Danny Boyle scored a real winner with T2, the best sequel/spinoff film I've seen this year. It respects the original so much because its a totally natural progression as a story & personal meta-narrative. T2 succeeds because its not someone new giving their version of the old vision. Its the original vision just 20 years more mature and established. So many corporate reboots fail because they decide on a fresh update and re-treading. Boyle makes a great theme out of the past and uses his first entry as a stylistic gimmick, but he (and the material itself) clearly state that they are not suckered by a cheap nostalgia tour. The film is helped tremendously thats its working off a sequel novel, but only loosely.
T2 won't get its props because its one of the rare higher profiled films this year that wasn't for kids, teens or families. This was the only mature 2017 film I've seen that wasn't partly trying to pass itself off as exploitation or a "popcorn film with a message". But the film isn't overly bleak. Its fun, gorgeous, experimental, sincere, thoughtful and a bit abrasive. Its a self-aware mid life crisis for the characters within and outside of it, including our society. Its not interested in returning to the70s, 80s & 90s but analyzing the changes, positive and negative, and celebrating LIFE 20 years later. Its so grateful for its audience and the opportunity to step back into its rare lot in cinema history.
I won't say its better than the original but maybe equal. I didn't want a Trainspotting sequel but this is the film I didn't know I needed. It totally recontextualizes and romanticizes and in some ways eclipses the original. Maybe this is easier to find in European cinema than in American when I think about the charming and welcomed Ab Fab film from a few years back. They are more accustomed to picking up stories again and respecting the virtues of storytelling in commercial filmmaking.
Willard took me by surprise too. I remember the stylish but hollow remake from the 2000s and that both films follow a 1967 novel. I expected a brainless Psycho ripoff with rats eating people. This is much more sophisticated, at least the script is. Its a very introspective study of society's victims and the realistic circumstances that leave them reduced to animal behavior to survive. Willard creates a complex, intelligent metaphor out of its title character. He's a true anti-hero or tragic hero. And the actor Bruce Davison does a lot of good work in the role.
Now the production is not so ambitious but quite memorable. Produced as studios faced a recession, Willard is shot closer to a B&W 1960s thriller TV series like Twilight Zone or Hitchcock Presents. Its very bare bones and muted, but this serves the tone of the film. There isn't much on suspense or action, so we the directing is focused on fleshed out performances and a sense of nerve that creeps up.
But the film is more than a serviceable adaptation of a good story. It surpasses the original text from my understanding in that Willard becomes a catalyst for the zeitgeist of angry youth. It worked well for the political climate then & now. Millennials will relate to the economic and generational abuse this character suffers. He rises into an avenging arm of rebellion, a Marxist. And he suffers a fate that is more poetic and radically leftist than his modest Poe-esque fate in the original tale. He becomes a mirror for the failures of the Love generation and a casualty of class warfare, selling out his own ideals by following the cycle of abuse he set out to destroy. Its heady, very appropriate and shocking for a low budget horror film that could've wasted effort on FX and decor (like the remake and surely the upcoming re-remake).
Jack Nicholson might be the greatest film actor of all-time by body of work. He's made a long list of excellent films because he's worked with some of the best directors of his era: Kubrick, Mike Nichols, Roger Corman, Polanski, Tim Burton, Scorsese and fit all of their esteemed aesthetics. The Passenger unites Jack with influential director Michelangelo Antonioni for a political/existentialist/postmodern/travelogue about identity and freedom. Antonioni loves to create surrogate characters of himself who take on harsh journeys into themselves to either triumph or crumble from their own reflection.
This is the 3rd Antonioni film I've watched and the 3rd in that timeline. Following Il Grido and Blow Up, The Passenger is an even wider and more abstract pilgrimage into the cinematic form. The director is fine playing off established tropes and motifs because he bends them in new ways, like he's revising a world view by performing the same story in vastly different ways. One big distinction is the change in female perspectives in these stories. In this one, Maria Schneider plays a radical youth who acts as a spirit guide or perhaps a siren who leads him to one of two fates. Antonioni might've been a Hitchcock fan because the film builds to an incredibly intense climax loaded with meanings.
"The Passenger" is a sure masterpiece like Blow Up before it, "Willard" is a very tuned in piece of mainstream-meets-counterculture that has aged terrifically & "T2" is a spiritual poem that lives up to the spiritual poem that inspired it. 3 great movies to enjoy forever.
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