Spiderhead (2022)

Score: 1.5 / 5

It took me longer than it should have to understand what was going on in this film. It's playing a very weird game from the outset. While science fiction thrillers work best by destabilizing our sense of context, forcing us to get on their weird wavelength right away, Spiderhead doesn't articulate itself very quickly. In some ways, the film treats us like its characters, trapped in a slightly trippy prison of ideas while being manipulated into a certain attitude. The story takes place in a strange futuristic prison where inmates are generally pretty free but the mysterious prison directors alter the prisoners' brain chemistry for research. They hope to be able to cure the world's problems with various medical enhancements and adjustments, and they use dubious scientist Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth) to do it all. 

Inmates have free will in this process -- it seems that saying "acknowledge" is their in-the-moment consent -- and apparently acquiescing can shorten their respective sentences. But it becomes pretty clear pretty soon that Abnesti is playing with fire. The drugs he chooses have intense effects: Laffodil provokes an overwhelming desire to laugh and Darkenfloxx induces extreme psychological pain, the latter resulting (at almost exactly the film's halfway point) in one inmate's graphic suicide. I point out the time of this revelation because the previous 45 minutes or so are almost unbearably dull. Half the movie goes by before we really understand a) the genre is thriller, b) the stakes of the situation, c) the quality (or lack) of the characters themselves. Those are all crucial to this story, and the film squanders them for too long, making everything after feel cheap.

I wondered a few times if I was being had. While I'm not familiar with the short story by George Saunders that inspires this film, it's clear that this film was desperate to stretch the material to a feature length. Screenwriters Rhett Rheese and Paul Wernick (Deadpool) try to imbue the proceedings with an off-beat sense of cold humor, and to some extent director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick) tries to follow suit by featuring blaring oldies rock and slapping neon pink scrawl on the screen for the opening and closing credits. Even Hemsworth vacillates between playing the role as a fairly serious therapist who may genuinely care about his patients/prisoners and a somewhat campy mad scientist who gets off on watching paranoid and horny people suffering under his control. The problem is that the film takes so long to get us to this realization -- or appreciation -- and nothing before adds up to much.

I kept waiting for this film to take a Shutter Island kind of turn, to make a political or moral statement like The Stanford Prison Experiment, or even to pull a Stephen King and make a humanist story about overcoming odds like in The Shawshank Redemption or The Green Mile. But it never does; it routinely marches forward, hitting all the familiar beats, reaching an uninteresting and uninspired climax that felt as though the filmmakers hadn't seen any movies since the late '90s. In fact, the few moments of actual revelation are so poorly executed, I find myself wondering again if this movie plays itself dumb for some smart reason. At the aforementioned midway scene, Abnesti drops his office keys while running to try and help the suicide; inmate Jeff (Miles Teller), nominally the protagonist, slowly grabs them and opens his desk drawers for unclear reasons, suddenly discovering that Abnesti is fully in charge of the program and experiments, not a mysterious board or committee. 

Maybe I just don't care about sci-fi for the sake of sci-fi. But this movie couldn't even make any statements -- or, much more better, open possibilities for further consideration and conversation -- about the prison system or pharmaceutical corruption. It says nothing about incarcerated men trying to help or one-up each other, about the psychological strain of the imprisoned or real attempts to help. It just exists for no satisfying reason and can't even muster up the artistic gumption to make itself memorable or worthwhile. What a waste.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Score: 2 / 5

Here we go again. The opening title card is the same as before, and the opening sequence again plays out over the familiar song "Danger Zone." This is a legacy sequel in spades, one that feels determined to work best for nostalgia's sake. Even though the late Tony Scott isn't directing this time, new director Joseph Kosinski seems to do his best mimicking the style of the earlier film, though his tone is much more somber this time. Frankly, I don't much like the first one, and while this film feels more serious and features much better-filmed practical effects, it also is just more of the same (without any queer coding to distract from its emptiness). I'm just not a fan of the whole Top Gun thing.

We begin with Tom Cruise's character, call sign "Maverick," working as a test pilot for the US Navy, a more believable career for him after the first film ended with him preparing to teach the top-tier titular program's students to become the Navy's best fighting pilots. He is summoned on a mythic "final job" mission to return to teaching a group of recent Top Gun graduates for a crucial mission. He doesn't really want to, but it persuaded to join. Unfortunately, he quickly learns that one of his students will be "Rooster" Bradshaw (Miles Teller) the son of "Goose," Maverick's former wingman who died in an accident Maverick caused. He has never forgiven himself, and is sure that Rooster hasn't either.

The actual plot is about as irrelevant and vague as it was in the original. There is an enemy, but great care is taken to never identify the enemy (in the first, we can probably assume North Korea or China; in this, it's almost certainly Russia). There is a mission to be done, though it's basically opaque. There's an impossible flight plan to destroy some target and almost certainly die in the process (is it the trench climax from Star Wars: A New Hope, or perhaps a Mission: Impossible task?). And, on the home front, Maverick needs to navigate his way around these young hotshots, harden them for the impossible, and also hopefully kindle romance with the local single-mother bartender (Jennifer Connelly). Because he's him, and this is us, and why not?

The cast is uniformly, well, uniform. Serviceable but generally unremarkable, and that's the result of writing and direction. A film so narratively castrated can scarcely harness the kind of energy wartime action dramas need to capture our attention. The lack of specifics in plot, in any capacity, makes the film feel more like a dreamy, vaguely patriotic attempt at rousing dangerous ideological pockets of our culture, much like the first film was so jingoistic and vainly pious for its own good. (Then again, the performatively macho presentation of the first has since been subjected to much critical suspicion, resulting in famed attempts to queer the material. It's funny and diverting, but ultimately a troubling exercise unless you take the whole film as camp, which is also diverting but I think fruitless.)

It's a summer blockbuster, taken for its entirety, and some people will love it. I enjoyed some of the didactic zingers and the general nostalgic sentimentality for what they were. Even though the actors are largely irrelevant, Connelly works hard to feel important and Cruise just sort of is important anymore, so they command the screen well. Teller often plays off Glen Powell, and I'd like to see them square off in a better film together, as their repartee is delightful. Val Kilmer returns for a single scene, and it's emotional enough when he reveals why he selected Maverick for this job; Jon Hamm and Ed Harris also pop in occasionally for apparent reasons. Movies like this tend to cast recognizable, grizzled older white men to bark orders and repeat lines like "But that's impossible" and "You're here to follow my lead," and that's all they do here too. There are some breathtaking sequences of airborne dogfights and low-altitude chases that are infinitely better than their counterparts in the original -- and a sexy beachside football match to rival the original's volleyball playoff -- and while it's still not movie material I love, I appreciated the authenticity and lack of VFX (and excellent editing!) in telling those parts of the story.