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the-desolated-quill · 6 years ago

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Doctor Strange - Marvel Cinematic Universe blog (as requested by 1000+ followers)

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Before I start, I just want to say thank you again to all one thousand of my followers (still can’t believe it. That number just doesn’t seem real. LOL). And, as promised, here’s my review of Doctor Strange. I chose to review this movie to mark getting one thousand followers because people have been wanting me to do this review for a long time now (nearly three years in fact) and also because it was this movie, or rather my harsh criticism of this movie, that arguably cemented my reputation on this site. So here we go. Hope you feel it was worth the wait. Enjoy :)

2016. A year of ups and downs to be sure. While it will forever be infamous for the Brexit referendum result, Trump’s victory in the presidential elections and many much beloved celebrity icons dropping dead like fruit flies, it was also the year where two of my all time favourite comic book characters would finally make the jump to the big screen. The first was Deadpool. The second was Doctor Strange. Two characters I thought would never get movie adaptations on account of them both being somewhat niche products. Deadpool was a violent, anarchic parody of antiheroes like Wolverine and the Punisher, while Doctor Strange was a psychedelic fantasy story focused on existentialism and Zen philosophy as well as having its themes and influences deep rooted in various Asian cultures and mythologies. Not exactly mainstream. And yet, against all the odds, both movies found great success at the box office. The difference being Deadpool managed to stay true to the tone and themes of the source material, whereas Doctor Strange... oh dear.

Now my long term followers will be very much aware of my stance on this movie. At the time I refused to watch it due to the casting of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One, viewing it as not only racist erasure, but also demonstrating a severe lack of understanding on the filmmaker’s part. East Asia isn’t just used as window dressing. It’s vitally important to the story as a whole, so discarding it would be incredibly moronic as well as deeply offensive. Now I’m not going to go into all the reasons why the whitewashing of the Ancient One is racist and why all the excuses Marvel gave at the time was bullshit as I’ve already explained these reasons ad nauseum various times before. If you’re curious, read Doctor Yellowface And The Bullshit Machine, where I explain it all in excruciating detail. Here I’m just going to say that this movie is racist. That’s not my opinion. It’s demonstrably, objectively, scientifically, factually and literally true. If you think otherwise, you’re an idiot. Period. Full stop. End of discussion. Do not pass Go. Do not collect £200. With this in mind, when I sat down to watch this for the first time, I expected to be angered and outraged by it throughout. But I wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a bad movie and a bad adaptation of Doctor Strange, but honestly the most remarkable thing about this movie is how unremarkable it is. Which is a problem in more ways than one, but now we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Lets start with the things I liked. Don’t worry. This won’t take long. There really isn’t that much to like about this film frankly. Even the bits I like have massive caveats to them.

My first shiny gold star has to go to Benedict Wong as Wong. Now as much as I love the comics, I’ll be the first to admit it has massive problems when it comes to how it presents Asian characters. So I’m pleased to report that Wong is the only aspect of the film that’s actually better than the source material. Whereas comic book Wong was Doctor Strange’s manservant, movie Wong plays more of a mentor role in Strange’s story. He’s the librarian of Kamar-Taj, guarding the sacred tomes, and is actually at a higher rank than Strange, which I love. It’s a good shift that refreshes the dynamic between them, and Benedict Wong’s deadpan delivery is exceptional. I just wish we could have spent more time with Wong and Strange. Maybe see Wong actually teach him something.

The second praiseworthy element of the film is the visual effects. This film was nominated for an Academy Award and... yeah, can’t argue with that. The CGI is fairly good for the most part. My favourite part of the whole film was when the Ancient One shows Strange the multiverse for the first time. The visual effects team clearly had a lot of fun coming up with weird and wonderful worlds that we only get a short tantalising glimpse of. (the dimension of hands gave me the shivers). This sequence came the closest to realising Steve Ditko’s vision in my opinion. Beyond that all we see for the rest of the movie is the poxy mirror dimension, which admittedly is cool at first, but quickly becomes dull and repetitive each time its trotted out. There’s even an entire fight sequence between Strange, Mordo and Kaecilius in a distorted version of New York, which would have been impressive if Christopher Nolan hadn’t done it first in Inception. And the less said about the technicolor monstrosity that was the Dark Dimension, the better.

Finally there’s Benedict Cumberbatch as Strange himself. I know some people were disappointed that Marvel didn’t racebend the character and I would have preferred that to, but if we must have a white guy in the role, I’m glad it’s Cumberbatch. He does a decent job in the role and there are moments where Strange almost leaps from the page and onto the screen.

Almost.

Because that’s the problem. Cumberbatch does the best he can, but he’s ultimately let down by the script. This film has a lot of issues, but by far the biggest is the title character. He may be called Doctor Strange, but he’s really Doctor Strange in name only. I was a massive fan of the comics growing up and I’m telling you this guy isn’t Doctor Strange. At least not the Doctor Strange I remember. And the weird thing is this seems almost by design. In order to show him to a mainstream audience, Marvel seem to have felt the need to completely sanitise the character, removing everything about him that made him unique and interesting in order to fit the expectations of the lowest common denominator.

Let me explain.

People often compare Strange unfavourably to Iron Man, and I can understand why to a certain extent. Both represent the epitome of white privilege and materialist obsession and their origin stories focus very heavily on criticising and deconstructing these inherently selfish and unlikable characters. Iron Man is about forcing a capitalist industrialist to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions, whereas Doctor Strange is about forcing an egocentric man to care about the wider world outside of his own bubble of privilege. Both may sound similar, but there’s a key difference between the two. Iron Man’s origin revolves around responsibility whereas Doctor Strange’s origin revolves around relativity. This needs to be understood if you’re going to attempt to adapt Strange and director Scott Derrickson doesn’t seem to understand that at all.

The fatal mistake Derrickson makes with this movie is that he’s trying to make Strange like Iron Man without fully understanding what made the first Iron Man movie good and what sets Strange apart. He’s clearly hit upon the arrogant, egocentric thing, but the problem is people exhibit arrogance and egocentricity in different ways. The comics understood this. Iron Man’s arrogance takes the form of this charismatic, devil may care kind of attitude, whereas Strange’s arrogance was more along the lines of an Ebenezer Scrooge type figure. Someone who’s cold and uncaring. Someone like...

Yeah! Someone like Dr Gregory House from the TV series House M.D.

See, if Iron Man is like Elon Musk, Doctor Strange is like House. Both are arrogant, but in different ways. So to see movie Strange acting all smug and making quips and one liners just didn’t feel right. Which is not to say Strange can’t be funny. The comics had their humorous moments, but it’s not the same kind of humour as Iron Man. Strange should be more cutting. More snarky. He needs to have more of a bite to him. Instead we get the poor man’s version of Robert Downey Jr.

But wait, because it’s actually worse than that. It’s not just Strange’s personality that’s different. Our perception of him is different too. The first Iron Man movie was extremely clear in how we should view Tony Stark. The gambling, the drinking, his lack of responsibility and the way he takes his friends and co-workers for granted. We’re clearly not supposed to like him. That’s why his character arc works. We’re seeing this selfish individual realise how selfish he is and try to make amends. Strange should be similar. He’s a callous arsehole who won’t lift a finger to help someone if the case isn’t interesting enough, seeing it as beneath him. So when the car accident occurs, him getting nerve damage in his hands feels less like a tragedy and more like karma. The universe punishing Strange for his selfish behaviour and forcing him to change. In the movie however, he doesn’t seem like that at all. In fact kind of the opposite. He doesn’t object to helping his ex girlfriend get a bullet out of a patient’s head and he seems to get on well with most of his colleagues, including his ex. Sure he’s a bit of a dick, but he still seems nice enough. The only time we see his Scroogeness come out is after the accident, at which point it’s hard to hate him even after he berates his ex because he’s a decent guy who’s understandably frustrated, which absolutely should not be the case. Strange is a bastard who cares for no one but himself. We’re not supposed to like him. But Marvel and Disney are so preoccupied about getting bums on seats that they’ve actually managed to strip away all the elements that make Strange Strange.

And then there’s the origin story itself, which the film gets completely wrong. Sure the basic elements are still there. Strange, in a last ditch effort to save his hands, travels East to see the Ancient One (except the Ancient One is now in Nepal instead of Tibet because of the Chinese market, but apparently they still can’t cast an Asian person as the Ancient One even though the film no longer has anything to do with Tibet and therefore there should be no issue. Marvel are racist dicks. Case closed), but beyond that everything is changed. In the comics, the Ancient One refuses to heal Strange’s hands because he’s a selfish arsehole who deserves no pity or help from anyone, but then when Baron Mordo tries to assassinate the Ancient One, Strange does the first selfless thing he’s ever done in his miserable life and tries to warn the Ancient One despite having his mouth magically sealed shut by Mordo. Then it’s later revealed that his mouth wasn’t sealed shut at all, and that the Ancient One knew all along Mordo was planning to assassinate him and was merely testing Strange, at which point he invites the good doctor to practice magic in order to stop Mordo in the future. In the movie however, Strange gets kicked out by the Ancient One only to then promptly get let back in after banging on their front door for several hours and gets taught all these spells despite showing no sign of selflessness or willingness to change whatsoever. Oh yeah, and Strange and Mordo are now total besties.

Do you see what I mean about this being a bad adaptation? There’s no longer any conflict. No character arcs. No one learns anything. Everything is just hunky dory and Strange is just magically a good person now. This is truly shit writing.

Everything about this movie seems to have been designed to be as bland and uncomplicated as possible. All the Asian influences and philosophies have been surgically removed to make way for a generic, knock-off Hogwarts for Dummies. The interesting plots and themes have been replaced with a by-the-numbers save the world plot. Even the lore has been simplified to an almost insulting degree. Take the Eye of Agamotto for instance. A powerful magical artefact created by and named after the most powerful sorcerer that ever lived.... reduced to a fucking Infinity Stone.

Oh and the Cloak of Levitation now has a mind and personality of its own because why the fuck not? Who wants to watch something intelligent or philosophical? Lets just make a shitty cross between Harry Potter and Mr. Bean.

And then... there’s the white saviour stuff.

Now I confess I haven’t read the comics for quite some time, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Strange didn’t have a photographic memory. Yet in the movie, that’s the convenient explanation we’re given for why Strange is somehow able to learn complex spells in a matter of days. Spells that are apparently meant to take years to learn, like astral projection and time manipulation. Now the comics had this problem too, what with proclaiming that Strange is not only the Sorcerer Supreme, but the most powerful Sorcerer Supreme that’s ever lived, as though his white skin were like the star power-up from Super Mario Bros, but the movie seems to go out of its way to double down on this bollocks. Oh sure, we see him struggle to create magic portals every now and then, but it doesn’t hide the fact that he’s somehow able to create mirror worlds and time loops despite having little to no training whatsoever. He’s like Rey from Star Wars. He can just pull any random super power out of his arse when the script requires him too.

So having completely botched Strange’s characterisation and journey, how are the rest of the supporting cast? Well like I said, I like this new Wong, even though he’s criminally underused. As for the other characters, it’s a pretty forgettable bunch.

Lets start with the elephant in the room. Tilda Swinton. Having heard all the excuses under the sun as to why Marvel and Disney simply had to cast a bald white woman wearing a bathrobe in an Asian role, I was expecting something pretty spectacular from Swinton, especially after all the praise critics gave her. Instead we get... well... a pretty dull character actually. In fact I’d go as far to say that this is the blandest and most uninspired performance I think I’ve ever seen Swinton give. There’s just nothing there. Now admittedly the Ancient One wasn’t all that complex or well developed in the comics neither, being little more than a racial caricature, but I thought the whole reason they whitewashed the character was to make him/her ‘enigmatic and ethereal.’ Instead we just get the same generic mentor figure we’ve seen dozens of times before. All the stuff about her tapping into the powers of Dormammu to increase her lifespan could have made her more interesting, but the film never fully capitalises on this revelation before she kicks the bucket.

Baron Mordo is pretty much just dead weight, with the great Chiwetel Ejiofor utterly wasted in the role. He’s essentially reduced to being yet another black sidekick for the white lead. Again, the comic book version isn’t all that great neither, but the movie replaces this camp pantomime villain with absolutely bugger all. We don’t get to see any real conflict between him and Strange until the very end and even then it doesn’t really make sense. Mordo is a stickler for rules and so gets pissy with Strange when he breaks the rules in order to save the world, to which I can only ask... what else could he have done? I didn’t see you come up with any bright ideas Mordo, you fucking moron.

Rachel McAdams... exists.

Seriously, why is she in this movie? Why does Doctor Strange need a love interest? Why not just wait and introduce Clea? I could get behind using an ex girlfriend to display how selfish and narcissistic Strange is (a bit cliche I admit, but this is an MCU film we’re talking about. I’m not exactly expecting Citizen Kane here), but as I said before, the two seem to get on quite well. And other than stitching up a stab wound, Christine Palmer pretty much does nothing throughout the majority of the film. So what is she even doing there?

Also it appears the film’s racism doesn’t just extend to Asian people because it turns out Christine Palmer is actually Night Nurse in the comics. The same mantle Claire Temple has, who appears in Marvel’s Netflix shows. Not only does this come off as quite alarmingly racist, it’s also just plain weird. For all their boasts about wanting to create a shared universe, Marvel seems to spend every opportunity it can find to keep the Netflix stuff at arms’ length, to the point where you question why they’re even in the same continuity in the first place. If Strange must have some human connection, why couldn’t it have been Claire Temple? For one thing, Claire’s character is much more interesting than Christine’s (and Rosario Dawson is a much better actor than McAdams. Sorry, but it’s true), and it would be a great opportunity to bridge the gap between the movies and Netflix shows without having to bog the narrative down with exposition. But as I’ve said numerous times in the past, Marvel are more interested in creating a BIG shared universe than a coherent one.

Finally there’s the villains. Nearly always the worst aspect of any MCU film and Strange is no different. We have Kaecilius, played by Hannibal’s Mads Mikkelsen whose performance is more wooden than Pinocchio, and Dormammu, played by Benedict Cumberbatch who seems to be competing with Andy Serkis as to who can play the most CGI/motion capture characters. Both, unsurprisingly, are shite. Kaecilius wants to save the world from death by allowing Dormammu to destroy it.

I don’t get it either.

So you’re probably wondering who was Kaecilius in the comics. I mean I’ve explained everything else, haven’t I? And honestly, I haven’t the faintest idea. Turns out he was a henchman of Baron Mordo who I completely forgot about because he barely ever shows up in the comics. So... they turned Baron Mordo into the black sidekick so that the villain could be played by a white guy. Oh. And guess what race Kaecilius is in the comics.

YYYYYep. He’s Asian. I guess all the Asian actors were sick that day, so they had to cast a white guy.

Oh and you’ll never guess what his backstory is. You’re right! He has none! Other than references to some tragedy, we know absolutely fuck all about him. Critics actually liked this movie?!?!

Oh and don’t get me started on the humour.

Kaecilius: “Mr...?”

Strange: “Doctor.”

Kaecilius: “Mr. Doctor?”

Strange: “No, it’s Strange.”

Kaecilius: “I guess so. Who am I to judge?”

Dear God, someone was paid to write that.

Then there’s the Big Bad Dormammu from the Dark Dimension. (Yes, the same Dark Dimension from Agent Carter and nope, that’s never referenced. In fact this doesn’t even look like the same Dark Dimension as the one from Agent Carter. Although, to be fair, I’d want to forget Season 2 happened as well considering how fucking terrible it was, but come on guys!). In the comics Dormammu is a mystical entity that has a quote ‘unnatural obsession with our material universe’. Could be interesting to explore. Oh but I forget, this is an MCU film. They don’t want interesting. They want safe. So instead we get a purple, floating CGI head and the generic destroyer of worlds archetype. (In fact Dormammu weirdly has more in common with Galactus than the actual Dormammu. Sometimes I wonder if anyone at Marvel Studios have ever even so much as glanced at one of their own comics before).

In conclusion, is this the worst film I’ve ever seen? Admittedly no. It’s not that bad. If you switch your brain off, I can imagine someone having a good time with this film. But you see that’s the problem. You shouldn’t have to switch your brain off to enjoy Doctor Strange. If anything the opposite is true. The comics, despite their faults, were intelligent, surreal and thought provoking, asking questions about our universe and our place within it. Steve Ditko (and only Steve Ditko. The late Stan Lee may have put pen to paper, but it was ultimately Ditko’s ideas and vision, which makes the gratuitous Stan Lee cameo in this film particularly galling to me) created something truly captivating in Doctor Strange. Despite the racial caricatures and white saviour tropes, I still love these comics because of how it explores the world and our relation to that world. How we are just small cogs in a massive and intricate machine. It’s truly groundbreaking and would influence many other comics to come. The Doctor Strange movie doesn’t even begin to do that. It won’t influence anyone. It won’t make anyone think or question their role in the cosmos. In fact, three years later, despite being a huge box office success, it’s largely been forgotten. And that’s a crying shame because Strange deserves so much more.

Doctor Strange may not be the worst comic book movie ever made, but it’s a terrible adaptation of the source material. Anything that made it unique or interesting was carefully removed with surgical precision under the guise of making it more progressive, when in reality they just wanted to make it profitable. But profitable doesn’t mean good, and Doctor Strange doesn’t even come close to being a good movie. I would love to have seen what a director like David Lynch or Ang Lee would have done with this psychedelic material. This movie could and should have been the most intelligent and surreal comic book movie that’s ever been made. A perfect opportunity to allow a visionary filmmaker to go wild and express themselves artistically. Instead it’s just another MCU movie. It’s such a shame.

And people wonder why I’m worried about Deadpool joining the MCU.

#doctor strange #marvel cinematic universe #review #spoilers

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britesparc · 5 years ago

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Weekend Top Ten #388

Top Ten Things Tim Burton’s Batman Films Did Right

Thirty years ago, give or take, the first Tim Burton Batman movie was released in cinemas (according to Google, its UK release date was 11th August 1989). Everyone knows the story; it was a phenomenon, a marketing juggernaut, a hit probably beyond what anyone was reasonably expecting. I was too young to understand or appreciate what was going on, but for twenty years or more the image of Batman in the public consciousness was intertwined with Adam West and pop-art frivolity. Suddenly superheroes were “dark” and “grown-up”; suddenly we had multi-million-dollar-grossing properties, franchises, and studios rummaging through their back catalogues of acquired IPs to land the next four-quadrant hit. Throughout the rest of the nineties we got a slew of pulp comic adaptations – The Spirit, The Phantom, Dick Tracy – before the tangled web of Marvel licenses became slightly easier to unpick, and we segued into the millennium on the backs of Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man. Flash-forward to a super-successful Batman reboot, then we hit the MCU with Iron Man, and we all know where that goes. And it all began with Batman!

Except, of course, that’s not quite the whole story. Studios were trying to adapt superheroes and comic books for a number of years, not least because Richard Donner’s Superman had been such a huge hit a decade before Batman. And the Batman films themselves began to deteriorate in quality pretty rapidly. Plus, when viewed from the distance of a couple of decades or more, the supposed dark, gritty, adult storytelling in Burton’s films quickly evaporates. They’re just as camp, silly, and nonsensical as the 1960s show, they’re just visually darker and with more dry ice. Characters strut around in PVC bodysuits; the plots make little to no sense; characterisation is secondary to archetype; and Batman himself is quite divorced from his comic incarnation, killing enemies often capriciously and being much less of a martial artist or detective than he appeared on the page (in fact, Adam West’s Batman does a lot more old-school deducing than any of the cinematic Batmen).

I think a lot of people of my generation, who grew up with Adam West, went through a period of disowning the series because it was light, bright, campy and, essentially, for children; then we grow up and appreciate it all the more for being those things, and also for being a pure and delightful distillation of one aspect of the comics (seriously, there’s nothing in the series that’s not plausibly from a 1950s Batman comic). And I think the same is true of Burton’s films. for all their importance in terms of “legitimising” superhero movies, they have come in for a lot of legitimate criticism, and in the aftermath of Christopher Nolan’s superlative trilogy they began to look very old-fashioned and a much poorer representation of the character. But then, again, we all grow up a little bit and can look back on them as a version of Batman that’s just as valid; they don’t have to be perfect, they don’t have to be definitive, but we can enjoy them for what they are: macabre delights, camp gothic comedies, delightfully stylised adventure stories. They might lack the visual pizazz of a Nolan fight scene or, well, anything in any MCU movie, but they’re very much of a type, even if that type was aped, imitated, and parodied for a full decade following Batman’s release. There’s much to love about Burton’s two bites of the Bat-cherry, and here – at last – I will list my ten favourite aspects of the films (that’s both films, Batman and Batman Returns).

Tim Burton’s Batman isn’t quite my Batman (but, for the record, neither is Christopher Nolan’s), but whatever other criticisms I may have of the films, here are ten things that Burton and his collaborators got absolutely right.

Great Design: seriously, from an aesthetic point of view, they’re gorgeous. The beautiful Anton Furst Gotham, all gothic towers and industrial pipework, is a thing of beauty, and in terms of live-action the design of all of Batman’s vehicles and gadgets has never been bettered. It gives Batman, and his world, a gorgeously distinctive style all its own.

Wonderful Toys: it’s not just the design of the Batmobile and Batwing that impresses (big, bulbous round bits, sweeping curves, spiky wings); its how they’re used. Burton really revels in the gadgets, making Batman a serious tech-head with all manner of grappling hooks, hidden bombs, and secret doo-dahs to give him an upper hand in a fight. It makes up for the wooden combat (a ninja Michael Keaton is not), suggesting this Batman is a smarter fighter than a physical one. Plus all those gadgets could get turned into literal wonderful toys. Ker-ching.

He is the Night: Adam West’s Batman ran around during the day, in light grey spandex with a bright blue cape. Michael Keaton’s Batman only ever came out at night, dressed entirely in thick black body armour, and usually managed to be enveloped in smoke. From his first appearance, beating up two muggers on a Gotham rooftop, he is a threatening, scary, sinister presence. It totally sold the idea of Batman as part-urban legend, part-monster. Burton is fascinated with freaks, and in making his Batman freaky, he made him iconic.

You Wanna Get Nuts?: added to this was Michael Keaton’s performance as Bruce Wayne. Controversial casting due to his comedy background and, frankly, lack of an intimidating physique, he nevertheless utterly convinced. Grimly robotic as Batman, he presented a charming but secretive Bruce Wayne, one who was kind and heartfelt in private, but also serious, determined, and very, very smart. But he also excellently portrayed a dark anger beneath the surface, a mania that Bruce clearly had under control, but which he used to fuel his campaign, and which he allowed out in the divisive but (in my opinion) utterly brilliant “Let’s get nuts!” scene. To this date, the definitive screen Bruce Wayne.

Dance with the Devil: The counterpoint to this was Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Cashing a phenomenal cheque for his troubles, he nevertheless delivered; his Joker is wild, over-the-top, cartoonish but also terrifying. In my late teens I was turned off by the performance, feeling it a pantomime and not reflective of the quiet menace and casual cruelty of, say, Mark Hamill’s Joker; but now I see the majesty of it. You need someone this big to be a believable threat to Batman. No wonder that, with Joker dead, they essentially had to have three villains to replace him in the sequel.

Family: Bruce’s relationship with Alfred is one of the cornerstones of the comic, but really only existed in that capacity since the mid-80s and Year One (which established Alfred as having raised Bruce following his parents’ deaths). So in many ways the very close familial relationship in Batman is a watershed, and certainly the first time many people would have seen that depicted. Michael Gough’s Alfred is benign, charming, very witty, and utterly capable as a co-conspirator. One of the few people to stick around through the Schumacher years, he maintained stability even when everything else was going (rubber) tits up.

Meow: I’ve mostly focussed on Batman here, but by jeebies Batman Returns has a lot going for it too. Max Shreck, the Penguin, “mistletoe is deadly if you eat it”… but pride of place goes to Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman. An utterly bonkers origin but a perfectly pitched character, she was a credible threat, a believable love interest, and an anti-hero worth rooting for, in a tour-de-force performance. Also came along at just the right time for me to experience puberty. If you’re interested. Plus – and this can’t be overstated – she put a live bird into her mouth. For real. I mean, Christ.

Believably Unreal: I used to criticise Batman for being unrealistic, just as campy in its own way as the ‘60s show. But that’s missing the point. It’s a stylised world, clearly not our own thanks to the Furst-stylings. And Burton uses that to his advantage. The gothic stylings help sell the idea of a retro-futuristic rocket-car barrelling through city streets; the mishmash of 80s technology and 40s aesthetics gives us carte blanche for a zoot-suited Joker and his tracksuited henchmen to tear up a museum to a Prince soundtrack. It’s a world where Max Shreck, looking like Christopher Walken was electrocuted in a flour factory, can believably run a campaign to get Penguin elected mayor, even after he nearly bites someone’s nose off. It’s crazy but it works.

Believably Corrupt: despite the craziness and unreality, the first Batman at least does have a strong dose of realism running through it. The gangsters may be straight out of the 40s but they’ve adopted the gritty grimness of the intervening decades, with slobby cop Eckhart representing corrupt law enforcement. Basically, despite the surrealism on display, the sense of Gotham as a criminal cesspool is very well realised, and extends to such a high level that the only realistic way to combat any of it is for a sad rich man to dress up as Dracula and drive a rocket-car at a clown.

The Score: I’ve saved this for last because, despite everything, Danny Elfman’s Batman theme is clearly the greatest and strongest legacy of the Burton era. Don’t come at me with your “dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner-Batman” nonsense. Elfman’s Batman score is sublime. Like John Williams’ Superman theme, it’s iconic, it’s distinctive, and as far as I’m concerned it’s what the character should sound like. I have absolutely no time for directors who think you should ever make a Batman film with different music. It’s as intrinsically linked with the character as the Star Wars theme is with, well, Star Wars. It’s perfect and beautiful and the love-love-love the fact that they stuck it in the Animated Series too.

Whelp, there we are. The ten best things about Burton’s two Batman movies. I barely spoke about the subsequent films because, well, they’re both crap. No, seriously, they’re bad films. Even Batman Forever. Don’t start.

#top ten #batman #1989 #tim burton #Michael Keaton #batman returns #comics #movies

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katribou · 7 years ago

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im gonna yell abt how much i lov dunkirk bc it’s been a month since i first saw it and i’ve like repeatedly seen it again but can’t stop thinking about it??? HOO

this is literally going to be a stream of consciousness fkdjgldf i may be a film student but i’m a terrible one so this won’t be coherent at all CUZ im biased and just love to gush and slap thoughts together

well first off like? man ofc i was excited to see this bc christopher nolan is one of if not my favorite director... i mean inception is after all my all-time fave and what made me curious abt studying film, pfft. since he announced he was doing dunkirk i was half surprised he was going to do a historical piece? like how was he gonna do that yo... i went into the theater wondering what would be the nolan gimmick™️ and ofc i was blown away by the nonlinear nature of how the story is told in its three perspectives. like how does he think to do that stuff man??? like his storytelling??? hello?????!? he loves messing with time in his films, it’s crazy. like how memento goes backwards?? or how time is compiled with each dream level in inception? or whatever the hell that was in interstellar? CRAZY BRUH

the film really effectively makes the story feel like an experience... A STRESSFUL ONE AT THAT!!! most prevalently through its deafening sound design, which may be a turn off for some people unfortunately. but i’m sure it really did justice to the situations portrayed in the film? with all these bombs and gunfire going off. i know interstellar used loud sound design in certain spots so it’s not an unfamiliar concept but it was especially fitting in my opinion here. NOT TO MENTION MY MAN ZIMMER BACK AT IT AGAIN WITH THE SOUNDTRACK LIKE HOLY SHIT IT REALLY ADDED TO THE STRESS... it’s integrated with the sound design itself rather impressively too, i might add. been listening to the ost and i get choked up at home and variation 15

ive like exclusively seen this movie in imax too and like.... the fact that it was mostly shot with imax cameras and making use of the taller aspect ratio makes a huge difference imo... ESPECIALLY with the spitfire scenes in the air? and the camera actually panning and rotating all vertigo and sideways with them?? goes back to really feeling like youre experiencing the stuff for real with those shots. though i have to say i think my favorite shots in the film are when that large minesweeper is sinking and people are trying to get out, and the camera is like upright with the boat, but bc it’s sinking the water level is moving up across the screen from right to left or vice versa. insane stuff...

in general? the story feels rather economic, especially compared to nolan’s other films, which are far longer. which, i suppose makes sense as a very grand world is portrayed in his other stuff whereas this film is a more isolated situation. so in a way it feels more intimate? which is frightening considering what the characters go through. really adds to how stressful it is to watch. i feel the choice to not show the enemy really helped this point too in making it really feel like you were in the characters’ points of view...

[spoilers in this paragraph] im Also super surprised at how invested i got with the characters like... obviously in a film like this you’re going to want the characters to survive and boy did i WANT THEM TO. im so bitter about gibson... not only were he and tommy like Ride or Die but he was literally so selfless for No Reason at All and saved the other guys’ lives so many times? but i guess it’s metaphorical in a way... he was french after all so i suppose he was never meant to make it out :’I but don’t even get me started on george. Fuckt up broe. he tried so hard yo. this is mainly a visual story without much dialogue so like... the acting in general is super nuanced and Good... fionn did a really wonderful job as the protag as did like Everyone else my lord...

OK ALSO LIKE MOST OF THIS SHIT WAS DONE PRACTICALLY TOO?? I KNOW NOLAN LOVES DOINGTHAT BUt it’s just crazy to me knowing they actually dressed up retired warships and flew real spitfires into the channel for thiS.... i’m in fuckn awe!!!!! not to mention they filmed this on the actual dunkirk beach itself man. i’d be upset if nolan doesn’t get any sort of nominations or awards for his directing. to be honest this film excels in so many ways i’d be upset if it didn’t get a lot of noms in MAANY categories. like def even a shot at best film. GOD

this movie is fuckn good. or at least to me. i really do love it. it like... immediately shot up to my top faves bro... like right up there with inception and inception probably only has a lead because of nostalgia factor... it just kept the suspense up and immersed u in the film’s world so well and the story unraveled so cleverly...just... dunkirk really moved me. this film really is something special

congraTS IF U READ THIS??? i’d be in awe if anyone did. lov this movie, man. here have this bad joke of a draw. i owe u my life choistofor nolan

#sorry i just rlly need 2 yell at my own ass #chatribou #movi talk #i havnt talked movies here in awhile

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Inception Ending: Why the Spinner Stopped

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Ten years on and folks still debate what exactly happened during the final moments of Inception. As director Christopher Nolan’s seventh film, the movie and its closing seconds are arguably what made him a household name. Of course he’d already helmed the global phenomenon that was The Dark Knight, but with Inception, Nolan presented an original and flawlessly executed vision that walked the line between pulpy summer thrills and superb science fiction brain teasers. And nothing was more teasing—or to some infuriating—than an ending that had people falling out of their seats over the brief wobble of a spinning top.

The moment in question is the literal last image of the film: a tractricoid top spinning on a kitchen table that belongs to Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCapiro). At least we think it is Cobb’s table. In truth, he hasn’t seen it in years because he fled the country after his wife and mother of his children, Mal (Marion Cotillard), killed herself due to the confusion he caused her. It’s an insidious revelation late in the movie when we learn that just by allowing this top to ceaselessly spin in her subconscious, he convinced Mal that her life, in all its forms, was a dreamy lie. Now Cobb uses the same cursed object as his own “totem,” a singular possession that allows the owner to tell the difference between a dream and reality.

Yet at the end of the film, after achieving what he’s wanted all these years—to return home—he doesn’t bother to wait at that table to see if his totem stops spinning, thereby confirming he’s awake and living his life instead of being trapped in a hideous delusion in some dark corner of his mind. Frankly, Cobb cannot distinguish the difference anymore and doesn’t care to. He’s home. And the top is still spinning. If. Only. Just. It might begin to falter, but Inception cuts to black before we can know for sure.

The intentional ambiguity of this ending launched a thousand think pieces and to this day incites argument among film critics, cinephiles, and just strangers quarantining on Twitter. There are those who’ll insist he’s awake, others that say he’s asleep, and more that suspect he and Mal never even awoke from limbo all those years ago. The filmmakers behind the film also don’t appear to be on the same page.

Two years ago, Michael Caine, who played Mal’s father in the film, admitted he didn’t understand the script but was assured if he’s on screen, then it must take place in reality. “I said to [Nolan], ‘I don’t understand where the dream is,’” Caine told Film 4’s Summer Screen. “He said, ‘Well, when you’re in the scene it’s reality.’ So get that – if I’m in it, it’s reality. If I’m not in it, it’s a dream!” That would be a simple way of concluding Cobb really did awaken alongside businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) from their subconscious limbo experiences—a tall feat when it would’ve seemed like they lived decades and lifetimes in an abyss—and Cobb really got to see his children again. But then by Caine’s own logic, almost all the scenes in the movie could be a dream, as he’s barely in the film.

Indeed, the actual star of the film is not so confident about how events played out. Only earlier this year, DiCaprio told Marc Maron on his WTF podcast that he doesn’t know what happened at the end of the picture. “Sometimes you’re just focused on your character, man,” DiCaprio told his fellow actor. “I actually do get involved, but when it came to Chris Nolan and his mind, and how that would piece together, everyone was trying to constantly piece the puzzle together.” He finally added that the ending “depends on the eye of the beholder, I guess.”

Even Nolan himself is his typically laconic self about one of his film’s enduring mysteries.

“The way the end of the film worked, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Cobb – he was off with his kids,” Nolan explained to The Guardian in 2015. “He was in his own subjective reality. He didn’t really care any more, and that makes a statement: perhaps all levels of reality are valid?”

While that’s a lovely dodge—and the significance of Inception’s ending extends beyond the binary choice of “dream versus awake”—we’d argue there is nevertheless a clear cut answer about what kind of happy ending Cobb got: It’s the one where he made his actual children happy too.

To be clear, DiCaprio’s Cobb is awake at the end of the movie and reunited with his real children, not false projections that could never realize these young souls in all their perfections and all their imperfections. They’re the real deal. And we know this not because Michael Caine is there to greet Cobb at LAX, but because of how Cobb has differentiated his reality from his dreams.

Despite what some abstract thinkers suggest, Inception is not entirely “just a dream.” This is proven every time Cobb is able to use his spinning top totem correctly. While it originally belonged to Mal, in her dream it spun for eternity. After Cobb appropriated it as his own following her unintentional suicide, we see it work the way it is intended when Cobb spends a lonely morning in a Tokyo hotel room during the movie’s early moments, and again after he and Ariadne (Ellen Page) get a frightful visit from the specter of Mal in one of Cobb’s dreams. Each time, the spinner stops spinning.

While the final image of the film delightfully (or frustratingly) cuts off before we see the spinner stop, it’s already heavily wobbling, which is something it’d never done before. And more telling than any hope Cobb places on the totem is the line he draws for himself when he’s awake. Obviously in his mind, he’s still married to Mal, a beloved wife who never leaves his side, even when it’s to the detriment of high stakes corporate espionage. Consider the moment when she interrupts Cobb’s James Bond impersonation during the film’s opening sequence to tell Saito he’s dreaming. It’s frustrating in the moment for Cobb, but his subconscious self is always attached to her, as implied by the fact in that very sequence he’s still wearing his wedding ring.

In fact, in every sequence of the film where Cobb is clearly established to be dreaming, he’s wearing the wedding ring. It’s there when he first lures Ariadne into the appeal of designing mazes in dreams, and it’s on his left hand when he’s going into a dream within a dream within another dream during the film’s amusingly convoluted third act. Even after he breaks up with Mal’s shade for good at the end of the movie, saying “you’re the best I could do, but I’m sorry you’re not enough,” he is still wearing that blasted ring. It’s on his hands when he meets Old Man Saito presumably years later in their shared limbo (at least years as far as their minds are concerned). She’ll always be with him.

But even if he can’t let go of his lost wife, in the real world he accepts she’s gone. That’s why he never once is wearing his wedding band in sequences clearly intended to be set in reality. It’s not there the first time we see Michael Caine in his Parisian classroom, nor is it there when Caine’s Miles introduces Cobb to Ariadne. Similarly, it’s not there at the end of the movie when he awakens on a jet bound for Los Angeles.

Some might consider this an oversight on Nolan’s part, given the sequence of him waking up was likely filmed the same day they showed Cobb and the others going to sleep. But as uncharitable as this is to a filmmaking maestro, it also would ignore how Nolan intentionally shows Cobbs pass through U.S. Customs while handing the border officer his papers with his left hand. No wedding ring is in sight. Ergo, when Cobb got home, his children were as awakened from a dreary nightmare as him.

While art really is in the eye of the beholder, and you can interpret Inception however you wish, based on the rules established by the film, we can say definitively that Cobb is intended to make it home and not be distracted by a lie. And yet, to settle for this as the main takeaway of the ending is to remain at the surface of Nolan’s dream.

After all, Nolan also said this in 2015: “I feel that, over time, we started to view reality as the poor cousin to our dreams, in a sense… I want to make the case to you that our dreams, our virtual realities, these abstractions that we enjoy and surround ourselves with, they are subsets of reality.”

Inception does indeed make the argument that one reality is not necessarily more valid than the other. While Cobb as the hero of a Hollywood blockbuster says he will not settle for an abstraction, there are characters who do. Cobb sees more than several spending their lives essentially hooked up to the dream-internet when he recruits Dileep Rao’s Yusuf earlier in the movie. They’re there dreaming their lives away, preferring to spend 18 hours a day—potentially eons in dream time—living in a seeming fantasy. But Cobb and the audience alike are challenged to ask who are we to judge them?

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In a world where storytellers like Nolan create just one of an infinite variety of abstractions and “subsets of reality” to get lost in, be it as film or television, video games, social media, literature, comic books, or more, is it really so horrible to find a form of truth in a lie? Nolan would probably argue not since Inception is every bit the manifesto for its self-reflective storyteller as The Prestige is.

While that earlier magician-minded movie acts as an obvious full-length metaphor about cinema and storytelling being a kind of magic trick, Inception is similarly a parable for the role of filmmakers in sharing their dreams with an audience that wants to get lost in a subset of reality. Like Nolan, DiCapiro’s Cobb is a blond haired and exceedingly well-groomed director masterminding an illusion that will cause maximum catharsis on his mark: billionaire Robert Michael Fischer (Cillian Murphy), but also us. And like any good director, Cobb assembles the best crew he can find alongside his production designers (Ariadne), cinematographer and assistant directors (Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Arthur), and actors (Tom Hardy’s Eames). Saito is even on hand to be both the caring producer and shrewd studio moneyman breathing down Cobb’s neck.

Together they create a world that exists only in scenes and shots, largely empty warehouses and soundstages occupied by a bit of artifice, or a lone street corner in Paris redressed for a specific and fleeting purpose. But when these elements are combined by a gifted group of storytellers, they create a subset of reality. And audiences, like the susceptible Fischer, populate the gaps and holes in the fantasy with their own imagination. Hopefully, in the rare instance, the fantasy can even be so emotionally powerful that it shapes the subconscious of the person who experiences it, potentially implanting an idea that could change the very essence of who we are. It happens to a cathartically drained Fischer, and it’s likely happened to you too with one movie or another.

“We bring the subject into that dream and they fill it with their subconscious,” Cobb tells Ariadne. And if the dream is rich enough, and the subset believable enough to pass as reality, then our minds will do the rest—like obsessing over the falter of a spinning top 10 years after a film cut to black.

The post Inception Ending: Why the Spinner Stopped appeared first on Den of Geek.

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lorrainecparker · 7 years ago

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ART OF THE CUT with Oscar nominated editor, Lee Smith, ACE on DUNKIRK

Lee Smith, ACE has cut numerous films with Christopher Nolan, including Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises, Inception (for which he was nominated for an ACE EDDIE), The Dark Knight (for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Editing), The Prestige and Batman Begins. He was also nominated for an Oscar for editing Master and Commander and we last spoke to Smith after he edited the James Bond film, Spectre. Art of the Cut catches up with Smith as he has teamed with Christopher Nolan again for the critically-acclaimed, Dunkirk.

HULLFISH: I don’t usually start by talking about score, but it’s very unusual and although you’re working with Hans Zimmer again, it doesn’t really sound like Hans Zimmer to me.

SMITH: Well it was. It doesn’t sound like Zimmer because you’ve probably never heard a score quite like it. Basically it was an idea of Chris’s based on using his ticking stopwatch to create a score that went the length of the movie or at least almost the full length of the movie – it always gave you a sense of the tension, so the rhythm was always giving you this amazing feeling that you just couldn’t let go and then when we did let go, we let go in a very specific area and then picked it up and let go one more time. So it’s probably one of the longest continuous cues in the history of filmmaking.

HULLFISH: What were those two places of release?

SMITH: It was released momentarily when the three boys arrived back on the beach, after the destroyer gets torpedoed, where they wait again. And then it’s finally released when Tommy is in the train and he falls asleep whilst Alex is talking to him about the fact that they’ll basically be vilified for retreating and not succeeding and it stops there because it’s kind of Tommy’s engine. And then once that’s over, the boys are basically safe from that point.

HULLFISH: That was one of those things that I felt — a continual sense of dread almost from the first frame of the movie.

SMITH: It was very carefully orchestrated. Literally the film was always designed to be the third act of a movie. You drop into the action from the first frame , no backstory. There was no let up in the sense of dread. just this burning desire for survival without all of the exposition and the dialogue that would normally be attributed to a World War II film. We didn’t have the ability to crosscut between the war room and the generals and all of the traditional stuff you’d have in a war movie.The only exposition is really given by Kenneth Branagh’s character.

HULLFISH: So often with score you can kind of sense from scene to scene, “Oh there’s the music score for that scene and there’s the music for that scene, but my sense from watching the film was that you couldn’t cut temp score for scenes because it all runs continuously from one scene to another.

SMITH: We didn’t use any temp score in the making of this movie. There was some developmental stuff there that we time stretched and used but basically the ticking of the heartbeat of the film was it and once we installed that, it never changed.

HULLFISH: The last time we talked you said Christopher Nolan did not like to hear temp in the first assembly.

SMITH: We’ve probably gone on to music quicker on Dunkirk by the simple nature that there’s so little dialogue. The film has to have that music to just keep propelling it forward. But the first assembly was literally silent. I was cutting a silent movie because even when we did have sound on those rare occasions, if it was shot with the IMAX camera sound was basically useless. So all we really had for a soundtrack was a sync guide track with the sound of a (chaff cutter?) running, which was the IMAX cameras.

There’s one shot in the trawler when it’s under attack where Alex and Tommy are inside the Dutch trawler that scene was shot with 65mm 5 perf cameras that were blimped so you can hear it in like the traditional 35 millimeter photography. But then again, parts of those scenes when they started going underwater, then they reverted back to IMAX again. So as you can imagine it wasn’t like a normal film where you’re editing wit reasonable quality guide tracks. We kind of had to make it up as we went along. I did a lot of quick, down and dirty beach sound effects and guns, then we fairly quickly handed it over to Richard King and said, “We’re so naked on this film, we can’t even screen it until we do a more sophisticated pass,” so we introduced the whole sound of the film early which is great because it was a very complicated sound job.

Everything had to have a very particular sound: from the guns to the planes. You can imagine the number of variations we went through on the Stukas it was insane. We developed that siren for a very long time before it finally got to the point where Chris was happy with it. We approached the sound from the point of view of the guys: “how they would have heard it?” rather than the reality of it, because it’s an emotional thing and if you read some of the historical reports where soldiers are being attacked they all have a different take on what things sounded like and some of them are quite interesting. It’s unusual. iI’s not the classic sort of thing that you think you normally hear. So a lot of developmental work went into that.

HULLFISH: (There’s a cool explanation of how Zimmer acheived some of the tension in the score in this article.) I noticed that there was very little dialogue and so often the dialogue drives the rhythm of the editing. So talk about how adding sound effects contributed to your sense of rhythm.

SMITH: If you can develop the sound early. It also informs the rhythm of the cut. One thing Chris was very keen to do was to show — for example — in the Spitfire sequences — just how difficult it was to shoot down another plane with that WWII technology – which I think we achieved – and a lot of that has to do with sound. We used the sound to give you the feeling that you’re riding a wild horse. Some films depict it as: you just you line up on the enemy you push the button like a video game. Those WWII pilots were just firing and the odds of hitting the plane were almost down to wind direction, good luck, and the chance that you were turning in the right direction where the German pilot might have been turning at the same time. It’s not like modern war. Basically you’re throwing rocks at something. So we wanted to try and capture that and capture all of the unique sounds that those fighters had. And I was fortunate enough to be there on the landing strip in England when we were shooting those sequences and the Spitfires and the Messerschmitts – or the ME109s – flying overhead where we were editing in a caravan right on the runway. Occasionally I’d walk out to get a coffee and they’d buzz right overhead and you’d think, that is one of the most frightening sounds you’ll ever hear just because it’s so aggressive and raw. These things were built in maybe 1936 and they’re flying today. I was so in awe of them.

HULLFISH: There’s a little featurette on how they shot the plane footage and it seems like much or all of it was shot practically, so the pilots could see the other planes and react to them. Was that easier to cut than if it had been green screen?

Dunkirk planes

SMITH: My God yes. There was no green screen for the planes. I’d say ninety six percent of what you see is real photography. To everybody’s credit we all embarked upon this mission with the view that you exhaust every possible way of doing it practically before you consider a bit of CG help. So that was the plan. There’s a couple of CGI cleanups where you have to take a bit of rig off something, but you’re not watching greenscreen. It was all shot in a particular location, so it’s not shot on a stage against blue or green. So they actually shot in the air and the pilot was sitting behind the actor in a modified plane called a Yak. It’s a Russian plane and it looked just like a Spitfire but it allowed for a pilot to sit behind the actor while they actually shot in the air.

HULLFISH: So I’m sure that helped in editing.

SMITH: Oh massively, massively. There’s no comparison editing real material. I’m at work now on a new project that has a very large greenscreen component. You just have to really retrain your mind as to how to imagine what’s not there. And then when you put the effects in you have to keep being incredibly diligent about making sure the perspectives, lenses, depth of field, horizon… It’s amazing what you can get wrong.

My mantra from back to the lessons I learned on Master and Commander: no matter what you’re doing, you put camera reality into the shots. We used to drive the visual effects people crazy because they would neaten a shot up and we’d say, “No. You couldn’t get that in that frame.” You have to go with the way we shot it, because if we were in a war situation or a dangerous situation you’ve got to remember, “What would the cameraman be doing?” You’ve got to put a physical brain behind the shot. When I watch other films they sometimes have what I call an impossible camera. I also think this is perceived by the audience members and I think I can bear this out with my children who always call bullshit on shots in other movies.

HULLFISH: So in this film, you’ve got essentially three stories. You got the guys on the beach who are pinned down by the Germans. You’ve got the British Royal Air Force guys that are protecting the beach and trying to protect the boats. And you’ve got the rescuers on the small civilian boats coming from England. I’m assuming that the script and the final movie do not have the same transitions between those stories.

SMITH: Not always. This script was a very, very strong blueprint but there were areas that were modifiable. For example, the point where the stories converge – the point where the little boats arrived. All of that we played with quite extensively because that has a very strong emotional kick. We experimented with that over several screenings before we arrived at the final choice. That was the lynch pin, where Branagh sees the little boats and where the timelines converge because we have coverage basically of all the timelines we could move that convergence point.

For the rest of it, it’s just a matter of where to cut. We might take one part a little bit further and one part a little bit less. Or sometimes when we’d watch it, and we went back to a particular story line, you felt like we’d been away from too long? Because the one thing you notice, as you’re editing, is that the plane sequences can’t just go on and on. So we were very mindful of the peppering of the plane sequences. So suddenly when you come back to the plane, the audience doesn’t think, “What happened?” It was a complicated process but all of the parts were built in. No reshoots, as usual with Chris. As Chris always says: “There are a thousand ways to cut this scene but only one right way.” And then I’d say to him, “I’m really tired.”

HULLFISH: (Laughs) That’s a lot of pressure.

SMITH: Oh my God. I have to assemble the whole movie to begin with and some of that was fairly mind-numbing just to get to that first point where you can say, “So, now what do we do?”

HULLFISH: I really love the moment where those small boats arrive at the beach. That was a very celebratory moment where the pacing kind of opened up. Can you talk about developing that as an emotional centerpiece?

SMITH: With the rhythms of the film, if you put it in the wrong place it felt forced. Where it landed was where it worked the best. And we always knew he had an emotional cannon to fire. But it was a cannon that the film needed right there. You had to have that emotional rush because otherwise the tension, I think, would have probably killed some people. (laughs) It’s the same with the boys when they land back on the beach and a soldier walks into the surf and the guys build the pier out of the trucks and the guys being washed back onto the beach. That in itself was a kind of break. It was tense, but in a different way. So it was intriguing how that needed to be very carefully placed.

Then when Harry Styles sees the Highlanders and jumps up to join them as they walk towards the trawler, that’s where it all kicks off again, because now they have a way off the beach and that was another fascinating thing and musically we did work with that extensively till we found the right moments to do what we did.

I think we tried some very solemn music over it which worked… it’s weird with music because out of context, music can really work well and you’re watching a sequence and you go, “Oh my God! This is amazing! This works so well.”

But what we always do: every week we run the entire movie, because we’re making so many changes and it affords you the ability to suddenly see problems: like that thing that worked so well, no longer works in the body of the movie. You’re not ready for whatever that emotion is. I’ve been doing that for years and I love that process and it never gets boring. It’s like you just run the whole movie. Because we’ve always done enough work to get something out of it. And you get to the end of the movie. and you say, that gave me a very different feeling.

HULLFISH: So to handle all of this intercutting of the three stories, did you do any color coding or did you put scene cards up on the wall?

SMITH: We always put the cards up on the wall. But I don’t think I ever looked at them. Chris would occasionally go over and stare at them, and then we’d go to lunch. (laughs) If we were in trouble, we’d actually refer to the script. Often when you’re doing a lot of manipulation and you’re not finding your way, or something’s gone astray, you just go back and read the script in that area and you see that you made a couple of small changes that seem to profoundly send it spiraling. And those changes are so small that you kind of didn’t even notice that you were doing it. I always had the scenes up on a wall, but more for me to just find out what reel I’m in. I’m not a paper editor. I know it helps a lot of people, but I just find it’s all in front of me on the Avid. Nothing was colour coded for story. The colour coding we used was all to identify the multiple film formats (The film was shot mostly in IMAX 15 perf and 65mm 5 perf.) We had two sequences: one was an IMAX reformatted into the 65mil format which in the end that’s what we really watch the whole time. The other was 65mil formatted for IMAX. So the colour coding was all about: The original camera – what was it shooting?

HULLFISH: The way sound effects work in the torpedo scene was very powerful.

SMITH: Early on we cut that scene and handed it to Richard King. I did a rough version where we actually recorded Chris drowning (into a pillow) and I multi-tracked that into the Avid because Chris wanted to hear the soldiers gagging. And then I did what I could just roughing it in in the Avid. And then we sent it to Richard and he developed it.

You point out a very good scene after the boat is torpedoed. That was another scene that went “around the house” probably five, six, seven, eight times before we arrived at where we wanted to be. Originally it had some water movement SFX that you are probably familiar with from underwater movies. And we stripped all of that out because Chris said, “I don’t want to hear anything like that. It’s got to be new.” Not new for new’s sake, it’s just gotta be not what you think you should hear. Again, it was more a perception thing of what would those men be hearing under there. We were thinking a cacophonous sound of people screaming and dying would be more interesting. So it’s actually underwater crowd noise. Plus all of the sounds of the teacups and the mundane sort of things that were treated as they cascaded and fell and get bumped off of tables and people getting kicked in the head. Plus all of the sonic power of the hull contracting. Just basically we wanted to make it hell.

HULLFISH: Mission accomplished. Do you remember any specific sound transitions between scenes?

SMITH: From memory, most of the scene transitions we cut dead, because sometimes it was nice to be very aggressive with the stop. But there were times we carried stuff over. On the beach, the German artillery is crashing down and we carry that down to Dawson’s boat in the next scene. You can hear that subtly in the background. But because the time lines were never intersecting until the end, it seemed better to make a point of the fact that, no this isn’t happening at the same time, so the sound really only started to blend when the timelines intersected.

As with all of the sound decisions it’s all very carefully considered. It’s so funny when you see reviews and they’ll comment on the sound as if it wasn’t thought about. Trust me, you spend 700 or 800 hours on a sound stage and you contemplate everything. Chris is that guy. He lives and breathes it and he collaborates with all of us. But we’re all laser focused on this product. And nothing gets by. There’s stuff that happens in the background that is so detailed and subtle, but it all just adds to the feeling. It’s a highly reviewed process and of course, in that process, you find great victories. Things that you didn’t think of. I’m not saying there aren’t happy accidents There are always happy accidents where something will happen and you go, “Holy shit! That works! It should be completely wrong, but it works.” So we’ll take that.

HULLFISH You’ve just got to trust the process of editing, right? You need to know that it IS a process and there are stages and it isn’t all formed at once.

SMITH: Yeah. Well if you didn’t think like that I think you’d go insane because you just have to have faith that you’re going to get there. But it’s nerve-wracking. I’m completely over the moon with how the film’s being received, but we were all terrified because this is a big summer season and you’re putting out of World War II film about a little-known story to the rest of the non-European world. So you have all the hallmarks of a disaster.

HULLFISH: And there’s very little dialogue. Was it a challenge to have so little dialogue and still be able to tell a story?

SMITH: No, not at all, and when I read the script, I said to Chris, it was probably the most emotional script I ever read. What was fascinating was, it’s not so much the dialogue but there’s just a sense of heroism that’s just so quiet in the movie even when the characters are doing things that aren’t heroic. You can totally understand why they’re doing it. Like carrying a wounded soldier onto a boat just to get on to the boat. You don’t judge them. You don’t think the worse of them. It’s that they’re just trying to get home. Or one of my favorite lines where Branagh says he’s staying for the French. They got the English first. Then they stayed to help with the French. And they evacuated a ton of French people. Just those little quiet moments. I think Rylance was genius casting as the classic Englishman wearing a tie and a vest into war. I love the fact that they never refer to Nazis. You’re not seeing them. You’re being bombarded or shot at but you’re seeing it from their point of view. Peter Weir did the same thing on Master and Commander. We talked about the French ship. And I said, “We’re not shooting anything on the French ship.” And he said, “That’s not how they see it.” They’re seeing it purely as an enemy. You know there’s nothing personal about it. They’re just guys trying to kill them.

HULLFISH: Other than the German planes, that’s all you ever see. At the beginning of the movie, the guys are running away from unknown gunfire. And then when they were sitting in that trawler on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in, you never see anybody shooting at them.

SMITH: Which is how they would have experienced it. Which is why I think it’s such an interesting movie because the traditional coverage would be the German’s loading their weapons – you see their dirty point of view of the trawler – or maybe, as Tommy says in the movie, that they’re doing target practice before the trawler moves. You could have the Germans all laughing, having a cigarette, slapping each other on the back. But I think that would have released the tension. And also you’re shifting from having the experience of being there because all you’re seeing is what they saw.

HULLFISH: You never see outside the trawler at all. You never see the tide coming in and splashing up against the boat.

SMITH: Yeah that’s right. We had exterior shots but we didn’t use them simply based on: when you went outside, it lessens the tension. It was weird. It was like whose point of view was that?

HULLFISH: And the same idea when you hear the footsteps of the Dutch guy walking around on the deck of a ship. You never cut to him. You never saw him.

SMITH: Yes. Which, again, we had a shot of the Dutchman approaching the ship. But if you show him, then you know he’s potentially not a soldier.

HULLFISH: Talk to me about the scenes back on the beach after the torpedo.

SMITH: You’re thinking, “how the hell do we get off this beach?” So the film always needed a breather right there. We needed to show the men in that hopeless situation. Again, a very cool moment to just calm everything down again.

HULLFISH: We’ve talked before about how you don’t use selects reels for performance. You use selects reels for action sometimes, but not performance. And this was a story that had to be told SO much through performance.

SMITH: This isn’t different from anything else. You view the footage and you pick the moments, that you really like and then if anything is debatable and you want to tune it up or down as we did in the trawler sequence, for example, you can dial it up and down a little bit as to how panicked they were and what they were thinking. But I always find just going back and looking fresh at the dailies is the way to do it because even if pull selects it’s just looking at it a different way and I always seem to find things when I have to go back and mine for what I’m looking for. So I’m still of the same mind. I’d rather go find it and take a little bit more time than just watching line after line after line going, “Well that’s a more excited read….”

HULLFISH: Well, that’s an interesting point: With less dialogue how would you even break up the selects when it’s just people thinking or expressing… How do you define one moment from the next in a selects reel?

SMITH: The performances were all there. Some takes were dialed up or down depending on who the actor was. You might find a physical thing in there that’s aiding in telling the story in some way. It’s a process of just continuously making sure you got the right thing and just amping up any particular moment that you think is working and juicing it. If you want tension, you can always juice – what other cutaways might give you something else. That’s one of the great pleasures of cutting this kind of stuff. Especially with very little dialogue, cause it really is about the looks on people’s faces, the sort of “Lord of the Flies” moments with those Highlander’s where they’re really, really looking kind of half-crazed with the idea of throwing someone off the boat. I thought that was a particularly good scene. I really liked cutting that.

HULLFISH: This may be a bit of a spoiler, but at the end of the film there’s a dramatic shot of a plane burning, then just before the credits you cut back to a close up of Tommy in the train and that’s the last shot in the film. So I love the fact that you look at the him one more time. You don’t use the big classic crane shot up from the flames. That doesn’t happen.

SMITH: No it doesn’t. The burning plane is the end of the script, but we felt we had to come back to Tommy because he is the thread of the entire film. So we tried adding him as the end sot and we both went, “Oh yeah this is the way to go.”

HULLFISH: This is another Hans Zimmer score. Did you temp with Hans Zimmer? This score does not sound like a typical Zimmer score to me.

SMITH: We only ever temped with music coming from Hans all original to “Dunkirk”. And we did temp with a modified version of Elgar’s Nimrod (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgoBb8m1eE), which is what that end sequence is based on. That was an idea that Chris had, whether a manipulated version would still give the same emotion that he was looking for because you always do try a couple of different things just to see what the film will like and what the film will basically throw out. And the Elgar just stuck like glue. Then it was a case of blending that into the idea of the ticking metronome. Then Hans sent us a version of the Elgar that was slowed down. So all that was happening while we were cutting and a lot of back and forth. I’ve got to give a callout to our genius music editor, Alex Gibson, and his co-music editor was Ryan Rubin. Those guys were amazing. To have someone in your editing facility who has access to a million of these component tracks, I mean, they’re coming from Zimmer but they all have to be deconstructed and rebuilt. And every time we screened, the rhythms have to be recut and rebuilt. It’s truly a great collaboration to be able to do that because this score was the hardest we’ve ever done by a long chalk. To get to where we got was the hardest of any film I’ve ever worked on.

HULLFISH; Were those music editors Hans’ guys? A lot of times, composers have their own music editors.

SMITH; They’re our guys but they work with Hans. But we specifically have our own music editors on Chris’s films because it’s easier to have them with us. So you know you have direct contact with the music and then it’s all being fed back through them, then Hans, then back to us. We have this loop happening. But it allows me specifically to have more time to concentrate on the editing without having to patch up temp tracks that you don’t really want to deal with anyway. A lot of time and effort is put into the whole temp world and not all composers will be brought on to work with you so exclusively. And as I’ve always said, the beauty of not using temp music is that you’re not ever in love with something that you’re either going to do a bad copy of, which you don’t want to do. In the real world, not every film can afford it and not every composer is used to that process. We’ve got a very particular way of working with Hans. To me, music and sound effects are just a great tool and you need to be using it early to understand it. Because by the time you hit the dub stage. That’s not where you want to be hearing your music for the first time, because then all you are is grateful or disappointed. (we both laugh) I’ve been both.

HULLFISH: We’ve talked in the past about this, you and I, how the temp score locks the composer in to possibly mimicking whatever they temped with.

SMITH: You know exactly why that happens: because people temp score. Everyone falls in love with it. It’s pushing all the right buttons. The poor composer then has to do a version of the temp that nobody likes because everybody like the temp so unless you’ve got someone who’s completely reimagining something – and at this level of filmmaking, that’s not easy. You’re going to end up with a lukewarm version of what you put in. And the composer is tearing their hair out because they can’t replace that temp because the temp is now almost in the DNA of the movie now. So now you’re in this really awkward position because if you’re temping with real high quality film score music, that wasn’t easy to get to the first time. Music is part of the candy that can be applied to a movie. So when it works it is brilliant. I just saw War for the Planet of the Apes and noticed how good the score was and they really pushed the envelope on the music and it works.

HULLFISH: We talked during our last interview about the fact that you don’t obsess about your initial assembly. Your assistant editor says you cut very quickly — which is something you’ve also said. I’ve talked to other editors that say, “I have to work and work on a scene until it’s perfect before I can put it in the first assembly.”

SMITH: It’s not that I don’t obsess. I just do it how I want to do it, and I guess the word obsession would mean I would be not convinced that I was doing it right. And I’d have to keep doing it and doing it or doing it. Whereas for me, from an energy standpoint, I get it right as quickly as possible and I’m not saying that I don’t have scenes that are more tricky than others. But I’m not sitting there second-guessing my own first guess. So if obsession is that you just keep working on something until you’re happy, but to me, that feels like you’re fussing with it to the point where you might start to lose what is that initially excited you about it.

The process of the assembly is that you are going to go through the film again and again and again and again and again and again. For me, it just keeps me fresh to keep looking at it. It makes me so I’m not averse to changing things and looking at different ways of doing it because I didn’t arrive at that first cut with blood and sweat. And a lot of how I originally cut it is what is in the movie. And sometimes those are the most complicated scenes in the movie. And the ones that seemingly are simple are the ones that you end up putting 50 versions together because for some reason that scene is not doing what it needed to do. And probably the reason you keep going back to it is there’s an inherent problem with that scene. So you’re really having to hammer it to make it do what you want it to do.

HULLFISH: I think when we originally talked about this it was a discussion of: “What’s the point of working it and working it and working it as a solo scene, when you need to see it in the context of the overall movie and story and even just to feel it in the position of the scene immediately before and after it.”

SMITH: Yes that’s true too. The other reason is: that I can’t hope to know — out of order, and in my first pass — if I pick the exact right things because I’m picking the things that appeal to me right now, out of context. I mean, of course, I’ve read the script and I know what I’m doing, but having said that, the film, once it’s joined together… the quicker you can get the film together in a good sensible fashion and start watching it as a movie the quicker you start understanding where the weaknesses are.

I’ll frequently let assistants cut things and invariably they’re sweating bullets about how to start the scene and I’ll ask them if they have seen the scene before the scene they’re cutting, and they’ll say, “It’s not shot yet.” And I’ll say, “Well, then you don’t know how to start this scene, so pick whatever you want and give as little thought as humanly possible because you might be right. But the odds are you might be wrong and you’re obsessing about something that you don’t know the answer to that yet.”

You can only answer that when you’ve got everything together. And you look at the transitions and you look at: “Should I be in closeup when I start? Should I be in a wide?” and you can spend three days cutting a sequence that really you should have spent three hours cutting it because you don’t know what’s the shot you’re coming from… you don’t have it. And that’s the assembly process.

Now what will happen is when I get that next scene I’ll join those scenes immediately together and then I’ll modify the cut. I will always be recutting my initial assembly the whole way through the assembly process. I never leave anything alone.

HULLFISH: That’s a really interesting point… so as soon as you have an adjoining scene, you cut them together?

SMITH: I’ll never join two scenes together once I have the material and not be happy with what I’ve done because part of my job is to tell the director or the shooting crew for any reason if there isn’t a good cut between those two scenes. I mean that is pretty rare. It could happen, so you’re duty bound to build a film that works properly by the time you get to the end of the shooting process.

Now having said that, even with Dunkirk there were sequences – even at the end of shooting – there was still a lot of development that had to go into building the aerial sequences because as I found out, I cut some of them in much more of a Hollywood action style at the beginning. Faster cuts. And then early on we thought, “Eh, it’s not going to work like that. It’s got to be …a different rhythm has to be imposed. You can’t force this kind of action.” I had the coverage to do it, but it didn’t look right. It felt like an imposed adrenaline surge that the film just didn’t need. Now, you don’t know that until you get further down the line. I mean you’d have to be a magician to know that.

HULLFISH: So we’re back to trusting the process.

SMITH: Yeah. And you just look at the movie and go, “Okay, when we hit these aerial scenes, now they’re like something out of Top Gun.” We don’t want that. So you immediately begin modifying and slowing those sequences down and spend more time in the cockpit. Don’t do your default settings. In another movie maybe that would work, but not with the rhythms that started to be used in this movie.

I think the other thing is that you can’t be precious. If you are precious, you’ll never arrive where you need to be. I always think the mark of anyone with talent: composers or directors, is the ability to change and throw out what they’ve done when it’s not working, even if it took a really long time and a lot of effort. You’ve got to have the ability to go, “Okay, well it’s not working. Let’s have another crack at it from a different perspective,” rather than defaulting to being defensive.

HULLFISH: The aerial scenes were also another place where you didn’t see the typical editing sequence of machine gun bullets firing out of the underside of the wings and you never see the perspective of the plane from the underbelly. You never see the Germans twisting in their seats to look back at who’s firing at them.

SMITH: Exactly, and it’s a choice that makes for a different style of cutting because you have to put the planes out there. You have to understand what you’re looking at. And it’s the use of some of those very interesting camera mounts that were developed. Putting the IMAX camera upside down inside this Yak and then bouncing mirrors up through the cockpit so that they could photograph some of those points of views because you couldn’t get an IMAX camera in the cockpit. So the mirrors created these weird anomalies of jerkiness and kind of slight distortion on the picture and when I when I started seeing the footage, I thought, this is so awesome because it’s so ragged and it just makes you tense. We were trying to show the difficulty level of these pilots. It certainly helped us make it feel like these are not planes you can just line up and shoot like a video game.

HULLFISH: Lee, great to talk with you as always. You’ve been a wealth of information. Have a wonderful time in beautiful Montreal.

SMITH: Thanks, Steve. Bye.

This interview was transcribed with SpeedScriber.

To read more interviews in the Art of the Cut series, check out THIS LINK and follow me on Twitter @stevehullfish

The first 50 Art of the Cut interviews have been curated into a book, “Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV editors.” The book is not merely a collection of interviews, but was edited into topics that read like a massive, virtual roundtable discussion of some of the most important topics to editors everywhere: storytelling, pacing, rhythm, collaboration with directors, approach to a scene and more. Oscar nominee, Dody Dorn, ACE, said of the book: “Congratulations on putting together such a wonderful book. I can see why so many editors enjoy talking with you. The depth and insightfulness of your questions makes the answers so much more interesting than the garden variety interview. It is truly a wonderful resource for anyone who is in love with or fascinated by the alchemy of editing.” In CinemaEditor magazine, Jack Tucker, ACE, writes: “Steve Hullfish asks questions that only an editor would know to ask. … It is to his credit that Hullfish has created an editing manual similar to the camera manual that ASC has published for many years and can be found in almost any back pocket of members of the camera crew. … Art of the Cut may indeed be the essential tool for the cutting room. Here is a reference where you can immediately see how our contemporaries deal with the complexities of editing a film. … Hullfish’s book is an awesome piece of text editing itself. The results make me recommend it to all. I am placing this book on my shelf of editing books and I urge others to do the same.”

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