The Eagle: Fatherless son searches for a standard in a savage land

The expository titles that open The Eagle emerge from a haze of computerized mist, a figurative fog that envelops the ancient history about to be conjectured upon. Inspired by the legend of the Ninth Spanish Legion, the words tell of how in 120 A.D. 5000 Roman soldiers journeyed into uncharted Northern Britain and vanished without a trace, along with their beloved standard, a silver eagle whose loss seems to have grieved Rome far more than that of its troops. But our story really begins 30 years later, with the arrival of centurion Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) at a remote, dilapidated garrison not far from the dreaded northern frontier. It seems an undesirable post, but Marcus Aquila has his reasons for being there: his father led the aforementioned ill-fated, now infamous, expedition.

Based on Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth, The Eagle may be set in Roman-occupied Britain, but its trajectory most closely resembles that of a revisionist Western, with its hero, devoted to his flag yet fundamentally an individualist of stoic integrity, traversing hostile terrain rife with primitive yet fierce aboriginal warriors in the name of some grandiose colonialist project. After an act of bravery lands Marcus Aquila a damaged knee, a medal and an honorable discharge, he hears rumours of recent Eagle sightings up in the Highlands and vows to retrieve it, with only Esca (Jamie Bell), his noble native slave, as companion and guide. So this lone ranger and his Tonto go behind enemy lines, off the map, and into the vastness of Scotland’s murky glens on what is surely a pointless quest, a journey into the heart of darkness for a hunk of metal, not even a person, though perhaps the real goal is to apprehend some obscure truth about a long-lost father and vindicate his tarnished legacy.

Reuniting Last King of Scotland director Kevin MacDonald, scripter Jeremy Brock, and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, The Eagle is transporting and richly atmospheric, pulling you in on the strength of its storytelling and gorgeously rugged images, some illuminated only by flickering candles. A moonlight fight is more brutal for its gloom, as is the vision of barbecued invaders resembling rabid hippies and fighting like wild dogs, crazed with the rage of the colonized. Later on the Pict tribes are introduced, the tables turned, Marcus Aquila becomes the slave, and there’s something transfixing in seeing this hulking hero kneel before lanky warriors who decorate themselves so as to look like they literally emerged from the surrounding stone, cold sea and hardscrabble. MacDonald refrains from any fashionable indulgence in gore, but reveals a deft understanding as to how to cultivate our anticipation of violence with close-ups of sharpened spikes spinning on the sides of cartwheels, or a knife about to plunge into a knee to perform surgery without anesthetic.

Brock’s dialogue however is often dry or simply too on the nose. Donald Sutherland turns up for a nice supporting bit, and there’s a scene where he provides amusingly colourless colour commentary to the coliseum fight that introduces Esca: “Look at that. Look at that!” But what’s spoken in The Eagle is secondary to what transpires, and the story itself is fascinating. At least for the first two-thirds. The film’s last act is disappointingly stupid, though in hindsight isn’t hard to see coming. I suppose says something about how all of us, oppressed and oppressors both, are capable of heinous acts and old soldiers never lose their fire. If only the story didn’t reward its genocidal Romans by feeding their vanity and idolatry. You can’t help but imagine the alternate version where Marcus Aquila finds the lost eagle but it’s been consigned to life as a rusty anvil or paperweight, or collecting dust in some closet where later humans will store forgotten bowling trophies and unwanted crock pots.

The Mechanic: Trying to make a decent contract killer out of a punk-ass loose canon

The Mechanic distinguishes itself almost instantly from your run-of-the-mill contemporary hitman-as-antihero actioner by way of its relative efficiency, dearth of annoying cutting frenzies and absence of ostentatious computer-enhanced tomfoolery. Most pleasingly, it also sports a far more interesting soundtrack than is the norm for a Jason Statham vehicle. Statham’s stoic killer, one Arthur Bishop, digs Schubert and high-end hi-fi, lives in quiet seclusion in the everglades, and is considering purchasing a nice little yacht.

After he’s paid to bump off Harry, his aged mentor—a pleasing cameo from Donald Sutherland in a wheelchair—he attempts penance via playing surrogate big brother and all-round Mister Miyagi to Steve, Sutherland’s ne’er-do-well brute of a son, played with remarkable nuance by Ben Foster, who exercised somewhat similar neuroses as the troubled Iraq vet in last year’s intelligent war-at-home drama The Messenger. But Steve’s something of a sadomasochist. He gets his kicks from dirty fights and punk-ass recklessness, the antithesis of Bishop’s “Make it clean” mantra. So when Bishop starts subcontracting jobs to the kid of course everything rapidly goes to hell. Meanwhile Steve, ignorant as to who killed dad, starts to wonder why Bishop’s being so nice to him all of a sudden.

Statham’s so rarely used to full effect. It’s refreshing to see him in a picture devoid of splatter, misogyny, sexual assault, inane video game aping, and bad comedy. But this remake of the 1972 film of the same name, which starred Charles Bronson, whose career certainly had its limits but could still serve as an instructive model for the Statham, rarely rises above being a classyish regurgitation of well-worn macho clichés, replete with a gold-hearted hooker who serves virtually no purpose. All of which is fine, of course, which is to say easy enough watch flicker across a screen for 92 minutes. The mostly straightforward direction comes from Simon West, who incidentally hasn’t helmed a feature since Tomb Raider. His handling of a sequence in which a romantic evening out with two tough guys turns into a monster truck rally for humans is bracing enough. The script was co-written by Lewis John Carlino, who wrote the original, but it feels less updated than resuscitated. It does have one great line: “I’m going to a put a price on your head so high,” Tony Goldwyn’s baddie tells Statham, “every time you look in the mirror you’re going to want to shoot yourself in the face.” I’m glad Statham doesn’t actually shoot his own face, but I kinda wish he’d sever ties with his agent.

Charlie don't slurp

Return of the robotical son: Astro Boy

Based on Tezuka Osamu’s beloved manga and anime franchise, Astro Boy is set partly in the clean and luxurious floating Metro City, and partly in the vast trash heap that constitutes the planet below, a dystopian vision in which the segregation of the wealthy elite from the underprivileged majority has been pushed to extremes—as have issues of waste disposal. Dr. Tenma (voiced by Nicolas Cage) experiments with “pure positive” and “pure negative” energies, which gets war-giddy President Stone (Donald Sutherland) jazzed on inventing excuses for some ultra-high tech ass-kicking to help boost his chances at re-election.

During one such experiment, single parent Tenma’s precocious only-son Toby (Freddie Highmore) is killed. Tenma plummets into grief and determines to bring Toby back to life by fusing some of the kid’s DNA into the body of a powerful robot look-alike, complete with all of Toby’s memories. But Tenma quickly becomes horrified by his creation, this cheerful little golem with his dead son’s smile and voice and demands for love. The robot Toby, our Astro Boy, is finally stranded on Earth, where other robots are onto his artificial nature while humans assume he’s one of them. He hooks up with a band of orphans led by one Ham Egg (Nathan Lane), a futuristic Fagan who hosts monster robot rallies. So Astro Boy has to keep a low profile, pose as a normal boy, conceal from the world his jet-propelled feet, superhuman strength, and machine guns ready to pop out of his synthetic flesh. Something that proves difficult once he knows that President Stone is on his tail and calling for his super-charged heart.

I’m not sufficiently versed in existing Astro lore to be certain how much of Flushed Away director David Bowers’ feature version extrapolates, bastardizes or re-invigorates the source material, but there’s no denying how engaged I was in Astro Boy’s recasting of Pinocchio, not to mention Oliver Twist, the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, and Freaks, its merging of familiar myths with modern concerns of class, isolationism, technological ownership, the environment, and the residual effects of rampant consumerism. Of course the implications are all pretty explicit, which seems perfectly legitimate given that this movie, with its moral parables, its colorful, fluid imagery and its exciting, explosive set pieces, is clearly geared toward a family audience.

Despite some notable histrionics from Cage, the vocal performances go a long way toward making Astro Boy feel buoyant amidst several detours into tragedy and eerie questions about what it means to be human. Sutherland actually underplays President Stone’s obvious roots in Bush Jr., Kristen Bell gives surprising texture to Cora, Astro Boy’s teenage love interest—speaking of eerie questions—and Samuel L. Jackson has a lot of fun within the very limited range of vocal possibilities of Zog, the giant robot pal revived by Astro Boy. Fantastic and somewhat simplistic as Astro Boy is, there’s a pleasing degree of investment here in what the consequences of our continued exploration of virtual culture and the uses and abuses of artificial intelligence. Sure beats the hell out of Surrogates, in any case.

Watery, grave: exploring the murky depths of Carnival of Souls and Don't Look Now

It occurs, of course, only after the car carrying those girls has spilled over the edge of the old bridge and sank into the river. It occurs only after that credit sequence, awash in spectral organ, where titles appear at angles that mirror the branches and roots that loom crookedly above the water’s surface. That’s when we get the image of Mary Henry, hair caked in muck, slightly bowed, arms slightly extended out from her sides, a stunned amphibian creature emerging in some primal state of shock along the muddy banks of the accident site. It’s the traumatic image that everything in Carnival of Souls (1962) can arguably be reduced to. But why reduce it? I’ve seen the movie numerous times since that first midnight screening I caught while in high school at a little prairie art house, back when such screenings were common, and it seems only richer, not the inspired work of atmospheric amateurism I once took it for but something far more knowing and adult and genuinely strange.

So Mary (Candace Hilligoss) walks away from the accident and, after some unseen recovery period, sets out to start a new life in a new town, some god-fearing place in Utah as it happens, where she can play organ in the church—and play the soundtrack to her own movie—and be perfectly anonymous, and lose herself, and live next door to an alcoholic lech who works in a factory and is nearly beside himself with desire for her, egged on by Mary’s capricious, peculiar demeanor, ice cold one day, friendly and needy and maybe even willing the next. He seduces her with coffee and normalness, then later takes her out bowling, but she really just wants to visit the swampy old abandoned palace outside of town, where pale figures beacon to her, rising from the water as if to say, We know where you’re coming from.

When Mary leaves her hometown—actually Lawrence, Kansas, the place William S. Burroughs called home after decades of restlessness—the kindly minister at the church imparts to her how “it takes more than intellect to be a musician—put your soul into it.” But Mary seems so utterly vacant, like she walked out of an audition for Bresson, and anyway she’s not a believer, at least not in the Lord, though the ghosts she catches sight of scare her half to death. Rather than win the hearts of churchgoers, she just wants to hit the right notes—they have a meaning that only she can decipher. She is also an unlikely feminist heroine, setting out by herself in her car, vulnerable but independent, resistant to the patriarchal comforts of fathers, boyfriends, doctors and the church. But there is a price to be paid for going it alone. We learn so little about Mary’s past, but it’s clear that the road trip that brings her to Utah is a flight from one of those “private traps” Norman Bates discussed with Marion Crane just a couple of years previous. If you’ve seen Carnival of Souls, you know just how airtight a trap it is.

I’ve heard it speculated that Colorado-born Herk Harvey directed over four hundred educational and industrial films during his years in Lawrence, and it says a lot about the secret artist in certain people that something so clogged with morose beauty could stay welled up in Harvey during all those years of cranking out documentaries. But who knows? Maybe there are hints of something dynamic and spooky in such titles as What About Drinking? (54), Operation: Grass Killer (61) and Pork: The Meat With a Squeal (63). Harvey made Carnival for an estimated $33,000.00, the production design having been largely provided by a pavilion outside Salt Lake City that caught his eye. The cast were mostly non-professionals, and many of them are quite stiff, delivering flat dialogue that aligns with the odd cutting patterns and the dropping of sound here and there. And it works, and not just as a cult movie. Reality is hardly grounded in this tale and the poverty row mise-en-scène feels as much the product of an aesthetic as necessity. The film remains singular, and not only because Harvey never made another feature.

Like Carnival, Don’t Look Now (73) begins with an accident, and with an image of its protagonist rising up out of murky waters, streaked with the earth that’s under the water, a man rendered monster in a moment of harrowing desperation. Because the film is edited as a sort of hopscotch puzzle, patterned on temporal ripples that evoke a distinctive flashing imagery shared by both an idea of what telepathy must be like and by the nature of the movies, it also, in a sense, can be reduced down to this one image. But reduction is precisely what the story, taken from Daphne Du Maurier, warns against, the title being ironic: look now, damn it, and then look again—you might just be missing something unfathomably important.

I don’t want to over-emphasize the links between these two films, but I do like the fact that in more or less randomly revisiting them in the days leading up to Halloween they revealed these very curious connection points. Nicolas Roeg, to say the least, is a far more consciously artful director than Harvey, with a career that goes all over the place but frequently touched on something like genius, yet at the same time he seemed very careful to invite a great deal of accident and spontaneity while making Don’t Look Now, and the details yielded from this approach just keep paying off when you watch it again. The story concerns John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura (Julie Christie), a Canadian and an English woman long married and freshly grieving for a dead child. Though, like Mary, he’s not a believer, John finds work restoring a crumbling church in Venice, a place I can’t imagine why you’d ever visit if you watched the movies—try following this one with The Comfort of Strangers (90). Laura seems unable to revive herself from grief until she meets, accidentally, the two traveling Scottish sisters, one sighted, the other second-sighted, who claim to have news of her dead daughter. They also claim that John has the gift, and that if he’s smart he’ll start to use it.

The portrait of familiar love and shared tragedy between John and Mary is tremendously resonant and moving, even if you don’t entirely respond to the notorious sex scene, inter-cut with other images of domestic behaviour and accompanied by a homey tune. Christie is radiant with hope after she meets the weird sisters and seems more in love with her husband for having gleaned something he hasn’t yet. Sutherland, in that wonderful wig, is very touching in his gentleness and patience while also giving hints of neglect and fear in his reasonableness. That both actors had worked with Robert Altman not long before might go some distance in explaining just how easily they could immerse themselves into their roles, and even more into their surroundings, while still remaining star presences throughout. They are both so subtle and easy with the more portentous demands of the story, such as the early scene where John merely closes a window and causes grit to fly into the blind psychic’s eyes, one of several acts that render him unintentionally culpable for another’s misfortune, the first being his spilling of water on a slide, causing an image to be consumed by red, and, in some deeply sinister logic, causing his daughter to drown? It’s a horrible implication, and it’s the real meat of Du Maurier’s best work, not unrelated to Melanie Daniel’s mildly sensational arrival setting off a small neurotic apocalypse in ‘The Birds.’

Roeg made several superb, obsessive, haunting movies in the 70s and early 80s, and the title of one of them, Bad Timing (80), could easily have worked for Don’t Look Now. Fate may or may not be an active agent in this movie—against all odds, it’s left deliberately ambiguous—but so many events possess their own inherit disaster. Inevitability hides in every scene, though it only reveals itself to us in that final killer flashback montage. The ubiquitous water and other reflective surfaces splash and offer clues along the way. The truly horrible ending shocked me more upon my second viewing than it did on the first. I somehow forgot what was coming, or, like John, maybe I was just in denial. This is the kind of movie that makes you want to reconsider your relationship to your instincts.