Mission: Impossible — Fallout (Review)

Mission: Impossible — Fallout (2018)

As a member of Alamo Drafthouse Cinema's Victory Rewards Program, I had the distinct privilege of being among the first audiences to see Mission: Impossible — Fallout after being invited to a pre-release Victory screening of the film. The screening came at the end of a long day full of conferences and meetings, and I walked into the theater really wishing I'd just put off the viewing until after the film's official release, at which point I could have picked a time when I was less tired to go and see it. I was pleasantly surprised to have left the theater a few hours later much more awake than when I arrived. And that was without consuming caffeine.

It should come as no surprise, though. The Mission: Impossible films have really reinvented themselves over the past few years as adrenaline-pumping blockbusters that race from one breathtaking practical stunt to the next. It is one of the last film franchises alive that sells itself on star power and star power alone. You go to Mission: Impossible movies to see what insane stunt Tom Cruise is going to film himself doing this time around, plot, setting, characters, and all the other important elements of story be damned. But the reason I left the theater quite enthused about this new M:I has less to do with watching Tom Cruise jump out of a plane than it does with—somewhat unexpectedly—the story.

The M:I films have been very good at playing out like massive-scale episodes of a weekly procedural television series. They are very old-fashioned in how they tell their stories, in how they market themselves as vehicles for the star. Limited character development in favor of plot-driven action has been the series' hallmark since Brian de Palma's original 1996 adaptation of the old television show. Every movie plays out a standalone story with very little in-universe referencing to the films that came before it. You might see a few familiar faces crop up every now and again, but for the most part every movie is a self-contained venture with new characters and new settings. Each film bears a distinct look and feel, the fingerprints of each film's respective director. It keeps things nice and clean, and you don't have to have seen the one that came before it to understand what's happening in the one you're watching. The M:I series has been a nice reprieve from the current culture of "shared universe" filmmaking, where all movies of any major film series are linked through this intricate web of interconnected characters and plots.

All that to say, Mission: Impossible — Fallout, the sixth film in the M:I series, is the first film in the series that really requires you to have seen the last film to understand what's going on. In fact, it really requires you to have seen every other film in the series to have a full appreciation for what is unfolding onscreen. And I do not mean this in the sense that Fallout incorporates little nods and homages to the previous films. What I mean is that Fallout is thematically linked to every other film in the series because it builds most every aspect of its plot and character drama, and even its action sequences, on everything that has come before. The most iconic scenes from every other M:I are repackaged and served up in Fallout, from the stellar opening sequence of de Palma's 1996 adaptation, to the black leather accented motorcycle chase of John Woo's M:I 2, to the scene where Cruise's character sprints across an entire city in M:I III, and so on. And the reason for these creative decisions on the part of writer/director Christopher McQuarrie (the first director to return to the series, after making Rogue Nation) is perfectly summed up by the film's title: Fallout.

Mission: Impossible — Fallout is a film about consequences. About dealing with all that's come before it. It is, in many ways, the Skyfall of the M:I series. The premise is simple: when three plutonium cores fall into the wrong hands, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team race against the clock to stop nuclear attacks from being carried out against the world's holy cities. But of course, the plot thickens as the movie sprints forward. The mission becomes more desperate and the situation much more dire when Hunt crosses paths with a villain from his past who, it turns out, has been haunting his dreams like a dark prophet of some coming apocalypse—Solomon Lane, the big bad of Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation. Lane comes back into the fold to exact his revenge against Hunt, and in doing so brings Hunt's past into the crosshairs of the present. He says that he is doing as much in some of the film's dialogue, suggesting the events of the film are the "fallout" of all that Hunt has done up until now.

Though the M:I films are hardly concerned with continuity, they have built for themselves an interesting mythology over the years. In his film, Brian de Palma introduced Hunt to this seedy European underworld led by Max, a sphinx of a character played by the striking Vanessa Redgrave. Max's bodyguard appeared in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, but Max comes back in a large yet unexpected way in Fallout. A character known as the White Widow turns out to be Max's daughter, and the way Vanessa Kirby delivers her lines echoes Redgrave's performance as the shady arms dealer of de Palma's film brilliantly. This is just one example of how Fallout stitches together the M:I mythology.

But the area where this storytelling tactic is strongest is easily in the realm of character drama. By bringing back Rebecca Ferguson as assassin Ilsa Faust and dropping Hunt's former wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) in harm's way, the characters of the M:I franchise really spark in new and interesting ways. Ever since the decision to have Hunt get hitched in M:I III, but separate from his new bride sometime before the events of Ghost Protocol, Julia has lingered in the shadows of the series for the past few movies, much like she haunts the fringes of Ethan Hunt's mind. By bringing her into the finale of Fallout, McQuarrie really raises the stakes while simultaneously ensuring that Hunt finally deals with some of the emotional "fallout" of choices that were previously made offscreen, during the in-betweens of previous films. It's kind of gutsy to do this in a film series that has made its name avoiding this particular brand of continuity development, but it really works here because it reminds us that its actors are actually capable of—surprise, surprise—acting. I quipped to someone after my viewing that Tom Cruise does more acting in the final thirty minutes of Fallout than he has in the entire series (except maybe the first one).

Apart from dealing with the consequences of previous decisions, perhaps the most prominent theme of Fallout is bound up in the character of Ethan Hunt himself. One of the hallmarks of the television series (and de Palma's original adaptation) was the twisty plots and subterfuge that always had you questioning the motivations of characters who might have been allies, might have been villains. In fact, de Palma's adaptation plays out like its caught in some nightmare state rife with paranoia. Fallout taps into this unique mood of espionage fiction. At one point, when watching Fallout, I distinctly remember thinking to myself, "I have absolutely no clue what is happening or who is doing what or why." I just knew that Ethan Hunt was the only good guy on the screen, until a character in the film suggested that maybe he was actually the villain, and for some reason I started thinking, "Why not? We don't actually know that much about him."

For the first three films of the franchise, Hunt almost played like a different character in each iteration. The original positioned him as a man on fire, burned by someone on the inside and a bit driven by revenge. The second film had him as this daredevil super-spy who often took unnecessary risks. The third had him as a desperate man who just wanted to leave this espionage business behind. But it wasn't really until Ghost Protocol that the Ethan Hunt we see in Fallout really began to form—a man committed to fighting the good fight because it's the good fight. Committed to saving lives because it's the right thing to do. Jack Bauer of 24 kind of does the same thing, but Bauer's philosophy would see him kill one for the sake of saving many. Hunt is kind of like the antithesis of Jack Bauer—he will move heaven and earth to save both many and the one. If anyone is going to be sacrificed, Hunt will sacrifice himself. This, it is revealed, turns out to be the impetus behind his decision to separate from Julia earlier in the series. There is no way he could be happily married when there was someone out there who wanted to set the world afire, and no way he could keep both Julia safe with him and stop the bad guys at the same time. So he undertook the ultimate "impossible mission," if you will, and removed himself from the equation. He let Julia fade into obscurity, under a new name, a new identity, and has kept tabs on her for years when he's not out there saving the world. Of course there's a lot of pent-up emotion here, and Fallout brilliantly deals with the consequences of those choices in the end. Hunt is a good man because he is willing to sacrifice himself to save others. This is teased out in dialogue between series regular Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Ilsa.  He is unwilling to make the hard choice of sacrificing one for the sake of many, and instead makes the hardest choice of all—sacrificing of himself, in a thousand unsexy ways, each and every day. Sometimes that means he's going to have to eat his meals alone. Other times that means he's going to have to sleep with a gun close at hand. But every now and then that means he's going to have to crash one helicopter into another helicopter to retrieve a remote detonator from a highly-trained killer bent on destruction, in what has to be one of the most harrowing and thrilling sequences of cinema ever filmed. These really are fun movies.

And this really is good storytelling. It's making do with the obvious beats in the story that have already been supplied by series history, while altogether pushing the narrative into new and unexpected areas. There are some interesting religious beats in the story, the villains calling themselves "The Apostles" and the targeting of specific holy cities. Religious motivations are the name of the game in Fallout. This film's primary villain, a mysterious man initially known only as John Lark, has messianic aspirations and delusions concerning world peace, which are juxtaposed against Hunt's virtuous character. In a way, the M:I films have always been on the cutting edge of politics and real-world happenings, all of these little details just end up being lost in the shuffle of a fast-moving narrative. In this instance, linking religious ideologies with convictions toward destruction firmly plant the narrative in the here and now. But in terms of where the story and themes land on all of this, it is important to note that, with this film, the series has effectively stated its overarching theme: that greater love hath none than this, that a man lay down his own life for his friends. This virtue is at the core of Hunt's character, and thus at the core of the entire franchise. There is a strong moral fiber here that one is not accustomed to finding in major movies. And that, I think, is enough to warrant a viewing of this particular summer blockbuster, whether you've seen the previous films or not.

It wouldn't surprise me if the next Mission: Impossible doesn't reinvent itself in yet another unexpected way. In some fashion, I am very content leaving Ethan Hunt's character where he ends up in Fallout. There's a lot of emotional resolution here, a kind of period at the end of a sentence that has been developing since Ghost Protocol, but manifested itself in prototypes during the first three films. I've found it helpful to think of the M:I film series, as it now stands, as two trilogies. Fallout serves as a good conclusion to the second trilogy, which has carefully shaded in its characters so that this time around, the characters have history and dimensionality. And the movie—and the film series as a whole—really is all the better for it.

Godzilla: The Virtue of Destruction

I remember seeing Gareth Edwards' 2014 Godzilla film in an IMAX theater near Lisle, Illinois. I remember walking out of the theater thrilled, stimulated, and having had my faith in true "blockbuster" cinema restored. While carried primarily by younger actors and actresses, the film also features performances by well-established stars. But I have to admit that even the combined power of Juliette Binoche, Bryan Cranston, Sally Hawkins, and Ken Watanabe on the screen could not rival the sheer exhilaration of seeing the reigning king of pop culture iconography come stomping into Daniel K. moments before laying waste to Honolulu while locked in battle with another kaiju (Japanese, which roughly translates to "strange beast").

Original theatrical release poster

Years before Sean Connery carried Ian Fleming's James Bond into the public conscience, decades before George Lucas first transported audiences to that galaxy far, far away, and nearly a half-century before Disney produced the current holy grail of cinema, Marvel's "shared universe," Japanese filmmaker Ishirō Honda crafted a parable of the nuclear age so visceral in tone and so searing in message, that the film's titular monster would be solidified as a cinematic wonder, going on to spawn one of the longest running film franchises in history.

In the original Godzilla, the testing of atomic weapons awakens a long-dormant monster from its supposed hibernation, and from the depths of the ocean "Gojira," or, Godzilla, rises to terrorize Japan. After much devastation, the creature is defeated, but one of the film's main characters, Dr. Kyohei Yamane (Takashi Shimura, of Seven Samurai fame), points out that, should nuclear testing continue, a threat like Godzilla could easily rise again. Honda's original incarnation of the character was poles apart from the more lovable and somewhat cuter versions that would become so popular in the succeeding decades, where the very idea of "Godzilla" would more readily conjure up thoughts of a man in a silly rubber suit rather than echoes of a nuclear nightmare, though this more jarring concept was the symbolic power with which the character was originally imbued.  Nonetheless, the moral of the original tale is not to be missed: if mankind is not careful, he will bring about his own destruction. Stylistically, Honda's original piece played out more like one of those old fashioned film noirs, weaving a dark tale of science gone horribly, horribly wrong that was tinged with tragic romance and cast with apocalyptic vision. And like all great myths of forbidden knowledge, the film came with a pointed warning meant to shake the viewer out of a kind of acedia, a way of snapping the fingers of the imagination before the mind's eye as if to say, "Wake up, and pay attention!"

I am fascinated by how certain films and characters lodge themselves in the public sphere with the longevity of franchises like the one begun here, with Honda's film. How is it that, for almost a century, the character of Godzilla has continued to adapt to changing times and changing morals, but yet somehow remain enough of a constant to be instantly recognizable? The answer, I believe, does not lie within the character's ability to adapt, as opposed to how I am often told films and characters need to "update" in order to "stay relevant." On the contrary, I believe the key to the character's longevity lies in the thing that remains constant, the consistency of the character's essence, which comes to light when one understands a character's purpose. And when the character's purpose deals in timeless themes, the character becomes what is mythically known as an archetype, a character with a thematic arc that crops up time and time again, in thousands of different stories down through the ages.

For Godzilla, the thematic purpose of the character is spelled out quite plainly in the original film. Godzilla is a most unique kind of thematic archetype, one that is rarely embodied but frequently invoked: judgment. Honda's film is as striking now as it was upon first release, because of the timeless themes with which it deals. The notion of mankind's scientific reach having grown beyond what he can grasp is as mythic a place to start as any. From Eden, to Prometheus, to Frankenstein, and now to Godzilla, the idea that there are things we ought not know can be traced right back to the beginning of what C. S. Lewis identified as the "True Myth" of Christianity. More importantly, the idea that one's attempt to access such forbidden knowledge will result in one's downfall is just as crucial of a component to the mythic structure of the narrative as anything else. Adam and Eve have plunged us all in to sin. Prometheus incurs the wrath of Zeus and ensures that man loses access to the means of life. Victor Frankenstein loses control of his own creation. Warmongering men have awakened Godzilla.

Perhaps in the age of superheroes and "Mary Sues," who march ever forward in the good name of progress and "empowerment," we have forgotten that all things, right or wrong, come with a price. That evil corrupts through pleasure, and good only triumphs through sacrifice. The signs of our times are Disney vacations and Hallmark cards—the yearnings of the human spirit to finally come to a place of rest, where all is made well. Yearnings that are not wrong, to be sure. But if all is made well through a simple redefinition of right and wrong, something is amiss. It seems to me that we tend to forget that "all is made well" only when evil is dealt with, not when it is ignored or simply redefined into that which is good, or not as bad as it might actually be. Quick are many to tell me, "Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, so you should get over your complaining about the way the world is and just be happy." And quicker am I to point out that the reason Christ commands us to not take revenge, to "turn the other cheek," is because revenge is not ours to take. This is Paul's point in Romans 12:19, in which he instructs believers to "leave room for the wrath of God." The point, of course, is not that vengeance is wrong. The point is not that grace deals with sin and that's the end of the story. The point is that vengeance is not man's to seek—it is God's. The Christian story does not end when Jesus ascends. The Christian story ends after he has returned, his robe dipped in blood, his eyes burning like flames, with a sword extending from his mouth with which to cut down all those who oppose him. Sounds a lot like judgment to me.

Godzilla (2014) poster

This is a point that both Honda and director Gareth Edwards understand, and as a result imbue their respective iterations of Godzilla with this thematic purpose. Edwards, however, puts a bit of a different spin on the character than Honda. Whereas Godzilla was, originally, an enraged monster disturbed by man, Edwards's take on the character positions Godzilla as an ancient alpha predator, but he does so without sacrificing the character's inherent mystique. Perhaps the chief complaint I have heard about how Edwards chose to portray Godzilla can be boiled down to this statement: "For a movie called Godzilla, there sure wasn't a lot of Godzilla in the movie!" While on one hand I can understand the frustration (the movie predominately follows a husband trying to get back to his wife and son in a world being ravaged by monsters), I cannot help but think such criticisms are somewhat unfounded, that they miss the larger point of Edwards's film. Edwards's cinematic style isn't actually all that different from Honda's, even though their respective iterations of the characters vary to some degree. In the original Godzilla, the vast majority of the movie revolved around a doomed love triangle, and the efforts of humans to understand and then survive the monster's onslaught. Godzilla was kept mostly shrouded in darkness and seen most frequently only in glimpses, and usually in strange angles, maintaining a mystique about the character that at once made Godzilla a being about which we were always curious, despite knowing that his ways were unfathomable.

In Godzilla (2014), Edwards updates the now well-established mythos surrounding the character to bring him into the present. He maintains the connection to the atomic age by having nuclear energy play a key role, but this Godzilla is less an angry monster out to destroy the men who have intruded upon his slumber; rather, this Godzilla rises to meet the challenge presented by the arrival of another monster (identified in the film as a "Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism" or "MUTO"), drawn to our world by our use of nuclear energy. Godzilla is the great equalizer, the one who comes to restore the balance of nature, which mankind upset through consistent abuse of natural resources and nuclear power. In order for him to do that, buildings will crumble. People will flee in terror. There will be a great and terrible cost before the situation is rectified.

What Edwards does incredibly well is imbue his Godzilla with age and, more importantly, reverence. Godzilla is not fully unveiled until around the halfway point in the film, and even then the moment is fleeting. He moves slow, graceful. He is ancient. He has been here long before any of us, and he will most certainly be here long after. Until the moment we see him in the film, the characters whisper about this monstrous being in hushed, urgent tones. When Godzilla is seen in full glory, we, as viewers, are privy only to the reactions on the faces of those characters who actually see him. Toward the end of the film, there is a shot that features Godzilla's tail sweeping through a haze of smoke and fog. Edwards positions the camera near the ground, looking up at the tail as it sweeps over the viewer's head. Then a flash of lightning, and for a moment, through the haze, we glimpse Godzilla's hulking behemoth of a form, the smoke curling about him, obscuring him enough that we only see his silhouette. It's a haunting, breathtaking shot reminding us that even though he might be standing in our midst, we humans are nothing compared to him. Our science has failed us, try as we might to understand his motivations. His ways are inscrutable, and he has come to rectify the problem that we have created.

Edwards chooses to paint Godzilla in a more heroic light than Honda. Of course, this is done out of respect for the character's legacy, since many of the Japanese films after the 1954 original came to view Godzilla as less of a rampaging force of nature, and more of a quirky kind of antihero with attitude. Godzilla found himself protecting the people of the Earth in those films, rather than acting as their judge, jury, and executioner. This is an interesting development, to be sure. One that deepens Godzilla as a character by ever so slightly shading him with emotions. There is a scene in Edwards's film in which the protagonist comes face-to-face with Godzilla, and the two of them lock eyes. For the briefest of moments, Godzilla looks tired. Worn out. Old and graceful and wise and fully ready to be done with this destruction business so he can go back to whatever forbidden depths he emerged from to fix the problem that humanity created. Then a cloud of smoke and dust closes in, and he is obscured from sight once again. It's a surprising and moving moment of calm in the midst of a fierce battle. But we know that to destroy the monsters man has conjured up is like slapping a band aid on a gaping wound. In the Flood, God destroys everything and preserves only a precious few, including the man named Noah. But the destruction of everything in the world does little to eradicate the problem that made the world worth destroying in the first place: the desire of the human heart for things belonging not to it, the desire for sin. This is the lesson of Noah's story in Scripture. This, too, should be the lesson we take away from a viewing of Godzilla.

To be sure, the virtue of redemption stories should not be missed. We are quick to see the ways in which movies about heroes who sacrifice themselves to rescue others points back to Christ and his ultimate sacrifice. But we are less ready to acknowledge that Scripture's narrative does not end with Christ's victory over death, even though we know on some subconscious level that this is true. Indeed, the story cannot end there, because the narrative is incomplete. The problem has not been solved, the crisis only temporarily averted. We know that Christ dies and resurrects for the benefit of those who are Christians, who place their faith in him to carry them through the shroud of death and into eternal life. But what about those who scorn him? Those who never come to faith? What about all the injustices that occur in this world, and wrongs that are never righted? Do these things just go away? It's that old and clichéd idea that asks the question, "How can there be a good God when bad things happen in the world?" The simplest answer is this, "Because that good God will deal with those bad things, just not according to how you think they're going to be dealt with." Remember, the reason that we do not take revenge to repay injustice is because the power of determination, the power of defining good and evil does not rest in the hands of men. So leave room for the wrath of God, because he will be the one to avenge you.

North American theatrical release poster

There is something about vengeance that functions on a primal level, a kind of catharsis which sees evil repaid. This is why my favorite films always contain shades of noir. No incarnation of Godzilla is a true film noir in the classic sense, but noir sensibilities infuse the best of these movies with such a sense of cosmic justice, a kind of moral gravity that brings the divine gavel smashing down. I applaud the efforts of Toho, the Japanese studio that owns the rights to Godzilla's character and legacy. In their most recent live-action outing, titled Shin Godzilla (2016), they effectively update the character's origin story and bring him back to his Japanese roots. A not-so-subtle social commentary on the ineffectiveness of the Japanese government to deal with a number of natural disasters that befell the country in the past decade, from tsunamis to nuclear meltdowns, Godzilla is again presented here as the one who has come to restore order to a chaotic world: only this time, he is hardly a relatable character at all, more of a blank force of nature that's not concerned with dueling other monsters, but with bringing judgment to mankind and mankind alone.

The theological connections here are not to be missed. In fact, they are spelled out quite profoundly in Toho's 2017 Godzilla film, Godzilla: Monster Planet, a piece of Japanese animation that gives us a look at the largest Godzilla ever to take to the screen. I've never been an avid watcher of anime (animation that takes its cues from a distinct Japanese art style), my exposure to the genre has been limited to what I know through the dissemination of pop culture. But I know when I first heard that Godzilla was going to finally step into the realm of anime, I had mixed feelings. On one hand, it seemed like a match made in heaven. A distinctly Japanese character appearing via a distinctly Japanese storytelling medium. Why hadn't this been done before? At the same time, I was troubled that this would somehow lessen the character's influence, reduce him to nothing more than a caricature, akin to those older movies where he became something of a slapstick character. Upon viewing the film, I was delighted that my concerns were unfounded.

Teaser poster for Godzilla: Monster Planet

While I would never call this my favorite Godzilla film, it certainly has got to be one of my favorite interpretations of the character. In the world of animation, the creators really get to let loose with what might have been impossible or too expensive to do in the world of live-action film, so they blow him up to gargantuan proportions appropriate for the tale being told. The story of Godzilla: Monster Planet finds the people of Earth plagued by the appearance of giant monsters at the end of the 20th Century. For decades, the people attempt to survive, but are pummeled time and again. Godzilla, the most devastating of these monsters, is responsible for the deaths of millions. Humanity, with its numbers dwindling, finds itself outmatched. But the arrival of two alien races, the Exif and the Bilusaludo, whose motivations are shrouded in secrecy, elect to help mankind to try and survive the onslaught of the monsters. But outmatched by Godzilla, mankind is forced to rely on the aliens and their technology in order to flee the planet.

This is all backstory, of course, and the film opens with humanity and their alien allies adrift in space aboard a ship. It's all a set-up very reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica. The plot of the movie gets going when the humans decide to return to Earth. Though they have only been in space some twenty years, because of time dilation and gravity and all that scientific mumbo-jumbo that I'm still trying to figure out, it seems as though an indeterminate amount of time has passed on Earth. What is for humans twenty years, is to Earth hundreds, if not thousands of years. So they return home, with a plan to destroy Godzilla if he is still there.

The Earth they return to has changed—drastically. The planet has been overrun by a kind of evolved plant life, and at the top of the food chain is Godzilla. There is much talk throughout this movie by the human characters, who seek to reclaim "our home" or "our planet." It seems as though the mentality of the characters is that Earth belongs to them simply because they were born there. And so they launch a plan to destroy Godzilla that, shockingly, works. By the film's end, Godzilla is dead. And they humans celebrate their victory—until a mountain in the distance explodes. And out of the rubble rises...another Godzilla? One of the team's scientists quickly realizes the false presupposition with which they had returned to the planet. It has been not a few hundred or few thousand years since mankind has been gone, it has been 20,000 years. The Godzilla they had just fiercely battled and destroyed was the evolutionary offspring of the Godzilla that had nearly eradicated man all those years in the past, the Godzilla which now resurfaced. And time has not only worked wonders on the planet. Godzilla himself has grown to tower over 300 meters in height. To put that in perspective, all other incarnations of Godzilla range from 50 meters to about 100 in height. This new incarnation is by far the most imposing. To the film's credit, even in animation, you can practically feel the size of this being.

As Godzilla proceeds to decimate the humans, who have realized their selfish ambitions too late, one of the Exif alien characters, Metphies, looks on from a distance and says, "When those fleeting lives destined to die, forget their humbleness and sing praises of glory, such will shake the very heavens and split the earth, and they shall know the wrath of the divine. The inevitable incarnation of destruction." And this is exactly the kind of thematic purpose with which the character of Godzilla was originally imbued. This is the great warning that this character and these films offer us, as humans—what I call the virtue of destruction. The same lesson taught to us in the story of Scripture, recapitulated time and again through myths of old. When mankind grows beyond himself, when human hubris runs wild and unchecked, the wrath of the divine will inevitably be incurred. Judgment will be incurred.

Godzilla is by far the most interesting Christ-figure in all of pop culture. Because he exemplifies a facet of Christ's being that is taught less frequently in contemporary churches, much less put to screen. With Godzilla, we see the Christ of the apocalypse, the Christ of judgment. The one who returns to recompense those who have remained in sin, who have never learned what it means to deny the self, to tame the hubris. When I left that theater in 2014, I was reminded what great blockbuster cinema can do for us. I was reminded that the wrongs of this world can be endured, because the wrongs of this world have stirred up the wrath of a divine avenger who is coming swiftly and soon. For vengeance is his, and he will repay.

And this, in turn, keeps me on the straight and narrow.

Sicario (Review)

Sicario (2015)

There are certain films we do not think of as Christian because they contain lots of swearing, lots of violence, and they leave us feeling like we've been kicked in the gut. Then there are certain films that we can argue are pretty explicitly Christian because they contain lots of swearing, lots of violence, and they leave us feeling like we've been kicked in the gut.

Sicario is one of those films. It gets under your skin because it plays out its narrative slowly and surely with a fiery intensity, and then sucker punches you for being naive enough to even entertain the thought of a happy ending. It is cynical and unflinchingly brutal. The Ecclesiastes, if you will, of action-thrillers, reminding us that there is one fate for both the righteous and the wicked—death.

This kind of cynicism ensures that Sicario works on the same visceral level as the old film noirs of classic cinema, though the color pallet here is decidedly different. A teacher once asked me what color I saw as I read The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. The answer was yellow. I had flashbacks to that novel when watching Sicario. Just like the film noirs make extensive use of lighting, color plays a central role in this film. Yellow permeates Sicario in various shades, painting a canvas that is, at turns, brilliant and blazing, pale and sickly.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve, the film is a masterclass of filmmaking in that it accomplishes what I consider to be the holy grail of cinema: the ability to marry image with theme. There are certain filmmakers who have this astonishing ability to really capture the essence of a story in a single shot, and then do it over and over again throughout the movie. Take Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, and the scene at the beginning in which Indiana Jones first steps out of the shadows. And again when Jones and the diggers, racing to uncover the lost Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis, unearth the Well of Souls. Jones is silhouetted against the blazing sun, the diggers are singing their foreign tune, and the scene has forever been seared into my mind. In that moment, I know exactly how I'm supposed to feel: entranced, exotic, transported to this other time, this other place. The scene is brief, but captures the essence of what the Indiana Jones films are about: adventure. And I'm left wondering just what is about to be uncovered, and what mysteries are yet to be discovered beneath those forgotten sands. This, I believe, is a hallmark of a truly great filmmaker. And Villeneuve has this ability in spades.

There is a sequence in Sicario when protagonist Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) finds herself in a caravan traveling across the border into Ciudad Juárez as part of a special task force assembled by the Department of Justice. She is as much in the dark about the operational details as the viewer. All she knows is that they are going to extradite a high-ranking member of the Sonora Cartel. As the caravan ventures into Mexico, wide, sweeping shots of the caravan weaving through desolate, dangerous streets reinforce the theme of isolation and emptiness that runs throughout the film. Macer, though surrounded by allies in the caravan, truly is alone in enemy territory. And I could practically feel the loneliness, the tension, as I watched the scene play out.

Macer is the viewer's window into this dangerous world. We know as much as she does about what's going on at any given point in time. Part of the film's tension comes in her learning that she has been intentionally left out of the loop as to what her special task force is actually doing when it comes to the drug war. Headed up by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), a cocky specialist with an affinity for flip-flops, the task force continues to take bigger and bigger risks that clash with Macer's morals. Like us, she begins asking, essentially, "How far is too far?" She finds an unexpected ally in a mysterious man also attached to the task force, Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro). There are certain actors who are born to play particular roles, and del Toro is perfectly cast as the wolfish Gillick, whose quiet, soft-spoken demeanor belies a deadly intent. At one point, Gillick suggests that Macer is like his own daughter, and we, like Macer, foolishly believe that she has formed some kind of bond with this silent titan of a man. Of course, by story's end, the truth is revealed. Gillick is exposed as the stone cold killer that he is, a man who is more than just a part of the world Macer is looking to bring down, but is, in fact, one of the men responsible for establishing that world's perverted status quo. And to Macer's horror, it turns out her own government is working with this man, to establish an older, more evenhanded cartel with which deals can be cut, and understandings can be reached. And when Macer threatens to tell the world of this perverse plan, it is Gillick himself who threatens her life until she gives in, and signs off on the documentation stating that all the task force did was completely legal and within the confines of the law.

Sicario is an exercise in futility. It perfectly embodies the Christian doctrine of reprobation, which tells us that bad people can do good things (like when Gillick at one point saves Macer's life), and still be bad people because inside they are rotten to the core. And bad people ultimately get what they deserve, even if it looks like they get away clean in the end. Gillick walks away with his life and government-approved freedom, despite murdering an entire family (including two young, innocent children) while the family sits down to dinner. Of course, we have spent the entire movie learning that he is empty inside, a shell of a human being. He might think he's walking away clean, but we know he's just as dirty as the bad men he's spent the movie killing. Macer compromises her morals and lets him get away, and then neglects to shoot him when given the chance. It's enough to make us rage at the screen.

It is telling that the first time I viewed Sicario, I walked away feeling cheated. I didn't like the ending. It took several rewatches and a lot of processing before I came around to thinking it's one of the best movies to come out in the past twenty years. There is a kind of dark poetry to the way the whole affair plays out, and writer Taylor Sheridan cracks the hardest storytelling code of all by crafting a story that ends on a wholly unexpected but somehow inevitable note. Having watched the film, when you go back and watch it again, you can see that the ending was etched in stone from the movie's opening moments, yet the quality of the movie-making somehow keeps you under its spell to the point where the ending takes you completely by surprise—not because it's unpredictable, but because it's just so unrelentingly brutal. Sicario is a dark film about dark things, about twisted motivations and lies masquerading as cheap and easy truth. But it is one of those films that allows you to emerge on the other side cleansed, having faced an evil so great and undiluted that our morality is jumpstarted. It makes you shake your fist at the screen and cry out for justice to be done.

And that in and of itself is a victory. We are slapped awake, and we go back to our complicated lives having had our sense of right and wrong restored. We have seen a great and terrible darkness, and that makes us appreciate the light all the more.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Review)

Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)

There is a rather popular saying that goes something like this, "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Regardless of who said it or when it was first used, there is a kind of perverse way of looking at this in which one asks, "Just how bad can things really get if good people do nothing?" Sicario: Day of the Soldado will happily provide at least one answer to that question.

I consider the original Sicario to be one of the finest films to come out of 2015. Sporting three powerhouse performances by Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin, and penned by Texan actor, screenwriter, and director Taylor Sheridan, Sicario does what only the best films of the old fashioned noir genre can do and really digs its fingers into your guts. It's dark, relentless, and utterly captivating as you watch these different people make all these moral compromises. And it ends in something of a squared circle, a testament to Sheridan's skill as a writer of a kind of dark, noir poetry. So when I first learned that there was going to be a sequel, I was skeptical, to say the least. The first one's ending was somehow resolute in its irresolution. And it worked.

But the truth is, Sicario: Day of the Soldado is hardly a sequel at all. Kate Macer, Emily Blunt's character in the original, is nowhere to be seen and, to my recollection, not even mentioned. At one point during my viewing, I remember thinking this movie was more of a reimagining of the first one, the way events might have played out had Macer not been present. After some further reflection, I think this is probably a good way to approach the film. Because Macer was the moral center of Sicario, and was the audience's vehicle into the film's world. Day of the Soldado, on the other hand, completely does away with that vehicle altogether and drops the audience into a story of amoral men fighting a shadow war on amoral terms. Sicario begins by immediately establishing an emotional connection with Macer. Day of the Soldado opens by rapidly showing a series of disturbing scenes featuring suicide bombers, before reintroducing Josh Brolin's character from the first film. It's horrific and shocking, but there's no real emotional connection to the characters. There's no backstory, no time spent catching up with the characters and telling you what they've been doing in the in-between.

Now, one can choose to deal with this in one of two ways. On one hand, it can be argued that the lack of emotional investment in a character like Macer hinders this film (which, to an extent, is true). On the other, however, and this is the position I'm more inclined to take, the lack of emotional investment is exactly the point the film is making. Most movies ask you to care about a protagonist; Soldado really doesn't care what you think about Alejandro Gillick (del Toro) or Matt Graver (Brolin). In fact, if you've seen the original, you know that both men are morally bankrupt. Gillick is a thug who kills out of revenge, and Graver is an emotional void who just follows his orders. To Sheridan's credit, he doesn't waste time trying to get you to care about characters who are inherently bad people. He just drops you into their world, and proceeds to let things unspool—and boy do they unspool.

The narrative really takes off when Graver and Gillick concoct a plan to kidnap the daughter of a cartel kingpin in a false flag operation (again, these are not standup individuals), all in an attempt to start a war between rival cartels. The abduction occurs, and the girl, Isabela Reyes (Isabela Moner), is taken. But she's not an idiot, and it's pretty evident that she knows something is amiss from the jump. And Moner really sells the role well. It's kind of stunning, actually, how well she acts through these really traumatic scenes. The movie really rises or falls on her ability to carry these scenes. Of course, the thing no one anticipates is the connection Gillick will form with her because she reminds him of his own daughter, who was killed by the cartels in years past. And when the United States government orders the mess that Graver and Gillick create to be cleaned up, Gillick becomes bound and determined to protect Isabela, no matter the cost. And the cost is great.

Whereas the first film shows the cost of compromise on the inner parts of a human being and the breakdown of conviction, Day of the Soldado shows the fallout of that compromise in an external sense. This films works more as a thematic continuation or "spiritual successor" rather than a direct sequel. If Sicario warns us that things will get messy if we're not careful and we compromise our moral convictions and abandon virtue, Soldado shows us just how messy things can really get. More than this, it shows us the consequences of choice. The first film ends with Gillick threatening Macer's life in order to make sure the war crimes and moral compromises committed by Graver and his team go unpunished by the powers that be. Day of the Soldado offers Gillick a chance at redemption by saving the life of this innocent girl whose only connection to the world of the drug trade is having a reprehensible human being for a father. If Sheridan was at all concerned with sentimentalizing redemption, he would have Gillick sacrifice himself in some kind of heroic fashion to save her.

But, as the first film smacked you for thinking it could end happily, Soldado backhands you for thinking Gillick will be granted an honorable death. To be fair, Gillick is willing to lay down his life for Isabela. But it's hardly a sexy death. He ends up blindfolded and tied down in the middle of a desolate desert, where he is unceremoniously shot in the face and left to rot. It's a jarring thing to see, the supposed "hero" of the story gunned down while groveling in the dirt. A brutal reminder that there are no heroes in this world. Only bad men getting what they deserve.

When Graver finally rescues the girl, despite his orders to kill her, he opts to save her life and place her in witness protection. He, too, had formed an emotional attachment—to Gillick, as a friend. And when Gillick is shot, it's the kick of injustice needed to shake Graver out of his emotional obsolescence and make him care about something other than himself or his mission. So it's actually the violence that ends up being somewhat redemptive. It's not the girl Gillick saves by laying down his life; instead, it's his friend, the man who had just been given orders to kill Gillick himself to ensure the mess is cleaned up.

But perhaps the most interesting storytelling decision of all, however implausible it may be, is the choice to resurrect Gillick. The bullet, it turns out, passed through his face, but didn't kill him. The final leg of the movie plays like something out of a horror film, as a badly wounded Gillick murders his way back from the brink of death. Dying alone in the desert is, apparently, not quite the fate this man deserves. Like Raoul Silva says in Skyfall, life clings to this bad man "like a disease." To die at this point, in this way, alone in the desert, would be too easy. Justice on a cosmic scale would not be served.

In similar fashion to the original Sicario, the key to watching Day of the Soldado lies in paying close attention to the character for whom the film seems named. "Sicario," as I understand it, is Spanish for "hitman." In the original film, it's clear that Alejandro Gillick is the titular "sicario." In this film, though, the question is who embodies the "soldado." "Soldado" roughly translates from Spanish to "soldier." And the "soldado" of this film is a young Mexican-American named Miguel Hernandez, a "coyote" who smuggles people across the border. When the film isn't following the exploits of Gillick or Graver, it follows Miguel's descent into the world of human smuggling. It is Miguel who ultimately pulls the trigger that appears to kill Gillick in order to fulfill his role as a "soldado" in a Mexican gang. Graver is redeemed ever so slightly, at the cost of a young man completely losing his innocence by choosing to end the life of another. Again, these films are relentlessly brutal, but this is further evidence of Sheridan's knack for a kind of dark poetry. He always gives his characters a shot at redemption—the issue is that they hardly ever take it, and when they do, it turns out that shrugging off past sins is not as easy as one might think. This, of course, is truer to life than anything else, and truer to Christ's own words concerning the cost of following him. It's a hard lesson to learn that the straight and narrow is the harder path to walk, due to the carrying of one's cross daily and the continual dying to oneself on that cross, which is so often glossed over in favor of finding a vague sense of "healing" by visiting the foot of Christ's cross whenever life becomes too inconvenient. Graver overcomes his crooked nature, but it takes more than a man seemingly dying, it takes him going against everything he thinks is right. The truth is that one man does, in fact, die the moment Gillick is shot—it's just not Gillick. It's Graver. Resurrection, then, does not belong to Gillick, but to Graver, who denies himself and saves Isabela.

The final moments of Soldado leap forward a year, and reveal that Gillick has tracked down Miguel with the intentions of recruiting him to be a "sicario." Of course, the smart thing for the kid to do would be to walk away from this ghost of a man, scared to the point where he leaves it all behind. More than this, if Gillick were a virtuous person, he would use his presence to try and scare the kid out of a twisted life rather than try to recruit him. But, that's not the moral universe Sheridan has established here. And it's certainly not true to Gillick's character. The screen goes black before we learn how Miguel responds.

Soldado, I think, does suffer from not sitting under the same director as Sicario, Denis Villeneuve. That's not to say that director Stefano Sollima does a bad job; on the contrary, the film is beautifully shot and still a very well-made film. But Villeneuve is a brilliant filmmaker in that he can marry image and theme perfectly. Soldado borrows a lot of its visual cues from the original, but there was never a moment where the sheer scope of a particular shot left me exhilarated like certain shots in the first one did. Taylor Sheridan continues to be one of my favorite writers, and at this point I'll watch anything he's even remotely associated with.

Overall, Sicario: Day of the Soldado works best as a thematic continuation of the previous film. The original ended with Kate Macer compromising on her convictions and letting the bad men get away. She was the good person who chose to do nothing. Soldado shows the ramifications of what happens when the bad men go running around unchecked, and how messy things can be when people who have closed themselves off to emotions get blindsided by them. That being said, I cannot recommend Day of the Soldado as eagerly as I would Sicario. The first film demonstrates the doctrine of reprobation well, and leaves you with a sense of hopelessness that can actually be redemptive. And while I don't believe Soldado revels in the amoral muck of death and destruction it depicts (and is actually all too real in the drug world today), the lack of Macer's convictions to remind us that what Gillick and Graver are doing down in Mexico is wrong leaves Day of the Soldado at risk of coming to be viewed as just another action-thriller, albeit a decidedly well-made one.

I've only seen Soldado once. It took multiple viewings before I came around to liking Sicario as much as I do. Perhaps the same will apply to Soldado once it is released for personal viewing. The problem is that I have little desire to see it again. Once is enough for this one, I think. From what I understand, Taylor Sheridan has planned a trilogy of Sicario films. If that is the case, then it's likely that, after the release of the third one, I'll be revising my opinion of Sicario: Day of the Soldado. And if Sheridan's fingers type up the script, I'll be there on opening night.

Virtue and Vice in Dirty Pretty Things

"There's nothing so dangerous as a virtuous man."

UK quad poster

I remember how jarring it was hearing those words the first time I watched Stephen Frears' thriller, Dirty Pretty Things. The line, spoken by a friend of the film's protagonist, struck me as profound if only because it seemed so out of place in our modern postsecular world. Not because the film had something to say about virtue; on the contrary, any film, really, has a standpoint on virtue. But what sets Dirty Pretty Things apart is how this notion of virtue is applied. In the context of the film, the virtuous man is Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a former Nigerian doctor living in London as an undocumented worker and the man whose story we follow. Okwe works multiple jobs, a cabbie by day, a hotel attendant by night. He lives platonically with a Turkish Muslim émigré named Senay (Audrey Tautou), who also works at the hotel. The plot thickens when Okwe discovers a human heart clogging one of the hotel's toilets, and the spellbinding mystery that unfolds leads him right back to the hotel's manager (Sergi López). Okwe and Senay soon find themselves embroiled in a dark, unsettling world where human organs are trafficked.

Dirty Pretty Things is a serious movie about serious things. There are moments of levity that permeate the darkness that aren't one-liners or offhand jokes, but instead arise from characters whose dispositions are given more to virtue than vice. The film's subject matter is grim, and it deals with the darkness straight-faced and without pulling any punches. There's no sentimentality here. A freak occurrence leads to sacrifices having to be made, and those sacrifices hurt. The circumstances surrounding Okwe and Senay are ones that many of us would look at and deem unfair, but in reality are circumstances that all of us face at one point or another, to varying degrees. Things happen beyond our control. We find ourselves in situations we did not ask for or seek out, but now we have to deal with whether we like it or not. It's never easy, and there is often unfathomable hurt. And sometimes the decisions we make in those circumstances are the difference between life and death, hope and despair.

Films like Dirty Pretty Things are a rarity. They come along once in a blue moon, a dirty little gem of a thing that plays like a diamond in the rough. It is careful, measured, nuanced in how it portrays good and evil. There is a strong moral center present that is so frequently lost amidst the sound and fury of more expensive films. This is the kind of feature that operates with conviction, the kind of small-scale movie-making that classic films are known for, that doesn't need a huge budget and filming locations that span the globe in order to be bigger and more important than most other films out there. More importantly, this is a film that understands virtue and the real value of moral integrity. Dirty Pretty Things is an antidote to the kind of thinking that says, "Until you've experienced the darkness for yourself, you have no grounds to talk about it." This kind of rhetoric is absurdly popular today, and is patently false. One does not have to be a pathological liar, or have been lied to, in order to understand that lying is wrong.

Whereas so many other films would be tempted to drag its main characters into the seedy underworld and have them indulge in heinous acts themselves to make some vague point about "morally gray" areas, Dirty Pretty Things presents Okwe as a force to be reckoned with not because he is physically imposing or possessing off-the-charts intelligence. Instead, he is a dangerous man because he has moral fortitude, because he has integrity, because he is a virtuous man. Okwe is a curious kind of Christ figure, because he represents a facet of Christ's person that is so often overlooked in modern cinema: morality, a strong conviction concerning what is right and what is wrong beyond mere social cues. And the fortitude to never waver from that certainty is what makes Okwe a threat to all that is wrong with the world he inhabits. It is a positive point, made from the negative. A means of pointing out the light by first establishing the darkness. This is a poignant, effective storytelling technique, one that drums up time and again throughout Scripture. Even the Bible introduces us to God by first introducing the dark, chaotic substance that was present in the beginning, and then demonstrating how God brings order to that chaos, and out of this darkness creates his perfect vision of the world.

Our vices may be glittering, and our sins hued in seductive crimson. But Dirty Pretty Things rightly orients our perceptions so as to render our vices dull and boring, as they are in reality, and to paint our sins as black as the darkness they impose upon our spirits. The film demonstrates that the measure of a man is not found in the darkness, nor is it found in the force behind his punch, or in the quickness of his tongue, or even in his redemption. Rather, it is found in the strength of his character, in his integrity. And in his conviction to live rightly, no matter the cost. To stay the course along the straight and narrow and to never once stumble from the path of righteousness. This is a lesson worth learning, in a way it is the lesson that all good men and women seek to pass on to the ones who come after them. It is the lesson of the New Testament concerning the times between Christ's first and second coming, it is the admonition of the wise old Christian to the brash young one.

This film's title was chosen as the namesake for this blog precisely because of its thematic value, its strong moral center, and its convictions about good and evil. The way in which Dirty Pretty Things has its virtuous characters interact with the world, unflinching and with a strong sense of justice, is a good indicator of what this blog hopes to accomplish in bringing theology to bear on popular culture. Dirty Pretty Things is not for the faint of heart, to be sure. But it is a good, serious movie that encourages us all to be good, serious people in the face of overwhelming darkness. It reminds us that it is possible to suffer well, and that virtue is the most dangerous weapon any of us can wield while we still walk on this side of eternity.