Four Forgettable Films

Sunshine
Saw IV
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Halloween

All four of these movies were more or less forgettable, but the only disappointment that came as a surprise was National Treasure, but that's because I seem to be one of the only smart people who enjoyed the first one. In the second installment, there's less bother about American history, which leaves much more room to show divorced couples fighting. For some reason this is very big right now, I think because so many celebrity break-ups have been part of the tabloid showcase in the past few years, and I can't go to the grocery store without seeing that Jennifer Aniston's family have made some new plea for Brad Pitt to come back home (allegedly). Parts of the movie are genuinely funny, but the charm of the original is completely gone. I'm sure the tie-in video game is great though, with all those scenes in the half-drowned city of gold.

Danny Boyle has made an entire career out of near misses, so if Sunshine disappointed it's my own fault for getting my hopes up. There are some interesting facets to Sunshine, including a really interesting performance from Chris Evans that had me stunned to find he was the same guy from that awful Fantastic Four movie. The problem in Sunshine is that the climax of the story passes so quickly and unobtrusively in the beginning of the movie that there's nothing left for the characters to do in the falling action but react, to the inevitable end. There's no jeopardy, since the outcome of the mission and the consequences for each character are completely obvious, and nothing to do but watch them all wait for the inevitable. There is an attempt at a vibrant plot twist with a crazed killer on the loose, but it's just pointless and comes out of nowhere far too late in the film to change the narrative. I think I was supposed to care about the characters, but only Evans showed enough depth amongst these one-faceted characters to make me feel anything for him. The end was supposed to be this big triumphant moment with sunshine and rock music, but the grim mood of the movie just drowned out all the attempts at spectacular visuals or any sense of hope, making it a tiresome plod, not an adventure. The really sad thing is how much the film lexicon of the magpie creators is on display, and makes it one of the few times I can say: just watch 2001 and Event Horizon while shining a bright light in your eyes, and you've pretty much got the whole movie.

In the case of Saw IV, I had a clear warning of how bad it was going to be: it was called Saw III. The latest film decided to dispense with the claustrophobia and engagement with particular characters of the first two films and just focus on strange ways to kill all the half-remembered characters from the first three movies. Seriously I had no idea who half the people were who end up playing a pivotal part in the denouement of this film, and I swear at least one of them was killed on-screen in the last movie. Oh, and the end of the last movie, when it sets up a sequel in which Saw's post-mortem death traps will haunt Angus MacFadyen as he tries to save his daughter, that was wrapped up in six seconds, but not until I had spent an hour and a half wondering what happened to his character. (This movie skips around in time a bit and doesn't always bother to inform the viewer, just to pull out a big ha-ha twist at the end with no dramatic investment, and consequently no real pay-off.) The entire film spends no time with its characters, instead choosing to give a long, uninventive backstory for Saw, which any intelligent viewer should be able to see coming when his pregnant wife is shown working with junkies at a free clinic. Mainly it's just frantic and pointless.

When I heard Rob Zombie wanted to do a remake of Halloween, only go deeper into the backstory of Michael Meyers, I kind of should have seen this coming. There are a host of movies from the 70s that lose something in translation, because the people who remake the movies always take out all the mystery. The shark in Jaws and Michael Meyers are my favorite examples of something ordinary that behaves in an extraordinary way, tapping into a larger fear of the supernatural without going so far as to step into fantasy. Since the 80s, every horror movie has abandoned this and unraveled in one of two ways, either as something banal and gory, or exploding into the ridiculous and losing all sense of the macabre. The original has a kid who's scared of the bogeyman for a reason, and this silent killer moving in this unnatural way on some inner murderous timetable hints at something otherworldly that has come out of a dark corner into the banal world of this baby-sitting teenager. Rob Zombie decided to take all that away by trying to explain how Meyers got to be this way, showing the abuse and early experimentation with killing animals and the withdrawal from the world behind a mask, and while creepy it forms a very weak bridge to the rest of the story, when Meyers must be unnatural and inhuman. Apparently there's a reason it's all compressed in Carpenter's original, leaving it a mystery that Dr. Loomis is only able to explain by referring to the mythical: Meyers is either obsessed with druid legends, or he actually stepped straight out of one. So anyways, the remake starts out interesting but because we know him too well, Meyers gets a little ordinary when he becomes a big guy chasing around cheerleaders with a knife.