The Usual Suspects (USA, 1995)
Directed by Bryan Singer
Starring Kevin Spacey, Gabriel Byrne, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro

All Bryan Singer films are deeply unsure of themselves: they attempt to marry several conflicting elements while never quite deciding what they want to be. Superman Returns can't decide whether it wants to be dark and moody like Batman Begins or a nostalgic throwback to the earlier films. Valkyrie flits between a romping B-movie about Tom Cruise blowing up Hitler and an intense character study about what it means to betray your country. And then there is The Usual Suspects, which claims to be the heist movie with the ultimate twist, but ends up as the ultimate disappointment.When making a genre film or any kind of homage, there is a very fine line between playing with conventions and coming across as completely unoriginal. The ingredients of a heist film are among the most familiar and formulaic in cinema: the assembly of a team, typically for one last job, the heist being planned and executed, and then something going horribly wrong. One of the tests of a good filmmaker is being able to take a very cliché-ridden subject and do something interesting and memorable while being fully mindful of generic constraints.There are two main ways to make a good heist film in the modern day. The first is to take a particular convention and break it. In The Ladykillers, the heist is barely planned and takes place off screen, with the majority of the film being focussed on the gang unravelling at the hands of Mrs. Wilberforce. The second is to use audience familiarity with conventions to one's advantage, using the heist as a springboard to explore something else. Inception may have a heist structure, but the actual crime which Cobb commits is only as important as the ideas surrounding it - the nature of dreaming, the fracturing of identity, the consequences of addiction and the pain of losing one's love.

From a purely mechanical point of view, The Usual Suspects is a very well-made heist film. All the pieces of the plot fit together very well: there are no gaping holes in either Kevin Spacey's account or the various encounters which persuade Gabriel Byrne to come on board for the big job. And taken in abstract, the final twist is fairly impressive. It's not a million miles away from the silly ending of Shattered, but it's carried with suitable grace and doesn't feel like an unnecessary contrivance, crowbarred in to bring the film to a speedy conclusion.But here, already, we have the central problem with the film. The Usual Suspects may be mechanically sound, but it is so obsessed with being mechanically sound that it never allows you to bond with what is going on in the meantime. Singer spends so much time and effort ensuring that we go through the motions in the slickest way possible, that the actual characters become increasingly superfluous.

By keeping the characters at arms' length from the plot, a barrier between the story and the audience is created. Whenever the screenplay attempts to invoke ideas about the nature of evil, or fear, or the power of will, these ideas are quickly passed over or shot down as the film demands to keep pressing forward. Potentially fascinating explorations of the nature of underground crime are suppressed in favour of the next irrelevant plot point, making The Usual Suspects a decidedly hollow experience.If we compare Singer's efforts to that of Quentin Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs, the significance of this problem becomes apparent. Like The Usual Suspects, Reservoir Dogs is a straightforward heist film whose distinctions are structural rather than aesthetic. But unlike Singer, Tarantino's work not only knew its place within a genre: it knew that the audience knew its place as well. By giving the audience a degree of certainty, Tarantino could get away with his outlandish dialogue and shuffled timeframes which would otherwise have thrown the audience a bigger curveball.To use the analogy of a circus, Reservoir Dogs is like a show at the big top in which everything happens as expected, but always with a flourish. Instead of just a trapeze act, we get a trapeze artist doing triple somersaults - and instead of gangsters simply talking about the heist, we get them to dissect the meaning of Madonna's 'Like A Virgin'. The Usual Suspects is like a circus show in which the ringmaster is so keen to hurry the acts along that we have no time to admire them, and all that is memorable is the huge poles holding up the tent.You only have to look at the characters to realise how much talent has been squandered here. The five 'usual suspects' are all quirkily drawn, whether in their dress sense, their accents or the way they conduct themselves within the group. Christopher McQuarrie's screenplay contains a number of potentially great scenes, laden with distinctively macho dialogue and criminal posturing. But the more time we spend in their company, the more you come to realise that they are quirky for its own sake: there is no narrative reason for Benicio Del Toro to speak like that. They are little more than archetypes in new suits, and like later Tarantino works, you are never convinced that any of them could really exist.

Without properly three-dimensional or believable characters, or much direction beyond rigidly following a formula, the one thing that could have saved The Usual Suspects would have been some kind of moral clout. Both this film and Se7en are thrillers in which the villain is prominent, or at least has a prominent presence which hangs over everything that unfolds. But what made Se7en work, aside from David Fincher's distinctive visuals, was its ability to make subtle contemporary moral points while honouring an old-fashioned hardboiled storyline.The Usual Suspects has the potential - that word again - to have this exact kind of moral clout. The character of Keyser Soze, a criminal who operates underground through oblivious associates, is an intriguing creation which carries meaning about the way that evil infiltrates society. Kevin Spacey's long monologues contain references to the Devil and vengeance on a genuinely Biblical scale, painting Soze as a man that would make even Hannibal Lector flinch. But again, the film never allows these ideas to come out beyond brief suggestions - suggestions which are barely elaborated upon by either the story or the characters.In the midst of all this, The Usual Suspects deserves some credit for its execution. Singer is not a terrible director, at least not from a constructional point of view: his camerawork is solid and the heist scenes especially are well-shot by his long-time cinematographer, Newton Thomas Sigel. As far as the performances go, Kevin Spacey gives his all in the meatiest of roles; his performance of a man with cerebral palsy is Oscar-baiting but convincing. Gabriel Byrne remains an enjoyable screen presence, even if his choice of films is somewhat less enjoyable, and it remains the best thing that Stephen Baldwin has ever done.But in all, The Usual Suspects is a densely plotted disappointment. Singer can never make up his mind what issues he wishes to explore within the confines of the story, and the result is a film which claims a lot but delivers on very little. Through the best efforts of the performers and the decent visuals, you find yourself wanting to like it more, and you start looking for something or someone with whom you can engage. But for all your best efforts the film never lets you in, making The Usual Suspects little more than a well-made waste of time.

Rating: 2/5
Verdict: Well-made but ultimately hollow

The Social Network (USA, 2010)
Directed by David Fincher
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer

When a director you admire drops the ball, it's bad news. It becomes worse news if other parties choose to reward said director with good reviews and awards nominations - the more encouragement he or she gets, the more likely it is that it will happen again. So as the months roll by and the director's next project looms, you sit there on tenterhooks, hoping that it was just a blip and that this time it will be different.After The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher's future seemed to hang in the balance. When it emerged he was making a film about Facebook, it was hanging by a thread. Even when the first trailers emerged, trepidation remained as to whether it would be even faintly compelling for those of us who can't write HTML. How wrong we all were. The Social Network is one of the best films of 2010 and about as big a return to form as you can get.

Within ten minutes of The Social Network starting, you can put to bed all fears that Oscar buzz had somehow gone to Fincher's head. His new film is better than Benjamin Button in every conceivable way: it's tauter, has more substance, is more engaging and doesn't keep collapsing into a bottomless pit of sentimentality. The Social Network is classic Fincher in both its subject and execution: intelligent, multi-layered, complicated and icy cool.Purely from a visual point of view, The Social Network is a sight to behold. Following on from his work on Zodiac, Fincher uses the cutting edge in digital photography and visual effects to create a uniquely enveloping cinematic world. Like his contemporary Christopher Nolan, Fincher has a real gift for finding reality in the fantastical, grounding all his bright and lofty ideas into something which we would easily recognise. Jeff Cronenweth, who also shot Fight Club, shoots the opening scenes with a perfect balance of gloss and brooding, bringing out the best in Harvard's intimidating architecture.Fincher has managed to do what Noah Baumbach never managed - to take a bunch of horrible people and make them engaging and interesting. This becomes an even bigger coup when you consider that most of the so-called action scenes in The Social Network consist of writing code and hacking into servers. Like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World earlier this year, The Social Network manages to take something which on the surface is impenetrable to anyone with a life, and find the interesting stories within that.

The Social Network is not primarily about Facebook, any more than Scott Pilgrim is primarily about video games. It is instead about an extraordinary paradox: the world's biggest friendship tool was invented by someone incapable of friendship, who may also be a tool. The Mark Zuckerberg presented on screen is someone of immense intelligence and programming skill, but who is completely inept when is comes to physical interaction (of whatever sort) with other human beings. It takes him a minute to realise that he is being dumped, and a whole hour of the film to talk to the girl in question (ranting online about her bra size didn't help matters).The casting of Jesse Eisenberg is significant, considering he played a similar character in The Squid and the Whale. But there is a crucial difference between Walt and Mark, and this is the difference which makes the film compelling. Walt is so utterly assured of his own intelligence that he feels the need to constantly belittle others; both he and his close circle of friends are so completely up themselves that we just don't care what happens to them. Mark may appear to be the same - obnoxious, privileged, highly intelligent - but he is completely unaware of how socially inept he is. He expects so much of other people but doesn't know how to deal with it when they fall short. As the lawyer remarks at the end of the film, "you're not an asshole Mark, you're just trying really hard to be one."

Despite the presentation of this character, The Social Network is not a thinly-veiled attack on the real-life Zuckerberg. Neither does it attempt to compensate for this portrayal with bald hagiography on the part of his classmates. Our sympathies shift between the characters, and the only constant is that all of them have incredible intellects and are living extraordinary lives beyond our wildest dreams.The film is on one hand a character study of Zuckerberg and the highly intellectual undergraduates which Harvard unleashes on the world. Where Revenge of the Nerds' characters were well-meaning and loveable, the nerds in this film are ambitious, aggressive and uncompromising. They're not a million miles from the modern-day jocks, embodied by the Winkevoss twins. The party scenes in The Social Network refine the template founded in Animal House, keeping the sense of chaos but disposing of anything distractingly adolescent. The fact that Fincher keeps his cool even when two characters are being fellated in a toilet is a clear demonstration of the film's self-discipline.

The film is also a detailed examination of just how ruthless and cut-throat modern capitalism is. Harvard students are presented as born-and-bred winners, who invent jobs rather than taking them and don't know how to take coming second. The film examines how painfully easy it is to get left behind, both in the fall-out between Eduardo Savarin and Shaun Parker, and in the fate of the Winklevoss twins. The last time we see them on screen, they have just come second in a very close race. The film ends on a spiky note, commenting that they "finished sixth" at the Beijing Olympics.Most of all, The Social Network is about the nature of modern-day friendships and the rapid speed at which life seems to move. Aaron Sorkin's Rashomon-like screenplay balances three timeframes and shows us different versions of what occurred in those fateful days in 2003-4. The characters talk with a natural impatience, demanding that you keep up with them or get left behind; it takes a good few minutes to get in the zone and be a part of their conversations. The film brilliantly demonstrates how Facebook and its counterparts have become a proxy or substitute for genuine friendship. The computer screens act as an artificial barrier between individuals; regardless of how much information we share, we are drifting apart even as technology brings us together.

The film is not quite flawless due to a couple of problematic scenes. Having spent so much of its running time in claustrophobic rooms with the intensity building, the boat race is like someone taking the lid of a pressure cooker; we feel like we need it, but the film is never quite the same again. This sequence feels like a very deliberate way to end the twins' part of the story, as if the film couldn't deal with four stories running side by side. The ending also drags a little for the simple fact that so much of this is recent history; how do you put a definite ending on something which is still ongoing?In spite of these little niggles, The Social Network is one of the best films of the year and a high point in Fincher's illustrious career. It is every bit is intense and atmospheric as The Ghost Writer, and every bit as entertaining as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. It raises all the right questions about its subject and contains a number of very fine performances, particularly from Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield. If nothing else, it's the most exciting film you could make about a bunch of unlikeable men sitting in dark rooms arguing about copyright. Inception remains the best film of the year, but this is a very close second.

Rating: 4.5/5
Verdict: One of the year's best films

Alien 3 (USA, 1992)
Directed by David Fincher
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Brian Glover

Alien 3 is one of the most misunderstood movies of the 1990s. Prompting mixed reviews when first released, it has become a convenient shorthand for badly judged studio interference, a case study for those who continue to argue for director’s vision over studio money-making. Most reviews of Alien 3 heap the blame onto the studios but fail to acknowledge any positive aspects. Whilst it is undoubtedly messy and confusing, there is much about Alien 3 which deserves rehabilitation.The production problems of Alien 3 are very well-known; one might almost call it the definition of development hell. After the success of Aliens, 20th Century Fox commissioned two further sequels, ending up with Ripley leading a full-scale war against aliens who were mass-produced by expatriated Earthlings. This idea was eventually scrapped when Vincent Ward was hired as director. He envisioned a story about a community of monks living on a wooden planet, with Ripley’s battle with the Alien representing a clash between God and the Devil.By the time David Fincher came on board, Ward’s story had been pared down through further rewrites. The monks were now prisoners who had converted to Christianity, and the planet was noticeably un-wooden. Fincher began shooting without a completed script, and when production wrapped his cut was effectively dismembered by the studio. Being a newcomer, Fincher was not given final cut, and therefore had next to no control over the finished product.

Reading through all this, you would expect Alien 3 to be every bit as dismal as David Lynch’s Dune or Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm. In both projects the director’s artistic intentions are in direct conflict with the commercial ambitions of the studio, a conflict which is clearly visible on screen and which produces a film of profound incoherence and annoyance. Just as Dune was attempting to cash in Star Wars, so several scenes in Alien 3 seem to have been shot with a quick buck in mind. The final act, which involves death using molten metal, is clearly derivative of Terminator 2.In fact, the film which Alien 3 most closely resembles is The Exorcist III, William Peter Blatty’s conclusion of The Exorcist triptych which was compromised by studio reshoots. As a result of these reshoots, the same character ended up being played by two different people: Brad Dourif in Blatty’s sections, Jason Miller in the rest. But despite this problem, the film still adds up and Blatty’s vision remains largely intact. In spite of everything, Alien 3 is not a totally derivative cut-and-shut sequel. There is more substance here than we would expect, and much in its visual style which hints at Fincher’s future greatness.

One of the film’s most impressive and startling qualities is its complete and utter nihilism. While neither of the previous films gave you any indication as to who would survive, Alien 3 is incredibly cavalier in its treatment of characters. It makes no bones about who gets killed and how, creating a vein of much-needed unpredictability. Newt, Hicks and Bishop are all dead in the first two minutes, and Charles Dance’s character cops it just when you think he’s known Ripley long enough to live. Ridley Scott’s original was a depiction of blue-collar space, full of dark corridors and grimy machinery. Alien 3 takes this one step further; you really feel, standing in the prison, that you are in the bowels of interstellar existence.Of the three sequels, Fincher’s vision is the closest to Scott’s original. To some extent this is unsurprising, since Cameron’s sequel was a deliberate departure, and Alien Resurrection is a clear example of a director being out of his depth. But there is more similarity than just the dark, grimy visuals. Just as the Nostromo was an interstellar haunted house, so Alien 3 has architecture like a cathedral. The prison has echoey rooms and corridors, which are dimly lit often using candles, and is inhabited by people whose form of Christianity brings out inordinate levels of guilt (or at least self-pity).

Much of Alien 3 is a clouded Christian allegory, an element which survives from Ward’s original concept. Ripley’s arrival ‘from the stars’ to a planet resembling Earth sets her up as a Christ figure. Her presence as a woman amongst an all-male population leads many to view her suspiciously, believing her to be a temptress who will lure the masses away from the righteous path. The warden’s order that she shave her head is an attempt by the powers-that-be to make her blend in, to prevent trouble from occurring. Brian Glover’s character is a modern day Pontius Pilate, desiring order and harmony over doing the right thing.With this allegory in place, the alien becomes the devil figure whom Ripley must defeat, a balance reinforced by Ripley sacrificing herself (in the original cut) to prevent evil spreading through the hands of corrupted men. The twist, however, is that Ripley is carrying this evil inside her; the alien won’t kill her because it recognises the queen growing in her chest. This shifts things closer to Eastern doctrines, in which good and evil are intertwined and one has to cancel out the other. It is a real stretch to compare it to The Last Temptation of Christ, but there is the same hint of a Christ figure having the same desires (and potential for sin) as the rest of us.

In a Guardian article for the 30th anniversary of Alien, David McIntee described the evolution of Ripley as one “from maiden to mother to crone”. The Ripley in Alien 3 is battle-hardened and weary of the world around her. She is more cynical and wracked with guilt, because of what has happened to her friends and because of what she carries. Incubating a queen is the physical expression of a bitter irony: she is giving life to the very thing she has devoted her life to destroying. Her position is ultimately fatalistic: she is fighting a losing battle to keep evil from the world, and her choice to go out fighting is a last desperate bid to aspire such devotion in others.On top of its allegorical connotations, Alien 3 contains a number of visual tricks which supplement its dark mood. Fincher’s decision to shoot the chase scene from the alien’s point of view is ingenious. As the alien scuttles along the ceiling, we become disoriented from seeing the prisoners fleeing upside down, giving us some sense of the blind fear they experience. A lot of the alien CGI is cheap and obvious, but the mechanical sections (including the scene in the nest) are generally well-played.

The weakest parts in Alien 3 are those which play against this dark tone for broader, mainstream appeal. In the midst of a thrilling chase scene, we don’t need characters running into each other in a broadly slapstick manner. Much of the acting is ripe, with Glover over-enunciating every line and many characters being reduced to twitches and other nervous tics. The first 45 minutes, which includes an attempted rape scene, is a complete scramble: it gives us very little clue as to the tone or style of the film, and threatens at points to throw us out of its world completely.Like Event Horizon after it, Alien 3 is a flawed but underrated film with intelligence and insight buried under layers of dumb action and bizarre plot points. It doesn’t stand alone like the previous two films, and it isn’t as consistently scary as one would have hoped. But given the right circumstances and the right amount of patience, the artistic visions of Ward and Fincher begin to bubble to the surface. In the end it is a troubling but strangely rewarding effort, with individual moments of brilliance and much in between to be admired.

Rating: 3.5/5
Verdict: Flawed but fascinating