Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

Ron Perlman faces larger problems than ever in Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Selma Blair (Liz Sherman), Doug Jones (Abe Sapien/Angel of Death/Chamberlain), Seth MacFarlane (Johann Krauss), Luke Goss (Prince Nuada), Anna Walton (Princess Nuala), Jeffrey Tambor (Tom Manning), John Hurt (Professor Trevor Bruttenholm), Roy Dotrice (King Balor)

There is something quite sweet about the Guillermo del Toro taking all the chips won for directing Pan’s Labyrinth and cashed them in for this comic book sequel. There you have the distillation of the man’s career right there: one for the artist and then one for the teenage boy he used to be. But Hellboy II is a marvellous creation, a gorgeous to look at, magical, rather funny comic book film crammed with amazing images, ingenious creatures and sparkling moments of action and adventure.

Thousands of years ago, the magical creatures of the world, led by the elves, fought a war against mankind. To win a desperate victory, goblins created the dreaded Golden Army, an indestructible mechanical army. Horrified at the slaughter, Elven King Balor (Roy Dotrice) offered a truce. His son Prince Nuala (Luke Goss) disagreed. In the present day, Nuala goes about to collect the three pieces of the crown needed to control the Golden Army – and only Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and his friends from the BPRD can stop him. 

Hellboy II is immensely imaginative and wonderful to look at. Perhaps inspired by Pan’s Labyrinth, the film plays like a cross between the most brain-twisting magic depths of that film and a traditional comic book. So we get dozens of creatures, each pulled from the pages of some sort of acid tripped Tolkien novel: with extended hands, distorted heads and steam-punkish extremities, the creatures on show are masterpieces of design and character. The juxtaposition between this ethereal, magical world of elves and goblins and mankind’s expansion brings home the danger this world is in: the Elven King’s palace in the modern day is in a sort of converted sewer, while Nuala’s base is an abandoned underground line. With some performers (often del Toro’s muse Doug Jones) under layers of make-up and prosthetics, it’s extraordinary the amount of personality each of these creatures gets. When the film takes a turn down a Diagon Alley-style market, you regret Del Toro never got to make a Harry Potter film.

Hellboy looks both part of this world and also like a muscular bull in a china shop. Ron Perlman continues to be perfect in the part, and captures the wry, cynical, slightly teenagerish humour of the part. Del Toro does a wonderful job of showing the sense of family between Hellboy, his lover pyrokinetic Liz (a decent performance by Selma Blair, although she is too often relegated to the “woman” role), and his surrogate brother, amphibious empath Abe (Doug Jones getting to provide the voice as well this time, and getting a fine display of growing emotional expression). The quiet character moments between the action really ring true – a very funny sequence sees Hellboy and Abe bemoan their romantic entanglements by getting drunk while singing Can’t Smile Without You.

It’s scenes like that which add the heart alongside the throbbing action and colourful character weirdness of del Toro’s vision. It’s also part of the distinctiveness of the whole vision of the film. Everything is seen with as fresh an eye as possible, and makes for some really striking images and scenes. The steam-punk aesthetic of the Golden Army seems to fit together perfectly with the more organic world of the Elves. There’s a sense at all times that the design and pacing of the film have been carefully thought through so everything fits logically together. Starting the film with a wonderfully animated Golden Army backstory (voiced by a briefly returning John Hurt for maximum impact) is just another reflection of the artistry at work here.

There is a nice vein of humour running through the film – there are some funny sight gags as characters walk nonchalantly through bizarre goings-on in BDRP HQ – and the more gory moments of the action are shot with a certain black comedy. The film also gets a decent few points in about how humanity rejects things that are different, which are not surprising but still hit home.

Hellboy II does start to become a bit more generic as it heads towards its final denouement. Most of the events of the final few scenes are pretty predictable from the outset, and offer little in the way of surprises. For all the chemistry she has with Perlman, Blair is more or less relegated to the sidelines for large chunks of the film (usually the action). But for most of the run time, it’s inventive, imaginative fun with a director bringing a distinctive vision to the genre while also kicking back his heels and having fun. And fun is what it wants the viewer to have as well – don’t try too hard, sit back, relax and enjoy yourself.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

Chris Pratt comes face-to-face with an old friend in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Director: JA Bayona

Cast: Chris Pratt (Owen Grady), Bryce Dallas Howard (Claire Dearing), Rafe Spall (Eli Mills), Justice Smith (Franklin Webb), Daniella Pineda (Zia Rodriguez), James Cromwell (Sir Benjamin Lockwood), Toby Jones (Gunnar Eversol), Ted Levine (Ken Wheatley), BD Wong (Dr Henry Wu), Isabella Sermon (Maisie Lockwood), Geraldine Chaplin (Iris), Jeff Goldblum (Dr Ian Malcolm)

I don’t care how old I get. I still love those dinosaurs. Doesn’t everyone? And of course what’s better than seeing dinosaurs munch down on them what deserves it? Well you got plenty of that in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which throws everything it can at the screen and is enjoyable enough, even if it feels a little like one for the money.

It’s been five years since the events of the first film, and the old Jurassic Park is now abandoned and the whole island given over to the control of the dinosaurs. In what you have to say is a pretty damning indictment of InGen’s planning (but then they really planned nothing well on this whole project) turns out the whole island is actually a volcano and, yup, she’s gonna blow. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) is leading a campaign to win government support for saving the dinosaurs, when she is recruited by Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), chair of a charity foundation set up by ageing businessman and park co-founder Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) to lead a ‘Noah’s Ark’ mission to the island. But they need the help of Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to find Blue the last surviving member of his Velociraptor pack. Arriving on the island howeer, they find not everyone can be trusted.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom plays like a remix of events and moments from each of the earlier films. So you more or less get exactly what you might expect, and the film never really surprises you at all. You have a dangerous mission on the abandoned island (Jurassic Park III), dangerous chases in a lab (Jurassic Park), a bioengineered super dinosaur running riot (Jurassic World), dinosaurs on the main land (The Lost World) and businessmen with ulterior motives (all of them). None of the sly wit and the relatively patient build-up of Jurassic World is really present here: instead we are almost immediately thrown into an island literally exploding, and the film gets bigger and bigger from there (even if it doesn’t get better).

JA Bayona directs this with a breezy professionalism, with a decent sense of pace and some well-constructed tension sequences. There are some decent call-back jokes, not least to Claire’s far more appropriate choice of footwear. The film also gets some decent material out of exploring the back story of Owen’s bond with the velociraptor back, not least his parental bond with lead velociraptor Blue. It makes for some interesting emotional material, but it’s a shame that this never really feels like it plays back into any broader theme in the movie. There is some stuff in there about parental bonds (Lockwood and his granddaughter, Wu’s plans to have Blue “mother” his latest super dinosaur abomination) but it doesn’t go anywhere.

That’s part of the problem of this film: it goes nowhere we haven’t really been before. Even the beats of wonder as people go “oh wow that’s a dinosaur” feel repeated and tired – the first moment even revolves around a brachiosaurus, just as the same moment did in the first film. Bayona does however draw some heart rendering material from the dinosaurs running vainly from death in the volcanic eruption – most notably from a brachiosaurus tragically bellowing in despair as it is engulfed in volcanic gas. 

But it’s all pretty samey. And the plot moves at such a lick that it actually starts to feel a little bit silly. So of course Owen and Claire are persuaded in minutes to go back to the island. Of course they are betrayed in the first few minutes. Of course the island starts to erupt almost as soon as they arrived. Everything happens at this crackerjack pace, that actually starts to make things feel even more cartoonish than a film about a load of man-made dinosaurs feels like to start with.

That’s on the top of the fact that none of the new characters make any real impact – most of them might as well have “Trope” or “Plot Device” written on their faces. The villain stands out a mile away the instant he appears. His main henchman is so nakedly untrustworthy, you marvel Claire and Owen even consider going on the mission with him. The comic relief character is insanely annoying. Countering this, Chris Pratt plays off his charisma extremely well to remain a very magnetic hero, and I think Bryce Dallas Howard gets much more to play with here as a Claire far more plugged in and competent than in the first film.

But the atmosphere of affectionate nostalgia, and delight that powers the first film so well and makes it (for my generation) such a huge joy to watch, with its tongue-in-cheek but also smart and not-overly-done fanboy style, is missing here. This feels more like a film assembled by people who have seen all the films and basically wanted to box tick everything you might expect to see. It’s not really trying to do something different, it’s just treading water.

But despite all that, it’s still quite good fun.  That’s the odd thing. Yes people in it behave with staggering stupidity and the film doesn’t offer any surprises (the dinosaurs have clearly read the script when planning their meals). Yes it’s derivative and unoriginal. But I still rather enjoyed it. It’s lacking in any inspiration or (you feel) the sort of genuine affection Colin Trevorrow brought to it, but you know it’s good enough. Whether good enough is good enough is of course another question.

Her (2013)

Joaquin Phoenix plays a complete prick in this unbearably pleased with itself satire Her

Director: Spike Jonze

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix (Theodore Twombly), Scarlett Johnasson (Samantha – voice), Amy Adams (Amy), Rooney Mara (Catherine Klausen), Olivia Wilde (Blind Date), Chris Pratt (Paul), Matt Letscher (Charles), Lukas Jones (Mark Lewman), Kristen Wiig (Sexy Kitten – voice), Brian Cox (Alan Watts – voice), Spike Jonze (Alien child – voice)

Every so often you start off engaged with a film and then, the longer it goes on, the less and less you like it. I couldn’t put my finger on the exact moment where I started to really take against Her, but I certainly had by the end of it. As someone once famously sort of said about Kriss Akubusi: “hard to dislike but well worth the effort”.

Anyway, Her is set in the near future. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a sensitive, insular man who writes personal romantic letters for other people who aren’t articulate enough (or bothered) to do it themselves. Getting divorced from his childhood sweetheart Catherine (Rooney Mara), Theodore downloads a new Artificial Intelligence Operating System for his computer. The system is designed to create a personality that appeals to the customer – and that is certainly the case here with this system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Theodore, finding it hard to connect with the real world, is drawn to Samantha and, as she grows and develops, they start a relationship. But can the relationship survive the divide between realities and Samantha’s growing self-awareness and personality?

Okay. I’m going to swing hard for this film, so let’s start with what’s good shall we. Spike Jonze directs very well. It looks beautiful. There is some lovely music. The future world it shows is close enough to our own to still feel connected. Amy Adams is rather good as Theodore’s old college friend, and Rooney Mara turns in a very good performance as Theodore’s wife, a woman who doesn’t let Theodore get away with his excuses. Scarlett Johansson is perfect casting as the alluring and engaging voice of Samantha (much as I was primed to be annoyed by her post-production replacement of Samantha Morton, who had been on set with Phoenix). There are some sweet and even romantic moments.

Okay that’s it. This is a film overwhelmingly, unbearably, unbelievably pleased with the cleverness of its own concept and trite ideas (a man loves his computer – take that our modern consumerist world!). It then goes on to tell us almost nothing, bar the most basic statements about our struggles to interact with, and relate to, each other in this technology-filled world. Apparently it’s hard to create bonds with real people where we are viewing everything through our phones. Bet that has never occurred to anyone before right?

But my main problem with this film is the lead character. Now I will say that Joaquin Phoenix does a good job with this role, and his skilful acting brilliantly holds the story together. He does extremely well with a part that is almost exclusively reacting to someone not actually there. But my problem is with this characterisation of Theodore. To put it bluntly, he’s a prick.

In fact, he’s the sort of quirky nerd beloved of this genre, but take a long look and he’s basically a complete creep. And all his relationships with women seem to be based on him not wanting to engage with the problems of the other person. He requires the focus to be on his wants and needs, as if he is the only person in the world who can be sensitive or sad – no wonder he falls in love with a computer programme designed to reflect the behaviours he finds appealing.

“You want a wife without the challenges of dealing with something real” his wife accuses, eagerly pointing out his inability to deal with or even want to engage with human emotions. The film wants to give him a pass, because he is such a sensitive soul, but it’s bullshit. Theodore is a deeply selfish person, despite what the film wants, who has that geeky, arrogant, self-satisfied sensitivity that blindly says “if I struggle in the world, then it’s the fault of the world not me”.

Theodore is a constant happy victim, a whining, softly-spoken, guilt-tripping prick who only sees himself as a victim and makes no effort to change or understand his behaviour to other people. The film wants us to think that the world is a puzzle to his poetic soul, but it’s actually a maze he doesn’t want to find a way out of. He doesn’t want to engage with it and only feels justified and reinforced in these feelings by everything he does.

He is like the perfect ambassador for passive aggressive guys: “Oh I don’t get the girls because they don’t want to open themselves up to my sensitivity blah blah blah”. Theodore goes on a blind date early in the film: it goes well, they make out, sex is on the cards and then she asks “Before we do anything, will you see me again?”. Theodore can’t even bring himself to make even the smallest offer, meekly babbling about having a busy weekend. When she reacts angrily and leaves, the film wants us to side with Theodore’s timidity, rather than say “yeah it is a bit shitty to let a girl put her hand down your pants and then not even show the slightest interest in seeing her again, and then call her unpleasant”. Fuck you Theodore.

Theodore is basically a controlling arsehole and it’s where the romance of the film drains out. He clearly has no idea why his marriage ended, but while the film wants us to think he’s too sensitive for the rough and tumble, it seems clear he had no interest in, or comprehension of, his wife’s life. She is constantly subtly blamed for not having patience with Theodore – the film ends with him writing her a cathartic e-mail saying he will always love his memory of her and thanking her for being part of his life, forgiving her from leaving (again, screw you film). Instead she, like other people, doesn’t deserve Theodore because she doesn’t have the patience to delve into his life.

Theodore, though, has no depths. He’s a bland, faux-poetic guy with a nervy disposition and a disinterest in other people’s emotions, focused only on his own gratification. He wants his relationships to adjust to what he needs them to be. As Samantha grows and develops into a more fully rounded personality, his first reaction is hostility and jealousy at the thought of her talking to other people and operating systems. It’s not sweet and endearing – or Theodore again being taken advantage of, as the film wants us to think – it’s creepy, and Theodore is the sort of passive aggressive gentle guy who ends up stalking and murdering the girl who rejected him.

How can you engage with the points of this film, when the central character through whom everything is filtered is so awful? Distance in relationships in this modern world – and the lack of genuine interaction – is a point that hardly needs hammering home as it does here. The trite points about love and relationships the film makes are all wrong. The film is so on the nose about distance between people and the artificial nature of our interactions, the hero even writes other people’s love letters for them. It’s subtle as a sledgehammer.

Computers and phones are everywhere and everyone uses them, but there is less insight and heart in this story than an average episode of Black Mirror (which would have done the same thing in half the time). The film does its best to build a romance between the two, but it never quite lands or has the impact it should, because it never feels like an equal relationship: first Theo has the control, then Samantha grows beyond anything Theo is capable of but is still trapped by her initial programming of devotion to him. What point is this meant to be making about romance and commitment? Theo lives in a dream-world and does so until the end of the film. 

Her is the sort of film lots of people are going to love. It uses the conventions of romantic films very well. It has darker moments, such as a sequence where Theo and Samantha try to use a surrogate for sex (a scene where to be fair I could understand why Theo is creeped out and disturbed), but none of these ever comes together into a coherent point. And Theo remains, at all times, a block on the enjoyment of the film, an unpleasant figure hiding in plain sight that stops you from falling for the film. In love with itself, in love with its idea, in love with its cleverness, this is a film that tells you everything about the smugness of the geek and nothing about the subjects it actually wants to get you thinking about.

The Martian (2015)

Matt Damon is Lost in Space in The Martian

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Matt Damon (Mark Watney), Jessica Chastain (Commander Melissa Lewis), Jeff Daniels (Teddy Sanders), Kristen Wiig (Annie Montrose), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Vincent Kapoor), Sean Bean (Mitch Henderson), Michael Peña (Major Rick Martinez), Kate Mara (Beth Johansson), Sebastian Stan (Dr Chris Beck), Aksel Hennie (Dr Alex Vogel), Mackenzie Davis (Mindy Park), Donald Glover (Rich Purnell), Benedict Wong (Bruce Ng)

Imagine being abandoned somewhere really difficult to get out of. Now how about being abandoned somewhere where it’s literally impossible to escape? Well you can’t get much more impossible than Mars, a place so bloody difficult it doesn’t even supply you with such luxuries as oxygen, water or food. But that’s exactly what happens to astronaut Mark Watney.

Part of the first manned mission to Mars, Watney (Matt Damon) is struck by debris and presumed killed after a storm forces the crew to abandon their planet. With no one on Earth aware he is alive, Watney faces huge difficulties: the next Mars mission isn’t for four years, and will land over 2,000 miles away. He has only enough food for at best a couple of years, and his Mars Rover can only travel 70 miles before it needs to be recharged. Fortunately, Watney (as well as being incredibly inventive) is a botanist – and works out a complex improvised farm in the base to grow potatoes (the only potential crop he has) as well beginning to modify the Rover to drive to the next mission site in four years. But things change when NASA (after holding his funeral) spot his movements via satellite – and now the race is on to organise a rescue mission.

The Martian perfectly works out what we find appealing about survivor stories: a charming, easy to relate to, protagonist who inspires with his never-ending MacGyver-ish invention. The best sequences by far focus on this, as Watney uses whatever he has available, from radioactive waste to his own shit, to try and save his life. There is something hugely compelling about seeing such inspiration in the face of adversity – perhaps because you want to believe “heck that’s what I would do…”

The first half of the film is crammed with these moments, made even more enjoyable by Watney’s off-the-wall, amusing commentary on events via video diary. Watney never succumbs to despair but instead constantly puts as positive as possible a spin on his situation, aware that opening the door to despair is the road to the end. A lot of this works so well because of Matt Damon’s terrific performance in the lead role. It’s no easy thing basically holding the screen entirely by yourself, but Damon does an amazing job here. He’s not just funny and engaging, but he also subtly touches on deep inner feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Scott understands all this and shoots most of the sequences with Watney with a low-key, calm but technically assured simplicity. He lets the action here largely speak for itself, and shows a better ear for comedy than I think many people thought him capable of. He also uses Watney’s “suit cam” and the video diary format to constantly shake up the visuals and allow us to see Watney’s actions and decisions from different perspectives. His mastery of the sweeping epic comes into its own when the camera swoops over Martian panoramas, making the hostile red planet look unbelievably beautiful. 

It’s easy to see why NASA supported this film so strongly, as the organisation comes out of this impossibly well. This is essentially a fictionalised retelling of Apollo 13, with the astronauts surviving above, while the ingenious techies below work miracles to first communicate with, and then devise a rescue mission, for Watney. The film is deeply in love with NASA – despite some personality clashes, the NASA characters are all shown to be highly intelligent, compassionate people. Even “the suit”, Director Sanders (played with a square jawed patience by Jeff Daniels), is basically a humanitarian who wants to preserve human life (and is cool enough to have a brilliant Lord of the Rings gag).

Despite this, the struggles of the various bigwigs at NASA to save Watney are slightly less interesting than the opening half of the film based around Watney’s struggles to survive. Perhaps because, well done as it is, we’ve seen this sort of stuff before, done better – not least in Apollo 13 – and partly because what NASA is trying to do is not quite clearly explained in layman’s terms. Think of the simple brilliance of Apollo 13 when the engineers need to create a filter using only what the astronauts have on the ship: it’s easy to understand, clear, brilliant and gripping. Comparative scenes in this film just don’t land as quickly.

The film also struggles as events and twists in the midway part of the movie lead to Watney losing a lot his agency. Since most of the film’s unique enjoyment is seeing Watney conquer his environment, and gain mastery of the rotten hand that fate has dealt him, as soon as that element is removed and Watney turns into more of a man in distress, the film struggles to maintain its unique interest. It makes the second half of the film more conventional (Damon is noticeably in this much less, considering how much he dominates the first half) and also ends up comparing unfavourably with other, better films (sorry I mean Apollo 13 again…)

But The Martian is crammed with good lines, fine jokes and some good performances – even if some of the characters seem a bit sketchily drawn. Benedict Wong is very good as NASA’s top techno bod. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Sean Bean do well as the most clearly sympathetic senior NASA bods. Up in space, the rest of the crew are very lightly sketched, but Jessica Chastain gives a fine sense of authority to the Mission Commander. But make no mistake this is Damon’s movie – and he dominates both the audience’s interest and the film’s.

The Martian is a very well made, intelligent crowd-pleaser. It’s not a classic – and it’s slightly in the shadow of better movies – but it’s brilliantly put together and hugely engaging. The second half of the story is less compelling and more conventional than the first, but there is more than enough invention and enjoyment there for you to want to come back and see it again.

The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

Fury and despair are never far away in brilliant survivalist film The Flight of the Phoenix

Director: Robert Aldrich

Cast: James Stewart (Captain Frank Towns), Richard Attenborough (Lew Moran), Hardy Krüger (Henrich Dorfmann), Peter Finch (Captain Harris), Ernest Borgnine (Trucker Cobb), Ian Bannen (“Ratbags” Crow), Ronald Fraser (Sergeant Watson), Christian Marquand (Dr Renaud), Dan Duryea (Standish), George Kennedy (Mike Bellamy)

Every so often you watch a film and say “where have you been my whole life!”. That’s the case with The Flight of the Phoenix– I can’t even imagine how much I would have loved this film if I had seen it when I was younger. This one has got it all for fans of anything from disaster movies to personality clashes. Aldrich’s film is a Sunday afternoon classic with bite, a brilliantly constructed actors’ piece set in the claustrophobic confines of the only shelter for miles around in the Gobi Desert.

Frank Towns (James Stewart) and Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough) are the pilot and navigator on a cargo plane flying to Benghazi, with several passengers. Caught in a sandstorm, the plane crashes in the desert over 100 miles off course. The chances of being located are small and the survivors have only enough water for a little under a fortnight, so long as they avoid exertion. While Towns quietly struggles with the guilt, and different (hopeless) solutions are suggested, German aeronautical engineer Heinrich Dorfman (Hardy Krüger) believes that they can build a new airplane from the wreckage to fly themselves to safety. Towns and Dorfman are incompatible people, leaving Moran to play peacemaker and to support the building of the new aeroplane which may be (as Towns believes) a forlorn hope in any case.

Amazingly the film was a box-office flop on release – but time rewards skill, because you watch the film and marvel at the economy of its storytelling, its expert direction, wonderful acting and fantastically drawn characters. It’s a film of immense tension, with nearly all of this coming from the bubbling potential for deadly clashes between the trapped men. The rest is supplied by the ever-present threat of diminishing resources – none more so than the limited supply of cartridges needed to start the new plane’s engine (they’ve got seven and, best case, need at least five). 

It’s this grim awareness of the knife-edge everyone is living on that powers the film. Every single resource is precious, and the pressure and fatigue show in every scene. As the film progresses, each of the men slowly disintegrates, growing increasingly scruffy, unshaven, dry skinned and weak and more and more susceptible to anger. Aldrich charts all this with professional excellence, the editing skilfully cutting away at several points to reaction shots from the actors as feuds come to a head, helped by some gloriously subtle and intelligent acting. 

And it’s not surprising really – few films capture the grim pressure of the desert better than this. Sand dries out skin and throats, reflecting the beating heat of the sun everywhere. The clear sky and burning sun turn every surface into smouldering heat – even the shade offers little respite. The viewer is left with no doubt about the insanity of spending time out of the shade in these conditions. You know immediately Captain Harris’ plan to walk 500 miles over the desert with a single canteen of water is absurd (it doesn’t end well of course). It’s a beautifully shot film that makes the mystical glamour of the desert beautiful and terrifying.

One of the things I like best about the film is that it is almost impossible to predict who will come out alive and who won’t. Unlike most Hollywood films, characters are not punished for deviating from goodness and purity – some of the most noble characters don’t come out alive, while some of the most self-serving, selfish and cowardly ones do. Even the central heroes are flawed: Towns is struggling with depression and a near crippling guilt that almost leave him fatalistically accepting death; Moran is a drunk possibly to blame for the whole disaster; Dorfman is arrogant, difficult, prickly and in many ways flat out unlikeable. 

Ah yes, Dorfmann. What a superb performance from Krüger (the first actor cast). In a masterstroke of invention, the character was changed from British (in the novel) to German. This opens up a whole world of additional prejudice between Dorfmann and the other passengers. “What did you do during the war?” antagonistic joker Ratbags asks Dorfman pointedly. It’s a tension that underlies most of the clashes. Dorfmann doesn’t help with his almost complete lack of awareness of social etiquette and his Germanic insistence on probabilities of survival: he sees no problem with treating the rest of the survivors like staff, openly debates the wisdom of helping the critically wounded, refuses to explain his thinking until absolutely pressed and has no empathy for their flagging strength and morale. But he also has a strange naivety which plays into a late plot reveal hinging on Dorfmann’s inability to read the reactions of the people sitting next to him. The film and Krüger flirt brilliantly with Germanic stereotypes – is there a more “German” character in film than Dorfmann? He’s about as far from a white knight as you can get.

But then so is James Stewart’s Towns. One of the things I like most about the film is the difficult psychology of survival. Towns is clearly struck with a barely understood guilt about the people killed in the crash, and seems ready to fatalistically accept death. His clash with Dorfmann is powered by numerous factors, not least a sense Towns has of his generation being replaced by a younger, technically minded one and a sense of losing control of his destiny. Nevertheless, Towns almost fanatically opposes the project at one point – and basically only accepts it when Moran and Dr Renard (an immensely noble Christian Marquand) tell him it’s better to have a chance of something to live for than to sit around dying. Stewart brilliantly taps into the ambiguity in his screen persona – a decency beneath the surface, but also a psychological weakness, a need for control under the nice-guy persona, a man struggling to accept he is out of his depth. It’s a brilliantly low-key psychological performance of a man struggling to button up guilt, pressure and unease.

The whole cast is superb. Attenborough plays the closest to type as a loyal number 2, but even he is clearly struggling to hold acres of despair while constantly playing peace-maker. Ronald Fraser is exceptional as a career army sergeant tottering on the edge of open-rebellion throughout the film, who betrays his commander’s trust no less than three times and is the most unknown wildcard in the pack. Ian Bannen was Oscar-nominated for his electric performance as a bitter, sarcastic Scots oil-worker who surprises everyone with his hard work while never letting up for a moment his bitter commentary on events. Peter Finch gives an excellent, ram-rod straight, almost naively decent stiff-upper lip performance as Captain Harris, a man a few degrees away from a noble idiot. Ernest Borgnine is touching as an oil foreman suffering from exhaustion and stress.

All this comes together in a superior package of film making, expertly made and superbly directed, with the actors embracing their well-developed characters with glee, making this in many ways part disaster movie, part chamber piece play. I love the little surprises it throws at you – just as you think you know a character there is a moment that surprises you or makes you reassess them. The tensions and dangers of survival in extreme conditions are brilliantly captured. There isn’t a weak moment in the film, and plot twists and surprises throw curveballs at the audience, some of which bring terrifying consequences. For any lovers of survival stories, acting or tense movies this is an absolute must.

Beginners (2010)

Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor are a father and son building a bond in quirky fable Beginners

Director: Mike Mills

Cast: Ewan McGregor (Oliver Fields), Christopher Plummer (Hal Fields), Mélanie Laurent (Anna Wallace), Goran Višnjić(Andy), Mary Page Keller (Georgia Fields), Kai Lennox (Elliot), China Shavers (Shauna)

Oliver Fields (Ewan McGregor) is a reserved man who has struggled to hold a relationship down because of his own emotional distance. His world is shaken when his father Hal (Christopher Plummer) comes out at the age of 75, after the death of his mother, and proceeds to lead an active life in the gay scene of LA, including taking on a boyfriend, Andy (Goran Višnjić). After his father’s death, reflecting on Hal’s love of life and increasing emotional honesty makes Oliver consider his own life and start to tentatively consider a relationship with a French actress, Anna (Mélanie Laurent).

This heavily auto-biographical film was based on the life and experiences of writer-director Mike Mills. It has moments of genuine sweetness and light, occasionally undermined by the slightly smug quirkiness that creeps into the story at several points. Mills sometimes tries a little too hard as a director, using montages of stock footage to place years into context and to add a quirky sheen to the drama.

In fact it’s that quirk that often gets in the way of the drama in the film, Mills relying too often on meet-cutes, a dialogue Oliver has (in subtitles) with his dog, jolly picture montages, the cartoons Oliver draws on themes like “The History of Sadness”, the achingly clever-clever graffiti Oliver sprays on walls etc. etc. Maybe I am just cold of heart but this sort of stuff gets on my nerves rather than awakening my warmer feelings. Clearly I’m getting old.

Someone who isn’t getting old is Hal. Played with Oscar-winning bravado and joie de vivre by Christopher Plummer, the film gets most (if not all) its emotional mileage out of Hal’s embracing of life and his equally profound regret at the years of concealment and emotional distance he inflicted on others. One tearful moment sees the extremely sick Hal holding Oliver’s hand on a bed, sadly reflecting he wanted to do this throughout Oliver’s childhood but didn’t feel he could. 

The film carefully positions Hal’s late acceptance of his personality and explosion of embracing life as an inspiration, and contrasts it with Oliver’s buttoned up repression. To be honest, someone as repressed and traditional as Oliver might well have taken slightly longer (you suspect) to deal with the fact that his dad comes out after the death of his mother – but then this is basically a father-son romance, so you can’t blame Mills for trimming down this expected drama. 

Instead the story focuses largely on Oliver learning to open his heart to a relationship with Melanie Laurent’s French actress (a relationship by the way so impossibly quirky the two of them meet at a fancy dress party – he’s dressed as Freud, she can only communicate through writing notes because she has laryngitis. To be fair it’s marginally less irritating than it sounds). This story is cross-cut with flashbacks to Hal’s last few years that illustrate different lessons Oliver learned from his dad.

This is all rather artfully and gently done, but very traditionally structured. The flashback material with Hal is far stronger and Christopher Plummer’s mix of playfully raging against the dying of the light and gentle emotion and sadness overwhelms the modern plotline. It’s hard to get wrapped up in Oliver’s stumbling shoot-yourself-in-the-foot courtship of Anna, when you have Plummer ripping through a beautiful monologue on how he was desperate not to be as distant as his own father. Even the jokes get overwhelmed – nothing in Oliver’s storyline is as amusing as Hal raving over garage music.

The real interest to be honest is in the relationship between Hal and Oliver, and the late blooming of emotional honesty and love between them (Oliver claims he can barely remember Hal from his childhood, and flashbacks confirm this). Even this however could have had more impact if the film had allowed more of this distance to be seen in the film, as we then lose the impact of the two characters starting to bond. 

In fact I’d love to have seen more of Hal and Oliver together, perhaps more intercut with flash-forwards about Oliver learning to accept love and joy into his life in the same way Hal did in his final years. Reversing the format, effectively. The warmest bond in the story is between Hal and Oliver and this seems a little lost. Ewan McGregor does his best, but he feels slightly constrained by the role, as if aware that he had the pressure of playing the director’s own life story. Melanie Laurent is adorable as Anna, but she feels like the sort of character one only meets in movies – beautiful, sexy, cute, showing the sort of incredible patience for the timid, confused, difficult Oliver that never happens in real life (in my experience).

Such a format change would also mean more Christopher Plummer, which is never a bad thing – and certainly wouldn’t be here, in one of Plummer’s finest performances: fun, witty, warm, kind, sad and gentle with a very touching relationship with his much younger lover (played very well by a sweetly naïve Goran Višnjić). It’s Plummer’s film and he rides above a story that often seems a little too unoriginal and quirky than you might have expected.

The Wages of Fear (1953)

Yves Montard and Charles Vanel struggle to collect The Wages of Fear

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Cast: Yves Montard (Mario), Charles Vanel (Jo), Folco Lulli (Luigi), Peter van Eyck (Bimba), Véra Clouzot (Linda), William Tubbs (Bill O’Brien), Darío Moreno (Hernandez), Jo Dest (Smerloff)

You’re stuck in a dead-end town without the money to get out. There’s been an accident at the local mining company that runs the town. They need to get super-duper, explosive material up there to blast the mine and prevent a fire spinning out of control. The only way to do it is in a truck up a bumpy hill road in the blazing sunshine. The company will pay a small fortune to anyone desperate or stupid enough to do it. Would you collect these Wages of Fear?

That’s the conceit in Clouzot’s slow-burn, tension-packed masterpiece. Mario (Yves Montard), along with several others, is stuck in a dead-end desert town in South America unable to afford the air fare to escape. Mario befriends an ageing gangster Jo (Charles Vanel), now also stuck in the town, and the two of them are tempted to drive trucks full of nitroglycerine (which can explode when hot or under the slightest jolt or pressure) to help put out a massive fire at the local American-owned oilfield. Along with Bimba (Peter van Eyck), a German, and Luigi (Folco Lulli), an Italian, they drive trucks up there – but the pressure affects the men in different ways and the dangers of the drive make it highly unlikely that they will all make it.

The Wages of Fear is the classic slow-burn leading to (literally) explosive tension. It’s almost a full hour into the film before the nitroglycerine makes an appearance, but after that the film lays a constant series of dilemmas in the way of our heroes as they try to make their way 300 miles to the oilfield. Never before has the slightest jolt of a car, or the smallest pot hole, been more wracked with danger. Is it any wonder each of the men go a little insane: who could do this and not be a little cracked in the head?

Clouzot directs this with a sublime brilliance. The film is a masterclass in subtle build-up. The opening act of the film establishes the characters of Mario and Jo (and to a lesser extent Bimba and Luigi). We see them in their natural habitat, and learn to understand their characters so thoroughly, that we are genuinely surprised and a little unnerved about how much they change over that long and dangerous 300 miles. Yves Montard’s Mario is a quintessential cool customer – hanging at bars, treating his girlfriend Linda (Vera Clouzot, the director’s wife) with a distant disdain – but he’s also a man easily influenced, prone to hero worship not least to new-guy-in-town Jo, on whom he has a massive man-crush.

Jo, played with a sustained brilliance by Charles Vanel, is the big fish in the small pond, a small-time gangster lording it over his fellow town-dwellers with an unruffled arrogance. Jo has no interest in anyone else and claims Mario’s allegiance as his right – in fact he takes delight in provoking Luigi, Mario’s previous best friend (crush?). He watches with amused detachment when Mario drops Linda to spend time with him. He openly provokes a fight in a bar with Luigi (Clouzot’s first sequence of bubbling tension, brilliantly shot with an unease and unpredictability that could see almost anything happen once a gun emerges) and makes a big show of his past relationship with O’Brien the oil company representative. 

The stage is set for us to see Mario as too laid-back, distracted and indolent to succeed and Jo as a collected, calm and controlling presence made for drama. So it works even better to see these two men change position as the journey continues and fear grabs Jo in a way that seems to surprise even him. Mario, meanwhile, becomes almost ruthlessly focused in his determination to see the mission through to its completion, and increasingly distant from those around him. Because in these life and death situations, there is no time for fear or to mollycoddle the concerned. When a single mistake could kill you all, you can’t afford to waste time on someone too scared to carry on.

Mind you, the opening section of the film brilliantly establishes the desperation these people feel to escape from this dead-end town. A young man, not selected for the driving operation, hangs himself in despair. Bimba states that the slightest horseplay or distraction on his trial run with the truck during the selection process will lead to deadly consequences for the joker – and he’s not fooling around. O’Brien of the oil company makes it clear that the mission is almost certainly suicide – and that the company basically doesn’t care at all about the fates of those selected to go on it: they are completely disposable.

Those selected are both lucky and unlucky – and Clouzot uses a brilliant early sequence to establish the danger of the nitro. O’Brien calmly takes a small sample of it in a shot glass and spills it to destructive effect. As one reviewer said, “you sit waiting for the theatre to explode”. Part of this is the way Clouzot uses the men in the film: they are very much rats on a running track, trapped in a route full of danger, with no release or relaxation from the deadly load they carry. Extraordinary sequences abound in the film’s second half, like a whistle-stop our of tension set-pieces from films.

The dangers of everything are doubled because the characters are driving a portable bomb. Moving over a bumpy road – terrifying. Driving round a tight corner on a rickety wooden platform over a cliff – tense enough normally, even more so now. Encountering a road block with a giant stone – guess we need to use some of this incredibly reactive stuff (a brilliant scene as Bimba tenderly pours a small amount of nitro into a drilled hole and rigs up a fuse). Crawling the truck through an oil slick – sublime. And it works so well because the film makes clear that our heroes have no choice at all, they simply must get the money that will come from finishing the mission.

Clouzot totally understands the personal dynamics that underpin these crisis situations. Bimba and Luigi slowly overcome distance to find a real bond between them. Meanwhile Mario and Jo’s relationship disintegrates, as Jo’s cowardice leads to Mario treating him with increasing disdain, contempt and finally disgust. Mario himself becomes increasingly adamantine, fixed on the mission’s success at the exclusion of all other concerns. 

Clouzot ends events with a supremely ironical touch, almost darkly comic – but then somehow not a surprise in this film where life is cheap and can literally blow up in your face at any moment. Sublimely directed, and a masterclass in tension and subtle character development, it features a brilliant performance from Charles Vanel and constantly rewards viewing. The Wages of Fear are high – but their price can be even higher.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

Samuel L Jackson and Bruce Willis Die Hard with a Vengeance

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Bruce Willis (John McClane), Jeremy Irons (Simon Gruber), Samuel L Jackson (Zeus Carver), Graham Greene (Detective Joe Lambert), Colleen Camp (Detective Connie Kowalski), Larry Bryggman (Inspector Walter Cobb), Anthony Peck (Detective Ricky Walsh), Nick Wyman (Mathias Targo), Sam Phillips (Katya)

The Die Hard franchise has spawned multiple imitators, all with the signature format of a hero taking on villains in a confined space: everything from a boat, to a train, to a plane to a bus. Of course the franchise itself had already started to head away from this in Die Hard 2, which takes place across an entire airport. Die Hard with a Vengeance pumps it up even further by setting the action in an entire city. Sure it loses some of the magic claustrophobia of the original, but then it’s got to do something different right? 

John McClane (Bruce Willis) is on suspension, with his marriage in ruins and his life on the skids. No change there then. But he’s dragged out of retirement when terrorist Simon (Jeremy Irons) detonates a bomb in New York and makes it clear he’ll keep doing so until McClane agrees to take on a series of games and challenges across New York – each with deadly penalties. In the first of these, with McClane wearing a very unfortunate sign in the middle of Harlem, he is saved by Zeus (Samuel L Jackson), a shop owner with his own problems with white people, who is forced to join McClane on Simon’s deadly game. After a bomb detonates in Wall Street, McClane starts to wonder: does Simon have an ulterior motive?

Die Hard with a Vengeance is probably most people’s second favourite Die Hard film, and it’s easy to see why. It’s got scale, bangs, loads of action and jokes. It largely takes the best things from the two previous movies and tries to replicate them: so we’ve got the bigger scale and stakes of Die Hard 2, matched with the battle of wits that powered Die Hard. At the same time, it avoids Die Hard 2’s habit of squeezing in as many references and characters from the first film as possible, and tries to make something fresher.

But yet, as I get older, I’m actually getting less keen on it. Guiltily, I think I prefer both entries 2 and 4. I just feel there is something a bit mean about Die Hard 3, something a bit brutal and vicious. Now I am no shrinking violet, but there is a lot (and I mean a lot) of angry swearing in Die Hard 3 – which actually makes it feel rather dated. Everything is “f this” and “f that”. But it’s symptomatic of a particularly 1990s action vibe about the film.Anyway it’s all angry – everyone in the film is angry most of the time. I mean sure they are stressed, but McClane was stressed in the last two films but it didn’t just project itself through fury.

McClane himself, in the first two films, may be hard as nails but he’s also a regular guy doing his best to save lives. But in this film he’s just extremely angry – probably because the character is hungover – and feels less like a police officer interested in preserving life than a vigilante acting above the law. Twice in this movie he executes people (one of whom is trying to surrender (in German)!) with no real warning. The blood and guts count seems a lot higher. The camera lingers on corpses and spurting blood. The character just feels harder to relate to. 

It’s no great surprise that the original intention of the script was for McClane to become actually more and more unhinged by events. It gets lost at the end, when the film settles for a more generic and triumphant ending rather than the unsettling, low-key one originally filmed (which feels like a much better thematic fit for the film you’ve just watched). It would have been interesting to make a film where the hero becomes as damaged and ruthless as the villain – but the studio didn’t want that, so we don’t get it.

McTiernan’s attempt to recapture the vibe of the first Die Hard film also doesn’t quite click. Simon is an odd character, who utilises brute force one minute and then inexplicably spares lives the next. His eventual heist on Wall Street is partly blood-free, partly a brutal slaughter of any resistance. McTiernan is obviously aiming for a battle of wits, but the original concept of Simon setting McClane a series of children’s riddles to solve gets lost half way through the film. Like Die Hard there is an attempt to get a sense of gleeful enjoyment from Simon’s actions, but Jeremy Iron’s character (despite his best efforts) isn’t devilishly charming enough for this to work.

But then things in the film do work. The chemistry between Willis and Jackson is very good, and Jackson really nails a character who is part cocksure, angry radical and half squeamishly out of his depth. The film’s at its most involving when it gets wrapped up in cat-and-mouse games. The first half of the film, which focuses on this, is by far the most interesting and offers the best twist on the action – from riddles about the man going to St Ives, to having to cross New York in a fraction of the time needed, or trying to defuse a bomb by putting four gallons into a five-gallon jug. The more these riddles die away in the second half and the film goes for more generic shooting and killing, the less interesting it becomes.

Not that this sort of stuff isn’t good fun. Although McClane seems more bad tempered and ruthless – and the baddies are mostly faceless goons rather than people – it’s still fun to see him take on the odds so successfully, and to see him being underestimated by the villains (the character is always smarter than he appears). McTiernan, with a huge budget, throws everything at the screen from bombs to fist fights to car chases. He doesn’t manage to create the magic sense of heroism that the first film has in such abundance, or that sense of one man doing what he must to save others, but the film still broadly works.

There is something very 1990s about this film, from its swearing to its violence to its general atmosphere of gritty comic book thrills. It is fun to hear jokes about Hillary Clinton (jokingly named as the next President – oops) and Donald Trump. But it’s that lack of moral purpose to McClane that proves the biggest problem – he’s motivated less by saving lives than by revenge. It’s a crueller film, sharper and meaner, which means for all the enjoyment it can bring, I can’t love it like I do the first film. It takes McClane to dark places, and presents a bad tempered hero it would be hard to like without the first two films. He’s already starting to feel less like a regular put-upon guy and more like an angry maverick dealer in violence. There is less to build on in this film, and perhaps that’s why we had to wait a while until nostalgia made John McClane a character we wanted to see again.

The China Syndrome (1979)

Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon struggle against Big Business interests in the Nuclear Industry in The China Syndrome

Director: James Bridges

Cast: Jane Fonda (Kimberly Wells), Jack Lemmon (Jack Godell), Michael Douglas (Richard Adams), Scott Brady (Herman DeYoung), Wilford Brimley (Ted Spindler), James Hampton (Bill Gibson), Peter Donat (Dan Jacovich), Richard Herd (Evan McCormack), Daniel Valdez (Hector Salas)

Do we really trust nuclear power? There is something about the dangerous possibilities of splitting the atom that alarms people even today. For all that burning coal wrecks our atmosphere, people would still rather that than live downwind of a station powered on substances that could obliterate everything within a five mile radius if something went wrong. The China Syndrome is about exactly that, an accident at nuclear power plant that could spell disaster for California.

Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda) is a roving reporter for a Californian news channel, who (thanks to her sexist bosses) is constantly relegated to ludicrous puff pieces (“Today a hot air balloon landed in downtown LA!”). Sent to a nuclear power plant, she stumbles upon the real news story she has waited her whole career for when she and camera-man Richard Adams (Michael Douglas) secretly film a near catastrophic incident. Investigations try to brush the event under the carpet, but shift supervisor Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon) knows corner-cutting and cost-saving is putting the whole of LA at risk – and, much against his inclination, he needs to speak out. 

The China Syndrome comes very much from that burst of 1970s conspiracy thriller films where shady big-business types are willing to throw almost anything under the bus in order to make a big bonus. It’s a film that takes a pop not only at the heartless bastards running a shoddy nuclear power plant (who couldn’t care less if the reactor is poorly welded together, so long as the money keeps rolling in) but also the hypocritical cowards running the media. The heads of the news channel kowtow swiftly to big business and are staggering in their sexism and race-to-the-bottom news coverage.

This film is as much about this brainless conformism as it is the dangers of nuclear power. The film is full of people who don’t want to rock the boat: half the people working at the plant would rather turn a blind eye to problems than pay the personal price of exposing them – even Jack Lemmon’s manager is the most reluctant whistleblower you’ll see in the movies. Fonda’s journalist may not be happy with her role as airhead eye-candy, but she will play the game in order to get ahead in the industry the role – and many of her media comrades seem almost totally lacking in any journalistic instincts. The film is bookended by inane TV coverage and advertising, a condemnation of an America that doesn’t ask questions and is sleepwalking towards catastrophe.

This catastrophe is, of course, extremely close – the power plant nearly goes into meltdown because a single dial gets stuck on a high reading, leading the control room to believe the nuclear rods are about to get flooded rather than nearly being exposed. Bridges mines a heck of a lot of tension from this crisis – told entirely from the perspective of the control room – as workers react with both stressed fear and a practised professionalism to a crisis that could become a disaster. Its part of a film where regular joes are generally professional and good at their jobs, but are let down and betrayed by the culture encouraged by the higher-ups.

Some of these themes, however, get a bit muddied in the film’s middle third, which gets bogged down way too much in nuclear theory, committee meetings, slow explanations of different types of weld, and dry lectures on the functioning of nuclear energy. While it is admirable that the film has no score, you can’t help but feel that a little music here to add some drama to Lemmon looking at x-rays or Fonda staring at diagrams could have helped pump up the tension. 

But it all gets paid off by the sudden (and surprising) shift to action and drama in the film’s final third, kickstarted by a surprisingly gripping car chase between Jack Lemmon’s quiet station manager and some shady goons hired by the company. Suddenly the film is powering through a tense series of set pieces that both feel like a different movie, while still a natural progression of the stakes.

Bridges directs the film very well. Each scene is calmly and coolly assembled, and he has a great eye and ear for technology and the noises and motions of machinery, which dominate the film – even if the film is rather in love with these background sounds, which risk taking over the soundtrack. It’s all part of stressing the cold mechanicalism and lack of humanity throughout both these industries. Sometimes the foot comes off the gas a little too much – you could probably trim at least 15 minutes – but when it comes to the moments of tension he directs with sharp snappiness.

The acting is also sublime. Jane Fonda is extremely good as Kimberly Wells. Initially she seems as light and superficial as the stories she is forced to cover, but Fonda paints a clever picture of a woman squeezed into playing a role, but yearning for (and capable of) so much more, who when she finds her moment shows levels of determination and cunning you would never have expected. For all her desire to become a ‘proper’ journalist though, Wells is savvy enough to make sure she is being filmed from her good side… Fonda makes her a careerist who uncovers a sense of moral purpose. She also manages to bring real emotion to the role, making Kimberly Wells a character we swiftly connect with.

The movie however is stolen away by Jack Lemmon, brilliantly low-key and everyday as the shift manager who becomes an overwhelmingly reluctant whistleblower. Lemmon’s performance is a perfect study in smallness, of a quiet dignity. He’s got no desire to rock the boat, quietly stating that the “plant is his whole life” – but when stirred, his professional pride transforms into determination to do the right thing, even while his lack of magnetism makes him unpersuasive and hard to take seriously. It’s a terrific performance of low-key tragedy, with Lemmon building the tension with small flashes of resentment, fear, determination and disillusionment flashing across his face. It’s a great reminder of what a marvellous dramatic actor Lemmon was.

Expertly produced by Michael Douglas (who does sterling work in the third-banana role as the camera man overflowing with conviction), The China Syndrome may at times be dry, but it makes up for that with its moments of high drama and moral conviction. By and large it avoids hectoring and lecturing the audience (when not teaching us about nuclear power), and lets its points be soft-sold rather than banged home. With some terrific performances, it’s a film that still feels relevant today, and is a great example of the 1970s conspiracy thriller genre.

Gone Girl (2014)

Rosamund Pike is the Gone Girl leaving husband Ben Affleck in a difficult mess

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Ben Affleck (Nick Dunne), Rosamund Pike (Amy Elliott Dunne), Neil Patrick Harris (Desi Collings), Tyler Perry (Tanner Bolt), Carrie Coon (Margo Dunne), Kim Dickens (Detective Rhonda Boney), Patrick Fugit (Officer James Gilpin), Missi Pyle (Ellen Abbott), Emily Ratajkowski (Andie Fitzgerald), Casey Wilson (Noelle Hawthorne), Lola Kirke (Greta), Boyd Holbrook (Jeff), Sela Ward (Sharon Schieber), Lisa Banes (Marybeth Elliott), David Clennon (Rand Elliott)

In our modern media age, we’ve got massive expectations for how people are meant to behave. With so much of our perception of life filtered through the internet and films we’ve seen, we are reassured when we see behaviours we expect to see, and disconcerted when we see those we haven’t been trained to see. Not distraught enough at your wife going missing? Well you must have done it then!

That’s the problem that faces Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) in this chilling, intricate adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling book. Nick’s wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing in mysterious circumstances, possibly a kidnap, possibly a kidnapping gone wrong. The case becomes a media sensation, but the problem is Nick just isn’t expressive enough, won’t play the role of weeping husband. Instead he’s calm, distant and polite. So naturally rumour swirls that he did it – particularly after more and more manufactured evidence rears up to suggest he might have done. But does Amy have darker secrets than anyone might even suspect? Well to say any more would be a spoiler.

Fincher’s film is a tour-de-force of deliberately cold, polished looking perfection – which is designed to reflect back the surface perfection of the Dunnes’ deeply flawed marriage. Fincher’s film is in many ways a jet black social satire, using its almost outlandish shocks and twists to involve the audience in that “oh-no-they-didn’t!” way, in the same way that the Dunne media story fascinates the people in the movie.

“What have we done to each other?” Nick asks in voiceover early in the film, and it’s the question the film tackles obliquely: how much of the flashbacks to the relationship we see between Amy and Nick is real and how much springs from unreliable narration from Amy’s diary? Two handsome people living the American dream, but how much of it is an invented or projected narrative? Is their whole life a performance they are living for themselves and for others? Poor old Amy is even already semi-fictionalised person, a parents using her life as inspiration for a beloved children’s book character Amazing Amy.

So when Amy goes missing, the strain on Nick is very different from what you might expect. Rather than being consumed with grief, he feels wearied and dutiful about continuing a performance of a marriage which has long since ended. Nick’s actually too honest for this world – he won’t put on a show of how he is supposed to feel, he can only try not to make too much of a show of what he really feels. The mystery that builds around his and Amy’s marriage is born in this blunt honesty, of someone who won’t be what people want him to be. Of course that doesn’t stop Nick from being selfish or even a whiner.

Fincher mixes this intelligent commentary on society with, to be honest, the sort of bizarre extremism and bunny-boiling antics that make you unsurprised to hear he was inspired by Paul Verhoeven while making the film. It’s a film that shifts gears notably in the second half to become an increasingly gothic horror-thriller. A lot of this is powered also by Rosamund Pike’s excellent performance as Amy, a woman who seems almost completely cryptically unknowable, whose whole life has been a performance, and for whom taking on a series of roles and personalities is clearly not a challenge. Needless to say the person she turns out to be, and what she is capable of, is completely different from what the film leads you to expect.

It’s no surprise that a relationship featuring a person like Amy could go as south as the Dunnes’ has, but then Nick is hardly a saint either. Ben Affleck is just about perfect casting as a sort of All-American charmer gone to seed, a prickly fellow who wants privacy but also partly grows to enjoy the drama that surrounds him, once he works out the game he is playing. Fincher’s deliberately distant, smoothly clean-surfaced film frames modern day aesthetic perfection all round this seemingly dream couple.

The whole film is a nightmare vision of a love match gone wrong, of the after-effects of a beautiful story that has spiralled out into disappointment and everyday mundane life. And that struggle to keep the romance going in the familiar is at least something many of us can understand right? So it’s enjoyable to see that matched up with the freaky, semi-gothic blood and guts the film serves up in the second half, and the almost surreal Grand Guignol plot developments that power that half of the film (shot and scripted by Fincher and Flynn with a brilliant mixture of tension, horror and black comic delight at its extremity).

Like many Fincher films, there are several delightful performances. Pike is a revelation in a gift of a role, Affleck very good channelling his life lived in the spotlight. Carrie Coon is a stand-out as Nick’s exasperated, down-to-earth and loving twin sister. Kim Dickens is authorative and questioning as the police detective investigating the case, and Tyler Perry assured and cool as a hot-shot lawyer. Playing way against type, Neil Patrick Harris is pretty unforgettable as a slightly self-satisfied rich kid still holding a candle for Amy after all these years.

But the main success of the film is the whipper-sharp coldness of its execution, the cool tension Fincher ekes out of every moment, and the violent, Vertigo-ish obsession he gets out of every moment. Gone Girl works because it’s at first a chilling what-if story of a man in a media storm, which becomes a sort of black comedy so extreme that it pulls a delighted audience in to gasp at audacious characters getting away with outrageous things. As a black comic thriller it’s delightful.rela