Snow White and the Huntsman

Charlize Theron as the movie's saving grace.

    It seems we’re in the middle of a fairy-tale movie revival.  2010’s Alice in Wonderland recast the titular heroine as a mail-wearing, sword swinging leader of men, Julia Roberts put her spin on Snow White’s evil queen earlier this year in Mirror, Mirror, and Angelina Jolie is poised to take on Sleeping Beauty’s villainess Maleficent in a 2014 release of the same name.  Is the public hungry for live action morality tales?  Has nostalgia gotten the best of Hollywood producers?  Or are these movies just trying to make a quick buck off properties people are already familiar with?  If Snow White and the Huntsman is any indication, it’s probably the latter.  This isn’t a bad movie, but too much of it feels perfunctory and derivative, as though it went through one too many focus groups before seeing release.

    Snow White and the Huntsman shares many things in common with Disney’s 1937 cartoon classic: there’s a handsome prince and a bunch of dwarves and a poison apple and so forth, but this is not your father’s, or rather your grandfather’s, Snow White.  In this much darker version, the princess Snow White (Kristin “Vampire Bride” Stewart) grows up locked away in a tower where she’s been imprisoned by a wicked queen (Charlize Theron).  She escapes, of course, and the queen dispatches the beer-swilling Huntsman (Chris “God of Thunder” Hemsworth) to collect her.  And the game is on!

    Or at least it would be if the movie didn’t become so tedious so quickly.  Part of the problem is the performances.  As Snow White, Kristin Stewart is mostly a dud.  Other characters keep talking about how Snow White is pure and good and innocent, but Stewart looks vaguely irritated throughout the entire movie, as though wondering whether she’s doomed to play fantastical damsels for the rest of her career.  She also betrays a lack of dramatic chops in a later scene where she gives what’s supposed to be a rousing call to arms but what plays more like a strange bellowing fit.  Chris Hemsworth brings a dependably brawny swagger to his role as the Huntsman, but the movie never slows down long enough to develop him or his would-be romance with Snow White.

    One performance that does work, and works in a rather grand way, is Charlize Theron’s as the evil queen.  Theron is the movie’s secret weapon and easily the best reason to see it.  She purrs with menace as she seduces the king, Snow White’s father, before betraying him to claim the throne, explodes with scorching anger when displeased, and generally gives great high bitch.  At the same time, Theron adeptly suggests the fear festering at the root of the queen’s ambition, and with the help of a few well-placed flashbacks turns her into the movie’s most interesting character.  The special effects team pitches in to give her a number of eye-popping powers that add to her evil majesty.

    When not focused on showing us how the queen can transform into a flock of ravenous birds or commune with her liquid chrome mirror, the visual effects awe and underwhelm in about equal measure.  First-time director Rupert Sanders is clearly a man of considerable vision, but he doesn’t always get to express it.  An early stretch of the movie set in an evil forest looks blotchy and dark; whatever interesting art design may be there is blotted out by the muddy photography.  But a later section, set in an enchanted glen filled with playful sprites and cheerful woodland critters, looks terrific, like a live action version of the cartoon original married with the surreal visuals from Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.  I particularly enjoyed the clump of mushrooms that opened their eyes to peer at Snow White as she passed by.

    Enchanting as that interlude is, the movie moves all too swiftly toward its conclusion, which consists of a medieval siege of the queen’s castle that draws incredibly unfavorable comparisons to far more impressive sequences in movies like Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.  Why fantasy flicks would even attempt something like this in the wake of those movies I’m not sure.  More satisfying is the final confrontation between Snow White and the evil queen, but Kristin Stewart is less than convincing as a fierce warrior and it’s probably a bad sign that I was half-rooting for the queen to win.

    Looking back, I’m left asking myself just who this movie is for.  The main characters are female, but young girls will likely be put off by the morose action.  Likewise, young boys probably won’t find enough of it.  This version of the Snow White story is too different from others to trade in nostalgia, and the whole production just isn’t done well enough to attract people simply looking for a good time at the movies.  Like me, I think that most people will leave the theater feeling indifferent, so maybe the moral of this fairy tale is just not to see it.

The Dictator

Beware the beard.

 With The Dictator, shock-jockeying actor-comedian Sasha Baron Cohen makes his first foray into the realm of scripted comedy.  Cohen scored a hit in 2006 with his ambitiously titled Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, in which he flounced around as a backwater third-world hick and shocked the consciences of unsuspecting middle-class Americans.  Satire came pretty naturally to that movie: all it had to do was put Borat in the same room as someone not in on the joke and watch.  The Dictator takes aim at some of the same topics, but in moving to a scripted format loses a bit of edge.

This time around, Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, supreme ruler of the fictional nation of Wadiya.  Aladeen is stupid, spoiled and, due to his country’s vast oil reserves, rich enough to do absolutely whatever he wants.  An early scene shows him competing in Wadiya’s answer to the Olympic Games, where he’s allowed to carry a gun and shoot athletes that threaten to outperform him.  These preliminary sections are a straight-forward send-up of real-world dictators like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il (to whom The Dictator is dedicated) and provide the movie’s biggest laughs.

When Aladeen heads to New York City to address the United Nations, his advisors scheme to replace him with a dim-witted double.  Aladeen soon finds himself wandering the streets of Manhattan, bereft of his power and his beard, reduced to working as a grocer at a health food store run by Zoe (Anna Feris), an environmentally conscious, politically liberal feminist whom Aladeen begins to fall for despite their vast, vast cultural differences.  These things… a plot, a romance, an arc… are things that Cohen didn’t really use in his previous movies.  That’s not to say he’s now a slave to them; the script frequently whisks Aladeen away on madcap misadventures designed purely to get laughs, but the fact that they’re here at all makes The Dictator feel a touch more traditional than I had expected.

And considering his pedigree, I’m not sure that traditional is a good look for Cohen, at least not the kind of halfway-there traditional on display here.  Like Borat, The Dictator trades mainly in vulgar, barf-into-your-popcorn kind of gags.  Most of the ordinary bodily fluids get a good workout, and there are some choice lines about the value of female infants.  It’s strange to then watch Cohen shift gears and play the vulnerable rom-com lead in his scenes opposite Feris or toss off softball references to Eat, Pray, Love.  Maybe we’re catching Cohen in a transitional phase on his way to producing more ordinary multiplex fare, but if so the transition is a bit awkward.

In fact, even the outrageous bits don’t hit quite as hard as they should.  There’s one scene, for example, where Aladeen loses… something (I’ll let you find out the details yourself)… in a pregnant woman’s uterus.  We then get a view, surely the first of its kind, of the object from an insider’s perspective.  The joke keeps building from there, and it’s one of those moments when everyone in the theater lets out a collective groan, part delighted exasperation and part violent recoil, the likes of which Cohen was probably going for.  But even that joke is a little, dare I say, safe when compared to similar moments from Borat.  Even if it’s an inventive and no doubt dutifully prepared bit, it lacks the thrill of spontaneity that made the previous outing so popular.

One thing The Dictator does have going for it is its willingness to engage with material that’s relevant on a macro level in the world today, something beyond the merely personal stuff explored time and again by its contemporaries.  True, lampooning brutal dictatorships hardly amounts to making a controversial statement, but Cohen displays enough of an understanding of the mechanics behind dictatorships to ensure that his film actually has a point.  There’s a speech toward the end that draws a lot of comparisons between dictatorships and democracy, and while it’s all a bit on the nose I was glad to see the movie arrive somewhere.

The Dictator is a bit softer than Cohen’s earlier stuff, but I suppose he couldn’t have kept on making movies that lived on the precarious edge of bad taste forever.  If this flick truly does represent Cohen in transition, I hope he keeps going in that new direction.  He’s a smart guy and The Dictator is a smart movie, and I’d love to see what he could do with something not required to be so broad.

Xenoblade

To vistas.

    Various publications have called Xenoblade Chronicles “a landmark achievement,” “a towering triumph,” and “the best RPG [of] this generation.”  One review raved that “everything it does dramatically improves and innovates the RPG genre.”  People like it, and while I certainly enjoyed my time with the game I don’t think it’s quite worthy of evangelization.  It’s towering, all right: huge and complex and epic in a way that’s downright Biblical, but its ambition occasionally gets in the way of its playability.  It takes the Japanese RPG down some new roads, but not all of those roads are worth traveling.  And it may well be the best JRPG of this generation, but considering the competition is that really much of an accomplishment?  It’s a big, bold, beautiful game with a lot to admire, but the second coming of the JRPG juggernaut it is not.  But if we’re lucky, it’s a herald of better days ahead.

Tall Tale

    Xenoblade Chronicles was directed by Tetsuya Takahashi, a JRPG veteran who worked on classics like Chrono Trigger before helming original games like Xenogears and Xenosaga.  Xenoblade is not a sequel to those games any more than the latest Final Fantasy is a sequel to the one before it, but they share a breadth of creative vision that is undeniably interesting.  The narrative idea at the core of Xenoblade is sort of brilliant: a long time ago there were two titans, the Bionis and the Mechonis, who fought against each other in an epic battle.  In the millennia since their fight, civilizations have sprung up to live on their corpses.  The Bionis has cities on its head, marshes on its thigh, and jungles on its chest.  It’s an intoxicating notion and a pretty effective expression of the well-worn idea that the world is a living thing.

    The level designers take this idea and make the most of it.  An early area located just above the Bionis’ knee shows off what they have in store: it’s a vast plain complete with swooping valleys, craggy mountainsides, intricate cave systems, and more, all of it seamlessly connected with zero loading times.  Monsters, not all of them hostile, dot the landscape, and in the distance there is always the Mechonis rising menacingly above the horizon.  Add in weather effects, a day-night cycle, haunting music, and a draw distance that has to be seen to be believed, and the world of Xenoblade approaches something like beauty.

    I just wish the game gave players more reasons to explore its painstakingly detailed geography.  Those who take it upon themselves to traipse off the beaten path are rewarded with crystals, implements that can be used to upgrade equipment by way of a mind-numbingly dull mini-game so boring I actually resisted exploration for fear that I would eventually have to engage in it.  Players can also take advantage of the game’s quest system by talking to certain NPCs (conveniently marked with exclamation points hovering over their heads) who will send them off on a variety of undercooked, uninvolving errands that feel more like taking out the Sunday trash than embarking on a grand adventure.  In the end, the best reason to explore the game’s environments is to see what beautiful sight the developers have queued up next.  That’s a great compliment to the art team, but it leaves the game world feeling strangely sterile despite all the love that clearly went into building it.

    Luckily, the central story is strong enough so that players can more or less afford to ignore the piteous extras.  The main characters fall into recognizable types familiar to anyone who’s ever played an RPG.  There’s Shulk, the fair-faced, soft-spoken hero.  His friend Reyn is the boorish tank.  There’s also a couple of ingénues, a taciturn swordsman, and a roly-poly, two-foot tall woodland critter who would be outlandish in any other game but who fits into a distinct JRPG mold as old as the genre itself.  The group doesn’t break any new ground, but they’re still a likable lot drawn with just enough specificity to set them apart from their long line of forebears.  They’re also well-acted by a cast of mostly British actors, and after spending upwards of sixty hours with them I admit I grew attached.

    The story itself isn’t half bad, either.  For as long as Shulk has been alive, his home on Bionis has been under periodic attack by the Mechon, malevolent robots from Mechonis.  After a particularly brutal assault on his home town, he sets out on a quest for revenge that slowly builds into something bigger.  The tale is well-paced, with few cut-scenes lasting longer than a couple of minutes and a healthy stock of interesting ancillary characters.  There are a few baffling twists along the way (what JRPG would be complete without them?), but the story rights itself by the home stretch and barrels ahead to a satisfying, if safe, conclusion.

Turn-Based Battles and Other Dirty Words

    Takahashi, whose Xenosaga titles often felt like a sci-fi miniseries occasionally interrupted by gameplay, shows admirable restraint in cutting down on the number of obtrusive cut-scenes.  For the first time in his solo career, the emphasis is on the part of the game you actually play, so it’s unfortunate that the best I can say about Xenoblade’s gameplay is that it could have been a lot worse.  In another much-lauded move, Xenoblade’s combat unfolds in real time.  First, players approach monsters in the field.  Before beginning a battle, they choose one party member to control while the game’s AI takes over for the others.  When not auto-attacking, each character can choose from their own list of special skills, each of which have their own effects, cool-down times, and tricks to using properly.  The battle system is fast-paced, clean, reasonably deep, and I kind of hate it.

    Look, I don’t know exactly when the RPG developers of the world got together and banished turn-based battles to the deep dark pit currently occupied by save points and auto-aim, but this shit has got to stop.  The Xenoblade team actually does a lot to make their real-time fights more involving.  Some moves work best when deployed from a certain angle, periodic glimpses into the future allow you to stop particularly deadly assaults before they happen, and chain attacks allow players to string together complimentary techniques from different party members.  But even with these updates the combat too often feels rote, like playing an MMORPG without all the social interaction that make MMORPGs worth playing.  There may come a day when some enterprising developer effectively marries the kinetic satisfaction of real-time combat to the mental massage provided by turn-based battles, but today is not that day.  Today is just Friday.

    Outside of combat, the menu-based character building is satisfyingly rich, perhaps too much so.  There’s a lot to do.  AP earned in battle lets you update techniques, passive skills are learned and even shared over time, and a relationship system affects how well characters work together in battle.  Generally, the game introduces these and other factors gradually enough so as not to overwhelm the player.  The exception is the inventory management system, which is simply too dense to be any fun.  Each character can be outfitted with a weapon, armor, leggings, helmet, shoes, and armguards.  Each of these can then be bedazzled with a limited number of attribute-enhancing gems (the product of our mind-numbingly dull crystal mini-game from before), which can then be rearranged to achieve different effects.  The end result of all this complexity is that whenever I saw a new shop, I cried a little.  Equipping your party takes a depressingly large amount of time, and while I grant that many less obsessive players may not have a problem with this, I think the better solution would have just been to simply the process.  Who wears armguards, anyway?

    As tedious as parts of the Xenoblade gameplay experience could be, I appreciate that they came mostly from a desire to overachieve.  So the battle system never quite takes off into the stratosphere.  It gets the job done and it introduces new ideas that can be expanded upon in future titles.  So the story never quite lives up to the potency of that initial image.  It’s still a good yarn told with breathless earnestness in classic JRPG fashion.  So it doesn’t reinvent the JRPG.  Who said it needed reinventing?  All the genre needs is games of vision and caliber, and despite its shortcomings Xenoblade possesses these two things in earnest.

The Avengers

Two men in Halloween costumes fight to save the world.

The Avengers is, among other things, one of most audacious marketing ploys Hollywood has ever conceived.  Sure, it’s a summer blockbuster at heart, complete with an enormous budget and a smorgasbord of special effects designed specifically to melt the eyes out of your head, but it’s more than that.  It’s a direct continuation of no less than three entirely discrete big-budget super-heroic action movies, and in making it Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Pictures have demonstrated a commitment to bigness seldom seen even in an industry as overblown as the movies.

Thinking about it, something like The Avengers was bound to happen sooner or later.  Comic books about superheroes are known for taking place in complicated, densely interconnected universes, so it makes sense that the movies based on them would eventually start to link together.  You don’t need to have seen the movies leading up to The Avengers to enjoy it, but a bit of context helps.  The plot revolves around the Tesseract, a mysterious alien cube of great power that was last seen plunging to the bottom of the ocean in Captain America: The First Avenger.  The Tesseract is currently being studied by S.H.I.E.L.D., a clandestine espionage agency headed by veteran spy Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson).  When it’s stolen by demi-god Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who himself was last seen plummeting through a dimensional worm-hole at the end of Thor, Fury enlists the help of super-spy Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) in rounding up a crew of heroes capable of getting it back.  That group includes the brilliant but abrasive Iron Man (Robert Downy Jr.), recently revived World War II legend Captain America (Chris Evans), and Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

Thor (Chris Hemsworth), god of thunder and Loki’s brother, eventually joins the team as well.  It’s a big cast, and each of them brings along their own unique star power and iconographic baggage.  To manage it, the producers tapped writer-director Joss Whedon, a man known mostly for the creation of television series like Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It was a smart hire.  Whedon has plenty of experience directing super-powered ensembles, and his script takes the story seriously enough so that we can get invested but not so seriously that the going gets dreary.  Laughs are plentiful, and they go a long way toward helping viewers settle into the premise.

Whedon also does a good job of pacing the movie such that almost everyone is given a chance to shine.  As the smug, cynical Iron Man, Downy Jr. gets the lion’s share of the crowd-pleasing lines along with the movie’s most moving heroic moment.  Evans’ Captain America provides an effectively earnest foil.  Chris Hemsworth’s Thor adds conviction and weight to the central plotline, and Tom Hiddelston has a blast smirking and sniveling his way through his role as the villain.  Even Johansson’s Black Widow, who has no superpowers, feels like she matters.  She has an especially great scene with Loki where she tries to fake him out into revealing some incriminating information.

Everyone, in short, is sure to have their favorite, and for me the Hulk nearly runs away with the show.  Ruffalo is the third actor to play the role in recent years, and he brings a wry, smirking self-pity to it that somehow never becomes grating.  The lone dud of the group is Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), an expert marksman whose role is so slight it almost feels like he doesn’t need to be there at all.  That hiccup aside, each member is well-developed enough so that we don’t want them to die once they arrive at the inevitable special effects-laden battle toward the end of the third act.

As spectacular as that battle is, and much credit is due to the effects team for some imaginative and technically immaculate work, its inevitability does take away slightly from the overall effect.  For all of its meticulous craft, for all the jokes and the bombast and the carefully choreographed characterization, The Avengers is occasionally too busy being an action blockbuster to dive as deeply into the characters as I wanted.  That’s part of the plan, of course.  If the movie holds things back, it’s so they can be better explored in the series of spider-webbing sequels.  The Avengers is a great time at the movies, but it’s also a link in a chain so wide I don’t think even Marvel knows where it ends.  With The Avengers, Marvel has committed not only to a franchise but to a network of franchises, and if the quality remains this high it’s a network in which I’m glad to be caught.

Chasing Ghosts

    Imagine that you’re in the back of a dimly lit bar in rural North Carolina.  You’re talking to a bespectacled, heavy-set gentleman, slow of eye and soft of speech, who’s pouring out his life’s woes to you between slurps of amber draft.  He tells you that he has no job, that he lives alone, and that he is not on speaking terms with his best friend, not since the two had a blistering fight over twenty years ago.  “What did you two fight about?” you ask.  And the man says that the friend beat his high score in Berserk.

    Do you laugh at this man?  He did, after all, just say something ridiculous.  Or do you sympathize with him, unable to mock a guy for whom this is clearly a very, very serious business?  If you ever happen to catch a 2007 documentary called Chasing Ghosts, and I think anyone with a subscription to Netflix and even a passing interest in video games should, you’ll get to make your own decision.  The man’s name is Joel West, and he’s one of a group of guys who back in the grand old 80s considered themselves to be the greatest video game players in the world.

    Of course, this was in the days when video games were confined mainly to arcade machines like Pac Man and Asteroids.  The title of Greatest Video Game Player in the World means something very different today, but just try telling these guys that.  Watching this movie, I caught myself absentmindedly gaping more than a few times after one of the now middle-aged arcade heroes reflected on their gaming pasts.  Consider our Berserk player from above, who at one point looks into the camera and says without a trace of irony that “there are days when you and the game become one.”  Or take Roy Scildt, a Missile Command prodigy, who talks down to his colleagues for playing “pansy-ass” games like Pac Man rather than “macho” ones like Missile Command.  The movie’s best running joke, or maybe it isn’t a joke, is that these guys take what looks from a distance to be a trifling hobby deadly seriously.  They talk about their high scores in Donkey Kong as though they’re Olympic gold medals.  Half the time I wasn’t sure whether to double over laughing or burst into tears.

    And yet, there are times when the movie inspires genuine wistfulness.  Director Lincoln Ruchti structures his documentary around a 1982 gathering of these gamers in Ottumwa, Iowa, the self-proclaimed video game capitol of world.  They were meeting to compete against each other in the pursuit of all-time high scores at the Twin Galaxies Arcade, and the strange thing is that some people actually took notice.  Life Magazine profiled the event as representative of the age, local cheerleaders became gaming “groupies,” and a few of the best players got the chance to compete against each other on national television.

    But of course it couldn’t last.  Arcades started to empty as home consoles came to the fore, and most of these kids seemed unwilling to make the switch.  In another of those tragi-comic moments, one gamer criticizes Street Fighter 2 for being too ostentatious and lacking the character of simpler games like Millipede.  Some of the guys grew up to be the kind of navel-gazing, basement-dwelling stereotypes modern gamers have been trying to escape for decades, but most of them moved on, got jobs, and started families.  What they have mostly in common is that they all look back on their days as gaming superstars as some of the happiest of their lives, and after a while I admit their nostalgia proved catching.

    So how are we supposed to react to these guys?  Laugh or cry?  Viewers could be forgiven for doing the former.  We’re talking about men who freely admit to playing Galaga for 48 hours straight and then smiling smugly as if they’d just won a Nobel Prize.  But there are too many moments of real vulnerability to take the entire thing as a joke.  Battlezone specialist Sam Blackburn has a particularly open moment, admitting that he took to video games after braking up with his girlfriend, killing time by moving flashing dots across an arcade screen when he wanted to be spending it with someone special.  The role of video games in society has evolved so much over the past thirty years.  They’re in our homes, they’re shared with our family and friends, and to play them, even to play them a lot, is considered an ordinary hobby rather than a strange handicap.  But I wonder if there aren’t some gamers who still feel a bit of a sting when they tell someone they love video games and get a flustered look in return.  Maybe the guys profiled in Chasing Ghosts are pioneers, digital frontiersmen who legitimized gaming for future generations.

    Or maybe they’re hopeless nerds.  Watch the movie and decide for yourself.

The Cabin in the Woods

    When Wes Craven’s Scream was released in 1996, it was hailed as a unique take on the horror genre.  The plot was standard issue slasher flick.  There was a killer.  There were victims, most of them young, many of them girls.  There was an attractive cast of teenagers destined to either solve the mystery or die trying.  But unlike so many teenagers in so many horror movies before it, these kids knew they were in a horror movie and tried to use the rules of the genre to their advantage.  That gave the movie a satirical edge, but as layered as Scream became it never broke those rules, even if it had some fun bending them.

    Not so with The Cabin in the Woods, a new movie co-written by geek god Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, Whedon’s longtime collaborator and the film’s director.  If Scream attempted to deconstruct the horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods rips it open stem to stern, stuffs it full of dynamite, lights a match and lets the chunks fall where they may.  It starts, as these flicks so often do, with a group of photogenic college students: there’s good girl Dana (Kristin Conneley), bad girl Jules (Anna Hutchison), alpha jock Curt (Chris Hemsworth, lately of Thor), beta jock Holden (Jesse Williams), and affable stoner Marty (Fran Kranz).  As this quintet sets off for a weekend at the titular cabin in the woods, we can already tell that the script is more carefully written than we might have expected.  It would have been easy to write these characters off as stereotypes, but the writers actually give them personalities and at least a few clever lines apiece.  As a longtime Whedon devotee, I enjoyed hearing his brainy brand of banter battered across the big screen.

    But it soon becomes clear that the film has other things on its mind.  For even before the kids set out on their vacation, the audience has been privy to the pithy discussions of two office drones (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford), bored salary slaves who work in some vast underground complex teeming with employees all seemingly bent on monitoring the every move of our protagonists.  Much of the fun in these early stretches comes from slowly uncovering the details concerning just what these two layers have to do with each other.  Unpredictability, it turns out, is one of the film’s strongest assets.

    For reasons I’ll leave you to discover for yourself, it ends up that the underground office exists to manipulate our heroes into acting out a typical American horror movie, and Whedon and Goddard spend the film’s middle sections poking fun at familiar horror staples.  Characters who are otherwise well-rounded individuals find themselves devolving into genre stereotypes, amalgamated redneck zombies rise from the earth to splatter our group’s guts across the forest floor, and the heroes inexplicably want to split up (to cover more ground, of course) even when it’s painfully clear they should stick together.   At this point, I became a little concerned that the movie would be satisfied to just point and laugh at the absurdity of the horror genre, but it’s in the third act, when the movie’s two worlds collide, that things get really interesting.  To spoil what happens would do you a disservice, but rest assured that the film’s final third is very dynamic, very imaginative, and a lot of fun to watch.

    The final act also takes a bit of a left turn into profundity that comes off as a touch insincere.  The script goes beyond satire into something approaching philosophy, openly pontificating about the nature of horror movies, why people continue to see them, and why society may need them.  The Cabin in the Woods is practically made out of right angles so the shift isn’t as jarring as it might have been in a different film, but some of the diatribe still made me want to roll my eyes.

    The movie, perhaps inevitably, is unable to find a consistent tone.  Parts of it play like a straight-up zombie flick, parts like an office sitcom, one chunk like a special effects bonanza and one part, at once the most interesting and tiresome part, like a sociological dissertation.  At a lean 95 minutes, The Cabin in the Woods is probably too short for all of these segments to be fully realized and joined into a cohesive whole, but if it went on any longer I fear it would lose its frenzied, sharp-turn-over-a-deep-drop spirit.  It’s too bold a movie to be perfect, but it’s a lot of giddy fun and should especially please those who take their humor with a heavy dose of irony.