First Man, A Trip to the Moon on Solid Wings

Damien Chazelle has a musical mind. He's directed two musicals, La La Land being the big one, and a movie about a drummer sacrificing it all to achieve his ambitions. Now, let's examine a rather poetic scene from First Man.

The Gemini 8, piloted by Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), is in the process of docking with an unmanned vessel. The spacecraft float towards one another, making sure their motions are in tune. A symphony plays a waltz rivaling the theme from Super Mario Galaxy. It's a musical sequence, an extraterrestrial dance.

I couldn't help watching the scene with a huge grin on my face. I love stuff like this. I love the cinematic grandeur of the shots. Chazelle's directorial eye appears to be improving in every movie he makes. I love the music. Justin Hurwitz knows his way around a music sheet. What's more, I love the sentimentality of it all. For generations jaded on Star Trek and Star Wars, nothing is less romantic than ships docking, but there's romance here. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Throughout First Man, Chazelle's musical background shows up like this more than once, but he also steps away from the overstated nature of the musical genre to tell the story of a man who seems incapable of expressing emotions and inner feelings. Ryan Gosling plays Armstrong with intense understatement. The performance borderlines on doing nothing, yet Gosling is doing something. He does bring the audience into his inner world and I would consider it among his best.

Claire Foy is predictably excellent as Janet Armstrong, though this is very much a "man's film." That much is evident in the title. It's about a guy amidst a bunch of guys who understand the historical significance of their mission and are out to seek glory for their country (yes, this is also a patriotic film) and for themselves. Still, Foy manages to leave her mark.

Occasional oversentimentality, however, prevents a very good movie from being a great one. It doesn't commit all the way to the story's quiet, unassuming center.

Venom, or How Not to Make a Marvel Movie 101

 

Inconsistencies, one-dimensional villain, no character development...so many snacks - I mean problems - so little time. I'm not sure what I should pick apart first, so I'll start with the entire mess that is Venom.

Nothing makes sense, least of all the story. It wants to be an anti-hero story. That's all fine and dandy, except that Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) has no real flaw. There can be no anti-hero if the main character is already heroic. Eddie faces no personal obstacle that prevents him from saving the day. Venom, himself, is a simple guy with a simple flaw: he's an alien that enjoys eating people. This seems to be his entire reason for existing and for being on earth. Then, bam, just like that, he changes. He's actually a nice guy, a team player. No genuine motivation for the change exists.

While I'm slicing up the story, I might as well mention that it takes far too long for Venom and Eddie Brock to be conjoined. The film makes the classic error of starting too early in the story. While the world building is a necessary evil in sci-fi, too much (and somehow too little) hurts more than it helps.

The character development, as is already clear, is something the writers and directors didn't seem to care about. The villain is a rehash of Apocalypse and Zamasu. He thinks he is above humanity and uses the Bible on one occasion to get someone to do his bidding, so I suppose that makes him Luciferian as well. Take all the bad guyness from any superhero movie you can think of and strip it of any emotional weight and anything to make the audience care. That's Carlton Drake/Riot (Riz Ahmed).

Even the female lead, Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), isn't immune to all the development this movie doesn't have.

Can't you see how much fun I'm having with this?

On to the acting, shall we? Actually, let's move on. There isn't any acting involved, just a bunch of guys going through the motions. I don't see how they could do anything else. The script is a hodgepodge of mostly random sequences and basic origin story stuff.

Venom has no idea what tone it should keep. The moments of intense drama are undone by the film's disinterested attitude towards them. An important character gets murdered and it's like, okay, that happened. The romance angle doesn't work. The film fails to convey tension and heartbreak. Also, since it's Venom, there are elements taken from the horror genre and turned into a game of tag. Go figure.

Pretty much the only entertaining moments in the movie stem from Venom's voiceovers. On a handful of sequences, I genuinely laughed, and not from accidental humor caused by directorial shortcomings. Those few crumbs kept my interest piqued just enough to keep watching without feeling entirely brain-dead. They do not, unfortunately, make up for the rest of this mess.

If anyone expects me to compliment the chase scene and CGI action sequences, you've got another thing coming. I'm not Michael Bay. Recycling explosions and set pieces from superior films does not get me excited. Action that is both cool and helps character development does (think the last three Mission: Impossible movies and The Incredibles).

Whew! That was tasty.