A Monster Calls - but dare you answer?

The screenplay for A Monster Calls was adapted by Patrick Ness from his own novel of the same name, but is based on a plot thought up,  but not written,  by the late Siobhan Dowd,  another prize winning ‘Young Adult’ author.    After Dowd died Patrick Ness was invited to develop her idea into a novel and then script.

The film A Monster Calls  was directed by the Spanish Director J.A. Bayone (The Impossible and The Others) and stars Liam Neeson,  Felicity Jones, Sigourney Weaver and the young Lewis MacDougal as Connor.    I urge you to see it.   But I also offer a warning.

In the rather beautiful opening credits water-colours float across the screen.   We will see such images later telling important stories and providing vital clues to guide us through the psychological and emotional thickets of this powerful movie.     But this is about death and facing the dying of a beloved.     

Twelve year old Connor’s mother has cancer.   He knows this and struggles with his fear, rage and shame.     His father is remarried and living in America.    His Grandmother seems to be emotionally distant.     So he is visited by a Yew Tree Monster who seems to wreak destruction but also tells ambiguous stories that confuse Conner.   And the Monster also demands that Connor will eventually tell his own story, the story that terrifies him.   

I read the Patrick Ness book in one sitting and remained determinately dry-eyed, but I knew that the more potent medium of the movie would not let me get away with that again.   It is nearly eleven years since my beloved wife died but it seems I still have tears to let flow.    Anything that helps us take another faltering step along the grieving road has to be good for us.   How often have I assured the bereaved that the tears we shed can help to heal us, but warned that unshed tears turn to acid and burn us from the inside.    Grief can feel like a monster, but it will not harm us if we respond to its call and face it, like brave young Connor, and listen to it.

I love the way today’s movie makers are able to put literally anything they can imagine onto the screen, from the kaleidoscopic  cityscapes of Doctor Strange and the beguilingly human BFG to the Yew Tree ‘ Monster’ voiced by Neeson in this film.   They can do so to thrill and amaze us, and can also do so to touch our hearts and heal us.  Movies can properly and beneficially move us.   Sometimes they address our own personal struggles, sometimes they are - as Saint Roger Ebert once said - ‘machines to produce empathy.’  

Twice in this film adults are faced with the outrageous behaviour of an emotionally  tortured child.    Twice he expects to be properly punished.  And twice he is asked ‘What possible good would that do?’    And so are we.    The late Josephine Hart’s novel Damage (filmed in 1992 by Louis Malle with Juliette Binoche, Jeremy Irons and Miranda Richardson)  made the crucial and succinct point that ‘damaged people damage people.’   That was long before we had to come to terms with the fact that abused people’s behavior so often alienates us from them,  making them –at the least – unsympathetic witnesses, self-harmers or, too often, abusive themselves.  

Empathy is a crucial characteristic of big brained mammals,  and one that needs to be fostered and fed.    Books such as  A Monster Calls may be hard to read, and movies such as this may be hard to watch,  but if they can help in healing our own wounds or feed our understanding of the wounds of others they are good for us.    And often rather beautiful.   I give thanks for those artists who write such books and those make such films.    

Sigourney Weaver must be pretty busy making the fifth Alien and three Avatar sequels.   She certainly does not need to master an impeccable English accent again for this role as she did long ago for The Year of Living Dangerously,  so she obviously wanted to be in this film.   Felicity Jones is at the top of her Theory of Everything and Star Wars acclaim and fame, so this comparatively ‘little film’ must have called to her too.   Liam Neesom can earn squillions making more meretricious Taken style revenge movies, but he also sometimes commits himself to more redemptive roles such as the recovering-alcoholic cop Matt Scudder in A Walk Among the Tombstones,  a brief appearance as God in the BBC’s wonderful Rev and now this.

As I said earlier, I urge you to see this film, but do heed my warning.

Cheeky CHAPPiE does not cheer me

Some years ago an advertising agency was given the uneviable task of persuading people to drink Babycham again.   For years this cheap and cheerful bubbly had been a laughing stock, as fashionable as support stockings.    Some desperate genius came up with the line ‘Babycham? it’s so far out, it’s in.’     I do not know if Babycham sales improved.

If only Chappie was so far out it’s in.     If only it was bad enough to be a great bad movie.    I left the cinema in a state of aesthetic culture shock.    I sensed that a small group of other people who had left the same auditorium were also reeling, and joined them.     We were united in our view.  This is One Really Bad Movie. 

I enjoyed Neill Blomkamps first film, District 9.    It was an original passionate political parable, an attack on any kind of racism or xenophobia,  made by South Africans in Jo’burg, but making the oppressed race real off-planet aliens.    The ‘xeno’ in xenophobia means ‘ different’ and these aliens were truly different.      Blomkamp’s second movie, Elysium,  with Matt Damon and Jodie Forster onboard,  was also about oppression, and I enjoyed its first two acts.   The way the third act degenerated into SFX and violence – and a singular lack of narrative logic – could be put down to the usual effect that big bucks and crass studio oversight can have on new directors.  See Gozilla.    Or rather don’t. 

But can we blame the Columbia Studio for Blomkamp’s Chappie?    I do not think so.  This is a poor thing, but it is his own.    In fact it is based on a short, very short, spoof ad. written by Blomkamp and his wife Terri  Tatchell way back in 2004, before District 9 was made.    Once more we are in Jo’burg, and some reviewers have assumed that like District 9  this film it is about political  oppression, this time inflicted on the local population by a robot police force.    But no, those who face these super-cops are heavily armed criminals, not subjugated citizens, and they have been brought in because of the heavy casualties the human police are suffering.       Deon (Dev Patel)  is the young programmer who created the robot software,  but he has higher ambitions.    He wants to endow them with AI,  the ability to think and act not just independently, but with a real moral sense.   More, he wants them to have an aesthetic sense and be creative.       When he tries to sell this idea to his boss (the woefully wasted Sigourney Weaver)  she laughs him to scorn.      Have you forgotten that you work for a corporation making Police Robots? she asks.    But Deon carries on his work all night, telling his video blog at one stage that he has almost cracked the programming problem,  just a few more terabytes of code to write  he says,  and two hours later he has done it.   He has written those ‘few more terabytes’ in two hours?    Ah, but of course  he had a can of RedBull to help him, delivered in one of the most outrageous examples of product placement I have ever seen in the movie.  

Denied permission to install this software in a working robot Deon steals a damaged and decommissioned one.      Meanwhile a trio of ‘kooky’ crims decide that the way to defeat the robocops is to find a remote to turn them off, and kidnap Deon and his now robot.   At this point the movie has opened up some interesting themes,   and I had hopes that it could join Her and Ex Machina as an intelligent exploration of AI.    We do see Chappie, as he is soon called, learning.    He is like a baby Deon tells his kidnappers.    I have to educate him.   But this cognitive and development education theme is badly fluffed.    Already I was wondering  is this meant to be  a parody of the films it clearly quotes?  Is it a caper thriller/comedy?   Has it any depth?    I still do not know what it was meant to be.        It is not parodic enough, nor does it build on any of the films it references in any interesting ways, and it is certainly not thrilling or comedic enough.       

We have seen so many robots and AI computers before.   The Copbots way back in THX 1138,   Sonny struggling with ethical and loyalty decisions in IRobot.       The chilling android David in Prometheus,  Hal  in 2001.    We have genuinely thoughtful movies such as  AI, Her and Ex Machina.   But here even Chappie’s minimally sketched  education cannot be compared to that of Frankenstein’s Creature,  nor his charm to that of  WALL-E.     I noticed that the poster says CHAPPiE.    Was that meant ot have some significance?      

However, when this creation  turns on his maker, Deon, outraged by the discovery that when his battery dies so will ‘he’,  my hopes rose again.  Maybe we would have a discussion around the Theodicy question of how a ‘loving’ God can allow death and suffering in the world;  but no.    No light is shed here.    This is not a philosophical movie.  

The plot soon becomes random.    Things happen simply because the Director needs them to happen, with no logical drive.    At one stage our crims visit a supplier to buy high the explosive  they need for the Big Heist.    We never find out what this heist will actually involve.     But while in the supplier’s stronghold they say Oh, and we’ll take those too.   ‘Those’ are  Sony PS4.     Why do they want them?    Simply because in a later scene Chappie will need them (no doubt to match the Sony laptops used throughout).    But no matter, when we have no real narrative sense of what is happening Hans Zimmer’s  music is blatantly used to tell us what is happening in dramatic terms, and what we should be feeling.   The music is so explicit that it might stand on its own without needing the rest of the film to illustrate it.    That really could be an improvement.   

Sigourney Weaver has little to do here, save lend her iconic presence.  She has made many fine films, and she has been happy to work off Ripley in other sf films in amusing ways, especially in the wonderful Galaxy Quest and the slightly less than wonderful burt amusing  Paul.    But sometimes seeing her name on the poster can raise unfulfilled expectations.   It does here.   Hugh Jackman plays the villain, a rival engineer who wants to discredit Deon’s work in order to boost sales of his own gigantic Robocop copy.    He plays his part well, and is game enough to display a mullet as he does so.    Dev Patel is fine,  but he really isn’t asked to do to much with his bland, naïve character.  Sharlto Copley, first revealed to us in District 9 , provides the motion capture and voice of Chappie.    To see a robot moving like a three year old, a teenager and then a ‘cool gansta’ is fun, and he does it well.  The voice, however, becomes annoying after a while.     A couple of South African musicians, known as Die Aantwon, are cast as the criminals who become Chappie’s ‘mother and father’, and they also amuse, but their characters have no depth, and their development from vicious criminals to a pair of caring – even heroic - people has no foundations or emotional logic.

Blomkamp is a gifted, creative and committed film maker.   He is still learning his trade, and I am sure he has a long  career ahead of  him.   It cannot be easy to listen to older and wiser voices when you have made an impressive debut,   but I think he needs to if he is going to improve on Chappie.