Baysplosions: the reboot/remake/sequel

Michael Bay is just trolling critics now.

When it was announced he was making a fourth Transformers movie with a new cast and new storylines, there was a suggestion in the tone of the press releases and other news that the quality and style of the film might change. People were batting around the word “reboot,” which is a word that intrigued me after the painfully awful first trilogy, in which Shia LaBouef spent nearly 8 hours bathed in digital calamity. 

But after seeing Transformers: Age of Extinction, it’s obvious Bay has no desire to tinker with his formulas. It’s more about ability: Michael Bay can’t make a better movie. It’s beyond his talent and scope. He’s the Walmart of film directors. He makes expensive stupid movies that appeal to people who can be suckered into paying for the same thing four times. He’s settled on that career path. It’s time we all accepted this as well. 

That’s a hard thing to do, though, especially when you’re three hours deep in a movie filled with what is essentially the same exact imagery over and over again. How many times can you watch low-angled shots of a hero Transformer shooting at an enemy Transformer? Here’s a whole movie to determine your breaking point.

Starring in this Transformer outing is Mark Wahlberg as Cade Yeager, a name that is supposed to conjure the spirit of adventure and bravery that is Chuck Yeager, the test pilot that first broke the sound barrier. Cade is a penniless tinkerer and inventor in the most wholesome town in America, where screen doors, windchimes, rocking chairs on wooden porches and American flags are seen so prominently they deserve below-the-title billing. It’s as if a Toby Keith song vomited all over a Cracker Barrel.

Trucker-hat-wearin’ ‘Murican patriot Cade — whose oblivious customers actually pay $20 for Discman repairs — makes a trip to a local condemned theater to scavenge for invention parts. He meets the theater owner’s son, an effeminate man with a wobbly handshake (gay joke?), who sells him an old 35mm projector and a demolished big rig that turns out to be Optimus Prime, the Transformer leader who has gone into hiding after the destruction of Chicago in Transformers 3. Later, because the plot demands it, a CIA strike team descends on Cade’s farm to search of Optimus.

And then the movie delivers its first double rainbow of awfulness: Cade tells a government goon he doesn’t have a warrant to search his farm. The agent points at his nose and says, “My face is my warrant.” What does that even mean?! Was his face drafted by a lawyer and signed by a judge? Or does he mean that his face is so mean-looking that doors just open for him? I’ll buy you tickets to a better movie if you can explain this line in a reasonable manner. Anyway, Cade’s daughter Tessa — wearing an outfit only worn by exotics dancers on Western Night at strip clubs — turns up so she can be threatened, kidnapped and thrown into danger only to be saved by men. To Bay, women are useless sex objects that would cease existing without male heroes. But don’t take my word for it; watch his movies. Any of them.

Optimus and his human companions eventually escape using a five-story rally car death-drop that is so implausible it makes the transforming robots seem kind of pedestrian and normal. They drive 20 minutes or so, from Texas to Arizona, to meet up with other Transformers including a fat one (voiced by John Goodman), a samurai (Ken Watanabee) and Bumblebee, the yellow one who talks using clips of other Michael Bay movies.

A plot starts coming together, but it mostly resembles the other films. The CIA has aligned itself with a Transformer, whose face literally turns into a gun, to hunt down all the other Transformers for some kind of space zoo. In the deal, the humans get alien technology that will allow them to make their own transforming robots in the style of Megatron, the villain who has been killed in three movies, yet still lives on. The metal used in Transformers is revealed to be Transformium, which is inexplicably dumber than the Unobtanium of Avatar. Kelsey Grammar and Stanley Tucci have minor roles, including a kung-fu break with Tucci as he waits for an elevator that never comes. Seriously, someone should check that elevator because it made this scene really awkward, especially when the female kung-fu warrior just stood there, as if she forgot her lines and Stucci had to mouth her dialogue to her off camera. 

All of the action is mostly identical to the action of the other movies. Someone could make a game show out of that premise: Which Transformer Movie? You’d have better luck looking for differences in two versions of a Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. My point is proven perfectly in a battle scene here in Age of Extinction when a Transformer ship destroys the top of the exact same building similarly crunched in Transformers: Dark of the Moon. I guess the CGI artists already had a composite for that building built, so why not reuse it? Every scene is vaguely similar to something already done in previous Transformers movies, be it Gunface and Optimus sword fighting, Bumblebee swooping ragdolled human bodies out of the air, or of Transformers blasting their armguns in heated battles. I will say Wahlberg’s gunsword was new, and also ridiculous. But still new.

All this eventually leads up to many, many product placements, including an Oreo and Waste Management Transformer, more Chevy’s than have ever (or will ever) exist in Detroit, an exploding Victoria’s Secret bus and a shameless scene involving Tucci turning some Transformium into a Beats speaker, because Beats didn't get a shit-ton of free press when Apple bought them off a guy who has lyrically killed half of Los Angeles. As if that weren’t bad enough, Wahlberg can’t even finish a major battle sequence until he swigs from a Bud Light. The biggest product placement, though, might be its final location, China. Remember when Iron Man 3 shot China-specific scenes to help promote the film to that huge market? Here we are again with the final act taking place entirely in the most populated country on the planet. This isn’t cultural outreach; it’s money seeding. 

Oh and dinosaurs. There are dinosaurs. Transformer dinosaurs. Nothing more be said about this.

Transformers: Age of Extinction is a terrible movie. All the Transformers movies are this bad. But you know this already. You either know it and don’t see them, or you know it and see them anyway. No one is arguing that these are great or important movies. Bay has his apologists; they’re anyone who buys a ticket. If these movies thrill you or tickle the bits of your brain that find sexual gratification from movie explosions, then I’m glad a film has that power on you. Movies have some of those powers over me — just not these movies. I don’t want to spoil your fun, but I do ask you to consider how many times you would pay for the same thing.

Because Michael Bay is trolling. And your wallet is the victim.

Night Moves is a taut eco-thriller

The opening moments of Kelly Reichardt’s hauntingly bleak Night Moves re-establish the director’s brand of proto-realism: characters wander, stare, skulk, sit, stand, lean, ponder, mumble and drive, though no two at the same time. To find comparably one-tracked, and terminally silent, characters we have to reach back to 1968, when men in monkey suits did a 20-minute cold-open for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This is an excruciatingly nuanced method. Slow and agonizing, and yet also perceptive and whisper-soft. This methodical pace and volume is the hallmark of Reichardt, whose work was first widely seen in Wendy and Lucy, in which Michelle Williams camped around a Northwestern town with a dog. Williams returned for Reichardt’s next film, Meek’s Cutoff, a period piece about settlers and their clueless prairie guide. The film’s tone and half-muffled dialogue baffled audiences and critics alike. 

In Reichardt’s Night Moves, which she co-wrote with frequent collaborator and Mildred Pierce writer Jonathan Raymond, the director doesn’t stray too far from those flat, realistic performances that have marked her previous pictures. The film opens on Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and Dena (Dakota Fanning) as they bop through an Oregon town running some errands, including one at a nude day spa, a suburban home to buy a boat, and to an organic vegetable farm. As things start getting pieced together, a shocking plot develops: Josh and Dena are eco-terrorists and are planning to blow up a dam that, in their minds, represents America’s endless energy dependence. 

As they piece their operation together they are helped in their endeavor by Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), a fellow True Believer, who seems to have hyped up his own intelligence by simply saying it out loud over and over again. The three eco-terrorists have their target, their delivery device and their window of opportunity, but not the bomb, which requires a visit to a nearby fertilizer plant. Dena, her innocent face and blond locks hardly threatening, is elected to go make the purchase even though the sale of 500 pounds of ammonia nitrate — the primary compound used in the Oklahoma City bomb — would likely send up some red flags. It’s this scene, as well as several others, that reveal a secondary motive for Night Moves: it’s a suspense thriller. An effective one, too. 

Reichardt’s pacing does wonders to the thrills. Even scenes of Josh towing the boat, it’s hull overloaded with explosives, through a recreation area left me jittery and ready for pretty much anything. Later, after the bomb’s timer has been started, as the trio are paddling away from the dam, a car blows a tire on a dam overlook, forcing the driver to get out and change the tire with the bomb-boat in clear view over his shoulder. The rules of suspense require this scene, which allows the three leads to tremble in their boat while the tire-changer struggles with his lugnuts. And remember what Hitchcock said about suspense: bombs exploding are less suspenseful than bombs not exploding. 

Later in the film, as Josh, Dena and Harmon separate, the film becomes a meditation on trust, guilt and the adage “honor among thieves.” Night Moves is seen entirely from the perspective of the Eisenberg’s Josh character, who seems to have no personality whatsoever. He does have ideas, though he’s a victim to their results. Josh lives on a family farm run by some hippy types who have more balanced principles. “I’m not interested in statements. I’m interested in results,” the main farmer says after the terrorist act. Someone asks: You don’t call the destruction of a dam results? “No, I call that theater.” Later, this same farmer learns of Josh’s involvement in the dam explosion and the single human death it caused. He kicks him off the farm, which provides one of the subtle visual wonders of Night Moves: Josh, a profoundly confused hypocrite, driving a gas-guzzling truck past a bank of electrical boxes. Another razor-sharp image can be seen from inside an RV, its passengers watching The Price is Right while supposedly “camping.” 

The movie isn’t really interested in the environment, sustainable water usage, marine biodiversity, organic farming, or other ideas from the granola belt. It’s an examination on the choices people make and the repercussions from those choices. The performances are slow and tedious, but that’s no slam on Eisenberg and Fanning, both of whom do what all actors in Reichardt movies do — they underplay everything. A looser, more ambivalent film might unravel under those conditions, but Night Moves is wound as tight as its characters. That allows for an interesting experiment in acting, story and suspense. 

Faces and trigger fingers are stars in Korengal

What we don’t understand about battle-born PTSD isn’t that troops want out of the war zone, but they want back in. 

That is one of many interesting new insights in Korengal, the sequel and follow-up to the award-winning Restrepo, which featured a platoon of soldiers in Afghanistan’s deadly Korengal Valley, where gorgeous scenery concealed hundreds of enemy combatants and the daily hell they brought to American troops. 

Restrepo is the name of the sandbagged outpost perched high up on a mountain in Korengal. It’s named after a soldier who was killed there. The way the soldiers talk about their mountain fortress has an Apocalypse Now tint to it. Restrepo is their Kurtz compound. But instead of a long ponderous journey up a river to get there, they’re airlifted there in a day. There’s no acclimation. One day they’re somewhere safe; the next they’re in the maw of the mountain, a death zone that will torment them throughout their 15-month tour. 

And yet, when the soldiers talk about it, Restrepo is their home. They feed off the danger, the rush of firing that massive 50-caliber machine gun, the crack of bullets over their head, the solidarity of their weary band of brothers. Sebastian Junger’s documentary benefits because it doesn’t have to say anything; it lets the soldiers speak. And we have the opportunity to listen. 

Of course, it helps if you’ve seen Restrepo, though that’s certainly not mandatory. Some of the footage will look alike; Korengal is essentially B-roll from the earlier movie. But where Restrepo was more about the perils of war, this movie is more ponderous and concerned with the details of the day-to-day living and fighting. Korengal Valley is home to an Al Qaeda highway, but it “looks like Colorado Springs,” one soldier says. He walks us through the nicknames of some of the pre-sighted hills — Spartan Spur, Nipple Rock, Honcho Hill. Personalities start to come out heavier. One soldier romanticizes his machine gun in a way only other soldiers will relate to. 

The troops confirm something that Americans might be unsettled by: they love the firefights. Injuries and deaths were always awful, but the occasional skirmish lets them blow some steam off. And their weapons become extensions of their souls, screaming to release. One man is asked what he’s going to miss. “Shooting people,” he says.

The firefights serve an important purpose beyond their obvious catharsis — they are proof the enemy is still there. Silence and boredom can wage wars of attrition in Korengal. On slow days, the troops lounge around, the weight of the world grinding against them. If only they had something to shoot, or kill, or blow up. When the enemy doesn’t come to them, they go to the enemy on patrols to nearby villages, where villagers greet them. “That guy accepts our 10-pound bag of rice during the day. Fires RPGs at us at night. And then the next day he smiles and waves. Fuck his heart. Fuck his mind,” a soldier says, quoting LBJ’s mission in Vietnam to win “hearts and minds.”

The movie has some absurd imagery right out of a Joseph Heller novel: soldiers firing their machine guns wearing only their military-issued boxer shorts, soldiers playfully holding hands on a patrol, and a scene of a troop smashing his guitar at Restrepo so it can’t be played anywhere else. War might be hell, but it’s also surreal and strange. 

Junger filmed Korengal and Restrepo with photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was later killed while covering the Arab Spring in Libya. His camera work is exceptional because he focuses on what matters most — faces. It’s a personal touch from which the movie benefits greatly.

Korengal might be a slight rehash of Restrepo, but it gives us another chance to listen to soldiers tell us their stories. We should never stop listening.

Star, director talk abortion jokes in Child

A scene in Gillian Robespierre’s romantic comedy Obvious Child takes no prisoners: a pregnant comic with an abortion scheduled for the following day prepares to go onstage for a stand-up performance. A friend tells her to “kill it out there.” The comic, without missing a beat, says, “No, that’s tomorrow.”

The audience I saw Obvious Child with gasped audibly. The air seemed to be sucked out of the room and then replaced with superheated fumes. A hundred seat cushions groaned under unsettled asses. And let’s admit it, the joke is clever. But it pushes — and punches, and curb-stomps — some buttons. 

“That was a scripted line,” Jenny Slate, the actress who plays the comic, says of the joke. “I think that’s an important moment … She’s making a joke, putting a toe over the line.”

Slate plays Donna, the meandering millennial with a bun in the oven and an impending abortion on her horizon. She has caring parents, a kind friend and a well-meaning boyfriend — her life is decent, and the baby was unplanned. After the abortion, her life continues, and she finds love. The movie seems to be a counter-punch to the pro-life argument that abortions ruin women's lives. 

Slate and Robespierre waded into the debate Wednesday during a Scottsdale screening of Obvious Child. They were upbeat and enthusiastic, because, as they see it, they made a comedy movie, not an abortion movie. 

“There are a lot of aspects that are new or stick out about this movie. This is my first leading role and this is Gillian’s first movie, and what we were initially trying to do was just to make a movie. The story, to us, is modern and natural. We aren’t trying to push anyone’s buttons,” Slate says in her gravel-inflected voice. “The situations … some of them haven’t been delved into before in the romantic comedy genre, but we’re trying to make a movie that is thoughtful and funny and satisfying to us.”

Robespierre simplified it further: “We wanted a movie with characters that are actually funny” — Slate laughs at this — “and female characters that get all the good lines. We set out to make this movie and we didn’t go through a studio and we didn’t ask anyone’s permission. We just told a story that we wanted to tell in the voice and the way we wanted to tell it.”

But this is America. And if there’s one thing guaranteed on the same level as piping-hot apple pie, Yankee baseball and a #3 combo super-sized, it’s that abortion is something we fight and argue about from here to eternity.

“I’m not afraid. I’m welcoming the conversation from both sides,” Robespierre says. “I don’t know that the right-to-life people will ever see this movie. They’ll just go off the trailer or what journalists say, and that’s a real shame. I think when you take the layers away, you get ‘romantic comedy’ and ‘abortion’ and those words aren’t really describing what we mean.”

Slate, who’s had bit roles on Bored to Death, Bob’s Burgers, Parks and Recreation and on Saturday Night Live — she was not invited back after letting a “fuck” slip in a live sketch — says Obvious Child aims to create truth in the humanity of real people. “Gillian and I are both feminists. We seek a world where there is equality between the sexes and we think that every woman has a right to choose for their own bodies. We aren’t telling anyone what to do, we’re just presenting one woman and her complex, and hopefully fresh, story.”

The movie was purchased by A24 in the first week of the Sundance Film Festival. “We went in with normal to low expectations,” Robespierre says. “We were just really excited to be at a festival and then one night I was up until 5 in the morning at the [talent agency’s house] negotiating with A24. It’s strange, because we worked very hard and we’re very proud of the movie, but you never know how people will bond to it, or perhaps they won’t. You want them to connect to it. So far it feels like everyone is very excited, and people are connecting with it.”

The connection is unmistakable in a scene that inspired the title: as Paul Simon’s “Obvious Child” plays, Slate and her male lead, Office add-on Jake Lacy, dance around in their underwear in a foreplay of giggles, kisses and awkward nuzzling. And then they have the sex that leads to her pregnancy. 

“It was a real go-for-it moment for me because well,” Slate says this next part to herself, like an inner monologue, “‘You know you said you wanted to be a lead actress and not just a jokey woman, but a woman with some real sexuality so go for it. Get in your underpants and dance the way you do it and don’t think how other people are doing it. Just do it.’”

And that’s what she did.

Obvious Child opens in Phoenix Friday.

Jenny Slate dazzles in button-pushing comedy

Obvious Child will forever be known as the “abortion rom-com,” which is a shame because it aspires to be so much more than the one unremarkable scene that everyone is talking about.

First and foremost, it’s a character study about a hopelessly endearing hipster — or millennial, pick your poison — flailing through life on a whim and what must be about $47 and an iPhone with mustaches on the case. It’s also a frank and honest romance that reveals the pitfalls of dating in a major city. The movie stars Jenny Slate as Donna, a stand-up comic whose routine is far better than the club she performs it in. Her opening routine had some roaring lines, including one about “commando crawling through cream cheese” that had everyone retching. After one of her sets, Donna’s boyfriend breaks up with her. More humiliating is the location the dumping occurs: the co-ed graffiti-covered bathroom where, presumably, someone was eavesdropping on the public breakup while they were pooping.

Donna, heartbroken and self-destructive, lets herself go in her next performance as she drunkenly staggers around the stage in self-pity. It’s not a good look on her, which doesn’t seem to faze Max (Jake Lacy), the software developer who is schmoozing clients in the Brooklyn comedy club. They buy each other drinks and before long they’re arm and arm, peeing in the alley. He accidentally farts on her head mid-pee, and she’s not grossed out all — really, she’s honored that he would embarrass himself so early in front of her. The scene culminates into a sexual encounter, but not before a lovely bedroom montage set to the Paul Simon song that the film has named itself after.

You’ve probably guessed that Donna gets pregnant. She decides to get an abortion in a scene that can be summed up like this: Donna decides to get an abortion. There is little debate, or arguing, or soul searching. She just makes a choice. Obvious Child doesn’t debunk abortion myths so much as it demystifies the controversial act by presenting us a pregnant woman and then letting us watch as she goes in for a procedure that, in her mind, might as well be a teeth cleaning. It doesn’t provoke controversy, preach, or belittle the opponents. It just exists as a testament to one woman’s right to control her body. When the film finally gets to the procedure, Donna cries a little, but the movie suggests her decision was a simple one, and that might be it’s strongest argument: the debate rattles on in Washington, D.C., but women have already been made up their minds. 

Slate is the right performer for this material. She’s intelligent, fiercely witty and her nasally voice gives Donna a whiny presence within the film’s Brooklyn setting, where everyone has money for $20 drinks but seemingly no jobs to earn that money. She has a funny way of delivering the most devilish of lines with a brand of innocence that comes with a halo and glowing aura. She’s so sweet, and petite, and childlike. But then she drops her bombs: calling something “softer than angels’ titty skins,” or telling her friend that she was playing “Russian roulette with her vagina.” She has one abortion gag that’s so self-aware and prescient that it explodes in your face. Slate, a bratty cross of Bridesmaids and Bikini Kill, comes from the Lena Dunham school of acting: just throw it all out there and let the audience sort it out. 

As the film strives for realism, though, I found it unfulfilling. The relationships, pregnancy and abortion are handled in honest ways, but almost nothing else is. When the woman at the abortion clinic tells her the procedure is going to cost $500, Donna hardly blinks and plops down the money. How? She works part-time at a failing bookstore, and she lives in a notoriously expensive city, one she seems to enjoy without limits. A pregnant woman’s financial stability might be a factor in any decision she makes, so it’s curious that this film would gloss over that issue. 

That aside, though, Obvious Child is an important comedy, if only because it is by women, starring women and aimed at women. The abortion might be its foundation, but there is so much more to see, namely Jenny Slate in her first starring role.

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right

If The Edge of Tomorrow were just the sum of its parts — its internal mechanisms being Saving Private Ryan, Groundhog Day and War of the Worlds — then it would be a perfectly acceptable action blockbuster. But the film excels past its formula, soaring into the lower tiers of sci-fi greatness.

At the center of Edge of Tomorrow’s mech-suited bombast is Tom Cruise, who — no surprise, here — knows his way around a bonanza of futurist ideas and concepts. Few actors seem very interested in experimenting with science fiction, but Cruise is fearless at the genre, from Steven Spielberg’s one-two punch of Minority Report and War of Worlds, to last year’s fascinatingly ambitious, though hammy, Oblivion. Here, in Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise plays Cage, a PR flack for the United States military. The opening moments show us a Starship Troopers-like flip-through of cable news, where we learn that an alien race has hijacked a comet and crash landed in Europe to breed like a bacteria. And there’s Cage, grinning like only a public relations geek can, as he analyzes the alien invasion with Wolf Blitzer.

In a slithery little PR move that reeks of bureaucracy, Cage is sent to the front lines of the alien invasion, where he’s fatally mangled during a gruesome D-Day-inspired beach-storming that turns out to be an ambush devilishly orchestrated by the sinewy tentacle-strewn aliens. But Cage doesn’t die, at least not permanently. He wakes up in the previous day, and only he’s aware of it. It’s as if the world reset back 24 hours just for him. This is where Tomorrow’s intricate construction begins to shine: now in the second version of the same day, Cage makes tiny changes to his original delivery, which reveals different outcomes and permutations to the events of a day he’s already lived (and died) through. A complacent Cage yields one scenario, while an ambitious Cage gets another one entirely. Those familiar with Groundhog Day and Bill Murray’s oft-repeated routine — “I Got You Babe,” coffee in the lobby, Needlenose Ned, Punxsutawney Phil — will find Tomorrow’s version of the same concept to be a riot, including when Cage tirelessly attempts different stunts through several weeks worth of catastrophic deaths. I especially enjoyed Bill Paxton, playing a commanding officer, who is often perplexed at Cage’s apparent clairvoyance.

The finale to each of Cage’s days is the European invasion, which he can never survive — like a difficult video game level, but with unlimited lives. He’s crushed, impaled, shot, blown up, drowned, set on fire, eaten, chewed up, ground into a chunky paste … death knows no bounds as he re-lives the same day over and over again. He eventually teams up with Rita (Emily Blunt), who had her own never-ending day a couple months before. She relived her day for so long that she eventually became a badass super soldier that earned her the nickname Full Metal Bitch. But her day ended, and now she latches onto Cage to try to crack this alien enemy, which uses time travel and forever-days as a tactic to refine their strategy. When she realizes he’s in the middle of one of the déjà-vu days, she tells him to “find me when you wake up,” and then promptly shoots him, starting another rebooted sequence. Later, they hunker down over topographical maps and sketch out their plan of attack; after each failure they make new annotations to their notes (right turn here, pause, run forward, back up, left). The maps get quite cluttered.

Edge of Tomorrow works so well because its inventive with its concepts. I especially appreciated how the script assumed we would understand the material. When Cage finds Rita for the first time, he doesn’t have to spend 30 minutes convincing her. She knows what he’s going through, and the film doesn't torture us with his long explanation of it to her. And like Bill Murray’s weatherman in Groundhog Day, Cage dramatically goes through all the stages of grief as he wanders through the same day over and over again, whether its months or 10,000 years. The first week is spent in denial, trying desperately to win the invasion. Then he goes through anger and a nasty bout of depression, including when he lets a fellow soldier get repeatedly squished by a falling deployment chopper. And then comes acceptance, where the film kicks into overdrive as Cage finally learns how to crack the day. This isn’t as philosophical or spiritual as Groundhog Day, but it has its charms. 

It also has its special effects, which are abundant and cleverly used. The big one is the mechanized suits worn by the soldiers. These hydraulic war costumes — kinky lingerie for cyborgs — seem too clunky and silly to wear into battle, but the plot builds much of every action scene around their overpowering ferocity. Although, Rita’s suit brings up a point I last brought up on the first Transformers movie: why would someone use a sword when they’re body is essentially one big gun? The other big special effect is the aliens, who move so quickly they’re hard to see until later in the movie. They achieve locomotion by spinning their squid-like arms around and rolling forward, like dust bunnies or tumbleweeds. They’re rather terrifying, with jump scares to prove it, but they’re generally harmless, if only because no one really stays dead in the movie.

Edge of Tomorrow is a fascinating and remarkably well-equipped science fiction film, one that allows Cruise to shine in a genre he has cornered for himself. The action and special effects are largely impressive, but the core science-fantasy mechanic bundles everything up nicely. That and the subtle chemistry of Cruise and Blunt, the latter of which is more than capable as an action heroine. It also embodies all that a summer movie should be: action, drama, romance, comedy, special effects, as well as some lesser-known pieces, like invention, wit, mystery and some light philosophy. It’s doesn’t overdo or neglect any one element. It just finds a nice balance for all of it, and then snaps it all together in what might be the most worthwhile blockbuster of the summer. 

Woodley sparkles in starry cancer drama

The Fault in Our Stars is a compendium of dying-people clichés. You’ve seen and heard all its parts scattered throughout other films, but here they are all together in one place — a junk drawer labeled “cancer.”

This isn’t meant as an insult, just an observation of the film’s inclusion — and then clever re-tooling — of all those sick-people scenes that other movies perpetuate, from the first ominous cough to the agonizing funeral. But that’s why John Boone’s film, based on John Green’s hit young adult book, is a deeply moving and beautifully written piece of humanity: it’s not just a strummer of heartstrings, but a delicate examination of young people as they maneuver through the final chapters of their lives. And where it hits cliché, it does so in interesting ways that does not detract from the presentation.

We begin with teenager Hazel, our narrator and star. She’s cancer-free thanks to an experimental drug that has permanently eradicated the cancer, but rendered her lungs terrifyingly fragile. She must breathe from an oxygen tube that snakes around her ears and under her nose, an accessory she wears well. The oxygen tank is in a cute little rolling backpack she tows at her heels, her life-giving trailer. Although her health is good, Hazel is a broken soul: her sickness has made her cynical and depressed, and she’s slowly spiraling into a void. When she stands up at a survivor support group, she tells everyone that “oblivion is inevitable.” Her doctor wants to prescribe her an antidepressant. She resists: “Depression is a side effect of dying.”

Hazel is played with astounding confidence by Shailene Woodley, an actress who seems to have no limitations. Fault in Our Stars shows her simply and exquisitely: her hair is short and simple, her makeup is minimal, her actions are muted and hushed. But there is never a single moment that Woodley does not own the screen. Her Hazel meets Augustus (Ansel Elgort), an eccentric older boy who was robbed of one of his legs by cancer. Gus, as he’s called, is the opposite of Hazel: confident, bright, smiling, and eternally hopeful. In an unfortunate quirk that claims is a metaphor, Gus walks around with a cigarette in his teeth. He doesn’t smoke it, just chews on it, because by not lighting it he’s taking away its power. (Nevermind that he funded big tobacco for that privilege.) He’s especially kind to his best friend, who’s about to lose his eyes to cancer. When the friend is dumped by his girlfriend, Gus gives him his basketball trophies to smash in a cathartic rage.

Gus and Hazel meet at their support group — colliding in a trademark Meet Cute — and they start dating. “I fell in love with him the way you fall asleep: slowly and then all at once,” she says. His infectious smile seeps into her life, and before she knows it, she’s happy and invigorated — her outlook brightens. Aside from her failing health, and his upbeat spirit, the film spends a great deal of time worrying about author Peter Van Houten, who wrote Hazel’s favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, about a cancer patient. After Gus and Hazel start an online correspondence with Van Houten (Willem Dafoe), they travel to Amsterdam to meet him and to get answers about his cryptic novel, which ends mid-sentence, signifying the character’s sudden death. Of course, they show up and Van Houten isn’t who they thought, which sends them on a detour through the Anne Frank house and other gorgeous locations. 

This is what happens in The Fault in Our Stars, but this is not the core of the movie. Within the scenes, and the loosely thatched plot, is a dialogue to young people about their mortality, their love and their fragile hearts. Hazel and Gus ponder their existence, the eternities, cancer … they seem to be struggling through a thoughtful analysis of the entire universe, stars included. The dialogue is smart and engaging, and the characters are informed and intelligent. They act and talk like adults, a believable aspect to young people who have encountered adult-sized illnesses. This might all sound very existential and ambiguous, and it is, if only because the film wants you to sort out what it all means — life, love and death. 

The comedy can be grim; gallows humor is probably the right classification. At one point, someone says the word “cancertastic.” Later, Hazel and Gus take a blind friend to an ex-girlfriend’s house so he can chuck eggs at her convertible. Van Houten is awkward and awful, even as he blasts Swedish hip-hop for his new guests. Cancer seems to hang over everyone, yet they have to smile and push forward under that gloomy cloud. Such is life. 

The Fault in Our Stars is not a reinvention of teen dramas — it’s certainly no dismal Nicholas Sparks book-to-movie — but it does take great care in trying to understand teens and their hopes, dreams and fears. Teenagers aren’t the idiots that movies make them out to be. They yearn for smart movies as much as adults, if not more so.