Gladiator II (Ridley Scott, 2024)

Cast: Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Denzel Washington, Connie Nielsen, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, Lior Raz, Derek Jacobi, Peter Mensah, Matt Lucas, Alexander Karim, Yuval Gonen, Tom McInnerny. Screenplay: Peter Craig, David Scarpa. Cinematography: John Mathieson. Production design: Arthur Max. Film editing: Sam Restivo, Clair Simpson. Music: Harry Gregson-Williams. 

Reruns

Movie: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) (TCM).

Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr.

TV: Doctor Who: Eve of the Daleks (BBC America); Only Murders in the Building: To Protect and Serve; The Boy From 6B (Hulu). 

St. Mawr is a lumpy pudding of a novella, crammed with D.H. Lawrence's themes and obsessions. The title character is a handsome but temperamental stallion, threatened with being sold to a new owner, a woman who will geld him, before his current owner, also a woman, decides to take him to America, specifically to a ranch near Taos, New Mexico. It doesn't take much knowledge of Lawrence's biography to see the correspondence between the horse and the author. The latter wound up on a ranch near Taos owned by Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy American woman whose experiences developing the ranch are reflected in a narrative aside near the end of the story. But the bulk of the story deals with the acquisition of the horse by Lou Witt, an American woman, and her husband, Rico, who inhabit the bright but empty society of postwar England. St. Mawr becomes a flash point in their marriage, which has grown stale and sexless. The situation gives Lawrence ample excuse to explore conflicts familiar to his readers: nature and civilization, men and women, race, class, national identity, and the like. In addition to Lou and Rico, there's Lou's middle-aged mother, who serves as a kind of cynical chorus, commenting on their marriage. There are also two grooms for the horses owned by the others: the part-Mexican, part-Navajo known as Phoenix (Lawrence's personal symbol) and the Welshman Lewis, who comes as part of the deal when St. Mawr is acquired by Lou and Rico; both provide their own commentary on the story's themes and events. Truth be told, St. Mawr is kind of a mess, but like most Lawrence stories it's larded with some extraordinary descriptions and narrative turns. 

The last time I watched Blade Runner on TV, about six years ago, it was on HBO, which was still showing the version of the film with a voice-over narrative and a "happy ending" that Warner Bros. demanded after poor box office response to the initial release. TCM, I'm happy to report, is now showing the so-called "Final Edit," which was put together with the director's approval in 2007. It's a darker version, but a truer one -- even to the editing out of some brand names like Pan Am that were defunct in 2019, when the film's action takes place. (Atari still remains, but maybe it was too hard to cut.) I miss a little of the whimsy involving Sebastian's "toys" -- we seem to have lost what I remember as a teddy-bear figure that bumps into things -- but the ending has more power to haunt. It also sets up Denis Villeneuve's 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049, much better. 

Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

Last night's Doctor Who was a fairly routine episode involving a time loop in which the Doctor and her companions keep getting exterminated by Daleks but coming back to life to figure out ways to survive, which of course they do at the final second. Time loop stories are irresistible to sci-fi writers, and there are some good ones like Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993), Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014), and Palm Springs (Max Barbakow, 2020). But too often they fall into the trap of being the same damn thing over and over. Doctor Who avoided that one, but didn't give us anything new either.

Only Murders in the Building did something interesting in the second episode, called The Boy From 6B, last night: Because it featured a deaf character who could communicate only in ASL, there was very little audible spoken dialogue throughout the episode, even when the scenes involved our usual protagonists. The plotting remains skillful on this series.  

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Cast: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow, Oscar Isaac, William Hurt, Mark Strong, Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Mark Addy, Matthew Macfadyen, Kevin Durand, Scott Grimes, Alan Doyle, Douglas Hodge, Léa Seydoux. Screenplay: Brian Helgeland, Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris. Cinematography: John Mathieson. Production design: Arthur Max. Film editing: Pietro Scalia. Music: Marc Streitenfeld.

Did the world really need another Robin Hood movie? From the lack of interest at the box office, it would seem not. At least Ridley Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland tried to give us something slightly different: a prequel, in which Robin finds his identity and mission and only at the very end goes off into Sherwood Forest with his Merry Men, presumably to rob from the rich and give to the poor. We've had a sequel before in Richard Lester's 1976 Robin and Marian, in which the aging couple find an end to their adventures. (Interestingly, the Robin Hood of Lester's film, Sean Connery, was 46 when it was made, the same age that Russell Crowe was when he made Scott's. Lester's Marian, Audrey Hepburn, was 47, and Scott's, Cate Blanchett, was 41.) Unfortunately, the prequel doesn't give us much that's new or revealing about the characters: The villains, King John (Oscar Isaac) and the Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew Macfadyen), remain the same, with an additional twist that they're being duped by another villain named Godfrey (Mark Strong), a supporter of the French King Philip, who is plotting an invasion now that the English army is still straggling back from the Crusades. Robin is a soldier of fortune named Robin Longstride, who has been to the Crusades and is making it back with the crown of the fallen Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston) as well as a sword he promised the dying Sir Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge) he would return to his father, Sir Walter (Max von Sydow) in Nottingham.  When he does, Robin meets Marian, no longer a maid but the widow of Sir Robert. On the way, he has gathered a retinue comprising Little John (Kevin Durand), Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes), and Allan A'Dayle (Alan Doyle), and in Nottingham he will add Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) to the not terribly merry company. They'll take part in repelling the French invasion, which Scott makes into a kind of small scale D-Day, to the extent of borrowing unabashedly from Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), including some landing craft whose historical existence has been questioned (along with much else of the movie's history). Robin and his fellow soldiers, including Marian, who arrives disguised in chain mail, save the day, but their hopes for a new charter of rights that has been promised them by King John are dashed when he proclaims Robin an outlaw. So everything seems to be set up for a sequel that will culminate at Runnymede and the signing of Magna Carta, but the film's flop at the box office put paid to that. Robin Hood certainly has some good performances, which you might expect from its cast packed with Oscar-winners and -contenders, but it feels routine and a little tired. It also resorts to filming much of the action with the now too common "gloomycam," in which fight scenes always seem to be taking place at night, so you can't tell who's killing whom.

Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)

Richard Harris and Russell Crowe in Gladiator

Maximus: Russell Crowe
Commodus: Joaquin Phoenix
Lucilla: Connie Nielsen
Proximo: Oliver Reed
Marcus Aurelius: Richard Harris
Gracchus: Derek Jacobi
Juba: Djimon Hounsou
Falco: David Schofield
Gaius: John Shrapnel
Quintus: Thomas Arana
Hagen: Ralf Moeller
Lucius: Spencer Treat Clark
Cassius: David Hemmings
Cicero: Tommy Flanagan
Tigris: Sven-Ole Thorsen
Slave Trader: Omid Djalili

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: David Franzoni, John Logan, William Nicholson
Cinematography: John Mathieson
Production design: Arthur Max
Film editing: Pietro Scalia
Music: Lisa Gerrard, Hans Zimmer

"Are you not entertained?" Well, to answer the question Maximus bellows at the crowd: No, not very much.

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

Sigourney Weaver, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, and Ian Holm in Alien

Ripley: Sigourney Weaver
Dallas: Tom Skerritt
Lambert: Veronica Cartwright
Brett: Harry Dean Stanton
Kane: John Hurt
Ash: Ian Holm
Parker: Yaphet Kotto

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett
Cinematography: Derek Van Lint
Production design: Michael Seymour
Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) posited that extraterrestrial beings might not be bent on world domination or worse, but instead were just looking to be friendly neighbors. Spielberg went on to reinforce that idea in 1982 with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It was a kind of reversal of the treatment of space creatures in 1950s sci-fi films, born of Cold War paranoia. But although the Spielbergian vision informed several other successful films, including John Carpenter's Starman (1984), the truth is that when it comes to movies, paranoia is fun.  No movie established that more clearly than Alien, whose huge success launched a whole new era of shockers from outer space, including Carpenter's The Thing (1982). Almost 40 years later, Alien still holds up, while the Spielberg films are looking a bit sappy. Is that a commentary on the movies themselves, or on us? Alien benefits from near-perfect casting and from outstandingly creepy design, making the most of the work of H.R. Giger on the alien and its environment and of Carlo Rambaldi (who had also created the benign aliens of Close Encounters and E.T.) on animating the creature. While it's true that time has not been entirely kind to some parts of the design -- such as the cathode ray tube monitors for the ship's computers, which would definitely be outmoded in 2037 when the film is set  -- everything else has become sci-fi standard, including the depiction of the Nostromo as an aging tub of a ship whose maintenance crew, Brett and Parker, gripe about being paid less than the management staff. Scott doesn't labor over the implicit critique of corporate capitalism that will become more prominent in the sequels, but it's nice to see it there.

The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015)

Andy Weir's best-selling science fiction novel was one of the few that manage to emphasize science almost as much as fiction. The film version, being aimed at a somewhat less cerebral audience, doesn't quite keep that balance, but Drew Goddard's screenplay is an admirable effort to keep up with protagonist Mark Watney's (Matt Damon) determination to "science the shit out of" the problem of surviving after he has been marooned on Mars. And in an age when science has fallen afoul of politics, The Martian nobly attempts to bring some luster to this essential human endeavor. There is also a political undercurrent in the film, namely the hurdles that NASA administrator Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels) has to leap in order to achieve the rescue of his stranded astronaut. It's gratifying, too, to see so many actors of color -- Michael Peña, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Donald Glover, among others -- given key roles in the effort to rescue Watney, all of them given parts emphasizing their skill and intelligence. On the other hand, there were protests that the ethnicity of some of the characters in the film had been changed. In the novel, for example, the mission director is called Venkat Kapoor, and he is a Hindu. His first name is changed in the film to Vincent, and he's played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the British actor whose parents were born in Nigeria -- the change is signaled by an explanation that his father was Hindu and his mother was a Baptist. One reason for such protests is that director Scott's previous film was Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), in which all of the Egyptian and Middle Eastern characters were played by white actors like Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton, a continuation of an old Hollywood tradition that increasingly seems wrong-headed. Fortunately, in The Martian Scott kept the novel's prominent female roles, including mission commander Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain) and astronaut Beth Johanssen (Kate Mara).

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

Rick Deckard: Harrison Ford
Roy Batty: Rutger Hauer
Rachael: Sean Young
Gaff: Edward James Olmos
Bryant: M. Emmet Walsh
Pris: Daryl Hannah
J.F. Sebastian: William Sanderson
Zhora: Joanna Cassidy

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenplay: Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples
Based on a novel by Philip K. Dick
Cinematography: Jordan Cronenweth
Production design: Laurence G. Paull
Film editing: Marsha Nakashima, Terry Rawlings
Music: Vangelis

I had forgotten that Blade Runner, with its flying cars, ads for Atari and Pan Am, and rainy Los Angeles, was set in the year 2019, which unless things change radically in the next four years puts it on a par with 1984 (Michael Anderson, 1956) and 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) for missed prognostications. Yet despite this, and even more despite the great advances in special effects technology, this 33-year-old movie hardly feels dated. That's because it isn't over-infatuated with the technological whiz-bang of so many sci-fi films, especially since the advances in CGI. Its effects, supervised by the great Douglas Trumbull, have the solidity and tactility so often missing in CGI work, because they're very much  in service of the vision of production designer Laurence G. Paull, art director David L. Snyder, and especially "visual futurist" Syd Mead. But more especially because they're in service of the humanity whose very questionable nature is the point of Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples's adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It also helps that the film has a terrific cast. Harrison Ford can't help bringing a bit of Han Solo and Indiana Jones to every movie, but it's entirely appropriate here -- one time when a star image doesn't fight the script. Rutger Hauer makes Roy Batty's death scene memorable, and even Sean Young, a problematic actress at best, comes off well. (I think it's because when we first see her, she's dressed and coiffed like a drag-queen Joan Crawford, so that when she literally lets her hair down she takes on a softness we're not accustomed to from her.) And then there's Edward James Olmos as the enigmatic origamist Gaff, Daryl Hannah, William Sanderson, and especially Joanna Cassidy, who manages to achieve poignancy even wearing a transparent plastic raincoat. I only wish that HBO would scrap its print of the "voice-over" version of the film, with Ford's sporadic narrative and the happy ending demanded by Warner Bros., and show director Scott's 2007 "Final Cut" version instead.