THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB : Tuesday 13th November 2018.

'THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB' which I saw this week, is the fourth instalment in the 'Millennium' series of novels and films. This film franchise first kicked off with the originator of the international best seller series Stieg Larsson who penned 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo', 'The Girl Who Played with Fire' and 'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest' - all of which were made into successful films in their native Sweden, launching the movie career of Noomi Rapace as lead character Lisbeth Salander in those first three films. In 2011, David Fincher made an American version of the first film starring Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander and Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist as an investigative journalist and occasional lover to Salander. When Stieg Larsson died in 2004 aged 50, having completed the three novels, David Lagercrantz carried the torch having penned two follow on novels so far, the first of which continues with this instalment. This time Directed by Fede Alvarez whose previous Directing credits include the 2013 version of 'Evil Dead' and  2016's 'Don't Breathe'. The film saw its Premier at the Rome Film Festival in late October, cost US$43M to make and has so far recovered US$18M, was released in Sweden at the end of October, was released here in Australia and in the US last week and has so far received generally mixed or average Reviews.

And so to the story. The film opens with the young child Lisbeth and her sister Camilla playing a game of chess on the floor of her fathers snow fortress home somewhere in the foothills of Stockholm. A servant enters the room where they play and commands that the girls go see their father in his bedroom. In making their way down the corridor, a heavily tattooed naked woman is seen walking into another room. Their father insists that the girls join him on his bed, as he unbuttons his shirt. It is clear that at this point that his intentions are far from honourable. Lisbeth hangs back as Camilla approaches her father. Lisbeth wants nothing of this and in a moment of distraction throws herself off the balcony and into a blizzard. Surviving the fall on an embankment of freshly fallen snow, the young Lisbeth is seen running off into the forest below. She chooses not to venture back to the house as long as her father remains alive.

We then fast forward twenty or so years to the present day. We are in an ultra modern apartment overlooking the Stockholm skyline. Lisbeth Salander (Claire Foy) is lurking in the shadows of the library, and has come to the rescue of an abused wife from her wealthy, successful and respected businessman husband, who has just beaten her bloody and is now trying to make up to her as she lays on the floor propped up against a kitchen bench. Lisbeth dressed in black with a hoodie and white make up contrasting her eyes appears as an avenging angel against the backdrop of a statue in the darkened room. Pretty quickly she has trussed the husband up in a wire lasso and has him dangling upside down from the ceiling. Meanwhile, she has hacked into his bank account and proceeds to empty it distributing his wealth in favour of his wife and child, and the two prostitutes he previously beat up, and which she plays him back on her smart phone, threatening to go public with the footage if he dare to come after her, or is wife and child ever again.

A few days later, dismissed from the National Security Agency, Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant) recruits expert hacker Lisbeth to steal 'FireFall', a computer programme that can access codes for nuclear weapons worldwide from a single device, and which he developed in the first place. He has come to realise that it's really not such a clever idea to leave FireFall unattended in the hands of the U.S. government, and so wants it destroyed. Lisbeth, using her advanced IT hacking skills is able to move the programme from the NSA's tightly guarded and high security computer vault. However, accessing the programme once it is in her possession is no easy feat, involving the answering of very cryptic questions, that we learn later on that Balders six year old savant son August (Christopher Convery) only has the answers to.

Edwin Needham (LaKeith Stanfield) is a former computer hacker of some repute and has now turned specialist techie geek for the NSA, and he traces the opening of FireFall to Stockholm. So off he jets on the next available flight. Upon landing he is picked up by the Swedish Secret Service authorities and told in no certain terms by Gabriella Grane (Synnove Macody Lund), the Deputy Director, to keep out of their business and that he has no jurisdiction other than being a tourist, and any contravention will result in his immediate deportation back from whence he came. Of course he ignores this directive immediately and goes off in search of Lisbeth.

Meanwhile, Lisbeth is living in secret in an abandoned warehouse, replete with all her computer gadgets and wizardry that enables her to hack her way into any computer system anywhere in the world with just a couple of clicks . . . a skill that more than proves its worth on multiple occasions throughout the film. Whilst relaxing in her bath however, her apartment is broken into by a group of unscrupulous masked men looking for the programme, who end up torching her digs in a ball of fire. Lisbeth, naturally survives although not unscathed, and has recorded the antagonists down to her computer located in her fire and explosion proof panic room. As for the rest of the apartment, it is well and truly torched.

As Lisbeth quickly salvages what she can from the burnt out ruins of her former abode, the Police begin to arrive to check on all the commotion. Lisbeth rides out on her motorbike and is chased along the waterfront by three Police cars in hot pursuit, but she is able to make her getaway across a frozen river.

With her computer containing the FireFall programme now in the hands of some nefarious underworld organisation, Lisbeth turns to her old friend Michael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) to get handy with some deep diving investigative work to uncover the masked perpetrators. Meanwhile she sets up covert surveillance of Balders safe house expecting that those perpetrators will eventually hunt him out wanting the access code. In the meantime, Blomkvist has traced one of the masked men through a distinctive spider tattoo, and has learned that 'The Spiders' are the secretive powerful and often violent Russian outfit behind Lisbeth's woes.

Via the covert surveillance camera placed strategically overlooking the Balder residence, Lisbeth is able to see the Russians infiltrating the household, brutally killing the guards on security duty and soon enough too Frans, taking August prisoner and setting up a drugged up Lisbeth to make it look as though she shot Frans through the head at very close range. Able to execute a fairly swift getaway, although only semi-conscious, Lisbeth recovers her senses and gives chase in an unmarked Police car. After a high speed car chase involving hand brake turns, wheel spins and jumps she eventually rescues the young lad from the clutches of them pesky no good Russians and leaves them high and dry on an elevated snow covered bridge, with Lisbeth on one side glaring at her evil long lost believed dead sister Camilla (Sylvia Hoeks).

Decamping to a secret hideaway on the outskirts of the city, Lisbeth and August make off in a hacked Lamborghini. They meet up with Blomkvist there, but within 24 hours Camilla and her Spider cohorts arrive and take back August. In the meantime, Needham has been arrested at the scene of the crime at the Balder household and Grane promptly orders that he be shipped back to 'Disneyland' post haste. Lisbeth goes to the airport to retrieve Needham from his heavy security entourage and does so by hacking into every surveillance camera, every electronic door locking device and every possible security measure to make his exit from there as easy and as fast as possible.

Arriving back afterwards with Needham safe elsewhere, Lisbeth is greeted by Camilla and her henchmen, and an unconscious Blomkvist. Once again there is a scuffle as Lisbeth and Blomkvist's lives are threatened, but she is able to escape, but not before the Spiders make off with August. With Blomkvist, Lisbeth visits Plague (Cameron Britton) a close associate of hers and a computer expert, where Needham is also holed out. Lisbeth is instantly able to trace August's location through a tracking device she planted on him earlier in the day.

Camilla and crew make for her childhood home, which now sits empty and run down. Inside, Camilla has set up camp with all the hi-tech gadgetry and computer screens necessary to unleash FireFall on an unsuspecting world. August is bound and tied in a separate room. She sneaks her way in, hacking the security cameras for Plague who is parked in his surveillance van down the road. Lisbeth makes reasonable progress through the house thwarting various bad dudes, but Camilla has anticipated her arrival and has set a trap for Lisbeth, which she falls into but not before putting up a fight.

When Lisbeth comes around she is kneeling on the floor with her hands tied behind her back, and in front of her sits August. Camilla orders Lisbeth to command August to reveal the access code to his fathers FireFall question. Seeing the situation as being hopeless and with a particularly nasty injection aimed squarely at a now also captive Blomkvist, Lisbeth says to August to release the code. And this he does, and within a few minutes FireFall goes live. Camilla then promptly wraps up Lisbeth in a black latex sack and sucks all the air out of it, so slowly suffocating her sister who by now resembles a vacuum packed bag of chicken portions. Meanwhile Needham has set up a sniper position with a high powered long range rifle and is dependant on Plague giving him the coordinates of the henchmen within the house. One by one Needham with a carefully trained eye takes out the unsuspecting henchmen through windows, walls and doors. Camilla, leaves her sister to suffocate slowly in her vacuum sealed confines, as she makes a fast exit.

Driving out of there at speed in a Maserati but with her computer at her side, Camilla believes she is in the clear, when the car hits a blinded Jan Holster (Claes Bang), Camilla's trusted accomplice and deliverer of very bad deeds. The car spins out of control, veers off the road and crashes into the trees. Lisbeth arrives having made her escape from the confines of her latex wrapping to find the driver dead, and Camilla's bloodied hand print on the back seat, but the door open and no sign of her.

Not before long Lisbeth has caught up with Camilla limping through the forest clutching her computer and bleeding heavily from her side. She veers up a rocky outcrop with the house in the distance. The pair exchange words, as tears well in both their eyes. As Lisbeth lowers her gun, Camilla throws down the computer onto the snow and steps back off the cliff edge falling to her death below. Needham arrives to find no sigh of Lisbeth, but the computer lying still in the snow. He opens the laptop to reveal a message from Lisbeth, that she has moved the FireFall programme as it is what Balder wanted. Mission : Accomplished! Needham makes good on his promise to Lisbeth for engineering his escape from the authorities by returning August safely to his mother in San Francisco.

The opening credits sequence of 'The Girl in the Spiders Web' reminded me a lot of the opening titles sequence in just about every Bond movie, which kinda set the tone for the rest of the film. Here Lisbeth Salander is a mash up of a feminine hard hitting Bond or Bourne, and a black clad superhero who gets kicked, punched, drugged, stabbed, gassed, blown up, shot at and vacuum packed but every time manages to bounce right back and kick more ass in the process. And the relative ease with which Lisbeth is able to hack into the seemingly most advanced computer systems with just a couple of clicks and faster that you can say 'computer hacker extraordinare' seems completely incongruous. The plot is repetitive in places and therefore becomes a tad predictable, but all that said Claire Foy makes for a respectable Lisbeth in her third big screen outing this year after 'Unsane' and 'First Man'. The action set pieces are delivered with imagination, but the character of Blomkvist is here sidelined as is his Millennium publication, and in penning this story the writer/screenwriters seem to have lost their way compared to the set up that Larsson so expertly and emotionally charged his character with. This is a good movie, but its not a great movie. On the strength of this instalment however, I would be easily persuaded to venture back to my local Odeon for the next Lagercrantz instalment 'The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye', which hopefully Claire Foy will return for.

'The Girl in the Spiders Web' merits three claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard, from a  potential five.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-

BLADE RUNNER 2049 : Tuesday 10th October 2017

'BLADE RUNNER 2049' which I caught earlier in the week in 3D, is released 35 years after the original neo-noir Sci-Fi film 'Blade Runner' as Directed by Ridley Scott which upon release polarised critical opinion and took lacklustre Box Office takings of just US$34M from its US$28M production budget. Here then, and finally, we have the long awaited, eagerly anticipated, much hyped sequel, set thirty years after that first film. The intervening years have been kind to the original movie, now elevated to cult status with many Critics hailing the film as one of the best all time Science Fiction movies, also bringing to prominence the work of Philip K. Dick upon whose book 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' the film is loosely based. Starring Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, Daryl Hannah and M. Emmet Walsh, the film was nominated for two Academy Awards, one Golden Globe, won three BAFTA's and was nominated for a further five amongst its total haul of eleven wins and eighteen nominations. Set in a dystopian Los Angeles in 2019, 'Blade Runner' depicts a future in which bioengineered androids known as 'Replicants' are manufactured by a powerful company to work on off-world colonies. When a renegade group of Replicants led by Roy Batty escape back to Earth in an attempt to prolong their lives, burnt-out LA cop Rick Deckard reluctantly agrees to one last assignment to hunt them down and 'retire' them.

And so this film, which has been in development for approaching twenty years with Ridley Scott on again off again and various storylines coming and going, has finally landed with Director Denis Villeneuve at the helm, Roger Deakins on Cinematographer duty and Harrison Ford reprising his role as Rick Deckard all for a production budget of somewhere in the vicinity of US$175M. Released in the US and Australia last week, the film has so far taken US$93M at the Box Office and early Reviews of the film have met with widespread universal acclaim, with many Critics gushing about the production values, cinematography, CGI, music score, and performances of the principal cast.

Set in a dystopian Los Angeles of 2049, thirty years following the events of the original film, bioengineered humans called 'Replicants' have now been integrated into Earth's general population. Working for the LAPD, K (Ryan Gosling) a more up to date model who is programmed to obey orders and works as a Blade Runner, whose purpose is to hunt down older rogue Replicants and 'retire' them from service.

As the film opens we see K descending in his vehicle on what appears to be a farm where he 'retires' Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista) the farmer breeding synthetic protein maggots on a large scale. There, buried under a large dead tree, he discovers a military strong box which is taken back to LAPD for analysis. Inside there are human remains - carefully preserved bones and hair. Forensics reveal that the remains are of a female Replicant who died from complications from what appears to be an emergency Caesarian Section operation. Further examination reveals a tiny serial number engraved on a bone, revealing this to be definite Replicant remains. K is perplexed as pregnancy amongst Replicants was always believed to be impossible. Later, K returns to the farm for further examination. At the base of the tree he uncovers an engraving of a date which seems to correspond with a date in his own childhood memory about a hand engraved wooden horse which he hid in a redundant incinerator in the orphanage in which he was raised. Before leaving the farm, he torches it, destroying all evidence from those that might come afterwards.

Meanwhile K is ordered to destroy all evidence in relation to this case before word gets out, by his commanding officer Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright). She holds the belief that knowledge of Replicants being able to reproduce is dangerous to the new world order and could potentially incite war. K does not necessarily subscribe to this point of view, but he goes along with it. He visits the Headquarters of Replicant manufacturer Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) and is introduced to his Replicant Assistant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) who helps him identify the body as Rachael, an experimental older model Replicant, but history is scant given the thirty years or so that have lapsed. There is a brief recorded transcript of a former Blade Runner Rick Deckard and Rachael, from which K deduces there was some romantic interest. Wallace who wants Rachels remains for his own analysis, orders Luv to steal the remains from LAPD and follow K as he goes in search of the child, from which he can then engineer Replicant reproduction for the expansion of his off-world operations beyond the nine worlds he currently inhabits.

K visits the orphanage in old Los Angeles where the child is thought to have been raised. There he meets Mister Cotton (Lennie James) who presides over hordes of young orphaned kids whom he sets to work stripping down electrical appliances for spare parts and salvage to sell. There his childhood memory comes rushing back, and searching the incinerator he finds his carefully wrapped up wooden horse, implying that his memory is in fact real, whereas all along he had believed these to be implants. While searching through the birth records for that year (2021) with his holographic female companion Joi (Ana de Armas) he comes across an anomaly in that twins were born that day with identical DNA except for the sex chromosome, but only the boy is listed as being still alive.

K seeks out Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri) a prominent memory designer who advises him that it is illegal to programme Replicants with real human memories, leading K to deduce that he is in fact Rachel's son. K has the wooden horse analysed by Doc Badger (Barkhad Abdi) who finds traces of radiation that lead him to the apocalyptic landscape of old Los Angeles.

There he locates Deckard living the lonely life in an abandoned casino with nothing but books, Whisky and a loyal dog (real or otherwise) to occupy his time. Deckard tells K that he was forced to muddle up the birth records and was forced to leave a pregnant Rachel with the Replicant Freedom Movement to protect both her and their unborn child.

Luv arrives with several henchmen, having tracked K with a homing device planted in his pocket, and having previously killed Lieutenant Joshi. They intend to take Deckard hostage, who has being lying very low for the past thirty years, in the belief that he will lead them to his child to allow Wallace to engineer reproductive Replicants. Deckard and K put up a fight but are no match for the high tech fire power of Luv and her men.

They cart off Deckard, leaving K for dead only for him to be rescued by the Replicant Freedom Movement who take him to their safe house and nurse him back to some semblance of health and strength. Their leader Freysa (Hiam Abbass) tells K that Deckard's child is a girl, shattering K's hopes that he was their child. From this news K surmises that Ana Stelline must be Deckard's daughter given her abilities with implanting the memory into him. Freysa's instructions to K are to prevent Wallace from getting even remotely close to discovering the secrets of Replicant reproduction, by all and any means possible, even if it means taking out Deckard!

Deckard comes around in Wallace's plush HQ surroundings and refuses to co-operate with him, even when prompted to do so by a Replicant duplication of Rachael, which he dismisses because of her eye colour not being of her original green. Luv transports Deckard to one of Wallace's off world colony's to be interrogated and tortured for information that will lead Wallace to his child's whereabouts, even though Deckard really has no clue. K intercepts their fleet of three vehicles bringing down two security vehicles in a blaze of fire and smoke and forcing Luv's vehicle to crash land at the base of a dam, about to release a torrent water supply. Deckard is shackled to his seat while K and Luv fight it out in the rapidly rising waters. Ultimately K overcomes Luv and kills her, allowing Deckard and K to swim to safety. K says that he will report that Deckard drowned in the vehicle so safeguarding him from Wallace and other no good Replicants. K accompanies Deckard to Stelline's laboratory offices to meet his daughter. As Deckard gingerly enters and sees his daughter for the first time, a badly injured K waits outside reclining on the steps in the falling snow looking up.

I liked 'Blade Runner 2049' a lot! The film retains the all the touchstones that made the 1982 film such a classic, and expands upon them without diluting any of what has gone before. It both compliments the earlier film, and stands alone in its own right, and as a companion piece it has the continuity that melds the two films together from the giant neon advertising billboards promoting now defunct organisations 'Atari' and 'PanAm'; through to the Origami paper folding of Gaff (Edward James Olmos who reprises his role very briefly); through to recollections of Rachael. The film is visually stunning down to the smallest details, and the CGI enhances the already solidly smart storyline with visions of a dystopian neon lit, hologram filled future Los Angeles (where it now snows); an apocalyptic garbage dump wasteland that is San Diego; and all the future world gadgets, gizmo's, tech and Sci-Fi notions that you can imagine. A worthy sequel that Villeneuve has made worth waiting for, that will quickly become the cult classic that its predecessor has long since done so, with gritty and convincing performances from its cast, and top notch production values throughout. At a running time of over two and half hours, the film does not outstay its welcome, although it must be said that 'Blade Runner : The Final Cut' has a running time of under two hours.  Earlier this month Villeneuve reportedly said that a third film may be made if '2049' proved a success, and Ford commented that he would be happy to reprise his role if the script added up. Watch this space!

-Steve, at Odeon Online-