Top 5... Directors For The New Star Wars Films

As I'm sure you're aware by now, Disney recently bought LucasFilm, and are currently planning on releasing the next trilogy of Star Wars films, starting in 2015 (which is looking like a pretty damn good year for movies so far, what with Avengers 2 and the Justice League movie). Currently nothing has been set in stone other than a frankly ridiculous amount of rumours over cast and crew, so I'm going to throw my hat into the already over-hatted ring as to whom I believe would make a decent director for what proves to be one of the most eagerly, yet cautiously, anticipated films of the next few years. As I like to do sometimes, I've made two lists, one of a safe pair of hands to kick off the trilogy, and another list of film-makers who could add an interesting spin on the series that I'd quite like to see.

Titanic

Now bear with me here, but I do actually really like Titanic. This may all stem from a fascination with the tragedy as a child, but its also in part due to James Cameron’s direction of a film too easily written off as a soppy romance that just happens to be set aboard the most famous nautical disaster of all time, other than Speed 2: Cruise Control. What Cameron does is take 1958s A Night to Remember, the foremost Titanic film pre-1997, and add characters you genuinely care about; DiCaprio’s steerage class ragamuffin and Winslet’s pressured poor little rich girl, as well as a sense of spectacle unavailable to film makers in the pre-CGI movie making era. There is a clear divide in the film – and eventually in the ship too – around the half way mark, once the inevitable iceberg has viciously assaulted the great ship and departed without exchanging insurance details, where the gender that the film panders to switches. Initially, the tale of an across-the-tracks romance between the leads and comparisons of their expertly realised respective classes, culminating in a steamy encounter in a car in storage is squarely aimed at the female half of the audience, but as soon as the Atlantic ocean decides it wants to come aboard and everything starts taking place on an ever increasing incline, the ensuing carnage, death and destruction should appeal to any man with a penchant for disaster movies.

Weaving fact (Kathy Bates’ ‘unsinkable’ Molly Brown) with fiction (Apparently one reason the iceberg wasn’t spotted until it was too late was due to Jack and Rose sharing a passionate snog on deck) it isn’t difficult to understand why this was the Biggest Film of All Time™ until Jimbo’s latest azure-tinged epic.

Negative points? At 3 hours it’s a bit of a trek, and the multiple villains (there’s at least four, not counting the iceberg) are all a bit too one-note to be believable, even though one, Jonathan Hyde’s weaselly marketing man Bruce Ismay, is based on a real person. There are also a few too many shout-at-the –screen moments of stupidity on behalf of the leads escape attempts – surely Rose would have realised Jack would have a better chance of survival on his own, if she has got on a lifeboat. That being said, there isn’t enough to detract from the quality of the film, with the characters and story never being overshadowed by the stellar effects work.

Choose film 8/10

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

How do you make a sequel to Terminator? It seems like the perfect movie to create a franchise with, featuring the possibilities for labyrinthine time-travel plotting, self referencing paradoxes and a villain who can be killed, but can also always return, but therein lays the biggest stumbling block. The villain from the original, Schwarzenegger’s unstoppable mechanical monster, the main draw of the first film, surely must return for the second, especially seeing as, in 1991, he was one of the biggest stars in the world. But how could the same robot come back as the villain? The sequel must somehow build upon the original, develop it further, else why bother? Having the same villain, with essentially the same plot, would seem a waste of time. So, proving that necessity is indeed the mother of invention, director James Cameron pulled a full character flip on not just Arnie’s T-800, now here as protector rather than foe, but also of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, discarding the ditzy 80s hairdo for some badass fighting skills, tank tops and a permanent ticket to the gun show. The introduction of John Connor (Edward Furlong) as a ridiculously irritating teenager spouting laughable phrases (Asta-la-vista, baby? Seriously?) is also a diversion from the expected, as he’s the so-called saviour of mankind, but he’s so goddamn annoying that whenever he was onscreen I found myself rooting for the bad guy.

And what a bad guy. Tackling the insurmountable challenge of topping the Governator’s performance in the previous film, Cameron used Robert Patrick as the liquid metal T-1000, able to mimic anything it touches. The T-1000 is superior to the T-800 in every way, making the formerly unstoppable Terminator now seem genuinely flawed. R-Patz plays the T-1000 with a similar steely, machine-like physicality to Schwarzenegger, but is much more agile and flexible, creating a more efficient killing machine.

The CGI (and indeed, lack thereof) is incredible (I recently discovered that the shot where the Connors go digging around in Arnie’s head whilst he is talking was done completely without computers, instead using a fake mirror and Linda Hamilton’s twin sister) especially the T-1000’s morphing abilities (the shotgun-blasted creature at the end is in actual fact a fully mechanical model, that someone probably has in their house somewhere. I want it). 

The film also comes with one of cinemas coolest moments, when the T-800 single handedly reloads a shotgun whilst riding a motorcycle, with Arnie not even looking at it. I also enjoyed how the Terminator universe had expanded from the first film, the events actually causing progression, as the arm of the T-800 that was trapped in the factory has been discovered, as has an integral chip from within its head, allowing scientists to invent the technology required to create the Terminators, possibly sooner than would have happened had the original T-800 and Kyle Reese not come back from the future in the first film.

Choose Film 9/10

The Terminator

Film night strikes again with the Terminator. This is a film that is so deeply ingrained within popular culture that I cannot remember the first time that I saw it, and probably did not even realise it was my first time then, as the character is so well known, from the way he moves to his handful of lines of dialogue, but I tried to watch it afresh, as though it was 1984 and I’d wandered blindly into a cinema and sat down. The most surprising thing I found was that there is no indication that Schwarzenegger is a cyborg until about 45 minutes into the films, though it is now the most famous aspect of the film. Up until Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) tells Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) that he is a robot sent from the future to kill her, preventing the birth of her son and therefore the revolution against the cyborgs that he will eventually cause, we only assume that Schwarzenegger is just a specially trained, seemingly unstoppable killer, possibly a soldier or hitman of some kind. Yes there are some hints; his stiff-legged walking and even stiffer speech mannerisms, but at the time no-one would have been expecting anything more acting-wise from the former bodybuilder. 

It seems that not just the cyborgs are out to get Sarah either, in fact almost all the machinery in the film is on the brink of turning against humanity, from the police radio or answering machines that lead the terminator to her or the man complaining about his garbage truck in the opening scene, the robot uprising is already upon us. Occasionally the soundtrack jarred with the action though, particularly the awkward synth noises during the motorcycle/car chase, and the effects in places looked a little ropey, but at the time they were incredible, and I don’t intend to belittle them now.

This is a film you can be a fan of without even watching it, so iconic are the scenes, characters and lines that it is ranked up with Star Wars and Indiana Jones for the effect it has had on today’s culture. So if you haven’t seen it because you think you already have, make sure that you do, if only for one of the greatest dead-oh-wait-no-he’s-not bits in cinema history.

Choose Film. 9/10