The fall of the titan: Mr. Robot

I took my time to re-watch the two seasons and be sure about what I want to discuss here. Before moving forward, I have to admit that I can't hold such discussion without talking about specific events of the 22 episodes aired so far. So consider yourself warned, there will be spoilers.

I also have to admit that I am writing these lines with the spirit of a betrayed lover. Therefore, to explain my feelings, I have to justify both the love and the betrayal.

The love was coming from season 1. I am not afraid to say that Mr. Robot (with Sense8 a close second) was the best show of the past year for the concept, the message and, most of all, the execution. The structure of the narration was nearly perfect, moving the plot at every given episode without wasting any time: every single storyline matters in the big picture of the full season. I can spend many words on the convincing acting or the amazing camera work, or on how much I loved the soundtrack (and how they brutally interrupt it to let a scene suddenly begin). The psychological drama was in a sense hidden in the frame of the plot before revealing itself in that eighth episode and then explode in the amazing next one.

You knew it all along, didn't you? 

It is thus clear that living up to that level is difficult for any show. If you try to look at it with a cold heart, you will notice that you have enjoyed a show that is basically a montage of different movies. The high skill of the creators was lying precisely in feeding us something that we knew all along and yet entirely different and exciting. For this reason, I look at the first season as a miracle of TV Shows.

However, considering my high expectations, season 2 turned out to be such a mess on almost every good aspect of the previous one. I can't help to consider this a betrayal.

First of all, the season suffers from a problem sadly common to many many movie sequels/prequels: a good part of it is dedicated to explaining the previous season. Such explanations, like the episode that opens up with a flashback to the moment when they decided to do the hack, do not add anything to the story and, therefore, have no reason to be there. In a season that, as we will see in a moment, has to explore so many storylines, adding unnecessary details to something that already happened makes the narration cumbersome and confusing. 

It appears clear that the plots to be explored are 4:

• How they follow up the attack
• How they escape to the FBI
• What the Dark Army and WhiteRose have in mind
• What's the next move of the E-Corp

These were the plots to be developed and to some extent they were. My problem is in those useless flashbacks and in what surrounds them. One plot above all: Joanna, Tyrell Wellick's wife. At the beginning of the season, she is covering something up about the hack by paying and then killing (s02e05) the guy that woke up Elliot at the end of the previous season (s01e10). Then she is struggling to maintain a clandestine relationship with the boring but beautiful guy that punches like a little girl. Her continuous presence on screen is not justified by the events, I waited and waited to see if she got eventually relevant, but no. She receives calls for the entire season, that would be interesting if they were coming from Tyrell; except they were coming from another insignificant character! Her presence just slows down the stories and it is, in the big picture, irrelevant. 

One may argue that it will be relevant in the next season so they, so to speak, kept her character warm for the viewers. But this is a betrayal of the first season's approach where nothing was there only to set up a sequel.

Another element of confusion is the character of Angela. She is popping out everywhere in the story, in every subplot. She does everything, she even knows how to contact Tyrell and even WhiteRose is surprised of her. Her character takes so many spins and turns along the season to lose any identity: she is just what is needed to move the plot along, the Angela ex machina. 

Control can sometimes be an illusion, but sometimes you need illusion to gain control.

The first episodes were mostly dedicated to exploring the psychological drama of the main character, Elliot. This was done perfectly, with him fighting his alter ego and then understanding how to live with it (except falling in another illusion of control). I started to appreciate that only during my second viewing, especially once that I was sure what was the end of the mentioned illusion. It is precisely this difficulty in being involved in this new season that made me focus on another sloppy aspect of the show. 

We can all agree that the opening is very dense of plots to be wrapped together, reminders of what happened a year ago, and Elliot descending to madness. Thus I now justify the difficulties that brought Sam Esmail to apologize on twitter. However, after episode 5, the narration is confusing, jumping from character to character without a specific logic. Sometimes the authors interrupt one plot for 1 or even 2 episodes, moving our attention somewhere else. This can be a strategy to transmit the chaotic state of mind of the protagonist, but the effect is rather making the viewer less involved in what was happening on the screen. 

I could surely mention a few great scenes or even great episodes, from now and then. I surely appreciated the bold experiment of episode 6, where Elliot finds himself living in an illusory world based on the Tv Show Alf, a situation heavily recalling a scene from Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers that is one of my favorite movies. But if I have to evaluate the season in its entirety, Mr. Robot falls short even if I do not consider my high expectations.

You realize that the episodes that effectively develop the plots listed above are less than 5. In a 12 episodes season long, this is a failure at the level of Game of Thrones. The powerfulness of the show was to create a cluster of episodes where everything ultimately mattered and contributed to the final result. The plot was interesting and loaded with complexity by itself, the narration was then direct because further complications weren't needed. Here we just have another show trying to drown itself in the storytelling. The complexity is now coming from a cumbersome narration rather than from the plot itself.

The entire post could have been shorter, containing the single thoughts that surprised me at the end of season 2: I didn't want to find out immediately what happens next. This is how bad it was. And we can only feel sorry about that because we have probably lost a gem.

Reasons to see (or not) The Magnificent Seven

Synopsys: We are in a quiet town somewhere near Sacramento, full of quiet, probably even good, people and a preacher that cares more about an empty building with respect to the six dead bodies around him. Why six dead bodies? I don't know, I'm not sure they were six. The point is that a bad guy called capitalism is coming to town and he is not fucking around too much. The quiet good people hire Denzel Washington to be himself once again. This time, he finds 6 other guys with different stories and probably even a few dreams. Yes, you are right, this makes them 7 and they are... beautiful. This is the story on if and how they saved the town from capitalism.

This movie is a remake of a western that was a remake of a Japanese movie. So one can expect a lack of originality and, let's face it, this movie gives you a Deja Vu feeling that remains with you when you leave the theater. As you can see, the plot is pretty standard for the genre and its development doesn't bring any particular new element.

During the movie I found myself appreciating this aspect. I lived classic western scenes as a citation, even as an homage to the genre. The piano player that stops playing when the badass character enters the saloon while everyone turns to look at him. The excellent crescendo during the staredowns on dusty roads. The music that embraces the plot till the final explosion of notes. All of this is done and presented with great skill, making the movie a very nice work to look at. The problem is that there is nothing new to support the homage, no contribution is coming from the movie. It thus looks very unoriginal to everyone that ever saw a western movie.

A bright spot is the overall performance of the actors, yet bugged with its highs and lows. Denzel is excellent, this is the kind of role that probably most suits him and the alchemy with the director (Antoine Fuqua) is strong for the entire movie. Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke bring to the screen a convincing performance, the one that I have appreciated the most since they convey some sort of journey for the respective characters. On the other hand, the performance of Vincent D'Onofrio, an actor that I liked a lot every time I've seen him (Full Metal Jacket and Daredevil), sounds off and underwhelming. But it can just be me feeling strange while I laugh every time he speaks or moves.

Another bad performance, but I suspect the reason is how the character is written, is coming for the bad guy. It is not a case that I refer to the antagonist as "the capitalism" or "the bad guy". While can be easy to find the actor's name online, I want to stress out that, in a movie with 7 important good guys, the bad guy should pop out of the screen and it simply doesn't happen, leaving the antagonist in an annoying shade of anonymity. The antagonist is one dimensional, he has a very little screen time and does nothing to be remembered.

This was probably the biggest disappointment since the rest of the characters is introduced very efficiently (with a few minor exceptions). We spend the first 30 minutes to meet our heroes, seeing them doing something that immediately gives us a reason to care or be curious about them. This is an aspect that I have appreciated since the last movie that I saw with multiple protagonists (Suicide Squad, reviewed here) was a mess in the introduction. If there we spent the first part of the movie by listening to someone telling us about the characters, in The Magnificent Seven they appear naturally one by one, saving us from what I can call the audiobook-effect. In other words, this movie succeeds where Suicide Squad failed: it goes beyond its trailer.

The action sequences are the other strong suit of the movie. The tension is slowly built up with excellent camera movements and small dialogues. Then the scene explodes with its choreography of smoking guns, flying knives, arrows, and dead bodies piling up. For being only a PG-13 movie, its violence is a very dominant factor, so expect a lot of very well written and directed action sequences with a lot of people dying on screen.

In conclusion, if you never saw a western movie, this is a fair sample of how it would look like and you will probably enjoy the action sequences and the badassery of the protagonists. Otherwise, everything will look familiar and there is the chance to be disappointed by the lack of originality of this movie.

At last, that preacher is a motherfucker.

Everything is fun and games until... Nerve

Synopsys: Nerve is a game like truth or dare, but without the truth. Nerve is or dare (it had to be said, move along). One day, the young people of New York find out that there is a website that dares people to do something in exchange for money and adrenaline. People can play or pay an outrageous amount of money per hour to see other people playing. In this world, where cell phones battery are extremely efficient, a shy girl is tired of not taking any chances in her life and start playing. In the night that follows that decision, everything goes wilder and wilder.

Regardless of my tone, Nerve turned out to be a very entertaining movie, with the right twists and turns, and some sequences that will keep you on the edge of your seats. I went to the theater with no expectations, I didn't come back thinking that I completely wasted my time.

The movie is essentially about how far one can go to impress the faceless crowd that is the internet community. It shows us a story, it shows us the risks of being trapped in such situations, and it shows us how being a faceless crowd and having easy access to other people's life can change our behavior. 

The main risk is to not sound credible. I personally find credible that an app that dares you to film yourself doing something unusual in exchange of money would have success. It's not difficult to imagine that the game goes too far eventually and someone is ready to get hurt in order to not lose the prize. It's not hard to believe that people would watch or film that. Less credible is the indifference of the media (or the police) towards such game, as many others pointed out already. However, the entire movie takes place in less than 24 hours, so it is not impossible to keep it as a secret (and it is in the rules).

Thus we have a credible absurd story unraveling in front of our eyes at a very high pace. She presses that button to start the game and from that moment it escalates with a very constant pace till the predictable grand finale. When I talk about predictability, I only mean that it is easy to expect that something big is going to happen, the curiosity to find out what keeps the viewer attention and makes the high rhythm a good aspect of this movie.

Regardless my surprise of seeing an unexpectedly nice movie, it is fair to say that this light movie has some problems, even accepting its lightness. The main issue is the lack of closure both in the main plot and in the secondary ones. To maintain it spoiler-free, the movie opens arcs of tension between the characters and then simply ends, without resolving most of them. This is usually indicating a lazy writer behind it, or, even worse, a characterization of the story dangerously stereotyped.

Then a message to those that cannot enjoy a movie if it is not scientifically or, as in this case, technologically accurate. Don't go, you will not like it. In the movie, the internet is a magical place, the hackers are wizards, the deep web is an even more magical place with leprechauns, and cell phones' batteries last forever.

In conclusion, this movie is able to surprise you. I'm not sure if it is because of its intrinsic qualities or because of my non-existent expectations, but it is going to surprise you. If you have a couple of hours to spare, it is not a bad idea to lighten up watching it.

Reasons to see (or not) The Infiltrator

Synopsis: Special agent Robert Mazur is like the Obi-Wan Kenobi of undercover agents, but gets tired of chasing narcos for a few dozen of Kg of drugs. He thus decides to chase the dirty money instead of the funny drugs. Here begins the true story of the man that infiltrates Pablo Escobar's cartel and discovers the money-laundering organization behind it. 

Being a true story, it is difficult to really define what is a spoiler or not, but, on the cinematographical point of view, everything that follows is completely spoiler-free.

True stories usually encounter two big issues once they are translated to the screens of our theaters. The writers are often lazy in explaining why a character changes attitude; since the change really happened, they don't feel the need of explaining it too much. Moreover, the fact that the viewer already knows how the story is going to end is often a reason for the lack of tension or, even worse, to make clumsy every attempt to create such tension. Therefore, before we continue with this post, I have to say that movies based on true stories are not my favorite one, generically speaking.

All that being said, The Infiltrator is, by all means, a good movie and most of the credit has to go to another marvelous performance by Bryan Cranston. I'm not usually a big fan of overwhelming performances by actors, but it is difficult to remain indifferent in front of the tridimensionality and the realism that this actor gives to his characters. Therefore, after admitting that true stories are not my favorite stories on screen, it is also time to admit that the ability of the actor is more than enough to make this movie enjoyable. Bryan Cranston's performance is not as good as last year's Trumbo (another true story for which I believe he deserved the Academy Award) but doesn't go too far from that.

However, the ability of the actors is not enough to compensate the transition-problem mentioned before. Although we are not at the low levels of War Dogs (to cite the most recent example AND continue in my self-promotion crusade), where nothing was explained, we are also far away from the high levels of Sully (to cite the most recent example AND continue in my self-promotion crusade), where the transitions in the attitudes of the characters are always well displayed. My guess is that, by trying to communicate the uncertainty and the insecurity of that investigation, the producers ruined from time to time an otherwise perfect flow in the movie. A few transitions are not smooth and they simply do not work on screen.

On the other side, The Infiltrator is a movie that keeps the tension level high every time it is needed. There are many sequences that make you wonder or fear for the protagonists. This is a big win for this kind of movies and worths the price of the ticket by itself. You naturally perceive the danger surrounding the investigation, how incredibly easy is to screw everything up and how close to screwing everything up they actually went.

In conclusion, coming from someone that is not a fan of true stories, not a fan of movies too centered around the ability of an actor, and pretty tired of seeing Pablo Escobar on a screen, this is a very recommended movie, it will completely absorb you into the narration, it has a few good comedy moment and it si definitely a good way of spending your time.

Sully: doing everything right and saying the wrong thing

Clint Eastwood comes back to our screens two years after American Sniper to tell us another American story. This time is the true story of the US Airways flight 1549, which, on February 15, 2009, was forced to land in the Hudson River after hitting several birds in the act of taking off from New York's LaGuardia Airport. 

The movie is centered on the figure of the captain, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the hero that saved everyone on that plane by taking the decision and then executing a bold water landing. In the movie, we go through the investigation of the accident and the struggles that captain Sully faced during that period. The hero is then haunted by doubts about himself and by the perspective of losing his pension after 40 years of service. 

Telling a true story on screen is always tricky, but Sully delivers with power every emotion, overcoming the fact that the viewer already knows the outcome of the story. I've enjoyed the movie, I felt a wide spectrum of emotions and it feels authentic. The actors are amazing and very well directed, the dialogues are powerful, and Aaron Eckhart should be forced to keep that glorious mustache till the end of time. Moreover, the narration of the events is very well designed, not giving us the scenes of big visual impact right away (like in the movie Flight), but rather delivered, one bit at a time, in different moments of the movie. 

The only flaw of the movie itself is a piece of dialogue that gave my nerves. It appears to me that the old Clint wants to remind the viewers that something else about planes crashing on New York happened in the recent past. Therefore, starting from the very first scene, we find images of how worse that accident could have been. At first, I tolerated the choice, since it is fitting with a PSTD of the pilot. Moreover, it could be the way of the director to say "everyone will think about 9/11 anyway, let's just ride the elephant in the room" (although I'm not sure about the first part and now we will never know). I ran out of tolerance when the issue was explicitly addressed with a phrase like "It has been a while since New York had good news, especially involving planes" (not a literal transposition). I found it inappropriate and it doesn't fit well in the movie.

Besides that, it is a very well executed movie, I fully recommend it because it is a good way to spend a couple of hours.

At last, I would like to address a message that the movie made me feel and to which I disagree with. The method used to represent the investigation, as well as the people whose duty (and let me stress duty) is to establish what went wrong and who is responsible, made me take a stand against the investigation itself. This is just wrong. In such accidents, the investigation is mandatory because you have also to decide if giving or not to the pilot (or the plane) the responsibilities for other human lives. It is true that the struggle and the self-analysis of the main character are saying that he trust the necessity of such investigation. However, from the choice of the actors (that always interpret annoying characters) to the dialogues, the feeling is that the investigators are the bad guys. I think this is simply the wrong message and I don't think that an expert director like Clint Eastwood did that by accident.