Classic characters return with CGI makeover

Peanuts was always a lo-fi cartoon strip. It was minimalist and plain, in presentation and theme. It was so plain — a kinder word than “boring” — that many kids skipped over it and went to other strips in the funny pages. And then creator Charles Schulz died, and newspapers cut their funny pages, and then the newspapers went out of business. And Peanuts faded into our collective past, a relic of a kinder and gentler time.

So when a hi-fi Peanuts movie — 3D, CGI, surround sound — crosses movies screens in 2015, it feels like a betrayal to the old Peanuts, the one that existed in a different time and place, one far removed from the digital age. Of course, a little nostalgia never hurt anyone, which is good because if it did you’d likely leave The Peanuts Movie with a compound fracture. 

Steve Martino’s faithful adaptation of Schulz’s characters is an earnest and heartfelt tribute to the original strip, which ran ubiquitously for decades in newspapers around the world. Yes, they’re updated with nifty computer rendering and cheerful color, but they maintain their original shape and jagged edges, from squiggles of hair to pencil swipes representing furrowed brows. The film is beautiful, but nothing that Schulz didn’t create first is implanted into this movie. 

And when I say “faithful adaptation,” what I mean to say is, praise all that is holy, no one takes a selfie with an Apple smartphone or browses “the web” from their Lenovo malware machine or dances to a Katy Perry song with Katy wearing a yellow zig-zag bra made of frosted candy-filled bearclaws. The film takes place like it’s still 1958, and that might be its saving grace. No product placement, no Internet, no celebrity cameos. Just Peanuts.

You’ll recognize most everyone here: tomboy Peppermint Patty, curbside shrink Lucy, blanket-toting bestie Linus, pianist Schroeder, stinkball Pig-Pen and, of course, blockhead Charlie Brown, who is either the most hated kid in town or the most loved. In earlier decades, Charlie Brown was a lovable loser with a menagerie of personality quirks that are today identified as depression, anxiety, paranoia and antisocial behavior. But remember, it’s 1958, so he’s really just a normal kid with oversized problems.

During an afternoon hockey game, Charlie and company watch as a new family moves into town. One of the family members is their age, the Little Red-Haired Girl. Charlie is smitten at first sight, and he begins to worship her from afar. At school they’re paired together, but he’s paralyzed with embarrassment and fear. There’s a school dance, a talent show, book reports, show and tell, snow days and all of the other scenarios you’d expect from a cartoon this old fashioned. Each new event is supposed to bring Charlie Brown closer to the unnamed Little Red-Haired Girl, but each one drives them further apart. “Good grief,” he says repeatedly.

Intercut inside all of this boy-meets-girl drama are Snoopy and Woodstock, who discover a typewriter and an old toy airplane. They begin hammering out a story that turns into a subplot involving Snoopy flying his dog house against the Red Baron during World War I. This is a thing that happened occasionally in Peanuts strips and TV specials, so just roll with it. It's sort of adorable, mostly because Snoopy and Woodstock share these indiscernible yelps, growls and pips.  

Everything you’d expect from a Peanuts movie is here, and right where it’s supposed to be. Lucy holds a football and pulls it away before Charlie kicks it, Linus has a conniption when he loses his blanket, Patty refers to Charlie as Chuck, Marcie refers to everyone as sir, Lucy gives advice from a booth on the sidewalk, Schroeder namedrops Beethoven, Woodstock flies around leaving little dotted lines in the sky … on and on, it’s all here. And again, that’s part of the film’s unmistakable charm. Chuck Brown dancing “Gangnam Style” would kill this, and it never happens, not even close. Reverence is paid to what Schulz did and how he did it.

Now, that doesn’t mean this should have been made, though. Not everything deserves a reboot, particularly the Peanuts, which is the product of another age, one that should remain in the past. We’ll never be in that place again, and it’s obvious watching this movie and its lovable innocence. But it does feel good to look back at it and smile.

Fantastic 4 is a monument to comic awfulness

If there is ever a museum for bad movies — and let’s all agree there should be, and it would be great — then the bronze monument at the entrance should be of the Fantastic Four. The plaque at the base can read: “Four heroes. Four films. Three franchises. Each fantastically awful.”

Chalk it up to divine intervention, Murphy’s Law, Chaos Theory, karma, Marvel’s pride or whatever, the universe will simply not allow the Fantastic Four to flourish. The disastrous race to beat expiring movie rights doomed 1994’s straight-to-video cheap-o-rama version. In 2005, an updated and CGI-heavy reboot, and its woeful sequel with the Silver Surfer two years later, bombed in an entirely new way with its characters, who bickered and sniped at each other like spoiled children. And here we are once again with a new Fantastic Four, and all new ways to wreck a film in spectacular fashion.

Marvel, the comic book company that now makes interlocking movie mosaics, has had a long and powerful run at comic movies. So long and so powerful that some people — people like me — are praying, hoping, cheering for the company’s eventual failure in Hollywood, which might just loosen the grip that superhero movies have on the cinema it has hijacked. Fantastic Four might not be Marvel’s death knell, but it’s proof that Marvel isn’t bulletproof. So ready, aim, fire on this clay pigeon of a movie.

Quantifying how bad this film is really very easy: it’s bad in almost every way. The actors are just atrocious, with dialogue that is forced and delivered in a drab monotone. The director, Chronicle helmer Josh Trank, is clearly out of his league with too many moving parts, an uneventful plot, a cast that is largely on screen to deliver meaningless exposition, and outdated, frankly embarrassing CGI. The pacing is off, with a long buildup to zero climax. The action choreography is uninspired and clunky. Even the score is dismal, its hollow notes punctuating the movie’s desperate failings. So little is done right that you can start to see why Trank, during the post-production of Fantastic Four, dropped out of the Star Wars spin-offs — that franchise might finally have its bearings, and Trank simply wasn’t cutting it. 

We begin with Reed Richards, a little kid in grade school called up to give a presentation about what he wants to be when he grows up. He expresses a genuine interest in science and discovery and the teacher laughs him back to his seat, because teachers just humiliate their students into submission. This is the first scene, and already I was laughing at the unintentional awfulness of Fant-four-stic, which is what the Internet has already dubbed it. Later, Reed and his new friend, Ben, who lives in what can only be described as an orphanage at a junkyard, borrow an industrial strength power converter to test out a quantum transporter. After blacking out the neighborhood, the toy car they transport disappears and in its place is a handful of foreign-looking space rocks. If this sounds interesting and slightly mysterious, don’t worry the film drops this completely so put it out of your mind. 

Years later, Reed and Ben (now played by Miles Teller and Jamie Bell) are apparently in their early 20s and participating in a sixth-grade science fair. Even stranger still, super-secret government science contractors, including Sue Storm (Kate Mara), are trolling the little kids’ baking soda volcanoes and potato clocks for insight for their own experiments. When they see the quantum teleporter they kick Ben back to the junkyard and give Reed a full-ride scholarship to continue testing his device. Back at their lab, Reed meets Sue’s brother Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), some Fast & Furious reject who can weld, and Victor Von Doom, whose name indicates he will most certainly be the villain. Doom is a hacker, something we know because he sits brooding behind six computer monitors, one of them plays video games and the others have streams of code scrolling down all Matrix-like. Also, Doom doesn’t shave — he’s angsty. 

The movie seems to be moving along at a decent clip, and then it just keeps on going, blissfully unaware that it’s on the wrong road entirely. As 10 minutes stretches to 20, then 30, then 45, Fantastic Four still has no plot, which is odd because this is the third franchise featuring this origin story, so we know what happens. It’s not a mystery: Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben are exposed to cosmic radiation and turn into mutant superheroes. It takes an agonizingly slow 45 minutes to get to the mysterious planet on the other side of the quantum teleporter. At the 55-minute mark the four finally get their powers, and only at the 90-minute mark do all of them share the same frame together as the Fantastic Four. The whole movie is 100 painful minutes long — only Marvel’s mercy saved us from more.

By the time Reed is a super-flexible Stretch Armstrong doll, Sue can turn invisible and create blue energy orbs, Johnny can fly and turn into a fireball, and Junkyard Ben is made of rocks, the film has already overstayed its welcome. Even worse, the actors have largely checked out, including the great Teller, so wonderful in last year’s Whiplash and here left to give impassioned pep talks with no passion or pep. He just lets the dialogue flop out of his mouth, especially in the anticlimactic finale where he pleads for unity among the four. “Alone we can’t beat him, but together we can,” he says in a voice meant for reading world news briefs on NPR. Mara has the regretful line, “I’m not going to be a tool,” and an early scene where she blurts out that she listens to music because of “pattern resolution.” Jordan and Bell have few lines, and maybe it’s best for them and their promising careers. The lines they do have reveal no depth to their characters or to the world they inhabit. 

The acting is just the worst, and the only excuse I have for these fine actors giving these awful performances is that maybe these were the performances Trank wanted. Or maybe the actors just turned it off once they realized the plot was a literal black hole. In any case, this is abysmal acting with no heart, no humanity, and certainly no payoff within Fantastic Four. It starts bad and only gets worse from there. When Doom’s black hole does open in the last 15 minutes, I was grateful that the first things sucked in were the Fantastic Four.

I suspect, as have others, that the reason the film has these abbreviated character storylines and why it takes so long to get going is because it’s building Fantastic Four’s world. The idea being that the universe is established here in this film, and then explored deeper in subsequent films, like Marvel’s Avengers universe. If that’s true, and I believe it is — proof: a Fantastic Four sequel was announced before this one was even released — then Marvel is the greatest risk to film since flammable film stock. The cinema has its troubles: writers are fleeing to TV, 3D is still a dastardly grift, and these abhorrent prequels, remakes and sequels will just never end. But these shared universes are going to ruin everything. That might sound like an overstatement, but Fantastic Four is a prime example of what happens to projects that focus on whole networks of films and not just the film at its feet. You end up getting an undercooked, overwritten piece of story filler that’s meant to take your money now, next summer and every summer after until it gets absorbed by one of Marvel’s other franchises. It’s not the art of film; it’s a pyramid scheme. 

This has to stop. And Fantastic Four’s epic failure is a step in the right direction. 

Where's Vanilla Ice when you need him?

Late in the rebooted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, the knife-bedazzled villain Shredder says, "Tonight I dine I turtle soup." Funny, because that's exactly what I was thinking. 

In one of the most blockheaded reboots to come out of Hollywood's trendy Reboot-a-Thon, the Michael Bay-produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles further perpetuates the principle of diminishing returns when it comes to re-imagining every design that was on your bedsheets when you were 7 years old. Recall how the original movies were silly fun and, yes, heaps full of stupid. Bay and director Jonathan Liebesman (Battle Los Angeles) vacuum all the color, visual gags and life from the franchise and supplant it with grit, haze and shadows. 

No one is going to try and convince you the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise was quality cinema. It was early '90s counterculture ("Cowabunga, dudes") wrapped up in a blank check to the pizza industry. It was kitsch and camp, rubber-faced costumes and pre-X-Games skateboard stunts. It was the kind of movie that pre-teen You loved, but if you were to watch it today be kinda embarrassed about. But the movie had pluck, and the plot and characters made sense. (Look at what the remake has done to me — I'm defending movies that are mostly indefensible.)

In the reboot, the plot is about as subtle as stomping through rain puddles in a minefield. It opens on Megan Fox as a journalist — the movie's first big joke. Fox is April O'Neil, a reporter at a New York City television station who says during a live broadcast, in Times Square no less, "Hey guys, I'm here in New York City …" Because all the viewers thought she was in Sheboygan, and she cleared that right up. The journalism stuff is all unintentionally hilarious, including a clueless editor played by Whoopi Goldberg, April's fact-free brand of reporting, and poor Will Arnett who keeps using the phrase "put it to bed" totally unaware that's an actual news term that means the opposite of what he's talking about.

April, the daughter of a dead scientist who experimented on turtles, gets a hunch about masked vigilantes trolling the Foot Clan, the city’s pesky paramilitary gang that operates in the shadows. She follows her make-believe leads until she finds the actual Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, hulking human-turtle hybrids with large prehistoric shells and color-coordinated masks. There is sword-swinging Leonardo (voiced by Johnny Knoxville), the leader; Raphael, the rebellious outcast; Michelangelo, the jokester and pizza fiend; and Donatello, the IT turtle who wears nerd glasses and a large headset array on his face.

The turtle’s are designed beefier and sturdier than the earlier movies. They're given lots of sewer-scavenged accessories — a bamboo chestplate, recycled sunglasses, do-rags, shell necklaces and, because whatever, a rocket skateboard — that allow them a grittier fashion sense, albeit a homeless one. The four reptiles are also entirely motion-captured CGI, giving them a creepy animated vibe. Making matters worse: none of the voice acting is convincing, or even memorable. They may be teens, but the turtles are voiced by gravel-voiced middle-aged men whose mothers couldn't pick their voices out in a vocal lineup.

Anyway, April and the turtles — and their rat leader, Splinter — team up to disassemble the Foot Clan and it's shadowy leader, who you will never in a million years guess. (It's William Fichtner and that was sarcasm.) Fichtner plays Eric Sacks, the Foot's financier who only speaks in exposition-filled diatribes. He hatches a plot to gas all of Manhattan so he can sell everyone a poison antidote. Sacks, a name that is funnier the more I read it, is willing to kill a whole bunch of people so he can be "stupidly rich," but he lives in a Bruce Wayne-sized mansion with a helicopter pad, owns numerous multinational corporations and has the mayor on speed dial — his priorities are a little screwy. 

Being that this is a Michael Bay movie, at some point a Transformer had to show up. This Transformer's name is Shredder. He's a human ninja wrapped in a metal knife-suit that could easily be mistaken for one of Hasbro's transforming robots. And like Bay's Transformers, Shredder doesn’t really have a form or shape, but rather metal tips and wings and appendages. Imagine taking a human shape and welding a junkyard to it … Shredder looks like that. 

The film’s mush of gunfights and ninjutsu is appropriately idiotic — the only thing it inherited from the original series — and takes place in the turtle's subterranean sewer plaza, high atop a skyscraper and skidding down the world's longest mountain snow slide. There are hints of zaniness, though much of it feels like a rehash of the Transformers movies, now with more reptiles. Ninja Turtles might also have the worst photography of the year: much of the movie is foggy and dark, and the 3D doesn't brighten the mud. It also doesn't help that every camera gimmick is used, from shaky cam and its stepchild spinny cam to lens flares and haze filters. It's as if Liebesman (let me repeat his credential here: Battle Los Angeles!!!) didn't want us to see his movie at all, which is actually my recommendation.

Lastly, let me talk about Megan Fox. Critics sometimes joke about bad performances, and we're prone to hyperbole, but I feel confident about this next sentence: acting doesn't get much worse than it does right here with Megan Fox. At one point she's out-performed by a pizza box, and then tube of ooze, and then four CGI turtles who live in a brick-lined tunnel made to funnel human excrement out of a city. We've know Fox was an awful actress for some time, but this confirms that she's also a glutton for punishment. She spends much of the movie being thrown from one dangerous stunt to another, but the film always has time to admire her ass. "You're a complicated chick," Arnett's character says as he drills holes through her jeans with his eyes. Fox had an epic falling-out with Bay during the Transformers movies, and supposedly she made nice to be cast here. If this is what happens when you apologize to Michael Bay, then he may never hear "I'm sorry" ever again.

So, who's ready for that soup?

Serkis captivates in Apes sequel

The apes are back, and once again they aren't so damned and aren't so dirty. 

In fact, the apes are looking pretty snazzy in Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, with their matchy warpaint high in their evergreen fortress in the rugged forests north of San Francisco. This is where we saw them victoriously scamper to at the end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the movie that featured the preacher from Footloose, Draco Malfoy and a James Dean puppet called James Franco, yet all anyone could talk about was motion-capture master Andy Serkis and his riveting unseen performance.

Serkis, who had previously played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies, returns here doing more motion capture — he gets to wear pajamas to work! — for Caesar, the ape leader who has fled humanity’s rotten grasp (or "stinkin' paws") to start his own primate civilization in the Sierras. And like his previous endeavor dragging his knuckles, Serkis again steals the show with a nuanced and rare performance that is only seen through the digital surrogate of Caesar, ape emperor. But more on that later. 

Dawn wastes no time and begins with immediate exposition: the opening credits reveal that a mutated Alzheimer's bug is sweeping around the planet in a deadly wave. In a nifty little animation, the infection is shown as a bright orange rash popping up over a spinning globe. And then the orange starts to fade — not because the virus has died off, but because the virus has no one left to kill. Some humans are naturally immune, and they hunker down in the post-apocalypse cities of America. In San Francisco, a decade after the pandemic started, we meet Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and Dreyfuss (Gary Oldman), two sound leaders trying to figure out if a nearby dam might provide their struggling refuge with some power.

And wouldn't you know it, the dam is in monkey country, where Caesar — a horse-riding, English-speaking, elk-spearing primate that puts those bike-riding bears at Barnum & Baileys to shame — has staked out his own kingdom within the trees and mist. After the humans cross into their borders, Caesar confers with his orangutan elders, warrior chimps and tank gorillas before deciding on a course of action. The decision he makes surprises me: backed by his furry army, he marches to the gates of the human city to announce to a stunned population that they have a "human home" and Caesar and his friends have an "Ape home" and never the two shall meet.

It was pretty much at this point I decided I liked this movie. A lesser film would have had a big action sequence here followed by three identical, yet slightly different, action scenes and then the credits. But Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is less interested in war and gunfights than it is with the examination of two competing societies — one on an upswing, the other crumbling away — as they struggle for meaning in a post-apocalyptic world. The fact the film builds off Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but in an entirely different direction in an entirely new genre only adds to the charm of the franchise.

These types of movies are usually filled with obnoxious archetypes, the kind of characters that Walking Dead fills its roster with to move the plots forward in lumbering incoherence. But that's not the case here. Aside from one meathead (Kirk Acevedo, who’s actually been on Walking Dead), Dawn is filled with smart and understanding human characters. They do things that real humans might actually do. They think. They reason. They encourage each other. They smile. Even Oldman, who turns into a minor villain, is given so much common sense that it defies the genre, which so frequently clings to murderous nutjobs. Clarke’s Malcolm has several important scenes that require him to trust his ape neighbors, including a sequence where he walks into Caesar’s village to petition that they all work together. His wife shares her medicines with the sick apes. And his son swaps comics with a lovable orangutan who has a thirst for reading and knowledge. These are decent people, and likable, too.

The human characters are mirrored in many ways within the ape society. Caesar plays Malcolm’s counterpart; he’s curious and willing to hear out his human visitors. Like Malcolm, Caesar has a son and a wife, and several close advisers, including apes called Ash and Rocket, and rampaging human-hater Koba, who was used as a test subject by humans before the fall. Caesar orders Koba to work peacefully with the humans and Koba points at his scars, "human work," he says in slow English. Maybelline did a number on this guy, and his actions are hot-headed and cruel, but not without merit. 

Of course, the established truce falls apart in a spectacular fashion as the movie requires it, but that doesn't take away the goodwill that was established earlier in the picture. Caesar believes in the humans, and some of the humans believe in Caesar, and that sets the stage for an epic standoff that is less about man versus ape, and mostly about competing ideologies, specifically peace versus war.

This is a competent and lyrically written action bonanza. It works on paper without a single special effect, yet the special effects make it something exceptional, especially Serkis and the other motion capture actors. The apes have weight, character, presence and momentum. It's obvious these aren't just computer models; they have a heavy physicality to their movement. Talk is being thrown around that Serkis should get an Academy Award nomination for a role he's never seen in. I don't think we're there yet, but we're definitely closer. And the fact that we’re even debating that is a huge testament to the work Serkis has thrown himself into. 

Aside from the motion capture, though, Dawn also deserve accolades for its gorgeous set design — from the rusty and overgrown city to the splintery wood deathtrap of the forests — and also its steady cinematography. Reeves did us no favors when he created super-shakycam with Cloverfield, but here he and cinematographer Michael Seresin slow their shots down, and atone for their movie sins, with careful camera placement and inventive composition of apes swinging through the trees or a single shot of a rotating tank turret. There are several long-takes, including one with Clark storming through his compound looking for an escape from the invading apes. It's no Children of Men, but the attention to the nuts and bolts of filmmaking is profoundly evident on the screen.

I must circle back to Serkis before closing out my review. I think he’s figured out how to fix lifeless CGI — a human must inhabit the special effect. It won’t fix a movie's CGI, but it puts it on the right path to create something memorable. Something like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Disney goofs with awful Maleficent

And this is why you don’t needlessly tinker with franchises.

Never before in Disney’s history — at least, not its theatrical history — has a movie been so poorly constructed, so rattled, so lost, so hopelessly written and so inconceivably misguided. From top to bottom, Maleficent is a wreck heaped on more wreck, a smoldering ruin of what was once 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. Disney has been sitting pretty the six months since Frozen blew out the windows, and now comes this awful setback.

Fairy tales are known for their simplicity, but you’d never guess that here as a simple premise — an enchanted sleep, “true love’s kiss” and a demonic sorceress — is turned on its head and punted into the backfield. Angelina Jolie stars as the fairy Maleficent, a name that will challenge even the most gifted public speakers. I think the syllable-busting name is pronounced mall-eff-iss-cent, though it’s hard to tell since each character says it differently.

The winged and horned fairy lives in a tree kingdom called James Cameron’s Avatar, which is right next door to a human kingdom of stone and iron, presumably called King’s Landing based on its number of mindlessly cruel old white dudes. One day she falls in love with the human Stefan (District 9's Sharlto Copley), who is clearly just bored with life. When Stefan doesn’t show much interest, and later hacks off her wings, she goes on an epic bender that culminates into her publicly cursing an innocent baby in its cradle. If she had friends they would stage an intervention at this point. Anyway, you’ve heard the curse before: before her 16th birthday, the baby will prick her finger on spindle and fall into a death-like sleep. The movie gets that part right, though not much else.

This plot is a mess, one that begins with a 25-minute voice-over introduction and then flops forward in flailing lunges for the next hour. Once the film establishes Maleficent is a wounded lovelorn fairy, it doesn’t take long to make her a villain, first with a big Lord of the Rings-style battle and then with her creepy stalking of the baby, Aurora, as she grows up in a nearby forest. These Aurora scenes are unintentionally hilarious as Maleficent lingers outside windows and behind trees for 16 years. Other witches have glowing orbs or swirling cauldrons that will show them the things they want to see; Maleficent has to sneak through the bushes in black latex bodysuits and velvet robes. And with those horns, she better hope it’s not elk season.

Making matters much worse is the comedy relief, three fluttering bobbleheaded fairies played by Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton and Juno Temple. Of the dozen or so jokes they were given — including throwing flour, fidgeting with blue butterflies, and lots of ditzy cluelessness — only about two ever land a hit as the others fizzle into oblivion. Their heads are digitally cut and pasted onto little pixy bodies in a terrifying special effect right out of 2002. Another noteworthy side character is Maleficent’s henchman Diaval, a shapeshifting crow. He’s played by Sam Riley, who bears so much resemblance to another feminine-featured fantasy hero that his Rent-a-Bloom tag is showing.

Even Jolie, an Academy Award-winning actress, struggles. Aside from a few sequences of giddy delight as she hams it up, Jolie has the loosest grasp on the limp material. Her tortured screams early in the movie are especially cringey and in need of some overdubbing. Much of her role is about holding uncomfortable poses for dramatically long periods of time in forests, behind bushes, hovering with her wings high above the clouds, or in Stefan’s lifeless castle. And speaking of poor Stefan, this guy is simply the worst. First he snubs his lady and then the flubs roll one after another: he starts a pointless war, marries another lady, ditches his baby in a forest, spends more time burning spindles than being a father, and then he tries to kill Maleficent after she’s saved the day. This character literally does nothing right for an entire movie.

What irks me most about Maleficent is the dangerous branding that Disney is imposing on its vintage franchises. The premise here is that the evil sorceress isn’t all that evil; in fact, she’s the hero who’s been misunderstood all these years. By recasting the villain as the hero, Disney is invalidating its own movies.

What’s next, a movie about a gentle wildlife enthusiast who heads deep into the woods to shoot a deer to feed his starving family? They could call it Bambi Killer.

 

 

Godzilla reboot is a smashing success

Spider-Man whimpers and pouts. Captain America is burdened with terminal nostalgia and guilt. Iron Man cracks jokes to hide his various insecurities. The X-Men might as well be a weepy soap opera sandwiched between commercials of Dove chocolate and furniture polish. Modern superheroes have a terminal case of the feels.

And now here’s Godzilla, the Gary Cooper of reptilian megabeasts. He doesn’t require love, or acceptance, or even, apparently, food. He simply shows up, stomps the monster shit out of rival titans and calls it a day. The scaly skyscraper-sized dragon is the existential answer to a generation of overwritten superheroes who are given only enough story to get them from Explosion A to Explosion B. Finally, here’s a superhero that requires none of that. He has no dialogue, no girlfriend (or boyfriend?), no history, no origin story, no comic tic, no witty banter — he is gloriously two-dimensional.

You’ll be forgiven if you didn’t know Godzilla was a superhero. I didn’t either. This little twist is the big new addition to Gareth Edwards’ nifty Godzilla reboot: he’s taken the Kaiju genre and skewed it a little in humanity’s favor by making Godzilla mankind’s savior. In the Japanese films, and the mediocre American remakes, Godzilla would stomp on humans, flatten nun-filled churches, crush elementary schools, vaporize whole city blocks and snack on commuter-filled traincars like pistachios. That kind of bad behavior is frowned upon in the new Godzilla in favor of placid acceptance of man’s dominion.

The film begins with energy honcho Joe Brody attempting to stop a catastrophic emergency at a Japanese nuclear plant. Irradiated steam blasts through the industrial corridors and the cooling towers crumble, and he can do nothing but watch as workers, one of them his wife, are trapped in a toxic plume of radiation. Fifteen years later, Joe returns to the disaster’s exclusion zone — now an overgrown and unpopulated city of vines and rubble — to poke around for buried secrets. He’s joined by his skeptic son, Ford Brody, a name that is far too interesting for a character this bland. Papa Brody suspects authorities are keeping a secret in the footprint of the old nuclear plant … and of course they are.

Sucking off the old reactor cores is a giant cocoon that has been having mild contractions for years and then, on the very night Joe and Ford show up, it hatches. The MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) that smashes out of the cocoon looks like the abnormally large baby of the Cloverfield monster and one of those Klendathu bugs from Starship Troopers — thankfully, a sex scene doesn’t illustrate the MUTO’s lineage. The giant creepy-crawly proceeds to destroy the exclusion zone before flying to Hawaii and then to San Francisco on his American destructo-tour.

Joe is played by Bryan Cranston, the sympathetic Breaking Bad star who is more likable and engaging than Aaron Taylor-John (Kick-Ass), the piece of soggy cardboard playing his son. Not since any Taylor Kitsch movie has an actor been so unfit for a leading role. Really, though, lots of actors are given pointless roles: Ken Watanabe always appears to be on the verge of tears; Sally Hawkins, so great in quirky British comedies, spends a lot of time looking off camera; David Strathairn plays the obligatory military commander; and poor Elizabeth Olsen, the critical darling, is trapped in a subway shelter with nothing to do.

The human characters chew the scenery for much of the first half of the movie as Edwards obscures Godzilla off screen, in shadows or in clouds of dust made of building materials and, presumably, human bodies. In an early scene, the frame is filled with Godzilla’s giant toeless turtle/elephant foot and that tiny glimpse feels like a generous gift. Hiding the monster is Edwards’ devious little ploy and it mostly works. Godzilla geeks will cry that the film didn’t feature a Hustler-style pictorial with 40-minutes of freezeframes and camera pans up the monster’s huge body. I enjoyed the mystery, and found that the effect made the final battlecry more fist-pumpingly magnificent.

It is funny, though, how Godzilla just kinda shows up during the first fight with MUTO and then the camera cuts away, denying the audience that first big battle. After MUTO flees to the West Coast, Godzilla goes for a swim that is basically a very long morning commute. He’s flanked by battleships, aircraft carriers and Navy destroyers as he casually lizard-paddles through the Pacific while MUTO and his recently hatched girlfriend terrorize California. And, aside from those jagged armor plates cutting through the Pacific Ocean with their Navy entourage, that’s all you see of the iconic monster for like 40 minutes. It’s a tease. An effective one.

Despite not knowing how to utilize its actors, Godzilla is not overly complicated like so many other big-budget action extravaganzas. The humans try some questionable stunts with nuclear weapons, but otherwise there is little holding the movie together besides the familiar faces and the lure of monster-on-monster boxing. That simplicity is a refreshing element to its composition. It also helps that Edwards, who cut his teeth on the noteworthy Monsters, provides some clever sequences, including a Spielbergian scene with soldiers checking radiation vaults in Yucca Mountain. They walk through a hallway opening little hatches that look into dark nuclear storage lockers. After several uneventful vaults, one soldier opens a port and light pours out revealing a terrifying segue into the next sequence.

In another scene, this one from 32,000 feet up, soldiers skydive into the gaping maw of MUTO’s hellish destruction. Red smoke trailing from flares attached to their ankles, the soldiers punch through the first layer of clouds as Alexandre Desplat’s haunting soundtrack — reminiscent of György Ligeti’s score from 2001: A Space Odyssey — builds from a gentle whistle to a seismic scream. These images served as early poster art, and you can see why here in the larger context of the film: it’s the first moment we finally see Godzilla doing his thing and the skydiving build-up serves as an appropriate red-carpet entrance to the event.

I’m not a Godzilla purist, so I can’t speak to how Godzilla’s legacy is protected here. I always liked the nuclear paranoia of the original films — a result of American atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II — and that’s all mostly absent here, though I don’t think it hurts the overall canon. If anything harms the Kaiju legacy, it’s the way Godzilla is seen as the world’s hero, not its villain. The people of San Francisco pretty much give him a sloppy valentine for his role in the destruction of their city. A shot of the mayor drafting a comically long bill for the damages, sadly, does not appear in the post-credits sequence.

Still though, I’m thoroughly impressed at Godzilla's overall size and power, and the breadth of his destruction and ruin. It felt like a Godzilla movie in almost every way, including that scene where he spews electric-blue atomic barf into the broken mouth of his adversary. That moment, punctuated by that trademarked roar, is the high-water mark of the movie’s sonic awesomness.

And any time you can write “spews electric-blue atomic barf” in a positive review is a film worth celebrating. Cheers,Godzilla.

Less amazing, more tangles in Spidey 2

The problem with every Spider-Man movie is always Peter Parker and the awe-shucks science nerd they get to play him. In Sam Raimi’s films, we were given Tobey Maguire, whose doughy face and dead eyes seemed to punctuate the actor’s limited range and depth. Some audiences discovered his shallow presence in the first Spider-Man, while others only realized it after Spider-Man 3, the lowest of the low in Marvel’s web-slinging comic franchise.

Now here we are again with Andrew Garfield, tall and lanky with a punky poof for a hairdo — the fourth Beastie Boy. He’s hipper and more likeable than Maguire, but so is a bluefin tuna. In the first movie, Garfield tripped over every line. Here in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, it’s more like every third line, which is a noticeable and commendable improvement.

But like the first Amazing Spider-Man, this one is a wreck of a story, filled with false leads, dead ends and sequel baiting. And, like all of Marvel’s franchises, the movie is simply a piece of a larger puzzle to be consumed “next summer” every summer. Characters are introduced and filed away, plotlines are unearthed and promptly reburied, and new villains are crafted from the ash of the old ones. It’s a vicious cycle of capitalist calamity that won’t end until we demand better stories, not more.

When we pick back up with freelance photographer Peter Parker (Garfield), he is still fighting crime as Spider-Man, though the police and public are still skeptical of his motives. In early scenes, police aren’t sure if they should shoot or deputize him. In the first action sequence, a plutonium theft in an armored car, he web slings to the side of the truck to make wisecracks to the crooks. The jokes are so bad that the production company could make an insurance claim on their delivery. The scene ends with the de-pantsing of the villain, who’s left standing in the street wearing these comically baggy boxer shorts with some kind of cartoon print on them. Jerry Lewis had subtler gags. 

Parker is as strong and agile as ever, but trouble is brewing on the homefront: the mysterious death of his parents is eating at him, his relationship with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) is on the fritz, and a troublesome friendship with Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) is slowly lurching forward even as warning signs are hammered to his face — so much for Spidey Senses. Harry will eventually become Green Goblin to the surprise of no one. DeHaan, who could use clips from this movie to audition for a young Adolf Hitler (yeesh, that haircut), is an afterthought to much of the plot as he mopes around his billionaire bachelor pad because Spider-Man won’t share his blood. Boohoo!

It’s a weak justification for a villain, but not the weakest; that honor goes to Electro, a bio-science worker (Jamie Foxx) turned human sparkplug after he falls into a tank of electric eels, which makes me wonder what happens when workers fall in tanks of peanut butter at the peanut butter factory — Marvel franchises have been started with less. Electro, his skin is a fluorescent blue glow, is a Spider-Man fanboy. So when Spider-Man shows up to stop Electro’s spontaneous zapping of the electrical grid, he does what any fanboy does — he geeks out. And Spider-Man doesn’t want hugs from creepy fanboys, which makes Electro rage-quit into villainy. The subtext of this scene is clear to me, but not to the film: fanboys ruin everything.

The movie does have a renewed urgency to its special effects, which were just kind of meh in the last picture. The action is peppier, more precise and better choreographed. It’s also lightning fast, which just feels oh-so-right as Spidey goes swinging down Fifth Avenue, hurling manhole covers in webby slings and catapulting over roofs and down alleyways. Remember in some of the later Christopher Reeve Superman movies, when it was obvious that Superman was dangling from wires in front of a rear-projected picture. There was no speed, no momentum, no rush. This film embraces rush in a way I was not expecting. It only adjusts the pacing during the occasional slow-motion sequence, including that spectacular final scene that will have everyone talking. 

Other parts of the movie aren’t so refined. For starters, the movie is scored like a Disney made-for-TV movie, with lots of instrumentation to punctuate visual markers: jokes get hammy string plucks, action scenes get overly energetic “action music,” and scenes of reflection are scored to schmaltzy numbers. All of the music too loud, as if to drown out the sound effects and dialogue. And later, when a dubstep mix gets thrown into a Times Square attack, I was sure the music department had been replaced by middle schoolers. The movie also has too many plots and characters, each of them given screen time that takes us away from the film’s emotional core: Peter Parker is incapable of falling in love without hurting those close to him. That plotline is one that will resonate with audiences, and yet it’s given second billing to everything else. (Let me quote David Sims fantastic opening line on his review for the The Atlantic: "It took Sam Raimi's Spider-Man series three films to make the mistakes The Amazing Spider-Man is making in two.")

Mark Webb’s sophomore attempt at a Spider-Man movie is better than his first, but he’s not showing as much growth as should be expected from a guy who’s done two of these things. He still has larger-than-necessary plots (and plothols), bloated casts and Marvel’s franchise meddling. It doesn’t help that his Spider-Man, the perpetually boring Garfield, could be ridden like a surfboard. Webb has perfected the look and feel of Spider-Man’s movement, which is a big deal that won’t go unnoticed within the franchise. Aside from the Spidey’s physics, though, the next strongest piece might be Emma Stone, who is the film’s secret weapon — she’s just lovely in every scene.

It’s just frustrating that with so much going on, there still so little to like. Perhaps in the next reboot they’ll get it right.