Fox Friday: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes & The Fault In Our Stars

A very randomly special Friday here at Dammaged Goods as we look at 3 seemingly sci-fi films that have little to do with one another besides being released by Fox.  First we'll check out #1 flick in America, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the follow up to 2011's quiet yet surprisingly solid reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  In that installment we met ape Caesar who after being injected with a test drug for Alzheimer's begins to gain super intelligence and leads an uprising.  Taking place 10 years after, Dawn finds us in the remote woods outside San Francisco where Caesar leads a community of intelligent apes in a peaceful existence.  Some humans wander into their territory looking for a dam that is their last hope to generate power and with it, their hopes at rebuilding society after the human created but Simian named epidemic has wiped out much of society.  From there, Caesar clashes with anti-human members of his tribe while assisting the survivors lead by Jason Clarke's Malcolm.  Of course common ground is found as tensions rise and before long it's another ape invasion resulting in Caesar and Malcom needing to work together to restore order.  While the film isn't boring or not enjoyable per se, it just wasn't very engrossing either.  The story beats are very basic and familiar and while the apes f/x looked amazing, I didn't give a crap if the humans lived or died.  While I appreciate films like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Godzilla, X-Men: Days of Future Past and now Apes trying to give audiences a little more story and emotion with their spectacle, it hasn't been wholly successful.  The best example is Cap's very familiar story that basically takes Three Days of the Condor's paranoid and violent government controlling conspiracy themes and adds a whole lot of action and technology without actually addressing or dissecting those issues and questions from 1975.  The worst example is probably Godzilla which relegated the title star to a minor role while we ran around with some very uninteresting characters for 90 minutes.

Another hit for Fox this summer was June's The Fault In Our Stars which cost $12 million yet opened up ahead of Tom Cruise's huge, $178 million sci-fi tentpole Edge of Tomorrow and to date has grossed $25 million more in America.  Worldwide though the action and visuals of Edge have given it a nice $100 million in extra ticket receipts.  Not that they are the same kind of film vying for the same audience, they just both happen to sound like science fiction films when Fault totally isn't.  While Edge was based on a Japanese Manga, Fault's source material is the 6th novel from best-selling author John Green published in 2012.  The story of teenage cancer patients Hazel and Gus, Fault explains to us early on that cancer sucks and the story being told will not be sugar coated.  However the runtime does include plenty of stock moments like the "meet-cute", the playful yet semi-fake sounding banter and a trip to Europe.  The Descendants' Shailene Woodley plays Hazel with humor and quiet grace while Ansel Elgort's Gus is goofy and open since he's survived a bout of the sickness and won't be silenced.  What's interesting is that these two play lovers here but previously acted as brother and sister in Divergent.  There's plenty of heart on display without the drama becoming too leaden or syrupy.  There were many a sniffle in the audience but I managed to keep it together.  I can only imagine that opening weekend with young fans of the book was Niagara Falls all day and night.  While it didn't hit me the chest the way that 50/50 did, Fault was a cute film dealing with serious issues and handled nimbly by director Josh Boone and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.  Oh and Michael Biehn totally should have played someone's dad in the film.  Speaking of the Biehn, on this day in 1986, Fox released James Cameron's sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien, Aliens.  See how this all works?

Summer Cinema: The Amazing Spider-Man 2

While Summer doesn't officially begin until June 21st, the cinematic season started last weekend on Friday, May 2nd with the release of Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  If you'll recall, Sam Raimi had directed 3 chapters in the Spidey-verse with Tobey Maguire playing the brilliant but struggling and lovelorn genius Peter Parker and his radioactive spider bitten heroic alter ego Spider-Man.  After budgets continued to climb and quality lowered, plans for a 4th Raimi directed Spidey adventure were scrapped in favor of a reboot by 500 Days of Summer's Marc Webb that would allegedly put more focus on the awkward teen still reeling from the mysterious disappearance of his parents.  Coming in at a hefty $230 million, The Amazing Spider-Man wasn't a bad time at the movies, it just didn't seem that different from the 2002 version.  Instead of being a nerdy photographer, Andrew Garfield's Peter Parker is just more of a loner.  Not an emo or goth kid, not an outcast, just a kid who wears hoodies and rides a skateboard.  Which today, doesn't seem that odd.  Instead of the vivacious redhead Mary Jane, we get Parker's first love from the comics, Gwen Stacy, played by Emma Stone. 

Part 2 of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's comic creation adaptation starts out by delving further into the origins of Peter's father, Richard.  If I'm not mistaken, you don't hear much about his real parents in the comics, he's just with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben from the start.  But now, everything has to be connected with some grand threat and inherit legacy involved blah blah so Richard Parker is shown to be a scientist working for Norman Osborn who doesn't want his top secret work on regenerating spiders weaponized so he dumps young Peter with his relatives and goes on the run.  I don't know what it is that we have to explain everything about everyone these days as Man of Steel was arguably more about his two dads than it was about him.  Here, large chunks of the narrative hinge on Peter finding out what dad was up to.  Are our current heroes so bland their stories can't fill the runtime of their own movies?  Maybe the makers should consider trimming these movies down to 2 hours even so you could save a good 20 minutes from having to up the stakes at the cost of our protagonist.

Anywho, Spidey comes across overlooked, overworked and socially awkward Oscorp electrical engineer Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx) who after a horrible accident at the office, harnesses the power of electricity and becomes Electro.  Meanwhile, childhood bud Harry Osborn comes back to the city to greet his dying father Norman and becomes obsessed with using Spider-Man's blood to find a cure for a disease he and his father share.  The opening of the film is quite fun with lots of wisecracking from Spider-Man but right away the movie lost me a bit because they have Spidey rescuing this person and that, his saving Max Dillon and showing him kindness is a story jump off point but then he just lets a rampaging semi run right into traffic causing what looks like horrific accidents.  I know they need to blow shit up to keep our attention but couldn't they at least had the truck driver escape the hero instead of just being let loose to cause havoc and innocent bystander deaths?

The flick moves at a nice clip and there's sweet, nearly saccharine scenes between Garfield's Parker and Stone's Stacy as they try to make their relationship work in the midst of going to college, Peter promising her dying father to leave his daughter alone and him being Spider-Man in general.  Everything is set up pretty quickly which is nice, you get a sense of the drama and issues and it's a jump off point for the story and action to come.  Simple beats of Foxx's put upon and lonely Dillon lead up to his wild outburst when he's granted super powers and wishing to be finally noticed while Harry Osborn quickly deals with his father's ailing health, taking over a $200 billion dollar empire, swimming with corporate sharks, having a friend in Peter and a suddenly fast moving flesh eating disease.  There are plenty of nods and straight giveaways to future cinematic Spider adventures with Doctor Octopus' arms, The Vulture's wings and a suit of armor for The Rhino as part of Oscorp's secret, military style division.

If you've read the books, you know that Gwen Stacy doesn't make it and Amazing Spider-Man 2 addresses that head on.  The scene came as a shock as I had forgotten that piece of Spidey's history.  It gives the film a bit of weight and I commend the filmmakers for having the balls to do that to such a major character played by a famous actress instead of just making everything work out fine in the end.  Divergent's Shailene Woodley shot scenes as future love interest Mary Jane but were cut so we'll see if she pops up in part 3.  Facing some stiff competition in the form of Seth Rogen and Zac Efron, Spidey 2 has taken a bit of a tumble at the box office and won't scale the financial heights of it's Sam Raimi helmed predecessors but is cleaning up overseas so more web slinging, city swinging, wise cracking, Spidey-sense tingling (only used once, lame) shenanigans should be on the way.

Vernal Viewing: Divergent

We now live in a cinematic age of comic book and Young Adult fiction adaptations, why?  Because they're a readily available source material that have name brand recognition to at least one segment of society and studios are just looking for that next hit franchise a la Iron Man, Twilight, Harry Potter and Batman.  So far, the YA market has seen it's hits like Twilight and Hunger Games as well as it's misses including Mortal Instruments, The Host and Ender's Game.  This past weekend, new challenger to the throne, Divergent, opened at # 1 with a healthy $56 million take and a solid A cinemascore.  A sequel has already been greenlit but it's being helmed by the guy who did RIPD so we might be in trouble...While I can't wrap my head around why people like Hunger Games, I did enjoy the crap out of Ender's Game.  Divergent fell in-between for me.  The story of a future Chicago where a wall protects the survivors of a great war and the population is split into five factions based on a test and the subject's choice whether they're kind, smart, honest, fearless, etc.


Tris (Shailene Woodley) is a young woman who has parents in the caring clan (they all have names but my memory isn't that good) that run the government.  Since she was a young girl she's dreamed of joining the Dauntless aka the wild boys who run free and protect the city.  Her test results show she's Divergent, which means she isn't just one trait, she's all of them and better.  But she has to hide it or risk being hunted down and killed as being different is a threat to the society leaders run by Titanic's Kate Winslet.  On the day of faction choosing, Tris goes against her parents' wishes and joins Dauntless, where she meets James Franco's athletic older brother Four (Theo James), who along with Eric (Jai Courtney), train all the new recruits and select how and where they'll end up serving.  Tris pushes herself physically and mentally to be accepted into the clan but her Divergent powers begin to show themselves in later phases of mental training.  Soon, all heck breaks loose as Winslet plans a coup d'état to overthrow the current governing body, drugs the Dauntless to become her personal army and begins her quest to wipe out any objectors.  Tris, with the help of her parents and a few rebels, fight back and save the day.

All in, Divergent has a lot going for it.  Director Neil Burger sets up the world so it seems less flimsy than The Hunger Games' shaky foundation of opulence and poverty taken straight from a text book.  There's a low watt cast of familiar faces throughout like Maggie Q, Jai Courtney, Ray Stevenson, Mekhi Phifer and Ashley Judd to support the young and talented Woodley.  There's a lot to do in the movie and much of it includes setting up the world, Tris' training, developing her relationship with Four, exploring her Divergent-ness so by the time the shit starts to hit the fan, you're wondering how much longer it's going to go on.  Like a John Woo movie or Return of the King, Divergent could have ended at least 5 times but kept going.  What made it more interesting for me was that Tris actually does stuff in the movie, she goes against her family, goes outside her comfort zone and joins the clan she's always wanted to be part of.  She won't be left behind and is always moving, not just reacting or getting dragged along like Mystique was in Hunger Games.  Film universe wise, I hope the filmmakers and writers sent a thank you note to the crews of Starship Troopers and Equilibrium because there's a lot from both of those movies here.  You can literally count off the Troopers similarities:  co-ed showers, a remark about statistically hitting a target and then a whole knife throwing/hand incident.

On the negative side, Miles Teller and Jai Courtney's unimpressive performances basically spell doom for their future portrayals of Mr. Fantastic in the Fantastic Four reboot and Kyle Reese in the new Terminator series.  Teller plays a bully here but seriously, who wouldn't slap that weak chinned, K.D. Lang lookalike in the face and send him crying?  Then Courtney, from Die Hard 5 fame, continues his hard man/brute routine only this time with a Macklemore haircut.  Kyle Reese is a sensitive action hero who gave up his life for love.  I just don't see Courtney being able to pull that off.  Oh and also, for future Chicago, there's two Asians and I don't think any Latinos.  This was strictly a white people party with a few black guests future.  Most of Tris' contemporaries are young, white males with brown hair, so when one of them is revealed to be a threat, you can't even tell which one he is.

Getting the early buzz going: