Writer & Director: Harmony Korine
Starring: James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, Gucci Mane
Length: 94 min.

Much of the reception of Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers has discussed it as a work of social commentary. Korine has a history of revelling in the fringes; he once said that “the most beautiful thing in the world is an abandoned parking lot and a soiled sofa on the edge … with a street lamp off to the side.”

Here, in depicting the violent, criminal journey of four girls to spring break and beyond, he critiques not youth, but the fearful perception of youth; not the American dream, but societal terror of descending into the opposite. The portrait he paints of adolescence is with the brush of hysterical parents and tone deaf politicians, a neon cum-shot on the face of conservative attitudes toward pop culture.

Throughout the film, Korine practically stares down the mob’s pitchfork, declaring, “You think video games, rap, and homosexuality are turning teenagers into violent, promiscuous, drugged-up delinquents? Here’s what that might look like. Oh, and I’m going to cast Disney starlets to make sure that the last people you’d want to watch this clamour for it.”

The four girls – Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachel Korine) – can’t afford to make the prodigal trip they long for so ardently. They decide to rob a restaurant with a hammer and a squirt gun, and wildly succeed. “Just pretend like it’s a video game” becomes the film’s mantra as the girls travel to their target. It’s no wonder it plays out so simply, in one perfect, elegant take. It is exactly how it would play out in a video game, or even any other film. How else would they know how to do it?

Looping dialogue tells us how the characters believe they will “find” themselves during spring break, discover who they want to be. It’s where they truly belong, we’re told: a primordial, animalistic orgy of bare skin, alcohol, sex, drugs and music. When rapper Alien (James Franco) bails them out after a drug-fuelled bender, the mania amplifies – guns, money and drugs are suddenly everywhere, and the three are hopelessly entwined. A little too symbolically, Faith is the first to flee.

It would be easy to read Spring Breakers as condemnatory if Korine didn’t allow his protagonists to take their power back. As Alien slowly cedes control to his new charges, they riposte his sexual advances (his being the kind they have been prey to for much of the film) and, on a pile of money, force him to fellate his own firearms. It’s not subtle, but it’s powerful.

If the first two acts are transfixing and rich, it’s in the third where Korine falters somewhat. What has until this point been engrossingly elliptical and hypnagogic becomes betrayingly straight-forward. It’s a rather soft thud as opposed to the loud bang the previous hour or so gestures towards, though perhaps there isn’t any other way for it to be.

The difficulty with Korine is that he claims not to want his films analysed cerebrally, so it’s impossible to know how seriously to take his output. He’s more concerned with indelible emotions or images, the latter conveyed here with pulsating cinematography. Midway through the film there’s a swooning scene of gun-toting glory set to the breathy tones of Britney Spears. It’s the ideal marriage of the thematic and aesthetic, whether Korine wants it to be or not.

Director: Derek Cianfrance
Writers: Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, Darius Marder
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes, Bradley Cooper, Ben Mendelsohn, Dane DeHaan, Emory Cohen
Length: 140 min.

The notion that the director of 2010′s indie hit Blue Valentine – an essential take on the contemporary romantic experience gone awry – would choose to tackle a big, roiling crime drama next is surprising.

The Place Beyond the Pines is an epic tale about choices, family, and the ties that bind – and those that need to be unravelled. It’s a film that equals far more than the sum of its parts. If you could wrap the Pines up in ribbon and package them neatly, the seams would burst and the glorious, messy tendrils that are its beating heart would spill forth, much like Ryan Gosling’s tears in a pivotal scene.

Luke (Gosling) is a stunt-bike rider, a switch-blade popping, pack-of-ciggies rolled in his shirt sleeves (a la McConaughey circa Dazed and Confused) kind of guy. He travels with the circus, swooping around on his motorbike in a tiny cage to the cheers of local punters who live in the hope of someone eating metal as they absentmindedly chew on wads of fairy floss.

When old fling Romina (Eva Mendes) stops by one night, Luke suspects something’s not quite right and seeks her out. She tells him they have an infant son together.

His urge to do the right thing and stick around comes from a good place – he feels a debt is owed and wants to repay it – but more than that, there’s a sense of longing for something that counts. To say that Luke is simply the carney incarnation of Gosling’s Driver is selling the role, and the actor, short. There’s a vulnerability here, but also a dogged compulsion to pursue what he wants.

The film has a certain cool factor in the design and costuming (Luke’s faux black and neon green Wayfarers) and an ensemble cast Woody Allen would envy. The score (composed by Mike Patton of Faith No More) and popular soundtrack couldn’t work in better opposition: the switch from being haunted to thoroughly amused offers a welcome breather. However, the highly choreographed yet authentic nature of these elements pales in comparison to what’s happening underneath.

There’s a question being asked here: what does it mean to fail as a father? Through life and various misdeeds, where is that line drawn, the one that states you no longer have any right to call yourself someone’s guardian? Throughout The Place Beyond the Pines, there’s a heavy undercurrent dragging the fathers kicking and screaming towards maturity, while their sons watch from the river bank, incredulous at the elder’s lack of awareness. Their actions impact others, and none more than their offspring. The cyclical nature of the relationships, mirrored in the film’s editing, suggests that what goes around will resurface to bite: but it can only hang on if you let it.

Consistently engrossing and featuring metered yet intense performances from all involved, The Place Beyond the Pines is one of the best recent films that mainstream audiences weren’t expecting to see.

Director: Thomas Vinterberg
Writers: Tobias Lindholm and Thomas Vinterberg
Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Annika Wedderkopp, Lasse Fogelstrøm
Length: 115 min.

The Hunt is precisely as maddening as it is brilliant. This may not sound like an endorsement, but it’s a testament to director Thomas Vinterberg that he harnesses this to the film’s advantage. The Hunt will make you want to shout at the screen, stamp your feet and groan in frustration, but for all the right reasons.

In a small Danish town, Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) works at a kindergarten in the aftermath of his divorce and losing his job as a high school teacher. The kids love him; with his son Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrøm) living with his ex-wife, they fill a void in his somewhat lonely life. The men in the community are part of a hunting club, and these friendships are one of Lucas’ only other outlets.

Just as circumstances begin to turn around, Lucas’ life unravels thanks to the unknowing lie of a child. Klara (Annika Wedderkopp), the daughter of Lucas’ best friend Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen), begins to develop a childlike crush on Lucas, who acts as something of an uncle to her. After Klara’s brother shows her a pornographic image in jest, Lucas’ rejection of Klara’s feelings leads to her saying something she could never have known would cause such palpable harm.

Having touched on similar themes with his Cannes-adorned Dogme 95 breakthrough Festen (1998), Vinterberg returns to confronting community drama with striking results. The Hunt is stunning and harrowing, a testament to the danger of mob mentality, herd morality and presumption of guilt.

There are characters you come to hate, but whose actions only seem extraordinary because of the dramatic irony at work. Where the audience knows everything that’s happening, the only characters who know the innocent reality are Lucas and Klara. It prompts you to ask: how would you act in this situation?

Tobias Lindholm, who wrote the script with Vinterberg, is methodical in the steadily-deepening fallout from Klara’s words. The construction of such a masculinised environment in the town – with the hunting club at its centre – is a subtle critique of how permissive violence turns vicious with too little evidence. Lindholm and Vinterberg even manage to imbue The Hunt with humour which prevents the darkness around it from overwhelming the audience.

Young Annika Wedderkopp is revelatory as Klara; how much she was aware of during filming is unclear, but her innocence and confusion are so effective as the adults around her coerce her into saying exactly what they think they should hear. A constant, claustrophobic undercurrent of fear courses through the film’s veins, with Mikkelsen the beating heart at its centre, in a performance more than worthy of the Best Actor award he won at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The Hunt is an emotionally draining but rich cinematic experience. Vinterberg’s impeccable craft and casting lends the film a realism that reinforces its powerful themes. Mikkelsen’s suffering immerses you in his horror, culminating with a conclusion akin to a punch to the chest. You’ll want to shout at the characters, yes; but you’ll want to shout yourself a second viewing all the more.

Director: Lorraine Levy
Writers: Noam Fitoussi, Lorraine Levy, Nathalie Saugeon
Starring: Emmanuelle Devos, Pascal Elbé, Jules Sitruk, Mehdi Dehbi, Mahmud Shalaby
Length: 105 min.

It’s an obvious comparison to draw, but I was strongly reminded of A Separation (Asghar Farhadi 2011) while watching The Other Son.

Both movies charter moral, legal and religious ground that is divisively played out between two families. In A Separation, these families are Iranian and separated by class (among other things). In The Other Son, the drama crosses national boundaries and is primarily concerned with identity. An Israeli and a Palestinian family discover their babies were switched at birth. Now nearing 18, Joseph (Jules Sitruk) has been raised a Jew in his Franco-Israeli family, while Yacine (Mehdi Dehbi) was brought up in Palestine.

Where A Separation was dexterously handled and nuanced, The Other Son‘s distinctly French melodramatic approach seems mismatched to the sensitive Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Amid this weighty political context, The Other Son feels contrived. The dialogue is stilted, and director Lorraine Levy (a French director with, unsurprisingly, experience in telemovies) is determined to spell out the characters’ emotions tangled in this trite switched-at-birth dilemma. The scene in which both families learn of the mistake explicitly recalls A Separation, but is foiled, like much of the film, by an amateurish script with machinations laid bare. The doctor’s misplaced “Do you have any questions?” following the revelation is answered, as if by mandate, with a superfluous “No.”

The film studies the conflicts of identity faced by the sons in light of their new knowledge. The boys’ fathers, and Yacine’s older brother Bilal (Mahmud Shalaby), are blinded by their patriotism; the latter swears his brother off as an enemy. Joseph is confronted with misguided spirituality after a Rabbi tells him he is no longer a Jew.

These concerns might make the film seem sincere and contemplative, but many of its insights are diluted by a disappointing reliance on formula. It’s too obvious that a lunch between the two families at the bourgeois Israeli home should flare into a nationalistic shouting match between the fathers, while the mothers beg them to stop. A more sophisticated film might have followed the scene past this point, with the voiced political differences configured into a silent meal and awkward pleasantries. Instead, the next shot shows the Palestinian family arriving back at their concrete home, hours later.

The film’s second half comes closer to striking notes of authenticity. Both boys cross the national border and explore the other’s life, as a profound sense of what could have been prevails. Inevitably, the two inner explorations of identity settle in a cultural middle-ground as both Yacine and Joseph inherit some of the traits of the other’s lifestyle. Is The Other Son offering an allegorical solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? If so, this seems too idyllic in light of such a complex and multifaceted dilemma.

The Other Son emerges not as a successful political allegory for two warring nations, but as a constructed parable of two challenged families. On several occasions, Joseph and Yacine shuffle through a passageway of armed soldiers and ID checks flanking the Israeli-Palestinian border. The tall, excluding fences capped with barbed wire, the barren Middle Eastern landscapes, and the stream of civilians quietly shuffling by: all are left in the periphery.

Director: Shane Black
Writers: Shane Black & Drew Pearce, from the comic book by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck and Jack Kirby, and the story arc “Extremis” by Warren Ellis
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Kingsley, Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Jon Favreau
Length: 130 min.

It’s an obvious claim, but film adaptations of comic books have been extremely successful. Not just financially, but also artistically. It’s Hollywood’s newest genre movement (now more than a decade old) and will likely be seen as historically and culturally significant, if it’s not already. In terms of its proliferation and popularity, you could say the comic book film is this era’s Western. No, really.

While comic books seem ready-made to be adapted to the screen because both the source material and the medium of adaptation are visual forms, there is a fine balance to be managed, weighing up spectacle and suspension of disbelief in a film world that at least seems real.

The Iron Man franchise (and most of the Marvel films) has struck this balance quite well. Iron Man 3 continues along this vector and manages to expand on a well-loved comic book arc in the process.

There’s a scene in The Avengers (Joss Whedon 2012) where Captain America (Chris Evans) asks Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) something along the lines of “without the suit, what are you?” Stark’s characteristically cheeky response doesn’t miss a beat: “genius, playboy, philanthropist.” But these are just labels, things Stark does rather than things he is. The spirit of Captain America’s provocative question is at the heart of Iron Man 3: what is Tony Stark made of?

After the events of The Avengers, Stark is suffering from anxiety and post-traumatic stress, and has thrown himself into his work, making over 40 variants of his Iron Man suit. When the mysterious terrorist known as the Mandarin (Sir Ben Kingsley) injures one of Tony’s loved ones in a bombing, Stark challenges him on national television, even supplying his home address. This moment both kicks off the plot, which rockets along after this point, and subtly highlights Stark’s unhinged, traumatised mentality.

To his credit, Robert Downey Jr. balances the usual rapid fire Starkisms with a vulnerability that is never overdone, but always under the surface, colouring most of the character’s actions. Also impressive is Sir Ben Kingsley, whose Mandarin is suitably chilling, mostly through his sonorous vocal performance.

Okay, now a brief digression into comic book fanboyism, if you’ll indulge me. When I first heard the Mandarin was to be the villain in this film, I was sceptical. The Mandarin is Iron Man’s greatest foe. He is to Iron Man what the Joker is to Batman. There were two reasons I didn’t think the character would work: one, the Mandarin is basically a sorcerer, possessing 10 magic rings; and two, the character is kind of racist. He’s a pastiche of the Fu Manchu type of Asian villain, an Orientalist vision of the Yellow Peril redolent of Ming the Merciless from the Flash Gordon comic strips. As with most comic book characters, the Mandarin has been updated and rebooted over the years, but none of those interpretations seemed likely to fit with the world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Thankfully, writers Drew Pearce and Shane Black find a rather novel way of adapting the character as a sort of super-terrorist, composed of various bits of iconography that colour the West’s fears about the East, the Middle East and the rest of the world. There is a moment when the brilliance of this characterisation is fully realised, and you’ll know it when you see it.

Other great moments include an aerial set piece filmed with very little to no CGI enhancement and a few instances of Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) doing more than sashaying around in a business suit.

Shane Black’s direction is competent, and like his previous directing gig, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), he and Downey Jr. seem to collaborate well, both films being solid on character and plot.

Highly polished and appropriately spectacular, Iron Man 3 would be a nice way to round off Tony Stark’s character arc. But of course we’ll see Tony Stark again, either in another sequel or the next Avengers film.

Dreama Walker in ‘Compliance’

The 2013 Gold Coast Film Festival began on Friday night with the Australian premiere of sci-fi comedy The History of Future Folk and closes with an advance screening of the remake of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. In total, it will showcase 28 feature films, including 15 Australian premieres. Running from April 18-28 at Birch Carroll & Coyle Pacific Fair cinemas, this year’s programme promises a typically diverse selection of local and international films.

The full programme is available at the Festival’s website. Our writers are particularly excited about these selections:

All Superheroes Must Die

Jason Trost (writer, director, actor, editor and producer) follows his 2011 cult hit The FP with this down and dirty response to comic-book movies. Four young superheroes suddenly lose their powers at the hands of arch-nemesis Rickshaw (James Remar) and are forced to compete in a deadly tournament to save themselves and all around them.

Starring Trost, Lucas Till and Sophie Merkley as the caped crusaders, All Superheroes Must Die is an interesting proposition – what happens when an indie filmmaker makes a big, no-holds-barred comic book film? With a tagline like “Some games have no winners,” some irresistibly dark trouble seems to be brewing. – Katia Nizic

Compliance

The manager of a fast food chain receives a call from a man who says he is a police officer and has evidence of a staff member stealing. This man asks the manager to isolate the girl and question her. Then he asks her to go one step further. Then another …

Based on a true story, Compliance is a fascinating and disturbing study of what people can do if someone else says it’s okay. In making you simultaneously question how you would respond, the film is utterly compelling, but not for the easily offended. – Jason Reed

Night of Silence

After serving his sentence for a crime he did not commit, a middle-aged Turkish man (Ilyas Salman) is arranged to be married to a 14-year-old girl (Dilan Aksüt). Night of Silence takes place over the fated wedding night of these two victims of social ordinance, as the girl tries to preoccupy her husband with stories, distractions and excuses to postpone the loss of her virginity.

At times tense, breathtaking and humorous, director Reis Çelik’s film offers a razor sharp critique of the patriarchal culture still very much prevalent in modern Turkey. The film won the Crystal Bear at the 2012 Berlinale and Best Screenplay at the recent Asia Pacific Screen Awards. – Myles Trundle

Thale

Two crime scene cleaners discover something more shocking than the gruesome blood and bodies they encounter everyday: a mythological creature hiding in a basement, whose beauty and allure may lead to their demise.

Based on Norwegian folklore, Thale has accrued a sizeable following since it premiered on the festival circuit. It seems to promise a combination of Species (Roger Donaldson 1995) and Troll Hunter (André Ovredal 2010) – just enough fantasy injected into a promising horror premise. – Jason Reed

Director: Robert Redford
Writer: Lem Dobbs, from the novel by Neil Gordon
Starring: Robert Redford, Shia LaBeouf, Julie Christie, Susan Sarandon, Brendan Gleeson, Terrence Howard, Richard Jenkins, Brit Marling, Anna Kendrick, Chris Cooper, Nick Nolte
Length: 125 min.

The vaguely defined ‘political/conspiracy thriller’ sub-genre is one that is – or at least should be – notorious for churning out a steady stream of very average films. The third Robert Redford-directed film in five years happens to be his third contribution to this growing phalanx of thrill-less thrillers after 2007′s Lions For Lambs and 2010′s long-forgotten The Conspirator (I smell a conspiracy!). It’s not that these films are bad; they just have a feeling of tired predictability about them that inspires little tangible affection.

The Company You Keep keeps to that trend as it follows Jim Grant (Robert Redford), a recently widowed father to an 11-year-old girl. Once a member of radical left activists The Weather Underground, Grant must suddenly go on the run when Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), a fellow member, is captured and interviewed by dogged young journalist Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf).

Grant must track down the one person who can clear him of complicity in their robbery of a bank at which a security guard was shot and killed. Shepard’s sleuthing begins to reveal the true extent of the cover-up at work as more and more people’s involvement comes to light.

The chief problem with the film is that it tries to pack in far too much material and still manages to be boring. Rarely is an overstuffed movie tedious, but Redford manages it. The cast is stellar, and yet few have even the vaguest opportunity to craft a character or display much significance to the plot that couldn’t have been sped up or cut entirely. Brendan Gleeson and Brit Marling are the only actors outside of Redford, Sarandon and LaBeouf who are given enough to do in their limited screen time to make the audience care about what happens to them.

The other glaring flaw is Redford himself. Seemingly out of vanity, he has cast himself as a 55-year-old character despite being a 76-year-old man. No casting director on the planet would have considered Redford for the role, so it’s lucky he directed the damn thing. Presumably he wanted to prove that he could still run a lot (and look terribly funny doing it) and move his face normally (again with little success). Whenever he appears in a scene with Nick Nolte, it’s like the dead have risen and made it in Hollywood.

Dramatically inert and predictable to the end, The Company You Keep is nonetheless competently made. Yet it amounts to the sum total of ‘why?’ With too little ability to compellingly tell its story, it fails to be about anything in the process, forgetting to discuss themes of activism, justice or parenting, all of which could have been explored to fascinating effect. For a purported thriller, it’s an incredibly lifeless affair, brimming with cliché and wasted talent. This is company you’re better off avoiding.

The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann)

Closing night film:

Zulu (Jérôme Salle)

Special Screenings:

• Weekend of a Champion (Roman Polanski)
• Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight (Stephen Frears)
• Seduced and Abandoned (James Toback)
• Otdat Onci (Taisia Igumentseva)
• Stop the Pounding Heart (Roberto Minervini)

In Competition:

Jury chair: Steven Spielberg

• Only God Forgives (Nicolas Winding Refn)
• Borgman (Alex Van Warmerdam)
• La Grande Bellezza (Paolo Sorentino)
• Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh)
• Venus in Fur (Roman Polanski)
• Nebraska (Alexander Payne)
• Jeune et Jolie (Francois Ozon)
• Wara no Tate (Straw Shield) (Takashi Miike)
• La Vie D’Adele (Abdellatif Kechiche)
• Shoshite Chichi ni Naru (Hirokazu Kore-Eda)
• Tian Zhu Ding (Jia Zhangke)
• Grisgris (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)
• The Immigrant (James Gray)
• The Past (Asghar Farhadi)
• Heli (Amat Escalante)
• Jimmy P. (Arnaud Desplechin)
• Michael Kohlhaas (Arnaud Despallieres)
• Inside Llewyn Davis (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen)
• Un Chateau en Italie (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi)

Un Certain Regard

Jury chair: Thomas Vinterberg

• Grand Central (Rebecca Zlotowksi)
• Sarah Prefere La Course (Chloe Robichaud)
• Anonymous (Mohammad Rasoulo)
• La Jaula de Oro (Diego Quemada-Diez)
• L’Image Manquante (Rithy Panh)
• Bends (Flora Lau)
• L’Inconnu du Lac (Alain Guiraudie)
• Miele (Valeria Golino)
• As I Lay Dying (James Franco)
• Norte, Hangganan Ng Kasaysayan (Lav Diaz)
• Les Salauds (Claire Denis)
• Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler)
• Death March (Adolfo Alix Jr.)
• Omar (Hany Abu-Assad)
• The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola)

Out of Competition:

• Blood Ties (Guillaume Canet)
• All is Lost (J.C. Chandor)

Directed by: Pablo Larraín
Written by: Pedro Peirano
Starring: Gael García Bernal, Alfredo Castro, Antonia Zegers, Néstor Cantillana, Alejandro Goic
Length: 118 min.

One of the reasons Argo (Ben Affleck 2012) – no matter how successful as entertainment – fails as historical drama is because it steadfastly refuses to contemplate the idea that there is more than one side to the events it depicts. Argo‘s wallowing in American/Affleckian exceptionalism wouldn’t be so grating if the film at least gestured towards the effects of such a constricted perspective.

The beauty of No is that, despite the inevitability of its premise, the political context of the events it recreates is presented with such nuance and intelligence that it’s engrossing to watch even if you enter fully aware of how they play out.

With the enigmatic ad man Rene Saavedra (Gael García Bernal) at its centre, No charts the development of the successful ‘No’ ad campaign, which incited the Chilean populace to vote the dictator Augusto Pinochet out of office in 1988. Finding the present campaign dour and unenticing, Saavedra joins the cause more for the challenge than his distaste for Pinochet’s regime.

The ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ sides are given 15 minutes each night to make their case for 27 days in advance of the plebiscite, which, if successful, would give Pinochet another eight years in power. Saveedra decides the campaign needs a positive spin, undertaking the task of selling the abstract – happiness, freedom – to the public. His conservative boss, meanwhile, heads up the ‘Yes’ campaign while his comrades are brutalised and his son, Simon (Pascal Montero), endangered.

Shot on fuzzy U-matic tapes and fused with archival footage from the time, No’s documentary-realist approach makes it spectacular to look at. Director Pablo Larraín has stated that roughly 30 per cent of the film is comprised of existing footage, but it’s so seamlessly interwoven that it’s impossible to notice.

While it revolves around a resolutely serious moment in Chilean history, No distinguishes itself further from other historical dramas by being the funniest in recent memory. Running jokes and black humour abound in the screenplay from Pedro Peirano. Handling the humour with resolute deadpan, García Bernal gives a terrific performance as Rene, playing him with an aloofness that recalls Mad Men’s Don Draper, but with a more boyish charm.

History tells us how it concludes, but the film handles this inevitability in a way that creates both tension as well as uncertainty. After so much effort has been singularly expended on this campaign, all involved have to ask “What now?” No captures perfectly the fear and waywardness that result from successful political revolution.

Rene’s wife, clearly a furiously left-wing activist, is repeatedly arrested and brutalised during the film, and by punctuating these occasions with Rene’s need to drop his son off with her we get a glimpse of how the Pinochet regime affects the minutiae of people’s lives. Simon is the character – and symbolically, it’s his generation – who would be most adversely affected by a successful ‘Yes’ campaign.

Which is part of why the story of the ‘No’ campaign is so compelling, aside from running jokes that escalate in hilarity and fantastic performances from the whole cast. Leading up to the brutal, intentionally anti-climactic climax, the stakes become higher and higher and the methodology behind each campaign more and more fascinating.

But the truest sign of the film’s success? In a film about advertising, you’ll assuredly be left humming the jingle of the titular movement as you would the catchy tune you just heard on TV. No matter what it’s for, the brain is still susceptible to the oily appeal of the advertisement, and No‘s is a message that will endure for years to come.

The 500 Club’s Calum Logan also caught the film at last year’s Canberra International Film Festival. Read his review here.

Director: Joseph Kosinski
Writers: Joseph Kosinski and Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt
Starring: Tom Cruise, Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko, Melissa Leo, Morgan Freeman
Length: 124 min.

When I’m watching a science fiction film, I often find myself revisiting Susan Sontag’s marvellous essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” Written in 1965, it posits that science fiction film is never about human nature, technology, or any such lofty themes. The genre is concerned with what Sontag calls the “aesthetics of destruction.” Beauty is drawn out from apocalypse; buildings burning and crumbling, missiles firing, alien heat rays melting everything in sight. The pleasure of these films, Sontag claims, comes from our complicity in the abhorrent, where we see a visual reflection of our desire to see the world broken apart and human civilisation razed.

But what happens after that? Post-apocalyptic science fiction films proliferated just after the publication of Sontag’s essay, perhaps as an expression of cultural anxieties as the Cold War became quite a bit less cold.

The aesthetics of destruction are in the past tense in post-apocalyptic films. All of that conflagration and conflict has already happened. In these “after the fall” narratives, the aesthetics of ruin are ascendant, where instead of delighting in a burning civilisation, we see the charred remnants of one that will not rise again. In that sense, it’s quite a nostalgic genre, where a longing for a lost “used-to-be” is fetishised.

Oblivion plays into this sort of fetishisation, and while some of the tropes of the post-apocalyptic science fiction film are lodged with a routine banality, others are imaginatively reinvented.

The film is set 60 years after aliens invaded Earth and destroyed the moon. After this catastrophic conflict, all that remains is a handful of human survivors who have fled to a colony on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are a husband and wife team charged with repairing automated drones that protect the enormous machines collecting the remnants of Earth’s resources for the survivors on Titan. They report to Sally (Melissa Leo) on the “Tet,” a tetrahedral space station that coordinates their mission. Harper is haunted by visions of a woman (Olga Kurylenko) and by a reluctance to leave Earth (damaged as it may be) for Titan.

Director Joseph Kosinski adapted Oblivion from a graphic novel he had planned to write for Radical Comics, and has stated that it is an homage to 1970s science fiction movies. Those resonances are definitely there, especially in the film’s depiction of various ruined landmarks of New York half-reclaimed by a parched Earth. Such imagery is similar to that seen in such classics as Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson 1976), where Washington D.C. landmarks like the United States Senate building become crumbling, vine-choked husks infested with cats and Peter Ustinovs.

The resituating of the grand symbols of our present civilisation is handled in a more narratively justifiable way in Oblivion. It is not simply a tactic of defamiliarisation or spectacle as it often is in the post-apocalyptic genre. The memories that these ruined landmarks elicit in Jack Harper become crucial to the plot as it wends down twists and turns that are only really surprising if you have not seen or read much science fiction.

Despite this, there is a sense of freshness about the film. Its sleek design is epitomised in Harper’s aerial transport as well as his home, a sort of open plan Californian penthouse perched on a plinth. The drones that Harper routinely repairs and services are well realised, and the sight of the Tet hovering in the skyline as a mechanical substitute for the shattered moon is both credibly rendered and unsettling.

While Oblivion’s visuals are suitably spectacular, it also possesses an impressive sound design: the drones hum and click like grumpier, tougher cousins of R2D2; the engines on Jack’s aerial transport roar with power in a way that makes the aerodynamics more convincing than they should be; and M83’s score is bold if sometimes intrusive.

Oblivion may not tread much new ground, but it is an interesting entry into the genre, chiefly because it marries (albeit not always successfully) the technological spectacle of sleek machines, gadgets and gizmos with a post-apocalyptic aesthetic of ruin and obsolescence. And surprisingly, Tom Cruise is bearable.