Movie Review: Rango

Children’s films these days, in general, don’t feel like children’s films any more. Watching Pinocchio (1940) or even more recent foreign affair like the wonderful My Neighbour Totoro (1988): the plot, characters and look of the film cater to its main audience with care and love, and that is clear from the classic status that both films have garnered around the world, despite their national differences. Classics in every sense because they do what they say on the tin; they’re for children, but for some reason the fashion these days is that you can’t have a children’s film without it being a “family film” too, as if the imagination of children isn’t enough of a challenge to hold. Step in Rango, the new animated film from Gore Verbinski (the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy and the by-numbers Ring remakes) that marks the first feature film by veteran special effects studios Industrial Light and Magic.

The cast are an ugly bunch, by no means a bad thing.

Thrown from his Vivarium home out of the back of his owner’s swerving car Rango (Johnny Depp), a pet chameleon, finds himself in a desert town populated exclusively by a host of weird and wonderful characters made up of the most bizarre desert creatures. On arrival Rango flexes his acting talents developed by his passion for Shakespeare in his glass enclosure by proclaiming himself to be a wandering hero, and soon becomes the town’s sheriff. Amongst the rumours of roving gangs and the threat of predators like Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy), the town, known simply as dirt, supply of water begins to disappear for unknown reasons. Tasked with the mission of finding this missing amenity vital to the town’s continuing survival, Rango sets out on a journey with a group of the strange townsfolk where he will have to prove his worth to his new friends, and to himself.

The film's surreal sections are more distracting than haunting.

The main problem with a film like Rango is marketing. Expanded upon succinctly and eruditely in his article ‘The problem with poor marketing’*, Sam Manning presents the point that many films in our modern world are not advertised to show necessarily the main qualities of the film they are representing, but to try to appeal to the widest audience possible. This particularly applies to Rango, a film far from the likes of My Neighbour Totoro: advertised, however, as a children’s knockabout comedy. Rango is a film full of dark surrealism, haunting imagery, western referentiality and adult themes that will go over most children’s heads. Not even in the honking, slap in the face fashion of franchise guff like the Shrek films (2001-2010), no mention of pop music or The Matrix (1999) here.  For instance The Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) reference is cute, and surely made me smile: but not one of the children in the cinema with me would have understood that, and this goes for much of the fun to be had with the film. There just aren’t that many laughs for a film touted as a comedy. Johnny Depp’s Rango is an annoying coward, the references, though sometimes pleasing like the aforementioned, are occasionally too bizarre for the film’s target audience and slow down the film irreparably in the third act. If you approach Rango from the respect of it being an action film akin to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or The Mummy (1999) however, the film seems to gel a lot better and the particularly fine action sequences and the beautiful animation become significantly more fitting.

Referential comedy gone hipster.

Rango is not a film for children. They will neither understand the references or the overarching themes of loneliness, there are too few laughs to please them and the downright ugly characters in the film are a far cry from the cute critters of Finding Nemo (2003) or similar Disney creations. When one distances the film from its advertising as a children’s comedy Rango stands on its own as a perfectly functional animated action film, let down by some heavy handed referentiality, poor marketing and diversions into the bizarre which seem incongruous within the context of the narrative.

*http://intheshrubs.blogspot.com/2010/01/problem-with-poor-marketing.html

Movie Review: Battle: Los Angeles

It’s very difficult not to compare films sometimes. Sometimes films demand that you look at other films and witness how they did things, then now how the film you’re watching does it differently. Battle: Los Angeles should not have demanded you make those comparisons.

Time: Now. Place: West Coast America. U.S. Marine Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz (An alarmingly chinned Aaron Eckhart) is taking leave of his career after losing men on his final tour. Seemingly coinciding with Nantz’s last day a meteor shower hits earth, spraying the American coastline with lumps of metal that suddenly begin to take shape as an invading force of lumpy aliens. Dragged back into the force the battle begins to save L.A. as Nantz and his squad set out to kick some alien butt.

Despite some interesting looking special effects, and Aaron Eckhart’s watchablity, this film is depressingly dull. Not in the crushing, angry, hair-ripping Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) sense, merely in the way of this being a missed opportunity. In the wake of rip roaring alien science fiction such as District 9 (2009), crowd pleasers like Avatar (2009) and excellent indie offerings like Monsters (2010); it’s hard to understand why director Jonathan Leibesman has made such a derivative, messy and wholly unsatisfying movie. The first thing that strikes you about the plot is its hackneyed, dull premise. Aliens invade. That’s it. Everything that the film throws at you is saddeningly similar to something you’ve seen before. As alien invasion movies go it’s Independence Day (1996) without the tongue-in-cheek humour, Starship Troopers (1997) without the gleeful satire, or even War of the Worlds (2005) without the skillful narrative direction. Battle: L.A. is a plodding, overly patriotic, overly sentemental mess that’s half an hour too long. 

Attenborough and the Giant Egg

Attenborough and the Giant Egg is a passionate and insightful look at the mysterious island inhabitants, both animal and human, of Madagascar.

Following the trail of a mystery unearthed more than 50 years ago by David Attenborough himself in a television series called Zoo Quest, Attenborough travels back to Madagascar to discover the origins of a gigantic broken egg that was given to him by a native of the island. Having been professionally reconstructed the Egg is enormous, almost three times the size of an Ostrich egg, and it is this item that forms the crux of the story at the centre of the program’s mission. 

The Elephant Bird and the enormous egg it produced

On arrival Sir David finds the country a very different place to the one he remembers, as is shown by the intriguing clips of Zoo Quest when it originally aired in 1961. A young Attenborough strides through lush forest in the empirical manner of a colonial explorer: picking up tortoises and lizards with the sort of exuberance that the modern Attenborough finds quite amusing now. Standing where he had once stood in the deep forest, behind him now is the ghost of a saw mill, at the heart of the problems of the extinction of many animals on the island as deforestation has reduced the vegetation by almost 80%. The giant egg, belonging to the so-called ‘elephant bird’ due to its enormous size, disappeared along with many other startling animals, such as a lemur the size of a man, when its enormous territory began to be threatened by the human settlers from the west indies who flattened the jungle to make way for livestock and farmland. Humans, it seems, were by proxy at the heart of the reason why this ancient animal disappeared.

 

A young David pointing out Madagascar in 'Zoo Quest'

Far from concentrating on the apparent gloom of the situation, the program never allows the sentiment to become choking and because of the valiant efforts of conservationists and the help of local people alike; the future of the forests looks bright as nearly 3 million trees have been replanted in the last year.

Sir David’s usual comforting tones give the program a personal feel, typified by the moments where he reads from the diary of his younger self, chuckling at the anthropomorphism used to describe the nature of some embracing lemurs, recounting stories of escaped millipedes in the hotel and marvelling at the lack of tact involved in his original mission there which, as well as a television series documenting the island, also had the young Attenborough capturing many animals and bringing them back.

The program is full of emotive texture, Attenborough’s personal quest is deeply important to him and when the egg that he found all those years ago turns out to have been possibly one of the last of these extinct giants, Sir David can barely contain his shock. As with most, if not all of the natural history documentaries that have been produced throughout David Attenborough’s long and entirely amazing life, this is a passionate exploration of the natural world; but it is the mystery that was so close to his heart that makes the program required viewing and an emotional journey.

You can find the program here on iplayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00z6dsg/Attenborough_and_the_Giant_Egg/