Of Action Films Who Respect Their Audience

            The Mission Impossible series has seemed to lend itself to those directors in a state of transition. With the exception of the first Brian DePalma directed vehicle, the series has seen John Woo use the second film as part of his transition from Hong Kong to Hollywood, and the third film saw J.J. Abrams make his transition from television to the big screen. It is fitting then that the fourth film in the series, subtitled Ghost Protocol, sees the entrance of Brad Bird, previously a director of animated films, into the world of live action. The film displays a maturity of form which might come as a surprise for a first time director in this field, but which should be to no surprise at all to those familiar with his work at Pixar.

            Despite the degradation in reputation that the tentpole blockbuster has undergone in recent years, Ghost Protocol is a film which respects its audience’s intelligence. Several capers are usually in play simultaneously, and the film has a habit of building up the tension in one of them, and then cutting away to a bit of parallel action during the other moment’s climax. Unlike the Transformers of the world, the film does not necessarily delight in showing us every detail of its action sequences, instead relying on the rhythms of the film itself to carry the audience along. Events sometimes happen on the edges of things, and the film has enough faith in his audience that it doesn’t feel the need to belabor these points.

            At one point, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has arrived at the party of powerful media mogul, whilst being tailed by a Russian agent. After the plot goes through its requisite machinations, the characters decide to make their escape. Hunt, who has been slinking around in the shadows on a terrace above the party, radios in his plans and makes his move to exit the frame. Down below, in the unfocused crowd of the party, another figure quickly exits the frame as well. While another film might feel the need to cut between the Russian and Hunt in sort of shot/reverse shot pattern (cutting to the shot of Hunt about to leave/cut to the Russian looking at him/cut to Hunt leaving/cut to Russian leaving), Bird has enough faith in the film to let everything play out uninterrupted, trusting that the audience can figure things out.

            The elegiac scenes set in Seattle near film’s end also play out in a similar way. As Hunt and William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) reveal their secrets to each other, a series of shots from Hunt’s point of view goes unacknowledged until their very end (at which point any audience member should have figured things out) by anyone besides the audience. Renner’s character does not have to acknowledge and explicate what is going on, like he would in many films. Like much else in Ghost Protocol, from exposition, to editing, to action scenes, the film appears almost freed from providing an explanatory purpose for its events, the audience being respected enough to provide that themselves.

            This allows the world of the film to simply exist instead of having to be built, and while some of the exposition’s briskness might come from an assumed familiarity on the part of the series towards its viewers, the overall tone of the film suggests otherwise. The events that occur throughout are a means to their own end, and not to any others. The visceral joy of action and motion is what the film is concerned with, and there are few screen spectacles of the last year that are on par with it. Being freed from some of the structures of storytelling does not destroy the narrative, as the characters’ motivations come off as surprisingly effective. Bird shows that he can transition well to the live action world, and hopefully his future career will be able to reach the visual heights of this initial work.

Picture courtesy of  http://www.film.com/photos/mission-impossible-ghost-protocol/attachment/mission-impossible-ghost-protocol-2#fbid=yAtvT6lsRux

Of Swedish Stories and American Remakes

*SPOILER ALERT* This post contains some spoilers as to relationships between characters in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There are no spoilers about the central mystery itself.            

           Is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as good as the Swedish original? That is the question that any prospective viewer is sure to have at the front of their mind, but in the end, questions of good or bad seem almost irrelevant. While not a shot for shot remake by any means, David Fincher’s American version hews so close to Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish production that the film commits a crime only slightly better than being bad. It’s pointless.

            The plot unravels in much the same fashion as the original, with the same scene performing the same function almost every time. With one notable exception involving the film’s ultimate mystery, there is very little for someone already familiar with the material to be surprised by. But that is not the film’s greatest error, nor is it one that it can be particularly faulted for. In a genre such as the thriller mystery a good amount of the narrative material has to be rigidly adhered to unless one wants to simply abandon the plot altogether.  One does not have the option of focusing on some plotlines while ignoring others in genres such as this, although this is an error which should have been deduced at an earlier stage in the film’s production.

            It is not so much that the revelations of the plot are the same, but the manner in which they play out seems barely different. Different actors might be reading different lines, but everything just seems like a well-constructed paraphrase, where the individual words are altered to avoid plagiarism, but the overall thought remains the same. Nothing has been reinterpreted from the Swedish version, just repeated. Not even the setting appears to have undergone a makeover, with the bridge to the Vangers’ private island looking exactly the same. Even the setting of Sweden seems tired and while critics of cultural imperialism might bristle at the thought, a change of setting might have been useful, if only to force some originality into the film style. In fact, the way that the film is presented now seems to only strengthen the argument that this English remake is a product of cultural imperialism. There truly is nothing different in it when compared to the Swedish version. Simply a change in packaging that appeals to an American audience.

            Even the negative aspects of the original remain the same. The ending feels anticlimactic and a subplot about Lisbeth’s social worker in the film’s first third remains both disconnected from everything else and needlessly graphic. The relationship between the two leads blossoms just as improbably this time, and while there are additional romantic scenes between the two of them thrown in, it all seems rather contrived.  The plot is simply regurgitated, instead of tightened up as it could be. Much like the Harry Potter films, the movie seems more concerned with getting its plot points on screen than in reinterpreting them in any sort of cinematic way.

            To its credit the film also retains one of the high points of the Swedish original: the performance of its lead actress. As Lisbeth Salander, Rooney Maura seems to have a vulnerability distinct from anything that might be present in Noomi Rapace’s portrayal. The film never tires of showing us how tough and concentrated Lisbeth is, with a brusqueness that most of the Internet generation would find admirable instead of rude. Fincher’s film, however, makes a point of including several scenes, like those between Lisbeth and her “warden” so to speak, that humanize her, and Mara makes sure that this vulnerability and emotion is not something left behind in only those moments. When hunting down a murderer near film’s end she seems more a dervish temporarily taken by emotion, then the sleek assassin of the Swedish version. What might seem natural to Rapace plays off more as performative for Maura, but never in the sense that the actress is the one playing a character, or that the person hiding behind Lisbeth’s cold exterior is Rooney Maura. In this case, the person hiding behind something is Lisbeth.

             One of the jobs of a critic is to say whether a movie is worth spending your money on, and it is oftentimes best to do that without setting up conditionals such as whether or not you have seen the original version.  In this case however, the conditionals seem unavoidable. If you’ve seen the original version, there’s no need to bother with this one. Would you buy a virtually identical pair of sneakers when you already own a brand new pair? A change might be in order after the first pair has become worn out, but for the time being, there’s no need to own two identical pairs of shoes. The similarities between Fincher’s version and the Swedish version border on laziness, with a bravura credit sequence and appropriately eerie score seemingly wasted on such an uninspired product.  Of course, the film it draws its inspiration from was entertaining in its own right, so the question must be asked. What’s the point?