Let’s talk about stunts, the forgotten category long left hanging in the wind by an Academy that has failed to award an element of filmmaking as old as film itself. And then they wonder why people think the Oscars are boring.
There will be a separate article for best choreography of the year, but I want to focus on stunt work for the time being. This is an article awarding the most singular achievements in stunt coordination this year.
Stunts can include everything from someone sent flying out of a building to being lit on fire, from precision driving to retraining an actor how to move like a different species. Stunt teams do some of the most difficult work on film, often to little or no credit.
I’ll be avoiding CG stunts. A performance can be aided by CG, motion captured, even take place in a set created through visual effects, but a stunt still has to be a performance. I won’t list anything here that’s entirely created through visual effects.
3. FURY
Hayley Saywell, stunt department coordinator Ben Cooke, stunt coordinator
Fury, aside from being one of the most egregious awards show oversights, pulled off a rare trick. For a mid-movie tank battle, it employed a real German Tiger tank. It was the first time since 1946 that one was used on a film set. Mock-ups were used to develop the battle choreography. On lend from the Bovington Tank Museum for exactly one day of shooting opposite the American M4A2 Sherman tank that played the film’s namesake, the crew had to practice the sequence to the point where they knew what every member was doing every second of each shot. They had to recreate in their mock-up the exact control scheme and sense of response a Tiger tank has so that there were no surprises in the choreography once they were shooting.
It’s the rare mechanical stunt whose complexity won’t be realized by most viewers. On top of all that preparation, the sequence required the crew pave unseen paths in a muddy field, keep to a tight schedule, and keep an eye on mechanical issues.
Fury is filled with other stunts as well, but this tank battle – the above clip only represents a brief moment in the entire sequence – is the showpiece that demonstrates one of the best displays of coordinating a battle scene in recent memory.
Pamela Croydon, precision driving team coordinator Lance Gilbert, stunt coordinator
That clip is all practical. None of the stunts in it are CG. Look, Need for Speed is a very average movie, but the sheer amount of stunt driving crammed into it is pretty audacious.
In an age when Fast and Furious is making money hand over fist with ridiculously CG driving sequences, Need for Speed focused on making everything practical. To do so, it employed no less than 38 stunt and precision drivers. It shows in the end result. Whatever else one says about this film, what you’re really paying to see – the chase and race sequences – are second to none.
Charles Croughwell, Marny Eng, Terry Notary, stunt coordinators
This doesn’t look like it involves much stuntwork. It’s just a bunch of CG, right? Not exactly. When you watch Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and realize that each of those CG apes spilling out of the woods is being played by an actor: climbing rigging, leaping, and bounding across sets in coordination with each other (often using prosthetic extensions to do so), it becomes one of the most overwhelming stunt accomplishments in recent history.
Motion capture has to have an actor performing the role in order to work. To coordinate dozens upon dozens of actors playing apes requires extensive movement training, complex staging, climbing coordinated between dozens at a time, and a brand new and unique fight choreography based on another species. The list of accomplishments here is stunning. It begins to blur the lines between stunt work, acting, movement training, motion capture, and fight choreography, and it does so to brilliant and moving effect.
Oscar season is upon us, and that means one thing – everyone’s opinion is about to change. When many of the best films of the year are held until the holiday season, top 10 lists will completely transform by January. Earlier movies will be seen a second or third time and will climb or fall down lists accordingly. As was the case with my top two films of 2013, The Place Beyond the Pines and The Grandmaster, I’ll even catch up with smaller or foreign films on DVD.
On the cusp of Oscar season, let’s do an experiment. I’ll list my top 10 films today and we’ll check back in with the list come January:
10. How to Train Your Dragon 2
The list is rounded out with big-budget fare that’s more ambitious than the average summer blockbuster. How to Train Your Dragon 2 might be the best American animated film since Pixar’s sadly passed golden age, but it’s not just about kids and their dragons. It possesses an epic visual streak rare in animation and speaks to the dispossessed of our society – children of broken families, the disabled, and war veterans alike.
9. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
This is our best (non-Batman) superhero film in a cinematic era overrun with them. Like many blockbusters of the last two years, it’s incredibly socially-minded, using comic book tropes to deliver a sharp critique on the oxymoron of a marriage between the Pentagon’s mandate for freedom and the rise of private military contractors.
8. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
For all its visual effects wizardry, this boasts one of the best-told stories of the year. It also challenges Noah for number of Bible references, posing original sin, Cain-and-Abel, and Jesus conceits against the backdrop of civil war in what’s effectively a third-world country. It’s rare that you could take away an action movie’s bigger setpieces and still be left with one of the best films of the year.
7. Noah
Noah is just on the outside of the top tier looking in. I’m big on its style and message, which were enough to make me forgive its unwieldy stretches on first viewing. I’m still a huge fan of its screenplay, which conflates various cultures’ flood myths, the entirety of the Old Testament, and a very meta approach to film narrative into a single story. That’s no easy feat. Darren Aronofsky’s “story of creation” is the best three-and-a-half minutes on film this year, and reveals that the film is better viewed as a postapocalypse fever dream than a direct religious adaptation. It tackles so much that I’m still putting it above much tighter films, but its unevenness can’t help but detract when we’ve had so many off-kilter masterpieces this year.
6. Nightcrawler
I just recently wrote on this film and, if you read on Monday how personally it struck me, you’ll accept my apology if I’d rather not write more on it for the time being.
5. Gone Girl
I don’t know if this is Gone Girl the movie so much as it’s David Fincher the movie. Rarely has a film been so precisely directed. You get the feeling that if there were a fleck of dust out of place on set, it would be moved into position before the camera rolled. It’s an accomplishment to be sure, and Gone Girl says a lot with a wry smile.
It’s a perfect film, essentially, but it knows it a little too much. It’s still pretty secure in the top 10, and I suspect it may move up once I see it again, but is it as important as some of the other films here? No. ‘Important’ doesn’t necessarily equal ‘good,’ but it can add a certain weight to a film. Gone Girl is an artistic triumph, but it’s also like looking at a date who’s a little too perfect. Like its protagonists when they meet, there’s no messiness there, and you get the sense their personality is a put-on. It’s intriguing and you might see where it goes, but really you’re looking for someone who’s more willing to make a mistake or embarrass themselves.
4. The Raid 2
What the hell’s a martial arts movie doing this high? Imagine if Stanley Kubrick had ever designed the sets for a martial arts film with a gangland story told by Martin Scorsese and choreography that harkens back to the riskiest stunts of Jackie Chan’s youth. That might be a mess for a film without a motive, but The Raid 2 is a tight gangster story that reflects Indonesia’s frustration with powerful organized crime.
What’s most impressive is its cinematography. Quiet, emotional moments barely move, as if trapped in a snow globe. Yet you never see the most impressively choreographed stuntpeople – the ones holding the cameras, who weave in and out of the action with as much exacting complexity and artful nuance as the actors themselves. For martial arts films, this doesn’t just create a new way of filming fight scenes, it creates new opportunities for telling more story through them.
3. The Rover
Capturing the sensibility of a short story in a feature length film is incredibly difficult. In The Rover, it requires a narrow focus on character and something shrouded and immaculately protected in their souls. You feel compelled to learn more, to stick with disgusting characters because you need to know what it is that drives them toward a task so meaningless and without consequence. What makes it personal?
In a postapocalyptic world, following a character who couldn’t care whether you live or die, what makes his journey important at all? Something does, you get the sense of it haunting every moment Guy Pearce holds the screen like some cornered, wounded animal, vicious and feral about protecting himself yet already given up to the idea there’s no point left in living. Then there’s Robert Pattinson, playing the dull-witted boy who makes up his mind to be like Pearce’s nameless drifter, play-acting the part of wounded animal. Both are performances for the ages in as sparse and unforgiving a film as I know. It’s a film that – once it finishes – makes you thankful for stepping into the sunlight and hearing the noise of cars and seeing planes in the sky. The Rover is a masterpiece of what it’s like to be desolate not just in the world around you, but inside yourself.
2. Fury
And then there’s Fury. Like The Rover, it presents us with a young man (Logan Lerman) being trained to survive through developing a skill for hatred. In fact, many films this year – Nightcrawler, the villain in Maleficent, and even Lerman’s role in Noah – give us characters who demonstrate the hatred created through uniquely male pressures. These characters are taught to find strength through layers of domination, learning to abuse the “lesser” violently and sexually in order to secure a role in society. None of them communicate it like Fury, however, its metaphors stripped to the bone in as stark a depiction of war as has ever been put to the screen.
1. Under the Skin
A Scottish art film in which each artist – sound designers, composer, cinematographer – was allowed to go wild when creating their own, unique perspective of a central vision, edited into a horror film about identity and sexual consumption. Scarlett Johansson plays an alien in human form whose job is to capture and digest human beings. She does so by luring drifters and other lonely men away from the public, tempting them with sex, and consuming them in some of the creepiest visual metaphors you’ve ever seen.
What Under the Skin does best is tricking us into viewing the narrative through the perspective of a sexual predator, and later using nontraditional means – inverted lighting schemes and Pavlovian musical cues – to coldly bring us out of it and make us consider what we’ve seen. It’s a mad, pulsating, unnerving film you don’t always know what to do with, sometimes frustrating but always captivating. What’s most impressive is that it doesn’t organize every artist’s contribution beneath a single directorial vision, which is usually better for a film – each perspective and artistic layer can still be seen in the final product. In truth, it’s the only way a film like this could have worked so well, as a rarity that can be viewed from so many different angles.
What will change by January? Probably a lot, even though I have a very hard time seeing those very top films unseated. Hopefully, I’ve inspired you to go check out one of them. Is there anything I’ve missed that you feel strongly about?
If there’s one fault to find across this summer’s best blockbusters, it’s that we’ve become so good at translating plot very quickly, we often skirt over the story in order to highlight the stupendously good action. Much of this is due to the number of sequels and remakes we have – there’s less story to tell if we already know the characters and situation heading in.
The rebooted Planet of the Apes series then, remains a bit of a throwback. The first entry, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, outlined how genetically modified chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas first become intelligent, and how we humans accidentally destroy ourselves. It created a non-human hero in the chimp Caesar (Andy Serkis), raised by a caring human yet struggling to come to terms with being part of two worlds.
Now its sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, takes the story to a darker, even more challenging place. While humanity dies out to the plague it invented, the intelligent apes have taken up residence in the Redwoods of California. They practice a non-violent society, but rifts between Caesar and the militant Koba (Toby Kebbel) become apparent when surviving humans happen into the forest.
The humans need power from a nearby dam, but the apes are wary. While the human leader Dreyfus (Gary Oldman) distrusts the apes, his friend Malcolm (Jason Clarke) asks for three days to try to negotiate a settlement that avoids war. What follows is a one-step-forward, two-steps-back peace process that is one of the tensest pieces of storytelling this year. It’s a rare movie that shows how truly difficult it is to be a peacemaker between two cultures bent on destroying the other.
This is where Dawn stands out from other blockbusters. There’s so much more story here, so many compelling character moments for ape and man alike, that I’m astonished it all takes place in barely over two hours. There’s a miniseries’ worth of content here, packed in and yet given ample room to breathe and fill out the film’s world.
Needless to say, Koba and Dreyfus both use the lull of peace to mobilize their armies. And just like politicians do to justify their warmongering, they eventually need a war. Like Russia and Ukraine. Like Israel and Palestine. Like allies we fund and supply in Syria who become enemies the minute they cross into Iraq. It’s a tale we’re simultaneously knee-deep in and terrifyingly naïve about, boiled down to its essentials.
For the apes, who preach “Ape does not kill ape” in the beginning, the resulting betrayals and civil war also reflect a Cain and Abel narrative. Serkis and Kebbel deserve more appreciation than they’ll get as actors. Even though their performances result in CGI characters, they must develop Caesar’s and Koba’s relationship primarily through movement. Serkis, in particular, is famous for motion-capture characters ranging from Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies to the namesake of King Kong. Here, Serkis’s Caesar is understated, allowing Kebbel’s Koba to steal the show. These actors must convey human emotion in a non-human way, and essentially direct animators who later bring the rival chimpanzees to life. In its own way, this can be far more work than actors who aren’t motion-captured; Serkis has been campaigning for an Oscar nomination for years now and it’s high time he’s recognized for his unparalleled work.
The 3-D is very solid. Despite much of the action happening in gloom (a death knell for many 3-D films), the picture is always crisp and clear. Especially effective are the moments we see the world from the apes’ perspective – atop a redwood or the Golden Gate Bridge. I hope you don’t fear heights. 3-D always takes away some finer visual detail, no matter the film, so you’ll recognize a little bit more nuance to the apes’ emotions in the 2-D version, but you can’t go wrong – in either format, the film’s visuals are compelling and it has heart to spare.
This is a sequel that resonates, especially as we watch yet one more war break out halfway around the world. It connects emotionally. More importantly than showing you a world you’ve never seen before, it shows you a culture you’ve never seen before, and it tells the tragic story of how it’s torn apart the same way we tear ours apart. This is sci-fi at its best, both entertaining and meaningful.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is rated PG-13 for violence and language. Its action is reasonable without being brutal and, more importantly, it’s always grounded and given emotional context.
Gabriel Diego Valdez 