Off Script: Near Dark

Film: Near Dark
Format: DVD from personal collection on rockin’ flatscreen.

When I first started blogging, I made the decision to rewatch everything I was going to review. That’s resulted in some pain more than once, of course, but it’s a decision I stand by. While plenty of my opinions have remained the same over the years, a number of my opinions have shifted one way or the other. With a film like Near Dark, I’m happy to have maintained this position of rewatching before reviewing, because this is a film that has not aged as well as I would have liked it to.

The premise is appealing on its face. Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar), a young red-blooded Oklahoman, encounters a drifter named Mae (Jenny Wright). The two spend the night together, mostly with Mae acting oddly and Caleb attempting to get something going with her. As dawn approaches, Mae panics, demanding that he get her home. He stops a mile or so from where she is staying and demands a kiss. She agrees, and finishes the kiss with a bite on Caleb’s neck, because as we’ve known all along, Mae is a vampire. And, now that the sun is up, Caleb’s flesh starts burning in the sunlight, so he rabbits home, but is picked up by Mae and her drifter family just as he nears his house.

Hide and Seek World Champion

Film: Zero Dark Thirty
Format: Starz on rockin’ flatscreen

I do love having a DVR. Every now and then when I scan through what’s coming on a few channels, I find something worth recording. A couple of months ago during a free preview weekend of Starz, Zero Dark Thirty was playing, so I recorded it. Tonight I finally had the chance to watch it. Put simply, this is not the movie I thought it was going to be. That’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it’s just a thing.

On the surface at least, Zero Dark Thirty is the story of the pursuit of, location of, and ultimate death of Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for planning the 9/11 hijackings and attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. For a great many Americans, I can imagine that Zero Dark Thirty represents something akin to closure. Honestly, it was only a matter of time before this story made it to the big screen.

A Different Sort of Drug

Film: The Hurt Locker
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

About a year ago, one of my students asked me if I had seen The Hurt Locker yet. I hadn’t at the time and he told me that I shouldn’t bother. According to him, the film did not accurately depict his experiences in Iraq. Then again, one of my current students actually was a bomb disposal expert in Iraq, and he says the film is the real deal. Since I’ve never been in the military or been anywhere close to an active war zone, I can’t really speak to the realism of the film; I can only discuss it as a movie.

What we have is less a plot than a series of intense events that lead us to a particular place. In a sense, the film is a character study of one man in particular, but also of a personality type—a look at a genotype of soldier.

We start with a bomb disposal squad consisting of three men. Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) has the important job of communicating with the man on the site of actually disposing of IED (improvised explosive devices) and providing cover. Sanborn is by-the-book and based on his line of work, doesn’t like mavericks or surprises. Also providing cover is Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), a nervous guy who frequently second- and third-guesses everything he does. These two are lead by Staff Sergeant Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce) who has the same sort of attitude in life as Sanborn. In the first bomb disposal we witness, Thompson is killed by a phone-detonated bomb, a death that Eldridge blames himself for, since he was in a position to shoot the bomber.

Enter Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner) who is everything that Sanborn hates. He is wild and reckless, taking chances simply to take them and unwilling to leave a zone with a known bomb in it despite the risks to himself and his team. He clashes with his team, particularly Sanborn, but he’s also very good at defusing and detonating enemy ordnance. This fact alone is what keeps him alive when Sanborn has the chance to literally frag James at one point.

What we see are snapshots of the last month of the team’s tour in Iraq. We see them go out on several bomb disposal missions, each one more dangerous and touchy than the last. It soon becomes evident that James isn’t specifically reckless, but more or less addicted to the adrenaline of life in Iraq. He collects pieces from the bombs he dismantles, for instance, because he enjoys looking at and holding things that could have killed him and failed. He continues to take risks that put him in danger, and more seriously, put the lives of everyone around him in danger, a fact that Sanborn especially takes issue with. Eldridge worries, but is more concerned with his own inability to pull the trigger when it needs to be pulled.

One of the many times things come to a head is when the team goes out on a mission with Colonel John Cambridge (Christian Camargo) in two. Cambridge frequently speaks with Eldridge to help him over his problems and guilt, and when Cabridge is killed by an IED, Eldridge feels additional guilt. Eldridge is later wounded when James leads the team on a mission and exceeds their authority.

The entire point of the film, everything that we as the audience are to get from the film, can be summed up in the opening moments before the film really starts. The film begins with a quote from New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” The quote fades, but leaves the last four words. War, then, is the drug of choice for Sergeant First Class James.

And really, what we see is his addiction. We see him in the moment, defusing bombs and in the moments just after, and it is very much like he has injected himself with the best thing in the world. Then, later, after the drug wears off, there’s nothing left for him until the next mission.

What impresses me the most about this film is the near constant level of tension. We spend all but a spare couple of minutes near the end in Iraq, and most of that we spend in the field on missions with the team. There is very little time spent anywhere safe, and in many respects we experience the same level of adrenaline that James finds himself addicted to. It’s incredibly effective and intense, never really giving us a let up until those moments at the end following yet another close call and the end of the rotation for James and Sanborn.

I have to say I’ve always liked Kathryn Bigelow as a filmmaker. I love Near Dark and Strange Days, and I certainly know more than a few people with a soft spot for Point Break. I can even see elements of those films in this one. But The Hurt Locker is Bigelow’s move into the real big time, her entry into not just films that are exciting and fun, but films that are truly meaningful and artistic, films that have something to say more than action and stunts. It doesn’t surprise me that this film is as lauded as it is.

Again, I’ve never been in the military or near a combat zone, so I don’t know what it’s really like. I can’t speak to the realism. But I can believe this as a story and I can believe this as a real possibility of soldiers in combat.

Why to watch The Hurt Locker: It actually matches the tension of the film La Salaire de la Peur.
Why not to watch: Depending on which veteran you ask, your realism may vary.

Fin de Siecle

Film: Strange Days
Format: VHS from personal collection on big ol’ television


It takes guts to make near-future science fiction. If you make a science fiction film set a couple of hundred years, or even a few dozen years into the future, you have a lot more play. When you only look three or four years off, your film tends to become silly once real time catches up to the time depicted in the film. As a case in point, Strange Days depicts a 1999 that never happened, even if it was a legitimate prediction when the film was made in 1995.

The film takes place over the last two days of 1999, mistakenly believed to be the last days of the 20th century, which really ended on December 31, 2000. Anyway, a great deal is made of the impending “end of the world” because of the first digit of the year marker changing. Interesting that the actual projected calamity of Y2K hadn’t been thought of when Kathryn Bigelow made this film. Anyway.

The latest and greatest technology is SQUID. Essentially, this is a neural net placed over the scalp that plays mini discs directly into the wearer’s cerebral cortex, allowing that person to actually experience the life of the person being filmed. The technology, originally developed for the military, has gone underground and black market. The main trade is (naturally) pornography, but there is also a market for clips in which the original recorder does things like rob liquor stores. This allows the user to experience the actual adrenaline rush and thrill of committing a crime without actually risking injury or jail time. There is also a market for so called “blackjack” clips in which the recorder dies at the end, giving the person playing back the disc a small taste of the Great Beyond.

In this world of underground smut and death runs Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), an ex-cop. He’s got a thing for his ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis), who is an up-and-coming singer working for a producer named Philo Gant (Michael Wincott) as well as Gant’s main squeeze. Lenny’s best friend is another ex-cop named Max (Tom Sizemore), and he also pals around with Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett), a private security/limousine driver. Lenny buys clips from other people, duplicates them, and packages them off to his clients who want to experience a little bit of someone else’s life. Lenny makes a good deal of money at this in part because of his discretion, and in part because like any illegal drug, the market always pays big.

We learn two important things at the start of the film. The first is that a former friend of Lenny’s (and Faith’s former best friend), a prostitute named Iris (Brigitte Bako) is in trouble. She is being pursued by someone who evidently wants to kill her. We also discover that a rap artist named Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer) has been murdered gangland-execution style. It’s likely that the two are related.

While all of this is happening, Lenny starts getting mysterious clips left for him by an unknown party. These clips depict a killer breaking into apartments and hotel rooms and raping and killing the women inside. More to the point, before killing his victims, the killer is wiring them with SQUID and feeding them back his signal, essentially forcing them to not only watch themselves die, but also to experience his own excitement at the crime. Evidently, James Cameron (who wrote the screenplay) spent some time watching Peeping Tom while penning this script. The parallel is impossible to miss.

Now, Lenny has to figure out who killed Iris and why, who killed Jeriko One and why, and what all of this has to do with him, with Faith, with Philo Gant, and with the “end of the century” coming. And then there’s the problem of the two cops (Vincent D’Onofrio and William Fichtner) who seem to want to kill him.

In essence, Strange Days is noir-punk. It follows all of the conventions of a good film noir, but sets it a few years into the future, into that cyberpunk world where technology is more important than humanity, and being wired is more important than being alive. Because 1999 and 2000 turned out to be very different than depicted here, it’s important to try to view this film from a pre-Y2K perspective. It can be difficult to judge this film based on the reality of 15 years after the film being made and 10 years after the “events” depicted in the film.

Viewed from that perspective, ignoring the Y2K aspects of the story (which are ultimately sort of a red herring anyway—important for a couple of lines of dialogue and very little else), looking at this film as simply “five years in the future,” it does a remarkable job of creating a mood and a believable atmosphere. This is a dark vision, but it is a very real vision and a possible one. This is not high science fiction in the sense of hyperspace, laser guns, and travelling to distant stars. This is gritty technology: real, human, and ripe for causing a great deal of pain and suffering.

The characters throughout are motivated by their emotions, and because of this, act in believable ways. Frequently they act in ways that are incredibly stupid, but are believable because of this. Vincent D’Onofrio hasn’t been this creepy and disturbing since Full Metal Jacket.

I like this movie. I liked it the first time I saw it, and I considered it a guilty pleasure, as I often do with science fiction. This may be because I was indoctrinated by my father to think that science fiction was something to be embarrassed about liking. Dad was never a big fan of anything involving aliens, lasers, spaceships, or future technology. So there’s a part of me that’s a touch ashamed of digging this kind of material. I should get over that, because Strange Days is really good and worth watching.

Why to watch Strange Days: Advances noir into the current century.
Why not to watch: “The last day of the last year” already happened very differently.