Cosmopolis (2012)

Cosmopolis must surely rank as one of the slowest road movies ever made. It follows the gradual crawl of a white limousine as it moves from one side of Manhattan to the other. Inside is Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), an insanely rich and staggeringly young billionaire who simply wants a haircut. Packer is the pinnacle of the ultra-rich 1%, one of Tom Wolfe's self styled Masters of the Universe; in this case, a portable, self contained universe. We see Packer's self engineered financial and personal downfall as he is ferried ever closer to a climactic confrontation with Unabomber-like former employee Benno Levin (Paul Giamatti), the nadir of the other 99%.

In terms of it's place in the oeuvre of director David Cronenberg, the easiest and most obvious connections would be with his other automotive nightmare, Crash. Both films create a glacial, hermetically sealed world, but whereas Crash allows us to peer in at this world through the glass, Cosmopolis places us inside of it. The interior of Packer's limo, bathed in the blue light of the screens bringing him news of his financial destruction, is scarily silent. Whenever the door is opened, the sounds of the city are almost deafening. His succession of advisers and analysts all speak in stilted sentences and strangely hollow sound bites, Samantha Morton in particular being disarmingly blank and angular as Packer's personal theoretician. As the cold and vulpine Packer, Pattinson undoubtedly has the hardest job, being on screen for almost every second of the movie, but he adds further proof of Cronenberg's canny eye for casting. He plays Packer as someone who has done too much, too young, and has nothing left but the thrill of losing it all. When we first see him holding court in his limo, he's dwarfed by his throne like chair. And when he exits the limo to confront an attacker, a gun tucked into his trousers, he does so with the cocky strut of a schoolboy trying to act harder than he feels. It's a pitch perfect performance that proves there is more to Pattinson than an army of screaming and swooning fans.

Paul Giamatti, on the other hand, has nothing to prove. The final twenty minutes of the movie, where Packer finally exits his universe and enters that of Giamatti's balding, dishevelled Levin, are the real triumph of Cosmopolis. The likes of Levin, those who have fallen through the cracks, have no place in Packer's world; “Do you think people like me can't happen?” Levin demands. He's the abandoned chickens of rampant capitalism come home to roost, desperation in his eyes and a gun in his hand. It's a gold standard of naturalistic scenery chewing, and armed with Cronenberg's style and Don DeLillo's words, he doesn't put a foot wrong.

Those looking for grand, damning statements on the evils of capitalism may not find Cosmopolis entirely satisfactory. Cronenberg seems more interested in showing modern society stretched to breaking point, threatening to snap at any moment. It's an incredibly easy film to admire, and an extremely hard one to love. It's certainly not a film for everyone, but then there's no fun in films that aim to be for everyone, and by extension are for no one. Cosmopolis is a film for some, and on those grounds it is almost flawless. And that's just fine by me.

Prometheus (2012)

Prometheus is not Alien. It seems necessary to make this clear. In fact, thematically it bears more relation to Ridley Scott's own Blade Runner. Both films ask what it means to be human. Blade Runner asks these questions indirectly, and even comes close to giving answers; Prometheus goes straight ahead and asks the questions, then never fully answers them. In this case, they are raised by a team of scientists travelling to a distant planet to find the beings responsible for life on Earth. The name of their ship is Prometheus, and the implications are clear: you don't mess with the gods. Whether or not you like the film will probably depend on how much you care about it's lack of satisfying answers.

Speaking for myself, I have no problem with remaining mystified. Too many films are lacking a sense of awe and mystery, and in several key scenes Prometheus delivers just this. The breathtaking design of the film alone is worth the price of admission; it has to be the most visually beautiful film I've seen all year. The problem lies with it's failure to succeed on a human level. The embarrassingly weak script and a disjointed story struggle against a strong cast who have to work hard to keep us interested. Noomi Rapace is a strong leading presence in her first English speaking lead role, with Scott opting for more than a simple Ripley re-tread. Her unshaken religious faith, even in the face of possible answers to life's great questions, is surprisingly original and refreshing. She's helped by a solid supporting cast, but even their combined strengths are overshadowed by the presence of Michael Fassbender. His performance as David, the ship's android, has been receiving so much acclaim that praising him has almost become a cliché. It's justified however, and in many ways David is the central crux of the movie, providing the same function as Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty in Blade Runner. They both share an Aryan flawlessness that manifests as veiled contempt of the humans around them, as well as a vague yearning to be as 'human' as them. There is a nice touch as David is seen modelling his appearance and speech pattern on Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. Later he offers a quote from that film to hint at the futility of the mission: “There is nothing in the desert, and no man needs nothing”. 

Ultimately, Prometheus doesn't hold together. It's fails to come as close as Blade Runner to answering any of it's central questions, and to describe the plot and script as messy would be far too kind. It is so staggeringly ambitious that it's failure to succeed is almost inevitable. It never works as a whole, but there are several moments when it soars.