Colette Arrand

Tag: The Wachowskis

  • Television Review: Sense8 (Season 1: 2015)

    Television Review: Sense8 (Season 1: 2015)

    Sense8 Nomi and Riley

    When I came to this space in order to praise Jupiter Ascending, I did so with the belief that, with 10 or 12 hours to tell their ludicrous story of star-crossed love between a human-bee genetic duplicate of a murdered immortal and a space werewolf sporting an especially bad goatee Andy and Lana Wachowski would have really had something. Sense8, created by the Wachowskis and Babylon 5’s J. Michael Straczynski, disabused me of that notion quickly, using its time and format to do little more than sketch out its interesting high-concept science fiction premise and build a world that is remarkably similar to our own.

    On the surface, there’s a lot going on here, as eight people from eight radically different parts of the world and stations of life find themselves psychically linked and, it seems, randomly dropping in on each other’s lives. For the show to really work, all eight of the “senseates” need to feel like their own people, so that there’s really something to the idea that, together, they’re more than their individual qualities. The problem is that, with eight central characters, it’s hard to get most of them out of the blocks. Here’s who and what we know at the beginning of the series:

    • Will Gorski (Brian J. Smith): A good, white cop from Chicago.
    • Riley Blue (Tuppence Middleton): An up-and-coming DJ living in London; formerly of Iceland.
    • Nomi Marks (Jamie Clayton): A trans woman from San Francisco who is a skilled computer hacker.
    • Lito Rodriguez (Miguel Ángel Silvestre): A superstar actor in Mexico who is in the closet about his homosexuality.
    • Sun Bak (Bae Doona): The daughter of a powerful Korean businessman. Skilled in kung-fu.
    • Wolfgang Bogdanow (Max Riemelt): An expert safecracker out of Berlin with a lot of unresolved father issues.
    • Kala Dandekar (Tina Desai): A pharmacist in Mumbai who is struggling with the implications of her pending arranged marriage to a man who doesn’t keep her religion.
    • Capheus (Aml Ameen): A Jean-Claude Van Damme-obsessed van driver from Nairobi who is desperate to purchase medicine for his mother.

    Looking beyond Gorski, whose good, white cop is the default focal point of television as a medium, that’s a pretty solid foundation for a show about strangers who need to come together to solve a problem, an engaging mix of queer faces and global perspectives that serve to make Sense8 interesting until it becomes clear that, for the most part, these characters and their stories are window dressing for a presumably doomed romance between the cop and the DJ. Once the show is beyond the benefit of a doubt, one wonders what the point of having so many brief sketches of life in India or South Korea or Kenya is, as the Wachowskis and Straczynski are never able to move beyond broad stereotypes for these people and their circumstances.

    Their chief achievement here is to split the atom that was Neo, the quintessential 90s action hero, who was an expert in everything because everything was loaded onto a floppy disc and downloaded directly into his brain. Split up, its more than a little disappointing that those traits are a) the point of grouping these eight people together and b) that some of these skills and character traits don’t go much father than a vague, American understanding of the world. Of course the only thing we know about the Indian woman (beyond her eventual fascination with the white criminal) is that she’s arranged to be married to someone she doesn’t love. Naturally, the kung-fu master of the group is from Asia. And yes, there is heart to the idea of a son trying to provide his mother with AIDS medication, but for an American audience whose conception of Africa is Blood Diamond and Hotel Rwanda, grisly gang violence is a more engaging backdrop. Maybe this would be excusable if the pieces on the board moved much, but as Sense8 narrows its focus to Will and Riley and the plot to capture and experiment on one or both of them, it’s clear that a multitude of queer, colored shoulders are being put to the wheel for the sake of white heteronormativity.

    This is particularly underwhelming given how much The Wachowskis seem to relish a character like Lito, whose lover (Alfonso Herrera) is something of a renaissance man, a skilled chef with a passion for Diego Rivera and lucha libre. The two are walking a thin line between bliss and public shame, and when they are blackmailed by an acquaintance (Eréndira Ibarra) who becomes their live-in beard to get out of an abusive relationship with a violent ex-lover, he has to figure out whether to play the coward to protect his career and identity, or to rescue his friend from her stalker and deal with the consequences. I want to see how that storyline plays out. Similarly, there’s Nomi, who is not only trans but in a relationship with a woman (Freema Agyeman) who loves her fiercely. Nomi is the first of the senseates captured by Whispers (Terrence Mann, who has to deal with that name), an evil senseate who runs the shadowy organization that functions as the main threat to our heroes, and she is sedated and secreted away to a private, heavily armed wing of a hospital where her mother (who insists on using Nomi’s birth name) strips her of any right to medical independence, agreeing to what is essentially a lobotomy after some slick talk from the medical professionals. This deliberate violation of autonomy is a thing that really happens to trans persons every day and to see it here (or in Orange Is the New Black and Transparent) is still new, still has a capacity for horror. Nomi and Amanita are given a lot of time and backstory before it’s necessary to saddle the hacker at a computer, and the Wachowskis use that time to explore Nomi as a sexual and political person, a figure who isn’t on the spectrum between tragic and life-affirming, but who just is. Other than a sex scene that sees Lito and Will accidentally having the best orgasms of their lives together, my favorite bit of Sense8 is a flashback to Nomi and Amanita’s first Pride as a couple, where Amanita steps up to defend her girlfriend from a friend who is dressing Nomi down for being a man colonizing a woman’s space. It’s a small moment, but it manages to make both of these characters feel like people, which is something Sense8 desperately needs more of. More than that, the sequence is a bit of queer politics that isn’t aired out much in popular culture, which is still struggling to find much use for trans women (and has yet to find a purpose for trans men) beyond totemic symbols for Living Authentically by assimilating as much as possible.

    Sense8 has potential, maybe more than this season lets on. In terms of science fiction concepts, this is one of the best that’s made it to series since Battlestar Galactica, which used the threat of human extinction and the promise that not every human was as he or she seemed to ramp up the drama in lieu of constant violence. The eight senseates here barely know each other beyond what skills they bring to the table, and maybe with every individual threat to them tied off they’ll have time to sit down and chat, become themselves without having to be told, over and over, how their powers work and what that means for them. As much as I enjoyed the quieter moments of the show, Sense8 was too frequently punctuated by mandatory violence and sex, meaningless sequences that suggested a real lack of ideas. Even in episodes directed by The Wachoskis or Tom Tykwer, those sequences frequently lack the visual flair or sexual energy that makes their films stand out, as if television is a language they’re still trying to learn. If nothing else, I’m curious to see if they have anything to say once they have that language figured out.

     

    Sense8. With Aml Ameen (Capheus), Bae Doona (Sun Bak), Jamie Clayton (Nomi Marks), Tina Desai (Kala Dandekar), Tuppence Middleton (Riley Blue), Max Riemelt (Wolfgang Bogdanow), Miguel Ángel Silvestre (Lito Rodriguez), Brian J. Smith (Will Gorski), Freema Agyeman (Amanita), Terrence Mann (Whispers), Naveen Andrews (Jonas Maliki), and Daryl Hannah (Angelica Turring). Created by The Wachowskis and J. Michael Straczynski, with episodes directed by The Wachowskis, Tom Tykwer, James McTeigue, and Dan Glass.

  • Movie Review: Jupiter Ascending (2015)

    Movie Review: Jupiter Ascending (2015)

    Jupiter Ascending

    Calling Jupiter Ascending an original movie is perhaps disingenuous. While it is among those increasingly rare science fiction blockbusters that weren’t adapted from comic books, novels, video games, or television shows, it is, like Pacific Rim before it, a hulking labor of nostalgia for an incredibly specific genre of film, the technicolor fantasia of the space opera. A dazzling array of humans, aliens, and spaceships pass before the eye, each of them unique and carrying loads of often unexplained baggage, but there’s hardly one that doesn’t have a corollary in Star Wars, Star Trek, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or something decidedly stranger, more off-beat. Andy and Lana Wachowski have always worn their influences on their sleeve, but here, with the gross domestic product of several small nations at their disposal, they are bearing their hearts, both of them glittering machinations assembled from the detritus of what used to be called nerd culture and what is now just culture. By making a film so decadent and doomed to failure, they seem to have laid claim to that tiny parcel of the collective imagination that is still yet unconquered by the spandex-clad horde.

    None of this is to say that Jupiter Ascending is any good. In fact, most of it is very bad. An array of beautiful images crudely hacked apart and stitched back together in the editing bay, to describe any aspect of the plot here as presented is to sound like one is making assumptions of a very long film after catching the last five minutes on television. Here goes nothing. Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is an undocumented Russian immigrant unsatisfied with her life cleaning toilets in Chicago. One day she is selling her eggs to a fertility clinic, which is surely a first in an action film. The next, she finds out that, through accident of birth, she is the exact genetic duplicate of the matriarch of clan Abrasax and the rightful owner of the planet Earth. This places Jupiter in the middle a family war between a hedonistic prince (Douglas Booth), an eternally young princess (Tuppence Middleton), and their ruthless industrialist of a brother (Eddie Redmayne), her only sure protection in the galaxy (which she will span in its vastness) being a soldier-turned-mercenary human/wolf/insect hybrid (Channing Tatum) first seen smelling her name on a sheet of paper at the clinic. There is a team of bounty hunters. There are little grey men. There are gigantic lizard men. There is the crew of the ship. There are robots and bureaucrats and the individual members of Jupiter’s family. All of them matter. Some are, it seems, audience surrogates, just as confused as we are about the world beyond our world that dances among the stars to an ancient song that can only be heard by those with access to its score.

    Luckily, the Wachowskis are keen to overshare. Large stretches of Jupiter Ascending exist just to fill in the details, coming so hard and heavy that even Jupiter, with her fate and the fate of the world on her shoulders, breaks down and says she doesn’t care about any of it. The other characters know so much and Jupiter so little that she frequently feels like a character without agency, falling for obvious ploys and needing constant rescue from Tatum’s Caine Wise, who has this neat trick where he is rescued from every conceivable deathtrap by the magic of coincidence and given all the credit. This is something of a disappointment, as Jupiter Ascending is, at times, nearly a Marxist, feminist manifesto shrouded by the glitter and doom of a summer blockbuster. Though doing so, I realize, is futile, I keep imagining Jupiter Ascending getting a summer release in a year that wasn’t overburdened with light, spectacle-driven sci-fi, having the billion-dollar success that was envisioned when the project was greenlit. Hundreds of thousands of men watch a woman struggle with the decision to sell her eggs, are enraged for her when her cousin negotiates a large cut of the profits. The working class grow angry with the film’s end boss, his speaking pattern belabored by a state of agonizing, near-constant orgasm as he lectures Jupiter about the need to convert humans into capital. A laugh is had as Jupiter negotiates the bowels of galactic bureaucracy with an over-taxed droid. A moment of silence is shared as a bottle of human goop—the liquid that allows the intergalactic ruling class their millennia-spanning lives—falls to the ground and is shattered.

    But I’ve mentioned a hoped for billion-dollar success, which spoils even my utopian ideal for the film. The larger engine at work throughout Jupiter Ascending is its naked desire for a sequel, the further adventures of Jupiter Jones in space or on Earth or wherever the focus group found itself most pleased. While my brain keeps twisting small moments in Jupiter Ascending into larger academic points (the CGI reconstruction of Chicago, just razed by a CGI spacechase, as a commentary on the vapid nature of such sequences, for example), the Wachowskis bumble about like Tobias Fünke, Yes, Anding themselves to the point of insanity. Jupiter is rescued from little grey men by a disgraced bounty hunter. Yes, and they fall in love. Yes, and their romance is complicated by issues of class. Yes, and there’s a marriage where one of the evil princes tries to marry an exact genetic replica of his mother. Yes, and that is spoiled by the bounty hunter, who was initially hired by the prince under the pretense that he would be reinstated to the military. Yes, and members of the military have wings! Yes, and, without his wings, the bounty hunter has these boots, these anti-gravity heelies that make it look like he’s tearing ass through the mall, even when his life is in danger. Yes, and, uhh, something about bees; an entire house covered in a honeycomb! Yes, and… uhh, wait, bees? Did you say bees? Yes! And, I dunno, maybe Jupiter’s scummy cousin buys a flatscreen TV?

    On and on and on, until the perfunctory action sequence brings us to the required Disney princess ending, which is some weird combination of The Secret and that old, classist pablum that one should be happy with what one has. Here, that means waking up at four in the morning to clean the toilets of the wealthy despite owning the deed to an entire planet, being okay with one’s place in a machine so large that even a Jupiter-sized refinery represents but one small cog within it. Recently, I saw a headline in my Google news feed that asked if Marvel could “save” the Wachowskis. Jupiter Ascending suggests not, as, despite its trappings, this is essentially their Marvel film, disguising the same mostly white, mostly male exceptionalism coded within the MCU with the same safe message that no, really, everybody can be special, the princess or the soldier (never both, and never something else). That’s a marketable idea, but not one the Wachowskis or their film seem to believe in. No, the heart of Jupiter Ascending, beating faintly under layer after layer of bloat, belongs to Terry Gilliam, sniggering maliciously as he affixes a rubber stamp to the deed that awards Jupiter Jones ownership of Earth. It’s a fine dream Jupiter has, of liberating her and her family. How easy, Gilliam’s appearance suggests, for that dream to become madness.

    Jupiter Ascending. With Mila Kunis (Jupiter Jones), Channing Tatum (Caine Wise), Sean Bean (Stinger Apini), Eddie Redmayne (Balem Abrasax), Douglas Booth (Titus Abrasax), Tuppence Middleton (Kalique Middleton), and Terry Gilliam (Seal and Signet Minister). Directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski, from a screenplay by the Wachowskis.