Direct Beam Comms #28

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, MoviesPosted on

Movies

MI–5 aka Spooks: The Greater Good Grade: C-

635823553900970690-STGG-LD-2005I finally caught up with this movie based on the British TV series MI–5 or Spooks, depending on where you live, from 2015. This film stars Kit Harington of Game of Thrones as Will Holloway, an ex-secret agent brought into the fold when things go wrong, people die the head of MI–5 Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) goes on the run.

Or something — I was never quite sure just what was going on.

I have a complicated relationship with the MI–5 TV series (2002–2011). That show was a sort’a UK version of the TV series 24 and shared both its strengths and weaknesses. Both shows were fast movie and action packed but didn’t have much depth. I remember watching the first season of MI–5 with a lot of interest, but I didn’t watch much of the series after the second season when the episodes started blending together to me. (Though I would argue that the second season episode of MI–5 entitled “I Spy Apocalypse” is a great hour of TV.)

That being said, I was interested in the MI–5 movie when it came out in 2015, though apparently not interested enough to go to the theater to see it or actually pay money outside my cable subscription to watch it.

The MI–5 movie is a lot like the MI–5 TV show, there’s a lot of action, a lot of things happen that if they didn’t happen in exactly the right order would mess up someone’s plan — and they always happen in the right order — and a whole lot of plot holes too. Which makes me wonder, with the MI–5 movie feeling essentially like an episode of the TV MI–5 that stars the guy from TV’s Game of Thrones why was did this need to be a movie at all?

It seems to me that when TV shows become movies that share most of the same cast and crew those movies tend to have a bigger, more expansive story than the TV series or go to places a single episode of TV on a budget couldn’t. Look at something like The X-Files movie from 1998 that featured a bigger story and bigger special effects or even the second Sex and the City movies that took that cast to Abu Dhabi.

The movie version of MI–5 does seem like it has a slightly larger budget than a comparable episode of the show but not much and all of the locations are shot around London, where the TV series took place, or London doubling for some other European local. The movie MI–5 does have the requisite story point of knocking off some of the TV characters in the film. Which now that I think of it, they did a lot of in the show too so even that’s not unique.

Still, even if MI–5 was a good episode of the TV series on the big screen that would have been good enough. But it wasn’t. The story here was absolutely a mess and I was never sure just what the characters were trying to do most of the time. And the end features a plot turn that’s so utterly insane it made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Everest Grade B+

700x394Another movie from last year that I just caught up on was Everest. And, unlike MI–5, I thought Everest was really good.

Everest tells the real story of an ill-fated climbing expedition of Mt. Everest in 1996 where eight climbers were caught in a storm and died. The movie plays out as a disaster film where we’re introduced to characters based on real people at the start of the movie and get to know them as the story progresses. Which means that when things start going wrong in Everest at about the half way mark we feel for them.

When the 1996 event happened I remember hearing about it on the news and watching documentaries based on it years later. So I felt going into Everest that I had a good grasp for what was going to happen. What I didn’t realize was exactly how the disaster unfolded, how conditions kept getting worse and worse as little mistakes that alone probably wouldn’t have amounted to anything started adding up and costing lives.

Like the group trying to summit Mt. Everest getting stuck waiting for ropes to be installed to help them get over a difficult part of the mountain. Or a limited supply of oxygen at the top of the mountain. Or a mountaineer having vision problems waiting for a person to come down and meet him rather than simply going down the mountain with another group…

Alone these issues probably wouldn’t amount to anything. But here, together, and with a blizzard raging over the mountain would lead to all those deaths. Which makes me wonder how many times other groups going up Mt. Everest get into the same kinds of situations, but are able to get out of it without anyone dying since things go their way instead of against them?

The first half of Everest is an introduction to the characters and life on the highest mountain in the world. The last half is essentially the ill-fated climb. The climb starts at midnight the day of the summit, then goes until around noon when the actual summit’s supposed to take place with everyone heading back down by 2PM. Except here, with all these mistakes holding the group up then the blizzard tearing across the mountain ends up causing havoc as the group splinters, some of the climbers becoming lost and others trapped in a place where they literally can’t breath.

And as rescue attempts are mounted, it slowly becomes apparent that for some of the climbers, still very much alive, rescue simply isn’t possible.

I think what helps and kind’a hurts Everest is that since it’s based on a true story there’s never any one big “Hollywood” moment where a team of heroic climbers are able to rescue the lead characters and bring them down alive. Since that didn’t happen in real life, it doesn’t happen here. Especially since where you’ve reached a certain altitude on Everest that kind of rescue is impossible since the air’s so thin that it takes all a person has just to get themselves down, let alone another.

I do think it’s that realism that ultimately benefits the movie since the story never ever has that moment of the climbers emerging out of the storm unscathed unlike what happens in most fictionalized mountain climbing movies.

BTW — I was surprised just how full Everest was of movie stars — or at least a lot of recognizable faces from Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Kiera Knightley and Jake Gyllenhaal to name a few.

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1954: Them! premiers in theaters
  • 1958: Bruce Campbell of The Evil Dead films and TV series is born
  • 1976: Logan’s Run premiers in theaters
  • 1981: Superman II opens
  • 1983: The movie Twilight Zone premiers
  • 1987: Spaceballs opens in theaters
  • 1989: Tim Burton’s Batman is released
  • 1991: The Rocketeer premiers in theaters

ID4: Disaster on a grand scale

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The summer of 1996 the movie Independence Day (ID4) was everywhere. It’s hard to understand now with how much pop-culture is fragmented, but 20 years ago that movie was ubiquitous on TV commercials, on the covers of magazines and in print ads as well. Even though back then it took a lot to get me to go out to see a movie I remember being particularly excited about ID4. In fact, now that I think about it, between the years 1994 and 1997 the ONLY movie I saw in the theater was ID4.

But why? Why was ID4 THE movie to see that year?

Will Smith
Will Smith

Was it because of actor Will Smith? Maybe, but at the time Smith was more known as a guy on TV who in 1996 was just on the verge of becoming a world-wide mega-star.

Was it because the movie was the “hip” flick of the year? Again, maybe. But a movie really can’t be “hip” until people see it. And everyone was excited and talking about ID4 for months before the release.

I think the reason ID4 was so big was because it was the first disaster movie to be released in the digital age.

Always before with disaster movies all the special effects were practical — done with models and other in-camera effects. But ID4 would be the first big-budget movie to use the then relatively new computer special effects to show all the damage and destruction that comes with a disaster flick on a grand scale. Even the best movies using practical special effects that try and show a huge expanse of disaster can come off looking cheap and cheesy. With those movies, wide vistas usually have to be done with large static matte paintings along with miniature models and various in-camera trickery.

Judd Hirsch, Mary McDonnell and Jeff Goldblum
Judd Hirsch, Mary McDonnell and Jeff Goldblum

And those are for the big budget movies. For the many large scale disaster movies that didn’t have a decent budget things look much worse. Miniature buildings don’t look like real buildings. Cheap blue-screen backgrounds look like cheap blue-screen backgrounds. And, worst of all, good special effects shots get used over and over again or good special effects shots from other movies are recycled into the cruddy ones.

But most of these problems disappear in the digital realm. What’s very hard to do practically is relatively easy to do digitally. And that’s what I think we were looking forward to the most with ID4 the summer of 1996. We were finally going to see just what the end of the world might look like in all its realistic glory. Or at least as “realistic” as gigantic alien spaceships zapping major metropolitan areas can be.

When I saw ID4 I remember being particularly impressed. I adored the movie, how it kept me on the edge of my seat and I loved how everything looked. In fact, I remember buying the ID4 movie magazine that fall and taking it into a college computer art and design class and looking at the pictures with classmates trying to figure out how all the special effects were done.

MV5BMzExOWQ0ZTItNWIyMS00ZGFkLWFlMmQtZmQyYjY0OTdjMTEzXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTAyNDQ2NjI@._V1_SX640_SY720_Later on in 1996 when ID4 was being released on VHS the excitement over that movie coming out on home video was palpable too. I remember standing in the lobby of a OnCue and watching the VHS commercial/trailer for ID4 over and over and over again. I bought ID4 when it came out on VHS and even “upgraded” my purchase years later by buying a bootleg VHS director’s cut of the movie dubbed from Laserdisc.

The ID4 disaster flick was so successful that it would later spawn a flock of other disaster movies in the late 1990s as well. From Volcano and Dante’s Peak (both 1997) to Deep Impact and Armageddon (both 1998) no part of the Earth was safe from destruction. And even the creators of ID4 tried their hand at another disaster film a few years later with Godzilla also in 1998.

Looking back now I’d say that ID4 is an enjoyable movie with some problems. It’s not one of those films that stands up to multiple viewings. It’s fun the first time, but not so much later after the holes become apparent. I can only hope the Independence Day sequel, titled Independence Day: Resurgence, out almost exactly 20 years after the original is at least as fun as the first film.