Summer Of Films: Now You See Me (2013)

Magic is about misdirection. Unfortunately, so is Now You See Me. On the surface, this is a heist film in which the ultra-clever heist gets carried out by a group of impressive young stage magicians. The marketing even suggested that the audience would get a chance to guess how they do it. But nothing about this film is real. To the contrary, it presents disjointed and nonsensical highlights while trying to make you believe you’re seeing a workable heist film. Ultimately, the film is stylish enough to be enjoyable, but it’s very shallow with some major flaws.

The Plot

Now You See Me starts with four talented street magicians getting invited by an unknown benefactor to perform in Vegas as “The Four Horsemen.” These are: the arrogant illusionist Danny Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), hypnotist Merrit McKinney (Woody Harrelson), escape artist Henley Reeves (Ilsa Fisher), and pickpocket Jack Wilder (Dave Franco).

To end their first show, they declare that they will rob a bank. To pull off this trick, they invite a French citizen on stage. This man is an account holder in the Credit Republicain de Paris bank, and he appears to be teleported to Paris, where he turns on a huge vacuum which pulls the money out of the bank’s vault and spews it out over the Vegas audience. Everyone is amazed, but the FBI is not amused. When the FBI discovers that the bank really was robbed, they send Agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) and Interpol Agent Melanie Laurent to investigate.

From there, the film becomes a game of cat and mouse as the outmatched FBI agents chase their own tails while trying to catch the magicians, who continue to up the ante. Their next trick, for example, involves robbing the show’s sponsor Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), an insurance company magnate who wrongfully denied thousands of claims in the city in which they perform the trick. Naturally, they drain his bank account while transferring his money to each of the people whose claims were wrongfully denied. He then hires Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), who makes money revealing magicians’ tricks and debunking claims of magic, to pursue them.

Ultimately, the film finishes with a protracted chase scene in which the magicians rob a defense contractor while trying to evade Freeman, the FBI and the local police. The benefactor then reveals himself and his motives, and you won’t guess who it is because it makes no sense.

Smoke and Mirrors and Misdirection

This film functions by misdirection. On the surface, this film involves an ultra-clever heist perpetrated by a group of talented young stage magicians. They do this heist right before the eyes of the frustrated FBI and a talented debunker, and as they do, they keep the audience guessing what will happen next and what just happened. And if you shut off your brain, this heist will rival any other heist film for complexity, originality, and surprise.

But there’s a problem: the heist isn’t real. And I don't mean, this probably wouldn't work in real life. What I mean is that the film doesn't even pretend to show you a possible heist, it just shows you hints of heists and then tries to trick you into thinking you saw more.

To give you some examples, it doesn’t take long to realize that they would need to know too much information to pull off these tricks. How do they find everyone who got screwed by the insurance company and invite them to attend the second show? How do they learn the account numbers and passwords to each of those people's saving accounts? The film never tells you. Somehow they also get them all to use the same banking software on their phones, software that doesn’t exist and which impossibly gives you a real-time ticker on the amount of money in your account as if deposits were added in penny by penny. Then they need to find a way to get Caine’s bank to conduct a thousand wire transfers in real time, at their command to work with the stage show, late at night. Again, they never make any attempt to explain how this was done.

At the same time, they need to know if the guys who will chase them will run to the left or the right. They arrange traffic stunts that Hollywood’s best would struggle with on a closed set, only they do it on the open road during rush hour. They participate in heists they could not physically perform. Again, the details are never explained.

Even when they explain things, they don't explain them. Consider the bank robbery in Paris. It seems impossible. Then Freeman comes along and explains that they did it the day before, and they did it by replacing the real money with fake money so no one would notice. The film even shows you a flashback of these characters hovering around the bank in armored car uniforms. Ruffalo then asks how they made the fake money vanish. To this, Freeman responds “flash paper” and he causes some to burn up in his hand. Oh, now it all makes sense. Actually, it doesn’t. At no point is an explanation offered for where the fake money actually came from, how they got it into the bank, how they removed the good money and replaced it with the bad, how they got the good money to Vegas overnight, how they set off the flash paper, why no one noticed the residue, or any other part of how the heist would need to work. All you get is an assurance that it happened followed by the debunker declaring their actions explained and brilliant.

The whole film is like this. Throughout this film, you are given explanations for how things supposedly happened that only touch upon the highlights of what needed to happen, e.g. “oh, there were blanks in the gun,” but there is never any explanation for how they actually made this happen. And the few times there are suggestions, like seeing them dressed up as armored car drivers, only raises a million more questions. But each time, the cops or the debunker are there to smooth it over and tell you that this is indeed how it happened, now stop worrying about that! Meanwhile, the characters drone on heavy-handedly in a near narrative (it’s the narrative of the magic act superimposed on the rest of the action) about the nature of magic being about sleight of hand in such an authoritative way that it basically comes across as the film telling you to stop doubting the heist. This is the equivalent of having characters scream, “This is the real world! It’s not like we’re in a movie!”

This is an interesting way to make a heist film. On the one hand, I suspect that a good chunk of the audience won’t be using their brains as they watch the film, so they will feel like everything has been fully explained. But for people whose brains remain active while watching the film, this method becomes a problem. For them, the suspension of disbelieve just keeps getting harder and harder throughout, and ultimately you are left feeling like you are just watching a lie because the film never even tries to make any of it real. At that point, the question becomes whether the gloss and veneer of the heist is enough to overcome the realization that the whole thing is being pulled out of the writer’s rear end.

In many ways, that makes this film very much like Ocean’s Thirteen, which similarly abandoned believability for style. In Ocean’s Thirteen, that worked because they presented a world you wanted to embrace and characters with relationships you wanted to be part of. Here, the true fatal flaw is the casting.

Jesse Eisenberg is unpleasant. Here he’s smug and angry and you don’t like him. Woody Harrelson always plays a jerk, but he typically makes his character likeable by letting him take a beating, which lets him have an epiphany which brings the audience to his side. Here, his misbehavior is never punished and he gets to let his jerk side run unrepentant. Ruffalo is an ass politically, but can be likable on film. Only, here he comes across as angry and lifeless. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine both play characters you aren’t supposed to like. The rest of the cast is non-existent. So what you’re left with is a deeply unlikable cast you can’t rally around. They never give you a grand look into the world of magic either. So you have little to latch onto.

All in all, this is an interesting but very shallow film. It would have served the film better to have actually presented a genuine heist scenario or more likable actors. Still, it’s probably worth seeing, if for nothing else but its potential. Just don't expect to be impressed if you pull back the veneer.

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Olympus Has Fallen (2013) vs. White House Down (2013)

by ScottDS

Per Wikipedia, synchronicity is the experience of two or more events as meaningfully related, where they are unlikely to be causally related. The concept was first described by Carl Jung in the 1920s. The concept would also explain why we seem to get two movies with similar subject matter every other year. In 2013, it was “Die Hard in the White House.” Neither Olympus Has Fallen nor White House Down are what you’d call great, but one is just a tad more entertaining than the other.

Olympus Has Fallen: Former U.S. Army Ranger Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) has been re-assigned from the Secret Service to the Treasury Department after saving the President’s life during a car accident... and failing to save the First Lady. At the same time, the White House is hosting a delegation from South Korea. All hell breaks loose when North Korean guerrilla forces open fire on Washington D.C. and eventually take the White House. President Asher (Aaron Eckhart) is held hostage along with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Banning leaves his office and shoots his way inside the White House. We find out that Korean terrorist Kang (Rick Yune) is behind the attack: he demands all U.S. troops be removed from the Korean peninsula, and he wants the access codes to Cerberus, a top-secret missile system. He intends to explode all of our nuclear missiles in their silos, which would turn the U.S. into a nuclear wasteland. Long story short, Banning manages to take out most of Kang’s men, stab Kang in the head, save the president, and stop the Cerberus countdown. Like I said, it’s all very Die Hard. [smile]

Look, I had pretty low expectations and the movie met them. It’s the very definition of “Sunday afternoon on TBS with nothing to do.” There’s nothing original about it but it does what it does reasonably well. Gerard Butler plays Banning and you know what? I’d follow him to the Gates of Hell. He’s no Brando but he’s fun to watch and seems like a cool guy in real life. The rest of the cast is over-qualified to say the least. Eckhart is believable as the commander-in-chief. Morgan Freeman plays Speaker of the House Trumbull who becomes acting president: at times, it seems like he’d rather be elsewhere. Robert Forster plays General Clegg, the Paul Gleeson/William Atherton/dick role, whose sole purpose is to be a thorn in our hero’s side. Angela Bassett plays the Director of the Secret Service: she makes it all look easy and there’s nothing to her performance that says, “Paycheck!” Melissa Leo is way, way, way too good to be in this movie! She plays the Secretary of Defense and her heartfelt cries of “Oh, Mr. President!” almost tug at the heartstrings. Rick Yune (Die Another Day) does a serviceable job as Kang – he doesn’t reinvent the wheel but you sure want to see Banning kill him in the end!

Just like in Air Force One, we get a traitorous Secret Service agent: Forbes, played by Dylan McDermott (Dermot Mulroney is a different person!). Yeah, he’s all friendly at the beginning, but when asked why he betrays his president and his country, his only answer is, “Globalization! Wall Street!” That’s it – take it for whatever it’s worth. Banning gives Forbes a chance to redeem himself later on but it comes across as a little too convenient. And the President has a son, Connor (Finley Jacobsen), who actually isn’t too annoying. I was afraid they were gonna do the “Bad guy holds kid hostage” thing but Banning helps the kid escape… halfway through the film! I have to applaud screenwriters Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt (this is their first credit) for not doing the obvious... this one time. [smile] And it’s through Connor that we get necessary exposition about the White House and where certain rooms are, thanks to Banning playfully quizzing him during the opening. Look, exposition is a clunky thing – the best you can do is try to hide it. The last thing you want to do is open a scene with, “As you know…”

Training Day’s Antoine Fuqua directs and, thankfully, most of the action is easy to follow. I know I’ve said it before but geography is important in movies like this. Too many filmmakers nowadays decide to get inside their characters’ heads: “Our hero doesn’t know what’s going on and the camerawork should reflect that chaos!” Organized chaos is one thing but it takes real skill to plot out an action scene. Simply shaking the camera to create tension gets old after a while. Now we even have movies that employ shaky-cam during otherwise mundane dialogue scenes! Most of the White House scenes take place in dim interiors (the power is cut off). It’s off-putting at first, but not so dark that you can’t see what’s going on. And it’s always interesting to see how filmmakers conceive certain locations: another bunker, another command center, ad infinitum. I doubt the computer interfaces in the real White House are as fancy as the ones seen here! Not a criticism, just an observation. In movies, it’s all about instant recognition.

While there is almost a vintage 80s vibe to the movie (certainly more so than the latest Die Hard sequel), there’s one aspect to the film that identifies it as a product of the 20-teens. That is the CGI, most of which isn’t very good… but that’s what happens when you outsource your effects work to a former Soviet Bloc country! The takeover of the White House is quite exciting and quite violent, with the guerrillas mowing down people left and right, and destroying the Washington Monument in the process. It’s all CGI – some of it looks okay but most of it looks obviously fake, including the blood. And there’s a lot of blood in this movie, along with gunshots, stabbings, the works. I’m not saying this is always necessary but in a world of too many sanitized PG-13 action movies (that seem to feature everything but blood), it’s nice to go balls to the wall sometimes. Speaking of balls, this leads me to…

White House Down. I must confess that I was pre-disposed to hate this movie. It was directed by Roland Emmerich and while I’m still a fan of Independence Day, Emmerich also directed 2012, which was pure torture. I’m happy to say that this film wasn’t as offensive or sadistic as that piece of crap – it’s just plain stupid. And it features all the clichés of Olympus Has Fallen, including a traitorous Secret Service agent, a kid in distress, an over-qualified supporting cast, and bad CGI… all for twice the cost! (Seriously, while there are exceptions, it's getting harder to tell where the money is going whenever one of these big films is released!)

John Cale (Channing Tatum) is a Capitol Police officer assigned to Speaker of the House Raphelson. Cale doesn’t get along well with his daughter Emily (Joey King) but she’s excited when they get to go to the White House. Cale has a job interview with Secret Service agent Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal)… which doesn’t go well. While on a tour of the White House, a man detonates a bomb in the Capitol Building and a team of mercenaries starts killing people left and right and takes the tour group hostage. This movie is even more Die Hard than the former film, with a bit of The Rock thrown in for good measure. This time, the Secret Service agent is Martin Walker (James Woods, naturally), who: a.) demands $400 million as ransom for the hostages, b.) wants to avenge the death of his son who was killed in action, and c.) wants to restore America’s place in the world by nuking the Middle East. Long story short, Cale saves the president (more on him soon), saves his daughter, and yeah, I’m done now.

To the film’s credit, Woods (who is an excellent actor) gives his character a little more emotion and pathos than we usually get in these movies. And there’s even a second traitor in the film: the aforementioned Speaker of the House (played by another excellent actor, Richard Jenkins), who wants a war in the Middle East which will make his defense contractor friends happy. I like Channing Tatum (not nearly as much as my female friends do!) and he comes across as a likeable schlub stuck in an impossible situation. Gyllenhaal is fine. Jason Clarke is Stenz, the leader of the mercenaries and he’s actually pretty good – I wish they put him in a better movie. (Oh wait, they did.) We also have the no-nonsense Lance Reddick as the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, oddball Jimmi Simpson as a Beethoven-loving hacker named Skip, and Michael Murphy (!) as the vice-president. What’s Michael Murphy doing here? He usually does classier movies like Robert Altman’s Nashville... and Woody Allen’s Manhattan… and Batman Returns!

[sigh] And then there’s Jamie Fox as President James Sawyer. I like Fox and I think he’s a talented performer… but he is NO president! He’s not channeling Obama... per se... but at the same time, he comes across as, um, how shall I put this… President… Black Guy. I can’t explain it – it’s just a vibe. An actor playing a president should give off a presidential vibe – Fox doesn’t, not for a second. The filmmakers give him and Tatum playful banter and 99% of it doesn’t work. At one point, a bad guy is reaching for him and Sawyer yells, “Get your hands off my Jordans!!” Really? I think by giving the actor playing the president too many comic relief lines, it diminishes the character. Aaron Eckhart has some playful banter with Gerard Butler in the other film, but it’s two middle-aged guys just shooting the shit, and not cheap comic relief. And no, it’s not a racial thing! Denzel Washington would make a great movie president, and Morgan Freeman already played the president at least once.

If you must know, if your favorite politician has an “R” after their name, you may bristle at a couple things, though I’m offended by the clichés. The mercenaries are all (I’m paraphrasing) “right-wing wackos,” including one who apparently blew up a Post Office because it employed too many African-Americans. (Don’t give me that look – I didn’t write it!) At one point, Sawyer asks Cale, “Have you ever heard of the military-industrial complex?” No, Mr. President, we haven’t. You’re the first character in a movie to bring it up ever! To be fair, Jenkins’ character points out that both parties benefit but it’s just one plot point among many. Sawyer’s Middle East peace plan, which would remove all Allied Forces, is what precipitates the entire thing. By movie’s end, seemingly every country on the planet agrees to sign off on it. And they all lived happily ever after.

Technically... yeah. The CGI in this film is just as bad as it was in the previous film. The model shots of Air Force One in Independence Day are actually better than the CGI shots of the same plane in this one. There’s a car chase on the White House lawn which looks horrible. Somehow John McTiernan was able to film a better car chase in Die Hard with a Vengeance and he only had one car… but he didn’t use bluescreen. He used (gasp!) real actors in a real car in a real location! Now I understand that they can’t film on the real White House lawn… but I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Quality notwithstanding, movie-making is hard work and every movie is a different beast, with its own requirements and logistical challenges. Olympus Has Fallen was able to erect a one-story White House façade on a field in Louisiana… while these filmmakers built most of their White House exteriors on a bluescreen stage in Canada.

If you must, watch Olympus Has Fallen. It’s streaming on Netflix. Don’t bother with White House Down unless you’re really curious… or you have a free rental at Redbox, which is how I got to see it. Seriously, I would’ve reviewed these movies a month ago but I was waiting for the coupon code e-mail to arrive! Rumor has it Roland Emmerich is working on a sequel to Independence Day. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

“The United States of America doesn't negotiate with terrorists!”

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Film Friday: Oblivion (2013)

Oblivion was considered a bomb, though it did well overseas. It was also derided by the critics as a knock-off and kind of thin. So I had pretty low expectations going in. I’m not sure how much having low expectations helped, but I actually found that I enjoyed Oblivion, though it was very slow. That said, however, I have no desire to see it again, and therein lies the problem.

I’m going to go light on the spoilers because what makes this film work is the steady stream of discovery. Without that, this film is pretty worthless. So here’s the plot in a nutshell: Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) is Tech 49. He lives in a house in the clouds with Victoria, his partner and lover, and his job is to protect and maintain drones which protect these massive machines that are sucking up the oceans and turning them into electric power, which gets shipped to the humans living on Titan.

The reason humanity has moved to Titan is because of a war. The year is 2077 and 60 years prior an alien race known as the Scavengers attacked the Earth to steal our resources. When they invaded, they initially destroyed the moon, causing massive earthquakes which up-ended the Earth, destroyed our cities, and nearly wiped out humanity. Then their troops landed. The humans were losing so they fired off nuclear weapons. Those weapons made most of the planet uninhabitable, but they succeeded in winning the war. Jack’s job now is to protect the machines producing the power from the last few Scavengers left.

The story begins with Jack fixing a drone and giving us a long series of visuals about the destroyed Earth. We are shown various destroyed landmarks, like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and the Pentagon. We also see that the scavengers are no match for Jack, and certainly not for the drones.

At this point, you can probably already tell where this is going, and that is the problem. Had this film been made in the 1950s, Oblivion would be considered pure genius. People would talk about it in the same way they talk about 2001. But it wasn’t. It was made last year. And since the 1950s, this premise has been done to death, and then some. In fact, I think every other episode of The Outer Limits in the 1990s started this way. And from those episodes, we know that things are not as they seem. Indeed, we know that Tom is really working for the bad guys and just doesn’t know it.

Is that what’s happening here? Well, yeah, but there are several more interesting twists I won’t tell you about, like who/what Tom really is and what role Tom had in the initial invasion of Earth. Again, neither point is original, but their inclusion feels surprising enough here that it’s worth not revealing in this review.

As films go, this one wasn’t dull, despite the very thin story. The film is beautiful, even if we are talking about yet another apocalyptic film. There is a lot of tension in the film, coming primarily from the use of space. Specifically, there is a constant sense that Tom lacks the ability to monitor the world around him to ensure that he’s safe whenever he steps out of his helicopter spaceship (a bubble ship). This was very well done to keep you anxious throughout.

The film is good too at dripping out a continuous stream of clues. (Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers.) For example, we get Tom having a dream involving a woman. That’s the first sign that something is amiss with Tom, especially as we are told they had their memories wiped for some reason. Who is this woman and what does she mean? And why wipe memories at all? Doesn't that seem suspicious? Interestingly, this dream also shows Tom in New York City before the invasion, which shouldn’t be possible if the invasion happened 60 years ago. So something is already wrong with the story. Then there’s the radiation zones. Radiation doesn’t sit, it travels. So the idea of radiation borders doesn’t make a lot of sense and should tell us that something is amiss with the radiation zones that are meant to keep Tom out of other areas. Then you have the drones, which act like they want to kill Tom. This foreshadows the idea that the drones are hostile to humans... which makes no sense if they were built by humans. Then Tom saves the woman who is his real wife, but again, how could they be the same age if she had been asleep for 60 years.

These clues and the way Morgan Freeman tells Tom to figure things out for himself rather than just telling him what he needs to know keep the movie interesting and keep you excited about solving the puzzle of what is going on. That is more than enough to make this a worthwhile film to watch. It is interesting.

But it also makes the movie worthless in terms of re-watchability. This movie depends entirely on the mystery it builds and the suspense in each individual scene... will they get him or not. And once you know the answer to the mystery and once you know when he’s in danger and when he isn’t, there just isn’t anything left in the film that you want to watch a second time. The story doesn’t resolve itself in a rousing way to make you stand up and cheer, so you can’t revisit the feeling of triumph. The romance is pro-forma and cold, so you can’t fall in love all over again. The film isn’t funny, the dialog isn’t beautiful or surprising. The action scenes aren’t spectacular. The world they create is sparse and uninteresting and not the sort of world that sparks fantasies. All you have is a mystery, a mystery that vanishes once you’ve seen the film.

For a movie like this to stand out after the flood of poor science fiction that pillaged ideas like this and made them all feel derivative, the film needs a second act. It needs Tom to stumble upon a second world to explore, where the story could become more than “wasteland Tom learns the truth.” Or it needs some strong emotional story in which Tom struggles against himself to realize what it means to be human and to do the right thing against real odds – face the impossible choice. Even revealing the past through some sort of flashback story would have helped. It needed something.

So here’s the thing. Nothing about this film is original. In fact, it’s horribly derivative. Nothing about this film is deep or memorable. The film isn’t an enjoyable story that you want to see again, it doesn’t present a world that will pull you in and make you want more, and it doesn’t have characters that you care about. But what it does have going for it is an interesting mystery about what exactly happened. In that regard, I definitely recommend seeing this film... just don’t buy the disc.

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Film Friday: Dreamcatcher (2003)

I’ve soured on Stephen King over the years. He steals his ideas from movies and his writing has become pedestrian and packed with nonsense and stereotypes. His movies are worse. Dreamcatcher is a good example of this. Indeed, despite being well-shot by Lawrence Kasdan and packed with solid actors like Morgan Freeman, Tom Sizemore, Timothy Oliphant and Thomas Jane, Dreamcatcher really highlights the shortcomings of King’s work over the past few decades.

** spoiler alert **

Dreamcatcher is the story of four friends who go to a cabin in Maine to relax. Unbeknownst to them, a hostile alien spaceship has crashed nearby and the Army has come to kill the aliens. While the Army is busy doing this, one of the aliens takes over the body of one of the friends and sets out for Boston to put worms into the water supply. These worms would infect the entire population and produce millions of aliens. But the four friends have a secret weapon. . . they had a retarded friend as a child, and as we all know, retarded kids have special powers. Here’s where this film fails:

● The Tired Formulas: Right out of the gates, Dreamcatcher presents us with the incredibly-tired, standard King formulas. You’ve got the evil, out-of-control military commander who decides to needlessly murder people. You’ve got the alcoholic. You’ve got the four friends who’ve been friends since childhood in their idyllic small town just like in Stand By Me and It. And the coup de grace, you’ve got the retarded kid who needs to be saved from the bullies, who then turns out to have special magical powers which are needed to solve the movie.

● The Rip-Offs: As you watch the film, you will get a strange sense of déjà vu, like you’ve seen everything in it before. This has become a standard feeling in King movies. Indeed, it seems that the way King writes books now is to rent all the popular movies on a particular topic, e.g. zombies, and then steal the best scenes from each movie and string them together in a new book. For example, when you watch something like Rose Red you can literally call out the movies he’s stealing from scene by scene. Dreamcatcher isn’t as bad as most of his recent work in this regard, but there is absolutely nothing original about the film at any point. King also seems determined to strew this film with references to better movies, like calling the alien virus “Ripley.” And to add insult to injury, he actually has Morgan Freeman tell you, “the men call the red stuff ‘Ripley’, after the broad in the Alien movies,” because you stupid viewers might not get such an incredibly obvious reference.

● The Nonsense: Where Dreamcatcher really underwhelms, however, is in all the nonsense at the heart of this film. Consider Duddits, the retarded kid. It’s rather asinine that King always pretends that retarded kids somehow have special powers. It’s like the racist portrayal of the “noble savage” (renamed “the magic negro”), where these non-mainstream individuals are presented as non-threatening, simpletons with a special gift of insight. King is famous for this, but that’s just the surface problem here.

The real problem is that Duddits isn’t human at all, he’s an alien in disguise, but no one seems to realize this -- including his own mother. Huh? The mother, by the way, lets one of the friends take cancer-stricken Duddits away to hunt the bad alien because she’d rather he died somewhere unknown rather than at home. Huh? Worst of all, for this movie to work, Duddits needs to misunderstand one of the other friends (as a kid) when he says “save the world another day.” Duddits hears this as “save the world from Mr. Gray.” So Duddits gives them all special powers which they will need 30 years later to fight against Mr. Gray himself, who crashes on earth by accident. In other words, Duddits knew that the four friends would go on vacation in 30 years near the crash site of an alien ship that just happened to be carrying Mr. Gray, and which would crash unintentionally, and that Mr. Gray would just happened to stumble upon the four friends in the vast Maine wilderness. Yeah, no coincidence there.

This is so far beyond the level of believable coincidence that you have to assume Duddits can predict the future. But if that’s the case, why not just visit them at the cabin and save them? Or tell them what they need to know. Also, how in the world can Duddits be portrayed as a genuinely retarded kid and adult, yet he ends up being more than a match for the highly-intelligent and maniacal Mr. Gray?

Then you have the relationship between Freeman, who plays Colonel Curtis, and Sizemore, who plays Owen, his second in command. These two guys are tight friends who have been fighting aliens together long enough that Curtis plans to retire after this mission and hand over control of the unit to Owen. Yet most of their conversations are spent with Curtis explaining to Owen what the aliens are, what the virus is the aliens spread, and how to combat it. Wouldn’t Owen know this? Why does he treat Owen like he walked in off the street? Curtis even has to tell Owen the name of the virus, even though Owen says he just came from a briefing about it.

At the same time, Owen’s character is given a generic King-style conflict. He has been approached by the General in charge who thinks Curtis is needlessly killing civilians. Being a General, he could pretty much do what he wants to fix that. So he chooses to confide in Curtis’s best friend and send him to spy on Curtis? Huh? Owen, of course, immediately confesses this to Curtis and they share a touching moment of derision for their superiors. Owen specifically tells Curtis that he thinks the General’s theory about the virus “is crap.” Before the scene even ends, however, Owen completely changes positions and tells Curtis that the General’s theory is accurate and neither of them seem to notice this about face. He then betrays Curtis on the word of a guy claiming to be a psychic (Thomas Jane as Henry) after about twenty seconds of convincing. This leads us to another stupid scene where Owen tells Curtis he should come listen to Henry, and Curtis agrees, only to decide he’d rather go secretly shoot Henry for no logical reason whatsoever. Moreover, Henry is warning them that an alien got away. Why in the world would this cause Curtis to shoot him? It’s nonsense.

Then you have the virus. The aliens spread a red powder all over the place. This powder infects people causing worms to grow inside them. Those worms shoot out their rear ends, creating thousands of little aliens. All it takes is a little red dust to make this happen and that dust is everywhere. Yet, to eradicate this threat, the Army sends in 3-5 Apache helicopters to blow up the alien ship with what appear to be anti-aircraft missiles and mini-guns. And to make the viewer think this is effective, they talk about quarantining the area until they can blow up the ship. But think about this. If a single alien is away from the crash site, taking a leak for example, the Army’s plan will fail. And with this virus infecting every animal in the forest, there is simply no conceivable way to quarantine the forest and stop these worms from spreading everywhere short of a nuclear blast. In effect, King has created an unstoppable alien, but then tells us bullets can stop it.

Nothing in this film makes sense. And that’s become the problem with King’s recent works. The scenes play out fine, but the way he combines them is utter nonsense. Moreover, so many of his stories now depend on the most bizarre string of coincidences to put the heroes in a position to win the movie. This is just bad writing.

Finally, it should be pointed out that this film did a lot of damage to Lawrence Kasdan’s career. He admitted that in 2012 and said that several movies he was planning fell through immediately after this one failed commercially. I’m not surprised. Other than Kubrick’s The Shining, how many other directors launched or saved their careers doing a Stephen King film?

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