Avengers: End Game (5/5 Stars)

A victory lap is the perfect description of Avengers: Endgame. It is a good enough story on its own, but is not afraid to tack on much earned nostalgia. If Lord of the Rings: Return of the King garnered a Best Picture Oscar in part because it was the culmination of a gorgeously executed triology, I don't see why the same logic wouldn't apply to Avengers: Endgame which is the perfect culmination of ten years and twenty-two movies of Marvel storytelling

Leaving off where Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp ended, half the life in the universe has been snapped out of existence by Thanos and his Inifinity Guantlet. The Avengers not snapped out of existence conveniently include the original assembly: Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, The Hulk, and Hawkeye. Captain Marvel shows up almost immediately after and they all get in a spaceship and track down Thanos. Unfortunately by the time they get to him, he has already destroyed the Infinity Stones. It's over. What happened cannot be fixed.

Then the movie jumps five years. It is a ballsy move and cements a feeling of reality over the events of Avengers: Infinity War. Usually comic book movies don't have dramatically acted scenes, but this one contains a particularly good bit of acting by Robert Downey Jr, as Tony Stark/Tony Stark, who excoriates Chris Evans, Steve Rogers/Captain America, decision several movies ago in Captain America: Civil War which broke up the Avengers and made Thanos harder to stop.

There is a catch of course as there must be. It comes in the form of Ant-Man who was stuck in the quantum realm when the Snappening happened and comes back five years later. (There is an emotional scene where Paul Rudd, Scott Lang/Ant-Man, finds his name on a memorial for those who died during the Snappening and when he reunites with his daughter.) Scott shows up at the Avengers headquarters with an idea that has to do with time-travel through the quantum realm. Much exposition is needed in this movie and quite a bit of it is people explaining things to Ant-Man who hasn't been around in the last five years. Most of it is quite funny.

Alot of this is quite funny. Some characters' arcs are rather dramatic like Iron Man, Captain America, Hawkeye, and Black Widow. But other characters are firmly in the camp of comic relief. Two characters that have completely hit their stride are Hulk, who is now Professor Hulk, a big, green and unangry Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). Then there is Thor. What happened to him over the past five years is the stuff of comedic legends.

The question here isn't if Avengers: Endgame will reverse the outcome of Infinity War. We know it must simply due to sheer amount of marketable product that was snapped out of existence. The question is whether how this is accomplished is too predictable or too confusing. It isn't predictable and it generally makes sense (in a comic book science sort of way). A few times in the movie I was sitting there wondering how they were going to accomplish what they had set out to do and then how they did was quite satisfying.

Without giving away too much of the plot, the Avengers actually visit previous movies. Three in particular: The Avengers, The Dark World, and The Guardians of the Galaxy. The team splits up into groups to go back in time and retrieve what they need from those films. It is always when you have many full formed characters and then mix and match teams so people who have not really met or interacted before are doing so for the first time. Thor's interactions with the Guardians of the Galaxy is great in particular. Captain American fights himself and that is satisfying too. There is a lot of good stuff all over the place here. One particular moment, where Captain America finds himself standing alone in front of an evil army, and the moment right after, garnered cheers from the audience that I was in. I felt like cheering too. I really like these guys.

Following the example of other great culmination of movies, the last hour of Avengers: End Game has a lot of goodbyes in it. I believe the movie earned these moments. I look forward to the next twenty films.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (4/5 Stars)

Like an antidote to universe-sized seriousness, Ant-Man and the Wasp sneaks into theaters just a few months after Avengers: Infinity Wars. Importantly, it takes place before that movie. A good thing since the Ant-Man franchise is notable in its complete lack of bigness in both themes and superhero size. It stars the nice and cute Paul Rudd as a petty thief named Scott Lang who teams up with the reclusive scientist Hank Pym (played by Michael Douglas) who engineers for him a suit that shrinks his size but outsizes his strength, you know, like an ant. Hank’s daughter, Hope Pym (Lost’s Evangeline Lily), gets her own suit this time around and becomes The Wasp. Really, she was better at this thing than Paul Rudd was even in the first movie. She was the one who trained him after all.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is all fun and action. I mean really, it is a Paul Rudd movie (everybody is nice or at least means well) but with car chases and quantum mechanics. However, to explain anything that happens in this movie takes a stupid amount of exposition. In fact, this movie could serve as a screenwriting class on exposition. There are some really good examples and others not so good.

Exposition is something that all movies need to do. Since Ant-Man and the Wasp is like the twentieth movie in an intertwined Marvel Universe, much exposition is needed to explain what this particular movie is about. The best exposition in this movie happens in the first ten minutes as a soliloquy performed by the scene-stealing Randall Park. (I’ve been doing this for so long that I can say about Randall Park what I said about Paul Rudd after “Knocked Up”, I think this guy is a leading man who needs his own movies). Randall Park plays a FBI agent who is checking in on Scott Lang during his house arrest. Scott Lang’s seven-year-old daughter asks why the FBI doesn’t like her daddy. Randall gets down on his knee to better connect with the little girl. “It must be hard to understand for you,” he relates and then speaks at length in a direct and literal tone about the various legal codes in effect since Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War. Classic. This does three things: One it explains the most important events of past Marvel movies concerning Ant-Man’s situation. Two and Three: It is a character-defining joke, the FBI agent seemed like he knew how to relate to a girl by getting down on her level but comically revealed that he was too straitlaced to do so.

The worse exposition concerns all the explanations concerning Hank Pym’s wife being lost in the quantum realm, how the quantum realm works, and the nature of the movie’s bad but not so bad guy Ghost. These do not come along with jokes or character development. They are necessary scenes but pales in comparison with good exposition as above. In fact, it pales in comparison with a scene of unneeded exposition provided by Luis (played by the scene-stealing Michael Pena) who answers the simple question “Where is Scott Lang?” in a very funny not simple at all way.

But besides the exposition, what is this movie like? Well, it’s got a bunch of good people trying to figure out problems. There are a few bad guys but they are either kind of goofy (Sonny Burch played by Walter Goggins) or mean well (Ghost played by Hannah John-Kamen). They have car chases over and about the hills of San Francisco. You may have seen that before, but have you seen it with cars that shrink and unshrink and sometimes a huge Ant-Man? It is good times.

This movie has notable diversity. It is a casting laundry list of the better actors of various ethnicities in its supporting roles. Obviously Paul Rudd is the straight white male. But two main superheroes beside him are both female (The Wasp and Ghost). Paul Rudd’s friends who run a security agency are hispanic (Luis), some sort of Eastern European and black. The FBI agent is Korean. The lesser bad guy is a southern gentleman (Walter Goggins) who employs at least one Indian. Given the movie’s location, San Francisco, the cast seems possible and besides me, I don't think anybody has made a point of it.

The Ant-Man franchise adds another complexity to the nature of the Marvel Universe. Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy added the vastness of the universe. Dr. Strange added new dimensions. Ant-Man adds the minute quantum realm. The science behind these complexities is real if thinly realized. What is more interesting perhaps is how these various thin interpretations of real science will interact with one another. This is bound to happen in the next Avengers movie given how Ant-Man ends.

The Hurt Locker (5/5 Stars) July 15, 2009

The Hurt Locker is the latest by Director Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break). It was written by Mark Boal (In the Valley of Elah), and is based on his experiences while following a bomb squad around Baghdad circa 2004. The squad is composed of the bomb disarmer Staff Sergeant James (played by Jeremy Brenner), Sergeant Sanborn (played by Anthony Mackie), and Specialist Eldridge (played by Brian Geraghty). In supporting are a couple of Indie heavyweights like Guy Pearce, as the doomed Staff Sergeant whom James replaces, and Ralph Fiennes, as a British mercenary. Rounding out the cast are known character actors David Morse, as a hotshot Colonel, and Evangeline Lily, as James’ estranged wife. Sometimes in great comedies you will find big name comedians jump in for short roles just because they want to be apart of something special. That seems to have happened here with these dramatic actors. 
The Iraq war so far has been a box office and critical dud. I talked for some length as to why I think this has happened in my review of Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies last fall. Having said that, I believe that Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker may have cracked the code, at least in terms of critical response. This is the best non-documentary film to come out of the Iraq War and there are a couple good reasons for it.
First of all, it is nonpartisan. Now, I’m not saying that a war film should not judge the merits of a war. Cinematic history just goes to show that the best judgmental war films were made years sometimes decades after the war had already ended. (Oliver Stone’s films Platoon (1986) and Born on the 4th of July (1989) are good examples.) This is because judging a war requires some perspective. Since we are still in the midst of the Iraq War it is hard to look upon it from a distance. So it helps that this movie is unconcerned with whether we should have gone to war in Iraq. In fact there is not a single mention of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Hussein, or WMDs. The soldiers in this story are primarily concerned with doing their job and staying alive, which makes more sense then having them philosophize over American politics. One of the big turnoffs of the earlier films (Boal’s own In the Valley of Elah in particular) was that they weren’t really about soldiers in combat. They were about politics, parents of soldiers, CIA operatives, or soldiers returning home. They may have been “about” the Iraq War but all the information was abstract. Mix that with heavy-handed moral messages and the outcome was two hours of muddled theoretical outrage. The Hurt Locker is the opposite. This film shows the nuts and bolts operation of a bomb squad in Iraq presently and since the bomb squad doesn’t care about politics, the movie doesn’t either.
Second, the movie doesn’t draw too heavily on the cliche’ of the crying vet. What I mean by ‘the crying vet’ is that increasingly prevalent scene in a serious war films that either has a soldier start crying uncontrollably or, on the other hand, flying off the handle in a psychotic rage. Do these episodes happen, sure. Is PTSD a serious issue, of course. But this certainly doesn’t happen to every veteran that sees combat. In fact, what is remarkable about trained soldiers (and far more interesting) is how they can keep control in dire situations, not lose it. In this movie, Sergeant James may be described as a wild man, but he is also blessed with an extraordinary gift of concentration under fire. Sergeant Sanborn may be intensely in touch with his own mortality, but he is always disciplined, capable, and follows orders readily. Eldridge may be a rookie, but his outlook is mature. There is real danger in this movie. The bomb makers, who look just like civilians, sometimes hang out on balconies overlooking the bomb squad’s progress. Because the soldiers aren’t about to fire on people who may be civilians, serious suspense is built in these scenes. But even though there are some very intense situations, the soldiers don’t panic or make stupid mistakes. They deal with the problems in concerned but controlled ways, as if they were (gasp) trained soldiers. It makes sense to involve a crying vet in a WWII or Vietnam movie because there were plenty of enlisted men completely out of their element in those wars. But in Iraq the army is ‘all volunteer’ and it is suspected that every soldier has seen the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan and has accepted the fact that they just might die in a not so noble way. Soldiers in an Iraq War movie shouldn’t be taken completely off guard by the horrors of war. Frankly, I would suspect that they would act like they do in this movie: Courageous, not cowardly.
Third, the actions scenes are played as action scenes, not melodrama. There are no slow motion melees with violins soaring in the background. We are not subject to speeches about how people don’t understand the true nature of war. On the other hand, there isn’t any John Wayne bullshit either. The bombs explode like real bombs. One person even gets killed by a shockwave. (Say What? I thought the only way you could die from an explosion was to be engulfed in the flames, and even then you could always outrun it.) The special thing about this movie is that its action scenes are realistic, but they are played for excitement, which is a combination rarely seen in blockbusters or serious war movies. In fact, at times, the Sergeant James seems to be enjoying himself, as if defusing bombs was like some sort of death defying crossword puzzle. Unlike the vast majority of serious war movies, this one admits that war can be fun. That it can be exciting. Sergeant James has defused 873 bombs. He has volunteered to do so. He is not fighting for God and country (at least not completely). He’s there for the adrenaline rush. Is this realistic? For some people, you bet. Does firing a gun make one feel powerful? Damn right. Is wearing a full body armored suit kinda cool? Fuck yeah. Can saving trophies from bombs that almost killed you make a person feel like he is a master over life and death? Hoo-rah! Can war be a drug? Unfortunately yes. The inclusion of a character like Sergeant James makes The Hurt Locker a more complete psychological study than recent anti-war movies, which omit characters like him precisely because they are trying to make a political point. Stephen Brenner’s performance in this movie is capable of snagging a Best Actor Nomination. The film itself should easily get a Best Picture Nomination now that the category has been expanded to ten films. This is one of the best films I have seen so far this year.
Some may find it odd that this seemingly pro-war film about a gung ho bomb disarmer was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who is obviously a woman. I don’t think so. Perhaps it takes a woman to point out that some men will perform death-defying feats compulsively for no particular reason (whereas in regular blockbusters men will usually perform these feats to ‘save the world’ or ‘save the girl’ etc. etc.) Frankly, women have made some of the best movies that deal with this profoundly male trait. American Psycho was adapted for the screen by Guinevere Turner and directed by Mary Harron. Protagonist, a magnificent documentary, was made by Jessica Yu. And you can’t get much more of a testosterone fueled adventure than Bigelow’s own Pointe Break. Surely women can become obsessed and perform death-defying feats themselves, but I’ve never heard of one that would do it just for the hell of it. As Billy Crystal joked once, “Women need a reason, men just need a place.” Or maybe some of them do. Perhaps that should be the subject of Bigelow’s next movie.