Quick takes on 5 films

Fast Color is a very non-traditional superhero kind of film. There’s no big bad guy to kill and no earth-shattering special effects (though the understated effects that are there are done very well); instead, it is about the personal journey of a person with special powers. Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) has just escaped a government facility where they were guinea-pigging her. We see quickly that she causes regional earthquakes, but learn later that other powers are present in the women in her family, and always have been, specifically, the power to take objects apart molecularly and put them back together. Ruth and her family are surviving in a world that is dying around them. Water has become scarce; it never rains anymore, bodies of water are a thing of the past, and even a jug of water to use for bathing is more expensive than a night at the motel. Ruth reunites with her daughter just as the government’s goons narrow in on them. The film is measured and moves slowly, which normally isn’t a problem for me (see Aniara that I review next), but it doesn’t fit well here for some reason. Mbatha-Raw is very good as Ruth (I liked her a lot in Belle a few years ago too), but Lorraine Toussaint as Ruth’s mom Bo was honestly a bit over the top and didn’t mesh with the other actors. The film does have a fine, stirring climax, but it felt like an age to get there.

Aniara shows how a slow burning film should go. A Swedish film, it takes place in the future where our Earth is dead and people are moving to Mars, though as a cold planet, it isn’t much better. The trip is to take 3 months, but the cruise ship-like Aniara is damaged by debris early on, and has to jettison their fuel rods, leaving them adrift. They are hurtling away from Earth with no way to steer or change speed in the inertia of space. The captain announces that they will use a celestial body’s gravity to slingshot around and return home, but it will take 2 years. However, an astronomer on board knows there is no such body on their course, and that they will never make it back, and she spreads the news, causing panic. The main story of the film follows a woman named MR, who runs an AI-powered virtual reality shop named Mina. Mina reads the minds of the people that visit her and gives them peaceful views of Earth before it was destroyed by its own inhabitants. However, with news spreading that they are stuck in space, people are depressed and angry, leading to Mina becoming the same, and she kills herself, ending the program. As the last haven for people to escape the monotony of their lives is gone, conditions on the ship deteriorate. Years go by, some good, but mostly bad. After 4 years, a probe is picked up on sensors heading their way. Not big enough to be a rescue shop, but hopefully carrying new fuel rods, the captain spreads lies that they are going to be saved. When the probe arrives 2 years later (6 years in), the crew finds it isn’t fuel, and may not even be human made. I cannot say enough how much I loved this movie. It is a real look at what makes up the good, bad, and ugly of humanity. So many aspects are explored, such as love and hate, hope and despair, religion and cults, birth and suicide, etc. Don’t watch if it you like Hollywood movies with pretty endings, but do watch if you like a profoundly moving film where the journey is just as important, if not more so, than any ending you can imagine.

Dark Phoenix may be the last movie in the X-Men film series before it rides off into the sunset (we’ll see if the long-delayed New Mutants ever gets released or not). The series will get rebooted and brought into the juggernaut that is the MCU in the coming years. Unfortunately it may go down as the worst of the series, and that’s saying something when you consider Origins: Wolverine. It’s the re-telling of the Phoenix storyline, first seen in X Men: the Last Stand. We see young Jean Gray first come into her parents, the same day she accidentally kills her parents and is brought to Professor Xavier’s school to join the X-Men. Years later as an adult, she and her team encounter a space anomaly which, instead of killing Jean, is absorbed into her, further strengthening her already considerable powers. She doesn’t immediately use her newfound strengths for good. The movie is thrilling for the first 20 minutes, and just when I started to wonder where all the bad reviews came from, the cracks started to appear. Sophie Turner does a great job of putting all those years of bad-assery learned on Thrones to good use, and she makes for a solid Jean Gray, but the movie just isn’t very good. Some truly fantastic actions scenes aren’t enough to blanket shoddy dialogue, cheesy throw-away lines, and a paper-thin plot. Every piece of cliché dialogue you can imagine makes an appearance, some more than once. It’s a dull thud of a movie, only really watchable for die-hard fans.

Going to state up front that I know nothing about Pokemon, and went into Pokemon: Detective Pikachu completely blind. I was too old to play the card game or the cartoon series when those were big, never played the Nintendo video games, and only played Pokemon Go for like a week when it first came out, to see what the craze was about. I think I would have enjoyed this movie more (or at least, all the little easter eggs that seem to be laid throughout) if I knew some of the backstory. It follows a young man whose father recently died, and he inherits his father’s pokemon, a pikachu voiced by Ryan Reynolds. The duo goes on a hunt to solve the mystery of the man’s death, and end up going up against a big corporation with a lot to hide. I bet fans of the series find plenty to love here. There were some decent moments and Reynolds’ delivery is always good for some laughs, but the film was a bit boring for me.

In The Dig, man, Callahan, returns to an abandoned family home in Northern Ireland and starts to fix up the place. He immediately confronts an older man, McKenna, coming out every day to dig holes on his property. Turns out Callahan has just been released from prison, having served many years for killing the older man’s daughter. McKenna has been digging in hopes of finding his daughter’s body, but Callahan was blackout drunk at the time of the deed, and doesn’t remember where her body is. Callahan is wracked with guilt, and McKenna can’t stand his guts for obvious reasons, but the two begin to dig every day together, and are fed meals and water from the surviving daughter, Roberta, who has been by her father’s side all these years. In the small town, Callahan is also hounded by the local citizens, even the local police officer, who don’t appreciate him being back. The film unfolds as a mystery/quasi-thriller. Our murderer wishes he could remember the events of that night, but they just never come, and his anguish grows with every swing of the shovel. Its a film about obsession and, hopefully by the end, redemption. I wasn’t a big fan of the twist that came in near the end, but the denouement was satisfying enough, and overall, I enjoyed the quiet, tense film.