Writer-director James Cameron has a knack for writing chimera: characters who combine, or who are at least attempting to reconcile, two disparate forms of identity. His Terminators are the most obvious example of this psychological discrepancy. They are futuristic machinery wrapped up in a sheath of human flesh that either rots in place after being shot full of holes or transmits such a convincing camouflage that the deception begins to turn itself inwards, inspiring a dot matrix approximation of heroism. Stephen Lang's motion-captured shade of Colonel Miles Quaritch is an abomination, a high-and-tight infiltrator who makes no attempt to assimilate or even disguise his Earthly origins. He is the memories and prejudices of an American imperialist, inscribed on the eve of what he believed to be his career-defining victory then wired into another massive cobalt clone. Jake Sully's eager symbiosis in the original film is caricatured in Avatar: The Way of Water by a team of colossal photostats who refuse to let go of their branded sunglasses and tactical apparel. Quaritch and his thugs only speak the language of conquest, clinging on to the possessions and hang-ups that defined their (now extant) human lives.
Although we are told that pain and infection have been eliminated in the oddly Mediterranean present seen in Crimes of the Future, Viggo Mortensen's Saul writhes in agony throughout David Cronenberg's latest film. Unlike his partner, Léa Seydoux's Caprice, who can hold steaming skillets and must voluntarily alter her appearance, Saul's body is constantly undergoing a twisting transformation. His insides give birth to new, unknown organs that are assumed to be vestigial and potentially tumorous. Saul submits himself to Caprice's surgical tinkering for the amusement of the champagne and canapés set, earning them both a fainting notoriety. Even the performance artist's attempts to feed himself primary-coloured mush requires a soothing, swishing, skeletal apparatus - one designed to simulate the movements that a body locked in choking dysphagia has otherwise grown unaccustomed to.
A stop-motion animation project decades in the making, Phil Tippett's Kickstarted shorts have - finally - blossomed into a full-length feature. Far longer than the constituent parts drip-feed over the tail-end of the 2010s, this Mad God pulls apart those three previously released episodes then stitches them back together around deeper, meaner, digressions. As always, a sturdy looking fellow in a gas mask is airdropped into a Hell of scratch built rot from the skies above, tasked with making sense of a crumbling map and the relentless gnashing around him. His journey excavates dozens of extinct, and still-functional, realms; all fixated on cruelty as an industry with no clear outcome. These wanders take the gas masked assassin to the centre of this sunken creation to set a bomb that has no hope of detonating.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria is built out of held frames, the director and his cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom using a flattened space, unmotivated by camera movement, to create vignettes. Tilda Swinton creeps across these frames. Her Jessica is always reticent, a trespasser slowly prodding further and further into places she doesn't seem convinced that she should be occupying. Weerasethakul also cranks up diegetic sound far beyond typically acceptable levels. The audience prodded to tune into the cacophonies that accompany this stillness; understanding these rhythms as extant incident rather than a plotted bread crumb. Weerasethakul never betrays this somnolent trust either. He allows his audience to abandon their search for obvious meaning or direction, sinking into scenes and situations to the extent that they are then able to conjure up a sense memory - a smell, maybe - associated with their own experience of having existed within similar moments.
Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan's Island defies the simplistic morality of heroic fantasy by having its lead child use his towering white robot to step on and crush fleeing, helpless, enemies. The act, a grim necessity with a nuclear weapon in play, registers first as disgusts then abject horror on Amuro's face; Yasuhiko's boyish draft of the character accentuating this acute, overwhelming, distress. The unspoken spell of this formerly peaceful space has been broken. Ray forcibly disconnects from the fast friendships he has made in this place; the safety and comfort of a childhood lived amongst other children. He resumes being a soldier. The viewer is left with an overwhelming impression that they have experienced a short but profound moment in Amuro's life. An alternative to an existence spent fighting was briefly available to him but, ultimately, forgone.
Amleth escapes but never recovers from the outrages he experiences as a child. The Northman's identity and outlook are frozen in the moments when he watched, helpless, as his father was slaughtered and his mother carried away as plunder. Amleth therefore never quite shakes off the spell that was cast over him in a smoke-choked hut in the days leading up to this event. His passage into adulthood was inadvertently stunted; the animal aspect that was summoned by shamanic ritual is never corrected by a return to the patterns and rhythms of a normal, albeit courtly, life. The oath he swears during his flight - to avenge his father and free his mother - becomes an all-consuming ideological fulcrum. A desire for correction now burns within Amleth. The emotion has swallowed him whole, feeding the slathering, amoral might that lurks within.
Deciphered as camp by cackling YouTube nit-pickers, who are themselves mired in the digital language of an American action cinema that demands everybody present as indifferent, SS Rajamouli's RRR is instead a self-consciously mythic folk tale, one that isn't afraid to bend real-life revolutionary leaders to its own demented will by dreaming up the exciting fictions that tested these men while they were experiencing their own (Christ-like) wilderness years. Set during the brutal reign of the British Raj, Rajamouli's film concerns the fast friendship between two men from opposite ends of the Indian sociopolitical spectrum - Ram Charan's chiselled matinee idol cop and Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao Jr's rather more cuddly tribal tracker. Discussion of Rajamouli's film has largely lasered in on its earnestness: the unashamed chumminess of the twin leads or the wave of computer generated animals that gobbled up the slow-on-the-draw colonisers. Far more affecting than either though is the scourging of Rama Rao Jr's Bheem, a sequence that generates a frequency similar to religious revelation, in which the captured man is whipped bloody by his best friend before his body is torturously manipulated by chained contraptions. Rather than kneel before the sadistic occupiers directing this outrage, Bheem straightens his flayed, oozing body and begins to sing through the barbed lashes. This immaculate defiance carries over the weeping crowds, drawn from Indian society's clashing castes, inspiring Bheem's countrymen to rise up then bite out the throats of their white tormenters.
Shin Ultraman impresses in its ability to constantly update both the stakes in play and the genre language used to decode them. The film's early passages set up a scenario straight out of the Silver Age Superman comics with Takumi Saitoh's Shinji Kaminga as the Clark Kent-like human alter-ego for Ultraman and Masami Nagasawa's Hiroko Asami as the Lois Lane analogue snooping into his affairs. This section contains delirious super-fights between the androgynous otherworldly defender and a radiation gobbling monster who has, in this instance, been spewed up from a revolting Earth. Viewpoints on these clashes are both observational and intimate. Whereas some shots are clearly derived from the locked perspectives available to awed human bystanders, other glimpses use an explicitly hand-held language, as if an equally massive cameraman has wriggled in-between these gigantic, steaming, participants. The lancing computer generated protrusions of these battling titans are also, clearly, rigged with (ginormous) GoPro cameras as they jab at Ultraman's indifferent alien face.
A technological gap between the United States of this film and a fictional Soviet-presenting superpower is a key building block in Top Gun: Maverick, one that allows the film to trespass into even more exciting and fantastical realms than its prequel. When the chips are down, Tom Cruise's Maverick is so supernaturally talented that he is able to render any advantage wrung out of next-gen aeronautical innovation effectively null. He doesn't just pilot his aircraft, he has a symbiotic relationship with the machinery. This concept is hammered into the audience via IMAX footage of a purple, straining Cruise riding billion dollar planes so hard that they seem to be about to fall apart.
Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash takes place in an Indonesian underworld where an unquenchable desire to square up allows men to exert themselves on a landscape lousy with bull-headed machismo. Beginning in the 1980s then jumping back-and-forth in time with little heed, the film chronicles the relationship between Marthino Lio's Ajo Kawir and Ladya Cheryl's Iteung. When the couple first meet Ajo is impotent, attempting to cure his uncooperative penis through, by turns, righteous and trivial violence. Iteung is no stranger to combat either, acting as the bodyguard for a man who Ajo has judged to be morally dubious. The two fight, an even match that is captured from an observational distance then conveyed to the audience in an unhurried edit that naturally tracks fatigue and frustration. Their back-and-forth is a flurry of palms and elbows; a series of twisting embraces in which the two briefly conjoin then detach. Naturally, they quickly fall in love.
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