moviefixes

[moviefixes]

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets was a huge disappointment.  If you want an amazing visual experience, then by all means see it and spring for the 3D if you're feeling a little wild.  But coherent plots, consistent characterization?  Not so much.  Which makes me very sad because I love Luc Besson.

I think part of the problem is that, like John Carter, Valerian and Laureline was so influential on scifi (on Star Wars, on The Fifth Element) that now that they've gotten around to making the movie, the material just feels stale.

Looking at the Wikipedia entry for the comic (I'm going to be leaning heavily on Wikipedia because I have zero background with the comic), Valerian's main traits are he's strong, he's dependable, he follows orders even when they go against his morals, and there's an ongoing joke that he's always late.  I can see nods to these things in film as presented, but they pop up once and the movie never does the work.  Instead he comes across as the boring rebel space cop that we've seen a hundred times until the very end where suddenly he has a crisis moment about turning the Mul converter over to the Pearls or returning it to his superiors.  This desire to follow the rules comes completely out of left field and made me go "what?" in the theater.

According to the Wikipedia, one of the recurring themes in the comics was the "rejection of machismo".  The movie doesn't do this AT ALL.

Laureline gets better characterization.  She's supposed to be rebellious and impulsive and willing to question orders.  As the comics continued, she was pulled out of Valerian's shadow and sent on solo adventures.  She described as being a sexual woman (which I'm sure was just an excuse to draw boobs in the comic). And the movie bounces back and forth from Valerian running around and Laureline running around.  To quote the radiant Aeryn Sun from Farscape, "you don't just protect me, we protect each other".

After taking a day to pout, I think I've figured out how to fix the movie so it's actually interesting for people who are looking for more than pretty scenery and weird aliens.  Mainly, scramble Valerian and Laureline.

Have Valerian experience dreams of Liho-Minaa since he was child so he grows up with this joyous, wonder-filled woman in the back of his head.  He believes in the mission given to him by the space cops.  He reads the fucking memos.  He's been in love with Laureline forever, but he's not going to act on it because...

...Laureline is the cad.  She's the one with the "Play List" and a history of having one night stands with other space cops and then never calling them again.  She's definitely attracted to Valerian, but she doesn't realize how serious it is.  Have a breathless, joking "marry me" pop out after the escape from Big Market.  Have her realize that marriage is what she really wants when he disappears into the infected part of Alpha, and she proposes for real when she finds him.  He just rolls his eyes because he thinks it's a joke again.  Have her try again the next time she rescues him.  And again at the very end when he realizes that she's serious, he gives her a "maybe" with a small smile that hints that he's going to make the "maybe" a "yes" eventually.

When it comes to swapping saving each other back and forth, send Laureline into Big Market to retrieve the converter because in the movie, Valerian is the one who breaks mission protocol, which is something more consistent with Laureline's supposed rebelliousness in the comics.  She breaks cover to protect the mysterious hooded aliens and grabs the pearl on impulse as she flees from Igon Siruss' men.  Valerian read the memo, and the plan is ticking like clockwork until she goes off script and gets her hand stuck in the box.  While he's trying to fix it, he gets a glimpse of the Pearls and recognizes them as Princess Liho-Minaa's people.

One of things that made me want to scream is when they ask Alex-Intruder (their spaceship) to brief them on Alpha and there's just this info dump.  No!  You are an experienced film maker, Besson, you should understand "SHOW! DON'T TELL!"  Especially since we see all of these habitats and aliens again when Valerian goes crashing through them in pursuit of the kidnapped commander and Laureline goes hunting for the psychic jellyfish.

When the government meeting is attacked and the commander kidnapped, Valerian is confused because the Pearls are acting so completely against their nature based on what he saw in his dreams. Valerian gives chase and crashes just like in the movie, and the part where Laureline loses her shit when he disappears and has to be restrained doesn't need to be tweaked at all.  It's when she pops the jellyfish on her head that she has her epiphany that she loves Valerian and wants to spend the rest of her life with him.

She finds him, but he's the one who is attracted to the pretty butterfly--channeling Liho-Minaa and perhaps being reminded of a creature from his dreams of Mul--so he's the one captured by space ogres. The ogre offers him a variety of clothes to change into. This is a Besson scifi film i.e. the person who put Ruby Rhod in an off-shoulder jumpsuit with roses around the collar--they could have a lot of fun with this scene.  After Valerian and the ogre get into their roaring match, he picks the next outfit the ogre holds up, which happens to be the white wedding dress.  The hat with the cutout for the top of his skull is a bit much, but he ends up forced to wear it anyway.

Meanwhile, Laureline, who is trying to find a way into the ogres' compound, is steered to the stripclub where she gets a private performance from the shapeshifting Bubbles. I would recommend finding a male Rihanna look-like for the start of the performance and then have Bubbles switch to actual Rihanna when she sees Laureline not getting into it as much as she should.  Laureline is basically sitting on her hands through the first part of the performance (and maybe the second? Maybe her Play List includes women as well as men).  Then there's the teaming up and awkward ogre-ing and arriving just in time to stop Valerian from getting his skull cracked open like a walnut.

So Laureline spends the final act of the movie running around in power armor or her underarmor and Valerian spends it in a ripped wedding dress, leggings, and a jacket he fished out of the trash (IDEK).  And there's no transphobic ragging on him for having a girl in his head.

The end of the movie wraps up much the same.  When the general's staff can't get a good identifying geneprint from the two of them, they ID them when Laureline loses her temper.  At the very end when they face the choice of giving the Mul converter to the Pearls and letting them rebuild their world or following orders and turning it over to the space cops, Valerian is actually torn. Through Liho-Minaa, he thinks of them as his family, but on the other hand, there is his duty to the space cop organization that is his entire life.  Laureline's speech about love being so powerful convinces him to a). let the Pearls have the converter and b). realize that she is being serious with her proposals. Hey, a proper arc for the romance.

[moviefixes]

The Mummy Review & Fix

Let me rant at you for a couple of minutes.

I went to see The Mummy last night.  I’d been warned that it was a horror film as opposed to the 1999 adventure film.  But, hey, I like horror.

Warning: Tom Cruise is just bizarre looking. There’s a scene where he’s PG-13 naked in the morgue, and it looks like his head has been poorly photoshopped onto the body of a bodice-ripper cover model.

One thing the movie (almost) got right: Set is the evil god instead of Anubis (if you want a decent portrayal of Anubis look to Mr. Jacquel from American Gods). However, Set is not the god of death--he’s the god of disorder, violence, the red desert.  

That out of the way, let’s talk what sucked and how I’d re-write it. So many spoilers under the cut.

Our “hero” (Tom Cruise’s character) is Nick Morton.  He’s supposed to be advanced recon for the US Army in Iraq, but he’s mainly a thief who spends his time in the desert looking for ancient artifacts to loot instead of insurgents.  His military commander, Greenway, thinks he’s a thieving ass.  He’s not wrong.  The only one who Nick seems give a shit about (besides himself) is his partner-in-crime, Chris Vail.

(The movie can’t seem to make up its mind if Vail is a corporal or a sergeant, so I’m going to refer to him as “Vail”, especially since I didn’t know he had a first name until I looked on IMDB.)  

Their opening scene where they fail to sneak into a ruined village filled with insurgents to grab some gold is one of the best parts of the movie.  They bicker like an old married couple as they get shot at and have a building blasted out from under them.  Vail calls in an airstrike against Nick’s wishes...which reveals a giant pit with a creepy ass Egyptian statue.

At this point, Greenway shows up to chew them out for their many transgressions.  He also brings Jenny Halsey, a beautiful blonde archaeologist with whom Nick had a one-night stand in Baghdad.  She’s not ashamed that she had a hook up, but she loathes him since he stole a map from her that led him here in search of treasure.  Greenway orders Nick and Vail into the hole with her.  Instead of finding a tomb full of artifacts to outfit the occupant in the afterlife, the tomb is designed to contain an evil spirit for eternity.  There’s a LOT of mercury, which Wikipedia is telling me wasn’t uncommon in Egyptian tombs, though maybe not in these quantities.  Because Nick is a dick, he shoots one of the ropes keeping the sarcophagus suspended in the pool of mercury, causing it to be lifted out. To quote Ardeth Bey: “You have started a chain reaction that could bring about the next apocalypse!”  Because the sarcophagus contains Ahmanet, a New Kingdom Egyptian princess who was mummified and buried alive after going on a murder spree and then trying to bring Set into the mortal world in the body of her “Chosen”.  Nick then becomes her new Chosen.

Like The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns, there are multiple swarms of creepy crawlies.  At one point, Nick is completely overwhelmed by rats.  Unfortunately, they do not eat him.  When they are still in the tomb, there’s a swarm of giant spiders.  I was practically bouncing in my seat going “please be camel spiders...please be camel spiders”.  And they were!  However, one bites Vail and injects him with venom that allows Ahmanet to take control of him. *rolls eyes* Camel spiders do not have venom.

They take the  sarcophagus and flee ahead of a giant sandstorm on what I’m pretty sure is a C-130 (my heavy-lift aircraft obsession, let me show you it).  Ahmanet crashes it over England because Crusaders brought her evil knife back with them to the UK and hid it.  Ok, Mummy, you do you.  In the crashing, Nick manages to save Jenny by getting her into what turns out to be the only parachute and shoving her out the giant hole in the side of the plane.  

He dies, Ahmanet resurrects him, and we have the naked scene in the morgue, which we could have all done without.  

One of the great strengths of the 1999 Mummy was Rick and Evie’s romance. It is one of the few OTPs I have because it is that good.  And it makes sense.  Yes, they don’t get off to a great start (see: the prison scene), but you watch them first realize “oh, shit, he’s hot” / “wow, I don’t think I’m going to trade her for a camel after all”.  

They have several conversations over the course of the film where they get to know each other: on the boat where’s he’s cleaning his weapons, in Hamunaptra where she gives her famous drunken “I am a librarian!” speech.  This isn’t love at first sight; this is love that grows.  And when we see them 10 years later in The Mummy Returns and they are still fucking in love, it makes sense because the kind of relationship they developed in the first movie is sustainable.  It's not stress-fueled passion.

In contrast, Nick and Jenny start out antagonistically--he stole from her--and their bickering never seems to come across as flirting. She’s constantly, rightfully, calling him out as a garbage human being until suddenly, she’s not.   When she tries to convince Nick that he’s a good man based on the evidence of giving her the last parachute, he straight up tells her that he thought there was another one.  And maybe it was supposed to be him trying to protect his fragile feelings...

...but the way Cruise says it makes me think he’s sincere.

It turns out that Jenny works for a secret organization, the Prodigium, whose mission is to stamp out supernatural threats.  It’s headed by Dr. Jekyll. (I did not realize that this film is the start of a grim!dark League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series), who wants to stop Ahmanet’s plan to release Set by killing the Chosen One, i.e. Nick.  There is talk of dissection. Because Jenny is not an awful human being, this bothers her, and she sets about trying to rescue Nick from her Prodigium buddies.

This is where we get the Easter egg that confirms that, unfortunately, this is supposed to be a sequel to the 1999 Mummy when Jenny uses the gold Book of Amun-Ra to smack Malik around during her rescue attempt.

And somewhere in here, Nick and Jenny decide that they are in love and spend the rest of the movie running from one danger to another, screaming each others' names. At the very end, Nick risks destroying the world to stab himself in the chest to possibly be able to resurrect Jenny.  Because this movie doesn't even attempt to do its homework, the romance is nonsensical.  

Normally, I would recommend dropping the romance altogether.  It worked well for the first Avengers movie ("There's no time for romance. We've got shit to avenge!") and Power Rangers, but Nick needs something to make him give a shit about anything other than himself.  I mean, at the beginning of the movie, he's running around Iraq stealing stuff.  He's not motivated by patriotism or wanting to protect innocent people from insurgents.  The movie doesn't even show him saving a kid or petting a dog as a trite way to reveal that, hey, maybe he's a good man under that greed.  Instead, we get nothing to make us think he's a person who would sacrifice himself to save the world.  He can't even quite pull off “BECAUSE I'M ONE OF THE IDIOTS WHO LIVES IN IT!” since what Ahmanet is initially offering is wealth and sex, two things he's shown serious interest in.  Being possessed by Set, yes, is a turn-off, but I think he'd be more likely to try and save his skin by fleeing from her and the Prodigium than stay and fight.

In fact, the only thing he is shown to care about other than treasure and himself, is Vail.  Their banter is the only that comes close to the banter in the 1999 Mummy and The Mummy Returns.  On the plane, when Vail is possessed by Ahmanet and starts stabbing people, Nick steps in between him and the soldiers and grabs a soldier's sidearm right out of his hands to hold them off.  When Nick shoots Vail the first time, it doesn't look like he actually intended to pull the trigger.  Instead of holding the gun in front of him, he has it up by his ear and sort of sideways.  When Vail keeps advancing, Nick is still trying to get him to stand down.  He doesn't look any more in control with the second shot, and "the third one was unnecessary. You freaked me out; I panicked".  The movie ends with Nick abandoning Jenny in the tunnels and then going to resurrect Vail and ride off into the desert with him, seeking adventure.

So I propose, what if the archeologist who comes to the tomb is a goofy little dude who is bitten by the camel spider (grrrr) and is possessed and starts stabbing people on the plane and then dies?  What if it's Vail who manages to get hold of the parachute and put it on before realizing there's not another one?  And he and Nick are screaming at each other--Vail isn't going to go until Nick finds a way out and Nick isn't going to let them both die, so he pulls the ripcord on the parachute and Vail gets sucked out and survives.

Then Jenny shows up in the morgue as a secretive agent of an unknown, possibly government group (the Prodigium), but before she can whisk him away to Jekyll's secret lair under the Natural History Museum (formerly the British Museum...hi, Return of the Mummy reference), Vail sneaks Nick out to the pub.  Nick is hallucinating rat swarms and Ahmanet, and Vail drags him into the bathroom, and they're yelling at each other about mercury poisoning and Jenny's hot but can they trust her?  At some point, a group of women try to come in, and they realize they're in the ladies' room.

(Jenny in the secret agent role would probably result in her being recast or Annabelle Wallis having to dye her hair brown because Hollywood is weird like that.)

When Ahmanet lures Nick to the church where evil knife was hidden by the Crusaders, Vail follows. "What the hell are we doing, man?"  Jenny reappears when they flip the ambulance as the leader of the Prodigium crew who capture Ahmanet.  Nick and Vail have the conversation about the last parachute, but when Nick says he thought there was another one, Vail just snorts.  "You just keep telling yourself that, Morton."

Vail is 110% against Jekyll's plan to summon Set and then kill him when the god is in Nick's body.  When Nick accidentally frees Mr. Hyde and the Prodigium security guards drag Vail out of the room, he runs around and ends up fighting Malik and throwing himself against the Hyde-proof glass.  The two men make a break for it while Ahmanet escapes.  Jenny leads them into the subway tunnels, trying to herd Nick towards Ahmanet and the completed dagger in order to enact Jekyll's plan.  They all get separated, Ahmanet drowns Vail, and, after attempting CPR, Nick brings forth Set to try and save Vail, yadda, yadda, yadda.

The movie ends with Jekyll and Jenny discussing what Nick's fate will be now that he's fused with Set, and then Nick and Vail ride off into the desert.  Exactly like the film as it stands.

Ta-da!  Follows the same plot of the movie, but with motivations that make sense!

The only thing I added was a disposable archaeologist in the first act.