The BBC Gives Me a Present: 'The Hollow Crown' Review

A/N: Each mini review was written after the film in question was aired so this is really a record of my week-by-week responses rather than a response to the whole.  Consequently it's quite long, even for this blog.  Epic blogging for an epic series.  That's what it is.

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The degree of excitement with which I greeted the BBC's announcement that they would be televising the Henriad, aka Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V, aka some of my favourite plays of all time ever, directed by Rupert Goold, Richard Eyre and Thea Sharrock aka some my favourite theatre directors of all time ever, with a cast that would not only include Jeremy Irons, Ben Whishaw and Simon Russell Beale but would also feature Tom Hiddleston aka my favourite actor of all time ever (I might have mentioned him here a few times) as Prince Hal, aka one of my favourite parts in Shakespeare of all time ever, could, in nuclear terms, have levelled a small conurbation. The BBC, it seemed, was like a drunken uncle in a generous mood who knows that your parents have been arguing: "Would you like a present?  There you go.  No wait, you've been such a good girl, have another.  No, that's not nearly enough.  Here, take my kidney."  Or similar.

I was very excited.  Like, Avengers-level of excitement.  And I'm not ashamed of being so plebbishly thrilled.  History plays were the Dallas and Dynasty of Shakespeare's day: sexy, glamorous men and women shagging and trying to kill each other, all for the benefit of grubby little groundlings like me watching with one hand in a bucket of popcorn (or holding an orange stuck with cloves for the historical pedants amongst you), gaping maw slackened with delight and reverence.  They're meant to be enjoyed, is what I'm trying to say.

Having said that, I didn't want to just come here and flail.  I purposefully have refrained from posting reaction posts or excessive abuse of the caps lock key.  These are my favourite plays, and I want to respond to them like the adult with an English degree that I am.

AND THEN THIS HAPPENED.

The BBC doesn't want me to respond like a mature, intellectual adult.  The BBC wants me to just offer my ovaries up on a plate and say, "I'm so sorry I ever tried to have coherent thoughts about your Shakespeare plays, I'm probably just over stretching my woman-brain."  The patriarchy has a new weapon, and its name is TOM HIDDLESTON IN A FUCKING SAUNA.

Pictured: patriarchy.

I am really quite annoyed.

Despite this obvious attempt by the forces of retrogressiveness to prevent me from giving a considered analysis of The Hollow Crown, I have overcome all obstacles and done so.  I have also rewatched the sauna scene several times in order to prove that its bewitching enchantments have no hold over me, thou foul televisual wizards at the BBC.  So let that be a lesson to you.  Anyway, on with the show.

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Richard II is a funny old play.  It's full of pomp and circumstance (phrase copyright Shakespeare, cf Othello), and a huge percentage of it is spoken in rhyming couplets which are not the easiest things to make sound spontaneous.  It was slightly to my surprise then that Goold's Richard II was - Act 1 to Act 5 - completely stunning.  I'd like to go into more detail than I can, mainly because I watched it three weeks ago now, but also because there's not much else to say.  The way it was translated into film was gorgeous: long, locked-off shots holding the court inside them like a series of picture-frames, the couplets delivered carefully but fiercely.  The great risk of any production of this play is that it will stale quickly, everyone caught inside the huge, slow-moving machine of the court and its rituals; Goold avoided this beautifully and the whole thing flowed like gossamer.

Whishaw is perfect casting for Richard - a man who is a bad king yet good at being king.  He was perfectly juxtaposed with Rory Kinnear's Bolingbroke, an actor who will never set the world on fire for me but was well cast here.  Whishaw is elegant and neurotic where Kinnear is heavy and direct, Richard's growing astonishment that he could ever be deposed beautifully paralleled with Bolingbroke's astonishment that he must be the one to depose him.  Also Whishaw is beautiful and Kinnear looks like a turnip but I'm sure that's beside the point.  The deposition scene in particular was magic; Richard's unwillingness to physically let go of the crown devolves into a grown man having a temper tantrum - but what a temper tantrum it is.  Goold and Whishaw understand what Richard understands - to be a king requires an essential theatricality, one that Bolingbroke does not have (but his son totally will).  It's not often you can watch an adult man lying on the floor kicking and screaming because someone is taking his toy (really, Richard's whole objection to Bolingbroke taking over as king amounts to "BUT HE DOESN'T LOOK AS GOOD AS MEEEE.  LOOK AT MY BONE STRUCTURE, THERE'S NO WAY HE CAN PULL OFF THIS CROWN.  I WANT A BIGGER LOLLY") and your overwhelming reaction is to hug them.

The cast as a whole is an embarrassment of riches - Patrick Stewart turns up to deliver the 'sceptered isle' speech ("Oh," says everyone with polite surprise, "so that's where that comes from") and then dies.  David Suchet turns up as York, which was actually less surprising than Lindsay Duncan turning up for all of two scenes as his wife and, apparently, mother to the guy with slamming cheekbones from the first series of Silk.  James Purefoy and David Morrissey are also just about discernible under a layer of grime and beards as Mowbray and Northumberland respectively, and Clemence Poesy does a very good job of swanning about being French and beautiful as Queen Isabella.

Speaking of queens, I was both amused and skeptical about the heavy Saint Sebastian imagery: as a play, Richard II owes a large debt to Marlowe's Edward II, which features a similarly idle king insensitive to his kingdom's needs who is then deposed and murdered, this time by his wife (another Isabella, conveniently) and her lover.  Marlowe, let's be frank, makes quite clear the reasons for Edward's wife's displeasure in the form a strapping young lad called Gaveston who Edward seems much more interested in spending time with.  I've always unconsciously assumed similar things about Richard and, it seems, so has Goold, except without the unconscious bit.  Richard lingers around nubile young models being painted as Saint Sebastian - adopted as a gay icon, as I found out when I proudly brought home a postcard of a very lovingly rendered Caravaggio-esque version of the pierced saint from the National Gallery and got some very questioning looks from my family - before dying in a similar fashion, shot full of crossbow bolts.  It's sort of reassuring that someone else had the same thoughts but also I'm still mentally thirteen and all the Saint Sebastian stuff was so heavy handed that it did make me giggle uncontrollably.  Not enough to put me off the production as a whole though: a gorgeous, gorgeous rendering of a difficult play.

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On first watch, Henry IV Part 1 was a much more mixed bag.  I must confess, the Henry IVs have a special place in my heart, much of which is owed to the wonderful productions at the Globe in 2010, much of which is owed to Roger Allam's Falstaff and a slightly smaller amount of which is owed to Jamie Parker's Hal, who between them stole my affections much more successfully than Falstaff manages the robbery at Gadshill.  That was a joke to show you I've read Shakespeare.  It was a production that could only have worked at the Globe: rowdy, slightly pedestrian in interpretation and thoroughly reliant on a few charismatic lead performances, but ultimately big-hearted and sort of magical.

Eyre's Henry IV was, on a personal level, less successful.  It is a rather chilly, loveless interpretation of a hugely generous play that demands imagination from its dramatists.  The Henry IVs present life in all its little permutations, in all its unimportant nuances.  Perhaps the reminisces of Falstaff and Justice Shallow in Part 2 don't affect the movement of history but I dare you to listen to an actor - any actor - deliver Falstaff's line, "We have heard the chimes at midnight" and not feel like it's important to life.  This, perhaps, is what Eyre misses.  A history play is usually the story of a king; it is no accident that the Henry IVs, that seem so preoccupied with lowlives and rebels and general scum, tell the story of a prince.  The simple genius of these plays is that Hal isn't king yet: he's still a man (well, boy) and he responds to things like a man.  Henry V is a political play about war, no two ways about it, but so long as Hal is around, his drama is that of a man, encompassing life at its grandest and its most trivial and Shakespeare makes every moment of it important.

Eyre's production was a disappointment only in this respect: I simply didn't laugh enough.  I'm not being a pleb demanding more rotten fruit being thrown, it's intrinsic to the way the play works.  There is no other Shakespeare play that draws you so thoroughly into the protagonist's journey - we, with Hal, are seduced by Falstaff (though, thank heaven, not literally) and we, with Hal, are shocked when the cracks start to creep into the relationship even though we, with Hal, have always known that the party has to end sometime because when you are the crown prince the ending is kind of a foregone conclusion.  With Simon Russell Beale's dour, downbeat Falstaff, there was none of this seduction.  I was unsurprised by Falstaff's callous disregard for human life towards his pathetic band of soldiers -"food for power" he mutters as he marches - which is usually the point at we which we (and Hal) start to suspect it's not all Elizabethan Santa Claus and cups of sack.

Eyre's approach to the language was brilliant and frustrating in equal measure. On the one hand, it was treated like actual, living, breathing language that people uttered carelessly while they were riding or fighting or drinking or reigning, which was wonderful.  No-one proclaimed or declaimed or recited; Hal's eulogy for Hotspur after he kills him (roughly translated into modern English as "I'm really sorry I had to kill you so my dad would love me") was all the more affecting because Hiddleston - covered in blood and dirt and sweat - could barely get the words out for shortness of breath and pain from his wounds.  On the other hand, some of Shakespeare's most glorious and inventive language was simply glossed over, lines that held so much potential just thrown away.  In the 2010 production, something was made out of every single line, which may not be the way that people speak but it's a pure delight to watch.  Here, Beale's introspective, insecure Falstaff practically mumbles the man's most audacious and brilliant lie - that he knew all along it was Hal under the buckram cloak robbing him of his own ill-gotten gains.

This is not to say that Beale was a bad Falstaff - no-one was bad.  Jeremy Irons nailed it as Henry IV - though I can only assume that they decided to recast and not have Rory Kinnear reprising the role because there is no way Kinnear's children would be that good looking.  (Wow, he's really taking a pounding here.  Sorry, Rory.)  Joe Armstrong was a strong Hotspur with an enjoyably broad accent, managing to make a lot of out of part that can be fairly thankless and tiresome (but then again, Hotspur is Hal's foil and Hal is great so yeah, suck it Hotspur).  I also very much enjoyed the casting gag of having his real-life dad Alun Armstrong play Hotspur's dad Northumberland (also supposed to be an older version of David Morrissey from Richard II, again I will assume that having an attractive son came into this decision).  There was also a nice little moment for the unfortunates amongst us who happened to become somewhat attached to the BBCs execrable Robin Hood series that ran a few years ago (call it morbid curiosity that kept me watching), reuniting Joe Armstrong as Hotspur/Alan-a-Dale with Harry Lloyd's Mortimer/Will Scarlett.  They even had a little bromance moment.  For a moment, I was seventeen again.  Then when I had finished blacking out from the horror and taken a shower, I carried on watching.

Hiddleston's Hal gave me a multitude of FEELINGS (yes, it has to be in capital letters), most of them signals from my brain to my ovaries telling them to shut the hell up.*  He excels at characters that are hard to read and this ambiguity works perfectly with Hal, a character that writes the book on playing his cards close to the chest.  He tells us in the first scene that he's going to ditch his friends to make himself look better and then does so in a needlessly brutal way, and at the same time he's disaffected, displaced and unhappy, and suffers from a major case of Daddy-doesn't-love-me...itis (this is becoming another Hiddleston trademark, and regular readers will know that you will hear no complaints from me on this front).  Hiddleston is marvellously subtle and compelling and was a canny casting choice in so far as he knows how to use the camera - to the point where this almost overshadows the rest of his performance.  Maybe he's been away from the stage too long, maybe he's not picked up some Shakespeare for a while but there were a few moments of disconnect from the words; the beauty of the performance lay in his reactions, his expressions.  I'm not complaining because it contributed to the great strength of this production: Eyre's translation of Shakespeare from stage to screen.  Shakespeare's characters lie.  They lie all the time - to each others and to themselves and Hiddleston conveys this wonderfully.  Falstaff asks him if he's afraid of Hotspur.  Hal replies, "Not a whit, in faith."  Bollocks.  Hal's clearly shit-scared - and Eyre lets you know that with close-ups that focus on details too small to be read from the auditorium, twitches and half-smiles and grimaces that reveal a whole different narrative underneath the text.  Eyre's other trick of cutting away during monologues, often to the next room, is more frustrating.  It's sort of like someone changing the channel in the middle of your programme.  Hey.  Richard.  I was watching that.  I was also disappointed that Hal and Falstaff's great soliloquies about (respectively) image management and honour were done in voiceover - it's a good trick for the camera but goddammit, I'm an audience member.  Talk to me.  Share with me.  It's what Shakespearean characters do.

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Watching Henry IV Part 2 made a lot of things a lot clearer.  My general concept of these two plays is as a great duet: major key and minor key, fast and slow, young and old etc etc.  Eyre takes this idea and shoves it out the window, giving us a slow, bitter breakdown of relationships between Hal and Falstaff, Hal and Henry, Hal and himself, Falstaff and the world - everyone and everyone, really.  Unwilling as I am to part with my view of these plays as simultaneously rambunctious, savage, warm, carnivalesque, etc, Eyre's conceit of them is compelling.  It is very much a cold, empty universe that Hal inherits as he steps up to become king; Part 2 is often observed to have a twilight feel to it - by which I mean everyone is tired and conscious of their own mortality, not stalking teenagers and walking around sparkling.

For me, the most electrifying of Eyre's directorial decisions comes in the scene where Hal, believing his father to have died, picks up the crown and puts it on.  Henry promptly wakes up and berates his son for being so eager to see him kick the bucket; it's a great scene anyway but Eyre directs it with incredible nuance, working through its arc beautifully.  Those close-ups I was talking about work overtime to give you Hiddleston wandering from his dead father's bed to the empty throne room, sitting and crowning himself before starting to cry.  By relocating the moment to the throne (in the play, Hal performs his self-coronation by the bedside) Hal becomes isolated and, most importantly, frightened.  It gives the moment a significance I never would have considered: for all his tactics, Hal is deeply insecure of himself.  I have always taken it as read that Hal has an intrinsic self-knowledge that enables him to pull off his prodigal son trick: he can defeat Hotspur in battle and he will be a good king.  Hiddleston's poker-faced prince is revealed to have no such certainty but, just when he should be assuming the mantle of authority, he collapses into grief like the young man that he is.  It's a brilliant counterpoint to Beale's Falstaff, who was immediately more satisfying in the melancholy rural world of Part 2, also playing his own great insecurity: that he is too old.

I am surprised that Part 2 should be more successful than Part 1 - it's a much less substantive play - but perhaps it allows the strengths of the actors to shine through more.  Hiddleston is a cerebral actor and doesn't entirely convince in Hal's carousing scenes, but in Part 2's long, introspective speeches and moments of self-realisation, he shines.  The famous dismissal of Falstaff loses some of its shock factor only because Eyre builds up to it so organically: when it comes, we wonder how Falstaff can have had any other notion of how this story would end.  No-one is suggested to be at fault - there is no calculating, opportunist Hal or sly, opportunist Falstaff - but it is merely the price of kingship.

I would suggest watching both parts of Henry IV together.  It's a long viewing experience, but you need the second part to make sense of the first.  Eyre connects the two stories in a way I never thought possible, not presenting you with a replaying of the same arcs in major and minor key, but the full and dazzling story of a young man's ascent.  Hal's coronation is the dynastic high point of The Henriad, yet it is packed full of attendant sorrows.  This seems to be the best way of describing Eyre's films: the ascent is grim and full of obstacles, but the triumph is earned.

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It's hard to be really surprised by Henry V anymore.  It's amongst the most adapted Shakespeare plays, with Branagh's and Olivier's being the obvious contenders and massive box office smashes in their day.  All that potential for blockbuster action sequences, all those rousing speeches etc etc, it's Hollywood's wet dream.  I've always found its popularity strange, though, seeing as it essentially starts with a Chorus apologising for CGI not having been invented yet.  The entire play is an exhortation of the imagination, a plea that the audience go along with it - because if they don't, all that patriotic guff about England's favourite warrior-king sounds terribly hollow.  Thea Sharrock's Henry V is, to my very great surprise, my hands-down favourite of the Hollow Crown films.  Why? Because she locates the heart of the play in this: the audience's understanding of Henry as a man.  She refuses to make the play either pro-war (as Olivier does) or a commentary on the horrors of war (as Branagh does).  She simply tells you the story of Henry.  And I was surprised again and again and again.

It is entirely valid to argue that the visual spectacle is what lets this film down: indeed, there is a little of the usual television-epic-army-of-twenty syndrome in the battle scenes and the courts are neither spectacular nor imposing.  I understand that some might be disappointed in this film precisely because it isn't Branagh's huge, roaring blockbuster.  But as I said that's not the story being told.  There's a huge preponderance of close-ups - not just of Harry but everyone, from the high-ups to the low-lives.  Sharrock tells the story of a series of individuals in war.  Of the four plays, it is the most successful in using film to convey the interiority of its players.  Heavily cut down to just over two hours, the paring back of the story to its essentials (the Scroop/Gray treason subplot is cut) allows us to focus on the lives at stake.  For god's sake, I cried over the Duke of York's death (an excellent Patterson Joseph).  I couldn't have told you for certain that there even was a York in Henry V previously but now I don't think I'll ever forget.  Sharrock also navigates the issue of the Chorus being a fundamentally theatrical device fantastically - Olivier and Branagh both took a meta approach, with the film starting on the stage of the Globe, and the Chorus walking through a film set respectively - by having Falstaff's page (usually martyred in the slaughter of the baggage train, an episode which was cut) morph into John Hurt's Chorus, present only in voiceover until that moment, still holding his bloodstained St George armband.  It's incredibly poignant, not because of the George's cross, but because we understand that we've simply been hearing the story of a man told by another man who was there.  Henry V is a mythologised king; Sharrock un-mythologises him brilliantly.

A large part of this is due to Hiddleston's performance, carrying on from the Henry IVs.  I freely admit that I was wrong in my predictions that Hiddleston would make a better Hal than Henry - while he was good in the previous instalments, he's extraordinary here.  Sharrock and Hiddleston explode all my lazy prejudices about Henry being an unsatisfying cipher of a hero; this is a young king learning on the job and all too frequently making mistakes.  "Once more unto the breach" is delivered to a small group of soldiers, each one addressed individually by a king who is clearly bricking it himself.  The threats to rape the women and murder the children of Harfleur are delivered with a desperation and tension that suggests Henry is shocking himself as he speaks.  It stands in beautiful contrast to his later order that all the French prisoners be killed, coming in a fit of rage after York's death and the apparent refusal of the French to surrender.  "I was never angry since I came to France/ Until this moment" he says, and boy do we believe him.  The Agincourt speech is not - as it usually is - a rousing call to the whole army but a quiet and simple exhortation to his nearest and dearest to simply be brave.  It brings out something dazzling in the speech - that Henry never actually says they're going to win.  All he asks is that they do their best.  It is perhaps the most affecting interpretation of it that I've heard.

This is the thread that Sharrock finds in a play usually cast as being pro- or anti- war or patriotism: the idea of courage.  It is never suggested that the English victory is due to Henry - heavy emphasis is placed on his prayers that God be on his side.  Rather than confront the validity of the war, this Henry resorts to something unquestioningly admirable: bravery.  Yet even then, bravery is not presented as morally superior; Paul Ritter's bitter, raging Pistol suffers a form of PTSD - faced with the battlefield, this "swaggerer" from Eastcheap simply breaks down.  Williams, the soldier that questions Harry in disguise, is likewise not condemned for his view that the king has blood on his hands - rather, you get the sense that Henry agrees.  York asks to lead the vanguard and dies - yet he dies at the hands of a rogue Frenchman (damn those rogue Frenchmen) and we never question his sincerity or wisdom.  It is a fantastically nuanced portrait of individual responses to war, from command to foot soldiers.

I'd also like to mention Tom Brooke's Corporal Nim, who was something of a revelation.  I've honestly never thought that hard about Nim before - another Eastcheap tavern sweller who goes off to war because there's sod-all else to do in Medieval England - but Brooke's unhappy, melancholic performance imbued the part with a huge amount of pathos and yet again reminded us not of the 'cost of war' or anything so sweeping, but simply of the single human lives that interweave throughout the story.  Similarly Melanie Thierry's Katherine - usually such a thankless task with the awkward lurching from war drama to rom-com - was brilliantly rendered.  The scene where she starts to learn English was imbued with a tension I'd always suspected was lurking there: she knows that her future is going to involve England in some way, and there's a war going on - something, anything to distract.  It's both pragmatic and strangely affecting.  The wooing scene is less successful but I'm going to blame Shakespeare here - it always seems oddly bathetic after the charge and energy of the battle scenes. Nevertheless, it is charmingly and (remarkably) convincingly done: the pledge of two young pragmatists who understand that their futures are linked and start to see that they could, despite everything, love each other some day.

Ultimately, Sharrock does things I never thought to see in a Henry V. Rather than cutting the play's problematic epilogue, in which we are reminded that Henry died not long after his conquest of France and left his infant son in the hands of the nobles who would begin the Wars of the Roses, Sharrock allows Shakespeare his final note of tragedy.  Opening and closing on Henry's funeral, we are left with a heavy mix of pride and grief: never for a moment is Hiddleston's distinctly flawed and human king anything less than the text's "star of England" - but stars fade, and history marches on.

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Overall, The Hollow Crown has been stunning television.  It has not only lived up to my expectations, it has surprised me over and over again with its deft, intelligent, even revelatory interpretations from directors and actors.  Is it perfect? No.  Do the four films hang together? Not really.  Could it have afforded a bigger budget?  Almost definitely.  But it has, I think, changed the way we think of Shakespeare on film.  All four are defiantly cinematic envisionings of a series of plays that demand much of their dramatists.  Richard II is slow and gorgeous; Henry IV 1 and 2 is an uncompromising look at plays that usually go affectionately unchallenged; Henry V is a brilliant answer to a play that the nation seems simultaneously obsessed with and troubled by.  I really couldn't have asked for more than this: a series that presents some of my favourite plays beautifully, intelligently and viscerally, yet reminds me that no matter how many times I think I've got the measure of them, the Henriad still has more treasures to give.  Standing ovations all round.

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*It sounded something like this: "oh huh wonder why they cut that line look they gave that bit to Doll oh that's interesting HIS SHIRT IS OPEN ooh I like that interpretation interesting I never thought of it like that OH MY GOD HIS HAIR IS WET AND ALSO HIS SHIRT jeremy irons is great oh look its will and alan from robin hood man that show was bad oh yeah shakespeare FUCK DID YOU SEE THE LIGHTING ON HIS COLLARBONE JUST THEN I wish these soliloquies weren't in voiceover HE JUST LOOKED INTO THE CAMERA oh no why did you cut that speech down HOLY FUCK LOOK AT HIS HANDS SO I GUESS I HAVE A HAND THING NOW OR SOMETHING IS THAT NORMAL LOOK HOW BLUE HIS EYES ARE CONCENTRATE ON THE SHAKESPEARE YOU HAVE A DEGREE OH FUCK HE WINKED AND NOW I'M DEAD".  But also he looked like this:

Oh hello.

And also all the promo shots for Henry V looked like this:

STOP LOOKING INTO MY SOUL.

THAT IS NOT AN APPROPRIATE WAY FOR A KING TO SIT.

So on balance I think I did quite well.

Finally A Post About Batman

It's no secret that Batman is kind of the unofficial mascot of this blog.  It was described to me today by a friend as "Shakespeare surrounded by Batman".  And yet I've never actually done a post exclusively about everyone's favourite winged vigilante.  I'm seeing The Dark Knight Rises tomorrow, so there'll be plenty to come on that but before we plunge into - let's face it - the end of a Batman epoch (because seriously, who is going to touch it for the next ten years after Nolan?) I want to address the "original" Batman film franchise and what went so badly, badly wrong.

I say "original" because, as any good nerd knows, Batman has been around in various guises since 1939. (Mostly bat-shaped guises, though there was that one comic where he was a pirate.  No seriously, google it.)  Pretty much all of my Batman knowledge comes from screen adaptations.  Despite my penchant for all things geek-shaped, I've never picked up/illegally downloaded a comic from the D.C. universe, nor will I because a) too much continuity and b) I hear they recently rebooted the D.C. universe for the seventeen billionth time and apparently it - to borrow a vulgarism - sucks ass.  Also, beyond Batman, the characters of the D.C. universe/Justice League have never really appealed to me as much as Marvel for whatever reason.  Maybe because Marvel keeps being so obliging with the abundance of cheekbones in their films.

Tons has been written about Batman in various cultural studies journals, so I'm not going to pretend that I can add anything new to the pot here but I know why I like him: he's mortal.  Batman is the most direct descendent of the heroic archetype that we have today. Beowulf, Odysseus, Spring-Heeled Jack - all of them went into making this guy who doesn't have any superhuman powers, just a gym membership and a large disposable income.  He's also hugely adaptable.  As far as I can discern, Batman has three main modes: gothy, campy and gritty.  All of them have their pros and cons but the character is always unfailingly Batman.  Not just in essentials (Batmobile, Batbelt, Batarangs, Batsignal, any other noun you can add 'Bat' to) but in motivation: "you fucked with my parents and now I'm going to dress up like a large rodent instead of visiting a psychiatrist like I probably should."  For great justice.

So let's take a look at Batman B.N. (Before Nolan).

Batman (1989)
This is a classic for so many reasons, but it has some flaws.  The main reason to watch it is Jack Nicholson's Joker.  We credit Heath Ledger with turning in an Oscar-worthy performance as a comic book villain, and rightly so, but let's not forget that this guy did it first.  Nicholson's Joker is more affable than Ledger's and (often literally for those onscreen) rib-crackingly funny.  He has the volatility of the character down perfectly post-chemical dip and even before 'Jack Napier' becomes the Clown Prince of Crime, Nicholson pulls no punches letting you know that this guy is a psycho with a nasty sense of humour.  Also, I defy anyone not to enjoy the sequence where the Joker and his goons burst into the art gallery to deface famous works of art accompanied by a huge 80s style boom box playing Prince's 'Partyman', written specifically for the film (oh yeah, loads of the songs are by Prince because that's not at all bizarre).

It's maybe not surprising that the Joker is the main draw of this film, given that it was directed by permanent-outsider-teen Tim Burton.  I unapologetically love Tim Burton, up to about 2007 when the formula started to wear thin (but it took some people much less time, so no-one can say I'm not faithful). But in 1989 Burton was at the beginning of his glory days.  His only major film before that was Beetlejuice, which ranks as my favourite Burton film of his oeuvre, and being such a comparative rookie has its good points and bad points.  On the one hand, Burton is gloriously unafraid to break the mould, which is what his Batman does in the same way that Batman Begins did sixteen years later.  Like Nolan, he wanted to make something that would open up the potential of this universe to more than just comic book fans.  The focus is on the Joker because what Burton does best is freakish outsiders, and it's hugely successful here.  Also remember when Burton was a great satirist, and not just someone who made things look cool by adding spirals?  That's hugely in evidence here, with Gotham's middle-class elite taking a battering for their narrow-minded concerns, picking up from the 80s yuppies in Beetlejuice and paving the way for the candy-coloured houses of Edward Scissorhands.

On the other hand, he doesn't really know what to do with the man himself.  Michael Keaton is great, and remains a lot of people's favourite Batman, but his Bruce Wayne - nervy, awkward, bespectacled and, now I think about it, oddly reminiscent of Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner in The Avengers - is more successful than his Batman.  There's no origin story here (well, it sort of comes into the plot later but in quite a half-arsed way), no explanation of why he does what he does.  The nearest we get is "Because I'm the only one who can", which is profoundly unsatisfying.  You get the feeling that Burton already had his hands full with one costumed weirdo and didn't really know how to balance the two against each other.  There's a nice thematic parallel between the two throughout, as it is gradually revealed that each are responsible for the other's transformation, but really there could be a lot more angst is all I'm saying.  Never thought I'd say that about a Tim Burton film.  As a whole, the film feels vaguely unformed: it's not quite a blockbuster, not quite a Burton film.

For all that, it's so worth watching if you haven't seen it.  All due respect to Nolan, but he wasn't the first to make Batman mainstream acceptable.  And also Billy Dee Williams is Harvey Dent in an aborted sequel hook that never quite enters Two-Face territory.  For shame.

Batman Returns (1992)
This is hands down my favourite Batman film, Nolan trilogy included.  With one film under the belt, Burton is much more sure-footed here and it's an out-and-out gothic Burton-gold-standard freak-fest.  Once again, the focus is on the villains and once again they're classics: Danny DeVito's genuinely disturbing Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer's iconic Catwoman.  The Penguin is a villain straight out of Burton's own imagination - in fact, there's even a character in Burton's 'The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy', a strange and excellent little book of poems and drawings concerning various deformed children, called That Hideous Penguin Boy.  And hideous he is too.  On my 153rd rewatch, I still find it distressingly hard to look at the Penguin full on so I guess bravo to the make-up department there, and also kindly go fuck yourselves for igniting a metric fuckton of Nightmare Fuel in my tender developing imagination.  Christopher Walken is also on good eerie form as Max Schrek, the shady industrialist who pulls the strings and, despite lack of animal-themed costume/deformity, is implied to be the real monster in Gotham.

Also remember what I was saying about Burton being a great satirist?  Pfeiffer's Catwoman is my favourite part of the whole film because of the way she gloriously deconstructs the idea of the sexy whip-toting dominatrix who just needs the love of a good man.  Don't get me wrong, she's still guilty of launching an entire generation of boyish masturbatory fantasies and I'd be lying if I said she wasn't objectified even a little bit (vinyl catsuit) but Burton and Pfeiffer make it gloriously clear that Selina Kyle is, y'know, brain-damaged.  In close up, she twitches, smears her lipstick across her face, her eyes lose focus and she occasionally tries to eat live birds.  She should probably be in a hospital ward but, like Bruce, she's decided to work out her problems by dressing as a furry mammal and capering across some rooftops.  Accordingly, the Batman/Catwoman/Bruce Wayne/Selina Kyle romance is done brilliantly and is actually integral to the plot too, unlike poor Kim Basinger's tacked-on romance in the first film.  The sequence where they turn up to a masquerade ball (as Wayne and Kyle) and are the only two not wearing masks is a great touch, as is Pfeiffer's deadpan delivery upon their mutual realisation of each other's alter-ego in the middle of the crowded dance floor: "Do we have to start fighting now?" Just two damaged, combative, highly secretive individuals taking turns to kick the shit out of each other and make out.  Move along now, nothing to see here.  In conclusion, Catwoman manages to be empowered and deconstruct the idea of empowerment-through-male-gaze at the same time.  And that was in 1992.  What happened?

Batman Returns is much tighter than its predecessor, and darker too - something which led to Burton's polite removal from the director's chair for the next one.  The design is superb, Gotham City re-imagined as an art deco nightmare with shades of film noir.  At the time, a reviewer called the film "the first blockbuster art film" (that's some great citation there), a trick which Nolan again repeated with The Dark Knight, and I think that's the perfect description for it.  The action is a little meagre and there's no fine delineation of heroes and villains, but that's not the point - it's a murky, gruesome, beautiful world in which it isn't hard to believe that deformed children are cast into the river to grow up in sewers beneath your feet and secretaries are pushed out of top-floor windows.  Not our own world by a long shot, but with enough resonances to make it uncomfortable viewing.

Batman Forever (1995)
And here's where the rot starts to set it.  Making good on their pledge that no bad decision go unmade, Hollywood decided that Batman Returns was a just a little too controversial and there was a whole audience of families whose wallets were going unemptied.  Enter stage right: Joel Schumaker and a sudden cold wind blowing through everyone's hearts.  Burton stayed on to produce, which is apparent in the final mix of the film: the universe is cartoonish and silly, but the tone is weirdly gloomy.  It's like the opposite of one of those kids who dresses in stripy tights and black eyeliner but then smiles all the time and says things like "I'm kooky!"  It's like Eeyore in drag.  (You're welcome.)  It's also famous for being the film in which Schumaker decided that subtlety was for pussies and rubber nipples were for men.

I won't lie, it's been a while since I watched it.  I do know, however, that as great as Tommy Lee Jones generally is (and he's an okay-ish Two Face here), I feel robbed of not seeing Billy Dee Williams in the role.  Robbed.  Val Kilmer is also an okay-ish sort of Batman but to me he will never ever not be the gay detective from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which is a) awesome and you should see it it now, b) not in any way an insult because Kilmer is great in it and c) this is the film where we get Robin for the first time so the homoeroticism is already dialled up to eleven.  Speaking of: ugh, Robin.  Chris O'Donnell is the kind of charmless charisma-vacuum that studios loved casting in the mid-nineties because for a very short space of time, that is apparently what women wanted.  On that note, let's bear in mind that they also apparently wanted Mel Gibson at that point too, so let's just write the whole decade off as a loss for relations between the sexes.  I would actually have loved to see Nolan's attempt at a gritty reboot of Robin, given that this is something that has actually been attempted in the comics, with the second (?) Robin, Jason Todd, becoming Nightwing when he was fired from being Robin on reaching adulthood (also I think he died or something).  Let's not dwell on the fact that Batman stops employing his sidekicks when they reach the age of consent.  I still have a secret hope that Joseph Gordon Levitt's role in The Dark Knight Rises actually is Robin in some way, given that my theory is that he's there to take over when Christian Bale breaks his spine or dies or generally stops being able to go Batmanning of an evening.

Shamefully, there is one thing that I like about this film a lot, which is Jim Carey as The Riddler.  That makes no sense to me even as I type it, but there it is.  He fits with the timbre of the new universe, being kind of a walking cartoon as he is, and The Riddler is a pretty classic villain (again, I was hoping he would make an appearance in the Nolan-verse but I can well imagine the Internet's ringing cries of "Joker knock-off!", only with more swearing and casual misogyny).  That is it though.  It's maybe worth watching because it's so bizarre, but on the whole you should just pretend the franchise died with Burton's directorial involvement.

Batman and Robin (1997)
There's little I can say about how bad this film is that you won't have heard before but do you want the truth?  You'll probably quite enjoy it.  It reaches levels of so-bad-it's-good so quickly that you almost suspect Schumaker of trying to make a cult film.  And then Arnie turns up with another ice pun and you realise that if anyone willingly put themselves through the making of this for art, then that person is a hero.  It's scraping the barrel so hard on the villain front, it's practically through to the floor.  As well as the inventively named Mr Freeze (he freezes things), we get an unnervingly dead-eyed Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy and some other bloke as her henchman Bane (man, I am so looking forward to The Dark Knight Rises).  In the first three films, we had a psychotic clown, a hideous deformed penguin-man, and a man with half his face burned away by acid.  The weapons threatening Gotham this time are frozen water, and plants.  Also Bane, who is supposed to be one of the smartest and strongest of the Batman Rogue's Gallery - he actually broke Batman's spine leaving him paraplegic in one story arc (oh my god, is it time for Dark Knight Rises yet?) - is reduced to an inarticulate luchador.  Also Alicia Silverstone is Batgirl and loads of people called her fat, which is really uncalled for when her performance is so horrible, you could just focus on that. (Also, she's not fat.)

So yeah, I could go through all the puns, all the nonsensical plot points, all the bizarre unintentional homoeroticism, all the torturous adolescent flirting, all the fucking BAT CREDIT CARDS, but I won't because you should just watch it with some strong drink and then a) you can say you've watched it and survived and b) you might even enjoy it a little bit.  Or just look at George Clooney's calming, symmetrical face.  Don't you feel better now?

But in the end, it's not enough to say that's it's a bad film, you have to ask why it's bad - because no-one sets out to make a bad film.  The answer is quite simple: money, dear boy.  Batman and Robin is a purely cynical money-spinning exercise from beginning to end.  It could have taken Burton's quasi-cartoon universe and pushed it into something more trippy and disturbing but no - Batman and Robin is the way it is because the producers wanted to sell more Happy Meal toys.  That's right, McDonald's did what the Joker never could.  It killed Batman.


And then along came Nolan in 2005 to resurrect our Bat-shaped hopes and dreams with a trilogy that has not only redefined Batman (again) but redefined what we're allowed to do with blockbusters.  It's the film that everyone will see this summer - they might not have seen The Avengers, they might not see The Amazing Spider-man, but they'll sure as hell see The Dark Knight Rises, and they'll enjoy it.  Unless, as I predict, Christian Bale ends the film shattered into a million tiny pieces and even then, it'll happen in an awesome way.  Just please, please, please, Christopher Nolan - don't fuck up Catwoman.

Pixar and Me: A Toy Story Retrospective

Warning: this post contains spoilers for all three Toy Story films and some extremely emotional italics.

The first Toy Story film came out in the UK in 1996. I was 6 years old. Like a lot of six year old girls, I had more than a passing fondness for pink, princesses, Cinderella, ballerinas, that kind of thing.  I had a princess party for my sixth birthday, much to the joy of my male playmates.  When I tell people this now, it usually surprises them; as regular discerning readers may glean, I'm not so much one for romantic comedy, more one for spurious escapism powered by explosions.  So what happened?  The short answer is Toy Story.  Toy Story happened.

When my parents took me to see Toy Story, the excitement on their part was largely to do with this new form of animation, which was – gasp – done on a computer.  Maybe some of this excitement rubbed off on me because, so far as I remember, I was rather keen to see this funny-looking film, despite obvious lack of castles, dresses, oppressive patriarchy etc.  By the time the credits rolled, I don’t think I or either of my parents were even considering the artistic and technological advances in animation because oh my god Toy Story was the best thing we had ever seen.  To this day, the trilogy tops every list of favourite films I make: nostalgia value, artistic merit, tight writing, aesthetics, storytelling, voice acting, it's got it all.  You can keep Citizen Kane.  I've got Toy Story.

But my relationship with Toy Story goes beyond artistic appreciation. It had a huge influence over my development as a person: from the moment Woody and pals did their jerky early-CGI swagger into my life, princesses were discarded.  I was going to be a cowboy.  I then quickly amended this ambition to cowgirl.  Toy Story woke in me some dormant tomboy gene, a desire for adventure and thrills: it was the start of a whole new way of being that was very different to the narratives that Cinderella was feeding me.  There's nothing wrong with being a girly-girl, of course, but there aren't nearly as many good stories involved.  If all your fairytales end with a handsome prince, you're getting a very limited worldview to say the least.  Toy Story led to me devouring Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Pippi Longstocking, Roald Dahl and, not much later, Harry Potter in a way I wouldn’t have done before.  Fairytales were swapped for Greek myths: so much bolder and brighter, with gods and monsters and heroes and people doing things.  Suddenly, there were more colours in the world than pink.

You know the montage in the first film where all of Andy's cowboy stuff turns into Buzz Lightyear stuff?  That happened to me.  Discarded was my faithful Snow White costume and in came a swanky new Woody outfit, complete with sheriff badge and hat.  The plastic orgy of Barbies in various states of hard, shiny undress were converted from dress-up toys into complex societies of doctors, superheroes, witches, singers and actors with more back-stabbing, secret alliances and political manoeuvring than a Game of Thrones episode (though probably about as much nudity, I had been gifted a lot of second-hand Barbies but not many clothes to cover their dubious modesty).  The cherry on the cake of all this was my own Woody doll - much chunkier than the film's lanky rag doll, but I wrote my name on his boot nonetheless - and a shiny silver special edition Buzz.  I'll never forget the horror of a friend's younger sibling asking to borrow Woody and the reproving look on my mother's face as I turned my beseeching eyes towards her.  Woody came back minus his hat and with his pull string broken.  They bought me a new one that played guitar but it wasn't the same.  Woody as I knew and loved him was gone and it probably wouldn't have happened if I hadn't done what my mother told me.  Goddamit, mum.  It was a dark chapter in my history and if you think I'm joking, only a little.*  I suppose the long and the short of it is that Toy Story taught me how to play. 

I turned 22 on Sunday.  For my birthday present to myself, I sat down with a close friend and a lot of pizza and watched Toy Story 3.  Before I address the film itself, I'll just say this: even at this age, it is my 7-year-old self that enjoys car chases, heists, prison breaks, explosions and shoot outs.  When I reviewed The Avengers, what I could not show you was my facial expression, which was one of pure childlike glee.  Toy Story's influence lives on also in my sense of humour: silliness, snarkiness and surrealism living comfortably side by side.  Buzz proclaiming, "Don't you get it?! I am MRS NESBITT" will never, ever not be funny to me.  We love talking about how Pixar invented the kids-films-secretly-for-adults genre, although as I get older I'm not even sure they're for kids at all.  I was severely disappointed in Finding Nemo when I first saw it at the age of 13, but as (more of) an adult the scene where Nemo turns around and tells his Dad, "I hate you" is extremely powerful.  Witness also the separation and reunion aspects of Monsters Inc, the bleak yet hopeful view of humanity envisioned in Wall-E, the obligatory mention of the first ten minutes of Up: I don't think Pixar is making kid's films at all, not even secretly-for-parents-kid's-films.  I think Pixar is making films to please itself and by god, I salute them.  Except for Cars.  Cars was a bit shit.

No matter what else it produces, though, the Toy Story Trilogy in its entirety is always going to be the pinnacle of achievement for Pixar.  For me personally, it holds a cachet shared only by one other series - Harry Potter (the books, obviously) - of having grown up as I have grown up.  Both series place strong emphases on friendship, courage and resourcefulness, both are funny and wildly imaginative.  I spent a lot of my teenage years emulating the dress and mannerisms of various fictional characters (Winona Ryder in Beatlejuice, take a bow) in the fruitless quest for self-identity that is adolescence but there's probably only one fictional character I've ever really wanted to be, and though I've put away my lassoo-skipping-rope now, I still hold that if I can be something like Woody - wisecracking, courageous, loyal, a leader, flawed but ultimately good – I could do alright.  In fact, much of the first film is driven by Woody's flaws; on my recent re-watch I was kind of surprised to discover how much of a jerk he is, so I guess Toy Story is also responsible for starting my worrying tendency to become a furious apologist for anti-social fictional men.  And on the topic of changing perspectives, when I was a kid it was Woody's fears of rejection and replacement that I related to - playground politics can be so cruel - but as an adult, Jesus Christ, is there anything sadder than watching Buzz's heroic breakdown when he realises he's not a real space ranger?  With the sad song and the window and the no! I will fly! moment?  And because Hollywood teaches us that if you really really want something and are an attractive twentysomething or an adorable cartoon character you can definitely always get it, we believe he's going to fly and then he doesn't?  And he loses his arm for trying? Blimey, Pixar, you ever think about pulling your punches a little?

And, of course, the films only get progressively darker and more spiritually wounding as they go on.  Most conceptual universes don't tend to examine the ins and out of the realities they create, but Toy Story 2 took the difficult questions of toy ownership - and sentient toys - and ran with it.  What happens when the kids start to grow up?  There's only really a few exits for toys from the playroom: donation, the attic or, most likely, in a bin bag.  The bottom line is that kids grow up and move on.  Toy Story 2 was one for the parents in this respect: the feelings of abandonment and rejection that Woody and Jessie experience are a poignant analogue for the knowledge that every parent faces - one day they too will appear "used" and "outgrown" to their children.  But the final message is redemptive: we cannot stop ourselves or our children from growing up but we can enjoy it while it lasts.  And if we are loved, truly loved with the special bond that Andy and Emily shared with their toys, that love can sustain us when the relationship is no longer as immediate or dependent as it once was.  And it's probably no accident that the weepy Sarah McLachlan ballad that plays over the heartbreaking montage of Jessie's abandonment by her owner also borrows heavily from the semantics of a romantic relationship ending.  Far from the usual Disney fare, in which walking off into the sunset is par for the course, the second lesson Pixar taught me with the Toy Story trilogy was that relationships ending is a fact of life, but it doesn't have to be the end of the world.  The final note is bittersweet, a relative first for children's entertainment, with Woody proclaiming that Andy's childhood "won't last forever" but "I wouldn't miss a moment of it".  Of course, then Toy Story 3 took those themes and turned them into a harrowing emotional black hole from which I barely managed to escape with my battered soul intact.

I never doubted that Toy Story 3 was going to be good.  It was simply far too important to fail, not just to me but to the thousands of kids in my age bracket who were now packing up their bedrooms to head off into the unknown.  Like that other fictional boy I grew up alongside, Harry Potter, Andy was now my age, or thereabouts, and now here was Pixar, showing us that we had not been forgotten, that they were here to close the final chapter on our childhoods.  I'm pretty certain I wasn't alone in practically pushing small children out of the way to get to the front of queue because goddammit eight-year-olds, you have no idea what this means.  I also spent a fair few minutes in conversation with the girl at the desk trying to sell me Odeon membership.  After some rapid and confusing exchanges about how much money I would be saving, I wailed in a loud and plaintive tone that sent heads turning across the foyer, "I JUST WANT TO SEE TOY STORY 3."  So to say I cried might be an understatement - from the opening sequence, taken word for word from the first two films, to the last half hour solid, I was pretty much a mess.

When I re-watched it yesterday, sufficient time had passed that I could also appreciate how breathtakingly well made it is.  The animation had progressed astoundingly compared to the original 1995 film; Pixar has always been shy about animating humans unless cartoonishly stylised first (Ratatouille, The Incredibles) but they seem to have conquered Uncanny Valley (explained in this post) with a vengeance because holy crap, look at all those emotions!  Look at grown-up Andy playing with Bonnie!  Look at Andy's mum tearing up in his empty bedroom!  Look at all these people.  The textures and tones were richer, the lighting beautifully rendered: eerie and flickering strip bulbs, sunlight through leaves, rainstorms, every single piece of debris in the furnace glowing and casting individual shadows.  It's a beautifully designed film.  It's also gleefully funny.  Just when one is ready to condemn the Americans for lack of wit, they go and pull something like Spanish Buzz which was, without a doubt, one of the best things on celluloid this side of the millennium, and probably the other as well.  The level of nuance in it is far greater than I'd appreciated: I'd thought the real emotional heft was contained to the last half hour but my friend and I were brushing away stray tears from the first act as the toys make one last ditch attempt to reconnect with Andy and fail resoundingly.  Even the only thing that I actively disliked about the film - the absence of Bo Peep - wasn't something I could fault artistically since it established that the years really hadn't been kind to our gang (but seriously guys, did you have to make the look on Woody's face when he said Bo was gone so painful?  and did you have to not even say what happened to her so maybe she wasn't even given away, maybe she got broken or something?  Stop fucking with my essential sense of narrative justice).  The film juggles genres with a nonchalance that Joss Whedon (a writer on the first film, by the way) has wet dreams about.  First it's an adventure flick, then that's a dream sequence, that it's all farewells and gritty emotional drama, then it turns into an eerie dystopia, then it's a prison break film with Mission Impossible overtones, then we reach the last half hour and holy fuck every known reference point for film goes out the window because I'm crying like a housewife with a bottle of gin and a DVD of Beaches.

I am willing to admit that, like every other person in that cinema, I truly believed they were going into that furnace.  Even if you said afterwards you knew all along they were going to be fine, you're lying because a tiny part of you deep down was preparing to say goodbye to these characters forever.  Which is then exactly what we had to do ten minutes later.  God fucking dammit, Pixar, how dare you have such puppet-master-like control over my heartstrings?  How dare you?  And do you know why it worked?  Because having the toys melt into bubbling plastic globs would have been easier.  It would have been the cheap emotionally manipulative ending that we're so used to seeing Hollywood pull.  No, forcing us to confront the terrible, bleak, mentally-scarring reality - that we'd always have memories of childhood but we weren't allowed to be children anymore, that it was someone else's turn to be a child - that is so much crueller.  Damn you, Lasseter.  Damn you, Pixar.  Damn you all to the special hell.

So maybe what sets Toy Story 3 apart as a film, that cements the trilogy's place in my heart, is that it's neither for children nor for adults: it's for us, those in-betweeny, hard to place 'young adults' who grew up with the original films.  That doesn't mean no-one else can enjoy it - my mum walked in on the last ten minutes and started crying immediately - but it is for us.  For which one can only say, along with Andy, thanks guys.  You're all really special but I have to go away now.  And if we're really lucky, we get to see someone else enjoying the thing that we once enjoyed, and if we're really really lucky then we get to see them loving it, and that love doesn't fade or lessen even if time is against us in all other respects.

Blimey.  Batman Batman Batman.  That's better.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to stockpile some tissues and go watch Wall-E.


*EDIT: Since posting this, my mother has informed me that I wasn't actually there when the request came for temporary possession of my Woody doll, so I can only assume that what I'm remembering is outrage as only a seven-year-old can be outraged, along with a seven-year-old's morality which disregards things like kindness and common courtesy because everyone else should just stay away from my toys.  I'd also like to point out that I've neglected to mention that Toy Story was a hugely important series not just to me but my whole family - say "Mrs Nesbitt" to any member of my family and they'll laugh.  Or cry.  Damn, I think I'm starting again.

Cheekbones in Space: Prometheus Review (Spoiler-free)

I don't really get people who automatically discount science fiction.  Yeah, I wasn't always a fan.  But even in my tenderest youth, I have never scanned a film poster for the slightest hint of tentacle or laser or teleportation and gone, "How dare you?!  You, sir, are trying to make me watch a - gasp - science fiction film."  Even when it didn't interest me as a genre, I never treated the entire collective as though if I touched it, the Facehugger of Deadly Nerddom would jump out and facerape me into a John Hurt-style coma where eventually an ugly geek child version of myself would burst its way out of the chest cavity of what used to be a nice, normal girl before she got mixed up in all that - gasp - science fiction.  I mention this because a) I have actually encountered this attitude in people in real life and b) Ridley Scott has created a film that is extraordinarily beautiful, both visually and otherwise, and you should go and see it, like, right now.

The most common criticism of sci-fi seems to be that it's too unrealistic to relate to and, indeed, there are two ways you can go with this.  You can acknowledge you're in a science fiction movie and just have fun with whooshing doors and phasers and unintentional dystopias where everyone dresses the same and nobody comments on this sinister conformity.  Or you can look at the potential within science fiction to transcend that genre, and build something that no other genre gives you the sheer freedom to imagine.  Come to think of it, that's why people who 'can't relate' to sci-fi confuse me.  Empathy.  Imagination.  Your special gifts as a member of the human race.  Use them.

Because ultimately science fiction is all about environment.  It's saying, "Yeah, this is set in a world like ours but not ours, and the go-to explanation for weird shit is science.  (If the explanation is 'a wizard did it', you're looking at fantasy.*)" It's world-building.  And what Scott does best, of course, is world-building.  Blade Runner isn't really a significant cinematic achievement for its plot or characters (Harrison Ford eats Chinese food a lot, looks cool, bangs robots) so much as its vision of our dystopian, corporate-run yet grimly beautiful future.  The world-building in Prometheus is off the charts.  We are taken from one stunning environment to the next, from bleak, haunting vistas on the Isle of Skye (Scottish Tourist Board, Ridley will accept with cash or cheque) to the clean, threatening lines of the Prometheus ship itself - the design of which is reflected in everything from the dark blue minimalist space suits to the silver-plated champagne bottles to Michael Fassbender's new Aryan hairdo - to the depths of an otherworldly colony, the twisting black gooey textures of which will recall some familiar creatures to those who have seen the previous Alien films and seriously unsettle those who haven't.  It is a miracle of design from beginning to end, though for me the standout moment (without giving anything away) concerns Fassbender's lonely robot David standing inside a holographic projection of all the terrifying, awe-inspiring majesty of space.  It's a beautiful moment of seamless design, effects and acting combining to make me go a little bit wibbly.

And speaking of awe-inspiring majesty, all the awe and majesty and awesome and majestic bobbins on show here are no accident.  Voltaire said (and if your inner Adolescent Philosophy Student Alert Alarm is going off right now, I don't blame you) that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.  Neil Gaiman wrote an entire novel based on the concept that faith is a creative energy, constructing gods out of things that we put our belief in.  Prometheus runs along the same lines, juggling hefty questions about our origins and what it means for God and faith if we start finding answers: discount religion entirely or keeping believing nonetheless?  The questions it raises are thoughtful but also lead to one of the few minor criticisms I had of this film, that all this faith-religion-science stuff is just a bit too nebulous to amount to anything tangible.

Fortunately, the cast is universally strong so you can just focus on the human drama if you like.  Noomi Rapace is excellent as Dr Elizabeth Shaw, all bright-eyed curiosity and calm capability and, crucially, possesses at least a modicum of common sense that makes her intensely rootable-for.  Logan Marshall-Green as Boyfriend Doctor Charlie Holloway is less likeable as the film's purveyor of Dickish Hubris but puts in a good performance.  Idris Elba is the film's Cool Black Dude (there's one in every Alien film, go check) but he is the Coolest of the Cool Black Dudes.  The more I think about Charlize Theron, the most I liked not only her performance but her character Meredith Vickers, the icy bitch-queen of Weyland Corporation.  Guy Pearce is slightly odd casting as the ancient Peter Weyland, founder of said corporation, and one of the rare decisions that doesn't hold up (what have you got against actors who actually, like, old, Ridley?  Enquiring minds want to know).  The standout performance is Michael Fassbender as aforementioned lonely robot David, who just wants to be a real boy.  Sort of.  I'm not sure if Fassbender's characters always start out as the most interesting ones or whether he just makes them that way by dint of sheer acting.  Seriously, that guy must be exhausted from all the bloody acting he does.  Actually seriously though, it's a fascinatingly detailed performance and I'm unsurprised that my cursory google turned up an interview where he stated avoiding watching the androids of previous Alien films and taking the Blade Runner replicants as his reference point, because that's exactly where my brain went.  He combines the Rutger Hauer arrogance with the Daryl Hannah childlike naivety and is thoroughly compelling throughout ("thoroughly compelling" - that's a thing that people say in reviews, right?).  It also doesn't give anything away to say that of the two blockbusters I have reviewed this summer, both contribute to the trend in sympathetic be-cheekboned villains with really shit sort-of dads.

Prometheus  has received mixed reviews from the press, largely because "it's not like Alien".  I can't help but think much of these are missing the point.  No, it's not Alien.  It's a totally different genre to Alien.  I'm not sure what genre it is, except maybe pseudo-philosophical-aren't-we-profound-here-are-some-pretty-things-to-look-at-so-you-might-not-notice-we-don't-know-what-the-fuck's-going-on (also included: Danny Boyle's Sunshine).  If I sound like I'm making mock, well, only a little.  Prometheus aims for something huge and succeeds on many many levels, enough to make a stunningly well-made film and, for a film where a lot of violent shit goes down, a strangely uplifting paean to human endeavour and courage.

Gosh, I've gone all serious.  Batman.  There, that's better. Though if I use Batman to drag things back from the brink of attempted profundity, my review for The Dark Knight Rises is going to be a very confused affair.

*Sorry for stealing your joke, Simpsons.  Your penetrating understanding of nerd culture is too much for me.

Jane Shakespeare Watches Buffy: Seasons 1-2

Gather round, kids, it's confession time.  Now, this is very hard for me.  I, Jane Shakespeare, have always proudly called myself a Joss Whedon fan.  Hell, I might even say I'm a fangirl.  (If you don't know the difference, you clearly haven't been on the internet very much.) But in all my nearly twenty-two years on this planet, I have never watched Buffy.

GASP TURN IN YOUR GEEK LICENSE RIGHT NOW, YOUNG LADY.  ALSO YOUR FEMINISM LICENSE WHILE WE'RE AT IT.

But Officer, let me correct myself.  I have never watched Buffy....until now.

Because I, in a fit of what I term 'productivity', have been mainlining episodes of this sweet, televisual goodness like all the illegal streaming sites are going down tomorrow.  Which they may well do if SOPA has its way. (Your slightly outdated satire quota of this blog has now been completed.  Thanks for reading.)

And what I must say is this: YOU GUYS WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME.

All those times when someone went "You've never watched Buffy?" and walked away from the conversation leaving me in no doubt that they thought a little less of me as a person, I kind of assumed that they were being weird because, like, it's a just a TV show and certainly I have always been measured and grounded and suchlike about fictional mediums and not at all prone to sweeping overreactions and abuse of the capslock button.  I'm so sorry, universe, I retract everything.  I now realise I've been letting you down by not engaging with one of the finest on-screen portrayals of attractive teenagers that our times had to offer.

Btdubs, from here on in there be spoilers for Seasons 1-2 and a bit of Season 3.  Spoilers that are fifteen years old and that everyone in the known universe has seen except me but spoilers nonetheless.

So the very first thing I am struck by is how incredibly 90s everyone looks, which makes me happy and sad at the same time because on the one hand the 90s were a truly tragic era for self-expression but on the other, hello childhood.  Seemingly all this 90s chic has wormed its way into my subconscious and thus my wardrobe, because once I start watching I spend the next week looking like Monica from Friends circa Season 3 or, on better days, Linda from Press Gang.

My second reaction is to curse how wrong I was.  Somewhere back in the early 2000s I got the impression that Buffy was a show about Sarah Michelle Gellar being hot and giving teenage goths something mainstream to call their very own.  Which it is, but it isn't.  I should have known from Firefly, really, that Whedon doesn't take on a genre unless he can subvert the hell out of it.  His recent forays into super heroics should have taught me that.  It isn't perfect.  There's some really dud episodes, like the one with the Internet Demon Robot, which I guess is Joss Whedon's equivalent of a Stranger Danger After School Special or something.  In fact, most of Season 1 plods along at a nicely goofy pace and the monsters are fun rather than scary.  The praying mantis/femme fatale thing is well done, the one where Xander gets possessed by a hyena demon confirmed all my worst impressions of him, and even the one with the ventriloquist's dummy (usually a fast-track into my nightmares) is just kind of silly.  Also having 'The Master' as your boss fight villain just makes me think that no self-respecting Time Lord would be seen in such passé attire, no matter how evil he was.

The show really grows some balls throughout Series 2 though. I particularly liked how much they upped the seriousness of Angel and Buffy's relationship, playing off that teenage intensity, and then going "OH BUT YOU THOUGHT THERE WOULD BE NO REPERCUSSIONS, EH?" Without making obvious comparisons with certain contemporary teenage dramas concerning romancing the undead, it's a tremendously clever way of using a sappy teen romance to further plot and character development.  In fact, you could say that of the whole show: it has this gleefully self-conscious B-Movie feel about it - for every bit of "Monsters in High School!" cheesiness, there's a snarky one-liner commenting on how cheesy and ridiculous it is.  My favourite so far is in the Series 2 opener from some kid in the hallway: "This is going to be our year for the football team! If we can just practice really hard, do well, and hope the unusually high death rate goes away!"

I love the characters too.  It's sort of impossible to dislike Buffy, even if I have started to tune out during her "my life is so hard" episodes.  I mean, obviously it is, but it's taking screen time away from characters I like more.  Xander starts off sort of awful but has become less awful as it progresses.  The bit of me that painfully identifies with Willow at that age kind of gets it though as he is pretty nice to look at, and would be comic relief were it not for the fact that everyone's lines are at least as funny, all the time.  Willow is adorbs and would definitely have been my favourite had I watched the show at a younger age.  By pop cultural osmosis, the two things I know about Willow are that she's a lesbian and she's a witch and so far neither of those things are greatly in evidence so I guess Joss really goes in for this whole 'character development' thing.  It's almost a shame because I really, really like Oz and have a dim memory of confiding in a schoolfriend that I kind of fancied Seth Green in the Austin Powers movies (well, the good ones anyway) and her asking if I watched Buffy because he was a cute werewolf in that.  So yeah.  I guess.  Cordelia is also sort of great and I am enjoying her horror at finding herself in a relationship with Xander (taking a bullet for womankind there, one feels).  I spent the first series being surprised at how swoony I found Angel and his throaty-voiced angst but then it became apparent that David Boreanaz ages at thrice the rate of a normal human being and I've kind of gone off him now.  Also, is his soul on elastic or something?  Jesus, man, get a grip.

And Giles!  Giles is consistently excellent and hey, he's a British character on American TV who isn't evil or sporting a completely ridiculously accent so that's progress, I guess.  Though speaking of ridiculous British accents, I was sort of aware that Spike had Billy Idol hair and a leather jacket but holy crap, that voice was not at all what I was expecting.  By which I mean, I did not expect to spend the next hour wandering delightedly around my house bellowing, "OI'M SPOIKE, THE COCKERNY VAMPOIRE, SO OI AM, SO OI AM.  MOI GELFREND'S NAME IS DROOOOSILLAH.  OI'M A BAD, ROOD MAN."  Seriously, he sounds like a cross between Michael Caine and Dick van Dyke.  (Try saying any of this to a female who was in her early adolescence at the time of airing and they look at you like you've just kicked a puppy.)  Drusilla is a product of Whedon's apparent fascination with pretty girls doing bad Mockney, I guess (see also River Tam).  We've also been introduced to Faith and considering that Eliza Dushku was seriously grating on me by the time I got to the end of Dollhouse, she's not too bad here.

But mainly I am struck by how much I would have enjoyed this had I watched it as a kid.  Maybe not when it first aired (I would have been seven and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was already scaring the crap out of me and my over-stimulated imagination) but in my early teens.  Thus all my reactions to the show came accompanied by the voice of little thirteen-year-old me, who - bespectacled, dead straight long hair, bookish - would have had no trouble identifying with lovely, insecure Willow, safe in the knowledge that I would never be as cool as Buffy, no matter how many times I almost threw someone in my after school judo class, and would probably end up spending my days watching the Xanders of my life lust after every other girl but me.  Thirteen-year-old me was remarkably accurate in her predictions.

So to finish, I leave you with this touching scene, of a nominal adult failing to live up the expectations of her younger self.

Now Jane (21) and Then Jane (13) are sitting on a cloud somewhere, eating popcorn.  No wait, that makes it sound like they're dead.  On a sofa, watching Buffy.  Yeah, that'll do.

Now Jane: So Xander is pretty much the worst, right?  He just needs to stop.

Then Jane: I like his eyes.

Now Jane: Oh god, no.  Honey.

Then Jane: He's funny.  We like funny guys.

Now Jane: Yeah but there's a difference between funny and just an awful human bei- holy crap, is that Xander in that tiny bathing suit?  I do not recall any of the nerds I know being that ripped.

Then Jane: Is that - why are you drooling?

Now Jane: Don't worry about it sweetie, you won't have your sexual awakening until Pirates of the Caribbean comes out this year.

Then Jane: Anyway, Xander is a better life choice than some bad boy who just broods and is all mysterious and -

Now Jane: Shut up, Angel is onscreen.

Then Jane: You are a very disappointing future version of myself.

Now Jane: Sorry.  If it makes you feel any better, your generation's angsty vampire-human romance is so much better than the next generation's.  You see that there, when Buffy says that being stalked isn't a big turn on for a girl?  Remember that, Young Jane.  There will come a time when that isn't taken for granted.

Then Jane: I've just started identifying myself as a feminist, you know.

Now Jane: And in a couple of years you'll actually know what that means.

Then Jane: Future Me...

Now Jane: Yes?

Then Jane: I know I said that liking bad boys was stupid...

Now Jane: Yes?

Then Jane: ...but Spike makes me feel all funny inside.

Now Jane: Ah.  I was afraid of this.  I think we need to have a frank and open discussion about the facts of life.

Then Jane: I know about sexing, I'm not an idiot.

Now Jane: Jesus, no.  I'm talking about something much more devastating and potentially life-ruining.  I'm talking about cheekbones.

Then Jane: That sounds exciting.

Now Jane: Oh, it is.  At first.  But pretty soon it's all you can think about and then before you know it you're losing whole days on Eddie Redmayne.  You drift off in the middle of a lecture because the tutor says something that sounds like 'Fassbender' and when you wake up, it's dark.  Cheekbones are dangerous.  You shouldn't be messing around with that shit.

Then Jane: Pfft, you're such a square, Future Jane.  I bet I'll be fine.

Now Jane: Oh, honey.  We can but hope.  Anyway, you're kind of right about bad boys not being worth the effort.  While Future You will be drawn to Spike's nigh-on Michelangelan bone structure, you will also harbour a secret soft spot for Oz.

Then Jane: Oz? Oz? Future You, I think there is something you are not telling me.  Are you on the marijuana?

Now Jane: No! Though, FYI, not nearly as big a deal as they tell you in PSHE.  But yes, Future You will be drawn to this guitar-playing teenage werewolf and feel really weird about fancying Seth Green, even if he is all young and cute and quietly deadpan.  And then Future You will reveal this aberration to the world in the form of a blog that combines pop culture with rage and far too much spare time.

Then Jane: What's a blog?

Now Jane: Trust me, you can wait eight years to find that one out.

Then Jane: Hey, Future Me, can I ask you something?  About the future?

Now Jane: No, you don't get married to Orlando Bloom but you'll also be pretty over him by the end of the year.

Then Jane: No...how does Harry Potter end?

Now Jane: You cry for three hours.

Then Jane: Yeah.  I thought so.

Finis.

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE: CAPSLOCK MINIMAL (Spoilerific)

Spoilers, my pretties.  So many spoilers.

The Avengers is five star, solid gold, Class A blockbuster entertainment.

There, I wanted to get the obvious bit out of the way.

But THAT WAS THE COOLEST THING EVER, YOU GUYS.  Sorry, I'll ease up on the Capslock after the hammering it took in my reaction post.  (There are, in fact, subtle references to two of the Avengers in that sentence.  Answers on the back of a postcard.)  I don't think I've anticipated a film this much since Toy Story 3 and while it didn't shred my psyche into weeping shards of emotional shrapnel like that one did, it certainly pushed me well into 'hyperventilating nerd' territory.  For those of you in doubt, it's not a great look.  In terms of plot, it's a standard three-act structure: threat is set up, threat is contained, threat breaks loose for epic final battle.  If I had one niggle, it would be that the 'threat is set up' part takes a while to get going but then again, there's a lot of story to get in there, given that it ties in to every single film from the franchise so far.  And while I predicted that the Tesseract (last seen being retrieved from the Arctic in Captain America, and then making a cameo appearance in the stinger for Thor) would be the film's chief MacGuffin, it was a) actually not a MacGuffin and b) extremely clever as it gives each of the Avengers some form of personal investment.  Captain A already had to face-off with it once, it emits gamma radiation so Bruce Banner must provide his particular form of big green wisdom, Iron Man's dad was the one that yoinked it from the depths in the first place, it's a Nordic god thingamabob so Thor has to get involved, and Hawkeye gets zapped by its blue glowy powers in the first ten minutes so Black Widow spends much of the film silently vowing revenge for her squishy-faced companion.

Despite the line-up of A-listers and superheroes, the real star of the show is Joss Whedon.  He keeps the plates spinning so deftly that it never feels like there's any fan-based Avenger favouritism going on.  Iron Man's heroic sacrifice in the closing minutes of the battle does not, for example, feel like a writer pandering to one of the Internet's favourite characters but rather the necessary ending to his character arc.  If you are reading this without having seen the film and are suddenly stricken with doubts over Tony Stark's fate then I'll just say that Iron Man 3 is set for release next year and I was really definitely not at all taken in by it, not even for one tiny little second, not me, and it would have been extremely silly if I had, say, whimpered a little.

There's some stunningly Whedonish dialogue too; even the throwaway lines sound like they've been culled from scripts for unaired episodes of Firefly ("Barton, take them down." "It would be my genuine pleasure, sir.") and, of course, it's extremely funny.  Thor and Loki get some pseudo-Shakespearian speeches that don't so much walk the fine line between the grandiose and the ridiculous as hop from one side to the other cackling with glee.  I already mentioned the "mewling quim" line in my reaction post but special points also have to go to Loki's villainous opening parlay: "I am burdened with glorious purpose.  And cheekbones like goddamn fish slices, seriously."  (Disclaimer: only half of that line was written by Joss Whedon.)  Being Whedon, he also gets to satirise his own writing with Iron Man gleefully snarking at Thor, "Doth mother know thou wearest her drapes?" Occasionally one sensed that there was a Whedon line struggling to get through the performance of a non-Whedon actor (cameos from Alexis Denisoff and Enver Gjokaj noted though) but really, you'd have to give many more fucks than I actually do.

It also became apparent what a good choice of ring-master Whedon was when the film opened with some hardcore Trekkie-style sci-fi.  Ok, so technically superheroes are science fiction but not in the same way as, like, aliens or whatever.  Which is odd, because Marvel comics have a long history of courting the extraterrestrial - the whole Phoenix Saga in X-Men, for example - and yet aliens have never really made it into the films in a big way.  Well, there was the Venom/Symbiote business in Spiderman 3 but given that its major threat seemed to be toward's Tobey Maguire's wardrobe, I think it's better off forgotten.  Joss, however, pulls off the alien invasion with aplomb, as well one might expect.

But as I said, the main part of this deftness is the way in which Whedon keeps every super-and-non-super-powered plate spinning for the full two and half hours.  In order to do them justice, let's examine the major players one by one.  Buckle up ladies, because oestrogen levels in your bedroom are about to go way, way up.

Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo)
Traditionally the hardest superhero to do onscreen, Whedon pulls off a masterstroke here by pointing out the intrinsic comedy value of a mild-mannered scientist with - as Iron Man puts it - "breath-taking anger management issues" combined with advances in Golum-style motion capture technology.  Ruffalo surpasses my (admittedly reserved) expectations in the role, finding something surprisingly touching in Banner's "I-just-want-to-be-good" Jekyll persona.  His explanation of the 'secret' to his control over "the Other Guy" left me a little baffled though - bounding away pre-Hulk, he turns and one-liners to Captain America, "You want to know my secret, Cap?  I'm always angry."  I guess there must be an in-depth explanation somewhere on the internet, but in the meantime I'm going to imagine this scene took place later:

Iron Man: Did Banner ever tell you what the secret to his whole rage deal was?
Captain America: Oh yeah, he says he's always angry, or something.
Iron Man: Jesus, guys, did you hear that?  Banner's always angry.  Wait, what does that even mean?  Holy shit, does that mean he's the Hulk like, all the time?  We've got to stop inviting that guy to our parties.

Or something.

Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans)
So, the good captain might be my least favourite Avenger, but he's still decent, in every sense of the word.  I think the problem is that he's a nice guy and he has a strong moral code and, oh yes, he uses a defensive weapon to show how he's a protector so we're all supposed to nod sagely and go "aaw, what a great guy" when secretly we're going "FOR GOD'S SAKE, ROGERS, BLOW SOMETHING UP."  My feeling is that he could have been a little goofier if they wanted to give him some more defining character traits (though the Wizard of Oz moment was very sweet) but they went with a leadership arc, which also worked fine.  Of the girls I went to see the film with, he was also the only Avenger who no-one wanted to sleep with, having been declared "meh".  Then again, it's entirely possible that we just can't get past a superhero called Captain America.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth)
I'm discussing Thor next because I kind of bracket him with Captain America in the big, dumb and good-natured category of superhero.  However, Thor/Hemsworth has something that Cap/Evans does not: comedy gold.  Whedon sends up the whole Norse god idea with tongue firmly in cheek and Hemsworth joins in with evident glee - because, seriously, I get that comic book writers were on a lot of crack in the 60s, but they took a very early lunch the day they went "Oh hey, let's just nick this whole Norse mythology deal.  Maybe we'll put some wing doodads on the helmet though.  Good work, Tim, no-one'll notice." Getting Branagh to direct the first film was also sort of genius and pretty much cements Thor as one of the best not-even-that-guilty pleasures of all time.  The only real beef I had with Thor was that Thor himself is such an unlikeable douche for the first half that my (admittedly morally unsound) sympathies gravitated so naturally towards Loki that they've kind of stuck there.  But post-Thor, the eponymous god has learnt some humility and is just really, really charming and likeable and funny.  Not my type but if he ever transcends the bounds of fiction and finds himself in South West London, I have a friend who would be very willing to give him the guided tour.

Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey Junior)
How fucking cool is Iron Man?  Or Tony Stark?  Or Robert Downey Junior?  Individually they all have something fundamentally cool about them but combined, they create a tsunami, nay a firewall of charisma.  Downey Junior predictably gets the best lines too, coming up with several nomenclatures for his eclectic teammates that made me nigh-on weep with joy.  There was also some much-needed character development in play so we can all look forward to a slightly humbler Stark taking the helm in Iron Man 3, for which I now have high hopes.  Still cool though.  Still fucking cool.

Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson)
And one cannot mention cool without mentioning Samuel L Jackson in the same sentence.  It's actually illegal in six different states.  At one point, he holds a bazooka and shoots down a plane.  Off an airship. 30,000 feet above sea level.  Also, the dude is 60.  You can't argue with that.  There's no-one else who could play a man with no superpowers other than ineffable sang-froid, yet can keep reasonable control of a group of divas with planet-destroying abilities.  I mean that literally: when they rebooted the Marvel universe, the comic book artists purchased the rights to Sam Jackson's appearance just because they too knew that you will never find anyone better to play this role.  Ever.

Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg)
Continuing with the 'normals', Coulson might be the normalest normal ever to kick ass and take names in an extremely polite fashion.  Since I've warned for spoilers, I'll do my inconsolable weeping over his death now, thanks: WHY WHY WHY CURSE YOU WHEDON, DAMN YOU AND I HOPE ALL YOUR PETS DIE HORRIBLY.  That was a masterclass in making you like a character, just so that you could kill him off.  Gregg is understated and wonderful, his dialogue is sharp and sweet, his fanboying of Captain America is adorbs, and his badassery in his dying moments is tear-inducing.  Coulson, you'll be sorely missed.

Hawkeye/Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner)
An Avenger and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent with no superpowers, I've known I was going to like Hawkeye ever since his cameo appearance in Thor.  I didn't know I was going to fucking love him.  Hawkeye is so incredibly boss, I can't even form coherent sentences.  Renner is a) very funny and b) manages to make his uniform of sleeveless vest and bow-and-arrow convincingly heterosexual.  A couple of the film's finest "fuck, that was cool" moments belong to him, most notably the shoot-behind-you-without-bothering-to-look and the turn-and-shoot-as-falling-off-a-building.  Those old chestnuts.

Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson)
And we can't talk about Hawkeye without discussing Black Widow.  Again, in the interests of getting the blindingly obvious out of the way, Scarlett Johansson is very hot.  In fact, she's almost breathtakingly hot in this film.  But that is so, so, so, so not the point of Black Widow (much) because good lord, she's a killing machine.  I mean genuinely frightening.  I would willingly put the next few Iron Man films on hold if it means we can get a Black Widow/Hawkeye film first.  I want to see Budapest.  I want to see him going to take her out and deciding to recruit her instead.  I want more fights like the epic smack down in the control room.  I want to see her dark and mysterious past and all the delicious attendant angst that goes with it.  Gah, I want more.  Now.  Please.  Fourteen-year-old boys everywhere will thank me.

And speaking of delicious attendant angst, let's just take a moment to talk about our villain.

Loki (Tom Hiddleston)
I'll be brief, I swear.  Well, ish.  Now, I will put good money on a redemption arc for Loki by the time the Marvel Cinematic Universe is done.  Because Loki is basically a really shit villain.  He's hopelessly outgunned for the majority of the film, allows himself to be outmanoeuvred and manipulated countless times and - this is the kicker - everyone knows it.  Tony Stark takes great delight in pointing out that Loki has wilfully antagonised some of the most powerful beings in the universe and seems not to give a flying alien fuck.  Thor makes no bones about the fact that his little brother clearly just wants to play with his toys.  Even Coulson deadpans "you lack conviction" before promptly dying.  Add to this the fact that it's not even his own brand of divine retribution that he's putting into play - rather, he's more like a middle manager for the Chitauri's planned takeover bid - and, yeah, Loki really isn't a great villain at all.  His villainous demands amount to classic Youngest Child temper tantrums.  Even his undeniably pimpin' outfits fuel the overwhelming sense of "LOOK AT ME!  LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT MEEEEEE!  NO SCREW YOU, THOR, THE PEOPLE ARE HERE TO SEE ME."

Look, I don't know if it's Whedon's writing or Hiddleston's performance but Loki is still dancing ever so slightly on this side of the redeemable.  Not forgivable, but redeemable - probably through dying.  If there isn't some kind of heroic self-sacrifice waiting at the end of Thor 3 or The Avengers 2, then I'll eat my winged helmet.  It's in his nature.  Villain motivated by greed/lust for power/Iago-esque-for-shits-and-giggles (cf. the Joker, Doctor Doom) = timely defeat and the world breathes a sigh of relief.  Villain motivated by jealousy/insanity/extremely dysfunctional family relations (cf. Doctor Octopus, Two-Face) = humiliating defeat or redemption equals death.  I know my genres.  And so does Loki, I suspect.

Oh and by the way, if you were wondering whether Loki's villainous ineptitude tarnished my shiny, near-worshipful love for him, then what are you, new?  As far as I'm concerned, anyone with those cheekbones gets a free pass.  To be honest, I found him kind of endearing (mass-murder aside).*  Hiddleston sells the role with marvellous aplomb too.  He must have an assistant just to pick the scenery out of his teeth.

All in all, The Avengers is a sustained and exhaustive exercise in being as awesome as is humanly possible in 140 minutes.  And even if it wasn't, I was never going to hate a film that gave me a legitimate excuse to shout "AVENGERS ASSEMBLE" across a crowded club as a way of finding errant group members.  God bless you, Joss Whedon, and all that sail in you.

What an unfortunate mental image to finish on.




*Charlie Brooker compares Hiddleston's Loki to Mad Men's Pete Campbell, another fictional sociopath for whom I have unfortunately tender feelings.  The management would like to point out that a) tastes in fictional men do not in any way reflect tastes in non-fictional men and b) if anyone ever invents some kind of universe-warping raygun that melts the bounds between fiction and reality, I am fucked.