coming. Then, nothing happens. There's some stuff about rocks and suddenly one of the astronauts has an alien spider in his suit. Apparently the alien spiders hide themselves as rocks, in a plot twist that's as dumb as a bag of them. More things fail to happen, then they finally decide to leave. That's about it.

If you want an exercise in how to make a seventy-six minute film with about fourteen minutes of interesting footage or you want a lesson in how not to build tension and create atmosphere, watch Apollo 18. A good idea for a promising little horror film was unfortunately wasted.

4 out of 10.