In Greek myth, the Gods sent disasters, monsters, plagues to those guilty of crimes, offence or overweening arrogance. These days at the movies, we have to settle for 'because blowing sh*t up looks way cool in 3D.'
Time was, it was man's meddling with the atom that unleashed Godzilla. Our imperial hubris which triggered the 'oh yeah? response from aliens in The War Of The Worlds and a hundred bug-eyed descendents. Our blind faith in science and progress over-turned by eco-disaster, intelligent apes, viral zombies or road warriors in spandex.
Whether we were right, wrong, or some confused mess in between, homo sapiens owned this apocalypse even if we hadn't earned it. This was our metaphor, dang it.
But now, thanks to CGI and the seemingly endless ability of 3D to make debris fly out of the screen at the audience, the end of the world seems to be getting longer, more superficially spectacular, more unprovoked and, dare I say, more pointless than ever before.
Yes, I'm looking at you, Man of Steel. Although previous offences such as Transformers, Star Trek II and to a lesser extent Avengers, should also be taken into consideration.
MOS climaxes with an extensive set piece with Superman fighting renegade Kryptonians above, around and through the skyscrapers of not-Manhattan. Buildings fall, planes explode, the earth shakes. Woah, right?
Yet what sounds epic swiftly hits Magpiemoth's law of diminishing returnsfrom CGI: once you've seen someone body slammed through a skyscraper once, you really don't need to see it again, let alone ten times more.
Technical bravado - and Zac Snyder is a great technical director - creates an interminable scene which unbalances rather than caps the entire film. What's more, these films can destroy New York and its surrogates like Metropolis as many times as you want, but by making them the backdrop to clashes of god-like robots or robot-like gods, with humanity relegated to screaming and running only, you rob them of any psychodrama.
This not our apocalypse any more, we're only living in it.
And when you've got a Superman film - rescue cape boy par excellence - and you make the crisis not only indirectly his fault in the first place, but then then give the impression of not really caring about the people caught up and presumably dying in the final battle because you're too busy focussing on techniques of destruction, you know you've got problems.
Ethical problems, arguably. Dramatic problems, very probably.
I did not have particularly high hopes for The Hobbit; the division of the book into yet another trilogy did not bode well. Advance word on the frame rate also raised the prospect that we might be disappointed by the FX - something that you'd think Peter Jackson would have absolutely nailed after the Lord Of The Rings films. And so it was that I went on my ... ah... expected journey into the cinema with middling expectations at best, and found myself very pleasantly surprised. And I grinned like an excitable child throughout the entire film.
All the usual Jacksonian virtues are in place - excellent script-writing, a first-rate cast, spectacular effects (frame rate, pah!), New Zealand landscapes - and combine to create something unabashedly epic. Most action films I see these days tend to undercut their heroic dimension with a hefty side-order of irony or self-deconstructing humour. The Hobbit, like the Rings films before it, is curiously old-fashioned in its refusal to apologize for or undermine its epic status. The new casting is excellent - Martin Freeman is well-cast as Bilbo and equally convinces as the English country gentle-hobbit and the reluctant action hero. His face-off with Gollum is a tour-de-force by him and Andy Serkis and the heart of the film. Richard Armitage manages to capture the twin dimensions of Thorin - the guerilla warlord his followers would go with into the jaws of death and the way his bravery and pride undercut his competence as a leader. Seriously, I can see why Gandalf chooses to hang out with hobbits. We're still having difficulty pinning character traits onto all the dwarves, but that's an even bigger problem in the book* The additional material the writers have added generally amplifies what's already provided by Tolkien rather than feeling like an ungainly modern graft. So, Thorin gets a backstory and an orcish nemesis in hot pursuit to add underlying tension to their travels across Middle Earth; Radagast provides additional comic relief; and the appearance of Galadriel and Saruman for an impromptu Council of the Wise at Rivendell serves to reinforce the maverick and marginal status of Thorin's mission to the Lonely Mountain. There's the odd flourish too many - the battle under the Goblin Mountain is like Moria stacked on top of the Temple of Doom on top of the Goonies in some crazed attempt to topple the very gods themselves, but it's so endearingly deranged that I'm half tempted to forgive it. They have Bilbo pick up on exactly the same notion of everyday heroism that I did when providing a quote for my employers on the Hobbit in the summer of last year. He goes questing for excitement, but also and more importantly to give the dwarves what he has but they lack - a home. And Bilbo does this despite his lack of experience and self-confidence, because he understands this as a moral imperative. In short: Peter Jackson knows what he's doing, as ever. Go see.
*The merchant one; the one who looks like a Warhammer Troll Slayer; the Jimmy Genghis Nesbit one; the devilishly handsome Being Human one; the glutton; the other young one; the mystic and the slighly pathetic one with the catapult. Sigh, only 8 out of 11 dwarves identified. FAIL. I should be using this handy flowchart from Wired to identify my dwarves, it seems.
Like the sainted Karenin himself, this is an easy film to respect but a tough one to like. Director Joe Wright and Script writer Tom Stoppard have taken the magic realist approach to AK - most of the film takes place within an endlessly plastic, unfolding theatre. So for example, as the scenery rises and falls, Oblonsky's office of pirouetting bureaucrats gives way to a St Petersburg street scene, to a restaurant and to a formal dinner in quick succession. Levin's ascent above the stage into the rafters where the poor live to see his ailing revolutionary of a brother is a great touch. Best of all, the horse race scene where Anna 'falls' publically' takes place in spectacular fashion on stage while the cast watch from the audience. It not only looks amazing, but it never lets you forget the double artificiality of both fiction and aristocratic Russian life. Levin's rural scenes - the most didactic in the book - are unsuprisingly shot much more naturalistically. An escape from artifice? What the film really needed to complement this was inspired casting - a central love triangle equal to the story - and encouragement to emote enough to be heard amid the tricksiness of the story. But Keira Knightly, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Jude Law, while not disgracing themselves, just don't grab the film by the emotional scruff of the neck and make it live amid all this cleverness. AK can only enhance Joe Wright's reputation as a director, but it's not a film to remember beyond that.
