Jeff Daniels

The Divergent Series: Allegiant

Diretor: Robert Schwentke (2016)

The third episode in this plodding sci-fi franchise grimly marches on to my general indifference.

Once again it looks fabulous, is filled with action and fizzes with great ideas. Thankfully there’s less abseiling, climbing and running than in previous instalments.

But it’s riddled with clumsy editing, needlessly fidgety camerawork, thin characters and leaden attempts at humour.

Touching on many modern concerns, the script has identity theft, genetic engineering, child exploitation, ethnic cleansing, ecological ruin, and personalised drone warfare.

All this good work collapses on itself due to a lack on underpinning logic, alarming plot holes and pedestrian performances.

Following on from the last film, called Insurgent (2015) for those of you still with us, the overthrow of Chicago’s brutal regime has resulted in mob rule, show trials and executions.

So freedom fighter Tris and her friends escape into the radioactive wasteland beyond the city wall.

Shailene Woodley has been brightest spark of the franchise but she seems unenthused by the never ending slog of supporting the seemingly never ending series.

They discover an advanced military city of gleaming spires, where they slowly learn the truth of Chicago’s horrific history.

Theo James plays Four, her curiously named romantic interest. Armed with a muscular pout  and great hair but no huge ability, he fails to limp convincingly.

Even the naturally combative and arrogant Miles Teller struggles to energise events as selfish sidekick Peter.

At least newcomer to the franchise, the veteran Jeff Daniels is reliably engaging.

He plays David, the softly spoken director of the sinister sounding Bureau of Genetic Welfare.

Violent blasts of music attempt to drown out the dull chorus of gunfire, explosions and painfully functional dialogue.

‘That doesn’t make any sense’ says Tris. It’s the only insightful line in the movie.

★★☆☆☆

Steve Jobs

Director: Danny Boyle (2015)

A terrifically talented cast are in perfect sync in this biopic of Steve Jobs, the charismatic and complex founder of the technology giant Apple Inc.

It’s as smooth, sleek and as tightly engineered as one of their computers or iPhones, but has problems with it’s memory and crashes at the worst possible time.

A binary figure who considered his employees to be with him or looking for a new errr, job, the Apple chief died in 2011.

Ashton Kutcher played him in the poorly recieved Jobs (2013) and he is rebooted here in a perfectly calibrated performance from Michael Fassbender.

Far from PC, he’s a bullying, vindictive and paranoid, a control freak with a messiah complex who inspires a noisy devotion in his disciples.

The university dropout was neither an engineer or a designer but was blessed with an intuitive understanding there are vast amounts of money to be earned through brand design and marketing.

Plus trapping his customers into an operating system incompatible with competing systems or products creates slaves of his customers.

This obsession with creating a closed operating system reflects Jobs emotional inner life. The prophet of the future surrounds himself with an  emotional firewall.

In contrast, sociable Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who wants to create a more flexible, adaptable open system, while urging Jobs to acknowledge the role others have played in the success of the company.

They produced a computer so intuitive to use a five year old could begin to use it without instruction, the five year old being his daughter Lisa, played by Makenzie Moss.

The script is intelligent, sharp and scorchingly funny in its early stages, there’s no romance, sex or violence, except for when Jobs downloads a torrent of abuse on his colleagues, friends and family.

It’s a typically well-researched work by scriptwriter of the Facebook movie The Social Network (2010) Aaron Sorkin. He’s smart enough to wittily flag up the limitations of the structure.

Framed as a three act play, each act focusses on the press launch of a new Apple product: the expensive first Macintosh computer in 1984, the disastrous NeXT in 1988 and the revolutionary classic iMac in 1998.

As Jobs is celebrated, sacked and rises again the drama stalls.

A lack of a martyr makes for a dull finale as the self-mythologising messiah is allowed his moment of destiny defining redemption.

Ridley Scott‘s astonishing Orwellian themed TV advert for Macintosh is seen and discussed.

But it’s never pointed out the Big Brother imagery invoked to attack his rivals products could easily be used to criticise Jobs and Apple itself.

He is creepily aware of the small details of his colleagues’ lives. They form a dysfunctional surrogate family.

Kate Winslet sports a Polish accent and some unfortunate fashions as Joanna, Jobs’ head of marketing and his ‘work wife’. It says something about a corporation when the marketing department represents its compassionate soul.

Jeff Daniels is father figure John Sculley, the ill-fated CEO of Apple against whom Jobs rebels. Seth Rogen plays his ‘bro’ Wozniak.

Few directors possess director Danny Boyle’s consummate command of music to accentuate the visual drama, or have his ability to cajole convincing performances out of young children.

Though Boyle’s attempts to add some visual dynamism through his restless camerawork, he can’t illuminate the dark confines of a dialogue heavy script.

An early girlfriend aside any reference to Jobs’ romantic life is absent. The huge job cuts he instigated on his triumphant return to the company are glossed over.

Coldly calculating in it’s refusal to condemn Jobs for his sins smacks of legal compromise. It’s not possible to libel the dead but one suspects Apple employ extraordinarily expensive lawyers to police it’s brand.

By the end we’re far from convinced of Jobs’ genius, as his only identifiable talent seems to be in rude manipulation, at which he is extraordinary.

★★★☆☆

The Martian

Director: Ridley Scott (2015)

Blast off to the red planet in this breathless, big budget sci-fi adventure which rockets along to a disco beat.

Based on Andy Weir’s 2011 novel, director Ridley Scott has rarely had so much fun or provided so much clever, crowd pleasing entertainment.

Scott washes away his reputation as a dry visual perfectionist by splashing wild torrents of humour and humanity over his typically brilliant design and cinematography.

When a Nasa team is forced to abort their experiments on the surface of Mars, Mark Watney is assumed dead and left behind.

Intelligent and likeable, Matt Damon is terrifically cast as the marooned astronaut forced to improvise to survive.

His resourcefulness allows him to farm water, oxygen and food but is constantly beset by technical problems, not least having no communications with colleagues in space or on Earth.

The operation he performs on himself is not as graphic as the one Noomi Rapace endured in Scott’s flawed Prometheus (2012) but still not for the squeamish.

Meanwhile Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara and Michael Pena begin the long journey home in their spacecraft.

When a Nasa technician discovers Watney’s alive, his now not-dead presence presents a tricky PR problem, especially if they fail to keep him alive a second time.

It’s a race against time, budgets, office politics and technical limitations.

As harassed Nasa officials, the comic ability of Jeff Daniels and Kristen Wiig are used to good effect in straight roles.

British Oscar nominated star of misery memoir 12 Years A Slave (2013) Chiwetel Ejiofor brings charm and warmth.

Sean Bean is a gruff conscience who brings heart to the constant equation crunching and scores for a big laugh.

The huge success of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) combination of humour, action, state of the art effects and pop tunes is clearly an influence. But this is more grounded and less smug.

With the exception of a strangely retro-titled ‘advanced supercomputer’, an excellent script offers plenty of plausible sounding sciency stuff.

Remember the killer scene in Apollo 13 (1995) when the Nasa techies have to improvise a new gizmo from old hairdryer parts and a vacuum cleaner? Most of The Martian is that scene – but bigger.

There are scenes in China which may well be extended when the film is released in that market. Unlike films such as Iron Man 3 (2013) the Chinese element feels a necessary part of the narrative.

Ideas and motifs touched upon in Silent Running (1972) Robinson Crusoe On Mars (1964) appear.

There’s little bitterness, fear or insanity but vast amounts of hope, hard work and optimism.

The Martian celebrates the courage, ingenuity and loyalty of humanity. It is a cry from the heart for the return of to an age of space exploration.

Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski worked on Scott’s flawed Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014). Scott often has him shoot from a low angle to include ceilings and skies in his shot, heightening the sense of Watney’s captivity and suffocating isolation.

Special effects by British SFX house Framestore bring the same bravura technical skills we saw employed to Oscar winning effect in Gravity (2013).

Having made two definitive pieces of sci-fi early in his career with Alien (1979) Blade Runner (1982), Scott has finally added a markedly different but triumphant third at the tail end of it.

Although much of the humour is as dry as the beautiful Martian landscapes, with music by Abba, Donna Summer and the O’Jays, there’s no shortage of atmosphere in this outer space epic.

★★★★★