The title refers to the discipline of silence observed by many contemplative religious orders, and in particular to the discipline of nighttime silence, which is stricter than during the day.

Into Great Silence is an odyssey, or perhaps a pilgrimage, into a world of such silence: the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps, head monastery of the Carthusian order, where Gröning received unprecedented permission to shoot in 2002. (A postscript to the film informs us that this permission came more than sixteen years after Gröning first approached the general prior with the proposal — an illuminating insight into the deliberateness of life in this world.)

Gröning stayed with the Carthusians for about half a year, observing in both senses of that word their rigorous way of life, from their discipline of silence to their grueling routine of prayer, work and sleep. Working alone, using only available light, he shot for approximately three hours a day, eventually amassing over 120 hours of material.

The formal rigor of the finished 164-minute film, mirroring the ascetic strictness of the monks themselves, offers none of the didactic or expositional context associated with typical documentaries. No voiceover narration expounds the history of the monastery buildings or the Carthusian order. No captions clarify or introduce us to the events or rituals we see.

No interview footage furnishes psychological insights into the dispositions or motivations of the monks (apart from a single brief homiletical reflection late in the film). In contrast to nearly wordless nature documentaries like Atlantis, Microcosmos and Winged Migration — or for that matter essentially the whole history of silent film — there is no nondiegetic music to provide emotional cues and mood support to the audience.

The result is more than a documentary of monastic life. It is a transcendent meditation on the human pursuit of meaning; on man as a religious and social creature; on the form and function of symbols and ritual and tradition; on the rhythm of work and prayer, day and night, winter and spring.

The silence is not total; the monks must speak, to celebrate the liturgy and other special functions, to accomplish certain necessary tasks, and on weekly outings from the monastery to socialize and discuss their life together. But if the silence is not absolute, it is still the point of reference; it gives meaning to the words, not the other way around. "The symbols are not to be questioned — we are," says one monk during one of those weekly outings. The monks don't question the silence, it questions them — and us, if we let it.

For all its asceticism, Into Great Silence is an exquisitely beautiful film. Precise compositions and splendid use of light at times overtly suggest the paintings of Vermeer, while stunning use of the natural beauty around the monastery may evoke Malick or Tarkovsky.

Like the monks' lives, the film is cyclical and repetitive. Yet there is also movement, direction. Into Great Silence opens in bleak midwinter, amid austerity, frozenness, impenetrability. The silence is so profound you can hear the falling of snowflakes. The monks go about their business, but we see them as outsiders. There is no entering their world.

But there is. A pair of postulants are received as novices and take the tonsure. An eye-opening scene reveals an older monk enjoying a surreptitious bit of fun with some furry friends. There are small signs of life, of coming spring. An icebound succulent clings to life. An elderly monk walks into a snow-covered field and begins shoveling, seemingly at random; eventually we see he is clearing garden beds for planting.

At last there are dripping icicles, melting snow, running water. Spring comes to the mountains. When did we realize that the monks' lives aren't so impenetrable after all? Severity and rigor yields to familiarity, fullness, even joy. At last we see the secret of the cloistered life: In rigor and discipline there is freedom and fulfilment.

The film could end there. But it doesn't. The seasons continue to turn. And yet it is impossible to return to the early sense of severity and impenetrability. The joy of the last hour is sublime. Such is the film's achievement by this point that one sees the monastery and the very world with new eyes.

There is no short cut to this experience. Like a novice, one needs sheer time to acclimate to this world before one is ready to fully appreciate and embrace it, to experience it aright. Repetition, sameness, even a degree of monotony, is inseparable from what Into Great Silence sets out to illuminate, what it has to offer, for sameness itself is somehow transformed when we have embraced it long enough. I watched the last hour of the film in a different state of mind from the first hour and a half — and I needed every minute of that first hour and a half in order to get into the right state of mind to fully appreciate that last hour.

Ultimately, Into Great Silence reveals itself to be about nothing less than the presence of God. So many spiritually aware films — The Seventh Seal, Crimes and Misdemeanors — are about God's absence or silence. Here is a film that dares to explore the possibility of finding God, of a God Who is there for those who seek Him with their whole hearts.

Into Great Silence makes no apology for the monks' traditional Catholic and Christian milieu. One of the few long sustained speeches in the film is a chanted excerpt from a patristic treatise on the Holy Spirit — a catechesis in Trinitarian theology. The film is punctuated by contemplative intertitles citing Old and New Testament scriptures as well as traditional Christian sources. Two frequently repeated texts suggest the two sides of the monastic experience. On the one hand, self-denial and severity: "Unless a man gives up all he has, he cannot be my disciple." On the other, the joy of self-abandonment to God: "O Lord, you have seduced me, and I was seduced." In the film's lone aside to the camera, a blind monk offers some simple but piercing observations on Christian happiness, abandonment to God's providential care, and the tragedy of the loss of faith and meaning in the modern world.

Yet Gröning isn't preaching to the choir; one need not be a Catholic, or even a Christian, to appreciate the beauty and depth the film finds in this way of life. Søren Kierkegaard, not a Catholic, vividly diagnosed the malady and the cure to which this film speaks:

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I would reply: Create silence! The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. And even if it were blazoned forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midst of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God. Therefore create Silence.

This film creates silence. Not just absence of noise, but inner stillness.

Another popular quotation, attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, advises, "Preach the gospel at all time; when necessary, use words." Into Great Silence is the antithesis of a preachy film, yet for receptive viewers of varying creeds — or none — Gröning's achievement reveals the beauty and power of this most hidden, yet unexpectedly human, world.

Filmmakers from Bresson to Tarkovsky to Malick to the Dardenne brothers have sought creative freedom in formal austerity, assiduously stripping away the superfluous and superficial to create space for the essential, the transcendent. Into Great Silence is both a work in a kindred spirit, and an immersion in a divesting of inessentials, not merely as a creative discipline or aesthetic philosophy, but as a total commitment, a way of life, a world unto itself.

Into Great Silence offers an implicit challenge, not so much to the trappings of modernity — modern technology crops up here and there in the monks' world, occasionally to humorous effect — as to the spiritual disconnectedness and social fragmentation of a world in decay, to the postmodern incapacity for commitment and sacrifice, to the dissonance and haphazardness of life as we know it. It is not for us, perhaps, this life, yet it isn't something irrelevant or unrelated either. The silence of the monks has something to say to us, if we have ears to hear.

Click here to find showtimes and locations for the limited opening of this astounding film around the country.

You may also enjoy this interview in which director Philip Gröning discusses life at the Grande Chartreuse monastery, the presence of God in the world, and his award-winning film.

Those Peter Jackson Touches

Facing the Giants was financed by a Georgia Baptist church, then picked up for distribution by Goldwyn. One Night with the King, directed by relative unknown, Michael Sajbel (whose credits consist of a few films for Billy Graham’s World Wide Pictures), and produced by Gener8Xion Entertainment (the company behind the apocalyptic Omega Code thrillers), comes to theaters courtesy of FoxFaith, 20th Century Fox’s new faith-and-family-values division. If the success of The Passion of the Christ hasn’t yet sent the Hollywood studios scrambling to produce religiously oriented fare, it’s at least partly responsible for the interest in films like these that otherwise might have gone straight to video.

As that suggests, One Night With the King, like Facing the Giants, has a distinctly made-for-TV vibe, notwithstanding the biblical film’s visual spectacle and a distinguished supporting cast including Lord of the Rings alums John Rhys-Davies and John Noble and Lawrence of Arabia costars Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif.

Sets, locations and especially costumes are quite good, with the Persian setting adding some exotic Bollywood-esque flavor to the usual ancient near-eastern nomad couture. The only lapse in production values is some glaring CGI, used for a couple of waterfalls and a white moth that seems to have flown in, along with Rhys-Davies and Noble, from The Lord of the Rings. (The heroine even talks to the moth on a rooftop in the opening scene, like Gandalf atop Orthanc.)

The apparent Peter Jackson influence doesn’t stop there. One Night with the King opens with a voiceover prologue flashing back hundreds of years, in which we learn of (a) the forging of a sinister metal trinket and (b) an ominous act of defiance by a king following a victory in battle that will have dire repercussions for ages to come.

The king is Saul, who, despite Samuel’s orders to spare no one after conquering the Amalekites, allows King Agag to live. Samuel (O’Toole) kills Agag, but, in a non-biblical twist, Agag’s pregnant queen escapes. Following a midrashic tradition, Agag becomes the ancestor of the genocidally anti-Semitic Haman (James Callis, looking oddly like Jesus). Following the biblical story, Haman plots to exterminate the diaspora Jews in Persia, but is foiled by the courage and cunning of the heroine (Tiffany Dupont, Cheaper by the Dozen), whom King Xerxes (British pop star Luke Gross) makes his queen.

Haman makes his entrance on horseback amid ominous portents, in the company of black-swathed riders — I’m sure I heard Nazgûl screeches on the soundtrack. The whitened streets of Susa evoke Minas Tirith, the White City (though the architecture is vaguely early Naboo), accented by distinctly Jacksonian aerial cinematography.

Glaring Anachronisms

Well, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best. Yet the screenplay, by Omega scribe Stephan Blinn, is home-video hackneyed rather than silver-screen sophisticated. Take Rhys-Davies’s opening voiceover: “From whence comes the purpose of a person’s life? Comes it by chance? Or does a call of destiny come for each of us?”

The problem is especially pronounced in the romantic scenes, in which Xerxes increasingly comes off like a smitten schoolboy mooning over the head cheerleader. “Know you how many times I tried to come to you after that first night?” Xerxes murmurs as he holds Esther. “How many evenings I spent counting the stars to keep my mind off of you? How many excuses I created just to avoid the other candidates?”

Um, why? He’s the king, right? What’s stopping him from being with the woman he wants (or not being with women he doesn’t want)? Later, as circumstances drive a wedge between the king and his bride, Xerxes pines for Esther’s affection with all the dignity and manliness of teenaged Anakin Skywalker carrying the torch for Amidala in Attack of the Clones. Not very attractive.

If all this, like the title of the film, sounds a bit romance-novelish, well, there’s a reason for that. The film is adapted from the book of Esther by way of the novel Hadassah: One Night with the King, written by Pentecostal preacher Tommy Tenney and published by Christian publisher Bethany House.

The novel, written in the form of a letter from the biblical Esther to a future royal bride-to-be, swoonily romanticizes Xerxes and Esther’s relationship, while turning Haman into a virtual forerunner of Hitler, complete with a swastika-like “twisted cross” symbol adopted from India (the swastika has pre-Nazi roots in Hindu and Jain traditions).

The novel is of indifferent merit; despite a few nods to Jewish tradition (such as Haman’s descent from Agag), its most prominent feature may be glaring anachronism. From Esther’s opening salutation “Dear X…” to her lamenting the corruption of the word “intimacy” as a “prudish euphemism” for sex, the novel’s contemporary sensibilities are stamped on every page. (The letter probably should have started something like “Esther, Queen of Persia and wife of Xerxes, to…” And while the use of “intimacy” for sex roughly parallels the actual Hebrew euphemism “to know,” this usage is not corrupt or “prudish,” but profound.) Also, despite the ostensibly female narration, the novel’s romantic point of view is glaringly male-centered (one passage finds Esther advising her female reader on the kind of woman that a man really wants).

Though affecting to be an ancient Hebrew manuscript, the novel frequently betrays its native English-language roots, sometimes in unintentionally humorous ways. While Tenney consistently uses “G–d,” following the post-Masoretic tradition of omitting vowels in the divine Name, on the very first page of Esther’s account he has Esther herself explicitly comment on the use of “the traditional Hebrew abbreviated forms in referring to Deity.” This reference would have been meaningless in Esther’s day, since Hebrew writing had no vowels at all until centuries after Christ, let alone in the time of Esther! Later, Esther compares Haman’s “twisted cross” symbol to the X’s in her husband’s name, though to the best of my knowledge “Xerxes” has no X-like characters in either Persian or Hebrew.

Not the Story You Expect

Though the novel takes significant liberties with the biblical story, the film departs further still. The canonical story opens with the defiance of Xerxes’ previous queen, Vashti, who refuses the king’s summons to appear at a feast where he wants to show off her beauty to his guests. The book of Esther explicitly draws out the potentially subversive implications of this act: what if other women, hearing of this, likewise refuse to obey their husbands? To ward off this danger, Xerxes dismisses Vashti and proclaims throughout the kingdom that all women must honor their husbands.

This event is all but unrecognizable in the film, in which Vashti’s refusal to appear is construed as an act of political resistance against her husband’s war with Greece, which the queen opposes. (The novel has a somewhat different angle on the event, claiming that Vashti refused to come at the feast because Xerxes wanted her to appear naked.)

Though both book and film versions incorporate elements of Jewish tradition, the story apparently sticks to the Hebrew text of Esther, ignoring the Greek additions in the Septuagint version of Esther, accepted as canonical by Catholics and Orthodox. Even when the film happens to go beyond the Hebrew text in exactly the same way as the deuterocanonical text, it ignores the deuterocanonical passages as potential source material.

Take the scene in which Mordecai prays to the Lord to save his people. The Hebrew text of Esther contains no prayers, but Mordecai is depicted offering just such a prayer in the Septuagint version of Esther. This deuterocanonical prayer would have been perfect for the movie’s purposes (“And now, O Lord God and King, God of Abraham, spare thy people, for the eyes of our foes are upon us to annihilate us…”). Yet instead the film merely has Mordecai use words drawn from Isaiah 40 (“They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength…”). Is this Protestant bias, more open to Jewish tradition than Hellenistic Jewish writings accepted as scripture by the Catholic Church?

Neither the film nor the book sells the romance of Esther and Xerxes. Whether due to the screenplay, direction, actors, or some combination, Esther herself comes off as chipper, chirpy and charming, but lacking in gravitas and depth. She’s much given to mischievous, playful banter like “You think of me as a child? Well, you’re wrong… I’m much younger than that,” but her winsomeness falls short of real complexity and mystery.

Xerxes, with his bare chest, Fabio hair, and mithril-y silver duds, looks like a bodice-ripper cover model or a '70s glam rocker. He’s supposedly captivated by Esther reading aloud from the book of Genesis; in the story of Jacob and Laban, Xerxes identifies Esther with — get this — Jacob, while he himself hopes to be her Rachel, her favorite, though he’s afraid he will only be her Leah. Oh dear.

What the heck is going on with Esther’s jewel pendant, which reflects luminous stars of David on surrounding objects when the light hits it just right — or does it? A late plot twist apparently suggests that it may be a bit like the jingle bells in The Polar Express: You’ve got to believe to understand, or something. Huh?

Christians lamenting the state of Hollywood sometimes flippantly comment that this or that Bible story “would make a great movie — intrigue, sex, violence, spectacle, etc.” By itself, though, that’s not a recipe for a great movie, but a mediocre one. The story of Esther could certainly be made into a great film. One Night with the King is not that film. In a number of ways, it’s not even that story.

(c) 2006 Steven D. Greydanus. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Steven D. Greydanus is a film critic for the National Catholic Register and appears weekly on Ave Maria radio. His website offers in-depth reviews of both contemporary and older films, evaluating them for moral and spiritual worth as well as artistic and entertainment value.

For complete ratings for this film and hundreds more visit the Decent Films Guide website.

Wholesomely All-American

Writing for Time magazine, Roger Rosenblatt declared,

For some 30 years — roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright — the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously. Nothing was real. With a giggle and a smirk, our chattering classes — our columnists and pop culture makers — declared that detachment and personal whimsy were the necessary tools for an oh-so-cool life…. The ironists, seeing through everything, made it difficult for anyone to see anything.

Perhaps not quite coincidentally, for most of that same thirty years, Oliver Stone has been making movies steeped in jaded cynicism and skepticism, if not always irony. From Platoon to Wall Street to JFK to Natural Born Killers, ruthlessness, corruption and decadence are the order of the day in Stone’s world.

You could say it’s ironic, then, that World Trade Center — as unabashed a tribute to heroism and human decency as Hollywood has produced in years — should be directed by Stone. Stone is personally hostile to patriotism and nationalism, which he has called “the two most evil forces that I know of in this century or in any century.” Yet World Trade Center is as wholesomely all-American as the prologue of Born on the Fourth of July — the key difference being that this time Stone isn’t setting up a house of cards in order to knock it down.

When three NYC cops step forward to volunteer to rush into the crippled towers and try to rescue civilians, the film isn’t out to debunk their naiveté, but to honor their courage. When ex-Marine Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), surveying the smoking ruins of Ground Zero, declares that “It’s gonna take a lot to avenge this,” it isn’t the blind rage of a bloodthirsty zealot, but the grim resolve of a righteous warrior.

“9/11 showed us what human beings are capable of,” one character reflects in an epilogue set two years after the fact. “The evil, yeah, sure. But it also brought out a goodness we forgot could exist…. It’s important for us to talk about that good, to remember, because I saw a lot of it that day.”

Based on a True Story

Based on the true story of police officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno (Nicholas Cage and Michael Peña), who were almost the last survivors to be pulled from the smoking rubble of the Twin Towers, World Trade Center is so doggedly decent and uplifting that a number of critics have suggested that it feels less like the work of an Oliver Stone than a Ron Howard.

Perhaps it is even reminiscent of a particular Ron Howard movie: Backdraft, Howard’s 1991 tribute to the heroism of big-city first-responders who rush toward disaster scenes while everyone else rushes away. An even more exact parallel might be a post-9/11 film that has also been compared to Backdraft: Ladder 49, starring John Travolta and Joaquin Phoenix in a story about a rescue effort involving an injured firefighter trapped in a burning warehouse.

Like Ladder 49, World Trade Center tells its story against a backdrop of Christian and Catholic faith. Crucifixes, crosses, a Bible and other religious trappings are in evidence, and a Catholic character actually has a vision-like experience of Jesus Christ modeled on the Sacred Heart image.

Also like Ladder 49 (and Backdraft), World Trade Center has its share of melodrama and cliché. Characters have lines like “I finally figured out the only thing I’m good at is helping people” and talk about “people taking care of each other, for no other reason than it was the right thing to do.”

Sometimes this kind of writing can evoke unaffected sincerity; other times it seems merely trite, perhaps reflecting the inexperience of first-time feature screenwriter Andrea Berloff. A flashback shows Jimeno and his pregnant wife Alison (Maggie Gyllenhaal) snuggling in bed, playfully debating whether to name their unborn daughter Olivia or Alyssa. Then Will winds up trapped beneath the fallen towers, and neither he nor Alison knows if they’ll ever see the other again. Sure enough, before you can say “The Gift of the Magi,” Alison, who originally liked Olivia, switches to Alyssa, while Will, who wanted Alyssa, does his best to leave his wife a message urging her to choose Olivia.

World Trade Center includes some striking images and moments. As the police rush toward Ground Zero, they are engulfed in a blizzard of office paper pouring from the gaping wounds in the towers. Anonymous evacuees drift silently past the advancing police, some covered in dust or streaked with blood.

Alarming groans from the building above as the police proceed through the main concourse foreshadow the disaster they can hardly imagine. Then there’s a striking moment toward the end of the film when, after nearly 24 hours of imprisonment at the epicenter of the worst terrorist attack in US history and nearly 12 hours of rescue efforts, McLoughlin becomes one of the last people in the world to learn what actually happened to the World Trade Center.

In the Traditional Mode

But World Trade Center is more a sentimental melodrama than the story of an event. It rushes through the suspense and logistics of the first act in order to spend as much time as possible in the hole with McLoughlin and Jimenez and in the homes of their families. Where Paul Greengrass’s brilliant United 93 crafted a documentary-like anatomy of events without presuming to get inside people’s heads or explain actions or motivations, World Trade Center is a more conventional Hollywood film, with dramatic dialogue, characters following clearly plotted arcs, and a swelling soundtrack to reinforce the mood.

It’s also worth noting that United 93 focused on the one subplot from that day of infamy that was in any way a victory against the terrorists. Every passenger on that flight died, yes — but their actions prevented the hijackers from reaching their intended target in Washington, DC.

World Trade Center tells a story with more traditionally heroic protagonists and a formally happier ending, but it is also arguably less inspirational. That these brave men walked willingly into the smoking towers is laudable, certainly; that they survived is a veritable miracle. But what they survived was an unmitigated disaster, an absolute triumph of evil. By contrast, what happened on that field in Pennsylvania was also a tragedy, but a victory as well.

I’m grateful for every one of the score of survivors pulled from the ruins of Ground Zero in that first 24 hours. But I’m more grateful for the resistance of the passengers of Flight 93. I’m gratified by the readiness with which ordinary Americans grasped and responded in kind to the previously unimaginable atrocity in which they found themselves, depriving the terrorists of the advantage of surprise that they would never again be able to use in this way.

This is not to say that stories of Ground Zero aren’t worth telling, or that World Trade Center doesn’t work at all, in a Hallmark Channel sort of way. Cage’s familiar screen presence recedes effectively into the role of McLoughlin, and Peña is even better as rookie Jimeno. Gyllenhaal is disarmingly brittle and disconnected as Alison, while Maria Bello gives a moving performance as McLoughlin’s wife Donna, and gets one of the movie’s most affecting scenes with a grieving mother (Viola Davis, very effective in a small part).

Is it enough? When United 93 opened, the question was first raised whether it’s “too soon” for 9/11 movies. I don’t think it’s “too soon” for a film like United 93, which is riveting without making an entertainment of its subject. World Trade Center, though, feels more like “just a movie.” Is it “too soon” for a movie like that? No one can presume to answer that question for anyone else, but World Trade Center raises the question for me in a way that United 93 didn’t.

(c) 2006 Steven D. Greydanus. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Steven D. Greydanus is a film critic for the National Catholic Register and appears weekly on Ave Maria radio. His website offers in-depth reviews of both contemporary and older films, evaluating them for moral and spiritual worth as well as artistic and entertainment value.

For complete ratings for this film and hundreds more visit the Decent Films Guide website.

A Second Helping of Swashbuckling Fun

The sequel, which reunites director Gore Verbinski, screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, and pretty much the whole cast from the first film, could easily have played it safe, giving audiences a second helping of the first film’s swashbuckling fun and spooky thrills while letting the wonderful weirdness of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow pick up the slack.

And, in fact, in some respects Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest does offer most of what you’d expect: an even more convoluted plot, even more eye-popping special effects and makeup, and an even more powerful supernatural nautical antagonist. Also like the first film, the sequel takes awhile to get warmed up, and winds up running about a quarter hour longer than it ought to (your mileage may vary).

At the same time, perhaps inspired by the eccentric twist Depp gave the material in the first film, the filmmakers have let their imaginations run wild, taking chances, striving to outdo themselves on every level. It’s an approach that can yield self-indulgent, bloated excess — or brilliance.

It pays off. Filmed back-to-back with next summer’s part three (At World’s End), Dead Man’s Chest successfully, er, parlays the one-off success of the first film into a sustainable phenomenon, not so much striking like a thunderbolt as rolling crackling along like ball lightning. Not that I’ve ever seen ball lightning, but it must be a sight as singular, and worth looking at, as some of what goes rolling by in this film, one of the most memorably entertaining popcorn flicks in memory.

The first film combined a lighthearted homage to the seafaring swashbucklers of Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks with the creepy thrills of a ghost story. The sequel is a far-ranging pastiche of everything from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to King Kong to The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. At the same time, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dead Man’s Chest takes the kinds of things that others have done before, and then does them so inventively that it becomes the new standard.

The Raiders comparison is more apt here than in the original, in which the swordplay and such was more energetic and well-done than inspired. The sequel takes the slapstick swashbuckling to a completely new level, evoking the ingenuity and physical comedy of a Buster Keaton or Jackie Chan set piece, crossed with the Rube Goldberg logic of a Chuck Jones cartoon.

The Middle Movie Template Writ Large

The first great set piece is staged on an island where the heroes are captured by unfriendly natives and face a grim fate — a familiar premise recalling everything from King Kong and King Solomon’s Mines to Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Yet the madcap escape sequence, like the truck sequence in Raiders, is an instant classic without any real precedent, at least as far as I know. To the extent that this and other scenes remind me of anything, they recall some of the animated derring-do of The Emperor’s New Groove, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, and The Incredibles.

A second, equally memorable sequence is set on another island, where the action cuts between a sort of musical-chairs swordfight, with an unlikely trio of allies fighting for their lives while armed with only two swords, and a freewheeling three-way duel that ranges from an open beach to the heights of a ruined watermill before going spinning off into uncharted territory. (The puns are just rolling off my tongue.)

Dead Man’s Chest follows the middle-movie template established by The Empire Strikes Back, with a darker, more sprawling story, bigger threats, and a cliffhanger finale. At the same time, it introduces a villain as visually astonishing as Return of the Jedi's Jabba the Hutt was in 1983 (something that Lucas himself couldn’t duplicate in any of his prequels): the fabled fiend of the deep, Davy Jones himself (of “Davy Jones’s locker” fame).

Here established as the literally heartless captain of the Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship crewed by the doomed souls of those lost at sea, Jones (Bill Nighy) recalls Jabba not only by his slimy, invertebrate-inspired character design, but also in his relationship to Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), who is loosely the counterpart to Han Solo.

Jones looms large as a villain not only for Sparrow, but also for heroic Will Turner (Orlando Bloom), for reasons that might be guessed based on the first film, and have to do with one of Jones’ thralls aboard the Flying Dutchman (Stellan Skarsgård, King Arthur).

Sparrow and Will each contend separately with Jones, while heroine Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) pursues them both. Along the way we learn more about the heroes’ back stories as well as Jack’s magical compass, which turns out to be more complicated than it seemed in the first film. As Christian critic Jeff Overstreet commented after the screening, it’s almost a moral compass; and we soon understand why Sparrow is unable to get his bearings from it.

Afterlife Concerns

Not only Jones himself, but the whole crew of the Flying Dutchman are a fascinating, fearful feast for the eyes, going light-years beyond the first film’s skeletal pirates. In particular there is one character with a conch for a head — don’t even bother trying to picture it — that must be seen to be believed. Looking at some of these creations, one is agog not just at the technical achievement — exceptional as it is even in this age of high-tech effects — but at the imagination that went into these bizarre images, and the fact that they were made at all.

A slight but distinct spiritual vibe runs through Dead Man’s Chest, particularly in regard to an uneasy awareness of judgment after death. “Do you fear death?” Jones asks the sailors of a ship he has taken as he offers them a Faustian choice between death and eternal service on his ship. “Life is cruel. Why should the afterlife be any different? Why not postpone the judgment?” Most of the sailors accept this Faustian bargain, though one sane soul demurs (“I’ll take my chances”) and is quickly dispatched.

In a comic variation on the theme, one of the formerly cursed pirates from the first film has taken a new interest in spiritual matters. “We’re not immortal any more — we got to take care of our immortal souls,” he warns his companion while leafing intently through his Bible.

The other eyes him dubiously. “You know you can’t read…”

But the first is undeterred: “It’s the Bible — you get credit for trying!” (It will be interesting to see if this minor theme of judgment and life after death continue, perhaps even pay off somehow, in the third film next summer.)

Over the last three years, the original Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl has grown in my estimation and affection, joining the likes of The Princess Bride and Galaxy Quest among the ranks of comic homages that succeed in their own right rather than working merely as camp or farce. Now, against all odds, comes a sequel that goes beyond genre entertainment to jaw-dropping invention. If it’s not in the same league as Raiders of the Lost Ark — and its “middle movie” muddle pretty much guarantees that — it still comes closer than either of Indiana Jones’s own sequels, not to mention pretty much anything that’s followed.

(c) 2006 Steven D. Greydanus. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Steven D. Greydanus is a film critic for the National Catholic Register and appears weekly on Ave Maria radio. His website offers in-depth reviews of both contemporary and older films, evaluating them for moral and spiritual worth as well as artistic and entertainment value.

For complete ratings for this film and hundreds more visit the Decent Films Guide website.

The Laws of Drama

One senses a growing awareness in the writer–director’s films of this presence that watches and sits in judgment, an uneasy consciousness of a power which he has perhaps sought alternately to placate or defy in previous films, but which he has never openly confronted — until now.

I speak, of course, of the film critic.

Shyamalan’s career has become rigidly defined with the trademark twist, the reversal of expectations. With each outing, the question “How can I pull the rug out from under the audience this time?” looms larger and larger.

And yet Shyamalan knows well that Story herself tells us “There are laws.” No kidding: Story is the name of the titular Lady in the Water, and says that there are laws.

To be sure, the laws of drama, like the Code in the original Pirates of the Caribbean, are “more like guidelines than actual rules.” Yet in the hackneyed world of Hollywood filmmaking, rules are, well, the rule, and exceptions are almost as rare as water sprites in swimming pools.

Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary offers a helpful compendium of such rules. Take the Law of Economy of Characters, which states that “all characters in a movie are necessary to the story — even those who do not seem to be. Sophisticated viewers can use this Law to deduce the identity of a person being kept secret by the movie’s plot: This ’mystery’ person is always the only character in the movie who seems otherwise extraneous.”

“Everyone has a purpose” is how Story puts it in Lady in the Water. But Shyamalan wants you to be surprised about what that purpose is. He doesn’t want critics using rules to deduce the identity of characters before he’s ready to reveal them. He wants to be above the clichés in Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary.

In Lady in the Water this preoccupation with defying critical expectations looms so large that it is actually embodied in the film by a character who is in fact a film critic, a figure who provides onscreen analysis of the plot in light of rote Hollywood practice, and whose presumptive ability to predict what would happen in a movie is sought by the protagonist for guidance as to what is actually happening to him, who the players are, and so forth.

Shyamalan takes great glee in upending the critic’s predictions, or at least one character’s application of those predictions. What he doesn’t do is generate the slightest sense of revelation, insight, or even mild surprise when he finally tells us what’s what. All he does is replace one arbitrary, unconvincing and uninteresting set of conclusions with another set that is equally arbitrary, unconvincing and uninteresting.

Can’t Buy This One

The Lady in the Water, not to be confused with the Lady of the Lake of Arthurian mythology, turns out in fact to be the Lady in the Swimming Pool at a Philadelphia-area apartment building, where after-hours activity in the pool draws the attention of sad-sack superintendent Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti, Cinderella Man).

After a bad fall, Cleveland discovers himself confronted with a mysterious young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard, The Village) wearing nothing but a shirt from his wardrobe, who says she is from the “Blue World,” and calls herself a “Narf,” a word that means nothing to him, and I guess meant nothing to Shyamalan, although to those of us familiar with Pinky and the Brain from The Animaniacs, “Narf!” — along with “Poit!” — are the familiar nervous ejaculations of Pinky, one of a pair of lab mice with delusions of grandeur bent on taking over the world. (I’m guessing that Shyamalan’s kids, for whom the director made up the story of Lady in the Water as a series of bedtime stories, haven’t seen Pinky and the Brain. Curiously, by a strange coincidence, the first DVD editions of The Animaniacs and the spin-off Pinky and the Brain series hit shelves next Tuesday.)

At any rate, “Narf” means something quite different to a pair of Korean residents in the building, a party-girl college student named Young-Soon (Cindy Cheung) and her mother (June Kyoto Lu), who remember Narfs from the bedtime stories Young-Soon’s grandmother used to tell.

In part through the recollections of Young-Soon’s mother, translated by Young-Soon, we are introduced to an obscure mythology of Narfs, Scrunts, Tartutic, and the Great Eatlon, as well as a passel of archetypes including the Vessel, the Guardian, the Symbolist, the Guild, and the Healer.

Oh, and there’s the assorted residents of the apartment complex: a self-doubting writer (Shyamalan) and his sister (Sarita Choudhury), a crossword-puzzle guru (Jeffrey Wright) and his young son, a goofy bodybuilder (Freddy Rodriguez) who only works out the right side of his body, an animal lover (Mary Beth Hurt), a family with five hysterical daughters, etc., etc.

Who is the Vessel? Who is the Guardian? The Symbolist? The Guild? The Healer? Call in… the film critic!

That would be Harry Farber (Bob Balaban), who declares that there is no originality left in the world, and confidently offers advice on matching characters with roles. Then Shyamalan drops the other shoe: film critics are always wrong — dead wrong! Ha ha!

Is this Shyamalan’s revenge on critics who panned The Village? A preemptive strike against the savaging Lady in the Water is sure to take? Who cares? Just make it interesting. Make me believe.

Whether the critic’s guesses, or my guesses, about the identity of the Guardian, the Symbolist, the Healer and the Guild are right or wrong is beside the point. I don’t care that I knew right away who the Symbolist really was, when the characters all thought it was someone else. I do care that the movie expects me to accept a young boy gazing at figurative tea leaves (they’re actually cereal boxes) and discerning messages like “She will lead a ceremony of seven sisters to bring strength to to the moment.” Narfs and Poits and such-all I can buy, but not this.

It doesn’t bother me that one character seems to be the Guardian, and then isn’t, and at the last minute we find out who the real Guardian is. It does bother me that when the Guardian’s identity is revealed, it tells us absolutely nothing about the character, the archetype, or anything else. There’s nothing to it but arbitrary directorial fiat; it could just as easily have been any other character, and I wish it had been. (My pick would have been either Young-Soon or her mother.)

It’s neither here nor there whether the Guild turns out to be one group of people or another. What does matter is that neither group of people actually has any meaningful role to play, though the movie pretends they do. Story claims that “Everyone has a purpose,” but while that may be a sound humanistic principle, dramatically it doesn’t actually apply here. In a sense, Shyamalan does manage to escape the rules of Ebert’s glossary: Not every character is actually necessary. In fact, very few of them are.

Great Talent, but Slipping

Lady in the Water wants you to believe that if I don’t like this movie, it’s because I’m not willing to accept it simply, like a child. That is obviously false. Give me Babeor Bambi, and I’m six years old again. I’m hardly too jaded to accept a nymph in a swimming pool — I think it’s a fantastic idea. My problem is that Shyamalan has absolutely no idea what to do with her.

Why, in fact, has Story come to the human world? To deliver a message to a writer who is working on a book about the state of the world. It seems this book will have a profound effect on political thought, and will inspire a movement of change that will lead to the election of an American president who will base his policies on the writer’s ideas. Why, I haven’t come across a fairy-tale premise calling for such childlike wonder and acceptance since the taxation of trade routes was in dispute and the greedy Trade Federation set up a blockade around the planet Naboo.

The fact that this pivotally important writer is played, in his most substantial role to date, by Shyamalan himself resonates distractingly with the writer-director’s alleged messiah-complex ego. Gazing at the actress who was the breakout star of his last film, Shyamalan tells her, in effect, that she’s his muse, and she in turn tells him that he’s a really great writer who will change the world. Yikes.

It would be easy at this point to conclude that The Sixth Sense was “a fluke,” but I suspect the reality is more complicated than that. Shyamalan is far from a hack; the evidence of his genuine talent is still evident in this, easily his most spectacularly misconceived film. What he is, I suspect, is creatively paralyzed, twisted in knots by his own legacy and the legendary status to which he aspires. With every film, the knots grow tighter, and he slips further and further into impotence and irrelevance.

At least he continues to be canny or fortunate in his leading players. Giamatti’s vigorous performance gives Lady in the Water whatever watchability it has, and Howard, though largely left to langish in a towel slumped in the shower, is persuasively otherworldly. Cheung, too, is entertaining as the free-spirited Young-Soon, though she and a number of other characters are little more than stereotypes.

But so what? As Gene Siskel used to say, is this film more interesting than a documentary about the same actors having lunch? Or as Charlotte Observer critic Lawrence Toppman recently remarked in reviewing The Devil Wears Prada, “Meryl Streep would be superb in a high school production of ’Carousel,’ and that would be about something.” Granted, Siskel and Toppman are only film critics, but, you know, even film critics can’t be wrong all the time.

(c) 2006 Steven D. Greydanus. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Steven D. Greydanus is a film critic for the National Catholic Register and appears weekly on Ave Maria radio. His website offers in-depth reviews of both contemporary and older films, evaluating them for moral and spiritual worth as well as artistic and entertainment value.

For complete ratings for this film and hundreds more visit the Decent Films Guide website.

Elevated Art and Entertainment

Directed by Pixar honcho John Lasseter, who helmed Pixar’s first three films (the brilliant Toy Story films and the lackluster A Bug’s Life) but hasn’t directed since, Cars ominously recalls some of the elements that made A Bug’s Life the most pedestrian and uninspired project in Pixar’s filmography. The total absence of human beings, for one thing. And a formulaic story of a threatened community pulling together to overcome adversity.

Happily, Cars is no A Bug’s Life. Offbeat and counter-intuitive, Cars finds a quirky creative groove and an emotional center that eluded the earlier Lasseter effort. The story of a callow young rookie racecar named Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) whose rise to the top is sidetracked by an unplanned stopover in a sleepy time-forgotten town may be formulaic, and on first viewing the first forty minutes or so — especially to an automotive non-enthusiast like me — seems a bit shaky. But the film’s sense of time and place, its 1950s small-town nostalgia, its jaw-dropping visual beauty, and its love of cars, the open road and the American Southwest ultimately elevate Cars to a level of art and entertainment that continues to defy even the best efforts of Pixar’s competitors.

Perhaps the film’s biggest risk is creating a automotive parallel universe without drivers — a world in which fixtures of 20th-century Americana, from NASCAR racing to the forgotten towns and mom-and-pop shops of Route 66, exist independently of human beings or indeed any animal life forms. In this world, if you squint at the flies buzzing around light fixtures, they turn out to be little VW Bugs, and tractors stampede like cows — and are subject to nocturnal tipping by rural pranksters. Even buttes and cloud formations in the background reflect the film’s autocentric milieu, with fin-tail and hood-ornament shapes cropping up everywhere.

The absence of drivers is reflected, almost literally, in the character design of the cars themselves, specifically in the placement of the eyes. Animated anthropomorphic autos (e.g., Speed Buggy) often “see” with their headlights, but in a driverless world it would be odd to see through the windshield into the empty driver’s seat, and so the windshields in Cars are transformed into the whites of enormous conjoined eyes.

Why does the absence of humans matter? The non-human worlds of the Toy Story films and Monsters, Inc. provided an emotional point of entry for viewers precisely by imagining how toys and monsters would feel about us, thereby holding up a mirror to our feelings about them. Had Cars developed the automotive side of the driver–car relationship, that might have been an intriguing way of tapping into the great American love affair with the automobile; but the filmmakers haven’t gone that route.

Without a Driver, What Motivates a Vehicle?

Without drivers to care about, what motivates a vehicle? As you might expect, it’s the same things — or rather, the same range of things — that motivate their human counterparts.

Take Lightning McQueen, who has come out of nowhere to be a spoiler for the Piston Cup. Like any brash, callow up-and-coming young athlete feeling his oats, McQueen is hungry to topple the big guys at the top — and to enjoy the rewards of celebrity, notably a lucrative new endorsement deal with Dinoco Oil. (Dinoco, the name of the gas station where Woody and Buzz fell out of Andy’s mom’s car in Toy Story, is one of numerous Pixar in-jokes.) Arrogant and self-centered, McQueen isn’t exactly a team player, and has little loyalty either toward his pit crew or his slightly stodgy current sponsor, Rust-eze, with its unglamorous clientele.

There’s also McQueen’s competition: classy reigning champ The King (voiced by racing icon Richard Petty), a 1970 Plymouth Superbird who’d like to retire in a (hopefully metaphorical) blaze of glory; and The King’s longtime rival, perennial runner-up Hick Chicks (Michael Keaton), who’s even more obnoxious than McQueen. Off the track, McQueen’s easygoing transport bigrig Mack (Pixar veteran John Ratzenberger) is content to haul the sporty racecar from race to race, and may be the closest thing McQueen has to a friend.

However, contrary to McQueen’s expectations, the most significant chapter in his life — and the heart of the film — takes place not on the racetrack or in the spotlight, but far from the beaten path of the Interstate, in the one-light town of Radiator Springs in Carburetor County. Once a prosperous rural community on the Route 66 thoroughfare from Illinois to California, Radiator Springs shared the decline of many similar towns that were bypassed by the new Interstate system.

For McQueen, Radiator Springs is the capital of nowheresville. He wants nothing to do with it or locals like gruff, no-nonsense Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), Mater the tow truck (comedian Larry the Cable Guy), and the businesslike Sheriff (Route 66 historian Michael Wallis), although he may make an exception for a sweet little Porche named Sally (Bonnie Hunt). Of course circumstances contrive to keep him in town, and of course McQueen slowly learns that he’s misjudged the town and its inhabitants, not least Doc Hudson, as in Hudson Hornet, of 1950s stock-car fame.

The plot elements are familiar and somewhat corny, most overtly resembling the 1991 Michael J. Fox comedy Doc Hollywood. But Cars has a specificity that goes beyond the lip service to small-town values typical to such films. It’s a heartfelt elegy to a lost culture, an almost mythic part of America’s past.

The Eisenhower-era nostalgia may be heartfelt, but it’s not entirely convincing. After all, it was Eisenhower who signed the Interstate Highway Act that doomed Route 66 and its small-town culture. Cars romanticizes the local feeling of a road that turned and wound “with the land” rather than cutting across it — conveniently overlooking the fact that those turns and bends cost lives, earning sections of the highway the moniker “Bloody 66.”

By contrast, the Interstate is disparagingly said to save drivers only “ten minutes of driving time,” but multiply the number of drivers per year by the time and fuel saved, and the benefit seems appreciable. Painful as it may be to watch communities decline, the answer, if there is one, isn’t not building better roads.

This Movie is Firing on All Cylinders

If Cars is heavy on hooey, it’s also genuinely endearing. The story is polished to a fare-thee-well, and the filmmakers have a few surprises up their sleeves. Refreshingly, neither of the big races that bookend the film ends the way formula would dictate. Cars doesn’t just mouth the platitude that winning isn’t everything; respect, dignity and loyalty are really honored above finishing first.

Mater the tow truck (Tow Mater, get it?) is funny and sweetly personable, and Newman’s Doc Hudson has real dignity and quiet authority. And, while praising the visuals in CG cartoons has become commonplace, Pixar’s work here goes beyond eye-popping realism into stunning beauty. This isn’t just technique, it’s art. The sprawling landscapes in Cars are even more gorgeous than the colorful coral-reef vistas of Finding Nemo, and that’s saying something.

Is Cars a disappointment? Only Pixar’s enviable track record could make it seem so. Compared to even the better efforts of their competition (e.g., Over the Hedge Robots ), Cars is firing on all cylinders, and then some.

For what it’s worth, no matter how consistently brilliant Pixar has been, I find that I never come to expect the next Pixar film to meet the same standard. Going into Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, I rather doubted each time that the film I was about to see would live up to their predecessors, and I was pleasantly dumbfounded each time to find my expectations exceeded. Cars doesn’t exceed expectations, but it continues the winningest streak in Hollywood history with a film that any other creative team in Hollywood would kill to have be the weakest of their last five films.

P.S. Whatever you do, don’t miss the end-credit outtakes, which include the funniest end-reel gag in Pixar history, as the cars go to a drive-in and watch excerpts from a number of films that seem awfully familiar.

(c) 2006 Steven D. Greydanus. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Steven D. Greydanus is a film critic for the National Catholic Register and appears weekly on Ave Maria radio. His website offers in-depth reviews of both contemporary and older films, evaluating them for moral and spiritual worth as well as artistic and entertainment value.

For complete ratings for this film and hundreds more visit the Decent Films Guide website.

Another Disappointing Third

Christopher Reeve made a pair of classic Superman films, then embarrassed himself with a couple of dismal sequels. Tim Burton and Michael Keaton’s two Batman films, whatever you think of them, are practically masterpieces compared to the franchise-killing follow-ups from Joel Schumacher.

X Men: The Last Stand may not be as bad as the third installments in those franchises, but it’s hard to see it as anything other than a disappointment. Not only is this effort a big step down from the excellence of the first two films, it largely squanders the dramatic and emotional momentum left by the second film.

Three years ago, the X Men series seemed likely to beat the odds. The original X Men, directed by Bryan Singer, was good enough to revive the whole comic-book genre in the wake of Schumacher’s disastrous Batman and Robin. X Men opened the door to some of the genre’s best films to date, including Batman Begins, Spider-Man 2, and Singer’s own equally impressive X Men sequel, X2. X2 also laid the groundwork for a third film that potentially could have been the best of the lot, climaxing with a sacrificial death that set the stage for the comic book’s most famous storyline, the Dark Phoenix saga.

But then Singer jumped ship to helm the upcoming Superman Returns, taking his X2 screenwriters with him. What possessed the producers to tap uninspired craftsman Brett Ratner (Rush Hour, Rush Hour 2 as Singer’s replacement? And who thought that the screenwriter of xXx: State of the Union and Mr. & Mrs. Smith was a good match for this project?

Was it producer Ralph Winter, who also allowed the dreadful Fantastic Four to be made by a director whose only previous credits were a pair of Queen Latifah comedies? Winter is one of Hollywood’s few vocal Christians, and I’m sorry to slag his work, but his job description involves bringing talent on board, and that calls for discrimination.

X Men: The Last Stand isn’t awful like Fantastic Four, but it lacks the emotional and intellectual punch of its predecessors.

You can hear it in the dialogue, which creaks with clichés. “Magneto wants a war; we’ll give him one,” one character vows. “We work as a team,” Storm lectures Wolverine, who shoots back, “The best defense is a good offense” (later in the film, sure as rain, the same two lines are called back with an ironic reversal, because that’s just so clever). Then there’s the imprisoned Mystique’s threat to a guard: “When I get out of here, I’m going to kill you myself.” Later, making good her threat, she gloats, “Told you.” Good one.

A Promising Story That Doesn’t Deliver

The story elements are promising. A certain Worthington Enterprises has developed a universal de-mutation drug hailed as a “cure.” Mutant leaders, both peaceful and militant, contend that mutation isn’t a disease to be cured — though some mutants, such as Rogue (Anna Paquin), whose powers cut her off from ordinary physical contact with others, might beg to differ. Mutant separatist leader Magneto (Ian McKellen), foreseeing that a weaponized form of the drug could be used to target mutants against their will, gears up for a pre-emptive strike on behalf of mutantkind.

Meanwhile, Cyclops (James Marsden), mourning the death of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), has telepathic intimations that she may not be as dead as she seemed. When she turns up not only alive but more powerful than ever, something about her bad dye job and veiny makeup suggests that this may not be the Jean Grey we knew, and Cyke and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) loved, in the first two films.

As if determined not to make the Fantastic Four mistake of forgetting to include action scenes in a super-hero movie, Ratner ramps up the action to comic-book proportions, eschewing the relatively restrained realism of the Singer films. The last thirty or forty minutes of the film are more or less non-stop large-scale action; Marvel fans may get a thrill out of an early sequence that gives us the Danger Room, the Sentinels, and the iconic if silly image of Colossus hurling Wolverine headlong into battle, all in about two minutes.

So much story and action and mayhem; so little characterization or feeling.

As ever, Jackman is the movie’s charismatic center as Wolverine, but his edge has been blunted, his character saddled with trite speeches (“Then we stand together, X Men, all of us”; “If we don’t fight now, everything they stood for dies with them”). His best moment is probably a brutal action scene in the woods, pitted against a half-dozen opponents; Ratner may do a lot of things wrong, but at least he doesn’t sell short Wolverine’s combat acumen.

So much is riding on Janssen’s portrayal of Phoenix, but neither she nor Ratner seems to have much insight into the character, who is said to represent Jean’s “subconscious mind… pure joy, desire and rage.” Does this mean that Jean subconsciously hated the characters Phoenix kills? The onscreen death of one major character makes plot-level sense, I guess, though dramatically it feels remarkably cheap and unmoving. But another major character dies offscreen for no very clear reason at all.

The franchise has never figured out how to use Cyclops, alas, and he’s as wasted here as ever, or more so. Storm (Halle Berry), her half-hearted vestigial African accent entirely gone, gets more screentime and makes more effective use of her powers, but as a character she’s as boring as Cyke.

Stewart and McKellen are wonderful to watch as always, but the film flattens and coarsens their characters; Magneto particularly becomes a more stereotypically villainous bad guy, coldly turning his back on a loyal associate (“You’re no longer one of us”) and callously using fellow mutants as battle fodder (“In chess it’s the pawns that go first”). Rebecca Romijn's (née Stamos) Mystique is squandered in more ways than one.

Try Again?

A veritable army of new supporting characters, outnumbering the overstuffed casts of both earlier films combined, parades through the film, to little effect. There’s no breakout character akin to Cumming’s Nightcrawler; the potential was there with Beast (Kelsey Grammer, boldly cast but wasted) and perhaps Angel (Ben Foster, sculpted and anonymous), but neither emerges as much more than a plot device. Nightcrawler himself, alas, is simply absent without explanation or mention; he’s sorely missed, though it’s some consolation that even if he had been present, Ratner would have found a way to waste him.

Grammer does have one effective moment, not an action one, in the presence of a mutant named Leech (Cameron Bright). Otherwise, he spends nearly all his screentime until the big climax walking around in a suit talking. Especially compared to Singer’s adroit use of Nightcrawler’s powers, the Beast is sadly wasted. Angel is effectively introduced in a squirm-inducing prologue that is one of the film’s most vivid scenes, but after that is reduced to a cipher with hardly any lines, mostly seen from afar, apparently to hide the cheesiness of his CGI wings.

Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page, the third actress to play the part) is now more than a walk-on, figuring as a possible spoiler in the troubled Iceman–Rogue romance, and briefly going up against the Juggernaut in the final battle. Colossus (Daniel Cudmore) has more screentime but even less personality than in X2. Poor Rogue is never given a chance to use her powers in a constructive way; they’re reduced entirely to a curse.

Pyro (Aaron Stanford), last seen as a rebellious X-student who went over to the dark side, has been transmogrified to a sneering stereotype of Eeevil who complains to Magneto that he wanted to kill Xavier(!), prompting one of the screenplay’s brief flashes of nuance as Magneto flares up in defense of his longtime nemesis: “Charles Xavier did more for mutants than you’ll ever know.” The much-built-up showdown between Pyro and his natural adversary Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) is about as lazy and anticlimactic as it could possibly be, and Iceman’s thudding attempt at a parting shot after defeating his opponent has got to be a new low in the annals of action-movie screenwriting, which is saying something.

Watching Ratner struggle with his enormous cast makes one appreciate the economy with which Singer established even minor supporting characters. The original film’s villains Sabretooth (wrestler Tyler Mane) and Toad (martial artist Ray Park) weren’t much as characters, but they were still more vivid than The Last Stand’s Juggernaut (British soccer star Vinnie Jones) and a host of anonymous cameos by tattooed villains who would be Callisto and the Morlocks, if anyone had time to call them anything.

The film does manage some striking images, mostly of the anti-gravitational variety, including an eerie fog-bound sequence at Alkali Lake, a major confrontation at Jean Grey’s childhood home, and a third-act set piece that is surely the most bravura display of Magneto’s power in all three films. The final half hour is pretty much nonstop large-scale action, some of it energetic and well-done comic-book fare (though for all its scale there’s nothing here to touch Spider Man 2’s train-top battle with Doc Ock).

Yet how many anonymous officers do we need to see vaporized by the out-of-control Phoenix? Were the crude epithets and crotch-trauma humor really necessary? Above all, when it finally comes down to a deadly confrontation between two characters whose relationship has been as close to the center of the series as anything has been, shouldn’t it matter more?

Oh, and if you’re going to kill off or otherwise permanently neutralize major characters with Whedonesque ruthlessness, do you really want to backtrack with not one but two anticlimactic codas (one before the end credits, one after) suggesting that the supposedly final changes aren’t really so final after all?

Presumably, despite claims that this really is the X-Men’s last stand, the studio wants to ensure that the door is left open for another possible sequel. Here’s a better way to do that: Make a better movie.

(c) 2006 Steven D. Greydanus. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Steven D. Greydanus is a film critic for the National Catholic Register and appears weekly on Ave Maria radio. His website offers in-depth reviews of both contemporary and older films, evaluating them for moral and spiritual worth as well as artistic and entertainment value.