A place to think deeply about movies
Avi Lewis’ documentary This Changes Everything looks at the narrative for civilization that allowed climate change to happen. Without preaching, the film takes a look at grassroots movements that are helping to mitigate climate change.
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We’re in an age of mass extinction. For centuries, you might expect one species to go extinct per year, but thanks to human activities, these numbers have increased by orders of magnitude. Director Louie Psihoyos’ Racing Extinction aims to not just manufacture outrage about this fact, but to create a sense of wonder at the natural world through using stunning high tech imagery to reveal never-before-seen footage or impossible-to-hear sounds.
The film follows a group of environmental activists — nature photographers and retired business executives who have dedicated their lives to saving endangered species — as they track down illegal animal slaughter around the world and expose it, in an effort to stop it. One of the first examples of this we see is a Hollywood techie who sets up a large screen onto which he projects an image of an endangered species of whales, in front of a California restaurant serving the endangered species, to raise awareness about the issue and deter customers from patronizing the establishment. His persistence helped drive the company out of business.
Meanwhile, we follow the group of activists to China and Hong Kong, where sharks are being hunted for their fins. In one terrifying shot, we see a large outdoor storage facility packed with nothing but shark fins, destined to be sold to make the delicacy shark fin soup. We watch our heroes posing as restaurateurs in order to get behind-the-scenes images of just what goes on so that they can expose it. It’s horrifying, and showing us this plainly has the desired effect.
Psihoyos also follows his activists on a parallel journey to discover images and sounds of lost or almost lost species. They visit Dr. Christopher W. Clark, a researcher in biofaustics at Cornell, where there is a large library of sounds of different species, including some now extinct. Clark plays the echolocation sounds of a blue whale for us — too low to be heard by the human ear — by speeding up the recording to reduce the wavelength to something our ears can process. Here, we feel just how much would be lost if these sounds were to disappear from the world.
In an effort to explain the connection between burning fossil fuels, the carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere, and endangered species, Psihoyus films footage through a carbon dioxide filter. This makes visible the usually invisible carbon dioxide emissions from cars, industrial plants, exhausts, and more. It allows us to visualize the emissions as pollutants rather than just some invisible source of mysterious origins. Similarly, there’s also a methane filter to help us see the connection between extensive cattle raising, methane emissions, and the build-up of carbon emissions in the atmosphere.
Because the film’s third goal is to cultivate optimism about the future and empower ordinary people to make a difference, it skimps too much on the explanation o the problem and the visuals. The carbon dioxide filtered camera produces dramatic images, but without a thorough explanation of exactly how this is linked to climate change — other than stating plainly that it is — it’s unlikely to have the desired effect of really changing how people think about carbon dioxide emissions.
Similarly, the before and after images of the same location in the coral reef in the 1980s and today show a staggering difference: the coral is bleached and the site looks sick. But without an explanation of what we’re seeing and how this is linked to human activity — how the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is changing the ocean chemistry which is in turn causing bleaching — it loses its full impact. We can mourn the loss of the reef, but without additional background knowledge, the average viewer won’t understand why. Fragments of the puzzle are doled out but never linked into a full picture.
The last third of the film is dedicated to showing the activists’ collaboration with Obscura Digital to create mobile art installations — via powerful projectors — on major landmarks, such as the empire state building, which will educate about endangered species and show the beauty of these creatures. On the one hand, their project is exciting, and the film is successful at getting us engaged and on board wit the project. It may take planning, but it’s the kind of thing that a small group of people can do, which can make a difference. We see legions of people stopping in Manhattan to view the light show in awe.
But it forces Psihoyos to sacrifice a lot of time which could have been spent showing us more dramatic images and helping us to better understand the situation. The high-tech visualizations and the beautiful images are what makes Racing Extinction a must-see. It’s awe-inspiring and vital. As important as it is to get as many people as possible to join the fight, there’s really not much more actionable information than in An Inconvenient Truth, but there’s less background provided to get you to the point where you understand the problem enough to want to address it.
Nevertheless, showing us a successful campaign does have its uses. Racing Extinction premiered at Sundance in January alongside the Canadian documentary How to Change the World, which chronicled the rise of Green Peace in Canada and its Save the Whales movement. How to Change the World documented the problems that can occur when a movement grows too quickly with too many different strategies, and it’s got a somewhat cynical message: the thing that changes the world can itself change into something unrecognizable.
Racing Extinction is about a movement that still needs to grow, and it’s about encouraging separate, independent, grassroots efforts to help grow it. It leaves you feeling like you can make a difference rather than that changing the world is a nigh impossible feat. And in that, it is valuable. But given how powerful and fantastic the film’s images are, I wish the focus had been on creating more of these — important and rare work — and less on activism in action.
For more information about the film, visit the film’s website here.
Read more: Josh Fox talks How to Let Go of the World (And Learn to Love All The Things Climate Can’t Change) >>
The Martian would be a great engineering recruitment film — if it ever mentioned the word “engineering.” When Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is faced with the challenges of surviving alone on Mars for four years, including growing his own own food and figuring out a way to communicate with Earth, he concludes he’ll have to “science the shit out of this.”
But what he’s really doing is engineering: breaking down the big problem of surviving into smaller pieces and applying scientific knowledge and concepts to create technology and solve problems. Yet there is no explanation for how this botanist manages to jerry-rig new technology from scraps on an otherwise barren planet — without ever troubleshooting anything.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘Before The Martian, I wasn’t aware that engineers also had to fly under the radar.'” quote=”Before The Martian, I wasn’t aware that engineers also had to fly under the radar.”]
For years, Hollywood has been making movies about Jews while pretending that’s not what they’re about. (See Dirty Dancing.) And the industry has been making queer narratives while pretending that they have nothing to do with the gay community — look no further than Golden Girls. But before The Martian, I wasn’t aware that engineers also had to fly under the radar. Not once does Mark mention that he’s got a degree in mechanical engineering — something that was explicit in the book. The film still assumes that knowledge with no evidence that he has it, which had me scratching my head more than once.
How did Mark manage to create a machine to make water, hack assembly code, devise an ASCII-based communication system, and fix a dormant robot? These are difficult feats for someone who specializes in chemical engineering (for building a machine to make water), electrical engineering (for figuring out how to fix the pathfinder circuits), and mechanical engineering (for knowing how to modify his vehicle), especially given that he doesn’t have access to the all-important Wikipedia. With nothing but a botany degree and some NASA training? Fat chance.
Mark’s first attempt to make water ends in disaster. He has to regroup, find the error, and fix the problem. Yet every other challenge he faces seems to be surmounted effortlessly. I get that it would be boring to watch Mark fail, fail, and fail some more, before he finally succeeds. But denying us the chance to see Mark fail and regroup undermines the sheer amount of effort it would take for Mark to survive.
[clickToTweet tweet=”THE MARTIAN is packed full of Eureka moments, giving you a dopamine hit every few minutes. ” quote=”THE MARTIAN is packed full of Eureka moments, giving you a dopamine hit every few minutes. “]
Much like last year’s The Imitation Game, and its superior space age cousins October Sky and Apollo 13, the greatest thrill of The Martian comes from watching Mark solve problems — even (or especially) when that means blowing himself up. Whereas The Imitation Game offered but one great Eureka! moment, The Martian is packed full of them, giving you a dopamine hit every few minutes. But when there’s little work required to reach each milestone, the accomplishments lose their full dramatic weight. We cheered with the Rocket Boys in October Sky when their rocket finally succeeded, because we’d watched dozens of them crash and burn. But we never even expect Mark fail, because major problems get solved as soon as he identifies them.
As long as you’re willing to buy Mark’s limitless knowledge, the film has few major scientific issues. Most egregiously, Mars’ gravity is depicted as equivalent to Earth’s rather than about one third of Earth’s — Mark should be hopping around even when he’s at his weakest. The storm at the beginning of the film, which caused Mark’s crew to abandon him on Mars and leave in a hurry, wouldn’t even be possible given the thinness of Mars’ atmosphere, a problem even the book’s author admits. The fateful, major decision made by the Head of NASA is so ludicrous on so many levels that it’s hard to credit as anything more than a plot contrivance. And having apparently learned nothing from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mark’s fellow crew member Chris (Sebastian Stan) does numerous space walks without tethering himself to his ship.
Drew Goddard’s script doles out enough information to let us in on the problem solving ourselves, so that we get to feel the same sense of discovery that Mark does onscreen. It’s structured to keep us curious and on the same page as Mark, rather than just passively watching him build and problem solve. Having seen Mark look through his teammates’ belongings that were left behind, we can make the logical leap at about the same time he does: he’s been left with their rations, too.
Yes, Mark sometimes outlines his plan by talking into a camera 127 Hours-style, but the device is used sparingly. Goddard frequently has Mark cracking wise, as much for his own sanity and amusement as ours: he’s alone out there and he needs to stay stable somehow. In one great moment, he describes the plan that a team of very smart NASA scientists came up with that amounts to drilling holes in the ceiling and banging on it.
Although Mark is still largely a conventional hero — white, male, cocky, super-smart — the film places him in a world full of unconventional players. A woman from the military (Jessica Chastain) is the strong and capable leader of the team that went to Mars. Similarly, the satellite specialist in Houston who first spots signs of life on Mars once the team has departed is also a woman (the radiant Mackenzie Davis). And it’s a young black academic (Donald Glover) who figures out the Hail Mary to save Mark. Not to mention that the team leader is the ever cool, intelligent, and charismatic Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Leaving aside Ridley Scott’s recent embarrassing misstep with the all-white cast of Exodus: Gods and Kings, he’s been a pioneer of putting marginalized groups in front of the camera. People still regularly cite Ellen Ripley from Scott’s Alien as the exemplar of a well-rounded strong female character. Goddard got his start writing for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so writing smart, capable, interesting women — without the personal hysteria that a Sorkin script would require — comes naturally.
But if I may be allowed a quibble, it’s troubling that the women are all white, while the male characters are more racially diverse. And in the odd scene when Goddard needs to explain some key facts to us, it falls to a woman, Kristin Wiig’s NASA public relations guru, to be the ignorant audience surrogate in need of an explanation.
The Martian is shot in 3D, but the effectiveness of this technology for the storytelling is uneven. The shots of Mark wandering Mars are when the 3D is at its most dramatic, driving home the fact that this is a man alone on a large, hostile, and empty planet. Similarly, Scott’s use of 3D back home sometimes brings home just how full of people and resources Earth is. NASA holds its first press conference of the film on the top floor of its headquarters with the speaker standing in front of a glass wall, the building’s vast atrium visible behind him. In contrast, I practically forgot that the film was in 3D during much of what happens in Mark’s Mars habitat or on the Earth. The Martian is not a bold, groundbreaking visual work of art in the vein of Gravity or 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it is a good story, and that’s enough.
Read more: Review: Ex Machina is yet another film about boys and their toys >>
Ex Machina isn’t just misogynistic; it gets the science wrong, too.
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Merchants of Doubt takes an in-depth look at how the same public relations experts — these “Merchants of Doubt” — who helped tobacco companies persuade the world, in the 1950s and 1960s, that cigarettes weren’t harmful to health, even though the tobacco companies had done their own very good scientific studies that proved the opposite, were later employed to sell lies about climate change.
There’s a crucial moment in The Imitation Game, the new biopic about Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) cracking the unbreakable German Enigma Code during World War II, when the code-cracking gang at Bletchley Park realises that the Germans end their dispatches with the phrase “Heil Hitler.” This Eureka moment emerges from an offhand comment, but if you’ve ever written a line of code, you’ll understand just how profoundly it changes the playing field — and just how exciting that feeling of finally solving the problem is.
When they started their work, they faced the challenge of checking 150 million million possible ways to wire the Enigma machine — it would take millions of years to check this by hand and the Nazis rewire the machine daily — to find the winning combination. Now, all they have to do is find the combination that translates to “Heil Hitler.” The first time they input this new setting into Turing’s code-cracking machine, a proto-computer with moving parts, it speeds up the calculations immensely. Before, the machine would calculate endlessly; suddenly, it comes to a stop, having found the winning combination within minutes. They’ve cracked the code.
I’m pretty sure the reason I was practically pumping my fist in the air at this point is because I’ve written lots of code. I understood that they’d just developed their first meaningful algorithm. A scientific revolution in computing just happened, and I understood why this made it possible to crack the impossible code. Although the film lays out early on the difficulty of the task, and we get to see just how quickly the machine figures things out with this new information, the inner-workings of what’s really happened is only subtly portrayed. If you haven’t coded, you’ll have to go by the suddenly fast-moving, swiveling camera, and the energy with which the entire cast starts running from place to place, to understand that excitement is in the air — something big just happened. You might feel a little manipulated, too.
The central problem of The Imitation Game is that it doesn’t understand what it’s like to be either a programmer or gay. The filmmakers clearly don’t understand how Turing’s Enigma-cracking machine works since Turing is never actually fiddling with the logic gates on it — the bits that make the machine intelligent — or the moving parts, but instead only ever touching immobile structures. When he pins up his sketches for the machine on the wall, it should show an interconnected network of logic gates, but it’s a disconnected mess. And there’s no clarity — either from a verbal explanation or the way the camera moves — regarding why some of the knobs of Turing’s machine spin faster than others. The filmmaker and the actors clearly do not understand this machine, so how can the audience be expected to?
Similarly, the film frequently conflates Turing’s social awkwardness — his inability to behave like a regular human — with his homosexuality, even though these are two very different, very separate things. Both may involve, for Turing, a certain “Imitation Game” of his own — imitating a person to fit in, imitating a heterosexual because homosexuality was illegal — but these are entirely different things.
From the inexcusably sententious script alone, you’d have a hard time figuring out that Alan Turing is a one in a million genius: he speaks largely without wit and in cliches (“You need me a whole lot more than I need you”). But it’s the strength of Cumberbatch’s performance that illuminates Turing as a complicated man: arrogant yet socially insecure, compassionate yet usually oblivious to the feelings of others, and above all, driven by the work, by solving the puzzle. Cumberbatch can speak at the speed of thought, a thrilling thing to watch, and so necessary when portraying a highly intelligent man — it makes me excited to see his Hamlet.
Director Morten Tyldum shoots Alan almost entirely in close-up, isolating him from the group around him, but also creating a real intimacy between him and us, the audience. We see his micro-expressions clearly, which means a raised eyebrow. a twitch in the eye, or a sly smile become a window into this man’s thought process. Cumberbatch’s reaction shot is what will make somebody else’s throwaway line suddenly sing; the same is true of many of the others in the ensemble cast, especially Matthew Goode whose mischievous smile speaks volumes. Every two-shot that Turing is in has to be earned. Although Cumberbatch’s performance is capital A Acting, I felt it was more effective and emotionally resonant than his usually affected performances, but here the numerous personal tics don’t mean Cumberbatch loses sight of the emotions. Turing is not a highly emotive man — he has too many bloody secrets to keep — which means even the smallest facial movement takes on massive meaning.
Turing has a hard time getting along well with others, whether as an adolescent (Alex Lawther, with great sensitivity) being bullied at school, or as a grown man, unable to connect with his colleagues at Bletchley Park. It’s only on the arrival of Joan Clarke (Kiera Knightley, utterly charming and believable as a brilliant woman), a fellow mathematician and outsider (“I’m a woman doing a man’s job”), that he starts to find a way into his colleagues’ hearts, thanks to Joan’s warmth and advice. Since all he needed was a woman, it starts to seem like the film thinks that what made Alan remarkable, what made him able to see the big picture and build a machine to crack the code rather than trying to do it by hand like everyone else, is that he was a homosexual without a heteronormative narrative. He wasn’t “normal,” but Joan made him more so. When the film’s infamous line — “Sometimes it’s the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine” — gets bandied about, it sometimes suggests that no one imagined anything of Alan because of his homosexuality, and not because he’s probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, which has nothing to do with sexual preferences.
I’d hardly be the first person to comment that Alan Turing’s sexuality is a non-entity in the film. A chaste knee-graze and a penned note reading “I love you” in his adolescence are as close as Turing ever gets to exhibiting homosexual desire or feelings. That he doesn’t fancy women is a secret he has to keep, but if we hadn’t been told in a police interrogation in 1951 that he paid a man to touch his penis, we’d have no inkling that he harboured such desires, let alone acted on them. Since the film asks us to feel indignant — and rightly so — that a war hero could be persecuted and chemically castrated for being a homosexual, it’s a problem that the film is so clearly afraid of Turing having any kind of demonstrable sexuality. It also means that Turing’s rejection of Joan, to whom he’d proposed marriage — for practical reasons, to help her out — lacks credibility: a beard is just what he needs, and he genuinely cares for her, so why pretend otherwise?
The film is able to address, if not show or develop, Turing’s homosexuality by using The Imitation Game, Turing’s test for whether you’re dealing with a human or a machine, as a framing device. The film begins with a police interrogation; the police investigator (Rory Kinnear) has read Turing’s work and seems more interested in finding out about that than the gross indecency case at hand. Alan’s testimony becomes the film’s narration, taking us back to Bletchley Park during the war, and then further back to his first adolescent love. Of course, you can’t play Turing’s actual Imitation Game in an empty room with two people, so the framing device falls apart once you see that it’s just a plot device.
The framing device has another advantage: it turns the film into a mystery of sorts. The police investigator thinks Turing is hiding something, perhaps that he’s a foreign spy, and Turing asks us at the beginning, “Are you paying attention?” Tyldum’s camera is always pushing in on a scene or a face, always bringing us closer to the action or to a person, inviting us to solve the puzzle: in effect, trying to give us the same excitement that solving puzzles gave Turing.
The mystery does help us stay engaged, but plot contrivances are constantly threatening to bring the film down. Attempts to dramatize a war-time predicament Turing may find himself in can sometimes feel forced. Just as they crack the code, they realise they now have to pretend as though they haven’t (yet another Imitation Game), keeping it a secret from the Nazis and the Brits so they can determine how best to use the information without being found out: how convenient that someone in that very room will lose a brother as an immediate consequence. The sheer number of times that Turing comes to verbal blows with his superior officer, Commander Denniston (Charles Dance), and one of them has to dramatically exit and then re-enter the scene strains believability — not to mention the fact that the local MI6 agent (Mark Strong) is always standing on the sidelines making know-it-all faces, entirely for comedic effect.
But, you know what? Seeing Charles Dance, Mark Strong, Matthew Goode, and Keira Knightley radiate charisma, share screen time in this ensemble cast, and butt heads with Benedict Cumberbatch’s “irascible genius,” is pretty much a joy. The actors are far, far better than the material, and by giving them their chance to shine, Tyldum elevates it, too. The Imitation Game is a hugely flawed film, but one I can’t help liking anyway.