Transformers: Age of Extinction

(Michael Bay, 2014, USA)

At first, it seems like Michael Bay might have grown up – or, at least, grown more self-conscious. Barely ten minutes into the fourth entry in the much-reviled director’s Transformers franchise, a background character (specifically, the owner of a old rundown movie house) waxes nostalgically on the state of contemporary cinema. “Sequels and remakes, bunch of crap,” he states deridingly, before referring to a worn poster of Howard Hawks’ 1966 Western El Dorado, starring John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, and asserting, “I liked this one.” It’s ironic for a few reasons; the most obscure of which is that El Dorado is essentially a remake of Hawks’ earlier Rio Bravo, and the most obvious, of course, being that Bay is one of the prime facilitators of modern movies’ crappiness. This brief moment of self-reflexive filmmaking engenders an entire array of questions. After the vicious satire of last year’s Pain & Gain, has Bay finally embraced his inner Jean-Luc Godard and begun openly mocking himself? Is Transformers: Age of Extinction poised to become a classic of meta-cinema, alongside Man with a Movie Camera, Persona, and Funny Games? Has the director’s entire oeuvre been one, elongated joke?

Edge of Tomorrow

(Doug Liman, 2014, USA)

After spending the bulk of his career avoiding death on screen, Tom Cruise dies repeatedly in Edge of Tomorrow, an action movie take on the frequently popular ‘time loop’ subgenre in science fiction cinema. Set during a future war between humanity and squidlike aliens (known as ‘Mimics’) who have invaded continental Europe, the film utilizes its Groundhog Day scenario to comment critically on both the marquee iconography of its star and the narrative philosophy of its genre. Cruise plays Major William Cage, a former advertising executive turned military spin doctor, whose feeble attempts to blackmail a general (a terse Brendan Gleeson) and avoid active combat finds him forced into service as a new recruit, branded a deserter, and essentially sentenced to die on the battlefield. And die he does, within minutes of landing on the beach as part of a D-Day-esque invasion of northern France, barely twenty minutes into the picture; of course, since this is hardly a Psycho or even Executive Decision instance of audience trickery, Cage immediately awakens the previous morning, replaying the day’s events but taking advantage of his prescience to avoid death – at least for a couple seconds, that is. And so the cycle resets again, and again, and again, with Cage meeting his demise in increasingly amusing and even hilarious ways, from being squashed by a falling ship to squished by a passing truck. It’s possibly a bit morbid in the way it plays mortality for laughs, but there’s hardly time to reflect on this before the next loop starts and Cage’s efforts to stay alive begin anew.

Top Ten Tuesday: Alien Visitations

This weekend finally sees the Canadian theatrical release of Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s much-discussed sci-fi film starring babe-of-the-moment Scarlett Johansson as an alien seducing and killing men in Scotland. While the premise makes it sound like just another Species sequel – albeit with an A-list actress as the lead – Glazer’s music-video background and the film’s seeming impenetrability (or at least thematic complexity) gives the film an arthouse reputation that was sorely missing from the Natasha Henstridge-headlined franchise – or most other alien movies, for that matter. Indeed, works detailing extra-terrestrials invading, investigating, or otherwise visiting our precious planet usually fall into one of two categories – big-budget blockbuster or B-movie obscurity – making Glazer’s more enigmatic approach all the stranger. With that in mind, and for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday, I count down my favourite cinematic alien visitations.