For the week of July 14th, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing the special "Rogue Cut" of X-Men: Days of Future Past to Blu-ray. A freewheeling, fairly loose adaptation of Chris Claremont and John Byrne's two-issue X-Men story arc, Days of Future Past finds Fox's X-Men universe folding in on itself through a series of temporal dislocations. In the near-future, a race of fearsome automatons known as Sentinels have almost wiped out the planet's mutant population, a situation that forces Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) to concoct one last, desperate offensive: they'll send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to 1973 to reunite their younger selves (James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender) and prevent the start of the Sentinel program. That's right - Days of Future Past is the Back to the Future II of the franchise, as the film warps time and pulls together most of its mutant characters (and adds a few new ones, the most enjoyable being Evan Peters' deadpan Quicksilver, who headlines the picture's most showstopping action sequence: a prison breakout scored to Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle") to wrangle the continuity threads established by X-Men: The Last Stand, The Wolverine, and X-Men: First Class into one coherent whole. However, one can track back the most profound influence on Days of Future Past to a DC property: director Bryan Singer (returning to the X-Men world after his beloved X2) puts so much emphasis on the 1970s milieu and the political climate that spawns the Sentinels – Peter Dinklage's brilliant, twisted inventor Bolivar Trask is able to bend the ear of Richard Nixon (Mark Camacho) in order to further his anti-mutant agenda – that, at times, it feels like he's doing a kid-friendly version of Watchmen, right down to the way he turns Jennifer Lawrence's embittered, now-rogue assassin Mystique into a Comedian-like political agitator (in one setpiece, Mystique even travels to the frontlines of the Vietnam War to investigate some beyond-unethical mutant testing). That heightened sense of social awareness is the best thing about Days of Future Past, and it's a strong reminder of the human touch the series lost when Singer left to make Superman Returns. Singer has always viewed the mutant struggle as a parable for the struggle of all disenfranchised groups (parts of X-Men and X2 invoked both the Civil Rights Movement and the LGBT advocacy cause), and this compassion gives his X-Men entries a resonance that exceeds the many action sequences. And therein lies the problem. What is most interesting about Days of Future Past are the human moments - Mystique's righteous anger, Professor X's self-loathing (and subsequent substance abuse, in the wake of the crippling accident that ended First Class), Magneto's keen sense of betrayal – and the action, for all its pomp and circumstance, simply can't compete. By the time Magneto is using RFK Stadium as a key instrument in yet another pro-mutant terrorist act, all we see is another fancy CGI showcase, and one that doesn't have the power of, say, a fraught conversation between McAvoy and Fassbender as they try to reconcile a lifetime of grudges towards one another and still come up short. The inner lives of superheroes...that would be an exciting stage in blockbuster-movie evolution, and one that Days of Future Past deftly, heartbreakingly sidesteps. The big selling point of the "Rogue Cut" is the reinstatement of Anna Paquin's Rogue character to the proceedings, and while the big action setpiece involving her is a good one (as well as a better showcase for McKellen and Stewart, who exist in the theatrical version as glorified cameos), what distinguishes this iteration of the film are some character beats that add a little extra richness to the film. The Mystique/Beast union gets some added dimension, as do the tiny grace notes involving Fassbender's Magneto, Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), and Iceman (Shawn Ashmore). It's hardly the extended hangout with the X-Men that these actors deserve - for all its faults, Joss Whedon's Avengers: Age of Ultron has a far sharper, more vital sense of character interplay and its emphasis over empty action sequences - but this Rogue Cut is a step in the right direction, and the strongest film version of Days of Future Past.
In his Blu-ray review of the theatrical cut, Jeffrey Kauffman writes that "X-Men: Days of Future Past does its best to infuse these elements with some ostensible human (and/or mutant) interest, most having to do with the long simmering conflicts between Charles and Erik, especially with regard to Mystique, but the film actually is more successful as a kind of time traveling caper outing. While Logan and his troupe are attempting to put aside their differences, Mystique is on the prowl for Trask, who is both smarmy and deadly (especially for the mutants on whom he's been experimenting like some 1970s version of Josef Mengele). When the day of the supposed Trask killing arrives (centered around the Paris Peace Accords at the close of the Vietnam conflict), the various parties converge, and while Logan's group does keep Mystique from killing Trask, a number of unexpected developments seem to suggest that the 'river of time' might be momentarily detoured, but cannot be significantly altered. As fun as the time travel element is, especially with regard to the wonderful production design that brings the decidedly kitschy seventies back to life, Kinberg's screenplay doesn't really toy with mind games the way this genre tends to. The film is structured more traditionally as a pure and simple adrenaline rush, one whose excitement is built largely around an uncertainty as to what Magneto's motives actually are, and whether or not Mystique will finally listen to reason (telepathically delivered by Charles). The film's final set piece, which sees Magneto moving an entire football stadium, plunking it down to create a fortress around the White House where Nixon and Trask are sequestered, is hyperbolic and boisterous, but also surprisingly involving. The film probably glosses over conflicts too easily throughout its running time, as well as tying everything up in a perhaps overly tidy package by the end credits. Logan's trip through time seems to ameliorate any number of traumas and tragedies that have befallen the X-Men in previous cinematic outings, to the point that some may wonder if, like that famous season on Dallas where Bobby returned from the grave, it's all been a dream." Of the Rogue Cut, Kauffman notes that "a lot of the changes in this new version are on the teeny tiny side. In fact, had Singer and Ottman not mentioned some of them in their commentary, I personally probably wouldn't have noticed had I not done a scene by scene comparison with the original version. The two new scenes are okay, but hardly revelatory. All of that said, at least this new version sweetens the deal with some appealing new supplements, including two excellent commentaries and a whole second disc of new material."
From A24 Films and Lionsgate Home Entertainment comes the sci-fi drama Ex Machina. Ex Machina marks the directorial debut of author/screenwriter Alex Garland (Sunshine, 28 Days Later), and as with those features, the film uses conventional genre trappings to wrestle with knotty issues of science and morality: in this case, the progression to the Singularity, personified here through the advanced android Ava (Alicia Vikander, in a performance that should help make her a huge star). The creation of tech magnate Nathan Bateman (the brilliant Oscar Isaac, who plays the role like a perfect mix of Mark Zuckerberg and The Situation), Ava's whirring, metallic case belies her facility with replicating empathy and human emotions, and so Nathan recruits young programmer Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) to help him run a Turing Test on Ava and determine whether or not her operating system seems functionally identical to a human consciousness. Now, a standard Turing Test would play out through a text screen, meaning that Ava's oddly alluring form complicates Caleb's reaction to her, yet this isn't a cross-platform romance like Her - the Emersonian ideals of that earlier film give way to a harder, far less sentimental look at the man-machine relationship and how social constructs of sexuality and gender have a funny way of throwing the most well-intentioned intellectual ideals out of whack. As such, Garland employs a level of graphic content to challenge the characters' response to Ava's form and purpose, but what's even more impressive is how Garland mirrors the film's form to its content. Ex Machina is, in many ways, its own Turing Test that the audience takes; it's up to us to decide where our sympathies lie, with the humans or with the synthetic characters. Every new revelation unsettles how we process the leads - the way Gleeson's innocence curdles into self-righteousness, Isaac's bro-charm masks a deeper sociopathy, or how the cold sterility of Ava's external components clashes against Vikander's striking emotional range - and this ambiguity powers the film's conclusion, which is disturbing not because of the late-act shift into horror-movie territory (and if I have any serious complaints about the film, it's that Garland undermines the chilling austerity of Ex Machina's first hundred minutes with some grisly violence that wouldn't be out of place in a slasher movie - the mind that turned Sunshine's ecstatic celebration of death into a highbrow Friday the 13th entry is still lingering at the edges) but because it argues something that most movies about the Singularity choose to ignore. We've been told that on-screen A.I. will either support (Chappie) or destroy (The Terminator) us, yet Ex Machina posits that a truly self-aware intelligence might not even care. It's the Modern Prometheus as indifferent god or absentee landlord, and it gives Ex Machina its hypnotic thrall. One of the year's best films.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted the "Kubrickian quality to Garland's direction here, especially with regard to a somewhat languid pace and a tendency to favor long (or at least longish) takes, sometimes with little to no dialogue. Several scenes have dialogue playing in the background while Nathan's mute housekeeper Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) is front and center, evidently taking it all in, despite Nathan's insistence that she doesn't understand a word of English. (The subplot involving Kyoko is not especially subtle, and any 'surprise' about this character's genesis will probably be obvious to anyone who's ever seen 'The Lateness of the Hour' from The Twilight Zone: Season 2.) Frequent static looking interstitials of the rather awesome looking countryside reinforce the Kubrickian ambience, while also drawing none too subtle parallels between Nathan playing God in his underground laboratory while an actual creative Divinity is working wonders outside. The film's screenplay is intentionally dense, but it also tends to simply state conundra rather than trying to 'solve' logical problems like what if anything a Turing Test can accomplish. Within a context of a kind of stoner (or beer guzzling) buddy tête–à–tête, Garland has Caleb and Nathan gloss over any number of philosophical and even existential phenomena, giving things a pseudo-intellectual patina that just may not bear really fulsome scrutiny. That said, the film, while somewhat brooding in a Kubrickian way, ticks off its plot points resolutely and firmly, with Caleb slowly becoming aware that he's at best a pawn in a chess game he doesn't fully understand, and at worst a puppet with several sets of hands (human and robotic) pulling the strings."
Just as good is the terrifying horror movie It Follows. The film centers on Jay (the excellent Maika Monroe), a teenager whose sexual relationship with her latest boyfriend (Jake Weary) has a devastating side-effect: she unwittingly contracts a curse wherein a spectral figure, visible only to those with the same malady, will follow her until it can reach and kill her. Along with her closest friends, Jay tries to find a way to defeat the beast, even as she begins to suspect that the only way to stop it is to delay its progression by passing the curse along to as many people as she can. That description might sound like the stuff of conventional chillers - certainly the monster's central conceit, that it spreads through sexual contact, carries a charge made all the more queasier from actual concerns about STDs and the AIDS virus - except writer-director David Robert Mitchell doesn't come from a horror background; in his first film, the lovely drama The Myth of the American Sleepover, Mitchell evinced a gift for presenting teenage life with unforced honesty and surprising naturalism, and what makes It Follows so special is that it's clearly a work from the same filmmaker. We watch Mitchell's cast (Keir Gilchrist, Lili Sepe, Olivia Luccardi, Daniel Zovatto, and Monroe, who between this and the underseen thriller The Guest has already assumed the mantle of Next Great Final Girl) interact with one another, and their behaviors have a fly-on-the-wall quality, like we're watching all the first kisses, late-night movie sessions, and aimless driving unfold in real time. The difference is, of course, that these characters have an unseen, ravenous monster tracking their every move, but whoever said adolescence was easy? Furthermore, Mitchell helps solidify this blend of teen drama with nightmare horror through an ethereal, drifting aesthetic style that recalls the work of Terrence Malick or early David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls, George Washington). Mitchell lets his action play out in long, gliding takes, and while some might see a stronger correlation there to the films of John Carpenter (and Mitchell has copped to that influence, too, especially in the very Carpenter-esque score from Disasterpeace), we feel the Malick Touch in the slow zooms, the way he lingers on his teenage cast's faces, the heightened visual presence of environments both natural and unnatural in conception (Mitchell shot this film in Detroit, and he gets so much psychic energy from the juxtaposition of that city's suburban enclaves with its pronounced urban decay). The overall effect is porous, as if anything - wonderful or otherwise - could happen at any time. The film doesn't need to resort to cheap jump scares or horror effects - it knows we'll get lost in Mitchell's delicate vision, and that our inability to escape is scary enough. Along with Jennifer Kent's masterful The Babadook, It Follows stands as one of the last fifteen years' two or three best horror films.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "if ever a movie came along at just the right time to completely reinvigorated a desperate, dying genre, this is it. It Follows demonstrates the beauty of structural simplicity, the elegance of a finely-tuned script, and the benefits of a filmmaker who not only understands the craft and the genre in which he or she is working but pours an obvious passion for it into the film and works from a deep knowledge base of what works, what doesn't, and how to best, and most effectively, blend both classic motifs and new ideas into a single, grand experience. The film embodies the horror genre at its most superficial basic - following characters who, by way of sexual activity, are stalked by a relentless figure - and at the same time its most mesmerizingly complex best, complex by way of its outwardly simple yet intoxicatingly precise, detailed physical construction and mesmerizing in its perfectly tuned psychological chills that build to an incredibly realized climax. The movie finds the perfect balance between pure scares, intense cat-and-mouse games, and dark psychological underpinnings, all without resorting to excess gore and working on a premise that's admittedly absurd but that plays on a number of levels nonetheless, something that's at once both an allegory of the dangers of promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases and, perhaps more apropos to the horror genre, a unique spin on the old 'have sex and die' crutch that was a genre mainstay plot device and has become something of catch-all definition of classic '80s horror."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering a new Blu-ray version of Carroll Ballard's masterful The Black Stallion. Most contemporary viewers can't fathom the impact this simple children's fable had on critics and audiences; the film garnered three Academy Award nominations (and won one for Best Sound Editing), spawned two disappointing sequels and a television show, and won the accolades of no less an authority on film as Roger Ebert, who listed The Black Stallion as his favorite film of 1980 (note: when Ebert listed his favorite films of the 1980s, Raging Bull occupied the top spot, so presumably his opinion on The Black Stallion cooled somewhat). How strange, then, that the picture has faded somewhat from the public eye, and how fitting that Criterion's Blu-ray existed to remedy that situation. From the opening scenes, which find young Alec Ramsey exploring the different nooks and crannies of a North African steamer, director Carroll Ballard begins weaving a blend of visual poetry both specific and surreal - Ballard constructs his scenes from lovingly composed details that only cut together through fairy-tale logic: the cascade of foreign languages spoken by Alec's fellow travellers, the simple act of Alec feeding the eponymous horse through a cabin porthole, the inky, impressionistic terror of their desperate swim after the ship sinks. It all culminates in an extended sequence that ranks with the best of the cinematic masters, as Alec and the horse bond through their shared survival experience on a desert island, an event that Ballard and his ace DP Caleb Deschanel present through strong physical actions - the need for food, in particular, unites Alec and the horse more than any speechifying could. For a while, we can see exactly why someone like Ebert would rank The Black Stallion over an established masterwork like Raging Bull: this kind of simple, direct, visual filmmaking died with the advent of talkies, and you can sense Ballard's clarity of purpose in distilling down fairly standard plot mechanics into their barest essentials. If The Black Stallion was able to maintain this pitch and style for all of its 117 minutes, we'd have an unassailable "children's" classic in the same vein as The Wizard of Oz and To Kill a Mockingbird, but then Alec and the stallion get rescued, and we begin to see why the film has lost some of its luster. It's not that the final hour is bad - far from it. Cinematographically, Ballard and Deschanel give their American heartland settings the same burnished wonder of the steamer and island scenes, and they get a great, uncharacteristically restrained performance from Mickey Rooney as a former jockey who starts working with Alec and the horse. No, it's that these moments are so narratively conventional. In place of the dream-logic that undercut the formula in the first half, we get a series of training sequences that build to - you guessed it - The Big Race, and as well made as these beats are, we're aware that we are watching a film in ways that aren't as viscerally compelling as the opening hour. How interesting, then, that we're left thinking The Black Stallion would be "better" if it were more consistently conventional, if the beginning traded in "exceptional" for "good enough."