It is a well-known story amongst many people close to the movie world that when James Cameron pitched Aliens as the sequel to the original beloved 1979 film Alien, he merely walked up to the whiteboard in the meeting room, added an “S” to the original title and promptly converted that “S” into a dollar sign ($). Of course, Cameron had already enjoyed critical and commercial success with his second directorial effort in The Terminator, so it’s not as if the studio executives in the room had only the dollar sign to go on, but if the story is to be believed, that move is what cinched the film’s production “yes,” which would lead to Cameron becoming a household name following that film and the success of Terminator 2 just five years later. Unfortunately, no such story exists about Lee Isaac Chung’s jump from his intimate and indie-budgeted Minari in 2020 to the heights of helming a major summer tentpole for Universal Pictures in the form of a sequel/reboot of the 1996 disaster classic Twister, but it sure would have been a fun marketing joke.

As it is, Twisters is never explicitly clear whether it means to act as a sequel to the original film or to re-invigorate the franchise for a new run of disaster flicks, but in both cases, it more or less follows the same formula as its predecessor, with an all-new cast largely standing in for the same parts the old guard had back in 1996. Daisey Edgar-Jones stars as the headstrong professional scientist working out of a weather station following an earlier tragedy who’s asked to come back into the field, Anthony Ramos is the one asking her to get back in the field, Glen Powell joins the cast as Tyler Owens – dubbed the “Tornado Wrangler” – who runs a YouTube channel with his own, more rough-and-tumble crew, which includes Nope breakout Brandon Perea clearly filling in for Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s “Dusty” character. The only meaningful difference, plot-wise between the first film and this one is the protagonists’ ultimate goal: instead of simply sending sensors into the tornados, the goal is to collapse and disrupt one in motion.

Legacy sequels/reboots are hard enough to do in honoring the original film or franchise’s spirit while also attempting to bring something new to the mix, but in cases such as this wherein the originals are remembered and rewatched, but not exactly beloved, that something new is a critical piece of the puzzle. If a filmmaker can get both of those right, and especially if they can get the latter part elevated above the first film’s level, then a truly worthy successor has emerged. Is Twisters a worthy successor or just a barely-elevated copycat? Your answer may depend on how much value you place on the original film. Having just seen Twister for the first time directly before seeing this one, I can say that Twisters is more or less the same movie with a few inversions in its plot mechanics; it just looks a lot more expensive. 

This film has more of a handle on the emotional core of its story than the original does, that’s for sure, but not so much of a handle that it becomes a standout element. Beneath all the howling winds, yeehaws, and homages to the original, it still functions largely as a movie that doesn’t quite know what to do with all the elements it has put together, even when they work individually, apart from pulling the same moves that its predecessor did. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos are doing what they can to elevate the material they’re a part of, but with a script that plays things this safe, there’s not a lot of ground to mine as far as character work, and Ramos gets the short end of the stick in that regard. The one bright spot as far as characters are concerned – well, two bright spots – are Glen Powell and Brandon Perea; every time they were on screen, I just wanted to follow them, despite the fact that both of them are unforgivably underutilized. Powell in particular has a thoroughly natural and occasionally overwhelming charisma that’s practically tailor-made for a movie like this one, and yet even when he is on screen, the film doesn’t seem to want to take advantage of that very powerful tool despite how openly he offers it. In Perea’s case, whether due to the size of the part in the context of the film or the performance itself, the movie gives quite generously. (Harry Hadden-Paton more or less functions as the comic relief of the film, and he’s appropriately placed, but there’s not a whole lot to his character beyond that.)

Where I will give the film half-credit is in the manner by which it introduces disaster exploitation companies that profit off of people’s suffering for real estate development opportunities; I say half credit because it introduces the idea but refuses to actually engage with it in more meaningful detail. Director Lee Isaac Chung has gone on record as saying that he doesn’t want his film to be bogged down in “a message,” but for Twisters, there’s not even really so much as a theme to lift it off the ground it’s drilled into. (Even Alex Garland’s Civil War earlier this year – which also avoids delving into its political blood pool right at the center of it all – at least makes a point about our obsession with images and how culpable we are when we’re more obsessed with them than with the ethical ramifications of what those images contain.) To be fair, this isn’t a Twisters-exclusive problem – the original film also wasn’t too keen on actually having something to say about climate change’s effect on whether phenomena – but it was an opportunity this film ultimate leaves unfulfilled; as far as the original is concerned, the tornado action felt so visceral and the film is so well-paced, it was hard to get distracted enough to even wonder if it had anything to say. Here, the tornado action is also well-rendered, but it almost feels momentum-less, apart from two distinct sequences which stand-out far above the rest, one of which takes place at a rodeo and – just like the first film’s drive-in set-piece – is the best tornado sequence in the movie.

All in all, Twisters gets the job done for those who want nothing more than to watch the first film again on a larger-budgeted scale, and it has its fair share of crowd-pleasing natural disaster goodness, but for those who remember that original film well or want to see another Glen Powell movie star moment, it’s unfortunately rather lackluster in terms of novelty or innovation. (Which, visually, is saying something, considering how it was shot.) And if studios are going to keep bringing talented directors from smaller, more intimately-rendered indie films like Minari onto larger tentpole projects the second they get noticed, the least they can do is not make the scripts for those tentpole projects feel as though they came off an assembly line. 

I’m giving “Twisters” a 6.5/10

- The Friendly Film Fan

It’s been nine years since Mad Max: Fury Road roared the once-thought-dead action franchise back to life with one of the most perfect action spectacles ever put to screen, and while there is still no direct sequel to that film (though The Wasteland remains in pre-production), Australian mad lad and franchise director George Miller has resurrected that film’s principle character for an origin story all her own. Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Furiosa, a young girl belonging to a place of abundance who is kidnapped from her home by the madman Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Over the course of many years, Furiosa must learn how the wasteland works by way of trade and road war, how to survive its many cruelties and trials, how to rise through the ranks in order to eventually seek revenge on the man who took everything from her, and above all, how to find her way home.
 
The best of the Mad Max films have never been all that concerned with complicated stories, which makes this Mad Max Saga an especially interesting test case in seeing whether or not Miller and company can pull off a slightly more nuanced version of the Fury Road feeling without it seeming like they’re just trying to do the exact same thing again, and to that degree, it largely succeeds. While Furiosa absolutely makes an excellent companion piece to Fury Road in tying everything together in way that doesn’t feel cheap or condescending from the origin points of certain character traits to the introduction of specific vehicles to even some musical motifs from the original Tom Holkenberg score, it is still very much its own movie, with its own ideas, its own story, and its own sense of place. The plot mechanics of our titular character’s odyssey across the desert are decidedly more complex than those of its predecessor, which thrived largely due to its magnificent craftwork overlayed on top of its simplicity, rather than attempting to weave it into a tale requiring more finesse. This movie a tale of the blood-soaked tragedy behind all the rage and resolve our titular character possesses when we meet her in the previous film, which by nature invites further complications into determining how those parts of Furiosa came to be, and its deliberate avoidance of peddle-to-the-metal pacing present in Fury Road – along with the longer runtime – is the clearest indicator that Miller is attempting to paint a complete and all-consuming portrait of who Furiosa is as a character; he is not crafting an action extravaganza, but a revenge epic.
 
That said, the action sequences that do appear in this film – at least most of them – all carry the same visceral adrenaline that those of Fury Road did. There is a chase sequence towards the middle of the film (which is broken up into five distinct segments) which could easily outclass all other action sequences made this year; at one point, the man next to me’s jaw actually dropped in response to one of the fighting mechanics introduced during the scene. It’s the kind of action filmmaking only the truly insane are capable of performing at this level, and despite the fact that it is clearly laden with more visual effects than any singular scene of Fury Road has, the way it’s shot and edited makes it feel like something no one except George Miller ever could pull off. And while that scene in particular was the definite highlight of the film for me personally, there are a few others that deserve near-equal praise in how they utilize the sound design, as does the entire film in that specific respect; you can feel the rumble of every engine, the power of the tires in the sand, the crack of the gunshots across the desert air. It’s the sort of sound design that forces one to realize just how much better great sound can make an already great movie. There are a few admittedly nitpicky areas in which Furiosa falters, chiefly in the visual makeup of the film (some of the green screen is a bit obvious and the color grade doesn’t feel as saturated as Fury Road does, making it less vibrant) and the fact that unfortunately, that epic sense of pace does mean that this movie feels longer than it probably should, despite the fact that everything within that length is working about as well as it can be expected to, but the craftwork in this still operates high above almost anything else being produced in Hollywood right now.
 
A great film can’t rest on craftwork alone, though. All the performers have to step up to the plate, and dear reader, they all knock it out of the park. There are, of course, some familiar faces involved which we get to know later on in Fury Road, and Tom Burke’s character does ultimately feel a tad superfluous when all is said and done despite his admirable performance, but this film truly belongs to the new blood. Anyone even remotely familiar with Anya Taylor-Joy is aware of her immense talents going all the way back to The Witch in 2015, but she gets to turn on a new mode here of feminine rage that feels not so much like a reaction to what was done to her, but an evolution of who she was destined to become; that’s a very hard line to act with minimal dialogue across two-plus hours, and she nails every moment she’s asked to. That said, Chris Hemsworth is the performance everyone is sure to be talking about coming out of this film; he's chewing scenery left and right, clearly having the time of his life playing the despicable (and occasionally hilarious) Dementus in what might be his finest performance to date. I’m not entirely sure I’m ready to hop on that train yet as we can only see how his part in all this stacks up with time, but it’s certainly the most fun he’s been to watch since at least Thor: Ragnarok, and probably ever.
 
In the end, though, this is still very much a George Miller film, and although Fury Road may be a better movie on the whole, this – I believe – is a better-directed piece of work, if only because the direction is more visible without a whole lot of other masters at work sharing the spotlight. It may seem trivial, but refusing to just play the hits again, even if they are hits for a reason, is an exciting thing for a filmmaker at Miller’s caliber to commit to, and despite any shortcomings the film may have, making this a different kind of movie than Fury Road was still absolutely the correct approach to telling this story, which he has rendered into existence with an exciting fervor. It’s so clear he cares about this world and these characters to such a degree no one else has even tried to make one of these, and if I had my way, no one else ever would, even after he’s long passed from this Earth.
 
I’m giving “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” a 9.2/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

​By Jacob Thomas Jones

​As one hears the opening notes of Wonka’s “Pure Imagination” theme at the start of Paul King’s prequel odyssey, the lyricized feeling of trepidation sets in. Has King bitten off more than he can chew? Do we really need a prequel to one of the most beloved films of all time? Can any living person capture the exuberance, the idiosyncratic energies of Gene Wilder’s wonderful, whacky chocolatier? There have been so many curiosities as to why this film was made in the first place, what its purpose is, and how it might go about achieving that purpose, not to mention the metrics by which that success is measured. Plus, there’s the added pressure of King’s cinematic legacy; can he make something as emotionally rewarding and wonderful as his two Paddington films, whose fans (of which I count myself a devoted one) are so taken with his particular brand of storytelling?
 
Soon, however, the initial trepidation dissipates, reforming into comfort once Timothée Chalamet’s particular version of our titular protagonist begins to interact with those around him in the film’s opening musical number, “A Hatful of Dreams.” There’s whimsy, there’s fun, there’s an acute sense of what specific brand of comedy pairs well with a story like this, and when best to utilize it, even if some jokes don’t land the same as others. Above all, King fosters a familial sense of togetherness, an understanding that this film is for everyone willing to give it a chance, that no one would be left behind for not following things too closely. There’s no rush to the finish line, nor is there a sense that the film is trying to be any more profound than it needs to be. This a movie for families in every sense of the word, and not one note or line reading betrays that tone.
 
Inside Chalamet’s performance – as paired with the director’s vision – there are all the great things about the character of Willy Wonka: enthusiasm, ingenuity, compassion, and an emotional connection to his renowned creations (the ingenuity in particular comes into play quite a lot in this story). These are all brought to life with a new and infectious warmth the likes of which only Paul King’s direction has been able to muster in quite this way, operating outside of the medium of animation. There’s a charisma about Chalamet’s Willy Wonka that one can’t help but be swept up in, as evidenced by his first scene selling chocolate just outside the Gallery Gourmet, a crowd of onlookers taken with his energy, buying every bit into the man he says he is. Any doubt one has about Chalamet in the part is quickly gone, and there’s a feeling one gets that no other living actor could have possibly taken on this mantle and done with it what he does, which extends to the film’s musical numbers.
 
The music itself, while not as memorable or lyrically impressive as one may hope for a musical centered around this eccentric character, informs the story for about the first half of the film, later on mostly retreating as things become more serious and our protagonist reaches the narrative climax. One gets the sense that even if a Best Original Song Oscar nomination is probably out of the cards here, a future stage adaptation is very much not. The songs are fun nonetheless, and in the moment, it does seem as though they could get stuck in one’s head with a couple of viewings of the film.
 
Where King’s true genius lies, however, is in the side characters he puts into his films, characters with particular quirks and unexpectedly funny personality traits which inform their place in the story being told without overwhelming the moments they share together. The people Willy Wonka meets – while not entirely fully fleshed out – have their own dimensionality, their own purposes, their own fears and nostalgias. (Calah Lane as Noodle is especially notable in this department. It’s her connection with Willy that drives the film’s main line of charm.) This is as much a movie about found family as it is following one’s dreams with that family’s help, and King’s direction is assured enough to never make a false step in that particular element of the story. There are a few performances that overdo it a bit, chiefly in the villains of the film, and in some moments set in the scrub house Willy Wonka stays in while selling chocolate. But, given the target demographic here, and the quirky nature with which the story plays out, it’s far less bothersome than it otherwise would be, and the absurdism sprinkled in lends itself well to some of the film’s running gags. As for Hugh Grant’s Oompa Loompa character, he is in the film far less than one might expect given how heavily he’s features in the marketing, so if you are someone aching for Hugh Grant musical numbers, that element of the film may let you down a bit.
 
All in all, Wonka’s strain of comfort film is sure to be a fallback for a new generation, buoyed by wonder, charm, and themes of familial warmth. Paul King ties yet another notch into his victory belt, having successfully pulled off three of these family films in a row, all of which are some of the best films of their years, and all of which are bound to have great replay value, their emotional cores tugging just enough at one’s heart that yes, you may tear up once or twice along the way. (I certainly did.) There’s no longer any doubt: Timothée Chalamet was absolutely the right choice to play this part, and though there is no definitive information on whether this is the beginning of a franchise play or simply a one-off, I would happily welcome more of his Willy Wonka to the silver screen as soon as he is ready to put the coat back on.

I’m giving “Wonka” an 8/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

Matt Reeves' take on the Caped Crusader is a Triumph of Noir Filmmaking​.

Through the many iterations and adaptation of the Caped Crusader’s adventures, the Batman character has always been one of DC’s most beloved characters, both because it’s easier to make media content centered around a non-superpowered person (meaning much less VFX work is necessary) and because he belongs to inarguably the most iconic trilogy of superheroes ever to grace a comic book page, the other two being Superman and Wonder Woman. But that’s not what The Batman is concerned with – its aspirations are closer not to legends, but scandals, not to symbols or ideas, but to the pursuit or revelation of truth, whatever that means for a city as corrupt and seedy as the title character’s hometown of Gotham City. It’s a world and a character ripe for crime capers and film noirs, but for whatever reason, the closest anyone has come to making a straight-up crime drama in a Batman movie before now was in 2008’s The Dark Knight, which wasn’t so much about Gotham or the Batman character as it was about whatever was happening to them as the Joker made his arrival. The Batman is not that movie. Director Matt Reeves’ solution to taking on the Batman story is to start not quite at the middle, not quite at the beginning, and do what should have seemed obvious from the get-go: make it a detective noir story.
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The Batman picks up just a few years into Bruce Wayne’s tenure patrolling the Gotham rooftops and alleys, which begins with Robert Pattinson’s voiceover not just explaining what kind of Batman he is, but what kind of story the film is about to tell; it’s one of seediness, corruption, scandal, darkness, and reckoning. Without diving too far into spoiler territory, the opening sequence of the film – just before Pattinson gives us his voiceover – is certainly the darkest a Batman movie has ever had the balls to put right up front, but it’s the nature of what we’re seeing and why we’re seeing it here that lends credence to the idea that while Gotham’s reckoning has come and gone, Batman’s is just beginning. It’s not only a reckoning well-formed and expertly told, but one that could only happen in a noir story like this.

What makes The Batman succeed where other “dark” adaptations failed is all in the eye of the beholder – that’s not me saying it’s a subjective opinion (though it is), but that what this film gets right is on display for all to see. The further we dive into the plotting of the film, the more beautiful it begins to look beyond what we’re shown for shock value or whatever was used in the trailers. Beyond the gorgeous wide shots, the striking color palettes, the makeup work, minimal use of visual effects, we see shadows. We see Batman emerge from them even as the camera has been focused on them for quite some time with nothing in sight. The only other Batman movie to get close to this was Batman v Superman when the dark knight first appears, but that movie never does that again. The Batman, by contrast, does it three or four times over the course of the film, and each time, it works, which makes Gotham’s lower-level criminals fear his being nearby, whether he’s actually there or not, and in turn lets the audience understand why.

Why is the big question posited by The Batman as its mysteries begin to unravel over the course of its three-hour runtime (a runtime which is felt, but not resented). Though it does back out of some of its more challenging material at one or two points, the answers to that question are nonetheless riveting to discover, especially when the script attempts to challenge some more traditionally held views on how the Batman story is meant to go and how the audience has become familiar with certain versions of characters the films rarely, if ever, actually explore. Few films about superheroes can challenge whether they belong on the pedestals we built for them, but fewer still can challenge whether their particular brand of heroism does more harm than good. That’s something usually reserved for anti-heroes, the answers usually falling along the lines of “I’ll go good” or “it doesn’t matter.” In The Batman, it does, especially where Paul Dano’s chilling, calculatory Riddler is concerned. “Unmasking the truth” is Riddler’s obsession, through violence or psychological terror, but we never wonder what it is he’s doing or how – we want to know why.

As Michael Giacchino’s instantly iconic score for the film blares through the theater speakers to signal the arrival of the Batmobile with all its cacophonous sound, we’re not obsessed with the epic car chase sequence or the many hand-to-hand fights leading up to this moment, but with what might happen after, since it might give us more answers to “why?” (though the car chase and those action sequences are excellent in practice as well). We’re not here for an action film, we’re here to help solve the mystery of what’s going on with the world’s greatest detective guiding us along the way. It’s the milieu of Gotham that intrigues most; who holds the power? What do they use it for?

The most intriguing of these social elite are the Penguin (Colin Farrell), who owns a nightclub in the city that Zoë Kravitz’s seductive Selina Kyle works at when she’s not parading around the Gotham rooftops herself (though the name “Catwoman” is never actually mentioned), and John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone. Waiting in the wings with naught but a few words to share and a lot of money to move around, these are the guys who make things happen, and the why of it all is what makes them the most interesting secondary villains to watch, even as Riddler remains the most captivating core antagonist since Heath Ledger’s Joker back in 2008 by taking down people exactly those kind of characters, though his focus is centered on Gotham’s social elite.

Reviewing a film like The Batman without discussing some of its more interesting elements in a spoiler-heavy fashion is a tall task – there’s not that much to spoil that anyone who watches the film won’t expect, but in describing how it all fits together and what’s great about it, there are some heavy-spoiler plots I can’t really divulge in a meaningful way. But, in summary, it’s an excellent crime noir with a visionary look, excellent sound design, an instantly iconic score, and performances that aren’t necessarily standouts, but that more than get the job done. Does it really matter if it’s better or worse than The Dark Knight?
 
I’m giving “The Batman” a 9.1/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan