Scream 4

CAUTION! SPOILERS APLENTY!

The fourth film in the franchise seemed determined to do a couple of things simultaneously, the first was to atone for the rather poor near-spoofy third film, the second was to somehow act as both a sequel and a reboot of the franchise. Generally I thought the film was pretty so-so, it had its moments, but then all the Scream films do despite their overall success. But not one Scream has managed to match that balance of thrills, jump-moments and smart comedy that made the first film such a breakout hit.

With the opening scene in this four-quel Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven delivered a double-whammy of movies-within-movies that rather brilliantly played upon audience expectations for how a Scream film should begin.

Beyond that it was pretty much business as usual, with Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) returning to her hometown, where it all began 15 years ago, to publicize a motivational book about confronting and dealing with fear. Meanwhile there's Sheriff Dewey (David Arquette) still amiably goofing about, having a somewhat frayed marriage with former reporter Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), and a whole heap of new teen characters and disposable others to be despatched or suspected once the screams start.

The first big problem with the film almost didn't exist, in fact, it was nearly the first thing about the film that really made me sit up in my seat and root for it, and it happens the first time Sidney and Ghostface meet.



It's the usual running around the house routine, but this time Sidney doesn't run, she squares straight up to Ghostface and gives 'him' a hefty kicking, and this new character beat was perfect and exciting. At long last here would be a scream-queen who wouldn't turn tail shrieking when the masked murderer enters the building, sure she's not going to dumbly stroll into an impossible situation, but she's not going to chicken out. This would mean the filmmakers would have to be even more inventive with how the killer gets under Sidney's skin and...

Oh no, they changed their minds, and Sidney becomes her usual self in next to no time.

It made me think about Steve Miner's rather good sequel Halloween: H20, where after all the generally teen-based slash-em-up fair has gone on for long enough, Jamie Lee Curtis' long suffering Laurie Strode decides to face her brother alone, she grabs an axe from a nearby fire safety point and strolls across the deserted schoolyard to where she believes her brother will be waiting, and that spine-tingling John Carpenter theme music kicks in. It's a brilliant moment, it doesn't turn Strode into some sort of 'Stallone-like' superhero, it just reinforces the point that she's been running away for so long and it's time to stop running and finish this.



Just a shame that they ended up brining her back for some more terrible sequels after that. Tsk!

Anyway, firstly, Williamson and Craven needed to maintain the strength of Sidney's character, I mean, she'd come to town to promote a book about facing your fears, and she does very little of that in the film. In fact, by the end scene where the killers are revealed she's pretty much going through exactly the same routine as she did at the end of the first film. Perhaps a deliberate 'remake' nod on the part of the creative team, but not really effective with regards to the overall structure of the franchise, it's a moment that seems lazy, her reaction there more to allow the villain to monologue for a bit.

So, the next biggest problem with the film's script was the ending, and that really matters in a slasher movie like this because essentially, moreso than a horror film, the Scream movies are 'whodunnit' mysteries, the scenes where people are being killed are pretty much totally interchangeable unless it's Dewey/Gale/Sydney being pursued, though it's also a huge shame that the filmmakers didn't have the guts to kill off any of their Holy Trinity.

In the end the film's message is 'originals are better than the remakes', the mastermind behind the killings was Sidney's cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) who wants to be famous - like Sidney - for surviving all the horrible killings, whilst framing her ex-boyfriend Trevor for it all. She stabs Sidney in the stomach, proceeds to mutilate herself and wakes up in hospital with all the press fawning over her miraculous escape.



Now, this is, to some degree, almost a great ending if the following ten minutes didn't happen in which Jill finds out Sidney survived the stabbing, she then goes to Sidney's hospital room to finish her off, only to have the Dewey/Gale cavalry show up, and Sidney finally kills Jill, quipping; "Never fuck with the original."

Sigh.

I kind of liked the ending - ignoring Sidney's whimpering - up to the point where Jill wakes up in the hospital and discovers Sidney survived, and I would have been happier and more impressed by the filmmakers if it had gone either of two ways:

1. Police turn up to the house, paramedics come in and find the bodies, Sidney is pronounced dead in front of Dewey and Gale, who embrace. A paramedic looks up from Jill's body and calls out that she's still breathing. Gale and Dewey accompany her on a stretcher as she's being taken to an ambulance. Dewey says some comforting and goofy things to her, which Jill nods wearily at. Gale, rather opportunistically, asks Jill to promise that she'll give her first interview to her, Jill feebly agrees. She is loaded into the back of the ambulance and just as the doors close she lets a happy little grin escape onto her evil face. The end.

2. The ending is exactly the same as it is, even including Jill waking up in the hospital with Dewey next to her bed. However, he is upset because Sidney died, he tells Jill this, expresses some confusion over the case, his tone is peculiar, a little detached, Jill plays it all angelic and innocent, but she can't help feeling a little confused. Dewey gets up to go, he stops at the door and looks back at Jill half over his shoulder, says; "Y'know, there are certain rules in order to survive a scary movie..." He lets out a little sniff of a laugh before turning on the television set and walking out. Jill sits in the bed, looking towards where Dewey left, but the words from the television enter her consciousness; "Viewers may want to look away, as this footage is quite disturbing." The sounds from the television are replaced with the sounds of the scene in which Jill is smashing herself into furniture around the house in order to get away with murder. Jill's eyes grow wide and worried as she watches, realising that the footage she is watching came from the geeky teen Robbie's headset camera and these images were broadcast live across the internet. Jill moves to leave the bed, but realises she's handcuffed to the frame. The end.

I think Ending #1 would have really pissed off a lot of people, I do love an unhappy horror ending, but I think Ending #2 would have been absolutely brilliant and would have forgiven the film for a number of its lazier earlier scenes. It would have closed the book on Sidney's story once and for all in a unique and dramatically surprising fashion, and I think it would have given the audience a satisfying feeling as they left the cinema. I know people 'want' to see the baddie get killed in an exciting way, but the scene in which Jill attacked Sidney in her hospital room was ridiculous, not least because it completely destroyed Jill's defense.

Captain America: The First Avenger

As always: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS!

I was pretty pleased with Joe Johnston's take on the first Avenger for the most part. I'm a big fan of his under-rated - though cult classic - comic book caper Rocketeer, it's still a favourite gee-whiz adventure flick with some truly exhilirating flying sequences, a decent square-jawed hero, Jennifer Connelly exuding style and charm, a delightfully slimy villainous turn from Timothy Dalton and a host of great supporting characters. That was the film that gave me confidence in Johnston's ability to tackle this 40s set yarn, and his ability to play cheesey patriotism without getting too sickly would be key in making Captain America work for an international audience.

For the most part he succeeds, Chris Evans is great as Steve Rogers, there's a fine supporting cast around him - most notably Stanley Tucci's affecting turn - and the film looks really nice. An early set-piece immediately after Rogers gains his enhanced strength is fun, and the montage in which Captain America is born as an advertising tool to sell war bonds is enjoyably tacky and is a great way to build up Rogers frustration that he is unable to 'stop the bullies' of Nazi Germany.

However, the key problem with the film lies in its book-ending, but there seemed to be a simple way to address this issue that would have enhanced the emotional resonance of the film as a whole.



The film's prologue and epilogue are set in modern times, initially with agents discovering a crashed ship in the Arctic and wiping ice away from Captain America's distinctive shield. Immediately as an audience we know how the film ends, that Steve Rogers will wind up frozen in this wasteland to be thawed out and drafted into the Avengers.

In some ways this makes the introduction of a lot of the characters in the ensuing 'flashback' emotionally redundant, because unless they're all frozen in time they hold no relevance to Steve's life and the flutters of fliration between him and Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter will ammount to nothing. We do meet Tucci's good hearted Dr. Erskine and, in the film's finest emotional scenes, he delivers the key moral and is ultimately assassinated, dying in Rogers arms and - much like Peter Parker in Spiderman - inspiring the first real test of Rogers' strength. The film using its action as a release off of the back of an emotional punch that finds the audience willing Rogers to catch the Nazi assassin all the more, it's popcorn at its best.

If only the same could be said for the rest of the villain's plot, a wobbly MacGuffin to tie in with Thor isn't given the same prominence as, say, the ark of the covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, indeed, it winds up just powering a bunch of laser guns that aren't too threatening really. Meanwhile, in a spirited montage, Rogers travels across Europe happily laying waste to all of Red Skull's weapons factories, but despite this carnage it doesn't really seem to effect production of his super plane where the film's final act takes place.



Perhaps if the set-pieces were centred more around discovering the location of the mysterious factory the film would have more tension, a ticking clock, to uncover where Red Skull was based and what he was building. Instead, for the most part, after glancing at a map Rogers knows exactly where he's based and doesn't hesitate to trash every single lab. By the time we finally get, rather unceremoniously, to that final 'secret' factory, Red Skull and his army are all ready to leave and lay waste to the coast of America.

So, how could this final act be improved? From a narrative perspective I understand the desire to use these montages of Captain America's success instead of a series of dedicated set-pieces in pursuit of Red Skull. The initial factory face-off has some nice moments, including a vertigo inducing walk across a rickety beam and a decent first encounter between Hugo Weaving's villain and our hero, delivering a rather cliched 'We're not so different, you and I' kind of speech.

Later, when scrapping on a train, Rogers loses his best buddy 'Bucky' Barnes (Sebastian Stan), though the moment lacks the same heart-rending effect as Tucci's demise, despite Stan's fine performance, but we needed to see more of the two men's camaraderie both pre and post super serum to really feel for the loss of this friend. But, it is this loss that should have been the film's turning point for Rogers as a character, and indeed should have continued to resonate throughout the choices in the narrative.

Ultimately Rogers will be frozen and wake up 70 years later, all the characters we meet here will be dead from old age at least, so why not use that opportunity to - rather mercilessly - have them killed on screen, in front of Rogers to confront him with the horrors of war in a way he couldn't have imagined, a display of reckless hate from Red Skull that would (a) assert him as a truly odious villain and (b) lend a visual reflection of the kind of fatalities that his grand plan would incur; indiscriminate genocide.

It would also give further fuel to Rogers' sacrifice as he takes control of Red Skull's plane and decides to crash it into an icy tomb, for all he knew he would die, and that choice unfortunately doesn't resonate as strongly as, say, George Kirk's does barely five minutes into J. J. Abram's Star Trek movie. If anything the audience may be forgiven for thinking that Rogers will once again rise from the wreckage and make his date with Peggy.



But there shouldn't have even been a date with Peggy on the table as he plowed that plane into the ground, she should have been killed at the hands of the Red Skull prior to the film's final battle, much like the shocking and devastating death of Elizabeth in Barry Levinson's over-looked and wonderful Young Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, that film creates a huge emotional resonance via three key actions:

1. The death of Professor Waxflatter who was Holmes' mentor as a young man.

2. When asked what he wants to be when he grows up, Holmes replies solemnly staring out of the window towards Elizabeth that "I never want to be alone."

3. Elizabeth is shot stepping in the way of a bullet meant for Holmes.

It gives the final battle between Holmes and his nemesis so much more wallop and goes a long way to establishing the emotionally unstable and cold detective of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novels brilliantly - even if it does take many liberties with the chronology of those books!



If Rogers had lost everything in the 40s there would be no reason for him to live other than to put an end to the 'bullying' and he would do this in a powerful gesture by giving his own life to protect the innocent, it would have been a spine-tingling moment and probably punctuated with a sentimental (though probably tear-jerking) shot of Rogers looking towards the picture of his lost love that he kept stowed in his compass. Boy, I'm welling up just imagining it.

This would make Rogers' confusion and anger over his actually surviving the crash even more shocking for him, but his desire to do whatever it takes to avenge those who are wronged and prevent another villain like Red Skull from rising even more palpable.

Unfortunately what we're left with is a decent blockbuster that feels more like an extended preamble to The Avengers than a complete film all of its own.

An Introduction

It's happened to me a lot recently, I've been sat watching a Hollywood blockbuster, full of hope that the wealth of talent behind the camera will deliver something that can match up to the greatest spectacles I've seen at the cinema. Now, that's not to say I demand every film to be a masterpiece, but when you consider the investment of both time and money put into every single film that reaches our movie theatres it's somewhat mind boggling to think how badly it can go wrong. Sure, people make mistakes here and there, perhaps working to a 'committee' is difficult as well, but sometimes films seem to miss out on such fundamentally basic ideas or narrative structure that would so easily render a piece of garbage into something at least entertaining that it saddens me, especially as I'm someone who would gladly take on the job of screenwriter or director for a fraction of the salary!

Occasionally films are pretty enjoyable, but they fumble the ball a few times as the conventions of being a blockbuster weigh heavy on their shoulders, this is why I feel J. J. Abram's Mission Impossible 3 is a bold and intelligent piece of popcorn, putting its set-pieces into the films 2nd Act and having its 'finale' set rather tamely in a few mucky rooms, but this is no less effective than, say, an intergalatic space battle, because it boils the film down to what is absolutely key in delivering a satisfying conclusion: characters, narrative and emotion.

Now, not every film is for every one, and maybe the things I'll gripe about are the things you love (and vice versa), but it's been striking me more often than not that a fair few films might be improved with some narrative tweaks that I was disappointed to not see in theatres and that's what this blog is, my own personal amends to films that are already out, so please bare in mind that there will be spoilers.