Black Bag (2025)

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Brand new. I really got to pick up my pace with the new releases. This year has been weird.

Did I Like It: I was probably going to like this film, however it ultimately turned out. I’m a supreme sucker for those times when Soderbergh feels the need to reach for something with a mainstream sheen. I had patience for the Ocean’s movies far longer than anyone else.

But there’s something oddly refreshing about the film beyond that which is worthy of note. Do I seem needlessly geriatric if I say that the mere act of going to a new movie that isn’t a cheap horror movie and/or comic book is refreshing enough? Probably not, as I do also enjoy those kinds of movies, but this experience was certainly nice. Also, the fact that it was only just-over ninety minutes long, it hardly had any time to wear out its welcome. That one makes me seem hopelessly immature. Trying to have all the right opinions is exhausting sometimes.

Beyond all that, the film has a fascinating concept at its core. A stylish spy thriller is always fun, but I’m bereft of another example of a spy story fueled by two characters who are pointedly committed to their marriage. Obviously one can ignore the Bond series*, or even the Mission: Impossible films. One can even set aside a film like Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) or True Lies (1994) would fit the bill, as they’re both about a marriage breaking apart under espionage and intrigue. Those who go up against George Woodhouse (Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett) come up short because their marriage is impenetrable.

*Incidentally, I think Pierce Brosnan is not getting enough credit (story of his life, probably) for not showing a hint of his Bond in a role we all might have forgiven him for doing so. As all my reviews for the Bond franchise up until this point are done, this may be my first opportunity to say this, but: With all due respect to him, if the new powers that be in the franchise want to do an “Old Man Bond” story, first, I think No Time To Die (2021) probably covered a lot of that ground, and I would really prefer a third Dalton movie in any event.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Strangely enough, I’ve somehow managed to avoid watching most of the series since starting these reviews. But this last weekend, I’m getting an oil change at one of those lightning fast, don’t-even-leave-your car joints. The guys doing the oil change were talking about superhero movies, and I just joined right in. One of them says this was the best of them all, and I was hard pressed to disagree. So it went near the top of my list to re-watch.

Did I Like It: It’s not hard to say that this is probably the best of the X-Men films*. It manages to weave together many of the elements that made X-Men (2000) and X2: X-Men United (2003) some of the early entries of the superhero boom, and the later films that managed to refresh the series with X-Men: First Class (2011). It even manages to avoid the particularly baffling multiple timelines that weighed down the series as it wore on… Mainly because this is the film that drove the timelines off the tracks.

But then again, as one of America’s fine purveyors of time travel nonsense, I fully approve of even that much.

It also helps that this film largely works. It may not be the bubbly 60s spy movie homage of First Class or the subtle homage to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)** that is X-Men United. It does owe a lot to The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and it may be the fact that at the moment I’m watching the Dirty Harry films, but Hugh Jackman has been spending the last twenty-five years just doing an Eastwood impression? It’s a pretty good one, sure, but… folks. That’s all he’s been doing.

That all reads like I’m picking at nits, but there were things that I found oddly affecting on this re-watch. And it only kind of has to do with the fact that the whole plot focuses on a megalomaniacal titan of the tech industry (Peter Dinklage) yanking a little too hard on the ear of the president (Mark Camacho) to bring us all to our inevitable doom.

All right, maybe it’s a bit more than kind of, but there’s other stuff here. I’m mainly focusing on the lost Charles Xavier as portrayed by McAvoy. He’s selfish and broken in a world where the only rational response would be to be selfish and broken. Who’s the only man in the entire multiverse who can set him right? The older, wiser Xavier as portrayed by Patrick Stewart. Hell, if I can’t have my future self set myself on the right track, I’d take any number of characters played by Patrick Stewart.

*If one ignores Logan (2017). We’re not going crazy here.

**I’ll die on this hill, but I probably won’t elaborate on it, unless I need to beef up the word count of this review.

Prometheus (2012)

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba

Have I Seen It Before: Sure.

Did I Like It: Is it possible to give a film partial credit? The last entry in the Alien franchise*, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (1997) benefited from an (just ever so slightly) above average script, but was weighed down by visual effects that removed any of the threat from the xenomorphs. This is working with the other formula and hoping for some degree of better success. The visuals are often stunning. The interiors of the ship Prometheus pull elements from the design of the Nostromo in Alien (1979) but extend it into a new environment that is always interesting to look at. I almost don’t mind that I can’t even kind of believe that the tech on display in this film looks wildly more advanced than the tech on the Nostromo, despite that first film taking place thirty years later.

Then there’s the story. One of the great “what the hell is that?” moments of Alien is the landing party coming across the Space Jockey. Alien doesn’t feel the need to tell us everything about how that poor unfortunate soul got something to leap out of them. It is content instead to let us wonder about how deeply weird this universe might be the deeper into the cosmos you drift. Jumping off with the idea of how that guy got into that seat is a shaky one to begin with. Jamming all of the wonder of that moment into its own two hour movie is pretty much guaranteed to dampen that wonder when one goes back to watch Alien again. But the film isn’t even really about that. It’s about those people, but LV-426 is kept as far away as possible. Even those squirrelly xenomorphs are only injected—sort of—as an afterthought that reeks of a studio note. How does one classify a bad idea that’s ultimately also a half-measure? “Uneven” is probably the nicest one for which I can immediately reach.

*I’m not looking in your direction any vs. Predator films, not because I’m looking down at you, but more because I can make the following point more smoothly without you getting in the way.

Steve Jobs (2015)

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Hell, I’ve read the book it was (loosely) based on twice.

Did I Like It: It feels like my opinion about the film seems like a fait accompli dependent on the answer to two questions:

1)     How do I feel about Steve Jobs (Fassbender) and the company he created going into the film?

2)     How do I feel about the work of Aaron Sorkin?

The answer to the second question is I enthusiastically love Sorkin’s work. I have no problem with The Newsroom, and I even like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, if you manage to ignore the last five episodes or so. Even if he’s starting to repeat himself a little bit and has never quite been as sharp as he was before he sobered up, I watch anything he has written, and I suddenly want to work harder at everything I do. Some people have some track of music or a particular recording artist to get them pumped, I have Sorkin.

Here, he has constructed a film story that reflects the products made by its subjects. Splitting a basic three-act structure across three of Jobs’ product launches, it bobs and weaves through many of the idea introduced in the Walter Isaacson biography upon which it is based. It was the only way to fit the essence of the book and the man into the confined package of a prestige drama. Sure, it creates fictions throughout that narrative, and in a vain attempt to make Jobs a gentler soul end the film at an arbitrary point in its central relationship. These are the realities of the biopic, even when it’s difficult to call this a biopic when it barely glances at the pre-Macintosh Jobs and only hints at the things he will do in the last decade of his life.

Which brings us to an attempt to answer that first question I mentioned above. Steve Wozniak (Rogen) may be the tragic, doomed hero of the piece, imploring his old friend that he can be gifted and kind. For a moment—as I indicated above—that it artificially seems like the lout Jobs was throughout the film may have found that his heart grew two sizes just before the launch of the iMac, but the reality and the text indicates he remained prickly and often hard to deal with for the rest of his life. The man didn’t really change, and he didn’t really mellow, but that’s not what the film is about. To watch him terrorize his colleagues is entertaining in and of itself, but I’m not sure I would have wanted to know the man personally.

Then again, I am typing this review on an iMac, so what do I know? He was probably right.

Dark Phoenix (2019)

Director: Simon Kinberg

Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Sophie Turner

Have I Seen it Before: This is usually the part in these reviews where I make a joke about how a film is entirely too much like what came before it for me to label it a truly new experience. It will be incredibly difficult to not make a remark like that here.

Did I Like It: As much as I tried to avoid that above refrain, try as I might, I can’t say I’m 100 percent on board with this.

There should be a moratorium on adapting year-long epic comic book arcs into movies that can not (by studio mandate) run over 180 minutes of screen time. Superman movies have failed over a couple of formats to harness whatever was interesting about the death and rebirth of the Last Son of Krypton. Batman even managed to stumble a little bit trying to mash together Knightfall, No Man’s Land, and The Dark Knight Returns in The Dark Knight Rises (2012). And now the X-Men series have failed twice to capture the Dark Phoenix saga after two tries in less than fifteen years. These stories need longer to breath, which is why, ironically enough the most effective adaptation of the Phoenix saga actually occurs in the sixth season of “Buffy The Vampire Slayer.”

I’m not sure if Dark Phoenix fails as aggressively as X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), but it certainly trips up in new ways. The story is listless, being somewhat about an alien invasion story, and somewhat about the same set of characters we met in X-Men: First Class (2006). Matters are not helped by Hans Zimmer appearing to phone in his score, where 20th Century Fox (and now, presumably, Disney) fully owns the rousing John Ottman scores from the better films in this series.

There are some things to enjoy, here. McAvoy and Fassbender still prove equal to the task of filling the shoes of Stewart and McKellan. To be fair, that’s probably more praise for the team behind the sprightly X-Men: First Class (2011) than the work performed here. Some have indicated that Fassbender looks bored in the role, but I would counter that he’s doing the best he can with a script that doesn’t seem that interested in him anymore. How they got Fassbender (and for that matter, Lawrence) to extend their contracts into this movie is beyond me. Maybe the proceedings looked different before the film became engulfed in the flames of the dread reshoot entity.

Also, the opening moments are kind of sweet, with the X-Men being national heroes for the first time in their own film series. Gone are the days when they hide in the shadow. In fact, the President has a direct line to Xavier’s study. It put me—in the early goings—of thinking of how far this film series has come in nineteen years, now that it’s ending. Gone are the days where this series was trying to be a character drama that needed someone like Bryan Singer to make it at all comprehensible to film audiences, and now we’re fine flying into space and doing combat with cosmic forces. What a long, strange trip it has been.

If only it all came together a bit better. Ah, well. We’ll still have Logan (2017)*. Wait, is this the first X-Men movie to not feature Hugh Jackman at all? Weird. That may have been part of the problem.

*Which, by the way, this movie sort of absent-mindedly pisses all over the admittedly byzantine continuity set by the previous films. Logan can’t be the future of the original timeline established in the first three films in the series. That much is clear. As of the end of X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), it would seem like Logan belongs in that new timeline, extended into X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) and concluded here. But this film has Xavier retiring to play Chess with Magneto in France (for reasons, I guess) so I’m not sure how Xavier re-joins the school he built before the deterioration of his mind. And, I’m almost relieved to say, we will never have the opportunity to reconcile these multiple discontinuities. So, the lesson becomes that even when I try to dwell on the brighter moments of this series, this film only suffers all the more.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride

Have I Seen it Before: Once in the theater, and once on blu ray.

Did I Like It: I’m pretty effusive about the film in the earlier review above, but considering I’ve only glanced at it a couple of times, maybe it had less of an impact than I originally thought.

The text of this review appeared previously in a blog post entitled “But My, Oh My, How Delicious The Cheeseburgers Will Be: The Future Of Cinema?” published on 05/28/2017.

Saw Alien: Covenant this week. The movie flew under my radar for the longest time, despite my love for the first two films of the series, and my not-quite-hate for Ridley Scott’s previous re-entry into the Alien universe, Prometheus (2012). But, when the opportunity comes to take off work a little early and catch a matinee, I am helpless against the prospect’s siren song*.

So, much to my surprise, the movie is actually good. It’s not an earth shattering revelation of a movie—for such an experience this year, you’re probably going to have to begin and end with Jordan Peele’s debut masterwork, Get Out—but it certainly irons out some of the more forgettable moments that muddied reactions to Prometheus, extending the philosophical rumination on the origins of man in a bleak universe to its natural, psychotic conclusion. It manages to be the kind of head trip that Prometheus so desperately wanted to be, without unravelling into a pointedly turgid lecture more at home in a freshman philosophy course.

And yet, there’s a lot that’s even more familiar about the movie. An egg opens up. The egg spits out a creature that is equal parts spider and Georgie O’Keefe painting. A little guy bursts out of one of the human guys. The little guy grows bigger, uses it secondary head to eat a few other guys. Acid is spilled, airlocks are blown, and everyone goes back to cryosleep, perhaps never to wake up again. It’s the same old story, a fight for love and biological weaponry.

Yes, I’ve seen this movie before. I’ve also eaten plenty of cheeseburgers before**, but it is rare that you eat a cheeseburger that is exceptionally well made, just as it is equally rare that a fairly basic monster movie is made as well as Scott and his crew made Covenant.

And that’s when a borderline-depressing thought occurred to me: the franchise movie is dangerously close to becoming a legitimate form of artistic expression. Sure, this summer we’ll be waylaid by inevitable crap like The Emoji Movie and Michael Bay’s latest attempt to make a Transformers film that isn’t technically a violation of the Geneva convention. But Ridley Scott—a legitimate and respectable filmmaker—has made his plans known to spend a sizable chunk of his twilight years trying to make more Alien movies, an effort many of us can agree he near-perfected in his first attempt nearly forty years ago. Kenneth Branagh went in a few short years from forging full-text productions of the Bard to making Chris Hemsworth a household name in Thor (2011). Sam Mendes made Oscar-bait like American Beauty (1999)***, then made 1 1/2 great Bond movies. Christopher Nolan moved from indie darlings to Batmen, and continues his quest to put the genie back in the bottle with the upcoming Dunkirk. Hell, movie news sites were abuzz just a few months ago with talk that Aaron Sorkin took meetings with Marvel Studios for some unknown project.****

I suppose this all means that original big-budget movies are going to be harder to harder to find. For every Pacific Rim (2013) there’s going to be a Pirates of the Caribbean: One More and Johnny Can Get The Rest of His Wigs Out Of Australia. That’s pretty measurably bad, mainly because I was holding out for 2Dark 2Shadows: Basically Just Mortdecai With Different Opening Titles.

But, it could also mean that the big tentpole movies will be better, on average. That has to be good, right? I mean, an Aaron Sorkin-penned Iron Man 3 would be… Well, it’d have a lot more references to Gilbert and Sullivan than the rest of the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and that has to count for something, right?

*See my ill-advised venture to watch this years undeniably weird, yet nearly shot-for-shot remake of The Breakfast Club (1985), entitled Saban’s Power Rangers.

**Probably too many; I get it.

***We could go on an on about whether or not American Beauty is a good movie. It’d make a half decent blog, if it weren’t for the fact that my answer would be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. (Note from 2019: There’s no way American Beauty is any degree of watchable anymore. I’m reasonably sure about that.)

****Yes, every individual named in that paragraph is a man. That’s another issue entirely, and one that Hollywood is working fairly slowly to fix.