Podcasting Them Softly

 David Oyelowo, Rosamund Pike, Jack Davenport, Tom Felton, Vusi Kunene. Directed by Amma Asante. Rated PG-13. 111 minutes. 2017.

It is important, first and foremost, to remember that film is a visual medium. It’s an obvious point to make about an art form that forces its consumer to view a series of rapidly moving photographs, but it is also important to remind oneself that, when it comes to relaying a true story through such a medium, the result must not simply coast on the extraordinary nature of its specifics. This is the trap into which Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom falls, unfortunately, for here is a film whose makers seem to have believed that the story they were telling was of more importance than their telling of the story. Even the broad subject matter is fascinating for the previously uninformed, such as myself, who had no idea of the marriage between the heir to an African king and a salesman’s daughter from London.

The heir is Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo, offering a fine performance that would make a good companion piece to the one he gave as Martin Luther King Jr.), and as his parents both died when he and his sister (Terry Pheto) were very young, Seretse is ready to take the throne of rule in the British protectorate of Bachuanaland (now known as Botswana) that was previously their grandfather’s. He is soon to return from London, where he has been completing his schooling, to assume his reign, but within the final months, he meets Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), who, unlike Seretse, doesn’t come from great wealth and is white. Their courtship is quick, and when he is faced with a return to his country without the woman with whom he has fallen in love, he asks her to marry him, much to the disapproval of his uncle (Vusi Kunene) and her parents (Nicholas Lyndhurst and Anastasia Hille). She, of course, says yes.

The situation is, to put it lightly, complicated, as it also turns out that neither the African regime nor the British government is approving of this union, especially after it is consummated. For the African tribe of which Seretse is meant to be king, it is a question of tradition: The wife of a king is also their queen, and they understandably see the rule of a white queen as another power move from colonialist England. For the British government, it is a question of decency: Sir Alistair Canning (Jack Davenport), the government’s liaison to South Africa, and Rufus Lancaster (Tom Felton), a commissioner, can barely remain discreet about his smug prejudice, which is shared by many whites among the upper class. For Seretse and Ruth, it is a question of love: Theirs for each other is undying, even in the face of such discrimination and a game of proverbial chess between countries.

The problem is that screenwriter Guy Hibbert, adapting a book by Susan Williams, doesn’t offer much insight here beyond what is on the page. Seretse and Ruth have an appropriate sweetness as a couple (Pike is also solid as Ruth, especially in moments when she realizes she has entered situations beyond her control), but they remain cyphers when treated individually. They are defined entirely by their roles as subjects of a biographical picture whose intent seems to be hitting the beats of the story without much to-do. There are scenes of individual power, such a pair of speeches given by Seretse that prove both his worthiness of a position of leadership and Oyelowo’s skill at delivering them, but the whole of A United Kingdom is too broadly drawn to garner much response beyond the kind that one has to the story it tells.

Roland Moller, Louis Hofmann, Joel Basman, Oskar Bokelmann, Mikkel Boe Folsgaard. Directed by Martin Zandvliet. Rated R. 100 minutes. 2017.

The men must scour the shore for landmines that their fellow soldiers laid down to trap the enemy. It is slow and grueling work, and the catch is that these are not actually men. Many of them are boys, these prisoners of war, and the hard men that lord over them care not a lick if they live or die. The sergeant says so, repeatedly, including after a bout of hunger in his workers and even when one of them catches ill, vomiting into the night and unable to stay awake for very long. The workers must use poles to prod the ground at intervals of roughly six inches, and the process to defuse the mines is simple in theory but unthinkably tense in practice. It’s a potentially hopeless life that is led by these young men in Martin Zandvliet’s Land of Mine, but the writer/director doesn’t wallow in it.

That’s an important achievement, because it means the characters are able to be and grow as characters, rather than needing to supply fodder for a message movie. This is, quite decisively and effectively, an anti-war polemic, but it doesn’t have the anger of the usual polemic. There are no blustering speeches raging against the System for sending these boys into a war they hardly understand. The situation is harrowing on its own terms, and it doesn’t need the burden of such acidic political statements. The realpolitik here is inherent in the story Zandvliet is telling, although the film does supply melodrama of a different kind by way of the story framing the situation. It loses some of its potency in those stretches, but that also matters less than it could have. The urgency is still present.

Some of the young men are essentially interchangeable, although a few of the interchangeable ones are afforded a personality trait (or, if they are lucky, two), such as one boy whose hands are so shaky we are never sure that he will survive. The job, after all, requires a steady hand. The ones who are not so interchangeable act as our entryway into the story. Sebastian (Louis Hofmann) wears a cross that reminds him a father whose fate he does not know, and he’s the one who readily stands up to their commanding officer on behalf of his brothers in arms. Helmut (Joel Basman) is the eldest and the makeshift leader of the young men, but his squirrelly attitude and conniving ways are a constant source of punishment for the whole group. There is a pair of twins, Ernst (Emil Belton) and Werner (Osker Belton), so one must only count the minutes until the pair are separated.

The commanding officer is Rasmussen (Roland Moller), and the focus on him is where the film occasionally stumbles. He begins with contempt for the boys, whom he sees as nothing more than another group of German soldiers worthy of death. “Better them than us,” says his own superior officer Jensen (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard), and Rasmussen’s look of concession to the point says it all. That sense of murderous superiority shifts quite radically, albeit slowly, when deaths occur (The craftsmanship in showing us the aftermath of a mine explosion is effective and somber, even after we start to expect it by way of a cleverly framed shot) and especially when Jensen abuses his power to humiliate the boys. The film essentially becomes another drama about a stern teacher who learns to warm to his students, although Moller’s performance is good enough that it doesn’t hurt the picture too much.

And that’s especially true when everything else is as effective as it is. The emotion might push a bit too hard in such scenes as a silly game of soccer, scored to some flowery compositions, but it’s a stark outlook elsewhere. Every scene in which the prisoners much go forth with their mission to find and defuse landmines is rich with tension and unpredictability. No character is safe here, and the stark presentation of the violence at hand is utterly compelling. Also effective are performances that, every one of them, are convincing and precise. There is not a single actor here that makes a misstep. The sense of focus in Land of Mine is less assured, but the drama is in the pitiable nature of a war that forces boys to fight as men and, if not fight, die without dignity.

Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John C. Reilly, John Goodman. Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts. Rated PG-13. 118 minutes. 2017.

I hesitate to call Kong: Skull Island a “good” movie, for it is also a movie of undeniable idiocy that contains an ensemble of characters who are really just cutout cardboard figures in the path of the ape of the surtitle. To embrace its simple pleasures, though, one must disconnect with one’s own expectations of seeing a movie with Kong in it, for this is not really a traditional King Kong movie. It uses the character popularized by the 1933, 1976, and 2005 pictures (and the various sequels they might or might not have spawned) as a springboard for an ensemble-driven action-comedy that, if the post-credits stinger is to be believed, wishes to insert the eighth wonder of the world into a new cinematic universe. Whether that franchise has legs remains to be seen, but it’s also immaterial to this film, which is just a lot of expository build-up to a string of action sequences.

The human characters matter approximately none, but we are still offered an eccentric cast of them, played by an eccentric troupe of actors. There is the expedition group that leads the charge of the main narrative engine: John Goodman as Bill Randa, who heads an ultra-secret government group that wants to explore the untapped terrain of a recently discovered island, Corey Hawkins as Houston Brooks, the college kid confronted by Randa because of his theory that the earth holds secrets, and Tian Jang as San, who just kind of exists to echo Brooks’s confidence in his theory. They confront a military colonel to green-light their expedition, which of course involves also green-lighting a military escort, a tracker who can guide them through the muck of the island, and a photographer to capture the journey for scientific and journalistic purposes.

The military escort is led by Samuel L. Jackson as Preston Packard, a soldier fighting in Da Nang who believes the U.S. has abandoned the war in Vietnam when President Richard Nixon calls it off. He’s grateful for one last mission, even one as seemingly trivial as an escort for a scientific study, and spends the rest of the movie apparently feeling he is still in combat with the human enemy. His men, who are mostly interchangeable, are still played by the personality-driven likes of Toby Kebbell, Jason Mitchell, Shea Whigham, Thomas Mann, and Eugene Cordero. Tom Hiddleston is James Conrad, the tracker in question, and Brie Larson is Mason Weaver, a photojournalist who passes up the cover of a popular magazine to tag along on something historic.

That seems like a lot of introduction to characters that, this review claims, don’t matter, but that’s also all the introduction we get. They are cutout cardboard stand-ins for the audience, with the exception of John C. Reilly, who is boatloads of fun when he shows up as Hank Marlow, a WWII veteran who was marooned on the island of the subtitle before his deployment ended. The real story of the movie kicks in when they reach the island. They encounter Kong (whose movements are provided by Kebbell via motion-capture) immediately in a superbly mounted scene of controlled chaos in which Kong considers the helicopters in which they arrive to be nothing more than giant gnats. The beast isn’t so much a tragic one here, though, as a territorial one, even more so when the interfering humans awaken the creatures that reside underground: They are fearsome beasties – giant lizards with lots of teeth.

There are yet more monsters on this island, such as an inexplicable cross between a bison and a leviathan or a far less mysterious arachnid with bamboo legs. The spectacle here is enormous and infectious, with screenwriters Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, and Derek Connelly keeping the tone light while director Jordan Vogt-Roberts approaches the genuinely berserk action violence with as much aplomb as anyone has recently. The film exists for the sole purpose of witnessing various evolutionary nightmares do battle and seeing foolish humans come between them. It’s all very inconsequential, frequently dumb-as-rocks, and almost exclusively successful in a way that requires one immediately discard one’s brain at the door, but Kong: Skull Island works, and it works because it knows it is all of these things. Sometimes, good-enough is good enough.