X2

Hugh Jackman's Wolverine is off exploring his ice bound origins; Famke Janssen's Jean Grey is worrying about her emerging Phoenix powers and a boring haircut (probably). And, thanks to her Monster's Ball Academy Award and eye candy turns in Die Another Day and Swordfish, Halle Berry's Storm is now allowed in-front of the camera. In this sequel she gets to not only lead a reconnaissance mission but fly a ridiculous plane that looks like a Lockheed SR-71 designed by Japanese toymakers. Storm also has a much better haircut than Jean Grey. How's that for a promotion? Anna Paquin's Rogue is thriving at school and has landed herself a new boyfriend, Shawn Ashmore's Iceman, who looks like Zack from Saved by the Bell and does very little even when the group is threatened with fifty foot waves. You'd think his total mastery of ambient water vapour would be a boon. Oh and James Marsden's Cyclops still has a curtain fringe and a blue Mazda that he doesn't drive? They're struggling to find things for him to do.

Despite the soap opera described above, director Bryan Singer's X2 is a much more confident and assured film than its predecessor. Action peaks early with the introduction of a teleporting goblin named Nightcrawler, played by Alan Cumming. Every dust-up that follows then is just okay. Each of the X-Men are finally allowed to be a gifted, individual components though, instead of a staff of irritating, scholastic bores. Wolverine is still the matinee star focus mind you, fighting a female opposite played by Kelly Hu and dimly snooping around military mutation tanks, but at least we aren't being asked to consider absolutely everything in this world from his louche perspective. The bad mutants get a lob-sided push as compensation: Rebecca Romijin-Stamos' Mystique is easily the most capable character in the whole film, quietly accomplishing amazing feats while the rest of the mutant menagerie struggle with basic heavies. Similarly, Magneto gets so much dramatic focus that his character starts to feel strangely indecisive. The reliance on Erik is understandable in that Sir Ian McKellen is so good he'll make it all look like a breeze - and he does - but by time the film begins to conclude his Magneto is less a consistent, organic character and more of a rolling plot generator. In particular, his decision to leave Patrick Stewart's Professor X to the wolves has the distinct whiff of bullshit about it.

X-Men

Pull X-Men apart and see what works. The screenplay, credited to David Hayter but featuring work by at least Christopher McQuarrie, Joss Whedon, Bryan Singer, Ed Solomon, and Tom DeSanto, does a decent job juggling X-Men and their introductions, building a central framework kin to Warner Brothers' 1990s political thrillers. You know the type. Easily digestible hook, usually starring some combination of Denzel Washington, Clint Eastwood, and Julia Roberts. Probably based on something people read in airports.

The first act's the best, invoking the Holocaust to give us a gauche sense of stakes, then flashing forward to a blustery white politician arguing down a beautiful mutant with homespun, right-wing rhetoric. This sense of solemnity is matched by Singer and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel's insistence on framing the actors against chicken fencing and complicated mechanical / architectural backgrounds. Cages are continually stressed with mutants either close or already in them.

Hugh Jackman's Wolverine - basically a quick healing version of Clint in Every Which Way but Loose - takes Anna Paquin's runaway Rogue under his wing and ends up at Professor Xavier's school for dorks. X-Men begins to wobble. The filmmakers are so desperate to push Wolverine as cool dude number one that they forget to give any of the other X-Men traits beyond party pooper. Halle Berry in particular is treated with contempt - barely photographed and saddled with an appalling Kenyan accent that somehow made it past rehearsals.

X-Men ends up being structurally unsound too. Action scenes are, correctly, built around each of the mutant's individual abilities. Unfortunately, no-one found a way to make these acts visceral, physical experiences. The film frequently stops dead for feature computer effects that read as impoverished and primitive. Singer and Sigel's deep focus framing splayed open for lame effects plates. X-Men then has no sense of release. Its attempts at kineticism as dull as the voluminous clouds of cosmic cum Magneto summons up for the finale.

Ibuki by Daigo Ikeno

Oro by Daigo Ikeno

Battlefield Hardline - RECKY

EA make their annual Battlefield intentions clear with Battlefield Hardline, due two weeks before whenever the next Call of Duty launches. While this cops and robbers framing does appear to be sleeping on the franchise's scale and destruction selling points, EA have at least roped in Dead Space studio Visceral Games to pump up whatever dreadful campaign DICE had planned. It's a shame seeing Visceral gobbled up for FPS grist, especially since their last game, Dead Space 3, seemed hobbled by executive interference. I suppose being relegated to off-season instalments of EA's leading property could read like a promotion, but I'd rather see Visceral exploring their horror game instincts.

Westworld

Westworld unfolds like an airport novella. We get a middle-aged hero upfront and struggling, along with a rhythm and pace that's closer to a sixty minute science-fiction serial than it is cinema. Writer-director Michael Crichton spends an extended amount of time unpacking his (great) idea - in the near future, themed resorts revolve around simulated murder and sexual debauchery. Crichton cycles through various permutations, detailing the central holiday destination from a variety of angles. Eventually, a simple gunslinger set-up takes centre stage in which Yul Brynner's black hat is vanquished by Richard Benjamin's nebbish attorney. Naturally, this is followed by a visit to the local bordello for the victors.

When Brynner reappears, apparently programmed for vengeance, it briefly feels as if the film is suddenly about to kick up several gears, delivering on the computer virus strand we've not long heard a few nervous scientists float behind the scenes. Westworld coils and withholds though. Brynner's 'droid is easily blown through a window, allowing Benjamin and his pal to indulge in the prison breaks and bar brawls that break up their robotic sex tourism. It's a dither, but one that permits an idea of safety to take hold. When the power fantasy shatters a little later in the piece it now registers as alarming rather than routine. Haven't we already sailed past this destination point? 

With Brynner now hot on his heels, Benjamin stumbles through the various other worlds that make up this futuristic theme park. One has been designed to resemble ancient Rome, the other the clean, Technicolor middle-ages seen in the swashbuckling cinema of these character's youth. We had previously gotten a taste of this Medieval World through a subplot in which a sweaty fifty-something tried to stick his dick in anything that moved, but Crichton had largely held back on Roman World. Our main glimpse of this pre-Christian retreat arriving during the initial malfunction when the robotic slaves threw off their shackles, like Spartacus, and murdered the middle-class holidaymakers posing as their masters.

By the time Benjamin shows up, both areas are strewn with dead bodies and deactivated androids, a development emblematic of Westworld's overall approach to conflict. Crichton's film is stubbornly anti-action. Benjamin is never asked to battle any other, subordinate threats, and his attempts to thwart Brynner's advancing clockwork heavy are realistically imprecise. Benjamin appears genuinely scared, depressingly aware of how little of a threat he is when the Gunslinger's safety restraints are turned off. In this sense Westworld is exciting for what it doesn't do. It's a relic from a time when films didn't need to have capable leading men. Like Steven Spielberg's Duel, Westworld posits adventure as a state of stress and psychological damage for a pampered everyman. It's not about baptising a hero then, it's about stripping the seventies version of a civilised man down to the naked, violent aggression wielded by our ancestors.

The Thing

Fortunately for me, I seem to naturally space out my viewings of The Thing just enough that I forget who turns out to be infected. Heart attack Norris is a constant, his face as engine to a repulsive insect form is seared into the part of my brain that pores over books about 1980s make-up effects (Mark Salisbury's Behind the Mask in particular). I'm less sure of everyone else though. It helps that there's a lot of doubling in the film - at a glance Blair and Doc Copper could pass for at least cousins. Palmer and Windows have a similar acid-fried outline. Kurt Russell's bearded MacReady toys with having a twin in kennel master Clark, only to trump Clark's modest baseball cap with a fuck off ten gallon. Individuality asserted.

The Thing endures, and thrives, because the threat is mostly abstract. John Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster are never tempted to telegraph anything specific. Instead danger exists as a potential, logical constant. The men deprive themselves of sleep and attempt to build alliances, slow to get a handle on a creature that gobbles up men and spits out facsimiles. A couple of the drones don't even seem sure they're imposters - it's only when cornered that their characters break, the creatures cycling through violent looking attack modes to stress threat while a contingency plan slithers away.

Unlike the Alien that stalked the Nostromo, the Thing is cowardly and opportunist. The shapes it takes don't prowl, attempting to sexually dominate the humans, they skulk. Masters of misdirection. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr's wobbly remake-cum-prequel proposed a drunken mugger, desperate to procreate. This Thing is more like a rapist. It waits until its prey is alone, success momentarily secured, before it dares to strike. It's a wimp playing a numbers game. When a defective component is offered the opportunity to lead it denies the promotion. It screws its face up and drops bass, feigning the kind of weakness that leaves trace levels of disgust. Leader Thing could've sabotaged from the front, plunging the survivors into needlessly dangerous situations, weakening the group. It didn't though. It considered short term gains irrelevant, dangerous even. Instead Thing chose to bide its time and blend into the crowd. Above all then the Thing is a survivor. It isn't driven by pride or anything else recognisably human. It'll debase itself, wrench its body apart, in order to see another day. It's truly alien.

Dudley by Daigo Ikeno

Ken by Daigo Ikeno

Powercut - Morning Swim / Evening Swim / Night Swim (the end)

La Roux - Let Me Down Gently

Perturbator - I Am The Night / Technoir (Feat. Noir Disco) / She Moves Like A Knife

Transformers vs GI Joe #2 by Tom Scioli

Gregor Clegane by Nordheimer

Alex by Daigo Ikeno

Transformers (UK) Collected Comics #6 by Geoff Senior

Godzilla (2014)

Godzilla has survived many genre upheavals. Beginning as a nuclear extinction parable, the films have raced excitedly through mutations dictated by public taste. Science fiction evolved into spy thriller, then an after-school special and onto childish superheroics. Godzilla has never been one particular thing. Like 007 the series is about building whatever story you like around one indefatigable idea - he walks the Earth. Godzilla 2014 matches the character with a modern set of concerns. How can we slot the King of Monsters into a pro-forces blockbuster?

Following an unusually localised earthquake in Japan, the Janjira nuclear power plant collapses in on itself killing (amongst others) supervisor Joe Brody's wife. We catapult ahead 15 years to find Brody and his son breaking into the exclusion zone to track radiation signatures in derelict buildings. It's a shame more time isn't spent in this milieu - the unhinged Joe as our point-of-view and Tokyo as the cyclical backdrop; ruin as a habitat rather than an interchangeable arena. Post-fall Edo is born in a reality bending shuffle. News footage of the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown by way of a 1970s disaster movie, framed, much like a key reveal in Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, from a classroom. A decade and a half after the accident a secret research facility sits in the heart of destruction. Teams of scientists pore over an egg concealing calamity, director Gareth Edwards giving us a taste of Akira scenes shot live action.

Despite the best efforts of on-site expert Dr Serizawa and his giant electricity gun, the egg hatches and the newborn riots, trashing Joe Brody's investigation. Attention then settles on his disengaged, thick-necked son for the remainder of the runtime. Brody Jnr. is an army bomb disposal expert with a smiley family back in San Francisco. Military leads are nothing new to the Godzilla series, the Millennium cycle had a procession of officer class women desperate for a settler with the Kaiju King. Ford Brody isn't quite so involved though, instead he's an everyman with a dramatically sympathetic job that allows us to track the carnage. Ford is decent but unremarkable, a poor substitute for a spluttering Bryan Cranston. From the second act onwards the entire film is placed on Aaron Taylor-Johnson's shoulders, of course it wobbles.

Godzilla 2014 is then constructed to tease. The title creature is glimpsed in snatches - an arm here, an undercarriage there. As with his excellent Monsters, Gareth Edwards wants to present a world in which mankind are struggling against warring / mating Gods. The reason this doesn't quite work, for me at any rate, is that Edwards is so good at arranging the combatants that you just want to see them fight. An extended sequence in Hawaii in which Godzilla comes to shore, causing a tsunami naturally, registers as a beautiful example of pace because we know one of the enemy MUTO monsters is rampaging on the same island. We are shown not only where the two beasts are but how close they're getting to each other. Geography is becoming a lost art in action films, so to see a director in complete command of beat-to-beat moments junking his climax for a Spielbergian gag is incredibly disappointing.

For all intents and purposes we have a sequence that plays like the greatest Wrestlemania hype promo disappearing into background noise. Godzilla was thundering through Honolulu, flanked by waves of people and debris. The male MUTO was in the process of eating a sky-train, presumably because it resembles the ICBMs it's discovered a taste for. We were criss-crossing constantly, soldiers firing wildly, unable to even gain Godzilla's attention. Ford Brody grappling with gravity, desperately trying to keep himself and a child from being consumed by the hungry antagonist. Explosions at the airport! Rows and rows of aircraft crumble and ignite around the moving MUTO, then water hits a cowering baggage handler, signalling the King of Monsters' arrival. It was an expert moment - endless possibilities signaled by a tiny detail. Godzilla is the wave, and he is close. His lumpy Apatosaurus foot smashes into view, framed by an airport lounge. Battle is joined. Cut to a child watching TV.

Again and again Edwards and editor Bob Ducsay build these confrontations, then deny release. Possibly this stings even more because a massive amount of trailer real estate was created out of the film's scant Godzilla glimpses. Surely the function of an advert should be to give an elliptical impression of the whole? Hints of spectacle rather than the spectacle itself? I haven't seen a film so committed to blowing its grandstand moments through advertising since Transformers. When the creatures do finally fall on each other, the resulting action is only briefly noted. We aren't experiencing these confrontations through the expertly realised monsters, we're avoiding it in the company of Kick-Ass. Sustained fisticuffs are absent, there's never really a point were you get to simmer in the weight and space of three titans clashing. Instead, for better or for worse, we're left with the vague impression of an earthbound God moving through clouds of rubble.

Hugo by Daigo Ikeno

JET SET

As a PS4 owner, if Microsoft could stop securing exciting third-party exclusives, that'd be great. Sunset Overdrive looks like a head-on collision between a Sega studio Jet Grinder and a 360 open world exclusive - think Dead Rising or Crackdown. As an open-world proposition, this looks a trillion times more fun than Sucker Punch's recent efforts.

Michael Jackson & Justin Timberlake - Love Never Felt So Good

The Wind Rises

It's hard to shake the idea that Hayao Miyazaki's latest (last?) is an autobiography of sorts. The Wind Rises is a film about the creative impulse and how it shapes lives. Miyazaki's Jiro Horikoshi is obsessed with aviation. In his dreams he communes with his idea of Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Caproni. The Count encourages the short-sighted child to channel his passion into engineering. These meetings are scattered throughout the film, steering Horikoshi through his career. Interestingly, there's very little attempt to discredit these sequences with the kind of visual language usually associated with fantasies. They're lucid, instructive encounters that impart wisdoms and reorganise failure. Horikoshi's subconscious readings actualised as a paternal, jovial hero. There's also an idea that Horikoshi lacks any true peers, so he must create them himself.

Anyway, back to the idea of the film as Miyazaki's account of himself. Horikoshi is a slight smoker who loses himself in intricately detailed drawings. His life is experienced in short bursts, usually built around particular aircraft projects. Friends and family drop in and out the film, usually with little fanfare. Close associates describe him as insensitive and unfeeling, tallying with the Miyazaki alluded to in One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island. Work consumes Horikoshi, leaving very little time for anyone else. He has his stationary and his cigarettes, he doesn't need anything else. Even experiencing deep emotional turmoil, Horikoshi continues to scribble away. This single-mindedness is such that when Horikoshi falls in love, it actually feels like an upset in trajectory. Maybe Naoko endures because she's a constant? Despite her illness she requires minimal upkeep, she's happy to spend her evenings holding Horikoshi's hand while he drafts planes. In describing this it strikes me that this sounds like a lopsided, even abusive relationship. It's actually nothing of the kind, Horikoshi and Naoko share a deep romantic love built on an unselfconscious stability. As with the rest of Miyazaki's films this is passion expressed through small physical gestures, and self-sacrifice. They're in this together, that's enough for them.

Sean by Daigo Ikeno

SHOTGUN FINGERS

Presenting Nuclear Throne, the latest game from Ridiculous Fishing dev Vlambeer. So what 16-bit games does this remind you of? I'm getting Chaos Engine mixed with the body altering power up system from Novotrade's underplayed Mega Drive masher Cyborg Justice.

LOCKDOWN

They're really holding back the bad guys in Transformers: Age of Extinction aren't they? Unless supercar sized Lockdown is meant to have Optimus Prime and his pet dinosaurs trembling. Who cares if he's got an army of generics, mollusc shell shaped Unicron ships, and a gun for a face? Lockdown originates from the Transformers Animated TV series in which he's a bounty hunter who's only notionally a Decepticon. Given his colour scheme, occupation, and general demeanour, I think it's safe to assume he's based on Death's Head, a Marvel UK character who beat up Transformers (in their own comic) on the regular.

Makoto by Daigo Ikeno