Movie Review: Chappie, Jupiter Ascending, Dawn of the Apes, Divergent

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Foreword

Each of these big blockbuster movies answers this question in different ways. Perhaps it's a byproduct of our postmodern culture's existentialist angst, but the big-screen movies these days seem to be doing a lot of the following: taking stock of fundamental questions of human nature, civilization, consciousness, matters of right and wrong, etc. If you're watching the action flicks for imagination fodder, you won't be disappointed, but you may miss the overarching plot.

Allow me to invent/define some terms for the sake of this review:

The "plot" is the obvious problem that is directly presented to the audience.
The "sub-plot" is any theme with importance but which may appear to be a distraction at first, since its connection to the plot isn't immediately clear (and if there is no connection, the flow of the movie suffers).
The "meta-plot" is the implicit, overarching theme that the movie makes reference to without ever explicitly addressing. Basically, if you pick out the theme, and ask "what would this cause the characters to be concerned about, or do?" then you have the meta-plot.

Example:
Plot: Simba grows up orphaned and has to somehow right the wrongs that his uncle Scar has perpetrated on the African Savannah.
Subplot: Simba's relationships with his father, Nala, Timon/Pumba and other characters.
Meta-plot: the quest to figure out what's important in life / growing up, becoming a man. Whereas the theme is "manhood," the meta-plot could be summed up as "Simba has to discover something in himself (a sense of duty/honor), and/or find his purpose in life, which will drive him to confront Scar, and help him win."

And the import of the meta-plot is communicated more through the subplot than the main plot. If all you're doing is following along CBS-tv-drama-style, you'll know why the characters are going from one place to the next and such, but you won't grasp the significance, and come away with the real message (intentional or unintentional from the director's/producer's standpoint) of the film.

Let's dive in.

****            ****            ****            ****

Introduction

The last 4 [not-yet-reviewed by yours truly] sci-fi movies I remember watching all had a common theme, explored in very different ways. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes answered the question, "what does it mean to be human?" through exploring the human-like qualities of the fictional ape characters. Chappie asks the question "what is consciousness?" by exploring the journey of learning of a robot, who rapidly traverses formative childhood and copes with the innate badness of human beings as he "grows up." Jupiter Ascending asks, "what is the worth of a society?" or "what makes life worth living?" and answers it through the parallelism of a jaded teenager who feels like she's wasting her life cleaning toilets, compared to jaded interstellar aristocrats who seem to live for nothing but to keep on living. Lastly, Divergent asks whether conformity is necessary for social stability, and asks if suppressing individuality through human government is a) possible or b) promotes peace, or tyranny.

Each film seems to invite the suggestion that how one responds to struggle is what reveals--or defines--one's humanity, and since without struggle, there is no plot, let's investigate the central struggles of these four films.

Last call for spoiler warnings

Brief Review of Interstellar

I grabbed the first Redbox movie in a long while and watched it earlier this week.

Interstellar is a film that thrives on making the special effects scientifically accurate -- there's no sound in space, waves are caused by the gravity of a nearby spacial body, mechanical equipment can tolerate lots of stress and collision damage but depressurization catastrophically tears it apart, the sensation of gravity in space must be generated by angular rotation, areas of high gravity play havoc with our straight-line perception of the surrounding space, bigger black holes are better black holes because they won't spaghettify you, the relativity of time is significant when spending time near high gravity ("every hour on the surface is 7 years back on earth" / "this little maneuver will cost us 51 years!"), etc.

The film also leans heavily on the human drama, with success. By that I mean that unlike many sci-fi epics, it doesn't feel forced, or added-on as an afterthought to please the crowd, but that it holds a central role without being uncomfortable or distracting from the plot. Indeed, the human drama is what drives the plot: resource scarcity on earth is what drives Matt McConaughey's father character to take a risk in order to make a better life for his children.

PROs:

• no sexuality. Not even kissing between the main characters, except one shot in the end between Jessica Chastain and Topher Grace, intended as humor and not depicted sensually
• no grotesque violence. The violence in the film is realistic and restrained, hardly characterizing the film but punctuating it at key moments to emphasize the heightened tension, if you somehow missed Hans Zimmer's mood-setting organ music.
• very little hint of any political punditry underwriting the plot -- considering that the director is Christoper Nolan, whose Batman movies have had such great success, I suspect, because of their distinct tendency to avoid promoting Hollywood Liberalism, it makes sense; I think, whatever his personal views are, that he's got a keen sense for the sort of messages that turn off or turn on a broad American audience.
• the closest thing to it is a government-issued textbook a public school teacher describes to McConaughey's character, as being 'corrected,' to show that the moon-landing was faked in order to bankrupt the Russians by making them waste resources on an imaginary space race. This is a very limited dialogue, and it leaves no one a glaringly obvious hint as to whether the censorship is supposed to be more consistent with a Republican or Democrat ideology.
• As for the setting, there is a hint that there was a global conflict some years or decades earlier, and that as a side-effect, it damaged global crops to the point that society reverted to become primarily automated, mechanized subsistence farming-based. It's implied that it's several decades if not a century or two in the future, but not too far, because historical events like the Dust Bowl and moon landing are referenced. The film avoids making statements that could be interpreted as overtly 'peacenik' or environmentalist, and thus succeeds at being a cautionary tale that's vague enough for anyone to import their own ideas into, as to what could be done to stop it. However, the line about "repeating the excess/wastefulness of the 20th century" is something that viewers might variably agree with or find just cause to label the teacher character as representative of their political opponents.
• The science is accurate. Assumptions are made about things that we don't know enough about, such as the nature of wormholes and black holes, and a few other things (mentioned below), but nothing that we know from physics is controverted. This makes it a better film than most, for an authenticity-hound like myself.
• Robots work the way they're supposed to.
• It promotes selfless sacrifice of oneself for others, and condemns the premeditated dismissive 'sacrifice' of some others for the sake of other others.
• It highlights the bonds of family and by cutting and scoring, present loving relationships as being one of if not the strongest driver to persevere in the face of difficulty.
• True to its departure from other space movies, and in part because it's more like Apollo 13 than Aliens, it doesn't start with 20 cast members and slowly kill them off until there's two left. The deaths are fewer and therefore more significant in terms of moving the plot, or providing closure on a subplot.

CONs:

More for the Movie Wish-List

There's a number of films I haven't yet seen, that I would like to. And they tend to be either documentaries or interview-centric. Some of the best films I've seen have been docu's. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was probably the first one of such, which changed my motivations for watching movies. After it, I saw "Iranium," and "180," but since moving back from college, with limited internet capacity, I have spent very little time on Youtube, or downloading/streaming movies anywhere, for that matter.

I "splurged" with respect to data usage, and watched this trailer:

"Polycarp: Destroyer of Gods," which I came across via Ken Ham's AiG blog where he recommended it after seeing it.

Other movies that have come out that I'd like to see are
Noah and the Last Days
IndoctriNation
Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus
and the film still in the works,
Genesis 

My list of books I'd like for a future library is even longer.

Here's to hoping I get the chance to watch the film sometime soon.

~ Rak Chazak

Movie Review: Hercules ft. Dwayne Johnson, and Edge of Tomorrow

I used my day off to take scrap garbage to the landfill, and watch two movies from Redbox back-to-back. The $2.50 for two movies is sweet, sweet free market delight. I might never go to the movie theater again, save once a year for auspicious occasions. Let the lowest-priced DVD-quality video provider win.

Hercules:

What I liked: With the exception of one flash-back of his wife, there really wasn't any sexual innuendo aside from wordplay that younger children would miss.

What I really liked: The movie avoided cliche'd supernatural cinematic overtures, and left the question of Hercules' mythology largely ambiguous. The movie even ends with a narration asking whether Hercules was more myth than man and whether it mattered; The Rock doesn't do anything that's necessarily impossible, just in two scenes he performs deeds that seem highly, highly improbable, which I suppose are included to offer the viewer something to grumble about--whether it indicates superhuman strength or not. In the legend of Hercules, Zeus' jealous wife Hera possesses Hercules to murder his family, driving him mad. But in the movie, it's part of a very human, larger plot twist that plays an integral role in the theme of who the man is, where he stops and the myth begins.

What might make you think: I appreciated that the film offered a "mythologically accurate" retelling while at the same time eschewing the cliche's and offering you a suggestion of how it might have happened if there were no gods or demons involved at all, just larger-than-life men who inspired embellished storytelling for one reason or another. I also appreciated that for once, this was directed at an actual myth, and not like so many modern movies, an attempt to undermine the Bible's account of history by recasting it as an after-the-fact hagiographical depiction of a much different reality.

It's a war movie, so there's blood and depictions of dead bodies, implied just-barely-off-screen breaking of bones, and intense emotional grief/anger, on people's faces as well as in the audio, so it's not a fairy tale movie but because of its lack of sex and obscene gore, as well as comparatively minimal profanity, it should be fine to watch with your preteen.

Edge of Tomorrow:                  (Groundhog Day, or Source Code, with guns and aliens)

The Religion of Transformers: Age of Extinction

Transformers IV finally came out on Redbox and I immediately rented it to watch at home. Well worth the wait. I enjoy action movies, for several distinct reasons.

1. They're creatively stimulating. Intricate CGI gives an active mind much to fantasize about.
2. You'll therefore get something out of it even if the plot or dialogue is terrible.
3. Because of the emphasis on aliens, robots, war etc, there's less unnecessary sexual content.
4. Because of dealing with very big themes and archetypes, the sparse dialogue is more significant. It can therefore be amazing (Jurassic Park, Dark Knight), or far off the mark.

In this case, with my senses highly attuned to detecting religious themes, I found several seemingly innocuous scenes which could, depending on a particular person's political/religious passions, be enormously significant, either as a slight or as an affirmation.

These go all across the board. Allow me, briefly, to show you where and what they are, to hopefully dazzle you with content you might not have noticed when you watched it.

Possible Theme: Diversity and Multiculturalism v. Conformity and Tradition

This is not an evenly matched equation, I grant you. But yet this is what gets bandied about in higher academia. Diversity is the golden calf and golden goose egg both, for universities these days. There is an unquestioned assumption that geographic diversity among students means better things for society. This has replaced the archaic notion that diversity of thought improves education by increasing students' exposure to a variety of ideas through lively discourse, that the most persuasive arguments may carry the day.

And why is this set in opposition to "tradition?" Because it's held in these circles that people who are "opposed to diversity" are religious hardliners who are all about following outmoded rules and such.

This is a portion of the cultural message from the left that I've been exposed to via student organizations in my college experience. That's why it stood out to me, when this line of dialogue occurred:

"All this species mixing with species, it upsets the cosmic balance. The Creators, they don't like it. They built you to do what you were told."

This is put in the mouth of the archvillain of the movie, and in one fell swoop, it ties the ideas of racism in with obedience to one's Creator. Subliminal promotion of the belief that the Bible and Christianity are/promote racist ideologies? Or do you disagree?

Next up,

Movie Reviews: Guardians of the Galaxy, Catching Fire, 47 Ronin, and More…

Redbox has become a middle road between the convenience of Netflix and the tangibility of what once was Blockbuster. Do you remember Blockbuster? It was a movie library, where you could go and peruse the classics on the shelves as well as pick up the new releases advertised around the wall. This was how I saw Terminator as late as 2008. But the internet era killed Blockbuster. The prices for rentals and the 7-day return was a relic of a pre-internet era. I mean, most of the movies were in VHS format! After this, my family finally joined the 21^st century and got ourselves a DVD player. Now a new contender has popped up, taking advantage of the ease of storage of DVDs and securing a reliable business model with one-day rental, allowing the prices to be low, ensuring customer loyalty. Redbox has become an overnight hit and I see them everywhere. There are at least five that I’m aware of in my town, at gas stations and supermarkets, but there are probably several more, and we’ve definitely taken up the habit of bringing home a movie in the evening some days and returning it the next morning after watching it. The calculus is too appealing to forgo: I can go to the movies and pay $8 for a ticket, $13 for 3D, and double that price if I’m paying for another person because I’m treating them. Compare this to the $1.20 price (increased once, so far, after starting at a flat rate of $1) of any DVD at Redbox. I can watch every single blockbuster of a single year for the price of taking me and one other person to the movies. This leaves plenty of room for snacks, not to mention that I can choose when to watch it, which is a convenience not afforded by small theaters, and it offers the opportunity to watch a broader range of movies than I might otherwise bother to go to theaters for. I would suspect that Redbox has therefore been a boon to independent films, and films that don’t get wide releases or make it to the aforementioned small theaters. In summary: all but one of the following I have watched on a Redbox rental, the sole exception being Guardians of the Galaxy, which we had to stay up til 9:30 for the latest showing, getting out around midnight, all just to avoid giving 3D a chance to ruin it for us. I don’t need 3D gimmicks to tell me that Object X is in front of Object Y. My eyes’ depth perception works just fine with a flat image, and the 3D glasses make the picture less sharp, which is my biggest irritation with it. A useless gimmick is one thing, but for it to reduce the picture quality? Why am I paying more for this, again?!

On to the reviews!

I determined that I could group some of the observations I made from these into different categories. Seeing everything through a lens of Christian theology is making me pick up on intriguing themes, whether intentional or unintentional as far as the director/producers are concerned. Some of the movies have little applicable themes, like Lone Survivor, which since it was made to be an accurate retelling doesn’t try to go outside of its realm, artistically speaking. The Last Days on Mars is another example of one without any sort of Christian parallels, seeing as it was (to my surprise) a good old-fashioned space zombies horror thriller. I’m honest with this and if I don’t pick up on something that I consider poignant, I won’t try to pigeonhole a movie to mean something it doesn’t. Yet, several of the movies were fascinating in this regard. Others were just good because they didn’t have “unnecessary gratuitous boobies” or suchlike.

There will be some spoilers.
*     *     *     *     *

Crop Dusting

I caught some pictures of this plane on film camera last year, but when I came back from a morning run one morning this summer, I witnessed this single-engine skimming the tops of the trees directly over our house. I quickly ran inside and grabbed my digital camera and snapped a few shots, but the video was better. Here's what a single pass looked like, from the road:

This is my first video upload anywhere on the internet, (correction: outside of Facebook) so it's going to be interesting to experiment with this and see how it goes.

~ Rak Chazak