The Tomorrow War (2021)

 Score: 2.5 / 5

Soldiers from 2051 materialize through a wormhole in the middle of the World Cup late next year. Their message to the world is urgent: in the future, an alien invasion has driven the human population to near-extinction. Desperate as they are to continue their failing war against the aliens, which has lasted approximately three years, scientists have developed a "Jumplink" to connect them to, roughly, the present. Using this technology, they bring military aid back for a series of seven-day deployments to fight. Each time, less than thirty percent of the volunteers return. The soldiers won't say much about their enemy, referring to the aliens as Whitespikes and darkly hinting that too much description would prevent anyone from willingly joining the fight.

Selected by the international draft, Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) is taken from his humdrum, dead-end job as a suburban high school science teacher and launched into an impossible scenario. Namely, he's briefly trained -- thank goodness he is an Iraq war vet -- and tossed into the future in the middle of a battlefield of what was once Miami Beach. Actually, something is wrong with the Jumplink, so in fact he materializes mid-air high above the skyline. Miraculously surviving the fall with a small squadron, they embark on their mission: to rescue scientists and their research working to find a Whitespike weakness. Before long, they are attacked by the aliens, and carnage ensues.

It's a really interesting premise, one that unfortunately predicates its clever ideas about time and sacrifice with violence and action. Forester seems upset to have to leave his wife (Betty Gilpin) and young daughter, but he's also upset in his current situation; he strikes the viewer as a sort of mediocre, dispossessed and disillusioned middle-aged middle-class white man who says almost immediately in the screenplay, "I am meant to do something special with my life." It's a little unnerving to see Pratt like this, partly because we've gotten used to seeing him as a macho man kicking ass in recent blockbusters. But mostly it's because the movie tries really hard to balance his character's rediscovered badassery with his apparently deeply emotional garbage as a man who lost his way. Pratt doesn't have those acting chops, and the film's attempts at emotional dialogue are, at best, clumsy. So when he learns that he was selected for service in 2051 because he dies before then, so as to avoid a paradox, we immediately expect him to run into his bereaved family. And he does, though his now-adult daughter Muri (Yvonne Strahovski) is in fact a not-very-sad scientist working to save humanity by developing a toxin to kill the Whitespikes. Melodrama doesn't end there, and I should have mentioned the sentiment dripping from Forester's pre-Jumplink scene with his estranged father (J.K. Simmons), which sets up, briefly, the otherwise bizarre final half-hour or so of the film.

Speaking of the Whitespikes, though, leads me to what I really liked about this movie apart from the basic conceit. The design of these aliens may not be inspired, but it's still horrifyingly effective. Albino monsters with long claws, rows of teeth, and tentacles that shoot -- you guessed it -- bony spikes like giant bullets. They move quickly, like the voracious monsters of A Quiet Place or even, perhaps more appropriately, Edge of Tomorrow, with a frenzied movement the camera tries to reproduce. The action scenes are almost exhausting in their attempt to recreate the mania inspired by these monsters, with story and effects battling each other for screen time amidst some mind-numbingly frenetic editing.

And despite the obvious loads of money poured into this movie, which looks fantastic, it's hard to skip past the mismatched cast, the groaningly exposition-heavy dialogue, and the otherwise rote nature of the film's execution. A clever idea and lots of money don't make an otherwise typical movie shine; as someone who doesn't even like Independence Day very much, I at least appreciate its tongue-in-cheek attitude toward its more ridiculous moments. Here, the underlying sentiments about fatherhood and sacrifice aren't matched up with the tone of the film, making this decidedly un-silly science fiction without novelty. Even its final sequence, which is something between The Thing and Aliens, is so blatantly undercooked that the fluids splattering the scene shouldn't have been surprising. And yet it was the most fun scene of the whole movie. Not a good thing to say about something well over two hours in length.

The Hunt (2020)

Score: 3.5 / 5

One of the most complex and controversial movies of our age has finally been released and nobody knows what to make of it.

A group of strangers awaken in an unfamiliar forest, locked into their gags, in broad daylight. Fighting panic, they gather in a small clearing around a large wooden box that feels like something between The Hunger Games cornucopia and the plane at the beginning of Lost. The opened box contains a wealth of weapons (along with a pig that might as well scream Lord of the Flies) that the confused and now excited people claim for themselves. Suddenly and violently, they are attacked by bullets from unseen assailants and run for cover, hoping to avoid the booby traps around them. Once they scatter, one by one they begin to realize they are being hunted, and the hunting grounds are being watched by drones, radio waves, and people in disguise. But humans, it would seem for those who don't already know, are the most dangerous game.

So what the heck is this much-maligned movie all about? What was it that made Trump paranoid and angry enough to tweet about it (even though, at that time last summer, no one had seen the damn thing yet)? What was it really that caused Universal to delay its release over half a year? Well, the basic premise is that these people being hunted are conservatives; their hunters are liberals. But labels here are more important than any basic human element -- in a story that works by dehumanizing people, the only things that matter are ideas and ideals -- and this isn't a story about normal people of certain political persuasions. These are distinct caricatures of extremists, all murderously angry about the state of the union, all frighteningly eager to enact the vitriolic hatred they spew onto social media. Sure, the MAGA-supporting "deplorables" are nominally the victims here and the wealthy, condescending "elite" seem to be the villains, but that's only a means to pit the two groups together. It could just as easily work the other way around, and there would be no thematic difference.

I find the beginning of the movie to be sorely miswritten and misdirected, because the opening two scenes paint broad pictures without allowing us time to think through the ideas puked out at us. We begin behind a shadowy figure leading a group text -- it's Hilary Swank's voice -- that coolly references a Manor, a Hunt, and deplorables. We have little context to all this, but we're immediately sure that these are "liberal" folk callously preparing to do bad things. We shift suddenly to a luxury jet in which caricatured liberals are contentedly served with caviar and booze, en route to this Hunt with some drugged, unconscious conservative people are stashed in with the baggage. One of these wakes up, staggers out asking for help before being slaughtered in the main plane cabin. It's more gruesome than funny, but because we don't really know what's happening we have little choice but to chuckle.

But after the scene with the pig, the box, the weapons, and the first murder of the Hunt, the movie kicks into what it's really about. It's a skillfully delivered thriller, designed to capture its absurdist black humor and extravagant gore from a perspective of surprisingly accessible neutrality. The cinematography and editing are grounded, tight, and clear, often so much so that I would pause and wonder if the whole movie was meant to be in earnest. But with the constant stream of hashtag-jargon and meme-worthy soundbytes coming from the archetypal characters and the constant Eli Roth-esque splattering of blood, you're reminded fairly often that this is the way we often treat the Internet, too. As a deplorable runs for his life, he eagerly spits out his disdain for refugees; as an elite prepares to murder someone, he is criticized for cultural appropriation and micro-aggressions. Some people take everything as a joke (until it's clearly not), while others take everything seriously (and eventually make fools of themselves). So much is lost when we forsake open and curious communication.

Which is, no doubt, writer Damon Lindelof's primary axe to grind here. It is no coincidence that his (again, nominal) victims here are angry trolls on the Internet who have spread hate and cruelty though chat rooms and comment sections, fueled by their insane conspiracy theories. Lindelof's magnificent work has been repeatedly maligned online by angry fans who essentially forced him off Twitter after Lost and before The Leftovers allowed him to prophesy our cultural future. This movie isn't Lindelof at his best, but perhaps his most dangerous: he effortlessly captures the kind of humor you see on SNL and repurposes it into a stew of dryly funny horror that he serves up with his typically self-aware dialogue and thrilling twisty narrative.

Lindelof places a woman named Crystal at the center of his story as the most mysterious character I've seen on film in a long time; that is, she is hard as the gem, if nowhere near as crystal-clear. Once she shows up -- seemingly she was one of the abducted and now hunted -- we know she's in it to survive. Ex-military and especially good at hand-to-hand combat, she seems coded as a conservative. Betty Gilpin plays Crystal with as much muscle and sass as you could hope for: she's as cool and quiet as classic-era Eastwood but ekes out jaw-droppingly brilliant moments of comedy with a simple jerk of an eyebrow or tilt of her head, an unwillingness to look at (or care?) about the people around her, and a strangely high-pitched sound occasionally escaping her otherwise locked jaw. She's cool and badass and utterly unreadable.

Especially at the end, and this is where I'll leave it all. While Crystal remains a mystery, a few things happen to complicate matters, especially when she finally confronts Athena (Hilary Swank), the leader of the Hunters, and surprises her with a few tidbits about herself. Namely, that she is far more educated than expected -- her practical application of Orwell's Animal Farm to her newly met adversary is truly chilling -- and that she was mistakenly abducted in place of the intended victim. Moreover, the climax, which consists of a brilliantly choreographed and photographed fight scene, includes a huge twist I absolutely did not see coming. And by the denouement, I was so hopelessly lost in the complicated implications of this apocalypse that I still have no idea if there is even a discernible moral to The Hunt. Other than, I guess, don't be an asshole?

The Grudge (2020)

Score: 3 / 5

If these walls could talk, they'd say all kinds of crazy stuff. That's the only message I've interpreted behind the Grudge franchise, which is the story of a haunted Japanese house. The iconic image of a pallid, skinny ghost with long, dripping black hair obscuring its face is chilling enough for some people, but its essence is what scares me. It's a vengeful spirit, created from a curse that spawns wherever someone dies badly, "in the grip of a powerful rage." The curse is, of course, the supernatural grudge of the title. Far from the divine justice of a Western deity, this curse metes out its cruel justice on those who stumble upon it: housed in its proximal location, it spiritually rots the house in question and manifests itself in various ways over time, resulting in a series of other bad deaths.

While I thought this newest installment of the franchise would be a sort of reboot or remake of the original Ju-On, it is in fact a sort of spin-off sequel. As it takes place in the US, I imagine the filmmakers conceptually see it as parallel to the regular sequels of the Grudge story. The curse of the house in Tokyo haunted by Kayako in the original is unwittingly transported to America by a live-in nurse who returns home. Disturbed by the horrors she witnessed, she is increasingly driven mad by the curse that has clung to her until she kills her family and herself. Then their ghosts haunt the next inhabitants of the house.

Here we don't see Kayako herself except at the beginning -- at least I don't think so, though some of the ghosts look similar enough and croak just like that bad bitch -- but that's okay because we get a host of new spooks to savor. After the nurse's family, we get John Cho and Betty Gilpin, sad because their baby is due to be born with a bad disease (ALD, which I had to Google during the film and still don't understand entirely). After John Cho visits the house and is attacked by its former inhabitants, he returns home to his pregnant wife and kills her and then himself; it seems he is possessed by the curse. Not long after, elderly couple Lin Shaye and Frankie Faison move in, dealing with dementia and terminal illness. Tryin to cope with his own emotional turmoil, Frankie calls Jacki Weaver in to help his wife commit suicide and end their suffering. And, as you might imagine, the ghosts attack them too.

I've never been much of a fan of the few J-Horror entries I've seen. It's mostly a matter of personal taste, as the vengeful ghost story just isn't something I find especially disturbing; at least, not when it involves a wet, gaunt specter or a zombified poltergeist. In this franchise specifically, while I really like the idea of dying badly causing a house curse, I've found the mythology a little to vague and the rules too flexible. This new installment, for example, exists purely as a result of some rules that bend its own premise: the curse of the Tokyo house haunted by Kayako in the original gets transported (or perhaps spreads?) to America, having used a live-in nurse as the unwitting courier. Later, as the stories of the new haunted house take form, we see that the ghosts follow their victims outside the house walls but only sometimes. The lack of consistency here is troubling, both in terms of innate plot holes and being unpredictably scary.

Its heavy reliance on jump-scares will no doubt earn it few fans, but I remained consistently disturbed by several elements of this Grudge that endeared me to it more than to any others in its franchise. It, like the original, works wonders with its nonlinear storytelling, but here it makes a strong case for a non-Western understanding of time and emotional intelligence. The dialogue itself, in one crucial scene, supports the narrative organization, which is brilliant. It also is the first Grudge I've seen to be truly, deeply ugly in its theme and character. Others have featured unhappy people, I suppose, but each new family in this film is dealing with staple hot-topic issues that are altogether unpleasant. Similarly, they all meet surprisingly violent and graphic deaths that we fully see on screen. We see bodies splatter multiple times, and frankly I just wasn't ready for it after all the ghost-faces popping out and gloomy, moody, slow camera machinations. After seeing these brief moments, I totally understood why these ghosts are upset.

But none more so than Andrea Riseborough and Demian Bichir, whose unlikely pairing here serves as a knockout audition for the next season of True Detective. They are both so miserable it's hard to entirely root for them, because we know they're past the point of no return. Paired together in the precinct, Andrea begins to investigate the house, perhaps to distract herself from her husband's recent death. Demian discourages this, as he lost his former partner to a manic obsession with the house and its curse that led to his near-suicide and insanity. And while no characters in this movie are around long enough for a dynamic arc, Andrea suitably carries the heart of the story right up to the end, when she's caught in a new haunted house and, I think, royally fucked by the curse she thought she destroyed.