Street Fighter

Much too long and convoluted to deliver sustained entertainment, director Kitao Sakurai's Street Fighter is, at least, an honest attempt to organise decades of contradictory video game tournaments into the kind of franchise-launcher not seen since Marvel Studios was in its ascendancy. Capcom's incomparable arcade hit, Street Fighter II, offered up a basic competition framing with blips of a background story rationed out based on a player's ability to clear the game with their favourite character. As far as adaptations have gone then - and there have been many - much has had to be invented to cater to the various and differing mediums that cashed-in, with more notable themes and ideas even being rolled into latter interactive instalments. 

Despite a large cast of characters then, one that largely favours the second game in the series, the key texts for this Street Fighter have turned out to be Masahiko Nakahira's Street Fighter Zero manga, a two volume black-and-white series that first introduced the concept of a murderous power lurking within Ryu, the Japanese all-rounder who is as close as the series gets to a default character, and Street Fighter Zero 2, the 1996 arcade cabinet that allowed a corrupted palette-swap of this what-if character to be selectable. Pushed aside for the all-American Guile in Steven E. de Souza's 1994 Street Fighter and AWOL from 2009's Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, Ryu is an unusual dramatic proposition largely because he avoids human connection within the various texts, partly to better serve as pure utility for a player's pre-adulthood imagination but also because this wandering warrior fits a particular (and popular) Japanese cultural archetype: the rōnin. 

So, although Gisaburo Sugii's animated Street Fighter II Movie successfully centred around a deliberately blank character with little personal desire, there's a sense that an American blockbuster audience might want a little more meat on their bones. Screenwriters TJ Fixman and Sakurai again (with Dalan Musson and Gary Dauberman sharing a story credit) invert the relationship of Ryu and Ken from Sugii's pass, trading an easygoing Ken transformed into a violent pawn of a psychotic dictator with a Ryu that, underwritten by coin-pumped lore, looks set to be similarly claimed. Noah Centineo's Ken is diminished by the trade though, losing his marionette fiancée Eliza (and subjected to ugly AI reproduction for prop photographs) to be crowbarred into the role of a comedic understudy for Andrew Koji's surprisingly conceited Ryu. This is perhaps the most glaring issue with Sakurai's Street Fighter then. By altering characters to fit roles that differ from their more simplistic, video game functions the film must apportion space or dramatic axis to justify these changes. This strained scaffolding is then compounded by inheriting such a massive ensemble, all of whom demand at least a certain amount of attention. As a result Guile, as portrayed by pro-wrestler Cody Rhodes, vanishes into a series of amusing YouTube skit-style asides and Callina Liang's Chun-Li - the character with the clearest filmic motivation - forestalls her revenge for no clear reason, allows her body to be mutilated, and is fobbed off with a moment of triumph in which she beats the shit out of her Interpol colleagues. 

Supergirl

Aside from a pair of brief flashbacks featuring David Corenswet's Superman, that ground the picture in the ongoing present of this newly minted DC cinematic universe, director Craig Gillespie's Supergirl often appears like it could all be happening hundreds of years into the future. In fact, given that every other humanoid very specifically resembles the exact kind of people found on Earth, it seems like it'd be less distracting if Kara Zor-El's adventures where disentangled from the now and took place when mankind has journeyed into the stars. Much like Starlord and pals in James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy movies though, this Supergirl is both contemporaneous with DC's unfolding superhero phase and proceeds from a place of airtight, space-faring slobbery. The interiors of this film's physics-defying spacecraft are caked with everything from shredded papers and stale cereal to fluorescent green dog piss. The leaky, lived-in aesthetic that George Lucas was so keen to evoke in Star Wars is taken here to a depressive, bed-rotting conclusion. 

Away from her adopted home planet, Milly Alcock's Kara celebrates her impending birthday by travelling to solar systems without yellow stars. By avoiding this specific spectrum of light radiation, Supergirl is able to both drink herself into a stupor and become vulnerable enough for Gillespie's film to entertain ideas of jeopardy. Bereft after being sent away from a surviving shard of the dead planet Krypton, Kara - quite reasonably - seeks distraction from her decaying memories of the family she left behind. Unlike the strident colonisers who sent Kal-El to Kansas to be its conqueror, Kara's parents (her father, played by David Krumholtz, is dressed very much like a retrofuturist scientist from a Fleischer cartoon) are far less megalomaniacal. Their decision to fashion a similar craft and have Kara follow her cousin to Earth done so simply to preserve the life of their beloved daughter. Of course, given that the audience is supposed to sympathise with Supergirl, it makes sense that she isn't seen to be mourning the passing of monsters. Indeed, there are asides from her parents here that are directly critical of Jor-El and Lara; positioned within the text as if to reassure us that not all Kryptonians are intergalactic imperialists but Kal-El's parents definitely were. 

Brief, compared to its comic book movie contemporaries (the film doesn't even hit the two hour mark), Supergirl plays like an overly tidied telling of a much messier journey. As is often the case with Warner Bros. tent-poles, trade magazines have rushed to detail the ways in which the various filmmakers fell out behind the scenes but even on the night, Supergirl is very obviously lacking in finer, lyrical detail. Characters may expound on their backstories or act decisively but there's little sense that they are growing closer and coming to rely on each other. At its conclusion Gillespie's film may outright declare that Eve Ridley's Ruthye (essentially Mattie Ross' vengeful teen from Charles Portis' True Grit) has, in fact, grown on Kara but there isn't a great deal within the piece that underlines this assertion. Although his screentime is comparatively brief, there's more of a sense that Jason Momoa's snarling Lobo has become a fan of this unusually principled child. That said, and although this film concludes in ways that are at odds with its source material - Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes' Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow - it's difficult not to draw real satisfaction from the sight of Kara, in full blue and red super-costume, placing the edge of an ornate sabre on the neck of a quivering, unrepentant sex trafficker then drawing it across his throat. 

A Minecraft Movie

Quite apparently tied in knots by teams upon teams of writers (the finished piece is, variously, attributed to Allison Schroeder, Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta), director Jared Hess' A Minecraft Movie betrays very obvious traces of this chronic overthinking and re-wiring. Denied entry to his beloved mines as a child, Jack Black's Steve, upon growing to manhood, returns with his pickaxe to tunnel his way into another, much blockier dimension. His ability to pass between this computer rendered world and ours thanks to a shining cube that, eventually, finds its way under Steve's childhood bed. A significant amount of time later, Emma Myers' twentysomething Natalie and her little brother, played by Sebastian Hansen, seem to move into Steve's long deserted home, whereupon they will find his precious gem and go on their own, Amblin-inflected adventure? Well, not quite. 

Turns out they didn't reckon upon actor-producer Jason Momoa, whose star presence demands that the tragic (and admittedly pat) backstory sketched up for this Movie's younger actors be obliterated to concentrate on detailing why Garrett, Momoa's tassel jacketed buffoon, thinks so highly of himself. It's not that Momoa particularly detracts from a film that might otherwise be completely given over to Black's increasingly monotonous honking. If anything it's sort of amusing that Momoa, a recently divorced father, can wield so much behind-the-scenes power when assembling a vehicle through which he might hope to win the eternal adulation of his own children. Although it would be impossible to adequately adapt the totality of Mojang Studios' enduring, Twitch-streamed juggernaut, it does seem notable that, when outfitting this Swedish video game property for the American big-screen experience, the filmmakers have overlooked plaintive pianos and unbridled creativity (but not the sudden transformation of sentient beings into tools that power the various mechanisms of Minecraft) to concentrate on invading subhumans and explosions. Speaking of which, can you guess how Hansen's Henry contributes to the teeming lexicon of this deliberately pre-industrial sandbox realm? That's right: he bashes together a firearm. 

Fast X

Fast X is, in every way that the film is enjoyable, a testament to the second-unit teams who describe the crashing action and the VFX studios that knit this disparate coverage together, allowing camera perspectives to come unshackled from their physical limits to zip around like curious insects (in this sense, Fast X is very much post-Michael Bay's Ambulance). Although pre-production and principal photography were begun by series mainstay Justin Lin, a falling out with Vin Diesel means that this tenth instalment is now credited solely to Louis Leterrier, a director who hit the ground running in 2005 with Unleashed (or Danny the Dog as it's known in Leterrier's native France) then never came close to scaling the same heights. Michelle Rodriguez revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair that not only was this handover a few weeks shy of instantaneous but that a fight sequence between her character and Charlize Theron's Cipher was accomplished without any principal director in place. This point notable because this specific set-to, staged in a futuristic surgical theatre, is easily the highlight of Fast X: a crunchy back and forth between two actresses with very little else to do in the wider feature that uses shattered glass both as an improvised weapon and as an editing exclamation point. Other than that, Mr Diesel's efforts to elevate his Dominic Toretto from a rage case petrolhead to an invincible folk hero are a noticeable, and consistent, drag on the film. This insistence on relentless self-mythologising not only renders every new, radioactive, danger instantly moot, it also muscles out more of the piece's genuinely entertaining elements - be that John Cena as a world class entertainer of children or Jason Momoa swapping beauty tips with his decomposing henchmen. 

Zack Snyder's Justice League

Upfront, Zack Snyder's Justice League offers a very clear demonstration of what the slighted director brings to this material, beyond a towering aspect ratio and a colour palette attuned to unyielding metals. In Snyder and screenwriters Chris Terrio and Will Beall's undiluted version, Batman's first meeting with Aquaman in a remote Icelandic outpost is presented as an incredible effort in of itself. Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne has surmounted cracking glaciers and a storm that grounded all manner of aircraft just be in the same room as the rightful King of Atlantis. Their meeting concluded, Jason Momoa's regal roadie strides off to be in the ocean. Bruce and an awed village follow. Joss Whedon's Justice League presented this sequence as a bickering back-and-forth that concluded with a hero shot of Momoa smashing into the water then zipping away. Punctuation, essentially. 

Here, we instead focus on Affleck's despondent expression, his glance off this would be ally as it starts to snow and a group of women begin singing the kind of mournful, lilting, prayer you'd expect to hear at a monarch's funeral. Bruce worries that his words - his warning - has fallen on deaf ears. When he remembers to look back, Arthur has gone and gentle ripples are fading on the water. Whedon's reconfiguration of Justice League was arranged to access chummy sniping and casual success; earth-shattering powers portrayed as something easy or natural for a select few. Snyder and this project's editors, David Brenner and Dody Dorn, want you to feel the effort, to sink into these moments and experience them as enormous and transformative rather than simply exciting. It's a mode of communication that is rambling, episodic and, often, portentous, but it's also frequently magical. 

Four hours long and broken up into eight distinct movements, Snyder's League occupies a space outside of whichever continuity WarnerMedia are currently hurtling forward with. Affleck's stocky take on Batman has long since been replaced - Matt Reeves and men's magazine troll (not to mention generational acting talent) Robert Pattinson wrapped shooting on The Batman less than a week ago - while the story told here seems at least partially at odds with Aquaman's first solo foray and completely incompatible with Wonder Woman's 1980s set sequel. Zack Snyder's Justice League is already a document, a relic from a recent past that, despite an Epilogue prickling with several different flavours of promise, seems unlikely to be followed up on. In a way, this is the strength of DC's disparate platter, their continuity is so obviously broken that it allows each character to be the star of their own, ever-changing, micro-continuity.

Trapped in Snyder's pocket realm, these heroes are put to the test in ways that require genuine strain, one that is consistently amplified throughout by the piece's downcast tone and an editing style that rejects hurry. Although cities are not atomised the film establishes a genuine, and consistent, sense of danger. We are not watching a film that seeks to glibly reassure its audience that good will, inherently, triumph. Every action has a consequence. So whenever Ciarán Hinds' gigantic Steppenwolf - reimagined here as prehistoric musculature, resplendent in a chainmail armour that hums with machine life - bursts into the frame, slaughter quickly follows. The invader's assault on Themyscira, already a stand out sequence in the theatrical cut, is significantly extended here - trading quick, geographical, fixes and action movie editing for an assembly that submerges us in Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen)'s fraying emotional state. 

We sit with the rage felt when a holy place is defiled; the despair as an enormous temple crumbles into the sea, ending umpteen lives. All this pain and confusion is expressed via image, space and sound rather than the crude, sex slavery invoking dialogue that Whedon brought to the table. Over and over we are forced to process the weight of these events and the effect they have on these characters. We are rarely thrown cold into an aftermath. This distended, atypical delivery works beautifully for a great deal of the film's other action sequences, especially those that felt perfunctory in their superheroics back in 2017. Gal Gadot's Diana / Wonder Woman foiling a London terror attack is elevated from a throw away scuffle to an act of Herculean expertise as Diana - in slow motion - struggles to place her bullet proof bracelets between Michael McElhatton's gun-wielding terrorist and several dozen innocent lives.  

Gadot's agog face fills the 1.33:1 frame, the first bullet traveling much faster than she can react. Through sheer will she gets her arm where it needs to be, interceding just in the nick of time. That's one bullet though. When the madman switches his rifle to fully-automatic then takes aim at a class of schoolgirls, Wonder Woman follows his line of fire, crouched and exerting; zipping inhumanly fast to put her gauntlets and, in one instance, her body between this outrage and these children. The film no longer rushes through these movements - perhaps previously unsure of how these staccato, obviously artificial, lunges would be received by an audience - we linger and examine now, cutting back and forth between the hammering gun and a dashing Diana. The effect is explosive, delirious even, precisely because the scene is unselfconsciously structured to cater to this idea of a body in the midst of a prolonged physical struggle. 

This Justice League is not summery or obviously celebratory then. Tonally speaking, we're not hanging out with our superpowered pals as they quarrel and pinball between disasters. Snyder's take is closer to a war film, one with a fantastical scope that reaches into our world's distant, unrecorded, past to tell of the day when a barbaric New God touched down on Earth and battled a who's who of human myth. Zeus and the Greek pantheon fought alongside an alien Green Lantern, Atlanteans, an Amazonian cavalry, and man's armies - including bearded Hun - against the being who would be master of the universe. The attempt, although unsuccessful, left both a mark on our planet and three living machines that can be combined to trigger an instantaneous apocalypse. Steppenwolf, the demonic agent gathering these devices, exudes the anxious presence of a toady. Although indescribably powerful when compared to mere mortals, he is, at heart, a needy middle-manager hoping to curry favour with his boss by wrapping up a noted loose end. 

Thanks to Marvel's trendsetting credit teasers this ruler, Jack Kirby's Darkseid, was beaten to the cinematic punch by Jim Starlin's deliberately similar cosmic bruiser Thanos. Elevated to chief threat in his universe, Josh Brolin's take on the Mad Titan even got to headline his own film, Avengers: Infinity War as well as a feature role in its sequel, Avengers: Endgame. That intergalactic plunderer, although brusque and all-powerful, was afforded a human dimension - a daughter he loved; a bizarre pursuit he, on some level, believed to be altruistic. Comparatively, Darkseid is portrayed with the kind of awe usually reserved for religious revelation. His introduction is that of an unholy visitation, a rippling God of militarised industry first seen silhouetted like John Wayne at the close of The Searchers before Snyder and cinematographer Fabian Wagner begin appraising this menace vertically. His figure is massive and granite; a hammer about to fall. 

This nascent form - identified in pre-release press as Uxas, the identity the God wore before taking command of the Omega Effect in John Byrne's Jack Kirby's Fourth World comics - is a ravenous, youthful, behemoth in search of an outlet. The Darkseid we see later in the film, primed for a starring role in a sequel that will likely never come, is this same being matured; skewing closest to the character's taciturn portrayal in Superman: The Animated Series and the subsequent Justice League and Justice League Unlimited television series. Voiced by Michael Ironside, that interpretation is, fundamentally, Satan ruling from his Church in Hell. Actor Ray Porter imbues this computer generated tyrant with similar gravelly malice; his voice a grim-dark growl that issues from a pit then carries through halls filled with conquered, mutated, subjects. 

Darkseid's screentime may be slight, especially when weighed against a 242 minute running time but every interlude counts - we see him batter through armies, felled only by the combined efforts of a Green Lantern, a legendary king and three Olympians; we watch the almighty Steppenwolf cower in fear when his master's image exerts itself on a slab of fissile ore. Darkseid's technology, the three Mother Boxes he abandons to Earth - depicted as desiccated hags in the apocalyptic visions of Ray Fisher's Cyborg - are a profane take on the act of creation itself. This God's Genesis is a wave of destruction that picks the flesh from Kryptonian bones and sets the world ablaze. Kirby's character, wholly new to this version of the film, makes such an obvious and immediate impact that the other sequel teases embedded in this film's Epilogue - Jesse Eisenberg's Luthor and Joe Manganiello's Slade Wilson laying the foundations for The Legion of Doom and an abandoned Batman film - seem positively tiny by comparison. 

Darkseid isn't the only character to receive reappraisal. Whereas this version of the film delves much deeper with the newer members of this Justice League, Whedon's theatrical cut seemed more of a feature length attempt to resuscitate Superman as a future tentpole prospect. Scenes were added and subtracted around Snyder's ticking time bomb - an effort undermined by computer assisted reshoot footage that, often, looked confrontationally bad - until Henry Cavill was behaving with the tranquil assurance of a Christopher Reeve. Snyder's assembly is a completely different story, doggedly sticking to Batman's Knightmare visions from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice as an eventual destination for the hero. The disorientated Superman who violently reacts to his resurrection doesn't instantly fade as soon as an action sequence has been ticked off here either. 

Kent's pain lingers, expressed in his choice of suit - a funeral draft of his usual costume that recalls everything from Spider-Man's Secret Wars symbiote and Jon Bogdanove's Recovery Suit to the evil Kryptonians of the Reeve films and the rogue Superman seen in the cyberpunk future of the Batman Beyond animated series. This clouded, post-death perspective allows Superman to register as something other than a pat obstacle in a genre rehash. In Snyder's cut it's clear he carries real pain at having been unnaturally returned to life. Mothers and fathers, both living and dead, flock to him, talking this superbeing out of his fog by reminding him of his emotional and physical connections to this world - Amy Adams' seemingly pregnant Lois Lane and his patient, hardscrabble mother, Diane Lane's Martha Kent. Russell Crowe's Jor-El and Kevin Costner's Jonathan Kent join the chorus, recounting the spiritual quest they imparted to him in the language of Gods and men. 

In action, this Superman is different too. His understanding of stakes and pressure rendered off-kilter by his all-powerful nature. So while his teammates battle through a tumorous, irradiated, gauntlet, Kent remains in Kansas to get his head right. This pronounced contrast between an absent, healing, hero and a squad of allies flogging their hearts out against a terrifying extra-terrestrial threat - especially when played at this kind of length - is a fight blueprint straight out of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball, a hugely successful multimedia series that plays with the myth of Moses and The Exodus in a similar way to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman comics. Toriyama's interpretation takes a more hysterical, comedic bent with a central character whose might is so massively out of whack with his contemporaries that all of the manga's plot contrivances are about placing successive hurdles between its hero, Son Goku, and any unfolding battles. 

As if to underline this structural note, Snyder's film tweaks Wonder Woman to be Superman's violent near-equal, an accomplice who isn't content to simply batter their enemies into submission. She's basically Superman's Vegeta - the displaced alien prince who works twice as hard to keep up with the savant Goku. Diana's similar insistence that Kal-El should only be referred to by the name given to him on his home planet is just the cherry on top. When Snyder's Superman does finally engage Steppenwolf, his hovering blows are unforgiving - the same brutal strikes he aimed at the Justice League seconds after they reawakened him - reminding us that this Superman remains at least slightly abstracted and perhaps not even the exact same man we saw in Man of Steel or Dawn of Justice. Death has altered the Kryptonian, there's a sense he isn't a complete person anymore, instead he's a wraith anchored to a previous life only by his Lois. 

That it requires such a massive intervention by his loved ones to even access his previous persona (his return to the life he had only possible because of their memories) tallies with Bruce Wayne's recurring fear that the Sun God who fell from the sky could become poisoned by dark rhetoric and take up the position of general in an army of annihilation. Finally, there's Fisher's Cyborg, a superhero instantly course-corrected in the theatrical cut to resemble the comedic, braggadocios, sidekick familiar to fans of Teen Titans Go!. Cyborg isn't simply re-evaluated here, his contribution to the overall shape of this film is seismic, far bigger than scene tweaks or costume corrections. In Snyder's version of Justice League Cyborg is a significant dramatic axis, one told with the anguish of a dead child forced back to life by a guilt-ridden father, Joe Morton's Silas Stone. Cyborg's story is one of halting reconciliation, not just with the parent who repeatedly chose work over his family, but with his own self-image. 

Cyborg's story is so thoroughly threaded into this king-sized Director's Cut that it's obvious why Fisher was protective of the role and then so bitterly disappointed when very little of it was released in 2017. Victor Stone is a multifaceted character that allows the actor to play two completely distinct personas - the confident, letter jacket wearing human half that keeps himself connected to the rest of mankind with bursts of online altruism and a mechanical aspect that Stone believes to be unnatural and damned. The latter gives Fisher the opportunity to play several different classic monsters - when he first meets Wonder Woman he's Quasimodo, hunched and evasive but taking a certain delight in his expertise; later he's Frankenstein's Monster, a resentful son committed to concealing or outright destroying his father's work. A metronome score carries us into an interior life where Stone is a God of human data, so powerful that he could end all life on Earth in an instant. 

Cyborg is a Dr Manhattan who hasn't become bored with the people around him. On the contrary, he wants to use his incalculable powers to help but sees no possibility for integration into wider society. He's hung up on the manufactured organs and arteries that maintain what's left of his shattered body. The shame he feels for this mechanism traps him, creating a wider context of internalised monstrosity that sours his outlook. It's clear that he abhors his physical identity, retreating into vast digital head spaces where he can stride around in the broad flesh and bone body he's all but lost. Cyborg's story, unlike his Watchmen counterpart, tracks towards an acceptance though - one facilitated by the precious knowledge that he isn't alone in this universe, that there are other people who share similar burdens to his own. It feels conceptually significant that it is Diana who reaches out to this metal man - in certain versions of her origin story she is an artificial construct herself, moulded from clay then imbued with life by a loving parent. 

None of this is to say that Zack Snyder's Justice League doesn't have its flaws, there are more than a couple of computer generated effects that, quite apparently, haven't received the fullest of attention. When suited up, Affleck's Batman, particularly in the tunnels fight, looks stodgy rather than brawny. And - despite an introductory accident that finds absurd, Richard Lester style humour in a moment of blind panic - Ezra Miller's Flash, when babbling in repose, often works against the film's mood in a glaring rather than playful way. There are perplexing additions too, the worst of which is a heartfelt conversation between Martha Kent and Lois Lane that tours the crater that Clark's loss has left in their lives before suddenly terminating with a needless superhero cameo that thoroughly undermines the moment. At its best though, this version of Justice League stresses stakes in a way that consistently feels just out of our heroes' control. Instead of clattering through danger, the film gives its set-pieces enough space for logistical appraisal. Threat waxes and wanes, allowing a genuine sense of wonder to take hold then flourish. Again and again we are assured that these heroes will have to break their bodies and work in the moments between seconds to accomplish the impossible.