Broad Green and Amazon Studios have helped distribute one of the year's finest films with their release of The Lost City of Z. David Grann's nonfiction account of Colonel Percy Fawcett, a British soldier who became obsessed with a mythical Amazon tribe, is a solid-but-unspectacular adventure story, one constrained by the vagaries of the historical record, most notably an ending that skews towards the disappointingly ambiguous. James Gray's film adaptation, on the other hand, is another beast entirely. It uses the contours of the novel as a springboard for a larger, more metaphysically resonant examination of the intersections between colonialism and the creative spirit, of all things. The film's Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam, giving a nuanced, textured performance I didn't think he had in him) is a man desperate to prove himself in early-20th-century England - for all his military and personal achievements, he lives under the shadow of his family's social ills, and Gray borrows a bit from Stanley Kubrick's great Barry Lyndon in terms of how he mines the driest of comedy from the distain others show Fawcett's class standing. You get the sense that Fawcett would have to change the world to achieve some semblance of respect from his peers, so that's just what he attempts, leading an expedition (Robert Pattinson plays Fawcett's aide-de-camp, and he's splendid - it's an understated turn of grit and intelligence) in order to survey uncharted regions of Brazil's Mato Grosso region. These sections of The Lost City of Z have the same dread power as Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo or Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. You can tell that the jungle captivated Gray as much as it did those other filmmakers, and he creates a hallucinatory atmosphere that's both dreamlike and uncomfortably visceral. Moments of horrible violence happen with terrifying speed: I'm thinking of the arrow attack on Fawcett's first journey, or the way one of his confederates seems to disappear in a swarm of piranhas. But other potential catastrophes unspool with almost languorous grace, like Fawcett meeting a surprisingly circumspect tribe of cannibals as well as the virtuoso final sequence that takes the explorer and his son (Spider-Man: Homecoming's Tom Holland) right up to the edge of the titular city in a manner that's either transcendental or horrible, or maybe a little bit of both. It helps, too, that the actual production challenges informed the film - Hunnam almost got attacked by snakes and had his eardrum eaten by a ravenous beetle, and Darius Khondji's luscious cinematography has a humid, mossy quality that's entirely the result of shooting in Columbia and South America – and these incidents further blur the line between fiction and documentary. Yet The Lost City of Z is such a generous feature that we're engrossed even when Fawcett returns home, and we can savor the work from Sienna Miller as his wife. In any other film, she'd be the nagging buzzkill, but Miller gives her a spirit that equals her husband's - one of the unsung tragedies here is how Fawcett unintentionally relegates her to second-class status even though she ends up being bound to his legend in ways he could never imagine, as evinced by the film's stunning last shot. Since his underrated 2007 policier We Own the Night, James Gray has been turning out one understated gem after another, but The Lost City of Z feels like its own entity: a full-throated, singular masterpiece.
Universal Studios Home Entertainment's The Fate of the Furious, on the other hand, is no masterpiece, but I had a blast with it nonetheless. I don't get the public reception to this one. To hear tell from Fast & Furious fans more die-hard than I, The Fate of the Furious represents some kind of deep franchise betrayal, one that sends the car thieves-turned-international secret agents (I guess?) into a) an even more ludicrously implausible adventure (after Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto goes rogue, his former teammates need to stop him from helping Charlize Theron's cyberwarrior Cipher steal the keys to Total World Domination) that b) violates the core tenet of the Fast & Furious universe: namely, that family matters above all else. See, to neutralize the threat that Dom and Cipher pose collectively, Special Agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson, who is so goddamn delightful in these movies that he renders most of the supporting cast redundant - he's both a one-man army and charm offensive) springs human battering-ram Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham, easily Johnson's equal) from prison despite the fact that Shaw killed Toretto's old buddy Han AND tried to take down the whole Fast/Furious squad in Furious 7. If I may, let me refute both points. On the subject of The Fate of the Furious' various implausibilities: yes, we do see Cipher weaponize hundreds of cars in downtown Manhattan, and the finale finds the heroes quite literally trying to outrace a decommissioned nuclear sub atop the Russian ice tundra. Documentary realism, this is not. But The Fate of the Furious is only continuing a trend of breathless cartoon physics that Fast Five started - once these movies started towing giant CGI bank safes through crowded city streets, any concessions to realism (minor as they might be) vanished, so I couldn't get too worked up about this one quadrupling down on the digital nonsense. What matters is that director F. Gary Gray has a good eye for this kind of hyperbolic vehicular mayhem (he also stages two franchise all-timers: the opening chase sequence, which is Fate of the Furious' only true car chase, and a breathtakingly kinetic prison riot) and that The Rock ends up throwing a torpedo with his bare hands at an enemy Humvee. It's the little things in life you treasure. And as for the team's bizarre about-face towards a guy that literally just tried to murder them all, sure, it defies logic, but these are stupid movies! When the Fasts aren't violating the laws of physics and God with their action sequences, they're ladling on melodramatic twists like a daytime soap opera on Creatine. In that regard, of course a former foe would become an unlikely ally. Furthermore, as much fun as Johnson and Statham are separately, they're a buddy pairing for the ages, and their playful/bruising approach to the many action sequences is enough to make you want a Hobbs/Shaw standalone adventure of its own (bonus points if this hypothetical spinoff adds Kurt Russell's gleeful Mr. Nobody as their Nick Fury-esque CO). If you're going to criticize anything about The Fate of the Furious, target your vitriol at Diesel and Theron, both of whom are beyond-boring as the ostensible heavies (the rationale for Dom's betrayal is clichéd nonsense, and Diesel seems so checked out - I'm not surprised Johnson lost patience with him), Scott Eastwood's charisma-free turn as the Paul Walker replacement (Eastwood has the distinction of being less interesting than both Walker or his own screen icon of a father - he looks like Clint, but that's about it), or the genuinely upsetting sexual politics, particularly those involving Elsa Pataky's used-and-abused Elena. But the batsh*t action scenes and the Statham infusion? They're what I liked the most.
In its continuing efforts to give what feels like every cult horror favorite the deluxe treatment, Shout/Scream Factory is preparing a special edition of the 1995 sci-fi thriller Species. Regardless of how I feel about Species as a movie, I'm astounded it even exists in its current form. For about fifteen minutes, Species puts on reasonably highfalutin' airs. Screenwriter Dennis Feldman wanted to explore the SETI program in a manner that's not dissimilar from Robert Zemeckis' prestige-picture Contact; in both movies, scientists receive satellite instructions from an extraterrestrial intelligence on how to create some form of alien technology. The difference, however, is that while Contact uses this setup to ask the Big Questions about Religion and Our Place In The Universe, Species eventually mutates that technology into an alien-human hybrid (Natasha Henstridge) that escapes from her government handlers and begins killing everything in sight. Still, that shift alone into monster movie isn't all that unexpected - there are far more evil-alien movies than uplifting-alien ones (don't check me on that), and Species is only furthering a tradition that includes films like It Came from Outer Space, this year's Life, and, of course, Ridley Scott's masterful Alien (furthering that latter connection: H.R. Giger designed both the xenomorph and the Species monster, the latter of which looks pretty good as a practical effect and borderline horrible when rendered in crappy CGI). No, what gives Species its unique WTF frisson concerns the monster's objective: she wants to breed and propagate its species (see what I did there?), and given that Henstridge was a Canadian supermodel, director Roger Donaldson takes every opportunity he can get to show the alien's naked human form as she sets off on this mission. What we have, then, is nothing less than a $60-million (adjusted for today's dollars) softcore porno, and I cannot tell you how surreal it is to watch Henstridge trying to rut away with every eligible male in sight while being surrounded by solid production value (DP Andrzej Bartkowiak lensed The Verdict and Prince of the City, for God's sake) and an A-list cast (Sir Ben Kingsley, a just-post-Reservoir Dogs Michael Madsen, Alfred Molina, and Forest Whitaker - hell, even future four-time Academy Award-nominee Michelle Williams is on deck to play the alien as a child). It's a surreal experience, and even though I can't in good conscience call Species a good movie, it is a lot of fun to watch it ping-pong between graphic violence and graphic nudity. Recommended for fans of sublime cheese.
Finally, this week hosts a spate of catalog rereleases, the most exciting of which are the 4K editions of two Luc Besson classics: Léon and The Fifth Element. Other than La Femme Nikita, these action epics stand as Besson's most iconic features, although time hasn't treated them equally. Case in point: his 1997 sci-fi blockbuster The Fifth Element. Twenty years ago, I was convinced I was watching the new Star Wars, so overwhelming was Besson's visual invention servicing a traditional hero's journey about a genially scuzzy flying-taxi-cab-driver (Bruce Willis, naturally) who becomes the unlikely ally of a young woman (Milla Jovovich) with the power to save - or destroy - the entire universe. Unfortunately, nowadays The Fifth Element looks a lot more like TRON or The Black Hole - in all those instances, I can respect what they're doing to advance the field of special effects while acknowledging that Said Effects haven't aged that well. Besson went a little CGI crazy in this one, and the medium has developed so exponentially over two decades that most of his Fifth Element digital effects lack weight or impact. His computerized, futuristic Manhattan looks fake in ways that Ridley Scott's tactile, model-based Los Angeles in Blade Runner does not, and Blade Runner is fifteen years older than The Fifth Element. Furthermore, Besson applies this overly blithe tone to the proceedings, and while I get that he's trying to pay homage to the breezy sci-fi serials he loved as a kid, the comedy so overwhelms the drama that the whole global destruction countdown has no stakes. People rag on Chris Tucker's endlessly mugging Ruby Rhod, but Gary Oldman's Big Bad Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg is even more problematic - Rhod is supposed to be the comic relief, but Oldman plays his megalomaniacal villain like a live-action Daffy Duck, so we never take any of his threats seriously. That said, Willis is a natural as this kind of reluctant hero (it's one of his most relaxed, engaging performances), and Jovovich's asskicking superwoman holds up better than any of the dodgy effects or clichéd twists. You can draw a straight line from her to River Tam in Firefly, Trinity in The Matrix, or even Jovovich's own Alice in the Resident Evil series. In that sense, she's the mother of all otherworldly action heroines. I have no such reservations, though, about Léon, which ranks alongside Die Hard and Children of Men as one of the great contemporary action movies. Certainly, it's one of the strangest and most idiosyncratic: we might be prepared for a thriller about the title character, a calmly dispassionate hitman (Jean Reno, in the best performance he'll ever give) attending to his business in New York City, but we're not necessarily expecting him to care for twelve-year-old Mathilda (Natalie Portman, in what is still one of her finest at-bats) after she escapes a beyond-crooked NYPD cop (Gary Oldman again, delivering a masterclass in the art of scenery chewing - he's more over-the-top here than in The Fifth Element, yet he never loses his grasp of the character's pervasive menace), and we're definitely not ready for the specifics of the relationship between Léon and his young ward. Léon serves as her protector, yes, but he also begins training Mathilda in the ways of the gun, and if that weren't queasy enough, the two develop a bond that's equal parts paternal and romantic. At least, it's romantic if you've seen Léon; the film's heavily truncated American release (titled The Professional) elides almost every suggestion that indicates the forty-something Léon and the preteen Mathilda are in love with each other. I get it - these moments are uncomfortable despite the fact that Besson never has the two act on their feelings (he'd never be allowed back into the United States if he did that). But they're supposed to be uneasy - one of the film's wonderful little subtleties is that Léon is just as broken as Oldman's stratospherically evil bad guy - and "normalizing" the film robs it of its singular, odd integrity. Léon is both a European art film AND a high-octane action extravaganza, and its daring exposes pretty much every other American blockbuster as timid and safe.