Tag: Marvel

Along With The Gods: The Last 49 Days (Singwa hamkke: Ingwa yeon)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When people die, they are taken to the world of the afterlife by specially designated guardians. Dead people undergo up to seven trials in 49 days in order to determine whether they will be reincarnated. That’s the basic premise of Korea’s Along With The Gods franchise.

The original film Along With The Gods: The Two Worlds (Kim Yong-hwa, 2017, pictured below) wowed audiences by piling on extraordinary set pieces exploring a series of hells and their attendant court chambers that comprise the afterlife. It also introduced the guardian captain Gang-lim (Ha Jung-woo), tormented by memories of his human life on Earth as a warrior in the Goryeo dynasty just over a thousand years ago, and his two sidekicks: one a young male warrior type Haewonmak (Ju Ji-hoon), the other motherly young woman Lee Deok-Choon (Kim Hyang-gi), both of whose earthly memories have been wiped.

This time round in Along With The Gods: The Last 49 Days, the three guardians’ human charge is deceased soldier Kim Su-hong (Kim Dong-wook), accidentally shot in the original film by fellow soldier Won Dong-yeon (Do Kyung-soo) then buried by Won and his commanding officer Lieutenant Park (Lee Joon-hyuk). A suggestion here that Kim might not in fact have been dead at the time of his burial is echoed in 1,000-year-old flashbacks of Gang-lim hinting he may have similarly failed to rescue his warrior king father from beneath a pile of battlefield corpses.

Pleading for soldier Kim, the two assistant guardians are forced to return to Earth to capture renegade guardian Sung-ju (Ma Dong-seok) whose self-imposed exile in the house of a grandfather has prevented the latter’s ascension to the afterlife. This forces the film to juggle an effects-laden journey through vast otherworldly landscapes with a more parochial, comic story based around a house and its immediate courtyard area lacking the same epic scale.

Sung-ju reveals the two guardian assistants’ past histories. They lived on Earth at the same time as their captain, effectively throwing in a further plot of a wintry historical epic about warrior sibling rivalry and a homeless girl caring for a group of orphans.

It might be less well balanced overall, but this second film nevertheless achieves some very impressive, state of the art visual set pieces, among them immersion in a sea of biting flying fish, a journey across a burning rock field disgorging humanoid lava monsters and a Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993, and sequels) homage featuring velociraptors, a T. Rex and a mosasaurus. Yet at the same time it delights in throwing in constant narrative complications with scant regard for character development making it all too easy to drown in multiple plot details.

Like its arguably superior predecessor, Along With The Gods: The Last 49 Days been a massive hit in its native Korea. Marvel-type teaser scenes at the end suggest plans for further franchise instalments (there are apparently two more films already in the pipeline) and it all works well enough as visual spectacle or lightweight, popcorn entertainment. However, given the good and dirty idea of people coming to terms with the consequences of their past actions nestling at the margins of the script, it’s a crying shame more couldn’t have been been done with that element on a par with the extraordinary visuals.

Along With The Gods: The Last 49 Days was shown as a London East Asia Film Festival teaser and is out in selected cinemas across the UK on Thursday, August 16th. Watch the film trailer below:

https://vimeo.com/281567990

Avengers: Infinity War

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Movies have always been in the middle of a war between making money on the one hand and having something meaningful to say on the other. There is no doubt whatsoever that Avengers: Infinity War is at the top of its dirty game in taking money. This is the film where numerous characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) converge, some to die onscreen, some to fight in another movie. The Marvel movies are huge at the box office and as long as this one doesn’t screw up (which it doesn’t) it’s set to make a killing. Reviewers are already fawning and Disney’s money men will clearly be delighted.

Some basic, hopefully spoiler-free plot. Thanos (Josh Brolin) is a massive-bodied, intergalactic villain bent on randomly wiping out every other inhabitant of any world he can get his hands on starting, at the beginning of the film, with Asgard, home of Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston). His purpose will be much easier to accomplish if he can obtain six ‘infinity stones’ – Loki has one, Dr.Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) has another – as these will enable him to simply snap his fingers and obliterate half-populations. It’s up to the Avengers and a roughly thirty strong host of Marvel superheroes, including the Guardians Of The Galaxy, to stop him.

So far so good. But so much is piled into two and a half hours here that there isn’t enough time for the material which would really make the film get under your skin. For example, the romance between Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and his assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is reduced to an early scene on earth and a later one where she is heard berating him over an audio comms link about going into battle and not coming home. There are lots of instances where one or two characters get a scene or two that you want to see developed but somehow it gets lost inside the bigger whole – Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Star Lord/Peter Quinn (Chirs Pratt), Vision (Paul Bettany) and Wanda the Scarlety Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) – and there’s also the father and two daughters dynamic of Thanos, Gomora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan). Good showbiz maxim: leave them wanting more. Trouble is, I’m not satisfied with what I’m being served here.

Then there are endless (well executed) fights between Thanos and assorted minions on the one hand and various Avengers or other good guys on the other. It may keep the fans happy, but it gets a little wearing after a while. Special effects, production design, cinematography, editing are all top notch but that does not in itself make a dirty movie. We need something more than groups of people in costumes flying through the farthest reaches of space and beating the crap out of one another on a series of planets with fancy names.

To be fair, after the commendable black bias of this year’s earlier Black Panther (title hero: Chadwick Boseman), that film’s characters crop up in the final third and are given a rather better airing than I would have expected: they feel like much more than a mere token black presence, which is to be commended. But even here, the sheer number of good guys – not to mention the villains and their massed armies – come at you so fast on the screen that it’s hard to feel any empathy for them. For the record, the film also includes the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Spider-Man (Tom Holland).

Could the film have been otherwise given the sheer number of characters it crams in to its two and a half hours? In other hands perhaps it could. There are films out there like, to pick but one example, the thriller The Silence Of The Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) which pack an extraordinary amount of plot and character into two or so hours. Here at the apex of the MCU, though, the franchise is the thing. You’ll have a wild time in the cinema but when the dust has settled, you may wonder where the gravitas was or what was the point beyond selling you the next set of Marvel movies. So really not very dirty at all.

There have been better Marvel movies – and better movies, period.

Avengers: Infinity War is out in the UK on Thursday, April 26th. Available on all major VoD platforms on Monday, August 20th.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Posted on by victorfraga

For those who never saw their less impressive first film, the eponymous Guardians are a rag-tag of space travelling mercenaries often on the wrong side of the law. Rocket (a raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper) has an unfortunate habit of insulting the wrong person at the wrong time. Peter Quill / Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) is a problem solver and adventurer, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) an agile fighter. The group also includes strong man Drax (Dave Bautista), from a race who take everything literally, and cute, walking baby tree-being Groot (voice: Vin Diesel). Welcome to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Clever and efficient story construction ensures that many different narrative strands are deftly balanced with several intertwined plots in play. Romantically involved with an Earthwoman in the 1980s, Ego (Kurt Russell) is an alien who seeds and cultivates mysterious plants on the planets he visits and is searching for his long-lost son Quill. A genetically engineered race called the Sovereign hire our heroes to protect their precious supply of batteries until Rocket steals some, at which point they send assorted armadas and later a gang of mercenaries led by blue-skinned Yondu (Michael Rooker) after them. And so on.

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Unusual elements fire off in every direction in this surprisingly innovative Marvel feature.

Leaving aside the plot, the space opera special effects are peerless and, seen on a huge screen in 3D, spectacular. All of which might be reason enough for the comic’s fans or even your average popcorn moviegoer to see it, if not for those of us who like our cinema on the more subversive side.

Where the film really scores though is in the spaces in between and around the franchising, the plot and the special effects which allow it room to breathe, play and get dirty. Take the very early scene in which the Guardians protect the Sovereign’s world from a marauding, tentacled maw. We’ve seen scenes like this before and they’ve become boring. This film knows that and shows much of the fight scene out of focus in the background or off to the side while in focus in the foreground baby Groot plugs in a sound system and dances to music as the mayhem rages.

Baby Groot will later fail several times to retrieve a simply described object from a sleeping jailer that would allow those who requested it to escape imprisonment and certain death. He keeps returning with various incorrect items. And later still, a lengthy sequence is constructed around baby Groot’s being assigned to press one of two buttons on a detonator, one of which would prove lethal. Infused with the spirit of gag cartoons or burlesque comedy, there’s something wonderfully subversive about all this.

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Some of the superheros from the surprising Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2.

Thus you have another scene where the action stops for Quill to insist that Gamora has an “unspoken thing” for him and dance with her on a balcony. Or a fight sequence where Yondu’s one foot long spear weaves a non-linear trajectory through the air as it takes out a plethora of enemy mercenaries by fatally piercing them one by one. Or an antagonistic character as complex as Gamora’s supposedly villainous sister Nebula (Karen Gillan) who may or may not be trustworthy. Or the iconic Kurt Russell clearly relishing his pivotal role. Or an entire sequence detailing a character’s funeral.

A big budget blockbuster this may be, but unexpected, additional elements constantly fire off in interesting directions without ever compromising form, narrative or visuals. The whole thing is efficiently scripted Hollywood eye candy with grime lovingly rubbed into its very fabric from the bottom up to turn it into something far dirtier and altogether more compelling.

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 is out in showing in cinemas across the UK from Friday, April 28th. Get a feel for the movie by watching the trailer below. Then close your eyes and picture it in 3D.