Dumbo (2019)

Dumbo (2019)

Dir. Tim Burton

Screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Based on Disney's DUMBO by Otto Englander, Joe Grant and Dick Huemer, which in itself was based on Dumbo, the Flying Elephant by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl

Starring Colin Farrell, Nico Parker, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Eva Green, Alan Arkin

I was going to begin by saying that 2019’s DUMBO takes Disney's recent "why does this exist?" energy to bold new heights, but I guess that's not really true; nothing could have less reason to exist than a scene-by-scene photorealistic LION KING remake, and that’s still too traumatically fresh a memory to ignore. We’ve already reached rock bottom, no need to indulge in any more hyperbole than necessary. But just because kicking you in the balls is clearly preferable to shooting you in the face, that doesn’t make the former commendable behavior. DUMBO may not be a harrowing, soul-churning pinnacle of anti-art the way LION KING 2019 –good God, they came out the same year—was, but it has a different kind of "why does this exist" cloud hanging over it, avoiding Disney's recent fetish for grotesquely tarted-up slavish recreations of their beloved animated classics… by instead throwing out virtually every single part of the original movie which bears the same name and replacing it with --well, not quite a new movie, exactly, because despite adding a second, comfortably feature-length scenario to the runtime, the new material isn't anywhere near cohesive enough to call a "movie" in its own right-- but certainly a whole lot of new stuff.

The "new stuff" consists of basically everything apart from the concept of a flying baby elephant named Dumbo who resides in a circus and is separated from his mother. Anything else from the original DUMBO –for example, original surrogate protagonist Timothy the mouse-- is included here only in the form of stultifying throwaway references, often hitting exactly that sweet spot of being far too emphasized to ignore, but having no meaning whatsoever outside their reference to the original film. Which mean that if you haven't seen 1941's DUMBO, this movie will be a baffling puzzle of inexplicable and meaningless visual cues.* But if you did see 1941's DUMBO and enjoyed it, you are now stuck with a movie that has functionally almost nothing in common with it, but insists on constantly reminding you of it. Cool.

The setting for the 2019 version remains the same as its predecessor, albeit with some odd added specificity. As before, we are introduced first to a rag-tag circus embarking on a tour of the American South at the end of World War I. This particular interwar American South, you will quickly notice, is very pointedly a land of harmonious integration and racial diversity, where an interracial family traveling by rails might receive a hearty handwave from the simple white farmers working the fields they’re passing by on their way to perform in front of a merrily heterogeneous audience which has apparently never known division along lines of gender, race, nationality, religion, or economic status. This is a little jarring, needless to say, but after some reflection, I’ve decided that it was ultimately the right approach, at least if we assume that this all absolutely had to be set in 1919 for some reason. You’d be entirely justified, were you so inclined, to slam it for whitewashing the brutality of segregation and Jim Crow, but hey, this was always fantasy – might as well be everyone’s fantasy. Once you’ve committed to “flying elephant” as a premise, I think it’s safe to say you’ve bought yourself sufficient distance from reality to be absolved of responsibility for hard-hitting journalistic accuracy, especially in service of broadened approachability. Or at least, I thought so until the movie arrived at its final act and decided it had some very serious thoughts on the morality of keeping animals in the circus. So, no problem brushing aside a century of brutal racial oppression in the name of fantasy, but cruelty to performing animals is just too pressing an issue to stay silent about. Got it.

At any rate, after a very leisurely scene-setting, our story starts to get going with the birth of the title character, a little elephant with gigantic ears which for some reason everyone considers a hideous, unspeakable deformity which brands him forever a freak and an outcast. Maybe because they never invented racism in this alternate reality, people are just real assholes about ears instead, I dunno.

Of course, he is a freak and should be cast out, but not for his ears. I mean, look at this fucking abomination:

This goddam thing looks like a baby C’Thulu cosplaying as Robert Blake’s character from LOST HIGHWAY. It reminds me of those grotesque “realistic” renderings of The Simpsons or Spongebob or what have you. This character design was all well and good in the squishy abstraction of cartooning, but you rip it, against God’s will, off the page and into the photorealistic real world, and you’ve got an unholy nightmare on your hands. Maybe COOL WORLD had a good point about keeping the ‘doodles where they belong.

Fortunately for the little freak, children can’t recognize the face of a Lovecraftian blasphemy when it’s staring right at them with its hateful squid eyes, and “Dumbo” finds allies in two hardscrabble circus urchins, siblings Milly (Nico Parker, giving a performance which cannot be described without the words “affectless automaton”) and Joe (Finley Hobbins, who the movie is so actively disinterested in that I frequently forgot this character existed while he was on-screen). The children discover Dumbo’s amazing power of flight (a feat of fanciful delight in the original cartoon, and a source of profoundly disturbing wrongness when translated to weighty, high-definition photorealism) which drags the young pachyderm from despised outcast to celebrated circus star.

So far, so good; sounds basically like the story of the original DUMBO with kids subbed for mice, right? And yet, while all of that happens on-screen, the above description doesn’t really accurately describe the movie, because it makes it sound as though this is Dumbo’s story. That would be a perfectly reasonable assumption to make, considering the title and the source material, but that is not the movie we have as a subject here today. You see, in a baffling feint towards gritty realism for a movie which --I feel I must stress this point-- features a flying elephant, Dumbo and his fellow circus animals do not talk or appear to experience any emotional state beyond what would be expected for an average trained circus animal.** Despite the disturbingly expressive face, Dumbo’s enormous, unnatural eyes stare impassively out from an empty, soulless void utterly alien to any human sensibility, and hence, despite various human characters frequently announcing aloud what his desires and wishes may be, he is really more of a MacGuffin than a character. He’s central to the plot, but more of an object to be acted upon by his human co-stars than a protagonist in any proper sense.

Horrible. Just horrible.

What we need, then, are human characters, and obviously the more the better. What’s that you say, we already have two human children to act as surrogate protagonists, and even one of those two is flagrantly unnecessary? No no, I mean celebrity human characters. We’re trying to spend 170 million bucks here. What’s that you say, there’s no possible artistic purpose in adding extraneous adults to this already entirely self-contained little fairy tale? What is this “artistic purpose” you speak of?

Therefore to fill the absolutely unavoidable storytelling necessity of having at least three A-list names printed on the movie poster, the simple story of talking circus animals trying to reunite an outcast baby elephant with its mother has been larded up with about 90 new humans (we do not, if I recall, see a single human face in the original DUMBO), all of whom must be given something to do (because they have no obvious purpose in the story as originally conceived) and yet not quite enough to do to  constitute an "arc" for any of them. Therefore recoil in horror as Colin Farrell, Danny DeVito, and Michael Keaton are dutifully trotted out for no clear reason, all giving career-worst performances while at the same time giving the distinct and worrying impression that they're trying very hard.*** They’re eventually joined by Eva Green, who manages to maintain her dignity rather better, and considering she must endure the mortifying indignity of being CGI'd onto the back of a flying baby elephant, this may be evidence that she is the greatest thespian who ever lived. Alan Arkin also appears in three scenes and so openly doesn't give a shit that you've kind of got to respect him for it. Sometimes being a pro means making a sincere effort regardless of the circumstances… but sometimes it just means recognizing a hopeless cause and giving up gracefully. Look, he set his margarita down for the take, what more do you want?   

The movie, alas, is too brain-dead to be able to follow Arkin’s example. Consequently, an absolutely exhausting amount of time is taken to establish each of these characters, even though only one has any narrative purpose whatsoever. Or, rather, only one is so completely extraneous to the original plot that establishing him essentially drags the movie in entirely new direction, thus creating a new narrative purpose for the character to fulfill. You see, once the movie has dutifully plodded through every single plot point from the original DUMBO, minus any part where animals talk or racism is happening, we’re still barely even sitting at the 40-minute mark. Now, the original DUMBO is only 62 minutes, but remember, we’re trying to spend $170 million here, and are therefore contractually obliged to pile as many convoluted plot points as money will allow into an appalling snake’s nest of wriggling chaos. That’s the law. And so, out of the blue appears Keaton, as a flamboyant, rapacious capitalist who buys the circus and immediately sets to work exploiting his star attraction, sadistically endangering his human employees, and eventually just straight up announcing that he’s going to murder Dumbo’s mom for absolutely no reason whatsoever. To accomplish these goals, he essentially kidnaps the entire cast and forces them into servitude in his garish, art-deco dystopian theme park known as “Dreamland.”

Savvy viewers will quickly notice that not a single detail of this has any relationship whatsoever to the 1941 movie DUMBO, which doesn’t even have a central villain character and is more about the generalized cruelty and randomness of the world. This is, then, basically a movie and its demented sequel uncomfortably shackled together roughly halfway though, as if somebody had edited BABE and PIG IN THE CITY to bare-bones shells, chopped the credits off the former, and then run them back to back as one movie. It’s deeply weird storytelling, but at least once Keaton appears the movie finds some focus; absent any kind of identifiable protagonist, it locates in its antagonist at least some measure of organization which utterly eludes it during the opening 45 minutes of wheezily recycled non-story. That doesn’t make it good, because it’s nothing of the sort, but at least it’s not quite so shapeless and inexplicable.

Speaking of the villain, what are we to make of the fact that, with his flashy showmanship, single-minded reckless ambition, and ostentatious theme park (complete with Epcot-center-esque “City of Tomorrow!”) this despicable sociopath is an unavoidable analog for Walt Disney himself? The comparisons are far too specific to even entertain the idea that this is not where the movie wants us to go, but why does it want us to go there? Is this some kind of sniveling JURASSIC WORLD-style apology for the tortured needlessness of the thing we’re watching, couched in ironic self-awareness? Is writer Ehren Kruger (damned forever for his part in writing three of five TRANSFORMERS films, and also producing the spectacularly moronic DREAM HOUSE, which is maybe even more embarrassing than having written it, though at least he can hold his head up with pride as the scribe of RENDEER GAMES) possibly deluded enough to believe this is somehow subversive? Or should we just consider this a tortured cry for help from the subconscious of Tim Burton, who Disney kidnapped and replaced with a TWIN PEAKS evil doppelgänger sometime in the mid-2000s? I’d dearly like to believe in the latter to be the case, but frankly by this point in his career Burton seems to have less in common with the misunderstood weirdos of the circus than he does with Keaton’s mercenary hired goons who happily trot off to murder Dumbo’s mom when their Disney-like boss tells them to, no questions asked.

Indeed, I’ve put off saying so as long as possible, but now there’s no escaping it, so let’s just face facts: Tim Burton is credited as the director here. He’s been in bored corporate lackey mode long enough now that I guess I can’t claim it’s a surprise, but even so, DUMBO 2019 conveys an alarming sense not just that the director’s a bored hack, but that there’s nobody at the wheel at all. Maybe twice in the movie he seems to perk up a little around some of the garish sets of “Dreamland,” but even the circus itself, which seems like the kind of thing Burton should have been able to work magic with in his sleep, is a disappointing nothing, lacking even the flop-sweating overdesign of 2005’s CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and 2010’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND. It’s a dreary, lazily shot-on-soundstages huddle of low, perfunctory structures populated by limply defanged stereotypes whom the movie is far too fretfully woke to allow to lean into their inherent cartoonishness, but also dismissively disinterested in imbuing with any other traits (at least DeObia Oparei, as the circus’ strongman/bookkeeper, gets to make some archly funny faces). The whole thing is then color-corrected into an unsettling alien landscape of not-quite-right chromatic mismatches, where the grass is an odd pine green verging on blue, and the sky is perpetually tinged with an anxiety-inducing orange-red, as if the sun was always right about to set, even when that’s manifestly not the case.

According to the film’s press kit, the production design drew inspiration from the paintings of Edward Hopper, an odd choice any way you want to look at it -- Hopper’s best known work came from decades after the movie’s 1919 setting, and is marked by a spare, quiet sense of modern alienation, making it a baffling aesthetic touchstone for a childrens' fantasy—but made even weirder by the fact that the movie’s nettled plottiness and overabundance of unnecessary characters all but ensures that Hopper’s serene minimalism is entirely out of the question.**** The only way this makes any sense is as an explanation for why Burton’s recent penchant for seizure-inducing overproduction is ratcheted down to simply garish overproduction. It’s depressing possible that this is what Burton believes qualifies as “minimalism” by this point in his career -- although it’s probably a lot more likely that this is just a simple case of barely giving a shit at all, and having his production crew try to run cover by throwing out an aesthetic which wouldn’t be immediately familiar enough for most people to call their bluff.

Let's compare this 1957 Hopper painting entitled Western Hotel...

...to this frame, from 2019's DUMBO. Anybody else not seeing much similarity? 

Which is, ultimately, the real problem here: despite the effortful ponderousness inherent in any movie pushing a 200 million dollar budget, there’s not a single aspect of this that doesn’t seem to be operating on autopilot. At no point throughout the momentum-free 112 minutes***** does the movie ever make even the flimsiest argument as to why anyone thought it would be worth making; there’s nary a character, setpiece, storyline, or sequence that feel inspired by recognizable human interest. The sole artistic inspiration in this entire sorry affair was the marketing departments’ dead-eyed certainty that people will pay to see an insanely expensive iteration of a recognizable brand name. That’s the movie they tasked Burton and co with making, and that’s what they got: a huge pile of busy but meaningless narrative clutter indifferently trying to obscure the fact that this exists exclusively to remind you of that famous thing you’ve already seen. Despite all the added narrative detritus, there is literally no other purpose here, and the movie never even pretends to aspire to any. It is more reference than film.

This tendency reaches its zenith during a little vignette –too insubstantial to call a “scene”—where Dumbo sits in a tent while some clowns blow large, elaborate bubbles in the air while a wordless snippet of the tune “Pink Elephants On Parade” --the big showpiece hallucinatory number from the original (brought to the pinnacle of its form by Sun-Ra and the Solar Arkestra in 1988)-- wheezes over the soundtrack. This all plays out in an entirely literal, straightforward way; there’s nothing subjective of surreal about it, we’re just watching a CG elephant baby watch a mildly impressive circus act set to inexplicably ominous orchestration for a minute or two, while he kills some time. There’s no reason for this to happen; Disney in 2020 isn’t going anywhere near “drunk baby elephant” territory, and it has no baring whatsoever on the plot and is never referenced again.

Now, there isn’t exactly an overwhelming narrative necessity for this sequence in the original film, either, but the reason for including it is immediately obvious: just in the fun of it. It exists entirely for a bunch of hungry, energized artists to indulge in the sheer joy of going hogwild animating a bunch of surreal nonsense. Their delight in it is palpable, and its ability to inspire similar delight has not diminished in 80 years, not due to any quantifiable utility, but entirely because it is a curious bauble, a creation entirely of whimsy.

Again, let's compare.... this still from the original sequence...

... to this one from 2019. Which one of these looks like a human being actually cared about it? 

That is categorically not so in 2020; here, the same basic elements exist entirely to fulfill a rote function… and that function is simply to mirror something else that already exists. There is no whimsy here, no sense of artistic exhilaration; hell, there’s barely even any cynical, pandering calculation. Nobody ever even bothered to ask why. The sequence, like the movie itself, takes for granted the idea that creation and simulacrum are indistinguishable, that the act of evoking is functionally identical to the act of creating. It is, in that sense, very nearly some kind of experimental postmodern gamble that content is completely meaningless in the face of context, challenging us to ask if meaning itself is purely a construct, a function of the viewer’s applied cultural baggage projected not onto the screen, but into our own internal landscape, where it can be given whatever meaning we find useful.

But I cannot concur. A pipe is an exceedingly useful tool, should I fancy a smoke. A painting of a pipe merely reminds me that I want to smoke. One is the inevitable outcome of human ingenuity and desire; the other is an advertisement. It’s why Magritte titled his famous painting The Treachery of Images. The evocation of “Pink Elephants,” and of 1941’s DUMBO more broadly, is equally treacherous here. The images of 2020’s DUMBO might conjure some vague nostalgia for the real thing, but they have no meaning of their own, and they were never meant to. Ceci n'est pas une DUMBO. Ceci n'est pas une film, even. It’s just a very long, very expensive callback. And not even a very entertaining one, at that.

That said, just looking at Dumbo’s awful CGI face for two hours conjured the most raw, primal horror I’ve felt for a movie in quite some time. This isn’t an uncanny valley, it’s the fucking uncanny Mariana Trench. DUMBO 2019 inspires very few emotions other than despairing tedium, but profound spiritual disquiet is a feeling, and if, as is sometimes postulated, the purpose of art is to draw a reaction from the viewer, I guess you could still say that ol’ Tim Burton managed to make some extremely potent art afterall, despite himself. Recommended for fans of ANGST and A SERBIAN FILM and anyone who wants to see just how much implacable, disturbing wrongness they can withstand. Otherwise, you’re better off forgetting this ever existed as quickly as possible. And fortunately, other than some lingering elephant-related nightmares, that shouldn’t be too hard at all.

* Good luck to the new-to-DUMBO kiddies trying to figure out why the plot stops dead for a few minutes to watch an elaborate bit of bubble-art while a snatch of unaccountably creepy music plays in the background. Viewers of the 1941 version will recognize this as a dismal, watered-down tribute to the "Pink Elephants" showstopper in the original, but without that bit of knowledge it must surely seem utterly inexplicable. In fact, it bears such an uncanny visual resemblance to the "Opera scene" in STAR WARS III: REVENGE OF THE SITH (elaborately dressed dignitaries in box seats having a fraught conversation while they half-watch an elaborate 3D bubble show in a darkened, circular amphitheater, with a similar color scheme) that I would not be surprised to learn that this is the more common interpretation of the scene being referenced (there is no way to interpret it as anything but a reference to something, because the movie focuses on it so insistently and yet it has no bearing on the plot or any other context of any kind) so it's simply a matter of whether most audiences will have any reference for it at all.

** I’m aware that Dumbo doesn’t speak in the original either, but having all the other animals speak gives us a clearer sense that these are, to some degree, anthropomorphized surrogates for humans with the kind of fully articulated, complex emotional lives you’d need in order to be, you know, the protagonist of a movie. Here, no such luck; sometimes the humans speculate on what Dumbo must want, but it’s genuinely up for debate if he has any fucking clue what’s happening to him, or any clear opinion about it. This is basically a slightly less sexy THE SHAPE OF WATER.

*** This is a particular shame on the part of Farrell, who actually has a shockingly passable track record of appearing in pointless remakes and giving excellent performances (see FRIGHT NIGHT, TOTAL RECALL, THE BEGUILED). Alas, his morose one-note (or less) blob of a character, combined with a somewhat labored Southern accent, defeats any effort he might be making .

**** It goes without saying that Hopper never painted anything remotely like the art deco futurism which comprises the latter half of the movie, but even the warmer earlier scenes don’t seem to fit at all with his style, except maybe in the sense of the movie’s unusual palette.

***** Psychotically long for an adaptation of DUMBO, but at least it manages to come in under two hours, which was not at all a sure thing given that some of these live-action remakes’ aggressive runtimes are now edging dangerous close to the 130 minute mark

ALSO, WHY NOT FOLLOW ME ON LETTERBOXD FOR EVEN MORE OPINIONS ON THINGS?

Overlord

Overlord (2018)

Dir. by Julius Avery

Written by Billy Ray, Mark L. Smith

Starring Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Mathilde Ollivier, John Magaro, Pilou Asbæk

I have a special fascination with genre hybrids, and, of course, particularly with horror genre hybrids. And there is no shortage of these; horror is an almost endless malleable genre, able to absorb other tones, styles, iconography, and structure, which makes almost unlimited mash-ups possible. I’ve seen horror/comedy, art-horror, action-horror, horror-westerns, horror/romances, horror/crime, sci-fi/horror, superhero horror, even horror documentary, just to name a few. These genre-straddling exercises can be fun because they shake up the usual formula and expectations we have for stock fiction structure, but they’re even more interesting to me as experiments with the very medium of genre. Smashing different tropes together and seeing what survives can be revealing about the nature of the genres themselves: why they work, what they mean, what elements are essential to the mechanism, and what elements turn out to be surprisingly replaceable. Consequently a WWII-men-on-mission movie crossed with a zombie/mad science flick sounded right up my ally. Not, of course, that it would be the first war/horror hybrid I’d ever seen, nor even the first Nazi zombie flick I’d ever seen (they go back to fucking 1941’s KING OF THE ZOMBIES and its first sequel, and run comfortably through 1966’s THE FROZEN DEAD and 1977’s SHOCK WAVES to 1981’s ZOMBIE LAKE to modern schlock like 2009’s DEAD SNOW). Still, the men-on-a-mission element (a venerable subgenre in its own right) struck me as a good angle, as did the historical setting. If OVERLORD could hardly boast at being the first to get here, I still thought there was a solid chance it could generate something interesting from its motley collection of genre elements.

Or at least, I did until I saw it was a JJ Abrams production. OK, he didn’t direct it (that would be Julius Avery, his sophomore film after the go-nowhere crime thriller SON OF A GUN) or write it (that would be Billy Ray, of a very weird career that begins with THE COLOR OF NIGHT and runs from the laughably inept VOLCANO and SUSPECT ZERO to the rather classy STATE OF PLAY and Oscar-nominated CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, and Mark L. Smith, who has a much more consistent resume of middlebrow horror trash except that he co-wrote the fucking REVENANT!). But even from the trailer, I could see that this would be a strictly Abrams affair. By which I mean, slick, flashy production and a relentlessly overthought structure hiding the fact that there isn't any real content at the center of it all. That Abrams touch.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what happens here. Despite OVERLORD's near-constant attempts to twist itself into shapes convoluted enough that they might elicit a flicker of mild surprise, the only actual unexpected thing about the movie is how long it takes for the genre-hybrid element to enter the picture. It’s a men-on-a-mission WWII story for much longer than it’s a horror movie, and it’s surprisingly committed to that war movie angle --at least financially, which is the only meaningful measure of intent here—obviously spending a good portion of its ample budget on rather extravagant battle scenes, as well as a Bokeem Woodbine (WISHMASTER 2: EVIL NEVER DIES) cameo. Some of it is rather nicely appointed; the aerial battle that opens the film is efficient enough to be exciting in a empty sort of way, and the cinematography by Laurie Rose (every Ben Wheatley film) and Fabian Wagner (JUSTICE LEAGUE) is perfectly handsome, if a bit bland. But of course the movie-killing problem here is that this is not a men-on-a-mission film; we know from the damn poster that this is all just a feint, that their war movie chicanery is a prelude to an abrupt swerve towards an altogether different kind of movie (the kind with Nazi zombies, AKA the kind of movie that you’d actually be interested in watching). Consequently, any real investment we might have in the first half of the movie is stillborn. The cast is adequate, but nowhere near committed enough to instill their one-note characters* with anything that would independently be worth our time, and so a huge portion of the film just becomes a tedious waiting game while they coyly tease that we’re eventually gonna get to the good stuff.

And then, finally, we get there, and… the movie suddenly ends! After more than an hour of teasing us with some good old fashioned Nazi zombie fun, we officially learn about the existence of experimental Nazi super-zombies and then easily dispatch them (as well as a couple hundred of their living colleagues) in what feels like 20 minutes of a overlong 110. It feels unbalanced, like the movie is missing an act or something. They finally get to the zombies, and then jump right into the big climactic fight scene (which isn’t really any great shakes itself, though there’s a gruesome CGI-assisted facial wound which is pretty cool) without any warm-up.

That leaves us with a movie which pretty much spends its whole runtime threatening to happen without ever getting there. A movie which has a lot of stuff in it, but never commits to any one thing enough to make an impact. A movie which is all conspicuously moving parts hiding an empty center. A mystery box with no mystery. You know, a JJ Abrams production. I’d still be interested someday in seeing a men-on-a-mission/horror hybrid,** but this isn’t really a hybrid at all. You’d have to be two things to be a hybrid, and this isn’t enough of anything to make for an interesting experiment.

*Or less; the movie can’t seem to make up its mind about what Wyatt Russell’s single note is even supposed to be, and he vacillates wildly from badass cynic to straight-up villain with no real logic or benefit to the story.

** There are, of course, already a couple; DOG SOLIDERS, for example, or DEAD BIRDS, THE SUPERNATURALS, THE BUNKER, THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2 (2007). But not too many prominent examples.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	IMDB says Stop The Unstoppable, but I didn’t notice that on any of the posters.
TITLE ACCURACY	It’s supposed to take place during operation Overlord but other than that there’s not a lot of reason for that to be the title, especially in light of the existence of the 1975 British docu-drama OVERLORD, which is actually about the real Operation Overlord and uses real war footage, and also happens to be one of the greatest war movies ever made.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	None
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Zombie, Nazi-Zombie, mad science
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Bokeem Woodbine?
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yeah the lead Nazi gets really gross and rapey with a captive French resistance member. Did they really not think we had enough reason to hate this character?
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Zombies, although of a mad-science sort
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yes
VOYEURISM?	Our boys spend much time –like, too much time, in fact-- hidden in an attic watching Nazi soldiers stand around and act like assholes to the homeowner downstairs.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Now more than ever we need to take the time to appreciate how baller FRANKENSTEIN’S ARMY was.

It Chapter 2

It Chapter 2 (2019)

Dir. Andy Muschietti

Written by Gary Dauberman, from half the novel It by Stephen King

Starring Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Bill Hader, Isaiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, James Ransone, Bill Skarsgård

For some reason I really doubled down on the Stephen King for the start of this Chainsawnukah. I don’t know why, exactly; I mean, you’re not going to be able to watch 50+ horror movies in a single month without getting some Stephen King adaptations in there by sheer random chance, but I wasn’t really seeking them out, necessarily. And I wasn’t seeking IT CHAPTER 2 out, in particular; I’ve never read the book, was lukewarm at best about its predecessor, 2017’s IT CHAPTER 1, and was absolutely mystified by its titanic financial and popular success (it remains, by a substantial margin, the highest-grossing horror movie of all time). Its GOONIES-style “Losers Club” of spunky, potty-mouthed outcast kids endeared it to me somewhat (the youthful cast instill their characters with a lot of personality, even if they tend towards one-dimensional types) but ultimately I felt like the horror leaned too hard on flashy CG and ended up looking --and feeling—more like a busy, insubstantial comic book movie than a horror movie. Not really what I’m looking for this time of year. That, and, uh, pretty much everyone I talked to seems to be uniformly of the opinion that the “good part” of the novel was exclusively confined to the material with kids, and the associated material with the adults, 27 years later, was hot garbage. So I cannot say I had high hopes for CHAPTER 2.

Even going in with such low expectations, though, I emerged aghast at what a spectacularly empty 169 minutes this turns out to be. Every problem CHAPTER 1 had is amplified exponentially here, and virtually every bit of its charm is diminished. The movie is absolutely chock-a-block with self-defeating decisions, and nearly every one of which can be laid squarely at the feet of director Andy Muschietti (MAMA, CHAPTER 1) and screenwriter Gary Dauberman (ANNABELLE, working on his own this time, after previously adapting a script by Chase Palmer and Cary Fukunaga, who had been developing the film before Muschietti came on board). I mean, I suppose you could also easily blame King himself, from whose novel much of this dreck arises, but King at least didn’t bifurcate the story this way. As I understand it (and, having never read the novel, there remains a possibility that I actually don’t understand it) King essentially uses the “adult” material (set in 1985 in the book, and 2016 here) as a mystery framing device: we meet the adults at the outset of the novel, upon their return to Derry, Maine, 27 years after a summer that they mysteriously cannot remember, and the story of their childhood encounter with “It” in 1958 (1989 in the movie) unfolds gradually as they explore the town and recover their missing memory.

You can argue that some of the individual plot beats within this quest to recover their lost memory are pretty lousy (a sequence in which a giant statue of Paul Bunyan attacks Ritchie is a face-palming low point for the movie, and comes, of course, directly from King’s pen). But you cannot take issue with the novel’s nimble, parallel-timelines structure, a rather clever and narratively economical way of getting at King’s obvious goal in telling a story that straddles two decades: exploring the ways in which the past informs the present, how the people we were become the people we are. By sending his adult characters on a journey to re-discover their unhappy childhoods, he forces them to directly confront the unformed roots of the people they would become.

Alas, then, that separating the two parallel timelines into stubborn chronological order, as the filmmakers have done, makes absolutely dire wreckage out of King’s intent, and robs the entire plot of CHAPTER 2 of its basic reason for existence. Since the “adult” story was, in the book, basically a framing narrative --existing as a parallel echo of the “kids” story-- it naturally adopted a nearly identical form: the Losers club comes together, breaks apart, and finally reunites to confront the supernatural menace of “It” in its underground lair. When telling the two stories simultaneously, their similar structure is a logistical necessity. When telling them separately, however, it turns the whole second movie into a helpless retread of the first, made impossibly labored by the fact that we’re now an entire movie ahead of the characters. Dauberman, you see, has suicidally decided to retain the basic structure of a framing narrative, except that now it’s just framing a movie we’ve already seen and are now watching the sequel for. Rather than serving as a mysterious springboard for the tale, we now suffer through the now-adult characters agonizingly re-learning everything we saw them learn last time around.

If it wasn’t immediately obvious, we know from painful experience that turning framing stories into full movies is a bad idea. And this one is fucking 169 minutes! It’s like if they spent three hours and eighty million dollars making the famously flashback-padded SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 2. Except here’s the thing: nobody is going to tolerate an eighty million dollar film that’s fully 1/3 recycled footage, and yet the adult story manifestly exists only to facilitate flashbacks. So Muschietti and Dauberman’s solution is to have the adults flash back to new footage from the previous film’s time period. Which means in practice that, apparently, each child experienced exactly one additional haunting incident that wasn’t important enough to be included in its natural place somewhere in the middle of CHAPTER 1, and the adults must now flash back to that one specific and relatively minor incident to re-remember the events of the previous movie. Consequently CHAPTER 2 boasts a screaming psychotic structure which basically revolves entirely around a collection of out-takes from the first film, stapled to a bigger, louder, longer retread of CHAPTER 1’s already enervating lightshow finale. And did I mention it’s 169 fucking minutes?

Given all that, the film was probably doomed to failure no matter what, and yet, even so, it still manages to disappoint in other ways, though most remain tied to its fantastically counterproductive structure in one way or another. Chief among the remaining sins is its flagrant wasting of an excellent cast: if the movie has nothing else at all going for it (and it basically doesn’t), credit must be given for the spot-on casting of Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Jay Ryan, Bill Hader, Isaiah Mustafa, James Ransone and Andy Bean, each a pitch-perfect mirror for the specific idiosyncrasies projected by the younger originators of these roles (all of whom also appear in flashbacks here). Honest to god, for the first 40 minutes or so, the cast was so good that I almost thought there was some hope here; despite the mess of the structure, the film’s opening does at least an adequate enough job that, yoked to the fine performances of the adults, something of King’s original interest in examining the links between childhood and adulthood comes through. But those hopes are quickly dashed; after a promising and genuinely charming reunion dinner, the “Loser’s Club” gets split up again for separate time-wasting individual fetch quests, all of which serve yet again to hammer home the single personality trait each one was given in the previous film and let the corresponding adult vamp on that single personality trait* until it reaches the point of parody, at which point it is immediately forgotten and they each promptly lapse into interchangeable CG dolls to get tossed around by a giant poorly-designed computerized monster. Indeed, considering that the chief pleasure of CHAPTER 1 was almost entirely in its earnest depiction of these characters and their relationship, CHAPTER 2’s fanatical insistence on keeping them apart, and limiting their few interactions to businesslike exposition, seems downright sadistic, especially in light of the movie’s mammoth runtime.

You’ll notice, by the way, that so far I’ve been entirely silent on the subject of any actual genre content, which one might understandably expect would be the point, or at least a point, in a movie which is ostensibly about an evil clown (occasionally still Bill Skarsgård, though just as often a bunch of bland-looking ones and zero’s). One might understandably expect that, but not if one were Muschietti or Dauberman, who somehow manage to almost completely excise anything that could reasonably be called horror from the movie. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think the horror elements in CHAPTER 1 worked, but at least they were there, recognizable as attempts at scare scenes. Here, aside from a brief return to Beverly’s childhood home and a little vignette which finds Pennywise luring a victim under some bleachers, there’s almost nothing whatsoever which seems even intended to creep you out. In fact, Pennywise rarely even appears, an unforgivable waste of the tremendously effective work Skarsgård put into the character the first time around. There are a few feints at some kind of weirdo, possibly EVIL-DEAD inspired gross-out scenes (a dinner sequence where the food turns into grotesque insects, a lengthy vomiting gag), and a good bit of frantic, expensive-looking CGI slugfests (the Paul Bunyan sequence, the endless climax), but ultimately the feel of the movie is much closer to some kind of quippy sci-fi adventure than any kind of horror movie. The weightless, mood-killing CGI is a part of that (see my review of CHAPTER 1 for a lengthy commentary on that subject) but a bigger part is simply the tone and design of the movie. It feels tongue-in-cheek and insubstantial in a way that CHAPTER 1, for all its faults, did not, mechanically grinding through its plot without ever bothering to ask what the point of any of this might be.**

In fact, the movie that makes for the most fitting comparison isn’t even its predecessor, or a horror film at all: it’s AVENGERS: ENDGAME. The parallels between the two are genuinely striking: First, both were made under the weight of nearly unmatched financial ambitions (following, as they do, the two previous highest-grossing films in their respective genres) and have the bloated budgets and absurdly distended runtimes to match those ambitions. But the similarities run deeper than that: both movies also divide neatly into a rigid three act-structure, with both movies employing a remarkably similar three acts: The first needlessly splits our core group apart, entirely for the purpose of checking back in on them as they deal with the consequences of a shared tragedy from years ago, before laboriously re-assembling them. The second then takes our laboriously re-assembled group and splits them up again, sending each on a separate fetch-quest for a totemic object from their past, while at the same time studiously avoiding materially interacting with that past in any meaningful way. Finally, the third act brings everyone back together again for an endless, monotonous slugfest against a giant, poorly-designed CGI enemy who must be ironically defeated with a taste of his own medicine.*** Both movies feature spectacularly overqualified casts stuffed into roles which are essentially elaborate busywork given weight only by the affection for the characters we bring with us from past adventures, and both somehow divide an epic length into such easily digestible, bite-size pieces that the sum total barely feels like a meal. More like distractedly binging on junk food for a few hours; you may notice some slight discomfort by the end, but you’ll be hard-pressed to specifically remember what might have caused it.

The result is a movie which can’t exactly be called unendurably awful, not in the same month where I’m likely to see Jess Franco movies and shit. The cast is likeable, there are occasionally some weird monsters or something, and to its credit, it moves along with a spritely energy that means you barely notice its intimidating length (I’m told this is a characteristic it shares with the novel), at least until the endless, shapeless final battle. But considering the advantages it had at its disposal, in terms of budget, cast, and opportunity, I can’t imagine a way to frame it that doesn’t feel like a gut-churning letdown, even with expectations suitably lowered. I don’t know, it might have been a hopeless cause from the get-go, but it could still damn well have added up to more than this. This feels like a movie with no clear explanation for its own existence, other than, you know, they titled the first one CHAPTER 1. Fortunately, it seems like people actually caught on this time: it made just a little over half of what its predecessor did in cinemas. I mean, it was still wildly profitable, but maybe, just maybe, that’s enough of a drop to make producers think it might be worthwhile to deliver a genuine horror movie next time.

*With the exception of Mike, who is again treated as such an afterthought that they don’t even bother giving him the one trait. Even calling him “their black friend” feels like a more distinct characterization than he gets here, despite Isaiah Mustafa’s (Old Spice Commercials, Shadowhunters) game attempts to suggest his mental state is a bit shaky after all these years.

** In particular, the film’s decision to open with a brutal hate crime which is then never addressed or remarked upon again strikes me as an illustrative specimen of CHAPTER 2’s chronic lack of intent. I realize this sequence comes from the book, but in 2019 it’s way too emotionally charged to just toss off and forget about. Any sane person could see that if they just stopped and thought about it for a second, but somehow the filmmakers just marched on with it.  

*** King himself appears in a cameo as a character who complains about lousy endings to horror novels. I mean, ha ha, but instead of just throwing up your hands and admitting your ending is terrible, why not think of a better one? CHAPTER 2’s insecurity about its lame ending all but drips from the screen –and I mean, deserved so, it sucks—but, like JURASSIC WORLD, that just makes it even lamer. Look guys, you fucking shot it, you spent months on the CGI and shit. At least have the conviction to stand behind what you made.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	You’ll Float Too [two?]. Weird to remind us of that, because actually no one floats here, they seem to have completely abandoned that idea from CHAPTER 1.
TITLE ACCURACY	More like part 2, but I’ll allow it.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from the 1986 novel by Stephen King
SEQUEL?	Yep, right there in the title.
REMAKE?	Arguably, since there is a well-remembered 1990 mini-series adapting the same material.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Clownsploitation?
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	At least Chastain and McAvoy. Oh, and Peter Bogdanovich has a cameo?
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Stephen King
NUDITY?	None (sorry, fans of the book’s original ending).
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Yes
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	One of Pennywise’s forms is of a zombie-type thing.
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yes, Pennywise transforms itself into a wide number of forms
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	You need to have a better reason to make a 169-minute sequel than “there are some things in the book that we didn’t include in the first one.”