For the week of June 5th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is giving Ex Machina the Ultra HD treatment. 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 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. 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. Still, even with these reservations, this film plays like the Modern Prometheus as absentee landlord, and that realization gives Ex Machina its hypnotic thrall.
The most heartbreaking release of the week is Walter Hill's The Assignment, courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment. From 1975 to 1982, writer-director Walter Hill was one of the most exciting action-movie filmmakers on the planet. Films like Hard Times, The Driver, and his groundbreaking 48 Hrs. aspired to (and often achieved) the thematic and cinematic purity of Zen koans, stripping down all character and narrative beats to their barest essentials. Since then, it's been a long, slow decline, but I've never sensed the mechanics of Hill's career grinding to a halt the same way I have after watching The Assignment. As with his underrated crime drama Johnny Handsome, The Assignment is a mad-scientist tale: tough male assassin Frank Kitchen (Michelle Rodriguez, complete with an unconvincing fake penis and even more incongruous glued-on facial hair) is the best at what he does until he crosses an unhinged doctor (Sigourney Weaver, giving maybe the worst performance of her career), who, in turn, takes revenge by subjecting Kitchen to a non-elective sex-change operation. Mayhem ensues, but if that setup had you hoping for the lurid thrills of something like Brian De Palma's great Dressed to Kill, seek help elsewhere. The knee-jerk reaction against The Assignment is to label it transphobic, but that complaint is somehow the least of the film's problems. For one, the film is so stupid that I can't imagine any political or gender agenda - good, bad, or indifferent - at work here. Hill and co-writer Denis Hamill use the gender swap solely for a cheap, ironic punch, like the denouement of a middling Tales from the Crypt or a bad O. Henry knockoff (a misogynist becomes a woman? SPOOKY!). More dispiritingly, though, is the lack of technical or aesthetic polish that one might expect from a master like Hill. Two weeks ago, I reviewed Hill's Streets of Fire, and I stand by my assessment there: it's a mess, but a glorious one filled with visual invention and wit. The Assignment plays, at best, like the work of a reasonably confident (but still unpolished) film student who has as ham-fisted a narrative touch as I've ever seen. Coverage of simple scenes is needlessly disorienting and busy (the asylum interviews between Weaver and Tony Shalhoub's characters often seem like the two actors were rarely in the same room together), and Hill is way too quick to try and jazz up exposition and interstitial material by slapping on a comic-book filter or tossing in a dutch angle like he's just figured out the editing gimmicks on iMovie. Look, I get that we're never going back to Hill's Southern Comfort glory days, but I do expect a level of general competency; his last big-screen venture, 2012's Bullet to the Head, was as formulaic as it gets, yet it featured a sly turn from Sylvester Stallone and showcased Hill's formidable action chops, particularly during a brutal axe fight between Stallone and Jason Momoa. The Assignment, on the other hand, couldn't be more dispiriting as a pure action movie, trotting out lazy shootouts and cheap effects and no weight whatsoever to any of the carnage. It's the only Walter Hill movie worth ignoring.
Now, Twentieth Century Fox's A Cure for Wellness, on the other hand? That's the kind of crazy I can get behind. In the first of about a thousand perverse creative decisions, director Gore Verbinski saddles us alongside Harry Lockhart (Dane DeHaan), a deeply unsympathetic Manhattan executive tasked with retrieving his missing CEO from an elite wellness spa nestled in the Swiss Alps. Lockhart is only on this mission as a means of atoning for some pretty egregious corporate malfeasances, but his legal problems quickly diminish the more time he spends at the spa, and he begins to suspect something ghastly is afoot, despite the protestations of a kindly doctor (Jason Isaacs, and that casting should tell you everything you need to know about his character). That's a lot to process, and I haven't even mentioned the involvement of a beautiful, haunted young woman (Mia Goth) who Lockhart suspects a central to...whatever is happening in the Alps. But while those plot details scan as pretty busy (and not at all dissimilar from Martin Scorsese's late-stage masterpiece Shutter Island), this is Gore Verbinski we're talking about here. As anyone familiar with his Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy or his unfairly maligned revisionist Western The Lone Ranger can tell you, Verbinski cares about plot so much less than the direct power of the image. In that regard, A Cure for Wellness might be his life's work. Very little of this is scary (unless you find eels and incest terrifying - Verbinski slathers the film in them), and none of it is as clever as Verbinski and screenwriter Justin Haythe seem to think it is. Ostensibly, the two want to condemn the ills of corporate culture a la The Wolf of Wall Street through the prism of a Magic Mountain-style allegory, except the mix of topical satire and German philosophy go together about as well as you might expect. Yet the level of visual invention is, on a molecular level, so consistently overwhelming that the flaws simply don't matter. The ideal version of A Cure for Wellness would be as a Fritz Lang silent epic (it's only a few muted hues away from being in black and white). Verbinski shares the same brutalist, all-encompassing approach to aesthetics as Lang showcased in Metropolis, with certain images - a train mirroring itself as it passes through a tunnel, a young woman silhouetted against a blue sky as she stands at the rim of a feted reflecting pool, a herd of eels (yep, you read that right) shimmering and weaving through a blood-rimmed tub - achieving a poetic dream logic. And to its credit, Verbinski chases that sensation. It feels like Verbinski has been watching a lot of Korean cinema in terms of how he blurs genres and experiments with tone - I was reminded of the works of Bong Joon-ho given how Verbinski will jump from paranoid thriller to satire to slapstick comedy to body horror to monster movie and back again, and with little to no setup. The last third feels deliberately incoherent - disturbing flash inserts suggest that much of what we're seeing might not be real - and if nothing else, A Cure for Wellness is a rarity: an almost-$100-million blockbuster sporting a hard-R rating that gets weirder and more provocative as it chugs along. By the time we reach the ending, which plays like a Hammer Horror climax financed on the grandest scale possible, we're exhausted and more than a little disoriented, but we're never bored. God help me, but A Cure for Wellness is one of the most pleasurable theatrical experiences I've had all year.
Finally, we end with two fascinating catalog releases from Kino Lorber and Shout Factory, respectively: Ridley Scott's epic 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Art Linson's Hunter S. Thompson comedy Where the Buffalo Roam. Both are, in their own weird ways, docudramas of a sort, yet they represent that genre at its most experimental and extreme. As the title might suggest, 1492 focuses on Christopher Columbus (Gérard Depardieu) and his search for the New World, with the Spanish explorer struggling to convince the Spanish government (personified by a terribly miscast Sigourney Weaver) of his trips' validity as well as to contain the physical and interpersonal conflicts that explode along the way. If ever there was a film that encapsulated the best and worst of Ridley Scott, it's this one. You would be hard pressed to find a film that enraptures the senses more than 1492: along with the gorgeous Vangelis soundtrack, Scott has created a grand installation piece, something that unfolds in stunning images (courtesy of DP Adrian Biddle) and powerful tactile details - Columbus discovering a mist-enshrouded Bahamas remains one of Scott's most rapturous screen setpieces. Yet the picture's visual and aural delights coexist alongside leaden plotting and genuinely stupid dialogue, both of which plague Scott's worst films. In those, I get the feeling sometimes that Scott treats normal movie shoe-leather (character development, tight plotting, necessary exposition) as afterthoughts that compromise his mise-en-scene. It is not an accident, then, that Alien and American Gangster alternate cuts aside, all his extended/director's cuts have been marked improvements over their theatrical iterations because they help restore the storytelling components to his cinematic mastery. So it goes with 1492, which deserves mention alongside Scott ventures like Legend and Exodus: Gods and Kings: all utterly essential and utterly frustrating. The same adjectives also come to mind for Where the Buffalo Roam, even though the film shares only a certain degree of heightened history fidelity with 1492. Inspired by the writings and exploits of Hunter S. Thompson, Where the Buffalo Roam follows the gonzo journalist (Bill Murray) as he tries to make sense (with the help of enough drugs and alcohol to send an entire developing nation into cardiac arrest) of '60s and '70s-era American culture. To date, director Art Linson has only helmed two features (including this one), and anyone who sees Where the Buffalo Roam will understand why almost immediately. Linson might be an accomplished producer (we have Linson to thank for The Untouchables, Heat, and Into the Wild, among many others), but he has almost no facility behind the camera, staging everything with a kind of Last Supper-flatness and indulging his actors even when their instincts prove detrimental to the film as a whole; as Karl Lazlo (inspired by Thompson's lawyer/partner-in-crime Oscar Zeta Acosta), Peter Boyle gives maybe the worst performance of his career, a shambling mix of wild-card mania and tedious sentimentality, and I blame Linson for doing nothing to reign in him. You compare Where the Buffalo Roam with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and there is no comparison. The latter feature nails Thompson's singular mix of madcap psychedelia and righteous social anger, and the former shambles along for a bit until it just sorta ends. That said, Where the Buffalo Roam remains a fascinating curio for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it recontextualizes Thompson's life as a slobs-vs.-snobs comedy. In biopic terms, it's an abject failure, but Where the Buffalo Roam doesn't look so bad next to Stripes or Animal House, given how relentlessly Thompson takes to trolling mainstream American culture (we even get Mark Metcalf playing a more officious version of his Animal House prick). Most of all, we have Murray delivering a truly unhinged take on Thompson. Johnny Depp is still the most layered Movie Thompson (whatever my issues with him as a person are, Depp has never been more adept at finding the humanity within the caricature as he is in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), but Murray plays the grand cartoon version, like he spent a year mainlining Doonesbury's Uncle Duke in preparation. It's Essential Murray, and for that reason alone, I'm glad Where the Buffalo Roam exists.