#i wrote this hilariously fast at work on friday and i'm not sure how well thought out it is

[perpetuallyfive]

okay actual spoiler shit on Atomic Blonde:

I think it’s a lot less joyful than John Wick, which is going to be treated largely as a mark against it although I disagree with that. While a lot about its pace and overall sense of style creates the impression that it’s going to be a similar love letter to violence, the setting and tone place it apart as something that aspires to be more grounded in the brutal reality and consequence of violent living.

The relationship with Delphine is central to this. Those moments of stillness and gentleness are used to demonstrate all that they have given up by choosing this life. As much as they enjoy those brief moments together, they can’t stay there forever. (Even the city as they know it won’t be there for very much longer.) 

This is made most apparent when Delphine tells Lorraine that she sees her for who she really is when they’re together and Lorraine says that she will have to work on that because it will only result in her death. (She doesn’t exactly fix it, and it ends up getting Delphine killed instead.)

In many ways Delphine represents lost innocence for Lorraine, which could fall into a pretty large and obvious trap of reducing her to no more than a device for the protagonist’s evolution -- not exactly better just because it’s a woman this time -- but I feel like in making some of her own choices in the end and even being vital to a few key moments, Delphine is given more of a primary role and even shown to choose to abandon that innocence herself. 

It didn’t feel like fridging to me. Not exactly. Delphine is given more agency than that, though her choices in the moments leading up to it are almost inexplicable. It feels like a scene is missing or something.

I feel like we’re still meant to guess and wonder at who Satchel could be, to the point that they wasted some of Delphine’s demise on misdirects. Annoying and unnecessary.

I’m just really, really glad she’s only dead and not the evil backstabbing betrayer (who would also end up dead).

The good news is almost fucking everyone dies, so Delphine is not given particularly worse treatment. This is further in line with the whole premise of the brutality of this world and how destructive it is.

I love the camera work in this film? I saw some straight dudes before it came out saying that they felt like the sex scene from the trailer was “male gazey.” I can’t tell if this is because it actually is and I’m fundamentally broken as a person because I fall for that shit now, or if people just ignore queer ladies to the point that they would actually forget that another group  exists that might appreciate it too. Anyway: the camera doesn’t actually feel exploitative to me. Those moments are fast and frantic to evoke the feelings of the characters, but their other moments together in bed are treated very gently. (Again, to match their mood.)

I love the use of nudity. The first time we see Lorraine naked, it’s so utterly removed from the usual sexualization. You can see her full body and, you know what, she has curves. She’s slouching and not every line is perfect. She is bruised and frankly looks her age. She has hips in the way that women actually have hips but women in film are almost never allowed to. The camera observes her just as it would a man in this position, placing her center frame and highlighting the injuries without any attempt to titillate. (Apart from the pure aesthetic pleasure of how good that shot looks, because holy shit.)

That shot of Delphine sleeping nude in bed is so beautiful because while you obviously see most of her naked body, the way it’s shot -- the framing of the scene and the camera work itself -- really makes it feel as though we’re viewing her from Lorraine’s perspective and not that of the male director.

I’m admittedly a pretty huge chump because when they showed Lorraine in Paris at the end I had a moment where I imagined that it was all a huge fake out and Delphine was going to have faked her death as part of a massive ploy they got into together.

In fact a part of me basically wants to write that, so whatever.

They’re living on a farm together in Colorado (or raising Huskies in Alaska) when, five years later, the government comes to call.  Hijinks etc.

It was never going to be that kind of a film and while I accept that on a purely rational level that’s not what happened in my heart. In my heart, Delphine was waiting on that fucking plane with John Goodman, just slightly out of frame.

Literally everyone’s covering it, but the music was fantastic. I loved the fight choreography. I loved the color grading.

The original 99 Luftballons is an anti-war protest song created in West Berlin during the Cold War about how small misunderstandings can escalate to tragedy, centered around the futility of war and violence. I saw a few people call the song out as being tonally out of place, but it wasn’t an accidental choice.

I’m really glad I finally saw Stalker just earlier this year! 

Stalker is also in many ways a similar protest work, this one made right before Tarkovsky left the Soviet Union. It’s hard to articulate what the film is about precisely but it focuses on concepts like yearning for that which is visible yet out of reach and can only be attained indirectly, through great struggle and suffering within a larger, unknowable system that functions off the futile exertion of those within.

Since apparently some people are super confused about this: Lorraine was Satchel. 

The List, which David saw, absolutely identified her as the double agent. (He might have killed Spyglass to keep her from having access. He might have done it to give his copy of the List greater value. Hard to say for sure what his motives were.) Lorraine has most likely planned all along to frame it on David. But as we learn, instead of being a double agent in the pocket of the Russians, she has been fucking over the Russians by giving them bad intel or using what they tell her to kill their people. The reason MI6 did not know she was doing this is she is revealed, at the very end, to be an American agent who went deep under cover within MI6 as well. Goodman is the only one who knows who she really is.