Category / film reviews

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Blood is Thicker than Water (and as Thick as Two Short Planks)

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (James Gunn, 2017)

I confess I had a sneaking liking for Guardians of the Galaxy, in part because I went in with no baggage and low expectations — although clearly that’s a contradiction. I quite liked the ironising, which under cut the macho posturing, but I was left with the sense of the displacement of ethnicity onto different coloured aliens and a near absence of women (a green heroine and her blue sister, who apparently was Amy Pond).

Vol. 2 comes with the baggage of the original and the risk of a joke being dragged too thin. It begins mid-caper, with the Guardians protecting batteries for a alien species called the Sovereigns in return for the return of Amy Pond who had previously tried to steal them. Unfortunately Rocket Racoon steals some himself, and they are chased across the galaxy by the Sovereigns, who seem rather weaponised for people who employ mercenaries. The Sovereigns then employ Yondu Udonta, who brought Peter Quill up, to go after them. Quill, meanwhile, is rescued by his father Ego, who turns out to be somewhat of a God and who has created a paradise. Perhaps.

By now, the pattern is established — witty banter between the central heroes punctuated by fights and capers, synchronised to a seventies soundtrack. We reach the diminishing returns pretty early on with the fights, but be reassured that no one will really die that you care for. There is the Unspoken Sexual Tension between Peter and Gamora, and Drax gets a few more lines, and Groot is cute, as baby Groot. A new character is brought in — Mantis, an empath with feelers, oddly Sino-French, but apparently German-Vietnamese in the original comic appearance — and adds a little to the cringe factor.

The casting of as Kurt Russell as Ego is genius — bringing with him the baggage of cult director John Carpenter such as Snake Plissken in Escape from New York and Escape from L.A., The Thing from Another World and Big Trouble in Little China, heroic but seedy, not entirely trustworthy. If you can’t afford Jeff Bridges, Russell’s your man. I could totally believe in him as love ’em and leave ’em immortal, but I definitely didn’t buy the plot gimmick as to why he needed his son. Ah well.

But it is, to some extent, a film about family and the coming together of estranged families, whether or not there is a blood tie. Yondu and Amy, recurring villains from the first film, are, after all, family, and family is family. They can be forgiven remarkably quickly and given a shot of redemption. Perhaps that’s what makes it comedy.

Meanwhile, as the Marvel Universe expands, the cameos and the injokes expand, with seemingly never ending closing credits, more Howard the Duck, too much Stan Lee — who has hardly improved as an actor since Mallrats — and Easter Eggs for future movies.

I can see how if you like this kind of thing you’d love it. I’d even go back for a third dose, but Ego is not the only thing to be indulged.

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Waiting for Gadot

Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017)

Of course, this is an important film — women directors are pretty rare and women directors given a big budget are even rarer. Whilst I am hardly disciplined in seeing DC and Marvel superhero movies, my experience is that women are mostly there to be rescued, with the few female superheroes rather sidelined. This is, I understand, the first female superhero movie (Supergirl aside or presumably Catwoman). I confess I’ve yet to have the pleasure of Batman vs Superman, a film seemingly so long in the making that I suspect they wanted us to forget about it. So this is my first meeting with Diana, Princess of the Amazons (Gal Gadot), at some point to be called Wonder Woman.

She is brave and headstrong and heroic, and refuses to be put in her place, with a string duty of care and a sense of ethics. As action figure, she fits in that line that started with Buffy and went through Catnip Evergreen to Rey and the ex-Emma Grundy née Carter. We need strong women. We need strong role modes for women.

Note the plural.

And we need a world in which $149 million can be wasted on tosh starring a woman as well as on tosh starring a man.

Because, it is, don’t get me wrong, tosh.

There is something that makes me feel awfully uncomfortable about a superhero movie set so firmly in the real world that the First World War features and which has the superhero also living in present day Paris. Paris. Of all cities. And obviously it raises questions about the Second World War, as well as more recent tragedies, and where the hell she was.

So little Diana, princess, has grown up on the island of Mascara, ok the island of Themyscira, passing through a series of different accents until she comes of age. After being forbidden to train as a warrior, she gets her way and is beefed up just in time for American spy Stephen Trevor to literally crash into her life, with boatloads of Evil Germans on his tail. These are soon seen off — although the battleship seems to be conveniently forgotten about — and Diana decides she wants to go to the Front, to find and defeat Ares, the God of War.

It is at this point that the idiot gear is engaged. She sails with Trevor, apparently overnight to London, waking up for Tower Bridge, which is closer to St Paul’s than you think and even closer to Selfridge’s, where they get her some clothes, with the aid of the former Hayley from The Archers aka Dawn from The Office as Etta Crumb, perhaps the most interesting figure in the film, who can more than hold her own, even when they are mugged in the surprisingly close by Sicilian Avenue.

Meanwhile, a mission is afoot: to stop the evil Dr Moreau (who spells it Maru) from developing a nerve gas even worse than the Mustard Gas used by the Germans in Ypres and elsewhere and indeed by the Allies in 1917 when they found some and started developing their own. This will also get Diana closer to Ares. And so Trevor recruits his team, Sameer and Charlie in London and Chief, a Native American, in Belgium, to go after the bad guys.

Of course, it is hard to think of Spud from Trainspotting as a sharpshooter, indeed he is not as good at it as you’d think, and when he raises his kilt to warm his, er, sporran over a fire, he clearly turns out not to be a true Scotsman. And there are unexpected twists that make absolutely no sense and an embarrassing and hideous mass killing, albeit of Evil Germans, by Dr Moreau and Herr General Evil German, who cackle with laughter in a callousness that feels poorly judged. Especially in a 12A. And the Evil Germans keep shooting at Diana, but unaccountably aim for her wrists or her shield, rather than, I don’t know, her ankles. But there’s hugs all round by the end. The surviving Evil Germans aren’t so evil after all.

Of course, I was under the impression that Trevor was Rogers and was going to turn into Captain America, but that was Chris Evans rather than Chris Pratt, an entirely different universe. Silly me. Too many Steves and Chrises.

Of course, Trevor is given a wonderful speech in which he explains that evil is inherent in humanity and there isn’t really one Big Bad, and you wonder (sorry) whether it’ll turn out that Diana was deluded after all. But he has to go off and buy the farm, whilst she gets to kick Ares after all. Of course, this is her brother, whom she is able to Stop, in the Name of Love, as she gets extra powers when she’s mourning.

The box office success of the film no doubt means a second episode is forthcoming, although whether this will be present day stopping evil in Paris or we have another flashback to her, I don’t know, fighting Ares in a Berlin bunker, having stopped…. no, just, no.

Perhaps less of the stupid next time?

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Look On My Prequels, Matey, and Despair

Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott, 2017)

It really does worry me that with this and Prometheus I was looking at my phone at the fifty minute mark and was wondering when someone, anyone, was going to die. By now, the Alien template should be established — a small crew, who you’ll never quite be able to distinguish, stumble upon something nasty and are killed one by one until the final girl survives. In the case of the Alien franchise we know there are going to be aliens, but unfortunately they seem to want to delay gratification as long as possible.

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Or, the Modern Frankenstein

Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

By design or accident, the Alien Tetralogy became interesting because each film had its own auteur or its own genre — Alien offered haunted house in space (and an uncanny double of the slasher), Aliens was a ‘Nam movie, Alien3 was a prison movie and Alien: Resurrection was. It simply was. So Ridley Scott decides he wants to go back and produce a new film in the Alien universe and make it a prequel — except for some reason it leaves the A-word off the title.

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But Not As We Know It

Life (Daniel Espinosa, 2017)

A year, maybe two years, ago there was viral footage of an octopus sliding around the deck of a ship and eventually escaping through a teeny weeny hole. Cute.

That wasn’t the only moment of déjà vu that I had watching this sf-horror hybrid — most obviously its DNA is infused with Ridley Didley’s Alien, with an alien inadvertantly being brought back on board a spaceship and killing the crew one by one until we’re left with the final girl. On a purely CGI level, you might well be able to make the case that the effects have improved in forty years and I do confess that the tension is satisfactorarily cranked up in the final third, but we will forget about this film before the next Star Wars release.

What was I writing about?

There is also no denying that there is an impressive single continuous take at the opening as we are introduced to a pleasingly international crew on the International Space Station, moving in and out of space and connecting corridors and so forth in a seeming cry of fuck you, Gravity, I can do this too. But this is presumably relatively easy in the motion capture and digital era — imagine what Hitchcock could do with Rope now.

So there’s a probe which has a soil sample (sans potatoes) from Mars that is going to be analysed on the ISS what with quaranteen and all, only it’s approaching too fast and is likely to collide with the ship or the astronaut playing catch. For the sake of the plot, the probe is snagged and, for the sake of no nausea, continuity editing is reestablished.

Ship’s biologist Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) locates a cute little monocell critter, apparently dormant, so he plays around with the atmosphere in the lab vitrine and gives it some ECT and it yawns and says hello daddy. Before you can say that’s not a bleeding obvious subtext, school children have decided that the alien will be christened Alien McAlienface — sorry, no, Calvin. I mean, it’s not as if the crew is going to be divided into the damned and the elect, is it? I may have hallucinated a character saying “I have a bad feeling about this”, but Calvin is pissed at the electronic probing and fights back and escapes. It can squeeze through the tiniest spaces.

And so, eventually, we get a body count and the kind of random disaster plotting that has been played with most recently in The Martian and Passengers — being knocked out of stable orbit, using up too much fuel, losing radio contact with Earth… And having carefully established that each cell can do the same thing as all the other cells, it rapidly becomes apparent that there is more than one Calvin. And fewer crew.

There are further attempts at the Deep and Meaningful — one character is reading The Interpretation of Dreams (“Can you say, ‘Monster from the Id’*”) and a copy of Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s Goodnight Moon is produced as a present for an astronaut who has just become a father (and that presumably has significance if you’ve read it).l

But the film cannot really recover from the sense that the characters are so shallow and lack sufficient back story to really make you care. There are some pretty deaths, and you do kind of root for the characters, but not with any enthusiasm. And even the almost obligatory genre ending can’t really redeem it.

* Anachronistic joke, obviously, as Interpretation is 1899, 1900, and The Ego and the Id (1923).

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Free Fall

Free Fire (Ben Wheatley, 2016)

This isn’t a postmodern movie like Reservoir Dogs, the academic introducing this movie reassured us, as Wheatley draws on Michael Mann rather than Quentin Tarantino.

Okay…

I’ve only seen two of Wheatley’s previous films (and his Doctor Who episodes) and I suspect I like one of them more than others and one of them less. One switched genre gears pleasingly into Wicker Man territory, the other was a Kevin Brownlow movie directed by Ken Russell. There was a camp if violent tone to both.

Free Fire cranks up the claustrophobia on both — after a couple of road scenes and a factory exterior in Toronto, we’re then stuck in single space in Brighton, although you could read it as Massachusetts and some point in the 1970s if you want to. On the one hand, there are Irish men looking for machine guns, presumably as part of the terror campaign, on the other hand there is a South African and an ex-Black Panther looking to sell. The inbetweeners are a bearded giant and almost the only woman in the film.

Of course, you know it’s going to go wrong and, whilst the film is a taut ninety minutes, it drags a little until the wrongness starts. One of them asks the woman if she is an FBI plant — just like Mr Orange, you’ll think, or in his mould, but that hasn’t been filmed yet. Later we’re told how long it takes to bleed to death — just as we find out in Reservoir Dogs. One faction will, you know, attempt to rip the other group off — or they’ll rip each other off.

There’s a very heavy handed flagging of a gun over a fireplace, although we’re never told what the gun is and … well, as far as I can tell this is a tease and perhaps the only real nod to originality in the film.

As the bullets fly, you rather quickly lose track of who is dead or dying, or perhaps merely dying, or perhaps they’re stunned… beautiful plumage… You can’t help but feel that as the shot, blown up and penetrated crawl over glass, syringes and rubble that they’d be a little more stunned. For all Wheatley’s plotting out of the action in Minecraft, the spaces don’t feel consistent.

There are some laughs. The guys behind me (I think there was only one woman in the auditorium) found shooting a gun hilarious. They found guns jamming hilarious. They found the need to reload hilarious. I think I missed the joke. Cillian Murphy, Michael Riley and even Sam Riley had good lines. Armie Hammer looks good in a beard, perhaps his one character note and a means of telling him apart from the others. Brie Larson has her moments, and I’d like to see her in Concrete Island if Wheatley fancies more Ballard. And Sharlton Copley has the same comic schtick he brought to District 9 and CHAPPiE, minus the CGI. Rather like Life it’s an endurance test for the audience as much as the characters, and I cared marginally more for them.

But solid back story, motivation and something like an actual plot have been carefully eliminated in the name of … well it used to be postmodern and ironic and it used to make a difference from Merchant-Ivory confection but it’s twenty years since Michael Mann in Heat remade his own LA Takedown from a decade before that. Do we have more than a feature-length sitcom with a body count? It is slick, but too slick.

When googling around on Wheatley, I read the comment that he’s the new Noel Clarke. This may have been a compliment.

To be honest, I’m not sure who should be more insulted.

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Why This is El Ay, Nor Are We Out of It

La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016)

Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) are both in suspended animation on board a spaceship on a century long voyage, dreaming of wish fulfilment. I apologise for the spoiler, but I haven’t seen a film this obvious since is-it-meant-be-a-surprise-he’s-dead-what-with-having-been-shot-in-the-chest.

The clue is a traffic jam on an LA freeway, when everyone gets out of their cars and starts a song and dance routine, and no one seems bothered, no one seems angry, no one gets shot and no cops turn up to beat anyone up. This is all the more remarkable given that the drivers are so ethnically diverse and it will be over an hour if not ninety minutes until another person of colour gets to speak.

Mia and Sebastian’s dreams intersect at this point, with one giving the other the finger, although if this is going to be a romantic comedy this is a sign of impending union. She is a wannabe actor, working shifts at a Warner Bros lot coffee shop in hopes of being noticed, going to a hundred pointless auditions in search of a big break. She tries for agency and to set up a one woman show to get herself noticed, and indeed she is picked up for a film that will be based around her.

Can we say, “solipsism”?

But then we are at the centre of our dreams.

Occasionally she breaks into song and she does not seem to find this strange, nor is she that bothered when she finds herself floating around a planetarium — I assume that the gravity has failed on the spaceship. On several occasions she walks across LA in the middle of the night, alone, with not a single sign of a mugger. LA is surely the city where nobody walks. It is the hyperreal.

Meanwhile, Sebastian dreams about being a jazz pianist, wanting to save jazz by creating a club where he can play. In the meantime he refuses to play the set list in restaurants and plays keyboards in covers bands. It shouldn’t be a surprise that when he breaks into song, but there is something delusional about a white person saving jazz, although we can repeatedly point to white singers (Elvis? Slim Shady?) who have become the popular avatars of music of black origin. In perhaps the most offensive scene he becomes the white counterpart to the magical negro who teaches an African American couple to dance.

Sebastian tells us about jazz as a conversation between musicians, a competition of ideas, but when we see him play it is pretty well always alone (aside from the awful bands) on the keyboard. It is playing as self expression.

Can we say, “solipsism”?

But then we are at the centre of our dreams.

In one version of the dream, there is no romcom reconciliation — indeed one of them seems to have started a family within days of their parting. Of course. Their dreams are so self-centred that they cannot find a unified space. In another version of the dream, there is the happily ever after. I give it six months.

Of course, in the process of the film, Hollywood is able to satirise itself, although as is so often the case, it is toothless, because we are seduced by the studio and the inevitable Academy Awards.

And no one seems to wonder why Keith (John Legend) is the only person of colour with substantial dialogue (there’s a casting agent in one scene, too). The dreams both involve an ethnic apocalypse.

During the closing credits, an elderly woman tapped me on the shoulder and said “You must be a jazz fan.”

I think this was an observation rather than an order. And, alas, I don’t think I am beyond the blindingly obvious Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Bix Beiderbecke. So I might be wrong when I suspect there was actually very little jazz in this film.

And then I woke up and it was all a dream…

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Judgement Day

Trainspotting 2 (Danny Boyle, 2017)

Back in the day there was a Panic, nay, a Right To Do, over Trainspotting the movie. Irvine Welsh was the Scottish flavour of the month for cult writer, but the film version led to Peter Bottomley and other Tory MPs to condemn it as it would turn everyone into junkies, which is an unlikely experience for anyone who actually saw the movie, as indeed Bottomley hadn’t. Will Self called it drugs porn, whatever that meant, presumably because it didn’t match his flavour of smugness.

Cool Britannia was heading for its height — the Oasis vs. Blur conundrum exercising everyone who hadn’t heard Pulp, Mr Tony was already doing his Tory PM in waiting grin and John Major was still the grey man. Family values and all that? Don’t eat the eggs.

Trainspotting was a breath of fresh air as I recall, being neither the chocolate box heritage adaptation nor the mockney gangster, Danny Boyle (and Ewan MacGregor) was hot from Shallow Grave and Robert Carlyle was emerging as a great character actor (Hamish Macbeth? The Full Monty was on its way). John Hodge weaved a series of vignettes into a linear but heavily narrated movie, the stories of junky Renton (MacGregor) and his friends in Edinburgh. The editing and mise en scène was sharp, the pacing assured, transcending various moments of MTV video. A hundred moments stand out — a freeze frame of Renton leaning on a car bonnet, Renton licking his cut finger, Renton wincing at a needle, Spud (Ewan Bremnor) gabbling his way through a job interview, a toilet dream fugue…

Carlyle and MacGregor went onto greater things — the latter fell out with Boyle when he wasn’t cast in The Beach and did Star Wars instead — Bremnor would appear from time to time, Jonny Lee Miller (Sickboy) never quite made star status and seems to have had more success on TV. And Boyle never quite repeated himself, so a return to Trainspotting seemed unlikely even though Welsh had written a sequel Porno.

But the creative team reassembled twenty years on — double the interval of the first two Linklater/Delpy/Hawkes Before movies — and found space for a sequel. Oddly, I had the same sense of fanboy stomach lurch when I saw the trailer for T2 as I did for The Force Awakens, which puts Carlyle somewhat in the Harrison Ford position and suggests that he may well have an emo kid who will be the death of him.

T2 is a darker film, both visually and thematically, even as Edinburgh itself has thrived. Renton, last seen heading for Amsterdam with a hold all full of money, has had a dull career and failed marriage, Spud used the money left for him on more drugs, Sickboy has moved into pimping and blackmail and Begbie (Carlyle) has been in and out of prison. Renton returns to Edinburgh, partly to rebuild his life and to make amends, but not everyone is pleased to see him. Revenge is on the cards.

Of course, we want to see the old team together again, whether it’s the three junkies and Begbie or the crew of the Millennium Falcon, but we know it can’t be the same again. Boyle cleverly plays with the desire from reunion, whilst quoting the earlier film in a parallel way to Abrams with Lucas. Sometimes it’s a matter of music cues — although in different recordings — sometimes it’s equivalent scenes such as chases, fights and Sean Connery impressions. We get the odd filmic flashback, lifting Trainspotting footage, sometimes we get newly shot versions. We even get, finally, the vignette that explains both the film’s title and Begbie’s behaviour, just in case we don’t realise the danger his son faces.

The junky lifestyle seems to be about history repeating itself, always as tragedy, certainly as fuck up, and the four leads always circulate around the possibility of falling back into old ways. There is the Big Scheme, one last scam, that will help them all escape, but you know they are doomed. Judgement Day awaits.

If Trainspotting was Renton’s film, then this is Spud’s, with a curious arc of redemption that almost makes the film eat its own tail. Certainly he is the focus of the stand out visual set pieces. He steals the scenes as Begbie chews and punches and kicks the scenery; Sickboy meanwhile is a minor villain and Renton largely an enabler.

If you remember the original posters for Trainspotting there were five figures in black and white surrounded by orange. The fifth, the only female, was Diane, Renton’s underage conquest, although in a sense he was the one who was conquered in a rather dubious sequence. Diane is back, in cameo, but relegated from poster duties. Two decades of sexual politics leads to a film about four men; the women here are mothers and ex-wives or girlfriends, the common sense of a normal life when the boys have stopped playing.

Danny Boyle would be eighty if we checked in again in twenty years. Is it a cheap metaphor to wonder if we would like another fix? Do we want to see the characters as the old men in the bar, nursing pints and chasers as young men fight each other? I suspect it is. I suspect we do.

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so much depends upon a red collar

Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, 2016)

Eddie Redmayne was lauded for his problematic performance in The Danish Girl, but it’s not until the closing credits of Paterson that it is revealed that here Marvin the dog  is actually played by Nellie (and has since died).

What are we to make of this? Is it a sign that her human, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), is so obsessed by her relentless redecoration of their house in black and white that she hasn’t noticed Marvin’s sex? Or in her world is Marvin a gender neutral name? She is explosively creative — painting the walls, the soft furnishings, the shower curtain, trying to learn the guitar in three days, wanting to make a fortune with cupcakes — and even subjecting Marvin to the indignity of bad paintings. It’s only a wonder she hasn’t painted on Marvin.

Whilst Laura stays at home, hubby Paterson (Adam Driver) drives a bus.

Imagine that. Imagine the version where they’d cast Minnie Driver.

Paterson, living in Paterson, has read Paterson and aspires to be a poet. He writes poetry when he should have been starting on route 23, he writes poetry in his lunch hour and he writes poetry in his den. He writes it in big friendly letters in his Moleskine (gotta love stationery porn) and on the screen, just in case we don’t get it. It is clean and there are no crossings out.

First thot, best thot.

Obviously it is Paterson-esque because this is Paterson in Paterson. No wonder Marvin’s confused. Is it meant to be any good? Paterson’s let Laura read it, but he’s never performed it and he’s never submitted it anywhere and because he doesn’t do any fucking drafts, the Moleskine is his only copy. So is it any good?

And every night, Marvin is taken for a walk to a bar. Not into the bar — he is made to sit outside, even though it is made clear that dog jackers are about. His life is at risk.

Paterson just sits there nursing a drink, chatting to the locals, in a kind of post-racial utopia where one of the African American patrons can pull a gun and not be gunned down by the law. Everyone can quote Abbott and Costello routines.

Maybe Marvin is better off outside.

But clearly Marvin is building stress and resentment, and, having committed minor acts of vandalism takes a bloody revenge on his humans. Serves them right. He’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore.

I have to say I never quite trusted Paterson. I suspect he’s on the edge of becoming all emo, obsesses over his dead grandfather and is likely to upset his parents.

Meanwhile, Marvin the paranoid canine has good reason to be paranoid, and Nellie is a great loss.

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Disturbing the Dust on a Bowl of Rose-Leaves

Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016)

I’ve tried to make this film review spoiler free, so I’ve been a little circumspect about some of its incipits. I am of course familiar with the Ted Chiang story, but I’m not here considering what has been changed between the two versions.

The last three films I have seen at the cinema have been sf — Passengers was predictably pants and I’m still processing Rogue One. It is one of Gareth Edward’s earlier films, Monsters (2010) that is most relevant here though, in which the US-Mexican border has been “infected” by sublime, incomprehensible aliens and the US is at war. Arrival’s heptapod aliens owe a debt to Edwards’s, as well as, perhaps Spielberg’s “Martians” in his War of the Worlds (2005). Aliens have arrived at twelve seemingly random if strategic points all over the world (which recalled Simak’s Visitors for me, but it must appear elsewhere) in giant, apparently rugby-ball shaped, ships. The race is on to find out why they are here and, more to the point, how we can exploit them. Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams), hero linguist, is called in to help decode the alien language, alongside physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), who is there for less clear reasons.

The film opens with what appears to be a sidetrack — the birth, life and death of Louise’s daughter. This made me rather nervous — that precursor film Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997) features a female protagonist with a dead father, and a tragic loss is an easy character motivation. There’s a certain amount of frustration to the camera angles — odd zones of focus and unfocus, characters offframe or not quite heard, so that we don’t quite get to see what’s going on. There are also a series of shots that for me recall Tarkovsky, although probably Nostalgia (1983) or The Sacrifice (1986) rather than Solaris (1972), although thematically that is in the mix too. In retrospect, it turns out, Villeneuve is playing fair with us but he has a helluva get out of jail free card. But I was a little distracted by the photo that Banks doesn’t have on her desk.

Of course, the bulk of the film is taken up with Banks and Donnelly’s attempt to communicate with the aliens, whom the latter names Abbott and Costello. This is odd, since neither of the heptopod duo engage in slapstick or banter, and it seems a very odd fashioned reference. Why not Laurel and Hardy? Ren and Stimpy? Cannon and Ball? Banks makes progress when she uses a whiteboard and when she recalls her daughter learning to read with picture books. We have a child’s garden of linguistics, as she explains her thinking to Weber (Forrest Whitaker), her military handler. The aliens, who haven’t seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977), communicate in mandala-like ink blots, characters that seem to be entire sentences rather than symbolic representations of phonemes. Time clearly passes, and you might think they get their Rosetta Stone moment rather too quickly, as Banks begins to forge a relationship with Abbott.

By then there’s a ticking clock — even though we are focused on the American translations the film never forgets that aliens don’t just invade London or New York. The Chinese and the Russians seem the quickest to get to the point of being militaristic, and risks making the film look like old fashioned Cold War propaganda. Banks has to solve the puzzle before the nuke from orbit option is exercised. And it is elements in the US military that she has to fear as much as overseas forces. We teeter on the edge of action adventure when the film is much more interested in sublime tableaux.

The film, largely, trusts us. As the prologue alerts us, we should distrust beginnings, middles and ends, and there is no character who properly sits down and tells us the bigger story that is unfolding. To my taste, there are three missteps: an insert of a post-encounter documentary (which refers to Banks as Louise), the Doctor Who tell-not-show tactic of news bulletins to narrate the story and a line of dialogue that is absolutely predictable and vomit-inducing from the mouth of a major character. But we’re sneakily told what non zero sum games and the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is, even if I’m not convinced that being immersed in a society where people only speak a foreign-to-you language is the same as thought being constructed by language. But pay attention or you’ve missed the key to the film. (There’s an early exchange between Banks and Weber, where she asks him to ask a question of another expert. The answer, “a desire for more cows”, presumably meaningful, is lost in the noise.)

Adams, low key, understandably nervous, is utterly convincing throughout. Renner looks somewhat bemused, presumably aware that his job is to be eye candy. Whitaker balances a difficult mix of potential threat and kindly go between. Meanwhile, almost every thing you take to be an idiot move has got a pay off. I don’t think that Solaris is that bad a model to bear in mind, stylistically and thematically. Put Stalker (1979) in the mix, too. This is sf for grown ups rather than frustrated teens, handling its big central idea much better than Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). It almost demands that you watch it again on a loop.

Villeneuve is set to film the sequel to Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). As directors of utterly pointless sequels go, the signs are good.