Chris At The Pictures

If your only exposure to the Divergent series was through their marketing, it’d come as somewhat of a shock to find that it’s actually another dystopian young adult franchise, not an arthouse drama following a group of stranded teens attempting to get down from a tall building. Seriously, look at the one-sheet for Divergent:

Look a bit stuck, don’t they? As if they didn’t quite think the whole thing through. Things don’t improve in part two…

After a quick change of hairstyles (more aerodynamic, maybe?), the star of Insurgent and her cohort were a bit too keen to reach the bottom.

And now, we reach part three in the series: our central lovers (accompanied by some concerned friends) have slowed things down a bit, tackling the descent with a dubious minimum of safety equipment.  This careful approach defines Allegiant as a film: playing it safe.

The last instalment ended with the revelation that Chicago, home city of our heroine, Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley), is a massive scientific experiment controlled from without. We very distinctly saw the gates of the city opened, and the inhabitants tiptoeing out onto pastures new. Within the first thirty seconds of Allegiant, however, the gates are closed and the  masses make an awkward U-turn, trudging back to the squabbling and infighting they were apparently desperate to break away from.

Tris, Four (Theo James) and company are forced to climb their way to freedom over the wall. Once beyond, they encounter The Bureau, a scientific order that surveys Chicago in the pursuit of discovering genetic purity. Overseer David (Jeff Daniels, practically trolleyed onto set from his role in The Martian) informs Tris that her divergent nature singles her out as ‘pure’ (read: chosen one) amongst her ‘damaged’ peers, and that she has key role to play in rebuilding the damaged world.

For a brief period, and despite my extreme lack of interest in the two previous movies, I found the opening act oddly gripping: we get punchy action set pieces with some nicely experimental sci-fi tech on display. However, this intrigue only carries the film so far; right until the CGI drones and bubble capsules are deployed not as world-building but active plot staples brought into play because the characters simply aren’t involving enough. Woodley is ferried from scene to scene, reverting back to the motionless, stale-faced approach that so vehemently turned me off the first Divergent, and James (despite having a far more active part) glowers from under his eyebrows ad infinitum. At the very least, Miles Teller seems to be having fun as Peter (the Edmund Pevensie of the group), but I can’t imagine the role of 'unlovable buzzkill' is any great stretch.

Skewed in favour of image over insight as the first act may be, it’s at least preferable to later stages which completely lose desire for any kind of vitality: as the signposted twists and turns unfold with box-ticking predictability, screen-time is split between the orange wastelands surrounding The Bureau and the civil war in Chicago, of which very little is actually depicted (presumably most of the budget got spent on rendering the Mad Max-y backdrops). Both concurrent climaxes are insipidly bloodless.

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Quite possibly the worst thing a film can do to you is betray you. Now I know that sounds like hyperbole, but despite the large and varied prejudices aimed at Fantastic Four – Marvel’s latest re-working of their classic comic book series – I entered the cinema truly wanting to be the dissident, the lone voice who found something of a gem within a troubled eventuality. Alas, my hopes were slowly but surely turned to ash as a laborious and suffocated production dragged itself across the screen.

The story will be somewhat familiar to anyone who knows the original comic, but for those who don’t: aspiring scientist Reed Richards (Miles Teller) creates a device capable of inter-dimensional travel and is hired by Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey in permanent motivational speech mode) to help develop the machine for NASA. Richards and his companions Johnny Storm, Victor Von Doom and childhood friend Ben Grimm (Michael B. Jordan, Toby Kebbell and Jamie Bell respectively) take a journey to another dimension but are ravaged by cosmic radiation, as is Franklin’s daughter Sue (Kate Mara) when the capsule returns to Earth. Whilst Victor is left behind, the remaining four friends wrestle with strange and powerful new abilities.

The tiny spark of a good idea that I wanted to be much larger manifests itself here in two forms: for one, the opening thirty minutes is mostly character building; developing the dynamic between the young scientists and exuding an Interstellar-like ‘shoot for the moon’ attitude, a hope that extraordinary discovery is just beyond the horizon. Weirdly, the second is a complete clash with this wide-eyed optimism, and appears when the group return from the alien world. Their new powers – far from wowing them or enthusing them to reach for new heights – hurt and traumatise our young heroes, presenting their mutations as a Croenenbergian body horror nightmare.

Sadly, the compromised nature of the film (supposed falling out between the director and the studio, extensive re-shoots, re-workings of the script to name but a few) means that any initial promise is cruelly snuffed out. This is surely a case of the ‘making of’ being a more interesting, exciting and funny final product than the joyless feature it produced.

While at least Teller and Jordan appear to be enjoying themselves, everyone else on screen slips into a stupor by the 40-minute mark, so the promised depth of character and narrative plods to a standstill. One can only imagine how/if the original second half might have saved the project, but for now we’re dealt a clear point where Trank’s film ends and the studio re-shoots begin. The final act is rushed forcibly into empty and unfulfilling action sequences with lumpen dialogue, a cliché villain and super-powers that are arbitrarily introduced when required for the plot and never properly explained.

So those who come for the story will be bored, those who come for action will feel cheated, and God only knows how lovers of the comic must be feeling. I’m never usually lenient on comic fans when it comes to film adaptations (believing that a movie has to stand up on its own terms), but this is something else. Fantastic Four was a chance to heal a wound in Marvel’s movie history, a delicate operation that unfortunately fumbled the scalpel and lobotomised the patient.

When the entire audience of a cinema goes silent enough to hear the fingers losing the pin – let alone it hitting the floor – you know a film is working. When it happens not once but twice, three times or more; pure cinematic magic is being performed. In this instance, the wand is a drum stick, and the film is Whiplash, Damien Chazzele’s drama about jazz student Andrew (Miles Teller), a quiet but hard-working drummer determined to rise through the ranks. Believing he’s been given his chance when band master Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) recruits him to a prestigious music conservatory, Andrew soon finds himself pressured to breaking point by teaching methods bordering on psychosis.

At the heart of Whiplash is a furious battle between two of the finest screen performances in years, a furnace of raw talent fuelled by a script sharp enough to cut diamond. Teller is disciplined and nuanced with just the right level of emotional leverage to sell the façade of someone desperate to give their life meaning, whilst Simmons engulfs the screen as a sinewy, black-clad monster that some have compared to Sergeant Hartman of Full Metal Jacket but for my money bears more resemblance to Darth Vader with Tourette’s.

Though there’s drama and tension to spare, the script also manages to find room for laugh-out-loud black comedy and plot twists shocking enough to make M. Night Shyamalan’s hair curl. The interior design and colour palette of the film present a warm, golden-brown hue of wood and brass that lulls you into a sense of calm and comfort before the dialogue snaps you straight back into the drama without pause for breath. The writing also takes into account the effect of our young protagonist’s climb to stardom on those around him, whether it’s his concerned father or the timid young woman with whom Andrew strikes up a brief relationship before the cut-throat path to perfection leads him away.

For those among you worried that your taste in music will put you off the film, fear not: I can’t stand jazz and am bored easily by languorous drum solos but I’ll be damned if I didn’t enjoy the heck out of the music in this film. Every piece of music – especially the titular Whiplash – begins to take on a character of its own as the skill level soars higher and higher and Andrew is forced to play faster, harder and longer than ever before with each passing suite, culminating in a sequence so palpably powerful you’ll be left sporting a knee that won’t stop jiggling up and down.

With the sheer number of individually brilliant elements fused gloriously together, it is no wonder many are hailing Whiplash as a triumph of modern cinema: it is a blood-smeared shot of adrenaline into the slack vein of awards season predictability and makes a more intense, funny and smart study of a tortured artist than Birdman could ever hope to be. Prepare to leave your seat with enough energy to run a mile and back in time for the next showing, and believe me; you’ll want to do just that.

★★★★★